The authors of the two preceding papers have both given us multum in parvo—by which I mean that each has dealt with a particular, localized problem and at the same time raised larger and very important questions. Professor Slavin has cast a new light on one of the major mysteries of early Tudor history—the fall of Thomas Cromwell. He adds substantially to G.R. Elton's careful survey of the evidence and takes us another step forward in the elucidation of this momentous episode.

Professor Seaver has focussed on a problem which other historians of the Puritan movement have hinted at but not fully explored, in suggesting that the role of the laity in the Reformation has been underestimated—and in the further assumption that they cannot be conveniently ticketed with the labels in common usage to designate the various clerical factions of the religious left. Both he and Professor Slavin have redirected our attention to the fundamental ambiguities of the English Reformation. Too often writers have unconsciously assumed that it was a fairly coherent process, moving in a reasonably orderly progression through the stages of separation from Rome followed by the renunciation of the mass and, then, after 1559, by a division within the Protestant ranks between Puritans and those who are anachronistically referred to as Anglicans. The process was in fact at every stage a very untidy splintering in which, as in Professor Slavin's study, the struggle is not between two well-defined adversaries but rather a tangled melee in which friend and foe were not always clearly identifiable. What I should like to reflect on briefly here is one such ambiguity, which has not always been presented with maximum clarity. I refer to the confused and indeed contradictory character of the church established by law in 1559 and its fumbling response to the initial challenge of Protestant dissent.