John Derricke’s Image of Irelande, Sir Henry Sidney, and the massacre at Mullaghmast, 1578

Abstract

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.

Ordinary Violence? Ireland as Emergency in the Tudor State

“…There is a tremendous amount of work in this vein just recently published or currently in the works, all of which has allowed us to look unblinkingly at Ireland, and indeed at English−Irish relations, in their too all frequently gory details. Salutary or not, however, it has had the (perhaps?) unexpected result of driving a wedge deeper between Ireland and the Tudor state.…”

Introduction: Human Rights and the History of Violence in the EarlyBritish Empire

“…In doing so, he brought scholarly rigour to the questions of genocide, atrocity and state terrorism in early modern Ireland. His work also challenged prevailing views of the queen herself. No Gloriana or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth instead came across as a ferociously calculating and martial‐minded monarch.…”

Three Faces of Civilization: ‘In the Beginning All the World was Ireland’

“…The pacification of the Irish aristocracy was pursued in a highly militarised and exceptionally violent way, reaching new depths from the assertion of Henry VIII's kingship of Ireland in 1534. English Lords Deputy made liberal usage of massacres, treachery and atrocities to subdue the native population, turning the whole English civilizing mission into exactly the sort of enterprise that suggests the need to put the word ‘civilization’ in inverted commas (Carey, 1999; Edwards, 2007). Rather than capturing prisoners to claim a ransom, the English, beginning with Sir William Skeffington (1465–1535), Lord Deputy (1534–5), started putting them all to death, even long after hostilities had ceased, not just in the heat of battle.…”