Reviews of Books

Reviewed by David Edwards, University College, Cork

In the summer of 1580, much of southern Ireland was in the grip of war following the outbreak of the Desmond rebellion. The revolt was destined to become one of the bloodiest conflicts in Irish history, producing tens of thousands of casualties across the province of Munster. In Dublin, however, the English official charged with financing the royal war effort against the rebels, Treasurer and Treasurer-at-War Sir Henry Wallop, was thinking of happier things. The war, he felt, would soon be over, and then it would be time for the good servants of the crown—people like himself—to receive their due reward. Having conferred with outgoing Lord Justice Sir William Pelham and Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Edward Waterhouse, Wallop agreed that "Mr. Waterhouse" would draw up a "platt" (p. 108), or proposal, for Queen Elizabeth I and the Privy Council in London, advocating the granting of Munster land to certain great persons of state.	1
It was an astonishing scheme. Ignoring that many native landowners in Munster remained loyal to the crown and would expect to have their lands and rights respected, it apparently proposed that the whole province should be granted to the Protestant war party at court headed by the earl of Leicester. Wallop, Waterhouse, and Pelham had derived much favor from Leicester already. Plainly, they expected to derive much more. Thus they urged that Leicester should become lord and master of County Cork (the largest county in Ireland), while County Kerry was to be given to his brother, the earl of Warwick, or else to his precocious nephew Sir Philip Sidney. Leicester took the platt seriously. He sent an envoy to Munster, who in July 1580 was conveyed by Pelham and Waterhouse up the Shannon estuary as far as Limerick City in order to appraise some of the lands that might be seized and granted to him. In the event, the project failed and was forgotten; despite Wallop's confidence, the war in the south dragged on until 1583, after which a state-sponsored colonial experiment, the Munster Plantation (1584), was introduced, confined to only parts of the province. Waterhouse and Pelham both missed out on this latter scheme, and Wallop had to settle for a mere lease of church lands at Adare, County Limerick, an outcome that irked them all greatly and left them hungry for land elsewhere.	2
Hitherto overlooked in studies of English colonization in Ireland, Wallop's ill-fated attempt to advance the interests of the Leicester party is discussed with telling effect in Nicholas Canny's new book Making Ireland British, 1580–1650. In a sense, the episode encapsulates much of the story that Canny has to tell. Charged with the task of "reforming" Irish society and making it more governable, successive generations of Englishmen from Wallop's time onward interpreted their orders liberally to allow them to pursue an alternate agenda of conquest, colonization, and, above all, unrestricted self-enrichment.1	. . .