Few men have ever shown a more sublime faith in the divine origin of their mission than the papal reformers of the eleventh century. They set to work with a ‘modest proposal’ to destroy two of the most intimate and powerful foundations of clerical society: they aimed to abolish simony and with it the lay control of patronage; they tried to destroy the family life of the clergy. From one point of view they were doing only what every policeman does—they were trying to enforce the established law. From another point of view their platform was a devastating social revolution. If we may admire the high idealism of Leo IX, Humbert, Hildebrand and Peter Damian, we must also concede that their work had many victims; the legislation of the eleventh-century Popes on clerical marriage must have produced as many broken homes and personal tragedies as the morals of Hollywood. Both Damian the ascetic and Heloise the deserted wife have a claim on our sympathy as historians; and both found their supporters in their own day. Between the unbending demand for the enforcement of celibacy and the view of the Anonymous of York that it was entirely proper for the clergy to be married there were many possible positions. The Anonymous (writing at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries) was propounding opinions already obsolescent; and clerical marriage found few defenders in the middle and late twelfth century. But if the field narrowed, the subtleties of the problem were more fully appreciated. The twelfth century was an age of growing sophistication in lay circles as well as clerical. Nowhere was this more true than in the world of love and of marriage; in that century (whatever the lot of womankind as a whole) the romantic ideal was born, under whose spell we still live. It is the variety and the subtlety of the view-points which give my subject its interest, and also its intractability. Clerical marriage is an exceedingly delicate topic, though it has not always been delicately treated.

The story of the Pardon of the Clergy in 1531 and all that it entailed has long been familiar to historians of the English Reformation; and despite the several gaps, not to say incongruities, in the accepted narrative, no writer has found difficulty in repeating the inherited version. Indeed, this most important episode in the story of Henry's overthrow of the medieval church has been distinguished by the unquestioning and brief, even peremptory, treatment which it has usually received. In the course of time, minor accretions have added to the first statement of events contained in the Chronicles. But perhaps because the Calendars are disappointingly reticent about public affairs during the winter of 1530–1, no author has seriously questioned that statement, however uneasy he may have felt about it on a priori grounds. The earliest version, therefore, compounded from Hall and Wilkins, still stands. According to it, shortly after Wolsey's death at the end of November 1530, the whole of the English clergy were indicted on a praemunire charge in the King's Bench by the Attorney General for having submitted themselves to the late cardinal's legacy. To escape from their dilemma, the two Convocations made a cash payment to Henry allowing him at the same time a new, if guarded, title of overlordship that was to prove full of consequence. Whatever the significance of the celebrated ‘saving clause’ and despite the reluctance of the clergy to concede any ground, the fact remained that Henry had won the first round with comparative ease and it was only a matter of time before he would proceed with confidence and equal success to the second.

John Locke received the following letter from the Hague on 31 January 1689, whilst he was waiting in Rotterdam for a ship to take him home, now that his exile in Holland could come to an end after the Revolution:

I have been very ill this fortnight. The beginning was what is called the disease of one's country, impatience to be there, but it ended yesterday with violence, as all great things do but kings. Ours went out like a farthing candle, and has given us by this Convention an occasion not only of mending the Government but of melting it down and making all new, which makes me wish you were there to give them a right scheme of government, having been infected by that great man Lord Shaftesbury.

The Colony of Sierra Leone originated in settlements of freed slaves on the West African coast carried out on the initiative of British philanthropists in the later eighteenth century. For over a century, British responsibility was as far as possible restricted to the small mountainous peninsula on which Freetown stands, and to certain nearby islands; but influence was inevitably obtained over nearby coast and hinterland, and during the nineteenth century some additional territories were incorporated in the Colony, though not always brought under effective administration. In 1896 the remaining regions not conceded to be under French or Liberian influence were proclaimed a British Protectorate; which also included, for administrative purposes, certain chiefdoms formerly part of the Colony. In this period, therefore, the term ‘Colony’ is applied to the peninsula and islands originally settled, with a few predominantly tribal areas around the river Sherbro; the term ‘Protectorate’ to territories the size of Ireland, which form the great bulk of the area marked ‘Sierra Leone’ on a modern map, and whose social organization was at this time exclusively tribal. At the beginning of 1898 British officials began to collect a House Tax which had been imposed on three of the five districts of the Protectorate. In February, resistance to the tax by certain Temne chiefs developed into open warfare in the north, and at the end of April a series of savage attacks took place on British and American subjects, mostly of African birth and descent, among the Mende and Sherbro people further south. These two outbreaks constitute the insurrection to be studied in this paper.