The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Preface: 1492 and its effects on Ireland (3)
Spain and the English assault on Ireland
How would one have viewed all this, looking at it then from the Irish side?
As Tudor England tried to force a reluctant Ireland to conform to its own policies and structures, the power of Spain was tempting. Surely it might be used as a counterweight? There were precedents: Irish kings and princes had been known to go into military alliance with foreign powers so as to achieve their ends in Ireland. One could find examples in Donal O’Neill (ally of Edward Bruce) and Dermot MacMurrough (ally of Henry II), and going all the way back to the exiled Irish prince who was in discussions with Agricola, Roman governor of Britain, about 50 A.D., according to Tacitus. But there are not very many of these examples on record. They can be regarded as extreme and abnormal responses. In the richly varied, particularist politics of Ireland an individual lord would normally seek resources within Ireland for his ambitions, or he would accept the current facts of power. This was still the case in the 16th century.
In the Gaelic or “Gaelicised” parts of Ireland, what most people desired was continuation of the kind of political communities they had, without fundamental change. I think this statement is true beyond reasonable doubt: behaviour in the 16th and 17th centuries sufficiently proves it. One prong of English strategy, which Henry VIII launched with his scheme of “Surrender and Regrant”, was to make the Gaelic lords a force for change. In the 16th century this policy had its most important success in Thomond. The English-educated Donough O’Brien, fourth Earl of Thomond from 1580 to 1624, was an absolutely reliable and usually active supporter of English policy. However, Gaelic culture continued to flourish in Thomond, and the professional poets and historians maintained their schools. Matthew de Renzi, an intellectually curious colonist and unofficial intelligence agent, managed to become their student. He warned that they were sustaining an independent sense of honour and political identity, and inevitably this would contain the seeds of rebellion.
Elsewhere, there were examples of what David Edwards called “collaboration without anglicisation”. Gaelic lords would carefully avoid conflict with the English, they would be verbally friendly and accommodating and make all manner of commitments, but in fact they would change little or nothing in the way they ran their political communities. Edwards gives the example of the MacGiolla Pádraig barons of Upper Ossory. (7). In other localities there were astute gamblers who would sometimes rebel when that was advantageous, but were careful also to make peace at the right time and not be caught out on a limb. Examples were Fineen O’Driscoll in West Cork, Donal MacCarthy in South Kerry, Grace O’Malley/Tibbot-na-Long Bourke in Mayo, and Alexander MacDonnell in Antrim. All of these people had that quality which Fear Flatha Ó Gnímh describes in one of his magnificent poems: the supple flexibility of the reed, which bends in the storm so as not to be broken. (8)
And then there were the few who were unbending and who gambled most on the power of Spain. First of all, James FitzMaurice, the most talented of the Munster FitzGeralds, who was squeezed out of his native province by his jealous relative the Earl, but who ultimately managed to precipitate earl and earldom into a religious war where the FitzGeralds were completely destroyed. And there’s Hugh O’Neill, the most important of all, whose relations with Spain are too complicated to try to make sense of them here. But the fact is, in 1596 he was offered a compromise that a typical Gaelic lord would have accepted. Gambling on Spanish aid, he was unbending: he stood like the oak in the storm, holding out for what Cecil called “Utopia”.
(Fineen MacCarthy of Carbery was someone who would certainly have wished to bend prudently, but he misjudged the wind’s force and direction. Right on cue, a handsome, gifted and ambitious MacCarthy appeared in Munster at the moment when the Munster FitzGeralds had been destroyed. For four centuries the MacCarthys had been scheming and hoping somehow to achieve this result. But the English, when destroying the FitzGeralds, had not at all intended to serve the MacCarthys’ ambitions. They were shocked when Fineen, the heir-apparent in Carbery, eloped with the daughter of the MacCarthy Earl based in Killarney, who had been supposed to marry the planter Nicholas Browne. There was the appalling prospect of the ancient pre-Norman power re-emerging in a huge unified territory – headed by a man who was known to have mastered the Spanish language. And this in 1589, the year after the Armada! The English made a measured response: they did not kill Fineen, but merely kidnapped him and brought him to London. Following the destruction of the Munster Plantation in the rebellion of 1598 he was briefly allowed back to West Cork, since it was hoped he could be a counterweight to Hugh O’Neill and the anticipated Spanish invaders. He temporised too much, so they kidnapped him again and this time kept him in London until his death 40 years later. The paranoia which this “Hispaniolised” Fineen inspired in the English is vividly expressed in Pacata Hibernia and some other letters published in Life and Letters of Florence MacCarthy Reagh by Daniel MacCarthy.)
Spain “endangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe”, Walter Raleigh said in 1596 (Pagden p. 67). To the extent that Spain was disturbing Ireland, its interest was instrumental. The Catholic Irish were the enemy’s enemy and they were capable of causing trouble. Ireland might have the potential to become “an English Flanders”. (9) But what was a Spanish alliance supposed to lead to from an Irish point of view?
The most able, resolute and persistent planner of a Spanish alliance was Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire, who became Archbishop of Tuam in 1609. In his cluttered book Perez Tostado identifies him as the first Irish “power broker” (p. 51), though without seeming to recognize his huge importance. In King James’s time, when Spain was at peace with Ireland, Ó Maolchonaire was prepared to press for Spanish diplomatic pressure to win some relief measures for Irish Catholics. However, his preference was for war. He aimed to exploit any outbreak of military conflict between Spain and England to organize an invasion of Ireland. Knowing how intense the rivalries were in Gaelic Ireland, he was prepared to consider makeshift political solutions. The essential thing was to restore the Catholic religion. To that end he had infinite faith in Spanish power: the Spanish certainly could do it, if only they wanted to. (10)
However, an Ireland sustained by Spain would surely have led a wretched, violent and most precarious existence unless the state power in England too was changed. And for any Irish gambler, that was quite a wager.
************
Did Spain change the way the English thought of the Irish? And if so, how? The question is worth asking because Spain, while it was the greatest power on earth, was a model in ways that were forgotten about when its power declined. The Spanish invented modern colonial thinking, and also another, opposite kind of thinking (by Bartolomé de Las Casas) which is hard to label but fascinating. I will say something about these in a future article.