Abstract
Few individuals were as critical to the story of how Ireland was brought fully under English rule during the Tudor period as was Sir William Fitzwilliam. He effectively oversaw the Irish finances as treasurer there during the 1560s and he subsequently served two terms as Queen Elizabeth's viceroy, first between 1571 and 1575 and later between 1588 and 1594. His second term as governor was particularly significant, being book-ended by the Armada crisis of 1588 and the outbreak of the Nine Years War in the mid-1590s. But Fitzwilliam has often been marginalised in accounts of the high politics of sixteenth-century Ireland as a figure who was less powerful or ambitious than other deputies such as Sir Anthony St Leger in the 1540s and 1550s or Sir Henry Sidney during the mid-Elizabethan period. The appearance of Deirdre Fennell's new book on Fitzwilliam, then, is welcome, though it has several flaws.
Fennell's main focus is on Fitzwilliam's time as treasurer of Ireland throughout the 1560s and then his first term as governor in the early 1570s. The book makes a significant contribution to the historiography in uncovering that Fitzwilliam did not arrive in Ireland in 1554 as part of a commission of investigation into the Irish finances, but rather only first arrived following the appointment of Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, as Irish viceroy in 1556. Rather William Fitzwilliam who was active in government circles in 1554 was a scion of the Fitzwilliams of Merrion, an Old English family of the Pale. Nearly every study which has considered Fitzwilliam's early arrival in Ireland has mistakenly identified the Fitzwilliam of this commission of inquiry as being the future viceroy. In correcting this Fennell has rendered an important service. Similarly, her examination of how a marital alliance between Fitzwilliam and the family of the Chancellor of the English Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, might have protected Fitzwilliam from charges of malfeasance and other criticisms in England is valuable, as is the examination of Fitzwilliam's wider family's role in Ireland, notably his brother, the senior army captain, Brian Fitzwilliam. Consideration of Fitzwilliam within a wider European context and comparisons with figures such as Don Luis de Requesens, who served as governor of the Spanish Netherlands for a time during the 1570s, are also judicious and enlightening.
However, there are other aspects about this book that are frustrating. Surely the foremost criticism that could be made of Fennell's work is a lack of coherence to her argument. The present reviewer found himself wondering what the book is meant to focus on. Is it a biography? Is it an assessment of Fitzwilliam's career as treasurer? Or is it meant to be a straight-forward account of his Irish career? If it is a biography, it is a patchy one. If it is an assessment of his career as treasurer, then it strays into other areas somewhat unnecessarily, and does not provide background discussion about the wider finances of Tudor Ireland which would have been crucial to exploring the significance of Fitzwilliam's tenure of this office. And if it is an assessment of Fitzwilliam's Irish career in its broadest sense, it almost entirely omits sections of that career. Fitzwilliam's role in the fomenting of the Nine Years War is largely ignored. Moreover, the epilogue, which covers Fitzwilliam's second term as viceroy between 1588 and 1594 feels like an afterthought. A large proportion of it deals with the accusations levelled against Fitzwilliam by the deputy remembrancer of the Irish exchequer, Robert Legge, a figure who left behind voluminous writings on Fitzwilliam's administration, but these are noted rather than explored in any depth. These problems are compounded by lengthy sections which offer details on the finances of Ireland in the 1560s without a clear articulation of why these same figures are significant. At times it feels as though the rehearsing of the ingoings and outgoings of the Irish exchequer during the 1560s, as provided in Fitzwilliam's accounts, is important in and of itself. Critical questions are not asked. For instance, was Fitzwilliam responsible for letting the Irish financial establishment expand during the 1560s in ways that had implications for decades to come?
Other complaints might seem more mundane but are nevertheless substantial. For instance, while Fennell is to be praised for consulting works on viceroys elsewhere in Europe during the sixteenth century, it is a pity that this judicious use of secondary material does not extend to Ireland itself. Many relevant works are entirely missing from Fennell's discussion. A glaring omission is Vincent Carey's study of the eleventh earl of Kildare, which deals with the fraught politics of the 1560s and 1570s. But surely the most egregious omission is Hiram Morgan's Tyrone's Rebellion, an entire chapter of which provides one of the most significant assessments of Fitzwilliam's second term as Irish viceroy. Neither work is listed in the bibliography nor cited in the footnotes. Instead, we have an over-reliance throughout on the textbook, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors (1998, 2nd edn. 2014) by Steven Ellis. As with other studies in the Wehrhahn Verlag series on ‘The Formation of Europe’, the index is inadequate. There are no sub-entries except for Fitzwilliam himself, while several individuals such as Legge who are mentioned on multiple occasions in the text received no index entry at all.
There is much of merit in this book (not least Wehrhahn Verlag's ability to produce attractive texts like this at a very reasonable price) and it certainly should be consulted and appreciated for its strengths by historians of the period, but it would have benefited from a tighter focus, a more careful consideration of the existing secondary literature and a clearer focus.