The religious division of Ireland into Catholics and Protestants is basic to modern Irish history. It originates in the the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the conflict between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which led to the creation of two separate churches. This book examines one side of that process of division and confessionalisation: the creation of a clearly Protestant Church of Ireland during the crucial decades from 1590 to 1641.

The Church's policy towards the Reformation in Ireland, though it failed signally to win over the native population, did succeed in creating a distinctive Protestant identity amongst the new English settlers and officials. The roots of that new identity lay in a complex combination of predestinarian theology, apocalyptic, history and cultural elitism, all of which were ultimately strengthened and confirmed by the shock of the Irish rising in 1641.