The first part of the introduction explores how historians and literary scholars have approached early modern memory and sketches the trajectory of recent work on the memory of the English and European Reformations. It then examines the ways in which the religious revolution transformed the memorial culture it inherited from the medieval past and the manner in which it engendered new strategies of remembering and forgetting, commemoration and amnesia. The second section explains the architecture and structure of the volume, which is divided into four parts (1) Events and Temporalities; (2) Objects and Places (3) Lives and Afterlives; (4) Bodies and Rituals. It probes the temporal; spatial and material; biographical; and ceremonial and corporeal dimensions of the memory of the English Reformation, establishing a series of conceptual frameworks for the essays that follow. The Reformation is reconceptualised less as a unitary moment of rupture than as ongoing struggle to reconfigure the nation’s ecclesiastical and cultural heritage and to accommodate the unruly legacy of the past. A prolonged development involving impulses towards both historical preservation and oblivion, it continues to be refought in memory and the imagination.

This chapter examines the memory of those who conformed and compromised – so-called ‘Nicodemites’ – in the English Reformation. It takes as its starting point and central case study Matthew Parker (1504-75), the first Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury, and his self-memorialisation in his memorial roll, a curious document which has often been described as autobiographical. The chapter considers the format, content and purpose of this unique manuscript, focusing particularly on the section dealing with Parker’s life during the reign of Mary I (1553-8) and the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England; a period in which Parker, unlike many other celebrated Protestants, was neither a martyr nor an exile, choosing instead the partial compromise of remaining in his newly hostile homeland. Both Parker himself and then his subsequent presented these years as either a period of inner spiritual constancy or as a time of suffering, a quasi-martyrdom. This, the chapter argues, reflects and illuminates a much larger process in which individual compromise was rewritten or forgotten in the creation of a larger, collective cultural memory of Protestant resistance and triumph.

In 1582 Cambridge's vice-chancellor, William Fulke, wrote to his superior, William Cecil, reporting that ‘the whole bodye of the Universitye is oute of frame’. Among the many problematic matters that he described to the chancellor was a ‘new practise’ which, he claimed, various Heads of Houses had noted and reported to him. Men, including those ‘not preachers or ever lyke to be reteyned as Chapleines, but of the most dissolute and disobedient sorte, have procured them selves to be admitted as Reteyners to diverse honorable personages, and some of them have openly worne their Masters cloths’. This behaviour, Fulke claimed, had first been spotted in Gonville and Caius, a college which in the same letter he described as so far from religious orthodoxy that it risked becoming a ‘an Asylum Papisticum or Seminarium hominium Neutrorum’. Fulke's letter suggested that the way to settle these problems both in this college and across the University as a whole was for Cecil to initiate a ‘generall commissione or Visitatione’.

Fulke's letter neatly demonstrates some of the contradictions surrounding the role of interactions between the university and outside authorities – men associated, in one form another, with the government of the Church or State – in its wider processes of religious change. External authority is seen as a key, perhaps as the only, way to bring Cambridge to religious orthodoxy. Yet outside influence could also protect and encourage the dissolute and disobedient. To reconcile this contradiction distinctions have to be drawn between legitimate and illegitimate authority, between Cecil's official role as chancellor and the more amorphous and informal, perhaps insidious, influence of various court patrons over university men. In reality, no such sharp dividing line existed and a diversity of external influences shaped and complicated the reformation of Elizabethan Cambridge. The university had, of course, never been closed off from outside forces. But by the later sixteenth century old channels of influence had been deepened and new ones formed by a confluence of factors both within and outside the universities. Wider changes in the Tudor Church and State made lay elites increasingly attractive patrons for university men. At the same time, these elites themselves became – or at least were felt to become – a growing and perhaps distorting presence among Cambridge's undergraduates.

The fragility of Edwardian Protestantism was revealed in the speed of its dismantling. The death of the young king on 6 July 1553 prompted a succession struggle between the supporters of Mary Tudor and of Lady Jane Grey that was felt deeply in Cambridge. Choosing sides in this contest was a fraught matter and Edwin Sandys, Cambridge's vice-chancellor in the summer of 1553, was among those who found themselves stuck on the wrong side, implicated in a failed attempt to block Mary's path to the throne. Sandys dined with Northumberland upon his arrival in Cambridge, and the next day preached a sermon in support of Queen Jane that pleased the duke sufficiently that he ordered it to be printed. Sandys had just finished preparing his text when the news came: Northumberland had surrendered. This brought disaster to both men.

According to the account offered by John Foxe – a narrative which it has been suggested was procured from Sandys himself – some of the university seniors turned upon Sandys with striking rapidity, declaring that he be stripped of ‘the statute booke of the Universitie, the keys, and such other things that were in his keepyng’: the trappings of his office. When Sandys attempted to take his usual place at a university congregation the following day, what Foxe called ‘a rabble of unlearned Papists’ tried to unseat him. In the ensuing struggle Sandys pulled a knife before friends persuaded him to bear this indignity more stoically. The men of Cambridge were, in this account, literally at each other's throats as the Edwardian regime's attempts to perpetuate itself crumbled. Allegiances seemed to shift quickly; Foxe sneered that William Mowse, the Master of Trinity Hall, and one of those who were sent to seize the statute book from Sandys, ‘beyng an earnest Protestant the day before … now was he become a Papist’. This, of course, was Elizabethan polemic, not Mowse's own understanding of his part in these events. The choice between Mary and Jane took in much more than religious identity: and support for the former cannot be read as anti-evangelical reaction. Yet the role of Mowse, an Edwardian appointee, and the other ‘rabble’ points to a wider truth: the seeds for the rapid re-establishment of Catholicism in Cambridge under Mary could be found, in part, within the Edwardian university.