The Covenanter movement in early modern British history has usually been associated with Scotland. After the imposition by King Charles I of Archbishop Laud's Anglican liturgical practices on the Church of Scotland in 1637 – a move which led to riots and unrest in Scotland – many Scots signed the National Covenant of 1638. This sparked the English Revolution, a series of complex events from 1638 to 1660 that tore apart the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The 1638 Scottish National Covenant was a document that challenged the King, and looked backward, seeking to move Scotland back to the ideals of John Knox and the original Scottish Protestant Reformation as articulated in 1580. England became linked to the Covenanter movement in 1643, when its Long Parliament signed on to the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 – a different document that looked forward to the future. The 1643 document was an attempt to preserve and propagate Protestant reforms in the respective state churches of the “Three Kingdoms.”

James Walters's book on the two covenants focuses on England rather than Scotland, and on the role that the covenants – especially the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant – played in the life of England during the Restoration of the Stuart dynasty after the tumult of the English Revolution and British civil wars. A better title for this book would have been The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant in England, 1660–1696. The English Long Parliament adopted the 1643 document in exchange for military help from Scotland in its civil war with the monarchy, but the English Restoration Parliament nullified the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant in the Sedition Act of 1661.

Given the persecution of Covenanters in the Restoration Period in Scotland (1660–1688), along with the stiff laws of the Clarendon Code (1661–1665) in England, one would think that the covenants would conveniently fade into the past. But that was not the case. Surprisingly the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant remained as an active point of discussion in England for the rest of the century, down to the merger of the English and Scottish parliaments in 1707.

Walters's argument is that the covenants, particularly that of 1643, served as a legitimate foundation for a national civil religion, particularly among Presbyterians, Dissenters, and other pro-parliament forces as the Restoration and its settlement proceeded. As the decades passed after 1660, the specific religious commitments of the covenants were de-emphasized and the more secular political demands were emphasized: royal and parliamentary powers, and the governance of the church, were to be established and administered under law, and were to be subscribed to by the solemn oaths of the populace. The net result was a more pluralistic version of Protestantism for England, which would encompass many more convictions than the specific theological, liturgical, and ecclesiastical visions of the original covenants.

Walters chooses five nodal points where the covenants played a key role in the political and ecclesiastical discussions in the history of England: 1660–1662 and the inauguration of the Restoration; the late 1660s, when there was discussion of toleration for Dissenters that might compromise the commitments outlined in the covenants; the late 1670s and early 1680s, when the prospect of a Roman Catholic monarch emerged in the near future; 1688 and the “Glorious Revolution”; and 1696, when the rule of William II needed reinforcement from a Protestant “Association,” rather than a covenanted conventicle. In each of these periods, the author focuses on the political, ecclesiastical, and intellectual discussions of the covenants and their role in the English constitution and the reform of church and state. The result is a rich intellectual tapestry of contemporary arguments and counterarguments, some of which can be difficult to follow and keep track of.

One of the features of the covenants is that while they were forged in the heat of conflict, they had elements that supported all of the elements of the royal, parliamentary, and ecclesiastical institutions in early modern Britain. Furthermore, these features led to a variety of interpretations of various sections of the covenants: while they were originally directed against the monarchy and its excesses, there were sections that were couched with a declaration of loyalty to the crown and a plea for the monarchy not to follow evil paths. At the same time, there were features of the covenants that called for the limitation – but not the elimination – of the monarchy. After the execution of Charles I in 1649 most Scottish Presbyterians were horrified at the regicide because they had a different interpretation of the sacredness of kingship than the radicals in the English Parliament. The Scottish Parliament therefore declared Charles II to be the succeeding monarch and negotiated with him to come to Scotland in 1650 to be crowned King of Scotland – if he acceded to the covenants, which he did. The fact that he reneged on his commitment to the covenants in the 1660s and became a bitter disappointment to them did not dissuade many of them from their doctrine of limited kingship. Independent congregationalists, English presbyterians, those devoted to episcopacy and prelacy, monarchists, radical Scottish Covenanters, Restoration Dissenters, Non-Conformists, and parliamentarians would each lift various features of the covenants to support arguments for their view of the church and the state, along with a variety of interpretations that emerged from each writer's own reading of the documents. Out of those debates Walters argues that the most important result was the emergence of a constitutional monarchy and parliament that was limited by written documents and laws and by the balance of powers between them.

This is a challenging book to read. The reader has to be familiar with many of the political and ecclesiastical details of seventeenth-century England and Scotland to understand the broader context in which the covenants were discussed and to follow all of the various trains of thought within the debates. It would have helped if the texts of the covenants, formatted for the modern reader, would have been provided. The footnotes and bibliography of the author reveal a significant reassessment of the covenants during the period 2000–2024. The references provide a valuable recent historiography of the Covenanter movement in England and related matters such as constitutionalism and church–state relations during and after the Restoration. Greater attention, in the form of at least a comparative chapter, could have been paid to what was going on in Scotland at the same time. What were English Dissenters thinking about the harsh treatment of Scottish dissenting Covenanters? Walters's book is an important contribution to a complex story, or series of stories, and indicates that more attention needs to be paid to the larger Covenanter movement in the British diaspora.