sins of commission and omission. By actively purging modern values and convictions from their assessment of historical events, Revisionists, Bradshaw charged, disguised a powerfully destructive ideology in the guise of benign explanation. In response to the nationalist attempt to establish long lines of continuity between the modern Irish nation and its historical predecessors, Bradshaw alleged that the Revisionists have with equal zeal interpreted "the past as a foreign country." In this approach to the past, he argued, the Revisionists have neglected a central aspect of it. "It is . . . in responding to the interpretative challenge posed by the catastrophic dimensions of Irish history," Bradshaw has written, "that the sins of omission of the value-free school are to be observed."8 The reluctance of Revisionist historians to make recourse to value judgments, Bradshaw argued, has marginalized, and even excluded, a central aspect of Irish history from the historical record. Though at times disturbingly presentist in orientation, Bradshaw has valuably emphasized the importance of personal values and biases for early modern Irish historiography. Sensitivity to the catastrophic dimensions of Irish history, he suggested, permits a clearer comprehension of the choices and forces that shaped it.

9. Foster, Modern Ireland, 51.

10. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 124; quoted in Canny, "Early Modern Ireland," 103.

11. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 124; Canny, "Early Modern Ireland," 103.

12. Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 111.

13. Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 32-57.

14. Ibid., 32-33.

15. In the second chapter of The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century, Bradshaw engages in an extensive analysis of the two varieties of the Old English reform movement. The first, arising during the early years of the sixteenth century, sought reforms on a limited scale; it aimed to stabilize the Pale before extending English jurisdiction to the Gaelic hinterlands. The second, emergent by the later 1520s, sought a general reformation that would encompass the entire island; this impulse, Bradshaw argues, embodied the principles of commonwealth liberalism. Discussion of the distinctions between these two impulses is better left to Bradshaw; what is important, for purposes of this essay, is not the subtle differences in the Old English demands for reform but rather the general themes and similarities that these demands reflected.

16. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 44-45.

17. Ibid., 46-48.

18. Sir Patrick Finglas, "A Breviate of the getting of Ireland, and of the Decaie of the Same," in Hibernica: Or, some Antient Pieces relating to Ireland, ed. Walter Harris (Dublin: 1747), 82.

19. Coyne and Livery was a Gaelic extraction that provided for private military retinues, not unlike the system of bastard feudalism characteristic of fifteenth-century England.

20. Finglas, "Breviate," 84.

21. Ibid., 101.

22. Ibid., 88.

23. Ibid., 88.

24. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 130-132; Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 145-147.

25. According to the provisions of Poyning's Law (1494), "the Irish council had to request permission from London for the holding of a private assembly, and it had to transmit to the English king and his Privy Council there the bills which it intended to pass in the Irish legislature. Only when the bills were returned in the approved form to Dublin could parliament be asked to go ahead and pass them into law." Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 14.

26. Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 147.

27. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 131.

28. Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565-1576 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976), 32.

29. "An Act that the king of England, his heirs and his successors be kings of Ireland," in Irish Historical Documents 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis and R. B. McDowell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 77.

30. Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 154-155.

31. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 238.

32. Ibid., 189, 240, 238.

33. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 140.

34. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 237.

35. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 139.

36. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 264.

37. Hans Claude Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, 11 vols. (1860; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1974), 1:59; James Gairdner, ed., Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509-1547, 21 vols. (1883; Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), 16:486.

38. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 140.

39. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 33-34.

40. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 148.

41. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 34.

42. Ibid., 35.

43. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 245.

44. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 229.

45. Bellingham, one of the new advocates of a military conquest of Ireland, had first imposed the seneschal system in Wicklow to suppress the Byrnes, O'Tooles, and Kavanaghs. Under this system, an English captain ruled as a seneschal, or bailiff, in the place of the dismissed Gaelic chieftain, enforced martial law, and financed himself and his retinues by the rents and dues of the subdued Gaelic Irish. See Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 34.

46. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 35.

47. In The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565-1576, Nicholas Canny writes that "[t]he scheme outlined by Sidney was, in many ways, an elaboration upon the proposals for the government of Ireland put forward in 1562 by [then-Lord Deputy] Sussex," but that it "was essentially different in purpose and broke away from the limited objective of defending the Pale" (Canny 47-48). Steven Ellis takes him to task on this point: "the 'new departure,'" Ellis writes, "had been anticipated by Sussex and was less novel or systematically pursued than had been thought" (Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 250). This essay is not concerned with settling this dispute between Canny and Ellis. What is important for our purposes is not whether Sussex or Sidney designed the program for military conquest, but rather that this program of military conquest was pursued by the crown administration.

48. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 47.

49. Ibid., 49-51.

50. Arthur Collins, ed., Letters and Memorials of State, In the Reigns of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James, King Charles the First, Part of the Reign of Charles the Second, and Oliver's Usurpation, Written and collected By Sir Henry Sydney . . . (1746; New York: AMS Press, 1973), 24.

51. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 64-67.

52. Ibid., 70.

53. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 82.

54. Ibid.

55. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 90.

56. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 246.

57. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 37.

58. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 267.

59. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 142.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 143-144.

62. Ibid., 147.

63. Ibid., 140-141.

64. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 284-286.

65. Ibid., 286.

66. Colm Lennon, "Richard Stanihurst (1547-1618) and Old English Identity," in Irish Historical Studies 21 (1978), 130.

67. Richard Stanihurst, "A Treatise Conteining a plaine and perfect description of Ireland; with an Introduction to the better understanding of the histories apperteining to that Iland," in Chronicles, ed. Raphael Hollinshed and William Harrison (London: 1586), 34.

68. Ibid., 10.

69. Ibid., 44.

70. Ibid., 44.

71. Clarke, "Colonial Identity," 60.

72. Ibid., 71.

73. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 132.

74. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 13.

75. Ibid., 35-36.

76. James P. Myers, Jr., "Introduction," in A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued [And] Brought Under Obedience of the Crown Until the Beginning of His Majesty's Happy Reign, ed. James P. Myers, Jr. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 3-4.

77. Sir John Davies, Historical Relations: Or, a Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Intirely Subdu'd nor Brought under Obedience of the Crown of England until the Beginning of the Reign of King James of Happy Memory, 3d ed. (Dublin: 1666), 4, in A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700, ed. Donald Wing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945).

78. Ibid., 164.

79. Ibid., 150.

80. Quoted here are the most conspicuously "nationalist" aims of Hugh O'Neill's rebellion. For the remainder, see "Hugh O'Neill's War Aims, 1599," in Irish Historical Documents 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis and R. B. McDowell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 119-120.

81. Canny, "Early Modern Ireland," 113.

82. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 300-303.

83. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 303.

84. Davies, Discovery, 65.

85. Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 18.