Early modern groups did not necessarily proclaim themselves. When they did, they were not necessarily groups. The historian must decide when to analyse people as separate individuals and when their commonalities were great enough that they should be considered together. These judgements have been the source of frequent debate. At times, the disagreement has been over the proper label for a group – whether, for instance, ‘puritans’ should instead be called ‘the godly’.Footnote ¹ In other cases, the very existence of a group has been called into question, with some doubting whether there was a ‘Ranter’ movement in the 1650s.Footnote ² Often, historians debate the coherence of a group, with one prominent scholar questioning whether the first whigs in the late 1670s were organized enough to deserve the appellation of a ‘party’.Footnote ³ The vigour of these debates suggests that some of our most important intellectual labours are done when we assign people to groups.

Historians fall into different camps in their willingness to group people together. To adopt J. H. Hexter's shorthand, some are splitters, others lumpers.Footnote ⁴ Splitters are quick to observe that categories, once established, can take on a life of their own, becoming reified and seeming more stable than they actually were. Lumpers are more apt to worry that if groups are permitted to dissolve in our writings, we will be left with an antiquarian history that is barely able to move beyond biography. The question, then, is to what degree our chosen categories reveal the contours of the past and to what degree they obscure them. No historian can do without groups entirely, but some manage to make do with fewer than others.

Groups can be defined in various ways. The nonjurors, for instance, were those who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution. This is a functional definition, in that a person had to take (or fail to take) a particular action in order to be deemed a member of the group. Historians rarely query these sorts of definitions; few are interested, for instance, in questioning whether the regicides of Charles I should be deemed a group. Signing the king's death warrant joined them together, and no historian has sought to put them asunder. Historiographical debates are more likely to be provoked when groups are defined ideologically rather than functionally, by common ideas rather than common actions. The ideology of royalism, for instance, was expressed by the royalists, but whether or not they were truly a coherent group has been a subject of extended discussion.Footnote ⁵ Some groups have both functional and ideological definitions, with controversy ensuing when the latter sort of definition is employed rather than the former. Thus, the Baptists in the early seventeenth century could be defined functionally, and uncontroversially, as anyone who practised adult baptism; they could be defined ideologically, and controversially, as a unified religious movement with a common identity and a collective sense of purpose. When the test for membership is having taken a particular action, the composition of a group is relatively easy to measure. When the test is having believed in something, the group is more difficult to define. Despite these difficulties, the investigation of these shared ideologies is where much of the action currently lies in early modern history. Groups are the catnip of historians; we hunt them because we must.

Much debate has been occasioned by the labels used to denote groups, especially when historians use names that are different from the ones used by the groups themselves. The puritans did not call themselves puritans, and the Quakers did not call themselves Quakers; these names were given to them by their opponents. Should we call them instead ‘the godly’ and ‘the Society of Friends’? It is fair to say that splitters, to employ Hexter's terminology, are less comfortable with using names that were not used by the groups themselves, while lumpers are more willing to use labels that were given to the groups by their contemporary opponents, especially when those labels are more precise or more concise. But splitters and lumpers are united in their abhorrence of designations that were used neither by a group itself nor by any of its contemporaries. This is one precept of post-Marxist historiography that commands widespread assent: the proleptic use of a category risks flattening history and foreshortening historical processes, as it leads the uninitiated to assume that a group still in the process of becoming had already come into existence. The long shadow of Marxist class analysis has provoked a widespread reaction in favour of emic rather than etic categories. It is illegitimate, in this view, to use a word to describe a collection of people that was never used to describe them at the time. Despite this axiom, it remains the case that historians do sometimes use anachronistic terms to describe groups, though they tend to withdraw from them when challenged. The nonconformist supporters of King James II, for instance, have often been called ‘whig collaborators’, a name that was never used for them in their own day.Footnote ⁶ The defence typically offered for this type of anachronism is the lack of any contemporary term to describe the same phenomenon. Sometimes, the defence is legitimate; sometimes not. The truth is that we are creatures of our discipline, whether we like to think of ourselves that way or not, and we tend to use the words sanctioned by prior usage in the historiography.

A historian who discovers and defines a new group is usually considered to have done a service by providing a new label for others to incorporate into their models of the past. A different kind of service is done by a historian who excommunicates a group from the literature. Such historians are called revisionists, and their work, while attention-grabbing, often provokes much grumbling. Well-established groups generally survive these efforts at banishment. The dauntless revisionist confronts a many-headed Hydra: as soon as one head is lopped off, another appears. Groups re-emerge in different guises, popping up again once the shock of the initial historiographical intervention has been dispelled. Since the field effectively has a bias in favour of adding rather than subtracting groups, the result is an increasingly complex terrain that requires greater effort to master. Where once we saw only Baptists, now, thanks to B. R. White and Stephen Wright, we see Particular Baptists, General Baptists, and Seventh-Day Baptists.Footnote ⁷ Where once we saw only antinomians, now, thanks to David Como, we see Eatonists, Grindletonians, and Traskites.Footnote ⁸ And woe betide the historian who confuses an Eatonist with a Grindletonian. This sort of confusion is what book reviewers live for.

The later Stuart period, from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the Hanoverian accession in 1714, offers a field day for the historian interested in tracking down new groups. This was the era of British history in which religious diversity became ineluctable and the proliferation of religious groups became irreversible. Schemes for ecumenical union repeatedly came to naught. Presbyterians in England, who previously had insisted that all true Christians should belong to a single church polity, effectively had become Congregationalists by the end of the period, divided into self-governing congregations that slowly relinquished their fading dreams of reunion with the established church. In Scotland, the Covenanting movement split into Presbyterians and Episcopalians, with both groups belittling the Cameronians and few making any effort to bridge the widening divides. The parliament at Westminster sanctioned the continuation of religious difference with acts of toleration, first for England in 1689 and then for Scotland in 1712. Not coincidentally, an era of heightened religious differences brought profound political divisions with the emergence of the first organized political parties in British history, the whigs and the tories. We would expect these multiplying groups to be reflected in a complex historiography, and we would not be disappointed. The works under review represent some of the most recent assessments of this fractious era.

The aim of Grant Tapsell's edited volume, The later Stuart church, 1660–1714, is to rescue the Church of England from the condescension of posterity. Tapsell and most of his contributors believe that the established church has been underappreciated in the historical literature. They provide a positive account of a body that has at times been presented as a den of time-servers more intent on persecuting nonconformists and vilifying Catholics than on promoting Christian piety. This is an unusually well-organized tome, with attention paid in turn to the church's ideology, its personnel, its relations with foreign churches, and its relations with other denominations within England. The volume begins with an essay by Jacqueline Rose offering a précis of her book, Godly kingship in Restoration England. Tapsell contributes a ‘state of the clergy’ piece, concluding that while some ministers were indeed the corrupt time-servers familiar from anti-clerical polemics (‘petty-minded clerics scratching each other's eyes out in pursuit of their own low ambitions’), many others were sincerely devoted to their cures (p. 90). John Spurr offers a complementary piece on the laity, which also leans towards the positive. His aim is to counter the image of the Anglican squire as a man who attended weekly services out of a sense of propriety but was not given to overt displays of piety, being more attached, as one contemporary put it, to his ‘hawkes, hounds, and whores’ (p. 71). In place of this Falstaffian image, Spurr finds ample evidence of Malvolian piety in the diaries and letters of selected Anglican gentlemen (and gentlewomen as well). The fact that many Anglicans were sincerely devout will come as no surprise to historians of the period.

Clare Jackson's penetrating essay on the established churches in Scotland and Ireland emphasizes their ‘precarious character’ in the Restoration period (p. 133), given the continued dominance of Catholics in Ireland and Presbyterians in Scotland. Both churches were dependent on support from the crown, which was not always forthcoming. Even the post-1690 Church of Scotland, though possessing a stronger popular basis with the abandonment of its bishops and the establishment of presbyteries, remained vulnerable to royal interference and was not master of its own destiny. Jeremy Gregory's essay expands the geographical frame of reference by exploring the diversity of religious establishments in North America. He depicts the later Stuart period as a time of increasing Anglican influence in the American colonies, the result of which was the retreat in many places of the tolerationist regimes imposed by royal charters earlier in the period. Tony Claydon investigates the ‘ideological muddle’ (p. 181) of the Church of England's relationship with the Reformed churches of Europe, a morass that resolved itself in the 1690s into two distinct positions, one being a ‘low church’ position that aligned the Church of England with continental Protestant churches of many different kinds, the other being a ‘high church’ position that accepted only churches with episcopal governing structures as truly reflective of the divine will. George Southcombe's essay charts the responses of Protestant nonconformists to religious persecution, paying especially close attention to the poetry of complaint composed in the Restoration period. Gabriel Glickman contributes an essay exploring the ‘utopian schemes of religious reunion’ advocated by some English Catholics and Anglicans (p. 227). He limns the disappointment of Catholics as these schemes foundered upon the rocks of anti-popery and religious prejudice.

The most arresting essay in the volume is Nicholas Tyacke's analysis of theological divisions within the Restoration Church. This is a seminal article that is sure to be cited endlessly, just as Tyacke's work on the pre-Civil War ‘anti-Calvinists’ has been.Footnote ⁹ Tyacke has a knack for identifying and describing theological groups, thereby opening new terrain for other historians to explore. In this essay, he rehabilitates the term ‘latitudinarian’, dispelling the cloud that John Spurr placed over it with an influential publication in this journal in 1988.Footnote ¹⁰ Tyacke refers to that article and then states modestly, ‘Having begun in the ranks of the sceptics, my own view now is that this concept provides a valuable tool of analysis’ (p. 64). His essay amply makes that case.

The term ‘latitudinarian’ emerged at Cambridge in the 1650s before being deployed widely in religious polemics from the early 1660s onwards. Spurr's objection was that it was a ‘term of abuse’ deployed against a group of theologians, who, in fact, differed little ‘from the views of most anglican clergymen on what were, after all, the major intellectual concerns of the day’.Footnote ¹¹ The so-called ‘latitudinarians’ called themselves ‘moderate divines’, and some historians have preferred to call them by this name, despite its troublesome lack of precision. Tyacke plumps for ‘latitudinarian’, taking aim in particular at the claim that this group of churchmen did not differ greatly from their clerical brethren. He contrasts the latitude-men with another group of churchmen whom he calls the ‘Laudians’, presenting them as the heirs to Archbishop William Laud. Latitudinarians and Laudians disagreed on the question of whether to accommodate the Presbyterians within the established church, with the former supporting the relaxation of minor liturgical formalities or ‘little things’, while the latter remained fixed on the ceremonies of the church ‘in all her height’ (pp. 52–3). Latitudinarianism was ‘the liberal theology of its day’ (p. 49), a method of argument that elevated the use of human reason in apprehending theological truths and swiftly attracted the criticism of those who championed ‘the supremacy of scriptural revelation’ (p. 50). Tyacke avoids the more grandiose connections sometimes drawn between latitudinarianism and the birth of the modern scientific method. These connections have been deemed spurious by Spurr and others, and it is unlikely that they will be revived in the near future.Footnote ¹² But Tyacke does succeed in making a more modest case for latitudinarianism as an avant-garde form of divinity that championed Protestant unity above liturgical purity. His essay signals that it is now safe to use the word ‘latitudinarian’ again.

This is just as well for Peter Elmer, who uses the term liberally in his intriguing study, The miraculous conformist. Elmer's subject is Valentine Greatrakes, the so-called ‘stroker’ whose touch was believed to heal many diseases and who became a sensation in England in the early months of 1666. Greatrakes was born in Ireland in 1629 to a Protestant English family that had settled in Munster in the late sixteenth century. His religion was not especially heterodox, though he became friendly with a few radical sectarians during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. His political interests were broad; he associated with both royalists and Cromwellians, and during the period of Cromwellian rule he seems mainly to have been interested in amassing property confiscated from his Catholic neighbours. There was nothing in his life story before the onset of his ministry in 1662 to indicate that he would take on a public role as a healer. But heal he did, first in Ireland and then in England, and the crowds soon followed.

The core of this study is a biographical compendium of over 200 people who testified to the veracity of Greatrakes's cures, either by agreeing to subscribe a printed testimonial or by writing letters to friends reporting the miracles. Elmer suggests that these supporters were disproportionately interested in reform of various kinds, whether of the church or of the medical profession. Meanwhile, many of Greatrakes's opponents were royalists more eager to defend the status quo than to reform it. Some of these critics depicted the Irish stroker as a usurper of monarchical prerogatives, in that the king was widely believed to have the power to cure the disease of scrofula with a single touch. The chief virtue of this book is that it disrupts a too-easy equation between reform-minded scientists and a secularizing, mechanistic philosophy that had no room for mysticism or ‘superstition’. The miraculous conformist, like Alexandra Walsham's recent book The reformation of the landscape, demonstrates that early modern Protestants, even in their hotter varieties, were not always averse to the miraculous.

Elmer characterizes Greatrakes's supporters as disproportionately ‘latitudinarian’ and then immediately runs into problems with the term, largely because he is appropriately careful in his use of it. The term is an odd fit for a study based so heavily on collective biography, because only a small proportion of Anglicans can be firmly assigned to the category. Simply being friendly with nonconformists was not enough to meet a strict definition of latitudinarianism and, in the absence of any major political campaign for the comprehension of moderate nonconformists, it was easy for people to remain silent about their position. As a result, although Elmer sprinkles the general concept of latitudinarianism throughout his pages, he is understandably chary about attaching it to specific individuals. A trawl through his index reveals that he applies the label to just sixteen people, eleven of whom appear in his compendium of Greatrakes's supporters. To buttress his point, Elmer is forced back onto a broader phenomenon of quasi-latitudinarianism. At one point, we are informed that several of Greatrakes's supporters were ‘broadly sympathetic to the aims of the latitudinarians’ (p. 89); at another point, we hear that one supporter ‘may have sympathized with latitudinarian elements within the Church’ (p. 190). The latitudinarian was evidently a rare beast; there are a lot of near misses in this book, but not too many confirmed sightings. Spurr's critique of the term retains some weight; if latitudinarians were so significant, then why are they so difficult to find? This is not to say that the group did not exist, or that there may not have been more than the ones we know about, but explicit espousals by Anglicans of support for religious comprehension are indeed rare in the surviving sources.

To compensate for the limitations of ‘latitudinarian’, Elmer deploys a more capacious category, that of ‘eirenicist’. Here we find many fish caught in the net, including the biggest catch of all, the Irish healer himself: ‘Greatrakes was at heart an eirenicist; that is, one who promoted religious peace and harmony’ (p. 74). The term ‘eirenicist’ is not one that has been used often by Restoration historians, but it can be useful if defined narrowly as an anti-dogmatic person who sought Christian unity while refusing to employ denominational labels as a means of self-description. Elmer prefers a broader definition, using the term to describe anyone who pursued religious peace. He thus gains his point by weakening it. If eirenic means having a preference for harmony over discord, then virtually everyone in seventeenth-century England was eirenic to some degree. The question was peace for whom and on what terms, not whether peace was desirable. Laudians wanted peace with Catholics but not Presbyterians; latitudinarians wanted peace with Presbyterians but not Catholics; Quakers wanted peace with everyone who accepted a Quakerly understanding of religious truth; and almost no one wanted peace with the Quakers. It is a challenging task to bring together the raw data of collective biography and the fine-grained subtleties of intellectual history, and this book reveals just how difficult that task can be.

The term ‘eirenic’, with all its limitations, serves as the handmaiden to Elmer's thesis. His book contends that Greatrakes's stroking was part of a broader mission to heal the religious divisions of a diseased body politic and that the followers of the Irish healer were attracted to him for this reason. The thesis is deployed in different ways in the English and Irish halves of the book. In England, Elmer tells us, Greatrakes implicitly endorsed a programme of healing and settling based on broadening the Church of England to encompass the Presbyterians while simultaneously lessening the harsh persecution of other nonconformists. In Ireland, according to Elmer, Greatrakes tapped into widespread Protestant anxieties about the 1662 Act of Settlement and its modification in the 1665 Act of Explanation. These acts proposed the surrendering of some of the lands seized by the Cromwellian adventurers, followed by their return to some of their former owners, whether loyal Catholics or Protestant royalists. (In the end, only a limited amount of property was reapportioned.) Elmer depicts the land settlement as a ‘divisive’ policy that ‘threatened to destabilize Protestant rule’ by pitting those who had gained lands against those who had lost them (p. 106). Expropriation, not incidentally, threatened the vast property holdings that Greatrakes had gathered under Cromwellian rule. But it remains unclear why a limited policy of land repatriation should be viewed as the antithesis of ‘healing and settling’. The policy might instead be seen as one of unification, a rare attempt to bring the dispossessed back into the body politic by compensating them for some of their losses. Was Greatrakes, then, a champion of a broad settlement on both sides of the Irish Sea, or only in England?

This disjunction suggests a larger problem with Elmer's thesis. Nearly any political programme can be depicted as an effort to heal and settle a disordered nation. In Restoration England, the advocates of religious toleration employed this rhetoric in spades, but so too did the advocates of persecution. By voting for uniformity in 1662, members of parliament thought that they were healing a divided nation. Their aim was to convince the nonconformists to save their souls by rejoining the true church. If people were attracted to Greatrakes because of his potential ability to assist in settling a disordered body politic, then nearly everyone ought to have been attracted to him, because nearly everyone in Restoration England wanted to heal and settle the nation. The metaphor of the disordered body politic was so malleable that it could easily be co-opted by any group.

The theme of rhetorical malleability is explored more thoroughly by Jacqueline Rose in her monograph, Godly kingship in Restoration England: the politics of the royal supremacy, 1660–1688. Her book brilliantly traces competing interpretations of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs from the Reformation to the Glorious Revolution. In the Restoration period, her main area of focus, she finds several readings of it. Many nonconformists championed the supremacy, seeing the king's dispensing power as their best chance at securing toleration so long as parliament remained intent on legislating conformity. Anti-clerical writers such as Andrew Marvell and John Locke joined the nonconformists in supporting the supremacy, seeing it as a means of taming the pretensions of overmighty clergymen. Meanwhile, Anglican clergy, especially in their ‘high church’ variant, became increasingly wary about placing an absolute supremacy in the hands of a potentially unreliable monarch, instead preferring theories of divine right episcopacy in which the church had an independent status granted by Christ that was beyond secular control. At the same time, many lawyers and members of parliament, who had no wish to elevate the powers either of the monarch or of the clergy, adopted theories that located the supremacy not in the king alone, but rather in the king-in-parliament. In outlining these positions, Rose demonstrates a refreshing lack of normative judgement, emphasizing not the correctness of any one point of view but rather the diversity of precedents that could be called upon to support any position. She discusses the ‘hybrid and fudged’ nature of the Reformation inheritance (p. 26), paying close attention to the difficulties involved in deciding whether the Henrician statutes about the supremacy had introduced new powers for the crown or merely confirmed existing powers. If the former, then parliament could take away what it had given; if the latter, then the monarch might have pre-existing claims that were beyond parliament's control. As one wag put it, ‘it is greater to give than to receive’ (p. 114).

The common thread running through the diverse positions charted by Rose is that people tended to choose the version of the supremacy that best suited their own interests. Nonconformists supported it at moments when the monarch seemed inclined to use it to assist them, not from any genuine attachment to it. Clerics cried up the supremacy with gusto when it was devoted to their interests under Charles I, but whispered it sotto voce when it was placed in the unreliable hands of Charles II and James II. Rose's account has echoes of Thomas Babington Macaulay, who told the story of the divorce between a heretofore loyal Church of England and a Catholic ruler in the fevered atmosphere of 1688 by delineating the ‘feelings which injustice aggravated by ingratitude naturally excites’. For Macaulay, self-interest ultimately trumped ‘scruples of conscience and honor’; Anglicans would not sit patiently and take punches forever.Footnote ¹³ Rose, while adopting a similar framework, locates the rift much earlier, in a growing sense among Anglicans in the 1660s and 1670s that the monarch could not be trusted and a concomitant retreat into theories of divine right episcopacy as a more reliable way of securing the established church. These jure divino theories have been traced before, by Jeffrey Collins and Mark Goldie among others, but not with such comprehensive scope.Footnote ¹⁴ In her analysis of the supremacy, Rose charts a high road to the Glorious Revolution; this was no sudden breakdown. For a generation, the church had been inching away from its Laudian commitments to the royal supremacy; when James gave them a fright, they bolted through an already open door.

Rose's worthy book is one more fox in the henhouse for Spurr's critique of the term ‘latitudinarians’, for she uses the word freely, reflecting her view, as stated in the Tapsell volume, that Spurr has been ‘overly optimistic about the ability of the church to maintain unity’ (p. 23). Rose's work highlights dissent, not assent. It would be possible to make her already complicated story even more byzantine by pointing to one more fracture: during the reign of James II, scruples about the supremacy continued to bind the consciences of some Anglicans, even while others forged a revolutionary path. Rose tends to downplay cases such as that of Herbert Croft, the bishop of Hereford, who distributed James II's Declaration for liberty of conscience to his clergy as ordered and then published a pamphlet defending his willingness to obey the king at a time when the seven bishops were famously refusing to do so. Dismissing the bishop as ‘supine’ and his pamphlet as ‘potentially unauthorised’, she neglects a more interesting story revealed in his unpublished correspondence.Footnote ¹⁵ Those letters underline the bishop's conscientious belief that the Church of England must submit to the royal will in all things not prohibited by divine law, while also revealing a palpable sense of agony that his stalwart obedience was dividing him from his episcopal brethren and dragging his name through the mud.Footnote ¹⁶ The internal conflicts of the bishop of Hereford and others like him, caught between the interests of their church and their high view of the royal supremacy, do not fit easily into a narrative that emphasizes the many cases in which supremacy proved to be a malleable rhetoric readily reshaped by the dictates of interest.

Rose focuses on England, but a Scottish story could also be told. There, the royal supremacy was a stick used by Episcopalians to beat Presbyterians into submission. Presbyterians responded with concerted efforts to undermine the supremacy, showing more eagerness to establish the independence of their church than to acknowledge any royal power over it. The supremacy in Scotland was thus not a bridge but a wedge. In his illuminating book, The culture of controversy: religious arguments in Scotland, 1660–1714, Alasdair Raffe discusses this and other points of conflict. He demonstrates that it was only after the Restoration that two distinct confessional cultures emerged, with the Episcopalians having the advantage of royal patronage while the Presbyterians were forced to choose between accommodating themselves to the new ecclesiastical regime or remaining outside of it as nonconformists. In addition to the debate over the supremacy, Raffe traces growing disagreement over liturgy, theology, and church government. He also charts the emergence of different styles of piety. Unlike another recent scholar of the period, Clare Jackson, he does not expend much effort on illustrating the points of agreement that could lead to a shared culture of lay conformity, that middle ground of laity who conformed to the Episcopalian settlement in 1662 and then switched their allegiance to the Presbyterian settlement of 1690. Instead, he emphasizes the differences that drove Presbyterians and Episcopalians apart.Footnote ¹⁷

Raffe offers an impressive array of examples, but some of them could have been expanded upon: he rarely lingers for more than a paragraph on any particular event, episode, or individual. This brisk pace enables him to cover a great deal of ground, both geographically and chronologically. His narrative covers the entirety of the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the death of Queen Anne, and he ranges easily from the southern shires up the eastern coast to Aberdeen (the Highlands do not feature as prominently). His book effectively buries the divide in Scottish historiography between a period dominated by confessional strife before the Glorious Revolution and a supposedly secularizing period after it. But the lack of extended case-studies hampers his wider argument about the emergence of a ‘culture of controversy’. Raffe contends that the term ‘public sphere’, so often deployed in the historiography of England, is unsuitable for Scotland, on the grounds that its public culture was less oriented towards a national capital, less dependent on printed pamphlets and newspapers, and more oriented towards controversial events discussed orally or in manuscripts (pp. 8–9, 22). It would be very interesting if Scotland's news culture had been less dependent on its capital than England's was. His examples, however, tend only to show that religious controversies happened in the localities and that these controversies were occasionally discussed by higher authorities in the royal government or the Presbyterian general assembly, not that these cases were discussed by members of the public in other regions of Scotland. From the evidence provided here, it remains difficult to assess just how wide the national audience was for these local episodes of religious controversy.

In contrast to the synoptic breadth of Raffe's work, Mark Knights's edited volume, Faction displayed, is a study of a single case, that of Dr Henry Sacheverell. The focus on this episode is justified by its importance. The Sacheverell trial of 1710 was, as Knights observes, the ‘apex of the “rage of party”’ (p. 7). The tory cleric was put on trial by a whig government for publishing two sermons that embodied the political beliefs of the high-flying clergy. His prosecution was widely viewed as partisan, and it proved to be highly divisive. As Eirwen Nicholson observes in her contribution to the volume, even the prostitutes in the capital were said to have asked potential clients ‘are you for the Dr’ (p. 71). Tory crowds accompanied Sacheverell to and from the courtroom on each of the ten days of the trial. Riots broke out in London midway through the proceedings, with angry tories ransacking six nonconformist meeting-houses. Although Sacheverell was convicted of high crimes and misdemeanours by a vote of the House of Lords, the punishment assessed was surprisingly light, with the doctor merely banned from preaching for three years. Tories across the country hailed the mild sentence as a partial vindication. Sacheverell seized the moment by arranging a progress across the Midlands, where he was greeted by roaring crowds. Meanwhile, the whigs stewed. Powerless to prevent the doctor from capitalizing on his fame as a tory martyr, they were aghast at the results of the parliamentary elections a few months later. The tories, cresting on the Sacheverell tide, had won a commanding majority in the House of Commons.Footnote ¹⁸ The whigs had thought that they were swatting a fly; instead, they found themselves beset by a plague of locusts.

This fairly modest volume does not so much transform our understanding of the Sacheverell trial as it respectfully concurs with the existing scholarship while developing a few underexplored themes. After Knights's introduction, which effectively lays out the stakes of the trial, W. A. Speck offers an admiring reassessment of Geoffrey Holmes's ‘definitive’ 1973 monograph, The trial of Doctor Sacheverell. Brian Cowan then analyses Sacheverell's speech at his trial, portraying it as a rhetorical stroke of genius that succeeded in garnering sympathy for the doctor by quenching the fiery rhetoric of his sermons and offering himself up instead as a ‘humble, orthodox, and loyal’ minister suffering persecution for his beliefs (p. 33). Geoff Kemp contributes a learned essay on proposals for the regulation of the press in the years between the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 and the passing of the first copyright act in 1710. Eirwen Nicholson examines contemporary indications that the ‘spectacle’ of Sacheverell – the circulation of his printed image, his well-attended progresses to and from the courtroom, and his pathetic poses at the trial – was especially ‘attractive to the female gaze’ (p. 72). D. W. Hayton explores the careers of two Irish ‘surrogates’ for Sacheverell, Francis Higgins and Sir Constantine Phipps, who each received the kind of acclaim among Irish tories that Sacheverell had garnered among English ones (p. 80). Higgins, in particular, followed the Sacheverell model of courting prosecution with provocative statements and then claiming ‘the privilege of victimhood’ when whig authorities took the bait (p. 90). Departing from the larger theme of the volume, Steve Pincus analyses tory and whig views on empire, suggesting that tories were more likely to prefer a land-based empire and whigs a commercial one based on trade rather than the holding of territory. Finally, Daniel Szechi offers a useful annotated text of Lord North and Grey's notes from the trial.

The common emphasis of these five books is on the increasing polarization of religious and political life in later Stuart Britain. In this respect, they are a reflection of our own politically divided age. Raffe makes polarization the central theme of his book, tracing the shift from a largely unified religious culture in Scotland in the 1640s to a sharply divided one at the end of the century. Rose charts a split in the Church of England, especially after the Glorious Revolution, between Erastian low churchmen, willing to submit to royal direction, and jure divino high churchmen, who insisted on the church's independence. Tyacke ably charts the divisions between latitudinarians and Laudians. Elmer focuses on resistance to polarization in the 1660s, examining the widely felt belief that the divisions plaguing England's body politic ought to be repaired. His book makes for an interesting contrast with Knights's volume. Valentine Greatrakes created a stir, but it was not the same kind of stir as the one that gripped Henry Sacheverell's England. London's prostitutes asked their clients ‘are you for the doctor’ in 1710, not in 1666. Perhaps if Greatrakes had emerged a half-century later, belief or disbelief in his cures would have become a badge of party loyalty for whigs and tories. But he emerged in an age in which partisan divisions had not yet sharpened and not everything was taken as a test of political allegiance.

Along with growing partisanship came an increasing degree of comfort with party labels. Early in the period, the adoption of such a label was typically a losing cause; in a society that still privileged consensus, to proclaim a party allegiance was to abandon any claim to speak for the will of the people as a whole. The clergymen who were sometimes called ‘latitudinarians’ understandably shied away from giving themselves that name. It was one thing to call yourself a ‘moderate’ man, an adjective and not exactly a party label; it was another thing entirely to call yourself a ‘latitudinarian’, a noun and clearly a party label. Seventeenth-century coyness gradually gave way to eighteenth-century brashness. Party labels were no longer political faux pas; instead, they became rallying cries in partisan battles. Terms like ‘whig’ and ‘tory’, originally insults, were worn proudly by the leaders of the parties so designated. As a result, historians of the eighteenth century are less likely to find themselves in the awkward position confronted by so many seventeenth-century historians, who fall back on partisan labels to describe groups of people who would have preferred not to have been thought of as partisans at all. The goal of describing people in their own terms is a laudable one, but it is not one that can always be met. The problem with relying exclusively on self-identification as a means of description is that not all people in the past were entirely open about who they really were and what they were trying to accomplish.

The increasing groupiness of later Stuart Britain fed into the famed clubbiness of Georgian Britain. A key component of civil society is the ability to form groups without government interference. Such interference certainly did not end in 1689, nor in 1714, but some minority groups, though not all, were legitimized and sanctioned by the government during this period. Religious and political divisions, and the partial acceptance of those divisions by both state and society, can be seen as one component of a broader transition from an early modern to a modern society. Although groups have emerged and faded away throughout British history, the later Stuart period has a claim to being both an unusually fruitful period for the emergence of influential new circles and a pivotal period for the acceptance of that diversity. The result, for the historian, is a rich field of historical experience that has yet to be fully explored. Happy hunting.