The Twilight Lords: An Irish Chronicle: The Fierce, Doomed Struggle of the Last Great Feudal Lords of Ireland Against the England of Elizabeth I

by Richard J. Berleth

Book Overview

A gripping chronicle of the ferocious twenty-year struggle between the English monarch and the feudal lords of Ireland. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566195985
• ISBN13: 9781566195980
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Books
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 9.3" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

Excellent reading on dark period of Irish history

Like the previous reviewer wrote, this book centered mostly around the Desmond Wars which proves to be a highly destructive conflict for the Irish people. But the book also understand that Elizabeth didn't go into Ireland by chocie but by necessity. A weak nation so close to England where it could be used by her many enemies, Elizabeth couldn't let the Irish alone. Irish lords didn't help the matter by catering to Elizabeth's enemies. The near genocidial wars that took place during Elizabeth's reign was direct result of all that. Religion, English effort to colonialized and taxes didn't help. I thought the book covered the entire story of these Irish wars very nicely without boggling down the reader with excess information. But like the previous reviewer, I wish the author went bit more into the O'Neill rebellion which was quite important.

The End Of Celtic Ireland

The author presents a fair and balanced account of the Irish wars between the 1560s and 1603. Most of the book concentrates on the First and Second Desmond wars, and the adventures of "The Desmond", Gerald Fitzgerald. Many giants of the age move across the pages of this book. We are introduced to Edmund Spenser ("The Faerie Queen"), Sir Walter Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth I, Phillip II of Spain, Francis Walshingham, William Cecil, Robert Dudley, James FitzMaurice, Gerald Fitzgerald, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Hugh O'Neill, James Eustace, Father Sanders, and many, many more. Unfortunately, only 30-40 pages of the book are dedicated to the O'Neill uprising of the 1590s and early 1600s. One has the sense that the author was compelled to cut the work short. He rushes through the story of Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell, all the while exclaiming that theirs was the most significant rebellion in Ireland's history. Perhaps Mr. Berleth had grown tired of his subject by that point, and moved on to more interesting pursuits. Even so, The Twilight Lords was an illuminating read, and I highly recommend it to students of Irish and Elizabethan English history.

A Depressing but compelling narrative of Elizabeth's Kossovo

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.

It's a mindboggling history of the Irish holocaust.

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.