The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (6 page)

The Gaelic Irish were effectively banished from English Ireland, save as peasant labourers, disabled at law from holding land or office, beyond appeal to English law. On the edge of the English colony was a border world, which was hardly defensible. Even Dublin itself suffered predatory raids from the circling Irish; from the O’Byrnes of the Wicklow Mountains, the O’Mores of Leix and the O’Connors of Offaly. At
the northern boundary of the Pale the Benedictine abbey of Fore was aggressively fortified in the mid fifteenth century against Gaelic incursions. In County Louth the families who paid both ‘black rent’ (protection money) to the Ulster chieftains to ransom their safety and taxes to the government of the Pale were recognizing the bewildering reality of lordship in Ireland.

The towns of Ireland were the heartlands of the Englishry. Their citizens spoke English, wore English dress, lived in houses like those in English towns, had well-ordered civic governments, prosperous trade and thriving religious institutions. There were about fifty towns of any size in early sixteenth-century Ireland; their inhabitants composing about one-tenth of the whole population of the island. Dublin, the royal capital, and the home of two cathedrals, was the largest city in Ireland and included most of Leinster in its hinterland. By the late sixteenth century its population was perhaps 6,000. It was the main port for the whole east coast. Like other Irish towns, Dublin was governed by a wealthy patriciate which dominated civic life through its ascendancy in the merchant guilds and its monopoly of office holding. A few families, closely tied by intermarriage, seemed to pass the city offices of mayor, sheriff, and alderman among themselves, although they were duly elected by the citizenry. In Galway, the second city of Ireland, fifteen merchant families formed so powerful and self-perpetuating an oligarchy that from 1484 until the mid seventeenth century only one mayor was elected from outside the group. Within these small, closed communities a strong sense of civic identity grew, fostered by a deep awareness of their difference from their Gaelic neighbours. By 1500 many of the coastal towns were isolated behind their defensible walls, dependent upon the sea for trade. It was usually easier for towns to send goods beyond Ireland than to each other, such were the difficulties of travel, but town merchants – ‘grey merchants’ – did buy and sell among the Irish. Inland towns were often overawed by local lords, as Galway was by the Clanrickard Burkes. Athenry in County Galway and Kilmallock in County Limerick were both razed and rebuilt during the sixteenth century. In the towns municipal and private philanthropy provided almshouses, hospitals and schools. In 1599 Sir John Harington wrote of his escape from the rigours of the army camp in Roscommon and of his arrival in the town of Galway, where his English translation of Ariosto’s epic romance,
Orlando Furioso
, was being read by the young ladies of the town. Tudor governors in Dublin and Westminster always looked upon
the Anglo–Irish of the towns as upholders of civility against the forces of Gaelic barbarism.

The Gaelic Irish lords had been driven back at the twelfth-century conquest, but that conquest had never been completed; the lords had reclaimed much of what had been lost, and most of Ireland was still theirs. Power in Gaelic Ireland was highly fragmented; there was no collective central authority, no governmental institutions. Each lordship was its own small society, with its own particular history, celebrated by its bards. Gaelic Ireland was ruled by lords whose power was dynastic and particularist, tribal rather than territorial, and lay in their personal headship of their own clans. The chieftains of the Gaelic ruling dynasties were always seeking to extend their overlordship and to become provincial kings once again. To the English king’s claims to overlordship they were oblivious, and he could never be sovereign where the Irish chieftains held their lands and lordships and administered their own law without reference to him. In Gaelic Ireland lordship lay in the control of people rather than of territory: where a chief of a lesser sept (a branch of a clan) feared a lord sufficiently to rise with him, seek his protection or pay him tribute, then effectively he was subject. Yet he could appeal over the head of his own immediate lord to secure the protection of a more powerful lord, as indemnity against the lesser lord’s oppression or neglect. In Ulster the O’Neill was lord of all the septs within Tyrone, but claimed authority also over the
uirríthe
(sub-kings) who were overlords over their own people: over O’Cahan, MacMahon of Oriel, Maguire of Fermanagh, and O’Reilly of Breifne.

It was the intense competition between and within the Gaelic dynasties which had invited invasion in the first place. That competition continued, and it was not only the Yorkists who had a parricidal history. Between the O’Neills of Tyrone and the O’Donnells of Tirconnell lay an old contention over the tribute of Inishowen and for overlordship of Ulster. And within the clans of O’Neill and O’Donnell there was intense rivalry too. One sept of O’Neills was habitually hostile to the ruling O’Neills and consequently allied with the O’Donnells. In 1493 Conn O’Neill was murdered by his half-brother, Henry Óg, who made himself chief – the O’Neill – with the support of another branch of the family, the Sliocht Airt. Henry Óg was in turn murdered in 1498 by Conn’s sons, ‘in revenge of their father’. There was civil war too among the Maguires of Fermanagh, after long peace. In 1484 at the altar of the church of Aghalurcher, Gillapatrick Maguire, the chosen successor to his father,
the chief, was slaughtered by his own five brothers. Almost every page of the Irish annals tells of murder within the ruling dynasties. Internecine struggles and raids between lordships were frequent; the consequence of a Gaelic inheritance system where succession was not the automatic right of the eldest son, and of the lack of any institutions of central government to control the warfare and violence which characterized political relations between lords who were concerned not only to extend their power but to defend their rights. But there was instability and rivalry too among the Anglo-Irish feudal lords who lived on the borders of the Gaelic world. In 1487 the 9th Earl of Desmond was murdered ‘by his own people’, allegedly at the instigation of his brother John Fitzgerald.

The first Anglo-Norman conquerors had been granted great lordships upon the ruins of the Irish supremacies. In Munster the Fitzgeralds became earls of Desmond in 1329 and possessors of palatine jurisdiction in Kerry, and they came to rule as independent princes over County Kerry, Limerick, Waterford and North Cork. At the same time the Butlers received the earldom of Ormond. They had extensive possessions in the south, especially in Tipperary, which they held as a liberty palatine, and in the area around Kilkenny, a ‘second Pale’. In the late fifteenth century the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds held these areas still, against the extreme hostility of neighbouring Gaelic lords and of each other, and by means fitting to a rough border world. The Fitzgerald Desmonds maintained private armies of hired kerns (foot-soldiers) and galloglasses (professional axemen) ready to march against rival lords; not only against the Gaelic MacCarthy Mór but also against the Earl of Ormond. The feudal barons had to defend the vast lands and liberties they had gained. They had little help, and little interference, from their overlord, the absentee king in England, who depended on their power while disapproving of their methods. In this marcher society, conditioned to war, they were the arbiters and keepers of peace. In England, war was the king’s war, peace the king’s peace; not so in Ireland where Ormond and Desmond waged private war into the later sixteenth century.

To English government officials, who saw a chasm between how things were and how they thought they should be, these feudal lords had, by making so many accommodations with their Gaelic neighbours, become Irish themselves. It was true that the earls of Ormond and Desmond used Irish law as well as English law; and that in the north-west
the Anglo-Irish Mayo Burkes were inaugurating their chiefs after the Gaelic manner. From the beginning, there was intermarriage between Anglo-Irish and Gaelic families; feudal lords took pledges and hostages, and fostered chiefs’ children, as the Irish did; spoke Irish as well as English; employed Irish bards and wore Gaelic dress. But life on the edge of the ‘land of war’ entailed compromise: Gaelic allies were needed to overawe Gaelic enemies. And while bureaucrats safe in Dublin and Westminster saw the Anglo-Irish as ‘degenerate,’ fallen from their race, they saw themselves as quite distinct from, and superior to, their Irish neighbours, for they held their lands and titles by feudal tenure and succeeded to their estates by primogeniture, a world away from the Gaelic system. When in 1488 Sir Richard Edgecombe tried to make the Anglo-Irish nobility accept certain conditions of pardon, they obdurately refused: they would rather be Irish, they said, appalled.

The Fitzgerald earls of Kildare, the feudal magnates who became ascendant in Ireland under the first Tudors, the bringers and the beneficiaries of English recovery there, had not been pre-eminent through the later middle ages. The 7th Earl (d.1478) had begun to restore the Kildare estates during a long period as chief governor for the king. In their perennial absence, the English kings, as Lords of Ireland, delegated their authority to their viceroys – their ‘lieutenants’ or ‘deputy lieutenants’ (for simplicity the term ‘chief governor’ will hereafter be used throughout). The position of chief governor was one of extraordinary power and autonomy. Pre-eminent in Ireland and isolated from the king in England, he had remarkable freedom to act. Garret Mór, the 8th Earl, attained huge power through his personal lordship over Palesmen, his clients, vassals and allies in Leinster, and also over many Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords far beyond the Pale and the bureaucratic control of Dublin, who paid tribute to him in return for his protection. Though he might have looked like a high king come again, his lordship depended on the powers eventually entrusted to him as governor by the Lord of Ireland, Henry VII, a king who was always unwilling to send those whom he trusted and to trust those whom he sent.

At his accession Henry Tudor was in many ways fortunate. He was a king with few rivals. Richard III was dead with no child to succeed him. Henry had gained his throne because Richard had alienated most of the landed community of Yorkist England by his plantation of the southern
counties with his northern followers, by breaking his own bonds of fidelity, by his usurpation and his presumed murder of the princes. ‘Men of honour’ had been uncertain where to give allegiance and, according to the
Great Chronicle of London
, most would as gladly have been French, subject to the ancient enemy, as ruled by Richard. Henry was the inheritor, if tortuously, of the Lancastrian claim, but as the vast royal affinity transferred allegiance to him, he also became the Yorkist claimant. He had support from Edward of York’s former household and was married to Edward’s daughter. Henry had no brothers and there was no focus among his kindred for political discontent. There was a kingmaker, and kingmakers were often dangerous to the kings they had made, but this one, Lord Stanley, soon to be elevated to Earl of Derby, was safely married to the King’s redoubtable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond. The destruction during the last few years of the greatest English magnates – Clarence, Neville, Buckingham, Hastings – had left the major noble families leaderless, powerless to set up petty kingdoms in the regions, even if they had so wished. Whole regions were without traditional local rulers. In East Anglia, the de la Poles and Howards, loyal Yorkists, were displaced by John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a stalwart ally of the new king. Henry chose not to give any one noble a commanding position in the Midlands; instead he allowed second-rank magnates to compete for regional dominance. The consequence would be a failure of law and order. In the South-West, royal favour was given almost exclusively to Giles, Lord Daubeney. Yet royal favour could not always guarantee loyalty; either from the lord who had been rewarded, or from the local political community, who might show a greater allegiance to their lord than to the King. A redistribution of patronage followed Bosworth, but it could not, of course, please everyone, and some thought themselves ill rewarded.

Richard’s supporters were in disarray, not knowing whether to resist or to make terms with the new order. Some fought on, some were imprisoned, some were executed, some fled, but most made peace. And still Henry felt acutely threatened and insecure. He would never be free from the fear that a challenger would arrive with a stronger claim to the allegiance owed to blood. The mystery surrounding the disappearance of the young princes left the way open for hopes and promises of their return. Since foreign intervention had secured a change of king and dynasty in 1470 and 1471, and had helped to put Henry himself on the throne, foreign powers might intervene again, and for a rival contender.

Rebellion soon confirmed the sense and reality of the King’s vulnerability. In the North, where allegiance to Richard had been strongest, there were disturbances in 1485 and 1486; risings stirred by the commons, not by landed society which showed a prudent loyalty to the new regime. At the end of 1485 Henry released the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, the leading lords of the North, but he restored them to their offices only during his pleasure, conditionally. From the first months of his reign Scotland showed its potential for disruption. In Ireland, the Earl of Kildare and the political community which he led held Parliament in October 1485, but still in Richard’s name, not acknowledging the change of state.