The history of England between 1603 and 1640 is not the history of a growing disease in the body politic, but of conflict – some of it healthy, some … - Geoffrey Elton

I think now that in England under the Tudors (1955), attempting to restore him [Thomas Cromwell] to view and show him in a truer light, I made some rather extravagant claims for him, though I stand by the essence of my opinions there. I still think that Cromwell was the most remarkable English statesman of the sixteenth century and one of the most remarkable in the country's history. I still think that he instigated and in part accomplished a major and enduring transformation in virtually every aspect of the nation's public life. And I still think that he was largely responsible for the fact that the medieval heritage of common law and representative institutions remained at the heart of England's modern government, until very recent times.

Among the educated upper classes a new phenomenon made its appearance – the Englishman who, so far from despising all who are not English, will offer praise only to "any country but his own". In the Stalin era we have become so familiar with this type of high-minded protest that we do not seem to realise how new it was in the age of Charles James Fox, well-endowed scion of the ruling order who chose to worship Robespierre from afar. As George Canning soon pointed out in one of his contributions to the propaganda published in the Anti-Jacobin, such "friends of humanity" would refuse even sixpence to a "needy knife-grinder" who admitted that his torn breeches testified to an ale-house brawl and not to the oppression of the poor; only kicks were suitable for wretches whom "no sense of wrong can rouse to vengeance". For the first time the passions of high-minded anti-patriotism sounded their tin trumpets. The wars made certain that the existing order would face serious military and economic problems but could ignore the claims of moral outrage; generally speaking, the English, explaining that they would never be slaves, remained patriotic. But there was that small band of harbingers who saw virtue only abroad.

The Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome was a government measure, affected slightly by opposition from the church and not at all by parliament. A proposal to authorize the archbishops by act of parliament to dissolve the king's marriage was soon replaced by a comprehensive attack on papal jurisdiction in England. In Cromwell's hands, the preamble turned into an unhesitating statement of the theory which underlay the whole practice of Henry VIII and his government: the theory of the imperial crown of England sovereign within its own realm over both laity and church.