The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I
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For a queen obsessed with her own sovereignty, the stunted royal establishment in Ireland was an acute embarrassment. Elizabeth was conflicted in her attitude towards her second kingdom. Sometimes she chose to protect the interests of her Irish subjects, instructing the Earl of Essex to ensure that local people bordering his Ulster plantation were ‘well used’. But other voices were also competing for her attention. Her captains in the field clamoured for the all-out war which would make a reality of her rule, and win them estates and glory in the process. Knowing how the queen mourned the failure of her sister Mary to defend English ground in France, royal commanders skilfully exploited her fear that Ireland too might be lost. Lord Deputy Sidney explicitly compared the situation in Ireland to that of Calais. In 1579 the incoming Lord Justice of Ireland, Sir William Pelham, warned Walsingham that ‘her majesty may say she had a country’ unless a remedy could be swiftly applied.10
His mandate to protect the queen’s safety required Walsingham to take a close interest in Ireland, where the survival of Catholicism was creating a tempting bridgehead for England’s enemies. The Reformation failed to make much impression on Gaelic culture, largely because of its hostility towards preaching in the Irish language. Tudor Wales acquired a Prayer Book and Bible of its own, whereas Irish was widely shunned as a ‘contaminant’ of English civility. Even more alarmingly, the Old English began to reject Protestantism in their droves mid-way through Elizabeth’s reign. Gentry families withdrew their sons from Oxford and Cambridge and offered them up to continental seminaries, just as their Catholic counterparts in England were doing. In 1576 the President of Munster informed Walsingham about the merchants’ sons from Waterford who were slipping away to Louvain to be ordained as missionaries. Catholic recusancy was a minority faith in England, the danger which it posed generally more apparent than real. But in Ireland it threatened to drive a wedge between the crown and the governing elite.11
Walsingham’s fear that a Catholic league was mustering took shape in Thomas Stucley, the English-born adventurer who spent the early 1570s shuttling between Madrid and Rome and Paris to recruit support for an invasion of Ireland. Stucley’s biography reads like a work of fiction: a professional soldier who fought for France and Savoy as well as England; a part-time privateer who considered joining the French colony in Florida, but ended up in Ulster on an official mission to persuade the warlord Shane O’Neill to come to terms. Stucley tried to settle as a loyal subject in Ireland, but Elizabeth was understandably suspicious of his erratic loyalties and his foul language. In 1568 he was accused of saying that he ‘set not a fart’ for the queen or her office. His land claims were passed over in favour of his cousin and rival Sir Peter Carew, prompting an increasingly bitter feud between them. Stucley nurtured a growing grievance against the royal court, its ‘pen and ink-horn’ men like Cecil and its gadfly queen given to ‘frisking and dancing’.
Honour and revenge propelled Stucley into open defiance of the sovereign whose patronage he had once craved. From 1570 he based himself in Spain, where Philip II gave him a pension and honoured him as Duke of Ireland. He soon repaid his master, captaining three galleys against the Turks at the victorious battle of Lepanto. But Philip had many other priorities besides Ireland. Stucley had to wait until 1578, more than thirty frustrating years since his career had begun in Henry VIII’s service, before he could sail from Civitavecchia in an eight-hundred-ton warship with a force of Catholic exiles, a handful of made-up titles and a blessing from the pope.
Walsingham had heard from his merchant contacts that Stucley was coming. A warning was sent to Lord Deputy Sidney, and the authorities in Bristol were put on their guard. A proclamation to the Irish nobility was rejected in case it implied that Stucley posed a real threat to ‘a prince of her majesty’s power, armed with the goodwill of her subjects’. As chance would have it, his flame was snuffed out a long way from the coasts of Munster. Putting in for supplies at Lisbon, Stucley was recruited by the devoutly Catholic King Sebastian of Portugal to join an expedition against the pro-Ottoman regime of the Sultan of Morocco. Sebastian bought his loyalty by promising to send a fleet against Ireland once the Moors had been defeated. Both men were killed in the ensuing rout of the Christians at Ksar el Kebir, Stucley losing his legs to a Portuguese cannon.
With one leaking ship and a few hundred raggle-taggle followers, Stucley can hardly have hoped to take on Elizabeth’s army in Ireland. But his story was interwoven with that of a far more dangerous opponent of the crown. James fitz Maurice Fitzgerald, a cousin of the Earl of Desmond, was another rebel adrift in Paris and Rome looking to liberate Ireland from the English. Unlike Stucley, however, he was Irish-born and a cradle Catholic. Fitz Maurice had led an uprising in Munster in 1569, restoring the mass in the towns which he captured and demanding that Protestants be expelled. His revolt gave voice to an ideology of Irish resistance. English rule in Ireland, he argued, depended on a gift made by the pope to King Henry II. That grant of power had been annulled by Henry VIII’s break from Rome, leaving Ireland free to seek a new ruler. The surrender of his allies had driven fitz Maurice into exile, but he continued to hawk his own brand of revolution around the Catholic courts of Europe. In July 1579 he came ashore at Smerwick on Ireland’s south-western tip, leading a company including survivors from Stucley’s escapade and the English Catholic resistance theorist Nicholas Sander. Fitz Maurice was killed a month later in a fight over some stolen horses, but Desmond took his place at the head of an uprising which Sander hoped to coax into a revolt of all Ireland. The royal official Nicholas Walshe explained the scale of the threat to Walsingham:
and now that [Desmond] is got in arms … he doth not behave himself as other rebels are wont to do, which (however ill soever they intend) do still pray for the prince, but in skirmishing do cry, papaboe, as who should say God send the pope strength and victory.12
The Desmond rebellions brought the politics of the Counter-Reformation to England’s own back door. Armed skirmishes and cattle raids were endemic to Irish culture, but the scale of the violence showed how traditional Gaelic warfare was changing in response to the threat from the English. Fitz Maurice and Sir Edmund Butler timed their attack on Enniscorthy in County Wexford to coincide with the summer fair, when the resident population was swollen by visiting farmers and traders. The menfolk were cut down in the streets while their wives and daughters were raped. Bodies were dumped in the river before the town was razed. The port of Youghal suffered a similar fate during the second phase of the Desmond rebellions, as Walsingham learned in a letter from Sir Henry Wallop. The Earl of Desmond had signalled his revolt by ritually defacing the royal arms in the town’s courthouse. Now Youghal’s defensive walls were demolished, its stores of corn looted and its buildings set ablaze. Only two stone houses survived. It was as if all traces of an alien culture were being erased from the landscape.13
When they sank to such brutality, the rebels were repaying atrocities meted out by successive royal armies since the 1540s. Prisoners taken by the English were regularly killed in cold blood, rather than ransomed according to Irish custom. In September 1580 there was a second landing at Smerwick harbour, a force of Spanish and Italian soldiers sent by the pope to shore up the Desmond rebellion. Their commander probably expected treatment according to the usual rules of war when they surrendered a few weeks later to a much larger English army under Lord Deputy Grey de Wilton. Richard Bingham, a naval captain who had fought with the Spanish against the French in Queen Mary’s day, described to Walsingham what happened next. Lord Grey ordered the colonel and captains to ‘deliver up their ensigns with order and ceremony’, which they did without protest. But once the English soldiers had occupied the fort, they ‘fell to revelling and spoiling and withal to killing, in which they never ceased while there lived one’.
Bingham estimated that between four and five hundred captives were slain, though Grey put it at nearer six hundred. The Catholic priests who had travelled with the expedition were hanged, t
ogether with any women and children unlucky enough to be found in the fort. All this took place after a white flag had been raised. Walsingham’s cousin Edward Denny commanded a company at Smerwick, and a young Walter Raleigh was among the officers directing the killing. The poet Edmund Spenser, then serving as Lord Grey’s secretary, was probably another witness. The phrase ‘Grey’s faith’ entered the Irish language as an act of treacherous dishonesty.14
The appointment of Grey de Wilton signalled a hardening of the English government’s attitude towards Ireland. Sir Henry Sidney had been a different brand of lord deputy, as much a courtier as a soldier. One of his initiatives had been to turn ‘the old ruinous castle of Dublin’ into a fitting headquarters for royal government, with better accommodation for the law-courts and a chamber in which the Irish privy council could meet. A narrative defence of his policies in Ireland, presented to Walsingham following his final recall, suggests that Sidney judged the people of Ireland by their actions rather than their ethnicity.
Lord Grey, by contrast, was a man of violence through and through. Before coming to Ireland, Grey had settled a dispute with a neighbour over the right to hunt deer by ambushing him with a cudgel in Fleet Street. Where Sidney showed some kindness to the future Jesuit Edmund Campion, Grey triumphed in the slaughter at Smerwick as a victory over false religion. The grovelling Spanish and Italian commanders were forced to listen to Grey’s tirade against the pope, ‘a detestable shaveling, the right Antichrist & general ambitious tyrant over all right principalities’. A letter of explanation which Grey sent to the queen rhapsodised over the Protestant confession of faith made by John Cheke, the only English officer to die in the engagement. But his account of the massacre itself betrayed no such fine feelings. Grey’s sole regret was that useful munitions and food had been spoiled in the process, ‘which in that fury could not be helped’. He confidently placed events at Smerwick within the compass of divine providence: ‘so hath it pleased the Lord of Hosts to deliver your enemies into [your] highness’s hands’. Grey’s report to the queen was soon repackaged as a popular pamphlet hailing England’s God-given victory ‘against the foreign bands of our Roman enemies’.15
Seven thousand Irishmen may have died as a result of the Desmond rebellions, in battle with English and loyalist forces or by execution under martial law. The earl was slain in November 1583, by a rival Irish sept rather than an English bullet. His brother Sir John of Desmond was already dead, his head sent to Dublin as a gift to Lord Grey. The war in Munster brought a demographic catastrophe in its wake. Faced with an opponent fighting a guerrilla campaign from mountains and forests, English commanders took inspiration from their Roman military manuals and set about laying waste to the countryside. In October 1579 Sir Nicholas Malby informed Walsingham that he had torched the town of Askeaton and destroyed the crop in the surrounding fields. A year later Richard Bingham was reporting on reprisals against the people of County Kerry for their failure to maintain the English garrison at Tralee. Sir George Bourchier had been empowered ‘to burn their corn, and spoil their harvest, to kill, and drive their cattle’ to deny these resources to Desmond. In a macabre parallel to the killing of prisoners, thousands of head of cattle were slaughtered and left to rot.
The consequences for a society which depended on milk, meat and hides were calamitous. In February 1582 Justice John Meade wrote to Walsingham describing the hunger and sickness which the people of Munster were being forced to endure, ‘and every plague so extreme that it is sufficient to destroy a whole realm’. Stocks of oats and barley were soon consumed, leaving nothing for animal feed or next year’s planting. The Earl of Ormond informed Burghley in September 1583 that the harvest hadn’t been gathered in Munster that year. Ireland was no stranger to hunger, but starvation and land-flight on this scale hadn’t been witnessed since the fourteenth century. Spenser recalled in his 1596 View of the Present State of Ireland that the common people had resembled ‘anatomies of death’, forced to graze the ground in imitation of the beasts which they had lost. A modern estimate places the death toll at more than forty-eight thousand, close to a third of the pre-famine population of the province. The truly horrifying thing about Meade’s report to Walsingham is his conviction that the Irish deserved their punishment, ‘which is justly lighted upon this nation for their long continuance in offending and transgressing of God’s laws and commandments, and now their unnatural rebellion against their liege sovereign lady the queen’s majesty’. Meade found some comfort in the spectacle of Sir John of Desmond’s headless body hanging in chains from a tower in the city of Cork, upside down ‘like a tumbler or juggler’ and visible from a mile away, to the terror of the rebels.16
Meade was a zealot, but his judgement that the Irish were rebellious by their very nature was shared by many other Englishmen. Much of this came down to their religion. The revolt of the Kildares against Henry VIII had cemented the connection between persistence in the Catholic faith and resistance to the rule of the English. The Desmond rebellions, the activities of Thomas Stucley and the presence of Nicholas Sander amongst fitz Maurice’s supporters at Smerwick could all be taken as evidence that allegiance to the pope was incompatible with loyalty to the queen. The same equation between Catholicism and treason which sent missionary priests to the scaffold in England could in Ireland be applied to an entire society. Some English observers went further, wondering whether the Irish could be considered Christian at all. Sir Henry Sidney doubted that children in Ireland were baptised, ‘for neither find I place where it should be done, nor any person able to instruct them in the rules of a Christian’. The ‘beastliness’ of the Irish for Edmund Tremayne went deeper than their Catholicism, which at least contained the spark of true religion: ‘they will swear, and forswear, murder, rob, ravish, burn and spoil, marry and unmarry at their pleasures with pluralities of wives without any grudge of conscience’, sufficient to shock any Christian heart. All these aspects of English belief – that Gaelic lordship was oppressive and tyrannical, that fertile soil was literally going to waste, that the Irish were pagans – assembled themselves into an inexorable conclusion: Queen Elizabeth’s second kingdom would have to be resettled. Thanks to the dearth and disease which stalked the war in Munster, it wasn’t difficult for prospective planters to convince themselves that the land was empty for the taking.17
Plantation was not a new solution to the problem of governing Ireland. Leix and Offaly had been renamed Queen’s and King’s Counties in 1557 as part of a planned extension of English influence to the west of the Pale, with English soldiers settling alongside loyal Irish septs. But farms proved difficult to defend against the O’Mores and O’Connors whose territory this traditionally had been. In 1579 Walsingham had to instruct the viceroy to spend more time in the forts of Maryborough and Philipstown to ‘keep these Irish in awe and subjection’, and encourage English settlers ‘to inhabit and manure’ the estates which they had been assigned.
The situation in Ulster was even more challenging. Sir Thomas Smith intended to take a hard line in the Ards peninsula in the early 1570s, expelling the ‘wild Irish’ and converting the more compliant into an underclass of agricultural labourers, forbidden to own land or wear English dress. Smith confidently placed his son in charge of the colony. But he reaped what he sowed when the younger Thomas was murdered by his Irish servants, his body boiled and fed to the dogs. The first Earl of Essex made matters worse by massacring the entire population of Rathlin Island, provoking violent reprisals against English soldiers and settlers.18
Elizabethan efforts to colonise Ulster were a kind of private enterprise, funded in Essex’s case by mortgaging his estates to the queen and in Smith’s by a joint-stock company. Learning a hard lesson from such high-profile failures, the crown took control of the Munster plantation from the outset. Walsingham set out the privy council’s thinking in a letter to Wallop in January 1585. The way to draw men into Munster was for the queen to redistribute confiscated rebel lands, encouraging ‘men of abi
lity to go over from hence to inhabit there, who may be able to sustain the charges of the first planting, and tarry for their gain till after some years’. English settlers would have to ride out the early years when yields from farming and industry were low, and hold fast until their investment started to pay dividends. Recruit the wrong sort of person, warned Walsingham, and they would lease out their estates to the native Irish, ‘who will not manure them but in such idle manner as hath been used before’.19
Before Munster could be repopulated, it would have to be mapped and measured. A small team of English commissioners meandered from Tipperary to Limerick, Kerry to Cork and Waterford, calculating what could be gleaned from the land. Stocks of corn and cattle, timber and minerals, and Church property were all recorded in a latter-day equivalent of England’s Domesday survey. Arthur Robyns claimed personally to have assessed a hundred thousand acres ‘both by line and instrument’. If true, then this amounted to about one-third of the acreage granted to the settlers once the confiscations had been ratified by Parliament. Viewed from England, where land and the social capital which it bought were in increasingly short supply, the bounty on offer in Ireland seemed to be a gift from God. Thirty-five gentleman planters or ‘undertakers’ had been selected by 1587 out of the larger group who applied, and the process of settlement could begin.20