Over the winter of 1687–8 James ii was attempting to secure a parliament which would repeal the test and penal laws that discriminated against his fellow Catholics. As part of his campaign he asked all lord lieutenants to pose three questions to the justices of the peace in their shires. The first enquired if they would vote for repeal of the anti-Catholic legislation if they were returned to parliament; the second if they would support people who favoured repeal in elections; the third if they would live peacefully with neighbours of all faiths. This systematic survey of opinion has been analysed by historians, who have usually argued that it was a disaster. Although rarely looking at the canvas in detail, scholars have suggested that most JPs refused to help the king's policies, or at least hedged, and that this encouraged resistance to James because people saw how widely their opposition was shared. Peter Walker's volume is the first book-length treatment of the three questions, and it does valuable work in outlining their organisation and results. The conclusions are interesting, if not revolutionary. Walker points out that the king got more support than is often realised. He rescues from scholarly neglect the numerous tories who said that they would always follow royal policy on principle, and shows that just under 20 per cent of JPs answered ‘yes’ to the questions, even if one excludes the Catholics whom James had recently (and perhaps illegally) appointed to the bench, and the whigs and dissenters to whom he began to turn as the survey went on. This would have been enough to keep local government and justice going, countering the view that the king had fatally alienated England's ruling class. He also suggests that the many equivocal answers may have hidden a ‘soft core’ of opinion on which James might have worked; and that the overwhelmingly positive response to the third question suggests that religious toleration – the court's policy – was becoming acceptable. On the other hand, the book gives full weight to the many flat rejections of James's position; and in the end it doubts that there was much of a soft core. Much equivocation hid organised resistance, and James was never the man to work patiently with doubters – he simply purged them. Walker also stresses that the apparently encouraging answers to the third question may have sprung from a desire not to burn absolutely all bridges with the court. Given such broad support for standard historiography, Walker's main advance may be his detailed excavation of why statistical support for the king differed so widely from county to county. The variation was often explained by differences in political structure which affected whether the gentry could co-ordinate their resistance or equivocation. Overall this is a useful guide. However, the detailed case study of Leicestershire in one chapter would have benefitted from Zoe Bliss's doctoral analysis of the East Midlands under James ii; and it is a shame that Walker wrote too late to respond to Steven Pincus’ work on the bureaucratic modernity of James regime, for which a national survey of opinion might provide evidence.