Abstract
In 1602, Christopher Nugent, Baron Delvin, died a prisoner in Dublin castle. Head of one of the leading Old English families in Ireland, a landed magnate on the marches of the Pale, proud of his English culture and political allegiance, and at home also in the Gaelic literary world (while at Cambridge he composed an Irish grammar for Queen Elizabeth), in the 1590s, he was a leading military figure in the crown’s struggle against Hugh O’Neill. His vast territories in Westmeath were subject to economic and military pressure from Confederate forces. The government suspected Delvin of compromise with O’Neill. Delvin's situation – crown loyalist by heritage, pressurised by O’Neill, and suspected by the Dublin administration – exemplified the plight of the Old English Palesmen during the Nine Years’ War. With exemplary clarity of focus, this book explores their experience during that war. Loyal to the crown by their identity as the English colony in Ireland arising from the twelfth-century conquest, wooed by Hugh O’Neill who needed their support for his revolt, the Palesmen were subject to heavy exactions both by the crown and, when possible, by the Confederates; they were marginalised and distrusted by the Dublin administration in the leadership of the war effort.
The growing political marginalization of the colonial community from the end of aristocratic delegation in 1534 is the subject of a useful historiographical survey, with which the book opens. The major theme of exclusion from crown government, and growing alienation as they noted their displacement by New English outsiders, enunciated here, is a leitmotiv of this study. Thus, the author deftly locates this study of the wartime Old English (in the 1590s) within the broader story of their political displacement in the second half of the sixteenth century. By the early 1590s, she concludes it was reasonable for both Hugh O’Neill and the Dublin government to believe that the Old English were sufficiently alienated as to support the revolt. The succeeding chapters seek to explain the ideological pressures on that community from Hugh O’Neill, their constant yet underrated military contribution to the crown, the social costs of military maintenance, and their resentment at the crown's rejection of their loyalty.
Maintaining a disciplined approach to the narrative, the author marshals the materials in the service of a clear exposition of several major themes. One of these is Hugh O’Neill’s endeavour to gain the adherence of the Palesmen, essential if the Confederates were to achieve the lasting military defeat of the crown in Ireland. This he sought by appealing to their insecurities, communal and individual: growing political marginalization, social displacement, and especially to a shared Catholic identity, increasingly forged in opposition to the denominational imperative of the Tudor state, and building on the militant Catholicism evident in regional revolts earlier in Elizabeth's reign. Canning provides an insightful analysis of O’Neill’s programmatic appeal to the Old English, and its rejection. This she does in part by considering the work of O’Neill's main clerical advocates. In an earlier phase archbishops MacGauran of Armagh, and O’Hely of Tuam, had been instrumental in forging an alliance of the Ulster chieftains, and of initiating contacts with Spain. With the help of a handful of militant clerics in his entourage (the Englishman Francis Mountford, and the Kilkenny-born Jesuit James Archer being the most prominent), O’Neill sought to lobby individual Old English on the basis of an appeal against Elizabeth's heretical regime in Ireland. However, despite intense lobbying in Rome, O’Neill never succeeded in having those Old English excommunicated who refused to become his allies.
Against the administration's oft-repeated assertions of intransigent clerical support in the Pale for O’Neill, the author concludes that little concrete evidence emerges. The majority shared their lordly and gentry patrons’ ancestral antipathy for Gaelic Irish political structures, and in particular their deep suspicion of O’Neill and his motives. Canning adduces the role of the handful of Jesuits active in Ireland from 1596. The Dublin Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon travelled amongst the Pale families, resolutely seeking a firmer adherence to the Roman church, but equally eschewing any endorsement of the Confederate cause. Contrary to what the administration dreaded, and O’Neill hoped for, a reinvigorated Catholicism did not provide the catalyst to overcome ancient ethnic antipathies; a common cause, political and military, did not emerge between the Palesmen and the northern confederates. Prompted by profit, some urban merchants supplied the Confederates with arms. Although some junior figures amongst Old English families sided with O’Neill, the author notes that most landed magnates remained loyal to the crown: these held that their landholding would be more secure under the Crown, than with a Gaelic Irish victory under O’Neill.
The author analyses the Old English participation in the crown's military enterprise. She negotiates the challenge of estimating the numbers of soldiers of this background in the documentary record, given English administrators’ tendency to downplay the native contribution. She demonstrates that this was significant numerically, and as a proportion of all crown forces. In addition to regular hostings under Pale magnates, deployed in defence of the Pale against Confederate attack, Palesmen comprised a high proportion of those forces which were nominally English. Discriminated against in terms of pay and promotion, the Palesmen were indispensable and made a major contribution to the crown's ultimate victory. Constantly disparaged in official reports, the Palesmen as soldiers at all social levels were accused of unreliability; as Catholics, and as Irish-born, their loyalty was always under suspicion.
A particular grievance of the Palesmen was the inordinate stress experienced in supplying lodging and food to crown forces, pressure on their resources that escalated as the war proceeded, and that left the community exhausted at war's end. Apart from those contributions regulated by custom and law, they suffered extortion and corruption in their localities from military figures; further, there was resentment that their traditional local control of the military enterprise was passing to English newcomers. The author offers an analysis of the Palesmen's peaceful response to these impositions, and to their displacement as military defenders of the ancient colony; this response was articulated in a stream of local and individual petitions, and treatises, together with personal lobbying at court by those with means.
This is a well-focused study of the range of pressures experienced by the older colonial community during the Nine Years’ War. The author does justice to the major dimensions of that crucible: ideological challenges to their loyalist identity, posited by O’Neill's appeal to participate in a Catholic crusade against a heretical regime, and the administration's growing questioning of their loyalty; the variety of individual Old English responses to Confederate military pressures on their lands; the major, indeed decisive contribution of the Pale community to the manpower of crown armed forces; the crippling social costs of providing men, food and supplies for those forces; and the growing alienation and resentment at their treatment by the crown's representatives, and their displacement in military and political service by New English of lesser social status than themselves. The author deploys a sophisticated analysis to explore the multifaceted wartime experience of the Old English community. War intensified the marginalization from the crown of this community, in spite of their deep and unwavering loyalism, in the face of the unprecedented demands which that lengthy conflict imposed, and the administration's rejection of their claim to loyalty. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the Nine Years’ War as it impacted socially and militarily on the Pale community, and the challenge that war posed to their identity as the natural defenders of crown rule in Ireland.