One of the mysteries of recent scholarship on the English Reformation—as a whole, hardly a neglected topic—is how little attention has been paid to the crucial early years, the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. A flurry of books around the turn of the millennium promised a resurgence of interest, but it has not been sustained. Even those of us who cut our researchers' teeth on the period have been unable to resist the siren lure of the later sixteenth century, whose sources are so much richer. It is a particular pleasure, then, to see this really first-rate piece of scholarship on the Henrician period taking pride of place in Cambridge's premier early modern series.

Oaths are an intriguing subject for a book. Dr. Gray's claims are that “the English Reformation was as much about oaths as it was about Henry's marriage, succession and headship over the English Church” and that “oaths were crucial to the English Reformation”: claims that are obviously true on one level and are forgivable hyperbole on another (1, 4). Beyond these claims lies the more serious point: that the Henrician regime chose the swearing of oaths as a key means of enforcing its religious policies on its subjects' bodies and consciences, and so if we are to understand that process of enforcement and the extent to which it was resisted, we need to understand those oaths.

So far, this may sound like a statement of the obvious, and like a lot of good scholarship, there are parts of Gray's book that consist of carefully and meticulously spelling out for us things that we more or less already knew. But scholarship of that kind is worthwhile because it always reveals surprises, and so it is here. The delight of this book is in the care with which Gray lays out complex events that received historiographies have blithely simplified or even ignored.

Hence the section which will, I think, prove the most original, valuable, and enduring: the discussion of the oaths of succession and supremacy that were imposed on various English subjects in the years after 1533. Once Gray has pointed out the vagueness of the standard scholarly accounts of these campaigns, it is embarrassingly plain. It is also, however, plain why so few historians have had the stomach to open this can of worms before. There was not one oath, nor two, but a tangle of them: a shifting series of subscriptions and professions that were tendered to different classes of people at different times and for subtly different reasons, with the distinctions between them a matter sometimes of careful policy and sometimes of simple confusion. Gray painstakingly teases the differences out for us: it is an account to which scholars of the subject will turn for generations.

To summarize: the regime did indeed attempt to administer the oath of succession to every adult male in England, and it managed the process with remarkably little trouble. (The one notorious exception, Thomas More, is considered in some detail: Gray carefully spells out what we know, and also what we do not know, about precisely what More was asked to swear and why he refused to do so.) The various oaths acknowledging the royal supremacy were an altogether different matter. Laymen were virtually never troubled with these, and their application to the clergy (both secular and religious) was unsystematic. Gray argues persuasively that one of the roots of this oath lay in Henry VIII's conviction, most forcefully expressed in the debates preceding the 1532 Submission of the Clergy, that the English clergy were “scarce our subjects” and that their oath of obedience to the pope was treasonable.

Along with some other recent scholarship on the fumbling complexities of policy in the early 1530s, this suggests a subtle recasting of the process by which Henry VIII moved from being a loyal Defender of the Faith to being Supreme Head of the Church. It emphasizes that his most heartfelt first ambition was to be supreme head of the clergy, from which wider dreams later followed. The old canard of “anticlericalism” is perhaps due for some reexamination.

The remainder of the book considers other flashpoints marked by the use of oaths. I am duly chastened by Gray's consideration of the use of abjuration oaths during heresy proceedings, in which he gently corrects some sweeping generalizations in my own work, with characteristically careful precision: but I am at least in good company. There is also an intriguing chapter on the use of oaths by the northern rebels of 1536, which suggests that the regime's own emphasis on oaths as a political instrument had been appropriated by its enemies.

Whether that counts as a victory or a defeat for Henry VIII is not clear. It is certainly helpful to Gray, arguing as he does that every crisis of the Henrician Reformation is marked by oaths. I am still not entirely persuaded that this is a very useful insight, nor that studying the oath as a phenomenon will in itself reveal much more about the Tudor regime and its opponents. But there is no doubt that Gray's book has laid bare complexities that the rest of us have skated over. My hope is that, beyond that, he will help to reenergize scholarship on the Henrician period as a whole. What better way to do this than to remind us that, for all the power politics and administrative complexities, in the end the English Reformation was a battle fought within individual men's and women's consciences?