The historiography of Franco-Irish relations in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has traditionally concentrated on commercial connections between the two countries and on the embryonic development of the Irish, and specifically the clerical, diaspora in France.¹ Ireland’s commercial ties with France in the late Middle Ages have been the subject of a substantial amount of specialised scholarly research that has broadly traced the principal trade routes, identified both Irish and French families involved in commercial networks and provided an insight into the practicalities of their business transactions.² Arising from this exposition it is clear that Ireland had established trade...

The first half of the sixteenth century witnessed the tentative beginnings of direct political relations between Ireland and France in the form of a French dimension to the intrigues of the Anglo-Irish Geraldine dynasty. During this period, leading members of the Geraldine family of Desmond and Kildare mounted campaigns in opposition to the English crown and in the process sought the assistance of François I (1494–1547). James Fitzgerald, tenth earl of Desmond (d. 1529), was the first Irish magnate to engage in serious intrigue with the French crown in the early 1520s. In 1540 his kinsman, Gerald Fitzgerald, heir...

In spring 1540 fears for Gerald Fitzgerald’s safety prompted Manus O’Donnell and his wife, Eleanor, to arrange the boy’s escape to the continent. Thanks to Manus’s characteristic duplicity in concealing his involvement in those arrangements, Eleanor has traditionally been credited with orchestrating her nephew’s escape, supposedly on the grounds that she suspected her husband of intending to hand the boy over the English government following his abandonment of the league the previous winter. Manus deflected English suspicions of harbouring Gerald by giving a conditional undertaking to surrender Gerald and his close associate, James Delahide, to Henry VIII in return for...

In early August 1540 Lord Leonard Grey’s successor, Sir Anthony St Leger, arrived in Ireland to begin an eight-year term of office as lord deputy. This led to a change in the tenor of domestic and Anglo-Irish political relations which in turn profoundly shaped the character of Franco-Irish relations. During the early and mid-1540s the altered dynamic of Ireland’s contacts with France resulted in a temporary aberration in their relations in two key respects. First, thanks to the success of St Leger’s conciliatory policy in handling the most powerful Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords, the early and mid-1540s witnessed none of...

The establishment of garrisons beyond the Pale in Ireland during the late 1540s initiated a process of piecemeal conquest which antagonised displaced Gaelic lords, drove them to seek foreign intervention and created strategic threats to the British polity where none had hitherto existed.¹ Throughout the period from the late 1540s to the mid-1560s, Gaelic dissidents became embroiled with the French, the Scots and disaffected elements in England in intrigue which involved varying degrees of collaboration and which aimed at undermining the Tudor régime. For the first time the Gaelic lords’ projection of the Irish cause in quasi-religious terms impacted in...

Although Franco-Irish intrigue during the period 1553–67 never reached the intensity or the seriousness that it had in the winter of 1549–50, a level of engagement between the French and Scottish courts and Irish dissidents persisted throughout the following two decades and quickened significantly in three distinct phases. The first serious engagement in the autumn and winter of 1553 centred on a plot to stage an uprising in Ireland to coincide with Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion in England. The crucial parties to this intrigue were Antoine de Noailles and Henri Clutin d’Oisel, ambassadors to England and Scotland respectively,...

The last phase of sixteenth-century French–Irish intrigue had its origins in two major insurrections headed by young Anglo-Irish lords, both of whom were militant supporters of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The first of these, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, first cousin of the fourteenth earl of Desmond, staged two rebellions in Munster, in 1569–72 and again in 1579–83, while the second insurgent, Sir James Eustace, third Viscount Baltinglass, led a rebellion in south Leinster in 1580–1 that spawned the so-called Nugent conspiracy of 1581–2. Of the two, the challenge posed by Fitzmaurice was of the greatest consequence in...

The opening years of the seventeenth century heralded a series of changes in politics in Ireland, France and on the international stage that brought to an end the episodic political engagement of the sixteenth century between Irish dissidents and the French for several decades to come. After the Spanish Armada, and throughout the 1590s, disaffected Irish lords consistently directed all their pleas for military aid at the Spanish and papal courts. However, a slight glimmer of hope for a possible French invasion of Ireland still survived so long as Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, and Hugh Roe O’Donnell of Tyrconnell...

The flight of the Gaelic lords from Ulster, and the delicately balanced relationship between Henri IV, James I and Philip III in the early 1600s, effectively eliminated the remote prospect of a revival of Franco-Irish intrigue and closed a chapter on Ireland’s short-lived political relations with France that was not re-opened until the 1640s. For almost sixty years, between the early 1520s and the early 1580s, the Irish had become embroiled in intrigue with the French for a variety of reasons. All the protagonists – the tenth earl of Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald, Con O’Neill, Manus O’Donnell, O’Doherty, Cormac O’Connor, MacWilliam Burke,...