The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (42 page)

The Desmond rebellions brought the politics of the Counter-Reformation to England’s own back door. Armed skirmishes
and cattle raids were endemic to Irish culture, but the scale of the violence showed how traditional Gaelic warfare was changing in response to the threat from the English. Fitz Maurice and Sir Edmund Butler timed their attack on Enniscorthy in County Wexford to coincide with the summer fair, when the resident population was swollen by visiting farmers and traders. The menfolk were cut down in the streets while their wives and daughters were raped. Bodies were dumped in the river before the town was razed. The port of Youghal suffered a similar fate during the second phase of the Desmond rebellions, as Walsingham learned in a letter from Sir Henry Wallop. The Earl of Desmond had signalled his revolt by ritually defacing the royal arms in the town’s courthouse. Now Youghal’s defensive walls were demolished, its stores of corn looted and its buildings set ablaze. Only two stone houses survived. It was as if all traces of an alien culture were being erased from the landscape.
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When they sank to such brutality, the rebels were repaying atrocities meted out by successive royal armies since the 1540s. Prisoners taken by the English were regularly killed in cold blood, rather than ransomed according to Irish custom. In September 1580 there was a second landing at Smerwick harbour, a force of Spanish and Italian soldiers sent by the pope to shore up the Desmond rebellion. Their commander probably expected treatment according to the usual rules of war when they surrendered a few weeks later to a much larger English army under Lord Deputy Grey de Wilton. Richard Bingham, a naval captain who had fought with the Spanish against the French in Queen Mary’s day, described to Walsingham what happened next. Lord Grey ordered the colonel and captains to ‘deliver up their ensigns with order and ceremony’, which they did without protest. But once the English soldiers had occupied the fort, they ‘fell to revelling and spoiling and withal to killing, in which they never ceased while there lived one’.

Bingham estimated that between four and five hundred captives were slain, though Grey put it at nearer six hundred. The Catholic priests who had travelled with the expedition were hanged, together with any women and children unlucky enough to be found in the fort. All this took place after a white flag had been raised. Walsingham’s cousin Edward Denny commanded a company at Smerwick, and a young Walter Raleigh was among the officers directing the killing. The poet Edmund Spenser, then serving as Lord Grey’s secretary, was probably another witness. The phrase ‘Grey’s faith’ entered the Irish language as an act of treacherous dishonesty.
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The appointment of Grey de Wilton signalled a hardening of the English government’s attitude towards Ireland. Sir Henry Sidney had been a different brand of lord deputy, as much a courtier as a soldier. One of his initiatives had been to turn ‘the old ruinous castle of Dublin’ into a fitting headquarters for royal government, with better accommodation for the law-courts and a chamber in which the Irish privy council could meet. A narrative defence of his policies in Ireland, presented to Walsingham following his final recall, suggests that Sidney judged the people of Ireland by their actions rather than their ethnicity.

Lord Grey, by contrast, was a man of violence through and through. Before coming to Ireland, Grey had settled a dispute with a neighbour over the right to hunt deer by ambushing him with a cudgel in Fleet Street. Where Sidney showed some kindness to the future Jesuit Edmund Campion, Grey triumphed in the slaughter at Smerwick as a victory over false religion. The grovelling Spanish and Italian commanders were forced to listen to Grey’s tirade against the pope, ‘a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist & general ambitious tyrant over all right principalities’. A letter of explanation which Grey sent to the queen rhapsodised over the Protestant confession of faith made
by John Cheke, the only English officer to die in the engagement. But his account of the massacre itself betrayed no such fine feelings. Grey’s sole regret was that useful munitions and food had been spoiled in the process, ‘which in that fury could not be helped’. He confidently placed events at Smerwick within the compass of divine providence: ‘so hath it pleased the Lord of Hosts to deliver your enemies into [your] highness’s hands’. Grey’s report to the queen was soon repackaged as a popular pamphlet hailing England’s God-given victory ‘against the foreign bands of our Roman enemies’.
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Seven thousand Irishmen may have died as a result of the Desmond rebellions, in battle with English and loyalist forces or by execution under martial law. The earl was slain in November 1583, by a rival Irish sept rather than an English bullet. His brother Sir John of Desmond was already dead, his head sent to Dublin as a gift to Lord Grey. The war in Munster brought a demographic catastrophe in its wake. Faced with an opponent fighting a guerrilla campaign from mountains and forests, English commanders took inspiration from their Roman military manuals and set about laying waste to the countryside. In October 1579 Sir Nicholas Malby informed Walsingham that he had torched the town of Askeaton and destroyed the crop in the surrounding fields. A year later Richard Bingham was reporting on reprisals against the people of County Kerry for their failure to maintain the English garrison at Tralee. Sir George Bourchier had been empowered ‘to burn their corn, and spoil their harvest, to kill, and drive their cattle’ to deny these resources to Desmond. In a macabre parallel to the killing of prisoners, thousands of head of cattle were slaughtered and left to rot.

The consequences for a society which depended on milk, meat and hides were calamitous. In February 1582 Justice John Meade wrote to Walsingham describing the hunger and sickness
which the people of Munster were being forced to endure, ‘and every plague so extreme that it is sufficient to destroy a whole realm’. Stocks of oats and barley were soon consumed, leaving nothing for animal feed or next year’s planting. The Earl of Ormond informed Burghley in September 1583 that the harvest hadn’t been gathered in Munster that year. Ireland was no stranger to hunger, but starvation and land-flight on this scale hadn’t been witnessed since the fourteenth century. Spenser recalled in his 1596
View of the Present State of Ireland
that the common people had resembled ‘anatomies of death’, forced to graze the ground in imitation of the beasts which they had lost. A modern estimate places the death toll at more than forty-eight thousand, close to a third of the pre-famine population of the province. The truly horrifying thing about Meade’s report to Walsingham is his conviction that the Irish deserved their punishment, ‘which is justly lighted upon this nation for their long continuance in offending and transgressing of God’s laws and commandments, and now their unnatural rebellion against their liege sovereign lady the queen’s majesty’. Meade found some comfort in the spectacle of Sir John of Desmond’s headless body hanging in chains from a tower in the city of Cork, upside down ‘like a tumbler or juggler’ and visible from a mile away, to the terror of the rebels.
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Meade was a zealot, but his judgement that the Irish were rebellious by their very nature was shared by many other Englishmen. Much of this came down to their religion. The revolt of the Kildares against Henry VIII had cemented the connection between persistence in the Catholic faith and resistance to the rule of the English. The Desmond rebellions, the activities of Thomas Stucley and the presence of Nicholas Sander amongst fitz Maurice’s supporters at Smerwick could all be taken as evidence that allegiance to the pope was incompatible with loyalty to the queen. The same equation between
Catholicism and treason which sent missionary priests to the scaffold in England could in Ireland be applied to an entire society. Some English observers went further, wondering whether the Irish could be considered Christian at all. Sir Henry Sidney doubted that children in Ireland were baptised, ‘for neither find I place where it should be done, nor any person able to instruct them in the rules of a Christian’. The ‘beastliness’ of the Irish for Edmund Tremayne went deeper than their Catholicism, which at least contained the spark of true religion: ‘they will swear, and forswear, murder, rob, ravish, burn and spoil, marry and unmarry at their pleasures with pluralities of wives without any grudge of conscience’, sufficient to shock any Christian heart. All these aspects of English belief – that Gaelic lordship was oppressive and tyrannical, that fertile soil was literally going to waste, that the Irish were pagans – assembled themselves into an inexorable conclusion: Queen Elizabeth’s second kingdom would have to be resettled. Thanks to the dearth and disease which stalked the war in Munster, it wasn’t difficult for prospective planters to convince themselves that the land was empty for the taking.
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Plantation was not a new solution to the problem of governing Ireland. Leix and Offaly had been renamed Queen’s and King’s Counties in 1557 as part of a planned extension of English influence to the west of the Pale, with English soldiers settling alongside loyal Irish septs. But farms proved difficult to defend against the O’Mores and O’Connors whose territory this traditionally had been. In 1579 Walsingham had to instruct the viceroy to spend more time in the forts of Maryborough and Philipstown to ‘keep these Irish in awe and subjection’, and encourage English settlers ‘to inhabit and manure’ the estates which they had been assigned.

The situation in Ulster was even more challenging. Sir Thomas Smith intended to take a hard line in the Ards peninsula
in the early 1570s, expelling the ‘wild Irish’ and converting the more compliant into an underclass of agricultural labourers, forbidden to own land or wear English dress. Smith confidently placed his son in charge of the colony. But he reaped what he sowed when the younger Thomas was murdered by his Irish servants, his body boiled and fed to the dogs. The first Earl of Essex made matters worse by massacring the entire population of Rathlin Island, provoking violent reprisals against English soldiers and settlers.
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Elizabethan efforts to colonise Ulster were a kind of private enterprise, funded in Essex’s case by mortgaging his estates to the queen and in Smith’s by a joint-stock company. Learning a hard lesson from such high-profile failures, the crown took control of the Munster plantation from the outset. Walsingham set out the privy council’s thinking in a letter to Wallop in January 1585. The way to draw men into Munster was for the queen to redistribute confiscated rebel lands, encouraging ‘men of ability to go over from hence to inhabit there, who may be able to sustain the charges of the first planting, and tarry for their gain till after some years’. English settlers would have to ride out the early years when yields from farming and industry were low, and hold fast until their investment started to pay dividends. Recruit the wrong sort of person, warned Walsingham, and they would lease out their estates to the native Irish, ‘who will not manure them but in such idle manner as hath been used before’.
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Before Munster could be repopulated, it would have to be mapped and measured. A small team of English commissioners meandered from Tipperary to Limerick, Kerry to Cork and Waterford, calculating what could be gleaned from the land. Stocks of corn and cattle, timber and minerals, and Church property were all recorded in a latter-day equivalent of England’s Domesday survey. Arthur Robyns claimed personally to have assessed a hundred thousand acres ‘both by line and instrument’.
If true, then this amounted to about one-third of the acreage granted to the settlers once the confiscations had been ratified by Parliament. Viewed from England, where land and the social capital which it bought were in increasingly short supply, the bounty on offer in Ireland seemed to be a gift from God. Thirty-five gentleman planters or ‘undertakers’ had been selected by 1587 out of the larger group who applied, and the process of settlement could begin.
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The plantation of Munster represented a personal triumph for the principal secretary. Walsingham had been promoting plats ‘for the reformation of Ireland’ since the landing of fitz Maurice and the revolt of the Earl of Desmond. His client Sir Edward Waterhouse had been the first to flag the opportunity to achieve ‘a thorough reformation … if English be planted’ in Munster. Waterhouse’s preference was for a colony ‘totally inhabited by natural English men’, augmented if necessary by Old English brought in from the Pale; the ‘natural inhabitants’ of the province came a poor third. Edward Fenton described the region to Walsingham in terms which anticipated Richard Hakluyt’s evocation of the new world: ‘a fruitful and pleasant country such as the sun cannot shine on better’, which if properly governed ‘would maintain thousands of loyal and dutiful subjects’ and add handsomely to the queen’s coffers.

Fenton wrote before the worst of the famine, but the belief remained widespread that Ireland offered a ladder to those with some capital and a willingness to settle. Walsingham imagined a society strictly ranked, with the gentry at its summit and three classes of farmers (‘chief’, ‘good’ and ‘other’) as the middling sort, descending to copyholders and humble cottagers at its foot. A feudal hierarchy long since eroded at home could be reinvented in Ireland, complete with courts leet and courts baron, a demesne farm for the lord, and tenants who had to ride to war when summoned. The land was divided up into ‘seignories’ rather
than parishes in another medieval throwback. The army officers who followed in the second wave of plantation found additional inspiration in the empire of Rome, whose soldiers had settled to farming and fashioned themselves as gentlemen. For a man like John Cooper of Somerset, one of the queen’s ceremonial guards who acquired estates in Cork, the plantation in Munster was a chance to join the colonial aristocracy. A propaganda pamphlet claimed that a landowner could do better on £50 a year in Ireland than he could for £200 in England.
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