It was in this ideological context that the most significant Gaelic challenge to English rule in Ireland erupted. Between 1594 and 1603, Hugh O'Neill, the renegade earl of Tyrone, led a rebellion to secure his palatinate rule over Ulster. Essentially a provincial figure, O'Neill nonetheless wrapped himself in the rhetoric of a broad Irish and Catholic nationalism. O'Neill fought, he said, so "[t]hat the catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion be openly preached and taught throughout all Ireland, as well in cities as borough towns, by bishops, seminary priests, jesuits, and all other religious men," "[t]hat the Church of Ireland be wholly governed by the pope," and "[t]hat the lord chancellor, lord treasurer, lord admiral, the council of state, the justices of the laws, queen's attorney, queen's serjeant, and all other officers appertaining to the council and law of Ireland, be Irishmen . . . [and] that all principal governments of Ireland, as Connaught, Munster, etc., be governed by Irish noblemen."(80) The reaction of the colonial communities to O'Neill's rebellion reflected clearly the ideological conflict over the nature of the Old English identity. The Old English community was not swayed by the Counter-Reformation appeals of one "whose career had been far from that of an exemplary Catholic."(81) Rejecting his claims to wide religious authority, the Old English overwhelmingly opposed O'Neill and his Gaelic confederacy; they lobbied in Rome against O'Neill and against subsequent papal measures designed to enlist support for his movement. The Old English refused to participate in a revolt intended solely to secure the supremacy of an ambitious Gaelic Irish lord.(82) In the eyes of the New English administration, however, O'Neill's rebellion revealed overtly the inherent Irish Catholic disloyalty that they had long suspected. In the rebellion, the colonial administration mistakenly saw the convergence of the degenerate Old English and the fractious Gaelic Irish in a campaign to oust the English government and the Protestant religion from Ireland. Lord Burghley, during the rising, saw "the queen's loyal subjects in the English Pale tempted to rebel."(83) Sir John Davies perceived in O'Neill's movement the collusion of "all the lords and chieftains of the Irishry, and degenerate or rebellious English."(84) In O'Neill's rebellion, each component of the colonial community recognized the proof of the arguments that they had developed and deployed during the later sixteenth century. In withholding their support from a Gaelic Irish insurrection, the Old English confirmed their loyalty to English law and civility. In the rebellion's seemingly nationalistic resistance to English rule in Ireland, the New English saw the traitorous nature of Irish Roman Catholicism, an identity in which they included both the Gaels and the "degenerate" Old English.

The parliament of 1613-1615 thus responded proximately to O'Neill's rebellion, but the anti-Catholic legislation secured by the Irish government marked the culmination of the political and ideological struggle within the colonial community over the nature of the Old English identity and its place in the Irish polity. R. F. Foster portrayed this struggle as one aspect of a local competition between varieties of Irishness; in the 1613-1615 parliament, he suggested, internal regulation subdued internal rivalries. During the sixteenth century, however, this struggle assumed nationalistic implications that Foster fails to acknowledge; what was at stake in the political and ideological conflict between the Old and New English was not regional or local identity but rather the very distinction between Irishness and Englishness. Initially during the early sixteenth century and then increasingly as the royal Irish government adopted more autocratic policies, the Old English recognized the divergence of their interests from the priorities of the crown. To protect these interests, the Old English community asserted an integrative identity that reconciled differences of religion, national origin, and political outlook. The Act for the Kingly Title articulated most clearly the Old English national identity. In order to secure their ambiguous position in the English polity, the Old English bound themselves to the crown as Anglo-Irish subjects of an Anglo-Irish monarch. The royal Irish government, however, rejected this expansive definition of Englishness; as New English officials gained political power and social influence, the English identity that they cultivated became increasingly restricted. Anglo-Irishness, thus, became strictly Irishness, and the Old English community that had operated within an overarching English identity found itself excluded from it. "By degrees," Aidan Clarke has explained, "the loyal element in the population of Ireland not merely lost the potentiality to improve its position through the successful assertion of royal power, but found that its actual position had been placed in jeopardy."(85) The Old English identity rested on the fundamental affinity between English and Irish life; it was, indeed, an Anglo-Irish identity in the fullest sense of both terms. Political and ideological manipulation by the New English community that culminated in the anti-Catholic legislation of the 1613-1615 Irish parliament permanently destroyed that affinity and left the Old English in search of a new identity. Expelled from the English community, as Aidan Clarke has argued, the Old English, during the seventeenth century, gradually joined the Irish community. The New English prevailed in the political and ideological conflict of the sixteenth century; they destroyed both the most intractable political opposition to their rule in Ireland and the identity that supported it. In doing so, however, the New English drew the lines for the destructive conflict between the English and Irish communities that has characterized the history of modern Ireland.

Notes
1. The history of modern Ireland has invested the term "Anglo-Irish" with profoundly nationalistic overtones that are anachronistic in the early modern period. In this essay, the term "Anglo-Irish" will refer simply to the English community in Ireland.

2. Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland 1625-1642 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 16.

3. Aidan Clarke, "Colonial Identity in Early Seventeenth-Century Ireland," in Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence, ed. T. W. Moody (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1978), 57; R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), 50; Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reign of James I, eds. C. W. Russell and John P. Prendergast (1872; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1974), 4:289; Nicholas Canny, "Early Modern Ireland c. 1500-1700," in The Oxford History of Ireland, ed. R. F. Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 114.

4. Foster, Modern Ireland, 45.

5. Foster develops this argument in the second chapter of Modern Ireland 1600-1972, entitled "'Nationalism' and Recusancy."

6. Ibid., 49, 51.

7. Ibid., 51.

8. Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures (London: Longman, 1985), 13. In articles published in Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), Stephen Ellis and Brendan Bradshaw debated the nature and purpose of Irish historiography in the early modern period. In "Nationalist Historiography and the English and Gaelic Worlds in the Late Middle Ages," Ellis critiqued the Whiggish character of early modern Irish historiography. "[T]he concern with the pre-history of Irish nationalism," he argued, "has been allowed to prejudge the issue of the island's separate development in the late middle ages." In this essay, he sketched the outlines of a Revisionist manifesto that applied Foster's interpretative approach to the general historiography of early modern Ireland. Rejecting the attempt of nationalistic historians to find in this period historical justification for their outlook, Ellis has interpreted the Anglo-Irish identity as a regional variant of a larger English identity and of Irish colonial life as a local manifestation of the larger trends of English life. The conflict between the crown administration and the Old English community, he suggested, played out as little more than a local feud, similar to the regional feudal conflicts of fifteenth-century England. Tensions between the Old and New English communities involved no nationalistic implications because of their provincial scale; a common English identity ultimately subsumed all regional biases and loyalties. "[N]ationalist interpretations necessarily reveal steady 'progress' towards an independent Ireland," Ellis has written. "But the validity of such concepts can only be tested by discussing developments in English and Gaelic Ireland in their respective contexts of the English and Gaelic worlds."

Brendan Bradshaw's response, "Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland," suggested the flaws of this Revisionist project. The attempt to establish an inviolable barrier between the intellectual climate of the present and the events of the past, Bradshaw argued, served to obscure rather than to elucidate the dynamics of that past. "'Separatism' well describes an important current that developed within the political consciousness of the colonial élite in the late medieval period," Bradshaw explained. "That a clear distinction was made between the colonists and any such regional sub-group is indicated by the contemporary designation which applied to [the Old English community] the qualifying epithet 'by blood,' thus setting them apart from the normal English 'by birth.'" The Revisionist attraction to "value-free" history, Bradshaw suggested, involved sins of commission and omission. By actively purging modern values and convictions from their assessment of historical events, Revisionists, Bradshaw charged, disguised a powerfully destructive ideology in the guise of benign explanation. In response to the nationalist attempt to establish long lines of continuity between the modern Irish nation and its historical predecessors, Bradshaw alleged that the Revisionists have with equal zeal interpreted "the past as a foreign country." In this approach to the past, he argued, the Revisionists have neglected a central aspect of it. "It is . . . in responding to the interpretative challenge posed by the catastrophic dimensions of Irish history," Bradshaw has written, "that the sins of omission of the value-free school are to be observed."8 The reluctance of Revisionist historians to make recourse to value judgments, Bradshaw argued, has marginalized, and even excluded, a central aspect of Irish history from the historical record. Though at times disturbingly presentist in orientation, Bradshaw has valuably emphasized the importance of personal values and biases for early modern Irish historiography. Sensitivity to the catastrophic dimensions of Irish history, he suggested, permits a clearer comprehension of the choices and forces that shaped it.

9. Foster, Modern Ireland, 51.

10. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 124; quoted in Canny, "Early Modern Ireland," 103.

11. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 124; Canny, "Early Modern Ireland," 103.

12. Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 111.

13. Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 32-57.

14. Ibid., 32-33.

15. In the second chapter of The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century, Bradshaw engages in an extensive analysis of the two varieties of the Old English reform movement. The first, arising during the early years of the sixteenth century, sought reforms on a limited scale; it aimed to stabilize the Pale before extending English jurisdiction to the Gaelic hinterlands. The second, emergent by the later 1520s, sought a general reformation that would encompass the entire island; this impulse, Bradshaw argues, embodied the principles of commonwealth liberalism. Discussion of the distinctions between these two impulses is better left to Bradshaw; what is important, for purposes of this essay, is not the subtle differences in the Old English demands for reform but rather the general themes and similarities that these demands reflected.

16. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 44-45.

17. Ibid., 46-48.

18. Sir Patrick Finglas, "A Breviate of the getting of Ireland, and of the Decaie of the Same," in Hibernica: Or, some Antient Pieces relating to Ireland, ed. Walter Harris (Dublin: 1747), 82.

19. Coyne and Livery was a Gaelic extraction that provided for private military retinues, not unlike the system of bastard feudalism characteristic of fifteenth-century England.

20. Finglas, "Breviate," 84.

21. Ibid., 101.

22. Ibid., 88.

23. Ibid., 88.

24. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 130-132; Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 145-147.

25. According to the provisions of Poyning's Law (1494), "the Irish council had to request permission from London for the holding of a private assembly, and it had to transmit to the English king and his Privy Council there the bills which it intended to pass in the Irish legislature. Only when the bills were returned in the approved form to Dublin could parliament be asked to go ahead and pass them into law." Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 14.

26. Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 147.

27. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 131.

28. Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565-1576 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976), 32.

29. "An Act that the king of England, his heirs and his successors be kings of Ireland," in Irish Historical Documents 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis and R. B. McDowell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 77.

30. Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland, 154-155.

31. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 238.

32. Ibid., 189, 240, 238.

33. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 140.

34. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 237.

35. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 139.

36. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 264.

37. Hans Claude Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, 11 vols. (1860; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1974), 1:59; James Gairdner, ed., Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509-1547, 21 vols. (1883; Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), 16:486.

38. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 140.

39. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 33-34.

40. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 148.

41. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 34.

42. Ibid., 35.

43. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 245.

44. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 229.

45. Bellingham, one of the new advocates of a military conquest of Ireland, had first imposed the seneschal system in Wicklow to suppress the Byrnes, O'Tooles, and Kavanaghs. Under this system, an English captain ruled as a seneschal, or bailiff, in the place of the dismissed Gaelic chieftain, enforced martial law, and financed himself and his retinues by the rents and dues of the subdued Gaelic Irish. See Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 34.

46. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 35.

47. In The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565-1576, Nicholas Canny writes that "[t]he scheme outlined by Sidney was, in many ways, an elaboration upon the proposals for the government of Ireland put forward in 1562 by [then-Lord Deputy] Sussex," but that it "was essentially different in purpose and broke away from the limited objective of defending the Pale" (Canny 47-48). Steven Ellis takes him to task on this point: "the 'new departure,'" Ellis writes, "had been anticipated by Sussex and was less novel or systematically pursued than had been thought" (Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 250). This essay is not concerned with settling this dispute between Canny and Ellis. What is important for our purposes is not whether Sussex or Sidney designed the program for military conquest, but rather that this program of military conquest was pursued by the crown administration.

48. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 47.

49. Ibid., 49-51.

50. Arthur Collins, ed., Letters and Memorials of State, In the Reigns of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James, King Charles the First, Part of the Reign of Charles the Second, and Oliver's Usurpation, Written and collected By Sir Henry Sydney . . . (1746; New York: AMS Press, 1973), 24.

51. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 64-67.

52. Ibid., 70.

53. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 82.

54. Ibid.

55. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 90.

56. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 246.

57. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 37.

58. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 267.

59. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 142.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 143-144.

62. Ibid., 147.

63. Ibid., 140-141.

64. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 284-286.

65. Ibid., 286.

66. Colm Lennon, "Richard Stanihurst (1547-1618) and Old English Identity," in Irish Historical Studies 21 (1978), 130.

67. Richard Stanihurst, "A Treatise Conteining a plaine and perfect description of Ireland; with an Introduction to the better understanding of the histories apperteining to that Iland," in Chronicles, ed. Raphael Hollinshed and William Harrison (London: 1586), 34.

68. Ibid., 10.

69. Ibid., 44.

70. Ibid., 44.

71. Clarke, "Colonial Identity," 60.

72. Ibid., 71.

73. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 132.

74. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 13.

75. Ibid., 35-36.

76. James P. Myers, Jr., "Introduction," in A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued [And] Brought Under Obedience of the Crown Until the Beginning of His Majesty's Happy Reign, ed. James P. Myers, Jr. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 3-4.

77. Sir John Davies, Historical Relations: Or, a Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Intirely Subdu'd nor Brought under Obedience of the Crown of England until the Beginning of the Reign of King James of Happy Memory, 3d ed. (Dublin: 1666), 4, in A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700, ed. Donald Wing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945).

78. Ibid., 164.

79. Ibid., 150.

80. Quoted here are the most conspicuously "nationalist" aims of Hugh O'Neill's rebellion. For the remainder, see "Hugh O'Neill's War Aims, 1599," in Irish Historical Documents 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis and R. B. McDowell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 119-120.

81. Canny, "Early Modern Ireland," 113.

82. Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 300-303.

83. Quoted in Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 303.

84. Davies, Discovery, 65.

85. Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 18.