Welsh Journals

very real abilities. Sir Geoffrey Elton saw his years in power as the first reforming era in England since the Cromwellian decade of the 1530s, and Professor Loades makes an interesting point when he states that 'apart from the fact that he was not as intelligent and had no legal training, John Dudley was not unlike Thomas Cromwell'. It is a pity that there is no concluding chapter in the book; it would have been valuable to have had Professor Loades's final verdict on Northumberland succinctly set out. There are several appendices detailing Northumberland's lands, offices and annuities. Finally, the book is beautifully produced-a credit to Oxford University Press. A. G. R. SMITH Glasgow THE BRITISH PROBLEM, c. 1534-1 707. STATE FORMATION IN the Atlantic ARCHIPELAGO. Edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. Macmillan, 1996. Pp. ix, 334. £ 42.50; pb £ 14.99 The problems of multiple kingdoms have come to attract historians in the last two or three decades at the same time as British politicians have begun to wrestle with the questions of Scottish and Welsh devolution and of Northern Ireland. Discussion of the origins of these problems is ably provided in this volume. John Morrill firmly states its purpose at the beginning: it does not pretend to be 'a new British history', but rather the story of the relationship between three different kingdoms and of the ways in which four different peoples fashioned themselves. By 1707 English had become the language of 85 per cent of the population of the two islands and a single monarch ruled over all. How had this come about? And were the seeds of present discontents already visible in 1707? Brendan Bradshaw opens by analysing the contrast in Reformation history between Wales and Ireland. Wales followed the government of the Tudor dynasty and the contemporary rule of cuius regio, eius religio applied. In Ireland the political and the religious policies of the Tudors met formidable resistance. Bradshaw shows that the success of the London government in Wales lay less in the administrative arrangements of Thomas Cromwell than in the decline of magnate power in the region and the acceptance by the new gentry elite of Tudor rule and the Act of Union: they became the willing agents of the Reformation. In Ireland, by contrast, magnate power was more firmly entrenched at the beginning of the sixteenth century. A distinctive Irish identity was beginning to emerge and