This book is one of the most scholarly treatments of the Restoration Church of England to have appeared in several years. Rose's argument—developed from a Cambridge PhD dissertation and trailed in a number of recent thought-provoking journal articles—is that the notions of royal supremacy unleashed by the Henrician Reformation were at the heart of Restoration politics. It is her contention that the Restoration was still using the language of godly kingship and debating its own preoccupations—episcopacy, toleration, indulgence, dissent, and the authority of parliament and law—in the idiom of the sixteenth century: the Restoration, in this sense at least, formed one more distinct phase of a long Reformation.

These claims are made good with a wealth of material. Rose deploys an impressively diverse set of sources, including canonical authors such as Christopher St. Germain, Sir Edward Coke, Edward Stillingfleet, John Tillotson, Gilbert Burnet, and Thomas Hobbes; lesser writers such as Robert Washington, Edmund Hickeringill, and Nathaniel Johnston; and occasional works such as sermons, legal judgements, parliamentary speeches, and pamphlets. She places her argument in its Tudor and early Stuart context by means of a substantial chapter that charts the different understandings of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy between 1530 and 1660. Her account of the twists and turns of a concept that connected law, ecclesiology, and political legitimacy is, in its own right, a valuable introduction to the thought of those decades. This sketch nicely sets up a series of post-1660 chapters that deal in turn with the legal and parliamentary suspicion of the royal prerogative and supremacy, the Anglican clergy's understandings of episcopacy and its dependence upon the royal governor, the Dissenters' claims that it was the bishops who were undermining the royal supremacy, and the Hobbists and others who elevated the royal supremacy to a priestly or sacerdotal power. A final chapter, devoted to the troubled reign of James II, brings together and extends many of these themes against the background of a paradoxical Catholic supremacy or papist caesaropapism. The shades of the 1530s are all too apparent in this account of a monarch riding roughshod over church revenues and property rights, never mind suspending and imprisoning bishops.

Given her formation as a historian at Cambridge, Rose quite naturally leans to “ideas in context.” She deftly summarizes pamphlets and debates and only pursues a writer's argument as far as it had purchase on the political issue under discussion. Thus there is a pleasing economy about her treatment of legal arguments, historical tracts, and clerical controversies. Legal cases are a particularly fruitful source: not only the familiar such as Thomas v. Sorrell but also the more obscure, such as Lord Cottington's 1678 petition to the House of Lords about his potentially bigamous Italian marriage—a case that touched upon lay (parliamentary) jurisdiction over spiritual causes.

The royal supremacy used to be a staple of the historiography of early modern England. It took a central role in narratives of the constitutional struggles of the reigns of Charles II and James II: the suspending and dispensing of powers, royal interference in episcopal autonomy, the demise of convocation, the imposition of ecclesiastical commissions, and the scandalous cases of Magdalen College, Oxford, or the Seven Bishops, were the very stuff of textbooks and popular histories. If, for a time, the royal supremacy slipped from historical view, obscured by the antics of Nonconformists in the alleys and courts of London or noisy Hobbists, it has now been restored by Jacqueline Rose's sophisticated book to a prominent position as a more complex and fascinating subject, full of ambiguity and nuance, than we had realized. Rose shows us that we need to know something of law and theology, of sixteenth-century history, and late seventeenth-century politics, if we are to comprehend the significance of the royal supremacy. Beyond that, this book demonstrates why we must pay more heed to arguments supporting those in authority (i.e., the royal supremacy cannot be appreciated without studying both its supporters and its detractors); and it deepens our conceptions of terms like “anticlerical” and “Erastian.”

Never excessively strident or oversimplistic, Rose makes her points forcefully. She coins some memorable phrases and definitions: supremacy was the “juridical embodiment of . . . anti-popery” (275) or a “constant reminder of the symbiotic relationship between policy and polemic” (278). She rounds off her argument with a powerful assertion of the poverty of the secular paradigm for understanding early modern political thought. This book is to be thoroughly recommended to all students of the later seventeenth century.