Rory Rapple . Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–1594.(Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.)New York : Cambridge University Press . 2009 . Pp. xiii, 332. $120.00.

Abstract

This skillfully written book aims first to dissect the careers of English captains who governed Ireland in self-serving fashion, and second to reveal their dissatisfaction with the Elizabethan regime. They vented social, political, and economic discontent by rationalizing executive intrusions into the judicial realm, denying due process, disregarding trial by jury, and trampling upon the common law (particularly property law). According to the author, the captains' bad behavior reveals their alienation from a royal court that failed to esteem the value, and leadership, of soldiering men. Rory Rapple's tone conveys disapproval that English captains enriched themselves in the name of the state. Early modern colonization was entrepreneurial, however, and prone to wider autonomy than intended, as illustrated by the bewildering variety of charters granted to settlers of the Atlantic seaboard. The author makes an implicit moral judgment that sixteenth-century crown servants should have observed something like modern office-holding protocols, an anachronism perhaps reflective of Rapple's continuing involvement in professional journalism. Although this study makes an original contribution to our understanding of political culture, its usefulness to a wide scholarly audience is limited by its conceptual framework and research parameters.