This volume in the Irish Historical Monograph Series represents the first major study of the Welsh involvement in early modern Ireland, covering events from the start of Elizabeth’s reign and the intensification of English military involvement there to the collapse of royal authority with the 1641 rebellion. Rhys Morgan charts the growth of a significant Welsh minority within the newly-established New English colonial community, with an eye also to wider perspectives surrounding the British multiple monarchy. Hitherto, the depiction of Wales in the ‘new British history’ has been disappointing – so Morgan argues: Wales lacked the independent state structures of the Tudor–Stuart three kingdoms, and the Welsh who came to Ireland all did so as agents of the English state. By shifting the focus, as here, from state formation to peoples – an ‘imagined community’ held together by shared origins, language, myths and culture – the Welsh contribution to British history becomes much more visible.

In respect of its structure and arguments, the volume is a model of clarity. The first three chapters forming part I look respectively at the Welsh presence in the Irish army, Welsh involvement in the Irish administration, and the role of Welsh settlers in the Irish plantations. Reflecting its proximity to Ireland, troops from Wales made up nineteen per cent of levies for English armies in Ireland between 1561 and 1625, as detailed in appendix 2. As Morgan shows these Welsh soldiers, despite contemporary complaints about them, were respectable labourers and artisans, not the dregs of society. Ninety per cent of the Welsh could not speak English, and so needed Welsh captains (listed in appendix 3) who made up six to fourteen per cent of the total officer corps. With their Welsh connections, Lord Deputies Sidney and Perrot also brought over large numbers of Welsh gentlemen volunteers. The Welsh presence in the Irish administration had been negligible before the 1590s, but boosted in Dublin by small temporary groups of household servants and administrators appointed by Sidney and Perrot. After 1603, the Welsh captains of disbanded companies became middle ranking soldier-administrators, mainly as constables of castles or in the expanded local administration: appendix 4 illustrates this point. Two ex-captains, Edward Trevor and Edward Blayney, rose to places on the Irish privy council; but Welsh clergy also made careers in Ireland, a few becoming bishops. Some Welsh gentry already established in the Irish military and administration also took part in the plantation schemes, particularly those closer to Wales. In late sixteenth-century Munster, the Welsh presence among the settlers was as high as eighteen per cent but it was less than 2.5 per cent in seventeenth-century Ulster. Under the influence of the Bagenal family, Newry developed a distinctly Welsh character; three of the thirty-five undertakers in the Munster plantation were also Welsh; and in the seventeenth century significant pockets of Welsh settlement spread to all the major plantations.

The book’s second part considers the Welsh established in early-modern Ireland as a community sustained by kinship ties and political and social allegiances formed in Wales. Traditionally, historians have treated the New English as a coherent community, focusing on their minority status, their Protestantism, and their shared experience of government, in opposition to the disenfranchised and Catholic Irish majority; but in fact the New English community included a significant Welsh minority, quite apart from the Scottish presence in Ireland, and was factious and divided. Ireland had by 1603 become the ‘near-abroad’ for the Welsh, with ‘Ireland-wide networks of Welsh cooperation’ which also extended back into Wales. Morgan establishes this point by looking at four of these networks of cooperation. In particular, his discussion of the earliest of these, focused on Newry, is fascinating. The Welsh gentry involved in Newry used the profits to rebuild positions in north Wales. Thus, Sir Edward Trevor of Brynkinallt was in 1622 both sheriff of Denbighshire and also an Irish privy councillor. Initially, New English writers had mostly presented the Welsh in a favourable light, with Welsh-style reforms seen as the way to reform Ireland. The wars from the 1580s, however, raised ethnic and religious tensions. High levels of recusancy and the defection of Welsh captains to Catholic armies raised New English concerns about the trustworthiness of Welsh troops, fuelling demands for cultural uniformity among soldiers and settlers. Welsh migrants confronted New English suspicions by emphasising the importance of the Welsh role in establishing English sovereignty in Ireland during the Norman conquest: this is exemplified by a discussion of the work of the Welsh cleric, Meredith Hanmer, whose Chronicle of Ireland (1633) used history to present the ‘New Welsh’, despite their distinctiveness and difference, as loyal members of the British state. Overall, this insightful volume provides the first sustained analysis of an early modern Welsh migrant community, offering a valuable alternative to the ‘three kingdoms’ model of ‘new British history’.