Abstract
These lines, inspired by Cicero’s De Officis, were written by the Old English official and some-time servant of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Anothy St Leger, Edward Walshe.1 The occasion of the tract from which they are taken, The Office and duety in fighting for our countrey (1545), was the service of a thousand Irish soldiers, mainly Gaelic kern (foot soldiers), at the siege of Boulogne in 1544 as part of Henry VIII’s army fighting his war against the French.2 Walshe served as a lieutenant in the army and was probably wounded: his book was written under St Leger’s patronage between 1544 and 1545.
Ye though our countrey were in dele so barraign, as that she shulde need the frytes of other realmes and so rude of tonge, therein treatinge of weightie matters we shulde ned the ayde of estraunge languages: yet resteth in her as in the originall and principall a great occasion of thankes and immortall prayses.
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Notes
On St Leger see Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 7.
On Walshe, see D. B. Quinn, ‘Edward Walshe’s The Office and duety in fighting for our countrey (1545)’, Irish Booklore, 3 (1977), pp. 28–31;
D. B. Quinn, ‘Edward Walshe’s “Conjectiures” concerning the State of Ireland (1552)’, Irish Historical Studies 5 (1946–47), pp. 303–22. Walshe cites Cicero as his inspiration in his dedication to St Leger.
See Cicero, De Officis trans. W. Miller (London: Heinemann, 1911), pp. 2, 5, 59–61, passim.
Edward Walshe, The Office and duety in fighting for our countrey (1545).
On the siege, see J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968), pp. 450–1.
See Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: a Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 74–86, 96–7;
David Lindley, ‘Embarrassing Ben: the Masques for Frances Howard’, in A. F. Kinney and D. S. Collins, eds, Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. 248–64.
On Henry’s claim, see Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (London: Longman, 1985), pp. 138–41;
Nicholas P. Canny, From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland, 1534–1660 (Dublin: Helicon, 1987), pp. 41–4.
See Graham Hough, A Preface to ‘The Faerie Queene’ (London: Duckworth, 1962), p. 192;
Liz Curtis, Nothing But the Saine Old Story: the Roots of Anti-Irish Racism (London: Greater London Council, 1984), p. 56.
More generally, see Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
The classic study is Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
See also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), chs 2–3.
See also Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 113–41, on the sexing of language in the Renaissance.
John Bale, The Vocacyon of Johan Bale to the Bishopricke of Ossorie, ed. Peter Happé and John N. King (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Text Society, 1990). All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text.
See Honor McCusker, John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary (Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr University Press, 1942), pp. 15–17;
Jessie W. Harris, John Bale: a Study in the Minor Literature of the Reformation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1940), chs 5–6;
A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London: Fontana, 1986, rev. edn), chs 9–10;
C. S. L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism, 1450–1558 (London: Paladin, 1990), pp. 263–91;
John N. King, English Reformation Literature: the Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), ch. 2.
See Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Art of Fiction: Poetry and Politics in Reformation England’, Leeds Studies in English, 23 (1992), pp. 127–56.
On Bale’s life, see McCusker, John Bale; Harris, John Bale; W. T. Davies, ‘A Bibliography of John Bale’, Proceedings and Papers of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, 5 (1940), pp. 201–79;
L. P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1976); King, English Reformation Literature pp. 56–75, 418–28, passim.
On the Vocacyon see Steven G. Ellis, ‘John Bale, Bishop of Ossory, 1552–3’, Journal of the Butler Society 3, ii (1984), pp. 283–93;
L. P. Fairfield, ‘The Vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography’, Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (1971), pp. 327–40.
A bibliography is provided in Peter Happé, ‘Recent Studies in John Bale’, English Literary History, 17 (1987), pp. 103–13.
On the Second Prayer Book, see Dickens, English Reformation, pp. 339–43; D. H. Pil, The English Reformation, 1529–58 (London: Athlone Press, 1973), pp. 149–56.
On this incident, see Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Edwardian Reformation, 1547–53’, Archivium Hibernicum 24 (1977), pp. 83–9, pp. 84–5;
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘George Browne, First Reformation Archbishop of Dublin, 1536–54’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970), pp. 301–26, pp. 312–13.
See William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Cape, 1963), ch. 2;
David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 2nd edn), p. 38.
See Rainer Pineas, ‘William Tyndale’s Influence on John Bale’s Polemical Use of History’, Archiv fur reformationsegeschichte, 53 (1962), pp. 79–96;
Margaret Aston, ‘John Wycliff s Reformation Reputation’, Past and Present, 30 (1965), pp. 24–6.
More generally, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. 2, passim;
W. Cargill-Thompson, ‘Martin Luther and the “Two Kingdoms”’, in David Thompson, ed., Political Ideas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 34–52.
Bale’s history of British literature, Scriptorium Mains Brytanniae… Catalogus (1557), was written in Latin. On Bale’s scholarship, see McCusker, John Bale; Fairfield, John Bale; King, English Reformation Literature ch. 4.
On the constitutional changes inaugurated by Henry VIII, see Franklin Le Van Baumer, The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940);
Geoffrey Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (London: Arnold, 1984, rpt of 1977), ch. 8.
See T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950);
F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library Publications, 1967), ch. 4.
For a recent analysis of the Arthurian legends as a means of justifying an English right to Ireland, see Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 7.
Rainer Pineas, ‘Some Polemical Techniques in the Nondramatic Works of John Bale’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance, 24 (1962), pp. 583–8.
Ellis, ‘John Bale’, p. 289. See also ‘Crown, Community and Government in the English Territories, 1450–1575’, History, 71 (1986), pp. 187–204.
Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
See also Barnaby Rich, A Catholicke Conference between Syr Tady MacMareall a popish priest of Waterforde, and patrieke Plaine a young student in Trinity College in Ireland (1612).
On ‘coyne and livery’, see Ellis, Tudor Ireland, p. 28; David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 52.
On hybridity, see Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28 (1984), pp. 125–33.
Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660’, in K. R. Andrews et al. eds, The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 45–64, at p. 55.
Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), pp. 145–7.
See Ciaran Brady, ‘Court, Castle and Country: the Framework of Government in Tudor Ireland’, in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, eds, Natives and Newcomers: the Making of Irish Colonial Society (Bungay, Suffolk: Irish Academic Press, 1986), pp. 24–49.
See also Geoffrey Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953);
Christopher Coward and David Starkey, eds, Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 46.
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal 21 (1978), pp. 475–502, p. 502. The impact of the Reformation has been one of the most keenly debated subjects among modern Irish historians of the sixteenth century.
See Alan Ford, ‘The Protestant Reformation’, in Brady and Gillespie, eds, Natives and Newcomers: the Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999, rev. edn), pp. 50–74;
Nicholas P. Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: une question mal posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), pp. 423–50;
Nicholas P. Canny, ‘Protestants, Planters and Apartheid in Early Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 25 (1986–87), pp. 105–15;
Karl Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the Reformation in Ireland: une question bien posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), pp. 196–207;
Steven G. Ellis, ‘Economic Problems of the Church: Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 41 (1990), pp. 239–65.
See Art Cosgrove, Late Medieval Ireland, 1370–1541 (Dublin: Helicon, 1981), ch. 7.
A. F. Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 20.
‘To Doctor Bale’, in Barnaby Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1989), pp. 84–5.
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© 2004 Andrew Hadfield
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Hadfield, A. (2004). Translating the Reformation: John Bale’s Irish Vocacyon. In: Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502703_6
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