Making Ireland British

I'm reading the excellent Making Ireland British 1580-1650 by the leading historian in the area, Nicholas Canny, a couple of opinions of offered below:

wonderful work, richly layered and contextualised ... a masterly study and an unmitigated triumph ... a masterpiece of painstaking research ... [a] splendid volume.(History Today)
No other work reveals so much about the transformation of life across the island through the remorseless colonial process that began in Elizabethan times. (Wiliam and Mary Quarterly )

This reading of the heavy tome prompted by a piece by TLS editor Peter Stothard's Severed heads all in a row, where Stothard writes:

Sir Humphrey Gilbert was the half-brother of Sir Walter Ralegh, less glamorous and, in most places, lesser known. Ireland is perhaps the one place where the name of Sir Humphrey still comes with a chill, famed as he was there for decapitating the corpses of rebels against Queen Elizabeth's rule and laying the heads like kerbstones along the path to his tent.
He liked a double row along the path by which Munster men seeking English clemency were forced to tread. The eyes and ears of their fellows would encourage a suitably compliant attitude, in Gibert's view.

Only just now, have I taken the trouble to read the original account of Gilbert's path of heads - from Thomas Churchyard's A General Rehearsal of Warres (1579), cited in a new Oxford edition of Edmund Spenser's letters.
What is striking is not the terror tactic itself but what the editors describe as 'the humanist apology on ethical grounds' by which it was justified.
This was the observation that the dead suffered no more by the decapitation ("the dedde felte no paines by cuttynge of their heddes") and that, following the view of Diogenes the Greek philosopher, their bodies might just as well be laid out 'ad terrorem' or eaten by dogs on a dunghill as decompose in any other way.

The author of The Fairie Queene, who served as a bureaucrat and private secretary in sixteenth century Ireland, included frequent beheadings, dismemberments and slaughters in Books V and VI of his poem - 'a clear residue of Spenser's experience', say the editors.

And from there I took out Canny's book, fortuitously, and a little unusually perhaps for such an academically inclined work, available in the local library.

Edmund Spenser was the principal ideological architect of the aggressive policy towards a cultural whitewashing of Ireland- making it British and, specifically in Spenser's framework of absolute good, English. Spenser's hopes for a change towards this policy were set out obliquely or analogically within The Faerie Queen, and directly in the prose piece View of the Present State of Ireland.

Everything Irish within this mental framework was intrinsically barbaric, uncivilised, and so its redemption could only consist in being Anglicised. And if one refused to submit to what was by definition good, then logically all one was fit for was death. Thus the severed heads.

"Evil could only be overcome through confrontation & continuous action; otherwise, as with the earlier English settlers in Ireland, even persons of the highest rank and best education could be seduced by the evil they had been sent to destroy."(Canny)
Happily as shown in much of The Faerie Queen, given the necessity of civilising through violence, Spenser seems to have found violence aesthetically pleasing, and the poem in large part a glorification of violence when employed in a worthy cause.

Canny writes that "what would have been most shocking within Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland piece would have been the general supposition that everything had to be cast down in Ireland before the perfect commonwealth could be established. This assumption conflicted with every received idea of the duties of government, far beyond even Machivellian principles because Machiavelli in 'The Prince' was offering advice on how order might be restored to a polity that had been destabilised by (improper rule). The propositions being advanced in 'The View' were altogether more fundamental, because they proceeded to detail how an existing sociopolitical order might be destroyed, and another erected in its place."

And so, for example, as a measure of at least Spenser's partial success, Irish people now speak English.

Mr Justice Robert Gardner in the 1590s listing "the diseases of this commonwealth" which alienated potentially loyal people in Ireland from the government, gave particular attention to abuses of martial law( martial law or absolute power, incidentally according to Machiavelli the goal of all ruling nobility), alluded to the "common allowance of head silver to such as bring heads, never knowing or examining whose heads, whether of the best or worst, so no safety for any man to travel."

Sir Henry Wallopp, treasurer and treasurer at war, 1579-99, also briefly joint lord chief justice, and ideological colleague of Spenser's, was by 1584 impressed by the heavy mortality that had fallen on Munster through war and its inevitable shadow of famine, pointed to the consequent need "to repeople it again with a better race and kind of people than the former were."

So here can be clearly seen how on 'humanist' grounds a philosophy of untermenschen can be justified. If someone is less than human then their absence, through the means of severed heads, famine, or whatever, is actually a blessing, and opportunity to accelerate cultural improvement. Spenser, incidentally, like similar ideologues, was the recipient of large estates in Munster, so the ideology wasn't entirely disinterested. Also much of the value of the notion of lebensraum is also perfectly in evidence here; i.e. the most fervent and able supporters of the empire or Reich being made wealthy in foreign lands, thus rewarding and encouraging such subservience of the individual will to the greater will, all the available host British territory already of course carved up.

Queen Elizabeth was, by the way, uneasy with the new level of ideological imperialist zealotry that was formulated by people like Spenser, whether on ethical grounds or the practicalities of government- alienating subjects whose culture you are actively destroying, on the basis that you are 'humanising' them and their land- otherwise in their former or native state they are less than human, unworthy of existence. All linked in people like Spenser's case with notions of man's original fall against which degeneracy you are battling.

Theme continuedhere and here.