‘The Cecils and Ireland’ conference - Welcome and Session One

26th Nov 2021 Listen back to the welcome by Professor Eve Patten,
Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub followed by talks from Dr
Alan Kelly PhD TCD titled ‘The secretaries before the Cecils: the
foundations of an Irish policy 1495 – 1558’ and Dr David Heffernan,
School of History, University College Cork gave a presentation
titled ‘Sir William Cecil and the shaping of English policy in
Ireland, 1558 – 1598’. 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.
http://www.lordburghley500.org/ Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/