According to the Byzantine sources, the reign of the iconoclastic emperor Constantine v (741–775) was characterised by an attack on the very institution of monasticism, and the brunt of the persecution directed against the ‘orthodox’ was borne by the monastic order. This anti-monastic phase of iconoclasm has not passed unnoticed in modern attempts to clarify the origins and motive forces of the iconoclastic movement as a whole. The gamut of explanations ranges from an extreme position which maintains that die iconoclastic movement itself was merely a pretext for attacking parasitic monasteries and to confiscate their land holdings, through more balanced views which claim that the enthusiastic and determined propagation and defence of image-worship by monks was an obstacle which had to be removed by breaking the power of monasticism if the official iconoclastic policies were to be effective, to a recent more sophisticated approach which claims to recognise in both monasticism and icon-worship illegitimate, unlicensed forms of spirituality, signs of separatist tendencies which die State battling against Islam for survival could not afford to tolerate.

Whatever his personal failings and those of his Order, the prior of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, more than any other man in England in the late Middle Ages, stood for the political standards that were most respected, if not most often acted upon, by his fellow-countrymen. He was also one of die great magnates of the kingdom, given power, money, and access to the king by his rich priory based at Clerkenwell, the five preceptories his office entitled him to, and his places in the upper house of parliament and die royal council. What use the priors made of their office and how they lived up to the ideals they were supposed to embody were, therefore, matters of consequence at the time. The surviving records, though not abundant, seem sufficient to provide partial answers to these questions for at least some priors; but no such attempt has yet been published.

The colloque of Poissy, September–October 1561, was an important incident in the history of the Reformation, and a dramatic incident in the career of the cardinal of Lorraine. This subject was first studied in detail by H. O. Evennett in his book The Cardinal of Lorraine and the Council of Trent, published in 1930. More recently, Evennett provided the inspiration for Donald Nugent in his study Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: The Colloque of Poissy. It is upon these two important works that any reassessment must necessarily be based. In a concluding chapter on ‘the case of the cardinal of Lorraine’, Nugent wrote: ‘while the sources would seem to argue for a better view of Lorraine and his conduct at Poissy, an element of ambiguity remains’. This cautious comment refers to the introduction by Lorraine of the confession of Augsburg and a Lutheran formula on the eucharist. For Nugent, the ‘critical role of the enigmatic cardinal of Lorraine has never been resolved’. In order to concentrate on his subject, the colloque itself, Nugent skipped briefly over its historical background. This he believed to have been fully treated by others—doubtless Evennett in particular. It is, however, still necessary to study this historical background more precisely in order to clarify how and why the colloque arose. Only then does it become possible to interpret the all-important role of Lorraine.

The year 1688 was for England a religious as well as a political turning-point, and nowhere more so than among the English Roman Catholics. The post-Revolution Church was maintained and led by the same clergy who had flourished under James 11, but in very different circumstances. The hectic triumphalism of the years before 1688 gave way to a period of slow, cautious, and self-consciously a-political consolidation. The change can be seen in the careers of two men, Bonaventure Giffard and John Gother. Giffard had been provocatively consecrated bishop of Madura in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall in 1688. In the same year he had gone to Oxford, to preside over twelve catholic dons at Magdalen College, intruded in the place of the evicted protestant Fellows. There he had confirmed and sung the mass, while protestant undergraduates stormed and howled outside the chapel windows. The Revolution brought a fourteen-month prison sentence in Newgate, from which he emerged, a chastened man, to oversee the formation and consolidation of congregations and clergy funds and organisations in the Midland District and, after 1702, to take charge of the London District with its mission to the London poor and unchurched.