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Scottish Presbyterian worship. Proposals for organic change, 1843 to the present day. By Bryan D. Spinks. Pp. xx + 299 incl. frontispiece and 21 ills. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2020. £25. 978 1 8008 3000 4

no means a religious pacifist, but rather, ‘a warrior Queen’, who because soldiering was not an option, ‘regretted not being a man’. Chapter viii (‘Colonial carnivals’) explores the notion that in the late part of her reign the Jubilees and attendant ceremonial both articulated an imperial ideology and helped sacralise her rule on a global scale. The final chapter ix (‘A completed life’) conveys the emotions unleashed by her death, with imperial and international as well as national voices mourning her passing in sermons and other literature. Great deaths of course helped ‘to consecrate imperial manliness’. However, the author here provides welcome historical context. For a point too often overlooked in some current critiques of the British Empire and its legacy is a recognition of how British imperialism helped to give world religions a distinctive voice – Victoria by the end of her reign was a Christian monarch presiding over a cosmopolitan and religiously very plural empire. While always doggedly committed to the Reformation and Protestantism, she increasingly interpreted this in a liberal and European rather than national and sectarian sense. Her sorrows and bereavements actually over time broadened and widened her religious appeal among her subject peoples. This book, full of shrewd and penetrating insights, deserves to be widely studied and reflected upon. The story it tells holds lessons for our own times when colonial and imperial history are under a hostile spotlight and scrutiny for sometimes present-day ideological reasons. The author ends on a highly relevant and timely note of warning. The breadth of Victoria’s appeal at the end of her reign may soon have been forgotten with her statues surviving as ‘fossil shells from a lost British world’ across Canada, Australia, New Zealand as well as Britain. The desecration of some of them during the Black Lives Matter protests certainly showed that for these activists their existence discouraged ‘the pursuit of truth about her Empire today’. Such a view pays too little attention to nuance and context. For example, whether true or not, state-sponsored memorialisation of Victoria in the empire advanced the claim that Victoria fostered racial and religious harmony. Even if the statues themselves might be regarded as ‘dour and cumbrous monuments to her cult’, the author fairly concludes that Victoria’s religious position, both private and public, was more complex and eclectic than is sometimes recognised. It deserves to be understood within the wider context of her times without the condescension of hindsight and present-day fashionable political agendas. In short, analytical distance is needed. In his evaluation of Victoria’s religion and religion’s place and role in her rule, Ledger-Lomas provides this. Hers was indeed a thorny crown.