In contrast to the extensive research devoted to the Marian exiles, little detailed attention has been paid by modern historians to the Englishmen who simply tried to continue Protestant worship during 1553–8 within the country. Yet developments in these years provide unusual insights into mid-Tudor Protestantism at its grass roots, particularly into what remained after the Edwardian Church of England had suddenly had the power of the state not merely removed from its support but actively turned against it. Not surprisingly, the change from Edward to Mary is referred to in contemporary Protestant tracts in something of the tone used toward an inexplicable natural disaster like an outbreak of the plague, for Mary's measures to return England to Roman Catholicism were indeed radical in their impact. Among other things, most of the Protestant hierarchy was soon in prison or in exile, and men and women intent on continuing the communal worship of the Edwardian Church were in effect cast into the same boat with religious groups like the Freewillers which that Church had previously repressed. Legally, all of them were now religious separatists – that is, persons who persistently conducted worship apart from the established Church – and any gatherings for Protestant worship were mere conventicles – that is, periodic meetings of self-selected persons worshipping without the participation of an authorised cleric.

Richard Baxter (1615–91) was possessed of that all-embracing curiosity, indefatigable energy and tenacious idealism which, as Reformation and Renaissance passed into the sober Augustan certainties of the Enlightenment, became ever rarer among Englishmen. His many-sidedness is reflected in the very different kinds of interest his career attracts. The ecclesiastical historian meets in Baxter both puritanism's most committed apologist and its most idiosyncratic representative, a man who, involved in every doctrinal controversy and every negotiation or conference convened to discuss a national church settlement, was to have a lasting influence on English Dissent. His participation in these debates is, however, more than a chapter in the history of later puritanism: it contributed to the development of seventeenth-century rationalism and liberalism and shows suggestive affinities with the thought of the Cambridge Platonists. There is, furthermore, contemporary relevance in Baxter's conception of ‘mere Christianity’: ‘the first exponent of Ecumenism in England’, he promoted ecclesiastical reconciliation, both practically, in the Worcestershire Association, and theologically, in the attempt of such treatises as Richard Baxter's Catholick Theologie (1675) to harmonise Calvinism and Arminianism.

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of political mobilisation for religious organisations. This is a well-established fact in the case of English nonconformity – not quite such a well-established fact in the case of the Established Church. My concern in this paper is to trace the response of the Church of England to the extension of electoral politics, a response chiefly evidenced in the work of the Church Institution. This body, founded in 1859 and reconstructed as the Church Defence Institution in 1871, survived until 1896 as the most important independent pressure group acting on behalf of the Established Church in English politics.

Dr Samuel Johnson, despite his dying exactly a century before this I Dixie Chair was founded, is linked with it individually and in three ways. The first is, that the only time he came to Cambridge he came to see Dr Richard Farmer of Emmanuel College – one of the two or three most celebrated Masters of Emmanuel College. When Johnson came to Cambridge, Farmer was not yet Master, being junior proctor that year, which was March 1765. He and Johnson had a common interest in Shakespeare, and Johnson used Farmer as his informant for some of the lives of the poets. They also had a common quality of both being lovers of London club conversation; and both totally careless of their appearance, so that at times observers could mistake each of them for being half-crazed; and both finding it impossible to get up in the morning.

Last year the world celebrated Martin Luther's quincentennial birthday anniversary with postage stamps, parties and publications. Scholars had been gearing up for the quincentennial for some years and began filling bookstores with quincentennial biographies and monographs in 1980 or 1981.1 Their production was impressive, yet in an odd way relatively little new ground was broken. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of Luther biography.