John Donne's Pseudo-Martyr (1610), a learned defence of the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance, has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Not only does Pseudo-Martyr constitute Donne's most comprehensive defence of the state and discussion on sovereignty and salvation, but it also lies at the centre of his biography as the work that earned him the honorary doctorate that led to his ordination in 1615, and consequently to his career as Dean of St Paul's. In Pseudo-Martyr, Donne puts forward a defence of royal absolutism and argues that Catholics who were executed after refusing to forswear papal claims to power to depose kings were not true but rather false martyrs. Witnessing to the faith discusses the political ideas which underlined this position, in the thought of Donne and of his contemporaries. In placing Donne firmly within the mainstream of late-Elizabethan and Jacobean conformist thought, Altman also pays attention to their ideas on martyrdom, religious truth and the role of a doubting conscience in the formation of religious beliefs. Donne came from a Catholic family (which included Saint Thomas More, often regarded as a martyr), but later took high office in the Protestant Church of England. This book contends that Donne never did convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, but rather conformed to the state church, while always maintaining that there was one true, foundational Christian religion. By exploring the intricacies of Donne's argument in the context of the contemporary pamphlet wars, Witnessing to the faith charts what it meant to be an English subject trying to make sense of a complex religious and political terrain during the reign of James I.