‘Not Christian,Civil or Human Creatures,But Heathen or Rather Savage and Brute Beasts’: Andrew Trollope and the ‘Reform’ of Ireland in the 1580s

In September 1581, a lengthy thirteen-page letter-tract arrived in London for the English Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham. ¹ Sent from Ireland, the report had been composed by Andrew Trollope, an obscure English-born lawyer who had just recently travelled across the Irish Sea. Trollope almost certainly did not know Walsingham, nor did he have any official reason for contacting him. Rather his motive was to helpfully compile a dossier of what he had seen and heard about in Ireland in the months since his arrival there, the better to inform the Secretary about the country. The resulting report is one of the most curious treatises written on Ireland during the sixteenth century, an intriguing mixture of vitriolic anthropological and cultural observation of the Irish and Old English, overlaid with broad political commentary and a journalistic account of the major rebellions in progress against crown government there. Such was the vituperative language employed by Trollope in this treatise, and a further report which he composed six years later in 1587, that they have been frequently mentioned by historians of Tudor Ireland. ² But to date no detailed assessment of the content of these papers has appeared through which to determine Trollope’s contribution to the debate on English government policy in Elizabethan Ireland. The paper which follows provides such an assessment.

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Andrew Trollope himself was an ephemeral character. What sparse details we can ascertain about him are revealed in his writings from Ireland in the 1580s. He was a lawyer, one whose education and training had consisted of some seventeen years spent consecutively at Eton, Cambridge, the Inns of Court and then the English Chancery. ³ He subsequently entered the employ of the seventeenth earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, around 1568, at which time he was most likely in his early thirties. Trollope’s role in Oxford’s household was as a deputy to the steward of the earl’s manor, Thomas Gent. ⁴ Consequently, Trollope occupied a relatively prominent position among the servants of one of the rising young magnates of the mid-Elizabethan period, one who had been considered for a prominent role in Ireland. ⁵ Trollope left the earl’s employ sometime around 1579 or 1580 and shortly thereafter he made the decision to travel to Ireland, though why he undertook this journey is indeterminable. ⁶ He first appeared in the second Tudor kingdom when he arrived at Dublin on 8 July 1581. ⁷ Trollope seemingly did not voyage to Ireland to take up any office, nor is there evidence to suggest that he acquired an official position there in the years that followed. ⁸ Rather he appears to have travelled widely throughout the country on his own initiative in the 1580s. For instance, his writings demonstrate that he had been to Waterford, Limerick, Ross, much of the Dublin-centred Pale, the midlands counties and Galway. ⁹ Given his legal background, it is unsurprising that Trollope attended the law courts and sessions of assize in some of these towns. ¹⁰ Equally Trollope, who was clearly an ardent Protestant, eagerly observed the religious life of these urban centres. Little else, however, can be ascertained about the wandering lawyer. He appears to have petitioned unsuccessfully to be made a steward of the crown manor of Strade in Mayo in the mid-1580s. ¹¹ It is also evident that he had developed connections with a number of government officials in Dublin during his time in Ireland and was privy to the contents of the letters patent being issued to grantees of land in Munster at the time of the plantation there in 1587. ¹² But why he had decided to travel to Ireland, what he hoped to achieve there and who he might have been affiliated with are all questions with no answers.

Given this dearth of information, it is wholly the case that Trollope’s writings are the most significant contribution which he made to the history of sixteenth-century Ireland. There are five letters extant. The first of these was the aforementioned account of Ireland which he addressed to Walsingham in mid-September 1581 shortly after his arrival in Ireland. ¹³ Then there is complete silence for six years before Trollope resurfaces in October 1587, when he composed four letters in the space of three weeks to the Lord High Treasurer of England, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Three of these are brief, consisting of little more than a page. ¹⁴ But one sent on 26 October, a ten-page document, is of a similar length and style with the extensive letter-tract which Trollope had written to Walsingham six years earlier. ¹⁵ Thus, Trollope’s significance for the history of Elizabethan Ireland lies in the treatise sent to Walsingham in September 1581 (just over 7,000 words in length) and the paper which he sent to Burghley in October 1587 (just over 6,000 words in length). These are letter-tracts in so far as they bear all the hallmarks of a formal, conventional treatise, except Trollope did not give them a title such as a ‘Discourse’, ‘Note’ or ‘View’ or other more formal structural characteristics. ¹⁶ Nevertheless, given their systematic treatment of the Irish problem, they can be considered as treatises or policy papers. As Trollope himself noted, his purpose in writing them was to present ‘such things as I find amiss in this realm and disclose the cause thereof’. ¹⁷ Indeed, when the paper written to Burghley was received in England, it was endorsed by the clerk who filed it as a ‘Discourse touching the government of the Irishry’. ¹⁸ If contemporaries understood such writings to be ‘Discourses’, we should too.

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We might query what Trollope’s motives were for composing his letter-tracts. Officials and other parties in Ireland during the sixteenth century produced treatises for a wide range of reasons, often motivated by a mix of a desire to see certain proposals implemented or to inform the metropolitan government about what was actually occurring in Ireland. But the hundred or so individuals who we know to have written treatises on Ireland between the 1530s and the end of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1603 nearly always had personal reasons for writing, too. Whether seeking an official position of some sort in Ireland or a land grant, the treatise-writer was very much a self-interested figure. A great many were successful and there were many individuals who left court having delivered a policy paper there and returned to Ireland with letters patent for a new position or a pension to prop them up financially. ¹⁹

Unfortunately, there is no clear evidence to indicate what Trollope might have been seeking when he addressed his letter-tracts to Walsingham and Burghley in 1581 and 1587. We can nevertheless assume that he had a motive of some kind. The date of composition of both of his treatises is suggestive. When he composed his first letter-tract in the autumn of 1581, the political and confessional landscape in Ireland was in a period of tumult unrivalled since the Kildare Rebellion of the 1530s. Rebellion suffused with religious overtones had enveloped Munster and the Pale. As such Trollope may well have been writing to the government in England to ingratiate himself as a New Englishman in Ireland who was exemplary in his Protestantism and opposition to these disloyal communities within the country. We can conjecture more still when it comes to the later treatise. In 1587, the Irish administration of John Perrot was finally embarking on the Munster Plantation, while in Connacht the provincial government of Richard Bingham was expanding its activity militarily, judicially and administratively. ²⁰ Was Trollope himself seeking land in the west or the south, a judicial appointment in line with his own legal training, or perhaps trying to rekindle his efforts to obtain a position such as the stewardship of the manor of Strade which he had sought? If he was, the explicit petition to this effect must now be lost. However, in assessing Trollope’s writings, we should bear in mind possible motivations such as these.

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Trollope’s writings were somewhat chaotic. The earlier tract from 1581, for instance, begins as an account of his own arrival in Ireland, before proceeding to relate developments in the revolt of the O’Brynes and O’Tooles of Wicklow against crown government in the summer and autumn of 1581. In the process, he breaks off to consider what he perceives as flaws in the governmental setup in Dublin and wider afield, before further digressing to provide his far from benign views on the Irish of Ireland. It is the latter sections which are the most striking aspect of his treatises. Trollope anatomised the Irish in a highly pejorative socio-anthropological bent. ²¹ Indeed so striking was his analysis of the natives in his paper to Walsingham in 1581 that the document was afforded an entry of over a page in length in the second volume of the original calendars of state papers published during the nineteenth century, an unusually extensive entry in that catalogue. ²² For Trollope, the Irish were irredeemable savages:

at this instant the Irishmen, except in the walled towns, live not Christian, civil or human creatures, but heathen or rather savage and brute beasts, for many of them, as well women as men, go commonly all naked, saving only a lose mantle hanging about them. ²³

He continued in this vein, suggesting that the Irish lords wore only the meanest of shoes and pants, while at night in a lord’s dwelling the members of the household, servants and guests ‘all lie in one little room not so good or handsome as many a hogscote [i.e. a pigsty] in England’. ²⁴ Their main pastimes were ‘murder, burning of houses, theft and mischief’, while they have ‘no occupations or have been brought up to any labour to learn anything’. ²⁵ If they could not find livestock and other foodstuffs to steal, ‘they eat…three leaved grass, which they call shamrocks, and for want thereof carrion and grass in the fields, with such butter as is too loathsome to describe’. ²⁶

Overshadowing all of this was Trollope’s perspective on the religion of the Irish. ²⁷ For him they were not simply to be condemned for any failure to adopt Protestantism. In his mind, the natives of Ireland were not Christians of any kind:

they never serve god or go to any church, and in most places in the country they have neither minister or church, or those which are be decayed [and] never used. They never marry, christen, or bury, but howl over the corpse like dogs. And because they think their selves cannot make noise enough they will many times hire some to howl with them. They have no manner of knowledge of god or his work, or any kind of religion, but in all things show themselves more barbarous and beastlike than any of the infidels. ²⁸

Clearly for Trollope the Irish were completely beyond reform. His depiction of them when writing to Walsingham concluded in the statement that they were ‘worse than dogs…and they degenerate from all manhood, humanity, and all else whatsoever should be in reasonable creatures’. ²⁹ This was doubly lamentable Trollope asserted, echoing an oft repeated trope among New English treatise writers in Tudor times, because Ireland was a bounteous country which could be a great boon to England. ³⁰

In many ways, Trollope’s views of the Irish were simply a distillation of the colonial rhetoric which had been inherited from the fourteenth and fifteenth century and repackaged during the reign of Henry VIII to justify the revitalisation of a policy of conquest in Ireland. The depictions of the Irish as lazy, tyrannous, murderous and anarchic, and the fetishising of their apparel and diet as indications of their savagery, are all tropes which can be found in the earliest Tudor treatises on Ireland written in the 1510s, 1520s and 1530s. ³¹ Views of this kind had entered the London press in the 1540s as Andrew Boorde in his Fyrst boke of the Introduction of knowledge (1548) informed the wider reading public in England that the Irish were ‘slouthfull…untaught and rude…wherefore it is presupposed they lak maners’ which ‘causeth the[m] to be angry and testy wythout a cause’. ³² Trollope may have been influenced by a number of works which appeared in the 1570s, particularly Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. The Irish sections of this singular publication of the Elizabethan age included the first print edition of the twelfth-century historian, geographer and anthropologist, Gerald of Wales, whose Topographia Hibernica (1187) and Expugnatio Hibernica (1189) established the classic tropes of Irish savagery. Gerald’s works have been understood to be highly influential in Tudor times. Trollope would have been among the first Elizabethan writers to potentially have access to it in print. Equally he may have been familiar with the Old English humanist, Richard Stanihurst’s contributions to Holinshed’s compendium, which contained descriptions of Irish cultural practices which were conspicuously similar to Trollope’s. ³³

Yet, there is no doubt that Trollope’s writings also represent a departure from the depiction of the Irish in Stanihurst and other writers of the early and mid-Elizabethan periods. The reader confronts a growing extremism in Trollope’s writings, a sense that, even if it was not explicitly encouraged by him, he felt that the best means to rid England of the ‘cancer’ of Ireland might be to simply dispense with the savages that inhabited it altogether. ³⁴ Perhaps, this was a by-product of Trollope’s own particular experiences of Ireland. When he wrote his letter-tract to Walsingham towards the end of 1581, he had just spent his first six months in an Ireland that was ravaged by war, famine and devastation. It is this treatise which presents his most vitriolic statements about the Irish and it is entirely plausible that his view of the natives of the country was coloured by his observations of them in extremis in the summer and autumn of 1581.

Whatever the specific circumstances of Trollope’s arrival at his judgements of the Irish were, these same views had quickly take on a sinister hew. Noting the hanging of the brother of Phelim O’Toole at Dublin in August 1581, Trollope revealed his tendencies in this regard, exclaiming ‘as I pray god I may see all the rest’. ³⁵ This propensity to view the Irish as disposable in Trollope’s writings presaged by a few years the alarming utilitarianism which was to be advocated for from the late 1580s onwards in Ireland by military captains such as John Merbury, John Dowdall and William Mostyn, and most explicitly by Edmund Spenser. ³⁶ Consequently, Trollope’s writings are an important early indicator of the mounting extremism towards the Irish within certain sections of the New English community in Ireland in the aftermath of the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–83). ³⁷

The wandering lawyer’s compositions were also symptomatic of another attitudinal shift among some of the New English in the 1580s. They displayed a deep antipathy towards the Old English, those descendants of the late medieval English settlers. Actually, at times when writing in 1581 and 1587, Trollope made no effort at all to distinguish between the Irish and the Old English, describing the Old English members of the Irish council as ‘Irish councillors’ and the queen’s attorney for Connacht, Gerard Comerford, as ‘an Irishman’. ³⁸ Generally, his references to these individuals were unfavourable. Comerford was deemed to be a favourer of thieves at the sessions held at Galway in the summer of 1587. Trollope was fearful that ‘the estate of this realm be no better at this day, for here are many Irish councillors and officers and they all…show and will not stick to confess themselves to be Papists’, while ‘the want of performance of the duties of her majesty’s council, being them Irish, hindereth her highness £10,000’. ³⁹ Trollope’s concerns regarding the Old English again largely revolved around their religion, particularly their adherence to Catholicism. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that this ranged towards heathenism. Most striking in this respect was his relation of Christopher Nugent, fifth baron Delvin. ⁴⁰ During his time in Connacht in the summer of 1587, Trollope had heard a report that a few miles from Athlone Delvin had a house ‘wherein are sundry mages and idols, and one of them supposed a gay Mr God with glass eyes, and to the same is great resort and abominable idolatry committed’. ⁴¹ As such, Trollope’s antipathy towards the Old English was nearly as acute as that which he displayed towards the Irish. Yet again here his treatises are indicative of a shift in attitudes among some of the New English. In the years ahead, the Old English were increasingly viewed with suspicion by English-born arrivistes wary of the religion of the Old English, their frequent protests against extraordinary crown taxation and the multiple rebellions engaged in periodically by prominent Old English lords throughout Ireland since the late 1560s. ⁴²

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These prejudiced socio-anthropological explorations of the Irish and the Old English were certainly the most striking feature of Trollope’s treatises. However, his letter-tracts are similarly noteworthy for the accounts they contain of political developments in Ireland during the 1580s. The paper to Walsingham provided an account of the progress of the rebellion occurring in the Pale in the summer and autumn of 1581. Being in Dublin and its environs himself Trollope was in a markedly good position to provide details of the dying stages of the revolt of the O’Byrnes and the O’Tooles of Wicklow in the aftermath of the abortive Baltinglass Rebellion. ⁴³

About the 15th of July aforesaid one Phelim MacToole, which dwelt within eight miles of Dublin and married the sister of Feagh MacHugh, one of the notable traitors, murderers and thieves in all Ireland, was apprehended for victualing the rebels. And his brother gathered together his tenants and followers and killed, burned, robbed and spoiled as many as he could find disposed to be true subjects, and sent word (as I heard say) to my lord deputy to deliver his brother or else he would burn and spoil the country even to Dublin gate, and that if he would pardon him and set his brother at liberty he would come in and be pledge for his brother’s good behaviour, which I think was true, for the 21st of July aforesaid it was so done. ⁴⁴

Yet this was not an end to the disturbances. Just weeks later, Phelim O’Toole and his allies conducted raids further north to within three miles of Dublin, an action which led to O’Toole’s brother being hung. The war quickly petered out thereafter. At the time of Trollope’s writing in September 1581, a pardon was being arranged for the head of the revolt among the Wicklow lords, Feagh MacHugh. Trollope’s hostility towards this particular rebel leader would prove enduring. In his letter-tract to Burghley in 1587, he described Feagh as ‘the only gall of Ireland and a maintenance and encouragement to all the traitors and rebels in the same’. ⁴⁵

Trollope’s account of the rebellion emanating out of the Wicklow Mountains in the summer of 1581 provides an insight into his views on another major policy issue confronting English officials in Ireland by the 1580s. This was the rampant granting of pardons and protections to rebels, a practice of which Trollope was a keen critic. Of this he noted that ‘all men of experience, not causeless, think that pardons, protections and such kinds of pains as have been lately knit up will arear such war as the Irishmen hitherto were never able to make’. ⁴⁶ Trollope argued that the respites offered by these pardons simply provided the Irish involved a period in which to regroup, rearm, bring in their harvest and then re-enter rebellion showing ‘themselves worse and more noisome rebels than ever they were before’. ⁴⁷ Returning to the example of Feagh MacHugh, he noted that the same lord had received or purchased in excess of a dozen such pardons which if they ‘had never been granted they could not have rebelled or murdered many hundreds which sithence they have slain’. ⁴⁸ For Trollope, it was clear that these needed to be discontinued, and his outlook in this respect would be repeated regularly in the years ahead by policy commentators such as Robert Legge, Thomas Lee and Thomas Lovell. ⁴⁹

In stark contrast to his impressions of the situation just south of the Pale in Wicklow, Trollope was highly appreciative of the state of Connacht in his correspondence with Burghley in October 1587. Where the former was ravaged throughout the 1580s by the depredations of Feagh MacHugh, in Connacht owing to Nicholas Malby and Richard Bingham, ‘two most valiant and politick soldiers, prudent, just and upright governors’, the province had been made peaceful and secure. ⁵⁰ Equally the town of Galway, which prior to the establishment of the provincial government of Connacht in 1569 had ‘great traffic into Spain’ and was ‘evil disposed’, was, ever since Edward Fitton’s appointment as the inaugural president of the province there in 1569, become greatly civilised and a centre of godly living in the west of Ireland. ⁵¹

Trollope’s travels throughout Ireland in the 1580s had also brought him through the midlands shires of King’s County (Offaly) and Queen’s County (Laois). The first official Tudor plantation undertaken in Ireland had been stuttering along here as a military colony for thirty years. ⁵² The colony, Trollope believed, had been well established under the viceroy, Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, in the late 1550s and early 1560s, but now was being undermined by the crown military officers stationed there to administer the region. These, he argued, were governing the region poorly and often favoured the Irish over the English settlers. ⁵³ Among these, Captain Warham St Leger, the governor of Queen’s County and lieutenant of the fort of Maryborough since 1584, was identified as the worst offender. ⁵⁴ Trollope’s dislike of St Leger was partly owing to his having ‘married an Irishwoman’, seemingly a reference to the Old Englishwoman, Elizabeth Rothe, whom St Leger was wedded to at some time in the late Elizabethan period. ⁵⁵ The common perception was that St Leger was intentionally keeping his bands undermanned and profiting from the wages himself, a criticism which was almost certainly accurate as this practice was rampant throughout Ireland during the sixteenth century. ⁵⁶

Another plantation which concerned Trollope was that being established in Munster in the mid-1580s. This was the subject of one of the briefer letters which he dispatched to Burghley on 19 October 1587. Here he noted that just a few days earlier at Dublin he had seen a draft version of the letters patent which were to be issued to the undertakers who were receiving estates in the plantation of the southern province. From what he had seen in these, Trollope perceived that the Queen would be at a great charge for years to come to maintain the defence of the new plantation. He also suspected that the lands there would either lie waste or simply be let to Irishmen, though again here Trollope may well have been referring to both the Irish and Old English. As a result, the opportunity to people Munster with Englishmen of sound religion would be lost. Thus, Trollope was an early critic of the Munster Plantation, an initiative which came under growing criticism in the years that followed. ⁵⁷

Trollope was capable of some positivity. In stark contrast to his scornful impression of the Irish and Old English, he was often complimentary of many of his fellow New Englishmen in Ireland, none more so than the former ‘attorney general’ treat as official titles, Thomas Snagge. Born into a prominent Bedfordshire gentry family, Snagge was elected as an MP for the shire in 1571. In 1577, he was appointed to the office of attorney general in Ireland, a position which he held until 1580 before returning to England. He was widely respected as a committed legist and reformer by many high-ranking officials in Ireland and some had considered him to be a likely candidate to succeed William Gerrard in the office of ‘lord chancellor’ treat as official titles of Ireland. That Trollope should have commended him, despite arriving in Ireland a year after Snagge’s own departure from there, attests to the reputation he had acquired. Indeed following his return to England Snagge continued to find favour, eventually serving as speaker of the House of Commons during Elizabeth’s seventh parliament in 1589. ⁵⁸ To Walsingham in 1581 Trollope noted that ‘many yet lament his departure and say it was great pity thereof, for many such men would soon have altered [the] miserable estate of Ireland’. ⁵⁹ Similarly Trollope praised William Russell at whose knighting at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin on 10 September 1581 Trollope was most likely present. ⁶⁰ Successive governors of the western province of Connacht, Edward Fitton, Nicholas Malby and Richard Bingham all met with the lawyer’s approval as firm administrators. An anomaly was the approbation Trollope displayed towards the military captain, Sir William Stanley. No doubt Trollope, as a committed Protestant, would have been appalled by Stanley’s defection to the Spanish and surrender of the town of Deventer in early 1587 while serving in the Low Countries. ⁶¹

Conversely, Trollope was sharply critical of many others occupying government office in Ireland and the corruption that pervaded officialdom there. Of the sheriffs and other county officials he noted that

they generally do much harm, and every of them seeketh gain and none to do good, the cause whereof is that every office is sold for money, or given for favour, but seldom without fleecing, and no one man preferred for his good deserts or ability to execute any office. ⁶²

Such denunciations of sheriffs and the venality which allowed unsuitable characters to buy their positions and then profit from them was becoming a staple in the writings of policy commentators in the 1580s and Trollope simply added to the growing calls by figures such as Edmund Tyrry to address this difficulty. ⁶³ Even the New English of the central administration came in for reproach. Trollope was a critic of capitalize, Adam Loftus, whom he claimed was willing to accept bribes and was abusing the Court of Faculties in Ireland for financial gain. Loftus, Trollope suggested, was ‘a good subject’ but had been forced to engage in such activity to support his extensive family. ⁶⁴ The lawyer was not the last individual to decry the archbishop’s conduct and reports on his misbehaviour abounded from Ireland in the 1590s. ⁶⁵

It was, though, religion above all else which animated Trollope in his two letter-tracts. As noted, religion was central to his assessments of both the Irish and Old English. But Trollope’s reservations did not stop there. He was equally critical of the Church of Ireland. Protestantism was crippled in Ireland in Trollope’s view. To emphasise this, he presented a kind of gazette of religious life in urban Ireland, drawn from his travels throughout the country. At Wexford, he had observed a church where service was being said, but there were no more than six people in attendance. At the nearby town of Ross, he was a witness to the celebration of the Feast of the Annunciation or Lady Day on 25 March 1587, New Year’s Day in Tudor Ireland at the time. This feast, Trollope noted, was much honoured among the Irish, but even so his impression of the religious celebration was far from positive, claiming that it was mostly observed by the women who ‘repaired to church and kneeled or sat near certain graves strewed with rushes, but they all prayed not, for the most prated and some slept’. ⁶⁶ When he attended service at Limerick in August of the same year, he was perturbed to discover that the townspeople did not attend, and the church would effectively have been empty had it not been for the presence of a dozen soldiers from the town garrison being in attendance. ⁶⁷ Waterford was the worst of the places Trollope reported on, as not only did ‘they use not any divine service’, but uttered ‘contemptuous and traitorous speeches’ against the Queen. ⁶⁸ Finally, Dublin was ‘somewhat better than the rest, but nothing dutiful, for the repair to churches there is nothing in respect of the number of inhabitants’. Trollope’s obvious tendency to exaggerate in his criticisms was on display here, claiming that ‘holy matrimony hath been and is [so] little regarded that they are almost all bastards’. ⁶⁹

What had caused this state of affairs? Since the outset of the sixteenth century, treatise writers and policy speculators in Ireland had been pointing towards the decay of the physical infrastructure of the church in Ireland. Trollope concurred, noting that ‘there is no divine service in the country’ as ‘all churches…are clean down, ruinous or in great decay’. ⁷⁰ But the more problematic issue for the lawyer was the inadequacy of the ministers appointed to benefices throughout the country. Of these he exclaimed that he could not ‘find whether the most of them love lewd women, cards, dice or drink best’. ⁷¹ When describing the empty churches he had witnessed at Limerick on Sundays, he noted that perhaps it was just as well that so few attended service as the minister could scarcely read English. ⁷² Others might bring a Latin version of the Book of Common Prayer to services with them, one which was sanctioned by the Elizabethan religious settlement, but which they utilised little in any fashion. Instead, Trollope avowed, they dealt in a form of residual paganism by telling tales about St Patrick ‘or some other saint horrible to be spoken or heard, and intolerable to be suffered’. ⁷³ To compound matters, these unsuitable ministers often held multiple benefices. A particularly egregious example of this pluralism was a minister at Dundalk whom Trollope noted held three benefices and yet was ‘a common table player and alehouse haunter’. ⁷⁴ He had heard report that as a result of his holding multiple livings parishioners in Dundalk often attended service on Sunday only to find that their dissolute minister was absent at one of his other benefices. Nor was this restricted to parish priests and local ministers. In his letter-tract to Walsingham in 1581, Trollope highlighted that this rot emerged from the very top of the Church of Ireland. Here he was critical of Loftus’s corruption and abuses of the Court of Faculties, while of the bishop of Meath, Hugh Brady, he asserted that he was ‘a man of loose life’ and ‘that he kept a harlot in his house’. ⁷⁵ The situation was even worse further afield from the Pale. Trollope suggests that of ‘above thirty bishoprics’ throughout the country there was ‘not seven bishops able to preach’. ⁷⁶ Others were even of questionable adherence to the Protestant faith. To emphasise this point, made in his letter-tract to Burghley in October 1587, Trollope enclosed a copy of a ‘reconciliation’ he had acquired which was the text of a submission the sitting bishop of Limerick, William Casey, had made to Pope Pius IV in 1561, before once again committing himself to the Church of Ireland in the 1570s. ⁷⁷ Thus, there were systemic issues of poverty and physical decay within the church across Ireland, while the blanket weaknesses within the ranks of the ministry throughout the country had retarded the spread of Protestantism. As a consequence, the people had ‘so little instructions…as here is in effect a general revolt from god and true religion, our prince and her highness’ laws’. ⁷⁸ There is no doubting that Trollope believed that the failure of the Protestant faith to gain a strong foothold in Ireland underlay and was the foundation for his perception of the greatly troubled state of Ireland. The question was what could be done to ameliorate this situation to any degree?

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Trollope was primarily a critic of what he observed in Ireland and an extreme one at that. However, he was not without ideas for how to improve the dismal environment in which he purportedly found himself. In both of his letter-tracts, he gave consideration to the issue of appointing a better standard of minister to serve in the highest offices of the Dublin administration. For instance, he suggested it would be best if local positions such as those of county sheriffs were not simply distributed to those who bought them. ⁷⁹ But it was the higher offices within the Dublin administration with which he was most concerned ‘for if the head be not well disposed the feet can never be well guided’. ⁸⁰ Accordingly, he believed that ‘two governors of good life or virtuously disposed would do more good than ten others’. ⁸¹ Elaborating, he stated that an individual of the nature of the former attorney general, Thomas Snagge, should be sent over to serve as the lord chancellor of Ireland, while men of similar abilities ought to be appointed as the chief judges in Dublin. ⁸² Thus, one of Trollope’s principal policy proposals was to reform the upper offices of the Dublin administration and the court system by appointing sufficiently trained individuals from England. This was not novel and had been argued for by many prominent policy speculators throughout the 1570s, including the Lord Deputy Henry Sidney and the Lord Chancellor, William Gerrard. ⁸³

Despite his focus on the neglect of true religion in Ireland, Trollope’s two letter-tracts were markedly bereft of proposals for reform of the Church of Ireland. A proposal that ministers should be brought over from England to occupy livings where unsuitable priests were holding multiple benefices was somewhat exceptional for offering a practical solution to the problem of pluralism. ⁸⁴ Nevertheless, the inference of his criticisms was clear. A much better standard of minister was needed to preach throughout Ireland, though his emphasis on being able to speak English was completely misplaced. Other reformers were wholly aware that ministers who could speak Irish were what was necessary in Ireland, the better to preach to monoglot Irish speakers. Indeed, since the 1560s, some had even been recommending bringing in ministers from Scotland to that end. ⁸⁵ The physical state of churches needed seeing to. Most importantly, in his criticism of the bishops and archbishops, Trollope was clearly suggesting that each diocese and archdiocese in Ireland needed to be overseen by a superior preaching minister.

The perennial problem of the O’Byrnes of Wicklow led by Feagh MacHugh O’Bryne and the threat they posed to the southern periphery of the Pale had featured prominently in both Trollope’s treatises. In 1587, he offered a solution to Burghley. Trollope opined that the O’Byrnes’ country should be surrounded on its periphery by forts and soldiers and that then ‘some special good captain with two-hundred soldiers to enter his country and so inhabit it…for as long as he [Feagh MacHugh] is suffered no good subject in Ireland can live in safety’. ⁸⁶ Trollope, who had seemingly no military experience of any kind, offered if necessary to undertake the leading of such an expedition himself, though noted that it would be best for a martial man to do so. ⁸⁷ This done, the crown would be able to turn its attention to Ulster where he believed the Dublin administration might still be able to utilise Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone, as a means to reduce the province to English rule. ⁸⁸

Another regional issue which Trollope had a solution to was the midlands where he had been critical of the actions of Captain Warham St Leger. Writing to Burghley in 1587, he noted that he had conversed with the inhabitants of King’s County and Queen’s County who ‘wish themselves eased of the soldiers, whatsoever shift they made with the rebels’ as they would ‘rather consume themselves with keeping men of their own which they might rule than be spoiled with the soldiers which triumph over them’. Accordingly, they wished for the Queen to remove the lieutenants of the forts there and the soldiers under their control ‘and allow the gentlemen among them pay for an hundred men’, whereby they ‘would be far better governed’. ⁸⁹ The widespread antipathy towards St Leger in Queen’s County at this time had clearly created a strong movement among the settlers there to allow them organise their own military defence. Just weeks before Trollope’s time of writing in late October, the deputy remembrancer of the exchequer office in Dublin, Robert Legge, had written a treatise entitled ‘Collections of the abuses and disorders in the exchequer’ which also noted that the settlers in Queen’s County had requested to have St Leger removed and that they would provide for their own security. ⁹⁰ Indeed, Legge and Trollope echoed each other in a number of respects in their writings, and it seems likely that they had exchanged policy ideas, though the two individuals certainly seem to have been possessed of vastly different temperaments in their writings. ⁹¹

It was in respect of the more recent Munster Plantation that Trollope put forward his most ambitious proposal. He had been wholly critical of how the scheme was being organised in 1587. At the end of his letter-tract to Burghley, he offered an alternative. ⁹² In his view, it would be best to have extended a plantation policy to all of Ireland. Through this, a survey of the entire country ought to be undertaken, whereby all waste and uninhabited lands could be identified. Then a survey of all of the inhabitants of England could be carried out to identify ‘any mean gents, honest yeomen, artificers, husbandmen, preachers, ministers, schoolmasters, or labourers which might be spared’ so that they might be sent over to inhabit ‘in every waste place of this realm’. ⁹³ By engaging in such widespread plantation throughout the second Tudor kingdom, Ireland could be ‘brought to know god and made religious, and the whole realm as civil and into as good order as England, to the glory of god, honour, safety, quiet and profit of our Josiah and commonwealth’. ⁹⁴ Such was Trollope’s most comprehensive solution to the irreligion, savagery and misgovernment which he claimed to have found almost everywhere in Ireland.

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The writings of Andrew Trollope are symptomatic of many of the changes which were underway within political discourse on Ireland in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Nine Years War. His views on the state of the Church of Ireland; the rampant practice of venality to buy shrievalties and other offices; the corruption among military commanders such as Warham St Leger in the midlands; and the need for a better standard of official to staff the highest ministerial positions in the Dublin administration were increasingly echoed by other treatise writers during the 1580s. That Trollope, a newcomer to Ireland when he composed the first of his two extensive letter-tracts in 1581, should have adopted these views as quickly as he did is instructive in highlighting the widespread discussion of such policy positions within the New English community at this time. However, his two treatises reveal much more besides. In particular, they provide an insight into events in the Pale in 1581 and occurrences in Connacht in the first years of Richard Bingham’s tenure as governor of the province in the mid-1580s. But it is unquestionably Trollope’s assessments of the Irish and the Old English which mark his letter-tracts as significant. Very few English observers of Ireland during the sixteenth century were as vitriolic in their depiction of the alleged savagery, sloth, incivility and ungodliness of the Irish, while his comments on the Old English were also withering. Thus, Trollope’s writings mark a notable shift in New English perceptions of the native communities of Ireland in the aftermath of the Second Desmond Rebellion and the Baltinglass Revolt. As such, while we unfortunately cannot learn much more about this shadowy wandering lawyer and what he was in Ireland for, the limited compositions which he left behind are an important precursor to the writings of individuals such as Edmund Spenser, William Mostyn and John Dowdall who tried to justify the annihilation of large sections of the Irish population in the 1590s.