Nor should we forget the outpouring of anguish from the frustrated lovers of the old religion when the images were smashed and the chantries closed down. The stripping of the altars has only a walk-on part here, yet it was a huge rupture in the life of the English and provoked in the Pilgrimage of Grace one of the great rebellions, surpassed only by that inferno of religion- powered conflict which we call the English Civil War.

It is the fading of religious intensity which really does mark off our age from the Early Moderns. And it is from this fading that the most prized features of modernity have become explicit: the freedom to realise your self, to do what you like with your body, to make Number One seriously number one. It is a measure of this fading too that one of our greatest historians should think it reasonable to shunt religion off into a siding reserved for obsolescent ideas and institutions, from which only occasional clankings and puffs of steam remind us of its existence. However else the Early Moderns might have imagined the future, surely few of them would have thought that a day would come when it was possible to write as if religion never really mattered.

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