‘Reform’ treatises and the inception of the Tudor conquest in mid-sixteenth-century Ireland, 1546–1565

The chapter begins in 1546 when a military incursion was launched by the Dublin government against the Irish lordships of the O’Mores and O’Connors in the Irish midlands of Laois and Offaly. I argue that this military venture was the first step in the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Eventually in the 1550s the plantation of this region was undertaken, thus initiating the general pattern whereby Ireland would be conquered and resettled down to the end of the seventeenth century. The chapter then goes on to examine the other major policy issues of the mid-Tudor period, specifically the growing threat posed to the Tudor state by Shane O’Neill’s ascendancy in Ulster and the incursion of Scottish settlers from the Outer Hebrides into the north-east of Ireland. Finally, consideration is given to the long viceregal administration of the third earl of Sussex and the criticism it drew from Irish officials in the late 1550s and early 1560s owing to its recourse to the ‘cess’ and other practices. Throughout the chapter how these issues arose in the treatises is discussed and the ideas put forward contextualised.