Issue #0

Owen Roe O'Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland

Plot

Jerrold Cassaway's biography provides the only modern and full account of the life of Owen Roe O'Neill - a member of the contingent of Irish nobility that fled Ireland in 1604 after the last Elizabethan war. Tracing O'Neill's thirty-eight years of exile on the Continent, it follows his eventual return to Ireland to command the forces under a Catholic confederacy comprised of remnants of the Old Irish aristocracy and dissident Anglo-Irish factions backed by the Church in Rome.

This study of Owen Roe is more than a portrait of a man entrapped in a vicious context of political and religious intrigue: it contains a wealth of detail never before pubished - from Irish, English, Spanish, and papal source materials.It becomes, therefore, a key study for understanding the complex nexus of events in Ireland that led to the downfall of Charles I, the collapse of native Ireland, and the rise of Oliver Cromwell; a study never before so fully explored from the Irish standpoint.