Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 211

This marvellous book makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of early modern Irish history. The Butler earls of Ormond were the major landowning family in County Kilkenny and, of the Irish noble families of the early sixteenth-century, after the earls of Kildare they were the most English in their culture, political allegiance and alliances and County Kilkenny the most English of the Irish counties outside the Pale. From the middle of the sixteenth century anglicized legal structures were adopted in the county. One of the reasons for this affinity to England was the education of successive earls at the English court. The tenth earl (Thomas, the Black Earl, d. 1614) moved freely between Ireland and the Elizabethan court, and through his access to the Queen, was able to act as a counterweight to successive lord deputies. His house at Carrick-on-Suir, built in 1565, would not look out of place in an English county and we can assume that this was deliberately so. James Butler, twelfth earl, was brought up an English Protestant in the household of archbishop Abbott. Their familiarity with English conditions and desire to advance the anglicization of their estates led both into difficulties, the tenth earl with a revolt in 1569–70 which was largely sponsored by his siblings, and the twelfth earl in the collapse of his authority in 1641.

Despite its title, Edwards has written a book (or perhaps two parallel books) which are overwhelmingly political in their concerns and orientation. The subtitle is a better guide to his concerns than the main title. The first two chapters contain an overview of County Kilkenny and the Ormond inheritance and it is probably here that social and economic historians will find most to interest them. There is good material on the farming economy of the estates and on the establishment of new markets (and the town of Castlecomber). It is established that the Kilkenny lowlands were a productive grain-growing agrarian society. Trade through Kilkenny and Waterford also contributed to the Englishness of the estates: in 1597 the earl is found exporting local cloth to Plymouth.

Edwards shows how the lands of the earldom were strengthened by grants of monastic lands in mid-century (a process which can be paralleled in England). In other respects the tenth earl’s cordial relationship with Elizabeth led the earldom to acquire a standing and authority which her successors were eager to trim, especially after the end of Gaelic Ireland as a political force in 1603. Whilst the tenth earl substantially altered the character of his power in the 1560s with the abolition of coign and 212 the agricultural livery (an arbitrary tax to support private armies), it wasthe twelfth earl who really began the modernization of the estates in the 1630s, driven by the unmanageable levels of debt that he inherited.

The second part of book is an extended interpretative account of the family and their role in Ireland which ends with the rising of 1641. There are some very good sections here: a challenging reinterpretation of the revival of Butler power under the ninth earl (the Red Earl, d. 1539); the origins of the rising of 1569, born out of the alienation of the tenth earl’s younger brothers from his modernizing mission; of the inheritance disputes which followed the death of the tenth earl in 1614 and the descent into rebellion in 1641, with its account of the establishment of the Wandesford plantation in Idough. Seventeenth-century historians whose interest in British history ends at Holyhead and Fishguard (or Chester and Monmouth) should read at least the account of the inheritance dispute, in which James I arbitrated in the most partial fashion between the heir male, Walter Butler, eleventh earl (d. 1633) and Elizabeth countess of Desmond (d. 1628), the daughter of the tenth earl who married one of Buckingham’s creatures, Sir Richard Preston. The earl’s refusal to accept the royal arbitration of 1618 resulted in his imprisonment in the Tower until he submitted in 1625. This whole episode was, as Edwards says, characterized by the exercise of arbitrary justice. Edwards might have noted parallels with other contemporary royal interventions in English peerage disputes such as that between Lady Anne Clifford and her uncle, the fourth earl of Cumberland. (See B.Coward, ‘Disputed inheritances. Some difficulties of the nobility in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, Bull. Institute of Historical Research 44 (1971),pp.194–215 and R.T.Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Mont gomery, 1590–1676 (1997), esp. ch. 3.) Equally dubious was the creation of the Idough plantation, where the twelfth earl sold Sir Christopher Wandesford land which was not his and whose possessors, the O’Brennans and others, were then dispossessed by law backed by military force. Wandesford was Irish Master of the Rolls: it is shown that he paid Wentworth a bribe of £1,000 for his co-operation. As contemporaries realized, the whole episode was corrupt in the extreme and is interesting to speculate how the scandal might have developed had Ulster not risen in revolt in October 1641.

This is a very notable contribution early modern Irish history. The Butler earls of Ormond were unique not only in their standing in Ireland but in the survival of their archives. After a reading of Edwards’ book, one is left wondering whether it would be possible to write an economic account of the estates. Edwards mentions history review potentially useful materials which it is not his purpose to exploit but which others might wish to look at in the future. One thing is clear: over large parts of the estate, intermittent private and state violence against people and property must have been responsible for creating the very economic malaise which the English colonial interest claimed to cure through the establishment of property rights to land on the English model.

I am sure though that I am not the only reader whose ease of understanding would have been aided by a genealogy of the family and more maps.