John Bramhall is perhaps best known today for his attempt to catch Hobbes's Leviathan: critical analysis of the work of the philosopher of Malmesbury was, however, but one field of literary endeavour for Bramhall. As befitted an Anglican bishop he also exchanged doctrinal buffets with both puritans and papists, and ardently embraced the royalist cause during the period of the Great Rebellion, suffering arraignment and exile in consequence. His most notable publication in this last connexion was The Serpent-Salve; or a Remedy for the biting of an Asp, which was published in 1643 with the aim of restoring to Englishmen that proper sense of the allegiance of a subject which some of them had so irrationally cast away, thereby plunging themselves (along with their fellow subjects) into what Bramhall called a ‘bottomless gulf of mischief'. An account of his royalism can thus appropriately centre itself upon this document while drawing also upon his other writings (in particular his Fair Warning to Take Heed of the Scottish Discipline of 1649) for additional illustrative material.

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.

The case against the authenticity of the Testimonium was put succinctly by Benedict Niese, ‘nam scriptus est a Christiano, male cohaeret cum insequentibus, dicendi genus a Josepho alienus, ab antiquissimis scriptoribus Christianis, imprimis Origine, non agnoscitur, abest ab argumentis libri XVIII, non exstat in Bello Judaico, neque ulla est causa cur necessarium putemus'. Scholarly opinion has long been divided over the matter, but it is safe to say that the arguments against authenticity outweigh those that would retain the passage as Josephan. Niese's points, that the passage interrupts a series of notices of Jewish risings and revolts and that Origen appears to have known Josephus only as hostile to Christianity, can be supplemented by the difficulty of attributing apparently Christian sentiments to a writer who in his last work, Contra Apionem, was very plainly proud to be a Jew. But if the passage is an interpolation, the further question is posed, whether it was inserted into the text of Josephus as a complete unit or whether it is the result of a process of minor alterations by many hands over many years. Here again there is divergence of opinion, but since 1930 it has been difficult to maintain the simple view of a single interpolation by one man at one time. Robert Eisler's attack upon this simple view was made possible by the publication of a thirteenth-century Slavonic version of Josephus initiated by A. Berendts, who in an earlier work had traced the Christian interpolations in Josephus back to the first century. Eisler's general contention, that the authentically Josephan basis of the passage constituted a hostile notice of Christianity and that this had, been altered in many particulars by various hands to show the opposite of what Josephus had written, was cautiously defended by Thackeray, the doyen of English-speaking Josephan scholars, in his Hilda Stich Strook lectures at the Jewish Institute of Religion.

While working on a more general assessment of William Gray's tenure of the see of Ely, I was struck by the amount of incidental information in his register relating to his associates, the officers of his spiritual and temporal administrations and the men who benefited from his patronage.

An important feature of the ecclesiastical history of the Church of England since the Reformation has been the unique and precious tradition of a choir of men and boys singing daily choral services in the cathedrals of this country. There have been several studies of this tradition and the music written for cathedral services, but there has not yet been a full account of cathedral choirs in the last century. There have been useful brief surveys by Owen Chadwick and Bernarr Rainbow, but these have been only parts of larger works whose main emphasis is elsewhere. Plenty of material exists, however, and the contemporary conditions which led S. S. Wesley to write his polemical pamphlet A Few Words on Cathedral Music in 1849 demand detailed investigation.

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 posthumous reputation of Gregory the Great presents a sharp but possibly insufficiently appreciated contrast. On the one hand, there is the Anglo-Saxon historical tradition which, through the Carolingian world and the eleventh-century reformers, has prevailed to the present day. The Gregory of Aldhelm of Malmesbury and of the Anonymous of Whitby, is ‘the teacher of the English’, ‘our own St. Gregory’, ‘this apostolic saint of ours’ who ‘on the Day of Judgement … will bring us, the English nation whom he has taught, to present us to the Lord’. By the English mission he had brought the English into the community of Christian nations and was seen as the initiator of the new missionary apostolate which Bede's contemporaries were consciously perpetuating on the Continent; as the source for the life of St. Benedict he was of major interest to those who had made peculiarly their own Benedict's monasticism. He is in a sense the immediate founder of all things; in an age which was losing the perspective of the secular as its historical horizons shrank, he was a principal link in a new chain of authority and legitimacy which extended back to St. Peter. His legend and prestige as a founding authority spreads and assumes diverse forms in unlikely places.

In explaining the failure of Mary Tudor's plans for Catholic revival during her reign, it is customary to dwell on her manifold errors of judgment. No one can deny her ardent desire to restore the love for Rome among her subjects—she declared that her people's souls meant more to her than ten kingdoms; but she is remembered for burning heretics and thus providing English Protestantism with much-needed martyrs and respectability, rather than for inspiring Counter-Reformation zeal. The most obvious reason for this failure was Mary's early death, which left her little time for long-term policies; but in addition emphasis must be placed on her misunderstanding of her subjects' prejudices and confusion after the schism. She disgusted the strong Henrician national feeling by marrying a foreigner and delighting openly in her Spanish blood; she showed no sympathy for the financial worries of influential subjects who had obtained monastic property and had no wish to surrender it; she instigated a persecution which aroused distaste even in minds accustomed to sixteenth century suffering and punishment; and she embarked on an unpopular war and lost Calais disastrously. Moreover, she reposed greatest trust in Reginald Pole, the papal legate, another leader who failed to comprehend the bitterness of English xenophobia and the strength of anticlericalism and heresy. Pole assumed that anti-Roman sentiments were the shortlived results of schismatic sin and would fade with the orderly restoration of Roman rule; and so he did not even begin to build a militant organisation which could have tried to resist Elizabethan Protestantism. It is an impressive catalogue of mistakes.

The ‘Act for Registering Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England’ of 1836 was a significant Act in at least four respects. First, it may be regarded as marking the foundation of the modern era in vital statistics in England and Wales. By it the General Register Office was created which ever since has proved a major source of both data and analysis concerning the demographic structure of England and Wales. Secondly, the Act was of importance in the process of the growth of government in nineteenth-century Britain. Thirdly, it remedied one of the major grievances of Dissenters by providing a civil, not ecclesiastical, registration of births, deaths, and marriages. Finally, the story of its passage casts much light on the fragility of the unity amongst the Dissenters in the period from 1829 to 1836.

Because the Church of England traditionally formed part of the British constitution, Englishmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often discussed the importance of extending the Established Church to settlements overseas. Yet nothing constructive was done in North America before the Revolution to complete the constitution of the colonial Church or reinforce its special position as the partner of the civil government. There were no bishops in America, and the remote bishop of London was left to supervise as best he could an institution that enjoyed few privileges and displayed an inveterate tendency towards independence. After the American Revolution, however, imperial administrators and colonial churchmen appreciated the need to buttress and reinvigorate the Church of England in British North America. In official circles at least, the loss of the Thirteen Colonies was attributed to the growth of a democratic spirit which a debilitated Church had been powerless to check. British administrators consequently agreed that the dangerous development of republicanism and religious dissent might be thwarted in the remaining colonies by strengthening the position of the Church as the ally of government in the task of preserving colonial loyalty.

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.

Much may be made of William Crashawe. As father of the poet, an editor of William Perkins's works, a publisher of rare manuscripts, the protagonist of catholicism, a devoted bibliophile, and a publicist for the Virginia Company, he merits recognition. Yet almost nothing has been written about his tenure at the Temple where, in the wake of Antonio de Corro and Walter Travers, he held one of the most lucrative lectureships in London.

While a number of historians have focused attention on the development of Protestant missionary thought and activity in India during the nineteenth century, comparatively little is known about the social background, education and motives of the missionary candidates eventually selected for service in that part of ‘the mission field’. Who were these men and why did they go? What pressures and motives lay behind the continued expansion of missionary activity in India during this period?

A political volte face is always likely to compel attention, especially when performed by a leading politician who thereby seems to reverse his lifelong attitude. So it was in the case of Lord John Russell's hostility to the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales and his adoption of legislation against it. His actions brought him no profit but rather helped to weaken his position. For the Ecclesiastical Titles bill, while it may have been intended as a hopeful introduction to a firmer political existence, appears instead as the culmination of a long decline. Russell never succeeded in recapturing the fulfilment of the years 1828–32, when he played a central part in carrying great constitutional changes which vindicated his principles of religious and civil liberty. After this he witnessed the great reforms being carried by others; as his latest biographer states, ‘Peel had run off with the credit for the free trade policy, Palmerston for the conduct of foreign affairs, Disraeli for the second Reform Act, and Gladstone for the policy of justice to Ireland…’. Moreover, he removed some of the glory of his liberal attainments by writing the Durham Letter and adopting the Ecclesiastical Titles bill—though Russell disagreed with such an opinion, since he denied that it was illiberal to resist ‘papal aggression’. Behaviour so intriguing as Russell's in 1850–1 has naturally been the subject of a good deal of inquiry and comment, but further examination may help to show the comparative importance of factors which contributed to the Prime Minister's motives.

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.

In the well-known passage in Book VII of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, where Hooker admits to having changed his mind on the subject of the origins of episcopacy, he cites the Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua among a list of marginal references to late-medieval and sixteenthcentury writers who maintained the view, which he states he had once considered ‘a great deal more probable than now I do’, that bishops were not introduced into the Church until after the death of the Apostles. Since the 1930s, when A. P. d'Entrèves, Gottfried Michaelis and C. W. Previté-Orton drew attention to the resemblances between some of Hooker's arguments and those of Marsilius, this passage has frequently been quoted as evidence that Hooker was familiar with the writings of Marsilius and it has been used to support the theory, which has come to be widely held in recent years, that his political ideas were directly influenced by the Defensor Pacis. D'Entrèves, for example, stated on the strength of this reference that ‘Hooker certainly knew the works of Marsilius’ and most subsequent writers on Hooker's political ideas have tended to follow d'Entrèves's lead in assuming that Hooker must have been acquainted with the Defensor Pacis at first hand.