The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland

James Charles Roy

• Éditeur: Pen & Sword Military
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526770738
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Irish History

Queen Elizabeth's bloody rule over Ireland is examined in this " richly-textured, impressively researched and powerfully involving" history (Roy Foster, author of Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 ). England's violent subjugation of Ireland in the sixteenth century under Queen Elizabeth I was one of the most consequential chapters in the long, tumultuous relationship between the two countries. In this engaging and scholarly history, James C. Roy tells the story of revolt, suppression, atrocities, and genocide in the first colonial "failed state". At the time, Ireland was viewed as a peripheral theater, a haven for Catholic heretics, and a potential "back door" for foreign invasions. Tormented by such fears, lord deputies sent by the queen reacted with an iron hand. These men and their subordinates—including great writers such as Edmund spencer and Walter Raleigh—would gather in salons to pore over the "Irish Question". But such deliberations were rewarded by no final triumph, only debilitating warfare that stretched across Elizabeth's long rule.

Part I

The Young Queen

Chapter 1

The Family Her Father’s England

It would be interesting to know, intimately, what forces really shaped the young queen’s character. What she understood about the past, how precise her knowledge of English history, and the intricacies of her Tudor forebears, truly were; what insights she may have had about that heroically embellished figure, her father “Great Harry” and equally, her disgraced mother. Whatever she knew on these subjects would not, in all likelihood, have been gleaned from books. The formal discipline of writing current history, or for that matter, contemporary encyclopaedias, was not an English accomplishment of the mid-1550s. The young Elizabeth would certainly have had some texts available, and chronicles as well, but more likely than not most formal education on the niceties of the immediate political past came to her in genealogical tables and charts, for these were studied scrupulously. Most of her earliest lessons in Tudor lore were probably verbal, anecdotal, and highly prejudicial conversations – the running commentary of great deeds, great marriages, great controversies touched upon as passing fingers scrolled about on the lineage and ramifications of aristocratic couplings. All this would have been embellished by those individuals closest to her in youth: the teachers such as John Ascham, many from Cambridge, who were summoned to educate her, in competition with the nurses and guardians of her own household, the people who actually brought her up, embodied by the dangerously talkative Kat Ashley, for example, for whom Elizabeth had genuine and familial affection similar to that of a mother and daughter.1

What she felt about England and its role in the Europe of 1550 may well have been dramatically different from the historical appraisals of today, a full four centuries later. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, who between the two of them ruled for eighty-three years of the sixteenth century as figurative Tudor bookends, are larger-than-life figures, at least to the English-speaking world. They seem to epitomize a sort of Renaissance dynamic whereby the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the suppressing of superstition by Protestantism, colonies in the New World, and the age of Shakespeare, all blend to coalesce into new beginnings, new hopes, great progress and excitement in an explosion of human energy. The afterglow of victory over Spain’s armada in 1588 typifies the mindset: vigorous, dynamic, enlightened England crushes a retrograde, backward opponent, one rooted in the Inquisition and rosary beads. In point of fact, it took Philip II of Spain just a year to recover from this financial and military fiasco. In 1589, he was busy rebuilding his fleet for further ventures.2 Scholars past and present who think and write in Philip’s Spanish tongue, or the “Burgundian” his father Emperor Charles V spoke (along with the French king, Francis I), or the Italian of any number of wily popes, have a substantially different perception of Tudor England than we do.3 To many of these commentators, England was a peripheral kind of place, the outsider, a meddlesome pest of a nation always ready to pick and scavenge along the sidelines as the true powers of Europe, epitomized by the royal dynasties of Habsburg and Valois, battled all over the mainland. The vulgar English language, for example, was not considered by foreign ambassadors as even a requirement for service to their postings at the court in London: Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and even Turkish, could be deemed essential, but not English, a signal sign of Continental contempt.4 If Henry VIII, a man of enormous vanity, did not accept this reality, his daughter certainly did.

Henry VIII succeeded the seventh Henry in 1509. He was seventeen years old, a handsome, athletic, though hardly carefree young man. His father, the first Tudor, had seized the throne at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. This fierce, two-hour fray brought an end to almost forty years of civil war, an evil memory that lingered in folklore for generations. Shakespeare gave Richard III a noble death at Bosworth Field, but popular relief at his removal from the scene was widespread. When the naked, mutilated corpse of the last Plantagenet was unceremoniously dumped in a horse trough at Leicester Castle, the populace threw garbage on it and spittle.5

This was the primary military adventure of King Henry VII. He married with prudence, ruled quietly, and taxed prodigiously. His son inherited a very ample treasury and his deceased brother’s wife, the Spaniard Catherine of Aragon. He would squander the first and discard the second, with disastrous results.

In the Plantagenet worldview, inherited by the Tudors, England could almost be seen as tangential, a watery spur from the jewel that truly counted, Aquitaine and France. As Shakespeare’s Henry V had so memorably cried, “No king of England, if not king of France!”6 The Plantagenets, after all, beginning with the famous Henry II and his progeny, Richard the Lionheart and John, had all been French-speaking nobility, and their cares and primary attentions had always been the Continent. King Richard, for example, king of England for ten years, had spent only six months of his reign on English soil. His ambitions, and those of most who followed him, were aimed at augmenting their power in France.

By the 1400s, however, English control of French territories had greatly diminished. On Henry VIII’s ascension, only the coastal town of Calais and the surrounding “marches” were left. Henry would spend prodigious treasure trying to expand that foothold, vital to any military endeavour as a point of entry to the mainland. What little success he achieved, through thirty- eight years of effort, was mostly the result of dynastic ambitions by men more powerful than he, and beyond his ability to control.

The great powers of the Continent were those of the French Valois, embodied by Francis I from 1515 to 1547, and the House of Habsburg, led by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Charles ruled his vast and complicated mélange of kingdoms from today’s Belgium; Francis, as king of France, operated from a variety of royal palaces, mostly those grouped around Paris and the Loire valley to its south. Henry was a lucky man that throughout the first years of his reign, Charles and Francis competed mostly in Italy, wasting money, armies, and attention in yearly campaigns that more often than not also embroiled the papacy. In moments of conscience, Charles even engaged the infidel Turk. Henry Tudor, however, navigated from the outside, entering and abandoning alliances as circumstance demanded. Like his wily father-in-law, King Ferdinand of Aragon, he had no moral compunctions. While negotiating a treaty of mutual assistance on the one hand, he could contemplate with complete self-assurance a secondary option to betray his partner simultaneously. These were the days, after all, of autocratic monarchies. Henry and all the others did as they pleased.

This is not to suggest that men like the king of England did not feel apprehensive or insecure. Far from it. Dangers lurked (real or imagined) on many and varied levels. Poor harvests, onerous taxation, religious hysteria, might all boil over into more or less spontaneous disturbances that could seriously shake a monarch’s composure. England, after all, was not a modern state as we understand that term today. Roads and communication were primitive, standing armies non-existent, and the king largely restricted to London. Henry himself hardly ventured more than 120 miles from his capital (Elizabeth not much farther); thus reaction time to a crisis out in a far-flung corner of the realm was necessarily limited.7 In Henry’s time, and that of his three children, peasant rabble often assembled to converge on London, and many of these “alarums” were extraordinarily threatening. The loyalties and devotion of his principal nobles were, accordingly, essential. Could he trust these men, could he count on them? Henry spent a great deal of time thinking over this question.

As he did so, he used the same criteria employed when dealing with Charles V and Francis I, and studied the same weapons at his disposal. Most broadly put – or as a last resort – the issue was soldiers and military might, but conceptually the main ingredient was the wedding bed.

Marriages, and the brokering thereof, was an essential tool of conspiracy. It is ironic that aristocratic women – many poorly educated and virtually ignored in terms of psychological development – should on the other hand be deemed invaluable as diplomatic commodities, but such was the case. Bloodlines, dynastic potential, geographical advantages, financial considerations, and simple vanity, all played their part in what were, essentially, business transactions. These marriages were by and large loveless, and expected to be so. Very few women foresaw any personal satisfaction to come from such unions, instead viewing these barterings in the fatalistic context of familial duty over which they had little say. The expectation for them was to be quiet and produce children.8*

Marriage alliances were critical in both foreign and domestic politics. Henry could, and often did, approve or disapprove of marriages among his nobility, as these were avenues whereby factions within court could solidify positions that might bolster, or threaten, the monarch. Likewise on the international scene, the diplomatic correspondence of Francis, Charles, and Henry is often obsessed with questions of matrimonial complexity. Some of Henry’s most prodigious temper tantrums were directed towards the marital difficulties of his sisters, of whom, it was said, he was fond. No matter, when their liaisons did not engender appropriate political results, his mood turned sour.

Likewise the necessity to have male heirs. Henry’s wayward, greedy eyes looked over the ladies of his court more or less as a cattle mart, there for the choosing. Catherine of Aragon did not appreciate these roving appraisals, but she knew it to be more or less standard royal behaviour and, as her husband advised, she put up with it. Henry, for example, took both Boleyn sisters as mistresses, and never would have married the younger as his second wife had Catherine delivered him a son. But Anne Boleyn was not a docile subject, perhaps because her origins were not sufficiently royal to grant her the unique patience of which Catherine – indisputably lineaged – was capable. Anne Boleyn had a sharp tongue and used it freely. She had smitten the king with “the dart of love,” but when she too did not produce the requisite male heir, only the “brat” Elizabeth, her subsequent jealousy of rivals imperilled her dangerously. “I can put you down,” Henry famously warned her, but Anne evidently did not believe him. When she was beheaded in 1536, all the intricate spiders’ webs of relationships created matrimonially among the Howard and Boleyn families stood endangered. And Henry, as he aged and grew familiar with processes of divorce and intemperate execution, put all factions on notice that marriage alliances held equal odds for disaster as they did for advancement.9

Henry’s wretched failure with his various wives aside, history may well have viewed this gluttonous individual as no more or less interesting than any of his contemporary despots had it not been for one crucial twist in his otherwise pedestrian career: religion. Had Catherine of Aragon done her duty as a royal spouse and produced the desperately required son rather than a superfluous daughter in Princess Mary, who knows if the Protestant Reformation would ever have achieved the Tudor’s eventual sanction? Henry was cynical enough and shrewd enough to see in the rising religious turmoil a useful tool that could shed the unwanted Catherine. It took him time to figure this out, as his minister Cardinal Wolsey first attempted conventional, and absurd measures to secure a divorce (claiming Henry’s marriage to be a sin against God, as he had taken his brother’s wife, citing a convenient Biblical text as justification. Unfortunately, rebutting texts were also abundant).10 Sexual tension heightened the cardinal’s plight, as Anne Boleyn, taking note of her sister’s fate as a royal concubine, initially refused to sleep with the king unless she was his legal consort. Wolsey in the end could not survive the challenge or the strain and was purged, replaced by his able assistant, the lawyer Thomas Cromwell. It is felt by most historians that it was Cromwell who advised the king that he could have his divorce and solve a second problem as well – his growing financial deficit – in one policy move against the church. This was astute advice from Cromwell, albeit amoral and perilous to all involved, but Cromwell, like everyone else around the king, was avaricious for power and spoil. He took advantage of Henry’s lack of self-control and formulated schemes that appealed to his master’s lustful nature. He should have realized that Henry’s appetites were uncontrollable, that once freed from restraint he would never be satisfied. As the king discarded one wife after another, Cromwell would lose his head as well, because a woman he chose for Henry, Anne of Cleves, had sagging flesh and droopy breasts. “I like her not,” the king announced, and a mere two months after being created Earl of Essex, Cromwell was dead (but not before doing his king the favour of working over the details, from his cell in the Tower of London, that freed Henry from his fourth marriage).11

Henry confronted the church, though not its religious principles, a distinction made many times by many historians, though this is a point that general observers sometimes miss.12

With Wolsey’s, and then more sharply, Cromwell’s guidance, Henry essentially replaced the pope as head of the Church of England, turning that figure into a pariah, most graphically depicted in Girolamo da Treviso’s propagandistic painting The Four Evangelicals Stoning the Pope, an important addition to the king’s collection.13 Henry was thereby enabled to dissolve his marriages without papal interference and, more pointedly, take possession of everything the church owned: its property, its gold, plate, and jewels, its endowments that generations of the faithful had put aside for the “chantries,” where monks and priests spent their time praying for specific souls in purgatory. These sorts of pieties were, of course, a prime instance of genuine abuse, and thus a prime target for reformers. Through compliant churchmen and anti-clerical parliaments, Henry satisfied the social clamour for cleaning up scandal, while simultaneously amassing tremendous wealth, in terms of ecclesiastical plunder, to pay his accumulating bills.14

The financial figures were staggering. During Henry’s reign, around 650 monasteries, friaries, abbeys, and religious hospitals were suppressed. The manors and farmlands of these churchly portfolios generated approximately £400,000 in ready money annually, dwarfing Henry’s rent rolls from crown lands ten times over. The king gave away about three per cent of these properties as gifts to powerful favourites, sold a goodly portion too, and rented the rest for his yearly income, which immediately doubled. By 1547, however, his extravagances had seen a full two-thirds of this appropriated spoil “alienated” from royal ownership, and the demand for additional cash forced the king to sell off a large proportion of what remained. After exhausting this particular source of loot, he turned his attention to the next pie, the episcopal estates of his powerful bishops. B...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Lords Deputy of ireland: 1556-1616
• Introduction: Bryskett’s Cottage
• Part I – The Young Queen
• Part II – The Queen at Mid_reign
• Part III – The declining Queen
• Part IV – The declining Queen
• Epilogue: Dramatis Personae
• Appendix: Places
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Credits and Further Reading on the Illustration
• Acknowledgements
• Plates Section