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- [00:01]
A
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
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The New Year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft leading to lost funds. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth part of your New year's goals with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com Special offer terms apply.
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A
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Amberlynn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. If you imagine Tudor island only in terms of dramatic rebellions or famous clashes, moments when the whole country seemed to erupt in conflict, you're not alone, but those big events only tell part of the story. Much of the Tudor takeover, if we want to call it that, happened more quietly through everyday pressure and steady intrusion into local life. That's the world we're exploring today. Now, for anyone less familiar with this period, it's worth stepping back for a moment. When the Tudors came to power in 1485, English authority in Ireland was limited to a small region around Dublin known as the Pale. Beyond that, most of the island was governed by powerful Gaelic lords or Old English families who operated with considerable independence. Over the next century, however, Tudor monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I attempted to extend royal control over across the entire island. They introduced new laws, planted English settlers, built garrisons, and increasingly relied on military force to break local power structures. Our guest today, Dr. David Edwards of University College Cork, is one of the leading historians of early modern Ireland. His work invites us to shift our focus away from the headline rebellions and look instead at how the Tudor government actually operated on the ground and and how it managed to extend its authority into places it had never controlled before. And a key part of that story is the widespread Use of martial law. In England, martial law was meant to be rare, used only in emergencies. But in Ireland, it became something very different, a regular tool of government. It allowed small groups of officers to act with sweeping powers, often without close oversight, and often in ways that blurred the line between enforcing order and exploiting the local population. Dr. Edwards Research shows how this system grew over time, how it shaped daily life and how it helped turn Ireland into a far more militarised society than many people realise. It reveals a version of the Tudor conquest that isn't just about great bloody battles, but also about constant low level coercion felt in homes, farms and villages across the island today. I'll talk with him about what martial law really meant in practice, why it became so widespread, and how it changed Ireland during one of the most important periods of its history. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Doctor Edwards, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:23]
C
Thank you.
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A
It feels that we're making a very important corrective, I suppose, of much of the history that is known of this period in Ireland. Why do you think this has been overlooked?
- [04:34]
C
I think there was the way Irish history was written and they always say that history is written by the winners. And there were two versions of Irish history. There was one from the 18th and 19th century written in the country by a sort of dominant Protestant minority of landowners and. And so on. And they wrote a history that justified their presence and their power in the country. And then you had another sort of Irish Catholic tradition, originally written overseas in exile by priests, and then subsequently in the late 19th, 20th century that started to assert itself as the dominant narrative of Irish history of an Irish Catholic country that had been put upon by its sort of Protestant neighbor. So in that story, basically great emphasis was placed on the role of Irish rebellions and the rebellions that were picked out for particular celebration and a sort of deliberate phrase were Catholic rebellions. So every Irish rebel became a Catholic hero and martyr and so on. And this was embedded then in the primary school and secondary school curriculum in the 1920s. So to this day I still deal with students who have imbibed of that culture that they have an uncritical view of Irish lords in the past. Irish rebellions in the past. Every Irish rebel is a hero, every Irish rebe martyr and so on. And of course, it was much more complicated and much more nuanced than that. Many of the Irish lords were political realists. They had to adjust to the growing power of the English monarchy as it asserted itself from the reign of Henry VIII onwards. And many of them made reasonably effective attempts at reaching an accommodation, some type of working relationship with the English Crown. But whether the English Crown was Protestant or Catholic, they still needed to surv survive and retain control of their own regions. And so that led to a more subtle form of politics in which negotiation, balances of power and so on were far more to the fore than ideology.
- [06:47]
A
You argue that martial law formed an essential part of the Tudor conquest of Ireland. We're going to be talking quite a lot about that. I hope. So. Could you start by defining martial law for us and what it meant in Tudor Island?
- [07:02]
C
Okay. Well, martial law is an emergency power for the government, the Crown, to intervene in an area under its jurisdiction, part of its dominion, where authority has broken down, where order has broken down, and to reimpose order. It's an emergency measure, as I said, and as part of that is enables summary justice, which essentially means targeting leaders of resistance and then killing them as quickly as possible. But in England, this system had existed for centuries. It's really not written down, it was part of the prerogative rights of the Crown. But increasingly, as we get into the 15th and 16th century, it starts to be defined. And the rules around the use of martial law and emergency powers and summary powers of execution and so on were very strictly prescribed and basically under English practice. And basically John Collins has shown this. And in that system, martial law could be used in England against rebels in time of their rebellion, only within a sort of geographically demarcated line within a particular region, five mile sort of range or so, and that was it. And then as soon as the rebels lay down their arms, those who survived would be brought to justice, traditionally through the courts. And some they could still end up being executed, but it would be through judicial process, trial by jury and all the rest of it. That was the system in England, in broad terms, in Ireland, when, as it starts to be used by the Tudors, from the reign, really the very end of the reign of Henry viii, particularly the reign of Edward VI onwards, a different system of rules applies. It is open ended. If you read the commissions of martial law that are issued to various Crown officials in Ireland from the 1540s and 1550s onwards, the latitude that these commissioners actually enjoyed is extraordinary. They can use summary powers of execution without limits, not necessarily against rebels in time of rebellion. That is taken as part of every commission, but also against suspected wrongdoers, malefactors and suspicious persons. This is part of the language. It's an elastic language to maximize the scope of the officials to impose their power on the power of the Crown that they represent is directly with immediate effect. But here's, here's the sort of key point, the killer point, if you will, was that these martial law commissions were where they didn't have a set period, they just stretched on and on and on. So they are used to break into previously autonomous, self governing Irish territories which were resisting English demand for change. They are usually as well. If you look at the pattern around the issuing of these commissions of martial law, a point that maybe hasn't been fully appreciated is that they tend to be issued in greatest numbers at times when the English Crown itself feels under threat, and not necessarily under direct threat in Ireland, but in threat more generally. The threat of a French invasion in the 1540s and 1550s, the threat, the fear of a Spanish invasion from the late 1560s and of papal interference, especially after 1570 and the excommunication of Elizabeth I. That's when you get the explosion of the issuing of commissions of martial law in Ireland, emergency powers to deal with a temporary emergency. But that then once these commissions are issued, the powers last for years.
- [11:10]
A
I mean, one, it's so striking that these are used against people suspected of crimes who are suspicious. I mean, this is very much the language of authoritarianism. You know, there's no real hope of justice in such circumstances. This may seem like an obvious question, but why were English officials relying so heavily on martial law instead of using normal judicial court system that is operated in England?
- [11:38]
C
Well, first of all, let's start with the court system, the court system in Ireland. And for there to be a court system operating in Ireland, English style court system, there has to be an effective county system of jurisdiction. Parts of Ireland had been created as counties in the Middle Ages. The Tudors begin to expand the creation of counties from the middle of the 16th century onwards. But they're in the process of doing it, making this happen. So they need something in the interim. So if you look at some of the commissions of martial law, especially Those from the 1550s and 1560s, many of them are focused on existing counties, but the rest are focused on territories, territories of particular Irish lords. And basically they're like lordships and so on. And then that's, that's the imposition into basically an unshired region of Ireland of English power, common law. The courts can't operate in those regions yet, but martial law can. So martial law is in many, many parts of Ireland, particularly in the Gaelic parts of Ireland. The parts of Ireland that Maybe once had been controlled by medieval English settlers. But since the 14th and 15th century, great, basically Gaelic lords had kind of recovered these territories and kind of buttoned down their sort of levels of control there in those areas. The first interface of the population with English power is with a martial law commissioner and his followers. It's not with, like, common law judges and so on. So the face of English justice for many Irish people is quite terrifying. Why the English lords? That's one of the reasons. That's a kind of, if you will, an institutional reason, a sort of administrative reason why they go for martial law. But the overriding reason why they go for martial law is it's cheap. The Crown recognized from Henry VIII's excommunication in 1534 onwards that they needed to increase their power in Ireland. They need to increase their military power in Ireland. In order to increase your military power in Ireland, you have to spend money. And anybody who knows anything about Henry VIII knows he did not like spending money. And likewise, Elizabeth I as well, is kind of famous for being parsimonious. Martial laws was a cheap and effective way to demonstrate royal powers of intervention in any part of the country, because martial law was, unlike in England, self financing. If you read the commissions, again, fascinating documents, terrifying documents at times, if you read the small print, so to speak. Yeah. A martial law commissioner was entitled to one third of the movable goods and possessions of anyone he killed, which is extraordinary. What's even more extraordinary is that these commissions are issued through royal prerogative. Right. They're a function of royal prerogative, so they're issued by the Viceroy and by senior commanders using the royal prerogative. They can't be challenged legally. So the commissioners, who are inarticistan, is untouchable. There are very few cases of martial law. Commissioners, even in the most excessive cases, have actually been brought to justice because they couldn't be. But the other point about this is about the one third of the movable goods and sort of possessions is we have many, many financial accounts for the Tudors in Ireland, because, as I said, Henry viii, Elizabeth I, Mary and so on really cared about how much money was being lost in Ireland. So they wanted to have good accounts. And we have excellent accounts from the late 1540s onwards. And in those accounts, all sorts of revenues are listed as well as the actual expenditure of Ireland. And part of the revenues should be the incidents from the use of martial law, from the forfeiture of goods by traitors and rebels and all the rest of it. And those do not appear anywhere in the Tudor accounts. Reading between the lines, we have to assume no accounts were made. Everything was seized by the Commissioner and his followers and those who were of his friends and supporters and so on, and that was the end of the matter. There's also the issue of whether this allows the Viceroy to the head of the government, the Lord Deputy, as he's usually called. He's effectively a viceroy, especially after 1541. The act for the Kingdom of Ireland makes him effectively the Viceroy of Ireland. This martial law allows him to create a shadow army, an army that isn't paid for by the Crown from London. There's no need for a treasure ship to pay for these forces. These forces can pay for themselves by what they do out in the field. Again, that question about inducement, a temptation to go out and line your pockets and to kill people, or else, as I suspect, was mutually the case in most areas, after a few killings at the start, to threaten to kill and instead operate a shakedown. And the irony of that is one of the justifications for using these types of measures in Ireland against the Irish, who were, according to numerous English kind of policy documents, lawless and given to violence, particularly the Irish lords. The Irish lords are routinely criticized for running protection rackets on their neighbors. But martial law probably became an English protection racket on top of the Irish protection rackets.
- [17:33]
A
So you're painting such a clear picture of what was being done and how martial law was enabling the Tudor state to expand its authority, particularly into Gaelic regions. Who are the commissioners? Who are the English officials who are using martial law?
- [17:54]
C
That's a very good question. There are kind of mixed bunch. There are Irish commissioners in martial law as well, those who are working in tandem with the Crown. Some Gaelic lords get commissions in martial law. Not that many, but there's probably a dozen of them over the later 16th century who actually get commissions in martial law because they're allies of the Crown. And again, they're making their forces available to the Crown, which saves the Crown money. They don't have to hire in more soldiers from England and pay them themselves. So the Irish lords can get commissions in martial law, which they can use against their own traditional enemies and so on. They are a minority of of the martial law commissioner group. Most of them, of course, are English. Most of them have arrived, often in the train of a new viceroy or lord deputy. They are followers. They are attached to the household of the Viceroy or lord deputy. Or they can also be adventurers, people who never actually get or rarely get any official position. But they turn up in regions and are given and it's martial law commissions that give them their official status. But they don't seem to have developed any other form of, like, official service. That was enough for them. And many of these will appear. They will flit into an area, you scour through the state paper evidence to try and find what happened to them later. And after a couple of years, they disappear. Presumably they just went back to England. It's hard to know a lot of the time, most of them or not with most of them, some of them. With most of them, however, they do stay. And many of them are English army officers who top up their pay with martial law commissions. So again, if you know anything about shooter finance, many of the pay rates for government officials, whether they're in the legal service, the administrative service of the state, or whether in the military service of the state, the pay rates are very old. This is the 16th century as a period of price inflation. So the army officers themselves are looking for more money. So martial law commissions are a way to augment the salary, which is low, and to basically allow them to develop a sort of lifestyle and all the rest of it that they think is their entitlement.
- [20:18]
A
And I'm struck by how great a power this gives the Tudor state over these territories with so few officials.
- [20:28]
C
Yes, it gives them power, but it's a limited power. I mean, one of the issues around the history of 16th century Ireland is that, yes, you can kick the door in, in a territory, you can shoot down or hang some of the military supporters of some Irish lord, but after that, what do you do? And you require all sorts of support services. And those support services often are very, very slow to appear, if they appear at all. So many of the martial law commissioners as well, if they hang, if they linger, if they hang around, if they decide that they like living in part of Wicklow or part of County Cork or leash or whatever, they have to get on with the local population. Sometimes they marry Irish women, they kind of go native. Some of them also become Catholics, even when they'd arrived, supposedly in the service of a Protestant state, you find later on that they're actually Catholic. There are numerous examples of that going on into the 17th century, which the English and subsequently British Crown after James VI and first finds rather disturbing that many of the English of Ireland, again not the majority, but a sizable minority, have gone native and are establishing themselves among native population groups and that they're Catholic. And then they start to be actually perceived as part of the problem in Ireland, not because of what they've done in the past, but the fact that they were Catholics and they control parts of Ireland and were no longer persecuting or prosecuting Irish Catholics themselves. They'd settled. So it's a complicated picture.
- [22:18]
A
You've made it clear that they're literally unaccountable. We don't have the accounts. Do we have any sense that the English Crown ever tried to rein in the abuses of martial law?
- [22:31]
C
Yes, intermittently. And there were several efforts made. There's an awareness that martial law can be counterproductive. The justification for using it to prevent rebellion can often instead cause rebellion, as English law or English representatives of English law and the English state are seen to be untrustworthy and so on, violent, dangerous to know and all around. And they can actually create and uprisings. So there are some interventions. There's an intervention in the early 1560s by students in the King's Inns, and basically in Irish law, students who see the use of the widespread use of martial law from the 1550s into the 1560s as an abandonment of proper English law, as an endangering. Of course, it also endangers them basically their own interests as, like, lawyers or basically aspiring lawyers. But then subsequently as well, politically at a high level, there are interventions to try and tone down, restrict the use of martial law. Some of the commissions as well. You can chart this through reading the actual commissions, the terms, the powers granted to some of the commissioners are prescribed, cut down, reduced. And there's an effort made much too late in the 1590s to have them basically limited in time, but they can only be for six months or for a year or whatever. But they didn't cancel the existing commissions of martial law that already were out there. So that was really just a sort of token gesture. There was an effort, serious effort, made quite late in the reign of Elizabeth I, in the 1580s. It probably would have happened before the Desmond Rebellion and the papal and Spanish intervention in Ireland in 1579-80. It probably would have happened before then. But once you had serious foreign interference in the country, martial law carries on. But once the major rebellion of that period, the Desmond Rebellion, is popped down in 1583, there's a serious effort made to claw back and the sort of situation. And a former governor of Ireland, a guy called Sir James Croft, who was the comptroller of the household to Elizabeth the First, he'd formerly been the viceroy in the early 1550s, he lobbied the Queen and worked with Burleigh to lobby the Queen to change the conduct of English government in Ireland. And he wrote basically a tree size and a sort of discourse for the reform of Ireland in 1583, just out at the very end of 1583, weeks after the Earl of Desmond had been killed in Kerry. And in that he denounces martial law as an abomination, as something that has brought nothing but disrepute to Her Majesty, that she was associated with the killing of women and children and a sort of basically shakedowns by soldiers and various elements of brutal behavior, and that it was a disgrace. And although there is no one document saying Elizabeth read this, shortly afterwards, if you read the instructions she issues to the new Viceroy of Ireland, Sir John Parrot, she requires him to behave in a much more controlled manner. And martial law itself, a couple of years later, in 1585, she decides, will be no longer used in Ireland. 1586, there's efforts made to actually stop its use. But then new problems emerge. We have the Spanish Armada. And part of the Spanish Armada in 1588, of course, was that there was a small detachment of the Armada were supposed to come to Ireland. The English officials in Ireland were well aware of this. They were waiting for it. And that only ensures that martial law will continue. So the Queen had been bent towards leniency. But now this new emergency in martial laws, always an emergency measure, ensures that martial law continues into the 1590s. Foreign.
- [27:14]
B
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- [28:43]
A
You've alluded to it along the way. But what was the impact of martial law on ordinary people. How exactly did they suffer?
- [28:53]
C
That's not easy to answer that question because we don't have detailed accounts of what happens within many of the territories of Ireland because English officials were so thin on the ground. There were few reports from different parts of the country, but there is no doubt that there was an uncontrolled use of severity. So martial law is meant to target the elite and. But the elite, a lot of the time when they see English forces coming, will get out of the way. So you'll find someone like Humphrey Gilbert, this is the most notorious case, who was colonel of Munster in 1569 and was meant to lead his forces against the rebel Catholic forces of James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald. Who's that? The real firebrand at the Counter Reformation in Ireland. Gilbert himself, something of a firebrand Protestant in Munster, goes looking for Fitzmaurice, or Fitzmaurice knows he's coming and gets out of the way. So Gilbert, using again the authority to kill with impunity, uses martial law to take out an entire village. We think it's in Limerick, might be in North Cork. Again, it's imprecise. Gilbert doesn't give precise details, he's not that interested. But he killed everybody in the village, women, children and all the rest of it and had their heads cut off. And he put a tent up and then sent out his messengers calling for the supporters of Fitzmaurice to come in for a parley. And when they arrive, he boasts about this and he had a sort of pathway made of the heads of his victims. So that's. It's shock tactics. That's an extreme example, but because Gilbert boasted about was written up a guy called Thomas Church and Thomas Churchyard, who wrote numerous accounts of English adventures in Ireland in the. In the reign of Elizabeth the First and interviewed many of the officers and you get some of the more lurid stories from their own mouth, so to speak, as reported by Churchyard. Other accounts, the Gaelic Annals are particularly good on this, but on the impact of the arrival of English forces in wartime in an emergency period, because martial law goes hand in hand with something else. It's not just used on its own, it shouldn't be seen in that way. And it's at its worst when it's used during war, an open war. So again, to take the Desmond rebellion, for example, 1579-1583 in Munster, a hugely destructive war, the Crown forces and the rebel forces both used scorched our tactics. So you end up with a famine within a Year, year and a half, there's widespread falling across muster. Untold numbers died, probably in excess of a hundred thousand people die during the. The Desmond War. Martial law is used as part of this. And there are accounts in the Gaelic Annals, in the Annals of the Four Masters, of the arrival of the Colonel, the new Colonel of Munster, John Zouch, who's again well connected at the Elizabethan court, and Zush, goes through Cork and Kerry, burning the landscape and killing everyone. And there's no doubt about this, he himself alludes to it in a couple of his letters. But the Gaelic Annals get the most vivid account of the impact of that of populations of, you know, women, children, old men, etc. The herders of cattle and so on, fleeing from one region to another, but then being caught up with and then destroyed. There were some English accounts as well, campaign journals from this period where the deliberate targeting of the ordinary population who were not in rebellion, but that didn't matter, and martial law allowed that type of latitude. The ordinary population can be targeted in order to expose the rebel Irish lords as weak and ineffective and therefore break their power. So you kill the poor to expose the wealthy and powerful as actually being ineffective, and martial law is part of that.
- [33:21]
A
So given that there was a sort of reassertion of martial law after the Spanish Armada and that particular threat, what do we see in the decades thereafter? And how, given that it's producing such resentment, does it continue to survive for so long?
- [33:42]
C
Well, it survives because it's brutally effective and it's cheap. I suppose one of the clearest ways of demonstrating that is that usually Irish historians view the early 17th century, the period after the flight of the Earls in 1607, when you, O', Neill, former rebel leader, Earl of Tyrone, and the head of the o' Donnells and Maguires, flee the country, basically leaving in a ship from Loch Swilly. And that basically prepares the ground for the ulster plantation of 1609-10. Irish historians usually perceive this period, the period after the flight of the Earls and O' Doherty's Rebellion of 1608. The period after that has been the. The early Stuart peace, and that supposedly lasts down to 1641. Now, in fact, it doesn't. We can talk about that if you want. But as regards martial law, martial law is part of the infrastructure of English rule in Ireland, because English rule in Ireland has shifted now to garrison government. They've been creating a network of garrisons since the 1540s. As English military power expands, castles are either seized from Irish lords and repurposed as English centers of strength. Or else new castles and forts are actually constructed. And as considerable amount of fort construction in Ireland from the 1540s onwards, new forts and so on. And the garrison commanders, the constables of these castles all had martial law authority. Now, after O' Neill's Rebellion, which ends in 1603 and so on, many of the garrisons are stood down in different parts of Ireland, but not in Ulster. In Ulster they are maintained. And that's where most of the English forces in Ireland will be in the early 17th century, and they'll be associated with various. There's a ring of garrisons all around Ulster, and these are the basis for the Ulster plantation as well. You can't seize three and a half million acres from people without having military power to actually do so. And the garrisons make that happen. And all the garrisons have martial law authority. They all have martial law authority. And that lasts right down into the 1620s. There's an effort again to limit it, but Wentworth brings it back in the 1630s.
- [36:25]
D
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- [36:54]
E
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- [37:38]
A
So would it be fair to say that rather than martial law being part of the conquest of Ireland, it is the conquest of Ireland. It's absolutely the. The substance of how the conquest of Ireland is enacted that could be argued.
- [37:56]
C
I don't think you can rule out the major military conflicts, the. The major battles and showdowns, the showpiece military episodes, and so on. They are of central importance in understanding how the collective power of Irish lords, when they form rebel alliances to resist the encroachment of English power, how that is broken by in. In. In These quite spectacular or more spectacular and sort of showdown, set piece showdowns and so on. But martial law is ever present. And so it's this low level military intimidation and control which then just becomes part of how the English rule Ireland. And it is something that no governor wants to surrender. It allows them, again, that wonderful phrase latitude. They can do more or less what they like. They can respond quickly. But it is also, of course, part of the reason why there will be this constant groundswell of resentments and mistrust. Some of the worst aspects or episodes of martial law can be associated with massacres. One of the most Notorious is in 1577, 1578 in County Kildare. But it's actually. It's actually to do with Leash, with the sort of neighboring territory of Leash, where some of the Gaelic lords or the descendants of the Gaelic lords, the omurs and their followers are invited in for a parley on the hill of Mullen Last in County Kildare. And when they arrive, they're asked to put down their arms and then they're all killed. And this is seen as an act of treachery by the Irish, understandably. But this had been planned and that there's a martial law commission issued literally weeks earlier to the very officers who perpetrate that massacre. So martial law creates this groundswell of mistrust of resentment for some Irish lords as well, or the sons of Irish lords who've been killed. There's this quest for vengeance which can be detectable and different parts of the country at different times, that it definitely is instrumental in breaking the back of the Irish lineages, of targeting the Irish lineages, the ruling lineages, who for centuries have controlled large parts of the country, not most of the country, in fact. It's a way of breaking into those groups and decimating them. But thereafter, conquests. We wouldn't be talking about conquest if the English hadn't followed it up with garrisons, with institutional frameworks to develop that power that they had acquired through shock tactics. So it's very important in the history of the conquest of Varna. But it needs all the other things for an actual real conquest to take place, if that makes sense.
- [40:56]
A
It does, yes. What do you think your findings on martial law in Ireland tell us about the nature of the Tudor state itself.
- [41:08]
C
It tells us, I think, a great deal about the willingness of the Tudors to behave with severity towards perceived threats. That in itself won't be any great news to students of English history. Are well aware that Henry VIII or Henry VII even could take quite severe measures against perceived opponents. But this is on a different level. And they treat Ireland, which is supposed to be a subject area and after 1541 is supposed to be a sister kingdom of England. And everyone born in Ireland after 1541 is supposed to enjoy, or at least this is what historians believe or have believed, that everyone born in Ireland is supposed to enjoy the same legal rights and protections as anyone born in England. And yet manifestly that isn't the case after 1541, or after 1571, or after 1601. It's a different kingdom with different rules. That the Tudor state is a multifaceted thing, that we have a pursuit of Anglicization and a supposition that Ireland's been made like England. But the very doing of that, the very making of Ireland's governable for the English, makes it unlike England. It creates a new form of monarchy, it creates habits. Some historians would argue that if you look at Wentworth's behavior in the 1630s, that the more unrestricted way you could behave in Ireland would encourage them to think come the end of the 1630s in the war with the Scots, that they could adopt similar measures in Scotland and so on, that this could be used. Irish methods, if you will, could be used to create a greater Stuart absolute state. Three monarchies, all controlled and with martial power. Military men much more to the fore. That particular interpretation needs to be explored a bit more, but it's certainly challenging.
- [43:20]
A
Lastly then, how do you think martial law influenced the long term relationship between England and Ireland?
- [43:27]
C
Very good question. I think the legacy of martial law, it's not just martial law. Again, we can't disconnected from the broader military edifice. And if you realize the importance of garrisons in Ireland, of military forts in every county has more than one. They have several. Some have, you know, 10 or so military centers, garrison points which at different points were used and then abandoned. Another is used instead. But garrison garrisons are really important in the. In the maintenance of English power in Ireland. In the 1650s, when you have the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, the garrison system that had existed is simply extended and that they carry on building. It becomes part of how you control Ireland is through garrisons. And the powers of martial law will continue to be used from time to time. In the 18th century, it's used quite widely and it's part of how English, the English crown maintains its power in Ireland, the 1790s in particular. And there's a very widespread use of light martial law throughout the country. So it's part of how English rule behaves is imposed, is enforced in the country. It's not the only way in which English power operates. You know, we aren't talking about constant threats of killing and all the rest of it, but it's there. It's there and it can be summoned. But the rest of the time, a more regular system of government emerges, of course, and you have the county system and county judges and circuits and size circuits and all the rest of it. These English model will apply in Ireland, and that will become the day today business of like, the administration of like, government and justice and so on. But there's always a garrison not that far away, so it's not like England.
- [45:43]
A
And presumably the basis of this, which is total mistrust of those officials, this fearful environment, the sense that you can always be shaken down not on the basis of having done something wrong, but of looking shady, is going to have sort of polluted and tainted relationships, to put it mildly, between the English and Irish for a lot longer.
- [46:09]
C
If the same terms were written into the later powers of martial law, it becomes part of the military system, so it becomes more regularized. So those extraordinary legal terminology that are being used in the early commissions of martial law basically enabling, kill anyone, don't fall away. Yeah. Now, in emergencies, emergency powers are emergency powers in Ireland as anywhere else in the world. A government will take emergency measures and they won't be too fussy about how they do that. But the martial law system that had been created in the 16th century becomes more controlled, more defiant later on, because English power is more extensive, is more defined, the country is more under control than before, so they don't need us. It becomes, in a way, regularized. So I don't think you have the same episodes. I don't know. I'm not an expert in. My period of expertise ends with Cromwell. I go from, if you will, Thomas Cromwell to Oliver Cromwell. That's my, broadly my period of expertise. But the later period, from what I gleaned from the works of others, it's not as wild as it had been in the 16th century. It is more regularized and it will be episodic. It will occasionally break out, but it will be understood basically under the umbrella of emergency actions. Whereas in the 16th and early 17th century, it was a constant, and that threat was constant, and there were no repercussions for officials who went too far at that time. Later on, I don't know, but it becomes part of the memory of the Tudors and so on. I mean, the reputation in, again, going back to what I said at the start about Irish Catholic history and then if you will, a more Protestant history of Ireland from the 18th and 19th century and so on in Irish Catholic history as well. It's linked into the martyrologies and so on of the penal legislation against priests in particular, but also against ordinary Catholics, martial law and some of the martial law commissioners, they may not be named as martial law commissioners, but once they're named, someone like Francis Cosby, they were martial law commission and they, they become associated in, in memory with the, with atrocities, with brutality, with cruelty and all the rest of it. And that becomes part of this Irish story of English misrule. So it's in there. It's often not called out for what it originally might have been, a martial law commissioner making the most of his commission, but it becomes part of the memory and becomes part of a particular historical construction of the Irish past.
- [48:57]
A
Dr. David, I would thank you so much for sharing your research with us, which is absolutely revelatory and has completely reshaped how I think about this period in Ireland. Absolutely combining it, as you've said, with the sort of major scale battles and understanding that this is part of a broader picture of the conquest of Ireland. But this kind of low level ongoing coercion is such an important part of the story that you have brought to light. I'm very grateful to you. Thank you.
- [49:31]
C
Thank you, Susanna Cheers.
- [49:34]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode of of Not Just the Tudors from History hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History. Hit.
- [50:12]
D
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- [50:40]
E
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