‘The Cecils and Ireland’ conference - Session 2

26th Nov 2021 Listen back to Session 2 – Chair: Prof Susan Flavin,
Dept. History, Trinity College Dublin with guest speakers, Dr Jim
Murray, Director of Development, Quality and Qualifications
Ireland, presentation titled ‘William Cecil and the early
Elizabethan Reformation in Ireland’ and Dr Brian Jackson,
Technological University of South-East Ireland, presentation titled
‘Sir William Cecil and the CounterReformation in Ireland’. About
the conference Not that long ago, the idea of relating the Cecils,
both Lord Burghley and his son Lord Salisbury, to the history of
Ireland in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century would have
been regarded as marginal and insignificant. And several major
studies of these great figures were produced over the course of the
twentieth century without any address to Ireland at all. Such a
radically reduced peripheral vision was in part ideological – the
often uncritical assumption that the history of England could be
entirely treated independently of its neighbours, Scotland, Ireland
and Wales. But it was also considerably reinforced in the
nineteenth century by archival decisions within the (then) Public
Record Office to separate the massive State Paper collections into
sections of Domestic, Foreign, Scotland, and Ireland in a manner
that suggested that all of the problems arising in these areas
could be separated into distinct and hierarchical compartments. In
recent decades, however, historians, English, Scottish and Irish
have broken free from such artificial divisions, and revealed the
many varied and complex ways in which the thinking of the
Elizabethans was richly informed by a sense of the
interconnectedness of all the regions within this western
archipelago. Central to this re-interpretation has been a
reassessment of the policies developed and strategies deployed of
the by the leading figures in Elizabethan government, notably the
Cecils. Recent studies by Stephen Alford, Ciaran Brady, Jane
Dawson, David Heffernan and others have revealed the way in which
decisions concerning Irish policy were influenced, altered and
deferred by other foreign policy considerations, and how foreign
policy attitudes were conversely influenced by assessments of the
state of Ireland in a manner that has never previously been
appreciated. The purpose of this conference is to build on such
substantial recent research, by extending both the breadth and the
depth of this interrogation of Anglo-Irish relations in the early
modern period. The contributors are all experts who have published
widely in this field and are actively engaged in further original
research. This conference is a partnership between the Trinity Long
Room Hub and the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation.
www.lordburghley500.org/ Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/