The abolition of clerical celibacy in England was, according to its first great modern student, Henry Charles Lea, “a process of far more intricacy than in any other country which adopted the Reformation.” Since Lea wrote, historians have come to accept an outline of that process. According to this standard view, it was Henry VIII, acting out of his own personal conservatism, who retained and defended mandatory celibacy in the first stage of the English Reformation. Once the king had died and his leaden foot was removed from the brake, the clergy were able to overwhelm ineffective conservative opposition in the Edwardian government and legalize clerical marriage. The gains of the Edwardian years gave way before the reaction of the Marian period, and they were not reinstated after Mary's death because of the anticonnubial tastes and religious conservatism of Elizabeth I. Throughout this period, so the story goes, the clergy (a majority of them, at least) struggled for the right and privilege of marriage, only to find royal resistance (except briefly under Edward VI) impossible to overcome.

This traditional outline is misleading in several respects. Elizabeth I's attitude toward the marriage of the clergy is far more complex than has been recognized. Specific regulations of such unions developed from her desire to establish an ordered church worthy of popular respect and cannot simply be ascribed to a general, almost pathological, personal distaste for marriage or quirky personal religious views.

This is the story of a story. It all began in May 1548, when an Italian Protestant named Francesco Spiera recanted. He had been denounced to the Inquisition the previous November, and, fearful that he would lose his wealth and beggar his family, he renounced Protestantism publicly both at St. Mark's in Venice and in his hometown of Citadella, near Padua. It was a painful decision. Even before his second recantation, he began to hear a voice warning him not to apostatize, and soon after it the voice returned, admonishing him for denying God and sentencing him to eternal damnation. Convinced that he had been forsaken by the Lord, Spiera fell into despair. He removed with his family to Padua, where his woeful condition quickly came to the attention of prominent theologians, including Pier Paolo Vergerio, the bishop of Capodistra, and Matteo Gribaldi, like Spiera, a civil lawyer and a professor at the University of Padua.

As Spiera's despair deepened, he was consoled by these eminent scholars and by as many as thirty other men. He suffered terribly, refusing food and rejecting their attempts to persuade him that he was not damned. The days and weeks passed; he maintained his conviction that God had forsaken him. He argued brilliantly with his learned visitors, displaying a remarkable grasp of Scripture and theology, which he deployed to prove his own damnation. He declared that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, the single fault that places one beyond the Lord's mercy.

Chartist political rhetoric was pervaded by images of domestic misery typified in these quotes. Historians have traditionally understood this stress on domesticity as a simple response to the Industrial Revolution's disruption of the home, either denigrating it as inchoate proletarian rage or celebrating it as a heroic defense of the working-class family. But domestic discontent was nothing new in the 1830s, for drink, wife beating, and sexual competition in the workplace had plagued plebeians for decades—if not centuries. Why then did it become such a potent political issue in the 1830s and 1840s? Following Gareth Stedman Jones, the question must be answered by analyzing Chartist domesticity not just as a reflection of social and economic changes, but as a trope that performed specific political functions in Chartist language.