This is a fascinating examination of English Presbyterianism in the years when it is not supposed to have existed. Our conventional historiography suggests that English Presbyterianism burst onto the scene in the early 1570s, came of age in the 1580s, and was crushed in 1589–90 in the aftermath of the Martin Marprelate affair; by the early 1590s, puritans had abandoned Presbyterianism in favor of pathways either more conservative (the cultivation of godly piety within the corrupt Church of England) or more radical (separatism and Congregationalism). This pat chronology has, however, always concealed an enormous problem: if Elizabethan Presbyterianism was so successfully crushed, how was it reborn half a century later, seemingly as if it were the most commonplace and natural of positions, in the early years of the Long Parliament? Polly Ha suggests that the conventional answer to this question—the influence of the Scots—is in fact wrong and that instead English Presbyterianism survived and occasionally thrived during those fifty years.

Ha has traced this survival in two different ways. First, she analyzes puritan antiseparatist and anti-Congregationalist arguments in the early seventeenth century (sometimes in texts that were not printed until after 1641), showing the growth and development of Presbyterian thought. The most important part of this analysis is Ha's detailed examination of the manuscripts of the Presbyterian leader Walter Travers that she discovered at Trinity College Dublin. These manuscripts clearly demonstrate the prominence of Presbyterian ideas for puritans in the first decades of the seventeenth century and the powerful challenge that Presbyterians posed to the developing Congregationalist movement, especially in their debates against the most original theorist of congregational autonomy, Henry Jacob. In this section, Ha successfully challenges the arguments of Stephen Brachlow and other scholars who had suggested that the primacy of synods was not a significant issue to puritans in this period. But she also shows that Presbyterianism was about more than just synods: it was about the commitment to a unitary church in the face of the centrifugal impulses of living under threat of persecution. Moreover, in her detailed analysis of Presbyterian arguments about church polity in the seventeenth century, Ha joins a growing chorus of historians who are suggesting that the constitutionalist political thought of the civil wars and revolution actually had its origins in the ecclesiological debates of earlier puritans.

Second, Ha analyzes the social world of English Presbyterianism in exile, especially the experiences of the English Reformed Church in Amsterdam, which was both technically in communion with the Church of England and part of the Dutch Reformed classis. In this unique example of licit English Presbyterianism, Ha has a laboratory in which to explore a series of issues that have remained obscure: the real problems that confronted an English “discipline” and the responses of the presbytery, the importance of poorer members of the church in that disciplinary process, and the complex interconnections between the English Reformed Church and its many English separatist and Congregationalist neighbor churches in the Netherlands. In a series of fascinating case studies from the English Reformed Church's disciplinary records, Ha shows the unique problems and unique solutions of this Presbyterian experiment in circumstances very different from the well-known contexts of Scotland and Geneva. In one case, for instance, Ha shows that the existence of an extracongregational classis, far from being an engine of authoritarianism, was a tremendously useful weapon for poorer members of the congregation, like the drunkard George Hewett who appealed up the chain of command against his neighbors in the consistory (162). In another case, a poor woman named Florence Stevens, who was disciplined by the church for rude and unchristian behavior, practically begged the church to excommunicate her so that she would become eligible to receive charity from another church instead; the elders refused, utterly unwilling to allow backsliding members to escape from their oversight (165).

This is empirical history of the highest order backed by excellent analysis; simply put, I know much more about the subject now than I did before I read this book. It is, I admit, what we in the United States sometimes call “inside baseball”: it is a book for specialists who accept the premise that a new perspective on the ecclesiological positions of a minority of a minority within the early Stuart Church really matters. I happen to be one of those (debates between Presbyterians and Congregationalists ripped apart both church and state in the 1640s, and the origin of those debates seems to me intrinsically significant), but not all readers will agree. Moreover, Ha's book remains susceptible to the criticism that her relatively small number of Presbyterians, many of them in exile, cannot support the full weight that is placed on their shoulders of explaining the reemergence of Presbyterianism after 1640. That is a question that awaits further empirical examination.