Nehemiah Wallington's extracts placed the violence of 1641 into a broad historical context and underscored the spiritual significance of Protestant suffering. Although horrific, the atrocities that pamphleteers disseminated about Ireland were in many respects identical to those that had been reported from war-ravaged France and Germany in the preceding two decades. Wallington understood this connection and explained it within a providential framework. As he saw it, the sufferings of Protestant noncombatants were tests of faith for the godly, reminders of the natural ferocity of the papists, and should serve as a divine warning of god's anger over Protestants' own spiritual failures. In this view, the war in Ireland was not a specifically British problem, but rather a desperate crisis for all Christians. England should respond to Ireland's misery not because of the political, historical, and cultural links between the two kingdoms, but because the plight of war victims in Ireland highlighted the dangers faced by the godly in Europe generally.

Prior to his section on the 1641 rebellion, Wallington copied accounts of Protestant suffering on the continent during the 1620s and 1630s. Some of this information came firsthand from a network of correspondents. A letter from Wallington's cousin, John bradshaw, a merchant who witnessed the duke of Buckingham's expedition to France in 1627, provided graphic information on the suffering of French Huguenots. Bradshaw reported that more than sixteen thousand Protestant inhabitants of La Rochelle had died of starvation during the French siege, and that the survivors had lived in ‘a world of misery’.