Sixty-six years ago now, Philip Wilson, in his book The beginnings of modern Ireland, focused attention on the 1530s and the two succeeding decades as the period of crucial significance in early modern Irish history. This study originated in a hunch that Wilson was right in his conclusion but that his unionist sympathies had led his argument astray, and that the theme was worth reworking. It was worth reworking, I felt, not for the satisfaction of revising Wilson – that was entirely incidental – but in order to attempt afresh what he had attempted and what no one had attempted since, to my knowledge. That was to provide a conceptual framework for the discussion of the political and constitutional history of early modern Ireland. I was and remain convinced that such a framework must exist before the themes with which political historians have come to occupy themselves recently – the social and economic dynamics of political history, and the like – may usefully be taken up in the context of early modern Ireland. If, therefore, this study is old-fashioned in its preoccupations and in its methodology, those who are kind enough to give it a second glance may find that it is not, for all that, irrelevant.

It is usual in the preface to a work of this kind to discuss in a general way the sources on which it is based. So let me be general. The list of sources set out in the Bibliography contains little with which any serious scholar of sixteenth-century Ireland will not be familiar. It would serve small purpose to work through the list here.