There is much that impresses about this book. Erudite and deeply researched, it tackles an important but challenging topic with considerable authority. At heart an exercise in intellectual history, it offers a focused, and deeply nuanced, examination of the debates over the nature of the royal supremacy in Restoration England. The amount of discussion that there was over the royal supremacy after 1660 has been obscured by the fact that there were few works of ecclesiology that explicitly announced themselves as such. Instead, Rose has had to approach the subject obliquely, by exploring how views of royal ecclesiastical prerogatives were invoked in debates over comprehension and toleration, divine-right episcopacy and popery – debates which took place not only in the press, but also in parliament and the pulpit. Rose's essential argument is that there were competing visions of the royal supremacy, as it had been established at the time of the Henrician break with Rome, that different people understood different things by it, and that those competing understandings were further complicated by the actions of both Charles ii and James ii, neither of whom always behaved in a way that was expected of a supreme governor of the English Church. Thus ‘attitudes to supremacy were a complex combination of an individual's reading of history, their idea of the nature of the church, and the political circumstances during which they wrote’ (p. 282).

Following an introductory chapter exploring arguments for supremacy from 1530 to 1660, Rose proceeds thematically, considering in turn how particular groups responded to supremacy during the Restoration: MPs and lawyers, churchmen, Dissenters and the so-called erastians. A final chapter focuses on the actions of, and reactions to, the Catholic supreme governor, James ii. (As Rose convincingly shows, James's policy was neither ‘Catholic modernity’ nor Enlightened freedom of choice; rather, James used Tudor means to promote his religious ends.) The thematic approach tends to blur the chronology, not just between chapters, but within them – note, for example, how chapter iv on the Dissenters starts with the comprehension debates of 1667–73, moves forward to James ii and the Dissenters, and then jumps back at the end to the early 1670s. A more diachronic framework, focusing perhaps on particular moments, would certainly have been more reader-friendly and might well have enhanced the analysis. Yet although at times tough going, this book is rich in insight and has much to teach us about the Restoration phase of England's long – now very long – Reformation.