Abstract
In December 1599, the Jesuit Henry FitzSimmons was imprisoned in Dublin Castle for five years for preaching heresy and spreading sedition. Feared more than virtually anyone else in some important government circles, FitzSimmons was convicted partly on the testimony of one George Taylor. Taylor recalled speeches from November at Mr Blackney’s house, when
The said Henry, having talked of the state of the country, uttered that the rebels had won a great part of the country. ‘No,’ said George [the testifier], ‘I thank God that they have not won any part of the English Pale, though they have wasted a part of it; and I hope in God, the Queen’s Majesty with her force will soon pull them down.’ Said Mr. FitzSimmons, ‘How came the English to the possession of this land?’ The said George answered, ‘By conquest.’ FitzSimmons answered, ‘Every conquest is not lawful.’ The said George said, that soon upon the conquest it was allowed by the clergy, and, as I heard say, confirmed by the Pope, and withal the Lords and chief men of the land did give up their titles and government unto King Henry and Second, and to sundry other kings since. Mr. FitzSimmons said, ‘Well, you see how the Irishry prosper notwithstanding.’ Whereunto the said George answered, Those questions are not good, nor to be reasoned upon. Give them over, for I love not these discourses. So taking my leave departed home.1
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Notes
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal 21 (1978), pp. 475–502, p. 502.
See Nicholas P. Canny, ‘Identity Formation in Ireland: the Emergence of the Anglo-Irish’, in Nicholas P. Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 159–212.
Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and Colony in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660’, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair, eds, The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland and America, 1450–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 45–64, at p. 55.
See also Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997);
Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997, rpt of 1987).
On the terminology, see T. W. Moody, ‘Introduction: Early Modern Ireland’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, eds, A New History of Ireland: Volume III, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. xxxix–lxiii;
Roy Foster, ‘Prologue’, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1988). Contemporary historians of the sixteenth century do not always agree on the nature of the historical relationship between any of these groups of Anglicised Irish;
see, for example, Ciaran Brady and Nicholas Canny, ‘Debate: Spenser’s Irish Crisis; Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present 120 (1988), pp. 203, 212–13.
Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (London: Longmans, 1985), pp. 139–40.
See also Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: the Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, rpt of 1990).
See, for example, Anon., ‘The State of Ireland and Plan for Its Reformation, c. 1515’, State Papers, Vol. II, Henry VIII, Pt. 3. — Correspondence Between the Governments of England and Ireland, 1515–38 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1831), pp. 1–31;
Patrick Finglas, ‘A Breviat of the getting of Ireland and the decaie of the same’, in Walter Harris, ed., Hibernica 2 vols (Dublin, 1747), vol. 2, pp. 39–52.
See D. B. Quinn and Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Ireland in 1534’, in Moody, Martin and Byrne, eds, New History of Ireland, vol. III, pp. 1–38;
Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 21–2.
Nicholas P. Canny, From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland, 1534–1660 (Dublin: Helicon, 1987), p. 41.
Michael Ritcher, ‘The Interpretation of Medieval Irish History’, Irish Historical Studies 24 (1985), pp. 289–98, p. 298.
See John J. Silke, Kinsale: the Spanish Intervention in Ireland at the End of the Elizabethan Wars (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1970);
Co1m Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: the Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), ch. 10.
See Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000).
See also Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966), ch. 1; Foster, Modern Ireland ch. 2.
James Ware, ed., Ancient Irish Histories (Dublin, 1633), p. iii.
See also Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997).
See, for example, M. Perceval-Maxwell, ‘The Ulster Rising of 1641 and the Depositions’, Irish Historical Studies 21 (1978–79), pp. 144–67;
J. A. Froude, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century 3 vols (London: Longmans, 1882), vol. 1, ch. 2;
T. FitzPatrick, The Bloody Bridge and Other Papers relating to the Insurrection of 1641 (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1903);
Mary Hickson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, or the Massacres of 1641–2, their Causes and Results, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1884);
T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Patterns of Ulster History (Belfast: Pretani, 1986);
Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Nicholas P. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Conrad Russell, ‘The British Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Historical Research, 61 (1988), pp. 166–82.
See also Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633–41: a Study in Absolutism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959);
T. O. Ranger, ‘Strafford in Ireland; a Revaluation’, Past and Present, 19 (1961), pp. 26–45.
Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War’, History 73 (1988), pp. 395–415, p. 404.
T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, Past and Present, 127 (1990), pp. 39–83, p. 48
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© 2004 Andrew Hadfield
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Hadfield, A. (2004). English Colonialism and National Identity in Early Modern Ireland. In: Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502703_3
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