A substantial study of James Ussher is long overdue. Alan Ford does not disappoint, presenting an impeccably researched, finely balanced and elegant study of Ussher, the churchman, theologian, ecclesiastical historian, biblical scholar and royalist. Ford's overarching theme through which he explores Ussher's activities is the interaction of history, theology and politics. At the core of Ussher's identity was a strong sense of Irish Protestantism. Ford highlights the weakness of home-grown Protestantism in later sixteenth-century Ireland. Whilst elsewhere there was a ready supply of committed martyrs to consign to the flames, in Ireland ‘a shortage of protestants to burn left the faggots unlit’ (p. 15). In the face of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and the large-scale defection of the Anglo-Irish, the foundation of Trinity College and the gradual emergence there of Irish, rather than English, graduates and fellows like Ussher was crucial to the intellectual formation of Irish Protestantism. Early seventeenth-century Trinity was not only staunchly Calvinist, but also Puritan in its leadership and Ford acknowledges the disagreement amongst historians regarding the extent to which the young Ussher was a Puritan and, if so, the degree to which he abandoned this youthful orientation in later life. Ford astutely argues that this perception is an English, not an Irish, one. Within the context of the Church of Ireland, Puritanism was largely absorbed within a generic Protestantism united against the numerically overwhelming threat of Roman Catholicism. In this engagement, Ussher was at the forefront of debates on the authority of the Bible, the beliefs and practices of the early Church and the relationship between contemporary Churches and primitive Christianity.

Irish Protestants, like their English and European counterparts, struggled to define and defend the legitimacy and descent of the Protestant Church, facing the challenge of ‘how to prove that they were not heretical bastards’ (p. 71). In De successione, Ussher favoured the radical approach championed by John Foxe and Matthias Flacius Illyricus, of tracing the history of the true Church not through institution but doctrine and belief. As the Roman Catholic Church slipped inexorably into AntiChristian tyranny from the dawn of the second millennium, true faith was to be found amongst those labelled heretics like the Waldensians and Albigensians, although Ussher was also happy to identify some Protestant roots within the medieval Catholic Church amongst ‘dissidents’ like the eleventh-century French theologian Berengar of Tours. Although Ussher firmly identified the pope as the AntiChrist, his apocalyptic thinking, unexceptional in an early seventeenth-century Irish context, was not millenarian in tenor and he expressed disapproval of Christians attempting to predict the end of the world.

Ussher entered into English theological and political debate at a time when the Arminian controversy and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War dominated affairs. To the English Calvinist delegation at the Synod of Dort he provided, in what Ford describes as ‘a model of judicious, moderate Ussherianism’ (p. 108), an intellectual defence of hypothetical universalism that offered a solution to the perceived contradiction between Calvinist double predestination and the universal extent of Christ's atonement. On the unfolding political situation, Ussher placed himself firmly in the Bohemian camp, risking royal displeasure by preaching in uncompromising apocalyptic language of the need to resist AntiChristian Catholicism. Ussher's elevation to the archbishopric of Armagh in January 1625 was, Ford notes, a tribute not only to his reputation and achievements but also his continued royal patronage and cemented his position within the European republic of letters. Ussher preached against Arminianism in front of Charles i and co-ordinated resistance from bishops in Ireland to indications that Charles was contemplating greater toleration for Catholics, but was unable to stop the tide turning against the Calvinists in the late 1620s.

Ussher played a pivotal role in the creation of an Irish Protestant history. Whilst some Protestants were content to identify Protestantism as a foreign import, Ussher was not and he applied his formidable historical skills into fashioning an ancient Irish past in accordance with pure primitive Christianity that was corrupted by Roman influence at the turn of the millennium. This involved, in his 1622 treatise An epistle … concerning the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Scottish, some careful treatment of the sources and an element of ‘intellectual gymnastics’ (p. 125), but the result was a powerful ‘ethnic origin-myth, designed specifically for protestants in Ireland’ (p. 132). Ussher's 1639 1,196-page historical magnum opus, Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates, was the result of many years research in Irish and British libraries, and brought together an unprecedented array of manuscript and printed sources to illustrate the origins of Christianity on the islands. Naturally Protestant in orientation, and credulous in terms of some of the sources included, it was nevertheless an impressive piece of balanced scholarship that was markedly sensitive to Gaelic cultural heritage. This work, and a 1631 erudite Latin work on the ninth-century German theologian Gottschalk of Orbais, demonstrated Ussher's penchant for insinuating pointed reference to contemporary theological concerns into his scholarship, in both texts casting aspersions on Arminianism via extended attacks on the evils of Pelagianism.

As a churchman Ussher was a passionate advocate of an independent-spirited Irish Church. Ford carefully unpicks Ussher's role in the drawing up of the 1615 Irish Articles and suggests, in distinction to Knox's assertion that they were broadly Anglican, that the Irish Articles not only represented a comprehensive revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles but went some way to accommodate Puritan concerns. They provided the Church of Ireland with ‘a distinct and distinctive theological identity’ (p. 102), and were therefore targeted by Archbishop Laud in the 1630s. Ford demonstrates how during the tortuous 1634 convocation Ussher sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent the straightforward imposition of the English confession and canons and struggled, with partial success, to secure the independence of the Church of Ireland. Crucially for Ussher, the Irish Articles were not rescinded, but the balance of power had shifted decisively. Ford, agreeing with Jack Cunningham, describes the end of 1634 as a turning point, ‘when de facto responsibility for running the Church of Ireland passed from Ussher to Bramhall’ (p. 192). Nor was Ussher able to keep the Arminian influence out of his beloved Trinity, where Laud appointed his protégé William Chappell Provost. However, as Ford stresses, these differences did not translate into personal animosity. In 1641 Ussher interceded on Bramhall's behalf when the bishop found himself imprisoned in Dublin, and served as Wentworth's confessor in his last days.

In May 1640 Ussher came over to England for what turned out to be a permanent visit. As a symbol of moderate Calvinism, a ‘role model for the non-Laudian bishop’ (p. 229), and a believer in divine right monarchy, he was soon in demand from all quarters. He was courted by godly parliamentarians, but also remained popular at court. Ussher was pivotal in late 1640 and early 1641 in co-ordinating support for a primitive or limited episcopacy, later publishing an edition of the letters of Ignatius that confirmed the existence of episcopacy in the early Church. Around March 1641 he produced a model of primitive episcopacy that could be incorporated into the English system that represented ‘a dramatic reinterpretation of the ecclesiology of the English church’ (p. 241). Although dismissed as inherently naive and impractical by many historians, Ford argues that Ussher's Reduction of episcopacy ‘served a very shrewd purpose’ (p. 252). Crucially, Ussher failed to obtain Charles's endorsement in 1641 when the plan had a chance, only for Charles to back it in 1648 when the ship had patently sailed.

Many of Ussher's Puritan friends hoped that he would back the parliamentarian cause after the formal outbreak of Civil War in August 1642. However, after the Commons voted on 1 September to abolish episcopacy, Ussher made a clear political statement by quitting London for Oxford. As Ford makes clear, the decision for Ussher was ‘a personally agonizing, but ideologically straightforward one’ (p. 261), for the primate believed that no subject could take up arms against their sovereign even if that sovereign toyed with the idea of subduing his Protestant subjects with an army of Irish Catholics. Ussher was back in London to view the king's execution from the rooftop of his old friend Lady Peterborough's house.

Ford's work makes a valuable contribution to ongoing debates about the role of religion in early modern society. Ussher put his religious ideas into practice in his scholarship, in the university, in the pulpit and at court. In Ireland he reshaped how Irish Protestants viewed themselves, and his vision of an independent Church of Ireland with an anti-papal heritage proved enduring even into the twentieth century. In England, he played an important role in 1640s politics, a role that could have been greater but for the miscalculations of the monarch to whom Ussher gave unswerving loyalty.