Edmund Spenser: A View of the Present State of Ireland: Discoursed by Way of a Dialogue between Eudoxus and Irenaeus. In William P. Trent, ed.: The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1903.
Edmund Curtis: A History of Ireland. London: Methuen and Company, Ltd., 1950 [1936].
“Lord! How quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!”
Eudoxus
In his elegant and judicious introduction to Spenser’s works, William P. Trent declares that “no idealist, no sensitive lover of ethereal beauty, no reader endowed with an ear trained to delight in the subtlest melodies and most exquisite harmonies, no dreamer enamored of the stately and romantic past, no willing prober of allegories and symbols, and, above all, no soul in love with essential purity can possibly remain indifferent to the appeal made by the poet and, to a considerable degree, by the man.” For any such reader, “to know Spenser at all thoroughly is to love him deeply” as the author of poems “gentle, pure, and lovely, rather than sublime.”
“But,” Trent continues, “idealists, symbolists, ethereal natures, and readers trained to enjoy the subtlest poetic harmonies are, and always have been, rare. This is a work-a-day world actuated by a rather overpowering sense of the real.” In the modern world, he writes “the great national dramas killed allegory.” Trent wrote those words with the First World War little more than a decade distant. And with still worse to come, the taste for epic poetry along the lines of The Faerie Queene would lie even more deeply buried under the rubble left by tyrannic cruelty and egalitarian vulgarity.
Had Spenser no sense of the real, though? He saw war. In his prose if not his poetry he unhesitatingly urged harsh measures against the enemies of his people, his queen, and his family. So much so, that Spenser’s literary admirers seem not quite to know what to make of his dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in which one character recommends the use of famine to break Irish resistance to English imperial rule, citing Machiavelli’s Discourses as an authoritative guide to mastering rebels. Spenser had to gather his wife and four children to flee an advancing Irish army, which burned his County Cork home down to the first floor. If an ‘idealist,’ he felt all the fury of a disillusioned one. Or would a closer reading of his poetry reveal toughness beneath the ethereality?
The Spensers had been living on the forfeited estate of the Earl of Desmond, in the manor and castle of Kilcolm. How London-raised Edmund Spenser, son of a clothier, scholarship boy at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, found himself living in southern Ireland itself requires a mind-clearing draft of real Irish history, as served by Professor Curtis.
Once a people centered in modern-day Austria but driven off by the Romans, the Celts arrived in Ireland around 350 BC. Spenser would have known the later Celtish claim, dating from medieval times, that they descended from the fierce Scythians, who established a nomadic empire in Central Asia in ancient times. Such claims notwithstanding, the Celts, with their “warlike, aristocratic, and masterful temper,” conquered the existing rulers, whose ancestors themselves had conquered peoples who’d arrived before them. The Gaels, as this branch of the Celts called themselves, practiced Druidism; the Roman authors Spenser would have read claimed that the Druids or priestly class practiced human sacrifice. The Druids shared authority with an aristocratic warrior class (in Caesar, the equites). In addition, the Fili—poet/seers who cast spells—served as “hereditary keepers of the ancestral lore and learning of Ireland as expressed in the Irish language.” Finally, the Gaels developed a set of laws, not written down until the eighth century AD, eventually called the Brehon laws, after the Brehons or judge-arbitrators who presided over cases under it.
Gaelic rule did not go uncontested, as chiefs of non-Gaelic peoples brought Gauls in as military allies. The strategy failed, but many Gauls stayed, settled, and became absorbed into the Irish population. Charles de Gaulle traced some of his ancestors to this population, and later English dealings with Ireland may have added to his list of grievances against perfidious Albion. For although the Romans never ruled Ireland, the Anglo-Saxons, who arrived in Britain in the fifth century AD, would eventually make the attempt.
The Anglo-Saxons may have been brought in as military guardians against the Celts, who were feared raiders in the region, poorly guarded since the end of Roman rule there, in 410. A young Christian born only about twenty years earlier, Patricius, son of Calpurnius, had been seized by Celtic raiders and served as a slave there—tending sheep, David-like, before escaping first to Britain and then to Gaul, where he studied for the priesthood at Auxerre. Dreaming that the voices of the Irish were calling on him to return and save them from Druidism, he received authorization from the Church of Gaul (then a more powerful element of the Roman Catholic Church than Rome itself) to launch an evangelizing mission. Consecrated as a bishop, in 432 the Church sent him on the mission which would indeed begin the end of Druidism and earn him recognition as a saint of the Church.
Culturally, Gaelic Ireland thus became a blend of Fili tradition and Roman-Church learning, and remained so. The Norse conquerors who ruled for nearly two centuries left no lasting political or cultural mark. Eventually called the “Ostmen,” they became “in spirit and habit almost Irish.” Of much more political significance were the Normans, who arrived in 1166, one hundred years after they had conquered Britain and a dozen years since they had lost control of the English throne to the Plantagenets. Perhaps wanting to give this “aggressive baronial race” something to do, and following a precedent set by his Norman maternal grandfather, Henry I, Plantagenet king Henry II had already given them liberty to attack Wales. There they mixed with the native Celts and gained a knowledge of Celtic customs useful in dealing with the Irish. With superior fortifications and military equipage, they quickly established a substantial foothold in eastern and southeastern Ireland. In October 1171 Henry II landed at Waterford, on Ireland’s southern coast, giving the first charter for Norman-English rule to Dublin, on the east coast. He appointed a viceroy and assumed control of land-titles, per English law. Staying only six months, he left the Norman-English “gentleman buccaneers” in de facto control of the territories they had seized.
This established the fundamental political dynamics that persisted, in one permutation after another, throughout Spenser’s lifetime. The Norman-English, also called the Anglo-Irish and eventually the “Old English,” struggled for control with some of the Celts while intermarrying with others; they also struggled with the English monarchy whenever it attempted to exert greater control over its colonies. The Celts fought with one another, too.
The viceroy or royal Deputy served as supreme judge, political ruler, and commander of the feudal levy in the Dublin government, whose territory was called ‘the Pale,’ a term referring to a fence made of stakes and meaning a boundary. Assisting the viceroy was an exchequer, a chancellor, a treasury, and a judiciary that followed English common law. The Magna Carta was extended to Ireland in 1217. Thus the Anglo-Irish enjoyed English rights. The Crown reserved the power of legislation to itself, consistent with the English understanding of the monarch as the ‘defender of the realm’ and ruler of imperial holdings. Locally, the English section established the shire form of government. But the native Irish there were reduced to the status of feudal villeins—essentially serfs with no rights under the English common law but no protection under the Brehon law, which the common law replaced.
Independent of and sharply contrasting with the Pale, northern Ireland was ruled by Gaelic kings who observed the Brehon law. They maintained their sovereignty with the aid of Scottish mercenaries, the formidable ‘galloglasses,” capable of fighting even the warlike Normans. The Anglo-Irish called these kingdoms the “land of war.” In the central and southern areas, a compromise was worked out. There weren’t enough English settlers to rule there, but the king nonetheless claimed sovereignty. He devised an arrangement whereby Irish chieftains would rule by royal grant. Called the “march lands” or the “feudal Liberties,” these areas served as fields of conflict for centuries.
As a result of these political arrangements, the Irish remained incapable of unifying against their conquerors but often could defend themselves locally. The Norman-English settlers also quarreled among themselves while at the same time intermarrying with the Irish and adopting many of the customs of the country—becoming increasingly Anglo-Irish. By the 1330s, Edward III had grown sufficiently alarmed that he abridged Anglo-Irish rights, provoking the formation of the first “Patriot party,” men unified not on the basis of Irish nationalism but by shared antipathy to political control centralized in Westminster. Edward assigned his second son, Lionel of Clarence, to settle the Irish question. Lionel called the Parliament of Kilkenny in 1366; to prevent Anglo-Irish “degeneracy,” he forced through a set of laws requiring the Anglo-Irish to maintain English language, laws, usages, even fashions, instead of adapting those of the “Irish enemies.” To counteract the charm of the Irish Fili, the new laws prohibited the employment of Irish minstrels, poets, and story-tellers as entertainers in English households. Violations of these laws would result in forfeit of lands—controlled, it will be recalled, by the monarch. Irish living within the Pale were excluded from all Anglican cathedrals and abbeys. This legislation succeeded in reinforcing ‘Englishness’ in the Pale, while effectively giving up on efforts to extend it in the other territories. Further, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw England distracted by more urgent matters than the governance of Ireland. Wars in France and the civil War of the Roses, which began in 1455, enabled the Irish to make political gains in some fifty to sixty provincial regions, where Irish barons, bards, and Brehons prevailed.
During the English civil war, the Irish supported the Yorkist challenge to the Lancastrian dynasty. Retreating from England, the Yorkists found in Ireland a springboard for counterattacks. In the provinces west of the Pale, Anglo-Irish lords were ascendant, eventually dominated by Thomas, Earl of Kildare. Gerald, the eighth earl, called Garret More by the Irish, was the most impressive of the line. Edward IV attempted to rein him in by sending Leonard, Lord Grey, to replace him, but Lord Grey failed.
So did the Plantagenets. When the Tudor king Henry VII ascended to the throne in 1485, replacing Richard III and ending the War of the Roses, England had its first genuinely ‘modern’ king—that is, a determined state-builder or ‘centralizer’ of English political authority. But in Ireland, the Earl of Kildare backed the anti-Tudor pretender, Edward VI, sending an expedition of Anglo-Irish and German mercenaries into England in 1487. They were crushed, and Henry had Kildare removed from power in 1494. He appointed Sir Edward Poynings as the new viceroy, tasked with “bridling the Irish Parliament,” as Curtis puts it, and with ending home rule by Yorkist aristocrats in Dublin. In doing so, Poynings secured the Pale. Recalling Poynings in 1496, Henry then reversed course and effectively co-opted Kildare, making him his Deputy in Ireland—a Deputy now unconstrained, but also unaided, by the parliament in Dublin and mindful that Henry could ‘unmake’ him as soon as ‘make’ him. Henry used Kildare this way for the next seventeen years. Dissatisfied with continued Anglo-Irish and Irish recalcitrance, Henry finally ruined the House of Kildare in the 1530s, reappointing Grey as his Lord Deputy. Grey called the “Reformation Parliament” in 1536, which attainted the Kildare family and revived the long-unenforced bans against Anglo-Irish marriage, employment of Irish minstrels and poets by the Anglo-Irish, and Irish styles of dress. To these regime changes to the Anglo-Irish way of life, the centralizing state added structural regime changes: reform of the Irish Church along more strictly Anglican lines; the end of aristocratic Home Rule; suppression of Brehon law; the territorial extension of the Pale. Henry had himself installed as the king of Ireland. Treaties with many of the Irish and Anglo-Irish lords allowed them to keep their lordships at the price of accepting tenure in office under the Crown. Henry’s successor, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, who might have been expected to be more sympathetic to Irish and Anglo-Irish claims, in fact extended Henry’s policy by confiscating lands in the midland section of the island, replacing Irish landlords with English.
This, along with the church reforms, led to a series of rebellions in the next half-century. It had been “hoped on the English side that the great lords and chiefs would gradually introduce and enforce in their own countries the English law, religion, and language.” But by the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1558 it had become clear “what a determined opposition the old Gaelic and Brehon order was capable of, even among the Old English.” The poets and bards had persisted in their role as “the chief inspirers of the native tradition,” maintaining “the haughty pride and warlike spirit of their patrons by their encomiums in verse.” The Brehons and chroniclers “kept up the native law and all its records.” Old-regime loyalists upheld an ethos in which the finest human type was held to be aristocrats who, Curtis writes “still lived in the heroic age, in the atmosphere of battle and foray, and who were expected by their poets, historians, and followers to be warriors rather than statesmen.” With the modernizing young queen on both the English and the Irish thrones, “the old Gaelic world, which had existed for two thousand years, was now to clash with the modern world as represented by the Tudor government.”
The Reformation Parliament in the 1560s imposed the Book of Common Prayer on church services; established the monarch as the head of the Church of Ireland; and confiscated Catholic cathedrals and churches for use by the Church of England. Curtis summarizes the rebels’ motives in the phrase, “religion, land, and local lordship.” In religion, the Catholic Counter-Reformation was now underway, with Jesuits sharpening the issues with their astute use of dialectic and Puritans answering with their astute use of doctrine. This promised international support for the rebels. The land issue centered on the insecurity of land-titles held by Anglo-Irish aristocrats in Leinster and Munster, where they were threatened by the introduction of English-born planters. And the political issue centered on threats to the feudalism introduced by the Normans and to the even older Irish chieftanships. The modern state tolerated neither.
Born in 1552, Spenser saw reports of the first rebellions against Elizabeth. In 1566 she appointed Sir Henry Sidney as Lord Deputy of Ireland. He enforced Westminster policy vigorously from Dublin. The First Desmond Revolt—named for the Earldom of Desmond, its locus—began in 1569. The Fitzgerald family, which held the Earldom, expected military assistance from Philip II of Spain. Preoccupied with his own rebels in Spanish-ruled Netherlands and with the expenses of ruling his extensive New-World colonies, Philip could offer very little to the Geraldines. Even with his own poorly-disciplined troops carrying the fight, the Earl managed to sustain the rebellion for five years before giving it up.
In 1579, twenty-seven-year-old Edmund Spenser was introduced to the Earl of Leicester by his young friend and fellow-poet, Philip Sidney, son of the now-former Lord Deputy. Spenser became his secretary, but soon found a new patron: Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who was appointed as Lord Deputy the following year, bringing Spenser with him as his aide.
By then the Second Desmond War had erupted. Initiated by James FitzMaurice Fitzgerald, commanding forces that included papal troops, this was (as the rebels put it) “a war for the Catholic religion and against a tyrant who refuses to hear Christ speaking by his Vicar”—namely, Pope Pius V, who had excommunicated Elizabeth a decade earlier. Henry Sidney, now on the Privy Council, supported stern repression. Arthur warred against the rebels unmercifully but ineffectively, and was recalled to face criticism in 1582. Among the decisions criticized was his conduct of the siege of Smerwick, a town west of Dingle on the southwestern shore of the island; Spanish and Italian soldiers had surrendered but were nonetheless massacred by Arthur’s troops. Yet Spenser never ceased to admire him, calling him in a set of verses of dedication to The Faerie Queene “Most Noble Lord, the pillar of my life, / And Patron of my Muses pupillage.” Writing his book from the “savage soyle” of Ireland, Spenser defended the Tudor policy of Anglicization in Ireland, and spared no pity on those who resisted it.
The rebellion ended in 1583 with the Crown forces triumphant. Beginning in 1586 English colonists were installed on the Munster Plantation in County Cork. Spenser was among them; his influential friend, Sir Walter Raleigh (who introduced him to the Queen a few years later) amassed some 40,000 acres; Spenser had to be content with a mere 3,000, residing in the confiscated manor and castle of the Earl of Desmond. He also won appointment as the Clerk of the Office of Munster.
Catholic resistance to Anglican rule hardly ended with the Desmond Wars. Most spectacularly, the Spanish Armada was wrecked only two years later; had the expedition succeeded, the lives of the English settlers would have been forfeit. And in 1594 the Tyrone War, also called the Nine-Year War, resulted in the aforementioned destruction of Spenser’s home.
The provinces of Tyrone and Ulster are nowhere near Munster. They are located to the northwest and northeast, respectively, of the Pale. In Ulster the old Gaelic regime had continued, and there “Red” Hugh O’Neill initiated the conflict, soon joined by his brother-in-law, Hugh O’Neill. They won several victories over the English, but with no artillery or siege weapons they failed to take Dublin. Hoping for Spanish aid, they nonetheless intended to prolong the war until the now-elderly Elizabeth died, in the hope of extracting a better settlement from her successor, James VI of Scotland. Enraged by the early defeats, Elizabeth appointed Sir Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy as Royal Deputy. In Curtis’s words, Mountjoy “decided that the war could only be ended by a general famine” brought on by burning crops—a policy Spenser’s patron, Arthur, had already tried. A war of containment and attrition followed. Mountjoy used this induced scarcity as a prelude to buying off many commanders and their vassals. Modest Spanish military assistance did come, but it was ineffective, and Hugh O’Neill surrendered in March 1603, four years after Spenser’s death. When James ascended to the English throne in the same year as James I he inherited a largely pacified Ireland.
Published in 1596, Spenser’s dialogue on Ireland may or may not have had some influence on the militarily successful English policy. It wasn’t published until 1633, but it circulated in manuscript shortly after Spenser completed it. Spenser also prepared a brief report to the Queen, giving her the gist of his argument. What is certain is that it provides arguments in favor of harsh means for achieving the end of regime change in Ireland, whereby it might be more firmly fixed in the Empire.
The interlocutors are Eudoxus, which means ‘Good Opinion,’ and Irenaeus, which means ‘Peace.’ Irenaeus has just returned from Ireland, reporting on its “good and commodious soil.” Eudoxus begins with a statement of wonder: “I wonder that no course is taken for the turning thereof to good uses, and reducing of that savage nation to better government and civility.” Irenaeus says that “good plots” have been devised for doing those things, but “they say”—he never identifies them—that all such plots or plans fail for four reasons, two ‘pagan’ and two Christian. They say the “genius” of the soil interferes with good plots; a “genius” is a presiding spirit, good or evil, determining the character of a person, place, or thing. It is present from the beginning—hence the root it shares with ‘generation—and is ineradicable. “They” also say the influence of the stars interferes; in Renaissance astrology, “genius” itself may be determined by the alignment of the stars at the time of origin. More pious persons say that God has not yet appointed the time of Ireland’s reformation, or that God may be reserving Ireland “in this unquiet state” to use it as a scourge of England.
Mr. Good Opinion knows bad opinions when he hears them. He dismisses them as “vain conceits of simple men” who “judge things by their effects, and not by their causes.” The real causes of failure must be unsound counsels and plans or else “faintness in following and effecting” them. “Through wisdom, [Ireland] may be mastered and subdued,” “since the poet sayeth, ‘The wise man shall rule even over the stars,’ much more over the earth.” [1] Eudoxus’ inclination to wonder, and his desire to get to the real causes of things marks him as more than merely a man of good opinion but as a political philosopher, or a would-be political philosopher, or perhaps a political man who seeks practical wisdom. He asks Irenaeus to enumerate the evils he’s observed there, as a “wise physician” diagnoses the disease before he treats the patient. This reinforces the impression that Eudoxus guides himself by the light of nature, not revelation ‘ancient’ or ‘modern.’
Irenaeus deplores “the infinite number” of evils in Ireland, which he likens to Pandora’s box. But the worst, “most ancient and long-grown” of these are the laws, the customs, and the religion.
How can laws, intended for the good of the commonwealth, be a source of evil? Eudoxus asks. Irenaeus replies that it is with laws as it is with a physician’s remedies: a given regimen may be good in itself but bad in the circumstances; or it may have been good in the original circumstance, bad when that circumstance changed. What is more, if medical or legal prescriptions are not consistently followed, evils will result.
By laws, Eudoxus asks, do you mean English common law or statutes enacted by Parliament? Both: the common law, brought over by William the Conqueror, “fitted well with the state of England then being” because the English at that time were a peaceable people tyrannized by their king, eager for change. William and the Norman laws were looked upon as improvements by this law-abiding population. “But with Ireland it is far otherwise, for it is a nation ever acquainted with wars, though but amongst themselves, and in their own kind of military discipline, trained up over their youths.” Indeed, “they scarcely know the name of law,” having “kept their own law,” the Brehon Law, which Irenaeus judges to be scarcely worthy of the name of law at all. Like the English common law, it is unwritten and traditional, but unlike the common law it is “in many things repugning quite both to God and man’s law.” For example, in criminal cases the Brehon does not so much judge as arbitrate between the parties to determine compensation. Even murder cases are settled with payment. More, the Brehon is appointed and controlled by the local lord, and can be depended upon to “adjudgeth for the most part the better share unto his lord.”
These practices continue despite the Irish acknowledgment of Henry VIII’s sovereignty and of English law. “What boots it to break a colt,” Irenaeus asks, “and to let him straight run loose at random?” The current generation disavows any agreement made by their fathers, since they Irish are not bound by oaths sworn by any previous generation. And indeed they are not so bound, under their own laws of succession, which are based not on inheritance but on tanistry: In Ireland, after a lord or captain dies his people elect a new ruler, usually a brother or cousin of the deceased, not one of his children. What they do respect and adhere to are “all the former ancient customs of the country.” This includes the rule that property not be ceded to strangers, “especially the English.” Tanistry ensures that they will have adult rulers, better defenders of the land than boy-kings or girl-queens dominated by their regents.
Eudoxus asks, how can this be remedied? Mr. Peace invokes Cicero: “all is the conqueror’s as Tully to Brutus saith.” Henry VIII did not sufficiently force the recognition of the right of conquest on the Irish, although the Irish parliament gave lip service to obedience. But perhaps, Eudoxus suggests, “it seemed better under that noble King to bring them by their own accord unto his obedience, and to plant a peaceable government among them, than by such violent means to keep them under.” And surely his daughter Elizabeth can rectify matters.
Irenaeus doesn’t think regime change comes so readily. “It is no so easy now that things have grown into a habit and have their certain course, to change the channel, and turn the stream another way, for they now have a colorable pretense to withstand such Innovations, having accepted other laws and rules already.” Ireland is no blank slate. Further, the William the Conqueror stayed “in person to overlook the Magistrates, and to overawe the subjects with the terror of his sword and the countenance of his Majesty,” whereas in Ireland neither the Plantagenet Henries nor the Tudor Henries did any such thing for a sustained period. Further, and crucially, “laws ought to be fashioned unto the manners and customs of the people, to whom they are meant, and not to be imposed unto them according to the simple rule of right; for else… instead of good they may work ill, and pervert Justice into extreme Injustice. For he who would transfer the laws of the Lacedaemonians to the people of Athens should find a great absurdity and inconvenience.” The Lacedaemonians were a military people, like the Irish, although better disciplined.
When the Irish grow weary of war “they sue for grace, til they have gotten new breath and recovered their strength again.” For this reason, “it is vain to speak of planting laws, and plotting of policies, til they are altogether subdued.” But were they not subdued by Henry II? Yes, but the Irish then retreated “into the deserts and mountains,” beyond the reach of the laws, as the English could not do in 1066. The Anglo-Norman settlers stayed under the law and enjoyed its benefits among themselves, but when the Irish returned, desperate for food and shelter, they were placed under vassalage by the foreign aristocrats, “who scarcely vouchsafed to impart unto them, the benefit of those laws, under which themselves lived, but every one made his will and commandment a law unto his own vassal.” The law of England “was never properly applied unto the Irish nation, as by a purposed plot of government”; the aristocrats evaded it. Then, when the War of the Roses began, the Anglo-Irish left to fight. The Irish, seeing the countryside “so dispeopled and weakened,” repossessed many of their former lands. And so Ireland has gone ever since—sporadic English attempts to rule interspersed with Irish rebellions in times of English weakness or distraction.
Satisfied with this account of the efficient causes of disorder in Ireland, Eudoxus requests an analysis of the problems of adapting English common law to the circumstances there. Irenaeus sets down as a first principle that laws must “take their first beginning” from “the manners of the people and the abuses of the country” for which they are “invented.” The aim of the laws should be justice, by which he means the prevention of “evils” and the safety of the commonwealth. So, for example, under ordinary circumstances it is wrong to punish thoughts—only words or acts—except when “devis[ing] or purpos[ing] the death of the king.” Regicide threatens the safety of the commonwealth itself, and must be punished capitally even if detected at the planning stage. “So that jus politicum, though it be not of itself just, yet by application, or rather necessity, it is made just; and this only respect maketh all laws just.” English common law, though invented in Normandy, fit the character of the English people; it does not fit the Irish people.
For example, English common law provides for jury trials, with juries “chosen out of the honestest and most substantial freeholders.” But a jury of Irish freeholders will always decide in favor of the Irishman against the Englishman, even against the Queen herself. In the latter cases, the Crown loses revenues. In their dealings with the English generally, the Irish “are most willfully bent,” never hesitating to perjure themselves or to cheat, a “cautelous and wily-headed” people, especially when armed with a smattering of legal knowledge. And if (as Eudoxus) suggests, English magistrates appoint English juries, then the Irishman will “complain he hath no justice.” And if, per impossibile, this could be done without stoking further resentment, witnesses called from “the base Irish people will be as deceitful as the verdicts” of Irish juries—”so little feeling have they of God, or of their own souls’ good.”
Would “heavy laws and penalties” against perverse jurors reform the courts? No, Irenaeus answers: “When a people are inclined to any vice, or have no touch of conscience, nor sense of their evil doings, it is bootless to think to restrain them by any penalties or fear of punishment; but either the occasion is to be taken away, or a more understanding of the right, and shame of the fault is to be imprinted.” For if the lawgiver had prohibited theft among the Lacedemonians or drunkenness among the Flemish, “there should have been few Lacedemonians then left, and fewer Flemings.” Other Irish acts of exploitation, abuse, and evasion of the common law include clever ways of dodging responsibility for the receipt of stolen property. Even outright rebels can avoid confiscation of their lands by the Crown if they convey those lands into a trust, prior to rebelling. They can enjoy their profits from the comfort of exile in some country ruled by “her Majesty’s professed enemies.” Generally, in Ireland and indeed in England, the great lords have too much power and can too readily defy the authority of the monarchy in their struggles to shift the regime toward de facto aristocracy.
In addition to being antiquated, many statute laws, too, are misapplied because the judges have too much leeway in their interpretation. “It is dangerous to leave the sense of the law unto the reason or will of the judges, who are men and may be miscarried by affections, and many other means. But the laws ought to be like unto stony tables, plain steadfast, and immovable.” In Ireland the rule of law is a hard principle to maintain, as when a lord is charged with treason he is required to “bring forth” his kindred in order to be “justified”; he thus assembles a small army of men who serve under the accused traitor, “who may lead them to what he will.” Eudoxus shudders, “In very deed, Irenaeus, it is very dangerous, especially seeing the disposition of all these people is not always inclinable to the best.”
At Eudoxus’ request, Irenaeus turns to a consideration of Irish customs, the Irish way of life, which underlies Irish law. Three peoples have contributed their customs to the Gaelic people: Scythians, Gauls, and English. This comes as no surprise, as “no nation now in Christendom, nor much farther, but is mingled and compounded with others.” Ethnic purity is a myth. And this is a good thing because God in His providence brought northern European nations to the south, where they encountered Christianity.
The interlocutors discuss the difficulty of tracing specific influences by consulting tradition. There can be no “certain hold of any antiquity which is received by tradition, since all men be liars, and may lie when they will.” For example, it is well-established that a people arrived in Ireland from Spain, but they might have been Gauls, Spaniards, Goths, or Moors. Of these peoples, however, the Gauls were the ones who had an alphabet, so he considers them the likely immigrants.
Such mingling can be good or bad, depending on the various sets of customs and the way they mix. The English colonizers have now “degenerated and grown almost Irish.” Eudoxus wonders, again: “What hear I? And is it possible that an Englishman, brought up naturally in such sweet civility as England affords, can find such liking in that barbarous rudeness, that he should forget his own nature, and forgo his own nation?” Yes, as a matter of fact, thanks to “the first evil ordinance of that Commonwealth,” by which Irenaeus evidently means Ireland, not England. But before going any further on that theme, he analyzes the evil traits which now characterize the Irish nation.
Scythians contributed seven. Like their Scythian ancestors, the Irish live in waste spaces, pasturing cattle, which leads to licentiousness, a life beyond the reach of the law. They wear mantles, allowing an outlaw “to cover himself from the wrath of heaven, from the offense of the earth and from the sight of men.” The mantle serves rebels and thieves alike, concealing weapons and booty. Prostitutes disguise themselves and swaddle their bastard children in the mantle, and even housewives can “lie and sleep in it, or… lowse themselves in the sunshine,” evading work. They wear their hair long, enabling themselves to mask their identities. “Uncivil and Scythian-like,” they howl in battle and indulge in “immoderate wailings” at funerals; this “Irish hubbabowe” gives vent to their savage passions. In their battle they go forth in a “confused order of march, in heaps, without any order or array.” Their barbaric religious customs include swearing by their swords and drinking bowls of blood to solemnize their warrior-bonds before battle. And the Irish, like the Scythians, claim that they turn into wolves once a year. The fact that they make such a claim bespeaks a longing for subhuman ferocity in predation.
The Goths contributed the customs of revering and supporting bards and drinking the blood of enemies. As for the English, their decent customs have been perverted by “liberty and ill example.” Making “private wars against each other,” English lords recruit allies among the Irish themselves; this corrupts the English and emboldens the Irish. The English “are now grown to be almost as lewd as the Irish,” except for the ones who live in the Pale. And this is no wonder, as “proud hearts do oftentimes (like wanton colts) kick at their mothers,” including their mother-country. Alliance often entails intermarriage, too. “Great houses there be of the old English of Ireland, which through licentious conversing with the Irish, or marrying, or fostering them, or lack of good nurture, or other such unhappy occasions, have degenerated from their ancient dignity, and are now grown as Irish as Ohanlan’s breech,” which is very Irish indeed.
Eudoxus can only gasp, “Where the lords and chief men wax so barbarous and bastardlike, what shall be hoped of the peasants, and base people?” Irenaeus brings him back to a more sober view. “It is but even the other day since England grew to be civil.” In Henry II’s day, English customs themselves were “very rude and barbarous.” That is to say that the English colonies in Ireland were themselves ill-founded.
For example, the English in Ireland abused their own language by speaking “Irish.” Eudoxus finds this strange, inasmuch as “it hath been ever the use of the conquerors to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his,” as the Romans did. [2] Irenaeus explains this by recalling the English habit of intermarrying with the Irish and/or giving their children to Irish nurses. “The child that sucketh the milk of the nurse, must of necessity learn his first speech of her, the which being the first that is enured to his tongue, is ever after most pleasing to him,” even if he learns English later on. And not only speech: Anglo-Irish children also learn Irish “manners and conditions,” for “small children be like apes, which will affect and imitate what they see done afore them, especially of their nurses whom they love so well, they moreover draw unto themselves, together with their suck, even the nature and disposition of their nurses; for the mind followeth much the temperature of the body; and also the words are the image of the mind, so as, they proceeding from the mind, the mind must needs be affected with the words.” An Irish heart will come from Irish speech, “for out of the abundance of the heart, the tongue speaketh.” The most intimate of infant experiences proves the path to a different regime.
So does the most intimate of adult experiences. Intermarriage with a foreign people is “a dangerous thing in all commonwealths,” as “the simplest sense” perceives. “How can such matching” of English with the Irish “but bring forth and evil race, seeing that commonly the child taketh most of his nature of the mother.” By mothers children “are first framed and fashioned,” and what they learn at her knee will be “hardly ever after forgot.”
Mr. Peace leaves no doubt regarding what habits of heart will be learned from the Irish. They are the habits of warriors. Although Eudoxus thinks that Irenaeus’ description of Irish garb, which reflects Irish spiritedness, takes them away from their discussion of customs, it is not so. If Irish customs underlie all Irish law, warfare underlies all Irish customs. They are Scythians and Goths first, civilized English only superficially if at all.
Thanks to the Goths, they have bards to urge them on. Irenaeus distinguishes bards from poets. They share with poets the task of “set[ting] forth praises and dispraises of men in their poems and rhymes.” “None dare to displease them for fear of running into reproach through their offense, and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men.” They mold public opinion. Mr. Good Opinion asks how they differ from poets. They differ, not in their art but in their use of their art. Poets “do labor to better the manners of men, and through the sweet bait of their numbers, to steal into young spirit a desire of honor and virtue.” Poets “are worthy of great respect.” Not so “these Irish bards.” “Far from instructing young men in moral discipline,” it is “they themselves [who] do more deserve to be sharply disciplined.” They praise not “the doings of good men for the ornaments of their poems, but whom soever they find to be the most licentious of life, most bold and lawless in his doings, most dangerous and desperate in all parts of disobedience an rebellious disposition, him they set up and glorify in their rhymes, him they praise to the people, and to young men make an example to follow.” They excoriate the English and encourage the “lewd liberty” of the Irish. “Evil things are decked out and suborned with the gay attire of goodly words, may easily deceive and carry away the affection of a young mind,” leading it to honor its own passions. As a result, Irish youth are “brought up without awe of parent, without precepts of masters, without fear of offense, not being directed, or employed in any course of life, which may carry them to virtue.” With bardic encouragement, a boy “waxeth most insolent and half mad with the love of himself, and his own lewd deeds; for such a youth, “his music was not the harp, or the lays of love, but the cries of people, and clashing of arms.”
Irish political customs also conduce to disorder. The Irish hold popular assemblies on hills, where disputes between townships are settled. This practice originated not among Scythians or Goths but among the Saxons, but in Ireland it is abused by “the scum of base people,” who “confer of what they list,” inflaming those desires as they do so. As a result, Englishmen who have ventured to attend such meetings have been murdered. Local democracy practiced by “a people so evil-minded” must be restrained. Eudoxus, who harbors republican sentiments, regrets the proposal but Irenaeus firmly insists that the meetings be abolished. The Irish are not ready for self-government; they need a stronger hand, and one not their own. Their very militancy makes them ungovernable: In this “country of war” with armies “scatter[red] around the country,” soldiers routinely requisition food and lodging from civilians. This provokes “great detestation of soldiers” among the common folk, which issues “into hatred of the very government, which draweth upon them such evils.” If soldiers are not seen as protectors but as plunderers, government itself will be distrusted, whoever attempts to govern. This too feeds licentiousness.
The last custom Irenaeus describes is economic. Landlords and freeholders rent farms to tenants on a year-to-year basis, or even during pleasure. Nor will tenants take land for longer periods. As a result, tenants fear landlords’ peremptory demands for both horses and humans, not knowing when their landlord will requisition either or both. The landlord, expecting the departure of his tenant at any time, “hover[s] in expectation of new worlds”—new tenants, new relations. With this unstable combination of liberty and arbitrary rule, tenants never invest in the land, which for them is here today, gone tomorrow. Their homes are “rather swine-steads than houses.” This here today, gone tomorrow attitude toward property injures not only local economies but the commonwealth as a whole.
On religion, his third set of Irish evils, Irenaeus will have “little to say.” The Irish profess Catholicism, but they are “so blindly and brutally informed (for the most part) as that you would rather think them Atheists or Infidels.” The problem stems from “the first institution and planting of religion” in Ireland. By then, religion had been “generally corrupted by [the] popish trumpery” of the priests. “What other could they learn from them, than such trash as was taught them and drink of that cup of fornication with which the purple harlot had then made all nations drunken?” Irenaeus asks, a touch rhetorically. Priests, pope, and people “have all erred and gone out of the way together.” So far, no reform has been possible, again because Ireland has been continually at war. “Instructions in religion needeth quiet times, and ere we seek to settle a sound discipline in the clergy, we must purchase peace unto the laity; for it is an ill time to preach amongst swords.” That is, civil or regime reform and stability must precede ecclesiastical reform.
It isn’t that Irenaeus lauds the Church of England. Simony, greed, “fleshly incontinence,” and sloth infect that church, too. It’s simply that the Roman Church is even worse. Merely replacing English with Irish clergy won’t help, as Irish prejudice against the English will prevent any real reform.
Given these legal, conventional, and religious evils, what is to be done? Irenaeus first highlights actions that haven’t worked. Certain military captains will not prosecute war vigorously, worrying that if they win they will be out of work. Some of the Crown’s appointed governors also do little, hoping to prolong their appointments. Other governors will conceal problems, passing them on to their successor. “The governors usually are envious one of another’s greater glory.” As a result, there is no peace. “The longer that government thus continueth, in the worse course will that realm be; for it is all in vain that they now strive and endeavor by fair means and peaceable plots to redress the same, without first removing all those inconveniences and new framing (as it were in the forge) all that is worn out of fashion.” The Irish will continue to resist, and resist successfully, any reform because they fear expropriation of their property, as happened when the Norman English first occupied their island, so long as dilatory half-measures prevail.
“Therefore, the reformation must now be the strength of a greater power,” for “it is vain to prescribe laws, where no man cares to keep them, nor fears the danger of breaking them.” The sword must come first. “All these evils must first be cut away with a strong hand, before any good can be planted,” as a tree must be pruned in order to “bring forth any good fruit.” Mr. Peace does not shrink from the task: “Where no other remedy may be found, nor no hope of recovery had, there must needs this violent means be used.”
He hastens to say that he does not recommend what we now call genocide. “Far be it from me that I should ever think so desperately, or wish so uncharitably.” It is “not the people which are evil.” And those among them who are evil “by good ordinances and government may be made good; but the evil that is of itself evil will never become good.”
Irenaeus then offers a detailed and comprehensive plan for regime change. First, England must send an army adequate to put down the ongoing rebellion. This means a force of 10,000 foot soldiers and 1,000 cavalry. It will take them about eighteen months to do it. These men must be well provisioned (as they are not now), so that they won’t need to requisition supplies from civilians. Military efforts should focus on the strongest rebel force, the one led by the Earl of Tyrone. Because the Irish are guerrilla fighters, it is useless to pursue them. Instead, set up four encampments in Ulster. From these encampments, gather intelligence on the enemy’s movements and drive him from one English stronghold to another. Do it in winter, when there will be less cover, more hardship. Offer amnesty to all those who surrender in twenty days from the beginning of the campaign.
After this, the remaining rebels will be the hardened and incorrigible ones, men upon whom no compassion need be wasted. Above all, lay waste to their food supply—cattle and grain. This worked in Munster (where Spenser had served), and Irenaeus doesn’t spare Eudoxus a picture of the result. After eighteen months, the rebels there “brought to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; the spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat of the dead carrions, happy were they if they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, insofar as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves.” “In all that war, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine, which they themselves had wrought”—presumably by their refusal to surrender sooner. Eudoxus can only say, “It is a wonder that you tell and more to be wondered how it should so shortly come to pass.”
No need to wonder, Irenaeus rejoins. The battle-ready Irish have no secure property. Accustomed to live off the land, they readily take from one another, up to and including devouring one another. As for the English destruction of livestock and crops, “this is very necessary to be done for the soon finishing of the war.”
Eudoxus sees a problem. When Arthur, Lord Grey imposed exactly this policy, the Queen’s compassion was aroused and those around her claimed that “he regarded not the life of her subjects no more than dogs.” Irenaeus agrees that “the Good Lord [was] blotted with the name of a bloody man,” when he was in fact a “gentle, affable, loving, and temperate” man acting under “necessity.” At Smerwick he made no promises to the Spaniards, who were not “lawful enemies”—having admitted to being adventurers, sent by neither the Spanish king nor the pope—and therefore not protected by the law of nations. As for his dealings with the rebellious lords, “he spared not the heads and principals of any mischievous practice or rebellion, but showed sharp judgment on them, chiefly for example’s sake, and that all the meaner sort, which also then were generally affected with that evil, might be terror thereof be reclaimed and saved, if it might be possible.” [3]
Irenaeus insists that before this harsh course of action be initiated, “it must be foreseen and assured, that after once entering into this course of reformation, there be afterwards no remorse or drawing back for the sigh of any such rueful objects as must thereupon follow, nor for compassion of their calamities, seeing that by no other means it is possible to recure them, and that these are not of will, but of very urgent necessity.” The property of those executed for their crimes should go to their heirs, not to the Queen. In this Irenaeus takes a thought from Machiavelli, he observes that men feel the sting of losing their patrimony more sharply than that of losing their father. Perhaps to strengthen Elizabeth’s resolution, Irenaeus recalls that she had raised up the chief rebel, the Earl of Tyrone, who now takes advantage of her kindness. And if any might question the right of England to rule Ireland in the first place, Ireland belongs to England by right of conquest, a feature of the law of nations—the right the Anglo-Irish themselves invoke against the Crown, when they resist its authority. [4] Lands owned by rebels who are not executed will be confiscated and added to Crown lands.
Very well then, Irenaeus, once the war is over, what do you propose to do with the victorious troops? Will they not be dangerous if they return to England, or hire themselves out as mercenaries for foreign powers? Irenaeus would maintain 6000 of the troops in garrisons on Irish soil; the remainder should be given farms there. Some will be assigned duty in Munster, the likely point of any Spanish attack. Few if any will return to England.
The enemy must be disarmed and all but the leaders should be given land to farm. Other Irish commoners can be made tenant farmers on English-owned plantations, so that they can be watched, with the garrisons on call if any serious trouble arises. The plantation owners will pay for the soldiers’ upkeep, needing them for protection; this will relieve the Queen of any burden. Indeed, such a standing army will prove less expensive than sending troops over to Ireland every seven years or so, to quell the latest rebellion. This simply reprises the Roman policies when they conquered England. The lack of such policies explain why Henry II’s conquest didn’t issue in civil peace.
Further, each garrison would have a town associated with it, a commercial town populated by additional English settlers. With civil peace assured, increased prosperity for Ireland, and increased revenues for the Crown will surely follow.
Irenaeus disapproves of locating the Lord Deputy’s office in Dublin, within the Pale, on the western shore. He should rule from Athy, “the main-mast of the ship,” located in the Earldom of Kildare along the River Barrow. Kildare is the section directly west of the Pale, and therefore a strategic borderland where Irish and Anglo-Irish influences meet—an inflection point, as it were, and also the place where the rebel Fitzgeralds live. From there, the Lord Deputy should act on the general guidelines established by the Queen’s council of ministers, but he should be supervised, and subject to review by a new officer, the Lord President, a man trusted by the Queen for his justice and equity. However, within that framework of safeguards, he should be given much greater discretion to act with energy and rapidity as a genuine executive of the laws, not needing to consult with his superiors before making a move. In recurring to this point near the end of the dialogue, Irenaeus will add, that “this (I remember) is worthily observed by Machiavel in his discourses upon Livy, where he commendeth the manner of the Roman government, in giving absolute power to all their Consuls and Governors, which if they abused, they should afterwards dearly answer it: and the contrary thereof he reprehendeth in the States of Venice, and Florence, and many other principalities of Italy who used to limit their chief officers so straightly, as that thereby oftentimes they have lost such happy occasions as they would never come into again.”
After a detailed discussion of specific actions to be taken to pacify the several most rebellious regions, Irenaeus concludes with his recommendations to remedy the three main “evils” he had outlined earlier. Regarding law, at this point “we cannot now apply laws fit for the people, as in the first institution of commonwealths it ought to be,” and as he had wished it had been done by Henry II and his colleagues. With English common law longstanding, “we will apply the people, and it them to the laws.” This can become possible only because many more English will settle in Ireland and participate in the Irish parliament, and because in the aftermath of the war the Irish will be more submissive. Irenaeus also recommends that the Irish upper house be packed with English aristocrats. Since the Irish nobles fomented the rebellion, not the people, they deserve to be shouldered aside, at least to some extent, in the Irish House of Lords.
Irish submissiveness can be prolonged, and civility enhanced, if the Crown divides the country into small, easily policed subsections. This will rid the country of the bandits and will also facilitate a regularized system of tithing. The precedent here is what King Alfred did in England when it resembled Ireland in its lawlessness, with “every corner having its Robin Hood in it.” With officials appointed by the Crown and answerable to it, these English-style shires will ensure that revenues are “withdrawn from [the] lords, and subjected to [the] Prince.” “By this the people are broken into man small parts, like little streams, that they cannot easily come together into one head,” “adhering unto great men.” In all this one readily sees the lineaments of a modern state, wherein a subordinated and co-opted aristocracy finds itself replaced by agents of the central government.
Irenaeus is confident that these new legal and institutional arrangements will foster reform of the Anglo-Irish aristocrats who exploit their tenants, cheat Her Majesty out of her rightful revenues, and become too Irish. The Old English “need a sharper reformation than the very Irish, for they are much more stubborn, and disobedient to law and government than the Irish be, and more malicious to the English that daily are sent over.” This elicits a shudder from sober Eudoxus: “Lord! How quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!” Irenaeus demurs, a bit: “No times have been without bad men…. Neither is it the nature of the country to alter men’s manners, but the bad minds of them, who having been brought up at home under a straight full of duty and obedience, being always restrained by sharp penalties from lewd behavior, so soon as they come thither, where they see laws more slackly tended, and the hard restraint which they were used unto now slacked, they grow more loose and careless of their duty; and as it is the nature of all men to love liberty, so they become flat libertines, and fall to all licentiousness, more boldly daring to disobey the law, through the presumption of favor and friendship, than any Irish dare.” With reformed laws, some of the dangers of English and Irish living together will be diminished, especially if they both must pay the same tithes.
As his final legal stroke, Irenaeus would ban the use of Irish names. New family names should be chosen, a surname description of the man’s trade, or “some quality of his body or mind,” or the name of his dwelling place. No more “Oes and Macks”—O’Brian (for example) meaning the grandson of Brian, McDonald meaning the grandson of Donald. The Irish way of naming was introduced for “the strengthening of the Irish” by recalling family lineages. Prohibiting the practice will help to blend the English and Irish populations rightly, so that each Irishman “shall in short time quite forget his Irish nation.”
As for customs, what Eudoxus calls the “manner of life,” Irenaeus intends to tame Irish warlikeness. Each non-freeholder shall have a trade. All trades are either manual, intellectual, or mixed. First and foremost, Irish commoners should become agriculturists, as agriculture is “the enemy of war,” replacing aggression with patience, contempt for property with respect for it. Husbandry is “the nurse of thrift, and the daughter of industry and labor.” In this it contrasts with herding, which conduces to habits of command, to marshaling masses of the obedient, and to long periods of idle dreaming which stoke ambitions of conquest—all consonant with a warlike people.
For others, a liberal education is indispensable, especially for “the sons of lords.” “That wretched realm of Ireland wanteth the most principal [trade], that is, the intellectual; therefore, in seeking to reform her state, it is especially to be looked into.” Liberal education can teach the arts of “civil conversation”—precisely what glory-loving would-be warrior scions of the Irish aristocracy need, if they are to participate in a civil not military society.
As a last-resort discouragement to the old way of life, and to give teeth to the new one, the Queen should appoint Provost Marshalls to patrol the countryside with a set of deputies. These men will round up stragglers and runaways, “terrify[ing] the idle rogues,” and wielding power of life and death over them.
Eudoxus calls liberal education second only to “the knowledge and fear of God.” Irenaeus has a few thoughts on religion. In noticeable contrast to the civil order, religious orthodoxy “is not sought forcibly to be impressed into [the Irish] with terror and sharp penalties, as now is the manner, but rather delivered and intimated with mildness and gentleness, so as it may not be hated afore it is understood, and [its] Professors despised and rejected.” Nor should Englishmen take the forefront. “Discreet ministers of their own countrymen” should be “sent among” the Irish, so as not further to associate Protestantism with the English. Irenaeus esteems the examples of St. Patrick and St. Columba, who proved that converting the Irish to Christianity was not impossible, even if they left the job woefully incomplete. He criticizes Anglican ministers for lack of energy in their missionary work, unlike their rivals, the Jesuits. He recommends repairing churches, in order to draw the people into them voluntarily.
Returning to matters secular, Irenaeus would build not only churches but better transportation infrastructure—roads and bridges which would support bigger markets and more national unity. He wants to see more market towns, with a ban on black markets supplemented by the branding of livestock, which will discourage both cattle-rustling and livestock smuggling.
He ends by adjuring his countrymen to remove legal corruption respecting public offices. The Lord Deputy must not sell offices “for money,” nor sell pardons, shares of bishoprics, or commercial licenses. The same prohibition goes for cronyism.
Spenser himself succinctly summarized his thoughts for the benefit of the Queen in “A Briefe Note of Ireland,” dated October 1598, a year before he died. First, “there can be no conformity of government where there is no conformity of religion”; second, “there can be no sound agreement between two equal countries” within the same empire; third, “there can be no assurance of peace where the worst sort are stronger.”
Of these precepts, the matter of religious conformity would be more effectively solved by religious toleration, or better, religious rights so long as the practices claimed by the religious do not violate civil order. That is (and to use an anachronism) the liberalism Spenser himself exhibits in his intention to shift the Irish, and especially Irish and Anglo-Irish aristocrats, away from war and toward peaceful civil and commercial ways of life would be supplemented by religious freedom. In this, he is seriously handicapped by his lack of a theory of natural right which might undergird the practice of religious liberty.
The matter of empire would be solved by the end of genuine empires and, in the case of what was soon to become Great Britain, the establishment of the British Commonwealth. As for the claim that peace cannot prevail when the evil predominate, that stands, despite the efforts of Bernard Mandeville and other ultra-Machiavellian political thinkers and practitioners. Like the later liberals, Spenser would dilute the evil influences within all human hearts by carefully-designed political institutions.
In considering regime change, Spenser enjoys the advantage of knowing what a regime is, in all its dimensions. The purposes of a good regime may be seen in the names of his interlocutors, “Peace” and “Good Opinion.” He clearly identifies who will rule in Ireland. He sets down the ruling structures to be established by law. And he understands the importance of custom, the way of life of a people. He sees how all these regime elements relate to each other.
Americans have undertaken regime change for themselves, and for nations they have defeated in war, on several occasions. Like Spenser, they have found that lasting regime change occurs only if the ruled consent to it (as did the Amerindian nations the Washington administration reformed) or, alternatively, if the ruled are first devastated and then supervised by the conqueror (as in Germany and Japan, after the Second World War). Half-measures induced by humanitarian critics prove ineffective and ultimately inhumane.
Notes
- The poet cited is Jeun de Meun in The Romance of the Rose. He is following Thomas Aquinas, in contradistinction to William Gower’s Confessio Amantis, in which not the wise man but the prayerful, pious man rules the stars by the grace of God.
- Not quite so: one must recall the Trojan-Latin settlement, described in the Aeneid.
- In his 1598 report to Elizabeth, “A Briefe Note of Ireland,” Spenser took up this matter directly with Her Majesty. “Great force must be the instrument and famine must be the means, for till Ireland be famished it can not be subdued.” (See The Poetical Works, p. 849.)
- The right of conquest proceeds from the mercy the conqueror has shown the conquered: he has allowed him to live. Obviously, this can apply only if the conqueror fought a just war in the first place. The English likely could have claimed that their war of conquest was just because the Irish had raided English shores repeatedly, for many years.
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