Aimed at advanced undergraduates and beyond, this interesting and scholarly book discusses debates concerning religion, the law, and church-state relations in Britain between the accession of Charles I and the outbreak of Civil War. It convincingly argues that these debates were of central importance to “the constitutional crisis of the early 1640s” (1). Modern scholars sometimes suppose that insofar as religion was a key issue in the events that led to armed conflict in 1642, it was theological doctrine that mattered above all. Prior contests this claim, arguing that ecclesiology was also highly significant. He persuasively contends that in the thinking of British people during the period the book surveys, there was no neat separation of legal and constitutional ideas from ideas about the church and religion. He vigorously contests the claim that the decades before the war witnessed the triumph of a secular, Erastian mindset, rooted in the common law, over religious and ecclesiastical modes of thinking.

Individual chapters discuss important controversies concerning the church and religion, some of which have received little attention from modern scholars. Topics surveyed include debates over bowing at the name of Jesus, and over the altar, Charles I’s religious policies in Scotland, the canons of 1640, and proposals for the reform or abolition of episcopacy. One chapter is about the thought of Thomas Aston, a baronet from Cheshire who defended church government by bishops, and who sided with the Royalists in the war. Another concerns the thinking of the leading parliamentarian pamphleteer and political theorist Henry Parker. The conclusion affirms that while “at certain points the debates examined in this book resolve into defined positions, it is not the case that we are presented with polarised or binary ideological groupings” and proceeds to assert — reasonably, if perhaps somewhat vaguely — that “there is more than a suggestion that conflicts over religion and law took place not only within an institutional structure, but also a framework of ideas that sought to clarify the nature, history, and proper relationship of the laws of church and realm” (230–31).

This book enriches modern scholarly debate about the origins of the Civil Wars of the 1640s. It is clearly written, and draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources. Occasionally its judgments are open to criticism. Prior discusses the phrase imperium in imperio — “That is, a sovereignty within a sovereignty” — and says “I have been unable to find the phrase in English writings before 1678” (33 and n82). This is odd, as a search for the phrase in the plain-text section of Early English Books Online reveals many uses of term in English writings before 1678. For example, the Earl of Shaftesbury employed it in 1675, John Owen in 1668, Henry More in 1664, Edward Stillingfleet in 1662, and Herbert Thorndike in 1659, while it occurs in the works of less well-known authors in the 1620s. Prior states that John Williams (who is depicted on the book’s dust wrapper) “became Dean of Westminster in 1621; this position brought with it a seat in the Lords, and in the 1620s Williams was heavily involved in affairs of state, particularly in the reform of law courts” (67). But the deanery of Westminster confers no right to sit in the Lords. The office that brought Williams to the Lords was that of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, which the king conferred on him in 1621.

Williams was at once a churchman and a law officer. Prior argues that some modern scholars have been too quick to dismiss clerics as unimportant to seventeenth-century political culture, and too prone to overrate the significance of common lawyers. The “period this book has surveyed,” he claims, “was distinguished by a political culture that was driven by the scholarly efforts of churchmen as much as it was by lawyers” (229). He stresses “the complexity of the tension between religion and law” (13) and refers to “the untidy mixture of the sacred and the civil” that characterized early Stuart thinking as “a confusion of tongues that drove the British to war with themselves” (17). In his exposition of their thought he eschews simple and tidy theories in favor of complex and textured description. While this does not always make for easy reading, it arguably gets us closer to the truth.