Ireland under the Tudors, with a Succinct Account of the Earlier History. Vol. 2 (of 3)

Remedies proposed

The remedies proposed were that the churches should be repaired out of the profits of the land, either by the Crown or by the tenants as equity might dictate, that Irish-speaking ministers should be sought at the universities or borrowed from the Regent of Scotland, and that some of the English bishops should be forced to visit Ireland, with their own eyes and at their own expense to see the spiritual nakedness of the land, and to prescribe a cure. ‘They be rich enough,’ he added, ‘and if either they be thankful to your Majesty for the immense bounty done to them, or zealous to increase the Christian flock, they will not refuse this honourable and religious travel; and I will undertake their guiding and guarding honourably and safely from place to place; the great desire that I have to have such from thence is for that I hope to find them not only grave in judgment, but void of affection.’³²³

Expenses of government

After his return from Connaught, Sidney busied himself with the revenue and general administration. He did not conceal from himself that for every penny of rent she received it cost the Queen a shilling to hold her own. ‘Yet,’ he said, ‘I will never consent that the country should be abandoned in any sort, for held it shall be; but only hereby to note unto you by the way, what a dear purchase this is and hath been to the Crown; and, by the example of this, you may judge of the rest that are of this nature.’ Sir William Drury, the new President of Munster, and William Gerrard, the new Chancellor, were promised in April but did not come till Midsummer, and in the meantime ‘the southern like the dog, the northern like the hog, mentioned in the holy book, were ready to revolt to their innate and corrupt vilety.’³²⁴

O’Rourke, O’Donnell, O’Connor. Sligo. Sidney counts the heads of enemies

O’Rourke, whom Sidney notes as the proudest man he ever saw in Ireland, came to Dublin and produced a patent of Henry VIII. which proved genuine. 20l. Irish was the rent reserved, but Sidney held out for 200l. sterling, and O’Rourke agreed to submit his cause to commissioners. O’Donnell also agreed to pay the 200 marks or 300 beeves which he had long since promised, asking only time for arrears. Sidney inquired into the very old dispute as to the tenure by which O’Connor held Sligo. O’Donnell said that 300 marks sterling had been paid to him and his ancestors since St. Patrick’s time. This was dismissed as fabulous, but a prescription of some generations was shown, while O’Connor convinced Sidney that the payment had never been made without violence, offering to give 100 marks a year to be quit of O’Donnell and to receive a sheriff peaceably, a ‘foreigner’ being preferred to an inhabitant of the country. Many other chiefs came to Dublin, and were ready to pay some yearly sum ‘all for justice; it is to be rejoiced that they so do, but more to be lamented that they have it not near to them.’ The Lord Deputy thought it very hard that he should have to do his own work and that of the President also; and, indeed, his post was no sinecure, for during the nine months that he had been in Ireland 400 men had been executed ‘by commission ordinary and extraordinary, and by slaughter in defence of the poor husbandmen.’³²⁵

Fresh troubles with Clanricarde’s sons

The delay in appointing a President for Connaught, and the impossibility of the Viceroy being in two places at once, soon restored their courage to the Earl of Clanricarde’s sons. Such English officers as were in Connaught Fitton described as mean men, and as meek as mice to the Earl and his sons, and yet mean as they were too much for the young men. They suddenly crossed the Shannon, and cast off their English clothes with the remark, ‘Lie there for one year at least.’ The old Earl wrote to say that he would prevent them doing harm till he heard from the Deputy, to whom he scarcely offered any excuse. Writing to Ormonde and Lord Upper Ossory, he said that the 6,000l. which the rebuilding of Athenry would cost was too much for his country to bear, and that he himself could not raise 500l. The young men, paying but little attention to promises made in their names, destroyed the few houses which had been restored in the ill-fated town, killed or dispersed the labourers, burned the new gate, and sought for the stone with the royal arms, that they might break it, swearing that no such stone should stand in any wall there. Fearing for the safety of Galway, Sidney prepared to chastise the rebels in person.³²⁶

Sidney and Clanricarde

The Lord Deputy only received the news on Tuesday, and on Friday he was at Athlone with a few officers; the bulk of his forces following as they could. Clanricarde came in on protection, which was granted unwillingly, and surrendered Loughreagh as a material guarantee. Kneeling at Sidney’s feet, the Earl besought pardon for himself and his sons, still maintaining that excessive taxation was the only cause of the rebellion. The Deputy sternly reminded him that the county had agreed to the rates imposed, and gave him leave to depart unscathed within three days. This was on Friday, and on the following Sunday Clanricarde came into the parish church and made submission on his knees, confessing the treason of his sons, and submitting himself and his cause to her Majesty’s pleasure. Sidney professed himself glad to gain an Earl and his castles instead of ‘two beggarly bastard boys,’ but tacitly admitted their power to annoy by pressing once more for a President. ‘Without a sufficient man in that office,’ he said, ‘I shall but trindle Sisyphus’ stone and bring it to the brim of the bank, and then forced to turn both head and hand, and so haply break either back or neck, but that is the least matter. In the meantime the Queen shall lose both honour and treasure, and her people lack both distribution of justice among them, surety of their lives, and saving of their goods.’³²⁷

Sir William Drury, President of Munster, 1576. Sidney in Connaught

Having secured Galway and Athlone, Sidney went to Limerick, where he settled Sir William Drury in his presidency. Drury was a native of Suffolk, who had served England well by sea and land, at home and abroad. He had been Governor of Berwick, and had superintended the siege of Edinburgh Castle, where, in spite of Grange’s chivalry and Maitland’s guile, that last fortress of a falling cause had surrendered to Queen Elizabeth’s ally. He was now to try what skill and courage could effect in the service which had been, and was to be, fatal to the fortunes of so many eminent Englishmen. Meanwhile the young Burkes – the MacIarlas as they were called – held the open country with 2,000 Scots, besides their usual rabble. Captains Collier and Strange were besieged in Loughreagh, but Sidney thought the place practically impregnable by such a force, and prepared at his leisure to strike a well-aimed blow. Early in September he entered Connaught again, accompanied by Maltby, who had been appointed military Governor of the province, by a number of Ormonde’s men under the command of Edward Butler, and by his own son Philip, whose ‘sufficiency, honesty, virtue, and zeal’ made him remarkable even in his twenty-second year. Maltby and Butler chased John Burke and his rabble up and down the country, but could never come up with them. On Sidney drawing towards the borders of Mayo, the Scots, fearing to have their retreat cut off, fled precipitately into Ulster. All the English officers were agreed that the state of Connaught was owing to the lawlessness and ambition of the Earl and his sons – ‘two cursed young men’ – who would brook no superior. The people would gladly be rid of their tyranny, but had been taught by experience that great culprits generally escaped justice, and returned to plague those who had ventured to withstand them. No help, though much passive sympathy, could, therefore, be hoped for by viceroy or provincial governor.³²⁸

Proceeding of Drury

Sir William Drury found plenty to do in his new government, though the county was free from any great disturbance. At Cork assizes forty-two persons were hanged, and one pressed to death; a chief of the MacSwiney gallowglasses, who had displayed a banner while driving cattle from under the walls of Cork, being among the sufferers. In derision the same banner was borne before the culprit to the place of execution. Nearly as many more were despatched at Limerick, the President’s object being to strike down the local ringleaders as much as possible. ‘They ride,’ he said, ‘all one horse, and the head of the salmon is worth a many small fishes.’ Like every other English governor, Drury complained of the number of idle men retained by territorial magnates. All he could do was to procure that registers should be kept, showing on whom each kerne or gallowglass was dependent, thus making the gentlemen responsible.³²⁹

Essex goes to England,

After the massacre of Rathlin, Essex determined to lead a private life. No place near Dublin was free from the prevailing infection, and he withdrew to Waterford to wait upon events.

He had half ruined himself and had failed entirely to do what he had proposed. ‘I have wasted no hour in Ireland,’ he told the Queen, ‘why should I wear out my youth in an obscure place without assurance of your good opinion, and should but increase the light of another man’s sun, and sit in the shadow myself?.. I am no way carried with inconstancy, but loth to drown my service without certainty of friends and good opinion.’

where he offends the Queen,

but she soon relents

In this temper he asked for leave to visit England. It was granted, and at the end of October 1575 he landed near his own house at Lanfey in Pembrokeshire. Even during the passage his ill-fortune pursued him. Vessels carrying his servants and baggage were dispersed by a storm, and the rough weather told upon his enfeebled frame. He was accompanied by Maltby, who was for the moment unemployed, and who thoroughly sympathised with him; but his health was so bad that Walsingham cautioned him not to travel too fast towards London. When he did arrive there he had still to complain of neglect, and of the expense to which he was put in dancing attendance on Queen and Ministers. Burghley found it necessary to ‘humiliate the style’ of the Earl’s letters before showing them to her Majesty, and he then wrote in a more submissive strain. It was this, probably, which elicited from the Queen one of those letters with which she well knew how to whistle back her disgusted servants. She congratulated him on his perfect conquest over his passions, which she attributed to the lessons of patience learned in the Irish service. ‘And though,’ she said, ‘you may think that it has been a dear conquest unto you in respect of the great care of mind, toil of body, and the intolerable charges you have sustained to the consumption of some good portion of your patrimony, yet if the great reputation you have gained be weighed in the balance of just value, or tried at the touchstone of true desert, it shall then appear that neither your mind’s care, your body’s toil, nor purse’s charge was unprofitably employed; for by the decay of those things that are subject to corruption and mortality you have, as it were, invested yourself with immortal renown, the true mark that every honourable mind ought to shoot at… We think your demands made upon us were grounded both upon the respect of your own benefit and of our service, interpreting as we do the word benefit not to import that servile gain that base-minded men hunt after, but a desire to live in action and to make proof of your virtue; and being made of the metal you are, not unprofitably or rather reproachfully to fester in the delights of English Egypt, when the most part of those that are bred in that soil take great delight in holding their noses over the beef-pots.’³³⁰

Return and death of Essex

In the end Essex received a grant of the barony of Farney in Monaghan, of the peninsula called Island Magee in Antrim, and of the office of Earl Marshal in Ireland for life. Having made his will and such other arrangements as were possible for the settlement of his estate, he returned to Ireland after an absence of about nine months. The leading of 300 men for which he had asked, and which Sidney recommended, would probably have been granted had not death cut his career short. He reached Dublin on July 23, 1576, and on August 30 was attacked by dysentery, which carried him off in three weeks.

His character

In his lifetime Essex did many things which history must condemn, though he seems not in any way to have accused himself. On his deathbed he showed himself a hero, if patience under suffering and faith without worldly hope are to be considered heroic attributes. Two days before his death he wrote to Elizabeth, besought her forgiveness for any offence he might have given, and begged her to be a mother to his children. He reminded her that his son would be poor through his debts to the Crown, and that she would be no loser by remitting them, since the minor’s wardship would amount to as much or more. In another letter he recommended his son to the care of Burghley and Sussex, ‘to the end that he might frame himself to the example of my Lord of Sussex in all the actions of his life, tending either to the wars, or to the institution of a noble man, so he might also reverence your lordship for your wisdom and gravity, and lay up your counsels and advice in the treasury of his heart.’ He sent his love to Philip Sidney, ‘and wished him so well that if God do move both their hearts, I wish that he might match with my daughter. I call him son; he so wise, so virtuous, and godly; and if he go on in the course he hath begun, he will be as famous and worthy a gentleman as ever England bred.’ As regards Sidney he spoke prophetically, and it is but reasonable to suppose that had Penelope Devereux become his wife she would have been the glory instead of the scandal of her age. With almost his last words he sang a hymn which he had composed, and at the end ‘he strove to praise even when his voice could not be heard.’ When it failed altogether, Mr. Waterhouse – his faithful friend always – ‘holding him by the hands, bade him give a sign if he understood the prayers, and at the name of Jesus he held up both his hands, and with that fell asleep in Christ as meekly as a lamb.’³³¹

Leicester’s conduct to Essex

The Jesuit Parsons accused Leicester of poisoning Essex, and he was probably not incapable of such a deed. The charge was made at the time, but Sidney’s contemporary account fully disposes of what he calls ‘a false and malicious brute,’ and the accusation was not made by any of those who were about the sick bed, nor was it believed by the dying man himself. But if Leicester is to be acquitted of poisoning the man whose widow he married, it is not so easy to clear him of having gained her affections clandestinely while using his political influence to keep her husband at a distance. In one letter Leicester hints that Essex does not expose his own person enough, and speaks somewhat slightingly of his abilities; nevertheless, he was angry with Sidney for not doing more to facilitate his return to Ireland. On the other hand, it would appear that Essex was on friendly terms with Leicester. What seems really clear is that Essex did not care much for his wife. His will contains no loving mention of her, and his last letter to the Queen speaks of the burden which dowries would lay upon his son’s inheritance. On his deathbed he spoke much of his daughters, lamenting the time which ‘is so frail and ungodly, considering the frailness of woman.’ While asking Elizabeth to be a mother to his son, he abstained from saying a word about that son’s natural mother. And it is evident that he cared little for his wife’s society; for after the failure of his great enterprise he was ready to live ‘altogether private in a corner of Ulster,’ rather than return home. The facts seem to exonerate Leicester from the charge of poisoning, but tally very well with the common report that he kept the Earl in Ireland while he made love to the Countess.³³²

Agitation against the cess

The truth hard to discover

The Queen continually upbraided Sidney with the expense of his government. He, on the contrary, maintained that there was no waste, and that the cost of supporting an army, without which government was impossible, grew greater every day. There had been a rise in prices unaccompanied by any increase in revenue, and the soldier found it hard to live without being burdensome to the country. The gentlemen of the Pale now took the high ground that no tax could be imposed except by Parliament or a Grand Council, though the cess was a customary payment, which in one form or another had been exacted since Henry IV.’s time. Sidney stood upon the prerogative, in this case strengthened by custom, ‘and not limited by Magna Charta, nor found in Littleton’s Tenures, nor written in the Book of Assizes, but registered in the remembrance of her Majesty’s Exchequer, and remaining in the Rolls of Records of the Tower, as her Majesty’s treasure.’ It was this Elizabethan way of looking at things that brought Charles I. to the scaffold, but in Sidney’s time no one thought such language strange. The theory that there should be no taxation without consent of Parliament was beginning to be advanced, but few were as yet so bold as openly to propose limits to the royal power. The efficiency of ill-paid soldiers is generally small, and many landlords said they could defend themselves better and more cheaply. The Lords of the Pale were usually called to the Council Board, and had ample opportunities of protesting against the cess. They admitted that it had been regularly imposed for thirty years for victualling the army, and more lately for the viceregal household. The old ‘Queen’s prices’ were not far from the real value, but they had crystallised into fixed rates, while the market had steadily risen, and was now about 150 per cent. higher. No doubt it was difficult to assess payments in kind. ‘The country,’ said Lord Chancellor Gerard, ‘set down notes falsifying the victuallers’ proportion. Because they varied in the weight of every beef and the number of loaves which every peck of corn would make, I played the butcher and baker on several market days, and weighed of the best, meanest, and worst sort of beeves, and also weighed the peck of corn and received the same by weight in loaves, containing the weight of 3 lbs. every loaf of bread; and found the same neither too weighty as the country set down, nor too light as the victuallers allege,’ &c.

The country, he said, paid a penny where the Queen paid a shilling. ‘The gentlemen,’ he adds significantly, ‘by their own confession, never lived so civilly and able in diet, clothing, and household, as at this day; marry! the poor churl never so beggarly.’³³³

The Pale sends counsel to London

The Lords of the Pale, however, sent three lawyers to London to plead their cause, and in the meantime refused to commit themselves by arguing. The advocates selected were men of family, and thoroughly acquainted with their views, but not agreeable to Sidney. Barnaby Scurlock he allowed to be a man of credit and influence, but he had lately indulged in ‘undecent and undutiful speech;’ he had made a fortune as Attorney-General, but Sussex had dismissed him for negligence. Richard Netterville was a seditious, mutinous person, who sowed discord and promoted causes against the Government – in fact, an agitator ‘who had bred more unquiet and discontent among the people than any one man had done in Ireland these many years.’ As to Henry Burnell, Recorder of Dublin, whom Fitzwilliam had formerly described as one of the best spoken and most learned men in Ireland, but a perverse Papist, Sidney could only wish he would mind his practice at the Bar, which had made him rich, and not meddle with her Majesty’s prerogative. He was, he says, ‘the least unhonest of the three, and yet he trusted to see the English Government withdrawn.’³³⁴

Sidney’s criticisms

Sidney’s high prerogative doctrines somewhat warped his mind. He condescended to say that Netterville was ‘son of a second and mean Justice of one of the benches;’ as if that could possibly prejudice his advocacy. He praised the Chancellor for acting as a partisan, though no doubt he was fair enough about prices. ‘He hath in public places both learnedly, discreetly, wisely, and stoutly dealt in the matter of cess, and rather like a counsellor at the bar than a judge on the bench.’ After all this is very doubtful praise, though Gerard was not acting in his judicial capacity.³³⁵

True bill against the cess

Before their emissaries started for England, the gentlemen of the Pale procured a bill to be brought before a Meath grand jury, of which the first clause contains these words: ‘We find Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of her Majesty’s realm of Ireland, Sir Lucas Dillon, &c. (all the council), … gave commission to Thomas Cusack of Gerardiston, sheriff of Meath, to charge … cess … corn, beef, butter, &c., and carts and carriages … 1,800l. or thereabouts … said sheriff has levied… Sir Robert Tressilian, Chief Justice of England, was put to death for misconstruing the laws in Richard’s time.’ Further clauses indict the inferior ministers occupied about the cess. By advice of the presiding judge, the charge against the officers of State was erased, but the rest of the Bill was presented and justified, and Burnell said openly in the Court of Star Chamber that he would have carried the case through, but that it would have delayed his journey to England.³³⁶

Nature of the tax

The details of the question at issue between Sidney and the Lords of the Pale are extremely obscure, and for a variety of reasons. Thus, when they complained that the exaction amounted to 9l. per ploughland, he offered to take 3l. 6s. 8d., but they refused, ostensibly from unwillingness to burden their heirs. One explanation is that the ploughland was a very uncertain measure, though generally reckoned at 120 Irish acres, and that the acreage had always been very much understated. It was feared that Sidney would measure the land more carefully and reduce the ploughlands to a uniform size, thus extracting much more money than might be supposed from his apparently liberal offer. Many lands had been exempted by favour or custom, and such exemptions tended to multiply; it was feared that Sidney might extinguish them. Grass lands had perhaps not been taxed at all, for Sidney only allowed 700 ploughlands in Meath, Westmeath, Kildare, and Dublin. The surface of those counties, without including Wicklow, contains nearly 11,000 ploughlands of 120 Irish acres each. On inquiry, Sidney found that the charge at existing prices came nearly to 8l. a ploughland, ‘for ease of which, by making the burden to be borne more universally, I by proclamation dissolved all freedoms that had not had their continuance time out of memory of man, whereof there were many, the most by a statute pretending thereby an increase of military men, which God knoweth, and I, are of little worth, … the statute is expired.’ Many repined, but ‘it was proved that they had no real reason to do so.’³³⁷

Netterville and his colleagues admitted that 1s. per acre Irish, or 8d. sterling, was the rent of land ‘in most, or at least in many places,’ within the Pale. They allowed that a foot soldier could not live on 8d. a day, nor a horseman on 9d., and they said roundly that there was no way but to increase these sums, declaring, and we may well believe declaring truly, that the Queen already lost more by the jobbing consequent on insufficient pay than she could lose by giving the extra 1d. a day, which the soldiers asked for. That so small an increase would content them reasonably they inferred from the fact that it had often been accepted by them in lieu of cess. The Pale was willing to victual soldiers maintained for its defence, provided a fair price was paid for it, Netterville and his colleagues pledging themselves to use all their influence to obtain the Queen supplies if only she would seek them constitutionally from Parliament.³³⁸

On the arrival of the three Irish lawyers in London, Walsingham assured Sidney that nothing should be done to prejudice his authority. The Privy Council received the strangers coldly, and Leicester took occasion to ‘ruffle that seditious knave Netterville’ in a style which pleased his brother-in-law greatly. The contention that cess was altogether illegal did not recommend itself to the Queen or her Ministers. Kildare and Ormonde, Gormanston and Dunsany, were in London, and being called before the Council admitted that the cess was customary, and only begged that consideration might be showed to the Pale in time of scarcity. The triumvirate, as Waterhouse calls them, were accordingly committed close prisoners to the Fleet, and Sidney was gently cautioned to shear his sheep and not to flay them. He confessed, indeed, that he ‘held a straighter hand in the matter of cess, the rather to bring them to a certain rent for the release of the same.’ Netterville had seen this clearly enough, and therefore the Lord Deputy writes him down ‘as seditious a varlet and as great an impugner of English government as any Ireland beareth.’³³⁹

The chiefs of the Pale under arrest

In all official letters from the Queen and the Privy Council much indignation was expressed at the idea of the royal prerogative being called in question. Sidney was instructed to deal sharply with the gentlemen who had deputed Netterville and his colleagues, and stiffly to assert the principle of the cess. Failing, after repeated arguments, to yield the point at issue until the result of their agents’ mission was known, and standing in the meantime on high constitutional ground, Lords Baltinglass, Delvin, Trimleston, and Howth, with many others of the best gentlemen in the Pale, were committed to the castle. This was strictly in accordance with the Queen’s orders, but in writing directly to Sidney she reprimanded him for choosing so bad a time to raise the question of the cess, and for drawing an inconvenient amount of public attention to undeniable grievances. At Court Philip Sidney accused Ormonde of thwarting his father, and contemptuously held his tongue when the Earl addressed him. Ormonde refused to quarrel, saying magnanimously that the young man was bound to take his father’s part, and that he was endowed with many virtues. Indeed, nothing could be said against Ormonde but that he was a general defender of the Irish cause, like all the rest of his countrymen at Court. He hated Leicester and did not like Sidney; but, as the latter himself expressed it, ‘love and loving offices’ are matters of favour, not of justice. How little sympathy there was between them may be judged from the passage in which the Lord Deputy defends himself against the Queen’s private strictures on his conduct. ‘I am condemned, I find,’ he writes to Leicester, ‘for lack of policy, in that in this broken time, and dread of foreign invasion, I should commit such personages as I detain in the castle… While I am in office I ought to be credited as soon as another; and this is my opinion, if James Fitzmaurice were to land to-morrow, I had rather a good many of them now in the castle should still remain than be abroad.’³⁴⁰

Composition for cess

The envoys, after tasting the hospitalities of the Tower, submitted humbly enough in form, but did not abandon their case, and the Queen, though she spoke boldly about prerogative, had evidently some sympathy with them. The prisoners in Dublin also submitted, and the Crown, having thus saved its credit, a composition was arrived at, which seems to have been substantially Burnell’s work, and to which Ormonde, Kildare, and Dunsany, who were in London, gave a preliminary adhesion. The counties of Dublin, Meath, Westmeath, Louth, Kildare, Carlow, Wexford, and Kilkenny acknowledged themselves bound to victual as many of the 1,000 soldiers and officers as the Lord Deputy should appoint, and to pay 1d. a day for each man of that number whether present or no, deducting that sum in the case of those men whom they were required to victual fully. They were to furnish 9,000 pecks of oats to the horsemen at 10d. sterling, and to sell fresh provisions to the Lord Deputy at reasonable prices for ready money. The Queen consented thoroughly to repair the old store-houses, but not to build new ones, and no other charge of any kind was to be made against her, except for damage by sea or fire; but she promised that purveyors should be punished if they abused their power. To this arrangement the cess-payers submitted with a tolerable grace, but officials complained that the Queen had made a very bad bargain.³⁴¹