Consolidating Conquest

Ireland 1603-1727

Padraig Lenihan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317868668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This groundbreaking and controversial new study tells the story of two nations in Ireland; an Irish Catholic nation and a Protestant nation, emerging from a blood-stained century. This survey confronts the violence and enmity inherent in the consolidation of conquest.

Lenihan contends that the overriding grand narrative of this period was one of conflict and dispossession as the native elite was progressively displaced by a new colonial ruling class. This struggle was not confined to war but also had cultural, religious, economic and social reverberations. At times the darkness was relieved throughout the period by episodes of peaceful cooperation. Consolidating Conquest places events in Ireland in the context of three Stuart kingdoms, religious rivalry within and between those kingdoms, and the shifting balance of power as monarchy and commonwealth, Whitehall and Westminster, fought for ultimate power.

CHAPTER 1
Reform to conquest 1534-1603

The English lordship

The core of the late medieval English lordship in Ireland was the fertile plain or 'maghery' of the English Pale which comprised the modern counties Dublin, Louth, south-east Meath and north-east Kildare. To this may be added outliers such as Bargy and Forth in the extreme south-east and the maritime towns.¹ Beyond the Pale, literally and figuratively, the Fitzgerald lordships of Kildare and Desmond and the Butler lordship of Ormond formed an extensive and discontinuous militarised buffer insulating the lordship from Gaelic territories spanning most of Ireland and western Scotland. The Kildare lordship was almost coterminous with the present-day county of the same name, Ormond encompassed counties Kilkenny and south Tipperary, while the largest of all, the Desmond lordship, sprawled across most of Limerick, adjacent parts of Cork and north Kerry, with detached blocks in Cork, Tipperary and east Waterford. This borderland was comparable (at least to Tudor monarchs) to the far north of England and to the principality and marcher lordships of Wales. All of these were areas in which laws and administrative structures and institutions (shires, assizes, Justices of the Peace and parliaments) devised for the English lowlands worked uncertainly and intermittently.² Local conditions demanded devolution of power to locally powerful feudal notables, but the perennial fear of over-mighty subjects suggested intensified centralisation, especially after Henry VIII's break with Rome forced him into a more interventionist strategy.

Late in 1534 the king abandoned the practice of delegating his authority to a prominent local magnate and dismissed Gerald óg Fitzgerald, 9th earl of Kildare, as deputy. It was not the first time he had done so. The revolt of Lord Offaly, better known as Silken Thomas, was an attempt to show his father’s indispensability. Royal guns battered the walls of Maynooth Castle, which fell after just ten days. Here, as elsewhere in western Europe, the royal monopoly of siege guns tamed feudal nobles.³

In autumn 1535 Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, queried ‘whether it shall be expedient to begin a conquest or a reformation’ in Ireland.⁴ The balkanised Gaelic and Gaelicised world was ‘feeble to be conquered’, urged a Palesman, Patrick Fingas, baron of the exchequer.⁵ At any one time there were about ninety chieftains who obeyed only ‘such persons as may subdue him with the sword’.⁶ Individually most of their armies were quite small and presented no danger to the Pale so long as they did not coalesce. The MacMurrough Kavanaghs of south Leinster, to take an example of a smaller lordship, could put no more than 200 horsemen into the field, alongside 300 kern and a smaller ‘battle’ of gallowglass. The Gaelic horseman, riding without stirrups on an animal too small to be a charger, could not ‘abide the shock’ of a cavalry charge.⁷ The ‘naked’ [unarmoured] kern, who comprised nearly three quarters of any Gaelic army, could harass a column marching through broken ground and defile, burn, forage and take prey but were useless in a stand-up fight in open country. The ‘gallowglass’ [Gallóglaigh or ‘foreign soldier’] in metal helm and mail coat were the nearest the Gael came to professional soldiers. Originally recruited from the west of Scotland, the Mac Sheehys, Mac Sweeneys, Mac Donnells and the rest were ‘grim of countenance, tall of stature, big of limb’ and held in awe by English commentators. Yet their fearsome six-foot battleaxe was obsolescent, as was their way of fighting.

When the Tudor monarch’s thoughts had turned earlier towards conquest in 1506 and 1521, he was advised it would take an army of 6,000 men and a large siege train to conquer these lordships.⁸ This had seemed altogether too heavy a drain on English finances then. It would hardly be less now. The earl’s destruction removed the network of Gaelic clientage and marriage alliances that had secured the marches of the Pale from encroachment. The alignment of O’Neill (Kildare’s traditional ally) and O’Donnell, O’Connor Sligo, O’Brien of Thomond and O’Connor Faly in the Geraldine League amounted to a Gaelic confederation across all four provinces.⁹ Indeed, an unprecedented invasion of the Pale itself by O’Neill and O’Donnell in 1539 underlined the lordship’s military weakness. For security the crown would, at the very least, have to maintain an outside governor and a strong permanent garrison, but lands confiscated from Kildare and from the church yielded less than these escalating costs. The crown remained generally unwilling to accept a large drain on English finances as the cost of greater centralisation and conquest. This explains the general neglect of Ireland by the Tudors, interspersed with bursts of activity and sudden reversals of policy.¹⁰ The fall of the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, prompted the first of many such reversals.

Tudor reform

With hindsight the beginnings of a divergence of interests can be detected between longer established settlers and English-born newcomers. The former, who are often called Anglo-Irish for want of a better term, stood to benefit most from a peaceful assimilation of Gaelic Ireland, whereas coercion would require more troops and English officials and so lessen the government’s dependence on local support. New English officials, meanwhile, tended to be hungrier for Gaelic land and were predisposed to conquest.¹¹ After Cromwell’s fall there followed what local reform lobbyists had long wanted: a programme of gradualist political reform. Anthony St Leger, who served as governor on and off from 1540 to 1556, had as his local right-hand man Thomas Cusack, the Commons’ speaker in the 1541–43 parliament, who rose to be Lord Chancellor in 1550.

Surrender and regrant

St Leger and Cusack’s ‘surrender and regrant’ arrangements saw Gaelic chieftains agree to renounce their traditional Gaelic title in return for an English feudal title, to recognise the king as their liege lord and to apply for a crown grant of their lands and peerage. They further agreed to reject papal jurisdiction, accept and assist the machinery of royal government throughout their lordship, perform military service and pay rent as specified, adopt English customs and language and generally structure their territory in an English fashion. Forced by the defection of many of his uirríthe or under lords, Conn bacach O’Neill surrendered in 1541 and the following year he was created earl of Tyrone in a ceremony at Greenwich carefully staged to create the greatest stir.¹² The next such visit saw O’Brien and Burke created earls of Thomond and Clanricard respectively.

The second chief manifestation of the new policy was the parliament which met at Dublin in 1541 and continued in eight sessions until 1543 and saw the unprecedented participation of Gaelic lords. To affirm the king’s new relationship with the Gaelic lords, parliament persuaded a reluctant Henry to take on the title of king, not lord, of Ireland. The Gaelic Irishman was now a royal subject, with accompanying legal status, and not an ‘enemy’ or alien. The English lordship in Ireland was now a separate constitutional entity, with a parliament, legal system and administrative structure of its own.¹³ Unlike the councils established to govern Wales and the north of England, the governor in Dublin superintended a complete council and executive in miniature and enjoyed civil and military powers little short of those of the King in England.

Though suspended towards the end of 1543, surrender and regrant worked to the extent that it brought two prominent families, the O’Briens and Clanricard Burkes, permanently onto the side of crown government. There was reason to expect gradualist reform and assimilation would work over the next thirty years. A comparable local strategy was being successfully applied in Wales and the north of England: eliminate or emasculate the top magnates, transfer their wealth to crown dependants, set up regional councils with special powers, replace local institutions with English common law, shire the territories into recognisable territorial units and impose religious uniformity.

Gaelic and Gaelicised lords were more powerful and autonomous than magnates in the other Tudor borderlands and it became apparent in the governorships (1556–62) of Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, that surrender and regrant would not lead to peaceful and gradual reform.¹⁴ For one thing, he ‘drastically’ changed surrender and regrant to offer the O’More and O’Connor clansmen of Laois and Offaly just one third of their territory following surrender, with the rest to be assigned to frontier garrisons and to...