Welsh Journals

dynamic change in the writing of history, and made striking generalization impossible. Even so, to conclude a chapter on politics with the judgement that 'any political "triumph of the gentry" was more limited than some historians have suggested' is perhaps to shy at a crucial fence. I have a nagging feeling that these two centuries did see far-reaching change, economically, politically, even socially; that the gentry were both leading actors in the process, and heavily affected by it; and that a single chapter on politics, sandwiched between 'administration' and 'education' is not enough to do justice to the theme. But what is notable is the authors' courage in tackling so vast a subject, their thoroughness in investigation, their rich use of telling quotation and apt example. This is a major work; the comparison with Stone is not inapt. C. S. L. DAVIES Wadham College, Oxford THE CHIEF GOVERNORS: THE RISE AND FALL OF REFORM GOVERNMENT IN TUDOR Ireland, 1536-1588. By Ciaran Brady. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xviii, 322. £ 35.00. Dr Brady's story is the sorry one of the 'long series of misunderstandings, miscalculations and failures' that paved the way for the tragedy of late Elizabethan and Stuart Ireland. In the overall aims of government, he demonstrates considerable continuities over the half-century following the Kildare rebellion of 1534 and the erection of the kingdom of Ireland in 1541. The Gaelic Irish and the subjects of the Anglo-Irish lords were to be assimilated to the English polity by the exercise of English law, the cultivation of English habits and the extension of English structures of government. The lords' extortion of 'coyne and livery' would have to be suppressed, individual rebels might need to be crushed, but the general process was to be one of accommodation, education and arbitration rather than expropriation or conquest. Three classes of obstacle, political, financial and cultural, combined to thwart these intentions. Irish politics could never be sufficiently stabilized to set the smooth process of assimilation in train, because the Butler/Geraldine rift ran so deep that almost every governor found himself reliant upon one group and opposed by the other; and Irish politics readily became linked to English politics, so that successive governors found themselves undercut at court. Secondly, what most impressed English monarchs and ministers was cheap yet stable rule, a chimera in an age of