Brendan Bradshaw

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2127249.html

This is an in depth look at the Irish policy of the later part of the reign of Henry VIII, arguing that Thomas Cromwell was (as in everything else) a key actor in dismantling the old regime, of leaving Ireland to muddle through under the Earl of Kildare, and that after his fall, two relatively obscure figures from Irish history, Anthony St Leger and Thomas Cusack, engineered the policies of surrender and regrant and of making Ireland a kingdom under Henry VIII in its own right (previously English kings were "Lords of Ireland"). In both cases this was doggedly carried through in the teeth of resistance from the old guard and of vicious court politics in London; it is particularly interesting to see how the officials persuaded Henry to agree to their plans after he had expressed characteristic opposition, or alternatively where they just went ahead and did what they wanted anyway knowing that he was on the other side of the sea and had no easy way of punishing or replacing them.

The claim of the book's title that this was a "constitutional revolution" is a little exaggerated; the old system was overthrown, sure, but that is not really Bradshaw's focus; and the St Leger / Cusack reform policy, after a promising start, wasn't followed through as Henry ran out of money and time, and his successors had other concerns during their brief reigns. (St Leger continued to serve as head of the Irish government, off and on, under both Edward VI and Mary I.) But it's convincing to say that what was going on in the 1530s and 1540s was a genuinely interesting and different constitutional experiment, to incorporate the peripheral but troublesome Irishry into the English-rules realm, and it had a lot of contemporary resonances for me with my own work on unrecognised states.… (mere)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1333338.html

It is a micro-study of one policy area concentrated on a period of a few years and geographically restricted mainly to the core areas of English rule in Ireland. But he puts forward, entirely convincingly, the evidence that the suppression of the Irish monasteries was driven at least as much by local circumstances and leaders as by the demands of Henry VIII, and that in fact it was no big deal - the monasteries had long since lost their way as centres of spiritual leadership, or even providers of public welfare, and had become blocks on economic and political development. The monks were in general easily bought off, and the only demonstration of popular protest against their dissolution was the successful mobilisation of public opinion in Dublin to save Christ Church Cathedral. The policy enabled Henry VIII to pull the Gaelic lords (and the Earl of Desmond) more tightly into his project of transforming Ireland from a Lordship to a Kingdom, with considerable success.… (mere)