Like the captains whom it studies, this is an ambitious and occasionally difficult book. Although his primary focus is on the military officers who sought to control Elizabethan Ireland before the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War, Rory Rapple's broader theme is how these men and their words and deeds in Ireland demonstrate radical tensions within the political culture of Elizabethan England: the queen's captains in Ireland, in effect, revealed impulses that were usually played down in England itself. In part, this reflected the plight of soldiers under Elizabeth. After two successive generations of English gentlemen had become accustomed to prolonged military service overseas under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, Elizabeth's understandable aversion to open war after 1563 dramatically restricted opportunities for military employment under the English Crown until the mid-1580s. Martial men, conditioned to expect honor and rewards for their endeavors in royal service, now felt distinctly underappreciated—they were like chimneys in summer, as Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, famously mocked them. By the 1570s, as Rapple explains, writers like Thomas Churchyard and Barnaby Rich were publishing works openly critical of the official neglect of soldiers, while aspiring officers scrambled for scraps of patronage from the court and sought employment abroad wherever they could find it. A handful of deeply alienated captains even turned traitor by defecting to Spain, further fueling royal suspicions about the alarming internationalism of martial values and the men who professed to follow them. For the fortunate few who secured a place in the queen's small army there, a post in Ireland was therefore prized as a lifeline. However, military employment in Ireland brought huge frustrations as well as rare opportunities. Elizabeth's Irish garrison was chronically underfunded, and service there was consistently regarded by the queen as virtually police work against a local “rabble”: Elizabeth and her court never appreciated the true difficulties of campaigning in Ireland or the tenacity of Irish enemies. Elizabeth's captains in Ireland were also frustrated by the political realities of the island, which often revealed official claims to English dominance over the island to be embarrassingly empty rhetoric. This offended the captains’ notions of English superiority over the Irish (even though most of them happily fraternized with the Irish on an individual basis) and sharpened their personal ambition to secure land, wealth, and reputation from their own service. With such blatant disregard (in their eyes) for the queen's authority and English law, here was both an incitement and an opportunity for the captains to carve out estates and reputations for themselves by acting in the queen's name in ways that would never have been possible in England, where their status as (mostly) younger sons of gentry families instead offered them the bleak prospect of downward social mobility. Such material ambitions, and the ruthlessness with which captains such as Sir Richard Bingham pursued them, have long been a stock feature of accounts of Elizabethan Ireland. Rapple, however, cautions that the individualism of these actions and the bitter personal rivalries between officers make it difficult to support the common assertion that the captains in Ireland followed a coherent strategy of repression there: “no matter what they purported to be doing, they suited themselves” (302). This was certainly true of Bingham, whose career is subjected to close examination in chapter 7. More important, though, Rapple argues that Elizabeth's captains in Ireland in the 1570s and 1580s self-consciously sought to justify their actions by appealing to established theories of royal authority that were markedly more imperial and absolutist than the “monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth,” which Patrick Collinson has famously observed in the actions of Cecil and his colleagues in England during this same period. While Cecil and the Privy Council sought to counter the terrifying prospect of an unclear royal succession that Elizabeth herself refused to make clear by drawing on ideas of civic republicanism to justify (and silently operate) a kind of monarchical republic, which would protect their vision of a Protestant England (and their own hold over it), individual captains in Ireland similarly sought to empower themselves and justify their own actions by explicitly casting themselves as the local embodiments of an absolute imperium against which no resistance was permissible. Such claims embodied an alarmingly different conception of English royal authority than that proffered by Cecil and his friends. Where the monarchical republic (to use Collinson's phrase) inherently limited royal power, the “imperium” advanced by individual captains in Ireland could override law or parliament and wasonarchical government” (308). Although there are passages that flow beautifully (especially in the early chapters) and the conclusion is a model of clarity, the book sometimes becomes heavy going, particularly in chapters 5 and 6, in which examples are densely piled up with few concessions to those readers who lack a prior knowledge of events in Elizabethan Ireland and their chronology. This perhaps underscores the book's nature as a study in the history of ideas rather than traditional political or military history but also makes it more suitable for specialist readers than for most undergraduates. Despite the generally high standard of production, the book would certainly have benefited from the inclusion of a map of Ireland that shows key towns and forts. At the risk of seeming pedantic, one might also quibble with the repeated use of “Whitehall” instead of “the Court” to designate the target of communications from Ireland. Although the point is perhaps arguable, the use of “Whitehall' as a synonym for central bureaucracy seems somewhat anachronistic for Elizabeth's reign. However, it would be unfair to end with carping. Rapple's book must be commended for forcibly reminding us once again that Elizabeth's twin realms of England and Ireland should not be studied in isolation from each other, as has so often been the case. Rapple also reminds us of the crucial importance of martial men and values in early modern Britain and that the Cecilian model of the Elizabethan polity—Collinson's monarchical republic—was only one of the self-serving visions of royal authority advocated by Elizabeth's servants.