Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

A History of the Modern British Isles, 1529-1603: The Two Kingdoms by Mark NichollsReview by: Brendan BradshawIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 32, No. 125 (May, 2000), pp. 130-131Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30007022 .

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130 Irish Historical Studies

sive debate about the failure of state-sponsored Reformation. It is not, as he admits, the definitive answer, but it is, for Dublin, wonderfully economical and intellectually quite distinguished.

Murray's depiction of the stratagems of the Old English clergy of Dublin reads

very well alongside Henry Jefferies's assessment of George Montgomery's experi- ences at the hands of another group of conservative clergy in Derry. There Gaelic

priests, mostly drawn from erenagh families, also sought to defend their ancient priv- ileges. Montgomery aimed in his involvement in the plantation scheme to secure root-and-branch eradication of erenagh influence, but, as Diarmaid 0 Doibhlin shows in his contribution, they proved themselves to be hardy perennials. Just as in Dublin, Catholicism not only endured but, despite some sharp buffets, went on to flourish. It is difficult not to be impressed by the endless capacity of the institutional fabric of the church to repair itself. By the second half of the eighteenth century, as both collections show, institutions of all sorts - convents, confraternities, charities - did, on the whole, grow and grow and grow. Only more recently, as John Ledwidge's synopsis of the history of the Christian Brothers in Derry shows, has there been the most marked reverse and decline for many centuries. Henry Jefferies's and Ciar6in Devlin's volume is interesting, but probably works better as a useful source book than as a diocesan history. Scholars will certainly build on the extremely valuable study and list of early church sites in the Faughan valley, and

many will turn to Bishop Edward Daly's own account of the 'Troubles'.

JOHN MCCAFFERTY Department of Medieval History, University College Dublin

A HISTORY OF THE MODERN BRITISH ISLES, 1529-1603: THE TWO KINGDOMS. By Mark Nicholls. Pp xxvi, 387. Oxford: Blackwell. 1999. £16.99.

To my knowledge, Mark Nicholls's A history of the modern British Isles, 1529-1603 can claim to be the first attempt for this period to provide a comprehensive history of the two islands that constitute what has recently come to be called the Atlantic Archipelago. In many ways it is an impressive achievement. It is well written: lucid, concise, stylistically unpretentious. It displays an enviable grasp of the histories of the four national communities who inhabit the two islands, a grasp that extends beyond political history to include social and economic affairs also. It is firmly grounded in the historical literature to which it adopts a properly critical stance - not only to the received wisdom but also to recent revisionist interpretations which seek to challenge it. However, Nicholls's account is vitiated by one fatal limitation.

The conceptual framework on which Nicholls organises his material seems to assume that the history of the British Isles amounts to nothing more than the sum of the national histories of their constituent territories. This is not the case. A more holistic approach to the subject has been developed over the past two decades by a group of scholars who, following the lead of a number of seminal conceptual and methodological essays by J. G. A. Pocock, have conceived of 'British history' as com- prising 'the historiography of no single nation but of a problematic and uncompleted experiment in the creation and interaction of several nations'. This conception there- fore calls for a pluralistic and comparative methodology. Its agenda for the period covered by Nicholls is centrally concerned with the task of identifying and analysing the processes of territorial consolidation and jurisdictional centralisation then set in place throughout the Archipelago, as well as the fissiparous tensions which beset them from the outset and which constituted the inheritance of the Stuarts as multiple monarchs in the seventeenth century. The inadequacies of Nicholls's

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Reviews and short notices 131

nationally orientated approach arises from the fact that it diverts attention from such concerns to the preoccupations of the national historian.

Thus, for instance, he elaborates the tortuous course of Henry VIII's matrimonial crisis in close detail, while failing to explore in anything like the same detail the aspects of the episode with which the historian of Britain is mainly concerned, namely the implications for state formation of the first formal assertion of the imperial status of the English crown, and the implications for the development of a British con- sciousness of the virulent antipopery to which the episode gave rise. Similarly in his treatment of Scotland he devotes some nine pages to elaborating the various stages of the Reformation there, without any reference to the significance of the episode in the wider context of British history. The latter question crops up for discussion only in the manner of an afterthought in a much later chapter dealing with Ireland, to which are prefixed two pages which, following a study by Jane Dawson, draw atten- tion to the development of an Anglo-Scottish cultural ambience based on a species of Calvinist consensus and the dominance of English as the language of literary dis- course. Again in dealing with Ireland, though Nicholls must be commended for his mastery of the chequered history of reform there, his account fails to address the significance of the Reformation for the history of the Archipelago more generally. Yet in that respect the period covered by Nicholls's book was crucial. Thus the thrust of the historical process on the island of Britain in this period was towards the gradual convergence of its three national communities, in whatever tentative, qualified and problematic fashion, driven by a shared Protestant cultural ambience, the burgeon- ing of a British rhetoric, if not of a common 'matter of Britain', and a growing aware- ness of their common security needs as the inhabitants of a Protestant 'beleaguered isle' threatened by the Catholic powers of the continental mainland. However, at the same time the effect of implementing Tudor reform and Reformation in Ireland was to set it on a course quite at odds with this development. First, the Old English, tra- ditionally loyalists, were alienated by the resultant loss of their role as the agents of the crown in favour of New English interlopers. Further, they and the Gaelic natives alike deeply resented the increasing militarisation of government, as garrisons pro- liferated throughout the island and martial law was increasingly resorted to in a vain attempt to cow the rebellious and maintain the civil order. This situation was greatly exacerbated in the reign of Elizabeth by the promotion of plantation as a key feature of the crown's reform strategy, thereby placing existing land titles - Old English and Gaelic alike - in jeopardy. Meanwhile the British rhetoric now burgeoning in Britain failed to resonate with either community; neither could identify with the British origin legend; and in any case, its effect was to reduce the status of their king- dom to that of a dependent province of the kingdom of England. Little wonder, then, that the religious Reformation, introduced in conjunction with this highly unconge- nial programme of civil reform, failed to find favour either. By the end of the century it was clear that while the institutional shell of the church in Ireland - its churches and endowments - had been claimed for the reformed faith by law established, the struggle for hearts and minds had been won by the missionaries of the Counter- Reformation. In short, by the end of the Tudor era the preconditions had been set in place that were to constitute Ireland a persistently destabilising presence within the British multinational conglomerate throughout the modern period.

While, then, A history of the modern British Isles, 1529-1603 can be recommended with confidence to the student seeking a concise introduction to the history either of England or of Scotland in the period (Ireland and, more particularly, Wales are less fully treated), it is not the introductory survey of the history of the Atlantic Archipelago in this period that is now such an urgent desideratum.

BRENDAN BRADSHAW

Queens' College, Cambridge

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