WOMEN, WRITING, AND LANGUAGE IN EARLY MODERN IRELAND
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Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland MARIE-LOUISE COOLAHAN
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox 2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Marie-Louise Coolahan 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–956765–2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 This publication was grant-aided by the Publications Fund of National University of Ireland, Galway
Acknowledgements The research for this book was conducted at a number of archival institutions and libraries. I would like to thank the librarians, archivists, and staff of the Bibliothe`que Royale, Brussels; Bodleian Library, Oxford; British Library, ´ Fiaich Library, Armagh; James Hardiman Library, Galway; London; Cardinal O National Archives, Kew; National Library of Ireland, Dublin; Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; Russell Library, National University of Ireland, Maynooth; and Trinity College, Dublin. For permission to cite manuscripts and to reproduce texts and maps, I am grateful to the Archivo General de Simancas, Spain; British Library, London; National Archives, Kew; National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Russell Library, National University of Ireland, Maynooth; and Trinity College, Dublin. I would also like to thank the sisters of the Poor Clare monastery, Galway, for their generosity in allowing me to consult and cite their archival holdings. I am indebted to the National University of Ireland, Galway for sabbatical leave and grants from the Millennium Fund; to the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for a Government of Ireland fellowship; and to the Institute of English Studies, University of London for awarding me visiting fellow status. All were critical in providing the time and space to concentrate on the project. As it developed, the fruits of this research were presented at various forums in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I am grateful to all participants in these events for their comments. This book has been some years in the making. I would like to thank all my friends, family, and colleagues for their support in that time. Particular thanks are due to those whose extended conversations with me helped refine the project: Raymond Anselment, Martyn Bennett, Caroline Bowden, Vicki Burke, Nicholas Canny, Danielle Clarke, Elizabeth Clarke, Richard Curwood, Jonathan Gibson, Natasha Lohan, Erica Longfellow, Sara McKibben, Anne Mulhall, Adam Smyth, Sea´n Walsh, and Gillian Wright. I am deeply grateful to those who read chapters in draft, offering wonderful insights and advice: John Ball, Clı´odhna Carney, Lesel Dawson, Adrian Frazier, Mı´chea´l Mac Craith, Naomi McAreavey. Alex Black provided his invaluable eagle eye to help with proofreading. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers at Oxford University Press. Any errors, of course, are my own. I would like to express my thanks to the editorial and production teams at OUP. My parents and siblings have been a source of unstinting support and encouragement, for which I am profoundly grateful. This book is dedicated to my parents, to whom I owe my greatest debt.
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Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Note on the Text
viii ix x
Introduction 1. Poetry in Irish
1 14
2. Irish Nuns’ Writing: The Poor Clares
63
3. Petition-letters
102
4. 1641 Depositions
141
5. Poetry in English
180
6. Autobiography Epilogue
219 258
Bibliography Index
261 285
List of Illustrations 1. ‘Caitilı´n Dubh cecenit’ (‘Caitilı´n Dubh composed this’), Maynooth MS M 107, p. 193. Reproduced by permission of the Librarian, National University of Ireland Maynooth, from the collections of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. 2. Detail from Baptista Boazio’s map of Ireland (1599), identifying ‘Grany O Male’ as chief. # British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Maps 10805 (166). 3. A Map of ye Kingdome of Ireland. With perticular notes distinguishing the Townes Reuolted or Burnt since the late Rebellion (Oxford, 1642). # British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 669.f.4(78). 4. The deposition of Joane (or Johanna) Constable, with her mark certified by the commissioners. TCD MS 836, fol. 89r. By permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin. 5. Katherine Philips, holograph copy, ‘To my Lord Duke of Ormond, Lord Lievtenant of Ireland on the discovery of the late Plot’, NLW MS 21702E, fol. 158r. By permission of the National Library of Wales. 6. 1651 map of Galway. TCD MS 1209/73. By permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.
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208 254
List of Abbreviations AGS
Archivo General de Simancas
BL
British Library
Calendar of Carew MSS
Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts
Calendar of Salisbury MSS
Calendar of the Manuscripts of . . . the Marquis of Salisbury
CSPI
Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland
DIAS
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
Field Day
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED RIA SP TCD
Oxford English Dictionary Online Royal Irish Academy State Papers, National Archives, Kew Trinity College, Dublin
Note on the Text Original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are retained. Abbreviations with superior letters are retained; e.g. ‘ye’ for ‘the’, ‘yr’ for ‘your’ or ‘there’. Where the scribe used a tilde or loop to indicate another letter or letters, these have been added in italics. Likewise, where the following abbreviations have been used in manuscripts to indicate missing letters, they have been expanded and italicized: strokes through the descender of ‘p’ for ‘per’, ‘pre’ or ‘pro’; strokes or loops to indicate missing letters, as in ‘protestant’, ‘deponent’. The downstroke for ‘es’ is silently expanded. Where I have inserted letters or words for the sake of clarity, this is indicated by the use of square brackets. Deletions and underlinings are retained only where they are germane to the argument. Early modern printed texts are generally cited by reference to printers’ signatures, due to regular mispagination in the sources themselves. Only the long ‘s’ is modernized. All quotations from scripture are from the Authorized King James Version, 1611. Two calendars were in use during this period: the Julian (Old Style) calendar, in use in England, was ten days behind the Gregorian (New Style) calendar, which was adopted by most countries on the continent from 1582. The new year began on 1 January in continental Europe, and on 25 March in England. Where dated documents refer to the period prior to 25 March, I have provided both years. Otherwise, dates are as provided in the sources.
Introduction This book concerns writing in Irish, English, and Spanish, by women in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between the years 1574 and 1676, a period of political, religious, and linguistic contestation that encompassed the key power struggles of early modern Ireland.1 The period between the Elizabethan conquest and the Restoration settlement saw rebellions and plantations, the nine years war, the confederate and Cromwellian wars. The island was peopled by Gaels, by descendants of the Norman invasion, and by a stream of settlers, speaking an array of languages. The clash of cultures and traditions made for a ‘noisy, scribbling’ place.2 The island’s inhabitants held conflicting opinions and expressed competing positions. They continued to write in alreadyestablished genres and engaged with newly emerging forms of writing. Women of all political and religious hues contributed to this clamour; they strove to be heard and to make sense of their situations, forging space for their voices in complex ways and engaging with native and new language-traditions. Despite the huge advances made in constructing women’s literary history in recent decades, it remains the case that we lack a cohesive account of the complexities of women’s writing in early modern Ireland. Who were the female authors of this period? Why did they write? What did they write? How does their textual production fit into the fluid and shifting picture of early modern Ireland that has been so vibrantly painted by historians? This book aims to answer these questions by supplying a narrative of the genres of women’s writing in early modern Ireland and the ways in which women represented themselves, their cultures, and their environments. It maps the landscape of women’s writing by investigating the mechanisms of textual production, the kinds of writing in which women engaged, their manipulation of literary conventions and rhetorical positions to accommodate female authorship, and the varieties of authorial agency. A core argument of this study is that identities are shaped and defined in relation to each other. This is particularly relevant in Ireland, where the social
1
These dates correspond to the earliest and latest dates of composition for the texts discussed. Deana Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3. 2
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Introduction
make-up was heterogeneous. The four primary ethnic categories commonly identified with regard to the early modern Irish period point to the diversities of ‘Irishness’ understood both at the time and since. The indigenous, catholic Irish (commonly termed native, or Gaelic, or mere Irish) were the inhabitants who claimed ancestry from mythical Milesian progenitors.3 Those called the Old English were descended from the Normans who invaded in the eleventh century. They remained catholic, intermarried, and largely embraced bilingualism. The number of alternative epithets by which they are known (Norman-Irish, Hiberno-Norman, Anglo-Norman) signals the hybridity of this community. Settlers who arrived during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are generally designated the New English. A fourth group comprised the Ulster Scots, typically presbyterian, who arrived in the seventeenth century to people the plantation of that province. Crude as such categories may seem, they remain useful touchstones of community affiliation which inform how these authors saw themselves and throw light on their religious and political attitudes. The women who form the focus of this study were members of these groups; however, although each can be identified with the dominant assumptions of her community, the texts they produced often unsettled such categorizations. The different cultures jostled together on the island and no group was entirely selfcontained. The daily necessity of fraternizing with others—whether in the bilingual Pale, on a provincial plantation, or encountering English administrators who toured and surveyed the country—ensured cross-cultural exposure. As these texts show, such encounters were not always construed as hostile. Responses to the bean sı´ (the fairy woman who traditionally functioned as a territorial figure; anglicized as ‘banshee’) and the bean chaointe (keening woman) form a thread running through this book. An encounter with the bean sı´ produces a visceral, uncomprehending reaction from the royalist Ann Fanshawe, travelling westwards to escape Cromwell’s troops. The bean chaointe provokes opposing responses: abhorrence on the part of Anne Southwell, a devout planter living in Cork, and gratification on the part of Alice Thornton, child of a deceased lord deputy. Both these female figures are, by contrast, enabling for the Irish poet Caitilı´n Dubh, who adopts them as models for her composition of elegies. The contexts for these variant representations are fully described below. What they reveal is the extent of cross-fertilization. Yoked together on a small island, crosscultural proximity was unavoidable. Responses could be unpredictable, but they illuminate how the contours of identity were delineated. We can only gain a full picture of their textual traces through a comparative analysis of writing practices in the different language-traditions.
3 See Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fı´or-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).
Introduction
3
In Ireland, in particular, language in this period is more than a medium of communication. It is a signal of literary tradition and culture as well as a claim to (sometimes hybrid) community. The Irish language was the mother tongue of the majority, the native Irish, but English was the language of the planters and crown administration. Latin remained the lingua franca for communication between the two into the seventeenth century, although it does not seem to have been a tool available to many women. The traces of women’s writing in Latin are scant. The bilingualism of the Old English community was often the subject of great suspicion by New English settlers, as was perhaps most famously expressed by Edmund Spenser, whose character Irenius in A View of the State of Ireland, when prompted to recount the ‘evill customes’ of the Old English, lambastes their adoption of Irish: ‘first I have to finde fault with the abuse of language, that is, for the speaking of Irish among the English, which as it is unnaturall that any people should love anothers language more then their owne, so it is very inconvenient, and the cause of many other evills.’4 Irenius lays bare the fear of assimilation and degeneracy as he identifies the practices of intermarriage and fostering children to the Gaelic Irish as the sources of linguistic integration. Thus, language was freighted with political significance. Palmer, in her pioneering study of language in the sixteenth century, argues that to understand this transitional linguistic moment is to understand the intersections of power and language.5 This is doubly the case for women’s writing. Women’s entry into a writerly world was often driven by economic, social, and political imperatives. Anne Southwell and Katherine Philips used their poetry to forge and consolidate elite social networks. The protestant women who composed depositions on their experiences of the 1641 rising testified in order to lay claim to financial compensation. These depositions demonstrate a polyglot mindset. They show Hiberno-English coming into being and display varying degrees of competency in the Irish language. The cross-linguistic hybridity abhorred by colonial administrators was extensive and penetrating. The rise of vernacular Irish, as opposed to the classical Irish sustained by professional prosodists, allowed women’s verse to be preserved. Economic considerations also informed this cultural production: the keens of Caitilı´n Dubh and Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain make claims for patronage and financial aid. European literary contexts are equally important to an understanding of women’s textual production. Written forms of Irish were becoming more demotic as a result of the Counter Reformation effort—directed by the Irish
4 Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland: From the First Printed Edition (1633), ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 70. 5 Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4.
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Introduction
Franciscan college at Louvain—and this political agenda informed the literary activities of the Irish Poor Clare order. These Irish nuns embraced the project of vernacular translation pursued by their male contemporaries at Louvain and by nuns across early modern Europe. They commissioned translations into Irish of their Rule (which prescribed the procedures and rituals of monastic life), authored by their foundress and translated into English by the exiled community based in the Low Countries. Economic necessity drove women to compose state petition-letters that would narrate their political situations and elicit relief. As the discussion of Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille (Grace O’Malley) shows, such engagement with the English state involved the negotiation of language barriers with the help of scribes and interpreters. A similarly pragmatic approach to linguistic obstacles is in evidence among women exiled in Spain. Mother Browne, author of the chronicle of the Irish Poor Clares, corresponded in Spanish with the convents that had hosted her sisters in order to compose their obituaries. Female catholic refugees in Spain combated problems of poor literacy and apparent monoglotism by exploiting the collective expertise of their community to compose petitions that would persuade the Spanish king to award them pensions. Thus, the picture that emerges is one of pragmatic language acquisition, of varied degrees of literacy, and of the range of political affiliations signalled by the language in which a text was composed. Central to this study is a complex understanding of authorship that centres on the authorial act of creating or composing a text, which does not necessarily equate with the physical act of writing. Gaelic poetic culture was as oral as it was scribal. Poems were composed for performance and the preservation in manuscript poem-books (duanairı´ ) of the verse authored by Caitilı´n Dubh and Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain is likely due to the connections of their writing with noble Gaelic houses. Like many of their male contemporaries, they left no writing in their own hand.6 Epistolary writing signed by women takes a variety of forms, from holograph letters entirely in a woman’s hand to signed autograph letters. Many petitions were written by amanuenses. Thus, this study takes into account the collaborative processes of textual production. The textual record of the 1641 depositions was written by state-appointed commissioners. Female signatures to these texts exhibit the full spectrum of literacy, from fluent signatures to personalized marks that were certified by the commissioners. But the survival of Elizabeth Dowdall’s first-person narrative of 1641 in her own hand cautions us against drawing simplistic conclusions from this evidence. Anglophone culture was far more conducive to the development of writing skills. There is ample surviving evidence for the scribal fluency of the women who form the focus of the last two chapters of this study. Manuscripts of their writing survive for Anne Southwell, Katherine Philips, Lucy Cary, Mary Rich, Alice Thornton, 6 Angela Bourke et al. (eds.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), iv. 360.
Introduction
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and Ann Fanshawe. English protestant culture provided a theologically sanctioned stimulus to literacy and the scribal contexts for these women’s writing were more conducive to preservation. The works under examination here are collaborative and commissioned texts as well as single-authored works. Modern concepts of authorship will not be troubled by the latter category. Through the various investigations of genre, this study attempts to unpick the layers of authority and mediation pertaining to women’s production of texts. These issues are not always specific to women: men’s oral delivery of their narratives of what had happened to them during the 1641 rising, for example, were equally filtered through the writing process.7 For all deponents, female petitioners in Spain, and even a Gaelic chieftain like Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille, authorship was collaborative. Their narratives were produced with the help of amanuenses but they remained their own compositions. The Poor Clares provide a different example of literary cooperation. The order’s Rule was authored by their foundress, St Clare, and revised in the fifteenth century by St Colette. It was translated into English by the exiled convent at Gravelines. The Irish nuns adopted the Counter Reformation programme of vernacular translation and enlisted male scholars to help produce a version in Irish. As argued in Chapter 2, Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh’s concern as a translator to educate the women in his coinage of new terminology suggests a close working relationship with them. This text was produced in partnership; the project was initiated by the women religious, for whom the text was a foundational document. Their commissioning of male scholars was astute as to political developments and rewarded by Mac Fhirbhisigh’s attention to their varying linguistic competencies. By examining writing that was written by women, produced with the help of scribal midwives, or in collaboration with male scholars, this study demonstrates the nuances and complexities of authorial agency. In its insistence on the archipelagic dimensions to early modern history and literature, the ‘new British history’ has influenced the present study. Some thirty years ago J. G. A. Pocock called on historians to decentralize our understanding of this period by attending to the different perspectives of the nations comprising the Atlantic archipelago. The historiographical shift that followed has most productively been felt in histories of the mid-seventeenth century, alert to the mutual reverberations of the wars of the three kingdoms (England, Scotland, and Ireland).8 This approach has percolated through literary studies, most recently in 7 See my ‘“And this deponent further saith”: Orality, Print, and the 1641 Depositions’, in Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter (eds.), The Written and the Verbal: Intersections Between Script and Oral Cultures in Ireland from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries (Dublin: Four Courts, forthcoming). 8 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History, 47 (1975), 601–28; repr. in his The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 24–43. For examples, see Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars in
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the work of John Kerrigan, who argues for a devolutionary approach to anglophone writing in the four nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland), and Kate Chedgzoy, whose study of women’s writing in the Atlantic archipelago is structurally themed around memory and place.9 My location of English women writers in their Irish contexts hopes to contribute to this body of scholarship. But, while the ‘new British history’ has been accused of Anglocentricity, it should be clearly stated that this book is Hibernocentric.10 It is focused on texts produced by Irish women and by women who lived in Ireland; its parameters are defined by residence or birth. Its concern with English (or Anglo-Welsh) writers, such as Ann Fanshawe or Katherine Philips, is not to claim their bodies of writing for an Irish canon, but to explore their complex engagements with Ireland and thereby reposition their work. Elizabeth Cary, another canonical English author, is of interest here as the biographical subject of her daughter, who was resident in Ireland as a child and wrote her biography as an exiled nun in Cambrai. This study is not concerned with claiming such writers as ‘Irish’. It analyses the writing practices of women who lived amidst the clamorous throng of voices in Ireland. It interrogates the influence of Ireland— in terms of literary tradition, religio-political imagination, self-construction—on that writing. Thus, while the insights of the ‘new British history’ inform the present study, it wears its Hibernocentricity on its sleeve. The canon of early modern Irish literature has been expanded in recent years. Scholars have moved beyond the dominant literary giants, as is most succinctly conveyed in the title to Deana Rankin’s Between Spenser and Swift, which has brought a range of hitherto neglected military, historiographical, dramatic, and romance texts to our attention. Clare Carroll has focused on responses to colonization by Gaelic and Old English authors in Irish and Latin. Bernadette Cunningham has provided a comprehensive study of the Old English history of Ireland written by Geoffrey Keating (Seathru´n Ce´itinn) and, with Raymond Gillespie, has highlighted the rich material surviving in sixteenth-century annals. Richard McCabe’s recent study of Spenser has investigated the resonances of his writing with that of his Gaelic contemporaries. The scholarship of Marc Caball,
Britain and Ireland, 1638–1651 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London: Longman, 1995); Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom?: The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995); Allan Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002); John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990); John R. Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1997). 9 Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10 For a useful synthesis of the debates around the ‘new British history’, see Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 21–30.
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´ Buachalla, and Mı´chea´l Mac Craith has enriched our understanding Breanda´n O of native Irish literary culture.11 Yet, with the exception of Chedgzoy, this scholarly industry has concentrated on male authors. This is partly due to our relative tardiness in looking for and retrieving female-authored texts. The study of women’s writing opens up a rich vein of material and presents us with a fuller picture of writing practices in early modern Ireland. Recent anthologies have marked a watershed in terms of awareness and availability of texts authored by Irish women in this period. Stevenson and Davidson’s Early Modern Women Poets has been imaginative in its commitment to a ‘Three Kingdoms’ approach, including poetry by women from the four nations, in English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Greek, Latin, and French.12 The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, volumes IV and V (2002), has been pivotal in publishing women’s Irish-language writing and innovative in its selection of a range of texts by and about women. Ma´irı´n Nı´ Dhonnchadha’s introductions have provided a sustained critique of writing in Irish associated with women.13 These anthologies highlight the need for cohesive critical analyses of texts which are now becoming accessible. The selectivity inherent in any anthology means that these are not comprehensive; further archival and editorial work remains to be done. Yet we still lack narratives about women’s writing in Ireland in this period. Anne Fogarty’s essay in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature is important in its inclusion of female authors alongside their male contemporaries. But its remit as a survey of English writing between 1550 and 1690 necessarily precludes detailed discussion.14 The key critical work remains MacCurtain and O’Dowd’s trail-blazing essay collection, Women in Early Modern Ireland (1991). Again, its scope is wide and, although attentive to literature, primarily historiographical.15 The present study
11 Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001); Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000); id. and Raymond Gillespie, Stories from Gaelic Ireland: Microhistories from the Sixteenth-Century Irish Annals (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003); Richard McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 2005); Marc Caball, Poets and Politics: Continuity and ´ Buachalla, Reaction in Irish Poetry, 1558–1625 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998); Breanda´n O Aisling Ghe´ar: na Stı´obhartaigh agus an tAos Le´inn 1603–1788 (Dublin: An Clo´chomhar, 1996); Mı´chea´l Mac Craith, ‘Literature in Irish, c.1550–1690: From the Elizabethan Settlement to the Battle of the Boyne’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds.), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), i. 191–231. 12 Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (eds.), Early Modern Women Poets (1520–1700): An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 13 Ma´irı´n Nı´ Dhonnchadha, ‘Courts and Coteries I: c.900–1600’ and ‘Courts and Coteries II: c.1500–1800’, in Field Day, iv. 293–303, 358–66. 14 Anne Fogarty, ‘Literature in English, 1550–1690: From the Elizabethan Settlement to the Battle of the Boyne’, in Kelleher and O’Leary, Cambridge History of Irish Literature, i. 140–90. 15 Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (eds.), Women in Early Modern Ireland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991); see also Mary O’Dowd, A History of Women in Ireland 1500–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2005).
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builds on this archival, historical, and editorial work by investigating the genres of women’s writing in early modern Ireland. By approaching women’s writing through genre, this study complements the diversity of cultures, languages, and identities at play and challenges the perception of a dearth of writing produced by women in Ireland in this period, which arises in part from the sometimes fragmentary nature of the surviving material. Many single letters, for example, in Irish and in English, were written by women. The traces of women’s poetry-writing in Irish are represented by single surviving poems or small bodies of work. By approaching the material through the prism of genre, this study identifies the literary contexts and writing practices in which women engaged in some numbers. Whereas an individualist emphasis foregrounds singularity, yielding little meaningful information about how and why women wrote, a discussion focused on genre offers a holistic way of analysing texts which survive as the sole exempla of a woman’s writing. This is not an exhaustive survey of all women’s writing in early modern Ireland. While the book certainly aims to provide fruitful and meaningful ways of thinking about women’s writing, it is not a comprehensive catalogue of all the texts produced by women. Hence, Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, is excluded from discussion; a towering intellectual figure associated with the Hartlib circle, John Milton (whom she employed as tutor to her nephew and son), Henry Oldenburg, Andrew Marvell, and confidante to her brother, the scientist Robert Boyle, Lady Ranelagh’s letters require study in their own right.16 The book’s methodology facilitates discussion of the diverse social conditions in which women were impelled or encouraged to become authors. The emphasis on genre reinstates these texts within their social environments, enabling an exploration of the impact of patronage, political and economic imperatives, community, worldly reputation, and the circumstances of circulation. The taxonomy of genre supports an investigation of the situations conducive to women’s textual production in the period. Chapter 1 examines poetry in Irish composed by women, rather than the poetry of any individual woman in isolation. From one perspective, there is an apparent paucity of sources: five poems by Caitilı´n Dubh (fl.1624–9), a single poem by Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain (c.1557–c.1617), an answer-poem attributed to Brighid Fitzgerald (Nic Gearailt, c.1589–1682), and two anonymous poems possibly by women. Here I demonstrate how women engaged with bardic tradition, and examine the legitimizing contexts for Gaelic women’s authorship of verse. The chapter begins with an explanation of the accentual caoineadh 16 For Lady Ranelagh, see Lynette Hunter, ‘Sisters of the Royal Society: The Circle of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh’, in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 178–97; Elizabeth Anne Taylor, ‘Writing Women, Honour, and Ireland: 1640–1715’, 3 vols., unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University College Dublin (1999), ch. 4 and app. 4.
Introduction
9
(keen) metre, in which Caitilı´n Dubh and Nı´ Bhriain composed, locating its emergence in the seventeenth century in the context of professional syllabic poetry. In caoineadh the female speaker laments the death of an individual. Caitilı´n Dubh deploys the figure of the bean sı´, or fairy woman, in order to authorize female speech. These poems engage with the themes and conventions of established bardic tradition. They express complex positions in relation to gendered and ethnic identity. I argue that Caitilı´n Dubh, in particular, exploits bardic tropes in order to present her subjects as Gaelic heroes; like a number of her male contemporaries, she demonstrates versatility in composing verse which accommodated cooperation with the crown in order to preserve Gaelic literary culture. Brighid Fitzgerald is associated with a playful verse dispute which hinges on familiarity with, and criticism of, elite poetic culture. Composed c.1607, the poem attributed to Brighid shows that Irish noblewomen were both capable of composing amateur syllabic verse and familiar enough with professional practice to engage authoritatively with its merit. This poetic exchange is considered in light of the answer-poem increasingly popular in Tudor and Stuart England. I argue that it can be seen as a bridge between the two literary cultures on the island—its syllabic metrics immersed in bardic literary culture, its playful theme analogous to English court poetry. Gaelic Scotland, which produced a larger quantity of verse by women, is then considered as an important reference point for the understanding of this material. The retention of Gaelic culture in the Scottish north and west until the eighteenth century provided a more amenable environment for women’s authorship. Examples of fifteenth-century women’s syllabic verse show that Fitzgerald’s literary activity was not unique. The development of a variety of vernacular forms by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish women provides an alternative picture of the possibilities for Gaelic women’s composition. This chapter’s investigation of the bardic and material evidence for Irish noblewomen’s patronage of poetry provides further support for women’s critical engagement with male-dominated bardic culture. Nualaidh Nı´ Dhomhnaill’s patronage of bardic verse in exile illuminates and strengthens the claims made for women’s participation in bardic culture, and returns us to the symbolic potency of the bean chaointe. Chapter 2 identifies a female culture of writing centred on the community of women religious and characterized by a uniform group of genres. The genres of nuns’ writing across early modern Europe were determined by community audience. They wrote obituaries, annals, religious lives; they translated devotional and foundational texts. The Irish experience is distinct in two key respects: the politicization of the Irish vernacular in the seventeenth century, and the Irish nuns’ particular experience of exile. The Irish Poor Clares were the first house founded in Ireland after the Henrician dissolution. Such foundations were shortlived, as all religious were dispersed in 1653 and again in 1698. The Poor Clares’
10
Introduction
Rule is a community-specific text, produced solely at the behest of the female group. Composed by the order’s foundresses and translated into English by exiled nuns, it was conceived within a specifically female culture of writing. Their enlisting of eminent Gaelic scholars to the project displays their immersion in contemporary Counter Reformation politics. The chapter details the distinctive pedagogical strategy employed with regard to language (whereby the translator sought to educate the sisters in a specialized vocabulary) in support of the argument for collaborative authorship. On the one hand, their securing of Irishlanguage translations of foundational documents is consistent with the continental picture; on the other, it participates in a highly politicized religious and linguistic project which sought to produce Irish-language religious texts as a dimension of Counter Reformation activities and resistance to the English crown. The former abbess of the Poor Clare community, Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne, authored a chronicle of the order, in Irish, while in exile in Madrid c.1668. The manuscript which survives is a contemporary English translation; its narrative arc runs from foundation through to persecution and exile. The genre of the nuns’ chronicle is outlined and its key features are identified with reference to chronicles authored by early modern nuns across Europe. Browne’s text, however, is apparently unique as an Irish nun’s chronicle. This chronicle leans in two directions: that of contemporary European nuns’ writing (particularly the English History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare) and that of contemporary male confederate writing in Ireland. I argue that it functions to assert a communal community identity, to articulate an Irish catholic royalist identity, and to testify to the experiences of Irish women religious who died in exile. Chapter 3 explores the genre of the state petition-letter. This genre of writing is highly pragmatic: the petitioner seeks to persuade the state to grant a suit, usually offering some reciprocal favour in return. It demands an informed and subtle command of rhetorical conventions and strategies. At the centre of discussion are two correspondents of Queen Elizabeth: Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille (c.1530–c.1603; al. Grace O’Malley) and Eleanor, countess of Desmond (c.1545–1638). The long petitioning career of the countess of Desmond occurs in two distinct phases: she first writes as intermediary for her rebellious husband and later on her own behalf as widow of an executed traitor. She exploits a variety of gendered roles, from loyal wife to obedient subject to destitute mother. Her petitions chart a narrative of deteriorating political influence, a trajectory that is most starkly reflected in the fluctuation of her reciprocal proposals. By contrast, Nı´ Mha´ille’s power-base was her own. An infamous pirate and warrior, her transgression of traditional gender roles equipped her with superior bargainingchips. For her, the reciprocal favour to Queen Elizabeth was military support. Nonetheless, she modulated her petitionary strategy, skilfully moving between the personae of widow and warrior for her own purposes. I then interrogate the process of composition. Nı´ Mha´ille’s submission of petitions in English is
Introduction
11
considered in the context of contemporary male chieftains’ negotiations with the crown, in order to elucidate the layers of translation. Both women, it is argued, exploited their gendered situations to persuade the state. They juggled the discourses of obedience, service, and justice to defend themselves against accusations of rebellion. As a counterpoint, the chapter examines petition-letters written by exiled Irish women to the king of Spain seeking pensions (entretenimiento). These women position themselves very differently: widows and daughters of soldiers, they sought payment on the basis of military service rendered. Thus, the principle of reciprocity so central to the genre is reversed. Here, gendered tropes of weakness and vulnerability are embraced as persuasive tools. Like Nı´ Mha´ille, these refugees worked with amanuenses who would translate their petitions; in this case, into Spanish. They employ the language of persecuted Irish catholicism. Consistently framed in terms of Irish lineage and female isolation, these letters point to an organized rhetorical strategy among the exiled Irish community. Chapter 4 examines the depositions collected from protestant women who were victims of the 1641 rising which began in Ulster and rapidly spread through the country. These are analogous to the Spanish petitions discussed in Chapter 3, in that their topics were determined by the state. Related in the third person, via amanuenses, these texts were orally delivered and revised. The depositions were claims for compensation that narrated experiences of violent assault as well as providing information on the rising and its culprits. Political and economic exigency motivated the composition of these narratives. They are controversial historical sources; this discussion interprets them from a literary perspective. It analyses the process of composition, arguing that deponents were accorded considerable narrative freedom. It examines how the gender of female deponents was turned to advantage in the construction of victimhood. These texts are suffused with speech. Orally delivered and preoccupied with reportage, they uncover the realities of language penetration. But the depositions also served as the repository for, and stimulus to, different genres of writing. The siege-letters of Lettice Fitzgerald, Baroness Offaly (c.1580–1658)—analogous to those of English women during the civil wars—display the value of feminine discourses of innocence and vulnerability to the construction of belligerent resistance. It is argued that the composition of her deposition prompted Lady Elizabeth Dowdall (fl. 1640–2) to author her first-person account of her defence of Kilfinny Castle, county Limerick. This memoir is an assured representation of military self-determination that portrays its author as a canny female leader indispensable to the counter-rebellion battle in her area. Both these writers constitute important counterpoints to representations of female victimhood in the depositions themselves. Chapter 5 demonstrates the importation into Ireland of English literary culture by New English settlers and visitors. It focuses on the use of poetry to establish and maintain literary networks in Ireland. The social mechanisms of
12
Introduction
English coterie manuscript culture are adapted in order to build and maintain relationships among the elite. Anne Southwell (1573–1636) settled in Cork about 1603 and returned to London in 1629. Although she has received critical attention from an English perspective, the Irish contexts for her work are investigated here. Her poetry articulates the anxieties of the planter class and seeks to establish a coterie of devotional poets among like-minded protestants. Katherine Philips (1632–64), the most widely circulated female poet of seventeenth-century England and Wales, spent a prolific period in Dublin from 1662 to 1663. The success of her Corneille play-translation Pompey, performed and first published in Dublin, made this the pivotal year of her literary career. She arrived as a land-claimant with an established literary reputation. Philips modified her literary strategies as she ingratiated herself with the ‘Old Protestants’ (as those who had settled prior to 1641 became known) of the new Dublin court. Focusing on the verse she composed in Dublin, I argue that Philips genders her addressees: women are hailed as the vehicles for her writing, men as fellow authors and political agents. Philips’s writing inspired verse in her praise, not only from the male members of the Dublin court, but also from an anonymous woman known as Philo-Philippa. This Irish woman’s substantial panegyric is remarkable both for its analysis of Philips’s work as a welcome importation of new authorial paradigms and for its proto-feminist sensibilities. Philips’s perplexity as to Philo-Philippa’s identity is considered in light of her own gendered sense of authorship. Both Southwell and Philips, it is argued, found Ireland to be a site for literary experimentation. Both women transplanted the fruits of their literary endeavours back to Wales and London when they left. The final chapter is concerned with autobiography and biography, texts that express a range of religious and political perspectives: that of the exiled nun, Lucy Cary (1619–50); the Cromwellian republicanism of Frances Cook (d. c.1659), wife of a regicide; the radical religious independency of the women in John Rogers’s Dublin congregation; the exemplary piety constructed by Mary Rich, countess of Warwick (1624–78) and Alice Thornton (1626–1707); and the well-travelled royalism of Ann, Lady Fanshawe (1625–80). These life-narratives display the diversity of the New English. They offer divergent views from those of the colonial administrators whose decisions led to their residence (or birth, in Rich’s case) in Ireland. Cary and Thornton, in particular, exhibit active engagement with native Irish culture. Each text is located according to its specific genre of autobiographical or biographical writing. What unites them all (with Fanshawe as an important exception) is their adoption of religious conversion as a narrative paradigm. Irish experience is fitted to the teleology of conversion—whether its terminus is catholic, puritan, or independent—as a signifier of catholicism. But these texts are simultaneously political. Indeed, religion, in early modern Ireland, is a badge of political identity. Writing from the autobiographical vantage-point of hindsight, these women are deeply concerned with worldly reputation. Their self-constructions are
Introduction
13
funnelled through the providential framework of conversion because it is, for women, an irreproachable mode that signals devotional exemplarity. The book’s methodology enables a nuanced analysis of women’s engagements with established genres of writing, canonical and non-canonical. By situating women’s writing in its male-authored contexts, the congruities of writing practices emerge and the degree of women’s literary achievements are reassessed. The study is attentive throughout to the ways in which these genres were reshaped and manipulated to accommodate female voices. The sophistication with which women participated in and transformed their chosen genres challenges binary gendered formulations. There are few specifically female genres of writing; rather, women engage with existing or newly emergent genres and adapt them to female expression. They often collaborate, as is evident in the Poor Clares’ project to produce vernacular translations of their foundational texts and in the numerous examples of women working with amanuenses. The genres women authored—the 1641 depositions and conversion narratives, for example—were also authored by men. Women adapted male-authored genres for their own purposes, selecting the aspects of those genres that best suited their own authorial situations. Kerrigan adverts to ‘the realities of cultural access allowed to women across the archipelago’.17 For Irish women and women who lived in Ireland, those realities resided in opportunity. They could be crisis moments of displacement, the urgency of economic survival, the imperative to build new communities, or the claim for reputation, but they were enthusiastically grasped. 17
Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 28.
1 Poetry in Irish In late 1649 the English royalist and autobiographer Ann Fanshawe wrote of a night spent under the roof of Honora O’Brien, daughter of the fifth earl of Thomond: I was surprised by being layd in a chamber where about 1 a clock I heard a voice that awaked me. I drew the curtain, and in the casement of the window I saw by the light of the moon a woman leaning into the window through the casement, in white, with red hair and pale, gastly complexion. She spake loud and in a tone I never heard, thrice, ‘Ahone’, and then with a sith more like wind than breath she vanished, and to me her body looked more like a thick cloud than substance. I was so much affrighted that my hair stood an end and my night clothes fell off. . . . About 8 a clock the lady of the house came to see us, saying she had not been abed all night because a cousin O’Brien of hers, whose ancestors had own’d that house, had desired her to stay with him in his chamber, who dyed at 2 a clock, and, said she, ‘I wish you to have had no disturbance; for it is the custome of this place that when any dye of the family, there is the shape of a woman appears in this window every night untill they be dead. This woman was many ages agoe got with child by the owner of this place, and he in his garden murdered her and flung her into the river under your window. But truly, I thought not of it when I lodged you here, it being the best roome I had.’ We made little reply to her speech, but disposed ourselves to be gone suddenly.1
Fanshawe’s description of the O’Brien fairy woman, or bean sı´ (phonetically anglicized as ‘banshee’; pl. mna´ sı´ ), is inevitably coloured by her own culture and language. Construing the sounds she heard according to the phonetics of English, her transliteration of the Gaelic Ocho´n (‘alas’) into ‘Ahone’ leaves its meaning unprobed. In her discussion of how Irish sounded to Elizabethan ears, Palmer writes that: ‘Incomprehension detached sound from sense . . . Judgements from sound were judgements by analogy—and the analogies selected captured the prejudices of the listener rather than the phonetics of the natives’ language.’2 1 John Loftis (ed.), The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 125; BL Add. MS 41,161, fols. 31r–32r. Ivar O’Brien speculates that the venue was either Clare Castle or Clonroad Castle; however, it may also have been Bunratty, seat of the earls of Thomond: O’Brien of Thomond: The O’Briens in Irish History 1500–1865 (Chichester: Phillimore, 1986), 179. 2 Palmer, Language and Conquest, 92. Interestingly, Fanshawe’s early editor, Beatrice Marshall, construed Ocho´n as ‘A horse’: Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (London: The Bodley Head, 1905), 87.
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In this case, Fanshawe discerns a pattern in Irish speech: she hears that the same phrase is uttered three times in succession. Rather than the ‘bestial utterance’ equated with Irish and identified by Palmer in English accounts of Irish women keening, Fanshawe’s supernatural bean sı´ speaks to unearthly and unfathomable effect. Her spontaneous unrobing is a visceral response, beyond language and volition. Her husband, once woken, is self-consciously protestant, aligning cultural difference with religious bias: ‘he entertained me with telling how much more these apparitions were usuall in that country than in England, and we concluded the cause to be the great superstition of the Irish and the want of that knowing faith that should deffend them from the power of the Devill, which he exercises amongst them very much.’3 The explanation provided by O’Brien counters the Fanshawes’ consensual interpretation—as is highlighted by their inability to reply and swift departure. The certainties of their protestant epistemology are disarmed. The anecdote concurs with latter-day sensationalizations of the banshee, but Fanshawe herself is ignorant of the terminology—nowhere in the passage does the word ‘banshee’ occur. Nor is there any cognizance of the tradition of keening, the lamenting of the dead. Her story provides a rare moment in which two coexisting literary cultures and genres clash: in this case, the English travel memoir and the Irish caoineadh, the verse form most associated with Irish women down to the nineteenth century. Contrary to Fanshawe’s report of the snatched, anglicized sounds she heard, the caoineadh, or keen (pl. caointe), is a defined metrical genre, and the earliest surviving examples composed by women date to the period when the medieval literary system was under threat. This chapter analyses six keens composed by Irish women, tracing the appropriation of the figure of the bean sı´ and the bean chaointe (keening woman; pl. mna´ chaointe) and the adaptation of bardic conventions. It then examines the amateur syllabic verse associated with Brighid Fitzgerald (Brighid Nic Gearailt) in the contexts of Scottish women’s poetry and the emerging English answer-poem. The discussion presents the more prolific women’s poetry of Gaelic Scotland and the evidence for Irish women’s patronage of poetry as legitimizing contexts for female composition and critical engagement with bardic culture. The classical Irish period (c.1200–1600) had attained a remarkable degree of literary stability: the bardic schools trained a hereditary caste of male poets in the rules of literary composition, genealogy, history, saga, metres, rhymes, and literary dialect. The professional fileadha (‘poets’; sg. fileadh) were attached to noble families and patrons, employed to compose and perform laudatory verse which followed a stock set of themes: noble descent and genealogy, heroism, military valour and leadership, physical prowess and beauty, support of the poets, hospitality and hosting of feasts. The fileadha held high social status, empowered 3
Loftis, Memoirs, 125.
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Poetry in Irish
to satirize and declaim as well as to praise. Professional verse—largely preserved in duanairı´ (family poem-books or poetic miscellanies)—was syllabic. The prosody of Gaelic verse was based on quatrains having a fixed number of syllables per line, with consonants rhyming instead of vowels. Strict versification, or da´n dı´reach, demanded the highest level of skill and expertise in an array of established rules regarding metre, rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration.4 However, the social structures which supported this literary system came under severe pressure during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. English crown policies aimed at dismantling Gaelic structures of governance, which centred on the ruling sept of a particular region or territory rather than the centralized administration favoured by the Tudors. As elite culture was destabilized, more vernacular kinds of verse began to be preserved by scribes; most particularly accentual verse, like the caoineadh—poetry whose metre is structured around stress rather than syllables. Although such forms had always existed, they were not written down in any quantity until the seventeenth century. Six caointe composed by women in the early seventeenth century survive; all are closely connected with the O’Briens of Thomond, Fanshawe’s hosts. Five of these are attributed to a woman named Caitilı´n Dubh, copied into the O’Brien family poem-book, or duanaire. This manuscript, titled Duanaire Uı´ Bhriain, was transcribed for Sir Donough O’Brien (1642–1717) in 1712.5 It contains the majority of the poems comprising Iomarbha´gh na bhFileadh, ‘The Contention of the Bards’. This bardic controversy, concerning the relative merits of Leath Mogha, the southern half of Ireland, over Leath Chuinn, the northern half, was initiated by Tadhg Mac Bruaideadha, a professional poet retained by Donnch´ Briain (Donough O’Brien), fourth earl of Thomond.6 (The south–north adh O antagonism was of especial relevance to this territory—approximating to modernday county Clare—which was exchanged between the provincial jurisdictions of Connacht and Munster four times between 1569 and 1602.7) In addition to 4
For detailed discussions of the rules of classical Gaelic poetry, see Eleanor Knott, An Introduction to Irish Syllabic Poetry of the Period 1200–1600 (Dublin: DIAS; 2nd edn., 1966); William J. Watson (ed.), Ba`rdachd Gha`idhlig: Gaelic Poetry 1550–1900 (Inverness: An Comunn Gaidhealach; 3rd edn., 1959), pp. xxxvi–xlv; Michelle O Riordan, Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007); Osborn Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry (Dublin: DIAS, 1970), 3–22. 5 Maynooth MS M 107. The female poet is named Caitilı´n Dubh twice and Caitlı´n Dubh once (pp. 193, 198, 204); accordingly, I follow the Field Day practice of naming her Caitilı´n. The manuscript, of 263 pages, is primarily transcribed by Aodh Buı´ Mac Cruitı´n; see Vincent Morley, An Crann Os Coill: Aodh Buı´ Mac Cruitı´n, c.1680–1755 (Dublin: Coisce´im, 1995). Another three hands transcribed bardic poems and an obituary of the O’Briens in Latin. The poems on ´ Briain are edited and translated by Liam O ´ Murchu´ in Field Day, Donnchadh and Diarmaid O iv. 399–405. 6 Lambert McKenna (ed.), Iomarbha´gh na bhFileadh: The Contention of the Bards, 2 vols. (London: Irish Texts Society, 1918); Joep Leerssen, The Contention of the Bards (Iomarbha´gh na bhFileadh) and its Place in Irish and Political Literary History (London: Irish Texts Society, 1994). 7 Thomond was incorporated into the province of Connacht in 1569, reunited with Munster in 1576, reallocated to Connacht in 1579, and finally assigned to Munster in 1602.
Poetry in Irish
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the ‘Contention’, the manuscript contains forty-two poems or verse-fragments related to the family. The inclusion of Caitilı´n Dubh’s poems, transcribed as a group, illustrates the transitional moment in which non-bardic, accentual verse was preserved alongside more elite forms, in a manuscript context which sought to advertise and eulogize the family. ´ Briain (Donough O’Brien), Her elegies lament the deaths of Donnchadh O ´ Briain, fifth Baron fourth earl of Thomond (d. 1624); Diarmaid (Dermot) O Inchiquin (1594–1624); Ma´ire (Mary; ne´e Nı´ Bhriain), sister to the fourth earl; and her husband, Toirdhealbhach Ruadh Mac Mathghamhna (Turlough Roe MacMahon, d. 1629)—the subject of two keens. The fundamental metrical principle of caoineadh is that the final stressed vowel of each line rhymes throughout. The metre is maintained by this final stressed vowel, permitting great freedom elsewhere. The number of stressed feet can vary between lines, the length of the lines can vary, devices like assonance and alliteration have no set rules. These features are particularly suited to performance, making it an appropriate verse-form for women fulfilling the cultural function of keening, lamenting the dead.8 Caitilı´n Dubh’s elegies exploit to the full the possibilities of the form: the lines end on a trochaic foot in which the same stressed vowel is maintained throughout the poem, facilitating irregularity elsewhere.9 But rather than the terrifying apparition of Fanshawe’s memoir, the bean sı´ is co-opted in these poems as an enabling peer for the female keener. There is a clear distinction in these poems between the fairy woman, or bean sı´—the supernatural figure who represents the clan’s territorial bonds—and the keening woman who composes verse. At the beginning of her lament on Diarmaid, Baron Inchiquin, the bereft female speaker is ‘gan fhonn gan aoibhneas’ (‘dejected and joyless’) when Aoibheall, the famous bean sı´ of county Clare, approaches. Her origin legend offers a sharp counterpoint to the account proffered by Fanshawe. According to twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources, Aoibheall appeared before Brian Boraimhe (Brian Boru; high-king of Ireland and progenitor of the
8
By comparison, amhra´n metre is more restrictive: the stressed vowels of the first line are repeated in the same order in every subsequent line. For further discussion of caoineadh, see ´ Buachalla, An Caoine agus an Chaointeoireacht (Dublin: Cois Life, 1998); Angela Breanda´n O Bourke, ‘The Irish Traditional Lament and the Grieving Process’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11 (1988), 287–91, and ‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry’, in Joan N. Radner (ed.), Feminist Messages: Coding Strategies in Women’s Folk Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 160–82; Rachel Bromwich, ‘The Keen for Art O’Leary, its ´ Background and its Place in the Tradition of Gaelic Keening’, E´igse, 5 (1947), 236–52; Breanda´n O Madaga´in (ed.), Gne´ithe den Chaointeoireacht (Dublin: An Clo´chomhar, 1978); Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 35–8. 9 The end-rhymes for those on Donnchadh and Diarmaid are /e´ – /; /ı´ – /. The two elegies on Toirdhealbhach adhere for the most part to the end-rhymes: /ı´ – / and /o – /. The elegy on Ma´ire offers another variation: ll. 1–10 employ the end-rhyme /u´ – /; ll. 11–52 the end-rhyme /e´ – /.
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O’Briens) at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. She functioned as territorial goddess for the O’Briens, legitimating their claim to Thomond.10 She is, therefore, a high-status companion for the speaker, who enters into competitive lamentation with her. Aoibheall sits down to bewail her isolation. She accommodates her displaced wandering to an inhospitable landscape: ´ , a Dhia, an raibh bean riamh mar taoimse O ag siubhal chnoc ’s ag gabha´il gaoithe, ag te´igheadh mo bhos ’s ag dortadh mo chaomhchruith, ar choill na ndos gan neach dom dhı´dean, ag siubhal na sreabh gan bharc gan slighe agum? (O, God, was any woman ever like me, traversing wind-swept mountains, beating my palms and marring my looks in thick woods where no one shelters me, crossing streams boatless and directionless?)
The speaker counters with her own situation, arrogating to herself precedence of suffering: Adubhartsa le´i ’s nı´or bhre´ag dhamh innsin gur seacht fearr a ca´s na´ mar bhı´mse gur bhris an chumhaidh lu´drach mo chroidhe ionnam, d’imthigh mo lu´th chum siubhail nı´l brı´gh ionnam nı´ aithnighim an la´ seach an oidhche . . . (I replied to her truthfully, saying she was seven times better off than I was since sorrow has broken my heart, I have lost my vigour, I cannot walk, I do not distinguish day from night . . . )
The speaker’s incapacity morphs into that of a feminized Ireland: mar ta´ E´ire d’e´is a claoidhte, do bhuail sı´ an bhe´im, nı´l feidhm a caoineadh, ta´ sı´ leo´inte breo´idhte taobhlag i ndiaidh na foirne do mho´irshliocht Mhı´leadh. (for Ireland has been worsted, she has lost her balance, it is no good to mourn for her, she is broken, sick and weak in body after that band of the great line of Mı´le.)
10 Patricia Lysaght, The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1986, 1996), 194–5.
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Mı´le was the ancestor of the Irish race; Thomond Milesian descendants claimed the line through his son, E´ibhear. The reference associates Diarmaid with originary myth, thereby constructing a national context for his death. The women engage in group lamentation, each goaded by the other as the caoineadh accumulates force. Another bean sı´, ‘Be´ibhionn na dtromscoth ndlaoitheach’ (‘Be´ibhionn of the heavy ringlets’), enters to offer philosophical counsel, citing Cato to support her stance of resignation: Na´ bı´dh leo´ nı´ co´ir a gcaoineadh seanfhocal e´ ata´ ag Ca´to scrı´obhtha nı´ thig grian gan athrughadh sı´ne. Gna´thach doilbheas i ndeo´idh aoibhnis tig an tra´igh d’e´is la´in na taoide mar ata´ an cla´rsa i ndeaghaidh na rı´oghmhac. (Do not heed them, it is not right to keen them, an old saying written by Cato has it that there is no sunshine without a weather-change. Sadness follows every joy, the ebb follows the full tide, so this land is in the wake of the royal sons.)11
Be´ibhionn’s equanimity facilitates the poem’s narrative progression to the eulogy of Diarmaid. The keening women form a chorus which introduces the lament proper; the fairy women empower and encourage the female speaker, who henceforth takes control of the poem. Aoibheall remains an authoritative figure, a touchstone who sanctions Caitilı´n Dubh’s laments. Towards the close of her second poem on Toirdhealbhach Ruadh, another chorus of fairy women lends support and companionship. Here, however, there is no need for their advice; the speaker is adept at her communal role: sas trı´otsa leig Aoibhill an osnadh, do chuir Fionnscoith dhı´m le codla, do bhuail Aine a clı´, sa bosa. Do shuı´gheadh mna´ibh sı´dh chum goladh ort, sdo shuı´gheasa mur gach mnaoi na bhfochair . . . (it is because of you that Aoibheall exhaled a sigh, that Fionnscoth banished sleep, that Aine struck her breast and palms, that the mna´ sı´ sat to weep over you and that I, like every woman, sat amongst them . . . )
11
Field Day, iv. 403–4, ll. 1, 11–31.
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Poetry in Irish
Taking her cue from traditional expressions of female lamentation, her carefully wrought independence as a female voice is reasserted in the final lines, which assert Christian atonement (a profession of faith conflicting with Richard Fanshawe’s exposition): o´s id dhiaigh nach bhfiadaim sosadh, acht agh lea´ghadh dot chu´mhaidh mar chu´bhar ar abhann, Do bheirim do Chrı´ost thu in ´ıoc na fola, do dhoirt mo Laogh re taoibh na croiche. (since in your wake I cannot rest, as I melt in sorrow for you like foam on a river, I bear you to Christ in payment for the blood my love shed by the cross.)12
Again, in the concluding lines of her lament on Ma´ire the speaker adopts Aoibheall as her archetype. This hints at the imaginative metamorphosis necessary to composition: do rı´n tu´ Aoibhioll dı´om id dhe´igheaighsi, no´ bean tsı´d ar thaoibh gach aodharchnuic. Dot caoinese a rı´ghbhean tse´aghain, do bheireadh maoin toghtha don e´igse. (you have made an Aoibheall of me in your wake, or a bean sı´ frequenting every fairy hillside, keening you, noble, majestic lady, who rewarded poetry with choice treasure.)13
Thus, the established mythical figure of the bean sı´ is appropriated for female composition, legitimating the act of keening in itself and signalling adherence to traditional literary culture. In so doing, she forges a persona for the female poet. In professional syllabic poetry the bereft poet is often figured as the chief’s lover—a problematic speaking-position for a woman. The self-construction as a keener in the company of mna´ sı´, and particularly the analogy with Aoibheall (figured as Brian Boru’s spouse in earlier texts) negotiates the problem by forging an independent gendered persona which draws on the territorial and spousal connotations of the fairy woman.14 Caitilı´n Dubh’s elegies, although composed in vernacular rather than professional metre, are thematically immersed in elite tradition. Established bardic
12 Maynooth MS M 107, p. 208, ll. 22–6, 31–4; my translation. I am grateful to Gerald ´ Murchu´ for allowing Manning for his help with some questions of transcription, and to Liam O me to consult his forthcoming edition, to which readers are referred. 13 Maynooth MS M 107, pp. 210–11, ll. 43–6; my translation. 14 Lysaght, Death-Messenger, 206–7.
Poetry in Irish
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topics—genealogy, military valour, patronage, and hospitality—are the foundation of these poems. The recitation of Gaelic ancestry, central to all professional verse, is accomplished. Rooted in both the local and the national, in reality and myth, and keen to emphasize the warrior qualities of their ancestors, these genealogies demonstrate the extent of Caitilı´n Dubh’s familiarity with bardic convention and genealogical lore. The O’Briens’ descent from the legendary progenitor of the Gaels, Mı´le Easpa´inne, through his son E´ibhear, and down through the high-king Brian Boraimhe, was commonplace in medieval genealogy. Like her contemporaries, Caitilı´n Dubh is broad-minded in her assertion of their kinship with the progenitors of other Gaelic lines, such as Niall Naoighiallach (the king who brought St Patrick as hostage to Ireland, considered ancestor to the Uı´ Ne´ill of Ulster), or his son Conall Gulban (claimed by the Uı´ Domhnaill of Ulster). Her genealogy includes the Old English magnates of Ireland—the Fitzgeralds, whose claims to Greek ancestry are highlighted here, the Butlers of Ormond, and de Burgos. This flexibility with regard to lineage is at one with contemporary practice: the catholic descendants of Norman invaders were incorporated into genealogy from the sixteenth century.15 Moreover, claims to mythical descent could embellish the representation of martial heroism. Toirdhealbhach Ruadh, portrayed in both poems as the leader of a vigorously trained fighting force, is simultaneously a warrior in the mould of Oscar, one of the mythical Fianna.16 The speaker refers to Toirdhealbhach Ruadh as ‘mo thriath’ (‘my lord’), and frames the first of her two elegies on him with a representation of his deserted seat: A chluainse tar a mbuailim go diamhair . . . ma´dhbhair guil is fa´th mo chaointe, Gan Toirdhealbhach ruadh ’na shuı´dhe ionnat. sas e´ mhaicid na heanuidhibhse chı´nse . . . (O cluain, over which I beat my palms . . . The cause of my crying, the reason that I keen, is that Toirdhealbhach Ruadh no longer sits in residence and the fens I used to see are sickness to me . . . )
Cluain refers to the place-name Cluain Idir Dha´ La´, anglicized as Clonderalaw. Thus, her emphasis on his support of Gaelic cultural activities may derive from personal experience. Toirdhealbhach Ruadh is praised as
15 See Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, Leabhar Mo´r na nGenealach: The Great Book of Irish ´ Muraı´le, 5 vols. (Dublin: De Bu´rca, 2003), i. 11–13. For a Genealogies, ed. and trans. Nollaig O more detailed discussion of genealogy in these poems, see my ‘Caitlı´n Dubh’s Keens: Literary Negotiations in Early Modern Ireland’, in Victoria Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 99–102. 16 Maynooth MS M 107, p. 207, l. 8.
22
Poetry in Irish fear do riaradh cliara, is sgoladh. Do re´igheadh da´nta, is da´imh re ndrongaibh, do bheireadh don e´igse seada, is sochair . . . (a man who attended to bards and schools, who expounded upon poems and poets before gatherings, who bore favour and comfort to the community of learning . . . )
His wife, Ma´ire, is likewise praised as the centre of a vibrant court: is ar do halladhuibh do bhı´odh daimhfhı´on e´asgadh, S gac aicmeadha le healadhain agh teacht ann, o´rd fa´dar na´r ghra´dhaigh an saoghal, is o´rd bra´thar ag tra´cht chum de´ ann, o´rd seanchaidh, is lucht seanma dhe´anamh, Breithiomhain toghtha chum molta do dhe´anamh, briathradh diadha ag sagairt do mhe´ise . . . (Blood-red wine flowed freely in your halls, and every kind of learning came there: the order of priests who rejected the world; the order of brothers treating of God there; the order of historians and music-makers; brehons [judges] selected to administer awards; the priests of your altar proclaiming the words of God . . . )
The hospitality for which they are praised is characterized by the diversity of its beneficiaries. Herself, perhaps, a client of Mac Mathghamhna, her depiction of the Gaelic court, with its multiple strands of patronage and performance, elucidates what the decline of the Gaelic system meant. Accordingly, these passages are inevitably followed by catalogues of mourners, correspondingly comprehensive and united in their loss of purpose. Toirdhealbhach’s loss is widely felt: is ´ıomdha o´inseach beoil-leamh borb, amhais ghaoithe gan brı´gh na bhfocail, fileadha, ba´ird, amada´in, is ollaimh, Do bhias choı´dhche gan aoibhneas orradh. (Many are the uncouth, inarticulate idiots, the insane wretches of meaningless words, the poets, lower-class poets, fools and chief poets will forever be joyless.)
His wife’s death affects male and female alike: is iomdha bean go lag o´ de´agais, is fear tais gan slı´ghe i gcath id e´agmais . . .
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23
(Many a woman is weak since you died, and many a man is soft and directionless in battle for want of you . . . )17
Female lamentation, of speaker and mna´ sı´, expresses the wider ramifications for a diverse community. By far the most extensive of these passages is that lamenting Diarmaid, Baron Inchiquin. The patron’s wide reach is reflected in the eclecticism of his mourning party: Is iomdha meirdreach bhaoth dot chaoineadh is cearrbhach taobhnocht o´ phle´ an dı´sle, mna´ibh me´irgheala ag tre´igean a ndlaothfholt ag maothughadh a ne´amhrosc gach laoi umat, ta´id mna´ibh aosta i nge´arbhruid chnaoidhte is ta´id ba´ird E´ireann be´altais claoidhte. Gach cle´ireach da´ le´aghadh an Bı´obla nı´ le´ir dho e´inlitir sı´os de . . . (Many the foolish harlot keens for you as does the gambler, threadbare from throwing the dice; white-fingered ladies are abandoning their coiffed hair and every day their eyes flow for you, elderly matrons are in bitter, wasting misery, bards have become soft-spoken and subdued. Every clerk who was wont to read the Bible cannot now distinguish one letter of it . . . )
The clerical incapacity to discern chimes with the female speaker of the same poem, who (surpassing Aoibheall) cannot distinguish day from night. The theme of alienation is further developed as the poem imagines the upturning of the environmental order: o´ t’e´agsa chlaonadar fiodhbha nı´ re´abaid e´isc shrotha a lı´onta. Nı´ le´imeann re´idhdhamh tar slighe amach nı´ fhe´adann cu´ be´alfhada sı´neadh air, nı´ e´irghid na re´alta san oidhche ta´id spe´arthaibh an aedhair ar aoinchrith . . . (since your death woods have declined, fish in streams no longer rend the nets. The sleek deer does not leap across the pathway, the long-snouted hound does not run in pursuit, the stars no longer rise by night, the ethereal skies are a quaking mass . . . ) 17 Maynooth MS M 107, p. 204, ll. 1, 4–6; p. 207, ll. 4–6; p. 210, ll. 32–8; pp. 207–8, ll. 18– 21; p. 210, ll. 39–40, respectively; my translation.
Poetry in Irish
24
Inchiquin’s death has caused a collapse among the many and varied followers of his court, even confounding the natural world. The passage is counterpointed by the memory of Inchiquin himself as a man who maintained now-dissipated boundaries, represented by emphatic antithesis: na´r ob e´igse fa´ spre´idh do shı´neadh nach tug me´inn do she´adaibh saoghalta na´ fuath che´ile a dhe´anamh ar aoinneach, acht searc don mhaith is ceas re cinnteacht, na´r char bean tar cheart a caoimhthigh na´r ghlac breab ar bhreath do chlaonadh na´r bhain don lag ceart a shinnsear, acht fa´ilte don tsean is maith do dhe´anamh. (who did not snub men of art in distributing wealth, who did not covet worldly goods, who did not cause any man to despise his wife, but who loved the good and who met miserliness with excess, who loved no woman beyond the rights of her lover, who could not be bribed in order to pervert a judgement, who did not deny the weak their ancestral rights, but who took delight in welcoming the old and in doing good.)18
The poem contrasts the dissolution that ensues from the chief’s death with his conservation of the proper order when alive. The terms of grief are clearly defined while the responsibilities and morality of the patron are accentuated. From our perspective, these poetic evocations of loss might attain greater piquancy in their historical context of composition. It is tempting to read these caointe as laments for an entire culture, disintegrating under the sustained pressure of Tudor aggression. However, Caitilı´n Dubh was not simply chronicling the preordained collapse of the Gaelic order, as is patently illustrated by her strategy in eulogizing Donnchadh, fourth earl of Thomond. Here, the poet demonstrates her skilful manipulation of bardic tropes in order to accommodate her subject’s support of the English crown. The earls of Thomond had been an early success of the policy known as ‘surrender and regrant’, whereby Gaelic chiefs would be persuaded to abandon the custom of ‘tanistry’—the tradition of succession in which the chieftain’s successor, the ta´naiste (tanist), was elected from a group of male relatives and nominated prior to the chieftain’s death. Instead, Gaelic chiefs were enticed to submit their titles to the crown, receiving them back under English jurisdiction and nomenclature and switching to
18
Field Day, iv. 403–5, ll. 47–60, 62–9.
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25
primogeniture for the succession.19 Donnchadh, fourth earl, was raised a protestant at Queen Elizabeth’s court. He succeeded his father, Conchubhar (Conor), in 1581. As a military leader and administrator he was loyal to both Elizabeth and James VI and I. He helped suppress Tyrone’s rebellion in 1595 and accompanied the earl of Essex on his Munster campaign in 1599. He was appointed governor of Clare in August, and a member of the Privy Council in September of 1599, assuming the role of Munster president in 1615. This active support of the crown did not go unchallenged. Donnchadh’s brother, Tadhg (Teige), joined the Ulster earls during Tyrone’s rebellion. He ´ Domhnaill (O’Donnell) during his incursions into north Clare in liaised with O ´ Briain (The 1599 and claimed the traditional Gaelic title to Thomond, O O’Brien). He died later that year. Donnchadh’s allegiance to the authorities was proven again when he saved the life of Sir George Carew, then president of Munster, in 1600. He was a commander of crown forces during the critical siege of Kinsale in 1601.20 Despite (or in addition to) all this, Thomond retained a Gaelic court and was an active patron of Irish poets. He would have required fluency in the Irish language for his daily business affairs. Such adherence to competing sources of authority on the island was not unique. As Caball has argued of the Fermanagh chief Cu´ Chonnacht Ma´g Uidhir, and the Sligo chief ´ hEadhra, both of whom maintained traditional bardic culture while Cormac O cooperating with the policy of ‘surrender and regrant’, ‘patronage of the fileadha must have been partly motivated by a need to cloak the increasingly nontraditional basis of the lords’ authority within the protective folds of bardic validation’.21 Thus, bardic eulogy functions as indemnity against allegations of anti-Gaelicism. Such deployment of the fileadha was novel only in its defence of anglicization—professional poets had long been employed for propagandist ´ hEadhra were neither prominent leaders purposes. However, Ma´g Uidhir and O of English forces nor crown administrators; Thomond presented a more uneasy challenge. Caitilı´n Dubh’s elegy incorporates Thomond’s English interests while recasting his military activities in a pan-Gaelic light. It adapts the bardic conventions outlined above to build a picture of a traditional Gaelic hero whose influence transcends the local, or even the national. Her opening stanza measures his impact on the entire island, expressly including the purveyors of culture:
19 In 1543 Murchadh (brother of the last king of Thomond) and his nephew Donnchadh (son of the last king) travelled to Greenwich to receive English titles. The arrangement was that Murchadh would become first earl of Thomond, his nephew would succeed him as second earl, and the title thereafter descended to the latter’s eldest male heirs; O’Brien, O’Brien of Thomond, 14–16. 20 Ibid. 33–7; John MacLean (ed.), Letters from George Lord Carew to Sir Thomas Roe, Ambassador to the Court of the Great Mogul 1615–1617 (London: Camden Society, 1860; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1968), 4. 21 Caball, Poets and Politics, 24.
26
Poetry in Irish
Fig. 1. ‘Caitilı´n Dubh cecenit’ (‘Caitilı´n Dubh composed this’), Maynooth MS M 107, p. 193. Reproduced by permission of the Librarian, National University of
Ireland Maynooth, from the collections of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. Do chuala ta´sc do chra´idh fir E´ireann do chuir a mna´ibh tar bharr a gce´ille d’fha´g a n-ughdair bruighte tre´ithlag ’s do chuir an chliar fa´ chiaich in e´infheacht, ba´s an iarla Uı´ Bhriain na dtre´inbheart. (I have heard tidings that have tormented the men of Ireland, that have deranged their womenfolk,
Poetry in Irish
27
that have left their authors bruised and debilitated, the poetic community in gloom— ´ Briain of great deeds.) this is the death of the Earl O
The earl is lauded as an Irish champion, a portrayal underscored by the traditional use of legendary figures to denote Ireland: ‘Gliadhaire do cheap fiadhghort Fe´idhlim’ (‘a warrior who checked the wild Land of Feidhlim’); ‘buachaill bo´ Chla´ir Fo´dla in e´infheacht’ (‘guardian [or shepherd] of the whole land of Fo´dla’). As in her other elegies, the poet enumerates a catalogue of mourners. This poem is singular, however, in its incorporation of non-Irish mourners. Strikingly, the sequence begins with the English court: Ma´ tha´inig deimhniughadh ar do sce´alta ’s a gcur go Lonndain da´ n-e´isteacht do chuir su´d mo´rghruaim ar rı´gh Se´amus ’s ar ono´ir na bprionnsuidhe le che´ile ar dhiu´icidhibh ’s ar ghiu´istı´sı´bh tre´ana. (If these tidings of you have been confirmed and have gone to be heard in London, then King James has suffered great dejection as have the honourable princes, dukes and powerful magistrates.)22
The Stuarts’ Gaelic pedigree was optimistically received among the native Irish. It fuelled expectations of improved relations with the crown and support of Stuart claimants to the throne throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.23 Moving to more conventional vehicles for mourning, the poet recounts the tears of Thomond’s female lovers, before returning to a wider embrace: Creach na n-o´g thu is creach na n-aosta, creach na nGall is creach na nGaedhal tu . . . (Your death is a ruinous loss to young and old, to the foreigners and to the Irish . . . )24
22 Field Day, iv. 399/401, ll. 1–6, 12, 14–18. Where printed translations are available, the relevant page references are provided in the second instance. 23 ´ Buachalla, Aisling Ghe´ar, and ‘James Our True King: the See Caball, Poets and Politics, 86; O Ideology of Irish Royalism in the Seventeenth Century’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan (eds.), Political Thought in Ireland Since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), 7–35. 24 Field Day, iv. 399/401, ll. 21–2.
28
Poetry in Irish
The structure of this passage, explicitly framed with reference to Thomond’s impact beyond Ireland, does not avoid his English allegiance but rather extols the earl’s straddling of both cultures. The caoineadh postulates Thomond’s conformity by adapting political incongruities to conventional paradigms. Thus, the portrait of his Gaelic court is solidly traditional: poetry, music, feasting, martial performance, sailing, and the rewarding of these activities have departed with the earl. The bardic device of the caithre´im (battle roll) is reworked to account for Thomond’s military activities on behalf of the crown. Introduced via analogy with legendary Irish heroes (Conn, Cairbre, Eoghan) and Munster ancestors (Eoghan Mo´r, Brian Boru, and his son Murrough), this caithre´im details Thomond’s triumphs over Gaelic forces during the nine years war. The poet cites battles in Ulster at Donegal, Dungannon, Assaroe, Strabane, and Erne. She invokes his defeats of the Connacht chief Mac ´ Ruairc (O’Rourke) of Breffny, Mac Uilliam Bu´rc (MacWilliam Burke), O ´ Conchubhar Sligigh (O’Connor Diarmada (MacDermott) of Moylurg, O Sligo), the men of Fermanagh, Cavan, Roscommon, Meath, and Leinster. Pausing to ask the rhetorical question— Cre´ad b’a´il liom da´ n-a´ireamh re´ che´ile ’s nach bhfuil ceann baile, bealaigh na´ sle´ibhe nach raibh aithne ar bhrataibh an tre´infhir. (Why should I enumerate these since, into every town and highway and moor, knowledge of the standards of this champion had reached?)—
the roll continues.25 Thomond’s triumphant progress through Munster (probably referring to his accompaniment of Essex in 1599) is applauded, and his role in the siege of Kinsale in 1601 is the subject of particular acclaim. The leader of the Spanish forces, Don Juan del A´guila, is represented as surrendering to Thomond rather than the English lord deputy, and the poet attributes to the earl superior strategic nous, as he is alleged to counter Mountjoy’s advice.26 Crucially, this caithre´im—already unusual in its political allegiance—excludes events which challenged or threatened Thomond’s clan supremacy. There is no ´ Domhnaill’s 1599 incursions into Clare, to Tadhg O ´ Briain’s reference to O uniting with the Ulster earls, nor to his claim to the Gaelic title for his brother’s territory. The elegist adapts the bardic trope of the battle roll in order to absorb her subject’s military activities, while her selectivity silences dissent.
25
Field Day, iv. 400/402, ll. 60–1. For the Battle of Kinsale, see J. J. Silke, Kinsale: The Spanish Intervention in Ireland at the End of the Elizabethan Wars (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1970; repr. Dublin: Four Courts, 2000); Hiram Morgan (ed.), The Battle of Kinsale (Bray: Wordwell, 2004). 26
Poetry in Irish
29
Her caithre´im begins with an assertion of kinship with legendary Gaelic heroes as a means of masking its transgressive content. It is followed by a genealogical passage which links the earl to myriad ruling houses of Europe: Leanfadsa d’eachtra do phre´imhe ’s gur as Teagh na Haustria do the´arnais, a bhra´thair rı´ogh Lonndan na gce´ad gcath, rı´ogh sta´dmhar na Spa´inne tre´ine, rı´ogh Po´land na Coro´na na´r claonadh is rı´ogh Franc ata´ teann san e´ileamh. A ghaoil rı´ogh uasail na Bohe´ime a bhra´thair Charoluis is tSe´asair, is Pa´ras tug la´nchath san Trae amuigh ’s an impire le´r tionnscnadh an fe´asta tug rı´ogha an domhain mho´ir da´ che´ile. (I shall again take up the story of your ancestry: you are of the line of the House of Austria, a kinsman of the battle-inured king in London and of the stately king of mighty Spain, of the king of Poland whose crown was not brought low, and of the king of the French, so stout in his demands. Kinsman of the noble king of Bohemia, of Charlemagne and of Caesar, and of Paris who fought the prolonged battle in Troy, of the emperor who started the feast and who gave the kings of the entire world to each other.)27
This genealogy far exceeds the more conventional Gaelic genealogies provided in the other keens. Yet it is rooted in Gaelic genealogical tradition which, since the seventh century, had traced Mı´le Easpa´inne back to the biblical Adam. As ´ Muraı´le observes, from an early period genealogies were used ‘to support O claims to power and territory, and therefore the forging of pedigrees to accord with changing political relationships and circumstances became something of a minor industry, akin to the forging of charters in other countries’.28 Caitilı´n Dubh’s elaborate genealogy may usefully be interpreted in light of this tradition of manipulating pedigrees to suit a historical situation in flux. More importantly, the assertion of kinship with Europe’s leading dynasties directs her audience toward multiple continental connections and away from the binary opposition of Gaelic–English. Having established an even-handed catalogue of mourners which embraced both foreign and Irish grief, the poet further circumvents accusations of anti-Gaelicism by locating the earl in a pan-European
27 28
Field Day, iv. 400/402, ll. 77–87. Mac Fhirbhisigh, Leabhar Mo´r na nGenealach, 11.
30
Poetry in Irish
context. The elegy exalts Thomond as a Munster and Gaelic hero and contains factional interests within the bardic tropes of the battle roll and genealogy. The poem’s close maintains this strategy. Adhering to convention, the poet invokes the trope of a feminized Ireland, widowed and broken in the wake of the chief ’s death: su´d Cla´r Banba feasta gan ce´ile, tug sı´ malairt ar atharrach sce´imhe do ghabh sı´ duibhe ar fhaicsin ghle´igil. Ta´ sı´ dall, do chaill sı´ a he´isteacht, do briseadh a cos, do stopadh a ce´imibh i ndeo´idh an fhir da´ dtug sı´ a haonta is truagh ’s is deacair bhur scaradh re´ che´ile . . . (Banba is now without a spouse, her visage has altered, she has put on a black in place of a bright countenance. She is blind, she hears not, she is lamed and incapacitated in the wake of him with whom she made union, your separation from each other is pitiful and harsh.)29
The denotation of Ireland as ‘Banba’ reiterates the claims to tradition. The dominance of this trope in professional poetry again provides cover for the poem’s unorthodox celebration of its subject.30 In his discussion of Clann Bhruaideadha, the hereditary family of historians and poets attached to the Uı´ Bhriain, Leerssen identifies a dilemma for such clients: ‘When Clann Bhruaideadha ply their craft in honor of O’Brien, and when O’Brien complies more and more with the English interest, then the curious result is Gaelic poetry which glorifies the instrument of anti-Gaelic policy.’31 The difficulty here is that, for the fileadha, to praise anglicized Gaelic chiefs risks participation in the demise of one’s own profession. Crown policies like ‘surrender and regrant’ were aimed at dismantling traditional power-bases, which included the legitimating activities performed by professional poets. However, we should not overburden these poets with historical hindsight. In the transitional moment of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the
29
Field Day, iv. 400/402, ll. 90–6. ´ Da´laigh’s ‘Mo´r ar bfearg riot a rı´ Saxan’, a midSee, for examples, Gofraidh Fionn O fourteenth-century poem which figures Ireland as a woman separated from her lover, Maurice ´ Rathaille’s Fitzmaurice, second earl of Desmond (Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry, 73–81); Aoga´n O eighteenth-century aisling, ‘Mac an Cheannaı´’, in which the feminized Ireland, awaiting her loved ´ Tuama and Thomas one (the Stuart Pretender), dies upon hearing of the latter’s death (Sea´n O Kinsella (eds.), An Duanaire 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1981), 156–61). 31 Leerssen, Contention, 37–8. 30
Poetry in Irish
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issue was not so clear-cut. While some historians argue that bardic poetry remained stubbornly local in this period, others have pointed to a more resourceful paradigm, which adapted to contemporary changes.32 Tadhg Mac Bruaideadha, attached to the fourth earl of Thomond, is an instructive example. Mac Bruaideadha also wrote an elegy on the fourth earl, in professional deibhidhe metre. Here, Thomond’s death creates three objects of pity: the poet himself, Munster, and Ireland. Its opening statement, ‘Eascar Gaoidheal e´ag aoinfhir’ (‘The death of one man entails the overthrow of the Gaeil’), belies the poem’s concentration on its subject’s service to the king. Gaill and Gaoidhil, foreigners and the Irish, are united here in fear of the martial supremacy of a warrior who surpassed the classical heroes Hercules, Jason, Pyrrhus, Hector, and Achilles. Mac Bruaideadha’s elegy is frank in its praise of Thomond’s crown activities, even adopting into Irish the relevant colonial vocabulary (my italics): Ceathracha is ceithre bliadhna . . . ata´ ag cungnamh don Choro´in . . . President mo´irchrı´och Mumhan, Iarla tromdha Tuadhmhumhan da´ ghairm gan ra-ru´n re a ra´dh . . . Post ceart do Chomhairle an Rı´ogh . . . scrios prı´omhnamhad a phrionnsa. (For forty-four years he has been aiding the crown . . . President of the great territories of Munster, influential Earl of Thomond—two titles of which no great secret is made . . . True supporter of the King’s Council . . . destroyer of his sovereign’s enemies.)33
Mac Bruaideadha’s (shorter) caithre´im, which lists five battles of the nine years war in addition to Kinsale, pointedly hails these triumphs: ‘ar mhairg do´ibh, | da´r thairg cura ar an gCoro´in’ (‘a source of regret to those who attempted to oppose the Crown’). Its conclusion assumes continuity and survival for posterity by means of poetry:
32 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Native Reaction to the Westward Enterprise: A Case-Study in Gaelic Ideology’, in Kenneth Andrews, Nicholas 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), 65–80; Tom Dunne, ‘The Gaelic Response to Conquest and Colonisation: The Evidence of the Poetry’, Studia Hibernica, 20 (1986), 10–11; Leerssen, Contention, 45–51; ´ Buachalla, Aisling Ghe´ar and ‘James’; Michelle O Riordan, ‘The Native Ulster Mentalite´ as O Revealed in Gaelic Sources 1600–1650’, in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1993), 61–91. This debate is summarized in Caball, Poets and Politics, 7–13. 33 For the entry of this lexicon into the language of the poets from the late sixteenth century, see ´ Buachalla, Aisling Ghe´ar, 3–66, and his The Crown of Ireland (Galway: Arlen House, 2006), O 26–47.
32
Poetry in Irish Mairid fionnlaoidhe fileadh d’admholtaibh gan aindligheadh o´ mbudh beo´ choidhche ar cuimhne gan reo´ ndoirche ar nDonnchaidh-ne.
(There remain in existence poets’ fair lays of praise without any irregularity from which our Donnchadh will always be alive in memory without eclipse.)34
While such claims to poetic posterity can be conventional in all literatures, its very conventionality here suggests no apprehension of a dying way of life on the part of the poet. As a woman writing non-bardic verse, Caitilı´n Dubh participates in this practice. Her eulogy of Thomond does not go so far as Mac Bruaideadha’s in adopting the terminology of the English administration. It seeks to reformulate his role as instrument of crown policy according to Gaelic paradigms. Like the professional poet, she continued to serve a leading Gaelic noble whose military allegiance was to the crown. That both poets did so points to a mutual preservation of the traditional patronage dynamic. Her verse is not only educated in bardic tradition and panegyric conventions, it manipulates them to find a way of eulogizing her subject. Like many of her male contemporaries, Caitilı´n Dubh demonstrates an elasticity in composing Gaelic verse which was prepared to accommodate cooperation with the English crown in order to preserve the literary culture. That this strategy would ultimately prove unsuccessful was not necessarily apparent to those who composed within a tradition that had remained stable for four centuries. This female keener’s biography remains obscure. Her allusion to Toirdhealbhach Ruadh as ‘mo thriath’ (‘my lord’), her composition of two keens on his death as well as another on his wife, suggest that Caitilı´n Dubh benefited from some form of patronage in the Mac Mathghamhna household.35 Her skilful deployment and manipulation of bardic tropes and conventions, her reference to Cato, her forging a space for female composition through the figure of the bean sı´, all point to a high level of education. The longevity of her reputation is evident from the oral tradition. Stories about Caitilı´n Dubh (or her daughter) rescuing a young man from the grasp of Clı´ona, the fairy queen of south Munster, survive from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of these tenders the surname Keating (the epithet ‘dubh’, while often attached to Gaelic names, is an adjective meaning ‘black’).36 Another caoineadh of the same period, composed by a relative of the same family, provides further evidence of women’s composition in this tradition. In 34 ´ Cuı´v, ‘An Elegy on Donnchadh O ´ Briain, Fourth Earl of Thomond’, Celtica, 16 Brian O (1984), 91–103, ll. 1, 69, 71, 121–3, 125, 128, 87–8, 233–6, respectively. 35 As also argued by Ma´irı´n Nic Eoin, B’ait leo bean: Gne´ithe den Ide´-eolaı´ocht Inscne i dTraidisiu´n Liteartha na Gaeilge (Dublin: An Clo´chomhar, 1998), 249. 36 ´ Cuı´v, ‘Deasca´n o´ Chu´ige Mumhan’, Be´aloideas, 22 (1953), 102–11. Brian O
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this case, however, the author is a member of the Gaelic nobility, and her noble status means that we have a good deal more biographical information. Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain (Finola O’Brien, c.1557–c.1617) was first cousin to Conchubhar, third earl of Thomond (d. 1581). In the fallout of the family’s submission to English primogeniture, her father Domhnall (brother of the second earl and uncle to the third, d. ´ Briain according with tanistry in 1553. There ensued two 1579) was proclaimed O decades of rivalry between the third earl and his uncle, until Domhnall was made sheriff of county Clare in 1576.37 Fionnghuala was first married to Toma´s Mac Muiris (Thomas FitzMaurice), lord of Lixnaw in county Kerry, but he put her away in favour of her half-sister, Honora, in December 1579. Soon afterwards Fionn´ Lochlainn (Owney More O’Loughlin) of the ghuala married Uaithne Mo´r O Burren, county Clare. His death in 1617 is the subject of her caoineadh. Like Caitilı´n Dubh’s keens, Fionnghuala’s lament is preserved in a family ´ Lochlainn was transcribed in 1727 by Aindrias Mac duanaire. The Book of O Cruitı´n (brother to Aodh Buı´, primary scribe of Duanaire Uı´ Bhriain) for Brian ´ Lochlainn (d. 1734), a doctor. This manuscript is another compilation of O sept-related texts. It contains bardic and non-bardic verse on the Uı´ Lochlainn, including (like Duanaire Uı´ Bhriain) extracts from Iomarbha´gh na bhFileadh. In addition to the Iomarbha´gh poems, it compiles seventy-eight poems and fragments (a number of which were composed by the Mac Cruitı´n brothers), as well as some short prose texts. According to the scribe’s colophon, the contents were copied from another manuscript, written for Donnchadh mac Toirdhealbhaigh ´ Lochlainn, highlighting the practice of duanaire (Donough son of Turlough) O compilation among families of county Clare in the early eighteenth century.38 Fionnghuala’s lament for her husband is immersed in the exigencies of her own perilous situation. Although the authorial attribution is filial (‘Fionnghuala inghean Domhnaill Uı´ Bhriain cecenit’, ‘Fionnghuala daughter of Domhnall ´ Briain composed this’), it is as a wife that she encountered hardship. Her O first husband’s desertion in favour of her half-sister some few months after her ´ father’s death left Fionnghuala in an awkward position. Her remarriage to O Lochlainn was apparently achieved with the help of the third earl of Thomond prior to the latter’s death in 1581. Fionnghuala and her second husband had no children; accordingly, on Uaithne’s death their home, Seanmhuicinis (Shanmuckinish) Castle, was bequeathed to cousins of his.39 Fionnghuala was entitled only to the value of her marriage dowry. Thus, the female author’s self-construction in the poem serves an immediate, personal purpose in addition to the lamenting of her husband: to remedy her newly impoverished and vulnerable 37
O’Brien, O’Brien of Thomond, 17–23. RIA MS E iv 3, p. 15. For a description of the manuscript’s contents, see Thomas O’Rahilly (ed.), Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin: RIA, 1926), 52–8. 39 James Frost, The History and Topography of the County of Clare (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker, 1893), 307. 38
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predicament. Unlike Caitilı´n Dubh, this noblewoman composes her caoineadh to procure economic aid rather than literary patronage. Her position as widow and the narrower ambition of her poem provide sufficient authority for her composition. The legitimating figure of the bean sı´ is unnecessary, and the fellowship afforded the female speaker of Caitilı´n Dubh’s poems is entirely absent here. Structurally, the poem is comprised of two halves: the first concerned with the loss of her husband, the second with her exposed situation. Its trochaic endrhyme (/ua –/) is a tribute to her husband’s name. The poem is framed at either end by the Christian hope that Uaithne will be protected by the holy spirit on his journey to heaven. His equal generosity to the church and the learned classes are presented as grounds for his welcome by Christ. This nod to traditional Gaelic values is followed by reference to Uaithne’s genealogy. But Nı´ Bhriain’s poem does not seek to emulate the conventions of professional poetry. As she herself indicates—‘beaga´n beaga´n’ (literally, ‘a little, a little’)—this is no bardic recitation of lineage; rather, it is another allusion to established topics. Fionnghuala names no ancestors but quantifies them: twenty-five kings and thirty provincial kings. Conscious of the accusation of brevity, of failing to fulfil standard requirements, her self-reflexive defence indicates both familiarity with the literature and a clear distinction between her own remit and that of the professionals: Muna leor so dot eolas uaimse do gheabhthar sgeol ort a leabhur na suadha ’sgur libh an ce´adlaoi da´ nduantaibh. (If this knowledge I give of you is insufficient your story can be found in the book of the poets’ considering that to you belongs the first poem of their compositions.)40
´ Murchu´ proposes, this reference may suggest that Fionnghuala had read As O ´ g Mac Bruaideadha’s 1594 genealogical poem on the Uı´ Lochlainn, Maoilı´n O ‘O cheathrar gluaisid Gaoidhil’. This poem is transcribed on the following pages of the manuscript.41 The deference to another authority emphasizes her self-construction as an amateur poet who is addressing her personal bereavement rather than a chief ’s public legacy. Indeed, the next stanza assumes a demarcation between her own keening and professional poetry, pinpointing the decline of that class: gur fhortabhair an tromdha´imh trı´ huaire is fir E´irionn da´ le´irsgrios uatha.
40 ´ Murchu´, ‘Caoineadh ar Uaithne Mo´r O ´ Lochlainn, 1617’, E´igse, 27 (1993), 75/76, Liam O ll. 9, 15–17; RIA MS E iv 3, pp. 46–8. See also editions in Field Day, iv. 396–7; Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 175–8. 41 ´ O Murchu´, ‘Caoineadh ar Uaithne Mo´r’, 68; RIA MS E iv 3, pp. 49–54.
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(you thrice succoured the oppressive [sad] company of poets when the men of Ireland were extirpating them.)42
Where Caitilı´n Dubh inhabits bardic tradition, manipulating its codes to suit her subject and reflecting political transitions, Nı´ Bhriain operates outside the world of literary patronage and clearly perceives its decline. At the same time, her praise of her husband rests on his protection of the poets. As the poem shifts to the widowed speaker’s situation, Nı´ Bhriain plays with the recurrent rhyme of the poem. She repeats and opposes certain words to convey her anxious situation. Where her husband is characterized by the absence of gloom (‘gan ghruaim riot’), the segue to her widowed experience is the opposite: ‘tharrla me´ a ngruaim riot’ (‘I have been mourning for you’; literally, ‘in gloom over you’). The verbal root buaidhreadh (‘troubled, afflicted’) is repeated five times in the poem’s second half, creating a sense of claustrophobic anxiety that conveys the speaker’s inability to overcome her isolation.43 Her focus fixes on events which compound her husband’s death to render her helpless. First, she mourns the death of the third earl of Thomond, with whom a protective and preferential bond is asserted: Sge´al fa´bhaill ata´ dom buaidhriodh; ata´im cra´idhte o´ bha´s Iarla Tuadhmhun . . . a´rdfhlaith aga mbı´odh ca´s im chruadhtan o´ bhfuighinn fa´ilte ghra´dhmhar shuaimhneach is fuighle badh binn liom am chluasaibh is ca´ta tar a la´n do mhna´ibh uaisle. (Another affair troubles me much: I am grieved since the death of my protector the earl of Thomond . . . a great lord who concerned himself with my hardship, from whom I got loving, soothing salutation, and speech which was sweet to my ears and honour above many noble ladies.)44
Nic Eoin has written of the bardic tendency to isolate their female patrons from the mass of women gathered at feasts—the terms of praise rest precisely on superiority rather than solidarity. This is hinted in the keener’s self-identification as a woman exalted above other noble women of his court. Certainly, the emphasis on comfort, recognition, and protection stands in stark opposition to the speaker’s current isolation. The passage has been read as a plea to his son, the fourth earl of Thomond, to alleviate her current situation, Nic Eoin arguing that it is analogous to the petitionletters of Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille (Grace O’Malley; discussed in Chapter 3).45 While this
42 43 44 45
´ Murchu´, ‘Caoineadh ar Uaithne Mo´r’, 75/76, ll. 20–1. O Ibid. 74–6, ll. 5, 8, 22, 23, 27, 37, 44, 48. Ibid. 75/77, ll. 27–8, 30–3. Nic Eoin, B’ait leo bean, 152–4, 246.
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would explain Fionnghuala’s lamentation of the third earl’s death thirty-six years after the fact, it also fits with her forlorn self-construction in the poem’s second half. The second context for her despair is the redistribution of power occurring in contemporary Ireland. The fragmentation of the Uı´ Ne´ill as a force and the loss ´ Briain combine to leave the speaker without any advocate. The sense of of O inevitable deterioration is intensified as the speaker reworks the trope of a feminized Ireland. Reversing Caitilı´n Dubh’s construction of the bereft spouse incapacitated by the deaths of her nobles, here it is Ireland who has abandoned her nobility: A E´ire ata´ taomannach buaidhiortha nı´ buan do re´ d’e´inneach da´r dhual tu; ’s a mhe´irdreach, o´ thre´igise h’uaisle is cuma liom fe´in cia an te´ fa´ mbuailfir. (Ireland, restless and tormented, no lasting reign has he who has proper claim to you; and, harlot, since you deserted your nobles I don’t care to whom you attach yourself.)46
The poem builds to a restless crescendo, emphasized by the strategic repetition of the verb buaidhreadh and the speaker’s renunciation of her country. Rather than moving towards consolation, then, the speaker at the poem’s close is more isolated than ever. There is a sad literary coda to Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain’s caoineadh. An anonymous poem on the deserted castle at Shanmuckinish, ‘Tuar guil, a cholaim, do cheol’, is transcribed underneath hers in the manuscript. Recalling Caitilı´n Dubh’s depiction of Toirdhealbhach Ruadh’s desolate seat, this poem employs the figure of a dove singing sorrowfully above the now-abandoned ´ Lochlainn home. The speaker singles out the lady of the castle, imagining a O special relationship between the bird and its female patron: o´ nach faice an u´rbhas fhial do chleachtais dod riar gach laoi. (you see no more the noble lady who nurtured you each day.)
The activities associated with the castle in its prime encompass music, poetry and feasting, warriors, cattle, boats, gulls, chessmen, sages, gentlewomen. All are linked through the repetition of ga´ir (‘sound’) in order to contrast the peopled sounds of the past with the solitary dove’s ceol bhro´naig (‘doleful music’) in the present. The penultimate stanza names Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain and displays a thorough understanding of her historical situation:
46
´ Murchu´, ‘Caoineadh ar Uaithne Mo´r’, 76/77, ll. 44–7. O
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Inghean Domhnaill do mhear me´ ’s do chuir mo che´ill ar mo mhuin; a beith gan oighre, gan ua, ca´ beag dhamh-sa mar thuar guil? (Domhnall’s daughter distracted me and set my senses wild. That she has neither heir nor offspring —have I not full cause for tears?)47
The poem’s contrast between the once-thriving castle and its departed mistress suggests that, were Nı´ Bhriain’s caoineadh a plea for help, it was unsuccessful—but equally, that her predicament reverberated through contemporary literary culture. The caoineadh is the verse form most commonly associated with women through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, both of these female poets, whose work survives due to the early eighteenth-century interest in preserving both bardic and non-bardic verse, present a snapshot of literary activity which was not privileged in the bardic system and which endured through the later oral traditions. Evidence for Irish women’s authorship of verse as early as the ninth century survives. While the bulk of this evidence is reported second-hand (through the oral tradition or in the annals), with few texts preserved, the traces of female poets are suggestive of a less barren landscape than might be assumed.48 Later references suggest a low social status for women versifiers. In a list of ‘poets, chroniclers or rhymers’ taken in Cork on 7 November 1584, two women are included: ‘Mary-ny-Donoghue, a she-barde; and Mary-ny-Clancy, rymer.’49 The clear distinction in medieval and early modern Irish culture between the fileadha, the professional poets—of whom the ollamh is the most exalted—and the baird, a lower order of itinerant poets who composed more popular verse, underpins these references. Thomas Smyth, an English apothecary living in Dublin, described (somewhat inaccurately) in 1561 the four classes of rhymers. Excluded from these classes, but described nonetheless, are the ‘mannigscoule’ (the mna´ siubhail, 47 ´ O Tuama and Kinsella, An Duanaire, 20–3, ll. 11–12, 33, 29–32, respectively; RIA MS E iv 3, pp. 48–9. See also Field Day, iv. 397–8, for the Irish text with translation by Lord Longford. 48 ‘Aithbe damsa be´s mara’ (‘Digde’s Lament’, also known as ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’), dated c.900, is the sole intact example of verse by a woman in the Old Irish period. For discussion of this poem, and of the reputed ninth- and tenth-century poets: Laitheog Laı´dech; ´ allach, daughter of Muimnecha´n; the daughter of u´a Dulsaine; and Lı´adan, wife of Cuirither; U Gormlaith, see Field Day, iv. 111–18, 299–300, 303–5, 133–9; and Thomas Owen Clancy, ‘Women Poets in Early Medieval Ireland: Stating the Case’, in Christine Meek and Katharine Simms (eds.), ‘The Fragility of Her Sex?’ Medieval Irishwomen in Their European Context (Dublin: Four Courts, 1996), 46–7, 64–71. Alan Fletcher argues of the Old and Middle Irish evidence that the ‘few glimpses afforded of female performing artists suggest that the sort of entertainment they offered, although possibly reduced in scope, did not markedly differ from that of their male counterparts’, citing four references to the practices of the bancha´inte (she-satirists): Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 34–5; 337, nn. 143–5. 49 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 627, cited in Field Day, iv. 302.
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walking women): ‘ther order is for to singe and the chyfest of them most haue but one eye, and he is calleid Lucas they do muche harme.’50 Both Irish and Scottish professionals seem to have held horrified attitudes towards the idea of a lower-class female versifier in their midst (although they were also pejorative about untrained male bards).51 The fourteenth-century Irish ´ hUiginn makes a sharp distinction between his own fileadh Giolla na Naomh O specialized profession and the inferior songs, or amhra´in, he attributes to women and lower-class men: do sgar an daghdha´n re a dhath abhra´n ban agus bhachlach. (The abhra´n [amhra´n] of women and churls has robbed genuine poetry of its colour.)52
The sixteenth-century Scottish poet Feidhlim Mac Dhubhghaill evinces a misogynist disgust for female poetry: ‘fuath liom cliar ara mbı´ bean’ (‘I hate a poet-band that includes a woman’).53 The expression of such pan-Gaelic revulsion across the classical period suggests, of course, that women poets did exist. It has been recently suggested that Agnes Carkill, the ‘barde wife’ who performed for James IV at his court in 1512, may have entertained the Scottish king in Gaelic. Clancy further argues that Carkill is an Antrim name and that she may therefore have been Irish.54 There is a singular example of a banollamh (‘woman ollamh’): Sadhbh (d. c.1447), ´ Maolchonaire, is daughter of Uilliam Mac Brana´in and wife of Maoilı´n O described as ‘banollamh of Sı´ol Muireadhaigh Mhic Fhearghusa and a nurse of all guests and strangers, and of all the learned men in Ireland’.55 But Gaelic women, in Ireland and Scotland, engaged with syllabic as well as accentual forms. The single surviving amateur syllabic poem attributed to an Irish woman displays the kind of intimacy with bardic verse that would have been assumed of its audience. Its apparent uniqueness raises important questions about our assessment of women’s authorship which are illuminated by the 50
SP 63/3/67. See Cathal MacMhuirich’s ‘Sona do cheird, a Chalbhaigh’, which castigates those who compose ‘da´n gan docracht’ (‘poetry without effort’), and ‘Ionmholta malairt bhisigh’ by ´ hEodhasa, which satirically abandons professional verse in favour of popular Eochaidh O ´ Baoill (ed.), Ga`ir nan Cla`rsach/The Harps’ Cry: An Anthology of vernacular poetry; Colm O Seventeenth-Century Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1994), 90–5; Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry, 127–9/270–1. 52 Lambert McKenna (ed.), The Book of Magauran: Leabhar Me´ig Shamhradha´in (Dublin: DIAS, 1947), 237/379. See also Field Day, iv. 301, with variant translation. 53 William J. Watson (ed.), Scottish Verse from the Book of the Dean of Lismore (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1937), 244–5. 54 Clancy, ‘Women Poets’, 55. 55 Field Day, iv. 337. Nı´ Dhonnchadha points to the ambiguity of the designation, arguing, ‘At very least, the use of banollamh suggests an attempt to honour Sadhbh as the suitably intellectual partner of her historian husband, but a more proactive involvement in scholarship cannot be dismissed’: Field Day, iv. 300–1. 51
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contemporaneous Scottish context. Brighid Fitzgerald (Nic Gearailt, c.1589– 1682), daughter of Henry, twelfth earl of Kildare, is associated with a more social genre of verse exchange. Brighid was married, at the age of 13 or 14, to the Ulster ´ Domhnaill (Rury O’Donnell).56 O ´ Domhnaill was active at chief Rudhraighe O the opposite end of the political spectrum to the earl of Thomond: he fought on the Gaelic side at Kinsale, accepting the anglicized title earl of Tyrconnell from King James when pardoned in September 1603. But he suffered from the crown commissioners’ reapportioning of land in 1605. He made common ground with ´ g Ma´g Uidhir (Maguire) of Fermanagh (who was himself Cu´ Chonnacht O involved in a dispute with his kinsman, Conchubhar Ruadh Ma´g Uidhir, over the state’s division of lands). Both men left for continental Europe in September 1607, accompanying the earl of Tyrone in the expedition known to history as the ‘flight of the earls’, and inadvertently clearing the way for the Ulster plantation.57 Brighid herself was born into the most powerful (and Old English) family of the Pale. Her mother and grandmother were both English and her aunt, Elizabeth Fitzgerald (d. 1618), was married to Donnchadh, fourth earl of Thomond.58 Thus, she is representative of the overlapping allegiances of the Old English and Gaelic Irish, of the pragmatic intermarriage of the nobility, and of the consequent importance of bilingualism and biculturalism. However, the political circumstances impinging on these families at the time are absent from the playful poetic dispute that survives. ‘A mhacaoimh dhealbhas an da´n’ (‘O young man who composes the poem’), attributed to Brighid, is an answer to a humorous love poem presented to her from her husband’s ally, Cu´ ´ g Ma´g Uidhir, both composed between 1603 and 1607.59 ‘Nı´ me´ Chonnacht O bhur n-aithne, a aos gra´idh’ (‘Friends, I am not your acquaintance’) is concerned with unrequited love. Its conceit figures the male speaker as a ghost who is neither dead nor alive as a result of his encounter with ‘du´il do dhu´ilibh nimhe’ (a ‘heavenly creature’).60 The poem’s final jest lies in the riddle of its last stanza. 56
Although married, Brighid is known by her maiden name. As she is best known to scholars via the English version, Fitzgerald, the latter is preferred. 57 ´ Ciana´in, Turas na dTaoiseach nUltach as E´irinn: From Ra´th Maola´in to Rome, ed. Tadhg O ´ Muraı´le (Rome: Pontifical College, 2007); Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: Nollaig O British Settlement in an Irish Landscape, 1600–1670 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1984). 58 Her mother was Lady Frances Howard, second daughter of Charles, earl of Nottingham. Her paternal grandmother was Mabel, second daughter of Sir Anthony Brown (c.1500–48), the courtier of Henry VIII whose second wife was Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daugher of the ninth earl of Kildare; ODNB and Field Day, iv. 451. 59 Biographical circumstances date the exchange between her wedding in 1603 and the earls’ departure in 1607. 60 ´ Ha´inle, ‘Flattery Rejected: Two Seventeenth-Century Irish Poems’, Hermathena, Cathal G. O 138 (1985), 12–13, l. 37. This text and translation are reprinted in Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 165–7; see also Field Day, iv. 384–8, with new translations by Patrick Crotty. As Mac Craith points out, the translation omits the poet’s pun on ‘du´il’, meaning both ‘creature’ and ‘desire’; hence, the line may also be read as ‘a creature of heavenly desires’; Michea´l Mac Craith, ‘Fun and Games among the Jet Set: A Glimpse of Seventeenth-Century Gaelic Ireland’, in Joseph Falaky Nagy (ed.), Memory and the Modern in Celtic Literatures (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006), 23.
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This riddle employs synonyms which—correctly construed—reveal the speaker’s name. Thus, ‘sadh ’ga mbı´ ciall agus cruth | iar, agus ´ı gan fholach’ (‘Ask for a bitch that has sense and beauty and that is not hidden’) takes sadh (‘bitch’) as a synonym for cu´ (‘hound’); ciall (‘sense’) for conn (‘sense’); and gan fholach (‘without hiding-place’) for nocht (‘naked’), to reveal Cu´ Chonnacht.61 The delight of this literary exchange rests on the identification of the author. This poem in Cu´ Chonnacht’s name, written in professional deibhidhe metre, was a ´ hEodhasa, ollamh to the Ma´g commission. Its real author was Eochaidh O Uidhir family. The answer-poem attributed to Brighid is in amateur syllabic verse, known as o´glachas. It conforms in its essentials to the professional metre, rannaigheacht mho´r, as is illustrated by an analysis of the first rann (quatrain): A mhacaoimh dhealbhas an da´n tig anı´os ar sca´th na scol; an da´n le´r chuiris do chlu´, maith a dhe´anamh, is tu´ id’ thocht. (O young man who composes the poem, stop sheltering behind the poets. The poem, by means of which you spread your fame, is well made, while you remained silent.)62
The poem conforms to rannaigheacht mho´r in the following ways: there are seven syllables per line, each ending on a monosyllable; the final syllables of b and d rhyme. The poet employs a device termed aicill, whereby the final syllable of the first line of the couplet rhymes with a word in the interior of the second line (da´n : sca´th in the first couplet, chlu´ : tu´ in the second). However, the first of these is imperfect as the consonants derive from different classes. (In professional rannaigheacht mho´r, aicill is necessary only in the final couplet.) There is internal rhyme in each couplet (mhacaoimh : anı´os in the first couplet; le´r : dhe´anamh in the second couplet). In strict rannaigheacht mho´r there would be at least two internal rhymes in each couplet, and the consonants would be of the same class and quality. A detailed appreciation of the metre demonstrates, on the one hand, the complexity of syllabic poetry and, on the other, the author’s facility with its amateur practice. Professional poetry was performed in public by a reactaire (reciter) accompanied by a cruitire (harpist). The quantity of specific rules— regarding rhyme, alliteration, assonance—illustrates both the extensive training required of the fileadh and the corresponding sophistication of the audience in recognizing his negotiation of the rules. 61 ´ O Ha´inle, ‘Flattery Rejected’, 13/14, ll. 67–8. Mac Craith further suggests that ‘ciall mh’anma’ might be read as ‘the meaning of my soul/love’; thus, ‘it could be a risque´ reference to Brighid Fitzgerald herself, as an intelligent (ga´ mbi ciall ), beautiful (agus cruth), naked (ı´ gan fholach) bitch (sadh)’; ‘Fun and Games’, 24. 62 ´ O Ha´inle, ‘Flattery Rejected’, 17/19, ll. 1–4.
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´ hEodhasa’s Rather than engaging with the love theme of Cu´ Chonnacht/O poem, Fitzgerald’s answer focuses on the question of authorship and the quality of the verse. Indeed, the matter of love is relegated to a single line in the penultimate stanza, in which the speaker brusquely refutes the claim: ‘ach nach deachadh dh’e´ag dom’ ghra´dh’ (‘but (this I know) that he would not die for love of me’). The answer-poem hinges on the female speaker’s familiarity with elite poetic culture and the da´n dı´reach of the fileadha. As we have seen, it opens demanding the correct identification of the professional poet. Her sensitivity to the skill of the fileadh means that she cannot countenance the idea that Cu´ Chonnacht himself could have written the poem: Beaga´n da´na ’na dha´n cheart; maith a dhe´anamh, a dhearc mhall; is gan tusa it’ adhbhar suadh, iongnadh linne cruas na rann. (Few poems are faultless; well is (your poem) made, o (you of the) steady eye; seeing that you are not (even) a student-poet, I find the difficulty of your quatrains amazing.)
Cu´ Chonnacht and his ghost-writer underestimated the female speaker’s literarycritical acumen. She draws a contrast between the ‘difficulty’ of the professional’s verse and the ‘softness’ which would be expected of an amateur (like herself ): is tu´ fe´in do mhill bhur modh mar nach ta´ngais fear-mar-cha´ch ar cuairt chugam le da´n bog. (it is you yourself who has spoiled your performance, because you did not come like any ordinary man to visit me bringing a facile poem.)63
´ hEodhasa poem, As Mac Craith has observed, there is an echo here of another O ‘Ionmholta malairt bhisigh’ (‘A change for the better is to be commended’), written in 1603. Here the poet satirizes the new fashion for ‘soft poetry’, joking that his patron (Brighid’s husband) would laugh to hear that he had abandoned the complexity of professional verse in favour of ‘Da´n bog ar bhe´l na slighiodh’ ´ hEodhasa’s claim in this poem to (‘Free and easy verse on the open road’).64 O have stooped to writing mediocre verse is mocked by Brighid in her poem. In attempting to write for Cu´ Chonnacht, she argues, he has shown that he is incapable of writing amateur verse. Her familiarity with the fileadha is demonstrated in a recitation of candidates ´ g, O ´ Da´laigh Fionn, O ´ hEoghasa, for authorship: Mac Con Midhe, Fearghal O
63
Ibid. 18/19, ll. 40, 13–16, 22–4, respectively. Bergin, Bardic Poetry, 128, l. 17; p. 270; Mac Craith, ‘Fun and Games’, 26–7. See also n. 51, above. 64
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´ Ha´inle, who identifies the likely individuals, and the Ma´g Craith family. O argues that this list is more appropriate to a professional than an amateur, and that Brighid is unlikely, therefore, to be the author. However, the ambiguity of the names—their allusion to hereditary families rather than specific indivi´ Ha´inle’s duals—is sufficient indication of her understanding of elite culture. O own identification of two thirteenth- and fourteenth-century fileadha among the list itself suggests that these are not proposed as genuine contenders; the purpose is to display the speaker’s knowledge of the poetic tradition.65 The poem concludes with its own version of a riddle. Less linguistically sophisticated, it is a game response, alluding to St Bridget, the pre-eminent female Irish saint: Mo shloinneadh nı´ chluinfe ca´ch uaimsi go dtille an la´ ine´; ata´ mh’ainm, gibe´ le´rb a´il, Ar mhnaoi do mhna´ibh fhlaithis De´. (No one will hear my surname until yesterday returns. My christian name, whoever may wish (to know) it, is borne by one of the women in God’s heaven.)66
Brighid’s poetic response is thematically structured around astute literary criticism. She recognizes the faultless professionalism of her interlocutor’s verse. The intricacy of the classical rules of poetry demanded of a listening audience that they be highly attuned to the different metres, rhymes, and consonantal classes of the verse. Fitzgerald was just such a listener. As Mac Craith has argued, this poetic exchange bears fruitful comparison with the English answer-poem emerging in the late sixteenth century, deeply concerned with literary competition.67 The vogue for conducting witty arguments through verse offered the opportunity to gain the upper hand over a rival, to signal one’s acquaintance with contemporary poetry, to veil topical critique. Perhaps the best-known examples are Christopher Marlowe’s pastoral love poem, ‘Come live with me, and be my love’, which inspired Walter Ralegh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply’ (‘If all the world and love were young’) and numerous variations, including those by John Donne and Robert Herrick. Indeed, Marlowe himself returned to his poem in order to parody it in The Jew of Malta through the character of Ithamore.68 Ralegh (who acquired a large estate at Youghal in 1586, and sold it on to Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, in 1602) was caught up in the genre again when he complained to Queen Elizabeth about his relegation ´ Ha´inle, ‘Flattery Rejected’, 20–1. O Ibid. 19, ll. 41–4. 67 ´ hEodhasa’s ‘A bhean chridhe Mac Craith, ‘Fun and Games’, 31; his discussion argues for O chompa´nta’ as an extension of the exchange. 68 For Marlowe’s poem and responses to it, see Patrick Cheney and Brian Striar (eds.), The Complete Poems of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 157–68. 65 66
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from the first order of favourites at her court. In this case his complaint, disguised as a love poem, inspired a verse response from his sovereign which maintained the amorous fiction.69 The court environment was particularly conducive to witty and combative exchanges, as Schleiner has shown in her analysis of the parlour-games of the Jacobean court.70 Provincial coterie culture, in which the circulation of verse in manuscript maintained social networks, was another arena in which the genre flourished and women contributed. The manuscript miscellany compiled by Constance Aston Fowler in Tixall, Staffordshire, mainly during the 1630s, preserves three pairs of poems and answers. Two are concerned with the question of (in)constancy in love, another with misunderstanding in friendship.71 Manuscript culture provided a more amenable environment than print for female poets participating in the genre. Jane Cavendish, for example, whose two manuscripts of her own verse were compiled during the 1640s, composed two corrective answer-poems on the topic of love—one answering the court poet Thomas Carew, the other answering a poem by her sister-in-law Alice Egerton, which was printed, with music by Henry Lawes, in 1658.72 Musical accompaniment was key to the success of the genre in the first half of the seventeenth century.73 Mac Craith points to this musical context, drawing comparison with the performance of bardic poetry at Gaelic courts, and raising the possibility that ´ Domhnaill, when he travelled to London for his pardon in Rudhraighe O 1603, might have returned with news of this fashionable genre.74 Brighid Fitzgerald’s literary dispute, then, can be seen as a bridge between the two literary cultures on the island—its syllabic metrics and literary criticism immersed in bardic culture, its playful theme analogous to English answer-poetry. 69 Steven May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 318–19. 70 Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 107–22. 71 Huntington Library, MS HM 904, fols. 136r–137r, 152v–154v, 158r–159r; Deborah Aldrich Larson (ed.), The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition (Tempe, Ariz.: Renaissance English Text Society, 2000), 105–6, 124–7, 132–4. Two poems are printed in Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 260–2. 72 Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 16, pp. 14, 16; Beinecke MS b. 233, pp. 16 (fol. 8v), 18 (fol. 9v). Egerton’s poem is attributed to Henry Hughes in Lawes’s Ayres and Dialogues, For One, Two, and Three Voyces: The Third Book (London, 1658); see Germaine Greer et al., Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1988), 109–16. For the answer to Carew’s poem, see Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 91. 73 E. F. Hart, ‘The Answer-Poem of the Early Seventeenth Century’, Review of English Studies, 7 (1956), 20–2. 74 Mac Craith, ‘Fun and Games’, 34–5. For further discussion of the English answer-poem, see Margaret Gamble-Downs, ‘New Pleasures Prove: Evidence of Dialectical Disputatio in Early Modern Manuscript Culture’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 2: 2 (1996) ; Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 159–71.
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The attribution of this poem has drawn attention in recent years. There is some question as to whether Fitzgerald composed the poem herself or commissioned it: the manuscript copy states ‘Brighid inghean Iarla Chille Dara cecinit ma´s fı´or’ (‘Brighid daughter of the Earl of Kildare composed this, so it is said’).75 The ruling principle of the exchange itself, of course, is authorial evasiveness. The scribe’s attribution replicates the use of the phrase ‘ma´s fı´or’ twice in Brighid’s ´ poem as she circles around the question of identification.76 The persona of O hEodhasa’s poem is ghostly and undead, its putative and real authors masked. Debate has centred around the interpretation of a surviving letter from Brighid to Lord Deputy Chichester, received on 1 October 1607. Having ´ Domhnaill sent the Franciscan deputy-provincial, emigrated, Rudhraighe O Eoghan Gruama Ma´g Craith, to his wife with eighty-one pieces of gold in order to arrange her passage to join him in Europe. However, their communications were intercepted, and Brighid wrote to Chichester to exonerate herself. Her strategy in this letter was to claim that she could not fully understand the messenger’s Irish. She could understand Ma´g Craith, she states, only through inadequate interpreters: ‘owen maccra˘ vsed these speeches at our first meetinge, (wch Denis o’morcan did interprett to me . . . the fryer vttered som words wch (as neere as bryan in his broken english could interprett).’ She undertook in this letter to betray her husband: ‘if ther shall any notice com to me of my lord[’s] intent, I do protest I will acquaint your lordship therof, for they shall never make me to conceale anye thinge that should tend vnto his maties: service.’77 The evidence suggests that she did no such thing. That she retained her husband’s confidence is evident from information received the following February from James Loach, who brought a message from her husband to Brighid in London, urging her to locate an incriminating letter and either burn it or keep it secret. Chichester wrote that he had given ‘directions to haue all his and her trounkes searched’ on this discovery.78 Brighid appears to have deliberately misinformed Chichester as to the identity of Ma´g Craith’s companion; ‘one Denis o’morcan (I thinke)’ was in fact another Franciscan, Thomas Fitzgerald. He was arrested and interrogated on 3 October 1607. His account contradicts that of Brighid. He states that he visited her twice, delivering letters from Ma´g Craith which she read without any difficulty (‘after shee had pervsed the letters shee tolde him’), agreeing ‘gladly [to] depart hence’. 75
This is the more reliable of the two manuscript witnesses; it transcribes both poems together, ´ g Mhaguidhir do chuir so ’na ainm fe´in go heading ‘Nı´ me´ bhur n-aithne’: ‘Cu´ Chonnacht O ´ g Ma´g Uidhir sent this in his own name to Brighid inghean Iarla Chille Dara’ (‘Cu´ Chonnacht O Brighid, daughter of the Earl of Kildare’). The other witness (dated 1694) erroneously attributes the ´ hEodhasa; see O ´ Ha´inle, ‘Flattery Rejected’, 6–7, 17; Field Day, iv. 384. answer to O 76 ´ O Ha´inle, ‘Flattery Rejected’, 18, ll. 11, 28. 77 ´ Ha´inle, ‘Flattery Rejected’, 8–9. SP 63/222/150 I; repr. in Field Day, iv. 388–9, O 78 SP 63/223/24. Loach was something of a double agent; he informed the crown as to Tyrone’s activities in Rome in December 1607; CSPI, 1608–1609, 359. I am grateful to Mı´chea´l Mac Craith for this reference.
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Upon his return with arrangements made, she had changed her mind, ‘resolued to goe first into Englande’.79 Rudhraighe made at least two further attempts to have her conveyed to Flanders.80 Brighid’s circumstances certainly encourage us to read her letter with tongue in cheek. The familiarity with Gaelic culture presented in the poem sits uneasily with her claim to rudimentary Irish. The strategy of the poem, so centred on the question of the inauthenticity of Cu´ Chonnacht’s authorship, would be somewhat compromised were it, too, to be ghost-written. On the evidence of both texts, Brighid sought to have her cake and eat it. She is represented in the poem as a noblewoman au fait with elite poetry, confidently participating in the literature of the Gaelic court; and in the letter as an innocent abroad, a Paleswoman at odds with the language of her husband. Taking his cue from the scribe’s vacillation, ´ Ha´inle—admitting the cleverness of the letter’s self-positioning and the domiO nance of the Irish language even in Old English households of the period—argues that her English descent through the maternal line may have made her an exception, and that Chichester’s reportage of news from the Kildare household suggests that he would not have been fooled. However, as we have seen, Chichester was caught unawares by Loach’s information. Martha Strafford (d. 1678), a ´ Ne´ill, d. protestant English aristocrat who married Sir Henry O’Neill (E´nrı´ O 1638) of Clandeboye, provides a salutary picture of cultural assimilation. Duanaire Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (the Poem-Book of Clandeboye) preserves bardic epithlamia celebrating the marriage and particularly her English nobility. Significantly, she is also the addressee of professional syllabic poems in her own right and courted as an appreciative patron of the fileadha.81 ´ Ha´inle posits a scenario whereby the initiator poem was performed for Brighid, O she had it translated, and commissioned a reply. Despite this line of argument, 79 SP 63/122/150 I, 150 A. She was granted a yearly state pension (in exchange for her claims on Tyrconnell land) of £200 on 22 December 1608; CSPI, 1608–1610, 117. On her remarriage, to the Old English Nicholas Barnewall, this was raised to £300, with a deduction of £50 for her daughter; CSPI, 1625–32, 55–6. The latter was a colourful figure; taken under the king’s protection following her father’s emigration, this daughter was subsequently known as Mary Stuart O’Donnell. Her escapades caught the imagination of catholic Europe. Her life-story was written in Spanish by Alberto Enriquez: Resolucion Varonil o Viage que hic¸o en trage de Varon la Contesa de Tirconel (Brussels, 1627), and translated into French by Pierre de Cadenet as Re´solution courageuse et louable de la Comtesse de Tirconnel (Paris, 1628). See also Jerrold Casway, ‘Mary Stuart O’Donnell’, Donegal Annual, 39 (1987), 28–38. 80 In 1607 an imprisoned James Fitzgerald wrote to Salisbury admitting that he had received £7 from Tyrconnell ‘to endeavour to convey his lady (Lady Bridget) to France or Flanders’, excusing his action in approaching her in terms of saving the king her yearly pension of £200 and rescuing her honour as an abandoned wife (Calendar of Salisbury MSS, xix [1607], p. 429). On 18 February 1608 Sir Thomas Edwards wrote to Salisbury: ‘It is said that one Garrett was awhile since dispatched into England by the Earl of Tyrconnell, to seek to bring away the said Earl’s wife’; CSPI, 1606–1608, 649. 81 ´ Donnchadha (ed.), Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Tadhg O Commission, 1931), 171, 179, 203–17. See also Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond ´ Gnı´mh’, E´igse, 20 (1984), 106–14. Gillespie, ‘The East Ulster Bardic Family of O
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however, he concludes that the poem ‘could have been composed by Brighid, if she had sufficient command of Irish’, and later commentators have followed his sceptical lead.82 Mac Craith remarks that the question ‘can be argued both ways, [but] the fact remains that she was the central character of this poetic debate and no doubt enjoyed both the linguistic witticisms and personal attention’.83 Nı´ Dhonnchadha notes that: ‘While the words “ma´s fı´or” introduce a suggestion of doubt, they also imply the attribution’s plausibility.’ Citing Thomas Fitzgerald’s evidence, she argues that it is ‘extremely difficult to believe that Brighid was not completely fluent in Irish by 1607’.84 At the very least, the attribution points to a common acceptance that an Irish noblewoman was both capable of composing amateur syllabic verse and well enough versed in professional practice to engage authoritatively with its merit. Our difficulty mirrors that of Chichester: the very reason that she got away with asserting both mutually exclusive positions is due to the historical moment, in which misunderstanding of one culture by the other (as exemplified by Fanshawe’s account of the banshee) was accepted, even assumed. Unlike Fanshawe, Brighid Fitzgerald/ Nic Gearailt occupied both traditions. These texts show her exploiting assumptions of cultural self-containment to suit her own purposes. Scholarly uncertainty over the attribution opens up some key questions about women’s participation in Gaelic literary culture. Doubt rests on two grounds: the poem’s apparent uniqueness as an example of an Irish woman’s amateur syllabic verse, and the sophistication of its literary critique. On the first count, the evidence of Gaelic Scotland is enlightening. A number of amateur syllabic poems in the Scottish manuscript known as The Book of the Dean of Lismore, compiled c.1512– 42, are attributed to women. One of these is the sole surviving poem authored by Aithbhreac inghean Coirceadail. Little is known of this fifteenth-century aristocratic poet; internal evidence suggests that she was the wife of the subject of the ´ g ( fl. 1455–72), chief of Clann Ne´ill, and constable of Castle poem, Niall O Sween, Knapdale. ‘A phaidrı´n do dhu´isg mo dhe´ar’ is a lament for the author’s husband composed in o´glachas—like Fitzgerald’s, an imitation of rannaigheacht mho´r. This elegy is framed by religious consolation; here, through the symbol of her dead husband’s rosary. Hence, it recalls Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain’s lament on ´ g Mac Ne´ill is praised as an her husband. Echoing bardic convention, Niall O accomplished reciter and memorizer of song himself, and for his economic support of professional poets from as far afield as Kerry and the Boyne in Ireland.85 82 ´ O Ha´inle, ‘Flattery Rejected’, 10; Nic Eoin, B’ait leo bean, 236; Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 164–5. 83 Mac Craith, ‘Fun and Games’, 26, n. 24. Mac Craith proposes Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird as a candidate for Brighid’s ghost-writer, although on the basis of circumstantial evidence (ibid. 27). See also Katharine Simms, ‘Women in Gaelic Society During the Age of Transition’, in MacCurtain and O’Dowd, Women in Early Modern Ireland, 36. 84 Field Day, iv. 384, 388. 85 Watson, Dean of Lismore, 60/61. See also Catherine Kerrigan (ed.), An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), verse translation by Meg Bateman, 53.
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Two love poems (‘Ata´ fleasgach ar mo thı´’ and ‘Is mairg da´ ngalar an gra´dh’) are attributed to ‘Issbell ne vek Callein’ (Iseabail Nı´ Mheic Caile´in, i.e. Isobel, daughter of Mac Caile´in), while another satirical poem on her chaplain’s penis (‘E´istidh a lucht an tighe-se’) is attributed to ‘Contissa Ergadien Issobell’ (Isobel, countess of Argyll)—all, again, in o´glachas.86 These poems are closer to the spirit ´ hEodhasa literary exchange. Both poems attribof the Fitzgerald/Ma´g Uidhir/O uted to Iseabail Nı´ Mheic Caile´in complement the courtly love poetry practised by the professional syllabic poets, indicating (like Brighid) a familiarity with the fashionable genres of Gaelic courts.87 The Ma´g Uidhir/Fitzgerald exchange, of course, is also located in the terms of courtly love; the initiator poem is centred around the conceit that the male speaker has been rendered a ghost following a single sighting of his female beloved. Unlike these Scottish poems, however, Brighid’s poem marginalizes those premises, choosing to answer the stance of courtly love by poking fun at its conventions and displaying her appreciation of professional verse. No discussion of women’s verse in Irish can be conducted without reference to the more prolific Scottish context. Up until the late sixteenth century Ireland and Scotland shared the same literary culture. But women poets benefited far more from contemporary cultural shifts in early modern Scotland: approximately 200 songs by Scottish women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries survive, whereas there is no comparable flowering of
86 The former two poems are printed with prose translations in Watson, Dean of Lismore, 234–5, 307–8; and with verse translations by Meg Bateman in Kerrigan, Scottish Women Poets, 60–1. The latter poem is transcribed, without translation, in E. C. Quiggin, Poems from the Book of the Dean of Lismore with a Catalogue of the book, and indexes, ed. J. C. Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 78. Watson, while noting that there are three possible identifications— Isobel (d. 1510, ne´e Stewart), wife of Colin, first earl of Argyll (d. 1493); their daughter, Isobel; or the daughter of Archibald, second earl (d. 1513), also named Isobel—concludes: ‘Probably, however, it is to the wife of the first earl that we should attribute all three poems’, and more recent commentators have tended to concur; Watson, Dean of Lismore, 307; Anne Frater, ‘The Gaelic Tradition up to 1750’, in Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (eds.), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 1; Clancy, ‘Women Poets’, 57; Wilson McLeod, Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland c.1200–c.1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 80. It is also possible that the poems were authored by two of these women (especially given the ribaldry of ‘E´istidh a lucht an tighe-se’, attributed to the ‘Contissa’, and its conformity with ae freislighe metre, rather than the rannaigheacht mho´r of the two love poems). As John Bannerman argues, ‘There seems to be no good reason to assume . . . that Isobel nı´ Mheic Caile´in and Isobel, Countess of Argyll, were one and the same person’; ‘Literacy in the Highlands’, in Ian Cowan and Duncan Shaw (eds.), The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland: Essays in Honour of Gordon Donaldson (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), 230, n. 98. 87 For the Gaelic courtly love poem, or da´n ghra´dha, see Thomas F. O’Rahilly (ed.), Da´nta Gra´dha: An Anthology of Irish Love Poetry (A.D. 1350–1750), 2nd edn. (Cork: Cork University ´ Tuama, An Gra´ i bhFilı´ocht na Press, 1926, 1968); O Riordan, Irish Bardic Poetry, 137–58; Sea´n O n-Uaisle (Dublin: An Clo´chomhar, 1988). For its European connections, see Michea´l Mac Craith, Lorg na hIasachta ar na Da´nta Gra´dha (Dublin: An Clo´chomhar, 1989).
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Irish women’s verse.88 The most recent anthology has estimated only twenty named women poets composing in Irish in the longer period between 1500 and 1800.89 There are a number of reasons for this divergence. First, the English crown’s policy of military conquest and plantation in Ireland was not ´ Baoill rightly reminds us, ‘it is often forgotten enacted in Scotland. As O (especially in Ireland), that Scotland had no Kinsale, and the old Gaelic way of life survived here for another century and a half ’.90 James IV (1488–1513) may have been the last Scottish ruler to speak Gaelic, and his great-grandson may have moved the Scots-speaking royal court to London on his accession to the English throne in 1603. But Gaelic culture continued in the north and west, as is illustrated by chiefs like Iain Breac MacLeod (d. 1693) of Harris and Dunvegan, who maintained a traditional Gaelic court at the end of the seventeenth century. The newly united Scottish–English crown pressurized the existing Gaelic system, most famously in the nine Statutes of Iona signed in 1609. The sixth statute ordered that the eldest son—or daughter, should the chief have no heirs male—be sent to the Lowlands for his/her education through English. The eighth statute expressly forbade the maintenance of ‘bairdis’.91 But despite this harsh signal of intent, the Statutes were mixed in ` g MacDonald (d. 1643) of their effect. The catholic Sir Domhnall Gorm O Sleat in Skye, for example, employed the professional poet Cathal MacMhuirich to tutor his family. It is as her former tutor that MacMhuirich mourns Catrı`ona, Domhnall’s daughter.92 Secondly, Scottish Gaelic responses to the protestant Reformation were more positive. Unlike the situation in Ireland, where protestantism was aligned with the New English and catholicism remained the religion of the native Irish majority and the Old English, a number of Scottish Gaelic chiefs and communities (such as the Campbells of Argyll) embraced the reformed religion. The first book ever printed in Gaelic (although in Roman rather than Gaelic type) was Carswell’s 1567 translation of the Book of Common Order (known as Knox’s
88 See Anne Frater, ‘Women of the Ga`idhealtachd and their Songs to 1750’, in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (eds.), Women in Scotland c.1100–c.1750 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 77; and her ‘The Gaelic Tradition’, 1. 89 Field Day, iv. 358. 90 ´ O Baoill, Ga`ir nan Cla`rsach, 7. 91 Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Historical Documents (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1970), 174–5. 92 ‘is mo´ide doimheama ar ar ndruim, | o´ige a h-oileamhna eadruinn . . . mairg file fuair a h-eo´lus; | bhudh raibhthe leoin a labhra | aithne a h-eoil no´ a h-ealadhna . . . mairg as oide ’na deoidh dhı´: | groide ’na dheoir do´ dlighfidh’ (‘The fact that she spent her formative years among us makes the grief on our shoulders all the greater. . . . Pity the poet who made her acquaintance; her eloquence, knowledge of her learning, or her gifts, were warnings of sorrow . . . Pity her tutor who survives her, for there will have to be swiftness in his tears’); William J. Watson, ‘Classic Gaelic Poetry of Panegyric in Scotland’, App. 1, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 29 (1914–19), 226–7, ll. 79–80, 82–4, 95–6; trans. Ronald Black, ‘The Genius of Cathal MacMhuirich’, ibid. 50 (1976–8), 334.
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liturgy), Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh.93 The adoption of the Reformation in 1560 in Scotland, the severance of ties resulting from the emigration of the northern earls from Ireland, and the subsequent Ulster plantation led to the breakdown of pan-Gaelicism. ‘By 1650’, Steven Ellis has argued, ‘a radically different definition of Irishness had emerged, based on faith and fatherland, comprehending the Old English, but excluding the Gaedhil of Scotland, on grounds of religion and geography.’94 The retention of the Gaelic lifestyle in Scotland well into the eighteenth century permitted the evolution of syllabic and accentual metres in verse, in tandem with a vibrant song tradition associated with women that ran parallel to the amateur syllabic women’s verse discussed above. The earliest vernacular song by a woman dates to the early sixteenth century.95 Anonymity was a frequent condition of such songs, preserved mainly by women through the oral tradition. Internal evidence is a key indicator of female composition, as in the anonymous ‘Cumha Ghriogair MhicGhriogair Ghlinn Sreith’—a lament by a woman of the Campbell family, who eloped with MacGregor of Glenstrae. The song is addressed to their son, and survives in two versions: as a lament in the style of the syllabic se´adna metre, and as a lullaby, better known as ‘Griogal Cridhe’. Like many composers of such songs, she is known via her relationships with men, as ‘nighean Dhonnchaidh’, daughter of Duncan Campbell, of Glenlyon.96 We must assume that the song was subject to revision, reworked again and again by those who performed and transmitted it. Work-songs were another prolific genre in which Scottish women composed, particularly the waulking-song (o`ran luaidh), which often adapted syllabic models to stressed metre. One of the defining features of this genre is that it is choral: the singer is joined by the group in singing the refrain (and insertion of refrains at any point after a line or half-line facilitates the lengthening of the song according to the activity). A well-known example is ‘Turas mo chreiche thug mi Cola’ (‘The journey of my undoing I made to Coll’), in which the refrain is structured around the line, ‘Hı` ri o ho, luidh leo iu` bho’, and sung after each line of the song
93
John Carswell, Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh (Edinburgh, 1567); ed. R. L. Thomson, Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh: John Carswell’s Gaelic Translation of the Book of Common Order (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1970). 94 Steven G. Ellis, ‘The Collapse of the Gaelic World, 1450–1650’, Irish Historical Studies, 31 (1999), 469. These events probably exacerbated a tendency argued by McLeod of the earlier period, that: ‘Relations with neighbouring non-Gaelic communities, especially the royal authorities of Scotland and England, were often more immediate and more important, especially in political terms, and dealing with these communities and authorities tended to bring about differences between the two Gaelic communities and to pull them apart from each other’: Divided Gaels, 221. 95 Frater, ‘The Gaelic Tradition’, 1–2. For text, see Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 93–4. 96 For text, see Watson, Ba`rdachd Gha`idhlig, 244–6; Kerrigan, Scottish Women Poets, 56–9; Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 72–5. For a second song attributed to ‘nighean Dhonnchaidh’, see Frater, ‘Women of the Ga`idhealtachd’, 74.
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proper.97 Tradition ascribes this song to a named Campbell woman, Fionnghal, whose torn loyalties with regard to the Covenanter wars of 1644–5 are expressed.98 In addition to addressing political events, waulking songs were often both light-hearted and sexually forthright as, for example, ‘He´ mandu’, attributed to Mo`r nighean Uisdein (c.1615). This song details a woman’s encounter with a poacher, and her regret at refusing his advances.99 Another innovation in Scottish Gaelic song of the seventeenth century was the development of strophic metre. Independent of syllabic influence, strophic verse is distinguished by its clear regular beat: a series of lines with the same number of stresses is concluded by a shorter line of a different number of stresses, thus forming a half-strophe, or half-phrase. This metre is particularly associated with Ma`iri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (Mary MacLeod, c.1615–c.1705), the bestknown Scottish woman poet of the seventeenth century. Ma`iri was a prolific poet attached to the MacLeods of Harris and Dunvegan. As with the verse of her near-contemporary, Caitilı´n Dubh, Ma`iri’s sixteen surviving songs incorporate bardic themes.100 The turn of the seventeenth century witnessed three further accomplished and prolific Gaelic poets: Catrı`ona Nic Gilleain, Mairearad nighean Lachlainn (c.1660–1751), and Sı`leas na Ceapaich (c.1660–c.1729), who wrote in both syllabic and stressed metres.101 The richness of the Scottish Gaelic tradition provides a suggestive and alternative picture of the possibilities for women’s composition of verse within Gaelic culture. The maintenance and preservation of the song tradition (continuity providing for the evolution rather than dissipation of syllabic metres), with the number of named women who produced substantial bodies of work, converge to present a different, but parallel path. In the oral song tradition the transmission ´ Baoill, Ga`ir nan Cla`rsach, 27–8, 112. O Fionnghal was married to Iain Garbh, eighth Maclean of Coll, and was therefore allied with the royalist, anti-Covenant forces of Montrose and Alasdair Mac Colla. However, she was also the sister of Sir Donnchadh Campbell of Auchinbreck, who led the Covenanting army at the Battle of Inverlochy in 1645, where he lost his life. The song dramatizes the conflicts within contemporary Scottish Gaeldom and the situation of the individual Gaelic woman, caught in the middle. For a waulking song expressing the opposite political perspective, see Diorbhail Nic a’ Bhriuthainn’s ‘Oran do dh’Alasdair mac Colla’; Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 272–6. 99 Ibid. 185–7. 100 J. Carmichael Watson, Orain agus Luinneagan Ga`idhlig le Ma`iri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh / Gaelic Songs of Mary MacLeod (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1965). 101 For verse by Catrı`ona Nic Gilleain, see Alexander Maclean Sinclair (ed.), The Gaelic Bards from 1411 to 1715 (Charlottetown: Haszard & Moore, 1890), 128–38, and his Cla`rsach na Coille: A Collection of Gaelic Poetry (Glasgow: Archibald Sinclair/R. McGregor, 1881), 217–19, 220–3. For verse by Mairearad nighean Lachlainn, see Alexander Maclean Sinclair (ed.), Comhchruinneachadh Ghlinn-a-Bhaird: The Glenbard Collection of Gaelic Poetry (Charlottetown: Haszard & Moore, 1890), 105–17, 278–82, and his Na Ba`ird Leathanach / The Maclean Bards, 2 vols. (Charlottetown: Haszard ´ Baoill (ed.), Ba`rdachd Shı`lis na Ceapaich & Moore, 1898). For Sı`leas na Ceapaich, see Colm O c.1660–c.1729/Poems and Songs by Sileas MacDonald (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, ´ Baoill, ‘“Neither Out nor In”: Scottish Gaelic Women Poets 1650–1750’, in 1972). See also O Sarah Dunnigan, C. Marie Harker, and Evelyn Newlyn (eds.), Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 136–52. 97 98
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of background stories means that anonymity is not a bar to the attribution of Gaelic verse to women. As Clancy has observed, ‘if one is approaching the subject of female authorship of poetry in a Gaelic context from the viewpoint of the Scottish Gaelic tradition, one is likely to be more favourably disposed to accept women as authors even in tenuous cases, and more open-minded about what the content of poetry by women might be.’102 The Scottish context is important— for all the distinctiveness of its historical situation—precisely because it problematizes the assumed prison of singularity in Ireland. Receptivity to the internal evidence of anonymous verse suggests a further Irish analogue to Brighid Fitzgerald’s playful poem. ‘Nı´ binn do thorann lem thaoibh’ (‘Ugly your uproar at my side’) is an anonymous seventeenth-century poem on a young man’s snoring, voiced by his close companion. The gender of the speaker is not declared, and Stevenson and Davidson have suggested that it is composed by a woman. There are certainly no expressions of love in this reluctant insomniac’s complaint. The terms of reference to the offender are neutral (a mhacaoimh, ‘young man’; a chaomhthaigh, ‘partner’ or ‘friend’) and the two share the same pillow. This poem—like Fitzgerald’s and the fifteenthcentury Scottish examples discussed above—is in amateur syllabic rannaigheacht mho´r metre. Linked at beginning and end by the ceangal (binding) words, ‘nı´ binn’ (literally, ‘not sweet/melodious’), the intervening stanzas develop the theme humorously by detailing an extensive list of sounds preferable to the androgynous speaker. Most of these images are introduced by the word binne (‘more melodious’), thus providing a structural tension hinging on the same root, binn. A simple list of these images will give some sense of the many aural and alliterative possibilities exploited by the poem: a woodpecker, grunting pigs, crunching sand, a moaning calf, a creaking windmill, a waterfall’s roar, wind on a cliff, howling wolves, cackling ducks, rough waves, bellowing bulls, a clanging bell, a crying child, screaming women in labour, geese, a screeching knife, a grinding cart, pounding waves, howling wild dogs—all these are more melodious than the companion’s snoring.103 If we were to accept that this poem was authored by a woman—and the Scottish evidence, with its models of anonymous and named individual women, its range of metres and subjectmatter, should make us less sceptical about the literary achievements of Irish women—then it would revise the debate as to Brighid Fitzgerald’s authorship. She would no longer be a unique Irish female author of o´glachas. At the very least, the poem offers a satirical critique of courtly love poetry that resonates with Brighid’s verse. By contrast, the anonymous ‘Fe´uch fe´in an obair-si, a A´odh’ (‘O son of Brian, ´ Ruairc noble Hugh’) is voiced by a female speaker, the wife of one Aodh O 102
Clancy, ‘Women Poets’, 58. ´ Tuama and Kinsella, An Duanaire, 34–7; Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women O Poets, 436–9. 103
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(Hugh O’Rourke, d. 1684), a landowner and soldier in the confederate wars of ´ Coisdealbha. The the 1640s. His wife has been seduced by a poet, Toma´s O poem dramatizes her dilemma: torn between the two men, she ultimately decides to stay with her husband. Again, authorship is contested. The poem is written in professional deibhidhe metre, leading commentators to conclude that it was composed by a male fileadh. Carney rejects the transparent reading of the poem on the basis that no professional would rehearse publicly such a dilemma ´ Ruairc. He proposes instead that the poem should on behalf of the real wife of O ´ be read metaphorically: that the author adopts the speaking-position of O ´ Ruairc’s wife in order to represent his ties to his patron (O Ruairc) and his ´ Coisdealbha. The conceit allows the poet to eulogize both affection for O without offending either.104 If this reading is persuasive (and it is compatible with the convention of the fileadh speaking as his chief’s lover), then the male poet’s expression of his position would fit with Nı´ Dhonnchadha’s argument that, from the sixteenth century, ‘there is evidence of an explicit assimilation of love between men to that between men and woman’.105 The Irish bardic evidence, so dismissive of female-authored verse, is welcoming of female patronage. Praise of the chief and his wife for their hospitality and rewarding of poetry (as already seen in Caitilı´n Dubh’s poems) was commonplace and informed by self-interest; few fileadha were inclined to bite the hands that feed. Thus, in the earliest surviving family duanaire, the fourteenth-century Leabhar Mhe´ig Shamhradha´in, of thirteen poems concerning Toma´s Ma´g Shamhradha´in (1303–43), ten include praise of his wife, Nualaidh.106 It has been suggested that such praise poetry is gendered: that women were represented as undiscerning, unsophisticated patrons.107 But this manuscript suggests otherwise. Seven of these poems elaborate on Nualaidh’s generosity as a patron; while two praise her as an indulgent, even indiscriminate judge of poetry, five do not, and her husband, Toma´s, is also identified as uncritical.108 As the example of Martha Strafford shows, even non-native noblewomen could be extolled as patrons on equal terms with men. The late sixteenth-century Duanaire Mhe´ig Uidhir, comprising twenty-four bardic poems addressed to Cu´ Chonnacht Ma´g ´ g, Brighid Fitzgerald’s interlocutor), Uidhir (d. 1589, father to Cu´ Chonnacht O includes verses in praise of the patronage of his second and third wives, Be´ 104 BL Add. MS 40,766, fols. 52r–55r. For the text, see Field Day, iv. 419–22. James Carney, Studies in Irish Literature and History (Dublin: DIAS, 1955), 257–60. 105 Field Day, iv. 363; see also pp. 296–8. 106 Of the three poems which do not praise his wife, two are elegies following his death and one is unfinished. 107 Simms, ‘Women in Gaelic Society’, 36; Nic Eoin, B’ait leo bean, 157. 108 For Nualaidh as patron, see McKenna, The Book of Magauran, 151/347, 167/353, 215/371, 227/375, 235/379, 247/383, 257/387. See pp. 235/379, 257/387 for Nualaidh as an indiscriminate patron; pp. 149/346 for Toma´s. See also the description of Niall, son and heir of Toma´s: ‘cia nach fuighe nı´ o´ Niall? | do-nı´ riar duine gan da´n’ (‘Who leaves Niall without being richer? He cares even for those who have no poetic power!’), pp. 133/340.
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´ hEadBhionn and Mairghre´ag.109 In the family duanaire written for Cormac O hra (O’Hara, d. 1612) of Sligo at the turn of the sixteenth century, two poems praise his first wife, Ma´ire, for her favour toward poets. His second wife, Caitilı´n (ne´e Nı´ Raghallaigh), appears to have experienced a more testy relationship with her husband’s clients. One poem refers to her jealousy of the poets while another defends her against poets’ anger; a further two poems praise her bestowal of gifts for poetry.110 Such varying responses suggest that she was anything but a passive audience. The chief’s wife was an influential figure, as is evident in another poem to Caitilı´n, asking her to intercede on behalf of the poet, who offers a poem in ´ hUiginn’s poem addressed specifically exchange for a horse; or in Tadhg Dall O to Mo´r inghean Bhriain Bhallaigh (Mo´r daughter of Brian Ballach) in which he ´ pleads with her to intercede as his patron with her husband, Domhnaill O Conchubhar Sligigh (Sir Donald O’Connor Sligo, d. 1588), whose displeasure ´ Domhnaill.111 he had incurred by addressing a poem to O Annals of the period often corroborate this bardic evidence. Regularly recording the deaths of individual women, a number of more expansive obituaries (many of which are usefully collected in the Field Day Anthology) highlight the cultural contributions made.112 Almost inevitably identified as daughters prior to their affiliations as wives, these women are praised specifically for their hospitality and piety, their support of the men of learning, and their rewarding of poets. Sadhbh (d. 1542), daughter of Mac Uilliam Bu´rc (MacWilliam Burke) and married to Ruaidhrı´ Mac Diarmada (Rury MacDermott), was noticed as ‘ben dob ferr da cinedh fe´in na do cinnedh eile na coimaimsir . . . ar da´il iolmaeinedh imdha de´igsib ocus dollamnaib, ocus daoss caca eladna archena’ (‘the best woman of her own kindred, or of any other family of her time . . . for distributing various gifts to poets and ollamhs, and men of all other arts’). She issued an invitation to the learned schools to gather for a great feast at her husband’s lands near Boyle, county Roscommon, during Christmas 1540; twenty-four attendees are named, others indicated.113 That women might also threaten the status of professional poets by critiquing them is evident in a barbed late-sixteenth-century poem written by Tadhg Mac Bruaideadha, to a woman named Sı´le who had challenged him on his genealogy 109 David Greene (ed.), Duanaire Mhe´ig Uidhir: The Poembook of Cu´ Chonacht Ma´g Uidhir, Lord of Fermanagh 1566–1589 (Dublin: DIAS, 1972), 86–9, 14–15, 28–31, respectively; also p. xiv. 110 Lambert McKenna (ed.), The Book of O’Hara: Leabhar ´I Eadhra (Dublin: DIAS, 1951), 100–3, 128–9, 142–3, 152–3, 194–7, 216–17. 111 McKenna, Book of O’Hara, 182–3; Eleanor Knott (ed.), The Bardic Poems of Tadhg Dall ´ hUiginn (1550–1591), 2 vols. (London: Irish Texts Society, 1922), i. 98–107; ii. 66–71. O 112 Field Day, iv. 332–40. On women’s patronage, see also Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Women and Gaelic Literature, 1500–1800’, in MacCurtain and O’Dowd, Women in Early Modern Ireland, 148–52. 113 William Hennessy (ed.), The Annals of Loch Ce´: A Chronicle of Irish Affairs from A.D. 1014 to A.D. 1590, 2 vols. (Dublin, Longman, 1871), ii. 326–9.
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of the Burkes.114 This is the same Mac Bruaideadha who served as ollamh to the fourth earl of Thomond. Clearly, his sense of superiority with regard to learning did not adversely affect Caitilı´n Dubh as an author. As Bannerman argues of bardic verse: ‘There had to be an audience for this poetry and it is inconceivable that it was not intended to be fully intelligible. If the poet required training to become proficient in his art, so did his audience to fully appreciate the results thereof.’115 Why address classical poems in such numbers to female patrons if the effort was not appreciated? ´ Women’s active participation in court life is documented in Cearbhall O Da´laigh’s (Carroll O’Daly) poem to Eileano´r Caomha´nach (Eleanor Kavanagh), composed about 1630. She is praised as musician, performer, and scribe: Is lu´far le´ir caolchrobh an rı´bheanga´in Ar liu´t, ar ghle´as shaor-chruite, ’s ar vı´rgina´l, Is cumhra se´is chaomhghutha a caoin-ghoib cha´idh re mu´isic she´imh she´aghanta chaoin-orga´in. I gcu´irt nı´l te´xa Be´arla nach bı´ aici a sha´ith Is dar liu´msa le´ighidh Gaedhalg mar shaoithibh Fa´il. Is dlu´th tiubh ge´ar gle´ a scrı´bhinn bhla´ith . . . (This regal woman’s little hand is nimble-sharp On the lute, the soft harpstring, the virginal, Her voice in her soft mouth is like music of the harp. At court she can master any English text with wit. She reads Irish like the sages of Inis Fa´il. Her script is lovely and clear, thick and close-knit . . . )116
The English influence—most apparent in the poem’s adoption of loan-words— is not a source of anxiety here, but a topic of praise. Eileano´r’s facility with both languages is a model of the kinds of court entertainments in which women like Brighid likely engaged. Women’s active participation in bardic culture is most plainly evident in their retaining of fileadha and commissioning of duanairı´ in their own right. In a poem consoling Gra´inne Nı´ Cheallaigh (d. 1440) on the death of her son, Tadhg ´gO ´ hUiginn describes himself as ‘t’ ollamh’, ‘your ollamh’. In the late sixteenth O ´gO ´ hUiginn addressed Caitilı´n Nı´ hEadhra likewise: ‘Bean century Domhnall O don fhre´imh Raghollaigh riamh | um re´ir daghollaimh gan dı´on’ (‘A lady of Raghallach’s stock can not resist the will of her good ollamh’).117 At least one
114
Field Day, iv. 406–8. Bannerman, ‘Literacy in the Highlands’, 229. 116 Field Day, iv. 415, ll. 25–31. 117 ´ g was attached to the chief of the Uı´ Cheallaigh, Gra´inne’s brother Ibid. 328, l. 95 (Tadhg O Tadhg); McKenna, Book of O’Hara, 194/195, ll. 2439–40. 115
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manuscript containing a prose tale about the mythical Fianna, and three devotional manuscripts, were commissioned by women.118 Two seventeenth-century poetic duanairı´ consolidate the picture of women’s patronage. A poem-book associated with the Ma´g Uidhir (Maguires) of Fermanagh and the Uı´ Raghallaigh (O’Reillys) of Enniskillen contains over forty poems, the majority of them love poems, including ‘Fe´uch fe´in an obair-si, a A´odh’, discussed above.119 What is particularly striking—and has led commentators to a specific female patron uniting these Ulster families—is the genealogy provided towards the end of the poem-book, which is written for Ma´ire Nı´ Raghallaigh. Titled ‘Seanchas bhantigherna innsi ceithlionn’ (‘The Genealogy of the Lady of Enniskillen’), its point of departure is ‘Ma´ire inghen ´ı Raghallaigh .i. Philip’ (‘Mary daughter of O’Reilly, that is Philip’). Her descent is traced, via her paternal grandfather Aodh, for 124 generations, down through the progenitor of the Gaelic Irish, Mı´le Easpa´inne, to the biblical Japheth and finally Adam.120 Highly unusual in its female point of origin (as is underscored by its route through the male line), the pedigree otherwise accords faithfully with traditional
118 The first section of a late fifteenth-century manuscript, Bodleian MS Rawlinson B 487, containing a version of the prose tale known as Cath Finntra´gha, was copied for Sadhbh, daughter of ´ Ma´ille, described as ‘saı´ mhna´ ar ghaı´s 7 ar eineach 7 gheanmhaigh[e]acht et reliqua’ (‘a Tadhg O woman-sage as regards wisdom, honour, and chastity’); Cecile O’Rahilly (ed.), Cath Finntra´gha: Edited from MS. Rawlinson B 487 (Dublin: DIAS, 1962), 47; translation Field Day, iv. 364. The first section of Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne (RIA MS 24 P 25) was compiled in 1513 and 1514 for Ma´ire Nı´ Mha´ille (d. 1522), wife of Ruaidhrı´ Mac Suibhne (d. 1518) of Fanad, co. ´ Ma´ille (d. 1513). Ma´ire’s is a collection of devotional Donegal, and daughter of Eoghan O material, mainly in prose, including saints’ lives, passages on theological doctrine, Christian and moral stories, with some devotional verse. Her obituary described her as ‘Ma´ire do nn-ar cansat udair 7 ollamuin’ (‘Ma´ire, for whom poets and ollavs sang’); Paul Walsh (ed.), Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne: An Account of the Mac Sweeney Families in Ireland, with Pedigrees (Dublin: Dollard, 1920), p. lii. See also Salvador Ryan, ‘Windows on Late Medieval Devotional Practice: Ma´ire Nı´ ´ Mha´ille’s “Book of Piety” (1513) and the World Behind the Texts’, in Rachel Moss, Colman O Clabaigh, and Salvador Ryan (eds.), Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006), 1–15. ´ Domhnaill A manuscript of saints’ lives in Irish was compiled in 1536 for a woman of the O family; unfortunately this manuscript appears not to have survived. Its only trace is a colophon by ´ Cle´irigh (discussed in Ch. 2) dated 27 March 1629, in which he states that the scholar Michea´l O ´ Domhnaill he has copied the manuscript from a book written for Ro´is, daughter of Aodh Dubh O ´g O ´ Neill; Charles Plummer, On the Colophons and Marginalia of Irish Scribes and wife of Niall O (London: British Academy, 1926), 8, n. 8. A copy of the life of St Colum Cille was transcribed in 1608 under the patronage of another ´ g Nı´ Dhomhnaill; see Paul Walsh, Irish Men of Learning Ulster woman of the same family, Ro´is O ´ Gallcho´ir, (Dublin: At the Sign of the Three Candles, 1947), 172–4. Ro´is, married to Tuathal O ´ Domhnaill (d. 1625), for whom she acted as spy and go-between was sister to Niall Garbh O ´ Ne´ill of Tyrone; CSPI, 1601–1603, 374, 376, during negotiations between Niall Garbh and O ´ Domhnaill, husband of Brighid Fitzgerald. 538. She was cousin to Rudhraighe O 119 BL Add. MS 40,766. For a description of the manuscript and its contents, see Robin Flower (ed.), Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London: British Museum, 1926– 53), ii. 161–73. 120 BL Add. MS 40,766, fols. 83v–84v.
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genealogy. Ma´ire was the daughter of Philip O’Reilly, MP for Cavan in the Irish parliament from 1639 to 1641, and leader of the Cavan rising in 1641, and Ro´is ´ Ne´ill (Owen Roe O’Neill), the Nı´ Ne´ill, whose brother was Eoghan Ruadh O confederate leader. She was married twice: first to Aodh Ma´g Uidhir (Hugh ´ g Ma´g, Brighid Fitzgerald’s interlocutor Maguire, grandson of Cu´ Chonnacht O ´ g Ma´g Uidhir (Rury Maguire, in verse) and secondly to his cousin, Rudhraighe O d. 1708), fifth Lord Enniskillen. Her patronage would explain the inclusion of five Maguire and five O’Reilly poems in the miscellany.121 Had Brighid Fitzgerald followed her husband into continental exile, a parallel literary life is suggested by her sister-in-law, Nualaidh Nı´ Dhomhnaill (Nuala ´ Domhnaill, had O’Donnell). Nualaidh, sister (or half-sister) of Rudhraighe O ´ married her cousin, Niall Garbh O Domhnaill, who fought for the English from October 1600—a course of action for which Nualaidh deserted him. She accompanied her brother and his 1-year-old son, Aodh (Hugh, 1606–42) when they left Ulster in September 1607. She travelled with them to Rome, where Rudhraighe died on 28 July 1608, followed by his brother Cathbharr ´ Ne´ill (Hugh O’Neill) on 23 (Cahir) on 15 September, and their nephew Aodh O September 1609. Following these deaths, Nualaidh took charge of the young O’Donnell heir and moved to Louvain, where she had him educated at the Franciscan Irish college.122 Living in exile in the town that served as a military base for emigrant soldiers, Nualaidh was at the heart of exiled Gaelic life. Her duanaire, compiled in Flanders between 1622 and 1650 by a number of different scribes, is an interesting example of politically engaged female patronage and a key document of cultural activities in exile. Its female ownership is determinedly declared. It is subscribed Leabhar Inghine ´I Dhomhnaill (the Book of O’Donnell’s Daughter) three times in Irish and three times in Latin on the front cover, and once again in Irish on the back cover paste-down in a contemporary hand. Half of the 154 folios are blank; this, with the number of scribal hands, suggest that the manuscript was a repository for topical bardic verse gathered over time rather than compiled as a specific commission. It contains thirty-seven poems, two-thirds of which are related to the contemporary Uı´ Domhnaill or their ancestors, and a prose tale. Its close relationship to another 121 BL Add. MS 40, 766, fols. 12v–13v, 20r–22r, 41r–44v, 44r–46r, 67r–71v (Ma´g Uidhir); ´ Raghallaigh). For a poem addressed to Ma´ire in 15r–18v, 32v–36r, 36v–40v, 60v–63r, 67r–71v (O another manuscript (TCD MS H. 5. 9), see James Carney (ed.), Poems on the O’Reillys (Dublin: ´ g Ma´g DIAS, 1950), 146. BL Add. MS 40,766 contains another genealogy beginning with Toma´s O ´ g. This genealogy was a Uidhir (d. 1480), and descending down to Ma´ire’s husband, Rudhraighe O later addition (occurring outside the paginated duanaire), the methodology of which is entirely different; see fols. 88r–89v. 122 Brighid and Rudhraighe’s son grew up as the second earl of Tyrconnell. He was knighted in Spain and commanded his own regiment from 1632; he died in military service in Spain in August 1642. Nualaidh was buried in the Irish College at Louvain; her date of death is unknown. For her exile, see Jerrold Casway, ‘Heroines or Victims? The Women of the Flight of the Earls’, New Hibernia Review: Iris E´ireannach Nua, 7 (2003), 64–7.
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manuscript of bardic verse compiled on the continent, the Book of the O’Conor Don, is suggestive of an intimate literary network. Leabhar Inghine ´I Dhomhnaill shares thirty-two of its poems with this vast anthology (originally containing 370 poems), which was commissioned in 1631 by Somhairle Mac Domhnaill (Sorley MacDonnell, captain in the Irish regiment of Flanders, and epicentre of exiled ´ Dochartaigh (Hugh O’Doherty) in literary activity) and copied by Aodh O Ostend. An undated note at the end of Leabhar Inghine ´I Dhomhnaill shows its close proximity to this military community and its literary archivist: ‘Sorle mc donnell Captin of Musskedtre The best of the Irish wither the[y] will or nott’, signed by both John O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, and one John McDonnell.123 The transcription of many contemporaneous bardic poems directs us beyond simply the preservation of a literary culture that was by now clearly and seriously jeopardized by the political convulsions necessitating emigration. Echoing the adaptability and continuity displayed in Caitilı´n Dubh’s poems, the fileadha persisted in composing verse that addressed their situation. Nualaidh was more than a revered noble patron whose male kin are celebrated and lamented. She emerges as a potent figurehead who is pivotal in five of these poems. The earliest of these, ‘Da´na an turas ´ trı´alltar sonn’ (‘Bold is the journey attempted here’), is addressed to Rudhraighe O Domhnaill by the fileadh, Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird. It responds to the 1603 negotiations to conclude the nine years war. The poem expresses deep misgivings ´ Domhnaill’s former enemies alongside about the peace, detailing the emotions of O those of the Gaelic Irish. Two supplementary quatrains, included in both the Book of O’Conor Don and Leabhar Inghine ´I Dhomhnaill, are concerned with Nualaidh’s reaction to events. Their effect is to focus the poem’s uncertainty—hitherto attached to unnamed, generalized persons—onto a specific figure. Consumed by events, Nualaidh encapsulates a much wider trepidation: Mo´r rı´oghan um Ra´ith Logha tarla do no´s Nu´aladha fan cce´im do-chluinsi ’na ceann a bpe´in tuirsi ’na timcheall. Fu´aras le´ a los a shiobhail, o´’s doilghe na de´idhionaigh, nach smu´ain an t-imneadh oile fu´air inghean ar nAodhaine. 123
Bibliothe`que Royale, Brussels, MS 6131–3, fol. 152r. For detailed discussion of contents, see Walsh, Irish Men of Learning, 179–205; Kuno Meyer, ‘A Collection of Poems on the O’Donnells’, E´riu, 4 (1910), 183–90; Nic Eoin, B’ait leo bean, 162–5. Mac Domhnaill (c.1586–1632) was another cousin of the O’Donnell family; he served as a captain in the Irish regiment in Flanders commanded by John O’Neill, earl of Tyrone. As well as his involvement with Leabhar Inghine ´I Dhomhnaill and the Book of the O’Conor Don, he commissioned in 1626–7 the compilation of Ossianic ballads known as Duanaire Finn, and a copy (incomplete) of the twelfth-century prose tale, Agallamh na Seno´rach. See Eoin MacNeill and Gerard Murphy (eds.), Duanaire Finn: The Book of the Lays of Fionn 3 vols. (London: Irish Texts Society, 1908–53); Douglas Hyde, ‘The Book of the O’Conor Don’, E´riu, 8 (1916), 78–99; Mac Craith, ‘Literature in Irish, c.1550–1690’, 215–18.
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(There is many a princess throughout Lugh’s Fortress who, like Nualaidh, with reference to this step she hears approaching, are in pain and sorrow round about her. I have found when with her that because of his journey—since the latest things are hardest to bear—our Hugh’s daughter has no thought for any other care she has suffered.)124
The poem’s doubts are perpetuated through its image of Nualaidh: she serves as a human face for its anxieties. Eoghan Ruadh was a member of the party that left ´ Macha´in, citing a letter of 1612 that indicates his departure Ireland in 1607. O from Rome to join Nualaidh in Flanders and noting the ill-will expressed toward her brother in his verse, suggests that the fileadh may have been attached to this female patron.125 ‘Truagh do chor a chroidhe tim’ (‘Sad is thy plight, O feeble heart’) by the same author concerns the earl of Tyrconnell’s fatal illness in 1608. Addressed to Tyrconnell’s sister (likely Nualaidh), the poem includes a final quatrain to his wife, Brighid. Here, the speaker retains his antipathy towards Rudhraighe, but this is subsumed by the national implications of his impending death. It is the imagined response of Brighid, Rudhraighe’s wife in Ireland, that embodies grief. The subjunctive mode sets up an opposition between wife and poet: Da´ gcluineadh a gcuala me´ inghean iarla fho´id Mha´ighe truagh an bedhgadh do bhe´aradh, truagh an treaghdadh tairreaghadh. (If the daughter of the Earl of Ma´ighe land heard all I have heard she would give a sad start, sad the piercing.)126
Her symbolic value is to some degree gendered: the same poet, writing on the imprisonment of her husband (whom she had abandoned) in 1608, posits Nualaidh as his vehicle for grief.127 In this latter poem, Mac an Bhaird enacts a poetic licence that mirrors Caitilı´n Dubh’s strategy in elegizing the earl of Thomond. ‘Truagh liom Ma´ire agas Mairgre´g’ (‘I am sad for Mary and Margaret’), by ´ g Mac an Bhaird, is addressed to Tyrconnell’s sisters who remained in Fearghal O Ireland. The speaker makes common ground with them as the poem laments Rudhraighe and Cathbharr, and their brothers Maghnus (Manus, d. 1600) and Aodh Ruadh (Hugh Roe, d. 1602). But its middle stanzas are concerned with Nualaidh, the lone sibling in exile. Her central location in the poem contrasts 124
Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry, 30/222, ll. 85–92; BR MS 6131–3, fol. 28v. ´ Macha´in, ‘The Flight of the Poets: Eo´ghan Ruadh and Fearghal O ´ g Mac an Pa´draig O Bhaird in Exile’, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, 21–2 (2007–8), 43. 126 ´ Raghallaigh (ed.), Duanta Eoghain Ruaidh Mhic an Bhaird (Galway: O Gormain, Toma´s O 1930), 74/320, ll. 65–8; BR MS 6131–3, fol. 22v. Bergin prints this poem using the Brussels manuscript as copy-text, but omits the final quatrain; Irish Bardic Poetry, 35–7/224–5. 127 ´ Raghallaigh, Duanta Eoghain Ruaidh, 128/337, ‘A bhraighe ata´ i dtor Lonndan’, O ll. 101–16. 125
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with her peripheral location from an Irish perspective. This gulf is mined by the poet as he switches from despair to hope: San Eada´ill na n-eas dtana, ionand is e´g Nualadha, ata´ ge´is chno´mhoighe Chuinn, cro´luighe dha´ he´is oruinn (In Italy of shallow waterfalls—it is as though she were dead—is Nuala, the swan of the nut-grown plain of Conn; her loss to us is agony.)
Unlike her brothers, Nualaidh endures. She is the speaker’s singular, and fleeting, cause for optimism, the positive figurehead at the poem’s centre whose generosity invokes the literary patron’s responsibilities: Nualaidh dhuaislı´onmhar, do´igh cha´igh, mairfidh go laithe an luanbhra´ith, tosach garma chru´ gCriomhthain, clu´ a hanma idir Eiriondchaibh. (Nuala the bounteous, the hope of all, first in renown of the blood of Criomhthan, to the day of doom shall live the fame of her name among the men of Ireland.)128
´ g was to leave Ireland for Louvain some years later; O ´ Macha´in Fearghal O suggests that this address to Nualaidh may have been a preparatory bid for her literary patronage.129 Nualaidh moves fully centre-stage as the solitary mourner of her brothers and nephew in Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird’s ‘A bhean fuair faill ar an bhfeart’ (‘O woman that has found the tomb unguarded’). Addressed solely to the grieving Nualaidh, the poem explores a specifically exiled experience of grief. The potency of the mna´ chaointe, the keening women, permeates the elegy as the touchstone for the poet’s study of the cultural consequence of expatriation. As Nı´ Dhonnchadha has observed, Mac an Bhaird reverses the conventional mise-en-sce`ne, whereby the ‘poets often commanded the keening women to move back from the graveside as they claimed the right to stand closest and to speak first’.130 Here, Nualaidh is alone at the graveside, unable to avail herself of the consolation of collective lamentation: A bhean fuair faill ar an bhfeart, truagh liom a bhfaghthaoi d’e´isdeacht; da´ mbeath fian Ghaoidheal ad ghar do bhiadh gud chaoineadh congnamh.
128 129 130
Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry, 47/230, ll. 17–24; BR MS 6131–3, fol. 9. ´ Macha´in, ‘The Flight of the Poets’, 49. O Field Day, iv. 389.
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(O woman that hast found the tomb unguarded, pitiful to me the number thou findest to listen; were the soldiery of the Gaels at thy side there would be help with thy keening.)
An echo of Mary Magdalen at Christ’s tomb hints at the possibility of the resurrection of political hopes. The ruling principle of the poem is the contrast between the solitariness of the e´migre´e and the traditional, communal mourning rituals that can only be envisaged in verse. The paramountcy of female lamentation is emphasized as the poet envisions a procession of empathic keening women from all corners of Ireland (reminiscent of Caitilı´n Dubh’s poems): Tiocfadh ad chomba´igh chaoinidh bean o´n E´irne iolmhaoinigh, bean o´ shlios bhinnshreabh Banna, inghean o´ Lios Liathdroma. Tiocfadh an bhean o´n Mha´igh mhoill, o´ Bhearbha, o´ Shiu´ir, o´ Shionainn; an bhean o´ Chruachuin na gcath, ’san bhean o´ Thuathaibh Theamhrach. (There would come in sympathy with thy wailing a woman from the many-treasured Erne, a woman from the shore of the sweetly flowing Bann, a maiden from Leitrim’s rampart. A woman would come from the sluggish Maigue, from the Barrow, the Suir, the Shannon; a woman from Croghan of the battalions, and a woman from the Tribes of Tara.)
Instead, Nualaidh is locked into an abundance of isolated grief, an excess in which the speaker encourages her: ‘nı´ guth dhuit gan che´ill ad chaoi’ (‘it is no blame to thee that thy grief passes reason’); ‘nı´ guth truime do thuirsi’ (‘no reproach is the weight of thy sadness’); ‘nı´ guth aidhbhle t’eo´lchuire’ (‘no reproach is the greatness of thy grieving’). This incitement to immoderate but proportionate grief forms a bridge into the poem’s second half, a caithre´im invoking battles of the ´ Domhnaill’s incurnine years war (including—by contrast to Caitilı´n Dubh—O sion into Thomond). But, while it performs the conventional function of extolling martial triumph, this battle roll is laced with lamentation. The recounting of each ´ battle is balanced with the commensurate grief its memory now inspires. As O Macha´in observes, it creates the ‘effect of crowding the poem with a tumult of placenames and activity, which contrasts with the loneliness and silence of the occasion being described’.131 There is no hopeful resolution to this poem. The speaker advises Nualaidh to place her faith in providence and turns, in the final stanzas, to prayer that divine wrath be no longer exerted against Nualaidh’s kin nor, by extension, to the Gaels themselves.132 This female patron, like those who preceded 131 132
´ Macha´in, ‘The Flight of the Poets’, 44. O Field Day, iv. 390–4, ll. 1–4, 17–24, 47, 51, 56, respectively; BR MS 6131–3, fols. 22v–24r.
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her, is apostrophized in bardic verse. But unlike the examples cited above, in which the female patron is praised for judging and rewarding poetry, historical events propel her representation as a focal point for grief. This chapter began with the O’Brien bean sı´, an incomprehensible, amorphous apparition who challenged Ann Fanshawe’s powers of explanation (although not her anecdotalist’s powers of description). For the keening persona of Caitilı´n Dubh’s poems, the same figure is enabling: a female model for bardic lamentation. The earthly bean chaointe invokes the mna´ sı´ to provide her with company, to inspire and stimulate her composition of verse. But the absence of such society is powerfully resonant. Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain’s self-construction as a lone keening widow needful of economic support is more forceful without the adulteration that might attend company. Mac an Bhaird’s tribute to the Ulster leaders builds its poignancy around the forlorn lamenting figure of Nualaidh Nı´ Dhomhnaill. But fundamental to that effect is the poet’s counterpoint of the assembly of mna´ chaointe imagined at home. The poem is equally an elegy on the Uı´ Domhnaill and a lament on the situation of the early seventeenth-century Gaelic exiles on the continent. Unlike Nı´ Bhriain, who abjures the consolations of Gaelic poetic culture, Nı´ Dhomhnaill remains in that frame—the figurehead for a poet who continues to compose verse according to inherited tradition. This chapter has sought to counter the lone image of the woman composing verse in Irish by reinstituting the more prolific contexts of women’s participation in bardic culture. The Scottish context shows, first, that Gaelic women did author verse in both professional and amateur metres in some numbers and, secondly, that the attribution to women of anonymous songs expressing female perspectives is widely accepted in that tradition. From a pan-Gaelic perspective, Caitilı´n Dubh, Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain, and Brighid Fitzgerald/Nic Gearailt are not so unusual in composing verse. Like the many women who embraced patronage of the fileadha, engaging critically with poetic merit and rewarding the composition of verse, their verse is steeped in bardic culture. Caitilı´n Dubh’s forging of a female speaking persona and manipulation of bardic tropes to accommodate oppositional English allegiances demonstrate a skilful devising of space for women’s composition. At the same time, these strategies embed her poems in elite male paradigms. Nı´ Bhriain is equally conscious of these norms. She invokes them to justify her own non-bardic model of authorship. Fitzgerald’s poem (like those of her Scottish counterparts) is entirely concentrated on the bardic world. Its composition at such a critical historical moment, immediately before her husband’s emigration, cautions against imposing an overly teleological interpretation on this verse. The culture of literary, courtly games persisted at the same time as convulsive political turmoil was brewing. Bardic continuities were asserted by Caitilı´n Dubh and her male contemporaries concurrently with the shifts that would gradually lead to their decline. This poetry emerges at the historical moment when the classical tradition is under threat. The increasing scribal attention to accentual verse provided a space for female authors, a category
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whose castigation in earlier sources is significant in that it attests to their existence and to the distaste for preserving their work. Nevertheless, faith in that culture’s resilience prevailed, as is evident by the continuing composition of poetry—a warning against replicating Ann Fanshawe’s isolationist assumptions about the individual bean sı´, bean chaointe, or amateur poet.
2 Irish Nuns’ Writing: The Poor Clares In 1563 the Council of Trent, seeking to counter the theological arguments of the protestant Reformation and staunch the flow of dissenters from the church, allowed for the use of vernacular languages for the first time. Session 24, on 11 November, decreed that sections of the liturgy pertaining to the sacraments should be translated into vernacular tongues, and that ‘during mass or the celebration of office on every feast or solemnity [priests] should explain the divine commandments and precepts of salvation in the vernacular’.1 This new space for vernacular instruction dovetailed with an emphasis on the promulgation of pious texts, particularly catechisms. It was of benefit to nuns across early modern Europe. While there is evidence that nuns in the period were expected to learn Latin, it is clear that this requirement was often aspirational, and that levels of proficiency were patchy at best. The Rule of St Clare, for example, provides for differing levels of ability, including those who could not understand Latin at all.2 Communities of women religious focused their attention on the production of texts in their vernacular languages. Foundational documents such as rules and lives of founders were translated; chronicles and hagiographical texts were composed. Thus, a female culture of writing, centred around communities of women religious, flourished. In literary terms, this writing culture is distinguished by a uniform group of devotional genres—rules, religious lives, annals, chronicles, obituaries. While varied in form, the genres produced by European nuns were homogenous, and the Irish community of Poor Clares was no exception, generating a translation of their order’s rule into Irish and a chronicle of the order. In this, their literary activity was entirely consonant with the forms of writing with which nuns engaged across the continent. Vernacular texts were of particular importance to nuns in exile from their homeland. Five Irish Poor Clares, who had professed at the English house at 1 Norman Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), ii. 764. 2 Eleanor Knott (ed.), ‘An Irish Seventeenth-Century Translation of the Rule of St. Clare’, E´riu, 15 (1948), 14–15, 32–3, 64–5, 72–3, 74–7. Charlotte Woodford finds that ‘By the CounterReformation, Latin was restricted to the liturgical texts. Private prayer books as well as religious meditations for nuns were predominantly in German’; Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 18.
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Gravelines in the Low Countries, left in 1625 with the patriotic intention of establishing a foundation in Ireland. Via Dunkirk and Nieuwpoort, they arrived in Dublin in 1629. Moved on by the authorities in October 1630, they founded a community named Bethlehem, near Athlone, and it was here in 1636 that they had their order’s rule translated into Irish. A further house was founded at Drogheda; this relocated to Waterford after October 1641. At the same time the dispersed Bethlehem community divided into three groups, starting new foundations in Galway, Wexford, and Athlone town. In 1647 a further community was founded in Loughrea, county Galway. However, as a result of the Cromwellian wars all these communities were dissolved and many of the nuns ultimately fled to Galway—the last town to surrender, after nine months’ siege, on 12 April 1652. The following year all religious were banished from the country; many Poor Clares followed their countryfolk into exile on the continent. Their experience was chronicled in a history of the community authored by their former abbess, Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne. This chapter examines both texts produced by this Irish community as being consistent with the specifically female culture of writing associated with communities of women religious across Europe in the period. The homogeneity of genres emergent from that writerly culture points simultaneously to the freedoms and limitations attendant upon nuns’ literary activities. The founding Irish nuns had witnessed the difficulties that arose for their English sisters on the continent. In need of a confessor who spoke their own language, preferably from their own country and the affiliated male Franciscan order, the English nuns at Gravelines actively encouraged a foundation of English Franciscans at Douai. They undertook themselves to translate both St Clare’s thirteenth-century Rule and St Colette’s fifteenth-century reform of the constitutions into their native English language in 1621 and 1622.3 The order’s Rule was their foundational document, a directory arranged in chapters prescribing the form of monastic and administrative life in the convent. St Clare (1193/4–1253) was the first female author of a religious rule; papal approbation for her form of life was obtained only two days prior to her death in 1253. This order, then, inaugurated the female culture of writing which blossomed in the early modern period. Clare’s prescriptive Rule was supplemented by the reformer, St Colette (1381–1447), in the fifteenth century. These texts were subsequently translated by the English Poor Clares at Gravelines, and later translated into Irish at the instigation of the Irish community. Pioneered by the foundress, revised and augmented by Colette, translated by English nuns, and
3 The Rule of our Holy Mother S. Clare translated into English (1621); The Declarations and Ordinances made upon the Rule of our holy mother, S. Clare (1622); place of publication unknown, probably Flanders. For a discussion of the writings of the English Poor Clares, see my ‘Identity Politics and Nuns’ Writing’, Women’s Writing, 14 (2007), 306–20.
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generated in Irish by that congregation, the layers of composition elucidate the needs-based principles of textual production among women religious. The textual history showcases continuities of authorship, each text founded on its previous, female-authored, incarnations. Their Irish sisters must have carried with them a copy of the Gravelines community’s texts, as these are the source-texts for two Irish translations undertaken at Bethlehem and Galway. The Bethlehem nuns arranged for the transla´ Siaghail and Aodh tion of the Rule into Irish by two Franciscans, Se´amus O ´ O Raghailligh. Little is known of these friars; the surviving copy is a transcription ´ Cle´irigh (Michael O’Clery), made by the famous Franciscan scholar Mı´chea´l O ´ Cle´irigh, which he signed and dated 19 and 21 October 1636 at Bethlehem.4 O whose family were hereditary Gaelic historians, had left the Irish college, St Anthony’s, Louvain, in 1626, under instructions to return to Ireland to gather, transcribe, and preserve materials relating to Gaelic history and saints’ lives. He had just accomplished the most important of these projects—the compilation of Anna´la Rı´oghachta E´ireann (‘The Annals of the Four Masters’)—at the time of his sojourn in Bethlehem. A monumental history of Ireland from pre-Christian times to 1616 which brought together early annals and independent accounts of the later period, this work remains of primary value to historians today. ´ Cle´irigh, as supervisor of the project, travelled Ireland seeking approbations O for the text. Arriving at Bethlehem, he was recruited by the nuns to transcribe a clear copy of their translated Rule. The literary exchange was likely reciprocal: ´ Cle´irigh must have allowed the nuns to access his manuscripts during his stay.5 O ´ Cle´irigh copied his transcription was clearly The manuscript in which O transported with the nuns to Galway in 1642, when they escaped protestant forces avenging the Ulster rising, because another translation follows the Rule: the Colettine Declarations and Ordinances. This translation was commissioned in Galway and undertaken by another eminent Gaelic scholar, Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, who completed it in December 1647.6 The antiquarian Mac ´ Cle´irigh, descended from a family of hereditary historFhirbhisigh was, like O ians. The work for which he is best known is Leabhar Mo´r na nGenealach (‘Great Book of Genealogies’), compiled in 1649 and 1650, also in Galway. Translated into Irish by commissioned male scholars, these texts were conceived and shaped within a specifically female culture of writing. The model of female authorship suggested here is one of informed collaboration. Participating in their order’s established culture of writing, revision, and translation, the Irish
4 ´ Siaghail was in Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 36; for translation, see supplement, p. 109. O Athlone when the town was taken by the confederate Preston in 1648; Brendan Jennings, Mı´chea´l ´ Cle´irigh and his Associates (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1936), 150–2. O 5 ´ Cle´irigh, 150. As Jennings has also argued; Mı´chea´l O 6 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 154.
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Poor Clares devised a vernacular version of their foundational documents. They recruited male scholars to their design, while contributing to their order’s textual tradition. That the nuns enlisted such culturally distinguished scholars to the task shows their familiarity with the contemporary scholarly network engaged in Gaelic cultural preservation, retrieving, synthesizing, and circulating valuable historical texts. Their access to the Franciscans was partly a measure of the closeness of the male and female orders of St Francis. St Clare was a follower of the latter in the thirteenth century and consciously based her female Rule on his constitutions for the male branch of the order. Consequently, there was a historical affinity between the Franciscan friars and the Poor Clare nuns and between their foundational texts. But there was a closer connection: two of Abbess Dillon’s brothers, Edward and George, had entered St Anthony’s, Louvain, in 1616 and 1620. George was host to ´ Cle´irigh while the latter completed Genealogiae Regum et Sanctorum Hiberniae at O Killinure Franciscan house, close to Bethlehem.7 Their commissioning of these translations demonstrates a profound political engagement on the part of the Irish Poor Clares. On the one hand engaging with the needs-based female culture of writing particular to their order, their provision of this translation was equally embedded in a wider cultural project. The translation of devotional texts into the Irish vernacular was more than educational at this time. Catholicism was becoming politicized, in that it was increasingly associated with resistance to the English crown, and this integration of religion with a new conceptualization of nation was driven by Irish Franciscan activity on the continent.8 The Irish Franciscans had enthusiastically embraced the Counter Reformation encouragement of vernacular instruction, adapting it as a political tool. They produced catechisms in Irish from the 1590s, printed their first catechism in Antwerp in 1611, and established their own printing-press at Louvain in 1614. A series of translations, catechisms, and doctrinal texts in Irish issued forth from this press, and the authors regularly digressed from their pious topics to lament the (to them) inextricably linked political and religious persecution of their countryfolk.9
7 Terence McCaughey, Dr. Bedell and Mr. King: The Making of the Irish Bible (Dublin: DIAS, 2001), 48. 8 For a succinct summary of the debate on the term ‘nation’ in Irish, see Mac Craith, ‘Literature in Irish’, 201–2, 207–9. 9 ´ Maolchonaire, Desiderius (Louvain, 1616), ed. Thomas O’Rahilly (Dublin: Flaithrı´ O Stationery Office, 1941), 113–64, ll. 3411–5050, attacks protestant thinking as heresy, urges the catholic Irish to resist heretic clergy, and argues that civil government is ultimately derived from the people. Aodh Mac Aingil, Sca´tha´n Shacramuinte na hAithridhe (Louvain, 1618), ed. Cainneach ´ Maonaigh (Dublin: DIAS, 1952), regularly digresses to lament the current state of Ireland, beset O by heresy and bereft of priests due to persecution (see examples at pp. 135, ll. 4420–4, pp. 146–7, ll. 4805–43). He balances these laments with reminders of Ireland’s pious past and urges his readers to adhere to the faith of St Patrick, aimed at rallying a national cause: p. 125, ll. 4073–86; pp. 190–1, ll. 6299–313.
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These publications were to some degree a rearguard response to protestant moves to proselytize through the medium of Irish.10 Queen Elizabeth had earlier provided for the manufacture of an Irish printing-press, but complained of the lack of progress in 1567.11 The first Irish translation of the protestant ´ Cearnaigh’s Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma (Dublin, catechism was Seaa´n O 1571). This work was equally politically engaged, including a prayer for Queen Elizabeth and appending a translation into Irish of Lord Deputy Sidney’s ‘A Brefe Declaration of certeine Pryncipall Articles of Relygion’ (Dublin, 1566).12 However, the New Testament was not printed in Irish until 1602, followed by the Book of Common Prayer in 1608.13 Under the sponsorship of William Bedell, bishop of Kilmore, the translation of the Old Testament into Irish was completed by 1638. However, this was not printed until 1685, when a revised version was financed by Robert Boyle.14 The temporally disjointed production of these texts, in conjunction with an ever-present distrust of the Irish language as barbaric, doomed the Reformation strategy of vernacular evangelization in Ireland. In this context, the act of commissioning in itself is a statement of political and confessional allegiance. The Irish Poor Clares’ production of translations aligned them, not only with nuns’ translation activities on the continent, but also with the broader exploitation of the international Counter Reformation effort to fashion a national, catholic Irish identity. The fact of their being commissioned adds another layer of significance to these translations: we have here an instance of user demand. Rather than the style of publishing engaged in by the Louvain Franciscans—which supplied devotional texts for an amorphous catholic, national readership, assuming (or constructing) a demand for the same texts and presupposing a simple readership, unsophisticated in literary terms—these translations show the production of devotional texts at the request of a specific audience. There is, therefore, a close
10
The Irish Franciscans were certainly aware of contemporary protestant translations into ´ Domhnaill’s Leabhar na nVrnaightheadh Irish, and Mac Aingil’s references to Uilliam O gComhchoidchiond (Dublin, 1608) show the attention with which they were read and the strength of the Franciscan impulse to counteract them; Sca´tha´n, 187–8, ll. 6171–200. 11 CSPI, 1509–1573, 356, lists among ‘Remembrances taken upon the accompt of Sir William Fytzwylliams’, December 1567: ‘66l. 13s. 4d. to be repaid by the Bishops unless they presently publish the Irish testament in print.’ 12 ´ Cearnaigh, Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma (Dublin, 1571), ed. Brian O ´ Cuı´v Seaa´n O (Dublin: DIAS, 1994), 114–21, 128–53. See App. II, pp. 185–9, for the text of Sidney’s ‘Brefe Declaration’, which was a Dublin printing of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s 1561 ‘A Declaration of certain Principal Articles of Religion’. 13 ´ Domhnaill, Tiomna Nvadh (Dublin, 1602); Uilliam O ´ Domhnaill, Leabhar na Uilliam O nVrnaightheadh gComhchoidchiond (Dublin, 1608). 14 Leabhuir na Seintiomna (London, 1685); a complete edition of the Bible in Irish was printed ´ Raghallaigh. For further in 1690. Intriguingly, Boyle retained as his chief translator another Aodh O discussion of these publications, see McCaughey, Dr. Bedell and Mr. King ; Nicholas Williams, I bPrionta I Leabhar: na Protastu´in agus Pro´s na Gaeilge 1567–1724 (Dublin: An Clo´chomhar, 1986); Mac Craith, ‘Literature in Irish’, 192–210.
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relationship between the translator and his readers; the translator could collaborate with the target audience who would be using the text. It is likely that Mac Fhirbhisigh in 1647 accommodated the female community’s response to the earlier 1636 translation of the Rule. The differences between the 1636 and 1647 translations (the modifications of the language discussed in detail below) can be interpreted as an illumination of the pedagogical impulse which runs through Mac Fhirbhisigh’s translation as a result of working with its destination audience. Thus, we have a counterbalance to Mac Aingil’s complaint that the Franciscan publications must serve instead of priests—that the people must be instructed through the written, rather than the spoken, word due to the dearth of clergy on the ground.15 This picture of audience reception sheds new light on the readers assumed by the Franciscans from their European base. The Poor Clare translation originated in the requirements of a specific female community; moreover, this was a community with particular claims to a tradition of female authorship. Their programme of vernacular translation raises interesting questions about the nuns’ (and by extension, women’s) literacy in the period. Mac Fhirbhisigh inserted an intriguing apologia at the end of his 1647 translation. First drawing attention to the table of contents at the end of the manuscript, in which he crossreferences the Irish translation with the English version, Mac Fhirbhisigh then centres on language: simplidheacht no bacuighe na Gaoidhelge do chuireas orra so; nı´ tre ghainne na Gaoidhilge tig sin, acht tre easbaidh a heoluis ar cha´ch, ionnus gurob usa leo´ focail choimhightheacha do thuigsin ina´id focail fhı´re na Gaoidhelge. Ar an adhbhair sin a´ilim beandacht, agus mo lethsge´l on leughtho´ir don D[ubhaltach Mac]F[hirbhisigh]. (the simpleness or lameness of the Irish I have put on these, that does not come from the poverty of the Irish language, but from people’s lack of knowledge of it, so that they find it easier to understand foreign words than the genuine Irish ones. Therefore I implore the reader to give his blessing to the D.F. and to excuse him.)16
A number of questions are provoked by this apology. To what extent might it be gendered, arising from the specific needs of women religious? What was the true extent of their bilingualism? If not all fully bilingual, they were clearly well informed as to contemporary cultural developments, particularly as they related to the Irish vernacular. Who were the other readers addressed here—those whose criticism of his Irish Mac Fhirbhsigh was anticipating? Given that his audience was a community of enclosed nuns, it is likely that Mac Fhirbhisigh was sensitive to differing levels of competency within the community. Abbess Browne, who enlisted Mac Fhirbhisigh to the project, was 15 16
Mac Aingil, Sca´tha´n, 49, ll. 1545–56. RIA MS D i 2, fol. 162r; translated in Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, supplement, 109–10.
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an accomplished author in her own right and fluent in Irish and Spanish as well as English. The majority of these Poor Clares were from the Old English community—the ethnic group descended from the Anglo-Normans, who remained catholic and were perceived by New English settlers as having assimilated through adopting the Irish language and Irish customs. The historical evidence suggests that the Old English were comfortably bilingual.17 It should be noted that, although Mac Fhirbhisigh directs attention to the quality of his Irish, he makes no reference to the differences in script. The nuns are assumed to be able to read, and to be familiar with both Gaelic and Roman alphabets. Mac Fhirbhisigh’s prospective critics lay within the community itself. Again, the wider context is crucial: Irish prose was in a state of flux at this ´ Cle´irigh and Mac Fhirbhisigh time. The hereditary learned classes to which O belonged had trained in a system whose elaborate literary aesthetics were developed over centuries. The literary values of alliteration, assonance, ornamentation, and archaism were prized in classical Irish. However, as discussed in Chapter 1, when the social structures which supported this system struggled under attack from the English crown, the political functions of writing in Irish were redirected, and the audiences such writing was trying to reach became more demotic. This applied not least to the more popular readership addressed by catholic devotional texts. Many of the texts emerging from Louvain express similar justifications for the simplicity, stylistic and semantic, of their Irish. ´ Maolchonaire’s (Florence Conry) translation of One of the earliest, Flaithrı´ O the Spanish devotional work Desiderius (Louvain, 1616), made an analogous apology: ma´ thig linn amha´in, maille re´ congnamh an Choimdheadh, na neithi-se do chor sı´os go soille´ir sothuigsi, saoilmı´d go madh lia do na daoinibh deaghaithneacha deisgre´ideacho ghuidhfeas oruinn ar son ar saothair, ina´ bhias ag iarroidh toibhe´imi do thabhairt da´r ndı´thcheall ar son simplidheachta na sttı´li inar sgrı´obhamar go sonnradhach chum leasa na ndaoine simplidhe, na´ch foil ge´archu´iseach a nduibheaga´n na Gaoidhilge. (If we can manage, with the help of the Lord, to set down these things clearly and comprehensibly, we think that more of the judicious, discreet people will pray for us on account of our labour than will seek to criticize our best efforts because of the simplicity of the style in which we have written, in particular for the benefit of the simple people, who are not expert in abstruse Irish.)18
17 Vincent Carey, ‘“Neither good English nor good Irish”: Bi-lingualism and Identity Formation in Sixteenth-Century Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), 48, 60; Palmer, Language and Conquest, 41–4. 18 ´ O Maolchonaire, Desiderius, 2, ll. 34–42; my translation. Mac Craith, pointing to the context ´ Maolchonaire’s apology may have been ‘a mere trope in of European humanism, suggests that O accordance with the stylised professions of humility common in literary introductions of the time’; ‘Literature in Irish’, 204.
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´ Maolchonaire, founder of St Anthony’s College in 1607, was, like Mac O Fhirbhisigh, from a professional learned family and had practised as an ollamh (the highest degree of professional poet). Such awareness of the discrepancies between classical Irish and the written language as it was now emerging was not confined to members of the traditionally learned classes. Aodh Mac Aingil (alias Mac Cathmhaoil, Hugh Cavellus), author of a doctrinal work on penance, Sca´tha´n Shacramuinte na hAithridhe (Louvain, 1618), drew attention to his own lack of expertise as a writer. He resolved the issue in favour of his work’s purpose to impart church teaching: Da´ n-abarthaoi gur da´na dhu´inn nı´ dho sgrı´obhadh a nGaoidhilg ’s na´r shaothruigheamar innti, as ´ı ar bhfreagra ar sin, na´ch do mhu´nadh Gaoidhilgi sgrı¯obhmaoid achd do mhu´nadh na haithrı´dhe, 7 as lo´r linn go ttuigfidhear sinn ge´ na´ch bı´adh ceart na Gaoidhilgi aguinn. . . . Guidhim thu´, a le¯ghtho´ir chroidhe Chatoilic, na´ tabhradh simplı´dheachd no´ droichsgrı¯bhneo¯ireachd an leabhra´in ort gan mo´irmheas do bheaith agad ar le¯ighionn leighis th’anma ata´ ann. (If it is said that it is bold of us to write anything in Irish without having laboured with the language, our answer is, that it is not to teach Irish that we write but to teach of penance, and it is sufficient for us that we be understood even though our Irish is not quite correct. . . . I pray you, reader of the catholic heart, do not grant the simplicity or the bad writing of the book without great respect for the healing lesson for your soul that is in it.)19
Antoin Gearnon’s catechism, Parrthas an Anma (Louvain, 1645), refrained from explicitly apologizing, but confidently asserted the values of intelligibility and clarity in its preface: ‘o¯ir ata´ an leabhra´n soile´ir so-thuigsi a modh comhra¯idh deisi ina bhfuil gach re cceisd 7 gach re bhfreagra’ (‘for the book is clear and comprehensible in the manner of a useful conversation in which there are alternate questions and answers’).20 The most immediately 19 Mac Aingil, Sca´tha´n, 5, ll. 74–8, 97–100; my translation. Mac Aingil later describes how friars ´ hEodhasa, who had at Louvain were taught Irish by Giolla Brighde (in religion Bonabhentura) O ´ hEodhasa practised as a professional poet prior to joining the Franciscans; ibid. 94, ll. 3080–8. O ´ hEodhasa, discussed in Ch. 1. was cousin to Eochaidh O 20 ´ Fachtna (Dublin: DIAS, Antoin Gearnon, Parrthas an Anma (Louvain, 1645), ed. Anselm O 1953), 6; my translation. That such apologies retained their currency later in the seventeenth ´ Maolmhuaidh’s 1676 preface to Lucerna Fidelium, which repeats O ´ century is evident in O ´ Maolmhuaidh, Lucerna Maolchonaire’s Desiderius apologia almost verbatim; Froinsias O ´ Su´illeabha´in (Dublin: DIAS, 1962), 11–12, ll. 194–205. Fidelium (Rome, 1676), ed. Pa´draig O The quality of the Irish was likewise a concern for those behind the publication of the 1685 Seintiomna. In a letter to Robert Boyle, 17 Feb. 1682/3, Archbishop Narcissus Marsh reports the ´ Raghallaigh with the language of the translation and reports the opinion dissatisfaction of Aodh O of ‘those, who well understand the language’: ‘though the Irish thereby may be less elegant, yet ’tis proper enough, & never the less intelligible by the vulgar people; yea they thinke ’tis a good, plain, familiar translation, & that if ’twere more elegant, ’twould not be so fit, as now it is, for common use’; Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence Principe (eds.), The Correspondence of ´ Raghallaigh’s objections, Robert Boyle, 7 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), v. 387. For O ´ Cearnaigh asks the reader to correct any faults see his letters to Boyle, ibid. v. 338–9, 377–8. O found with his Irish and, in his ‘Aibghitir’ explaining the phonology, he draws attention to the
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contemporary with Mac Fhirbhisigh’s translation, Gearnon was present in Galway in spring 1647.21 Again and again, comprehensibility is the prime concern of these writers, not all of whom were themselves ‘experts in abstruse Irish’. Mac Fhirbhisigh’s apology should be interpreted in light of the Louvain authors’ streamlining of written Irish for the purposes of instructing and rallying a broader, more popular readership than the elite audiences of classical Irish. From this perspective, any notion that his apology is gender-specific—that he simplifies the language because he is writing for women—is dispelled. The alliterative, ornate qualities for which classical Irish prose was prized are generally easily discerned via the deployment of a multitude of (often synonymous) adjectives, or lists, where a single word might suffice. As the editor of Desiderius observes, ‘the use of two or more words where one would do was a virtue, not a vice’.22 In the case of the Poor Clare translations, such lists of adjectives do not occur. The translators, as Mac Fhirbhisigh signalled, were concerned with a clear corresponding text. However, Mac Fhirbhisigh’s trained ear finds room for typically Irish resonances of sound, and he regularly takes the opportunity to translate the English in an aurally satisfactory manner. Some simple examples (in which the corresponding sounds are italicized) are: ‘dı´oghaltas diadha’ (‘diuine vengeance’); ‘ag l abhra go l e´r gan l iosdacht’ (‘speking plainly without superfluity’); ‘na cu´ isi umhla uirı´sle’ (‘those matters that be humble and abiect’); ‘tre dhı´th coda cuibhdhe no´ coitchinne’ (‘for want of common, or sufficient refections’); ‘go ffhuil an cosa´n cumhang, 7 an dorus d ´ırech’ (‘the way is narrow and the gate strait’).23 There are rare instances of the quiet insertion of an additional synonym, such as ‘go d ´ıochra d u¯thrachtach’ (‘feruent’).24 Most of these enhancements of sound are adjectival, although noun-phrases—‘a mbetha, a mbe´usa 7 a mbriathra’ (‘their liues, manners, and wordes’); ‘tre´ sg oiltedh, na´ sg a´inedh’ (‘by no clefts or creuisses’)—and verbal phrases—‘a lenamhna 7 a lorgairechta re lu´thg[h]aire la´nmho´ir’ (‘to follow and imitate him with exceeding great ioy’)—are skilfully mined for aural effects where none pertain to the English.25 The extent to which Mac Fhirbhisigh was attuned to the potential for aural consonance is clear from his manipulation of the translation itself. In the quantity of specific rules, referring the reader to the fileadha (poets) for further clarification, ‘oı´r is le´ na n-eala´dhain bheanas sin do thra¯chdadh go hı´nntleachdach e´olusa´ch: & nı´ leamsa’ (‘for intellectual, knowledgeable discussion of this pertains to the learned, and not me’; my translation); Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma, 54–7, 66–7. 21 Gearnon left Louvain in March 1647. He wrote a letter to General Preston from Galway on 19 April that year and was present at the Franciscan chapter held in county Galway on 5 September 1647; CSPI 1633–1647, 604, 608; SP 63/263/107; Gearnon, Parrthas an Anma, pp. ix–x. 22 ´ O Maolchonaire, Desiderius, p. xli. 23 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 52/53, 136/137, 144/145, 78/79, 46/47. Both the Irish and the English on the facing page are cited. 24 Ibid. 88/89. 25 Ibid. 116/117, 84/85, 132/133.
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following examples the meaning is modified to allow for alliteration: ‘cu´ramach ca´onbharrach’ (‘carefull & discreet’; lit., ‘careful, kind’); ‘go foirfe friochnamhach’ (‘perfectly and intierly’; lit., ‘perfectly, attentively’); ‘le crı´onnacht 7 le ciu´nus’ (‘with prudency, and security’; lit., ‘with prudence and with silence’).26 Perhaps the most obvious example of semantic license for literary effect sees Mac Fhirbhisigh himself explaining his transgression: ‘go dlighthech, reil , roichert’ (‘lawfully, really, and iuridically’; lit., ‘lawfully, reil , very justly’).27 Indeed, his keen ear sometimes leads him into straightforward mistranslation, as with ‘go mo´rmho´r’ (‘moreouer’; lit., ‘especially’) and ‘indethbhirech’ (‘indifferent’; lit., ‘hastily’).28 Like the Louvain writers, Mac Fhirbhisigh’s primary concern is clarity of meaning, and it is the vocabulary of his translation—the use of ‘foreign words [rather] than the genuine Irish ones’—for which he apologizes. Sensitive to charges of improperly importing ‘foreign words’ for which perfectly good indigenous alternatives already exist, Mac Fhirbhisigh pre-empts any such criticism by recourse to the allegedly poor expertise in Irish of at least part of his audience. In fact, this practice of incorporating loan-words was well under way in Gaelic culture, not only in the Louvain texts but also in secular writings of the period. It is a practice familiar to non-English speakers in today’s global economy. One of the most obvious examples of the importation of a specialized term is the loanword ‘profession’. Corpas na Gaeilge, the concordance of 700 Irish texts printed between 1600 and 1882, cites sixteen examples of the term’s use in seventeenthcentury texts, all but one taken from these Poor Clare translations.29 As with all the loan-words in these texts, the foreign word is hibernicized at least insofar as it is declined according to the grammatical rules of Irish; that is, it is imported and treated as being an Irish word. Thus, the grammatical rules governing the treatment of nouns following prepositions are observed: ‘a bprofession’ (‘in the profession’); ‘bhar bprofeissioin’ (‘of your profession’); ‘do phrofession’ (‘vnto Profession’).30 There are degrees of hibernicization, however, and Mac Fhirbhisigh evinces a marked tendency to conform as closely as possible to Irish-language norms. The translation of ‘vicaress’, for example, is a combination of a 26
Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 44/45, 100/101, 150/151. Ibid. 124/125. Ibid. 54/55, 144/145. 29 Corpas na Gaeilge 1600–1882: Foclo´ir na Nua-Ghaeilge: The Irish Language Corpus (Dublin: RIA, 2004); proifesion, proifession, proiffesioin, profeission, profesion, professioin, profession, professionta. The concordance is not lemmatized, meaning that words must be searched in all variant spellings in order to arrive at reliable statistics. Accordingly, all variant spellings for each word are cited. Unassimilated foreign words are prefaced by a dollar sign (‘$’) in Corpas. The other text in which the term occurs is Brian Mac Giolla Coinnigh, Riaghuil Threas Uird S. Froinsias ´ Su´illeabha´in, Rialachas San Froinsias (Dublin: DIAS, 1953). The (Louvain, 1641), ed. Pa´draig O term is not included in E. G. Quin et al., Dictionary of the Irish Language: Based mainly on Old Irish and Middle Irish Materials, compact edn. (Dublin: RIA, 1983). 30 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 6/7, 12/13, 64/65. 27 28
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hibernicized loan-word (‘bioca´ire’) and the indigenous feminine prefix ‘ban’: ‘bainbhioca´ire’. This term occurs forty-five times in the Corpas, again all but one derived from these Poor Clare translations.31 To some degree, however, this is a product of the uniquely female religious audience: the male version, bioca´ire, is cited as occurring seventy-five times in nineteen texts printed before 1700, other than the Poor Clare translations.32 Contrary to his apology, Mac Fhirbhisigh displays a clear impulse to employ the ‘genuine Irish’ term wherever possible, as is most evident when his word´ Siaghail choice is compared with that of the translators of the Clarissian Rule. O ´ and O Raghailligh display a distinct unease with the English word ‘convent’, for example, using the loan-word ‘conueint’ once. They avoid translating the term at all on two further occasions.33 Mac Fhirbhisigh’s Colettine source-text, littered with occurrences of ‘convent’, provokes an approach which is far more assured and faithful to the Irish language. He consistently translates ‘convent’ as ‘coimhthiono´l’, an indigeous Irish term meaning ‘assembly’.34 Similarly, to ´ Siaghail and O ´ Raghailligh simply incorporate translate the English ‘cloister’ O the English as ‘cloustar’, whereas Mac Fhirbhisigh hibernicizes the word as ‘clabhsdra’, a usage also found in other contemporary texts.35 There are several other arresting instances of Mac Fhirbhisigh choosing the more authentic term over the Rule translators’ lazier adoption of loan-words. The English ‘conversation’, for example, is rendered ‘conuersa´id’ in the Rule, ‘comhluadar’ in the ´ Declarations and Ordinances; ‘recreation’ is transliterated as ‘recrea´tioin’ by O ´ Siaghail and O Raghailligh, but appropriately translated as ‘caitheamh aimsire’ by Mac Fhirbhisigh; ‘sacrifice’ is straighforwardly incorporated as ‘sacrafisi’ in the Rule, but authentically translated as ‘iodhbairt’ by Mac Fhirbhisigh.36 These are 31
Corpas na Gaeilge ; bainbhioca´ire, bainbhioca´irı´, bainbioca´ire, banbhioca´ire. Ibid.; biocair, bioca´ir, biocaire, biocaı´re, bioca´ire, biocairi, bioca´iri, bioca´iribh, bioca´iridhe, bicaire. See also Dictionary of the Irish Language, bica´ire, p. 73. 33 ´ Cle´irigh’s colophon Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 18/19, 34/35. The only other instance is in O at the end of the Rule (p. 36). Corpas na Gaeilge cites forty seventeenth-century examples, using eleven source-texts in addition to the Poor Clare translation; coinuent, coinuint, conbhint, conueint, conueinte, conuent, conuente, conveint, convent, conventib, conventibh. See also Dictionary of the Irish Language, conuent, p. 150. 34 For examples, see Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 84/85, 102/103, 112/113. 35 Ibid. 8/9, 34/35, 80/81, 118/119. Corpas na Gaeilge lists only the Poor Clare Rule spelling ‘cloustar’, with one other text providing ‘claustor’. A total of twenty-nine other variants occur, of which twenty-one are Mac Fhirbhisigh and six are alternative source-texts: clabhsdra, clabhsdraibh, clabhstra, clabhstradha, clabhstraibh, claustra, claustraibh, clobhsdra. See also Dictionary of the Irish Language, claustra, p. 120. 36 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 12/13, 34/35, 46/47, 56/57; 18/19, 110/111, 114/115; 28/29, 126/127. Corpas na Gaeilge lists twenty-four examples of ‘conuersa´id’ in seven seventeenth-century source-texts other than the Poor Clare Rule : coinbhearsaid, coinbhearsa´id, coinbhersaid, coinuearsa´id, co´inuersa´id, coinversa´id, conuersaid, conuersa´id, conuersa´it, conversa´id. See also Dictionary of the Irish Language, 130, which lists six examples of ‘coinbersa´id’ meaning ‘practice, ´ Siaghail and O ´ Raghailligh’s text is the sole variant of usage’, and one meaning ‘conversing’. O ‘recrea´tioin’ in Corpas na Gaeilge. Five additional texts combine with the Poor Clare Rule to provide forty-seven instances of ‘sacrifice’: sacrafis, sacrafı´s, sacrafisi, sacrafı´si, sacrafı´sibh, sa´crafı´sibh, 32
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conspicuous examples of the adoption of ‘foreign words’ rather than ‘the genuine Irish ones’, yet it is not Mac Fhirbhisigh but the earlier translators who are most open to critique. Mac Fhirbhisigh’s rejection of the ‘foreign words’ and subsititution of authentic Irish terms harbours a greater belief in the linguistic competence of his female readers and suggests a closer relationship between translator and audience. It would appear, then, that Mac Fhirbhisigh is not the worse culprit, but rather the more self-aware, and this awareness may have stemmed from familiarity with his readership. There are, of course, many hibernicized loan-words which were already established at the time of translation, of which some examples are: ‘discreet’, rendered ‘deiscre´iteach/disgre´dedh’; ‘purgatory’, rendered ‘purgado´ir’; ‘habit’, rendered ‘aibı´d’; ‘article’, rendered ‘airteagal’. All of these were in use in Louvain texts as well as others at the time. Thus, neither Poor Clare translation is particularly remarkable for adopting these words. What is striking, however, is their shunning of other hibernicized loan-words which were coming into popular currency via the Irish Franciscan publications. The Louvain authors regularly transliterated ‘devotion’ as ‘de´bho´ision’, for example—a habit rigorously avoided in both Poor Clare translations, which more correctly render ‘devotion’ as ‘cra´bhadh’ and ‘devout’ as ‘cra´ibhtheach’.37 Similarly, ‘reverence’, increasingly transliterated as ‘re´bherens’ in the Louvain texts, is here construed as ‘fı´re´ntas’; ‘reverend’ as ‘fı´re´unta’ (meaning righteousness, righteous).38 These examples demonstrate two things. First, Mac Fhirbhisigh is far from alone in his incorporation of ‘foreign words’ into Irish in the service of intelligibility. Rather, the opposite is the case: he participates in the Counter Reformation project to bring devotional texts in the vernacular to a wide audience, and this intended expansion in readership regularly involved the importation of nonindigenous terms. Secondly, in rejecting some key terms adopted widely in the Louvain publications, these translators adhere more closely to their native language than might be considered typical.
sacraifis, sacraifı´s, sa´craifı´s, sacraifı´seadha, sacraifı´sibh, saicrifis, saicrifı´s, sa´icrifı´s, saicrifise. See also Dictionary of the Irish Language, p. 516, which lists only seventeenth-century Louvain examples of ‘saicrifis’. 37 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 24/25, 52/53, 56/57, 78/79. For examples of ‘debho´sion/ ´ hEodhasa, An Teagasg Crı´osdaidhe (Antwerp, 1611), ed. Fearghal deuo´ision’, see Bonabhentura O Mac Raghnaill (Dublin: DIAS, 1976), p. 59, l. 1878, p. 60, l. 1931, p. 82, l. 2561; Desiderius, p. 97, l. 2950, p. 217, l. 6694; Sca´tha´n, p. 106, l. 3343, p. 155, l. 5086, p. 177, l. 5826, p. 195, l. 6453. All four examples listed in Dictionary of the Irish Language are seventeenth-century (p. 206). Corpas na Gaeilge cites fifty-two examples derived from ten source-texts printed prior to 1700: debho´isio´n, de´bho´ision, debho´sion, deuo´ision, deuo´isioin, deuosion, deuo´sion, de´uo´sion, deuo´tion, deuo´tio´n, devosion, devosio´n, de´vosio´n, $devotion. 38 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 58/59, 66/67, 72/73, 90/91, 128/129. For examples of ‘rebherens/ reuerens’, see Desiderius, p. 3, l. 72, p. 60, l. 1728, p. 226, l. 6931; Sca´tha´n, p. 105, l. 3421, p. 167, l. 5503. Corpas na Gaeilge lists sixty-three examples from twelve pre-1700 source-texts; $rebherens, re´bheirens, re´bherens, $reuerens, re´uerens, reuereus, $reverence, $reverens, re´verens.
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But most importantly, there is a distinctive pedagogical thrust to the Poor Clare translations, without parallel in the Louvain texts. Mac Fhirbhisigh may have been unsatisfied with his translation and defensive about the perceived need to simplify the language, but he sought to redress this in the text by educating his readership as to the requisite terminology, coining some new words in the process. This educative approach suggests an engagement with the community whose textual traces point to a dialogic exchange. One illustrative ´ Siaghail example relates to the translation of the specialized term ‘novice’. O ´ and O Raghailligh employ a straightforward hibernicization, ‘nouistedh’, which is found in other contemporary texts.39 But Mac Fhirbhisigh tries out a unique coinage, ‘Nua´sachain’ (from the root ‘nua’, new). He immediately provides a more anglicized alternative, ‘no´ Noibhisigh’, and it is this latter which he employs later in the text.40 This retreat from linguistic innovation is uncharacteristic of Mac Fhirbhisigh, who in fact coins a number of new Irish words specifically for his target readership. His method is to provide, in the first instance, his newly coined Irish word in tandem with the English, subsequently adhering to the Irish coinage. The terminology surrounding confession, and particularly the male priest who ´ enters the convent to hear confessions—the confessor—is a good example. O ´ Siaghail and O Raghailligh, translators of the Rule, adopt the English term ‘confessor’ to translate ‘chaplain’, using the traditional ‘athair faoisidne’ (lit., ‘father of confession’) to translate ‘Priest for cause of Confession’.41 However, the Colettine Declarations and Ordinances (which devotes the entirety of chapter 5 to the sacrament of confession) sees Mac Fhirbhisigh fully engaged in an educative linguistic policy. He derives his coinage from the Irish word faoisidin, ‘confession’. He explains clearly his new term: translating ‘of the Confessour’ as ‘don fhaoisidmhech (da ngoirther confessor)’ (lit., ‘of the “faoisidmhech” (which is nearest to confessor)’). From this point on, expecting the sisters to have absorbed the new term, Mac Fhirbhisigh employs the Irish coinage four times, reminding them of the translation on the fifth occurrence (‘a cconfessor no´
39
Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 12/13. See Dictionary of the Irish Language, 480, 481, no´ibiste, nouice. Corpas na Gaeilge cites thirteen examples from six seventeenth-century texts, of which three are from the Poor Clare Rule : nobiste, noibhisd, noibhı´sdeadh, noibhisteadh, nouist, nouisteachta, nouistedh, nouistibh, noviste, novisti, novistibh, $novitiatus. 40 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 66/67, 70/71, 94/95. Mac Fhirbhisigh is the single source for variants of this term in Corpas na Gaeilge ; noibhisigh, noibhı´sigh, noibhı´sioch; his coinage ‘nua´sachain’ is singular. See also Dictionary of the Irish Language, 480, for the late loan-word ‘no´ibı´seach’, and p. 481 for an early compound translating ‘neophytum’: ‘nuiethicd’. 41 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 14/15, 20/21, 34/35. Corpas na Gaeilge cites fifty-four instances of the term in ten seventeenth-century texts, of which four are from the Poor Clare Rule, and two are explanatory glosses from Mac Fhirbhisigh: coinfeaso´ir, coinfeaso´ireadh, coinfeaso´iribh, coinfeaso´ra, coinfeasso´ir, coinfeasso´ire, confeso´ir, confeso´ireadh, confeso´r, confessoir, confesso´ir, confesso´ire, confesso´ireadh, confessor, confesu´r, $confessor. See also Dictionary of the Irish Language, confesion, p. 146.
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affa´oisidmhech’; ‘their . . . Confessour’), and adhering to the Irish word for the remaining four usages.42 The vocabulary surrounding convent visitation, the regular period of inspection of the convent by male church authorities, is another prime example of this pedagogical approach to translation. Where the relevant terms occur in the Rule, ´ Siaghail and O ´ Raghailligh are (again) somewhat inconsistent. They translate O ‘Visitation’ once as ‘do fhe¯chain’ (lit., ‘the looking’)—satisfactory in terms of its deployment of a ‘genuine Irish’ word, although lacking in semantic specificity. On other instances of the term occurring in the text, they simply adopt the English words: ‘uı´sitation’ and ‘uisita´tor’.43 Mac Fhirbhisigh, on the other hand, develops another Irish coinage for ‘visitor’: ‘an fiosado´ir.’ This is derived from the primary function of the visitation, to inspect; the root fios means knowledge, the verbal fiosrughadh connotes enquiry. Mac Fhirbhisigh first elucidates his coinage in an isolated occurrence of the term: ‘risin visitour ’ (‘vnto the Visitour’ ). He then adopts the term wholesale when translating chapter 15 (allocated to the topic of visitation), translating ‘Of the Visitatour’ as ‘Don fhiosatto´ir ’ from the very beginning. Again, all fourteen subsequent translations of the term ‘visitor’ adhere to the new Irish coinage, fiosado´ir/fiosato´ir.44 In addition, Mac Fhirbhisigh uses two near-synonyms to translate the noun ‘visitation’ itself: the linguistically related fiosruighe (‘inquiry’) and the more casual cuairt (‘tour’, ‘visit’).45 Due to their frequency in the source-text, these are the most systematically developed examples of innovative translation. But there are many instances, in both translations, of the juggling of terminology, the provision of ‘foreign words’ ´ Siaghail/ alongside ‘genuine Irish ones’. The following are examples from the O 42 One earlier instance, without explanation, occurs in the translation of William Cassall’s letter: ‘bhar bhfaoisidmhigh’ (‘of your confessor’); Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 52/53, 78/79, 80/81, 82/83, 118/119, 120/121, 140/141. All ten examples of the term listed in Corpas na Gaeilge derive from Mac Fhirbhisigh: faoisidmhech, fa´oisidmhech, faoisidmhigh, fa´oisidmhigh. The term is not listed in Dictionary of the Irish Language, but see the medieval ‘faı´smedach’, p. 293. 43 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 30/31, 34/35. Corpas na Gaeilge lists twenty-three seventeenthcentury variants from six source-texts, of which three derive from the Poor Clare Rule and three are explanatory glosses from Mac Fhirbhisigh: uı´sioto´r, uisitatioin, uisitation, uisita´tion, uı´sitation, uisita´tor, u´isita´tor, visitour, $visitatio, $visitatuor. All three examples cited in Dictionary of the Irish Language derive from a single seventeenth-century source (p. 627). 44 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 106/107, 120–9. Mac Fhirbhisigh is the sole source for this coinage in both Corpas na Gaeilge (fiosado´ir, fiosato´ir, fiosatto´ir) and Dictionary of the Irish Language (fisato´ir), p. 308. One earlier instance of the term, in the chapter on convent elections, is translated via a loan-word by Mac Fhirbhisigh: ‘an t-u´achtara´n no´ an visitour’ (‘the Superiour or Visitour’), pp. 90/91. Knott in her edition uses arrow brackets to indicate words inserted above the line in Mac Fhirbhisigh’s hand. In these two instances, however, the inserted words are placed in the margins in the manuscript; ‘visitour’ and ‘visitatuor’ are written in Roman rather than Gaelic script; see RIA MS D i 2, fols. 112r, 128v. 45 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 106/107, 120–5. See also Dictionary of the Irish Language, 309, which suggests that this usage was ‘formed by contamination with fiafraighe [questioning, inquiring]’.
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´ Raghailligh translation: ‘examen no´ sgru´dadh du¯thrachtach’ (lit., ‘examen or O diligent examination’); ‘an caille dubh, no an uelam’ (lit., ‘the black veil, or the uelam’); ‘bliadhain a bprofessioin, no´ a nderbhtha’ (lit., ‘the year of their profession, or their surety’); ‘san fhirmarii no´ a ttigh na n-easla´n’ (lit., ‘in the firmarii or the in house of the unhealthy’).46 Additional examples from Mac Fhirbhisigh’s translation include: ‘an minisdir choitchenn (no´ ghenera´lta)’ (lit., ‘the universal (or general) minister’); ‘an tigherna Cairdional cosnamhach an uird; (da ngoirid Protector)’ (lit., ‘the lord Cardinal protective of the order (which is nearest to Protector)’); ‘Cor no¯ Oiblioga¯id Riagla’ (lit., ‘the Pledge or Obligation of the Rule’).47 This policy entails providing the loan-words alongside their authentic Irish synonyms. It is congruent with Mac Fhirbhisigh’s provision of a table of contents at the end of the manuscript, cross-referencing the Irish with the English translation. He envisages that at least some of the women will read and compare the Irish and the English versions; that they will perform and learn as bilingual readers. Above all else, it demonstrates the extent to which their translators expected these nuns to engage with, and work at, their bilingualism. It is clear that, where he could, Mac Fhirbhisigh sought to educate the sisters in a specialized vocabulary which would remain faithful to the Irish language. His apology may suggest anxiety about their familiarity with the terminology relevant to their vocation, but his practice demonstrates great faith in their linguistic capabilities, in their capacity to learn a more authentic, newly coined terminology. On one level, of course, the Irish Poor Clares were addressing the needs of their community, in much the same way as their English counterparts required an English-speaking confessor to facilitate their sacraments and professions. In this regard, the translation of these foundational documents into the Irish vernacular served a very pragmatic function. Their provision of key formulae through the medium of Irish—the text to be recited at profession, the text for ballot papers electing new officers of the convent—enabled and facilitated the recruitment of native Irish women.48 Their securing of vernacular translations of foundational documents is consistent with the continental picture. They already had in their possession English vernacular translations. Clearly, they were interested not simply in obtaining a comprehensible vernacular version, but texts available in both languages. Their agency in generating the project and 46 Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 10, 12, 16. The term ‘caille dubh’ served as a metonym for ‘nun’ in medieval and early modern Irish. 47 Ibid. 60/61, 114/115, 134/135. 48 Ibid. 66/67, 90/91. The provision of essential texts in the vernacular was also a key part of the Franciscan project, as evidenced by Mac Aingil’s provision of an Irish vernacular version of ´ hEodhasa’s the ‘Confession’ for those who could not understand Latin (Sca´tha´n, 106); and by O exploitation of the tradition of oral recitation in Gaelic culture to supply poems in traditional metres for the purposes of instruction, availing of the mnemonic qualities of verse (Teagasg Crı´osdaidhe, 2– 7, 34–7, 51–2, 75).
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collaborating with hand-picked experts produced texts which extended their order’s tradition of writing; collective authorship characterizes monastic literary production. On the other hand, their initiation of and persistence in this translation programme participates in a highly politicized religious and linguistic project which sought to produce vernacular religious texts as a dimension of Counter Reformation activities and resistance to the English crown. These texts’ facilitation of new professions from the native Irish community highlights the emerging cooperation between both ethnic groups on the basis of shared religion. Their engagement with this emergent sense of religio-political catholic Irish identity is further developed in the chronicle of the order, which also survives. At least one Irish Poor Clare engaged with a different kind of authorship, also commonly practised by early modern nuns. The abbess who commissioned Mac Fhirbhisigh’s 1647 translation herself composed an accomplished chronicle of her order. Born into a prominent Galway family, Mary Browne entered Bethlehem with her sister in 1632, professing as Sr Bonaventure.49 She was part of the group who left in 1642 to found a new convent in Galway, and served as that convent’s third abbess from 1647 to 1650. Fluent in Irish, English, and Spanish, she wrote her history of the Irish Poor Clares while in exile in Madrid in the late 1660s. Chronicle-writing, like the translation of pious texts, was a form of authorship sanctioned by the needs of the community of women religious. The medieval monastic chronicle was a well-established genre; predominantly written in Latin until the middle of the twelfth century, vernacular chronicles were emerging in the later medieval period.50 The nuns’ chronicle is a genre in which women wrote the history of women for an audience of women. This form of authorship was, however, circumscribed in some key ways. The objective was always to produce a collective history; the individual, whether author or subject, is subordinate to the community. A particular nun may be praised for her participation in communal devotion and labour; she may be lauded for her service to the community. But only posthumously could she receive personal praise. This is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the ‘unique woman’ model of women’s history, whereby the biographical subject is singled out as an isolated individual. The point of a nuns’ chronicle is to represent conformity to collective spiritual endeavour. Unlike the protestant spiritual autobiography (see Chapter 6), which documents the trials of the individual devout life, the autobiographical subject rarely enters
49 She was the daughter of merchant Andrew Browne and Catherine Bodkin; her grandfather had been mayor of Galway in 1609. Her cousin, Sr Catherine Francis Browne, had entered Bethlehem in 1631. See Celsus O’Brien, Poor Clares, Galway, 1642–1992 (Galway: Connacht Tribune, 1992), 12. 50 For a useful study of the medieval chronicle, see Elizabeth van Houts, Local and Regional Chronicles (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995); while predominantly a male-authored genre, van Houts notes five medieval chronicles authored by nuns (pp. 51–2).
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into a chronicle. Indeed, many chronicles are anonymous, demonstrating the perceived insignificance of personal authorial attribution. Across early modern Europe nuns’ chronicles were being written. Often chronologically structured around year-dates, or abbacies, they recorded the histories of individual convents, serving an important function in constructing and sustaining community identity. Although some chronicles incorporated the stories of sister houses, the primary emphasis was on the community in which the author resided. Thus, chronicles attend to the particularities of the house’s communal identity over and above that of the religious order more generally. This is a form of history-writing attentive to the needs of its audience. The enclosed community of women religious required comprehensive records as well as devotional texts. As Woodford has noted, such chronicles often performed the vital function of copying and preserving documents which would otherwise be lost.51 As histories of female communities, they answer a need for cohesion, drawing the community together into a narrative which privileges the collective and locates it in a historical timeline. The circumstances of enclosure and contemplative devotion placed chronicle authors in a relatively privileged position regarding authorship. As Lowe observes in her study of Italian nuns’ chronicles, the ‘primary reason why nuns were the only women to write history in this period is that they were the only ones with the intellectual rigour, space and time to do it’.52 Nuns’ chronicles typically narrate the house’s foundation, new professions and deaths, elections of officers, spiritual activities, and building works. But the geographical dislocation caused by external political events or internal dissension often brings these texts into engagement with the world outside the convent’s enclosed walls.53 For example, the Gravelines chronicle of the English Poor Clares (from which the Irish community was originally derived) narrates the struggle between Franciscan friars and the diocesan bishop regarding jurisdiction over the women’s community, and the subsequent split into two houses at Gravelines and Aire.54 A number of German chronicles trace the impact of the thirty years war on communities of women religious, often necessitating the evacuation of convents.55 The chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses at Louvain relates in detail the 1635 siege of the town by the prince of Orange, 51
Woodford, Nuns as Historians, 32–6. K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 396. 53 Laven observes of Reformation Europe that ‘convents found themselves at the center of the propaganda wars. Catholic polemicists—nuns included—consolidated the rumors of cruelty and abuse, eager to make martyrs of their sisters and demons of their enemies. They also played a part in fashioning the tales of heroic resistance that have come down to us’; Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent (London: Penguin, 2002), 82. 54 The Chronicle of the Poor Clares of Gravelines, MS, formerly held at Clare Abbey, Darlington. I am indebted to Caroline Bowden for sharing with me her transcript of this chronicle. 55 See Woodford, Nuns as Historians, chs. 4 and 5. 52
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and the convent’s defence by Colonel Preston’s Irish regiment.56 Contemporary religious and political events inevitably impinged on communities of women religious, causing upheaval, relocation, and exile. Such calamitous events are diligently reported and dramatically represented in nuns’ chronicles across Europe, and Browne’s chronicle is no exception. Where this text is exceptional, however, is in its apparently unique status as an Irish nuns’ chronicle. The Poor Clares were the first order of women religious to be founded in Ireland after the Henrician dissolution. But within a decade or so other communities were springing up, particularly in Galway. A group of Irish Dominican nuns professed in 1644; they erected a house in Galway in 1647 but, like the Poor Clares, were dispersed in 1653 and settled across Spain. Their story is recorded by the Irish Dominican John O’Heyne, who visited the Spanish convents during the 1660s and wrote about them forty years later. Mary O’Halloran (who ‘had a more accurate acquaintance with the Spanish tongue than the Spaniards themselves, and was well versed in sacred and profane history’) went to Zamora; Mary Blake to Toledo; Mary French to Valladolid; Julia Nolan and Mary Lynch to Bilbao. Following the accession of James II, both Bilbao nuns returned to Galway to found a new convent in 1686. But the 1698 banishment of male clergy left the nuns dispersed in the town.57 A convent of Augustinian nuns was founded, again in Galway, in 1646; these nuns also dispersed across Spain.58 In 1639 Fr Dominic O’Daly founded the Bom Sucesso convent of Irish Dominican nuns in Lisbon. This is the only convent to operate continuously in Portugal since those times, and was quick to gain notoriety in Ireland.59 Richard Boyle, Church of Ireland archbishop of
56
Dom Adam Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St. Monica’s in Louvain, 2 vols. (London and Edinburgh: Sands, 1904–6), ii. 124–33. For further studies of European nuns’ chronicles, see Wybren Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries: The ‘Modern Devotion’, the Canonesses of Windesheim and their Writings, trans. David F. Johnson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004); Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004); Heather Wolfe, ‘Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris’, in Burke and Gibson, Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing, 135–56. 57 John O’Heyne, Epilogus Chronologicus (Louvain, 1706), trans. and ed. Ambrose Coleman, The Irish Dominicans of the Seventeenth Century (Dundalk: William Tempest, 1902), 157–69; see also Rose O’Neill, A Rich Inheritance: Galway Dominican Nuns 1644–1994 (Galway: Connacht Tribune, 1994), 9–19. 58 Alonso de Villerino, Esclarecido Solar de Las Religiosas Recoletas de Nuestro Padre San Agustin y Vidas de Las Insignes Hijas de sus Conventos, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1690–4), ii. 45–7. I am grateful to David Kelly for this reference. 59 Honor McCabe, A Light Undimmed: the Story of the Convent of Our Lady of Bom Sucesso Lisbon 1639–2006 (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 2007). See also CSPI, 1663–1665, 578–9, for Sr Elizabeth Mary Purcell of the Third Order of St Francis from Kilkenny, who petitioned Charles II in May 1665 for relief on her way to join the Irish convent at Lisbon.
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Tuam and cousin to the earl of Cork, complained on 12 June 1641 of the Bethelehem Poor Clares and the Lisbon Dominicans in the same breath: not farr from [Kilconnell] is a conspicuous Nunnery called Bethlem wherin are reclused many young gentlewomen daughters to Lords Knts and the best of the Country to the number of threescore . . . and who at their entry pay great somes of money to the howse and doe there live vnder as strict a governmt. of their Abbess and order as they doe in that much spoken of Nunnery in Lisborne.60
The lords justices wrote to Secretary Vane on 30 June 1641 that there were ‘many hundreds of Iesuits friers and Priests’ in the environs of Drogheda; among the rest, ‘a howse for a Nunnerie of late erected, with great charge, which is soe spacious, as it conteines fowrscore windoes of a side, and is not yet throughly finished, but great expectation there is of it.’61 (This was likely the Poor Clare house founded from Bethlehem, discussed below.) The English Benedictine community at Ypres was re-established as an Irish community in 1682, when Irish nuns previously residing at English convents in Dunkirk, Pontoise, and Ghent joined. This house spawned two rival convents in Dublin during the 1680s, but political events again superseded the mission and both dispersed by 1690.62 Mooney cites a report of eight refugee nuns of St Elizabeth from Ireland living at Richebourg, near Nantes, in 1650.63 These different communities of contemporaneous nuns suffered the same experiences of upheaval and exile as a result of the wars of the seventeenth century. Their stories are of short-lived foundations, resettlement, and dispersal among catholic communities on the continent. Browne’s history of the Poor Clares, however, appears unique: it is the only Irish nuns’ chronicle known to survive. Its conformity with the stories of contemporary female religious orders renders it representative—if not of extant writings, then certainly of the experiences of seventeenth-century Irish nuns. Originally written in Irish, Browne’s chronicle was composed between 1668 and 1671 while she was in exile in Spain. It was sent to the Irish nuns who reestablished the foundation at Galway in 1672. The surviving manuscript, whose watermark dates from the late seventeenth century, is a contemporary translation into English—the original perished during the Williamite wars in 1691.64 Its tripartite narrative structure covers the history of the convent’s foundation in Ireland (first in Dublin at Merchant’s Quay, then in Lough Ree at Bethlehem); the 1642 attack by protestant soldiers, relocation, and dispersal in 1653; and the 60
SP 63/259/44 (iii). SP 63/259/44. 62 Patrick Nolan, The Irish Dames of Ypres, 2 vols. (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 1908). 63 Canice Mooney, Irish Franciscans and France (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1964), 105–6. 64 Arms of Amsterdam, very similar to Churchill’s no. 24, dated 1686; Watermarks in Paper in Holland, England, France, etc. in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and their Interconnection (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1935). 61
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deaths of individual nuns in exile in Spain. The narrative arc runs from foundation through persecution to exile. Its climax is the 1642 protestant attack on Bethlehem, dramatically and graphically represented. The chronicle is also unique, then, in providing a catholic woman’s account of the events arising from the 1641 rebellion. These three divisions of the narrative loosely reflect its motivations: to assert the community’s identity; to articulate an Irish catholic royalist identity; and to testify to the women who died in exile. From the outset, the struggle against persecution is formative in the chronicle’s representation of community identity. The founding seven women who established themselves in Dublin in 1629 no sooner recruit twelve new sisters but they are subject to ‘search and threatnings in such manner, as it was needfull for them sometimes to hide themselues, and to send their ornaments to be kept to some chatolicke houses’. The women’s adherence to their collective identity is bound up with good reputation, which in turn engenders a perception of the community as spectacle. It is this very spectacular, exoticized quality which led to their banishment from Dublin. The chronicler writes that the ‘sweet savour of their vertues extended it selfe, and the manner of their life was much admired . . . and soe every body was desierous to see and heare them, amongst the rest the Lady Deputy went disguised to looke on them, the which shee did through the high grate as they were in divine office’.65 Although Browne identifies here the wife of the lord deputy, in fact there was no vice-regent at the time. Lord Falkland had been recalled to England in April 1629 and was not replaced until the arrival of Thomas Wentworth in July 1633. In the interim, Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, and Adam Loftus, Viscount Ely, were appointed lords justices. As Cork makes clear in his diary that he was not present, it is likely that it was Lady Loftus who exposed the women: ‘as shee returned home, [she] sayd before ye Deputy and Peers, that if prists and fryers were persecutted for preaching and instructing the people that ye manner of life of the nunns, was a more forcible motiue to withdraw them, then any preaching.’66 Ordered to court with the mayor and an armed escort, the public spectacle of the deputation of nuns would have been extraordinary. Careful to represent the scene in accordance with the women’s vow of poverty, and employing a Christian metaphor to evoke vulnerability, the chronicler represents the parade as provoking a public response of solidarity: ‘as he passed the streets with these mild lambes there assembled great 65 Chronicle of Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne, MS, Galway Monastery of the Poor Clares, fol. 3v (henceforth Galway Chronicle). For a modernized edition, see Celsus O’Brien (ed.), Recollections of an Irish Poor Clare in the Seventeenth Century (Galway: Connacht Tribune, 1993); for extracts, see Helena Concannon, The Poor Clares in Ireland (A.D. 1629–A.D. 1929) (Dublin: Gill, 1929). Extracts printed in Field Day, iv. 475–7, are from Concannon. Browne’s chronicle is followed in the manuscript by the anonymous ‘Additional Material Following the Narrative of Mary Bonaventure Browne’s “Narrative”’, dated 1694. 66 Galway Chronicle, fol. 4r. Lady Loftus was Sarah (ne´e Bathoe), widow of Richard Meredyth, bishop of Leighlin.
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concourse of people, who tooke compassion to see them goeing abroad barefoot, and feared much they should suffer greater harme, they raised such tumult as ye mayor feared to be stoned.’67 The simplicity of the scene’s delineation of loyalties—the gentle women aligned with the menacing mob—initiates the battle-lines of identity constructed later in the text. Word must have spread of the remarkable pageant, as ‘a great multitud of people exspected them’ at Dublin Castle. Their potency as spectacle is reinforced by Abbess Dillon’s persuasive speech inside: she ‘was soe prudent and wyse, that wth her discreet answers, shee convinced him, and moved both him wth all that were prsent to compassion’. Her achievement was twofold: to avoid banishment from the country altogether in favour of banishment from Dublin within a month, and to gain the public relations advantage of transportation home: ‘seeing them barefoot . . . [Loftus] begged pardon, and sent a Coach wth them to their convent.’68 The symbolic value of this acquiescence was recognized by Cork, who dissociated himself from it in his diary: ‘And as those 5 nonnes were brought to the castle on foot, soe it was without my consent or privity that they were sent thence in a coach, wherby too much grace and countenance was given to such delinquents, and contempners of aucthorety.’69 Competing sources of authority lay at the heart of the English problem in Ireland; catholics were accused of loyalty to the pope before the king. Attempts to distinguish between temporal and spiritual authority—as, for example, in the confederate oath of association drawn up in June 1642—met with suspicion from the crown, which regularly insisted on oaths proclaiming full allegiance. The women’s relocation to an island on Lough Ree near Athlone, where they founded the Bethlehem convent, offers the chronicler the opportunity to balance her narrative. The decade spent at Bethlehem is described as a ‘Golden age’.70 Convent life is represented in some detail, providing a structural balance to the persecution before and after, and the basis for the communal identity asserted in the text. With the exception of the Dominican convent at Lisbon (founded independently in Europe, rather than as a self-contained community relocated from Ireland), exiled Irish nuns had no stable foundation on the continent. While their male colleagues in religion benefited from Irish colleges as far afield as Louvain and Prague, the pattern of female religious experience was one of enforced nomadism, dependent on the support of host communities. By contrast, English nuns, who were also exiled from their homeland, managed to sustain a number of houses on the continent whose intake was careful to preserve 67 Ibid., fol. 4r. Her description accords with the attempted arrest of priests in Dublin on 26 December 1629, when officials were pursued by a stone-throwing mob; SP 63/249/108. 68 Galway Chronicle, fol. 4r. 69 Alexander Grosart (ed.), The Lismore Papers, 1st series, 5 vols. (London: Chiswick Press, 1886), iii. 106. Cork, however, was positioning himself in opposition to Loftus, who had been a member of the rival faction during Falkland’s deputyship. 70 Galway Chronicle, fol. 4v.
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national identity, despite the financial insecurities of the civil wars.71 No such cohesion pertained to dispersed Irish nuns. Browne’s chronicle provides a textual cohesion all too absent from her sisters’ experiences: the text itself becomes the glue of the community. The overriding importance of poverty as a defining characteristic of the order is consistently portrayed via an opposition between the noble lifestyle to which they would have been entitled as seculars and the abstemious lifstyle they chose as nuns. It is emphasized in the Dublin novices’ determination to pursue their vocations: ‘none of them would tarry wth their parents, but contemning (as ye professed did) their sumptuous houses, and da[i]nty tables, went for the great loue of God, with the rest to a remote Country village, to liue in great Austerity amongst unknowen people.’72 Their daily life in the ascetic accommodations at Bethlehem is described through the same opposition: they were ‘meanely apparalled who Imployed themselues in ye Lowest offices, and eat ye grossest meats although they were cheife and noble persons in ye world’. Like most nuns in the early modern period (usually due to the dowry requirement for admission), the Poor Clares were from the higher social classes. Their gender, combined with nobility, converge in the construction of their identity. Now enlarged to a community of sixty, the religious life is described in terms of labouring activities: drawing turf and wood, brewing, baking, working in the kitchen. Their prayer routine is described in detail, underscored by their adherence to ‘all other things ordained by ye first rule of sainct Clare with the strights [strict] statuts made by sainct Closett [Colette] vppon sd Rule’—copies of which, of course, they had in English and were producing in Irish.73 The community’s success is measured, again, in terms of spectacle and pious repute. ‘The fame of their vertuous life being spread abroard, it was cause that many great personages came to see them from farr off, and were edified by their holy conversation’; amongst them Lady Wentworth, wife of the recently appointed lord deputy, and the duchess of Buckingham, who visited from Dublin. Katherine Villiers, duchess of Buckingham and influential figure at the Caroline court, had renounced catholicism at her first marriage but returned to the fold after her husband’s assassination in 1628. Her second marriage in April 1635 to Randal Macdonnell, second earl of Antrim, brought her into the Irish ambit. They lived permanently in Ireland from September 1638 until the rising of October 1641, and she was a participant in confederate politics until her death in Waterford in November 1649. Her interest in the Poor Clares, then, must have 71
Walker, Gender and Politics, 38–42. Galway Chronicle, fol. 4r. The chronicler echoes here the 1635 English translation of the life of St Clare, The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare: ‘gentle woemen and Ladies contemning their faire houses and sumptuous tables shut vp them selues in monasteries’; Frans Korsten (ed.), Elizabeth Evelinge, I, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Series 1, Part 3, vol. 3 (New York: Ashgate, 2002), 119. 73 Galway Chronicle, fol. 4v. 72
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been sympathetic. Elizabeth Rodes, the lord deputy’s third wife, was connected to Abbess Dillon by marriage. James Dillon, third earl of Roscommon, married the lord deputy’s sister, Elizabeth Wentworth (who may well have accompanied the women to Bethlehem). His aunt Jane was married to Abbess Cecily’s eldest brother, Sir Christopher Dillon. These court ladies serve as a mechanism for the introduction of providential revenge to the narrative: ‘ye Lady Deputy wth other Ladyes that were in her company told them That it was noted how those who p[er]secutted them, out of Dublin, did never after prosper well.’74 There is some truth in this report, although it might be attributed to the lords justices’ relationships with Wentworth rather than providence. The earl of Cork was threatened with prosecution in 1636 for his landacquisition practices in Munster; Loftus was imprisoned in Dublin Castle in April 1638, and released the following year. The nuns’ pious reputation also inspired others: the chronicler reports that a house of the third order of St Francis (laywomen who took simple vows) in Drogheda was prompted to enclosure by Bethlehem. Some years later seventeen Bethlehem nuns left for Drogheda to found a convent of the first rule in the same town (the convent reported to Vane, above). This golden age, in which the convents ‘were flourishing as well in admitting of good p[er]fect members, as alsoe in vertue and renowne of good life’, comes to a sudden close with the wars following the Ulster rising of October 1641.75 Another Sir James Dillon (Abbess Cecily’s brother) was in charge of the Irish confederate forces besieging Viscount Ranelagh, president of Connacht, at Athlone throughout 1642. The chronicler strategically omits this circumstance, introducing her account of events via God’s providence in warning the nuns of an impending protestant attack on the convent. The narrative design imitates the life of St Clare, the order’s foundress. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who was excommunicated twice and finally deposed by Pope Innocent IV, had made peace in 1228 with the Muslim Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt. He recruited Saracens to his army, and they attacked Assisi in 1240 and 1241. These attacks are recounted in the English life, The History of the Angellicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare (1635). The repulsion of the Saracen army is achieved through the intercession of St Clare’s prayer to the holy sacrament.76 The chronicle’s account is modelled on this hagiographical life, as is indicated by a series of verbal echoes. The Irish women’s vulnerability is expressed in terms of their isolation and devotion: the ‘poore flock . . . were surprized wth great feare and terrour, not knowing where to seeck for help, nor from whome to hope for deliuery from soe eminent a perill, but onely from God, by ye meritts of their most holy mother’. The English biography of St Clare reports that ‘the 74
Ibid., fols. 4v–5r. Ibid., fol. 5r. For this story, see Korsten, Evelinge, 190–5. St Clare was particularly associated with devotion to the blessed sacrament; see ibid. 188–9. 75 76
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Religious were so surprised with feare and terrour . . . not knowing where to seeke for help nor from whom to hope for deliuery from so eminent perill but onely by the merrits of their holy mother’.77 The Irish nuns, we are told, erected in the choir a painting of this miracle, ‘to be still praying before it, in prsence of ye Most Blessed Sacramt’.78 The incorporation of this episode to their own situation offers precise symbolic value: associated with the anti-Islamic defence of catholicism, St Clare’s successful repulsion of the Moors offered hope of a similar defeat of protestant forces at Bethlehem. Of particular concern to the women, like many contemporary convents of nuns in Europe threatened by adjacent warfare, was the prospect of rape: ‘It can be hardly expressed wth what fervour and Devotion these sacred vergins prayed then to God to deliver them from that perill, especially that they should never loose the pretious Iewell of their verginity, wch would greeue them, more then any kind of death that could be invented’, again recalling the 1635 life, in which ‘it can not be expressed with what terrour and teares these deuout virgins incessantly offred their prayers’.79 The women mobilized themselves to pray in rotation twenty-four hours a day, spending months thus ‘in such panic as it were farr easier for them, to suffer death at once, then to liue in the like prolonged martyredome’. The hagiographical model is again recalled through verbal imitation, the narrative aiming to evoke the providential victory achieved by St Clare.80 A copy of the 1635 English translation is currently held at the Poor Clare Monastery, Galway, inscribed to the Poor Clares of Galway from the Gravelines convent and dated 13 June 1667. Browne was in exile at this time, and her Irish original would not have seamlessly incorporated such textual borrowings. It is likely, then, that her English translator mined the hagiographical text donated to her community. This demonstrates the intertextuality of this female culture of writing and its cross-genre applications. It points to a hybrid model of chronicle authorship, consonant with the prioritization of the collective over the individual. In narrative terms, however, the parallel broke down; on this occasion, their prayer fails and the women must flee. The plot is handled with great skill, events depicted in rapid succession according to a framework of action and reaction. The departure of fourteen nuns to found a new convent in Galway is represented in terms of the soldiers’ response, the effect heightening the tension even further: ‘The heritickes heareing 77
Galway Chronicle, fol. 5r; Korsten, Evelinge, 191–2. Galway Chronicle, fol. 5r. 79 Ibid., fol. 5v; Korsten, Evelinge, 195. 80 The chronicle’s representation of the women ‘pouering foorth from their vexed hearts sweet Lamentations, replenished with confidence in their beloued Spouse Iesus Christ, often repeateing how they had abandoned all for his love, and retired to that solitud, and could not vse materiall weapons to defend themselves’, is modelled on the 1635 biography’s formulation: ‘she sent forth from her heart these sweet lamentations, replenished with confidence in her beloued spouse Christ Iesus; is it possible my God thy will should be that these thy seruants who can not vse material weapons to defend them selues’; Galway Chronicle, fol. 5v; Korsten, Evelinge, 192. 78
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how these Religious were brought to Gallway, it spurred them on the sooner to effect their wicked designe, least the rest that remained in the Convent after them (wch were about 30 in Number) should be alsoe taken away, before they should make their prey of them.’81 The intensification of the language dovetails with that of the narrative pace. The nuns, throughout defined in accordance with a discourse of gentility and vulnerability, are opposed to their rapacious enemy: the lamb versus the wolf. The chronicler conforms to Counter Reformation practice in labelling the protestants heretics—a useful designation of apostasy for the reformed church that had broken from uniform catholic teaching. The Louvain authors, for example, invariably use eirice (‘heretic’); the word ‘protestant’ was rarely adopted in early modern Irish.82 As Carroll writes of contemporary exiled catholic historians, the term offered particular symbolic resonance in an Irish context: ‘The English . . . when portrayed as heretics could be seen as an alien people, who, similar to the Jews and the Moors in the Spanish Reconquest, would have to be expelled in the reconquest of Ireland by the Irish.’83 The symbolism further explicates the analogy with St Clare herself. Suspense is increased as the chronicler narrates that the women remained on the island some weeks longer, fleeing only at the very last minute: ‘at last they were warned, that the heretickes were in their way towards the Convent, and soe they fled away in boates to ye other side of ye lake.’ The narrative structure of action–reaction, whereby the nuns jump one step ahead of their enemy, is maintained as the protestant forces vent their anger. The chronicler details a catalogue of sacrilegious acts, coloured throughout by the language of cruelty: The Mercylesse heretickes seeing themselves frustrated of their Malignant intent, Entered into ye Convent, and stayed therein for ye space of three dayes and three nights, devoureing all the provision of ye poore sisters, and makeing their sport and laughter of the Alters pictures ornaments and sacred things wch were therein, some of them would putt on ye habitts of ye Nuns they found there, and jesting at them, would say, come lett vs goe say Masse, and yow to serve vs, Lastly sett fire to ye Convent.84
Further verbal parallels with the 1635 life—wherein the Moorish attackers are ‘merciles bloudsuckers’, ‘forced to abandon the prey’—serve both to associate the protestant soldiers with the ‘Barbarians’ of the Clarissian narrative and to authorize the chronicler’s violent language.85 Blasphemous iconoclasm is a commonplace of literature representing the religious wars, on both sides. 81
Galway Chronicle, fol. 6r. Of ninety-eight variants listed in Corpas na Gaeilge, all but four examples derive from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: protastant, protastu´in, protastu´n, protastu´nach, protastu´naigh, protestain, protestaint, protestanagih, protestanta´dhe, protestuin, protestu´in, protestu´inibh, protestu´n, protestu´naibh, protusdant, protustun, proitestu´n. 83 Clare Carroll, ‘Irish and Spanish Cultural and Political Relations in the Work of O’Sullivan Beare’, in Morgan, Political Ideology in Ireland, 233. 84 Galway Chronicle, fol. 6r. 85 Korsten, Evelinge, 191, 195. 82
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Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, for example, portrays a similar impulse to mock and deface the religious practices of the enemy; in that case, by catholic murderers of protestants.86 The gendered anxieties posed by a community of nuns, magnified by their actual escape, are symbolically defeated as the soldiers penetrate the cloister and perform a transvestite subversion of female catholic practice. The barrier of enclosure, which created a sense of exoticized spectacle earlier in the text, is surmounted. Spectacle depends on boundaries between viewer and viewed; here the women are absent, permitting a desecration of the convent space which figures sexual violation. However dramatic Browne’s representation may seem, there is corroborating evidence. Richard Bellings, in his history of the confederate wars, coincides in many of the details. He describes: three hundred, who, under the command of [Captain Francis Bertie], the Earle of Lindsay’s sonne, were sent to the convent deserted by the nuns, where they had left all their provision, some of their habits, some pictures and other adornments for their chappell and aulter. The souldiers who had as little reverence for those things consecrated to God, as they had temperance to abstaine from the drinke in the cellar, fearlesse of any enemy, and secure, as they tooke it, from all danger, filled themselves liberally. Soe as when a party, sent by Sir James Dillon, who was advertised how they were imployed, came upon them the next morning, most of the souldiers and officers were as unfitt to fight as they were uncapable to obey the commands of their leader, who, striving in vaine to draw his men into a posture of making resistance, and giving prooffe in his owne person of much resolution and vallour, was slaine, and with him most of his men, the Irish being incensed at the copes and habits which some of the souldiers had put on to make themselves sport.87
The Old English Bellings, whose history was composed in 1674, was secretary to the confederate government from 1642 to 1651, and therefore well placed to document the event. Moreover, he is not the only confederate author to incorporate the Poor Clare experience to his narrative. It also serves, for the anonymous native Irish author of the Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable Faction, as a signifier of anti-catholic cruelty. This author writes that: The Round-heads issuinge to the countrie, ranginge the matter of 4 score, went to Bethlem (the place wheare those nuns did dwell was soe called) demolished the house, caried away what they founde in it, and hittinge on some of the habitts, some of the rogues did weare those wides in a gyringe [jeering] maner, tellinge their comrads that he was a poore nun. Away they went to theire garrisons, as they thought, but against God’s divine providence, there is noe wisdom. One Captain Charles Mellaghlin of Sir James 86 See the murders of Coligny and Loreine; Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris (London, 1594), sigs. Br, B2r. 87 John Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, 1641–1649, 7 vols. (Dublin, 1882–91), i. 85–6.
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Dillon’s regiment, and Oliver boy FitzGerald with the matter of 4 score men in theire company, lay in ambush before these Round-heads, seeinge theire fitt opportunitie, started to them, slaughtered them all there, neither had they the courage to stricke one blowe in proper defence. . . . See how those were payed, for plunderinge the nunrie, and for gyringe the holy weede.88
Written between 1652 and 1660 and arranged into chapters headed by aphorisms (largely derived from Robert Dallington’s 1629 Aphorismes Civill and Militarie), the Aphorismical Discovery narrative takes the opposite political view to Bellings (who blamed the papal nuncio Rinuccini for the defeat of the confederation). The discoverer represents the confederation’s collapse as the result of factional politics. Nevertheless, both writers’ attention to the attack on Bethlehem points to confederate history-writing as a fruitful generic context for Browne’s chronicle. Competition over the writing of history was clamorous. Exiled catholic ecclesiastics such as Nicholas French and John Lynch, and Fr Peter Walsh in Ireland, published versions of history which argued against the exclusion of the Old English community from the Restoration land settlement.89 Like all these writers, Browne writes on behalf of her own community. At this stage of her narrative the communal identity of the group of women religious converges with the military identity of the confederation. As the widespread rebellion sparked by the Ulster rising of 1641 grew into a war, the Old English joined forces with the Gaelic Irish, an alliance formalized as the Confederation of Kilkenny, the first assembly of which met on 24 October 1642. Royalist and catholic, the confederate government attempted to marshal opposition to the English parliament during the wars of the three kingdoms. That Browne was firmly in support of these religio-political allegiances is most clear at a later point in the narrative, when Galway is commended as the last town to surrender in 1652: ‘Gallway held out a whole yeare after the three Kingdomes yeilded to ye Parlem.t, fighting valiantly for their faith and King.’90 By 1652, of course, Charles I had been executed; his son, crowned Charles II by the Scots in 1651, was in exile; and confederate hopes had collapsed. But the attack on Bethlehem occurred at precisely the point in time when the confederate alliance was being forged, and the story of the nuns is interwoven with that of national politics. The nuns’ chronicle becomes one of many texts which construe events through the royalist, catholic prism of defeat. The narrative arc parallels that of the Aphorismical Discovery, shifting from the nuns’ ‘prolonged martyrdome’ and the transgressive occupation of the convent to a providential revenge. As Walsham has shown, providence was a central and 88 John Gilbert (ed.), A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland, from 1641 to 1652, 3 vols. (Dublin: Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1879), i. 58. 89 For these writers, see Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, 117–48, 177–9, 204–29, 236–9. 90 Galway Chronicle, fol. 7r.
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flexible concept in medieval and early modern thinking. In Reformation England both protestants and catholics used ‘providence as an intellectual weapon in their struggle to win converts, reinforce the commitment of their existing constituencies, and undermine the morale and credibility of their “heretical” or “antichristian” enemies’.91 In defiance of the attempt to destroy the convent, ‘God preserved Mirac[ul]ously the Tabernacle in wch the Most Blessed Sacrament was vsed to be kept . . . and likewise an old Image of our Blessed Lady both made of wood’.92 The chronicler’s account is constructed with a keen eye to drama: her soldiers (who are fewer in number than Bellings’s and greater than the aphorismical discoverer’s) stay three days and nights, rather than Bellings’s single night. She elides her male contemporaries’ emphasis on military hierarchy and order (strikingly omitting reference to the abbess’s brother) in favour of spontaneous popular fury. Her avenging force is a righteous horde, recalling the Dublin mob who gathered in defence of the nuns: ‘they were all surprized and Killed (being in number 120) by a p[ar]ty of ye Irish Catholickes who to revenge such Enormious a crime, and publicke affront donn to the Spouses of Christ, Gathered from the boardering villages, and fell vppon them, in the high way like fierce Lyons.’93 The plebeian composition of the avenging catholics is emphasized: ‘not onely those armed men went about to revenge that wicked fact, but even ye very Labourors and pasturors of ye feild wth their clubbs and shouells . . . a Cow herd would slash a Trooper in ye backe wth his batt.’ The chronicle accords with both confederate accounts in representing the protestant soldiers as incapable. Like the discoverer, she attributes this to cowardice rather than drunkenness: ‘it seemed they lost all their courage . . . and a sudden freight and terrour surprised them in such confused manner, that none of them all lifted vpp his hand, to defend himselfe, nor begged quarter, but onely one who was a knights Sonn, and their Captine.’ The deployment of this key phrase—‘a sudden freight and terrour surprised them’—reverses the roles of soldiers and nuns; the nuns, ‘surprized wth great feare and terrour’, escaped. The narrative pivots around to portray the converse situation, in which their vulnerability is transferred to the 91
Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 225 and passim. For an influential discussion of puritan providentialism, see Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present, 109 (1985), 55–99. For a pertinent counter-claim to providence in an Irish context, see Oliver Cromwell’s account to the English parliament of the victory at Wexford in 1649: ‘we intending better to this place than so great a ruin, hoping the town might be of more use to you and your army, yet God would not have it so; but, by an unexpected providence, in His righteous justice, brought a just judgment upon them, causing them to become a prey to the soldier, who in their piracies had made preys of so many families, and made with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they had exercised upon the lives of divers poor Protestants’; Wilbur Cortez Abbott (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), ii. 142. 92 Galway Chronicle, fol. 6r. The wooden statue of the Virgin Mary with child is still held at the Poor Clare Monastery, Galway. 93 Ibid., fol. 6r.
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enemy. The symmetry in the phrasing concurs with the inevitability of divine retribution underpinning the episode. As a narrative strategy, this is compounded by the verbal play on ‘quarter’: Captain Bertie, who ‘begged quarter . . . was answered that one who comitted ye like sacralidge deserved noe quarter, but deserved to see him selfe quartered, and wth that he was stabbed to death’.94 The providential design is relentless. One soldier fled to Athlone, but there ‘ye ensueing night being possest wth an infernall fury stabbed himselfe with his one [own] dagger, and soe went to accompany his fellow shouldiers to hell’.95 Another, who hid in a corn-hutch, was followed by his enemies, who, after searching all ye house and not finding him, were goeing away but it chanced (because it was Gods will that none of them should escape) that the belt of his sword remained out of ye Hutch; whereat they rann towards the place where he was, and openning the Hutch, did take him vpp by ye haire, and as ye halfe of his body was out of it, they layed ye table over him, and cutt of his head.
These details are derived from unnamed eyewitness testimony (‘Such as were prsent at this slaughter said . . . They sayed besides . . . ’). Far from retreating from the violence described in the text, the narrator concludes the story with a satisfied flourish: ‘This was the end of that infernall people being a Iust and due hire, to such cruell and Impious insendaryes.’96 The apparently shocking quality of the depiction, however, should be considered in light of the contemporary life of St Clare: the chronicler’s account may be graphic, but its representation follows the hagiographical model of the order’s foundress. Thus, the chronicle leans generically in two directions. It draws on the order’s hagiographical life, exploiting its terminology both to draw explicit parallels with the foundress’s experience and to authorize its depiction of violence. Simultaneously, it participates in contemporary confederate history-writing, providing a female-authored perspective on the early events of the war. Browne’s responsibility to her female religious community allows for a distinctive version of providential closure, however. The agenda of both Bellings and the aphorismical discoverer was to write a history of the war in its entirety, with a view to vindicating their own communities. Hence, both male authors are presented with the dilemma of a satisfactory narrative ending in the face of defeat (a problem insightfully discussed by Rankin). Browne’s teleology is different: her narrative is focused on the female religious collective and the dispersal of the community, where narrative endings are resolved in individual adherence to piety in exile. Her text, while resonating with contemporary confederate histories, avoids their problem by situating itself primarily within the paradigm of chronicle-writing. The Irish Poor Clares were involved in their own battle over 94 95 96
Ibid., fol. 6v. Ibid., fol. 6r. Ibid., fol. 6v.
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land at the Restoration, but it was not conducted through historiography.97 Their chronicle participates both in the established genre of nuns’ history-writing and in the post-confederate history-writing of their male contemporaries but it prioritizes the former as an interpretative framework. The impact of the evacuation of the Bethlehem convent on the narrative is to intertwine the Poor Clares’ story with that of the catholic confederation. The subsequent series of resettlements follows the gains made by Cromwellian forces across Ireland, and the narrative continues to be dominated by providential design. The vicaress of Bethlehem and co-founder of the order in Ireland, Sr Martha Marianna Cheevers, led some of the community to a new foundation at her native city of Wexford. Cheevers herself died four years later, and her miraculously preserved body is written into the national narrative.98 The chronicler describes how ‘her graue oppened of it selfe, being the summer before Cromwell tooke Wexfoord, wch was ye first place he tooke in Ireland’ (Wexford was taken in October 1649). Cheevers’s body is inscribed within the overlapping discourses of politics, religion, martyrdom, and miracle. The perspective of hindsight frames the discovery of her corpse, witnessed by Franciscan friars: ‘amongst the rest, three of ye seaven ffranciscans Martyred then by Cromwell, whose names were fa.r Hamon Staford, Bro. Didacus Chivers and bro: James Rochford.’99 Sr Martha Marianna’s body, ‘as white and fresh as when shee was buried, onely that her hands, were as if they had beene anointed with oyle’, is interpreted as a portent of the Cromwellian assault on the town: ‘the holy martyre father Hammon said it prognosticated some great tribulation that was to come, the wch came to passe very soone.’100 The incorrupt body foreshadows the accounts of exiled nuns to follow. The remaining women of Bethlehem settled in Athlone town, while ‘The English gott ye vpper hand in Drogheda, and p[er]secutted ye Irish out of it’, causing the removal of these Poor Clares to Waterford. Their determination heeds scriptural example: ‘following herein ye Councill of our Lord who sayth; If yo.w be p[er]secutted in one Citty, fly vnto another.’101 Another new convent was optimistically founded at Loughrea in 1647. But the Cromwellian dissolution of 1653 rendered their situation intolerable: to live ‘out of cloister among Seculars, 97
See O’Brien, Poor Clares, 30–1. Cheevers was dead by October 1646, when a petition from the Wexford Poor Clares signed by Mother Mary Augustine was received by the confederate government; CSPI, 1633–1647, 659. 99 Galway Chronicle, fol. 7r. Didacus Cheevers was surely a relation of Sr Martha Marianna. Rochford may have been related to the Franciscan Robert Rochford of St Anthony’s, Louvain, who obtained a passport to accompany the original group of women to Dublin from Nieuwpoort; Mooney, Irish Franciscans, 105. 100 Galway Chronicle, fol. 7r. 101 Ibid., fol. 7r. Matthew 10: 23. The nuns stayed in Athlone at least until May 1647, when they petitioned the confederate government for relief; CSPI, 1633–1647, 662. A letter from Sr Magdalen Clare of the Waterford convent to General Thomas Preston is dated 3 May 1645; Gilbert, History of the Confederation, iv. 242. 98
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in a Country where heretickes had all magesteracy and Gouerment . . . is as for the fish to be out of ye water’. Recalling the Dublin novices in 1630, many resolved ‘to seecke a chelter in strang Countryes, wherein they might Enjoy ye sweet imbracements of their celestiall Spous after wch they were Launguishing’.102 Spain was the most attractive destination for banished religious (and secular refugees; see Chapter 3), due to the Spanish king’s provision of dowries and pensions, its state aid motivated by the common cause of catholicism.103 This broader religio-political identity again impinges on the story, as Browne testifies to seven Poor Clares embarking on ‘a ship Loaden wth souldiers, among wch were many of their Coussins and frinds eccleciastiall and secular that came in banishm.t’.104 The hardships of this journey, compounded by the ship’s quarantine off the coast of Galicia for fear of plague, caused the deaths of the foundress Sr Cecily Francis Dillon and Srs Margaret Evangelist Moore and Cecily Joseph Burke. At this stage the chronicle switches from national events to testimonial and obituary as narrative paradigms. Tellingly, it is also the point at which the firstperson singular pronoun enters the narrative. There is always a tension in the writings of women religious between the individual and the collective—most particularly between personal credit and the self-abnegation required as a member of the community. As Browne writes at the close of her chronicle, ‘before death, none is to be praised’; the paramount virtue of humility dictates that recognition must be posthumous.105 The key to the emergence of the first-person singular at this point of the narrative is its new responsibility to testify to the experiences of exile. The community’s fragmentation is mirrored in the narrative voice. The nuns have dispersed and eyewitness testimony becomes crucial: ‘In this persecution and banishment dyed very many of them in great renoune and estimation, after suffering incredible miseries, necessityes, toyle and troble, all wch I will sett downe heare.’106 102
Galway Chronicle, fol. 7v. The annals of the English Poor Clares record two Irish nuns who drifted initially to Spain, but then to Dieppe, where they founded a secular house. Sr Clare Ludovick Tuite then moved to the English community at Rouen, where she remained for seven years, and in 1671 was financed to return to Ireland, where she re-founded the Athlone house. Sr Catherine Magdalen Burke came to Rouen in October 1665, yearning to die in an enclosed religious house, which she did in January 1666; Ann M. C. Forster, ‘The Chronicles of the English Poor Clares of Rouen’, Recusant History, 18 (1986), 96, 179. Fr Raymond Caron is reported as having helped the Irish Poor Clares at Dieppe. Srs Ellis Font and Elizabeth Skerrett remained in disguise in Galway. The first abbess of the Galway convent, Sr Mary Gabriel (Helen) Martin, also stayed in Galway, where she died in 1672. According to Fr Anthony McHugo, confessor to the Poor Clares from 1717 to 1720, some of the nuns who went to Spain returned to Galway to join their sisters in hiding. See Mooney, Irish Franciscans, 46; Benignus Millett, The Irish Franciscans 1651–1665 (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964), 230–2; O’Brien, Poor Clares, 30, 35; Concannon, Poor Clares in Ireland, 63–6. 104 Galway Chronicle, fol. 8r. 105 Ibid., fol. 10r. 106 Ibid., fol. 7v. 103
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Aware of the need to authenticate her hagiographical accounts of her Irish sisters, Browne is self-reflexive and transparent about her research methodology. Midway through this section of the chronicle she breaks off to describe her preparatory work: ‘But before I ∧undertooke to write in this booke what is recounted therein of the deceased Irish nunns; I wrote to ye Convents in wch they dyed, and to ye other persons of creditt, craveing their Letters of certification thereof, the wch Letters I keepe still in my custody.’ Her method included the gathering of biographies as well as memorials. Browne reports of her sibling Catherine’s death that her confessor, Fr James O’Neill, had written a biography, to which the reader is referred for further details of the miracles wrought through her.107 Recounting the story of Sr Julian Blake’s death at Ordun˜a, Browne cites ‘a relation wch ye Abbesse of that convent writ of her death . . . out of wch I will recount a little’. The implication that this account was significantly lengthier than a standard obituary is confirmed by Browne’s statement of self-restraint: ‘Many other things are related of her, but it is not fitt to inlarge them in this place.’ The self-awareness evident in the citation of her sources is enhanced by this nod to literary constraint. Her attention to the proper boundaries of genre is reiterated at the close of the chronicle: ‘if my intended brevity had permitted, I might ad[d] much more to what is sayd heare of ye deceased.’108 Oral testimony, especially from the host convent, is equally important. Of Sr Elizabeth Baptist Lynch, ‘her confessour Testified, that in his life he never treated wth a purer soule then her’; ‘after [Sr Margaret Clare Jonyne’s] death the community avouched . . . they never found her, but ordinarily in crosse, saying her prayers on her knees, wth her armes a crosse’. Sr Cate Evangelist tells the tale of Sr Clara Colette’s posthumous apparition in order to comfort the latter’s cousin in Madrid. Sr Apollonia Connor’s state of grace is reported by a Spanish sister at Valladolid; Sr Clare Maria’s aunt reports her niece’s apparition.109 Browne is candid about her personal investigations: ‘I doe alsoe verifie, that dureing my banishment heare in Spaine, I haue seene severall convents, in some of wch I Lodged some nights, and heard true relation of many.’110 Enclosure was often a bar to European nuns’ gathering of such testimony; Woodford finds that this was particularly the case during wartime, when the female chronicler might depend on second-hand information, whether oral or written.111 As we have seen, this was certainly the case for Browne in relation to the 1642 attack. On the other hand, in exile and aware that her chronicle would be the only witness to her deceased sisters in Spain, she energetically travelled and wrote to convents, seeking information which would be verifiable and retaining control over the 107 Galway Chronicle, fols. 9r, 8r. Millett surmises that this biography was sent to the restored Galway convent, where it was destroyed with Browne’s original manuscript in 1691; Irish Franciscans, 230. 108 Galway Chronicle, fols. 9r, 9v, 10r. 109 Ibid., fols. 8–9. 110 Ibid., fol. 10. 111 Woodford, Nuns as Historians, 122–4.
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papers she gathered. This is a different kind of collaboration to that seen in the translations: it is a gathering of sources, an exploitation of the networks of women religious in Spain, in order to authenticate the chronicle’s testimony. Browne’s testimonial is informed by hagiographical conventions; virtually no attention, therefore, is paid to life in the Spanish convents. The signs of God’s grace are manifest through the preservation of the incorrupt body after death. The chronicler’s sister, Catherine Bernard Browne, died in the Conceptionist convent known as Cavallero de Gracia, Madrid: ‘her body remaines still vncorrupted.’ When the grave of Sr Elizabeth Baptist Lynch, who died at the Conceptionist convent, Maqueda, was discovered, ‘her body was seene fresh and white, wthout any bad Smell’. The body of Sr Clara Colette Christian Blake, who died in the same convent, became a spectacle of piety: ‘after her death her body became soe beautifull as it demonstrated the Glory her soule Enjoyed in heaven, and for admiration to see the like beauty in a dead carkas, many came to ye quire grate to look on it.’ Its purity was evident even five years later, when the corpse’s partially incorrupt status triggered its mutilation: ‘her right eare, and her tongue were found as fresh and intire, as when shee was aliue, and ye Nunns of ye convent seeing such great wonder they pulled out her teeth to haue them as relickes.’ A less grisly proof of the demand for mementos of an acclaimed devout woman is represented by Sr Margaret Clare Jonyne, who also died in Madrid. She was renowned for her particular dedication to prayer: ‘shuch was the estimation had of her good life, that . . . The Abbesse caused all ye beades, medalls, and other things of devotion, that shee carried about her . . . to be distributed betwixt severall p[er]sons, who wth great devotion begged it as a Relique’—the demand was such that her beads had to be distributed stone by stone.112 Another feature of these hagiographical accounts is the premonition of death, often accompanied by apparitions. Sr Clara Colette, in addition to inspiring a frenzy for dental relics, reportedly foresaw her own death, arranging her profession for that day. She appeared miraculously to Sr Cate Evangelist in Madrid. Sr Apollonia Connor of the Loughrea convent died with the Carmelites at Valladolid; she ‘merited to see our B: Lady comeing to comfort her in her death bed’, and a Carmelite sister reported a vision in which it was revealed to her that Apollonia attained to heaven following fifteen days in purgatory. Sr Clare Maria of Wexford, hosted by the Urbanist convent at Salamanca, ‘attained to such perfection, that shee knew her death a yeare before it’. She appeared to an aunt in the same convent at the moment of death to assure her of her salvation, kissing her. The interpretation is again aimed at calculating the time spent in purgatory: ‘for 3 dayes after shee felt cold in her lipps, from the kissing, by wch shee Iudged, that the deceased was not then in Glory, though neere to come to it.’ 112
Galway Chronicle, fols. 8r–9r.
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Sr Mary Augustine of Waterford struggled at her death in Madrid with more troubling visions: ‘the divell was inciteing her to vaine glory, for leaveing her Country, parents, and friends, to come to comply wth her obligations of a Monasticall life, for ye overcomeing whereof, shee craved the prayers and assistance of her confessor, with the Religious women that were prsent, wherewth shee overcame the Hellish fiend.’113 Thus, the anxieties of exile disrupt the good death. Like her foundress, this Irish nun triumphed with prayer.114 The singular Sr Julian Anthony Blake died in a Clarissian convent in Ordun˜a, ‘where by marvelous signes God manifested how pleaseing her soule was unto him’. One of these signs was her spontaneous fluency in Spanish: ‘being alwayes very backeward in speakeing the Spanish languadge, some dayes before her death, shee spoake it as eloquently as if shee had beene natiue of ye same Country.’ Her exemplary death is portrayed in her joyful singing and its effect on those around her: ‘ye community tooke such delight, that each one said interiourly, what sweetnesse is this wee feele, it is to be in Glory, or assisting a good death.’ She, too, foresaw her demise: ‘prsently shee became sencelesse, and soe rendered her happy Soule to God, wth such peace and Tranquility as if it were smileing.’115 Those for whom there was no evidence of especial grace in death are approved via a formulaic construction: Sr Catherine Francis Browne (who died in the Urbanist convent, Bilbao) ‘left behind her a sweet odour of vertue and renowne of good life’; Sr Cate Evangelist ‘liued and dyed in Renoune of a holy life’ at Madrid; Sr Margaret FitzLaurence died ‘in Renowne of good life’ with the Urbanists of Salamanca.116 There is an interesting dynamic—pertaining to many nuns’ lives and chronicles— between the individual woman, lauded for the extraordinary signs of grace, and the conformity of those signs with hagiographical protocol. The paradigms of praise for the individual nun adhere to long-established ecclesiastical conventions. The function of such biography is to present exemplary models for imitation, but their very compliance with orthodox paradigms (the female saint, the religious order, the national mission) locates these women within collective catholic contexts. The particularly Irish character of these accounts—the nuns’ determined adherence to their original rule, even in exile and living in convents of a different profession— could inspire the chronicle’s readers in their continued struggle to persevere with their faith and vocation. The chronicler is clear on the confluence of national allegiance and allegiance to the order, distinguishing Spanish from Irish devotion: ‘none of those [Spanish] convents aneers, to the stright observance of fasting, sylence, dispropriety, and such other Austerities, of the forementioned convents of Ireland.’ 113
Galway Chronicle, fols. 8v–10r. ‘This noble Damsell Clare vsed prayer as a shield wherwith she surmounted the diuell and triumphed ouer his temptations’; Korsten, Evelinge, 182. 115 Galway Chronicle, fol. 9. 116 Ibid., fols. 8v–9v. 114
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The final paragraph of her chronicle is preoccupied with this matter. Browne insists upon the Irish convents’ strict adherence to the order’s rule and statues, citing first male Franciscan witnesses and secondly her own eyewitness perspective: ‘there are yett aliue many graue fathers of ye observants worthy of creditt, who cann certifie this to be true, whereas some of them were provincialls, others visiters, and others confessors to the said convents: And I my selfe (although an vnworthy sinner) can wittnesse it.’117 The parenthetical self-deprecation points, once again, to authorial self-abnegation, and to the gendered hierarchies of authority prescribed for communities of nuns. The Irish Poor Clares were forced to break cloister many times: when banished from Dublin, when evacuated from Bethlehem, and when exiled by Cromwell. In such circumstances it is little surprise that their chronicler insists time and again on their conformity to the rule and statutes of the order.118 Browne’s insistence on the Irish convents’ adherence to the first Rule of St Clare and Colettine statutes reiterates the centrality of those texts to the community, and explicates the importance of arranging for their translation into Irish. These translations enable us to contextualize the chronicle. Rather than a singular nun’s account of persecution and resistance in Ireland, the chronicle is one of a group of Poor Clare texts highly involved in the language politics of Counter Reformation Europe. Nuns wrote obituaries, annals, chronicles, religious lives; they translated devotional and foundational texts. From a European perspective these texts are typical, entirely at one with the literary activities of their sisters on the continent. Their reading culture can be partially reconstructed. The chronicler (or her translator) had access to a life of their foundress, St Clare—perhaps, as I have suggested, the English translation produced in the Aire convent and presented to their Galway sisters. They read Fr O’Neill’s life of their former abbess, Catherine Bernard Browne, sister of the chronicler; an addendum to Browne’s narrative, dated 1694, refers to her perfections, ‘cleerely manifested in her life written by her confessor the Reverend father Iames O Neile’.119 The chronicler, or her translator, was well versed in scripture, as is evident from numerous marginal citations of the New Testament. Two passages cited at the chronicle’s beginning are central tenets of the vow of poverty: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven;’ ‘Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.’120 The passages quoted in the chronicle itself are designed to illustrate the condition of displacement. The first—‘The poore Nuns being thus wthout a place wherein to dwell according the saying of Christ (vide the foxes haue their holes and the birdes of ye ayre their nestes, but ye Sonn of man hath not where to decline his head)’—may be derived 117
Ibid., fol. 10. The Irish Dominican O’Heyne is equally anxious to assert the Dominicans’ adherence to their rule in Galway, despite their breaking of cloister; Coleman, Irish Dominicans, 163. 119 Galway Chronicle, fol. 11v. 120 Matthew 5: 3; Luke 6: 20. The former verse is also cited in the 1635 life; Korsten, Evelinge, 143. 118
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from the English Declarations and Ordinances; this is one of the few biblical images introduced to the order’s Colettine statutes.121 Two further quotations comment on the experience of persecution and exile: ‘If yow be p[er]secutted in one Citty, fly vnto another’; ‘heare Daughter, and see and incline thine eare, and forgett they people, and the house of they father.’ The proximity of the language to the Authorized King James version of 1611 is striking: ‘But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another’; ‘Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear; forget also thine own people, and thy father’s house.’122 Considered in tandem with the verbal echoes of the 1635 English life of St Clare, these allusions suggest a degree of creativity on the part of Browne’s translator. This brings us full circle, from the translation of the female-authored rule and statutes of the order into Irish to the translation of the Irish chronicle into English. The literary input of Browne’s translator, informed by her community’s devotional reading and writing, mirrors Mac Fhirbhisigh’s customizing of his translation for the female community. These scriptural quotations bear no relation to the 1602 Tiomna Nvadh, the protestant translation of the New Testament into Irish. Although the chronicler or her translator may have been familiar with the Latin Vulgate, the additional incorporation of the English life of St Clare into the chronicle suggests that the anonymous translator added to Browne’s text in the process of rendering it for the English speakers of her community. That Browne herself was indisputably an author is shown by both internal and external evidence. The opening paragraph of the chronicle suggests that the text as it survives is merely one part of a greater whole. It begins with the sentence: ‘Although there came noe more of this holy order that dyed actually by sheding their blood for Christ to my knowledge, then what is formerly sett downe, yett the reader may supose that there are many more.’123 Further evidence is provided by a 1732 bibliography of Franciscan publications collated by Fr Joanne a` s. Antonio Salmantino. Here, Salmantino describes: a most famous Irishwoman from the Poor Clares of the monastery of the city of Galway of that realm, having been moved because of risings and wars to the monastery of Madrid commonly called El Cavallero de Gracia in Spain, shining with the model of life, wrote a
121 Galway Chronicle, fol. 6v. ‘The foxes haue their holes, and the birdes of the ayre their nestes, but the Sonne of man hath not whereupon to rest his head’; Knott, ‘Rule of St. Clare’, 71. Cf. the King James Authorized Version (1611): ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head’; Luke 9: 58. 122 Galway Chronicle, fols. 7r, 8v; Matthew 10: 23; Psalms 45: 10. 123 Galway Chronicle, fol. 3r. The first folio of the manuscript is damaged: the top of the page is torn out in a triangular shape. The sides survive, showing that nineteen lines of the manuscript are incomplete. The text then begins with an account of the Irish Poor Clares who came home from Gravelines.
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huge work in large quarto, in the Irish language presently kept by the commissary of the Irish at Madrid and strengthened by licences and censures. I have seen it.
This quarto comprised eleven tracts, which are listed as: ‘An historical discourse on heresiarchs and their persecutions’; ‘The martyrdoms of certain Poor Clares and Tertiaries during the tyrannous cruelty of Ireland’; ‘A life of Henry the Eighth’; ‘A life of Anne Boleyn’; ‘A life of Queen Catherine’; ‘The Acts of the Virgin Saint Colette’; ‘A life of the Blessed Margaret del Pilar, Poor Clare’; ‘A life of D. the holy Queen of Sicily’; ‘An historical tract about many persons of most proven life in the world’; ‘Concerning the devotion of the Rosary and its origin’; ‘Concerning other Rosaries given by divine generosity to God’s own devoted ones.’124 As Concannon and Taylor have proposed, it is likely that the second of these tracts is the chronicle which survives, titled in the manuscript, ‘how divers Religious women of this holy order dyed in persecutions Banishm.t and calamityes for their holy faith and profession, and especially of such of the Irish nation as dyed soe’.125 This tantalizing account of Browne’s work points to a circulation network which stretched beyond convent walls. Salmantino’s informed description of her life and work provides authoritative proof of Browne’s dedication to writing once resident in a secure religious house. That security, unfortunately, did not extend to our time: the original to which he refers has disappeared. Surely one of the great lost texts of early modern Irish women’s writing, Salmantino’s detailed description points us to a more international Counter Reformation concern with devotional and biographical writing that accords perfectly with the lives and devotional texts so typical of convent literary activities. The historical circumstances which dictated endless rounds of relocation are the probable cause of the dearth of surviving texts produced by early modern Irish nuns. Unlike, say, the prolific hive of writing activity at the Cambrai and Paris convents of English Benedictines, whose enthusiastic composition of spiritual meditations and translation of pious texts have been documented by Wolfe and Latz, Irish nuns did
124 ‘MARIANNA A S. BONAVENTURA, Hyberna clarissima, ex Clarissis Monasterij Civitatis Galvensis ejusdem Regni, seditionum, ac bellorum causa in Hispaniam translata, Mattiti in Cœnobio, vulgo dicto el Cavallero de Gracia, exemplaritate vitæ refulgens exaravit ingens opus in 4. magno, sermone Hybernico, impræ sentiarum asservatum a` Matritensi Hybernorum Commissario, licentijs, & censuris roboratum. Vidi. Continet tractatus istos: Discursum Historicum de Hæresiarchis coramque persecutionibus. Quarundam Clarissarum, ac Tertiariarum Martyria durante Hybernie˛ tyrannica crudelitate. Vitam Henrici Octavi. Vitam Annæ Bolene˛. Vitam Reginæ Catharinæ. Acta Sanctæ Coletæ Virginis. Vitam B. Margarita del Pilar, Clarissæ. Vitam D. Sanciæ Reginæ Siculæ. Tractatum Historicum de plerisque personis vite˛ probatissimae in sæculo. De devotione Rosarij ejusque initio. De alijs Rosarijs Divina largitate, suis devotis concessis.’ Joanne a` s. Antonio Salmantino, Bibliotheca universa franciscana, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1732; repr. Farnborough: Gregg Press, 1966), ii. 328. I am grateful to Eric Graff for this translation. See also Concannon, Poor Clares in Ireland, pp. xv–xvi. 125 Galway Chronicle, fol. 3r. Concannon, Poor Clares, pp. xvi–xviii; Taylor, ‘Writing Women, Honour, and Ireland’, ii. 658–9.
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not have an extended period of time in one place affording them the opportunity to write.126 That the Poor Clares made best use of what opportunities they had is evident from their commissioning of translations, Browne’s gathering and authoring of a range of texts, and her anonymous sister’s creative translation of her chronicle. In focusing on the writings generated by this community of women religious, this chapter has embraced more than one genre of writing. Their religious vocation places the Poor Clares’ production of texts in a broader European, and gendered, context. Contemporary women religious directed their attention to the vernacular translation of foundational texts, the composition of lives, obituaries, and chronicles. In this sense, the chapter is distinct in its identification of a female culture of writing, centred around the community of women religious, and characterized in literary terms by its adherence to a homogenous group of devotional genres. This context is paramount to the understanding of these texts. The writings emanating from the Irish Poor Clares, apparently unique from a national perspective, conform entirely to the European picture. Rather than isolated examples of literary production, they properly belong to a vibrant tradition of women’s writerly activity. The genre-based methodology of this study proposes that women’s texts should be understood in their pertinent contexts, not in singular isolation. To understand these Poor Clare texts we must look to their European counterparts. The Irish Poor Clares themselves took their cue from the diasporic European experience. They originally professed at Gravelines and emulated that community by producing their own vernacular translation of its English Rule. The Clarissian Rule and Colettine Declarations and Ordinances—female-authored texts, translated by English nuns—are located firmly within a specifically female culture of literary activity. This is the primary context for the Poor Clare translations, as is highlighted by Mac Fhirbhisigh’s self-conscious eschewal of classical Irish prose. Their commissioning of himself ´ Cle´irigh suggests that these nuns were comfortably abreast of the contemand O porary literary efforts of Gaelic scholars and their political agenda. Abbess Browne, who commissioned Mac Fhirbhsigh’s translation, was herself a committed and multilingual author. There was, then, a significant degree of literary expertise within the community, and the range of language competencies among the women is signalled by his apologia, addressed to those well versed in classical Irish literature and its aesthetics. His adoption of a distinctive pedagogical strategy with regard to language suggests a collaborative model of translation. Concurrent with the female, European context are contemporary male models of diasporic history-writing. The stylistic lucidity of the Colettine translation 126 Wolfe, ‘Reading Bells and Loose Papers’; Dorothy Latz (ed.), ‘Glow-worm light’: Writings of Seventeenth-Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1989), and The Building of Divine Love, Jeanne de Cambry: As Translated by Dame Agnes More (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1992).
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accords with the methods of the Louvain Franciscans, who were at the same time addressing from exile an Irish catholic readership. The male-authored histories of confederate writers like Bellings or the aphorismical discoverer, and Restoration exiles like French and Lynch, are fruitful contexts for the Poor Clares’ chronicle. They show that the Poor Clare texts were immersed in other forms of writing and confluent with genres produced by men. But they differ in important ways. The printed texts issuing from Louvain were distant from their readership. By contrast, the distinctiveness of Mac Fhirbhisigh’s pedagogical strategy accentuates the intimacy of his relationship with his target audience, whose translation was initiated due to community needs and writerly tradition. The chronicle’s narrative teleology looks to the genres of nuns’ writing, resolving its story through obituaries. Thus, while the Poor Clare texts share important stylistic and generic features with these male models of devotional and history writing, they ultimately reaffirm the primacy of contemporary nuns’ writing as their generic frame of reference.
3 Petition-letters I durst not vntyll nowe . . . ones oppen my lypps nor put penn to paper to intreat (Eleanor, countess of Desmond, to Queen Elizabeth, 12 September 1574)
Petition-letters perform a clear political or economic function. The petitioner seeks to persuade her addressee to grant an individual suit. Moreover, the target audience—the state—provides for a high survival rate; as officially lodged requests, the state archives of England, Spain, and France have preserved petition-letters in extensive numbers since the sixteenth century. This is a rich area of study with regard to women’s literacy and authorship. In his survey of English women’s letters from 1540 to 1603 Daybell has found that this category accounts for one-third of extant letters.1 A petition signed or submitted by a woman is not necessarily written in her own hand: many are the product of collaboration with scribes and amanuenses. Our notions of authorship are expanded by this genre; the construction and arrangement of arguments are more important than the physical skill of writing. The genre’s conventions—its formal structures of address, language of supplication, etiquette of reciprocity—are preordained. If the suitor wishes to be heard, then she must speak the language of the state. This was a particular issue for Irish women, who were at a linguistic and geographical remove. The petition-letters discussed here demonstrate the pragmatism with which women overcame problems of literacy and language to lodge persuasive representations of themselves and their requests. To maximize the chances of success, the petitioner must familiarize herself with the protocol of the genre while identifying distinctive topics of persuasion to set herself apart. For many female petitioners their gender offered opportunities to elicit sympathy and expedite their requests. Women’s petitions often display a knowing and strategic mining of gendered stereotypes to achieve their own ends. The energy with which women from both native Irish and Old English traditions engaged with this genre highlights its practical function and suggests that it was often the only recourse open to women in dealing with the state.
1 James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 229, 234.
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This chapter approaches this material through the writings of two Irish women and a body of petitionary writing by Irish women in Spanish exile. As wife of one of the most powerful lords in Ireland, Eleanor, countess of Desmond, exerted considerable clout, and this gave her a substantial advantage among contemporary female petitioners. Her usefulness, for the crown, lay precisely in her role as intermediary with her rebellious husband, and Eleanor exploited her dual role as wife and subject, negotiating her own situation and agitating for political settlement through epistolary representation. But her bargaining-chips rested on her husband’s power. On the Munster rebellion’s failure and her husband’s execution, her political authority collapsed. This obliged her to fall back on more conventional petitioning strategies and to locate her topics of persuasion around the figure of the destitute widow and mother. At this stage petitioning the English state became something of a female family business, as her daughters joined her by composing petitions for relief. Throughout her petitioning career the fluctuating strength and weakness of her position can be traced in the reciprocal promises she offers. Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille (Grace O’Malley) was a Connacht chieftain in her own right. Popularly known as the pirate Granuaile, she addressed a series of petitions to Queen Elizabeth and her lord treasurer, Burghley, in the 1590s. These are remarkable for their robust handling of the principle of reciprocity, central to the form, and their skilful shifts between the personae of widow and warrior. Moreover, she composed these petitions as a non-English speaker. The process of composition, therefore, is examined and the strategies of her male contemporaries are discussed in order to elucidate the questions about language raised by her petitionary writing. For female refugees in Spain, the petition-letter was a crucial instrument for survival. Petitioning the Spanish king for pensions, they had to conform to specific conditions of eligibility prescribed by the state. Like Nı´ Mha´ille, they negotiated language barriers and worked with amanuenses. They used the military service of their male kin as proof of their contribution to the Counter Reformation cause. They framed their petitions according to the discourses of heresy and tyranny that underpinned Counter Reformation rhetoric. They exploited gendered stereotypes of female weakness to elicit sympathy. By doing so, they adopted apparently victimized and weak positions as effective means of persuasion. As a group, they were familiar with the most potent discourses of persuasion and deployed them with alacrity. These petitions reverse the principle of reciprocity so typical of the genre: they aimed to establish that the requisite service had been rendered and that recompense was now due from the Spanish state. All these women were immersed in the politics of identity and rebellion, and these circumstances are what drove them to write. Petitions must be persuasive. To expedite their chances of success, petitioners must understand their highly formularized structure and master rhetorical conventions and strategies. As Peter Mack asserts in his study of Elizabethan rhetoric,
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those ‘who cannot master the structures of discourse agreed by a particular community or who do not know the arguments it considers persuasive are excluded from direct participation’.2 Thus, the petitioner must be informed as to the processes of epistolary state engagement, its customary format, language, and topics of persuasion. Contemporary letter-writers were aided by Erasmus’ influential De scribendis epistolis (1521) and its sixteenth-century English adaptation, Angel Day’s The English Secretorie, published nine times between 1586 and 1635. Day’s manual distinguishes between epistolary registers, arguing that those petitioning for themselves should adopt a stance of ‘humilitie and entreatie’, whereas those writing on another’s behalf should present with ‘a necessarie supposall and assuraunce of their demaundes to be hearkned vnto’.3 The individual’s status and situation determined the tone of the approach. Women who participated in petition-writing demonstrated familiarity with rhetorical models; many became adept through frequent exposure. Writing of the fifteenth-century Stonor letters, Truelove argues that ‘stylistic influences, particularly in the case of women, were more likely to have come from contact with other examples of the form than from contemporary letter-writing manuals’.4 Daybell similarly argues that the ‘direct evidence of the letters themselves strongly indicates women’s conversance with the formal rhetorical structure of Renaissance letters, whether from the pages of Erasmus and Angel Day, through formal tuition, or perhaps more commonly from regular practical contact with the form’.5 A literary genre with a most pragmatic function, the petition-letter is a failure unless appropriately framed. Its conventions—formal salutation, deferential language, establishment of patronage relations, narration of arguments, the concluding promise of a reciprocal favour in return—are necessary to the suit’s success. The principle of reciprocity was a necessary corollary to the request itself. The petitioner promises to repay the debt, whether through prayer or some more material social benefit. On one level the reciprocal promise is a conventional prerequisite for petitionary persuasion. But the nature of the exchange offered is an important barometer of the petitioner’s power. The fact of the reciprocal promise is conventional, but the favour offered could distinguish the petitioner. What’s more, the principle itself could be reversed. In the case of the Spanish petitioners discussed below, the burden of requital rests with the state. 2
Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 3 Angel Day, The English Secretorie (London, 1586), sig. M8v. See also Lynne Magnusson, ‘A Rhetoric of Requests: Genre and Linguistic Scripts in Elizabethan Women’s Suitors’ Letters’, in James Daybell (ed.), Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 56–62. For English letter-writing manuals, see Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, ch. 3. 4 Alison Truelove, ‘Commanding Communications: The Fifteenth-Century Letters of the Stonor Women’, in James Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 53. 5 Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, 241.
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Although they adhere to convention, petitions could afford particular opportunities for self-construction. Daybell argues of letters more generally that they represent a ‘vehicle through which female letter-writers composed a self or selves through writing; the very process of writing a letter prompted women to view themselves in relation to others’.6 Petition-letters sharpen this focus on selfrepresentation. For a female petition-writer, her representation of herself was always shaped by her immediate situation. In making her case, the petitioner had to position herself in order to achieve her goal, and herein lay the space for manoeuvre. The genre encouraged women to narrate their circumstances, to present a version of themselves which would be likely to secure favour. But this self-representation was always coloured by the petitioner’s agenda and institutional audience. The subjectivity articulated in a state petition-letter is informed by the circumstances of the suit and anticipation of its reception. Female stereotypes afforded distinctive persuasive possibilities. Daybell identifies a number of strategies which exploited gender and distinguished female from male petitioners: ‘tropes of female weakness and fragility for strategic effect; emphasis on the plight of widows; the duty of wives, mothers, and kinswomen to intervene on behalf of family and friends.’ The prevalence of this strategy among petitioning Irish women demonstrates a shrewd manipulation of patriarchal assumptions. The perception of female weakness could be adapted as a strategic ploy. As Truelove puts it, representations as a submissive female were ‘tactical rhetorical devices, used to invite a favourable response from the recipient’. While observing the level of congruence between female- and male-authored petitions, Thorne finds that in ‘times of crisis . . . women were more likely to resort to stylistic devices that foregrounded their gender identity or familial status’.7 So often the instrument of disadvantage, in this context gender offered supplementary means of persuasion. Petitionary writing reveals a vast spectrum of women’s literacy. Traditionally, scholars assessing literacy in the early modern period have focused on letters and legal documents, designating signatures the most basic sign of writing competency. As O’Scea argues, this emphasis on signatures ‘tends to understate true reading capacity and to overstate true writing ability’.8 Holograph letters, written entirely in a woman’s own hand, are clear evidence of writing proficiency. However, Daybell’s evidence of the drafting of holograph letters reminds us that even this type of writing could be collaborative, and recent work has argued
6
Ibid. 7. Ibid. 231; Truelove, ‘Commanding Communications’, 54; Alison Thorne, ‘Women’s Petitionary Letters and Early Seventeenth-Century Treason Trials’, Women’s Writing, 13 (2006), 26. 8 Ciaran O’Scea, ‘The Role of Castilian Royal Bureaucracy in the Formation of Early-Modern Irish Literacy’, in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006), 215. 7
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for a more varied conception of partial literacy.9 Many women employed amanuenses to write their letters—as a sign of status, due to self-consciousness about defective spelling or handwriting, or sometimes due to no writing competency at all. But, as Bowden argues, the presence of the sender at the time of writing indicates active participation in the process.10 Autograph signatures provide evidence of a woman’s ownership of the text and suggest that, at the very least, she read it. Yet the process of composition need not demand even that level of signature ability. Daybell concludes that, ‘for a woman to be considered an author it is not necessary for her to have possessed the ability to write or actually herself to have written a text. What mattered instead was that she could communicate orally what she wished to have set down, or that she was able to participate in the process of revision.’11 Traditional literacy indicators can be misleading as guides to authorial proficiency, which embraces such aptitudes as invention and disposition of arguments, foresight with regard to reception, as well as an understanding of generic form. The petitioning career of Eleanor (ne´e Butler) Fitzgerald, countess of Desmond, occurs in two distinct phases: as wife and intermediary for her husband, and as widow of an executed traitor. The daughter of a Gaelic Irish mother and Old English father, she became the second wife of Gerald Fitzgerald, fifteenth earl of Desmond, in 1565.12 Her husband’s period of rule was riven by conflict: a longrunning feud with Thomas Butler, tenth earl of Ormond (first cousin to the queen, and son of Gerald’s first wife Joan); internecine rivalry within the Desmond lordship; periods of imprisonment in London; the first Munster rising (1569– 73) and eventual leadership of the Munster rebellion of 1579–83. Controversially proclaimed a rebel on 2 November 1579, the ensuing rebellion engulfed Munster and the English administration in Ireland. Ultimately it was disastrous for the Desmond lordship, laying waste to the province (as was most famously and graphically described by Edmund Spenser) and clearing the way for the plantation
9 Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, 76; Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in Gerd Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 97–131; David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and ‘Levels of Illiteracy in England 1530–1730’, in Harvey Graff (ed.), Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 105–24; Margaret Spufford, ‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Autobiographers’, in Graff, Literacy and Social Development, 125–50; Margaret Ferguson, ‘Renaissance Concepts of the “Woman Writer”’, in Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 146–52. 10 Caroline Bowden, ‘Women as Intermediaries: An Example of the Use of Literacy in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, History of Education, 22 (1993), 215–16. 11 Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, 90. 12 I follow here T. W. Moody et al., in the ‘vexed question of the enumeration of the earls of Desmond’; see A New History of Ireland, 9 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–2005), ix. 126, 168, 232–3.
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which granted lands to Ralegh, Spenser, and other English undertakers.13 Eleanor’s persistence in writing petitions (both holograph and autograph letters) reveals the lack of alternative options for an Irish woman immersed in, and tainted with, rebellion. But her petitions also show the effectiveness of the genre as a medium for political agitation, the assertion of counter-narratives, and its pliability as a form in which women could adopt tropes of female destitution for their own ends. In a letter of 1574 to Queen Elizabeth, following her husband’s most recent submission, Fitzgerald sets the tone for the first phase of her petitioning career. She establishes multiple speaking-positions—as loyal crown subject, as devout Christian, as personal suitor—and proceeds to explain her husband’s actions. She deploys antithesis to emphasize her claim that he was led astray, and lays responsibility for the ever-present currents of resistance at the foot of the crown’s Irish administration: ‘my husbands dealinge since his departur from dublin proceadid not . . . throughe eny evill intencion towards yor. Matie or dignitie: but rather incencid by vngodly disturbers of the comon tranquillitie to conceave otherwise of your worthy gouernor then he had Cause.’ She eschews the figurative language employed by her husband, whose letter accompanied hers and beseeched the queen for ‘one droppe of yor grace to asswadge the flame of my tormentid mynd’.14 But her resort to writing can only be authorized by the present moment of suspended hostilities: ‘yett I durst not vntyll nowe that he hath both hartely repentid and duetifully performid suche thinges as was requirid by yor mates Deputie and Counsell ones oppen my lypps nor put penn to paper to intreat for your highnes mercifull Clemency for him.’15 She did not wait for the convenient moment again but, having put pen to paper, Fitzgerald continued to compose petitions that agitated forcefully for reconciliation with the English state. Writing to maintain the peace between the first and second rebellions, the epistolary principle of reciprocal exchange served a coded political purpose. She wrote from Youghal on 30 September 1578, thanking the queen for her letter of 1 March. She flattered Elizabeth as ‘so noble and graciouse a princes indued wth such rare clemency’, who has condescended to write to ‘me yor maties poore, simple and Loiall subiect’. But her self-characterization signals the more immediate and urgent function of the correspondence: to assure the monarch of the couple’s loyalty. The conventional reciprocal offer of prayer for the addressee connotes a more political promise which is highlighted by the quantity of 13 Spenser, View of the State of Ireland, 101–2. See Ciaran Brady, ‘Faction and the Origins of the Desmond Rebellion of 1578’, Irish Historical Studies, 22 (1981), 289–312; Anne Chambers, Eleanor, Countess of Desmond, c.1545–1638 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1986); Michael MacCarthy-Murrough, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583– 1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Anthony McCormack, The Earldom of Desmond 1463– 1583: The Decline and Crisis of a Feudal Lordship (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005). 14 SP 63/47/56. 15 SP 63/47/55.
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synonyms: ‘So the onely Recompence that I can yeld to yor matie for the same (besedes my daylie praier) is faithfull fidelitie Sound Loyaltie and Duetifull obedience.’16 As with all the subscriptions to her holograph and autograph letters, the countess displays her familiarity with the semiotics of epistolary space: her signature is placed at the very bottom of the page, to the right, signifying the social superiority of the addressee.17 In this case Elizabeth wrote to Eleanor on 21 December 1578, assuring her of her good standing and promising a gift in return as ‘the proofe of our good meaninge towardes you’.18 (That the queen’s officials did not necessarily share her benign view is manifest in a letter from Lord Chancellor Gerrard to Walsingham on 8 January 1578/9, in which he reports that he has not yet delivered a gown from Elizabeth to the countess.19) The outbreak of the Munster rebellion put an end to such courtesies, and Eleanor’s diplomatic skills were severely tested. Frustrated with the Irish administration, she bypassed local state officers and wrote a lengthy petition-letter on 28 June 1580 to the English Privy Council. This autograph letter exploits her existing correspondence with the queen to justify Desmond’s attack on the administration in Ireland. It postulates a counter-narrative of events. Finally, it articulates the female petitioner’s own predicament, as dual subject of both husband and monarch. Fitzgerald forgoes any deferential introduction, opting instead to go on the offensive with an immediate complaint against the administration. The queen had written to her husband eighteen months previously, assuring him of her peaceful intent and impartiality. Eleanor repeated these words verbatim: ‘I per fectlie knowe that her Mates intention hath alwaies ben to maineteine her highnes subiectes of this realme in peace and quietnes: / And yt her officers shoulde wthout respect of person indifferentlie minister Iustice vnto all men wthout oppressinge of anie.’ More importantly, the queen had promised ‘to punishe with all severity’ any of her ministers convicted of acting otherwise.20 By invoking this promise, Eleanor sought to indemnify the accusations of hard dealing to follow in her petition. She summons monarchical authority—the queen’s own words—in defence of her position and against that of the Irish administration. Rebellion, of course, would render Elizabeth’s promise null and void. Hence, Eleanor’s next task was to explain and justify her husband’s declaration for the rebels while proving maladministration. 16 17
1–2.
SP 63/62/23. Jonathan Gibson, ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’, Seventeenth Century, 12 (1997),
18 James Hogan and N. McNeill O’Farrell (eds.), The Walsingham Letter-Book or Register of Ireland: May, 1578 to December, 1579 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1959), 30; for her letter to Gerald on the same date see pp. 29–30; for a draft of her letter of 1 March, see SP 63/60/21. 19 SP 63/65/13. 20 ‘. . . our intention having never been other then to maintayne them [her Irish subjects] in peace and quietnes, ministringe justice indifferently unto them all without respect of persons or oppression of anie’; Elizabeth to Earl of Desmond, 21 Dec. 1578, Walsingham Letter-Book, 30.
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Her petition explains the competing interests and conflicts of a highly complex political situation as she narrates her version of events. She distinguishes her husband from those who instigated the rebellion, citing his fidelity in the face of internecine opposition—‘the diligent painefull and loiall service, done by him ageinst his wicked bretheren, and ageinst the Traitor Ieames fitz morris’. By deploying the term ‘traitor’ early and attributing it to Fitzmaurice, she forestalls the issue of her husband’s attainder until she has explicated his actions. What turned the course of events, she alleges, was the brutal behaviour of Nicholas Malby, who exploited the power vacuum created by Lord Justice Drury’s death in October 1579: when ye place of Iustice was voide havinge the Leadinge of the Englishe armies marched therewth. into my husbandes Countrie, murdred, cer teine of his men, toke and spoyled certeine of his Castles, burned wthin heweses [houses] old men and children, and wthin churches bourned certeine monumtes of his Auncestors, and (a thinge wch greved him most) openlie called him a Traytor wthin the Cytye of Lymreicke.
This list of emotive grievances is then compounded, in Eleanor’s narrative, by the rebuffing of all her husband’s attempts at damage-limitation, including his proposed direct appeal to the English court and his pledge of both property and son. His official proclamation as a traitor is presented as the last straw. Her husband’s quandary is derived, in this account, not from his own antipathy to the English government, but from the administration’s treacherous dealings in affronting his house and threatening its destruction: ‘after he vnderstode he was proclaymed by that name, wch his auncestors and he ever tetested, he made choise rather to ioine his force for safegard of his persone wth his vnworthie bretheren, then to comit hym selfe to those who have alredie Condempned him.’ Portraying her husband’s decision as an informed but desperate dash for the lesser of two evils, her narrative seeks above all to supply context and motive. The petition then narrates its author’s independent plight. She is torn between two ideal types of female behaviour: obedience to her husband and to her monarch. These allegiances are now mutually exclusive, and the petitioner plays them off against each other. Caught between the obligation to her husband and her responsibility as monarchical subject, she claims to have preferred the latter: ‘I havinge respecte to my dewtie and to the vowe I made to her matie repaired to Lymbreick and there in vmble manner made sute to ye L Iustice that I might have some Lyveloide to leve vpon, and so to forsake my husband thoughe yt were ageinst the Lawe of god and man.’ But she had long argued for herself as a moderating influence on her husband; she was far too useful to the administration to be allowed to abscond. Hamstrung by her very claim to influence, her attempt to escape was compromised by her political value. Her conclusion slips between the two stools of obedience. Her husband’s faithful intentions toward the monarch are reaffirmed, despite her mooted abandonment of him. Recapping the case, she moves to apportion some blame onto her brother-in-law,
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Sir John of Desmond, with whom she had long experienced an uneasy relationship: ‘for my owne parte I verelie knowe and so doe diuers others that sethe the tyme I was married and speciallie sethens yt yt [sic] hath pleased god to send my husband a sonne, his wicked brother Iohn hathe allwaies enveyed the pro speritie of my husbande.’ Her understanding of the dynastic and political tensions underscoring the rebellion suffuses this petition. Expertly conveying the web of loyalties and competing interests feeding into the rebellion, events are reined in at its close by her return to the theme of justice. She reiterates the moment of his proclamation as pivotal and avers that her advice has not held since. The thematic frame of her petition evinces a subtle shift from monarchical to divine justice: ‘as knoweth god whome I beseiche to enspier into yor hartes to have dewe consideracion of the premisses wherebie these persones who cawseles have wrought my husbandes woe and myne, may be to the ensample of others ponnisshed accordinge to yeir deseate.’21 Her persona shifts within the petition from loyal subject to deserting wife to petitioner on her husband’s behalf. She clung to the justification provided by divided loyalties to husband and crown. The consistency of her arguments points to a concerted diplomatic strategy. Fitzgerald’s petitions attempt to maintain a baseline of obedient intention while insisting on the complex swirl of factors driving events on both sides in Munster.22 Cognizant since 1570 of the benefits of an appeal to the queen in person, her desire to circumvent the Irish administration found further expression in her reiterated requests for permission to travel to court.23 In this she was not unusual: English women also supported their written suits in person.24 But for an Irish petitioner personal attendance could surmount the additional obstacle of the provincial administration. That administration’s hostility, often rooted in her agency as a woman, reflects the shape-shifting persona of her 1580 petition. In the early 1570s she was perceived by members of the administration to have been a moderating influence on her husband. Captain George Bourchier, writing to Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam in December 1573, vouched for her ‘contynuall cryinge owt vppon him to remember his dewtie’.25 Less enamoured of her behaviour, Fitzwilliam nevertheless affirmed her persistence in this position to Burghley on 18 April 1574: ‘The Countesse wth her contynuall importunacie and constant asseveracion of his conformitie, made vs to hope he woulde in tyme prove so conformeable as she
21
SP 63/73/67; see also extracts in Field Day, v. 17–18. For Desmond’s efforts to negotiate an end to the rebellion between summer 1580 and April 1583, see McCormack, Earldom of Desmond, 187–92. 23 May 1581 to Munster council; SP 63/83/6 (ii). This copy was certified by Edmund Spenser, then secretary to the council. 24 Thorne, ‘Women’s Petitionary Letters’, 24. 25 SP 63/43/21 (ii). 22
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reportid him.’26 As the second Munster rebellion evolved, Eleanor’s slippery political positioning incurred the wrath of officials. Writing to Walsingham on 16 February 1579/80, Lord Justice Pelham advised that ‘there is not any amongst the conspirators that more encourageth the disloyalty of the Earl than she’.27 Geoffrey Fenton, writing from a camp near Askeaton on 8 August 1580, portrayed her as both rebel and arbitrator: ‘The Countesse came in at her day assigned, but wth the same impudencie wherewth she had covered her face since her first breaking out wth her husband: yet taketh she vppon her to worke hym to submission.’28 He echoes Fitzwilliam’s distaste for Lady Desmond’s boldness. Both men acknowledged her conciliatory efforts, suggesting that it was her gender which aroused their contempt. As the rebellion wore on, the more vicious denunciations of Fitzgerald derive from those whom she accused and who were forced into defending themselves on two fronts—militarily on the ground and textually in letters to the court. Sir Nicholas Malby (then governor of Munster) wrote to Francis Walsingham on 24 October 1580 expressing astonishment that ‘the wourdes of an infamous woman. the wyffe of a proclaymed traytor. her selfe a notorious trayteres. the greatest wourcker of thies wicked rebellions in the popes behalfe) should cary that credyt to deface the faythfull service of a duetyfull and honest servant’.29 The queen, however, took Eleanor’s allegations seriously.30 Clearly, such femaleauthored political agitation was effective but also provocative. Warham St Leger wrote to Burghley on 15 May 1581: ‘I knowe her to bee as wicked a womann, as ever was bred in Ireland, and one that hath benn the chief Instrumt. of her husbands Rebellion.’31 This litany of advocates and enemies demonstrates the extent to which she manoeuvred between political sides. The regular castigations of Eleanor as wily, crafty, and not to be trusted point to her skill in negotiating her parlous situation. As the rebellion entered stalemate Fitzgerald’s petitions witness the deterioration of her negotiating position. In January 1582 Sir John of Desmond died, leaving her husband as the rebellion’s sole figurehead. Eleanor’s petitioning strategy changed. She submitted to Lord Grey at the English camp on 15 June
26 SP 63/45/72; also the lords justices to the Privy Council, 12 Sept. 1579: ‘being a lady well disposed and apt to give good advise to hir husband’; Walsingham Letter-Book, 170. 27 Calendar of Carew MSS, 1575–1588, 222. By 12 August, however, Pelham wrote to the queen that the earl ‘maketh mediation for peace by the Countess . . . whose abundance of tears betrayed sufficiently the miserable estate both of herself, her husband, and their followers’ (p. 293). 28 SP 63/75/27. 29 SP 63/77/52. 30 The Irish Privy Council wrote to Elizabeth in response to a general report ‘that yor matie stoode greatlie displeased wt Sr nicholas Malbie vpon the complaint of the Countesse of Desmond’, enclosing depositions in his defence; SP 63/80/39–39 (i). 31 SP 63/83/25.
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1582, whence she was moved to Dublin.32 No longer petitioning on her husband’s behalf, her stance shifted dramatically from political agitation to abject submission. From Dublin in August she addressed two letters: one to the lord deputy and council, the other to William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The letter to Burghley, written in the first person and in her own hand, foregrounds her reversal. She is forced to negotiate space between others’ opinions of her and her own self-construction and sets out her admission of fault at the beginning: ‘I repaired to dublin, before the L. depputie and counsell, to submytt my self and consideringe howe depely I offendid her moste excelent maty I haue of sounde and good myende as becometh a loyall subiect to do, humbly and simply prostrated my self to her highnes moste gratious mercy.’ She argues against the decision to reinstall her in Munster, ‘a thinge more grevous to my then death and the place that moste abhorreth me’. This alienation from her husband’s power-base alters her self-representation. No longer his intermediary, she moves to exonerate herself. Wifely duty ceases to be a chosen allegiance; rather, it serves as mitigation: ‘god I take to withnes that I am Inocent of all evill actions towardes her maty Save only the followinge of my husband beinge dreven thervnto by compulsion.’ Her address to the English lord treasurer draws on the discourse of friendship to heighten the urgency of her plight: ‘my humble sute vnto your honor is . . . nowe in the tyme of my moste adversetie, not to wthdrawe your accustumed frendshipp from me so farre that yt wold please youe to be a meane for me to obteine her maty moste gratious favor and pardon.’33 The claim to friendship performs a further persuasive function. As Daybell argues, ‘women’s selection of a language of political friendship, and the dexterity with which they deployed this rhetoric, are in themselves instrumental in constructing an image of their authority and equality with the addressee’.34 In a worsening situation, this bid for familiar status also reveals her distance from the monarch. Her maternal role (never entirely absent from her petitionary concerns) combines with political nous as she makes a play for her son’s—rather than husband’s—future. James Fitzgerald had been offered in custody in 1579, ‘for the better prof of my loyalltye’. Left in Dublin Castle, ‘wthout any kyend of learninge or bronginge vpp’, his mother asks that he be removed to England with an eye to the future advantages for the Desmond lordship of an English court education.35 On her husband’s execution, in November 1583, Eleanor’s usefulness to the crown evaporated. Hence her epistolary persona shifted once again, as she adopted the persuasive tactics of the destitute widow and mother. She had 32 Walsingham sent instructions that she be returned to persuade her husband to surrender; SP 63/93/53. 33 SP 63/94/104. 34 Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, 258–9. 35 SP 63/94/104.
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been turned back to Munster and remained with her husband until June 1583 when, with her daughters, she submitted to her husband’s arch-rival, the earl of Ormond. Ormond wrote sympathetically of ‘this poer lady [who] lamenteth greatlye the follye and leodnes [lewdness] of her husband whome reason could never rule’, and became her ally, writing to urge her pardon in December 1583 and again the following month.36 Deprived of access to any Desmond lands (intended for settlers in the Munster plantation), Eleanor threw herself on the mercy of the state.37 She wrote in the first person to both Burghley and Walsingham from Dublin in September 1585 to explain her position and petition for financial aid. She was barred from travelling to England to petition on her own behalf and from suing for jointure as a condition of her pardon. Her strategy forsook self-justification in favour of the rhetorical figure of commiseratio, the evocation of pity: I and my children haue Livid in such calamite thatt if my Lo. deputie had nott taken pittie of me and them in Reliving vs owtt of his Lops [Lordship’s] kitchin we might haue staruid wth honger, for (in my necessitie) all my kinsmen & frendes here haue vtterly forsaken me, And since my Lo deputie wthdrewe his Liberalitie from me I and my children haue tasted of so moche myserie thatt I protest vnto yor honnor I knowe no waye howe to presarue me and them from perisshing by famyne except her matie do nott relive vs.38
It has been argued of this emotive trope that the extent of widowed destitution was often exaggerated.39 However, that Eleanor was not merely cynical in her deployment of this argument is clear from petitions on her behalf by the archbishop of Dublin, Adam Loftus, who wrote twice to Burghley testifying to the family’s impoverished situation.40 Her letter to Walsingham repeats this description of her condition. She adds complimentary clauses to her new correspondent which seize the moral authority of the scriptural widow and shift the grounds of reciprocity. Her appeal is couched in terms which might surprise those acquainted primarily with Walsingham’s reputation as Elizabeth’s ruthless spymaster: as the fame of yor honnorable & godly dealinges towardes those that are distressed hath spred farr abroad, So I as one thatt above all other wofull wightes haue most occasion of yor charitable furtheraunce am humbly to deasire you for gods sake to lett me among the rest of the afflighted sort tast of yor goodnes . . . In doing wherof yor honnor shall worck a most charitable deed And bynd me wth my five comfortles children to praye for the preseruacion of yor honnorable estat.41
36 37 38 39 40 41
SP 63/102/88; SP 63/106/13; SP 63/107/48. For her legal difficulties at this time, see Chambers, Eleanor, Countess of Desmond, 178–81. SP 63/119/2. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, 254. 18 July 1585, SP 63/118/30; 10 May 1586, SP 63/124/8. SP 63/119/3.
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Flattery is ever a means of persuasion, but the appeal to god is not coincidental. A particular obligation for succour pertained to magistrates and widows, derived from scriptural models.42 Reduced now to the commonplace reciprocal promise of prayer, this serves her purpose by substantiating the persona of the isolated widow. The principle of reciprocity shifts along with her situation. Implicit in her early petitions is the political value of her loyalty. However, as she comes to occupy the widow role—a role characterized, for her, by destitution—such reciprocal obedience is of little use. Thus, the moral currency of the scriptural widow attains greater prominence.43 Granted a pension of £100 per annum in August 1586, subsequent petitions focused on securing payment, often supported by personal attendance at court.44 Persuasion centred consistently around the representation of a starving family, unable to escape penury. Her petitioning career outlived her patron Burghley, who died in 1598. Fitzgerald co-opted his son and successor, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, as she deferentially proposed continuity of patronage: ‘As I have been always troublesome to my good lord, your father, who hath been my best and only means, so I presume upon your honourable favour besides all other.’45 Her political power-base had eroded, and Eleanor sought security in new marital alliances, either for herself or her daughters.46 Cecil apparently approved her ´ Conchubhar second marriage to Donough O’Connor Sligo (Donnchadh O Sligigh), a fellow Irish petitioner at the English court. Social status restored, her thanks were symbolically expressed. Before departing for Ireland she sent a short note to accompany the gift of an Irish harp to Salisbury.47 The gift is a measure of her improved situation: initially offering political fidelity as a requital of favour, then reduced to the widow’s prayer, the harp provides a reciprocal exchange in material kind, showing Eleanor’s restoration to elite patronage relations. Indeed, the harpist formed the acceptable face of Gaelic culture for the English; Cecil maintained an Irish harpist, Cormac MacDermott, from about 1603 until his death.48 42 e.g. Deuteronomy 10: 18: ‘He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and the widow’; and Isaiah 1: 17: ‘relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.’ 43 She wrote again to both officials in the first person on 10 Feb. 1585/6, deploying the same topics ‘to make my moane’; SP 63/122/68–9. 44 Calendar of Patent Rolls, Ireland, Elizabeth, 116. She was granted £200 on 20 Sept. 1588; ibid. 186. She spent a number of years living in England and petitioning for payments; see SP 63/132/ 32–3, SP 63/136/65, SP 63/142/47. For dockets recording her suits, see SP 63/149/37, SP 63/149/ 38, SP 63/150/39, SP 63/161/39. For her jointure dispute with her brother in 1598, see Calendar of Salisbury MSS, viii. 248. 45 4 May 1597, Calendar of Salisbury MSS, vii. 186. 46 25 May 1597, ibid. 212–13; 7 June 1597, ibid. 245. 47 4 Sept. 1597, ibid. 378. 48 See Lynn Hulse, ‘“Musique which pleaseth myne eare”: Robert Cecil’s Musical Patronage’, in Pauline Croft (ed.), Patronage, Culture, and Power: The Early Cecils (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 139–58; Sean Donnelly, ‘An Irish Harpist and Composer, Cormac MacDermott (?–1618)’, Ceol, 8 (1986), 40–50.
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Eleanor’s second husband, not unlike her first, was caught between two warring factions: the Gaelic earls of Ulster and the crown administration. But unlike her first marriage, she did not compose petitions on his behalf. Instead, she and her daughters continued to address petitions for financial redress to the English state. The perception of female vulnerability enabled them to request relief. O’Connor was restored to his lordship in 1596, when Sligo’s strategic importance grew as the nine years war gathered steam. He was captured by ´ Domhnaill (later husband of Brighid Fitzgerald, discussed in Rudhraighe O Chapter 1) in summer 1599 and coerced into support of the Ulster earls. In Munster, Eleanor’s son was ineffectively installed as earl of Desmond against the rival claimant, Eleanor’s nephew James FitzThomas, the ‘Su´ga´n’ (‘straw-rope’) earl. (Her son was withdrawn back to England, where he died in 1601.) Plunged again into political upheaval, Eleanor was esteemed as her husband’s confidante. But writing in itself was unsafe. O’Connor sent a messenger to his wife in Dublin with four sheets, blank other than his signature, ‘because he was not suffered to wryte any thing him self vnknowen to o donnell: Willing his wyffe . . . signifie the same in eich of theis blancks’.49 Eleanor did not express her political views in writing. Rather, she focused on her financial situation. She travelled again to London, arriving for a nine-month period in summer 1603 with her two daughters, Joan and Ellen. They industriously set about submitting petitions to Cecil.50 Fitzgerald’s position was compromised, however, by association with rebellion and the monotony of her petitionary assaults. Her petitioning career illustrates the importance of that fine line between convention and invention. She herself articulated her descent into repetition in 1603. Exhausted of new persuasive topics, she could only reiterate those which had characterized her suits as a widow: ‘in regard of my dutiful behaviour, chargeable and tedious suits these twenty years and upwards, as also that I am destitute of a place of abode both for me and mine.’51 She was conscious of the diminishing returns attendant on her tireless petitioning of the English state. But her persistence demonstrates the lack of alternative options available to a woman whose political influence was on the wane. Initially her petition-writing had been highly effective. She began by using the petition-letter as a medium for dissent, and stimulated the queen’s scrutiny of her Irish officials. But widowhood stripped her of political power and consigned her to acquiescent, conventional topics. Her petitioning career illustrates the mutability of self-construction as she adopted the personae of obedient wife and 49 O’Connor asked his wife to obtain permission to travel to Sligo, ‘in hope he might the better ympart his mynd to her’; SP 63/205/180 (iii). Suspicions as to her political motives remained current. George Carew alleged in 1600 that he had foiled Eleanor’s plan to marry her daughter Joan [Jane] to the Ulster earl Hugh O’Donnell, his description of the ‘old craftie Countess’ according with suspicions of many decades standing; Calendar of Carew MSS, 1589–1600, 491–2. 50 Calendar of Salisbury MSS, xii. 543, 578; xiv. 200; xv. 373. 51 Ibid. xv. 372. See also her petitions on same subject: xvi. 51–2, 236, 245; xvii. 171, 587.
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subject, political intermediary and agitator. She regularly set these roles against each other for her own ends. But it simultaneously charts a narrative of deteriorating influence. The shifting terms of her reciprocal promises mark its peaks and troughs. By contrast to Eleanor Fitzgerald, Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille’s political power was derived from her own independent position as Gaelic chieftain. This female leader was astute as to the genre’s potential as medium for political agitation and took advantage of the persuasive possibilities promoted by its monologic perspective. Sir Richard Bingham, governor of Connacht, was a thorn in her side and, recalling Fitzgerald’s complaints against the Irish administration, she accused the governor of unjust practices from the authoritative speaking position of a chieftain on the ground. Her stature as leader empowered her to engage robustly with the principle of reciprocity so central to petition-writing by offering military support in exchange for her suits. This discussion argues that her composition of petitions involved careful attention to the forms and language of the state. The articles of interrogatory addressed to her in London outlined the topics that were of interest to the crown with regard to her territory. Her petitions addressed these topics as a means of persuasion. Their composition in English highlights the importance, and success, of the negotiation of language barriers by Irish chiefs dealing with the state—a dimension of state negotiations that is easily forgotten. The surmounting of linguistic obstacles entailed a collaborative approach to authorship that embraced scribes and translators. A well-known and colourful figure in Irish history, Nı´ Mha´ille was a member of the Gaelic Connacht elite. Although twice married to men who were elected ta´naistı´ of their septs, it is as a pirate and leader in her own right that she was best known, and infamous among English administrators.52 She was described by Lord Deputy Sidney as ‘a most famous feminine sea captain’, who offered him the support of three galleys and 200 fighting men when they met (in the company of his son, the writer Philip) in March 1577. Sidney’s assessment— ‘she brought with her her husband, for she was as well by sea as by land more than Mrs. Mate with him . . . [she] was a notorious woman in all the coast of Ireland’—highlights her transgression of gender roles.53 The only female chieftain identified in Baptista Boazio’s 1599 map of Ireland, she overlapped with Desmond in ways that show the contingency of political allegiances in sixteenthcentury Ireland. In early 1577 Nı´ Mha´ille was captured by the earl of Desmond as a sign of his loyalty to the crown and imprisoned in Limerick.54 Toward the end of her imprisonment Drury described to the English Privy Council a woman ‘governing a country of the O’Flahartey’s, famous for her stoutness of courage 52 First (c.1546) to Do´nal an Chogaidh O’Flaherty of Ballinahinch, and second (by 1567) to Richard an Iarainn Burke of the Mayo MacWilliam. 53 Calendar of Carew MSS, 1575–1588, 353. 54 See Drury’s reports of July and August 1578; SP 63/61/30 (ii), SP 63/61/61.
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Fig. 2. Detail from Baptista Boazio’s map of Ireland (1599), identifying ‘Grany O Male’ as chief. British Library
Board. All Rights Reserved. Maps 10805 (166).
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and person, and for sundry exploits done by her by sea’.55 Despite Desmond’s actions, later that same year Nı´ Mha´ille’s husband Richard Burke (Ristea´ird an Iarainn Bu´rc) mustered forces in support of the Munster rebellion. The last Mayo MacWilliam (Mac Uilliam ´Iochtar) to be appointed in accordance with tanistry, he died in 1582.56 Bingham’s appointment as governor of Connacht in 1584 inaugurated a decade of hostilities and rebellion in the province which included the Burkes, and in which Bingham accused Nı´ Mha´ille of involvement. Long charged with importing Scottish mercenaries, she now flirted with the leaders of the Ulster rebellion. Her sons were caught up in events: the eldest, Owen O’Flaherty ´ Flathartaigh), killed in 1586; her second, Murrough (Murchadh na (Eoghan O Maor) O’Flaherty, submitted in 1591 (for which his mother punished him by an assault on his camp); her youngest, Tiobo´id na Long (Theobald Burke, who married Maeve O’Connor, sister to Eleanor Fitzgerald’s second husband), was imprisoned in 1593. Nı´ Mha´ille, like Fitzgerald before her, bypassed the Irish administration, composing petitions directly to both Queen Elizabeth and Burghley and bolstering their impact by a personal visit to the English court in summer 1593. Consistently hampered by Bingham, she sought to establish English rights to their land for both herself and male kin, and to obtain sanction for her martial activities. Nı´ Mha´ille maximized her first suit’s impact by lodging the same petition with the two most powerful agents of the state, the queen and her treasurer, Burghley. Dated July 1593, this is a sophisticated, cogent, and persuasive item of epistolary rhetoric. Crucially, Nı´ Mha´ille’s self-representation is grounded in an acceptance of English crown authority. Her stance, like Fitzgerald’s, is to question the local administration rather than the English government itself. Greeting the queen as ‘yor Loyall and faithfull subiect Grany ny Mailly of Conaght in yor highnes realme of Ireland’, Nı´ Mha´ille approached her suit deferentially. But her petition embraces a range of shifting and potentially contradictory positions. Her opening narratio places her past actions in the context of tribal strife, playing upon English prejudices. Martial behaviour is a product not of rebellion against the crown but of indigenous tradition and self-defence against sept rivalries. Nı´ Mha´ille’s own position as female chief is slipped in as masculine nouns slide into the singular feminine: wheras by meanes of the continuall discord sturres and dissention that hertofore long tyme remain among the Irishrye especiolly in west Conaght by the sea side; every Cheeftaine for his safegard and maintenance and for the defence of his people followers and contrye took armes by strong hand to make head against his neyborges: wch in like
55 56
Calendar of Carew MSS, 1575–1588, 141. Moody et al., New History of Ireland, ix. 171.
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manner constrained yor highnes said subiect to take armes and by force to maintaine her selfe and her people by sea and land, the space of fortye yeares past.
The elision assumes equality of status with her male contemporaries. Deferring her suit, the petitioner amplifies her narrative, introducing the more conventional gendered roles of wife, mother, and widow. On the one hand tempering the transgressive implications of her dominion, this self-construction simultaneously serves to set up one of her requests: as spokesperson for her male kin, she seeks English confirmation of their land rights. She outlines her marriages and progeny, pointedly asserting legitimacy (vital to her land-claims), and employing her husbands’ Gaelic titles: during wch tyme shee married O fflahertye being naturall mother of his Lawfull sone and heyre nowe lyving, and after his death married Mac William the cheefe of the Burghkes of West Conaght, who died xi yeares past, since which tyme she remaineth widdowe, and is likwise the mother of his lawefull sone and heyre nowe lyving.57
The adoption of English legal terminology points to her employment of an informed amanuensis and suggests her acceptance of English primogeniture. Her petition presents the bereft widow as falling between the two stools of ‘the rude custome of their auncesters’ and the local Elizabethan taxation settlement, the composition of Connacht. Introduced in 1585, this settlement sought to replace the English governmental tax (‘cess’) and the traditional Gaelic system of ‘coyne and livery’ (whereby mercenary soldiers were maintained by customary and arbitrary exactions on the chieftain’s subjects) by imposing instead a fixed rent of 10 shillings per quarter (120 acres) of inhabited arable or pasture land, with exemptions for local lords. With no provision according to either system, the destitute widow is subsumed by the chieftain: ‘by the same [she] is restrayned to vse her former course to her vtter decay and ruine.’ Having intertwined the potentially contradictory positions of female leader and bereft widow via her assertion of exigency, and having identified the equal failure of Gaelic provision and English composition in alleviating her plight, the petition moves on to its statement of request. This, in fact, comprises four distinct requests. The first sues for her own portion and introduces an argument of declining years: ‘In the consideracion wherof and in regard of her great age she most humbly beseecheth yor Matie of yor princly bounty and liberalitye to grant her some reasonable maintenance for the litle tyme she hath to lyve.’ Her second request is made on behalf of her two sons, asking that their lands be held in line with English patents. Furthermore, Nı´ Mha´ille petitions that her kinsmen, Walter Burke FitzTheobald Reogh and Shane Burke Mac Meiler, also be granted English legal rights to their land.
57
Underlinings are Burghley’s.
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Her final request, however, is remarkable. Moulding her own independent interests to those of the queen, Nı´ Mha´ille proposes a singular reciprocal exchange as subject morphs into champion: ‘And lastly that it would please yor matie, to grant vnto yor said subiect vnder yor most gracious hand of signet free libertye during her lyfe to invade wth sword and fire all yor highnes enemyes whersoever they ar or shalbe wthout any interruption of any persone or persones whatsoever.’ This far exceeds the coded political allegiance expressed by Fitzgerald prior to the Desmond rebellion. Nı´ Mha´ille tenders military support as recompense for the granting of her suits. The only behavioural change proposed here is the banner under which she will campaign: under the auspices of the queen, she will continue as before. Rather than being buffeted by circumstances which drive her to violence and plunder, the female petitioner seeks the endorsing mantle of the English sovereign in an arrangement of mutual protection. Her conclusion aligns fealty with military self-determination: ‘Thus shall your said subiect according to her bounden duty ever remayne in all obedient alleageance to the vttermost of her powre ∧resist all remnants of rebellions enimies and praye continually for yor Maties long life and prosperous raygne.’58 Siegfried has pointed to the potential ambiguity arising from the absence of punctuation here; obedience and resistance are indeterminately balanced.59 As a result, Nı´ Mha´ille’s power-base is married to that of the queen. The trajectory of selfrepresentation is fundamentally focused on the right to independent action. Her persona shifts from victim compelled to plunder to obedient subject compelled to counter-rebellion. This petition to the queen, repeated verbatim to Burghley, was likely shaped by Nı´ Mha´ille’s answers to the articles of interrogatory addressed to her, also in July 1593.60 Although it has been assumed that Nı´ Mha´ille’s petition was sent from Ireland, it is more likely—given the flawless secretary hand in which it is written—that it was composed and submitted in London.61 The articles comprised eighteen questions pertaining to Nı´ Mha´ille’s descent, marriages, and progeny; her kinship with other Connacht suitors then at court; and the ownership of land in Connacht. The questions put to her indicated clearly the topics of most interest to the crown. If the composition of letters prompted the author to 58
SP 63/170/64. Siegfried asks: ‘does Gra´inne mean that she will remain “in all obedient alleageance” only to “the vttermost of her power?” Or does she mean that “to the vttermost of her power” she will “resist all remnants of rebellious enemies”?’; ‘Queen to Queen at Check: Grace O’Malley, Elizabeth Tudor, and the Discourse of Majesty in the State Papers of Ireland’, in Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves (eds.), Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 167. The scribal insertion of ‘resist’ above the line renders it even more ambiguous. 60 Apart from minor spelling variants, the sole difference between the two petitions is that to Burghley substitutes ‘your oratrix’ for ‘your subject’; SP 63/170/65. 61 Anne Chambers, Granuaile: The Life and Times of Grace O’Malley c.1530–1603 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), 120, 122; Siegfried, ‘Queen to Queen’, 167–8; Judith Cook, Pirate Queen: The Life of Grace O’Malley, 1530–1603 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2004), 147. 59
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fashion herself, such interviews also directed the interviewee to think about herself in specific contexts. In particular, the articles demanded detailed information about Gaelic provisions for widows and about provision for wives in the composition of Connacht—key factors negotiated in Nı´ Mha´ille’s petition. Her replies were carefully read, as is clear from Burghley’s annotations, in which he underlined personal and place names (rendered below) and sketched family trees in the margins alongside her answers. Moreover, the oral interrogation would have entailed the services of an interpreter, shedding light on the processes of translation which must have pertained to the petition’s composition. In her answers, Nı´ Mha´ille agitated forcefully against Bingham. Her responses deployed emotive images and she took the opportunity to stick the knife into the queen’s governor wherever she could. In reply to the third article, ‘What sonnes she had by him [her first husband], what be their names and where they live’, she grasped the occasion, narrating in detail the MacWilliam rebellion in 1586 and her eldest son’s murder by John Bingham, the governor’s brother. At the outbreak of rebellion, she declared, her son Owen had quartered Bingham and 500 soldiers on an island off the west coast. But Owen was betrayed. Bingham apprehended her son and eighteen followers, imprisoned them at Ballinahinch, removed 4,000 cows, 500 mares and horses, and 1,000 sheep, ‘levinge the remaine of the poore men all naked wthin the Illand’. Attuned to the rhetorical function of commiseratio, Nı´ Mha´ille invoked injustice and age to colour her account: ‘that eveninge he caused the said xviij prisoners wthout triall or good cause to be hanged, among whom was hanged a gentleman of land & living called Theobault O Twohill being of the age of ffourescore and ten yeres.’ The following night, ‘the said owen was cruelly murthered having twoelve deadlie woundes, & in that miserable sort he ended his yeres & vnfortunat daies’. In her naming of a number of captains present at the event (one then at court) she avails herself again of the opportunity to point the finger. In answer to the eleventh article, ‘How she hath had mayntenance and lyvinge synce hir laste husbandes deathe’, Nı´ Mha´ille seized the chance to counter any accusations made against herself. She omitted any active part she may have taken in the rebellion and presented herself (like her son) as having followed Bingham’s instructions by raising her cattle and followers ‘to com and dwell vnder him’. Captured by John Bingham en route, her dramatic account displays a feel for vivid and moving detail: ‘thervpon shy was aprehended & tied in a rope, both shy & her followers at that instant were spoiled of their said Cattell and of all that euer they had besides the same & brought to Sr Richard, who caused a newe pair of gallowes to be made for her last funerall wher shy thought to end her daies.’ Burghley’s underlining shows the effectiveness of her narrative strategy. Nı´ Mha´ille anticipated charges of rebellion and explained her flight to the rebellious Ulster earls, balancing it with swift reference to her subsequent pardon in 1587 by the lord deputy: ‘feare compelled her to fly by sea into Wlster & ther, wt O Neale and O donell stayd three monethes: her galleis by a tempest being
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broken: shy retorned to Conaght & in dublin receyved her maties gratious pardon by Sr Iohn perrott.’ Possessed of a keen sense as to how these actions might appear, she used her presence at court to pre-empt and direct the crown response. Her effortless adoption of a range of personae is most apparent in her concluding selfconstruction which is, in itself, as remarkable as that of regnal champion: ‘ever sethens shy dwelleth in Conaght a ffermors liffe verie poore bering cesse & paing her maties composission rentes, vtterly did give ouer her former thrad of maintenanc by sea & land.’62 Nı´ Mha´ille adopts different positions, whether gendered or not, according to their anticipated persuasive force. The farmer persona was not to appear again. But the congruence of her answers with her petition hints that these articles of interrogatory suggested the arguments of the latter. Nı´ Mha´ille’s efforts were rewarded with a personal meeting with Elizabeth at Greenwich that summer. The meeting went well, but events at home made her impatient. In September she addressed a new petition to Burghley. Urgently concerned with her recently imprisoned son, Tiobo´id na Long, she urged the treasurer to deliver on the queen’s word: ‘whear the Quenes most excellent ma.tie of her gracious clemencie and favor towardes her hath promyste her letters to Sr Richard Bingam for the delyuery of her sonn whoe hath ben lately since her cominge from thence comytted to pryson’ (again pointing to her presence in London when submitting the earlier petition).63 She requested a stay of execution and, conscious of the queen’s distrust of her officials in Ireland, Nı´ Mha´ille drove a wedge between the two. The English state is distinguished from its instruments: ‘the ∧poor gentle: of of [sic] that countrey are soe exstreamly vsed as they are most comonly executed befor they be Iustlye tryed or ther causes duely hearde.’ Her martial persona is abandoned in favour of the language of patronage and friendship—‘she hath alwayes found your lp: her good lo: [your lordship her good lord] and best frende since her cominge hyther’—as Nı´ Mha´ille adopts the more conventional reciprocal promise of prayer for the patron: ‘And she shall pray for your honnorable lps good successe and longe lyf to contenue.’64 It appears, however, that it was the bellicose rather than submissive persona which appealed to Elizabeth herself. The queen was just as receptive to Nı´ Mha´ille’s complaints as she had earlier been to those of Fitzgerald, and sought Bingham’s account of events. Incensed by Nı´ Mha´ille’s direct engagement with the monarch, he wrote in August 1593 that ‘she was nevr helde here but for a noteable Tratouresse and Nurse to all rebellions in this Province’.65 Casting her governor’s hostility aside, Elizabeth wrote to him on 6 September 1593 ordering that her petitioner’s requests be adhered to. The apparent ease with which Nı´ 62 63 64 65
SP 63/170/62–3. Bingham reported Tiobo´id’s apprehension to Burghley on 13 Aug. 1593; SP 63/171/12. SP 63/171/44. SP 63/171/18.
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Mha´ille’s arguments of destitution, senescence, and combative loyalty were ratified points to the clarity with which they were presented. As Siegfried has observed, in her petition ‘O’Malley proffers the possible grounds for her own pardon’.66 Elizabeth ordered that her sons and brother be released from custody under bonds for their good behaviour, and indulgently accepted her submission: she will as long as she lives continue a dutiful subject, yea, and will employ all her power to offend and prosecute any offender against us. And further, for the pity to be had of this aged woman, having not by the custom of the Irish any title to any livelihood or portion of her two husbands’ lands, now being a widow . . . we require you to deal with her sons in our name to yield to her some maintenance for her living the rest of her old years.
Nı´ Mha´ille’s remarkable fusion of apparently contradictory personae is replicated in the incongruities of the queen’s reply. While the queen’s letter acknowledges and forgives the petitioner’s earlier insurrections, its final reiteration of her bellicose promise conveys the petition’s novel impact: ‘although she hath in former times lived out of order . . . She hath confessed the same with assured promises by oath to continue most dutiful, with offer, after her foresaid manner, that she will fight in our quarrel with all the world.’67 Nı´ Mha´ille’s insistence on her position as female leader determined the strength of her bargaining position—an exchange assented to by the monarch. Siegfried contends that her petition ‘is meant to mirror Elizabeth’s own position . . . although Elizabeth and Gra´inne figure competing forms of female sovereignty, they manage to collaborate on a transformation that preserves the Irish woman’s local authority while bolstering Elizabeth’s own status as queen’.68 Certainly, her success is founded on the dextrous construction of a multifaceted persona and adroit anticipation of its unique appeal. Yet Nı´ Mha´ille was careful to pursue her case. She followed it up with a more direct and traditional petition to Burghley. The same strategy delivered satisfactory results two years later. Nı´ Mha´ille travelled a second time to the English court in 1595, to protest her compliance and complain against Bingham’s sabotaging of her military efforts. On this occasion she procured a letter of recommendation from the earl of Ormond as indemnity against the English governor.69 The first of two petitions to Burghley on this visit renews her martial assertiveness. She juxtaposes the widow with the rejuvenated naval leader as she brings her addressee up to speed: sethens wch tyme shee procured all her sons, Cusens, and ffollowers of the mailles wth a nomber of galleis (whereof some new made and built after her last Retorn into Ireland) fournished wth men & victualles at their own chardges, accompanied wth Capten Strittes and his band of Souldiors, to repaire to the sease, wher in certaine Illandes eighten of the 66 67 68 69
Siegfried, ‘Queen to Queen’, 166. Calendar of Salisbury MSS, iv. 368–9. Siegfried, ‘Queen to Queen’, 166, 170. Ormond to Burghley, 17 Apr. 1595, SP 63/179/35.
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cheefest of the Bourkes here vnder named, being proclamed traitors, and a great nomber of their adherents, were killed and slaine.
Thus establishing a record of active service (against her own kinsmen) and cooperation with crown military officers, the petition moves to its specific grievance: the quartering on Nı´ Mha´ille’s followers of English soldiers, ‘wtout any cause of service in that part of the contrey to be donn’. She details the billeting costs and outlines the consequences in terms calculated to appeal to Burghley’s financial sense: ‘[this has] impoverished the poore inhabitantes: wasted the contrey, disabled them to sarve her matie diminished her hieghnesses Rentes and inforced yor suples and the Rest . . . to abandonn and leave the contrey.’ The petitioner speaks as leader, representing the collective privation of her people. Most pertinently to the state, this unsolicited quartering undermines the terms of the composition. Nı´ Mha´ille proposes a more cost-effective route: that she and her followers would serve ‘at their ownn chardges at sease vponn the coast of Ireland in her maties warres vponn all occasions’. She offers her resources in exchange for peaceful restoration to their land.70 But again, Nı´ Mha´ille followed her assured representation of military support with a more straightforward statement of her suit. Her letter of May to Burghley was the only petition to be addressed in the first person. It aims to capitalize on a more personalized relationship and hone the argument. Focusing on Bingham’s frustration of her individual claims to land, this petition concentrates on her personal suit. It occupies a more deferential position than her earlier petition. She again substitutes the conventional reciprocity of prayer for pugnacity: ‘humblye prainge yor lordshipes is faworable letters in my owne and me sonns behalf to the lo: deputie and to Sr richard bingame so cravinge pardon for my contynuall bouldnes bescechinge the livinge god to blesse and preserue yor lordships to yor hartes ease.’71 On both occasions Nı´ Mha´ille opens negotiations with a powerful rhetorical declaration of strength and then consolidates her case with a more measured representation of her suit. Both times, the strategy bore fruit. How were Nı´ Mha´ille’s petitions, so skilled in their rhetorical arguments, composed? The seductiveness of her alliance with the queen, inferring a relationship of mutual respect, has long captured the popular imagination in song and onstage.72 But the women are reputed to have conversed in Latin during their meeting at Greenwich in 1593; Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille apparently spoke only Irish and the contemporary lingua franca.73 The queen’s 1593 letter to Bingham, in
70
SP 63/179/36. SP 63/179/70. 72 See Chambers, Granuaile, 164–78. More recently, two stage productions by Macnas/Belgrade (Granuaile: The Pirate Queen, 2002) and the team behind Riverdance (The Pirate Queen, Chicago and Broadway, 2006) have foregrounded the meeting of the two ‘queens’. 73 Chambers, Granuaile, 135. 71
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remarking of Nı´ Mha´ille’s son, Tiobo´id, that he ‘hath been brought up civilly with your brother and can speak English’, suggests that his bilingualism was unusual for the family.74 Although Queen Elizabeth herself was urged to engage with the Irish language as early as 1562—as the dedicatee of the Old English and Cambridge-educated poet Christopher Nugent’s primer in the Irish language— there is no evidence that she took such promptings seriously.75 In order to negotiate with the English state all Gaelic chieftains had to find ways of managing the language barrier, and her male contemporaries provide illuminating models for understanding Nı´ Mha´ille’s mastery of the petition-letter. ´ Ne´ill (Shane O’Neill, c.1530–67) is particularly enlightThe case of Sea´n O ´ Ne´ill—elected ta´naiste of Tyrone—was suing for ening. Like Nı´ Mha´ille, O inheritance rights and autonomy as chief. His father had surrendered the Gaelic ´ Ne´ill, and been granted the first earldom of Tyrone. His son sought to title, O disbar the named successor (his illegitimate elder brother Feardorcha, Baron Dungannon) in favour of his own claim to the title. In his dealings with the ´ Ne´ill’s correspondence was English administration during summer 1561 O conducted in both Irish and Latin; the Irish originals are preserved with anonymous contemporary English translations.76 In January 1562 he attended the queen in person at court. In his speech of submission, reported in English but delivered in Irish, he stated that ‘because my Speache beinge Irishe is not well vnderstanded, I bothe caused this my Submission to be written in Englishe and Irishe and therto haue Sett my hande & Seale’.77 Like Nı´ Mha´ille, he was subject to detailed questioning by Cecil as to the legalities of his situation. These articles ´ Ne´ill’s answers are preserved in English in the state papers.78 Again like Nı´ and O Mha´ille, he addressed petitions directly to the queen in English during his fivemonth sojourn at the English court.79 Ignorance of English presented no handicap to the would-be earl of Tyrone in his transactions with the crown, of which Hogan has commented on ‘that remarkable intimacy with English and Anglo-Irish law and administration which is manifest in all his correspondence with the English authorities from 1560 onwards, and which is especially noticeable during the London negotiations’.80 That his refusal to acquire English was perceived, at least by his 74
Calendar of Salisbury MSS, iv. 368. Christopher Nugent, ninth Baron Devlin, wrote this primer in Cambridge in 1562. It was based on a primer for Elizabeth Zouche, who learned the language on her marriage to the earl of Kildare in 1503; see Gilbert, Facsimiles of the National Manuscripts of Ireland (London, 1882), vol. iv, part 1, p. xxxv and appendix, xxii. 76 SP 63/4/22, I–X. 77 SP 63/5/5. 78 SP 63/5/21–2. 79 For examples, see SP 63/5/42, SP 63/5/45, SP 63/5/49, SP 63/6/1. The latter is in the first person. 80 James Hogan, ‘Shane O’Neill Comes to the Court of Elizabeth’, in Se´amus Pender (ed.), Fe´ilscrı´bhinn Torna (Cork: Cork University Press, 1947), 167. 75
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countrymen, as a matter of taste and discernment is reflected in Holinshed’s report that a native Irishman, asked ‘why O Neale, that last was, would not frame himselfe to speake English’, answered: ‘thinkest thou, that it standeth with O Neale his honor to wryeth his mouth in clattering Englishe?’81 A salutary counter to English value-judgements on the Irish language as barbaric-sounding, Holin´ Ne´ill’s engageshed’s anecdote highlights the cultural undercurrents at play. O ments with the crown were informed and persuasive (although his primary suit was ultimately subject to the Elizabethan tactic of postponed irresolution).82 Many Irish chieftains were ignorant of the English language, and Latin was the lingua franca for their dealings with the English administration until at least the 1580s.83 Sidney had reported of his meeting with the Mayo MacWilliam (predecessor to Nı´ Mha´ille’s husband) in 1576 that he found him ‘very sensible, though wanting the English tongue, yet understanding the Latin’.84 Palmer, in her pioneering study of language and translation in sixteenth-century Ireland, has identified a silence in English sources about the processes of translation. Arguing against the contemporary occlusion of translation (inherited by scholars since), she reinstitutes the mechanics of communication, imagining ‘the reality of that encounter with its inevitable verbal and gestural fumblings—the sign language, the pidgin phrases, the macaronics of the new speaker, the mispronunciations and misunderstandings, the staggered exchanges mediated by interpreters and their variously unreliable glosses, the whole drama of language in flux’.85 Many Irish lords engaged interpreters to facilitate their dealings with the crown. In November 1567, when Sir Donald O’Connor Sligo (uncle of Eleanor Fitzgerald’s husband) arrived in London to submit to Queen Elizabeth, he brought with him his own translator: ‘the said O’Connor Sligo came to the Queen at her palace of Hampton Court, and there in his Irish tongue by an interpreter ´ Briain (Conor O’Brien), declared to her Majesty.’86 In 1580 Conchubhar O third earl of Thomond—who arranged for his son Donnchadh to be educated at the English court, thus ensuring his heir’s linguistic and cultural assimilation— negotiated with Ralph Rokeby, chief justice of Connacht, through the earl of ´ Briain’s Irish into English.87 Ormond, who translated O 81
Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, ed. Liam Miller and Eileen Power (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1979), ´ Ha´inle for this reference. In a Jacobean play, the character O’Neale 17. I am grateful to Cathal O reproaches his secretary: ‘Esta clamper, thou talkest to much the English’; The Famous Historye of the Life and Death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley (London, 1605), sig. D3v. See also Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, 18–19. 82 ´ Ne´ill, see Ciaran Brady, Shane O’Neill (Dublin: Historical Association of Ireland, For O 1996). 83 Patricia Palmer, ‘Interpreters and the Politics of Translation and Traduction in SixteenthCentury Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 33 (2003), 260. 84 Calendar of Carew MSS, 1575–1588, 49. 85 Palmer, Language and Conquest, 45. 86 Calendar of Carew MSS, 1515–1574, 378. 87 Ciaran Brady (ed.), A Viceroy’s Vindication? Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland, 1556–78 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 74.
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Levels of language competency were varied, reflecting gaps between comprehension and verbal ability. Sir Robert Gardiner in 1594 observed that Aodh ´ Domhnaill (Hugh O’Donnell) understood but could not speak English.88 O ´ Domhnaill and O ´ Ne´ill, employed Philip Hore ‘to Both Ulster chiefs, O translate into English their demands’ in January 1595/6.89 Richard Bingham himself used interpreters during his period as governor of Connacht in the 1590s, not least in order to translate the terms of the composition to those who could not speak English.90 Nor were all contemporary interpreters male: ´ Ne´ill, earl of Tyrone, apologized in Toirdhealbhach (Turlough) Luineach O 1574 for his ‘illiterate education’ and the ‘imperfect setting of inappropriate and unfitting language’.91 His Scottish wife, Agnes Campbell, acted as interpreter for him during the 1570s.92 But as Palmer has shown, the identities of translators of written documents were often obscured by passive constructions. While letters intercepted in Ireland were frequently forwarded to the English administration with translations into English attached, the process of translation (or communication in Latin) often went unremarked.93 Sidney’s easy narration of the conversation he and his son had with Nı´ Mha´ille in 1577—‘This woman did Sir Philip Sydney see and speak withal; he can more at large inform you of her’—highlights the point.94 Those who composed petitions to the English state, whether Irish or English, male or female, rarely wrote holograph letters. They employed secretaries. Thus, Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille’s petitions—silently translated—were, like those of her contemporaries, written by amanuenses. Personal attendance at court would have enabled her to forge acquaintance with interpreters and scribes; not least, her interrogation by Burghley required a competent translator (or, like O’Connor, she brought her own). In personally attending the court and availing herself of interpreters, Nı´ Mha´ille could retain control over her petitions, working with those versed not only in the language but in the discourses of the state in order to maximize the effectiveness of her suits. Such a level of control was not always retained by Irish chieftains whose letters required translation.95 88
SP 63/172/89 (i). Calendar of Carew MSS, 1589–1600, 144. 90 For references to the Binghams’ use of interpreters, see SP 63/157/24, SP 63/158/57, SP 63/ 161/1, SP 63/172/38 (ii), and Palmer, ‘Interpreters’, 265. 91 CSPI, 1571–1575, rev. edn., ed. Mary O’Dowd, 522; the original is in Latin; SP 63/45/19. 92 Palmer, ‘Interpreters’, 270–1. 93 See e.g. Bingham’s forwarding of a letter in Scots Gaelic received from the mercenary McDonnell gallo´glaigh in 1586; CSPI, 1586–1588, 153–4. The original, headed ‘The translation into Inglish of an Iryshe Lettere sent to Sr Richard Binghame by the Captens of Scottes’, preserves only the anonymous English translation; SP 63/126/17. 94 Calendar of Carew MSS, 1575–1588, 353. 95 In a letter to Burghley on 17 July 1587, Lord Deputy Perrott recounted an abuse of his position by the Scotsman Davies Omey. Employed as translator by Toirdhealbhach Luineach ´ Ne´ill, the process of composition is laid bare as the assorted texts were retrospectively gathered: O the original Irish, the translation into Latin, and then the mistranslation into English by Omey. The 89
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Analogous language barriers faced the Irish female refugees who flooded Spain. For these women the petition-letter was the means to a pension. They overcame obstacles of language and poor literacy to make claims on the Spanish state. But their services to the catholic cause were almost inevitably predicated on the military careers of their male kin. Thus, male biographies are woven into these women’s representations. The gendered rhetoric of destitution comes to the fore as tropes of female vulnerability are exploited time and again to elicit sympathy and thereby expedite the request. Their frequent success, and the competition among the Irish, is suggested in a poem by the exiled fileadh, ´ g Mac an Bhaird (whose ‘Truagh liom Ma´ire agus Mairgre´g’ is Fearghal O discussed in Chapter 1).96 Writing to the founder of the Irish college (and author ´ Maolchonaire, from his of Desiderius, discussed in Chapter 2), Flaithrı´ O lodgings in Louvain, he complained of the sheer volume and ignobility of those seeking succour on the continent: Meisi folamh, fe´ch nach diongna, ’s da´oine da´ora ar na´r dhu´al gean sunna o´n Spa´in ag agha´il ionmhuis a n-ana´ir chla´ir bhionnghlais Bhreagh. Mna´ anu´aisle buirb is bathluigh a mbeartaibh o´ir san aird thall ata´id tra´ agus sinn gan e´da´il, dar linn ata´ e´ga´ir ann. (That I am empty—see whether this be not a thing to mark, while base folk, unworthy of regard, are here receiving riches from Spain in honour of the sweet green plain of Bregha. Vulgar wives of churl and clown are yonder in golden raiment, while I lack wealth—I deem it unjust.)97
Mac an Bhaird, who was a distinguished poet of the elite caste, could deploy his considerable literary talents to frame a petition for aid in verse. The women whom he berated, however, had to negotiate problems of language and literacy in composing their entreaties for help. The succession of military defeats of the Gaelic Irish and Old English from the late sixteenth century led to large-scale emigration to the continent. The most famous group of refugees are those associated with the ‘flight of the earls’ in 1607, among whom were Nualaidh Nı´ Dhomhnaill (discussed in Chapter 1), her sisterin-law Ro´is Nı´ Dhochartaigh (known as a political activist), and Catherine Magennis, the earl of Tyrone’s fourth wife and a regular petitioner to the Spanish ´ Ne´ill with the instructions, ‘If there lord deputy enclosed with this evidence another letter from O be any more in the Latin than is in the Irish it is falsely inserted by the translators’; CSPI, 1586– 1588, 389–90. 96 For a discussion of three Mac an Bhaird poems composed in exile, which argues that he left ´ Macha´in, ‘The Flight of the Poets’, 52–7. Ireland for Flanders after 1618, see O 97 Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry, 41, 227–8.
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crown.98 Many Irish soldiers found employment fighting for the Spanish across Europe, and their wives often accompanied them.99 Among the first waves of emigrants were refugees from Munster, the primary focus of this discussion. These early refugees established the pattern for the soldiers, religious, and mercenaries who streamed into Europe throughout the century, the largest wave arriving in the aftermath of the confederate war and Cromwellian conquest.100 Female refugees could not offer military service, but as wives and widows of soldiers they travelled to Spain and Spanish Flanders, often falling back on the charity of the state. Paramount among the reasons for the attraction of Spain was the Spanish policy of rewarding Irish catholic refugees with a pension, termed entretenimiento. Entretenimento was awarded on certain conditions. Catholicism was a requirement; those wishing to receive a Spanish pension had to prove their service to the Counter Reformation cause, militarily and financially. The term ‘represented an award for services carried out for the king and brought with it an obligation to serve’.101 Nobility was a prized advantage. Proof of eligibility according to status, service, losses, and religion was necessary, despite the fact that Irish refugees came from a culture lacking in bureaucratic certification. Thus, Irish emigrant priests and leading members of the nobility were called upon to vouch for petitioners. The office of protector of the Irish was set up in April 1604, in response to early floods ´ Maolchonaire—to whom Mac an Bhaird appealed— of refugees, and Flaithrı´ O was appointed his advisor. The Franciscan was to act as gatekeeper and authenticator, providing information on rank, services, and losses pertaining to the Irish in Spain.102
98
Jerrold Casway, ‘Rosa O Dogherty: A Gaelic Woman’, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, 10 (1980–1), 42–62; Casway, ‘Women of the Flight of the Earls’, 56–74; Micheline Walsh, ‘Some Notes Towards a History of the Womenfolk of the Wild Geese’, The Irish Sword, 5: 19 (1961), 104–6. 99 Following the French religious wars of the late sixteenth century, France was initially unsupportive of Irish refugees appealing to pan-European catholicism. For a discussion of ´ Ciosa´in, ‘A Hundred Years of Irish Migration to France, migration to France, see E´amonn O 1590–1688’, in Thomas O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001), 93–106. For the Irish diaspora in early modern Europe, see Gra´inne Henry, The Irish Military Community in Spanish Flanders, 1586–1621 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992); Robert A. Stradling, The Spanish Monarchy and Irish Mercenaries: The Wild Geese in Spain 1618–68 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994); O’Connor, Irish in Europe; Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish Migrants in Europe After Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003); O’Connor and Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006); Declan Downey and Julio Crespo MacLennan (eds.), Spanish–Irish Relations Through the Ages (Dublin: Four Courts, 2008); Jerrold Casway, ‘Irish Women Overseas, 1500–1800’, in MacCurtain and O’Dowd, Women in Early Modern Ireland, 112–32. 100 Petty estimated in 1691 that of 40,000 refugees from this period, 6,000 were comprised of boys, women, and priests; William Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691), 19. 101 Ciaran O’Scea, ‘The Devotional World of the Irish Catholic Exile in Early-Modern Galicia, 1598–1666’, in O’Connor, Irish in Europe, 31, n. 15. 102 Ciaran O’Scea, ‘The Significance and Legacy of Spanish Intervention in West Munster During the Battle of Kinsale’, in O’Connor and Lyons, Irish Migrants, 57.
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This confrontation with Spanish bureaucratic culture ultimately led to an increase in literacy among the exiled Irish community. O’Scea, who offers a detailed account of the process, argues that a revolution in literacy—most markedly in signature ability—occurred as a result of the exiles’ exposure to the Spanish state bureaucracy and its petitioners’ urgent need to familiarize themselves with it.103 Language as well as literacy posed problems. Many Irish refugees did not speak Spanish, although, as Mother Bonaventure Browne, who was both literate and fluent in Spanish, shows us, not all female exiles were dependent on others to communicate.104 Long-established trading links on the coasts of France and Spain meant that the Irish language was spoken and understood, even to the point of interpreting services being available. The example of Margery Barnewall, a nun who arrived at St Malo in Brittany in 1580 and for whom a local man who spoke Gaelic acted as interpreter, shows that in merchant towns like St Malo or La Corun˜a in Galicia locals could speak Irish and interpret for refugees.105 Members of the e´migre´ Irish communities would have been equally valuable to newly arrived migrants. Community was essential to survival; if a Spanish pension was to be obtained, it was necessary that the petitioner be a member of the exiled Irish catholic demographic and that lineage and service could be corroborated from within the group. Furthermore, while language served to cement community identity, the same group acted as an organized grapevine that communicated the terms of entretenimiento and the best means to obtain it. It was a vital source of information with regard to bureaucratic process, translation, and the terms of persuasive engagement. Irish women who petitioned the Spanish state for financial aid inevitably used amanuenses; these petitions are written in the third person.106 Likely drawn from within the community, such amanuenses—who served women and men— performed an invisible scribal and translation function.107 The structure generally states the supplicant’s name and status, lineage, contribution to the panEuropean catholic cause (most often dependent on male military kin), a narrative of her destitution, summary of grounds, and request. The prescribed terms of eligibility dictated the contours of the biographical narratives which emerged in these petitions. It is the narratio—the narration of past services on which criteria for eligibility depends—that provides room for manoeuvre in self-representation. 103
O’Scea, ‘Castilian Royal Bureaucracy’, 221. Henry argues that this failure of language acquisition was a central factor in the introverted nature of the Irish military community in Spanish Flanders; Irish Military Community, 85–6. 105 Helena Concannon, Daughters of Banba (Dublin: Gill, 1922), 130. 106 Walsh’s articles are misleading in this regard, as she chose to translate the primary sources in the first person. 107 Noting that military commanders sometimes translated from English to Spanish, Morales suggests that the widows of Irish soldiers ‘enlisted the support of their husbands’ fellow soldiers who ´ scar Recio Morales, ‘Irish E´migre´ Group Strategies negotiated the payment of their pensions’; O of Survival, Adaptation, and Integration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Spain’, in O’Connor and Lyons, Irish Communities, 256–8. 104
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In her study of women’s pauper letters in sixteenth-century French Tours, Broomhall argues for authorship as a collaboration with parish clerks or cure´s: ‘[although] the supplicants were illiterate, they were by no means without rhetorical skills . . . A poor woman knew how to construct both an identity and narrative of her situation that would appeal to her benefactors.’108 Similarly, Irish women (and men) exiled in Spain surmounted obstacles of language and literacy to author their own life-narratives, attuned to the stipulations of the state. Many petitions are clarity itself, satisfying the terms of reference dictated by the state to the letter and providing no more information than is required. Thus, a successful petition forwarded to the king by the Council of State on 4 April 1609 simply adheres to the introduction, brief narrative, and request: Don˜a Marina Mahum, an Irish widow, states in a letter of petition forwarded to the Council, that she is a noblewoman, descended from the house of the O’Briens and that she lost in the service of Your Majesty her husband and two brothers, together with all her estate, in the wars of Ireland. On this account, she begs Your Majesty to grant her a pension in Flanders or any other favour that may allow her to return to her country.109
Mahum’s petition sets out the required grounds of eligibility: noble lineage, military service (to which she has claim through her male kin), and economic loss resulting from that service. Her situation as widow is foregrounded in the introduction, framing the petition’s narration of circumstances. Her hankering after an Irish community underpins her request either to subsist in Flanders (where the Irish regiment was based) or to return home.110 Given the prescription of service to the Spanish king as qualification for receipt of a state pension, many of these women’s narratives are founded on the military biographies of male kin. Thus, the woman’s self-narrative operates as a derivative of the a priori life-narratives of her menfolk. These narratives delineate military careers, anti-English activity, economic loss, and always
108 Susan Broomhall, ‘“Burdened with small children”: Women Defining Poverty in SixteenthCentury Tours’, in Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (eds.), Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400– 1700: Form and Persuasion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 227, 229. 109 ‘Don˜a Marina Mahum viuda Irlandesa en un memorial que se remitio al consejo refiere ques muger noble descendiente de la cassa de los obrienes y que a perdido en seruicio de V.Md. a su marido y dos hermanos con toda su Haz.da en las guerras de Irlanda, atento lo qual supp.ca a V.Md. le haga mrd. de vn entretenimiento en Flandes. o otra cossa con que se pueda voluer a su tierra’; AGS, Estado, Neg. de Espan˜a, Legajo 2745. Her circumstances verified, she was awarded a lump sum of 600 reals to return home. My work on this material is indebted to the research of the late ´ Fiaich Library, Armagh. Micheline Kerney Walsh, whose archive is now held at the Cardinal O Manuscripts have been consulted via the microfilm copies held at the National Library of Ireland. Translations are in consultation with Quid Translations, Dublin. This Marina Mahum is apparently not the same Morina Mahun whose petition to the Infanta Isabella is printed in Field Day, v. 570. 110 See also the petitions of Rose Geoghegan and Elena Geraldina; Field Day, v. 570; Walsh, ‘Some Notes’, 101.
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death (which is why the woman petitions in her own right). The loss of male protection prompts the composition and submission of a female-authored narrative. Women’s claims, founded on service, are dependent on male contributions to the cause. But the very act of petitioning embraces agency. Their destitution forces them into a world of bureaucracy and self-fashioning. For most, the introduction to a writerly, autobiographical conceptualization of the world is driven by the loss of male support. Elena Geraldino (the hispanicization of Fitzgerald), for example, petitioned the crown in summer 1608 on the basis of her husband’s military service. She began by identifying Maurice Fitzgerald as kin to the earl of Desmond and brother to Lord Kerrycurrihy. She then narrated his military career in Ireland and on the continent, rooting the claim to service in the opposition of European catholic to English identity: who in the last war of Ireland was always in charge of a unit on horseback and an Infantry company until the war ended; because of her husband’s service to the Catholic cause the English confiscated all his properties and estate and he was banished together with the petitioner and they moved to La Corun˜a three years ago, where Marquis de Carazena granted him a salary of forty escudos per month . . . This pay was transferred to Flanders as he was sent to serve there and while he was serving in a regiment, he died.
At this point the petitioner’s own, destitute circumstances come into play: ‘leaving the petitioner with a daughter and much necessity.’ Her request for receipt of her husband’s salary was declined; instead, she was awarded a lump sum of 400 ducados, ‘so as not to be unfair to other Irish widows’.111 This clause in itself demonstrates the volume of petitions received and the state’s impulse to maintain consistency as well as minimizing its outlay. Cecilia Barry’s petition of April 1612 is framed with reference to herself, but the narration is concerned with the activities of her husband and son at the decisive 1601 Battle of Kinsale and in the Spanish army. The male story establishes service; the bereft, vulnerable, female situation brings up the rear to clinch the argument. Introducing the petitioner as ‘an Irish widow, the wife of the late David Barri’, the petition details her male kin’s services at Kinsale: her husband and a son were the first ones, together with their people, to receive Don Juan del Aguila as he arrived in Kinsale Harbour, to whom they also gave a castle that was
111 ‘en la postrera guerra de Irlanda, siempre tubo cargo de vna tropa, de cavallos y vna compan˜ia de Infanteria, a su costa hasta que se acauo la guerra, que por lo que sirvio su marido en defensa de la caussa catholica los Ingleses le confiscaron toda su Hazda. y estado, y le desterraron Juntamente con la suplicanta y vinieron a la Corun˜a tres an˜os ha, donde el Marques de Carazena le sen˜alo quarenta escudos . . . que auiendo se le mudado este sueldo a Flandes fue a servir a aquellos estados y estandolo continuando en vn tercio murio, dexando a la suplicante con vna hija y extrema nec¸esidad . . . por escusar consequenc¸ia, a otras viudas Irlandesas’; AGS, Estado, Neg. de Espan˜a, Legajo 2744. For Elena’s subsequent marriage to Mateo Tulio and petitions for his pension on her second widowhood, see Walsh, ‘Some Notes’, 100–2.
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located over the river of Kinsale, called Ringcurran, and then at night, they were sent by Don Juan to speak to Kinsale’s chief magistrate whom they intended to convince, without resistance, to open the harbours of the village, and so he did.
The petitioner’s life-narrative is intertwined with, but ultimately subjugated to, her husband’s. His continuing military service in Spain and Flanders is further proof of eligibility: And later they came to Spain with their wives and children with Don Diego Brochero, where they served in the regiment of Don Pedro Sarmiento in the navy . . . After that, they went to Flanders with General Pedro Cuibianes and encountered the Dutch once again. They were known to be strong and courageous and were wounded there: one of them was crippled and the petitioner’s husband died a few days later.
Having fleshed out the stories of her male kin, the petitioner then reins in her narrative to her present circumstances, formulating her indigence in expressly gendered terms: she herself is ‘in great necessity’ and must provide for her ‘maiden daughter’.112 The pre-eminence of nobility in establishing one’s eligibility is conspicuous in the 1623 petition of Cicilia Geraldina, which prioritizes the petitioner as daughter rather than common-or-garden soldier’s wife: ‘she is the daughter of noble parents who died at the Earl of Desmond’s Wars against the English in defence of the Catholic cause and [states] that her husband, Mr Eugenio Chabe recently served in Ireland, Flanders and the Royal Army.’ The range of her husband’s services provides for a striking narrative, his subsequent enslavement producing a twist on the established topos of widowhood: ‘he was taken prisoner by the Turks on board the “Urca Imperial” in 1620 in Carthaginia in the Levant and they took him from Algiers to Constantinople, where he was sold to the galleys of the Turks, where there is little hope for him to be rescued.’ Furthermore, ‘her eldest son was killed by a musket shot whilst in a brave fight and her second son died last September as he fought the Turks in the company of Cornelius O’Driscoll onboard the galleon, “Nuestra Sen˜ora del Rosario de la Armada del Estrecho”’. Mustering her arguments, Geraldina’s biography encompasses services against
112 ‘Cec¸ilia barri Viuda Irlandesa mugr, de dauid barri difun.to dize q. el dho su marido, y vn hijo suyo fueron los Primos q. con su gente Vinieron A receuir a don juo del aguila qdo llego al Puerto de quinsale al qual tambien entregon vn cast.o q. estaua sobre el Rio de quinc¸al llamando Rincorran y luego de noche fueron de parte del dho Don juo a hablar al Corregidor de quinc¸al con el qual Procuraron q. sin resistimto Abriesse los Puertos de la Villa como lo hizo y despues se Vinieron con mugeres y hijos con D. diego brochero a espan˜a, a donde siruon en el ter.o de don Po sarmiento en la armda del mar oceano . . . de donde passaron a flandes con al gnral Po cuibianes y tubieron vn Recuentro con los holandesses se sen˜alaron sus personas como fuertes y animosos ssres donde quedaron heridosel vno estropeado y el marido de la suppte murio de Alli a pocos dias dexando a la suppte con mucha necessd . . . Para sunsteno y de vna hija Donzella’; AGS, Estado, Neg. de Partes, Legajo 1756.
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both protestantism and Islamism. She is mindful of the persuasive effect of the figure of the distressed widow and mother. Her conclusion recalls exactly the terms used by Broomhall’s paupers of Tours: ‘leaving her helpless, poor, in sorrow and burdened with two orphaned maiden daughters, without any hope other than the help that Your Majesty may wish to give her.’113 The gendered rhetoric of destitution—so characteristic of Eleanor Desmond’s later submissions to the English state—was pervasive across the spectrum of women’s Spanish petitions. Women pressing for a Spanish pension used a language of vulnerability and isolation associated with traditional female roles. They were often the mothers of orphans, newly heads of household who were far from home. Their gender, while disbarring them from military service, gave them a supplementary persuasive edge. They were well aware of the potential advantage presented by their gender in creating a picture of urgent distress, and the power of that image to evoke compassion in their readers. As Thorne argues, in her discussion of English women petitioning for the release of their husbands: ‘deploying the rhetoric of helplessness, these female petitioners are clearly exploiting received assumptions about the physiological and intellectual inferiority of their sex as the readiest means of inducing sympathy for their plight.’114 While these Spanish petitions evince a dependence on male service, that very dependence foregrounds the woman’s weakened situation. The assumption that women were weak, conventional though it may have been, strengthened the female petitioner’s case. In authoring the stories of their menfolk and prioritizing them in their own self-narratives, these women then invoked a female vulnerability that stood in polar opposition to male military agency. The juxtaposition served to highlight their plight and entrench the argument. This foregrounding of their plight as women is but one tool in the composition of these life-narratives. Addressing a state-defined identification of the petitioner as victim, the terms of self-fashioning are equally focused on discourses of politics and religion. In this sense, women’s adherence to externally imposed terms of reference is not gendered at all; rather, it participates in dominant contemporary ways of conceptualizing identity. Many Spanish petitions draw
113 ‘Don˜a Cicilia Geraldina . . . que es hija de Padres nobles que se perdieron en las guerras del Conde de Desmon contra los Ingleses en defensa de la causa catholica y su marido Don Eugenio Chabe siruio en las vltimas ocassiones de Irlanda y en Flandes y Armada real hasque le cautiuaron los Turcos en la Vrca Imp.l el an˜o de 620. sobre Cartagena de leuante y le lleuaron de Argel a Constantinopla bendido a las Galeras del Turco de donde ay pocas Esperanzas de su rescate, que en esta ocassion mataron a su hijo mayor de vn mosquetazo peleando con balor, y el segundo se perdio por Septiembre pasado con Don Cornelio Odriscol peleando con los Turcos en el Galeon n˜ra Sen˜ora del Rosario de la Armada del Estrecho como consta por sus papeles, por lo qual queda desamparada pobre y lastimada y cargada de dos hijas donzellas huerfanas sin ningun remedio mas de la mrd que V.Md. fuere seruido de hazerla’; AGS, Estado, Neg. de Espan˜a, Legajo 2752; Broomhall, ‘Women Defining Poverty’, 232. 114 Thorne, ‘Women’s Petitionary Letters’, 29.
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explicitly on the discourses of heresy and tyranny to consolidate their case. Their currency and value are equally apparent in the contemporary writing of prominent male emigrants. As Carroll explains of Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s prose history of Catholic Ireland, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium (Lisbon, 1621): ‘The Irish are portrayed on the one hand as defenders of the faith, an analogy with the imperial cause of the king of Spain, and on the other hand as the victims of English tyranny, an analogy with the early Christians who suffered at the hands of Roman imperialism.’115 As the first Irishman to enter the Spanish order of knighthood, O’Sullivan Beare was well placed to reinforce this version of e´migre´ identity. O’Scea attests to Irish soldiers playing on ‘the “heretical” English conquest of Ireland’ to gain access to Spanish military knighthoods.116 Hence, Cathalina O’Riegan, as early as 1608, narrates the military actions of her male kin in strictly religious terms, and delineates the economic consequences in the heightened language of persecution: Dona Cathalina oRiegan, an Irish widow, states that her father, husband, brothers and relatives served Your Majesty in the war of Ireland with their people and estate and maintained soldiers in the Royal Service of God and Your Majesty. In defence of Faith her husband and two brothers died in the war, fighting against the enemy, and the heretics burnt down one property with a lot of estate and over fifty people were burnt to death there and then she was deprived of all her possessions and forced to leave her country and come to the refuge of Your Majesty.117
Interweaving confessional allegiance with the emotive detail of retributive warfare, she fuses her exiled destitution with the broader perspectives of contemporary politics. Elena Ny Donocho, widow of Dermot McCarthy (brother to the MacCarthy Reagh, al. Mac Ca´rthaigh Riabhach), similarly concludes with a canny eye to the effectiveness of broader discourses of victimization and power: ‘her only son is a prisoner in Cork in the hands of the heretics . . . And the said Don˜a Elena, in order to save her life from the tyranny and cruel persecution of the enemy, has come to live under the refuge of Your Majesty until God may wish for her to return to her country at peace.’118 In this case, her departure for Spain independent of any male kin is an act of taking matters into her own 115
Carroll, ‘Irish and Spanish Cultural and Political Relations’, 236. O’Scea, ‘Castilian Royal Bureaucracy’, 220. ‘Dona Cathalina oRiegan Viuda Irlandesa dice q. su Padre marido hermanos deudos y parientes seruieron a V. Magd en la guerra de Irlanda, con sus gentes hacienda y personas seruiendo y sustentando soldados en el real seruicio de Dios y de V.Magd en defenca de la Fee, su marido y dos hermanos murieron en la guerra pelleando contra el enemigo y los herejes le quemaron vn lugar con mha hacienda y q. perecieron, en dho. lugar mas de cienquenta personas fueron quemadas y despues le quitaron todo lo que tenia. fuela forsosa sallir de su tierra y venir a ampararse de V.Magd’. AGS, Estado, Neg. de Partes, Legajo 1749. 118 ‘su unico hijo presso en corque en poder de los Herejes y la dicha Don˜a Elena para salvar su vida de la tirania y cruel persecucion del enemigo que la perseguian a venida a bivir de debaxo del Amparo De su mag.d hasta que dios fuera servido que buelva a su tierra con paces’; AGS, Guerra y Marina, Mar y Tierra, Legajo 589. 116 117
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hands. Elena employs this persuasive rhetoric to recast her independent agency as enforced religious banishment. In this Spanish context the principle of reciprocity is reversed. Rather than promising a future return, these authors aim to establish that the requisite service and loss have already been rendered. Thus, the burden of recompense is laid on the Spanish king, who is urged to make good the bargain by issuing pensions. ‘At the beginning of the seventeenth century,’ Morales wryly comments, ‘the Spaniards were surprised that they could hardly find an Irishman in Spain who had not helped Juan del A´guila at the battle of Kinsale . . . In this way, Irishmen [and women] turned what was supposed to be the Spanish “soccoro de Irlanda” or “aid to Ireland” into the Spanish king’s duty to the Irish people.’119 Juana Carty, daughter of Elena Ny Donocho, followed her mother in composing many petitions for relief. Her petition of May 1609 is illustrative of this assumption of the state’s moral obligation. Her narrative aims to incite guilt with reference to the perennial Irish expectations of Spanish military support. Following defeat at Kinsale, she declares, ‘together with his people, the petitioner’s father gathered many others with whom, while they waited for the help of Your Majesty, he fought the enemies causing grave damage to them, until he died’. Her conclusion uses MacCarthy Reagh’s capture to seal her argument: ‘On account of the many and great services of her father and uncle, who is a prisoner in the Tower of London, she begs Your Majesty to grant her a pension according to her status.’120 MacCarthy Reagh was not the only Munster leader who languished in the Tower of London. Catalina Geraldino was sister to James FitzThomas, the ‘Su´ga´n’ (‘straw-rope’) earl of Desmond and rival claimant to Eleanor Fitzgerald’s son. He led the Munster rising of 1598 and died in the Tower in 1607. Granted a pension of 40 escudos per month in Antwerp in November 1607, Geraldino, like many petitioners and her fellow Geraldine Eleanor Fitzgerald, was obliged to petition regularly for payment of her pension. The extent to which petitioners might massage their stories in order to recalibrate them for a Spanish audience is clear from her petition of May 1609. Steering attention towards her affluence and status, she transmutes the motivations for her brother’s rebellion into straightforward service of the Spanish king: her brother, the Earl, had one hundred and ten miles of the flattest and most fertile land that there may exist in Ireland or England, which was full of villages, towns and seaports. The King of England would not have in his domains a richer and more
Morales, ‘Irish E´migre´ Group Strategies’, 244. ‘con su gente el padre de la suplicante junto, otra mucha de la suya con la cual aguardando el socorro de V Md hizo mucho dan˜o al enemigo hasta que murio … atento lo qual los muchos y sen˜alados seruicios del dho su padre y tio questa preso en la torre de londres supp.ca a V.Md. la haga mrd, de un entretenimiento en esta corte conforme su calidad’; AGS, Estado, Neg. de Espan˜a, Legajo 2745. This petition received a personal response from the king. 119 120
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powerful vassal than her brother, the Earl, who was lost and with him all his possessions, serving of Your Majesty.121
This idyllic picture of fertile land would be questionable to any familiar with the series of devastating rebellions in late sixteenth-century Munster. Where Eleanor Fitzgerald had earlier sought to impress on her audience the myriad localized antagonisms at play in Munster, Catalina excised such considerations in favour of conformity to the precept of mutual service. Her neglect of Irish contexts, however, could not transcend the internecine tensions that surfaced within the exiled community. Writing a month later on behalf of her niece Juana (‘a natural and only daughter of her brother, the Earl’), Catalina took issue with the latter’s portion. Juana, she claims, had already submitted a petition on her own behalf but had fallen foul of the verification process. On the recommendation of Mauricio Cornelio, Juana was awarded 600 reals, ‘whereas’, she alleges, ‘others who had already received money twice or three times before (and he knew this himself ) are receiving monies as assistance towards their costs, and other monies on account of assistance they do not need and pensions are paid for no reason and to people he does not know’. Recalling Mac an Bhaird’s verse protest, Catalina’s complaint lays bare the competition over resources and status, challenging the integrity of the state’s advisor. Her argument against Cornelio reinstates the local politics absent from her May petition. Indigenous class-conflict and score-settling followed emigrants to the continent: ‘The nature of those in our country who are not of noble birth is to be always enemies of the nobility in all they can, and especially the said official, who is our adversary, because this petitioner’s father had hung sixteen of his relatives and friends as they were thieves.’ The difficulties of authentication—of adjudicating between oral authorities—are illustrated as Catalina (citing the while her niece’s reduced marriageability as a noble orphan and thereby summoning an additional gendered argument) ‘begs Your Majesty to be better informed of the status and losses of Don˜a Juana Geraldino by some of the principal people of her nation’.122
121 ‘el Conde su hermano tenia ciento y dies millas del tereno mas llano y fertil que ay en yrlanda o Inglatierra pobladas de muchas villas pueblos y puertos de mar no tiene el Rey de Inglaterra en sus dominios otro mas rico ny mas poderoso vasallo que, el dho conde su hermano el qual se perdio osy y todo lo que tenia en el seruisio de V. Magd.’; AGS, Estado, Neg. de Partes, Legajo 1750. Walsh cites a record of Catalina Geraldino being paid 51 escudos per month in 1610; ‘Some Notes’, 99. 122 ‘una sobrina hija natural del Conde su hermano’; ‘a otras que auian resivido dineros dos otres veses antes (segun el mismo sabia) y agora en nombre de ayudas no siendo ellas assy y entretenimitos sin rason y a quien no conosia la naturalasa de los de nuestra tierra que no son nasidos de cavalleros es ser siempre enimigos de la noblesa en todo lo que pueden mas desto el dho lisensiado es aduersario nuestro por auer el padre desta supp.te ahorcado dies y seis de los parientes y amigos del dho ldo. por ser ladrones . . . Supp.ca a v. Magd. sea seruido se informe major de su calidad y perdidas de la dha don˜a Juana geraldino y sea de algunos de la gente prinsipal de su nasion’; AGS, Estado, Neg. de Partes, Legajo 1745.
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Such disputes highlight the familiarity of female petitioners with the most successful arguments of persuasion available to them, as is further evident from the case of Leonor Ryan, who attempted a form of benefit fraud. Writing in 1622, Leonor framed her petition within the established discourses of Irish lineage and female isolation. She contended that her father, William Ryan, died in the service of the Spanish army, ‘leaving me an orphan without protection or means of livelihood’. She came to Spain with her uncle, the bishop of Killaloe, who died in Lisbon in 1616, ‘leaving me more orphaned and unprotected than ever’. Bequeathed her uncle’s Spanish pension, Leonor claimed that it was insufficient for her needs and petitioned for an increase, ‘in view of my rank and my great losses’. In this case her claim was investigated and the language of her petition turned back on her: ‘it was found that (far from being an unprotected orphan)’, she was married to a man simultaneously in receipt of a Spanish pension and, furthermore, that she had already received additional monies from the state for travel purposes.123 This shows the real efforts at authenticating claims conducted by the Spanish authorities. They may, as O’Scea has shown, have frequently expressed frustration at the lack of supporting documentation and consequent difficulty of confirming the claims of Irish petitioners, but they persisted in their efforts to do so.124 Ryan may have overestimated the gullibility of the authorities and underestimated the acuity of their authenticators, but her willingness to test the Spanish state reveals a widespread knowledge, within the exiled Irish community, of the likeliest language with which women could improve their situations. Writing of the women in the party that left Ulster in September 1607, Casway has concluded that their impotence in exile ‘made female refugees victims and casualties, not romantic heroines’.125 While he is right to emphasize their vulnerability in the matter of survival, the polar opposition is misleading. Claims to victimhood are absolutely necessary to a petition for entretenimiento. The state dictated the terms of reference for self-representation, which centre around religious persecution and self-identification as a victim of that oppression. On the one hand disempowered as a result of their expatriation and impoverished as a result of economic loss, on the other the act of petitioning presented a way of regaining some control over their situations. The Spanish petitioning process offered the opportunity to represent oneself in writing and the prospect of ameliorating one’s position. It is precisely the purpose of a petition for entretenimiento to compose a narrative of victimhood, and it is on this narrative that success depends. To a certain extent—as in the cases of Leonor Ryan or Catalina Geraldino—self-representation as a victim could be a rhetorical ploy, designed to 123 Micheline Walsh, ‘Further Notes towards a History of the Womenfolk of the Wild Geese’, The Irish Sword, 5: 20 (1962), 133; see also Casway ‘Irish Women Overseas’, 122. 124 O’Scea, ‘Castilian Royal Bureaucracy’, 219–20. 125 Casway, ‘Women of the Flight of the Earls’, 74.
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exploit or probe the sympathies of the Spanish state. Composing these narratives was the only means for these women to exercise some influence over their fates. The currency of their discourses of persuasion points to a sophisticated e´migre´ community. These women were aware of what was likely to work; they were informed as to how best to position themselves; and, despite the variety of their narratives, they did not deviate from the paradigms they were asked for. These petitions differ substantially from those of contemporaries addressed to the English crown in that the Spanish state itself explicitly defined the terms of reference. In order to secure success, an Irish woman’s petition to the English state had to establish loyalty to the crown as a prerequisite. Beyond this, as we have seen, Irish women enjoyed a certain latitude in their self-representations. By contrast, petitioners to the Spanish crown conformed to conditions of eligibility laid down by the state; freedom of rhetorical invention was accordingly limited. Nı´ Mha´ille and Countess Desmond, who petitioned from Ireland and in person at court in order to attest to their obedience to the English monarch, could situate themselves in more complex, self-generated ways. Exiled Irish women needed to prove their adherence to a formula prescribed by the Spanish state. The fact of exile further complicates the difference. Alienated from any power-bases in Ireland, the political promises dangled by Desmond or Nı´ Mha´ille are unavailable to these women as means of persuasion. Yet their membership of the refugee community defined more clearly the arguments likely to succeed, which were predicated on past rather than future service to the state. Petitionary writing treads a fine line between convention and invention. As Mack maintains, the petitioner must first master the language and epistolary forms of state engagement. But the proliferation of petitions entailed a concomitant attention to distinctive topics of persuasion that might differentiate the petitioner from the mass of others and obtain the ear of the state. The authoring of a petition encouraged women to fashion themselves, but this was always a constructed persona. These are never transparent self-narratives; self-representation is shaped equally by considerations of audience and the nature of the suit. The language of these petitions is rarely figurative; authorial skill lies in the construction of narrative and the deployment of key persuasive discourses. These are always stories calculated to elicit sympathy, to present a particular allegiance, to curry favour in order to achieve a specific goal. The invention and selection of topics and the modes of selfcharacterization are highly rhetorical. For Irish women, they were also deeply political. Submissions to the state had varying degrees of success but, to maximize chances, petitioners had to accustom themselves quickly to the prerequisites and conventions of this most pragmatic of genres. Exigent circumstances are what compelled these women to compose petitions, and many exploited their gender in order to justify their resort to the petition-letter and to strengthen their appeals as needy and deserving supplicants. Necessity is the mother of invention, driving the commitment of the petitionary self to paper, whether writing oneself or in collaboration with amanuenses, whether in one’s native or another tongue.
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Fig. 3. A Map of ye Kingdome of Ireland. With perticular notes distinguishing the Townes Reuolted or Burnt since the late Rebellion (Oxford, 1642). British Library Board. All
Rights Reserved. 669.f.4(78).
4 1641 Depositions On the penultimate weekend of October 1641 two coordinated catholic plots were due to be realized: the seizure of Dublin Castle (led by Conor, Lord Maguire) and a rising in Ulster (by Sir Phelim O’Neill). The Dublin coup was prevented by the last-minute divulgence of the conspiracy to the lords justices on the evening of 22 October. But the Ulster rising proceeded that night. It spun rapidly out of O’Neill’s control. Protestant settlers were robbed and ejected from their lands by catholic neighbours, often former landholders who had been displaced by the plantation. The insurrection quickly spread across the country. It was a central event in the deterioration of relations between the English parliament and King Charles I. The Scots had already revolted in 1639 against the king’s attempts to impose the English ecclesiastical model on the presbyterian church, leading to the bishops’ wars. Now, the prospect of sending an army to repress the Irish rebellion further stoked tensions between king and parliament. The rebellion would evolve, by summer 1642, into the confederate wars, contributing another front to the civil wars being fought across the Irish Sea.1 In the midst of this tumult the English state—anxious to provide some framework for compensation and to collect information on the rebellion—issued three commissions (23 December 1641, 18 January 1642, 9 June 1642) authorizing a committee of eight protestant clergymen, under the leadership of Bishop Henry Jones, to record the sworn statements of the protestant victims, female and male. Primarily taken in Dublin (the main port of exit for fleeing refugees) but also in Munster, the surviving depositions now occupy thirty-one manuscript volumes, grouped according to county.2 The 1641 depositions (as they are known), like the Spanish petitions discussed in Chapter 3, were a form of 1 For the 1641 rising, see: Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638–1661 (London: Routledge, 1999), 44–74; Mac Cuarta, Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising; M. Perceval Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, ´ Siochru´, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis 1994); Michea´l O (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999). 2 TCD MSS 809–39. The material in the collection is mainly comprised of depositions taken in the years immediately following the rising; another category comprises fair copies of these originals, made by Thomas Waring in the late 1640s; and there is a substantial collection of examinations taken in the early 1650s during legal proceedings that ensued from the rebellion. This chapter is concerned with the first group of material. For a fuller description of the collection, see Aidan Clarke, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, in Peter Fox (ed.), Treasures of the Library: Trinity College Dublin (Dublin: RIA, 1986), 111–22. Long accessible only via microfilm, these manuscripts are currently being prepared for electronic publication under Clarke’s stewardship.
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life-writing originated by the state. The political imperative to gather testimony ensured that women’s stories were solicited on the same basis with men’s, and accorded equal status. Predicated on belonging to a particular religio-ethnic community which had been targeted because of that identity, the depositions became a medium for self-construction and self-expression for both women and men. Like the Spanish petitions, this self-representation was reactive, a response to attacks which were motivated by the identification of the deponents as members of a community. But the act of deposing (or petitioning, in the Spanish case) cemented that identification even further, encouraging the individual woman to identify herself—rather than being identified externally—with a specific group. Thus, the gathering of depositions encouraged an internalized self-identification, building a framework for the understanding of the community as a collective group, despite regional and local differences. Gender, no bar to the act of deposing, impinges on these accounts as an evocative locus of victimhood and violation. Speech permeates these texts, orally delivered and steeped in reportage. Their concern to relate news of what happened and what was said highlights the intertwining of religious and colonial discourses, while betraying a vast range of bilingual competencies and pointing to their often dangerous consequences. Designed to register persecution, the genre’s flexibility accommodated narrative constructions of justice, as in Elizabeth Price’s relation of vengeful spirits at Portadown. The depositions could function as the site of preservation for different kinds of writing, evidenced by Lettice Offaly’s furious letters in response to her besiegers at King’s County, but also as the prompt to alternative forms of authorship, shown by Elizabeth Dowdall’s composition of a memoir detailing her military resistance. These latter two cases counter the genre’s emphasis on victimhood with their assertive claims to female agency and writerly skill. Thus, while highly formulaic as a genre of writing, the depositions embraced a range of narrative forms and a plurality of self-constructions. From the moment they were first taken, the depositions have been controversial sources, often mined for polemical purposes. Bishop Jones printed his account of the rising in March 1642. Initially presented to the House of Commons, A Remonstrance of Divers Remarkeable Passages concerning the Church and Kingdome of Ireland is peppered with references to the depositions in its narrative of events. It foregrounds the source material by printing selected excerpts. Jones excised from his printed selection the standard formulae and inventories of goods lost, concentrating instead on narratives of robbery and cruelty, and paying particular attention to the reported speech of the rebels, which revealed the extent of their intentions (even allegedly encompassing the invasion of England). Depositions by women are plentiful in this selection, comprising one-third of the total printed. Sir John Temple published his influential The Irish Rebellion, in which he calculated that 300,000 protestants
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had either died or been displaced during the rebellion, in 1646.3 Organized in four sections, the first provides Temple’s narrative of events, the second his narrative of atrocities. Supporting quotations from individual sensational depositions are juxtaposed with this narrative, placed in marginal paragraphs which gradually encroach on and colonize the primary text. The third section comprises selected depositions, with no intermediary narrative, and the fourth resumes the high-politics story, largely containing a reprinted letter from the lords justices to the lord lieutenant. Of the depositions cited, just over one-third are attributed to women. In his preface Temple recognizes the contentiousness of the deposition evidence, insisting on the care with which the material was gathered and noting that the depositions are held by the Irish as very injurious to their countrey men . . . it is not much to be wondedered [sic], if they who had it in designe to destroy all the publick Records . . . to banish both the English Law and Government, do so bitterly declaim against these evidences of their cruelty, and lively attestations given in to perpetuate the memory of them to their eternall infamy.4
Pointing to the fairly immediate exploitation of the sources as talismanic incitements to outrage (rather than as the basis for future legal proceedings), Temple’s own repeated recourse to specific narratives of atrocity displays his eye for the juiciest polemic. Quickly passing into contemporary legend, its anniversaries celebrated in protestant sermons, the most extreme seventeenth-century estimate placed the number of deaths during the rising at 600,000—a substantial exaggeration, given that the protestant population of Ireland in 1641 numbered less than 100,000.5 As Clarke observes: ‘From the inference that what had been printed was representative there had arisen, and there was to survive, the belief that every page in the collection told similar tales of horror.’ In fact, his study estimates that, of the depositions, ‘three out of five made no reference to deaths; one out of five reported death through privation; and one out of five told of deaths by violence’.6 Historians continue to debate the usefulness of the material, pointing to its 3
John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646), sig. A3v. At least ten editions were printed between 1646 and 1812; Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question 1690–1830 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1992), 7. 4 Temple, Irish Rebellion, sigs. a4v, br. 5 Milton’s estimate in Eikonoklastes is extrapolated from the testimony of Dr Robert Maxwell, who reported that 154,000 had been killed in Ulster; John Milton, Eikonoklastes (London, 1649), 115; TCD MS 809, fol. 10v. For the historiography of the rising, see T. C. Barnard, ‘The Uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebrations’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 889–920; Barnard, ‘1641: A Bibliographical Essay’, in Aspects of the Rising, 173–86; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 461–9; Raymond Gillespie, ‘Temple’s Fate: Reading the Irish Rebellion in Late Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 315–33. 6 Clarke, ‘1641 Depositions’, 112–13.
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partisan nature and its admission of rumour and hearsay evidence. Simms, for example, has approached the Armagh depositions via a rigorous analysis, categorizing eyewitness, hearsay, and corroborative evidence and collating these in order to calculate the numbers killed.7 Most recently, Canny has argued for the depositions’ importance, despite their biases, ‘because they constitute the only detailed information we have of what happened’.8 Bennett, while adverting to the depositions’ use as ‘weapons in a sectarian war’, weighs their value thus: ‘the accounts are replete with lies, hearsay and speculation, and also contain conveniently rounded sums of money representing financial losses and irretrievable loans. However, they also contain much of what was true, and they demonstrate what many witnesses believed to be the truth’.9 As the sole primary source they are, at the very least, important evidence of contemporary anxieties. But to approach the depositions as narrative, rather than to interrogate their veracity, allows us to sidestep the controversies over historical facts. From a literary perspective the more valuable depositions are precisely those which are likelier to be sensationalized. These are the lengthier depositions by women, the accounts in which female deponents have taken the opportunity to develop a personal narrative and to implement their narrative skills. The process of their composition reveals the methods by which stories were constructed but also, conversely, the degree of narrative freedom pertaining to their creation. The depositions were taken down by scribes, in the presence of at least two commissioners. They were sworn on the Bible and intended as documents which could be used as evidence in future trials. Structurally, they follow the formula determined by the questions asked: those taken following the first commission state the deponent’s name, place of abode, and status at the time of the rising; make a standard statement of forcible deprivation and robbery; itemize the goods and chattels lost and estimate the financial value of those losses (often including projected earnings); provide the names of those responsible; and, finally, give any further information on the rebellion. The second commission expanded these terms to include information about murders and those who had converted to papistry.10 Rarely do the depositions deviate from this chronological structure, a frequent consequence of which is disjointed narrative. The most basic of them employ linguistic formulae, betraying their genesis as answers to predetermined questions. Those attesting to losses typically employ the construction, ‘was 7 Hilary Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh, 1641’, in Mac Cuarta, Aspects of the Rising, 123–38. 8 Canny, Making Ireland British, 468. For a study of violence against the Irish, see Kenneth Nicholls, ‘The Other Massacre: English Killings of Irish, 1641–3’, in David Edwards, Pa´draig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), 176–91. 9 Bennett, Civil Wars Experienced, 46. 10 Henry Jones, A Remonstrance of Divers Remarkeable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdome of Ireland (London, 1642), sigs. C3r–C4v.
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deprived, robbed or otherwise despoiled’. Hearsay is acknowledged via the standardized, ‘it was a common report’ or ‘as she was credibly told’; uncertain identification by the phrases, ‘and others whose names she cannot express’ or ‘whose names she knoweth not’. Written as continuous prose, responses to distinct questions are incorporated via attributive phrases which progress the narrative: ‘And this deponent further saith . . . ;’ ‘And further deposeth . . .’ As Bennett has argued, the depositions bear generic similarities to a range of state legal examinations—from the commissions investigating English Midlands riots in 1607 to Westminster exchequer accounts and the Edinburgh Committee of Accounts and Monies.11 Yet the narratives themselves vary enormously, from sparse statements providing an inventory of goods and basic information on the circumstances of robbery and deprivation, to extensive and sensationalized accounts of the rebels’ behaviour, cruelties, conversations, and the deponent’s personal experiences of stripping, privation, siege, and hunger. As a genre of writing signed by women, the depositions demonstrate a wide range of literacy. Women made depositions in their own right, as widows, or on behalf of their dead kin. Bennett’s statistical study according to county finds that women’s depositions were as low as 5 per cent in Kerry but as high as 39 per cent in Kilkenny, concluding that ‘areas which witnessed the most violence, returned higher proportions of women deponents, perhaps because of a higher male mortality in those counties’. Canny argues that the high proportion of women deposing on behalf of their husbands in Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Cavan was due either to fatalities or to their male kin enlisting for miltary service against the rebels.12 The depositions were taken down by state-appointed scribes, usually in a secretary hand. But the scribal process masks more extensive writing competencies. Dame Ann Butler of Carlow, for example, signed only her name at the end of her deposition, but a holograph letter to her brother-in-law shows that she was an adept writer.13 Although Lady Elizabeth Dowdall penned her own holograph account of her experiences during the rebellion elsewhere, her deposition was copied by a scribe and she wrote only her signature.14 Many women signed their own names. These were usually of higher or middling social status, such as Jane, countess of Westmeath; Ann Smith and Susanna Wright of Londonderry (wife and daughter of James Smyth, gentleman); Elizabeth Holliwell of Roscommon town or Mary Hammond of Tuam, both wives of clerks of the parish.15 However,
11 Bennett, Civil Wars Experienced, 46. See also John R. Young, ‘“Escaping Massacre”: Refugees in Scotland in the Aftermath of the 1641 Ulster Rebellion’, in Edwards, Lenihan, and Tait, Age of Atrocity, 219–41. 12 Bennett, Civil Wars Experienced, 67; Canny, Making Ireland British, 348. 13 TCD MS 812, fols. 69v, 120r. 14 BL Sloane MS 1008, fols. 66r–69r; TCD MS 829, fol. 138v. 15 TCD MSS 817, fols. 22r, 23r; 839, fol. 102v; 830, fol. 35v; 830, fol. 136v.
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the majority of women (like the majority of men) signed their depositions with a mark, certified by the relevant commissioners witnessing the deposition.16 The manuscripts reveal how the depositions were composed—a process which shaped oral narrative, recorded it in manuscript, and ultimately (via Jones and Temple) emerged in edited form in print. Individual depositions, once taken, were then read aloud to deponents for purposes of revision, approbation, and corroboration. In a joint deposition, Ann Smith and her daughter Margaret Clark of Armagh begin by affirming the deposition of Margaret Phillis, taken the day before: ‘[they] depose and say that they have heard redd & considered of thexanacion [the examination] of Margarett Phillis . . . And say that the same is in all thinges true of their owne knowledges saveing that they cannott soe crtenly speake to her losses as she doth.’17 Verification entailed reading the deposition aloud to later deponents. This procedure is foregrounded in the depositions of corroborating witnesses, suggesting that all depositions were read back to their authors as a method of confirming the text. This system explains the revisions made: where words are inserted, these are most often for purposes of clarifying or elaborating the narrative, rather than editorializing or substantially changing the text. Phillis’s deposition, for example, is emended in order to insert further detail—an act consonant with the idea that it was recited to the deponent prior to her endorsement (here rendered by superscript): ‘And they alsoe killd one Mr Robinson the ministr ∧ of the parrish of Kilmore & his wiffe & 3 of his children: And furthr saith that the Rebells alsoe first ∧ half hanged and then cutt of the eares of one Iames Gibson ∧to make him confess moneis.’ Deletions often occur for the sake of specification: ‘about the tyme that they hadd their army hadd . . . she was her husband and she were deprived’ (Smith and Clark); ‘That some of the Rebells murthered her hus forceibly carried away her husband out of her sight’ (Phillis).18 The fact that some revisions are not inserted above the line, but continue following the deletion, suggests that the depositions were revised even as they were dictated by deponents. All deponents, it seems, had their depositions read back to them, with the possibility of adding further details or elucidating their sentences. Readingcompetency may not have been an issue at all. At the very least, those who could not sign their names could still hear and see their testimony. This highlights the orality of the material; these are authored texts, composed according to an established set of questions flexible enough to embrace narratological skills. They are collaborative insofar as the narratives were written down by their first audience, then revised and agreed. Their often disjointed structure is a 16 O’Dowd estimates that a third of female deponents could sign their names, based on a sample of Dublin, Kilkenny, and Carlow; History of Women in Ireland, 210. 17 TCD MS 836, fol. 73r. 18 Ibid., fols. 66r, 73v. Quotations do not record deletions other than, as here, where they are germane to the argument.
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consequence both of their oral composition and their adherence to the questions asked. Their very diversity, from simple statements of losses to pages describing catalogues of violent events, suggests that the scribes or commissioners did not tamper with the women’s accounts themselves. It was in the interests of the commissioners, whose remit was to gather information about the rebels and their behaviour, to confer narrative freedom on the deponents, encouraging them to relate as much detail as possible. The extent and exercise of this freedom is most readily apparent in the comparison of depositions composed by different women on the same event. Phillis, Smith, and Clark describe one of the most notorious incidents of the rebellion, the burning of a group of protestants in a thatched house in Shewis, Kilmore parish, Armagh. Smith and Clark were the sole survivors, yet their depositions were taken the day after that of Phillis, whose testimony is based on hearsay. Hence, there is a reverse chronology whereby the hearsay evidence (which cites them) is read back to the eyewitness victims, who then corroborate the hearsay evidence. While Phillis begins with an account of her own losses and then proceeds to Kilmore, Smith and Clark begin with Kilmore and conclude with estimations of economic loss. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Smith and Clark adopt terms and phrases employed by Phillis, who was not present. Recounting how the two women escaped through a hole in the house, for example, Phillis states that Smith (whom she names Agnes) and Clark were ‘left in ye snowe for dead: yet aftr, whilest thes Rebells were busyed in burning the rest wth[in] the howse’. Smith and Clark repeat the phrase: ‘the Rebells busied wth burning the howse & ye rest of the Protestantes left them ∧the deponts lying here vpon ye ground for dead.’ Strikingly, all three women employ a mantra of murderous methods, deriving its impact through accumulation. Phillis says: ‘But all ye rest being a great multitude, were all murthered & putt to death some by burning some by drowning some by hanging: some famishing or starveing, the sword, torture & othr cruell deaths’; whereas Smith and Clark reorder the sequence: ‘some they putt to death by hanging some by drowning ∧ in Rivers ditches and holes some by burning, the rest by the sword starveing famishing torturing & othr cruell deathes.’ Nevertheless, as might be expected, Smith and Clark’s lengthier deposition provides additional detail. Where Phillis has them both knocked on the ground after escaping, the survivors specify that Margaret was thrown to the ground by a great stone and Ann knocked on the head. Smith and Clark single out Jane Hampson as the leader and name all the Kilmore victims with whom they were acquainted. Where Phillis plainly narrates that the rebels ‘burned all those naked protestantes saveing only twoe’, Smith and Clark omit any mention of nakedness in favour of the more evocative: ‘all the rest were burned to ashes being a house full of poore innocent soules.’19 Their version of Kilmore, unlike that of Phillis, is contextualized by their narration of the broader picture of violence in the area, 19
Ibid., fols. 66, 73.
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incorporating another notorious massacre at Portadown Bridge and lamenting the destruction of the plantation. These narratives work together like jigsaw pieces, accruing more and more detail to build a composite picture of the event. The commissioners did not query the discrepancies nor attempt to collate the stories, suggesting that deponents’ accounts were not changed and that considerable narrative leeway was encouraged. The extent of narrative licence accorded to deponents is further highlighted by comparison with the account of Joane (or Johanna) Constable (one of the betterknown depositions, precisely because of its more expressive and graphic narrative). Constable, her sister, and three children were imprisoned in Kilmore parsonage at the time. Where Phillis, Smith, and Clark narrate the event in all its particulars, Constable has an inclination towards dramatic detail and emotional reaction. She inserts, for example, the image of the house imploding: ‘at length the howse fell vpon them: And the combustible part of the howse being consumed before the bodies of all those miserable wretches were burned to ashes The bodies of many of them lay there in holes and Cornrs partly burned & part vnburnd to the great greefe terror and amazemt of the aftr [after] protestant behouldrs.’ She provides additional information entirely absent from the eyewitness accounts: a young boy also escaped the house but did not survive. Her representation incorporates aural effects: the outcryes lamentacions & schritchings of those poor martird persons were exceeding lowd & pittifull yet did nothing prvaile nor mollify the hardned harts of their murderers. But they most bouldly made braggs thereof & tooke pride and glory in Imitateing those cryes: & in telling the deponent and othrs how the children gaped when the fyre began to burne them.20
Her insertion of herself into the narrative, via the rebels’ speech, knits together the various sensational strands of her account while downplaying the ambiguity over her testimony’s status (often pieced together from hearsay). Such sustained rhetorical embellishment is not common among the depositions; however, there was room for metaphorical expression. Constable’s account of violence is wideranging, and her narrative is enriched by striking images: the rebels were ‘fareing and ranging vpp and downe like merciles wolves’; she was warned against travelling to Kinnard, for ‘she might goe above the soales of her shooes in bloud there’.21 It is Constable, not Phillis or Smith and Clark, whom Temple chooses to quote in print. In fact he plundered her account four times in all. His method of repeatedly citing from the same narratives of atrocity showcases his editorial
20 21
TCD MS 836, fol. 87v. Ibid., fols. 88r, 88v.
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Fig. 4. The deposition of Joane (or Johanna) Constable, with her mark certified by the commissioners. TCD MS 836, fol. 89r. By permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.
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agenda.22 The orality of the genre, and hence the immediacy typical of its narrative constructions, are here made visible as a second statement is appended to Constable’s initial deposition. Underneath her mark, certified by two commissioners, the narrative resumes: ‘And this depont further saith . . .’23 Rather than an afterthought, this substantial postscript comprises the rebels’ report of vengeful apparitions at Portadown and their anti-monarchist sentiments. Constable’s comprehensive narrative of events in both Armagh and Tyrone, its rhetorical flourishes, its interweaving of personal experience with third-person accounts, and its discursive structure demonstrate the considerable degree of narrative flexibility encouraged by the commission. The focus of the depositions lies with the individual’s experience of persecution, and these women’s stories are not, therefore, steered towards narratives of their menfolk (although many widows incorporated accounts of their husbands’ deaths).24 This emphasis on the experience of persecution foregrounds the individual’s bodily and social situation. Thus, gendered circumstances of pregnancy and maternity figure large, but impact with greater force in the first-person accounts from women. Thomasin Osbaldeston of Waterford recounted that she was already lying in when she heard of the rebels coming into the town, at which she ‘fled for succour into the hospitall at Waterford & there lay secretly vpon bare straw for 4 dayes & nightes toge[ther] vntill she escaped away by sea wth her twoe Children’.25 Mary Hammond of Tuam, county Galway, composed a particularly eventful narrative of the lone pregnant woman. Her husband, William, was already safely ensconced in the fort of Galway city. On 12 January 1642 Mary began her trip to Galway on horseback, expecting delivery of the child within two or three days. Her narrative is almost picaresque, structured around a series of encounters on the road—some threatening, others supportive—and her physical condition is central to their appreciation. First menaced by a party of men at Bellclare, she was afterwards set upon by one Patrick Higgins, ‘with his skeyne [scian, ‘knife’] naked in his hand (in wch posture he road violently towards her so soone as he espyed her) wch made her (not without danger) leape from her horse as soone as 22 Temple, The Irish Rebellion, sigs. N2r, N4v, O2r, R3. The contrast is further evident when set against other women’s references to Kilmore. Jane Grace recounts the event in a single sentence; Ellen Matchett (Constable’s sister) cites the burning of ninety protestants in an outhouse in Shewis; Christian Stanshaw cites information that an unidentified house was the site of the burning of protestants, adding that those who sought to escape were cut in pieces and thrown on the fire (TCD MS 836, fols. 52r, 59r, 75v). 23 TCD MS 836, fol. 89r. 24 For women’s experiences of the wars, see also Andrea Knox, ‘Testimonies to History: Reassessing Women’s Involvement in the 1641 Rising’, in Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward (eds.), Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women and Wicked Hags (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004), 14–29; Mary O’Dowd, ‘Women and War in Ireland in the 1640s’, in MacCurtain and O’Dowd, Women in Early Modern Ireland, 91–111; Bernadette Whelan, ‘Women and Warfare, 1641–1691’, in Pa´draig Lenihan (ed.), Conquest and Resistance: War in SeventeenthCentury Ireland (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 317–43. 25 TCD MS 820, fol. 8r.
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he came at her, but then he for her husbands sake (as he sayd) did her noe other harme’. Some few miles further along she was robbed and stripped of her apron by an unnamed woman and two men, who were in the process of stripping her gown when two Joyce men from Galway ‘came accidentally and rescued her’. The Joyces punctuate her narrative with their repeated efforts on her behalf. Another arbitrary rescue occurs further along the road, when two Irish men detained her in the rain, ‘before she was deliuered from ym by one James Lally (that knew her) accidentally coming that way’. The fortuitous nature of these encounters lends her deposition its picaresque quality. Four miles from Galway the Joyces deposited her in the English Herbert Cross’s house. Turned out by Mrs Cross for fear of the Irish, ‘though in bad case to stirre’, the heavily pregnant Mary was assaulted by some Irish men, at which she screamed for the Joyces (whom she knew were staying nearby). Once again they came to the rescue, ‘and after much parley were faine to giue the rogues worth a shilling in drinke to let them carry her to some place in the Towne’. Eventually, ‘thus wett, dirty, weary, & bruised’, and placed in a poverty-stricken Irish house, the Joyces left her once more. Soon afterwards she went into labour. The man of the house (her protector) departing for the midwife, his absence permitted a rogue from the street to enter the house; this man ‘tooke off her mantle ∧wch she borowed from her man . . . & putt it upon himselfe, & sat down by her, mocking & flowting at her’.26 This act of personating an English woman has carnivalesque resonances. The wide-scale stripping of protestant victims was most obviously due to the clothes’ economic value, but it also evoked a subversion of colonial relationships. Elizabeth Pierce of Down was clear on the social and ethnic semiotics of clothing, deposing that the Irish ‘soe much hated the English and their very fashions in clothes, that ∧they resolued aftr the irish hadd gotten the victory all the women in Ireland should as formerly goe ∧only in smockes mantles and broages: as well Ladies as othrs: & the English fashions to be quite abolished’.27 Thus, Englishness is symbolically purged through the restoration of traditional Irish dress. It is to be performed by Irish women of all social classes. Yet the perceived need to overthrow English fashions itself demonstrates the extent of cross-cultural penetration, and this was not so clear-cut; English clothing was captured and worn as well as destroyed. Canny has pointed to the ritualistic dimension of stripping as a means of humiliation and a leveller of social status. Ball has further argued for the complex symbolism of stripping as the visual demonstration of a world turned upside-down, of the removal of the English from Ireland. The donning and adaptation of stolen English dress unsettled English, as well as Irish, assumptions.28 The Irish mantle 26
TCD MS 830, fol. 136. TCD MS 837, fol. 11v. 28 Canny, Making Ireland British, 545; John Ball, ‘Popular Violence in the Irish Uprising of 1641: The 1641 Depositions, Irish Resistance to English Colonialism, and its Representation in English Sources’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins University (2006), 95–109. 27
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as worn by Irish women held associations of barbarism and sexual licence in the English mindset. Careful to explain the circumstances for her adoption of this dress (borrowed from the man of the house), Hammond attempts to avoid any such association. The incident marks a tragic swerve in her narrative. On the midwife’s arrival the cross-dressing rogue is joined by ‘many more [who] would not allow her the priuacy of that poore chamber, without either bed or fire’. This continued the length of her labour, from Friday night to Sunday night. The eventual stillbirth is construed in terms of cause and effect: ‘she was deliuered of a dead child: wch she veryly believed was kild by ye ill usage she had receiued . . . it being very liuely before.’29 A similar occurrence is narrated by Judith Philipps of Waterford who, sneaking out with some hidden silver to buy bread for her children, was mugged and beaten by an Irish man, causing her to miscarry immediately.30 Hammond’s stands in stark contrast to the separate deposition made by her husband, in which he recounts events in the city of Galway between Christmas 1641 and May 1643.31 Neither husband nor wife alludes to the other in their depositions, suggesting that the act of deposing independently negated the need to speak on a spouse’s behalf. Mary’s narrative is distinct from William’s; its climax with the loss of her child and explicit statement of cause and effect demonstrate the extent to which personal and gendered narratives could be woven into the apparently Spartan form of the depositions. While such stark authorial gendering of the narrative is not common, the sensational value of atrocities committed on women—and particularly on pregnant women—means that such stories (often derived from hearsay) became paradigmatic. Anna Hawkesworth reported that in Sligo the rebels drowned the wife of James Scott, ‘& gave her such a wound in her belly that the childes Arme (wherewth she was great) appeared through the wound, and she & her child in that posture were carried down wth the streame’.32 Another version emerged in Armagh, where Joane Constable’s narrative foregrounds this story: the divellish Rebells did . . . Drowne one Mris Maxwell the wiffe of Mr James Maxwell: when she was in Labour of Childbirth & soe pregnant & forward therein that (as some of those Rebells . . . and divrs othr the actrs in that blooudy act, tould and bragged of to her this depont) that the very Childes arme appeared & waved in the watr ∧the child being halfe borne when the poore mothr was soe drowned.
In this case Constable provides an emotional and retributive balance by immediately paraphrasing a priest’s response: ‘one oˆ Corr a dignitary preist . . . sayd That wthout doubt that ∧child cryed for vengence against them: & that ∧neithr corne nor
29 30 31 32
TCD MS 830, fol. 136v. TCD MS 820, fol. 219r. TCD MS 830, fol. 134. Ibid., fol. 40v. Cf. 2 Kings 8:12; 15:16.
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grasse would evr growe nor any thing prosper where they did any of those bloudy actes.’33 Margery King and her servant Margaret Simon of King’s County, in a joint deposition, cite another hearsay report that one Jane Adis was murdered with her child suckling at her breast.34 The gendered situation of the pregnant woman, with its straightforward connotations of vulnerability and infant innocence, at the least occupied a memorable space in the collective imagination. Where Spanish petitioners draw on gendered discourses of vulnerability as a persuasive tool in establishing themselves as deserving recipients of entretenimiento, deponents seized on stories of atrocity enacted on pregnant women as particularly affecting evidence of rebel depravity. In both genres gender is exploited as an immediate and potent topos in formulating victimhood. The symbolism of death by water is reminiscent of stories from the French religious wars of the late sixteenth century. The prominence of such anecdotes evokes the ritual of cleansing. But, as with French accounts of mass drownings (which were attendant equally to the possibilities of both purgation and pollution), some deponents drew attention to the converse, and more pragmatic, implication. Dame Ann Butler of Carlow knits one such anecdote to its logical inference of contamination. Reporting of an unnamed Englishwoman, newly delivered of twins, that ‘they violently compelled her in her great paine and siknesse to rise from her childbed, and tooke the infant that was left alive and dashed his braines agt the stones, and after threw him into ye River of the Barrow’, she continues: and the Deponent one day haveing a peece of Samon to dyner Mr Bryan Cavonoghs wife beinge w:th her shee the said Mrs Cavonogh refused to eate any parte of the Samon and being demaunded the reason, shee said shee would never eate any ffish that came out of the Barrow because she had seene severall infants bodyes and carkases of the English taken upp in the weares.35
The subversive semiotics of religious violence permeated narrative accounts on both sides. We might weigh Mother Browne’s account of the protestant soldiers’ performance as nuns, for example, with the following tale from Kilkenny: ‘the Rebells then and there putt a gagg in the mowth of the said Mr Bingham the ministr & laying the leafe of a bible before him bade him preach Saying his mowth was open wyde enowghe.’36 In both cases the impact of the story hinges on confessional stereotypes. This was not simply the reworking of European tropes of violence: such deeds participated in the complex Irish heritage of symbolic mutilation. Focal acts—such as the reported use of the decapitated John Fox’s head as a football in Galway— were not singular, but richly resonant.37 The practice was most notoriously 33 34 35 36 37
TCD MS 836, fol. 88. TCD MS 814, fol. 81r. TCD MS 812, fol. 286r; for the damaged original, see fol. 69r. Ibid., fol. 203r. TCD MS 830, fols. 142r, 147r, 158r.
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associated with the beheading of Sir John Chichester in 1597.38 Palmer has alerted us to the custom of playing football with decapitated heads on both sides during the Elizabethan period.39 Moreover, in sharing his name with John Foxe the Elizabethan martyrologist, the Galway victim lent further meaning to his violent end. Foxe’s protestant martyrology, based on oral and documentary evidence and available in every English parish church, surely influenced at least some of the deponents’ accounts of persecution. At the least, their compatibility with his Acts and Monuments is clear from the incorporation of 1641 Irish atrocities to late seventeenth-century editions of his work. The adoption of highly evocative violent paradigms is also apparent in contemporary print accounts. The subtitle of Irelands Tragical Tyrannie (London, 1642)—‘sent over in two letters, by a speechlesse damzell . . . first ho[w] they defloured her body, and after tore the haire from her head, and lastly, how they cut out her tongue, and one of her hands’—owes a debt to Shakespeare’s Lavinia and the Greek Philomela. But despite that pamphlet’s focus, it seems that rape, for which there is little evidence in the depositions, was widely perceived as a violation too far. Simms notes two reports among the depositions in the violent hotbed of Armagh. Both O’Dowd and Canny have remarked on the scarcity of its occurrence in their studies of the material. O’Dowd attributes this absence to a social stigma discouraging deponents from reporting such violations. Canny counters this, arguing that the existence of some graphic descriptions of rape across the country, and accounts of potential rapists being restrained by fellow rebels, suggest that it was reported where it occurred and that ‘the insurgents considered rape to be a more grave moral transgression than murder’.40 This subject suggests a rich vein for future research. While gender passivity is most effective in the construction of victimhood, gendered agency is equally powerful in the depiction of transgression. It offers a similar shock value in representations of the aggressors. Martha Culme of Cavan reported that ‘ye Irish women would follow after ye Irish rebel soldiers & put them forward in cruelty wth these & such wordes, spare neither man woman nor child: god so pitty your soules as you pitty them’.41 Beatrice Hopditch, of county Clare, attributed to them a greater agency: the women Rebells were more firce and cruell then the men: And amongst the rest one Sarah oˆ Brian [niece to the incumbent earl of Thomond] . . . vndrtooke to convoy and bring saffly out of ye Castle of Dromore the said Peetr Newman & his wiffe . . . But when shee had gotten their goodes she suffered the barbarous Rebells there first to cutt of the
38
SP 63/201/64 (i); see also SP 63/200/125 for Chichester’s decapitation of combatants. Patricia Palmer, ‘“An headlesse Ladie” and “a horses loade of heades”: Writing the Beheading’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), 25–57. 40 Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh’, 136; O’Dowd, ‘Women and War’, 101; Canny, Making Ireland British, 544. 41 TCD MS 834, 111r. 39
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said Peetr Newmans arme & aftr otherwise extreamely to turture him & at length to shoote him to death & aftr the said Sarah stripped the said Petr Newmans wiffe and child ∧of their clothes & turned them away exposed to the dangr ∧of those whom . . . the said Sarah had hired to kill them: But they haveing notice of her bloudy intenccon: did by godes assistance prvent the dangr by goeing anothr way.42
In Kilkenny, Alice Butler (daughter of Lord Mountgarrett) was similarly singled out. In a joint deposition Joseph Wheeler, Elizabeth Gilbert, Rebecca Hill, Thomas Lewis, Jonas Wheeler, and Patrick Maxwell attested to the ceremonial display of seven English soldiers’ heads in the marketplace: ‘Where the Rebells: but especially the women there and amongst the rest Elice Butler a reputed mother of bastardes . . . stabbd cutt and slasht those heades: the said Alice Butler drawing her skeine slasht at the face of the said Wm Alfrey & hitt him on the nose.’ Two further unnamed women were to suffer the consequences of their actions: And one of those lewd viragoes that had noe weapon struck one of the heades soe wth her hand That the same night ∧ the said hand grew black & blew canckled and she was extreamely lame of a quarter of a yere aftr . . . And anothr of those women that wth great reioyceing went and sawe those heades: did quickly aftr the sight thereof fall into such an estonishmt & distraccion that for 3 or 4 daies aftr she could not sleepe nor rest but cryd out that she still saw those heades before her eyes.43
The symmetry apparent here, in the blighting of the senses of touch and sight, aspires to narrative satisfaction. McAreavey persuasively applies the interpretive paradigm of trauma theory to the understanding of female deponents’ articulation of their experiences; we might also consider the consequences for these anonymous perpetrators as examples of the psychological fallout of trauma.44 However, the emotional balance provided by these just desserts is unstable. Butler herself, the extent of her delinquency emphasized by the inserted detail of her bearing illegitimate children, is not held accountable. Her exemption from any reckoning serves to underscore her monstrosity in the narrative. Perhaps most notorious of all was Jane Hampson, whose actions at Kilmore, according to Smith and Clark, made her ‘the most forward & Cruell Rebell amongst them’. Beseeched by the victims to allow them out of the thatched house, ‘rathr to knock them in the heades then to burne them’, Hampson ‘beeing resolute to destroy them by that way sayd she would be a Blacksmith amongst them & denyed to suffer them to come out of the howse But shee haveing a pitchfork & ye othr Rebells othr weapons made fast the doore’.45 Constable, typically, elaborates, her greater distance from the event reflected in the variant surname: 42
TCD MS 829, fol. 74v. TCD MS 812, fol. 203r. 44 I am grateful to Naomi McAreavey for allowing me to read her forthcoming article, ‘“Being women whose husbands were murdered and slain”: Women’s Victim Testimonies During the Irish Rebellion of 1641’. 45 TCD MS 836, fol. 73r. 43
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A great numbr of protestantes were by the meanes & instigacon of one Iane Hampskin als Hampton formerly a protestant, but a meere irish woman & lately turned to Masse, & of divrs her assistantes and Confedrates, forced and thrust into a thatcht howse wthin the parrish of Kilmore . . . The same howse was by that bloudie viragoe Iane Hampskin and her barbarous assistantes: sett on fyre.46
The implications diverge in the telling. Assuming the role of blacksmith, Hampson is represented as transgressing both occupational gender norms and the proper socially productive ends of that occupation. The fact that she is a woman magnifies the overturning of the social order. Constable’s version situates Hampson’s as a treacherous act, the opportunistic assumption of religious identities (mere Irish catholic turned protestant turned mass-goer) demonstrating the innate slipperiness of the native Irish. This protean approach to confessional identity was not limited to the native Irish community, and the social order it toppled could be familial too. Margery Bellingham, who had lived in her son Henry’s house in Carlow, sought refuge in Dublin with her sister, Jane Cheevers. Margery bluntly related her hostile reception: ‘The said Iane tooke vp stones and threatened this deponent, that if she departed not from her doore: Shee the said Iane wold braine her.’ This betrayal takes on a dual religious and familial dimension as the women’s brother, Patrick White, ‘(formerly a protestant, and now revolted) drew out part of his sword, & said, This shalbe the sword that shall cutt of yor twoe sonns heades: yf evr I meete them: The said Patrick, before this Rebellion, being manteined by this deponentes s[ai]d sonn Henry’.47 The social rupture entailed familial estrangement and shifting confessional allegiance on all ethnic sides. Rebel speech, whether uttered by transgressive women or men, plays a critical function in the depositions: to authenticate the sensational stories and insurgents’ (often incompatible) aims. To this way of thinking, if the rebels themselves said so, then it must be true—an argument seized upon by Temple.48 Constable, as we have seen, frequently grounds her narrative in rebel speech to lend it greater authority. Where a story might be second-hand, if its route to the deponent were via rebel admission or confession then its claim to truthfulness was deemed more authentic. What’s more, the sourcing of a story in rebel conversation could enhance the portrait of protestant fortitude. Elizabeth Holliwell’s deposition is dominated by her martyrological representation of one pregnant woman, framed as rebel communication: And they alsoe confessed: That whenas that woman perceived her husband & her othr children to be slaine, Shee became soe resolute & careles of death to herselfe That 46
TCD MS 836, fol. 87r. Henry himself, employed in the Court of Exchequer, deferred to his mother in his deposition, concentrating instead on his economic loss and ignoring the social dimension so crucial to Margaret; TCD MS 812, fol. 54. 48 Temple, Irish Rebellion, sig. br. 47
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smyleing she advised othrs that were to suffer wth her not to greeve nor be affraid of death: For she hoped to supp wth god that night Insoemuch (as the Rebells themselves confessed) That they themselues were angrie that shee smyled and greeved not.49
The Christological representation of self-sacrifice, devout faith, and prodigious endurance derives credence from being sourced in rebel speech. Their admission of frustration further heightens its impact. The widespread reportage of events drawn from hearsay regularly neglects the matter of attribution; ‘common reports’ circulate among unnamed rebels and victims as often as they are pinned on individuals. But some deponents are selfreflexive; Hawkesworth, for example, narrates the rebels’ threats to herself and her children with the acknowledgement that, ‘although it was very often and too true yet it may seeme incredible to relate’.50 Yet in the absence of any other hierarchy by which the communicator of second-hand stories could discriminate between contradictory motives or competing claims to truthfulness, the authenticating value of rebel speech was privileged. Rumours and news about the insurgents’ world-view range from the ejection of the colonial administration to the defence of the king against parliament, from the genocidal to the royalist, from usurpation to restoration of the monarch. It was reported that rebels claimed to act on the king’s authority (an idea developed by John Milton in his Eikonoklastes), but also that they were promised support by the kings of France and/or Spain; that they planned to make Phelim O’Neill king of Ireland, to avenge the reputed murder of Queen Henrietta Maria’s catholic chaplain, or to divest the country of the English altogether.51 Contradictory and numerous, their immediately propagandist value—manifest in their forming the foundation of Henry Jones’s introduction—was grounded in their alleged origin not as rumour but as reportage.52 Whether these rumours were true or not is, in an important sense, irrelevant, as they signal prevailing anxieties and paranoia. As Canny argues, such hearsay statements are of value, ‘if only because they convey some sense of the terror which gripped the minds of the settlers as word reached them of the breakdown of authority in several parts of the country’.53 The plurality of motivations and goals is reflected in deponents’ confusion as to the intended targets of the rebellion. Petitioners to the Spanish court are clear about the lines of identity most useful to them. They draw on a world-view that interprets individual persecution from a broader perspective and uses the individual as microcosm of the grand narratives of contemporary politics, thereby acquiring greater resonance and significance. But the 1641 deponents are less clear as to the terms of engagement. Identified by the state as members of a 49 50 51 52 53
TCD MS 830, fol. 4r. Ibid., fol. 40v. Milton, Eikonoklastes, 115–27. Jones, Remonstrance, sigs. Bv–B4r. Canny, Making Ireland British, 468.
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collective group persecuted by Irish catholics, the deponents’ own sense of who was targeted and why is diffuse. Elizabeth Moore of Tyrone argued that the rebels initially ‘prtended there quarrell only to be agst the English, but after fell upon the Scottes’.54 Elizabeth Trafford of Longford reported that ‘his matie . . . charged them the said Rebells that they should not entermedle with any Scotchman at all; nor hurt them, but onely with the English’.55 Smith and Clark of Armagh, on the other hand, present a picture which conceives the insurgency in colonial terms: ‘the irish Rebells neithr spared protestant nor papist soe they were eithr Englishe or Scottish . . . Soe as in deed all the full & faire plantacions of protestantes in the Cuntry hereaboutes were quite depopulated and distroyed.’56 Others again, like Anna Hawkesworth of Sligo, represented the attacks as assaults ‘vpon all the brittish protestantes’.57 If the composition of petitions to the Spanish state demanded self-identification as a catholic, the composition of a deposition on the Irish rebellion embraced a greater confusion of persecuted identities. Yet alongside this multiplicity of motives and targets, the depositions demonstrate consistency in the discourses attached to protestant identity. Accounts of the pejorative nomenclature employed by the Irish repeatedly deploy the discourses surrounding heresy, so central to Irish petitioners in Spain. Bridgett Drewrie of Armagh demonstrates that verbal assault was immersed in the currency of religious controversy: diurs of the rebells would comonlie & publiquely say that it was noe more pittie to kill the English then to kill doggs calling the englishe heretiques and saying they were godes enimyes: & therefore oughte not to be releeved Saying furthr what right have the English in Ireland to doe any thing there They had beene there longe enoughe And that the king was a king & noe kinge: for the parliamt would suffer hym to doe noe more then one of them cold doe or to that effect.58
Suggesting that the rebellious Irish she encountered were well versed in contemporary English politics, the disclaimer tagged onto the end (‘or to that effect’) draws attention to her claim to reliable quotation and reconstitutes it as paraphrase. As Drewrie condenses religion, nationalism, and anti-monarchism, she illustrates the swirling anxieties that were fused together. Her account of the pejorative appellations employed accords with other deponents. In Galway, John and Jane Sheeley, Magadalen Smith, and Margaret Rowleright deposed that they were scared to go out,
54 55 56 57 58
TCD MS 839, fol. 35r. TCD MS 817, fol. 163r. TCD MS 836, fol. 73v. TCD MS 830, fol. 39r. TCD MS 836, fol. 46v.
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being subiect euery day to their scandalus and oprobrious wordes as English doggs, and threatening often what deaths the english doggs (as they tearmed them) should suffer . . . their very frie or yong children would wth skeanes . . . come to the English women & say wth their skeanes prsented; you English Iades ∧ or doggs I will cutt yor throats.59
Holliwell narrates the imprisonment of a minister’s wife, Jenet Narns, who was ‘called Ethnick, and many othr opprobrious names’.60 The epithet here is religious, rather than racial; the term referred to nations who were not Christian or Jewish in the early modern period.61 The prevalence of heresy as a justificatory concept for the Gaelic Irish merges with heathenism. Elizabeth Crooker of Down reported public declarations, ‘That they were no Christians & there was noe salvation for them’.62 Margaret Bromley of Armagh concurs, her repetitions drawing attention to her oral delivery and lending rhythm to her words: the Rebells alsoe vsually sayd that the protestantes were worse then dogges, and were noe Christians but those that were Christened at Masse were Christians & the protestantes shold be Christened ovr againe at Masse before they cold be Christians, And the Rebells alsoe said that they knew that if they themselves shold dy the next morning their soules shold goe to god.63
The religious, if not the national, focus of the persecution was well understood.64 The many accounts of protestants deceived by perfidious catholic neighbours and rebels jostle alongside acknowledgements of assistance from the native Irish. As we have seen, Mary Hammond’s narrative is peopled equally by assailants and protectors, although her stillbirth tips the emotional balance. Anna Hawkesworth prevailed upon one Robuck O’Crean to plead for her husband’s life in Sligo; he later procured a pass for the family to depart (although this was not to save the life of her husband). O’Crean was consistent in his sympathetic efforts, reported elsewhere as having taken it upon himself to bury the corpses in Sligo.65 Elizabeth Holliwell, of Roscommon town, recounted the night-time escape of some, with ‘the advise and help of one Nicholas Nynny a meere irish man: but an honest protestant’.66 Religious constancy, in this case, trumped ethnicity. Canny argues that priests were often a restraining influence, their sympathies tempered by the goal of
59
TCD MS 830, fol. 169r. Ibid., fol. 4r. See OED. 62 TCD MS 837, fol. 4v. 63 TCD MS 836, fol. 40. 64 See also Brian Mac Cuarta, ‘Religious Violence Against Settlers in South Ulster, 1641–2’, in Edwards, Lenihan, and Tait, Age of Atrocity, 154–75. 65 TCD MS 830, fol. 40r; Canny, Making Ireland British, 498. 66 TCD MS 830, fol. 35v. 60 61
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conversion.67 But assistance was often conditional on mass attendance, as experienced by Beatrice Hopditch on her escape from Ballyalla: ‘very sick & weake getting to an irish mans howse [she] was there kept for some tyme But being laboured to goe to Masse shee & her children privately escaped away.’68 Accounts of help forthcoming from the Irish are often ambivalent and weighed down by circumstances. The narrative of the siege of Castle Forbes in Longford, sustained and defended by Lady Forbes, acknowledges Irish help but recounts the fatal consequences: ‘twoe men of the Rebells . . . often releeved the beseiged in the Castle in the dark nightes for viij weeks togethr wch being aftr knowne the Rebells hanged.’69 Magdalen Redman of King’s County, with a group of protestants including twenty-two widows, was stripped by the rebels; trying to cover themselves with straw, the rebels set them alight, ‘where they had bin burned or smoothered, But that some of the Rebells (more pittifull then the rest) comanded those cruell Rebells to forbeare’.70 This latter is a narrative of mercy rather than aid; those who intervene are participants and complicit in the rebellion, and their compassion is a matter of degree. Most striking amongst the various Irish compassionate figures in the deposi´ Ne´ill), who arrived in Donegal tions is Owen Roe O’Neill (Eoghan Ruadh O from Spain in July 1642. He is the central figure of Elizabeth Price’s account of the rising and its aftermath in Armagh—one of the most striking and detailed deposition narratives. Its focal event is the massacre of protestants at Portadown Bridge (which, with the burning at Kilmore, were the two most infamous events in Ulster). The act of deposing was intended to provide evidence for future redress. But rather than postpone justice, Price weaves the satisfaction of punishment into the fabric of her story. Her consequent transformation of the genre requires an emphasis on the supernatural. This deposition falls into the category described by Canny as ‘enter[ing] the realm of the fantastic’, but is all the more powerful narratologically for doing so (and was therefore heavily mined by Temple).71 Price, who was captured, stripped, and imprisoned by the rebellion’s Ulster leader, Phelim O’Neill, touches on many of the distinguishing features of other narratives. She narrates the deceitfulness of her Irish captors; those drowned at Portadown Bridge believed they were heading for England. Instead, the group (which included Price’s five children) were ‘brought or rathr driven like sheepe or beestes to a Markett’, forced off the bridge and drowned.72 She details the tortures performed on herself and the remaining prisoners in order to extract confessions as to the whereabouts of their goods. Her meticulous description of the effects of hunger—recalling those descriptions of near-famine in besieged
67 68 69 70 71 72
Canny, Making Ireland British, 488–91. TCD MS 829, fol. 74v. TCD MS 817, fols. 178v–179r. TCD MS 814, fol. 77v. Canny, Making Ireland British, 468; Temple, Irish Rebellion, sigs. M3r, M3v, M4r, Nv, O2, R3. TCD MS 836, fol. 101v.
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castles—hints at, but retreats from, the prospect of cannibalism, thus intimating and drawing on the horror of the taboo: [they] were forced to eate grasse & weedes & when they wanted liberty to goe out & gathr ∧them; extreame hungr inforced them to burst open the window in their prison chambr & there to scrape & rake vpp weedes mosse or any thing that they could possibly eate from the walls . . . Inasmuch as at length they hadd as she is verely perswaded beene inforced to haue fedd and eaten of such of them as hadd aftr dyed.
At this point in her narrative providence, which is always associated with rescue or escape in the depositions, is invoked in the unlikely form of the returned Irish leader: ‘Had not the great God almighty putt some end to those great calamitous miseries by the landing of Owin Roe oˆ Neile out of Spaine or from some othr part beyond the sea.’ This is the turning-point of her narrative, and it is the native Irish exile—former commander of the Irish regiment in Flanders and soon to be confederate leader—who acts as God’s instrument. His heroic construction in the narrative is underscored by its use of emphatic antithesis: he Did not only inlarge and sett at libertie her this depont and those othr prisonrs that survived & were there wth her: sent them all wth a saffe Convoy to or nere dundalk: But ∧upon the sight of this deponent and other prisoners miserablie almost starved and in this deponts prsence & hearing exceedingly reprooued the said Sr Phelim oˆ Neile and his othr partaksrs for theire odious and merciles cruelties.73
Justice, here, is attained within the narrative itself rather than as a nebulous, future consequence of the deposition. The narrative performs its own enactment of retribution as Price records Owen Roe’s punishment of his fellow Irish: ‘hee plainly tould them in this deponentes hearing: that they ought to suffer & indure the like tormentes & deaths that they hadd forced & putt vpon the protestantes.’ Moreover, his actions spoke louder than words: ‘hee the said Owin oˆ Neile , in part of Revenge & Detestacion of their odious actions, burned some of the Rebells howses at Kinnard and sayd hee would Ioyne wth the English army to burne the rest.’74 Social order is resumed as O’Neill’s morality overrides all other motivations. He is the earthly agent of revenge. But redress is also demanded through otherworldly vehicles. Price develops and entrenches this sense of retribution as her narrative embraces a supporting supernatural cast. She and her fellow prisoners, now freed, desire to attend their dead at Portadown but, discouraged by reports of spirits, they wait until Owen Roe and his men, ‘resolued to bee at Portadowne bridg to informe themselues concrning those apparitions’, accompany them. There follows a skilfully wrought sequence in which the supernatural acts on behalf of the
73 Price is not the only Armagh deponent to see O’Neill this way; see Canny, Making Ireland British, 491. 74 TCD MS 836, fol. 102.
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protestant community, dead and living. Emphasizing the unity of the witnessing protestants and catholics, Price deposed that: being all togethr at the watr side . . . vpon a sudden there appeared vnto them a vision or spiritt assumeing the shape of a woman waste highe vpright in the watr ∧naked wth elevated & closed handes, her haire disheivelled, very white, her eys seeming to twincle in her head, and her skinn as white as snowe wch spiritt or vision seeming to stand straight vpright in the watr divulged and often repeated the word Revenge Revenge Revenge.75
The deponent’s sensitivity to the effectiveness of visual detail reinforces the impact of the scene. The arrangement of hands evokes prayer, the twinkling eyes an otherworldliness. But unlike traditional ghosts (also typically white), this is not a named deceased victim. The Reformation rejection of purgatory sought to dispel the idea that the dead could return. Yet, as Peter Marshall has shown, the distinction between superstitious catholic belief in ghosts and rational protestant repudiation of same was not black and white.76 Faced with the endurance of apparitions, reformist theologians sought to explain them: as natural emissions from the corpse; as the product of over-active imaginations; as angels or, conversely, as delusions caused by the devil. The Swiss reformer Ludwig Lavater insisted that the soul could not return, but accepted that spirits did appear and counselled his readers that these were either good or bad angels acting under divine sufferance. Good spirits would warn or defend the faithful, whereas bad spirits functioned to punish the wicked.77 Price’s account avoids the word ‘ghost’ altogether, cleaving to ‘apparition’ or ‘spirit’ instead. The effect here on the amassed spectators is one of shock: ‘Whereat this depont and the rest being putt into a strange amazemt and fright, walked a little from the place.’ It emerges, however, that this spirit is sectarian, which crucially eliminates any Marian undertones. Taking charge of the situation, Owen Roe sent for a catholic priest and friar to engage with it: ‘they asked it questions both in English and latin but it answered them nothing.’ The vision would answer only to a protestant minister (sent for from the English army by the resourceful O’Neill): 75 TCD MS 836, fols. 102v–103r. Katherine Cooke reports a male apparition, breast-high in the water with elevated and closed hands, although without the vengeful speech. Her version provides no explanation for its sudden disappearance. See also the depositions of James Shaw, who reports visions or spirits at Portadown crying for revenge, and Alice Gregg, who reports female and male apparitions, naked and upright in the water, pronouncing revenge; ibid., fols. 92r, 112v, 95v. 76 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 232–64. 77 De spectris, lemuribus et magnis atque insolitis fragonibus (Zurich, 1569) was first translated into English as Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght by Robert Harrison (London 1572; repr. 1596), 159–64. See also Bruce Gordon, ‘Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation’, in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95–100.
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the same minstr saying In the name of the fathr, the sonne and the holy spret, what wouldest thou have, or for what standest thou there: It answered Revenge, Revenge, very many times iterating the word Revenge, thereat the same minstr went to prayer privately and after they all departed, and left the same vision or spiritt standing and crying out as before, But after that night of six weekes togethr it neithr appeared nor cried any more.
The implied reason for the apparition’s disappearance is the protestant minister’s prayer. However, it returns, and this reappearance is presented as a consequence of the Irish having resettled the land: Yet after six weekes ended it appeared againe and cried as before Soe as the Irish that formerly were frighted away wth it, and wch were comen againe to dwell in the English howses thereabouts In hope it would neuer appeare nor crye more, were then soe againe affrighted that they ran quite away and forsook the place.78
Thus, the apparition herself enacts justice. The spirit becomes the protestant protector of the area. In narratological terms, Price’s incorporation of the supernatural is providential. It is a means of protestant resistance and defiance. Victimhood ceases to be the driving force of her story, sidelined in favour of justice. Having established this, the deponent then backtracks chronologically to the very first reported apparitions at Portadown. It is only now that the Irish interpretation is permitted to emerge: the first visions or apparitions after the protest[ant]es drowned, were in shewe a great numbr of heads in the water wch cried all wth a lowd voice Revenge Revenge &c, as this depont hath been credibly told by the Rebells themselves (whoe alsoe tould this depont that those apparitions were English divells) & as is most comonly beleeved and reported by most of the Irish inhabitants thereabouts.79
On the one hand, the arrangement of the two stories shows the competing impulses of narrative comprehensivity (including the full story) and authorial skill (foregrounding the more dramatic, and eyewitness, incident). On the other, we are presented with an array of interpretive possibilities, inflected by coexisting theological explanations. The Irish identification of the apparitions as English devils accords with one strain of reformist thinking—that apparitions could be devilish delusions—but it also sanctions repudiation of their vengeful message. Price’s more open-ended interpretation carefully avoids identifying any of the apparitions. These are not theologically troubling individuals returned from the dead but anonymous, explicitly protestant instruments of divine justice, recurring reminders of those murdered and custodians of their territory.80 78
TCD MS 836, fol. 103r. Ibid., fol. 103. 80 By contrast, Dr Robert Maxwell, rector of Tinon, Armagh, provides an account in which the ‘Ghosts’ of named Portadown victims were seen day and night walking on the river, ‘sometimes singing of psalmes sometimes brandishing of naked swords, and sometimes scritching in a most 79
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Like many depositions, Price’s narrative is replete with accounts of the insurgents’ speech. Language was a key identifying factor for the different communities living on the island. But the depositions themselves reveal the extent of linguistic accommodation between communities, as is most obvious in the all-pervasive use of the term ‘skeine’ for the rebels’ weapon of choice—an anglicization of the Irish scian, ‘knife’. Encouraged to divulge any information on the insurgents’ plans, the depositions are full of rumours and reportage of the rebels’ intentions. But the deponents generally remain silent as to the language in which these overheard conversations were spoken. As represented in the majority of depositions, discussions between and among the rebels were conducted in English; deponents themselves argued and conversed with rebels in English; women (as Culme, a self-declared monoglot English-speaker, deposed) urged on their menfolk in English. The dominance of English as the language in which victims related their stories should not blind us to the coexistence of languages on the island. The ease with which rebel speech is reported points to bilingualism as a pervasive reality.81 Price’s narrative lays bare the narrative strategies via which language competency was assumed. Reporting the castigation of Phelim O’Neill and his followers by Owen Roe, she tantalizingly relates that ‘some bitter wordes hadd passed concrning the same betwixt him and the said Sr Phelim’.82 Although these words must have been exchanged in Irish, it is unclear whether the narrator construes them as bitter due to body language or to linguistic comprehension. Proceeding to give an account of the rebels’ ‘private mutterings’, it finally emerges beyond all doubt that Price herself was an Irish-speaker, quoting and translating from the Irish: And this depont furthr saith that whenas divrs of the English were about to be murthered, and desired the Rebells vpon their knees first to admitt them to make their prayrs to God, The Rebells haue often in her the depontes hearing in Irish wordes answered and said Cuir do anim in dwull, wch in English is Give or bequeath thy soule to the Divell.
This is not a simple phonetic rendering in English; the phrase in Irish is ‘Cuir do anam don diabhal’. The correct spelling of the word cuir (phonetically pronounced, ‘kwir’) suggests an impressive degree of linguistic competency (either on her own or the scribe’s part). The provision of a competent translation—the
hidious and fearefull manner’, causing the Irish to abandon the land. Maxwell distances himself from the story, sourcing it from ‘comon table talke amongst the Rebells’. He reports that local priests and friars interpreted these ghosts as either ‘a cunning sleight of the devill to hinder this great worke of propagating the Catholique faith and killing of heretiques or that it was wrought by witchcraft’. But he himself demurs and is equivocal as to the truth of the story, having not witnessed it personally; TCD MS 809, fol. 10v. For Price, see Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, 24–7. 81 See also Canny, Making Ireland British, 450–5, for a discussion of bilingualism in the depositions. 82 TCD MS 836, fol. 102v.
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synonyms (give or bequeath) pointing to the translator’s care for accuracy— reinforces the point. But this brief moment of linguistic clarity quickly slips away as the narrative resumes an elision more typical of the depositions: ‘And at othr tymes would say to the protestantes (vpon their knees, begging wth teares, that they might pray before their deaths) Why should yow pray for yor soule is wth the Divell already, And therevpon and wth those wordes in there mowthes would slaughtr and put them to death.’83 The very materiality of the words here transforms them into an additional murder weapon. Is this second quotation a rendering of English speech or a translation into English? Given the context of the previous Irishlanguage construction, the latter is likely the case. The narrative’s subsequent omission of the Irish, straightforwardly substituting the English phrase instead, suggests that many other deponents simply did the same. It is often only through casual slips that proficiency in Irish is revealed. Thus, as she defends an Irish catholic who helped the rebels, it transpires that Anne Read of Leitrim was to some degree bilingual: ‘the Rebells in Action did call the s[ai]d Phillip Realy an English churle ackording to the Irish (badogh sasonogh) because he would offer to releeve any English; and threatened to burne his house.’84 Correctly translated, the Irish bodach Sasanach was again rendered remarkably closely by the scribe. Deponents, in keeping with the information-gathering remit of the deposition process, are placed in the position of interpreters on the state’s behalf. Deponents were addressed in Irish as well as English, and those without any comprehension of Irish assumed bilingualism on the part of the Gaelic community, as the following exchange recounted by Martha Culme illustrates. Art McMahon Speaking to this Exmt in Irish, she desired he would deliver himselfe in English for she vnderstood not Irish; he answered ∧in English yt such as speake English should forfet ten shillings to ye king. wt king saith this Exmt ∧have we yt will not alow the speaking of English? what king, saith he, but the Earle of Tirone?85
The clash of monarchs is equally a clash of languages. Fluency in Irish could be an advantage: Katherine Cooke’s daughter ‘escaped becawse she spoke irish and sayd she was an irish woman’.86 But unless cleverly handled (here, to disguise herself successfully), speaking Irish was no guarantee of safe passage, as Joane Constable discovered when her sister was murdered. Captain George Fleming and his soldiers ‘carryed [Constable’s] sistr quite away saying hee would drowne her becawse she could speak irish, & would discovr their actes, wantes, & wordes if they suffered her to live’.87 The threat posed by this English speaker of Irish 83 84 85 86 87
Ibid., fol. 104v. TCD MS 831, fol. 39v. TCD MS 834, fol. 111r. TCD MS 836, fol. 92v. Ibid., fol. 89r.
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mirrors that inherent in the deposition genre itself: public disclosure. This particular episode throws light on the many conversations Joane herself had with the rebels of Armagh, implying that she was not known as an Irish-speaker and that her own conversations were conducted in English. However, fluency in the Irish language need not have been common knowledge. The Waterford rebels overheard by Thomasin Osbaldeston surely did not realize she was eavesdropping when she ‘heard some of the towne[smen] & othrs Rebells in Waterford say & wish in Irish That they hadd the stripping of all that brave company’—the company in question being a group of refugees convoyed to the port by Lady Ormond.88 Bilingualism comes to the surface by the by. Deponents’ competencies in Irish are neither foregrounded nor entirely suppressed, but wielded pragmatically on a situational basis. In the circumstances of the rising, bilingualism was performed clandestinely. Language was understood as a sign of cultural division and the hybrid identity it might connote was not a matter for display. Despite the scope for narrative freedom and self-expression in the deposition genre, its prescribed structures, audience, and function mitigated against an assertion of agency that was not founded in victimhood. The writings of Lettice Digby, Baroness Offaly, and Lady Elizabeth Dowdall exhibit assured self-constructions of female resistance.89 The depositions formed the repository for Offaly’s siege-letters and the stimulus to memoir-writing for Dowdall. Thomas Pickering, curate of Killeigh and Lynally of King’s County, in his deposition dated 15 August 1642, gives a lengthy and detailed account of events in his parish. Nestled within this deposition are a series of summons issued by Dempsey rebels to Lettice Digby, together with her replies.90 Lettice Fitzgerald was the only daughter of Gerald, who pre-deceased his father (eleventh earl of Kildare and first Baron Offaly). In 1598 Lettice married Sir Robert Digby of Coles Hill, Warwickshire. The couple resided in Ireland, Robert serving the administration and both campaigning for their retention of the Offaly title and lands against the Kildare heirs. Her husband died in 1618, but Lettice was clearly an accomplished negotiator. In 1619 James I awarded her the manor and parsonage of Geashill, King’s County, and in 1620 confirmed her as Baroness Offaly for life. Her son Robert married Sarah Boyle (whose father was the first earl of Cork) in 1626, and Lettice took care of her grandchildren following Sarah’s death seven years later. Of Old English stock, and having married a New English administrator, Lady Offaly’s pro-plantation activities made her a target for local rebels, to whom she was closely related.91 Lewis Dempsey, second Viscount Clanmalier, and his 88
TCD MS 820, fol. 8r. For a discussion of both women from the perspective of the femme forte, see Naomi McAreavey, ‘“Paper bullets”: Gendering the 1641 Rebellion in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Dowdall and Lettice Fitzgerald, Baroness of Offaly’, in Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton (eds.), Ireland in the Renaissance c.1540–1660 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), 311–24. 90 TCD MS 814, fols. 71r–74r. 91 CSPI, 1615–1625, 587. 89
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brothers Charles and Henry were her first cousins, once removed—grandchildren of her paternal aunt, Mary.92 Pickering’s deposition weaves the epistolary exchanges between these two parties, besiegers and besieged, into the story of his own ejection and anecdotes of others’ sufferings in the area. Copied in the same scribal hand and in sequence, the correspondence comprises three letters of summons from the Dempsey camp, alternating with Offaly’s defiant replies, and concluding with a final summons found following the Dempseys’ departure.93 Many sieges are described by women in the depositions, but few evince women’s agency in defending their strongholds. Offaly is not unique, however: Lady Forbes of Castle Forbes in Longford arranged the fortification and defence of her castle in a lengthy siege during which she provided refuge for all the British protestants of the surrounding area, including those fleeing Longford Castle after its surrender. Forbes and Lady Seaton of Longford also wrote letters to their besiegers, as attested by Arthur Ahmoty and Martin Johnston in their joint deposition.94 Lady Elizabeth Dowdall commanded the defence of Kilfinny Castle in Limerick. Furthermore, English women during the civil wars were soon impelled to defend their castles. The parliamentarian Lady Brilliana Harley is perhaps best known; her letters describe her defence of Brampton Bryan Castle, in the absence of her husband and son, during a siege lasting seven weeks in summer 1643.95 Lady Offaly’s correspondence with her adversarial kin offers an unusually complete picture of the exchange of letters in an Irish siege situation, and of how a woman might exploit her gender in epistolary combat. This exchange demonstrates the intransigence of the positions taken. It displays the rhetorical skill and nerve required by those resisting siege. Letters from both sides of an ongoing siege are life-and-death bids at persuasion, either to surrender or withdraw. Offaly’s negotiation of her situation takes advantage of gendered self-constructions as a means of resistance. Her besiegers, who themselves 92
Baroness Offaly’s first cousin, Mary Nugent (d. 1618) married Owny O’Dempsey (d. 1638); their children, including Lewis O’Dempsey, second Viscount Clanmalier, were the Dempseys under consideration. For the family tree, see Frederick Fitzgerald, ‘Lettice, Baroness of Offaly, and the Siege of her Castle of Geashill, 1642’, Journal of the County Kildare Archaeological Society, 3 (1899– 1902), insert between pp. 420 and 421. 93 All three summons, with Offaly’s replies, were published in Charles William, The Earls of Kildare, and their Ancestors: From 1057 to 1773, 3rd edn. (Dublin, 1858), 228–32. They were again published, with a letter from Offaly to the earl of Ormond dated 19 Jan. 1641/2, in Fitzgerald, ‘Lettice, Baroness of Offaly’, 419–24. The latter edition is reprinted in Field Day, v. 25–7. 94 TCD MS 817, fol. 178v. 95 Lady Mary Bankes at Corfe Castle, Dorset: G. Bankes, The Story of Corfe Castle (London, 1853); the countess of Derby at Lathom House, Lancashire: Edward Chisenhall, A Jounal of the Siege of Lathom House (London, 1823); Lady Helen Neale at Hawarden Castle, Chester: Rupert Morris, The Siege of Chester, 1643–1646 (Chester: Journal of the Chester and North Wales Archaeological & Historic Society, 1923); Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press, 1990), 149–77, and ‘Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics: The Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (1598–1643)’, in Daybell, Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, 143–58.
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disparagingly construe her tenacity in gendered terms, are discursively countered at every point. The first pair of letters exhibit the clash of competing royalist identities so germane to the Irish rebellion. The first peremptory letter of summons, subscribed by seven members of the Dempsey faction, opens with a claim to royalist legitimacy: ‘We his Maties loyall subiectes att the present imployed in his highnes service for the sacking of this yor Castle.’ As we have seen, such claims were widespread and widely reported in the depositions. Offering a ‘reasonable Composicion’, the letter immediately moves to a threat of all-encompassing slaughter, predicated on religious affiliation: ‘vpon the non yeilding of ye Castle we doe assure you that we will burne the whole towne kill all the protestantes and spare neither man woman nor child vpon taking the Castle by compulsion.’ The missive reminds Offaly of her gender, opposing it to their military strength: ‘Consider Madam of this our offer and impute not the blame of your owne folly vnto ∧us Thinke not that here we bragg.’ Her response is to the point, confronting and challenging these terms of engagement. ‘I received yor Lettere’, she begins, ‘wherein you threaten to sack this my Castle by his Mates authoritie.’ Focusing on royalist identity, she asserts her own competing version and adopts a stance of perplexity: ‘I have ever been a loyall subiect and a good neighbor amongst you therefore cannot but wonder at such an assault.’ Having thus dismissed their rationale, she then politely declines their proposition: ‘I thank you for yor offer of a Convoy wherein I hould little saftie’—a wise decision, given the volume of depositions recounting the mendacity of such offers of quarter. Her defiance rests on arguments of integrity, selfdefence, and piety. She concludes with a veiled threat of her own: ‘my resolucion is that being free from offending his Matie or doing wrong to any of you I will live & dye innocently and will doe my best to defend my owne leaving the Issue to god And though I haue bene and still am desireous to avoyd the shedding of Christian blood yet being provoked yor threats shall no whitt dismay me.’96 The discourses of innocence and belligerence are delicately balanced here; provocation is the bridge that licenses her warning. The implicit threat is acknowledged by her next interlocutor, Lord Clanmalier, who retreats to an argument as to who provoked whom: ‘Noble Madam. It was never my intencion to offer you any Iniurie before you were pleased to begin with mee.’ Having arrived at Geashill with a ‘great peece of Ordinance’, Clanmalier scurries to occupy a chivalric position, adopting his own euphemism for the rebellion: ‘I finde you are not sensible of the Curtesies I alwayes expressed vnto you since the begining of this Commotion.’ His offer of quarter, ‘both for yor selfe Children and Grandchildren’, pointedly remarks on the weakness of the besieged. He reiterated the threat of the first summons and maintained its imperious tone: ‘I hope you will not impute the blame on me if you be not 96
TCD MS 814, fol. 71r.
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fayrely dealt wthall ffor I expect to haue the Comand of yor howse before I stirre from hence.’ His subscription—‘Your loveing Cozen’—betrays the specious rhetoric of such exchanges. Moreover, the gender assumptions informing his approach are underlined by a bullying postscript listing male reinforcements lately arrived in the town.97 Not to be cowed, Offaly’s rejoinder elucidates the underlying codes of the correspondence. Invoking consanguinity and morality, which Clanmalier has observed in the breach, she redefines ‘injury’, the term introduced by her interlocutor: I little expected such a salute from a kinsman whome I haue ever respected you being not ignorant of the greate dammages I haue receiued by yor followrs of Glanmaleroe, so as you cannot but know in yor owne Conscience that I am innocent of doing you any Iniury vnles you count it an iniurie for my people to bring back a smale quantitie of myne owne goods where they found them, and with them, some others of such men as haue done me all the Iniurie they cann devise.
Recovery of goods is the central tenet of her defence, screening the subsequent admission of plundering her enemies. She assumes a gendered position of vulnerability in order to test Clanmalier’s appropriation of chivalry: ‘I was offred a Convoy by those yt formerly beseiged me, and I hope you haue more honnor then to follow theire example by seeking her ruine that never wronged you.’ The battle of wills enacted in these letters is highlighted by Offaly’s refutation of responsibility. She entrenches her position by recourse to a highly emotive selfconstruction that draws on scriptural models of Christ and widowhood: ‘[I] can thinke no place saffer then my owne howse wherin If I perish by your meanes the guilt will light on you, and I doubt not but I shall receive a Crowne of Martirdome dying innocently: God I trust will take a poore widdow into his protect[i]on from all those wch without cause are rise[n] vpp against me’, underlining the point by signing herself: ‘Your poore kinswoman.’98 Not least among her recalibrations of the argument here is her nomenclature: Clanmalier’s ‘commotion’ is a ‘rising’. Moreover, she reveals the localism inherent in many protestant accounts of the rebellion by perceiving it as an act committed against her personally. Pickering deposed that Clanmalier’s ordinance was indeed directed against Geashill Castle. The cannon broke at the first shot, dooming their efforts.99 Nevertheless, Clanmalier issued a second summons, in which he acknowledged
97
Ibid., fol. 72r. Ibid., fol. 72v. In his account, Frederick Fitzgerald colours the story: ‘As the Baroness was looking out of a window, a shot happened to strike the wall beside her. She immediately wiped the spot with her handkerchief, showing how little she cared for the attempts of the assailants’: ‘Lettice, Baroness of Offaly’, 421. The anecdote, discussed as a performance of aristocratic sprezzatura by McAreavey, at the least demonstrates the longevity of Offaly’s heroic reputation; ‘Gendering the 1641 Rebellion’, 319–20. 98 99
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that ‘my peece of ordinance did not prosper’, but insisted on his military might, advising her to ‘be sensible of the hazard and losse you are like to susteyne’, and threatening: ‘If not expect noe further favour att my hands.’ Offaly’s reply is succinct, consolidating her arguments and scoffing at his actions: I never disputed how it prospered presuming you would rather make vse of it for your owne defence or agt enemies then to try your strength against a poore widdow of yor owne blood But since you have bent it agt me, lett yt blood wch shalbe shedd be required att theire hands that seeke it ffor my part, my conscience telleth me that I am innocent.100
She occupies the role of isolated but righteous widow. The moral force connoted by this position is set against the physical force with which she is threatened. Offaly’s letters share many arguments with those of the English parliamentarian Lady Harley, written a year later and in a different bellicose context. Like Offaly, Harley countered her besiegers’ claims to regal authority. She adopted a strategy to draw out the siege by epistolary negotiation. She contended that her arms and men were mustered as a defensive measure, and insisted on her legal rights to retain the family’s property. Exploiting her gendered situation, she argued that only her absent husband could decide to surrender, and drew on providential judgement, cautioning her besiegers ‘how you make yourselves guilty of innocent blood; for so you will, if you shed the least drop of any with me’.101 In reality at opposite ends of the political spectrum, both Offaly and Harley appropriated the language of female vulnerability, of political loyalty, of innocence and self-defence, to persuade their besiegers in writing. The availability of this rhetoric to women, and their widespread deployment of it, transcended specific political contexts. The Dempseys’ frequent claims to superior strength were belied by the fact that they ‘were beaten out of the towne’. Pickering narrates that a further letter, written by Charles Dempsey, and also reproduced in his deposition, was found after their departure. This final summons paints an intriguing picture of many other letters written by Offaly in the hope of alleviating her situation. Writing— whether to dissuade her besiegers or to cajole others to help—was her form of action, and her effectiveness as a writer aroused fury in her antagonist. Dempsey, whose forces had intercepted her messages, passionately upbraided her: Madam I doe admire that a lady of your worth and honnor as you conceive your selfe to bee should in so regardlesse a sort in steed of matters of Consequence in your lres [letters] vse frivelous and Scandalous words expressly nominating vs your enymies . . . in that lre written this very day vnto Sr Luke ffitzgerrald desireing his assistance to the number of 50 men . . . he being yor Enymie noe lesse then wee secluding kindred, not prophanesse of
100
TCD MS 814, fol. 73r. Hilda Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women’s Political Writings, 1610– 1725, 4 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), i. 201. 101
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religion Nay yor Lapp was not formerly abashed to write to [Lord Justice] William Parsons, nameing vs in that lettere vnto him a mixt multitude.
Her language is an affront, her confessional allegiance unnatural, and her perseverance in writing as a woman a grave transgression. Insisting on gendered hierarchies, he cautioned: ‘Remembe[r] your selfe Madam, consisting of more women and boyes then men.’ Dempsey angrily countered her prolific writing with news of his own as he informed her of the intended execution of her captive messengers: ‘Yor Lapp by yor letteres desires Novelties. Heare then.’102 He admits that her letter to Parsons reaped some reward: Chidley Coote came to relieve Geashill but was repulsed. Indeed Coote, in his lengthy deposition of his military services, relates that he attempted to relieve Geashill on 10 December 1641: ‘But the whole Countrie being vpp They were Inforced to retire againe.’103 Thus, Coote dates the surviving correspondence to late 1641. Dempsey was right to be concerned at the circulation of Lady Offaly’s letters. Obviously, Pickering obtained copies and had them recorded in the depositions. But she herself disseminated them. Writing to the lord lieutenant on 14 December 1641, the lords justices reported: ‘Wee lately received Letters from the Lady Ofaly, and a Letter containing most insolent Menaces inclosed therein, sent her from the Rebels, to which shee sent them a Noble Answer, Copies whereof we send here inclosed.’104 Among the men defending her castle was the son of William Bladen, Dublin alderman and printer. This is probably the means by which the first pair of letters were transmitted to Bladen, who forwarded copies to another son in London. Bladen wrote his own account of the rebellion, enclosing both letters and authorizing print publication. Thus, Lady Offaly’s dextrous rhetoric received wider acclaim, published in London in 1642.105 Offaly was proactive in circulating these letters, holding them as evidence both of the besiegers’ iniquity and her own righteousness. She wrote to the earl of Ormond (not, apparently, for the first time) on 19 January 1641/2, enclosing a copy of the first summons, ‘wherby you may see ther Insolency and blody resolution’. We get a flavour here of the incendiary invective against which Dempsey railed. Providence is a key trope of her representation to Ormond, which is unhindered by the polite protocol required of parley: ‘if god of his mercy had not sent a great glut of rayn we had perished for want of water . . . and now I remayn as a prisner within thes walles which thay threten to bater about my Ears all which extremitys god willing I am resolued to sufer rather then to fall into ther hands that haue no sence ether of Honner or honesty.’ Offaly presents their writings 102
TCD MS 814, fol. 73v. Ibid., fol. 91r. Robert Lloyd confirms that Offaly’s messengers were executed; fol. 74v. 104 Temple, Irish Rebellion, sig. Ff 2v. 105 William Bladen, A True and Exact Relation of the Chiefe Passages in Ireland, since the First Rising of the Rebels (London, 1642). This first pair of letters were again reprinted by Edmund Borlase, A History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion (London, 1680), 77–8. 103
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and actions to indict the Dempseys. In her response to them, she appealed to chivalry; here, she unequivocally asserts its absence. Her petition for relief, by contrast, appeals to Ormond’s nobility, a quality she aligns with compassion towards women: ‘for to whom should I make my complaynt if not to your Lopp whos inate Noblenes I know cannot but Pity a Lady in distres and in Charity send releef to a poor widow.’106 Her surviving letters show an astute sense of audience and a readiness to exploit gender as an instrument of persuasion. Her innocence and distress as an isolated woman are proffered as reasons to lift or relieve the siege, yet her determined rhetoric belies the self-construction. Refusing to accept the terms, linguistic or military, of her besiegers, her obduracy is self-righteous. Confident in her own innocence, loyalty, faith, and position, her oft-asserted gendered vulnerability manifests as a trope, rather than a source of anxiety, in her writing. She stubbornly remained at Geashill following the first relief by Coote and Lisle, bolstered by fresh supplies. But ultimately she was forced, in October 1642, to abandon her Irish residence for her late husband’s Warwickshire estates.107 The deposition genre, with its receptiveness to breadth of detail, accommodated many women’s accounts of siege. Beatrice Hopditch, for example, deposed of her experiences in Ballyalla Castle (the last to surrender in county Clare) from June to September 1642. Her account embraced military detail, describing the artillery presented by their besiegers, who brought wth them from Limerick a brasse peece of ordinance did therewth make divrs shotts against the said Castle of Ballialley: & prepared and brought nere the same castle divrs basketts of earth & twoe engins called sowes: & thereby & by their small shott soe annoyed those in the Castle: That they durst not goe out for watr nor fewell.
(The sow was ‘a wooden tower drawn on wheels by a team of oxen [or horses] and filled with musketeers firing through loopholes’.108) Where artillery failed, a starvation policy enabled by blockade usually ensued. Like many deponents, Hopditch describes the experience of hunger, the inhabitants reduced to eating horse- and dog-meat, nettles, and weeds. Venturing out to parley, the castle’s representatives were taken prisoner and a gallows erected in sight of the castle to intimidate those inside.109 Eventually the besieged protestants surrendered, departing with their lives and half their goods. Such narratives of siege typically outline
106 Bodleian Library, Carte MS II, fol. 305; also Fitzgerald, ‘Lettice, Baroness of Offaly’, 422–3; Field Day, v. 26–7. This letter is in Offaly’s hand. 107 She apparently turned her hand to poetry in later life, composing a devotional poem in the contemptus mundi tradition, and a quatrain to serve as her epitaph; see Lettice Digby, My Ancestors: Being the History of the Digby and Strutt Families (London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne, 1928), 55–6. 108 Ronald Hutton and Wylie Smith, ‘Sieges and Fortifications’, in John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1638–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 232. 109 TCD MS 829, fols. 73v–74v.
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the number of refugees gathered within castles, the danger of attempts to scout outside the walls for food, and the apprehensive reception of offers of quarter.110 But in at least one case the deposition framework was too restrictive. Lady Elizabeth Dowdall composed both a deposition and a holograph first-person account of the siege of Kilfinny.111 Dowdall’s mother Anne (whose poetry is discussed in Chapter 5) had arrived in Ireland with her first husband, Sir Thomas Southwell, at the turn of the sixteenth century. She returned to London with her second husband (where she died in 1636) but left behind an expanding dynasty of settlers in Munster, including her daughter Elizabeth (who married Sir John Dowdall) and granddaughter and namesake Anne, who married Captain John Southwell (ambushed and killed en route to relieve Newcastle, county Limerick).112 In March 1642 a special commission was issued authorizing Philip Bysse, archdeacon of Cloyne, to collect depositions from Munster refugees, who had hitherto bypassed Dublin on their flight from Ireland. Bysse appointed locals as commissioners to work with him, and one Robert Southwell regularly appears as a counter-signatory.113 The gulf between Elizabeth Dowdall’s deposition and her first-person narrative—most starkly obvious in the latter’s pride at the author’s military performance—suggests, first, that the deposition genre was confining for some, but secondly, that its incitement to life-writing stimulated other forms of authorship. Dowdall’s deposition, dated 3 October 1642, adheres to the conventional format. Written by Bysse himself, signed by Dowdall, and certified by Robert Southwell, the survival of her holograph narrative cautions us against making easy assumptions as to deponents’ illiteracy. It begins with an itemization of losses, calculated as amounting to £5,083, and Dowdall proceeds to name those rebels who deprived her. This version of events (making no reference to her husband) concentrates on the plunder of her livestock. The siege itself is treated in a matter-of-fact way: Captain Eedy Lacy arriving with 100 men 10 days after Candlemas; Lieutenant Patrick Purcell came at Shrovetide, ‘accompanyed with an Army of 7000d men with 3 peices of ordnance, from whome she endured 4 great shot, before she yeilded vnto them’. Rather than describe the siege, Dowdall identifies those killed. Like other deponents, she reports the rebel leaders’ speech 110 For further examples, see Lydia Smith on Longford Castle (TCD MS 817, fol. 159); Anne Frere on the siege of Knockvicar House, Roscommon (TCD MS 830, fols. 32r–33r); Anna Hawkesworth on the siege of Sligo Castle (ibid., fols. 39r–40v); Dame Barbery Browne on the siege of Castletown castle, Limerick (TCD MS 829, fol. 250r). 111 TCS MS 829, fol. 138. Dowdall’s holograph account is in BL Sloane MS 1008, fols. 66r– 69r, a manuscript collection of materials gathered by Edmund Borlase for his History of the Execrable Rebellion with correspondence relating to its controversial reception. It was printed by Gilbert, whose text is based on the holograph (History of the Irish Confederation, ii. 69–73). Unfortunately, Gilbert does not signal the scribal hand, and is incorrect in some readings. The edition in Field Day, v. 22–4, is taken from Gilbert. 112 TCD MS 829, fol. 256r. 113 For Bysse’s Munster depositions, see Clarke, ‘1641 Depositions’, 114–16.
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as proof of their genocidal aims: ‘[they said] that they fought for the Kings prerogatiue, and yt they would beate all the english out of Ireland, & yt they would go to London, and then they would beate the protestants out there too, & so possesse the kingdome for themselues, & they were resolu’d euery man of them all to dye, but yt they would do the work.’ There follows an extensive list naming the men who besieged her castle in July (‘the cheifest of the Army’), and the deposition concludes by identifying local protestants now ‘turn’d papists’.114 While not of the bare-bones variety, her deposition’s concerns are typical: the enumeration of losses, the identification of culpable rebels and converts. Its dual focus is economic and denunciatory. In her compliance with the genre—answering questions of interest to the commission—the deponent is characterized as a passive victim. Yet this identity is quite at odds with the strong female leader who emerges from her first-person account. The surviving manuscript, entitled ‘a true note of my seuerall carues [services] done In county of limbrike at my casill of Kilfini’, is written in Dowdall’s own hand, with corrections and revisions in a second unsigned hand—that of the deposition scribe, Bysse.115 Thus, her narrative likely followed a similar protocol to the depositions. Initially written by herself, it was probably read back to her with clarifying changes made. These were primarily of spelling and grammar, with one substantial editorial substitution. Endorsed at Kinsale and dated 6 October 1642, three days after her deposition, it is likely that Dowdall left the country from this port, and she may have left her first-person narrative with Bysse. By the late 1670s it had come into the hands of Edmund Borlase, who was gathering materials for his 1680 History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion. Although he did not print Dowdall’s narrative, the extent of the striking impression it made on him is clear from his exaltation of her military heroism: And amongst the rest, (omitting many whom we have not time to insist on) we might particularize the passages of the Siege of the Castle of Kilfinny, in the county of Limrick, the Lady Dowdall Commandress, and Owner of the Castle, which after forty weeks resistance, (in that time behaving her self, in several Encounters, with more than Amazon courage, and exemplary conduct) was delivered up to the Rebels, she being reduc’d to the uttermost extremities.116
The survival of both texts, with Bysse’s collaboration, suggests that the act of composing a deposition provoked a more writerly impulse and that this was actively encouraged by the commissioner himself. While other deponents exploited the opportunity to compose their own stories within the deposition
114 115 116
TCD MS 829, fol. 138. BL Sloane MS 1008, fol. 66r. Borlase, History of the Execrable Rebellion, 87.
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genre, Dowdall authored an orthodox deposition but also a distinctive military narrative which places her own actions at its heart. Dowdall’s ‘true note’ differs markedly from her deposition in its stress on military self-determination and efficacy. Her narrative is loosely structured around four services performed: the first three detail her organization of military forays in response to the plunder of English goods; the fourth is an extended account of the siege of Kilfinny from January to July 1642. The emphasis lies on a series of operations to regain livestock, married to successful counter-attacks that embraced the plunder and ransacking of ‘the enimy’ in reprisal. This stands in complete contrast to the catalogue of losses set out in her deposition. In her ‘true note’ no enemy incursion goes unpunished: each theft is answered with brutal retaliation. What appears, from the deposition, to be a one-sided accretion of robbery and spoliation becomes here a mutual sequence of raid and counterraid. Moreover, Dowdall’s side maintains the upper hand. The most obvious explanation for this contrast between the passive victimhood represented in the deposition and the martial agency asserted in the ‘true note’ rests with genre. In composing her deposition Dowdall’s conformist persona is directed towards compensation; in authoring her own narrative she professed a strong military persona, untrammelled by the constraints of the deposition format. The disjunction suggests that both Dowdall and Bysse were conscious of generic protocol, and that Dowdall herself was anxious to articulate an independent military identity entirely unsuited to a deposition. Her narrative is a self-portrait as military leader. Less concerned with rebel attempts than with her own triumphant vanquishing of them, and entirely indifferent to conventional gender roles, the Lady Dowdall who emerges here is a commander and fighter. Her account begins with her raising a small army. She presents this action not (like Offaly) as a reaction to a localized rising, but more heroically as a royalist contribution to a broader war: ‘I was four [s]core stroung allarmed at my ouin cost and chargs, I was thirty hors and fifti fot, which I hired a sofisint soger [soldier] to tran and ecarizs [exercise] for the Kinges sarues If ned had ben redy for the feld the wares [wars] gro[w]ing hot.’ She refers to her opponents as ‘the enemy’, not rebels; this is the representation of war, not insurgency. Her narrative consistently places Dowdall at the centre of decisionmaking, strategy, and fighting. The first-person-singular pronoun dominates her account with regard both to command and action. Her second service, for example, is to retrieve her tenants’ stolen cattle: ‘I sent out the sam hors and fot agane, a found the tsad [said] cattell and I celed [killed] ten of the enimy tock to prisnirs droue to hondred of the enimy of[f] ouer the riue[r] again tock all the pray of the touin, peligd [pillaged] the tone and restored the Inglis ther catell.’ Her own actions supplant those of her hired soldiers. Dowdall’s use of the prounoun annexes this series of feats, even intimating that she had conducted the sortie single-handed. The possessive pronoun is used to convey her preeminent military command: ‘my forc[e]s com fercley opon them ron all away my
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men kiled tuenty of them.’117 The first slips into the third person in places, but always reasserts itself. One of the most striking of these instances conclusively establishes the paramountcy of her own role: ‘I sent out twenty hors well armed and recouered another pray from the enimy and the rest of my forces I deuided and cept ten mosceters [musketeers] on the windmil hel [hill] the rest for the defence of the casill wich apon the alaam giuen & the Ld: Dowdall in person, we iseued out.’118 This is the sole reference to her husband, and it is inserted above the line in Bysse’s hand. An appendage to the text, the benevolent interpretation would be that Lord Dowdall was an occasional presence at Kilfinny (perhaps serving elsewhere as a soldier); he certainly was not a key player in mind while his wife was writing her memoir. Her skill as tactician outshines that of the military men around her. She tells the story of her alliance with Captain Francis Courtenay (who arrived for the first fortnight of January to reinforce her troops) to highlight her superior cunning in forestalling enemy plans. Richard Stevenson, the high sheriff, thought to haue betraed capt Cortni and his compny but by no mens I wold not let him met them but with my forces goyened [joined] to his company, which when the enimy saw to be to hard for them thay went away and left them, but confesed to my self sence, If my forces had not ben with him thay wold haue kiled him and all his company.119
Her decision is vindicated by the rebels themselves. As with many depositions, the reportage of rebel speech lends legitimacy to the narrative, here affirming Dowdall’s strategic superiority over Courtenay and foiling their scheme. At the beginning of the siege, on 9 January, the same Stevenson arrived with 3,000 men, two ‘sows’, and thirty scaling-ladders. As in Offaly’s case, the besieger entered into correspondence with the lady of the castle. By implication, Dowdall’s replies were less courteous than the Geashill owner’s: ‘thay writ many atemting leters to me to yeld to them wich I ansered with contempt and scorne.’ There is a black humour to Dowdall’s narrative of the siege, supplemented by ironic wordplay. Recounting Stevenson’s advance, she wrote that he ‘came op In the front of the army with his droms and pipers but I sent him a shot In the hed that mad him bed the world god night’. This particular instance of mockery, however, was deemed excessive. Bysse cancelled the line—whether with Dowdall’s agreement is unclear—and replaced it with the more muted ‘but I worsted him’.120 Her sardonic commentary on the following day’s action, however, was allowed to stand. Narrating the besiegers’ advance with their sows (sufficiently heavy to require
117 118 119 120
In the manuscript, ‘kiled…them’ is written vertically in the left margin. BL Sloane MS 1008, fol. 66. Ibid., fol. 67r. ‘but…night’ is written vertically in the left margin, as is the scribe’s substitution.
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sixteen horses), she recounts the castle’s preparation of flaming missiles to burn them: I tocok upome that trade to match the enimy and made good nioue match with ouur hand we mad sconces that wee hong In changs [chains] to giue lit and flingeing light and standing lits we mad abondance of stra[w] fagets to borne theire sous [sows] bound op with dry woed then wee mad fiuewrkes [fireworks] to fling In to ther sous on thersday thay druewe ther soues nerer ond friday thay cam an at night with a foll carear and a gret acclamacion of jooy, euen hard to the castell but I lent such a fre[e] welcom to them that torned ther merth In to moaning.121 I shot Iaron bolets that persed thro ther soues tho thay wer lined with Iarn gridds and flock beds and borllsters that I kiled ther pigs.122
Dowdall puns throughout this passage: ‘match’ is deployed to express both her equality with the enemy and her invention of kindling; the ‘sow’ is downgraded to a prosaic pig as a result of her strategy. Her language conveys her successful repulse of the enemy. The alliterative transformation of mirth to moaning humorously emphasizes the point. At this late stage the hand of providence is incorporated into her account: the next day being the sabath day the 17 febrary which I haue all was [always] reson to rem[em]ber with thankes giuing to god for our mity [mighty] del[i]uernce we borned both ther sous and tocke away thirty scaling laders from them which so discomfited the gret army that thay left ous the nex day but left a garican [garrison] of a hondred moscaters to kipe os In to starues vs.
As Chedgzoy has argued, Dowdall’s anchoring of chronology in the Christian calendar (a structural device common in the depositions) provides an easily recognizable conceptual framework as well as gesturing to the religious politics of the conflict.123 The garrison blocked all entry or exit, the consequences of which were the deaths of thirty-nine men, women, and children within the castle. Eventually, Dowdall writes, ‘we bruck out and borned ther garican ouer ther hed and mad the enimy ronay [run away]’. Following this decisive victory, she resumes the first-person singular as her narrative regains its proud tone, its author exercising unchallenged dominion: ‘aftar that I cept the contry clear for sixtine weeke.’124 Dowdall relates her scorched-earth policy, her numerous reliefs of Crom Castle, and her punishment of its constable’s duplicity, ‘for conuaing away the Kings munisin [munition] and practicing to betray the garican to the enimy’. The battle lines, for Dowdall, are consistent: the enemy versus the king. Just as she does not engage in defensive rhetoric nor exploit gender stereotypes, so she ignores the complexities of royalism in contemporary Ireland (complexities of which she was well aware, as is clear from her deposition). Her war is untypical in 121 122 123 124
‘Friday…moaning’ is written vertically in the left margin. BL Sloane MS 1008, fol. 68. Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World, 92. BL Sloane MS 1008, fol. 68v.
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its polar certainty, a clear-cut engagement of two opposites. Nevertheless, her enemy ultimately defeated her with greater firepower. The second and final assault occurred between 25 and 29 July. But again, where her deposition detailed the strength of the opposition and narrated simply her surrender, her ‘true note’ emphasizes resistance: ‘I fou[gh]t with them four days before I wold let them plant ther ordnince and kiled som of ther men I indured four shot of ther ordnance and thay war redy to giue fire agayne which wold haue throu[n] my hous ouer my hed I was forced to cry quarter.’ The explanatory penultimate clause serves to excuse her surrender. What’s more, the terms of her quarter consolidate her self-characterization as respected military leader of a force with national allegiance: ‘apon condicions that what presners war In the Inglis army should be geuen to them to redem me.’ As Chedgzoy has suggested, the national epithet here places Dowdall herself in a colonial middle ground between the English and the enemy.125 Dowdall’s final lines neatly encapsulate her insistence on personal military and moral pre-eminence. She uneasily admits destitution, only to balance this final disempowerment with a statement of its wider regional consequence: ‘the enimy tocke all that euer I had from me saue my we[a]ring linen the rest of the castels In the county of lim [erick] aftar I was beten doune war all tackin with paper bolets [bullets].’126 The striking image of paper bullets conveys the impotence of local forces, simultaneously reinforcing Dowdall’s self-representation as the king’s strongest strategist and last line of defence in the area. Dowdall’s personal narrative of her military triumphs and eventual failure, completed in close consultation with the scribe who took down her deposition, throws into relief the conventions and restrictions of the deposition genre. While some women, like Mary Hammond, embraced the opportunity to recount their individual gendered experience, and some, like Elizabeth Price, pounced on the possibilities of weaving earthly and supernatural justice into their stories, others (like Dowdall) must have felt restricted by the narrative paradigm dictated by the state. Dowdall, not an apparition, is the champion in her area. But she articulates this in an autobiographical narrative, not in a deposition.127 As a genre, the 125
Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World, 90–1. BL Sloane MS 1008, fol. 69r. 127 For another example of a woman’s account of the rising, which has no foundation in the deposition process, see the narratives of Mrs Briver, wife of Francis, mayor of Waterford (Bodleian Library, Carte MS IV, fols. 249r–258v, 478v–489r). Briver defends her husband’s actions in protecting the English of the town and their goods, and his attempts to repulse the rebels at the city gates. Two versions survive, both in the first person: one a continuous narrative, the other a sequence of four letters, dated March 1641/2. They were addressed to Captain Evelinge of the nearby Duncannon garrison and intended for wider circulation. These texts await a good edition. Gilbert’s is uncharacteristically muddled; he merges both versions rather than editing either one, and places one passage incorrectly in the sequence, thus obscuring the meaning (Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation, ii. 8–22). See also Naomi McAreavey, ‘Gendering Irishness: Women and Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast (2006), 50–78. 126
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depositions employ tropes, both linguistic and structural, which prioritize conformity. The bare-bones narratives comprising the majority of the material demonstrate that the function of gathering these statements was, first and foremost, to serve as legally sworn evidence. That very conformity, however, highlights by contrast the many lengthier, more sensational narratives which emerged from the legal process. The significance of both Offaly and Dowdall lies in their manifestation of different ways again in which women wrote of their experiences in 1641–2. On the one hand amenable to the composition of personal and substantial female narratives, on the other, the deposition format could be restrictive in its emphasis on specific paradigms. Letters and first-person narratives (preserved in or prompted by a deposition) were another means of literary engagement that were deeply implicated in the construction of the gendered self in writing. Gender informs these accounts in a variety of ways. Attacks on pregnant and vulnerable women, recounted in so many depositions, presented a direct route to victim identity. But they were more effective in depositions authored by women, whether first- or second-hand. The value and rhetorical usefulness of the isolated widow is highlighted by Offaly’s tactical deployment of the figure in her letters. But any assessment of women’s roles and actions during the rising must take account of the heterogeneity presented by characters as diverse as Dowdall the military leader, Offaly the defiant guardian of her castle, Price the chronicler of suffering and vengeance, and Hammond the travelling expectant mother. Depositions were solicited from female and male victims of the rising. The diverse writings that emerged from the process owe much to individuals’ narrative skills and self-constructions as well as to the gender of deponents.
5 Poetry in English For the New English, Ireland offered opportunities for career advancement and economic reward. But moving to Ireland also involved the establishment of new social connections. This chapter examines the literary strategies of two poets— the Munster planter Anne Southwell, and the Anglo-Welsh land-claimant Katherine Philips—who used their writing to forge alliances among their peers. Both poets circulated their writing to a network of acquaintances and friends in manuscript, a medium attractive for its facilitation of control over readership. Scholars have mapped the vibrancy of contemporary manuscript culture in England as a particularly social sphere for writing, in which verse was disseminated through coterie networks often centred on specific communities: the court, family, university, inns of court, or provincial gentry.1 Scribal publication was preferred by women writers, as it avoided the connotations of immodesty and promiscuity levelled against print publication and offered the support of a select, sympathetic group. Moreover, for members of the planter class in Ireland, scribal circulation was a means of building new social networks and consolidating a minority community, often geographically scattered and beleaguered. Southwell and Philips brought with them the social mechanisms of this English literary culture, composing verse that identified and courted allies. At the same time, their Irish experiences unavoidably impinged on their writing. This chapter traces their importation of an English model of poetic culture for an elite audience in Ireland. It argues that their established literary strategies were honed and developed in Ireland; that their Irish residence became an opportunity for literary experimentation. Ultimately, Ireland served as a stepping-stone for both women, who recalibrated their writing practices in a socially beleaguered context, and transplanted those strategies back home, to greater success. 1
Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), and Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992); George Justice and Nathan Tinker (eds.), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric ; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 279–340; the Perdita Project .
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The vulnerability of the planter class infuses the writing that Lady Anne Southwell composed in Ireland.2 Based in Cork, she expresses the anxieties of her class, outnumbered on the religious front and comprehending of the religious and political implications. In a lengthy Decalogue poem on the third commandment, she confronts the possibility of an Irish funeral, dramatizing the culture clash of coexistence on the island. ‘Yf in Hibernia god will haue mee dye,’ she writes, I cannott haue your capon eaters knell, yett for a pound Ile haue a hundred crye, & teare theyr hayres like furyes sent from hell.
The antithetical juxtaposition of traditions—the ringing for the dead and distribution of dole to the poor that would be expected in England, opposed to the keeners, or wailing women, lamenting the dead in Ireland (and associated here with a classical paganism)—articulates dislocation.3 The mna´ caointe here are emblems of Irish catholic superstition: poore wretched soules, they’r <are> full of such madd fittes, the Pope doth cozen them of wealth & wittes.
Their lack of ‘wittes’, as exemplified in the (apparently) meaningless wailing and hair-pulling of an Irish funeral, establishes a hierarchy of value rooted in economics and religion. But the speaker expresses resignation to living in the plantation amidst the incomprehensible incivility of the Irish, deferring to providence and the future possibilities of protestant instruction: Lord yf it bee thy will, giue them more light & cutt of theyr seducer from his throane that the tenne hornes may worke him that despite told to St Iohn by reuelation for whilst this Hidrae [Hydra] holdes his head aloft ther’s litle hope to haue them better taught.
The scriptural reference to the ten-horned beast of Revelation, ‘full of the names of blasphemy’, fits this digression on native Irish ritual to the poem’s broader topic: taking the Lord’s name in vain.4 But the uncertainty of proselytization is balanced by a corresponding sense of ecclesiastical vulnerability:
2 Although, as Burke reminds us, her title was properly Anne, Lady Southwell, I concur with Longfellow in following the dominant title given in Southwell’s manuscript; Victoria Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning in the Manuscripts of Anne, Lady Southwell’, in Justice and Tinker, Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas, 113, n. 1; Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 100. 3 For the tradition of dole, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 443–9. 4 Revelations 17: 3.
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The poet expresses unwavering personal belief, but this does not extend to the stability of the church itself.5 Southwell (ne´e Harris) arrived in Ireland with her husband, Sir Thomas, soon after he was knighted in 1603. They settled into the Munster plantation, at Poulnelong, county Cork (seven miles from Kinsale). Sir Walter Ralegh, who sold his Munster estate to Richard Boyle (later earl of Cork) in 1602, had been a Devonshire neighbour of Anne’s family, serving, like her father, as MP for the area.6 Her husband served on the Munster council during the 1620s, as did her brother, Sir Edward Harris, who became chief justice in Munster by 1602. Anne remained in Cork for over twenty years. Her first husband (nephew to the Jesuit martyr and poet Robert Southwell) died in June 1626; by the end of that year she had married Captain Henry Sibthorpe, an officer serving under Sir Edward Villiers at Youghal. The last recorded payment to Sibthorpe for maintenance of his men by the corporation of Cork is dated 12 December 1627.7 The earl of Cork recorded in his diary entry of 26 June 1629 that Anne visited him, proposing for the third time a marriage between his eldest son and Ann Carr, daughter of the earl of Somerset.8 At some point after this the couple returned to London, settling first in Clerkenwell and relocating in 1631 to Acton, where Anne was buried in 1636.9 Rather than languish in Irish isolation among ‘poore wretched soules’, she composed religious verse, cultivating social connections among the New English elite through her writings. Southwell’s poetry is preserved in two manuscripts, one intended as a presentation to the king, the other a miscellaneous collection. The Decalogue poem cited above is paired with another, on the fourth commandment, in British Library Lansdowne MS 740. Both are prefaced by a dedicatory poem to the king (whether James I or Charles I is uncertain) by Southwell and followed by a 5 BL Lansdowne MS 740, fol. 148r, ll. 241–55. Both manuscripts containing Southwell’s verse, BL Lansdowne MS 740 (hereafter Lansdowne MS) and Folger MS V.b.198 (hereafter Folger MS), are edited by Jean Klene, The Southwell–Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS. V.b.198 (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997). All references are to this edition, which includes the folio numbers. Klene’s angled brackets denote deletions. 6 There is some evidence that her husband acquired property from Ralegh in 1598; Samuel Hayman (ed.), The Handbook of Youghal (Youghal: J. W. Lindsay, 1852), 18. However, as Klene observes, this Thomas Southwell may have been another of the three documented at the time (Klene, Commonplace Book, pp. xiv–xv). 7 SP 63/245/869. 8 Grosart, Lismore Papers, ii. 18; also Sarah Ross, ‘Women and Religious Verse in English Manuscript Culture, c.1600–1688: Lady Anne Southwell, Lady Hester Pulter and Katherine Austen’, unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (2000), 47. 9 Folger MS, fol. 59r, includes an inventory of Lady Anne’s goods moved from Clerkenwell to Acton, on 23 and 26 April 1631. For biographical information, see Klene, Commonplace Book, pp. xii–xiii; Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 97–8; Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 94–102.
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commendatory poem written by her second husband. The manuscript is a fair copy: a number of corrections and deletions in her husband’s hand make it unlikely that the poems were presented to the king in this form. Folger MS V. b.198 contains letters, drafts, and finished poems by Southwell; poems by other writers; prose excerpts; and household receipts and inventories. Despite the titlepage’s indication of a single-author compendium—‘The workes of the Lady Ann Sothwell: Decemb: 2o 1626o’—the manuscript gathers a vast array of material, compiled over time and after her death, in a number of hands. This is no presentation manuscript: corrections and revisions, many in Southwell’s hand, are a striking feature. It contains military receipts from the 1580s as well as Sibthorpe’s library catalogue, which post-dates his wife’s death. Among the poems authored by Southwell here are drafts of her Decalogue poems plus further poems or drafts on the fifth, first, second, seventh, and eighth commandments; and poems addressed to friends, including acquaintances made in Ireland.10 Her self-construction as a poet is overwhelmingly devotional and protestant, and sharply defined by its opposition to the religion of the majority culture surrounding her. The expatriate evaluation of funerary rites, above, is a particularly dramatic moment in the complex figuration of identity in her verse. References to Ireland in the Decalogue poems of the Lansdowne manuscript indicate that they were composed while she lived in Cork, and these poems provide further glimpses of the cultural insecurity attending her situation as a member of the planter class. Those who have converted to ‘blinded papistrye’ are castigated as one of the greater sort of blasphemers in her poem on the third commandment, in a sequence explicitly referring to Ireland. The poet proceeds to list the offences of catholic observance: belief in purgatory; reading of ‘Legendarye’ books (rather than scripture); the buying of indulgences; pilgrimage; selfflagellation; fasting; attendance at mass; idolization of the saints—all central objections made by the reformed church. Her frustration with her country of residence concludes this sequence. But she hints at an aloof pragmatism: Rome holdes not vpp more fopperyes then this land yett as I hide mine eyes, I stay my hande.11 10 For description of the manuscripts, see Klene, Commonplace Book, pp. xxxiii–xxxviii, xlii–xliii; her ‘“Monument of an Endless affection”: Folger MS V.b.198 and Lady Anne Southwell’, English Manuscript Studies, 9 (2000), 165–86; Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 102–5; and Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 94–7, which suggests that there may be a third, lost manuscript of Southwell’s works. For discussions of Southwell’s possible contributions to court news games, see Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 113–18; Klene, Commonplace Book, pp. xxviii–xxxi; Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 109–12; John Considine, ‘The Invention of the Literary Circle of Sir Thomas Overbury’, in Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 65, 69; Elizabeth Clarke, ‘Anne Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Manuscript’, in Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (eds.), Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 38–42. 11 Lansdowne MS, fols. 146v–147r, ll. 188, 195–201, 203–4.
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The speaker’s detachment suggests impotence in the face of the dominant religion, but the identification of the specific category of the protestant convert at the beginning of the passage points to anxiety that the experience of living in Ireland might be conducive to apostasy—as was alleged of Elizabeth Cary by her biographer (see Chapter 6). The accompanying poem on the fourth commandment further nuances the battle-lines of religious belief. The poet castigates the Family of Love, a radical sect who insisted on allegorical interpretation of the Bible, as dealing in ‘blind Devotion’.12 The speaker presents the sect as exceeding catholicism in error. Her residence in Ireland once more suggests precariousness: by to much clemencye these flyes increase at home a surplesse makes them sitt & mourne but heere fiue churchmens seates serues not one turne.
But the opposition between ‘home’ and ‘here’ is again less clear-cut than it might appear. The sense of occupying a space between both cultures is reinforced by the speaker’s ambivalence about her own Englishness. The poem on the third commandment expresses unease with her native country. These lines hint at enemies in the English court, figured by the anti-republican Roman conspirator Catiline contrasted with the imperial peacemaker Augustus: For mee, I haue of all but litle reason to flatter gaynst my harte that happy land where I was borne, who like fruit out of season hath layd on mee an envious stepdames hand yett doe I pray all Catelines may perish & our Augustus happily may florish.13
Southwell is probably referring to an incident that occurred in 1603, when she travelled to Berwick to greet Queen Anne, en route to London for her husband’s coronation as James I. She was dismissed under some ignominy. John Synner, charged with escorting her back to London, wrote to Robert Cecil complaining of Southwell’s truculence: ‘yesterday I had her halfway out at the town but could not get her on without violence . . . I will keep her close prisoner without suffering her to write or receive any letters but what I may see, to stop her importuning those she should not, and clamouring.’ Her husband also wrote to the secretary of state to vindicate Southwell’s (and therefore his) reputation
12 Lansdowne MS, fol. 165v, l. 552. Initially cancelled, these stanzas then received Sibthorpe’s imprimatur: ‘These verses & those that follow though crossed out are fitt to stand’ (ibid., fol. 165r). This follows the logic of the stanzas following the cancelled passage, which sustain their counterschism thrust. For this protestant sect, see Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge: James Clark, 1981). 13 Lansdowne MS, fol. 165v, ll. 569–71; fol. 151v, ll. 409–14.
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against ‘our malicious slanderers’.14 Her rejection by the queen did not fatally impair her husband, who was knighted two months later. However the damage was limited, the rebuff surely rankled. Southwell’s verse articulates an outsider position with regard to both cultures, by contrast to her unswerving construction of personal identity as a protestant devotional poet. Southwell persistently affirmed this identity in her verse, engaging with contemporary English debates about sacred and profane poetry and seeking to implement her vision of poetry in Ireland, recruiting new acquaintances from the planter class in her efforts to establish a network of devotional poets. Reflecting contemporary English apprehensions about rhetorical excess—eloquence in the service of the secular rather than divine—her poem on the fourth commandment defines her own writing while engaging with this broader debate. The speaker is scathing about those who write for financial or worldly reward, contrasting her own literary practice: To lay fayre colours on a wrinckled hide or smooth vp vice wth eloquent discource Who writes for pence, be<e> he<e> soe turpified & lett those nine Chima’raes bee his nurse. to teach him crawle the Heliconian hill & in Pernassus dipp his iuorye quill. for mee, I write but to my self & mee what gods good grace doth in my soule imprint I bought it not for pelf, none buyes of thee nor will I lett it at soe base a rent as wealth or fame, wch is but drosse & vapor & scarce deserues the blotting of a paper.15
In circumscribing her audience, she represents her authorship as an act of inner spiritual meditation. But she authored a poem dedicating these verses to the king; she incessantly revised her own poetry. Her self-image here does not entirely accord with the reality. Nevertheless, as Clarke has suggested, her choice of manuscript as a medium ‘escapes the mercenary economies in which worldly rhetoric is implicated’.16 The real battle is between two kinds of love poetry: secular and devotional. While the former is roundly condemned as a fad, that is no reason to censure love poetry (properly celebrating God) in itself: & though some amorous Idiotts doe disgrace it in making verse the packhorse of theyr passion
14 15 16
Calendar of Salisbury MSS, xv. 91, 388. Lansdowne MS, fol. 161r, ll. 283–94. Clarke, ‘Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate’, 46.
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such cloudes may dimme the sunne but not deface it nor maruell I that loue doth loue this fashion.17
These ideas were forged while in Ireland. A letter written to Cicely Ridgeway throws further light on Southwell’s literary targets, and draws attention to the allusiveness of her verse. Ridgeway was daughter to Henry MacWilliam and Mary, Lady Cheke. Her husband, the Ulster planter and crown administrator Sir Thomas, was created earl of Londonderry in 1622.18 The letter is a Sidneian defence of poetry, in which Southwell advocates ‘devine Poesye’ and lambastes secular love poetry. The ‘amorous Idiotts’ debasing love poetry, it turns out, are William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, whose ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Hero and Leander’ are named and shamed.19 This castigation of Marlowe’s poem directs the reader to a suggestive echo. Leander seduces Hero in terms directly opposed to Southwell’s: Thee as a holy idiot doth [Venus] scorn, For thou in vowing chastity hast sworn To rob her name and honour.20
Southwell takes Marlowe’s simile and inverts it in an aggressive act of literary critique. She advocates the retention of love poetry, substituting heavenly for earthly love. Furthermore, she adapts the metaphors of Elizabethan love poetry to her poem on the fourth commandment: for hee [God] is fresh as is the flourye may & truly constant as the turtle doue his breth like beddes of roses cheere the morne, his hayres reflex the sunne beames doth adorne. From his fayre eyes, the world hath all her light & till hee look’d on her, shee lay as dead.
The turtle-dove was a common figure for fidelity in love poetry of the period. Richard Brathwait, whose 1611 volume The Golden Fleece the Sibthorpes had in their library, describes in a pastoral epithalamium (published in 1614) the ‘brighter colours such as flowry May’. Marlowe’s famous ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ provides another suggestive correspondence: ‘And I will make thee beds of roses.’ Alongside ‘Hero and Leander’, ‘Venus and Adonis’ was cited to Ridgeway as an example of the worst sort of secular love poetry. In a further echo, Southwell’s image of God’s resurrection of the world mirrors Adonis as he revives Venus, who is lying apparently dead, with a kiss: 17 18 19 20
Lansdowne MS, fol. 161r, ll. 301–4. Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 117, n. 31; ODNB. Folger MS, fol. 3v. Cheney and Striar, Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, p. 205, ll. 303–5.
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Like the fair sun when in his fresh array He cheers the morn, and all the earth relieveth. And, as the bright sun glorifies the sky, So is her face illumined with her eye, Whose beams upon his hairless face are fixed, As if from thence they borrowed all their shine.21
The allusiveness of her poetry fortifies Southwell’s devotional vision. Rather than rejecting the imagery of contemporary love poetry, she absorbs and transforms its metaphors in the service of God. Her theories of devotional verse were being forged in Ireland; at the same time she endeavoured to entice others to engage with her in composing devotional verse. Her letter to Ridgeway was a response to the latter’s dismissal of poetry as an art form. Southwell’s defence, as we have seen, locates her ideas in relation to contemporary texts, demonstrating their currency within English literary culture. The letter is equally an incitement to write religious verse. God’s creation is presented as the archetypal poetry. This logic is then applied to manoeuvre her interlocutor into an untenable position: ‘being thus poetically composed; How can you bee at vnitye wth your self, & at oddes wth your owne composition.’ Adopting the stance of a physician, Southwell examines her patient’s distrust of poetry, and diagnoses secular love poetry (specifically, Shakespeare and Marlowe). David, the biblical psalmist, is presented as the counter to these. Poetry itself is not at fault: ‘It is the subiect, that commends or condemnes the art.’ Southwell’s letter is more than a surviving moment in a literary correspondence; it actively seeks to involve her correspondent in poetic endeavour. She adopts the pose of apprenticing Ridgeway to the art of poetry: ‘giue mee your hand, I will leade you vpp the streame of all mankind.’ The letter closes with an offer of further instruction: ‘when I haue your honourable word of reconciliation, I will then delineate out euery limme of her, & how shee is envelloped vpp wth the rest of the artes.’22 This exhortation to join Southwell in practising the art of devotional poetry is simultaneously a pragmatic means of perpetuating and maintaining the relationship. The letter is an invitation as well as a manifesto; Southwell is building her own coterie among the New English community. She used her poetry in the same way, accommodating her well-articulated requirement of devotional subjects to the social functions of coterie verse. Her poems to fellow English settlers apply her aesthetic theory and encourage others to participate. Southwell wrote two poems inspired by Ridgeway. The first
21 Lansdowne MS, fol. 161v, ll. 315–20; Jean Cavanaugh, ‘The Library of Lady Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe’, Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), 251; Richard Brathwait, The Poets Willow: or, The Passionate Shepheard (London, 1614), sig. E4r; Cheney and Striar, Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, p. 158, l. 9; William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 201, ll. 483–8. 22 Folger MS, fol. 3.
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is a mock-elegy. Recalling the letter’s function as literary solicitation, ‘An Elegie written by the Lady A: S: to the Countesse of London Derrye. supposeinge hir to be dead by hir longe silence’ is both a meditation and a playful provocation, seeking a reciprocal response (in a similar fashion to the Fitzgerald literary exchange discussed in Chapter 1). Teasing her friend about an over-long epistolary silence, the poem takes as its starting-point the assumption that Ridgeway must have died, and develops its social purpose—to provoke an answer—via a series of framing questions. She asks for a report on the constitution of the heavens, the saints, and the nature of hell. This is a complex poem, serving as a platform for Southwell’s intellectual concerns. It echoes Petrarch’s Triumph of Death, a dream-vision in which the bereft poet speaks to his deceased Laura about their relationship and death itself. Where Petrarch has his beloved engage in dialogue with him, however, Southwell’s one-sided entreaties are more poignantly lonesome.23 Imagining Ridgeway’s soul rising to heaven, the poem engages in neoplatonic speculation, fusing astronomy with classical myth. As the soul is imagined closer to heaven, earthly speculation is dismissed as ‘fantasie’, the speaker all the while funnelling theological questions: Good Lady, freind, or rather louely Dame, if yow, be gone, from out this clayie frame, tell what yow know, whether th’Saynts adoration? will stoope, to thinke on dusty procreation.
This self-reflexive playfulness is further developed as the speaker asks about hell, incorporating classical myth and catholic belief. Poets and papists are imagined together in Charon’s boat, secular poetic idols and transubstantiation equally damned: Poets makes blinde Gods, whoe with willowes beates them, Popelings’ makes Hoasts of Gods, & euer eates them. But let them both, Poets & Popelings, passe whoe deales too much wth eyther, is an Asse.
The poem departs from its interrogative structure to meditate on the nature of postlapsarian faith. But the provocative function is paramount; the meditation is interrupted and reined in to the original social premise of the poem: But stay my wandringe thoughts? ’las <whether> where wade I? In speakeinge to a dead, a sencelesse Lady.
23 For a female contemporary’s translation of Petrarch’s poem, see Margaret Hannay, Noel Kinnamon, and Michael Brennan (eds.), The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert: Countess of Pembroke, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), i. 273–82.
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The self-mockery inherent in this interruption is reminiscent of the closing promise of the letter: if Ridgeway would enjoy further, then she must respond. The cancelled words of the concluding couplet (indicated in angled brackets) reiterate the desire for a reply: Yow Incke, and paper, be hir passeinge bell, The Sexton to hir knell, be Anne Southwell.24
Encouraging Ridgeway to join forces with her as a devotional poet, Southwell was keenly aware of the dilemmas attendant on early modern female authorship. An extended passage of over twenty stanzas, in her poem on the fourth commandment, locates social proscriptions against women’s writing in the wider context of male stereotypes about women. Most pertinent to the present discussion and prominent among the stereotypes (the female prophet, the virtuous woman, the sanguine woman, the melancholy woman) which are invoked and debunked, is the author. Impersonating male disparagement, the speaker wittily delineates her impossible position: Dare you but write, you are Mineruaes bird the owle at wch these battes & crowes must wonder, they’l crittickize vppon the smallest word this wanteth number case, that tense & gender then must you frame a pittifull epistle to pray him bee a rose was borne a thistle.25
Clarke’s interpretation of the final line as a reference to King James I (King James VI of Scotland prior to his accession to the English throne) invites us to read it as a commentary on her presentation of the Decalogue poems via a monarchical dedication.26 Semantically ambiguous—are we to read ‘pittifull’ as sympathetic or plain old pathetic?—the need ‘to frame’ an epistle denotes a pre-emptive strategy against male criticism of women’s writing. If a veiled and humorous reference to her own dedication, then it glosses Southwell’s deployment of this preventative strategy. She protects herself as a writer by setting her sights on
24
Folger MS, fols. 19v–20v, ll. 55, 61–4, 79–82, 117–20. Lansdowne MS, fol. 163v, ll. 445–50. Clarke, ‘Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate’, 44. Dedicated to ‘Brittanes mighty kinge’, the identification is indeterminate. Although no specific date has been proposed for the composition of the Lansdowne poems, as they were written (at least in part) in Ireland, they likely pre-date 1629. James, of course, was king for the bulk of Southwell’s time in Ireland, until 1625. Klene, citing the omission in the Lansdowne MS of three stanzas referring to King James occurring in the Folger version (fol. 42v, ll. 327–44), argues that this excision suggests that the dedication of the Lansdowne MS was to Charles I; Commonplace Book, p. xxxii. Clarke has argued otherwise, pointing to the addition of a reference to James’s ‘Demonologye’ in the Lansdowne MS (fol. 153r, l. 487); ‘Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate’, 52, n. 24. It may be that the Lansdowne version, substantially rewritten and dedicated to the king, was not deemed to require additional stanzas in praise of the monarch within the poem itself. 25 26
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monarchical patronage. For Ridgeway, the sheltered folds of coterie circulation would offer analogous sanctuary. Southwell is incisive about the care with which a female author must present her work. Her maternal situation sees her draw on another sanctioned paradigm for women’s writing: the mother’s legacy.27 Addressing the ‘litle brattes that hange about my knees’, in her poem on the third commandment, she prepares her children for her death, urging: Yett ere I goe, this charge on you I lay to keepe gods precepts ever in your harte.
But she is remarkably modern in her critique of social expectations. Her representation of the competing demands of writing and child-care might strike a chord with any working mother today: To you I lend these poore fruites of my studye, wch to my shame tast not of the lampes oyle. the fault is yours, they are soe dull & muddy they haue bene to much toss’<e>d in your fond toyle. for at your gamballs yf I hold not place, you looke as yf I did you some disgrace . . . skarce one but half hower out of fower & twentye your hunting, feasting, reuelling allowes my <surfett> queasy stomack that is growen to dayntye for this wild stuff. Thus hurryed yett I send these forced lines in all your hoobubles< > penned.28
The jolt between caring and writing is rhythmically expressed; the caesura in the penultimate line stands out in Southwell’s couplet-centred verse. If intended as a legacy, Southwell’s writing was certainly enabling for at least one of her children. Her daughter, Elizabeth Dowdall, was herself an author, writing the dramatic account of her 1641 defence of Kilfinny discussed in Chapter 4. As a role-model whose writerly issue was tendered to her children, Southwell was effective. Fate intervened, however, in her attempts to engage her female friend. The pose of Cu´ Chonnacht Ma´g Uidhir, as a courtly lover neither dead nor alive, elicited a spirited response from his interlocutor, Brighid Fitzgerald, as discussed in Chapter 1. But Southwell’s provocative mock-elegy proved fatally prescient. She was obliged to write her own reply: her epitaph on Ridgeway’s death in 1627.29 This short 27 See Sylvia Brown (ed.), Women’s Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin, and Elizabeth Richardson (Stroud: Sutton, 1999); Jennifer Heller, ‘The Legacy and Rhetorics of Maternal Zeal’, English Literary History, 75 (2008), 603–23; Wall, Imprint of Gender, 283–96. 28 Lansdowne MS, fol. 145, ll. 115–16, 121–6, 134–8. r 29 ‘An: Epitaph vppon Cassandra MackWilliams wife to S Thomas Ridgway Earle of London Derry’ (the title was inserted by Sibthorpe, who confused Cicely with her daughter or sister, Cassandra); Klene, ‘“Monument of an Endless Affection”’, 180.
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epitaph ruefully retreads the failure of her provocateur poem, which had languished ‘like an vnbayted hooke | Or as a well whose springe was dead’. Southwell’s literary efforts to build and sustain a coterie friendship with Ridgeway had run aground. The wind somewhat taken out of her sails, Southwell half-heartedly maintains an interrogative theme—‘Yo < > starr gasears that view the skyes? | saw yow of late a newstar rise?’—but abandons speculation in favour of shamefaced brevity: ‘I’le prayse noe more, hir blest condicion, | but follow hir, wth expedition.’30 Southwell also addressed poems to men who were at the front line of the Church of Ireland effort. These are vehicles of introduction and literary display, socially aspirational poems which parade their author’s literary sophistication while always adhering to her devotional poetic vision. Francis Quarles was an established religious poet when he came with James Ussher, newly appointed archbishop of Armagh, as his secretary in 1626. Quarles’s A Feast for Wormes, a collection of biblical verse paraphrases, was published in 1620. Southwell wrote an acrostic poem to him: a personalized tribute spelling his name and a stimulus to further devotional writing. Again, her informed literary sensibility and taste for intertextual allusion are in evidence, as she rewrites Quarles’s own lament for his ‘Art-lesse Hand ’, praising him instead as a god-like writer: Rays’d by thy arte-full quill, t’hat lifes doth giue Vnto the Dullest things, thy fy’ery straine Adds Immortalitye, maugre priuation And by thy power brings forth a new Creation.31
Not unlike the Poor Clares, who aimed to establish an indigenous textual tradition and co-opted scholars to their vernacular translation programme (see Chapter 2), Southwell made common ground with Quarles. She retreats from the overreaching implications of divinity, offering clarification in step with her exaltation of devotional verse: Nor lett them thinke cælestiall powers will blesse Loose ballads or Hyperbolizeinge Ryme<s>.
Rather, the reader is exhorted to ‘In throne [enthrone] thy Phœnix in Iehouahs brest’.32 Ironically, as Fogarty has outlined, Quarles himself took the opportunity, while resident in Ireland, to shift from devotional to secular subject-matter.33
30
Folger MS, fol. 21r, ll. 4–5, 9–10, 15–16. Francis Quarles, A Feast for Wormes (London, 1620), sig. B4v; Linda Dove, ‘Composing (to) a Man of Letters: Lady Ann Southwell’s Acrostic to Francis Quarles’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 11 (1998), 14. Dove’s argument that they did not meet in Ireland is based on the mistaken assumption that Southwell returned to London after her second marriage in 1626. 32 Folger MS, fol. 17r, ll. 2–5, 8–9, 12. 33 Fogarty, ‘Literature in English, 1550–1690’, 162–3. 31
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The prefatory address to his mock-heroic Sidneian romance in verse, Argalus and Parthenia (London, 1629), dated at Dublin, 4 March 1628/9, attends to the anticipated surprise of his readers at this turn—readers, like Southwell, familiar with his Feast for Wormes: ‘This Booke differs from my former, as a Courtier from a Churchman: But if any thinke it unfit, for one to play both parts, I have presidents for it.’ His switch in genre is gendered: ‘Ladies (for in your silken laps I know this booke will choose to lye, which being farre fetched, if the Stationer be wise, will be most fit for you).’ Likely to offend Southwell on two fronts, the stereotyping of women and the abandonment of devotional material, Quarles nevertheless prefigured her own eventual strategy of transplanting her writing from Ireland to England: ‘She hath crost the seas for your acquaintance.’34 Once again, perhaps, Southwell was out of step. But Quarles reverted to type; back in London by March 1630, he went on to become one of the most popular devotional poets of the century, his Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638) regularly reprinted. Southwell’s poem to Bernard Adams, bishop of Limerick from 1604 to 1626, was the first of two versions she composed in her lifetime. It travelled with her to adopt a new guise when she relocated to London. Her exhortation of the Irish bishop to join her in composing religious verse is framed as an invitation to collaborative authorship. The poet puns on her interlocutor’s surname, Adams, to develop a series of meditations centred around the biblical Adam and the Fall. While explicitly stating her poetic aim, she defers to the bishop’s theological preeminence: If this extent of paper could suffice to show how Adam fell how hee might rise Good reuerend Father I will doe my best and where I fayle doe yow supply the rest.35
Her versification of the topic is loosely organized around a musical structure: ‘A songe of eight tymes three parts I would singe.’ The meditation steers the reader through a series of triads: the holy trinity; the ‘greife, calamitye dispayre’ of the Fall; man’s ‘vnderstandinge memory & will’, the mortal type of the holy trinity; and is finally resolved in faith, hope, and love, which offer redemption and a way out of postlapsarian confusion. The pun on his name encourages her addressee to read himself into the poem’s injunction to song: Now Adam out of Edens place of pleasure I leaue thee in more high more happy treasure expectinge there wth ioy to heare thee singe An Halleluiah to heauens glorious Kinge.36 34 Francis Quarles, Argalus and Parthenia, ed. David Freeman (London: Associated University Press, 1986), 49–50. 35 For Adams’s prose writings, see Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 117, n. 22. 36 Folger MS, fols. 18r, 19r, ll. 13–17, 117–20.
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The nature of the song she encourages him to sing accords exactly with her principles of poetry. Her verse poems to these members of the protestant elite were not aspirational; Southwell moved confidently in circles of power within the crown administration. Writing to Richard Boyle, on behalf of the land-claim of a family friend, Southwell joked: ‘Butt if you will neither doe mee good in this respecte, nor tell mee why; I must bee forc’d to put vp a petticion against you to the Countesse, who by this tyme I hope is stronge enough to putt you ten thousand pound in debt by the birth of another sonne or daughter.’37 Boyle was at this time one of the richest men in Ireland and on his way to becoming one of the most influential, not least through his astute arrangements of dynastic marriages for his children.38 She wrote to Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, to console him on his recall to England from the lord-deputyship in 1629. (Falkland had written to the king in support of Sibthorpe’s petition for a command in Ireland in October 1627.)39 Her poems to New English protestants perform friendship in more subtle ways. The impulse to establish a new social network merges with her dedication to devotional poetry, driving her efforts to establish a small group of like-minded manuscript poets. Time and again she presents her addressees as the stimuli for spiritual meditation in verse. Equally significant is the consistent impulse to include, persuade, and encourage them to engage in the same poetic practice. Her repeated solicitations of Ridgeway, her praise of Quarles’s devotional verse, her invitation to Adams to supplement her meditation on the Fall, are attempts to build a coterie of devotional poets. Southwell imports the mechanisms of English manuscript culture to her Irish circumstances. Her insistence on a devotional paradigm can be read as an urgent response to social vulnerability in Munster. By writing this poetry she overcomes the anxieties of cultural insecurity and enacts her own form of plantation in verse. This modus operandi was transplanted back with Southwell when she returned to London around 1630. The Folger manuscript also contains material relating to her social network in Acton. This included the composer and court lutenist Robert Johnson and his wife Ann; Roger Cox, the local curate and devotional writer (a contemporary of George Herbert’s at Cambridge); and the parish rector and theological writer Daniel Featley.40 In Acton, Southwell’s verse epistle to
37 Lismore Papers, Chatsworth, Derbyshire, XIV, fol. 160, cited in Klene, Commonplace Book, p. xxxi. 38 See Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork 1566–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 46–64. 39 Folger MS, fol. 4r; SP 63/245/803. 40 Burke further suggests an acquaintance with Catherine, Lady Conway, widow of Sir Edward, who held land in Ireland and served as chief secretary of state to James I and Charles I; ‘Medium and Meaning’, 101.
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Bishop Adams was rewritten for circulation amongst her new coterie. An untitled passage of fifty-eight lines, this version maintains the original impulse towards mutual collaboration, now redirected to a new social situation. If anything, it is even more forceful in its encouragement of correction, and reaches beyond the intended recipient to their wider circle: If this extentt of papar could suffice to show how Adam fell, how he must rise My noble Neighbour I will doe my best and wheare I faile, please you supplye the rest, Whoe hath a minde and hoards it vp in store is poorer then a beggar at the doore Let your cleare Iudgment, and well tempored soule Condemne, amend, or rattifye this scrole . . . If you haue lost your fflowinge sweete humiddities and in a dust disdaine theise quantities Pass it to oure beloued Docter Featlye his tongue dropps honnye, and can doe it neatlye.
As Burke argues, this latter reference suggests that Roger Cox is the neighbour addressed.41 Cox, at least, reciprocated in kind: the Folger manuscript preserves his elegy on Southwell and two sermons.42 Thus, Southwell’s interest in constructing a literary coterie, repeatedly evident in her poems to Irish acquaintances, is transplanted to London. The persons and country may have changed, but the impulse remained constant. Such recycling is endemic in English manuscript culture, and frequent in Southwell’s writing. Indeed, the first six lines of the letter to Adams are also incorporated to another poem, defending Eve.43 The Folger miscellany, which compiles many poems by Anne Southwell, conforms with contemporary literary practices in England, appropriating lines composed by other poets for her own purposes and redeploying her own lines in new contexts.44 ‘The Lie’, for 41
Folger MS, fol. 26r, ll. 9–16, 19–22; Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 100. Folger MS, fols. 73r, 66v, 72r. For Featley’s writings, see Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 100. Folger MS, fol. 26v, ll. 51–6; cf. fol. 18r, ll. 1–6. 44 She twice reworked lines derived from Ralegh’s associate, Arthur Gorges: first in a sonnet (‘Like to a lampe wherein the light is dead’), then in an epitaph on the countess of Somerset (for whom Southwell had acted in marriage negotiations with Richard Boyle, discussed above); ibid., fols. 9v, 23r, ll. 5–16. The epitaph on Somerset also reworks Southwell’s own image of the ‘vnbayted hooke’ in her Ridgeway epitaph; ibid., fols. 21r, l. 4; 23r, l. 4. Gorges himself engaged in the same practice. He first employed the lines in a love sonnet of the 1590s (‘Like to a lampe whose flaming lyghte is deade’), revising them in 1603 to commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s death, and again in 1613 for his elegy on Prince Henry; Helen Estabrook Sandison (ed.), The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 67, 182, 238–9; see also Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 144–8. The Sibthorpes’ library contained one of the many printed collections of funeral elegies on Prince Henry; Cavanaugh, ‘Library of Lady Southwell’, 252. For the malleability of verse in English manuscript culture, see Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 135–208. 42 43
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example, a poem attributed to Walter Ralegh since the 1590s, is rearranged, with Southwell contributing her own lines and signing her own name underneath the poem.45 The collection is typical in the fluidity of notions of authorship it displays. By engaging in this intertextual practice, Southwell serves as an exemplar of the kind of collaboration she urges on Adams, Cox, and Featley. The redirection of her Adams poem is striking, then, not due to the reworking of lines of verse in itself, but in its transplantation from one coterie to another, from Ireland to England. An Acton clergyman is substituted for a Church of Ireland clergyman. On the one hand, this dusting down of lines of verse fits with the fluidity and mutability of poetry in contemporary English manuscript culture; on the other, it is made safe by the Irish Sea lying between the two circles. Southwell and her husband were the only points of contact shared by both spheres and, as is suggested by Sibthorpe’s posthumous organization of the manuscripts, they controlled their readership. Katherine Philips was another poet who exploited the possibilities of coterie verse, in England and Wales as well as Ireland. But Philips’s circles of acquaintance were congruous and overlapping—the Irish Sea was no guarantee of containment, nor was it intended to be. She is well known for her friendship poetry, and particularly for her creation of a new space for female friendship. Philips’s verse traces a wide network of friends, many of whom adopted coterie names derived from French romances and English royalist plays.46 Philips (‘Orinda’) was the most widely circulated female manuscript poet in seventeenth-century England.47 Her care to control the arenas in which her poetry appeared is well documented. Her few entries into print prior to 1663 are 45 Folger MS, fol. 2r. For discussion of this poem and the texts of other contemporary versions and responses, see Michael Rudick (ed.), The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (Tempe, Ariz.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999), pp. xlii–xlvii, 30–44. 46 Alex Davis rightly cautions against too literal an interpretation of Philips’s ‘Society’: ‘Her evocation of a literary community—a circle of friendships created and maintained to a large extent through the exchange of texts—was so powerful that commentators on her work have often spoken of her “Society of Friendship” as a literary salon, with regular meetings, a well defined membership, even a sort of heraldic seal of its own. In fact, it seems clear that many of these relationships were constructed through the medium of a manuscript culture, just as much as they were sustained by personal contact’; Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), 199. 47 For discussions of Philips, manuscript culture, and her circulation of texts, see Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 55–100; Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 147–91; Catharine Gray, ‘Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie’, English Literary Renaissance, 32 (2002), 426–51; Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London: Penguin, 1996), 147–72; Elizabeth Hageman, ‘Treacherous Accidents and the Abominable Printing of Katherine Philips’s 1664 Poems’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts III (Tempe, Ariz.: Renaissance English Text Society, 2004), 85–95; Elizabeth Hageman and Andrea Sununu, ‘New Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, the “Matchless Orinda”’, English Manuscript Studies, 4 (1993), 174–219; their ‘“More Copies of it abroad than I could have imagin’d”: Further Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, “the Matchless Orinda”’, English Manuscript Studies, 5 (1994), 127–69; Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 176–99; and my ‘“We live by Chance, and slip into
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notable for their projection of a royalist coterie, a protective environment for the female poet. Born into a puritan merchant family in London in 1632, Katherine Fowler moved with her mother to Wales in the 1640s, where Katherine married James Philips, a prominent Cromwellian of the Interregnum period. His wife was staunchly royalist, and her exploitation of manuscript culture signalled her political affiliations, while adapting the cavalier doctrine of retirement to her own concept of friendship. The bulk of her verse is addressed to two female friends, Anne Owen (‘Lucasia’) and Mary (ne´e Aubrey) Montagu (‘Rosania’). She wrote verse in praise of the poets Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley, the royalist newsbook-editor John Berkenhead (‘Cratander’), the court musician Henry Lawes, as well as Francis Finch (‘Palaemon’), John Jeffreys (‘Philaster’), and Edward Dering (‘Silvander’), husband of Philips’s schoolfriend Mary Harvey (whose musical compositions were printed alongside Lawes’s). Philips herself was in turn the addressee of poems by Vaughan, Cowley, and Dering. Her doctrine of friendship, in particular, was a topic of praise: Finch addressed his prose treatise on friendship to ‘Lucasia-Orinda’; the royalist divine Jeremy Taylor wrote his discourse on friendship as a consequence of discussion with Philips.48 By circulating her verse primarily through the medium of manuscript and carefully controlling the print collections in which her poems appeared, Philips constructed a reputation as a refined poet without incurring the invective hurled at other women, like Mary Wroth or Margaret Cavendish, whose writing entered the less controlled realm of print publication. Philips’s friend Dorothy Osborne wrote scathingly in 1653 of Cavendish, whose Poems and Fancies was recently published: ‘Sure the poore woman is a litle distracted, she could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too. If I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that.’49 The print publication in 1621 of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, a roman a` clef by Wroth (niece to Sir Philip Sidney, who conversed with Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille, and his sister, the writer Mary), had caused a scandal at court; the second part remained in manuscript.50
Events”: Occasionality and the Manuscript Verse of Katherine Philips’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 18 (2003), 9–23. 48 The only known copy of Francis Finch’s Friendship is held at Christ Church Library, Oxford; see W. G. Hiscock, ‘Friendship: Francis Finch’s Discourse and the Circle of the Matchless Orinda’, Review of English Studies, 15 (1939), 466–8; Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship (London, 1657). 49 Dorothy Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, ed. Kenneth Parker (London: Penguin, 1987), 75. 50 Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine Roberts (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), and The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine Roberts, with Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe, Ariz.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999).
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As a coterie poet, then, Philips arrived in Ireland with a more extensive literary network than Southwell. She spent a single, prolific year in Ireland, from July 1662 to July 1663, and is best known in an Irish context for her translation in heroic couplets of Corneille’s 1644 play La Mort de Pompe´e. She arrived with her friend Anne Owen (Lucasia), who had recently married Colonel Marcus Trevor, Viscount Dungannon. Writing to her friend and ally Charles Cotterell (‘Poliarchus’, master of ceremonies at Charles II’s court) on 4 June 1662, she presented social curiosity as the reason for her journey: ‘I my self was very desirous to share with her in all the Hazards of the Voyage, and to see the Places and Persons where and with whom she is now to live and converse.’51 But there was a more pragmatic reason for remaining in Ireland as the chips of the Restoration land settlement were falling. Philips’s father had invested £200 as an adventurer in Ireland in 1642: according to the terms of the act, individuals would invest in an army to suppress the 1641 rising in return for land which would be confiscated from Irish rebels.52 This investment was passed to Philips’s husband on their marriage. Conveniently, her friend Edward Dering (‘Silvander’) was in Dublin as one of seven commissioners appointed to implement the 1662 Bill of Settlement. She had connections to the crown administration and Dublin court; her legal objective involved her in the political wrangling of the new regime. Philips applied to Restoration Dublin the strategies which had proved so successful on the other side of the Irish Sea. She became acquainted with the leading members of the Dublin court, who were busy establishing themselves as ‘Old Protestants’ (the term by which planters who had arrived prior to 1641 became known), the new ruling elite. However, this shift in the social status of her circle—her poetry was now addressed to aristocrats—led to new challenges in the self-construction of a merchant’s daughter, even one with the entre´e of a literary reputation and gentry friends. Serendipitously, her current literary project complemented that of Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery (son of the earl of Cork with whom Southwell bantered). The pair met soon after her arrival. Philips reported on 20 August 1662 that he had read her translation of a scene from Corneille’s Act III and urged her to complete her work. He pressed the issue, writing a poem in praise of her writing and reiterating his desire for her to complete the play. Ultimately, Orrery advanced £100 to pay for costumes for the play’s public performance.53 The play dramatizes the aftermath of civil war. It is set in Egypt, on the fringes of the Roman empire, following the Battle of Pharsalus in which the absolutist 51 Katherine Philips, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips: The Matchless Orinda, ed. Patrick Thomas, Germaine Greer, and Roger Little, 3 vols. (Essex: Stump Cross, 1990–3), ii. Letter XI, p. 37. 52 Karl Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 181 and passim; Philips, Collected Works, ii, Letter XVIII, p. 57; L. J. Arnold, The Restoration Land Settlement in County Dublin, 1660–1688 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993). 53 Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letters XIV, XXV, pp. 47–9, 75; iii. 186–8.
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Julius Caesar defeated Pompey and the Senate, overthrowing the Roman Republic. The play opens with Ptolemy, king of Egypt, debating the best course of action to take as Pompey advances, seeking refuge. Ptolemy’s situation is further complicated by his sister Cleopatra, rival claimant to the throne of Egypt and Caesar’s lover. Pompey is apprehended and beheaded offstage; his wife Cornelia escapes and vows revenge. On arriving and hearing the news of Pompey’s murder, Caesar laments the death of his former friend and reproaches Ptolemy. The latter, with his advisers, resolves to murder Caesar, and arranges a revolt. Cornelia, sworn enemy to Caesar, nevertheless warns him and insurrection is averted. Ptolemy himself, conspirator but also Cleopatra’s brother, is spared. He drowns as he flees by ship. Cornelia departs for Africa to muster military support, and the original play closes on the brink of Cleopatra’s coronation. The play is an exposition of the fluid subject-positions of individuals tied to competing interests in the wake of civil war. Each character is torn: Ptolemy between loyalty to Pompey, fear of Caesar, and his yen for the throne; Cleopatra between love for Caesar, for her brother, and duty to Pompey; Cornelia between avenging her husband and admiring Caesar’s virtues; Caesar himself between respect for Pompey and the repercussions of his military triumph. No character in the play can celebrate the acquisition of power, which comes at significant cost. This play, therefore, held an array of topical, urgent resonances for the new court of Restoration Dublin. Orrery, the driving-force behind its production, was particularly invested in the issues it probes. As Lord Broghill, Roger Boyle had fought for King Charles I against the Irish rebels, but he switched sides and, after the king’s execution in 1649, agreed to serve as military commander for Cromwell in Ireland. He became a key adviser during the Interregnum and served as president of the Scottish Council in the 1650s. Boyle overcame this personal history at the Restoration; backing Charles II’s return, he was created first earl of Orrery in September 1660. He had already embarked on his own literary rehabilitation. He wrote to Ormond in January 1662 that Charles II commanded me to write a play for him . . . some months after, I presumed to lay at his majesty’s feet a tragi-comedy, all in ten feet verse and rhyme. I writ it in that manner upon two accounts; first, because I thought it was not fit a command so extraordinary should have been obeyed in a way that was common; secondly, because I found his majesty relished rather the French fashion of plays, than the English.54
Adhering to the king’s taste by writing in the French style, Orrery’s Altemera was first performed privately at his Dublin home, Thomas Court, before the steadfastly loyal Ormond (recently appointed lord lieutenant) on 18 October 1662. It was publicly performed at Smock Alley on 26 February the following year, a week or so after Philips’s Pompey was performed at the same theatre. Altemera was 54 Thomas Morrice (ed.), A Collection of the State Letters of the Right Honourable Roger Boyle, The first earl of Orrery, Lord President of Munster in Ireland (London, 1742), 38.
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produced in London as The Generall in 1664.55 Philips’s Pompey was a great success, published in Dublin by the king’s printer, John Crooke, in 1663 and later the same year in London. Indeed, the resulting celebrity led her into uncharted waters. Philips, so judicious in the circulation of her work in manuscript and royalist coterie publications, scrambled to dissociate herself from Richard Marriott’s pirate edition of her Poems in 1664.56 For both authors Dublin served as a testing-ground where they adapted the French style of drama and introduced the rhyming couplet to the British stage. Their success was decisive for their reputations. This was not the first time that drama in English, performed in Dublin, resonated with contemporary politics, nor the first time a female poet was involved. On his arrival as lord lieutenant in 1633, Wentworth engaged in a cultural programme designed to entrench English political culture in Ireland. The lord lieutenant’s ‘strong cultural aspirations for the “Englishing” of Ireland’ led him to sponsor the construction of a theatre at Werburgh Street, which opened in 1637—the only permanent theatre outside London.57 He hired James Shirley as playwright and John Ogilby (dancing- and fencing-master to Wentworth’s children) as theatre manager, but the project was cut short due to Wentworth’s recall in 1639 and the outbreak of rebellion in 1641. The last play to be performed, and the first by an Irish playwright to be staged in Ireland, was Henry Burnell’s Landgartha (1641). Burnell was an Old English Dubliner, related by marriage to the Dillon family.58 Eleanora, his daughter, contributed to the print publication of his play: she composed two prefatory poems in Latin.59 A convoluted tragicomedy of Scandinavian war, changing allegiances, and conquest, with an unequivocally positive heroine (the chaste female warrior Landgartha), the play’s strident dramatization of sexual and gender politics has been less interesting to commentators than its relation to the contemporary political situation.60 55 Kathleen Lynch, Roger Boyle: First Earl of Orrery (Knoxville: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 117–18. For Boyle’s drama, see Mita Choudhury, ‘Orrery and the London Stage: A Loyalist’s Contribution to Restoration Allegorical Drama’, Studia Neophilologica, 62 (1990), 43–59; John Kerrigan, ‘Orrery’s Ireland and the British Problem, 1641–1679’, in David Barker and Willy Maley (eds.), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 197–225, repr. in his Archipelagic English, 144–67; Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘Regicide and Reparation: The Autobiographical Drama of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery’, English Literary Renaissance, 21 (1991), 257–82, repr. in her Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 164–89. 56 For the debate as to her role in this publication, see Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls, 156–64; Beal, In Praise of Scribes, 161–5; Hageman, ‘Treacherous Accidents’, passim. 57 Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, 81, 96; Fletcher, Drama, Performance, and Polity, 261–77. 58 His wife, Frances, was daughter of James Dillon, first earl of Roscommon. 59 Henry Burnell, Landgartha (Dublin, 1641), sig. A3r. For the first of these poems, with translation, see Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 385. 60 John Kerrigan is an exception to this rule; Archipelagic English, 175–81. For Landgartha, see also Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8–9; Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, 105–8; Catherine Shaw, ‘Landgartha and the
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Similarly, scholars have focused on Pompey’s negotiation of contemporary Irish and English politics. The play’s concerns with divided loyalties, the imperial centre and provincial margins, clemency and revenge, republicanism and monarchy, have invited allegorical readings. But it defies any straightforward correspondences. The beheaded Pompey, who might figure Charles I, is complicated by his leadership of republican resistance to Caesar’s absolutism (suggesting Cromwell), and by his exile (alternatively evoking Charles II). Caesar, who might be read as the triumphant and forgiving Charles II, is complicated by his relationship with Pompey and, as Shifflett has observed, it is Cleopatra who is restored to the throne at the play’s end.61 The convenient demise of her brother, a badly advised king, might further suggest Charles I to some.62 Noting its allegorical looseness, Morash argues that Ptolemy—who begins the play prevaricating about the impossible situation in which he finds himself, caught between Pompey and Caesar—echoes Lord Broghill’s dilemma prior to switching sides in 1649. Mambretti reads the play in light of the Cromwellian James Philips’s situation at the Restoration. Shifflett interprets Pompey as an exploration and critique of the idea of royal clemency, directly referring to Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Rankin proposes that the play’s exploration of the relationship between political centre and periphery likely reverberated for the Old Protestant elite, who ‘wondered whether Ireland would henceforth be a sister or a subject kingdom’, and played out the issue on stage.63 Taking their lead from the prologue and epilogue, which locate the play in Restoration Dublin, coded readings have proven irresistible. Chalmers is surely right when she argues that the attraction to Corneille’s original was ‘precisely because of its ability to illuminate the simultaneous worth of conflicting claims in the English political situation and to break down straightforward binary oppositions . . . [Pompey] seeks to promote a reconciliation which boldly confronts the pain of loss and the
Irish Dilemma’, E´ire–Ireland, 13 (1978), 26–39; Christopher Wheatley, ‘Beneath Ie¨rne’s Banners’: Irish Protestant Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 4. 61 Andrew Shifflett, ‘“How Many Virtues Must I Hate”: Katherine Philips and the Politics of Clemency’, Studies in Philology, 94 (1997), 108–9. 62 Philips herself, to entangle matters further, twice used Pompey in her verse: in ‘On the 3d September 1651’ to figure the defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester, and again in her 1660 ‘On the numerous accesse of the English to waite upon the King in Holland’, to represent the ruler in exile; Philips, Collected Works, i. p. 83, l. 23; p. 70, l. 4. 63 Morash, History of Irish Theatre, 27; Catherine Cole Mambretti, ‘Orinda on the Restoration Stage’, Comparative Literature, 37 (1985), 233–51; Shifflett, ‘Politics of Clemency’, passim, repr. in his Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 3; Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, 173; also her ‘“If Egypt now enslav’d or free A Kingdom or a Province be”: Translating Corneille in Restoration Dublin’, in Sarah Alyn Stacey and Ve´ronique Desnain (eds.), Culture and Conflict in SeventeenthCentury France and Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 194–209.
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complexity of divided loyalties’.64 She might have added that the Irish political situation further heightened the complexity of these issues. The composition of the play and her early alliance with Orrery served as a springboard for Philips’s integration into Dublin literary society. Her letters to Cotterell (published posthumously in 1705) documented her assimilation into the court and maintained contact with the London court, agitating for her literary preferment there. Poetry had been her means of establishing and consolidating advantageous relationships throughout the 1650s. Her decision to compose songs for Pompey, to be sung between each of the five acts and at the play’s close, offered the ideal opportunity to capitalize on the buzz surrounding the play and secure her status in Dublin. In the context of the play translation, the songs impose Philips’s own stamp on Corneille’s drama, providing, as Morash observes, ‘a harmonious counterpoint to the harsh choices offered by tragedy’.65 Dances were inserted: Act I is followed by ‘an Antick dance of Gypsies’; Act III by a ‘Military Dance’; and Act V by a ‘grand Masque’ choreographed by Ogilby, manager of Wentworth’s Werburgh Street theatre in the 1630s. These allude to the court masques of the 1630s, particularly associated with Queen Henrietta Maria.66 The queen’s fondness for performing with her ladies on the court stage was the source of no little controversy; the scandal aroused by women performing onstage at court added fuel to pre-civil war tensions. Their insertion in Pompey is a political expression of both royalism and continuity with court genres. But the songs also attend to the leisure demands of the Dublin court. They were circulated in their own right, for her new circle’s edification, and played an important role in Philips’s entrenchment. Her invention of these songs was enthusiastically endorsed by her new acquaintances: ‘I have ventur’d to lengthen the Play by adding Songs in the Intervals of each Act, which they flatter me here are not amiss’, she wrote to Cotterell on 10 January 1662/3. That local encouragement was reiterated four days later, when she enclosed the texts: ‘if all who have seen them here do not flatter me very much, I may send them you with less Confusion than ever I could yet any thing of the like nature.’ These five songs were set to music by John Jeffreys (‘Philaster’), Peter Pett, Monsieur le Grand, and ‘a Frenchman of Orrery’s’.67 The court’s enthusiasm for her project is apparent in the quantity of prologues and epilogues offered to Philips. She was in the luxurious position of choosing between an array of texts; always with an eye to the main chance, she
64 Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers 1650–1689 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86–7. 65 Morash, History of Irish Theatre, 28. For discussion of the songs, see Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics, and Literature, 90; Rankin, ‘Translating Corneille’, 202–4. 66 Philips, Collected Works, iii. 22, 56, 90. 67 Ibid. ii. Letters XXIII, XXIV, XXV, pp. 69, 72, 75.
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chose those authored by Wentworth Dillon, earl of Roscommon, and her friend Edward Dering, commissioner of the Court of Claims.68 The songs complemented the topical currency of the play; at least two were adopted by women of the court. Elizabeth, countess of Cork, married to Richard Boyle, second earl of Cork and Orrery’s brother, was a prestigious advocate. In a letter of June 1663 Philips reported of her song for Act V that: ‘all here are extremely taken with it, particularly my Lady CORK, who sings very well, and is as good a Judge of vocal Musick as the best of them.’69 Cork’s daughter Elizabeth helped promulgate Philips’s reputation by performing the song written for Act I, and Philips was quick to build on this coup by celebrating it in another poem. ‘To my Lady Elizabeth Boyle, Singing—Since affairs of the State &c’, commemorates the moment when Philips’s songs broke away from the theatre and became established in elite circles. The song itself celebrates the importance of leisure as a counterbalance to high politics, making it particularly suitable for coterie performance. It was in circulation prior to the play’s production. In a letter written to Cotterell on 10 January 1662/3, Philips wrote of this particular song that, ‘abundance of People are learning it’. Four days later she reported that: ‘Almost all that can sing here have learnt it already.’70 Obviously delighted with its reception, Philips acted to make the most of her triumph by writing this poem on Boyle’s performance of the song. The imagery of conquest is deployed, the speaker represented as helpless and unarmed in the face of Boyle’s charm-offensive. But Philips’s praise is impressively double-edged. The gendering of her verse—whereby women are vehicles for her ideas, whereas men are critical authorities—is explicitly stated, the poet’s excitement barely contained: By this my verse is sure to gain Eternity with Men. Which by your voice it may obtein, Though never by my Pen.71
The disingenuousness of her proposition masks the appeal for lasting fame at the same time as it reflects her socially inferior position. Philips aggressively pursued the young daughters of the Dublin elite, who followed the lead of her older friends—three of whom, Dering, Owen, and Jeffreys, were also in Dublin—by adopting sobriquets marking their entrance into her circle 68 Reporting her selection of these texts, Philips wrote that ‘Several other Hands have likewise oblig’d me with both Prologues and Epilogues; but those I first mention’d [Dillon’s and Dering’s] will be only repeated; for they are the best writ that ever I read any thing of that kind’; Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letter XXV, p. 75. 69 Ibid. ii. Letter XXXII, p. 92. 70 Ibid. ii. Letters XXIII, XXIV, pp. 69, 72. 71 Ibid. i. p. 178, ll. 21–4. Thomas’s copy-texts for the Restoration Dublin poems are the Rosania MS (NLW MS 776B, compiled for her friend Rosania shortly after Philips’s death) and the Dering MS (Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Pre-1700 MS 151, compiled by her friend Edward Dering). Where no earlier manuscript copies are known, Thomas uses the authorized print edition of her Poems (London, 1667).
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of friendship. The daughters of Richard Boyle, second earl of Cork, and his wife Elizabeth Clifford were recipients of a quantity of surviving verse: four poems are addressed to Elizabeth (‘Celimena’); one to her sister Ann (‘Valeria’); and one to their elder sister Frances, by now married to Wentworth Dillon, fourth earl of Roscommon (who wrote the prologue for Pompey).72 Two poems are addressed to Mary (ne´e Butler, ‘Policrite’), daughter of the lord lieutenant James Butler, duke of Ormond, and Elizabeth, his duchess.73 Philips’s circle of female friends has been considered in light of the French model of pre´ciosite´, the female-centred salon tradition that emerged in Parisian society and promoted an ideal of platonic love.74 Her circle’s sourcing of sobriquets in French heroic romances offers another dimension to this influence. For Philips, the exploitation of French romance performed a useful function: the smoothing-over of social inequalities. Davis has argued that Philips’s ‘rhetoric of friendship equalises social relations’ in a way analogous to humanist ideas of Ciceronian amicitia; thereby, ‘Romantic abjection becomes indistinguishable from social inferiority’.75 This effort is borne out in her poems to these aristocratic daughters of the elite. ‘To my Lady M. Cavendish, chosing the name of Policrite’, is particularly explicit on this point. Figuring the adoption of the coterie name as a willing abasement in which the addressee stoops to her friend’s level (rather than the other way around), the coterie name becomes a means of sidestepping social inequality: And least I suffer by the great surprize Since you submit to meet me in disguise Can lay aside what dazles vulgar sight, And to Orinda can be Policrite. 72 Frances Boyle was the eldest daughter of the earl of Cork. She married, first, Colonel Francis Courtenay (who fought alongside Elizabeth Dowdall in 1641); then Wentworth Dillon in April 1662. Dillon’s mother was the sister of Thomas Wentworth, after whom the fourth earl was named. He was, thus, related to Abbess Cecily Dillon, discussed in Ch. 2. Thomas argues that Frances adopted the sobriquet, ‘Amestris’; Collected Works, i. 385. Elizabeth Boyle (1636/7–1725) married Nicholas Tufton, earl of Thanet, on 11 April 1664. Ann Boyle (d. 1671) married a Montagu. The earl of Orrery had five daughters: Elizabeth, Anne, Margaret, Catharine, and Barbara. Elizabeth, his eldest, married Folliott Wingfield, Viscount Powerscourt, in Spring 1662. Thus, she would not have been Elizabeth Boyle at the time of Philips’s sojourn in Dublin. Philips wrote an epithalamium on the countess of Thanet’s marriage in 1664, supporting the case for Cork’s daughter. Orrery’s second daughter, Anne, died young; Morrice, Collection of State Letters, 1742, p. 50; Lynch, Roger Boyle, 113, 116. Letters written by Philips confirm her close relationship with the women of the Cork family: Collected Works, ii. Letters XXIX, XXXVIII, XL, pp. 84, 106, 116. 73 Mary Butler (1646–1710) married William Cavendish, later duke of Devonshire, at Kilkenny Castle on 26 October 1662. Her husband had toured France and Germany with Wentworth Dillon during the 1650s. 74 Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 72–82; Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Barash argues that Philips’s poetry of friendship is derived equally from the pre´cieuses and male Cavalier models; English Women’s Poetry, 66. Hageman and Sununu have located a seventeenth-century manuscript collection of French poems, representative of the pre´cieuses poets, which includes two poems by Philips (BL Harley MS 6900); ‘Further Manuscript Texts’, 139–44. 75 Davis, Chivalry and Romance, 199, 178.
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The world of the coterie stands outside the realities of social hierarchy. Yet it is a world ruled by Orinda, as she reminds her friend: You must endure my vows, and find the way To entertain such Rites as I can pay.
Although the portrait is a flattering one, in which Policrite receives Orinda’s attentions, it remains a world of the latter’s devising. Yet the posture of abjection, so useful in addressing one’s social superior, is maintained throughout. Love and kindness (and, of course, poetry) are all that she can finally offer. These are recast, in the real world of status, as virtues which transcend inequality, hierarchy itself reconfigured in religious terms: ’Tis all that mortals can on Heav’n bestow, And all that Heav’n can value here below.76
Anxiety about the potential minefield of asserting equality through friendship is always present in these poems. It presents a new challenge: no longer simply to justify writing poetry as a woman, but as a woman of lower social status. Although Barash points to the dynastic affluence of Anne Owen, addressed as an equal through the 1650s, Chalmers suggests that the discordance in the Restoration friendship poems is due to changed political circumstances: ‘after 1660, social disparities were not so easily overridden by the sense of being united in political disadvantage which Philips shared with her royalist friends during the 1650s.’77 ‘To Celimena’, signalling the coterie relationship in its very title, employs another religious metaphor for the potential social transgression: But say, bold trifler, what dost thou pretend? Wouldst thou depose thy Saint into thy Friend? Equality in friendship is requir’d, Which here were criminal to be desir’d.78
The mutual exclusivity of friendship and social inequality is a persistent problem. These poems display recurrent attempts to overcome it, with a regularity that highlights its intransigence. But Philips keeps on hammering away at it.79 The imagery of conquest is a particular tool employed in her negotiation of the issue. ‘To the Lady E. Boyl’ draws on the established romanticization of the
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Philips, Collected Works, i. pp. 213–14, ll. 11–16, 27–8. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 76; Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 84. 78 Philips, Collected Works, i. p. 227, ll. 5–8. 79 I differ here from Barash, who argues that ‘“Friendship” is a code that creates equality, cancelling social differences it would otherwise be “criminal” to desire changed’; English Women’s Poetry, 79. These poems are precisely about the attempt and repeated failure to cancel inequality. The poems cannot be trusted to surmount the difficulty and therefore constantly reiterate it. 77
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relationship by addressing her subject as Celimena in the opening line. The poem defines the relationship in terms of military capture: Dear Tyrant, why will you subdue Orinda’s trivial heart, Which can no triumph add to you, Not meriting your dart?
Yet the speaker finds succour in a gift of jewellery: material proof of the reciprocity and bonds of their friendship. Despite this, she steers a self-conscious path between between vassalage and aspiration: To be your slave I more design, Than to have all the world be mine . . . Pardon th’Ambition of my aim.80
This need for proof of friendship is also evident in her poem to Ann Boyle. Careful, again, to begin with the coterie designation (‘Ador’d Valeria’), the poem’s title—‘To my Lady Ann Boyle’s saying I look’d angrily upon her’— roots it in a social occasion. This serves the immediate purpose of establishing the reality of their friendship. The poem laments the unreliability of body language, but rejoices in the assurances provided by its misinterpretation: But I must thank your Errour, which procures Me such obliging Jealousy as yours: For at that quarrell I can ne’re repine, Which shews your Kindness, though it questions mine.81
All these poems, of course, are also vehicles for Philips’s own literary reputation. In writing about these women she uses them as channels for her poetry, and advertises her new aristocratic connections. The poems may have been flattering for their recipients, but Philips’s association with them also enhanced her social and literary credit. As Barash has argued, these poems function as a means of access to the male political elite: ‘In addressing poems to aristocratic women . . . Philips flattered not only the women, but also the male members of their families.’82 Her epithalamium on the marriage of Mary Butler to William Cavendish in October 1662, soon after her arrival in Ireland, highlights this objective and draws on a shared royalist politics. Creating a sense of distance by speaking in a third-person voice, the poem imagines the classical muses as bridesmaids. Hinting at Charles II’s exile (during which he was attended by the duke of Ormond, the bride’s father), the muses are figured as deposed monarchy:
80 81 82
Philips, Collected Works, i. pp. 221–2, ll. 7–10, 23–4, 31. Ibid. i. pp. 201–2, ll. 1, 13–16. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 80.
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The poem then narrates a pedigree voiced by each of five muses in turn. Thus, the poem becomes a means of praising the bride’s father, Who fortune’s stratagems hath so surpast, As flattery can not reach, nor envy blast; In whom vice-gerence is a greater thing Then any crowne, but that of England’s king.
Another muse praises the duchess of Ormond, alluding to her loyalty in exile: ‘Whose suffering in that noble way and cause, | More veneration then her greatnesse drawes.’83 The concluding lines present the couple as proof, ‘That love and fortune are no longer blind’. The marriage is figured as a royalist epitome of the Restoration.84 Thus, Philips’s established royalist politics are woven into her new Irish social fabric. By summer 1663 Philips felt able directly to address the duke of Ormond in a poem. Bound into a manuscript of verse addressed to the lord lieutenant, this poem was presented to him by Lord Dungannon, husband of her friend Lucasia.85 As with her enlisting of Cotterell as intermediary for her writing to the royal family, Philips recruited Dungannon as intercessor on behalf of this poem.86 ‘To my Lord Duke of Ormond, Lord Lievtenant of Ireland on the discovery of the late Plot’, was inspired by the routing of a conspiracy to seize Dublin Castle and murder the lord lieutenant by disaffected Cromwellians in May. The conspiracy, led by Thomas Blood, was motivated in large part by concerns about the Court of Claims adjudicating the Restoration land settlement. Opposed to the restoration of land to catholics found innocent of rebellion, the plotters sought a retrenchment of existing proprietors.87 Although a land-claimant herself, Philips professed to be ignorant of the plot’s cause in a letter to Cotterell: ‘There is a Plot discover’d here, but what to make of it I know not.’ As Kerrigan observes, the conspiracy in itself highlights the topicality of her 83 Ormond herself wrote many letters; those written to Sir Edward Nicholas in exile are in BL Egerton MS 2534, fols. 17–18, 26, 30–1, 40, 44–5, 55, 57, 129–31. She also wrote a series of letters regarding the management of her Irish estate during the Restoration; for a sample, see Field Day, iv. 30–4, 501–3. 84 Philips, Collected Works, i. pp. 250–1, ll. 9–12, 25–8, 33–4, 48. 85 Formerly BL MS Loan 37/6, and used as copy-text by Thomas, the autograph manuscript of this poem was sold at Sotheby’s on 19 July 1994, lot 275. I am grateful to Peter Beal for this information. For descriptions of the manuscript, see Hilton Kelliher, ‘Cowley and “Orinda”: Autograph Fair Copies’, British Library Journal, 2 (1976), 102–8; Philips, Collected Works, i. 43. It is currently held at the National Library of Wales: NLW MS 21702E, fols. 158–9. 86 Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letters XXIII, XXVI, XXXI, pp. 68–71, 77–8, 90–1. 87 See Arnold, Restoration Land Settlement, 72, 87, and passim.
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Pompey.88 Her poem offers a direct engagement with contemporary politics, filtered through panegyric. It proclaims Philips’s establishment credentials, identifying Ireland’s interest with that of Ormond: For ’tis your Prudence Ireland’s Peace secures, Gives her her safety, and (what’s dearer) yours. Less honour from a Battell won is got, Then to repel soe desperate a Plot.
This, perhaps, was just as well, given Ormond’s acquittal of himself during the confederate and Cromwellian wars. He is represented as implacably loyal throughout the wars and in exile: In vain the bold ungratefull Rebels aym To overturn, when you support the Frame. You, who three Potent Kingdoms late have seen Tremble with fury, and yet stedfast been Who on afflicted Majesty could wait, When it was seemingly forsook by Fate; Whose settled Loyalty no Storm dismay’d, Nor the more flattering Mischiefs could disswade.
The poet’s easy identification with the political interests of the elite is manifest in the optimistic closing lines (which rather prophetically anticipate Ormond’s two terms as lord lieutenant): You shall secure your King’s entrusted Crown, Assisted by his Fortune, and your Own; And whilst his Sword Kingdoms abroad bestows, You, with the next renown, shall this dispose.89
Philips approached senior women of the Dublin court as patrons for her dramatic writing, in a move reminiscent of Southwell’s heed to the advantages of court patronage. The patronage dynamic, with its long-established hierarchy between client and patron, allows for respite from the ever-present anxiety about social inequality in her friendship poems to younger women. The concern in these poems is with the reception of Pompey, which was circulated fairly widely. Philips reported that: ‘There are, tho’ much against my Will, more Copies of it abroad than I could have imagin’d.’ The duchess of Ormond and John Jeffreys allowed copies to be made of their copies; her friend Lucasia received a copy, as did Rosania and Poliarchus in London.90 Philips’s misgivings about the circulation of a single work so widely can be traced in her correspondence. Her vulnerability created a need to find patrons. Most ambitiously, she sought the 88 89 90
Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letter XXXIII, p. 96; Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 248. Philips, Collected Works, i. pp. 222–3, ll. 5–8, 13–20, 29–32. Ibid. ii. Letter XIX, p. 60; Letters XX, XXIII, pp. 63, 68.
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Fig. 5. Katherine Philips, holograph copy, ‘To my Lord Duke of Ormond, Lord Lievtenant of Ireland on the discovery of the late Plot’, NLW MS 21702E, fol. 158r. By permission of the National Library of Wales.
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patronage of the duchess of York. She worried anxiously in a letter to Cotterell on 27 December 1662: ‘’Tis now about to be expos’d to al the Criticks of ALGIER, and what will become of it I know not, unless you please to be its Champion, and persuade her Royal Highness to favour it with her Protection.’91 At the same time she was securing the support of Dublin’s aristocracy. ‘To the right honourable the Countess of Cork’ is a poem written to accompany her copy of the play. The poet’s approach is made via the anthropomorphized translation itself. Figured as an ‘untimely Flower’, the translation, ‘of strict Eyes afraid’, With conscious blushes would have sought a shade, When your resistless Power did Orders give, Thus to recall the timerous Fugitive.
Responsibility for the transcription of this copy is shifted from author to addressee. The power-relations of literary patronage privilege social support over worldly fame: Yet from submission this assurance grows, That you’ll protect the Person you expose, Who more delight from such a shelter draws, Than to obtain, or to desire applause.92
Literary recognition could be a perilous prospect for the woman writer. Flattery, of course, is the best means of securing patronage, and the idealization of Lady Cork via her Clifford lineage avoids the problem of social hierarchy through its recasting onto the patron–client paradigm. Lady Cork’s eldest daughter, Frances, also received a poem accompanying her copy of the play. ‘To the Countess of Roscomon, with a Copy of Pompey’, similarly deflects the author’s own anxieties about the play’s reception onto the play itself. In this case, rather than the text, it is the character of Pompey who seeks protection: Great Pompey’s Fame from Egypt made escape, And flies to you for succour in this shape.
The poem’s speaker enters into a dialogue with her character, acting as his mediatrix with his potential patron. Both poems illustrate the impossibility for Philips of reusing lines of verse like Southwell—such approaches to female patrons extended as far as the duchess of York and could not risk recycling. Here, character and translator join in supplication to a friend, rather than judge: For how can either of us fear your frown, Since he and I are both so much your own.93 91
Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letter XXII, p. 66. Ibid. i. p. 241, ll. 1, 5–8, 11–14. 93 Philips was effusive in her praise of Frances Dillon in letters to Cotterell, particularly in the latter’s setting aside of social hierarchy: ‘She is pleas’d to lay aside all the distance betwixt us, and uses me as a most particular and intimate Friend’; ibid. ii. Letter XXI, p. 65; see also Letter XXXIII, p. 97. 92
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The poem then diverts to the inspiration of the play; as in the poem to Lady Cork, Philips is careful to lay responsibility elsewhere—in this case, upon Orrery (Lady Roscommon’s uncle): But when you wonder at my bold design, Remember who did that high task enjoin; Th’illustrious Orrery, whose least command, You would more wonder if I could withstand.
The second half of the poem, in fact, is a eulogy of Orrery himself. The sponsor of the play is addressed indirectly through his niece. (Similarly, Thomas has suggested that Philips’s poem ‘The Irish Greyhound’ is an indirect compliment to the earl.94) Once more, women of the court are vehicles for accessing and flattering the men. It is in circumscribed terms that Orrery is praised here— strictly for his literary (not military) activities: Where all their Lyres the willing Muses bring, To learn of him whatever they shall sing; Since all must yield, whilst there are Books or Men, The Universal Empire to his Pen.95
Neatly sidelining Orrery’s problematic military service for both Charles I and Cromwell, Philips participates in the repackaging of his reputation for the Restoration.96 However, she concludes the poem with a reclamation of her own responsibility for the play: she may endorse the collaboration, but her self-construction is always reaching for personal credit. Philips was operating in a literary milieu Southwell could only dream of. Trolander and Tenger have written insightfully on her correspondence as both an arena for critical commentary and as a literary economy in which social credit is accrued via the exchange of texts (not only authored by this circle but also Italian texts circulated by post).97 Her letters vividly describe an enthusiastically literary environment, supportive of her as a writer. But Philips enjoyed a receptive literary bubble, centred on the capital city. There is no sense of social intercourse with those outside the court. Her account, in January 1663, of her reception contrasts markedly with Southwell’s imagining of her own Munster funeral: ‘never any body found more Civility, Kindness and Respect from all manner of Persons, especially of the highest Quality, than I do in this Country: I believe no Stranger was ever so
94
Philips, Collected Works, i. 374. Ibid. i. p. 223, ll. 1–2, 15–20, 25–8. By contrast, her reverence towards Orrery at their first meeting is derived from his military dominion: ‘[he] so earnestly importun’d me to pursue that Translation, that to avoid the Shame of seeing him who had so lately commanded a Kingdom, become a Petitioner to me for such a Trifle, I obey’d him’; ibid. ii. Letter XIV, p. 47. 97 Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger, ‘Katherine Philips and Coterie Critical Practices’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37 (2004), 367–87. 95 96
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well receiv’d among them before.’98 Quite unlike Southwell, Philips was the beneficiary of a wide literary acquaintance. Her Dublin circle was actively engaged in cultural production as a dimension of its newly established political hegemony. Philips relates a revealing anecdote about Sir Nicholas Armorer, who had served Elizabeth of Bohemia with Cotterell prior to the Restoration and was now stationed in Ireland, and Dr Pett, MP for Askeaton in county Limerick, fellow of the Royal Society and song composer for Pompey. Narrating Armorer’s impatience with a bellman who would disturb his sleep while making evening rounds in the city, Philips recounts his composition of verse as a diversion, quoting one such poem in her letter. She further relates that there are ‘a great deal more of the like reverend Extravagancy, which he and the ingenious Doctor PETT have contriv’d for the same purpose’. The point of this story is to illuminate her literary milieu: ‘This is to convince you, that tho’ Spiders are not conversant in IRELAND, the Muses are better natur’d, and that there are Poets here besides my Lord ORRERY.’99 The composition of verse was a social and frequent activity. A miscellany of verse printed in Dublin in 1663 preserves a record of these literary pursuits. Poems, by several persons, published by John Crooke (who was also to print both Dublin and London editions of Philips’s Pompey) includes three poems ‘by a Lady’: ‘The Irish Greyhound’; her epithalamium for Mary Butler; and her response to Abraham Cowley’s ode on retirement. The coy identification of a female author is glossed by the inclusion of both Orrery’s and Cowley’s poems in praise of Philips, naming her as Orinda.100 The publication is of a piece with her earlier ventures into print, which offered the protective security of a royalist coterie. As Beal argues, the miscellany formed ‘the very essence of a coterie circulation of verse connected with the Dublin court’, a print imitation of manuscript.101 Philips was not about to miss out on this cultural capital. Disingenuously writing to Cotterell that her poems had been stolen and printed without her consent, she nevertheless promised to send him a copy of the print miscellany, in tandem with the array of poems that were accruing around her: You shall likewise have at the same time all the Prologues and Epilogues that were sent me for POMPEY, and all the complementing Verses I receiv’d on that Translation; together with a Prologue spoken the other day to a Play that was acted before my Lord Lieutenant, in which the Poet has taken occasion to flatter me on account of POMPEY.102
98
Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letter XXIII, p. 71. Ibid. ii. Letter XIX, p. 60. Armorer was also involved in drama. He wrote to Joseph Williamson in May 1663: ‘to encourage Mr Ogelby and his comedians. I am this very day giving a play to the King’s whole company. The Prologue and Epilogue shall come to you by the next’; CSPI, 1663–1665, 87. Hageman and Sununu interpret this as a reference to Philips’s Pompey; ‘New Manuscript Texts’, 194–5. The prologue and epilogue may be those catalogued at CSPI, 1663– 1665, 113–14. 100 The only known surviving copy is in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 101 Beal, In Praise of Scribes, 159. 102 Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letter XXX, p. 88. 99
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The moment of her greatest triumph—the reception of Pompey—was anything but unmarked. The play’s inspiration of so many verses in praise of her achievement was an unequivocal endorsement of Philips herself as a writer, and as a female writer; her gender is a key topic of these poems in her praise. But it is also a signal of the particular vibrancy of the court as a literary centre at this time. Another measure of her success as a literary influence is her apparent stimulation of at least one Irish woman to compose verse. Giving account of the many complimentary verses she received, Philips singles out to Cotterell an oddity: ‘One of them, who pretends to be a Woman, writes very well, but I cannot imagine who the Author is, nor by any Inquiry I can make, have hitherto been able to discover. I intend to keep that Copy by me, to shew it to you when next we meet.’103 Despite her reservations, Philips happily circulated the poem, which was printed in the 1667 edition of her own Poems. The anonymous author of ‘To the Excellent Orinda’, known as ‘Philo-Philippa’, wrote a substantial poem celebrating Philips as a pioneering poet and translator. The author uses encomium to analyse the nature of gender and authorship and the social situation of the woman writer. Commentators have followed Philips’s perplexity in their surprise at the poem itself, although most have accepted that it is written by a woman.104 Determined anonymity is not an automatic bar to the assignation of female authorship. Although it precludes the possibility of identifying other works by the same author and frustrated Philips’s investigative efforts within her circle, it is strangely at odds with the poem’s celebration of women’s writing. The literary activities of the Dublin court clearly inspired many to write and perform. That it was an enabling cultural environment for women is clear from the adoption of literary coterie names by the daughters of the elite, and from the enthusiastic performances of Philips’s songs by at least Elizabeth Boyle and her mother, Lady Cork. Moreover, the proto-feminist ideas expressed in the poem are not as singular as may at first appear. They resonate with Southwell’s writing as well as with the early seventeeenth-century pamphlet debate about women. They confront responses to Philips’s work articulated in verse by male poets like Orrery and Cowley. Most pertinently, Philips herself provided an authoritative and celebrated model of a female poet in Dublin—and is acknowledged as such in Philo-Philippa’s poem. This anonymous poem shows a comfortable familiarity with Philips’s work, its enthusiastic reception at court, and (recalling Southwell) contemporary literary culture. Referring to the rival translation of Corneille’s play by a group of writers led by Edmund Waller in London, the poet represents Waller’s circle in terms 103
Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letter XXVI, p. 78. Andrew Carpenter (ed.), Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), 367; Greer et al., Kissing the Rod, 204; Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550– 1700 (London: Routledge, 2004), 399; Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 402. 104
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calculated to politicize the literary competition. The Waller group is characterized as ‘a new Lay poetick SMEC’ in an allusion to the controversial 1641 antiepiscopal pamphlet signed by a collective comprising the authors’ initials (SMECTYMNUUS). As Chalmers observes, the significance is multifaceted: ‘By comparing the group translators of Pompey to Smectymnuus, Philo-Philippa links their multiple authorship to political and ecclesiastical disunity, implicitly opposing Philips’s unified efforts to such divisiveness.’105 Philo-Philippa’s acquaintance with Philips’s poetry of female friendship extends to coterie names. Speaking as an Irish poet, she expresses gratitude for Philips’s importation of this female-friendly model of writing: ‘That noble friendship brought thee to our Coast, | We thank Lucasia.’ Her awareness of the contours of Pompey’s reception at Dublin incorporates both Orrery and the wider proliferation of eulogies composed for Philips: The wise and noble Orrery’s regard, Was much observ’d, when he your Poem heard . . . But why all these Encomiums of you, Who either doubts, or will not take as due?106
Her knowledge of the rival play, of Orinda’s society of friendship and its profemale principles, and of the enthusiastic reception in Dublin of her play translation all point to an extensive immersion in the literary contexts outlined above. Philips herself was the literary authority for Philo-Philippa’s writing, as is manifest in its opening, gender-sensitive lines: Let the male Poets their male Phoebus chuse, Thee I invoke, Orinda, for my Muse.107
Her style adopts the increasingly fashionable heroic couplet, prevalent in Philips’s verse. While Philips was hesitant as to the gender of its author, she could hardly dismiss the possibility of an accomplished poem by another woman, being herself a celebrated female writer who was composing prolifically in the very same literary milieu. Her scepticism can be interpreted in light of her own gendering of authorship in her poems. Despite her great volume of poems written to other women celebrating her friendships, the evidence suggests that she neither received nor expected to receive reciprocal poetry by women. Women in her circle were creative in their own right. Her schoolfriend Mary Harvey, married to Edward Dering, was a composer whose work was published in Henry Lawes’s Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues (London, 1655), to which Philips contributed two poems. Yet Harvey is absent from the latter’s verse. Lawes’s first Book of
105 Philips, Collected Works, iii. p. 198, l. 18; Smectymnuus, An Answer to a Book entitvled An Humble Remonstrance (London, 1641); Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 103. 106 Philips, Collected Works, iii. pp. 200–1, 203–4, ll. 79–80, 107–8, 179–80. 107 Ibid. iii. p. 197, ll. 1–2.
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Ayres, and Dialogues (1653) was dedicated to his long-time pupil Lady Alice Egerton. Best known to history as the Lady in Milton’s Comus of 1634, she was an accomplished musician, masque performer, and allegedly a poet herself in her youth.108 Yet her creative activities are not celebrated in Philips’s verse. Her poem welcoming Egerton to Wales as wife of Richard Vaughan, earl of Carbery, makes no mention of her addressee’s considerable artistic connections nor her reputation as poet or performer.109 Despite being a feˆted female author herself, Philips was reticent about her contemporaries’ achievements, unless they reflected on her own. Thus, much as Philips is celebrated in this poem as a confounder of expectations when it comes to gender and the authorship of verse, Philo-Philippa herself confounds the expectations of her role-model. Philo-Philippa’s poem opens with this very issue: the male presumption that women cannot write. She develops a series of arguments designed to counter forcefully such prejudice. Manipulating the myth of Apollo, the author rewrites his raping of Daphne to gender the muses of poetry: He could but force a Branch, Daphne her Tree Most freely offers to her Sex and thee.
Armed with the help of Daphne, Philips’s writing has upturned established ideas and opened the floodgates for women’s verse: Thou glory of our Sex, envy of men, Who are both pleas’d and vex’d with thy bright Pen: Its lustre doth intice their eyes to gaze, But mens sore eyes cannot endure its rayes; It dazles and surprizes so with light, To find a noon where they expected night.110
The anonymous poet echoes here some contemporary male responses to Philips’s verse, which were printed alongside her three poems in the 1663 Dublin miscellany. Orrery’s poem to Orinda anticipates the point, perhaps protesting too much: In me it does not the least trouble breed That your fair Sex does Ours in Verse exceed.111
The possessive pronouns presage Philo-Philippa’s polarization of the issue. Cowley, in his ode ‘On Orinda’s Poems’, freely admits to a more confrontational 108 She played in Aurelian Townsend’s Tempe Restored in 1632; Jane Cavendish attributes to her a poem (‘I prethy send me back my heart’), attributed to Henry Hughes in Lawes’s third book of Ayres and Dialogues (1658). The Cavendish attribution, in two manuscripts compiled during the 1640s, pre-dates that in Lawes; Bodleian MS Rawlinson poet. 16, p. 16 and Beinecke MS b. 233, p. 18. See p. 43, above. At the very least, it suggests that the song was established in Egerton’s singing repertoire. 109 Philips, Collected Works, i. 84–5. 110 Ibid. iii. p. 197, ll. 3–4, 9–14. 111 Ibid. iii. p. 186, ll. 12–13.
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response: ‘Ah! Cruel Sex will you depose us too in Wit?’112 Philo-Philippa casts this battle of the sexes in terms of natural injustice. The new order is figured in the triumph of the moon over the sun: Nature doth find that she hath err’d too long, And now resolves to recompence that wrong; Phoebus to Cynthia must his beams resigne, The rule of Day and Wit’s now Feminine.113
The female speaker’s indignation at the historical situation of women bears useful comparison with the early seventeenth-century pamphlet debate about women—itself wrought with scepticism and uncertainty as to the gender of authors who contributed to it. Joseph Swetnam’s The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1615) elicited defences of women attributed to Ester Sowernam (punning on the instigator’s name), Constantia Munda, and Rachel Speght. The last is the only contributor for whom biographical documentation has been located. Accordingly, the rhetorical force of these defences, purportedly written by female authors, has led scholars to question the signatures as impersonations of the female voice.114 Participating in the tradition of the querelle des femmes, these pamphlets are unconcerned with female authorship. Rather, their disputation of the nature of women is rhetorically positioned, grounded in classical authorities and scriptural exegesis. While Philo-Philippa’s poem evinces an informed use of classical exempla, it avoids the debates over Eve and the ideal women of scripture. Her point of departure is an acknowedged woman writer. She recalls Southwell as she argues that the rare instances of intellectual women have been pigeonholed: Or, if they ventur’d to speak sense, the wise Made that, and speaking Oxe, like Prodigies.
Such women are extraordinary. Like Southwell’s ‘Mineruaes bird’ or a talking ox, they are fantastical, deemed prodigies—a term which might flatter in the same breath as it exoticizes, segregates, and quarantines. Philips is extolled as a breakthrough writer who has surpassed male writing, a true prodigy in the portentous seventeenth-century sense of the word: 112
Ibid. iii. p. 191, l. 3. Ibid. iii. p. 198, ll. 21–4. Charles Butler (ed.), Female Replies to Swetnam the Woman-Hater (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995); Katherine Henderson and Barbara McManus (eds.), Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy About Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Harlow: Pearson, 2001), 49–79; Clarke, ‘Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate’, 37–53; Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘From Polemical Prose to the Red Bull: The Swetnam Controversy in Women-Voiced Pamphlets and the Public Theater’, in Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene (eds.), The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 122–37; Diane Purkiss, ‘Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate’, in Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (eds.), Women, Texts, and Histories: 1575–1760 (London: Routledge, 1992), 69–101. 113 114
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The speaker’s assertion of female solidarity is consistently rendered through her use of first-person-plural pronouns—another feature characteristic of Philips’s friendship poems, interpreted by Gray as an attempt to construct a collective royalism during the 1650s.116 The speaker adverts to a lengthy list of historical and mythical examples that overturn assumptions of male superiority and female weakness. Nurture is preferred over nature: Train’d up to Arms, we Amazons have been, And Spartan Virgins strong as Spartan Men: Breed Women but as Men, and they are these.
Cowley’s ode also imagines the ‘warlike Amazonian train’, who hope that Orinda will arbitrate for their gender.117 Following her praise of Philips’s poetry of female friendship, the speaker asserts an androgynous ideal. Her familiarity with her subject’s verse is further evident in the specific allusion to Philips’s line, ‘If soules no sexes have’, from a poem in circulation since the 1650s.118 The reference summons Southwell, not only in her allusive style of poetry but also in her insistence on the gender-neutrality of the soul.119 Philips’s poem objects to the exclusion of women from friendship; Philo-Philippa adapts the line to the topic of authorship: If Souls no Sexes have, as ’tis confest, ’Tis not the he or she makes Poems best: Nor can men call these Verses Feminine, Be the sence vigorous and Masculine.120
Content does not determine the gender of the author; gender stereotypes confuse the attribution of authorship. Her vision of androgynous authorship raises precisely the questions that caused Philips to query the gender of her acolyte. Having negotiated this range of positions and paradigms regarding gender and authorship, the poem then returns to Philips, its inspiration, to offer a reading of her translation of Pompey. This is a detailed passage of literary criticism. Philips wrote disparagingly of the Waller version of Corneille’s play as being closer to paraphrase than translation. But she rejected a strictly literal approach: ‘the rule 115
Philips, Collected Works, iii. p. 198, ll. 33–6. Gray, ‘Post-Courtly Coterie’, 441. Philips, Collected Works, iii. p. 199, ll. 63–5; p. 195, l. 75. 118 Although Thomas’s edition provides this line as ‘If no souls no sexes have’ (ibid. i. p. 166, l. 19), this reading is incorrect. All the major manuscripts have ‘If souls no sexes have’; NLW MS 775B, p. 164; NLW MS 776B, p. 331; HRHRC Pre-1700 MS 151, p. 83. 119 Lansdowne MS, fol. 164v, ll. 499–504. 120 Philips, Collected Works, iii. pp. 200–1, ll. 91–4. 116 117
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yt I understood of translations till these Gentlemen inform’d me better, was to write to Corneille’s sence, as it is to be suppos’d Corneille would have done, if he had been an Englishman, not confind to his lines, nor his numbers . . . but always to his meaning.’121 Philo-Philippa concurred: To render word for word, at the old rate, Is only but to Construe, not Translate: In your own fancy free, to his sence true, We read Corneille, and Orinda too.
Echoing Philips’s approach to Lady Roscommon via the character of Pompey, Philo-Philippa conjures Pompey and his wife Cornelia, whose reputations are enhanced for posterity as a result of the play. Cornelia, in particular, is a focus for the poet’s aesthetic vision of translation as a literary activity which transforms and hones the original: In the French Rock Cornelia first did shine, But shin’d not like her self till she was thine: Poems, like Gems, translated from the place Where they first grew, receive another grace.122
The specific denotation of poems embraces Philips’s verse and the literary strategies she transported with her from Wales to Dublin. A series of images are deployed to illustrate the point: trees uprooted and planted in a different soil; ore mined from the earth and refined; liquor transferred into new casks. Of course, these images also serve to represent Philips’s importation of English coterie culture to Restoration Dublin. Her stimulation of others, not least PhiloPhilippa, to compose and perform verse is testament to her success. It is proclaimed in a 1669 copy of her Poems belonging to a Boyle, who marked each poem relating to the family with an arrow.123 If Philo-Philippa’s identity was unknown to her, the reach of Philips’s influence stretched farther than she thought. To some degree this was a matter of being in the right place at the right time; the restored Dublin court was engaged in a major cultural and political project to establish itself, and hence responsive to Philips’s approach to writing. Her role in the importation of this poetic culture took advantage of an active and reciprocating literary network, a particular cultural moment, and a more fluid and stable interchange between Dublin and London. Its ephemerality as an opportune moment is underlined by Philips’s later lamentation of the declining quality of Smock Alley Theatre’s productions.124
121 122 123
Ibid. ii. Letter XXXIXa, p. 114; see also Letter XXXVI, pp. 103–4. Ibid. iii. p. 203, ll. 157–60; p. 202, ll. 131–4. This copy is currently held at Marsh’s Library, Dublin. See also Beal, In Praise of Scribes, 178,
n. 68. 124
Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letter XXXIII, pp. 96–7.
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The transplantation of verse from Ireland to London in which Southwell engaged would have been fraught for Philips, whose circles overlapped and travelled between Dublin, Wales, and London. Although lines of verse could not be reused, however, the hype surrounding her in Dublin transplanted well to the English court. The contrast with a country life in Wales, to which she returned in July 1663, engendered a note of urgency in her letters planning a trip to London in order to capitalize on her current prestige: ‘before the present hopes that are given me of an Interest and of being well receiv’d at Court, wither by Time, and are lost for want of laying hold on the Opportunity that now offers.’125 Philips wrote these words on 8 January 1663/4; she made it to London the following March but died of smallpox three months later. Her untimely death foreclosed the opportunity she had worked so hard to create. Restoration Dublin had been the crucible in which Philips adapted her literary strategies for a courtly, aristocratic audience, experimented with dramatic form to great acclaim, and extended her network of courtly contacts. The year she spent in Dublin effected a transition in her writing that would be crucial to her ambitious hopes for an audience at the London court. Both Southwell and Philips used their poetry as a means of creating and sustaining social relationships in Ireland. The coterie dynamics of English manuscript culture informed their literary approach to the problem of establishing a social base in the country. One a planter, the other a land-claimant, location was important to their formulation of literary strategy. The first Munster plantation, following the Desmond rebellion, had been short-lived; Edmund Spenser was one of those ejected in 1598. Southwell’s commitment to devotional verse is consonant with contemporary English writing practices, but its centrality to her writing gains urgency when considered in light of the insecurity attendant upon being a settler in that part of the country. Her vision of devotional poetry was a calling-card to potential allies among the New English community. For Philips, Restoration Dublin was a far more amenable venue. Her writing also served as a calling-card by which she could ensconce herself in a new environment. But she was fortunate in her surroundings. The Old Protestants were busily re-establishing courtly culture and receptive to her model of social verse. This was of mutual benefit; Pompey’s success marked a turning-point for Philips, in terms of her relationship to print publication and her wider literary reputation. For both women, Ireland was a site of experimentation where their literary strategies were honed and refined. On returning to London and Wales, both sought to capitalize on their achievements, preparing themselves for assaults on the summit of literary patronage, the royal court. Ultimately, Hibernia was not the endgame but a stepping-stone for the importation of English poetic culture, the evolution of the female poet’s poetic strategy, and its transplantation back to the English capital. 125
Philips, Collected Works, ii. Letter XLIII, p. 124.
6 Autobiography Come forth and harken dearest friends, all such as love the Lord, What he for my poor life hath done, to you I will record.1
Thus Frances Cook began the poem appended to her autobiographical account of deliverance from shipwreck off the coast of Cork in 1650. For Cook, the impulse to write her story was to celebrate the signs of divine favour. Religious motives commonly provided sanction for early modern women’s autobiographical and biographical writing. Catholic communities of women religious had long been engaged in the composition of hagiography and obituary. But the rise of autobiography as a popular form in English in the mid-seventeenth century was a consequence of the protestant impulse (exemplified by Cook) to testify to the workings of the Lord in one’s own life. The importance of radical religion in facilitating the extraordinary emergence of female prophets and autobiographers in the 1640s and 1650s has been established by scholars.2 Admission-testimonies of the independent gathered churches and prophecies formed a sizeable portion of printed texts by living women. While the conditions stimulating print publication for independents did not pertain in the same way beyond the Restoration (due to the reinstitution of press censorship and increased intolerance of dissenting sects), the enthusiastic move to order one’s life experience held a lasting influence—most obviously bearing fruit in the spiritual autobiography, a genre that developed further through the eighteenth century.3 At the same time women began to write secular autobiography and biographies of husbands, often circulated within the family. 1 Frances Cook, Mris. Cookes Meditations (Cork and London, 1650), sig. B3v. Although Cook’s surname is spelled ‘Cooke’ in this publication, her husband is widely known as Cook. To avoid confusion, I have adopted the latter spelling. 2 See Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: SeventeenthCentury Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 154–77; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–1688 (London: Virago, 1988), 54–75. 3 See Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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Modern conceptions of autobiography have regularly coloured approaches to its early forms. The term itself is anachronistic for writings of this period. It comes into use in the late eighteenth century although, as Mascuch observes, ‘descriptive terminology usually lags behind practice’.4 Canonical histories of the genre tend to begin with the unique example of St Augustine’s Confessions in the fourth century, and the starting-point for many historians of the genre in English is the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe. Scholars inevitably point to the mid-seventeenth century as the first flowering of autobiography in English. Definitions of the genre are admirably loose. In his seminal study of the form in the seventeenth century Delany describes autobiography as: ‘a coherent account of the author’s life, or of an extensive period or series of events in his life . . . composed after a period of reflection.’5 More recently, Graham has conceived the genre as ‘the life or life-history of the self who is writing’.6 A disjunction between the self who writes her life and the self which is her subject is characteristic of the genre.7 Yet the entire question of selfhood in this period is problematic. The Burckhardtian view that autobiography is a reflection of the emergence of the individual during the Renaissance, in a linear progression culminating in the modern subject, has held a powerful influence over all autobiographical scholarship since (if only as a tenacious paradigm to be rejected).8 Reaction against this view has emphasized continuities between the medieval period and the Renaissance and observed the Eurocentric limitations of Burckhardt’s examples, culled from the Italian male elite.9 The wealth of recent critique reminds us to be cautious: as Graham puts it, ‘a coherent notion of self does not emerge uniformly’. The self which is written is not transparent, but a persona. As Hobby reminds
4 Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 19. 5 Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 1. 6 Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, in Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 209. 7 For influential studies of autobiography, see Shari Benstock (ed.), The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (London: Routledge, 1988); Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne, 1986); Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); James Olney (ed.) Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); William Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 8 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1958). 9 Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 17–18. See also David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists: or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in Aers (ed.), Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177–202.
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us, the ‘picture we derive of someone’s experiences from a biography or autobiography is just as much an artificial construction as any other kind of writing’.10 Feminist scholars have found the labels ‘self-writing’ or ‘life-writing’ more useful than ‘autobiography’ or ‘biography’, as they facilitate discussion of different genres—letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, poems, spiritual confessions, trial records—all of which engage with the articulation of the female self in this period.11 As Seelig argues, these terms can ‘convey the multiplicity of forms involved and the lack of adherence to certain predetermined generic types’.12 This open-minded approach has the virtues of attentiveness to the various forms of self-construction flourishing in the period and of yielding new ways of understanding seemingly non-autobiographical texts. As seen in Chapters 3 and 4, genres such as the petition-letter or deposition can be usefully understood as forms of life-writing. While there are fruitful and interesting areas of overlap, these genres differ in some key ways from the autobiographical texts under discussion in this chapter. Addressed to the state, the information presented in a petition or deposition is modulated by its very specific, institutional first audience. For Irish petitioners to Spain or deponents of the 1641 rising, the terms of self-construction are imposed by the state; rooted in a specific set of political circumstances and present urgency, their starting-point is self-identification as member of a persecuted community. Biography and autobiography are useful designations of genre because they signify the conscious interpretation of a life from a vantage-point of hindsight which, while concerned with the projection of a particular persona or image of the self, enjoys some temporal distance from the events described, independent of state institutions. Such writing contains a hermeneutical significance. As Hindmarsh argues, autobiography ‘is always an apologetic of the individual’; it is ‘one of the ways to answer the question of what my life means’.13 In attempting to answer this question, the writers discussed in this chapter are simultaneously preoccupied with the question of what Ireland means. 10 Graham, ‘Writing and the Self’, 213; Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 78; see also Elspeth Graham et al. (eds.), Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989), 17. 11 Michelle Dowd and Julie Eckerle (eds.), Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1–13; Graham, ‘Writing and the Self ’, 209–17; Nicky Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1; Marlene Kadar, ‘Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice’, in Kadar (ed.), Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 3–16; Sheila Ottway, ‘Autobiography’, in Anita Pacheco (ed.), A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 231–47; Helen Wilcox, ‘Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance English Women’, in S. P. Ceresano and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds.), Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 47. 12 Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5. 13 Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 5.
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The authors discussed here exploit divergent traditions of autobiographical and biographical writing. Their Irish experiences are construed in terms largely determined by the circumstances in which they wrote their retrospective lives and the personae they sought to project. Wives and daughters of government administrators and settlers, their residence in Ireland was determined by the decisions of their male kin. But the diversity of their perspectives—from republican to royalist, catholic to radical protestant—shapes the way in which they make sense of their lives in Ireland. These determining factors are often signalled in declarations of motive for writing. This persistent compulsion to explain authorial motive points to gendered anxieties about female self-assertion. Their choices as to the genres of life-writing in which they engage address such anxieties and redound on their constructions of Ireland. The biography of Elizabeth Cary, primarily composed by her daughter Lucy (resident in Ireland as a child and writing as an exiled English nun in France) is situated within the traditions of catholic life-writing. As the story of her mother’s conversion to catholicism, it also performs an important autobiographical function, describing the author’s own journey to religious life. Frances Cook’s narrative of shipwreck, composed in Ireland, interprets deliverance as a manifestation of grace and female exemplarity that endorses the regicidal republicanism of herself and her husband. The conversion narratives of the women in John Rogers’s independent congregation in Dublin articulate a radical subjectivity that construes the 1641 rebellion as a trial fundamental to the journey to grace. Writing in the early 1670s, Mary Rich and Alice Thornton in their spiritual autobiographies adapt Irish experience to illustrate the role of providence in their lives and to construct images of ideal female piety. The royalist Ann Fanshawe’s more secular life-story embraces both res gestae (the account of worldly achievements) and the travel narrative. Presented as family history, she recounts her life with her husband Richard (poet, diplomat, and confidant of Charles II) from the broader perspective of a traveller in mid-seventeenth-century Europe.14 The generic richness of the ways in which these women interpret their lives impacts upon the way in which they make sense of Ireland and Irish experience. Rich, Thornton, and Fanshawe, in particular, have been studied as exponents of English women’s autobiographical writing. But the importance of the Irish dimension to their self-constructions has often been overlooked.15 A resonant signifier of catholicism, Ireland was exploited both positively and negatively in the autobiographical projection of an exemplary persona. The country serves to
14 The memoirs of Elizabeth Freke, which record periods of residence at her husband’s estate of Rathbarry, Cork, during the 1670s, 1680s, and 1690s, were composed between 1702 and 1714 and are, therefore, outside the remit of this study; see Raymond Anselment (ed.), The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke: 1671–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 15 With the exception of Elizabeth Taylor, who discusses both Thornton and Cook; ‘Writing Women, Honour, and Ireland’, chs. 1, 2.
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endorse the version of the self being written at a geographical and temporal remove, however various those selves are. This discussion aims to reframe our understanding of these English writers by examining the role played by their Irish experiences in formulating their lives and thereby repositioning their complex engagements with genre. The Lady Faulkland: Her Life is a biography of Elizabeth Cary written at the English Benedictine convent of Our Lady of Consolation at Cambrai, France. Cary is well known to scholars of early modern women’s writing as an author of drama, history, poetry, and translation.16 She came to Ireland with her husband, Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, newly appointed lord deputy, and children in September 1622. Her two youngest, Patrick and Henry, were born in Dublin in 1624 and 1625. Her patronage was sought after: Richard Bellings (author of the History of the Confederation discussed in Chapter 2) dedicated to Cary his continuation of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1624), acknowledging her ‘many favours’ as a ‘worthy patronesse’.17 Cary left Ireland in July 1625, and in November 1626 famously converted to catholicism. Six of her nine children converted a decade later. As discussed in Chapter 2, European communities of women religious were prolific sites of production for devotional writing, particularly biographies—whether saints’ lives, obituaries, or exemplary nuns’ lives. The devotional principles of such writing prioritized anonymity; as Mother Browne wrote, when compiling the obituaries of her sisters in exile, ‘before death, none is to be praised’. Four of Cary’s six daughters entered religious life at Cambrai: Lucy and Mary in August 1638, Elizabeth in October that year, and Anne in March 1639 (the year in which their mother died). Founded by Thomas More’s great-granddaughter, Cambrai was a conducive literary milieu.18 As an English convent peopled by recusant exiles, it was one of many communities working towards the restoration of the catholic church at home. Thus, the writing produced pursued a political as well as religious agenda. The manuscript is in four hands; Wolfe has identified Mary (Dame Maria) and her brother Patrick as amending hands and argues that Lucy (Dame Magdalena) is the main scribe. It was composed between February and August 1645, with Patrick’s emendations dating from between March and May 1650, at which point the manuscript was bound.19
16
For the most recent essay collection, of a large bibliography, see Heather Wolfe (ed.), The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 17 Richard Bellings, A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (Dublin, 1624), sig. A2; see Deana Rankin, ‘“A More Worthy Patronesse”: Elizabeth Cary and Ireland’, in Wolfe, Literary Career, 208–17. 18 Latz, ‘Glow-worm Light’; Wolfe, ‘Reading Bells and Loose Papers’; Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘“To have her children with her”: Elizabeth Cary and Familial Influence’, in Wolfe, Literary Career, 223–41. 19 Heather Wolfe, ‘The Scribal Hands and Dating of Lady Falkland: Her Life’, English Manuscript Studies, 9 (2000), 192–204.
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Unlike most nuns’ biographical writing, which centres on saints or exemplary women religious, this is a life of the biographers’ progenitor—the mother responsible for their conversions to catholicism. In telling the story of their mother’s conversion, Lucy, Mary, and Patrick are relating the story of their own entry into religious life. The main author’s perspective—writing in the late 1640s as a nun herself—shapes her interpretation of the life, even to the extent of foregrounding her mother’s catholic devotional writing.20 The attention paid to Lucy’s own development, from jeering child who taunted her mother to penitent nun, shows that the act of writing her mother’s life also contained a strong autobiographical impulse. As Wolfe notes, in ‘writing Life, not only did she commemorate her mother, but she also described and confessed her own faults to God and the other nuns at Cambrai, making a useful text out of the fragments of her own sinful past’.21 Lucy’s death-notice explicitly lauds Her Life as a narrative which traces Cary’s conversion as a means of precipitating those of her children.22 Her daughter, privy to her mother’s temperament and financial difficulties following her public conversion, incorporates analysis of her mother’s faults. Thus, it avoids the hackneyed features of catholic life-writing—a consequence, as Wolfe observes, of the contemporary move to accessible pious models for emulation. Her daughter ‘was not trying to sanctify or venerate her mother in the medieval hagiographical sense of describing her incorrupt flesh and posthumous miracles, but in the counter-Reformation sense, common to Protestants and Catholics alike, of a pious individual rising above her own weaknesses and overcoming persecution by others to achieve salvation’.23 Like the puritan conversion narratives discussed below, the overarching plot of this life-story is conversion, but from protestantism to catholicism. Ireland, where her biographers had resided as children, is interpreted according to that overwhelming narrative drive. The country, a swirling Petri dish of politico-religious elements, provided encounters which are represented as key stages in Cary’s spiritual awakening. First and foremost, her residence in Ireland permitted first-hand association with catholics. ‘In Ireland’, her biographer states, ‘she grew acqvainted with my Lord Incheqvin an exceeding good catholike, and the first (att least knowing one) she had yet mette; she highly esteemed him for his witt, learning, and iudgement.’ ´ Briain, fifth Baron Inchiquin, memorialized in Gaelic verse This was Diarmuid O ´ by Caitilın Dubh (see Chapter 1). More than a chance encounter, the event is adopted to the narrative’s teleological scheme: ‘he did somewhat shake her supposed security, in esteeming it lawfull to continve as she was.’ Lest the 20 The Lady Faulkland: Her Life reports poems on the Virgin Mary, lives of Mary Magdalen, St Agnes, St Elizabeth, and other saints; fols. 15r, 18r. The manuscript is edited by Heather Wolfe, Elizabeth Cary Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (Cambridge: RTM, 2001), 101–222. All references are to this edition, which preserves folio numbers. 21 Wolfe, Life and Letters, 62. 22 Ibid. 458. 23 Ibid. 74.
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impression Inchiquin made on Cary be dismissed by her readers, her biographer emphasizes his equally strong impact on Lord Deputy Falkland: ‘her Lord did the same, admiring him much as a man of so sincere and vpright a conscience, that he seemed to looke on whatsoever was not lawfull as not possible.’24 The selection of conscience as grounds for approval here is significant. A loaded concept in the period, it chimes with the narrative’s later representation of Cary as insisting on her conversion as a matter of conscience, divorced from worldly considerations. That it is her husband who identifies conscience as the basis for esteem lays the groundwork for the text’s later suggestions that Falkland respected his wife’s catholicism. While in Ireland, Cary is represented as driven to quiz any who had converted to protestantism. In particular, the biographer describes her enquiries of Nicholas Hacket, a former Jesuit, then serving her husband as chaplain. Intrigued as to his motives, Cary ‘could not be qviet till she had inqvired of himself (having observed in him, that he never in his sermons spoke against catholike religion as most that are fallen doe, but only exhorted to good life) earnestly vrging him to tell her the truth in this’.25 The parenthetical generalization foregrounds the biographer’s own perspective as a nun. It transpires that Hacket’s motive was reassuringly worldly. Considering presbyterian Scotland (his mooted mission) ‘the most dangerous and incommodious’ of destinations for a Jesuit, ‘out of the desire he had to find some way how he might avoyd so hard ∧ (as it seemed to him) ∧ an obedience, began to looke into protestant religion . . . but this was truly ∧ the ∧ first motiue of his search into religion; with this answere she remained well satisfied, leaving to wonder as she had done before’. For both Cary and her daughter, Hacket’s account of himself is satisfactory because it does not present any compelling spiritual justification; on the contrary, it is a cowardly act of selfpreservation. The third stage of her Irish experience in moving towards catholicism is the birth of her second son, Patrick (annotator to Her Life). The naming of the child is incorporated in the conversion narrative by the biographical subject herself, whose hindsight informs interpretation: ‘The eldest of tow sonnes she had there . . . in devotion, to the great patron of the Country, she called by his name, who she did beleeve did take them both into his protection, assisting them with his prayers, she living to see them both catholiks.’26 These three Irish stepping-stones to conversion occupy a central place in the story’s teleology. Indeed, her eventual conversion at the London home of the catholic Walter Butler, eleventh earl of Ormond, maintains this Irish dimension. But Her Life also offers a fascinating glimpse of this high-ranking woman’s colonial attitudes. As Rankin proposes, the ‘story is not one of expatriate distance, but of thorough involvement, of conversation with and interventions 24
Her Life, fol. 10v. Ibid., fols. 10v–11r. Similarly, Mary’s birth six months prior to their arrival in Ireland is suffused with Marian devotion; ibid., fols. 11r, 8v. 25 26
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into the lives of the inhabitants of her new home’.27 Cary’s determination to be a positive force contrasts markedly with the positions of male administrators, or even such writers as Anne Southwell. A keen linguist, Cary had learned French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin as a child. The gesture to functionality in her acquisition of Transylvanian (‘but never finding any vse of it, forgott it intirely’) glosses her attempts to learn Irish. She ‘learnt to read Irish in an Irish Bible; but it being very hard (so as she could scarce find one that could teach it) and few bookes in it she qvickly lost what she had learnt’.28 The bible in question was ´ Domhnaill’s 1602 translation of the New Testament. The dearth of protestant O texts published in Gaelic (discussed in Chapter 2) is here shown to be not simply a one-dimensional issue of proselytization, but from the other side as an obstacle to those settlers who were willing to engage with the majority language. As wife to the lord deputy, Cary’s influence was considerable and she set about directing her energies to development work: ‘chiefly the desire of the benefitt and commodity of that nation, sett her vpon a great designe.’ Her project focused on vocational education. Cary arranged for ‘linnen and wolen weauers, dyers, all sorts of spinners, and knitters, hatters, lace makers, and many other trades’ to train local children. The narrator describes in some detail her mother’s recruitment policy: she tooke of beggar children (with which that country swarmes) more then 8 score prentices, refusing none a boue seven yeare old, and taking some lesse . . . they were parted in their severall romes and houses, where they exersised their trades, many romes being filled with little boys or girles, sitting all round att worke.29
Dryly admiring the spelling of ‘many romes’ and observing that the project approximated a ‘chain of child-labor sweatshops’, Rankin rightly assesses this as ‘an extraordinary moment of English female action in the Irish public sphere’.30 The scheme was endorsed by the lord deputy, who wore cloth produced by the school, and by prominent settlers. Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, and his motherin-law, Alice Fenton, contributed both orphans and funds to the project.31 But the episode is ultimately adapted to the author’s biographical method. Her daughter distinguishes between Cary’s interpretation in hindsight and her own project to present her mother as an exemplary catholic who maintained her faith, warts and all. The school’s failure was perceived by Cary as a judgement on the enforced protestant attendance of the pupils (a classic missionary tactic): yet it came to nothinge; which she imputed to a iudgement of God on her, because the overseers made all those poore children goe to church; and she had great losses by fire and
27
Rankin, ‘Cary and Ireland’, 205. Her Life, fols. 2v, 8v. 29 Ibid., fols. 8v–9r. 30 Rankin, ‘Cary and Ireland’, 206–7. 31 Wolfe, Life and Letters, 120, also 122; Grosart, Lismore Papers, ii. 87, 93. I am grateful to Heather Wolfe for this reference. 28
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watter (which she iudged extraordinary, others but casuall) . . . all which when she was a catholike she tooke to be the punishment of God for the childrens going to church.
Significantly, the narrator is ambivalent about her mother’s reading of a providential design, choosing instead to use the episode as an illustration of Cary’s character. Rather than voice the alternative interpretation herself, the biographer places it in the mouths of unidentified observers: ‘but others thought it rather, that she was better att contriving then executing, and that too many thinges were vndertaken att the very first . . . but chiefly the ill order she tooke for paying mony in this (as in all other occasions) having the worst memory, in such thinges, in the world.’32 Again, the parenthesis is enlightening: this episode establishes a pattern of behaviour repeated throughout the narrative. Cary is represented as helpless in the face of the dire straits arising from her conversion and subsequent separation from her husband, further aggravated by her own lack of financial acumen. Her Life’s autobiographical impulse underpins its handling of the fallout from Cary’s conversion, which led to marriage breakdown and miserable poverty. Her children-biographers are in the invidious position of celebrating her decision while seeking to reconcile the adversarial relationship of their parents. The ramifications were serious for a high-profile aristocrat to convert to catholicism; the king himself was married to a catholic, and proponents of Arminian doctrine were commonly accused of crypto-catholicism. For Cary’s husband, the most eminent government official in Ireland, her conversion was potentially disastrous. In their daughter’s words: ‘his displeasure against his wife being much greater out of his taking himself to be much preiudiced by her turning, and that she had by it disabled herself to advance his affaires . . . he was allso angry with her for making such hast to publish her being so.’33 In order to continue as lord deputy in Dublin while his wife was causing scandal at the London court, her husband moved to dissociate himself from her immediately. He refused to support an independent household or to offer any maintenance. This is a portrait of wifely resistance complicated by the filial loyalties of the biographer. The female exemplarity constructed in this text is that of principled catholicism, not of the wife who obeys her husband and subordinates herself to his career. Her biographer, understandably prone to defending her father, blamed her parents’ estrangement on the duplicitous dealings of retainers, facilitated by the Irish Sea lying between husband and wife.34 A flurry of epistolary activity is described. Courtiers who wrote on her behalf—among them the duchess of Buckingham, who reverted to catholicism (see Chapter 2)—were foiled by the malicious reports of Falkland’s servants. The text’s religious bias and filial impulse finally merge in the account of Falkland’s death in 1633. He is described as 32
Her Life, fol. 9. Ibid., fol. 16. Falkland, however, denied this, defending the honesty of his servants in a letter to Conway, 5 July 1627; Wolfe, Life and Letters, 293. 33 34
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refusing to proclaim himself protestant. A copy of his wife’s recusant translation of Cardinal Perron, annotated by himself, is discovered, and this causes Lucy to hope that he died inclined to catholicism.35 A very different vision of marital harmony is projected in the autobiographical texts of Frances and John Cook, printed together in Cork in 1650, about the time that Her Life was bound. At this juncture, in the middle of the Cromwellian conquest, the city of Cork became a printing location for Commonwealth polemic. It was there that Cromwell published his anti-catholic reply to the bishops of Clonmacnoise in January 1650; it appeared in London the following March.36 Frances landed in early January with her husband, the regicide John, at Wexford, site of Cromwell’s famous assault the previous October. John Cook had been employed before in Ireland, as a lawyer in Wentworth’s Dublin administration between 1634 and 1636. Having married Frances Cutler in 1646, he led the prosecution at the trial of King Charles I and returned to Ireland at Cromwell’s behest, to begin legal reform and proceedings against those responsible for the 1641 rebellion. After some days in Wexford the Cooks set sail in the Hector for Cork. They endured a violent storm lasting ten days before they were to land safely, and both published accounts of that experience, interpreting their survival as a sign of divine approbation of their Calvinist republicanism and the new Cromwellian order. John Cook’s biographer has pinpointed their romantic value: ‘What the “his and hers” accounts provide for modern readers is an affective testimony to the love shared by John and Frances Cook.’37 What their accounts provided for contemporaries, however, was proof that God was on their side. They were written almost immediately after the event and circulated among the New Model Army in Ireland and Calvinists in England. They constituted a claim in the court of public opinion which strived to boost the morale of soldiers engaged in the fierce Irish military campaign by offering evidence of divine approval. Her husband’s narrative makes the political import of their accounts quite explicit. A high-profile republican, he was conscious of the hostile conclusions that might be drawn from their misfortune. He first laments his position as a settler husband: ‘it almost broke my heart to think what my wives friends would say in England, that I should bring her into Ireland to drown her.’ Highly attuned to the habits of providential construction on all political sides, he expresses equal concern for the interpretation that might be made of their deaths: ‘it almost split my heart to think what the Malignants would say in England when they hear that we were drowned.’38 It was imperative that providential judgement exonerate Cook as regicide and republican. He experienced the storm as a crisis of faith, in 35
Her Life, fols. 21v–22r. Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ii. 196–205. 37 Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 233. 38 John Cook, A True Relation of Mr. Iohn Cook’s Passage by Sea from Wexford to Kinsale in that great Storm (Cork and London, 1650), sig. A3r. 36
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which Christ appeared to him in a dream, helping him to right understanding. Initially despairing, Cook is prompted to reassign responsibility: ‘this was no naturall storme of Gods sending, but an extraordinary Tempest raised by Satan (by Gods permission) to destroy those which were coming to fight against his Servants.’ Thus, rather than divine punishment, the storm becomes a sign of their righteousness. Moreover, its targets are specific and Cromwellian: ‘the Devill and his Imps were very earnest with Jesus Christ to get leave to destroy the Governour of Wexford, by the storme’; Christ in the dream voiced particular concern for sick soldiers in the same town.39 Frances Cook’s pamphlet shares this political goal, contributing a female puritan exemplarity to the joint projection of divine espousal. Deeply concerned with justifying her female authorship, its title signals her reason for writing: Mris. Cookes Meditations, Being an humble thanksgiving to her Heavenly Father, For granting her a new life, having concluded her selfe dead, and her grave made in the bottome of the Sea, in that great storme. The act of writing is compelled by her deliverance and the experience has effected a breach from her old life. Her text is the fulfilment of a commitment: ‘Having solemnly promised to the most high God in the grea[t] storme, that if his Majesty would be pleased to prolong my dayes, and deliver me from so great a danger, I would studie to prayse and glorifie his Name all the dayes of my life.’ Her republicanism is smoothly conveyed here through the deployment of the monarchical designation: the only majesty is divine. Spontaneity provides further cover for writing; her printed text, ‘written suddenly after my comming to Corke’, disavows any notions of writing for aesthetic effect.40 Cook carefully formulates the process of transmuting religious experience into text. Invoking the psalms as writerly model (‘My heart is inditing a good matter . . . my tongue is the pen of a ready writer’), Cook presents her autobiographical text as testimony: ‘I desire my hand may be brought to testifie against me, my heart and tongue shall not only prayse him, but with my pen also will I stirre up my self.’ Her experience of salvation (supported throughout by pertinent scriptural citation) drives her to witness to the broadest possible audience: ‘I would not only record it in my heart . . . but in all places . . . and tell all the world, that I have my life from Christ.’41 The focus of this autobiographical text is a single event, construed as a trial of faith. The experience of near-shipwreck is not a matter of worldly description but of spiritual ecstasy. Her narrative begins at the end, with the disorientation experienced on safe disembarkation: ‘Landing in Kinsale, I said, am I alive or 39
Ibid., sigs. Bv, B2r. Cook, Meditations, sig. Av. A facsimile edition has been published in the Early Modern Englishwomen: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works series; Elizabeth Sherpan-Wheeler (ed.), Life Writings, I (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Edited extracts are in Suzanne Trill, Kate Chedgzoy, and Melanie Osbourne (eds.), Lay By Your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England, 1500–1700 (London: Arnold, 1997), 169–75. 41 Psalms 45: 1; Cook, Meditations, sigs. A2r, A4r. 40
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dead? Doth not the ground move under mee? I have been dying all this storme, and I cannot tell whether I am yet alive.’ The transition from her old to new lives challenges all physical and temporal certainty. Cook shifts from present to past tense as she recounts her ordeal. The storm is God’s tool to test the limits of her faith and endurance: ‘The Lord comes to the quick, and puts me to the tryall, that I might know what temper I was made of . . . and what stock of grace I had gained to support at such a time of need.’ The crux of her ordeal is understood as a deeply spiritual confrontation, in which Cook’s soul is questioned by God. Yet, throughout she remains conscious of divine love and, finally, obtains ‘assurance of my eternall salvation’.42 This emphasis on assurance is fundamental to all puritan conversion narratives. It is the experience which marks the believer as one of the elect. But in order to undergo spiritual rebirth the self must be relinquished. Paradoxically, such texts represent what Wilcox calls ‘a self-effacing form of self-expression’.43 Contemplating the certainty of death, she surrendered: ‘I found my spirit willingly to submit . . . I patiently lay expecting every houre when I should be dissolved and be with Christ.’ This triumph over the self is the hallmark of the protestant conversion narrative, and it is carried over to her new life which will be dedicated to God: ‘I would no more live to my selfe, nor to the world but wholy to the Lord.’44 The experience also spurred Cook to compose an autobiographical poem. The biblical psalms provided a sanctioned model for women’s poetry in the period, and psalm paraphrase was a well-trodden path. As Clarke explains, the ‘text of the Psalms was peculiarly open-ended, enabling women to encounter and rework it because they were implicitly part of its mode of articulation and because poetic paraphrase could easily be seen as only partially their own work’.45 Cook’s poem summons and rewrites the psalms, its opening stanza (cited at this chapter’s beginning) reworking the verse: ‘Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul.’ Her substitution of ‘love’ for ‘fear’ and ‘life’ for ‘soul’ uses the biblical text as a template, but appropriates it to her autobiographical act. This, with Psalm 107, which narrates the experience of the redeemed via a shipwreck metaphor, are the foundations of her poem.46 Interspersed with stanzas of praise is a loose narrative of the storm and its suspension, the whole circling around variants on a refrain reiterating her vow to glorify God. The two Cook texts work in tandem to project in print a vision of God’s dealings in Ireland. Frances’s narrative, with its emphasis on the individual experience of salvation, complements her husband’s more explicitly political 42
Cook, Meditations, sigs. Av, A3v. Wilcox, ‘Private Writing and Public Function’, 48; see also Naomi Baker, ‘Counterfeiting Nature: Constructing Agency in the Life Writings of Rose Thurgood and Cicely Johnson’, Women’s Writing, 11 (2004), 331–46. 44 Cook, Meditations, sigs. A3v–A4r. 45 Clarke, Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 129. 46 Psalms 66: 16; 107: 23–30. Cook, Meditations, sigs. B3v–B4v. 43
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exegesis. Her stress on the justifications for writing contrasts with the absence of any such concern on her husband’s part, suggesting anxiety about female print publication. Yet any perception of transgression is softened by the strategy of coupling her text with that of her husband. John avails himself of her elect female piety to balance the polemicism of his own narrative. Their deliverance manifests God’s grace and affirms his approval of their work in Ireland. John Cook assumed his position as chief justice of Munster in March 1650, where he embarked on legal reform, often antagonizing landlords with rulings favouring their tenants.47 The couple returned to England in 1657, where Frances died during the winter of 1658/9. Her husband returned to Ireland with his second wife, Mary, and was executed as a regicide in 1660.48 Both Cooks, writing in the immediate aftermath of their deliverance and with a view to print circulation, reached for providential design. In Frances’s case this offered justification for her writing as a woman. Her subjectivity is that of a member of the elect, impelled to testify to divine glory. If that subjectivity and sense of self is circumscribed by the spouses’ joint publication, then the female conversion narratives of John Rogers’s independent congregation in Dublin were even more so. The high-point of independent protestantism in England, between 1650 and the dissolution of the Barebones Parliament in late 1653, dovetailed with events in Ireland as the new regime sought to copperfasten its victories by consolidating puritan culture in the country. By 1653, ‘the range of sects and radical groups in Ireland was swelling with the massive influx of 34,000 Parliamentary soldiers’.49 These years saw the popular emergence of the conversion narrative in print on both islands through a combination of the collapse in print regulation and the rise of radical religion. The intensification of millenarian belief—that the Second Coming, or Fifth Monarchy, was imminent—afforded particular interest in establishing oneself as a member of the elect. John Rogers was one of a number of independent ministers commissioned by the Council of State to preach in Ireland as part of the project to entrench puritanism in the aftermath of the Cromwellian victory. In Dublin by August 1651, Rogers preached to a congregation based at Christ Church Cathedral. His period of residence was brief—following the secession of baptists from his congregation in early 1652 Rogers returned to his London parish by March that year—but he wrung as much benefit as possible out of it for his reputation, publishing Ohel or Beth-shemesh in 1653. Primarily composed in 47 See T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland 1649–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 261–76. 48 Robertson, Tyrannicide Brief, 234–65. 49 Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 153; see also his God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29–53; Phil Kilroy, ‘Radical Religion in Ireland, 1641–1660’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation: 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 201–17; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, 90–182.
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Dublin, Ohel formed a defence of Rogers’s brand of independency (soon to evolve into Fifth Monarchism). As proof of his success, he printed thirty-seven conversion narratives composed by members of his Dublin congregation (many of whom were Cromwellian officers and their wives), seventeen of which are by women.50 Rogers’s collection was not the only contemporary assembly of independent conversion narratives: Spirituall Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (London, 1653) and Samuel Petto’s Roses from Sharon (London, 1654) point to the English context for such autobiographical texts. The puritan conversion narrative, as initially developed in New England, was a feature of the gathered churches— independent congregations which required an account of the individual’s experience of conversion for membership. This was a new stimulus to autobiographical composition. The believer was to engage in self-examination, seeking to identify ‘the twin signs of election in his or her life: the inward testimony of the Spirit and the outward evidence of sanctification’.51 Frances Cook’s spiritual experience during the storm delivered, for her, the first, while their deliverance from death provided the second. But the more typical conversion narrative follows what has become known as the ‘morphology of conversion’, or ordo salutis. As Webster explains, the emphasis lay on ‘conversion as a process, a movement of several stages, election, vocation, humiliation, contrition, justification, adoption, sanctification and glorification’.52 The believer’s former life is fitted to this scheme, narrated in order to establish waywardness or sinfulness. The path to conversion is riddled with false starts and ‘backslidings’. It proceeds to the awakenings of grace, often accompanied by periods of inner turmoil and self-doubt, resolved through the epiphany of assurance, and concluded with a relation of spiritual rebirth manifest in the submission of the self to God. Thus, the genre engages in a complex tension between conformity (the pattern of the regenerate life) and individuality (personal experience of that path). The pressures arising from this were manifest in the oft-quoted anxiety of Richard Baxter, that ‘I could not distinctly trace the Workings of the Spirit upon my heart in that
50 John Rogers, Ohel, or, Beth-shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun, or, Irenicum Evangelicum: An Idea of Church-Discipline in the Theorick and Practick Parts (London, 1653), 393–417 (sigs. Eeer–Hhh3r); this excludes Rogers’s own narrative. Raymond Gillespie’s calculation of twenty-five men and twenty women is based on the 1655 edition, pp. 386–419; ‘The Crisis of Reform, 1625–60’, in Kenneth Milne (ed.), Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: A History (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 211. 51 Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 38. 52 Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 43. See also Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963); Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Owen Watkins, The Puritan Conversion Experience (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
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method’, eventually understanding ‘that God breaketh not all Mens hearts alike’.53 On the one hand participating in the drive for independency as an ecclesiastical model, on the other Rogers’s collection is presented as proof of the vibrancy of his congregation in Ireland. His introduction to these narratives locates them specifically in Dublin. As such, they construct a wider prestige for the minister, emerging from newly reconquered Ireland. Rogers draws attention to the colonial dimension of his publication, figuring Ireland in the scriptural terms of Solomon: ‘The savor of which (I hope) will be attractive, and encourage others over into Ireland, where the Lord hath his Garden enclosed, and full of Spices, with the Mandrakes laid up for the Beloved against his coming; which is looked for every day there, as well as here.’54 Not only does he urge new recruits to the Cromwellian effort in Ireland, but he publishes these texts as examples to those elsewhere: ‘it might incite others to doe thus, viz. to gather out the flowers of their garden, to present to the Saints in other places.’ The scope of his ambition is wide; the model he has developed in Ireland is to be exported. In publishing these narratives he proclaims Dublin as an important location for the broader community of saints, figuratively conveying the ‘variety in unity’ enabled by the conjunction of individuality with conformity in these narratives: ‘the variety of the flowers, and of the colors, and of the natures, and of the formalities of them, gathered together into one, give a glorious lustre, and like the Rain-bow of many colours, signifie fair weather for Ireland.’55 Indeed, Rebecca Rich’s attraction to Rogers’s congregation offers a glimpse of radical religious culture in the city: ‘I was much comforted and confirmed even the last night in Michaels publique place, by that Ordinance of prophecying one by one, which the Church kept so sweetly, and I was very much convinced of your walking together in love and unity of spirit.’56 These texts were produced in Ireland, then printed in England. They reflect the effort to stimulate puritan autobiographical culture in Ireland, and exhibit the extent of that achievement to an audience in England, at the same time adding prestige to the book’s construction of Rogers, now returned to his homeland. The radical sects offered new opportunities for women’s speech. Rogers was supportive of women’s participation in church, devoting a chapter of Ohel to arguments in favour of women’s liberty to vote, object, and contribute to church affairs, with the proviso that all members, male and female, were subject to the congregation as a whole. His advice to women, however, tends toward realpolitik. He looks to a time of greater freedom (‘I do verily beleeve that handmaids shall 53
Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London, 1696), sigs. B3v, B4r. Rogers, Ohel, sig. Ddd4v; Song of Solomon: 6: 2; 7: 13. Quotations do not reproduce the italics in Rogers’s original. 55 Rogers, Ohel, sigs. Hhh3r, Hhh4r. 56 Ibid., sig. Hhhr. 54
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prophecy, and have more publick liberty then now’), but argues via a print metaphor for self-restraint: ‘as the note that comes too nigh the margent, is in danger to run into the text the next impression, so spirits that run too high at first, may soon fall into disorder, and irregularity.’57 Female testimony was important to Rogers: almost half the narratives he published were by women. Although he has some tendency to note their associations with men, this is by no means his prevailing impulse. Elizabeth Avery’s narrative, for example, is glossed in the margins: ‘Mr. Parker was her Father, that able Divine that writ De Eccles. Polit. so largely; but she married Master Avery a Commissary in Ireland.’58 Here Rogers was advertising his church’s connections. Avery’s father was an influential preacher and writer who had been suspended from his Wiltshire ministry and died in exile in the Low Countries. Her brother, Thomas Parker, was a presbyterian minister who had emigrated to New England. Most importantly, Avery herself was an established radical writer who found a home in Rogers’s church (at least temporarily). Her Scripture-Prophecies Opened (1647) is a series of three letters in which she acts as prophet, applying specific scriptural passages to England. Like many contemporary female prophets, she pre-empted criticism by claiming that the spirit spoke through her: ‘though I may be counted mad to the world, I shall speak the words of sobernesse: and if I am mad, as the Apostle saith, it is to God; and if I am in my right mind, it is for the benefit of others.’59 Subsequently named a heretic, her brother castigated her in The copy of a letter . . . to his sister, Elizabeth Avery (1650). He attacked her on theological and patriarchal grounds: ‘Your affectation and writing of Assurance did not formerly so well savor, and your printing of a Book, beyond the custom of your Sex, doth rankly smell; but the exaltation of your self in the way of your Opinions, is above all.’60 Avery arrived in Ireland about 1651. Her lengthy conversion narrative traces the fits and starts of her progression towards grace. It maintains her radical eschatological vision, which complements the testimonies of some other women in the congregation, leading Gribben to suggest that ‘Ohel ’s female narratives offer the most millenarian interpretations of regeneration’.61 While Avery represents a unique opportunity for Rogers, the minister also adverts to the Cromwellian and marital contexts for other women’s testimonies. He notes of Elizabeth Chambers, for example, ‘Her Husband a Captain’; of 57
Rogers, Ohel, sig. Ppp4v. Ibid., sig. Fff2r. 59 Elizabeth Avery, Scripture-Prophecies Opened, which are to be accomplished in these last times, which do attend the second coming of Christ: in several letters written to Christian friends (London, 1647), sig. A3v. 60 Thomas Parker, The copy of a letter written by Thomas Parker, pastor of the church of Newbury in New England, to his sister, Elizabeth Avery (London, 1650), sig. B3r. 61 Gribben, Puritan Millennium, 161. For Avery, see Gribben, God’s Irishmen, 160–73; Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 199–209. 58
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Rich, that she is ‘Captain Rich’s wife’.62 The marginal identifications locate the Cromwellian context for these texts. But eleven women’s narratives are devoid of such comments.63 The women often testify to the influence of named male preachers in their progress towards grace, and the fervour of their desire for assurance is sometimes conveyed in romantic language: Avery ‘hunted after my lovers’; Anne Hewson ‘was a frequent lover of good men’.64 But the women’s narratives—sometimes referring to husbands in passing—are often indifferent to the matter of their patriarchal status, and the male narratives are equally attentive to the influence of preachers. Rogers’s editorial mediation of the voices of his congregation complicates any discussion of the female subjectivity they express. Headed ‘testimonies’ or ‘experiences’, and written in the first person, their print context presents them simultaneously as individual narratives and community texts. His stated method of translating oral to print testimony insists on accuracy: ‘I have dealt faithfully with all, as I finde them in my Notes, as near as I can to a tittle, taken out of their owne mouths, without respect of persons; excepting some of the most ordinary sort, which I have taken summarily.’65 The division between ‘ordinary’ (preaching, praying, reading, and writing) and ‘extraordinary’ (dreams, trances, voices, and visions) means of attaining grace is a distinguishing feature of Rogers’s ministry. Mary Burrill, for example, experiences confirmation of grace through dreams; Dorothy Emett hears an enlightening voice.66 Rogers’s editorial principles are not aesthetic but reader-oriented, centring on novelty and an impulse to avoid duplication: ‘for the godly Readers sake, that I must contract much their experiences as they were taken, least they be too voluminous . . . I shall gather out the flowers onely, and give you the sum of what they said.’67 His direction of the reader in marginal notes indicating the moment of calling (or conversion)— when, where, how, and its effects—reinforces, as Watkins remarks, ‘the tendency for the accounts to display a standard scheme of interpretation’.68 But the members of his Dublin congregation themselves shaped their lives according to this scheme, exposing the split self typical of autobiographical writing. The present self selects and omits occurrences in the past life in order to illuminate present circumstances. In the case of independent conversion 62
Rogers, Ohel, sigs. Fff3v, Hhhr. Ruth Emerson, Anne Bishop, Tabitha Kelsall, Frances Curtis, Mary Turrant, Elizabeth Marrow, Mary Barker, Margaret Fanshaw, Ann Hanly, Sarah Barnwell, and Ann Megson. 64 Rogers, Ohel, sigs. Fff2v, Ggg2v. 65 Ibid., sig. Hhh3r. 66 Ibid., sigs. Hhhr, Ggg3r. See Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 42; Watkins, Puritan Conversion Experience, 93. 67 Rogers, Ohel, sig. Ddd4v. 68 Watkins, Puritan Conversion Experience, 41. With regard to Rogers’s editorial influence, Hindmarsh argues that elisions were theological, and reflected the minister’s teaching (Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 48); Gribben argues that ‘the voice we hear is Rogers’ all along’ (Puritan Millennium, 167). 63
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narratives this present perspective is starkly displayed, as the past life must lead to grace. Any recognition of Rogers’s role as editor should be cognizant of the selfediting and life-shaping that occurred as individuals recounted their experiences to the congregation. Rogers declares at the beginning of his own conversion narrative that: ‘To give a formall account from year to year of my life, would make me too tedious, to you and my self . . . I shall cite some of the most remarkable passages which (to my present remembrance) I have met with in former years to this day.’69 What is tedious is the comprehensive, detailed life; what is important is the trajectory towards conversion and assurance. Ruth Emerson is similarly self-reflexive: ‘The Lord hath exercised me much, and to passe by all outward troubles which have been very many, I shall declare what the Lord did for me when I was young.’ Emerson edits her own story; only the most salient information is supplied to the congregation. Her theological discussions with the preacher, Mr Archer, are also cut short: ‘I made many objections (which would be long to tell now) but he answered them all.’70 Where Emerson prunes her story, this is due to her own sense of genre; prioritizing the schema of conversion, she edits extraneous detail. Anne Bishop begins her narrative with a sermon heard at Christ Church, adverting like many other members to scriptural ‘hungrings and thirstings’.71 Like Emerson, she edits her story, but allows for the relation of a new life-story in the future: ‘I had abundance of temptations, and trials both inward and outward (which I hope to have time to tell hereafter).’72 Certainly, Rogers is not averse to regular endorsements of himself as divine instrument. His marginal note to Elizabeth Chambers’s narrative informs us that she experienced a vision from God prophesying the arrival of a preacher, now identified as Rogers. Chambers herself recalls in her testimony that she ‘had no full and clear satisfaction all this while; until the Lord, who heareth prayers, sent over Mr. Rogers from the Councel of State to us’. Rogers opportunistically glosses the passage: ‘A good example to women.’ Yet he does not excise the more personal elements of Chambers’s narrative—the lived Irish experience which lends authenticity and originality to the conformist pattern. Her narrative of conversion is integrated with her life: ‘When the Rebellion brake out here in Ireland, I went over with my Husband into England.’73 First encountering the godly in Bristol, she returned to Dublin, progressing through a series of preachers and finally arriving at assurance through Rogers’s ministry.
69
Rogers, Ohel, sig. Hhh4r. Ibid., sig. Ggg2r. 71 ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled’, Matthew 5: 6. 72 Rogers, Ohel, sig. Ggg3r. 73 Ibid., sigs. Fff4r, Fff3v. 70
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The impact of the 1641 rising is woven into many of these accounts as a trial incorporated to the schema of conversion. Frances Curtis begins her narrative with her wayward youth, diverting to an account of her rebellion experiences: In these wars I was stripped by the Rebels (being abroad) and came home so, thorough sad tempests, and since have gone thorough great troubles, and very many. A while after, I heard my Husband was killed by the Rebels, which I feared was by my sins, and so my troubles were renewed; and then the enemies came upon us, the Cannon-bullets flew over my head; and in few days I was turned out of doors, with my childe in my arms. I cannot express what God hath done for me, in saving my life, and my Husbands, in hearing my prayers and tears; and now in satisfying my soul with himself.
This differs markedly from the trajectory of the deposition narratives. Composed from the vantage-point of military victory and radical religious enthusiasm, the 1641 rebellion can be construed as a staging-post in a more personal providential scheme. Mary Turrant’s narrative highlights this teleology, as she brings her story to its climax: ‘My children were murthered by the Rebels, and I lost my Husband by the sickness, and yet the Lord hath spared me in mine old age; and now I see why? That I may enjoy this great mercy, which I never looked for, to comfort me in my old age.’74 The life, here, is co-opted to the linear design of the conversion narrative, whereby the narrator interprets the past according to present assurance. The collapse of the Barebones Parliament and subsequent establishment of the Protectorate marked the decline of independent influence. The 1662 Act of Uniformity ejected puritan ministers from their livings and recast them as dissenters. Yet the influence of the genre lasted well into the eighteenth century. Hindmarsh interprets its importance as establishing ‘an autobiographical religious culture that included both clergy and laypeople’.75 This democratizing impulse to write protestant spiritual autobiography permeated the mainstream church, its best-known exponent being John Bunyan, whose Grace Abounding was published in 1666. While the puritan conversion narrative as condition for church membership retreated, lengthier autobiographies recounting the individual’s life according to a teleology of spiritual progress remained common. Spiritual autobiography became a dominant paradigm, its generic conventions manipulated to account for more worldly attitudes by writers such as Mary Rich and Alice Thornton. Both raised in Ireland as children, Rich and Thornton were prolific authors who used their writing to construct themselves as conforming to contemporary protestant formulations of exemplary femininity.
74 Rogers, Ohel, sig. ggg4r. The testimonies of Chambers, Curtis, and Turrant are edited in Field Day, iv. 481–2. For men’s incorporation of 1641, see also the narratives of Thomas Higgins and Andrew Manwaring; sigs. Eeer, Ggg3v–Ggg4r, respectively. For a woman’s incorporation of pre1641 Irish experience to the independent conversion narrative, see ‘MW’ in Spirituall Experiences for Sundry Beleevers (London, 1653), 8–18. 75 Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 50.
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Rich, the only Irish-born writer discussed in this chapter, offers an interesting case study of the complex construction of national identity among the postRestoration Irish elite. As Mary Boyle, second youngest child of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, she was born into one of the most prominent New English settler families. Aunt to Katherine Philips’s Boyle sisters, sister to the intellectually renowned Lady Ranelagh and scientist Robert Boyle, she eschewed the dual residence and politics of her brother Roger, earl of Orrery, spending her adulthood in England. Her socially mobile and aspirational father—whose energetic arrangement of advantageous marriages for his children was teasingly referenced by Anne Southwell (see Chapter 5)—maintained an English base. His daughter was exposed to the London court and ultimately married into the English aristocracy. In addition to her short autobiography, written towards the end of her life between 1671 and 1673, she filled volumes of diaries from 1666 until her death in 1678, and at least one volume of occasional meditations. Each of these genres adheres to pious models for writing. Her diaries function as spiritual journals, recording devout practices as well as the tribulations of married life, contemporary events, and social engagements. Her volume of occasional meditations is its own testament to her godly activities.76 Her writerly output, firmly grounded in sanctioned religious genres, was posthumously hailed as evidence of her exemplary piety. Her chaplain, Anthony Walker, published his funeral sermon (which cited her diaries) along with her letter of advice on holy living to George Berkeley and a selection of her meditations.77 Her seamless assimilation to English ideals glosses over the range of personae projected in her writings and demonstrates the flexibility of aristocratic identities between Ireland and England. Her manuscript autobiography, entitled ‘Some Specialties In the life of M warwicke’, adopts the generic framework of spiritual autobiography. But unlike the independent conversion narratives discussed above, Rich’s text provides extensive personal detail. The teleology of conversion does not exclude the relation of more worldly concerns; rather, it provides the interpretative framework for her life, legitimizing her decisions. She begins, conventionally, with an 76 For the spiritual journal or diary, see Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy’; for occasional meditation, see my ‘Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation’, Seventeenth Century, 22 (2007), 124–43. The diaries are now BL Add. MSS 27,351–5; the meditations are BL Add. MS 27,356. The diaries and autobiography were edited in the nineteenth century: Memoirs of Lady Warwick: Also her Diary, from A.D.1666 to 1672 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1847); Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick, ed. Thomas Crofton Croker (London: Percy Society, 1848). For modern biographies, see Sara Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1987); Charlotte Fell Smith, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1625–1678): Her Family and Friends (London: Longmans, 1901); Mary E. Palgrave, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick 1625–1678 (London: J. M. Dent, 1901). 77 Anthony Walker, Eureka, Eureka, The Virtuous Woman Found. Her Loss Bewailed, and Character Exemplified in a Sermon Preached at Felsted in Essex, April 30, 1678 (London, 1678).
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outline of her lineage—born in November 1624 at Youghal to Katherine Fenton and Richard Boyle.78 The providential framework licenses a materialist emphasis, as her father’s worldly advancement is proudly recounted: by the good prouidence of God [he was] brought in to Ireland, wher when he landed he was master of but 27, pond and 3, shillinges, in the world and afterwardes God so prosperd him ther that he had in that contery about, 20, thousand pond a yeare coming In, and was made Lord Treasurar of Ireland, and one of the two Lordes Iustises for the Gouernement of that Kingdome.79
Boyle’s self-elevation is subordinated to divine agency, a formulation later exploited by the author to gloss her own actions. Ireland is the land of opportunity for a man on the make. Her mother died when she was aged 3, and Rich was fostered ‘to a prudent and uertuous Lady, my Lady Claytone’.80 Ann Clayton’s husband, Sir Randall, was an English planter and her father’s agent. Rich lived with them in Mallow, county Cork, until the age of 14, when her father called her home. Some months later, suffering from Wentworth’s determination to prosecute him for the illegal acquisition of lands in Munster, Boyle moved his family to Stalbridge, Dorset, whence he hoped to prevail on contacts in England to oppose the Irish lord deputy.81 Rich does not appear to have returned to the country of her birth. Indeed, her evasion of such a prospect—in fact rooted in filial disobedience and a keen sense of self-determination—is construed according to her providential paradigm. Ireland serves as a signifier of disaster averted; a narrative tool by which she justifies her defiance. Ever-conscious of his nouveau riche status, her father sought to pursue an arranged alliance for Mary with another colonial aristocrat, James Hamilton, son to Viscount Clandeboye and grandson of Sir John Perrot, former lord deputy.82 Mary resisted. This act of rebellion caused great familial consternation. She excuses it in her autobiography as a prescient intervention of providence. Hamilton, it is suggested, was equally subject to paternal pressure. Arriving at Stalbridge in August 1638, ‘mr Hambletone (posible to obay his father) did designe gaineing me by a uery hansome adress which he made to me’. His intended felt very differently: ‘the expressiones he made me of his kindnes were uery unacseptable to me . . . nor that could I be brought to endure to thinke of ha[vi]ng him, though, my father preste me exstreamely to it, my auersion for him was exstrordnary, though I could giue my father noe satesfactory acounpte why it 78 As Mendelson has shown, the 1625 date provided in the autobiography is incorrect; Stuart Women, 64. 79 BL Add. MS 27,357, fol. 2. 80 Ibid., fol. 2v. 81 For Boyle’s practice of fostering his children in Ireland, see Canny, Upstart Earl, 94–102. 82 James Hamilton (d. 1659) was son and heir to James, first Viscount Clandeboye, who arrived from Scotland in 1587, and Jane Philipps, granddaughter of Sir John Perrott. G.E.C., The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland …, rev. Vicary Gibbs, 13 vols. (London: St Catherine Press, 1910–59), iii. 222–3.
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was so.’ Friction between herself and her father runs throughout the narrative, resolved only after Cork’s death and his daughter’s conversion, when she expressed regret at her disregard for his opinion. In this instance his daughter’s intransigence prevailed: ‘yet I could neauer be brought ether by faire or foule meanes to it, so as my father was at last forced to breake it of, to my fathers unspeakeable troble, and to my high satisfaction.’83 The allusion to a range of coercive methods here renders her refusal all the more remarkable. Such stubborn intractability does not accord with exemplary prescriptions of female behaviour. Yet the conventions of the spiritual autobiography offer the means to construe her filial rebellion in more acceptable terms. Her writing self, as opposed to her past self, can proffer a satisfactory account: afterwardes I aparantly saw a good prouidence of God in not letting me Close with it, for with in a yeare after my absolute reafuseing him, he was by the Rebelion of Ireland inpouirished so that he lost for a great while his whole estate, the Rebelles being in the possesion of it, which I should haue lik’t uery Ill, for If I had maried him it must haue bene for his estates sake, not his one, his persone being highly disagreeable to me.84
The Ohel narratives construe 1641 as a trial of faith; here it is a means of legitimizing Rich’s resistance. Hindsight—the vantage-point of autobiography—vindicates her defiance of her father; moreover, the incendiary associations of that event are implicit in her construction of her actions. Safe in England, she gives thanks for her escape (from marriage, loss of property, and implied persecution). Providential interpretation emasculates her own agency, conveniently rewriting her insistent self-determination as divine deliverance beyond the subject’s control. Rich defied her father’s express wishes on more than this occasion and, again, providence is co-opted as exoneration. The younger Mary Boyle, however, is oblivious to the divine plan discerned by her older self. Living in London and happily joining her new sister-in-law (the former maid-of-honour Elizabeth Killigrew) in courtly activities, she ‘continued to haue an auertion to maridge, liueing so much at my ease that I was uery unwilling to Change my Conditon’.85 At this point Rich adopts the conventions of the romance narrative to structure her renewed battle of wills with her father over a suitable match. Charles Rich, younger son of the earl of Warwick, was not in a financial position to interest her father as a son-in-law. But Mary’s depiction of their courtship unequivocally represents it as a love-match. Her representation of their passion according to the conventions of the romance narrative is at odds with the difficult and fractious relationship depicted in the diary. Wray argues that Rich’s deployment of the romance paradigm in her autobiography serves to explain her actions: ‘exploiting 83 84 85
BL Add. MS 27,357, fols. 3v–4r. Ibid., fol. 4r. Ibid., fol. 4v.
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the conventions, logic and morality of romance, Rich is enabled both to justify the filial disobedience that any other discourse would castigate and to register how, through an unwitting investment in romantic ideology, she arrived at the poor choice that underpinned her marital decision.’86 The autobiography’s providential self-fashioning offers further cover. The discrepancies between the different versions of her marriage demonstrate the extent to which genre—even pious genres—could be exploited in the construction of autobiographical personae, authorizing one’s actions in divergent ways. In addition to the sanction available from a romance narrative, Rich here makes a larger claim for the workings of God’s plan. She explicitly invokes divine intervention as she argues that the end justifies the means, even if the means entail contravention of God’s patriarchal law: heare lett me admire at the Goodnes of God, that by his Good Prouidence to me, when I by my maredge thought of nothing but haueing a persone for whome I had a great Pation, and neauer sought God in it, but by maring my husband flatly disobayd his Comand which was giuen me in his Sacred Oracles, of obaieng my father, yet was pleased by his unmertited [sic] Goodnes to me to bring me by my Maredge in to a Noble, and which Is much more a Realidgious famely, wher Relidgion was both practised, and incoraged.87
The teleology of spiritual autobiography again licenses self-determination. By marrying Rich, she found her way to conversion. The narrator’s defiance of her father’s wishes is discharged by its introduction of Boyle to a pious family. The significance of her actions is apparent only through the prism of providence; meaning shifts from the romance paradigm (identified by the ‘I’ who is the subject of the narrative) to the spiritual paradigm (identified by the ‘I’ who writes the narrative). From this point her autobiography seeks more formally to register the progressions and regressions of the journey to grace. Following the births of a daughter and son (and the death of her father), her awakening began, she says, at the age of 21. Like so many life-stories of conversion, however, the path is hard. Her 4-year-old son’s illness is interpreted as a turning-point: ‘my Concscinse told me it was for my baikeslideing.’ Like Frances Cook, she made a covenant: ‘[I did] solemly promise to God If he wold heare my prayur I wold become a new Creature.’88 The distinction between the writing subject and the experiencing subject dissolves as the climax of assurance approaches. At Leighs, Essex (the Warwick estate), the civil war campaigns meant that she was left alone, 86 Ramona Wray, ‘[Re]constructing the Past: The Diametric Lives of Mary Rich’, in Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (eds.), Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 151; see also Sandra Findley and Elaine Hobby, ‘Seventeenth-Century Women’s Autobiography’, in Francis Barker et al. (eds.), 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century (Colchester: University of Essex, 1981), 22. 87 BL Add. MS 27, 357, fol. 16v. 88 Ibid., fol. 19v.
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a key ingredient of her salvation. Encouraged by Walker, the family’s chaplain, she records an irrevocable breach between her pre-conversion, courtly life and her godly preoccupations from this moment on. She had been as uaine, as Idell, and as inconsiderate a persone as was posseble, minding nothing but Curious dresing, and fine and Rich clothes and spending my preatious time in nothing ellse but Readeing Romances, and in Readeing, and seeing Playes and in goeing to Court, and hide Parke and spring Garden . . . being stedfastly sett against being a Puritan, but O my Good God what shall I now render unto thee for thy Conuerting Grace . . . which did make me to hate and to disrealich all my former uaine and Idell pleasures, and I then stodyd the God¼breathed¼Oracles and spent much time in Reading in the word, layeng by my Idlle bookes.89
The renunciation of romances as reading material mirrors the narrative’s shift from that paradigm to the conversion narrative whose signs are in evidence from the opening account of her father’s career in Ireland. Encouraged by her sister Ranelagh in this course of action, by the time her family returned to Leighs her split self was apparent to all: ‘and indeed it was noe wonder to me that I apeared so alltered to them for I was so much changed to my selfe that I hardly knew my selfe, and could say with that conuerted persone (I am not I).’90 The divided self is an acknowledged and established signal of experimental Calvinist identity. The vicissitudes of her life following this moment are consistently read in terms of her relationship with God, whether as deliverances, trials, or comforts in affliction. Subjection to divine will suffuses her response to the events of her life: smallpox, recovery from a coach accident, the death of her son (for whom Katherine Philips wrote an elegy), her husband’s death in 1673, her marriage arrangements for her three nieces.91 Her identity, as construed in the autobiography, is not that of the Restoration Old Protestant class, but of an exemplary protestant woman whose writings subscribe to more typically English models of femininity.92 The autobiographies of Alice Thornton are structured around moments of divine deliverance rather than a linear progression toward conversion, but they are nevertheless wedded to the need to establish female piety through the workings of providence. Like Rich, she exploited the genre of spiritual autobiography and its signs of exemplarity in order to justify her worldly actions, but Thornton often stretched its conventions to the limits. Her father, Sir Christopher Wandesford, was (like John Cook) appointed to Wentworth’s Irish administration. Wandesford served his cousin and mentor as one of the lord lieutenant’s key advisers, and as his replacement in April 1640 until his death the following
89 90 91 92
BL Add. MS 27, 357, fols. 22v–23v. Ibid., fol. 25r. Philips, Collected Works, i. 206–7. Neither her diary nor volume of meditations address her Irish birth.
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December. His wife and children followed him to Ireland about 1634, when Alice was aged 8, remaining until 1641.93 Thornton authored four different manuscript versions of her life in her own hand, all arranged according to the providential paradigm of deliverance in order to demonstrate her piety and defend her reputation. The index to the first of these, ‘A booke of remembrances of all the remarkable deliuerances of my selfe, Husband & Children w:th theire births, & other remarks as conserning my selfe & Family, begining from the yeare 1626’, flags the structure to be used in the later manuscripts. The rubrics of the main text indicate only the years in which events occurred, but the index prioritizes their status as deliverances.94 Thornton later rewrote this first life-narrative (covering the period up to 1668), expanding and reworking it in three separate volumes, each of which is an autobiography in its own right. By February 1669, living in East Newton, Yorkshire, she had begun the first of these, which relates the events of her life from the age of 3 in 1629 to her widowhood in 1668. The second, now lost, rehearsed the same period but continued into her experiences of widowhood, as does the third volume, which concentrates on the first year of widowhood. Only two of these (‘A booke of remembrances’ and the first of the three autobiographies) have been in the public domain. The latter is the manuscript under discussion here.95 93
Although Thornton states in volume I (p. 12) that she came to Ireland about 1632, a year after her father, he was not appointed until midsummer 1633. 94 This manuscript is now lost; Yale University holds a microfilm of the manuscript (Yale Microfilm no. 326), from which extracts were published in Graham et al., Her Own Life, 150–64. 95 In summer 2009 the British Library acquired the first and third volumes, previously held by a private collector (now BL Add. MS 88897). I am grateful to Arnold Hunt for this information. However, the present dicussion is based on the British Library’s microfilm copy of the first volume (BL RP 2346; hereafter Thornton, I)—hitherto the only volume in the public domain. Her autobiography was published in the nineteenth century as The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, of East Newton, Co. York, ed. Charles Jackson (Durham: Surtees Society, 1875). This edition is primarily based on volume I, and includes extracts from volumes II and III. Unfortunately, Jackson’s guiding principle in editing the manuscripts was to avoid repetition. As Anselment additionally points out, Jackson’s focus on secular events leads to a further misrepresentation, in not reproducing the many prayers and thanksgivings which conclude her accounts of specific events (Raymond Anselment, ‘The Deliverances of Alice Thornton: The ReCreation of a Seventeenth-Century Life’, Prose Studies, 19 (1996), 21, and his ‘Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton’s Life’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 45 (2005), 138–9). Thus, it is impossible to reconstruct, from this edition, precisely the ways in which Thornton rewrote her life. Humberside County Council holds a transcript made by Thornton’s descendant, Charles Norcliffe, and used by Jackson (DDHV/75/1; a paper copy is held by the British Library, RP 5757). For a recent discussion of the manuscripts and edition by Raymond Anselment (who obtained access to volume III), see ‘Manuscript Sources’, 135–55. For his comparison of the book of remembrances with the first volume of autobiography, see ‘“My first Booke of my Life”: The Apology of a Seventeenth-Century Gentry Woman’, Prose Studies, 24 (2001), 1–14. One reason for rewriting her life may derive from biographical chronology. Irish deliverances are placed at both ends of volume I, although not by design. Thornton, expanding her ‘booke of remembrances’ for the first time, forgot to include a number of episodes in her life, which is arranged in chronological sequence. Thus, she included these at the end of the manuscript, following the poems and prayers on widowhood, with the instructions: ‘A Recollection of
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Thornton’s life was not written in its multiple versions solely for the purposes of pious self-expression. The volumes were begun after her husband’s death with the intention of refuting a series of slanders made against her. These slanders centred on the marriage of Thornton’s eldest daughter, Alice, to the local clergyman, Thomas Comber, who lived with the Thorntons. Alice junior (Naly) had married quietly two months after her father’s death; the public ceremony occurred six months later. The perceived subterfuge became a hostage to fortune. Although the precise allegations are never spelled out, it is clear that they included the accusations that Alice senior was engaged in a relationship with Comber, that she herself intended to marry him following her husband’s death, and that Comber sought to resettle the Thornton estate in his own favour. Indeed, her third volume relates that William Thornton travelled to Malton (where he died suddenly) precisely in order to counter the slurs, which he attributed to a long-established dislike of his family in the neighbourhood.96 Hence, land and inheritance, infidelity and duplicity, were at root of the defamation. Thornton composed her various lives in order to combat these attacks on her good reputation, to justify her actions, and to restore her honour. That she lived on until 1707 but 1669 was the terminus of her latest life-narrative underlines the point. Ostensibly an account of deliverances and preservations received from God, her manuscripts simultaneously performed the more worldly function of defending her character. Her motives are explained in the third volume, when she writes of her maid Daphne: by her I sent my owne Booke of my Life, the collections of God’s dealings and mercys to me and all mine till my widowed condittion. That she might be able to sattisfy all my friends of my life and conversation,—that it was not such as my deadly enemyes sugested, and the reasons I had to take caire for all my poore children, and what condittion I was reduced into after the intaile was cut of, and many other great remarks of my life, which I knew would take away all those scruples and false calumnyes against my proceedings in the match,—this poore woman did shew the said bookes to my aunt Norton and severall other friends, as my lady Wyvell, which sent to her to lett her know how much I was wronged.97
With a female readership in mind, these autobiographies were testimonies to her exemplary piety, expressly including explanations for her actions and memmorable accidents; & Passages. forgotten to be Entred in to my Booke. this must be placed In the first Place’ (Thornton, I, 286). Jackson’s edition follows the author’s instruction, silently incorporating these episodes into the desired chronological sequence; Autobiography of Alice Thornton, 8–36. The interpretative dilemmas posed by the manuscripts, as to chronology and hierarchy, are suggestively outlined by Graham, ‘Writing and the Self ’, 211. 96 Jackson, Autobiography of Alice Thornton, 236–9. For detailed discussion of the slanders, see Anselment, ‘Deliverances of Alice Thornton’, 30–3; ‘“My first Booke of my Life”’, 2–4, 10–11; and ‘Manuscript Sources’, passim. 97 Jackson, Autobiography of Alice Thornton, 259.
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disseminated in order to prove her innocence. Thornton incorporates the events of her childhood to this providential paradigm. Ireland provides a short-cut to exemplary spirituality, provokes detailed political and cultural analysis, and forms a structural contrast to her later sufferings.98 In the first instance, Ireland represents an idealized past, a privileged childhood which forms an antithetical prelude to Thornton’s subsequent life. Due to her father’s position in the Dublin administration, Thornton was raised at the centre of the 1630s social and political elite. She describes the country as a place where she ‘inioyed great happienesse and Comfort dureing my hon:red fathers life’. At the opposite end of the spectrum to the curriculum of manual industry for the children Elizabeth Cary aimed to train, Thornton’s education in the company of the lord deputy’s daughters, Anne and Arbella, encompassed: ‘The french Language to write, & speake ye same; Singing Danceing, Plaieng on ye Lute, & Theorboe. learning such other accomplishments, of Working, Silkes. gummeworke &c. Sweetemeats & other sutable huswifery.’99 Yet religious instruction, Thornton is careful to emphasize, was paramount. The overriding structural schema is that of deliverance, and her childhood experiences are straightforwardly co-opted to that paradigm. Secular events are inevitably construed in terms of the divine hand of preservation, and her short narratives of deliverance are generally followed by prayers of thanksgiving. She records deliverance from fire in Dublin, the family’s preservation from shipwreck when returning from England in 1639, her preservation from drowning after her leg caught in a ship’s cable, escape from drowning in a riverside coach-crash, recovery following a fall from a swing while playing with the Wentworth girls in Dublin, and the discovery of a major fire in the castle itself.100 For Thornton as a child, divine intervention favoured prevention over cure. Yet her providential framework is not always able to contain Thornton’s political and cultural observations. Her more extended narratives of events in Ireland surrender to an impulse for analysis and storytelling, where the narrator strains at the leash of spiritual autobiography. Her ‘Obseruations, vppon seuerall accidents happening in Ireland vppon ye Earle of Strafford, &c: in ye. yeares. 1640: 41: and on his fatall murder: may: 12: 1641’ is a substantial polemic on behalf of her father’s mentor, revealing an astute political sense of contemporary 98 Although her manuscripts present many areas of great interest, this discussion examines the ways in which Ireland is constructed and symbolically exploited for her exemplary self-construction. Her autobiographies expound upon financial hardship and legal difficulties, marriage, and contain unusually detailed descriptions of pregnancy, childbirth, and miscarriage; see in particular the Anselment articles cited above; Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 70–7; Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, 228–9; Sharon Howard, ‘Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-Century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 367–82. 99 Thornton, I, 12. 100 Ibid. 14–17, 288–92.
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tensions. When writing of his recall as lord deputy (from which her father’s career benefited), she is nonetheless uncompromising in Wentworth’s defence. Characterizing his accusers as ‘factious Spirritts’, she identifies ambition, antimonarchism, and the Laudian settlement of the protestant church as the factors leading to his downfall. The echoes here of Thornton’s own situation, fighting off unfounded slander, show how her motives for writing permeate her purchase on events. Alleging that the real target of ‘this tradegie’ was the king himself, Thornton’s analysis is attuned to Machiavellian strategies: ‘Nor could there be found, a better expedient for thire purpose then to make ∧a cloake of Religion.’ She anatomizes the competing behaviours of the existing catholic communities: ‘The Irish thirsting, affter ye blood, & liues of ye English, pretended oppression . . . ye other of yt Nation could not be subiect to o:r Church Gouernment, & orders, but affected a loose libertineissme to y:r owne pernicious waies, ioyned w:th ye Irish in theire complaints against this wise & Noble Person.’ Thornton’s them-and-us construction is that of the New English elite. She distinguishes between native Irish and Old English on the basis of ethnicity and motive. But antipathy towards the English is represented as leading to common ground. Age-old colonial discourse enters into the diatribe: ‘All his endeauours euer tending for theire good . . . And the due ordering of yt Barbarous People & theire Ciuilizeng them to o:r good Lawes & gouernment.’101 Her identification with the man whose children she played with extends to textual legacy as a source of justification, recalling again her own circumstances as she wrote and rewrote her life-stories. The power of false allegations unmistakably resonates with her own experience: ‘inuention of abundance, of Lies, & callumnies cast about & instilld into ye eares, & hearts of ye vulger meaner Peopple.’ Her citation of texts authored by the accused earl cannot but invoke her own acts of writing for the purpose of self-defence: ‘[he] did iustifie his innocency to ye death. as may be seene in his papers, & last speech.’102 This is not the stuff of conventional spiritual autobiography. Anselment has argued of her preoccupation with restoring her reputation that the ‘apologia ultimately more interested in her relations with others than in her relation to God threatens to displace the stated intentions of prayerful and meditative thanksgiving’.103 Here, it is the apologia for Strafford, so reminiscent of her own situation, that threatens to overwhelm the ostensible deliverance. Thornton’s father served as lord deputy for eight months. Her ‘Relation conserning my Hon:red Father. ye Lord Deputy Wandesforde, & of his Death. Decem: 3:d 1640:’ claims for him an exalted place in the struggle for hearts and minds: ‘none w:ch went from England gained soe much vppon affections of yt
101 102 103
Thornton, I, 20–2. Ibid. 24–5, 26. Anselment, ‘Deliverances of Alice Thornton’, 33.
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Nation.’104 The point is reiterated in her account of his exemplary protestant death. She wryly notes, he was ‘ye only Man in that place [i.e. lord deputy], (as was obserud[)] W:ch died vntouched, or peaceably in theire beds’.105 Despite her strongly New English perspective, however, Thornton stands in polar opposition to Anne Southwell (see Chapter 5), embracing the conjunction of Irish and English funerary rites at Christ Church Cathedral, the venue for Rogers’s congregation a decade later. ‘Such was ye loue yt God had giuen to y:s worthy Person’, she writes, ‘yt ye Irish did sett vp theire Lamentable: hone as they call it, for him in ye Church. W:ch was neuer knowne before for any Englishman don.’106 Unlike Fanshawe, whose bemusement at the term is discussed in Chapter 1, Thornton comprehends the cultural significance of the Irish ocho´n. Chedgzoy points to her appropriation of this distinctively Irish ‘site of memory to celebrate English authority in Ireland, albeit in elegiac mode’—a singular homage to Thornton’s idealized father.107 The cross-cultural tribute was not entirely happy for one member of the Thornton clan. Alice’s brother, Christopher, she relates later in the manuscript, ‘heearing the great & dreadfull cry yt the Irish made att my deare fathers Funerall was soe frighted y.t he fell into y.e most greuios fitts of y:e Splen w:ch much tormented him for many yeares affter’.108 There is another subtext here. Christopher became heir to the Wandesford estates on the death of their older brother George in 1651. For some time he argued against the provisions of their father’s will, which was lost when the family left Ireland. Thornton’s relation of her father includes a passage on this will, confirming its existence and therefore staking a claim for her own financial well-being. The contrast between the two siblings’ responses to the keening at his funeral prefigures their conflict over their father’s legacy. The death of her father marks the key turning-point in Thornton’s life, of which she leaves the reader in no doubt: ‘This was ye begining of troubles in o:r Familie.’109 The moment of loss might more specifically be pinpointed as the outbreak of the Irish rebellion. Writing at approximately the same time as Mary Rich, Thornton also exploits the rising as shorthand for protestant exemplarity. Her very presence in Dublin in 1641 assigns to her an authenticity of protestant suffering. Again, her instincts as polemicist and storyteller struggle against the generic conventions of spiritual autobiography. She composed a detailed account of the plot to seize Dublin Castle in October 1641, offering a counterpoint to the depositions discussed in Chapter 4. Thornton’s version is informed and 104
Thornton, I, 28. Ibid. 36. 106 Ibid. 37. 107 Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World, 96. See also Tait, who suggests that the keening women presented no threat to Thornton; Death, Burial and Commemoration, 37. 108 Thornton, I, 293. 109 Ibid. 38. 105
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dramatic, replete with invented dialogue for the main protagonists. Commenting on her deployments of direct speech in the narrative of her later life, Anselment argues that ‘reconstructed scenes and speeches are obviously designed to rewrite history as well as image . . . [she] imaginatively preserves her memories of family and self with the freedom of a novelist’.110 This tendency is much in evidence in the story of the conspiracy against Dublin Castle, where she writes narrative history with minimal regard to herself or family. Indemnifying her account generically by framing it as a deliverance, she proceeds with her own tale of the Dublin plot. Her theatrical impulse centres the account on the assembly of conspirators in a tavern. Here, her providential scaffolding is adapted to create dramatic suspense; it was ‘a most miraculous discouery . . . by w:ch as ye meanes o:r gracious God appointed we weare deliuered from Perishing in those flames intended for vs’.111 The scene is set by an exposition of the dramatis personae: the ringleaders, Lords MacMahon and Maguire, ‘sett drinking in a blind Alehouse’, with MacMahon’s kinsman. Thornton correctly states that this kinsman (Owen O’Connolly) was servant to Sir John Clotworthy, a protestant convert and married to an Englishwoman, but does not provide his name.112 Omnisciently, she narrates his attitude to the men, his notice of the ‘impious expressions yt they vsed towards ye English’.113 Her representation of the competing allegiances of blood, ethnicity, religion, and marriage in the tavern scene is grounded in the immediacy of direct speech. Drunkenly regaling their (unbeknown to them, protestant) companion, the two leaders tell him of their ‘galantest designe . . . against ye English Doggs’: ‘they would Batter downe ye Towne ouer the Heriticke Dogs eares & not spaire one of them.’ Their distressed kinsman cries out, ‘what shall I doe for my wife. They said hang her. for she was but an E[n]glish dogge he might gett better of his owne country.’ Thornton designs dialogue whose pejorative terminology fully concurs with deposition accounts. She describes O’Connolly’s entrapment, his eventual escape through a broken window and midnight swim across the river to Lord Justice Parsons. On arrival, his speech combines gravity and intoxication while making her providential point for her: ‘My Lord I am sent to you by ye Prouidence of God. to saue yo.r Lp & all ye English. I am bound in conscience to deliuer my owne soule in there preseruation from ye Irish whoe intends to destroy them all.’ The intrigue does not end there. Thornton narrates that, when the rebels were apprehended, it was the informer who found them hidden at the top of the house behind a trap-door. Having developed such an elaborate account, Thornton closes the circle: ‘soe they were taken & secured & we all 110
Anselment, ‘Deliverances of Alice Thornton’, 33–4. Thornton, I, 63. 112 For O’Connolly’s and MacMahon’s depositions, see TCD MS 809, fols. 13–15; also Gilbert, Contemporary History, i. 353–9. 113 Thornton, I, 64. 111
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poore sheepe destinated to destruction was thus wonderfully preserued & deliuered in Dublin.’114 Thus, she reins in her narrative and reaffirms her providential model, reminding her readers of the exemplary protestantism the episode should convey. The resumption of her framework shifts the narrative to personal experience. The Thorntons underwent a fortnight ‘in great feares, frights & hideous distractions & disturbances from ye Alarums & outcries giuen in Dublin’. As is the pattern of illness in her life-narratives, Thornton’s body registers her emotional distress: ‘I fell into a desperate flux. called ye Irish disseas beeing nigh vnto death.’115 The family’s safe flight to England and Alice’s subsequent recovery of health are attributed to divine will. The thanksgiving which follows firmly locates the entire story as a sign of grace. The innocent thousands of protestants killed are contrasted with the miraculously preserved Thorntons. The family arrived at Chester only to become embroiled in the English civil wars. Among other deliverances, Thornton’s recovery from smallpox provides another opportunity to use Ireland as a signifier of protestant exemplarity. Accompanying the Thorntons was an Irish orphan named Frank Kelly, who succumbed to the same illness as Alice and her brother. Kelly had been rescued from his benighted state as a 9-year-old. Her father, playing bowls in Dublin one day, noticed ‘a poore naked boy in Rags . . . very officious in gathering vp his bowles’. Wandesford offered the boy refuge on condition of conversion. ‘Askeing him seuerall questions’, presumably in English, ‘& hearing his witty answers, seeing him an Irish orphan, had compassion on him. and tould him if he would be willing to forsake all his old waies yt he was bred vp in his Papist freinds. he would bring him vp in ye true feare of God, And he would take caire of him & prouide for him yt he should neuer want all his daies.’ The meal-ticket proposed here recalls Cary’s school for Irish children. But where Cary objected to the missionary stipulation, Thornton’s approval is necessary to the model piety she aims to project. The effectiveness of the family’s religious instruction is reflected in the boy’s exemplary carriage throughout his illness. Kelly renounces his former religion; his sickness is modulated by ‘hearty thanks offten to God, who had taken him out of yt wicked way as he calld it, wherein he undoubtedly had bin damnd’.116 Thus, he is a paragon of the civilizing English protestant influence, exemplifying the missionary possibilities of engagement in Ireland. The saintly Kelly is a useful narrative tool: his origins provide a yardstick against which exemplary protestantism can be measured and proclaimed. He performs the ultimate, Christ-like sacrifice in return. Praying to God that Alice should be spared and he taken, he died fourteen days after her recovery.
114 115 116
Ibid. 64–5. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 74–5.
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Thornton’s adoption of spiritual autobiography as the genre in which she would write her life-stories in itself functions to project an image of piety that counters the slanders made against her. Her experiences in Ireland yield many instances of divine favour to support that image. But they also stimulate narrative impulses more suited to fiction. Regardless of the devotional sincerity that grounds her life-story, the genre’s conventions also serve to camouflage her worldly motive of self-justification. Far from these generic conventions imposing a specific and limiting female subjectivity, Thornton’s subjectivity imposes itself on her chosen genre. The genre becomes a narrative skeleton which can be fleshed out with, and complemented by, more worldly representations of the female self. As Anselment has argued, Thornton’s ‘attempts to add secular dimensions more suited to the novel strain the intent of the spiritual meditation, but her blend of fiction and history is not a failure to realize an authentic selfhood’.117 Spiritual autobiography here is simultaneously a reflection on a pious life, an intervention for public reputation, and a forum for imaginative storytelling and polemic. By contrast with all the writers hitherto discussed, Ann, Lady Fanshawe’s autobiography is more secular, reminiscent of res gestae. Peppered with thanks for preservations and deliverances, the hand of God is lighter in Fanshawe’s narrative— an assumed and acknowledged presence, rather than the impetus for writing. Fanshawe’s authorial motive is very different. Composed in 1676, ten years after her husband’s death, this manuscript life was written for a very specific audience: their son Richard, born less than a year before his father died.118 Ann married Richard Fanshawe, royalist diplomat and poet, at Oxford in 1644. Fanshawe tells the manifold stories of their lives together in support of the king, as royalist exiles, and finally as a diplomatic family in catholic Europe. Rather than the self-directed introspection of spiritual autobiography, this is a record of achievements, travels, encounters, and observations. Akin to two contemporary biographies of their husbands, one by the republican Lucy Hutchinson, the other by the prolific royalist author Margaret Cavendish, Fanshawe’s differs in its enfolding her husband’s life within her own first-person life-narrative.119 The couple themselves are the unifying force of the narrative which, as Seelig notes, skilfully blends literary paradigms (biblical, exemplary, providential, mercantile, romantic, and devotional).120
117
Anselment, ‘Deliverances of Alice Thornton’, 34. BL Add. MS 41,161; the manuscript was copied by a scribe, with Fanshawe’s autograph corrections. 119 Hutchinson’s manuscript remained unpublished until 1806, apparently due to its unrepentant republicanism; Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson with a Fragment of Autobiography, ed. N. H. Keeble (London: J. M. Dent, 1995). Margaret Cavendish’s separate autobiography was published as part of Natures Pictures (London, 1656); extracts are edited in Graham et al., Her Own Life, 89–99. The Life of the Thrice Noble…William Cavendishe (London, 1667) was published during the Restoration. 120 Seelig, Autobiography and Gender, 109. 118
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Fanshawe spent almost a year in Ireland, from April 1649 to February 1650. She experienced the crisis of the Cromwellian conquest at first hand and from the losers’ side. But her perspective as a well-travelled diplomat’s wife renders her Irish experiences only one instalment in a catalogue of travels. As a writer she has a winning way with an anecdote (as her account of the bean sı´ in Chapter 1 demonstrates), and her narrative is informed by an anthropological impulse. In this sense her autobiography may usefully be considered a travel narrative. It is episodic and attentive to places, people, and events. Cultural difference is of interest to her, but she observes it pragmatically and from a distance. Fanshawe arrived in Ireland in the last months of the confederate war, some few months after Charles I’s execution and prior to Cromwell’s arrival in August. Her husband had been sent in February to requisition monies from Prince Rupert’s fleet, stationed outside Kinsale. For Fanshawe, Ireland is not the stimulus for an identity opposed to, or aligned with, catholicism, the role it serves for other memoirists. Rather, it is a venue for establishing elite royalist connections. The uneasy peace between Ormond and the bishops agreed in January, the summer campaign in Leinster far away, Fanshawe’s happy initial impressions evoke the calm before the storm. Ensconced for six months at Red Abbey, a house belonging to Dean Michael Boyle (cousin of the earl of Cork) in Cork, ‘we liv’d so much to our satisfaction that we begun to think of making our abode there during the war, for the country was fertil and all provisions cheap, and the houses good’. Complacent in her royalist surroundings, she attended to the forging of social bonds: ‘my Lord of Ormond had a very good army, and the country seemingly quiet, and to compleat our content, all persons very civill to us, especially Dean Boyl, now Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Arch Bishop of Dublin, and his family, and the Lord Inchequin, whose daughter Elhena I christned in 1650.’121 Social prestige is the issue here, as signalled by her attention to Boyle’s Restoration promotions. A more politically minded writer might seek to delineate the character of his brother-in-law, Murrough O’Brien, sixth Baron Inchiquin. Popularly known as Murchadh na dTo´itea´n (Murrough of the Burnings) due to his violent reputation as a military commander, O’Brien was the son of Diarmaid, who made such a strong impression on Elizabeth Cary. He was raised a protestant as a ward of court following his father’s untimely death. Inchiquin changed sides twice during the wars, joining forces with his fellow vacillator Lord Broghill (later earl of Orrery) for parliament in 1644 and returning to the royalist fold in 1648. The likelier cause for this agreeable representation, however, is the remarkable equanimity characteristic of her writing, evident when she combines the death of her son with the new military order, equally signs of mutability: ‘But what earthly comfort is exempt from change, for here I heard of the death of my 121
Loftis, Memoirs, 123.
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second son, Henry; and within few weeks of the landing of Cromwell, who so hotly marched over Ireland that the fleet with Prince R[upert] was forced to set sale.’122 Thrust into the middle of the Cromwellian conquest, for Fanshawe it is political, rather than ethnic or even religious, allegiance that mattered in Ireland. She was living in Cork when the English garrison and residents rose in October to join with parliamentary forces, and casts herself as family heroine, making little of traditional ethnic distinctions. Pregnant and suffering a broken wrist, she acted to save her family and possessions in the absence of her husband (on business at Kinsale). She recounts the havoc that ensued: ‘at midnight, I heard the great guns goe off, and there upon I called my family to rise . . . Hearing lamentable scricks of men and women and children, I asked at a window the cause. They told me they were all Irish, stript and wounded, turned out of the town.’ Sympathetic to the native Irish and recognizing herself to be in the same boat, the royalist Fanshawe promptly sent a warning letter to her husband. She then gathered up their belongings and papers and set off to secure a pass permitting them out of the town: ‘about 3 a clock in the morning, by the light of a tapour and in that pain I was in, I went into the market place, with onely a man and a maid, and, pasing through an unruly tumult with their swords in their hands, searched for their chief commander.’ With her daughter, sister, and five servants she departed for Kinsale, and the happy reunion is attributed to providence: ‘[Richard’s] joys exceeded to see me and his darling daughter, and to hear the wounderfull escape we through the assistance of God had made.’ As a raconteur, Fanshawe regularly narrates a punchline with a sting in the tail. This episode is no exception. Like Thornton, she inserts direct speech to heighten the drama. In the aftermath, we are told, Cromwell ‘demanded where [Fanshawe’s] papers and his family were, at which they all stared one at an other, but made no reply. Their Generall sayd, “It was as much worth to have seised his papers as the town; for I did make account by them to have known what these parts of the country were worth”.’123 Thus, the narrator’s heroism is twofold: she saves the family and contributes to the war effort in foiling Cromwell. Moreover, her political acuity is suggested by her nod to Cromwell’s economic interest, already focused on the land settlements to come. There follows a peripatetic existence, in which the Fanshawes availed themselves of local hospitality and awaited a series of letters and directions from Charles II. Ever attentive to social connections and material goods, her account of impending defeat runs parallel with a diplomat’s attention to their reception. The couple tarried with the earl of Clancarthy for two nights at Macroom, where Fanshawe exchanged appropriate gifts with his wife, sister to the royalist leader Ormond. Then on to Limerick, where their civic welcome and entertainment by 122 123
Loftis, Memoirs, 123. Ibid. 123–4.
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the mayor, aldermen, and recorder are noted. In early November her husband met with the bishop of Londonderry and the third earl of Roscommon (then lord chancellor). The latter’s accidental death following the meeting necessitated a longer stay, rendered pleasant by a month at the home of Lord Inchiquin: ‘we had very kind entertainment and vast plenty of fish and fowle.’ The apparently normal maintenance of social congress serves as contrast to her representation of rapid military collapse: ‘Ormond’s army was quite dispersed and himself gone for Holland, and every person concerned in that intrest shifting for their lives, and Cromwell went through as bloodily as victoriously, many worthy persons being murdered in cold blood, and their familys quite ruined.’124 Like the transplanted catholics not long after them, the Fanshawes headed ever westwards. Stopping three nights at Lady Honora O’Brien’s house (where they encountered the bean sı´ ), they proceeded to Galway, where they sought to embark by ship for Spain. Their dilemma is represented as a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea; her husband, perceiving ‘Cromwell pursuing his conquests at our backs, resolved to fall into the hands of God rather than into the hands of men’. In this crisis identity is not a matter of nationality, but of wartime political affiliation. Her gift for townscape, dialogue, and anecdote comes to the fore in her account of Galway, devastated by plague the previous summer and the longestwithstanding royalist town. Fanshawe recounts their path to their lodgings, escorted by an Irish footman: ‘He led us all on the backside of the town under the walls over which the people during the plague, which was not yet quite stopped, had flung out all their dung, deart, and rags, and we walked up to the middle of our leggs in them.’ Their host was clearly possessed of civic pride: ‘[he] sayd, “You are wellcome to this desolate city, where you now see the streets grown over with grass, once the finest little city in the world”.’ Fanshawe’s immediate response—surprisingly, given her recent route—is acquiescent: ‘And indeed it was easy to think so, the buildings being uniformely built and a very fine markett place, and walkes arched and paved by the sea side for their merchants to walk on, and a most noble harbour.’ But first impressions can be misleading. On awakening the following morning, her husband, his legs covered in spots, feared the worst: ‘he called me, saying, “My heart, what great spots are these on my legs? Sure, this is the plague, but I am very well and feel nothing”.’125 On further investigation, their flea-infested blankets were to blame. Her love of a good yarn and tolerant sense of human foibles lead Fanshawe to indulge herself in a tale that betrays the deviousness of a countryman. The year before, her host told her, the marquis of Worcester had secured from local
124 Ibid. 125. Fanshawe is a year too soon here; Ormond sailed from Galway (with Inchiquin and Richard Bellings) in December 1650. 125 Ibid. 126.
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Fig. 6. 1651 map of Galway. TCD MS 1209/73. By permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.
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merchants a loan of £8,000 against the surety of a box of jewels. Fanshawe’s alternation of tenses lends the story a chatty immediacy: My Lord appointed the day of receiving the mony and delivering his jewells. Being met, he shews them all to these persons, then seals them up in a box and delivered them to one of these merchants, by consent of the rest, to be kept for one year . . . After my Lord had received this mony, he was entertained at all these persons’ houses and nobly feasted, sta[y]ing with them near a month.
The merchants sought repayment during the Fanshawes’ stay, but ‘my Lord Marquis [in France] made no answer, which did at last so exasperate these men that they broke open the seales, and opening the box found nothing but rags and stones for their 8000lb, at which they were highly inraged, and in this case I left them’. The final clause inserted here is characteristic of Fanshawe’s prose style; her anecdotes are recounted with a deft, light touch—she excuses herself, leaving judgement to the reader. Similarly, on their eventual departure in February 1649/50 their jocular host sends them on their way with a chilling thought: ‘I thank God you are all gone safe a boord from my house, not withstanding I have buryed 9 persons out of my house within these 6 months.’ Fanshawe’s response (recalling their departure from Lady O’Brien’s) is typically understated and resilient: ‘which saying much started us, but god’s name be praised, we were well and so continued.’126 Concluding her narrative of their Irish travels, Fanshawe moves towards a more anthropological view. Her impressions are located in historical context. Her stay coincided with dramatic, consequential events, and she knew it: ‘we left that brave kingdom fallen in 6 or 8 months into a most miserable sad condition, as it hath been many times in most kings’ reigns.’ Her magnanimity made her the ideal diplomat’s wife: ‘God knows why, for I presume not to say, but the natives seem to me a very loving people to each other and constantly false to all strangers, the Spaniards only excepted. The country exceeds in timber and seaports, and great plenty of fish, fowle, flesh, and by shipping wants no forein commoditys.’127 Conscious of the affinity between Ireland and Spain, she glosses over internal ethnic tensions. As a travel narrative, Fanshawe’s autobiography is attentive to local colour and eager to set forth the author’s observations. This is not specific to her Irish experience. Her eye for landscape and heed to local customs are evident as she describes the Isles of Scilly, Lisbon and the Portuguese, Madrid and the Spanish nation.128 She was exposed to many catholic countries and curious about their cultural and religious divergences from her own. She visited many nunneries (although none in Ireland). Catholic practices are represented tolerantly, although often with an aside signalling their interpretation as superstition. But 126 127 128
Loftis, Memoirs, 127. Ibid. Ibid. 118–19, 128–9, 147–50, 167–8, 171–3.
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this nonchalance is predicated on their not jeopardizing her own English protestant identity, as is most starkly evident in her response to an offer from the Spanish queen mother. Following her husband’s death in Spain in 1666, Fanshawe was offered a pension and residence at court if she and her children would convert to catholicism. No Frank Kelly, her gracious and polite refusal reflects her certainty as to her own identity.129 Royalism and nobility, for Fanshawe, are paramount, as is underlined by her accounts of meeting Irish aristocrats in exile and during the Restoration. She highlights her relationship with Elizabeth Butler, then marquess of Ormond, who enthusiastically made a connection when they met in London in 1648, the two women having been born in the same house.130 The Ormonds were regular attendants of the king and queen in exile in Paris, as were the Fanshawes, who travelled back and forth to the exiled court, and sailed triumphantly with the royal family from The Hague in 1660. The Ormond connection was carefully cultivated. On their departure for Ireland in 1662, Fanshawe draws attention to their special relationship, detailing the precious gifts received: ‘upon my taking leave of Her Grace she gave me a turquois and diamond bracelet and my husband a fosset diamond ring. I never parted from her upon a journy but she ever gave me some present.’ The especial grace and favour received (Fanshawe is consistently concerned with recording such instances) is further certified by her presence at their daughter’s society marriage: ‘When her daughter the Lady Mary Ca[ve] ndish was married, none was present but his grandmother and father, and my husband and self. They were marryed in my Lord Duke’s lodgings at Whitehall, and given by the King, who came privatly without any train.’131 Like Katherine Philips, whose epithalamium on the Irish celebration of this marriage is discussed in Chapter 5, Fanshawe revelled in the association. Their host in more difficult times, now earl of Inchiquin and a catholic convert, visited them in Lisbon in 1662, where her husband was ambassador, as commander of English troops sent to Portugal’s aid against Spain.132 Her encounters with these Irish aristocrats are indifferent to Irish identity; rather, they are founded on a shared royalism. On an elite social level, cross-cultural encounters are not perceived as cross-cultural at all. In representing social relations from this perspective, Fanshawe follows the lead of her aristocratic acquaintances, whose dual identity tended to privilege the English over the Irish (as evident from the discussion of Mary Rich).
129
Loftis, Memoirs, 186. Ibid. 121. 131 Ibid. 142. Both Rose and Seelig find the second half of the narrative less engaging, due to what Rose terms ‘the reiterative rendition of public honours’. However, as both acknowledge, the shift from wartime escapades to peacetime diplomacy is the cause; Rose, Gender and Heroism, 69; Seelig, Autobiography and Gender, 102–4. 132 Loftis, Memoirs, 145. 130
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Her traveller’s interest in places and people and her anecdotalist approach to reportage place Fanshawe in a discrepant position in relation to the dominant construction of Irish experience in the autobiographical texts discussed in this chapter. What is most strongly evident in most of these texts is the co-option of Irish experience to a contemporary religious semiotics. Whether republican or royalist, catholic or puritan, Irish experience serves as a benchmark against which exemplary piety can be gauged. The dominance of this imaginary mode is most conspicuous in the treatment of Irish children; Cary’s beggars and Thornton’s Frank Kelly are equally subject to missionary proselytization. They are deployed to demonstrate opposing confessional ideals. Whatever the ends of such constructions, Ireland signifies catholicism. The range of political viewpoints expressed complicates the picture of New English identity. Republican and royalist, these writers occupied a colonial position that was typically grounded in the binary opposition of protestant to catholic. Their encounters with the indigenous population were hostile but also culturally inquisitive and sometimes sympathetic. The diversity with which these relations are represented reveals a more nuanced attitude than the ethnic label suggests. The paradigm of conversion dominates these life-narratives. Constructions of Ireland are inextricably linked to genre. The teleology of conversion determines these autobiographers’ interpretations of their experiences. The lens through which the country is viewed is coloured by the writing subject’s religious destination. Irish experience, as a key component of the past life, is construed according to this linear narrative scheme, although the interpretation itself is individual. In construing what a life means (or what Ireland means) the autobiographical act is also a claim for reputation. Whether circulated in manuscript or print, a biography or autobiography proclaims to its reader: this is what my life means. These texts are deeply concerned with reputation and legacy. Whether Cary’s reclamation of her mother for a catholic audience, Cook’s espousal with her husband’s political standing, the elect status of the women in Rogers’s church, Rich’s recasting of self-determination as providential intervention, Thornton’s claims to pious character and divine favour, or Fanshawe’s explanation of her husband’s life and her own for her son—all proclaim female exemplarity as a means of building and bolstering their status in the world. To write in a socially irreproachable genre, such as the conversion narrative, was to arm oneself against criticisms of female authorship and to distract attention from the more worldly goals of writing. However explicitly devotional these autobiographies may seem, they are always also political.
Epilogue This book has aimed to expand our picture of women’s literary activities in early modern Ireland. Women from all the communities living on the island—native Irish, Old and New English, Ulster settlers—were composing and creating texts. The range of social backgrounds represented by the female authors discussed here encompasses impoverished refugees as well as educated noblewomen. While many of these writers had claims and connections to the elite (of whichever community), many women, whose confrontations with bureaucratic culture were often predicated on religious persecution, authored texts from disorientated and desperate situations of internal and external displacement. Between these two extremes lie the women who were neither noble nor indigent: the women of John Rogers’s church, for example; the women of the Poor Clare community; the poet Caitilı´n Dubh, educated and in search of patronage; or Katherine Philips, a merchant’s daughter. Women from all social classes entered into a writerly world, regularly for very pragmatic reasons. They engaged with the forms of textual production that were available to them, taking the opportunities they were given to represent themselves and their experiences. Noblewomen, like Eleanor Fitzgerald and Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille, adopted the petition-letter as a malleable space for self-fashioning that would ameliorate their situations in the eyes of the English state. Catholic refugees overcame the disadvantages of illiteracy and monoglotism in order to compose petitions for relief. Deponents of the 1641 rising embraced the opportunity to register claims for compensation, simultaneously witnessing to suffering and embarking on textual forms of self-representation. But most of this writing embraces practical goals concurrently with more ambitious aims. The Irish Poor Clares’ production of vernacular translations answered to basic textual needs, but, with their collaborator Mac Fhirbhisigh, they developed a translation that was suitably indigenous. By commissioning the translation they participated in the political and linguistic projects of the Counter Reformation. Mother Browne’s accomplished chronicle of her community embraces the literary traditions and heritage of the Clarissian order as well as the urge to write confederate history. The surviving texts of Irish women poets are steeped in traditional bardic conventions but also critically engaged with them. There are glimpses of courtly activity, of composing simply for fun, as in the case of Brighid Fitzgerald. Economic motivations also underpin these texts, fuelling
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the bid for patronage or financial help exemplified by Caitilı´n Dubh or Fionnghuala Nı´ Bhriain. English poets also wrote with an agenda. Anne Southwell’s writing industriously forges a vision of devotional poetry; its planter context foregrounds the urgency and social agenda of her efforts to establish a coterie of poets. Katherine Philips arrived in Ireland as an established poet of royalist friendship. Like Southwell, she embarked on constructing a literary coterie, but she also exploited her Irish experience as a stepping-stone to advancing her literary career. The biographical and autobiographical texts discussed here demonstrate the worldly concerns of women who consciously wrote their lifenarratives. Their devotional frameworks communicate female exemplarity and make claims for earthly reputation. What women wrote was often predicated on why they wrote and on which literary forms were available to them. In focusing attention on a range of genres—poetry, translation, history, petitions, depositions, biography, and autobiography—this study has sought to demonstrate the rhetorical resourcefulness and inventiveness of women’s engagements with writing. Women participated in the literary traditions dominant within their own communities and reshaped them for female composition. They appropriated forms and adapted them to suit their own acts of authorship and their own agendas. The variety of tropes, sometimes of weakness, that women turned to their own advantage demonstrates the exploitation of stereotypes in a knowing and strategic way. Their self-positioning is attuned to social norms and to the power of their transgression. The projection of female exemplarity, facilitated by the adoption of a conversion paradigm through which to interpret the life, often functions as a mechanism through which worldly claims can be camouflaged. Genres such as the petition-letter are vehicles for political agitation as well as supplication. In poetry by Irish women, established female models for lamentation are brought into conjunction with bardic conventions to forge a space for women’s composition; courtly love poetry is challenged by the demurring female voice. Coterie manuscript culture is enabling for the women who adopted its modes as they settled in Ireland. Southwell’s reclamation of male love poetry for devotional purposes is concurrent with her challenges to male disparagement of women poets. Katherine Philips, an acclaimed woman poet, enhanced her literary reputation through her writing in Dublin, to the extent that she inspired another woman to compose verse. Authorial agency takes many forms. This book has examined the range of writing competencies exercised by early modern women. It has interrogated the mechanics of textual production in order to show that authorship is often a collaborative process that might involve scribes, amanuenses, and interpreters. In a period when bureaucracy (and therefore the need for literacy skills) was taking hold, the state urged its supplicants to represent themselves in writing. Such representations need not have been made in the woman’s own hand; the creative act of composing a text is not contingent on writing it. In arguing for new
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concepts of authorship, this study hopes to have opened up our sense of what writing is in early modern Ireland. The book demonstrates an extensive range of cross-cultural, multilingual activity. Straightforward categorizations of identity are often useful to these female authors as, for example, for those testifying to deprivation or for those defining religious conversion. But the boundaries of identity were also porous. Deponents let slip their linguistic hybridity. The Poor Clare nuns, many of whom were from the Old English community, embraced vernacular translation not only as a recruitment tool, nor simply as an expression of their cross-cultural assimilation, but also as a political statement that reached across catholic Europe as a specifically Irish contribution to Counter Reformation strategy. Languageacquisition could be pragmatic, but it also shows an impetus to cross-cultural engagement—whether in Elizabeth Cary’s attempts to learn Irish or Spanish petitioners’ astute management of the language of supplication as both persuasive discourse and medium of communication. Women who engaged with the English or Spanish state in writing familiarized themselves with its terms and manoeuvred within them to construct complex identities. Language was a signal of literary tradition, but the genres in which women composed could accommodate seemingly incompatible identities. Caitilı´n Dubh reconciles the anglicized identity of the earl of Thomond to the conventional Gaelic heroism of bardic verse. Analogously, for Ann Fanshawe, royalism and nobility are the paramount indicators of community, not ethnic or confessional affiliations. Encompassing a plurality of languages and intersecting identities, the landscape of women’s writing in early modern Ireland is rich and varied. This book has not sought to chart all the territory; where possible, I have indicated caches of material which would reward further scholarly attention. The picture provided here has embraced single-authored and collaborative works. It has mapped the complexities of authorial agency, the range of motivations for women’s production of texts, and the various modes of representation grasped by women writers. Women composed in the same genres as men, devising inventive strategies for female composition. They used these genres to articulate their experiences and adapted them for their own purposes. Impelled and stimulated to writerly activity for myriad reasons, women in early modern Ireland produced a wealth of material that is as vigorous and diverse as the world in which they lived.
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W E B S IT E S
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Index Italic numbers denote references to illustrations. Acton 193 Adams, Bernard, bishop of Limerick 192, 193, 194, 195 Ahmoty, Arthur 167 Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma 67 Aire, see Poor Clares, English amanuenses 4, 102, 103, 106 and 1641 depositions 11 and petitioners 5, 11, 119, 127, 130 see also scribes ancestry, Gaelic 21, 29 Anglo-Norman, see Old English Anna´la Rı´oghachta E´ireann (Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland) 65 Anne of Denmark, Queen 184–5 Anselment, Raymond 246, 248, 250 answer-poem 8, 9, 15, 42–3 Aoibheall 17–20, 23 Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable Faction 88–9, 91 apparitions 162–3 Armorer, Sir Nicholas 211 Athlone, see Poor Clares, Irish 92 Augustine, Saint, Confessions 220 Augustinian nuns 79–80 autobiography 12–13, 219–57 Avery, Elizabeth, Scripture-Prophecies Opened 234, 235 baird (bards) 37 see also ollamh; fileadha bardic conventions 9, 20–32, 50 bardic culture 9, 15–16, 34–5, 37–8, 43, 47, 52–7 Ball, John 151 Bannerman, John 54 banshee, see bean sı´ Barash, Carol 204, 205 Barebones Parliament 231, 237 Barnewell, Margery 130 Barry, Cecilia 132–3 Baxter, Richard 232–3 Beal, Peter 211 bean chaointe 2, 9, 59, 61, 181 bean sı´ 2, 9, 17–20, 61 described by Ann Fanshawe 14–15 Bedell, William, bishop of Kilmore 67 beheading 153–4, 155
Bellingham, Margery 156 Bellingham, Henry 156 Bellings, Richard 88, 89, 91, 101, 223 Benedictine nuns 81, 99, 223 Bennett, Martyn 144, 145 Berkeley, George, first earl of Berkeley 238 Berkenhead, John (‘Cratander’) 196 Bethlehem convent 64, 65, 78, 83–5 attacked by protestant soldiers 81–2, 85–91 Bhallaigh, Mo´r inghean Bhriain 53 bilingualism 39 in depositions 142, 164–6 of Irish Poor Clares 68–9, 77 of Old English 2, 3 of Theobald (Tiobo´id na Long) Burke 125 Bingham, John 121 Bingham, Sir Richard 116, 118, 122–5 use of interpreters 127 biography 12–13, 219, 221, 222, 250 of Catherine Bernard Browne 94, 97 of Elizabeth Cary 222–8 by nuns 223 of Saint Clare 85–6 see also obituary Bishop, Anne 236 Bladen, William 171 Blood, Thomas 206 Boazio, Baptista 116, 117 Book of Common Order, see Carswell, John Book of Common Prayer 67 Book of Margery Kempe 220 The Book of the Dean of Lismore 46 Boraimhe, Brian, see Boru, Brian Borlase, Edmund, History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion 174 Boru, Brian 17–18, 20, 21 Bourchier, Captain George 110 Bowden, Caroline 106 Boyle, Ann (‘Valeria’) 203, 205 Boyle, Dean Michael 251 Boyle, Elizabeth (‘Celimena’) 202, 203, 204– 5, 212 Boyle, Elizabeth (ne´e Clifford), countess of Cork 202, 209, 212 Boyle, Frances, see Dillon Boyle, Katherine (ne´e Fenton) 239 Boyle, Katherine, see Jones, Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh
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Boyle, Richard, archbishop of Tuam 80–2 Boyle, Richard, first earl of Cork 82–3, 85, 182, 193, 226, 238–41 Boyle, Richard, second earl of Cork 202 Boyle, Robert 67, 70 n. 20 Boyle, Roger, first earl of Orrery 200, 212, 251 Altemera (The Generall) 198–9 friendship with Katherine Philips 197–8, 201, 210, 211, 213, 214 Boyle, Sarah, see Digby Brathwait, Richard, The Golden Fleece 186 Briver, Mrs Francis 178 n. 127 Broghill, Lord, see Boyle, Roger, first earl of Orrery Bromley, Margaret 159 Broomhall, Susan 131, 134 Browne, Catherine Bernard 94, 95, 97 Browne, Mother Mary Bonaventure 4, 68–9, 223 chronicle of Irish Poor Clares 10, 64, 78, 81–99 fluency in Spanish 130 obituaries of Irish Poor Clares 93–6 research methodology 94–5 works by 98–9 Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding 237 Burckhardt, Jacob 220 Burghley, see Cecil, William, first Baron Burghley Burke, Richard (Ristea´ird an Iarainn Bu´rc) 116, 118, 119 Burke, Theobald (Tiobo´id na Long Bu´rc) 118, 122, 125 Burke, Sı´le 53–4 Burke, Victoria 194 Burnell, Eleanora 199 Burnell, Henry, Landgartha 199 Burrill, Mary 235 Butler, Alice 155 Butler, Dame Ann 145, 153 Butler, Eleanor, see Fitzgerald, Eleanor, countess of Desmond, petition-letters of Butler, Elizabeth (ne´e Preston), duchess of Ormond 203, 207, 256 Butler, James, duke of Ormond 203, 205–7 Butler, Mary, see Cavendish Butler, Thomas, tenth earl of Ormond 106, 113 Butler, Walter, eleventh earl of Ormond 225 Bysse, Philip, archdeacon of Cloyne 173, 174, 176 Caball, Marc 6, 25 Cambrai, see Benedictine nuns Cambridge History of Irish Literature 7 Campbell, Lady Agnes 127 Campbell, Isobel, countess of Argyll 47
Canny, Nicholas 145, 151, 154, 159–60 caoineadh 8–9, 15–37 metrical principle 17 caointe, see caoineadh Caomha´nach, Eileano´r (Eleanor Kavanagh) 54 Carew, Sir George 25 Carew, Thomas 43 Carkill, Agnes 38 Carr, Ann 182 Carroll, Clare 6, 87, 135 Carswell, John Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh 48–9 Carty, Juana 136 Cary, Anne 223 Cary, Elizabeth (EC’s daughter) 223 Cary, Elizabeth, Viscountess Falkland (EC) 6, 184 biography of 222–8 conversion to catholicism 222, 224, 225, 227 Cary, Henry (EC’s son) 223 Cary, Henry, Viscount Falkland 193, 223, 225, 227–8 Cary, Lucy 4, 12 The Lady Faulkland: Her Life 222–8 Cary, Mary 223–4 Cary, Patrick 223–4, 225 Casway, Jerrold 138 catechisms in Irish 66, 67, 70 catholic(s): catechisms 66, 70 conversion narrative 222–8 exiles in Spain 4, 129, 130, 134–5 politicization of 66 and resistance to English crown 66, 78, 83 1641 attacks on protestants 141–79 see also Gaelic Irish; Old English Cavellus, Hugh 70 Cavendish, Lady Jane 43 Cavendish, Margaret, duchess of Newcastle 250 Poems and Fancies 196 Cavendish, Mary (ne´e Butler; ‘Policrite’) 203–4, 205–6, 211, 256 Cavendish, William 205 Ceapaich, Sı`leas na (Sileas MacDonald) 50 Cecil, Robert, earl of Salisbury 114, 115, 184 Cecil, William, first Baron Burghley 110, 111, 114, 121, 125 Eleanor Fitzgerald’s petition-letters to 112, 113 Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille’s petition-letters to 103, 118, 120, 122, 123–4 Ce´itinn, Seathru´n 6 Chalmers, Hero 213 Chambers, Elizabeth 234–5, 236 Charles I, King 89, 141, 198, 200, 210, 228, 251
Index Charles II, King 89, 198, 200, 205, 222, 252 Chedgzoy, Kate 6, 7, 177, 178, 247 Cheevers, Jane 156 Cheevers, Sr Martha Marianna 92 Chichester, Sir Arthur 44–5 Chichester, Sir John 153 chronicles: of Irish Poor Clares: see Poor Clares, Irish: chronicle of written by nuns 78–80 Clancy, Thomas Owen 38, 51 Clann Bhruaideadha, see Tadhg Mac Bruaideadha Clare, Saint as author 5, 64 follower of St Francis 66 repulsion of Saracen army 85–6 see also The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare; Rule of St Clare Clark, Margaret 146–8, 155, 158 Clarke, Aidan 143 Clarke, Danielle 230 Clarke, Elizabeth 185, 189 Clayton, Lady Ann 239 Clayton, Sir Randall 239 Clotworthy, Sir John 248 Coirceadail, Aithbhreac inghean 46 Colette, Saint 5, 64 see also Declarations and Ordinances; Rule of St Clare Comber, Thomas 244 Concannon, Helena (Mrs Thomas) 99 confederate histories 88–92 confederate oath 83 confederate wars 52, 92, 129, 141, 207, 251 Confederation of Kilkenny 89 ´ Maolchonaire, Flaithrı´ Conry, Florence, see O Constable, Joane (or Johanna) 148–50, 149, 152, 155–6, 165–6 convent(s): translation of 73 see also Augustinian nuns; Benedictine nuns; Dominican nuns; Poor Clares, English; Poor Clares, Irish conversion narratives 12–13, 222–8, 230, 231–7, 238–42, 257 Cook, Frances 12, 219, 222, 228–31, 232 Mris. Cookes Meditations 229–31 Cook, John 228–31 Corneille, Pierre, La Mort de Pompe´e 197–8, 200, 201, 212, 216 Corpas na Gaeilge 72, 73 Cotterell, Sir Charles (‘Poliarchus’) 207 enlisted as intermediary 206 Katherine Philips’s letters to 197, 201, 202, 206, 209, 211, 212 Council of Trent 63 Counter Reformation 3–4, 5, 10, 87 and resistance to English crown 78
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and Spanish petition-letters 103, 129 and vernacular instruction 66–7, 74 Courtenay, Captain Francis 176 Cowley, Abraham 196, 211, 212 Cox, Roger 193, 194, 195 Cromwell, Oliver 2, 200, 210 in Ireland 90 n. 91, 92, 251, 252–3 reply to bishops of Clonmacnoise 228 Cromwellian wars 64, 92, 129 Crooke, John 199, 211 Crooker, Elizabeth 159 Culme, Martha 154 Cunningham, Bernadette 6 Curtis, Frances 237 Davidson, Peter 7, 51 Day, Angel, The English Secretorie 104 Daybell, James 102, 104, 105, 106, 112 decapitation 153–4, 155 Declarations and Ordinances 65, 73, 75, 98, 100 Delany, Paul 220 Dempsey, Charles 167, 170–2 Dempsey, Henry 167, 170–2 Dempsey, Lewis, second Viscount Clanmalier 166, 168–72 depositions on 1641 rising 141–79 Armagh 146–8, 152, 155–6, 158, 159, 160–5 and bilingualism 164–6 Carlow 145, 153, 156 Cavan 154, 165 Clare 154–5, 160, 172 Dublin 248 n. 112 Down 159 female assailants 154–6 format of 144–5 Galway 145, 150–2, 153, 158–9 and gender 150–3 Kerry 145 Kilkenny 145, 153, 155 Kilmore (Co. Armagh) 147–8, 155–6, 160 King’s County 152–3, 160, 166–72 Leitrim 165 Limerick 173–4 Longford 158, 160 and narrative license 147–8 Portadown (Co. Armagh) 142, 148, 150, 160–3 and procedure 146–7 and protestant identity 158–9 and rape 154 Roscommon 145, 156–7, 159 Sligo 152, 157, 158, 159 and stripping 151–2 symbolism of violence 153–4 Tyrone 158 Waterford 150, 152, 166
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Index
depositions on 1641 rising (continued) and women’s literacy 145–6 see also rising of 1641; Fitzgerald, Lettice, Baroness Offaly; Dowdall, Lady Elizabeth Dering, Sir Edward (‘Silvander’) 196, 197, 202, 213 Desiderius 69, 71 Desmond, see Fitzgerald Desmond rebellion, see Munster rebellion Digby, Robert (LF’s son) 166 Digby, Sir Robert (LF’s husband) 166 Digby, Sarah (ne´e Boyle) 166 Dillon, Sr Cecily Francis 85, 93 Dillon, Frances (ne´e Boyle), countess of Roscommon 203, 209–10, 217 Dillon, Sir James (Abbess Cecily’s brother) 85, 88 Dillon, James, third earl of Roscommon 85, 253 Dillon, Sir Christopher 85 Dillon, Wentworth, fourth earl of Roscommon 202, 203 Dominican nuns 80–1, 83, 97 n. 118 Donne, John 42 Dowdall, Lady Elizabeth 4, 11, 166, 179 defence of Kilfinny Castle 167, 173–9, 190 deposition 173–4 literacy 145 memoir 142, 174–9 Dowdall, Sir John 173, 176 Drewrie, Bridgett 158 Drogheda, see Poor Clares, Irish Drury, Sir William 109, 116 duanaire (poem-book): Chloinne Aodha Buidhe (Clandeboye) 45 Mhe´ig Shamhradha´in (Magauran) 52 Mhe´ig Uidhir (Maguire) 52–3 Uı´ Bhriain (O’Brien) 16 Uı´ hEadhra (O’Hara) 53 Uı´ Lochlainn (O’Loughlin) 33 and women’s patronage 54, 55–7 Dubh, Caitilı´n 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 61 biography 32 caithre´im and caoineadh compositions 16–30 poem by 26 Dublin: Benedictine convent 81 John Rogers’s congregation 222, 232, 233 Poor Clare convent 64, 82–3 Restoration court 197–218 Dublin Castle 83, 85, 141, 248 Egerton, Lady Alice 43, 214 elegies, see caoineadh Elizabeth I, Queen 10, 42–3, 110, 126 Eleanor Fitzgerald’s petition-letters to 102, 107–8
Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille petition-letters to 103, 118–20, 122–5 and Irish language 67, 125 letter to Eleanor Fitzgerald 108 response to Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille 122–3 Emerson, Ruth 236 Emett, Dorothy 235 emigration, see refugees, Irish English literary culture in Dublin 11–12, 180–218 entretenimiento, see Spain: petitions for pensions Erasmus, De scribendis epistolis 104 exile, see refugees, Irish fairy woman, see bean sı´ Family of Love 184 family poem-books, see duanaire Fanshawe, Lady Ann (AF) 5 autobiography 222, 250–7 encounter with bean sı´ 2, 14–15, 17, 61 Fanshawe, Henry 251–2 Fanshawe, Richard (AF’s husband) 15, 222, 250, 251 Fanshawe, Richard (AF’s son) 250 Featley, Daniel 193, 195 Fenton, Alice 226 Fenton, Geoffrey 111 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing 7, 53–4 fileadh, see fileadha fileadha (poets) 15–16, 32, 41, 52 and anglicized chiefs 25, 30 attitudes to lower-class poets 37–8 and exile 57, 128 and patrons 25, 45, 52–61 skills of 40–1 see also ollamh Finch, Francis (‘Palaemon’) 196 Fitzgerald, Brighid 8, 9, 15, 47, 51, 61, 190 answer-poem 39–42 and authorship 44–6, 51 and English answer-poem 42–3 as poetic subject 58 Fitzgerald, Eleanor, countess of Desmond 10, 103 petition-letters 106–16, 139 Fitzgerald, Elizabeth, countess of Thomond 39 Fitzgerald, Ellen 115 Fitzgerald, Gerald, fifteenth earl of Desmond 103, 106–12 Fitzgerald, James 112, 136 Fitzgerald, Joan 115 Fitzgerald, Sir John 109–10, 111 Fitzgerald, Lettice, Baroness Offaly (LF) 11 and Geashill siege 167–72 siege-letters 142, 166–72, 179 Fitzgerald, Maurice 132 Fitzgerald, Thomas 44–5
Index FitzThomas, James, ‘Su´ga´n’ earl of Desmond 115, 136 Fitzwilliam, Sir William 110–11 Flanders 45, 56, 57, 58 Fogarty, Anne 7, 191 Forbes, Lady Jane 160, 167 Fowler, Constance Aston 43 Fox, John 153–4 Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments 154 Francis, Saint 66 Franciscan order 64, 66, 79, 92, 97 publications 67, 68, 74, 98 see also St Anthony’s College (Louvain) Freke, Elizabeth 222 n. 14 Gaelic Irish 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 21, 27, 39, 48, 55, 57, 77–8, 88, 89, 102, 106, 128, 156, 159, 161, 181, 246, 252 Galway 65, 71, 78, 89, 254 Ann Fanshawe’s account of 253, 255 and Augustinian nuns 80 and Dominican nuns 80 Poor Clares’ convent 64, 81, 86–7, 98 Gardiner, Sir Robert 127 Gearnon, Antoin 70–1 Geashill (King’s County) 166, 167–72 gender 9 and authorship 1, 3–5, 7–13, 50–2, 37–8, 43, 64–6, 77–80, 91–2, 100–1, 102–6, 128, 130–1, 138–9, 140, 144–6, 179, 180, 189–90, 212, 213–16, 220, 222, 230–1, 233–6, 242, 257 as focus for violence 85–6, 150–4 roles 10, 11, 116, 119, 175 stereotypes 102, 103, 105, 128, 134, 153, 189, 214–16, 154 as topic of persuasion 102, 103, 105, 113–14, 134, 139, 169 genealogy, see ancestry, Gaelic genre 7–13, 63, 173 see also answer-poem; autobiography; biography; caoineadh; catechisms; chronicles; conversion narratives; depositions on 1641 rising; hagiography; obituary; o`ran luaidh; petition-letters; poetry; Rule of St Clare Geraldina, Cicilia 133–4 Geraldino, Catalina 136–7 Geraldino, Elena 132 Geraldino, Juana 137 Gerrard, Sir William 108 ghosts 162–3 Gillespie, Raymond 6 Graham, Elspeth 220 Gravelines, see Poor Clares, English Gray, Catharine 216 Grey, Arthur, Baron Grey of Wilton 111–12
289
Gribben, Crawford 234 Hacket, Nicholas 225 hagiography 85–6, 91, 94, 95, 96 Hammond, Mary 145, 150–2, 153, 158–9, 178, 179 Hammond, William 150, 152 Hampson, Jane 147, 155–6 Harley, Lady Brilliana 167, 170 Harris, Sir Edward 182 Harvey, Mary 196, 213 Hawkesworth, Anna 152, 157, 158, 159 Henrietta Maria, Queen 201 heresy/heretics 87, 103, 135, 158, 159, 234 Herrick, Robert 42 Hewson, Anne 235 Hiberno-English 3 Hiberno-Norman, see Old English Hindmarsh, Bruce 221, 237 The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare 10, 85–6, 91, 97, 98 Hobby, Elaine 220–1 Hogan, James 125 Holliwell, Elizabeth 145, 156–7, 159 Hopditch, Beatrice 154–5, 160, 172 Hore, Philip 127 Hutchinson, Lucy 250 identity 1–2, see also catholic(s); Gaelic Irish; New English; Old English; Old Protestant; protestant(s) interpreters 4 and Brighid Fitzgerald 44–6 English–Irish 165 female 127 and Irish exiles 130 Irish–English 44, 126–7 used by Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille 121, 127 Iomarbha´gh na bhFileadh (‘Contention of the Bards’) 16, 33 Irish College (Louvain), see St Anthony’s College (Louvain) Irish language 3 catechisms 66 changes in style 69–77 classical 69–71 loan-words 72–5, 76–7 significance of 3 see also interpreters; poetry: in Irish; translation James VI and I, King 27, 39, 166, 189 James IV, King 38, 48 Jeffreys, John (‘Philaster’) 196, 201, 202, 207 Johnson, Ann 193 Johnson, Robert 193 Johnston, Martin 167
290
Index
Jones, Bishop Henry 141 A Remonstrance of Divers Remarkeable Passages concerning the Church and Kindgome of Ireland 142, 157 Jones, Katherine (ne´e Boyle), Viscountess Ranelagh 8, 238, 242 Jones, Roger, Viscount Ranelagh 85 Keating, Geoffrey 6 keen, see caoineadh keening woman, see bean chaointe Kelly, Frank 249, 256, 257 Kerrigan, John 6, 13, 206–7 Kilfinny (Co. Limerick) 11, 167, 173–8, 190 Kilmore (Co. Armagh), atrocities at 147, 148, 155–6, 160 King, Margery 152–3 Lachlainn, Mairearad nighean 50 Latin 7, 63, 162, 226 lingua franca in Ireland 3, 124, 125, 126, 127 women’s poetry 199 Latz, Dorothy 99 Lavater, Ludwig 162 Lawes, Henry 43, 196, 213–14 Leabhar Inghine ´I Dhomhnaill (‘The Book of O’Donnell’s Daughter) 56–61 Leabhar Mhe´ig Shamhradha´in (‘The Book of Magauran’) 52 Leabhar Mo´r na nGenealach (‘The Great Book of Genealogies’) 65 Leabhuir na Seintiomna 67, 70 n. 20 Leerssen, Joep 30 Lisbon 255, 256 and Irish Dominican nuns 80–1, 83 literacy, see women: and literacy Loftus, Adam, archbishop of Dublin 113 Loftus, Adam, Viscount Ely 82, 83, 85 Loftus, Lady Sarah (ne´e Bathoe) 82 Louvain 4, 56, 59 siege 79–80 see also St Anthony’s College (Louvain) Mac Aingil, Aodh (alias Mac Cathmhaoil) 70 Mac an Bhaird, Eoghan Ruadh 46 n. 83, 57, 58, 59, 61 ´ g 58–9, 128, 129 Mac an Bhaird, Fearghal O Mac Bruaideadha, Tadhg 16, 31–2, 53–4 Clann Bhruaideadha 30 MacCarthy Reagh, Florence (Finian Mac Ca´rthaigh Riabhach) 135, 136 Mac Craith, Mı´chea´l 7, 41, 42, 43, 46 Mac Cruitı´n, Aindrias 33 Mac Cruitı´n, Aodh Buı´ 16 n. 5 MacCurtain, Margaret, Women in Early Modern Ireland 7
Mac Domhnaill, Somhairle (Sorley MacDonnell) 57 Macdonnell, Randal, second earl of Antrim 84 Mac Fhirbhisigh, Dubhaltach 5, 65, 68–77, 100, 101 Leabhar Mo´r na nGenealach 65 pedagogical approach to translation 68, 75–7, 100 Mack, Peter 103–4, 139 MacLeod, Iain Breac 48 ´ g 248 MacMahon, Hugh O Mac Mathghamhna, Ma´ire (ne´e Nı´ Bhriain; Mary MacMahon) 17 Caitilı´n Dubh’s caoineadh 20, 22–3 Mac Mathghamhna, Toirdhealbhach Ruadh (Turlough Roe MacMahon) 17, 32 Caitilı´n Dubh’s caoineadh 19–20, 21–3 MacMhuirich, Cathal 48 MacWilliam, Mayo (Mac Uilliam ´Iochtar) 53, 118, 121, 126 Ma´g Craith, Eoghan Gruama 44 Magennis, Catherine, countess of Tyrone 128–9 Ma´g Shamhradha´in, Nualaidh 52 Ma´g Shamhradha´in, Toma´s 52 Ma´g Uidhir, Be´ Bhionn 52–3 Ma´g Uidhir, Cu´ Chonnacht 25, 52 ´ g 39–41, 47, Ma´g Uidhir, Cu´ Chonnacht O 190 Ma´g Uidhir, Ma´ire, see Nı´ Raghallaigh, Ma´ire Ma´g Uidhir, Mairghre´ag 52–3 Maguire, Conor, Lord Enniskillen 141, 248 Mahum, Marina 131 Malby, Sir Nicholas 109, 111 maps: Connacht 117 Galway 254 Ireland 140 Marlowe, Christopher 42, 88, 186, 187 Marriott, Richard 199 Marshall, Peter 162 Mascuch, Michael 220 McAreavey, Naomi 155 McCabe, Richard 6 mere Irish, see Gaelic Irish Milton, John, Eikonoklastes 157 mna´ chaointe, see bean chaointe Montagu, Mary (ne´e Aubrey; ‘Rosania’) 196, 207 Mooney, Canice 81 Moore, Elizabeth 158 Moors 86, 87 ´ scar Recio 136 Morales, O Munster plantation 106, 113, 181, 182, 218 Munster rebellions: 1569–73 106
Index 1579–83 103, 106, 108, 111–12, 118 1598 136 Narns, Jenet 159 native Irish, see Gaelic Irish New English 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 48, 69, 166, 180, 182, 187, 193, 218, 238, 246, 257 New Testament 97–8 see also Tiomna Nvadh Nı´ Bhriain, Fionnghuala 3, 4, 8, 9, 61 caoineadh 32–6 lament for 36–7 Nı´ Bhriain, Ma´ire, see MacMathghamhna, Ma´ire Nic Dhiarmada, Sadhbh 53 Nı´ Cheallaigh, Gra´inne 54 Nı´ Dhochartaigh, Ro´is 128 Nı´ Dhomhnaill, Nualaidh 9, 56–61, 128 Nı´ Dhonnchadha, Ma´irı´n 7, 46, 59 Nı´ hEadhra, Caitilı´n (ne´e Nı´ Raghallaigh) 53, 54 Nı´ hEadhra, Ma´ire 53, 54 Nı´ Mha´ille, Gra´inne (Granuaile) 4, 5 as chieftain 116, 117, 118, 120, 124 petition-letters 10–11, 103, 116–24, 139 use of interpreters 121, 124–5, 127 Nı´ Mhaolchonaire, Sadhbh 38 Nı´ Mheic Caile´in, Iseabail 47 Nı´ Raghallaigh, Ma´ire 55–6 Nic Eoin, Ma´irı´n 35–6 Nic Gearailt, Brighid, see Fitzgerald, Brighid Nic Gilleain, Catrı`ona 50 Norman-Irish, see Old English Nugent, Christopher, 125 Nugent, Jane, countess of Westmeath 145 nuns: chronicle writing 78–80 and vernacular languages 4, 5, 9–10, 63–4, 66, 68–9, 77–8, 100 writing by 9, 63–101, 224 see also Augustinian nuns; Benedictine nuns; Dominican nuns; Poor Clares, English; Poor Clares, Irish Ny Donocho, Elena 135–6 ´ Baoill, Colm 48 O obituary 93–6 ´ Briain, Conchubhar (Conor O’Brien), third O earl of Thomond 25, 32–3, 35–6, 126 ´ Briain, Diarmaid (Dermot O’Brien), fifth O Baron Inchiquin 224–5, 251 Caitilı´n Dubh’s caoineadh on 17–19, 23–4 ´ Briain, Domhnall 33 O ´ Briain, Donnchadh (Donough O’Brien), O fourth earl of Thomond 16, 17, 24, 25, 35, 126 Caitilı´n Dubh’s caoineadh on 24–30 related to Brighid Fitzgerald 39
291
Tadhg Mac Bruaideadha’s elegy on 31–2 O’Brien, Finola, see Nı´ Bhriain, Fionnghuala O’Brien, Lady Honora 14, 15, 33, 253 ´ Briain, Murchadh na dTo´itea´n (Murrough O O’Brien), sixth Baron Inchiquin 251, 256 ´ O Briain, Tadhg 25 ´ Buachalla, Breanda´n 7 O ´ Cearnaigh, Seaa´n 67 O ´ Cle´irigh, Mı´chea´l (Michael O’Clery) 65, O 100 ´ Coisdealbha, Toma´s (Thomas Costello) 52 O ´ Conchubhar Sligigh, Domhnall (Sir Donald O O’Connor Sligo) 53, 126 ´ Conchubhar Sligigh, Donnchadh (Sir O Donough O’Connor Sligo) 114, 115, 126 O’Connolly, Owen 248 O’Connor, Maeve 118 ´ Da´laigh, Cearbhall (Carroll O’Daly) 54 O O’Daly, Fr Dominic 80 ´ Dochartaigh, Aodh (Hugh O’Doherty) 57 O ´ Domhnaill, Aodh (Hugh O’Donnell), O second earl of Tyrconnell 56 ´ Domhnaill, Aodh Ruadh (Red Hugh O O’Donnell) 127 ´ Domhnaill, Niall Garbh (Niall Garv O O’Donnell) 56, 58 ´ Domhnaill, Rudhraighe (Rury O’Donnell), O first earl of Tyrconnell 39, 43–5, 56, 57, 58, 115 ´ O Domhnaill, Uilliam, see Book of Common Prayer; Tiomna Nvadh O’Donnell, Mary Stuart 45 n. 79 O’Donnell, Nuala, see Nı´ Dhomhnaill, Nualaidh O’Dowd, Mary 154 Women in Early Modern Ireland 7 ´ hEadhra, Cormac (Cormac O’Hara) 25, 53 O ´ O hEodhasa, Eochaidh 38 n. 51, 40–1, 44, 47, 70 n. 19 ´ hEodhasa, Giolla Brighde (Bonabhentura) O 70 n. 19 Offaly, Baroness, see Fitzgerald, Lettice, Baroness Offaly ´ Flathartaigh, Eoghan (Owen O’Flaherty) O 118, 121 ´ Flathartaigh, Murchadh na Maor O (Murrough O’Flaherty) 118 Ogilby, John 199, 201 ´ Ha´inle, Cathal G. 42, 45–6 O O’Heyne, John 80 ´ hUiginn, Domhnall O ´ g 54 O ´ hUiginn, Tadhg Dall 53 O ´ hUiginn, Tadhg O ´ g 54 O Old English 1, 2, 3, 21, 39, 45, 48, 49, 69, 88, 89, 106, 128, 166, 199, 246
292
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Old Testament 67, 70 n. 20 Old Protestant 12, 197, 200, 242 ollamh (ollav) 37, 38, 40, 54, 70 see also fileadha ´ Lochlainn, Uaithne Mo´r (Owney More O O’Loughlin) caoineadh on 33–6 O’Malley, Grace, see Nı´ Mha´ille, Gra´inne (Granuaile) ´ Maolchonaire, Flaithrı´ 70, 128, 129 O see also Desiderius ´ Murchu´, Liam 34 O ´ Ne´ill, Eoghan Ruadh (Owen Roe O’Neill) O 56, 160, 161–2, 164 ´ Ne´ill, Feardorcha (Matthew O’Neill), Baron O Dungannon 125 ´ Ne´ill, Sea´n (Shane O’Neill) 125–6 O ´ Ne´ill, Toirdhealbhach Luineach (Turlough O O’Neill) 127 O’Neill, Sir Phelim 141, 157, 160, 161, 164 ´ Raghailligh, Aodh 65, 73, 75–7 O o`ran luaidh 49–50 O’Riegan, Cathalina 135 Ormond, see Butler Orrery, earl of, see Boyle, Roger, first earl of Orrery ´ Ruairc, Aodh (Hugh O’Rourke) 51–2 O Osbaldeston, Thomasin 150 Osborne, Dorothy 196 O’Scea, Ciaran 105, 130, 135, 138 ´ Siaghail, Se´amus 65, 73, 75–7 O O’Sullivan Beare, Philip, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium 135 Owen, Ann (‘Lucasia’) 196, 197, 202, 204, 207 Palmer, Patricia 3, 15, 127, 153–4 Parker, Thomas, The copy of a letter 234 Parliament, Barebones 231, 237 Parrthas an Anma 70–1 Parsons, Sir William 171, 248 patronage: and Anne Southwell 189–90 and Elizabeth Cary 223 of Irish poets 22, 25, 32, 45 and Katherine Philips 207, 209–10 of petitioners 104, 114, 122 by women 9, 15, 52–61 Pelham, Sir William 111 pensions, Spanish, see Spain: petitions for pensions petition-letters 4, 10–11, 102–39 conventions 102–4, 129–30 and principle of reciprocity 104, 107, 114, 116, 118, 124, 136 and self-representation 105, 115–16, 118–19, 122, 130–2, 134, 138–9 and women’s literacy 105–6, 130–1
Pett, Peter 201, 211 Petto, Samuel, Roses from Sharon 232 Philip III, King 11, 103, 131, 135 Philip IV, King 93 Philipps, Judith 152 Philips, James 196 Philips, Katherine (‘Orinda’) 3, 4, 12, 180 as land claimant 197 letters to Cotterell 197, 201, 202, 206, 209, 211, 212 and manuscript culture 195–6, 211 and patronage 207, 209–10 poem to Ormond 208 Poems (1664) 199 Poems (1667) 212 Poems (1669) 217 poetry 195–218 Pompey 197–9, 200–1, 207, 209, 212, 213, 216–17, 218 and Restoration Dublin court 197–218 see also Poems, by several persons Phillis, Margaret 146–8 ‘Philo-Philippa’ 12, 212–13, 214–17 Pickering, Thomas 166, 167, 169, 170, 171 Pierce, Elizabeth 151 plantation, see Munster plantation; Ulster plantation Pocock, J. G. A. 5 poem-books, see duanaire Poems, by several persons 211 poetry: in English 180–218 evidence for Irish women’s authorship 37–9 in Irish 4, 8–9, 14–62 prosody of Gaelic 16, 40, 50 by Scottish women 46–51 see also caoineadh; fileadha; ollamh; patronage Poor Clares, English: Aire convent 79, 97 Gravelines convent 5, 63–4, 79, 86, 100 writing produced by 5, 64–5, 79, 86, 97 Poor Clares, Irish 4, 5, 9–10 bilingualism 68–9, 77 chronicle of 64, 78, 81–99 exile 64, 93–7 and Franciscan order 66 flee from Bethlehem 81–2, 85–91 foundation of order 63–5 and piety 84–5 and poverty 84 writing produced by 13, 63–101 see also nuns; Rule of St Clare Portadown: reports of apparitions 142, 150, 161–3 Portadown Bridge massacre 148, 160 Price, Elizabeth 142, 160–5, 178, 179
Index protestant(s): attack on Bethlehem convent 81–2, 85–91 attacked in 1641 rebellion 141–79 Bible translations 67 conversion narratives 230, 231–7, 232–42 identity 142, 158–9 independent churches 219, 232 John Rogers’s Dublin congregation 231–7 see also New English Quarles, Francis 193 Emblemes 192 A Feast for Wormes 191–2 Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man 192 Ralegh, Sir Walter 42–3, 107, 182, 194 Rankin, Deana 200, 225–6 Between Spenser and Swift 6 rape 154 Redman, Magdalen 160 Reformation 48–9, 63, 67, 90, 162 refugees, Irish 4, 11, 93, 103, 128–39 Restoration: Dublin 197–218 land settlements 89, 92, 197, 206 Rich, Charles, earl of Warwick 240–1, 242 Rich, Mary, countess of Warwick 4, 12, 256 autobiography 222, 237–42 Rich, Rebecca 233, 235 Ridgeway, Cicely, countess of Londonderry 186–91, 193 Ridgeway, Sir Thomas, first earl of Londonderry 186 rising of 1641 3, 11, 85, 89, 247–9 see also depositions on 1641 rising Rodes, Elizabeth, see Wentworth, Elizabeth Rogers, John 12, 222, 231–7 Ohel or Beth-shemesh 231–7, 240 Rokeby, Ralph 126 Rowleright, Margaret 158–9 Ruaidh, Ma`iri nighean Alasdair (Mary McLeod) 50 Rule of St Clare 4, 5, 9–10, 63–78 Irish convents’ adherence to 97 translated into Irish 68–77, 100 Rupert, Prince, duke of Cumberland 251, 252 Ryan, Leonor 138 St Anthony’s College (Louvain) 3–4, 56, 65, 66, 70 writing produced 66, 67, 69–71, 72, 74, 75, 87, 101 St Leger, Warham 111 Salmantino, Joanne a` s. Antonio 98–9 Sca´tha´n Shacramuinte na hAithridhe 70 Schleiner, Louise 43 school, Elizabeth Cary’s 226–7
293
Scotland: Gaelic culture 9, 47, 49–51 and women’s poetry 15, 38–9, 46–51 scribes 102, 144–5, 147 see also amanuenses Seelig, Sharon Cadman 221, 250 Shanmuckinish (Seanmhuicinis) Castle 33, 36 Shakespeare, William 186, 187 Sheeley, Jane 158–9 Sheeley, John 158–9 Shifflett, Andrew 200 Shirley, James 199 Sibthorpe, Captain Henry 182, 183, 193, 195 Sidney, Sir Henry 116, 126, 127 Sidney, Sir Philip 116, 127 sieges 167–79 Siegfried, Brandie 123 Simms, Hilary 144, 154 Simon, Margaret 152–3 smallpox 218, 242, 249 Smith, Ann 145, 146–8, 155, 158 Smith, Magdalen 158–9 Smock Alley Theatre 198, 217 Southwell, Lady Anne (AS) 3, 4, 12, 173, 212, 215, 216, 247 compared with Katherine Philips 210–11 and planter class 181–2 poetry of 3, 181–95, 218 Southwell, Anne (AS’s grand-daughter) 173 Southwell, Robert 173 Southwell, Sir Thomas 173, 182 Sowernam, Ester 215 Spain: Ann Fanshawe’s experiences in 255–6 as destination for Irish Poor Clares 93–6 and Irish refugees 4, 103 military service 129, 131–4 petitions for pensions 11, 129–39 Spanish language 4, 11, 69, 78, 80, 96, 103, 130, 226 Spenser, Edmund 6, 106–7, 218 A View of the State of Ireland 3 Spirituall Experiences of Sundry Beleevers 232 Statutes of Iona 48 Stevenson, Jane 7, 51 Stevenson, Richard 176 Strafford, Martha 45, 52 stripping of clothes by insurgents 150–2, 160, 166 strophic metre 50 surrender and regrant policy 24–5, 30 Swetnam, Joseph, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women 215 Synner, John 184 tanistry 24, 33, 118 Taylor, Elizabeth Anne 99
294
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Taylor, Jeremy 196 Temple, Sir John, The Irish Rebellion 142–3, 148, 156, 160 Tenger, Zeynep 210 theatres: Smock Alley 198, 217 Werburgh Street 199, 201 Thomas, Patrick 210 Thorne, Alison 105, 134 Thornton, Alice (AT) 2, 4, 12 autobiography 222, 237, 242–50, 252, 257 Thornton, Alice (Naly) 244 Thornton, William 244 Tiomna Nvadh 67, 98, 226 Trafford, Elizabeth 158 translation: of Bible 67, 70 n. 20, 98, 226 Book of Common Order 48–9 and Brighid Fitzgerald 44–6 Declarations and Ordinances 65, 100 and depositions on 1641 rising 164–6 Desiderius 69 and Gra´inne Nı´ Mha´ille 121, 124–5, 127 The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare 84 n. 72, 86, 97 of Irish Poor Clares’ chronicle 10, 78, 81, 86, 97–8 by nuns 9, 99, 100 of petitions 11, 127 Pompey 197, 201, 212–13, 216–17 of Rule of St Clare 4, 5, 10, 64–8, 71–8, 100–1 in sixteenth-century Ireland 126–7 and refugees in Spain 103, 130 Trevor, Colonel Marcus, Viscount Dungannon 197, 206 Trolander, Paul 210 Truelove, Alison 104, 105 Turrant, Mary 237 Ulster: earls’ flight 39, 56, 128, 138 rising: see rising of 1641 Scots 2 Ulster plantation 2, 39, 49, 141, 148 Ussher, James, archbishop of Armagh 191 Vaughan, Henry 196 Vaughan, Richard, earl of Carbery 214
vernacular languages 63, 78 see also translation; nuns: and vernacular languages Villiers, Katherine, duchess of Buckingham 84–5 vocational education 226–7 Wales 195, 196, 214, 217, 218 Walker, Anthony 238, 242 Waller, Edmund 212–13, 216 Walsham, Alexandra 89–90 Walsingham, Sir Francis 108, 111, 113 Wandesford, Sir Christopher (AT’s father) 242–3, 245, 246–7, 249 Wandesford, Christopher (AT’s brother) 247 Wandesford, George 247 waulking-song, see o`ran luaidh Webster, Tom 232 Wentworth, Anne 245 Wentworth, Arbella 245 Wentworth, Lady Elizabeth 84–5 Wentworth, Thomas, first earl of Strafford 82, 85, 203 n. 72, 242, 245–6 cultural programme 199, 201 Werburgh Street Theatre 199, 201 Wolfe, Heather 99, 223, 224 women: keening: see bean chaointe and autobiography 12–13, 219–57 and biography 12–13, 93–6, 219, 221, 222–8 and chronicles 78–99 and depositions on 1641 rising 141–79 and literacy 68, 105–6, 130–1, 145 participation in bardic culture 53–61 and patronage 9, 15, 52–61, 207, 209–10 and petitions in English 106–27 and petitions in Spanish 128–38 and petition-letters 102–6, 138–9 and poetry in English 180–218 and poetry in Irish 8, 14–62 and poetry in Scotland 15, 38–9, 46–51 refugees in Spain 11, 103, 129–39 see also gender; translation Woodford, Charlotte 79, 94 Wray, Ramona 240–1 Wright, Susanna 145 Wroth, Mary, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania 196
