Robert Baillie was a professor at Glasgow University, pastor of the Ayrshire parish of Kilwinning, and a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. He is known mostly through David Laing's three-volume edition of his letters and journals, a work published in the early 1840s. As Alexander Campbell points out in this well-written intellectual biography, Laing's edition of the letters, while presenting historians with a massive source of information on politics and religion in the British Civil Wars, has largely obscured Baillie the man from the historical gaze. Indeed, Baillie's letters have all too often been deployed by historians as an index for what the “Scots” were thinking in general, rather than recognizing them as the product of a particular, highly idiosyncratic individual. This is not helped by the fact that, like most Presbyterians of the era, Baillie has a poor reputation among modern historians. In many accounts of 1640s politics, most notably the influential work the late Valerie Pearl, Baillie emerges as a counterrevolutionary spider at the center of a Presbyterian web, callously directing events and people in the furtherance of Scottish Presbyterian interests. A man who could gleefully write about the sudden death of an opponent such as the Hebraist Thomas Coleman as the work of the gracious providence of God, Baillie's poetic immortalization by John Milton as one of the “new forcers of conscience” still carries weight in contemporary scholarship.

The time is therefore ripe for a sensitive biography of Baillie. Alex Campbell's monograph provides a corrective to many of the one-dimensional portrayals of Baillie. In Campbell's hands, Baillie is cast as a far more moderate figure than has often been allowed, particularly in contrast to fellow covenanters, such as George Gillespie and Samuel Rutherford. Based on a thorough reading of Baillie's printed and surviving manuscript sources, Campbell's study is divided into seven chapters dealing with Baillie's intellectual formation, his political and religious positions, his biblical scholarship, and preaching and the legacy of his record keeping. Through Baillie's biography, Campbell contributes to the current historiographical renovation of the intellectual environment of early- to mid-seventeenth century Scotland, a period formerly seen as something of a Calvinist dark age before the flourishing of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of Campbell's study focuses on Baillie as a theologian and religious polemicist. Campbell provides a fascinating chapter-length discussion of Baillie's views on church polity, challenging the rigid application of denominational categories such as “Presbyterian,” “Congregationalist,” and “Episcopalian.” While acknowledging that these categories clearly had contemporary meaning, Campbell picks up on the common scriptural and ecclesiastical heritage of the various positions to argue that Baillie held a substantial degree of flexibility in matters of church polity. This chapter provides a welcome challenge to the often thought-stopping caricature of Baillie (and others) as a “rigid Presbyterian.” Other chapters look at Baillie's engagement to the challenges to Reformed orthodoxy presented by Arminius and Amyraut and the royal impositions on the Church of Scotland of the Five Articles of Perth and the Prayer Book. The argument of these chapters is that Baillie remained both flexible and moderate, while at the same time defending the core positions of Reformed orthodoxy.

The theme of Baillie's moderation in comparison to his more extremist covenanter colleagues is highlighted by Campbell's discussion of Baillie's views of church and state. This topic has recently been given a new lease of life by historians such as Jeffrey Collins and Johann Sommerville. As Sommerville has nicely put it, the effect of these studies is to reimagine the period from 1638 to 1662 as one of “Erastian” rather than “Puritan” revolution. In chapter 2, Campbell convincingly shows that Baillie remained a defender of the Stuart monarchy's royal supremacy: the power of the King to order matters in the church (such as ceremonial observance) that were indifferent to salvation. In this sense, Baillie is described as holding a position of “monarchical loyalism and Erastianism” (60). Unfortunately, Campbell does not define his use of the term “Erastian,” a term whose imprecision originates from its first use in the seventeenth century as a smear word deployed against opponents of jure divino Presbyterianism. Campbell's omission is all the more problematic given that Baillie was one of the first, if not the first person, to use the term “Erastian” in writing. In Baillie's writings, “Erastian” originated as a slur on English opponents such as John Selden, Thomas Coleman, and William Prynne who argued that the civil magistrate held power to determine not just external matters of church order and worship, but the very doctrine and discipline of the Church itself. In this light, it is questionable whether “Erastian” or even “quasi-Erastian” (73) is the appropriate adjective to describe Baillie's thought. As Campbell acknowledges, Baillie held to the Calvinist “two kingdom theory” closely associated with Presbyterians, such Thomas Cartwright and Andrew Melville. This political theology afforded the civil magistrate a ius circa sacra as a “nursing father” of the Church, while denying that the wielder of the civil sword possessed the ius in sacra that single sphere theorists such as Coleman, Selden or Erastus, a sixteenth century follower of Zwingli and Bullinger, himself espoused. Campbell is, however, on more solid ground in his convincing demonstration that Baillie differed from his more extreme Presbyterian colleagues, such as Rutherford and Gillespie on the extent to which matters of ceremony and polity were adiaphorous and thus within the competence of the magistrate.

In conclusion, Campbell's book on Baillie is a welcome study of a character who history has allowed to become obscured by his own rich archive. In exploring the mind of Robert Baillie, Dr. Campbell provides much food for thought on topics that were at the core of the British political and religious crisis in the seventeenth century. This study does much to remind students of history and religion that mid-seventeenth century Presbyterians were not as monolithic and backward in their positions as has often been thought.