231. Colonising Ireland: Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, & The Tudor Conquest (Ep 1)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Drumpel. You've got a very serious voice on. We're in the same room, so I can look as serious. I'm incredibly hungover. Serious looking at me. You're looking almost donnish with your intensity. I've got a positively splitting headache. Really, why is that then, William? Let's all feel sorry for you. There was a little bit of a party at the Joy Village Festival last night. It is true. And I am so busy getting my wife to drink a pint of water and we got home that I didn't remember to drink a pint of water myself. Poor baby. Anyway, look, the thing that we've been really excited about is talking about Ireland.

1:03For ages, William and I have been speaking about this. And we both come to this with a real serious draw because, well, you start off. Why do you care about Ireland? I've always been aware that I don't know as much about Irish history as I should do. I was very much brought up by my half-Irish, half-Scottish nanny on tales of the potato famine and was taken down, I remember, to the public library in North Berwick at the age of about six and seven and shown these woodcuts of Irish mothers turning to cannibalism and this sort of stuff. It was in The Great Hunger. 1847. You're not allowed to talk yet.

1:36You end up being introduced. We've got a great guest. We have a guest here. She's irrepressible. You just heard her voice. We're going to introduce her any second now. Yeah, so that was your interest. It was something which was so present. I mean, my childhood, like everyone else of my age, I'm now about to turn 60, was, you know, pub bombings and the whole Irish question. The IRA and troubles. We never really understood what it was all about, where it all started, who the IRA were, why they were so angry with people in Britain that they'd let off bombs and bobs. And I've always been aware that while I've studied history in half the rest of the globe, I've never really educated myself properly sufficiently on Irish history.

2:19It's been a great learning curve to read the books of our guest. Who we haven't introduced yet. Who we haven't introduced. She's actually one of the nicest people we've had on the pod. And she's being so very patient. I told you you love her. I love her. I love her. She's all mine. The reason I come to Ireland and I've been obsessed with it is because Ireland came up time and time again in research when it came to Indian nationalism. And it was a really troubled and troubling relationship. So on the one hand, when I wrote about things like the massacre in Amritsar, the men who were responsible for that were two Irishmen.

2:52One, Sir Michael O'Driogh, a Catholic from Tipperary. and the other, Rex Reginald Dyer, who went to Middleton College in Cork and had a wretched time there, didn't like it, but had that sort of Irish identity as well. And I didn't understand how that happened. But also, you had members of Irish nationalism holding up Indian nationalists who had either launched bombs or put trains off tracks or given up their lives or been hanged, in the case of Otham Singh, as their heroes too. And the first official visit that happens to a free India is de Valera, who comes over representing Ireland to India.

3:30So there's all of these gnarly things. And so we turned to the absolute best person who's all mine, all mine. Professor Jane Allmire is here, author of Making Empire, Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World, who is going to unravel all of this. I mean, I have to tell you, William did say, I'm going to introduce you to Jane Allmire, you're going to fall head over heels in love. It's happened. You're absolutely, it did happen. It completely happened. Jane and I have already been on a sort of lecture tour together. We've been an extraordinary initiative. Jane was brought over by the Irish Embassy.

4:01And it happens that the British High Commissioner in India is from Belfast. And they've made firm friends, the Irish Ambassador and the British High Commissioner. And Jane and I were sent off to sort of talk empire and all things that connect empire in India and empire in Ireland. and we did it in Bombay and we've done it in Delhi in front of an extraordinary diplomatic audience and it was at this point that I realized there was absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not bringing Jane on for a whole new series and I think this is one of the things that people really really have consistently asked us to do since we started Empire three years ago to focus very much on these major issues of the first English right and so we now we can legitimately hear your voice Hi.

4:49You're allowed to talk. You're allowed to talk frantically. Well, Anita, William, I'm absolutely thrilled to be here and to be here with you at the Jaipur Literary Festival. William, we had such fun at the Tata Festival in Mumbai and then, of course, in Delhi. So at that amazing event, the British High Commissioner and the Irish ambassador. And do you know something? It was so interesting. At the end of that, the Lithuanian ambassador got up and she said, you know, this is so extraordinary. The colonized and colonizer having a very respectful, difficult conversation because these issues are difficult so i mean she said that it couldn't possibly happen between lithuania and russia for example right yeah so there's some signs of hope we've just at this draipol literature festival where we're speaking from i've just come from watching gideon levy on stage talking about palestine and israel and he came up with a very nice hebrew phrase he said that in hebrew they have a saying that the darkest bit of the night as the moment before dawn.

5:43Oh, right. Well, you live in hope. Let's hope. So all of these questions, Jane, that are in our heads, and also you throw in something even more interesting into the mix, which we're going to be discussing in this series, which is that Ireland is the laboratory where all colonial experiments are perfected. And just in a nutshell, because we're not going to do it in this episode, we're taking all the way back to Tudor England in this episode. But what do you mean by that? It's a laboratory for all other colonialism. Well, Ireland is England's first colony, and they use Ireland literally to try out policies, ideologies.

6:19But also men, mostly from England, learn the business of empire by cutting their teeth first in Ireland and then going into the Atlantic world and, of course, then into India and elsewhere. So Ireland is a place where we're a colony. We were a colony. But we also then made empire. And of course, as you've just alluded to, help to unmake empire in the 20th century. So it's at so many levels that Ireland is there. It's from the very beginning until the very end. You have the Honourable Society of Ireland, founded just, what, nine years after the East India Company? Yeah, it's 1613. Which is formed to do in Derry, what the Brits are doing in Bombay and will do later in Madras and Calcutta.

7:06And then at the very end, you can make an argument, and you do in your book, that it is the partition of Ireland that forms the possible template. Yes, the template for the partition of India. And I heard you speak about that here in Jaipur. And there was an audible gasp from the audience. I think because Irish people are white, they don't think of Ireland as a colony. But obviously, we'll get into that in the discussion. A point you made at that series was also very, very interesting. why is it that of all the countries in Western Europe, it is the Irish that have stood by the Palestinians? And you said because they're the only place in Western Europe that has been a colony.

7:44And imperialism is about violence and the exercise, the raw exercise of power. But I also think Ireland and our ambassador Kevin Kelly made this point just at the discussion earlier on today. Because Ireland has experienced 30 years of intense violence during the Troubles, which of course, is a colonial war. This empathy now Ireland has for Palestine. But I also think Ireland should give hope because the two-state solution in Ireland has worked since the Good Friday Agreement. Brexit dealt it a body blow, but it definitely hope as well. Well, I mean, hopefully this has set your taste buds buzzing for what you are going to feast on in this series.

8:22But we are now going to start right at the beginning of this story. And I was thinking, you know, we'd start with the Tudors, but you want to start even earlier than the Tudors. Which has started earlier. We should start at the beginning. When did the English first arrive militarily in Ireland and start killing people? Well, 1169, you have the Norman invasion and it's down in County Wexford. And that invasion then is at the invitation of an Irish chieftain. But what happens is increasing numbers of English Norman settlers come and they settle that southeast corner of Ireland, particularly County Wexford.

8:56But you also then find them in urban areas. So Dublin and the Pale and then other urban areas. And this character Strongbow, tell us about him. He sounds like somebody out of a cider advert. One of those Norman invaders who marries Aoife, who is a Gaelic Irish princess. But it's symbolic then of the Galicization that happens of Ireland, especially as you get into the 13th and 14th century. So those initial, if you want, Norman English settlers very quickly become Galicized. When you say Galicized, what exactly do you mean? The Norman settlers come in and many of them marry, as in the case of Strongbow and Aoife.

9:42But over time, that means that they actually become Irish. They speak the Irish language or Gaelic as well as English, but they behave like Gaelic chieftains. And the English back in England say they've become degenerate. Okay, they've gone native. They've gone native, absolutely. It's very interesting to try and compare the Norman conquest of England with the Norman conquest of Ireland. Because what happens with the Norman conquest of England is that the entire Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and hierarchy gets shoved aside. I try to remember back to my A-level history. I seem to remember that there was only one Anglo-Saxon lord holding land by the time of the Doomsday Book in whenever it is 20 years after the conquest.

10:27And you have this picture, therefore, of Norman settlers putting up their modern Bailey castles with those lovely sort of steep hills. I just made one three weeks ago with my nine-year-old son for a project. I'll tell you everything you need to know about Palisades. Exactly. Palisades and all that sort of stuff. But can I say, William, as well, what you see happening are these consistent efforts or periodic efforts by the London administration to, if you want, anglicise Ireland. So the Statutes of Kilkenny, which are 1366, these are a series of laws that are passed that says you can't marry Irish people, you can't wear Irish dress, you can't speak the Irish language, you can't use Breton law or customary law.

11:09Oh, absolutely. And then it continues on. But it comes in fits and starts until the 1530s, really. You get the same in India later, don't you? Because you get all sorts of attempts to, first of all, encourage mixed marriages. And then later on, strong attempts to forbid it and ban it and not give any perks to anyone that's got an Indian wife. And it's not just forbidding it. It's also saying you must speak English. You must use the English law courts. You must use English law. I sort of threw the comment in, you know, they were worried that all of their lords had gone native. And normally that really is a pejorative that is associated with the colour of people's skin.

11:46Here you have something where everybody is white. And so, I mean, what is the attitude to those who are Irish from those who are English? What do they say at this time? Oh, we've got a fantastic insight into that, thanks to the work of somebody called Géraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales, who publishes a book called Topographia. And it basically, because of course, Ireland is never conquered by the Romans. And as a result, they're uncivil. They're barbarous. And this narrative of othering begins in the 12th century. Yeah, he's part of that Norman conquest. And his narrative is a bestseller. A Latin manuscript can be a bestseller.

12:27And what's so important about it, William, is it's then later translated in the 16th century by Hollandshed into English. And then it is printed. And the second it goes into print, it's like the Internet today. So that very hostile, negative representation of the Irish speakers and the Gales. And what were the stereotypes? What did England say about the people of Ireland? They're always uncivil. They're savages. They're barbarous. They're treacherous. Increasingly, they're subhuman. They're hogs. They're caterpillars. They're a lower form of humanity. Isn't that interesting? Because those are exactly the kind of terminologies that we hear used in those who are native to Africa and Asia as well.

13:11You're talking about sort of the Gaelic chiefs that, you know, come about over time. Did they get on with each other? How much land they control? You know, was it all just one kumbaya happy family before there was any kind of colonisation there? Definitely not, Anita. It was a real sort of patchwork of feuding tribal lordships. And you would have had an overlord who would have had a few sort of underlings, sublords. It was all about control over people. It's not about control of land. It's about control of people and control of cattle, actually, because cattle are the currency in Ireland. So a lot of time is spent, you know, running around cattle raiding because the more cattle you have, the richer you are and the more people that you can then control.

13:57It's very much a fighting and feasting culture. So the fighting is all around the cattle raiding and about all this feuding. This sounds like my own Scottish borders. The Reavers going backwards and forwards over the borders, driving the cattle into the Dells, beef tug, Moffat and all this. It's exactly that. And alongside that, William, it's a feasting culture. It's about how these great chieftains can exercise control over their followers with food. And I think what's important is to remember that the seas are the super highways of this period. So if you want Ulster and that west coast of Scotland are part of the same entity, actually.

14:37and the sorts of behaviours that we're seeing in Gaelic Ireland, we see that mirrored across the North Channel, especially in the Western seaboard. The Irish language and Scots Gaelic, they even say in Scotland they're speaking Irish. What did the Irish chieftains say about the English? Well, it's really interesting, Anita, because what we find is the Irish chieftains are surrounded by retinues of bards and poets and they're the ones who record, if you want, the contempt that is felt towards the English and their attempts to Anglicize. So that's where we see evidence of, if you want, hostility.

15:16And actually, you have somebody like Geoffrey Keating, who's writing, saying, actually, the Irish are hugely civilized. And they go back to Ireland, the land of saints and scholars, back, of course, to the 6th, 7th century, when it was the Irish. When you have Irish missionaries converting first the Picts, then going across onto the mainland and founding Bobbio and Sangal and these wonderful Celtic monasteries with all these wonderful Irish manuscripts that are still in the libraries. And saying it's really, and they actually refer to some of these negative English commentators, starting with Combrances, as dung beetles who go around, you know, gathering up the dung and they're not willing then to actually engage with, if you want, Irish civilization as it truly is.

15:59So to move forward from the Middle Ages to the Tudor period. Basically, the English invasion of Ireland is not successful. There's very little land in the hands of the English. The English that are there get galicized. And so by the time that you're entering the time of Henry VIII and the Tudors, English imperialism in Ireland is half cock. There's very little clearly anglicized territory outside the Pale, which means the area of Dublin. Absolutely. And some other urban areas. So what happens, of course, is we have the Protestant Reformation. Henry wants to marry Anne Boleyn and get rid of Catherine of Aragon.

16:40And that really changes the face of Irish history, because all of a sudden we have now a very Catholic country that doesn't want to become Protestant. And I think Ireland is the only country in Europe that doesn't adopt the faith of its monarch. And that means Ireland is a strategic geographical threat to England. It's that backdoor into England because the Spaniards particularly want to vilify and capture England. So, I mean, you know, Henry's frustrated with the Pope and that's well documented. You know, he's fed up and he gets fed up with Wolsey because Wolsey can't deliver the Pope unto him and make the Pope do what he wants to do.

17:16But he actually does mention Ireland specifically. Ireland is a little thorn in his side, even though there's a lot of other things going on. And he writes, there's this letter to Pope Clement VII saying, you know, Henry's just sick of Ireland, sick and tired of Ireland. And he says, he declares himself the King of Ireland rather than the Lord of Ireland. And he decides, look, I'm going to show you, you will kneel, you will bend the knee to me. You're right in my sights. And don't think just because you're over the water, I don't notice that you're not letting me do what I want to do. Well, actually, that Kingship Act that you're referring to as 1541, Anita, is very, very important because all of a sudden, actually with that, Henry is saying all subjects in Ireland are my subjects.

17:56Prior to that, it was really only that Anglo-Norman colonial elite. So that is a very significant shift. And what he says to the Gaelic lords, he says, okay, I'm going to make a deal with you. If you renounce your Gaelic title and swear allegiance to me, I will re-grant you an English title. But in return for that English title, and he means an earldom or a baronage or some sort of English title, I'm going to give you a patent or a legal title to your land, but you are also going to help me anglicise Ireland. So by the mid-16th century, something like 40 of the most important Gaelic lords have signed up to these surrender and re-grant agreements.

18:41And that came out of the Kingship Act. What was it for them? What did these lords get by bowing the knee to Henry VIII? Well, what they get is they're very pragmatic, William. So they're hoping that it's all going to give them greater political control and enhance their power bases, their local power bases. So they're using the influence of their king and their relationship with the king to actually make them more powerful on the ground. And is this an immediate contrast with England? I mean, obviously, there is a slow conversion of the English to Protestantism. and the Reformation rolls on right into the next two or three reigns.

19:20But is it something that you see from the beginning that the English are basically okay with rejecting Rome and the Irish basically want to stick to their loyalty to the Pope? Yeah, you do see that fairly early on. So there's a number of reasons for that. One is that the English Protestant Church doesn't have enough resources on the ground, so the infrastructure is weak. The second thing is the Catholicism, that link to Catholicism, is very, very deep. And what we see increasingly... No more or less deep than the English Catholicism? Well, what happens in Ireland is that especially the merchant Old English families, those Anglo-Norman settlers become known as the Old English, they send their children to the continent to be educated, and they do so en masse in a way that that doesn't happen in England.

20:09To Rome or to Earth? Well, to all of the Irish colleges that start to spring up across Spain, France, the Netherlands, the Spanish Flanders, which would be modern day Netherlands. And that really helped reinvigorate Irish Catholicism with counter-reformation, post-Trent Catholicism. And we know that the English very quickly learned to hate the Jesuits and regard the Jesuits as the enemy and the kind of almost like KGB, the Secret Service. Stormtroopers. Stormtroopers who are working for the Pope against the Reformed faith. Are a lot of these Irish colleges Jesuit colleges? Many are, but the Franciscans are actually as important as the Jesuits.

20:53And what you'll find are many of these old English families, but also Gaelic Irish families, will have family members, younger sons, who go over to Louvain particularly, which is... I have a Catholic priest brother who studied in Louvain. Well, you know where Louvain is, which would have been Spanish Flanders. The first printing press... Modern Belgium. Modern Belgium. The first printing press in the Irish language is actually in Levain in 1609. And it's actually printing all of this counter-reformation literature that's then brought back to Ireland. Here in the Jaipur Literature Festival, we have a Spanish chapter in Valladolid where there's another Irish college.

21:31Absolutely. Salamanca, there's about 20 of them that are very active. And it's so important in terms of how that sustains Catholicism in Ireland. The other thing I would say about Ireland is how important women are. In other words, Catholicism is very much domesticated. And the women of Ireland play a hugely important role in sustaining Catholicism in the house. So the matriarchy, I mean, they hold the table, they preside over the rituals and things. Yeah. And you see that very, very widespread. They're very important indeed. But are they recognised then as a problem by the English? Of course they are.

22:08So how do they talk about the women at this time? Irish women then who are doing these exact hiding trees? Oh, well, the Irish women, they're lewd, they're whores, they're politically subversive, they're worse than the men. And the language is extremely negative and graphic because they're seen as such a threat because of this ability to promote not just the religion, but also Irish culture. Yeah, defiance, the stories, Coughlin and all of those sort of, you know, Irish mythologies that are so precious to those people who don't want to be English. you have their own stories. That is something that you see repeated.

22:42I mean, you know, we're going to come to, you know, the laboratory of imperialism, but I wonder if that's just the language of conquest that if you attack women, you're going to call them whores. It's the worst thing you can do. But I also would say that women in this period are, if you want, chattels. A married woman is a chattel of her husband. And when it comes to the law, it'll be the husband or the father that's prosecuted rather than the woman. So they have this degree, actually, of flexibility and freedom by virtue of their gender. Very interesting. So it is interesting. So just so that I understand.

23:14I mean, you mentioned hiding priests. That's obviously something that's going on also in English recusant houses where Jesuit priests are in disguise, are coming ashore and being held in the Catholic houses. And there are priest holes and secret chambers where the priests can escape and leave the house if the army comes. But I haven't got an impression yet of Tudor control in Ireland. After the break, Jane, maybe you could tell us a little bit about how the Tudors were able to exercise control in the way that the previous English kings had not.

23:52Welcome back. So just before the break, William brought in a really important thought, which is you've got a distance between you. You've got some people who are loyal to you and they've swapped titles and others who haven't. How do the Tudors exert control then in this land over the water? So basically, the army. So it's about the use of military force, and that includes the use of martial law. So in other words, the administration can exercise martial law. So Tudor Ireland is an extraordinarily violent place. So on the one hand, you've got extreme violence and the exercise of violence. But on the other then, there are attempts to, if you want, create a service nobility.

24:34You have this programme of surrender and re-grant, where you're basically trying to win the support of your leading lords, and that continues. But geographically, how widespread is Tudor control? Well, basically, by this point, Tudor control is pretty widespread. So you see a number of major rebellions in Ireland. But by the 1570s, so you're now starting to get into Elizabeth's reign, you are seeing the Tudors spread control around that southern province of Munster. And then Leinster, which is where Dublin is, where they have very limited control is in the west, which would be Connacht, and virtually no control in Ulster, which is that northern province.

25:21So ironically, the area which is now Northern Ireland and is part of Britain now, is the area which is not controlled by the British. It's the wild and the land of the free. I mean, it really is. It's terra incognita. And we can see this in the maps. You know, you see these wild men, but they have no notion really of the topography. And remember, mapping is a tool of empire here. So we see, particularly under Elizabeth, extensive mapping occurring of those regions that they do control. But Ulster is really the one area and it's really only the Nine Years' War. So the military conquest of Ireland is complete in 1603 with the death of Elizabeth.

26:03Right. Okay. So shuffling forward sort of well into the reign of Henry, and you describe this sort of title swap shop that if you want to be in, you hand in your Irish title, we'll give you a shiny new earldom and an English title. To me, I mean, even though you've described this sort of, you know, this very brutal, backed up with military might rule from England that's going on in Ireland, even though it's fairly spread out, it wouldn't have worked unless you had a buy-in from those newly swapped earls. And one of them who, you know, we should talk about a little bit are the O 'Neills, the O 'Neill clan, who will become the earls of Tyrone.