This is a big, important book demonstrating a career's worth of insight and reflection on a critical period in early modern European history and how historians have written about it. The author's acknowledgements and bibliography of scholarship cited reads almost as a Who's Who for the field, and the historiographical discussions within the chapters offer colourful commentary and assessments. Smuts has intended here to expand the historical and political narrative beyond the realm of high politics, print and manuscript circulation; regional politics and the thinking and activity in the rural countryside also mattered, for, after all, a cattle raid could be political, too (though it has ‘yet to find its historian’; p. 3 n. 10). Rather, he seeks to uncover the practicalities of political reasoning behind the manifold understandings of ‘the state’, which could be understood simply to reflect a legislative body, the condition of an entity or ‘a fragile socio-political order’ that was vulnerable and in need of strategic protection (pp. 3–4). Over the course of thirteen lengthy chapters moving in chronological order from 1578 to 1625 (and beyond), Smuts offers discussion of some well-trodden topics of particularly English history, but he also broadens the narrative (and not just for contextual reasons) to engage directly with issues in Scottish, Irish and mainland European histories. Indeed, one of the overarching themes of the book is the importance of understanding the English and later British state as comparatively weak alongside Spain and France. That relative weakness was due to a range of factors (not just financial), so our understandings of how the last Tudor regime and those of the first two Stuarts navigated religious politics within their own dominions needs to be seen in relation to how religious warfare elsewhere in Europe affected the state of the state, as it were, because early modern European states were permeable, vulnerable to challenges, and often looking to one another in political theory as well as practice.

Most of the book addresses issues and context during the reign of Elizabeth, starting with a synoptic analysis of the public discourses about the Anjou match in the late 1570s, especially with reference to fears among English Protestants regarding a Catholic network and conspiracy across Europe to destabilise English politics. Those religious and political fears played into ‘English efforts to subjugate Ireland, control Scotland, defend the kingdom's maritime interests and shape developments on the European Continent’ (p. 94). Smuts sees strategic government action in punishment and investigation as successful in suppressing and isolating Catholic threats during the early 1580s and, in turn, limiting English Catholics’ political effectiveness; one can imagine how a historian more sympathetic to Catholic causes may differ in degree. Queen Elizabeth's difficulties north of the Border in the 1580s, however, were more problematic because of the ambiguous dynastic threat posed by King James vi, whose ‘pragmatic willingness to seek political advantage by dealing with partisans of both confessions inspired mistrust that fueled religious polarization’, and not just in a domestic Scottish context (p. 133). James's expediency in this respect was seen as inconsistent, duplicitous even, which meant that any alliance from 1584 forward would be fragile. Having learned much from their French counterparts in the 1560s and 1570s, and in the relative vacuum created by a lack of sufficient and sustained financing from the English state, English privateers of the 1580s joined the war effort against Spain, often venturing their own and others’ finances without guarantees of repayment. Importantly, Smuts emphasises that this ‘entrepreneurial violence’ and chivalric politics was a broadly European phenomenon but one with particular relevance to the English because of the relative inability of the state to provide more adequately. Royal parsimony is a consistent theme across the book.

As a case in point, ‘Irish history diplays in stark relief the opportunistic and brutal underside of the Elizabethan ideal of a Protestant state or commonwealth’ due to the violent, difficult, inconsistent and arbitrary nature of English attempts to subjugate and establish rule on what was effectively a shoestring budget (p. 229). Smuts rightly observes the situational, contingent nature of English political thought among Elizabethans who preferred a mixed polity by way of their own government but then urged a strong absolutist hand against the Irish while supporting resistance theory in Scotland (p. 265). Disconnections between English and Dutch modes of governance, order and sovereignty combined with Elizabeth's parsimony and Dutch corruption to create a nearly impossible situation for Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, in his expeditions to lead the revolt against Spain in 1586–7. Smuts's synthesis of existing scholarship is on display here in an impressive exercise in compression, but his own interpretations and analysis come through nicely; his point about Leicester's efforts eventually paying off in buying time for the Dutch is well taken, notwithstanding the earl's and Elizabeth's obvious failures (p. 335). The passing of a generation in the late 1580s and 1590s, and the rise of a new, has led some historians to see a new phase in English political culture, but in Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, and his circle, Smuts sees elements of continuity in their emphasis on the virtues of war and the state, with potential tension arising between ideas of patria alongside monarchy.

In two chapters discussing the efforts of the 1590s and early 1600s to establish erastian control of the Church in England and Scotland and, more broadly, James vi & i's very personal attempts to forge a united kingdom (chapters viii and ix), we see Smuts's attention to detail and difference alongside his recognition of important analogues and contexts. For example, we read that English common law's insularity was not because of ignorance but rather because of ‘a conscious effort to prevent contamination of English law by foreign ideas’, especially potentially violent French ideas regarding absolutism and resistance to it (pp. 462–3). Many of the same problems that bedevilled Elizabeth and her regime regarding Ireland continued under James and his, with the added element of religious resistance in the Scottish Highlands. Indeed, in the ability of Irish Catholics not only to survive but to thrive and expand their power, while Scottish Presbyterians persisted in their controversies against episcopacy, Smuts again sees a weakness or complete lack of state machinery, in this case to enforce religious conformity across the three kingdoms (p. 537). In two chapters offering a preliminary effort at re-examining the entire subject of relations between the British crown and mainland Europe (chapters xi and xii), Smuts analyses James's theological interests, religious principles and pragmatic politics, and in doing so he offers a qualification to the idea that James had a principled aversion to religious war, especially regarding James's disdain for papal absolutists and Jesuits who sought to undermine national Churches. No mere simpleton or fool (even if wise), James was, for Smuts, nuanced and complex in his understanding of religion and politics across Europe, and his inclination towards peace needs to be seen as a product of the king's financial and practical inabilities vis-à-vis Spain and France. As ever, we should be wary of rhetorical and rosy pronouncements about ecumenism and irenicism when bread-and-butter issues lie beneath. The final chapter (ch. xiii) takes the story forward into the reign of Charles i, and again themes of the broader European context, the relative weakness of the English state (along with an overestimation of English military valour) and contingencies particular to the 1620s and 1630s come through.

In sum, the book embeds the history of English politics and political culture during the reigns of Elizabeth and James in the religious violence of the period and the wider European contexts of war, theories regarding the state and the ways in which English and Scottish regimes tried to navigate a heterogeneous and fluctuating landscape of great powers. Smuts's expansive narrative is deliberately historiographical (and not just in the footnotes), so at some points the book reads as a synthesis of scholarship over the past few decades, but at other points Smuts qualifies or outright disagrees with the prevailing winds. Smuts's use of well-known state papers in London and printed calendars and editions is combined with valuable additions from French, Dutch and Austrian archives; readers looking for a German angle may, for the most part, want to look elsewhere. The book will be an essential and fun read and resource for students and scholars for many years to come. The lengthy chapters are rich with references, and the index of thirty-five pages is comprehensive. In a work of such scholarly merit and weight (metaphorical and literal), it is nevertheless unfortunate to see slips in the finished product. Mis-spellings and antiquated spellings (e.g. Heidelburg, Westmoreland, Ratisbone), inconsistencies in names (e.g. Robert Persons / Parsons, John Casimir / Casimir) and other infelicities (e.g. TMA for TNA, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments not in Bibliography) can distract the reader attentive to detail. A closer and more consistent eye at the point of copy-editing and production by the publisher would have been welcome and would have matched the scholarly rigor under the hood, so to speak. None of these unfortunate slips, which must lie in part at the feet of Oxford University Press, detract from what is a major and substantial contribution.