This book is an attempt to chart the development of the doctrine of predestination in the English Church in the century between the Reformation and the English Civil War, but, as its title suggests, it seeks to locate that development in its contemporary political and often polemical setting. The challenge of a time-scale so lengthy and a canvas so broad may well be considered over-ambitious, especially for the author of a first book. Since the reasons for accepting the challenge have in large part determined the structure of the argument, it may be helpful to the reader to know what they are.

It is of course a commonplace that the links between church and state in the early-modern period were so close that no historian of the one can afford to ignore the other. The political setting of doctrinal evolution was above all monarchical. As the preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 put it, ‘this realm of England is an Empire … governed by one supreme head and king … unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience’. Throughout the period covered by this book, the royal supremacy proclaimed under Henry VIII continued to operate as a powerful determinant of theological development, and the principle of cuius regio eius religio was accepted throughout Europe.

It was not merely the workings of the royal supremacy that forged inseparable links between church and state. In the century after the Reformation, religious belief was at a number of points linked with national identity.