The conclusion reviews the findings of the book, noting that the ‘second Reformation’ included a series of changes and reform endeavours – Laudian, abortive, Westminster, Cromwellian, Caroline – which all in their different ways sought to push the Church of England’s ambiguous Tudor legacy in specific new directions. It notes that all religious groups were prepared to contemplate change to the church’s pre-war formularies, and that all were indeed required to adapt their religious ideas and practices in the face of the upheavals of these years. Portraying the disruptions of the 1640s as the climax of the Church of England’s early history rather than as an aberration in an otherwise continuous ‘Anglican’ master-narrative, the book has demonstrated how many elements of the reforms of the 1640s and 1650s had been anticipated in the doctrines, practices, statutes, bills, and reform proposals of earlier decades. It also maintains that compromise and negotiation were as ubiquitous as change and radicalization in the period’s religious politics, and argues the need to look beyond the simple binary oppositions of contemporary polemic. The period is best seen as a time when everyone was obliged to rethink what the established church was and how its past should be understood.

The Introduction explains the book’s intention to look at the religious history of the mid-seventeenth century in the context of the history of the Church of England and its earlier Reformations. Given that recent historians have emphasized that there was no single clear Church of England orthodoxy in the pre-war period, and have mostly ceased to use the term ‘Anglican’ altogether to describe pre-war conformists, it does not seem to make sense to describe the religious upheavals of these years as the destruction of a coherent established church. The book will instead propose that these events should be studied as an extended argument over the identity of the Church of England, and how it should be reformed, that involved a wide range of religious opinions. The use of the term ‘second Reformation’ to describe this phenomenon, and the rationale behind including the Laudian movement of the 1630s as part of this process, are explained. A final ‘Note on Terminology’ explains the meaning and rationale of several new terms introduced in the book to describe some of the phenomena discussed therein, and explains the rejection of the terms ‘Anglicanism’ and ‘Restoration settlement’ as anachronistic and/or misleading.