Surviving the Tudors: The 'Wizard' Earl of Kildare and English Rule in Ireland, 1537-1586.

Vincent P. Carey. Surviving the Tudors: The 'Wizard' Earl of Kildare and English Rule in Ireland, 1537-1586

(Maynooth Historical Studies.) Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2002. 240 pp. index, append. map. bibl. $55. ISBN: 1-85182-549-5.

About thirty years ago, when I set to discerning the threads of Tudor policy for Ireland during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, I encounter shadowy references to Gerald Fitzgerald, eleventh earl of Kildare. I did not then know that he was popularly remembered as the "wizard" earl, and that the information on him is shadowy only because relatively few letters by the earl himself survive. What we know of him comes principally from negative appraisals of his character by officials in the Dublin administration and from a plethora of statements by shady individuals alleging the involvement of Kildare in a series of conspiracies usually in association with Catholic foreign powers and Gaelic Irish rebels. This earl was the one who, as every Irish school-child knew, had escaped the vengeance of King Henry VIII (who decided upon the destruction of the great house of the Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare, after the rebellion of "Silken" Thomas of 1534-36) only because he, as an infant, had been passed from on e noble house in Ireland to another until he was in 1537 whisked by a kindly aunt to the safety of Catholic Europe. It remained a mystery how in later life this refugee succeeded in recovering his ancestors' estates and title, and reintegrating himself into the political life of Ireland to the point where he could be represented as a threat to the Irish interests of the English monarchy. The solution to this mystery, and many problems besides, are addressed in this excellent study which establishes Vincent Carey among the prime practitioners both of Irish political history of the sixteenth century and of early modern Irish and British history in a European context.

The sources available to Vincent Carey shed little light on the childhood of the future earl or of his sojourn on the continent 1537-55. Instead the three crowning achievements of this book concern the mid-century: these are Carey's reconstruction of the painstaking endeavor of Kildare to recover much of his ancestral inheritance and influence within the English Pale and on the borders of the Gaelic midlands; his explanation of how Kildare succeeded in making himself useful to the furtherance of government policy; and his depiction of Kildare's desperate effort to find a middle way when opinions became polarized, first on constitutional and then on religious grounds, between crown officials and the previously loyal community of the Pale. The third achievement is the most significant historiographically. Here Carey makes it clear that while Kildare was a committed Catholic, he did not allow this to stand in the way of his life-long endeavor to reinstate his family as the prime noble house under the English cr own in Ireland; not even when close kin became engulfed in religious revolt and when his wife, the English recusant Mabel Browne, fostered priests who favored a rejection of the authority of Queen Elizabeth because she had been excommunicated by the pope.

My only criticism is that Vincent Carey is excessively deferential towards the opinions of recent authors on sixteenth-century Ireland, even where these opinions have been advanced only by assertion. Thus, he describes repeatedly as "humanists" those Palesmen who, with Sir Anthony St. Leger, forged the policy which, in the nineteenth century, came to be known as "surrender and regrant," even though the first people within the English Pale in Ireland with humanist credentials were those associated with Edmund Campion, whose activities are detailed in this book. Similarly, Vincent Carey describes (59) the arrival of Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, in Ireland as marking "a turning point in the crown's efforts to secure effective control over the entire island of Ireland," whereas Sussex's own words of 1572 (quoted 157) makes it clear that that governor's ambitions were limited to retaining crown influence where it had customarily rested; in the Pale and in the hands of English-Irish lords. Most regrettably, Vi ncent Carey has devoted a first chapter to rehearsing the well-known historiography of the Kildare rebellion of 1534-36 instead of alerting potential readers to the original and important subject he has to unfold.