Abstract
The body of a text is like the frame of a kingdom. There is always the potential for growth. In the case of a marginal text which addresses the culture at large, this power of expansion is especially pronounced. Having examined in some detail the twists and turns of Spenser’s View, I want now to look at a minor treatise by Francis Bacon which captures in an even more condensed form the tensions and texture of the Irish problem in a British context, or, perhaps more accurately, the British Problem in an Irish context.1 Where Spenser is one of the foremost poets of the period, Bacon is a writer known chiefly for non-fiction, one of the most important essayists and political theorists of the English Renaissance, a figure who straddles disciplines and genres, and who participated in the making of policy. Bacon’s belief in progress and the possibility of change, and the frequent analogies he draws in his writings between the acquisition of knowledge and the politics of empire, conquest and discovery, make his pronouncements on Ireland sharply relevant. His Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland (1609), a short essay of some 4,500 words, has received scant notice either from students of Bacon or historians of early modern Ireland, and yet it is arguably one of the most articulate statements of the politics of plantation in the period.2 Bacon’s Irish treatise appeared on the eve of the Commission of 1609 which was crucial in laying the groundwork for the Ulster Plantation, and anticipated the publication of the Conditions to be observed by the Brittish Undertakers of the Escheated Lands in Ulster (1610).
no man can, by care taking, as the Scripture saith, add a cubit to his stature, in this little model of a man’s body: but in the great frame of kingdoms and commonwealths, it is in the power of princes or estates, to add amplitude and greatness to their kingdoms. (Bacon, ‘Of Plantations’)
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Notes
David Stevenson, ‘The Century of the Three Kingdoms’, in Scotland Revisited, ed. Jenny Wormald (London: Collins & Brown, 1991), pp. 107–18.
All references to Bacon are by volume and page number from James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon, 15 vols. (London, 1857–74);
Spedding (ed.), The Life and Letters of Francis Bacon, 7 vols. (London, 1861–74).
See, for example, Clare Carroll, ‘The Construction of Gender and the Cultural and Political Other in The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland: The Critics, the Context, and the Case of Radigund’, Criticism 32, 2 (1990), pp. 163–92;
Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Course of Justice: Spenser, Ireland and Political Discourse’, Studia Neophilologica 65 (1993), pp. 187–96;
Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland under English Eyes’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1990), pp. 123–34;
Jim Daems, ‘Dividing Conjunctions: Milton’s Observations Upon the Articles of Peace’, Milton Quarterly 33, 2 (May 1999), pp. 51–5;
Christopher Hill, ‘Seventeenth-century English Radicals and Ireland’, in Patrick J. Corish (ed.), Radicals Rebels and Establishments: Historical Studies 15 (Appletree Press: Belfast, 1985), pp. 33–49;
David Loewenstein, ‘“An Ambiguous Monster”: Representing Rebellion in Milton’s Polemics and Paradise Lost’, Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992), pp. 295–315;
Paul Stevens, ‘Spenser and Milton on Ireland: Civility, Exclusion, and the Politics of Wisdom’, Ariel 26, 4 (1995), pp. 151–67;
Denise Albanese, ‘The New Atlantis and the Uses of Utopia’, ELH 57 (1990), pp. 503–28.
F. J. Levy, ‘Francis Bacon and the Style of Politics’, ELR 16 (1986); p. 117.
Sir John Davies, A Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely Subdued, nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England, untill the Beginning of his Majesties happie Raigne (London, 1612);
Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the reign of James I (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 22.
J. Michael Hill, ‘The origins of the Scottish plantations in Ulster to 1625: a reinterpretation’, Journal of British Studies 32 (January 1993), p. 25.
Edmund Campion, Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland (1571), ed. A. F. Vossen (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1963), p. 149.
Robert Dunlop, ‘Sixteenth-century Schemes for the Plantation of Ulster’, Scottish Historical Review 22, 87 (1925), p. 211.
Toby Barnard, ‘Planters and Policies in Cromwellian Ireland’, Past and Present 61 (1973), p. 33.
Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 130–5;
Anthony J. Sheehan, ‘The Overthrow of the Plantation of Munster in October 1598’, The Irish Sword 15, 58 (1982), pp. 11–22.
David Stevenson, ‘Ulster 1641 in the Context of Political Developments in the Three Kingdoms’, in Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising, ed. Brian Mac Cuarta (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast, 1993), p. 94.
Hiram Morgan, ‘The End of Gaelic Ulster: A Thematic Interpretation of Events between 1534 and 1610’, Irish Historical Studies 26, 101 (1988), p. 31.
Hans S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 30.
Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 225, n.20.
Judith Anderson, ‘“But we shall teach the lad another language”: History and Rhetoric in Bacon, Ford, and Donne’, Renaissance Drama n.s. 20, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press and The Turnberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, 1989), p. 171.
Clark Hulse, ‘Spenser, Bacon, and the Myth of Power’, in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, eds Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 338.
Keith G. Robbins, Insular Outsider? ‘British History’ and European Integration: The Stenton Lecture 1989 (Reading: University of Reading, 1990), p. 15.
Cited in Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 195.
Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 166–7.
Ian Box, ‘Politics and Philosophy: Bacon on the Values of War and Peace’, The Seventeenth Century 7, 2 (1992), p. 116.
Robert K. Faulkner, ‘The Empire of Progress: Bacon’s Improvement upon Machiavelli’, Interpretation 20, 1 (1992), pp. 54–60.
See Achsah Guibbory, ‘Imitation and Originality: Cowley and Bacon’s Vision of Progress’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 29, 1 (1989), pp. 99–120.
David Stevenson, ‘The Century of the Three Kingdoms’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland Revisited (London: Collins ST Brown, 1991), p. 107.
Denise Albanese, ‘The New Atlantis and the Uses of Utopia’, ELH 57 (1990), p. 503.
Jenny Wormald, ‘The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Core and Colonies?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6, 2 (1992), p. 180.
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© 2003 Willy Maley
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Maley, W. (2003). ‘Another Britain’? Bacon’s Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland (1606; 1657). In: Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403990471_6
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