The division of the State Papers, those crucial records of central government now in The National Archives in Kew, into separate categories relating to Ireland, Scotland, and England seems to date back at least as far as the time of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's great sixteenth-century Secretary of State. The distinction has bedevilled the writing of history ever since: Irish historians know well the contents of SP/63, but seldom turn to State Papers Domestic; English ones just reverse the tunnel vision.

Heroic efforts were made by Conrad Russell and Jack Pocock in the 1970s to “decenter” the early-modern history of Britain and Ireland, and their successors have sought to escape from the focus on England and London as normative and restore the “British” dimension to early-modern history. The results have been mixed, the difficulty encapsulated in the failure even to come up with an inclusive geographical term: “Britain” does not include Ireland; Pocock's “the Atlantic archipelago” is a cumbersome monstrosity; so we are left with Charles Haughey's bland “these islands.” This book by Malcolm Smuts is clearly in this tradition of such “British” history. It covers a crucial period in the history of these islands, the “bit before” the period leading immediately up to the Civil War of the 1640s. Lengthy, but clearly written, it is obviously the product of a lifetime researching English and European court politics, international diplomacy, and political thought.

Seeking to escape not just from whig narratives of constitutional development, but also revisionist focus upon high-politics, Smuts sets out to examine the “assumptions about about the fundamental strategic challenges facing the rulers of Britain and Ireland. . . less concerned with abstract theories about how government ought to work than with the thought processes through which people sought to understand the constantly evolving challenges of their political environment.” (4) Instead he looks at Ireland, Scotland, and England “as embattled Protestant states,” exploring how a “London-based ruling group sought to exert control over the variegated social, cultural, and geographic landscapes of Britain and Ireland, while reacting to religiously-inspired challenges to its continuing hold on power.”(16) As he rightly suggests, such an analysis cannot be done within the limitation of purely national or political histories. But the task is a challenging one – reflected not just in the size of the book, but the scale of the research required – mastering the multiple historiographies from three different countries.

This, then, is an ambitious book. It is at its strongest in those areas where the author's own expertise allows him to speak with confidence and insight. Thus he provides a helpful overview of the capacity of the government in each state to exercise its power, contrasting the effectiveness of central control of local government in England with the greater reliance upon territorial magnates in Ireland and Scotland. Smuts also paints a masterly portrait of the complex interplay between diplomacy, religion, and Realpolitik in late sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth century Europe, taking us from the courtship of Elizabeth by Anjou in 1580, through the last years of Elizabeth, to the succession of James and the efforts to unite the two kingdoms. He provides a helpful re-evaluation of James's attitude to foreign policy and his efforts to avoid becoming involved in a European war, suggesting that this was less a matter of high-minded principle than hard-nosed pragmatism – England was too weak militarily to risk war. He concludes the book with a discussion how the weakness of the British state which James bequeathed to his son contributed eventually to the state's collapse in the 1640s.

As Smuts himself acknowledges, the task he has undertaken here is, if not impossible, certainly very difficult. He makes considerable progress in providing a viewpoint that includes Scotland and Edinburgh alongside the traditional focus on London and England. He is, perhaps, less successful when it comes to Ireland. The fact that Ireland was a separate kingdom, with its own government and parliament based in Dublin, and, crucially, that it was a largely Catholic country with a Protestant government and established church, meant that it provided a peculiar and distinctive perspective on religion and government. Smuts is successful in giving the English perspective on this, less so in giving the views of the Dublin authorities, or the mass of the Irish Catholic population. Thus throughout the early seventeenth century, Dublin was at odds with London over the issue of religious policy. Where the latter pressed for preaching and persuasion, the former, inspired by James Ussher's citing of the example of the Donatists, pressed for strong civil penalties to eradicate Antichristian Catholicism. This repeated persecution in return led Irish Catholics to bypass England entirely, and appeal instead to the wider European community, producing in the process masterpieces such as the Annals of the Four Masters, and David Rothe's Analecta, which offered a radically different take on recent Irish history, transmuting executed Irish traitors into Irish Catholic martyrs.

Equally, the Church of Ireland which Ussher helped create, distinctively Calvinist and anti-Catholic, took advantage of its distance from the monarch to produce a subtly different confession of faith to the Thirty Nine Articles, and to offer a very different kind of established church – including puritans and even presbyterians within an episcopal structure – which Ussher unsuccessfully sought to “sell” to the King in the early 1640s as an alternative model to the dysfunctional Church of England.

Obviously, this review looks at Smuts book from the point of view of Ireland; there is a parallel appraisal to be written from Scotland and, perhaps, Wales. But what it demonstrates is that attempts to write the history of these islands from an inclusive perspective are fiendishly difficult. Everyone has a viewpoint, defined by origins, discipline, and specialism. Decentering early-modern history means moving away from British state archives, and from the narratives of British historians, and conceptualizing history from markedly different viewpoints, not just Edinburgh and Dublin, but Iar Connacht and the Scottish Highlands, Rome and Brussels. This is a very good book – Smuts has clearly read SP/63 – but it is still in the tradition of Robert Cecil and Conrad Russell, of viewing “the peripheries” from the perspective of England.