New World, Inc.
Page 10
With the Muscovy Company opposed, Elizabeth rejected Gilbert’s petition. But the young courtier seemed unperturbed. He set aside his plans for reaching Cathay and began discussions with some of his West Country friends about a new scheme: establishing a colony in Ireland.
AS WELL AS being strategically important, Ireland was a potential source of significant revenue for English investors and the English crown largely thanks to its chief asset: land. While much of its 32,500 square miles consisted of bogs and swamps, there was plenty of fertile farmland, rich coastal waters, and thick forests. Also, Ireland boasted a thriving, if underdeveloped, economy—although the Spanish were the biggest beneficiaries, thanks to the trade in fish. According to Sidney, some six hundred Spanish ships were said to visit Ireland annually, taking advantage of the abundant fishing grounds. In Munster, in the south, Spanish fishermen took to sheltering in the coves and havens of the crenellated coastline, and constructed makeshift camps for drying and salting their catch, much as they did off the coast of Newfoundland. The Spaniards so valued the Irish fishery that Charles V, Philip II’s father, offered to pay a thousand pounds annually for exclusive rights to fish in Irish waters.34
Gilbert worked with several collaborators on the colonization scheme, including his uncle, Arthur Champernowne, and William Winter, one of Elizabeth’s senior naval officials. Together, they drew up plans for a corporation, following the model of the shareholding approach pioneered by the Mysterie, which was growing in popularity among leading merchants. And as he had with his proposal for a voyage to Cathay, Gilbert sought to bring the queen into the enterprise. He requested a £20,000 loan, an army of fifteen hundred men, and the use of the Phoenix, a royal ship under Winter’s command. With such support, Gilbert and his associates promised they would not only establish a colony of four thousand English settlers in Ulster but also oust Shane O’Neill.35
The timing was good. The idea of an English colony was being widely discussed among Elizabeth’s advisers in the mid-1560s, and one of these was Sir Thomas Smith, author of the Discourse of the Commonweal and Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris. In a letter to William Cecil, he reasoned that if England wished to conquer Ireland, it “needeth nothing more than to have colonies.” Such settlements, he wrote, would serve “to augment our tongue, our laws, and our religion in that Isle.” These three elements, Smith believed, were the “true bands” of a commonwealth, the very bands by which the Romans had “conquered and kept” their empire for such a long time.36 Sidney, too, recognized the potential of colonization. In the mid-1550s, as an emissary in Madrid, representing Queen Mary and King Philip, he had seen how Spain’s New World settlements enabled it to realize enormous wealth—albeit through authoritarian, violent, and ultimately unsustainable means.
Elizabeth was eventually persuaded to support the idea of an Irish colony. In July 1567, she wrote to Sidney, instructing that two villages on Ulster’s northeast coast were to be colonized. She recommended “our servant Humfrey Gilbert” as the negotiator.37 With Elizabeth’s blessing, Gilbert voyaged to Ireland to advance the colonization scheme. But soon after his arrival, he discovered that the principal Irish thorn in Elizabeth’s side had been plucked out. Shane O’Neill and his supporters had been defeated in a conflict with one of his rivals for supremacy in Ulster, the O’Donnells. He then sought an alliance with the MacDonnells, another of his longtime enemies. At first, they seemed willing to shelter him. But they soon fell upon him, slit his throat, chopped him into chunks, and cut off his head. Later, they had his head delivered—“pickled in a pipkin”—to Henry Sidney, who had it impaled and displayed on the gates of Dublin Castle.38
With O’Neill out of the way, Elizabeth was less inclined to supply Gilbert and his associates with the soldiers, ships, and cash that they needed to build a colony. And without her active support, they seem to have lost their enthusiasm for an Ulster settlement. But although the project faded, Gilbert did not give up on Ireland.39 He began to consider the potential for yet another settlement, this time in Munster, in the south of the island, where there was a thriving fishing industry. With his fellow investors—including Richard Grenville, his cousin, and Sir Warham St. Leger, son of a former Lord Deputy of Ireland—he sought rights to the lands and havens stretching along the southern coast.
In February 1569, Gilbert petitioned Sidney, outlining the proposed terms of a new corporation that would establish a colony centered on Baltimore, a fishing port on the south coast.40 Some three thousand people would be recruited. They would enjoy the right to all fishing—free of customs duties—and the liberty to grant land “to such Englishman as shall inhabit there.”41
The enterprise attracted great interest from London merchants. According to one observer, “a company of thirty of the richest of the London merchants” had “made an agreement with the queen that they will conquer a certain part of the country [Ireland], the lordship of which shall belong to them on payment of a tribute.”42 But, in the end, Elizabeth declined to provide the £10,000 loan Gilbert needed to launch the colony. Without royal funding, the risks of establishing a colony were too great, even for a group of gentleman investors. Once again, Gilbert’s colonial ambitions foundered on Elizabeth’s unwillingness to invest ever more royal resources in this seemingly impossible place.43
But even if Gilbert and his associates had received royal approval for the Munster plantation, it might have run into serious trouble. When rumors spread that Gilbert’s corporation would simply seize land in Munster to establish its proposed plantation, both communities—the Gaelic Irish and the Old English—temporarily set aside their differences and rose up in protest. One of the Old English feudal lords declared a holy war against the intruders he characterized as “Hugnottes”—a term that lumped all Protestants, including French Huguenots, into one reviled category.44 This faith-fueled Irish rebellion erupted just as a group of powerful earls—men who, in effect, ruled the north of England—led a violent but ultimately futile insurrection to overthrow Elizabeth and install Mary, Queen of Scots, in her place.
In an effort to restore peace in Ireland, Henry Sidney dispatched Humphrey Gilbert, who was now a colonel, to subdue the rebels. Gilbert was given only five hundred men to counter an Irish force that numbered as many as four thousand soldiers. Perhaps because of the daunting odds, Gilbert was merciless in warfare, winning a brutal victory in less than six weeks. As he remarked to Sidney, he “refused to parley or to make peace with any rebels.” Whenever he demanded the surrender of a castle or fort and the Irish resisted, he took it by force, “however many lives… it cost,” and he did not flinch from “putting man, woman, and child… to the sword.”45
Thomas Churchyard, a courtier-poet who accompanied Gilbert, reported that the colonel ordered “that the heads of all those… which were killed in the day, should be cut off from their bodies and brought to the place where he camped at night.” There, the severed heads were to be “laid on the ground by each side of the way leading to his own tent.” As a result, any visitor to Gilbert’s tent had to “pass through a lane of heads.” Understandably, this spread “great terror” among the Irish, and those who came to negotiate or supplicate with the colonel had no choice but to behold the lifeless expressions of “their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk and friends.”46
This behavior was so dreadful, and the picture it evoked so graphic, that it became the defining expression of Gilbert’s character, even though it was far more extreme than any action he took before or after. Perhaps responding to criticism, Gilbert tried to justify his actions. “No conquered nation will ever yield willingly obedience for love,” he told Sidney, “but rather for fear.”47 The queen, we can assume, agreed. In Dublin, on January 1, 1570, Sidney knighted Gilbert for his services to England.
SOON AFTER THE knighting ceremony, Gilbert returned to England, his vision of a commercial Irish settlement unrealized, but the failure of his colonial ambitions did not mark the end of England’s efforts to reassert Eliza
beth’s sovereignty in Ireland. Indeed, this goal rose to the top of the Privy Council’s agenda in February 1570, the month after Gilbert returned to England. Quite unexpectedly, Pope Pius V issued a bull, or papal edict, declaring Elizabeth to be a heretic and demanding that Catholic subjects reject her as their rightful queen.48 It was more than an excommunication—it was, in effect, a Christian fatwa. From that point onward, Elizabeth lived in fear of attack, and even assassination; Cecil and the Privy Council were constantly on the lookout for plots against her. They were right to do so. The following year, Cecil did uncover yet another plot—this time led by a Florentine banker, Roberto Ridolfi—to put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. As Philip II, the man who had once proposed marriage to Elizabeth, put it, “If I provide some help, it would be easy for [Ridolfi’s associates] to kill or capture Elizabeth and place the Scottish queen at liberty and in possession of the throne.”49
With the threat level so high, it was imperative to address the unresolved issue of Ireland because it was seen as a back door to England that could easily be opened for an attack, insurrection, assassination attempt, or major military invasion. Once again, Cecil and the Privy Council considered the idea of creating colonies as the best way to guard that vulnerable back entrance.
Now the man who had previously expressed deep concerns about the state and proposed ways to save the English commonwealth stepped forward to put his ideas into practice and, ideally, to make his fortune: Sir Thomas Smith.
As a first step, he prepared a petition on behalf of himself and his son, also Thomas, asking for a royal grant of lands in the Ards Peninsula on the northeast coast of Ireland. There they would conquer the Irish in order to make them “civil” and to ensure the area was populated by “natural Englishmen born.” Smith, knowing Elizabeth’s parsimoniousness, pledged to personally bear the costs of the mission, and in November 1571 he received letters patent from the queen. He was granted 360,000 acres of land, about 560 square miles, in the Great and Little Ards region.50
Of course, neither Smith nor his son actually had the resources to cover the costs, but they presumed they could raise funds from rich families. To that end, they published a promotional pamphlet. Smith explained to his fellow privy councillors that they would only be able to raise money through “persuasion” in one of two forms, speaking or writing—and he had concluded that “writing goes further.”51
Quite unlike anything that had been published before, the pamphlet combined cogent arguments for colonization with an appeal for subscription to the proposed settlement in Ards. It was, in effect, the first dedicated marketing brochure for an English corporate venture. Smith reassured would-be adventurers—the investors—that settlement could indeed be achieved in Ireland without great effort, expense, or danger, and with assured profit and prestige. And planters—the colonists, who would live in Ireland—could expect to reap a greater benefit by going it alone, “without the Queen’s pay.”52
Smith made a particular appeal to those who had suffered as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries. Although the raid on church property had been a boon to those who were able to buy land from the crown at reasonable prices, it had been a disaster for many others, both those with means and those without. The poor lost their social safety net. The wealthy lost a convenient occupation for their younger sons, who received little if any inheritance under the rule of primogeniture.* For years, these junior members of the family had been “thrust into abbeys, there to live (an idle life)” as clergymen. With the monasteries destroyed, many scions of great dynasties faced a bleak future with fewer opportunities.
Smith passionately believed that, as planters in Ireland, these young men could take their place in the world. He urged them to “employ two or three years of [their] youth” in what was the “most honorable service than can be in our times done for England.” Their reward would be “thanks, estimation, and a profitable inheritance” and, above all, “to be the patron & first founder of a family in that country, which in time to come, with God’s favor, may spring up to great authority.” And what a place they could expect to own, he exclaimed: “a land that floweth with milk and honey.”
Unlike Sidney, who wanted to create an English community of farmer-settlers, Smith realized that, given the frequency of raids by Irish clans, a colony would have to start out as a military operation. Some of the colonists would be “footmen”—household servants from aristocratic families or conventional soldiers (without a horse). If they came furnished with the necessary accoutrements, they would be required to commit ten pounds for victuals and other necessaries for the first year. Those with a horse would need twenty pounds. Smith also stipulated that any adventurer who did not wish to go to Ireland himself could underwrite a footman or horseman, with the appropriate sum, in his stead.
The potential benefits sounded appealing. Each footman would receive one “plowland,” or 255 acres, of arable ground, with an additional forty-five acres of pasture and meadow. A horseman would get two plowlands and ninety acres of pasture or meadow. “I believe,” Smith wrote, “you would call that in Essex a good manor.” Footmen and horsemen alike would be bound to pay a penny sterling for every acre, though the payments would not start until the fourth year, in 1576—by which time, Smith assured his readers, the colony would be profitable and self-sustaining. “How say you now,” Smith asked, harking back to the days of Sir Thomas More, “have I not set forth to you another Eutopia?”*
In one respect, Smith’s piece of colonial promotion proved very successful: by May 1572, only six months after being granted approval, the required number of colonists—around eight hundred—had assembled with Thomas, Smith’s son, at Liverpool, the port on the northwest coast of England that looked toward Ireland. Most were soldier-farmers, travelling on their own account. Smith also attracted a few of England’s notable magnates to invest, including William Cecil, who ventured more than three hundred pounds, and Sir John Thynne, Thomas Gresham’s brother-in-law and the lord of the manor of Longleat—one of England’s great estates.53
In another respect, Smith’s pamphlet was a disaster. “I could well have wished rather some abstinence had been used,” wrote Sir William Fitzwilliam, Sidney’s successor as Lord Deputy. It was read by the Irish whose lands were to be affected—that is, seized—for the new settlement. He suggested that the “rumours spread both by talk and show of printed writing” made the prospect of success all the more difficult.54
Faced with objections and complaints, the sailing of the colonists was delayed. Everyone waited for Elizabeth’s blessing to embark. As time dragged on, some of the planters began to desert the enterprise, and when at last the voyage set off, arriving in Ireland at the end of August 1572, the original eight hundred had dwindled to a motley band of one hundred. Undermanned and underfunded, young Thomas and his men faced an uphill battle, made all the more difficult by the resistance of the Irish. Sir Thomas had anticipated peaceable relations, but his son wrote to Cecil not long after landing that one of the lords “would not part with one foot of the land,” and that he had withdrawn his men from the Ards, away from danger.55
After this, things went from bad to worse. In October 1573, the younger Smith was murdered by “Irishmen of his own household, whom he much trusted”—clearly without cause.56 His body was boiled up and fed to a pack of dogs.57 Sir Thomas, devastated, withdrew from court and retreated to his Essex country estate. But within a few months, he put together a plan for a second wave of settlers, to be led by his brother, George, a cloth merchant and member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers. By this time, however, he was not the only one with colonial ambitions in Ireland. Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex, had embarked on the creation of another Irish settlement in Ulster. And he had something that Gilbert and Smith had failed to extract from Elizabeth—her money.
The Essex Colony was to be thoroughly military in character and organized along feudal lines, complete with castles and forts, incorporated towns, new laws,
and the authority to wage war with the Irish—in effect, to carry on where Gilbert left off.58 Smith, for his second attempt, while facing up to the reality of Irish hostility, did not embrace the totalitarianism of Devereux’s plan. He envisaged a capital city to be named Elizabetha, after the queen.59 A military commander would govern the plantation, but only until it could achieve enough “quietness” that residents could safely work in the fields and merchants could travel without danger “to fairs and markets within the territories of the colony.”60 Remarkably, Cecil and John Thynne again invested in Smith’s venture, and Sir John Berkeley, a gentleman-courtier, plowed a thousand pounds into the enterprise.61
In the end, neither colony succeeded. Smith’s settlers reached Ireland in August of 1574, but they were repelled and forced out of the Ards area. Essex’s scheme also failed to take hold, and he was reduced to blaming the planters for his colony’s demise. They were “weak-hearted men,” he wrote, who were too enamored of “the delicacies of England.”62 Elizabeth was unimpressed. In the space of two years, she had spent £46,000 on Essex’s plantation.63 By contrast, her revenues from Ireland over the previous fifteen years amounted to a paltry £19,000.64 She wrote to Essex to say that she was “relinquishing the Ulster project.”65