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The problem of Ireland in Tudor foreign policy, 1485–1603. By William Palmer. Pp ix, 161. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer. 1994. £29.50.

THE question of Ireland's place in Tudor foreign policy has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Apart from a handful of studies, the writings of historians have presented Ireland mainly as a domestic issue for the Tudors, only infrequently adverting to the country's significance (or lack of it) in European diplomacy during the Renaissance and Reformation period. The result has been not just to emphasise the contemporary peripherality of the country in early modern Europe, but also to consign it to relative historiographical inconsequence. William Palmer's book is a welcome attempt to address this myopia. His approach is to track the appearance of Irish affairs in the foreign policy of each of the Tudor monarchs, and also to assess the impact of that policy on the English administration in Ireland. Using mostly Irish state papers and printed calendars, Palmer briskly covers the ground, collecting and analysing the many 'bruits', rumours, reports and alarums which stud the correspondence of Tudor state officials relating to Ireland. While disarmingly admitting the tenuity of much of the evidence of 'rumour-mongering common among Tudor diplomats', the author does demonstrate quite effectively how Ireland was sucked into the Franco-Scottish nexus down to 1559. The effects of Spain's replacement of France as England's national enemy, culminating in Ireland in the crisis of the Nine Years War, are shown to have been especially reverberant. Disappointingly, however, although the constitutional implications of Ireland's being considered a papal fief are raised briefly in the context of changes wrought by the Reformation in the 1530s, the issue is not really examined again for the Counter-Reformation period.