Given that he spent almost a decade in the role of lord deputy, not to mention five stints as lord justice, Sir William Fitzwilliam (1526–99) might be thought of as a seminal figure in the administration of Tudor Ireland who has been unduly neglected by historians. There is a tendency to view his terms of office as an interlude between those Ciarán Brady dubbed ‘programmatic’ governors, men with a plan like Sir Henry Sidney and Sir John Perrot, whose failures have provided more dramatic material for historians than Fitzwilliam's more prosaic ones. This biography does much to rectify this neglect, while not substantially modifying perceptions of Fitzwilliam as a stopgap, a ‘a knowen removable’ as he believed himself to be seen by his masters. The term biography should perhaps be qualified, because this book is closer to an account of the Irish administration in Fitzwilliam's time than that of an individual's life. Given the way Ireland consumed the subject's life (and money), this is almost the same thing, but not quite. This is perhaps unavoidable, given the nature of the source material, most of which relates to his activities in Ireland and attendant financial woes. With the exception of some scrupulously-researched material on his early years and family background (indeed, highlighting the role played by family connections is a strength of the book), there is little account of Fitzwilliam's life outside his service in Ireland. The book jumps, for example, from the end of his first term as lord deputy in 1575 to the beginning of his second in 1588, with little mention of what he was up to in the intervening thirteen years.

Having established the background from which Fitzwilliam emerged, Fennell delves straight into the business of the Irish administration during his tenure as vice-treasurer, a position he held throughout the 1560s, and it is here that the dominant theme of the book emerges — namely finances, or rather the lack of them. This period saw a constant tug-of-war between a somewhat contradictory series of impulses, ranging from reform and conciliation of the Irish magnates, to the repression (most notably in Ulster and Desmond) of those that read into these policies a sign of weakness on the government's part. Fitzwilliam had the unenviable task of trying to square these expensive ambitions with the constant imperative from London to reduce expenditure. The result was vacillation and the half-hearted execution of military objectives that laid the seeds of discontent on the fringes of the Pale, while leaving the regime in Dublin ill-prepared to deal with the consequences. It was also financially ruinous, both for the crown and Fitzwilliam personally, who was liable for thousands of pounds of debt due to irregularities in his accounting.

The minutiae of Fitzwlliam's prodigious accounting disasters are admirably researched and presented by Fennell, and indeed an intimate familiarity with both the primary sources and the personnel of the administration at this time is evident throughout. One example of the author's attention to detail is deserving of note, and may necessitate a major revision of the subject's biography. This is with regard to the date of Fitzwilliam's arrival in Ireland and compelling evidence that historians have been mistaken in dating this to 1554, identifying Fitzwilliam as heading the commission that investigated charges of corruption against Lord Deputy St Leger. This individual, Fennell suggests, was an entirely different William Fitzwilliam who was born in Ireland, and cites correspondence from Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam that he did not arrive in the country until 1558. Such sharp use of primary sources is laudable, although at times the detail is almost overwhelming, and might have been leavened to good effect with an integration of the regime's concerns into the broader sweep of Irish history in his crucial period, when the groundwork for the great transformations of the seventeenth century were being laid.

The miseries of service in Ireland left Fitzwilliam a beholden figure, practically begging the queen not to him lord deputy, which he was appointed in 1571. In keeping with the book's subtitle, Fennell emphasises this reluctance throughout the two chapters covering his tenure as lord deputy in the 1570s, although it may be wondered if this is overplayed at times. Some of his contemporaries certainly believed that his service in Ireland had been more profitable to Fitzwilliam than he let on and there are reasonable grounds for believing that he may have put on the poor mouth in order to deflect accusations of corruption. Such complaints attended in particular his final term of office between 1588 and 1594, when he was recalled to the lord deputyship in what was then considered old age, his mid-sixties. The book's concluding chapter deals with this period and the chapter is structured around answering three main charges levelled at Fitzwilliam in a scathing review of this last term by an attorney of the king's bench in Ireland. These charges boiled down to: incompetence on account of his age, corruption and disloyalty to the crown. The evidence for and against is weighed with fairness and intelligence, although a straining to refute the charges is detectable and suggests a leniency towards the subject that he scarcely merits.

This is perhaps an understandable occupational hazard for biographers in relation to those they have lived with as research subjects for a long time. While not exactly exonerating Fitzwilliam, the effect is to conclude that he was no worse than the average royal servant of his time. This is not the only occasion on which Fitzwilliam gets off more lightly than might be thought fitting. His bizarre claim to be leaving an Ireland at ‘univ'sal quietnes’ in 1594, when it was in fact descending into war, goes largely unchallenged, which it certainly was not at the time. Likewise, Fitzwilliam's conduct in the execution (1590) of Hugh Roe McMahon, widely believed to have been a ruthless expedient to eliminate evidence of his own corruption, is scarcely mentioned. Notwithstanding these minor flaws, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature on the period. It will prove of particular value in shedding light on the mundanities of factional squabbling and financial malpractice, sometimes neglected in favour of the more dramatic material provided by the Reformation, and wars against the O'Neills of Tyrone and FitzGeralds of Desmond.