Customer Reviews

The Twilight Lords: An Irish Chronicle

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This is a highly readable, and indeed compelling, narrative history of Elizabeth I's Irish wars, with the bulk of the text concentrating on the Desmond Wars in Munster. The story is one of almost unrelieved horror, and indeed some of the incidental details are quite stomach-churning. The period is a pivotal one, not just in Anglo-Irish relations, but in the larger European context as well, in that during it newly-born religious enmities and emerging feelings of national identity created a sense of denial of the other party's humanity as never before. This is the twentieth-century experience of Bosnia, Kossovo and Afghanistan translated into a sixteenth-century Irish setting - indeed in some ways a prelude to the Thirty Years' War. The scale of devastation, the ruthlessness of the protagonists on both sides, the rapid descent into bestiality and the near impossibility of achieving any final settlement other than by outright massacre and exhaustion of the other side makes absorbing but depressing reading. Nobody comes well out of this history, unless it is the peasantry who, manipulated and expended like pawns by their own chieftains, somehow endured despite all, however diminished in numbers. Even allowing for the standards of the time, eminent Elizabethans such as Sir Walter Raleigh emerge as pathological killers and war criminals and their Gaelic counterparts are no more sympathetic. If this book has a weakness it is that it misses out on the epic of Donal O'Sullivan-Beara's epic retreat and skates over the Great O'Neill's 9-Years war in scarcely more than a chapter, despite this episode being in itself of comparable, perhaps greater magnitude, and potentially more significance in the European context, than the Desmond Wars.

This is an eye opening explanation of how today's troubles started. It tells the story of how Queen Elizabeth ordered every living thing (men, women, children, dogs, cows, horses, pigs) killed in the province of Munster. This was carried out to the letter. The entire southern part of Ireland was massacred. This caused a famine throughout Ireland, affecting everyone, the British included, because there weren't enough people left alive to plant or harvest the crops. The Irish fought back, usually losing, but occasionally winning, for a short time. The author documents the political and military history of Ireland from 1580 to 1602. This was just the beginning of hostilities between Ireland and England, which has never ceased in all the ensuing years.

I read this book while in my mid teens and even with my limited knowledge of Irish history then, I found misunderstandings in it that amused me. The author has a poor understanding of Irish history and gaelic culture. For instance, with regard to a rather important personage, in places the author doesn't seem to understand that this person is the same person that he mentions elsewhere. This mistake is due only to the use of irish adjectives instead of the person's full name, an understandable mistake for a novice of Gaelic culture, not for someone writing on it. ( he lists that person under the two names in different parts of the index showing different pages for each) This betrayed also an obvious lack of understanding of the Irish and of the various power spheres that existed over the length of the period the book addresses. The author wrote a book about the end of the Gaelic culture in Ireland, often contrasting it to the English culture. The problem is he understood the English but hardly understood the culture he wrote the book on.