Vincent P. Carey, Surviving the Tudors: The 'Wizard' Earl of Kildare
and English Rule in Ireland, 1537-1586 (Dublin: Four Courts Press,
2002), 240pp, ISBN 1851825495
Vincent Carey has chosen an appropriate title for his study. The story of the
eleventh Earl of Kildare is indeed one of survival under a Tudor regime
whose Irish policy wavered between conciliation and oppression, with its
implementation dependent as much on the personality and competence of
the current Lord Deputy as upon a more settled and consistent programme.
At the highest level, Carey's narrative takes in the rule of four of the Tudor
monarchs, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, divided as they
were by religious conviction as by temperament and skill. It also takes in
the policies of their courts and leading ministers, notably Cromwell and
Burleigh, frequently preoccupied with events in Scotland, France and Spain,
but united in their determination to maintain English hegemony, or at least
influence, in Ireland. The play of faction complicates Carey's narrative
further. Fortunes were scarcely to be won in Ireland—indeed a melancholy
aspect of the story is the consistent lack of success on the part of Deputy
after Deputy—but political standing could be enhanced and client relations
strengthened. These seem to have been motivation sufficient to persuade
men like the Earl of Sussex and Sir Henry Sidney, the most successful of the
Lords Deputy, to leave the comparative calm of the court in London for the
incessant turmoil of Dublin and Ireland.
If survival of chameleon and incoherent policies and personnel in
London provided a challenge for Kildare, a far more complex situation
faced him at home. Ireland in the sixteenth century exhibited a cultural
diversity beside which most modern multi-ethnic societies look simple.
Divided by language, legal systems, social practices, religion and, blatantly,
habit of mind, the Gaelic, English-Irish (Carey's term) and New English had
scarcely in common the most rudimentary basis of social and political
consent. Outside the Pale, allegiance to England was more notional than
real, with day-to-day order depending on family structures and the
fluctuating fortunes of great and minor lords. From the English perspective,
this was a political nightmare, and one that was exceedingly costly to solve
(Elizabeth felt this with particular keenness). The Kildare earls had been of
genuine service in the past as Lords Deputy and mediators between English
and Gaelic, fattening their own coffers and establishing their own preeminence as they did so, until the Kildare rebellion of 1534-5, and the
subsequent execution of leading members of the family. The eleventh Earl
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never attained the rank of Lord Deputy after his return to Ireland in 1549,
though he received preferment of various kinds from the crown and from
several Lords Deputy for services rendered. These were of a complex and
disputed kind, ranging from pillage to negotiation, but always, Kildare
alleged, in the service of the English crown. He attained prosperity, partly
through the exaction of traditional duties of coign and livery as well as the
collection of rents on restored lands. He also accumulated power, but such
was his ambivalent position on the boundary between Gaelic and English
that accusation and trial were inevitable, though, characteristically perhaps,
he was found not guilty of treason and died in his bed.
Carey tells this spell-binding and complex story with huge authority,
drawing on published and unpublished records, including the hitherto
untapped Kildare papers in the Public Record Office in Belfast. His range
includes factions at the Tudor court, the personality and policies of
individual Lords Deputy, the histories of Gaelic chiefs such as Shane
O'Neill, and the changing fortunes of the Kildare family in its several
branches. If he is sometimes unsparing in detail, and disinclined to evoke
for the novice reader the more colourful aspects of sixteenth-century Irish
politics, these are shortcomings we can readily forgive in return for so much
instruction.
Ronnie Mulryne
University of Warwick
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