No one in the Elizabethan regime knew more about Ireland than did William Cecil. For thirty-five years he was the one constant in Irish affairs: fifteen men held the governorship over that period, and they all reported to him. Just what he knew and what he attempted to do with it forms the heart of this excellent and much-needed study. Its overarching argument may not surprise—Cecil, who always saw Ireland in terms of English interests, was an obsessive bureaucrat and trusty servant rather than alter rex—but the supporting details make this essential reading.

The book is divided into three parts, the first of which sets the historical background of both English-Irish relations in the early sixteenth century as it changed from lordship (chapter 1) to kingdom (chapter 2) and Cecil's own rise in the government bureaucracy, chiefly his time as secretary under Edward VI. The bulk of the text and its most fascinating bits come in the thematically organized part II, “Ireland Matters.” Chapter 3, “Correspondence and Points of Contact,” focuses on governance from a distance. Cecil, who never visited Ireland, privileged practical knowledge provided by those on the ground. Chapter 4, “Government and Policy,” addresses how Cecil used that knowledge: his thinking on Ireland was always derivative, reactionary, and directed toward the best interests of the Tudor state.

From a historiographical perspective, the ensuing three chapters are the most crucial. Chapter 5 tackles matters financial, a vital and understudied subject, and demonstrates Cecil's conviction that control over Ireland was worth any cost, even if queen, soldiers, and loyal residents in Ireland felt he managed the purse poorly. Chapter 6's assessment of his dealings with the Irish themselves is of immense value given the subject's importance in the scholarship. Maginn argues that while Cecil may have seen English-Irish relations as a basic clash of civilization, he, unlike some others in the regime, sought to “comprehend, rather than to denigrate or seek to destroy outright” (162) the Irish and their culture. Chapter 7 takes up religion and provocatively states that it always occupied a subordinate role to secular matters in Cecil's reforming efforts.

Part III, “Burghley's Ireland,” attends to his legacy. Chapter 8, a survey of the realm in the year of Cecil's death, advances the claim that while Tyrone's rebellion reveals the short-term failure of Cecil's policies, the failure of the rising was in fact a sign of their longer-term success: the framework of governance and law that Cecil helped orchestrate was strong enough to withstand the epiphenomenon of rebellion, even one as severe as the Nine Years’ War. The final chapter argues that Cecil was sufficiently “behind the scenes” and lacking in ambition to use Ireland to aggrandize or enrich himself so that contemporaries did not associate him with rule there. Ireland was no more a Regnum Cecilianum than was England. All told, Cecil comes across as simultaneously big and small minded: he saw shades of gray and thus worked at times with Gaels and Catholics, yet his lack of vision ensured that Ireland's incorporation into the Tudor state was a “disaster by contemporary European and English standards alike” (230).

Though it is fabulously erudite, one might wish the book to be more expressly engaged with the historiography. The secondary literature rests gently on the narrative, which may leave its many interventions to hover below the nonspecialist radar and potentially limit their impact. This would be unfortunate because positions advanced here have crucial bearing on our understanding of the period. In addition to those noted above, we might consider three cases in point, starting with Maginn's suggestion that modern historians have made the issue of English-Irish relations more complex than contemporaries believed them to be. Did Elizabethans really break down into “coercion” and “persuasion” camps, and is it modern historians who have complicated matters by imagining, then describing, a constellation of incompatible positions on governance of the realm? In addition, the author writes that “Tudor policy in Ireland was not, even in the last full decade of Elizabeth's reign, set inexorably on a course of conquest and coercion” (111). Considering the central place of colonialism and its effects in both early modern Irish historiography and in metanarrative work on subjects such as human rights and imperialism, it would have been enlightening to read more on this subject and its debates. Finally, to frame Ireland as a constitutive part of the “Tudor state” is not an uncontroversial move, even if it is constitutionally accurate. On these and other issues, it would have been welcome had Maginn weighed in more heavily on the implications of the interpretations advanced here. Others undoubtedly will do so, for this is a masterful study of true importance. When they do, we may hope that the author takes off the gloves and proves more Essex than Cecil in response.