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This book revisits one of the defining judicial engagements in English legal history. It provides a fresh account of the years 1606 to 1616 which witnessed a series of increasingly volatile confrontations between, on the one side, King James I and his Attorney-General, Sir Francis Bacon, and on the other, Sir Edward Coke, successively Chief Justice of Common Pleas and Lord Chief Justice. At the heart of the dispute were differing opinions regarding the nature of kingship and the reach of prerogative in reformation England. Appreciating the longer context, in the summer of 1616 King James appealed for a reformation of law and constitution to complement the reformation of his Church. Later historians would discern in these debates the seeding of a century of revolution, followed by another four centuries of reform. This book ventures the further thought that the arguments which echoed around Westminster Hall in the first years of the seventeenth century have lost little of their resonance half a millennium on. Breaks with Rome are little easier to'get done', the margins of executive governance little easier to draw.

Exploring what the early English Protestants came to believe about the afterlife, and how they arrived at their positions, this much-needed book fills a gap in the scholarly literature. In surveying the authorised doctrinal works of the English church through the Reformation period, the progress of eschatological thinking is traced from the earliest days of change to the solidification of the formularies which remain binding across the worldwide Anglican Church today.Fresh observations are made on some well-known texts such as the Books of Common Prayer, Articles of Religion and official Tudor homilies, and these are complemented by commentary on surprisingly understudied documents of the period including primers, catechisms, and the paratexts of the early printed English Bibles. The result is a fascinating study of the English reformers'navigation past both Roman Catholic and radical anabaptist beliefs, and it shows that their arrival at a relatively barren destination was due in part to a complete switch in theological priorities and in part to a fear of the implications of formally adopting some of the highly contested views.Establishment Eschatology will prove to be an important resource for students and scholars of England's early modern religious and cultural history.

This study commends the public theology of the English Reformation as a fruitful though neglected resource for a critical analysis of the contradictions of freedom that riddle late-modern liberal democracies and a constructive response to them. Drawn from the key legal, liturgical, homiletic and confessional elements of the English Reformation, this foundational Anglican tradition provides a theological vantage point for understanding current moral and political impasses in the western legacy of natural rights. The extensive development of natural rights in pre-modern scholastic theory and practice and its continuity with theoretical development from the 17th century onward make the Reformers'criticisms of scholastic moral, political, and ecclesial thought germane to identifying the problematic features of the prevailing modern tradition and to furnishing a theological alternative to them. These features are: an individualistic and voluntarist conception of moral agency, a regulative and juridical orientation to human relationships, and an anthropocentric concentration on human rather than on divine right, judgement, and freedom. The humanity they portray is detached from its created ordering to Christological perfection and bound within a self-enclosed ethical and political self-understanding. This is effectively countered by the English reformers'presentation of the salvation of creation in Christ, faith working through love, the spiritual fellowship of the church, and the provisional character of political jurisdiction.