This is an extremely subtle and persuasive account of the English evangelical movement (formerly known as English Protestantism) in the later years of Henry VIII's reign, when the pressures of the Act of Six Articles and other forms of conservative retrenchment forced the movement to take new forms and express itself in new ways. Alec Ryrie's fundamental assertion is that even in this period of supposed “reaction” against heresy, reformers were in fact able to hold much of their ground and even score significant victories. They did so, however, by constantly negotiating the limits of acceptable reform and, for the most part, trying to stay within those limits. The resulting form of moderate Protestantism was, as Ryrie notes, a process rather than a party (145). But it was a process with certain recognizable contours: acceptance of the royal supremacy over the Church and some form of Real Presence in the Eucharist, combined with an emphasis on salvation through faith alone and universal access to scripture.

The most interesting and significant part of this argument is Ryrie's assertion that this unsteady compromise “achieved that rare thing in the European Reformation: a lowering of the ideological temperature” (89). This was possible because evangelicals, despite the rhetoric against Nicodemism, were so willing to recant their beliefs when faced with government repression that a virtual “culture of recantation” developed in the 1540s (89). The king, for his part, was more interested in making obedient subjects than martyrs and hence accepted these recantations despite their sometimes obvious shallowness—as Ryrie puts it, “recantation, like martyrdom, is a game for two players” (81). The result was a Church in which various types of politic and expedient moderation were possible, and in which evangelicals could find room to thrive.

And thrive they did. Ryrie's analysis of evangelical activities at the universities and at the court are masterpieces of reconstruction that show moderate reform seeping into the culture in subtle but meaningful ways. Likewise, his analysis of the Protestant exiles of Henry VIII's reign, with their more radical rhetoric, shows both how out of touch these exiles were and how little impact their writings had in England, at least before 1544. The result is a sort of victory for the moderates, made possible by the regime's continued willingness to tolerate them and hence avoid pushing them into a more radical stance. Only on issues of social policy, Ryrie argues, did the regime so alienate the evangelicals that more outspoken criticism became the norm, and here Ryrie seems to see the shadowy origins of puritanism.

In all of this, Ryrie combines a gift for wonderful turns of phrase with a remarkable subtlety of exposition. This subtlety is more than usually necessary here, because the argument he is trying to make could be—and no doubt will be—misunderstood. He is not, I think, trying to argue that the moderate form of Protestantism described here was somehow intrinsically moderate in the sense of representing a via media in the Reformation; it was rather “a matter of policy rather than of principle” (120) or even “painfully moderate” (118). Its achievement was not ideological but practical. However, this is not to say that it was disingenuous either, and here Ryrie is at his most delicate. He seems to have an intuitive understanding for the fluid boundary between belief and practice, and he recognizes better than most historians that a Protestant could believe in the Real Presence because doing otherwise is suicide, understand at some level that that is why he or she believes it, and yet believe it nonetheless.

My argument with Ryrie, then, is also a subtle one. In delineating his moderate Protestant “process” in the 1540s, he tends to define it as a willingness to accept the authority of Henry VIII and the royal supremacy despite the backsliding of the Act of Six Articles. Those immoderate Protestants who fled into exile or got themselves into trouble, by contrast, were those willing to “oppose or denounce the regime” (120, and see also 113, 154, 250). Here, I think, more analysis is necessary. The Tudor era was a period when opposing the regime could easily be understood as a deadly sin, and even overt opposition to its policies was most often combined with an acceptance of its authority and a willingness to suffer at its hands. The usual practice of people with radical ideas was therefore to gloss them as loyalist and even to present them to the magistrate for implementation—see the practices of both most Presbyterians and most Catholics in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It might be useful, then, for historians following in Ryrie's capable footsteps to offer extended close readings of some of his moderate Protestants—Thomas Becon, Richard Tracy, Richard Morison, Robert Crowley, and others—and ask not whether they remained loyal but how they used their loyalty. The results will not disprove Ryrie's subtle thesis, which I believe is demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, but may suggest that a recognition of these reformers’ moderation would serve better as the beginning of our analysis rather than its conclusion.