Gerald of Wales is primarily responsible for the generally accepted view of Henry II as a founder of monasteries. In his De Principis Instructione Liber he gives an account of the penance imposed on the king at Avranches in 1172 for his part in Becket's murder, and its commutation. Gerald reveals that instead of leading a Crusade to the Holy Land in person, and, we learn from other sources, maintaining two hundred knights there for a year at his own expense, Henry delayed for three years. He thus eventually gained from the pope a commutation to encompass the founding of three monasteries. These were, says Gerald, Waltham, where a group of holy secular canons were replaced with canons regular, Amesbury, where he violenter intrusit nuns from Fontevrault, and the third was probably Witham where a group of patient and holy men humbly bore hardship and the lack of a roof over their heads. ‘Sed quid attinet humana versutia contra divina consilia?’ asks Gerald. In a long passage he elaborates his theme that the Almighty will not be deceived by such a shamming, paltry, effort.

One of the more interesting personalities in the puritan party of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the Kentish minister Josias Nicholls (1553–1639). In The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967) Professor P. Collinson notes Nicholls's importance on a number of occasions, paying particular attention to his tract The Plea of the Innocent (1602), which Collinson sees as exemplifying many of the attitudes and aspirations of the moderate wing of the party. A number of other works also mention Nicholls briefly and record the bare bones of his career, including his opposition to Whitgift in 1584 and his deprivation in 1602. But Nicholls remains a shadowy figure and the full significance of his contribution to the godly cause unclear.

It may confidently be surmised that at all times in history many men and women have sighed for the abatement of systematic and organised violence between or within tribes, empires and states, particularly when personal involvement has seemed likely. Such sentiments must have been common in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even though the combatants in war were relatively few; famine and pestilence, the indirect consequences of conflict, were severe enough to guarantee that. It has been estimated that in the seventeenth century, there were only seven years in which wars were not being fought somewhere in Europe. Calculations for the eighteenth century could be expected to yield similar results. Yet it was only towards the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (known to contemporary Englishmen as the Great War) that determined action was taken to establish organised movements for peace. The result was the establishment in 1815 and 1816 of two peace societies in the United States, and of the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace (commonly described as the Peace Society) in Great Britain. These remained virtually alone until other bodies were formed in Britain and on the Continent in the period after 1867. These in turn contributed to the movements which led to inter-governmental conferences for peace and disarmament in the first decade of the twentieth century and to the formation of the League of Nations after the First World War.