At some time or other, when put on the spot by a persistent questioner, most of us will have been surprised to hear ourselves blurt out some opinion of which we had been only dimly aware up to that point. Perhaps this was Roger Sawrey's feeling when he was asked at Lancaster in November 1687 whether he would support the repeal of the persecutory penal laws and the Test Acts, which kept Catholics out of office. The confrontation between Sawrey, minor gentleman, Baptist, and former Cromwellian soldier, and the Lord Lieutenant who waved James II's Three Questions in his face is vividly recreated in Scott Sowerby's Making Toleration. Squirming under the gaze of his neighbors, agonizing about the implications for Protestant Dissenters of this pro-Catholic choice, and forbidden to equivocate by the authorities, Sawrey suddenly gave way and answered that he would “cut off” all these laws. Sowerby's ability to bring to life individuals and episodes culled from an impressive trawl through the regional archives of England and Wales is just one of the virtues of his account of the “repealers,” those of James's subjects who supported his campaign for the parliamentary abolition of the penal laws. The materials that he has gathered from 136 manuscript repositories and numerous printed sources allow him to get under the skin of his subjects and to test some of the easy assumptions of the existing scholarship. He offers illuminating vignettes of principles buckling or finding new courage under political pressure: Sawrey's case might be compared to the ordeal of the Anglican cleric Sydrach Simpson, who ran hither and thither seeking advice from his brethren on whether to read the King's Declaration for Liberty of Conscience from his pulpit, which he did and instantly regretted. Sowerby's sympathy for individuals on the horns of a dilemma is allied to a good ear for the slogans and cliches of the age—a nice discussion of the phrase “fears and jealousies” enlivens his account of the nature of antipopery. Sowerby's precise and careful archival scholarship pays dividends in several other ways. He analyzes the “regulation” of a sample of parliamentary boroughs where the Privy Council orders for the removal of individuals from the corporation can be matched to locally held records. This suggests that contrary to the assumption of many historians that boroughs had to be repeatedly “regulated” because new appointees refused to serve, this was in fact a deliberately phased process designed to maintain the required quorum of each corporation. Elsewhere in the book he discusses those towns, such as Chester and Rye, where the new appointees did prove unreliable and had to be replaced. All of Sowerby's carefully constructed revisions and case studies serve the book's larger purpose of demonstrating that there was popular support for the repeal of the penal laws and the Test Acts. Admittedly, the kernel of evidence is not large: the campaign for repeal lasted approximately eighteen months, from April 1687 to October 1688. It spawned eighty pamphlets; a weekly newspaper, Henry Care's Public Occurrences Truly Stated; sixty loyal addresses thanking the king for his Declaration; and twenty-seven addresses from parliamentary boroughs pledging support for repeal. But by drawing on the wider, often indirect, evidence, by following up every lead, and by extensive contextualization of each fragment, Sowerby wrings the most out of his material. The results are often fascinating, whether in the detail of the challenges made to the jurors by both sides in the seven bishops’ trial, in the inventive correlation of loyal addresses with boroughs in cloth-producing regions, or in an individual source such as Aston's diary recording James II's speech at Chester in August 1687 when he compared religious preferences to skin color. All in all, this is the strongest scholarly case yet made for widespread interest in repeal in 1687 and 1688. Whether it demonstrates that this support was a “movement” is far more debatable. Sowerby lists all the characteristics of a movement that are lacking—a platform, membership, bureaucracy, and so on—but then smuggles the term into his argument as a theoretical necessity by relying on Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow's sociology of revolutionary processes. The case is clear-cut. In Sowerby's eyes, repeal was a movement for enlightened reform sponsored by a reformist and conciliatory James II. Because it is axiomatic that bad governments are at their weakest when reforming, James's project predictably provoked a defensive countermovement that overthrew him and then incorporated some of the repeal agenda into the settlement via the 1689 Toleration Act. As a consequence, the fact that there had ever been a repeal movement was downplayed or, in Sowerby's phrase, “forgotten,” by the revolutionaries and their descendants. This level of abstraction, built upon some comparative and sociological premises, but innocent of larger questions about the socioeconomic nature of revolutions, is not easily connected to the kind of archival material with which Sowerby is working. No reader would begrudge Sowerby his consciously iconoclastic take on the period and his bold claims, clever redescriptions, and debating points—indeed, it is no bad thing to be confronted with a few counterintuitive speculations (Would James have converted to Anglicanism? Would Nonconformity have gone over to Jacobitism in 1689? Were skeptical Anglican clergy a pool of potential support for repeal?)—but at heart Sowerby seems too scrupulous an archival historian to be entirely comfortable with some of his own more grandiloquent assertions about the origins of modern constitutionalism and the structure of revolutions. Caveats are entered and distinctions are made, and yet there remains at the heart of the book a curiously unconvincing picture of James the reformer, a provocative picture of antipopery (rather than popery) as the actively destablizing force in English politics, and an absence of religious zeal, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, in the calculations of any of the actors. Although at times the author's larger arguments overreach themselves, his book will arouse as much admiration as exasperation. Making Toleration is a refreshing, scholarly, and engaging account of the last two years of James's reign that succeeds in throwing an unfamiliar light on events and individuals that we all thought we knew, and some, such as Sawrey, whom thanks to Scott Sowerby we now meet for the first time.