Did I miss this controversy?

The Catholic controversial novel Father Oswald, one of the best-known responses to Grace Clement's Father Clement, includes this startling exchange:

            As the carriage with Mrs. Boren and her party drove off, the
        Prelate said to Sefton, "I have been told that your own laws
        and customs consider the wives of Bishops and Clergymen in a
        very equivocal light; I have even heard that their children are
        hardly considered legitimate."
            "Certainly," replied Sefton," our laws and customs are very
        ambiguous on that question, and one cannot be surprised at it
        appearing odd to foreigners; for while a simple knight confers
        title and precedence on his lady, a Bishop can confer neither
        one nor the other on his wife: as for the legitimacy of their
        offspring, we must leave that question to be mooted by the lawyers.
        But when will these ordinations you were speaking of
        take place?" (255)

Now, I know that this question of legitimacy was a live wire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; once clerical marriage became acceptable, after all, the state had to define the legal status of married clergymen's children. It looks like there was some discussion of this topic in 1830s legal circles, but only in reference to marriage by license instead of banns; otherwise, I've never seen a single reference to such illegitimacy in any other controversial or non-controversial, fictional or non-fictional text.     I've been hunting through the RHS bibliography, JSTOR, Google, GoogleBooks, etc., and cannot find any studies of a large-scale controversy.  Or even a small-scale controversy.   The various histories of marriage on my shelves are of no help.  Is this anonymous female novelist abstracting a debate from the Reformation and early post-Reformation periods, misunderstanding a legal quibble, or actually responding to a contemporary controversy?