The chapters of this book successively explore different aspects of how the Old English of the Pale reacted to the Nine Years’ War. The author's interpretation of Old Englishness has Catholicism as an irreducible component and is useful as a working definition. She does not delineate the boundaries of her Pale but in practice focuses on Counties Kildare, Dublin, Louth, and Meath, together with the marcher outshot of Westmeath. This tight focus on the strategic core of English dominion is a real strength of this study. In chapter 2, Canning implicitly warns that one cannot treat zealots like the Jesuit James Archer as representative because most clergy in the Pale did not preach religious war against the English. I use the word implicitly because the author is rather tentative in reminding us that Tyrone's rebellion did not receive universal support from the Irish clerical community (48).

Canning's exploration of how the Old English responded to Tyrone's manifesto against the “enemies of God and of our poor country” (65) in chapters 3 and 4 is as nuanced as that response predicated as it was on “status, religion, family ties, location” (78) and other factors. Those who rallied to Tyrone were likely to be socially marginal younger sons or geographically marginal, like the Daltons of County Westmeath. Canning emphatically concludes that “the Old English of the Pale would never accept O'Neill—or any other man of Gaelic blood—as their ruler” (83, 171). Never say never. Once religious persecution began right after the war, the Palesmen were quick enough in August 1603 to choose Tyrone as their spokesman to petition for religious toleration from James VI/I. In the epilogue, the author reopens the counterfactual question: “would the Old English have been willing to rise up against Ireland's English administration at this time?” (199). One can imagine the Old English joining Tyrone if, for example, the Castle had begun religious persecution earlier.

Chapter 4 evaluates the importance of native contributions to the Crown's war effort. The reported proportion of Irish-born or native regular soldiers rose from at least 20 percent in 1595 to 75–90 percent by 1598, and Canning would seem to think that most regulars were native troops, whether Old English / Palesmen or Gaelic is impossible to say. At any rate, native troops played a decisive role, she argues, probably because the numbers of English soldiers serving in Ireland were so quickly thinned by disease and desertion. Sir John Norreys complained in July 1596 that of the 3,500 recruits sent over “within this year,” all but 1,000 “are either dead, run away, or converted into Irish” (102). Norreys's estimate implies colossal wastage, even at a time when annual attrition of one half (as with Swedish troops campaigning in Poland in the late 1620s) was not unknown.

Chapter 5 captures the impact of war. The Pale was Ireland's granary, but by 1597 anecdotal evidence points to depopulated villages, untilled fields, and “an exceeding great famine” (148). Wheat was reportedly for sale at 18–20 shillings a bushel, which, by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, was about three times the highest price in England. This is an important chapter that confirms what other studies of war and society have found—namely, that the civilians had much to fear from “friendly forces” consuming and destroying the agricultural infrastructure of animals, crops, buildings, and, indirectly, the peasants themselves. In the next chapter, the author deftly traces the Palesmen's protests about their exclusion from office and influence by increasingly hostile government. They insisted that it was “frivolous” to equate “difference in matters of conscience and Religion” (171) with disloyalty. Neither the author, nor anyone else for that matter, has explained how the Old English could be so deluded as to believe, then and later, that the cuius regio eius religio principle did not apply to them.

In the epilogue the author, quite rightly, looks beyond the accession of James VI/I in 1603. Indeed, the Jacobite Parliament of 1689 was the ultimate, if belated and short-lived, expression of long-standing Old English aspirations articulated as early as the 1590s. The Palesmen and the Nine Years’ War opens many fruitful lines of inquiry and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Irish identity formation in the crucible of war.