Revived interest in the eighteenth-century Church of England has perhaps focused too much on parishes. Were the parsons performing their duties satisfactorily? How effective was their pastoral ministry? How important was the Church for the laity? Hence biographies of the Church's leading figures—comparable to Norman Sykes's lives of Edmund Gibson and William Wake—have been somewhat neglected.

Robert G. Ingram's study of Thomas Secker (1693–1768), archbishop of Canterbury from 1758 to 1768, is therefore to be welcomed. Secker was one of the most remarkable, and arguably the most remarkable, of the eighteenth-century primates: Professor Ingram describes him as “the Cranmer or Laud figure of the age” (9). Moreover, Secker was an interesting, if not a particularly likeable, man. Originally a Dissenter from an undistinguished family, he converted to the established Church, was ordained, and became a royal chaplain (1732), rector of St. James's, Piccadilly (1733), bishop of Bristol (1735), then Oxford (1737), and dean of St. Paul's (1750) before his elevation to Canterbury. From the start, he showed himself to be able and diligent, discharging his duties in a thoroughly conscientious fashion. An extremely efficient administrator, his voluminous surviving papers constitute a biographer's treasure chest, and Professor Ingram has used them very effectively. His bibliography lists manuscripts consulted in twenty-six archives in England and elsewhere, and the evidence derived from these and the many printed primary sources is extremely well marshalled in the text—the task must, at points, have been difficult. The book is not only engagingly written, the author also has a good eye for apt quotations. Professor Ingram's knowledge of modern secondary works is similarly impressive.

Professor Ingram investigates his subject thematically: Secker's move from dissent to the established Church; the Church and the Enlightenment; pastoral provision; Church and state relations; and the Church's aims respecting the American colonies and foreign churches. He is interesting on Secker's politics and particularly interesting on the archbishop's endeavours to enforce orthodoxy—“Secker's first priority … was to promote orthodoxy, to stamp out doctrinal diversity, and to combat heterodoxy” (70). (There was a revealing instance when the archbishop interviewed Peter Peckard, the future master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and dean of Peterborough, obliging him to submit utterly to Secker's condemnation of mortalism. “Bullying could work,” Professor Ingram comments [102]; and, when one turns to the frontispiece portrait, capturing Secker's formidable features, the scene is not hard to visualize!) Professor Ingram handles topics that are not always sensitively handled—for example, patronage and the rôles of the royal court and the House of Lords—in a convincing way, eschewing the dangers of anachronistic value judgments. It is good, too, that he engages properly with theology: historians are too often—if understandably—reticent about doing so.

As the title indicates, Professor Ingram's book is not just a biography of Secker. In 1990, Joanna Innes noted that the “problem of integrating into a single vision aspects of past society which strike us as ‘modern’ and aspects which strike us as alien seems for some reason to be one historians of eighteenth-century England find particularly hard to resolve” (“Not so Strange? New Views of Eighteenth-Century England,” History Workshop 29 [Spring 1990]: 183). It is this issue—whether Georgian England was a backward looking, ancien-régime society or a conspicuously modernizing one—that Professor Ingram seeks to examine through his study of Secker's career. He concludes that Secker, keeping his eyes on past practice and the primitive model of the priesthood, wanted to reinvigorate the Church by reforming, not transforming, its existing institutions; but that the state could prove unsupportive because of its political priorities at home and for the empire, and as a result of war. Thus, Secker's plans for an American episcopate were thwarted because the politicians considered them inexpedient in the 1760s. Such a tremor in Church and state relations was indicative of the movement of tectonic plates—the decline of the confessional state—that would in time become increasingly apparent.

Professor Ingram's study ends poignantly by noting that St. Mary's, Lambeth, where Secker's funeral was held, was deconsecrated in 1972 and is now London's Museum of Garden History: a symbol of the Church of England's decay, the state's indifference to it, and rapid secularization. Given the Church's current difficulties and divisions, one may soon see the conclusion of the process whose origins this book seeks to trace.