MILITARY history, when serves the ready popular it is well written, deserves the ready popularity it receives from a devoted if at times biased reading public. The reissue of Cyril Falls's classic, Elizabeth's Irish Wars, is welcomed by all who read Irish history for academic reasons and by a much wider group who attend the meetings of the Military History Society. The destruction of the medieval world of castle and monastery in Ireland occurred in the half century that Cyril Falls examines in this fine study of Anglo Irish relations.
It was a period when Elizabeth's armies in Ireland relentlessly pursued the Tudor objective of pacifying Ireland, personified in the stern figure of Elizabeth I. In practice this meant reducing to powerlessness what Cyril Falls describes as "the strength of the menace to English power represented by an alliance between rebellious Ireland and Spain".
What Elizabeth's administrators perceived as a general state of rebelliousness during her 45 year reign can be read as dissatisfaction with Tudor policy among her subjects. For her Irish lords there was an added, rankling sense of injustice over dispossession of lands. Cyril Falls demonstrates that the devastating wars of the second half of her reign reduced the great lordship of the Geraldines in Munster to famine conditions, immortalised in Spenser's descriptions as a participant in that war. The final confrontation between Elizabeth and her arch traitor, Hugh O'Neill, in the Nine Years War, was played out for high stakes. Her death coincided with the military conquest of the whole island.
During her reign the Tudor state in Ireland established itself on foundations of contemporary colonial theory. Swift punishment of the great rebels was followed by confiscation of their lands and the introduction of settlers from England, Wales, and Scotland. Her viceroys quickly learnt to become commanders in chief. Arguably Elizabeth's government was forced to take drastic military measures to guard Ireland against invasion from Spain. There was a moment in the Nine Years War, after Hugh O'Neill's victory at the Battle of the Yellor Ford, when Ireland could have been incorporated into the European Hapsburg Empire. The moment passed. Falls's analysis of the disaster of Kinsale is exemplary military history.
In examining a crucial phase in the formative decades of Ireland's relationship with Great Britain, Cyril Falls, an Oxford scholar, raises disturbing questions, some of which he endeavours to answer. As a military historian, he supplies the answer in terms of a military solution. Elizabeth's armies were more competent, better organised and, with the exception of Hugh O'Neill, had better leaders. The Elizabethan state, centralised in the person of a brilliant monarch, was more advanced materially and in the scale of Renaissance values, more culturally mature.
The English style of warfare, in methods of planning and strategy, was superior. It was also ruthless. The divide and conquer strategy of employing Irish forces and Irish leaders such as Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormonde, was accompanied by the systematic devastation of the countryside and by the placing of garrisons at key points.
Falls's book appeared before the late G.A. Hayes McCoy, Ireland's finest military historian, produced his classic studies of the nature of Irish warfare. By suggesting that Elizabeth's Irish wars exemplified the clash of two civilisations, one ancient, even atavistic, the other a centralised state marching to a different military tune, Falls prepared the way for new avenues of research.
Later scholars have illuminated this important period when two societies drew away from mutual understanding of each other. Falls convinces the reader that overwhelming technical superiority and willingness to spend money on military outlay succeeds. He also implies that a higher degree of statesmanship would have secured a different and happier future for Anglo Irish relations.