The early fourteenth century marks one of the most significant periods in the development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Not only did this period witness a profound transformation in the theological understanding of the older feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but it also brought about the active engagement of the laity in its celebration. In northern Italy the first lay confraternities dedicated to celebrating the feast of the Conception were founded in the 1320s and 1330s under the direction of the Franciscans, then the greatest advocates of the immaculist cause. This coincidence between the theological definition of Mary's conception, lay participation in the feast's celebration, and Franciscan sponsorship of confraternities raises interesting questions about the nature of lay piety and the role of lay associations in disseminating religious beliefs.

The question of when certain religious beliefs and their theological formulations become known and understood by the majority of the faithful is complex, particularly in the case of the Immaculate Conception. No explicit mention of Mary's sinless conception exists in Scripture or in apostolic teaching. Belief in the Immaculate Conception emerged only gradually, through centuries of reflection and disputation, and was not proclaimed a dogma of faith until 1854. This gradual unfolding of the doctrine has meant that identifying the shift from a general reverence for Mary's conception to an explicit belief in the sinlessness of her conception has proved difficult. A second difficulty is that for centuries the qualifier ‘immaculate’ was not attached to the name of the feast. During the Middle Ages the feast was referred to simply as the ‘Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ The mere observance of the feast, therefore, tells us little about what the faithful actually believed.

There is no end in sight to historical squabbles about the speed, impact and enduring cultural and ecclesiastical legacies of the English Reformation. The past two decades have witnessed a lively and stimulating debate about the reception and entrenchment of Protestant belief and practice in local contexts. Over the same period we have seen a series of heated and animated exchanges about the developments taking place within the early Stuart Church and the role they played in triggering the outbreak of hostilities between Charles I and Parliament in 1642. While the focus of the first controversy has been the relationship between zealous Protestantism and the vast mass of the ordinary people, the second has been conducted almost exclusively at the level of the learned polemical literature of the clerical elite. So far little attempt has been made to bridge and span the gap. This is hardly surprising – sensible scholars think twice before venturing into two historiographical minefields simultaneously. Nevertheless the problem of reconciling these parallel but largely discrete bodies of interpretation and evidence remains, and it is one which historians like myself, whose interests straddle the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century divide and the Catholic–Protestant confessional fence, can no longer afford to sidestep and ignore. This essay represents a set of tentative reflections and speculations on recent research, a cautious exploration of three clusters of inter-related issues and themes.

Phillips Brooks was undeniably one of the most popular preachers of Gilded Age America. Sydney Ahlstrom described Brooks and the liberal Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher as ‘in a class by themselves, envied and emulated the country over’. Unlike Beecher, however, the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, subsequently Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, has attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. His few biographers have rarely attempted to place his thought or career in their social or intellectual contexts. With one recent notable exception, little of scholarly value has been written about Brooks. The older biographies have tended to portray him as initially rooted in the evangelical tradition, even though he subsequently became a leader of the emergent Broad Church party. Alexander V. G. Allen concludes, for example, that by the close of his seminary training, Brooks ‘freely accepted the leading truths which are known as Evangelical’. E. Clowes Chorley asserts simply that ‘Brooks never drifted from the heart of Evangelical religion’. Allen and others stress the evangelical origins of Brooks's thought in order to argue for the continuity between the evangelical and liberal streams within American Anglicanism. This portrayal of Brooks as a churchman who somehow retained the essence of an early evangelicalism while later embracing his Church's liberal future has served what Allen Guelzo has aptly called the ‘myth of synthesis’ in Episcopal historiography. Such an interpretation does not view Evangelicals as being forced out of the Church in the 1870s but posits a benign creative synthesis that enabled the Church to transcend the aberrant party battles of the mid century.

The medieval canon law of affinity as an impediment to marriage combined a large range of prohibited degrees with a wide power of dispensation. After the Reformation, however, English law, in line with mainstream Protestant opinion, prohibited marriages within the degrees mentioned in Leviticus, with no provision for dispensation. The prohibited degrees were set out in ‘Archbishop Parker's Table’ in the Prayer Book, beginning with the memorable declaration that ‘A man may not marry his grandmother’. In the nineteenth century, however, some of these restrictions came to be challenged. The classic case was that of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and it was under this title that successive bills were introduced to alter the law.

Until 1857 the law of marriage was administered by the ecclesiastical courts, according to the canon law. However, the civil courts modified and controlled this canon law by means of the writ of prohibition: canon law was now subordinate to common law, and where the two conflicted the civil courts would over-rule the ecclesiastical courts. Marriage with a deceased wife's sister was illegal, and, as with other impediments to marriage, a case could be brought in the ecclesiastical courts to have such a marriage declared void. A case on these grounds could only be brought during the lifetime of both spouses. Nevertheless, the marriage had theoretically been void ab initio, and even after one spouse had died the survivor could still be proceeded against for incest.

In the summer of 1543 King Henry VIII promised that he would send 40,000 ducats, the equivalent of £10,000, to Ferdinand, king of the Romans and of Hungary, archduke of Austria, to help his brother, Emperor Charles V, in his defence of Christendom against the Turk. Europe witnessed a strange alliance between Henry, himself a schismatic monarch, and Charles, who had effectively blocked Henry's attempts to have the pope annul his first marriage. The coalition of opposing forces was equally remarkable, comprising the Most Christian King of France and his non-Christian ally, the Turk. Francis's support for the Turks was contrasted by some with the king's attitude to Protestant reform. Francis seems to have regretted the presence in 1543–4 of a Turkish colony at Toulon, which appears to have possessed a slave market and mosque. The alliance between Charles V and Henry VIII attests to the persistence of the medieval concept of Christendom (Christianitas), groups of nations which shared basic religious and cultural values despite the religious divides being caused by the Reformation.

Henry made elaborate plans to furnish Charles with the promised £10,000 to support military action on the continent. The money, available either as cash or as bills of exchange, was released in two halves, the first on 16 August 1543 and the second on 18 September. In his usual way, the imperial ambassador in England, Eustace Chapuys, made things worse by harrying the Privy Council for speedy payment of the funds. The crown, none the less, hit on an interesting solution to the problem of recovering its money. Henry issued an appeal to every diocese in England to organise voluntary contributions from parishioners to recover the amount of money he disbursed abroad. Working from the financial returns among the exchequer subsidy rolls at the Public Record Office, Dr Kitching has calculated that such collections raised no more than £1,903 8s. 3d., less than a fifth of the money advanced to Charles V. The English parishes reimbursed the crown in late 1543 and early 1544.

As Dr Kitching himself has indicated, the background to the whole episode is poorly documented. Previously unknown to historians, however, important material concerning the king's plan survives in the diocesan archives of London and Westminster. The episcopal registers of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, and Thomas Thirlby, bishop of the short-lived see of Westminster, both shed valuable light on this scheme. Diocesan bishops recorded their formal administrative acts in registers, the compilation of which was supervised by the diocesan registrar. Unfortunately, the archiepiscopal archives at Lambeth are silent on the collections of 1543. The registers for the dioceses of London and Westminster, however, are particularly informative for the opening years of the Reformation. It is my purpose to consider the nature of the new evidence and to offer a transcript of the more important documents.