The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland
Philip Sidney, Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, the Earl of Essex, Frances Walsingham (the spymaster’s daughter) and many other illustrious Elizabethans whom most of us know about, all spent part of their careers in Ireland, the part which most of us know least about. Historians and novelists who write about such celebrities usually pay scant attention to Irish affairs, regarding them as a distraction from more interesting events, as indeed did the Queen herself.
Roy’s scholarly and magisterial work gives us the Irish dimension in full, and much, much more. Perhaps the only criticism is that most of it is not about Ireland. Although Roy is an Irish American scholar, this is a surprisingly Anglo-centric book which also finds space to deal with France and Spain. The capture of Cadiz by the English takes as much space as the battle of Kinsale. The entire Elizabethan Age is here, even a critique of the Faerie Queen, which is a bonus since Roy writes with a caustic wit which does not spare the savagery and ineptitude of so many of our Elizabethan heroes.
