The Church of England has never been free from internal disagreements since its inception during the sixteenth century, not least because Henry viii despite breaking with the papacy continued to burn Protestants as heretics until his death. The fifty or so years covered by David Hoyle's challenging book, however, were especially fraught, culminating as they did with the triumph in the 1630s – and subsequent overthrow in the 1640s – of a movement associated with the name of Archbishop Laud. But here one enters a terminological minefield. Modern commentators can be divided into what J. H. Hexter rather inelegantly described as ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’, or generalisers and atomists. The lumpers tend to be happy with ‘isms’, the splitters not. Hoyle himself inclines towards the atomising end of the interpretative spectrum; he does sometimes use terms like ‘Puritanism’, ‘Calvinism’ and ‘Arminianism’, but is basically sceptical about such labels. Instead he generally employs the description ‘reformed orthodoxy’ to comprehend what others have called Calvinism in both its conformist and nonconformist (Puritan) varieties. Hoyle also remains rather coy about the collective naming of the ‘critics of reformed orthodoxy’, the emergent ‘piety’ – as he puts it – which for much of the period in question ‘barely dared to speak its name’, but in his preface comes out with the label ‘Anglican “popery”’. Laudianism, on the other hand, is deemed unfit for analytical purpose. Hoyle acknowledges a particular intellectual debt to the work of Anthony Milton, while at the same time dissenting from his most obvious predecessor in the field – Harry Porter. Like Milton, in his book Catholic and Reformed (1995), Hoyle posits an Elizabethan Church relatively homogeneous in its Protestant outlook and denies the existence of a via media or half-way house between Rome and Geneva as traditionally invoked. By contrast Porter, in Reformation and reaction in Tudor Cambridge (1958), wrote of ‘veins of doctrine’ running ‘side by side’ and that the Cambridge religious disputes of the 1590s witnessed ‘the rear-guard action of one important party [the “Calvinists”] on seeing another important party beginning to capture a little too much territory, upsetting … the theological balance of power’. The ‘Arminian avant la lettre’ Peter Baro, Porter's hero and target of the Cambridge Calvinists, is instead depicted by Hoyle as an ‘isolated voice’ who unsuccessfully challenged the ‘prevailing consensus’. According to this latter historiographical version, reformed orthodoxy did not meet its match until the reign of Charles i. Indeed in many ways the story told by Hoyle is a familiar one, yet he is adamant that ‘Arminianism’ had very little to do with the matter. Clearly much depends here on definition. Unlike the present reviewer, Hoyle is firmly of the opinion that only those who can be shown to have drunk at Dutch sources qualify even potentially as ‘Arminians’ in an English context; similarity of teaching concerning the theology of grace will not suffice. Unsurprisingly, this rules out most candidates. Moreover even when contemporaries claimed to be debating Arminianism, we are told repeatedly that this was not ‘really’ what the argument was about or that the reformed orthodox themselves were ‘tilting at windmills’. At risk of putting words into his mouth, Hoyle apparently discerns a developing struggle at this time over the ‘identity’ of the Church of England, between evangelicals and anglo-catholics. The argument runs that the evangelical purveyors of the ‘good news’ of the Gospel having, in the course of the sixteenth-century English Reformation, swept away ‘the consolations of catholic devotion’ had replaced these with a ‘salve for the bruised protestant soul’ – in a word ‘predestination’; their opponents, initially rather thin on the ground, were in the business of restoring much of this lost catholic tradition. Nevertheless contemporaries were well aware that English and Dutch Arminianism differed; thus Peter Smart, vocal opponent of the notorious Durham ceremonialists, christened his adversaries ‘Popish Arminians’. Nor is it clear that Baro was such a lone figure during the 1590s as represented here; Andrewes, Harsnett and Overall were all theological big-hitters, although Hoyle will not allow that they belonged to the same team. At the same time there is the interesting case of Queen Elizabeth, who was certainly no enthusiast for reformed orthodoxy. Hoyle also, alas, perpetrates two serious howlers. Thus he ascribes the 1622 directions to the clergy, which included a prohibition on popular preaching about predestination, to the time of the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 (pp. 94–6) and links this with an implausible attempt to portray James i as an anti-Calvinist. In fact this prohibition was triggered at least in part by a dramatic bust-up during the 1622 Cambridge Commencement, when the dons engaged in a very public slanging match about the pros and cons of Dutch Arminianism. Secondly, Hoyle has the young Joseph Beaumont converting to Roman Catholicism (p. 207) – seemingly unaware of his career after the Restoration as Master of Peterhouse and Regius Professor of Divinity. Beaumont reigned for a quarter of a century over the Cambridge divinity schools, from which reformed orthodoxy was now banished and the theology of grace consistently glossed in an Arminian sense. On almost his last recorded appearance, in 1699, Beaumont went so far as to suggest that in matters of grace God was a Remonstrant – i.e. a Dutch Arminian.