Memories of violence and New English identities in early modern Ireland*

This article explores the violence surrounding the collapse of the Munster plantation in 1598 . It situates this event in the wider context of violence in early modern Ireland, and highlights both similarities and differences in the behaviour seen there, and in other, better-explored Irish episodes of violence. It also argues that while the memory of those earlier settlers was apparently forgotten or silenced, violence in 1598 played a significant part in how later violent incidents in Ireland were narrated, particularly the 1641 rebellion, and that consequently Munster played an important role in New English identity-building in the early modern period. This article will examine that It will also investigate some of the analytic tools and symbolic tropes used to write about and interpret conflict and bloodshed, particularly the adaptation of ‘traditional’ narratives of martyrdom to the Irish the the English community of settlers, virtue be an Irish Examining the events further our understanding of the relationship between episodes of violence in the sixteenth century, by

In October 1598, Irish rebels under the command of Owny O'Moore marched into the province of Munster on the orders of Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, and almost immediately the nascent plantation of English settlers was swept away in a wave of violence. Contemporaries described the killing of English men, women and children, the burning of their houses, and the survivors being driven away from their homes and lands. This article will examine the collapse of the plantation, and the violence that brought about its endincluding killing, robbery and rape -and the often ritualized and targeted nature of this violence. It will also investigate some of the analytic tools and symbolic tropes used to write about and interpret conflict and bloodshed, particularly the adaptation of 'traditional' narratives of martyrdom to the Irish context, where civility was placed alongside godliness as the ideal for the English community of settlers, a virtue to be defended in the face of an Irish onslaught. Examining the events of 1598 can also further our understanding of the relationship between episodes of violence in the sixteenth century, by enabling comparison with later instances such as the 1641 rebellion which have received a great deal more scholarly attention. The relationship and connections between the violent events in Munster in 1598 and those in 1641 will be examined in the final section of the article. There are striking parallels between the sufferings of English settlers, separated by several generations, in Ireland, tying in with David Edwards's and John Walter's arguments regarding a 'continuum' of violence splattered across the pages of early modern Irish history. 1 Munster, although Hadfield doubts Spenser's specific involvement. 6 The Supplication, a long account of the violence suffered by the English in Munster, together with an attack against both the Old English and Gaelic Irish, is undoubtedly related to these documents. It communicates a strong, pervasive belief in the irredeemable nature of Irish culture, and promotes the New English as the only legitimate rulers of Ireland, angling for the ousting of the traditional Old English elite. 7 Debates concerning the document's authorship are ongoing. 8 All of these manuscripts emanated from the afflicted community themselves, and are particularly revealing of the struggles over the apportioning of blame: as will be explored further below, criticisms of the conduct of the settlers arose very quickly after the plantation's collapse. But the sources also show a concerted effort to portray the community as undoubted victims, and, even more than that, they argue that these English planters should be considered as martyrs both for the Protestant cause and for civility more generally. The manuscripts reveal the machinations behind the crafting of a convincing narrative of victimhood and suffering, and as such deserve careful scrutiny.
The Munster plantation began in the mid fifteen-eighties, after the defeat of the earl of Desmond's rebellion. The countryside lay waste, with prime farmland left uncultivated and large swathes uninhabited. The devastation was captured by Edmund Spenser in his View of the Present State of Ireland, in which he described how the people were reduced to 'anatomies of death', with the country 'voyde of man and beast '. 9 Added to this material problem was the political problem of how to effect a perpetual peace. The answer to both these questions seemed to lie in plantation. The plan was to attract highstatus, wealthy English as 'undertakers', who would be assigned seignories of land which they promised, or 'undertook', to plant with English families while also providing for their, and the crown's, security in the province more generally. 10 The agenda envisaged establishing firm English control of the province militarily. However, where it departed from previous English settlement schemes was in its aim to effect wider cultural change, particularly through the examples of English civil living: the planners envisioned the gradual civilizing of the Irish through contact and eventual copying of the (evidently superior) English way of life, including the adoption of English law and customs, among other things. 11 This cultural mission marked out the Munster plantation as a new departure for the English crown, as social engineering was embedded into a land transfer scheme. Raymond Gillespie has argued that using this definition of plantation, only the Munster and the later Ulster scheme were 'true plantations' in the sense of possessing these dual aims. 12 The rhetoric of cultivation and improvement through 'proper' use of the land also played an important role in the fostering of this civilizing mission within the plantation scheme. 13 With this ambitious agenda set, a framework of seignories in place via extensive surveying, and a list of undertakers drawn up, the movement of English settlers to the province began in the late fifteen-eighties and continued steadily across the fifteen-nineties. By 1598, Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh estimates that there were approximately 4,000 English planters living in Munster. 14 The Munster plantation, having been born in the violence of the Desmond rebellion, was to meet its end in another Irish revolt. Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, moved into open rebellion against Elizabeth I in 1594; in August 1598, he triumphed at the battle of Yellow Ford, marking the high point in his campaign against the crown. Brimming with confidence, he signalled his intention to expand the rebellion beyond its thenconfines of Ulster and the midlands by having Owny O'Moore and other lieutenants advance into Munster. Indeed, already in 1597 there were reports of some violence in the province, committed by Connacht-based rebels with the support of some 'disaffected' Irish in Munster itself, including the murder of some undertakers. The 1598 offensive, however, constituted the definitive push into the province. 15 O'Moore entered Limerick between late September and early October; the meagre forces of the lord president Sir Thomas Norris retreated in disarray when confronted with O'Moore's men. 16 The evident weakness and unpreparedness of the English forces in Munster then emboldened the beginnings of an attack against the plantation settlers. The first signs of trouble appeared in a letter from Norris himself to the privy council, in which he complained of the weakness of the forces available to him; ominously, he also stated 'of the undertakers, [there are] not any to be accounted of'. 17 Just two days later one of Norris's co-authors, James Goold, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil that he 'knows none able to keep his seignory'. 18 The signs were already less than good for the Munster planters.
Over the following weeks and months, more and more stories began to emerge of what had happened to the English men and women at the hands of the Irish rebels. In late October, Saxey stated in unflinching terms that the rebels 'have effected many 12 R. Gillespie, 'The problems of plantations: material culture and social change in early modern Ireland execrable murders and cruelties upon the English'. He recounted one particularly gruesome tale of a man's heart plucked from his body in view of his wife, who was subsequently forced 'to yield the use of her apron to wipe off the blood from the murderers' fingers'. By relating this story, Saxey was stressing the social disorder and dislocation of rebellion, a 'world turned upside down' in which a new widow cleaned the hands of her husband's murderers. 19 The Supplication also provided further shock tales. The Irish 'bloodie wolves' killed many, 'many slayne with the sword, many hanged, many pende in there owne houses and burned'. The 'bloody wolf' was a common image associated with the earl of Tyrone, but also with Catholicism more generally, and the Supplication's invocation of the term immediately lent the killing a religious air. 20 Likewise, burning was associated with the execution of heretics, prompting the reader's mind to draw possible parallels both with France and with the tales of the Marian martyrs. 21 The Supplication particularly stressed the additional horror that it was the settlers' neighbours, tenants and servants who were committing these acts of savagery, a phenomenon also picked up by Saxey. 22 The intimacy of the violence was what made it so shocking. The English, it was claimed, had no time even to begin to defend themselves, before they were 'hewed and massacred miserablie', even as they tried to flee. 23 The use of 'massacred' was significant: it was a word that was almost exclusively associated with Catholic religious violence and atrocity, particularly killings of Huguenots during the French religious wars. 24 There were also reports of heavily ritualized and symbolic killing. Saxey, in his report, drawing upon biblical imagery, said that 'infants [were] taken from the nurse's breast, and the brains dashed against the walls', while the Supplication also described 'infants scarce yet seasoned with the ayre of the world, most lamentably brained: some dashed against the walls: others tombled from high towers', while still further numbers of men and women were driven into rivers and lakes to drown. 25 The targeting of babies made the Irish appear as latter-day Herods in their cruelty and unnaturalness, killers of defenceless and innocent children. The rhetoric surrounding the violence was heavily inflected with the language of martyrdom and Christian struggle, casting the Irish as the unholy soldiers of Antichrist, encouraged by their priests and friars in the persecution of innocent English Protestants. The development of the European Protestant martyrological tradition from the mid sixteenth century onwards had allowed for even people of humble origins, killed 'non-judicially', such as the French Huguenots massacred on St. Bartholomew's Day, to be included as martyrs. 26 It seems that Saxey, the author of the Supplication and others in the Munster community drew upon this expansion of the institution in their presentation of Protestant victims in the province. While the killing of settlers was immediately shocking, it is evident that other kinds of violence also aimed at the elimination of the English from Ireland. Thus, planters were stripped and sent away, with 'antient women Contempteouslie, savagely, unchristianly, and inhumanely stripped: nothinge lefte them to cover those parts which humanitie even amonge the barbarows would never have so much dishonoured'. 27 There were also descriptions of mutilations, with throats and heads cut and maimed, while others had their tongues cut out. The terror this was intended to inspire was made clear by Saxey, who openly said that those who escaped 'fear the like to befal to themselves', while also driving home an extremely important message: the English were not wanted there. 28 Indeed there was a strong anti-English tinge to much of the non-lethal violence. The settlers were stripped of their goods and property, such that those who survived were left 'pitifull creatures naked and comfortless lying vnder the towne walls and begging aboute all the streetes'. 29 But the rebels also expressed their ethnic hatred through the destruction of buildings associated with the plantation, in that 'whatsoever savoureth of an Englishe fashion is abhomination unto them'. Houses that had chimneys -a distinctive English feature -were singled out for destruction for being a blot of Englishness upon the landscape. 30 Economic jealousies cannot be ruled out as contributing to such instances of violence as well: the relative prosperity of the planters inversely represented the dispossession of the Irish and their resulting economic distress. Tensions were compounded further by the accusation that the settlers themselves were of 'base' or 'mean' origins. The targeting of plantation buildings was in many respects akin to the breaking of enclosures that took place in England. 31 Additionally, plantation towns were singled out for destruction, with Tallow and Balabegg burned down; Mallow suffered similarly, though the castle was preserved; and the undertaker Sir Arthur Hyde reported that the town surrounding his castle was burned. 32 These accounts of physical destruction were set alongside the stories of human destruction and suffering. It is clear that writers such as Saxey and the author of the Supplication intended for their accounts to be read as tales of the attempted total extirpation of Englishness in all its forms from Ireland, and especially from planted Munster.
One of the most shocking and disturbing acts of violence described in Munster was rape. It was reported in several accounts, which also included a moving description of its 26   harrowing consequences. Describing the ill-treatment of English women, the author of the Supplication wrote: 'none that lighted into their hands escaped their beastly lust If they were under fortie: verie Children of a dozen or therten yeares of age (a thinge as true as hard to be believed) could not be privileged from their villainy'. The older women were not spared either, being violently stripped and expelled, and 'much dishonoured'. The author feelingly described the pain and shame of the victims, saying: It is a matter of no smale Compassion to see howe the poore innocent abused women walke the streetes dismayed, consumed away with the shame of this villainy: hanging downe their heades: ashamed to looke any in the face (althouge poore soules they carie no shame of their owne, but shame of others). 33 As Garthine Walker has argued, the language describing rape was problematic in the early modern period, with complexities surrounding female resistance and agency. She argues that often the physical violence of rape was stressed, above its sexual elements. 34 Certainly in Munster, the emphasis was on the 'beastly' and 'villainous' nature of the act, with the men who committed it rendered as inhuman and uncontrollable, and the women seemingly absolved of any guilt or complicity in the violence. The purpose of these stories' inclusion seems to have been to underline the savageness, wildness and fundamental immorality of the Irish, and particularly of Irish men. 35 In fact, the author of the Supplication goes further, to say explicitly that the rebels were 'savage beasts, for men we cannot call them'. Their raping of defenceless women, furthermore, was 'contrarie to manhood', implying that committing such atrocious acts inherently 'unmanned' them. 36 Of course, it is difficult to say from these references just how widespread sexual violence was as a tool of war in Munster. Rape seems to have been common in other theatres of conflict, such as the rape of Huguenot women by Catholic soldiers, and there were also reports of it during the Thirty Years' War. 37 So its place in accounts of violence in Ireland would fit that wider pattern of conflict-based sexual violence.
While the Munster accounts of rape would seem to concur with wider European trends, its incidence places it at odds with some other episodes in Irish history. Rape did occur elsewhere in Ireland of course, such as the rape of a young girl in Ulster in 1606, which informed part of the grievances of the earl of Tyrconnell before his flight. 38 However, such instances are in contrast to the almost total non-appearance of rape in the 1641 depositions. 39 A number of reasons for this have been posited, such as shame and humiliation preventing 'public reporting' of the crime by the victims, especially 33  those of higher social status. 40 Most of the rapes that are reported deal with attacks on servants and other lower-status women, while other accounts spoke of women who had subsequently died, indicating perhaps that talking of such instances featuring low-status or deceased women was easier and did not carry as much social 'baggage'. 41 Equally important is the idea of rape as a 'trope' of violence, with the 'ravished woman' an intrinsic and emotive part of the wider rhetorical landscape of conflict and violence. 42 As Walker's work has shown, the reporting of rape was a fraught issue, with complexities surrounding questions of consent and complicity, as well as resistance -physical resistance by women was perceived as unfeminine, but not to resist implied guilt. 43 Others, including the depositions commissioners themselves in their 1643 treatise, have posited that rape was in fact not widespread, because the rebels were too busy pillaging and spoiling, a perverse cause for '[rejoicing] that they were herein guiltless'. However, the commissioners also advanced the argument that women were too ashamed to report their rape, foreshadowing modern interpretations. 44 Reconciling these arguments is difficult. What is apparent is that rape was, to some degree at least, a feature of early modern Irish violence, a contention that the Munster evidence generally supports, and its occurrence in 1598 is of relevance to debates on its nature and usage more widely in Ireland.
One area where the narrative of violence is further complicated in Munster is in regard to explicitly religious violence, which is almost entirely absent from all of the sources. In 1641, the targeting of bibles and Protestant ministers and the destruction of Protestant churches were widely reported phenomena. 45 However, nothing comparable occurs in 1598, it would seem. 46 The reasons for this are not entirely clear. It is possible that, compared with the larger and more established Ulster plantation, such targets were not as readily available in Munster. Another explanation is the effectiveness of clerical preaching focused on these symbols of Protestantism in the early and mid seventeenth century, leading up to the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion. One example of this is the phenomenon of attacks on the bible in 1641. The strong association between Protestantism (and particularly 'puritanism') 47  of English oppression, was evidently emphasized, whether through Catholic preaching or other means. Its prominence as symbol is evident in the 1642 document entitled 'The grievances of the peers and gentry of Ireland', which stated 'That the English and Scotts combyned and joined in a petition to his Majestie to bee lycenced for to come into Ireland with the Bible in one hand, the Sword in the other for to plant their Puritan Anarchicall Religion amongst vs, otherwise after to distroye vs'. 48 This is not to say that religion did not play an important role in the Munster violence. Indeed, men such as Saxey were clear about the influence of Catholic clergymen in particular, and their role in stirring up rebellion. He accused the priests and Jesuits of 'stealing away the hearts of the Irish from Her Majesty', while Sir James Perrot singled out the Jesuit Henry Fitzsimons as delivering 'trayterous speaches against the Queen and State'. 49 And, while the 1598 violence itself might not appear overtly religious, it was certainly conceived of as such. In particular, the willingness to draw on the rhetoric and narrative style of martyrdom cast the violence in an unequivocally religious light. The Supplication makes this case explicitly, with the author invoking the Goths and the Vandals, as well as the 'recordes of the Turkes and the Infidells', as being unblemished in comparison with the Irish and the sufferings they inflicted on the English, who were 'mangled', 'prayed' and indeed 'martyred' in Ireland. As shown above, the word 'massacre' was heavily charged with overtones of the French religious wars and atrocities inflicted on innocent Protestants by Catholics. Its use in the Irish context would instantly call to mind Catholic cruelty and bloodiness, especially the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day massacres across France, which were widely reported upon in both England and Scotland and even inspired literature such as Christopher Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, one of the most popular plays of its day. 50 So the rhetoric surrounding the violence was heavily inflected with the language of Christian struggle, casting the Irish as the footsoldiers of Antichrist. The evolution of the Protestant martyrological tradition across Europe from the mid sixteenth century onwards had allowed for the inclusion of 'massacre' victims, and it was in this tradition that Saxey, Spenser and the author of the Supplication anchored their tales of the persecution of the Munster undertakers. There were, however, some subtle alterations to the traditional image of the martyr. While Saxey and others were evidently attempting to portray the settlers as suffering for their Protestantism, a new element was also added: the idea of them being martyrs for civility and social improvement. The letter to the queen stressed that the planters were 'practisers of more Civill trades of life', and by extension brought such civil ways of life to the Irish. The Irish in turn despised them for this, and persecuted them. The combining of religion with this quasi-evangelical civilizing mission created the image of the godly planter who was attempting to bring 'the civill example of the English' to the 'savage' and godless Irish. 51 The rhetoric of cultivation and the bringing of civility through plantation featured very strongly, with the English as quasi-missionaries bringing both a peaceful and civilized way of life to the Irish. Such efforts were, however, beaten back by the 'infidell' and 'Turkish' Irish, who would not embrace either civility or the true religion. Thus the Munster settlers made a concerted bid to be seen as legitimate sufferers -they drew heavily upon the rhetoric of martyrdom, civility and cultivation in their self-fashioning as deserving victims, martyrs for Englishness in Ireland.
One of the more immediate demands of these settler-martyrs was revenge. The Munster accounts are saturated with cries for help and cries for vengeance, thus establishing them as important texts in the development of writing about early modern atrocity, especially in the Atlantic world. In the case of the Supplication, its purpose was evident from its title alone: the English in Ireland wanted revenge for what had happened to them. 'The crye of the fatherlesse orphanes, the crye of the desolate widowes . . . sound through both the eares of the almighty, cryinge revenge . . . On the abetters and setters on of these cursed rebels crie those miserable creatures revenge' declaimed the Supplication. 52 Eamon Darcy has noted that the revenge motif was a common trope in writings surrounding 1641, and that it was also a common feature of writing about colonial violence in the Americas, such as the calls for vengeance after the 1622 Jamestown massacre. 53 Here too, in Munster, the planters were baying for scores to be settled, against those 'who haue imbrewed them selues so deeplie in our bloud'. 54 The great majority of the appeals were, of course, to Elizabeth. Her 'avengement' of the wrongs suffered by her loyal subjects was framed as not simply desired, but necessary, for it would enable 'a perpetuall establishment of both peace . . . and also of great strength', which would ensure no such rebellion and slaughter could occur again. 55 The settlers articulated a call for vengeance for their sufferings, but also for the chance to re-establish the plantation, in order to continue their civilizing work. The plantation would indeed be re-established in the early seventeenth century with some of the same undertakers, although the initially slow pace of return was a source of frustration to the English government. 56 The legacy of the violence, however, would have mixed outcomes in both the short and the long terms.
The claims by the settlers themselves to be considered as victims, and indeed as martyrs, did not receive widespread acceptance. In fact, from very early in the rebellion, criticisms and recriminations were also in ready circulation alongside accounts such as Saxey's, while figures such as Sir Thomas Norris and the earl of Ormond wrote several complaining letters regarding the apparent cowardice and shameful behaviour of the planters. Ormond, writing to the privy council, reported that 'the undertakers had most shamefullie quitted and forsaken their estates'; he repeated his criticisms in letters to Sir Robert Cecil, and to Elizabeth herself. In fact, the queen echoed such criticisms in her stinging letter to Norris in early December, in which she castigated the undertakers' 'mere cowardice' in running away from 'a ragged number of rogues and boys'. 57 The settlers' accounts of events must be viewed in light of such criticisms. The undertakers countered claims of cowardice by saying that they had had no time to organize before being overwhelmed: as peace-bringers and civilizers, they were not in a position to be able to resist effectively Irish rebels who 'naturallie hate the English'. 58 The Supplication characterized the English as piously naive in their dealings with the Irish, whom they had treated with compassion and pity, only to be repaid with Irish falseness and treachery. 59 However, even within that same document, there is evidence of some degree of acceptance of blame, as the Supplication's author argued that their sufferings were chastizement from God for their failings. 'The fault hath been ours: we have made godes cause the last and least cause, yea no cause', he said, and 'Sinne it was that brought all upon us, our rebellion against god, made him stirre up these rebells against the state to devour us'. 60 Such a binary division between unholy persecution and godly chastizement was a further feature of the martyrologies that evidently influenced the rhetorical style of many Munster writers. 61 Saxey, who described with compassion the sufferings of his fellow English, also provided a list of the reasons for the rebellion: alongside his condemnations of the Catholic clergy, and Catholics more generally, he also stated that there had been 'slackness' among the undertakers in fulfilling the conditions of their grants, thereby leaving the community vulnerable. 62 It is very likely that the undertakers, even before the rebellion broke out, were aware of criticisms of their failures, such as not peopling their seignories adequately with English men and women. 63 But certainly doubt had been seeded as to the effectiveness of the planters' response to the rebellion, and indeed their very moral fibre and loyalty to the queen were questioned because of their failure to resist adequately, despite the evident sufferings of many.
Other further criticisms focused on the supposedly rampant popery among the English living on the plantation, an intriguing strand for further investigation. David Edwards has demonstrated that there were significant numbers of English Catholics living on the plantation, and in Ireland more widely. Ireland was part of a network of 'safe havens' for English Catholics -along with continental Europe, and later Maryland -and Catholics sought both relief from persecution and economic opportunity with schemes such as the Munster plantation. Indeed, some of the earlier colonization attempts had been undertaken by Catholic 'soldier-planter' families, such as in Laois and Offaly. 64 While there were complaints of Catholics coming to Munster in the early fifteen-nineties, 65 the most stinging rebuke came later in the seventeenth century from Fynes Moryson, who wrote that 'turbulent' English Catholics were living on the plantation to avoid the recusancy fines in England, and were even offering more money for land to ensure they could settle. His accusations were repeated in his unpublished chapters, in which he claimed that because they were 'ill-affected' towards the crown, they failed catastrophically to carry out their plantation obligations, such as building defensible castles. 66 This accusation is not widely found elsewhere, but it is possible to see in other accounts some attempts at smoothing over potentially embarrassing and inconvenient facts, such as the presence of recusants on the plantation. Hadfield has argued that Saxey's account stressed a 'common bond of Englishness' in the sufferings of the planters; 67 likewise, the emphasis placed on the settlers' civilizing role also served strategically to highlight that suffering was inflicted for merely being English, as well as being a Protestant.
Despite the writings of men like Saxey and others, a predominantly negative perception of the first plantation of Munster persisted into the seventeenth century. Where it appears in writing, it is usually in a negative way. Thus Moryson, having already chastized the planters for the presence of Catholics among them, exhaustively listed the failings of the plantation, and of the New English community there: they were rapacious and profit-driven, while also being unprincipled and irreligious. His judgement is worth reproducing at length: And to speake truth, Munster vndertakers aboue mentioned, were in great part cause of this defection, and of their own fatall miseries. For whereas they should haue built Castles, and brought ouer Colonies of English, and haue admitted no Irish Tenant, but onely English, these and like couenants were in no part performed by them. Of whom the men of best qualitie neuer came ouer, but made profit of the land; others brought no more Englishe than their owne Families, and all entertained Irish servants and tenants, which were now the first to betray them. If the couenants had been kept by them, they of themselues might haue made two thousand able men, whereas the Lord President could not find aboue two hundred of English birth among them . . . Nor did these gentle Vndertakers make any resistance to the Rebels, but left their dwellings and fled to walled Townes; yea, where there was such danger in flight, as greater could not haue been in defending their owne, whereof many of them had wofull experience, being surprised with their wiues and children in flight. 68 In the unpublished sections of his Itinerary, Moryson further elaborated the failings of both the plantation and the settlers: the colonists in Munster were disorderly men, 'banckrots and very poore', which in turn drove them to seek profit at all costs. For Moryson, it was the quality of the people who came to settle that had caused the downfall of the scheme. 69 In a similar vein, Parr Lane's poem News from the Holy Ile condemned the planters as preferring 'the taphouse' to the fort. 70 Thomas Gainsford, in his History of the Earle of Tirone, did not mention the plantation at all, but did fleetingly refer to Tyrone's plot to 'extirpate the English' from Ireland; similarly, Sir Thomas Stafford's Pacata Hibernica is largely silent on the plantation specifically. 71 Explaining these silences is difficult -was there a lingering shame and embarrassment surrounding the very evident failures of the plantation? The rhetoric of shame and dishonour is extremely prevalent in the contemporary accounts of Ireland between 1598 and 1600. This must partially be due to the inescapable fact of Tyrone's rebellion having persisted so long, but those pamphlets and manuscripts that also mention or imply the violence 67 Hadfield, p. 384. 68 Moryson, Itinerary, p. 25. against the plantation are similarly saturated in the language of dishonour, and vengeance. Thus the Supplication decried: Weepe England, mourne, lament, not the losse of us, but the losse of thy honour; not ore destruction, but thine owne disgrace. Thou that wast woonte to checke the mightie monarches, art nowe almost mated and matched by a roote of base trators . . . Tell us, which of thyne elders hath ever seen the like dishonour befallen thee. 72 In Norden's pamphlet, he urged all Englishmen to repent, to assure victory for the earl of Essex and to avenge Tyrone's bloody tyranny, while Churchyard spoke of England's 'right' in sending Essex and troops to Ireland to quell the rebellion there. 73 Even the queen's proclamation for sending her army was steeped in this rhetoric: the proclamation spoke of 'repairing of our Honour' in the face of the rebellion, and the harm done to her loyal subjects in Ireland. 74 Honour was a deep concern for the queen and emerged especially prominently in the fifteen-nineties, with Tyrone's rebellion considered an affront to it. This intransigent and traitorous subject had challenged her, and would not submit as a true subject should; her honour as a protective and powerful monarch had been visibly damaged by the Irish rebels. 75 The evidence for the embarrassment surrounding the Munster project is also apparent in subsequent discussions of plantation in Ireland. One prominent example is Sir Francis Bacon, who in his essay Of Plantations wrote, arguably with Munster in mind, that the destruction of plantations lay in the 'base and hasty drawing of profit', because they had heretofore attracted 'the scum of people' interested solely in money, rather than settlers committed to the higher ideas of plantation as a method for building a cultivated and civilized society. 76 Bacon's deep interest in plantations is palpable in his Considerations touching the Queen's service in Ireland, in which he expressed his dismay at the seeming lack of 'prescript and formulary' in the direction of the Munster plantation, which meant that the undertakers did not adequately build for their own defence. Bacon stated that this oversight would be rectified in any further plantation, including potentially the re-establishment of the Munster scheme. 77 He repeated his assertions in Certain considerations touching the Plantation of Ireland, which was presented to James I as plans for the nascent Ulster plantation in 1609 were being drawn up. Bacon argued forcefully for the benefits of plantation in Ireland as a mechanism that would simultaneously make the country both fruitful and peaceful, while also providing a 'British' safety valve through emigration: English and Scottish families could go to establish themselves, and thus 'prevent many seeds of further perturbations' that might arise by way of overpopulation. However, Bacon explicitly cautioned against following too closely the example of the sixteenth-century Munster scheme for future plantations. 79 Blundell specifically highlighted the large size of many of the undertakers' estates as the main reason for its weakness, but he also repeated the by-now-common refrain of how the undertakers had 'fled before their enimies' in 1598. 80 What is evident is that there was a dual process of both shame and selective forgetting surrounding the Munster plantation by the late sixteen-tens and sixteen-twenties. While Munster appeared in discourses specifically discussing plantation, the story of the earlier settlers and their downfall, with the exception of Moryson's commentary, had all but disappeared even from more widely circulated popular accounts of the Nine Years' War, such as those by Stafford and Gainsford. Shame and dishonour clearly surrounded the collapse of the plantation. Yet, the settlers themselves also presented a version of events that, through careful rhetoric and textual dexterity, cast them in more sympathetic light, especially through the language of martyrdom. Despite this, most of these accounts circulated only in manuscript, with print accounts tending towards negativity about Munster, or indeed total omission. The sixteenth-century planters seemed to be drifting into a kind of shadowy sub-memory, in very real danger of being forgotten and excluded from the collective past of the English community in Ireland. Of course, gaps and silences in the remaining written record cannot be interpreted solely as a kind of conspiratorial cover-up. It is impossible to say, for example, how the memory of the first Munster plantation lived on via oral culture or other means. Hints are discernible, but many of the memories appear to focus on the person, and increasingly the legend, of Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone. In 1630, Viscount Dorchester wrote to the earl of Cork regarding rumours apparently in circulation about the planning of an insurrection in Ireland with foreign aid, with hopes centred on O'Neill's 'eldest sonne'. 81 Evidently the memory of O'Neill's rebellion lived on in popular consciousness, and was resurrected during moments of panic (or hope, depending), especially in relation to possible foreign intervention. Other hints include Cork's re-edification of Lismore cathedral. Its devastated building would have served as a physical site of memory -but also a contested one -for the Nine Years' War in Munster. 82 Nonetheless, the very evident criticisms of the settlers do seem to have left a lasting impact on how they were remembered (or not), and to have contributed to their gradual exclusion from the annals of English suffering in Ireland. However, despite this seeming exclusion, the legacy of 1598 did live on in several important ways. It provided an important filter or prism through which later Irish violence was perceived and written about, particularly in 1641, and especially through the re-emergence of the rhetoric of martyrdom, godliness and civility. The events of 1641, in turn, were remembered along these martyrological lines, and thus a link was forged between the earlier Munster episode and the wider process of Anglo-Irish identity formation across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 79 After its re-establishment, the Munster plantation went on to become the most populous scheme, with some When discussing the reporting of violence surrounding 1641, it is important to make some distinctions in the types of writing it generated. The media blitz and explosion of popular, often-lurid and graphic pamphlets concerning the rebellion has long been acknowledged. Accounts such as Bloody Newes from Norwich juxtaposed popish panics in England, and fears of a Catholic onslaught, with stories of atrocity and massacre in Ireland. The bloodthirstiness and treachery of Catholics (whether in England or Ireland) was everywhere emphasized, and fed a market that was expanding because of the virtual collapse of printing controls. 83 The Irish rebellion was one of the first major events to 'benefit' from this blanket publishing, and what was being reported fed in to wider stereotypes of anti-popery and Catholic conspiracy. Ethan Shagan has argued for the publications describing the rebellion as fitting into wider perceptions of the battle between Christ and Antichrist, and for the events of 1641 being a large contributing factor to the collapse of Charles I's rule through rumoured links between him and the rebels, while Eamon Darcy has underlined the connections between the descriptions of atrocities in Ireland and the pamphlets concerning the Thirty Years' War that had circulated widely in England, especially in the sixteen-thirties. 84 There were also more concentrated efforts by some in the English administration in Ireland to ensure that a particular version of the rebellion was the one that attained credence. Thus we have Dean Henry Jones's Remonstrance, first read in the English house of commons in March 1642 and subsequently published. This document is considered to be a hugely important contribution to the Irish Protestant cause, cementing their status as victims, and worthy of assistance from England -indeed, one of Jones's chief aims was to raise funds for dispossessed ministers in Ireland. 85 He was subsequently involved, with three of his fellow commissioners for depositions, in writing a further treatise on the rebellion which seemingly was never published, but which was presented to the privy council. 86 Jones's claim to credibility and authority rested on his inclusion of extracts from the depositions he was charged with collecting, and he presented these supposedly eyewitness accounts as undeniable proof of the suffering of the British settlers in Ireland. This was also the approach taken by Sir John Temple, master of the rolls at the outbreak of the rebellion, whose 1646 book The Irish Rebellion became the canonical text among Irish Protestants concerning 1641. Temple echoed Jones's emphasis on the suffering of the community, and adopted the latter's technique of founding his arguments in the depositions, to boost his credibility and authority. Temple himself fiercely defended the veracity of the depositions, which had begun to be criticized just a few short years afterwards for being exaggerated, or even falsified, descriptions of violence during the rebellion. 87 The impact of accounts such as those of Jones and Temple, and especially their claims to authority via the use of primary sources, meant that they staked a claim as the definitive narrators and elucidators of the rebellion, both for their own time and for subsequent generations. It is thus fruitful to examine their work in particular when analysing the potential impact of earlier violent episodes in Irish history.
While it is impossible to say what sources Temple drew upon beyond the depositions he had printed with his text, the parallels and similarities between his work and the Munster texts of 1598 are striking. Of course, the absorption of shock stories from the Thirty Years' War undoubtedly also had an influence, but it seems clear that earlier stories of Irish violence had left a lasting impression among settlers in Ireland, and contributed both to the short-term reaction to the 1641 rebellion, and to the longer-term processes of identity formation and the consolidation of a Protestant, English hold on Ireland. There was certainly heavy repetition of particular tropes surrounding violence, often drawn from biblical or other sources. Darcy has highlighted, for instance, the maltreatment of corpses as being derived from the Old Testament, as well as the Book of Revelation, and he also points to the dashing of babies against rocks as being either biblically derived or 'memories of atrocities committed during the Nine Years' War'. 88 In fact, as explored above, such stories were in wide circulation among the narratives of the Munster plantation: William Saxey described infants 'dashed against the walls', while the Supplication bewailed that babies were 'most lamentably brained', with some thrown against walls and others tossed from towers or high places. The Munster accounts in turn were heavily inflected both with imagery from the psalms, and possibly the Massacre of the Innocents, an episode which had undergone a 'revival' in literature and art through its contemporary appropriation in conflicts such as the Dutch revolt. 89 The suffering of the English was everywhere underlined in accounts of both 1641 and 1598, with possible rhetorical borrowing in evidence: witness the similarities in the descriptions of the refugees who made it to walled towns, and to Dublin. Both Temple and the Supplication described the displaced as wandering the streets, while Temple and the 'Address to the queen' described the survivors of both rebellions as 'living ghosts'. 90 The parallels are striking, pointing to textual borrowings on the part of Temple and other writers about 1641 from the Munster accounts, and to the evident impression those accounts had made on the rhetorical imagining of violence in the Irish landscape. The two events were also rhetorically connected by their repetition of what can be called 'plantation tropes', especially with regard to the Irish living among the settlers, and how they turned upon their neighbours once rebellion broke out. Thus many writers emphasized that the Munster planters' tenants and servants were among the first to betray them, while others cited the inveterate malice of the Irish, who took any opportunity to betray their English neighbours. 91 A similar rhetoric of betrayal is evident in writing about 1641. In their 1643 treatise, the depositions commissioners also stressed the 'depradations of [their] next neighbour' in carrying out violence, railing against the 'savage inhumanities' visited upon 'friends and neighbours', while Temple presented an idyllic coexistence before the rebellion, with great plenty and great security suddenly and violently overthrown by the treacherous Irish. 92 The image of the settlers as peaceable cultivators and bringers of civility, ruthlessly attacked by the jealous and treacherous Irish, was evidently one that cut across both plantations. The Munster planters had presented themselves as some kind of colonial martyrs, persecuted for their attempts to bring English ways and improvements to Ireland. This rhetoric was picked up again in the sixteen-forties, and was further underlined through the emphasis on the apparent peacefulness that reigned in Ireland before 1641. Its use also points towards the consolidation of a New English identity across the late sixteenth and early-mid seventeenth centuries: one that depended on the self-presentation of godliness and civility.
This martyrological rhetoric was also more explicitly invoked in the traditional sense. In Munster, the Supplication lamented the undertakers as 'mangled' martyrs, and their blood as the blood of the innocents shed, while the 'Address' described them as 'miserable wretches'. 93 Religious justification for violence was everywhere invoked, even in the absence of explicitly religious action: the English were 'heretikes', and followers of the 'sectaries' Luther and Calvin. That it was justified to kill heretics was a widely accepted commonplace, and the Munster writers were therefore clear that those who died were killed at least partly for their religion, making them martyrs. 94 Despite these attempts, as has been shown, the prevailing image of the Munster planters became that of possibly-recusant cowards, greedy profiteers, and general failures in their efforts properly to plant the province. The rhetoric of Protestant martyrdom, however, reappeared forcefully among the seventeenth-century New English community. The depositions commissioners, headed by Henry Jones, made numerous references in their 1643 treatise to the settlers being martyrs for the cause. They argued that Ireland had 'gained' a 'numerous supply of happy and triumphant Martyrs' through the 1641 rebellion, martyrs who had earned their accolade because they 'resisted with blood', and because they were able to stand their ground and defend their faith before dying. 95 Indeed, according to the commissioners, 'this kingdome hath in few months yielded as 91 95 There are some parallels with the previous discussion of sexual violence, and the complexities of resisting: the lack of resistance rendered the Munster settlers suspect, while their later descendants made clear their resistance, and thus their innocence. many Brittish martyrs as it did in farre more of the best times afford Irish Saints', and the proof of their triumph could be seen in the many signs and wonders that occurred after their deaths -the Portadown apparition, for example, featured strongly. 96 The Book of Revelation was invoked, with the reminder that the dead bodies of those martyrs slain by the Beast would lie in the streets -a possibly comforting explanation in light of the widespread refusal to bury those who were killed. 97 Those men and women who gave depositions to Jones and his colleagues in some cases picked up on this rhetorical thread, which was especially evident in their accounts of attempted conversions and the resulting violence. Violence against ministers was a particularly explicit, and in many ways obvious, example of the use of martyr imagery: men of God such as William Oliphant in Co. Sligo, to give one example, were described as 'stedfast' in their faith, even while being tortured and eventually killed, underlining the martyrological characteristics of such men, and such events. 98 Thus, the martyrs of 1641 and 1598 bear some striking resemblances: they were victims of the Beast and of an international Catholic onslaught, and they had died for being both English/British and Protestant, two categories that heavily overlapped. 99 Despite this, it was those of 1641 who lingered in popular memory, with the work of one of the chief proponents of this outlook, Sir John Temple, later incorporated into martyrologies of Samuel Clarke and others. 100 Despite these evident influences, nowhere do the Munster planters appear directly as an example of a previously persecuted Protestant minority in Ireland. Temple, in his discussion of Ireland before 1641, skimmed over the history of the Elizabethan years, with limited discussion of Tyrone's rebellion. He did mention that some 'English colonies' were 'barbarously rooted out' of Ireland, but it is unclear whether he meant the Munster plantation and other proto-English settlements, or the Old English community, who did largely refuse to join Tyrone's rebellion and fought for the crown against him. In the preceding discussion, Temple made no reference to the plantation directly, simply saying that Elizabeth applied herself to reducing 'the disorders of her Subjects in Ireland' through a variety of means. It is possible that Temple was referring to the Old English, as until this point it is they who carry the moniker 'English' in his account. 101 In Jones's unprinted treatise, discussion of former rebellion is similarly overwhelmingly concerned with the loyalties of the Old English, who became turncoats in 1641 by joining with the 'mere Irish', against all their former allegiances to the crown in earlier rebellions. 102 The relationship between former episodes of rebellion, and the 96 The apparition at Portadown is one of the most famous ghost accounts in the 1641 depositions; the apparition was said to have appeared after a mass drowning at the bridge in the early months of the rebellion. It was reported to have taken the form of a naked woman who stood waist-high in the river, and who screeched and wailed at night. According to the most famous account of this apparition -that of Elizabeth Price -the woman was heard to utter 'Revenge Revenge Revenge' (see T.C.D., MS. 836 fos. role of English-born settlers within them, seems ambiguous, despite the similarities between the two cases. This ambiguity and silence is apparent even in sources dealing specifically with Munster during the 1641 rebellion. An obvious point of comparison is the Munster depositions, and whether there were echoes of the earlier violence against planters in the province. The Munster depositions do contain many stories of death, dispossession and violence, with evident parallels between the planters of the early sixteen-forties and those of the fifteen-nineties. For example, Elizabeth Danvers reported how a troop of Irish attacked a group of English people in Coole, Co. Cork, describing the events with evident horror: [they] sett vpon and murthered them all (being about thirty) vseing such torture & execrable cruelty that they cutt some of the mens tongues out of their heades, ripped and slitt vpp the womens bellies, Cutt and slitt the noses of others, and cutt slashed & mangled others to peeces, spareing neither age nor sex, but miserably slaughtering them all. 103 There are very apparent similarities in the describing of atrocity across the two events, with echoes of Saxey and the Supplication, indicating again some rhetorical borrowing from these earlier accounts. A measure of absorption of the rhetoric of martyrdom is also evident in some depositions, such as that of Robert Hamilton in Co. Tipperary. In his statement, Hamilton described the killing of George Low, a minister, emphasizing his faithfulness to the Protestant religion, and his desire to pray before his death at the hands of an Irish rebel. 104 Such descriptors point to a common language of violence and conflict, but also, as with Temple, suggest some debt to previous episodes of violence in Ireland itself as a frame for comprehending these events. Indeed, these rhetorical echoes could even potentially point to the circulation of stories of earlier persecutions in some form, and the repetition of imagery heard from such tales. It is difficult to say definitively, however, as there is very little evidence among the Munster depositions of specific knowledge of the plight of the earlier settlers. That there was a degree of knowledge and memory of the Nine Years' War in Munster can be seen in one deposition, that of Therlagh Kelly, who deposed that he was saved from death by one Sullevayne, who knew 'this deponents father the last warrs in the campe of Kinsale against Tirone'. 105 That many of the Munster depositions were collected by Philip Bisse, who appears to have followed a specific pattern of questioning and recording, with an emphasis on collecting evidence of lost property, debts and apostasy, may also mean that such memories did not make it into the depositions for the province. 106 Nonetheless, as elsewhere, the sources are resolutely silent on the Munster plantation and the events of 1598, despite some rhetorical imitation.
Despite these silences and uncertainties, there is some tentative evidence of what could be described as a 'learning link' between the two cases of anti-settler violence. One is the stress placed in the sixteen-forties upon the military prowess of the planters, and the English forces more generally, and especially on the bravery and valour witnessed in the early stages of the rebellion. Thus, Henry Jones, alongside writing the Remonstrance, also wrote the Relation of the Beginnings and Proceedings of the Rebellion in the County of Cavan, an account of the outbreak of the rebellion there. In it, he detailed the heroic exploits of Sir Francis Hamilton and Sir James Craig, who among other things provided shelter to distressed Protestants, and hampered the efforts of the rebels generally, especially at the siege of Drogheda. 107 This is in sharp contrast to the criticisms that aired both at the time and subsequently of the cowardice of the Munster settlers, in fleeing and not resisting adequately when the Irish fell upon them. In Munster itself, the earl of Cork and Sir William St. Leger, among others, also ensured that this time the settlers reacted quickly. Cork, in a letter to the speaker of the English house of commons, wrote of his efforts to arm his tenants, and of organizing troops under the command of his sons to resist the rebels. 108 St. Leger was also proactive, at times ferociously so, in ensuring that resistance was given to the Irish by the English of Munster. 109 While it is impossible to say categorically that this stress upon the courage of men such as Hamilton, Craig and St. Leger came about because of the criticisms of earlier planters, it is evident that the New English community in the sixteen-forties was keen to prove itself both courageous and militarily effective. Of course, appeals were made to England for military aid, and there was panic -especially in the early letters from the lords justices -that the community would be overwhelmed, but there was also a spark of resistance that was seized upon as evidence of the New English community fulfilling its civilizing duty of defence, resisting the forces of anti-Christian Catholicism, and trying to keep Ireland peaceable.
Beyond the borrowed rhetoric and imagery, and the desire not to be seen as the cowards of 1598, there was an overarching desire among the Protestant settlers of the sixteen-forties not to be forgotten, and it is there that one sees a potential further, more emotional link with their forebears in the sixteenth century. Soon after 1598, the Munster planters were already aware that their plight was being at best forgotten or at worst ignored by the authorities: witness the appeal made to Elizabeth I for her mercy, in which the English claimed 'the miserie of our estate is not made knowne vnto you but rather kept from your knowledge by such as by concealment thereof think to haue their blames concealed'. 110 By contrast, the desire of the later settlers not to be forgotten is everywhere apparent. Indeed, in his preface Temple stated that he wrote 'for the benefit of the present age, as well as of posterity', while Jones noted that the Remonstrance of 1642 had been designed to convey information about the 'undeserved sufferings' of the Protestants in Ireland. Writing again in 1643, he and three other commissioners took up their pens in order to make 'fresh and yet farther representation of the rebells in Ireland, and our calamities', again to ensure that their sufferings were recorded for posterity. 111 In the fifteen-nineties and sixteen-forties, both groups appealed to their mission as civilizers, evangelizers and bringers of peace to Ireland to emphasize how undeserving they were of what had happened to them. Thus, the Munster planters argued that they ventured their lives and possessions in Ireland 'for the nourishment and encrease of the politike body' and were responsible for great plenty in the province. Likewise, those of the sixteen-forties argued that peace and prosperity had come in the wake of further plantations in the seventeenth century, and that they had lived 'peaceably and lovingly' both with each other and with the Irish. 112 The similarities in their justifications and self-presentation here are striking. However, that the British of the sixteen-forties did enjoy a much longer (and arguably still continuing) afterlife is evident through examples such as the inclusion of Temple's atrocity descriptions in later editions of martyrologies; the celebration of 23 October as a solemn day of remembrance; and the three centuries' worth of scholarly and popular debates surrounding events in 1641, and particularly the veracity of the stories of massacre. 113 By contrast, the Munster settlers were subjected to a barrage of criticism even as the plantation was collapsing, and great shame and embarrassment engulfed the project and the circumstances under which it fell apart. The effort to which their later descendants would go to ensure that a narrative of deserving and blameless victims was the dominant one could perhaps be traced back to this earlier failure, drawing upon the rhetoric deployed by those ancestors but to far greater effect.
Examining the first Munster plantation and its demise serves in some ways to amplify the role of 1641 as a 'turning point' in British and Irish history. The complex relationship that the New English of Ireland had with their past is evident in the writing surrounding that year. Despite the apparent existence of a precedent for anti-settler violence by the Irish, and some evident 'recycling' of atrocities and the language of violence, the memory of 1598 was not directly invoked as evidence of the ever-present treachery and bloodiness of the Irish. The reasons for that are unclear, but it was possibly due to the bad reputation acquired by the planters of the fifteen-nineties. This bad reputation hounded them at the time, but later passed into silence, and the reviving of such a memory would be politically dangerous for the English of the sixteen-forties in their quest for support against the Irish. This reluctance to draw on the past, and instead the choice to emphasize the 'unprecedented' and horrific events of the sixteen-forties, served to give the 1641 rebellion a central role in the development of a New English, Protestant identity that was to dominate Ireland for more than two centuries. Toby Barnard, in his examination of Protestant identity in Ireland after 1660, stressed that while there were sometimes wide divergences in interests and outlooks within this community, there were factors that bound them together as well, such as the belief in a shared past -especially when interpreted along providential lines as salvation from a series of Irish onslaughts. 114 However, the account presented here complicates the narrative of a shared past. Instead, it suggests that a more selective past was used by this community to serve its own purposes. While of course personalities from earlier rebellions, such as 'bloody Tyrone', were stock figures and almost universally known, the position of earlier plantation dwellers is less clear. The 1641 rebellion was widely acknowledged as an attack against the English in Ireland, and thus a key moment in the consolidation of an English, Protestant interest that was determined still to tie its fortunes to Ireland. 115 Yet, the relationship of these later settlers to the suffering of earlier ones, 112 Supplication, p. 12; Temple, p. 39. 113