To this end, on July 14, 1597, Burgh’s forces dislodged a contingent of Tyrone’s men guarding the Blackwater ford and established a small garrison there. But until it formed part of a longer chain of garrisons leading into Ulster, the Blackwater fort remained vulnerable, its three hundred troops too isolated to resupply. Shortly after, Burgh, like so many of the English commanders in Ireland before and after, took sick and was dead by October. The establishment of another garrison at Lough Foyle and the pincer movement against Tyrone’s forces in the north would have to wait.
Tyrone then let one of his periodic truces with the English lapse, and he and his allies went on the offensive, catching the English off guard at Cavan, Leinster, and Blackwater. Tyrone decided it was easier to starve the English troops than assault them directly, and the Blackwater garrison was soon reduced to eating horses and then scrounging for roots and grass. The best military minds the English had in Ireland urged that the fort at Blackwater be abandoned. Their advice was ignored. Sir Henry Bagenal, an old campaigner, volunteered to lead an English army out of Dublin to resupply Blackwater. Bagenal was a bitter enemy of Tyrone, who had eloped with his sister Mabel seven years earlier. The departure of Bagenal’s well-equipped army of close to 4,000 foot soldiers and 320 cavalry in early August must have been a comforting sight to English settlers in Ireland, an indication of Elizabeth’s commitment to their safety.
Bagenal’s army passed through Armagh, and on August 14 marched the final stage toward Blackwater fort, with Bagenal dividing his large army into six regiments. Two regiments marched in front, two in the rear, and two in the main body. The idea was that, if attacked, the three groups would link up. The tactic proved disastrous. After marching a mile through sniper fire, the English vanguard pressed on to a point across the Callan Brook known as the Yellow Ford, where it had to pass through a long trench with bogs on either side. The fort was now in sight, and the starving English garrison at Blackwater could see the lead column coming to their relief. But at this point the English advance fell into disarray. A heavy artillery piece got “stuck fast in a ford,” and the gap between the lead regiment and the main body began to widen. The vanguard received orders to close the gap, but as it turned back it was set upon by the Irish and “put to the sword without resistance.” The English troops, especially the many fresh conscripts, panicked. Bagenal, leading the second regiment, rushed forward only to be “shot through his forehead.” His regiment soon suffered the same fate as those in the vanguard.
Retreat was now urgent, and commands were given to that effect. But following a huge explosion (probably set off by a spark from the lighted match of an English soldier replenishing his supply of gunpowder) chaos ensued, and black smoke enveloped the English troops. Raw recruits ran for their lives and “were for the most part put to the sword.” Hundreds of hired Irish in Bagenal’s army dashed over to their countrymen’s side. The detached rear guard went forward in relief but were themselves charged by two thousand Irish foot soldiers and four hundred cavalry. The surviving English captains were barely able to secure a retreat. Only fifteen hundred English troops, many of them badly injured, made it safely to nearby Armagh, where they took shelter in the local church. Intending to relieve a starving and surrounded force, the English were now themselves surrounded and had enough food to last just eight or nine days. The Irish forces stripped the dead and beheaded those Englishmen too badly wounded to flee.
With Bagenal dead, several thousand troops killed or wounded, and the survivors about to starve or be killed, nothing now stood between Tyrone and Dublin, the heart of English rule in Ireland. Were the Spanish to capitalize on the defeat and send Tyrone long-promised reinforcements, the situation would be even more dire. Seeing no alternative, the lords justices in Dublin sent Tyrone a groveling letter begging him not to inflict “any further hurt” and warning him of Elizabeth’s wrath if he should act in “cold blood.” Elizabeth, upon receiving a copy of this letter, was incensed at their cowardice.
Unbeknownst to the lords justices, Tyrone, against the advice of his supporters, decided to extend generous terms not only to the surrounded force in Armagh but also to the famished troops at Blackwater, who were likewise allowed to leave, unharmed. Tyrone passed on his chance to drive unimpeded into Dublin because his spies had told him that the English were planning to land forces to his rear, in Lough Foyle. Under such circumstances it was no time for a siege of the force in Armagh. What Tyrone hadn’t figured on was that as soon as the news of Blackwater had reached England, the Lough Foyle plans were scuttled, and the two thousand English troops who planned to land there hastily diverted to reinforce Dublin. News of Tyrone’s “merciless bounty” in sparing the lives of the survivors in Armagh was greeted back in London with a mixture of relief and cynicism.
While Dublin and its environs were spared, Irish forces elsewhere in the country set to work the rest of the summer and fall of 1598, determined to uproot the plantations of the New English who had appropriated their land. It was a brutal campaign. Throughout the autumn, fresh reports of English losses reached London. Tobie Matthew wrote to Dudley Carleton in September that since “the great overthrow” at Blackwater, there are “four hundred more throats cut in Ireland.” By mid-November, Chamberlain reported that “messengers come daily” out “of Ireland… like Job’s servants, laden with ill tidings of new troubles and revolts.” The desire for revenge and the satisfaction that will be derived from Irish bloodletting is conveyed in some lines of verse by the usually level-headed poet, John Donne:
Sick Ireland is with a strange war possessed
Like to an ague, now raging, now at rest,
Which time will cure, yet it must do her good
If she were purged, and her head-vein let blood.
(Elegy 20)
Essex, having returned to the court, weighed in on who should lead a retaliatory force. But when his friend Lord Mountjoy’s name was put forward, Essex opposed the idea, arguing that Mountjoy lacked military experience and was, frankly, too bookish. As each candidate was proposed, Essex found grounds for objecting: only “some prime man of the nobility” would do, he insisted, someone “strong in power, honor, and wealth, in favor with the military men and which had been before general of an army.” It soon became obvious, as Camden notes, that “he seemed to point with the finger to himself.” His enemies enthusiastically endorsed sending Essex. At the least, he’d be overseas and unable to interfere with their designs at court. Essex knew well enough that once out of the queen’s orbit his enemies would try to poison her against him. But he was trapped: he could not stand watching a lesser man lead so great an army. To his closest friends, Essex admitted that “I am tied by my own reputation.” Perhaps the Irish campaign could win him back into the queen’s good graces, “to be valued by her above them that are of no value.” If not, he might as well “forget the world and be forgotten by it.”
By December 1598, confirmation that Essex had agreed to go to Ireland was followed by rumors that he had changed his mind. Essex knew that if he were to have any chance of success he would need a very large army, well outfitted and equipped, with promise of replacements. He knew, too, that despite Elizabeth’s reservations, this was the moment to hold out for such an expensive expedition, with soldiers of fortune and second sons of noblemen throughout England clamoring to fight by his side, each one, Chamberlain reports, hoping “to be colonel at least.” As 1598 came to a close, Essex remained uncommitted. Chamberlain writes that “the matters of Ireland stand at a stay or rather go backward, for the Earl of Essex’s journey thither that was in suspense, is now they say quite dashed.” The reversals were maddening, and the nation waited for a sign that its most charismatic military figure would agree to lead the greatest English army into battle since the days of Henry VIII.
– 3 –
Burial at Westminster
Shakespeare was not the only major writer at court on the eve of the new year. In late December another arrived bearing letter
s to the Privy Council from Sir Thomas Norris, president of Munster. He had embarked from Ireland on December 9, 1598, arrived in London within two weeks, and took up residence on King Street in Westminster, a few minutes, walk from Whitehall. His name was Edmund Spenser, author of the great national epic The Faerie Queene and widely acknowledged as the greatest living English poet. For Spenser, the dithering and divisions at court had led to personal ruin and potential disaster for the entire colonial enterprise in Ireland.
Spenser was a prominent member of the Munster Plantation, which extended over nearly six hundred thousand acres of Irish land appropriated by New English settlers. Spenser himself lived on a three-thousand-acre estate on confiscated land at Kilcolman, County Cork (for an annual rent of about £20), where since 1589 he had done much of his greatest writing and exchanged ideas with his literary neighbor Sir Walter Ralegh (who had commandeered forty thousand prime Irish acres for himself). Spenser imagined he and Ralegh as a pair of poetic shepherds: “He pip’d, I sung; and when he sung, I piped.” It was expected that eight thousand Englishmen would emigrate to Munster. One reason that never happened, according to one English settler, was that the new landowners “have enticed many honest men over, promising them much but performing nothing.” In 1598, two decades after the plantation was established, only about three thousand Englishmen had settled in Munster, too few to defend themselves when Tyrone’s allies in the south arrived in the aftermath of Blackwater to “burn and spoil, to murder and kill and to break down the castles of the Englishmen.” The colonists were dealt with brutally: “some with their throats cut, but not killed, some with their tongues cut out of their heads, others with their noses cut off; by view whereof the English might the more bitterly lament the misery of their countrymen, and fear the like to befall to themselves.” In the face of this onslaught, most of the English settlers panicked, abandoning rather than defending their estates, and sought refuge within the walls of Cork. Spenser and his wife (who reportedly lost a “little child new born” in the assault on Kilcolman) were among them.
Spenser appears to have spent Christmas week near Whitehall, for at the end of the month he was paid eight pounds for his services to the state, the warrant personally signed by Cecil. Three months earlier Cecil and his fellow privy councillors had urged the authorities in Ireland to appoint Spenser—“a man endowed with good knowledge in learning and not unskillful as without experience in the service of the wars”—sheriff of Cork. In addition to conveying Norris’s report on the military situation and the arrival of reinforcements from England, Spenser was able to provide the Privy Council with a firsthand account of the situation that had been unfolding in Munster since early October.
Spenser had lived in Ireland for twenty years, having arrived there in his late twenties in 1580, when he was appointed private secretary to the new lord deputy, Lord Grey, a hard-line Protestant. Shortly after Spenser’s arrival, Lord Grey ordered the massacre of six hundred Spanish and Italian soldiers in a garrison on the southwest coast of Ireland, at Smerwick in County Kerry, after these Catholic troops had already surrendered. Spenser, who along with Ralegh witnessed the slaughter, vigorously defended Grey’s action. Spenser prospered in Ireland, dividing his time between his writing and various administrative posts. He also steeped himself in historical writings on Ireland and found time to compose A View of the Present State of Ireland. Though ostensibly written in the form of a dialogue, its two points of view are not all that far apart. Spenser’s Irish tract addressed head-on the cause and cure of England’s Irish troubles. However complex the roots of the current crisis, Spenser’s solution was simple if cold-blooded: the Irish were best brought to heel by starvation. The Privy Council was almost surely aware of this tract, which Spenser probably completed when he was last in England in early 1596 when he returned to oversee publication of The Faerie Queene. Spenser probably intended his View to circulate in manuscript among policy makers, a likelihood reinforced by the survival of over twenty handwritten copies.
When Spenser passed along Norris’s letter to the Privy Council in late December 1598, he is likely to have shared with these government officials an updated position paper “A Brief Note of Ireland.” It wasn’t the only such tract making the rounds. The New English settlers were desperate to influence England’s Irish policies. Among those in circulation at this time was The Supplication of the Blood of the English Most Lamentably Murdered in Ireland, Crying Out of the Earth for Revenge, whose title captures the desperate state of the dispossessed English settlers. Spenser’s “Brief Note” recapitulates the main point of his View: “Great force must be the instrument, but famine must be the mean[s], for till Ireland be famished it cannot be subdued.”
Spenser knew the consequences of the starvation he advocated. The most powerful paragraph in his View renders in graphic detail the effects of a starved and cannibalistic Irish population who “consume themselves and devour one another”: “Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them, they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves, they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them. Yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves.” Having seen its effects firsthand, Spenser vigorously advocated mass starvation as a proven policy. A copy of part of Spenser’s tract now at the British Library ends with sneering and un-Spenserian verse that punctuates these recommendations with a prophecy of what the Irish and Tyrone had in store:
Mark, Irish, when this doth fall,
Tyrone and tire all,
A peer out of England shall come,
The Irish shall tire all and some,
St. Patrick to St. George a horse-boy shall be seen,
And all this shall happen in ’ninety-nine.
Spenser’s visit to Whitehall coincided with the court’s Christmas festivities, a good occasion to meet with old friends and admirers. It was also an ideal time to circulate copies of his new tract and to urge upon those gathered at court the importance of a strong hand in Ireland. His company would have been much sought after by courtiers planning to accompany Essex’s on-again, off-again expedition. His depressed and dispossessed fellow planters, holed up with their families in Cork, must have been counting on him to report back on what the government was prepared to do. It could not have been an easy time for Spenser, whose health may have already suffered from the winter crossing of the Irish Sea.
Culture-starved, Spenser was probably eager to see the best plays of the previous year staged at Whitehall, including the two performed by the Chamberlain’s Men. We know from his correspondence that Spenser had himself written “nine English comedies,” closet dramas that were never intended for the public stage. They are now lost, perhaps burned at Kilcolman. Critics from John Dryden on have also argued that Spenser admired Shakespeare and acknowledged that high regard in his allusion to “our pleasant Willy” in his poem “The Tears of the Muses,” as well as in his reference in “Colin Clout’s Come Home Again” to “a gentler shepherd… Whose muse full of high thoughts invention, / Doth like himself heroically sound.” Whether Spenser was referring to Shakespeare in these poems and not to some other writer (and whether Shakespeare responded in kind in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), the two were familiar with each other’s work. It’s unknown if words were exchanged at Whitehall between England’s most celebrated poet and its leading dramatist. But it’s at least worth speculating about what Spenser would have made of Shakespeare’s The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, had he attended a performance of it that week—particularly the play’s handling of military conscription, an issue vital to a successful resolution of the Irish problem, as Spenser himself had argued in his View.
“Rumor,” who introduces the play, broaches the issue of military enlistment by asking, “Who but Rumor, who but only I, / Make fearful musters and prepared defense.” “Prepared defense” refers to the
well-organized local militia; “musters” was the far more corrupt practice whereby poor men were randomly hauled off to fight, sicken, and often die in foreign wars. Musters were “fearful” not because, as some editors of the play imagine, the enrollment of troops was inspired by fear of invasion but because the musters themselves were a frightening prospect for able-bodied Elizabethan men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, all of whom were potential conscripts. The number of Englishmen rounded up from villages or urban streets to fight abroad kept growing in the late 1590s. Government figures at the time indicate that 2,800 were forced to serve in 1594 and 1,806 in 1595. That figure rose sharply in 1596 to 8,840, dropped to 4,835 in 1597 and then nearly doubled to 9,164 in 1598. The number drafted in the first six months of 1599 alone was 7,300. Apprentices and unmarried men in London of lower social stations had special cause to be fearful. The authorities had no scruples about using required church attendance as a means for rounding up recruits: John Stow reports that on Easter Sunday, 1596, after an order came for a thousand men, “the aldermen, their deputies, constables, and other officers, were fain to close up the church doors, till they had pressed so many men.” Local authorities didn’t hesitate during Elizabeth’s reign to raid fairs, ale houses, inns, and other popular meeting places. The authorities could count on a good haul at the playhouses, too. The only account of recruiting from the theaters survives from 1602, when Philip Gawdy writes that there “hath been great pressing of late, and strange, as ever was known in England. All the playhouses were beset in one day and very many pressed from thence, so that in all there are pressed 4,000.”
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 8
