As a work of cultural propaganda, the Actes and Monuments was an unprecedented success. In spite of its enormous bulk (over 2,000 pages in the 1583 edition), and consequent expensiveness, its influence permeated down to the lowest social levels and helped to create that popular anti-Catholicism which was such a feature of the England of the 1580s. Its first edition, in 1563, was supported among others by Sir William Cecil, but it was never officially promoted, and indeed its second edition of 1570 was by implication highly critical of the Queen for failing to press on with the reform programme. What it did, most effectively, was to present the Catholic Church as a conspiracy of clerical pride and cruelty, anti-Christian and inspired by the devil.

Queen Mary herself was represented as a victim of this clerical conspiracy, the protagonists of which were Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner. She was guilty mainly by association for having married a Spaniard, who not only reintroduced the Pope, but brought in the ungodly ways of his own nation, so that Catholicism became not only cruel and unnatural, but also foreign.