Among the multitude of enemies facing the newly born English republic, the Presbyterians of Ulster posed a threat at once ideological and military. Such supporters of the new regime as John Milton derided the “blockish presbyters” of a “remote” province and denounced them as Scottish intruders upon English soil. But the threat they posed lay not only in their capacity to mobilize an armed population but to do so around religious and political positions drawn from a common stock of ideas present across the three kingdoms. The twin dangers could be made to serve polemical purposes within domestic English debate as the Commonwealth sought to counter the religious ambitions and constitutional challenges of those they branded as “Scottified” Presbyterians. In Ulster, the short-lived Presbyterian “revolt” proved a remarkable though fleeting success. Its proponents cultivated these transplanted ideas into fertile if fragile growth in the form of armed organization and communal mobilization. This episode attests to the importance of localizing ideology in precise contexts, and to the fact that print was only one vector, if a vital one, for its transmission.

在新生的英国共和国面临的众多敌人中，阿尔斯特的长老会在意识形态和军事上都构成了威胁。像约翰·米尔顿这样的新政权支持者嘲笑“偏远”省份的“封锁长老”，并谴责他们是苏格兰入侵英国土地的人。但他们构成的威胁不仅在于他们动员武装民众的能力，还在于他们围绕着来自三个王国存在的共同思想库的宗教和政治立场这样做。当英联邦试图对抗那些被他们称为“苏格兰化”长老会的人的宗教野心和宪法挑战时，这两种危险可能会在英国国内辩论中起到争论的作用。在阿尔斯特，昙花一现的长老会“起义”被证明是一个了不起但短暂的成功。它的支持者以武装组织和社区动员的形式将这些移植的思想培育成肥沃但脆弱的增长。这一事件证明了在精确的背景下定位意识形态的重要性，以及印刷品只是其传播的一个载体，如果一个重要的载体。