The ideological valence or resonance of Hooker's Ecclesiastical polity has proved to be a controversial subject. This article attempts to bring to bear on the problem the immediate response to Hooker's book of a number of contemporaries – moderate Puritans, avant-garde conformists and Catholics. It concludes that none of these groups saw the Polity as a mere restatement of English reformed orthodoxy, the continuation of English conformist business as usual, and suggests that modern commentators should take these contemporary evaluations into serious account in their own analyses of Hooker.