This volume completes Thomas M. McCoog’s trilogy on the Elizabethan Jesuits, following “Our Way of Proceeding” (for the period 1541–88, published in 1996) and Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the King of Spain’s Monarchy (2012, covering 1589–97). As its title implies, it presents the Society under threat in Ireland, Scotland, and England, focusing as it does on the transition from Elizabeth I to James VI and I, a time of political uncertainty in the British Isles and tension within the Catholic community.

The book’s organisation reflects the Jesuits’ embroilment in, and vulnerability to, affairs in the public sphere. This is not an institutional history in a narrow sense: that is, a tracking of the internal development of structures, policies, and practices. Nor does it present separate, consolidated accounts of the missions in each of the three regions, although a reader could construct them by reviewing the sub-sections. Instead, McCoog has worked with three chronological blocks: 1598–1600 is concerned mainly with divisions within the Catholic community at home and abroad; 1601–2 is dominated by the partial success of the second appeal to Rome by opponents of the archpriest; and 1602–6 deals with the English succession and the Gunpowder Plot. For the first two periods, McCoog divides his material between developments on the mission and those on the Continent. This makes for some repetition but also serves to emphasise the influence of the Catholic exiles, the power structures in Rome, and the French and Spanish monarchies.

To do justice to such a scope of enquiry is a challenge which McCoog has met, as in his previous two volumes, by intensive scrutiny of the correspondence, held chiefly in the Jesuit archives in Rome and London, the Vatican archives, and the archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster. Despite the disruption of the suppression of the Society from 1773 to 1814, the efficiency and scrupulousness of the Jesuit registers and other compilations means that we are able to gain a remarkably complete perspective from within. Since there was so much frank disagreement among the correspondents, the picture that emerges is complex and engaging. McCoog seeks to render this multi-dimensionality chiefly by reporting the letters in free indirect speech which a careless reader might mistake for authorial narration.

Despite the predominance of archival material related to the English mission, McCoog is careful to pay due attention to Scotland and Ireland. There were very few Jesuits in Scotland, but they had influential family connections to grandees such as Huntly and Hay. Moreover, their greatest coup was the secret conversion of Queen Anne, which encouraged expectations of the conversion of James himself and contributed to Catholic support for his succession to the throne of England. Irish affairs were overshadowed at this time by the rebellion of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, which came close to achieving a formal revision of the religious dispensation in Ireland. The earl’s progress was checked at Kinsale in 1602 but his movement coincided with the largely successful re-launching of the Jesuit mission, suspended since the failure of Fitzgerald’s papally-backed campaign in 1581.

In this way, McCoog supplements Michael Yellowlees’s “So strange a monster as a Jesuiste”: The Society of Jesus in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (2003) and provides the most comprehensive account to date of the Society in early modern Ireland. The two matters that loom largest in the book, however, are the archpriest controversy and the English succession. “Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished” will be required reading for students of these topics. Instead of propounding a startling new interpretation, McCoog guides us through the moves of two intricate chess games, one of which ended in stalemate and the other in resignation—he himself observes that the moves and counter-moves of the Jesuit mastermind Robert Persons and the appellants in the corridors of power in Rome resemble the plot of a Le Carré novel. The appellant priests who objected to the appointment (or, as they saw it, imposition) of the archpriest George Blackwell to supervise the secular priests in England sought a hierarchy that would give them more independence from Jesuit influence. Rebuffed in 1598, they succeeded in 1602, with the help of French diplomacy, in having the archpriest’s authority clearly separated from all Jesuit direction. Playing the French off against the Spanish, and trying (naively) to bargain with Elizabeth’s government for more toleration in return for the expulsion of the Jesuits, the appellants contributed to the conflicts of interest that ensured there would be no unified Catholic approach to the succession, on which the health of the Catholic community seemed so much to depend. If Persons had had his way, the Catholic powers of Europe would have united behind a single, unequivocally Catholic candidate for the succession, and the Catholics in England would have had no doubt who to support. He was right about James, let down by the archpriest Blackwell and even more by Philip III of Spain: his opponents were wrong if they thought him all-powerful in Rome or all-malign.

It lies outside the scope of McCoog’s work to analyse the political situation comprehensively, although this book represents an advance even on his essay in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes’s 2014 collection, Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England. The crucial significance of the manoeuvring so expertly delineated here was that early modern British Catholicism entered the Stuart era under a cruelly disappointing religious dispensation, with the mission no longer a united enterprise: authority was now divided between the archpriest and the Jesuit superiors. Readers are thus presented with the perfect starting point for the study of Catholicism in Britain in the seventeenth century.