As the first book on Richard Creagh, this biography is an important addition to scholarship on the Tudor/Elizabethan period. Although he spent all but three of his twenty-two years as archbishop of Armagh in prison, Creagh was a highly influenctial figure in early Elizabethan Ireland. By the end of his life in 1586 he had come to symbolize the dilemma of a politically loyal prelate of the Roman Catholic church in a Protestant state. He failed ultimately to satisfy the Tudor authorities about the compatibility of his allegiances and paid with his life.