While working on a more general assessment of William Gray's tenure of the see of Ely, I was struck by the amount of incidental information in his register relating to his associates, the officers of his spiritual and temporal administrations and the men who benefited from his patronage.

In explaining the failure of Mary Tudor's plans for Catholic revival during her reign, it is customary to dwell on her manifold errors of judgment. No one can deny her ardent desire to restore the love for Rome among her subjects—she declared that her people's souls meant more to her than ten kingdoms; but she is remembered for burning heretics and thus providing English Protestantism with much-needed martyrs and respectability, rather than for inspiring Counter-Reformation zeal. The most obvious reason for this failure was Mary's early death, which left her little time for long-term policies; but in addition emphasis must be placed on her misunderstanding of her subjects' prejudices and confusion after the schism. She disgusted the strong Henrician national feeling by marrying a foreigner and delighting openly in her Spanish blood; she showed no sympathy for the financial worries of influential subjects who had obtained monastic property and had no wish to surrender it; she instigated a persecution which aroused distaste even in minds accustomed to sixteenth century suffering and punishment; and she embarked on an unpopular war and lost Calais disastrously. Moreover, she reposed greatest trust in Reginald Pole, the papal legate, another leader who failed to comprehend the bitterness of English xenophobia and the strength of anticlericalism and heresy. Pole assumed that anti-Roman sentiments were the shortlived results of schismatic sin and would fade with the orderly restoration of Roman rule; and so he did not even begin to build a militant organisation which could have tried to resist Elizabethan Protestantism. It is an impressive catalogue of mistakes.

Much may be made of William Crashawe. As father of the poet, an editor of William Perkins's works, a publisher of rare manuscripts, the protagonist of catholicism, a devoted bibliophile, and a publicist for the Virginia Company, he merits recognition. Yet almost nothing has been written about his tenure at the Temple where, in the wake of Antonio de Corro and Walter Travers, he held one of the most lucrative lectureships in London.

A political volte face is always likely to compel attention, especially when performed by a leading politician who thereby seems to reverse his lifelong attitude. So it was in the case of Lord John Russell's hostility to the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales and his adoption of legislation against it. His actions brought him no profit but rather helped to weaken his position. For the Ecclesiastical Titles bill, while it may have been intended as a hopeful introduction to a firmer political existence, appears instead as the culmination of a long decline. Russell never succeeded in recapturing the fulfilment of the years 1828–32, when he played a central part in carrying great constitutional changes which vindicated his principles of religious and civil liberty. After this he witnessed the great reforms being carried by others; as his latest biographer states, ‘Peel had run off with the credit for the free trade policy, Palmerston for the conduct of foreign affairs, Disraeli for the second Reform Act, and Gladstone for the policy of justice to Ireland…’. Moreover, he removed some of the glory of his liberal attainments by writing the Durham Letter and adopting the Ecclesiastical Titles bill—though Russell disagreed with such an opinion, since he denied that it was illiberal to resist ‘papal aggression’. Behaviour so intriguing as Russell's in 1850–1 has naturally been the subject of a good deal of inquiry and comment, but further examination may help to show the comparative importance of factors which contributed to the Prime Minister's motives.