Welsh Journals

church in Ireland and the English supremacy there depended on support from the English government. When that goverment was controlled by Archbishop Laud, this was a fact that had to be accepted. Ussher, there- fore, made concessions to Laud and Strafford which his admirers have not always been able to approve. When Ussher left Ireland in 1640 (characteristically, well before political trouble there started) he subsided into the life of scholarship which had always been his main interest. In addition to his theological, chronological and historical researches, Ussher wrote on geography, pressed for the teaching of medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and corresponded with mathematicians and scientists like Henry Briggs, John Greaves, and Nicolaus Mercator. Mr. Knox does not mention the intriguing fact that for three years in Ireland Ussher's secretary was the very popular poet, Francis Quarles. Less than half of this book deals with Ussher's biography. The rest is of interest to theologians rather than to historians. The author is concerned with such problems as whether Ussher's concessions to Scottish clerics in Northern Ireland, or his 'quotation of such men as Brightman and Beza' and indeed Calvin, can be fitted into Anglican orthodoxy (pp. 123-25). Mr. Knox concludes that 'Ussher was closely akin to the Anglican position' (p. 118). For the historian the whole discussion is pretty unreal, since before 1662 Anglican orthodoxy meant something different from what it did after that date. The author confuses the issue by distinguishing between 'Puritans' and 'Anglicans' before 1640, whereas in that period 'Puritans' were no less Anglican than the Laudians. The two parties were trying to reform their church in different directions, There were good pre-1640 Anglican precedents for Ussher's equation of the Pope with Antichrist, for looking back to the Waldensians rather than to mediaeval catholicism for the ancestry of his church, though post-restoration Anglicanism has shifted its ground. It is important not to read the victory of the anti-Puritans back into the period before 1640, when it could be claimed with some reason that Laud was the greater innovator and there- fore less 'Anglican' than 'the Puritans'. The book is pleasantly produced, though there are one or two misprints: the worst is on p. 40, where '1652' should read '1632'. The historian will find the biographical part of the volume useful. CHRISTOPHER HILL Balliol College, Oxford