Tag Archives: tudor history

The Geraldines: An Experiment in Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald

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Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un, again):

The Normans were at this time the foremost race in Christendom. Their courage and ruthlessness had made them conspicuous among the rovers from Scandinavia who ravaged Western Europe. Their sails had been the terror of both coasts of the Channel, long before they conquered and settled in Gaul. But – unlike the previous Scandinavian warriors – the Normans were not content to remain seafarers. They became landsmen. And in land warfare, they cast aside the weapons of their forefathers and learnt to handle the weapons of their newly-won land with greater prowess than they had ever been handled before. They had archers with bows carrying death at a distance; they had cavalry clad in mail armour, and armed with long lances and glittering kite-shaped shields. In the province of Normandy they founded a mighty state, which gradually extended its influence over the neighbouring provinces of Brittany and Maine. And, without laying aside that dauntless valour which terrorized every land from the Elbe to the Pyrences, the Normans rapidly acquired all, and more than all, the knowledge and refinement which they found in the country where they settled. They established internal order. They adopted the French tongue, in which Latin was the main element, and raised it to a dignity and importance which it has never lost. French literature became the glory of the civilized world. They embraced Christianity and adopted the feudal doctrines of France which they worked into some sort of a system. They adopted their own form of architecture, the romanesque. They were chivalrous, these Normans; indeed, with them began the age of chivalry. Unlike other Germanic peoples, they renounced brutish intemperance; their polite luxury presented a striking contrast to the coarse voracity and drunkenness of their Saxon and Danish neighbours. The Norman baron displayed his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armour, gallant horses, choice falcons, well-ordered tournaments, and wines chosen for their flavour rather than for their intoxicating power. They were dignified in their bearing and well-spoken. They were born orators as well as born lawyers, just as they were born soldiers. For before all else they were soldiers. Their conquests extended to Southern Italy and Sicily on the one hand, and to the British Isles on the other.

I have been trying to find out about the author of this book. Thanks to the genealogy websites, I have determined that his full name was Brian Boteler Fitzgerald, that he lived from 21 January 1908 to 20 July 1977, that he was the son of Lord Henry Gordon FitzGerald (1863–1955) and Inez Charlotte Grace Casberd-Boteler (1871-1967) and the grandson of the 4th Duke of Leinster, and that he married Elizabeth Dorotea Maud Brocklebank Fleetwood-Hesketh (1914-1992) on 28 July 1936 when he was 28 and she 22. I don’t find any record that they had children. In addition to this book, published in 1951, he published four other Irish history books in 1949, 1950, 1952 and 1954, and a few more edited volumes of letters later in the 1950s, all relating to the Fitzgerald family, so a rather concentrated period of writing activity in the middle of his adult life. I have no record of anything else that he did at any other time in his career. He was born, married and died in London, but clearly wore his Irish heritage proudly.

This book is the work of a very enthusiastic and energetic romantic, dedicated to proving the proposition that the Fitzgeralds are the key factor in Irish history for more than four centuries. It’s actually a proposition that most would agree with, but by focussing on one family’s history, you can lose sight of what else is going on. In particular I’d have liked to get an understanding of the relationship between the Fitzgerald lands and the Pale/Butler territory on the one hand, and the more Irish districts on the other.

It’s also misleading to suggest that the Fitzgeralds’ rule of Ireland was the basic pattern of Irish government consistently from 1189 to 1603. It was perhaps the default, but there was no automaticity and the right of English kings to intervene was clearly accepted by all concerned. The peak of the Kildare Fitzgeralds’ power comes at the very end of the period, when Henry VII is forced to accept their continued rule in Ireland after Bosworth Field because he has no alternative; but the collapse of that power in the 1530s came very swiftly, which suggests that it did not have such deep foundations after all.

I was surprised to learn that the Fitzgerald family trace their origins to the Gherardini family of Tuscany, based in Florence from 1100, whose most famous member is probably Lisa del Giocondo, to use her married name (though that is not how she is best known). This link seemed really fanciful to me, but the book has documentary evidence from both sides indicating that the Gherardini accepted that the connection was there. To me it’s fairly clear that the mythology of the family begins with Gerald of Wales, who was the son of one of the daughters of Gerald FitzWalter, the best documented originator of the dynasty, and I don’t quite see the timelines adding up.

Still, it’s full of details about the entire period of Irish history from 1170 to 1603, and although it’s partisan, it wears its heart on its jacket and is rather endearing. You can get it here.

This was the very last of the books that I acquired in 2018 which I managed to clear from the unread shelves, ten months after I did the same for the last of my 2017 acquisitions. The full list so far, since I started tallying this way eight years ago, is:

Last book acquired in 2018, read in November 2024 (The Geraldines)
Last book acquired in 2017, read in January 2024 (Rule of Law: A Memoir)
Last book acquired in 2016, read in August 2023 (Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan)
Last book acquired in 2015, read in November 2022 (Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait)
Last books acquired in 2014, read in October 2021 (The Empire of Time and Crashland)
Last book acquired in 2013, read in October 2020 (Helen Waddell)
Last book acquired in 2012, read in May 2020 (A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese dialogue 2000-2003)
Last book acquired in 2011, read in October 2019 (Luck and the Irish)
Last book acquired in 2010, read in January 2019 (Heartspell)
Last book acquired in 2009, read in December 2016 (Last Exit to Babylon)

There are 26 books on my unread shelves which I acquired in 2019, and 11 of them are by H.G. Wells, so there’s going to be a fair bit of minor Wellsiana coming up. I’m starting with:

  • The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee (shortest)
  • Lost Objects, by Marian Womack (sf that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)
  • What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah (top book on LibraryThing which isn’t by Wells)
  • Marriage, by H. G. Wells (top book on LibraryThing which is by Wells)
  • Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, by David A. Gerber (non-fiction that has lingered longest unread)
  • Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien (non-genre fiction that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)

The Tudor Discovery of Ireland, by Christopher Maginn and Steven G. Ellis

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Second paragraph of third chapter (a long’un, about a list of the havens of Ireland; this paragraph alone has many more words than the document it is describing):


The list’s comprehensiveness is impressive, considering that it was likely drawn up in the early Tudor period, a time when knowledge in England of Ireland’s geography, most especially of the west and north-west, was limited. In the commonplace book of Christopher Cusack, sheriff of Meath – a copy of which survives from the early sixteenth century but which contains disparate material which is probably much older – there is a geographic description of the island of Ireland in which its most southerly and northerly points are aligned against St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Dumfries in Scotland, respectively. Here, it was inaccurately stated that Ireland was larger than England: ‘Irland should be mor then Ingland by iiixx miles’ its author concluded.2 Later, in 1543 Sir Anthony St Leger, lord deputy of Ireland, offered Henry VIII a detailed description of Ireland’s havens – ‘The more parte of the notable havons of Ireland’; but he named only thirty-seven, and was quick to point out those havens which lay within (or near) the Irishry and which were, in effect, beyond royal control.3 It was only in Elizabeth’s reign, as Tudor rule extended throughout the island, that a greater awareness of such geographical detail was achieved in governing circles, and mainly through the increasing use of maps.4 This is evident, for example, in the well-known, and richly detailed, maps of Ireland drawn in the 1560s by Laurence Nowell and John Goghe.5 When these are compared with the crude ‘Cotton’ map of Ireland drawn in the 1520s – this drawing represents the earliest known attempt under the Tudors to map the island – and a later Italian map of Ireland from 1565 – in which Dublin and its hinterland are plotted too far south, and Sligo is depicted as lying north-east of Donegal – the new-found superiority of English knowledge of Ireland’s geography and topography becomes immediately apparent.6 Of course the act of listing havens, and ultimately plotting them on maps, did not conjure these locations into being. For centuries Englishmen and Irishmen had relied on local knowledge to move about the country, by land and by sea, without a reliance on lists of places or maps. Lists of places, such as that included in the Hatfield Compendium and on maps, were not intended to replace local knowledge. Rather they represent an effort to impart some of this local knowledge to those unfamiliar with Ireland, so allowing them to measure and to visualize that which they could not see first-hand.
2 TCD MS 594, fo. 36. The description in Cusack’s commonplace book is nearly identical to the undated and anonymous ‘Geographical account of Ireland’, which was placed in the year 1514 in the State Papers of Henry VIII: TNA, SP 60/1/5, fo. 7 (see also below, p. 138).
3 Havens of Ireland, 6 Apr. I543, TNA, SP 60/11/2(1), fo. 15. St Leger provided a brief description of each haven: ‘Dublyn, a badde haven. Wicklowe, but a crecke’.
4 William Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and early modern Ireland, c.1530-1750 (Cork, 2006), ch. 1.
5 ‘General description of England and Ireland’, c. 1564, BL, Additional MS 62540, fos 3v-4r; ‘Hibernia: insula non procul ab Anglia vulgare Hirlandia vocata” , 1567, TNA, MPF 1/68.
6 The well-known ‘Cotton’ map is reproduced in Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory, pp 40-1. Bolognino Zaltieri’s 1565 map of Ireland, published in Venice, is a copy of Sebastiano de Re’s 1558 map of Ireland. The former is reproduced in S.G. Ellis, ‘The Tudor borderlands, 1485-1603’ in John Morrill (ed.), The Oxford illustrated history of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford, 1996), pp 66-7. See also the Elizabethan effort to set out the depths of some of the harbours in Munster: the depths, anchorages etc., of the harbours of Ireland, 21 Apr. 1567, BL, Cotton MSS, Titus B XII, fo. 482.

Coming at the Tudor period, and Ireland specifically, with the tools of the historian rather than the literature scholar, this is a deep analysis of a 15-folio manuscript preserved in Hatfield House, by two of the top writers on the period. The manuscript includes eight short documents, all about different aspects of Ireland in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the most substantial are a potted history at the beginning and a set of Ordinances for Ireland at the end, though it’s not clear if these last were ever put into effect.

The Hatfield Compendium was clearly written for a newly appointed Tudor official with a senior role in the government of Ireland, and the authors spend a large part of the book examining the very poor state of knowledge of Irish affairs in England throughout the Tudor period. The overthrown Yorkists had had much better links than their Lancastrian predecessors or Tudor successors – not mentioned here, but Richard of York, before he gave battle in vain, was the chief governor of Ireland for over a decade and launched the 1460 campaign to retake England from there.

Henry VII came to throne only vaguely aware of his nearby realm, and devoted significant effort and personnel (though not a lot of money) to getting a grip on it. Maginn and Ellis are able to trace the information in the Hatfield Compendium both backward and forward, looking at how it was created to satisfy the needs of the king and his senior advisers for data about a rather unknown place.

The book then traces the story through the ending of the Fitzgerald dominance and the beginning of surrender and regrant, and the definition of the kingship of Ireland (rather than lordship as it had been since Henry II), through the policies of successive underfunded chief governors appointed by Henry VIII.

Taking a step back, it strikes me that when the English court thought of Ireland, they really meant the Pale and a few outposts under government control (loosely defined), and the areas under the control of the greater magnates, the Butlers and Fitzgeralds; about half of the island, under the control of the Irish clans, just didn’t feature in calculations except as a source of trouble and potential fodder for land grabs. It’s a normal enough paradigm for this sort of conflict between a well-armed but under-informed military and a hostile and well-dug-in population; one thinks of Israel v the West Bank and Gaza, but there are plenty of other parallels.

Quite a short book, but with a lot of good stuff in it. You can get it here.

Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl

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Second paragraph of third essay (“The Tudor Court: Dust and Desire”, by Thomas Betteridge):

This discussion is in two parts. The first section will examine a number of mid-Henrician responses to the court, including Wyatt’s courtly lyrics, while the second part will look in detail at the work of Skelton. This chapter will argue that the Henrician court paradoxically exists in its purest state in the work of Skelton before this court starts to emerge as a coherent institution during the 1520s and ’30s. In Magnyfycence and The Bowge of Courte, Skelton creates a Henrician court before the avant la lettre [sic], a spectral court that haunted the real thing, not as a hidden secret but as dust, detritus, as a material reminder of the court’s consistent failure to achieve its fantasy of itself.²

² Slavoj Žižek comments that “object petit a is the reminder that can never be sublated [aufgehoben] in the moment of symbolization. So not only is this reminder not an ‘inner’ object irreducible to external materiality— it is precisely the irreducible trace of externality in the very midst of ‘internality,’ its condition of impossibility (a foreign body preventing the subject’s full constitution) which is simultaneously its condition of possibility. The ‘materiality’ of this reminder is that of the trauma which resists symbolization.” Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek  (New York: Verso, 2000), 90-135, 117, emphasis in the original.

A collection of essays on how the court actually functioned under the Tudor monarchs, apparently papers from a conference in 2004. The two editors and the other six contributors are all English literature scholars, and I must say I find it interesting that I’m getting quite a lot of value from the literature end of analysis of the Tudor period. The first three essays are about Henry VIII and humanism as deployed at court; the other five are about Elizabeth I, and the standout for me was Peter Sillitoe’s piece on the royal progresses, both their limitations and their achievements in terms of projecting royal power. But there is lots of other good stuff to chew on. No mention of Ireland though. You can get it here (for a price).

Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger

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Second paragraph of Part III (on All Hallows in the Tower):

Before long, the early wooden structure was replaced by a stone church, which was enlarged and altered over the centuries. The church’s tower was rebuilt in 1659, following a devastating fire, an, along with some sections of the church’s outer walls, was all that survived the blitz of 1940-41. Interestingly, it was from the top of the tower that Samuel Pepys watched the Great Fire consume London in 1666, noting in his diary for 5 September, ‘I up to the top of Barkeing steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires … the fire being spread as far as I could see it’.

I still aspire to take some time off one of these years and do some writing about my Tudor ancestor, but it’s receding a bit into the distance right now. In the meantime I still have plenty of books on the period to read. I’m also of course fascinated by London as a place, even though I haven’t actually been since November.

This is a nice little guide book to the sites in London with strong Tudor associations. The longest section looks at ten houses and palaces where substantial parts of the fabric survive from Tudor times or earlier, of which I think I have been to three – Eltham Palace, the Tower of London and Westminster Hall. Of the rest, I am now particularly keen to visit the Guildhall and Hampton Court. The next section looks at thirteen churches, where I think the only one I have been to is Westminster Abbey, though in general they have been much more messed around with since. And the final section runs through the museums in London with substantial Tudor content, starting of course with the British Museum and the Museum of London, but also looking at the Museum of the Order of St John and the Garden Museum which were not previously on my list.

It’s a breezy gazetteer, which assumes that the reader already has a decent framework knowledge of the Tudor period (as I like to think I do). I would have preferred, however, to have a geographical structure rather than a thematic one; I felt that we jumped around the map rather a lot. But these things are difficult to organise – certainly I scratched my head a lot when planning how to present the Hansche ceilings.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves; you can get it here. Next on that pile is Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece, by Jonathan Bardon.

The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women: A Social History, by Elizabeth Norton

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Infancy was also the stage of experimentation and play, universal for children of all social classes, which could begin in earnest when the swaddling was finally removed. It was Cecily Burbage who was responsible for taking Princess Elizabeth out of her cradle to play,4 and it was she who, when Elizabeth was around a month old, released her hands from the swaddling bands, after which her arms were covered by loose little sleeves.5 This was the first freedom of movement Tudor babies enjoyed, allowing them to ‘use and stir’ their hands.
4 Harrison, op. cit., f34v.
5 Guillimeau, op. cit., p.22

An interesting look at the experience of half of the English people during the reigns of the five Tudor monarchs, going from top to bottom – linking the lives and deaths of princesses and queens to what is known of the rest of the population. The framework is around Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, taken as applying to all of us, so from infancy to old age and the various options between.

There are some very good bits here; the chapters on crime and religion in particular are fertile ground for the imagination. It’s also interesting to learn of Katherine Fenkyll, a multiply married businesswoman in the City of London. As usual with this sort of book, sadly, the word “Ireland” is missing from the index, and there’s not even much about Wales. But it’s good to come at a well-known subject – life in Tudor England – from a different direction, and I certainly learned as much as I had hoped from it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Unsettled Dust by Robert Aickman.

Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle

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Second paragraph of third chapter (“Elizabeth on Ireland”, by Leah S. Marcus):

In shortchanging Ireland in our volume of Works we were doubtless influenced by an anachronistic view of Britain as comprising its present territories and therefore including Scotland, but not most of Tudor Ireland. We were likewise influenced by the fact that James VI of Scotland went on to become James I of England. But we were, I suspect, also motivated by a desire to present Queen Elizabeth I in a positive light. The project of editing her writings was hatched during the heyday of second-wave feminism: we wanted to show that a woman could demonstrate all the skills and savvy that were usually attributed to men, and Elizabeth was for us a prime example. We avoided Ireland, perhaps, because the story of Elizabeth in relation to Ireland is not, by and large, a success story. Most of Elizabeth’s biographers – especially the most hagiographic among them – have also had disproportionately little to say about Elizabeth in Ireland.

Back in 2009 I had immense fun attending a conference on Elizabeth I and Ireland, held at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut. This is the book of that conference, with a number of the papers that were presented, refined for the delectation of an academic audience.

Lots of interesting stuff here. I admit that some of the literature chapters sailed over my head – my Irish is not up to epic poetry, even in short doses, and my tolerance for Spenser is rather low as well. But this is amply compensated by the chapters on politics and what might be called ideology; what did the rulers of Ireland, including Elizabeth herself, think that they were doing, or trying to do? Of course, it’s a messy picture, with individuals located along a spectrum ranging from those who wanted to engineer a durable political settlement to those who were just in it to get as much property as possible. But it’s lovely to have so much evidence, from different perspectives, gathered in one set of covers, and it took me back to that exciting weekend in 2009, of which I still have fond memories.

My not very secret agenda in reading books about Elizabethan Ireland is to look for mentions of my ancestor, Sir Nicholas White, who as Master of the Rolls was one of the leading Irish politicians of the day. I spotted three: Ciaran Brady describes him as one of “the most far-seeing members of the English-Irish elite”, and Valerie McGowan-Doyle mentions him twice, once briefly as the object of a patronage dispute but also quoting at length from one of his letters to Burghley, defending the right of the Queen’s loyal subjects in Ireland to complain about high taxes. All very useful if I ever get my project of writing his biography off the ground.

This was the unread non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Deep State of Europe: Welcome to Hell, by the late great Basil Coronakis.