The opinion of modern scholars is divided about the nature of Anne Boleyn's relationship to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Tudor poet. On the basis of a few of his verses and three Catholic treatises, some writers have concluded that Anne and he were lovers. In these analyses not enough attention has been paid to the role of Henry VIII, the third member of this alleged lovers' triangle, who guarded his own honor and inquired into that of his wives, before, during, and after their marriages to him. A comment on the way in which the king viewed and defended his honor will be useful to this examination of the evidence customarily accepted as proof of Anne and Wyatt's love affair.

A gentleman's honor, as Henry's contemporaries perceived it, was a complicated concept. First and foremost it was assumed that a man's birth and lineage would predispose him to chivalric acts on the battlefield where, in fact, only one cowardly lapse would stain his and his family's reputation forever. Secondly, the concept embodied the notion that it bestowed upon its holder certain social privileges and respect. During Henry's reign, moreover, the “realm and the community of honour” came to be viewed as “identical” with the sovereign power of the king at its head. One result of this “nationalization,” was that the behavior of crown dependants and servants affected the king's good name in both a personal and a public sense, and his ministers took care to do all that was appropriate to his reputation in settling disputes and in negotiating treaties.

In recent years, church historians have been paying increasing attention to the characters who populate that troublesome “middle ground” of the Elizabethan religious settlement. Neither doctrinaire conformists nor hot gospellers, these adherents of the “religion of protestants” have heretofore had their role in English history minimized simply because they did not fit neatly into the usual historiographic categories, and our view of Elizabethan and early Stuart religious history has thereby been simplified at the expense of accuracy. The orthodoxy now being established instead is that most English protestants in the decades before the Civil War found themselves nearer the middle than the ends of the religious spectrum. The religion of protestants turns out to be the religion of Chaderton and Hutton, Morton and Carleton, rather than that of Laud or of Ames.

But now we face a new problem—what do we do with the middle? In particular, what do we do with the ultimate failure of the middle to keep the extremists from each other's throats? The fact of war still looms large on the Stuart horizon, and ending our accounts of the religion of protestants in 1603 or 1625 does not quite eliminate the problem of conflict to come. Where was the middle in 1640?

The rapid increase in Irish immigration, it is often argued, was the chief cause for the growth of anti-Catholicism in mid-nineteenth century England. Patrick Joyce and Neville Kirk both believe that ethnic tension and violence in southeast Lancashire and northeast Cheshire increased during and after the late 1840s, that that increase “followed the pattern of the arrival and dispersal” of Irish immigrants, and that the controversy over the creation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850 intensified the conflict.

L.P. Curtis, Jr., agrees that the mid-century is important, for it was then, he argues, that the stereotype, based on scientific racism, of the Irish as inferior, was “finally assembled and reproduced for a mass reading public which was by then ready to believe almost anything of a derogatory nature about the Irish people.” The English image of the Irish

Curtis admits that the Victorians used the word “race” very loosely, and that working-class anti-Irish “prejudice” had class and religious, as well as racist, bases. But he fails to explore these non-racist elements; his argument rests on the evidence of Victorian anthropological writings; he clearly believes that racism bears explanatory primacy.