Raymond Hylton's Ireland's Huguenots and Their Refuge begins with the apparent paradox that Catholic Ireland would be an attractive haven for persecuted French Protestants and, after surveying the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Huguenot settlements in Ireland, ends by resolving the paradox by showing that Ireland provided a suitable place for the refugees to live and thrive. In the process, Hylton highlights the key issues that hindered the development of a cohesive Huguenot community in Ireland.

Sussex Academic Press has launched something of a cottage industry in publishing monographs that address aspects of the Huguenot immigration to England and Ireland. These works inevitably straddle the fence dividing academic history and genealogy. The descendants of Huguenots have played a part in the resurgence of interest in family history, and they will likely continue to sustain a niche market for works dealing with their ancestors. Professional historians tend to be dismissive of this trend, but in the case of Hylton, Sussex Academic Press, and the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, the new interest in genealogy can lead to insightful works of historical inquiry. It can also have less felicitous consequences.

In Hylton's case, the influence of genealogical concerns shows up in two distinctive forms. Hylton displays little interest in Huguenots once they assimilated to Irish society and ceased to attend francophone congregations. This tendency mirrors a larger trend among Huguenot scholars to restrict their interest to those periods when the refugees maintained a distinctive linguistic and religious identity. Hylton also spends a great deal of time and text exploring the minutiae of demographic reconstruction and evaluating the sparse evidence for Huguenot settlements in areas outside Dublin and Portarlington.

Hylton is forthright in admitting that this study is an exercise in trailblazing and as such carried with it an obligation to summarize the existing data relating to Huguenot refugees. He is optimistic that other scholars will carry on research into the lesser-known Huguenot settlements and definitively establish the total number of refugees that immigrated to Ireland and where and in what concentrations they settled. As important as this foundational work is, it seems unlikely that this project will appeal to a wide audience.

These reservations aside, Hylton renders a valuable service by situating Ireland's Huguenot refugees within a wider context. The text elegantly summarizes the period in Huguenot history before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and traces how conflicts between politique and zealot Huguenots had far-reaching consequences for the refugees in Ireland. He also provides helpful miniature biographies of many of the key ecclesiastical and political actors within the French community and those within the Irish establishment who rendered them aid. His biography of James Butler, the first duke of Ormond, clarifies why Ormond, who was a staunch conformist and hence distrustful of Protestant Dissenters, desired to invite Huguenots to Ireland in the first place. Ormond played an instrumental role in passing legislation in 1662 that opened immigration to French Protestants, but with the stipulation that they conform to the rites of the established church. Initially the few Protestants that took the Irish Parliament's offer had little trouble with this provision and worshipped using a French translation of the Book of Common Prayer. Ormond hoped they would provide an economic boost to the country and be exemplars of thrift, industriousness, and sobriety. Hylton adeptly traces how later refugees chafed under the requirement to conform to the Church of Ireland. When legislation passed in 1692 dropped the requirement of conformity for the refugees, schism erupted between conformist and nonconformist Huguenots.

Hylton effectively argues that conflict over the issue of conformity sabotaged the possibility for a unified Huguenot community in Ireland. This argument seems unassailable, but Hylton misses the opportunity to relate this internecine conflict between French Protestants to larger conflicts between conformists and nonconformists throughout Britain and Ireland. He could have made more of the fact that the Huguenots played an important symbolic role as models of fully reformed Protestantism for those who attacked the church policies of the Laudians and, later, for those who defended them. At the Restoration, one of the architects of the first conformist Huguenot congregation in the Savoy, Jean Durel, willingly provided polemic to undercut the notion that the Book of Common Prayer and episcopal government were contrary to the Reformed Protestant tradition as he had experienced it in France. This early engagement by French Protestants on the side of episcopal government made the conflicts that Hylton ably documents almost inevitable.

Besides the religious controversies that divided the Huguenot in Ireland, the other big story in Hylton's book is the role that they played in defeating James II and securing Ireland against future Jacobite invasions. Hylton provides an extensive survey of the policy that led to the settlement of Huguenot veterans and their families in strategically important areas of Ireland. The most successful of these settlements existed at Portarlington, to the west of Dublin. The chief strategist behind the Portarlington endeavor was the Huguenot leader the Marquis de Ruvigy who, for his military exploits on behalf of William III, was made viscount and then earl of Galway. Galway twice served as one of the lord justices for Ireland and effectively ran Irish affairs from 1697 to 1701. Despite the continued threat of a Jacobite invasion, Galway's perceived favoritism for Huguenot veterans produced a parliamentary act of resumption that jeopardized the Portarlington settlers’ legal title to their land. This, combined with controversies over conformity, prevented the realization of Galway's plan to secure Ireland.

Hylton's care in recounting these incidents along with his detailing of the Huguenot role in the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland ensure that both specialist and nonspecialist readers can glean important insight from the text. Hylton's work also demonstrates that genealogical interests can coexist with the concerns of professional historians.