The book under review is very readable but limited as a scholarly access to the history of the English Anabaptists in the reign of Henry VIII. The problem, encountered by previous studies of this topic, is the insufficiency of reliable source material. What we have are scattered chronicle references to the deaths of Anabaptists in judicial persecutions of heretics from the time of Henry's efforts to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in 1529 until his death in 1547, as well as several official descriptions of Anabaptism in royal proclamations and statutes mandating religious uniformity.

Pleysier puts the goings on in Henry's court against the background of post-1525 Anabaptist history in Switzerland, south Germany and the Netherlands. Since the English Anabaptists of the Henrician period were almost exclusively Dutch immigrants, this approach has much to recommend it. However, Anabaptism in Germanic Europe is a well-established area of scholarship with extensive source material; and Pleysier does not have a critical mastery of the subject.

For example, Pleysier cites the importance for English Anabaptism of the Anabaptist regime in Münster in Westphalia, February 1534—June 1535, an episode that produced great aversion both in Germany and in England. However, in describing the events in Anabaptist Münster, he relies uncritically on the chronicle of Hermann von Kerssenbroeck, without awareness that its deficiencies were long ago presented in 1851 by C. A. Cornelius, the first critical historian of the subject. Nor is his account informed by the best modern scholarship on Anabaptist Münster, above all that of Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff. The result is a lurid, rollicking tale of Anabaptist polygamy and terror, closer to sixteenth-century polemic than to modern history writing, which attempts, as much as possible, to use Anabaptist as well as anti-Anabaptist source material.

In England some thirty Dutch Anabaptists, not refugees from Münster but from the upheaval of post-Münsterite Anabaptism in north Germany and the Netherlands, were burned at the stake in the years leading up to 1547. Pleysier says, probably correctly, that these persons belonged to the part of Anabaptism founded by Melchior Hoffman, a leader with a heterodox Christological doctrine. However, the English Anabaptists are only a shadowy backdrop to their history because of source material problems. The royal pronouncements about them are in part the precipitate of things that English churchmen learned from their Continental peers about the diverse Anabaptist groups in Europe. Therefore, I do not think Pleysier's summation of early English Anabaptist beliefs is dependable—particularly his stress on their adhering to the ideas of the Seven Articles of Schleitheim (1527) as well as Melchiorite Christology.

What is front and center in Pleysier's book, and what makes it very readable, is his detailed retelling of the very brutal religious politics of the court of Henry VIII following the king's decision to rid himself of Catherine of Aragon. This led to Henry's well-known break with Rome, but it did not lead, during Henry's reign, to a protestant England. The royal council was divided, almost equally, between persons who wanted to uphold Catholic orthodoxy and persons willing to explore the doctrines taught at Wittenberg. Whether the one or the other group was ascendant was a result of Henry's maneuvers in the world of European war and diplomacy among the Habsburgs, the French, and the Schmalkaldic League. The German Lutherans of the Schmalkaldic League were only needed to block an invasion of England by Charles V and Francis I to restore papal supremacy. At times when this was not a danger Henry tended towards Catholic orthodoxy in doctrine. Both factions in the royal council were supply accommodating to their royal master's doctrinal twists and turns. For instance, the doctrine of transubstantiation was always insisted upon—if you denied it, or could plausibly be suspected of not believing it, you went to the stake. Those burned at the stake for denial of transubstantiation were labeled “Anabaptist heretics.” Thus, in the last years of Henry VIII's reign Anne Askew (whom Pleysier correctly describes as a Sacramentarian) was executed for not having a credible belief in transubstantiation. English Anabaptism was always a murky shadow behind the brutal “religious” carrying-ons that resulted from Henry's version of royal monogamy.