The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (39 page)

The consuming obsession of Thomas Ratcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter, the 3rd Earl of Sussex and chief governor in Ireland between 1556 and 1564, was the destruction of Shane O’Neill. When Shane seized what his father had denied him – leadership of the O’Neills and his rightful place in Tyrone – his disobedience and his assertion of tanistry threatened to subvert English law and government throughout the island.
Conciliation with this Gaelic chief would mean disgrace, Sussex insisted, but Shane’s defeat would break the Geraldine alliance and bring the Gaelic rebels of the midlands to order. Sussex’s strategy prevailed in the English Council, and in 1560 he returned to Ireland with orders to subdue O’Neill. Three arduous campaigns failed as the elusive O’Neill retreated into his Tyrone fastnesses, and Sussex despaired. Yet it was not Shane O’Neill and military failure in Ireland which broke him but his enemies at court in England. Persuaded by Sussex that there was glory to be gained in Ireland, Robert Dudley determined that it must be his.

Rivalries and reverses at the English court increasingly unbalanced the ‘knots and maintenances’ which lay at the heart of the political order in Ireland. The great Irish feudatories, with their networks of underlords and Gaelic friends throughout the island, looked to the English chief governors for favour. But these viceroys, needing friends in Ireland, were caught in the great web of alliances themselves, even though they were meant to moderate between the factional rivals, and to be indifferent arbiters and impartial distributors of Crown patronage. Sussex was a steadfast supporter of Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, who accompanied him on all his campaigns against O’Neill. Alliance with the Butlers brought alliance with the Clanrickard Burkes of Galway and with their chief Gaelic ally Conor O’Brien, the embattled Earl of Thomond. But to be a friend of the Butlers was, as always, to be the enemy of the Geraldines. Ormond’s enemies were Desmond’s friends.

The power of the great feudal magnates – Kildare, Desmond, Ormond and Clanrickard – rested still upon their systems of protection and intimidation, and the force that they could muster to sustain them. Great private armies were essential in a world of deterrence and distraint, and no lord could disarm until and unless his rivals did likewise. Coyne and livery flourished as before and kept the people in misery. Fear held underlords in subjection and made tenants pay their rents. The threat of violence usually sufficed, and while the power of the lords was balanced there was no out-and-out war. Elizabeth at first turned a blind eye to the illegalities of her overmightiest Irish subjects, and pardoned even flagrant breaches of the peace, but the 1560s saw a descent into private warfare in Ireland, encouraged by the rivalries at her own court.

While Sussex aligned himself with Ormond, he denied Desmond favour, believing that the Geraldines would gradually be broken as their followers deserted them. So it was that as Desmond’s political fortunes
declined in the early 1560s, as his underlords withdrew the services they owed him and challenged his authority, he was increasingly driven to collect dues by distraint, and to the violence which led him so consistently into trouble with the Crown. Yet Sussex’s vulnerability at court gave hope to the Geraldines. Throughout 1562 and 1563 Sussex’s enemies, led by Dudley, sought ways to undermine and discredit him, and still Sussex lacked the victory against Shane O’Neill which might have saved him. Shane had visited the English court in January 1562, and had, wailing and prostrate, submitted himself, but soon he looked to the Pope and Mary, Queen of Scots as his sovereigns. Sussex was recalled in 1564. His successor was Sir Nicholas Arnold, one of Dudley’s clients, and, in the way of things in Ireland, Arnold naturally turned to the enemies of his predecessor for support, to Gerald, 11th Earl of Kildare. But the revived favour towards the Geraldines inflamed their feud with the Butlers, with dangerous consequences. In Thomond in the far west there was war among the O’Briens as Desmond and Arnold supported Sir Donnell O’Brien in the bitter succession dispute, and Clanrickard came to the aid of Conor O’Brien, Earl of Thomond. In Munster, the feud between Desmond and Ormond became war. At the ford of Affane early in 1565 the vassal lords and Gaelic allies of the rival earls, bearing their banners, fought a private battle. Hundreds were killed and Desmond was taken Ormond’s prisoner. Incensed, the Queen summoned both earls to her presence. Arnold had allowed feudal war and Gaelic rebellion, and he was powerless against Shane O’Neill, whose continued depredations in Tirconnell he had sought to conceal. In 1565 he was replaced by Sir Henry Sidney, Dudley’s brother-in-law and client.

Sidney, like Sussex, had larger plans for reforming Ireland than the extinction of Shane O’Neill, but all other schemes – the extension of common law justice, the setting up of presidencies and provincial councils – waited upon O’Neill’s submission, and Sidney’s reputation would depend on the ‘fortunes of the wars’ against Shane. Sidney came to Ireland vowing to bring impartial justice, but found impartiality confounded by the factions between the feudatories, ‘how indifferently so ever I shall deal’. He was consumed too by an awareness of the intrigues and insinuations of his enemies in England, Sussex and Norfolk, who plotted to discredit him and thereby his patron, Dudley, who had been created Earl of Leicester. The Queen, aware of the feuds, told him in 1565 that she could ‘patch’ but not ‘heal’ them. She urged friendship between Sidney and his brother-in-law Sussex, even as there was now
friendship at court between the inimical rivals Leicester and Sussex. The Queen’s anger against her overmighty feudatories and her Chief Governor’s impolitic patronage moved her insistently to intervene. To ‘Harry’ she wrote an obscure letter – so secret that he must consign it to ‘Vulcan’s base keeping’ (to the flames) – warning him to distinguish ‘twixt tried just and false friends’; to reward Ormond, not to favour Desmond. She suspected ‘
leger de main
’, seeing ‘the balances held awry’. Still in August 1566 she wrote telling Sidney that he had ‘entered into some great mist of darkness in judgement’ in his dealings with Desmond. The Queen refused to appoint a president of Munster, which Sidney saw as the way to order; for Sidney’s candidate, Sir Warham St Leger, showed, she said, ‘an inward preferred friendship’ to Desmond. Faction delayed reform in Ireland.

Sidney abandoned Desmond when the Earl, in his insecurity, turned to greater violence to assert his waning power. Sidney despaired, fearing that a new ‘great confederacy of the Scot and Shane’ portended disaster. Remember Calais, he warned in June 1566. Ireland could be lost also. O’Neill was in communication with Desmond, and under the protection of the Queen of Scots. The Earl of Argyll was now O’Neill’s ally, not England’s. Shane sought French aid to expel the English from Ireland and to defend the Catholic faith. But the desperate threat he posed to England was ended not by successful campaign, but by his assassination in June 1567, which Sidney had contrived. O’Neill’s head was sent to Sidney as a trophy and a warning to others in Ireland who thought to disobey the Queen. Ulster was, for the while, quiet; so were Leinster, Meath and the Pale. Rebellion now came from another quarter. Sidney had warned in September 1566 that rebellion in Desmond’s lordship was inevitable. Yet, so the Queen charged him as revolt convulsed Munster in the summer of 1569, his foreseeing it had not prevented it.

Desmond’s continued violence had led Elizabeth to order his arrest in April 1567. The seven years of imprisonment which followed brought disaster for the Desmond lordship as his vassals deserted him and his tenants forgot their rents. Desmond’s patrimony was despoiled, his authority eclipsed and bankruptcy loomed. Into this void stepped James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, appointed captain-general of the Desmond Geraldines in the Earl’s absence. His grudges against the English government were as deep as the Earl’s, and he found remedies more radical. In the new world of English settlement and government, as fledgling colonies were founded in Munster, men like Fitzmaurice who lived by
the sword saw no prospects, only expropriation. Calling upon the old Geraldine allies to protect their country and their inheritance and reverse their humiliating subjection, and summoning the Desmond kerns and galloglasses, he assailed the newly settled English in Munster with great ferocity. Gaelic lords of Munster – O’Sullivan Mór, O’Sullivan Beare and O’Keeffe – joined the rebellion. Donal MacCarthy Mór abandoned his new English title of Clancar and his shallow allegiance. Even their inveterate enemies saw a greater threat from England than from the Geraldines, and by the end of 1569 the brothers of the Earl of Ormond were bound fast to Fitzmaurice. With the Butlers came their allies in the west – Clanrickard and Thomond – to join the confederacy. Ormond, ‘my professed foe,’ wrote Sidney, ‘with whispering, did bitterly backbite me, saying that his brethren were driven by my cruelty to rebel.’

The English threat to the traditional society of Munster was easily and dangerously asociated with a Protestant assault on the old faith. Fitzmaurice presented the rebel cause as no less than a holy war, and in the name of the Catholic faith sought the aid of the Pope and the King of Spain against a heretic queen. The rebels, who had risen to resist English schemes to confiscate and plant in Munster, destroyed the newly planted colony of Sir Warham St Leger and Richard Grenville near Cork. It seemed as though all Munster might be lost. Humphrey Gilbert, a Devon gentleman, appointed Colonel of Munster in October 1569, his first military command, waged a campaign of ruthless devastation and exemplary violence. Irish lords who came to submit were marched through a corridor of severed heads. Gilbert argued, as others did later, for extremity and extension of the prerogative in ‘cases of necessity’, and urged the Machiavellian doctrine that newly conquered nations would yield not ‘for love but rather for fear’.

In 1566 Sidney had seen English rule in Ireland at a crossroads. The Queen might bring the people to the just rule of the common law or she could ‘banish them quite’. But if she intended to extirpate O’Neill ‘so as there shall never be O’Neill more’, and to ‘unpeople the soil’, she might succeed but, so he advised, she should remember that no Irishman would then feel safe, and that this policy would involve prodigious expense.

Early in 1569 Cecil composed a memorandum on the state of the realm, foreseeing great danger: ‘perils many, great and imminent’. For a decade the preoccupations of England’s Catholic neighbours had saved her, but
that security was now threatened as Spain turned away from the Turks in the Mediterranean to look north, and the French Crown seemed set to prevail against the Huguenot rebels. England’s fellow Protestants in Europe were ‘brought to worldly desperation’. News had travelled of the ominous meeting at Bayonne, on the frontiers of France and Spain, in June 1565 between Philip II’s militant councillor Fernando Alvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, 3rd Duke of Alva, and the Regent of France, Catherine de Medici. Alva’s intent was extreme: the military extermination of Protestantism. Catherine was more moderate; she could hardly be less so. Since 1567 Alva had been attempting to pacify revolt in the Netherlands by sword and fire; his Council of Troubles persecuted heretics and rebels in their hundreds. The rebel leaders Counts Egmont and Horn, were executed in June 1568, and in July Louis of Nassau’s forces were obliterated at Jemmingen. This disaster made Elizabeth listen to those who feared for England’s safety ‘if the planets keep this course’. In March 1569 the Huguenots lost their Prince, Louis de Condé, at the rout of Jarnac. These successes for the Catholic powers freed them to unite to restore the ‘absolute tyranny of Rome’; even to place Mary Stewart on Elizabeth’s throne. Against this threat, England, without allies, had little recourse. Yet if England’s Protestants were gloomy, they were also resolute. Now was the time for a defensive alliance amongst the beleaguered Protestants of Europe. To sustain the cause of the true religion was not only a matter of duty, but would avert present dangers for England. ‘What shall become of us, when the like professors with us shall be utterly destroyed in Flanders and France?’ How could England stand by and watch? asked Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. Yet, for Cecil, the encouragement must be politic, secret, and short of war, not least because the Queen was not moved by religious enthusiasm and never wished to aid rebels against other monarchs.

In 1565 Elizabeth had refused to send aid to the Protestant Lord James Stewart, who had raised rebellion against his half-sister, the Queen of Scots. She would, she insisted, never maintain a subject in disobedience to his prince. Yet her own principal rebel, Shane O’Neill, was from 1565 under the protection of the Queen of Scots, whom he intended to proclaim Queen of Ireland. In Scotland Mary’s misrule, personal and political, brought chaos and disintegration. Her marriage in July 1565 to Henry, Lord Darnley provoked opponents of her regime and her religion to sign the ‘band of the nobility’. In England that September the Council debated military intervention in Scotland. Fear of war in Ireland
was one reason to draw back, but England’s abandonment of Lord James Stewart’s cause alienated the Earl of Argyll whose ‘double dealing’ sustained Elizabeth’s rebels in Ulster. No just cause was found to intervene in Scotland, and an uneasy amity held. In June 1566 the birth of a prince to Mary perpetuated the Stewart claim, while Elizabeth allowed the second session of her second Parliament no hope that the Tudor line would continue. While Elizabeth resolutely remained unmarried, her sister Queen burned to marry the Earl of Bothwell. Darnley stood in the way, but not for long. In February 1567 he was found murdered. Mary, suspected of complicity in the murder, and now married to the alleged murderer (acquitted by a court packed with his followers), was forced to abandon her son and her realm. The fall of the Queen of Scots was, said Sir Walter Mildmay, a ‘marvellous tragedy’, but it was what befell ‘such as live not in the fear of God’.