The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (55 page)

Perrot began a tour of the country in 1584 – the first of his annual perambulations into the heart of Gaelic Ireland – and marched into Antrim in August to hunt down the Scots. That autumn he persuaded the Ulster lords to accept commutation of their traditional claims over their people for a fixed rental income to be collected by an English resident army which would exact from the country more than the lords’ own forces had done. Having enforced the commutation, the army would be withdrawn, and smaller forces left to collect the sums agreed upon for the lord. Yet when Elizabeth vetoed Perrot’s contingent scheme for a series of forts, she undermined his policy. There was no way of compelling the lords, who now used the composition troops, who still ‘cut upon the country’, in their private wars. Most of Ulster was soon divided into three lieutenancies, granted to Sir Henry Bagenal, Turlough Luineach O’Neill, and Hugh O’Neill, Baron of Dungannon. Fierce and inveterate jealousy burned among these three men, and for the two O’Neills no English lieutenancy could transcend the overlordship in Ulster they claimed already and disputed between themselves.

Perrot’s determination to undermine the social and political structure of the Gaelic lordships had been evident even in his inaugural address, when he had promised to end the oppression of ‘churls’. At the end of 1584 his plan to extinguish tanistry by subdividing the lordships began in East Breifne, the lordship of the O’Reillys. With the division of the
lordship among four heads of the main lineages, tanistry was in abeyance there. But in Mayo, Perrot’s move in 1586 to partition the Lower MacWilliamship between six competitors drove the Burkes and their following septs into recurrent revolt. ‘They would have a MacWilliam,’ they vowed, ‘or else they would go into Spain for one.’

Perrot continued his assault on the Gaelic lordships by extending that policy whereby the lords submitted and surrendered their lands to the Crown, to be regranted them by letters patent or indenture. By the end of his governorship, the only great lords who had not made agreements were O’Donnell, O’Cahan and O’Rourke. Yet the lords’ submissions were often fleeting; the agreements a way of usurping rights and claiming lands throughout the lordship which had never been theirs. And if they lacked the will to honour the agreements, they also often lacked the power. The allegiance and rents they offered the Crown were given in return for protection against their Gaelic overlords. So the O’Connor chief of Sligo expected the Queen to defend him against O’Donnell of Tirconnell. When that defence failed, the lord found himself subject both to the Queen and to O’Donnell, bound to pay tribute to each, and ultimately to choose between them.

So many of Perrot’s policies were only declaratory, formal, fragile; the rents were not paid, the agreements not honoured. In Ulster, his plans to restructure the Gaelic lordships fell into disarray. The greater the attempt to reform, the greater the failure. His many critics in Dublin and London were turned into enemies, not only by his authoritarian and abrasive style but also by the collapse of his policies. The possibility of reform by anything other than military repression came to be doubted by many of those who were charged with governing Ireland. Hopes for the extension of English law and civility were disappointed when the Irish consistently refused to recognize what was, to the English, the ineluctable superiority of English law and processes. The programme of the reformers began to give way to the more ruthless schemes of the hardliners. It also gave way before the new imperatives of an English government at war with Spain and fearful of an invasion from the east, not recognizing yet the likely prospect of one from the west. In 1586 Elizabeth ordered Perrot to desist from policies involving expense. Perrot should have lived under Henry VIII, Walsingham told him sympathetically, for then ‘princes were resolute to persist in honourable attempts’. When Perrot was recalled early in 1588 he left Ireland peaceful. That peace was deceptive.

Munster was quiet: with the quiet that came of exhaustion and despair. Devastated and depopulated after the savage suppression of the Desmond rebellion in 1583, it lay open to the colonization which some saw as the remedy to the Irish problem and a way of bringing regeneration and order out of chaos. To ‘plant’ was to cultivate both land and manners. In December 1585 a scheme was drawn up for the plantation of Munster. Lands were to be divided into units of regular size – seignories (a name resonant with lordly aspirations) of 12,000 acres – and granted to Englishmen who would ‘undertake’ to inhabit them with English –
not Irish
– settlers. Ralegh, the planter of Virginia, had little to do with planning the Munster plantation, but moved with courtierly assurance to claim three-and-a-half seignories, when the limit for any undertaker was one. From 1587 he held 40,000 acres of the best land in Counties Cork and Waterford, and in 1588–9 he was Mayor of Youghal.

Edmund Spenser’s poem
Colin Clout’s Come Home Again
, addressed from his house at Kilcolman, County Cork, celebrated the encounter of two poetical shepherds; Colin Clout, who was Spenser himself, and the Shepherd of the Ocean, Ralegh. ‘He pip’d, I sung; and when he sung I piped.’ Colin lamented his banishment ‘into that waste where I was quite forgot’, yet when he was ‘come home again’, home was Ireland, not England. Exile from ‘Cynthia’s land’ was painful, for in England, unlike Munster, there was ‘no grisly famine, nor no raging sword’. Yet life in the wild offered freedoms. In Ireland, Spenser pined not only for England, but also for the lost time when the Protestant circle, of which he was part, aspired to save the soul of Europe. It was in Ireland that he wrote his prophetic, apocalyptic, allegorical epic,
The Faerie Queene
. And in Munster Spenser wrote another work: not a chivalric epic – far from it – but a manifesto for the New English, a work of utter disillusion and cold brutality:
A View of the Present State of Ireland
(written by 1596, but censored and not published until 1633). A sinister and desolating life on the frontier of English rule, circled by the dispossessed and hostile Irish and Anglo-Irish, made Spenser contemplate radical solutions; to answer the threat of rebellion with starvation, garrisons and total subjection.

Ireland was abandoned to pragmatists, planters and freebooters. Perrot’s successor, Sir William Fitzwilliam, an old Ireland hand, came as chief governor again in 1588. With no ideals, no commitment to any group or policy, he was mainly concerned to protect himself against
Perrot’s sniping from London and to sweeten the bitterness of his service with bribes from the Irish. His hope of ensuring peace by doing nothing, by leaving well – or not so well – alone, was his delusion and Ireland’s great misfortune. Fitzwilliam’s ineffectual rule unleashed the provincial governors, whose ambitions and energies Perrot had tried to curb. In Connacht, Sir Richard Bingham, commissioned in the summer of 1584 to execute martial law, had fallen to that duty with a vengeance. In 1586 he ‘hunted’ the rebellious Mayo Burkes ‘from bush to bush and hill to hill’ and slaughtered their Scots mercenary forces in their hundreds at Ardnaree. Bingham began to renegotiate the first composition agreements, increasing his own exactions, denying the claims of some lords, and revising the freedoms granted and settlements made with others, most notably O’Rourke. Bingham’s violence and extra-legal methods alarmed his masters as well as the Irish. Fitzwilliam reserved for him the ultimate Tudor insult: ‘atheist’. In December 1589 Bingham was cleared of charges of misgovernment by a Dublin court and set loose to prosecute the Burkes and their followers whose renewed revolt against Bingham’s regime had spread through Mayo, Sligo and Leitrim. Thereafter Bingham consolidated his military control over Connacht, and through a network of military offices granted to his brothers, cousins and friends, lived like an arbitrary Gaelic lord himself.

The shiring of Ireland – begun by Sir Henry Sidney and completed, in name, under Perrot – had brought all the familiar officials of English local government: sheriffs, bailiffs and constables. But they came with quite different incentives and rules than the stalwarts of the English shires. ‘These Seneschals, Sheriffs and others, that should have been the reformers… became the only deformers,’ wrote Barnaby Rich, a New English soldier of fortune. In Sligo, the exactions of O’Connor of Sligo and O’Donnell were ended, for the while, in 1588 when O’Connor of Sligo’s estate was forfeited to the Crown and Hugh Roe O’Donnell, who had been kidnapped by Perrot, fretted in Dublin Castle, but the people now bore the burden of Captain George Bingham’s ‘cutting’ upon the country, his extortion of money by torture. Sheriffs toured their new shires with large retinues, demanding food, lodging and the ‘black rent’ formerly extracted by the Irish lords. At the end of the 1580s a northern assize circuit brought royal justice to Ulster, its judgements to be enforced by Sir Henry Bagenal, who, said Hugh O’Neill, sought to rule like a ‘little king’. For the Irish, the extension of English law seemed to bring servitude, not justice.

Fitzwilliam had not come to reform. Yet as a consequence of his actions, which they saw as arbitrary and self-seeking, the Gaelic lords began to fear for the survival of their power, lands and customs. In Oriel, the MacMahon lordship in southern Ulster, Fitzwilliam’s prescriptions were so radical, so exemplary that every Gaelic lord was fearful thereafter. In 1587 MacMahon had surrendered his lands in order to free himself from the overlordship of Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, but on MacMahon’s death in August 1589 the sept repudiated English sovereignty and, with Tyrone’s support, elected a new MacMahon according to Gaelic custom. The heir according to English law, Hugh Roe MacMahon, was arrested by Fitzwilliam and charged with treason. MacMahon’s real offence, said the Irish, was not paying Fitzwilliam the bribe he had promised. The Queen urged caution, for MacMahon had committed only ‘such march offences as are ever ordinarily committed in that realm’, but unavailingly. The trial of MacMahon was of dubious legality, his execution arbitrary, and what followed was a fundamental assault upon the tenurial structure of Gaelic society. The lordship was divided between seven lords, and the land distributed among a new caste of freeholders. The Earl of Tyrone saw this as an attack upon his own supremacy over his dependent lords. The Gaelic lords also understood that they must honour their agreements with the Crown or face retaliation. There began then a ‘heart burning’ among them as they wondered whose turn it would be next.

It was Sir BrianO’Rourke’s. O’Rourke rebelled, and his lordship of West Breifne, now the county of Leitrim, was invaded and occupied by Bingham in the spring of 1590. Taking refuge in Tirconnell, and then in Scotland where he went to recruit mercenaries, O’Rourke was handed over by James VI and delivered into England in April 1591. O’Rourke was tried for the treason of denying the Queen’s sovereignty and for aiding her enemies, the shipwrecked Spaniards from the Armada. His trial was held in England – although his treasons were committed in Ireland, which had laws of its own to try him – for the judgement was that he was subject to the Queen against whom the treason was committed. His death by hanging at Tyburn in October 1591 was ominous for all those Gaelic lords who did not recognize themselves as subjects.

The great and growing power of Hugh O’Neill stood in the way of the reform of Ulster and of Ireland. The amphibious O’Neill, fostered among the New English of the Pale, trained in English arms and manners,
with friends in the highest places in London and Dublin, was Baron of Dungannon and, from 1585, Earl of Tyrone. But he was also, since 1579, tanist of the O’Neills, and aspired to be
the
O’Neill, Prince of Ulster. He presented himself as defender of the English Pale, pacifier of Ulster against Turlough Luineach and the MacShanes, and as cast aside by English freebooting officials, his services unrewarded. But his way of making promises which he did not keep, his deluding charm and his deep dissimulation were long recognized by the English government, and his loyalty was suspect. It had failed to curb his power while there was a chance; between 1588 and 1591, while the MacShanes were strong and Tyrone was in trouble. By 1592 it was too late.

The long power struggle among the O’Neills which had convulsed the lordship of Tyrone was ending, and the underlords were passing from the control of Turlough Luineach to that of Hugh O’Neill. By 1592–3 he had extended his power at the expense of the less successful branches of his family and assumed full control of the lordship. By marriage and by fosterage, Hugh O’Neill was bound to most of the lordships of Ulster: Hugh Maguire of Fermanagh and Hugh Roe O’Donnell were his sons-in-law. Sir Henry Bagenal became his reluctant, inimical, brother-in-law, when O’Neill eloped with Bagenal’s sister, Mabel. Since the kidnapping of O’Donnell in 1587 had been a way of containing O’Neill, his escape from Dublin Castle at the end of 1591 and flight to Tirconnell was a politically momentous as well as a heroic moment. Hugh Roe O’Donnell returned, burning with indignation against English incursions, to awe and regenerate his ravaged lordship. In February 1592 he expelled Captain Willis from Donegal Priory. In May he was inaugurated as the O’Donnell, chief of his clan. The two great lordships of the north, Tyrone and Tirconnell, their long succession disputes over and their traditional rivalries resolved, were now in dangerous alliance.

When, in the spring of 1593, Maguire’s country was invaded by Captain Willis, who was attempting to establish himself as sheriff of Fermanagh, the Maguires revolted. The Maguire bard Eochaidh Ó Heóghusa (O’Hussey) had celebrated Hugh Maguire as the saviour who would wash Ireland in English blood and return it to peace and prosperity: ‘Hugh is the land that protecteth Fermanagh.’ In May 1593 Maguire’s forces entered Sligo and Brian MacArt MacBaron invaded South Clandeboye in the far east of Ulster. Maguire was O’Neill’s son-in-law, MacBaron his nephew; neither had acted without his
knowledge or direction. Their revolt followed the gathering of a synod of Catholic bishops in Tirconnell at the end of 1592. This ‘Irish combination’ looked beyond Ireland to Spain, and called upon Philip II’s assistance to save Ireland and the Church. No help came, yet. O’Neill’s name was missing from the appeal, but behind it lay his secret collusion. His underlords had sworn an oath before him to aid the Spanish invaders. O’Neill had unleashed his dependants against his rivals, Bingham and Bagenal, to prove his paramountcy, and that Ulster could not be governed without him.