This chapter tries to assess the contribution that Walcott made to cricket as a player, administrator and global icon, with particular reference to his role in challenging racial and social inequalities. It concludes that Walcott was one of the most important figures the game has ever seen, not just in the sphere of West Indies cricket, but in the game as a whole.
How precisely did the courts of Gaelic Irish lords look and function? These foundational questions have never been properly addressed. This chapter offers close reading of bardic poetry – the primary record of Gaelic political thought and culture – to reconstruct the various positions represented at the Irish cúirt, what purposes they served, and how they interacted to create a political culture with both vernacular distinctions and links to broader European practices.
This first biography of Sir Clyde Walcott takes a detailed look at the life and achievements of one of the greatest cricketers of all time. For the West Indies in the 1950s, Walcott was part of the legendary ‘3Ws’ batting triumvirate with Everton Weekes and Frank Worrell, helping to give West Indies cricket a new identity separate from its colonial past. After Test cricket he became a prominent cricket administrator, managing the great West Indies teams that ruled the world in the 1980s. A vocal supporter of using cricket to apply pressure on the South African apartheid regime, in 1992 he became chairman of the International Cricket Council – the first non-white person in that influential role. Shining a light on Walcott’s role in effecting change through the vehicle of cricket, this book also shows how he contributed to dramatic social change in British Guiana (after independence, Guyana) as cricket and social welfare organiser for the country’s sugar estates from 1954 to 1970, bringing about improvements in the living conditions and self-esteem of poor Indo-Guyanese plantation workers while promoting the emergence of a number of world-class cricketers from a previously neglected corner of the Caribbean.
This chapter sheds new light on the role of courtier-councillors in the creation of policy in the wake of both the first Earl of Essex’s spectacular failure colonising Ulster and the even bloodier breakdown of relations between the Crown and the English-Irish Earl of Desmond. Through close analysis of a previously overlooked reform treatise – Sir James Croft’s A Discourse for the Reformacon of Irland (1583) – David Edwards reveals how first-hand knowledge of Ireland could sway the regime to reconsider martial rule in Ireland in favour of more conciliatory efforts. Given that Croft operated below the level of Council or Irish Viceroy, his influence on the Queen and her favourites has been overlooked. Recovery of the role he played in late-Elizabethan approaches to ‘Ireland matters’ speaks more widely to one of this collection’s central theses – the importance of the wider court in determining the character of English–Irish relations in the early modern period.
How did courtiers interested in Ireland move from reform plans to action? This chapter takes up the question of the genesis of that most celebrated early attempt at Crown–courtier collaboration in bringing ‘reform’ to Ireland: the dismally unsuccessful attempt to anglicise Ulster led by the first Earl of Essex. Here we witness the inner workings of court, Privy Council and Queen in the making of policy and planning its implementation. On the positive side, factional inclinations had little effect on an emergent policy consensus; on the negative side, the lack of proper information and scrutiny of the actual logistics required boded ill for success.
This chapter offers a case study in the cultural intermingling characteristic of courts in Ireland across the late medieval and early modern periods. Taking as its subject the ‘English-Irish’ aristocratic dynasty of the Butler earls of Ormond and its cadet branches, the study draws on bardic encomium for tracking the effects of anglicisation, state centralisation and religious change on court culture and political mentalities. One of the poems to the Butlers, Triall gach ēinfhir gu cúirt tTeabóid, has been cited at the start of the introduction to this collection. The present chapter works through the entire extant corpus of poems to the family and considers the relationship between poetic ideals and social practice.
This section chapter demonstrates just how widespread interest in Ireland was among English courtiers. Taking as his subject the critical first decades of Elizabeth’s reign during which a policy sympathetic to persuasion shifted resolutely to one grounded in coercion, Heffernan reveals that ‘Ireland matters’ were not something reserved for a small clique, but rather engaged most of the Privy Council and a broad range of court figures. In doing so he uses the case of Ireland to expand our understanding of the English court, particularly by showing that arguments for court factions appear less tenable once it is understood how approaches to Ireland cut across those groups and extended beyond them.
This chapter looks at Walcott’s early days and background in Barbados, including as a cricketing prodigy at school. It covers his early working life, his emergence as a first-class cricketer and his first experience of travel outside the Caribbean.
This collection’s concluding chapter considers what happened when access to the world of the court became more exclusive with the growth of England’s empire. For aspiring English courtiers, the union of the crowns in 1603 and the heightened importance of Whitehall created a simple numbers problem by which too many competed for too few places. In Ireland, the state’s sustained attacked on indigenous courts obviated the traditional roles available to poets, churchmen and other councillors and hangers-on. Among the aspirant and the displaced across the realms emerged a new genre of communication by which the practice of courtliness could be maintained at a distance: the verse letter.
This study explores the large body of verse addressing noble households. In doing so, she argues that the ‘country-house poem’ should be understood as constituting a distinct genre, and one that provides unique insight into Gaelic and Old English views of the physical space of the court from the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. In addition to offering a window onto changes in Irish elite culture over the early modern period, the ‘country-house’ poem is analogous to a genre also found contemporaneously in England and thus provides a means for comparative analysis across linguistic and national communities.