Conal Condren's new book is an important, provocative, but ultimately unsatisfying analysis of the language of office in early modern England, an analysis that, in broader terms, he uses to launch a critique of much recent work on the Tudor and Stuart state and early modern political thought. The work is divided into three sections. The first offers an overview of office and office holding, examining its ceremonial, institutional, and linguistic features, as well as looking at “offices of the intellect” (105): the personae of poet and philosopher. In contrast to other work on office holding in the same period, Condren stresses the importance of persona to office, which he defines as “the expectation that people must behave according to the requirements of their respective offices” (25). The middle section of the book disputes what Condren sees as historians’ preoccupation with political sovereignty, political resistance, and an anachronistic separation of the political from other realms, by suggesting instead that “politics” was really centered around often casuistic debates over counsel, office, and office abuse. The final section explores controversies relating to oath taking, specifically those following the imposition of the Jacobean oath of allegiance, the Engagement to the Commonwealth, and the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. Condren uses this study of oath taking to dismiss the importance of the emergence of a secularized de facto theory in these debates, instead arguing that these were disputes focused on the obligations placed by oaths upon the conscience.

Throughout the book, Condren, following on from his argument in The Language of Politics in Seventeenth Century England (New York, 1994), repeatedly criticizes other historians for reading the values of their own conceptual vocabulary into the past. Condren suggests that he wishes to broaden the discussion of office beyond its largely institutional setting in order to prevent the leakage of Weberian assumptions about the emergence of a bureaucratic state, which he sees present in the work of Michael Braddick in particular, into his analysis. However, it might be suggested that Condren has developed instead a definition of “office” capacious enough to support his ambitious claim that virtually all of what is defined as political discourse or political theory was actually “office-talk” (3).

This claim was unconvincing and not well supported. Too much of Condren's work seemed to artificially shape what was really a criticism of current historiography into a discussion of office. For example, Condren argues, contrary to the work of Patrick Collinson and others, that the association to Elizabeth I drafted in 1584 was a device to maintain the office of rule, not evidence of “embryonic republicanism” (61). The problem is that these were patently not mechanisms created simply to ensure the continuance of monarchical government or, indeed, merely the continuance of government. If that was the aim, there was no need of them, as in the event of Elizabeth I's assassination, there was a perfectly good hereditary claimant to the throne already residing in England, Mary Queen of Scots. These were devices to preserve the Protestant nation first and the monarch second—as the association to William of Orange in 1688 bears witness.

Similarly, Condren, in chapter 9 of his book, suggests that what historians often designate as “resistance theories” were really no such thing but rather casuistic discussions of “office-abuse” that attempted to dodge accusations that the act of resistance was really an act of unlawful rebellion. The observation that much pamphlet literature of the early years of the English Civil War was casuistic in tone is reasonable, though not peculiarly Condren’s. J. G. A. Pocock, in his introduction to The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), noted this tone much earlier. But again, this seems to be seriously inflating the importance of office to political writing and ignores the use of justifications of the use of force on the basis of popular or parliamentary sovereignty, which was central to the writing of Henry Parker and William Prynne. Even in the case of the examples he has chosen, The Nineteen Propositions and the king's Answer to them, it seem perfectly reasonable to suggest that demands to vet the appointment of royal officers also constituted an attack on royal prerogative and an extension of parliamentary power.

There is a similarly myopic dismissal of “de facto” theory, both with reference to the Engagement Controversy and the oaths of allegiance to William and Mary, despite the fact that it was an element of both these debates that was so ubiquitous that contemporaries often talked of someone being a “de facto man.” As with the discussion of “resistance theory,” Condren is also forced to erect something of a “straw man” of recent historiography, given that much work by Glenn Burgess, Tony Claydon, and Craig Rose has already successfully asserted the importance of the nonsecular discourses of providence and the elect nation in these controversies.

Overall, the investigation of oaths that the book finishes with does not add much to support Condren's expansive claims. Of course, the taking of oaths was an important part of assuming office, but not all oaths were oaths of office, and, indeed, some oaths actually eroded the distinction between those who held office and those who did not, for example, most of the oaths of allegiance imposed by the Long Parliament (the Protestation, the Vow and Covenant, and the Solemn League and Covenant).

Some of the criticisms of recent historiography made by Condren are undoubtedly justified. He rightly points to the complexities of using terms like “private,” “public,” “resistance,” and “self” in an early modern context. However, to me, it seemed as if there were two books struggling here to live within one set of covers: one a polemical attack on recent work on the administrative, intellectual, and political history of early modern England and another a narrower, and more sustainable, etymological analysis of the language of “office.”