His thesis is simple: English policy in Ireland was shaped to a greater extent than has previously been realized by foreign policy and the power politics of the Counter Reformation... A brief but important book.'CHOICE Dr Palmer explores the role of sixteenth-century Ireland in considerable depth, examining how it changed during times of crisis abroad, and how the tensions provoked by the Reformation in England introduced an ideological element into international politics. He shows how the failure of Henry's invasions of Scotland and France in the 1540s led to greater involvement in Ireland by these countries, which in turn led to the entry of more and more English officials into Ireland and the implementation of increasingly aggressive policies. This study thus shows that Tudor rule in Ireland reflected wider international politics, with significant implications.WILLIAM PALMERis Professor of History at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

An examination of the various dimensions - political, social and economic - to the evolution of Franco-Irish relations in the early modern period. The period 1500 to 1610 witnessed a fundamental transformation in the nature of Franco-Irish relations. In 1500 contact was exclusively based on trade and small-scale migration. However, from the early 1520s to the early 1580s, the dynamics of 'normal' relations were significantly altered as unprecedented political contacts between Ireland and France were cultivated. These ties were abandoned when, after decades of unsuccessful approaches to the French crown for military and financial support for their opposition to the Tudor régime in Ireland, Irish dissidents redirected their pleas to the court of Philip II of Spain. Trade and migration, which had continued at a modest level throughout the sixteenth century, re-emerged in the early 1600s as the most important and enduring channels of contact between the France and Ireland, though the scale of both had increased dramatically since the early sixteenth century. In particular, the unprecedented influx of several thousand Irish migrants into France in the later stages and in the aftermath of the Nine Years' War in Ireland (1594-1603) represented a watershed in Franco-Irishrelations in the early modern period. By 1610 Ireland and Irish people were known to a significantly larger section of French society than had been the case a hundred years before. The intensification of this contact notwithstanding, the intricacies of Irish domestic political, religious and ideological conflicts continued to elude the vast majority of educated Frenchmen, including those at the highest rank in government and diplomatic circles. In their minds, Ireland remained an exotic country. They viewed the Irish in the streets of their cities and towns as offensive, slothful, dirty, prolific and uncouth, just as they were depicted in the French scholarly tracts read by the French elite. This study explores the various dimensions to this important chapter in the evolution of Franco-Irish relations in the early modern period. MARY ANN LYONS is Professor of History at Maynooth University, Republic of Ireland.

Sheds fresh light on our understanding of violence, imperialism, and political centralisation in Tudor England.

This study reassesses the policies of the founder of the Tudor dynasty and shows how Henry worked within existing traditions rather than breaking with the past. Every facet of the reign is considered including the nature of government - both at central and local level, financial policy, relations with the Church, foreign policy, economic affairs and concludes by assessing Henry as a 'new monarch'.

William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor State explores the complex relationship which existed between England and Ireland in the Tudor period, using the long association of William Cecil (1520-1598) with Ireland as a vehicle for historical enquiry. That Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's most trusted advisor and the most important figure in England after the queen herself, consistently devoted his attention and considerable energies to the kingdom of Ireland is a seldom-explored aspect of his life and his place in the Tudor age. Yet amid his handling of a broad assortment of matters relating to England and Wales, the kingdom of Scotland, continental Europe, and beyond, William Cecil's thoughts regularly turned to the kingdom of Ireland. He personally compiled genealogies of Ireland's Irish and English families and poured over dozens of national and regional maps of Ireland. Cecil served as chancellor of Ireland's first university and, most importantly for the historian, penned, received, and studied thousands of papers on subjects relating to Ireland and the crown's political, economic, social, and religious policies there. Cecil would have understood all of this broadly as 'Ireland matters', a subject which he came to know in greater depth and detail than anyone at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Maginn's extended analysis of Cecil's long relationship with Ireland helps to make sense of Anglo-Irish interaction in Tudor times, and shows that this relationship was characterized by more than the basic binary features of conquest and resistance. At another level, he demonstrates that the second half of the sixteenth century witnessed the political, social, and cultural integration of Ireland into the multinational Tudor state, and that it was William Cecil who, more than any other figure, consciously worked to achieve that integration.

The first sustained consideration of the roles played by Elizabeth and by the Irish in shaping relations between the realms.

This text examines the efforts of the Tudor regime to implement the English Reformation in Ireland during the sixteenth century.

This engaging collection of over 60 primary document selections sheds light on the personalities, issues, events, and ideas that defined and shaped life in England during the years of Shakespeare's life and career. Documents of Shakespeare's England contains more than 60 primary document selections that will help readers understand all aspects of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The book is divided into 12 topical sections, such as Politics and Parliament, London Life, and Queen and Court, which offer five document selections each. Each document is preceded by a detailed introduction that puts the selection into historical context and explains why it is important. A general introduction and chronology help readers understand Shakespeare's England in broad terms and see connections, causes, and consequences. Bibliographies of current and useful print and electronic information resources accompany each document, and a general bibliography lists seminal works on Shakespeare's England. This is an engaging and accurate introduction to the England of William Shakespeare told in the words of those who experienced it.

In this new study, Donna B. Hamilton offers a major revisionist reading of the works of Anthony Munday, one of the most prolific authors of his time, who wrote and translated in many genres, including polemical religious and political tracts, poetry, chivalric romances, history of Britain, history of London, drama, and city entertainments. Long dismissed as a hack who wrote only for money, Munday is here restored to his rightful position as an historical figure at the centre of many important political and cultural events in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633, Hamilton reinterprets Munday as a writer who began his career writing on behalf of the Catholic cause and subsequently negotiated for several decades the difficult terrain of an ever-changing Catholic-Protestant cultural, religious, and political landscape. She argues that throughout his life and writing career Munday retained his Catholic sensibility and occasionally wrote dangerously on behalf of Catholics. Thus he serves as an excellent case study through which present-day scholars can come to a fuller understanding of how a person living in this turbulent time in English history - eschewing open resistance, exile or martyrdom - managed a long and prolific writing career at the centre of court, theatre, and city activities but in ways that reveal his commitment to Catholic political and religious ideology. Individual chapters in this book cover Munday's early writing, 1577-80; his writing about the trial and execution of Jesuit Edmund Campion; his writing for the stage, 1590-1602; his politically inflected translations of chivalric romance; and his writings for and about the city of London, 1604-33. Hamilton revisits and revalues the narratives told by earlier scholars about hack writers, the anti-theatrical tracts, the role of the Earl of Oxford as patron, the political-religious interests of Munday's plays, the implications of Mu

Britain has historically been seen as an upholder of international norms, at least in its relations with western powers. This has often been contrasted with the violence perpetrated in colonial contexts on other continents. What is often missed, however, is the extent to which the state with its capital in London—first England, then Great Britain—inflicted extreme violence on its European neighbours, even when still using the rhetoric of neighbourliness and friendship. This book comprises eleven case-studies of Anglo-British strategic violence, from the siege of Harfleur in 1415 to the fire-bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Chapters examine actions that were top-down and directed, and perpetrated for specific geopolitical reasons—many of them at, or well beyond, the bounds of what was sanctioned by prevailing international norms at the time. The contributors look at how these actions were conceived, executed and perceived by the English/British public, by the international legal community of the time, and by the victims. This history of English violence in Europe complicates not only easy notions of England/Britain as a champion of the ‘standards of civilisation’ or of the ‘liberal international order’, but also of the supposed distinction between ‘European’ and ‘extra-European’ warfare.