In Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, Michael Questier places national, or international, dynastic politics in a central role within the story of the religious changes that took place in the British Isles between the accession of Elizabeth I and the breakdown of relations between king and Parliament prior to what became known as the “Personal Rule.” It is largely a study of relations between the monarchy and the contending groups that formed the political nation, Privy Council and Parliament, during these years. Competition for access to these institutions, especially the former, was fiercely contested, and access to the monarch provided those who saw themselves as the rightful governors of the realm (or, more accurately, both realms) with the surest means of securing the safety of the kingdom as they saw it. Despite the book's title, the kingdom most discussed is England; for while the fall of Mary Stuart in Scotland is treated at some length, Scottish affairs thereafter are largely discussed through the prism of English politics. Irish politics plays a modest role in the story throughout.

Questier begins by challenging the view of C. S. L. Davies in his review article “Representation, Repute, Reality” (review of Selling the Tudor Monarchy; Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England, by Kevin Sharpe, English Historical Review, 124, no. 511 [2009], 1432–47) that Tudor monarchs tended to see themselves as individuals rather than part of a dynasty. This seems to be the catalyst for the current book, although Questier's distinguished series of publications provides the research base on which it stands. The contention is that triumphal accounts of the inevitability of Protestantism as the culmination of God's plan for humanity (notwithstanding the perils that lay in wait for it at home and abroad) and the powerful myth of the “Virgin Queen” have relegated the quotidian concerns of politics to a subsidiary role in the story of the Reformation. Whatever the monarchs may have thought, the untimely (but to some providential) deaths of both Edward VI and Mary I made it clear to Protestant politicians like Cecil that the future of the Reformation was intricately bound up with the future of the dynasty. And we have long been aware of the importance of the succession in Elizabethan politics: it drove the determination of both Privy Council and Parliament to secure the execution of Mary Stuart, while the Jesuit mission provided a constant reference point for Protestant fears of rebellion at home and invasion abroad. The conversion to Catholicism of Henri IV in 1593 confirmed the regime's worst fears, and James VI's apparent willingness at the same time to offer an amnesty to those Scottish Catholic peers who opposed him did nothing to alleviate those concerns. Both events emboldened English Catholics: firstly, the French example offered them an example of a Gallican Catholicism detached from Spanish and Jesuit connotations, and, secondly, events in Scotland suggested that such a moderate Catholicism might be able to find a place in any polity led by the man most likely to succeed Elizabeth. The Protestant leaders of the regime and in Parliament were all too aware of the extent to which Catholicism, often (but by no means always) of a lukewarm variety could be found among the governing classes in both court and country at this time. And, while their public pronouncements referred to plots and the papacy, it was this danger, close at hand and often closely related to them, which the Protestant leadership found most troubling.

Uncovering this Catholic strand at the center of British politics has been a major part of Questier's work. The importance of the Catholics presence to understanding the shifts in the dynastic politics of the period—by which one largely means marriage alliances with other European powers and the concerns that Protestant office-holders expressed about them—forms the crux of his argument. Questier makes a strong case for the pragmatism of Stuart royal policy in engaging with their Catholic subjects against the wishes of Parliament, and the failures of royal foreign policy when attempting to intervene on the Protestant side internationally, whether historically in the Netherlands in the 1580s or in the Palatinate in 1619–20, suggest that they had a greater understanding of European power politics than did their Parliamentary opponents. In making that case, Questier places the loyalist English Catholic laity in a central, if not a crucial, role in British dynastic and religious policy, rescuing them from both the rhetoric of their Protestant opponents and from the condescension of those Catholic historians who would wish for a more positively Roman expression of their faith. This is an important contribution of this deeply researched and densely argued book.

But one question remains. In viewing the royal household in the early seventeenth century, its more Protestant opponents would have seen a mirror image of those neighboring Catholic households in which the public life of the head of the household conformed to the law while its domestic regime remained distinctively Catholic. To many of them, this was a source of understandable concern. And, looking forward to the 1680s, who is to say that those concerns were not justified? Dynastic politics, left to itself, might have dramatically altered the history of the country, as Kingsley Amis once explored in a now largely forgotten novel, The Alteration.