Adrian Hastings - The construction of nationhood. ethnicity, religion, and nationalism

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remained attached to their traditional beliefs and practices. In English Ireland local government remained too much in the control of Catholics, parliament included, for the sort of squeezing of recusants which was just possible in Lancashire to work. Moreover for Counter-Reformation priests trained on the continent, the Old English in their towns were an easier primary target than the pure Irish. They were in consequence coming to represent a genuinely Counter-Reformation form of Christianity.

As England reconquered and reordered Ireland from the reign of Elizabeth to that of William of Orange, the Old English were in consequence dispossessed of control of parliament and most of their economic position by the new English settlers and driven into an ever closer union of shared religion and oppression with the Irish. It is, I believe, precisely the role of the Old English within the conflict between the New English and the Irish which best explains how across the catastrophic course of seventeenth-century history a new form of Irish identity developed, sprouting a kind of consciousness which may most appropriately be described as nationalism. I would like to illustrate what was happening by considering three literary figures. The first is Edmund Spenser.

Spenser represents the poetic quintessence of Elizabethan nationalism in a way that Shakespeare certainly does not. In The Faerie Queene we are offered a synthesis of Bible, nationalist history and a wealth of medieval imagery. 29 In the multiple allegories whose complexity almost defies the modern reader, faith, morality and politics come marvellously together through the interplay of three, variously named, sliding personages. First comes the Redcrosse Knight who is, of course, St George, England's patron, but whose role is also played by Arthur, Britain's primordial emperor and medieval hero of chivalry; Redcrosse is furthermore an image of England itself, of the redeemed Christian and, perhaps, even of Christ. Secondly there is his lady, Gloriana, Queene of Fairy Land, also named Astraea, Mercilla and Una. She is the one true church, universal, pre-papist, resurrected in the Church of England, Elizabeth herself. Finally, there is her rival, Duessa, Lucifera or Radigund, the other woman, at times appearing almost equally beautiful but utterly dangerous; she is the Papacy, Babylon, Anti-Christ, Mary Queen of Scots. Across a range of allegory and the mutation of names Spenser merges contemporary history with spiritual war of an

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apocalyptic sort, a subtle insinuation of Foxe's history of the church in which Protestantism brings holiness and even a sort of pastoral paradise.

The strategy of The Faerie Queene is not a narrowly puritan one. Far from rejecting England's medieval past as irremediably polluted by false religion, it reclaims huge chunks of myth, imagery and knightly virtue, to put at the service of Protestant nationalism. It is throughout the celebration of the providential union of England and true religion under the sovereignty of Elizabeth. It is thus a work of reconciliation between old Englishness and new Englishness, a closing of ranks between the 'Merrie England' which Catholics claimed had been lost with the Reformation and the Protestant gospel. Too many critics have succumbed to the temptation to read 'sweet Spenser' non-politically, even non-theologically, wallowing instead in a vast maze of allegory of the moral life. Universalist as The Faerie Queene may be, it is so only across an embedding of the general within a highly particularist and militant context. Its first three books were published in 1590, shortly after the defeat of the Armada and four years after the execution of Mary Stuart, an act it is intent on justifying. But the point that matters for us here still more is that it was written in Munster, where Spenser was in government service, at the sharp end of the nationalist war and it has absolutely to be read in that context. It was the work of a man who had begun his literary career by translating into English a piece of apocalyptic anti-Catholic propaganda written by a Dutch Calvinist and who went on to write A View of the Present State of Ireland, which he completed in 1596, the same year that the other three books of The Faerie Queene were printed. A View is written as a dialogue providing an intelligent, well-informed but utterly uncompromising denunciation of the 'licentious barbarism' of the Irish together with a more veiled but very consistent critique of the Elizabethan state for not being sufficiently ruthless in regard to their suppression and, in particular, for still maintaining the use of common law. Its real purpose was less to expose the lack of civilisation of the Irish than to berate both the Old English for succumbing to, and even supporting, the Irish, and the Queen's government for being pussyfooted in response. For Spenser the only solution was 'the sworde'. 30 Three years later, having fled the Munster Rising and left his burnt-out home, he returned a refugee to London. Just before he died he composed a

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further 'Brief Note on Ireland' which was still less restrained. While not actually appealing for genocide 'that were to bloudie a course: and yet there continuall rebelliouse deedes deserve little better' 31 his advice as to how 'to subdue Ireland throughly' sounded hardly less than genocidal: 'Great force must be the instrument but famine must be the means for till Ireland be famished it cannot be subdued . . . There can be no conformitie of government whereis no conformitie of religion . . . There can be no sounde agreement betwene twoe equall contraries viz: the English and Irish.'32

The point of quoting Spenser is that through his poetry he had made himself a leading ideologist of English nationalism while being at the same time the man on the spot. There is no evidence of any internal shift in conviction between writing The Faerie Queene and writing A View or A Brief Note or to imagine that any real contrast is to be found between them, despite the 'sweetness' of the one, the harshness of the other. Both equally represent the mind of an out-and-out English Protestant nationalist. While his views were not shared by all the settlers, particularly in his own Munster where the leading figure, Richard Boyle, the Earl of Cork, was far more of a pragmatist, and were somewhat more extreme than those of the government in London, which is why The View remained unprinted for forty years, there is no reason to think that they were not widely characteristic of the New English in Ireland. Effectively Spenser's views were acted upon by Mountjoy and, still more, by Cromwell. They do not represent a marginal eccentricity and the consequences still remain. To quote the rhetoric of Winston Churchill, a politician whose judgement oscillated throughout his life between statesmanship and English nationalism, commenting upon Cromwell's work in Ireland,

By an uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic religion, by the bloody deeds already described, he cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds. 'Hell or Connaught' were the terms he thrust upon the native inhabitants, and they for their part, across three hundred years, have used as their keenest expression of hatred 'The curse of Cromwell on you' . . . Upon all of us there still lies 'the curse of Cromwell'.33

Despite Spenser's extremely low view of the religious qualities of

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Irish Catholics, he admitted in a remarkable passage that for zeal and courage their priests educated abroad far outstripped the Protestant clergy. It was, he wrote, 'great wonder to see the odds which is betwene the zeale of the popishe priestes and the ministers of the gosple for they spare not to come out of Spaine from Rome and from Reynmes by longe toile and dangerous travell hither wheare they knowe perill of deathe awaite them and no Rewarde or Riches is to be found'. 34 Those words may be used to introduce my second example, Geoffrey Keating.

Keating was born around 1580 in County Tipperary of a particularly Gaelicised Old English family. He had attended a bardic school as well as learning Latin and was ordained in Ireland before going for further study to France in 1603. He returned in 1610 and remained in Munster until his death thirty-five years later. A scholar, poet and preacher of distinction, he wrote works in Gaelic on the Mass, the rosary and death of a typically Counter-Reformation kind before composing his great work on early Irish history, the Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. Keating has been hailed as 'the Herodotus of Ireland'. He pursued the manuscripts and the oral traditions already threatened by the growing collapse of Gaelic society but he put them together with a new orderliness, characteristic of his Old English background and continental training. The aim of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn was, moreover, a highly strategic one, and not dissimilar to Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonnum. On the one hand it created a unified history within the framework of a list of kings of Ireland, instead of continuing the old pattern of a series of annals; on the other hand, by showing that Irish history was also one of a series of arrivals of new groups who became integrated into the national story, he was able to place the Old English inside, instead of outside, the Irish story line. It was then essentially a reconciliatory book between Old Irish and the Old English who were now at last becoming a sort of New Irish. Just as Spenser's The Faerie Queene can be seen as an attempt to reconcile English medieval national spirit with post-Reformation nationalism as the battle between Protestantism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism hotted up, so was Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn negotiating the union of the Old English with the Gaelic tradition to consolidate a common front against the attacks of the Protestant New English. Where Spenser and all the English-language historians found barbarism, Keating

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defended the civility. He did it very well and his book was widely popular. It was circulated widely in manuscript and was, in part, printed in English and yet in Irish it was never printed before the twentieth century. 35

That brings us to a point we can pursue further by considering the Irish Bible. Elizabeth provided money at the start of her reign for the printing of it but there was remarkably little enthusiasm to translate the scriptures in Gaelic. At last in 1602 the New Testament appeared. Thirty years later William Bedell, the extraordinarily ecumenical Bishop of Kilmore, appealed for the Old Testament to be translated too.36 With the help of a team of translators the work was completed by 1640 but it was not printed until 1685. The original edition of the New Testament was extremely small and it was not reprinted until 1681. The two appeared together for the first time in 1690. All this activity from 1681 on was chiefly due to Robert Boyle, the scientist, a son of the Earl of Cork. But Robert Boyle had moved from Munster to London and his prolonged concern to see a Gaelic Bible, for use in Scotland at least as much as Ireland, did not represent the normal Protestant attitude to Gaelic. It is striking how Dublin-born Archbishop Ussher, despite his Old English background and extensive scholarship, consistently opposed Bedell's plans for an Irish-language Bible. In this Bedell, while fully in line with Protestant insistence that the Bible should be available in every vernacular, was quite out of line with most English Protestants in Ireland. Far from wanting to convert the Irish through their own language, they believed that the language was a basic part of the problem. Protestantism and English must go together. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century there were few Protestant clergy or laity who did not agree with Dean Swift that 'it would be a noble achievement to abolish the Irish language' or Bishop Woodward of Cloyne that 'if it be asked, why the clergy do not learn the Irish language, I answer, that it should be the object of government rather to take measures to bring it into entire disuse'.37

It is only too clear that, despite exceptions, the Church of Ireland was far too committed to the Anglicisation of Ireland to be faithful to its own Protestant principles. Only in the nineteenth century, when the people were anyway abandoning Gaelic by leaps and bounds, did the Church of Ireland become seriously interested in the language. Its committed Englishness had hitherto been in reality a

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saving grace for Irish Catholicism. But what about the Catholic side? What was its role in the language battle and what was its responsibility for the nation's effective abandonment of Gaelic by the mid-nineteenth century? It appears to me that that is a question absolutely central to Irish identity but one which does seem to have been too long evaded. Why indeed did the Irish people abandon Gaelic?

The answer seems to me to be clear enough. It is twofold. There was next to no printed Gaelic literature and the Catholic clergy abandoned the language before the laity. If the former had not done so, the latter would not have. The attitude of the clergy to Gaelic is, of course, more complex than that might suggest. In the seventeenth century with the ruin of the traditional Irish order, the near disappearance of aristocracy, jurists and bards, the role of the clergy, both the seculars and the religious, the Franciscans particularly, became overwhelmingly important. The fate of the nation was largely in their hands. As Irish seminaries and religious houses multiplied on the continent, training priests in a new Counter-Reformation manner, there was a very great effort, especially in Louvain, to save the Gaelic literary tradition. The historical value of that effort was immeasurable. Nevertheless what is clear is how little was actually ever printed and how limited were the more popular works produced in Irish. It is only too significant that Keating's great history never was, until this century. In an age of print a national language will not survive under pressure, if its national leaders are choosing not to use it. Of course the seminaries trained men to know both English and Gaelic for pastoral purposes, but understandably enough the Catholic clerical culture, first on the continent and then in Ireland, became an English-language one. When Maynooth was opened in 1795, there was no question but that English was its principal language. If English was good enough for the clergy, it was good enough for the laity too. There seems to me little doubt that if Irish scholars abroad in the seventeenth century had produced an Irish Bible and a mass of printed Irish Catholic literature as the English exiles at Douai did in English then Irish would have remained the language of Ireland.

Why did they not do so, despite their undoubted loyalty to the Gaelic tradition and desire to preserve it? The answer to that question lies under three heads people, policy and circumstances. Let us consider the people first.

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There does not seem much doubt that in the early seventeenth century when Ireland and the Irish church faced the greatest threat to their existence, the role of the so-called 'Old English' was decisive in shaping the response. They were Gaelic speakers, unattracted by the ways of the 'New English' and now, at last, when the Old Ireland was about to tumble to pieces, realising that they were fully part of it. Their being so made all the difference. Their disputes with the Old Irish could still remain sharp enough yet it was they by and large who provided the early base for the clergy of the Counter-Reformation; they from whom so many of the first leaders of that clergy came, they who in consequence largely shaped the colleges and priories of the church overseas. Archbishop Lombard, Bishop Rothe, the Franciscan, Luke Wadding, and Keating himself were all Old English. Both Lombard and Wadding exercised a great deal of influence on the continent, while Rothe as Vicar-General of Armagh and Bishop of Ossory virtually led the Irish church for many years. Such men, like Archbishop Oliver Plunkett in the next generation, were wholly committed to the survival and effectiveness of Irish Catholicism but they could still put up the backs of the Old Irish by the way they went about things. They were keener on 'civilitie' than on Gaelicness.

While the Old English were inevitably small in number compared with the pure Irish, circumstances favoured the maximisation of their influence over the developing ethos of the clergy. There seemed much advantage on the continent in using English rather than Irish, but there was also in time a political advantage at home. The Anglicisation of the country was going on and if the Catholic Church could use English effectively, then it was in a way stealing Protestantism's clothes. The conversion of the Catholic clergy to a systematic use of English implied for them the primacy of the interest of religion over language even if it naturally appealed to the Old English mindset whereas the failure of the Protestant clergy to follow the Bedell line and learn Gaelic implied for them the primacy of national, English, interest over religious principle, because a failure to use Gaelic was betrayal of a most central principle of the Reformation.

The impact of the Old English on the New Ireland was not merely a clerical one. They were townsmen attuned by past tradition their long control of parliament, their multitude of common-law

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lawyers trained in London to play the English game as the pure Irish were not. In consequence, in the post-Cromwellian situation, the experience of the Old English type of leadership remained valid in a way that the Old Irish type did not. Their differentiation as a group disappeared but not the sense of identity of individual family groups and urban communities in Dublin, Waterford and elsewhere. Many nineteenth-century Irish Catholics prided themselves, if not too publicly, on being of Old English stock. Just as the new Irish church, geared increasingly to the use of English, could hardly have come into existence with the quick effectiveness it did if it had not been able to draw upon the Old English clergy, so the new Irish nationalism would draw some of its character from Old English lay experience, just as it would draw some of its inspiration and leadership from the creative minority of New English who came to put Ireland before England, from Swift to Parnell. I cannot help thinking that this is an under-researched theme, perhaps because it is an uncongenial one both for Gaelic nationalists and for revisionists! If medieval Scottish nationalism had in a way been a branch of English nationalism turned against the main tree, so to some extent was the new Irish nationalism. Each grew in part out of the injection by English minorities of a nation-state view of politics into a Celtic nation.

It seems strange that Irish nationhood suffered so little from the abandonment of its strongest redoubt, the language, and it was only possible because Gaelic had in a very real way been replaced by an alternative principle, that of Catholicism. The fact that the threat to national identity in the seventeenth century was so clearly a Protestant one, and that Protestantism went necessarily with the dominance of England, inevitably identified Catholicism with Irish resistance to loss of national identity. Moreover the fact that the Old English had finally sided against England helped to demonstrate that the speaking of English was no longer in principle a threat to the nation. When Protestants in the nineteenth or twentieth century have protested against the Catholic-nationalist identity the only answer which could historically be given is that they had themselves made it inevitable and, indeed, continued to do so by stressing their Englishness or Britishness. While individual 'new English' like Parnell could jump the dividing line, yet remain Protestants, it seems almost impossible to imagine that as a group they could have done

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so, willingly abandoning the sense of being primarily British in the Victorian age when Britain was the most powerful country in the world, and with it their ascendancy.

Could the Catholic Irish too in the nineteenth century conceivably have forgone Irish nationalism in favour of being primarily British in a united kingdom and empire where Protestantism mattered less and less and where they now had the vote? Could they have behaved in fact like the Scots or the Welsh who were content to channel their national distinctiveness into the ecclesiastical rather than the political arena? The English Catholics, after all, had no difficulty in being patriotically British in a still nominally Protestant state, and the general advantage to the Catholic Church of having forty or fifty Catholic Irish MPs at Westminster was huge. Nothing is impossible with time and there can be no doubt that many Irish Catholics were happy and loyal enough within the British state. Some rose to very high positions in parts of the empire. There seem, however, to be at least four reasons why in general this was not possible. First, the alienating experience of Ireland at British hands had been vastly more painful than that of Scotland or Wales, at least in recent centuries. The memory could not be overcome in a few decades. Second, while the Protestant ethos of British power had notably diminished, it was still far too obvious in Ireland for the Catholic majority to acquiesce in it to the extent that the tiny minority of English Catholics across the Irish Sea could comfortably do. Thirdly, the fact that Ireland had had a parliament of sorts until 1800 meant that there was a plausible alternative to incorporation within Britain as for Wales at least there was not. Dublin was too obviously a capital and indeed remained such with its Lord Lieutenant and all the ritual of Dublin Castle for it not to keep the nationalist option more than open. But fourthly, and finally, Ireland had out of the agony of the seventeenth century refined its ancient national identity in something of a new form, but one no less powerful than its old, purely Gaelic, one. Nationalisms once conjured up just don't go away when basically unsatisfied, and yet still seemingly attainable in aim. If there had been no nationalist spirit in Ireland, maybe its people, Catholics included, could have been as satisfied with a British identity as were the Scots or the Welsh in the heyday of the British Empire. But such an 'if' requires the absurdity of forgetting the whole history of Ireland prior to 1829, and how the

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role of religion in all of that, first Protestantism and then Catholicism, had been absolutely decisive. It shaped the lines which have still not gone away and much as church leaders may wish to affirm that the conflicts of today are not about religion and are not between religious people, the fact remains that without the impact of religion they would be totally incomprehensible.

If I contemplate Irish history across the longue durée, I can see no even moderately plausible alternative to what one may fairly call a nationalist interpretation. Roy Foster, hardly a nationalist historian, has summarised early seventeenth-century developments with the words 'What was happening to the government of Ireland was ''Anglicisation" . . . in the sense of governing Ireland with English priorities and in English interests. Part of this strategy meant Protestantisation.' 38 One must, of course, in a history of details point to ups and downs, twists and turns, within a long process but the point of the longue durée is that Foster's words summarise fairly enough not twenty but three hundred and fifty years of Irish history. It is striking, for instance, how the arrival of Evangelicalism from the mideighteenth century merely reinforced an already ancient Anglo-Protestant determination to beat down Irishness. Elsewhere, and in its very origins, Evangelicalism was an anti-establishment religious movement but not here. Its very 'lack of denominational and doctrinal homogeneity'39 in Ireland actually seems to have made it the easier for Evangelicalism to reconsolidate a conviction that, regardless of the niceties of church or doctrine, Protestants must stand together whether Episcopalian, Presbyterian or Methodist to ensure that Ireland remained both British and Protestant. Thus Methodists, despite their relatively low social class and contempt for the Church of England at home, were gripped in regard to Ireland as Professor Hempton has shown40 by an ill-informed paranoia in their opposition to Catholic Emancipation. The point is that popular Protestantism, in whatever new form of religious enthusiasm it appeared, shared exactly the same political objectives as older, drier and more establishment forms. While Catholic political attitudes varied greatly in Ireland over the centuries, what strikes one is the sheer stability of the Protestant political position from the late sixteenth to the late twentieth century. As the genuinely religious views of the Protestant and post-Protestant community have altered as much as anyone else's over this period, it is hard not to conclude