I

English social history is a hardy growth, with its roots in the self-regard of the English for their own achievements and peculiarities, their precocious industrialization, their apparently self-righting system of representative government, their venerable legal system with its claim to bear the imprint of the people's customs. The motor that primed earlier efforts at social history was unabashedly committed to the idea of English progress, whether these treatments were Thomas Babington Macaulay's or G. M. Trevelyan's, or even the not entirely un-Whiggish perspective of G. D. H. Cole, R. H. Tawney, and E. P. Thompson, where Albion's socialist future, if not guaranteed, seemed a trophy within grasp. Later English social history (whether its anthems were Kiplingesque or sung by Ewan McColl) sloughed off this patriotic sentiment in favour of a commitment – best displayed in the work of Keith Wrightson and his students – to the worth of the local and domestic experiences of English people. The re-appraisal of ‘popular politics’ in Tudor social history and the attrition of the revisionist and post-revisionist skirmishes of the 1980s and 1990s have mitigated some of the ‘Progressive’ or ‘Dialectical’ momentum, though not always the phantom pains that follow the amputation of a long-essential limb. Rather than professing confidence about how the symphony develops as a whole, social historians are now more likely to listen to a single bar.Footnote ⁶ Much that has resulted has been impressive, whether covering a particular theme over time or giving attention to a smaller chronological span. When working on this scale, a capacity to pick out tonal differences in primary sources is the skill to be coveted above all others. This is especially the case when dealing with events that have long been perceived as ‘tragic’ in character.

Andy Wood's work on the Derbyshire miners, The politics of social conflict: the peak country, 1520–1770, showed the high quality of his ear for ‘popular politics’ among the English commons. More recently he has embraced a shorter chronology in The 1549 rebellions and the making of early modern England, which attends to the ‘commotion time’, especially those ‘commotions’ commonly associated with Robert Kett. Wood's vivid and engaging book, while retaining respect for the Marxist tradition in history and theory and its interpretative fruits (whatever one thinks of the accompanying political theology), displays an enviable gimlet eye for what mattered to the peasants involved in it all.Footnote ⁷ Here we are presented with a highly politicized Tudor peasantry that took pride in their local traditions of righteous insurgency, and gloried in them because of their moral certainty that when they protested they proceeded in accordance with justice, right-thinking, and their ancestors – a phenomenon not too dissimilar to that of a Thompsonian moral economy. In short, they were in no way contentedly deferential. They did not need cues from elites to mould their own political customs nor a supposedly newly coined argot of ‘commonwealth’ handed down by high culture. An intense consciousness of how they situated themselves socially vis-à-vis their betters, and, indeed, their inferiors, was enough to form their identity. Here Wood's cultural emphasis is different from, but not incompatible with, that of MacCulloch who, thirty years ago, established the local peculiarities of the stirs in Norfolk and the extent to which the insurgents in East Anglia saw themselves primarily as a magisterial alternative to a local gentry that was obstructing the Protector. Ethan Shagan has flagged up the same self-regard in his treatment of correspondence between Somerset and the ‘campers’.Footnote ⁸ According to Wood, 1549 was more the last hurrah of a traditional popular politics that conceived of a reasonably united class of commoners capable of collective action. But that unity was beleaguered. Aspirational yeomen – described as ‘honest' – were splitting away from their ‘class’ and allying with the enclosing gentry: these ‘honest men’ were as despised by the ‘commonwealths’ as the honnêtes gens would later be by the sans culottes. Of course, other substantial yeomen, most famously Kett himself, chose to opt for solidarity (or maybe traditional values) and joined the ‘commonwealths’, taking a leading role in their struggles. Crucial to Wood's account is that this body of tradition had an instructive cast as well, recommending, for example, the best means of fomenting revolt – ‘anonymous letters, bills and libels … rumour’ not to mention the use of church bells, often by sympathetic members of local government, to summon the disaffected.Footnote ⁹

The reader is left in no doubt that Wood's desire to reclaim the longevity of the political culture that found expression in 1549 co-exists with a tangible sympathy for the insurgents’ most radical aims. Yet, Wood's regard for Marx does not preclude scrutinizing that currently undervalued thinker's historical hypotheses from the vantage point of Wrightson's work.Footnote ¹⁰ The resulting re-examination of the Marxian proposition that the expropriation of peasants was the foundation of capitalism, deserves serious attention. Of course, despite Wood's parti pris, he takes account of the full diversity of voices among the commons, especially when dealing with subsequent political attitudes towards the commotion. This is after all the man who told us the Derbyshire miners were royalists.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, material he presents us with from the reports of quarter sessions and the mayor's court in Norwich allows us to hear the voices of both wistful former insurgents and others who wanted to forget about the whole thing. In fact, the time came when even nostalgia was punished: some of the more sentimental ageing radicals suffered humiliating and debilitating judicial sanction for their dewy-eyedness about Mousehold; of course, their punishment was less severely exacted than the fierce retribution visited on those who died at Dussindale and the many who were snuffed out in the subsequent cull.Footnote ¹²

Wood refuses to posit the usually stark polarity between the traditional Catholic insurgents of the Western Rebellion and the Protestant East Anglian stirs. A good deal of evidence supports this, for example the rage felt in East Anglia at expropriation of church property, which found expression in the rebel destruction of the harbour of Great Yarmouth, a structure built with proceeds from the sale of ecclesiastical swag.Footnote ¹³ It should be no surprise that religious, social, and economic anxieties caused by the dissolution of the monasteries proved incendiary everywhere in the country because it was those who were already comfortable who benefited most from this rapid nationalization and privatization. Individual insurgents, no doubt, had different motives: one may have felt violated by sacrileges that he had witnessed; another may have been livid with jealousy at an opponent's good fortune; yet another may have been sympathetic to reformed religion. Generally speaking, the collapse of the traditional ecclesiastical sphere had vertiginous social effects, opening to question each and every man's relationship with the Tudor regime; a state of affairs exacerbated by the implementation of liturgical and doctrinal change by the Tudor state under Somerset.

Much of the horror expressed in loyalist accounts of the commotion centred on the insurgents’ disrespect for the property of the ‘honest’ men of Norwich, demonstrated when the campers stormed the city; a new type of iconoclasm, perhaps. It should not surprise us that these near-contemporary accounts had a municipal provenance and lingered with palpable schadenfreude over the ‘shamefull deathes’ of the rebels, and the indignities their bodies suffered thereafter.Footnote ¹⁴ These massed dead are, of course, silent to us; furthermore, their ostensibly vocal leader is, perhaps, not as well known to us as we would like to think. What can be traced of Kett's real voice? Wood points out that the speeches ascribed to Kett in Holinshed's, Richard Woods's, and Neville's accounts were composed for those who abhorred the campers’ aims (not unlike the retrospectively constructed official Tudor caricatures of Irish opponents, most notably Shane O'Neill and ‘Silken’ Thomas Fitzgerald).Footnote ¹⁵ As a potentially dangerous compensatory gesture for Kett's silence, Wood tentatively cites a printed ‘primary source’, dated 1830, which claimed to be a redaction of the long missing contemporary eye-witness account, the ‘Norwich Roll’, a supposed record of Kett's arraignment before the chief justice. There can be no doubt, however, that the Kett of this account is suspect: he has the poise and vocabulary of a stock nineteenth-century radical – more Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt than Robert Kett. Wood freely admits this, yet he hesitates before he lets go. However, this lingering over temptation – an ‘occasion of sin' – is playful, and more than adequately compensated for by Wood's skilful archaeological use of court records and even ‘proto-bourgeois’ historians, such as Holinshed et al.Footnote ¹⁶

II

While Wood asserts, and proves, that we can listen out for, and understand, the rebels of 1549 (even when their voices are relayed through hegemonic ‘sound systems’ designed by those that snuffed them out) the Northern Rebellion of 1569, another ‘tragic’ episode in Tudor English history, confronts us with an arguably stiffer challenge, but one that is obviously comparable with Irish parallels, having had a considerable seigneurial component. Without doubt, this rising – when considered alongside the manoeuvres at court from 1568 to the detection of the Ridolfi Plot in 1571 – was one of the pivotal events in Elizabeth's reign. In its aftermath, the policing and administration of the north of England fell more and more into the hands of a Protestant élite committed to fulfilling the demands of the metropolis. It is very good news that Krista Kesselring, best known for her Mercy and authority in the Tudor state – an impressive, groundbreaking book – has produced an account of the rising. The Northern Rebellion of 1569: faith, politics, and protest in Elizabethan England is a different kind of book to Kesselring's debut.Footnote ¹⁷ It would be true, but not unkind, to say that it is a more pedestrian product; not unkind, because this is unavoidable given the anticlimactic nature of the subject matter she has had to work with. Nonetheless, it is a much-needed and ambitious book. Writing about the Northern Rebellion of 1569 is supremely challenging. The revolt is pure bathos and therefore agonisingly difficult to emplot, teach, or write about. Kesselring has coped with these inherent difficulties very well, producing a pacy and astute account of the period.

It is difficult to believe that this treatment of the Northern Rebellion is the only dedicated analytical account of the Rising in print. The methodology employed is state-of-the-art. Her examples of the use of rumour and popular memory excavated from the archives are of a piece with Shagan's and Wood's work on ‘popular politics’.Footnote ¹⁸ Particularly notable is Kesselring's bid to break out of Anglocentric confines and consider the tumult alongside the events that convulsed the Desmond and Butler lands of Ireland in the same year; and while she has nothing particularly new to say about Irish rebellions, the outreach is shrewd and well presented. James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, the Kerry gentleman, is given his due recognition for his precocious Catholic radicalization in 1569.Footnote ¹⁹ Of course, Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald was in his own way a militant Catholic Englishman – although English-Irish. His precocity in 1569 and notably his calling on the people of Cork City to give up all their ‘Hugnettes’, has sometimes been eclipsed by the central role he played as a bogeyman for the regime a decade later while he was instigating the second Desmond Rebellion.Footnote ²⁰

Kesselring's treatment of the aftermath of the rebellion is particularly noteworthy. While the ‘patriotic’ party throughout the country – many no doubt ‘honest men’ of the type referred to by Wood – gloried in the queen's victory, the fate of those caught on the losing side has always been somewhat obscure. For more than a century, the sole publication on the martial law regime imposed after the breaking of the rebellion has been a thirteen-page article by H. B. McCall published by the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal in 1905.Footnote ²¹ Kesselring has steeped herself in the evidence, and has justifiable reason to question some of McCall's conclusions. Significantly, she believes that Sir George Bowes's well-known testimony (addressed to a close relative), that he had killed 600 rebels in the mopping-up operation, is true and accurate. Of course, 600 is an exact decimation of the (contemporarily reckoned) 6,000 men who rebelled, which might raise some suspicions about Bowes's tally, given that he was under great pressure to process the prescribed number of killings by martial law from the earl of Sussex and Elizabeth. His own ongoing presence in the locality may also have been a motive towards non-traceable leniency, but despite these caveats Kesselring's case seems solid. The very fact that we do not have the tally of the casualties caused by Sir John Forster's employment of martial law further north indicates, as the author tells us, that the total number of casualties was probably greater yet.Footnote ²² Kesselring sees parallels for this type of campaign of repression in the subjugations of the commotions throughout England in 1549 and the suppression of rebellions in Ireland in 1569.Footnote ²³ These pan-insular comparisons are welcome and suggestive but Kesselring's greatest achievement is the production of a narrative account of the Northern Rebellion that not only makes sense, but also gives indications as to how the event facilitated a change in political culture, especially in print. Perhaps even more space could have been given over to a fuller analysis of the single-minded and undilutedly anti-Catholic commentaries and responses that Thomas Norton (of Gorboduc fame) cranked out, probably under Cecilian patronage, in 1570, and the place that the rebellion held in subsequent Catholic controversial literature, but the perfect in this respect should not be the enemy of the very good. Kesselring should be congratulated for this useful book.Footnote ²⁴

III

As already noted, the topic of violence in Tudor Ireland has received quite a deal of attention of late. Age of atrocity: violence and political conflict in early modern Ireland, edited by David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait, has been a flagship for this thematic turn, being based on the proceedings of a major conference entitled ‘Age of massacres: violent death in Ireland, c. 1547–1650’, held in Dublin in spring 2002. Unsurprisingly, the seventeenth century elicits strong contributions (outside the scope of this article) dealing with topics from the massacre at Drogheda to a study of how the law of war influenced the conduct of the ‘Williamite’ war. The sixteenth century receives a good deal of varied attention too, from Clodagh Tait's article examining accounts of Irish gloating over the imagined deaths of Sir William Drury (as well as the deaths of Ireton, Coote, and Brouncker) to Vincent Carey's survey of primary and secondary sources dealing with the infamous siege and massacre at Smerwick. John McGurk's treatment of ‘The pacification of Ulster, 1600–1603’ is let down somewhat by his adoption en passant of the suggestive but hyperbolic thesis that the attitudes of the ‘literate [English] military caste’ to the Irish and Ireland was informed by Spanish sources like Oviedo and Las Casas.Footnote ²⁵ Yet, McGurk's contribution is certainly of a piece with the stated aim of this collection which is to show that Ireland was subject to ‘early modern developments [that] were exceptionally abrupt and exceptionally extensive’.Footnote ²⁶

Does this proposition broaden our historical understanding? The violent character of sixteenth-century Ireland has been freely admitted by the historical mainstream since the nineteenth century. In his History of England in the eighteenth century, W. E. H. Lecky characterized the Elizabethan era in Ireland as one marked, not only by atrocity, but more precisely by genocide:

J. A. Froude, better acquainted with the sources, was unfettered in denouncing the evil he perceived to have been at work in the acts of violence carried out by crown officers.Footnote ²⁷ The moral sensibility Froude nursed about the plight of the Irish during Elizabeth's reign resembled his particular sensitivity to the fate of those Catholic peasants who fought ‘for their hearths and altars’ at the first battle of Clyst in 1549: this amounted to intense sympathy for apparent residues of human dignity that could be found in blinkered, backward, and primitive contexts. The almost Blakean image of Myles Coverdale preaching among stiffening corpses ‘with their faces to the stars’ thus stands beside his account of killing sprees in the hills of Leinster as part of his witness to the sorrows of the world.Footnote ²⁸ So, in one respect, it might be argued that the topic of bloodshed in Tudor Ireland had already been worked through in the nineteenth century – not forensically, perhaps, but as a kind of moral meditation (or, in Lecky's case, a pious prelude) to be undergone before taking to the field in the seventeenth century where reassuringly conflict became recognizable; sectarianized, proletarianized, politicized in a way easy to understand, or at least easier to break down in accordance with a current political taxonomy that ran along the grain of the issues of the day.

So perhaps there is not much new about the proposition that Ireland's sixteenth century was atrocious. However, the motivation behind Age of atrocity's claim of Irish exceptionalism is spurred on by a specifically and somewhat polemical twentieth-century concern. The position taken seems to be an adaptation of the position held by historian and intellectual, Brendan Bradshaw, in his classic 1989 article ‘Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland’. Bradshaw's article at first blush was a reply to Steven Ellis's charge that Irish medievalists were conceptually naive, devoted to an anachronistic, whig-nationalist notion of Ireland. According to Ellis, their normative focus prevented medieval Irish historians attaining sophisticated and relevant conclusions. In particular, he felt that these tendencies hindered the reception of fundamental data about the period: first, that Gaelic identity was necessarily non-national, obtaining across a territory that encompassed much of Ireland and the Scottish highlands and islands without concerns for Irish distinctiveness per se and, secondly, that the Englishry of Ireland had more in common with other English populations in other ‘borderlands’. Their deviations from the higher forms of English civility, therefore, had a more generic provenance than any distinct character formed in Ireland by a process of Gaelicization. This was the starting point, but Bradshaw broadened the focus of his criticisms, turning to scrutinize the ideological terms under which the professionalization of Irish history had taken place in the early twentieth century. He suggested that the ideology prevailing among professional historians since the 1930s had, in fact, been so eager to distance itself from any suggestion of Whig fallacy that it resulted in a fetishization of ‘value-free’ history in the academy that precluded historians from engaging with the crucial matter of violence inflicted and catastrophe suffered in Ireland's past. Bradshaw ultimately claimed that what had resulted was the ‘removal of the pain from Irish history’ and the limitation and distortion of the past. Although Bradshaw explicitly repudiated the idea that early modern Irish woes could claim exceptional status, he took the opportunity to formulate a number of prescriptions for historians. Foremost of these was that they should have a renewed sense of responsibility so they could act as effective mediators between the ‘actuality of the historical experience and contemporary perceptions of it’. The principal ways he suggested achieving this were empathy and imagination.Footnote ²⁹ Interestingly, Edwards, Lenihan, and Tait counsel a remarkably similar public responsiveness, singling out for disparagement the ‘empiricist narrative’ favoured by erstwhile generations of Irish historians seeking to generate a professionalized craft: ‘many of the general public [we are told] failed to be convinced by the historians’ bloodless representation of sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland’. The editors then criticize unnamed historians for reluctance to apportion blame, a refusal to acknowledge atrocity, and – most seriously – of choosing ‘simplification’ and ‘even falsification’ over ‘more messy and complicated truths’ about the era.Footnote ³⁰

The editors’ polemic about the treatment of suffering and pain in Irish historiography is worth contextualizing and unpacking. Much of its rhetoric emanates from a particular, but lengthy, cultural moment in modern Irish history, one that had a profound effect on intellectual life in Ireland and the treatment of Ireland's past. During the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, the historical profession in Ireland, like Irish society as a whole, contained many who not only felt revulsion at the horrific human cost of the campaign of the Provisional IRA but seemed to believe that any attempt to imagine or even seek understanding of how people could feel justified in carrying out such atrocities was tantamount to collusion with what they saw as a type of Irish fascism.Footnote ³¹ In public discourse, any such attempt was liable to be interpreted by some as the creeping prelude to an apologia. This political stance often arose out of a feeling of solidarity with victims and their relatives, especially those whom the conflict had affected in the most brutal and unprovoked ways, but it also made the crude politicization of the study of Irish history seem more like a necessary virtue than it in fact was. While the venerable polarity between Unionist and Nationalist historiography still remained, it had been eclipsed by the polarity between groups that had emerged from a once apparently integrated nationalist tradition. In practice, this often played out as a clash between, on the one hand, those who held to social-democratic, liberal-constitutionalist, or internationalist-socialist doctrines (in rough Irish political party terms: Labour Party supporters, Fine Gael supporters and members of varied left-wing groups, most notably supporters of the Workers’ Party and Trotskyites),Footnote ³² and, on the other hand, historical pragmatists (and pessimists) who acknowledged with the greatest regret the perennial utility of violence to achieve ends (here can be numbered various independent commentators, the most eloquent of whom was Breandán Ó hEithir),Footnote ³³ as well as adherents of a type of traditional Irish ‘Gaullist’ strain, which had long managed to integrate a sentimental story of violent anti-colonial/imperialist revolution with a narrative of state formation (Fianna Fáil supporters). Actual supporters of the Provisionals were thin on the ground during public or media-based debates, partly because of an Irish state-sponsored broadcasting ban on statements and spokespeople from either the Provisional IRA or Provisional Sinn˙Féin. Notably, when particular supporters of the Provisionals did speak, their statements varied quite a deal in the rationale put forward and rhetoric used to justify the campaign.Footnote ³⁴

The political and intellectual atmosphere caused by this polarization was such that renewed historical scrutiny of the pantheon of Irish ‘patriots’ and their beliefs became not only more common among historians, but also widespread in the media. ‘Revisionism’ in the academy and the fourth estate was sometimes represented as a retrospective hunt for Provos avant le lettre with the aim of debunking their mystical authority by means of sceptical questioning, combined with a desire to subject their characters, personal lives, and their projects to a sometimes tendentious scrutiny. Of course, the re-examination of ‘heroes’ and ‘patriots’ has been a tendency in all healthy national historiographies since the middle of the last century, but some practitioners at each end of the Irish nationalist historical tradition's ideological poles seemed, on one hand, to hope and, on the other, to fear that the eventual result of this enterprise would be the elimination of those venerable props, intellectual resources, and historical precedents that separatist physical-force Irish nationalism had rested on in the past, not to mention the present. Many just saw it as a needlessly iconoclastic attack on distinct parts of Ireland's national identity, and perceived it as part of a larger ‘forbidding of Ireland’ (with apologies to Roger Scruton) occurring at a time (the 1980s) when the self-esteem of the Irish state's citizenry was at a low ebb.Footnote ³⁵ In any case, physical-force republicanism was commonly portrayed as something of a pathology founded on psychological or intellectual incapacity, one of an array of viral atavisms that had stunted Ireland's growth. Arguably, a wider context for this climate existed than that provided by Ireland's political context alone. Mainstream Western European political and intellectual culture, buoyed up on the hopes engendered by European integration following the horrors of the Second World War, had undeniable problems conceiving of a utilitarian, consequentialist view of violence, or investigating the contexts and thinking that impel people to kill.Footnote ³⁶

In this political/intellectual atmosphere, the study of catastrophes in Ireland's past became particularly sensitive. The denunciation of polemical ‘revisionism’ was elided with a suspicion of the intentions of professional historians. It was even argued that many professional Irish historians concentrated more on finding out in supposedly ‘value-free’ conditions the quantitative quiddities of Irish catastrophe, rather than evaluating the force that perceptions of the scale of catastrophe, itself an important catalyst for change, exerted over Irish political and social life. In the late twentieth century, the study of untimely or premature death and, as a corollary, the incidence of both violence inflicted and violence suffered in Irish history became particularly politicized and the adoption of a hermeneutic of suspicion towards the work of professional historians became rhetorically commonplace.Footnote ³⁷

The degree to which the aforementioned polarity affected history-writing on Tudor Ireland at that time, however, was rather limited. The conceptual debates that were deemed most serious when approaching sixteenth-century Irish history tended, first, to be disarmingly and somewhat self-consciously cosmopolitan, and, secondly, to be concerned about which transnational or international historiographical project Tudor Ireland should be annexed to. On one hand was Steven G. Ellis's ‘borderland’ approach, which presented Ireland as populated by mutually diffident Gaelic and English populations, the latter obliviously enacting a type of state-formation best understood as part of a parallel process taking place in the north of England and the marches of Wales: an historical vision that sought comparison with scholarship on medieval English and European frontiers and ‘state-formation’ and castigated both home-county historiographical snobbery and Hibernocentricity.Footnote ³⁸ On the other hand, was the view of Ireland fashioned by Nicholas Canny, in which English conquistadores, having first emulated Spanish colonial precedents by othering the Irish through an allegedly compulsive ethno-anthropological analysis, then settled down to acting remarkably like the colonial elites of the New World. Canny's focus on cultural contact seemed perfectly pitched for easy conversation with the projects and concepts of 1970s and 1980s Atlantic history.Footnote ³⁹

Disagreements over which historiographical agglomerate should prevail have persisted, but, impressively, these discussions have borne little of the domestically inflected political impress of the debates that animated modern Irish historiography on the period from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, where the impact of contemporary Irish political developments was clear and the intellectual atmosphere produced by them palpable. Yet, whenever those modernists who self-identified as ‘revisionists’, or were caricatured as such, turned to the sixteenth century, they did not tend to deny Lecky's and Froude's account of Tudor massacre, or the atrocious nature of the period. But then, of course, they were generally more interested in later things, the ideological battlefields lay elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁰ Perhaps this was a reason why Tudor Ireland attracted less popular attention than most other modern periods because, once investigated, it refused to present a history that people could be easily and instantly political about. Perhaps the effect of recent historical scholarship and the globalized historiographical debates about Tudor Ireland made it difficult to sustain such passions. As Ronald Hutton has pointed out, fierce debates about the nature of the ‘English Civil War’ had calmed in the 1990s once the ‘scholars had done their work too well for comfort. By discarding the idea of the inevitability of the war, and its propulsion by mighty social and economic forces, they … removed the sense of manifest destiny which connected it organically to the present day.’Footnote ⁴¹ In spite of Canny's and Ellis's debates about where best to locate Tudor Ireland historiographically, a new narrative about the nature of what had actually happened during the period and the major motivations swaying political protagonists had emerged. This normative narrative was itself a composite of two historians’ work on the period. The first was Brendan Bradshaw's Irish constitutional revolution of the sixteenth century, which had brought about the greatest leap forward in the sophisticated study of the period for over a century: he conceived of a ‘reform’-minded English metropolitan policy in Ireland which facilitated a fundamental movement against the wonted ethnocentric assumptions of the English-Irish colony in the late medieval period.Footnote ⁴² This was subsequently grafted to a contrasting, but in many ways complementary, thesis formulated by Ciaran Brady, who proffered a view of official ‘reform’ policy that was less idealistic and more venal and brutal than that formulated by Bradshaw.Footnote ⁴³ The lineaments of this model have proved particularly compelling.Footnote ⁴⁴

In this light, it is interesting that Edwards, Lenihan, and Tait ascribe the ‘general [Irish] public's’ lack of concern for sixteenth-century Irish history to their instinctive rejection of an ‘empiricist narrative’. They suggest that an adherence to ‘newer theoretical frameworks’ are the solution to this apathy. The theoretical frameworks they are thinking of, however, are not the brave horizons of ‘borderlands’ history or those proffered by the ‘Atlantic world’, but rather frameworks that can ‘play a small role in peacemaking through preparing communities for the process of reconciliation by encouraging them to confront historic wrongs perpetuated in their names, bridging gaps in popular historical consciousnesses and promoting a more nuanced understanding of historical events’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, would historical scholarship pursued with such an aim really fare better in any public forum? Would it be any more arresting than what we already have? In truth, the concept of giving a notional ‘general public’ a veto over the content of historical scholarship and writing, let alone preparing for reconciliation by doing research on atrocity, is fraught with problems. Plebiscitary history is not only impossible, it is undesirable. Historians should not feel anxiety about the degree to which their project or their argument does or does not correspond to some mystical sensus fidelium that cannot by its very nature be falsified. Of course, historians should write and present their material so as to have a claim on an audience and, in certain formats and media, the wider the audience the better. This should, out of respect for that audience, take the form of attention to style and presentation, certainly not concessions regarding content or thesis or research agenda, nor should it involve mandatory subscription to some sort of moral test act.Footnote ⁴⁶ Any vague concept like the ‘general public’ too easily becomes a totem that can aid the assertion of a narrow moral hegemony. In Age of atrocity, truth to tell, despite the editors’ desire for nuance, sixteenth-century Englishmen mostly come pre-packed, motivated by just as much black-hearted malice as would have been attributed to any atavistic Provo by a 1980s armchair-revisionist. Such demonization, no matter how cathartic, in fact, hampers historical thinking. There is an exception to this tendency in the book: Hiram Morgan's excellent essay on Hugh O'Neill's capacity for devastating but pragmatically conceived homicidal action is a much-needed counter-balance to the general tendency to guy protagonists.Footnote ⁴⁷

This hermeneutical and ethical point aside, Age of atrocity has such a great deal to offer the student of Tudor Ireland. The most significant article in the volume for Tudorists is David Edwards's piece on the escalation of violence in sixteenth-century Ireland.Footnote ⁴⁸ This is an essential contribution to the literature. The spine of Edwards's argument is plausible and timely. Put briefly, he suggests that the level of violence in Ireland increased steadily from the mid-fifteenth century to the 1530s, positing that the interventions of the crown over the two decades following the 1520s occurred at a moment when internal instability within the indigenous political system was particularly pronounced. From that point on, Ireland became an ever more violent society, never recovering its former equilibrium. His examination of the situation from the mid-fifteenth century to the 1530s shows sensitivity to political changes in Gaelic Ireland and stands as a significant addition to a recent crop of histories based on the evolving politics of many of the Gaelic-Irish and English-Irish lordships of the time.Footnote ⁴⁹ His observation that the coincidental occurrence of a number of succession disputes in a significant number of Gaelic-Irish lordships around 1511 accentuated the impact of external political intervention is particularly compelling and his creative use of the seventeenth-century ‘Annals of the Four Masters’ to divulge data about the nature and scale of Irish warfare in the previous two centuries is expertly done.Footnote ⁵⁰ Furthermore, Edwards is justified in his frustration that the crown's campaigns around the time of the fall of the House of Kildare and the subsequent campaign against the Geraldine League have not received more scholarly scrutiny before now – although the destabilization that resulted has been noted, if not anatomized, by Ciaran Brady and forms a crucial and unavoidable prelude to the narrative of his Chief governors.Footnote ⁵¹

It becomes clear, however, that a central component of Edwards's thesis is his belief in the relative impossibility that defensive or minimal concerns could motivate crown actions during the mid-Tudor period to any extent. Instead Edwards prefers to advance the thesis that a unified vision or programme – ‘conquest' – animated crown policy and dominated the whole era. However, it is worth remembering that the initial idea of enlarging the Pale, whether its motivation was defensive or sparked by avidity for ‘conquest’, had a peculiarly Irish provenance. It was an expression of the design long fetishized by the English-Irish Palesmen and vigorously advocated in the reform literature put out by the literati of Dublin and its hinterland; a central project advanced by this literature was the recovery by force of the scope of the medieval colony, necessitating the violent expulsion of the Gaelic Irish.Footnote ⁵² While the Palesmen are let off the hook somewhat in this regard, a certain amount of special pleading is made on behalf of the Gaelic-Irish lords and their violence over the whole period. It is suggested that whereas English (that is to say, crown) violence aimed to kill directly, Gaelic-Irish violence produced mostly ‘indirect casualties’. Edwards admits, however, that the Gaelic-Irish were common users of scorched-earth strategies.Footnote ⁵³ His uncertainty about the extent to which alleged beliefs among the Gaelic-Irish elite about the dishonour that resulted from killing peasants made an impact on the tenor of actual events is understandable, given the limitations of the sources available to us, but perhaps this should have given rise to a question as to whether this alleged taboo resulted in very few peasant killings, or whether it really just meant that such violent deaths, if they occurred, were unlikely to be recorded in Gaelic-Irish sources? Certainly, Edwards admits that after the 1530s, Gaelic-Irish killing of non-combatants was carried out with gusto, but he argues that this was because the scale and nature of warfare had been limited before the advent of crown intervention – the opening of Pandora's box – after which a total change in the character of conflict in Ireland took place. In short, ‘colonial warfare’ became the order of the day. Although Edwards cites Bruce Lenman as his authority, when using the phrase ‘colonial warfare’ it does not follow that Lenman would be wholly sympathetic to Edwards's use of the term. Lenman defined colonial wars as ‘episodes of violence’ that were extremely varied in nature and motivation, and certainly not relentless pre-meditated metropolitan or colonial bids to expand dominion.Footnote ⁵⁴ Edwards, however, seems to suggest that from the 1520s the beginning of a never-ending early modern crescendo of violence in Ireland had an English inception and was impelled onwards by a coherent English strategy, clear-eyed English tactics, and, to a remarkable degree, English malice.

And yet, amid this catalogue of violence, by turns Edwards appears to be aware that something else is needed. Although he asserts that ‘here is not the place for detailed discussion of the political circumstances underpinning the crown's embrace of expansion by conquest’, it seems certain that this is precisely the type of contextualization needed. There is a void at the centre of any account of Tudor Ireland, whatever its focus, which does not engage in a sustained way with politics. Ireland was a political society. Ongoing political relationships between the crown, its representatives, and the Irish existed. Even when Edwards refers to the significant military co-operation that occurred between many Irish lords and the crown, we are told that these indigenous troops came from ‘a rising number of compliant Gaelic lords anxious to secure the crown's friendship’. The pejorative adjectives ‘compliant’ and ‘anxious’ do not mitigate the need to account for the fact that when the crown campaigned in Ireland many of the Irish assisted it, and political agreements facilitated this.Footnote ⁵⁵ The existence of such political agreements and a political narrative extrapolated from them, however, has been central to the work of ‘reform-centred’ historians, who are unfairly presented here as figures with a deliberate desire to play down the brutality of Irish life in the period.Footnote ⁵⁶

It is more than plausible, indeed undeniable, that violence escalated in Tudor Ireland throughout the sixteenth century, but this does not mean that the country became a less political place, henceforth dominated by a crude strategy of conquest launched by the crown. Just as the tensions that sparked the Western Rebellion, Kett's Rebellion, and the Northern Rebellion and the subsequent conduct of those events were intensely political, involving the interplay of a variegated ‘popular politics’, the aspirations of yeomen, the disgruntlement of magnates, and the concerns of the crown, so Ireland, even in times of conflicts, was awash with the language of the deal and rough negotiation. In short, the essential and mesmerizing truth about Tudor Ireland is that intense political activity and physical force often had no buffer between them, frequently being each a part of the same negotiation. This should not be surprising. Political programmes, no matter how humanistic and optimistic they have been couched rhetorically, are not and never have been exclusive of violence – the constitutionalist/revolutionary dichotomy often projected on to Irish nationalist politics in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries was never received by the best ‘reform-centred’ historians of Tudor Ireland. We should not be amazed that the Elizabethan regime in Ireland could comprehend both the dubbing of MacCarthy Mór as earl of Clancar in 1565 and the slaughter of the O'Mores at Mullaghmast in 1578. Furthermore, whatever the editorial in Age of atrocity might imply, the admission of the political element in Tudor-Irish history actually makes the topic more interesting, as it would any sociological study or story. This should not be surprising either: The Wire and The Sopranos, for instance, are riveting dramas precisely because of their marriage of politics and violence. An exclusive focus on the violence alone, even if depicted solely from the vantage point of the victims, could not be as compelling as the tortured story of human transactions, institutional corruption, systems failure, and life on the edge of violence. Brutal violence, real politics, and sincerely conceived ameliorative intentions, strategies, and plans are far from mutually exclusive. It is extremely important to deal with them all to reach as full an understanding of Tudor Ireland, and indeed Tudor Rebellion, as possible.

The Ireland of that time easily comprehended both political momentum and violent action at the macro-level – in formal programmes of crown government as well as procedural vice-regal decisions – and also at the micro-level, where the many venal modi vivendi that all sections of Irish life – English-Irish freeholders, English captains, Gaelic-Irish and English-Irish magnates – arrived at with each other were hammered out. It was in this way that the country and its resources were carved up until the unasked for cataclysm of the so-called ‘Nine Years’ War’, brought on by a combination of dynastic politics, institutional neglect, charmless military captains, and the emergence of a radicalized Catholic identity opposed to metropolitan religious policy. Occasionally, total meltdown occurred, as in the earldom of Desmond between 1579 and 1584, but otherwise the normative state of affairs in the Irish polity consisted of vigorous and violent diplomatic risk-taking by the men of power whatever their ethnic or political identity. It is to these negotiations and an attendant story of institutional breakdown that Ciaran Brady's work, for instance, and Connolly's survey Contested island in particular attest. Specifically absent in Edwards's essay – and it is missed – is a serious acknowledgement of the myriad deals that were formulated between Irish magnates and the crown throughout the sixteenth century, most of which were based around the transaction that nineteenth-century historians came to call ‘surrender and regrant’.Footnote ⁵⁷ For despite all the valuable insights this essay presents (and they are many), writing about the 1540s and 1550s in Ireland without mentioning Sir Antony St Leger or Sir Thomas Cusack is not unlike writing about the 1630s without mentioning Wentworth. While ‘surrender and regrant’ was an imprecise tool and was often roughly used, while it could be exploitative and could issue in catastrophic failure – and indubitably it was meant to be superseded by something else, as everyone knew, from the start – nonetheless it became the metaphorical table around which the administration in Ireland, its officers, and the Irish magnates made eye-contact, did political work, gambled for high stakes in the knowledge that while losing could mean destruction, success could promise an English title, freedom from importunate retinues, and a fixed revenue.Footnote ⁵⁸ Politics and violence were each parts of the ‘ugly reality’ of ‘life long ago’ in Tudor Ireland. To leave that unnoticed or dismiss it, to repeat phrases used by the editors of Age of atrocity, results in choosing simplification over more messy and complicated truths. It should be remembered that the Irish lords were no slouches themselves when it came to exploitation of all and sundry, including the crown. Another thing is clear about Irish magnates and elites of the sixteenth century: they did not consider themselves fated to be victims.

IV

Which leads us to a work that is global in scope. The kaleidoscope of historical references used in the very last paragraph of Ben Kiernan's Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur is somewhat mystifying.Footnote ⁵⁹ Kiernan takes his reader from contemplation of Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton, Elizabethan viceroy of Ireland, through a succession of turns referring to Sir Charles Coote in the seventeenth century, the persecution of Australian Aborigines, Nazi use of the term ‘lice’ to describe Jews, and, finally, Al Qaeda's pathologization of the Sh'ia community. These cases are meant to stand side-by-side as symmetrical types.Footnote ⁶⁰ Doubtless, Grey is mentioned because Kiernan's world history of genocide has as one of its prominent and pivotal chapters a consideration of ‘The English conquest of Ireland, 1565–1603' – one link, between ‘Early modern southeast Asia’ and ‘Colonial America’, in a chain of sorrow. It would be beyond the remit of this review article to consider Blood and soil in its entirety – it is Kiernan's treatment of Elizabethan Ireland that concerns us here. However, in order to address this properly, it is crucial, first, to consider how he frames the subject and, secondly, to examine his methodology.

The measure of everything in this book is the definition of genocide arrived at by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide. Kiernan, founder of the Genocide Studies Programme at Yale University, adheres to this definition not only when analysing repression and violence today, but also when analysing repression and violence in the past. While Kiernan admits that the retrospective application of the Convention with a view to prosecution is impossible, he argues that there is no conceptual reason why such retrospective application of the Convention by means of an historical treatment should not be carried out. This historical study, he argues, aids ‘an understanding of the past patterns of the phenomenon [genocide] and the obsessions propelling its perpetrators’. This, it is hoped, will assist in ‘early and effective intervention’ when the ‘detectable warning signs’ are recognized.Footnote ⁶¹

At this point it is worth stating that the Convention was formulated with the practical aim of securing prosecutions. This aim determined the breadth of its terms; the hope in 1948 was to arrive at the broadest definition of genocide possible so that genocidal intent might be perceived early and nipped in the bud. The Convention states that any of the following acts committed ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ constitute genocide: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Kiernan also points out that the Convention does not require a perpetrator's motive to be the actual destruction of an ethnic group in order to define that state, group, or person as guilty of genocide, the effect of the actions provide sufficient proof – a crucial point.Footnote ⁶² Despite Kiernan's desire to arrive at an understanding of past patterns of genocide, the most basic of questions will not go away: can the Convention, defined in 1948, be used in any intelligent way when dealing with the past? Does this rough graft from the institutional definitions of the late twentieth century to the actions of early modern individuals, even those holding office from a sovereign, transcend the cognitive difficulties it poses? The Convention was composed to do something – halt potential genocide as quickly as possible and bring perpetrators to book, but the possibility of nipping early modern genocide in the bud has long past, as has the possibility of subjecting suspected perpetrators to due process.

In any case, to aid his readers, Kiernan has clarified those warning signs that should alert us to early modern infringements of the 1948 Convention. The first of these will not surprise readers: it is racism. The second is more subjective. Kiernan singles out an attachment to ‘the utopian, the intangible [and] the irrational’ as an infallible facilitator of past (and present) genocidal violence. Such an attachment, he asserts, will most often be culturally expressed through ‘a cult of antiquity’, ‘a vision of ideal land use’, and the deployment of that vision to justify territorial expansionism. Here, Kiernan unfortunately comes very close to an idée fixe and the campaigning tone that results tends to be subversive of historical thinking.Footnote ⁶³ A whistle-stop tour through ‘Classical genocide and early modern memory’ is telling. Throughout Blood and soil, Book ii of the Aeneid is treated as almost an explicit manifesto for genocide, the reading of which is deemed coterminous with genocidal inclination or intent. Similar to this are Kiernan's criticisms of Cato. Although that grave Roman is accurately accused of actively facilitating Rome's destruction of Carthage, the gloss that is given this cataclysmic event – namely that it ‘fits the definition in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention: [being] intentional destruction “in whole or in part, [of] a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such”’ – demonstrates how the methodology used to account for the reception of ideas in this book leaves more than a little to be desired.Footnote ⁶⁴

To be fair, when Kiernan deals with Tudor Ireland in a similar way he is doing something that has become, by now, quite traditional. Sixteenth-century Ireland has long been used as a screen on which diverse academic hypotheses have been projected. This tendency has been particularly notable in the realm of literary criticism, where the temptations offered by the junction of the Shakespearean age and fraught ‘Anglo-Irish relations’ have been particularly exciting for practitioners of the new historicism. Rather than concerning themselves with ‘improvisations of power’, they often assay improvisations of history. While literary and historical reflections on the sister kingdom by scholars such as John Kerrigan, Richard McCabe, and Deana Rankin have been sublime, all in all the history of sixteenth-century Ireland has paid a heavy price for Edmund Spenser's canonical status in undergraduate English lit courses.Footnote ⁶⁵ To Kiernan's credit, he has opted for a wider sample of sources and a greater variety of them than the wonted use of Spenser's works and letters to drown out all other testimony from the period. What results, unfortunately, does not provide a substantial enough corrective for the botched torsos proffered by slapdash literary critics. Blood and soil's treatment of Elizabethan Ireland also has forebears among the historians. Nicholas Canny, following passing suggestions by D. B. Quinn, asserted, but never demonstrated, that the attitude of the English to the Irish during Elizabeth's reign was strongly influenced by debates and opinions current in Spain about the status of native Americans and was marked, above all, by anthropological prejudice.Footnote ⁶⁶ This thesis has always proved attractive to those seeking quickly digestible meanings and motivations in Tudor Ireland. The broad conclusions at which Canny arrived, however, belied the circumstantial evidence cited to assert it.

Kiernan's treatment throws caution to the wind and takes this model of the highly conceived ethnological prejudice in the hearts and minds of English Elizabethans in Ireland as read – the publication in 1578 of an English translation of Gomara's Istoria de la conquista de Mexico is deemed to be particularly significant to English attitudes in the sister-kingdom – however, he also prioritizes the reception of accounts of the destruction of Carthage by ‘England's emerging leadership [which had] turned increasingly to classical precedent … [a]s England edged closer to the brink of empire’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This, he argues, was the crucial determinant of the genocidal tenor of government action of Tudor Ireland. The ‘emerging leadership’, we are told, was ‘the group of radical Protestants [who] spearheaded a broader cult of classicism and conquest’, among whom were the Sidneys of Penshurst, the Smiths (Sir Thomas and his son, Thomas Jr), William Fitzwilliam, and Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex.Footnote ⁶⁸ This line of argument is problematic on a number of levels, apart from the hermeneutical problem of difficulty distinguishing correlation with causation. First, the characterization of these men as a highly integrated cadre with shared ideals is simplistic. They certainly knew each other, but in the way that colleagues know – and sometimes cordially loathe – each other. Secondly, the prominence of Ireland in their careers indicates that, far from being emerging leaders, they were figures whose careers were at the beck and call of the real Elizabethan first-raters: Leicester, Hatton, and, of course, Burghley. Thirdly, their views of the sister kingdom amounted to conventional truisms: Ireland was a flawed political society; the Gaelic-Irish (since 1541) were her majesty's subjects; the application of solutions that had stabilized politics in late fifteenth-century England and also in Wales was to be the norm in Irish policy; the Irish – Gaelic-Irish and English-Irish – currently had the upper-hand in both high and low politics; individual Irish potentates constantly sought their own advantage through the employment of sporadic violence, non-compliance with crown policy, and delay, usually done with the aim of receiving the best deal possible in local, regional, or national politics; the Irish commons were scandalously treated by their own indigenous overlords; severity was required in Irish affairs, especially when dealing with lawlessness and advanced rebellion, but was more likely to cause more debilitating trouble and expense for a crown officer than the short-term satisfaction it gave was worth; Elizabeth did not support officers if they incurred or even risked serious expenditure; it was not pragmatic to treat adherence to the norms of the ‘old religion’ in Ireland as a necessary badge of disloyalty (at least up until the second Desmond rebellion) unless it was calculatedly flagrant; Ireland was under-populated; small-scale colonization using private resources could have a role in Irish policy, but experience showed it to be disastrous; in the provinces English military captains serving as crown officers could not be prevented from being venal. In short, Ireland was an appallingly unsatisfying place to work if one was pure-minded. A classical education, then as now, was of great value, but it was more likely to be a consolation in moments of despair than a spur to genocidal action.

The core of the problem is that Kiernan does not want to consider Tudor Ireland as a political society at all. Indeed, he cannot allow himself to do so if what he wants to do is deal with it as a pivotal case-study in a Manichaean global history of state-sponsored genocide according to the 1948 UN Convention. He chooses rather to project his conceptual framework on to matter that, in this case, refuses to accede to it. His repeated assertion that genocide, extermination, and colonization were the manifest aims of official crown policy in Ireland carried out by officers het up on a heady cocktail of Livy or Virgil may come to mind when looking at Ireland from the vantage point of the specific interests that concern genocide studies, but the reality was different. Unfortunately, the question as to whether crown violence in Tudor Ireland was genocidal according to the 1948 UN Convention advances historical scholarship as much as would consideration of whether Samuel Pepys was guilty of sexual harassment according to its definition by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1980.

V

So at the end of this tour through the Tudor regime's territories from East Anglia through the English north-east to Ireland, how do we reconcile their histories of rebellion and suppression? The robustness of the model of holistic social history as practised by figures like Duffy, Kesselring, Shagan, and Wood assuredly recommends itself as most satisfactory; Tudor Irish primary sources, even hoary old state correspondence, are certainly rich enough to support ‘thickly described’ social, cultural, and political histories, including histories of rebellion, coercion, and suppression.Footnote ⁶⁹ Essentially, if proffered the choice between writing an account of conflict or an account of consensus in Ireland over the sixteenth century, we should refuse to choose. It would be a false choice. Whatever else, historians should not congratulate themselves for serving those who perished at Dussindale in 1549, Gillingwest in 1569, or Rathlin Island in 1575. A moral turn in historical studies, often framed in terms of a duty to compensate for the depredations of power by speaking truth to it, rings hollow, especially in cases (the majority) where the power involved was wielded in a past with which the historian can have no immediate physical link. All the writing and lecturing that an historian can do on the subject of suffering and violent death, no matter how profound, cannot do the dead any good. It behoves historians to embrace humbly our limitations. In embracing them lies our freedom. As for lost causes, their partisans and all those who died in the course of their suppression, we should certainly strive to investigate and understand them with as much care and attention as possible, but this should not occlude our duty to seek out and examine the motivations, contexts, and actions of those who have been perceived as victors or perpetrators with as much sympathy and skill. We must treat the dead we encounter in our researches with great respect in their diversity and individuality (even those for whom we feel less sympathy). We should resist making assumptions about them as much as possible, and certainly eschew stratifying them according to our present-day understanding of categories like race, sexuality, political loyalty, religious creed, or social status as best we can. The best tribute we can pay to them is to do as the best historians do, be curious about them, find them interesting, be patient with them, hypothesize that they are at least as clever as us, and persevere in their company even when they begin to bore and disgust us. In short, we must seek to understand them on their own terms.