Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine
of Britain, but it is no more than a tradition. So far as the idea of settlers ‘coming home’ to Ulster at the time of the plantations is concerned, the professor says that the seventeenth-century Scottish settlers came primarily from Scotland’s border with England. These settlers were not Gaelic speakers, and it would be wrong to consider them the same people as those who may once have left Ulster. It would, the professor says, be very difficult to identify an ‘Ulster people’. I am left with the strong caveat that I should be careful of historical interpretations which carry an underlying political motivation.
‘Throughout history,’ declares Sinn Féin’s website, ‘the island of Ireland has been regarded as a single national unit. Prior to the Norman invasion from England in 1169, the Irish had their own system of law, culture, and language, and their own political and social structures.’ While it makes political sense for Sinn Féin to describe pre-1169 Ireland as a ‘single national unit’, it makes less historical sense. During this period the island was a patchwork of independent chiefdoms, often at war with one another, and ready to make alliances to achieve greater power. One such alliance led to the arrival of the English in Ireland. It was struck between Dermot MacMurrough, deposed King of Leinster, and Henry II, King of England, and its legacy has dominated the story of Ireland for the past eight hundred years. Henry granted MacMurrough the services of Anglo-Norman barons to help him to regain his lost kingship. One of these barons, the Earl of Pembroke, known as ‘Strongbow’, overran Waterford and Dublin, and defeated the High King of Ireland in battle. Fearing the emergence of a rival Norman kingdom across the sea, Henry landed an army at Waterford in 1171, with which to confront the ambitious Earl. Strongbow quickly pledged obedience to Henry and promised him the lands that he had conquered. As Henry proceeded through Ireland, the native Irish kings swore fealty to him in turn – all except the rulers of Ulster.
This story of England’s first intervention in Ireland is told by the Welsh-Norman chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis, who describes a meeting at Armagh called by the Irish clergy ‘concerning the arrival of the foreigners in the island’. The clergy’s opinion was that God was allowing the English to ‘enslave’ the Irish, ‘because it had been formerly been their [the Irish people’s] habit to purchase Englishmen indiscriminately from merchants as well as from robbers and pirates, and to make slaves of them’. As a result they decreed that ‘throughout the island, Englishmen should be freed from the bonds of slavery’. Unfortunately for the churchmen, this decree did not result in an English withdrawal. Giraldus proceeds to declare proudly, ‘Let the envious and thoughtless end their vociferous complaints that the kings of England hold Ireland unlawfully. Let them learn, moreover, that they support their claims by a right of ownership resting on five different counts…’ Three of these counts rest on legends, one being the claim that the kings of Ireland once paid tribute to King Arthur, ‘that famous king of Britain’. The fourth count is that English rule had the authority of the Pope. The fifth is that ‘the princes of Ireland freely bound themselves in submission to Henry II, king of England, by the firm bonds of their pledged word and oath’. And so, from this casual intervention many hundreds of years ago, described by a highly partial observer, Anglo-Irish relations came to assume their familiar antipathy and bloodshed.
A problem for the English kings who came after Henry II, attempting to assert their authority on Ireland, was the tendency of their representatives to assimilate. The lords who were meant to be cementing English rule began instead to adopt Irish customs, language, and laws, and became difficult to distinguish from the existing Irish chieftains. By the end of the fifteenth century the English Crown’s authority covered only a small area around Dublin, known as ‘the Pale’. The area outside of English influence was therefore considered ‘beyond the Pale’, and remained subject to an anarchy of tribal conflict. Henry VIII attempted to re-anglicize the ‘Old English’ lords; he forced them to drop their Irish titles, and he re-granted them their lands under English feudal law, but his authority was not noticeably strengthened as a result. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, faced six rebellions from the Old English and the Irish. She put these down ruthlessly, and appointed officials with little sympathy for the local people. One of these officials was the poet Edmund Spenser, author of the tender couplet ‘Such is the power of love in gentle mind, that it can alter all the course of kind.’ But Spenser’s gentle mind did not extend to the Irish people, whom he considered ‘vile catiff wretches, ragged, rude, deformed’. As England became wealthier and more powerful, Ireland became a country to be suppressed and civilized. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign a centralized English administration was in place, as was a bitterly confirmed resentment of English rule.
By this time the issue of religion had also emerged. The Reformation of the Church had taken hold in England, but it had failed to do so in Ireland. It was proving difficult enough to impose an English administration on a resistant, widely scattered population, and utterly impossible to impose the Protestant religion. So a new policy was adopted: the colonization of the province by loyal Protestants. In 1606 Sir John Davies, the Irish attorney general, described Ulster as ‘the most rude and unreformed part of Ireland’ and he hoped that ‘that the next generation will in tongue and heart and every way else become English’. What better way to achieve this, and to deter the French and Spanish from creating an Irish bridgehead from which to invade England, than by settling Ulster with English and Scottish Protestants? A good part of the existing Irish population was forced from its land by these ‘plantations’, and the repercussions have been felt down the centuries. The Northern Ireland government of much of the twentieth century would be run by, and for, the descendants of Protestants who were brought to the province in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Lessons learnt in Ulster were immediately put to use by the English in their next effort at colonization by plantation, across the Atlantic in Virginia and New England. The Ulster plantation was the forerunner of the foundation of America. In the New World the native population was all but extinguished by slaughter and Old World diseases, leaving the settlers to thrive and give thanks every November. In Ulster, where the natives did not die off, a population with split allegiances and long memories was created.
Early in my travels I met a man named John Beresford-Ash. He lives just outside Derry with his beautiful French wife, Agnès, in a lovely late-seventeenth-century house, Ashbrook, that benefits from looking and feeling its age. John is a wonderfully old-fashioned character, impeccably mannered, entertaining, honest, and indiscreet. His family can be traced back over four centuries to the earliest Protestants to arrive in Ulster, and I had been told that he would be an interesting man to speak to, so I telephoned him and was immediately invited to lunch the following day. I showed up and sat with John and Agnès, intending to interview him after the meal, but the food was good, the wine kept coming, and the conversation bubbled along, taking in subjects as various as Lord Lucan (an old friend of John’s who is indisputably dead) and the Nuremberg Trials (another old friend was the junior British counsel). I finally rolled out of Ashbrook, virtually incapable, with the promise of an interview the following day. The promise was warmly kept.
Ashbrook was originally granted to Beresford-Ash’s ancestor, General Thomas Ash, by Elizabeth I in recognition of his loyal service to the Crown. Another ancestor was Tristram Beresford, the first land agent for the merchants of the City of London. Beresford was evidently a pragmatist. According to his descendant: ‘The Spanish were very short of oak trees to build their warships and one day some Spanish galleons turned up in the River Foyle. There were a lot of lovely oak trees here in Derry, doire being the Irish for oak grove, and though Elizabeth was a marvellous queen, she was awfully tight-fisted and she hadn’t paid her troops. My ancestor practically had a mutiny on his hands because his troops hadn’t been paid, and the Spanish had an awful lot of gold, so he said to the Spaniards, “If you can pay, I will give you the oak trees of Derry,” which he did – and thus committed high treason. He was had up by the court of the Star Chamber, but fortunately for him – and indeed most fortunately for me – he was a great friend of Walter Raleigh, who interceded on his behalf, so he didn’t get his neck stretched.’
Many of the plantations in Ulster were undertaken privately, the settlers being Presbyterian Scots whose independence of spirit has shaped the history of the province. In Derry, however, the settlement was funded by the livery companies of the City of London and many of the original settlers were Londoners.