The position of English monarchs as supreme governors of the Church of England profoundly affected early modern politics and religion. This innovative book explores how tensions in church-state relations created by Henry VIII's Reformation continued to influence relationships between the crown, Parliament and common law during the Restoration, a distinct phase in England's 'long Reformation'. Debates about the powers of kings and parliaments, the treatment of Dissenters and emerging concepts of toleration were viewed through a Reformation prism where legitimacy depended on godly status. This book discusses how the institutional, legal and ideological framework of supremacy perpetuated the language of godly kingship after 1660 and how supremacy was complicated by the ambivalent Tudor legacy. It was manipulated by not only Anglicans, but also tolerant kings and intolerant parliaments, Catholics, Dissenters and radicals like Thomas Hobbes. Invented to uphold the religious and political establishments, supremacy paradoxically ended up subverting them.

Winner of the 2012 Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize

'… a major achievement. Thanks to its ambitious scope, and thoughtful dissection of the works of so many thinkers, it will become an indispensable guide to some of the most important questions about church and state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.'

Christopher Brooks Source: Reviews in History (history.ac.uk/reviews)

'This book is one of the most scholarly treatments of the Restoration Church of England to have appeared in several years … [and] is to be thoroughly recommended to all students of the later seventeenth century.'

Source: Journal of British Studies

'Godly Kingship is likely to prove enduringly useful to scholars of the Restoration.'

Joel Swann Source: The Seventeenth Century