A Fragile English Foothold
England had conquered Ireland between 1169 and 1171 and held it on the ground that it might otherwise become a base for France or Spain against England. At Elizabeth's accession the English ruled only the eastern coast, part of the south and the area around Dublin; the rest of the island was governed by clan chiefs who obeyed England in name only. Constant conflict with the English disrupted an Irish society organized along clan lines, a system that bred turbulence and disorder yet had also produced poets, scholars and saints. Much of the country was forest and bog, travel and communication were difficult and dangerous, and some eight hundred thousand Celtic inhabitants, according to the book, lived in deep poverty and insecurity.
The English settlers were nearly as poor as the Irish and made Elizabeth's task harder by their corruption and embezzlement, plundering the English treasury as diligently as they plundered Irish farmers. During her reign they drove Irish landowners and tenants from their holdings, and the Irish answered with violence, so that life for victor and vanquished alike became a contest of force and hatred. Cecil himself admitted that the Irish had better reason to rebel against English rule than the Dutch had against Spain.
Religion and Resistance
Elizabeth's Irish policy rested on the belief that a Catholic Ireland would endanger Protestant England. She ordered Protestantism imposed throughout the island: the Mass was forbidden, monasteries were closed, and worship outside the English zone was stopped. Priests went into hiding and administered the sacraments secretly to small groups. Deprived of religion and of peace, public order collapsed and crime spread. Irish leaders appealed to the popes and to Philip II. Philip hesitated to invade Ireland for fear that England would retaliate by aiding the rebels in the Netherlands, but he founded colleges and refuges in Spain for Irish exiles. In 1560 Pope Pius IV sent an Irish Jesuit named David Wolfe to Ireland. With the courage and devotion typical of his order, Wolfe trained recruits in secret, brought in other Jesuits in disguise, and restored Catholic faith and hope. Encouraged, the clan chiefs rose one after another against English rule.
Shane O'Neill
The most powerful of them was Shane O'Neill of Tyrone, a man for whom the Irish would fight and whose name entered legend. He fought fiercely against his brother for the family title, flouted the moral law yet adorned the Church, foiled every English attempt to capture him, risked his life by traveling to London to win Elizabeth's alliance and support, and returned in triumph to rule Ulster and Tyrone. He waged bitter war on the rival O'Donnell clan, was finally defeated in 1567, and was killed when he took refuge with the MacDonnells, Scottish settlers in Antrim whom he had once attacked.
Deputies and Atrocities
After his death the history of Ireland became a succession of revolts, killings and English lord deputies. Sir Henry Sidney, father of Sir Philip, served nine years in that thankless post; he helped defeat O'Neill and pursued Rory O'More until he was killed, and was finally recalled because his victories cost too much. Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex, became notorious for the massacre on Rathlin Island off the Antrim coast in 1575, where the rebel MacDonnells had sent their women, children, old and sick for safety; after the garrison surrendered, some six hundred of these noncombatants were killed.
The Desmond Rebellion
The greatest revolt of the reign was raised by the Geraldines of Munster. James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, after repeated captures and escapes, went to the Continent, gathered a force of Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Dutch and English Catholic exiles, and landed it on the coast of Kerry in 1579, but was killed in a skirmish with another clan. His cousin Gerald FitzGerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond, carried on the rebellion, while the neighboring Butlers under the Protestant Earl of Ormonde sided with England. Catholics within the English Pale raised a force and defeated the new lord deputy, Arthur, Lord Grey, in 1580. Reinforced, Grey besieged Desmond's main force by land and sea on a headland at Smerwick. Some six hundred survivors, helpless against his artillery, surrendered and begged for mercy, but all were put to death except officers able to promise substantial ransoms.
The English war against the Irish, together with the clans' wars against one another, so devastated Munster that, in an Irish historian's words, neither the lowing of a cow nor the voice of a farmer was heard that year from Dingle to the Rock of Cashel. An Englishman wrote that within six months, besides those executed or slain, thirty thousand people in Munster died of famine. A great English historian observed that Irish lives in that province were taken with appalling indifference. Munster, almost emptied of its people, was divided in 1586 into plantations for English settlers, one of whom was Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene.
Hugh O'Neill and the Nine Years' War
In 1593 the desperate Irish rose again. Hugh O'Donnell, Lord of Tyrconnell, joined Hugh O'Neill, second Earl of Tyrone, and Spain, now openly at war with England, promised help. Between the departure of one lord deputy and the arrival of the next, O'Neill defeated an English army near Armagh, took the Blackwater, a key English fort in the north, and sent forces to renew the revolt in Munster. The English settlers fled, abandoning their plantations. Hope spread through Ireland, and even the English expected Dublin to fall.
In this crisis Elizabeth sent the inexperienced young Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, as her deputy in 1599. She gave him seventeen thousand five hundred soldiers, the largest army England had yet sent to Ireland, with orders to attack O'Neill in Tyrone, make no treaty without her knowledge and consent, and not return without her leave. Arriving in Dublin, Essex wasted the season with only a few skirmishes; disease swept his army and many died. Without her permission he signed a truce with O'Neill, and in September 1599 he returned to England to explain his failure.
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, with courage and skill held back the cunning O'Neill and the bold O'Donnell. Pope Clement VIII had promised forgiveness of sins to all who defended Ireland and the Catholic faith, and a Spanish expedition with troops and arms landed at Kinsale. Mountjoy hurried south and defeated the Spaniards and their allies so decisively that O'Neill submitted, the rebellion collapsed, and an uneasy peace was established by a general pardon in 1603. By then Elizabeth was dead.
A Stain on Her Greatness
Her conduct in Ireland diminishes her greatness. She misjudged the difficulty of subduing a people whose love of country and faith was their only bond with life and dignity. She blamed her deputies for failing, though their failure owed something to her own parsimony: unable to pay their soldiers, they preferred plundering the Irish to fighting them. She wavered between conciliation and terror and never clearly chose either. Although she founded Trinity College, Dublin, in 1591, she left the Irish people as unlettered as before. After an outlay that the book puts at ten million pounds and the final peace, half of that beautiful island lay in ruins, and above all there remained an unspeakable hatred that in later times would bear fruit in bloodshed and plunder.