Elizabeth's reign was calamitous for Ireland and indeed the mismanagement there was close to bringing disaster upon England as well. Why could she not have muddled through in Ireland with the sort of Tudor consensus and conciliation that worked for England and Wales? Elizabeth had good intentions towards Ireland and Irish but these were stymied by a range of historical, political, gender and personal issues. Unlike Wales, the subjugation of Ireland had not been completed during the middle ages. Henry VIII had embarked upon the integration of Ireland at a time of religious upheaval and strategic threat. This process – the so-called reformation of Ireland – was still ongoing when Elizabeth came to the throne and the international situation became more menacing both ideologically and militarily as her reign unfolded. Female monarchical rule was a difficult enough task in the home polity but the task of governing a subordinate kingdom through male proxies made the government of Ireland doubly difficult. This paper starts with the problems facing Elizabeth in Ireland, looks at the personalities and policies of those she governed through, examines the responses of the Irish elite and makes some conclusions.

The Tudor regime faced its greatest challenge in Ireland at the turn of the sixteenth century. The extension of royal authority had run into fierce opposition from a confederacy of Gaelic lords led by Hugh O'Neill. The Tudors stigmatized such resistance as rebellion but the fact that it was taking place in a dependent kingdom in which the monarch was not resident quickly rendered it a war of liberation. This prompts comparison with the other great independence struggle of the early modern period – the Dutch revolt. In both cases the language of faith and fatherland came to the fore. In Ireland this rhetoric was directed at the English-speaking descendants of the Norman conquerors whose support was crucial to the success of O'Neill's cause. Yet it fell on deaf ears because the confederates were unable to legitimize their struggle in the eyes of these catholic loyalists. The sources of political and religious legitimacy were stronger in The Netherlands. While the Netherlandish provincial estates were founts of popular sovereignty, the Irish parliament was an organ of the Tudor state. And whereas in Holland the source of ecclesiastical authority was the non-hierarchical Dutch Reformed Church, in Ireland it was externalized in the person of Clement VIII who could not be won over in spite of the efforts of Peter Lombard, O'Neill's agent in Rome.

The period between the Kildare rebellion and the plantation of Ulster marks the final phase of a distinct political system. During these years the English administration in Ireland made strenuous efforts to reform Gaelic society. This paper aims to show that indigenous society was not inevitably doomed to submit before a superior Renaissance state. Indeed it proved flexible in responding to the challenge and was itself in the process of ‘modernisation’. This process was most marked in Ulster which was the strongest Gaelic region and the crown’s most intractable problem. The northern province was differentiated from the other Gaelic regions of Ireland by its political and physical geography. Ulster was an homogeneous cultural zone and contained the powerful polities of Tyrone, ruled by the O’Neills, and Tirconnell, ruled by the O’Donnells. Guarding the southern approaches of the province was a barrier of rough terrain interrupted by lakes and passes.

Colonization, as a means of reforming Ireland, had been advocated by certain Anglo-Irish politicians and English administrators since the early sixteenth century. This policy had been activated in 1548. Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77), a leading political and intellectual figure, contributed to the policy's development in the early 1570s with his colonial venture in eastern Ulster. Under Elizabeth, he served as ambassador to France on two occasions and held the principal secretaryship between 1572 and 1576. Smith is regarded as an important English humanist. His main works, A discourse of the commonweal of this realm of England (1549) and De republica Anglorum (1565) analyse respectively the economic problems and the legal and political system of the period.