In 1599 Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, arrived in Ireland. Essex had been given the difficult task of defeating the rebel earl, Hugh O'Neill. Essex's position at court, as the queen's favourite and a leading councillor, depended on his eliminating the threat which O'Neill posed. For Essex, his assignment was a sentence of banishment to, as he put it, ‘the most cursed of all countries’. It was a pivotal moment for him and for the Elizabethan regime. Twenty-six years earlier, Essex's father Walter, the first earl, arrived in Ireland in very different circumstances. In 1573 Ireland was stable (by its standards) and Tudor rule there finally seemed poised to advance into those areas of the kingdom which remained beyond royal control. Walter Devereux saw in Ireland hope and opportunity: it was a kingdom in which he, a newly-made earl and a rising figure at court, would make his fortune, advance his house and bring honour to his queen. In this carefully researched book, David Heffernan shows that the first earl of Essex's ‘enterprise’ to colonise north-east Ulster represented an important episode in the history of Elizabethan Ireland.
If historians are broadly familiar with the course of Essex's enterprise, they are well acquainted with its outcome. It was a spectacular failure. Over three years, between 1573 and 1576, it ruined Essex's career, indebted his house and cost the crown nearly £100,000; it also badly damaged the government's relationship with the Ulster Irish whom Essex sought to displace east of the river Bann in the modern counties of Antrim and Down. Essex's own death in Dublin, aged just thirty-six, provided a fitting end to what was a futile endeavour.
Typically, historians have sought to understand Essex's enterprise within the mental world of English colonisation. Here was an early example of an ideological impulse which would become a feature of the exercise of English rule in Ireland and across the Atlantic. Heffernan is alive to the colonial aspects of Essex's enterprise, but prefers instead to understand and locate the episode more narrowly within the prevailing political and socio-economic circumstances of the 1570s. He does so by offering a chronological narrative of Essex's three years in Ireland. The earl did not keep a diary or journal, but he left behind an ample correspondence with crown officials in London and Dublin. Heffernan expertly exploits this reservoir of evidence, and to his credit complements it through his use of a range of additional archival materials, including Essex's household accounts and the Devereux papers. This definitive telling of Essex's enterprise is enhanced by twelve illustrations – maps, photographs of important locations, portraits and reproductions of documents – which are interspersed to good effect throughout the text.
Yet the deeper worth of this study lies in the author's use of Essex's failure to point up the limitations of the early modern English state. Geography and distance accounted for some of these limitations: Essex was hampered from the start by the slowness of communication with London; Elizabethan government, meanwhile, encountered logistical difficulties in harnessing its resources in England to supply the earl and his soldiers in Ireland. Heffernan also touches on what may be thought of as a philosophical limitation of the Elizabethans – ironically, their resolute inability to acknowledge their own limitations. What A. L. Rowse once proudly referred to as ‘the expansive energy’ of the Elizabethans, Heffernan sees as ‘hubris’. Essex, who had limited military experience – and no experience and little knowledge of Ireland – was nonetheless expected to secure and colonise approximately 3,000 kilometres of land, which was already occupied by a culturally-foreign and militarised population.
As Essex could not finance his venture independently, he mortgaged his lands in England to serve as collateral to a £10,000 loan from Elizabeth (at an annual interest rate of 10 per cent). Nor could the earl field all the troops necessary to carry off his ‘enterprise’. For additional support, he again relied on the crown, but he also turned to a group of ‘gentlemen adventurers’ who contributed soldiers in return for lands in Ulster. For two years the queen's councillors, chiefly Lord Burghley, predicated their national strategy for Ireland on the success of the enterprise. Even after Elizabeth effectively pulled the plug on the project in August 1575, in the face of rising costs and little progress, Essex hovered over Irish affairs like a ghost until he died, of dysentery, in September 1576.
There was no clear exit strategy for a nobleman in whom, and in whose venture, so much was invested: Essex's enterprise was ‘too big to fail’ for a queen unwilling at that juncture to assume the enormous burden of dramatically extending her rule in Ireland. But fail Essex did. There would be other, even more audacious, English efforts to colonise Ireland, but Essex's experience impressed upon royal government the need for the state to run such ventures. Though the first earl of Essex's enterprise lacked the high political and personal drama of 1599, this book shows that the earlier episode was in fact the more revealing example of Elizabethan activity in Ireland.
