By the early 1590s, it had become an inescapable fact that the Reformation had failed in the diocese of Dublin and, indeed, elsewhere in the English Pale. Writing to the archbishop of Canterbury in March 1591, Archbishop Loftus of Dublin and Bishop Jones of Meath admitted as much, when they acknowledged that the inhabitants of the region had ‘grown into such obstinacy and disobedience that we… find it a matter almost impossible either to reclaim them or to draw them to any good conformity’. This book has contended that the principal cause of this failure was the English Irish community's attachment to a survivalist form of Catholicism. And that this attachment itself had been actively and effectively defended and fostered by the clerical elite of the Pale, especially during the Marian period and theopening decade of Elizabeth's reign.

Yet it is a curiously conservative conclusion. It sits easily, in a number of respects, with some of the main conclusions reached by the two leading writers on Tudor Ireland's religious history in the modern era, Robin Dudley Edwards and Brendan Bradshaw. Edwards's major work Church and state in Tudor Ireland was written with the intention of portraying the heroic struggle of a brave Catholic people to defend its religion against a strong and repressive Tudor state, and to show how this struggle – even as early as the sixteenth century – had contributed to the birth of the Irish national tradition.