The English Reformation, more than most parallel upheavals throughout Europe, has produced a vexed historiography, thanks to its end-result in a variety of Protestantism which has spent time and energy arguing as to whether it should be considered Protestantism at all. Anglicanism as a religious identity could not have existed in the sixteenth century, but it has relentlessly produced a narrative of the Reformation in England suggesting that Anglicanism was in the mainstream of the story from the beginning. Journalists and those historians still not especially interested in religion, let alone the less well-educated bishops of the Church of England, still unreflectively use the word ‘Anglican’ in a sixteenth-century context. This book is the perfect antidote to such crassness. In its reflective postscript, the very end of Queen Elizabeth's reign produces a writer, Richard Hooker, whose work might be seen as ‘the origins of what would later be called “Anglicanism”’ (p. 575). Hooker died in 1600 and the bulk of his writing in the Ecclesiastical polity was done rather rapidly in a single decade, the 1590s (and in fact never finished). Peter Marshall then rightly places the ‘Anglican’ identity as forming after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Thus his book, which comes to its elegant conclusion at the end of the 1580s, describes the creation of a Church of England which was not Anglican. Journalists, historians not of religion, bishops, please take note.

Instead of the Anglican myth, the book tells a much more interesting story: of a single fragment of the Western Church, which through a complicated mixture of power politics and exposure to the intellectual energy of the wider Reformation, was remoulded by its monarchy into a Church for a single kingdom. The very different story of the Tudors’ other kingdom, Ireland, is not Marshall's concern, though we would all profit from his turning his attention over the water. Underlying his narrative is a gently humorous appreciation of the paradox that the very particular pluralism which has characterised English Protestantism, Establishment versus Dissent, arose despite a strong official determination to eliminate pluralism. Official English Protestantism did not just persecute obstinate papal Catholics when it had the chance under Elizabeth i, it also burned anti-Trinitarian radicals and hanged Reformed Protestants who refused to accept a royal Church betraying its Reformed credentials. And while the general tone of the official developed Protestantism which Marshall describes is indeed Reformed Protestant, fastidiously eschewing a Lutheran version of Reformation in favour of Zürich, Geneva or the Palatinate, it embraces the phenomenon of the surviving cathedrals, the one part of Henry viii’s messy Reformation to endure unaltered down to the present day. As Marshall appreciates, cathedrals sit very uneasily in a Reformed Protestant system, and the unease, so effectively disguised as synthesis by Hooker's sadistically complex prose, is central to Anglicanism's eternally conflicted identity.

Yet the character of Protestantism is only one of the concerns of this richly textured book. It begins with a sensitive account of late medieval English religion, and in fact the main narrative from the 1510s to the 1580s only really launches at p. 66. After that, we are introduced to the puzzles of Henry viii’s religious outlook, which for reasons still obscure allowed the politicians round his son Edward decisively to swing the Church towards the developing Reformed Protestantism of mainland Europe. It is difficult to pick out highlights in the story, but Marshall is exceptionally good on the first decade of the reign of Elizabeth, when the regime had once more decisively plumped for a Reformed future, despite its own fragility, the uncertain religious temperature of the nation and the quasi-Lutheran instincts of the queen herself.

Marshall can write with such authority because he has made himself the master of detail in intricate investigations of apparent byways – for example, the Welsh adventurer under Henry viii James Ap Gruffydd Ap Hywel – as well as patiently uniting the evidence for wide and resonant Reformation themes, such as trust and betrayal. He is well-placed, therefore, to make a judicious assessment of coal-face research by other scholars, and he seems to have read everything: aficionados of a well-crafted citation will explore the endnotes with admiration and profit. He has an eye for arresting possibilities, such as the report by the veteran courtier and Catholic recusant Sir Francis Englefield that he had been employed by Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole to exhume and cremate the corpse of King Henry viii (p. 409). He enjoys the observation which in its incongruity invites reflection: as in the fact that the Dutch Sea Beggars – Protestant pirates in the North Sea who might be labelled terrorists today – gloried in an Islamic crescent badge and the motto ‘Rather Turkish than popish’ (p. 502). He also displays a proper historical agnosticism. Having described at p. 148 the typical profile of a convert to evangelical religion in the early Reformation – well-educated, Erasmian humanist, critical of Church abuses, advocate of a vernacular Bible – he points out that this is the profile of Sir Thomas More. This is an utterly reliable history of the English Reformation, but it is also its imaginative biography, treating the story as a single narrative, watching its birth, its growth, its growing complexity, ending with the prospect that finally, as one hopes in a human life, a rueful wisdom may follow. Marshall is an historian's historian, probing the close-up warp and weft of the period with admirable curiosity and archival expertise, but he also enjoys an enviably light touch for the general reader.