There were tears of joy and rounds of applause among the prelates who closed the Council of the Church in Trent Cathedral in December 1563. The 226 signatories to the final decrees and the many other attendant theologians and canon lawyers who had served on sub-committees no doubt had mixed emotions at this conclusion: pride in what had been achieved; relief that the bitter arguments which had characterised many of the final sessions were now ended; thankfulness that, with whatever haste, they had finally agreed on a package of legislation for the sick pope to sign, in case his death would mean that the work was lost or had to be redone; hope and expectation – at least among the genuine reformers – that they could now go out into the world knowing what they had to defend against heretics, and that they had rules – whatever the omissions – to guide their reform of the Church and its members. The sick pope recovered; by June 1564 he had ratified the canons and decrees produced by the Council since its opening in December 1545 and ordered their printing and circulation to diocesan bishops for implementation.

Church is not the first place we should think of looking for ‘the historian of the Roman Empire’. He is more usually thought of as the opponent of organised Christianity and of the established church whether under Constantine or the Hanoverians. Yet we know that he dutifully sat in the family pew at Buriton, occasionally attended services elsewhere and was indeed something of a connoisseur of sermons. Our aim is to seek him out during times of worship and, by an imaginative interpretation of certain known facts, to enter as far as possible into his mind. Such informed reading between the lines, using the documents which reveal to complement those which leave things unsaid, is hardly going beyond what the historian does when he deduces probable causes or demonstrable effects from a set of well-documented facts.