ABSTRACT
One possible solution, which might appeal to both historians of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, although it would probably find less favour with historians of the eighteenth century,3 is that during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries England had
indeed been Protestantized, but, because of the secularizing tendencies of the century and a half after 1660, there was a need to start the whole process off again, allowing historians to talk of a “religious revival” in the Victorian period.4 Another possible answer is that the remarkable upsurge in the number of Catholics after 1800, for whom a re-converted nation appeared a real possibility, made the need to Protestantize seem more urgent.5 A third, and perhaps rather more plausible explanation, is that many of those who might well have called themselves Protestant were not, or at least not in the eyes of the clergy and those members of the laity who considered themselves part of the religious elite. The problem which I had in reconciling these two review articles opens up the interrelated conceptual and methodological concerns of this chapter: when was England made into a Protestant nation, and how historians have attempted to measure the success of that endeavour?
