The dissolution of the monasteries in England was a dramatic action which both at the time and since has captured popular imagination. A persisting myth pictures the monks turned out by the agents of Henry VIII departing, slowly chanting, into the snow-bound countryside which shrouded their later fate from human eyes. Historians, who have been equally drawn to the subject, have given the picture a different slant. The story of the suppression has been fitted into a wider background of fast-moving religious and secular change in the decade 1530 to 1540, and can be seen as one of a number of moves which were designed at once to strengthen the king's control over the Church and to improve his finances. By 1536, indeed, the religious were already accustomed to the passage of royal commissioners and had had the power of the crown brought forcibly home to them by a number of direct royal interventions in matters of internal monastic discipline.

Within a decade after the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to England and Wales in 1850, cardinal Nicholas Wiseman found himself engaged in a significant struggle with the archdiocesan chapter of Westminster. The fundamental issue involved the right of the chapter to interfere in matters which, as they appeared to Wiseman, were clearly within the sole jurisdiction of the bishop. A number of other controversial matters became almost inextricably tied to the dispute, so that litigation, in England and in Rome, plagued the cardinal to the end of his life.

The Gestapo arrived at Martin Niemöller's rectory in Berlin-Dahlem on the morning of 1 July 1937. He was taken away for questioning and remained a prisoner for nearly eight years. His detention came as no personal surprise since he had been aware of his perilous existence. Ever since Hitler's accession to power in January 1933, the uneasy relations between Church and State had received a certain amount of attention abroad. The precise issues at stake were, however, difficult to grasp. This complexity remained, but as the struggle appeared to centre on the fate of one man—Niemöller—interest became more widespread. Thirty years later, in England, whenever the Church Struggle is mentioned, the name of Niemöller most readily comes to mind.