John Donne's Pseudo-Martyr (1610) makes an important contribution to the defense of King James's Oath of Allegiance through its author's careful positioning between extremists on both the Catholic and Protestant sides of the debate. Where William Barlow insists that Catholic devotion and deference to James's civil authority are incompatible, and Robert Persons argues that Catholic faith is grossly compromised by swearing James's Oath, Donne asks English recusants to pledge their loyalty to James without insisting that they change their church denomination. This delineation between public declaration and private religious belief not only distinguishes Pseudo-Martyr as an Oath of Allegiance tract, it also more closely mirrors James's attitudes toward religious controversy, as they are demonstrated in his own Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (1607, 1609) and in the other policies he supported with regard to Scottish Presbyterians and Catholics both before and after his ascension to the English throne. In response to this controversy's fixation on scholarly accuracy, Donne proposes his own, highly innovative use of italics. This and other innovations further substantiate his claims for scholarly objectivity because they distance Pseudo-Martyr from the fixation on quotational and citational accuracy that typified printed European religious debate throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Fitzherbert's attack on Pseudo-Martyr in 1613 wholly ignores Donne's larger argument in support of the Oath, and his experiment with scholarly method, focusing instead on an ostensible error -- if not willful deception -- pertaining to Donne's quotation of the last canon from the third Lateran Council (1179). Thus, Donne does not succeed in changing the tenor of either Protestant or Catholic polemic. What he does demonstrate, however, both in Pseudo-Martyr and in his subsequent decision to pursue a career as a Protestant preacher -- a decision supported, and rewarded, handsomely by James -- is that his English king is more invested in securing his subjects' obedience than he is in shaping their consciences. The strategies pursued by both Donne and King James during this crisis severely problematize subsequent interpretations of their politics as 'absolutist'. Rather, both men pursue civil aims pragmatically, while recognizing a space for private religious devotion. Donne does so -- fittingly -- with striking ingenuity, and clear awareness of his king's preference for compromise.