|
Like Ormond and Kildare, the house of Desmond in the southwest had a long, wealthy, and proud history in Ireland dating back to the Anglo-Norman invasion. Unlike its rivals to the north and east, however, it did not survive the Tudor period. The fifteenth earl launched a major rebellion that was crushed in 1583, and the crown, on the grounds of treason, siezed the earl's property and that of his rebel associates. The Desmonds had been one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in England and Ireland in the mid-sixteenth century; by the early seventeenth century, they had become powerless, and their titles passed into the hands of Richard Preston, Lord Dingwall, one of King James's Scottish favorites.
|
