an educational backwater for the first time.28
During the later sixteenth century, Elizabeth I’s programme of dissolving Irish monasteries coincided with the state execution of all clergymen who refused to accept the English Crown as the religious head of Christendom. It also led to the creation of the first Irish university, Trinity College in Dublin, nominally as a Protestant theological college. As a response, Catholic religious orders founded the first of many Irish Colleges on the European continent. The first was created in Spain, where trading links had long existed between Gaelic Irish chieftains near the west and southwest coasts of Ireland and regions such as Galicia. In common with Irish trade with Bordeaux, the Spanish lowlands, Brittany and Italy, these trade links were now purposively curtailed by legislation.29 There was no Irish support for the attempted Spanish invasion of England in 1588. Some Irish nobles, however, had sent family members to Spanish Flanders to acquire more modern military expertise. In the 1590s, Ulster chieftains made the unusual move of considering pledging their allegiance to the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty, in an attempt to acquire Spanish assistance, whilst endeavouring to appeal to a distinct sense of Irish nationality based on Catholicism. They mounted a resistance to English rule that, in the wake of a couple of military victories, seemed likely to stimulate a nationwide rebellion, but this endeavour was defeated in 1602 in the wake of a very small Spanish invasion attempt on the southern coast of Ireland.30 Meanwhile, on a national level, the formation of over a dozen Irish Colleges on the European continent, located in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, France, Italy and even Prague, was of limited significance because they were designed primarily for the training of priests. Although no longer complete unknowns in European court society, Irishmen were generally viewed in Europe only as a potential source of additional manpower, be it for political intrigues on the continent itself or against England, rather than as representatives of a distinct nation in international relations.31 This was because the Irish parliament served little purpose other than to make requests for English subsidies to sustain an insolvent Irish administration that was nevertheless able to facilitate extensive exchequer returns to London, based upon rents, customs and taxes, that helped to ensure that ‘Irish money balanced the royal books’ of England.32
The increasingly confessional nature of European states did not reflect the origins, nature and purpose of contemporary wars in Europe where the balance of power was considered to rest with the outcomes of Atlantic trade wars that were fought between the Spanish, French, Dutch and English. The Dutch played the most pivotal role because their bankers were the most adept financiers of both wars and state debts. Dutch tradesmen would succeed in getting appointed as mayors of major Irish towns such as Dublin, Drogheda and Limerick several times over the course of the seventeenth century.33 The status of the Netherlands as the cockpit of Europe was reflected by its desire to maintain its competitive advantage in the world of trade and its consequent authorship of the rules of international relations. Hugo Grotius defined the bases of international law as resting equally upon a recognition of the sovereignty of nation-states and their right to free trade on the ocean. An alternative method the Dutch employed to maintain their advantage, however, was to sustain their army through hiring soldiers from within other states’ jurisdiction.34 Irish expatriate soldiers, most notably Owen Roe O’Neill, attained senior military rank in the Netherlands, albeit in the Spanish Netherlands. Here O’Neill would suggest during the 1620s that an effort should be made to establish an Irish republic despite the fact that the only republic in Europe at the time was Spain’s enemy, the United Provinces of the Netherlands (established 1581), the sovereignty of which would not be recognised by Spain until the Westphalia settlement of 1648.35
The primary objective of the Tudor and Stuart dynasties in Britain was maximising the power of the English navy through financial speculation in colonial plantation schemes, beginning in Ireland and subsequently in North America. After initial Tudor plantations in the eastern Irish province of Leinster and the southern Irish province of Munster, upon the accession of the Stuarts a major plantation scheme was launched in Ulster. As this was launched at the same time as the first English plantation scheme in America, it effectively introduced a new dynamic into the framing of Irish political developments: namely, the development of an Atlantic economy. In the opinion of Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618), this was based upon one simple principle: ‘whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade commands the riches of the world and consequently the world itself.’36 London and lowland Scottish investors profited greatly from the plantation of Ulster (purchasing, for instance, the entire townland of Derry), which had much of the best quality land in Ireland. A perpetual sense of insecurity would exist among these planters, however, because the manner in which courts arranged the dispossession of land from its prior legal owners was frequently illegal.37 Among the profiteers was Sir Arthur Chichester, ‘the landless second son of a minor Devonshire gentleman’, who suddenly became exclusive owner of all commercial shipping and fishing rights in Ulster as well as one of the largest landed estates in either Britain or Ireland. Regarding this development, historian Sean Connolly has noted that
All this is, at first sight, little short of piracy, yet public policy [supported by the Privy Council of Scotland] also played a part in the transactions … The two enterprises were in fact complimentary. Gaelic Ulster and Gaelic Scotland represented a single ungovernable hinterland. The passage back and forth across the narrow waters of the North Channel of mercenary fighters had long sustained the rebelliousness of one [Ulster] and the militarised disorder of the other [Scotland]. Plantation in Ulster, along with continued efforts to discipline the clan chiefs of the Highlands and Islands, would fracture this zone … removing a major threat to the security of all three British kingdoms … [and] transformed irreversibly the face of what had previously been the last stronghold of Gaelic Ireland.38
Being urban recipients of state aid, many of these planters were of note for introducing more commercial practices into Irish agriculture. Meanwhile, during the 1630s, Sir Thomas Wentworth, a new English appointee to lead the Irish administration, attained a complete monopoly of all Irish trade in Virginia tobacco.39 Maryland, the second such American colony, was supposed to be filled exclusively with unwanted Catholic subjects. Controversially, however, rather than encouraging his unwanted (Irish) Catholic subjects to become planters, Wentworth allowed them to join in their thousands the Spanish army in Flanders in an effort to improve Anglo-Spanish relations. This proved to be a major setback to Anglo-Dutch relations. In turn, it created controversy over the specific manner in which Charles I was financing the Royal Navy, causing a civil war to break out in England in which Wentworth became the first political casualty.40 Just prior to his death, Wentworth had extended the operations of the English admiralty to Ireland in an effort to suppress piracy and enhance English security while he also disbanded the Irish parliament.41 Irish Catholics from the south of Ireland reacted by creating an alternative form of political assembly known as the Irish Confederation. Meanwhile, Owen Roe O’Neill, who had received the military services of those who had left for Spanish Flanders, returned to Ireland to lead an undisciplined rebel force in Ulster. Both of these groups claimed to support the Stuart king and did not seek any foreign intervention, but the Irish Confederation would be offered, not by its own request, the services of a papal nuncio who was expected to act in a purely advisory capacity on church–state relations.42
