| dc.description.abstract | The fall of the Kildare Geraldines in 1534 has traditionally been seen as the hinge of late medieval and early modern Irish history. In comprehending this period, the collection of documents published in the 1830s as the State papers [of] king Henry the eighth have conventionally and understandably been a foundation stone for historians. This invaluable canon of documents has also been central to the existing historiography. However, the near exclusivity of these state papers which mostly postdate 1534 has left a somewhat imbalanced impression of early Tudor Ireland. Additionally, their selective arrangement in the nineteenth-century has resulted in a teleological and in many ways an artificial Victorian construct. In the early stages of my studies I began to appreciate these complications regarding the state papers. Recent historiography has left an opening for a greater consideration of alternative, through exiguous and fragmentary evidence. My own interests in material culture and literary history have offered some modest insights and many such sources have inform this study.
This thesis begins with an examination of the expressions of power in late medieval and early Tudor Ireland. By comparing James Butler, the White Earl of Ormond to Garret Mór Fitzgerald, the Great Earl of Kildare, an ascendant ruling magnate evidently assumed a broad, largely pan-cultural approach to the maintenance of power. To a significant degree, this position was projected through what might be termed material culture, namely art, architecture and other non-verbal pursuits. In contrast, those who opposed the ascendant lord lobbied the crown for a renewed conquest which was to be regional in nature. The rhetoric produced by those in opposition projected this stance through a distinctly insular interpretation of the twelfth-century account of the original conquest, the Expugnatio Hibernica. Although these positions unfolded in terms of factional conflict between Kildare and Ormond, along with other anti-Geraldine proponents of conquest , they were in fact alternating positions that did not spring from rivalries but rather depended on their standpoint in terms of political power. My growing understanding of the importance of material culture, and subsequently historiographical culture in the sense of the Expugnatio Hibernica, has enlightened subsequent research.
Thus in chapter two, I explore the aggressive perspective of conquest with particular attention to a number of Hiberno-English editions of the Expugnatio which appeared in the late fifteenth-century. As a projection of their supremacy, the major cultural endeavours of the ascendant Kildare Geraldines are discussed in chapter three, including their extensive humanist patronage and relations with the Gherardini of Florence. In opposing Kildare, the proponents of conquest attacked what they presented as the Kildare-induced decay of the Englishry. Chapters four and five critically approach the state papers and quasi-state paper material from this point of view. The cultural import of the well known State of Ireland and plan for its reformation [1515] and Breviate or Getting and decay of Ireland by Patrick Finglas are assessed in context. The former tract is given particular attention as it is a redaction of a humanist text. Chapter six returns to the lavish cultural representations of Kildare dominance, which included high renaissance patronage. An aristocratic rapprochement between Garret Óg Fitzgerald and Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk is discussed. In chapter seven, Cromwellian reform and the conquest lobbyists are explored along with the Kildare rebellion of 1534. In the context of this thesis, the mysteries surrounding the motives of Lord Offaly Thomas Fitzgerald in rebelling, the killing of Archbishop John Allen and the Geraldine appeal to Rome in the context of the Henrician reformation are not resolved, but deepened. The final chapter considers the fate of the push for regional conquest , most vocally presented by Robert and Walter Cowley, which was sealed with the fall of Cromwell in 1540. It is in the aftermath of the rebellion and late 1530s state paper hegemony that the biased nature of these sources becomes most apparent. The state paper archive justly remains the principal informants for historians but in the context of this thesis they can perhaps be counterbalanced through incorporating alternative sources for political analysis. | en |
