Over the past ten years, historians of early modern Britain have produced a (largely) new portrait of the interaction between politics and religion. Specifically, a number of scholars have emphasized the lasting effects of the reformation on the structure of political power in England, Scotland, and Ireland. The forerunners in this line of inquiry are well known, and their essays form a compact group of seminal studies: John Guy on the Tudor imperium, Conrad Russell on the problem of ecclesiastical supremacy and parliament, and, most importantly, John Pocock's observation that the reformation of Henry VIII did much to shape the politics of the 300 years that followed. As a result, we now have a much greater appreciation of how debates on ecclesiology served as the conduits for the discussion of politics, law, liberty, toleration, and constitutionalism. Second, the shop-worn narrative of early modern political thought as being dominated by the twin goods of republicanism and secularism has been exposed as faulty at best, and at its worst, a distortion. And, finally, historians have developed a wider and more synthetic portrait of the period, which allows us to transit some stubborn boundaries (1642, 1688) and to attempt a more finely textured view of what is clearly the key problem of the early modern period: the tension between church and state.

Jacqueline Rose's eagerly anticipated book emerges from precisely this historiographical context. Its subject is ostensibly the politics of the royal supremacy in the Restoration period, but its arguments and conclusions have implications for the entire period of the long reformation. Rose argues that, instead of being a stable concept, the royal supremacy existed in a variety of “conceptions.” That its meaning was fluid and ambiguous is explained by the fact that the statutes, canons, and injunctions that served as the statutory basis of the reformation cast up a number of interpretations of the nature and scope of regal power in the realm of the sacred. Added to these legal texts was an eclectic range of other sources, predominantly historical, to which writers turned for guidance on the question of kingly power in the realm of the sacred. Some looked to the religious practices of the ancient Hebrews; others to the Apostolic church, and especially its clergy; and still others examined the vernacular history of the Gothic church in England. The basic point here is that since power was understood to have historical precedents, and given that history could be narrated and glossed in a variety of ways, the whole nature of the supremacy was dynamic and fluid.

The book is divided into six chapters, each of which presents a splendid balance of close readings of a large number of printed and manuscript sources, and compact treatments of the contexts and issues that frame their meanings. At the center of the discussion is the figure of “Godly kingship,” and Rose demonstrates how it was employed in the cut and thrust of political debate. In some iterations, it served as a bulwark to the royal prerogative and episcopacy (no bishop, no king), and in others it furnished a critique of the dereliction of kingly duty, and the decline of a godly ministry into clericalism and priestcraft. The first chapter presents a sweeping survey of the problem of the royal supremacy between 1530 and 1660. The substantive argument is presented in the remaining chapters. The first of these examines how lawyers sought to restrain the prerogatives of the restored Charles II, paying close attention to issues like the power of Convocation (the “parliament” of the church), church law, and the dispensing power. The third and fourth chapters examine how churchmen understood and disputed the supremacy, and how it served as a focal point for the discussion of wider issues, including the nature of episcopacy as either iure humano or iure divino, and the use of supremacy by dissenters in attacks on prelacy. The fifth chapter takes up the Erastian debate about whether the supremacy gave the king sacerdotal power, or mere governorship of the church, while the final chapter considers the case of James II, whose Catholicism challenged the supremacy whose conceptual bedrock was reformation Protestantism.

This is all very well done. There are some very nuanced readings of key figures like Coke, Bramhall, and Hobbes, and the book also raises a host of writers from obscurity. It moves easily between quite technical discussions of law and religion without losing clarity or focus, while resisting the temptation to overplay either one of them—there is neither a constitutionalist revolution nor a confessional state in Rose's pages.

In short, this is a first book that has much of the bearing of a second, or third. It adds significant depth and texture to our understanding of the nature of the ecclesiological politics of the Restoration period, and anchors these decades more firmly in the context that informs them rather than (as has been the convention) portraying the period 1660-1688 as a great staging ground for modernity. Here is perhaps the book's major contribution beyond its specialized topic, for as Rose argues “to secularise Reformation Europe's political thought it to distort it” (3).

This is very true, but it is also the case that an equal risk of distortion is presented if we seek to reverse the trend of secularism by sacralizing all past politics. The key lies somewhere in between, that is, in arriving at a better understanding of how civil and sacred, temporal and spiritual, existed in a series of contexts. Godly Kingship offers an example of how this history can be written.