By the late twelfth century, the principle that hereditary succession guaranteed title had triumphed in English feudal land law, and this threatened lords' rights to choose their tenants freely. Henry II's assizes were providing mesne tenants with security of tenure. They separated title to a tenement from lordly acceptance of the tenant when the the tenant was a direct descendant of the previous landholder. An undoubted male heir could take possession at once, not waiting for his lord to put him into possession, denying the lord his right to take the land into his hand and hold it until relief was paid.

The new actions available to mesne tenants did not apply to direct tenants of the Crown, however. The Angevin monarchs resisted following rules that their courts were enforcing against other feudal lords in their treatment of their own tenants-in-chief. The king held to the old view that an heir does not succeed to his ancestor's property automatically, but only has a customary claim to be accepted as tenant. As Glanvill noted, the king claimed primer seizin, his right to take possession of a barony and to place the heir in possession only once the heir had done homage to him and made arrangements to pay relief.

Historians differ widely in appreciating the fiscal grievances of the Lincolnshire Uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Following the Dodds, some dismiss them as a marginal concern, while others regard them as a major cause of revolt. No matter where they stand, historians have handled these grievances without careful analysis. This seems to stem from a debate that has dogged both rebellions. The complexity of the rebels' complaint is obscured by a simplistic desire to show that the revolts were primarily of religious provenance, notwithstanding the variety of causes evident in the rebels' demands. Furthermore, the two main advocates of secular motivation, A. G. Dickens and R. R. Reid, perversely mention the fiscal grievances only in passing. Yet they were there, firmly declared in the rebels' bills, petitions, and songs. A pervasive force affecting the whole range of society, they sustained the rebel view that the government had to be checked not only to prevent the subversion of the Church but also the decay of the commonwealth. They were also present in the revolts of 1537 as northerners rose again, this time to protest against a breach of promise committed by the government's attempt to collect the lay subsidy and clerical tenth before the York Parliament had met to determine whether or not they should be collected.

Slightly more than two years after the decapitation of Charles I, the Commonwealth of England inflicted the same punishment on the same block against his follower, Sir Henry Hyde. The failure to reach a settlement in the aftermath of the British civil war led to the king's beheading. Explaining Hyde's execution, however, requires a geographically broader context, for Sir Henry undertook his treasonable activities against the overseas interests of the English Commonwealth and Sir Thomas Bendysh, who had served as English ambassador in Istanbul since 1647, when he assumed the role of protector of English merchants. Although Bendysh later quarreled with his charges, the unexpected appearance of Henry Hyde in Istanbul in 1650 rallied the merchants behind him, for Hyde represented to them a return to the recent past, with its governmental interference and royal regulation of commercial activity. His presence also forced merchants to choose sides, thereby transposing upon Levantine commerce the divisions that had emerged during the civil war. Just as most Company members supported Parliament, so did their factors in the Levant back Bendysh, a known quantity, a clever negotiator, and a pragmatist. In his brief tenure, Bendysh had proven his ability to strike bargains with the Ottomans and stimulate commerce. He also personified the interests of the Council of State and the Levant Company directors, thereby linking the disparate but inter-dependent network of Levantine commerce.

In August 1874, the Marquess of Ripon, until recently a Liberal Cabinet Minister, decided to convert from the Church of England to that of Rome. The Times, which like the rest of the English political world assumed that this ended Ripon's public career, denounced the moral “obliquity” of the man who “has renounced his mental and moral freedom, and has submitted himself to the guidance of the Roman Catholic Priesthood.” In October, the former Prime Minister, William E. Gladstone, asserted in an article on ritualism that the High Church position could not lead to Rome because, among other things, “no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another.” Remonstrances from Catholics (among them Ripon) on the issue of civil loyalty led Gladstone to develop his position fully in a pamphlet in November, The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, which in turn provoked one of the major Church-State controversies of the century. Historians have generally assumed that Ripon's conversion was causally connected with Gladstone's outburst.” It was, but with a difference.