The English Lordship of Ireland and the Irish Sea World: re-assessing the origins of the Kildare Ascendancy, c.1390-c.1513

By the close of the fifteenth century, the FitzGeralds of Kildare had established themselves as one of the most powerful entities in Ireland. A considerable body of work has been completed on the rise of this dynasty and their relations with the Tudor monarchy. Scholarship has focused primarily on the career of the eighth earl of Kildare, Gerald FitzGerald (d.1513): his ability to forge alliances with both the colonial and indigenous Irish nobility has been viewed as a core element in the establishment of his dynasty’s ascendancy. Nevertheless, this article seeks to offer a new perspective on the establishment of Kildare power and locates the rise of the Kildare earls within a wider chronological and geographic framework of interpretation. In particular, it argues that the Kildares’ rise to prominence owed much of the earlier efforts of the Butler earls of Ormond. During the early 1400s, the Butlers forged a series of dynastic alliances with the nobility of Ireland’s western seaboard and helped to extend English influence into western Scotland. Following the Butlers’ ejection from Ireland in the 1460s, the FitzGeralds of Kildare appropriated many of these dynastic alliances. This article investigates the Butlers’ relations with the nobility of this ‘wider Irish Sea world’ and explores how events on Ireland’s western seaboard and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland shaped both the emergence and establishment of the Kildare ascendancy as well as the development of England’s Irish colony during key phases of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses.