on making sure Walsingham did not miss the point, Trollope added that “[i]f hell were open and all the evil spirits abroad, they could never be worse than these Irish rogues—rather dogs or worse than dogs.” Or, most famously, in Edmund Spenser’s telling, the Irish “steal; they are cruel and bloody, full of revenge and delighting in deadly execution, licentious swearers and blasphemers, common ravishers of women and murderers of children.”17
Of course, English observers routinely heaped scorn on all sorts of people throughout the world, but the Irish were favored targets because foreign observers could easily compare them with the English. Unlike the people and societies that might be found throughout the Mediterranean world, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, the only thing that separated the Irish from the English was a short stretch of easily navigable water. On the surface, as Barnabe Rich noted, “the English, Scottish, and Irish are easy to be discerned from all the nations of the world, besides as well by the excellency of their complexions as by all the rest of their lineaments, from the crown of the head, to the sole of the foot.” All the peoples of the British Isles were more alike than unlike and therefore the supposed barbarity of the Irish people and the rudeness of their customs were problems in need of explaining. How was it, Rich wondered, “that a countrey scituate and seated under so temperate a Climate” could be “more uncivill, more uncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish … then any other part of the world that is knowne”?18 Colonialism needed to be justified, but who the Irish really were was an even bigger problem because that question could not be addressed without broaching the larger problem of what it meant to be English, a problem that confronted England repeatedly from the late medieval through the early modern era.19
Ireland therefore presented England with a series of overlapping social, political, and cultural challenges that were worked out over the course of many generations.20 Predictably, English commentators addressed the subject of slavery in Ireland, but they did so in curious ways during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although the English had been in Ireland since the late twelfth century, their control over the island was generally limited to the area around Dublin—the so-called Irish Pale—and often hotly contested. During the sixteenth century, a series of local rebellions took place that shaped English colonialism on the island. In the wake of Thomas Fitzgerald’s failed rebellion in 1534, Henry VIII recommitted the English government to imposing its sovereignty on the island, even having himself declared “king” rather than “lord” of Ireland in 1541. This effort met with stern resistance throughout the rest of the century, most famously during two large-scale conflicts: the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–83), which sought to eject the English from Munster, and Tyrone’s Rebellion (1594–1603), led by the capable Hugh O’Neill, which spread outward from Ulster and nearly succeeded in defeating the English.21 The bloody effort to impose English rule in Ireland, and the refusal of both the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish to be brought to heel, combined therefore to create a compelling rationale for English invaders to write about slavery.
Irish resistance to English suzerainty virtually demanded character assassination in order to justify the ongoing efforts to (re)conquer the island. Considering the ease with which English propagandists denigrated the Irish, it should come as no surprise that would-be English conquerors routinely justified the continuing effort to subdue the Irish by expressing their profound sympathy for “the country people living under the lords’ absolute power as slaves.” “[U]nder the sun,” Sir Philip Sidney concluded in the 1570s, “there is not a nation which live more tyrannously than they do, one over the other.” In 1567, English officials accused the rebellious Earl of Desmond of treating the inhabitants of Cork “as in effecte they are or were become his Thralls or Slaves.” In 1592, Sir Henry Bagenal reported to Lord Burghley that because the English had allowed the local lords to maintain control of large swaths of land, Irish leaders had “been enabled to enslave all their tenants” and maintain their independence from English rule. In an even more extensive treatment, Sir John Davies, who served in Ireland as Attorney-General and, eventually, Speaker of the Irish Parliament, claimed that the problem with the Irish was not their basic nature but that “such as are oppressed and live in slavery are ever put to their shifts.” Irish laws and traditions, and the oppressive rule and extortions of Irish lords, had simultaneously promoted tyranny from above and made “the tenant a very slave and villain, and in one respect more miserable than bondslaves, for commonly the bondslave is fed by his lord, but here the lord was fed by his bondslave.”22
Because early modern Englishmen were routinely critical of slavery as it existed throughout the world, these accusations are unsurprising. In Ireland, however, slavery provided English apologists with a weapon to claim that they were actually engaged in a war to liberate the mass of poor, downtrodden Irish from the bondage that was imposed on them by their own lords. They recognized, of course, that slavery was a double-edged rhetorical sword. Barnabe Rich argued that the Irish rebellions were routinely excused by people who claimed that they wanted “to free themselves from thralldom (as they pretended).” And, indeed, Rich was correct. Hugh O’Neill justified his efforts in 1598, in part, by lamenting that “we Irishmen are exiled and made bond slaves and servitors to a strange and foreign prince, having neither joy nor felicity in anything, remaining still in captivity.” But Ireland’s problem, according to Rich, was not really the Irish enslaving their own people or the English holding their neighbors in a state of bondage so much as it was the absence of the restraints on the inherent cruelty of the Irish. “[W]hat subjects in Europe do live so lawless as the Irish,” he queried, “when the lords and great men throughout the whole country do rather seem to be absolute than to live within the compass of subjection?” Bondage was relevant because Ireland lacked order, something that could only be rectified through the imposition of English rule.23
Ironically, although slavery may have been listed prominently among the reasons why the English needed to impose themselves on the Irish, it is a measure of the frustration of English proponents of the invasion of Ireland like Sir Arthur Chichester, writing to Burghley’s successor, Lord Cecil, in 1602, that they were led to conclude that “their barbarism gives us cause to think them unworthy of other treatment than to be made perpetual slaves to her Majesty.” Chichester, however, did not generate this recommendation without precedent. The idea that the Irish deserved to be enslaved had previously been mentioned by Gerald of Wales and it reappeared in print when Raphael Holinshed published his Chronicles in the 1570s, the second volume of which dealt largely with Ireland. Holinshed reported on a thirteenth-century gathering of clergymen in Ireland where the participants sought out an explanation for why Ireland “was thus plagued by the resort and repaire of strangers in among them.” After some debate, the congregants concluded that “it was Gods just plague for the sinnes of the people, and especiallie bicause they used to buie Englishmen of merchants and pirats, and (contrarie to all equitie or reason) did make bondslaves of them.” Divine justice “hath set these Englishmen & strangers to reduce them now into the like slaverie and bondage.” It was the sinful behavior of the Irish themselves, Holinshed’s Chronicles reported, that brought the Anglo-Norman invaders to their door. And God, not without a sense of irony, apparently meant for the Irish to be enslaved for retribution while “all the Englishmen within that land, wheresoever they were, in bondage or captivitie, should be manumissed, set free and at libertie.”24 Such was the nature of English ideas about slavery in the early modern era that the effort to rescue the Irish from slavery demanded that the Irish be reduced to slavery.
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The presence of slavery in Russia and Ireland was important to English observers bent on emphasizing the differences between themselves and the inhabitants of other parts of Europe. It also proved to be an easy way to criticize the customary practices and cultural values of other nations. But slavery was not necessarily viewed as inherently bad or as an indicator of moral turpitude in all cases. Many Englishmen approached slavery with a kind of academic curiosity, not revulsion. The subtlety with which English travelers were willing to treat the subject of human bondage as it was practiced in foreign lands is demonstrated in the surviving accounts of the system of slavery that pervaded the Mediterranean world, especially Turkey, Syria, Persia, Jerusalem,
