“This Is That I May Remember What Passings That Happened In

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2010, vol. 5

“This is that I may remember what passings that happened in Waterford”: Inscribing the 1641 Rising in the Letters of the Wife of the Mayor of Waterford Naomi McAreavey

This is that I may remember what passings that happened in Waterford since Christmas Eve till the day after Saint Patrick’s Day. Captain Evelings I protest to God all these I write with my own hands because I was grieved at the passings and ill carriages of those that went in rebellion against the Mayor. That if it be God Almighty’s will I live, I will make good before their faces every point that I write to be true, and I hope in God I shall have right against those that are my enemies.1

omposed in the immediate aftermath of the Irish rising, this is an Cexcerpt from the remarkable letters of the wife of the Mayor of Waterford, which are preserved among the Carte Papers in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Through a detailed examination of the letters in manuscript, my essay will disentangle their representation of conflict in Waterford, and in doing so indicate the complexly gendered and nationalized nature of one Irishwoman’s writing of war in the mid- seventeenth century.2 The author’s forename is not recorded and her identity remains obscure, but it is known that she was wife of Francis Briver, who was Mayor of Waterford when the rising began in Ulster in the penultimate weekend of October 1641.3 A pivotal event in the development of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (better, but less accurately, known as the “English” civil wars), the rising originated as a conspiracy of

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discontented native Irish Catholic landowners who planned to take the principal fortified positions in the country in order to negotiate a resolu- tion to grievances from a position of strength; they were joined in revolt by the Old English the following month.4 The Old English were descended from the Anglo-Norman invaders of the twelfth century, and shared with their co-religionists a common resentment of the special rights and privileges enjoyed by the most recent arrivals in Ireland, the Protestant New English, who, by the mid-seventeenth century, dominated the Irish Parliament at Dublin Castle.5 What had begun as an attempted coup d’état by the Catholic elite quickly descended into widespread violence against Protestant settlers, which, along with the more formal military campaign, had reached Waterford by December 1641.6 Toward the end of the month, Richard Butler, third Viscount Mountgarret, a prominent Old English Catholic, assumed command of Confederate forces in Kilkenny, and within a week had taken most of the strategic points in the counties of Kilkenny, Tipperary, and Waterford.7 Covering the period from “Christmas Eve till the day after Saint Patrick’s Day,” Mistress Briver’s letters chart what had happened in Waterford from the first stirrings of revolt in the city until shortly after its capture by the Confederate Catholics.8 The letters are addressed to one Captain Evelings who was stationed at the crown garrison at Duncannon Fort at the mouth of Waterford Harbour, which was under the command of Laurence Esmonde, Baron Esmonde of Limerick. Written in March 1642 not long after Waterford’s capture, the letters attempt to explain to the men leading the war against the Confederate Catholics why the Mayor was unable to retain possession of the city.9 Briver asserts an ostensibly loyalist political position through her deliberate adoption of the language of “rebellion” and, defining what happened locally as a “rebellion against the Mayor,” she insistently emphasizes the Mayor’s loyalty and the rebelliousness of Waterford’s citizens. It is perhaps no surprise that Waterford was to declare for the Confederate Catholics: an Old English stronghold, the city was nicknamed “Parva Roma” (“Little Rome”) because of its stringent Catholicism.10 But an Old English Catholic background was no guarantee of affiliation with the Confederate cause, as Briver’s letters vividly testify. She and her husband were Old English, and perhaps also Catholic, yet throughout her letters she

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unrelentingly protests the couple’s vigorous opposition to the Confederates and their loyalty to the New English.11 The letters are framed as testimony. Composing her story that “I may remember,” Briver suggests that she does so for herself but also for posterity. And protesting that she “write[s] with my own hands,” whether or not this is literally true, she invokes the authority of the eyewitness. Throughout, she stresses the reliability of her “true” account. Yet apparent throughout the letters is a defensive tone that suggests she is addressing a skeptical, even hostile, audience. Asserting that “I will make good before their faces every point that I write to be true,” Briver acknowledges that her version of what happened in Waterford has been contested by her “enemies.” These “enemies” (some of whom she specifically addresses in her letters to Evelings) are elsewhere identified as settlers who were driven by the Confederates from Waterford city to safety in Duncannon Fort. Having evidently taken to the garrison a rather different story of her husband’s conduct as Mayor, Briver confronts these New English and challenges their suggestion that her husband was complicit with the Confederates in the persecution of the settlers. Briver’s account of the rising is thus ani- mated and disturbed by her readers’ doubts about her husband’s loyalty, which points to the complexity of Irish representations of war at this time. Locating Briver’s writing amongst the ethnic, religious, political, and ideological fault-lines inherent to Waterford during the rising, my essay unpacks the underlying tensions in her description of revolt. In doing so, I contend that Briver’s account of the events that precipitated Waterford’s fall to the Confederates is shaped by her desire to defend her husband’s actions as Mayor and justify his failure to protect the city. The first part of the essay introduces the manuscripts and situates them in the context of Waterford and the 1641 rising, thereby proposing that Briver writes her apology for the Mayor in response to some contemporary pamphlets that question his loyalty. In the second part of the essay, I argue that her status as Mayor’s wife gives Briver the authority, as well as a legitimate reason, to write about the proceedings of the highly masculine sphere of municipal government, but that she also specifically commemorates her own interventions on her husband’s behalf. While her ostensible purpose is to defend and support her husband, she also emphasizes her own loyal

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agency independent of her husband. Underlying doubts about the couple’s loyalty are the focus of the third part of the essay, which explores the ways in which Briver’s description of the uprising is compromised by alternative versions embedded within her account, whereby she and her husband are cast as complicit with the Confederate Catholics. Suggesting that the tensions that underpin her story are largely attributable to the couple’s Old Englishness and possible Catholicism, I demonstrate how Briver attempts to resolve the contradictions inherent in their Old English identity through her representation of a leading Confederate sympathizer. Casting him as the wild “Irishman” of the English colonial imagination, Briver defines her family as “English” by contrast. The instability of this construction is explored in the final part of my essay, which shows how Briver attempts to intervene in her family’s uncertain future through her letters, revising her account in light of her family’s present circumstances. After several attempts on her husband’s life, the need for Briver to emphasize the loyalty of the couple as individuals is obvious, for if her husband were to be killed, she would be responsible for her own survival, and that of her children. By repeatedly asserting the efforts she and her husband made on behalf of the New English refugees in Waterford, she may be soliciting the same protection from her New English “friends” as the couple gave them. Perhaps, then, Briver’s letters were written to Captain Evelings at the royalist garrison in the hope that he would now offer safety to her family, just as they apparently did to the New English. This is my essay’s contention. And arguing that the letters represent Briver’s attempts to preserve her family from their “enemies” in Confederate-controlled Waterford, I hope to show the richness of her writing on war in early modern Ireland. By focusing on the wartime writings of a regional Irishwoman, my essay follows recent moves to relocate the “English” wars of the mid- seventeenth century in a “Three Kingdoms” context.12 I also respond to critics such as Kate Chedgzoy who urge scholars of early modern women’s Anglophone writing to consider writers from all parts of the Atlantic archipelago.13 In illuminating Briver’s writing, my aim is to put women writers throughout “Britain” and Ireland during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in conversation with each other. Furthermore, by showcasing

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this hitherto unknown Irishwoman’s lively narrative, I hope to stimulate further search in the archives for other examples of women’s writing in early modern Ireland, which will undoubtedly enrich the landscape of early modern women’s writing as a whole.

Two versions of Briver’s letters are preserved among the Carte Papers in the Bodleian Library, which duplicate content fairly accurately: one is ostensibly a series of letters (Briver A), while the second is a continuous narrative (Briver B).14 The existence of two versions suggests that Briver (or her readers) intended her letters to be circulated and/or preserved. The only modern edition of the letters is published in John Gilbert’s History of the Irish Confederation (1882).15 It is loosely based on Briver B, but the edition overlooks the complexities of the manuscripts by failing to acknowledge that two versions are extant. Briver A is a series of four separate letters: the first, second and fourth letters are written in a neat italic script; the third is penned in an informal secretary hand, but with an endorsement / superscription in the original italic script. Briver B is written entirely in the same secretary hand as the third letter in Briver A; the letters are arranged according to the sequence delineated in Briver A, and form a continuous narrative. With the evidence indicating that Briver A is copied from Briver B, it seems that each letter was dictated by Briver and recorded by a scribe in the secretary hand (Briver B) before a copy was made (or endorsed) in the italic script, perhaps by the author herself (Briver A). Besides some minor revisions evident in Briver A, the ten-line addition to the fourth letter indicates that the Briver A “letters” is a second, revised draft, and that the Briver B “narrative” is the “original.” Briver’s appropriation of an epistolary frame for her writing thus appears to be strategic. As a sanc- tioned form of women’s writing, letter-writing may be the means by which she justifies her decision to take the pen, especially since she dares to write about the exclusively masculine sphere of municipal government.16 As a series, the four letters form a roughly chronological narrative of the events of the rising.17 Briver documents the earliest attacks on the settlers by the natives of Waterford, and showcases the often frustrated efforts

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of the Mayor and his Corporation to safeguard the lives and goods of the English settlers. At the same time, she records the approach of Viscount Mountgarret’s army to the gates of the city, depicting the divisions that emerged within the Waterford Corporation between those who supported the Mayor in remaining loyal to the government, and those who were sympathetic to the objectives of the Confederate Catholics.18 Claiming that the Recorder (to whom Briver refers only by his title but who is elsewhere identified as John Leonard) and his kinsman, Alexander Leonard, led the Mayor’s enemies within the city, promoting the rising and urging Waterford to join the Confederates, she illustrates the Mayor’s attempts to maintain both his authority and the loyalty of the city.19 She explains how the conflict reached crisis point when, encouraged by the Recorder and like-minded members the Waterford Corporation, the army attempted to enter the city, before revealing how the Mayor was eventually betrayed by the citizens who helped the Confederates take control of Waterford. She thus shows how, despite the Mayor’s best efforts to preserve the city, Waterford was at last lost to the Confederate Catholics. The composition of Briver’s letters in March 1642 coincided with the publication of Captain Thomas Aston’s Newes from the West of Ireland (London, 1642). Here, Aston accuses the Mayor and his Corporation of having “most insolently and rebelliously taken up armes, and in defiance of his Majesty and the Crown of England, advanced themselves against his Majesties Fort of Duncannon, and against my Lord Esmond, his Majesties true and loyall subject, Governour thereof.”20 The Captain evidences his charge by printing a heated epistolary exchange between himself and the Mayor, who co-signs his letter with John Leonard, the Recorder who receives so much negative attention in Briver’s letters. With her husband thus condemned by his own hand, Briver must have perceived the potency of the epistolary form. Letters were often the basis of news coming from Ireland and published in pamphlets in London; another pamphlet published in the same month brings news of Waterford’s revolt by printing a “letter of credit” that is “not forged as are most of Pamphlets lately Published,” which suggests that the epistolary form was used to legitimize stories of the rising.21 Irishwomen’s letters also found their way into print in pamphlets like these; perhaps Briver hoped her letters would be pub-

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lished, too.22 In the context of these pamphlets from war-torn Ireland, Briver’s appropriation of an epistolary frame in writing her defence of the Mayor is apt.23 While there is no evidence that she knew of the existence of Aston’s pamphlet (there is no explicit allusion to it in the letters), it seems probable that she would have been aware of a publication that so publicly defames her husband. It is therefore possible that it was in response to the pamphlet that Briver penned her letters to Captain Evelings, Aston’s comrade at Duncannon Fort, in an attempt to vindicate her husband and restore his now-damaged reputation.

Throughout the letters, Briver indirectly challenges Aston’s accusation that the Mayor had “rebelliously taken up armes” against the English Protestant administration. Instead, she memorializes the “ill carriage of those that went in rebellion against the Mayor.”24 She describes what happened in Waterford as a “rebellion,” but the “rebels” are specifically identified as those citizens who revolted against her husband’s civic authority. In naming the “rebels,” Briver primarily accuses “the Recorder and his Cabinet Council,” but also singles out “the Recorder’s man Alexander Leonard” for particular blame.25 Alexander Leonard is at the heart of her account of revolt in Waterford. From the opening lines of her first letter, Briver suggests that Leonard’s misconduct provoked her to take up the pen:

Good Captain Evelings, I protest to God I had rather than a hundred pound of the best money that ever I handled in my days that you had been here this day to witness what an affront and a horrible abuse was done to the Mayor in his own house by Alexander Leonard.26

Hinting at what will eventually be revealed as a shocking assault upon the Mayor, Briver’s seemingly spontaneous opening lends her account a lively immediacy. Describing what happened “this day,” she gives the impression that she writes on the day that the confrontation took place rather than several months later. She uses exclamatory apostrophe to address the absent Evelings, and invites him to vicariously experience what happened through her testimony. She vividly sets up the scene for her description

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of the “affront” and “horrible abuse” that disturbed her home, but before recounting what actually happened between Leonard and the Mayor, Briver relates—in a skillful narrative maneuver heightening the dramatic suspense of her account—what led to the confrontation between the two men. As she goes on to “express unto you the cause betwixt them,” Briver’s discussion extends to nearly a thousand words before she finally says at the beginning of the next page: “Now this is to declare of Alexander’s passing.”27 An adept storyteller, she is evidently confident that her story is worth the wait. Having established that Leonard’s assault on her husband is a cul- mination of his attempts to prevent the Mayor and his Corporation from coming to the aid of New English refugees in Waterford, Briver finally describes what happens when “the Mayor sent for Alexander to come before him to give an account of these wild actions”:

he [Leonard] said he would not obey Mayor or Sheriff. The Mayor commanded he should give his weapon. He would not give it. With this the Maire parclosed with him to take away from him his weapon. I took one hand and my nurse took the other hand; John Hore held him fast. The rest that was at the room dare not stir. In the meantime the Mayor took away his sword and his long knife. And while the Mayor was taking them from Alexander, Alexander most basely bites the Mayor’s three fingers with his teeth, and took away three pieces of the Mayor’s flesh from his fingers with his teeth, that the Mayor’s hand were all red with blood running from his sore fingers.28

A wonderfully salacious description of Leonard’s crimes, Briver’s almost onomatopoeic use of alliteration at key moments (“basely bites”), the mangled repetition of fingers and teeth, the focus on flesh wounds and blood loss, and the clinical precision of the description (“three pieces of the Mayor’s flesh”) all combine to evoke the scene of the attack vividly. Briver then identifies Leonard as “the Recorder’s man, and the only ringleader of all the mischiefs committed in town,” and documents his other misdemeanors before shifting her focus to the Recorder whom she blames for Leonard’s delinquency.29 As well as failing to “tie this Alexander to the peace and good behavior,” Briver alleges the Recorder’s guilt in a catalogue

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of other transgressions.30 Ending her first letter by vowing “I will make good before the world that it is not for the good of the town he is so busy to bring them in but for his own private ends,” Briver’s second letter then continues her condemnation of the Recorder.31 Since it was a letter co- signed with the Recorder that compromised the Mayor, it follows that the Recorder and his kinsman are at the heart of Briver’s account of the conflict in Waterford. As she describes the Mayor’s frustrated efforts to bring the Confederate sympathizers under his control, Briver emphasizes her active support of her husband. Briver consistently refers to her husband as “the Mayor”; in one case a reference in Briver B to “the poor man” is modified as “poor Mayor” in the revised Briver A.32 This indicates the importance of her decision to define her husband primarily by his public office, which depersonalizes her account and perhaps lends it greater authority. She also legitimates her husband’s position, and as Mayoress claims for herself official sanction. The representation of the altercation in her home between Leonard and the Mayor has already been quoted. In her depiction of this key event she plays a leading role. As the Mayor was trying to coax Leonard to surrender his weapons (Leonard’s dogged resistance conveyed in the repetition of “he would not”), she describes how she opted to take more decisive action. Grabbing Leonard by one arm and commanding her nurse to take the other, Briver’s example prompts one of the men to hold him still, thus enabling the Mayor to disarm him. In the midst of this, she writes: “the rest that was at the room dare not stir.” So while the majority of the Council stand idly by, Briver bravely takes action. The mention of the nurse is one of only a couple of passing, but undoubtedly pointed, refer- ences to the fact that she is the mother of young children, which heightens the gender differential in responses to violence, for as the men stand idly by, Briver takes the matter into her own hands. Briver helps the Mayor bring Leonard under his control, but embedded in her representation of this bloody confrontation is the suggestion of her husband’s deficiencies as Mayor, because he is able neither to control the citizens nor to inspire the allegiance of his Council. And, for a fleeting moment, Briver fantasizes about taking the place of her husband as Mayor: “God knows, if I were Mayor, he should be the first man I would hang at the market cross.”33 This

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may be a veiled critique of the Mayor’s handling of Leonard. However, elsewhere Briver acknowledges that “if my Lord President had left martial law to the Mayor, he would hang at least forty of the mad, wild men of this town,” which implies that her husband would also execute the seditious citizens if he had the authority.34 Nevertheless, the Mayor is often represented as unable to take control of the situation in Waterford. Describing another violent conflict between the Mayor and Confederate sympathizers on the streets of the city, Briver is again forced to intervene:

when I heard that so many swords were drawn at the market cross against my poor husband, and he having none to defend him, I ran out the streets without either hat or mantle and laid my hands about his neck and brought him in whether he would or no. But for that I brought him from them, I doubt not but there had been a great mutiny in town.35

In this unusual example, Briver identifies the Mayor as “my poor husband,” emphasizing his domestic rather than political role. And replacing mayoral with wifely agency, Briver takes control of the situation, removing her husband from danger “whether he would or no.” Appearing in public “without either hat or mantle” (perhaps acknowledging the risk of stripping), Briver bravely exposes herself to physical danger by putting herself in the way of the citizens’ swords. But claiming that her actions prevented “a great mutiny in town,” Briver not only authorizes her actions but, since she prevents further bloodshed, confers upon them an especial significance. If her letters implicitly seek the aid of the English administration, perhaps the ever-present possibility of her husband’s death means that Briver has to demonstrate to her readers her individual role in preserving the city from the Confederate Catholics and prove herself worthy of relief in her own right. She certainly intervenes further as the situation in Waterford worsens. Describing the activities of the Recorder, Briver writes: “when the Mayor would command the gates should be kept shut, the Recorder would give straight charge and command that the gates should be broken up to let in as many as please him.”36 In reaction to the Recorder’s disobedience, Briver later describes how she confronts him:

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I said unto him, “presume it not Mister Recorder, for I vow if any man in town should offer to break the gates of the city he should be run through with powder and bullets through his heart.” He asked me had I been the party would have done it. I answered him if I knew how to do it I would have done it; I told him that I would hire those would have done it.37

Briver apparently takes it upon herself to castigate the Recorder for his lack of obedience to the Mayor. The force of her rebuke is reflected in her use of direct speech to record her own words, which are distinguished from the indirect speech of the Recorder.38 But she is evidently weakened by the sarcasm of the Recorder’s retort, and reverts to indirect speech in a subtle admission of this disempowerment. While her response to the Recorder’s patronizing dismissal conveys a sense of frustration with her ostensible exclusion from the masculine sphere of military and political activity, it also suggests that she would act on her convictions if she knew how to fire a gun. Just as earlier she had asserted what she would do “if ” she were Mayor, again Briver fantasizes what she would do if her gender did not prohibit it. Once more she vows that she would use violence against the Confederates, which she implies would be much more effective than her husband’s more lenient approach. Moreover, her repetitive assertion that she “would have done it” demonstrates that while she herself may not be able to physically stop the Confederate Catholics from breaking the gates of Waterford, she can certainly “hire” men to protect the town. And she does so when Confederate forces arrive at the gates of Waterford, writing that she “kept a spy above the gate to tell when he had seen forces to come; that he should command the gates to be shut presently.”39 When she writes: “but for the town kept such good watch and ward I doubt not but it had been surprised,” she claims the credit for preventing the army from entering the gates of Waterford and taking the city.40 Briver’s letters also suggest that she played a vocal role during the Council meetings over which her husband presided. Two different accounts of one of these meetings—one drafted in the list of points and the other written “at large” in the second letter—indicate the extent to which Briver manipulates her involvement through her writing. In the elev- enth point of the list, Briver claims that their enemies accuse the Mayor

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and his comrades of acting as if they alone constitute the council: “all the town would condemn them three saying they kept a cabined council.”41 The negative associations of the Mayor’s “cabined counsel”—confined, and also figuratively cramped and hampered, according to the OED—are later suppressed when Briver later refers to the “Cabinet Council.” Because the spelling legitimates what was perceived by the Mayor’s enemies as des- potism, corruption, and incompetence, this fleeting example tantalizingly suggests that Briver’s rather idiosyncratic orthography is more purpose- ful than has previously been acknowledged.42 And in rewriting what is apparently the same moment in the second letter, Briver claims that it is she who tells the town that her husband and his colleagues are the only important council members: “when these three spoke, I says to the rest of the council, ‘these be the Cabinet Council that speaks now.’”43 She thus appropriates the disparaging comments of her husband’s enemies to reas- sert her husband’s position in Waterford, and an allusion to her husband’s contested status is reworked to actually champion his authority. And just as in the representation of her quarrel with the Recorder, Briver’s voice is again powerfully asserted through her use of direct speech in recording her own words. Briver later reasserts her singular voice during the climactic moment of political crisis in Waterford when (as she writes): “I went myself in person to the fort and told to James Woodlock’s son Clement Woodlock that his life, lands, and goods should be answerable for the fort.”44 However, this audacious intervention does not go unnoticed by the city’s men, and Briver writes: “their conclusion was that I should go live in my father’s house because I should offer to speak to James Woodlock for the fort.”45 Because Briver speaks out of place, and, specifically, because she offers her opinion on the conduct of a man, it is suggested that she does not observe her proper place as a woman, and thus needs to be brought under male control. By directing her to her father and not her husband, the men implicitly criticize the Mayor for failing to control his wife. However, sure of her readers’ hostility to the men who criticize her for behaving in a manner inappropriate to her sex—who, with the Recorder, are all Confederate sympathizers—Briver legitimates her activities because she defies gender roles only to oppose the Confederate Catholics. By repeating her criticism

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of Captain James Woodlock (the commander of the fort) and his co-con- spirators to an audience hostile to the Confederates, and showing how (as she had feared) their actions led to the loss of Waterford, Briver defends her husband from their charges while also justifying and celebrating her intrepid speech and actions on his behalf.

Throughout her writing, Briver seems to be aware that her account of what happened in Waterford is subject to contestation. In her last letter she presents her writing as the “true” and verifiable account of the rising in Waterford, and her claim that “all these I write with my own hands” emphasizes her legitimacy.46 Throughout the letters she repeatedly asserts the authenticity of her testimony: “I vow to God what I write unto you is true”; “I will make good before the world”; and “I will tell publicly hereaf- ter.”47 Specifically, Briver states her intention to “make good before their [the Confederate sympathizers’] faces every point that I write to be true,” and professes, “I hope in God I shall have right against those that are my enemies.”48 In this self-conscious assertion of what is “right,” “good,” and “true,” she appropriates moral authority as she sets her account of the rising against competing versions. Moreover, by pointedly addressing Evelings, she makes an implicit appeal to her addressee to believe her particular version of events rather than the counter-narratives of her “enemies.” To borrow from Sidonie Smith, a leading scholar in autobiographical studies, embedded in Briver’s text lie “alternative or deferred” stories of what happened in Waterford that “constantly subvert any pretensions of truth- fulness.”49 These competing versions are those of the various “enemies” to whom she alludes throughout her writing, enemies who include some of the people to whom she addresses her letters. Briver writes primarily to Captain Evelings, but she clearly expects her letters to be circulated at Duncannon Fort. That they were disseminated is testified by the fact that two copies came into the hands of James Butler, twelfth earl and first duke of Ormond (1610–1688), whose papers form the core of the Carte Papers.50 Ormond led the king’s forces in Ireland, so Evelings would have fought under his command; Briver’s letters may have

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come to Ormond from Evelings via Lord Esmond, who was commander of Duncannon Fort. Briver urges Evelings to communicate the contents of her letters to others in the garrison, requesting him to “pray show this paper to your friends,” and later specifying, “show this letter to my Lord Esmond, Mistress Gisope, to Mister Long, and Mister Benedict.”51 The last three seem to be Briver’s old neighbors from Waterford; since they can now be reached through Evelings, it is likely that they are New English refugees who have since been forced to flee the city to safety in Duncannon Fort. Interestingly, she addresses both women and men. Briver writes to Evelings and the others as “my good friends,” and, in one of the tangents of her first letter, she stresses the sympathy and pity she and her husband feel for the persecuted settlers to whom she refers as “the poor distressed English”; she further asserts, “I vow to God I pity them, and if I were able to do them a pleasure I would have done it with all my heart.”52 However, it is soon clear that her professed sympathy for the New English is rather more fraught than it first appears. Throughout her early letters, Briver emphasizes that she and the Mayor are continuing to honor their responsibilities to their exiled friends: for example, she asks Evelings to assure Mr. Aston and Mr. Coper that she continues to look after the belongings that they left in the protection of the Corporation. She also mentions some of the efforts the Mayor made on behalf of the persecuted settlers while they were within the city. Focusing specifically on his support for settler women, she asks Evelings to

Call to Mistress Liscome, and let it be upon her conscience to witness how the Mayor went to defend her from John Baly and Edward Lince; that she saw the Mayor was ready to slash John with his naked sword for offering any abuse unto her.53

By threatening to assault a woman, the unmanly brutality of the two citizens is clear. Rushing to her defence, the Mayor, by contrast, is cast as a model of chivalric virtue, and his perfect masculinity is signified by the spotlighting of his phallic sword.54 So for its positive representation of the Mayor, Mistress Liscome’s testimony is vital to Briver’s apology. Yet appealing to the New English woman’s “conscience,” Briver seems to doubt Mistress Liscome’s willingness to corroborate her version of events.

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Embedded in Briver’s account, then, is the possibility that the persecuted settlers might have a different story to tell. Throughout her letters, Briver counters and refutes other accounts of what happened in Waterford. These alternatives are exemplified by Captain Aston’s pamphlet, but Briver specifically refers to other stories within her letters. She several times alludes to various allegations made against her and her husband by the settlers, some of whom she addresses in her correspondence. For example, she acknowledges that she herself has been accused of taking two hundred pounds from the New English, and in her own defence she writes: “I defy any English man or woman in England or in Ireland to say that ever I received a piece or half a piece of their goods, either in money or money’s worth.”55 She also challenges the accusation of one Mr Aston (perhaps a kinsman of the author of the pamphlet) that her husband seized goods that had been donated to the victims of the insurrection. Briver refutes these allegations, claiming, “Aston said not true. I am content to lose my life if the Mayor did ever seize upon any Englishman’s goods, or ever did give a warrant under his hand to stay their goods.”56 Perhaps this allegation accounts for the urgency with which Briver reminds Evelings to “tell to Mister Aston I keep his white horse for him.”57 Throughout her first two letters, Briver seems to try constantly to reassure her New English readers that she and her husband have not betrayed them. Rather, as she avers, “if I were able to do them a pleasure I would have done it with all my heart.”58 But underlying the multiple refuta- tions that structure her narrative, and possible to glimpse if her account is read against the grain of her intentions, is an alternative version in which she and her husband are implicated with their Old English neighbors in the robbery of the New English settlers in Waterford. Briver strenuously denies any hints of avarice when she proclaims (in the arresting opening statement of her first letter) that the grand sum of “a hundred pound of the best money that ever I handled in my days” would be no substitute for having Evelings as witness for what happened in Waterford.59 Even without him, however, she is lucky to have “honest John Hore and Paul Cary” to vouch for her, as she admits: “I am glad to have so good a witness to testify what I write unto you to be true.”60 Briver calls upon witnesses to confirm the truth of her version of events throughout

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her letters, writing, for instance: “let Mister Long and Mister Benedict tell you”; “likely Mister Long’s wife saw them out of her window”; “my cause of knowledge is this”; “Nicholas Power of Kilballyquilty is my authority for this”; “Mister Nicholas Power told me”; “call to Mistress Liscome, and let it be upon her conscience to witness”; “Mistress Gisope shall witness”; “the dene can witness.”61 Significantly, many of the witnesses called upon here— such as Mr. Long, Mr. Benedict, and Mrs. Gisope—are also addressed as potential readers of her letters. Since these individuals are later asked to “judge of all this carriage,” they are constructed as her judges as well as witnesses for her defence, and this is a persuasive strategy implying that Briver’s account cannot be proven false when even her reader-judges can verify its truth (if only parts of it).62 And of these readers, she adds,

I desire them for the love of God and the passion of Christ that they shall saddle the saddle upon the right horse, and that the innocent shall not suffer for the faults of them that are guilty, and every man to be accountable for his own actions.63

In this rather jarring digression from her account of what happened in Waterford, Briver obliquely identifies herself and her husband as the “innocent” who are suffering for the “faults” of the “guilty” (such as the Recorder or Alexander Leonard) by people who do not seem to be able to identify the “right horse” upon which to “saddle” blame. This is particularly unfair since, as Briver claims, the couple have suffered alongside their accusers. She reveals “how ill I am beloved in town and country, both myself, my husband, and children, for to be so favorable to the English as we have been hitherto.”64 And although her reference to “the English” acknowledges that her family are themselves not “English,” throughout her letters she recounts how she and her husband have suffered on behalf of the New English they sought to protect. Describing the looting of the couple’s house in Passage by Confederates from Wexford, Briver inventories their losses:

you took out of that house one great furnace worth twenty pound, that those that were there left it to the Mayor for his rent; you took with you all the iron and glasses that were in the windows; you broke

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up the planks that were underfoot; you tore all the doors and took away the locks and keys.65

To Evelings, she then adds, “all this thy did to the maire is howse in passige: of mallise beecause the maire and his councell wud not let them into the sitty uppon nue yeare is day.”66 She thus unequivocally links the Mayor’s personal losses with his public loyalty to the Protestant settlers. Throughout her letters, Briver describes how the family’s property has been vandalized and looted, how they have been subject to threats and intimidation, how they have endured actual physical violence, and how her husband has barely escaped several attempts on his life. Briver thus suggests that the couple can fully sympathize with the refugees because they share their pain, and she simultaneously insinuates that she and her husband could not possibly be complicit with those at whose hands they themselves have suffered. Yet underlying Briver’s writing is her recognition of the gravely prob- lematic nature of the couple’s professed affiliations with the New English. Even as she represents the couple as vehemently opposed to the confederacy of native Irish and Old English Catholics, she is conscious of the fact that her family were Old English—and perhaps Catholic. In a city where the majority Old English population had declared for the Confederates, Briver is painfully aware that their allegiance with New English Protestants was highly suspicious. While she recognizes that the couple may be perceived to share the aspirations of the Confederates, she challenges the inevitability of such assumptions by evoking the hybridity implicit in an Old English identity. Descended from the original English settlers, but competing for land and power with the newer arrivals, the Old English of the mid-seventeenth century had double identities as both colonized “Irish” and “English” colonizers. So while they enjoyed a prior claim to an “English” identity in Ireland, they were also distanced from “Englishness” as redefined by the New English Protestant settlers: the persecuted “English” of Briver’s letters. Accordingly, the Waterford Old English occupied a slippery middle ground between “English” and “Irish.” For Briver, they are neither “English” nor “Irish.” The “Irish” are the encroaching army; when Briver claims that the Recorder and his comrades were constantly “at people to join with the

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Irish,” the distinction between the Waterford and the “other” Confederate Catholics is clear.67 Yet it seems that the citizens of Waterford have the capacity to become “Irish” if they commit to the Confederate cause. The “degeneration” of the Old English (to adopt the term made famous by Spenser) is most vividly imagined in Briver’s depiction of Alexander Leonard, the proclaimed “ringleader” of the rising in Waterford.68 After her initial introduction of Leonard in the first letter, Briver defines him as “a base Turk of a fellow and an unchristian-like boor in my opinion.”69 Appropriating the stock images of English (Protestant) colonial discourse, the different aspects of Briver’s derogatory construction of Leonard’s social, religious, and national identity are richly interconnected to form a general picture of his otherness. His identification as “Turk,” for example, yokes together ideas of ethnic and religious difference under the general category of barbarism. During her representation of the bloody confrontation between Leonard and the Mayor with which she opens her first letter, Briver’s focus on the violent details of Leonard’s attack, the gratu- itous preoccupation with the Mayor’s hand which was “all red with blood running from his sore fingers,” and, specifically, the repetitive emphasis on Leonard’s teeth, indicates the wild, bestial nature of Leonard—and perhaps even his cannibalism.70 In animalizing the Old English man in this way, Briver obliquely echoes a famous passage in John Davies’ A Discoverie of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued, which, typical of New English attitudes in the period, offers a gendered depiction of the degeneration of the Old English in Ireland:

These were the Irish Customes, which the English Colonies did embrace and use, after they had rejected the Civill and Honorable Lawes and Customes of England, whereby they became degenerate and metamorphosed […] like those who had drunke of Circes Cuppe, and were turned into very Beasts; and yet tooke such pleasure in their beastly manner of life as they would not returne to their shape of men againe.71

Since “Circe is a woman, a seductress,” as Clare Carroll points out, by comparing her bestial victims to the degenerate Old English, Davies

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specifically blames native Irish women for the degeneration of Old English men; moreover, “Irishness,” in general, is feminized.72 In this context, I wonder if doubts about Briver’s “English” credentials are perceived by her in gendered terms. In other words, does she feel that the New English see her specifically as a threatening “Irish” woman? Some of the evidence suggests so. For example, when she is accused of stealing two hundred pounds from the settlers, the charge is emblazoned on a “paper […] laid upon my father’s door.”73 The gendered dimension of her public shaming—which implies that her father must take her under control because her husband can or will not—suggests that hostility to Briver was shaped, in part, by her perceived repudiation of contemporary norms of femininity. Her refusal to be silent, passive, and obedient is thus added to the crimes of theft and rebellion which the New English accuse her of committing. Belief in women’s active involvement in violence and looting during the rising was widespread, and in fact used to justify the targeting of women in retaliatory attacks, so it is within the context of heightened suspicion toward “Irish” women in particular that Briver’s letters might best be understood.74 In order to remove herself from these negative associations, however, Briver locates the worst “Irish” attributes in Old English men. Drawing upon New English assumptions about the native Irish and Old English Catholics in her representation of the Confederate sympathizers in Waterford, she represents Leonard in particular as the “wild Irishman” of the English colonial imagination. However, her strategic alignment with Davies and other New English male writers is complicated since she writes as an Old English woman. Her text sits uneasily within the misogyny of male colonial discourse; furthermore, her appropriation of New English attitudes is complicated by their suspicion of and hostility to the Old English. Moreover, since Davies, like Spenser before him, refers to the degeneration of Old English men under the influence of native Irish women, the Old English woman is invisible in their writings. This provides an opening for the Old English female subject, however, and Briver enters the void, finding a space within “English” colonial discourse for the Old English woman who, unlike her kinsmen, is not degenerate and “Irish,” and cannot become so. Briver therefore appropriates the nationalized misogyny of male-dominated “English” colonial writing to challenge the automatic

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identification of Old English with native Irish, and the correlation of “Irishness” with (negative) femininity and “Englishness” with (positive) masculinity. As a woman, Briver defines herself as “English” in contrast to the “Irish” Leonard, and asserts “Englishness” as not just the privilege of New English men but of Old English women, too. Furthermore, the potentially Circe-like control she wields over her husband at critical moments of confrontation with Leonard and other degenerate “Irish” men (and they are all men), actually helps to prevent his similar degeneration. As neither the threatening native Irish woman nor the vulnerable Old English man, but an Old English woman, Briver uses her feminine—and un-Circean—influence to stop the degeneration of her Old English husband and assert his “Englishness” instead. For Briver, during the Irish rising and its aftermath, there is no possibility of sustaining an Old English identity with its inherent duality: the Old English can only be either “English” or “Irish,” even if this construction is intrinsically unstable. Just as she appropriates cultural stereotypes to identify Leonard as “Irish,” Briver constructs her and her husband’s identities against him. By associating Leonard with “mutiny” and her husband and herself with “peace,” she fashions a clear distinction between her family and Leonard, deconstructing the hybridity of their shared Old Englishness and establishing her family’s cultural and political “Englishness” in opposition to Leonard’s “Irishness.”75 She thus throws off the “mantle” of her family’s perceived “Irishness” (as she does when she runs out into the streets of Waterford to save the Mayor from Leonard’s sword) to dress Leonard in it instead.76 And by displacing the “Irishness” implicit in her family’s Old English identity upon him, Briver conflates his “Irishness” with “rebellion” and her family’s “Englishness” with “loyalty,” and asserts her and her husband’s allegiance to the persecuted New English. Yet this remains an unstable construction, and when the conflict reaches crisis-point (as documented in the critical third letter), Briver admits that, instead of preserving her enmity with Leonard, circumstances force her to be reconciled to him. As she goes “to swear the peace against Alexander because I feared my life,” the boundary between Briver and Leonard becomes frighteningly porous.77 Yet Briver recoils from the recon- ciliation by claiming she had no choice, and belligerently swears the peace

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“against” rather than “with” Leonard. Nevertheless, Briver’s fear that she and her husband might be confused with Leonard and the other Confederate Catholics in the eyes of the New English persists even as Leonard is firmly re-established as the couple’s “enemy” in the conclusive fourth letter.

In her final letter, Briver reminds her reader(s) of Leonard’s notorious confrontation with the Mayor. Identifying him as “the man [who] would not be committed by the Mayor,” she refers to the “affront he did unto the Mayor,” thus jogging her readers’ memories of his violent assault.78 Leonard then enjoys a leading role in the events to which she returns here. Designed to precede the original first letter, the fourth letter’s account of the events of Christmas Eve both opens and completes her narrative of the proceedings “in Waterford since Christmas Eve.”79 Briver describes what happened when, under the direction of Elizabeth Butler, Countess of Ormond, New English refugees from Kilkenny arrived in Waterford:

there came from Kilkenny [city] and the county of Kilkenny three hundred English men, women, and children to the bank of Waterford. And my Lord Reeve’s brother came with a letter to the Mayor and Council from my noble lady the Countess of Ormond to ferry over these English till shipping had been here to carry them for England. As soon as the Mayor read the letter he sent a warrant to the quay with Mister Reeves that they should all be ferried over here.80

The Countess of Ormond is an important figure in Briver’s depiction of the rising. Not only was she wife of the royalist commander in Ireland, but she was also well known in her own right for her generous assistance to New English refugees (which in fact helped secure the support of Cromwell when she sued for restoration of her property after her husband’s exile in the 1650s). She therefore provides Briver with a model for the loyal royalist wife. As a member of the Old English Butler family, the Countess of Ormond also represents for Briver the possibility of being an Old English woman and supporting the New English settlers. However, since Lady Ormond was also a Protestant, she might have enjoyed a greater

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stake in “Englishness” than the possibly Catholic Briver. Certainly, the Countess’s loyalty is never questioned, unlike that of the Briver couple who are even required to respond to allegations that “the Mayor did seize upon the goods that Aston should send to my lady Countess.”81 While such charges place the two women in opposing sides of the political divide, Briver defends her husband against them by stressing his positive response to Lady Ormond’s later requests. Despite the Mayor’s attempt to carry out the Countess’s instruc- tions, however, he “could not prevail” due to the interventions of a number of “wild young men” (with Leonard at the forefront) who caused “a great mutiny at the quay.”82 Briver’s list of those responsible are the last words written in the Briver B version, and are crammed into the margin of the Briver A copy. However, there is an addition in Briver A which continues the story:

When the Mayor heard of all this, he was driven to be out of his bed and to send for his Council that very night. They all agreed that the Captain Lombard should go to ferry them without Saint John’s Gate, in good houses there. The Mayor in person went on Christmas Day to bring in Dean Warront. The Dean can witness there was six swords drawn at the Mayor for to bring him and his acquaintance into the city. The English all came in by degrees and shipped for England.83

Thus, in Briver A’s revisionary supplement, the account no longer ends with the Mayor’s failure to help the refugees. Rather than giving the last word to those who “would not suffer the English to be ferried over the river,” Briver’s letter finally witnesses how, against the odds, “the English all came in by degrees: and shipped for England,” thus ending her letter—and launching her epistolary narrative—on a note of success.84 In doing so, Briver offsets the gloomy ending of the third and “last” letter in which she describes Waterford’s fall to the Confederate Catholics, which precipitated a fatal confrontation between the Mayor and his enemies:

when those of the fort saw the Mayor at the market cross dividing of powder, bullets, and match, he and Doctor Gifford standing together,

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they gave a volley of shot thinking to shoot at the Mayor. But it missed the Mayor, and Doctor Gifford was killed, and a handsome maid that was standing by them; and the Mayor’s constable that stood by the Mayor, he was not fully killed off but he will never turn.85

In this, the last of the seventeen points of the “last” letter, Briver’s account of the rising in Waterford comes to a pessimistic conclusion. The forward thrust of the account (reflected in the uncharacteristic lack of punctua- tion) brings with it a sense of the inevitability of the Mayor’s defeat, as well as the hopelessness of the situation. Accordingly, Briver highlights, with pathos, the very real danger in which the Mayor and his family now find themselves. The description of this murderous confrontation between the Mayor and citizens is a fitting end to Briver’s epistolary account of the rising, which is framed by a series of bloody clashes, and launched with an expression of doubt about her own survival beyond the war (“if it be God Almighty’s will I live”).86 Even as she attempts to excite the sympathy of her readers, Briver’s acknowledgement of the danger in which she and her family lives is undoubtedly also an expression of her genuine fear of violent suffering and death at the hands of the Confederate Catholics. In a testimony obsessed with naming names, the death of an unnamed woman in Briver’s description of the final altercation between the Mayor and citizens seems significant. Since victimhood during the Irish wars is so often gendered (as I have discussed elsewhere), the woman is perhaps a personification of all the innocent victims of the war, and particularly the (feminized) victims of the (all male) Confederate Catholics.87 Briver specifies that she is “handsome”; she is also a “maid,” which stresses her unmarried (and thus unprotected) state, and perhaps also her youth. Thus emphasizing the beauty, innocence, and vulnerability of the anonymous female victim, Briver demonizes her murderers, and increases the pathos of the woman’s death. There is also the intriguing possibility that the woman who “stood by the Mayor” is an expression of Briver’s traumatized selfhood. Specifically, the dead woman may reflect, for Briver, the frightening possibility of her own death. This is not to say that a woman did not die when the Mayor was shot at; it is simply to add that her murder may have been appropri-

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ated by Briver to give voice to her own fear of death at the hands of the Confederate Catholics. Since the Mayor is indirectly responsible for the death of this innocent female bystander, Briver may feel that her own prox- imity to the Mayor exposes her to the Confederates’ vengeful violence— especially when her husband is himself exposed, vulnerable, and powerless to protect her. Even more than her husband, Briver often professes a desire to commit violence against the “rebellious” citizens, fantasizing about hang- ing lawbreakers or shooting potential “traitors,” but she never instigates violence. Moreover, as she admits in her heated confrontation with the Recorder, she is unable to shoot a gun to defend either herself or her family. She may therefore perceive herself to be particularly vulnerable to the violence of the Confederate Catholics, and in the murder of the innocent woman who stands by the Mayor’s side, she may see the materialization of her worst fears. It is from these circumstances—the couple’s exposure to retaliatory violence after the Mayor’s defeat and likely removal from office (he was to be replaced as Mayor by Thomas White)—that Briver writes her fourth letter. Unable to change how the story ends, in this letter Briver rewrites its beginning. Reading the letter in the context of her husband’s vulnerable position in Confederate-controlled Waterford, Briver’s evidence of the Mayor’s role in helping “three hundred English men, women, and children” commemorates the efforts he made on behalf of the New English who needed him, and represents him as steadfast and loyal. This is crucial to Briver’s depiction of her husband in the third letter as well. Revising her final words between the two versions of the letters, Briver subtly modifies her account of the bloodshed that followed upon the city’s fall. Substituting as her last word the straightforward “recover” of Briver B with the rather more ambiguous “turn” of Briver A, Briver may have intended to play on its meaning of “turn” as not only to recover but also to switch allegiances.88 If so, “he” refers not to the Constable but to the Mayor, and Briver may be suggesting that, despite the bloodshed that led to the Constable’s seri- ous injury and the deaths of two civilians, the Mayor “will neuer turne” to the Confederate Catholics for his own safety, but will remain loyal to the English Protestant administration. Briver thus reminds Evelings of her husband’s loyal service, and perhaps seeks an invitation to the royalist gar-

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rison at Duncannon Fort, where her family can, with the other persecuted “English,” be safe. The little evidence we have of the Mayor’s conduct after Waterford’s capture by the Confederates suggests, however, that Briver was unsuc- cessful in this aim. When the first meeting of the Supreme Council of the Confederate Catholics took place at Kilkenny in June 1642, Lord Mountgarret, who had led the assault against Waterford, was appointed President. Having once opposed their army, Francis Briver’s name appears on the second of four rolls of the 1647 Confederate General Assembly atten- dance lists.89 The official records of the Confederate Catholics thus indicate that, despite Briver’s frequent protestations of her husband’s unwavering loyalty to the New English Protestants, the Mayor was to join his erstwhile enemies after their capture of Waterford. Briver’s efforts to defend her husband’s behavior and champion his loyalty to the New English are thus belied by his actions after the fall of the city. However, her husband’s future allegiances with the Confederate Catholics are already foreshadowed by her letters, which provide an account of her husband’s conduct as Mayor that is fraught with tensions and contradictions throughout. Her letters to Evelings seem to be the only trace that remains of Mistress Briver, to whom we cannot even assign a first name. The fact that she can now only be identified through her husband is a poignant remind- er of the marginality of the early modern Irish woman writer. However, Briver wrote during one of the most significant periods in Ireland’s past, and her account has since found its way into the Irish historical record. Her husband can make no such claim. Moreover, much of what is known about the Mayor is found in his wife’s letters. What this suggests is that, during the conflict of the mid-seventeenth century, Irishwomen like Briver—but also Lady Elizabeth Dowdall, Lettice Fitzgerald, Baroness of Offaly, and others—were presented with an opportunity to write themselves into history, which they did, whether or not they were conscious of doing so. Examining Irishwomen’s representation of key events of the past can offer us uniquely gendered and nationalized perspectives on Irish and British history. Through her letters, remarkable in their representation of national conflict and female agency, Briver asserts the singular voice of the citizen’s

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wife, and shows the ways in which women from this background could write of their experiences during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Unlike the better-known siege writings of rural aristocratic women like Brilliana Harley or Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, or, in an Irish context, Dowdall or Fitzgerald, Briver’s writing illuminates the experiences of a mercantile female living in a war-torn town. Urban communities in seventeenth-century Ireland, like Waterford, were traditionally Old English and Catholic, but due to the recent influx of Protestant settlers, they were increasingly becoming melting pots for people of different ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds. And, accelerated by the conditions of war, traditional social and gender categories were also beginning to be eroded. Briver’s letters thus provide an interesting case study for the exploration of the complex interrelationship of social, gender, ethnic, and religious identities in seventeenth-century Ireland. Briver’s account of the rising in Waterford reveals the ambivalent position of the Old English in Ireland (neither “English” nor “Irish,” but something in between); it also reveals the elastic loyalties of her and her husband (neither wholly to the New English Protestants nor the Confederate Catholics). More importantly, it demonstrates the extent to which Briver, in writing her account, exploits these ambiguities in her flexible representation of the couple’s activities and experiences during the Irish wars. In doing so, her letters underline the shifting nature of political categories during this period of military crisis and the necessity of adapt- ability in an unstable political climate. Briver might not have known how to fire a gun, but she could certainly use a pen to ensure her family’s buoyancy through this tumultuous period of Irish history.

Notes

1. “This is that I may remember what passingis that happind in watirfort since Christmas eue till the day after sainte patricke is day: kaptaine euelings I protest to god all these I write with my one handes beecawse I was griued att the passingis: and Ill carrigis of those that wente in rebellion aganst the maire: that If it bee god allmightty is will I liue: I will make good beefore there facis euery point that I write to bee true: and I hoop in god I shall haue right aganst those that are my enemies.” Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. Carte, 4, fol. 250r. All subsequent quotations are taken from these manu-

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scripts. Modernized transcriptions are provided in the main text, with original quotations cited in the endnotes; folio numbers follow the quotations. I would like to thank the edi- tors of Early Modern Women and the two anonymous readers for their careful reading of my essay and their insightful suggestions for its development and improvement. Thanks are also due to Danielle Clarke and Edel Lamb for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. 2. What constitutes an “Irish” identity in the seventeenth century is an extremely fraught issue. In this essay, “Irish” refers to those who were born in Ireland and/or lived in Ireland on a long-term basis; it is therefore a catch-all term for people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds who may or may not have identified themselves as “Irish.” When necessary, however, particular ethnic and religious identities, such as native Irish or Old English Catholic, or New English Protestant settler, will be clearly specified. 3. A little more is known about the Briver family, which occupied an important position in the hierarchy of families that governed Waterford in the early seventeenth century. The third generation of the family in Waterford, Francis Briver was the eldest son and heir of James Briver (d. 1618) and his wife, Ellinor Lambert, and was a minor at his father’s death. His son, James Briver, succeeded his father at an unknown date. I would like to thank Julian Walton for providing me with these details drawn from the Villiers- Stuart MSS, University College, Cork. 4. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 469; Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), 87. 5. On the Old English, see Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000); and Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999). 6. Irish Catholics were of course also the victims of violence during the conflict, but this is not acknowledged in Briver’s letters. For a nuanced discussion of atrocities in mid-seventeenth-century Ireland that focuses on violence against Catholics, see Micheál Ó Siochrú, “Atrocity, Codes of Conduct, and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641– 1653,” Past and Present 195 (2007): 55–86. See also Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, ed. David Edwards, Padraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007). 7. Sean Kelsey, “Butler, Richard, third Viscount Mountgarret (1578–1651),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); 18 Feb. 2009 . 8. Throughout this essay I will use the slightly anachronistic but politically neutral term “Confederate Catholic” to designate those who opposed, through military and political action, New English Protestant rule at Dublin Castle, even though the first meeting of the Confederate association was not to take place until the summer of 1642. 9. From Good and Bad Newes from Ireland (London, 1642), 2, it is clear that Waterford had been taken by the Confederate Catholics by 28 February 1642.

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10. In 1640, eighty-one percent of the land in County Waterford was owned by Old English families; the Old English also enjoyed a monopoly of the mayoralty and the other high offices of municipal government in the city. See Catherine Ketch, “Landownership in Co. Waterford c. 1640: The Evidence from the Civil Survey,” Waterford History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County, ed. William Nolan and Thomas Power (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1992), 199–225; and Julian Walton, “The Freemen of Waterford 1542–1650,” The Irish Genealogist 5 (1978): 560–72. 11. The manuscript pages of Briver’s letters are marked by “Iesus: marya [Jesus; Maria],” which indicates that the writer of the letters was Catholic. The same inscription appears on a contemporary letter of an Irish Poor Clare nun, which may suggest an affiliation with the Franciscans, who were present in Waterford at this time. See Sister Cecily Francis Dillon to an unidentified recipient, 27 Dec. 1642. A copy of Sister Cecily Francis’s letter is in the Poor Clare Monastery, Nuns Island, Galway; I am grateful to Sister Louis for providing me with a copy. The original is in Archives, St. Isadore’s College, Rome. The possibility of the couple’s Catholicism helps to explain Briver’s striking refusal to identify any of the factions by religion. This is probably strategic because, if she is Catholic, it is in her interest to downplay the Catholicism of the Confederate Catholics and the Protestantism of the New English settlers. 12. See Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War: The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford, 1987–1988 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Conrad Russell, “The British Problem and the English Civil War,” History 72 (1987): 395–415. 13. Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For work on women’s writing in early modern Ireland, see Marie-Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). “Atlantic archipelago” is adopted as a more politically neutral term than “British Isles.” 14. Carte, 4, 249–58, 478–89. 15. John T. Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, 1641–1649, vol. 2 (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 1882), 8–22. Gilbert’s edition is silently based on the Briver B narrative, but it is supplemented with dates and endorsements / superscriptions from Briver A, with an addition to the fourth letter—missing from Briver B—incorrectly inserted between the first and second letters. The letters are also excerpted (with inaccuracies) in P. M. Egan, History, Guide and Directory of the County and City of Waterford (Kilkenny: P. M. Egan, 1894). My edition of the letters is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance. 16. On early modern women’s letter-writing, see Early Modern Women’s Letter- Writing, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion, ed. Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb

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(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); and James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 17. The “first” and “second” letters are dated 14 and 15 March respectively. Next is a list of seventeen points written “that I may remember to write these poyntes at lardge in a letter when I am at leasure” (258r), but these are then endorsed as “My third letter to kaptaine euelings let him looke this last of all” (257v). There is a further letter identified as the “fourth” (251v), but this is dated 14 March, and Briver directs Evelings to “open this letter first” (252v). The fourth letter thus introduces and concludes the account (and it is from this letter that the excerpt with which I began this essay is taken). 18. Writing to the Recorder and citizens of Waterford, Viscount Mountgarret’s son, Edmund Butler, warns them of the threat posed by “your Cheefe Magistrat, Mr. Fransus Briver,” of whom he says that “neither the religion of the oth he tooke to the common cause, nor his obligacion to God, and his countrie, can outweigh the perversnes of his greedie appetit to inrich him and his assosiats with our estates, as the rewards of their trecherie” (Gilbert, 23). 19. Thomas Aston, Newes from the West of Ireland (London, 1642), 7. 20. Ibid., 8. 21. Good and Bad Newes, 1. 22. A True and Exact Relation of the Chiefe Passages in Ireland, Since the First Rising of the Rebels (London, 1642), publishes letters written by Lettice Fitzgerald, Baroness of Offaly, during the siege of Geashill Castle, County Offaly, in the winter of 1641–42. An Old English Protestant besieged by Catholic kinsmen, the epistolary exchange between Lady Offaly and her besiegers, like Briver’s letters, reveals the complexity of ethnic, religious, and political affiliations in mid-seventeenth-century Ireland. 23. See Keith J. Lindley, “The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5,” Irish Historical Studies 18 (1972): 143–76; Kathleen M. Noonan, “‘The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People’: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth-Century Policy and Propaganda,” The Historical Journal 41 (1998): 151–77; Ethan Howard Shagan, “Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641,” The Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 4–34. 24. “Ill carrigis of those that wente in rebellion aganst the maire” (250r). 25. “the recordir and his kabynets councell”; “the recordir is man elexandir lin- ard” (250r). 26. “Good kaptaine eeuelings: I proteste to god I had rather then a hundrith pounde of the best mony that euer I handlid in my daies: that you had beene heere this day to witnes what an afronte and a horyble abuse was done to the maire in his one howse: by elexandir linnerd” (253r). 27. “expres unto you the cawse beetwext them” (253r); “Now this is to declare of elexander is passinggis” (254r). 28. “the maire sente for elexander to come beefore him to giue an accounte of theese wilde accions [. . .] hee sed hee wud not obay maire or shifrife: the maire com- mandded hee shud giue his weapon hee wud not giue it: with this the maire perclost with

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him to take away from him his weapon: I toke wan hand and my norse toke the other hand: Ihon hore helde him fast: the rest that was att the rome dare not stir: in the mene time the maire tooke away his swoord and his long knife: and while the maire was taking them from elexander: elexander most basely bites the maire is three fingirs with his teeth: and tooke away three peeces of the maire is fles from his fingirs with his tith: that the maier is hande weere all red with blod running from his sore fingirs” (254r). 29. “the recorder is man: and the onely ringleder of all the mischifes committed in toune” (254r). 30. “tye this elexander to the pease and good beehauiour” (254r). 31. “I will make good beefore the world that it is not for the good of the toune hee is soe bussy to bring them in but for his owne priuat endes” (254r). 32. “the poore mane” (481r); “poore maire” (254r). 33. “god knowes if I weere maire hee shud bee the first man I wud haing at the marked crosse” (254r; emphasis added). 34. “If my lord president had lefte marchciall law to the maier hee wud hang at least forty of the mad wild men of this toune” (253r). 35. “when I hard that soe many swoordes weere drawne att the marked crosse aganst my poore husbant: and hee hauing none to defend him: I ran out the strites without ether hat or manttell and laid my hands about his necke and brought him in whether hee wud or noe: but for that I brought him from them: I dought not but there had bene a greate mutany in toune” (253r). 36. “when the maire wud command the gates shud bee kipt shute […] the recorder wud giue straight charge and command that the gates shud bee brokin up to let in as many as please him” (254r). 37. “I sed unto him presume itt not mister recorder: for I uowe If anny man in toune shud offer to breke the gates of the sitty hee shud bee run throrow with pouder and bulleds throw his hart: hee asxte mee had I beene the party wud adone it: I answeered him If I knue how to doe it I wud adone it: I tould him that I wud hire those wud adone itt” (256r). 38. Direct speech is recorded in the form in which it was uttered; indirect speech is reported in the third person. 39. “kept aspy aboue the gate to tell when hee had seene forces to com: that hee shud command the gates to bee shut presently” (256r). 40. “but for the toune kept such good weech and ward I dout not but it had bene surprist” (256r). 41. “all the toune wud condemne them three saying they keept a cabined counsel” (258r). 42. Gilbert describes Briver’s letters as being “peculiar in orthography” (xli), while Egan labels her spelling “riotous” (59). Yet Briver’s letters share the oral quality observed in some women’s letters that Daybell in Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing describes as having incidences of “colloquialisms, non-standard forms and erratic or pho- netic spellings” (6). In the same volume, Alison Truelove indicates that Briver’s writing is

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fairly typical of a woman of her social status; see “Commanding Communications: The Fifteenth-Century Letters of the Stonor Women,” 42–58 (42). Briver’s orthography suggests that she is not familiar with standard spelling, although she is clearly highly literate in other ways. 43. “when these three spoke: I sese to the rest of the councell: theese bee the kabinit councell that speakes now” (255r). 44. “I went my selfe in person to the forth and tould to Iames wudlock is sone clement wudlock that his life lands and goodes should be answerable for the forth” (257r). 45. “their conclution was that I should goe liue in my father is house because I shud offer to speake to Iames wudlock for the forth” (257r). 46. “all these I write with my one hands” (250r). 47. “I uow to god what I write unty you is true” (253r); “I will make good beefore the world” (254r); “I will tell publickely here after” (254r). 48. “make good beefore there facis euery point that I write to bee true”; “I hoop in god I shall haue right aganst those that that are my enemies.” 49. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5. 50. Mike Webb, “The Carte Papers,” The Electronic Calendar of the Carte Papers, 1660–87. Updated 27 May 2005. 18 March 2009 51. “pray show this paper to yowr frinds” (257v); “show this leter to my lord esmon: mistris gisop: to mister ling: and mister Benedict” (253r). 52. “my good frendes” (254r); “the poore disstressed Inglis” (253r); “I uow to god I pitty them and If I weere able to doe them a pleasure I wud adone it with all my hart” (253r). 53. “caull to mistris liscom: and lit it bee uppon hir concience to witnes how the maire went to defend hir from Ihon baly and edward lince that she saw the maire was redy to slach Ihon with his naked sword for offring any abuse unto her” (256r). 54. For a powerful analysis of violence and masculinity during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, see Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 55. “I defie anny inglis man or woman: in ingland or in eairland to say that euer I receued a pease or halfe a peese of there goodes: ether in mony or mony worte” (256r). 56. “aston sed not true: I am content to losse my life If the maire did euer sease upon anny inglis man is goodes: or euer did giue a warrant under his hands to stay there” (256r). 57. “tell to mister aston I keepe his white horse for him” (253r). 58. “If I weere able to doe them a pleasure I wud adone it with all my hart” (253r). 59. “a hundrith pounde of the best mony that euer I handlid in my daies” (253r). 60. “honest Ihon hore and paule kary”; “I am glad to haue soe good a witnes to testifie what I write unto you to bee true” (253r).

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61. “let mister ling: and mister benedict tell you” (253r); “lickely mister ling is wife saw them out of hir windoe” (253r); “my cause of knolege […] is this” (256r); “nicolas poor of kilbaly kilty is my autter for this” (256r); “mister nicolas poor tould mee” (256r); “caull to mistris liscom: and lit it bee uppon hir concience to witness” (256r); “mistris gisop shall wittnes” (258r); “the dene can witness” (251r). 62. “Iudge of all this cariadge” (257v). 63. “I desird them for the loue of god and the passion of christ that thy shall sadle the sadle uppon the right horse and that the innosent shall not suffer for the faultes of them that are guilty, and eueri man to be countable for his one accions” (253r). 64. “how ill I am beeloud in toune and contry: bothe my selfe my husbant and childrin for to bee soe fauowrable to the inglis as wee haue beene hither to” (253r). 65. “you tooke out of that howse one greate furnes wort twanty poound: that those that were there left it to the maire for his rente: you toke with you all the Iron and glasses that weere in the windoes: you broke up the plainkes that weere undir foote: you tore all the doores and toke away the lockes an keies” (255r). 66. “all this thy did to the maire is howse in passige: of mallise beecause the maire and his councell wud not let them into the sitty uppon nue yeare is” (255r). 67. “at peple to Ioyne with the irish” (258r). 68. “ringleder” (254r). 69. “a base turke of a feloe: and an unchristian licke boor in my opinion” (253r). 70. “all red with blod running from his sore fingirs” (254r). The most famous depiction of Irish cannibalism is, of course, Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 101–2. 71. John Davies, A Discoverie of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued (London, 1612), 181–82. 72. Clare Carroll, “Representations of Women in Some Early Modern English Tracts on the Colonization of Ireland,” Albion 25 (1993): 379–94 (391). For her book- length exploration of the gendering of English colonial discourse in Ireland, focusing specifically on the trope of Circe, see Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Writing about Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001). 73. “paper […] laid uppon my father is doore” (256r). 74. Ó Siochrú, “Atrocity,” 62. On women’s experiences during the wars, see Mary O’Dowd, “Women and War in Ireland in the 1640s,” Women in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1991), 91–111. 75. “mutany”; “pease” (254r). 76. “manttell” (253r). 77. “to sweere the pease against Alexander because I feard my life” (257r). 78. “the man wud not bee committed by the maire”; “affront hee did unto the maire” (250r). 79. “in watirfort since christmas eue” (250r). 80. “there came from kilkeny and the county of kilkeny: three hundrith inglis men women and childrin: to the banke of waterfort: and my lord riues is brother came

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with a letter to the maire and councell: from my noble lady the countis of ormon: to fery ouer thise inglis till shipping had bene heere to karry them for Inglant: as soene as the maire rid the letter: hee sente a warrant to the kea with mister riues that thy should all bee feried ouer here” (250r). Elizabeth Butler (née Preston), Countess of Ormond (1615–1684), was wife of James Butler, twelfth earl and first duke of Ormond. 81. “the maire did sease uppon the goods that aston shud send to my lady counties” (256r). 82. “cud not preuaile”; “wild yong men”; “a greate mutany at the key” (250r). 83. “When the maire hard of all this: hee was driuen to bee out of his bed and to sende for his councell that uery night: they all agrid that the kaptaine lombard shud goe to fery them without saint Ihon is gate: in good howsis there: the maire in parson went on christmas day to bring in dene warront the dene can witnes there was six swoordes drane at the maire for to bring him and his acquaintance into the sitty: the inglis all came in by degries: and ships for inglant” (251r). 84. “wud not suffer the Inglis to bee feried ouer the reuir” (250r). 85. “when those of the forth saw the maire at the merked crose deuiding of pouder bulleds and match he and doctor giffers standing together they gaue a ualy of shot thinking to shut at the maire but it mist the maire and doctor giffers was killd and a hansom maide that was standing by them and the maire is counstable th stood by the maire he was not fully kild of but he will neuer turne” (257v). 86. “If it bee god allmightty is will I liue” (250r). 87. See my “Re(-)membering Women: Protestant Women’s Victim Testimonies during the Irish Rising of 1641,” forthcoming in Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2 (2010) . 88. “turne” (257v); “recouer” (489r). 89. Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 255.

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