 Hello, thank you for joining us for this evening's event. I'm Alan Bryson, one of the creators of the British Library Exhibition, Elizabeth and Mary Royal Cousins, rival Queens. This evening's event is a look back on Tudor Ireland's complex relationship with England. It's part of a programme of events supporting the British Library Exhibition, Elizabeth and Mary Royal Cousins, rival Queens, which explores the turbulent relationship between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. The exhibition is running until 20 February. Do get your tickets and keep an eye out for other events. We'll be taking your questions later on. You can submit your questions for the panellists using the question box below the video. Use the tabs above the video to provide the British Library with feedback on the cultural events programme to donate to the library or else to buy the exhibition catalogue. Now, chair this evening is Shafi Mr Deake. He's a journalist covering British and Irish politics with a focus on race, faith, identity, frontier cultures and marginalised communities. Shafi has worked for the BBC, NBC and The Economist, among other publications both in Britain and in mainland Europe. Many of his stories are born from the multiple identities of going up and living in the London Borough of Camden home to 130 languages, a large contingent of Irish among them. So I'm going to hand over to Shafi now. Thank you very much. Thanks, Alan. Thank you so much for that. Lovely to see you all. Thank you very much to all of you joining tonight. We have three fantastic guests for you and we really, really hope that you're going to enjoy what they talk about. We have Professor Sparky Booker, we have Professor Sue Dorran and we have Brendan Cain, all with their different takes on Irish or specifically medieval Irish history and Queen Elizabeth I. So, our first speaker tonight is Professor Sparky Booker. She is a social and cultural historian focused on late medieval Ireland. She's an assistant professor in history at the School of History and Geography at Stubborn City University. Sparky has published on many aspects of late medieval Irish history and she is the author of cultural exchange and identity in late medieval Ireland, the English and Irish of the Four of Bedian Shires. So, I'll hand over to Sparky right now. Great. Lovely. Thank you very much, Shafi, for your introduction. I'm very happy to be here with all of you this evening to talk about Ireland and the Tudor State, although I feel like a bit of an imposter because, as Shafi mentioned, I'm really a medieval historian. So, I'm going to provide some context from this earlier period that I study, but I hope it will be helpful in informing and sort of reflecting on the conversation tonight about the Tudors and Ireland. So, to do this, I need you to do a bit of time travelling with me. So, back from the 16th century, all the way back to the 12th century and specifically to the late 1160s. This is when the first English settlers arrived in Ireland and they did so first as mercenaries, essentially, in the company of this man that you can see here pictured with an axe over his shoulder. That is the exiled king of the Irish kingdom of Lentster, Dyrmyt McMurrah. He had been cast out of his kingdom, as one contemporary source puts it, by several other Irish regional provincial kings after losing to them in battle and he didn't take it sitting down. He went to England to try to find help to regain his kingdom. King Henry II gave him permission to recruit from across Henry's realm and this is just what he did and McMurrah and his allies succeeded in regaining Lentster, McMurrah's kingdom, but they don't stop there. The success of his subjects alarms Henry a little bit. He didn't trust all of them so Henry II came to Ireland himself in 1171 to take control and he makes Irish kings and his own subjects now newly established as lords in Ireland submit to him and accept him as their overlord and this is really the genesis of the English colony in Ireland that would remain in place throughout the Middle Ages though it never managed to encompass the entire island so there always remained some independent Irish regions. The reason I mention all this even though it's 400 years before the period we're really talking about is just to get in our minds how old, how long established the English presence in Ireland was by the 16th century and how many centuries of history that the tutors inherited when they came to power. Another reason to mention this period of the late 12th century is because of the influence of an author known as Gerald of Wales also known as in Latin Geraldus Cymbrensus on the tutors. Gerald wrote two popular works on Ireland. They were concerned in a large part with justifying the position of the king of England as rightful lord of Ireland. That was one of his main purposes in writing these works and I've just shown you here some marginal illustrations from one of the earliest manuscripts of Gerald of Wales's works on Ireland and I can't get into what they show exactly because we don't have the time although I'm happy to answer questions about it later but essentially these pictures and the stories that they accompany all tried to demonstrate that the Irish were barbaric, were less civilized than the English, that their forms of Christian observance were improper and that they were even perhaps a bit animalistic and that Henry II should rightfully therefore rule over them. This way of thinking about the Irish as inferior and even the specific ways that this supposed inferiority was described echoed for hundreds of years after Gerald wrote his works in the 1180s and his texts were copied, translated and disseminated widely in the 15th and 16th centuries even when his work was not cited directly and this is actually something Professor Cain has written about the fact that Gerald often isn't named in tutor treatises about Ireland. His way of speaking about the Irish and the rightness of English rule in Ireland remained a very sort of influential vocabulary in English thinking about Ireland in the 16th century. So as I've mentioned the English colony never extended over the entire island of Ireland and people of Irish descent remained in place in much of the colony as well as in Irish held areas of the island and over time these English settlers in Ireland did what settlers very often do right they married Irish people they learned the Irish language they started wearing Irish clothes and you can just see some of these clothes here the figure in the middle is wearing a shaggy woollen mantle this is a kind of typical Irish garment waterproof very good for Irish conditions the yellow tunic worn by the figure on the right is another sort of stereotypical Irish garment English settlers in Ireland also adopted the Irish mustache this very long luxuriant mustache you can see on some of these figures and a hairstyle known as glids which was like a long fringe over the eyes many English lords in Ireland participated in a shared elite culture with the Irish so they employed bardic poets to write them praise poems in the Irish language Irish brechen lawyers to advise them on matters of Irish law they employed Irish musicians to play at their feasts and conversely the reverse happens Irish people living in the English colony often adopt English sounding names fashions and language some elements in the colonial community wanted to put a stop to this very extensive cultural exchange and they did so most famously at a session of the Irish parliament in in 1366 and you can see the the text here of one of the most famous enactments from this parliament which ordered that every Englishman use the English language be named by an English name leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish and that every Englishman use English customs fashion mode of writing and apparel this 1366 session of the Irish parliament also dealt with another problem that was increasingly apparent as the middle ages wore on hostility between the English of Ireland and the English of England this conflict may have been caused in part by increasing cultural distance between these two groups caused in part by cultural exchange with the Irish and this belief inherited from Gerald Wales's time that these Irish customs and culture were inferior so it's necessary for the Irish parliament of 1366 to ban these two groups from calling each other names ordering that no difference of allegiance shall henceforth be made between the English born in Ireland and those born in England by calling them English hub or Irish dog right so you get a feel for the kinds of insults they used for each other this increasing sense of sort of distance and occasionally even hostility between the English in Ireland and those in England was expressed in other ways so for example Irish born people living in England regardless of whether they came from the settler community or not were included in the alien subsidy or 1440 attacks levied on people residing in England who had been born outside the realm interestingly the Welsh were exempted from this alien subsidy but the Irish were not and this or people born in Ireland were not the English of Ireland objected strenuously to their inclusion in the 1440 subsidy and they weren't actually included in subsequent subsidies after objecting but I think it tells you something about how they were perceived different as different in England evidence of these sort of regional tensions regional differences I suppose that were increasingly crystallizing between different regions of the English polity evident in this letter from Henry VIII to his armies in 1513 saying that his soldiers shouldn't give reproach to each other regardless of whether they were French English Northern Welsh or Irish this is really just a tiny little taste of the evidence we have of these regional and perhaps sort of cultural fault lines emerging in the later Middle Ages and before the Reformation but given the topic tonight I am just going to dip my toe into the later 16th century into Elizabeth's reign and just look at a few items that I think show a continuation of some of these same concerns about the Englishness of the English of Ireland and their sort of cultural attributes so this is an excerpt from a book called The Book of Hoth a text called The Book of Hoth that was written by Christopher St. Lawrence member of an established long established settler family when he went to court in 1562 to report on Irish affairs Queen Elizabeth asked him if he could speak English and he was immensely insulted by this I can't imagine that she hadn't been well briefed on exactly who he was he had been educated in England at Lincoln's Inn I think she's just insulting him here rather than making a mistake but it's interesting that the way she chose to insult him was questioning his linguistic proficiency in English we also see some defensiveness in the work of Richard Staneyhurst so another author from the English community in Ireland born in Dublin he tells this story about an English royal officer who went to Wexford and who was very proud of himself because in talking to the common people as he went about his business he understood here and there sometimes a word other times a sentence and he thought he would soon be fluent in Irish with such promising beginnings the joke of course as Staneyhurst puts it is that he supposed that the blunt people had praddled in Irish while all the while they jangled in English right so they're dialect the way that they're speaking hiberno English the dialect of English spoken in Ireland in this period and the accent they're using is enough to convince this English royal officer that they're not speaking in English at all but Staneyhurst is also keen to defend this hiberno English he says that it's an older pure form of English a Chaucerian English and then he lists a bunch of words that show these suppose and the supposed Chaucerian pedigree like the idea that you call a spider and at her cop which is supposedly an older form this defensiveness we sometimes see from the English of Ireland about their own Englishness is even more sort of naked even more apparent in a list that Christopher St Lawrence made in the book of Hoth of traders from England and he explains why he compiled it he says when anyone of English birth comes to Ireland they report and brag that everyone there is a trader affirming that there that there was never any treason committed in England the truth is that no country that is known ever more rebelled against their prince than England right and then he has this whole long list of every trader he's found by reading English history so what's my point in all of this different material that I've sort of introduced here I suppose all I want to do is highlight this long and complicated history of interactions between England and the people of Ireland meaning both English colonists as well as the Gaelic Irish and also this growing distrust and cultural distance between the English of England and those of Ireland in the later Middle Ages our story of the 16th century has sometimes been dominated by discussion of religious difference and these new fault lines that arose from the events of the 16th century but I just think it's important to reflect on the way that these new fault lines were influenced by and sometimes even mapped on to these older kind of cultural tensions and divisions between the people that lived on these islands thank you so much that was really fascinating and once all the speakers are done we'll get back to you sparky and we'll have a little discussion and obviously an audience Q&A at the end so please keep the questions coming in from our audience right so to our second speaker professor Sue Durran she is professor of early modern British history at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at Jesus College and St Bennett's Hall at Oxford she's written numerous books including Mary Queen of Scots and Illustrated Life and Elizabeth I and Her Circle she's also edited a number of exhibition castelogs for the British Library including the one accompanying the exhibition that we've spoken about from the beginning Elizabeth and Mary Royal Cousins rival Queens so I'll leave it to Sue to discuss her take on Elizabeth I both before during and after Sue. Thank you very much and thank you everyone for coming my talk is going to be about politics I'm going to explain the legacy that Elizabeth had when she came to the throne and the problems that she encountered and some of the ways she tried to deal with the problems ultimately her policy on Ireland was a failure but we'll say more about that afterwards politically perhaps one of the most important changes that had taken place before Elizabeth came to the throne was the transformation of the English relationship with Ireland the political and constitutional relationship in that it was no longer a lordship Henry VIII became king of Ireland and all the inhabitants of Ireland were now his subjects this meant that Ireland was ruled directly through an English law deputy and it also meant that as far as the English were concerned there should be one system of law which meant there was an attack on brand law the Irish law and that all the subjects of the monarch in Ireland had rights rights and obligations and the rights were rights of protection which created a real problem because Elizabeth had to protect Irish lords particularly those Irish inhabitants particularly those who were living in the English pale who were subject to raids from their Gaelic neighbours a policy that had been introduced in Ireland before Elizabeth came to the throne which was to continue right this way through was a policy which was intended to anglicise the Irish we've heard about the cultural differences the Tudors wanted to erase those cultural differences because they believed it would make Ireland much easier to control and the policy that was introduced was known as surrender and re-grant and this was intended for Gaelic lords to surrender their lands to the English king and then the lands to be re-granted to them on English tenorial terms and that they would be taking on English noble titles so it was an attempt to impose on Ireland the kind of social hierarchy that existed in England and the third innovation that Elizabeth inherited was the first of the plantations the plantations of Laysian Offili which began not because of a colonising policy or ideology but as a way of trying to deal with safeguarding the border areas of the of the pale by planting in those areas which had been subjected to raids as far as English were concerned and making as it were garrisons and settlers there who would protect the area from the Gaelic lords who would not surrender their lands and have it re-granted and would not accept this anglicisation process now as far as Elizabeth was concerned and the majority of those who were advising her island was a problem it was a problem largely because it was a security risk there were fears of rebellions the some of the Gaelic lords did not accept the surrender and regret and went into a war against against the English and against their English allies but there were more serious rebellions which called upon not very successfully it has to be admitted foreign support so in particular there were the two rebellions of the Earl of Desmond in which the Spaniards were invited to come into England indeed there was some small forces only about 500 700 men in the second Desmond rebellion but nevertheless when England was having a very tense relationship with the Habsburg powers in in Europe who were Catholic this island was seen as the soft belly it was a security risk it was one of the back doors into England and at the same time this foreign intervention became incredibly dangerous when Elizabeth was actually at war against Spain after 1585 and in the last years the last nine years of Elizabeth's reign there was a war that was known as the nine years war and it made the country a theatre of the anglo-Svanish wars so this was one of the main ways that Elizabeth and her private councillors viewed Ireland but there were also problems that they faced in that it was incredibly difficult to impose obedience uh acceptance of the crown on many of the Gaelic lords and at the same time it was extremely difficult to get the support of those gentlemen and gentle women who were living in the English pale the area which had been originally the colony the settler colony where there were the old English inhabitants to get their support and particularly to get their support in imposing the reformation because in Elizabeth's reign there was the new attempt to protestantize not just England but also Ireland now the attempts at solution it should not be thought were mainly military in fact Elizabeth did not want a war and certainly not a war of conquest that was not the preferred model for establishing royal control over Ireland it cost far too much and was too risky nevertheless the government had to fall back as they saw it on coercion and military measures as a response that they believe was necessary to raise disobedience and risings and the way that they tried to manage these military endeavours was limited military forays against a given enemy the problem of geography meant that they often were unsuccessful but nevertheless that was that kind of limited warfare that they preferred because it was unsuccessful a policy of garrisoning in key locations was also their endeavour and this was one of the ways in which the plantation policy the policy of plant of removing the Gaelic tenants and and the the landlords and imposing a settler class and English protestant settler class in those areas it was seen partly for security reasons and garrisons were established in those areas where there were plantations and finally as a last resort where there were rebellions the English government in Ireland resorted to scorched earth tactics which devastated Ireland at various points notably and most famously at the time of the nine years war where the lord deputy lord lieutenant of Ireland lord mount joy destroyed everything in his path whether it was cattle crops or people but at the same time there continued this assimilish simulation list programme it took a number of different forms but it was integral to the idea of turning Irish Gaelic Irish Anglo Irish into full-blooded English people yes of course there was the cultural divide and yes there was prejudice but initially at least in Elizabeth's reign there was the hope that through Protestantism through education the Irish lords would become anglicised and they in turn would anglicise their tenantry this all came to nothing and there were lots of different reasons why it came to nothing some would say it was inevitable the Irish problems were just too great others would say that Elizabeth made some quite serious mistakes others would say that it was a problem because they resorted too often to military measures and coercion and didn't give time to allow the political programmes and a similar list cultural measures to dig in deep but whatever it was by the time that Elizabeth died yes she had managed or rather her her lord deputy had managed to defeat the Irish rebels the O'Neill's and and their allies during the nine years war but it was at a terrible cost for Ireland and ultimately Ireland could only be held down by an English settler class which alienated even those Irish who would have liked to have been friends and supported the English government thank you so much for that I've been scribbling down furiously as you're talking so very very excited to ask you some questions in a bit but before I do I'll go to our next speaker Brendan Cain Brendan is a professor in the departments of history and literature cultures and languages at the University of Connecticut. Brendan's research focuses on Irish and English relations in the early modern period particularly as revealed through the Irish language archive his publications include the co-edited collection Elizabeth I and Ireland and the politics and culture of honour in Britain and Ireland between 1541 and 1641 Brendan currently serves as the vice president president-elect of the Celtic Studies Association of North America and he's created an exciting new resource for learning early modern Irish which hopefully will chat about later if not in the presentation that he's about to give so Brendan bye away thank you so much Shafi and thanks so much for the opportunity here and to everybody who's joined us tonight and I also want to thank Sparky and Sue who've really sort of set the ground really nicely and I'm actually in that kind of enviable position where I can just kind of sort of jump in and add a couple bits to this and so that's really all I'm going to do as opposed to sort of a set narrative I'm just going to add a couple bits to the conversation and hopefully will provide some other aspects that we can get into during the Q&A so the first thing I just want to sort of reinforce is that the something that's already been raised is that Ireland was a composite society during the time of Elizabeth's reign so we've already heard about the Gaelic Irish and we've heard about the old English who are the descendants of the Anglo-Normans but also that group that comes in after 1541 as Sue was saying with the constitutional change of Ireland to a kingdom those folks start to be designated or known as the new English so as to draw a distinction between them and different religion different sort of interests in the state and those who have been resident in their families have been resident for centuries so if you look at the looking on this slide here though you can see a visual representation of if not that distinction between Gaelic Irish old English and new English but rather a status hierarchy so you can see you know from our perspective on the left of John Speed's map from the early 17th century you can see sort of aristocrats at the top of Gentry in the middle and then the near Irish down below and so I think this is a really nice reminder of the complexity of Irish society again whether that complexity is defined as sort of ethnic difference or sort of difference of national origin or whether it is difference by hierarchy and status but also reminds us of the ways in which some of those who are looking from the metropole were attempting to try to make sense of that complexity and attempting to represent it for audiences back at home so moving on secondly I just want to remind us you know allow us to remind ourselves that the Irish language is is also an element of the complexity of English Irish relations which is to say that the Irish language is not ethnically determined right Irish language or Gaelic as often often is referred to does not equal Gaelic Irish so as Sparky has already noted the you have these families who move in and there's a living cheek by jowl with people who were there before the indigenous and they intermarry they become bilingual and there's a beautiful example of this is the Newton primer and this is the Newton primer named after Christopher Nugent so one of the family of the parents of Delvin so this is an old English family and this was produced we are told at the behest of Elizabeth herself a request received when Nugent was a student at Cambridge University and I think this is really a fascinating example for two reasons one it demonstrates not only Elizabeth's you know interest in in the language and the fact that you have a Baron who is interested in matters linguistic and matters grammatical but also the fact that this is a sign of the understanding of or at least the reputation that you know that would have been known by Nugent and others of Elizabeth's great learning and interest interest in languages so take a look and see both of the examples of that so so it's a short little primer it's quite lovely quite stark and sparse but it gives some of the sort of grammatical aspects of the language and it gives some of the sense for the sense for the alphabet but also then brief little conversational sentences in Irish in Latin and in English so now the next example that I want to show is it gives us a sense for the limits of the English interest in Elizabeth and interest in the Irish language so this is the the first printed Irish the first book printed in Irish in Ireland shown a carnage of the way it gets cut kismet and this is an example of the use of vernacular language for religious reform and as that's I'm sure we all know this is one of the key features of Protestantism and as Sue was talking about you know proselytising for reform and you know the publication of religious tracks in the vernacular was a European wide phenomenon of the of the reformation but Ireland is quite unique in this sense and that there's very little actually produced in terms of Irish reform material in the Irish language and precisely for the kinds of reasons that Sue has already described about the ways in which those relations start to break down political relations start to break down and in spite of the fact as as Sparky has already noted this sort of bilingualism was quite common certainly amongst the old English community and so the fact that we have very very little printed in in Irish demonstrates the limits of the crown's interest to actually try to sort of bring the Irish into sort of the reformed nexus of the post break with Rome period and what that also allows then it allows the situation to emerge where most of the print that's going to happen in the Irish language is produced in the interests of the counter reformation and produced and produced on the continent so we could get to see one of these splits so again suddenly it wasn't inevitable but a split so third we've already heard about surrendering grant and I think it's a really important sort of thing to bear in mind so that we are reminded that tension between the Gaelic Irish or even the old English and the Tudor state was by no means inevitable certainly there was a lot of reason why we could imagine it could grow but it was most certainly not inevitable and so just to add on to what Sue was saying about surrendering grant it's so if we can have the next slide if it's not up yeah thank you I just want to show quickly three pedigrates right so hopefully you can see some of these a bit and so this is a pedigree of one of the greatest greatest Irish aristocratic families and royal families in fact these are the O'Brien's and the O'Brien's actually take avail themselves of surrender and rebrand and trade in the claim to be the the chief of the name right the O'Brien and exchange that for an English style title is the Earl's of Thoman but this is the family that claims amongst its lineage the great Hiking Brian Baru even that family it's made the transition and what's really nice about this pedigree is a traditional Irish pedigree would have been textual and now it could have come in different genres or different forms but it did not have the kind of visual imagery that we associate with English heraldic tradition and certainly continental heraldic tradition so here you see this really wonderful sort of like mapping of old material onto a new form and if you could see it at the top probably not you can actually visually see the moment when the family avails of surrender and rebrand because you can see written in there it says Earl and you can also see the little image the Earl's cornet and this is a very traditional looking one right it's textual but this is actually a pedigree for somebody who is a I mean not a newcomer but somebody who's used their loyalty to the crown to be to be elevated really because of the dynamics that were opened up by the relationship with Ireland in the tourist state and this is actually for random McDonald who is a by-camp done loose and an Earl of Antrim and you can see you know someone says born born born born it goes down down in the list but it also provides us really interesting information about relationships between the McDonald's in Ireland and in Scotland and so again you probably can't see this but there's really nice bits in there about you know when you know when certain members of the family are moving back and forth between Ireland and England so you and so you can have a traditional pedigree for someone who is you know an upstart of by some definition and then the third pedigree that I have is just a sign that pedigrees can also show not simply loyalty but disloyalty and this is a really unique pedigree this is of the O'Neill's and as we've just heard from Sue Hugh O'Neill who is the second Earl of Tyrone leads this great sort of movement to expel the regime right and he is he renounces his Earl dome you know when he sort of kind of bounces back and forth at the end of the war he actually takes it back on but you can see here like with the Thoeman one you can see where they where the family takes on surrender re-gram because boom it says Earl and it's the Earl's Cornet but you can also see where they have run afoul of the crown and so you can see the red hand of Ulster and you can see the the the Earl's Cornet upside down and it was kind of an eerie foreshadowing you can see the land in that little image in which basically it's going to say like yes that is now ours thank you very much all right so now having looked at the pedigrees and thinking about and thinking about sort of both loyalty and resistance I'm going to come back to this question of the plantations and you know the issue with you know issue with the plantations since you know as Sue has has has brought out and if we can go to the next slide is that I think it's worth reminding ourselves that plantations in Ireland don't actually start because of the Reformation they don't start with Protestant Monarch they start with the Catholic Monarch but the real plantations fall the responsibility for those fall at the feet of Elizabeth right and the great one is the Desmond you know it's the monster plantation that comes after the Desmond of the Islands that you heard about and I think it's worth bearing in mind that when like serious resistance against Elizabethan regime emerges it comes not from the Gaelic Irish but it comes from an English identifying Earl who is connected with the families that's parking stuff to go and but what's you know fascinating about it you know is he's just sort of like wipe out right you know the sort of population the society of that territory and attempt to reconstruct it and this is not from Francis Robson but look you know whoever started right you know whether it was and you know a Gaelic Irish and Lord or is a you know an English identifying Earl like whoever started it once the plantations are in process right it becomes a massively transformative phenomenon but it also in terms of the sort of the political language by which this relationship is negotiated alters radically because Desmond enters into that language the ideology of defensive faith and defensive patriot so faith and fatherland ideology that is going to be picked up by Hugh O'Neill afterwards so it's a really interesting way of thinking how Gaelic Lords resisting picking up on language used by old English Lords and just to give you a sense for the scale of this thing you know it's about it's the better part of 600,000 acres that are going going forfeit to the ground is this is limerick carry cork most of those counties plan is to install about 20,000 settlers and you know as Sue said like make it look like the south of England and we can compare that with 108 people who land in Roanoke in 1585 right so massive pardon me social engineering exercise all right next bit so if we think about you know Gaelic Irish or Irish speaking resistance to the crown detention right what are the forms that that takes what are the kinds of things that that sort of produce that we've already seen religion but again you know religion can sort of go back and forth you know there are you know O'Neill can resist the crown but once the war is over he can take the you know he can take the cutting back on so I'll move on right so one of them it's simply culture and increasingly over time you start to see this language of sort of denial or resistance to anglicisation on cultural terms and this comes out in a variety of forms it comes out most clearly in irish in irish part of poetry and there's a political reason for this in part two because political change means that the barge to our critical political councillors are going to learn that lose their position within the hierarchy so they have a vested interest in anglicisation not occurring but you can see this this is a bit from a really famous poem by Lee Sheffa-Wards and called that year a hlach is raalder right which is talking about two brothers and one who started to adopt English ways and one who sticks to the old ways and as you can imagine the good son is the one that sticks to the old ways so the culture and the political obviously the land grab you know becomes a critical feature and what's really interesting you know here is that historians will tell us that you know burly pretty much figures you know it works out how Ireland or how England is going to relate to Ireland but from an Irish language perspective many commentators lay the responsibility for what happens like the destruction of the landscape as as it was saying firmly at the feet of Elizabeth and this is a wonderful example from the heroic biography of Eru O'Honno which is written by Louie Clary and O'Donnell this is read by Hugh O'Donnell who is the main confederate of Hugh O'Neill in which you know you know Clary says like look if you want to know who is behind this it's Elizabeth and it's not a matter of policy it's a matter of her being offended and it's her you know a matter of her getting getting upset about things and then finally I just want to point out that there is a conceptual reason why there were problems between the English in the Irish which is to say Irish succession was not premature right and go from father to son there were a whole range of male claimants who could come to the kingship or a lordship and so the fact of a woman coming to executive authority is just a category or it's really difficult for people to wrap their heads around and another way to think about this is the Irish succession is is or the Irish the gay political system is one that has respect for the divine right the legitimating power of divine right so the lord has to be holy protect the church and things like that but it's not one that works by divine right and divine right being the kind of thing that would allow one to explain why there's a woman in the front it just simply doesn't exist all right so let me end then let us remind ourselves what like the great Gaelic political sort of you know imaginary was into the 18th century which is Jacobidism right and tension with the monarchy did not always mean that it was going to be tension with the monarchy and you know the Gaelic Irish desperately attempt to make their peace with and show their loyalty to the house of steward and it's going to be one of the great expressions of Irish politics and Irish mentalities up into the up into the 18th century so this stuff is not always inevitable and chinamage and stuff like that thank you so much Brenton that was terrific really really fantastic um i think that what's interesting from all the presentations they all touch on very different things yet the one theme that struck me is that often we describe the relationship between England and Ireland as one of conflict but it's not necessarily so there's a lot of trust as well and often trust in conflict work together um sparky I know that you can of look at literary trends so to speak and the English of Ireland employ a lot of Irish poets you know a lot of the English laws marry Irish people would it be fair to say the distance to Irish culture is smaller than we might imagine and if so how does that look like in terms of in terms of language and poetry it's a big question I was saying but I'll try to pull together my my thoughts on it um I think that the English of Ireland which in my period is how they would tend to describe themselves um and they would have very vehemently asserted their Englishness I think that they were much more immersed in Irish culture than they would admit in most of the documents that survive essentially um there's this really lovely quote that the historian Robin frame has about the impossibility of knowing how the English of Ireland felt in their unbuttoned moments right the medieval there aren't medieval documents that you know that are like diaries or personal correspondence like the past and letters that that survive from England in the 15th century so I think we can see a great deal of evidence from the legal material from the corpus of bardic poetry itself that the English of Ireland were deeply immersed in Irish literary culture um but they didn't like to admit that in a lot of the other documents that I look at things like correspondence with royal administrations in in England so finding out I suppose what what the truth is is a bit difficult because they had a lot of vested interest in sort of asserting their Englishness the whole time I mean I think that certainly outside the pale bilingualism was incredibly common and even inside the pale I think it was quite common as well and that's one thing that I think we really need to remember a lot of medieval historiography has gone in the direction of accepting the idea of multilingualism right and not trying to say this person was a sort of first language Irish speaker or English speaker or even that they only spoke two languages a lot of medieval people spoke many languages and just spoke them in different contexts um so they would have used different languages you know according to what what suited the particular context there there are some nice sort of stories about gentlemen from outside the pale in fact from the midlands from from the area where those first plantations were implanted changing their clothes when they arrived in Dublin to go to the parliament right so they actually have different sets of clothes for each situation Irish ones and sort of English ones they bring with them so yeah so I don't know I hope that answers your your question it's it's fascinating because a lot of your work is obviously on more of the ordinary level of people go class and I know that you look at things like tenancy agreements and wills and how difficult is it to decipher you know large philosophical questions of identity through very ordinary documents it must be a difficult thing to do incredibly difficult but I I can't stop trying I can't hold myself back I mean one of the things that I look at a lot is naming and the reason I look at that is because people's names are recorded you know it's often the only bit of evidence we have for someone's existence they might be named in a a list of tenants on a given estate um and we never hear of them again one of the things that I think is really interesting that we find in names among the English of Ireland is the use of Irish nicknames um and I often sort of descriptive nicknames um that may relate to a physical characteristic um describing their hair color or if they have a limp or you know distinctive physical things um and I think this is really interesting evidence for their use of the Irish language and their kind of um the use of the Irish language by all their associates who presumably came up with this nickname and also just their willingness to to be called by an Irish nickname I think is quite telling um but again the evidence is a little bit uh obscure you know you really have to to work with it because there there isn't anything uh reflective where someone from the English community in Ireland says I feel like this I am you know this or that when they do make such declarations they say that they are English because there's more in it for them to to say that I mean speaking of the English Sue Elizabeth first is working in an atmosphere where essentially her father her father's policies dominate dominate the political landscape I'm really interested to know why the English Reformation which saw England break away from the Pope why it didn't necessarily work in Ireland particularly well it was always a top-down phenomenon in England when Elizabeth inherited the throne the majority of people were Catholic there had been a very successful restoration under Mary the first in Ireland it was equally Catholic in its culture in its religious belief there was a difference I think in that in England there was a Protestant core there were universities in England there was a relationship with the continent which wasn't true in Ireland so Ireland was perhaps more isolated from Protestant trends than there than it was in than England was however it was nevertheless always going to be top-down and there are two things that I think we can say the first relates to the the pale the administrators of the pale the the Anglo uh the what we would call the old English um and it links to what you were talking about in relation to trust because I would argue that they were increasingly distrustful of Elizabeth and alienated from her yet they were the ones who were going to be responsible for a large amount of the implementation of Protestantism not in the whole area of Ireland but certainly in the area not just in pale in the pale but in other counties as well Lentus but for example uh and elsewhere and they were aggrieved particularly by being excluded from much of the patronage um Brenton quite rightly has talked about plantations in more depth and the fact that the old English felt that they were being excluded from the plantations they felt that they were being excluded from officials positions and that they were not being listened to and this is an increasing phenomenon through Elizabeth's reign and I think not being able to get their support is crucial to the failure and many of the people on the pale in the pale start moving into a strongly Catholic position I mean one of the rebellions which takes place at the same time as the Desmond rebellion is of a gentleman of the pale little button grass and and also dovin is involved in that as well and they see themselves as part of a Catholic crusade and there are others in the pale who start identifying themselves as Catholic and sending their children abroad and also harboring priests when they come to England and when it comes outside that area where there's stronger English control there aren't the structures there is not the diocese and authority that most of the bishops are Catholic and they are for a long time in Ireland and there's as as Brenton quite rightly said there is no Protestant Gaelic material there's very little preaching that is occurring so I would say that the fundamental problem as I see it is that there's a political problem and that political problem prevents that top-down reformation which you have in England where there is collaboration where Catholics realise there's something they're going to get out of collaborating with the English regime they may be waiting for better times hoping that Mary Queen of Scots will sometime sit on the throne but you in in Ireland that kind of collaboration is very hard to acquire because of that deepening alienation as I see it for the people the Anglo the old English living in the pale. It's interesting because when you were talking I wrote the word Irish problem and as a political journalist I've heard that word more times than I've wanted to hear in recent years and it's fascinating because the complex relationship both the problems and the hopes I'm wondering does it's the current ones in the past century or so do they stem from this period or is that just a two generic statement to make? Well I think they do in lots of different ways obviously the religious problem stems from this period and as the Jesuits and other priests start coming in towards the end of Elizabeth's reign and build up quite a lot of momentum under the stewards that is a profound division but the plantation problem is really under James's reign because what happens under James is that O'Neill who was defeated in the nine-year war but was allowed to return as Earl of Tyrone and his fellow who was the Earl of Tyronell they become increasingly again I'm using the word alienated and this is by the tactics of the English Marshall administration and in the end they flee they take flight that's called the flight of the earth and people are expecting them to come back with a Spanish army but it doesn't happen the Spaniards want peace with James I but the outcome is that their land is confiscated and the confiscations not only bring in English new English Protestant English but also Scots Scottish Presbyterians and so you have the beginnings of that presence in Ulster Northern Ireland today of that Scottish Presbyterian English Calvinist set of planters who become the the landlords the owners of the of the province before I get to the audience questions and by the way there's still time to please do send them in um Brendan you talked about the mapping of old material you've done that yourself as well with a the resource that I've been flicking through today um an archive of religious poetry love poetry um could you tell us a bit more about that yeah just sort of briefly I mean one of the things that's interesting about studying this period is that it is primarily done through the Irish language archive sorry the English language archive and I mean in a way that makes a certain amount of sense there's a fast body material that tells us about the relations between England and Ireland in the period but there's also quite a bit of Irish language material and it exists across genres and and and forms so there's all kinds of poetry there's political poetry love poetry religious poetry there are annals chronicles biographies things of sort um and almost nobody reads them and it's it's particularly unfortunate I think this moment when there is a lot of interest at decolonize the work that we do right just you know as scholars um and you hear a lot about decolonizing the archive and this is one of those archives that that remains to be decolonized and and one of the areas of study and um you know like when I came into it you can tell from the accent right you know I'm an American going and stuff and so you know I got into this thinking that well I'm going to be an Irish historian if I want to be one if I if I were going to be a French historian or a Chinese historian you know I would learn the language and I would get on with business and um and kind of found out that that's not so easily done uh in large part because the resources for learning the language weren't available right so if you want to learn old Irish eighth ninth century there's grammar amazing dictionary there's you know there are guides on how to do it modern Irish is a living language that you know I'm a great advocate of and speaker of and teacher of and this and the like but that that bit in between is is is really problematic because there is no grammar no guide and no dictionary no dedicated dictionary so a bunch of us uh I mean parts of it kind of sort of came out of came out of my head but it exists as a collaboration first project and it actually is intended to work that way so lots of people make it happen I just happened to be one of those people and uh so yeah we wanted to make it freely available and work with publishers of editions so the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study the Irish Tech Society lots of scholars and um up-and-coming scholars it's been really important for us but we wanted to make it available to people um free right so this is sort of the beauty of digital humanity so if you want to try your hand at learning how Keating writes right you know who does the forest fasa or you want to try your hand at bardic poetry you can go and you can click around you can try it out and we are about to launch a paleography uh primer and guide and quiz you know um so I would encourage people to give it a shot and just as a quick reminder why that's important there is a lot of material but imagine you know English cultural life without access to Shakespeare or American political discourse without access to the writings of the founding fathers you know this is a similar situation exists in the Irish speaking um uh sort of universe which is to say again there's you know that stuff was written not that long ago it's there it's a manuscript some of it's in print and people don't read it so yeah there's definitely increasing interest and awareness right now so fascinating fascinating um I'm just going to head to a few of the audience questions um and any one of you can answer this one from Lara Walsh uh did Margaret Beaufort play a role in Ireland to help raise support for son before he won the throne he wants to go he wants to take that question it's a difficult one um yeah uh I'll take that um the answer is uh not really um there was uh so Ireland was quite firmly um Yorkist for lots of different reasons and there are actually two Yorkist pretenders launched from Ireland after the accession of Henry VII we have um another question somebody asks what was the economic benefit of colonising Ireland this is a really good question or was it simply politics well that that's a massive question I mean so do you want to tackle that one yeah I'll say a few things number one the idea was that the English crown should not bear the cost of holding Ireland and plantation as well as as I already said being a way of maintaining security was also a way of of was thought to be a way of getting um money to the crown and money for the Irish establishment which would mean that the cost which was soaring much to Elizabeth's alarm um would be kept under control and would basically the books would balance it's interesting that the areas where they attempted colonisation were areas which were at the time before the colonial process were rich areas Munster was was really a rich area um before the rebellion and um and that's the Desmond rebellion and it was looked as if I mean one of the points that hasn't been made is that a lot of those people who are planting are adventurous their people are in it for profit they're not there uh some of them I mean are ideologically committed to colonialism there is that dimension but there is also the get rich quick um approach to some of that some of these um adventurers had so yeah I think economics was important financially for the crown that it seemed to be a cheap way of holding Ireland and for those who were going to be settling they thought they would be making a really good profit and it's it was the same sort of mentality um that was applied when Virginia was colonised you know the kind of propaganda that was used to get investors into Virginia and and the land to be divided out followed the pattern of the plantations in Ireland and you know people were attracted to it in part because they thought they'd be making a profit and we see in especially Elizabeth's reign a lot of mavericks a lot of adventurers kind of leads the way in colonisation and we often frame these debates about you know imperialism and colonialism through the British empire lens but I think with Elizabeth the first I think it's more uh you know it's more done as you say about profit rather than politics I guess the politics comes after politics are about control security the ideology is the kind of humanist you know we are the new Romans and we're going to civilise and and have our own empire and then there's the economic dimension which as I said is is to make money after the venture and what you have is a kind of public private I mean Tony Blair's always associated with that predates Tony Blair these are public private ventures um and the crown is it's deeply involved in it but relies heavily on these private adventurers to put up the money and and to um settle um we have a question from Alex hope I pronounced your name correctly can any of the Lord's deputies appointed by Elizabeth the first be said to have been successful in governing Ireland well I would say no uh uh a friend of mine come in here and there are a number of reasons why I mean it's a damn difficult situation but there's also issues surrounding faction faction in Ireland but also faction at the royal court and for example someone like Sussex is always has at his back he was uh the first Lord deputy of um Elizabeth has at his back in court um Lester and Henry Sydney who is going to replace um Sussex I mean he's with Sussex in Ireland for a while and then he goes to the court and to his brother-in-law Lester they're sniping all the time and so Sussex doesn't get the the number of troops he wants every time he does if there's any kind of failure you know he has to withdraw from some of the policies that he wanted to follow because he knows that he's he's facing um a whole group of people at the English court who are trying to bring him down and this is true I think with virtually all of them uh Sydney is it's it's true I mean he's imaginative actually he's picking up a lot of Sussex's ideas but ultimately he can't see them through Brendan did you want to time in I could see you I could see you have to see my boy to Sydney complain at the end of this ring because it impoverishes it right um you know and if we move a little bit further in times think about Wentworth um you know that that didn't end well and I mean it really is an incredibly difficult job but in part it's difficult job that has very little to do with Ireland I mean obviously there are aspects of what's going on in Granite Island that make it difficult but I just would would emphasize what Sue was saying it's that um it's you know this is an aspect of sort of court maneuver right trying to figure out the way so much you know like your plan can go forward and you can use this as a way not only to enrich yourself but also to be a patron right and it's absolutely critical and I so you know just back to thinking in these ways that sort of break out of binaries of English and Irish or Protestant and Catholic or you know Gaelic in English um this is a really nice way to think about the ways in which sort of the complexities of a kind of pre-modern state make it really difficult to actually do the kinds of things that um ideologically or sort of theoretically one may wish to do in ways that aren't just like an ongoing disaster right so like in a way it kind of works right you know it finally becomes sort of anglicized by some by some definition but it's just like over the course of the tutor and into the steward periods this is kind of like rolling trainwreck in a lot of ways um and it's hard to imagine who's the person who would have planned that all the topics we've could have discussed have been somewhat of about identity got a question in there's quite a personal question from Liz Ashley um Liz asks one of her ancestors I presume was one of those quote Scottish Presbyterians I would like to find out more about this line my mother is deeply ashamed of this heritage and pretty well refuses to talk about it where might I start well I believe you're all kind of archivists in some way or another obviously heritage's ancestry probably isn't your line of focus um all the time but is there anywhere that she could probably have a look at Brendon you go on sewer do you want me to go first I would just I mean I suppose in many ways I need to know more so I need to know really when you know when this person became a settler does it go right the way back to the plantations under under James because there are some lists of names so um that that that might be possible but it all depends as to when these um these plantae you know the person was part of the of the plantation I know and it also depends on what kind of what kind of material the question asked her wishes to dig into there's quite a bit of there's quite a bit written on the ulcer plantations like that historiography is really ballooned and in really impressive impressive ways um and focus not purely on the plantation itself and like those communities but also the relationships between those communities in scotland and also to the crown um and but then there's also primary material that's been made available primarily through the Irish tech society so there's a really wonderful text which is the 1622 commissions right so this is commissions that go in to actually to see if the the conditions upon which people received plantation land in Ulster those conditions were being followed and you can read really phenol like material across those um you know and that's that's available you can pick that stuff up but I mean the one thing that I thought about like it just really quickly is um if the question answer doesn't know uh yeah this is teaching in class in Irish history last last semester and I hand students read two polls one by martin at zero and and these are both in the field field day anthology of literature is really great but martin at zero is from uh Aran Islands and you and you know he ends up a Dublin he's working you know in uh in an office and this is after the free state or it's after the republic and he you know he's writing about how he feels incredibly alien and then John Hewitt you know he's writing about um you know farming in northern northern Ireland and you know this beautiful poem called once alien here talking about how you know he feels so rooted in the soil and and I think it might be worthwhile taking a look at those two poems this is a way just kind of like emotionally and kind of historically conceptually into those real real tensions um you know both like the pain but like you know I think as Sparky was saying that it just like there becomes a kind of social kind of you know people feel a sense of identity and belonging even in you know areas of tension and so there's real beauty to be found there as well. Thank you I think that's about it from all of us our hand back to Alan. I want to thank our speakers Sparky, Sue and Brendan and our chair Shafi for a fascinating event tonight keep an eye on the whats on pages at the British Library website for more information about events linked to the Elizabeth and Mary exhibition you can watch past events on the British Library player I hope you've enjoyed this evening's event thank you very much for joining us