The Victorians wrote more on the Stuarts than on any other period in their nation's past. Considering how important religious controversy was to both the Victorian and Stuart periods, this preoccupation with Charles and Laud, Cromwell and the Puritans, James and William comes as no surprise. As they reflected on the contemporary conflict between Church and Dissent, the Victorians could not help but sense a parallel with the sectarian strife that had plagued the seventeenth century. Despite the Elizabethan insistence on uniformity, the Reformation had created a nation that was religiously plural, and the resulting conflict between Protestant and Catholic, Anglican and Puritan persisted well into the Victorian age. As Robert Southey pointed out in 1813, the Reformation may have been one of England's great “blessings,” but it was a blessing bought at considerable cost. “The price we paid,” Southey explained, “for the deliverance [from Roman Catholicism] was a religious struggle which, after more than a century, broke out into a civil war, which the termination of that war mitigated, but could not quell, and which has continued till the present day.” Britain, it seems, never thoroughly resolved its Reformation crisis until the close of the nineteenth century. As the Victorians wrestled with the problems of religious equality, they naturally turned to the Stuart past, producing a body of literature that was both scholarly and politically engaged.