by John Cooper
Dee’s argument was superficially simple. Piracy was a growing problem around the British Isles, shrinking the profits of trade and sullying the dignity of the crown. Foreign fishermen had taken to poaching in English waters. His solution was for the queen to create a ‘petty navy royal’, a fleet of eighty frigates built on sleeker lines than the heavy warships anchored at Portsmouth and Deptford. Elizabeth’s little navy would be capable of outrunning the pirates, allowing merchants to ply their trade without fear. Securing the food supply would reduce the danger of any ‘homish disorder’ and make for a quieter commonwealth. The queen’s enemies would be discouraged from invasion, while her subjects would be schooled in the art of navigation: the mathematics of sightings and soundings, how the tides ebbed and flowed.
Dee was troubled about national security, but he also had a more ambitious agenda to press upon the queen. The Memorials advertised a companion volume to follow it, which promised to set out the ‘entitling of Queen Elizabeth to very large foreign dominions’ on the grounds they had once belonged to her ancestor King Arthur. Books of navigational tables would supply the necessary proof, building up into a series under the collective title of The Brytish Monarchy. For Elizabeth to restore the ancient British empire was not simply expedient in Dee’s eyes; it was her sacred duty. Once the overseas territories rightfully belonging to the monarchy had been ‘recovered and used’, many secret and wonderful things would be revealed by the power of God.
The Memorials was a carefully targeted piece of propaganda. A hundred copies at most were printed, implying that the argument was aimed at the courtly elite rather than the wider reading public. An elaborate title-page reinforced the case which Dee was making. Classical and Christian emblems are jumbled together in an allegorical landscape. An outsize Queen Elizabeth steers the ship of state towards the coast, watched over by St Michael and the Hebrew Tetragrammaton standing for the power of God in Protestant iconography. The rudder is emblazoned with the royal arms, which appear again with Tudor roses at the top of the page. The chi-rho (ΧΡ) monogram of Christ tops both the masts, while three councillors – Hatton, Walsingham and Burghley perhaps – stand on deck. A border in Greek sums up the image as a ‘hieroglyph of Britain’.
Having crafted a deliberately complex image, Dee offered some guidance on how to interpret it. The woman kneeling on the shore represented Respublica Brytanica, ‘earnestly soliciting the most excellent Royal Majesty, of our ELIZABETH, sitting at the helm of this Imperial Monarchy’. The Latin respublica meant different things during the Renaissance, but given the praise which Dee lavished on the majesty of monarchy an appropriate translation would be ‘state’ rather than ‘republic’. The ship in the estuary flies an English ensign and is guarding against the marauding vessels to the left, one of the duties which Dee expected of his petty navy royal. The walled town bottom right also has a homely look to it, with its churches and pitched roofs and defensive bastions. Perhaps this is meant to be England, basking in the protection of God and the queen.
But this isn’t the only possible reading. Like her cousin the Queen of Scots, Elizabeth was fascinated by emblems and symbols. Dee knew that she would look for hidden meanings to decode. Perched above the city on a hill is the goddess of opportunity, holding a laurel wreath in the direction of the queen. Dee completed the Memorials in the summer of 1576, coinciding with the return of the privateer Martin Frobisher from his first voyage to Canada to locate the fabled north-west passage to China. Frobisher hadn’t discovered what he set out to find, but he did manage to reconnoitre a previously unknown shore, and he had the evidence in the form of an Inuit man captured complete with his kayak off Baffin Island. The rumour soon spread that Frobisher had also stumbled across something far more lucrative, a lump of blackish ore which bore clear traces of gold. Both souvenirs caused a sensation in London. In this context, Dee’s emblems of fertility and plenty – the two gentlemen exchanging a bag full of money, the forests, the ear of corn – allude to an altogether grander project than the construction of a new national coastguard. His vision of Elizabeth as the pilot of a ship, with the figure of Europa swimming beside her on a bull, was an invitation to the old world to capitalise on the new.1
Dee was not alone in presenting imperial images to the queen. When Elizabeth revived her love interest in the Duke of Alençon, court painters used their art to steer her away from a French alliance. George Gower’s ‘sieve’ portrait of 1579* features a terrestrial globe behind Elizabeth’s right shoulder, clearly intended to chime with the classical symbol of chastity in her left hand. Another version was painted in about 1583 by Quentin Metsys the younger. Gower left his globe as a blank space, but Metsys mapped his out in detail: the British Isles glowing in the sun, with open seas to westward and ships under full canvas. Beyond Metsys’s globe is the figure of Christopher Hatton, full of swagger in his role as captain of the queen’s ceremonial guard. Unlike everyone else in the painting, Hatton looks the viewer boldly in the eye. John Dee’s diary records a meeting with Hatton on 1 December 1577, when the vice-chamberlain received his knighthood from the queen. Francis Walsingham was knighted during the same ceremony.2
The sieve portraits and Dee’s Memorials combined a hymn to the Virgin Queen with an appeal to found a new England overseas. Walsingham became a fulcrum for the various adventurers and ideologues who were competing to get noticed at court. Years before he entered the service of Cecil and Elizabeth, he and his family had been involved in promoting English trade and influence beyond the boundaries of Europe. Walsingham’s earliest known connection as a private investor was with the Muscovy Company, which his first wife’s father had helped to establish in Queen Mary’s reign. Russian furs and the products of the White Sea whaling trade were exchanged for English wool and cloth. As principal secretary he was paid partly in licences to export the unfinished cloth which foreign merchants valued so highly. He also took a keen interest in the opportunities opening up to the east. The Ottoman Empire based at Constantinople was denounced by preachers as the scourge of Christian civilisation, but it was also the greatest enemy of Spain in the Mediterranean. Walsingham supported the efforts of the Levant Company to court the sultan’s favour on political as well as economic grounds.3
Elizabethan traders pushing eastwards found that other nations – Venetians, French and Portuguese – had got there long before them. In the new world to the west, the situation was very different. The American mainland north of Florida had scarcely been touched by European settlement. As Elizabeth’s secretary and one of her closest advisers, Walsingham was ideally placed to coax the queen towards a policy of westward exploration and colonisation. John Dee, who coined the term ‘British Empire’, and Richard Hakluyt, the Church of England clergyman whose writings did so much to launch it, both wanted him for a patron. And as Hakluyt pointed out, England’s ambitions in America were bound up with another one of Walsingham’s responsibilities, the pursuit of a stable administration in Ireland. Trade between Ireland and the new-found lands could only have an improving effect on the unruly Irish people.
Walsingham was instrumental in translating the crown’s policy of plantation from the provinces of Ulster and Munster to the land which the English called Virginia in honour of their queen. He was personally involved through his cousin Edward Denny, who was a soldier and then a planter in Ireland, as well as his stepson Christopher Carleill, who commanded the English garrisons at Coleraine and Carrickfergus and harried the Spanish West Indies in the company of Francis Drake. There were many more ties between Elizabethan Ireland and the Americas. When Hakluyt and other observers wrote about ‘reducing’ Ireland and America to a state of civilised government, they used the verb in its Latinate sense of reducere, to lead back or restore rather than destroy by conquest. But as the English diaspora became progressively bloody, the word gathered a bleaker set of connotations: ‘to reduce’ became to lay waste and to plant society afresh.4
When Thomas Lake drew up a catalogue of the state
papers in Walsingham’s possession in 1588, the index to the Irish material alone ran to twenty manuscript pages. Instructions sent to the Lord Presidents of Munster and Connaught fought for space with treatises on taxation and the founding of a university in Dublin. A ‘box of Ireland’ in Walsingham’s study at Seething Lane contained ‘a bundle of plots and devices for the reformation of Ireland’ and papers relating to the first Earl of Essex’s plantation schemes in Ulster. A note in a different hand refers to the lending of a book of plots and discourses to Sir Robert Cecil in 1596, revealing that the Walsingham archive continued to inform the government of Ireland years after his death. When King James I was shown the ‘infinity of books and packets’ in the State Paper Office in 1619, he drily remarked that ‘we had more ado with Ireland than with all the world beside’.5
The order which Lake brought to Walsingham’s papers was disrupted long ago. But at least one of the Irish documents which he describes can still be traced. The manuscript that Lake calls ‘Mr Edmund Tremaines discourse of Ireland’ survives in the Huntington Library on the outskirts of Los Angeles, part of the Ellesmere collection of English government papers acquired by the railroad magnate and philanthropist Henry E. Huntington. Edmund Tremayne went to Ireland in the late 1560s as secretary to Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney, before returning home to the clerkship of the English privy council. His ‘Discourse’ addressed a critical dilemma for Elizabeth’s advisers: whether she should be counselled ‘to govern Ireland after the Irish manner as it hath been accustomed, or to reduce it as near as maybe to the English government’. Tremayne completed his report in December 1573, apparently at the request of Sir Walter Mildmay. This was the same month that Walsingham was sworn principal secretary. The ‘Discourse’ was almost certainly among the documents being debated during six days of meetings on the Irish question in early January 1574, giving Walsingham his first taste of what it meant to govern on behalf of the queen.
For Tremayne, the rule exercised by a typical Gaelic Irish lord was nothing short of tyranny:
he useth the inferior people at his will and pleasure. He eateth and spendeth upon them with man, horse and dog. He useth man, wife and children according to his own list, without any means to be withstanded or gainsaid. Not only as an absolute king, but as a tyrant or a lord over bondmen.
The Irish tradition of brehon law (from the Gaelic breitheamh, a hereditary judge) seemed to allow a lord to pardon or to punish as he saw fit. Disputes were settled by acts of vengeance instead of the queen’s justice. The situation was little better in the nominally English areas of Ireland. Nobles claiming to be of ‘the English race’ still behaved as absolute rulers of their own countries, maintained in power by gangs of idle soldiers. Tremayne was swift to point out the implications for royal authority. Not only the revenues owed to the crown, but the very hearts of the people – ‘which should be in deed the very fortress of a prince’ – were being forfeit. In short, ‘the Irish rule is such a government as the mightiest do what they list against the inferiors’.
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.6
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.7
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.8
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.9
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.