A Pyhrric Victory
It was a different matter to bring an alien culture to heel than to suppress ones own nobility and people. The war in Ireland was never to end, continuing in one form or another into the present day.
The institutions of Gaelic Ireland were eventually to be swept away during the upheavels of the 17th century
Munster was devastated in the 1570's
Connacht had collapsed because of internal divisions and was being
Only the north remained unconquered.
The Plan to Destroy Irish Culture
The Elizabethan administration in Dublin realised that fighting and instability could go on indefinitelyand so licence was given for more and more extreme measures to be used against the Irish.
So, alongside the military plan was a political, and the lynchpin of both approaches was economic control.
law, language and martial rights
The policy of the English Elizabethan administration, terrified of Catholic counter revolution
Frustration with this project of reform caused the gradually discarded notions of changing them and decided to replace them
peoples meetings were dissolved
How to Conquer Ireland
Here an Elizabethan administrator tells us the policy to be pursued,
Like all good servants, he explains the economic advantage to English government of destroying the Irish nobility.
"To take away the greatness of the Irish lords, that the inferior subject might be freed from their Irish customs, cuttings and exactions, and by knowing what was their own...to be drawn to depend ever after upon the state, and not on those Irish Lords or gentlemen: which also might not only avail her majesty in time of any stirs or revolts, by drawing the common people from following the great chief lords, but also bring a more certainer yearly rent or revenue into her majesties coffers."
If the Irish nobility could not be defeated militarily or controlled through bribery, they could certainly be impoverished.Thus humiliated and isolated, the people could be separated from their nobles and made reliant on the state instead.
the English fleet controlled the sea approaches to Ireland
Without their clients, the nobles would be helpless.
And so the noose was tightened using Englands greatest advantage, sea power. by first cutting off the island by sea and stopping the flow of soldiers from western Scotland and cut trade connections with France and Spain and also shut down there own merchants who were making a fortune selling to both sides
The financial method was to withdraw the circulation of gold Spanish coin. introduce copper money because it was worthless for international trade, but accepted by English business and state, this drew the poorer people towards the towns, all of which were English centres and the location of garrisons.
Preventing the buying of arms
Once an Irish chief had signed a surrender and regrant agreement they could be taxed and fined to ended up mortgaged to those with money, the merchants of the towns and if , under this pressure they rebelled, their land could be confiscated.
Laws designed to destroy the warrior tradition of the Irish
As far back as 1571, Henry's daughter, Elizabeth turned on the Galloglas in a prohibition:
"The sons of all husbandmen and ploughmen shall follow the same occupation as their fathers. If a son of a husbandman or ploughman shall become a Kern, Galloglas or horseboy (Galloglas or hobulur's servant or page), or will take any other idle trade of life he shall be imprisoned for 12 months and fined."
After the Powhatans killed the colony's Council President, Lord Ratcliffe, and attacked the colony in the first First Anglo-Powhatan War, Lord De La Warr headed the contingent of 150 men who landed in Jamestown, Virginia on June 10, 1610, just in time to persuade the original settlers not to give up and go home to England. As a veteran of English campaigns against the Irish, De La Warr employed "Irish tactics" against the Indians: troops raided villages, burned houses, torched cornfields, and stole provisions; these tactics, identical to those practiced by the Powhatan themselves, proved effective. wikipedia note
the Englishman after whom the bay, the river, and, consequently, an American Indian people and U.S. state, all later called "Delaware", were named.
In the 13th century
"After these events a synod of all the clergy of Ireland was convoked at Armagh in which the arrival of the foreigners in the island was the subject of long debates and much deliberation. At length it was unanimously resolved, that, it appeared to the synod that the Divine vengeance had brought upon them this severe judgment for the sins of the people, and especially for this, that they had long been wont to purchase natives of England as well from traders as from robbers and pirates, and reduce them to slavery, and that now they also, by reciprocal justice, were reduced to servitude by that very nation...
....it was there fore decreed by the before mentioned synod, and proclaimed publicly by universal accord, that all Englishmen throughout the island who were in a state of bondage should be restored to freedom."
A peculiarity of Irish reasoning on invasions was that of ascribing them, not to the invaders but to divine reasons. also our own histories were based on a series of invasions
