Volume 20, Number 4 · March 22, 1973
How Nasty Was Thomas Cromwell?
By Lawrence Stone
Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell
by G. R. Elton
Cambridge, 447 pp., $19.50
It is a textbook cliché that during the upheaval of the Reformation, after a period of great uncertainty, the religious configuration of Europe was eventually somehow made to correspond to the political. In the end, the boundaries of nation-states dictated the religious faith to which the great majority of their populations in fact subscribed. This should not surprise us too much, because by and large the same generalization of 'cuius regio eius religio' applies even more to the twentieth century, the second era in which Western civilization has been split ideologically down the middle. In Bolshevik Russia, fifty years of political pressure have largely destroyed the Orthodox faith; and another thirty years of political pressure in Eastern Europe will probably suffice to reduce Roman Catholicism east of the Iron Curtain to negligible proportions. In America, on the other hand, members of the Communist Party are as rare as bald eagles, and for much the same reasons.
Review, 2997 words
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