The blurb on the rear cover of The Church of Ireland under the Stuarts observes that there has never been a satisfactory study of the church through the turbulent seventeenth century and it declares that ‘[t]his book fills the gap’. Yet, this book is not as comprehensive as its title and blurb might lead one to expect. The editor, Patrick Little, acknowledges that further detailed work is needed on various matters, including the ‘relationship of the Irish Church with the larger, domineering, Church of England’ (19). His conception that the Church of Ireland under the Stuarts was the Irish Church, ‘separate from its overbearing English neighbour’ (16), is fundamentally problematic. Just before James VI of Scotland became the supreme governor of the Church of Ireland in 1603, almost seven decades after it was first established by Henry VIII, a ‘native’ Protestant reckoned that there were about 120 Irish Protestants among the 1 million inhabitants in Ireland.Footnote ¹ Alan Ford has acknowledged that the ‘natives’ of Ireland, with remarkably few exceptions, would not willingly attend the Church of Ireland’s services.Footnote ² He stated repeatedly that the ‘natives’ ‘abandoned’ the church,Footnote ³ ‘deserted’ it,Footnote ⁴ ‘defected’ from it,Footnote ⁵ and/or ‘withdrew’ from it.Footnote ⁶ Yet, Ford insists that the established church was still ‘the Irish Church’ despite having no more than a ‘handful’ of Irish people.Footnote ⁷ In alluding to that incongruous conceit, Diarmaid MacCulloch in Reformed identity and conformity refers to the ‘grotesque mismatch’ between the Church of Ireland’s former status as the ‘established’ church and its pretensions to being the ‘national’ church (264). No explanation is offered in Little’s book as to how the ‘Irish Church’ supposedly lost virtually all 1 million of its Irish members and became instead the church of British settlers.

Alan Ford’s chapter on Trinity College, Dublin focuses on the mission to ‘civilise’ the ‘natives’/‘indigenous population’ of Ireland by anglicisation and protestantisation (9). Ford ascribes its difficulty in recruiting Irish students to the pernicious influence of Catholic priests (30–31), but Trinity’s fellows’ obsession with refuting Catholicism and proving that the pope was the Antichrist undoubtedly created an uncongenial environment.Footnote ⁸ Coleman Dennehy presents a ‘scoping exercise’ on the Church of Ireland’s bishops in which he demonstrates how they were key figures in the British colonial establishment in Ireland (159). Liam O’Rourke offers interesting insights into the luxurious lifestyles of the Protestant bishops. They invested massively in prestigious palaces — ‘vital locations for consumption and entertainment’ — and spent lavishly on wines, meats, vegetables and exotic foodstuffs to provide ‘hospitality’ for other elite members of the colonial establishment (124). The symbiotic association of the Church of Ireland with British colonialism was not lost on the Irish. One of the case studies presented by Joan Redmond in her chapter on the intersections of godly masculinity and British civility is focused on accounts of a party of Irish rebels who posed the corpse of a British Protestant minister on a chair holding a bible as if ‘preaching’ to the corpse of a leading British settler sat facing him (72–3). Little’s chapter on the English settler community in southern Munster during the War of Three Kingdoms also reflects the symbiotic relationship between the Church of Ireland’s clergy and other colonists. They identified themselves with ‘the Protestant religion and the English interest’ against ‘the slavish and barbarous yoke of the Romish church and Irish anarchy’ (90–91). The absence of a chapter on Ulster, the heartland of the Church of Ireland then as now, is curious. In another of his chapters Little uses the diary of the second earl of Cork to examine his devotional life during the Interregnum. The evidence is not at all clear, and references to the Book of Common Prayer are noticeably lacking, but Little feels sure that the earl secretly had ‘common prayer’ in his house despite protestations to the contrary (101–07). Jessica Cunningham makes the interesting observation that liturgical changes in the Church of England in the 1620s and 1630s precipitated by Bishop Launcelot Andrewes and Archbishop William Laud prompted developments in the physical and aesthetic components of silver altar ware that ‘became the standard’ for the Church of Ireland after the Restoration (179). In her chapter, Kerry Houston reveals that the generous salaries offered by Dublin’s two wealthy cathedrals ensured that they could employ English church musicians to bring the most recently composed English sacred music to Ireland’s capital after the Restoration, while Toby Barnard’s contribution presents a very lively and informative chapter on the vicissitudes of the Church of Ireland during the reign of James II.

The Church of Ireland under the Stuarts certainly fills gaps in the historiography, but the insistence on the separateness of the Church of Ireland from the ‘domineering’ Church of England results in a loss of context. In fact, the Church of Ireland was an adjunct of the Church of England. Its liturgies and doctrines were determined by English/British monarchs in their role as its supreme governor, and religious changes regularly followed regime changes. Its bishops were appointed by the British crown. Its beneficed clergymen were almost all British by birth or descent. The congregations who voluntarily attended its services were comprised almost entirely of British immigrants who settled in Ireland and brought with them religious beliefs that had been forged in Britain. Understanding religious developments in Britain is key to understanding religious developments in Ireland.

In an ‘Afterword’ to Reformed identity and conformity, MacCulloch observes that, ‘[t]he world at large has still not caught up with the implications of the half-century and more of scholarship that has patiently detached the history of the Church of England from the well-intentioned myth-making of Victorian high churchmanship, and put it in the hands of historians who may keep in check whatever confessional enthusiasm they might possess’ (264). The old polemical notion that there was an Anglican via media between Rome and Geneva has been thoroughly discredited, and there is a general recognition that the Church of England was very much a Reformed Protestant Church (1–9). However, as Jake Griesel and Esther Counsell affirm in their introduction to Reformed identity and conformity, the Elizabethan religious settlement, with its idiosyncratic combination of a Reformed theology with more traditional ecclesiastical structures and liturgical practices, together with a royal supremacy that made religious belief and practice subject to the monarch, ‘led to recurring tensions in early modern England, as both clergy and laity contested the nature or parameters of conformity and the theological-ecclesiological identity of the established Church’ (1). Several contributors to Reformed identity and conformity cross the traditional boundary in ecclesiastical history to address laymen’s concerns with religion side by side with those of theologians and other churchmen. They emphasise the political as well as the theological ramifications of the debates concerning religion. They also highlight fluctuations in the imposition of conformity, the frequent attempts made to negotiate flexibility and the daily forbearance of divergent practices on the ground. Seen in its wider English context, it is clear the Church of Ireland under the early Stuarts was not characterised by a distinctively ‘Irish’ form of Protestantism. James Ussher, its leading theologian, was very much part of the mainstream of the English Reformed conformist tradition, and he played a significant role in religious debates in England as a leading figure in the Reformed conformist establishment (175, 180, 182-6, 190–94).Footnote ⁹ His Reformed convictions are reflected very clearly in the articles he composed in 1615 and in his An epistle … concerning the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Scottish, shewing it to be for substance the same with that which at this day is by publick authoritie established in the Church of England (1623).Footnote ¹⁰

The Reformed Protestantism of the established church had particular significance for the Irish in that the Reformed doctrine of double predestination made any attempt at evangelisation or proselytisation intrinsically redundant. God predestined only a tiny minority, the elect or ‘godly’, for salvation, while he condemned the vast majority of mankind, the reprobates, to eternal damnation long before they were even conceived. No human action could alter their fate for good or ill. The ‘godly’ were convinced that Catholics were ‘antichristian’ and irredeemably predestined for hell (Reformed identity & conformity, 157, 166–7).Footnote ¹¹ The prevalence of Reformed Protestantism among the British helps to explain the absence of any systematic attempt being made to convert the Irish to Protestantism.Footnote ¹² Matthew Rowley has shown that the ‘godly’ regularly used the Hebrew bible to justify the robbing, killing or enslavement of ‘countless’ of God’s enemies in Ireland, North America and elsewhere.Footnote ¹³ Kimberly Anne Coles has argued along similar lines and, inter alia, highlighted a plan by Henry Cromwell, son and deputy of the infamous Oliver, to send Irish Catholic women to Jamaica to be sexually exploited by the English soldiers garrisoned there.Footnote ¹⁴

The breakdown of the Reformed Protestant consensus during the Interregnum is the subject of a very exciting book by Andrew Ollerton, The crisis of Calvinism in revolutionary England. Ollerton explains how at its political apogee under the Cromwellian regime, Reformed Protestantism was undermined by a crisis of plausibility brought about by a convergence of theological, pastoral and philosophical concerns. The easing of censorship exposed to unprecedented public scrutiny and debate the inherent contradictions between the arbitrary deity who predestined most of mankind to hell as against the merciful Jesus who invited people to heaven. Antinomianism, which assured the godly of salvation regardless of their actions, was discredited. The Aristotelian scholasticism that underpinned Reformed theology was superseded by Baconian science, Cartesian rationalism and Lockean theory. Reformed Protestantism was reduced to being a sectional yet not insignificant strand of English Christianity after the Restoration. The shift among the English from Reformed Protestantism to Arminianism from the mid 1650s might help to explain how Scottish settlers in Ulster were accommodated within the Church of Ireland under the early Stuarts but dissented from it subsequently. In any case, it is indisputable that studies of the Church of Ireland under the Stuarts are enhanced immeasurably by abandoning the ‘Irish Church’ paradigm and setting it in its wider British context instead.