William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor State, by Christopher Maginn

Abstract

The extraordinary flowering of sixteenth-century Irish history since about 1975 has transformed our understanding of events and generated illuminating controversy. It has largely, and rightly, been written from an Irish angle, whether that of the ‘New English’ soldiers and settlers or the government in Dublin, including the ‘Chief Governors’, the Crown’s representatives; or from that of the two established communities, the ‘Old English’, or the Gaelic ‘mere Irish’. (Nomenclature in this area is more than usually hazardous and value-laden.) Recently local studies have begun to illuminate the process further. The book under review, by Christopher Maginn, shifts attention back to Westminster and to the long-term. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was the principal maker of Irish policy for almost the whole of Elizabeth I’s reign, aided between 1574 and 1590 by his ally Francis Walsingham. The Queen obviously took the ultimate decisions. But Cecil’s control of correspondence, his compilation of a vast database on Ireland, as on so many other topics, his careful weighing of pros and cons, gave him an authority which was difficult to challenge, even if decisions ran the further hazard of implementation (or not) by officials in Dublin.