This study has made the case that the secularismof the English marriage plot has been too readily assumed.That assumption dissolves as soon as the genre’s early political contexts are more fully taken into account: Court Whig hegemony, the passage of and intense resistance to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act and the marriage debates that follow. Yet the origins of the English marriage plot are nothing if not layered. The novels of Richardson, Fielding, Shebbeare and Goldsmith shaped the genre and retain connections to improper marriage cultures. Old urban clandestine wedding markets and theatrical mock marriages continue to haunt them even as, promoting various Anglican and political interests, they invent a genre for which proper church ceremony is central.