The _Cambridge Modern History_ covered a period which did not properly fall within Maitland's special range of study; but he was taken into counsel as to the general execution of the plan, and persuaded to contribute a chapter upon the Anglican Settlement and the Scottish Reformation. That Acton should have chosen Maitland for this particular piece of work may cause some surprise. The ground was intricate, sown with pitfalls and clouded with controversy, and Maitland had made no special study of the sixteenth century upon the political or religious side. On the other hand he could bring to the task a cool, dispassionate judgment, a fine power for appraising historical evidence, and a singular and exact felicity in the expression of delicate shades of certainty and doubt. That he stood outside the Churches might have been a disqualification, had devotional impulses been the staple consideration in the question, or if the banners of rival confessions were not already waving on the battle field; but the age of Elizabeth was theological rather than religious, and it was of the first importance to obtain the verdict of a thoroughly impartial mind upon a subject which could never be treated by a churchman without some suspicion of partisanship attaching to his results. Maitland accepted the task with misgivings, and discharged it with characteristic thoroughness. In an astonishingly short space of time his mind filled itself up with the reports of French and Spanish ambassadors, with the theological treatises and the political intrigues of sixteenth century Europe. A month or so after he had taken the plunge he was talking of Caraffa and Cecil as if he had known them all his life, and seemed to have gathered up the whole complicated web of European policy into his hands. He did not content himself with mastering and reproducing the voluminous literature of the subject; some pretty little discoveries, some "Elizabethan gleanings" were contributed to the _English Historical Review_, and gave evidence of refined investigations which did not stop at printed material. Results which might have furnished the theme for a substantial volume were packed into a chapter of forty pages. Critics complained of obscurity not of thought but of allusion; others, imperfectly versed in Tudor history, of a defective sympathy with religious emotion. The first charge is true; for Maitland was undoubtedly over-allusive, not from ostentation but from absorption and from a tendency common to learned and modest men to credit the general reader with more knowledge than he is likely to possess. To the second allegation it is some reply that Maitland was inclined to attribute the most decisive act in the period, Elizabeth's resolve to reject the Roman overtures, to religious rather than to political motives.