The fourth marriage of the emperor Leo vi set in motion a complicated series of events involving not only the canonical question of marriage in the Christian life, but also ecclesiastical schism, Church-State relations, and papal ecclesiastical policy. The affair of the tetragamia, centering as it did around the personalities of the emperors Leo vi, Alexander, and Romanus Lecapenus and the patriarchs Nicholas Mysticus and Euthymius, was perhaps the most significant event of early tenth-century Byzantine political and ecclesiastical life.

In the Scottish General Assembly of 1638 the Covenanters, openly defying Charles I, reformed the kirk to remove what they saw as its corruptions. Bishops and the Court of High Commission were abolished. The Five Articles of Perth (regulating certain points of worship), the 1636 Book of Canons and the hated Prayer Book of 1637 were all condemned.

The parliament which met in April 1640 was the first to meet in eleven years. Men hoped that this parliament might be more successful than its predecessors. Mingled with hopes for success of the parliament was anxiety about failure. The disorderly dissolution of the last parliament had not been forgotten. Reactions to the levying of ship money and to the active ecclesiastical leadership of Laud and others of the bishops had shown that Englishmen would not be silent if they felt their liberties threatened. Royal requests for aid against the Scots in the spring of 1639 had met with protests. Men feared that attempts to obtain redress of grievances in parliament would lead to disputes with the king and a quick dissolution.

There are four major interpretative themes in historical writing about nineteenth century English politics whose exposition has customarily involved a bald allusion to Gladstone's abolition of compulsory church rates in 1868. In reality the facts do not justify any of these familiar uses. What follows is intended not only to demonstrate that this is so by briefly describing ‘how it really happened’, but also to consider how it has come about that this legislation has been so often pressed into service in inappropriate contexts ever since it was passed, and to speculate a little upon this as part of the general problem of the delays and paradoxes in the development of historical writing on nineteenth-century England.