In his brief account of James Pilkington, bishop of Durham, F. O. White created an enduring myth. Citing only two documents from the state papers, he proposed the following scenario:

“Though Bishop Pilkington was a great iconoclast, he was a vigorous maintainer of the rights and property of his see. Shortly after his consecration he had received a partial restitution of his temporalities, but the restitution of the remainder was long delayed, it being felt by the queen and her ministers that the spiritual and temporal power of the Bishops of Durham was excessive.

Pilkington appears to have so pertinaciously insisted on his rights, and so strenuously refused to allow the bishopric to be spoliated, that the queen made him a prisoner in his own house, for we find him, in a letter to Sir W. Cecil, written just before the warrant for the restitution of his temporalities was issued (May 23, 1566), stating that then he was ‘at liberty to walk’, and ‘dared to go abroad into gardens’. At last the matter was arranged, and on June 13, 1566, the warrant was issued for the complete restitution of his temporalities, on the condition of his paying to the Crown £1000 a year during his life.”

This portrait of a Pilkington both combative and disgraced is entirely absent from the biographical account of him which prefaces the Parker Society edition of his Works. A few years later, however, the Coopers asserted that it was only ‘in consequence of his spirited remonstrances’ that his lands were fully restored. C. W. Sutton, writing a few years before White, rehearsed Henry Machyn's account of a sermon during which, in March 1560, Pilkington had demanded ‘better living’ for the bishops and clergy and went on to observe that he was ‘a great stickler for the rights and emoluments of his see’.

Publication of An essay on spirit in 1750 was, on the face of it, no particular landmark in the history of heterodoxy. There had been arguments in Anglican circles since the 1680s about ‘mystery’ and the Holy Trinity, all part of the assault on fundamental articles of belief waged by such critics as John Toland and Anthony Collins after the Revolution Settlement, a time when interest in Arian ideas was reviving among Isaac Newton's followers, particularly Samuel Clarke and William Whiston. An essay on spirit – this latest expression of a highly developed Arianism – was couched in scholastic, even esoteric language, of apparent interest only to controversialists on either side of the question. What, however, made it a cause célèbre was the talk from the moment it left the press that its author and apologist for what we have recently been reminded was the archetypal Christian deviation was none other than one of the most senior members of the Church of Ireland – the bishop of Clogher, Robert Clayton, himself an Englishman by birth. Though not every commentator could or would believe this ascription, the bishop himself never attempted to deny it and, before long, the unsettling evidence of the extent to which heresy had penetrated the highest circles of the Anglican establishment was beyond serious doubt. Its appearance (and the writings which followed) led to vigorous counter-blasts on both sides of the Irish Sea from a range of clerical and lay opinion that extended well beyond the confines of any church ‘party’. Having spent the previous half century countering, with some success, the different strains of deism and free-thinking on the frontiers of Anglicanism, a broad band of clergy was alarmed that Clayton's writings of the 1750s bore disturbing witness to the presence of traitors within the citadel who, in challenging the Church to tolerate their continued presence, were ready to endanger its moderate latitudinarian character. Moreover, An essay on spirit appeared at a time when the writings of Middleton and Hume also demanded the notice of theologians, and the ‘Church in Danger!’ had not ceased to be an appropriate battle cry to marginalised Tories.

Traditionally scholars distinguish English Anglican cathedrals of ‘old’ foundation and those of ‘new’, but since Henry VIII a further category has arisen comprising those established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to serve newly created dioceses. These are often referred to as parish-church cathedrals because they mostly remained parish churches even after their elevation. Their new status raised various architectual and organisational problems, and this essay concentrates on the latter, illustrating them with select examples. These problems deserve examination because there is little recent literature on them and some passing references may tend to mislead.

Two events define the period. In 1836 the first modern parish-church cathedral was created at Ripon. In 1931 the Cathedrals Measure provided for revision of all cathedral statutes within general guidelines, the outcome of a commission of enquiry which Church Assembly had launched in 1924 and which had reported in 1927. Moreover by 1931, albeit then unperceived, an era had ended in another respect because after a surge of creations in the 1920s, no more new bishoprics have been erected in England by the Anglican Church (despite various plans), though some territorial adjustments have been made between dioceses, notably the transfer of Croydon from Canterbury to Southwark. Throughout much of this period popular odium surrounded cathedral establishments, a residue from radical attack in the 1830s and 1840s upon all ecclesiastical corporations whose wealth, admittedly often maladministered, critics had hoped to appropriate to other uses, whose neglect of duties had become scandalous, and whose quirky and outmoded ways Trollope gently satirised in his Barchester novels. The period saw a piecemeal and relatively unco-ordinated response to the problems which creation of these cathedrals involved, and that Church Assembly commission explicitly deplored the ‘anomalous and confused’ situation which had arisen.

The year 1998 sees the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the World Council of Churches. Great, but subsequently largely disappointed hopes, greeted it. The movement that led directly to its formation had its genesis in the International Missionary Conference of 1910, an event often cited in popular surveys as marking the beginning of the Ecumenical Movement. This paper will, however, argue that modern ecumenism has a complex series of roots. Some of them predate that conference, significant though it was in leading to the ‘Faith and Order’ movement that was, in its turn, such an important contributor to the genesis of the World Council.

Archbishop William Temple, who played a key role in both the ‘Faith and Order’ and ‘Life and Work’ movements, referred to the Ecumenical Movement as the ‘great fact of our times’. This was a gross exaggeration. It is true that the movement engaged, from about 1920 onwards, a very considerable amount of the energy of the most talented and forward-looking leaders and thinkers of the Churches in the Anglican and Protestant traditions. It remained, however, marginal in the life of the Roman Catholic Church until Vatican II, despite the pioneering commitment of some extremely able people amidst official disapproval. Some leaders of the Orthodox Church took a considerable interest in the movement. However, both the official ecclesiology and the popular stance of most Orthodox precluded any real rapprochement with other Churches on terms that bore any resemblance to practicality. Even in the Anglican and mainstream Protestant Churches, the movement remained largely one of a section of the leadership. It attained little genuine popularity, a fact that was frequently admitted even by its most ardent partisans. One could well say that the Ecumenical Movement had only one really solid achievement to celebrate in 1948. This was the formation, in the previous year, of the Church of South India, the first Church to represent a union across the episcopal–non-episcopal divide. This type of union has yet to be emulated outside the Indian sub-continent.

One of the aims of this article will be to try to explain why success in India went unmatched elsewhere. The emphasis will be on the English dimension of the problem, though many of the factors that affected the English situation also obtained in other countries in the Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition. This assessment must be balanced, however, by an appreciation of the real progress made in terms of improved and even amicable church relationships.

It was long a commonplace of Reformation history that John Bale, the Catholic friar turned Protestant firebrand, was during his time at Cambridge University a member of Jesus College. This received wisdom was enshrined in the pages of such standard reference works as Cooper and Venn, and was regularly repeated, where appropriate, in histories of the university and of the English Reformation. This was not questioned until J. Crompton observed over thirty years ago that there was no foundation for this tradition. Crompton's lead was followed some years later by L. P. Fairfield, who reiterated in his study of Bale that there was ‘no evidence whatever that Bale ever became a member of Jesus College’. However, despite these categorical conclusions, the editor of Bale's surviving plays, Peter Happé, now the leading authority on Bale's life and works, has recently maintained that after all he ‘probably entered Jesus College’. In making this claim, Happé argues partly from a passage in Bale's own writings relating to his connection with two early Fellows of Jesus College, Geoffrey Downes and Thomas Cranmer, and partly from a later tradition of Bale's membership attested in a seventeenth-century manuscript history of the college. A close analysis of the evidence, however, corroborates the contention of Crompton and Fairfield, and indicates that the later tradition arose from a misinterpretation by the Stuart antiquary Thomas Fuller of Bale's own recollections.

The French wars of religion, 1562–1629. By Mack P. Holt. (New Approaches to European History, 8.) Pp. xiv+239 incl. 9 maps and 7 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. £30 (cloth), £10.95 (paper). 0 521 35359 9; 0 521 35873 6

Reformation in La Rochelle. Tradition and change in early modern Europe, 1500–1568. By Judith Pugh Meyer. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 298). Pp. 182 incl. frontispiece, 9 figs and 21 tables. Geneva: Droz, 1996. 2 600 00115 8

A city in conflict. Troyes during the French wars of religion. By Penny Roberts. (Studies in Early Modern European History.) Pp. xi+228. Manchester–New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. £40. 0 7190 4694 7

One king, one faith. The Parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century. By Nancy Lyman Roelker. (A Centennial Book.) Pp. xiii+543. Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1996. £50 ($65). 0 520 08626 0

When the French king Henri III appeared before the Parlement of Paris to enregister the Edict of Nemours on 18 July 1585, he was greeted with a eulogistic harangue from the first president of the parlement, Achille de Harlay. This was, he told the king, a true lit de justice, in which the king was united and reconciled with his people within a godly union around the one, true and Catholic religion. He went on to remind the king that it was twenty-five years ago to the month that the first edict of Catholicity had been promulgated. In the intervening period, the parlement had never accepted the principle behind the adventure of religious pluralism attempted in the various edicts of pacification with the Protestant minority. They had only enregistered them under the duress of ‘the explicit command of the king’ and the ‘urgent necessity of the times’, judging all such measures ‘contrary to the tranquility of your state’, and against the law of God. One observer recorded that the king wept during this speech. But these were not tears of joy, for this edict (which obliged the Protestant minority to abjure or depart the realm within months) had been forced upon him by the duke of Guise and the Catholic League. At a stroke it unwound the painfully slow efforts of the French monarchy to rebuild its authority on the basis of a royally imposed religious pluralism. The king appeared before his parlement to reap what rewards he could from a measure that also advertised his faiblesse. Like the more recent tear for the decommissioning of a royal yacht, these were the ways a monarch used to express the politically impossible. For us they are an important reminder of the passions that gripped French politics during its painful and bloody reformation and how sophisticated we must be in their interpretation. The four works under consideration here are very disparate – a socio-institutional study, an up-to-date, interpretative textbook, and two case-studies in the urban reformation. Their only common thread is that they represent the variety of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (in the French denomination) scholarship on the wars of religion.