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Irland y el Rey Prudente. By Enrique Garcia Hernan. [Coleccion Hermes, No. 2.] (Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, S.L. 2000. pp. 286; 5 maps. Paperback.)
An Irish Prisoner of Conscience in the Tudor Era: Archbishop Richard Creagh of Arnagh, 1523-1586. By Colm Lennon. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed in the United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 2000. Pp. 166. $39.50.)
Those Irish who resisted Tudor centralist and Reformation policies based their appeals to France, Spain, and Scotland now on religious grounds, now on the advantages to be gained by England's foreign enemies in a military diversion in Ireland. As the sixteenth century wore on, they increasingly played the card of Ireland as the "English Netherlands," where Philip II might trump Elizabeth by supporting revolt, at reasonable cost and with prospect of incalculable gain. Other Irish, of course, accepted royal supremacy and, if clergy, ecclesiastical preferment, if laity, English ennoblement. Still others like Archbishop Creagh sought to combine loyalty to the pope in spirituals with loyalty to the crown in temporals.
Until 1571 Philip, as Garcia remarks, was chiefly engaged in the Mediterranean, against Turks and Moriscos. Victory at Lepanto allowed him to turn to the north, keeping in mind that removal of Elizabeth might result in a hostile union of France, England, and Scotland (the latter two ruled by Mary Queen of Scots). He thus gave but limited encouragement to English or Irish revolt and made no undue effort to save Creagh (poisoned by his gaolers in 1586) or Mary (beheaded in 1587). Mary's death, however, cleared...