With the completion of the third volume of his massive history, Father Philip Hughes brings the story of the Reformation in England to an end, though it is an end only in the sense that the Elizabethan settlement had reached, at the death of the queen, a certain stability in its development. The first duty of a reviewer must surely be to congratulate Father Hughes on a great achievement. He has covered the whole general ground in closely-studied detail, exploring all the printed sources with patient and accurate industry. Yet, immense as is the mass of fact he makes use of to elucidate events and the factors controlling them, we are never allowed to feel that the vital issues are obscured rather than illuminated; they stand out in his narrative with invariable clarity. The disciplined learning of his treatment of the complex evidence will make his book, for a long time to come, a classical exposition of the Catholic point of view in Reformation history. The writing is distinguished by a deep and sometimes passionate conviction, yet it is conspicuously fair; this is acknowledged by scholars who do not share Father Hughes’ presuppositions. ‘An historian’s book for historians’, it has been called by one such scholar, ‘a work of real value to all who wish to study the English Reformation at an advanced level.’

The truth of the saying omnia abeunt in theologiam is specially observable in Reformation history. The greatest of the non-Catholic historians of the period, as Father Hughes sometimes shows, can be at a disadvantage in appreciating to the full the influence of theological presuppositions upon thought and action on both sides.