Robert Dudley Edwards died on 5 June 1988 in Dublin, where he had been born seventy-nine years and one day before. In later life, at least, he would have approved of that exact, spare sentence, because in later life he resolved the conflict between his undisciplined temperament and the discipline of his profession by reducing his role as historian to the task of record keeping. I said as much in a review of his Ireland under the Tudors in 1978, and some weeks later was alarmed to see him making purposefully towards me through a reception crowd, telltale large Paddy held protectively on high. ‘I liked your review’, he shouted across the heads; ‘you were exactly right’. Reaching me, he added in an undertone, ‘they were hoping that I was going to make a scene’. They were, of course, and it was typical of Dudley that he extracted as much satisfaction from disappointing the expectation as he might have done from fulfilling it. Others have told me that he became cantankerous with age, and the evidence is conclusive, but I never experienced anything but generosity from him from beginning to end.

Few Irish parliaments were more important than that of 1560. It recognised Elizabeth Tudor’s title to the crown of Ireland and authorised the reform of the Irish church. Yet the sparse documentary record of its proceedings has lent itself to wildly differing interpretations. Controversy has centred upon the manner in which the ecclesiastical legislation reached the statute books, and the disposition of the bishops towards it. Even today, long after the interdenominational debate has ended, there is no consensus among historians on this very difficult subject.

In the most comprehensive treatment to date of the 1560 parliament Robert Dudley Edwards concluded that fraud and deception were employed to force the queen’s ecclesiastical legislation through a recalcitrant House of Commons. However, the opposition of the bishops in the upper house was insurmountable and the parliament was quickly prorogued without its legislative programme being sanctioned.

Sir Piers Crosby, knight and baronet, lived for fifty-six years, but it is not perhaps too much to say that only a single day in that life has brought him to historical notice. That day was 28 November 1634. On the previous afternoon, Lord Deputy Wentworth had informed a joint meeting of the two houses of the Irish parliament that his government was not prepared to honour the promise which King Charles I had given to landed proprietors in Ireland six years earlier and would not permit the passage of acts relinquishing historic royal claims to Irish land. When the commons met on 28 November, a majority of the members vented their anger and disappointment by defeating an entirely uncontroversial government bill. Prominent among that majority, their ringleader if Wentworth is to be believed, was a renegade privy councillor, Sir Piers Crosby. That Wentworth’s account of what happened was seriously misleading is well established, and I have examined it elsewhere as an illustration of the proposition that one of Wentworth’s major achievements was to impose his version of the events of his deputyship upon generations of historians, approving and disapproving alike. His influence similarly colours historical impressions of the people with whom he dealt, and the purpose of this paper is to suggest the interpretative difficulties to which that may give rise by reconstructing the shape of the career of one individual who suffered the dual misfortune of crossing Wentworth’s path and being remembered only by what Wentworth wrote of him.

What follows is a list — covering items published between 1900 and 1986 — of serious accounts of the history of important architectural projects undertaken in Ireland between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. It is intended to be comprehensive in respect of monographs, collective works and articles in non-Irish periodicals, but in respect of Irish periodicals it is a supplement to Richard J. Hayes, Sources for the history of Irish civilisation: articles in Irish periodicals (9 vols, Boston, 1970).

None of the above definitions is rigidly adhered to: much is included which falls outside their limits, but an attempt has been made to include everything that falls within them. The following have not been comprehensively included:

(1) Monographs on non-resident architects whose careers, notwithstanding Irish commissions, were mainly abroad, e.g. Robert Adam, G.E. Street, Edwin Lutyens. This is partly because such architects are so numerous (there is evidence of over a hundred British architects having professional contacts with Ireland between 1750 and 1850) and partly because they are already well served bibliographically, e.g. by Howard Colvin, A biographical dictionary of British architects, 1600–1840 (London, 1978);

(2) studies of the foreign careers of Irish architects, e.g. James Hoban, Eileen Gray;

(3) studies of vernacular architecture (but see entry under this heading in the index);

(4) contemporary reviews or criticism of buildings;

(5) reviews of books;

(6) printed primary sources, such as J.T. Gilbert, Calendar of ancient records of Dublin… (19 vols, Dublin, 1889–1944).