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Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish and Gender by Spenser and His Contemporaries

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Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish and Gender by Spenser and His Contemporaries Loughborough University Institutional Repository Irish demons: English writings on Ireland, the Irish and gender by Spenser and his contemporaries This item was submitted to Loughborough University's Institutional Repository by the/an author. Citation: FITZPATRICK, J. 2000. Irish demons: English writings on Ireland, the Irish and gender by Spenser and his contemporaries. Lanham: University Press of America. Additional Information: • This material is still protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher (www.univpress.com/) for permission to copy, dis- tribute or reprint. Metadata Record: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/6240 Version: Accepted for publication Publisher: c University Press of America Please cite the published version. This item was submitted to Loughborough’s Institutional Repository (https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/) by the author and is made available under the following Creative Commons Licence conditions. For the full text of this licence, please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ Fitzpatrick, Joan. 2000b. Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish and Gender By Spenser and His Contemporaries. Lanham. University Press of America. Chapter 1 _________________________________________________________ Writing of Ireland: The “Supplication” and A View of the Present State of Ireland Ireland was England’s first colony and remains its last. The 800 years since the first English settlements can be divided into two distinct phases: the first incomplete colonization of the island by twelfth-century Anglo-Norman settlers, and the re- colonization in the early modern period. The second phase manifested ruthless determination to succeed where the first phase was deemed to have failed. Plantation as a policy began under Mary 1 with the confiscation of two-thirds of Leix and Offaly, the increasingly lawless regions west of the Pale.1 English men were encouraged to settle in Leix and Offaly but were forbidden on pain of forfeiture to sell or lease their land to any of Irish blood or birth. Under Elizabeth 1, however, financial frugality dominated. Like her father before her, Elizabeth was reluctant to undertake an expensive policy of state-funded colonization: it would instead become the enterprize of private speculators and adventurers. Two attempts to colonize parts of Ulster—one by Thomas Smith in 1572 and the other by Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, the year after—failed miserably. Following the fall of the House of Munster an act was passed in 1586 for confiscation of the Earl of Desmond’s estates. Among the New English granted land by the crown was the poet and government official Edmund Spenser.2 In 1580 Spenser had gone to Ireland as secretary to the newly appointed Deputy, Lord Arthur Grey de Wilton. When Grey was recalled, due to the excessive brutality and expense of his Irish policies, Spenser stayed in Ireland and wrote The Faerie Queene. Spenser left when the Munster plantation was overthrown in 1598. Early modern English writings on Ireland frequently display anxieties about gender and use sexual difference as a metaphor for political, ethnic, and religious difference. The demonization of the Irish enemy weaves myths of savagery, including cannibalism, into a matrix of sexual deviance and disease, and transposes this onto the Irish landscape which is figured as menacing. The transition from an uncivilized state to an idealized, subdued condition is imaged as sexual conquest and this movement is evinced in writings by Spenser and his contemporaries. The main chapters of this book explore important ideological concerns at work in The Faerie Queene, concerns that are both reinforced and echoed in a range of early modern English writings on Ireland. As Andrew Hadfield points out “Spenser’s life in Ireland does not mark him out as a particularly unusual Elizabethan writer. There are numerous examples of English writers going to Ireland out of necessity or desire” (Hadfield 1997, 20). Amongst those listed by Hadfield who “were connected to the Elizabethan civil service or military, often both” are Barnaby Rich, John Derricke and John Davies whose opinions on Ireland and the Irish feature in this book. The prose tract A View of the Present State of Ireland (hereafter the View) analyses the parlous state of Ireland and proposes how best to bring it to order Fitzpatrick, Joan. 2000b. Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish and Gender By Spenser and His Contemporaries. Lanham. University Press of America. under English rule. Nicholas Canny has suggested that the opinions expressed in the View are representative of those held by the New English involved in the colonial project in Ireland (Canny 1983, 10-11). It has long been assumed that the View was written by Spenser but recently this has been called into question.3 For our purposes, however, milieu supercedes authorship: whether Spenser or some other English colonist wrote the View is less important than the text itself as an example of early modern English opinion on Ireland. Some time in the winter months of 1598 a New English planter penned an extraordinarily vehement attack against the Old English and Native Irish denouncing their brutality against the New English settlers in Ireland. “The Supplication of the Blood of the English most Lamentably Murdered in Ireland, Cryeng out of the Yearth for Revenge” (hereafter the “Supplication”) was written during the Nine Years War, after the overthrow of the Munster plantation. Although the View was not published until 1633 it was probably written in 1596 and circulating in manuscript before its publication. Presumably the “Supplication” would also have been circulated in manuscript because, like the View, it would have aroused the interest of colonial groups in Ireland as well as associated parties in London. The “Supplication” is anonymous but, given the unclear initials at the end of the manuscript (apparently ‘T. C.’) and peculiarities of style and handwriting, its transcriber, Willy Maley, suggests that it may have been written by Thomas Cartwright, an Elizabethan puritan. Yet as Maley points out, and as with the View, the question of authorship is less important than “the general drift of New English Ideology” that the “Supplication” betrays (Anon. 1995, 10). This ideology is of particular interest to readers of Spenser. If the “Supplication” can be shown to consider the same issues at work in The Faerie Queene then we can perhaps see the degree to which Spenser shares the mind-set of other early modern colonists in Ireland. The author of the “Supplication” speaks with the collective voice of the New English settlers. Like Spenser, T. C. was a resident of Cork who was forced to flee his land and property during the Munster rebellion. Both the “Supplication” and the View advise the queen on how best to deal with the conflict in Ireland during the 1590s and both display what Maley refers to as a barely submerged resentment of Elizabeth couched in frequent protestations of loyalty (Anon. 1995, 8). The View may have been censored because of the severity of opinions expressed in it and although we cannot tell whether the “Supplication” was intended for publication we can assume that had it been offered for immediate publication it would certainly have been considered dangerous material. Maley calls the “Supplication” an early example of “English atrocity literature, rehearsing the myths of massacre which were to turn radical English thought resolutely against the Irish in the 1640s”. As such it disseminated certain “planter myths, cultivated by a dominant minority at crucial historical moments, and intended for popular consumption in England and Ireland” (Anon. 1995, 7). Maley goes on: This is no real mine of information for the social historian, or for the historian of contemporary politics and policies, but rather a rich seam of sources for intellectual and literary historians, eager to reconstruct the mental world of the Elizabethan planter. (Anon. 1995, 10) Fitzpatrick, Joan. 2000b. Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish and Gender By Spenser and His Contemporaries. Lanham. University Press of America. Analysis of the “Supplication” in the context of The Faerie Queene and the View suggests that it is possible to at least partially “reconstruct the mental world of the Elizabethan planter” by identifying the psycho-textual strategies of planter myths. The attitude towards the landscape of Ireland and its inhabitants in the “Supplication” is typical of much of the planter rhetoric during this period in its ambivalence toward the former and hostility toward the latter. In the “Supplication” the land is represented variously as submissive, inherently wicked, bloodthirsty, wounded, and infected. At times T. C. claims that the land itself is malevolent, sometimes its inhabitants are the problem, and sometimes both conspire against the English. Throughout the “Supplication” there are references to the land and the Irish as cursed. The land is also presented as a victim, a passive receptacle for the savage Irish. If the land could be freed of the Irish people, T. C. asserts, “The curse of the one, will vanishe wth the distruction of the other” (Anon. 1995, 72). In the View Irenius tells Eudoxus that it is said of Ireland that no purposes whatsoeuer are mente for her good, will, prosper or take good effecte, which wheather it proceed from the very Genius of the soile, or influence of the starres, or that Allmighty god hathe not yeat Appointed the tyme of her reformacion or that he reserueth her in this vnquiet state still, for some secrete skourge, which shall by her Come vnto England it is harde to be knowen but yeat muche to be feared (Spenser 1949, 43-44) Eudoxus answers that this is superstition and that Ireland’s problems are not the result of any supernatural agency but “proceed rather of the vnsoundnes of the Counsells and plottes, which youe saie haue bynne often tymes laied for her reformacions or of faintnes in followinge and effectinge the same .
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