Book review: Leaders of the City: Dublin’s First Citizens, 1500–1950 (original) (raw)
Related papers
16th-century Ireland experienced revolutionary change, as the Tudor monarchy undertook comprehensive efforts at extending English political control throughout the island. These efforts, together with religious and legal reforms, met with a variety of responses from the native English and Gaelic communities, ranging from eager collaboration to stubborn resistance. This book offers a fresh perspective on Tudor state formation in Ireland by exploring the interplay between the royal government and the lesser nobility of the English Pale during a formative period, from the ascendancy of local magnate the earl of Kildare in the later 15th century to the beginnings of an intensified extension of English authority under Sir Henry Sidney in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It argues that the default position of this regional frontier elite was loyalty and service to the monarch and to the monarch’s representative in Ireland – an attitude based on the peers’ traditions and identity, their locations close to the royal capital Dublin, and their relative economic and military frailties. None the less, the nobility of the English Pale did not evolve into a kind of ‘service nobility’ observable in parts of Britain and continental Europe, whereby aristocrats were co-opted by a combination of inducements and threats into the increasingly centralised and powerful Renaissance state. Rather, relations between Tudor government in Ireland and the Pale nobility were fragile and liable to acrimonious break-down; by the later 1560s the relationship between both groups was one of profound mutual distrust. This development, it is argued, was not caused by conflicting ideological dispositions, but instead was a function of the nobles’ comparative weakness and the dictatorial tendencies of Tudor government in Ireland, and forms part of a wider failure of Tudor policy towards Ireland. The fortunes of the nobility of the English Pale therefore demonstrate the complex and unpredictable nature of Tudor interventions in Ireland, and, more broadly, the variety of noble responses to state formation in early modern Europe.
Senior Honors Projects, 2006
There are few periods in the history of any nation as tumultuous as the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries in Ireland. The following paper examines the social and religious upheavals of this period and identifies an emergent national identity among 'Gaelic Irish' and 'Anglo-Irish' Catholics. Although English forces defeated the Irish 'rebels' in the two major military conflicts of the period, the Desmond Rebellion (1579-84) and the Nine Years' War (1595-1603), the means employed by England to achieve victory, cultural continuity among the Irish (and Gaelicised English), as well as the conflict over religion throughout Europe ensured that Ireland would remain a point of resistance to colonialism and the reformation. The pages below question the historical orthodoxy surrounding the 'Elizabethan conquest' and explore Ireland during those years in terms of a nation being created rather than destroyed.
The Early Tudor Reformations in the Irish Pale (2001)
A survey of the early Tudor reformations in the Pale around Dublin, the key religious battleground in Tudor Ireland. It situates developments in Ireland in a wider 'English' context, and shows commonalities as well as contrasts with England.
English Ireland may not have been set apart entirely from political developments in late-medieval Europe, but neither were its politics without their own distinctive flavour. Two of the most familiar structural features of Irish politics in the centuries after the English invasion are the island’s status as a lordship separate from, but dependent upon, the English Crown; and the division of the island into two peoples. Historians seek to understand and explain dependency and division by describing Ireland as a classic colonial situation. The problem with the colonial paradigm is not that it is wrong, but that, by itself, it explains too much and too little. What is most interesting about Ireland as a specimen of European political ideas in action is that the characteristics of dependency and division sat awkwardly – indeed, sat increasingly awkwardly – in the evolving thought-world of late-medieval Europe. This was the era when the ‘state’ was emerging as something more than an idea and was beginning to coalesce with conceptions of nationhood. As Andrea Ruddick has shown, the kingdom of England was being conceptualized in the late Middle Ages as a defined physical space that supplied the homeland of a distinct people. How, then, was one to define the status of those of the king’s English lieges who resided outside the realm yet claimed the liberties of freeborn Englishmen as their birth right? Since the king could not perform his office in person, how much of his sovereign authority devolved upon his representative in Ireland, who took an oath of office based upon the coronation oath? What were the king’s duties, whether of care or correction, towards the native inhabitants of Ireland whom the settlers had displaced and disenfranchised? And finally – a question prior to all of these – by what right did the monarch of England claim to rule Ireland in the first place?
2009. ‘Medieval Ireland and the Wider World’, Studia Hibernica, 35, pp 167–86.
Studia Hibernica 35 (2009) 167–86, 2009
Review article of the following: THREE ARMIES IN BRITAIN: THE IRISH CAMPAIGN OF RICHARD II AND THE USURPATION OF HENRY IV, 1397–1399. By Douglas Biggs. Pp xvi + 295, illus. Leiden: Brill, 2006. €110 hardback (History of Warfare, vol. 39). INQUISITIONS AND EXTENTS OF MEDIEVAL IRELAND. Edited by PaulDryburgh and Brendan Smith.Pp vi, 290. Kew: List and Index Society, 2007. Distributed to subscribers: £17 members, £22.50 non-members paperback (List and Index Society, vol. 320). DE COURCY: ANGLO-NORMANS IN IRELAND, ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES. Pp 205, illus. By Steve Flanders. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. €55 hardback. IRELAND AND WALES IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Edited by Karen Jankulak and Jonathan M. Wooding. Pp 296.Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €55 hardback. MEDIEVAL IRELAND: TERRITORIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DIVISIONS. By Paul MacCotter. Pp 320, illus. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. €55 hardback. MANX KINGSHIP IN ITS IRISH SEA SETTING, 1187–1229: KING RÖGNVALDR AND THE CROVAN DYNASTY. Pp 254, illus. By R. Andrew McDonald. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €55 hardback. IRELAND AND THE ENGLISH WORLD IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF ROBIN FRAME. Pp xii + 241. Edited by Brendan Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. £50 hardback. THE ANNALS OF IRELAND BY FRIAR JOHN CLYN. Edited by Bernadette Williams. Pp 303. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €65 hardback.
Peter Crooks (ed.), Government, war and society in medieval Ireland: essays by Edmund Curtis, A.J. Otway-Ruthven and James Lydon (Four Courts: Dublin, 2008), pp 353–75