Published by the Corco

Published by the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia.

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Catastrophic Dimensions: The Rupture of English and Irish Identities in Early Modern Ireland, 1534-1615

D. W. Cunnane

Catastrophic Dimensions

R. F. Foster has interpreted the Irish government's new emphasis on religious discrimination as a primary cause of the emergence of a distinct Old English identity in seventeenth-century Ireland. The anti-Catholic thrust of the 1613-1615 parliament, Foster has suggested, was incidental to the government's more significant attempt to secure English interests in the turmoil wrought by the failed rebellion of Hugh O'Neill, the renegade earl of Tyrone. "The real priority of government," Foster has argued, "was to reorganize representation, incorporate new boroughs and Protestantize the personnel of parliament. This produced a decisive, if dependent, Protestant majority in the 1613 parliament, ranged against a largely Old English minority."

(4) The Irish government thus pursued strategies of Anglicization and Protestantization not as punitive or exclusionary measures but rather as matters of internal regulation; these strategies, intended to rein in particularistic, myopic, local interests, bore no nationalistic implications.

(5) That "version of Irishness" cultivated by the Protestant New English settlers in the Irish administration most effectively conduced to the governance of Ireland "with English priorities and in English interests."

(6) Policies intended to stabilize, however, soon gave rise to instability; the aggrandizement of Protestant New English interests stirred resentment in the Catholic Old English community. "[T]hese developments in politics," Foster has suggested, "coupled with the threat to land titles and the effects of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, completed the politicization of the Old English, the phrase now applied universally to those 'English of Irish birth.'"

(7) The anti-Catholic legislation passed by the 1613-1615 parliament, Foster has argued, responded to no single threat to the interests of the crown in Ireland but rather to a political situation fragmented by local competition and dissent in both the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish communities. Protestantization and Anglicization simply provided the administration with the means to regularize the enforcement of English law and to elevate governance above local rivalries. The consequential exclusion of the Old English from political and social influence, Foster has argued, did not represent a chapter in what Steven G. Ellis calls "the dominant Whig-nationalist tradition of Irish historiography--an independent Irish nation ever emerging but always frustrated by English interference."

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While Foster has perceptively escaped the distorting influences of this "whig-Nationalist tradition" of Irish historiography in his interpretation of the policies of the 1613-1615 Irish parliament that denied the political and social legitimacy of the Old English community, he has also neglected the nuances of the Irish national identity that emerged from the turbulent interaction of the Old and New English communities in the Tudor period and motivated those policies. During the sixteenth century, the attempt by the Old English to exercise the rights enjoyed by English subjects to comprehensive and effective local governance ran counter to the crown's impulse to protect royal interests at minimal cost. Both groups demanded the governance of Ireland "with English priorities and in English interests,"

(9) but each group understood those concepts differently. Political competition between the Old English community and the royal administration, filled increasingly by Protestant New English officials, gave rise to an ideological conflict over the meaning of Englishness and the relationship of the Old English identity to it. The Old English occupied an ambiguous position in Tudor Anglo-Irish society: Catholic but loyal to the crown, committed to principles of English governance in a distinctly Irish political context, they were neither fully English nor fully Irish but rather an amalgam of the two. The Old English raised legitimate opposition to adverse crown policies on the basis of their membership in an overarching English identity. As the crown administration's frustration with this opposition grew, political conflict quickly assumed nationalistic implications. By emphasizing the growing divergence between the interests of the crown and the demands of the Old English community, New English officials and commentators transformed competition within a national identity into competition between national identities. The shift in emphasis from racial to religious discrimination, ratified by the 1613-1615 parliament but emergent well before then, allowed the New English administration to deny the Old English community its place in an overarching English identity. Race had linked the Old English and the New English, but religion linked the Old English undeniably to the Gaelic Irish. The rift that the Irish government established within the colonial community laid the foundations for the type of militant Irish nationalism that, in its aggressive opposition to English rule, expanded and augmented the tragic, catastrophic dimension of Irish experience. In their political action during the sixteenth century, the Old English shaped an integrated national identity that, though markedly distinct from the English identity cultivated by the royal administration, reconciled English principles with Anglo-Irish priorities. The militant and exclusionary response of the New English community, in turn, opened a chasm between Englishness and Irishness that the Old English had sought to close.

In this respect, the collapse of Fitzgerald hegemony in Ireland was a blessing in disguise, for it provided an opportunity to realize the Old English demands for political reform that had developed during the first three decades of the sixteenth century. Brendan Bradshaw has called attention to a burgeoning movement for comprehensive political reform indigenous to the Old English Pale community.

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3) The Old English demanded, in short, the full actualization of the king's claim to Ireland; they sought vigorous local governance and a commitment by the crown to enforce English laws, to defend the Pale, and to expand jurisdiction over the Gaelic regions. This reform movement addressed the crown's governance of Ireland and its failure to provide for the general security of Old English interests. "[T]he crown's involvement in Irish government for the first twenty years or so of [the reign of Henry VIII] suggests an attitude fluctuating between apathy and feeble interest."

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4) The political reform movement of the early sixteenth century played out under the control of both the government and the Old English community. The socio-economic structure of the Pale, geared toward stable colonial life, invested the Old English with a strong commitment to peace. Their tradition of participation in local government and their loyalty to the crown motivated their attempt to secure peace and stability through traditional political processes. Bradshaw identified both conservative and liberal impulses in the Old English reform movement, but he nonetheless found similarities in their general approach to conditions inside and outside the Pale.

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5) The Old English community of the Pale demanded a strengthening of the governmental apparatus, an improvement in the Pale's military defenses, the reduction of the power of local Old English feudal magnates, and sustained and efficient royal governance in Ireland.

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6) The Old English also demanded improved relations between the Pale community and the Gaelic Irish, the expansion of royal governance throughout Ireland, and the eventual assimilation of the Gaelic Irish communities under crown rule. Though the Old English reformers disagreed slightly on their time frame and their specific method of reform, they envisaged, by and large, the gradual expansion of English authority in Ireland on an increasingly national scale.

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7) They sought an Irish government that would govern all of Ireland.

Finglas revealed none of the anti-Gaelic sentiment that would characterize later Old English treatises; he criticized the inability of the ineffectual royal Irish government to suppress Gaelic law, not the degenerative influence of Gaelic culture. In a striking passage, he unfavorably compared the failure of the administration to maintain English law with the assiduous commitment of the Gaelic Irish to their traditional Brehon laws.

It is a gret Abusion and Reproach, that the Laws and Statutes made in this Lond are not observed ne kept after the making of them eight Days, which matter is oone of the Distructions of Englishmen of this Lond; and divers Irishmen doth observe and kepe souche Laws and Statuts which they make upon Hills in ther Country firm and stable, without breaking them for any Favour or Reward.

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1)

Finglas' proposal for political reform involved the expansion of royal power within the Pale as a prelude to the reformation of the Irish lordship as a whole. "Furste, our Souveraigne Lorde the Kyng shuld extend his gracious power, for the Reformacion of Leinster which is the Key and highwaye for the Reformacion of the Remanent."

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2) The political reform of Ireland, however, ultimately required the Irish government to enforce English law uniformly throughout Ireland.

[W]hensoever our Souveraigne Lord shall extend the Reformacion of Irlaund, he must Reduce the Lordes and Gentilmen of this Londe whych be of English Nacion to due Obedience of his Grace's Lawes, which is very harde to doe, unless the Kyng with an Army represse Irishmen upon the Borders, to contribute in a good conforming.

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Finglas and the other Old English reformers demanded, and expected, the reformation of the Irish government to proceed on their terms. They sought efficient, centralized English governance sensitive to their own interests. Only when the king acted on these interests would the English foothold in Ireland be secure.

In the Irish parliament of 1541, the Old English struck preemptively to advance their program for reform against the crown's reluctance. Through the Act for the Kingly Title, which declared Ireland to be a sovereign kingdom under the rule of the English monarch, the Old English secured the comprehensive reform of the Irish administration for which Finglas and other reformers had called. The text of the Act reveals an attempt to bind the king to the enforcement of English laws in Ireland.

[L]ack of naming the king's majesty and his noble progenitors kings of Ireland, according to their said true and just title, style, and name therein, hath been great occasion that the Irishmen and inhabitants within this realm of Ireland have not been so obedient to the king's highness and his most noble progenitors, and to their laws, as they of right, and according to their allegiance and bounden duties ought to have been.

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Reactions to the passage of the Act for the Kingly Title in Dublin and in London revealed that both the Old English community and the crown recognized its implications for the dynamics of Irish politics. On 18 June 1541, a public holiday and a general amnesty for prisoners were proclaimed in Dublin as the Act for the Kingly Title was promulgated at Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Two thousand Dubliners celebrated High Mass and Te Deum, and cannonades, bonfires, and free wine marked the transformation of Ireland from a medieval lordship into a sovereign kingdom.

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5) The reaction in London differed substantially. "Not a cheer was raised at court,"

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6) and the king's council handled the Act as matter of routine administration and statutory revision. The passage of the Act infuriated the irascible monarch who acquired the title. Henry VIII condemned it on both constitutional and pragmatic grounds. The Act's text, he charged, implied that his kingly title in Ireland proceeded from the election and common consent of the Irish parliament and not from the right of original conquest; the bestowal of the kingly title by the Irish parliament, he argued, would derogate that title which he already held.

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7) Henry also understood the Act's practical implications. He rebuked his council for devising "by an act, to invest in us the name and title of king of Ireland" when royal revenues were not "sufficient to maintain the state of the same."

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8) Nevertheless, Henry could not refuse his new duties. The Old English, it seemed, had succeeded in binding him to protect and to advance their interests.

Between 1547 and 1565, these two impulses shaped a program for the military conquest of Ireland. Events at the beginning of Edward's reign suggested the form that this policy would assume. Gaelic Irish disturbances in the midlands erupted in 1546 and 1547 into open warfare under the leadership of the O'Connors and O'Mores. William Brabazon, Lord Justice of Ireland, suppressed the rebellions and established forts at Daingean, in Offaly, and at Ballyadams, in Leix. The privy council, in March 1547, authorized the establishment of English garrisons "in most meet places of service without the English Pale."

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4) Around these garrisons, Lord Deputy Sir Edward Bellingham, one of those courtiers who had secured patronage in Ireland, constructed a plantation to secure the Pale against further Gaelic unrest. By confiscating the land surrounding the garrisons and populating it with soldiers, by driving the indigenous Gaelic cultivators west toward the River Shannon, and by organizing the remaining Gaelic population under a seneschal system,

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5) the Plantation of Leix and Offaly attempted to provide a self-financing system of defense for the English settlement in Ireland.

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6) The precedent of this plantation in the midlands informed the program that Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland between 1565 and 1571, attempted to apply to Ireland as a whole.

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7) Sidney considered his program to be "the solution to the government of Ireland and was convinced that the appropriate machinery would be in operation within three years."

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8) It involved three aspects. Sidney would continue the seneschal system in the Gaelic parts of Leinster in order to make those areas into shire ground; he intended to remove the military threat to the Pale's security by gradually eliminating local Gaelic rule. He would reform the feudal lordships by instituting provisional councils, with jurisdiction confined to areas where English law had formerly prevailed and areas that had been drawn into English law by surrender and re-grant. Finally, he would launch a military campaign to overthrow Shane O'Neill and to expel Gaelic Scots immigrants from northeast Ulster.

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9) Sidney intended to further these proposals with the assistance of the New English, a class of settlers newly brought from England to Ireland.

The implementation of Sidney's program soon revealed a divergence between conquest in theory and conquest in practice. Colonization formed a central part of the program; in 1567, Sidney explained to Elizabeth that,

. . . all the Treasure your Highenes sendeth, is yssued out of this Realm; and so will it be, thoughe your Majestie sent as muche as Englande bredeth. This Myschief is no Waye to be helped, but by ministring of Justice, and planting of som civill People upon thoise barbarous Placies. And, moste gracious Soveraigne, this Matter is worthie of deliberate Consideracion and spedy Redress.

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During the 1560s, Sidney's colonization program dangerously alienated the Old English community from the royal Irish government. The imposition of unorthodox military extractions known as "cesses," the gradual exclusion of Old English influence from colonial politics, and an increasing suspicion of Old English loyalties by the New English settlers threatened to exacerbate the tensions that already existed between crown and colony. The augmented military establishment necessary to actualize Sidney's colonization program transgressed what Steven Ellis has called the "unwritten law" of English government: that "rule of the counties lay in the hands of their native elites."

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6) The principal spokesmen of the Old English community began to assert "in open speche that ther Kyngdom was kept from them by force and by such as be strangers in bloodd to them."

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7) Against the advance of the military conquest and colonization of Ireland, the Palesmen advocated the delegation of power to the Old English feudal lords who could both protect Old English interests and contain Gaelic regions and Gaelic resistance. Increasingly, the Old English held up the Act for the Kingly Title as a bulwark against the work of colonization. Old English lawyers repudiated the extension of superior English jurisdiction over the institutions of Irish government on the basis of Ireland's sovereign status.

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8) The Old English continued to assert their inviolable rights as subjects of the monarch, but the conquest and colonization of Ireland in the 1560s and 1570s forced a shift in emphasis. Before 1541, the Old English had asserted their English rights to secure the protection of their interests in the absence of adequate English governance. After 1547, the Old English asserted their English rights to protect themselves against the increased encroachment of the royal administration.

The Old English enjoyed more substantial success in rolling back the colonization of Ireland through organized resistance in the Irish parliament. The parliament in session between 1569 and 1571 revealed a new political alignment between the Old English landowners of the Pale and the Old English feudal lords. Sir Edmund Butler, brother of the earl of Ormond, and the Palesman Sir Christopher Barnewall succeeded in consolidating Old English interests in the Commons to oppose the colonization policies of the government. Sidney had expected the parliament to endorse his programs without criticism; the emergence of a cohesive Old English bloc that transcended internal divisions between the Pale and the landed classes succeeded in extending the parliament for eight sessions over two years. The Old English in Commons forced the government to concede defeat on a number of key issues. The passage of many other bills was largely permitted by the withdrawal of the government's most strident opponents from the parliament. Frustration with the political process quickly drove Butler himself into open rebellion.

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3) By 1584, the leadership of this Old English parliamentary bloc had passed to younger men who asserted that the English government was, by its very nature, inimical to local interests. An overwhelmingly Old English majority secured the defeat of an ambitious and autocratic program introduced by Sir John Perrot, the Lord Deputy, during the Irish parliament of 1584. Perrot's dual attack on constitutional liberty and on recusancy solidified Roman Catholicism as a rallying cry of the Old English cause.

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4) The Perrot parliament of 1584, Steven Ellis has explained, saw "the final emergence of a distinct Old English community, centering on the Pale, overwhelmingly and tenaciously Catholic, but loyal . . . asserting its primacy in defending English civility in Ireland and its unique ability to secure a peaceful reformation of the Irishry."

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5) The Old English had achieved through parliamentary opposition what they had failed to secure through armed rebellion; though they did not defeat the colonization project, they had, for a time, frustrated its expansion.

The Old English, of course, had always been Catholic, but the holding up of Roman Catholicism as a central and overt component of the Old English identity during the Irish parliament of 1584 suggested that the political struggle between the Old English and New English communities had taken on vast ideological dimensions. Religious conflict, it will be noted, has thus far been conspicuously absent from this essay. The tensions between the Old English community and the New English in the crown administration broke down largely along political lines during most of the sixteenth century. In their conflicts with the crown before 1541 and during the colonization program of the 1560s and 1570s, the Old English claimed and asserted rights on the basis of their English identity. As these conflicts intensified, however, the legitimacy of this identity came under attack. The struggle to maintain their political influence reflected a larger, ideological struggle on the part of the Old English to maintain their membership in the Pale community. The denial of this membership provided the means by which the New English extended and secured their authority in Ireland. Thus, political conflict sparked ideological conflict. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, articulate members of the Old English community attempted to reify their English identity; they defined themselves against the "uncivilized" Gaelic Irish and asserted the compatibility of loyalty and Roman Catholicism. At the same time, the New English deployed concepts of "degeneracy" and called attention to the common Catholic faith that linked the "civilized" Old English with the "barbarous" Gaelic Irish. The later sixteenth century, therefore, saw the Old English identity redefined.

The attempt to reify the Old English identity during this period manifested itself clearly in the writings of Richard Stanihurst, a leading spokesman for the Old English community and the descendant of a long line of prominent Palesmen. In his De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis, Stanihurst coined the term "Anglo-Hiberni," which "claims for the Old English society an identity apart from the mother-country," as Colm Lennon has explained. "Stanihurst's society was not to be considered merely as a remote outpost of English civilization but as a vibrant cultural organism with its own institutions which he took pride in portraying."

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6) In an extended passage of his "Description of Ireland," Stanihurst praised the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare and Lords Deputy of Ireland whose commitment to local Old English interests and management of the Gaelic Irish had secured the efficient operation of the Irish administration. "If it had stood with the good fortune of the Giraldines, that the king with equall balance would poise their valure, long yer this had all Ireland beene put in a quiet and peaceable state."

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7) Stanihurst criticized those members of the Pale community who shunned their distinctive Old English identity:

There are some of the ruder sort so quaint in seuering the name Irish and Ireland, as that they would be named Ireland men, but in no wise Irishmen . . . who so will grate upon such diuersities, in respect that he is ashamed of his countrie; trulie (in mine opinion) his countrie maie be ashamed of him.

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Even the "meere Irish," Stanihurst argued, recognized the vast differences between the Old English and New English identities. "[T]he Irish man . . . termeth anie one of the English sept, and planted in Ireland, Bobdeagh Galteagh, that is, English churle: but if he be an Englishman borne, then he nameth him, Bobdeagh Saxonnegh, that is, a Saxon churle."

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9) However, while he affirmed the distinctive identity of the Old English community and advocated a return to local governance, Stanihurst would by no means associate the Old English with the Gaelic Irish:

Before I attempt the unfolding of the maners of the meere Irish, I think it expedient, to forware thee reader, not to impute anie barbarous custome that shall here be laid downe, to the citizens, townsmen, and inhabitants of the English pale, in that they differe litle or nothing from the ancient customes and dispositions of their progenitors, the English and Welsh men, being therefore as mortallie behated of the Irish, as those that are born in England.

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Stanihurst described an Old English identity utterly distinct from that of the Gaelic Irish and equal in manners and civility to that of the royal administration. Stanihurst's Old English identity had a dignity and dynamism all its own. Uncorrupted by the influence of the "meere Irish," it was well adapted for the governance of Ireland.

The colonial New English refused to acknowledge these differences in religion and culture that distinguished the Old English and Gaelic Irish communities. As articulate members of the Old English community asserted their civility and loyalty, the New English actively stripped them of both qualities. Nicholas Canny has shown that a dramatic reconceptualization of the Gaelic Irish and Old English identities accompanied, and indeed justified, the widespread colonization of Ireland. Sidney was profoundly critical of the Old English feudal society but admitted that English colonization would reform it on the model of English civility. William Gerrard, one of Sidney's subordinates, argued similarly that only force could subdue the Gaelic Irish but that the "rodd of justice" would reform the feudal Old English, for "in theim yet resteth this instincte of Englishe nature generally to feare justice."

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3) By the 1590s, however, New English perceptions had begun to change. Edmund Spenser's A View of the State of Ireland, written around the year 1598, reflected a subtle yet striking shift in the New English understanding of the task of reforming Ireland. Spenser's View revealed neither a recognition of the differences between the Old English and the Gaelic Irish nor any suggestion that the Old English could participate in the reformation process. The conditions of Irish society, he argued, had made legal reform impossible:

So the lawes were at first intended for the reformation of abuses, and peaceable continuation of the subject; but are sithence disannulled, or quite prevaricated through change and alternation of times, yet they are good still in themselves; but, in that commonwealth that is ruled by them, they worke not that good which they should, and sometimes also that evill which they would not.

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Spenser condemned both the Act for the Kingly Title and the parliament of 1584, instances of Old English self-assertion, as detrimental to the English reformation of Ireland; both suggested to Spenser the intractability of the Old English and their disloyalty to the crown. Nothing, however, revealed this disloyalty more clearly than did the Old English allegiance to Roman Catholicism:

[T]here bee many ill disposed and undutifull persons of that realme, like as in this point there are also in this realme of England, too many, which being men of good inheritance, are for dislike of religion, or danger of the law, into which they are run, or discontent of the present government, fled beyond the seas [to the Catholic kingdoms of the continent], where they live under Princes, which are her Maiesties professed enemies, and converse and are confederat with other traitors and fugitives which are there abiding. The which nevertheless have the benefits and profits of their lands here, by pretence of such colourable conveyances thereof, formerly made by them unto their privie friends heere in trust, who privily doe send over unto them the said revenues wherwith they are there maintained and enabled against her Majestie.

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For Edmund Spenser, the Roman Catholicism of the Old English community made it inherently traitorous and set it, for all intents and purposes, outside the civil Pale community. The suppression and reformation of Ireland that Spenser advocated involved a suppression and reformation of the Old English community. Indeed, that community, in its political action and popish loyalties, had emerged as a more inimical threat to English colonial interests than the Gaelic Irish had ever been.

[T]he State of England ought to be cleared of an imputation, which a vulgar error hath called upon it, in one point: namely, that Ireland long since might have been subdued and reduced to Civility, if some Statesman in policy, had not thought it more fit to continue that Realm in Barbarism . . . ever since Our Nation had any footing in this Land, the State of England did earnestly desire, and did accordingly endeavor from time to time, to perfect the Conquest of this Kingdom, but that in every age there were found such impediments and defects in both Realms, as caused almost an impossibility, that things should have been otherwise than they were.

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The theme of degeneracy pervades Davies' Discovery. He argued that, through their contact with the Gaelic Irish surrounding the Pale, the Old English became degenerate, adopted Irish ways, lost their English identity, and thus became crude and ungovernable.

These were the Irish Customs, which the English Colonies did embrace and use, after they had rejected the Civil and Honorable Laws and Customs of England, whereby they became Degenerate and Metamorphosed like Nebuchadnezzar: who although he had the face of a man, had the heart of a beast; or like those who had drunk of Circes Cup, and were turned into very Beasts; and yet took such pleasure in their beastly manner of life, as they would not return to the shape of man again; Insomuch, as within less time than the age of a man, they had no marks or differences left among them of that noble Nation, from which they were descended. For, as they did not, onely forget the English language and scorn the use thereof, but grew to be ashamed of their very English names . . . and took Irish Sirnames and Nick-names.

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The Old English, Davies argued, had in fact become Irish; their adoption of Gaelic customs indicated the decay and degeneration of their very Englishness:

[I]f we consider the Nature of the Irish Customs, we shall find that the people, which doth use them, must of necessity be Rebels to all good Government, destroy the commonwealth wherein they live, and bring Barbarisme and desolation upon the richest and most fruitfull Land of the world.

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This concept of degeneracy provided both a powerful justification for the exclusion of the Old English from political influence in the colonial administration and a compelling motivation for the thoroughgoing suppression of their incorrigible "Irish Catholic" ways. Davies collapsed the two threats to English interests in Ireland--the easily handled series of Gaelic rebellions and insurrections and the more intractable and problematic political opposition raised by the Old English community that had frustrated crown policy throughout the sixteenth century--into a single problem with a single solution. The suppression of "Irish Catholicism" and the "barbarism" which it engendered would solidify the strength and security of the English government in Ireland.

The parliament of 1613-1615 thus responded proximately to O'Neill's rebellion, but the anti-Catholic legislation secured by the Irish government marked the culmination of the political and ideological struggle within the colonial community over the nature of the Old English identity and its place in the Irish polity. R. F. Foster portrayed this struggle as one aspect of a local competition between varieties of Irishness; in the 1613-1615 parliament, he suggested, internal regulation subdued internal rivalries. During the sixteenth century, however, this struggle assumed nationalistic implications that Foster fails to acknowledge; what was at stake in the political and ideological conflict between the Old and New English was not regional or local identity but rather the very distinction between Irishness and Englishness. Initially during the early sixteenth century and then increasingly as the royal Irish government adopted more autocratic policies, the Old English recognized the divergence of their interests from the priorities of the crown. To protect these interests, the Old English community asserted an integrative identity that reconciled differences of religion, national origin, and political outlook. The Act for the Kingly Title articulated most clearly the Old English national identity. In order to secure their ambiguous position in the English polity, the Old English bound themselves to the crown as Anglo-Irish subjects of an Anglo-Irish monarch. The royal Irish government, however, rejected this expansive definition of Englishness; as New English officials gained political power and social influence, the English identity that they cultivated became increasingly restricted. Anglo-Irishness, thus, became strictly Irishness, and the Old English community that had operated within an overarching English identity found itself excluded from it. "By degrees," Aidan Clarke has explained, "the loyal element in the population of Ireland not merely lost the potentiality to improve its position through the successful assertion of royal power, but found that its actual position had been placed in jeopardy."

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5) The Old English identity rested on the fundamental affinity between English and Irish life; it was, indeed, an Anglo-Irish identity in the fullest sense of both terms. Political and ideological manipulation by the New English community that culminated in the anti-Catholic legislation of the 1613-1615 Irish parliament permanently destroyed that affinity and left the Old English in search of a new identity. Expelled from the English community, as Aidan Clarke has argued, the Old English, during the seventeenth century, gradually joined the Irish community. The New English prevailed in the political and ideological conflict of the sixteenth century; they destroyed both the most intractable political opposition to their rule in Ireland and the identity that supported it. In doing so, however, the New English drew the lines for the destructive conflict between the English and Irish communities that has characterized the history of modern Ireland.

Notes

1. The history of modern Ireland has invested the term "Anglo-Irish" with profoundly nationalistic overtones that are anachronistic in the early modern period. In this essay, the term "Anglo-Irish" will refer simply to the English community in Ireland.

4. Foster, Modern Ireland, 45.

6. Ibid., 49, 51.

7. Ibid., 51.

8. Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures (London: Longman, 19

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5), 13. In articles published in Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 19

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4), Stephen Ellis and Brendan Bradshaw debated the nature and purpose of Irish historiography in the early modern period. In "Nationalist Historiography and the English and Gaelic Worlds in the Late Middle Ages," Ellis critiqued the Whiggish character of early modern Irish historiography. "[T]he concern with the pre-history of Irish nationalism," he argued, "has been allowed to prejudge the issue of the island's separate development in the late middle ages." In this essay, he sketched the outlines of a Revisionist manifesto that applied Foster's interpretative approach to the general historiography of early modern Ireland. Rejecting the attempt of nationalistic historians to find in this period historical justification for their outlook, Ellis has interpreted the Anglo-Irish identity as a regional variant of a larger English identity and of Irish colonial life as a local manifestation of the larger trends of English life. The conflict between the crown administration and the Old English community, he suggested, played out as little more than a local feud, similar to the regional feudal conflicts of fifteenth-century England. Tensions between the Old and New English communities involved no nationalistic implications because of their provincial scale; a common English identity ultimately subsumed all regional biases and loyalties. "[N]ationalist interpretations necessarily reveal steady 'progress' towards an independent Ireland," Ellis has written. "But the validity of such concepts can only be tested by discussing developments in English and Gaelic Ireland in their respective contexts of the English and Gaelic worlds."

Brendan Bradshaw's response, "Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland," suggested the flaws of this Revisionist project. The attempt to establish an inviolable barrier between the intellectual climate of the present and the events of the past, Bradshaw argued, served to obscure rather than to elucidate the dynamics of that past. "'Separatism' well describes an important current that developed within the political consciousness of the colonial élite in the late medieval period," Bradshaw explained. "That a clear distinction was made between the colonists and any such regional sub-group is indicated by the contemporary designation which applied to [the Old English community] the qualifying epithet 'by blood,' thus setting them apart from the normal English 'by birth.'" The Revisionist attraction to "value-free" history, Bradshaw suggested, involved sins of commission and omission. By actively purging modern values and convictions from their assessment of historical events, Revisionists, Bradshaw charged, disguised a powerfully destructive ideology in the guise of benign explanation. In response to the nationalist attempt to establish long lines of continuity between the modern Irish nation and its historical predecessors, Bradshaw alleged that the Revisionists have with equal zeal interpreted "the past as a foreign country." In this approach to the past, he argued, the Revisionists have neglected a central aspect of it. "It is . . . in responding to the interpretative challenge posed by the catastrophic dimensions of Irish history," Bradshaw has written, "that the sins of omission of the value-free school are to be observed."8 The reluctance of Revisionist historians to make recourse to value judgments, Bradshaw argued, has marginalized, and even excluded, a central aspect of Irish history from the historical record. Though at times disturbingly presentist in orientation, Bradshaw has valuably emphasized the importance of personal values and biases for early modern Irish historiography. Sensitivity to the catastrophic dimensions of Irish history, he suggested, permits a clearer comprehension of the choices and forces that shaped it.

9. Foster, Modern Ireland, 51.

10. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 124; quoted in Canny, "Early Modern Ireland," 103.

12. Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (New York: St. Martin's Press, 19

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5), 111.

14. Ibid., 32-33.

16. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 44-45.

17. Ibid., 46-48.

19. Coyne and Livery was a Gaelic extraction that provided for private military retinues, not unlike the system of bastard feudalism characteristic of fifteenth-century England.

20. Finglas, "Breviate," 84.

21. Ibid., 101.

22. Ibid., 88.

23. Ibid., 88.

25. According to the provisions of Poyning's Law (14

9

4), "the Irish council had to request permission from London for the holding of a private assembly, and it had to transmit to the English king and his Privy Council there the bills which it intended to pass in the Irish legislature. Only when the bills were returned in the approved form to Dublin could parliament be asked to go ahead and pass them into law." Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 14.

26. Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 147.

27. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 131.

30. Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 154-155.

33. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 140.

34. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 237.

35. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 139.

36. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 264.

38. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 140.

39. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 33-34.

40. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 148.

41. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 34.

42. Ibid., 35.

43. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 245.

44. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 229.

45. Bellingham, one of the new advocates of a military conquest of Ireland, had first imposed the seneschal system in Wicklow to suppress the Byrnes, O'Tooles, and Kavanaghs. Under this system, an English captain ruled as a seneschal, or bailiff, in the place of the dismissed Gaelic chieftain, enforced martial law, and financed himself and his retinues by the rents and dues of the subdued Gaelic Irish. See Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 34.

46. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 35.

48. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 47.

49. Ibid., 49-51.

51. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 64-67.

52. Ibid., 70.

53. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 82.

54. Ibid.

55. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 90.

56. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 246.

57. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 37.

58. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 267.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 143-144.

62. Ibid., 147.

63. Ibid., 140-141.

64. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 284-286.

65. Ibid., 286.

67. Richard Stanihurst, "A Treatise Conteining a plaine and perfect description of Ireland; with an Introduction to the better understanding of the histories apperteining to that Iland," in Chronicles, ed. Raphael Hollinshed and William Harrison (London: 15

8

6), 34.

68. Ibid., 10.

69. Ibid., 44.

70. Ibid., 44.

71. Clarke, "Colonial Identity," 60.

72. Ibid., 71.

74. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 19

9

7), 13.

75. Ibid., 35-36.

76. James P. Myers, Jr., "Introduction," in A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued [And] Brought Under Obedience of the Crown Until the Beginning of His Majesty's Happy Reign, ed. James P. Myers, Jr. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 19

8

8), 3-4.

77. Sir John Davies, Historical Relations: Or, a Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Intirely Subdu'd nor Brought under Obedience of the Crown of England until the Beginning of the Reign of King James of Happy Memory, 3d ed. (Dublin: 16

6

6), 4, in A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700, ed. Donald Wing (New York: Columbia University Press, 19

4

5).

78. Ibid., 164.

79. Ibid., 150.

81. Canny, "Early Modern Ireland," 113.

82. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 300-303.

83. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 303.

84. Davies, Discovery, 65.

85. Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 18.