James Anthony Froude was an unlikely candidate to defend British Protestantism among his nineteenth-century contemporaries. As a student at Oriel College during the Oxford Movement, and with a brother, Richard Hurrell Froude who was a pronounced Anglo-Catholic polemicist, Froude appeared to be following John Henry Newman into the Roman Catholic Church. But Froude’s reservations about low-church believers in the Church of England were not as great as his eventual frustrations with the Oxford Movement. After being forced out of Oriel, Froude edited Fraser’s Magazine and began to compose his monumental twelve-volume history of England, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth (1858–70). His literary skills later earned him an appointment (1868) as rector of the University of St. Andrews. This post at Scotland’s oldest university may have stemmed from his rendering of the Protestant Reformation as, Froude stated, “the root and source of the expansive force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon race over the globe.” But because that was Froude’s description not of Scotland’s but England’s Reformation, the speaker may have felt obligated in his 1870 inaugural address at St. Andrew’s to show increased appreciation for the Scots.

Benjamin M. Guyer does not engage with Froude in How the English Reformation was Named but his book is a brief against the kind of broad historical judgments in which St. Andrew’s University’s rector trafficked. Later published with the simple title, Calvinism, Froude’s lecture underscored the significance of the Scottish Reformation. For Presbyterians who labored under the stigma of a rigid, dogmatic, and intolerant faith, Froude offered hope and even inspiration. He conceded that Calvinist ideas about free will put a damper on personal responsibility. But that did not deter Froude from adding that Calvinism possessed “singular attractions” for some of the “greatest men that ever lived.”

His list included Luther, Calvin, Knox, Andrew Melville, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, and John Bunyan, men “whose life was as upright as their intellect was commanding and their public aims untainted with selfishness. . . frank, true, cheerful, humorous, as unlike sour fanatics as it is possible to imagine anyone, and able in some way to sound the key-note to which every brave and faithful heart in Europe instinctively vibrated.” If Calvinism was responsible for people like this, then its genius was self-evident. Froude wrote, “Where we find a heroic life appearing as the uniform fruit of a particular mode of opinion, it is childish to argue in the face of fact that the result ought to have been different.” Calvinism explained, at least to Froude, “the conscientious fear of doing evil” that had taken root in the “people’s hearts” of both England and Scotland.

Guyer clearly disapproves of the sort of historical analysis in which Froude and fellow nineteenth-century gentlemen amateur historians engaged. His twelve volumes on England between Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were no less sweeping. Froude argued that Elizabeth, by prevailing over the Spanish, saved Protestantism not only for Britain but for Europe more generally. That may explain why Froude began his list of “Calvinists” with Luther and ended with Bunyan. Lutherans and Reformed in Europe, established and sectarian Protestants in England and Scotland, all benefitted and depended on England’s Reformation.

Guyer is particularly concerned with distinguishing the English from the Scottish Reformation. The reasons stem neither from denominational pride nor nationalist excess. Guyer thinks his guild of professional historians still suffers from “pietist mythology.” This happens when scholars stress popular notions about Luther’s ninety-five theses, a “Bible-centric reformation,” or the priesthood of all believers.” Luther was influential in sixteenth-century developments, Guyer argues, but the German theologian should not be decisive for the history (and the historiography) of early modern church reform. Guyer’s book is a response to his own call for how the history of reformation should “go forward.” He writes, “We need to continue uprooting pietist mythology” by “replacing it with studies of how the vocabulary of reformatio was used and disseminated” in Latin Christendom between 1400 and 1700. Luther does not “define” references to “reformation.” Publications from these three centuries do.

If Guyer is a model for future historiography, scholars may have second thoughts. This is not to say that his scholarship is flawed. In fact, his attention to a host of works from the early modern era, with particularly sensitive readings of passages about the “reformation” of church life, is meticulous. Readers wanting to follow debates among church leaders and university professors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will want to have a copy of this book if only for the notes and bibliography. At the same time, as a work of intellectual history that summarizes, groups, and arranges chronologically a vast number of published primary sources, Guyer’s book lacks some of the drama that the biographies of writers and debates on the House of Lords yield. Authors and institutions recede behind texts. Even then, a book or pamphlet, for Guyer’s purposes, is useful mainly for its use of the word “reformation.” 

Such precision is especially useful for driving home the author’s main point about the lack of care historians and authors sometimes display when writing about the past. To Guyer’s credit, his attention to detail unearths specimens that might have remained buried under the historical eras of Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation. For instance, he traces the origins of the word “reform” to fifteenth-century church officials who proposed conciliarism as a remedy for out-of-control papal supremacy. In response to the “two-headed monster” of a papacy in Rome and another in Avignon, writers spent considerable time discussing the reforms necessary to restore unity to the church. Although conciliarism’s sway was short-lived, it did plant the seeds for alternatives—Presbyterian and Congregational—to episcopal governance in the church. At the other end of Guyer’s excavation of reform language is the surprising discovery that English Protestants paid little attention to Luther either in commemorating 1517 as the start of church reform or in reprinting the German theologian’s works. As Guyer explains, by the Restoration era, English Protestants knew and remembered Luther not for his doctrine but for an “infamous temper.”

Another factor in the reception of Luther in 1517 among the English and Scottish churches was a British debate about the genuine origins of English-speaking Protestantism. Guyer argues persuasively that Henry VIII’s abrupt determination in 1534 to become head of the English church made older conciliarist arguments useless to the English Reformation. Instead of debating the powers of councils, English church and legal officials had to justify royal supremacy. Even as the Scots joined the arguments, with John Knox leading the charge, differences between Presbyterians and Episcopalians became a recurring theme for the better part of 150 years. For defenders of bishops, Presbyterian reforms often looked too militant and deviated from the initial reforms of Henry and Edward VI. Presbyterian authors, English and Scottish, countered that episcopal reforms were insufficient and weak. In the background of these rival positions, especially during the reign of the Stuarts, were disputes between Parliament and the Crown, another indication of the degree to which royal supremacy loomed large (for and against) on the minds of British Protestants.

As careful as Guyer is to sift through the shades of meaning and historical precedents embedded in his set of texts, he leaves readers unprepared for the eventual construction of a reformation that was neither Episcopalian nor Presbyterian, neither Tudor nor Stuart, neither English nor Scottish, but simply British. Linda Colley’s 1992 widely-praised work on British identity, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 is a study of the use of the Reformation for political purposes during the forging of the British Empire. Guyer may have disapproved of Colley’s appeal to the Reformation because she missed the subtleties he reconstructs from his materials. But Britons was no pietistic appeal to Protestant hagiography. It reflected the importance of distinguishing Protestants from Roman Catholics (with all the anti-Catholic bigotry that followed) for the security and longevity of the British Crown after the chaotic period of English and Scottish history under the Stuarts.

This broad, British Protestantism also produced a measure of coherence in Britain’s colonial societies, especially North America which developed a pattern of denominationalism that leaned heavily on all the Protestant communions with roots in the British Isles—from Episcopalians and Presbyterians to Congregationalists, Quakers, Methodists, and Baptists. (These denominations would become the backbone of the so-called Protestant establishment in American Christianity.) During the period Colley narrates, the Protestant Reformation became popularized as it never had before. Her evidence comes partly from the widespread sale and distribution of John Foxes’ Book of Martyrs (1563) and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). That Foxe and Bunyan were not Church of England insiders but became popular Protestant authors in English-speaking lands is one indication of the significance of Colley’s point. British identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was difficult to imagine apart from the sixteenth-century Reformation. Colley’s argument also goes a long way to explain Anthony Froude’s comments as an English writer before a Scottish university in 1870. The niceties of Presbyterianism and Episcopacy mattered little in the age of nationalism. Among English-speaking countries, the religious default for national identity was Protestantism.

Had Guyer placed debates about church reform in wider political uses of religious developments, he might have categorized the many English and Scottish seeds of Britain’s later Protestant identity. His attention to detail fails to achieve the synthesis of historical trends that made Colley’s account of British identity so compelling and popular. To be sure, the sort of history that Colley produced was (and is) not without scholarly critics. But she did use broad cultural trends, including eighteenth-century reception of the Protestant Reformation, to make plausible claims about both national and personal identity. Having neglected the national and cultural implications of his analysis, Guyer turns a useful contribution to church history into a guide to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant sources.