Conclusion

Summary

When John Harington translated the Orlando Furioso in 1591, he airbrushed the earls of Desmond from the relevant line in canto ten and replaced them with the Butlers of Ormond, who were then moved by the poet ahead of Kildare as the land's foremost peer: ‘and of these bands the Lords and leaders are, the noble Earls of Ormond and Kildare’. Even if one were familiar with Ariosto's original Italian, this may appear as a seemingly innocuous piece of poetic licence. Given the recent Munster wars it was perhaps politic to omit the Desmond Fitzgeralds. Did Harington anticipate a courtly reception and seek to avoid offence by elevating the queen's old colonial cousins? To speculate here is intriguing but ultimately futile. What can be determined is that at a stroke, in this snippet of verse the original context was entirely distorted. Unintentionally, Harington's Elizabethan audience along with subsequent generations were denied a fragmentary glimpse of what originally were late medieval Geraldine Italianate overtures. Kildare-Ormond rivalry in the politics of the 1510s and their respective projections in terms of their relation to political power were also obscured, rooted as they were in conditions specific to Ireland's early Tudor renaissance. In time, with the descent of layers of historiographical complexity, a veil was drawn over these particular circumstances in the historical record. There may be additional meaning in Davies’ remark that the ‘people of this land’, both Irish and English, desired to be governed by ‘great persons’. Therefore, considering what has been discussed, especially in chapters three and six, the above extract from Harington's verse is profoundly revealing. In this context, the cultural crisis of the fall of the Geraldines and the emergence of a ‘reformed’ humanism that overshadowed inveterate traditions merits further study.

The paradigm of the State Papers has provided a convincing illusion in recounting the anti-Geraldine narrative of ‘conquest’ up to and after the 1534 rebellion. The perspective of those seeking to challenge the status quo as they pushed for an entrenched regional intervention reverberates in the flood of state correspondence from 1534.