Mark Goldie is a towering figure in the historiography of early modern England, with a wide body of work concerning the origins and formations of political and religious institutions, including nascent party groups. His essays and edited collections inform most other accounts of the period, and his cohort of influential supervisees is legion within academia.

Contesting the English polity includes articles from a four-decade span concerning the Restoration. Minor revisions, mostly in the footnotes, helpfully alert the reader to subsequent and ongoing historiographical developments. The essays collected here contain essential recoveries of collective and individual mindsets concerning ‘priestcraft’, theories of ‘royal sovereignty’ and ‘religious intolerance’, and debates around sundry subject matters. Goldie adroitly analyses the interaction between ideology and political strategy. The relative autonomy of ‘absolutist’ thought provides one example: Whigs advertised the theory's supposedly far-reaching implications, while Tories qualified it to incorporate habitual respect for parliaments and the rule of law (pp. 20–1, 29). Whigs themselves, often theoretical parliamentarians, frequently found themselves appealing to the king over parliaments dominated by Cavaliers and Tories (chs iv, ix). Addressing other historiographical narratives, several chapters show the continuing import of the Reformation, and curious by-ways of ‘Enlightenment’ on English shores. Goldie's capacity to recover dominant, insurgent and idiosyncratic conceptions of a godly commonwealth, also evidenced in his 1977 doctoral thesis, ‘Tory political thought, 1689–1714’, and recent Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, is unmatched.

It is worth meditating on the theoretical and historiographical consequences of Goldie's oeuvre. How might this collection contribute to the ‘contesting’ of the Restoration polity today? What kind of ‘revolutions’ and ‘restorations’ occurred is briefly touched on here. It might be excessive to say, in an original introduction, that ‘[t]he “revolution” of the 1640s was, as a solution to England's contested polity, simply a failure’ (p. 9). If it did not achieve consensus, programmatic transformation or ultimate resolutions, it did fundamentally alter the political sphere, serving to warn (or inspire) future magistrates and create new political and ecclesiastical constituencies and institutions. Contesting the English polity, from its analysis of ‘the theory of royal supremacy’ to its multivalent understanding of incipient Whiggism and Toryism, stands testament to this.

The collection also illustrates that casting the revolution of 1688/89 as a definitive type of regime change is perhaps unfruitful. Goldie, among others, has shown that 1688/89 instantiated several revolutions, and contained the seeds of others – Godly (Anglican, or ambiguously NonconformistFootnote ¹), commercial, constitutional and ‘Anglo-Dutch’, with ‘Whig’, ‘radical’, republican or ‘Tory’ inheritances, and English, Scottish and imperial angles. Goldie's essay on the ‘Anglican revolution’ shows, helpfully, how divergent approaches accompanied its different stages: Anglican resistance to James's policies could theoretically, and plausibly, be separated from supporting his deposition as king. Several parties ‘contested the English polity’ during the Restoration and its abutting revolutions. Whilst hegemonic orders emerged, these constituted diverse coalitions, and drew forth resistance. The essays here on Monmouth, sceptical Toryism and Andrew Marvell's adversaries, amongst others, impeccably demonstrate this.

Contesting the English polity primarily analyses the ‘interconnectedness of religious and political thinking’ (p. vii), logically ‘distinct’ but actually ‘co-extensive’ (p. 1). Partly thanks to Goldie, scholars now give due attention to religion in Restoration and eighteenth-century England. But what ‘religion’ have we regained?Footnote ² The introduction contains a refreshing earnestness about writing as ‘a child of secular modernity and a non-believer’ (p. 3). This does not create misrecognition: Goldie's essays guard against anachronism, and here include epistemological meditations around modern and early modern concepts of belief (pp. 54–5).

But what do we characterise as ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ thought patterns and behaviours? The introduction considers that individuals advocating religious toleration and programmes doctrinal relaxation became the bearers of, with qualifications, ‘Enlightenment’ thinking. The slow evisceration of ‘institutional religion’ which began in this period laid the ground for the ‘early Enlightenment’ (p. 11). We are also told, however, that ‘people of the late seventeenth century thought of themselves as people of the Reformation and not of “the Enlightenment”’; Whigs and anticlericals were simply a different religious parties (p. 4). How does one operationalise religion?Footnote ³ Is it the presence of public, even state, ecclesiastical institutions; inward conviction; ethical behaviour; a declaration of religiosity; the adherence to true doctrine or theologically-orientated ‘practices’? Do we see Whigs, anticlericals and even Nonconformists as neutering ‘religion’, or only the established Church; and were they reluctant supporters of religious pluralism or deliberate secularists? Whether England underwent further Reformation, an Anglican or ‘conservative’ Enlightenment, an impious one, or some combination of these, is contingent upon the definitions used.Footnote ⁴

Goldie's introduction to Roger Morrice considered the differing sociological and intellectual accounts modern historians give of early modern religion.Footnote ⁵ Here, we witness contemporary divisions about what rights ‘religion’ had over people. Goldie is correct to state, in a seminal essay on ‘Priestcraft and the birth of Whiggism’, that any ‘quest for the origins of irreligion [cannot overlook] how profoundly English radical writing remained religiously committed’, supporting ‘Christian reformism’ and the rule of a ‘godly magistrate’ (p. 123). Elsewhere, we are shown that Hobbes-inspired erastians supported a similarly divine magistracy, and even the deepening of the church state (p. 92). Despite these theological underpinnings, however, anticlericalism and many ‘religious’ forces outside the establishment did attack national and mandatory ecclesiastical institutions. Whig anticlericals were rarely anti-religious (p. 99), but did occupy their time assailing traditional religious authorities. Many Puritans and Whigs were chiefly concerned with ‘sav[ing] the secular commonwealth from churchmen’, rather than improving the latter (p. 172). If these actors held fast to ‘religion’, they diminished its political and compulsory claims.

Similarly, although Puritans and latitudinarians might welcome authoritarian ecclesiastical structures, the concession that many beliefs and practices were adiaphora (pp. 37, 89, 192, 254),Footnote ⁶ and de facto complicity in pluralism, gave up much that other clergymen considered essential. The upshot was rarely missionary zeal, and the disclaimer of some that they were not irreligious should not trump all. For diverse groups it was sacrilege to undermine traditional authorities, or reduce religion to knowledge, propositional affirmations and good behaviour:Footnote ⁷ to deny the reach of spiritual institutions could be to deny divine agencies.Footnote ⁸

The paradoxes of a common religiosity are exposed when we consider that some actors employed a more intellectual criterion of ‘religion’. This was a contested position. A brilliant essay on ‘Danby, the bishops, and the Whigs’ partly illustrates this. ‘Church’ and Tory parties formed in response to forces indifferent or hostile to extensive ecclesiastical compulsion. Those traducing ‘priestcraft’ opposed the political influence of conventional authorities (pp. 131–2): ‘godly’ kings were to stand above clerics, and promote a more nebulous ‘Christian liberty’ than specific doctrines or institutions (pp. 135–6). These latter individuals diminished what others felt were the valid outward manifestations of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’, and gestured towards criticising inward ones. It is ironic that orthodox, authoritarian Nonconformists sometimes backslid to support toleration, heterodoxy or erastian neutralism between Churches (p. 173); and that Restoration anticlericalism continued to have religious presuppositions. But individuals promoting such ideas differed profoundly from High Churchmen seeking Anglican enforcement, and latitudinarians seeking comprehension and vigorous voluntarism within an established Church. Dissenters differed internally, between those maintaining the fight for uniformity, and others increasingly dismissive of worldly commonwealths.Footnote ⁹ Religion and politics being ‘co-extensive’ had sharply different meanings.

Contesting the English polity rightly attests to the sincere beliefs of the Dissenters, even if many came to accept pluralism, in the essay concerning toleration and the Huguenots (p. 165). But an increasingly rationalised (or demoralised) Protestantism meant fewer dogmas, less vigorously pursued. This essay recounts an indicative debate between the later non-juror George Hickes and the latitudinarian Samuel Bold (pp. 165–8). Hickes and like-minded churchmen argued that persecution and discipline were justified with respect to those justifying untrue doctrines, whereas Bold defined all persecution as betraying, in his own words, the ‘popish conceit of infallibility’. Bold moved toward ‘an Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment world’, and this must prompt the understanding that his and others’ projects reduced the public, doctrinal and parochial holds of religion, and even convictions about its import.

The essay on ‘Toleration and the godly prince’ argues, somewhat differently, that the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence was ‘an incident in England's long Reformation’, revealing the ‘ecclesiological dimension of proto-Whiggism’ (p. 139). This is true, but it again lessened ecclesiastical and magisterial strictures. Similarly, Locke's belief in religious illumination was buttressed by a theory of religious illusion, fostering his ‘anticlericalism’ (pp. 314–15) and desires to constrain religious passions and dogmatic criteria. One man's ‘religion’ could cannibalise another.

It might also provide a shell. An essay on the Tory ‘science of toleration’ finds Sir Peter Pett's prudential approach to religion and society foreshadowing the Enlightenment, but also as ‘wrought within a distinctively Protestant consciousness’ (p. 264). This latter judgement perhaps makes a part into the whole, or bathes one part with characteristics from another: could Pett's tolerationist ideas not be interpreted as formulating within or alongside a Protestant worldview? Such metaphors alert us to the difficulty of defining the ‘religion’ at work. In other cases, discrimination is apparent: in the essay concerning the political thought of the ‘Anglican revolution’, Goldie relates, following J. N. Figgis, that ‘Anglican absolutism was essentially a Bodinian or Hobbesian doctrine expressed in the language of Protestant political theology’, hedged by theological concerns to create a clerical ‘middle ground’ (pp. 273–4). Another essay traces William Lawrence's ‘Protestant’ account of the duke of Monmouth's legitimacy. But Lawrence's arguments were arguably more idiosyncratic than Reformed, and did not attract Protestant consensus (pp. 224–5). Lawrence's monarch had little religious mission, only accruing legitimacy (somewhat tenuously) through ‘Protestant’ means. If political theory and practice were shot through with religious conceptions,Footnote ¹⁰ this cannot mask that some envisioned a less clerical society, or adopted theological justifications in a more instrumental fashion.

Justin Champion's excellent The pillars of priestcraft shaken, developed under Goldie's supervision, sums up the Janus-faced interpretations available. It is cited here (as elsewhere) to illustrate the religious underpinnings of a radical and freethinking critique of the established Church, yet the individuals it considered severely undermined most contemporary religious beliefs.Footnote ¹¹ If we see Hobbes's thought ‘within the frames both of Protestant imperialism and anticlericalism’ (p. 151), do we also regard the fact that modern Hobbesianism has ‘shed its theological premises’ (p. 92) as an accident? Can we adjudge a spiritual discourse to be circumstantial, even disingenuous? Happening upon definite historical motivations, religious or secular, is fraught with empirical and conceptual difficulty.Footnote ¹² In a banal sense, religion was everywhere, and seemed to motivate the action of all during the seventeenth century, whether the Hobbesian or the High Churchman.Footnote ¹³ But if we accept that ‘religion’ motivated behaviour according to a universal letter, its explanatory purchase dissipates. This period undoubtedly witnessed accommodations to the laity and worldly ‘reason’, and significant threats to the Church of England's authority.Footnote ¹⁴ Beyond empiricism, our concepts of religion and individual character become significant to understanding this.

To question underlying premises is not to malign the author's purposes or to accuse Goldie, as he contemplates at one point, of ‘taking the Whigs’ side’ because he dwells on, or respects, their arguments more fully (p. 11). Ample coverage is given to various sides.Footnote ¹⁵ One does not get the feeling that the strength and sophistication of traditional forces is highlighted to maintain the dignity of those assailing them; or to warn that any victories gained were contingent ones, instructing the present. But there is a sense in which magnanimity falls upon the Whigs’ side: they seem to unite Reformation and Enlightenment, religion and secularisation, in a manner less partial than the church party.Footnote ¹⁶ They are different to us, but as historical mediators, tactful or judicious enough to unite alternative approaches.

There is much credence behind the idea that England's ‘Reformation’ continued into the Restoration, and beyond.Footnote ¹⁷ Much of that is substantiated here. As John Spurr has argued, however, understanding the theory of religious intolerance propagated in this period might get at how, but not why, it became urgent.Footnote ¹⁸ The ‘why’ was coming to consist not only in threats to a specific orthodoxy and establishment in religion, but to ideas of orthodoxy and establishment tout court. The terms by which the clericalist or traditionalist parties (controversial terms, but necessary if we are allowing continuities) defined their opponents, and which we and in some cases they would accept, changed. They were less commonly ‘Puritans’, nor in every case obdurate, but principled, ‘sectaries’, ‘Nonconformists’ and ‘Dissenters’. Many individuals were defined, at times by themselves, by ‘moderation’ or latitude, ‘lowness’ and ‘natural’ theology, and parties of a philosophical (Hobbist, freethinking, and latterly Platonist) or political (Whig) nature. Some critics conceived of latitude and comprehension as a plot for ‘Mastery’ by sectaries,Footnote ¹⁹ but the ordinary manner was to distinguish them. Men of moderation were perceived as laxist, trimming and critical, rather than heretical or rigorist. Such accusations were perhaps uncharitable, but point to a new direction of travel in the English Church-State.

While Restoration ‘contests’ took place in a hegemonic religious field, it was one in which ‘religion’ was being undermined by the subjective criteria of some opponents,Footnote ²⁰ and by some less contentious outward criteria (narrowing, for example, its disciplinary hold). Contesting the English polity confirms the historical and analytical acuity of Goldie's scholarship, and that ‘religion’ was contested within and ‘co-extensive’ with the political sphere. But to the modern High Church historian, there is more clearly discernable a ‘decline in religious belief and observance … in England after the Restoration’ of 1660.Footnote ²¹ It is necessary, at the very least, to note that some conceptions and practices of religion were being attacked, even if from ‘religious’ premises. This is a pertinent collection, and further reflection is to be welcomed.