The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (44 page)

The superiority of the English system of law was usually evident only to the English. English bewilderment about Ireland turned to disillusion as, through the 1570s, the Irish lords became not more ‘civil’ but more rebellious. In most of Ireland the people observed the ‘old religion’ still, followed local lords, and spoke the Irish language. The complexity of Irish society made it difficult to impose uniform regulations. Everything about Gaelic Ireland seemed to the English archaic, anarchic and conditional. This was, so they heard, a land of werewolves and blood oaths, where poets could rhyme a man to death and men would starve themselves to death at the doors of their enemies. The Gaelic lords had promised fealty to the English sovereign and taken feudal titles but, as they moved as freely in and out of these agreements as they did with those they had with each other, hopes that this would ensure their loyalty faded. Conn O’Neill had become the 1st Earl of Tyrone, but within a confused generation tanistry was reasserted, and after the murder of Shane O’Neill, Turlough Luineach was chosen as
the
O’Neill and inaugurated with what Sir Henry Sidney called ‘brutish ceremonies’. The first Earls of Clancar, Clanrickard, and Thomond renounced their English titles in protest against the actions of the English governors and, as signal of their revolt, the Earl of Clanrickard’s sons – the
Mac an larlas
– discarded their English dress and threw it in the Shannon. Even family allegiances might be temporary and opportunistic in Gaelic Ireland. Fosterage could create stronger bonds than kinship, and the practice of ‘naming’ children – affiliating the offspring of temporary liaisons to their fathers – created mighty alliances. Marriage, too, might be impermanent; an alliance broken, like others, when it no longer suited. Women chiefs could be as redoubtable as the men. Grania O’Malley, the pirate queen of the west, chose her own husband, ‘Richard in Iron’ Burke of Mayo, and, said Sir Henry Sidney, ‘was as well by sea as by land more than
Mrs Mate with him’. To the English the Irish came to seem hardly Christian, sunk in papistry and paganism.

But these exotic, transient ways, condemned by the English governors, had the power to seduce. ‘Lord, how quickly doth that country alter men’s natures,’ wrote Spenser. For those who thought like Spenser, the Anglo-Irish lords of the original conquest had, long before, become ‘degenerate’, fallen from their race. By fostering and marrying the Irish, speaking their language, using brehon law, they had, as the proverb went, ‘grown as Gaelic as O’Hanlon’s breeches’. Yet the Anglo-Irish community maintained a long tradition of loyalty and obedience to England which was not easily ended. The Anglo-Irish were neither purged from government nor alienated from its policies in the first decades of Elizabeth’s rule, and there had been no radical estrangement between the English born in Ireland and the new generation of planters and soldier-settlers who arrived from England. But a difference of interest and attitude between the Anglo-Irish and the new settlers became clearer. In September 1577 Sir Nicholas Malby, President of Connacht wrote of the ‘division among us Council’, between ‘we of the English’ and those of ‘this country birth’. By the 1580s a sense grew among the Anglo-Irish community of their dispossession and alienation.

As their way of life was threatened, those with a double loyalty – to England and to Ireland – might be forced to choose between the two. Between 1560 and 1580 all the greatest Anglo-Irish lords – Desmond, Ormond, Kildare and Clanrickard – either rebelled themselves or were in collusion with rebels. As they moved towards rebellion again in 1574, the 15th Earl of Desmond and his Countess adopted forbidden Gaelic dress and reinstated brehon law. The 11th Earl of Kildare, half-English leader of the Geraldines, had been brought up in exile in Italian Renaissance courts. ‘A perfect horseman’, he had become Master of the Horse to Cosimo de’ Medici. As a loyal defender of Mary during Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554, he had been restored to his great lands and title, and entrusted with the defence of the Pale. Yet he still spoke Irish and used coyne and livery. He was accused of dealing with James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald in 1569, and in the early 1570s he shored up his newly restored power in Leinster by suspicious alliances with the unruly O’Byrnes, O’Mores and O’Connors. On his new fireplace at Kilkea he inscribed the ancient war cry of the Geraldines, ‘Cromaboo’.

Mystified by the Irish, the English began to resort to primitive ethnology to explain what they came to see as irredeemable barbarism.
Although mostly sceptical about their own foundation myths, the English chose to be credulous about fantastic mythic Irish origins and to believe that Irish savagery stemmed from their ancient Scythian ancestry. The claim that Ireland was part of Britain’s Arthurian empire before the Anglo-Norman conquest and the now embarrassing papal grant gave Arthur’s Tudor descendants the right to complete the conquest. To many charged with governing Ireland, the Irish were a ‘savage nation’: they were ‘wild beasts’ to be ‘herded’, ‘hunted’, and ‘tamed’; colts to be ‘bitted’, ‘bridled’, ‘broken’. A proposal in 1570 to establish a university for the ‘reformation of the barbarism of this rude people’ foundered, like so many Elizabethan schemes in Ireland, until Trinity College, Dublin was established in 1591. Some came to adopt a pessimistic determinism, seeing the whole nation as unregenerate and recognizing that barbarism did not easily fade under the influence of civility. Even Sir Henry Sidney, twice chief governor (1565–71 and 1575–8), and the one who understood the Irish best, as he left Ireland for the last time allegedly boarded his ship reciting Psalm 114: ‘When Israel departed out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from a barbarous people.’

‘There lies some mystery in this universal rebellious disposition,’ lamented Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam in 1572. That most of the island was still peaceful was little consolation to English governors charged with quelling the unrest which seemed endemic. The ‘universal rebellion’ of Munster, Ulster and Connacht of 1569–72 threatened to recur in the spring of 1574. Yet the causes of Irish turbulence were no mystery; they lay in the increasing ambivalence and contradictory nature of English policy in the last third of the century. The Queen and her advisers still spoke of reform by peaceful means, of the advance of law and civility and of the freedoms of her Irish subjects, yet reform was often undermined not only by Irish rebellion, but by the very governors charged with implementing it. As each chief governor in turn was betrayed by rivals at court and in Ireland, they betrayed the strategy of reform by failing to be thoroughly committed to it. The instructions that came from the cautious and impecunious Queen were often erratic and contradictory, as events not only in Ireland but in Europe forced her to vary her commitment.

In July 1574 Elizabeth wrote to Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex, then in Ireland: ‘You allure that rude and barbarous nation to civility rather by discreet handling than by force and shedding of blood.’ Yet Essex was countenancing widespread expropriation and colonization.

There had been desultory projects of plantation during the reign of Queen Mary. In Leix and Offaly in Leinster uneasy garrisons had been established at Philipstown and Maryborough; citadels of English influence around which stalked the displaced and hostile O’Byrnes, O’Mores and O’Connors, waging intermittent guerrilla war. Adventurers with greater ambitions came to Ireland under Elizabeth, seeking easy gain, and were countenanced by a government which saw private plantations as a cheap solution to the perennial problem of how to order Ireland without prodigious expense. The arrival of Sir Peter Carew in 1568 to lay claim to lands lost since the first conquest of the twelfth century engendered fears of the general dispossession of the Irishry, not least because this chancer’s venture was not opposed by the Chief Governor. In 1569 Sir Warham St Leger and other adventurers projected a plantation for south-west Munster which was predicated upon the clearance of the native population as though they were all proclaimed traitors; which they were not, or not yet. This failed, and in Munster expropriation by the English led to rebellion in 1569–71. Lord Deputy Sidney was driven from Ireland, and if he had ever supported colonization, he did so no longer. Parliament’s posthumous attainder of Shane O’Neill in 1569, and the confiscation of O’Neill lands, offered the chance for the ‘enterprise of Ulster’; the establishment of private schemes to colonize this turbulent province and to drive out the Scots once and for all.

With the ‘enterprise of Ulster’ and the royal grant of the Ards and South Clandeboye to Sir Thomas Smith and his son in 1571, and of the Glynns and North Clandeboye to the Earl of Essex in 1573, all the lords of Ulster were threatened with expropriation. The colonists’ promise to those who joined their venture of a ‘land that floweth with milk and honey’, but which was ‘waste’, ‘desolate’ and ‘uninhabited’, did not impress the Irish who inhabited it, and who now resisted their own part in the colonial scheme, which was to become the colonized. The ‘enterprise’ forced not only the Gaelic underlords, who had recently sought English protection from the depredations of Shane O’Neill, but also independent lords like Sir Brian MacPhelim O’Neill of Clandeboye and O’Donnell of Tirconnell, into a ‘knot to rebel’, and as before they looked to the O’Neill, now Turlough Luineach, for leadership. Gaelic unity in Ulster was – ominously – restored. Within a month of his arrival in August 1573 Essex had learnt not to trust the Irish. Essex was no speculator, but a feudal overlord; his services, said the Queen, were
‘grounded not upon gain, but upon honour and argument of true nobility’. But in this world of cattle raids, flooded fords, broken promises and guerrilla attacks, his project failed. Betrayed at home – by his wife and ‘back friends’ at court – his finances in ruins, and denied the highest office in Ireland which might have saved his honour, he despaired. He had vowed never to ‘imbrue his hands with more blood’ than necessity required, but his methods turned sanguinary. In November 1574 he invited Brian MacPhelim, his family and followers to a feast which ended in their slaughter. At Rathlin Island the next summer Essex found a final solution to the Scottish presence: to massacre the MacDonnells. His vengeful troops hunted down survivors in cliffs and caves. For his ‘rare constancy’ and ‘true temperance’ the Queen thanked him.

Returning to Ireland at the end of 1575, as chief governor for the second time, Sir Henry Sidney moved to placate the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic lords of Munster; he also made a truce with Turlough Luineach in Ulster, and took the submissions of the rebellious Burkes and O’Connors. If Sidney had ever been optimistic about assimilating Ireland to English ways, he was not now. He pursued, with relentless energy and some impetuousity, policies which veered between conciliation and coercion. Bound by an impossible promise to the Queen that he would make the government of Ireland pay for itself, and undermined still by enemies at court, he needed immediate results. For him, provincial presidencies and councils were the way of providing an alternative to the exclusive military powers of the great lords, whose maintenance of private armies supported by coyne and livery was the source of perennial instability and oppression; and also a means of providing justice in distant regions, distinct from brehon law and the private jurisdictions of Desmond and Ormond. The presidents were to be military men, provided with the armed force to prevent violence in their provinces, as well as being charged with the maintenance of justice. That the first presidencies had, in the way of reform attempts in Ireland, mutated from their original purpose when, in the face of rebellion, Gilbert in Munster had ruled not by common law but the law of the sword, and Fitton in Connacht had not ruled at all, did not deter him. In 1576 Sir Nicholas Malby became President in Connacht.