The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (41 page)

By referring to bondmen and bands of armed retainers, Tremayne was deliberately evoking the world of medieval lawlessness and violence which the Tudors prided themselves on having banished from England. He aimed his appeal at councillors, Walsingham and Mildmay, whose duty was to persuade the queen ‘to reduce that realm to a better government’. Religious and legal reforms were urgently required. But even Tremayne had to admit that these would not be enough; the body of Ireland was too diseased. Only a third kind of medicine – her majesty’s army – could render the other two effective.
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How had Ireland come to be in this state? The history of England’s attempts to rule, to settle and to understand its western neighbour was already very old when Elizabeth came to the throne. Anglo-Norman adventurers, the so-called Old English, had colonised large parts of the east and south in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with much smaller coastal enclaves established in Galway and Ulster. By 1300 something like two-thirds of Ireland was under the nominal control of the English crown. But the Black Death of 1348–9 cut a swathe through the market towns built by the incomers, and plague was followed by political fragmentation in England. By the time that Henry VIII assumed his new title of King of Ireland in 1541, the ‘Englishry’ had shrunk to less than half the island. Even here, the Old English had adopted a hybrid identity, passing estates to their eldest sons on the model of the English peerage, but offering hospitality to Gaelic poets and judging their tenants’ grievances according to brehon law. New English commentators like Edmund Tremayne criticised their Irish dress and their horses without saddles, and mocked their Chaucerian patterns of speech. Gaelic culture seemed everywhere to be encroaching. Villages in productive farmland had been abandoned by farmers of English blood. Fields which historically had been ploughed for arable lay desolate. A landscape which had once been recognisable was reverting to Irish forest and scrub, a metaphor of cultural degeneracy.

Reformers in Dublin and Westminster hoped that raising Ireland from a lordship to the status of a kingdom would turn the Gaelic tide. Tremayne described Elizabeth as ‘the natural liege sovereign’ of both Ireland and England, and argued for their equal treatment – so long as Ireland conformed to English standards of civility. The instructions which Walsingham sent in the queen’s name to her administrators and clergy referred to ‘our realms of England and Ireland’, as if parity existed between
them. Ireland had a parallel jurisdiction of Parliament and privy council, lord chancellor and a reformed state Church. Efforts were made to refashion the native nobility on an English model. Successive lord deputies from the 1540s onwards persuaded leading Gaelic families to surrender their lands to the crown in order to have them re-granted as English-style peerages, with access to the royal court and a seat in the Irish House of Lords. Deals were sealed with the spoils of dissolved monasteries.
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For a few years, it seemed that this might be the answer. In June 1576 Francis Agarde, an English soldier and official who had based himself in Ireland since Edward VI’s reign, wrote to Walsingham setting out his hopes for the future. The O’Donnells and O’Kellys had agreed to pay sterling rents into the Irish exchequer and to become loyal liegemen of the queen. Other Gaelic lords might soon follow their lead. In all his years of service, ‘the likelihood of obedience (amongst the very Irish I mean) hath not been more’. Agarde was New rather than Old English, but his argument was not so different from the petitions sent to Westminster by earlier generations of would-be reformers. If the crown would only commit more resources to Ireland – Agarde’s own plea was for the appointment of ‘upright ministers’ to bring proper English justice to the planted provinces – then peace was within its grasp. But surrender and re-grant had a fatal flaw. Gaelic society could not permanently be restructured on a feudal footing for the simple reason that land, in Irish law, belonged to the sept or clan and not the lord. The differences between English and Irish definitions of landownership would be spectacularly laid bare in 1595 when Hugh O’Neill, up till then a powerful ally of the crown in Ulster, cast off his title of Earl of Tyrone and was hailed as the O’Neill at the stone chair of Tullaghoge.

Agarde’s optimism couldn’t hide the truth of a deepening political and sectarian crisis in Ireland. Another of Walsingham’s
correspondents, William Gerard, hoped that his long experience of bringing common-law justice to the Welsh marches would transfer to his new posting as Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1576. But he was dismayed to find that the Irish courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas were mere ‘shows and shadows’ of their English equivalents. When Gerard tried to hold the assizes at Trim in County Meath, he was faced with a courthouse resembling ‘an English pinfold for cattle’ and officers of the crown dressed worse than the peasantry back home. The town of Trim lay well within the ditch and stockade of the Pale; the country beyond it was even more unfathomable. Francis Agarde referred to the Gaelic territories as ‘those foreign parts’. Agriculture in Gaelic Ireland was based on cattle rather than crops, a dramatic contrast with the ordered ploughlands of lowland England. The custom of transhumance, the people following their animals to their summer upland pastures, meant that settlements appeared temporary and insubstantial to English eyes. Dwellings were built of mud, turf and timber rather than stone. The native Irish came to be seen as slothful and shiftless, uninterested in cultivating the land which they occupied. English writers were fascinated by the Irish diet, its butter mixed with cow’s blood and offal cooked on open fires.
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The belief that the Irish were under-using their land became an excuse for annexation. In a book of verse illustrated by detailed engravings, John Derricke contrasted the ‘royal soil and fertile Irish ground’ with the wildness of the ‘woodkerne’ or peasant soldiers who inhabited it. His 1581
Image of Ireland
painted Gaelic culture as lost in rebellion, its natives drunk on whiskey and inflamed by the preaching of Catholic friars and bardic poets. Lodowick Bryskett, a clerk of the Irish privy council who sent Walsingham a series of reports in the early 1580s, was moved by what he called ‘the universal disposition of this people to disobedience’ to come to a damning conclusion about Ireland:

the state whereof me thinketh I may well compare unto an old clock or garment often times mended and patched up, wherein now so great a rend or gash being made by violence, there is now no remedy but to make a new; for to piece the old again will be but labour lost.
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The attempt to govern, to reform and finally to conquer Ireland in Elizabeth’s name generated a huge volume of paper. Walsingham and Burghley largely shared the work, either of them taking the lead according to circumstance. Burghley’s position as lord treasurer meant he had more patronage to offer, and his personal relationship with Elizabeth was unrivalled. But Walsingham’s control of royal correspondence could give him the edge. His chief clients in Ireland – the soldier turned administrator Sir Nicholas Malby, vice-treasurer Sir Henry Wallop, Sir Edward Waterhouse – bombarded him with reports and advice and requests for money. Maps of Ireland and its English plantations covered his desk and the walls of his study at Seething Lane. If the Elizabethan regime ultimately succeeded in extending its control over the whole of Ireland, then Walsingham could be credited with making progress where generations of English officials had foundered. But if Ireland had been pacified only through indiscriminate bloodshed, if victory came at the cost of ethnic and religious divisions which were more entrenched than ever, then Walsingham must also take his burden of the blame.

For a queen obsessed with her own sovereignty, the stunted royal establishment in Ireland was an acute embarrassment. Elizabeth was conflicted in her attitude towards her second kingdom. Sometimes she chose to protect the interests of her Irish subjects, instructing the Earl of Essex to ensure that local people bordering his Ulster plantation were ‘well used’. But other voices were also competing for her attention. Her captains in the field clamoured for the all-out war which would make a
reality of her rule, and win them estates and glory in the process. Knowing how the queen mourned the failure of her sister Mary to defend English ground in France, royal commanders skilfully exploited her fear that Ireland too might be lost. Lord Deputy Sidney explicitly compared the situation in Ireland to that of Calais. In 1579 the incoming Lord Justice of Ireland, Sir William Pelham, warned Walsingham that ‘her majesty may say she
had
a country’ unless a remedy could be swiftly applied.
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His mandate to protect the queen’s safety required Walsingham to take a close interest in Ireland, where the survival of Catholicism was creating a tempting bridgehead for England’s enemies. The Reformation failed to make much impression on Gaelic culture, largely because of its hostility towards preaching in the Irish language. Tudor Wales acquired a Prayer Book and Bible of its own, whereas Irish was widely shunned as a ‘contaminant’ of English civility. Even more alarmingly, the Old English began to reject Protestantism in their droves mid-way through Elizabeth’s reign. Gentry families withdrew their sons from Oxford and Cambridge and offered them up to continental seminaries, just as their Catholic counterparts in England were doing. In 1576 the President of Munster informed Walsingham about the merchants’ sons from Waterford who were slipping away to Louvain to be ordained as missionaries. Catholic recusancy was a minority faith in England, the danger which it posed generally more apparent than real. But in Ireland it threatened to drive a wedge between the crown and the governing elite.
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Walsingham’s fear that a Catholic league was mustering took shape in Thomas Stucley, the English-born adventurer who spent the early 1570s shuttling between Madrid and Rome and Paris to recruit support for an invasion of Ireland. Stucley’s biography reads like a work of fiction: a professional soldier who fought for France and Savoy as well as England; a part-time privateer who considered joining the French colony in Florida,
but ended up in Ulster on an official mission to persuade the warlord Shane O’Neill to come to terms. Stucley tried to settle as a loyal subject in Ireland, but Elizabeth was understandably suspicious of his erratic loyalties and his foul language. In 1568 he was accused of saying that he ‘set not a fart’ for the queen or her office. His land claims were passed over in favour of his cousin and rival Sir Peter Carew, prompting an increasingly bitter feud between them. Stucley nurtured a growing grievance against the royal court, its ‘pen and ink-horn’ men like Cecil and its gadfly queen given to ‘frisking and dancing’.

Honour and revenge propelled Stucley into open defiance of the sovereign whose patronage he had once craved. From 1570 he based himself in Spain, where Philip II gave him a pension and honoured him as Duke of Ireland. He soon repaid his master, captaining three galleys against the Turks at the victorious battle of Lepanto. But Philip had many other priorities besides Ireland. Stucley had to wait until 1578, more than thirty frustrating years since his career had begun in Henry VIII’s service, before he could sail from Civitavecchia in an eight-hundred-ton warship with a force of Catholic exiles, a handful of made-up titles and a blessing from the pope.

Walsingham had heard from his merchant contacts that Stucley was coming. A warning was sent to Lord Deputy Sidney, and the authorities in Bristol were put on their guard. A proclamation to the Irish nobility was rejected in case it implied that Stucley posed a real threat to ‘a prince of her majesty’s power, armed with the goodwill of her subjects’. As chance would have it, his flame was snuffed out a long way from the coasts of Munster. Putting in for supplies at Lisbon, Stucley was recruited by the devoutly Catholic King Sebastian of Portugal to join an expedition against the pro-Ottoman regime of the Sultan of Morocco. Sebastian bought his loyalty by promising to send a fleet against Ireland once the Moors had been defeated.
Both men were killed in the ensuing rout of the Christians at Ksar el Kebir, Stucley losing his legs to a Portuguese cannon.

With one leaking ship and a few hundred raggle-taggle followers, Stucley can hardly have hoped to take on Elizabeth’s army in Ireland. But his story was interwoven with that of a far more dangerous opponent of the crown. James fitz Maurice Fitzgerald, a cousin of the Earl of Desmond, was another rebel adrift in Paris and Rome looking to liberate Ireland from the English. Unlike Stucley, however, he was Irish-born and a cradle Catholic. Fitz Maurice had led an uprising in Munster in 1569, restoring the mass in the towns which he captured and demanding that Protestants be expelled. His revolt gave voice to an ideology of Irish resistance. English rule in Ireland, he argued, depended on a gift made by the pope to King Henry II. That grant of power had been annulled by Henry VIII’s break from Rome, leaving Ireland free to seek a new ruler. The surrender of his allies had driven fitz Maurice into exile, but he continued to hawk his own brand of revolution around the Catholic courts of Europe. In July 1579 he came ashore at Smerwick on Ireland’s south-western tip, leading a company including survivors from Stucley’s escapade and the English Catholic resistance theorist Nicholas Sander. Fitz Maurice was killed a month later in a fight over some stolen horses, but Desmond took his place at the head of an uprising which Sander hoped to coax into a revolt of all Ireland. The royal official Nicholas Walshe explained the scale of the threat to Walsingham:

and now that [Desmond] is got in arms … he doth not behave himself as other rebels are wont to do, which (however ill soever they intend) do still pray for the prince, but in skirmishing do cry,
papaboe
, as who should say God send the pope strength and victory.
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