Scott Sowerby's Making toleration examines a neglected set of English people (the author demonstrates that almost no Welsh were involved). These were the ‘repealers’ (of the penal laws and test acts) who supported James ii's policy of religious toleration in the 1680s. These folks have been dismissed by other scholars as a tiny, and morally dubious, clique of ‘whig collaborators’ with the king, but Sowerby uses an impressive array of neglected archives, especially across the English provinces, to argue for a broader and more significant phenomenon. The repealer ‘movement’ gained considerable popular support in some areas – especially the textile territories of East Anglia and the South-West; it generated a rich set of well-publicised political arguments; it mobilised people across a very wide spectrum of faith; and it organised well enough in many boroughs to be a substantial help to the monarch as he tried to secure a parliament that would accept his religious policy. In fact, Sowerby argues, the movement became so powerful that the triumphant Anglicans felt that they had to offer it something after the Glorious Revolution. Even though the royal champion of toleration was defeated in 1688, mainstream churchmen had seen how the repealer movement had divided English Protestantism, and came to accept that some concessions to dissent were necessary on political grounds (they remained unconvinced of spiritual or intellectual arguments). Even more interesting, Sowerby argues that the repealer movement demonstrated a new style of royal rule. After the civil war, monarchs could not afford to act like despots (the work constantly stresses that repression never came under James ii – even when in the shadow of William of Orange's invasion, there were no mass arrests). Instead, kings needed to govern at the head of mass popular movements. Charles ii had understood this as he had allied with the tories in early 1680s; James attempted this in his leadership of repealers. All this is fresh and thought-provoking. Yet the book also undermines itself, mainly with its historical honesty. In the end, it charts the even greater success of the anti-repealers. They had an unanswerable message of anti-popery, and whipped up opposition with rumours of a conspiracy by James and Louis xiv to extirpate European Protestantism. This book is ground-breaking on the role that this sham plot played. It also admits the internal divisions, the incompetence and the gaps in support (little in Cornwall with its rich haul of parliamentary boroughs, or in Wales or the North) that meant that the repealers would probably not have won a parliamentary election. Thus the work ends up closer to older analyses than it claims. James's policies were doomed after all. The work also underplays an important strand in Anglican thinking. Prominent among Latitudinarians, this condemned persecution as anti-Christian and popish, even as it rejected the virtues of religious pluralism. The 1689 ‘toleration’ act was hatched by this group, and was not only a reaction to the repealer movement.