‘As lief to the gallows as go to the Irish wars’: Human Rights and the Abuse of the Elizabethan Soldier in Ireland, 1600–1603

Abstract

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.

Violence on the Fringes: The Virginia (1622) and Amboyna (1623) Massacres

“…Vincent Carey describes the work of English soldiers engaged in their own ‘harvest’ in Ireland in the summer of 1600, a gruesome parody of a harvest in which soldiers slaughtered cattle, horses, and sheep, burned houses and destroyed fields of grains. The Indians in Virginia look much like the English in Ireland in this comparison of wartime behaviour, but there are some important differences. English reliance on Indian food stores had been one of the sources of friction in earliest years of settlement.…”