When it comes to the Age of Exploration and Conquest in the 16th century, we often think of the Americas, but there was also a conquest of another sort happening in Ireland.
Book Recommendation: Elizabeth I and Ireland
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Transcript: The Tudors in Ireland
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is Episode 117, and it’s an introduction. I want to stress that it’s only an introduction to the English colonization of Ireland, the conquest of Ireland. There is so much more that needs to be researched and written on this subject. So much more research I want to do. But I also wanted to get you starting to think about this subject because it’s not really one that you see written about a lot.
It was a major part of English foreign policy, especially during the later Elizabethan period, especially as war with Spain became much more of a threat. The religious differences really came to the fore. So Ireland was really important. We don’t really tend to think about it quite so much and about what was happening in Ireland during this period. So we’re going to talk about that a little bit today.
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England’s Involvement with Irish Affairs
Alright, so let’s talk about Ireland. Early on in Henry VII’s reign, monarchs in Tudor history were worried that the Yorkists who had been beaten would go to Ireland to stage a resurgence. This is much the way Henry himself had been welcomed in Brittany and planned his invasion from there. The Tudors thought that if they were going to successfully rule in England, they had to subdue Ireland.
During the 16th century, they worked to extend the administrative central power of the English crown. They also wanted to expand their trading networks. They saw an opportunity in Ireland to try to broaden their commercial horizons.
But this wasn’t the first time that England went into Ireland and got involved in the Irish affairs. The English had been involved in Irish affairs on and off since the time of the Norman Conquest. In fact, the first conquest of Ireland from the Anglo-Normans was under Henry II in the 12th century. At this point, the Irish were seen as barbarians. They needed to be civilized, which is, of course, a page out of the playbook of any invading country.
Whenever a country goes off to colonize and take land from people who are already there, they often justify that in their head by saying, “Oh, they were uncivilized,” or “They needed to have religion brought to them,” or any number of things. Then you cut to a Monty Python movie where they say, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” “They brought peace!” Sorry, if you don’t know Monty Python, you really should. You need to evaluate your life choices. That diverged.
So the Anglo-Norman influence was fairly strong, especially around Dublin until the Black Plague. After the mid-1300’s, 1348 there on, many left, leaving this power vacuum, where the regional clans and the regional kings came back. This power structure is similar to what England had seen in the 1800’s and the 1900’s before England became centralized, Alfred the Great and all that. I am not an expert in this, I would refer you to the History of England Podcast, also in Agora member or the British History Podcast if you want to actually dig deeper into that.
But during this period before England became united, there were regional kings and there was the Kingdom of Northumbria, and the Kingdom of Mercia, and Wessex and East Anglia. That was a kingdom. So there were all these kinds of regional kingdoms. That’s what we have in Ireland at this time then too. These regional kingdoms where people would pay a tribute usually in cattle to their overlords. The overlords would wind up paying to the regional kings. Then everybody would be protected back on down, right. So that’s what was going on in Ireland at this time.
The area around Dublin though, did have some English influence. It was similar it was called the English Pale, much like they called the Pale in Calais that ostensibly had some English influence. But it was sort of a frontier area, and it was really unstable. So despite the fact that it had been bustling with Anglo-Normans until the 14th century, the English had just backed off until the end of the 15th century.
Henry, Lord of Ireland
What happened then was two different pretenders to the English throne under Henry VII sailed from Ireland supported by Irish lords. That brought about this concerted attempt in the 16th century to subdue the Lords of Ireland, and unite them under the control of the centralized rule of the Tudors.
It’s interesting because often, when you look at what actually came out of the Tudor period, one of the main things that often comes up is the centralization of the state, and the paperwork, and the bureaucracy, and all that kind of stuff. This is an example where we see that being exported to Ireland.
At the edge of the pale there was this frontier, beyond which was the land ruled by the Gaelic warlords and their followers. Henry VIII first tried to subdue Ireland by making himself Lord of Ireland. He also tried to make the church Protestant. He sent soldiers. He also put friends in high places, and try to rule through the leaders that were already there.
So Henry wanted to bring about an administration and central government. He introduced a policy called Surrender and Regret. The Irish would agree to give up their land to Henry, then in return, Henry would give it back provided that they followed English laws and recognized him as Lord of Ireland, that they would speak English and follow English customs.
Many Irish took him up on the offer. But there were a lot that would just kind of agree then, as time went on, they would just be like, “What? What did I agree to? I don’t know. Henry? Who’s Henry? I don’t know Henry.”
Fitzgerald clan of Kildare
It was really expensive for the Tudors to try to be ruling this land. Instead, they invested their time and their money into supporting the warlords who were friendly towards the English. The main one was the Fitzgerald clan of Kildare.
This is a policy that many countries still try to do today leading to mixed results, where you go in and instead of just taking over you try to get in, there’s a whole debate about whether or not that’s smart, but then instead of just taking over you get a group that’s sympathetic to you that has power and have them kind of rule through you. That’s all really great until it turns on you.
That’s what happened with Henry. The Lord of Kildare was the Lord Deputy of Ireland, despite the fact that he was a political enemy of the Tudors. But it was cheaper for the Tudors to use him to rule Ireland for as long as possible. That was the policy until 1534 when it all went bad. That’s when the Fitzgeralds got fed up with being the King’s deputies and the rebellion of Silken Thomas happened.
Silken Thomas believed an untrue report that his father had been executed in London. So he rebelled. He took a Kildare stronghold, and he killed even those ones who surrendered. He just rebelled like crazy. This was a turning point as the English struggled to reassert their authority in Dublin and in Ireland.
From there on out, the English colonization of Ireland – also called the Conquest at times, depending on whose side you’re on (Conquest/ Colonization)- changed methods back and forth, going from sending armies, which usually ended in disaster for England, to trying to work with local families, which also had mixed results.
As Henry moved England away from the Catholic Church and imposed the Reformation on even reluctant Englishmen by seizing church lands and punishing nobles, he didn’t actually have that infrastructure in Ireland. So Ireland remained Catholic.
This is something that is still when you think about how do these decisions still affect us today, if you look at what happens in Ireland and the struggles, again, I’m not an Irish expert, but a lot of that comes from the religious tensions and that directly is related to the way the Reformation spread in Europe during the 16th century.
During Queen Mary I’s Reign
After Henry, Queen Mary, despite still being Catholic, she still wanted to roll Ireland. It was Mary who actually introduced the first English Plantations in Ireland. The idea was she wanted to plant English and English supporting families in Ireland where over time they would grow and increase the support for England.
The idea was send a family here and a family there, and pretty soon they’ll have lots of children and there’ll be lots of people who support England and they’ll kind of weed out the ones who don’t. That’s a nice idea. She wanted to plant two counties but very few people went as they were all too afraid.
Elizabeth came to the throne then determined to subdue Ireland once and for all. That’s where we start to really see a lot of the action and a lot of the people who were very famous Elizabethan adventures got their start in Ireland.
Sir Philip Sidney
In 1581 John Derrick wrote The Image of Ireland, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney’s father, Henry, who had led several victorious armies over the Irish. The book also contained woodcuttings showing the victories, and denigrating traditional Irish culture.
Again, nothing particularly new in that. The woodcuts showed clans fighting against each other in ways that were seen as backwards and tribal. In many ways, Ireland was still ruled through these relationships between the lord and his subjects, like we talked about.
There were formal relationships like this, but no administrative arm, which the English saw as a lack of progress. There were key families in each province who controlled the system, and the largest were the Fitzgeralds in Kildare and the Butlers of Ormond. It’s been said that between these two, with their allies on each side, there was almost a two-party government system in Ireland between these two great families, but again, nothing central.
When Henry Sidney was Lord Deputy, he had to leave Dublin to subdue the Irish many times. He would always try diplomacy first, but then he would crush the rebellions militarily, setting up a pattern of rebellion followed by submission.
Humphrey Gilbert
Another famous deputy was Humphrey Gilbert. Humphrey Gilbert was the Queen’s deputy in Ireland during the 1570’s. He believed in complete submission. If any Irish rebelled against him, he would decapitate an entire village, even women and children.
Supposedly he lined the path to his tent with severed heads. He used to make the relatives of said victims walk along the path to provoke great terror in them, which I can imagine, I actually I can’t imagine. So yeah, imagine if you were the son of a rebel and you had to walk down this path where your relatives’ heads was. Pretty gory stuff.
Thomas Butler
But it wasn’t just the English, even the Irish lords would kill fellow Irish to prove their loyalty to the Queen. Thomas Butler was the 10th Earl of Ormond. He supported the queen. He actually built his house in the English style. He added it on to an existing castle and looking very Tudor.
Thomas Butler had been brought up at the English court. He was cousins with Elizabeth and he took great pride in that. He butchered thousands of fellow Irish in an effort to show her how loyal he was. You actually still see the names that he sent in lists to the Queen. They’re there in the archives. So you can see these lists. “I killed this group, I killed that group. This is how loyal I am to you.”
This then is the period where Elizabeth was a Protestant and branded as a heretic. The great fear was that the Catholic monarch from the continent was going to support the Irish rebels. Ireland was seen as the staging ground through which you could reach England easily. So if there was room for a foreign country to come in and take it, England had to keep that from happening.
Desmond Rebellions
In 1580 James Fitzgerald Fitzmorris of the House of Desmond landed in southwest Ireland accompanied by a combined Italian and Spanish force of 600 men, and a papal nuncio. They asked all Catholic Irish men to join them in a crusade for Christian/Catholic rule against the heresy of the English.
Edmund Spenser the poet, and Walter Raleigh were among the troops sent to intercept them. The forces were trapped and besieged, faced with an English artillery. They put down their arms and they surrendered and they were all killed.
This was the pattern – the Spanish would support the rebels because they supported the religious part, and saw it as a religious crusade against Protestantism. They saw Ireland as the backdoor to England. The Desmond Rebellion lasted for several years, and is remembered in English literature because of the writings of Edmund Spenser.
Spenser was in favor of a scorched earth policy against Ireland, writing about the Irish in ways similar to the way the English would write about the Native Americans – they were barbarians, incapable of being governed. He thought their language should be eradicated, believing that if children learned Irish before English their hearts would be Irish, and then there would be no saving them. He writes that during the Desmond rebellion:
“‘Out of everye corner of the woode and glenns they came creepinge forth upon theire handes, for theire legges could not beare them; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spoke like ghostes, crying out of theire graves; they did eate of the carrions, happye wheare they could find them, yea, and one another soone after, in soe much as the verye carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theire graves; and if they found a plott of water-cresses or shamrockes, theyr they flocked as to a feast… in a shorte space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentyfull countrye suddenly lefte voyde of man or beast: yett sure in all that warr, there perished not manye by the sworde, but all by the extreamytie of famine … they themselves had wrought'”
The Desmond lands were confiscated by the English, and the land was opened up for plantations for the English. Raleigh and other adventurers bought large estates. This is actually when the first potatoes to be grown in Ireland were planted. They were brought over from the Americas. Raleigh then sold his estates, and concentrated more on America. But again, you have these plantations springing up.
Hugh O’Neill
The Province of Ulster was the last part of Ireland to be captured by the English. It was dominated by the O’Neill clan. Their chief during Elizabeth’s time was Hugh O’Neill. He had been educated in England as a nobleman. The Queen thought so well of him that he was allowed to keep a standing army of 600 men.
He had fought with the English adventurers like Raleigh, and so he was trained in the English methods of war. But then as it came to threaten his own territory, he turned. He had no choice but to rebel. So in 1593/‘94, he began training his army for war. He had been clever and rotated that 600 standing army in and out through the years, so that when he decided to rebel, he actually had a much larger army available to him right away. At one stage, he had close to 30,000 men under arms in Ulster, many of which were Scots who’d come over as well.
The front line was along the Black Water River, where English built forts on the south side to threaten the ONeill’s in Ulster. But the forts had to be constantly refortified, and became a drain on the resources of England. On August 14, 1588, 4000 men went to relieve one of the forts that had been under attack. The column was ambushed, and nearly half the men were killed with the rest retreating and abandoning their weapons. The Battle of Yellow Ford was the most decisive victory over the English in Ireland.
O’Neill’s power grew, he kept moving and gaining more land. He grew to have almost all of Ireland, but he couldn’t get Dublin. Whoever held Dublin held Ireland, but he couldn’t attack because it was a walled city and he didn’t have the siege equipment. The Port of Dublin was always going to be a line of communication back to England.
So he tried another tactic, he decided to become blatantly pious, and that was a way to appeal to the Pope. He linked Catholocism with Irish patriotism. The English saw this as a cynical ploy for foreign aid, and when the Earl of Essex met O’Neill during a peace negotiation, he made a comment about how O’Neill likely cared for his horse more than religion.
Pope Clement VIII named him the Captain-General of the Catholic Army in Ireland. O’Neill hoped that the Spanish would come to his aid, and appealed to Phillip II to send aid to him in Northern Ireland. But in 1601 the Spanish came and they got lost and they wound up coming to Southern Ireland in County Cork, at a coastal town called Kinsale. The English response was to lay seige to the town. The Spanish were trying to fortify it, getting it ready. Lord Mountjoy of the English, they came and laid siege.
It was December at this point, O’Neill’s moving south through the winter, trying to come and meet Philip. They’re moving their armies south. At one point then Mountjoy, the Lord Deputy found that he was surrounded because he had the Irish coming from the one side and then the Spanish on the other. He was in the middle, sandwiched.
On Christmas Eve 1601, the Irish moved towards the English lines. They were hoping to take them by surprise. But the English were watching and there were apparently a lot of tactical errors and issues. It was a hot mess and became a military fiasco.
One of the main takeaways that people talk about is that the English saw what was going on. They used the cavalry to break up the Irish and they had stirrups, and that meant that they could charge faster and the stirrups would take the weight if they got knocked.
So they weren’t going to fall off the back of their horses, whereas the Irish had shorter horses, they didn’t have stirrups, and a lot of people say this whole battle was lost by the Irish because of the lack of stirrups. So that’s interesting.
Mountjoy used the cavalry, broke up the Irish, stirrups or not. Shortly after, the Spanish then surrendered as well. The English conquest over Ireland over the Gaelic tribes at this point was pretty much complete. Mountjoy laid waste O’Neill’s land and Ulster. They shattered the stone upon which generations of O’Neills had been crowned.
Hugh O’Neill surrendered. he was allowed to keep some of his land. Though it was obvious his power had been destroyed. Eventually, these Irish nobles left Ulster for Europe. Hugh O’Neill died nine years later, an exile in Rome. Apparently still talking about his dream of going back and capturing his land from the English.
So that is going to be it for this week on this very brief introduction to the English in Ireland. But I think it’s interesting because during this period, we talk a lot about the English going to the Americas and colonizing the Americas. A very similar thing was happening in Ireland. For a lot of these adventurers that was kind of their proving ground or their practice before they went to America. I honestly think it’s kind of interesting.
The book recommendation is Elizabeth I and Ireland by Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle. There are also movies and films on YouTube. I’ve lifted listed some of them in the show notes on Englandcast.com, so you can go there and grab all the different notes and links and everything like that.
Let me know if you enjoyed this episode. If you want to know more about Ireland. You can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801-6TEYSKO, through Twitter @Teysko. You can go the Facebook group Facebook.com/englandcast.
Or you can look for the Tudor History group that I run on Facebook as well. It actually came out of the Tudor Summit. You can go to facebook.com/groups/TheTudoorGroup. You can check out everything that we’re doing there. There’s a lot of discussion a lot of stuff happening so come and join the community and hang out with me online.
Thank you so much for listening and I will be back again in another couple of weeks. Talk to you then!
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.