Ruth A. Canning, The Old English in Early Modern Ireland: The Palesmen and the Nine Years’ War, 1594–1603. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019. xx + 228 pp. £75.00. ISBN 9781783273270 hardback.

I often wonder what effect the word ‘Ireland’ in a title has on readers who are neither Irish nor professionally involved in the study of early modern Ireland. More than twenty years of studying and working in England inclines me to think that it prompts a yawn. Still more spent living in Ireland makes me think that it is past time to reconsider that reflex. After all, so many of the pitfalls – or pratfalls – of recent British history have their common origin in a refusal to engage with Irish history. Despite the clamour of alarmed voices on this (western) side of the Irish Sea, the Brexit debate in G.B. ignored the very thing – the Irish border – which would, in time, reveal that what Brexiteers had imagined to be a ‘scepter’d isle’ (we might call it the John-of-Gaunt complex) was actually a ‘part of [a] main’ – just not the one they were concentrated on. Priti Patel’s brainwave – that UK negotiators use the threat of food shortages in Ireland to wring concessions on the ‘backstop’ – played very badly in Ireland where memories of the Great Famine remain green. Yet, such is the power of the Great Amnesia that the Tories (whose name comes from the Irish for ‘outlaws’, torraithe) forgot that, in legislating to break international law – but only in the ‘limited and specific way’ that related to Ireland – they would rile the descendants of those (like Joe Biden) who fled hunger in Ireland and now have the power to veto a UK-US free-trade deal. Not everyone forgets the lessons of history.

Ruth Canning’s The Old English in Early Modern Ireland is a salutary act of reminding. It tells the story of a strategic betrayal that would determine the course of Irish – and British – history. But it is also a story with resonances for contemporary debates about the future of the United Kingdom. As Scotland becomes unmoored from the union and as the ‘border down the Irish Sea’ (the direct consequence of the Leavers’ calamitous ignorance of Irish history) at once materialises and further intensifies the threat to a united kingdom, it is instructive to see how loyalists become separatists. The Old English – the ‘englishe Irishe’ – were the descendants of the English, Welsh, and Norman colonists who had settled in Ireland after the Conquest of 1169. Though no English monarch had visited the island since Richard II in 1399, the Old English of the Pale (Dublin and its surrounding counties) remained defiantly loyal. True, they stayed with the old faith after the Reformation but, as Richard Stanihurst, speaking for his bewildered community, pointed out, it wasn’t the Old English who strayed from Englishness: it was their brethren in the metropole who had embraced ‘newfanglednesse’. Even at that, as Canning convincingly shows, the greater part of the ‘English of Ireland’ remained doggedly loyal throughout the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, up to and including the decisive Nine Years War (1594-1603). Yet, even before the defeat of the Irish Confederacy at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, it was clear that there would be a very cold welcome for them in the new colonial order.

Having introduced us to the Old English, Canning’s first chapter examines how the Palesmen’s recusancy prised open the fault-lines between their ethnic and confessional loyalties. The second explores the perils of collusion. The third follows the Old English into war, and the fourth counts the economic cost of the conflict. The final chapter and the epilogue chart the displacement of the Old English by the new men. Canning convincingly argues that, far from the Old English casting off their loyalty to embrace the faith-and-fatherland ideology which Hugh O’Neill so cunningly crafted to seduce them to his Confederacy, it was the New English who ditched them – actively driving loyal Palesmen into reimagining their identity and, in the process, reconfiguring what it meant to be ‘Irish’. (The role of continentally educated advisers in shaping O’Neill’s evolving ideology is another fascinating subplot in this study.)

One of the questions which Canning’s account raises is this: just how masochistic do you have to be to remain a loyalist? Or, put another way, how feckless do Crown representatives have to be before loyalists, realising that ties of affection flow only one way, finally snap? Canning’s meticulously researched work captures just how much of the burden of the Nine Years War was borne by the Old English. They paid for much of the campaigning, advancing loans that would never be repaid. They became the put-upon hosts of a billeted army of conquest. The Earl of Essex’s army, for example, was 19,000-men strong; each man had his ‘boy’; camp followers swelled the numbers further; and horses, too, needed feeding. Garrison conditions were unspeakable and Crown forces avoided them like the plague; indeed, lice infestations and undernourishment – for O’Neill’s men constantly interrupted supply lines – turned forts into hotbeds of plague. Instead, soldiers requisitioned food and lodgings from her Majesty’s unhappy subjects in the Pale. The results, as Maurice Kyffin acknowledged in a letter to Cecil of 1597, were pitiful:

it were lamentable to consider, whether the owtcryes of the soldiors, euery where, for want of pay, or of the country people, extreemely robbed and pillaged by the soldiors, be the more greeveous. Whole countryes, even within the English Pale, be left waste, with owt habitation, or tillage… The Native subiects spoiled, and brought to extreme beggary. No seruice in warre performed. No militare discipline or ciuile Iustice exercised. Briefly the whole kingdome ruined, and forrayed. (126)

It is no accident that the wretchedness which Canning vividly reconstructs chimes so uncannily with the camp scenes in Henry V (1599); after all, what James Shapiro calls Shakespeare’s ‘going-to-war’ play is itself an artefact of the Nine Years War.[1] Meanwhile, the aristocracy and gentry of the Pale were slighted, mistrusted, denied military command, and systematically displaced from the administrative and judicial positions which they had exercised almost continuously since the Anglo-Norman conquest. To their horror and fury, they were replaced by New Englishmen whom they regarded as their social inferiors. For a long time, they limited their dissent to sending (or carrying) complaints and petitions to court. They could not, Canning concludes, ‘see the writing on the wall’ (199). Take, for instance, the loyalist Baron of Delvin: having defended the northern frontier of the Pale throughout the Nine Years War, he died a prisoner in Dublin Castle; his usefulness over, his recusancy suddenly became more visible than a lifetime of service. Only when the writing screamed ‘KEEP OUT’ from every wall were the Old English finally able to read its message. By then, it was too late.

One of the pleasures of The Old English in Early Modern Ireland is its rich assemblage of colourful vignettes and micro-biographies. We eavesdrop on tittle-tattle leaked from Dublin dinner parties. We meet James Sedgrave, ‘a gentleman Cornett’ and ‘an Irish Meath-man of great size and courage’, who served with Sir Ralph Lane against O’Neill’s Confederates at the Battle of Clontibret in 1595. Sedgrave charged O’Neill so fiercely that both were unhorsed. The big Palesmen, ‘having Therle about the neck’, tried to stab him but ‘could not perce him nether with his stafe nor sworde’ – until one of O’Neill’s men severed the arm with which Sedgrave held the Earl in a chokehold, leaving O’Neill to finish off the job ‘with his skeane [dagger]’ (85). But there are also stories left untold. What of the Old English who lived outside the Pale, like the great Munster lords? And what of Paleswomen? (The ‘Palesmen’ of the title is no unmarked, gender-neutral accident.) Above all, where is culture in all of this? This is a story about the painful reformulation of a community’s identity told largely from the State Papers. Richard Stanihurst, the great recorder – and himself a protagonist – of that painful journey is mentioned only once, as a ‘proud Palesmen’ (4). The story of the great project which he and others embarked upon, of writing a complex new Irish identity into being, remains to be told. Nonetheless, the story told here provides an important historical framework for addressing that larger project with renewed energy – while casting a salutary sidelight on the unravellings of the present.

Patricia Palmer

National University of Ireland, Maynooth

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