Misanthropy Read online

  In effect, no stable English kingdom existed in Ireland at this time. The settlers proved increasingly troublesome to the English government, and the Papacy wielded more power than the crown. By the early fifteenth century, it even seemed as though the Gaelic princes had drawn the sting of their Norman neighbours and would overwhelm them. A ‘Gaelic resurgence’ was taking place, which spelt ‘the progressive decline of the English colony’, and the actual destruction of some of the centres of Englishness in Ireland. On the eve of the Tudor period, ‘the English community in Ireland was in danger of total extinction’, and ‘the Great Earl’, Gerald, Earl of Kildare, was de facto virtually master of Ireland.4

  The man who put a stop to this, and ushered in the truly devastating period of colonial violence, was Henry VIII. Henry thought Ireland was getting more and more disorderly, and the dynasties in Ireland increasingly precarious. When Kildare power collapsed, in 1534–5, the king sent in his troops, aiming to establish central control, direct rule from London and a garrison (permanent army of occupation) to enforce it. From 1546 to 1566, military campaigns took place on a more or less yearly basis. Between 1534 and 1691, Ireland changed from a land of two related nations, the ‘Irishry’ and the ‘Englishry’, to a subject kingdom of the British monarchy. By 1691, newcomers – the ‘planters’ or ‘New English’ – owned four-fifths of a land that had previously been in Irish hands. They were Protestant colonizers, freshly arrived from the homeland, far more brutal and rapacious than their Cambro-Norman predecessors (and better organized). Theirs was a radical colonial project that involved full-scale, bloody conquest. They strategically uprooted local elites, forcing landowners and their tenants and peasants off their land. From Henry onwards, the English objective was dramatically to reshape Irish culture in government, language and culture, transforming it into a replica of England (‘Anglicization’). The English justified this by a gospel of ethnic superiority, according to which the Irish were backward, savage, quarrelsome, tribal, drunken, licentious, unreliable, dishonest, idle and hopelessly second-rate. Many of these stereotypes would subsequently persist for centuries.

  As a magisterial James Joyce was later to put matters, ‘A conqueror cannot be amateurish’.5 The English were certainly not. The years from Henry VIII to Oliver Cromwell’s departure in 1650 saw the repeated practice of State terror. The Tudors knew they could get away with counter-insurgency measures in Ireland that the English would not stomach at home: torture, massacres, head-hunting, pre-emptive strikes, mass slaughter of unarmed civilians, summary execution, not least of migrants and vagrants, frequent mutilation and dismemberment. The colonizers favoured a scorched earth policy in which lands and crops were put to the torch, leading to widespread famine. Some particularly targeted women and children (to dissuade families from harbouring ‘rebels’, an interesting word, in this context). ‘We killed man, woman, child, horse, beast, and whatever we found’, boasted one of Lord Charles Blount Mountjoy’s captains. (Mountjoy was Lord-Lieutenant in Ireland in 1603–4).6 Meanwhile, rogue planters accepted financial inducements to murder, or pursued their own greedy little entrepreneurial wars of annexation.7 Much of the country was destroyed, left waste. Certainly, there was ‘a poisonous dynamic of escalation’:8 the Irish struck back, under provocation but sometimes no less outrageously, notably, perhaps, in the case of the massacre of Ulster Protestant settlers, those who had stolen their land, in 1641. But they were fighting to keep hold of their territory and defend their families, not brutally threatening the livelihood of another people and the world that they had built for themselves.

  The invaders used the same methods during the Confederate Wars from 1641, which again pitted the by now better established English and Scots Protestant colonists and their military commanders – General George Monck (English), James Butler, Duke of Ormond (Old English, i.e. originally Cambro-Norman, Protestant), Sir Charles Coote of black legend (New English settler, land-grabber and indiscriminate killer, much extolled in the London press) – against the Catholic Irish. Sometimes the commanders ordered the atrocities. Sometimes soldiers just went berserk.9 The Cromwellian campaign began in 1649, and included the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford. Cromwell sent the survivors of the first off to indentured servitude in Barbados (they were bartered for sugar and tobacco). He left again, by which time there were hardly more than half a million Irish remaining. The Jacobite War of 1689–91 between William of Orange, the English, settlers and Protestants on the one hand, and James II, the Catholics and Irish on the other, was less remarkable for hellish conduct, perhaps because of the number of nationalities that fought on both sides – the Jacobite war was a European war, not another instance of the more usual local bullying – though the rapparees, irregular Irish pike-bearers, were ‘hunted down like wild animals’.10 At all events, the defeat of the Catholic cause brought peace.

  For Irish misanthropists, the consequences of the triumph of the cause of the Anglo-Irish or the Protestant Ascendancy, as it now became known, were bitterly instructive. Founded on horror, the Ascendancy speedily erased the memory of it. As though it felt an urgent need to disprove its own barbarous origins, it devoted itself to culture, excelling in philosophy (Berkeley), literature (Swift), political theory (Molyneux) and science (Boyle). It founded the Dublin Society and the Royal Irish Academy. Trinity College had first admitted students in 1593. Now it came into its own, growing richer, rapidly expanding, putting together a vast estate and developing a formidable reputation it was never to lose (though its orientation long remained colonial, doctrinal and sectarian, sometimes dismayingly so). Dublin also became increasingly well known for its medical tradition (all the doctors being Protestants). Responsible as he had been for some of the most alarming excesses of the soldiery during the Confederate Wars, Ormond was also responsible for initiating a redesign of Dublin which, as far as architecture and city planning were concerned, was to turn it into one of the most interesting and stylish eighteenth-century European cities. The same period saw the emergence of the great Irish country houses. The Ascendancy were not only elegant improvers; they were also shrewd ones, creating an educational meritocracy (if strictly for their own, plus converts) that was important to the success of their culture.

  This privileged colonial elite wanted absolute political monopoly, lest the ‘rebels’, who were unfortunately seditious, bloody, cruel, thievish and predisposed to ‘inveterate hatred’,11 should rise up again. So they established a set of barriers between themselves and the lesser race. The Irish were a savage, recidivist people, and it was best to treat them roughly: ‘They are like their Boggs’, wrote one pamphleteer, ‘never to be trusted to by going gently over’.12 It was clear that what Ireland needed was discriminatory legislation. This duly took shape as the Penal Laws. These were partly military: they disarmed the Irish, with the intention of keeping them that way. But they were economic, too, administering the coup de grâce to the Catholic landowning class, which soon owned only five per cent of Ireland. They outlawed all manner of Catholic institutions and practices.

  They were also deeply racist, though, in most of Ireland if not Ulster, religious difference served (as so often) as a convenient pretext. Edmund Burke famously described the Penal Laws as ‘a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people as ever proceeded from the ingenuity of man’.13 Yet that machine was designed precisely to safeguard what its beneficiaries took to be a civilization from the mire from which it had supposedly been raised, according to what the Ascendancy called the ‘right of conquest’. As the eighteenth century wore on, the ethics of the Ascendancy seemed increasingly to be one of enlightenment and moderation. Yet this coexisted with a ‘brutish and indefensible’ treatment of its own historical victims.14 Such conduct went far beyond the Penal Laws, as the practices of many landlords (racking rents, levying outrageous tithes, threatening the always insecure tenure of the peasantry) amply bore witness.

  At this poin
t, we are almost back at 1798. We could also go beyond it. Long into the nineteenth century, for the majority of the Irish, life spelt dire abjection. Joyce writes for example of ‘the terror of soul of an Irish village in which the curfew was still a nightly fear’.15 Curfews were associated with Coercion Acts, of which the British government introduced 101 between 1800 and 1921.16 It would be naive to doubt the excesses they made possible. But worse than coercion was famine: one of the major historical occurrences powering Irish misanthropic writing during the nineteenth century was the Great Famine of 1845–52, which wiped out four million, half the population of Ireland. Here the issue was not so much the degree of responsibility the British bore for the catastrophe, much debated by historians and moralists, but rather the very limited degree of responsibility they took for it. In 1801 the British Parliament had passed an Act of Union making a single kingdom of Britain and Ireland. How was it then that, when Ireland suffered unconscionable disaster, England kept treating it as a separate province? What could Union on such terms mean?

  But here we might pause. The Irish had good reason to look upon the English with ‘a colder eye’, to adopt a term of Hugh Kenner’s,17 and, indeed, for a long while, many of them unflaggingly did. They also had good reason to be at the very least sceptical about the British colonial project in Ireland. The invading power had often behaved cynically if not monstrously. Furthermore, it had proved expert in doublethink and doubletalk. First, treachery: from the Tudor campaigns onwards, the Irish thought of the English as perfidious. Perfidy became a word they particularly connected with Albion, and remained so long after the Tudors. The Tudor forces in Ireland repeatedly promised mercy or clemency and then reneged on their promise. This became traditional: Monck and his soldiers offered ‘quarter’ (mercy) to the women at the Castle of Blackwood, Co. Kildare – and then, with one of the most chilling puns in history, duly chopped them into quarters.18 Secondly, the English kept on coming up with specious justifications for shabby doings: God, providence, racial supremacy, all were used to bear out the case. Most ironically of all, the Tudors repeatedly invoked the value of ‘civility’. But ‘from the Irish perspective savagery and monstrosity were located squarely in the supposed instrument of English civility’ itself.19 The discourse of ‘civility’ was merely spin, at which the English were always skilled. For centuries, the Irish were to remain distinctly unimpressed by the claim implicit in the concept of the ‘Anglo-Saxon civilization’.20

  Thirdly, the English had one set of standards for Ireland and another for England. Cromwell, for instance, perpetrated no atrocities in England during the Civil War, but Ireland was a different matter. Indeed, the monsters of Ireland repeatedly became and remained English eminences, luminaries and heroes, key figures in the national mythology: Henry VIII, the scorched earth king; Elizabeth I, supporter of ethnic cleansing in Laois and Offaly; Walter Raleigh, involved in the torture and slaughter of several hundred unarmed, defenceless prisoners at Smerwick in 1580, including the hanging of women and children; Edmund Spenser, great, canonical English poet, proselytiser equally for ‘civility’ and dispossession, transportation, the elimination of the Gaelic elites and the use ‘of famine as a military tactic’.21 The tradition of racist national heroes continued later with the popular British military hero the Duke of Wellington, English-identified Anglo-Irishman who supported the movement for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, but whose attitudes to the Catholic Irish are captured in his reaction to being described as Irish: being born in a stable did not make one a horse; Palmerston, much lauded in England as the people’s minister, who, during the Famine, shipped off two thousand impoverished tenants from his Irish estates – and briskly improved his lands; and, perhaps most unpleasantly of all, the dirtiest name in the Famine, Sir William Gregory. Gregory came up with an amendment to the Poor Law Extension Act (1847) that (as the landlords wanted) facilitated mass evictions from their estates, greatly increasing the sum of Irish misery. He was duly knighted in England.22 Fourthly, still, the English got away with it. The larger world – or at least, the larger non-colonial world – respected the ‘Anglo-Saxon civilization’, even when it hated and feared it. But that meant the Irish reputation only suffered further as a consequence. The Irish fiercely opposed a civilization: they must evidently all be wild animals, brutes, hoodlums, gunmen, dynamitards and rebels. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some Irish nationalists were determined strategically to resist what they had come to see as a ‘campaign of calumny’.23

  But resentment, political anger and chronic political scepticism do not amount to misanthropy. Anti-colonial rage does not have the same structure as colonial misanthropy. Indeed, the reverse is likely to be the case: it tends to breed righteousness, like that of John Mitchel in his Jail Journal (1854), for example – though he can sound misanthropic – a conviction of the good (one’s own). This can be unappetizing, or is easily made to sound so: hence Joyce’s refusal to share it. ‘I find it a bit naïve’, he writes, ‘to heap insults on the Englishman for his misdeeds in Ireland … for so many centuries the Englishman has done in Ireland only what the Belgian is doing today in the Congo Free State, and what the Nipponese dwarf will do tomorrow in other lands’ (anticipating Japanese conduct in China thirty years later).24 This, however chilling, is meant to sound like gritty political realism, a hard, modern resignation to incontrovertible historical and political fact. It emphatically repudiates the tradition of impotent fury and the refuge in pious self-satisfaction.

  But Joyce was certainly no misanthropist, and the passage I have just quoted also repudiates the Irish misanthropic tradition, as Joyce was concerned to do throughout his career. This, however, has the useful effect of allowing us to see the tradition more clearly for what it is. One can date the beginnings of the Irish misanthropic tradition approximately to the battle of Kinsale in 1601. This is because Kinsale saw the comprehensive defeat of the forces of the Gaelic Irish, and marked the ultimate stage in the subjugation of the old Gaelic order in Ireland. As we have seen, Gaelic Ireland had successfully maintained its identity after the initial invasion. It had done so, not least, by assimilating the invader. In the late sixteenth century, however, it had been progressively threatened by the Tudor strategy of plantation. Kinsale marked the decisive success of Tudor policy; henceforth the Irish were open to disinheritance and dispossession on a massive scale.

  This dealt a death blow to what had previously been a sophisticated, if deeply fissured, constantly warring culture centred on the Irish clans. The clans were structured according to a hierarchical order with a dominant aristocratic caste which had, for example, its own complex and subtle legal system. Above all, this was a culture that profoundly valued poetry, music, literature, storytelling, including the narration of history, and art. Here the key figures were the bards, imposing presences in medieval Irish culture. Poets and scholars were effectively minor nobility patronized by the clan chieftains and aristocracy. They were chroniclers, moral advisers to the chieftains, promulgators of knowledge, responsible for the preservation and cultivation of traditional learning. Though their social role might certainly be conducive to satire – satire was one of the principal concerns of the bards – it was unlikely to breed misanthropy, not least, given the privileges the bards enjoyed. With the collapse of the Gaelic order, however, the bards lost the elevated social position they had enjoyed for centuries, a loss cemented in place as Anglicization made progressively deeper inroads into traditional Gaelic culture. Whether or not, as some historians have suggested,25 the concept of the annihilation of the Gaelic order should be opened up to question, the bards after Kinsale certainly experienced the destruction of their world. One is left with a choice: on the one hand, a (possibly in some degree) mythological evocation of a historical experience which for the bards was not a myth, but a disaster inflicted on the communal psyche, or what Joyce would later call a ‘vastation of soul’;26 on the other, the technical, delicate, sometimes rather soulless discriminatio
ns of the pragmatic, moderate, modern historian. Poetry and literature should orient us from the start, here, since they speak hauntingly of psychic disaster, do so again and again.

  *

  The psychic disaster of the end of the Gaelic order has a number of consequences. With the famous exile of the Irish aristocracy in 1607, the so-called Flight of the Earls, the bards were deprived of their wealthy, noble patrons. They were therefore more inclined to turn to ordinary Irish people both as their audience and for their subject matter. At the same time, while maintaining their learned traditions, they were now deprived of their own privileges and comforts. ‘The high poets are gone’, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair lamented, ‘and I mourn for the world’s waning’.27 The bards frequently became itinerant, impoverished, chronically at risk from the invader. They died in despair and abjection. Bards were publicly hanged, as in the case of Piaras Feiritéar in Killarney in 1653, or murdered, as in the case of the hapless, nameless figure whom an English soldier threw over a cliff.28 According to the seventeenth-century Cambrensis Eversus (by John Lynch), in the invaders’ war of destruction of everything Irish, the famous bardic instrument, the harp, ‘was broken by soldiers wherever it could be found’.29 The predicament of the seventeenth-century bards gives rise to a tradition of writing from a position of learned destitution, exquisite and coarse together, that endured well into the last century.

  In post-Kinsale Ireland, the tradition of bardic satire now took on misanthropic dimensions, if irregularly, here and there; in other words, a misanthropic discourse now formed part of it. Aogán Ó Rathaille’s ‘The Merchant’s Son’, for example, speaks of an Ireland where one can expect ‘no welcome, no regard or love’.30 In Art MacCumhaigh’s ‘Fair Churchyard of Cregan’, a female figure tells the poet: