Strype tells the story of how Henry VIII is said to have remarked, on being given a copy of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man by Anne Boleyn, ‘For this book is for me, and all kings to read.’ Whether or not the story is true—and it is perhaps safest to regard it as apocryphal—it has generally been held to be ben trovato in the sense that Tyndale’s teaching on authority and obedience was such as would have had an obvious appeal to Henry VIII, and it has frequently been assumed that Tyndale’s doctrine anticipated the legislation of the reformation parliament. But what precisely was Tyndale’s political teaching and where does he stand in the history of sixteenth-century political thought? It is a curious fact that although Tyndale’s importance as the first English protestam political thinker of the sixteenth century has been widely recognised, there has been little detailed investigation of his political thought and no attempt to set it in the context of contemporary continental protestam thinking. By and large, Tyndale has been accepted simply as an extreme exponent of Luther’s teaching on non-resistance and the divine right of authority, or as a precursor of the royal supremacy, without any effort being made to analyse the precise character of his views.