Debates surrounding lay patronage were the greatest source of instability in the eighteenth-century Scottish Church. Laurence Whitley's stimulating book traces the post-Reformation roots of the controversy over patronage, and provides a detailed account of the subject's political significance in the years 1690–1750. Chapters i–iv discuss patronage and ecclesiastical property from the medieval period to the revolution of 1688–90. Chapters v–xv continue the mostly chronological narrative, now based on extensive use of church records and political correspondence, to the rise of the Moderate party in the 1750s. The right of lay patrons to present ministers to vacant Scottish parishes was twice abolished before modern times, in the revolutionary circumstances of 1649 and 1690. The revival of patronage at the Restoration is easily explained, as part of a programme to restore royal and noble rights after the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s. But the act of 1712 restoring patronage is less well understood, and Whitley offers a sophisticated and convincing interpretation. The system of parochial calls introduced in 1690 was ambiguous and problematic; patrons seem to have believed that it was a temporary measure. The patronage act of 1712 was not a breach of the Anglo-Scottish union, and patrons quickly began to use their restored rights of presentation. Here, and in his analysis of disputed settlements, Whitley criticises partisan nineteenth-century historians whose tendentious judgements have survived into recent times. Whitley is a reliable guide to the complex contests over patronage after 1712, and he has a better understanding than most historians of the legal issues involved. With its emphasis on the political management of the eighteenth-century Church, the book is slightly old-fashioned. The cultural ramifications of disputes about patronage are scarcely explored, and we are told relatively little about the beliefs of ordinary men and women who sought a role in the nomination of their ministers. Occasionally Whitley's interpretations – influenced by the hard-headed political historians of the 1970s and 1980s – are a touch cynical, and take too little account of religious ideas. Nevertheless, Whitley pays welcome attention to now little-studied episodes in Church history, notably the Secession of the 1730s. He inevitably concentrates on problems of patronage in the established Church, but gives numerous examples of episcopalians’ opposition to the settling of presbyterian ministers. Because Whitley shows how patronage was entwined with other tensions in religious politics, his book is more wide-ranging than its title suggests. A great grievance should be read by all historians of the early modern Scottish Church.