In his introduction, the editor claims that there must have been an unexpected degree of “diversity” (4) among Scottish settlers in Ulster because so many stood aside at the beginning of the 1641 rising. Not content to use this as a rhetorical hook to snag the reader’s attention, Edwards then accuses other historians of ignoring “the sheer scale of Scottish collusion” with the Irish (3). But is it fair to blame those who write surveys of whole centuries for smoothing out the ephemeral, regional, and ultimately inconsequential? In his own contribution on officeholders, Edwards concedes that the leading Scottish nobles Hugh First Viscount Montgomery and James Hamilton First Viscount Claneboye may have attended the Privy Council so rarely because they chose to focus their attention on east Ulster. However, the failure of the well-connected Patrick A’Hanna (the surname Ó hAnnaigh is an unusual example of a Scottish Gaelic O name) to get the clerkship of the council shows that the New English “really controlled” (5) government and the Scots had to be content with a “negligible” (32) number of offices. The exclusion of the Scots is all the more striking after reading Jane Ohlmeyer’s contribution on Scottish peers like Montgomery and Claneboy whose choice of marriage partners and other indexes show that they were really quite anxious to assimilate to the New English elite. William Roulston’s piece on Scottish settlers modestly disavows any “claim to originality” (95) but this reviewer learned a lot, not least about that nebulous but often-mentioned social category of freeholder.

Alan Ford explains that “particularly Irish compromise” whereby bishops in east Ulster operated a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward ministers suffering qualms about episcopacy and an English-style liturgy. Claneboye pops up again to broker such compromises. Furthermore, as Robert Armstrong demonstrates, the next Claneboye/Montgomery generation lobbied Oliver Cromwell to delay transplanting Presbyterians to Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary. Given the limited life expectancy of the republican regime, to delay was to divert and so they saved “Scottish Ulster” but were themselves “perhaps fatally weakened” (269). Ford worries that historians may have gone too far in rehabilitating the popular appeal of Rome to the extent of caricaturing Protestantism as a top-down imposition with little popular appeal, and vividly captures the excitement and enthusiasm of early revival meetings. (He needn’t fret; the notion of the Protestant Reformation as a protest by “the people” against “abuses” will never be dislodged from popular imagination in the English-speaking world.)

Brian Mac Cuarta deftly delineates the Scottish Catholic presence in Ulster, most memorably the block of papist plantation in northwest County Tyrone carved out by the Hamiltons who fled “severe corercion” (150) in their native Renfewshire. R. Scott Spurlock and Jason Harris reach apparently opposite conclusions about the reasons behind the Roman missions to the islands and western Highlands of Scotland. On the first reading the initiative came from the hard-pressed leaders of Clanranald and allied clans who requested the missionaries as a “powerful tool” (185) to bring about clan cohesion. On the other hand, Harris asserts that the nuncio in Flanders and the pope imposed the first mission on skeptical Irish Franciscans. Both make good cases, which I suspect would have been reconcilable if merged into a jointly authored essay. The long-term outcome was that the missionaries managed to “sew a Catholic fringe onto the frayed ends of the kirk in western Scotland” (223). Aoife Duignan vividly describes how, in 1641–42, Sir Frederick Hamilton raided far and wide into neighboring counties and baronies from his fortified base at Manorhamilton. Duignan seems unsure if the “ruthlessness and ferocity” he displayed was “notable” or was a “regular feature” (236) of early modern conflict in Ireland. I would agree that Hamilton “epitomized the isolated Protestant settler” (243) but would have liked to see that comparison developed by reference to the likes of Charles Coote the younger who waged an equally aggressive, and far more successful, chevauchée in neighboring County Roscommon.

Edwards has drawn together an unusually cohesive set of articles grouped around an orderly sequence of themes that include land, office, religious identity, and politics.