The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (15 page)

Many English of the land forsaking the English language, dress, style of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, dress and language of the Irish enemies and also had contracted marriages and alliances with them whereby the land and the liege people thereof, the English language, the allegiance due to our lord king, and English laws there are put in subjection and decayed….
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The colonists had become ‘degenerate’ and the first aim of the statutes was to stamp out this sickness and renew the colony’s essential Englishness.

A host of measures was proposed to this effect. Irish poets and musicians, for example, were forbidden from moving among the colonists, for fear they would spy out their secrets and ways; and the colonists themselves were to be subject to a whole raft of new legislative restrictions. The Irish language was singled out for attention: a colonist caught using Gaelic faced the penalty of being removed from the safeguard of the common law and treated as Irish – a serious penalty, in that the sentence for killing an Englishman was death, whereas the punishment for killing an Irishman was only a fine. This particular clause, in fact, had a broader cultural resonance: simultaneously, the English government was championing the use of English over French as part of its struggle against France in the Hundred Years’ War. But the statutes had much more than the Irish language in their sights:

It is ordained and established that no alliance by marriage…fostering of children, concubinage or sexual liaison or in any other manner be made henceforward between English and Irish on one side or the other…Also, it is ordained and established that every Englishman use the English language, and be called by an English name abandoning completely the Irish method of naming and that every Englishman use English style in appearance, riding and dress, according to his position in society…. And that no Englishman worth one hundred shillings a year in land, holdings or rent shall ride otherwise than on a saddle in the English style….

Some of the statutes seem trifling today: the playing of a game called
horling
– which appears in fact to have been a precursor to modern hockey, rather than to modern hurling – was forbidden, with colonists enjoined to practise archery or throwing the lance instead. Taken together, however, they demonstrate the degree of foreboding in the administration of the lordship at the time: if the colony were to survive, it was essential that such drastic measures be adopted.

The statutes also betray the fear that the authorities felt for the colonial population itself – in particular for its elite, now governing its lands in its own interests and in its own way, regardless of the wishes of the Crown. The great irony here is that this population as a whole, regardless of the manner in which they lived their lives, continued to regard themselves as culturally English. The statutes were simplistic in the extreme and were handed down by administrators who seemed to have little true sense of the intricacies and subtleties of Irish society.

The Statutes of Kilkenny resonate in Irish history, but they also have a place in the broader context of the evolution of greater state control and the slow rise of central government in England itself. While they are distinctively racial in their preoccupations and cultural anxieties, they can also be related to the Statute of Labourers that was passed in England in 1351 with the intention of curbing the social and economic mobility of those former landless serfs who had been newly empowered, following the Black Death, by the dearth of available labour. The Statute of Labourers sought to reimpose the power of the aristocracy over this class of peasants; like the Statutes of Kilkenny, it reflected an anxiety to maintain certain structures of power and authority in what was a rapidly changing world. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the understanding that both sets of laws were essentially unenforceable: legislators were gazing Canute-like at the advancing tide, powerless to act. In the case of the Statutes of Kilkenny, the evidence speaks for itself, for they would be enshrined, adopted – and duly ignored. As the fourteenth century ended and the fifteenth began, intermarriage continued; ecclesiastical offices came into the hands of Irish clerics because Englishmen could not be found to fill them; and Irish tenants moved on to the settlers’ manors in the absence of anyone else to till the land.

Further attempts would be made to shore up the position of the colony. The expeditions of Richard II – the third and last English monarch to visit medieval Ireland – in 1394–5 and 1399 seemed to achieve their aims, in that a number of Irish chieftains submitted to the king; the colony may have seemed set fair now for a revival. But it was not so: Richard ‘gained but little; for the Irish, then feigning submission to his will, straight away after his departure were in revolt, as all men know’.
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Furthermore, Richard’s absence in Ireland resulted in the loss of his kingship (usurped by Henry Boling-broke) and subsequent death.

Meanwhile, the borders of the Pale – that zone encompassing Dublin and its hinterland in which the Crown’s writ more or less ran – had shrunk by the middle of the fifteenth century to within a few miles of the city, and the authorities were obliged to fortify the roads running into Dublin from the west in order to protect it from attack. Stories were told of corn stolen from the fields of the Pale and of buildings attacked and looted by the Irish under cover of darkness. It was not until the very end of the fifteenth century, with the Tudor dynasty more or less established on the throne of England, that the administrations in Dublin and London would at last be in a position to address the situation in Ireland anew. Power would be centralized ruthlessly by the Tudors – and both the freewheeling English barons of Ireland and their Irish neighbours would meet one of history’s immovable forces.

On 13 October 1494 an English delegation put in at the harbour of Howth, just north of Dublin, and made its way into the city. At its head was Sir Edward Poynings, the king’s new representative in Ireland.
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Poynings’s spell in the country was brief – he would be gone again by 1496 – but what happened in these few years symbolized the renewed English determination to order events in the Irish colony. One of Poynings’s first acts was to sweep away the entrenched caste of administrators at Dublin Castle and replace it with English-born officials – representatives of an Old English culture were being supplanted by New English loyalists; it was a decision that set off a wave of unrest and violence in the countryside of the Pale. Very soon, however, Poynings felt secure enough to summon the Irish parliament to meet at Drogheda, on the northern edge of the Pale: the session opened at the beginning of December 1494.

The parliament would sit at Drogheda for several months, and during this time it promulgated a series of thirty or so acts known today as Poynings’ Law. Of these, the best remembered is the ninth, which declared that the Irish parliament could no longer legislate independently: all laws would now have to be approved by the English monarch or his representative in Ireland; furthermore, the parliament itself could henceforth not even meet without the monarch’s consent. Other provisions – for example, regulating the hiring of certain servants (that is, Gaelic Irish servants) employed by Old English families within the Pale – were reminiscent of the Statutes of Kilkenny in their intentions; others – such as those banning the keeping of private firearms – spoke of a determination to end the private wars and legal and military free-for-all that had characterized life in the lordship. As a whole, there was a clear intentionality behind Poynings’ Law: these measures, designed to imprint themselves on the political life of the country, were drafted and pushed through by the will of a new regime that had just taken power in England.

Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs, had come to the throne in 1485. His first pressing task was to reconcile a state torn apart for three decades by the chaotic Wars of the Roses fought between the Houses of Lancaster and York, and thus to copper-fasten the dubious Tudor claim on the throne itself. Ireland had already played a significant part in one early threat to Henry’s power. In late 1486 or early 1487 one Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne, escaped from imprisonment in the Tower of London and made his way to Dublin. Here he was supported covertly by Gerald FitzGerald, the eighth Earl of Kildare and first Lord Deputy of Ireland – and thus the king’s official representative in the country – and crowned at Christ Church Cathedral on 24 May 1487. Simnel’s supporters in Ireland raised an army that was dispatched to England a few weeks later, only to be annihilated at Stoke Field in Lincolnshire on 16 June.
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Simnel’s activities had the effect of once again concentrating minds on the state of Ireland. The country may have held no intrinsic allure for the Crown, but the English authorities remained alive to the strategic possibilities of Ireland and to the potential threats it posed. This unease was given further impetus by the subsequent efforts of another pretender, Perkin Warbeck, who paid several visits to Ireland in the 1490s in the course of a campaign of destabilization. There was a perception that the evident neglect of English interests in Ireland, the political drift that had become such a feature of life in the lordship, could not be permitted to continue – that, when circumstances allowed, something had to be done. Poynings’s brief visit symbolized this energy: it is significant for the sense of engagement and knowledge of Ireland that it brought. But there would not be any further sweeping changes in Ireland just yet: at Christmas 1506, to be sure, Henry appears to have arranged for a large and well-organized military force to be sent across the Irish Sea in the following year with the objective of conquering the whole island once and for all – but this plan never materialized, the king’s still fragile position making such a great gamble distinctly unwise. He had to be content with already having left a mark on the Irish political scene.

For the moment, then, the FitzGeralds of Kildare continued to exercise influence in the now much-diminished lordship. Their position was maintained by their value in the eyes of the English monarchy – it was cheaper and usually more straightforward to have a local force in the saddle in Ireland. This reality was reaffirmed when the eighth earl, in spite of his obvious disloyalty, was reinstalled in his position as lord deputy: when told that ‘All England cannot rule yonder gentleman’, Henry’s response had been a dry: ‘No? Then he is meet to rule all Ireland.’ So the Kildare dynasty began the sixteenth century in an ostensibly strong position: secure in the favour of the Crown, and ready and willing to continue to rule Ireland by means of a now-familiar combination of violence, diplomacy and matrimonial alliance.

Henry died in April 1509, and in June his son was crowned at Westminster Abbey. Henry VIII was a formidable character: over 1.8 metres (6 feet) in height – psychologically significant in an era when people were distinctly smaller than they are today – and possessed of a very distinct idea of his divine right to rule.
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His world may have been poised between feudal absolutes and the power politics of a new age, but his was not to be a reign like that of his father, mediating between squabbling barons, endlessly sending armies to crush rebellions, uncertain as to where the next challenge to the throne was going to emerge. Within a decade of being crowned, Henry was sweeping away all obstacles to his power. He rapidly subdued the independently minded nobles of northern England, and it would only be a matter of time before he turned his attentions to their Irish counterparts.

Henry’s feelings about Ireland and his subjects there were essentially ambivalent. At one level, he saw a population of colonists that was essentially part of the English nation; at another, however, he saw degeneracy, with these same colonists over-exposed to the barbarous Irish, even to the extent of speaking their tongue, wearing their garb and following their traditions. His objectives for Ireland – at least to begin with – were measured and implemented slowly: they were concerned principally with bringing its uncouth inhabitants more or less to heel, and with maintaining and entrenching existing English control over parts of the country. After all, there were few other avenues open to him: England at the opening of the 1500s remained a second-rate European power, impoverished by the traumatic defeats and loss of foreign territory that had marked the previous century. Henry was hamstrung by empty coffers: there was no money for a wider campaign for change in Ireland, even if the royal will was consistently there. And it was not: Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, who briefly replaced the new (ninth) Earl of Kildare as lord deputy in 1520, sighed that it would be better for Henry if Ireland were simply to sink beneath the waves.
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