Since, unlike Plutarch, I write history and not lives, I should warn the unsuspecting reader that this work was neither conceived nor executed as a biography of Richard Boyle. Rather it has been designed as a series of studies based on Boyle's life experience which are intended as a contribution to a series of debates of general importance that are currently engaging the attention of historians in many countries. Each chapter, with the exception of the first which is introductory, is capable of standing on its own, but the book was also conceived as a whole and will hopefully be accepted as a contribution to understanding the mores of planter society in early-modern Ireland. To that extent this work is a logical continuation from The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, and a foretaste of what is to come in a book on a broader canvas, on which I have been engaged for several years, to be entitled Ireland in the English Colonial System, 1580–1650.

The composition of the book was very much a Galway achievement in that the research was undertaken during the vacation periods of the years 1975–9 and the writing was done in time stolen from my leisure activities. During those years I have been constantly vigilant to spare my students from mention of Richard Boyle, but the ideas that run through the book have been tried out on unsuspecting colleagues, graduate students and undergraduates.