Among the topics of Constantine's governmental measures affecting the Church there is one which has received little or no attention in modern scholarship. And yet this topic would seem at least as important as the numerous disquisitions relative to his motivations, sincerity, honesty of purpose and similar questions which have virtually suffocated modern Constantinean research. The problem which would appear to demand an exhaustive analysis, is so much conditioned by the ramifications of antecedent history as well as by the constitutional development that on this occasion I can do no more than tentatively indicate its extent and scope.

Arecent scholar has written of ‘the widespread belief, by no means the monopoly of high Anglicans only, that it was to Glastonbury, first of all places in these islands of ours, that the Christian faith first came, and that Glastonbury is therefore the fountain and headspring of Christianity in England, and indeed in the whole of the British Isles’.

From its foundation the Carthusian Order cultivated letters as the most fitting form of labour for those who dwell apart in the desert; for although they lived and worked in strict solitude, they still spoke to the Christian world through the books which they wrote, copied and transmitted. Adam of Dryburgh (†1212 at Witham), one of the first and best-known English Carthusian authors, wrote of this activity in his work On the Quadripartite Exercise of the Cell, recalling a passage of the Consuetudines of Guigo 1 which is often cited as evidence of the Carthusian attitude to letters:

‘If the prior has so provided, there is one work to the performance of which you ought especially to attend; that is either that you learn to write (if, of course, you can learn), or if you can and know, that you do write. This work is, as it were, immortal work; work, if one may say so, not passing but lasting; work certainly, may we say, and yet not work; the work, finally, which, among all other works is most fitting to literate religious men …

The interregnum period in England saw the polarisation of thought concerning the nature of the ministry and its relevance to salvation. Almost twenty years ago James Fulton Maclear classified the anti-clericalism which matured during these years in three ways: anti-clericalism based on mounting class consciousness and bitter resentment against the pretensions of the clergy; anti-clericalism rooted in political antagonism; and the anti-clericalism to be discerned in the thought of men such as William Walwyn, which was moralistic, anti-theological and indifferent to ecclesiastical problems. Most historians have discussed the issue of a settled ministry with reference to the writings of the leading controversialists—Milton, Walwyn, Lilburn, Winstanley, Fox, and Jubbes. The position assumed by the Presbyterian ministers themselves has received rather less attention—theirs was essentially a defensive standpoint and consequendy less colourful. Yet, for many reasons, there is a real need for an examination of the development of clerical professional exclusiveness prior to the Civil War and for an analysis of the reaction of the settled ministry to subsequent attacks upon their position.

Edward Gee, rector at Eccleston, near Chorley in Lancashire, from 1643 until 1660, was born in 1612 or 1613, at Banbury (Oxon.). During the years following the reorganisation of the Church in Lancashire along Presbyterian lines in 1646, he achieved recognition as a leading member of the clergy in that county. In 1650 he was said to possess the parsonage-house and glebe at Eccleston, with tithes and a water cornmill. Although he had agreed with the parliamentary cause in the Civil War, he opposed the more revolutionary changes carried out in 1648 and 1649, years in which the House of Commons was purged by the army, king Charles I executed, and the monarchy and the House of Lords abolished. The decision of the new republican Commonwealth regime to exact a promise of allegiance, known as the Engagement (first, in 1649 from a number of important Englishmen, and then in 1650 from all adult males in England) provoked a major pamphlet debate. This Engagement Controversy was the occasion of a lengdiy and detailed exchange of opinions and interpretations concerning the whole problem of how the subject should in conscience behave with respect to a drastic change of government, or, as many would have it, a usurpation of civil authority.

The present-day parishioner, constantly urged to take a more positive role in the life of the local church community, might be surprised to reflect that this onus of responsibility is a comparatively recent development, and that throughout most of the Middle Ages, on the rare occasions when parishioners as such were mentioned at all in the ecclesiastical records, it was virtually in the capacity of property, and often troublesome property at that.

There are many accounts of the ‘prebendaries' plot’ of 1543 against archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Some view the event as a counterattack against advancing heresy in Canterbury diocese. Others see a ‘papist’ revolt within Cranmer's own household. Nearly all agree that the plot was a wholly clerical enterprise. They have studied the clergy alone, focusing on the prebendaries' and preachers' activities against their ordinary. Recent accounts have stressed the relationship between the prebendaries' plot and the conflict between Cranmer and bishop Stephen Gardiner. That there was factional strife in the royal council, which could easily focus on religious issues, is not in question here. What is lacking, however, in recent accounts is any consideration of the substantial involvement of a number of Kentish gentlemen and royal officials, although their part in the affair was noted in near-contemporary accounts. By following these traces we may enlarge our understanding of the intrigue of 1543 in the context of Reformation politics at the county level.

Small attention has generally been paid to the activities of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, during his year in Scotland from September 1655 to September 1656. In particular, his negotiations with the Protester and Resolutioner ministers have not been supposed any more or less successful than those, for example, of Lillburne or Monck, but merely another stage in the Cromwellian government's ineffectual urgings towards a settlement of the dispute in the Church.

Historians of the eighteenth century have written of William Whiston, if at all, with an ill-concealed smile. ‘The engaging Whiston’, that ‘most amiable of heretics’, is duly noted in every account of the development of Arianism in England, but his lunatic vagaries are kept well to the fore. Yet Whiston has some claims to serious historical attention. His heresies were considered dangerous enough to provoke the champions of both high and low-church to counter attack, and to unite the warring factions in the turbulent Convocation of 1710/11 in a concerted attempt to silence ‘this corrupter of our common Christianity’, this ‘fallen star of our church’. To Whiston, rather than to Samuel Clarke, belongs the dubious credit of having revived the Arian heresy in England, and although Clarke's less flamboyant teaching was ultimately more influential, Whiston, in converting the dissenters Joseph Hallett and James Peirce to Arian views, was indirectly responsible for the conflagration at Salter's Hall in 1719, and the spread of Unitarianism in English dissent. The story of the discovery of ‘Primitive Christianity’ and the prolonged persecution which Whiston's attempts to propagate his new gospel provoked is not widiout elements of farce, but there is a serious side to the episode. The abortive attempt to cite Whiston before the ‘court of Convocation’ in 1711, and his subsequent prosecution in the Court of Delegates, were seen by churchmen as yet another demonstration of the impotence of the Church of England in the face of her enemies, and by latitudinarians and unbelievers as a dangerous attempt on the liberties of protestant Englishmen. Like the Sacheverell trial, to which it forms a pendant, the Whiston affair was, while it lasted, a cause célèbre, and casts further light on the eighteenth-century debate on the place and function of the Church in Society.

The religious revival during the 1740s, in Britain and the American colonies, resulted in a vast output of printed matter. A comparison of the literature printed before, with that printed after this period, shows the impact of a single decade on both the form and content of evangelical literature. In particular, the revival was responsible for launching a new literary genre—the evangelical newspaper and magazine. Where there had been no specifically evangelical periodical publication in the first forty years of the century, by the last forty years such literature had become a normal means of communication and propagation for several denominations.

Students of the Evangelical Revival may have noted the grateful reference made by George Whitefield to a minister in Gloucester, Thomas Cole, who encouraged him in his youth when he began preaching, and have wished that we knew more of this ‘most venerable dissenting minister’. A few months after Cole's death in 1742, Whitefield tells how he was brought up to ridicule Cole ‘and (with shame I write it) used, when a boy, to run into his meeting-house, and cry, Old Cole! old Cole! old Cole! Being asked once by one of his congregation, what business I would be of? I said, “a minister, but I would take care never to tell stories in the pulpit, like the old Cole”. About twelve years afterwards the old man heard me preach in one of the churches at Gloucester; and on my telling some story to illustrate the subject I was upon, having been informed what I had before said, made this remark to one of his elders, “I find that young Whitefield can now tell stories, as well as old Cole”. Being affected much with my preaching, he was as it were become young again, and used to say, when coming to and returning from Barn, “These are days of the Son of Man indeed!” nay, he was so animated, and so humbled, that he used to subscribe himself my Curate, and went about preaching after me, from place to place’.

Not much is known about Robert Holland, the only Renaissance demonologist to venture into print in the Welsh language. He was born in 1557 at Conway, the third son of a gentleman, and went eventually to Cambridge and into the Church of England. He took his B.A. at Magdalene in 1577–8, was ordained at Ely two years later and spent the 1580s preaching and schoolmastering in East Anglia. In 1591 he became rector of a crown living at Prendergast, near Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, and he was subsequently presented to Walwyn's Castle and Robeston West in the same county. As a result of the patronage of John Philipps of Picton, he was also incumbent of the Carmarthenshire parish of Llanddowror from at least 1594 until 1608. He is presumed to have died before the end of James I's reign, probably in 1622.

In October 1826, an impassioned letter appeared in The Times, written by an outraged correspondent whose house had been entered unceremoniously by two offensive females who demanded first a donation towards the construction of a missionary training college and then a justification of his refusal to subscribe. He fulminated against the triumphalism of voluntary religious societies: ‘It seems “to grow by what it feeds on”’ The first half of the nineteenth century in Britain was certainly an age of ‘evangelical aggression’, and probably the modern missionary movement was making an impression on British society far deeper than it made on such countries as India and Africa, to which missionaries were sent. Missionary enthusiasm appears to have increased lay giving for home missions as well as foreign missions; it probably stimulated interest in home missions and increased the number of candidates for the ministry; it almost certainly provided a fillip to theological education; it reinforced the already existing tendency to express piety in activity rather than quiescence; it helped to bury fatalistic and deterministic theological systems; it appears to have appealed, like the later temperance movement, to all classes of society; and (perhaps related to the last claim) it declared war on denominational bigotry.

In an earlier article I discussed the general status of Anglican chaplaincies in continental Europe after the defeat of Napoleon and attempted to show how feeble this aspect of the pax britannica really was. Peter Hinchliff s expression ‘The One-Sided Reciprocity’ indeed fits perfectly the position of the Anglican Church abroad in those years. Despite the Royal Patents obtained by bishop Edmund Gibson of London in 1727 and 1728, the authority of the bishop of London was far from being strengthened by the Royal Supremacy: if anything, the Royal Supremacy neutralised episcopal authority. In a situation where some chaplains were appointed by the Foreign Office and others engaged by private bodies (the most notable at this time being the Colonial and Continental Church Society), the bishop of London, as nominal ordinary of Anglican congregations in Europe, could only exercise authority over those clergy who had received their appointments directly from Government, the operation of Government patronage having emasculated all independent episcopal initiative; and these clergy often refused to defer to the bishop unless specifically directed to do so by the Foreign Secretary. ‘As I have no jurisdiction at Ostend’, wrote bishop Charles James Blomfield of a priest who owed his appointment to a private body, ‘my licence holds good only so long as the Congregation, who pay their chaplain, think fit to respect it’.

Hitherto we have depended on the State, i.e. on the ruling powers in the country—the King and the aristocracy … But these recollec-tions of the past must not engross our minds, or hinder us in looking at things as they are, and as they will be soon, and inquiring what is intended by Providence to take the place of the time-honoured instrument which he has broken (if it is yet to be broken) the regal and aristocratic power, I shall disgust many men when I say, we must look to the people’. (J. H. Newman, British Magazine, 1833).

Discussions of the ‘Catholic Question’ of the early nineteenth century have concentrated almost exclusively upon developments in Ireland, where demagogues, priests, and peasants cleverly contrived to extort Emancipation from a protestant parliament. The historian's choice of focus scarcely requires explanation, what with the purport of Irish events and the relentless logic with which the O'Connellites had organised their following. And yet, despite the emphases of scholarship, the concessions of 1829 actually represented a triumph on both sides of St. George's Channel. The Catholic Saxon as well as the Catholic Celt, each in his own way, had contributed to the joyous outcome, and quite possibly neither would have succeeded without the other.

The 1880s witnessed a remarkable upsurge in public concern over the question of child welfare. Not only were two important Acts of Parliament passed providing children, for the first time, with effective safeguards against neglect, cruelty and exploitation, but the final year of the decade saw the establishment of the highly influential National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Whilst much has been written of these developments, the part played by cardinal Henry Edward Manning in forming public opinion and in helping to secure the successful passage of legislation has, by and large, gone unacknowledged. It was in 1885—some twenty years after his elevation to the see of Westminster—that he took up the burning question of child protection, a fact which adds weight to Ausubel's assertion that ‘his last years were in many respects the most fruitful of his life, especially in his attempts to apply Christianity to social problems’.

Late in 1831 a number of Jamaican slaves began a movement of passive resistance in which all work on the island was to be ended on 25 December. By the time that the subsequent chain of events had been played out, perhaps as many as a thousand slaves had died, although the official figures listed 207 killed during the ensuing insurrection and 312 executed in the aftermath. The white colonials immediately turned against the Baptist and Wesleyan missionaries, accusing them of fomenting the rebellion. As a result of this violent and-missionary reaction six Baptist missionaries were jailed, a Wesleyan was tarred, five Wesleyan chapels and ten Baptist chapels were destroyed, while the latter had another four chapels suffering partial destruction.

Among the sources that Strype used for his Life of Whitgift was a group of MSS., relating to the activities of the Puritans between c. 1588 and 1591, which he was lent in 1711 by the Rev. Thomas Brett, LL.D., of Spring Grove, Kent, the future Non-Juror bishop. The papers had originally belonged to a maternal ancestor of Brett's, Sir John Boys of St. Gregory's, Canterbury, a successful Elizabethan lawyer who had been M.P. successively for Sandwich, Midhurst and Canterbury, and Recorder of Canterbury and Sandwich, and who had held the office of steward of the Liberty of the see of Canterbury for almost forty years under archbishops Parker, Grindal, Whitgift, Bancroft and Abbot. Sir John Boys left no direct issue, but numerous collateral relations and the papers appear to have descended through the family of his nephew Edward Boys, who inherited the manor of Betshanger from his uncle, until the beginning of the eighteenth century when they came into Brett's possession after the death of his mother's brother, Jeffray Boys of Betshanger, in 1703.