One of the bitterest fruits of human conflict is the resort to massacre. From the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, combatants have regularly attempted to defeat their enemies through acts of indiscriminate killing. The history of early modern European colonial expansion is replete with such incidents. The remembering and recounting of them has become the stuff of historical and political controversy. The aim of this article is not to review these painful episodes, but to examine the sixteenth-century context in which these resorts to massacre occurred; to focus on one particular atrocity that achieved some notoriety in Ireland in the early modern period; and to suggest that a now largely forgotten episode, at Mullaghmast in County Kildare in 1578, was part of a pattern of conquest which implicated not only the soldiers and settlers who served in the Gaelic localities, but also the upper echelons of the English administration in Ireland. This pattern was accompanied by an apologetic ideology of civility and savagery best reflected in a central text, John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581). Derricke’s Image provides us with sufficient evidence to suggest that indiscriminate slaughter was an accepted tool in the effort to subdue Gaelic Ireland. Indeed, Derricke’s text adds weight to the conclusion that the atrocity at Mullaghmast in 1578 implicates no less a figure than Sir Henry Sidney, the quintessential renaissance English official in Ireland. Mullaghmast is important not only because it demonstrates the officially sanctioned brutality of the conquest, but also because it raises the question of how memory and history are constructed.

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This essay explores the treatment of the Elizabethan soldier in Ireland under lord deputy Mountjoy from 1600 to 1603, the years of the most atrocious violence of the conflict. Coming at the experiences of the ordinary soldier in these years from the perspective of human rights forces the historian to a set of rather uncomfortable conclusions. For while many of these soldiers inflicted horrific violence on the native non‐combatant population, their own experiences were determined by a set of forces and practices that left them vulnerable to some of the most extreme abuses of the age. While this essay will address the question of human rights and the implications and applications of the terminology for Elizabeth England, it will do so within the context of a war that abused the ordinary soldier as much as it abused the non‐combatant Irish. Yet the abuse of these men is worth re‐examining as it provides us with an insight to the state's attitude to the subordinate classes and their basic rights. For in examining the recruitment, equipping and treatment of the ordinary soldiers in the field, we find a brutalized mass whose only option was to endure or flee. A mass whose fundamental rights as subjects of the English crown or indeed as humans were badly abused. They were often masterless men unsuitable for combat and ultimately the victims of ‘social cleansing’, victims of class and coercion. The wretchedness of their conditions of service was thus forced, inevitably downwards, on the helpless non‐combatant Gaelic Irish.

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