‘The Cecils and Ireland’ conference - Welcome and Session One

26th Nov 2021 Listen back to the welcome by Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub followed by talks from Dr Alan Kelly PhD TCD titled ‘The secretaries before the Cecils: the foundations of an Irish policy 1495 – 1558’ and Dr David Heffernan, School of History, University College Cork gave a presentation titled ‘Sir William Cecil and the shaping of English policy in Ireland, 1558 – 1598’. About the conference Not that long ago, the idea of relating the Cecils, both Lord Burghley and his son Lord Salisbury, to the history of Ireland in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century would have been regarded as marginal and insignificant. And several major studies of these great figures were produced over the course of the twentieth century without any address to Ireland at all. Such a radically reduced peripheral vision was in part ideological – the often uncritical assumption that the history of England could be entirely treated independently of its neighbours, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. But it was also considerably reinforced in the nineteenth century by archival decisions within the (then) Public Record Office to separate the massive State Paper collections into sections of Domestic, Foreign, Scotland, and Ireland in a manner that suggested that all of the problems arising in these areas could be separated into distinct and hierarchical compartments. In recent decades, however, historians, English, Scottish and Irish have broken free from such artificial divisions, and revealed the many varied and complex ways in which the thinking of the Elizabethans was richly informed by a sense of the interconnectedness of all the regions within this western archipelago. Central to this re-interpretation has been a reassessment of the policies developed and strategies deployed of the by the leading figures in Elizabethan government, notably the Cecils. Recent studies by Stephen Alford, Ciaran Brady, Jane Dawson, David Heffernan and others have revealed the way in which decisions concerning Irish policy were influenced, altered and deferred by other foreign policy considerations, and how foreign policy attitudes were conversely influenced by assessments of the state of Ireland in a manner that has never previously been appreciated. The purpose of this conference is to build on such substantial recent research, by extending both the breadth and the depth of this interrogation of Anglo-Irish relations in the early modern period. The contributors are all experts who have published widely in this field and are actively engaged in further original research. This conference is a partnership between the Trinity Long Room Hub and the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation. http://www.lordburghley500.org/ Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/