This is an old–fashioned book, concerning relatively well–known events, written in the main as a conventional interpretive narrative. It was not meant to be that way. At the outset (a setting out that took place far too long ago) the study was intended to serve as a contribution to the recently revitalised topic of the Tudor conquest of Ireland. By that time the traditional account of sixteenth–century Irish history as an era in which the last bastions of ‘the Celtic fringe’ gradually collapsed in face of the superior armed strength of a centralised Tudor state was already being superseded by interpretations of considerably greater sophistication. A number of historians, notably David Quinn, Nicholas Canny and Brendan Bradshaw, were then drawing attention to important developments within the Tudor attitude towards Ireland, and were suggesting that such alterations could be related to significant ideological shifts that were taking place in English political culture throughout the sixteenth century.