James Ussher (1581–1656), archbishop of Armagh from 1625, was an impressive figure in what is generally seen as an unimpressive church. A scholar of European reputation, he was admired and respected even by theological and political opponents. The Church of Ireland of his day, by contrast, providing religious services of at best variable quality to one-tenth of the population while enjoying the full privileges of an established church, has had few admirers. Instead the tendency has been to present a figure like Ussher—or his contemporary William Bedell, the pioneer of efforts to evangelize the Irish population in their own language—as admirable but exceptional figures or at best as examples of what might have been.

Alan Ford's new study, by contrast, rejects any such compartmentalization between man and institution. Instead he depicts Ussher as the central figure in a process by which the Church of Ireland, across his lifetime, achieved a distinctive and durable identity. Its articles of faith, adopted in 1615, gave it a clear theological position. Ussher's massive scholarly labors, meanwhile, provided historical legitimacy, asserting the continuity between the Protestantism of his own day and an early Irish Christianity presented as bibliocentric, predestinarian, and firmly non-Roman. By these means, Ford argues, the Church of Ireland, despite its continuing minority status, had by the 1630s acquired an assertive self-confidence and a sense of its place within Irish society that had been wholly missing in the first half century of its existence.

At the same time that he restores Ussher to his full Irish context, Ford also presents him as a case study in the potential of British history, properly understood. By this is meant not an occasional invocation of the Celtic periphery to illuminate a primarily English narrative but rather a genuinely multicentered analysis of religious and political developments in the three Stuart kingdoms. Thus, Ford argues convincingly that Ussher's important contribution to Calvinist theology, including his influential intervention in the deliberations at Dort, can be understood only in the context of a church in which the term “puritan” had limited meaning because the specifically English relationship of conflict out of which it arose did not exist in Ireland. In the same way his advocacy in 1641 of a reduced episcopacy, seen by Ford as a more shrewd response to the immediate political situation than has been recognized, drew its inspiration from the distinctive Irish combination of episcopal government and Calvinist theology. From another point of view, the willingness of English opponents of Laudianism to appeal to the Irish articles as supporting the legitimacy of their position on doctrine and liturgy helps to explain the determination of the crown to impose uniformity both there and, disastrously, in Scotland. As such it confirms Conrad Russell's important insight that religion was the one area in which government was denied the flexibility in response to local conditions that in other spheres could make multiple monarchy workable.

In all this, Ussher the individual remains something of an enigma. Himself one of the Old English descendants of the medieval colony, he worked and wrote for a church that circumstances had cast as a colonial institution, largely staffed by and ministering to a newly arrived settler population. He was an appreciative collector of Irish manuscripts who could nevertheless speak approvingly of the continuing policy of plantation at the expense of the native Irish. His intense engagement with Irish religious history led him to correspond on friendly terms with a number of Catholic scholars, including his own uncle, the priest and political exile Richard Stanihurst. Yet he consistently called on the state to suppress Catholic church organization and worship and adhered firmly to the belief—enshrined in the articles of 1615—that the pope was the Antichrist. Contemporaries praised his piety and integrity. But they also commented frequently on his accommodating manner, in terms that at times came close to admitting that he told people what they wanted to hear.

Faced with this conflicting evidence, Ford offers a generally positive estimation: that Ussher was a man of firm principle who declined to personalize disputes. In support he points to repeated occasions in which Ussher was willing to risk royal displeasure by speaking out openly against the politically expedient toleration being offered to Catholics. But Ford also acknowledges the glimpses of a more complex and calculating man, as in the maneuvers by which Ussher sought to slip a formal confirmation of the 1615 canons past Wentworth and Laud in 1634. Politics could also creep into his scholarship. His study of the ninth-century monk Gottschalk of Orbais, presented as a persecuted champion of true doctrine against a resurgent Pelagianism, was a coded assault on the Arminianism of his own day, while his determination to reshape the early Irish church as a precursor of seventeenth-century Protestantism required significant special pleading. Ford acquits Ussher of the single most damning charge leveled against him by near contemporaries, arguing that it is highly unlikely that he was the bishop reported to have advised Charles I that he could legitimately disregard his private conscience and, in his political capacity, consent to the execution of Thomas Wentworth. But his final word is to draw attention to the absence of a satisfactory portrait of Ussher, explained by his chaplain with the revealing comment that “the air of his face was so hard to hit” (285).