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  • The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century
  • John Coffey
The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer. Pp. 272. ISBN 1 85182 532 0. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2002. £40.

This collection of essays, edited by two distinguished historians of early modern Scotland and Ireland, sets out to challenge Anglocentric approaches to three kingdoms history. In a pugnacious opening, the editors allege that the 'New British Histories' represent 'a neo-Whiggish return to S. R. Gardiner' and reflect 'an overwhelmingly insular and introspective historiography' (p.15). The Stuart Kingdoms, by contrast, 'invites scholars to view the three kingdoms from a holistic standpoint and to pay due attention to Scotland, Ireland as well as their awkward neighbour, England, without losing sight of the wider European and global pictures' (p.35).

The dozen essays that follow are rather disparate in both method and subject matter. The editors maintain that this is in order to showcase an interdisciplinary approach 'that embraces the apocalyptic as well as the baronial, the commercial as well as the confessional and the imaginative as well as the iconoclastic' (p.23). However, there is no cross-referencing between essays and not much sense of common purpose. But if the book is less than the sum of its parts, the parts are well worth reading.

The most ambitious essay is Steven Ellis's interpretation of the development of the English state between 1422 and 1607. Ellis suggests that the old Whig story of English nation building has been displaced by the 'new British history' centred on the concept of 'state formation'. He then challenges this 'new grand narrative' (p.37) by reminding us that the Tudor state failed to adopt the French and Spanish strategy of state formation. It 'did not develop a professional bureaucracy, a standing army, and an effective system of national taxation', though its failure has been given a positive Whig gloss in 'English nationalist historiography' (pp.47-48).

Ellis's themes reoccur in Edward Opalinski's examination of the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary union. This has been included to provide a comparative perspective on state formation, though readers are left to make the comparisons themselves. Claire McEachern contributes the sole literary studies essay, albeit one that takes pains to situate Macbeth in the context of Jacobean union debates. In a stimulating excursion into the history of ideas, Paul McGinnis and Arthur Williamson examine the Scottish role in early modern [End Page 141] debates over race. The villain of the piece is John Mair, the Scottish theologian and logician who taught in sixteenth-century Paris. Mair is convicted of anti-semitism, racism and underwriting Spanish imperialism. Indeed, the authors allege that he was 'more a Spaniard and a Scot' (p.76). By contrast, John Knox, George Buchanan, Andrew Melville and David Hume of Godscroft are lauded for their opposition to world empire and the new racism. For all its merits, the essay draws too neat a dichotomy between an imperialist, racist and culturally stagnant Spain and the 'potentially liberating' new world order envisaged by the Scots (p.93). The notion of purity of blood was less dominant in Spain than the authors imply, and the Spanish were far more likely than their British counterparts to intermarry with Native Americans.

At the centre of the book are five chapters on the three kingdoms crisis of the mid-seventeenth-century. John McCafferty ably challenges the view that the presence of militant Presbyterians in early Stuart Ulster meant that the Church of Ireland in the early seventeenth century was 'doomed to explode' (p.202). Instead, he argues (taking a cue from Collinson and Tyacke), that it was the Caroline drive for conformity that turned godly Protestants into rebellious nonconformists. Steve Murdoch and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin provide vital European perspectives on the Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates respectively. Murdoch demonstrates that the Scandinavian powers freely allowed military supplies to reach the Covenanters during the Bishops Wars. When even his own uncle (Christian IV of Denmark) failed to support him, Charles I was in deep trouble. Ó hAnnracháin analyses continental influences on the Confederates, drawing the striking conclusion that given the tensions between the...

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