1626.

Lady Offaly has seized half the ancestral Kildare lands – now she wants them all. But so does the rich and powerful English-born Earl of Cork.

Lord Cork arranges a marriage for his daughter Joan to his ward, George Fitzgerald, 16th Earl of Kildare. Her grandmother warns Joan that her husband should be careful. But George Kildare is not a careful young man. He is a charming, feckless spendthrift who resents his father-in-law and quarrels disastrously with Lady Offaly. Each time there is marital conflict Joan is torn between her desire to be a good wife and her need to please her father.

When the spark of an Irish rebellion is lit, Catholics turn on their Protestant neighbours and the killing begins. With her father in England and her husband out raising troops, Joan is alone with her children and servants at Maynooth when rebels arrive at the gate demanding she surrender her husband’s castle – or else!

The Taming of Lord Kildare is the story of a young woman trying to hold her marriage together while the country inches closer to civil war.