CONQUEST, CIVILIZATION, COLONIZATION: IRELAND, 1540–1660

Jane Ohlmeyer

Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ireland was conquered and colonized. Contemporary observers acknowledged the effectiveness of England's efforts. An early seventeenth-century Ulster poet, Fear Flatha Ó Gnímh, whose family had served as hereditary poets to the O'Neills, wrote a lament ("Pitiful are the Gaels"), which described Ireland as "a new England in all but name." An anonymous pamphlet, dating from 1652 and presumably written by an English parliamentarian, noted how "we have fought to make Ireland English." This chapter explores how, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, Ireland was conquered, "civilized," colonized, and commercialized. The military, political, economic, religious, social, and cultural initiatives that underpinned these overlapping and interconnected processes began in the 1540s with the passage of the Kingship Act (1541) and a series of surrender and regrant agreements. Thanks to an aggressive policy of plantation, these processes gained momentum during the early decades of the seventeenth century. With the completion of the Cromwellian reconquest and the mid-century revolution in landholding, a new order founded on English legal, administrative, political, landed, and economic structures, the English language, and English culture had become established. Out of this period of profound transition emerged the Protestant Ascendancy and, eventually, the modern Irish state. This was not a linear progression, nor was the outcome predestined. On the contrary, what this chapter highlights is the haphazard, messy, and clumsy nature of the processes surrounding state formation and the very real limitations on central power.

The passage of the Kingship Act in 1541 transformed Ireland's status from a patchwork of feudal lordships to an imperial kingdom. This "constitutional revolution" redefined relations between the English king and his subjects, especially those of Irish provenance who were now accorded the same rights as those of English origin. Though Ireland was a kingdom in name the crown treated it, for much of this period, as a colony whose interests were consistently subverted by those of England. Fear of foreign invasion and concerns about domestic security drove English imperialism in Ireland, as did the determination to populate the island with English, Welsh, and Scottish settlers. Alongside this ran the desire to civilize and anglicize the Irish. Just as Ireland's constitutional status proved fraught with tensions and contradictions, so too were the policies of those who ruled the country. They ranged from some that favored the annihilation of the native people followed by the wholesale colonization of the island to others that promoted the assimilation of the resident population to the culture and religion of the metropole and the introduction of English political, legal, and economic processes. Whether aggressively pursued or not, there was nothing new in these calls for the civilization of Ireland, which dated back to the twelfth century. What distinguished the early modern state from its medieval predecessor was its ability to drive forward an imperial agenda in Ireland in a way not hitherto possible.

James VI and I, who acceded to the throne of the three kingdoms in 1603, needed to capitalize on Elizabeth I's hard-won victory over the earl of Tyrone and his followers at the end of the Nine Years' War. To achieve this, the king sought to reform his unruly subjects, to tame the overmighty lords, to replace "thuggery and feuding" with "law and order," and to channel labor into production rather than destruction. He aimed to establish — at the national, provincial, and local levels — political, administrative, and legal control over all elements of Irish society. Closely linked to this was the determination to secure, wherever possible, religious conformity with the Church of Ireland. Alongside political subjugation and conversion to Protestantism stood cultural assimilation and the need to reform "uncivil" natives and to anglicize their "barbarous" customs, practices, and culture. Finally, the king wanted full control over Irish land. A combination of reform initiatives in the 1540s, 1570s, and 1580s together with official plantation and unregulated colonization transformed the legal basis on which land was held in Ireland and allowed the state to reconfigure Ireland's economic and tenurial infrastructure in accordance with English commercial and improving models, patterns of landowning, and inheritance practices (namely, primogeniture and entail).

The burden of implementing these imperial policies in Ireland fell to the chief governors, government officials, Church of Ireland clergy, and lawyers. The crown also created a "service nobility" or colonial hierarchy loosely modeled on the English aristocracy, akin to what the Habsburgs achieved in Bohemia and Lower Austria after 1620. The Tudor peerage was small and had remained relatively stable for generations with dynasties of Anglo-Norman provenance predominating. During the first three decades of the seventeenth century, the crown embarked on an unprecedented experiment in social engineering. Two hundred and fifty-eight new Irish knighthoods were bestowed, "of which just under a third was awarded to men of Old English or Irish name." Between 1603 and 1640, the resident Irish aristocracy more than doubled, from twenty-nine peers to sixty-nine. The number of Protestant peers increased tenfold over the same period, from three to more than thirty-six. Thus the crown created a new generation of ambitious and avaricious peers, usually Protestant and largely of English and, to a lesser extent, Scottish extraction, who were determined to make their fortunes in Ireland and to secure public reward and social recognition. These "new" lords joined ranks with established ones to form a composite...