This is a satisfying specimen of the best sort of monograph, treating a bounded subject and, by its awareness of wider implications, altering our view of a whole period. The English have chosen to forget the seven-year occupation of Boulogne, Henry viii's pride and joy, because despite involving more troops and resources than any previous English military enterprise, it ended in anticlimax, and was indeed followed in less than a decade by the final loss of Calais and its Pale. Yet Murphy shows just how significant the Boulogne fiasco was at the time, and also how it provides a better understanding both of England's troubled history in Ireland and subsequent overseas adventures. In the short term, Boulogne provided an experience of military occupation and personal links that fuelled much mid-century Tudor instability. Key personnel from its administration first exported their local experience to the brutality wreaked on insurgents in 1549 in the Western Rising and Kett's Rebellion, and Edward vi's government then proposed the forced recruitment of former rebels with military experience to bolster numbers in the failing garrisons of Boulogne and Calais. Many of the same leaders in Boulogne were subsequently prominent in the Protestant attempts to overthrow Mary's Catholic regime in Wyatt's Rebellion and the Dudley Conspiracy. On a wider basis, Murphy convincingly demonstrates that the devastation and attempted repopulation of Boulogne provided the laboratory for England's first major early modern colonial project in Ireland, in Laois and Offaly, ironically an enterprise of Catholic Philip and Mary. He also argues that the atrocious English conduct in Henry viii's Boulogne campaign provides continuity with both medieval modes of warfare and English destructiveness in Ireland. If there is any dubious consolation to be drawn from this, it is that English conduct towards the Irish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no worse than their conduct towards Scots, Welsh or French, or indeed towards mid sixteenth-century English people classed as rebels. Much illumination follows from Murphy's careful demonstration that Henry viii treated his Boulogne success differently from his earlier and equally ephemeral triumph in Tournai. Henry had entered Tournai as rightful king of France: this time, he determined to add Boulogne to the Pale of Calais as an integral part of his English Crown, and so claimed right of conquest (complete with proclamation to the former inhabitants to acknowledge his rule, thus justifying any punitive action against them: shades of the Spanish in America). Naturally, part of his purpose was complete assimilation to his version of Reformation, extended by the self-consciously Protestant government of Edward vi with the full complement of iconoclasm and evangelical indoctrination: a contrast in energy with parallel tentative efforts in the Pale of Dublin. Readers of this Journal will be interested to glimpse the prominent Protestant preacher John Huntingdon, protégé of many leading evangelicals including Cranmer, hard at work in Boulogne, and Murphy makes good use of that precociously evangelical Welsh commentator Elis Gruffydd. It is intriguing, too, to hear of Welsh soldiers scorning the host in French churches as early as the duke of Suffolk's French campaign of 1523. Amid many delights both incidental and significant, we learn of Henry viii's souvenir gift to Anne Boleyn after their jaunt of 1532 to Calais during which they consummated their relationship: a diamond brooch depicting Our Lady of Boulogne. The royal troops who destroyed her shrine on strategic grounds after 1544 will not have been reminded of this love-token.