Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Early Modern Literature in History)

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Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain Andrew Hadfield

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: Anna R. Beer SIR WALTER RALEGH AND HIS READERS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Speaking to the People Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (editors) TEXTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Martin Butler (editor) RE-PRESENTING BEN JONSON Text, History, Performance Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Unbridled Speech Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 John Dolan POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox (editors) BETRAYING OUR SELVES Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI

Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Pauline Kiernan STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE Ronald Knowles (editor) SHAKESPEARE AND CARNIVAL After Bakhtin James Loxley ROYALISM AND POETRY IN THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS The Drawn Sword Anthony Miller ROMAN TRIUMPHS AND EARLY MODERN ENGLISH CULTURE Arthur F. Marotti (editor) CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS Jennifer Richards EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Sasha Roberts READING SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE MASTERS AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CULTURE Authority and Obedience The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.

Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order ISBN 0-333-71472-5 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain Andrew Hadfield

Q Andrew Hadfield 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. MacmillanT is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0-333-99313-6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hadfield, Andrew. Shakespeare, Spenser, and the matter of Britain / Andrew Hadfield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-333-99313-6 1. English literature–Early modern, 1500-1700–History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature–Great Britain–History–16th century. 3. Literature and history–Great Britain–History–16th century. 4. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Knowledge–Great Britain. 5. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599– Knowledge–Great Britain. 6. Great Britain–Politics and government– 1485-1603. 7. Kings and rulers in literature. 8. Great Britain–In literature. 9. Nationalism in literature. 10. England–In literature. 11. Ireland–In literature. I. Title. II. Early modern literature in history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm) ) PR428.P6H28 2003 820.9’358–dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2003056402

Contents List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: English Literature and Anglicised Britain

1

1. Crossing the Borders: Ireland and the Irish between England and America

12

2. English Colonialism and National Identity in Early Modern Ireland

27

3. Malcolm in the Middle: James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings

43

4. ‘Bruited Abroad’: John White and Thomas Harriot’s Colonial Representations of Ancient Britain

59

5. Translating the Reformation: John Bale’s Irish Vocacyon

77

6. Cicero, Tacitus and the Reform of Ireland in the 1590s

90

7. From English to British Literature: John Lyly’s Euphues and the 1590 The Faerie Queene

105

8. Spenser and the Stuart Succession

122

9. Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain

137

10.

Shakespeare’s Ecumenical Britain

151

Notes

169

Index

214

List of Illustrations 1. ‘Adam and Eve picking the apple’, frontispiece to Theodor De Bry, ‘The True Pictures and Fashions of the People in the Parte of America now Called Virginia, Discovered by Englishmen’, appended to Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590).

66

2. De Bry, ‘Som Pictures of the Pictes which in the Olde tyme dyd habite one part of the great Bretainne’, Plate 1, ‘The truue picture of one Picte’.

67

3. De Bry, ‘Som Pictures of the Pictes’, Plate II, ‘The truue picture of a woman Picte’.

68

4. De Bry, ‘Som Pictures of the Pictes’, Plate III, ‘The truue picture of a yonge dowgter of the Pictes’.

69

5. De Bry, ‘Som Pictures of the Pictes’, Plate IV, ‘The truue picture of a man of nation neighbour unto the Picte’.

70

6. Raphael Holinshed, inset engraving of the Scots and Picts fighting the Britons, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577).

72

7. John Bale, The Vocacyon of Johan Bale (1553). Title page.

79

Illustrations 1–6 reproduced with kind permission of the Columbia Library; illustration 7 reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

vi

Acknowledgements This project has been facilitated by the help of numerous friends and colleagues along the way: my thanks to David Baker, Gordon Campbell, Paul Hammond, Margaret and Tom Healy, Claire Jowitt, David Scott Kastan, John N. King, Ann McLaren, Willy Maley, Tom Paulin, Anne Prescott, Jennifer Richards, Jim Shapiro and Bob Welch, who have all played significant roles in making the book see the light of day. Alison, Lucy, Patrick and Maud have either been with me all this time or arrived on the way there. I am glad I belong to such a nice family who put up with my work habits. Thanks to Eire/Ireland, for permission to reproduce an earlier version of ch. 1, ‘English Colonialism and National Identity in Early Modern Ireland’, which first appeared in volume 28, i (Spring 1993), pp. 69–86. To the Journal of Early Modern History: Contacts, Comparisons, Contrasts for permission to reproduce an earlier version of ch. 2, ‘Crossing the Borders: Ireland and the Irish between England and America’, which first appeared in volume ii (May 1999), pp. 135–52. To Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce earlier versions of ch. 4, ‘ ‘‘Bruited Abroad’’: John White’s and Thomas Harriot’s Colonial Representations of Ancient Britain’, which first appeared in David Baker and Willy Maley, eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 159–77; ch. 5, ‘Translating the Reformation: John Bale’s Irish Vocacyon’, which first appeared in Andrew Hadfield, Brendan Bradshaw and Willy Maley, eds, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 43–59; and ch. 7, ‘From English to British Literature: John Lyly’s Euphues and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’, which first appeared in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds, British Identity and British Consciousness, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 140–58. To Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reproduce an earlier version of ch. 6, ‘Cicero, Tacitus and the Reform of Ireland in the 1590s’, which first appeared in Jennifer Richards, ed., Discourses of Civility in Early Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 115–30. vii

viii Acknowledgements

To the Review of English Studies, for permission to reproduce an earlier version of ch. 8, ‘Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain’, which first appeared in volume 51 (NS) (2000), pp. 599–616. To Literature and History, in which an earlier version of ch. 9, ‘Spenser and the Stuart Succession’, first appeared.

For Robert and Angela Welch

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Introduction: English Literature and Anglicised Britain

The issue of a union of the four nations that constitute Britain and the imminent prospect of becoming British assumed an especial urgency for English writers in the 1590s. There had been plans to unite Britain earlier in the century, notably an attempt made during the brief, radical and unstable reign of Edward VI in the wake of the Anglo-Scots peace treaty signed on 10 June 1551.1 Wales had been annexed to England through the Act of Union of 1536, and Henry VIII had assumed the title of king of Ireland, five years later, in June 1541, so that the English crown had ruled over a multiple kingdom for half a century in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign.2 Each Act had paved the way for the attempt to spread English law and the administrative and military machines that were designed to make it function to each country. Both nations were to be transformed into obedient and docile territories, loyal to the English monarchy. This did not mean that they necessarily had to become English in every way, but exactly how the differences of Irish and Welsh society were to be accommodated was not an easy or obvious question to answer. Wales was incorporated into England, through the implementation of English law, so that Wales was divided up into shires and was administered by elected Members of Parliament and appointed justices of the Peace, as was England.3 Wales all too often disappeared as a separate entity. In William Camden’s Britannia (1586), the title page makes clear that the work will analyse the ancient customs and habits of the ‘Angliae, Scotiae, and Hiberniae’, but there is no mention of the ‘Cambriae’, another people who inhabited ancient Britain.4 Similarly, Raphael Holinshed entitled his major historical project, The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1577, 1587). There is no mention of Wales. This geographical sleight of hand has led 1

2 Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain

historians to underestimate the resistance of many Welsh to English rule and has precipitated the myth that Ireland was England’s first colony, a statement that is true only if colonised territories have to be overseas.5 If Wales proved to be almost invisible to contemporaries and later historians of the period, Ireland was all too visible throughout the sixteenth century, providing such stubborn resistance to English attempts to impose law and order that it was a militarised zone for much of the century characterised by war rather than peace.6 In the 1590s the revolt of Hugh O’Neill, which rapidly developed into the Nine Years War (1594–1603), provided the most serious threat to the English crown that it had experienced since the Wars of the Roses and made the Tudors’ boast that they had brought stability after a bloody civil war seem somewhat hollow.7 The general fear was that the triumph of the Catholic Irish, aided by Spanish and papal forces, would prove decisive in the religious conflict being fought out in Europe, leading to the destruction of Protestantism.8 It is hardly surprising that Ireland featured more prominently in an English consciousness than Wales did, even less so if one bears in mind the vast numbers of colonists, civil servants and soldiers who had settled there throughout the century, attracted by the chance of careers, land and status unobtainable in England.9 This group became known as the ‘New’ English to distinguish them from the ‘Old’ English who had settled in Ireland in the wake of the Norman invasion of the twelfth century.10 English identity was transformed and mutated in Ireland in a manner which clearly complicated any pious hope of making Ireland English.11 The unification of Britain – or the British Isles, Ireland’s place within the geographical unit being problematic, although the de facto suzerainity of the English crown tended to settle any possible ambiguity – only required the co-operation or acquiesence, whether forced or not, of Scotland.12 The problem was that British unification was most likely to occur through the assumption of the English throne by the Scottish king, James VI. Whereas Wales and Ireland had been conquered and assimilated by the English crown, the English did not conquer Scotland with military force, as many English kings had attempted to do with mixed success throughout the Middle Ages. Instead, they were forced to grant the English throne to an alien ruler, establishing an importantly different power relationship between Scotland and the rest of Britain.13 It is hardly surprising that many English writers expressed considerable anxiety at this prospect even though James’s keen desire to assume the English throne and so be the first king of Britain was by no means a

Introduction: English Literature and Anglicised Britain 3

foregone conclusion even in the months immediately preceding Elizabeth’s demise.14 When James did assume the English throne he tried to enforce a constitutional union of Britain in his first parliament, but found that he did not have the power to enforce his prerogative and eradicate centuries of hostility and mutual suspicion, let alone establish a workable means of uniting Scottish and English legal and political traditions.15 A series of delaying tactics in the House of Commons made sure that the bill foundered and other issues took precedence despite the king’s feeling that the union was the key issue in the parliament.16 James had to settle for the title of King of Britain, a formula he used even though it had no legally binding significance. A number of writers on either side of the border debated the question of James’s attempted union in a series of pamphlets and speeches.17 Most wrote in favour of the union. Robert Pont argued that James’s plan would enlarge the empire of the king in uniting Britain and soon it would be impossible to tell Scots and English apart because there would only be Britons.18 John Russell employed an analogy with the union of the houses of York and Lancaster after the Wars of the Roses to argue that Britain would replace England and Scotland just as the Tudors had united and consigned to history the warring dynastic factions within England.19 However, Sir Henry Spelman argued that the effects of the union would be a disaster. The Scots would consume the greater part of England’s wealth, preventing the proposed eradication of poverty south of the border; without the discipline of monarchical rule they would return to their old barbarous ways; and the fiery Scots preachers would transform the churches and universities into hot beds of dangerous radicalism.20 Spelman’s hope that there should be an allegiance between James’s Scottish and English kingdoms, rather than a fully incorporated union, held sway with the House of Commons, and Britain remained an ideal rather than a real form. In the final analysis too many influential people were afraid that a proper union would bring with it too many disadvantages and relatively few advantages. The hostility directed towards James’s court after 1603, his cultivation of favourites and the perceived advantages distributed to the entourage who had followed him from Scotland indicate that the English were not yet ready to consider the possibility of a British union.21 Interestingly enough, the range of opinions and the doubts about union expressed at the time have been reproduced in the arguments of later historians since the advent of the New British History which is


usually dated back to J. G. A. Pocock’s groundbreaking article, ‘British History: a Plea for a New Subject’, published in 1975.22 Pocock evidently felt uneasy that British history would have to tell the story of an apparently inevitable English triumph and the British Isles becoming socially and culturally Anglicised and politically Anglocentric from the Renaissance onwards. His article argued that there was a need to balance a pluralistic approach with the reality that ‘the history of an increasing English domination is remarkably difficult to write in other than English terms’.23 Opponents have turned Pocock’s attempt to reconcile such obviously contradictory intellectual dynamics into an admission of the inevitable failure of the project, arguing that British history can never really be anything other than English history under a new name and new guise.24 Others have doubted the wisdom of studying a subject which, they claim, always existed anyway and has simply come into being to promote the work of those unable to see that the British Empire doesn’t really need any new clothes.25 I would suggest that it is hard to resist the notion of Britain and the British context not because there is anything inevitable, desirable or good about such a proposed political union or geographical reality, but because the notion of Britain loomed so large in the horizons and imaginations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. On the one hand there was a clear understanding that the current peoples of the British Isles had developed from the peoples who had inhabited ancient Britain: the Britons, Scots, Picts, Irish and English, a comprehension made explicit in the illustrations to Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588, 1590) (see ch. 4). This historical sense was coupled with an understanding that the union of a Protestant Britain would be desirable as a means of combating the Catholic empire of Spain, which appeared unstoppable in the 1590s.26 On the other hand, English writers in particular were riddled with anxiety about what such a union might mean and how it might transform their status as Englishmen. Edmund Spenser and Michael Drayton clearly expressed their doubts in major works of non-dramatic poetry (see chs 7 and 8), the former causing a significant political scandal, the latter confirming his self-image as a marginalised poet outside the circle of court writers. The more protean William Shakespeare wrote a whole series of plays devoted to the problem of Britain: Henry V, Macbeth, King Lear, Cymbeline, as well as others that can be read as allegorical representations of the historical issues spawned by the proposed union, such as Hamlet (ch. 10). But if Shakespeare appears less keen to adopt an obvious position – as one might expect to be the case with a dramatist


required to produce topical and popular plays rather than works which present coherent arguments – it is also evident that his plays express similar forms of anxiety generated by the prospect of a united Britain. Nevertheless, it should not be assumed that an English desire to unite the four countries of Britain was constant. Nor should we construct a teleological narrative that sees the eventual – partial – union of 1603 as an inevitable consequence of what went before.27 The relationship between England and the other three British nations assumed separate dynamics, as did the relationship between all four countries and the notion of a united Britain.28 England was intermittently at war with Scotland throughout the sixteenth century. The most spectacular military engagement was the decisive Battle of Flodden in 1513, after Scotland had supported France against Henry VIII’s claim to the French crown. This resulted in the death of King James V and the slaughter of thousands of Scottish troops.29 More frequently, conflict was localised, limited to border raids while irritable diplomatic negotiations over rights and allegiances took place. However, when Elizabeth succeeded her elder sister, Mary, as queen of England on 17 November 1558, Mary Stuart claimed the English throne for herself, as the great granddaughter of Henry VII. This inaugurated an especially tense and uneasy period in Anglo-Scottish relations, although Mary’s claim was rendered ineffectual because of the bitter religious conflict which made her rule of her native kingdom impossible after she returned to Scotland in 1561 when her first husband, Francis II, king of France, died. Mary was eventually forced to seek sanctuary in England after the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley, crossing the border in May 1568.30 Mary remained under house arrest for the rest of her life, her presence triggering a series of crises – possibly as much fabricated or exaggerated as real – before she was executed in February 1587, as a result of the discovery of the Babington Plot, a desperate attempt to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with Mary as a Catholic sovereign, which the Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham easily tracked and exposed.31 However, the execution of Mary did not substantially transform how many English writers, Spenser and Shakespeare among them, appeared to feel about Scotland (see chs 4, 9, 10). After Mary’s death, her son, James VI, became one of the most likely candidates for the English throne, given that Elizabeth would not name a successor and was clearly beyond the age of reproduction, her last chance of marriage and motherhood having come to an end with the failure of the Alençon match in the early 1580s.32 James was an unknown quantity, but it was assumed by many that he might well possess a number of the obvious


disadvantages of his mother. In any case, there was a significant fear of being ruled by a neighbouring monarch who was likely to bring his own entourage south of the border with him. The Jesuit writer, Robert Parsons, in the most sustained analysis of the succession published in Elizabethan England, noted that, although James had the best claim to the English throne, very few English men and women wanted him to become their king.33 James was, however, vigorously defended by Peter Wentworth four years later, when he urged the queen to show her hand and ease her subjects’ understandable anxiety. Wentworth argued that not only did James have the best claim to the throne via his descent from Margaret, Henry VIII’s sister, but also that the union of the two kingdoms would work to everyone’s advantage, relieving the anxiety caused by the perpetual friction between English and Scots who would assume an English identity under James’s wise and benevolent rule.34 When James did become king many were pleasantly surprised that he was keen to end sectarian conflict and was not the autocrat that his writings had suggested he might be.35 Nevertheless, an opposition did clearly develop, based on a nostalgia for the pristine pastoral Englishness that was now assumed to have existed before it was contaminated by James and his attempt to impose the diverse nature of British identity onto his reluctant new English subjects.36 In short, it is hard to read Anglo-Scottish relations simply in terms of an English desire to dominate, control and Anglicise their immediate neighbours, however potent such feelings may have been for many English writers and thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For Spenser and Shakespeare, the main writers under discussion here, Scotland loomed large as the main threat to English identity in the 1590s. Anglo-Irish relations are equally problematic and inconsistent. In terms of a British project it needs to be reiterated that Ireland was, as often as not, considered to be an island next to rather than part of Britain by English historians and observers.37 The relationship between the British Isles and the island of Britain could then – as now – be used as a means of including and excluding different peoples depending on the argument in question.38 Ireland provided stout and dangerous resistance to English attempts to Anglicise and incorporate the island into a homogeneous and governable territory. It would be wrong to assume that the strenuous conquest of Ireland was always part of an ongoing British project, even if at least one writer could refer to Ireland as a ‘West England’.39 As many historians have argued, an understanding of the concept of the ‘multiple kingdom’ will do equally well as an attempt to explain English actions in Ireland.40 The desire for control over Ireland


did not necessarily indicate that the British union would be the next step. Ireland was indeed made British, as Nicholas Canny has argued, but this depended on more than simply a preconceived plan dating back to the 1530s and the use of the Arthurian legends to replace England’s purported right to Ireland granted by Pope Adrian IV’s Laudabiliter.41 Any European monarch could rule over a variety of kingdoms – as many did – without feeling the need to make them all part of a larger unity. The point to be made is that it would be a mistake to try to subsume Anglo-Irish relations under the umbrella of the British question – precisely the criticism of the new British History made by its detractors.42 Equally it would be a mistake to deny that conceptions of Britain and Britishness play a part in the history of the British Isles (denial of which has often led to the complicated and confusing battles over the issue of nomenclature).43 Anglo-Irish history must be conceived alongside the history of Britain and Britishness, not conflated with those notions or collapsed into them. The case of Wales is also different.44 Wales was rendered – relatively – invisible for two reasons. As I have already outlined, Wales was assumed to have been seamlessly absorbed into the expanding territories of its larger and more powerful neighbour.45 But it also adopted an apparently more hierarchical position in the political history of Renaissance Britain through the Welsh ancestry of the Tudors. How seriously the Tudors took their Welsh-British roots is a moot point, one fiercely debated at the time, even if its actual impact on public policy and royal behaviour may well have been minimal.46 Even so, Henry VII saw fit to name his eldest son Arthur, and clearly there were many living in the British Isles who either believed in – or, perhaps, thought it important to make use of – the Arthurian legends.47 Many Welsh intellectuals, priests and courtiers found their way into England and became assimilated.48 Some Welshmen, such as the historian William Thomas, had successful careers at court, as did numerous Anglo-Irish magnates.49 Nevertheless, the effect of the Welsh origins of the Tudors was the same as the assumption that Wales had been annexed without serious difficulty, the disappearance of Wales and the Welsh from public life. Perhaps this explains why the Welsh are invariably represented as sycophantically loyal to the crown on the London stage: ridiculous creatures who are obsessed with cheese and eager to fight at the slightest provocation, but, at heart, trustworthy and dependable. In contrast, the stage stereotypes of the Scots and Irish represent them as far more threatening and potentially disruptive.50


One would be hard pushed to find evidence to claim that there was a groundswell of support for a sense of Britishness in England either side of the year 1600, as Linda Colley has argued was the case in the eighteenth century.51 In Wales and Ireland a select group stood to gain, but there was considerable opposition to an attempted union.52 In Ireland even fewer stood to gain from English hegemony, and the Old and New English in Ireland were more concerned with the issue of who had the right to assume the mantle of Englishness than any question of more abstract geo-political groupings.53 In any case, England was often carelessly equated with Britain, as though both were synonymous with the island that contains England, Scotland and Wales. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, probably written around 1595 and published in 1597, the usually astute and generally sympathetic figure of John of Gaunt makes precisely this error, eulogising England in familiar words that, nevertheless, need to be quoted at length: This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England[.] (2.1.40–50) Gaunt’s lines must be read ironically, although even some commentators seem not to be able to perceive the strange contradictions contained within them.54 The central point is that England is not an island and it is not protected from invasion in the way that Gaunt hopes it will be. The invasion is actually led by the banished Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, Gaunt’s own son, who deposes the king of the ‘scepter’d isle’, severing any link between monarch and land that had existed, because after Richard II there was no English monarch who did not have a claim to the throne that was disputed by rival claimants with powerful cases. Furthermore, the fantasy of England as the Garden of Eden is placed in stark relief when Queen Isabel has to listen to the political musings of the gardener and his two ser-


vants at the end of the third act, who point out, much to her consternation, that ‘our sea-walled garden, the whole land,/Is full of weeds’ (3.4.43–4). But, like John of Gaunt, they fail to note that one of the problems is that England is not an island. It is no accident that Bolingbroke launches his invasion when Richard is in Ireland, a journey he refers to disparagingly as ‘wand’ring with the Antipodes’ (3.2.49). The appearance of trusty Welsh soldiers, dutifully conforming to the stereotype of unswerving loyalty to the crown, dispersing because they believe that Richard is dead (2.4), may remind the audience that, while the future Henry IV landed in the south-west of England, the future Henry VII defeated Richard III when he landed at the Welsh port of Milford Haven, as Shakespeare had represented on stage some five years earlier. However one chooses to read Gaunt’s lines they expose the fragile nature of a nation surrounded by hostile territories eager to exploit its weaknesses rather than a confident assertion of patriotic pride, exactly the situation of England in 1595, just after the outbreak of the Nine Years War. Few people may have been enthusiastic about the union of Britain or the British Isles in the 1590s, but most were at least observant enough to notice that the reality of Britain had to be acknowledged. The essays collected together in this book deal mainly with the relationship between English writing and the British Isles from the immediate aftermath of the Reformation (the 1540s) to the reign of James VI and I (1603–25). I have highlighted the literary works of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, the most celebrated dramatic and non-dramatic poets from the English Renaissance, both of whom were acutely aware of the British context of English literature.55 Spenser spent virtually all of his adult life in Ireland after 1580 when he must have been in his late twenties; Shakespeare probably spent most of his time between London and Stratford, but clearly kept abreast of current affairs and saw fit to advertise his connection with Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, when Essex went to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant as the head of the largest army ever to leave English shores to end the Nine Years War.56 As the chorus to Henry V, Act 5, confidently announces But now behold, In the quick forge and working-house of thought, How London doth pour out her citizens. The Mayor and all his bretheren in best sort, Like to the senators of th’antique Rome With the plebeians swarming at their heels, Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in;


As, by a lower but as loving likelihood, Were now the General of our gracious Empress, As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, Bringing rebellion broached on his sword, How many would the peaceful city quit To welcome him! Much more, and much more cause, Did they this Harry. (5.0.22–35) The link made is not simply between Essex and Henry V, but a third figure appears, the conquering Julius Caesar, enabling Shakespeare to compare the London that produced Henry and Essex to the Rome that produced the victorious Caesar. The mayor and aldermen become the senators of Rome and the citizens of London Roman plebeians. England’s two heroes stand worthy of comparison with those of ancient Rome. The irony of Essex’s subsequent rebellion has often been noted, whereby he brought ‘rebellion broached on his sword’ in a significantly different way to that anticipated by Shakespeare.57 Equally pertinent is the comparison to Julius Caesar. Caesar’s conquest of the Gauls is implicitly compared to Essex’s predicted conquest of the Irish and the triumph of Henry’s British army over the French.58 And, of course, Caesar was murdered because he was thought to have betrayed his country and people, the subject of what was almost certainly Shakespeare’s next play, his violent death overshadowing his spectacular military achievements. The point is that the wider British context signaled by the lines in Shakespeare’s play suggest how we might read Henry V, transporting the audience beyond the original purpose of the history and showing how text and context interact so that the matter of Britain is both contained within the text and determines how its meaning is disseminated. I have included work on other important writers such as John Bale, Thomas Harriot, Michael Drayton, John Lyly, George Buchanan and Richard Beacon, not all of whom are what we would consider literary authors, showing how we need to examine a wide number of printed books and look at the works of historians, political theorists, artists, travel writers, and so on, if we truly wish to reconstruct the variety of Renaissance public culture. I have also included some essays which provide more general historical interpretation and contextualisation. My hope is that this book will not only provide readers of Shakespeare and Spenser with an understanding of their engagement with British issues and problems, but also show how the matter of Britain could only be avoided by English writers at their peril. The fact is that nations can


never exist in isolation and have to define themselves, their boundaries and their culture in terms of the stubborn existence of their neighbours.59 Such attempts at establishing identity often involve policing boundaries and excluding others or attempting to absorb and transform adjacent lands and people. Occasionally they also involve imagining new geopolitical units and territories which do not actually exist, such as Britain, one reason why the histories of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are so complex, intertwined and confusing.60

1 Crossing the Borders: Ireland and the Irish between England and America

How the English perceived the Irish in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has proved to be a matter of considerable debate among historians of the period. Assumptions that Ireland was regarded as a stepping stone on the way to the Americas and that the Irish were represented in terms of native American Indians, made by historians such as David Beers Quinn and Nicholas Canny, have been challenged in a variety of ways.1 Brendan Bradshaw has argued that the Irish were regarded in terms of a philosophical debate between an Erasmian humanism which posited that they could eventually be assimilated into an English polity and a pessimistic Calvinistinspired Protestantism which argued that the defective will of the Irish meant that they had to be brought to obedience and order through the use of harsh coercion. Those in favour of assimilation tended to be the Catholic ‘Old’ English, descendants of the Norman settlers in Ireland, who were moving gradually towards an understanding of Ireland as a separate nation; those in favour of coercion were often the ‘New’ English, recent settlers who wanted to displace the ‘Old’ English as the governing colonial class.2 Bradshaw’s reading of this anthropological dispute suggests an instructive comparison with the great debate about the ‘natural slavery’ of the American Indians which was held at Valladolid in 1550, even though Bradshaw sees England’s Irish question in terms of an inward-looking conflict. At Valladolid, Bartolome´ de Las Casas argued that the natives of the New World should be humanely treated as equals and not exploited and oppressed, whereas his opponent, Juan Gine´s de Sepu´lveda, argued that they were the defective sub-humans described by Aristotle in 12

Crossing the Borders: Ireland and the Irish between England and America 13

The Politics, and so could be dispensed with and used as the property of the master.3 More recent formulations have followed Bradshaw’s lead in various ways: Steven Ellis has suggested that Ireland has to be regarded as a Tudor ‘borderland’ which presented no unique problems of its own; Hiram Morgan has argued that English attempts to govern Ireland should be seen in terms of internal – rather than intercontinental – European expansion; Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh has argued that for English men and women crossing the Irish Sea to live on the Munster Plantation in the 1580s and 1590s was neither more nor less than moving to another part of mainland Britain; Joseph Th. Leerssen’s encyclopaedic study of Anglo-Irish representations relies on the assumption that national stereotypes have an intimate binary relationship and can be studied in pairs; Ciaran Brady has suggested that ideologies as such had little impact on officials whose behaviour was dictated far more by the day-to-day problems of administrative government.4 Such a variety of opinion indicates a wide range of forms of representation, evidence that can be read in different ways rather than a uniform body of material that historians have simply read differently. Perhaps the truth is that the Irish were perceived in terms of – at least – two overlapping, often competing, discourses. On the one hand the Irish were seen as subjects of the English crown (see below, ch. 2). On the other, they were regarded as ‘savages’ or ‘barbarians’ (the two terms are usually interchangeable in Elizabethan English, certainly with regard to Ireland, as even the most cursory inspection of the state papers will reveal), the polar opposites of the civilised English. Of course, the Irish were not the only savage peoples represented within the British Isles. The Scots and the Welsh were also represented in similar ways, usually when they challenged the authority of the central government.5 On occasions, English from the peripheries were described as ‘savages’, especially in the north after the rebellions of 1536–37 and 1569–70. When activated, the implicit assumption made by the dominant political and social groups in southern England was that they were the only civilised people in Britain, and that savagery became more prevelant the further one travelled away from the centre.6 Being civilised involved wearing clothes; reading and writing; establishing laws and government; properly regulated sexual relations; building cities and advanced settlements; the control of violence; and producing arts, culture and a generally sophisticated style of life.7 Savagery dictated the opposite of these virtues; nakedness; lack of social and sexual control; absence


of cities or developed settlements; illiteracy; unchecked violence; the absence of art, culture and sophisticated life. It is generally agreed that most Tudor representations of Ireland and the Irish owed a great deal to the works of the twelfth-century historian, Gerald of Wales, who accompanied King John on his expeditions to Ireland in the 1180s, and subsequently wrote the massively influential Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hibernica. Gerald described the Irish as: [S]o barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture . . . They use very little wool in their dress and that itself nearly always black . . . When they go riding, they do not use saddles or leggings or spurs . . . Moreover, they go naked and unarmed into battle . . . They are a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living . . . little is cultivated and even less sown . . . The nature of the soil is not to be blamed, but rather the want of industry on the part of the cultivator . . . For given only to leisure . . . they think that the greatest pleasure is not to work, and the greatest wealth to enjoy liberty. Elsewhere he details the identical consequences of their lack of Christian faith and goes out of his way to spread malicious stories detailing instances of bestiality among the Irish.8 The Irish are regarded as too savage to possess the land they currently occupy, a common intellectual manoeuvre made by would-be colonisers.9 Similar description abound in various sixteenth-century texts and Gerald was indeed the ‘ghost in the machine’ of English representations of Ireland for at least four and a half centuries.10 This obligation is not merely detectable in the abundance of references to Gerald in English texts themselves, but was noted by Geoffrey Keating, the great Irish historian of the early seventeenth century who lamented that Cambrensis [Gerald] was ‘the bull of the herd for them [subsequent English writers] for writing the false history of Ireland, wherefore they had no choice of guide’.11 Keating compares such writers to dung beetles, unable to see the beauties which surround them because they wish to dive headlong into horse or cow dung and roll themselves therein.12 Gerald and his English acolytes are accused of writing shit. Virtually all subsequent English writers on Ireland do copy Gerald on numerous points, representing the Irish as filthy, irreligious (pre- and post-Reformation descriptions of the Irish are often remark-


ably similar),13 barbarous in dietary and personal habits, unable to feed themselves adequately through their agricultural practices, congenitally lazy and so on.14 Gerald’s two books can be described as hegemonic in the production of a discourse representing the Irish in the same way that Peter Hulme describes Columbus’s writings playing an identical role in the production of a discourse of cannibalism in the Americas.15 However, no text should ever be dismissed as simply the sum of its (ideological) content and reduced to its place within a discursive field. What the series of different interpretations of evidence and types of documents among historians and cultural historians should alert us to is the need to consider the function of each text written and not just the material it presents.16 While reconstructing the context of a communicative act is fraught with difficulties – how can one ever be certain that the pieces of information brought to bear on the text in question are the exact and relevant ones? – it is not acceptable to homogenise diverse series of writings which were read in different ways by different audiences despite using the same sort of material. To give one specific example: Sir John Dowdall, an army captain writing to Lord Burghley from the fort at Duncannon in 1596 during the Nine Years’ War, described the Irish as ‘these cannibals’.17 A multitude of interpretative problems stems from the use of the word ‘cannibal’. Was Dowdall indulging in a splenetic outburst, a fancy piece of figurative hyperbole, or a genuine attempt at connecting and classifying? As is well known, ‘cannibal’ is a corruption of ‘carib’ made in Columbus’s writings, and its use connoted a New World referent.18 However, the immediate context gives us no easy clues. Dowdall continues to elaborate his fear that the Irish rebels ‘have drawn the greatest part of their kerne to be musketeers, and their gallowglasses pikes, they want no fowling pieces, calivers, swords, grave murrions, powder and shot great store’. The ‘cannibals’ are surrounded with technology, which they ‘were unaccustomed to have in this measure’. In other words, they are a people habitually without sophisticated means of warfare who are now dangerous because one of the key gaps between them and their enemies, the English, has been closed. The word ‘cannibal’ is also used in another context and to a different end in Luke Gernon’s long letter to an anonymous friend, ‘A Discourse of Ireland’ (c.1620), when he tries to persuade his correspondent that ‘The Irishman is no Caniball to eate you up nor lowsy Jack to offend you’.19 Once again, it is by no means obvious whether we should take this as a seriously meant refutation of mainland prejudice based on personal observation, or a piece of sly humour in a familiar letter. The


reference does suggest that it had occurred to some Englishmen that the Irish were similar to the worst kind of New World savages and that such an identification was not beyond the bounds of possibility. This point is made more forcefully in one of Barnaby Rich’s characteristically unguarded moments.20 In his A New Description of Ireland (1610), Rich stated – among other trenchant observations – that the ‘barbarous savages’, the Irish, were worse than the Scythians or the cannibals in their cruelty and lawlessness.21 Rich felt it necessary to write a defence of his book which was published two years later, wherein he claimed that he had not actually called the Irish cannibals or worse than cannibals, but merely suggested a comparison concerning certain resemblances.22 Clearly, this indicates that some readers – principally Dubliners, according to Rich – resented what they took seriously as a genuine slight, forcing Rich to defend his words, albeit somewhat ambiguously, and tone down his comments. Representations should never be taken at face value as if they constituted a form of monolithic ‘discourse’ because readers of English in early modern Britain were rarely passive and would often try to resist hostile conceptions of them.23 Yet, according to one source, purportedly citing eyewitness accounts, the Irish were indeed cannibals. Fynes Moryson, Lord Mountjoy’s secretary during his successful campaign to conclude the Nine Years’ War, an experience which he later incorporated into his substantial account of his wanderings throughout Europe, North Africa and Turkey, describes the effects of Mountjoy’s ruthless destruction of the rebels’ corn: Sir Arthur Chichester, Sir Richard Moryson, and the other Commanders of the Forces sent against Brian Mac Art aforesaid, in their returne homeward, saw a most horrible spectacle of three children (whereof the eldest was not above ten yeeres old), all eating and knawing with their teeth the entrals of their dead mother, upon whose flesh they had fed twenty dayes past, and having eaten all from the feete upward to the bare bones, rosting it continually by a slow fire, were now come to the eating of her said entralls in like sort roasted, yet not divided from the body, being as yet raw . . . Captaine Trevor & many honest Gentlemen lying in the Newry can witnes, that some old women of those parts, used to make a fier in the fields, & divers little children driving out the cattel in the cold mornings, and comming thither to warme them, were by them surprised, killed and eaten . . . These and very many like lamentable effects followed their rebellion.24


Eating human flesh is invariably regarded as the taboo that violates human status and reduces the practitioner to the very lowest form of barbarous savagery.25 Moryson’s rhetorically nuanced passage sets up two images, which reflect and invert each other as the children eat the mother, before the mother-figures eat the children they should protect. The last sentence quoted makes it clear that responsibility for this vicious state of affairs rests squarely with the rebels themselves: their self-consumption is the result of their rebellion.26 Such cases do not merely point out the problem of reconstructing context: they also remind us of the importance of genre and the style it fosters in any given text. Dowdall’s and Gernon’s texts are letters, one a matter of state, the other a seemingly private correspondence; Rich’s a polemical pamphlet, designed to argue a religious case and promote the author’s opinions; Moryson’s part of a large, inchoate enterprise which adapted various forms of material which was never published in completed form.27 All the above texts clearly reproduce the same representations, but exactly how these are refigured within each text’s narrative clearly varies. No text can ever be an exact repetition of another text, or a pure and self-sufficient entity excluded from other writings.28 As recent studies of literary genre have noted, genres are inevitably mixed and bear traces of other texts, signalling other possible ways of reading, so that no one reading can ever be ‘right’.29 A text may well foreground one mode of reading – as appears to have been the case with the examples of works citing, or appealing to, an understanding of cannibalism – but is always likely to trigger other readings from readers within the system of textual circulation.30 Barnaby Rich’s need to defend his usage of the term ‘cannibal’ was a result of diverse communities of readers who selected different details and read them in different ways. In his Latin treatise, Croftus Sive De Hibernis Liber (c.1591), a work which owes a great deal to the political writings of Plato, Cicero, Livy and Tacitus, and arguably, most significantly, Machiavelli, Sir William Herbert describes the degeneration of the Irish into their former barbarous habits owing to the laziness and carelessness of the (English) magistrates: These habits and garb are so wild and uncouth that in more civilised parts they have not just gone out of use but have also been rejected. Nevertheless some Irish think that they are characteristic of and, as it were, essential to the Irish and that they are bound up with Ireland’s safety and prosperity. In truth, these habits and garb were common and customary among almost all barbarians and ancient


peoples, who had still not become acquainted with a more comfortable and cultivated way of life.31 Herbert continues to list a whole series of classical authorities to back up his judgement, citing Dion, Pliny, Pomponius Mela, Cicero and Suetonius on Gallic customs and the Romans’ need to stamp out such aberrations within their empire, following with the threat that if such customs are not removed via the use of good government and persuasion then ‘some king of England and Ireland, of great prudence and power, prompted by political considerations and designs, will disperse that entire race and will extirpate all the inhabitants there who have lapsed into the habits and customs of the Irish’. The section concludes with a quotation from Machiavelli’s The Prince, justifying the conqueror’s destruction of the conquered’s practices and institutions and a comparison of any resistance to a disease: ‘This stubbornness of mind is a leprosy. Once it has struck deep roots, no elixir, no lotion, no skill cures it’ (p. 87). Herbert’s analysis is both complex and ambiguous. The Irish are characterised as irredeemably alien, a people whose culture threatens the spread of the conquering English and their system of law and order, and so has to be destroyed. What actually makes them ‘Irish’ and not English is precisely the problem.32 Comparing the Irish to the barbarians described in various classical texts – as if these peoples were all the same – suggests that classical precedents played a large part in determining colonial representation and theory in Ireland, as Lisa Jardine has noted.33 However, textual references cannot be so easily closed off and circumscribed: one series of references undoubtedly leads to another. Savagery/barbarianism was a moveable feast which was defined against its binary opposite, civility, enabling writers to flatten out a historical narrative into a struggle between the two terms: ‘Savagism assumed meaning only in the sense that it inverted the civil condition’.34 Therefore, any employment of this dichotomy automatically signalled other instances of it, so that Herbert’s text allows the connection to be made between the Irish, ancient savages and those found in the contemporary world, principally the Americas, whether that link is highlighted or suppressed. Exactly the same comparison was made by Sir Thomas Elyot in his The boke named the governour (1531), when he urged that children being educated to rule read Julius Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul because there ‘maye be taken necessary instructions concernynge the warres/agayne Irish men or Scottes: who be of the same rudenes and wilde disposition/


that the Suises and Britones were in the time of Cesar’.35 Even more revealing is the example of the drawings of the ancient Picts by either Jacques Le Moyne de Morges or John White, both artists of the Americas, collected by Theodore de Bry as part of a series of drawings of the Americas in the 1580s, with the explanation that these figures had been added ‘to show how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia’.36 The second point that needs to be made about Herbert’s cluster of intellectual references is its Europeanisation of the Irish. By citing Machiavelli, who wrote about colonisation in terms of ancient, rather than current practice in the Americas, in The Prince and The Discourses, Herbert is treating the Irish within a paradigm of inclusive political practice and language, rather than regarding the existence of the Irish as an alien problem of a separate order.37 Reading their situation in terms of such ancient history suggests that the barbarian Irish’s present is the past of contemporary European civilisation, with Croftus Sive De Hibernia Liber promoting itself as a humanist text of the same order as The Discourses in its relationship to a classical writing it reinscribes.38 The connections made by Sir Thomas Elyot and in Theodore de Bry’s America, that a geographically remote savagery once belonged to Europe’s past, a relationship that simultaneously represents the savage as both self and other, are implicit premisses of Herbert’s argument. The Irish are unsettling in that they need to be – and can be – accommodated into the languages of state, but are also the very antithesis of civilised values and so need to be eliminated. Put another way, they occupy an uneasy position between the two poles of ‘self’ and ‘other’, making the message of the treatise hard to pin down with any certainty and open to diverse readings.39 While Herbert demanded the destruction of Irish culture in words which resemble those of more notoriously strident English observers – Edmund Spenser, Barnaby Rich, Fynes Moryson40 – he was also relatively unusual in advocating the need for the Bible and public prayers to be translated into Irish, arguing that Irish ‘minds and wills are to be bettered principally by the instructing them in true religion . . . which in a strange tongue could be to them but altogether unprofitable’.41 Herbert’s work appears to be contradictory on this point. At times he calls for the destruction of Irish culture, custom and language, as impediments to the spread of English civilisation, yet he also saw the need to use Irish culture and language in order to translate that very civilisation and not render it meaningless. The first response assumes that the medium is the message – language is opaque – the second that the two


can be separated and translation can occur without interference – language is transparent. Herbert’s practical response is the very opposite of the more logical ‘blend of ritual, cynicism, legal fiction, and perverse idealism’ contained in the Spanish Requerimento, a document in Spanish which informed American Indians of their rights and duties to their new European rulers and listed the harsh penalties if they refused to obey.42 In contrast, Herbert’s writings are simultaneously an attempt at rapprochement between Irish and English – but only on English terms – and a desire to destroy and conquer. Herbert’s response to the Machiavellian problem of governing conquered territories is perhaps one of the most interesting and involved of English documents relating to Ireland (see below, pp. 95–8, for further analysis). The problems encountered in Croftus are reproduced elsewhere in other writings. In his more polemical tract on recent Irish events, Barnaby Rich makes the statement – also possibly derived from Machiavelli, perhaps at second or third hand – ‘That a conquest should drawe after it Lawe, Language and Habit’, and that the conquered should surrender their langauge to the conqueror. Yet, a few lines later, he reports that the king has translated the Bible and Prayer Book into Irish out of the good of his heart, a grudging acknowledgement that matters are not really so simple to solve.43 The reverse is the case in a slightly earlier anonymous document, ‘A Discourse of Ireland’ (c.1599), written in the wake of the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion and almost certainly after the destruction of the Munster Plantation in 1598.44 While the author shows a considerable knowledge of the Irish economic situation and personal familiarity with Ireland, it is unclear whether he was actually resident there, like Herbert and Rich, or had been in Ireland for any length of time. Hence it is difficult to know whether the extremity of his views stems from ignorance or knowledge: either case could be made.45 The author claims that the malice is so inveterate within Irish heartes, as hardly they endure their subjection unto the English nation or to mixe or suffer us to participate with them in any interest of their Soile unless we [become] meere Irish with them in Language, Apparel and Manners. In other words, the process of cultural translation, which Herbert invoked, is taking place the wrong way round. And as Herbert does, the author employs a historical comparison, suggesting that the English are akin to the Jews and the Irish the Cananites, and that the former must replace the latter:


Thus the Wisdome of God forsawe in the corruption of mans Nature, when in the planting of the Jews in the land of Canaan commanded to roote out the auncient people of that lande lease their evill maners should corrupt the Jews, threatening that the Canaanites and the rest of those cursed nations should be as thornes among them if the Jewes obeied not the Counsel of god as in deede it fell out to be so. And as touching the Irish (I speak not of the good, who are to be embraced and cherished) what are they better than Canaanites, which contemne God and Relligion observing neither the rites of Baptisme nor Matrimony. It is soon made clear that few of the island’s population are to be ‘embraced and cherished’. Rather, ‘all the race of [the Irish is] to be translated out of Ireland’ and replaced with loyal subjects – ‘English with some Flemmings’ – and in other countries the Irish may well be reformed as good servants. Irish servants in England are ‘very faithful and loving’, so the few that are transplanted there will become useful rather than dangerous subjects. Some others will replace those English gone to Ireland; a few can remain in service in Ireland; some may go to the Low Countries; and in ‘these warres with them sword and famine will devour many’. The author assures the reader that he proposes a ‘course necessary to be helde’, yet he ‘would not the blood of them should be extinct’. It is to be hoped that these exiles will ‘happily alter their disposition when they Shall be planted in another Soyle’. Numerical details are given for transplanting populations – well beyond anything ever attempted on the Munster or Ulster plantations46 – and the treatise ends with the obvious conclusion: ‘Whereby her Majestie shall make Ireland profitable unto England or mearely a West England’.47 This text is in many ways typical in its use of apocalyptic, religious rhetoric of a substantial group of unpublished tracts deposited in the state papers, written during or immediately after the destruction of the Munster Plantation.48 The use of an Old Testament example (Exodus 6.4), somewhat elaborated to include the specific expulsion of the Canaanites and the godly demand for the careful separation of peoples, stands in the same relationship to this text as Herbert’s references to a classical culture in Croftus, authorities which authenticate a current demand for practice. For Herbert that is the inclusion of the Irish into a European political sphere, the Irish standing to the English as the English once stood towards the Romans; for the author of the ‘Discourse’, the Irish are irredeemably ‘other’ and can


only survive by ceasing to be Irish. Indeed, given the logic of the argument, genocide is a policy option which has to be either endorsed or rejected: I persuade in no wise anie more to mixe English with the Irish in replanting the Country with English inhabitants, which must be a course necessary to be helde yet I would not the bloud of them should be extinct, but all the race of them to be translated out of Ireland. (p. 165) While Herbert desired to translate English civilisation in order to bring the Irish into the fold, the author of the ‘Discourse’ aims to ‘translate’ the Irish and separate the land from the people.49 The author’s need to add this clarification takes us back to the question of readers and reading communities: just as Herbert felt obliged to note the disquiet many of his fellow colonists clearly felt at his proposals, so does this writer’s apparent drawing back from the possibility of genocide imply that not all would have agreed that the consequences of rebellion in Ireland should be extermination.50 The problem with which such texts had to deal was that the Irish appeared to English observers to resemble the savages they had so frequently read about and seen represented graphically, yet they existed within the boundaries of the dominions of the English monarch and so were entitled to the status of subjects after Henry VIII’s declaration in 1541 that he was no longer lord but king of Ireland.51 The ‘discovery’ of Sir John Davies’s A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued is that English law was never properly spread throughout all of Ireland, so the Irish were never given a vested interest in serving the state: I note as a great defect in the Civill policy of this kingdom . . . the English lawes were not communicated to the Irish, nor the benefit and protection thereof allowed unto them, though they earnestly desired and sought the same . . . If the king would not admit them to the condition of Subjects, how could they learn to acknowledge and obey him as their Sovereigne? When they might not converse or Commerce with any Civill men, nor enter into any Towne or Citty without perrill of their Lives; whither should they flye but into the Woods and Mountains, and there live in a wilde and barbarous maner?52


Davies’s attack on what he perceived to be the malign legacy of the legislative effects of the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366), which forbade contact between English and Irish in order to stem the cultural traffic (‘degeneration’), a phenomenon that disturbed English writers from Gerald of Wales onwards, significantly blames the English for failing to educate and reform the Irish from their barbarous ways, forcing them outside cities, forbiding them to trade and, most importantly, denying them access to the law.53 For the author of the ‘Discourse on Ireland’, these are all signs of the depraved nature of the Irish; for Davies, a failure of English policy in Ireland. Just as Herbert, writing in 1591, argued for persuasion in the medium of Irish, so Davies, writing after the seeming completion of the conquest of Ireland, with the project of the Ulster Plantation well under way, could blame the English for their inability to follow – as he saw it – the logic of their long-term policy in Ireland. The Discovery suggests that there is an easy route from subjection to subjectification, the formation of loyal subjects. It would be a mistake to deduce from this argument that the Elizabethans therefore could not envisage the Irish in terms of the – rediscovered and refigured – savages of the Americas. The fact that the Irish were perceived in terms of the spread of the rule of law did not rigidly delimit representation of them within a domestic discourse.54 Nicholas Canny’s influential argument that English colonists like the Earl of Essex and Sir Humphrey Gilbert felt that ‘in dealing with the native Irish population, they were absolved from all normal ethical restraints’ because of their ‘cultural superiority’ over a people who were seen in terms of the savages described by the ancients and recent travellers to other continents needs to be qualified.55 The heated discussions following the notorious massacre at Smerwick (1580), for example, which led to the eventual recall of the Lord Deputy, Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton, after protests to the Queen from angry and influential Palesmen and other Anglo-Irish magnates such as Elizabeth’s own cousin, Thomas Butler, tenth earl of Ormond, were all based on the legality and legitimate conduct of his actions in slaughtering soldiers who had put their lives in his hands, not simple revulsion at a cruel act.56 Quite clearly it was easier for government officials and English colonists to side-step legal restraints the further they got from the centres of power; but the point is not that the law was only available within the boundaries of the putative nation-state of England, rather, that it was supposed to spread throughout all the monarch’s territories. In other words, in one sense


England was cut off from its overseas colonies, including Ireland, and represented these as ineluctably different from itself and similar to each other; in another, there was a desire both to assimilate and absorb overseas colonies and Ireland, both American Indians and the Irish, as the law spread Westwards. In the dedicatory page to The Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser referred to Elizabeth as ‘Queen of England, France, Ireland and Virginia’, which would imply that he for one acknowledged no simple difference between kingdom and colony, domestic and exotic lands under the jurisdiction of the monarch, a state of affairs which would inevitably be compromised by the practical necessities of government.57 Canny’s citation of Sir Humphrey Gilbert as an example of someone who found it easy to go beyond the law would appear to be contradicted by the propaganda tract written by Sir George Peckham, ‘the chiefe adventurer, and furtherer of Sir Humphrey Gilberts voyage to Newfound Land’ in 1583, later reprinted in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, the most important collection of English overseas voyages in the late sixteenth century.58 Peckham attempts to establish the legality of the colonisers’ actions at every possible turn. On arrival in Newfoundland, Gilbert summons the diverse elements of his crew and reads out the rules of his taking possession of the land, which is to be ‘after the maner of the law and custome of England’. ‘All men did very willingly submit themselves to these Lawes’ so that there can appear to be no question of coercion in the establishment of rights to the land. Peckham reflects on the problem of the law and concludes that a general law of religion and commerce supports an English claim to the land: I say that Christians may lawfully travell into those Countries and abide there: whom the Savages may not justly impugne and forbidde in respect of the mutuall societie and fellowshippe betweene man and man prescribed by the Law of Nations. Therefore, an international law reinforces a national one, however bogus that conception of the law might have been. Peckham, in fact, conceives the Westward enterprise reversing itself as Newfoundland ‘doeth (as it were with armes advanced) above the climates both of Spaine and France, stretch itself towards England only’.59 The inclusive desire of Davies’s Discovery is mirrored in Peckham’s justification of Gilbert’s actions: there can be a meeting between the two cultures, but only on the terms of the coloniser. Pace Canny, texts describing the exploits of colonisers in Ireland and the Americas are saturated in legal


discourse, albeit based on an unworkable conception of the law proffered with cynical bad faith, as Peckham makes it clear that the law was only read to Gilbert’s crew not the natives.60 Peckham’s and Davies’s tracts share a style of argument, strategy and rhetoric which marks them out as analogous, even generically compatible in certain ways, despite other differences. A more troublesome text to categorise is John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande (1581), dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, who would undoubtedly have disapproved of its rather limited poetic range and style. Conversely, the handsome woodcuts which accompany the text are among the finest woodcuts produced in late sixteenth-century England and, consequently, the most frequently reproduced visual representations of Ireland from that period.61 Derricke’s poem is designed to praise the efforts of Sir Henry Sidney in establishing order in Ireland and describe the recalcitrant elements he has had to overcome, specifically the Irish soldiery, or woodkern (who clearly stand in metonymic relation to the whole of the island’s culture). In many places, Derricke uses a series of rather obvious metaphors to establish the absolute ‘otherness’ of the Irish and place them beyond the boundaries of civility, in the same way that the author of ‘A Discourse of Ireland’ does (see above, pp. 20–1). He writes of the anomalous marriage of the beautiful land to the hideous people, ‘To see a Bride it is the Soile,/ the Bridegroom is the Karne’, and the ease with which Irish eagles can be trained by English falconers in comparison to the impossible stubbornness of the kern, who do not simply resist any change towards civility but desire to become savage: Yea though thei were in Courte trained up, and yeres there lived tenne: Yet doe thei loke to shaking boggs, scarce provying honest menne. And when as thei have wonne the Boggs, suche vertue hath that grounde: that they are wurse than wildest Karne, And more in sinne abounde.62 But the text is a little more complicated and fractured than these hardline comments would imply, opening out the possibility of divergent readings. The last part of the poem contains the dramatic monologue of Rory Oge O’More, executed in 1578 (probably when The Image of Irelande was written), whose severed head speaks from the battlements of Dublin Castle to warn other potential traitors of his fate:


All men that heare this, take warnyng by me, . . . Against the Croune royall, doe nothyng attempt, For, if against it, ye falyng at odde: Doe feele as I felt, the strength of the rodde. The dead rebel explicitly contrasts his own miserable state of rebellion to the benefits of obedience to the crown: O who can tell, expressyng evrie parte, The excedyng joye, that loyall Subjects winne, Or who can shewe, the thrice redoundyng smarte: That reachlesse lives, to rebells bringeth in, Whiche make things seem, as though thade never bin (O pearle of price) to honour Princes Lawes: Of healthe and wealthe, the sole and onely cause.63 The exhortationary force of these lines, urging the obedience of the Queen’s Irish subjects, does not fit well with the deterministic rhetoric articulated elsewhere, which denies that any common ground can ever be found between English colonisers and Irish colonised. Like Herbert’s Croftus, two different representations of the nature of the Irish compete for hegemony in the mind of the reader. Such contradictions, I would suggest, are scattered throughout the variety of texts – of diverse generic forms – which represent the relationship between England and Ireland in the early-modern period. They are by no means simply the products of a split between a language of state and a language of colonial domination, because no such easy separation occurs between two discourses, which inevitably slide into each other.64 But, equally, any attempt to close off the one from the other is doomed to failure because, first, each writer was obliged to employ the representations at his or her disposal and, second, no text exists outside the interpretations of its readers – real or implied – who may well have chosen to emphasise different aspects of the same work, as evidence would suggest. Through such processes modes of representation and discourse interact and overlap. In a sense, Ireland was often left suspended between Europe and the Americas; but in another way, the Americas were used to explain the anomalous position of Ireland as both kingdom and colony. Only within such limits could cross-cultural encounters take place and, in English writing at least, on the terms of the conqueror.

2 English Colonialism and National Identity in Early Modern Ireland

In December 1599, the Jesuit Henry FitzSimmons was imprisoned in Dublin Castle for five years for preaching heresy and spreading sedition. Feared more than virtually anyone else in some important government circles, FitzSimmons was convicted partly on the testimony of one George Taylor. Taylor recalled speeches from November at Mr Blackney’s house, when The said Henry, having talked of the state of the country, uttered that the rebels had won a great part of the country. ‘No,’ said George [the testifier], ‘I thank God that they have not won any part of the English Pale, though they have wasted a part of it; and I hope in God, the Queen’s Majesty with her force will soon pull them down.’ Said Mr. FitzSimmons, ‘How came the English to the possession of this land?’ The said George answered, ‘By conquest.’ FitzSimmons answered, ‘Every conquest is not lawful.’ The said George said, that soon upon the conquest it was allowed by the clergy, and, as I heard say, confirmed by the Pope, and withal the Lords and chief men of the land did give up their titles and government unto King Henry and Second, and to sundry other kings since. Mr. FitzSimmons said, ‘Well, you see how the Irishry prosper notwithstanding.’ Whereunto the said George answered, Those questions are not good, nor to be reasoned upon. Give them over, for I love not these discourses. So taking my leave departed home.1 Here, in a miniature, we have two thumbnail sketches for a history of national identities in Ireland. On the one hand, Henry FitzSimmons wishes to speak for an indigenous native culture and history; on the other, George Taylor argues that the conquered must accede to the will 27


of the conquerors. The leading contemporary historian of the Reformation in Ireland has argued that the effect of introducing Protestantism into Ireland was that ‘Ireland emerged with an apartheid constitution in law and practice, religion providing the criterion for discrimination’.2 In effect, despite the complexities of the situation, two communities appealing to different histories, having mutually incompatible senses of identity, each claiming to speak for the whole of the island, developed in Ireland after the Reformation.3 The dilemma of dual identity, starkly illustrated in the confrontation between George Taylor and Henry FitzSimmons, was by no means unique in the hundred years or so after the Reformation was first introduced into Ireland (1540–1660). It must be remembered that there were now two competing colonial communities in Ireland: the ‘Old’ English who had come over in the wake of Henry II’s original Anglo-Norman invasion in 1169 and the ‘New’ English who crossed the Irish Sea in the sixteenth century. The continuity between medieval and early modern Ireland, in Karl Bottigheimer’s sharp judgement, is that ‘The religious difference reinforced at every point older conflicts of a political or cultural nature.’4 However, the emergence of a fragmented colonial milieu complicated the problem of stable identity for those who were to form the basis of an ‘Anglo-Irish’ tradition, whether they were Old English, New English or already and separately ‘Anglo-Irish’.5 Any account of the history of Ireland that neglects such cultural and colonial conflicts must, therefore, be inadequate. Not only should we reexamine historical events in order to construct a framework within which they can be interpreted, but we should also look closely at the differing reactions of Old English settlers to the new wave of invasions and the attempts of the New English to make sense of an alien environment. The New English saw the Old English as a ‘degenerate’ people who had severed all connection with their former countrymen. The colonisers had become one with the colonised, an identity some of the Old English were happy to adopt, while others assumed a lofty superiority to the new wave of vulgar invaders who were less English than they were (some, such as Richard Stanihurst, assumed both positions at different points in their careers (see below, pp. 32–5)). In importantly different ways the confrontation with Ireland forced both groups of colonisers to question their own sense of identity, which left them with the problem of defining the nature of the Irish as well. After 1541, when Henry VIII declared that he was no longer lord but king of Ireland, it was no longer possible for the English authorities to accept a division of Ireland into a ‘land of peace’ where English law ruled

English Colonialism and National Identity in Early Modern Ireland 29

and a ‘land of war’ where native Irish law and custom held sway, each separated by the border zones inhabited by the marcher lords: Instead of the island’s effective partition – the political structures, customs and law of the Gaelic parts unrecognised in the lordship and vice versa – there should be a new kingdom embracing the whole island and all its institutions, and with the Gaelic population enjoying full rights under the crown as did the Old English.6 Before this change it was common for servants of the English crown to argue that the whole of Ireland should come under the crown’s control.7 After, it was no longer possible to separate English and Irish subjects rigidly as two distinct groups with different statuses. The Gaelic Irish and ‘degenerate’ English – those who had become ‘Irish’ – were held to be subjects of the English crown de facto as well as de jure.8 Ireland had become a separate kingdom under the sovereignty of the English king and its people had become his subjects: As long as the jurisdictional area over which the king claimed authority was referred to as the lordship of Ireland it was being implied that only those within this designated area were the king’s subjects, and that those outside that jurisdiction had no recourse to the protection of the crown in the event of their being attacked. This reality was admitted by Old English and Gaelic Irish alike as the implication of the change in title which made it clear that all within the newly defined kingdom of Ireland were subjects of the king and would be entitled to the protection of his law if they acknowledged him as their sovereign.9 This is only one side of the coin. Henry’s declaration also increased the theoretical de jure power of the king to demand obedience and loyalty from his subjects. The tandem policies of ‘massive military enterprise from England and plantation of Ireland’10 were designed to implement this centralising authority, which was not achieved de facto until after the Battle of Kinsale (1601).11 By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, it could be said that the Old English had a much more coherent sense of their own identity than they did in the 1550s, a change illustrated in the production of Geoffrey Keating’s history of Ireland, Foras Fease ar Eírinn, which assumes that Irish identity can accommodate both the native Irish and those, like Keating himself, of Anglo-Norman – Old English – descent.12 The demand of the English crown that all conform to a standard had


succeeded only in hardening senses of identity extant before Henry VIIl’s claim of sovereignty. One particular crux in the history of Anglo-Irish relations was constituted by 1541; it is a coincidence that – arguably – the next most important event, the rebellion of 1641, occurred exactly one hundred years later. History rarely organises itself into such neat chronological patterns. As many commentators have pointed out, before the rebellion, the English and Anglo-Irish authorities flattered themselves that they had solved the Irish problem. In the preface to his edition of Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, contained with his collection of Ancient Irish Histories (1633), Sir James Ware wished that the work of the great poet had ‘in some passages . . . bin tempered with more moderation’. He argues that if hee had lived to see these times, and the good effects which the last 30 yeares peace have produced in this land, both for obedience to the lawes, and also in traffique, husbandry, civility, & learning, he would have omitted those passages which may seeme to lay either any particular aspersion upon some families, or generall upon the Nation.13 Ware deliberately categorises Spenser’s View as an ‘ancient history’, when it must have been obvious to any reader that it was a politically motivated text designed to confront an immediate danger. Ware’s attempt to bring the work into the public view – one that made Spenser’s text available for numerous readers over the next two centuries and more – simultaneously tries to diffuse its offensive and aggressive arguments by defining it as an ancient history, one that may have been appropriate once but was no longer so relevant in the Ireland of the 1630s. Such pious hopes were destroyed by the spectacular and unexpected outbreak of violence in 1641. A nation-wide revolt broke out after an attack on a group of Ulster settlers by their native neighbours on 22 October of that year. The rebellion has been the cause of acrimonious debate among Irish historians ever since, principally over the question of numbers slain on either side.14 It also revealed the unstable nature of the forces on either side of the religious and national divide. As Conrad Russell has argued, it took the draconian policies of the earl of Strafford to enable the New and Old English to unite in the 1640 parliament and have him impeached and subsequently executed.15 Russell’s judgement that ‘Strafford, it seemed, was the only Englishman ever to break down


the religious divide in Irish politics’ indicates a keen sense of historical irony.16 This unstable union helped to precipitate an even firmer and wider division between the two Christian denominations and national allegiances in Ireland. Charles I had made a series of promises to the Old English Catholics in the 1620s pledging greater religious tolerance and protection in return for subsidies. These became known as ‘The Graces’. Wentworth managed to hold out the carrot of ‘The Graces’ in the 1634 parliament to secure further money from the Old English, which helped to turn them against the crown and towards their Irish compatriots. Most Old English grew to feel that their long-term interest lay with the native Irish, their co-religionists, rather than with the Protestant New English.17 Hence, in 1641, the key group in Ireland was the Old English, ‘the pigs in the middle of Irish politics’, who began to see that it was no longer possible to be ‘a gentleman first, and a Catholic second’. The choices that faced the Old English and their dual sense of identity were recognised by all social elements, from the aristocratic Protestant, James Butler, twelfth earl and first duke of Ormond, three times lord lieutenant of Ireland in the seventeenth century, to less exalted Catholic rebels. [Butler] commented that he was the first Englishman to be treated as if he were Irish. He was not to be the last: in 1641, one of the rebels marked the great watershed in Irish history by describing them [the Old English] as the ‘new Irish’.18 Ormond, not surprisingly, became an increasingly marginalised figure after the series of uneasy truces in the 1640s, cut off from the majority of Old English Catholics, an experience mirrored by that of many subsequent Protestant Anglo-Irish aristocrats. Toby Barnard has argued that it is dangerous to lump the terms ‘English colonist’, ‘Anglo-Irish’ and ‘Irish Protestant together’, because ‘By the mid-seventeenth century, if not before, Irish Protestant society was splintered and disunited to a degree which not even shared religion and privileges could hide, and would remain so.’19 Along with other influential commentators on Irish history and affairs, Barnard has insisted that the reality of class difference be placed at the centre of the analysis of national identity.20 An Irish Protestant’s sense of identity depended on how the individual subject perceived the state within which he or she lived: Protestants ‘settlers . . . imagined their worlds in Ireland sometimes as a neglected and exploited colony, a proud


kingdom or a thriving province, or sometimes as a special quarter of the Christian commonwealth’.21 After the 1641 rebellion, Protestant settlers felt alienated both from Irish Catholics and from the English crown which they thought had abandoned them. Before 1641 many – like Ware – saw their adopted homeland as ‘a proud kingdom or a thriving province’, but by the mid-seventeenth century most Protestants described Ireland along the lines of ‘a neglected or exploited colony’, and a siege mentality often led them to believe further that they inhabited ‘a special quarter of the Christian commonwealth’.22 Irish Protestant identity was undoubtedly complex, disunited and fractured, as Barnard suggests. But it is clear that the choices available did not involve the forging of a new British identity. Rather, any form of identity adopted was conceived in terms of England and Ireland, as often as not, an Englishness experienced and lived in Ireland. The same is true of the Old English who were also forced to choose whether they cast their lot with England or Ireland, as the case of Richard Stanihurst (1540–1617) demonstrates. Stanihurst was the son of James Stanihurst, the speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and a member of one of the most prominent Old English families in the Pale.23 He wrote two major works on Ireland, the first being his contribution to the first edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577). The very fact that Stanihurst was asked to write a ‘History of Ireland’ for such a major collaborative project indicates his standing in key English intellectual circles. Among his most revealing comments on national identity in this work is his analysis of the mother tongues then spoken in Ireland. His ideal is an unchanging, steadfast language as an index of civility: linguistic transformation is symptomatic of decay or degeneracy and brings with it undesirable social effects. For Stanihurst, Irish-English exhibits all the healthy features of a proper language: The inhabitants of the English pale have beene in old time so much addicted to their civilitie, and so farre sequestered from barbarous savagenesse, as their onelie mother toong was English. And trulie, so long as these impaled dwellers did sunder themselves as well in land as in language from the Irish: rudenesse was daie by daie in the countie supplanted, civilitie ingraffed, good lawes established, loyaltie observed, rebellion suppressed, and in fine the coine of a yoong England was like to shoot in Ireland. But when their posteritie became not altogether so warie in keeping, as their ancestors were valient in conquering, the Irish language was free dennized in the English pale: this canker tooke such deepe root, as the bodie that before was whole


and sound, was by little and little festered, and in manner grew putrified . . . my short discourse tendeth to this drift, that it is not expedient that the Irish toong should be so universalie gagled in the English pale: because that by proofe and experience we see, that the pale was never in more flourishing estate when it was wholie English, and never in woorse plight than since it hath infranchised the Irish [my emphasis].24 This praise of the Palesman’s English, the guarantee of their pure identity, must be placed beside Stanihurst’s denigration of the Irish language. Irish, according to Stanihurst, is a language called ‘Gaidelach, partlie of Gaidelus the first founder, and partlie for that it is compounded of all languages’. Not only does written Irish differ so greatly from spoken Irish that ‘scarse one in five hundred can either read, write, or understand it’, but also ‘the language carrieth such difficultie with it, what for strangenesse of the phrase, and the curious feature of the pronunciation, that a verie few of the countrie can atteine to the perfection thereof’. Irish has become so mixed, so barbarous, that it fails to be successful as a mother tongue.25 What has to be emphasized is that Stanihurst does not simply construct an identity vis-a`-vis the ‘meere Irish’, he also argues for the superiority of the Old English as the spokesmen of Ireland against both the New English and the English of the fatherland. The Old English are establishing a ‘yoong England’, vigorous, wholesome and better able to transform barbarous Ireland than the vulgar New English and tired metropolitan English in England, which the mixed metaphor of the rapidly growing money describes. The implication is that the Old English of the Pale will eventually ‘outgrow’ the English. Later in his life, Stanihurst became a post-Tridentine Catholic and crossed over to the other side, believing that his future lay as an Irishman not an Englishman, young, old or new. Nevertheless, he still lavished explicit praise on the English of the Pale, showing that, even after he switched allegiance, his identity as an English Palesman remained crucial to his sense of self: The residents of the English province . . . do not depart by a hair’s breadth from the customs of their English ancestors. They are native English speakers and have no other vernacular. Carefully shunning That strange and florid English, currently fashionable, which plunders from foreign languages, they preserve among them the pure and pristine tongue [my emphasis].26


In his contribution to Holinshed’s Chronicles Stanihurst notes that English is spoken in all cities throughout Ireland and derides those in England who judge the inhabitants of the English pale, upon their first repaire into England, to learn their English in three or four daies, as though they had bought at Chester, a grotes worth of English, and so packt up the rest to be carried after them to London. The implication is that it is the sneering metropolitan who is unable to speak proper English – a conclusion supported by the tale of the noble man who was sent to Wexford as a commissioner ‘to decide the controversies of the countrie’. He became so confident, having been able to understand most of ‘the rude complaints of the countrie clowns’, that he boasted to a friend that he would soon become a well-spoken man in Irish. Stanihurst’s conclusion is savagely ironic: ‘Howbeit to this daie, the dregs of the old ancient Chaucer English are kept as well there as in Fingall’ – that is, the noble lord could not understand what was once his peoples’ language because his own had become so degenerate. He was also ignorant enough to believe that what he heard and partly understood was Irish.27 When Stanihurst argues that ‘a conquest draweth, or at the leastwise ought to draw to it three things, to wit, law, apparel, and language’, it is clear, at least, which version of English he was advocating should serve to obliterate Irish.28 However, while it could be argued that Stanihurst’s account of language change serves to complement his views of cultural degeneration, he is not always so consistent. In the chapter ‘The lords temporall, as well English as Irish, which inhabit the countrie of Ireland’, the first family described is the Geraldine FitzGeralds, earls of Kildare, who ruled Ireland as lord deputies from the start of the fifteenth century until the revolt of ‘Silken’ Thomas in 1534, when English-born deputies took over.29 Stanihurst recounts their genealogy: they were originally Florentine, moved to Normandy, to Wales with Strongbow, and then to Ireland. Yet, Stanihurst states ‘The Famllie is English’ [my emphasis] two pages later.30 That this contradicts what is written elsewhere in the ‘Description’ cannot be disputed. What this lapse reveals is the lack of a coherent ideology of national identity in Ireland in the late sixteenth century. Then – as now – a series of contemporary discourses based on oppositional distinctions between England and Ireland and the Irish and the English existed that determined how people saw themselves. These were employed rhetorically as the occasion suited, revealing that


no one lived outside the representations and identities available to them. So, it should not be a matter of any surprise to us that some texts foreground different questions at different points and produce answers that radically undermine what was just gone before. Stanihurst’s second work concerning Ireland, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis (1584), was written after he had become a Counter-Reformation Catholic and fled in exile to Spain and the Netherlands. Still praising the purity of the Palesmen’s English, Stanihurst now concerned himself with a different series of national oppositions: that of the Old Irish or Hibernici against the Anglo-Irish or Anglo-Hiberni, as he now called what he had previously called the Old English. In the preface dedicated to Patrick Plunket, a fellow Old English exile, he starts to write of ‘our race’, ‘our country’ and, later, ‘our natives of the English province’.31 Stanihurst’s reasons for choosing a life of exile may well have been primarily matters of faith. Nevertheless, it is clear that religion and national identity could not be separated in the early modern British Isles and that Stanihurst had crossed a cultural as well as a theological boundary by changing his faith.32 However, such cultural boundaries were also porous – as Stanihurst’s life and career indicate. It has been frequently pointed out that the New rather than the Old English tended to favour military conquest and the systematic spoliation of the country rather than legal and institutional reform to transform Ireland into an obedient state profitable to the crown.33 Nevertheless, both groups were inclined to see the ‘wild’ or ‘meere’ Irish in identical ways, defining themselves as English in Ireland in opposition to the natives. It was often taken as fact that the Irish were a barbarous or savage people – dirty, nomadic, treacherous, lecherous and devoid of all stabilising social customs – who even lacked the ability to pass above their pastoral mode of living to a ‘higher’ form of civilisation.34 The problem for both Old and New English was to account for this deficiency. Edmund Campion, the Jesuit martyr and a close friend of Stanihurst, his former student at Oxford, assembled his History of Ireland somewhat hastily at the Stanihursts’ Dublin residence between August 1570 and May–June 1571, when he was fleeing from the English authorities before becoming a Jesuit exile (Stanihurst, in turn, made great use of Campion’s work when writing his history and description for Holinshed’s Chronicles). Campion describes the Irish, both ‘meere and English [i.e., Old English]’, as infected with ‘licentious and evill custome’ – the former more odiously and dangerously than the latter. Confident, however, that education would remedy the problem, Campion ends his work with extravagant praise of Sir Henry Sidney,


the Lord Deputy, for his pledges to make good this lack.35 Campion’s benign assessment of the situation in Ireland and hope for the relatively straightforward solution to the problem of the recalcitrant native Irish suggests that his History should be read alongside Old rather than New English treatises. In marked contrast to Campion’s analysis is that of John Derricke’s The Image of Ireland (see above, pp. 25–6). Derricke describes the difficulty of training wild Irish eagles, but he alleges that at least these will change eventually, in contrast to the wilfully perverse Irish ‘woodkerne’ or foot-soldiers: But Irishe karne unlike these foules, in burthe and high degree: No chaunglyngs are thei nowhit, In civil I state to bee. Thei passe not for civilite, Nor care for wisdoms lore: Sinne is their cheef felicite, whereof thei have the store . . . 36 In Derricke’s text, leopards do not change their spots: Irish savagery is natural, not cultural, and thus the Irish would appear to be immune to Campion’s optimistic hopes for their salvation. But strangely enough for us to contemplate perhaps, Derricke, like Campion, was closely connected to the Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, who, as in Campion’s History, is the hero of the narrative.37 Derricke’s poem appears to be stridently Protestant in tone and content, condemning the Irish and their Old English allies for their inherent evil and sin. What these connections should alert us to is the flexibility of friendship and patronage networks which often cut across ideological commitments, even in a country as polarised and riven as Ireland. It was not always the case that factions or groups dependent on one mighty courtier would share the same political or religious outlook and agenda. The differences between Campion and Derricke should also remind us that times change and no one situation remains constant. Ireland in the late 1570s offered a different proposition to official eyes than it had in the 1580s when the Desmond Rebellion was at its most dangerous and provided encouragement for such other significant rebels as Rory Oge, the villain of The Image of Ireland.38 Both Campion and Derricke describe the Irish in broadly similar terms, and their conclusions reflect the pragmatic nature of their arguments. For Campion, the


Irish can be reformed; for Derricke, they are too far gone. Between 1540 and 1660, these two basic positions are stated over and over again, depending on the current military or political situation and the personal preference of the writer concerned. Any historical analysis should take account of both the wider patterns and the specific events. John Hooker’s account of the Anglicizing of Cormac Mac Teige during the first Desmond Rebellion (1568–74), published in Holinshed’s Chronicles alongside Stanihurst’s ‘Description of Ireland’, provides an interesting analogue to Derricke’s account of the Irish woodkerne: [T]his Sir Cormac, in dutie and obedience to hir majestie and hir lawes, and for his affection to all Englishmen, surpasseth all his own sept & familie, as also all the Irishrie in that land. For albeit a meere Irish gentleman can hardly digest anie Englishman or English government, & whatsoever his outward appearance be, yet his inward affection is corrupt and naught: being not unlike to Jupiters cat, whome though he had transformed into a beautiful ladie, and makde hir a noble princesse; yet when she saw the mouse, she could not forbeare tosnatch at him; and as the ape, though he be never so richlie attired in purple, yet will still be an ape.39 Hooker’s analogy of Jupiter’s cat, like Derricke’s comparison of woodkerne and eagles, suggests that an immutable essence of Irishness will survive even the most thorough transformation. Hooker, like Derricke, feared that the Irish were beyond redemption. A completely different perspective is provided by William Herbert (see above, pp. 17–20). Herbert would undoubtedly have agreed with Lord Chancellor William Gerard who, when sent over to report on the state of Ireland in 1576, defined Irishness in terms of culture and social practice, placing greatest emphasis on language. Gerard alleged that ‘Irishe speache, habit and conditions . . . made the man Irishe’.40 Nevertheless, Herbert made plans to have the ‘the Lord’s prayer, the Articles of the Creed, the Ten Commandments, translated into the Irish tongue’ in order to better his tenants ‘by instructing them in true religion, the firm foundation of the fear of God, of their loyalty to Her Majesty, and of their love and charity one to another’.41 For Herbert, Irish was clearly not an insurmountable barrier to the truth. Like Campion, Herbert saw education as the way to civilise the Irish, suggesting that at least one element of his reading of the situation in Ireland enabled him to adopt the ‘benign’ perception of the native Irish. For Herbert, language was not an intractable barrier to the communication of values, as these


could be translated; neither was Irishness incompatible with loyalty to an English administration. Herbert’s confidence in the success of the English enterprise in Ireland – like Campion, he was writing during a period of relative peace42 – suggests that Irish identity, like an old coat, can be easily removed. Matters were very different at the end of the 1590s after the outbreak of the Nine Years War.43 In 1598 the Munster Plantation was attacked and effectively destroyed by supporters of Hugh O’Neill, the earl of Tyrone.44 An anonymous tract by one of the New English colonists, ‘The Supplication of the blood of the English most lamentably murdered in Ireland, cryeing out of the yearth for revenge’, appealed directly to Elizabeth to assert again the rights of the colonists and punish the evil Irish rebels. In many ways this tract might be said to prefigure the pamphlet war of atrocity literature sparked off by the rebellion of 1641.45 The tract begins in an apocalyptic vein: From the fact of that disloyall and rebellious yearthe of Irland, crieth the blood of yore Majesties subjects, whose bodyes dismembred by the tyranie of traytors, devowred by the merciles jawes of ravenous woolves, humblie craveth at the hands of yore sacred Majestie (unto whom god hath committed the sword of justice to punishe the offender, and upon whom he hath imposed a care and chairge for the maintainance and defence of the innocent) To revenge the monstrous rapes of many virgins, the lamentable desolation of many poore forlorne widdowes, and the bloody murders of many of youre faithfull subjects. And wthall, to provide for the saftie and securitie of those soules that yet remayne, and heare after shall by yore grace be placed, amonge those malicious and wicked sonns of Edom, amonge that faithlesse, unmerciful!, idolatrous, and unbelieving nation of the Irishe.46 Crucially important to the author’s argument is his use of pronouns and his construction of a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’. For ‘your Majesties subjects’, ‘loyal English’, ‘yore natural and true subjects’, read New English. The Old English are systematically attacked and their loyalty ridiculed, because they have ‘degenerated’ and become Irish: They were in the former tymes, as wee are now, meere Englishe in habite, in name, in nature. They nowe retaine nothinge of that they were but the bare name. Our apparel is scorned of them; or nature hated; ore selves abhorred . . . what a change may yee thinke in soe


many ages, soe many generations, hath wrought in yore English-Irish sweete hartes? what difference (I pray yee) doe yee finde between the O Roorkes and the Geraldins, betweene the O Moores and the lacyes, between the O mulveanies and the Purcells, the Supples, and the McShees; Are they not neere hande all rebells to god, their prince, and their contry? Is there lesse hatred towards us in the one then in the other? Is there any more love, any more humanytie, any more conscience, any more religion in the one then in the other? They are nowe all one: there is no difference [my emphasis].47 William Herbert’s sense in 1588 of the impending integration of the Irish with the English has been replaced in 1598 by a vigorous desire to assert an English identity vis-a`-vis the Irish. This means that, while Herbert took little notice of the ‘pigs in the middle’, the Old or ‘degenerate’ English, the anonymous author of this tract must emphasise how distinct are the identities of the Old English and the colonists in order to heighten his own community’s feeling of isolation. For this author, the Old English have become Irish. While Herbert appeared keen to ignore the defining characteristics of the New English, in the ‘Supplication’, a decade later, they have become indispensable signs of a privileged cultural difference. A writer who was careful to distinguish between the Old English and native Irish was the soldier and author Barnaby Rich, whose connections with Ireland date from the 1570s. Rich retired to Dublin in the early 1600s and probably spent the rest of his life in Ireland.48 Rich makes an interesting contrast to Richard Stanihurst in his comments on religion and national identity. While Stanihurst’s Tridentine faith led to an increasing sense of Irish national identity under the banner of the Roman Catholic Church, Rich divided up the Irish along the lines of their religion.49 While many English authors, like Edmund Campion, saw the Irish on a sliding scale from the most to the least Anglicised, Rich hated the Old English far more than the native Irish because he felt that they had seduced the ignorant natives away from the Protestant faith. His writings illustrate the degree to which religious allegiance often determined national identity in the early seventeenth century. Rich commented: ‘the popery of Ireland is the bar that excludeth all regard of duty, both to God and the king’. Planting Ireland with English became a Salvationist mission ‘giving light to a blind and ignorant people’ because ‘there wanteth nothing in Ireland but the true knowledge of God and obedience to the Prince’.50 When Rich submitted his dialogue ‘The Anatomy of Ireland’ to King James in 1615, it is


interesting to note that the two disputants, Antodonus and Phylautus, argue from opposing positions when discussing the nature of the Irish and the way to reform them. Antodonus claims that Irish incivility stems from customs and nurture rather than nature, while Phylautus claims that ‘thys savage maner. . . is bred in the bone’. The dialogue does not seek to resolve the dispute, but rather to present the reader with what Rich saw as two different Irish identities: the intractable New Irish and the merely ignorant, native Old Irish.51 English colonists continued to rely on two separate notions of Irish identity right upto the institution of the Penal Laws. This is illustrated in the famous debate that took place in the wake of the decision of the Cromwellian Irish parliament to transplant the Irish ‘guilty’ of the massace of 1641 westward beyond the Shannon into Connacht.52 The acts passed were attacked by Vincent Gookin, a colonist, in The Great Case of Transplantation in Ireland Discussed (1655). Gookin’s argument hinges on familiar notions: transplanting the Irish will make matters more difficult for the Cromwellian settlers, who will be deprived of expertise; removing the Irish will deprive them of the chance to become civilised through contact with the English. Gookin asserted that it is much more likely that the Irish would turn English in a pacified and Anglicised Ireland than that the English would now degenerate like their forebears. Before, the Irish were the main body of the people, owned most of the land, ran the legal system, and could make the English adopt their habits and speak their language. Now cultural traffic flows the other way and separating the English and the Irish is the way to court disaster.53 Not surprisingly, Gookin’s pamphlet provoked a dismissively angry response from Colonel Richard Lawrence, another English colonist, entitled The Interests of England in the Irish Transplantation Stated (1655). Lawrence’s argument is also familiar: the security of the English depends on protecting their legally acquired lands in Ireland. Because the Irish are an intractably wicked ‘nation’ as their behaviour in 1641 demonstrated, Irish presence must be kept to a minimum among the English and many of them should be transplanted.54 What conclusions can be drawn from such a brief survey of the writings of early modern Old and New English in Ireland? First, it is worth noting that the debates outlined here are not new and do not mark a sudden departure from previous English representations of Ireland. There exists no simple distinction between medieval and Renaissance accounts of Ireland, as is sometimes alleged.55 Both Old and New English writers acknowledge that the dominant influence on English


perceptions of Ireland were the writings of Gerald of Wales composed in the 1180s after his two visits to Ireland.56 John Hooker, who translated Gerald’s Conquest of Ireland and then continued the chronicle of Ireland up to the present of 1586 in his contribution to Holinshed’s Chronicles, berated the failure of earlier historians to record their debt to Gerald: ‘In this they were much to be blamed, that all of them were beholding unto Giraldus, and not one of them would yield that courtesy either to publish his history, or, using the same, to acknowledge it.’57 Similarly, the seventeenth-century Irish historian Geoffrey Keating, who was descended from an Anglo-Norman family but chose to write in Gaelic, made it quite clear from the start of his History of Ireland (1629) whom his work was intended to refute: We shall set down here a few lines of the lies of the new foreigners who have written concerning Ireland, following Cambrensis; and shall make a beginning by refuting Cambrensis himself . . . because it is Cambrensis who is as the bull to the herd for them for writing the false history of Ireland, wherefore they had no choice of guide.58 Both comments emphasise the acknowledged continuity of description of Ireland in English accounts. What is written about the Irish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is not new. Second, it is not only the representation of a people or a culture which matters, but the use to which this representation is put. Just because writers relied upon the same rock of material does not mean that they all tried to say the same thing. It is undoubtedly right to suggest that Rich, Campion, Gookin, the anonymous authors of the ‘Supplication’ and ‘The Discourse of Ireland’, Hooker et al., rely on the same representational possibilities of the Irish they encountered and so observed them within the same paradigms. But different political circumstances require different conclusions from the use of the same material. The contingent nature of such political analysis is borne out especially if we contrast their accounts with that of Richard Stanihurst, who tried to forge his own sense of identity as an Irishman, but was often forced to rely on the same material as did his colonist counterparts. They in turn had to define themselves as New English against both the native Irish and the competing colonial elite of the Old English. Third, we need to understand that identities depend on difference for their articulation, a banal observation, but one that is more often recognised than explored. The history of the various groups in early modern Ireland – principally native Irish, Old English and New English – cannot


be seen in isolation. It is the interaction between them that forms the sense of inclusion and exclusion vital to group identity. As many historians have pointed out, a hybrid ‘national’ group like the Anglo-Irish has a history which both absorbs and opposes English and Irish traditions.59 National identities are never static, although they contain key continuities observable over time. However, and this is the fourth point, it is clear that whatever hopes some may have had of a united Britain containing Ireland, and so unifying the British Isles, few involved in Irish politics could see – or wanted to see – beyond the dichotomy of English and Irish identities. It is hardly surprising that English writers resident in Ireland such as Edmund Spenser were nervous about the possibility of a British union (see below, chs 7–9). In Ireland, Britain and Britishness did not feature as part of the political landscape. Britain, if it was acknowledged at all as a geo-political entity, was simply equated with England.

3 Malcolm in the Middle: James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings

The question of British identity and the projected unification of Britain appears to have had little discernible impact on the conception of Anglo-Irish relations, English perceptions of Ireland or Irish perceptions of England.1 However, the links between England, Scotland and the projected union of Britain show that what was true of one area of the British Isles cannot be easily applied to another. David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (The British Union) (1605), one of a number of tracts written to persuade James either to continue with or to abandon his plans for a British Union, makes a strong case that James should fully integrate the kingdoms of Scotland and England.2 Few people wrote more enthusiastically about the hopes for a united Britain: Hume’s vision is an all-encompassing one that imagines the end of the English and the Scots and the birth of a new people, the Britons: Indeed what is now called England was not always England, and they say that the name of Scotland was unknown to the earliest Scots. And if there was ever a just cause for any people to change its name, it’s assuredly the case now for both the English and the Scots. And if it is determined to change the name, then it is for the better to adopt the more general name: Britannia. (p. 109) In the unpublished second part Hume demonstrates that his ideas are not simply fantasies and there are carefully thought-out practical proposals designed to make the ideals a reality: ‘Nobody shall refer to himself or to another as either English or Scottish. Whoever does so shall be fined, with doubled and quadrupled penalties (and so 43


forth) for repeated offences’ (p. 155). There are to be no separate legal systems, forms of religion, or political institutions: ‘So let’s all be altogether clear about it from now on. Let’s have it inscribed in letters of gold on a tablet of bronze: THERE SHALL BE ONE PEOPLE’ [Hume’s emphasis] (p. 159). This second part undoubtedly remained in manuscript because Hume’s idea of union was far too radical and republican for James and his advisers in England to countenance as acceptable political discourse.3 Insisting that James should be monarch of both nations and that neither would be able to claim him as their own was clearly in line with James’s plans: Let the Scots not think of him as particularly their own king just because he was born to them, nor the English think of him as especially given to them. But let them know that he was legitimately given to them. And let the Scots realize that he did not withdraw from them to their detriment just because the English have yielded to him. (p. 14) But demanding that ‘There shall be one supreme council of Britain’, which would be the major organ of central government, so that the noblemen of Britain would effectively assume control over the newly forged nation, was clearly not what James intended to happen: The members of the council shall be drawn in equal number from the people of both countries. The total shall be double the number of the councillors who formerly served on the supreme council of England. The majority shall be composed of the leading men of the kingdom the noblemen. These men shall be entrusted to serve the king and to give him advice and counsel both on his own affairs and on those of the kingdom at large. Those councils that presently serve in York and Lancaster shall be subordinate to this council. And to these shall be added councils in London and Edinburgh, and perhaps in Aberdeen. Cumbria shall be governed from Edinburgh, Annandale from York. A fifth part of the membership on these councils shall be drawn from people who live on the other side of the old border. These councils shall take responsibility for their own affairs and for whatever pertains to their own region or district. They shall make their own decisions on lesser matters. On matters of great moment they shall consult the supreme council of Britannia. They shall hold sessions annually. Should they

Malcolm in the Middle 45

fail to do so, they shall be held accountable to the supreme council of Britannia. (p. 177) The republican and democratic thrust of this passage is obvious enough. The king does not feature as a significant political figure in this imagined constitution, only someone who is to take advice from his councils. They hold the real power in the land, as the last sentence spells out. The careful selection of councillors and the regular sessions that the councils have to hold shows that the constitution is more important than the individual actors who form it, a notion of politics that was anathema to James. The autonomy of the regional councils who are accountable to the supreme British council highlights the fact that the king does not possess overall control. In essence, Hume’s Britain is scarcely a kingdom at all, and its people less subjects of the monarch than citizens who exist in the public world of the classical republic.4 As Hume’s editors point out, Hume’s imagined British republic is directly descended from the political ideas and ideals of his mentor, George Buchanan. Buchanan ‘had faced the challenge of imagining Scotland as a classical republic’, hoping to transform a brutal and violent state dominated by over-mighty warriors into a society governed by reason and virtuous behaviour; Hume ‘faced the far more daunting project of turning Britain into a plausible polis’.5 However, while Hume’s attempt to revive the old ideals of public culture and classical liberty were one side of the political legacy of Buchanan’s influence on Scottish life and culture, the other side was the autocratic theories of James VI and I, his former pupil. While Hume’s vision of Britain was centred around the council of virtuous aristocrats, James’s centred around the sacred person of the monarch. Buchanan had returned to Scotland from France to teach James, part of the pious hope of the Protestant faction in Scotland that they could mould the king in their image and so transform Scotland into the virtuous society that they wanted it to be.6 In many ways it is hard to imagine a less harmonious or successful relationship.7 Buchanan was an irritable, aged humanist with proto-republican ideas keen to impress on his young charge the need for the monarch to serve his people well. Buchanan believed that a bad king could be deposed by any of his subjects as long as they could justify their actions, a position that went well beyond the arguments of most monarchomachs whose writings terrified European monarchs in the second half of the sixteenth century. Such theorists invariably argued that only those who held public office, the magistrates, had the right to overthrow and kill kings who went


against God’s law.8 Buchanan’s fellow Scot, John Knox, whose First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) is more concerned to dismiss the rights of evil queens to reign than to develop theories of resistance, government and representation, argues rather vaguely that only those who elected an idolator have the right to depose her (his target was Mary Tudor who died before the work was published, which meant that Knox was loathed by her younger half-sister, Elizabeth, ever afterwards).9 Even the notorious Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579), the most infamous Huguenot treatise written during the bloody French civil wars of religion, which terrified monarchs throughout Europe, insisted that private citizens had no right to resist and that only magistrates had the right and duty to resist tyrants: ‘To private individuals it is said: ‘‘put your sword in its sheath’’; but to magistrates: ‘‘You do not bear the sword in vain’’ ’.10 One of the key themes which binds together Buchanan’s voluminous output, produced throughout his long life, was a moral crusade against bad monarchs who neglected their subjects and usurped powers and rights for themselves which rightly belonged to others. Most frightening for the young James was Buchanan’s method of instruction which was to bombard the king with a plethora of examples of bad rulers and their subsequent horrible and richly deserved fates. It is hardly surprising that soon before his own death, and some forty years after that of his tutor, James had a horrible dream in which Buchanan appeared, addressed him in verse and predicted that ‘soon afterwards he would fall into ice, and then into fire, that he would endure frequent pain, and die after two years’ (Buchanan’s ghost was a year out).11 Equally, it is hardly surprising that as James developed his own ideas of the importance of the true monarch unfettered by the useless and often harmful political and legal institutions demanded by over-mighty subjects, he should demand that the works of Buchanan be prohibited (and, when it was revealed to him, the second part of Hume’s treatise).12 However, it is far too easy to put the disastrous relationship between the two men down to a personality clash.13 It should be noted that Buchanan taught another student who espoused political ideas diametrically opposed to those of his teacher, Michel de Montaigne, suggesting that he was not a figure who always inspired acolytes.14 Buchanan’s desire to impress on James the need for him to serve the people well stemmed in part from his vision of a virtuous Protestant anti-empire which Northern Europeans could establish as a means of opposing the barbarous cruelty of the Catholic Iberian Empire (and Hume’s hopes for a united republican, Protestant Britain follow Buchanan’s lead).


Buchanan was not alone in having high hopes for James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, and the disappointment he had felt at the paths she took meant that he came to see her as one of the key traitors to the cause of proper virtue and government in Europe (see below, pp. 60–2).15 Mary became the apotheosis of the long line of dreadful Scottish tyrants in Buchanan’s posthumously published History of Scotland, the lamentable story of her crimes against Scotland occupying a huge portion of the total narrative.16 He also wrote a separate treatise outlining her sins, which was widely known throughout Britain, Ane detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes (1571).17 Buchanan clearly hoped that if he worked hard enough on James he could prevent the sins of the mother being visited upon the son, a reason why he was chosen by the Protestant faction in Scotland to return from France and help them make the king in their image.18 Buchanan composed a poem on James’s birth in 1566, ‘Genethliacon Jacobi Sexti Regis Scotorum’ (‘A Celebration of the Birth of James VI, King of Scots’), which urged the boy to ‘promise a golden age and the end of warfare’, ending civil war and making Scotland into a stable country which could serve its people well. Buchanan argued that the example of a virtuous king was the best hope for reform: Imprisonment, punishment, and the executioner’s axe, Do not so animate the soul’s trembling fear of the law As does the reputation for genuine virtue, the character of a king, The glory and respect owing to blameless rule, Convert the souls of subjects to an honourable way of life.19 Buchanan did not live long enough to see the fruits of his tutoring (he died in 1582 when James was 16), and, while he would undoubtedly have had some sympathy for James’s successful efforts as a peacemaker in the early 1600s, and his principled resistance to Catholicism, it is unlikely that he would have found his pupil’s political views to his taste.20 It is crucial to note that both James and Buchanan have equally ambitious plans for the reform and transformation of Britain, but their proposed aims for the island cluster stand as neatly inverted images. For Buchanan, politics was a sacred business. He represented virtuous republics as political formations sanctioned by God, sometimes associating them with ancient Israel, sometimes suggesting that as Biblical Israel was ruled by God’s will it was ‘irrelevant to politics’.21 However, rather than subsuming politics into a broader category of religion, Buchanan effectively achieved the opposite, placing all religious issues within the


rubric of the human and the political. Commentators routinely observe how secular Buchanan’s work is, despite the prevalence of religious language and subjects in his work.22 Having established that the question of virtue is to dominate judgements in both secular and sacred spheres, Buchanan has effectively demystified religious belief and opened up religious issues to the scrutiny of political and social values. If the central question asked is what is good for the people, then the answer can clearly sometimes be that religious concerns can be irrelevant, pernicious or simply inferior to other forms of value. There is no special religious virtue which can override all other considerations in Buchanan’s thought. In his most polemical treatise on government, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos (1579), later translated as A Discourse concerning the due privilege of Government in the Kingdom of Scotland (1721), Buchanan explicitly set out his political stall. The dialogue was dedicated to James as a means of helping him detect, and so avoid, the attentions of flatterers at court. Buchanan makes it clear that ‘kings are not ordained for themselves, but for the people’, firmly rooting the question of sovereignty as a prerogative of the populace not the ruler.23 Buchanan argues that people can elect the king, and much of the dialogue, like much of Buchanan’s writings elsewhere, is dedicated to the problem of how to identify and get rid of tyrants (pp. 172–3, 185–7). Kings should be elected representatives of the people (p. 208), and kings who assume the throne through this route will administer the laws better and in the interests of the people (pp. 209–10). The king is, in essence, a functionary whose duty it is to make sure that the laws determined by his subjects work properly. In the History of Scotland Buchanan expresses his irritation with the Scots for allowing Kenneth III to assume the throne as a hereditary monarch, and so overthrowing the honourable Scottish tradition of elected monarchy.24 Buchanan makes it clear that he has little sympathy with the devious Kenneth whose aim was to promote his own family at the expense of the Scottish people. And he is equally dismayed that the people have effectively made Scotland the same as other European kingdoms. For Buchanan it is a short step from hereditary succession to tyranny because the natural order whereby the people can control the kings who rule them has been inverted and a binding contract broken. The disaster Scotland has brought upon itself cannot be underestimated and the reign of Kenneth III – in other ways a good king, according to Buchanan – marks the turning point in Scottish history that must be reversed if possible:


And so the People are to be universally committed into their Power, who have no Power over themselves: insomuch, That those Persons, who are hardly brought to Obey Wise, Prudent and Experienced Kings, are now required to yield Obedience, as it were, to the very shadow of a King: by which means, we willingly precipitate ourselves into those Punishments, which God threatens to Those, who despise and contemn his Holy Majesty, namely, That Children, Male or Female, may Reign over us, whom the Law of nations, and even Nature it self (the Mother of all Laws) hath subjected to the Rule of Others. (p. 205) Buchanan revels in pointing out the paradoxes that the establishment of hereditary kingship has inaugurated: adults are now subject to the rule of children and instability will result from a law that was designed to promote stability (p. 206). Whereas God usually has to punish nations who break his holy laws, here the Scots have done his job for him. God, although himself a ‘Holy Majesty’, does not require those on earth to copy his mode of government. Buchanan uses a striking metaphor to describe his conception of kingship. He argues that the king is set in the theatre of the world, where all can look at him. His vices can never be kept secret (p. 226). It is as an example on this public stage that the king has his greatest influence for good or evil (p. 231). Moreover, it is not the men and women who are the players, but the king observed by the audience of his people who will decide whether they want him to continue in his profession after he has performed for them. Buchanan may be providing an answer to critics of the theatre such as Stephen Gosson and Philip Stubbes, who argued that the stage only taught people how to behave badly.25 Here, the king acting in the theatre of the world has the power to lead his subjects to the sort of virtue and happiness that Sir Philip Sidney felt could be achieved by reading poetry.26 It is not surprising that Buchanan should have used theatrical metaphors given that he was a successful Latin dramatist himself, regarding drama as a useful medium for conveying his ideas to the powerful, and reaching a wider audience.27 Buchanan translated two classical tragedies, Medea and Alcestis, and wrote two biblical tragedies: Jephthes was based on the story of the military leader who fought the Ammonites in the book of Judges 10.6–12.7 and Baptistes narrated the story of John the Baptist, most probably written in the 1540s when Buchanan was living in Bordeaux.28


Baptistes is perhaps the more interesting of the two original plays, not least because it demands to be read as a pie`ce a` cle´f. It has been argued that John the Baptist should be read as Thomas More and Herod as Henry VIII. Buchanan himself made this claim when he was interrogated by the Inquisition in Portugal in 1552, but, given that he had been forced to flee Paris because of his vigorous and often obscene satires of the Catholic Church, and he was already turning against the authority of the Pope and towards Protestantism, it seems likely that this allegorical reading is more of a blind than an insight.29 It is equally likely that Buchanan was alluding to the martyrdom of John Fisher, who had told Henry that he would suffer the fate of John the Baptist because he felt about Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn the way that John had felt about Herod’s marriage to Herodias. Henry duly obliged and Fisher’s head was duly decapitated in 1535. Furthermore, given Buchanan’s obsessive hatred for Mary Queen of Scots, it is possible that the revised version of the play contains a criticism of her refusal to listen to the spokesman of the people, John, after she has murdered her second husband, Lord Darnley.30 Such allusions help point to the topical and political significance of the play. Baptistes follows the main thrust of Buchanan’s writings in subsuming the sacred within the secular. The play opens with the elders, Malchus and Gamaliel, arguing whether the Baptist is an appropriate critic of society or whether his attacks on the corrupt morals of Israel are vitiated and rendered meaningless by his status as an outsider: MAL. So dwelling alone in the lonely crannies of the unfrequented countryside he has beguiled the simple folk with the appearance of stern sanctity. With his shaggy hair, his frame covered with skins, his diet of wild game and deceits of that kind, he has attracted the attention of all. The common folk believe that a new prophet has suddenly been bestowed on the world. And now he has drawn to himself an army of an attendant mob, now the people abandon their cities and look up to him alone; princes cultivate him, kings revere him . . . GAM. Can you persuade me that the man who rebukes vices, teaches good manners, and walks first on the path which he enjoins on others is wicked? MAL. Can you persuade me that the man who despises laws, promotes new sects and new rites, attacks with abuse the teachers of the people, and disparages the priests is good? (pp. 135–6)


This passage raises a question that Buchanan discusses elsewhere in De Jure Regni Apud Scotos. There he argues that people who withdraw from society, like Timon of Athens, are suffering from a ‘distemper of mind’ because God likes men to gather together, as Cicero also suggested (pp. 177–9).31 Malchus clearly wants to cast the Baptist as an outsider who has abandoned society and therefore has nothing to teach it because he is merely a misanthrope. But, as his own words recognise, kings, princes and common people are flocking to hear the Baptist preach. It is society that has left him, not vice versa. Furthermore, it is the widespread support that he receives that justifies the actions of the Baptist, as much as the sanction from God, again indicating Buchanan’s real concerns. Once again, the play’s central target is not the question of the nature of worship, or a particular religious policy or doctrine, but the behaviour of tyrants. Herod could be any one of the bad Scottish kings attacked throughout Buchanan’s History of Scotland. Although Malchus opposes the Baptist in debate because he undermines the fabric of Jewish society, disregarding the words of elders and challenging the rabbis ‘with impudent words’, the chorus points the audience to the truth that the truth will eventually out and all will be exposed: [A]s for you, stern hypocrites who take delight in wicked gain though manifesting severity on crabbed brow, however much you have hidden your secret crimes from the misapprehensions of the trusting crowd and though the foul dregs of your impious minds are concealed, none the less your conscience gnaws you in secret and finds you guilty. The hidden executioner enclosed within your entrails devours you, scourging you with his grim whip. (Baptistes, p. 152) Malchus then appears on stage and the moral is pointed directly to the king, who has treated his most loyal servant despicably: MAL. No reliable hope lies in the king. By his own base ambition he has betrayed both the state’s cause and his own. In his eagerness to please the people, in his pursuit of the fair wind of favour by an appearance of gentleness, he has striven to consign me to the anger of the common folk, and has sought to compensate for the injuries done to him by exposing me to danger. . . Malchus argues that Herod has used him so that he can be blamed for the execution of the Baptist if the people protest, but take the glory if


they approve: ‘In this way kings mount for their enjoyment shows which exploit the blood of citizens from opposing sides, and sport with the slaughter we inflict on each other’ (p. 153). The play reverses the monarch’s cruel use of theatre and subjects Herod and his modern imitators to the theatre of the world as Buchanan suggested was the proper order of things in De Jure Regni Apud Scotos. Although the play concludes with the chorus warning the Israelites of the impending judgement of God who will punish them for their worship of false idols (pp. 162–3), the action has actually exposed the tyranny of the few rather than the sins of the many. Buchanan’s metaphors and comparisons would seem to reveal that his main concern was the eyes of the people and it is they who should control government in Scotland and the rest of Britain. The opening of James’s Trew Law of Free Monarchies reads as if it was designed to refute the views of his old tutor, which it probably was: As there is not a thing so necessarie to be knowne by the people of any land, next the knowledge of their God, as the right knowledge of their alleageance, according to the forme of gouernement established among them, especially in a Monarchie (which forme of gouvernment, as resembling the Diuinitie, approacheth nearest to prefection, as all the learned and wise men from the beginning haue agreed upon; Vunitie being the perfection of all things,) So hath the ignorance, and (which is worse) the seduced opinion of the multitude blinded by them, who thinke themselues able to teach and instruct the ignorants, procured the wrack and ouerthrow of sundry flourishing Common-wealths[.]32 While Buchanan stressed the need for the public to see and understand the nature of government so that they could judge their rulers, James emphasises the sacred mystery of kingship as a form of the divine; what for Buchanan leads to bad government, for James leads to good, and he ends the opening sentence of his treatise berating those who foolishly think they can understand the mysteries of state because in convincing themselves and others that they can, they help to ruin and destroy good government. For James, the king was best understood as God’s deputy on earth to whom he was responsible (pp. 194, 200), a notion of government that diametrically opposes that of Buchanan for whom the Majesty of God was not to be copied by earthly rulers. Buchanan argued that the king was appointed to administer the laws ordained by the people; James declared in his public document to his son that if


the king established good laws himself his subjects would be drawn to virtuous behaviour because ‘people are naturally inclined to counterfaite (like apes) their princes maners’.33 Both James and Buchanan worked within the same paradigm of political argument and imagery (James makes a great deal of the prince being on display in the opening pages of Basilikon Doron, a passage that can be related to Buchanan’s image of the king being in the theatre of the world), but it is clear that they draw opposite conclusions even when they use the same material. James, as is well documented, was personally uncomfortable with the notion of public display. He was reluctant to touch subjects for the king’s evil, scrofula, because he did not think that he had the power to cure it, the age of miracles being past, and because he ‘feared that the ritual . . . savoured of Roman superstition’.34 He did not stage an accession day tilt until 1624 because of his ‘distaste for public ritual’.35 And, as is well known to scholars of drama, James was decidedly ambivalent about the value of plays, unlike his queen. He established the King’s Men as his official playing company but does not appear to have enjoyed performances a great deal, appearing spectacularly drunk with his brotherin-law the King of Denmark on one occasion and becoming so bored with Ben Jonson’s masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1617–18), that he interrupted the players with the exclamation, ‘Why don’t they dance? What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance!’36 It would be a mistake to put this reluctance solely down to shyness or a natural reserve, although James was a noted recluse for much of the time.37 James was more than keen to debate with his subjects on a variety of issues, seeing this as a proper role for the king.38 He was also keen to use certain public events, such as the burning of books he had proscribed, as manifestations of royal power.39 The problem was that the monarchy was too sacred for James to be put on display in a manner that threatened to make it appear as a cheap imitation of the real thing, to make it seem as if the king was playing at being a king. In Debora Shuger’s words: Despite his [James’s] acute sense of how kings ‘are as it were set . . . upon a public stage in the sight of all,’ his understanding of the way in which kings imitate the persons of the Trinity and of the saints is wholly anti-theatrical. The sacral character of the mimesis forbids any disjunction between the royal persona and the royal person; it is essential that the imitation of God be a true likeness,


not role-playing, for the obvious reason that the street name for make-believe godliness is hypocrisy, the white devil [my emphasis].40 In his treatise on witchcraft, Daemonologie (1597), James warned that one of the devil’s chief weapons was to produce representations of things that were not real, chimera that misled men and women into a false sense of security in their senses. It is little wonder that the devil ‘may delude our senses’, argued James, ‘since we see by common proofe, that simple Iugglars wil make an hundreth things seeme both to our eyes and ears otherwayes then they are’.41 For James the link relationship between performance and the work of the devil was uncomfortably close. It was clearly the duty of the king to make sure that he was not responsible for any demonic delusion but that he tried to seem what he was, God’s representative on earth. The one ceremony that did really matter to James was the Coronation oath, because ‘the oath in the Coronation is the cleerest ciuill and fundamental law whereby the Kinges office is properly defined’.42 Here, the king swore to uphold proper religion, his first priority as ruler, as well as the law in return for the unconditional obedience of his subjects. Once this oath had been performed, James felt that the sacred relationship between monarch and subjects had been explicitly defined and needed no further public endorsement or repetition to establish its further validity. In fact, such displays could only serve to diminish the authority of a king who needed to reaffirm the loyalty of his people. Buchanan and James offer radically different conceptions of the relationship between the monarch and his or her people. For Buchanan, the work of the king is in an endless performance on the world’s stage, exposed to the gaze of his subjects, who have the right to decide whether he serves them well or not. When acting as tutor to James Buchanan had ‘whipped the arse of the Lord’s anointed’, showing that he regarded the king’s private body as no more sacred than his public one.43 For James, the person of the king did partake of divine status, however weak and feeble the body of the actual king. Once the Coronation oath has been publicly declared, the sacred hierarchy has been established and cannot be altered. A king may be good or bad, but no one has the right to resist and overthrow him because a ‘wicked king is sent by God for a curse to his people, and a plague for their sinnes’ (Trew Law of Free Monarchies, p. 206). Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, which makes extensive use of material out of Holinshed’s Chronicles, and which may also be informed by a reading


of Buchanan’s History of Scotland, stands poised between the diametrically opposed conceptions of politics and kingship articulated by Buchanan and James. It used to be assumed that Shakespeare must have intended Macbeth to carry an obviously royalist message because the play was probably performed at court soon after it was written c.1606.44 Against this might be made the obvious point that the play does show the evil effects and the destruction of tyranny rather than the good behaviour of a monarch.45 Equally important, as David Kastan has observed, is the fact that there are different claims to the throne represented in the play, as there were in the sources narrating the relevant history of Scotland: ‘If the Stewart line is seen to derive from Banquo, then Malcolm’s claim to the throne and James’ own seem to conflict’.46 If we also bear in mind that James was wary of touching for the king’s evil then only his Scottish origin and interest in witchcraft possibly serve to make the play tailored to his concerns and designs. The key scene in the play may well be one that is generally assumed to have little dramatic impact to recommend it and which is often cut in whole or part in production. Act 4, Scene 3, shows the encounter between the exiled heir apparent, Duncan’s elder son, Malcolm, and the vigorous Scottish warrior, Macduff, one that has no source in the chronicle histories of Scotland.47 When Macduff asserts that ‘Not in the legions/Of horrid Hell can come a devil more damn’d/In evils, to top Macbeth’ (55–7), Malcolm then sets out to prove that he is actually far worse. Malcolm tests the loyalty of Macduff by pretending to be an evil tyrant who will appropriate his subjects’ property, abuse Scottish women, and prove incapable of upholding any laws.48 All these are the central and characteristic vices of the tyrant as laid out in Aristotle’s Politics and routinely noted by political and literary commentators afterwards, including, of course, both Buchanan and James.49 Malcolm is simply repeating what he has learned from reading the relevant literature of political advice that any well-informed monarch should use to educate himself in the ways and means of government. The essence of Malcolm’s argument is that if he were to be made king he would rule Scotland solely for his own interests, using women for his own pleasure, obtaining property for his own use (going so far as to provoke false quarrels between subjects to achieve this aim (82–4) ), and eschewing the qualities and graces necessary for a monarch: ‘Justice, Verity, Temp’rance, Stableness,/Bounty, Perseverance, Mercy, Lowliness,/Devotion, Patience, Courage, Fortitude’ (92–4). Aristotle notes that a tyrant is


someone who ‘rules over subjects all equal or superior to himself and rules to suit his own interests and not theirs’; Buchanan argues that any ruler who sees a kingdom as his own rather than given by God to the people who live there is a tyrant; and James also condemns a tyrant as a ruler who ‘(by inuerting all good Lawes to serue onely for his vnrulie priuate affections) frame[s] the common-weale euer to aduance his particular: building his suretie vpon his peoples miserie’.50 So far nothing would appear to be strange or unusual about the political discourse employed in this scene. Nobody sought to defend tyranny as a political form, although Aristotle did argue that there could be worse types of government and that sometimes it brought stability after periods of chaos.51 What it does show us is the political education of Malcolm, who we see putting scholarly book-learning into practice, testing out what he has learnt from authorities in the real political world. Malcolm’s actions are obviously difficult for Macduff to comprehend and accept, something that Malcolm rather naively fails to recognise at the end of their encounter when he reveals his true self and expects Macduff to pledge unswerving loyalty:

Macduff:

Now we’ll together, and the chance of goodness Be like our warranted quarrel. Why are you silent? Such welcome and unwelcome things at once, ’Tis hard to reconcile. (136–9)

In the second half of the scene Malcolm’s caution is justified. Macduff hears the terrible news of his family’s slaughter and reveals his own naivety through his attempt to represent the awful event: ‘O Hell-kite! – All?/What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,/At one fell swoop?’ (217–19). No one leaves fowl unprotected when there are birds of prey in the area. Macduff has now become a loyal subject of Malcolm. The pragmatic Malcolm has learned to use his knowledge well and is developing quickly into a potentially able and wise king.52 The parallel to the education of James in Scotland at the hands of Buchanan is worth noting. James was instructed in the ways of virtue by his tutor, and, as a young king, he had to learn how to deal with difficult political enemies in a divided and dangerous land riven by faction. In August 1582 James was kidnapped by the chief Protestant lords and imprisoned in Ruthven Castle until he escaped in June 1583, a key event which helped to persuade him that the king must rule as a figure rising above his people and controlling them from a position of authority.53 Like Malcolm, James had to learn the hard way how to govern.


But if James learned that the best way to combat tyranny was to assume a position of lofty superiority to his subjects, it is at least arguable that the political lesson that Malcolm is given teaches him to pursue the opposite course. After he has claimed that his actions as king would ‘confound/All unity on earth’ (98–9), Macduff produces an impassioned outburst lamenting the fate of his nation: Macduff: Malcolm: Macduff:

O Scotland! Scotland! If such a one be fit to govern, speak: I am as I have spoken. Fit to govern? No, not to live. – O nation miserable! With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter’d, When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again, Since that the truest issue of thy throne By his own interdiction stands accus’d, And does blaspheme his breed? (100–8)

Macduff has undergone a political education in this scene which parallels that of his future monarch. Macduff’s political views correspond to those of Buchanan, as he argues that the tyrant who abuses the people does not deserve to live, let alone govern. In De Jure Regni Apud Scotos Buchanan argued that there was no common bond of humanity between ordinary, virtuous people and tyrants and the latter could be killed with impunity.54 And, just as Buchanan does, Macduff puts the nation before the king, regarding the latter as the servant of the former.55 In a play which contains a whole series of neat inversions, the hereditary king Malcolm has taught one of his subjects to be a monarchomach, just as his republican tutor taught him to be an advocate of the divine rights of kings. Political education in a complex world does not always turn out as one expects, a point the witches made in the opening scene. Macbeth does not necessarily endorse the opinions of Macduff. It does, however, recognise that such political views are likely to develop in a fractious and violent kingdom and that they must be heard and considered. Malcolm’s political education takes place in England and the play ends with him looking forward to being crowned as king by making all the Scottish thanes into the first Scottish earls, a title borrowed from England. The implication is that Malcolm has seen a better system of honours and titles operating in England than in Scotland and that he is prepared to learn from what he has observed and transplant it to his


kingdom as a means of rewarding the Scots for the loyalty they have shown him (5.9.28–9).56 More topically, the union of aristocratic titles also provides an echo of James’s plan to unite the kingdoms and forge a new kingdom of Britain. However, while James centred his plans for the union on the person and office of the king, it is not clear that Macbeth simply follows suit. The play is ambiguous about hereditary kingship. Macbeth was a tyrant not through a false claim to the throne but through his actions as king.57 But Macduff then felt able to refer to Malcolm as the ‘truest issue of thy throne’, indicating that he had the best claim as Duncan’s eldest son (a claim that emphasises the confused and confusing position of Macduff).58 Malcolm is, I would suggest, caught between the theories and ideas of James and Buchanan and, at the end of the play, it is not clear how he will govern Scotland. And, if we can see his political behaviour as leading his nation in the direction of the larger union favoured by the later Scottish king, it is not clear exactly what sort of Britain Macbeth points us towards, whether the ideas of James or Buchanan and Hume will have the greater influence.

4 ‘Bruited Abroad’: John White and Thomas Harriot’s Colonial Representations of Ancient Britain

Who really wanted there to be a British union? Certainly interest in the British question was a force in British intellectual and political life from the 1580s onwards. Many Scottish intellectuals were publicly in favour of a union for a variety of reasons.1 But how serious was anyone in England about the prospect of a wider union? Raphael Holinshed’s history of the British Isles, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577, 1587) significantly makes no mention of Britain in its title. William Harrison’s ‘The History of Britain’, which opens the work, distinguishes the island of Britain from its nearest neighbour, Ireland, and from ‘little Britain’, otherwise known as Armorica, or Brittany.2 However, Harrison has no desire to relate the conception of Britain to the contemporary history of the island; in fact, quite the opposite, as he stresses the antiquity of the geopolitical entity he is describing. Harrison is retelling a Galfridian narrative of the decline of the Britons, eventually driven into Wales, Cornwall and Armorica by the victorious Saxons, with whom many of the Britons intermarry (Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 1, pp. 13–14).3 Equally, he is at pains to stress the number and variety of races living within the island owing to the wave of invasions. There are the Picts who travel from Scythia specifically to plunder the Britons; the Scots, who are driven to Ireland by the Picts but return later; the Roman invaders; and the Saxons, then the Danes, who force the Britons into Wales (Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 1, pp. 11–13, 48–50). Indeed, the Britons themselves prefigure the range of identities of the land by dividing up the island they possess, a precedent first established by their eponymous founder, Brutus (Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 1, p. 195). 59


William Camden in his Britannia, published in Latin in 1586, translated into English in 1610, was sceptical of Geoffrey’s abilities as a historian and he argued that Geoffrey had ‘little authority among men of learning’.4 Camden attempted to disprove the myth of Brutus (vii–viii), but his work had the same historical emphasis as Harrison’s account and Holinshed’s design, delving into the past to authenticate the truth with little concern to relate the histories and identities of the peoples who inhabited Britain at various times to a contemporary situation. Camden’s aim is to separate out identities and establish their roots through tracing etymologies, basing his investigations on the principle that people who speak the same language must have the same origin (xviii). Camden, like Harrison, shows that Britain has been populated at various times by Britons (now Welsh), Scots, Picts, Romans, Saxons and Danes (lxxxiv–clxiii). Is it surprising that such works show such little interest in the conception of Britain? In effect, the British project involved a plan to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland. Ireland was rarely considered to be part of Britain, unless the notion of the ‘British Isles’ was invoked.5 Wales, as Camden and Holinshed’s works demonstrate, was considered to have been absorbed into England.6 By the 1580s it was clear that Elizabeth would not have children and that the Tudor dynasty would end. It was most likely that her successor would be from the Scottish line of Stuarts, whether that meant James VI, who had become king of Scotland in 1567 with the forced abdication of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, or his young cousin, Arbella Stuart (1575–1615).7 If Elizabeth were to die without further negotiation and planning for the succession, a Scottish claim to the English throne would unite Britain. Furthermore, given the central role that Mary Queen of Scots played in English political life in the 1570s and 1580s before her execution in 1587, it is unthinkable that any history of Britain could not have been written in the light of the knowledge of her role and activities. England was technically at war with Spain, England’s queen having been declared a heretic by Pope Pius V, who asserted that she could legitimately be overthrown by her Catholic subjects. Many non-Catholic Englishmen and women would not have welcomed the prospect of rule by a ‘North Briton’, especially in the light of the constitutional issues the question of Mary’s imprisonment raised, the scandals she was involved in and the plots to overthrow Elizabeth that she appeared happy to endorse.8 Mary’s biography reads like an English nightmare. She had been brought up a strict Catholic at the French court. She was the daughterin-law of Catherine de Medici, later the evil genius behind the Massacre

‘Bruited Abroad’ 61

of Saint Bartholomew’s Day (1572), having married the sickly dauphin, Francis. Therefore, she had been used to unite England’s two traditional foes, posing a threat alongside – at worst, in tandem with – Spain, whilst also being the heir to the throne of England. The spectre of her namesake, Mary I, who had allied herself with Spain through marriage to Philip II, signalled further undesirable associations. Mary’s attempt to claim the English throne in 1558 when Mary I died, on the grounds that her half-sister, Elizabeth, was illegitimate, created further grounds for hostility. After she returned to Scotland, she was implicated in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley, in 1567, and married the earl of Bothwell, who was also implicated in the murder, three months later, a union which led to civil war in Scotland and Mary’s enforced abdication and flight to England where she spent the last 19 years of her life under arrest. Once she had been imprisoned Mary was the centre of a number of plots to overthrow Elizabeth and install her as monarch, action Mary endorsed on a number of occasions despite her protestations of innocence. The three major plots were the Ridolfi plot (1571), the Throckmorton plot (1583) and the Babington plot (1586), when she dictated a letter giving her consent to a rebellion which planned to overthrow Elizabeth.9 Despite Elizabeth’s reluctance to sign her death warrant, Mary was tried, condemned to death and executed on 8 February 1587.10 In short, Mary was associated with aggressive Catholicism and the murder of Protestants, an alliance between England’s traditional enemies, underhand dealing and connivance, and civil war, in both Scotland and France. She was thought to be lewd, inconsistent, capricious, arrogant and deceitful. It is not surprising that so many clearly feared the Stuart claim.11 But, more to the point, as Anne McLaren has recently argued, the debates, especially those in parliament, over the rights and wrongs of the execution of Mary, significantly changed the political climate in England. First, they contributed to an on-going battle between Elizabeth and her advisers and would-be advisers over the definition of the term ‘counsel’. Elizabeth wished to limit this to advice that she sought and chose. As the queen informed her parliament in 1589, ‘Many come hither ad consulendum, qui nesciunt quid sit consulendum’ [many come hither to counsel, who are ignorant what counsel means].12 Predictably enough, many of her subjects felt they had a right to advise the monarch in parliament as they saw fit, in line with their sense of what was best for the nation, that is, that Mary should be executed.13 Second, the debates transformed English perceptions of the Scots:


From being, as they had been deemed by earlier apologists, brothers in Protestantism, the Scots became ‘strangers’ (a term employed with equal venom to describe recusants within England) and ‘barbarians’, an identification that underpins the language of conquest which features so prominently in their debates.14 When James succeeded to the English throne in 1603 there were plots against him – albeit rather half-hearted – and the House of Commons threw out his attempt to establish a formal union of Britain, which helped to foster his distrust of oligarchic and democratic institutions.15 Nevertheless he did often style himself ‘King of Britain’ and, at last, works appeared that seemed to be enthusiastic about the projected union of Britain. The most notable example was John Speed’s The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611), which represented James as he appeared to see himself, as the king who unified the four kingdoms of the British Isles.16 Perhaps Speed’s inclusion of Wales and Ireland as British kingdoms signals the crucial change from the 1580s, and shows how the focus was no longer on Scotland and England, emphasising English fears of a Scottish Britain. It is in terms of the anxieties induced by the political turmoil of the 1570s and 1580s that we have to read contemporary representations of Britain. This is, I would suggest, the case with the illustrations of the Britons and the Picts appended to Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, when it was reprinted in 1590 as the first part of Theodor De Bry’s on-going project, America (1590–1634).17 Harriot’s text has been interpreted in a variety of ways, but has not really been related to debates over the question of Britain and Britishness.18 Harriot’s Report was first published in 1588 as a small quarto. Harriot, a prote´ge´ of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, who had worked with Raleigh since at least 1582, had long been interested in voyages to the New World.19 He had used his scientific knowledge and navigational expertise to plan the 1584 voyage to the colony on Roanoke Island led by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, and had then sailed on Richard Grenville’s expedition in 1585–86. One of Harriot’s roles was to study the native Americans and their environment in collaboration with the artist John White, another of Raleigh’s prote´ge´s, who had already travelled on other voyages to the Americas – probably on Martin Frobisher’s expedition to Newfoundland in 1577 – and who was later to become governor of the colony at Roanoke.20 Harriot’s Report was written partly as a defence of the colonial enterprise in Virginia, and partly as a scientific treatise, detailing the


flora, fauna and people of the south-east coast explored by the English. Harriot claimed that he had collected far more material on the ‘straunge beasts, fishe, trees, plants, and hearbes’ of the region which he would publish in due course, but the projected volume never materialised (p. 20). The text we have has a clear polemical edge and promotional purpose. The preface, dedicated to the ‘adventurers, favorers, and welwillers of the enterprise for the inhabitting and planting in Virginia’ (p. 5), admits in the second sentence that ‘There have bin divers and variable reportes with some slaunderous and shamefull speeches bruited abroade by many that returned from thence’, which need to be counteracted. The native Americans are shown as docile, helpful peoples who will present no physical challenge to any European settlers (if any are left alive after the importation of disease).21 Indeed, Harriot admits that any fault has been on the side of the English: ‘some of our companie towardes the end of the yeare, shewed themselves too fierce, in slaying some of the people, in some towns, upon causes that on our part, might easily enough have been borne withall’ (p. 30). The divided nature of the text and the ideological forces at work within it are, I would argue, even more in evidence when the Report was reprinted by De Bry with the added illustrations based on John White’s original drawings, and one important plate derived from a painting by the French artist, Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues. As Paul Hulton has pointed out, De Bry tends to Europeanise the natives’ faces and gestures.22 The Algonkian Indians are seen to be civilised, reasonable people in the main, even if certain practices – praying with rattles around the fire (Plate XVII), performing ritual dances (Plate XVIII), worshipping idols (Plate XXI), tattooing themselves in bizarre ways (Plate XXIII) – and basic appearance, mark them out as exotic curiosities, whose effects might grace a wu¨nderkammer. It is noticeable that the illustrations representing the Algonkians as unEuropean are all gathered at the end of the sequence. Before then, the reader has seen that they have a social structure which resembles that of European societies (Plates III, IV, VI, VII, VIII), a religious system (Plate V), styles and types of dress (Plate IX) and an organised society based on marriage (Plates IV, VI, X). The Indians are shown in a variety of civilised and domestic situations; carrying their babies (albeit on their backs rather than ‘in their armes before their brests’ (p. 53) ) (Plate X); making boats out of trees (Plate XII); fishing (Plate XIII); broiling fish over a fire (Plate XIV); cooking meat in earthenware pots over a fire (Plate XV); and sitting down to eat (Plate XVI). A complete picture of an orderly,


recognisable society, familiar to the reader is carefully established – before the last plates complicate the impression. Harriot wrote captions to the pictures in Latin, which Richard Hakluyt, who had probably put De Bry in touch with Harriot, translated into English. These further establish the sophisticated and relatively civilised state of the Algonkians, contrasting them favourably to their European counterparts. Next to Plate XIII, ‘Their manner of fishynge in Virginia’, Harriot writes Ther was never seene amonge us soe cunninge a way to take fish withall, whereof sondrie sortes as they fownde in their Rivers unlike unto ours. Which are also of a verye good taste. Dowbtless yt is a pleasant sighte to see the people, sometymes wadinge, and goinge somtymes failinge in those Riuers, which are shallowe and not deepe, free from all care of heapinge oppe Riches for their posteritie, content with their state, and liuinge frendlye together of those thinges which god of his bountye hath given unto them[.] (p. 56) There is something of a sting in the tail of this description as Harriot draws attention to the Algonkians’ lack of true religion. However, there is a clear critique of European greed, an exultation of the life of the unaccommodated man, an appeal to the natural wealth and abundance of the New World, and a suggestion that no sensible person would stay in England if they could possibly travel to the Americas and live with these marvellous people. Similarly, the two plates which depict the Indians cooking and eating, XV and XVI, praise their habits at the expense of their European counterparts. Harriot emphasises the social nature of meals, having described the careful methods of preparing and cooking food which are observed: Then they putte it out into dishes, and sett before the companye, and then they make good cheere together. Yet they are moderate in their eatinge wher by they avoide sicknes. I would to god wee would followe their exemple. For wee should bee free from kynes of diseases which wee fall into by sumptwous and unreasonable banketts, continuallye deuisinge new sawces, and provocation of gluttonye to satisfie our unsatiable appetite. (p. 60) A common moral is drawn, one made often enough in works dealing with the New World, that Indian continence and restraint has much to teach the greedy Europeans.23


Harriot’s captions encourage the reader to think of the native Americans in terms of European society.24 In fact, the whole sequence appears to be designed to make the reader try to place the newly discovered peoples it represents within larger cultural, political and religious schemes. The opening plate produced by De Bry shows Adam and Eve about to pluck the fatal apple from the tree of knowledge. In front of them, the lion lies down with the mouse and the rabbit as an emblem of peace within the Garden of Eden. Behind them a man labours while a woman tends a baby in a shelter, clearly a sign of the division of labour and the curse of work effected by the fall.25 The illustration provides a sense of drama and wonder to the subsequent images, relating the European discovery of the Americas to the fall of mankind.26 What is the relationship between the Indians and Adam and Eve? Are the Indians on the verge of a disaster, as the greedy and destructive Europeans enter their realm? Or, should the sequence be read the other way round: is it the Europeans we should concentrate on, and their discovery of a society that resembles the Garden of Eden in the New World? Who, in a sense, has most to gain from the encounter? Harriot’s harrowing description of the diseases which decimate the Indians and consolidate English superiority would seem to suggest that both sets of questions are valid. The three ‘Pictures of the Pictes which in the Olde tyme dyd habite one part of the great Bretainne’, and the two illustrations of ‘neighbour[s] unto the Picte’, which conclude the sequence, are equally problematic. However we choose to interpret these illustrations – and their meaning is open to considerable dispute – it is significant that De Bry’s version of Harriot brings us back to the island that the explorers and colonists left, encouraging the reader to contextualise the images in terms of ancient and contemporary British politics. De Bry writes on the frontispiece to the pictures that The Painter of whom I have had the first of the Inhabitants of Virginia, give me these 5 Figures . . . fownd as hy did assured my in a oold English chronicle, the which I wold well sett to the end of these first Figures, for to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as sauvage as those of Virginia [my emphasis]. (p. 75) However, despite De Bry’s words, the illustrations deliberately refuse the most obvious comparison (ancient Britons and American Indians). The first point to note is that the emphasis is placed upon the Picts. Their


Figure 1 ‘Adam and Eve picking the apple’, frontispiece to Theodor de Bry, ‘The True Pictures and Fashions of the People in the Parte of America now Called Virginia, Discovered by Englishmen’, appended to Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590). Reproduced with kind permission of the Columbia Library.


Figure 2 De Bry, ‘Som Pictures of the Pictes which in the Olde tyme dyd habite one part of the great Bretainne’, Plate I, ‘The truue picture of one Picte’. Reproduced with kind permission of the Columbia Library.


Figure 3 De Bry, ‘Som Pictures of the Pictes’, Plate I I , ‘The truue picture of a woman Picte’. Reproduced with kind permission of the Columbia Library.


Figure 4 De Bry, ‘Som Pictures of the Pictes’, Plate I I I , ‘The truue picture of a yonge dowgter of the Pictes’. Reproduced with kind permission of the Columbia Library.


Figure 5 De Bry, ‘Som Pictures of the Pictes’, Plate I V, ‘The truue picture of a man of nation neighbour unto the Picte’. Reproduced with kind permission of the Columbia Library.


‘neighbours’, who appear to be considerably more civilised, are obviously the Britons. But it is noticeable that Harriot does not choose to name them, remarking that ‘Ther was in the said great Bretainne yet another nation nigbour unto the Pictes’, and proceeds to describe their clothes without further comment (‘which did apparell them selves with a kind of cassake other cloath Jerkin . . . The did also wear longe heares, and their moustaches . . . and did carye the picke or the lance in their hande . . . as you may see by this picture’). It seems likely that the startling avoidance of the expected comparison is designed to focus attention on the relationship between the Picts and the Indians. The comparison is an inauspicious one, and serves to make a pointed contrast between the two peoples. The Picts were generally regarded as a savage, lawless race, whose main object was to plunder other, more established and successful races, as their supposed Scythian origins would suggest. They were notable for their lack of stability – they built no towns – and ferocious war paint, as the three illustrations demonstrate.27 Crucially, for my purposes here, they were associated solely with Scotland, where they fought and intermingled with the Scots, helping to form the Scottish people, and invariably opposed to the Britons and Saxons.28 In the first edition of the Chronicles (1577), Holinshed describes the Picts as ‘a cruell kind of men and much given to warres . . . more desirous of spoyle than of rule or government’.29 A woodcut included in the text shows the British king, Marius, defeating the Picts. Marius eventually allowed the Picts to settle in Scotland. The last illustration depicting the Virginian Indians shows a heavily tattooed figure and the caption explains how important such marks are to their chief men. Nevertheless, the inscriptions on the body are more regulated than those on the Picts and do not serve to define the Indians as a people (tattoos do not appear elsewhere in the sequence).30 The captions to the pictures of the Picts emphasise the importance of body paint. The woman Pict is shown to have griffin heads on her shoulders, lion faces on her ‘low parts and thighs’, half-moons on her breasts, and her belly has a sun (another contrast to the clothing of their neighbours, pointed out in the caption). The civilised behaviour of the Indians is in stark contrast to the savage aggression of the Picts, who are shown in hostile warlike poses, brandishing weapons and clutching the severed heads of their enemies. De Bry’s opening remarks on the comparison between the Indians and the ancient Britons are, in fact, quite accurate. But it is the neighbours of the Picts who resemble the natives of Virginia, not the Picts themselves.


Figure 6 Raphael Holinshed, insert engraving of the Scots and Picts fighting the Britons, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577). Reproduced with kind permission of the Columbia Library.


The sequence of illustrations would appear to offer coded but quite explicit advice to any English readers. A connection is made between the Britons – and, by implication, the English – and the docile, civilised peoples of the New World. In stark contrast are the Picts, who are truly threatening and savage. The reader is encouraged to look towards the New World for riches and success, both of which Harriot’s text promises anyone astute enough to get involved in the colonial project. The illustrated Report looks forward to texts produced two decades later, such as the report commissioned for the Virginia Company in 1609, Nova Britannia, which argued that the ancient Britons would have remained in savagery and ignorance if ‘Julius Caesar with his Roman Legions (or some other) had not laid this ground to make us tame and civil’ and William Strachey’s The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612).31 Britain’s past can be repeated in the ‘New World’ and a new Britain established there. The Picts, in contrast, appear to warn the reader of a path that should not be taken. Given their association with Scotland it is not likely that they are simply included here to represent, metonymically, the people of ancient Britain, but to have a bearing on contemporary developments in Britain. Specifically the Picts represent the threat to England from a Scottish claim to the throne and, hence, a unification of Britain, which many saw as highly undesirable. It is extremely unlikely that any of those associated with the publication of De Bry’s version of Harriot’s Report would have been in favour of the Stuart claim to the throne.32 The 1580s were the time when English colonial projects were first planned and carried out, Harriot’s Report being the definitive account of events in the very first of these. There were a huge number of works published in these years, designed to persuade Englishmen of the value and necessity of establishing colonies in the Americas.33 The most important propagandist was Richard Hakluyt, who produced a collection of descriptions of voyages to the Americas in 1582, followed by his influential ‘A Discourse of Western Planting’ (1584) and the first edition of his major work, The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). Hakluyt was driven by a fear that if Protestant England did not establish an empire in the Americas, then Catholic Spain would dominate the known world for the foreseeable future. In short, his goal was to continue the sectarian conflict within Europe in the Americas.34 Hakluyt played a key role in De Bry’s project and was instrumental in persuading De Bry ‘to publish the Harriot-White material first as the first part of his projected America’.35


It is unlikely that any of the subsequent material in De Bry’s collection made the same impact as the engravings based on White’s pictures.36 The inclusion of the drawings of the Picts, with their implicit political message, would appear to be part of the larger overall religious design behind Hakluyt’s colonial project, warning English and European Protestant readers that more dangerous savages lived within the realm than were to be found in the Americas. De Bry (1528–98) also had little reason to be enthusiastic about a Catholic Stuart claim to the English throne. He was a Protestant who had been forced to flee his native Belgium during the long struggle of the Low Countries to free themselves from Spanish rule.37 De Bry’s enterprise was a conspicuously Protestant collection which made a significant contribution to the ‘Black Legend’, the accounts of Spanish atrocities in the Americas and Europe as a means of promoting Protestant ventures.38 A famous illustration to the account of Girolamo Benzoni’s voyage to South America (1541–56), placed after a gruesome sequence of Spanish atrocities towards the Indians, shows gleeful natives pouring molten gold down the throat of a Spanish soldier with the words, ‘Eat, eat gold, Christian’, a richly evocative native response to colonial avarice. Closer to home, the Spanish Armada was defeated only two years before the start of De Bry’s America. It is also evident that Harriot and his patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, to whom the elaborate folio text was dedicated, were party to Hakluyt’s thinking about English colonial expansion in the New World.39 Moreover, Raleigh was closely associated with Edmund Spenser at this point, through their Irish connections (see below, chs 8, 9). In 1589, Spenser travelled back from his Munster estates to Elizabeth’s court, probably in an attempt to secure patronage and publicity for The Faerie Queene. He recorded the visit some years later in Colin Clouts come home againe (1595), which he dedicated to Raleigh. A year later Spenser seriously offended James VI, through his portrait of the trial and execution of Duessa in The Faerie Queene, V, ix, a thinly veiled allegory of the trial of his James’s mother Mary Queen of Scots. James demanded that Elizabeth punish Spenser.40 Later, in the 1590s, Raleigh appears to have hedged his bets as far as he could when he realised that the succession was likely to pass to the Stuart line.41 It is more than likely that his association with Spenser was enough to damn him in James’s eyes, a link compounded by Raleigh’s association with forward Protestants such as Hakluyt. Indeed, given that most colonial propagandists in the late sixteenth century were staunch Protestants, Raleigh’s involvement in projects such as De Bry’s publication of the Harriot-White material may


have implicitly signalled an opposition to the Stuart claim and the attendant fears of an encroaching Catholicism. It is also worth noting a further link to Raleigh’s later life and works. Raleigh’s own account of his voyage to Guiana in search of the fabled city of El Dorado, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596), has to be read in terms of Raleigh’s problems with Elizabeth and his anxieties as a courtier following his clandestine marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton and their subsequent banishment from court (1592).42 Raleigh demonstrates that his men show themselves to be continent and restrained in the face of the wealth and variety of opportunities presented to them in the Americas, a message to the queen that he has learned his lesson. He also includes a passage on the legendary Amazons of whom he has heard reports even though he has not seen them himself. He describes how the Amazons assemble with men once a year to choose partners and for one month ‘they feast, daunce, & drinke of their wines in abundance’. If they conceive a son they leave it with the father, if a daughter, ‘they nourish it, and reteine it, and as many as have daughters send unto the begetters a Present, all being desirous to increase their owne sex and kinde’.43 Raleigh’s digression, which he signals himself (‘And though I digresse from my purpose, yet will I set downe what hath been delivered me for truth of those women’ (p. 146) ) appears to be an allegorical core to the whole text, that under female rule men are emasculated and their actions circumscribed. The Amazons’ desire to separate the girls from the boys and live apart seems to be placed either as a warning to Elizabeth, or, more likely, a coded comment for like-minded male readers. Women’s rule was one of the key political issues of Elizabeth’s reign, with even her defenders, such as John Aylmer, sharing the basic assumption with opponents like John Knox, that female government was an aberration that it would tax the finest minds to explain.44 In this context it cannot be an entirely innocent detail that two of the three Picts are female. Both women are recognisable as Amazons or warrior women, glaring back at the viewer.45 De Bry, contrary to his usual practice of Europeanising his subjects, has made the expression of the ‘dowgter of the Picts’ more aggressive and hence more alien than in Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues’ original drawing. Should these fierce women be read as counterparts to Raleigh’s Amazons? Women who, in essence, violate nature by daring to usurp male authority and rule? Mary Queen of Scots had been executed by the time De Bry’s edition of the Report was published, but there was still the possibility that Arbella Stuart, now 15,


could succeed Elizabeth as queen. And, it took a considerable time before the Stuarts and the Scots were not associated with all the perceived characteristics of female rule – civil war, the inversion of the proper order, factionalism and contrived artifice.46 Moreover, given the hostility to female rule, especially in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign, there were numerous commentators, some of them clearly associated with Raleigh and his circle, who felt that Elizabeth was in danger of turning into the Whore of Babylon she had supposedly destroyed in 1587.47 The aggressive women Picts, both iconographically represented as virgins with long flowing locks, may be another sardonic comment on the decaying cult of Elizabeth’s virginity.48 John Shirley has suggested that ‘[t]he original purpose of Harriot’s volume is difficult to determine’.49 He is right that there is no clear and straightforward link between the text and a context, and that much of what has been argued here can only be conjecture and surmise. Some of the details I have selected for scrutiny and attached importance to may well be anodyne or incidental. But within the context of the Stuart succession, English expansion overseas and the possible unification of Britain in the late 1580s and early 1590s, John White and Thomas Harriot’s Picts suggest a covert colonial critique of an undesirable prospective political union by rehearsing historical national differences. However the illustrations to the Report are read it is hard to believe that they are not designed to emphasise the gulf between the English and the Scots, suggesting that any union between the peoples was problematic and more difficult to inaugurate than a union with the relatively civilised peoples who inhabited Virginia.

5 Translating the Reformation: John Bale’s Irish Vocacyon

Ye though our countrey were in dele so barraign, as that she shulde need the frytes of other realmes and so rude of tonge, therein treatinge of weightie matters we shulde ned the ayde of estraunge languages: yet resteth in her as in the originall and principall a great occasion of thankes and immortall prayses. These lines, inspired by Cicero’s De Officis, were written by the Old English official and some-time servant of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Anothy St Leger, Edward Walshe.1 The occasion of the tract from which they are taken, The Office and duety in fighting for our countrey (1545), was the service of a thousand Irish soldiers, mainly Gaelic kern (foot soldiers), at the siege of Boulogne in 1544 as part of Henry VIII’s army fighting his war against the French.2 Walshe served as a lieutenant in the army and was probably wounded: his book was written under St Leger’s patronage between 1544 and 1545. Perhaps the point of greatest interest in Walshe’s seemingly commonplace sentiment is the use of the first-person plural pronoun, ‘our’. Who does he address here? For whom is he speaking? Whose country is referred to? David Beers Quinn has noted that six copies of Walshe’s book were imported into Ireland by James Dartes in 1545, which may imply that it had been written for an Irish audience, especially because: The content of the book fits in very well with St. Leger’s policy in Ireland. The assumption of the title of King of Ireland by Henry VIII in 1541 has been part of a policy which aimed at encouraging the Old English to regard him as, effectively, their sovereign, while also providing a framework inside which the Gaelic Irish too might be reconciled.3 77


Walshe may well have been demonstrating, as Shakespeare’s Henry V or Jonson’s The Irish Masque at Court were to do half a century later, that the Irish – or, rather, those who spoke for Ireland, the Old English – were thoroughly patriotic and loyal to the incarnation of their native land established by Henry’s assumption of his imperial title to Ireland.4 Rather like Spenser’s creation, Irena, or the famous Punch cartoon of Ireland as Britannia’s vulnerable younger sister threatened by the Fenian menace, the landscape of Ireland is emptied of elements hostile to English rule, specifically those who do not speak English.5 Walshe exhorts that ‘we’ defend the noble church of England and Ireland (fo. 7) and focuses this unity on the de facto and de jure presence of the king’s person: And yet thinfidels remembrynge the magnanimitie of their princes were so animated [to fight and die for their countries]: Howe moche more shulde we be even enflamed beholdinge the princely clemency fortitude and maganamitie of our liege and naturell kynge Henrye of Englande Fraunce and Irelande defendour of the fayth in earth under god of ye churches of Englande Irelande ye supreme hede, and of his noble progenitours which no volume can comprehende, were the same by any oratour explicable. (fos 19–20) The king stands as a metonymy of the nations he rules; a part signifying the whole and a whole standing for the parts.6 Furthermore, it is clear that when Walshe writes of the relationship between land and language he is referring to English and not Irish: ‘By her benefit [i.e. the motherland] we fyst learned to go on to the grunde, and in an aimiable manner to frame oure babyish tongues, to speake oure mother tongue or contrye language’ [my emphasis] (fo. 5). His call for a translation of Demosthones’ oratory into ‘the mother tongue’ (fo. 14) repeats this elision. It is scarcely credible that he would demand an Irish vernacular when considering himself to be writing in an English one. Walshe’s concept of duty is filial, a ‘vocacyon’ to a mother tongue and a motherland (fo. 5), fathered by a king.7 The Old English assume a mantle of Irishness loyal to England and Englishness, ‘that by the example of our fathers we ought to be always thankful for oure nutricion’ (fo. 5).8 Walshes’s ‘vocacyon’, with its stress on the importance of translation, is in many ways the mirror image of John Bale’s. Bale wrote his more famous work, The Vocacyon of Johan Bale to the Bishopricke of Ossorie, in 1553.9 A prodigious Reformation polemicist, Bale was in exile in Antwerp when Walshe’s tract was written. According to Walshe, exile from

Translating the Reformation: John Bale’s Irish Vocacyon 79

Figure 7 John Bale, The Vocacyon of Johan Bale (1553). Title page. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.


one’s native country was among the most terrible of punishments (fo. 10). Bale had been there since his mentor, Thomas Cromwell, had been executed by Henry VIII in 1540. He returned to England in 1548 when Edward VI became king, as the religious tide finally turned in his favour.10 He was promoted, rather reluctantly, to the see of Ossory in Ireland where he spent an awful year (1553) recounted in the Vocacyon. Bale tells how he landed at Waterford in January and reached Ossory the following month. Despite the hostile atmosphere he managed to preach throughout Lent, urging his new flock to accept his radical Protestant views. This involved renouncing ‘abhomynable ydolatries’, transubstantiation, prayers for the dead and other traditional practices of the Medieval Church, as well as accepting the Bible and the Second Prayer Book sanctioned by Edward as the sole sources of doctrine and liturgy. Attempting to make the priests take wives met with no discernable success and by the summer the chances of Bale actually surviving his term of office were looking slim. When Edward died and Mary was proclaimed queen after a long delay (20 August), Bale retired to the country for his own safety. After five of his servants were killed on the festival of Our Lady’s Nativity (8 September), for working on a saint’s day, Bale decided that it was time to leave Kilkenny. With characteristic panache and foolhardiness, his parting gesture was to have three of his vociferously Protestant plays performed in the market square.11 Finding no support in Dublin, he left for Scotland, only to be kidnapped, apparently mistaken for a rich Frenchman by a Flemish pirate. After a storm had driven the pirates to St Ives in Cornwall – where Bale found that Protestantism had made as little headway as it had in Ireland – the captain and crew threatened to leave him at Dover to face the wrath of the Marian authorities. Bale persuaded them to transport him to Europe for the sum of 50 pounds. He landed in Flanders and made his way to the exiled Protestant community at Wesel. In December the Vocacyon was published with the provocatively satirical colophon, ‘Imprinted in Rome before the Castle of S. Angell, at the signe of S. Peter’.12 The Vocacyon is self-consciously written as a modern saint’s life. In fact, Bale claims that the authority of his voice is sanctioned by Saint Peter (hence the satirical colophon): First he boasted of his vocation/and sayde,/‘God sorted me out and appointed me from my mothers wombe/and also he called me by his grace/to preach his lively gospel amonge the heathen. (gal. 1). What if I shulde in like case boaste/that he by his grace had also called me in this age/to preache the same Gospel to the Irish heathens/which


never hearde of it afore/to acknowledge? I shulde not do other wise than the truthe is. (p. 33) Bale has established his words as those of a ‘truth teller’, a subject position which forces him to deny that he speaks anything other than that which is literal. Paradoxically, it is a rhetorically fashioned stance which necessitates the denial that he uses rhetorical figures or tropes. Elsewhere in his writings Bale contrasts the plain style of the Protestants to the delusive and duplicitous figurative speech of the defenders of the Church of Rome.13 The true word is contrasted to the language of the world. Bale has to assume that scriptural authority is ‘already read’ and that it constitutes the subjectivity of the godly individual. A proper text will simply repeat the original scriptural text; a false one will constitute a simulacrum, a demonic, Catholic parody of the ‘truth’. Bale produces himself as a ‘readerly text’, one whose meaning is open, fixed and certain.14 The Protestant martyr, John Philpott, executed by the Marian authorities whom Bale only just escaped, declares his righteousness in representing himself as a similar copy of God’s word: I protest here, before God, and his eternal Son Jesus Christ my Saviour, and the Holy Ghost, and his angels, and you here present that be judges of that I speak, that I do not stand in any opinion, of wilfulness or singularity, but only upon my conscience, certainly informed by God’s word, from which I dare not go for fear of damnation: and this is the cause of mine earnestness in this behalf.15 Philpott’s act of baring his soul before his inquisitors serves both to preserve and deny his individuality. When the flesh is stripped away all that remains as a guarantee of his election to the heavenly kingdom is the syntax of God’s words written on his soul. The inner self exists in conjunction with the rigorously plain style of Protestant discourse and the desire to expunge metaphoricity. It is hardly surprising that Bale should place such emphasis on the use of language in religious ceremony and performance. One of his most provocative acts when he was in Ireland was to insist that the Second Book of Common Prayer, drawn up for Edward VI in 1552, be used in all churches.16 Bale’s reasoning was the same as Walshe’s call for patriotic service. When Thomas Lockwood (or ‘Blockhead’ as Bale re-christens him), the Dean of Dublin Cathedral, refused to use the Second Prayer Book to consecrate Bale and his fellow new bishops on the grounds that ‘it wolde be . . . an occasion of tumulte’ because the book had not yet


been approved by the Irish parliament, Bale rejoined that ‘[i]f Englande and Ireland be undre one kinge/they are both bounde to the obedience of one lawe under him. And as for us/we came hyther as true suiectes of his/sworn to obeye that ordinaunce.’ He further added that he would use no other book than that one when resident in Ossory (Vocacyon, pp. 52–3).17 In Kilkenny there was also, rather predictably, considerable hostility to the use of the 1552 book. As Steven Ellis has pointed out, Bale’s objection to the first Edwardian Book of Common Prayer (1549) was that it was open to abuse because it ‘was effectively an English translation of traditional Latin services’.18 In Waterford Bale was horrified at the ‘abhominable ydolaryes maintained by the epicurysh prestes’: The Communion / or supper of the Lorde / was there altogyther used lyke a popysh masse / with the olde apysh toyes of Antichrist / in bowynges and beckynges / knelinges and knockings / the Lorde’s deathe after S. Paules doctrine, neyther preached nor yet spoken of. (p. 51) In contrast, in the 1552 version of the book, ‘the structure of the eucharist had been substantially modified and new rubics introduced . . . a communion table had replaced the altar, and the minister now faced the congregation wearing a surplice instead of the medieval vestments’.19 In other words, probably the most important change made to the structure of religious services was that they now had to force the congregation to adapt to an idiomatic English. Indeed, throughout the Vocacyon Bale fulminates against ‘latine momblinges’ (presumably the priest and congregation half-audibly imitating the traditional mass declared illegal by the acts which established the Edwardian prayer books) and the refusal of priests to use English in the service (pp. 51, 62, 72). He concludes, ‘How howlinge and jabberinge in a foren language shulde become Gods service, than I can not tell’ [my emphasis] (p. 84). It is, of course, a historical irony that Bale and John Foxe, whose martyrologies were to have such a vast influence on the shaping of an English national consciousness, had both started out trying to write for an international Protestant audience. Foxe first sketched out the Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, on which he was working while Bale was writing the Vocacyon, in Latin.20 An irony, but given Bale’s Lutheran or Wycliffite stress on the necessity for absolute obedience to a secular ruler, and the need to have the langue of God’s truth exist as the parole of a real communicable language, it is hardly surprising that the internationally


minded scholar should have to express his grand project in parochial, national terms.21 Bale’s universe of word against world, church separate from state, true versus false religion, required an outline of history – later expanded by Foxe – in order to justify itself.22 There is a further irony inherent in this need: a mode of reading which claims to be beyond interpretation requires a history of correct interpretations to establish its veracity. For Bale, the British church was one constituent of the primitive apostolic church which established the true word of Christianity before suffering terrible persecution at the hands of the false church of Rome, a branch of the church which illegitimately claimed hegemony over the other independent cluster of autonomous but united national churches in the first millennium and demanded their obedience. History is then read as a battle between these two rival institutions, each of which has written its own story, one true, one false.23 It is important to note that for Bale the British church is a part of the universal church.24 Bale did not develop a conception of an ‘elect nation’ that enabled later writers such as Bishop John Aylmer to claim that God was English.25 What Bale does provide in the Vocacyon is an outline of ‘the Christian Church of our realme’ [my emphasis] ‘in those days called Britaine/and now named Englande’ (p. 44). The familiarly elastic uses of ‘our’ and ‘English’ enable Bale to include the Irish as they exist under the rule of the same monarch and so bound to obey the same laws.26 The co-opting of British history as English was a commonplace manoeuvre made by numerous Tudor writers, but perhaps it is in Ireland that the significance of this elision can best be appreciated.27 Elsewhere, Bale is conscious of a British tradition and a British culture which cannot easily be equated with England and English history. In Ireland he is much keener to establish a stark contrast between England and Ireland and so conflates any possible distinction between England and Britain, making them one – virtuous, Protestant – nation. Bale’s history of his native land is simple in essence, but, as usual, ornamented with the use of numerous examples as he shows off his scholarship.28 Britain received its Christianity ‘[f]rom the scole of Christe himselfe . . . and not from Rome’ (p. 45), first via Joseph, a disciple of Philip the Apostle; then from St Paul; and, most importantly, from Paul’s disciple, Timothy, who converted King Lucius. Soon, however, ‘wicked ministers’ started to distort the message of the gospel and ‘monkery’ began to flourish. The Christian natives were punished for these errors by God when the heathen Saxons invaded England and spread throughout Britain.29 Augustine, ‘the Romish monke’, brings in


a further ‘swarme’ of ‘superstitiousnesse’, ‘[s]o that they made Gods heavenly wurde/to seeme to the people/darke/rough/harde/and unpleasant’ (p. 47). Enough good men survive to tell the true history, but the false church of Rome does its best to disguise, destroy and counter this narrative, as Nobility tells Clergy in Bale’s play, King John: Yt is yowre fassyon soche kynges [i.e., John] to duscommend As yowre abuses reforme or reprehend. Yow priests are the cawse that Chronycles doth defame So many prynces and men of notable name, For yow take upon yow to wryght them evermore.30 Nevertheless, the forces of good are able to recover when [t]hat wonderful wurke of God/that noble prince, kynge henrye the 8 within thys realme by his royall power assysted/after that he had given an overtrowe to the great Golias of Rome/our most godly soverayne Kynge Edward 6 for this tyme perfourming the same. (p. 48) The secular sword has reasserted its right and true religion has been restored to its place. Bale, as the Vocacyon emphasises, was directly appointed by Edward.31 Steven Ellis has suggested that when Bale writes of ‘our nacion’ he limits himself to those of English birth, deliberately contrasted to ‘that wilde nacyon’ of the Irish, which includes the Gaelic Irish, the ‘tame Irish’ and the Old English. Ellis argues that Bale has an ‘apparently modern idea . . . of nationality’ which ‘stemmed from the idea of England as the elect nation’.32 However, this may be an anachronistic interpretation which places the cart before the horse, and assumes a teleology which cannot be substantiated. Bale may have been read as an early modern later, but the distinctions he makes appear to be in terms of the theocentric history he has mapped out. Bale’s notion of ethnicity is dependent on the fundamental religious distinctions he makes.33 In fact, his logic is circular. When Bale writes of Irish robbers who ‘have slain English men/and done their robberies within the English pale’ (p. 86), he is adopting a usage which could refer to either ethnic or linguistic categories. But when Bale equates Britain and England, yet demands that the Irish church adopts an idiomatic English vernacular for its teaching (p. 44), it is clear that ‘Englishness’ is being defined in terms of its context and against other seemingly exclusive categories.


Similarly, Bale can contrast ‘that wilde nacyon’ to ‘our nacion’ (p. 58), equating ‘English’ and ‘our’, because he also refers to rebellion against ‘the English captaines’, the assault of ‘English fortes’, the death of ‘English men and women’ and the lack of an ‘English deputye’ to sort matters out. ‘English’ simply cannot be limited to those of English birth. Bale subsequently refers to the drunken bishop of Galway gadding ‘from town to town over the English part, confirminge yonge children for ii. pence a pece’ (p. 63), ‘contrary to the Christian Ordinances of Englande’ [my emphases], a usage which could include ‘English’ born in Ireland. And, writing of his enforced stay in St Ives, Bale refers to ‘our Irishe and Englishe churches’ (p. 73), which undercuts the previous distinction he has just made (and one also notes a conventional reference to the ‘English pale’ (p. 85) ). As Rainer Pineas has observed of Bale’s use of the Scriptures in his arguments against Catholic and rival Protestant versions of history, he ‘applies the Prophecy of the Revelation sometimes to his own era and sometimes to the past, whichever happens to suit his purpose . . . [he] is evidently more concerned with immediate effect than overall consistency’.34 The same can be said of Bale’s use of ethnic categories. As the woodcut used as the frontispiece to the Vocacyon demonstrates, Bale deliberately conflates religious and ethnic categories, enabling him to produce a stark contrast between the English Christian and the Irish papist, a wolf in sheep’s clothing (see Figure 7).35 Religion is the key to Bale’s representation of English and Irish identities. Only at the end of his tract does Bale start to analyse the character and society of the Irish. He acknowledges that many readers will find this a strange decision: ‘[s]ome men peradventure will marvele/that I utteringe matters of Irishe/shulde omitt in this treatise/to write of Coyne and lyverie’ (p. 84). ‘Coyne and livery’, a practice which allowed Irish lords to quarter themselves and soldiers on their clansmen as a payment for protection, stands as a synecdoche for the defects of Irish society.36 Bale states that there are three types of people in Ireland who will not ‘suffre faythe/truthe/and honestye to dwelle there’: priests, lawyers and kern. He adds that he ‘speak[s] only of those which are bredde and borne there/and yet not of them all’ (p. 85), which, again, alerts the reader to a usage that is by no means restricted to place of birth. Bale further comments, with biting sarcasm, on how these wicked Irish lead their fellow countrymen astray: [T]o bringe their conceived wickednesse to passe/they can do great miracles in this age/by vertue of transubstanciacion belyke/for


therein are they very conninge. For thye can very wittely make/of a tame Irishe a wilde Irish for nede/so that they shall serve their turne/ so wele as though they were of the wilde Irishe in dede. (p. 85) Writers in the service of the English crown from Gerald of Wales onwards complained of the phenomenon of ‘degeneration’, of the English becoming Irish and so losing their civilised values.37 Here, Bale refers to the cross-cultural transformation of the native Irish, how the ‘tame’ becomes ‘wild’. Yet again, this metamorphosis is represented in theological rather than ethnological terms; transubstantiation, a practice that can only exist with the ‘foren’ Latin mass, is seen as the key to the change in this rhetorical set piece. Whereas Edward Walshe writes of the ‘barraign’ country needing the fruits of other realms to turn its barbarism into civility, Bale envisages Ireland transforming itself into a kingdom of darkness. How the ‘tame’ Irish fit into Bale’s rather fluid classification is left unsaid, but the problem has a crucial function in the economy of the text. Bale elides any possible distinction between God’s word and its expression in English, which means that far from having a modern conception of national identities, he is unable to define Irishness. In one sense ‘English and ‘‘Irish’’ are diametrically opposed as good and bad, civil and barbarian, Protestant and Catholic. However, in another, there can be no absolute distinction between the two nations because one can supposedly be transformed by religious conversion into the other. Moreover, between the two stand the ‘‘tame’’ Irish, who possess a hybrid identity, and are neither English nor Irish.38 Bale’s rather insubstantial comments on the Irish amount to little more than a criticism of the Irish lords who exact tributes from the impoverished peasants, destroying the harvests and leaving nothing ‘behinde them for payment/but lice/lechery/and intollerable penurie for all the yeare after’ (p. 85). His pointed comment, ‘Yet set the rulers thereupon a very fayre colour/that it is for defence of the English Pale’, opens up the question of identity once again. Is he referring to the Old English lords as Irish? And, if so, did he want to make any sort of distinction between Old English and Irish or did he see them as all the same? Bale gives three reasons for his lack of interest in Irish life and culture. First, his book is primarily concerned with religion. Second, the matter is too large and requires another book to deal with it adequately. Third, two ‘worthie men’ have desribed the Irish so ‘exactly, as no man . . . therein can amend them’ (p. 84). One of these worthy men was undoubtedly Gerald, whose works Bale possessed in his voluminous library.39


Despite the obvious impact of the Reformation, it is clear that in many ways religious change reinforced rather than transformed political and cultural conflicts that dated back to the Middle Ages.40 The Laudabiliter, Pope Adrian IV’s bull granting Ireland to Henry II and reproduced in Gerald’s Expugnatio Hibernica, makes the supposedly civilising purpose of Henry’s conquest clear: We therefore support your pious and praiseworthy intention with the favour which it deserves and, granting our benevolent consent to your petition, we regard it as pleasing and acceptable to us that you should enter that island for the purpose of enlarging the boundaries of the church, checking the descent into wickedness, correcting morals and implanting values, and encouraging the growth of the faith of Christ.41 The motives – or excuses – stated are the same as those in Bale’s Vocacyon: bringing a wicked and barbarous (what Bale saw as wicked, Gerald saw as barbarous) people to civilisation and obedience. In the process, the identity of the civilised colonisers was liable to change, a stubborn fact that Bale tries to resist by clinging to his religious distinctions. Nevertheless, the English were just as likely to ‘degenerate’ and become Irish as the wild Irish were to become ‘tame’, as Bale also recognised in the Vocacyon. Bale tries to maintain a religious and ethnic purity, through the potent image of the English Christian and the Irish papist which both prefaces and pervades the text, but has to admit that contamination often takes place. Both Bale and Walshe have to rely on hybrid conceptions of ‘our nation’ to articulate their respective ‘vocacyons’. In the same way, their positions uncomfortably reflect one another in their conceptual evasions, blind spots and contradictions. Each betrays an anxiety regarding the stability of their own cultural identity: how can the other be defined if the self cannot be without the use of aggressive, contradictory assertions? The questions that Bale and Walshe pose with regard to identity, nation and who is ‘one of us’ are by no means new ones or ones that will suddenly go away. But they assumed a frantic urgency after Henry VIII’s declaration that he was no lord but king of Ireland.42 The writings of Walshe and Bale show that ‘it is the . . . need for homogeneity which is reflected in nationalism’.43 Consequently the difference of the Irish had to be expunged and the discourses employed in the Vocacyon and the Office and duety would seem to bear this out. Far from employing a modern sense of nationhood, Bale’s work has to be read as an expression of a hope that Ireland and England could be united and exist as one


entity, a political desire motivated by religion, which would leave Ireland inhabited by English Christians and not Irish papists. The irony is that the exact opposite took place. The attempt to assert identity led only to a proliferation of the difference Bale feared so much: The reforming milieu itself developed a strongly sectarian character. Recognizing the intractability of the problem, it seems, tacit agreement was reached to allow the Catholic population to go to hell their own way. . . By the end of the seventeenth century the Catholic challenge had been defeated, and Ireland emerged with an apartheid constitution in law and in practice, religion providing the criterion for discrimination. The Protestant ascendancy had acquired a strong incentive to leave Ireland for the greater part Catholic.44 The medieval division between the ‘land of peace’, where English law could be administered and the ‘land of war’ where Irish custom held sway stubbornly refused to go away.45 On the supposed threshold of a nation, any hope of unity fragmented into the diametrically opposed sets of identities which constituted the subsequent history of Ireland. Bale’s unhappy experience in Ireland was in many ways more portentous than he could realise. He was the first in a long line of English Protestant intellectuals – many of whom were at odds with the prevailing government in their native land – who, for one reason or another, ended up in Ireland. The list includes Christopher Goodman, William Lyon, Meredith Hanmer, John Long and Thomas Cartwright.46 As Cartwright’s twentieth-century biographer contends: ‘Ireland was at this time [the 1560s] an excellent resort for English dissidents, and there were now in that island many Puritan ministers, who were allowed to practise nonconformity with impunity.’47 In the year of Bale’s death (1563), Barnaby Googe dedicated a sonnet to him in his Eclogues, Epytaphes and Sonnettes, fulsomely praising his literary labours: O happye man, that hath obtained such years, And leav’s not et on papers pale to looke . . . Thou, I think Don Plato’s part will play, With Booke in Hand to have they dying day.48 Googe, a staunch Protestant and a prote´ge´ of Bale’s, who went to Ireland in 1574, later became Provost Marshall of Connacht (1582–85), wrote a prose epistle to Barnaby Rich’s Allarme to Englande (1578), and dedicated


his Foure Bookes of Husbandry (1577) to Sir William FitzWilliam, the Lord Deputy, may have been referring to more than his mentor’s antiquarian labours.49 Bale, an ideologue of religious nationalism, represented Ireland in terms taken from the debates generated by the English Reformation. Yet the equation of Englishness and Protestantism in the Vocacyon paved the way for later interpretations of the Irish as irredeemably Catholic, and, perhaps even more crucially, attempts to forge an English identity in Ireland.

6 Cicero, Tacitus and the Reform of Ireland in the 1590s

Richard Tuck has argued that the most significant development in European political philosophy in the last decades of the sixteenth century was the change from the philosophy and style of Cicero to that of Tacitus. The former was regarded as the philosopher of advice, the founder of a speculum principis tradition which engaged in dialogue with the state, republic or monarchy holding sacred the central principle ‘that the survival and advancement of one’s republic had to take precedence over all things, and that the conventional virtues might not in fact always be adequately instrumental to that end’.1 Given this definition, Thomas More’s Utopia, with its stress on the importance of service to the government, can be defined as an archetypally Ciceronian work. As Brendan Bradshaw has pointed out, it is Morus not Hythlodaeus, who has ‘grasped the meaning of the Utopian message: in the resources of reason, rhetoric, and moral virtue, the humanist possesses the means and, therefore, incurs the duty, to pursue the interest of the commonwealth even in the world of Realpolitik’.2 Tacitus, in contrast, was used as the basis for a markedly different style of politics, one based on the conception of ‘interest’ and ‘ragion di stato’. The basic vocabulary and ideas for this style of political thought were mainly derived from the writings of Francesco Guicciardini and Justus Lipsius, not, as has often been suggested, Niccolo` Machiavelli.3 Such writers stressed that there was no principle of government or order beyond the cold eye of sceptical reasoning. They did not have faith in the fundamental nature of constitutions or constitutional values – although, by the same coin, they were not necessarily opposed to such values or programmes. They did not believe that governments ruled for noble or exalted purposes. As Guicciardini stated in his Maxims: ‘all political power is rooted in violence’.4 Self-interest was deemed to be, 90

Cicero, Tacitus and the Reform of Ireland in the 1590s 91

if not more laudable, then more sensible, practical and for the greater public good, than altruism. Lipsius was quite happy to argue that the law could be overridden when necessary but only for ‘preservation . . . not for any other reason, such as the enhancement of a ruler’s or his country’s glory’.5 Moreover, he also argued that public religion should be made subordinate to political considerations, a judgement which corresponded with the more notorious pronouncements of Machiavelli, and made Lipsius appear to be a ‘Machiavellian’.6 The transformation should not be regarded as absolute and irrevocable, and it would clearly be a grave error to pretend that Cicero’s political philosophy had little influence after the 1580s; after all, Cicero was still a central part of the school and university curriculum, and is referred to frequently in all the works examined in this chapter.7 But the significance of this change in political emphasis and focus should also not be underestimated.8 What I want to argue in this chapter is that Tacitus – and Tacitism – had a key influence on the ways in which Ireland was analysed, represented and perceived by English writers in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign, especially in the 1590s when it seemed more likely than not to many observers that Ireland would be wrested from English control by Hugh O’Neill’s alliance with the Spanish.9 Tacitus, Guicciardini and Lipsius all forced writers to engage in the comparative analysis of governments and cultures, and to leave aside straightforward faith in the sanctity of their own civilisation and civilised superiority. Tacitus wrote two major histories of the Roman empire, The Histories and The Annals, covering the period from the death of Augustus to the reign of Vespasian. The former was translated into English in 1591 (by Sir Henry Saville) and the latter (by Richard Greneway) in 1598.10 Tacitus was widely admired and imitated for his impartial representations of the virtues and flaws of the emperors he scrutinised: his narration of the reign of Tiberius was particularly admired.11 A play based on Tacitus’s representation of Tiberius was performed in the early years of James’s reign and published in 1607.12 Tacitus’s histories of Rome and the critical approach to history they encouraged had a considerable appeal for Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, who was keen to foster and develop an analytical method of reading political examples which would advance his own position at court as well as his ability to advise the queen, but which ‘risked raising dangerous political questions’.13 As J. H. M. Salmon has pointed out the influence of Tacitus was general and pervasive, and his Neostoic philosophy became ‘a vehicle for discontent in Jacobean court circles’, although it could also have more quietist, conservative implications


as well.14 Essex, of course, played a crucial role in Irish politics in the last years of the sixteenth century and used Ireland as a power base to launch his rebellion in 1601. His intellectual influence undoubtedly spread to English settlers in Ireland.15 Tacitus was also important for his works on Britain and Germany, Agricola and Germania, which were appended to the English translations of the Histories and the Annals. The ‘grim picture of barbarian life’ represented in the Agricola was used to support a teleological reading of human evolution, whereby societies developed from a state of savage barbarism to enlightened Christian civilisation. Tacitus was used to support the notion that the Irish were at the same stage as the Britons had been when the Romans had conquered their island, labelling them as one of the many ‘ancient barbarian tribes of northern Europe’, so justifying the English conquest of Ireland.16 In short, it is little wonder that Tacitus became such an important writer for English commentators on Ireland in the dangerous 1590s. Ciaran Brady has argued that the upsurge in writings about the reform of Ireland from the 1530s onwards was based on the assumption that the problems which the English government faced in Ireland were analogous to those it had successfully dealt with in England and expressed a confidence in the spread of the rule of law throughout the king’s dominions. Ireland was not of a different order to England and, sooner or later, it would be absorbed into the same body politic.17 However, experience suggested that Ireland was immune to the political philosophy of Erasmian humanism, and would stubbornly resist anything other than coercion and violent repression.18 Brady points out that a large number of writers in the 1580s and 1590s, including Andrew Trollope, Sir William Herbert, Richard Beacon and Edmund Spenser, began to ask why ‘had English law failed to take root in the island; why, after so much effort, had their demonstrably superior civilisation failed to improve the Irish?’ Ireland ‘raised a fundamental challenge to humanist assumptions’ based on a faith in the power of civilisation to reform primitive peoples and, specifically, the inherent virtue of the English common law.19 The disappointment and radical change is clearly signalled in Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, in which the good humanist, Eudoxus, has to be schooled in the harsh realities of Irish life by the experienced Irenius, whose contact with the country has changed his mind.20 In a long and often analysed passage, Irenius tells Eudoxus that the common law will not function in Ireland until the basis for a stable state has been established, through violent military conquest. Irenius cunningly short-circuits the debate between those who regarded the


Norman Conquest as a violation and repression of the ancient Saxon laws and liberties of England, and those who argued that the reception of Roman Law through William the Conqueror was a victory for civilisation by conflating the two traditions. Irenius asserts that the common law was actually imported by ‘William of Normandye broughte in with his Conquest and laied upon the necke of England’ [my emphasis].21 A View cleverly dismantles and replaces a whole reform tradition of Ciceronian inspired humanist approaches to England’s Irish problem with an emphasis on the need for military action to precede political and religious change.22 Brady further argues that the key intellectual figure who justified such changes was Machiavelli who not only explained the failure of English law in Ireland in a manner that exonerated English government from the burden of guilt, he also justified the abandonment of the discredited policy of gradualist reform and the adoption where necessary of the more ruthless alternatives.23 It would, of course, be wrong to downplay the influence of Machiavelli. His writings lie behind the political analysis of Ireland as a conquered country in Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594), are mentioned in Herbert’s Croftus Sive De Hibernia Liber (1591) and Spenser’s View.24 But it needs to be pointed out that Machiavelli was one among a cluster of thinkers who were read by those interested in ‘Tacitean’ history: Tacitus himself, Justus Lipsius and Guicciardini are the most significant, but the list would also include writers as diverse as Jean Bodin, Livy, Sallust and Polybius.25 Furthermore, I would suggest that the impact of such thinkers on English commentators in the 1590s went beyond the straightforward justification of the use of violence to transform the Irish body politic. The employment of a comparative, dispassionate method of historical and political analysis led to a questioning of the assumptions of civilised superiority and opened the way for more problematic – and balanced – approaches to historical examples.26 Dealing with the extent, scope and trauma of the Irish rebellion led numerous writers to question their own cultural position, something that life in Ireland frequently demanded anyway. Don-John Dugas has suggested that Thomas Lee, subject of the famous portrait by Gheeraerts, was simply presenting himself as he really was, a man who dressed in a mixture of English and Irish clothes, not someone trying to indulge in symbolic self-fashioning or


representation.27 After all, such cross-cultural transformations were routinely observed by English authorities in Ireland and formed the basis of the draconian sumptuary laws.28 This process was highlighted and exaggerated by the very authorities they turned to in order to explain the situation. If, as Guicciardini and others alleged, all political power was rooted in violence, then who had the right – rather than simply the might – to rule? All too often, English commentators found themselves arguing contradictory cases because of their confused or ambivalent sense of who made up the body politic. It is no great surprise to discover that the three substantial treatises produced by the circle of English intellectuals resident on the Munster Plantation in late Elizabethan Ireland are all ambiguous, potentially subversive works of political analysis. In short, all show signs of emanating from a culture immersed in Machiavellian, Guicciardinian and Tacitean principles and modes of historical and political analysis; what, I would argue, was an intellectual and cultural climate that thrived among the English exiles and settlers on the Munster Plantation. It is symptomatic of this culture that Geoffrey Fenton, the translator of Guicciardini’s History of Italy – a work popular enough to be printed in 1579 and 1599, despite its inordinate length – should have travelled to Ireland in 1580, the same year as Spenser, and remained there as a prominent civil servant until his death in 1608.29 Like Spenser, Fenton married into the rising Boyle family, but, unlike Spenser, his writing career came to a grinding halt.30 Equally revealing is Barnaby Rich’s oftcited remark, ‘thos wordes that in Englande would be brought wythin the compasse of treason, they are accounted wyth us in Ireland for ordynary table taulke’.31 Given the presence in south-west Ireland – albeit intermittent – of figures such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, John White, Lodowick Bryskett, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Meredith Hanmer, all of whom were immersed in current intellectual trends and fashions for Italian political and cultural analysis, Protestant polemic and colonial theory, diverse and experimental approaches to the problem of English rule over Ireland are to be expected.32 Harriot and White both spent some time on the Munster Plantation in the late 1580s, and given that the name of Harriot’s residence, Molanna, appears as a key allegorical figure in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, to say nothing of their mutual acquaintance with Raleigh, it is inconceivable that the two men did not know one another.33 This particular connection may be especially important, and not just in terms of the contexts and analogues of The Faerie Queene. White and Harriot’s observations of Virginia produced the influential A Briefe and True Report of the New


Found Land of Virginia (1588, 1590), a work which explicitly pointed questions about the rights of civilised European nations to rule over the savages of the New World, and compared the natives of the Americas to the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles, exactly the type of sceptical, hard-headed comparative political analysis that was applied to contemporary Ireland (see ch. 4).34 Perhaps the most confused of the three treatises produced by the Munster planters analysed here is the earliest, William Herbert’s Croftus Sive De Hibernia Liber, written in c.1591, a Latin work which circulated in manuscript, but which may have been intended for publication.35 Herbert places great stress on the need to have the Bible and public prayers translated into Irish, arguing, somewhat platitudinously, ‘that ignorance of the true God and the true faith is the fount and origin of innumerable ills both private and public and of evil counsels in a state’. Knowledge of the Bible would enable ‘the sun of justice [to] rise in that western land and would illuminate the minds and actions of believers in its sacred light’ (97). Herbert proclaims his faith in the efficacy of the word of God which he, in a common image from Protestant writing, suggests is ‘more penetrating than that of a double-edged sword’ (99).36 Such sentiments have led some historians to contrast Herbert’s analysis of Ireland to what they regard as the harsher, more aggressively Protestant sentiments of Edmund Spenser who was not in favour of translating anything into Irish and made it clear that Protestant proselytisation could only take place after a brutal conquest.37 Herbert is clear that he derives much of his analysis from the staple of English humanist education, Cicero, most notably the Cicero of De Officiis and De Senectute. The preface, concerning the benefits to be derived from wisdom and philosophy, contains large quotations from Cicero on the ways and means of living a good life and creating harmony in the universe, leading ultimately to an ethical, utilitarian political philosophy ‘which has in view the happiness of the greatest number and the right administration of the state’ (11). Furthermore, Herbert invokes Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, casting his relative and mentor, the former Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir James Croft, as Africanus and himself as Scipio (15–17). Just as Scipio learnt his practical, political wisdom from the dream of his dead predecessor, so will Herbert and his readers learn how to govern Ireland from the words and spirit of the recently deceased Croft: we shall consider those matters which best serve for the public advantage and safety of the greatest number, and aided by the precepts,


observations and instruction of the wise and distinguished Croft, we shall, in what follows, philosophise on the condition, the government and the happiness of Ireland. (23) As Herbert’s editors point out, in style and substance ‘The Ciceronian stamp on this passage is almost total’ (xx).38 However, if Herbert wishes to represent his political vision as a mild and humane one, there are clear warnings that he too realised that political power was rooted in violence and that the sword was rather more double-edged than Herbert’s metaphor indicated. Herbert’s real ‘antidote’ to prevent the decay of Ireland consisted in two things. It is true that there was the attempt to incline ‘the inhabitants’ minds towards virtue and goodness’, but there was also the need to weaken ‘those forces which lead them to wickedness and evil’ (97), and Herbert is quite clear about how this aim is to be achieved: If the Irish are not disposed by any laws, persuasion or examples to embrace from the heart a way of life distinguished by the best principles and ordinances but decide, whenever any opportunity is offered, to fall back and relapse into their old habits and vices, then I avow and predict with quite as much truth as force that some king of England and Ireland, of great prudence and power, prompted by political considerations and designs, will disperse that entire race and will extirpate all the inhabitants there who have lapsed into the habits and customs of the Irish. (85–7) Irish and ‘degenerate’ English, who have become Irish in habits of thought, will both be removed from the landscape. Herbert, like Beacon and Spenser and all English thinkers on Ireland, stressed the need for a strong figure in authority, a vice-regent, to cope with protracted and sustained resistance to their political will. Herbert warns against the ‘leprosy’ of ‘stubbornness of mind’ and refusal to obey the precepts of good government and devotes considerable space to outlining the powers which should be granted to the ‘chief magistrate’, the Lord Deputy, by the crown whom he serves and for whom he stands as the symbol of authority. At this point in the text, Herbert’s debt is openly to Machiavelli and not Cicero. Immediately following the passage that outlines the hypothetical destruction of the Irish and fellow-travelling English, Herbert cites the ‘distinguished Italian’ at length from Tegli’s Latin translation of 1560. Machiavelli ‘has made a most acute and perceptive observation’:


[I]f a state which is accustomed to live by its own laws and customs comes into the power of someone who thinks it should not be destroyed, then he must expect that it will destroy him. For always at a time of rebellion it will have a place of refuge, namely those ancient ordinances of its own. These can never be consigned to oblivion either by the lengthy passages of time or by the conferring of benefits, and whatever one might do or provide for, if the inhabitants are not divided up and scattered, those institutions never pass from their memory, and they will immediately return to them at every turn of events. (p. 87)39 The focus on the virtue and good government of the wise ruler and his counsellors has given way to a hard-headed analysis of the dangerous situation in Ireland, one which implicitly acknowledges the limits of a Ciceronian politics. If a prince is to take advice from Machiavelli and behave in a way that preserves his power over an alien people he has subdued, then the moral right of England to rule over Ireland, asserted from the Laudabiliter onwards, is challenged and qualified.40 Herbert attempts to square this particular circle with a pious hope for the influence and character of the ‘supreme magistrate’ who ‘ought to be surpassing in . . . extraordinary piety and virtue’, as well as an assault on Machiavelli’s functionalist conception of religion. Political and cultural change will be achieved through ‘the true fear of God . . . not the assumed and simulated piety of Machiavelli’.41 In short, what Herbert has argued in his treatise, whether knowingly or not, is that a narrative based on the principle of realpolitik comes before one based on a belief in the sacred power of the prince to rule with his or her attendant natural rights. For all the Ciceronian artifice of Croftus, the real basis of the work’s political principles are those of the Renaissance Tacitus and other Tacitean thinkers: Lipsius and Machiavelli, supported by Livy, Polybius and Sallust.42 Tacitus, Livy and Sallust are invoked especially in discussions of the ways and means of controlling and dispersing rebellion, passages which cast aside moral outrage in favour of practical advice. Tacitus’s Histories are quoted to characterise the rebel mind: ‘They think the greatest honours are to be found in the greatest dangers and ‘‘they delight not so much in the rewards of dangers as in the dangers themselves’’, as Tacitus says’ (61).43 Lipsius and Tacitus are then invoked as authorities to justify the maxim: ‘Those who are rebellious are to be separated by guile . . . Some can approach them craftily, ‘‘pretending to have the same aims. In this way their advice will carry more weight’’ ’ (p. 63).44 Tacitus,


Livy, Sallust and Thucydides, as well as the more famous words of Machiavelli, are cited to justify the use of colonies, Tacitus providing an argument based on efficient surveillance: ‘Tacitus is also of this opinion: colonies should be conducted to conquered peoples so that they may be more securely restrained and watched’ (75).45 Herbert, as his editors suggest, was probably not fully in control of the political moves and intellectual leaps made in his work, somehow failing to understand that the ruler he desired bore little resemblance to the one fashioned by Machiavelli.46 The same case cannot be made with regard to the much more astute and subversive Solon His Follie, published by Richard Beacon in 1594. Indications of the work’s problematic status and the author’s awareness of this, can be inferred from what may be attempts to disguise the subject matter of the work. The title, Solon His Follie, or a Politique Discourse toching the Reformation of common-weales conquered, declined or corrupted, makes no mention of Ireland; the dialogue itself is in an allegorical form and makes it clear that the particular case – the need for Athens (England) to reform its decaying conquered territory, Salamina (Ireland) – stands as a political case study with a wider application; and the fact that Beacon had the book published in Oxford, so that it was not subject to the scrutiny of the committee of censors overseen by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London; all suggest a subterfuge.47 Against such a reading, however, it should be noted that Beacon dedicated his work to Elizabeth, claiming that it was a ‘speciall remembrance to all posterities’ of the queen’s heroic transformation of Ireland from its ‘rude, cruell, and wilde’ state to an ‘obedient, gentle, and civill’ existence (Solon, p. 4) – albeit, hardly an accurate description of its contents. Beacon’s work clearly owes much to republican thought, especially Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Decade of Livy, which stands as the principal authority for Beacon’s political analysis.48 However, it is a point of contention whether Solon His Follie, despite its use of republican theory and Tacitean history, actually works to endorse a monarchical position, or whether it genuinely advocates alternative forms of government as a means of solving England and Ireland’s problems. For Markku Peltonen, Richard Beacon in Solon His Follie ‘is perhaps the most important as well as the most radical exponent of classical humanist political discourse in England before the 1650s’.49 Vincent Carey argues a diametrically opposed case, seeing ‘The deployment of the language of classical humanism [as] . . . superficial’, and that ‘far from articulating a republican consciousness Beacon and other New English commentators on Ireland like their contemporaries at home were monarchists


who resorted to the Florentine political theorist in a limited and selective way’.50 The radical disagreement between two scrupulous readers of the text and the assumed relationship between ‘real’ meaning and rhetoric are, I would suggest, of more significance than the straightforward question of whose is the better reading of Solon His Follie. Just as one might dispute whether the absolutist Jean Bodin, who argued that to protect the monarchy power had to be transferred to the magistrates, or the republican Machiavelli, whose work was cited and used to bolster the central authority of existing rulers, was actually and in effect the more radical thinker, so one might argue what is the real effect and purpose of a work like Solon His Follie.51 The point is that any work which has to look at the violent origins of society in order to understand and rebuild the social fabric, and does so employing a sceptical, comparative method of historical investigation, is forced to consider ideals and methods more threatening and subversive than those recommended elsewhere, and run the risk of becoming gamekeeper turned poacher. Beacon’s dialogue is conspicuously monologic in style, deliberately abandoning the balanced nature of the Ciceronian dialogue, ‘which calls for ‘‘discussing both sides of the question’’ ’, as it does the Ciceronian ideals of using ‘the language of everyday speech and the flavor of real conversation’, preferring the text to be ‘laden with quotations and abstract outlines’.52 Solon His Follie consists of three books. The first of these has the characters, Solon and Epimenides discuss the possibility of reforming a ‘declined commonwealth’ (p. 18), whether and in what circumstances this can be achieved through laws or military action. The second has them discuss how a commonwealth can be reformed, and what measures can be used, frequently emphasising, in the spirit of Machiavelli, the need to win the good will of the people: ‘Sith therefore the consent of the people, doth give so great furtheraunce unto this action of reformation, it seemeth a matter verie necessarie, that everie Magistrate shoulde retaine the arte, skill, and knowledge, of perswading and inducing the multitude’ (p. 48).53 Such assertions suggest that Beacon’s focus is as much on England as on Ireland, and that the use of Ireland to argue a more general political case should not be seen simply as a subterfuge. The book concludes with advice – again largely following Machiavelli – on how to retain commonwealths once they have been acquired, and the need to establish and maintain good laws.54 It is better to act before a commonwealth has declined too far because then ‘a milde course of government doth worke his office, and carrieth with it allowance and


commendations’. When ‘the people are in manners corrupted’ – as is the case in Ireland – the authorities need to ‘sharpely prosecute and punish offendours’ (p. 83). The final book, inspired more by the book of Revelation than republican political theory, illustrates which signs show that a commonwealth has declined, and what forms of decay can be detected. A long final chapter draws on a variety of classical and contemporary sources, including Plutarch, Bodin, Lipsius and Guicciardini. Here, Beacon includes a substantial discussion of the merits of establishing colonies. Solon opens his argument with the assertion, ‘A nation conquered may not be contained in their obedience without the strength of colonies or garrisons’ (p. 136), equating the two institutions (again, following Machiavelli).55 Colonies serve three functions, as Epimenides explains. First, they help to control ‘the people poor and seditious which were a burden to the common-weale . . . whereby the matter of sedition is remooved out of the Cittie’; second, ‘by translating of colonies, the people conquered are drawen and intised by little and little, to embrace the manners, lawes, and government of the conquerour’; and third, they help reveal and suppress mutinies, acting ‘like Beacons’ (pp. 139–40). Beacon’s political analysis poses more questions than it can answer. The tenor of the work is ‘Tacitean’ in its sceptical comparativism, although there are no specific references to Tacitus. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that the Agricola was not a major source for the comments on the decline of commonwealths and the need to establish colonies (especially if one considers that a translation of that work was included in Saville’s 1591 translation of the Histories). In that work, Tacitus writes of a situation in which ‘neither before nor since has Britain ever been in a more uneasy or dangerous state. Veterans were butchered, colonies burned to the ground, armies isolated.’56 The Britons were ‘barbarians’, who have military valour, but have become decadent through an excess of liberty and are now divided up into ‘jarring factions’ who are fighting among themselves.57 Agricola’s great military success is based on the establishment of forts/colonies: ‘It was observed that no general had ever shown a better eye for ground than Agricola. No fort of his was ever stormed, ever capitulated or was ever abandoned.’58 The sixteenth-century commonplace that the contemporary Irish were the same as the ancient Britons, made in works such as Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531), is central to Beacon’s political analysis and recommendations.59 More challenging is the implicit comprehension that when one goes beyond the certainties of a Ciceronian tradition of ‘advice to princes’,


the very nature of civilisation and government comes under scrutiny. It is no surprise or accident that Solon His Follie has one eye on England as well as on Ireland, and confidently moves from the particular to the general. There is a telling comparison near the end of Book II, when the interlocutors turn their attention to ‘Howe a Magistrate of rare and excellent vertues is required in this action of reformation’. Epimenides refers the reader to the decline of Rome under the line of the last kings, the Tarquins, and argues that the great city would have been ruined if the great vertue and severitie of Brutus had not governed at that time the helme and sterne; whereby the courage and boldnes of the traitours, raised by the suffrance and lenitie of Collatinus, as a tempest was suddenly calmed and pacified. Solon makes an instructive comparison: ‘Therefore provident were the counsel of Athens in committing this action of the reformation of Salaminia, sometimes into the handes of L. Gray, sometimes into the handes of Sir William Russell’ (p. 65). A direct link is made between the establishment of the Roman republic and the suppression of rebellion in Ireland, a suggestion, perhaps, that efficient masculine government based on the qualities of the self-selecting elite of the best magistrates was preferable to that of hereditary monarchy. Beacon may have known of Grey’s role in arguing for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots against the stated wishes of Elizabeth, an event recorded in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a work that Beacon could possibly have seen in manuscript before he wrote Solon His Follie.60 Elsewhere one might also note Beacon’s enthusiastic praise of republican Venice, specifically for giving their rulers powers ‘with certaine limits and bondes, not lawfull for them to exceede; and further did appoint certaine watchmen, as daily beholders and observers of all their actions and doings’ (p. 44). Beacon’s political analysis bears numerous comparisons to that of Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland, which is hardly surprising given their existence in the political milieu of the Munster Plantation in the 1590s. A View, like Solon His Follie, can be read as an explicit rejection of the Ciceronian dialogue, replete with difficult stylistic passages, obscure references and challenging arguments, all directed towards one goal, that of persuading the rational but ignorant English humanists that cruel and vicious methods, way beyond their limited experience, are necessary in Ireland (see above, pp. 92–3). Again, it is not, at first sight, a work that conspicuously


owes a debt to Tacitus, although in Irenius’s long discussion of the origins of the Irish there are two references to the Agricola, albeit both at second hand.61 But, even more than Solon His Follie, it can be described as ‘Tacitean’ in its desire to analyse coldly and objectively the ways and means of solving the Irish crisis, deliberately provoking and undermining received wisdom and certainty and demonstrating that successful policy in Ireland always runs the explicit risk of turning into what it is supposed to prevent, in the same way that liberty and success lead to decline and decay in the cycle of history represented in the Histories and Annals.62 Significantly enough, Spenser’s text concludes with a discussion designed to limit the powers of magistrates who abuse their offices, based on Machiavelli’s reading of Livy, followed by fulsome praise of Florence and Venice as well-ordered principalities.63 Like Solon His Follie and, to a lesser extent, Croftus Sive De Hibernia Liber, A View demonstrates the impossibility of straightforward loyalty for Englishmen in Ireland. A View tells a story of English occupation in Ireland which closely resembles many aspects of Tacitus’s histories of Rome. The real villains of the story are the ‘Old’ English who conquered Ireland in the twelfth century, but then decayed through an excess of liberty and the lack of the law to uphold civilised standards, and became Irish. Eudoxus blithely assumes that Irenius will find little fault with the Old English – or English-Irish – because they managed to abolish most of ‘the olde badd Irish Customes’ and establish ‘more Civill fashions’. In fact, Irenius corrects him, the contrary is the case, ‘for the Chiefest abuses which are now in that realme are growen from the Englishe and the Englishe that weare are now muche more Lawles and Licentious then the verie wilde Irishe’ (p. 113). The confrontational nature of the text is clear, as is its desire to recommend and produce truthful answers which do not avoid key issues, however painful they might be, a particularly Tacitean quality. The View tries to emphasise the need for strong, clear action to sort out English rule in Ireland. Its proposals are remarkably simple: before law and religion can be reformed, a military conquest has to be undertaken which will either kill off all Irish rebels or force them to accept English rule.64 Like Beacon, Spenser singles out Lord Grey for special praise, as someone who knew how to deal with the crises he had to face as Lord Deputy, even though his wise actions have only brought him opprobrium (pp. 159–62).65 But perhaps the most famous passage of A View, the harrowing description of the Munster famine, best expresses the text’s rhetorical strategies and style of argument:


Out of everie Corner of the woods and glinnes they Came Crepinge forth uppon their handes for theire Leggs Could not beare them, they loked like Anotomies of deathe, they spake like ghostes Cryinge out of theire graues, they did eate the dead Carrions, happie wheare they Coulde finde them, Yea and one another sone after, in so muche as the verye carkasses they spared not to scrape out of theire graves . . . in shorte space theare weare non allmoste lefte and a moste populous and plentifull Countrye sodenlye lefte voide of man or beaste, yeat sure in all that warr theare perished not manie by the sworde but all by the extreamitye of famine which they themselves had wroughte [my emphasis]. (p. 158) This is a horrifying passage, and is clearly intended to be. On a straightforward level, it shows that harsh courses of action must be pursued by those who wish to save Ireland from anarchy and rebellion. It is the fault of the Irish themselves if they starve and the pity one might feel in the description only serves to emphasise the criminal folly of opposing the power of the prince. But, more worryingly, it also shows what a thin line divides savagery and civility. The cure may be worse than the disease, making the situation effectively an impasse. The standard metaphor of the disordered state as a diseased body politic is one which features prominently elsewhere in A View, drawing our attention to this very problem. Irenius argues that usually the care of the soul is to be given priority over the care of the body, unless, as is the case in Ireland, ‘youe should knowe a wicked person daungerouslye sicke havinge now bothe soule and bodye sore diseased’, in which case the physician takes precedence over the preacher.66 Again, the comparison is, I would suggest, designed to shock the reader, and persuade him or her that ordinary considerations have to be suspended in Ireland: in this case, the urgent need for religious reform as the key to civilised existence. Obviously far more points could be made to flesh out such a reading of A View (the work’s discussion of the law, the origins of the Irish, customs, language, etc.). But the key issues are, I think, clear enough. A View may not directly owe its form, style and content to Tacitus – although there are substantial links between Spenser’s vision of Ireland and Tacitus’s analysis of Rome and the Roman invasion of Britain. Nevertheless, it is a distinctly ‘Tacitean’ work, developing out of an English cultural and intellectual milieu in Ireland, one which used a series of sceptical and detached histories and political commentaries to make sense of, and so try to reform, a situation which went beyond those educated in an English Ciceronian tradition. Cicero refused to get


involved in republican plots against Julius Caesar, although he opposed Caesar’s tyrannies, but his noble detachment could not prevent his murder on the orders of Octavian in 43 BC. Tacitus appears to have been less involved in public affairs, although his work could be interpreted as a call to throw off the shackles of convention and tell the truth, a message which could easily be aligned with the republican actions of Brutus, who took arms against Caesar.67 Tacitus was cast as the historian and political theorist whose analysis could most easily be applied to any contemporary situation, or ‘present state’. For intellectuals in Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century, a Tacitean approach to political analysis and action evidently seemed preferable to a Ciceronian. Advising the prince carefully and cautiously through coded language and well-chosen examples had to give way to a more urgent and dispassionate mode of analysis that would reach those who had the power to act decisively and immediately. However, as Spenser’s View so aptly demonstrates, the very purpose of the exercise could be paradoxical. The establishment of English civilisation, as the quotation dealing with the degeneration of the Old English makes clear, was the desired goal. For Spenser, writing within a sceptical tradition that was prepared to challenge established wisdom and shibboleths, the danger was that establishing civility could only be achieved at the cost of being savage.68

7 From English to British Literature: John Lyly’s Euphues and the 1590 The Faerie Queene

In sixteenth-century England writers of literature were frequently unsure exactly how to employ the flexible category at their disposal. Often authors found themselves caught between two related but opposed desires. On the one hand they sought to elevate the status of English literature so that it could rival the achievements of the classical world and those European nations which had imitated that heritage rather more successfully – Italy, France and, less often, Spain. On the other, they used ‘literature’ as either an adjunct or supplement to political representation, arguing the need for a critical public sphere where national problems could be debated. In other words, a celebratory nationalism was pitted against a specifically critical nationalism. In trying to perform this impossible balancing act, authors often solved the problem by imagining two or more different – often overlapping – communities representing the nation at specific points within their narratives, collections of lyrics, dramas, etc. Even to writers immediately concerned with the need to bring the category of the nation into sharp focus, it remained a shadowy, barely visible wraith, all too often realised in the gaps, fissures and contradictions which constitute the margins of the texts.1 The most frequently cited literary case of this problem of competing, conflicting and indeterminate national boundaries is the outburst by the Irish Captain MacMorris serving in Henry V’s army in France in the play of that name. In the scene before the battle of Harfleur, the four representatives of the British nations, MacMorris, Jamy, Llewellyn and Gower are left alone on stage, awaiting the start of battle. Llewellyn asks MacMorris to consider ‘the disciplines of war’, by way of ‘friendly argument’ and 105


‘communication’.2 MacMorris responds that it is no time to talk of war when ‘there is throats to be cut’, Jamy echoes MacMorris’s call for action but adds ‘I would full fain hear some question ‘tween you twae’. At this point Llewellyn takes offence: Llewellyn: Captain MacMorris, I think, lookk you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation – MacMorris: Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation? (3.3.59–63) Llewellyn objects further that MacMorris has taken ‘the matter other wise than is meant’ and protests that he is as good a man as his Irish counterpart who threatens to cut off his head before the English Gower intervenes to calm the situation by suggesting that both are at fault: ‘Gentlemen both, you will mistake each other’. MacMorris’s lines have been variously interpreted by commentators.3 It is indeed likely that MacMorris is a ‘degenerate’ Anglo-Irishman, his name being a Gaelicized form of the Anglo-Norman Fitzmaurice, so that he could be said to belong to four different communities with importantly different identities – English, Irish, Anglo-Irish and British – some of which overlap and some of which are opposed.4 Various conclusions can be drawn from this encounter relevant to my purposes in this essay. First, it is unclear what either MacMorris or Llewellyn are referring to when they use the term ‘nation’. Does it correspond to ‘race’, and, if so, does it label MacMorris as Irish or Anglo-Irish? Or does it correspond to a territory, and, if so, is that territory Ireland or Britain? Or are these questions simply missing the point in demanding a specific answer because Llewellyn is suggesting no more than an Anglicised allegiance of factions in Henry’s army? The incident seems designed to provoke rather than answer such speculations, especially given the Chorus’s apparently confident prediction of the Earl of Essex’s English conquest of Ireland as the prelude to Act 5, as well as the enigmatic style of the exchange which stresses a series of communication gaps. Second, it is noticeable that the possibility of conflict is prevented by the intervention of the relatively taciturn Englishman, Gower (who has earlier in the scene praised MacMorris as ‘a very valiant gentleman’ (11–12) ), implying that whichever way the peoples present in the army are separated, the English are the natural rulers. Thirdly, one might suggest that the scene connotes both unity and disunity. The soldiers fight together to obtain a famous victory which could be charcterised as English or

John Lyly’s Euphues and the 1590 The Faerie Queene 107

British, depending on how the relationship between monarch and subjects is conceived and whether Henry is characterised as English, Welsh or British.5 However, their separate identities, mutual antagonisms and different interpretations are left unresolved to be carried into the space beyond the play which has subsequently been read as an unproblematical celebration of an English identity and a harsh indictment of a usurping dynasty leading the nation astray.6 In this chapter I want to suggest that English notions of national identity became more complex and problematic as Elizabeth’s reign continued, a phenomenon recognised in the literature which often sought to help construct that sense of identity. Perhaps three related factors can be singled out: the development of colonialism, particularly in the Americas; the increasing importance of Ireland in English political and social calculations after the 1580s; and the desire for a united Britain fuelled by the succession crisis and speculation that James VI of Scotland would become king.7 The change can be illustrated by means of two massively influential literary texts both of which sought to define a national literary style and influence the creation of a national literary identity, John Lyly’s Euphues (1578) and its sequel, Euphues and his England (1580) and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which appeared in a first edition of three books in 1590, to be followed by an edition containing a further three in 1596. Lyly’s text is not without its contradictions, references to contradictory and competing conceptions of the nation, but these are confined within an English context rather than that of the British Isles and beyond. John Lyly’s two prose romances were among the best-selling works in Renaissance England. G. K. Hunter has remarked ‘Every aspiring author in the period must have read Euphues’ and Lyly’s distinctive style – later labelled ‘Euphuism’ – came to define a dominant form of literary English.8 As late as 1632 Edmund Blount, editor of Lyly’s plays, commented ‘our nation are [sic] in his debt for a new English which hee taught them’ [my emphasis].9 Lyly’s characteristic style, consisting predominately of balanced shorter clauses and antitheses, made the ‘Petrarchan paradox into the capstone of a whole view of life’. Lucilla when infatuated with Euphues, for example, endures ‘termes and contraries’, her heart caught ‘betwixt faith and fancie . . . hope and fear. . . conscience and concupiscence’.10 It is perhaps not too far-fetched to describe this style as a means of vernacularising Latin and of successfully finding a ‘structural principle in English which would enable the language to deal adequately and in an ordered fashion with complex material, and thus do the work formerly done by the inflected endings of Latin’.11 It also became


the courtly style par excellence.12 So dominant did Euphuism become that any author of prose seeking to thrust himself forward as the literary spokesman of Englishness had either to copy Lyly’s writing or define his own in opposition to it. This is exactly what Sidney felt obliged to do in An Apologie for Poetrie (1579), as he pitted the periphrasis he employed as a structural principle in the Arcadia against Lyly’s balanced antitheses.13 As one of the earlier Elizabethan writers Lyly was in many ways writing in a vacuum and the experimental nature of his work must be taken into account.14 Just as his style has precursors – William Pettie, John Rainolds’ Latin15 – but is clearly not simply derivative, so the form and generic identity of Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England have models – courtesy books of varying modes like Stefano Guazzo’s The Civil Conversation (1574, translated into English by William Pettie in 1581 after the publication of Lyly’s two books) and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531), Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), and, in the corpus of classical and Renaissance literature, the Greek romances of Heliodorus (c. third century AD), Boccaccio’s Decameron (mid-fourteenth century), as well as contemporary Italian prose romances – without actually resembling any individual one.16 Symptomatic of this mixed, experimental mode of writing is the fact that Lyly’s conception of his project in his two prose works seems to have changed between the writing of the one and the other.17 Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit tells the straightforward story of a witty but arrogant and morally suspect young Athenian who chooses to reside in Naples, where he betrays his friend, Philautus, in love, is himself then betrayed by the young woman, Lucilla, who dies in suitably miserable circumstances later, becomes reconciled to Philautus, realises that he has not behaved very well so far and returns to Athens to study moral philosophy, and proceeds to lecture all and sundry on the ins and outs of moral behaviour. Appended to the third edition of Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit is a letter to the gentlemen scholars of Oxford. Here, Lyly acknowledges that his work had been read allegorically and that criticisms he had made of the University in Athens (Athens is represented as effectively one giant university) had been read as criticisms of Oxford (vol. 1, p. 324). The text itself ends with Euphues crossing the sea to England where he expects to ‘see a courte both braver in shewe and better in substance, more gallaunt courtiers, more godlye consciences, as faire Ladyes and fairer conditions’ (vol. 1, p. 323). In the letter Lyly imputes these criticisms to ‘the envious . . . the curious by wit . . . [and] the guiltie by their own galled consciences’; he


promises that ‘Euphues at his arrival I am assured will view Oxforde, where he will either recant his sayinges, or renew his complaintes’ (pp. 324–5). Such comments – and the title – probably lead the reader to expect a survey of the realm which only actually occurs at the end of Euphues and his England in passages which owe a great deal to William Harrison’s well-known Description of England (1577), included in Holinshed’s Chronicles.18 The bulk of the story casts Philautus as the principal actor who suffers in love and courtship until he eventually woos and wins the chaste and beautiful Camilla. Euphues, alongside various other moral guides whom they meet during their stay, serves as a moral instructor, returning to Athens before the end of the book where he pens his ‘Glasse for Europe’, a description of England and the English for the edification of ‘the Ladyes and Gentlewomen of Italy’: I am come out of Englande with a glasse, wherein you shall behold the things which you never sawe, and marvel at the sightes when you have seene. Not a Glasse to make you blush, yet not at your vices, but others vertues. (vol. 2, p. 189) All of which implies that the relationship between the two texts and questions of national identity is both undeniable and undeniably problematic. Euphues and his England has been taken at face value and read as a celebration of England and Englishness.19 However, its inherently mixed generic nature would seem to preclude such a naive empiricist reading and use of evidence beyond context, as would the question of its readership. The ‘Glass’ is addressed to Italian ladies but within a work which is prefaced by two letters, one ‘To the Ladies and Gentlewomen of England’ [my emphasis] and one ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’ (Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, in contrast, is addressed to a singularly male audience). While the former promises to correct the misogyny of the previous volume and, most importantly, advertises itself as a work for female consumption – ‘Euphues had rather lye shut in a Ladyes casket, then open in a Schollers studie’ (vol. 2, p. 9) – the latter is explicitly clubbish, using comparisons to denigrate women and bind a male audience together in recognising such tropes as means of sexual exclusion. Euphues is described ‘as long in viewing of London, as he was in comming to it, not farre differing from Gentlewomen, who are longer a dressing their heads then their whole bodyes’ (vol. 2, p. 11). Lyly draws attention to the complexities of reader response in this openly diacritical act of splitting up his audience into two separate groups.20 What does connect these two groups is their Englishness, so that when a section is addressed


to Italian ladies within a fiction which openly acknowledged that it had been interpreted allegorically, the English reader must surely entertain the probability that things are not what they seem. Not only is Euphues’ ‘Glass for Europe’ really a glass for England to read itself, but when the fictional author specifically protests that the text is designed to make the reader blush ‘not at your vices, but other virtues’, it should be apparent that the vices and the virtues are both English. When, towards the end of the treatise, Euphues informs his audience that ‘we can see our faults only in the English Glass’ [emphasised in the text] (vol. 2, p. 202), the mirror is clearly self-reflexive. England is forced to take a hard look at itself isolated from the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, the precise relationship between ‘Euphues’ Glass for Europe’, the rest of the text and the world outside that text has to be puzzled out by the reader and there is not necessarily one right answer or right way of reading. Ostensibly, the ‘Glass’ reads as a long eulogy to the virtues of England. However, careful inspection reveals much that demands closer scrutiny. For example, early on Euphues attacks English attitudes to attire as ‘the greatest enormity that I coulde see in England’ and comments, ‘there is nothing in England more constant, then the inconstancie of attire, nowe using the French fashion, nowe the Spanish, then the Morisco gownes, then one thing, then another’ (p. 194). Strangely enough, the last description we have of Euphues before his departure for Athens is that he was ‘commonlye in the court to learne fashions’ (p. 185), a seeming discrepancy which is not explained. Is Euphues merely learning about fashions? Does the word ‘fashions’ refer to something other than clothes despite the verbal echo? Is Euphues’ leaving after this comment merely a coincidence? Or does the attack on the vagaries of English fashion refer to something more serious? A similarly troubling passage occurs two pages later and needs to be quoted at greater length: Their Aire is very wholesome and pleasant, their civilitie not inferior to those that deserve best, their wittes very sharpe and quicke, although I have heard that the Italian and the French-man have accompted them but grose and dull pated, which I think came not to passe by the proofe they made of their wits, but by the Englishmans reporte. For this is straunge (and yet how true it is there is none that every travailed thether but can reporte) that it is always incident to an English-man, to thinke worst of his owne nation, eyther in learning,


experience, common reason, or wit, prefereing alwaies a straunger rather for the name, then the wisdome. I for mine owne parte thinke, that in all Europe there are not Lawyers more learned, Divines more profound, Phisitions more expert, then are in England. (vol. 2, p. 196) This also seems to read fairly straightforwardly as extravagant self-praise for an internal audience under the guise of correcting an undue modesty for the benefit of other nations (in some ways that is obviously the witty joke). Nevertheless, certain things do not appear to add up. Euphues provides no answer to his initial question as to whether the English are witty or not. He first gives an explanation for the poor reputation of the English – foreigners believe their bad accounts of themselves. He comments on the lack of English self-confidence. Finally he side-steps the issue by praising learned lawyers, profound divines and expert physicians. The question of the wit of the English is not solved. My reading might seem like a pedantic exercise in splitting hairs. However, it needs to be remembered that the first volume’s full title is Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and is in essence the story of a young man who abuses his natural wit at court, where, incidentally he has just come from in Euphues and his England and the place in which he is really interested in the ‘Glass’. Wit is nothing if not an ambiguous quality as represented in the text. Near the start of Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Euphues is observed by a wise old Neapolitan gentlemen who respects his potential but fears for his future: an old Gentleman in England seeinge his pregnant wiytte, his Eloquent tongue somewhat tauntinge, yet wyth delight, his myrthe wythout measure, yet not wythout wytte, hys sayinges vaineglorious, yet pythie, beganne to bewayle hys nurture; and to muse at his Nature, beeinge incensed agayunste the one as moste pernicious, and enflamed wyth the other as moste precious: for hee well knewe that so rare a wytte woulde in tyme eyther breede an intollerable trouble, or bringe an incomperable Treasure to the common weale: at the one hee greatly pittied, at the other he rejoysed. (vol. 1, p. 186) Euphues stands poised between two extremes here: his story will either be that of national glory – for if Athens was read as Oxford, Naples was read as a representation of the English court – or waste and shame.21 Unfortunately he uses his wit to bad purposes, abusing the elderly gentleman with a series of clever logical reversals, going on to betray


his friend before his deserved comeuppance, retreat into scholarship and the study of general ethics.22 It would be false, I suggest, to read a simple dichotomy of good English court against bad Neapolitan court as represented in the behaviour of the sexually loose Euphues and Lucilla. Instead the question of English wit is quite deliberately left open and the reader forced to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of witty conduct – whether it will bring ‘intollerable trouble’ or ‘incomparable Treasure’ to the nation – in the light of the story of Euphues’ conduct. In a sense what Lyly is arguing for, I believe, is that his work be read as a conduct book on a national level. In ‘Euphues’ Glass’, the fictional author heaps praise upon the ‘grave and wise Counsellors’: whose foresight in peace warranteth saftie in warre, whose provision in plentie, maketh sufficient in dearth, whose care in health is as it were a preparative against sicknesse, how great their wisdome hath been in all things, the twentie two yeares peace doth both shew and prove. For what subtilty hath thir bin wrought so closely, what privy attempts so craftily, what rebellions stirred up so disorderly, but they have by policie bewrayed, prevented by wisdome, repressed by justice? What conspiracies abroad, what confederacies at home, what injuries in anye place hath there beene contrived, the which they have not eyther fore-seene before they could kindle, or quenched before they could flame? (vol. 2, pp. 196–7) This description becomes more disturbing as it continues. We move from the depiction of an ordered and happily stable nation, to being presented with an almost nightmare vision of a paranoid panoptican state with threats from both within and without the realm. The suggestion is of a nation which needs to be vigilant against the wiles of its enemies, exactly what one might expect given the fear surrounding the proposed marriage between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Alençon, negotiations for which were taking place at the time that Lyly was writing his sequel.23 Protestants – like Lyly – were particularly worried about two interrelated potential developments: a loss of English sovereign integrity and the Catholic corruption of the English reformed church.24 This fear goes some way towards explaining the drastic and confusing generic change between Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England. ‘Euphues’ Glass for Europe’ – possibly the germ of an original plan for the sequel – presents a hopeful but fragile ideal of an


independent England, one which current events thereatened to engulf in various ways. Lyly uses the survey not as an unqualified jingoistic celebration of England and its institutions but as a stick with which to beat the present and spur it into action. In effect, Lyly, an aspiring courtier, is pushing himself forward as a sage counsellor whose literary offering is more valuable than the empty wit of court.25 It is surely an obvious irony that Euphues’ wisdom emerges only when he has returned to the university world of Athens and left the Court, exactly the opposite journey to the one Lyly himself was hoping to make.26 Symbolically, the wisdom of the ancients is being ignored, as is contemporary counsel.27 Like Euphues’ wit at the start of his tale, England has the potential for disaster or spectacular success and a careful look into the ‘Glass’ will reveal, if not the answers, then at least the right sort of questions to ask. Both prose romances clearly demand to be read in terms of the national form they attempt to produce and circumscribe. Their author would appear to be caught between conflicting desires and discourses, as, indeed, the idiosyncratic development of his hybrid prose works illustrates. At one level form and content appear to be out of sympathy: while Lyly develops a sophisticated courtly style to rival other European literatures, the logic of the text demands the ability to decode narratives in a more straightforward, allegorical manner. Rhetorical excess (copia) confronts logic and Lyly appears to both enjoy the copiousness of his style and simultaneously to be suspicious of it (as the praise of the counsellors who can see through the masks of conspiracies perhaps illustrates). One celebrates the achievements of an increasingly sophisticated court display while the other impulse values a more obvious moral truthfulness and fear of the present. The values of the court and the university are shown to be at odds, to say nothing of the suspicion that, at the court of a queen, there is a feeling that excessive politesse and flowery language are feminine values and therefore cannot represent the whole of the nation. As the two prefatory letters to Euphues and his England recognise, a fractured text will have a fractured audience and the nation cannot be united, but will consist of different groups who will read the texts in different ways.28 Such an awareness conflicts dramatically with the desire of the author to serve as a spokesman for the nation and advise the monarch at court. Euphues like so many sixteenth-century English literary texts attempts to circumscribe and fix a national identity and, inevitably, becomes entangled in the logic of that slippery problem. In this sense, the text is both about the national question and defined by it. What is crucial


to note, is that the nation in question is never anything other than an English entity. Lyly’s Anglocentric preoccupation and confidence in the existence of an English nation, however that nation might be threatened by foreign invasion or infiltration, became much more difficult to sustain later in Elizabeth’s reign. The Faerie Queene, a product of these later years, although the circumstances of its composition remain obscure in the absence of manuscript evidence, is often thought by critics to become more critical of Elizabeth’s policies as its narrative progressed.29 From the start of his major poem Spenser was critical of the Queen, insisting on regarding political problems in a British rather than an English context and urging her to take a similar view.30 After his encounter with the grisly Despair in The Faerie Queene, I, ix, the Redcross Knight is taken to the House of Holiness where he is restored to physical and spiritual health ready to rescue the parents of his betrothed, Una, from the dragon who holds them captive. Finally, he is brought to Contemplation, an old hermit, who leads him to the top of a mountain and reveals his destiny and explains his past. The Redcross Knight is not a fairy as he thinks himself to be, but an English changeling accidently switched by a fairy, whose destiny is to become Saint George, the patron saint of England.31 This leads the way for the last two books to be read as a historical and spiritual allegory of mankind’s liberation from the forces of darkness and England’s liberation from Catholicism.32 Although there is evidence that contemporaries did read the poem in this manner, there are numerous suggestions within the narrative that all is not quite as it seems.33 When questioning Contemplation as to his role in life the Redcross knight asks if he will have to follow traditional romance pursuits in his new role: ‘But deeds of armes must I at last be faine,/And Ladies love to leave so dearely bought?’ Contemplation replies rather irritably, ‘What need of armes, where peace doth ay remaine,/(Said he) and battailes none are to be fought?/As for loose loves are vaine, and vanish into nought’ (I, ix, 62). Contemplation has shown the knight a vision of the New Jerusalem, so it needs to be pointed out that he is referring to life after death in heaven: but this does not square with Contemplation’s assertion that the city of the Faerie Queene, Cleopolis, imitates the New Jerusalem: Yet is Cleopolis for earthly frame, The fairest peece, that eye beholden can: And well beseemes all knights of noble name,


That covet in th’immortall booke of fame To be eternized, that same to haunt, And doen their service to that soveraigne Dame, That glorie does to them for guerdon graunt: For she is heavenly borne, and heaven may justly vaunt. (I, x, 59) The most obvious discrepancy is that the Redcross Knight’s immediate tasks, killing the dragon and marrying Una, do actually involve the sort of old style romance values which Contemplation claims are not part of his new role thus setting the fallen world at odds with the ideal of heaven.34 There is a pun on peece/peace in line 2 of the stanza which is later echoed in V, xii when Artegall, the knight of Justice, has to rescue Irena from the tyrant, Grantorto. In neither incident is the end result peace. The Redcross Knight leaves the realm to fight the enemies of the Faerie Queene. Artegall is recalled to the Court of Cleopolis before he has managed to introduce true justice into Ireland (V, xii, 26–7).35 The abrupt ending of the book itself is a further warning that England is a far from ideal realm, safe and secure from its enemies: Her joyous presence and sweet company In full content he there did long enjoy, Ne wicked envie, ne vile gealousy His deare delights were able to annoy: Yet swimming in that sea of blissful joy, He nought forgot, how he whilome had sworne, In case he could that monstrous beast destroy, Unto his Faire Queene backe to returne: The which he shortly did, and Una left to mourne. (I, xii, 41) The last line strikes a bathetic note which would appear to undermine the married bliss of the lovers whose union is left unconsummated by the knight’s need to keep his vow to serve his Queen for six years against the ‘proud Paynim king’ (I, xii, 18–19), an interlude glossed as the reign of Mary by John Dixon, the poem’s first-known reader.36 The lovers’ happiness turns out to be one in a long series of false dawns and hopeful escapes from the pains of the real world which inevitably end in disappointment. Indeed, the Redcross Knight does appear later as one of the knights in Malecasta’s Castle Joyeous alongside her champions (III, i, 63–6). He does eventually fight with Britomart, the heroine of Book III, against the lustful and immoral inhabitants of the castle, but not before


the reader has been left in considerable doubt as to his motivation or the circumstances in which he was discovered in a house of such obviously ill repute. The Redcross Knight appears, suddenly and without any narrative warning, alongside Malecasta’s knights, ‘Halfe armed and halfe unarmed’ (III, I, 63, line 3). It is not immediately apparent why the knight has reappeared in the narrative after his book has ended. Given that his downfall in Book I explicitly revolves around the question of a vigorous sexuality he fails to control (he abandond Una after seeing her phantasm copulating with a knight, takes up with Duessa despite the clear warnings he is given by Fradubio, and he is defeated and imprisoned by Orgoglio when he foolishly removes his armour and relaxes in a shady bower, the inevitable location of seduction and sexual transgression in sixteenth-century literature and emblem books),37 it is fair to conclude, however, that for all his spiritual pretensions, the Redcross Knight fails to escape the limitations of the flesh.38 Britomart begins her book by defeating Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, in battle, and then exposing the lack of moral fibre in the Redcross Knight. It seems absolutely clear that the poem shows that a simple notion of Englishness has to be rejected in favour of a more inclusive and expansive conception of Britishness as represented by Britomart in Book III, especially as Britomart is able to go beyond the specifically physical limitations of the male protagonsits of the first two books.39 The Redcross Knight is clearly represented in the first edition of the poem as a traditional romance hero, ending the book bearing a passing resemblance to Chre´tien’s Yvain, the flawed and inadequate hero who has to learn the hard way that chivalry means virtuous action in the real world and not just killing other knights or winning tournaments. The allegorical narrative would seem to imply that England and its representative hero falls short of the ideal state of peace and stability desired, a question of the reality failing to match the ideal as in Lyly’s romances, or, more to the point, the hero and the nation he represents not having the means to cope with problems as they exist in the real world, and so proving ultimately vulnerable and lost rather than being able to control their fate. It is not just a question of an ideal English polity being found wanting, as is the case in both Euphues texts. Instead, the very notion of Englishness as an ideal is called into question from the start of the poem. Contemplation calls the Redcross Knight ‘Saint George of mery England’ (I, x, 61), but his genealogy betrays a less harmonious state of affairs:


For well I wote, thous springst from ancient race Of Saxon kings, that have with mightie hand And many bloudie battailes fought in place High reard their royall throne in Britaine land, And vanquisht them, unable to withstand[.] (I, x, 65) The Redcross Knight’s future is supposed to lead to peace but his origins are bloody. In fact, being a conquering Saxon sets him against the ostensible hero of the whole narrative, Prince Arthur. In the previous canto, Arthur has explained ‘his name and nation’ (I, ix, 2) to Una and the knight and, although also ignorant of his origins, he describes his education by Merlin and Timon beside the River Dee, significantly, the boundary between England and Wales. Arthur’s status as the greatest king of the Britons was too well known to escape even the most ignorant Elizabethan reader so that Arthur’s Britishness places him in opposition to that of the knight he has just saved.40 As in the scene before Harfleur in Henry V, this implies both a potential union of the disparate peoples of Britain in a new peace, and harks back to older conflicts. It is up to the readers of the poem how they conceive matters or which path they decide to pursue themselves. Arthur’s origins are never actually described although they play a crucial part in the development of the plot, not just in terms of the relationship between his own character and a real or imagined history outside the text, but also in terms of an authentication of both Britomart and Artegall who turn out to be Briton changelings – Britomart being the daughter of a Welsh king, Ryence (III, ii, 17–18, III, iii, 26).41 Merlin prophesies that Artegall will be slain, ‘in words that recall the treachery of Mordred’, who betrays and kills Arthur (III, iii, 27–8).42 In Book III, the last book of the first edition of The Faerie Queene, dynastic history and the tracing of a genealogy becomes more important and occupies a large part of the first and last cantos of the book as Britomart, the knight of Chastity, first discovers who she is and then what the future holds in store for her (Guyon, an elf by birth (II, i, 6), does not have the same focus placed upon his origins). Put another way, the book is framed by a consideration of her role in terms of her Britishness, a sense of identity which mirrors and develops that unfolded to the English Redcross Knight in a much briefer narrative. The wider focus of the narrative moves from a sense of Englishness to a sense of Britishness. When Arthur reads the ‘auncient booke, hight Briton moniments’ (II, x, 59), left in an old chamber in Alma’s House of Temperance, he is able to survey a line of British kings from the establishment


of Britain by the eponymous Brutus, who drives out the savage giants to the accession of Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father, at which point the book breaks off abruptly. Arthur, unlike the Redcross Knight, does not discover his own origins but the reader can clearly make the connection. The canto opens with a direct address to Elizabeth from the narrator, which helps to make sense of this very deliberate dramatic irony: Thy name O soveraine Queene, thy realme and race, From this renowmed Prince derived arre, Who mightily upheld that royall mace, Which now thou bear’st, to thee descended farre From mightie kings and conquerours in warre, Thy fathers and great Grandfathers of old[.] (II, x, 4) Elizabeth is represented as a Briton Queen herself and it is up to her to discover her identity through reading the poem. Both she and Arthur are in the dark at this point and so will have to make sense of the developing moral allegory of the poem, which demands a response to the direct historical/mythical references contained throughout the narrative in order to find out who they are and what they must do.43 The two have already been directly linked through Arthur’s bemusing erotic dream of the Faerie Queene (I, ix, 13–16), who, as the letter to Raleigh informs readers, was ‘the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene’.44 The time scale of the relationship is therefore double: Elizabeth is linked to Arthur as both future bride and descendant; literally, typologically and in terms of a moral allegory.45 This episode also details the battles of Briton kings against would-be invaders, principally the Romans, but, more importantly, the Saxons. Spenser is relying on material taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain, the principal source of the British legends for the Tudors.46 Spenser’s adaptation of the narrative truncates a series of reigns and incidents so that there is only a gap of a stanza between the final defeat of Hengist and Horsa, the first two Saxon invaders of Britain, invited in to help Vortigern fight his civil wars, and the accession of Uther Pendragon, paving the way for Arthur. The effect is to highlight a contrast between ruinous civil war leading to invasion and the dawn of a glorious age, the implication being that Elizabeth has the power to establish the latter if she assumes the mantle of her descendant Britomart, the martial Briton warrior queen, a dichotomy which is to assume more importance as the narrative progresses.47


In III, ii–iii, Merlin shows Britomart her future – Briton – husband, Artegall, and reveals to her the ‘Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours,/Thy fruitfull Ofspring, shall from thee descend’ (III, iii, 23), reviving a dynasty ‘out of auncient Troian blood’ (22). The subsequent prophetic visions establish Artegall as Arthur’s half-brother, as he is the son of Igraine, Arthur’s mother, wife to Gorlois, King of Cornwall. The two will return to Britain and ‘withstand/The powre of forrein Paynims, which invade thy [Britomart’s] land’ (III, iii, 27). Then, the following narrative tells of the struggle between Britons and Saxons for the rule of Britain. Thus it reverses the earlier perspective of the Redcross Knight (27–42), which ends with the seeming triumph of the Saxons and the expulsion of the Britons, following Geoffrey: ‘The Britons, for their sinnes dew punishment,/And to the Saxons over-give their government’ (41). However, not only do the Saxons start to fight among themselves as the ruling Britons had before them (46), but the chronicle is carried up to date with the reclaiming of the crown under the Tudors as a British dynasty, the assumption of peace and prosperity as a ‘royall virgin’ reigns, at which point the prophecy breaks off with Merlin overcome by what he has seen, refusing to disclose it to Britomart or her nurse, Glauce. Inspired by the hope of setting such events in process through augmenting her quest, Britomart sets off dressed in the armour of Angela, a great Saxon virgin, the most recent of a line of famous martial maids (53–8). Angela was often represented as the eponymous founder of England.48 Britomart’s symbolic wearing of Angela’s armour serves to unite Britons and Saxons, going beyond the earlier conflicts. The Redcross Knight’s Englishness now appears somewhat sectarian. But the abrupt ending of the chronicle reminds us that all may not turn out as harmoniously as the description of peace in Elizabeth’s time suggests: But yet the end is not. There Merlin stayd, As overcomen of the spirites powre, Or other ghastly spectacle dismayd, That secretly he saw, yet note discoure: Which suddein fit, and halfe extatick stoure When the two fearefull women saw, they grew Greatly confused in behavioure; At last the fury past, to former hew Hee turnd againe, and chearefull looks (as earst) did shew. (III, iii, 50) The poem has moved into the present time and the future is unpredictable and uncertain. Britain may well become united as the prophetic


visions suggest, or all may turn out to be a fantastic chimera. The last detail given in the chronicle is the supposed intervention in the Netherlands with Elizabeth stretching ‘her white rod over the Belgicke shore’ (49), a commitment Elizabeth was reluctant to make despite the pressure put on her by Protestant factions at court, and which did not really happen.49 Towards the end of Book III, Britomart and the fickle, lustful knight Paridell tell stories of their ancestries. Paridell is descended from Paris, whose ravishment of Helen led to the destruction of Troy, and, therefore, indirectly, the establishment of Britain via Aeneas and Brutus. Paridell’s celebration of his lineage suggests a myopic reading of history as his ancestor’s action leads to the destruction of Troy. Paridell shows that he has learnt nothing from the burden of the past when he seduces Hellenore, his host, Malbecco’s wife, causing misery and disaster. Britomart is angered by Paridell’s reaction as she shares an affinity with the Trojans rather than the Greeks (III, ix, 38) and she forces him to tell the story of the founding of Britain and its cities (45–51). The point to be made here is that history can be read in various ways according to one’s perspective. It can be used to build up a dynasty in a fertile way, so that the nation prospers, or it can be used as a form of pointless seduction (the reason why Paridell tells his stories) and become merely self-aggrandising and, ultimately, self-destructive. Elizabeth, it is implied, has to choose which path she will follow, uniting that of Britain or of trapping it within a cycle of violence.50 Or, maybe, seeing that Elizabeth was already past childbearing age in 1590 when the poem was published, it was all too late anyway and the dye had been cast. A year before the publication of the second edition of The Faerie Queene (1596), Spenser published the autobiographical Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, a fictionalised account of Spenser’s recent voyage to England in the previous year to oversee the publication of The Faerie Queene and probably attempt to promote the poem at court.51 Spenser now seems keen to cast himself as an English exile in Ireland, or an Anglo-Irishman. He prefaces the poem with a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh noting that the poem was written ‘From my house of Kilcolman’, the estate he purchased on the Munster Plantation in the late 1580s, having his fictionalised persona refer to Ireland as ‘that land our mother’ (line 226) in contrast to ‘Cynthias land’ (289) over the sea.52 This could be taken to signal a very deliberate change from the integrationist, British identity articulated in the first edition of The Faerie Queene and a promotion of a more colonialist outlook founded in an expatriate ‘New’ English community in Ireland.53 In the second edition of The Faerie


Queene, the question of the mismanagement of its colonial government by ignorant English authorities becomes a central issue, especially in Books V–VI.54 The failure to spread justice to Ireland results in the destruction of any attempt to unify Britain (see chs 8 and 9). It is possible that this reflects the increasing pessimism of the author, who lost faith with Elizabeth’s vacilating policies, as some have argued.55 However, we do not know how the poem was composed and some sections of the later books could well be of a relatively early date, especially those which praise Spenser’s patron of the early 1580s, Arthur Lord Grey De Wilton.56 The point to be made is that, from the start of The Faerie Queene, there could be no straightforward discussion of England as a self-enclosed political entity outside a British context, as there was in Euphues and Euphues and his England, whatever the anxieties betrayed in those texts. Spenser’s poem deliberately replaced an English with a British context and became increasingly focused upon Ireland, specifically in the representation of Anglo-Irish political relations in Book V, the depiction of savages and role of the Blatant Beast in Book VI, and, perhaps, most scandalously of all, the depiction of Ireland as a mythical land of primeval chaos in the extant fragment of Book VII, abandoned by the myopic Queen who cannot see that her hopes of a unified kingdom will not survive without its conquest.57 The Faerie Queene also aroused the ire of the Scottish – soon to be British – king for its portrayal of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, as Duessa, specifically in the trial scene at Mercilla’s court in V, ix (see ch. 9).58 What Lyly’s work takes as its object, an Englishness, is no more than a starting point for Spenser, who cannot read Englishness apart from a Britishness, which looks across to contemporary Ireland as well as back to the Arthurian heritage of the matter of Britain, both elements confronting each other in the poetic landscape of Faerieland. For Lyly the question is how to protect an identity in danger from foreign interference; for Spenser, that stage has not yet been reached as Britain is by no stretch of the imagination united. Whether putative versions of the published The Faerie Queene were more Anglocentric we shall probably never know. But, after its publication, both the influence of the work on generations of Protestant writers and the more integrated political geography of the British Isles as an ‘English Empire’ meant that such insularity became more problematic.59

8 Spenser and the Stuart Succession

Had Edmund Spenser not died in 1599, he had good reason to fear the future when James VI ascended to the English throne. As is well known, Spenser aroused James’s wrath through his portrait of the trial of Duessa in The Faerie Queene, V, ix, a transparent allegory of the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots on 8 February 1587. The English ambassador in Scotland, Robert Bowes, wrote to Lord Burghley on 1 November 1596 that James refused to allow the second edition of The Faerie Queene to be sold in Scotland and ‘further he will complain to Her Majesty of the author as you will understand at more length by himself’.1 On 12 November, Bowes wrote again explaining that the problem stemmed from ‘som dishonourable effects (as the King deems thereof) against himself and his mother deceased’. Although Bowes claimed that he had persuaded James that the book had not been ‘passed with privilege of Her Majesty’s Commissioners’, James ‘still desire[d] that Edward [sic] Spenser for his fault be duly tried and punished’.2 Nor was the affair over yet. On 5 March 1598, George Nicolson, a servant of Robert Bowes, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil that Walter Quinn, a poet later to enjoy a successful career at the courts of James and Charles I, was ‘answering Spenser’s book, whereat the king is offended’.3 The work, assuming it was ever completed, has not survived. Spenser’s relationship to the Stuart claimants to the throne was clearly a key feature of his mature work published in the 1590s, as Richard A. McCabe has conclusively demonstrated.4 Nevertheless, a series of questions about Spenser’s representation of an event that had taken place nine years before the publication of the second edition of The Faerie Queene remain unresolved. In attacking Mary, was Spenser deliberately trying to blacken the name of her son and thwart his chances of becoming the king of England, as James clearly suspected? If so, are we justified 122

Spenser and the Stuart Succession 123

in reading Mary as James in Spenser’s published poetry, or does the nonappearance of James in the poem indicate that Spenser was not making any attempt to offend the Scottish monarch and may have been genuinely surprised at the diplomatic row that ensued? Does Spenser’s allegorical representation of Mary demonstrate that he was asking readers to infer a moral significance from a historical event, which, like the legend of King Arthur, was ‘furthest from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time’, in the words of the Letter to Raleigh appended to the first edition of the poem?5 Or, does it show that Spenser reused and refigured work he had written earlier, as Josephine Waters Bennett suggested was his habitual method of composition?6 There is no surviving evidence that will enable us to answer these questions with any certainty. Nevertheless, ignoring the issues involved impoverishes and distorts our comprehension of the context in which Spenser produced his magnum opus, something that has been a main aim of recent criticism of the poem. Furthermore, as I shall hope to demonstrate in this chapter, there is a direct relationship between the way in which we assume that Spenser composed his poetry and its allegorical significance. Our judgements concerning Spenser’s political involvement, acumen and belief help to determine how we read the wider significance of The Faerie Queene. In this chapter, I will analyse the extant evidence of Spenser’s complex and problematic attitudes towards Mary Stuart and James VI of Scotland. Such hermeneutic decoding poses central questions about the nature of Spenser’s allegorical purpose in The Faerie Queene and his intentions when writing the poem. James VI of Scotland had a distant, complex and often difficult relationship with his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. While he may have been much more sympathetic to her than is often assumed, her execution must have come as some relief because it cleared the way for James to realise his ambition to become king of both England and Scotland.7 It marked the end of Mary’s rather half-baked plans, conceived in 1581, some 13 years into her captivity in England, that she and her son would rule Scotland jointly as an ‘Association’.8 James, who had not seen his mother since 1567, when she had abdicated her Scottish throne and fled to England after the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley, apparently declared, ‘I am now sole king’.9 James had a powerful claim to the English throne through his mother’s descent from Henry VII and the same ancestry of his grandmother, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, who had passed her claim on to her grandson when she died in 1578.


Nevertheless, as Susan Doran has recently argued, even though he had the strongest hereditary claim to the English crown, James’s concerns about his impending accession were well founded, and there were a number of potential rivals and alternative plans, some more plausible than others, circulating up to end of the 1590s.10 Many significant English aristocrats and politicians were afraid of James because they were concerned that he would use his position to avenge the trial and execution of his mother (his reaction to Spenser’s representation of Mary supported this view). Despite James’s protestations of loyalty to the reformed faith, his appointment of Catholics to key positions in his government in Scotland, toleration of priests and Catholic nobles, undermined the good will he had hoped to gain with many who had influence. Key figures here were William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son, Robert, who had earlier pledged support for the less substantial claims of the Suffolk line. Another claimant was James’s cousin, Arbella Stuart (1575–1615), who appears to have shown no great personal interest in the throne, but who was to suffer throughout her life for her birthright. After 1603, this was directly a result of James’s fear of her as a rival.11 There were rumours that Burghley intended to marry his son to Arbella, as a means of thwarting James’s claim, and, after Burghley’s death in 1598, that Robert Cecil favoured a match with the Spanish infanta, Isabella. Rumours circulated around Europe, too, that Henri IV of France planned to marry Arbella, and that Isabella would be married to a high-ranking English Catholic nobleman through the designs of exiled priests and Catholic nobles eager to return England to the Catholic faith. In straightforward terms, it was clear from the early 1580s, after the failure of the Alençon marriage plans, that the Stuarts had a strong claim to the English throne, but that James’s route to power was by no means straightforward or easy.12 He tried to shore up his claim as much as he possibly could and make himself attractive to those he hoped would be his future subjects by emphasising his Protestant faith and aptitude for government. James christened his son Henry in 1594, ‘an essentially English name’, and the name of the king who had brought peace after the Wars of the Roses, from whom his claim stemmed. He called his daughter Elizabeth, ‘as a gesture of respect to the English queen and godmother’.13 It is likely that James was less concerned about the character of a mother who he hardly knew being blackened than the effects such attacks could have upon his claim to the English throne. George Nicolson’s letter cited above also contains a reference to James commissioning Walter Quinn to write another book ‘concerning the king’s title


to England’, indicating that James linked his mother’s fortunes to his own hopes and plans. In his published advice to Prince Henry, Basilikon Doron (1599), James was quite happy to argue that the work of John Knox and his old tutor, George Buchanan, should be suppressed. The main reason, presumably, was that their writings threatened his path to the succession.14 His anger at Spenser’s temerity in The Faerie Queene was clearly of the same order. As James Emerson Phillips has pointed out, the specific terms in which Bowes and Nicolson’s letters express the king’s anger articulate his concerns: ‘James’s complaint, focussed as it was on Elizabeth’s licensing policies, suggests his fear that her government, by allowing Spenser’s work to be published, was thereby condoning an attack on the Scottish right and title to the succession in England.’15 Moreover, he was quite correct to be offended. Spenser’s portrait of Mary rivalled the most hostile attacks of George Buchanan: ‘Never had Spenser been so overtly political and never was the immediate reaction so intense.’16 The Bill of Association (1586) stated that ‘anyone who practiced upon Elizabeth’s life automatically lost all title to the crown’, a point not lost on James who publicly stated his fears in Basilikon Doron, that his claim might be undermined through his unavoidable association with his mother.17 Elizabeth had forbidden her subjects to publish on the subject, and Protestant supporters of James moderated their hostility towards his mother because they realised that denigrating her was likely to damage his chances of securing the English throne. Spenser’s intervention singled him out as a notable opponent of the Stuart claim and, given the uncertainty of James’s claim to the English throne and the existence of numerous other rivals, it is easy to see why James was so incensed and made the threats that he did. It is possible that Spenser, seeking to vilify female rule, had misjudged the effect that his allegorical representation of Mary would have had on her son. But it seems more likely that he was prepared to risk the hostility of the Scottish king through the figure of Duessa. The question remains why Spenser was so opposed to the Stuarts and felt the need to stick his neck out when everyone else was busy retracting theirs. A variety of reasons can be suggested. Spenser was no stranger to controversy and had been prepared to risk serious trouble before through his portrait of Lord Burghley in Mother Hubberds Tale, which may have led to his departure for Ireland in 1580, when it probably circulated in manuscript, and caused a major scandal in 1591, when the published edition was called in.18 He was clearly prepared to risk controversy when he felt strongly enough about a vital issue and no one could doubt that the New English


Protestants in Ireland felt very keenly that they had been abandoned by Elizabeth’s regime in the 1590s.19 It is plausible to assume that an attack on Mary Queen of Scots was also an implicit attack on the Catholicism of the Stuart line. Throughout his life, Spenser was associated with leading Protestants and Protestant causes, particularly the forward foreign policy and anti-Spanish position adopted by Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, the Sidneys, Raleigh, and later Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, his last patron.20 More significant still, I would suggest, Spenser appears to have become concerned about the dangers of diluting England and contaminating Englishness through the advent of a greater British union, especially if that union was inaugurated by a ruler whose pedigree and policies were not in line with Spenser’s conception of England. Such fears haunt the second edition of The Faerie Queene, and A View of the Present State of Ireland, also probably written in 1596.21 Both works acknowledge that a ‘pure’ identity cannot be preserved when different peoples are forced to interact through force of circumstances. A View recognises that interaction between the English and the Irish will involve a series of compromises and changes that will transform the English in Ireland. Nevertheless, the principal goal of English rule and civilisation must not be abandoned or else everything will degenerate into (Irish) chaos. The Faerie Queene charts the same journey, the English Redcross Knight making way for the idealised future British queen, Britomart, in the first edition. By the end of the second edition, however, failure to preserve English military rule and civilisation see the unnamed pastoral British space of Book VI overrun by hostile savages. If movement to a greater Britain was inevitable, it would be vitally important exactly who would rule the new multiple kingdom, or the hegemonic dominance of Protestant England could be dissipated or overturned (see ch. 9 for further discussion).22 James publicly declared his adherence to the Protestant faith from the late 1580s onwards, possibly as part of a pact with Elizabeth’s privy councillors to enable him to become king of England.23 However, this clearly failed to convince a number of English observers, Spenser probably being one of them.24 Spenser did become an increasingly hostile critic of the Elizabethan regime – along with a whole host of others in the 1590s – and appears to have been moving towards a conviction that republican ideas might best revitalise a decaying body politic, writing a posthumously published sonnet to preface Lewis Lewkenor’s translation of Gaspar Contareno’s extravagant praise of the Venetian republic’s political system, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599),


and citing Machiavelli’s Discourses at a key point in the View.25 Certainly his later works, from the publication of Complaints (1591) onwards, are more explicitly critical of the politics and culture of the English court than his first flurry of publications in the late 1570s and early 1580s, and it is possible that he was starting to believe that an oligarchy would preserve the interests of the English people better than a hereditary monarchy which threatened the core values of the nation.26 If the crown was to pass from the Tudors to the Stuarts then Elizabeth, a queen who appeared to many of her male subjects to have justified all the hostility to female rule by her behaviour in the late 1580s and 1590s, would have further betrayed the legacy others had worked so hard to establish. The transfer of power to the son of a Catholic traitor was, perhaps, simply a bridge too far and Spenser may have felt that the Catholic poachers would turn gamekeepers. However, all such comments, reasonable as I think they are, depend on the assumption that Spenser knew what he was doing with his allegorical designs, even if he evidently miscalculated the extent of the problem he would cause. Perhaps he assumed that his poem would not come to the attention of the Scottish monarch but would only be read by sympathetic parties in England and Ireland. Given his complaint about his obscurity in Ireland in the same poem (‘Who knowes not Colin Clout?’ (VI, x. 16)), it is conceivable that Spenser did not expect his work to be widely and carefully read, even though he had received a £50 annual pension from the queen in 1590.27 There is no surviving evidence enabling us to reconstruct the manuscript circulation of The Faerie Queene, apart from the references to early versions of the poem by Gabriel Harvey and Lodowick Bryskett.28 From these it is clear that Spenser wrote and circulated early versions of the poem. The only serious attempt to reconstruct the possible genealogy of the text has been that of Josephine Waters Bennett, who argued that the early versions of the poem were probably inspired much more by the Italianate romances of Ariosto than the published versions and that much of the early material had been incorporated – not entirely successfully – into Books III and IV.29 Bennett also suggested that Book V, which followed the ‘Letter to Raleigh’ closely and was allegorically rather wooden because it directly represented historical events and commented on their political significance, may have been an early work.30 Bennett’s assumptions, most notably her comments on the allegory of Book V, are based on the questionable notion that Spenser’s work became more sophisticated and less overtly political as he got older, whereas it is more


plausible to argue that the allegory of The Faerie Queene was more overt in Book V because the author wanted to make a series of urgent points about contemporary politics in the 1590s. Nevertheless, it is possible that in representing the allegory of Mary Queen of Scots in 1596, Spenser was simply reusing older material and making a general point about the wiles of Catholicism without paying heed to the particular circumstances of 1596 and without any specific reference to James VI’s claims to the English throne. No obviously allegorised form of James appears in The Faerie Queene, and it is possible that Spenser did not have him in mind at all, but was merely reintegrating earlier work into the published form of the poem.31 His control over his allegory may not have been as firm as is often assumed and references to Duessa as Mary may not have any relevance to James whatsoever. Duessa’s role in the poem and her allegorical representation as doubleness or duplicity is more complex than has often been acknowledged. It is crucial that we appreciate that the metaphysical, spiritual and moral implications of her role are directly related to her allegorical representation as Mary. It is notable that the first surviving reader of Spenser linked the events of Book I to the Stuart succession. John Dixon, writing in 1597, glossed Archimago’s success in separating the Redcross Knight from Una and linking him to Duessa in canto ii, as ‘A fiction of a Challenge by Q: of: s: that the religion by hir maintained to be the truth’.32 Duessa’s temporary triumph in leading the Redcross Knight astray is read as Mary’s challenge to Elizabeth. The link between Duessa, and the key figures associated with her, and Mary appears to have been evident to contemporary readers from the start of the poem, showing that the Stuart pretender was represented as the arch figure of duplicity all along. Nevertheless, as Spenser evidently realised, it was not an easy matter to separate good and evil. Commentators on The Faerie Queene have recognised the continuity between the figure of Duessa as the whore of Babylon in Book I and Mary Queen of Scots in Book V.33 Duessa clearly stands as an allegorical representation of all that threatened to undermine the religious and political unity of the Elizabethan regime. The problem was, as Claire McEachern points out, that [L]ess than modelling itself upon the tropes of virginity, the cult of Elizabeth was far more eager to appropriate those of sovereignty: to dress, as it were, for success. Elizabeth I was not imitating a virgin, but the Whore of Babylon . . . Far from defining itself in opposition to Roman rule, the Tudor state sought to appropriate its powers.34


Elizabeth and her doppelganger were always in danger of becoming the same figure: ‘The Woman in the Apocalypse moves fluidly between good and evil.’35 Mary/Duessa was never simply an external enemy who could be easily circumscribed and so opposed. Her presence as the evil queen threatening to undermine stability showed how insecure Spenser was about the foundations of the regime he served. How could any English subject ever be sure that their queen would not become a Duessa, that Elizabeth would not turn into Mary and do her work for her? Although Mary’s execution prevented her from becoming queen of England, her son might still become king through the complicity of Elizabeth. One of the recurrent motifs of the poem is that the failure to destroy evil completely will result in its eventual return, often in mutated form. Artegall, the Knight of Justice, has to learn this lesson. He defeats Radigund, the Amazon Queen, in single combat, but throws away his sword when his senses are bewitched by her ‘faire visage’, enabling her to triumph and imprison him (V, v, 12–20).36 After he has been liberated by Britomart, Artegall shows no mercy to the shape-shifting Malengin, a ‘wicked villain’ who preys on unsuspecting travellers passing through the wilderness where he hides. Artegall has Talus destroy Malengin completely with his ‘yron flayle’ so that all his bones, as small as sandy grayle He broke, and did his bowels disentrayle; Crying in vaine for helpe, when helpe was past. So did deceipt the selfe deceiver fayle, There they him left a carrion outcast; For beasts and foules to feede upon for their repast. (V, ix, 19) Only an unexplained recall to the Faerie Court prevents Artegall from establishing ‘true Iustice’ and completing the quest he was sent out to undertake (V, xii, 26–7). The Faerie Queene – or her courtiers – are acting like the Artegall who was defeated by Radigund, not his later incarnation, and so actually performing the work of the queen’s enemies. Mercilla/Elizabeth is not as diametrically opposed to Radigund as she should be, and the two figures are shown to collude and combine. Duessa is the most spectacular example of this repeated pattern of inversion and subversion. She gains in power once the Redcross Knight falls prey to the wiles of Archimago in Book I, canto ii, until she helps imprison the knight and inaugurate the rule of Orgoglio, appearing


herself as an explicitly signalled emblematic model of the Whore of Babylon riding on a dragon (I, vii, 16–18). After Orgoglio’s defeat, she is stripped and exposed in a cruel parody of the blazon, appearing as a half-woman, half-beast (I, viii, 46–50). However, just as the defeat of a monster called Error leads to the proliferation of errors and the delusive overconfidence of those whose duty it is to protect the truth, the subsequent banishment of Duessa to the wilderness only makes her more dangerous. Duessa, predictably enough, returns to assert a previous claim to the Redcross Knight at his betrothal to Una (I, xii, 24–36), through Archimago. He is unceremoniously thrown into a dungeon, but the claim is not, despite Una’s protestations of her prior right (33–4), laid to rest. The book ends with the knight returning to his service to the Faerie Queene for another six years, and Una ‘left to mourne’ (41) alone. The question left hovering is whether Una can, after all, be separated from Duessa.37 Duessa plays an important role in Book IV, summoning Ate from hell (IV, i, 19), and supporting her crimes, before she returns as the explicit allegory of Mary in V.ix.38 But just as Duessa is not killed earlier on in the poem, neither is her execution actually represented at the end of canto ix. The canto ends with a description of the pity her fellow sovereign, Mercilla/Elizabeth, feels at her rival’s plight and her own grim duty in ordering her death: But she [Mercilla], whose Princely breast was touched nere With piteous ruth of her so wretched plight, Though plaine she saw by all, that she did heare, That she of death was guiltie found by right, Yet would not let iust vengeance on her light; But rather let in stead thereof to fall Few perling drops from her faire lampes of light; The which she couering with her purple pall Would have the passion hid, and up arose withall. (V, ix, 50) The description recalls Artegall’s foolish pity for Radigund when he surrenders the initiative at the sight of her pretty face mired with blood and sweat: At sight thereof his cruell minded hart Empierced was with pitifull regard, That his sharpe sword he threw from him apart, Cursing his hand that had that visage mard [my emphasis]. (V, v, 13)


Artegall is fortunate enough to have Britomart to rescue him, and it was equally fortunate for all concerned, Spenser implies, that Elizabeth/ Mercilla was rescued from her folly, made to use her sharp sword on Mary’s neck, and so allowed her to learn from her mistakes. Mercilla/Elizabeth is described as hiding her passion, a description that not only plays upon the ubiquitous conundrum of the queen’s two bodies and suggests that women are unsuited to rule, but also shows Elizabeth disguising her true self, clearly reminding the reader of the exposure of Duessa and the possibility that Una – Mercilla/ Elizabeth – may not be so far removed from her rival as writers like Spenser would desire her to be.39 The sympathy between the two women is a clear recollection of the scene at the start of Book III, when Britomart ‘by self-feeling of her feeble sexe’ (III, i, 54) is drawn into foolish sympathy for the sexually incontinent Malecasta.40 Mercilla/Elizabeth is guilty of pandering to what she has in common with Mary – her gender – rather than establishing their religious and political differences. The implication is that a man – or an oligarchy of men such as the council who urge Elizabeth to act decisively and execute Mary – would police this distinction more effectively than the queen.41 If the allegory is to be applied directly to James, then the implication would seem to be that, despite all his attempts to either distance himself from his mother, or rescue her reputation from the slanders she had to endure, he was neither manly nor Protestant enough to rule England.42 Duessa, although her death is not actually described, does not appear again in The Faerie Queene. But, it seems to me, her role is by no means over. Book VI shows the dangers inherent in tolerating the Catholic threat, principally through Spanish support for rebellion in Ireland, and its devastating effects on the rest of the British Isles.43 Duessa’s legacy, like that of Error, whose monstrous brood devour their mother when the Redcross Knight kills her (I, i, 25–6), and who are actually more dangerous when dead than alive, is poisonous and destructive. More significantly, I would suggest, Duessa is transformed into the ultimate threat to order in the poem, Mutabilitie, a change in keeping with the most conspicuously Ovidian poem Spenser wrote.44 The Faerie Queene, as many commentators have noted, can be read as a battle between the two figures of Orpheus and Proteus for control over the narrative, which lurches between a confidence that the wilderness can be stabilised, controlled and the savage made civil, and a fear that the forces of good and reason must surrender to primeval chaos.45 Put another way, the battle for the mastery of Spenser’s poem is that between Virgil and Ovid. If Virgil retains the upper hand in the first


edition, the second increasingly emphasises Ovid. Spenser becomes more dependent on Ovidian motifs, myths and tropes at crucial junctures as the narrative progresses. A key myth is that of Actaeon and Diana, one of the central stories from the Metamorphoses for a Renaissance audience.46 Elements from this myth dominate Book VI, especially the fear that the pleasures of the civilised are being surreptitiously observed by hostile creatures on the margins of society hidden from view in the dangerous forests.47 The myth reaches its apotheosis when it forms the sub-text for the story of Faunus and Diana, how his desire to see her naked leads to the transformation of Ireland from the holy to the cursed island (VII.vi.37, 55). Spenser’s use of the myth has – quite rightly – been seen as a way of making the grand philosophical designs of the poem relevant to contemporary Irish politics.48 But the obvious topical references – Faunus as an allegory of Hugh O’Neill, leader of the Irish during the Nine Years War (1594–1603), daring to see Diana/Elizabeth naked in the most vulnerable part of her dominions – have perhaps hidden an even clearer meaning, more fundamental to the allegorical core of Spenser’s myth, and one that is also based on another Ovidian myth, that of the challenge of the Titans to the supremacy of Jove.49 It is absolutely clear that Cynthia, who is challenged by Mutabilitie, can be read as a representation of Elizabeth, making her the same figure as Diana – Cynthia’s alternative name – who is stalked by the voyeuristic Faunus, as the ‘Letter to Raleigh’ indicates.50 Moreover, Cynthia’s steeds, one black, the other white, represent Elizabeth’s colours (VII, vi, 9).51 In her final words before Nature gives her judgement, Mutabilitie sets herself against Jove and his creature, Cynthia, in hostile terms which assert her right to control the universe. Despite her pretence and avoidance of the key issues, Cynthia is all too human and fallible: Then is she mortall borne, how-so ye crake; Besides, her face and countenance euery day We changed see, and sundry forms partake, Now homd, now round, now bright, now brown and gray: So that as Changefull as the Moone men use to say. (VII, vii, 50) These pointed lines refer to two principal issues. First, they make the irrefutable observation that Elizabeth is reaching the end of her reign because she will die soon.52 Her political wiles and regal bearing cannot save her body from its imminent demise. Second, they criticise her vacillating and fickle style of government, in a commonplace attack


on women’s rule made by numerous dissillusioned, frustrated and worried men in the 1590s.53 But, more specifically, they appear to allude, albeit obliquely, to the behaviour of Mercilla in Book V, canto ix, when she has to be forced by her male advisers to act decisively against Duessa/Mary Queen of Scots. The ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ as a whole can be read – on one level – as a rewriting of the Mercilla episode. They both dramatise the battle between civilisation and chaos; describe a journey into the inner workings of the state/universe; make explicit reference to legal theories, problems and language which are related to more metaphysical issues; and culminate in trial scenes with ambiguous endings (nature’s victory can be seen as no less problematic than Mercilla’s reluctant surrender of authority). Cynthia claims her descent from Jove, but Jove, as all readers obviously would have known, was a usurper himself, just like the Tudors.54 In fact, Elizabeth’s claim to the throne was, in many ways, no better than that of Mary, who was also descended from Henry VII. For Catholics, Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon was not recognised, so Elizabeth was illegitimate, making Mary Stuart the true heir of Mary Tudor and her cousin the real usurper. This claim, announced by Henri II of France on Mary Tudor’s death, was recognised throughout Catholic Europe and formed the basis of the series of plots against Elizabeth throughout her reign.55 Mutabilitie’s initial challenge is made against Cynthia. When Mercury, Jove’s messenger, tries to force her to drop her claim she refuses to ‘leave faire Cynthias siluer bower;/ Sith shee his Ioue and him esteemed nought,/No more than Cynthia’s selfe; but all their kingdoms sought’ (VII, vi, 18). Mutabilitie and Mary have identical aims. Jove’s response to Mutabilitie, made on behalf of Cynthia, is brutal and less than convincing. He dismisses the claim of the Titans and asserts that For, we by Conquest of our soueraigne might, And by eternall doome of Fates decree, Haue wonne the Empire of the Heauens bright; Which to our selues we hold, and to whom wee Shall worthy deeme partakers of our blisse to bee. (VII, vi, 33) The first part of Jove’s statement might have reminded readers of the way in which the Tudors seized the English throne. Certainly there were enough chronicles available to remind any audience literate enough to read The Faerie Queene, notably those of Hall and Holinshed. The second,


especially given the self-referential nature of the argument, appears to be an adjunct of wishful thinking at odds with the impending fate of Elizabeth and the Tudors which the cantos are at pains to emphasise. Jove’s claims, while they may support the forces of reason and order, appear no better than those of Mutabilitie even if the narrator reminds us that she plans to break not only ‘the lawes of Nature’, but also ‘Iustice and of Policie’, turning the universe upside down: ‘And wrong for right, and bad of good did make,/And death for life exchanged foolishlie’ (VII, vi, 6). In Ovidian terms, Mutabilitie plans to turn the world back to the primeval chaos described at the start of the Metamorphoses, mirroring the Titans’ attack on heaven.56 Perhaps another myth from the same book also informs Mutabilitie’s actions: Orpheus was slain by the Ciconian women when ‘for the first time, his words had no effect’, just as Spenser might well have felt that his words had no effect on the queen and the question of the succession in the 1580s and 1590s.57 ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ dramatise the conflict between Nature and order ranged against the forces of chaos; Jove against the Titans; Elizabeth against Mary Queen of Scots; the Tudors against the Stuarts. Nature awards the victory to the former on the problematic grounds that although everything changes They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate. (VII, vii, 58) Metaphysically this may be true, but it clearly does not square with the description of the ailing queen eight stanzas earlier, or the myth of Ireland’s fall into contemporary chaos at the end of canto vi. Mutabilitie, I would suggest, is a transformed version of Duessa, just as Duessa was a transformed version of Error. As such, she inherits the allegorical mantle of Mary. Mary’s execution, as I have already pointed out, is not actually represented in the poem, surely a sign that Duessa has been inadequately dealt with, banished rather than extinguished. The graphic destruction of Malengin outside the gates of Mercilla’s castle, after that shape tries, unsuccessfully, to prolong his life by transforming himself from his ‘proper forme’ (V, ix, 16), serves as a pointed contrast and a key to the correct way to deal with dangerous enemies. The fear the poem articulates is that Mutabilitie may be evil and wrong, but that her claims – like Mary’s – are impossible to resist. Order will return to chaos and Orpheus, his words savaged by the


Blatant Beast (VI, xii, 40), will be torn apart by the Ciconian women and their evil legacy. The question arises, whether Spenser intended the cantos to be read as an attack on the Stuart claim, rather than on just Mary herself as an evil Catholic queen. If so, then the cantos have to be read as an attack on James who clearly enabled his mother to live on, making the reader equate James with Mary, as the son assumes the mother’s mantle. This is possible and the fact that James took no action when the poem was published in 1609 cannot in itself be read to prove the opposite case.58 By then, Spenser had been dead for ten years and the problem of the succession had long been decided. Had he read the poem, it is likely that James would not have bothered much about the representation of his mother as his own objectives had been achieved. However, we do not know when the ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ were written. They were published by Matthew Lownes, who probably inherited them from the papers of Spenser’s major publisher, William Ponsonby, but in exactly what state is not clear. As Colin Burrow has pointed out, they ‘may just be an incomplete fragment of an unfinished book’, that ‘Lownes could possibly have printed . . . to make his 1609 edition more attractive to the book-buying public’.59 There are enough topical references contained in them to suggest that parts were written in the 1590s and a plausible case has been made that they refer directly to Spenser’s land dispute with his immediate neighbour, Lord Roche of Fermoy.60 However, it is also possible that the representation of Mutabilitie herself was written much earlier, perhaps when the question of Mary’s influence was more topical in the late 1580s.61 Once again, how we decide to date the parts of the poem helps to determine how we read the allegory, its significance and relevance. What conclusions can be drawn from this analysis of Spenser’s representation of Duessa and the intervention of James VI? I would suggest that given the careful rewriting that characterises The Faerie Queene, where episodes conspicuously echo and qualify earlier ones, forcing readers to go back and reread passages, it is likely that the links between Mary Queen of Scots, Duessa and Mutabilitie are deliberate and form part of the wider allegorical significance of the poem. Representations of Elizabeth – Britomart, Florimell, Gloriana, Belphoebe, and so on – are to be read against these dangerous and divisive female rulers and powerful figures, but also stand as examples of what Elizabeth could be (as recent analyses have made clear, figures such as Lucifera were designed as explicit criticisms of Elizabeth and her court, illustrating


the overlap of good and bad queens in the poem).62 The poem suggests that that there may be less to choose between such figures than there should be and that Elizabeth, in spite of herself, is likely to do the work of Duessa and Mutabilitie herself. It is clear, then, that the representation of Mary Stuart plays a key role in the poem’s allegory. It is hard to believe that Spenser had no idea that his work might reflect badly on James VI, even if he underestimated the attention it would receive, but, in the absence of corroborating evidence, we must work with conjecture. Nevertheless, it is possible that Spenser was a careless writer who recycled his work in a more haphazard manner than we have often assumed and James, not realising that Spenser had no official sanction, overreacted most unfortunately. Alternatively, it is much more likely that the attack on the claim of Mutabilitie would seem to reflect explicitly on James himself, and serve as a warning that he should not resemble his mother in any way.

9 Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain

A number of recent studies has made the strong case that the effect of English expansion within the British was primarily to unify the peoples concerned and help form identities of the emerging nations. Thus Marc Caball, in a thorough and meticulously researched book on early modern bardic poetry in Ireland, has argued that in the face of the invasions the bards ‘initiated a pioneering re-evaluation of traditional Gaelic modes of communal definition which culminated in the creation of the modern Irish national identity’.1 Peter Roberts has claimed that the union of England and Wales which became law in 1543 spread a single code of legal practice to Wales and so served to release ‘the Welsh from the sense of occupying only sections of their own country. . . and they could now be said to inhabit a land united for the first time in their history’.2 In fact, in answering Gwyn Williams’s famous question, when was Wales? Roberts unequivocally answers that ‘Wales was the creation of the Henrician ‘‘union’’ with England’.3 What I want to turn my attention to in this chapter is the concomitant fear of a disunification and fragmentation of English identity as English expansion gained momentum in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, especially when the English throne was occupied by a Scottish king who had his own ideas for unifying the diverse peoples of the British Isles. Perhaps a reading of the centripetal and centrifugal forces which determined the ways in which early modern British identities were constructed will cause us to rethink Homi Bhabha’s understanding of the ambivalence of colonial discourse and the balance of the varieties of hybrid identity in the respective contact zones.4 Of course, various forms and types of identity did exist. But while Ireland and Wales appeared to contemporaries to have been united by their different experiences of invasion and colonisation, 137


English intellectuals saw their nation in danger of dissolving or selfdestructing. Jeffrey Knapp has argued that there was widespread scepticism in early modern England about the value of the spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to establish colonies in the Americas in the 1580s and 1590s. What most commentators demanded, according to Knapp, was security at home and the establishment of stable borders against the internal and external threat of Catholicism, so that writings ostensibly concerned with other cultures inevitably become self-reflexive in style and content. Knapp sees Spenser as the key poet because he established an ‘otherworldly English potentiality in his poetry’.5 I would suggest that Knapp’s argument is half-right, but fails principally because of his rigid separation of a domestic England and an exotic New World, that is, he ignores the imperial context of the British Isles and assumes that ‘little’ England was a stable entity rather than a moveable feast. Propagandists like Richard Hakluyt the younger were painfully aware that if England wanted to preserve its independence then it had to compete with the Spanish in the Americas.6 The identity of a nation could only be preserved through expansion. It is this paradox, I would like to suggest, which is more central to English fears and preoccupations around the year 1600 rather than a straightforward and – it has to be said – quite impossible desire for an isolated ‘little England’. There was, I think, extreme suspicion of the ‘British project’, so far as plans were developed, comprehended or known. Even James I, as the recent researches of Jenny Wormald have established, was probably less committed to the goal of uniting the British Isles under his rule than has hitherto been assumed, and was more interested in a strategic plan which would advance the interests of Scots at court.7 After all, James’s plan was never ratified by the English parliament even if he did often choose to style himself ‘King of Britain’.8 It is arguable that a blueprint for a British identity could be seen in William Camden’s Britannia (1586), a work which significantly included Ireland in its definition of Britain, or to a lesser extent the enthusiasm for the Arthurian legends and early British Christianity in Bale or Leland.9 Camden certainly exercised a massive influence over more derivative chorographical works such as John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611), and was undoubtedly important in determining the ambitious ‘British’ works of Edmund Spenser and Michael Drayton.10 However, it is by no means clear that Camden himself had any enthusiasm for a more integrated political notion of Britain. Camden is at pains to stress the antiquarian nature of the task he is

Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain 139

undertaking and that in uncovering the ancient history of the Britons and their part in the history of the islands they inhabited, he explicitly avoids any connection with the present.11 Of course, Camden’s stance may be disingenuous, but it stands in marked contrast to the loyal enthusiasm for James’s British project advertised in Speed’s Theatre. Speed dedicated the work to James I as ruler of Great Britain and in the dedication to George Norrey King writes of his book as a restoration of the glory of ‘our nation’ in which the reader can see the true shape of Britain as if in a mirror.12 The point to be made is that although both Spenser and Drayton made extensive use of Camden’s Britannia and other relevant works in their writings, they were never dependent on the ways in which Camden constructed his material. Indeed, I would argue that in the course of writing their lengthy poems on the histories and geographies of Britain they articulated serious criticisms of the very notions of Britain and Britishness. The Faerie Queen, as I have argued in the previous two chapters, explicitly signals a British context for Faeryland.13 This is not, of course, the same as assuming that it is a poem in favour of a ‘British project’. The second edition of the poem (1596) ended with a book that witnessed the destruction of the pastoral world, which Spenser had explored since the start of his poetic career, a series of bucolic settings representing both England and Ireland at different points.14 The inability to control and reform Ireland in Book V sees the unstoppable progress of the Blatant Beast and the attendant chaos this inability brings, which sweeps aside all the pastoral havens in Book VI. Even when the Beast is bound, he escapes, threatening all sense of order, including the poet’s words: So now he raungeth through the world againe, And rageth soe in each degree and state; Ne any is, that may him now restraine, He growen is so great and strong of late, Barking and biting all that him doe bate, Albe they worthy blame, or cleare of crime: Ne spareth he most learned wits to rate, Ne spareth he the gentle Poets rime, But rends without regard of person or of time. (VI, xii, 40) Whereas the beasts, dragons and giants who punctuated the landscape in Book I were all eventually defeated by the forces of good, the poem


published in Spenser’s lifetime ends with the apocalyptic fear that there is one creature who cannot be so controlled and who will destroy all marks and traces of civilisation.15 In a crucial sense the problem of the chaos and random destruction with which the authorially sanctioned form of The Faerie Queene ends has to be linked to the acknowledgement of the problematic and amorphous presence of Britain. If a monarch claims to be able to unite the greater part of the nations and regions that make up the British Isles, in what sense can that ruler exercise power and authority over the territories and the peoples which inhabit them? After all, aren’t the nations different territories, which have separate – albeit intertwined – histories, which cannot easily be joined together? Isn’t there a danger that in appealing to the ancient concept of Britain to unite a series of disparate peoples – Britons, Picts, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Danes, Normans, and so on – histories will contradict each other and assumed rights be impossible to reconcile? One should remember that Spenser was involved in a long legal struggle with the Old English Lord Maurice Roche of Fermoy over the rights to parts of his estate at Kilcolman, a case that began in 1589 before the publication of the first edition of The Faerie Queene and which Lord Roche won.16 The rights of English undertakers in Ireland were not beyond local challenges whatever English claims of their rights to Ireland. In addition, one should remember that the text of The Faerie Queene is littered with signs that Britain can never be united properly. When the Thames and the Medway are married in the Hall of Proteus, all the rivers of the world attend from the Ganges and the Euphrates to the humblest English rivers such as the Churne and the Charwell as the description moves inwards. The Irish rivers are included but their history is cunningly forgotten by the poet: Ne thence the Irish Riuers absent were, Sith no lesse famous then the rest they bee, And ioyne in neighbourhood of kingdome nere . . . Though I them all according their degree, Cannot recount, nor tell their hidden race, Nor read the saluage cuntreis, thorough which they pace. (IV, xi, 40) There is a slippery pun here on the word ‘race’ meaning a people and the course the water takes. There is also a clear irony in the poet’s sudden lapse of memory given that these lines were published after he had written extensively on the Irish and their ‘salvage cuntreis’ in A View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1596).17 A few stanzas later a hint of the sort


of history that the rivers bring with them is given with a reference to the ‘balefull Oure, late stained with English blood’ (44), probably an allusion to the defeat of Lord Grey de Wilton at Glenmalure in 1580.18 Such historical knowledge is obviously inappropriate for a marriage ceremony and its attendant celebrations. Despite the wide geographical range of the river guests, the threatening reality of recent British history is kept at arm’s length, absent but revealed for those who want to read it. But if there are dark hints throughout the authorially sanctioned Faerie Queene that the question of Britain may well circumscribe and define the historical allegory in the poem, the problem is tackled full on in ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’. As I have argued in the previous chapter, Mutabilitie’s plea that she is the true ruler of the universe depends on her claim that all are eventually subject to the vicissitudes of time and that she can therefore undermine and overtake the institutionally sanctioned power of Jove. Her claim is made in terms that point explicitly to the question of sovereignty, which links her assertion of a prior right to that made by Mary Queen of Scots and her supporters, and casts Cynthia – Jove’s minion – as Elizabeth. The trial of Mutabilitie takes place in Ireland, a reminder of the English crown’s claim to that kingdom. Indeed, I would suggest that it is the British context of this asserted right which helps to emphasise the problems that a monarch who rules a multiple kingdom will have to confront.19 Mutabilitie’s challenge, if upheld, erodes the belief in a stable hereditary monarchy that rules a given territory, that is, exactly the claim that Jove makes as his right to rule the universe and one which upholds the power of his client, Cynthia (Elizabeth). The paradox of the English monarchy’s expansion within the British Isles is that it actually served to undermine the belief in a right to rule through hereditary monarchy, even if the stated reason for the expansion was to protect such a system of government through the establishment of an imperial authority.20 With territorial expansion came competing claims for territories, a conflict which inevitably challenged faith in the timeless right of monarchs to rule over a specified area. Looked at this way, from Mutabilitie’s perspective, the British project, however loosely conceived, did not necessarily lead to the vision of an ordered and united kingdom ruled by divine right as James would later have it, but possibly to republican values with their particular emphasis on the need for military conflict, territorial expansion and conquest to test and preserve society’s virtue. Whereas hereditary monarchy depended upon the acceptance that the ability and right to rule was the preserve of the classes and individuals who had always performed such tasks, republicans


argued that virtue had to be continually tested, often through the trial of war. It was an easy step to assume that perpetual conflict was therefore a benefit to the society that wished to be virtuous.21 All of this may not be the stated intention of Mutabilitie’s challenge; after all, she wishes to play by the old rules. But it may well be the effect.22 In essence, Mutabilitie’s case is hard to resist and the questions she poses are precisely the ones which any hereditary monarchy would least like to have to answer. Jove is a usurper; his own position undercuts his intellectual defence of his rights. His argument culminates in a belief in the rights of conquest and the exercise of superior power: For, we by Conquest of our sovereine might, And by eternall doome of Fates decree, Haue wonne the Empire of the Heauens bright. (VII, vi, 33, lines 5–7) Mutabilitie has forced Jove’s hand and he has effectively admitted that his only right to rule is through his military might, a position which would appear to support his opponent’s case rather than his own, indicating that his claim is certainly no better than hers. Jove’s explicit defence of his right to rule is based primarily on his power and authority, I would haue thought, that bold Procrustes hire, Or Typhus fall, or proud Mons paine, Or great Prometheus, tasting of our ire, Would have suffiz’d, the rest to restraine. (VII, vi, 29, lines 5–8) Just as the landscapes of Books V and VI are littered with the dismembered bodies of rebels pour encourages les autres, so does Jove boast of his ability to root out and hurt those who oppose his authority.23 The conclusion that he appears like an earthly Renaissance monarch to Spenser is strengthened when he dismisses Mutabilitie as ‘this offscum of that cursed fry’ [i.e. the Titans] and expresses outrage that she ‘Dare to renew the like bold enterprize,/And chalenge th’heritage of this our skie’ (29). It is not clear that Jove has the right to claim that the kingdom of the sky is his heritage. If there is no fundamental conception of order in the universe then we cannot preserve a belief in a divinely ordered sense of time, although Jove asserts that he rules ‘by eternall doome of Fates decree’. Again, this is precisely Mutabilitie’s point: what counts is the ability to enforce one’s will on others. The parallels between the trial of Mutabilitie and the transformation of the land where the event takes place show how clearly focused


Spenser was on the question of British government. When Diana abandons Ireland it ceases to be ‘far above the rest/Of all that beare the British Islands name’ (VII, vi, 38, lines 2–3) and becomes a wilderness populated by thieves and wolves who attack the decent citizens unfortunate enough to live there (55). Significantly enough the debate between Jove and Mutabilitie occurs before Diana’s humiliation and departure, enabling Spenser to make a polemical political point about Elizabeth abandoning Ireland to its fate in the 1590s by refusing to support the New English settlers with adequate military aid during the Nine Years War.24 More radical still is the suggestion that perhaps Cynthia/Diana/ Elizabeth has no right to Ireland anyway beyond her rights of conquest and the superior force she possesses as a creature of Jove. In abandoning Ireland Diana surrenders her right to rule, something that can only be exercised through her active republican virtu`. The paradox which the poem presents is that hereditary monarchy can only survive if it proves its worth in a hostile universe, a reality that calls into question what is ostensibly being defended. Equally, one might make a case that the most virtuous form of government, and the one best suited for the inhabitants of the British Isles, is a hereditary monarchy.25 Republican thought does not necessarily lead to republicanism. I am not asserting that in The Faerie Queene Spenser argues a straightforward case and makes clear-cut conclusions. Rather, that his work is bold enough to highlight the problems of territorial expansion and the competing and conflicting claims that result from such activity.26 Of course, the problem is one that cannot be avoided, a point forcefully made through Spenser’s use of the myth of Saturn, Jove and the Titans. Which borders have ever been stable or which dynasty undisputed? How many nations have not suffered from internal conflict or refused to expand when it was within their power? As Spenser was obviously aware there were opportunities as well as problems in such an uncertain universe. Jeffrey Knapp’s contention that Spenser was a key poet for many subsequent writers is well attested.27 However, his influence was undoubtedly not in terms of a straightforward polarity between colonialism and insularity as Knapp suggests. Rather, I would suggest, Spenser’s key influence was in terms of Britishness. If Spenser’s vision of Britain was fractured by actual and potential conflicts, that of his disciple, Michael Drayton, brought these to a head. The poem has recently been read with scrupulous care by Claire McEachern, following on and revising Richard Helgerson’s analysis of the transformation from nation as monarchy to


nation as land itself in Christopher Saxton’s maps, which accompanied the text. McEachern argues that Drayton attempts to balance a fine line between the universal and the particular, the local and the national: In many respects, Poly-Olbion tempers the ferocity of regional alliance . . . Yet at the same time, if Poly-Olbion wishes to contain the divisiveness provoked by local loyalty, it also wants to acknowledge it: to appease the conflict revealed in the union debates and yet also to insist on the prerogatives of Englishness.28 McEachern further points out that whereas colonialism is acknowledged as important to England at this time, it is only ever in terms of the Americas, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, never the notion of ‘Britain’ itself.29 The model for uniting Britain under English suzerainty, according to McEachern, was a hope that the other British nations would be as docile as Wales was believed to have been earlier in the sixteenth century.30 While accepting much of McEachern’s perceptive comments, I would suggest that Drayton was a more careful reader of Spenser than McEachern has realised, and, like Spenser, less of a straightforward enthusiast for James’s proposed British union. Poly-Olbion was dedicated to Prince Henry, not his father, and the company which Drayton kept – Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Ben Jonson, the Sidneys – certainly suggests that we need not assume that his poem was intended to celebrate James’s political initiatives.31 Drayton, in fact, had failed to secure James’s patronage early in his reign and so had good reasons for regarding him with suspicion.32 The fact that the poem was delayed for so long after it had been announced by Francis Meres in 1598 further suggests caution and problems with its composition and anticipated reception. The very title of the poem, Poly-Olbion, suggests a refusal to return to a British origin in order to unify the disparate nations, in favour of what was normally assumed to be the more ancient name for the island, ‘Albion’ (and so excluding Ireland). Moreover, the notes to the poem, composed by the historian, John Selden, argue that the name ‘Albion’ post-dates that of Britain, indicating a break from the obsession with origins as a means of authenticating a name or a place. Selden comments that ‘the name Britain was known to strangers before Albion’ and that ‘Afterward Albion was imposed upon [the inhabitants] . . . expressing the old British name Inis-guin [The White Isle]’.33 For Selden, at least, the name ‘Albion/Olbion’ signifies an inauthenticity: ‘which argument moves me before all other, for that I see it usual in antiquity to


have names among strangers in their tongue just significant with the same in the language of the country to which they are applied’ (p. 33). The prefix ‘Poly’ would appear to suggest that the territories included within the geography the poem represents consist of a variety of different identities, regional and national.34 Drayton’s political fear, I would suggest, was the same as Spenser’s, that the cultural and civilised ideal which their education, life and writings had led them to support had, in fact, no more divine sanction than the chaos, anarchy and barbarism against which they believed they were struggling.35 The much-analysed episode in the Fourth Song concerning the dispute between Wales and England over the isle of Lundy illustrates this problem neatly.36 The debt the poem owes to Spenser is frequently advertised in Selden’s notes (vol. 1, p. 114; vol. 2, p. 86), and it is clear that many passages owe much to The Ruins of Time, The Prothalamion, and the marriage of the Thames and Medway in Book IV of The Faerie Queene, probably a fragment of an earlier poem on the rivers of England.37 The Fourth Song, where the Welsh and English argue their claims for possession of Lundy, appears to derive from the recently printed ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (1609). Spenser’s fragment was published posthumously by the printer Matthew Lownes, someone who may well have shown the manuscript of the poem to interested parties. Lownes was also partly responsible for the publication of the first part of Drayton’s poem, further indicating a link between the two works.38 Drayton’s poem takes the form of a legal-historical argument between the two countries for possession of the island, which, in William Hole’s accompanying engraving, is placed exactly halfway between the two countries in the River Severn. In reality, and the Saxton map on which the engraving was based, it lies closer to Cornwall than Wales.39 The goddess Sabrina, alerted to the dispute between ‘countries like allied’ (IV, 39) asks Neptune for his permission to stage the contest and asks the spirit of the River Severn to judge. When Neptune gets his Tritons to proclaim the contest, the rivers, moors, marshes and meads assemble somewhat overeagerly and chaotically: ‘Mongst Forests, Hills, and Floods, was ne’er such heave and shove,/Since Albion wielded arms against the son of Jove’ (IV. 55–6), consciously Spenserian lines which recall the assembly of the rivers for the marriage of the Thames and Medway in The Faerie Queene, IV, xi, as well as Jove’s war with Saturn, and then the Titans, indicating that there may not be a clear and inviolable right to rule.40 The Welsh argue from their position as inheritors of the legacy of the Britons (the original inhabitants of the island whose name has been usurped in favour of the one adopted by the poem).41


They boast of the exploits of their most famous prince, Arthur, and his establishment of an empire in Europe when he conquered Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and parts of France, before his betrayal by Mordred. They also detail the power of Merlin and their defeat of the Saxons before they were exiled to Brittany (all derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain, the principal source for Arthurian material in Tudor and Stuart England).42 The English respond with their historical legacy as Germans and Saxons, praising both English and Normans as the two races became mixed after William the Conqueror’s invasion. Elsewhere, William’s reign is significantly represented as ‘tyranny’ (II.200), an allusion to the fraught political arguments over the ‘Norman Yoke’, another disagreement between races that inhabited the British Isles to which the poem refers.43 Fortunately enough, a storm prevents an early judgement and, when it does arrive, the Severn is suitably even-handed, celebrating the achievements of both sides, diplomatically referring back to the Tudors’ uniting the Red and White roses of the houses of York and Lancaster, and concluding rather tamely, ‘That Lundy like allied to Wales and England is’ (V.80).44 Probably the details of the conflict are not so important for the purpose of my argument here. Drayton’s Spenserian model of Britishness emphasises the contingent nature of the universal, indicating that one can never triumph fully over Mutabilitie because no judgement can ever be secure. The fear is that there may actually be no sense of right in the universe and that, in the end, force is all that rules. The project of uniting Britain will succeed – after a fashion – if James has enough muscle to enforce his vision, but equally might fail and the whole break up into distinct parts if recalcitrant peoples and cultures prove more powerful. There is no moral or philosophical way of choosing between either position, or way of predicting how areas will be combined in the future. The land in Poly-Olbion brings with it a multifarious history of success and failure, unions and divisions. Nevertheless, Poly-Olbion, with its catalogue of Ovidian myths where female river nymphs combine with male spirits of mountains, has more often been read to support Barbara Ewell’s contention that ‘Contained and organised by Albion’s deified body, the discontinuous realities of England are metamorphosed into an ideal unity, a goddess who embodies all space and time into a living symbolic whole.’45 It should be pointed out that ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ has often been read in the same way, as an endorsement of the status quo.46 What needs to be understood is that the land represented is not simply England, which is


the first problem. England and Britain could not simply be equated, especially during the rule of a Scottish king assuming the English throne seeking to unite the British Isles. The second problem is the Ovidian form of the poem because, as Spenser, Drayton’s poetic master, demonstrates, Ovid performed a variety of roles for readers in early modern England. Ovid was a subversive erotic poet, a political exile, whose ubiquitous aetiological myths could serve a whole range of ideological purposes.47 The seemingly benign landscape of the British Isles – at least the section represented in Drayton’s poem – is replete with signs of danger, exactly like the pastoral landscapes of The Faerie Queene, Books VI and VII.48 Just as Spenser’s rivers carry a history with them which is not always what people want to hear or believe, so do the natural features in Poly-Olbion. Invariably such historical references remind the reader of the reality of countless invasions and civil wars. In the sixth song which represents the rivers of Wales, the Muse of the Wye complains of the invasions which have ousted the British and the peoples who have assumed domination of the island and extirpated the remains of the indigenous peoples: The Roman, next the Pict, the Saxon, then the Dane, All landing in this Isle, each like a horrid rain Deforming her; besides the sacrilegious wrack Of many a noble book, as impious hands should sack The centre, to extirp all knowledge, and exile All brave and ancient things, for ever from this Isle. (The Sixth Song, lines 335–40) It is hard to see how these differences can be ignored or integrated into a larger whole as easily as Ewell’s optimistic reading of the poem suggests. The complaint is repeated by Sabrine, muse of the Severn in the Eighth Song, probably a reminder that suspending a judgement will not solve the question of the possession of the Isle of Lundy. Sabrine casts her eye over the landscape and observes her native land: Those counties whence she came, surveyeth (passing by) Those lands in ancient times old Cambria claim’d her due, For refuge when to her th’oppressed Britons flew; By England now usurp’d, who (past the wonted meres, Her sure and sovereign banks) had taken sundry Sheeres, Which she her Marches made: whereby those Hills of fame And rivers stood disgrac’d. (The Eighth Song, lines 4–9)


The Marches were, of course, borderlands designed to protect England from Welsh incursions and resistance to English domination.49 The history of the island appears to be working strongly against a British project of unification. The Muses are reminding readers that the integration of Wales was by no means the straightforward, painless exercise it was often assumed to have been, and that the union might still have painful repercussions.50 The lines cited above raise the problem of the historical differences between races. What if national, regional and racial differences stubbornly refuse to break down and ancient identities are preserved? Will the hopes of union evaporate? Poly-Olbion at the very least articulates the fear that this has been and will continue to be the case in the foreseeable future. The burden of various and conflicting histories is further emphasised in the ‘Two-And-Twentieth Song’, in which the Muse of the River Ouze is forced to describe the effects of rebellion and civil war on the landscape close to the heart of England itself. The narrator ends her long description – in the longest song in the poem – of England’s civil wars with a hasty list of recent rebellions: the Cornish Prayer Book Rebellion (1547–49); Kett’s Rebellion (1549); and Wyatt’s Rebellion (1553–54).51 The song ends with a substantial description of a solitary nymph sadly left over from a previously flourishing pastoral community: So travelling along upon her silent shore, Waybridge a neighbouring Nymph, the only remnant left Of all that Forest-kind, by Time’s injurious theft Of all that tract destroy’d, with wood which did abound, And former times had seen the goodliest Forest-Ground, This Island ever had: but she so left alone, The ruin of her kind[.] (The Two-And-Twentieth Song, lines 1602–7) These lines appear to be yet another deliberate echo of The Faerie Queene, referring back to the transformation of Ireland from the ‘Holy Island’ to the desolate wilderness described after Diana leaves in ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (Selden refers to Ireland as ‘the Holy Island’ in his notes to Poly-Olbion (p. 24)).52 In Spenser’s fragment, Ireland is transformed from the best of the British Isles (‘when IRELAND flourished in fame/Of wealths and goodnesse, far above the rest/Of all that beare the British Islands name’ (VII, vi, 38) where Diana comes to play with her nymphs (39), to the worst:


Them all, and all that she so deare did way, Thence-forth she left; and parting from the place, There-on an heauy haplesse curse did lay, To weet, that Wolues, where she was wont to space, Should harbour’d be, and all those Woods deface, And Thieues should rob and spoile that Coast around. Since which, those Woods, and all that goodly Chase, Doth to this day with Wolues and Thieues abound: Which too-too true that lands in-dwellers since haue found. (VII, vi, 55) The most striking parallel between the poems is the destruction of the woodland. But one might also note the significance of each being described as the best area now destroyed and the flight of the nymphs. Just as Diana flees, so is one solitary nymph left to relate the story to future generations ignorant of the area’s former glory. Books VI and VII of The Faerie Queene depict the terrible vision of the chaos which will be wrought throughout the British Isles if Ireland is not reformed and made secure for English rule.53 Drayton would then appear to be an extremely astute reader of Spenser in transferring the wasted landscape of ‘Two cantos of Mutabilitie’ to England itself. There is an acknowledgement that no territory and its history can ever reveal true stability and harmony; challenging and hostile histories do not simply occur in the furthest corners of Britain such as the savage Irish rivers stained with English blood present at the marriage of the Thames and the Medway (see above, p. 140). English history itself reveals conflicts and divisions which threaten current stability. The implications of attempts to unite the diverse cultures and peoples of the British Isles in the late Tudor and early Stuart period are uncertain, then as they are now. Certainly late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury observers and commentators, as the examples of Spenser and Drayton indicate, were by no means sanguine about the attempts they witnessed. For Spenser and Drayton, more meant more contested views rather than unity and harmony. However, neither was a naive ‘little Englander’ and realised that the question of Britain was not one that could be answered by a simple acceptance or refusal. Spenser, undoubtedly a founding voice of a certain equivocal scepticism regarding grand political projects, saw the implications of English expansion within the British Isles as a challenge to preconceived English ideas of political order and stability. However, expansion was as much a challenge and


an opportunity as a problem, and the republican implications of territorial expansion appear to have been grasped with a certain amount of enthusiasm.54 Equally the dangers of chaos and the end of civilisation are emphasised throughout the later books of The Faerie Queene. What is absolutely clear from ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ and other writings is that neither time nor the nation can afford to stand still. Drayton’s political position is perhaps less sharply defined. His nostalgia for Elizabeth’s reign and perceptive understanding of the inevitable conflicts and traumas which union has brought and would bring in the future do not end in a coherent political vision.55 Poly-Olbion is a poem beset by nervous anxiety and division, the latter problem exaggerated by the conflict between Drayton’s poetic text and John Selden’s scholarly notes.56 If Spenser made a plea for urgent and drastic action to stave off the forces of apocalyptic chaos, Drayton looked to the future with a certain resigned gloom.

10 Shakespeare’s Ecumenical Britain

What did Shakespeare think of the British project? Was he in favour of a union? Opposed to one? Did he change his mind? Or did he simply produce a vision in line with popular contemporary thought? His plays show how clearly he was interested in – or at least prepared to engage with – the British question. Henry V contains a Scottish captain called Jamy, one of four characters who represent the four nations of Britain on stage before the storming of Harfleur (3.2) (see above, pp. 105–7). It is hard to believe that Jamy is not a somewhat patronising reference to James VI of Scotland, the candidate most likely to assume the English throne after Elizabeth’s death, suggesting that Shakespeare, like Spenser, was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of being ruled by a monarch from north of the border.1 Jamy, albeit somewhat inadvertently, sparks off the clash between the Welshman, Fluellen, and the Irishman, Macmorris. When Macmorris complains that ‘It is no time to converse’ (3.2.106), because military prowess rather than verbal skill is demanded in the heat of battle, Jamy retorts that ‘ere these eyes of mine take themselves to slumber I’ll dae guid service’ (115–16).2 He concludes his short speech with the provocative, ‘Marry, I wad full fain heard some question ’tween you twa’ (119–20), an opaque statement that indicates that some sort of discussion should precede their engagement with the French, and that they should not accept that war is simply a matter of ‘there is throats to be cut, and works to be done’ (112–13), as Macmorris alleges. Jamy’s remark, illustrating his irritation with the swaggering Macmorris, leads to Fleullen’s notorious remark that ‘there is not many of your [Macmorris’s] nation —’ (122–3), which then sets the Welshman and the Irishman at odds. Shakespeare deliberately leaves Fleullen’s comment unfinished, adding to the ambiguity and confusion of the situation. The 151


sensible Englishman, Gower, intervenes, pointing out that each mistakes the other (136). It is important that the English audience in London sees the Scotsman sowing dissent between the Welshman and the Irishman, a situation that reveals how fractured Henry’s army really is, and how the union of the four nations will be a hard task for anyone to achieve and may only occur if they have a common enemy such as France. Shakespeare’s scepticism is more readily apparent if one bears in mind that the play was written just before the Earl of Essex left for Ireland with the largest army ever assembled in England to quell Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion, a context signalled in the text by the slip whereby ‘France’ is substituted with ‘Ireland’.3 In Henry V the Welsh, Scots and Irish would fight among each other if they were not controlled by the English.4 Another late Elizabethan play, Troilus and Cressida (c.1601–2), can also be read as a sardonic comment – albeit oblique rather than direct – on the potential union of Britain.5 As has been extensively documented, the Tudors made use of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, in order to trace their ancestry back to the Trojan Brutus, descendant of Aeneas, and so record a translatio imperii from Greece/Troy to Rome to England/Britain.6 Shakespeare’s play ridicules the war and its principal actors, the Greeks being cynical and brutal, the Trojans foolish and ineffective, and the two women, Helen and Cressida, self-serving courtesans. The audience has to work very hard not to agree with Thersites that ‘All the argument is a whore and a cuckold; and a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon’.7 This is not a message that is comfortably in line with expectations set up by the prologue, whose grand words seem to echo those of the prologues in Henry V: In Troy there lies the scene. From isles of Greece The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed, Have to the port of Athens sent their ships Fraught with the ministers and instruments Of cruel war. Sixty and nine, that wore Their coronets regal, from th’Athenian bay Put forth toward Phrgia, and their vow is made To ransack Troy, within whose strong immures The ravished Helen, Menelaus’s queen, With wanton Paris sleeps; and that’s the quarrel. (Troilus and Cressida, Prologue, 1–10).8

Shakespeare’s Ecumenical Britain 153

Troilus and Cressida owes much to Spenser’s retelling of the Trojan legends in The Faerie Queene, Books II and III. There, Britomart showed how the legends could be used to inspire a nation and establish a dynasty of kings and queens who would protect their subjects for generations to come. In pointed contrast, the lustful Paridell showed that he had gleaned the bare facts but not the substance of history, as he used his knowledge to seduce the foolish Hellenore, thus repeating the story of Troy’s fall rather than building a new nation from the ashes of the civilisation of the old world. Spenser’s rather gloomy point is that these lessons may be good ones but they are now redundant as Elizabeth has failed to produce an heir and secure the succession.9 Shakespeare’s play, written as the demise of Elizabeth and the accession of James was imminent, is more nihilistic. Spenser’s poem allows for the possibility that good advice, if properly heeded, could lead to regeneration and the renewal of the nation (although Spenser is clear enough that Elizabeth has got many things wrong). Troilus and Cressida seems to deny any possibility of revival for a moribund body politic, the predominant image being venereal disease, the ‘Neopolitan bone-ache’, that Pandarus wishes on the audience in the last lines of the play: ‘I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,/And at that time bequeath you my diseases’ (5.11.55–6). Such imagery can be read in terms of earlier trenchant commentary on the state of the nation in the history plays, a case in point being the overgrown and wild garden symbolically represented in Richard II (3.4). Here the Gardener remarks to one of his men that he needs to act ‘like an executioner’ and ‘Cut off the heads of too fastgrowing sprays/That look too lofty in our commonwealth’ (33–5), a simple allegory of the chaos caused by Richard’s over-promotion of his favourites that the Queen, hiding behind some trees, has no difficulty in interpreting. Given that Shakespeare provides a critical allegory of the Earl of Essex in Troilus and Cressida, representing him as the stupid and petulant Ajax, the play would seem to suggest that the dying realm of Elizabeth had nowhere to turn and no potential saviour.10 All the hope that Elizabeth might actually marry and produce an heir, expressed in numerous works in the first half of her reign, had given way to the disgust and hopelessness of painful disease that enveloped the body politic.11 The Virgin Queen had, in fact, had the same effect on her realm as Helen of Troy: She’s bitter to her country. Hear me, Paris: For every false drop in her bawdy veins A Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple


Of her contaminated carrion weight A Trojan hath been slain. Since she could speak She hath not given so many good words breath, As for her Greeks and Trojans suffered death. (4.1. 70–6) Troilus and Cressida, if it was written in 1601, would seem to be a brilliantly conceived literary intervention and commentary on what might well have been the lowest point of the queen’s reign. The Earl of Essex’s hopeless revolt took place on 8 February and he was executed on 25 February, the reductio ad absurdum of the cult of honour that Troilus and Cressida reveals as ridiculous.12 The campaign in Ireland looked equally grim and heading for disaster, with O’Neill’s forces linking up with the Spanish and threatening to end English rule and establish a hostile Catholic country within striking distance of England. The decisive defeat of the Irish and Spanish forces at Kinsale occurred at the end of the year (24 December 1601), making the gap between the rebellion and the defeat of the Irish an especially anxious time for the English. In any case, the extent of the success was not immediately obvious to contemporaries and O’Neill was able to negotiate favourable terms when the Nine Years War was finally brought to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Mellifont (30 March 1603).13 And, worst of all for Shakespeare perhaps, James VI was likely to inherit the throne. The British context is therefore crucial for an understanding of the historical significance of the play. Events in England, Scotland and Ireland did not bode well for the future. Troilus and Cressida is the most savage attack on the legend of the Trojan War written in Elizabeth’s reign. The play serves as an oblique commentary on the failures and vacillations of the Elizabethan regime, suggesting that the excess of violence caused by Helen, who has armies of great and insignificant men fight and die for her honour, can be read as a mirror of Elizabeth’s England. Yet the mirror of the play reflects a more potent truth still. Shakespeare is explicitly attacking those devotees of the matter of Britain who were keen to foster links between Britain and Troy, via Rome, and so patriotically assert the independence of a proud British tradition. The principal source was, as I have already noted, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which narrated the story of Brutus in terms of heroic conquest and imperial destiny. Brutus was the great-grandson of Aeneas, founder of Rome. When he was born the soothsayers predicted that he would ‘cause the death of both his father and his mother; and that after he had wandered in exile through many lands this boy would eventually


rise to the highest honour’.14 Brutus’s mother dies in childbirth and he accidentally shoots and kills his father ‘by an unlucky shot with an arrow’ while hunting, as a result of which he is exiled (p. 55). Brutus’s wanderings reunite him with other exiles from Troy and he becomes their leader. After a series of battles and conquests in Europe they reach the deserted island of Leogetia and found a temple to the goddess Diana where Brutus is told that he will sail to a new land and that ‘A race of kings will be born there from your stock and the round circle of the whole earth will be subject to them’ (p. 65). Brutus sails to the island of Albion, which he renames Troia Nova, but it is subsequently called Britain in his honour as the eponymous founder of the island race. Geoffrey casts Brutus as a second Aeneas, his story as an epic to rival those of the ancient world, with the triumph of the Britons and their empire coming after periods of uncertainty, doubt and defeat. Troilus and Cressida seems to be an explicit challenge to this ancient world of heroes and the birth of nations. The story takes us back to the pre-foundational story of Britain and shows that the origins of the Britons were as sordid and squalid as it was possible for them to be. This is a brilliant manoeuvre. Shakespeare avoids the rigours and pitfalls of historical argument, and does not have to align himself with Polydore Vergil’s attempts to expose the fictional nature of Geoffrey’s History and the myth of ancient Britain.15 Aeneas is shown to be a relatively colourless and insignificant figure, less important and dominant than his fellow Trojans Hector and Troilus, and also less impressive than the Greek heroes, Ajax, Ulysses and Diomede. Trojan idealism, expressed most pathetically in Hector’s self-deluding volte face at the end of Act 2, Scene 2, when he shows that he can see though the futility of war, but will fight anyway because everyone else has decided to do so (163–93), is shown to be dangerous and naive. The implication is that those who show an enthusiasm for the matter of Britain are equally deluded because the historical record shows only suffering and conflict. The union of the British nations would probably lead to problems rather than solutions, exposing the folly of the idea that Britain and England could be equated and conflated. Troilus and Cressida suggests that if you examine the historical record carefully and properly, it may warn you against the enthusiasms of the present (although, the play is, of course, made up, a conscious irony). It is significant that it is the Greeks, cynical and unappealing as they are, who have not only right on their side, but, through Thersites, provide the most intelligent commentary on the conflict (the point is further reinforced if we bear in mind that the harsh description of Helen is that


of Diomede, who supplants Troilus as Cressida’s lover). The Trojans may have a central place in the British imagination but it is the Greeks who serve as a more useful culture to emulate, being more intelligent and just. The complementary cynicism of Thersites and Ulysses, the one providing the detached analysis, the other the instrumental reason required to get things done, are what Britons should pay attention to, not the romantic notions of the Trojans, which disguise and distort reality and eventually cause disaster. The projected union of Britain would appear to be one such notion. Geoffrey’s History links Troilus and Cressida to a play that even more obviously made use of the matter of Britain, King Lear. Geoffrey is the sole source for the history of the reign of King Lear (Leir), a history which, as all students of the play well knew, Shakespeare refused to follow. Shakespeare probably also consulted the story as told in the chronicle sections of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II, canto x, 27–32, which is based closely on Geoffrey’s narrative. Geoffrey’s history is significantly different from the story told by Shakespeare (even if we ignore the question of the sub-plot). After a long reign (60 years) Geoffrey’s Leir – as Shakespeare’s – does indeed foolishly divide his dominions up between his daughters, giving a third each to Goneril and Regan, and nothing to the honest Cordelia who refuses to flatter him and so is married off without a dowry. Goneril and Regan then turn against him with their aggressive husbands. Hounded out of his kingdom and across the channel with one remaining follower, Leir is supported by his youngest and most loyal daughter and her husband, Aganippus, king of the Franks. Their army returns to invade Britain and the aged but vigorous Leir leads his troops to victory, defeating his treacherous sons-in-law. He is reinstated as king, and dies three years later to be succeeded by his remaining daughter. Cordelia rules for the next five years but is then overthrown by her sisters’ sons and she kills herself in prison (pp. 81–7). Geoffrey’s story of King Leir has no obviously happy ending and functions as part of the overall narrative pattern which sees the Britons oscillate between triumph and disaster (the book ends with the last British rulers sailing for Brittany after the Saxons have defeated the Britons). But it is clear that Leir is able to recover from his catastrophic errors in a way that he is unable to do in Shakespeare’s play and return as sole ruler of the Britons. Spenser too has Lear restored to his throne, ‘In which he dyde, made ripe for death by eld,/And after wild [i.e., willed], it should to her remaine’ (II, x, 32, lines 3–4). Indeed, it was the ending of


King Lear that gave the play its well-deserved reputation as Shakespeare’s bleakest work, one which led to Nahum Tate’s famous Restoration adaptation of 1681 in which Lear and Gloucester retire to a life of pastoral philosophizing while the newly married Edgar and Cordelia assume control of the kingdom. Edgar’s lines that close the newly conceived play serve as a pointed contrast to Shakespeare’s last scene: Our drooping Country now erects her Head, Peace spreads her balmy Wings, and Plenty Blooms. Divine Cordelia, all the Gods can witness How much thy Love to Empire I prefer! Thy bright Example shall convince the World (Whatever Storms of Fortune are decreed) That Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed.16 Tate’s world where ‘Jack shall have Jill and naught shall go ill’ is not in the spirit of Geoffrey’s ultimately nostalgic lament for the lost glories of the Britons. Nevertheless, Tate’s cheerful lines are closer to Geoffrey’s world than the pessimistic despair of Lear’s rhetorical question, ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life/And thou no breath at all?’ (5.3.305–6), or Kent’s comment on the dead king ten lines later: ‘Vex not his ghost; O let him pass. He hates him/That would upon the rack of this tough world/Stretch him out longer’ (312–14).17 The point is that Shakespeare’s play differs from the ways in which the story of Leir was told before and after his work. The question then remains why Shakespeare chose to depart so radically from his source material. A clue might be given in the title of the first printed version of the play, the first quarto of 1608 which advertised Shakespeare’s play as the True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters. A previous version of the story had appeared in print in 1605, The True Chronicle History of King LEIR and his three daughters. This was the anonymous chronicle play that had first been acted in 1594, and which ended happily with the restoration of Leir to his rightful place as King of Britain. As R. A. Foakes has observed, ‘It looks very much as if [Shakespeare’s] publisher was anxious to challenge Leir by claiming simultaneously that the new play was like the old one, and superior to it.’18 King Lear returns to and corrects the history of the matter of Britain, showing how the reality was much worse than the chronicle histories revealed. Shakespeare’s fiction lies to tell the truth, suggesting that we should read the play alongside Troilus and Cressida as


a work which sought to expose and so curb the bogus nature of the enthusiasm for ancient British history as a means of establishing the basis for a patriotic epic. It is clear that King Lear, a play written in the early years of James’s reign, between 1605 and 1606, reflects on James’s attempt in his first parliament (1603–4) to establish a binding union between England and Scotland.19 Of course, Shakespeare’s play cannot be read as a simple allegory of Jacobean politics.20 King Lear is an old man and James I a relatively young one (39–40 when King Lear was written); James was just starting his reign as King of England/Britain (as he hoped), Lear exhausted and planning to ‘crawl toward death’ (1.1.40); James had two sons, Henry and Charles, Lear, three daughters (Geoffrey notes that he had ‘no male issue’ (p. 81)); James wanted to unite Britain, Lear divide it up into three main parts which undoubtedly correspond to the territories of England, Scotland and Wales; and James had a wife, Queen Anne, who had a visible presence and was often at odds with her husband, Lear was a widower. It is the situations in which the monarchs place themselves that provides the substance of the parallel. Both monarchs grapple with the question of the unity – or disunity – of Britain; each ruler has an autocratic notion of kingship; and, most significantly, perhaps, the problems each king has in governing Britain stem from his inability to establish a more secure power base in a wider political public sphere. More topically, James’s sons, Henry and Charles, had just become dukes of Albany and Cornwall, the names of Goneril and Regan’s husbands (although it is hard to make a case that either prince actually resembled the spouse in question).21 James alienated the English House of Commons almost immediately through his intervention in the dispute resulting from the controversial election of Sir John Fortesque.22 Fortesque, a councillor, was beaten by Sir Francis Goodwin in Buckinghamshire, a rare case of a properly contested election in Tudor and Stuart England. Chancery then declared that Goodwin’s election had taken place without proper procedures being followed and that Fortesque should be permitted to sit in the Commons. The Commons decreed that Goodwin had won the right to represent Buckinghamshire and told him to take his place in the House. James insisted that Fortesque be given the seat because he had the backing of the king, but the Commons argued that James was trespassing on their rights as an ancient part of the English constitution, and refused to give way. When James demanded that the election be called void and that a conference be held between the king, his judges and


councillors and the Commons to determine the issue, the Commons issued a document outlining what they saw as their grievances and rights (the Apology). This declared ‘that parliamentary privileges were sacred’, and that the king did not understand the constitution of the country he was presuming to govern in demanding that they give up their independence. James responded with a justification of his position, which demanded that parliament respect his absolute authority, and see itself as an advisory body, rather than one that had the power and right to determine the actions of the monarch.23 Lear manages to alienate even his most loyal supporter, Kent, when he dares to tell the king that he is not acting in his own best interests, let alone those of his people: Be Kent unmannerly When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man? Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak, When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound When majesty falls to folly. Reserve they state, And in thy best consideration check This hideous rashness. (1.1.146–52) Such advice cannot be tolerated under Lear’s regime and Kent is duly banished for his outspoken bluntness, the form of his words a symptom of the fact that advice is not welcome and negotiation impossible. When Lear confesses that he has taken too little care of the impoverished in his kingdom (3.4.23–36) we also know that he is starting to realise that his isolated position as arbitrary ruler has been the principal cause of his ignorance of his realm. This ignorance is arguably the most telling fear articulated in King Lear. Lear simply does not know much about the lands he rules. He is quite prepared to divide his realm up using a map, revealing in the process that he knows nothing about his daughters’ ability to rule, or the subjects over whom they are to be given power. His first action shows that he has little understanding of the extent and reach of his kingdoms. His ‘darker purpose’ (1.1.35) is not just secret but, as the plot shows, a disaster for those who have to endure tyranny, civil war and uncertain government. Lear reveals that he has no conception of the ways in which a map describes and defines the people who live in the territories it represents, the relationship between the lines on the page and the real world. King Lear is sceptical about geographical and historical ignorance, which is why the fiction works to reveal the


truth hidden by the historical record and the people hidden by the map. Troilus and Cressida works relentlessly to expose those who would abuse their classical learning to generate enthusiasm for what Shakespeare evidently regards as a bogus historical argument crudely applied to the present for naive and dangerous patriotic purposes. King Lear performs a similar function, using history to create a true myth. The play points out that even the best intentioned monarch cannot hope to rule such a massive series of lands effectively without widespread support. James’s theory of autocratic government and his grand territorial ambitions are shown to be hopelessly inadequate and inevitably at odds. For if Lear knows nothing of the further reaches of his kingdoms, James had just demonstrated that he knew nothing of England and its constitutional traditions. Nevertheless, while Troilus and Cressida represents a hopeless and barren myth in which there is no possibility of change or redemption, King Lear shows a monarch who can take advice and learn from his errors, even if the play shows him realising the truth far too late and so unable to save his family and his nation from being destroyed. However, if plays written before and immediately after James’s accession to the throne are critical of – and might be read as hostile to – the projected union of the kingdoms and the ability of James to rule effectively, Shakespeare would seem to have changed his mind towards the end of his career. What was probably his last British play, Cymbeline, cannot be dated with any certainty because it only appears in the first folio of 1623. But, given that some of the source material that Shakespeare must have used is contained in Holinshed’s History of Scotland, narrated just after the story of Macbeth, it is likely that the composition of Cymbeline came in the wake of the Scottish play of Macbeth, probably composed 1608–10.24 While Troilus and Cressida and King Lear can be read as a literary pairing that express sceptical and hostile notions of the potential union of Britain, Macbeth and Cymbeline use material from Holinshed’s Chronicles to indicate that whatever faults James’s style of government had, and whatever limitations the partial union of Britain manifested, the accession of James had not been the disaster that many had expected. What is interesting about Cymbeline is how little is known of his reign. Geoffrey tells us that he was a ‘powerful warrior whom Augustus Caesar had reared in his household and equipped with weapons’. He had two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, and he handed over the British crown to the first born soon before his death. It is Guiderius who then defies the Romans and refuses to pay tribute, not his father, but he is


defeated by the forces of the emperor Claudius and murdered by the crafty Roman chief of staff who disguises himself as a Briton in order to get near the king in battle. His brother then makes peace with the Romans (pp. 117–19). Holinshed has Cymbeline become king in 33 CE and reign for 35 years. As in Geoffrey his childhood is spent in Rome. Holinshed claims that Augustus waived his right to a tribute from the Britons because Cymbeline serves him so well in his campaigns. Holinshed also has the refusal to pay tribute to Rome occur during Guiderius’s reign. Throughout the account the chronicle expresses uncertainty of detail and acknowledges gaps in the historical record: ‘This man (as some write) was brought up at Rome’; ‘here is to be noted, that although our histories doo affirme . . . yet we find in the Roman writers’; ‘But whether this controversie which appeareth to fall forth betwixt the Britans and Augustus, was occasioned by Kymbeline or some other prince of the Britains, I haue not to auouch’.25 Spenser’s narration of Cymbeline’s reign concentrates on the birth of Christ which took place at the same time: Next him Tenantius raigned, then Kimbeline, What time th’eternall Lord in fleshly slime Enwombed was, from wretched Adams line To purge away the guilt of sinfull crime: O ioyous memorie of happy time, That heauenly grace so plenteously displayd; (O too high ditty for my simply rime.) Soone after this the Romanes him warrayd; For that their tribute he refusd to let be payd. Good Claudius, that next was Emperour, An army brought, and with him battaile fought, In which the king was by a Treachetour Disguised slaine, ere any thereof thought: Yet ceased not the bloody fight for ought; For Aruirage his brothers place supplyde[.] (II, x, 50–1) Spenser makes no mention of Guiderius and has Arviragus as Cymbeline’s brother rather than his son. The confused, sketchy and little-known story of Cymbeline provides Shakespeare with an ideal opportunity to develop and rewrite British history for his own ends. Nothing whatsoever is known of Cymbeline’s


character, and the two key details that emerge from the story are the conflict with the invading Romans that is eventually resolved and the fact that Cymbeline’s reign takes place at the same time as the birth of Christ. Shakespeare makes use of the first issue as a means of concluding the play, and, although the second event is not mentioned, it undoubtedly provides a context for interpreting the action of Shakespeare’s plot.26 Cymbeline collects together a series of multiple plots to produce a coherent narrative.27 Cymbeline is a foolish king of Britain married to a warlike, nameless queen. Led on by his evil spouse, who wants her son, the oafish and brutal Cloten, to marry Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen, he banishes Posthumous Leonatus, a good gentleman who he has raised in his household, for marrying her first. Posthumous travels to Rome where he meets the cynical lothario, Iachimo. Posthumous bets Iachimo that Imogen will be too resolute to submit to his seductions when he travels to Britain. Imogen does indeed repel Iachimo’s advances but he hides in a trunk in her bedroom and so observes a mole on her breast enabling him to claim that he has won the bet. Posthumous sails in anger for Britain planning to kill her. Imogen learns of Posthumous’s anger from his servant, Pisanio, when heading for the Welsh port of Milford Haven to meet Posthumous and so disguises herself as a boy, Fidele, which enables her to join a band of British exiles in Wales led by the general, Belarius, who fled when he was falsely accused of complicity with the Romans. His two ‘sons’, Guiderius and Arviragus, are, in fact, the sons of Cymbeline, whom Belarius took with him. Meanwhile, the queen has encouraged Cloten’s pursuit of Imogen, and he pursues her to Wales where he is killed and beheaded by Guiderius. The diverse plots are all resolved in the final act. The Britons and the Romans assemble for what will be a decisive battle, with the Britons emerging victorious. Posthumous, who has fought for the Romans, is captured, and awaits execution. However, he experiences a marvelous vision when the ghosts of his dead father, mother and brothers (‘with wounds as they died in the wars’) appear to him, followed by Jupiter who explains that he has suffered enough and that everything will work out well. Iachimo confesses that Imogen is pure and the lovers are re-united; Cymbeline is also re-united with his sons, and reconciled to Belarius, realising that he did not betray him to the Romans; the wicked queen, aware that her plot to poison Cymbeline and install Cloten as king has failed, commits suicide. The play ends with a peace treaty concluded between the Britons and the Romans, with the victorious Britons agreeing to pay tribute to ensure cordial relations between the two nations.


The plot is worth rehearsing for a number of reasons. Cymbeline has frequently been criticised for its lack of consistency and its incredible narrative.28 Such criticism would seem to be wide of the mark, for the play continually reminds the audience that it is a fictional fantasy, and delights in adding more and more absurd detail and coincidences. It is clearly in line with the other romances, although bracketed with Pericles as an experiment that does not quite work, rather than the evidently successful The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.29 The point is not that Cymbeline is a play that fails to merge romantic fantasy with acute psychological insight, but, rather, that it makes fantastic many elements and narratives that might have seemed realistic to an audience.30 And, given that it is a British play, this manoeuvre has a distinct political significance. The plot of Cymbeline revolves around moments of incredible good fortune which draw attention to their own absurdity. When Posthumous hears Iachimo’s confession that Imogen was true to him all along, he strikes and nearly kills his future wife, believing her to have been murdered on his instructions, not disguised as the pageboy who tries to interrupt his passionate outburst. Fortunately Imogen recovers and all is well. Such romantic serendipity is mirrored in the political fortunes represented in the play. It is crucial to note that Cymbeline wins the battle by luck not judgement. The defeated Roman general, Lucius, makes a speech that no one contradicts: Consider, sir, the chance of war, the day Was yours by accident: had it gone with us, We should not, when the blood was cool, have threaten’d Our prisoners with the sword. But since the gods Will have it thus, that nothing but our lives May be call’d ransom, let it come: sufficeth A Roman with a Roman’s heart can suffer[.] (5.5.75–81 (my emphasis)) Cymbeline turns out to be an incredibly fortunate king. Although he makes a bad marriage to a wicked queen she and her son are conveniently disposed of before they cause permanent damage, he foolishly banishes his most powerful and loyal general, in the process losing his sons, but they are re-united; he banishes Posthumous, failing to see his true virtue and suitability as a future son-in-law and ruler; and, as outlined above, he defeats the Roman invaders through luck rather than judgement and military prowess. It is little wonder that at the end of the play Cymbeline feels so confident of his good fortune and


so well disposed towards the defeated Romans that he promises to pay the tribute that he owes them and formally submits to the emperor Augustus. In fact resistance had been the plan of ‘our wicked queen’, who has met her just reward (5.5.459–66). Instead, encouraged by the Roman soothsayer’s prophecy of ‘peace and plenty’ for Britain if it united with the Roman eagle (459, 481), the two armies leave the stage together, waving a Roman and a British ensign, with the British king confident that ‘Never was a war did cease/(Ere bloody hands were wash’d) with such a peace’ (485–6). The questions that the play raises are urgent, profound and, needless to say, difficult to answer. If Cymbeline is such a fortunate king in a play characterised by lucky accidents, what meaning can the action have for us? Is the peace significant, or does the audience know that this is simply one moment in the cycle of violence of British history and that disaster is just around the corner (in Geoffrey’s History, Vespasian returns to conquer Britain after Claudius concludes the peace treaty with Arvirargus)? Is Cymbeline wise enough to make use of his good fortune for the benefit of his subjects, and so behaves justly and fairly in agreeing to pay the tribute to Rome? Or is this simply a naivety that will haunt and burden his subjects? And, what relationship does this ancient British history have for the present? Cymbeline is probably the least distinguished and colourful of Shakespeare’s titular heroes, as befits a king whose historical presence is most notable for its shadowy nature. He achieves little of merit in his lifetime that stems from his own virtue, a quality more closely associated with his daughter (1.7.141–5; 4.2.19–24), perhaps pointing out the weakness and sins of the father. We do not see his victory against the Romans, which, like the battle for Britain in King Lear, takes place offstage. In fact, both are very distinct alterations to the historical record suggesting that Cymbeline’s great victory is a rewriting of Lear’s great defeat.31 Cymbeline may be an unlikely figure of James, having a daughter rather than two sons, being a military ruler, and having no discernable interest in young men or theology. Nevertheless, Shakespeare would seem to be drawing attention to the similarities in the respective positions of the two monarchs, showing how James in 1609–10 resembled his version of the ancient British king.32 The rewriting of King Lear suggests how much had changed since the early years of James’s reign. In 1609 James must have seemed to many of his subjects to have been among the most fortunate kings ever to have ruled. His self-styled role as the peacemaker seemed to be no idle boast and was bearing spectacular fruit after the war-torn century of the Tudors.33 The change from the last


decade of Elizabeth’s reign was especially striking. Although his attempt to unify Britain had been rebuffed by parliament, James had achieved most of what he could have hoped to have achieved in other areas. The Spanish threat had melted away, and the Treaty of London signed in 1604 had held. The Irish war had ended just days before James assumed the English throne, with the signing of the Treaty of Melifont, and James had been able to establish the Ulster Plantation in subsequent years. The Hampton Court Conference of 1604 had not ended religious faction and strife, but had not completely alienated either Puritans or Catholics either. But, most significantly of all, an attempt on his life, the Gunpowder Plot, had failed miserably when 36 barrels of gunpowder were discovered in the cellars of the House of Commons. James, like Cymbeline, clearly led a charmed life, as he acknowledged in his speech to parliament when parliament did open four days later. In that speech he repeated a comparison he frequently employed, that the king was like the head of the kingdom, and the parliament its body, an image which is spectacularly present in Cymbeline, not just in the headless corpse of Cloten, the evil son who would be king, but also when Cymbeline declares that Belarius, Guiderius and Arviragus form the ‘liver, heart, and brain of Britain’ (5.5.14).34 As Cymbeline did, James used his good luck to establish peace and reconciliation. The discovery of the plot did not inaugurate a new wave of repression against Catholics. The conspirators were tortured before being hanged, drawn and quartered, but repressive measures were minimal compared to those passed and enacted throughout the sixteenth century. Parliament passed more severe laws against Catholics, significantly increasing recusancy fines, but James made every effort to continue with his chosen policy of pursuing a via media which enabled most of his subjects to obey the laws of the land. He established an oath of Allegiance which simply demanded that his subjects acknowledge him as the lawful king of Britain and ‘denying the power of the Pope to depose him, but swearing also that the doctrine that an excommunicated king might be lawfully deposed or murdered was an impious, heretical and damnable doctrine’.35 James’s aim was to keep as many Catholics as possible loyal to the crown and so give them the means to serve both the Pope and their monarch, precisely what his religious policy had been before the Gunpowder Plot. Shakespeare’s play acknowledges this regal goal through its dual representation of Rome. On the one hand ‘Ancient Rome operates . . . proleptically to sanction an idealized British union that James sought from the beginning of his reign’; on the other, through the character of Iachimo,


we have ‘a scheming Tudor-Stuart stage Italian’ who stands for all the complex evils of contemporary Italian politics and religion.36 Hence, the ideal of union is juxtaposed to one of the chief threats to that union. Iachimo, unlike Antonio and Sebastian in The Tempest, does repent in the last scene, revealing his villainy and offering his life as a recompense for his crimes (5.5.414–18), which Posthumous refuses to take. But the question that hovers at the end of a play stuffed full of fantasies and acknowledged fictions is whether this is a repentance that is any more likely to take place in the real world in order to bring about a reconciliation than the offer Cymbeline makes to pay tribute to Rome after his victory. Equally problematic and finely balanced is the Welsh setting and representation of the fractured allegiances of the British Isles.37 There is no reference to Wales in the sources. Clearly setting the play in Wales avoids the difficulty of signalling open hostility to the crown through the use of Ireland, or tying the play to James too closely by using a Scottish location. Are we to read Wales as a symbol of peaceful union with England, demonstrated by the fact that it did not receive a separate history in Holinshed’s Chronicles, but appeared as part of the history of England? Or was Shakespeare using the Welsh setting to remind his audience that Wales might seem pacified and integrated into England, but was quite capable of fostering rebellion against the crown and helping to break up any union? Terence Hawkes suggests that the use of Milford Haven would have triggered off patriotic memories of Henry VII’s landing there on 7 August 1485 to begin his campaign against Richard III which eventually established the Tudor dynasty, but also would have reminded readers of the vulnerability of the coastline in the wake of the attempted Spanish invasion of 1588.38 Cymbeline constantly reminds its audience of the warlike and independent spirit of the ancient Britons – Geoffrey’s History ends with the Britons changing into the Welsh (‘as the foreign element around them became more and more powerful, they were given the name of Welsh instead of Britons’ (p. 284)). A number of these reminders come from the mouths of evil characters: Cloten cites Virgil’s famous comment that ‘Britain’s a world by itself’ (3.1.13); his mother follows this with an attempt to stir up hostility to Rome by reminding her husband of ‘The natural bravery of your isle’ (19) and asserting, rather spuriously as any reader of De Bello Gallico would have known, that ‘Caesar came here, but not here his brag/Of ‘‘Came, and saw, and overcame’’ ’ (24–5). Such lines persuade Cymbeline to fight the Romans, so, in a sense, help him to pay the tribute from a position of strength rather than weakness.


But noble characters also invoke the independent military nature of the Britons. Posthumous responds to Philario’s assumption that Augustus’s forces will inevitably defeat the Britons, by boasting that the Britons are now more skilled and powerful than when they were patronised by Julius Caesar (2.4.9–26). Belarius, whose military prowess has helped to make Cymbeline a successful king, articulates a similar argument. In explaining his reasons for exile in the Welsh caves, Belarius attacks the soft and hypocritical life at court and contrasts success there to military prowess: Did you but know the city’s usuries, And felt them knowingly: the art o’ th’court, As hard to leave as keep: whose art to climb Is certain falling: or so slipp’ry that The fear’s as bad as falling: the toil o’th’war, A pain that only seems to seek out danger I’th’name of fame and honour, which dies I’th’search, And hath as oft a sland’rous epitaph As record of fair act . . . My body’s mark’d With Roman swords; and my report was once First, with the best of note. Cymbeline lov’d me, And when a soldier was the theme, my name Was not far off[.] (3.3.45–60) Belarius’s point is that military success should count for more than it does, and that often the truth lies hidden beneath false narratives (a telling point in a play which deliberately alters the historical record). As a result he has chosen the ‘honest freedom’ (71) of an uncomfortable life to the successful but immoral life at the centre. Given that Cymbeline later sees Belarius as part of the very organs of the state, his bellicose language explicitly challenges the pacifistic message of the play’s conclusion, although whether Cymbeline equates martial vigour with the Welsh who might threaten England, or suggests that the new Britain might need the military prowess of the old, is an open question.39 The questions raised at the end of Cymbeline are all clearly unresolved. Is the play praising James for his brilliant resolution of apparently insurmountable problems? Or is it suggesting that such resolutions were a fantasy that could never occur and urging James to take stronger action against his enemies, as has recently been argued was the case with John Fletcher’s Bonduca (1611–14), another play which represents a


Roman invasion of Britain that ends with reconciliation?40 Cymbeline is an experiment in writing a history play from a blank sheet.41 As accounts made clear, nothing significant was known about the reign of Cymbeline: he might have been a great hero who protected his people from disaster, or a fool who caved in to their enemies. He might have been very lucky, or, possibly unlucky, his mighty deeds being lost from the historical record. Shakespeare seems to be asking whether James has been the wise king of peace that he saw himself to be, the foolish coward that his enemies suggested he was, or whether he was simply lucky, like the Cymbeline in his play. The answers history gives will depend on what happens in the coming years, which version of Britain becomes dominant and which version is actually needed. The year 1609–10 was one of peace and relative plenty, but, given the cyclical nature of British history, ancient and recent, it was hard to tell what exactly would come next.42 Shakespeare lived on beyond the British crisis of 1599 that Spenser analysed so acutely and, as it turned out, so erroneously. However, he knew that the prosperity of 1609–10 was equally unlikely to last and James’s plans for union might come to seem as distant a memory as Spenser’s vision of the impending apocalypse.43

Notes Introduction 1. Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism’, in Roger A. Mason, ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 161–86. 2. Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales, c.1415–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), ch. 10. See also Penry Williams, ‘Government and Politics’, in Trevor Herbert and Gareth Elwyn Jones, eds, Tudor Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988), pp. 134–61. 3. Williams, Recovery, ch. 11. 4. William Camden, Britannia siue Florentissimorum regnorum, Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio (1586). 5. Dennis Walder states that Ireland is ‘arguably the oldest colony’ (Post-Colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 38)). This definition only works if colonies have to be overseas. For an attempt to solve the problem which only succeeds in confusing the issue, see Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: the Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). For analysis, see M. I. Finley, ‘Colonies: an Attempt at Typology’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 26 (1976), pp. 167–88. Philip Schwyzer shows how Wales is often made to disappear by historians past and present in ‘British History and ‘‘The British History’’: the Same Old story?’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley, eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 11–23. 6. See J. A. Watt, ‘The Anglo-Irish Colony under Strain, 1327–99’, in Art Cosgrove, ed., A New History of Ireland: Vol. 2, Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 352–96; Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: the Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995). For a map of the moving division between the English and Irish Ireland, see Ruth Dudley-Edwards, An Atlas of Irish History (London: Methuen, 1973), pp. 89–91. 7. Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: the Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993); John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8. See Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), ch. 1. 9. Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 169

170 Notes, pp. 2–4 10. T. W. Moody, ‘Early Modern Ireland’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, eds, A New History of Ireland: Volume III, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. xlii–xlviii. 11. See Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture, and Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland. 12. See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies, 112 (1993), pp. 390–408. 13. See Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 14. See Susan Doran, ‘Revenge Her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder? The Impact of Mary Stewart’s Execution on Anglo-Scottish Relations’, History, 85 (2000), pp. 589–612. For James’s desire to assume the English throne, see David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Cape, 1962), chs 9–10. 15. For a brief overview, see Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: a Political History of England, 1603–1642 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 158–68. See also Wallace T. Notestein, The House of Commons, 1604–1610 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 211–54; King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 134–7, 160–78. 16. Lockyer, Early Stuarts, p. 168; Notestein, House of Commons, pp. 235–45. 17. See Bruce Galloway and Brian P. Levack, eds, The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1985). 18. Robert Pont, Of the Union of Britayne, in Galloway and Levack, eds, Jacobean Union, pp. 1–38, at pp. 17, 28. 19. John Russell, A Treatise of the Happie and Blessed Unioun, in Galloway and Levack, eds, Jacobean Union, pp. 75–142, at pp. 100, 135. 20. Sir Henry Spelman, Of the Union, in Galloway and Levack, eds, Jacobean Union, pp. 161–84. 21. For analysis, see Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), ch. 2; Mason, ed., Scots and Britons. 22. ‘British History: a Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History, 47 (1975), pp. 601–28. For a recent overview, see David Armitage, Jane Ohlmeyer, Ned C. Landsman, Eliga H. Gould and J. G. A. Pocock, ‘AHR Forum: the New British History in Atlantic Perspective’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 426–500. 23. Pocock, ‘British History’, p. 610. 24. For analysis, see David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 427–45. 25. Armitage, ‘Greater Britain’, p. 432. See also the thoughtful essay by Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 446–62. 26. See Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: the Apocalypse, the Union and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979); Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson, eds, The British Union: a Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of

Notes, pp. 5–7 171

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). I am grateful to Arthur Williamson for allowing me to see his introduction in advance of publication. On English fears of Spain and the Spanish empire in the 1590s, see Carol Z. Weiner, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: a Study of Elizabethan and Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, Past and Present, 51 (1971), pp. 27–62; R. B. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–1595 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). For discussion, see R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: the Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Frame, Political Development of the British Isles; Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: the Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 4; Baker and Maley, eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature. On Flodden, see Randald Nicholson, Scotland: the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1974), pp. 600–6. For details, see Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), ch. 16. For details of the Babington Plot, see Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots, ch. 24; Francis Edwards, S. J., Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002), ch. 6. Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), chs 6–7. Robert Parsons, A conference about the Next succession to the Crowne of Ingland, divided into two partes (1594), pt 2, pp. 108–9. Peter Wentworth, A Pithie Exhortation to her Maiestie for Establishing her Successor to the crowne (1598). See Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Monarchies: the Scottish Context and the English ‘‘Translation’’ ’, in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 36–54. For a more general contextualisation of James’s writing, see Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, eds, Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002). See Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘shepheardes nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). See Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian’. See Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, p. 2. D. B. Quinn, ‘ ‘‘A Discourse of Ireland’’ (Circa 1599): a Sidelight on English Colonial Policy’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 47, sec. C (1941–42), pp. 151–66, p. 166. Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid-Atlantic Blues’, The Irish Review, 11 (1991–92), pp. 50–5; Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Michael Richter, Medieval Ireland: the Enduring Tradition (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1983), pp. 129, 149, 161.

172 Notes, pp. 7–9 42. For an overview, see Glenn Burgess, ‘Introduction: the New British History’, in Burgess, ed., The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 1–29. 43. Though not, of course, all of them. For discussion, see ‘AHR Forum: the New British History in Atlantic Perspective’; David J. Baker and Willy Maley, ‘Introduction: an Uncertain Union’, in Baker and Maley, eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, pp. 1–8. 44. For an excellent recent analysis of the relationship between later Tudor culture and Wales, see Terence Hawkes, ‘Bryn Glas’, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 23–45. 45. For the history, see J. Gwynfor Jones, Early Modern Wales: c. 1525–1640 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); W. S. K. Thomas, Tudor Wales (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1983). For analysis, see Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh (London: Black Raven Press, 1985). 46. The most informative discussion remains T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950). See also Sydney Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 44 (1961–62), pp. 17–48; Charles Millican Bowie, Spenser and the Table Round: a Study in the Contemporaneous Background for Spenser’s use of the Arthurian Legend (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932). 47. J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 271. Scarisbrick sees little significance in the naming, however. The principal source of Arthurian material was Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). 48. Williams, When Was Wales?, p. 117; Williams, Recovery, passim. Many Irish also lived in England. For discussion, see Liam de Paor, The Peoples of Ireland: From Prehistory to Modern Ireland (London: Hutchinson, 1986), pt 2. 49. On Thomas, see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 24–32. 50. J. O. Bartley, Teague, Shenkin and Sawney, Being an Historical Study of the Earliest Irish, Welsh and Scottish Characters in English Plays (Cork: Cork University Press, 1954); Gillian E. Brennan, ‘The Cheese and the Welsh: Foreigners in Elizabethan Literature’, Renaissance Studies, 8 (1994), pp. 40–64. 51. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 52. Levack, Formation of the British State, pp. 32–3. 53. See Maley, Salvaging Spenser, passim; Marc Caball, Poets and Politics: Continuity and Reaction in Irish Poetry, 1558–1625 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998). 54. McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood, p. 6. See also Walter Ullmann, ‘This Realm of England Is an Empire’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), pp. 175–203. 55. See Baker and Maley, eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature. 56. G. A. Hayes-McCoy, ‘The Completion of the Tudor Conquest and the Advance of the Counter-Reformation’, in Moody, Martin and Byrne, eds, New History of Ireland, vol. III, pp. 94–141, pp. 127–9. See also John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: the 1590s Crisis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey, eds, A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chs 6 and 7.

Notes, pp. 10–13 173 57. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 86–7. 58. For analysis, see Michael Neill, ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), pp. 1–32. 59. For analysis, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 60. The classic analysis is Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and NeoNationalism (London: New Left Books, 1977).

1

Crossing the borders

1. David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1966); Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: a Pattern Established, 1565–76 (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976); K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair, eds, The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978). Canny has provided a more nuanced reading of the evidence in his recent work: see ‘The Origins of Empire; an Introduction’, in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 1: The Origins of Empire, British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–33; Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2. Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, The Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 475–502; The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3. Bartolome´ de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. Nigel Griffith, introduction by Anthony Pagden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. xxviii–xxx; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 30–7. 4. Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (Harlow: Longman, 1985); Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: the Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid-Atlantic Blues’, The Irish Review, 11 (Winter 1991/92), pp. 50–5; Michael McCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1986); Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: the Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5. J. O. Bartley, Teague, Shenkin and Sawney, Being an Historical Study of the Earliest Irish, Welsh and Scottish Characters in English Plays (Cork: Cork University Press, 1954).

174 Notes, pp. 13–15 6. See Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds, Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). On the ‘British question’, see Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds, The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds, British Consciousness and Identity: the Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). A succinct overview of rebellions is provided in Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (Harlow: Longman, 1968). 7. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, 2 vols, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); Raymond Williams, ‘Civilisation’, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 57–60; Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). See also Andrew Hadfield, ‘The English Conception of Ireland, c.1540–c.1600, with Special Reference to the Works of Edmund Spenser’, unpublished D.Phil. Thesis, University of Ulster at Coleraine, ch. 4. 8. Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 101–2, 106. See also Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland), ed. F. X. Martin and A. B. Scott (Dublin: The Royal Irish Academy, 1978); John Gillingham, ‘The English Invasion of Ireland’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, eds, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 24–42. 9. See, for example, Sir George Peckham, ‘A true report of the late discoveries . . . of the Newfound Lands’ (1583), in Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 256–65. 10. Conveniently collected in Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish; J. P. Myers, ed., Elizabethan Ireland: a Selection of Writing by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland (Hamden, CI: Archon, 1983). 11. Geoffrey Keating, History of Ireland, ed. D. Comyn and Rev. P. S. Dineen, 4 vols (London: Early Irish Text Society, 1902–13), vol. 1, p. 153. 12. Keating, A History of Ireland, vol. 1, pp. 3–5. 13. See below ch. 6. 14. See Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish, for the best collection of examples and commentary. 15. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 20. 16. For analysis and discussion, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). See also Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Robert J. C. Young, ed., Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 48–78. 17. Sir John Dowdall to Lord Burghley, 9 March 1596, Calendar of State Papers, Ireland of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1592, October–1596, June, p. 486. 18. See Hulme, Colonial Encounters, chs 1 and 2; D. B. Quinn, ‘New Geographical Horizons: Literature’, in Fredi Chiapelli, ed., First Images of America: the Impact of the New World on the Old (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 635–58. See also Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern

Notes, pp. 15–18 175

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 178–87; Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Britain (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999), passim. Reprinted in C. Litton Falkiner, Illustrations of Irish History and Topography, Mainly of the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1904), pp. 345–62. Rich (1542–1617) was a pamphleteer, soldier, colonist and writer of prose fiction, who is best known for his collection, Rich his Farewell to the Military Profession (1581), which contains the source for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Rich was often outspoken and evidently caused offence frequently. See Edward E. M. Hinton, ‘Rych’s ‘‘Anathomy of Ireland’’ (1615), with an Account of the Author’, PMLA, 55 (1940), pp. 73–101. Barnaby Rich, A New Description of Ireland, wherein is described the disposition of the Irish whereunto they are inclined (London, 1610), p. 18. Barnaby Rich, A True and Kinde Excuse written in defence of that booke, intituled A Newe Description of Irelande (London, 1612), pp. 8–9. Constituting discourse in this manner is a theoretical/empirical flaw in David Cairns and Shaun Richards’s pioneering Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), which is otherwise useful and stimulating. Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland & Ireland (1617), 4 vols (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1907–8), vol. 3, pp. 281–3. See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1983); Hulme, Colonial Encounters, ch. 1; Bernard Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 2. Compare the passage in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland analysed in Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Ireland and Sixteenth-Century Political Theory’, The Modern Language Review, 89 (1994), pp. 1–18, pp. 8–9. For details, see Charles Hughes, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare’s Europe, Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, Being a Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the Sixteenth-Century (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1903), pp. xxxvi–xliv. See Edward W. Said, ‘On Repetition’, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 111–25; Paul De Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 187–228. See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 221–52; Deborah L. Madsen, Rereading Allegory: a Narrative Approach to Genre (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), ch. 1. See J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, in Harold Bloom et al., eds, Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 217–53. Sir William Herbert, Croftus Sive De Hibernia Liber, ed. and trans. Arthur Keaveney and John A. Madden (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1992), p. 83. For some further examples see Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh, eds, Strangers to That Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation

176 Notes, pp. 18–20

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

to the Famine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), ch. 3, ‘The Nature of the Irish’. Lisa Jardine, ‘Encountering Ireland: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and English Colonial Ventures’, in Bradshaw, Hadfield and Maley, eds, Representing Ireland, pp. 60–75. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility, p. 2. See also Arthur B. Ferguson, ‘Circumstances and the Sense of History in Tudor England: the Coming of the Historical Revolution’, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 3 (1967), pp. 170–205, p. 194–5. Sir Thomas Elyot, The boke named the governour (1531) (Menston: The Scolar Press, 1970), p. 40. Paul Hulton, ‘Images of the New World: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues and John White’, in Andrews, Canny and Hair, eds, The Westward Enterprise, pp. 195–214, at p. 211. See below, ch. 5. Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker and Brian Richardson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 291–303; The Prince, ed. and trans. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 9–13. Machiavelli appears to have had even more influence on another contemporary treatise, implying that Machiavelli’s ideas might well have flourished among English colonists in Ireland: see Sydney Anglo, ‘A Machiavellian Response to the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594)’, in Edward Cheney and Peter Mack, eds, England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1990), pp. 153–64. Spenser also cites Machiavelli as an authority; A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 169. See also Canny, ‘Origins of Empire’, pp. 6–7. Keaveney and Madden argue that, although his work was never published, Herbert probably had hoped for a European audience for Croftus, which was why he wrote in Latin rather than English. The text was carefully prepared with an elaborate scholarly apparatus and written in a Ciceronian style; Croftus, ‘Introduction’, pp. xviii–xxv. See Hayden White, ‘The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish’, in Chiappelli, ed., First Images of America, pp. 121–37. Spenser, View, pp. 1–3; Rich, New Description of Ireland, chs 4–9; Moryson, Shakespeare’s Europe, pp. 211–12, 232–3, passim. ‘A Description of Munster, 1588’, cited in Hadfield and McVeagh, eds, Strangers to That Land, p. 49. See also Croftus, p. 97; three tracts calendared in Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, Elizabeth, 1586–1588, July, pp. 527–47. Herbert acknowledges that some opposed his plan; Croftus, p. 160. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 97–8. See also ‘Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century’, in Chiapelli, ed., First Images of America, pp. 561–80, for comments on the two poles of linguistic use in colonial texts. Rich, New Description, pp. 32–4. McCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation, pp. 130–5. Karen Kuppermann points out that settlers in the Virginian colonies in the early seventeenth century tended to be less extreme in their condem-

Notes, pp. 21–3 177

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

nations of Indian culture and religion than those who derived their knowledge second hand; see Settling with the Indians: the Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980). See MacCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation, especially ch. 2; T. W. Moody, The Londonderry Plantation, 1609–1641: the City of London and the Plantation of Ulster (Belfast: William Mullen, 1939); Philip S. Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape, 1600–1670 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994, rpt of 1984); Raymond Gillespie, Colonial Ulster: the Settlement of East Ulster, 1600–1641 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1985). D. B. Quinn, ‘ ‘‘A Discourse of Ireland’’ (Circa 1599): a Sidelight on English Colonial Policy’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 47, sec. C (1941–42), pp. 151–66, pp. 164–6. See, for example, ‘The Supplication of the Blood of the English’, BL Add MS 34 (PRO), 313, ff84–121, ed. Willy Maley, Analecta Hibernica, 36 (1994); Edmund Spenser(?), ‘A Brief Note on Ireland’, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: a Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., The Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), pp. 235–45; ‘A Book on the State of Ireland, addressed to Robert, Earl of Essex, by H. C. . . . in the form of a dialogue between Peregryne and Sylvyn’ (March 1599), calendared in Calendar of the State Papers, relating to Ireland, of the reign of Elizabeth, 1598, January–1599, March, 505–7. See also the treatises calendared 431–46. See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies, 112 (1993), pp. 390–408, pp. 405–6. Compare the notorious passage in Spenser’s View, pp. 94–5, and the analysis in Eamon Grennan, ‘Language and Politics: a Note on Some Metaphors in Spenser’s View’, Spenser Studies, 3 (1982), pp. 99–110. Criticism of colonial expansion has always existed alongside propaganda extolling its virtue and necessity; see Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: an Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), ch. 6. See Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660’, in Andrews, Canny and Hair, eds, The Westward Enterprise, pp. 45–64; Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: the Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), chs 2–4; Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, eds, Natives and Newcomers: the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), ‘Introduction’; Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). John Davies, Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never Entirely Subdued (1612) (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969), pp. 116–17. On the Statutes of Kilkenny, see Michael Richter, Medieval Ireland: the Enduring Tradition (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), pp. 166–7; Nicholas Canny, ‘Protestants, Planters and Apartheid in Early Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 98 (Nov. 1986), pp. 105–15. It should be pointed out that the Irish could purchase ‘charters of liberty’ and so become English; the laws were designed to extirpate ‘Irishness’ and make the loyal Irish become English.

178 Notes, pp. 23–6 54. As tends to be the assumption in Steven Ellis, ‘Henry VIII, Rebellion and the Rule of Law’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), pp. 513–31; Alistair Fowler, ‘Spenser and War’, in J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring, eds, War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), pp. 147–64. 55. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, pp. 122, 130. See also ‘The Ideology of English Colonisation: From Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 30 (1973), pp. 575–98. 56. The evidence is assembled and analysed in Alfred O’Rahilly, The Massacre at Smerwick (1580) (Cork: Cork University Press, 1938). On Ormond, see Ciaran Brady, ‘Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond (1531–1614) and Reform in Tudor Ireland’, in Ciaran Brady, ed., Worsted in the Game: Losers in Irish History (Dublin: Lilliput, 1989), pp. 48–59. 57. David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire’, in Canny, ed., Origins of Empire, pp. 99–123, p. 116. 58. See Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1935), ch. 14; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 4; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 3. 59. Sir George Peckham, ‘A true Report of the late discoveries, and possession taken in the right of the Crowne of England of the Newfound Lands, By that valiant and worthy Gentleman, Sir Humphrey Gilbert Knight’, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1600) (London: Everyman, 1907), 8 vols, vol. 6, pp. 42–78, pp. 43–4, 49, 46–7. 60. For analysis of the use of the law in an Irish context, see Hans Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: a Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 61. See John Derricke, The Image of Irelande, ed. David Beers Quinn (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985), for analysis. Woodcuts from The Image of Irelande, most frequently one depicting the Irish at a chaotic open-air feast, with bards, basic foodstuffs, scavenging dogs and defecating guests, appear in or on the cover of numerous books. 62. John Derricke, The Image of Irelande (London, 1581). 63. On Rory Oge O’More, see Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1885–90), vol. 2, pp. 340–5; Vincent P. Carey, ‘John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande, Sir Henry Sidney, and the Massacre at Mullaghmast, 1578’, Irish Historical Studies, 123 (May 1999), pp. 305–27; ‘Rory Oge O’More, the Massacre at Mullaghmast (1578), John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande (1581) and Spenser’s Malengin’, Notes and Queries, 245 (Dec. 2000), pp. 423–4. 64. See Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, ch. 1; Young, Postcolonialism, pt 1. See also Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, ch. 4; Claire McEachern, The Poetics of Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Notes, pp. 27–9 179

2

English colonialism and national identity in early modern Ireland

1. ‘The Declaration of George Taylor’, 24 December 1599, Calendar of State Papers: Ireland, 1599–1600, ed. E. G. Atkinson (London: HM Stationery Office, 1899), p. 341. 2. Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 475–502, p. 502. 3. See Nicholas P. Canny, ‘Identity Formation in Ireland: the Emergence of the Anglo-Irish’, in Nicholas P. Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 159–212. 4. Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and Colony in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660’, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair, eds, The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland and America, 1450–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 45–64, at p. 55. See also Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997, rpt of 1987). 5. On the terminology, see T. W. Moody, ‘Introduction: Early Modern Ireland’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, eds, A New History of Ireland: Volume III, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. xxxix–lxiii; Roy Foster, ‘Prologue’, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1988). Contemporary historians of the sixteenth century do not always agree on the nature of the historical relationship between any of these groups of Anglicised Irish; see, for example, Ciaran Brady and Nicholas Canny, ‘Debate: Spenser’s Irish Crisis; Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present, 120 (1988), pp. 203, 212–13. 6. Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (London: Longmans, 1985), pp. 139–40. See also Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: the Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, rpt of 1990). 7. See, for example, Anon., ‘The State of Ireland and Plan for Its Reformation, c. 1515’, State Papers, Vol. II, Henry VIII, Pt. 3. – Correspondence Between the Governments of England and Ireland, 1515–38 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1831), pp. 1–31; Patrick Finglas, ‘A Breviat of the getting of Ireland and the decaie of the same’, in Walter Harris, ed., Hibernica, 2 vols (Dublin, 1747), vol. 2, pp. 39–52. 8. See D. B. Quinn and Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Ireland in 1534’, in Moody, Martin and Byrne, eds, New History of Ireland, vol. III, pp. 1–38; Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 21–2. 9. Nicholas P. Canny, From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland, 1534–1660 (Dublin: Helicon, 1987), p. 41. 10. Michael Ritcher, ‘The Interpretation of Medieval Irish History’, Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1985), pp. 289–98, p. 298.

180 Notes, pp. 29–33 11. See John J. Silke, Kinsale: the Spanish Intervention in Ireland at the End of the Elizabethan Wars (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1970); Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland : the Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), ch. 10. 12. See Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000). See also Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966), ch. 1; Foster, Modern Ireland, ch. 2. 13. James Ware, ed., Ancient Irish Histories (Dublin, 1633), p. iii. See also Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997). 14. See, for example, M. Perceval-Maxwell, ‘The Ulster Rising of 1641 and the Depositions’, Irish Historical Studies, 21 (1978–79), pp. 144–67; J. A. Froude, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols (London: Longmans, 1882), vol. 1, ch. 2; T. FitzPatrick, The Bloody Bridge and Other Papers relating to the Insurrection of 1641 (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1903); Mary Hickson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, or the Massacres of 1641–2, their Causes and Results, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1884); A. T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Patterns of Ulster History (Belfast: Pretani, 1986); Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Nicholas P. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 15. Conrad Russell, ‘The British Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Historical Research, 61 (1988), pp. 166–82. See also Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633–41: a Study in Absolutism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959); T. O. Ranger, ‘Strafford in Ireland; a Revaluation’, Past and Present, 19 (1961), pp. 26–45. 16. Russell, ‘British Background’, p. 169. 17. Clarke, The Old English, chs 5–6. 18. Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War’, History, 73 (1988), pp. 395–415, p. 404. 19. T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, Past and Present, 127 (1990), pp. 39–83, p. 48. 20. See, for example, W. J. McCormack, The Battle of the Books (Westmeath: Lilliput, 1986); Terrence Brown, Ireland, a Social and Cultural History, 1922–79 (London: Fontana, 1985); Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland: the Orange State (London: Pluto Press, 1976). 21. Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity’, p. 81. 22. For an overview of the period, see Foster, Modern Ireland, chs 4–6; Alan Ford, ‘The Protestant Reformation in Ireland’, in Ciaran Bardy and Raymond Gillespie, eds, Natives and Newcomers: the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Bungay, Suffolk: Irish Academic Press, 1986), pp. 50–74; J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (London: Fontana, 1981), chs 1–6. 23. Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, the Dubliner, 1547–1618 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), pp. 14–15. 24. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols (London, 1807–8), vol. 6, p. 4. See the analysis provided in Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994).

Notes, pp. 33–8 181 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 6, pp. 6–7. Cited in Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, p. 144. Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 6, p. 4. Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 6, p. 5. See Ellis, Tudor Ireland, chs 1–5; G. A. Hayes-McCoy, ‘The Royal Supremacy and Ecclesiastical Revolution, 1534–47’, in Moody, Martin and Byrne, eds, New History of Ireland, vol. III, pp. 39–68. Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 6, pp. 46, 48. On Plunket, see the entry in the DNB. On Old English identity, see Canny, ‘Identity Formation’, The Formation of the Old English Elite in Ireland (Dublin: O’Donnell Lecture, 1975); ‘Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity’, Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), pp. 1–19; Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Colm Lennon, ‘The Counter-Reformation in Ireland, 1542–1641’, in Brady and Gillespie, eds, Natives and Newcomers, pp. 75–92. See Colm Lennon, ‘Recusancy and the Dublin Stanihursts’, Archivium Hibernicum, 23 (1975), pp. 101–10; ‘Richard Stanihurst and Old English Identity’, Irish Historical Studies, 82 (1978), pp. 121–43. On the link between religion and identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, see Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, for a comprehensive discussion of the political ideologies of Old and New English. See also Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture, and Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), passim. See David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1966); Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh, Strangers to That Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (Gerald’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994). Edmund Campion, Two Bokes of the History of Ireland, ed. A. F. Vossen (Assen; Van Gorcum, 1963), Bk 1, chs 5–6; Bk 2, ch. 10. John Derricke, The Image of Ireland, with a Discourse of Woodkerne (London, 1581), STC 6734. On Sir Henry Sidney, see DNB entry; Ellis, Tudor Ireland, passim; Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: the Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 4. For a narrative of events, see Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, 3 vols (London; Longman, 1885–90), vol. 2, pp. 340–5, passim. Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 6, p. 109. Lord Chancellor Gerrard, ‘Notes of his Report on Ireland – May 1578’, Analecta Hibernica, 2 (1931), pp. 93–291, p. 122. Calendar of State Papers: Ireland, 1586–8, ed. H. C. Hamilton (London: HM Stationery Office, 1877), p. 533. See Ellis, Tudor Ireland, ch. 9. See Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: the Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 1993); ‘The End of Gaelic Ulster: a Thematic Interpretation of Events between 1534 and 1610’, Irish Historical Studies, 26 (1990), pp. 8–32.

182 Notes, pp. 38–42 44. A. J. Sheehan, ‘The Overthrow of the Munster Plantation’, Irish Sword, 15 (1982–83), pp. 11–22. 45. See Patricia Coughlan, ‘ ‘‘Cheap and Common Animals’’: the English Anatomy of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday, eds, Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 205–23; Perceval-Maxwell, ‘The Ulster Rising of 1641’. 46. ‘The Supplication of the Blood of the English most lamentably murdered in Ireland, crying out of the yearth for revenge’, BL Add. MS 34 (PRO), 313, ff84–121; ff85. The text has been transcribed and edited by Willy Maley in Analecta Hibernica, 36 (1994), pp. 1–90. Prof. Maley kindly allowed me access to his research before the text was published. 47. ‘Supplication’, ff97. 48. On Rich’s life, see T. M. Cranfill and D. H. Bruce, Barnaby Rich, a Short Biography (Austin: Texas University Press, 1953). On the Dublin in which he lived, see Colm Lennon, The Lords of Dublin in the Age of Reformation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989). 49. For a general history, see Patrick Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, a Historical Survey (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985). 50. Barnaby Rich, ‘Epistle to William Cokyne’, A New Description of Ireland (London, 1610), STC 20992, p. 93. 51. E. M. Hinton, ‘Rych’s Anatomy of Ireland, with an account of the author’, PMLA, 55 (1940), pp. 73–101. 52. T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), chs 1, 4, passim. 53. Vincent Gookin, The Great Case of Transplantation in Ireland Discussed (London, 1655), Wing 1273. 54. Richard Lawrence, The Interest of England in the Irish Transplantation Stated (London, 1655), Wing 675. 55. See, for example, David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism, Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), ch. 1. For criticism of such assumptions, see Richter, ‘The Interpretation of Medieval Irish History’; John Gillingham, ‘Images of Ireland, 1170–1600: the Origins of English Imperialism’, History Today, 37 (February 1987), pp. 6–22. 56. See Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. J. O’Meara (1951; rept Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982); Expugnatio Hibernica: the Conquest of Ireland, ed. and trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978); Michael Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1976); Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 57. Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 6, p. 109. 58. Geoffrey Keating, The History of Ireland, ed. and trans. D. Comyn and R. S. Dineen, 4 vols (London: Early Irish Text Society, 1902–8), vol. I, p. 153. On Keating’s sense of identity in his history, see Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-Century Interpretations of the Past: the Case of Geoffrey Keating’, Irish Historical Studies, 98 (1986), pp. 116–28. 59. See, for example, Canny, ‘Identity Formation in Ireland’; Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity’.

Notes, pp. 43–6 183

3

Malcolm in the middle

1. To give one example. Historians argue whether Irish poets had a conception of the English as an invading nation or whether they were simply seen as a group of unscrupulous foreigners out for what they could get in Ireland, but they never debate whether the Irish saw the English – and Scottish – settlers as British. For recent accounts, see Michelle O Riordan, ‘ ‘‘Political’’ Poems in the Mid-Seventeenth-Century Crisis’, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 112–27; Marc Caball, Poets and Politics: Reaction and Continuity in Irish Poetry, 1558–1625 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998). 2. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson, eds, The British Union: a Critical Edition of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. Contemporary works on the union are collected in Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack, eds, The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1985); analysis is provided in Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 3. McGinnis and Williamson, eds, ‘Introduction’, British Union, pp. 47–53. 4. See Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), Vol. 1, ch. 5; Blair Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443–75; W. M. Spellman, European Political Thought, 1600–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), ch. 4; Marrku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5. McGinnis and Williamson, eds, ‘Introduction’, British Union, p. 24. 6. I. P. McFarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), ch. 6. 7. For discussion, see Roger A. Mason, ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pt 2; Roger A. Mason, ‘James VI, George Buchanan and The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies’, in Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance Scotland (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1998), pp. 215–41; Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies: the Scottish Context and the English Translation’, in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 36–54; J. H. Burns, The Trew Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1996), chs 6–7; D. Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Cape, 1956), ch. 2. 8. See Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580’, in Burns, ed., Cambridge History of Political Thought, pp. 194–218. Catholic resistance theory was even more widespread and vigorously argued: see J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580–1620’, ibid., pp. 219–53. 9. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory’, pp. 197–200; A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth,

184 Notes, pp. 46–9

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 49–59. For Knox’s writings, see Roger A. Mason, ed., John Knox on Rebellion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince, ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 60. Cited in Roger A. Mason, ‘George Buchanan, James VI and the Presbyterians’, in Mason, ed., Scots and Britons, pp. 112–37, at p. 122. James I, Basilikon Doron, The Workes (1616), pp. 137–89, at p. 176; McGinnis and Williamson, eds, ‘Introduction,’ British Union, pp. 50–1. For an excellent analysis which this chapter is significantly indebted to, see Wormald, ‘James VI and I’. McFarlane, Buchanan, p. 95. George Buchanan, The Political Poetry, ed. and trans. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1995), pp. 27, 274. The history of Scotland written in Latin by George Buchanan; faithfully rendered into English, trans. J. Fraser (London, 1690), Bks 16–20. The work was first published in Latin as Rerum Scoticarum historia (Edinburgh, 1582), and incorporated into Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande (1577, 1580). Published by John Day. Willson, James VI and I, ch. 2. George Buchanan, ‘A Celebration of the Birth of James VI, King of Scots’, lines 25–9, in Political Poetry, p. 154. For details, see W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). McGinnis and Williamson, eds, British Union, p. 3. Buchanan, Political Poetry, p. 3; Wormald, ‘James VI and I’, p. 50; Mason, ‘George Buchanan’, pp. 122–3. George Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos [or a Discourse concerning the due privilege of Government in the Kingdom of Scotland] (1721), p. 181. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. For fuller discussions of sovereignty in the late sixteenth century, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 2, passim; Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), vol. 2, passim. Buchanan, History of Scotland, pp. 193–200. For an analysis of Buchanan’s historical scholarship in the history, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution (English Historical Review Supplement 3 (1966) ). See Glynne Wickham et al., eds, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 157–90. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973, rpt of 1965), p. 109, passim. On Sidney’s connections to Buchanan and the influence of Buchanan’s work in England, see James E. Phillips, ‘George Buchanan and the Sidney Circle’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 12 (1948–49), pp. 23–55. Shakespeare undoubtedly knew Buchanan’s work; see David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Histori-

Notes, pp. 49–55 185

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

ography’, in Kevin Sharpe and Stephen N. Zwicker, eds, Politics of Discourse: the Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78–116; David Scott Kastan, ‘Macbeth and the ‘‘Name of King’’ ’, Shakespeare after Theory (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 165–82; Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books: a Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources (London: Athlone, 2001), pp. 71–4. For similar attempts in England, see Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). George Buchanan, Tragedies, ed. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), introduction, pp. 2–4. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. The Trial of George Buchanan before the Lisbon Inquisition, ed. James M. Aitken (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939), pp. 25, 131–4. Buchanan, Tragedies, p. 12. Although links between Buchanan’s writings and Macbeth have often been noted (see above, note 26), so far as I know Buchanan has never been read as a source for Timon of Athens. James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, Workes, pp. 191–210, at p. 193. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. James I, Basilikon Doron, p. 155. Willson, James VI and I, p. 173. Keith M. Brown, ‘The Vanishing Emperor: British Kingship and Its Decline, 1603–1707’, in Mason, ed., Scots and Britons, pp. 58–87, at p. 68. Willson, James VI and I, p. 191; James Loxley, The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 115–16. On James and his relationship to drama and masques, see Jerzy Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990). Willson, James VI and I, p. 230; Robert Ashton, ed., James I by His Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1969), pp. 63–4. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), pp. 169–207, p. 189; Wormald, ‘James VI and I’. Cyndia Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 2. Deborah Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: the Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (Basingstoke: Palgrave now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 63. See also David Scott Kastan, ‘ ‘‘Proud Majesty Made a Subject’’: Representing Authority on the Early Modern Stage’, Shakespeare after Theory (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 109–27. James I, Daemonologie, Workes, pp. 91–36, at p. 105. Cited in Burns, Trewe Law of Kingship, p. 235. David Norbrook, ‘The Emperor’s New Body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism’, Textual Practice, 10 (1996), pp. 329–57, at p. 343. For the most fully developed reading, see Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of ‘Macbeth’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1950). See Mary Ann McGrail, Tyranny in Shakespeare (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001), ch. 2.

186 Notes, pp. 55–60 46. Kastan, ‘Macbeth and the ‘‘Name of King’’ ’, Shakespeare after Theory, pp. 165–82, p. 168. 47. For more substantial analysis, see McGrail, Tyranny in Shakespeare, ch. 2; Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Political Culture (Arden Critical Companions; London: Thomson Learning, 2003), ch. 1. 48. Macbeth, 4.3.55–138. All subsequent references are to the Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1951). 49. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 224–31, passim; McGrail, Tyranny in Shakespeare, ch. 1; Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). For James’s comments on tyrants, see King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 20–2, 70–2, passim. 50. Aristotle, Politics, p. 170; Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, pp. 238–9; James VI and I, Political Writings, p. 20. 51. Aristotle, Politics, pp. 231–2. 52. See Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Political Culture, ch. 1, for further comment. 53. Willson, James VI and I, pp. 42–8. 54. Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, pp. 304–5. 55. Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, p. 210. 56. Buchanan’s History of Scotland includes this detail (p. 215). 57. See Aristotle, Politics, p. 170. 58. For the implications of this ambiguity, see Kastan, ‘Macbeth and the ‘‘Name of King’’ ’, pp. 166–70.

4

‘Bruited abroad’

1. For details, see Bruce Galloway and Brian P. Levack, eds, The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1985). See also Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson, eds, The British Union: a Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). I would like to thank David Baker, Anne McLaren and Willy Maley for commenting on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland [1577], 6 vols, ed. Vernon Snow (New York: AMS Press, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 3–6, 32, 52, 60. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text. 3. On the influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae in sixteenth-century England, see T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950). 4. William Camden, Britannia, ed. Edmund Gibson (London, 1695), p. 2. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 5. See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies, 112 (1993), pp. 390–408. 6. See Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds, British Consciousness and

Notes, pp. 60–2 187

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

Identity: the Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 8–42. The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, ed. Sara Jayne Steen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 30. See Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London: Cape, 1960), ch. 18; Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); J. E. Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), introduction, appendix 1. For details, see Read, Burghley, chs 3, 15, 18; Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots, pp. 424–9, 469–70, 475–500. Read, Burghley, ch. 18; Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots, chs 25–6. Phillips, Images of a Queen, passim. See also Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain’, Review of English Studies, NS, 51 (2000), pp. 599–616. Cited in A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 160. McLaren, Political Culture, ch. 4. McLaren, Political Culture, p. 172. See Levack, Formation of the British State, passim; Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 138–61. See Anthony Miller, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), ch. 6; Tristan Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages under James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). A convenient modern facsimile is edited by Paul Hulton (New York: Dover, 1972). All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text, unless stated. Selections from De Bry’s project can be found in Michael Alexander, ed., Discovering the New World, Based on the Works of Theodor De Bry (London: London Editions, 1976). Works which deal with the illustrations include Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn, eds, The American Drawings of John White, 1577–1590, 2 vols (London: British Museum, 1964); Paul Hulton, ‘Images of the New World: Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues and John White’, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair, eds, The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 195–214; Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: a Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of De Bry’s Great Voyages, trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); B. J. Sokol, ‘The Problem of Assessing Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of His Discoveries in North America’, Annals of Science, 51 (1994), pp. 1–16; Juliet Fleming, ‘The Renaissance Tattoo’, Review of Ethnographic Studies, 31 (1997), pp. 35–52; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 115–26.

188 Notes, pp. 62–74 19. On the relationship between Raleigh and Harriot, see John W. Shirley, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot’, in John W. Shirley, ed., Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 16–35. 20. On what is known of White’s life, see Hulton and Quinn, eds, American Drawings of John White, vol. 1, pp. 12–24. 21. See Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets’, Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 21–65, at pp. 21–39. 22. Harriot, Report, p. xi. 23. For other examples, see Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing, pp. 71–91; Michel De Montaigne, ‘Of the Cannibals’, The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, 3 vols, trans. John Florio (1603) (London: Everyman, 1910), vol. 1, pp. 215–30. 24. For further examples, see Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing, ch. 2. 25. For further analysis, see Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing, pp. 115–17. 26. For this ubiquitous concept in New World writings, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 27. Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 1, p. 11; vol. 5, pp. 3, 27, 47, passim. 28. See Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 6. 29. Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577), p. 67. 30. For further comment, see Fleming, ‘Renaissance Tattoo’, pp. 44–8. 31. First text cited in Brian Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 214; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612), ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953). 32. On the close relationship between Harriot, Raleigh, Hakluyt, De Bry and White, and the probable sequence of events that led to the publication of De Bry’s version of the Harriot-White material, see Alexander, ed., Discovering the New World, p. 64; Paul Hulton, America 1585: the Complete Drawings of John White (London: British Museum, 1984), pp. 17–21; David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955). 33. For details, see Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing, pp. 97–8. 34. Andrew Hadfield, ‘Rethinking the Black Legend: Sixteenth-Century English Identity and the Spanish Colonial Antichrist’, Reformation, 3 (1998), pp. 303–22. See also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), ch. 4. 35. Paul Hulton, introduction to Harriot, Report, p. xiii. 36. Hulton, America 1585, p. 19. 37. Alexander, ed., Discovering the New World, pp. 8–9. 38. See William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: the Development of AntiSpanish Sentiment, 1558–1660 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971). 39. Shirley, ‘Raleigh and Harriot’, p. 18.

Notes, pp. 74–8 189 40. Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI’, English Literary Renaissance, 17 (1987), pp. 224–42; Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), pp. 67–8. 41. Philip Edwards, Sir Walter Raleigh (London: Longman, 1953), pp. 25–6. 42. See Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery’, Representations, 33 (1991), pp. 1–41. 43. Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Land of Guiana, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 146. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 44. McLaren, Political Culture, pp. 59–69. 45. See Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama (Brighton: Harvester, 1981). 46. See J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 2 vols (London: Cape, 1957), vol. 2, p. 262. 47. See McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood, ch. 2; Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), ch. 6. On Elizabeth’s second reign, see McLaren, Political Culture, introduction; John Guy, ‘The 1590s: the Second Reign of Elizabeth I?’, in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–19. 48. Fleming, ‘Renaissance Tattoo’, p. 45. 49. Shirley, ‘Harriot and Raleigh’, p. 19.

5

Translating the Reformation

1. On St Leger see Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 7. On Walshe, see D. B. Quinn, ‘Edward Walshe’s The Office and duety in fighting for our countrey (1545)’, Irish Booklore, 3 (1977), pp. 28–31; D. B. Quinn, ‘Edward Walshe’s ‘‘Conjectiures’’ concerning the State of Ireland (1552)’, Irish Historical Studies, 5 (1946–47), pp. 303–22. Walshe cites Cicero as his inspiration in his dedication to St Leger. See Cicero, De Officis, trans. W. Miller (London; Heinemann, 1911), pp. 2, 5, 59–61, passim. 2. Edward Walshe, The Office and duety in fighting for our countrey (1545). On the siege, see J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968), pp. 450–1. 3. Quinn, ‘Edward Walshe’s The Office and duety’, p. 30. 4. See Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: a Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 74–86, 96–7; David Lindley, ‘Embarrassing Ben: the Masques for Frances Howard’, in A. F. Kinney and D. S. Collins, eds, Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. 248–64. On Henry’s claim, see Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (London: Longman, 1985), pp. 138–41; Nicholas P. Canny, From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland, 1534–1660 (Dublin: Helicon, 1987), pp. 41–4.

190 Notes, pp. 78–81 5. See Graham Hough, A Preface to ‘The Faerie Queene’ (London: Duckworth, 1962), p. 192; Liz Curtis, Nothing But the Same Old Story: the Roots of Anti-Irish Racism (London: Greater London Council, 1984), p. 56. More generally, see Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6. The classic study is Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). See also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). 7. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), chs 2–3. See also Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 113–41, on the sexing of language in the Renaissance. 8. Quinn, ‘Walshe’s ‘‘Conjectures’’ ’. 9. John Bale, The Vocacyon of Johan Bale to the Bishopricke of Ossorie, ed. Peter Happe´ and John N. King (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Text Society, 1990). All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 10. See Honor McCusker, John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary (Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr University Press, 1942), pp. 15–17; Jessie W. Harris, John Bale: a Study in the Minor Literature of the Reformation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1940), chs 5–6; A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London: Fontana, 1986, rev. edn), chs 9–10; C. S. L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism, 1450–1558 (London: Paladin, 1990), pp. 263–91; John N. King, English Reformation Literature: the Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), ch. 2. 11. See Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Art of Fiction: Poetry and Politics in Reformation England’, Leeds Studies in English, 23 (1992), pp. 127–56. 12. On Bale’s life, see McCusker, John Bale; Harris, John Bale; W. T. Davies, ‘A Bibliography of John Bale’, Proceedings and Papers of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, 5 (1940), pp. 201–79; L. P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1976); King, English Reformation Literature, pp. 56–75, 418–28, passim. On the Vocacyon, see Steven G. Ellis, ‘John Bale, Bishop of Ossory, 1552–3’, Journal of the Butler Society, 3, ii (1984), pp. 283–93; L. P. Fairfield, ‘The Vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography’, Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (1971), pp. 327–40. A bibliography is provided in Peter Happe´, ‘Recent Studies in John Bale’, English Literary History, 17 (1987), pp. 103–13. 13. See Bale’s commentary on the Revelation, The Image of Both Churches, in H. Christmas, ed., John Bale: Select Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), p. 261. 14. See Roland Barthes, S/Z: an Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987, rpt of 1974), pp. 4–6. 15. ‘The Fourth Examination of John Philpott’ (1555), in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, 9 vols, ed. G. Thownsend and S. R. Cattley (London, 1938), vol. 7, p. 615. Bale was a friend of Philpott; see Vocacyon, p. 49; McCusker, John Bale, p. 19.

Notes, pp. 81–3 191 16. On the Second Prayer Book, see Dickens, English Reformation, pp. 339–43; D. H. Pil, The English Reformation, 1529–58 (London: Athlone Press, 1973), pp. 149–56. 17. On this incident, see Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Edwardian Reformation, 1547–53’, Archivium Hibernicum, 24 (1977), pp. 83–9, pp. 84–5; ‘George Browne, First Reformation Archbishop of Dublin, 1536–54’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970), pp. 301–26, pp. 312–13. 18. Ellis, ‘John Bale’, p. 287. 19. Ellis, ‘John Bale’, p. 287. 20. See William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Cape, 1963), ch. 2; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 2nd edn), p. 38. 21. See Rainer Pineas, ‘William Tyndale’s Influence on John Bale’s Polemical Use of History’, Archiv fu¨r reformationsegeschichte, 53 (1962), pp. 79–96; Margaret Aston, ‘John Wycliff’s Reformation Reputation’, Past and Present, 30 (1965), pp. 24–6. More generally, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. 2, passim; W. Cargill-Thompson, ‘Martin Luther and the ‘‘Two Kingdoms’’ ’, in David Thompson, ed., Political Ideas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 34–52. Bale’s history of British literature, Scriptorium Mairis Brytanniae . . . Catalogus (1557), was written in Latin. On Bale’s scholarship, see McCusker, John Bale; Fairfield, John Bale; King, English Reformation Literature, ch. 4. 22. See Bale, Image of Both Churches, for the clearest exposition of his sense of history. See also The Examinations of Anne Askew, in Christmas, ed., Select Works, p. 188; Fairfield, John Bale, chs 3–5; Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, ch. 2; Bernard Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, in C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, eds, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 93–124. 23. Rainer Pineas, ‘John Bale’s Nondramatic Works of Religious Controversy’, Studies in the Renaissance, 9 (1962), pp. 218–33, pp. 227–8. See also John Bale, Second Examination of Anne Askew, in Christmas, ed., Select Works, pp. 187–94; The Temptation of Our Lord, Complete Plays, ed. Peter Happe´, 2 vols (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), vol. 2, p. 61. 24. See John Bale, Second Examination of Anne Askew, pp. 187–8. 25. See Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, pp. 87, 107–8; Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, pp. 107–8. 26. On the constitutional changes inaugurated by Henry VIII, see Franklin Le Van Baumer, The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940); Geoffrey Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (London: Arnold, 1984, rpt of 1977), ch. 8. 27. See T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950); F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library Publications, 1967), ch. 4. For a recent analysis of the Arthurian legends as a means of justifying an English right to Ireland, see Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 7. 28. Rainer Pineas, ‘Some Polemical Techniques in the Nondramatic Works of John Bale’, Bibliothe`que d’humanisme et Renaissance, 24 (1962), pp. 583–8.

192 Notes, pp. 83–8 29. Bale is mainly relying on Gildas, De Exidu et Conquistu Britanniae (see Vocacyon, p. 46), but also Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae. Both books were in his library: see Honor McCusker, ‘Books and Manuscripts Formerly in the Possession of John Bale’, The Library, 2nd series, 16 (1935–36), pp. 144–65, p. 149. See also John Bale, Index Britanniae Scriptorum, eds, R. L. Poole and M. Bateson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 317, 489; Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytanniae Catalogus (London, 1557), pp. 49, 194–5. 30. John Bale, King John, in Happe´, ed., Complete Plays, vol. 1, p. 144. 31. Davies, ‘John Bale’, p. 222. 32. Ellis, ‘John Bale’, p. 289. See also ‘Crown, Community and Government in the English Territories, 1450–1575’, History, 71 (1986), pp. 187–204. 33. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 34. Pineas, ‘Polemical Techniques’, p. 584. 35. See also Barnaby Rich, A Catholicke Conference between Syr Tady MacMareall a popish priest of Waterforde, and patricke Plaine a young student in Trinity College in Ireland (1612). 36. On ‘coyne and livery’, see Ellis, Tudor Ireland, p. 28; David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 52. 37. Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, rpt of 1951), pp. 108–9. 38. On hybridity, see Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28 (1984), pp. 125–33. 39. McCusker, ‘Books and Manuscripts’, p. 151; Bale, Index Britanniae, p. 317. 40. Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660’, in K. R. Andrews et al., eds, The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 45–64, at p. 55. 41. Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), pp. 145–7. 42. See Ciaran Brady, ‘Court, Castle and Country: the Framework of Government in Tudor Ireland’, in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, eds, Natives and Newcomers: the Making of Irish Colonial Society (Bungay, Suffolk: Irish Academic Press, 1986), pp. 24–49. See also Geoffrey Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953); Christopher Coward and David Starkey, eds, Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 43. Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 46. 44. Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 475–502, p. 502. The impact of the Reformation has been one of the most keenly debated subjects among modern Irish historians of the sixteenth century. See Alan Ford, ‘The Protestant Reformation’, in Brady and Gillespie, eds, Natives and Newcomers: the Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999, rev. edn), pp. 50–74; Nicholas P. Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: une question mal poseé’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), pp. 423–50;

Notes, pp. 88–91 193

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

6

‘Protestants, Planters and Apartheid in Early Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1986–87), pp. 105–15; Karl Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the Reformation in Ireland: une question bien poseé’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), pp. 196–207; Steven G. Ellis, ‘Economic Problems of the Church: Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 41 (1990), pp. 239–65. See Art Cosgrove, Late Medieval Ireland, 1370–1541 (Dublin: Helicon, 1981), ch. 7. See the relevant entries in the DNB. A. F. Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 20. ‘To Doctor Bale’, in Barnaby Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1989), pp. 84–5. On Googe’s life, see DNB entry; Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets, introduction, pp. 1–16.

Cicero, Tacitus and the reform of Ireland in the 1590s

1. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 20. See also Anthony Grafton, ‘Humanism and Political theory’, in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 9–29. 2. Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, in Burns, ed., Cambridge History of Political Thought, pp. 95–131, at p. 125. See also Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner, eds, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 387–452, at pp. 447–52. 3. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, ch. 2. This is not, of course, to discount the significance of Machiavelli for English readers. See Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: a Changing Interpretation, 1500–1700 (London: RKP, 1964); Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), passim; Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: the Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 331–2. 4. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 38. 5. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 58. 6. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 59. 7. See T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare’s Small Latin and Less Greek, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944). 8. As Blair Worden has recently pointed out ‘[t]here is now a sizeable literature on the reading of Tacitus in the late Renaissance’, a clear reflection of the seachange scholars perceive as a result of the upsurge of interest in the histories and writings on Britain and Germany: The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 257. 9. Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: the Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), ch. 10; Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: the Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (Boydell: Brewer, 1993), pt 3.

194 Notes, pp. 91–3 10. The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba: Fower Bookes of the Histories of Cornelius Tacitus. The Life of Agricola (Oxford, 1591); The Annales of Cornelius Tacitus. The Description of Germanie (London, 1598). Markku Peltonen has pointed out the significance of translations in developing political ideas in early modern England; Classical Humanism and Republicanism, Introduction, passim. See also Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, ch. 5. 11. David Wormersley, ‘Sir Henry Saville’s Translation of Tacitus and the Political Interpretation of Elizabethan Texts’, Review of English Studies, 42 (1991), pp. 313–42. 12. Claudius Tiberius Nero: a Critical Edition of the Play Published Anonymously in 1607, ed. Uwe Baumann (Frankfurt am main: Peter Lang, 1990). 13. Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: the Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 315. 14. J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’, in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 169–88, at p. 187; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, rev. edn), pp. 152–3. 15. Essex was probably Spenser’s last patron and paid for his funeral. See Rudolf B. Gottfried, ‘Spenser’s View and Essex’, PMLA, 52 (1937), pp. 645–51. 16. Deborah Shuger, ‘Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997), pp. 494–525, pp. 498–9. See also Andrew Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1993), pp. 390–408. 17. Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: the Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Introduction. See also ‘The Road to the View: On the Decline of Reform Thought in Tudor Ireland’, in Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland: an Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989), pp. 25–45. 18. See also Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation of Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 475–502; The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 19. Brady, Chief Governors, p. 297. On the common law tradition, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, rev. edn). 20. See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Ireland and Sixteenth-Century Political Theory’, Modern Language Review, 89 (1994), pp. 1–18. 21. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, The Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), p. 46. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 22. See, for example, Ciaran Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present, 111 (1986), pp. 17–49. 23. Brady, Chief Governors, p. 297. 24. For Beacon’s use of Machiavelli, see Richard Beacon, Solon His Follie, ed. Clare Carroll and Vincent Carey (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Text Society, 1996), Introduction, pp. xxvi–xliii (subsequent references to

Notes, pp. 93–5 195

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

this edition in parentheses in the text); Sydney Anglo, ‘A Machiavellian Solution to the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594)’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack, eds, England and the Continental Renaissance (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), pp. 153–64; Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, pp. 75–102; Vincent Carey, ‘The Irish Face of Machiavelli: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie and Republican Ideology in the Conquest of Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan, ed., Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 83–109. For Herbert’s, see Sir William Herbert, Croftus Sive De Hibernia Liber, ed. Arthur Keaveney and John A. Madden (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1992), p. 205 (subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text). On Spenser’s, see View, p. 229; Edwin A. Greenlaw, ‘The Influence of Machiavelli on Spenser’, Modern Philology, 7 (1909), pp. 187–202; Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence’, in Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland, pp. 109–25. On the influence of this cluster of writers on one particular seventeenthcentury gentleman, see Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, ch. 2. Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 338. See also Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Introduction. Don-John Dugas, ‘Elizabethan Appropriation of Irish Culture: Spenser’s Theory vs. Lee’s Practice’, Mosaic, 32 (Sept. 1999), pp. 1–20, p. 8. See also Hiram Morgan, ‘Tom Lee: the Posing Peacemaker’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, eds, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 132–65. See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Dismantling Irena: the Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England’, in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger, eds, Nationalisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 157–71; Christopher Ivic, ‘Spenser and the Bounds of Race’, Genre, 32 (1999), pp. 141–74. On Fenton, see Rudolf Gottfried, ‘Geoffrey Fenton’s Historie of Guicciardini’ (Indiana University Publications: Humanities Series, 3, 1940). See DNB entry. E. M. Hinton, ‘Barnaby Rich’s ‘‘Anatomy of Ireland’’, with an Account of the Author’, PMLA, 55 (1940), pp. 73–101, p. 91 For details, see Michael McCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), ch. 2; Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), pp. 85–108; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 95–6, 126–30, passim. John W. Shirley, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot’, in John W. Shirley, ed., Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 16–35, at p. 21; Shohachi Fukuda, ‘Fanchin, Molanna’, in A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia (London and Toronto: Routledge and Toronto University Press, 1990), p. 300; McCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation, p. 43, n. 91. Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing, pp. 112–26.

196 Notes, pp. 95–100 35. William Herbert, Croftus Sive De Hibernia Liber, ed. Arthur Keaveney and John A. Madden (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1992), Introduction, pp. xviii–xix. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 36. W. D. Cargill-Thompson, ‘Martin Luther and the ‘‘Two Kingdoms’’ ’, in David Thompson, ed., Political Ideas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 34–52. 37. Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Robe and Sword in the Conquest of Ireland’, in Claire Cross, David Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick, eds, Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton on His Retirement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 139–62; Ciaran Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present, 111 (1986), pp. 17–49. 38. For a fuller analysis, see Herbert, Croftus, ed. Keaveney and Madden, pp. xix–xxxiii. 39. Niccolo` Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 49–50. 40. F. X. Martin, ‘Dairmait Mac Murchada and the Coming of the Normans’, in Art Cosgrove, ed., A New History of Ireland, Vol. 2, Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 57–60; Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian’. 41. Machiavelli, Prince, pp. 99–102. 42. See Herbert, Croftus, pp. 202–7, for the relevant references; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, chs 2–3, for the intellectual context. 43. Tacitus, The Histories, trans. W. H. Fyfe and D. S. Levene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 107. 44. Tacitus, Histories, p. 69. 45. Tacitus, On Imperial Rome (The Annals), trans. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), pp. 256–7. 46. Herbert, Croftus, pp. 189–91. 47. For a fuller discussion, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Censoring Ireland in Early Modern England’, in Andrew Hadfield, ed., Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (Basingstoke: Palgrave now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 149–64. 48. Sydney Anglo, ‘A Machiavellian Solution to the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594)’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack, eds, England and the Continental Renaissance (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), pp. 153–64. 49. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, p. 76. 50. Vincent Carey, ‘The Irish Face of Machiavelli: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie (1594) and Republican Ideology in the Conquest of Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan, ed., Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 83–109, at p. 90. 51. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 1, ch. 6; vol. 2, ch. 8. 52. Solon His Follie, Introduction, pp. xxx, xlii. 53. Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 19. 54. Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 6. 55. Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 20. 56. Tacitus, On Britain and Germany, trans. H. Mattingly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), p. 55.

Notes, pp. 100–6 197 57. Tacitus, On Britain and Germany, pp. 61–2. 58. Tacitus, On Britain and Germany, p. 73. 59. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. Lehmberg (London: Everyman, 1966), p. 38. 60. See McCabe, ‘The Fate of Irena’, p. 115; Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of the ‘Faerie Queene’ (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1942). 61. Spenser, View, pp. 86, 89, 313–15, 317–18. 62. See, for example, The Histories, trans. W. H. Fyfe and D. S. Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 80–1, pp. 223–4; The Annals, trans. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), pp. 168–9, 376. 63. For discussion, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’, English, 47 (1998), pp. 169–82. 64. See, Ciaran Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present, 111 (May 1986), pp. 17–49. 65. For a recent assessment of Grey’s role and his relationship to Spenser, see Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), passim. 66. See, View, p. 139. For comment, see Eamonn Grennan, ‘Language and Politics: a Note on Some Metaphors in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’, Spenser Studies, 3 (1982), pp. 99–110; Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Course of Justice: Spenser, Ireland and Political Discourse’, Studia Neophilologica, 65 (1993), pp. 187–96, at pp. 189–90. 67. A contemporary representation of these events is to be found in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (c.1599). For commentary, see Allan Bloom with Harry V. Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981, rpt of 1964), pp. 96–8, 108–9. 68. For further comment, see Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), chs 5–6.

7

From English to British literature

1. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–7, p. 1. More generally see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2. William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), III.iii.39–40. All subsequent references to this edition. 3. See Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: a Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 74–6; Willy Maley, review of David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), in Writing Ireland, Textual Practice, 3 (1989), pp. 291–6, at pp. 293–6; David J. Baker, ‘ ‘‘Wildehirissheman’’: Colonialist Representation in Shakespeare’s Henry V’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), pp. 37–61, at pp. 43–50; Michael

198 Notes, pp. 106–9

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

Neill, ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), pp. 1–32, at pp. 19–20. Neill, ‘Broken English and Broken Irish’, at p. 19. See Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 36–44, 113–18. See Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gurr, ‘Introduction’; Michael Quinn, ed., Shakespeare: Henry V (London: Macmillan, 1969); Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: the Case of Henry V’, in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 206–27. See Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire: the Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981); Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (Harlow: Longman, 1985); Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: the Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 259. R. W. Bond, ed., The Works of John Lyly, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), vol. 3, p. 3; William Ringler, ‘The Immediate Source of Euphuism’, PMLA, 53 (1938), pp. 678–86, at p. 679. Bond, ed., Works of Lyly, vol. 1, p. 205. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses. Jonas A. Barish, ‘The Prose Style of John Lyly’, ELH, 23 (1956), pp. 14–35, at pp. 24, 27; Hunter, John Lyly, p. 264; Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 97–8. Bates, Rhetoric of Courtship, p. 97. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973, rpt of 1965), p. 139; Hunter, John Lyly, pp. 286–7. Walter N. King, ‘John Lyly and Elizabethan Rhetoric’, Studies in Philology, 52 (1955), pp. 149–61, at p. 161. J. Swart, ‘Lyly and Pettie’, English Studies, 23 (1941), pp. 9–18; Ringler, ‘The Immediate Source of Euphuism’. Hunter, John Lyly, pp. 53–4; John Leon Livesay, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance, 1575–1675 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 78–83; Samuel Lee Wolff, ‘A Source of Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit’, Modern Philology, 7 (1910), pp. 577–85. This variety of sources accounts for the problems critics have had classifying the works: see Theodore L. Steinberg, ‘The Anatomy of Euphues’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 17 (1977), pp. 27–38. Hunter, John Lyly, p. 65. Euphues arrives in England armed only with Caesar’s De Bello Gallico and experience shows him that more up-to-date accounts are required; Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 76. E. D. Marcu, Sixteenth Century Nationalism (New York: Abaris, 1976), pp. 79–81.

Notes, pp. 109–15 199 20. For some reflections on the sexualising of national identity see Andrew Parker et al., eds, Nationalisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1992); Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chs 6–7. 21. Hunter, John Lyly, p. 59; Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, p. 75. 22. King, ‘Lyly and Elizabethan Rhetoric’. 23. See J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (London: Cape, 1934), ch. 15; John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 282–5. More generally, see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), chs 3–6; Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies, passim. See also Greg Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 6. 24. Bond, ed., Works of John Lyly, vol. 1, p. 74; Geoffrey Elton, England under the Tudors (London: Methuen, 1965, rpt of 1955), pp. 324–5. 25. Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, pp. 6–7, 77. 26. Bates, Rhetoric of Courtship, pp. 102–3. 27. In a letter Euphues explicitly warns Philautus to ‘avoyde solitariness, that breedes melancholy’ (vol. 1, p. 256), an ironic reflection on his own status. 28. Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, p. 68. 29. On the comoposition of the poem, see Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of The Faerie Queene (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1942); on Spenser’s alleged increasing disillusion, see, for example, John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 30. For discussion, see Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, ch. 6; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2002, rev. edn), ch. 5; Bart Van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 31. On Spenser’s use of Saint George, see Harold L. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser’s Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), ch. 2. 32. See, for example, Michael O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: the Historical Dimension of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979), ch. 2. 33. John Dixon, The First Commentary on the ‘Faerie Queene’ [1597], ed. Graham Hough (Privately Printed, 1964); Alastair Fowler, ‘Oxford and London Marginalia to the Faerie Queene’, Notes and Queries, 206 (1961), pp. 416–19; John Manning, ‘Notes and Marginalia in Bishop Percy’s Copy of Spenser’s Works (1611)’, Notes and Queries, 230 (1984), pp. 225–7. 34. Weatherby claims that Spenser was attempting to displace the old image of Saint George derived from The Golden Legend with a truer image based on patristic writings; Mirrors of Celestial Grace, ch. 2. It is arguable that the Redcross Knight/St George is less perfect than Weatherby claims and that an ideal is balanced against a less worthy figure. 35. See Richard McCabe, ‘The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence’, in Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland: an Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989), pp. 109–25. 36. Dixon, First Commentary, p. 10.

200 Notes, pp. 116–19 37. See, for example, Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975–77), VI, 21–4. 38. Robert Kellogg, ‘Red Cross Knight’, in A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia (London and Toronto: Routledge/University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 587–8l, does not stress the obvioulsy sexual nature of the Redcross Knight’s pattern of failures and makes little of the significance of his reappearanace. 39. While the Redcross Knight succumbs to the pleasures of the flesh, Guyon heroically resists them, as the episodes in the Cave of Mommon (II, vii) and the Bower of Bliss (II, xii) indicate. Britomart, in contrast, is able to control rather than eschew her sexuality and put her body to good use in establishing a dynastic succession. For recent commentary, see David Mikics, The Limits of Moralising: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1994), chs 2–4; Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 40. See Hugh MacLachlan, ‘Arthur, Legend of’, and Gordon Teskey, ‘Arthur in The Faerie Queene’, in Hamilton, ed., Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 64–6, 69–72; Charles Bowie Millican, Spenser and the Table Round: a Study in the Contemporaneous Background for Spenser’s Use of the Arthurian Legend (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932); Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), ch. 7, ‘Britons and Elves’. 41. The name of Britomart’s father probably derives from the North Welsh king in Malory (as noted in Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), p. 320), who is an enemy of Arthur’s ally, Lodegraunce, Guinevere’s father, and who Arthur hates; The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 39–41. If such an allusion has been made, the unity of the British Isles is further disrupted. 42. Teskey, ‘Arthur in The Faerie Queene’, p. 70. 43. See Paul Alpers, ‘How to Read The Faerie Queene’, Essays in Criticism, 18 (1968), pp. 429–43, for a comparable analysis of ways in which the poem positions its readers. 44. See Anglus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: an Essay on Spenser (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), pp. 86–8. 45. For a fuller treatment of Spenser’s levels of allegory, see Isabel G. MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: the Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), part I. 46. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966); T. P. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950); Carrie Anna Harper, The Sources of the British Chronicle History in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1910). 47. See O’Connell, Mirror and Veil, ch. 3; Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), ch. 2. 48. See Harper, Sources of the British Chronicle History, pp. 165–8. Spenser has embellished the story considerably unless there is a lost source.

Notes, pp. 120–3 201 49. For the hisory of Elizabethan responses to the revolt, see Charles Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1970). 50. See Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, pp. 198–200; O’Connell, Mirror and Veil, pp. 84–9. 51. For details of Spenser’s movements, see Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), pp. 52–7. 52. On the Munster Plantation and Spenser’s involvement in its history, see Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 53. See Nicholas Canny, ‘Edmund Spenser and the Development of an AngloIrish Identity’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), pp. 1–19. 54. See Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland; Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Course of Justice: Spenser, Ireland and Political Discourse’, Studia Neophilologica, 65 (1993), pp. 187–96. 55. See, for example, Thomas H. Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1978). 56. For speculation on the composition of The Faerie Queene, see Bennett, Evolution of The Faerie Queene. 57. Andrew Hadfield, ‘Wild Fruit and Salvage Soyle’: Spenser’s Irish Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), ch. 5; Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pt V. 58. On this last point, see Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots and James VI’, English Literary Renaissance, 17 (1987), pp. 224–42. 59. See William B. Hunter, Jr., ed., The English Spenserians: the Poetry of Giles Fletcher, George Wither, Michael Drayton, Phineas Fletcher and Henry More (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1977); Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969); Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English, chs 8–9; Hugh Kearney, ‘The Making of an English Empire’, The British Isles: a History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 7.

8

Spenser and the Stuart succession

1. Cited in Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), p. 678. On Bowes, see DNB entry. 2. Maley, Spenser Chronology, p. 68; Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland, 1589–1603, ed. Markham John Thorpe (London: Longman, 1858), p. 723. 3. Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland, 1589–1603, p. 747. On Quinn, see DNB entry. 4. Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James I’, ELR, 17 (1987), pp. 224–42. 5. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 737. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text.

202 Notes, pp. 123–6 6. J. W. Bennett, The Evolution of The Faerie Queene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). 7. Susan Doran, ‘Revenge Her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder? The Impact of Mary Stewart’s Execution on Anglo-Scottish Relations’, History, 85 (2000), pp. 589–612. 8. D. Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Cape, 1956), pp. 54–5. 9. Irene Carrier, James VI and I: King of Great Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 29. 10. Doran, ‘Revenge Her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder?’, pp. 608–9. The rest of this paragraph is indebted to Doran’s analysis. 11. The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, ed. Sara Jane Steen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 30. 12. Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), passim; Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), chs 6–7. 13. Carrier, James VI and I, p. 29. Two excellent works on English responses to Mary are James Emerson Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in SixteenthCentury Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), passim. 14. James I, Basilikon Doron, The Workes (1616) (rpt Hildesham and New York: Verlag, 1971), pp. 137–92, at pp. 176–7. For Buchanan and Knox’s writings on Mary Stuart, see Phillips, Images of a Queen, passim. On James’s attitude to censorship in general, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘Burning Books as Propaganda in Jacobean England’, in Andrew Hadfield, ed., Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 165–86. 15. Phillips, Images of a Queen, p. 203. James had obviously misunderstood the process of press regulation in England, imagining that any work approved by the Stationers’ Company had royal backing, whereas their Register was a means of establishing rights to publish a book. For details, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pt 1. 16. McCabe, ‘Masks of Duessa’; see also Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 1–2. 17. McCabe, ‘Masks of Duessa’, pp. 240, 225–6. 18. Muriel Bradbrook, ‘No Room at the Top: Spenser’s Pursuit of Fame’, in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, eds, Elizabethan Poetry (London: Arnold, 1960), pp. 91–109; Richard S. Peterson, ‘Laurel Crown and Ape’s Tail: New Light on Spenser’s Career from Sir Thomas Tresham’, Spenser Studies, XII (1991) [1998], pp. 1–35. 19. Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), ch. 1. In addition to Spenser’s works complaining of the fate of the New English, see ‘A Supplication of the blood of the English most lamentably murdered in Ireland, Cryeng out of the yearth for revenge’ (1598), ed. Willy Maley, Analecta Hibernica, 36 (1994), pp. 1–90.

Notes, pp. 126–8 203 20. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, passim. See also Darryl Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Kenneth J. Larsen, ed., Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion: a Critical Edition (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), both of which stress the central importance of Protestant doctrine, theology and liturgy to Spenser’s poetry. However, it should also be acknowledged that a general commitment to Protestantism did not necessarily preclude association with Catholics. Prothalamion, published in the same year as the second edition of The Faerie Queene (1596), celebrated the betrothal of the two daughters of Edward Somerset, earl of Worcester, one of the leading Catholic nobility, to two (Catholic) gentlemen of the Temple. For an argument – not always convincing – that Spenser was more ecumenical and eclectic than Protestant in his religious beliefs, see Harold L. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser’s Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 21. See ch. 9 for further discussion. See also Willy Maley, ‘Spenser and Scotland: the View and the Limits of Anglo-Irish Identity’, Prose Studies, 19 (1996), pp. 1–18. For some incisive observations on Spenser’s relationship with power after the accession of James, see Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, ch. 1. 22. See Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, for an elaboration of this argument. 23. Willson, King James VI and I, ch. 9. I owe this point to Anne McLaren. 24. Doran, ‘Revenge Her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder?’, p. 608. 25. Andrew Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’, English, 47 (1998), pp. 169–82; John Guy, ‘The 1590s: the Second Reign of Elizabeth I?’, in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–19. On the general currency of republican ideas in Elizabethan England, see Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 2; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in John Guy, ed., The Tudor Monarchy (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 110–34. 26. See Thomas H. Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978). For an argument that Spenser was always critical of court culture, see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 6. 27. Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, pp. 170–2. 28. Maley, Spenser Chronology, pp. 9, 28. 29. Bennett, Evolution of The Faerie Queene, ch. 1. 30. Bennett, Evolution of The Faerie Queene, p. 180. 31. See Mark Eccles, ‘James I of England’, in A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia (London and Toronto: Routledge/Toronto University Press, 1990), p. 409. Eccles comments that suggestions that James appears in ‘allegorical guise’ in Spenser’s works are ‘unsubstantiated’. 32. Graham Hough, ed., The First Commentary on ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Privately printed, 1962), p. 10. See also Michael O’Connell, ‘Dixon, John’, in Hamilton, ed., Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 220–1; King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, pp. 72–4, 118–19.

204 Notes, pp. 128–32 33. See, for example, McCabe, ‘Masks of Duessa’, pp. 226–7. 34. Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 57–8. 35. Leonard L. Thompson, The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 82. I owe this reference to Anne McLaren. 36. For commentary on this episode, see Clare Carroll, ‘The Construction of Gender and the Cultural and Political Order in The Faerie Queene 5 and A View of the Present State of Ireland: the Critics, the Context and the case of Radigund’, Criticism, 32 (1990), pp. 163–91. All references to The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977). 37. For comment, see McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood, p. 46. 38. See Anthea Hume, ‘Duessa’, in Hamilton, ed., Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 229–30. 39. On female rule and the general male opposition, see Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 40. For further analysis of this episode, see Andrew Hadfield, ed., Edmund Spenser (Harlow: Longman, 1996), Introduction, pp. 15–16. 41. Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’, pp. 175–7. 42. Could Spenser have known of the scandal of James’s close relationship with Esme Stuart? His enemies alleged that he had been sent to Scotland in 1579 to lure James back to Catholicism, and it was claimed that the two men shared a homosexual passion; see Roger Lockyer, James VI and I (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 11–15; Robert Ashton, James I by His Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1969), pp. 107–8, passim. 43. Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, ch. 5. 44. Michael Holahan, ‘Imque opus exegi: Ovid’s Changes and Spenser’s Brief Epic of Mutability’, ELR 6 (1976), pp. 244–70. On the cultural importance of Ovid and Spenser’s relationship to Ovid as a precursor throughout his career, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), ch. 1; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), passim. 45. See, for example, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975). 46. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp. 77–80; Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 162–6, passim. 47. Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, ch. 5. 48. Julia Lupton, ‘Mapping Mutabilitie; Or, Spenser’s Irish Plot’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, eds, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 93–115; Patricia Coughlan, ‘The Local Context of Mutabilitie’s Plea’, Irish University Review, 26 (1996), Special Issue: Spenser in Ireland, 1596–1996, ed. Anne Fogarty, pp. 320–41. 49. On the former allegory, see Helena Shire, A Preface to Spenser (Harlow: Longman, 1978), pp. 64, 187. On the Nine Years War, see Colm Lennon, SixteenthCentury Ireland: the Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), ch. 10. On the Titans, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, pp. 32–5; Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Titans’, in Hamilton, ed., Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 691. 50. Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 737.

Notes, pp. 132–7 205 51. Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), pp. 71–4. I owe this point to John N. King. 52. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 152–3. 53. Guy, ‘The 1590s’. 54. Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, ch. 6. 55. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 20. 56. Ovid, Metamorphoses, pp. 29–36. 57. Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 247. Spenser’s thoughts on the succession were articulated in a number of works from The Shepheardes Calender (1579) onwards. See Hugh McLane, Spenser’s ‘Shepheardes Calender’: a Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961); Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, ch. 6. 58. Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, p. 17. 59. Colin Burrow, Edmund Spenser (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 41. 60. Coughlan, ‘Local Context of Mutabilitie’s Plea’. 61. An early date is argued in Alice Fox Blitch, ‘The Mutabilitie Cantos: ‘‘In Meet Order Ranged’’ ’, English Language Notes, 7 (1969–70), pp. 179–86. Most critics assume a later date; see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), p. 269; Russell J. Meyer, ‘ ‘‘Fixt in heauens hight’’: Spenser, Astronomy, and the Date of the Cantos of Mutabilitie’, Spenser Studies, 4 (1984), pp. 115–29. 62. See Paul Suttie, ‘The Political Pragmatism of Edmund Spenser’, Studies in Philology, 95 (1998), pp. 56–76; McEachem, Poetics of English Nationhood, ch. 2.

9

Spenser, Drayton and the question of Britain

1. Marc Caball, Poets and Politics: Reaction and Continuity in Irish Poetry, 1558–1625 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), p. 152. A similar case has long been made by Caball’s mentor, Brendan Bradshaw. See The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); ‘The English Reformation and identity formation in Wales and Ireland’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds, British Consciousness and Identity: the Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 43–111. 2. Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in Roberts and Bradshaw, eds, British Consciousness and Identity, pp. 8–42, p. 11. 3. Peter Roberts, ‘The English Crown, the Principality of Wales and the Council in the Marches, 1534–1641’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds, The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 118–47, p. 118. See also Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), ch. 1, ‘A New England Called Ireland?’. Kiberd comments that, in the sixteenth century, ‘the makers of

206 Notes, pp. 137–40

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Crown policy in Ireland made ever more strenuous attempts to define an English national character, and a countervailing Irish one’ (p. 9). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. chs 3, 6. Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 17. See Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), ch. 2. Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI, James I and the Identity of Britain’, in Bradshaw and Roberts, eds, British Problem, pp. 148–71. See, Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). See, T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950). Frank F. Covington, Jr., ‘Spenser’s Use of Irish History in the Veue of the Present State of Ireland’, Texas Studies in English, 4 (1924), pp. 5–38; R. D. Dunn, ‘Camden, William’, in A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press/Routledge, 1990), p. 131; William H. Moore, ‘Sources of Drayton’s Conception of PolyOlbion’, Studies in Philology, 65 (1968), pp. 783–803, pp. 786–5. See also Carrie A. Harper, The Sources of the British Chronicle History in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Philadelphia: Bryn Mawr University Press, 1910); Charles Bowie Millican, Spenser and the Table Round: a Study in the Contemporaneous Background for Spenser’s Use of Arthurian Legend (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), for Spenser’s use of the matter of Britain. William Camden, Britannia, trans. Edmund Gibson (London, 1695), Preface. John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611), Dedications. For comment, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘National and International Knowledge: the Limits of the Histories of Nations’, in Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, eds, The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 106–19. On the geography of Faeryland, see Wayne Erickson, Mapping ‘The Faerie Queene’: Quest Structures and the World of the Poem (New York: Garland, 1996); Michael J. Murrin, ‘Fairyland’, in Hamilton, ed., Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 296–8. On Spenser’s pastoral world and his interest in the genre throughout his career, see John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: a Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1993). On Spenser and the Apocalypse, see Florence Sandler, ‘The Faerie Queene: an Elizabethan Apocalypse’, in C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, eds, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 148–74; Richard Mallette, ‘Book Five of The Faerie Queene: an Elizabethan Apocalypse’, Spenser Studies, XI (1990), pp. 129–59. Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), p. 61. There is a brilliant reading of ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ in terms of Spenser’s suit with Lord Roche by Patricia Coughlan;

Notes, pp. 140–3 207

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

‘The Local Context of Mutabuilitie’s Plea’, Irish University Review, 26, 2 (Autumn/Winter 1996), pp. 320–41. See also Andrew Hadfield and Raymond Gillespie, ‘Two References to Edmund Spenser in Chancery Disputes’, Notes and Queries, 246 (Sept. 2001), pp. 249–51. For comment, see Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). Maley, Spenser Chronology, p. 12; Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, p. 516. Spenser refers to the defeat in A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland, ed. R. B. Gottfried (Variorum edition; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), pp. 171–2, 393–4. On the significance of a ‘multiple kingdom’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its application to Britain, see Conrad Russell, ‘The British Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Historical Research, 61 (1988), pp. 166–82; id., ‘The British Background to the English Civil War’, History, 73 (1988), pp. 395–415; Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid Atlantic Blues’, The Irish Review, 11 (1991), pp. 50–5. See Walter Ullmann, ‘ ‘‘This Realm of England Is an Empire’’ ’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), pp. 175–203. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), ch. 3; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 30–4. See also Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: the Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). For an argument that Spenser may well have been leaning more towards republican values in his last years, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’, English, 47 (1998), pp. 169–82. It should be pointed out that Mutabilitie, as a Titaness, is one of the giants who usually signal sterility and futile aggression throughout the poem (e.g. Orgoglio in Book I, Maleger in Book II, Corflambo in Book IV and Grantorto and Geryoneo in Book V). Mutabilitie as Mary Queen of Scots could then be read as a consequence of Elizabeth’s failure to secure her right to the throne by securing an heir or establishing a viable body politic. Mutabilitie may well be undesirable, but this does not mean that she is necessarily in the wrong in the Age of Iron. For comment on these figures, see Susanne Lindgren Wofford, ‘Spenser’s Giants’, in Mihoko Suzuki, ed., Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), pp. 199–220. On the physical violence in the later books of The Faerie Queene, see Elizabeth Fowler, ‘The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser’, Representations, 51 (1995), pp. 47–67. Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, ch.1; Helena Shire, A Preface to Spenser (Harlow: Longman, 1978), pp. 63–4. Howard Erskine-Hill argues that Shakespeare’s history plays make this case; Poetry and the Realm of Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pt 1, ‘Shakespeare and the Succession of Kings’. For further reflections on this problem, see Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing, esp. ch. 2.

208 Notes, pp. 143–5 27. See, Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets: a Study in Elizabethan and Jacobean Poetry (London: Arnold, 1969); William B. Hunter, ed., The English Spenserians: the Poetry of Giles Fletcher, George Wither, Michael Drayton, Phineas Fletcher and Henry More (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1977); David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), ch. 8; Moore, ‘Sources of Drayton’s Conception of Poly-Olbion’, pp. 798–800. 28. Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 191. My reading is indebted to McEachern’s provocative and scholarly insights. See also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 117–24; Richard F. Hardin, Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence/Manhattan/Wichita: The University Press of Kansas, 1973), pp. 61–6, passim; Bernard H. Newdigate, Michael Drayton and His Circle (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), ch. 12; Grundy, Spenserian Poets, ch. 6. 29. McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood, p. 182. 30. McEachem, Poetics of English Nationhood, pp. 189–90. 31. On Prince Henry’s circle, many of whom sought him out as a potential focus of opposition to his father, see Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986). See also Newdigate, Drayton and His Circle. Thomas Cogswell, ‘The Path to Elizium ‘‘Lately Discovered’’: Drayton and the Early Stuart Court’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 54 (1991), pp. 207–33, argues that Drayton looked back with nostalgia to the military culture of the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign as a corrective to what he saw as ‘the effete court and policies of James I’ (221). Anne Lake Prescott argues that Drayton was ‘Hoping (in vain) for bays and patronage despite some anti-Stuart overtones in the verse’: ‘Marginal Discourse: Drayton’s Muse and Selden’s ‘‘Story’’ ’, Studies in Philology, 88 (1991), pp. 307–28, p. 326. 32. Newdigate, Drayton and His Circle, ch. 9; Dick Taylor, Jr., ‘Drayton and the Countess of Bedford’, Studies in Philology, 49 (1952), pp. 214–28. 33. The Complete Works of Michael Drayton, ed. Richard Hooper, 5 vols (London: John Russell Smith, 1876), vol. 1, pp. 31–4. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. On the disparity between Drayton’s poem and Selden’s notes, see Prescott, ‘Marginal Discourse’. On Drayton’s use of sources, see Robert R. Crawley, ‘Drayton and the Voyagers’, PMLA, 38 (1923), pp. 530–56; id., ‘Drayton’s Use of Welsh History’, Studies in Philology, 22 (1925), pp. 234–55; I. Gourvitch, ‘The Welsh Element in PolyOlbion: Drayton’s Sources’, The Review of English Studies, 4 (1928), pp. 69–77. 34. McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood, p. 193. 35. On Spenser, see Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, ch. 6. Readings of Drayton which stress the integrated harmony of Poly-Olbion are Barbara C. Ewell, ‘Drayton’s Poly-Olbion: England’s Body Immortalized’, Studies in Philology, 75 (1978), pp. 297–315; Stella P. Revard, ‘The Design of Nature in Drayton’s Poly-Olbion’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 51 (1984), pp. 105–17. 36. See McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood, pp. 187–90; Philip Schwyzer, ‘Purity and Danger on the West Bank of the Severn: the Cultural Geography of a Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634’, Representations, 60 (Fa11 1997), pp. 22–48, pp. 28–30.

Notes, pp. 145–7 209 37. J. W. Bennett, The Evolution of The Faerie Queene (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 156. 38. Newdigate, Michael Drayton and His Circle, pp. 161–2. For a suggestion that Lownes showed ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ to other writers, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘An Allusion to Spenser’s Irish Writings: Matthew Lownes and Ralph Byrchensa’s Discourse occasioned on the late defeat, given to the Archrebels, Tyrone and O’Donnell (1602)’, Notes and Queries, 242 (Dec. 1997), pp. 478–80. 39. McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood, p. 187. For other comments on this episode, see Grundy, Spenserian Poets, pp. 138–9; Revard, ‘The Design of Nature in Drayton’s Poly-Olbion’, pp. 112–13. 40. Compare the narrator’s struggle to describe the vast number of rivers attending the marriage in The Faerie Queene, IV, xi, 9–10. The link made by Drayton between the natural world and classical myth may well suggest an Ovidian aetiological myth after the manner of ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’, the text, I would argue, which most closely shadows Poly-Olbion. 41. I. Gourvitch points out the careful use Drayton made of Welsh sources, notably Humphrey Llwyd’s Historie of Cambria, trans. David Powell (1584), a further indication of Drayton’s scepticism of a straightforward Anglocentric agenda. Gourvitch demonstrates that Drayton made no use of Holinshed’s Chronicles when composing the Welsh sections of the poem; ‘Welsh Element in PolyOlbion’, p. 77. 42. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pts 5–8. See also Kendrick, British Antiquity, ch. 3; John E. Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions: the British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002). 43. For analysis J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 44. See Revard, ‘The Design of Nature in Drayton’s Poly-Olbion’, pp. 112–13. Revard regards the episode as ‘a sign of unity rather than the division of the land’ (112). 45. Ewell, ‘Drayton’s Poly-Olbion’, p. 299. See also Robert Ralston Crawley, who comments that ‘Few poets typify Elizabethan patriotism so completely as Michael Drayton. His most ambitious poem, PolyOlbion, is a fond effort to record the chorographic intricacies of his beloved island’ (‘Drayton and the Voyagers’, p. 530). Crawley’s judgement is typical of a critical consensus on Drayton’s purpose and beliefs, one that fails to notice that England is not an island. 46. See, for example, Sheldon P. Zitner, ‘The Faerie Queene, Book VII’, in Hamilton, ed., Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 287–9. 47. As Peter Lake and Kevin Sharpe remind us early modern political discourses cannot ‘be reduced to a simple ideological programme, a single theory of government. Rather they were all polyvalent, that is they could be read or glossed in very different ways, appropriated for very different purposes’ (Peter Lake and Kevin Sharpe, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Lake and Kevin Sharpe, eds, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), p. 13). On the ways in which Ovid was read in

210 Notes, pp. 147–52

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

10

Elizabethan England, see Laurence Lerner, ‘Ovid and the Elizabethans’, in Charles Martindale, ed., Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 121–36. See Donald Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, chs 5–6. See, Steven G. Ellis, ‘Crown, Community and Government in the English Territories, 1450–1575’, History, 71 (1986), pp. 187–204; Glanmor Williams, Renewal and Reform: Wales, c.1415–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), passim. For a comprehensive overview, see Williams, Renewal and Reform. Brendan Bradshaw is probably guilty of underestimating Welsh resistance to English rule in his attempt to make a strong case for Irish resistance to English attempts to impose a religious conformity on Ireland: ‘The English Reformation and Identity Formation in Ireland and Wales’, in Bradshaw and Roberts, eds, British Consciousness and Identity, pp. 43–111. For details, see Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (London: Longman, 1968); John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 56, 58, 208–10, 231–2; David Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). He also uses the Latin name, ‘Insula sacra’, as Spenser does in View (p. 92). See Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, chs 5–6. I have made this case elsewhere in ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’. On Drayton’s nostalgia, see Hardin, Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England. See Prescott, ‘Marginal Discourse’, for further details.

Shakespeare’s ecumenical Britain

1. Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pt 1. 2. All references to the Arden Edition, 3rd series, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Thomson, 1995). 3. Willy Maley, ‘ ‘‘This sceptred isle’’: Shakespeare and the British Problem’, in John Joughin, ed., Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 83–108, at p. 84; Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Introduction, p. 7. 4. Although one should also bear in mind that Henry displays and celebrates his Welsh origin to Fluellen (4.7.103–4). The Welsh are clearly privileged above the Irish and the Scots in the play. 5. See also the lively discussion of these issues in Matthew A. Greenfield’s ‘Fragments of Nationalism in Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), pp. 181–200. 6. For recent analysis, see John E. Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions: the British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002).

Notes, pp. 152–8 211 7. Troilus and Cressida, ed. David Bevington (Arden, 3rd series; London: Thomson, 1998), 2.3.69–71. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 8. Compare the opening lines of Henry V: ‘O for a muse of fire that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention,/A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,/And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!’ (1–4). And, of course, each of these prologues recalls the opening prologue of the most militaristic play of them all, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. 9. For comment see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 6; Jerry Leath Mills, ‘Spenser and the Numbers of History: a Note on the British and Elfin Chronicles in The Faerie Queene’, Philological Quarterly, 55 (1976), pp. 281–7; Heather Dubrow, ‘The Arraignment of Paridell: Tudor Historiography in The Faerie Queene, III.ix’, Studies in Philology, 87 (1990), pp. 312–28. 10. See Troilus and Cressida, ed. Bevington, Introduction, pp. 11–19. Essex was frequently represented as Ajax. Essex had been executed for his rebellion by the time the play was written: given Shakespeare’s company’s minor part in the rebellion, it would have been wise for Shakespeare to have disavowed any links he clearly had to Essex. For comment, see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Political Culture (London: Thomson, 2003), pp. 66–8, passim. 11. See Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977); Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996). 12. Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: the Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 13. See Steven G. Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule (London: Longman, 1998), ch. 12; J. J. Silke, Kinsale: the Spanish Intervention in Ireland at the End of the Elizabethan Wars (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1970); T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, eds, A New History of Ireland, Vol. III: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), ch. 4. 14. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 54. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 15. See Curran, Roman Invasions, passim; T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950), for details. 16. Nahum Tate, The history of King Lear: acted at the Queens Theatre reviv’d with alterations (1681), p. 67. 17. All references to the Arden edition, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Thomson, 1997). 18. King Lear, ed. Foakes, p. 90. For commentary on the differences between Shakespeare’s play and the anonymous chronicle history, see pp. 96–100. 19. For details, see Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons, 1604–1610 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 78–85. 20. For further discussion, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Power and Rights of the Crown in Hamlet and King Lear: ‘The King – the King’s to blame’, RES (forthcoming).

212 Notes, pp. 158–68 21. King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Introduction, pp. 1–2. 22. See Notestein, House of Commons, pp. 60–78; David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Cape, 1956), pp. 247–9. 23. Willson, James VI and I, p. 249. See also James’s speeches to parliament collected in King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 24. Cymbeline, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London: Methuen, 1955). All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 25. Allardyce Nicoll and Josephine Nicoll, eds, Holinshed’s Chronicle as Used in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Everyman, 1927), pp. 228–9. 26. See Lila Geller, ‘Cymbeline and the Imagery of Covenant Theology’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 20 (1980), pp. 241–55, at p. 246. 27. See David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), ch. 7; Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), ch. 6. 28. See, for example, Derick R. C. Marsh, The Recurring Miracle: a Study of Cymbeline and the Last Plays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1980, rpt of 1962), Introduction. 29. For recent discussion, see Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, eds, Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 30. See Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, p. 145. 31. For other links between the two plays, see Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, pp. 159–60. 32. See David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1985), pp. 136–57. 33. See Willson, James VI and I, pp. 271–87. 34. King James VI and I, ‘A Speech in the Parliament House, as neere the very words as could be gathered at the instant’, Political Writings, pp. 147–78, at p. 155. 35. Willson, James VI and I, p. 228. See also Notestein, House of Commons, pp. 141–60. 36. See Thomas G. Olsen, ‘Iachimo’s ‘‘Drug-Damn’d Italy’’ and the Problem of British National Character in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 10 (1999), pp. 269–96. 37. For excellent discussions, see Terence Hawkes, ‘Aberdaugleddyf’, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 46–65; Ronald J. Boiling, ‘Anglo-Welsh Relations in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), pp. 33–66. 38. Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, pp. 49–50. See also Emrys Jones, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), pp. 84–99. 39. See Boiling, ‘Anglo-Welsh Relations in Cymbeline’. 40. Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589–1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), ch. 3. 41. See also Lisa Hopkins, ‘ ‘‘It is place which lessens and sets off’’: Perspective and Representation in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 10 (1999), pp. 253–68. 42. Jones, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, p. 96.

Notes, p. 168 213 43. For some comments on the cyclical nature of seventeenth-century British history, see Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 14.

Index Act of Union, 1 Adrian IV (Pope), 7, 87 Aeneas, 120, 152, 154, 155 Agricola, 100 Alençon, Duke of, 5, 112, 124 Algonkians, 63–4 Allegiance, Oath of, 165 Alpers, Paul, 200n. 43 Amadas, Philip, 62 Amazons, 75, 129 America, Americas, 12, 15, 19, 23, 26, 62–76, 95, 107, 138, 144 Angles, 140 Anglo-Irish, 28, 30, 35, 42, 106, 120–1 Anglo-Norman, 28, 29, 41, 106 Anne, Queen, 158 Antwerp, 78 Ariosto, Lodovico, 127 Aristotle, 12, 55–6 Armorica (Brittany), 59, 146, 156 Arthur, Arthurian Legends, 7, 117–19, 123, 138, 146, 191n. 27, 200n. 41 Ascham, Roger, 108 Association, Bill of (1586), 125 Athens, 108–14 Augustine, Saint, 83–4 Augustus, 91, 160–1, 164, 167 Aylmer, John, 75, 83 Babington Plot, 5, 61 Bagwell, Richard, 181n. 38 Bale, John, 10, 78–89, 138, 190nn. 13, 15, 191n. 21, 192n. 29 Bards, 137, 183n. 1 Barlowe, Arthur, 62 Barnard, Toby, 31 Bate, Jonathan, 204n. 44 Baumer, Franklin Le Van, 191n. 26 Beacon, Richard, 10, 92, 93, 98–101, 194n. 24 Bennett, Josephine Waters, 123, 127, 199n. 29 Benzoni, Girolamo, 74

Bernard, John D., 199n. 29, 206n. 14 Bhabha, Homi K., 137 Black Legend, the, 74 Blount, Edmund, 107 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 108 Bodin, Jean, 93, 99, 100 Boleyn, Anne, 50 Book of Common Prayer (Edwardian), 81–2, 191n. 16 Bothwell, Earl of, 61 Bottigheimer, Karl, 28, 192n. 44 Boulogne, Seige of (1544), 77 Bowes, Robert, 122, 125 Boyle family, 94 Bradshaw, Brendan, 12–13, 90, 174n. 6, 181n. 33, 192n. 44, 205n. 1, 210n. 50 Brady, Ciaran, 13, 92–3, 178n. 56, 179n. 5 Britain, Britishness, 1–11, 42, 43, 45, 58, 59, 60, 62, 83, 106–7, 117–18, 120–1, 137–50, 151, 155 British History, New, 3–4 Brittany (Armorica), 59, 146, 156 Brutus (founder of Britain), 59, 60, 118, 120, 152, 154–5 Brutus (Roman conspirator), 104 Bry, Theodor de, 19, 62–76 Bryskett, Lodowick, 94, 127 Buchanan, George, 10, 45–58, 125, 184nn. 24, 26, 185n. 31, 202n. 14 Buckinghamshire, 158 Burghley, Lord (William Cecil), 15, 122, 124, 125 Burrow, Colin, 135 Butler, James, twelfth earl of Ormond, 31 Butler, Thomas, tenth earl of Ormond, 23 Caball, Marc, 137, 182n. 1 Cairns, David, 175n. 23, 182n. 55 Calvinism, 12 214

Index 215 Camden, William, 1, 60, 138–9 Campion, Edmund, 35–7, 38, 39, 41 Cannibalism, 15–17 Canny, Nicholas, 7, 12, 23, 24, 173n. 1, 179n. 5, 181n. 31, 192n. 44 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 98 Carey, Vincent, 98 Cartwright, Thomas, 88 Catherine de Medici, 60 Catholics, Catholicism, 2, 4, 5, 12, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 46, 47, 50, 60, 61, 73, 74, 81, 85–6, 88–9, 112, 114, 124, 126, 127, 131, 133, 135, 138, 154, 165, 183n. 8, 203n. 20, 204n. 42 Cecil, Sir Robert, 122, 124 Charles I, 31, 122, 158 Chartwell, River, 140 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 34 Cheney, Patrick, 204n. 44, 206n. 14 Chre´tien de Troyes, 116 Churne River, 140 Cicero, 17, 18, 51, 77, 90–104, 176n. 38, 189n. 1 Claudius, 161, 164 Clegg, Cyndia Susan, 202n. 14 Cogswell, Thomas, 208n. 31 Coleman, Janet, 184n. 23 Colley, Linda, 8 Colonialism, colonies, 2, 26, 28, 40, 73, 87, 94, 100, 107, 137–8, 144, 177n. 50 Columbus, Christopher, 15 Commons, House of, 3, 62, 158–9, 165 Connacht, 40, 88 Contareno, Gaspar, 126 Corish, Patrick, 182n. 49 Cornwall, 59, 80, 145, 158 Cornish Prayer Book Rebellion (1547–49), 148 Coronation Oath, 54 Coughlan, Patricia, 206n. 16 Counter-Reformation, 35, 39 Coyne and livery, 85 Crawley, Robert Ralston, 209n. 45 Croft, Sir James, 95 Cromwell, Thomas, 80 Cromwellian settlers, 40

Cunningham, Bernadette, 182n. 58 Curran, John E., 210n. 6 Darnley, Lord, 5, 50, 61, 123 Dartes, James, 77 Davies, Sir John, 22–3, 25 Day, John, 184n. 17 Dee River, 117 Demosthones, 78 Denmark, Danes, 53, 59, 60, 140, 146 Derricke, John, 25–6, 36–7, 178n. 61 Desmond Rebellion, 36, 37 Dion, 18 ‘Discourse of Ireland, A’ (c.1599), 20–1, 25, 41 Dixon, John, 115, 128 Doran, Susan, 124 Douglas, Margaret, Countess of Lennox, 123 Dover, 80 Dowdall, Sir John, 15, 17 Drayton, Michael, 4, 10, 138–9, 143–50, 208n. 31, 209nn. 40, 41, 45 Dublin, 35, 39, 80, 182n. 48 Dublin Castle, 25, 27 Dublin Cathedral, 81 Dudley-Edwards, Ruth, 169n. 6 Dugas, Don-John, 93 Eccles, Mark, 203n. 31 Edward VI, 1, 80, 81, 84 Edwards, Francs, S. J., 171n. 31 Elizabeth I, 1, 2, 5, 23, 38, 45, 60, 61, 74–6, 91, 98, 107, 112, 114, 118, 119–21, 124–36, 141, 143, 150, 151, 153, 154, 165, 207n. 22, 208n. 31 Ellis, Stephen, 13, 82, 84, 178n. 54, 192n. 44 Elton, Geoffrey, 191n. 26 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 18, 19, 100, 108 English, ‘New English’, 2, 8, 12, 27–42, 98, 120, 125–6, 143 English, ‘Old English’, 2, 8, 12, 27–42, 77–8, 84, 86, 102, 104, 140, 181n. 31 Erickson, Wayne, 206n. 13 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 202n. 13, 207n. 25

216 Index Essex, 2nd Earl of (Robert Devereux), 9, 23, 91–2, 106, 126, 152, 153–4, 194n. 15, 211n. 10 Euphrates River, 140 Europe, European, 2, 19, 21, 26, 48, 63–5, 95, 113, 146 Ewell, Barbara, 146–7, 208n. 35 Fenians, 78 Fenton, Geoffrey, 94 Fischlin, Daniel, 171n. 35 Fisher, John, 50 Fitzsimmons, Henry, S. J., 27–8 FitzWilliam, Sir William, 89 Flanders, 80 Fletcher, Anthony, 174n. 6 Fletcher, John, 167 Flodden, Battle of (1513), 5 Florence, 102 Foakes, R. A., 157, 211n. 18 Ford, Alan, 192n. 44 Fortesque, Sir John, 158 Fortier, Mark, 171n. 35 Fowler, Elizabeth, 207n. 23 Foxe, John, 82–3 France, French, 5, 45, 46, 61, 77, 105, 124, 133, 146, 151–2 Francis II, 5, 61 Fraser, Antonia, 171n. 31 Frobisher, Martin, 62 Gaels, Gaelic, 29, 77, 84, 106 Galway, 85 Ganges River, 140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 59, 60, 118–19, 146, 152, 154–7, 160–1, 164, 166, 172n. 47, 186n. 3, 192n. 29 George (Saint), 114, 116, 199n. 34 Gerald of Wales, 14–15, 23, 41, 86, 87 Gerard, William, 37 Germany, Germans, 92, 146 Gernon, Luke, 15–16, 17 Gheeraerts, Marcus the younger, 93 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 23–5, 94 Gildas, 192n. 29 Gillespie, Stuart, 185n. 26 Gillingham, John, 182n. 55 Glenmalure, Battle of (1580), 141

Goldberg, Jonathan, 203n. 21 Goodman, Christopher, 88 Goodwin, Sir Francis, 158 Googe, Barnaby, 88–9 Gookin, Vincent, 40, 41 Gosson, Stephen, 49 Gouvitch, I., 209n. 41 Graces, the, 31 Greece, Greeks, 120, 152–6 Greenblatt, Stephen, 176n. 42, 188n. 26 Greenfield, Matthew A., 210n. 5 Greneway, Richard, 91 Grenville, Richard, 62 Grey, Lord Arthur de Wilton, 23, 101, 102, 121, 141, 197n. 65 Guazzo, Stephano, 108 Guicciardini, Francesco, 90–1, 93, 94, 100 Gunpowder Plot, 165 Guy, John, 189n. 47 Hakluyt, Richard, 24, 64, 73–4, 138 Hall, Edward, 133 Hampton Court Conference (1604), 165 Hanmer, Meredith, 88, 94 Harriot, Thomas, 4, 10, 62–76, 94 Harrison, William, 59, 60, 109 Harvey, Gabriel, 127 Hawkes, Terence, 166, 172n. 44 Hechter, Michael, 169n. 5 Helgerson, Richard, 143, 198n. 18 Heliodorus, 108 Hengist, 118 Henri II, 133 Henri IV, 124 Henry II, 27, 28, 87 Henry IV, 9 Henry V, 10, 105–7, 117, 151–2 Henry VII, 5, 7, 9, 123, 133, 166 Henry VIII, 1, 5, 23, 28–9, 50, 77, 80, 87, 133, 191n. 26 Henry, Prince, 124, 125, 144, 158, 208n. 31 Herbert, Sir William, 17–20, 23, 25, 37–8, 39, 92, 93, 95–8, 176n. 41 Herod, 50–2 Hole, William, 145

Index 217 Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 54, 59, 60, 71, 109, 133, 160, 161, 166, 201n. 41 Hooker, John, 37, 41 Horsa, 118 Huguenots, 46 Hulme, Peter, 15 Hulton, Paul, 63 Humanism, humanist, 12, 19, 90, 92, 98 Hume, David of Godscroft, 43–5, 46, 58 Hunter, G. K., 107 Iceland, 146 Inquisition, 50 Ireland, Irish, 2, 6–7, 11, 12–42, 59, 62, 74, 77–89, 90–104, 115, 120, 125–7, 131–2, 137, 139, 143, 144, 146, 148, 151–2, 154, 165, 182n. 1, 210n. 50 Irish-English, 32–3 Irish language, 33, 41, 78 Israel, 20–1, 50–2 Italy, Italians, 105, 108, 109–10, 127, 165 James V, 5 James VI and I, 2–3, 5–6, 9, 39, 43–58, 60, 62, 74, 91, 107, 121, 122–36, 138, 139, 141, 144, 146, 151–68, 202 nn. 14, 15, 208 n. 31, 212 n. 23 Jardine, Lisa, 18 Jesuits, 6, 27, 35 John (king), 14 John of Gaunt, 8–9 John the Baptist, 50–2 Jonson, Ben, 53, 78, 144 Julius Caesar, 10, 18–19, 73, 104, 166, 167, 198 n. 18 Jutes, 140 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 190 n. 6 Kastan, David Scott, 55, 185 n. 26, 186 n. 58, 212 n. 31 Katherine of Aragon, 133 Keating, Geoffrey, 14, 29, 41, 182 n. 58 Keaveney, Arthur, 176 n. 38 Kellogg, Robert, 200 n. 38 Kendrick, T. D., 172 n. 46, 186 n. 3

Kenneth III, 48 Kett’s Rebellion (1549), 148 Kiberd, Declan, 206 n. 3 Kidd, Colin, 181 n. 32 Kilcolman, 120, 140 Kildare, earls of, 34 Kilkenny, 80, 82 Kilkenny, Statutes of, 23, 177 n. 53 King, George Norrey, 139 King’s Men, 53 Kinsale, Battle of (1601), 29, 154 Knapp, Jeffrey, 138, 143 Knox, John, 46, 75, 125, 184 n. 16, 202 n. 14 Kuppermann, Karen, 176 n. 45 Lake, Peter, 209 n. 47 Las Casas, Bartolome´ de, 12 Latin, 82, 86, 107, 108 Laudabiliter, 7, 87, 97 law, laws, 22–5, 28–30, 88, 92, 102, 137, 145, 177 n. 53 sumptuary laws, 94 Lawrence, Richard, 40 Lee, Thomas, 93 Leerssen, Joseph Th., 13 Leicester, Earl of (Robert Dudley), 126, 144 Leland, John, 138 Lerner, Lawrence, 209 n. 47 Levack, Brian P., 183 n. 2 Lewkenor, Lewis, 126 Limon, Jerzy, 185 n. 36 Lipsius, Justus, 90–1, 93, 97, 100 Livy, 17, 93, 97, 98, 102 Llwyd, Humphrey, 201 n. 41 Lockwood, Thomas, 81 London, Bishop of, 98 London, Treaty of (1604), 165 Long, John, 88 Lownes, Matthew, 135, 145, 209 n. 38 Lundy, Island of, 144–8 Lyly, John, 10, 107–14, 121 Lyon, William, 88 McCabe, Richard A., 122, 191 n. 27, 197 n. 65, 213 n. 43 McCaffrey, Isabel G., 200 n. 45 MacCarthy-Morrogh, Michael, 13

218 Index McCusker, Honor, 192 n. 29 McEachern, Claire, 128, 143–4, 208 n. 28 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 17–20, 90–1, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 127, 176 n. 37, 193 n. 3, 194 n. 24 McLaren, Anne, 61, 189 n. 47, 204 n. 39 Mac Teige, Cormac, 37 Madden, John, 176 n. 38 Maley, Willy, 182 n. 46, 200 n. 51 Malory, Thomas, 200 n. 41 Marlowe, Christopher, 211 n. 8 Margaret Tudor, 6 Mary Queen of Scots, 5, 47, 50, 60–2, 74, 75, 101, 121, 122–36, 141, 207 n. 22 Mary Tudor, 5, 45, 61, 80, 133 Mason, Roger A., 184 n. 16 Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, 60–1 Medway River, 140, 145, 149 Mellifont, Treaty of, 154, 165 Meres, Francis, 144 Merlin, 117, 119, 146 Mikics, David, 200 n. 39 Milford Haven, 9, 162, 166 Montaigne, Michel de, 46 Moody, T. W., 179 n. 5 More, Thomas, 50, 90 Morgan, Hiram, 13, 207 n. 19 Morges, Jacques Le Moyne de, 19, 63, 75 Morrill, John, 174 n. 6 Moryson, Fynes, 16–17, 19 Mountjoy, Lord, 16 Munster Plantation, 13, 20, 21, 38, 74, 94–5, 101, 120, 200 n. 52 Nairn, Tom, 173 n. 60 Naples, 108, 111 Netherlands, 21, 35, 120 Newfoundland, 24 Nicolson, George, 122, 124, 125 Nine Years War, 2, 9, 16, 38, 132, 143, 154 Norbrook, David, 184 n. 26 Norman Conquest, Normans, 93, 140, 146 Norway, 146

Octavian, 104 O’More, Rory Oge, 25, 36 O’Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, 2, 20, 38, 91, 132, 152, 154 Ong, Walter J., 190 n. 7 O’Rahilly, Alfred, 178 n. 56 O Riordan, Michelle, 183 n. 1 Ossory, 80, 82 Ouze River, 148 Ovid, Ovidian, 131–2, 134, 146–7, 204 n. 44, 209 nn. 40, 47 Oxford, 108, 111 Pale, the, 32–3, 86 Paor, Liam de, 172 n. 48 Parliaments English Parliament, 61, 138, 158, 165 Irish Parliament, 82 Parsons, Robert, 6 Patterson, Annabel, 180 n. 24 Paul, Henry N., 185 n. 44 Pawlisch, Hans, 178 n. 60 Peckham, Sir George, 24–5 Peltonen, Markku, 98, 194 n. 10, 203 n. 25 Penal Laws, 40 Peter (Saint), 80–1 Pettie, William, 108 Philip II, 61 Phillips, James Emerson, 125, 184 n. 26, 202 n. 13 Philpott, John, 81, 190 n. 15 Picts, 4, 59, 60, 62, 65–76, 140 Pineas, Rainer, 85 Pius V, 60 Plato, 17 Pliny, 18 Plunket, Patrick, 35 Plutarch, 100 Pocock, J. G. A., 4 Polybius, 93, 97 Pomponius Mela, 18 Ponsonby, William, 135 Pont, Robert, 3 Pope, the, 2, 27, 39, 50, 165 Portugal, 50 Powell, David, 201 n. 41 Prescott, Anne Lake, 208 n. 31, 208 n. 33

Index 219 Protestants, Protestantism, 2, 4, 12, 28, 31–2, 36, 39, 45, 46, 47, 50, 56, 61, 73, 74, 80–9, 94, 95, 112, 124, 125, 126, 203 n. 20 Punch, 78 Puritans, 165 Quinn, David Beers, 12, 77 Quinn, Walter, 122, 124 Rainolds, John, 108 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 62, 74–6, 94, 118, 120, 123, 126, 127, 132 Rebellion of 1641, 30, 38 Reformation, 9, 28, 78, 89, 192 n. 44 Religion, religious, 47–8, 54, 64, 85, 97, 102 Republicanism, 44–5, 47, 98, 101, 126, 141–3, 203 n. 25, 207 n. 21 Requerimento, 20 Revard, Stella P., 208 n. 35, 209 n. 44 Rich, Barnaby, 16, 17, 19, 20, 39–40, 41, 88, 94, 175 n. 20, 182 n. 48 Richard II, 9, 153 Richard III, 166 Richards, Shaun, 175 n. 23, 182 n. 55 Richter, Michael, 177 n. 53, 182 n. 55 Ridolfi Plot, 61 Roanoke Island, 62 Roberts, Peter, 137 Roche, Lord of Fermoy, 135, 140 Romans, Rome, 10, 18, 21, 59, 60, 73, 80–1, 83, 91, 92, 101–3, 118, 152, 154, 161–4, 165–7 Roman Law, 93 Russell, Conrad, 30, 207 n. 19 Russell, John, 3 Ruthven Castle, 56 St. Leger, Anthony, 77 Sallust, 93, 97–8 Salmon, J. H. M., 91, 183 n. 8 Saville, Sir Henry, 91, 100 Saxons, 59, 60, 71, 83, 93, 117–19, 140, 146, 156 Saxton, Christopher, 144, 145 Scarisbrick, J. J., 172 n. 47, 189 n. 2 Schwyzer, Philip, 169 n. 5

Scotland, Scots, 1, 2–3, 5–6, 11, 13, 43–58, 60, 61–2, 71, 73, 76, 80, 107, 121, 122–36, 137, 138, 144, 147, 151–2, 154, 158, 160, 166 Scrofula, 53 Scythia, Scythians, 16, 59, 71 Selden, John, 144–5, 148, 150 Sepu´lveda, Juan Gine´s de, 12 Severn River, 145–7 Shakespeare, William, 4, 5, 6, 8–9, 10, 54–8, 78, 105–7, 151–68, 184 n. 26, 197 n. 67, 207 n. 25, 211 nn. 8, 10 Shannon River, 40 Sharpe, Kevin, 195 n. 25, 209 n. 47 Shirley, John, 76, 188 n. 19 Shuger, Debora, 53 Sidney, Sir Henry, 25, 35, 36 Sidney, Sir Philip, 25, 49, 107, 126, 144, 184 n. 26, 193 n. 8 Silberman, Lauren, 200 n. 39 Skinner, Quentin, 184 n. 23 Spain, Spanish, 2, 4, 20, 35, 60, 61, 73, 74, 91, 105, 110, 124, 126, 131, 138, 154, 165, 166 Spanish infanta, 124 Speed, John, 62, 138–9 Spelman, Sir Henry, 3 Spenser, Edmund, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 19, 24, 30, 42, 74, 92–3, 94, 95, 101–3, 107, 114–36, 138–43, 145, 149–50, 151, 153, 156–7, 161, 168, 177 n. 50, 194 n. 15, 197 n. 65, 200 nn. 39, 41, 48, 203 n. 20, 204 n. 42, 205 n. 57, 207 n. 21, 209 n. 40 Stanihurst, James, 32 Stanihurst, Richard, 28, 32–5, 37, 39, 41 Steinberg, Theodore L., 198 n. 16 Strachey, William, 73 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, earl of, 30–1 Strong, Roy, 208 n. 31 Stuart, Arbella, 60, 75–6, 124 Stuart, Esme, 204 n. 42 Stubbes, Philip, 49 Suetonius, 18 ‘Supplication’, 38–9, 41

220 Index Tacitus, 17, 90–104 Tate, Nahum, 157 Taylor, George, 27–8 Thames River, 140, 145, 149 Thomas, William, 7 Throckmorton, Elizabeth, 75 Throckmorton Plot, 61 Thucydides, 98 Tiberius, 91 Timon of Athens, 51 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 184 n. 24 Trollope, Andrew, 92 Troy, Trojans, 120, 152–6 Tuck, Richard, 90 Tyrants, tyranny, 47, 48, 55–6, 57, 146, 159 Ulster, 30 Ulster Plantation, 21, 165 Uther Pendragon, 118 Valladolid, 12 Venice, 101, 102, 126 Vergil, Polydore, 155 Vespasian, 91, 164 Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, 46 Virgil, 131–2, 166 Virginia, 19, 62–3, 71, 94–5 Virginia Company, 73 Vortigern, 118

Walder, Dennis, 169 n. 5 Wales, Welsh, 1–2, 7, 11, 13, 59, 60, 62, 107, 117, 137, 144, 145–8, 151–2, 158, 162, 166, 167, 200 n. 41, 209 n. 41, 210 n. 50, 210 n. 4 Walker, Greg, 185 n. 27 Walshe, Edward, 77–8, 86, 87 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 5 Ware, Sir James, 30, 32 Wars of the Roses, 2, 3, 124 Waterford, 80, 82 Weatherby, Harold, 199 n. 34 Weiner, Carol Z., 171 n. 26 Wentworth, Peter, 6 Wesel, 80 Wexford, 34 White, John, 19, 62–76, 94 William the Conqueror, 93, 146 Williams, Gwyn, 137 Williamson, Arthur, 171 n. 26 Willson, David Harris, 170 n. 14 Wilson, Charles, 201 n. 49 Wofford, Susanne Lindgren, 207 n. 22 Worcester, Earl of (Edward Somerset), 202 n. 20 Worden, Blair, 193 n. 8 Wormald, Jenny, 138 Wyatt’s Rebellion (1553–54), 148 Young, Robert J. C., 177 n. 50

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