Tag Archives: tudor ireland

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.

Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish, and Gender by Spenser and His Contemporaries, by Joan Fitzpatrick

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Second paragraph of third chapter (with embedded quote):

In his comments on the Ruddymane episode Upton cites the View where Spenser, in his inventory of Irish customs supposedly inherited from the Scythians, refers to Irish war-cries: ” … at theire ioyninge of Battell they likewise Call vppon theire Captaines name or the worde of his Auncestours As they vnder Oneale crye Landargabo, that is the bloddie hande which is Oneles badge” (Spenser 1949, 103). Although Upton is right to make this connection with the Red Hand of Ulster his interpretation of the episode is unconvincing:

This wicked witch had slain the parents of young Ruddymane, the bloody-handed babe: —plainly alluding, I think, to the rebellion of the Oneals, whose badge was the bloody-hand, and who had all drank so deep of the charm and venom of Acrasia that their blood was infected with secret filth. [emphasis as original] (Upton 1987a, 378)

Given that the episode is about the seduction of “The gentlest knight … the good Sir Mordant” (2.1.49.8-9) it is strange that Upton should think it is the Native Irish O’Neills who have been infected. If Upton’s reading of the allegory is correct then we might ask what group or individual Acrasia is meant to represent and who or what has infected the blood of the O’Neills.

Just to warn you that there are a number of Irish history books working their way through my bookblog at the moment, as the tail-end of my 2018 purchases and some recent academic acquisitions come together.

This is a book-of-a-PhD-thesis, a genre that I’m sympathetic to; it takes the Faerie Queene as its core, and looks also at other writing by Spenser and his contemporaries, teasing out particularly what is said about women and gender identity, and how this relates to Spenser’s understanding of Ireland and the Irish. Spoiler: Spenser was not very convinced of the good points of either women or the Irish. There’s also a particularly good chapter on Spenser’s take on the wild Irish landscape. Substantial stuff which I’m not really equipped to judge more thoroughly. You can get it here.

Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley

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Second paragraph of third document (‘A Letter from Sir John Davies, Knight, Attorney-General of Ireland, to Robert Earl of Salisbury, touching the state of Monaghan Fermanagh and Cavan, wherein is a discourse concerning the corbes and irenahs of Ireland’):

After the end of the last term my Lord Deputy took a resolution to visit three counties in Ulster, namely, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Cavan, which, being the most unsettled and unreformed pasts of that province, did most of all need his Lordship’s visitation at that time.

This is rather an interesting collection. The foreword gives the reader the following instructions:

  1. first, read the last chapter
  2. then read the second chapter as far as page 330
  3. then read the first chapter
  4. then read the rest of the book from page 330 to the end of the second last chapter
  5. and finish with the appendices if you like.

I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a non-fiction book suggesting that you read the chapters out of order. (Of course, it’s standard for Choose Your Own Adventure type books, but they are not usually non-fiction.)

It’s a collection of Irish historical documents from late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, really from 1596 to 1610. The documents themselves are printed in chronological order of composition, but Edward Morley, the editor, was right to suggest that you should start with Fynes Morison’s description of Ireland, then go to John Davies’ potted history of Ireland under British rule (which was what tipped me off to the existence of the Duke of Ireland), then go to Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland with that background fresh in your mind, and then read the remaining 80 pages of material from John Davies (and 15 pages of appendices).

The centrepiece of the book really is Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland, the first chapter in composition order. It’s well written and brutal, and argues that the English just need to destroy Irish possessions and traditions until the Irish become tractable; the beatings will continue until morale improves. He did not live to see this put into practice by Mountjoy at the end of the Nine Years’ War, but he would certainly have approved. One senses Motley, as editor, putting this and the other pieces on the pacification of Ireland forward as a contribution to the Whig theory of Irish history, that enlightened rule from London was the inevitable and desirable end point.

Still, important primary material which I’m glad I have handy. You can get POD copies in various places.

My eye was caught by one of the observations by John Davies, that in the new settlement, the judges “do now every half-year, like good planets in their several spheres or circles, carry the light and influence of justice round about the kingdom”. It’s a really interesting astronomical metaphor. One can speculate about the likelihood (or not) of an Irish administrator in 1612 knowing about the Copernican system; Kepler’s Astronomia Nova was published in 1609, and one can imagine that even if copies were not available, it would have been the talk of educated circles in Dublin, especially around the new university.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell.

Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The loyalists of Ireland were far more exposed to suspicion for resisting the royal claim to supremacy over the Church than were those of England. In England, refusal to submit might be regarded as the outcome of loyalty to the pope rather than of disloyalty to the king. In Ireland, those at first called on to conform were the inhabitants of the Pale, and resistance to the law was exceedingly difficult for people with such a strong tradition of loyalty. Disobedience to the king’s laws was their perpetual complaint against the Anglo-Irish outside the Pale, and they hesitated to act in any way which might result in their being identified with the older colonists. Hence their tacit acceptance of the ecclesiastical changes. There was an equally tacit acceptance by those Irish or Anglo-Irish lords who were coerced or persuaded into submitting to the royal authority during the course of the reign. In the actual operation of the new laws can be traced the real attitude of each class in the country.

I have been wondering where the phrase “Church and State” originates as a book title. Robert Dudley Edwards published this in 1935; my father used a similar title, Church and State in Modern Ireland, for his own book on the more recent period. Looking back, I find an 1886 essay by Tolstoy, a mid-nineteenth century Church and State Gazette in England, and an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson about the need for “a wall of separation between church and state”; but I think the inspiration is more likely to be from other historians: A.L. Smith published Church and State in the Middle Ages in 1913, and probably the original use of the phrase in this context is Robert Keith’s The History of the affairs of Church and State in Scotland from the beginning of the Reformation in the Reign of King James V to the retreat of Queen Mary into England in 1568, published in 1735.

I did not know Robin Dudley Edwards, though I saw him in action, heckling shallow Nationalist interpretations of Irish history at a UCD seminar only a few months before he died in 1988. He published this in 1935 when he was 26; it is the book of his PhD thesis from a couple of years earlier. It’s a remarkable piece of research for the day, looking in detail at the records for the efforts by the governments of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I to impose the Reformation in Ireland (and Mary I’s efforts to reverse it).

He concentrates a bit more on the early part of the period, which I am less interested in, rather than the 1560s and after, but I can understand first of all that any writer have more energy for dealing with the earlier bit of research and second that there was simply more going on in the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s in terms of the dynamics of religion and government.

There are two stories here. The first is that the government of Ireland was weak and London was not prepared to put in enough resources to make it effective, so the story of Tudor Ireland is of one chief governor after another failing to make much impact until the very end, in 1603. The second is that the Protestant side was unable to find resources to staff the religious effort; most Irish people spoke Irish, but the state was constrained to operate in English; any sensible rising Protestant evangelist stayed in England where it was safer and the monetary rewards better; and the ability of the state to enforce religious behaviour (let alone belief) even in the most loyal areas was correspondingly weak.

Despite its weight I also found it quite a quick read. I know that much more research has been done on the topic since, but it’s good to go back to basics sometimes. You can get it here (at a price); I was lucky enough to get my father’s copy.

This was the shortest unread book that I added to my shelves in 2018. Next on that pile is New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyes.

Archbishop Treanor’s funeral, and Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait

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I attended a big Irish funeral earlier this week. Archbishop Noël Treanor, the Vatican’s diplomatic representative to the EU, died suddenly on 11 August and was buried in St Peter’s cathedral in Belfast, where he had previously been the bishop for many years, last Tuesday. I happen to be in Norn Iron at present and attended, sitting between a retired South Belfast community worker, and the mum of two of the choristers.

I knew Noël from his current and previous roles in Brussels, and we’d had a really excellent lunch at his residence on 12 July (an auspicious date!), my last working day in the office until September. We discussed many things, including ironically enough the Pope’s health (“I saw him just a few weeks ago; our appointment was at 8.30 am and it was his fourth meeting that morning; his mobility may not be great but he’s as sharp mentally as ever and he’ll stay around at least until the Synod has concluded in October”) and the church blessing of same-sex relationships (Noël surprised me by saying, without any prodding from me, that he agreed with the Pope’s positive approach). I looked forward to continuing the conversation on my return to work next month, but, alas, it is not to be.

The funeral was a massive affair, with a full cathedral including dozens of bishops and well over a hundred priests. (“I’ve never seen so many priests!” gasped the lady beside me. “I didn’t realise there were that many left!” I replied. Noël, who was 73, would have been roughly in the middle of the age range of the clergy attending, and younger than most of the bishops.) It ended with Noël being laid to rest in the chapel where two of his predecessors already lie (Patrick Walsh, his immediate predecessor, died only last December). The current bishop, Alan McGuckian, led the service, apart from the committal at the very end which was led by Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister. The ceremony stuck closely to the liturgy that I know so well, but with a lot more ecclesiastical chanting than I am used to (and that’s a fine thing). It was a respectfully and carefully designed occasion; I left feeling that my friendship with Noël, which was warm but not deep, had been given decent closure, and I am sure that everyone in the congregation who knew him felt the same.

Funerary rituals have been around since the dawn of humanity, but it is surprisingly difficult to track down the historical details of death as a cultural phenomenon. Clodagh Tait has tackled Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650 in this short monograph. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The period of time between a person’s physical demise and the disposal of their corpse is worth close examination, for in the glimpses of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people addressing the fact of the corpse in their midst we can also see them dealing with some of those rather more complicated questions raised by that corpse’s presence among them. The rituals and processes involved are difficult to reconstruct. At this stage the corpse usually was in the hands of family and friends, the focus of procedures which, because they were to contemporaries too ordinary to be documented or remarked upon, let alone explained, become all but invisible when the historian attempts to look at them in any depth.

This is a very dense book, looking in depth at what is known about attitudes to death and the dead in Ireland in the early modern period. Tait is frank about the shortcomings of the source material – the surviving written evidence is mainly about the rich rather than the poor, about English speakers rather than Irish speakers, about adults rather than children. But there is enough to pull together a fascinating cultural and ritual landscape, of corpses and graves being relocated for political reasons, of which relatives you are buried with, of how the afterlife is imagined at a time when Protestants and Catholics were being offered very different future fates.

The struggle over the religious jurisdiction of death would in itself have been enough for a whole book, but it would not have been as good; by leading in with the nuts and bolts of the deathbed, the funeral rites and the monuments, Tait establishes a framework of universal human experience, with an Irish historical hue, in which the denominational squabbles then take place. Many of the old cultural practices around death are lost forever, thanks to industrialisation and modernisation, but enough survives to give us a really interesting glimpse of a society both familiar and alien. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell, by Monica Blackett.

Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610: Politics, Migration and Trade, by Mary Ann Lyons

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

St Leger’s occupancy of the lord deputyship was critical in maintaining the fragile peace and stability that resulted in both Irish abstinence from involvement in intrigue with France and consequent minimal demands for financial, military and naval resources from the English privy council to fortify Ireland’s defences. His success, however, proved short-lived. Within months of the arrival in Ireland in May 1548 of St Leger’s successor, Sir Edward Bellingham, his aggressive handling of the midland septs led to insurrection. In the aftermath, the dispossessed O’Connors embarked upon a sustained campaign to elicit military support from Henri II of France in support of their opposition to the English crown in what was the most serious episode in sixteenth-century Franco-Irish intrigue.2
2 See Ch. 4 below.

This is a nice short book adapted from the author’s Ph D thesis on the same topic. French interest in Ireland waxed and waned over the long sixteenth century; the big game was always in the future relationship with England, and Scotland was a far more important factor (and Scottish politics much better known) in Paris. Also, the Irish chieftains were much kore assiduous and successful at building relations in Spain, whose relationship with England was much less complex.

So Franco-Irish relations in the Tudor period are a bit of a sideshow, but there is still quite a lot to tell if you want to look into the official documents and archives in France and England (and Ireland, to the limited extent that it is possible). The most interesting Fact I Had Not Known is that Henri II of France came close to organising an invasion of Ireland via Scotland in 1549-50; but the politics didn’t quite work out, and nor did the weather. It would have been a tough defence for the English, provided that a critical mass of Irish leaders had joined the French; in the end I think they would likely have opted for the devil they knew, but that would not have been clear from the beginning.

It’s also just useful to have a look from a different perspective. I’ve read a lot about Tudor Ireland over the last few years, but it’s almost all been internally focused with occasional references to the court in London. It was good to be reminded that there were other neighbouring countries with skin in the game, even if not very much. I’d love to read something about the Spanish angle, however – and that would include Belgium, then under Spanish rule and a hub for Irish exiles.

Anyway, a good book if you are interested in the subject. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next, if I can find it, is Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences, by Bernard Grofman.

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.