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Mary Morrissey, Moderate Radical: Tobie Matthew and the English Reformation. By Rosamund Oates, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 70, Issue 2, October 2019, Pages 897–898, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flz053
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The English Reformation has several figures whose biographies can be effective vehicles for writing the history of their ‘times’. Patrick Collinson’s 1981 biography of Edmund Grindal and Diarmuid McCulloch’s 1996 biography of Cranmer asked similar questions about how men of conscience could make pragmatic accommodations with a political regime. Rosamund Oates’s new biography of Tobie Matthew (1544–1628) is equally instructive about how the progress of the English Reformed church depended on churchmen who could, when the occasion required, be both politically adept and pragmatic. Oates uses her account of Matthew’s early years to establish the elements that would shape his subsequent career: his closeness to Marian exiles, many not much older than him, and his religious and political formation among the Protestants of Christ Church, Oxford. Matthew was close to many at the centre of the vestiarian controversy, and he learned from them the kind of ‘conditional obedience’ to the secular authorities that is a characteristic of puritanism. But Matthew’s career would bring him to the centre of the political and ecclesiastical establishment: as bishop of Durham (1582–1606) and then archbishop of York he was a vital part of William and Robert Cecil’s mechanisms for governing (and converting) the north of England.
