‘Don’t burn hundreds of your subjects at the stake.” If a modern-day image consultant could offer advice to some of the past’s most notorious rulers, that nugget of wisdom would stand at the top of the list. “As soon as modernity rolls around,” the consultant would explain, “everyone will wonder what in the world you were thinking.”

No one would have benefited more from this advice than Mary Tudor. During her short reign as queen of England, from 1553 to 1558, 284 men and women were burned for their religious beliefs. She has been known as “Bloody Mary” ever since.

But bloody isn’t the only adjective that tradition has bestowed upon the queen who tried to reaffirm her country’s Catholicism after her father, Henry VIII, broke with Rome. As historian Eamon Duffy points out in his latest work, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, her regime has been consistently labeled by historians as “backward-looking, unimaginative, [and] reactionary.” Mary’s church, moreover, was considered “strong on repression, weak on persuasion.” The burning of heretics has therefore been understood as a last-ditch effort to turn the country back to Catholicism: Argument had failed, and brute force seemed necessary.

That this trope was able to entrench itself and become the dominant way of thinking about Mary’s reign should come as no surprise. In 1558, Mary died after only five years in power, leaving her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, to take the crown that she would wear for over 40 years. Such a long reign provided the opportunity to establish an official narrative about her predecessor — to set Mary up as a foil to the Virgin Queen and to legitimize the English church’s separation from Rome.

Many writers advanced this goal, but it was perhaps John Foxe who, with his 1563 Book of Martyrs, did the most to make Mary “bloody” in the eyes of generations to come. The Book of Martyrs describes the persecution of Protestants during the English Reformation and argues that the sufferings of faithful Christians at the hands of the Catholic hierarchy justified the country’s break with Rome. Foxe’s work became so popular — after the second edition was issued in 1570, every cathedral was ordered to own a copy — that it swamped any rival accounts, leaving later historians little else to rely on.

Of course, the polemical nature of Foxe’s work makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction, and this has further skewed later scholarship. Geoffrey Dickens’s classic 1964 The English Reformation, for example, argued that Mary’s regime was beset by a “sterile legalism” and had “failed to discover the Counter-Reformation.”

Enter Eamon Duffy, author of the ground-breaking 1992 Stripping of the Altars — the book that changed modern scholarship by demonstrating both the strength of Catholicism in 16th-century England and the violence with which the Reformation was imposed. The eminent Cambridge historian now has set his sights on Queen Mary. In particular, Duffy hopes to “dispose once and for all of some of the misapprehensions that have dogged and distorted the historiography of mid-Tudor Catholicism — that it was ineffective, half-hearted, complacent, unimaginative, insular, lacking in leadership, trapped in the preoccupations of the 1520s or 1530s rather than addressing those of the 1550s; in short that it failed to discover the Counter-Reformation.”

At the center of Mary’s attempt to reinstate the Catholic Church, Duffy places Reginald Pole, archbishop of Canterbury, who “though by no means the only activator, was the single most influential figure in the Marian Restoration: Put briefly, he was in charge.”

Pole is central to Duffy’s narrative for good reason. The traditional criticisms of the restoration — that it lacked the power to persuade and relied instead on force, that it was fixated on the medieval past, that it was cruel and reactionary — have almost all taken Cardinal Pole as their principal target. Thus, if Duffy can show that the charges leveled against Pole are ahistorical, he can, by extension, argue that traditional portrayals of Mary’s reign are equally flawed.

As Duffy explains, “it has become an orthodoxy that the Cardinal was ‘unenthusiastic about preaching,’ ‘seldom preached himself,’ distrusted ‘preaching campaigns’ and thought that preaching in general was best left on the back burner, until the more important matter of discipline had been properly established.” One can understand why these charges were readily believed: Mary and her supporters were supposed to be cruel; the last thing such a regime would do is reason with opponents.

As it turns out, Pole did place great emphasis on the importance of preaching. When he decided in 1558 to make a book of his sermons, he explained that the work was designed to “feed and instruct” those who “for ignorance of the truth have fallen in diverse diseases of the mind” and for whom, “not being able to speak with so many by mouth, I have put in writing that I would speak if I were present for their instruction.” On the importance of preaching the doctrine of Christ, Pole explained, “herein is no controversy at all, in this both the Catholic and heretic will agree.” Moreover, because preaching could be used as a tool against the church as well as for it, Pole was convinced that “the antidote” to heresy “was not the suppression of preaching, but the provision of Catholic preaching.”

Duffy shows that published treatises were crucial as well, which runs against the previous consensus that the Marian regime missed the significance of the printing press. Both Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole were well aware of the power of the printed word: “Very few English printers actually left the country under Mary,” Duffy notes. “Key Protestant printers . . . were put out of business and their presses were handed over to reliable Catholics.” And Mary didn’t just play defense. Catholics also produced their own polemical tracts, focusing on Protestantism’s weak spots: its “changeability and destructive power,” and its “tendency to destabilize traditional order.” Pole himself contributed “the most sustained and the most ardently papalist defense of papal authority by any English writer of the sixteenth century” in his De Unitate, a treatise that focused on the “providential role of the papacy in England’s history.”

All of this leads Duffy to conclude that “this was a regime fully alert to the power of the press, with the theological and literary resources to generate a formidable body of catechetical and hortatory material making a positive case for Catholicism.”

There remains, of course, one aspect of the regime that is impossible to ignore: the burnings, the central symbol of Mary’s cruelty and her inability to stop the spread of Protestantism. As if in response to the modern-day image consultant’s advice, Duffy begins his discussion of the burnings with an obvious disclaimer: “Any civilized twenty-first-century person will of course agree that burning men and women alive for their fidelity to deeply held beliefs must be both obviously and profoundly ‘the wrong weapon’ in a struggle for religious reconstruction.”

Nonetheless, Duffy argues that many of our modern assumptions about the burnings are misguided. It is unfair, for example, to assume that, because our modern sensibilities recoil at the thought of executing heretics, those of 16th-century societies did as well. Heresy was a threat not only to the stability of the state but also to the eternal salvation of the men, women, and children under the state’s care. Rulers and church leaders on both sides of the Protestant/Catholic divide therefore felt a solemn obligation to root out heresy, using lethal force when necessary. Moreover, as Duffy shows in example after example, Pole and Mary were actually quite reluctant to use lethal force against heretics, seeking every opportunity to persuade recalcitrant heretics to recant their beliefs.

Similarly, it’s wrong to assume that the regime could never have won England back over to Catholicism simply because we know in hindsight that it did not. As it happens, the evidence suggests the burnings were, at least initially, effective, for they “frightened most members of the movement into outward conformity and . . . created disarray in the relatively few Tudor communities in which Protestantism had established a significant presence.”

But in the end, of course, people were burned at the stake: 284 of them in four years, which is 284 too many. Mary, like so many rulers of both her time and ours, has blood on her hands. But does she deserve the appellation Bloody? Historians are at their best when they are correcting historical misconceptions, and, with Fires of Faith, Eamon Duffy shows again that he is one of the very best of historians.

– Ryan Sayre Patrico is assistant editor at First Things.