The Elizabethans (3 page)

Sir Henry Sidney was one of the prime movers in bringing Reform to Ireland: in confirming the Protestant Reformation, in introducing the rule of law to replace the more anarchic Gaelic traditions relating to inheritance and property, in inaugurating a system of education. Elizabeth allowed him to summon an Irish parliament upon his arrival in 1566, the first Irish parliament to meet for six years. Every single reform that Sidney proposed met with opposition from the Palesmen, from the English-speaking parliamentary representatives. They rejected his proposal for an Irish university – it was not until 1592 that Trinity College, Dublin, was established. They rejected his attempts to set up grammar schools all over Ireland. They were deeply suspicious of trial by jury being introduced to Ireland. Sidney had two terms as Deputy: 1566–71 and 1575–8. Like those of the other Elizabethan deputies, his Irish career ended in failure. In 1577 his son, Philip, aged twenty-three, wrote a defence of his father’s career in Ireland. It was also a job application to succeed him as Deputy. He told the Queen that she had three options when it came to attempting to rule Ireland. The first was military conquest – not an option, as he realised, not least because the parsimonious monarch would have deemed it far too expensive. Second was the path of complete military withdrawal. Again, this was not an option, for it would lead to the loss of Ireland altogether. The only other option, the third way, was to raise revenue in Ireland itself to meet the costs of extended government. The rebellions of ‘Shane O’Neill and all the Earl of Ormond’s brethren’ must be put down by the Irish themselves. Of course Ireland and its inhabitants were ‘in no case to be equalled to this realm [of England]’. Of course one symptom of this was the ‘ignorant obstinacy in papistry’. But they would never forget ‘the fresh remembrance of their lost liberty’, ‘until by time they find the sweetness of due subjection’.
¹¹

Funnily enough, the Irish never did find due subjection as sweet as the young Philip Sidney believed that they should. But the matter is more complicated than we should suppose, when viewing it from the perspective of today. Ireland is today at peace. It could be said that it is at peace because it has at last got rid of English interference. Another way of describing the current, early twenty-first-century picture of Ireland, however, is that, for the first time in 400 years, Ireland is governed by a rule of law
accepted by all sides
. The secularised values of modern Ireland derive from the Renaissance and Reformation, which the English Elizabethan deputies were trying to persuade the Irish to adopt. After the scandals of child abuse and the decline in priestly and religious vocations, Ireland has abandoned its ‘papistry’. The days of de Valera’s Ireland, in which it was impossible to purchase a copy of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
in the city that inspired it, have gone for ever.

This has led to a divergence among the Irish historians themselves. On the one hand, there are those who do not baulk at comparisons between the Elizabethans in Ireland and the butchers of the Third Reich.
¹²
On the other hand, there are more moderate voices among Irish historians
¹³
who argue that Celtic, or Gaelic, Ireland was in any event dying in the sixteenth century. It had to be replaced by
something
. An historian such as Patricia Coughlan (
Spenser and Ireland
) has some sympathy with the actual administrators in Ireland itself during this period, and blames the failure on a ‘loss of nerve’ in London – by the Queen and her court. The planters were, Coughlan argued,
¹⁴
constantly urging London, from the 1540s onwards, not to abandon Ireland, not to give up helping the Irish emerge from a collapsing Gaelic community of life.

But – is it true that Gaelic culture in Ireland was collapsing? True, Ireland was an outpost, in a changing Europe, of a way of life that was totally unlike the mercantile, urbanised world of Elizabethan London, or the city states of Italy. But how much did the English colonists
know
of Irish culture? How much, come to that, do modern historians know of it? Edmund Spenser was unusual among the English in Ireland. His antiquarian curiosity led him to obtain translations of old Irish poems. And he learned a smattering of Gaelic.

A much more typical Elizabethan picture of Ireland came from the famous traveller Fynes Moryson – chief secretary to Sir Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy – in 1600 Lord Deputy of Ireland and younger brother of Sir George Moryson, Vice President of Munster 1609–28. Fynes Moryson, who in 1616 published An
itinerary
of travels in places as far afield as Turkey and Poland, gave what was the stereotypical view of Ireland. The Irish speak ‘a peculiar language, not derived from any other radical tongue (that ever I could hear, for myself neither have nor ever sought to have any skill therein)’. He regarded the Irish, of whatever degree, as no better than savages. ‘They willingly eat the herb shamrock, being of a sharp taste, which, as they run and are chased to and fro, they snatch like beasts out of the ditches . . .’

Many of these wild Irish eat no flesh, but that which dies of disease or otherwise of itself, neither can it scape them for stinking . . .

I trust no man expects among these gallants any beds, much less feather beds and sheets, who like the nomads removing their dwellings, according to the commodity of pastures for their cows, sleep under the canopy of heaven, or in a poor house of clay, or in a cabin made of the boughs of trees and covered with turf, for such are the dwellings of the very lords among them.
¹⁵

Edmund Campion, later a Jesuit, wrote a
History of Ireland
, in ten weeks in 1571, and dedicated it to his patron the Earl of Leicester.
¹⁶
It was in part intended as a defence of Sir Henry Sidney. It is doubtful whether Campion ever went beyond the Pale, and he based his frequently satirical picture of the Irish on the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis – whose visit to Ireland was in 1185–6. Typical in tone is Campion’s account: ‘In Ulster thus they used to Crowne their king, a white cow was brought forth, which the King must kill, and seeth in water whole, and bathe himself therein stark naked. The sitting in the same Caldron, his people about him, together with them, he must eat the fleshe, and drinke the broath, wherein he sitteth, without the cuppe or dish or use of his hand.’
¹⁷

In fact there is no particular evidence for any so-called ‘decline’ in the clan system in Ireland during the sixteenth century when the Elizabethans decided to abolish it – just as the London government waged its war on the Scottish clans in the eighteenth century, and systematically attempted to eliminate tribal structures in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
¹⁸
‘The Gaelic way of life stood in the path of Progress.’ Those who have studied sixteenth-century Ireland from a non-imperialist viewpoint for example, in the lands belonging to the Desmonds, found ‘an organized State, with an elaborate fiscal system, providing a settled annual revenue for the sovereign and his various sub-chiefs. This revenue was definitely assessed on certain areas of land. It postulates fixed metes and bounds, a considerable amount of tillage. Every clan, every sub-sept, had its own territory; and on this territory the amounts due for the support of the hierarchy of chiefs were systematically applotted.’
¹⁹

This is very different from the barbarous anarchy seen by the Elizabethan deputies, their assistants and their sympathetic English, usually male, historians. They did not trouble to learn Gaelic, so they were hardly in a position to know whether or not the Gaelic culture was ‘in decline’. In fact, the bardic poets were a group detested by the Elizabethan governments because of the influence they exercised over the Gaelic aristocracy. Sir Henry Harrington, seneschal and chief English officer of the O’Byrne territory in County Wicklow in 1579, was instructed to ‘make proclamation that no idle person, vagabond or masterless man, bard, rymor, or other notorious malefactor, remain within the district on pain of whipping after eight days, and of death after
twenty days
.’
²⁰
In the same year, 1579, Hugh MacShane O’Byrne died, Gaelic chieftain and leader of the resistance in Wicklow. You can read his Poem Book and see the vigour with which the bards responded to the Elizabethan Reform movement:

Who buyeth a piece of nine verses,

Even though he get the purchase thereof?

To the men of Leinster, though high their repute,

I know that is a difficult question.

The answer the O’Byrnes make us is:

‘Let not the verses, eight or nine, be heard;

Until the Sasanachs have retired overseas

We shall pay for neither poem nor lay.

He who never bowed to Foreigner’s custom

Hugh MacShane, of comeliness renowned

It is with him I have tried my fortune

With a piece in verses eight or nine.’
²¹

In fact there is a great deal of manuscript evidence that a vigorous bardic tradition survived in sixteenth-century Ireland. Nor could even the most repressive of the settlers always manage to sustain the classic justification for colonialism the world over – namely, that the natives existed in an anarchy from which imperialism alone could rescue them. In 1556 the O’Moore lands in Leix were confiscated by settlers. For fifty years the O’Moores and their supporters resisted plantation and carried on their old tribal way of life unless interrupted by English attempts to civilise them. In 1600 Lord Deputy Mountjoy raided Leix. It was none other than Fynes Moryson who left the desperate account:

Our captains, and by their example (for it was otherwise painful) the common soldiers, did cut down with their swords all the rebels corn, to the value of 10,000 and upwards, the only means by which they were to live, and to keep their bonaghts [hired soldiers]. It seemed incredible that by so barbarous inhabitants the ground should be so manured, the fields so orderly fenced, the towns so frequently inhabited, and the highways and paths so beaten, as the Lord Deputy here found them. The reason whereof was, that the Queen’s forces during these wars, never till then came among them.
²²

Edmund Spenser did not like the conclusion to which his
View of the Present State of Ireland
drove him: that it was the introduction of English law – that bedrock of English stability – that made Ireland in fact anarchic and ungovernable. Yet he and all his fellow planters and administrators were:

. . . in blood

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
²³

In the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Munster plantations served as a model for settlements in Virginia and the Carolinas.
²⁴
In the sixteenth century, as the Irish seemed less and less amenable to ‘the sweetness of due subjection’, we can now see that as there was so little chance of subduing the Irish by persuasion, it had to be done by coercion. And for this the English looked for role models among the Spanish Conquistadors in the New World. It was an unhappy example to follow, but entirely compatible with Elizabethan attitudes to cultures that got in their way of progress, or people who could if necessary be reduced to sub-human or non-human status for the sake of commercial gain. And it is to the painful subject of slavery and its relation to colonisation that we must now turn.

2

The New World

WHEN, DRIFTING IN
the morning calm of 26 July 1588, the Lord Admiral of the Fleet, Howard of Effingham, conferred knighthoods upon six Elizabethan seamen, there was probably none more deserving of the honour than John Hawkins of Plymouth. As Treasurer to the Royal Navy, Hawkins had done more than any man to ensure the invincibility of the English fleet and, in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, his seamanship and skill had just been ably demonstrated. After ten days of bitter fighting against the huge Spanish navy, not one English ship had fallen out for sea damage or the enemies’ shot.
¹
That was a collective achievement of course, but it would not have been possible without Hawkins, who learned about ships not simply from his ship-owning father – William Hawkins, Mayor of Plymouth – but from his very active career as a young man on the high seas.

How shall we classify that career? As a ‘privateer’? As a cut-throat pirate? As a spy, a double-agent, a confidence trickster and thief? A case could be made for making such a description of this brave desperado. And I think it must be said at the outset that if you find
nothing
to admire about John Hawkins, or about his cousin Francis Drake – nothing to enjoy in their outrageous careers – then the Elizabethan Age will remain for ever a place of incomprehensible nightmare for you.

To King Philip II of Spain he was ‘the English pirate named John Hawkins, who has gone through the Indies committing great robberies and destruction’. When trying to con his way into the Spanish pearl fishery of Borburata (in present-day Venezuela) he had told the Spanish officials that he was a personal friend of Philip’s. ‘I knowe the [King of] Spaine your mr unto whome alsoe I have bene a servaun.’
²
A few years later a Spaniard called Juanos de Urquiza was stating as a fact that Hawkins was the first man knighted by Philip II when he came to England.
³