Empire: World History - 231. Colonising Ireland: Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, & The Tudor Conquest (Ep 1)

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Ireland is the only country in Western Europe that has experienced being colonised in the modern era. It was used by England as a laboratory for imperialism, and was the site of bloody colonial wars for centuries, yet many people in the neighbouring United Kingdom have little understanding of Ireland’s history.  The new series on Ireland & Empire begins with the Tudor Conquest. By the 1500s, there were small pockets of English imperialism in Ireland via descendants of the Anglo-Norman invasions of the 1190s, but they were concentrated along the southeastern coast. However, when Henry VIII launched the Protestant Reformation in England, establishing control over Ireland suddenly became a top priority. In 1541, he declared all Irish people as his subjects. He built upon previous laws banning Irish language and customs, and created a militarised society. And by Elizabeth I’s reign, the Tudors introduced plantations in Ireland which granted land to English and Scottish settlers.  Listen as Anita and William are joined by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer at Jaipur Literature Festival to discuss how Tudor colonialism paved the way for the overhaul of Gaelic society in Ireland. _____________ Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, and a weekly newsletter! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up or start a free trial on Apple Podcasts. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk goalhanger.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Drupal. We've got a very serious voice on. We're in the same room so I can look. I'm incredibly hungover.

You're looking almost donish with your intensity. Got a positively splitting headache. Really, why is that then, William? Let's all feel sorry for you. There was a little bit of a party at the Jaquorwich Festival last night. It is true. And I am so busy getting my wife to drink a pint of water and we got home that I didn't remember to drink a pint of water myself.

Poor baby. Anyway, look, the thing that we've been really excited about is talking about Ireland. For ages, William and I have been speaking about this. And we both come to this with a real series. draw because, well, you start off, why do you care about Ireland? I've always been aware that I don't know as much about Irish history as I should do. I was very much brought up by my half Irish, half Scottish nanny on tales of the potato famine and was taken down, I remember, to the public library in North Berwick at the age of about six

and seven, and showing these woodcuts of Irish mothers turning to cannibalism and this sort of stuff. It was in the Great Hunger, the 1847. 1847. You're not allowed to talk, you didn't have been introduced. We've got a great guest. We have a guest here. She's irrepressible. You just heard her voice.

We're going to introduce her any second now. Yeah, so that was your interest. It was something which was so present. I mean, my childhood, like everyone else of my age, I'm now about to turn 60, was, you know, pub bombings and the whole Irish question. The IRA and troubles. And yet, we never really understood what it was all about, where it had all started, who the IRA were, why they, why they were so angry with people in Britain

that they'd let off bombs and pubs. And I've always been aware that while I've studied history in half the rest of the globe, I've never really educated myself properly, sufficiently on Irish history. And it's been a great learning curve to read the books of our guest. Who we haven't introduced her? She's sitting here. She's actually one of the nicest people we've had in the pod. And she's being so very patient.

I did. I love her. I love her. She's all mine. The reason I come to Ireland and I've been obsessed with it is because Ireland came up time and time again in research when it came to Indian nationalism. And it was a really troubled and troubling relationship. So on the one hand, when I wrote about things like the massacre in Amritsa, the men who were responsible for that were two Irishmen. One, Sir Michael O'Dar,

a Catholic from Tipperary, and the other, a Rex Regenald Dyer, who went to Middleton College in Cork and, I mean, had a wretched time there, didn't like it, but you know, had that sort of Irish identity as well. And I didn't understand how that happened, but also, you had members of Irish nationalism holding up Indian nationalists who had either launched bombs or put trains off tracks or given up their lives or been hanged in the case of them saying as their heroes too. And the first official visit that happens to a free India is de Valera who comes over representing Ireland to India. So there's all of these gnarly things. And so we turned to the absolute best person who's all mine, all mine. Professor Jane Omwe is here.

author of Making Empire, Ireland, imperialism and the early modern world, who is going to unravel all of this. I mean, I have to tell you, William did say, I'm going to introduce you to Jane Ormire, you're going to fall, head over hills and love. It's happened. It's happened. It did happen. It completely happened.

Jane of I have already and I have been on a sort of lecture tour together. We've been an extraordinary initiative. Jay was brought over by the Irish Embassy, and it happens that the British High Commissioner in India is from Belfast. And they've made firm friends, the Irish ambassador, and the British Act Commissioner. And Jane and I were sent off to sort of talk empire and all things that connect empire in India and empire in Ireland.

And we did it in Bombay. And we've done it in Delhi in front of an extraordinary diplomatic audience. And it was at this point that I realized there was absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not bringing Jane on for a whole new series. And I think this is one of the things that people really, really have consistently asked us to do since we started Empire three years ago

to focus very much on these major issues of the first English. Right, and so now we can legitimately hear your voice and high. You're allowed to talk to this morning. Well, Anita, William, I'm absolutely thrilled to be here and to be here with you at the Jaipo Literary Festival. William, we had such fun at the Tata Festival in Mumbai

and then, of course, in Delhi. So at that amazing event, the British High Commission and the Irish Ambassador, And you know something? It was so interesting at the end of that, the Lithuanian ambassador got up and she said, you know, this is so extraordinary. The colonised and coloniser having a very respectful, difficult conversation because these issues are difficult.

So, I mean, hopefully. She said that it couldn't possibly happen between Lithuania and Russia, for example. Right. Yeah. So there's some signs of hope. We've just at this tripolitia festival where we're speaking from, I've just come from watching Gideon Levy on stage talking about Palestine and Israel. and he came up with a very nice Hebrew phrase.

He said that in Hebrew they have a saying that the darkest bit of the night is the moment before dawn. Oh, right. Well, you live in home. Let's hope. So all of these questions, Jane, that are in our heads. And also, you throw in something even more interesting into the mix, which we're going to be discussing in this series,

which is that Ireland is the laboratory where all colonial experiments are perfected. And just in a nutshell, because we're not going to do it in this episode, we're taking all the way back to Tudor England in this episode. But what do you mean by that? It's a laboratory for all other colonialism. Well, Ireland is England's first colony and they use Ireland literally to try out policies, ideologies, but also men, mostly from England, learn the business of empire by cutting their teeth first in Ireland and then going into the Atlantic world and of course then into India and elsewhere. So Ireland is a play.

where we're a colony, we were a colony, but we also then made empire and of course, as you've just alluded to, help to unmake empire in the 20th century. So it's at so many levels that Ireland is there. It's from the very beginning until the very end. You have the Honourable Society of Ireland founded just what nine years after the East India Company. Yeah, it's 1613. Which is formed to do in Derry, what the Brits are doing in Bombay and will do later. in Madras and Calcutta. And then at the very end, you could make an argument

and you do in your book that it is the partition of Ireland that forms the possible templates. Yes, the template for the partition of India. And I heard you speak about that here in Jaipei. And there was an audible gasp from the audience. I think because Irish people are white, they don't think of Ireland as a colony.

But obviously we'll get into that in the discussion. A point you made at that series was also very, very interesting. Why is it that of all the countries in Western Europe, it is the Irish that have stood by the Palestinians? And you said, because they're the only place in Western Europe, that has been a colony. And imperialism is about violence and the exercise,

the raw exercise of power. But I also think Ireland and our ambassador, Kevin Kelly, made this point just at the discussion earlier on today. Because Ireland has experienced 30 years of intense violence during the troubles, which of course is a common, colonial war. This empathy now Ireland has for Palestine, but I also think Ireland should give hope because the two-state solution in Ireland has worked since the Good Friday Agreement. Brexit Delta did a body blow, but it definitely hope as well. Well, I mean, hopefully this has set your

taste buds buzzing for what you are going to feast on in this series, but we are now going to start right at the beginning of this story. And I was thinking, you know, we'd start with the tutors, but you want to start even earlier than the Tudors. Well, because it started earlier. We should start at the beginning. When did the English? first arrived militarily in Ireland and start killing people? Well, 1169, you have the Norman invasion, and it's down in County Wexford, and that invasion then is at the invitation of an Irish chieftain, but what happens is increasing numbers of English Norman settlers come, and they settle that south-east corner of Ireland, particularly

County Wexford, but you also then find them in urban areas. So Dublin and the pale and then other urban areas. But what's... And his character, Strongbo. Tell us about him. Oh, yes. Because he sounds like somebody off of a cider advert. One of those Norman invaders who marries IFA, who is... Galic.

Yeah, Gaelic Irish princess. But it's symbolic then of the gaelicisation that happens of Ireland, especially as you get into the 13th and 14th century. So those initial, if you want, Norman English settlers, very quickly become galicised. When you say galicise, what exactly do you mean? The Norman settlers come in and many of them marry, as in the case as Strongbow and Eiffa.

But over time, that means that they actually become Irish. They speak the Irish language or Gaelic as well as English. But they behave like Gaelic chieftains. And the English back in England say they've become degenerate. Okay, they've gone native. They've gone native. Absolutely. It's very interesting to try and compare the Norman conquest of England with the Norman conquest of Ireland,

because what happens with the Norman conquest of England is that the entire Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and hierarchy get shoved aside. I try to remember back to my A-level history, and I seem to remember that there was only one Anglo-Saxon lord holding land by the time of the doomsday book in whenever it is 20 years after the conquest. And you have this picture, therefore, of Norman settlers putting up their modern Bailey castles with those lovely sort of steep hills. I just made one three weeks ago with my nine-year-old son for the project. Tell you everything you need to know about palisades. Exactly. Palisades and all that sort of stuff. But can I say, William, as well, what you see happening are these consistent efforts or periodic efforts by the London administration to, if you want, anglicise Ireland.

So the statutes of to kill Kenny, which are 1366, these are a series of laws that are passed. They say, you can't marry Irish people. You can't wear Irish dress. You can't speak the Irish language. You can't use Breton law or customary law. Oh, absolutely. And then it continues on. But it comes and fits and starts until the 1530s, really.

You get the same in India later, don't you? Because you get all sorts of attempts to, first of all, encourage mixed marriages. And then later on, strong attempts. to forbid it and ban it and not give any perks to anyone that's got an Indian wife. And it's not just forbidding it. It's also saying you must speak English. You must use the English law courts. You must use English law.

I sort of threw the comment and, you know, they were worried that all of their lords had gone native. And normally that really is a pejorative that is associated with the colour of people's skin. Here, you have something where everybody is white. And so, I mean, what is the attitude to those who are Irish from those who are English? What do they say at this time? Oh, we've got a fantastic insight into that, thanks to the work of somebody called Giralis Cambrenzis, Gerald of Wales, who publishes a book called Topographia.

And it basically, because of course, Ireland is never conquered by the Romans. And as a result, they're uncivil, they're barbarous. And this narrative of othering... It begins in the 12th century. Yeah, he's part of that Norman conquest. And his narrative is a bestseller. A Latin manuscript can be a bestseller. And what's so important about it, William, is then later translated in the 16th century by Holland Shed into English. And then it is printed. And the second it goes into print, it's like the internet today. So that very hostile, negative representation of the Irish speakers and the gales. And what were the stereotypes? What did England say about the people of Ireland? They're always uncivil. They're savages. they're barbarous, they're treacherous, increasingly they're subhuman, they're hogs, they're caterpillars,

they're a lower form of humanity. Isn't that interesting? Because those are exactly the kind of terminologies that we here used in those who are native to Africa and Asia as well. You're talking about sort of the Gaelic chiefs that are, you know, come about over time. Did they get on with each other? How much land did they control? You know, was it all just one kumbaya happy family before there was any kind of colonisation there? Definitely not, Anita. It was a real sort of patchwork of feuding tribal lordships. And you would have had an overlord who would have had a few sort of underlings, sublords.

It was all about control over people. It's not about control of land. It's about control of people and control of cattle, actually. Because cattle are the currency in Ireland. So a lot of time is spent, you know, running around cattle. because the more cattle you have, the richer you are, and the more people that you can then control. It's very much a fighting and feasting culture. So the fighting is all around the cattle raiding and about all this fusing. This sounds like my own Scottish borders. The river's going

backwards and forwards over the borders, driving the cattle into the dells, beef tug, Moffat and all this. It's exactly that. And alongside that, William, it's a feasting culture. It's about how these great chieftains can exercise, control over their followers with food. And I think what's important is to remember that the seas are the superhighways of this period. So if you want Ulster and that west coast of Scotland are part of the same entity, actually. And the sorts of behaviours that we're seeing in Gaelic Ireland, we see that mirrored across the north channel, especially in the Western seaboard. The Irish language and Scots-Gallic, they even say in Scotland they're speaking Irish.

What did the Irish chieftains say about the English? Well, it's really interesting, Anita, because what we find is the Irish chieftains are surrounded by retinues of bards and poets, and they're the ones who record, if you want, the contempt that is felt towards the English and their attempts to anglicise. So that's where we see evidence of, if you want, hostility. And actually, you have somebody like Jeffrey Kemp. Keating, who's writing, saying, actually the Irish are hugely civilised and they go back to Ireland, the land of saints and scholars back, of course, to the sixth, seventh century when it was the Irish.

When you have Irish missionaries converting first the picks, then going across onto the mainland and founding Bobio and Sangal and these wonderful Celtic monasteries with all these wonderful Irish manuscripts that are still in the libraries. And saying it's really, and they actually refer to some of these negative English commentators, starting with Combrances, as dung beetles. who go around, you know, gathering up the dung, and they're not willing then to actually engage with, if you want, Irish civilization as it truly is. So to move forward from the Middle Ages to the Tudor period, basically the English invasion of Ireland is not successful. There's very little land in the hands of the English. The English that are there get galacised.

And so by the time that you're entering the time of Henry VIII and the Tudors, English imperialist, in Ireland is half cock. There's very little clearly anglicised territory outside the pale, which means the area of Dublin. Absolutely. And some other urban areas. So what happens, of course, is we have the Protestant Reformation. Henry wants to marry Ambelin and get rid of Catherine of Aragon. And that really changes the face of Irish history. Because all of a sudden, we have now a very Catholic country that doesn't want to become Protestant. And I think Ireland is the only country in Europe that doesn't adopt the faith of its monarch. And that means Ireland is a strategic geographical threat to England. It's that backdoor into England because the Spaniards particularly want to vilify

and capture English. So, I mean, you know, Henry's frustrated with the Pope and that's well documented. You know, he's fed up and he gets fed up with Woolsey because Walsy can't deliver the Pope unto him and make the Pope do what he wants to do. But he actually does mention Ireland specifically. Ireland is a little thorn in his side, even though there's a lot of other things going on. And he writes, there's this letter to Pope Clement, the 7th, saying, you know, Henry's just sick of Ireland, sick and tired of Ireland. And he says, he declares himself the king of Ireland rather than the Lord of Ireland. And he decides, look, I'm going to show you, you will kneel. You will bend the knee to me. You're right in my sights. And don't think just because you're over the water, I don't notice that

you're not letting me do what I want to do. Well, actually, that kingship act that you're referring to as 1541, Anita, is very, very important because all of a sudden, actually with that, Henry is saying all subjects in Ireland are my subjects. Prior to that, it was really only that Anglo-Norman colonial elite. So that is a very significant shift. And what he says to the Gaelic Lords, he says, okay, I'm going to make a deal with you. If you renounce your Gaelic title and swear allegiance to me, I will re-grant you an English title. But in return for that English title, and he means an earldom or a baronage or some sort of English title,

I'm going to give you a patent or a legal title to your land, but you are also going to help me anglicise Ireland. So by the mid-16th century, something like 40 of the most important Gaelic law, have signed up to these surrender and reground agreements. And that came out of the Kingship Act. What was it for them? What did these lords get by bowing the knee to Henry the 8th? Well, what they get is they're very pragmatic, William. So they're hoping that it's all going to give them greater political control and enhance their power bases, their local power bases. So they're using the influence of their king and their relationship with the king to actually make them more powerful on the ground. And is this an immediate?

contrast with England. I mean, obviously, there is a slow conversion of the English to Protestantism and the Reformation rolls on right into the next two or three reigns. But is it something that you see from the beginning that the English are basically okay with rejecting Rome and the Irish basically want to stick to their loyalty to the Pope? Yeah, you do see that fairly early on. So there's a number of reasons for that. One is that the English Protestant church doesn't have enough resources on the ground. So the infrastructure is weak. The second thing is the Catholicism, that linked to Catholicism, is very, very deep. And what we see increasingly... No more or less deep than the English Catholicism? Well, what happens in Ireland

is that the, especially the merchant old English families, those Anglo-Norman settlers become known as the Old English. They send their children to the continent to be educated and they do so en masse in a way that that doesn't happen in England. To Rome or to a... Well, to all of the Irish colleges that start to spring up across Spain, France, the Netherlands, the Spanish Flanders, which would be modern-day Netherlands. And that really helps reinvigorate Irish Catholicism with counter-Reformation, post-Trent Catholicism.

And we know that the English very quickly learned to hate the Jesuits and regard the Jesuits as the enemy and the kind of almost like KGB, the Secret Service. Stormtroopers. Storm troopers who are working for the Pope against the reform faith. Are a lot of these Irish colleges, Jesuit colleges? Many are, but the Franciscans are actually as important as the Jesuits. And what you'll find are many of these old English families, but also Gaelic Irish families. We'll have family members, younger sons, who go over to Louvain,

particularly, which is... I have a Catholic priest's brother who studied in LeVayne. Well, you know where LeVayne is, which would have been Spanish Flanders. The first printing press... Modern Belgium. Modern Belgium. The first printing press in the Irish language is actually in Levin in 1609, and it's actually printing all of this counter-reformation literature that's then brought back to Ireland.

Here in the Jaipo Literature Festival, we have a Spanish chapter in Valladalid where there's another Irish college. Absolutely. At Salamanca, there's about 20 of them. that are very active. And it's so important in terms of how that sustains Catholicism in Ireland. The other thing I would say about Ireland is how important women are. In other words, Catholicism is very much domesticated.

And the women of Ireland play a hugely important role in sustaining Catholicism in the house. So the matriarchy. I mean, they hold the table. They preside over the rituals and things. Yeah. Yeah. And you see that very, very widespread. They're very important indeed.

But are they recognised then as a problem by the English. Of course they are. So how do they talk about the women at this time? Irish women then who are doing these. Oh, well, the Irish women, they're lewd, their horrors, they're politically subversive, they're worse than the men. And the language is extremely negative and graphic because they're seen as such a threat because of this ability to promote not just the religion, but also Irish culture.

Yeah, defiance, the stories, cuckling and all of those sort of, you know, Irish. mythologies that are so precious to those people who don't want to be English, you have their own stories. That is something that you see repeated. I mean, you know, we're going to come to, you know, the laboratory of imperialism. But I wonder if that's just the language of conquest that if you attack women, you're going to call them horse. It's the worst thing you can do. But I also would say that women in this period are if you want chattels, a married woman is a chattel of her husband. And when it comes to the law, it'll be the husband or the father that's prosecuted rather than the woman. So they had this degree.

actually of flexibility and freedom by virtue of their gender. So it is interesting. So just so that I understand, I mean, you mentioned hiding priests. That's obviously something that's going on also in English reconsent houses where Jesuit priests are in disguise, are coming ashore and being held in the Catholic houses. And there are priest holes and secret chambers where the priests can escape and leave the house if the army comes. but I haven't got an impression yet of Tudor control in Ireland.

After the break, Jane, maybe you could tell us a little bit about how the Tudors were able to exercise control in the way that the previous English kings had not. Welcome back. So just before the break, William brought in a really important thought, which is you've got a distance between you. You've got some people who are loyal to you and they've swapped titles and others who haven't. How do the Tudors exert control then in this land over the wall? So basically the army. So it's about the use of military force and that includes the use of martial law. So in other words, the administration can exercise martial law. So Tudor Ireland is an extraordinarily violent place. So on the one hand, you've got extreme violence and the exercise of violence. But on the other then, there are attempts to, if you want, create a service nobility. You have this program of surrender and regrant where you're basically trying to, to win the support of your leading lords, and that continues.

But geographically, how widespread is Tudor control? Well, basically, by this point, Tudor control is pretty widespread. So you see a number of major rebellions in Ireland, but by the 1570s, so you're now starting to get into Elizabeth's reign, you are seeing the Tudor's spread control around that southern province of Munster and then Leinster, which is where Dublin is, where they have very limited control is in the West, which would be Connacht, and virtually no control in Ulster, which is that northern province. So ironically, the area which is now in Northern Ireland and is part of Britain now is the area which is not controlled by the British. It's the wild and the land of the free.

I mean, it really is. It's Terra Incognita. And we can see this in the maps. You know, you see these wild men, but they have no notion really of the topography. And remember, mapping is a tool of empire here. So we see, particularly under Elizabeth, extensive mapping occurring of those regions that they do control. But Ulster is really the one area. And it's really only the nine years war. So the military conquest of Ireland is complete in 1603 with the death of Elizabeth.

Right. Okay. So shuffling forward. sort of well into the reign of Henry. And you describe this sort of title swap shop. If you want to be in, your hand in your Irish title, we'll give you a shiny new earldom and an English title. To me, I mean, even though you've described these sort of,

you know, this very brutal, backed up with military might, rule from England that's going on in Ireland, even though it's fairly spread out, it wouldn't have worked unless you had a buy-in from those newly swapped earls. And one of them who, you know, we should talk about a little bit, are the O'Neils, the O'Neill clan, who will become the earls of Tyrone. They are important in this story.

Still remembered in Ulster. Right. So start from the beginning. Who are the O'Neils? And what do they become? Well, the O'Neils of Ulster are probably, they're the overlords of Ulster. They're the most important lords.

But remember, prior to Surrender and Regrant, it was about survival of the fittest. It wasn't about primogeniture. Surrender and Regrant introduces primogeniture. But it gets very, very messy, because they don't follow primogeniture and they're all killing each other. It's a bit like the Mughals. And this man, Hugh O'Neill that we're talking about, who's the second Earl of Tyrone, born in, I think, about 1540. He goes on to become the great overlord. And he's a fascinating

character, Anita, because he's the one who really leads resistance against England and almost wins in this nine years war. The amount of money and resource that England has, has to commit to win the war against Hugh O'Neill, because they do win it in the end, means that the English crown is almost bankrupt by this period, but it also delays them actually engaging in Westford expansionism in America. Jane, pause for a second and give us the pen portrait of this man, Hugh O'Neill. Where's he from? What's his education? What's his power base? So Hugh O'Neill, one of the O'Neills, he's not actually the eldest son, but we won't get

too detained by that. He's born in County Armagh. which is in Mid-Ulster of absolutely Gaelic blood. So he's allied by kin to all of the leading families in Ulster. He is extraordinarily politically adept. And he makes all of these alliances and he uses very effectively his Gaelic network. But what's important, he's actually raised in the household of the Hovenden family, which is one of these old English colonial families, He's part of the colonial elite, but also as part of the household of Sir Henry Sidney,

who is the Lord Deputy or the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Why is he raised in their house? Why is he not raised by his own people? This was typical. So in other words, if a child died and they hadn't reached the age of majority, the state would take over their education. And that was one of the tactics used to try and anglicise. You see it in India later. Yes, the schools they set up for the children of noble, noabs and princes, you know, come But it means that somebody like O'Neill, he's a Gaelic chieftain, but he's also highly anglicised. Right. And speaks the English language and if you want knows English ways extremely well.

Who is O'Neill fighting in this nine-year war? When he goes against the English and he's militarising the resistance and standing up against the Judea armies, who is he fighting? Yeah, so it's primarily Englishmen and at this point really is English and Welshman. And Scotland isn't part of the conversation. In fact, at this point, the Scots are on Hugh O'Neill's side, the Gallagal. are fighting for Hugh O'Neill. So he's fighting the English and his particular enemy is a man called Bagnall, Sir Henry Bagnall, whose sister he has married. So he's a very interesting love life, Hugh O'Neill. Yes, he's quite an active boy, isn't he? He really is. So she is his third wife.

He's in his early 40s. She's in her early 20s. And she's the daughter of the chief military official in the area. They live in Nurey and Bagnall. So she's called Mabel Bagnall. And she's called Mabel Bagnall. And basically he elopes with her. And she then converts to Catholicism and lives with him. Which is not something that's going to endure him or her to her family. Her brother disowns her. But what's interesting is that Hugh O'Neils says, obviously he has to apologize. He's looking for her dowry.

And he says, you know, I've married her because she's going to bring civility, again in inverted commas, to my house. So it's women as these agents of civility. English women as agents of civility, but she herself was born in Ireland. And one of the figures who's facing them across the divide is none other than Edmund Spencer of the Fairy Queen. So with Edmund Spencer, you have the most extraordinary character because he's known as this great Renaissance poet.

I remember studying him. Exactly. Part of the English canon. In Ireland, it's a very different story because Spencer has been a colonial official. he was the secretary of one of the Lord deputies. He extensive lands as part of the Munster Plantation. And Spencer, of course, is writing about the Nine Years' War because O'Neill's men actually attack his home in North County Corps. I think he's got good reason to be a bit pissed off.

Well, he does, but some of the things that he writes in a view of the state of Ireland, I think. One of the things that he sort of said about him in contemporary things is that, you know, that Brian Friel's play of 1988, he's a schema, the leader, the liar, the statesman, the lecher, the patriot, the drunk, the sour, bitter emigray. I mean, would they have written about him that way in the time itself as well? No. Listen, Brian Freel's play making history is absolutely fantastic. And what Freel does is he brings Q O'Neill alive.

And Q. O'Neill is this great Irish nationalist. And by portraying him the way that he does and characterising him, very accurately, probably Anita, he debunks him as this great. Irish nationalist. So Friel has a different agenda, which is at the height of the troubles, one about reconciliation and creating a space for Catholics and Protestants. However, at the time, Hugh O'Neill is very highly regarded by many. They value the fact that he's such an effective military commander. However, of course, they write bad things about him as well, because, especially in London, in around 1600, he has become the most hated man in England. Why? Because

the amount of money that it's costing the English exchequer to put the rebellion in Ireland down. So it's really interesting to, you know, see this. On the one hand, they recognise just how politically astute and effective it is. On the other, they vilify him and his followers. And again, this language of he's subhuman, he's villainous, he's treacherous, he's uncivil, he's barbarous, he's savage. So you get both. But this rebellion very nearly succeeds. It really does, William, but what sort of, it all goes awry really.

So O'Neill has been very closely working with the Spaniards. Remember 1588, the Armada, the Spaniards, they go back to the Spanish court and they say, okay, guys, let's try again. A lot of the Armada end up in Ireland. Of course. And whenever you see beautiful Irish girls with very dark eyes, everyone always says, oh, the descendants of the Spanish who got washed up on the Dingwell Peninsula or whatever. Well, the Armada, many of the wrecks, I think about 30 of the wrecks are off the Irish coast.

Only about four of them have been actually properly excavated, but they're all there. And every year they commemorate that, actually. Anyway, Street of Strand and the Armada wrecks. But going back to you, O'Neill, he is working very closely with the Spaniards. And the Spaniards do send an expeditionary force. But instead of landing... What sort of scale? Oh, you're looking at a very significant force of a couple of thousand troops.

And they land with their weapons and all that? They all land. but they land, instead of landing in Ulster, they land in Consail. So they land at the other end of Ireland. Which is how far away just for people who don't know the scale of this? I mean, you're probably looking at least by marching, two, three weeks march. Oh, right. Gosh, that's no use at all then. No, no, no use.

So what happens is the Spaniards come in in the wrong place. There's this mad scramble then to get the troops down so they're there to support the Spanish invasion. But of course, what happens is the English intercept. and at the Battle of Kinsale, which is in 1601, you have this routing of the forces. And basically it's game over from that point on. OK. Well, we're going to see what happens in the next episode. But this is a good moment to stop.

The rebellion is gone badly wrong. And we're about to see a big reaction. But if you want to hear what happens next right now and you can't wait and who can blame you, sign up to the Empire Club for. for early access, extra bonus episodes, even more special at the moment because they're full of mini interviews with brilliant writers.

We knobled at the Jayapur Literary Festival. So just head to Empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com to sign up. And if not, then, you know, we'll miss you. But we'll see you next time. For now, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durumple.