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

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 cessThe 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

CHAPTER XXXIV.

LAST YEARS OF SIDNEY’S ADMINISTRATION, 1577 and 1578

Lord Chancellor Gerard on the Pale

The letters of Lord Chancellor Gerard give a vivid picture of the state of the Pale during the controversy about cess. He divides the inhabitants into three classes – gentlemen, idlemen, and churls. Every gentleman kept a number of idle hangers-on, who sponged upon the poor cultivators, and robbed openly when refused free quarters. Their nominal master gave them neither food nor clothes but merely countenance, in return for which they were always ready to avenge his real or fancied injuries. These locusts ate up all the scanty surplus which was left to the poor cultivator. Remonstrance was vain, and perhaps the landowners had really not much choice. ‘I will not put away my thieves,’ a gentleman would argue, ‘for then such a one’s thieves would rob me; let him put away his, and I will put away mine.’ The vicious circle was hard to break, for the Government was not strong or steady enough to repress all impartially. The judges went circuit with little effect, for the juries ‘more regard whether any of the parties are of kin or allied to the justice or of the sept of the justice, or counsellor, than to the matter, and that way commonly passeth the verdict.’ Nor was there much outward magnificence to hide the inherent defects in such a judicial system. At Trim the Court of Assize was like an English cattle-pen; there was no crier, no trumpeters or javelin-men to hedge the sheriff’s dignity, and no competent officer to see that indictments were properly drawn or prisoners duly arraigned. That a desire for justice existed was shown by the conduct of a Meath grand jury, whose members were of very humble position, but who took heart at the Chancellor’s visit, and, believing that right would at last be done, found bills against above 100 of the local oppressors for retaining idle followers.

Gerard’s scheme for governing Ireland

Important causes, in Gerard’s opinion, were better removed into the Chancery or Star Chamber, but the thieves might be dealt with by the hangman provided the assizes were a little better conducted. English judges were much wanted to secure something like impartiality. Gerard had sixteen years’ Welsh experience, and he saw no reason why the policy which had succeeded there should not succeed in Ireland. The Lord Deputy should endeavour to keep the Irish from actual rebellion, and to persuade them to make some contribution to the revenue. Afterwards, on the borders of each county, English judges might ‘deliver justice with such severity as the poor fleas may have yearly comfort to be delivered from the webs and oppression of the great spiders, … and so by little and little to stretch the Pale further, thereby to hit the mark long shot at, and hitherto missed, which is to save the revenue of England and bring somewhat from hence.’

The Irish to be civilised or extirpated

Hitherto the prevailing policy had been to keep English and Irish from hurting each other, and the more successful it had been the more harm it had done. The peasants of the Pale were all Irish. They propagated their species with perfect recklessness, and it was therefore useless to expect any increased civilisation. Even in Dublin people of English race delighted in talking Irish, and habits and feelings always followed the language. It might be possible to civilise some of the Irish: the rest should be extirpated, and English farmers with good leases and moderate rents substituted for them. From this nucleus the Celtic wilderness might be gradually reclaimed. In the meantime, the prisons were few and insecure. There were no pounds. The mountains everywhere harboured thieves, and they came within four miles of Dublin. Cattle were not safe in the fields, even at the very gates. But it had once been no better in Montgomery and Radnor, in Brecknock and Monmouth. There also it had been necessary to fold the flocks securely at night until the twenty-sixth year of Henry VIII., when Wales was fully reduced to shire ground and the Presidency Court made a reality by hanging the mountain thieves instead of allowing the Lord Marchers to traffic in pardons. Dublin county might be made as quiet as Monmouthshire if compositions for crimes were sternly abolished and if successive Lord Deputies would ‘work hanging instead of agreeing to recompense felonious offences.’342