The Duke of Ormond’s army was quite dispersed. . . and every person concerned in that interest shifting for their lives; and Cromwell went through as bloodily as victoriously, and many worthy persons being murdered in cold blood, and their families quite ruined. . . . We left that brave kingdom fallen, in six or eight months, into a most miserable sad condition, as it hath been in many kings’ reigns, God knows why! For I presume not to say; but the natives seem to me a very loving people to each other, and constantly false to all strangers, the Spaniards only excepted.
Ann, Lady Fanshawe, English Royalist refugee (1650)
The late Middle Ages saw the beginning of a military revolution that would one day allow the Europeans to dominate the world. Key developments were handguns, cannons, artillery forts and ocean-going sailing ships. This new technology was expensive and so was increasingly the preserve of kings, whose coercive power over their subjects was thereby greatly augmented. This set in train a process whereby decentralised feudal kingdoms were turned into centralised national monarchies. The castles of the European nobility, and their status as the elite military class, had enabled them to maintain varying degrees of independence from royal government for centuries. Gunpowder weapons undermined this status. While a knight took years to train, anybody could be trained to use gunpowder weapons in a few weeks. This made the nobility redundant as a military class. Nor were their castles any longer a refuge from royal authority because the king’s cannons could knock them down in a day or two. Not only did monarchs acquire greater power to enforce their will, the process of centralisation created its own imperative need to do so. Semi-independent principalities became a politically unacceptable challenge to the absolute power of the monarch. This ultimately spelled the end for the semi-independent Celtic principalities and chiefdoms of Brittany, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Brittany was the first to go, conquered by France in 1491 (see p. 153). Ireland, which seemed almost to have shaken free of England in the fifteenth century, was conquered by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Gaelic chiefdoms of the Scottish Highlands survived the longest, but they too had been subjugated by the middle of the eighteenth century.
In July 1453 at Castillon near Bordeaux, French cannons shattered England’s once invincible army of archers and armoured infantry, bringing the Hundred Years War to a decisive end. Almost two centuries of allround aggression had brought the English scant rewards. True, Wales had been conquered and pacified, but of continental empire, for which so much blood and treasure had been expended, there remained only Calais and the Channel Islands. Scotland had not only been lost but also thoroughly alienated, and in Ireland England controlled only the Pale and a few other lordships in the south-east. The shock of defeat helped throw England into thirty years of dynastic instability and occasional military conflict known as the Wars of the Roses, which were ended only by Henry (Henry VII) Tudor’s victory at Bosworth Field in 1485. Ireland had seen little fighting in the wars but, as the great Anglo-Irish families had taken sides, it was important for Henry to establish his authority there.
Henry’s initial problem was the governor of Ireland, Gerald Fitzgerald, the earl of Kildare (1456-1513). Kildare had been a supporter of the Yorkist dynasty that Henry had overthrown, but his services could not be dispensed with lightly or easily. He was a most able governor, who commanded the respect of both the Anglo-Irish and the Gaelic lords (who called him Gearoid Mor or the ‘Great Earl’). His lands, comprising the counties of Kildare, Wicklow, Offaly and Leix, gave him a strong autonomous power base and all the revenues of Ireland passed through, and often stuck to, his hands. When Kildare supported the unsuccessful Yorkist pretender Lambert Simnel in 1487, Henry was powerless to punish him. When he supported another Yorkist pretender in 1491, Henry decided that extreme measures were necessary. In 1494, he sent Edward Poynings to Ireland with an army to arrest Kildare and replace him as governor. Poynings effectively ended the governor’s autonomy by ending his right to call the Irish Parliament without the king’s permission and by bringing Ireland’s revenues under the supervision of the English Exchequer. His wings satisfactorily clipped, a chastened Kildare was restored to the governorship in 1496: he was still plainly the best man for the Job. His son and successor as earl, another Gerald (this one known to the Irish as Gearoid Og, that is Gerald the Younger), proved Just as troublesome to Henry VII’s successor Henry VIII (r. 1509-47). Kildare was eventually sent to the Tower in 1533 after being accused of appropriating crown property. When rumours spread that he had been executed, his son ‘Silken’ Thomas rose in rebellion, but he had little support to begin with and still less after his men murdered the archbishop of Dublin. Thomas surrendered to crown forces in the spring of 1535, and was taken to the Tower, where his father had already died, eventually to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Several other members of the family were also executed and the crown annexed their lands: it was the eighteenth century before the Fitzgeralds recovered any influence. Now
Plate 29 Cloghmore Castle, Co. Mayo, a typical Irish tower house (fifteenth century)
Source: John Haywoood
That Anglo-lreland was obedient to the crown, it was the turn of the Irish to be brought to heel. However, Henry’s religious policy was about to alienate the Irish still further.
World History
