Search results
The tactics being used by Meath Catholics are perhaps familiar to historians of early modern England or France, where studies of the importance of rumour, libel, public displays of defiance, riot and other resistance tactics such as petitioning have increasingly come to the fore over the last two decades or so. The politics of rumour during times of conflict, especially during the 1640s, has received some attention, while cases of early modern riot and protest are also coming under scrutiny. The level of conflict actually occurring, in early seventeenth-century Ireland in particular, has been largely ignored. Riots, rescues, and short-lived popular demonstrations can seem like unusual blips on the radar. Yet then and during Elizabeth's reign they were part of a range of tactics regularly used by Ireland's inhabitants to test the limits of the disabilities placed on them.
This chapter concentrates upon the religio-political identity carved out for the Irish Catholic community by the Catholic clergy after 1603 in their difficult task of balancing a strident defence of papal monarchy with the pursuit of toleration from a Protestant state whose ruler claimed to be head of the Irish Church. Given the political roles played by Catholic clerics throughout Ireland during the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, it was unsurprising that James was unconvinced by Catholic professions of loyalty. The civil power was to have no influence over any aspect of what the Church defined as religious life. The centrality of this tenet to Irish Catholic identity is clear from their refusal to swear an Oath of Allegiance until a reformulated version was offered in Charles' reign that omitted the notorious clause denying the pope's deposing power.
This chapter discusses the political culture of the early years of Elizabeth's reign as reflected in the texts as The Mirror of Magistrates. It examines the writing of Barnabe Googe, whose works represent an attempt to produce a specifically Protestant and magisterial combination of Henrician court poetry with Edwardian politics. All the poetry that Googe produced during the 1560s was committed to the creation of a godly Protestant England. Its enemies were an anarchic populace, papist idolatry and Cupido's tyranny. The chapter also discusses John Foxe's Acts and Monuments and George Gascoigne's work A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. It argues that these two very different works produce similar ideological solutions to the problem of defining Elizabeth's queenship. In the process they illustrate the extent to which the culture of the later Elizabethan period was a product of the political and poetic debates of the early years of the Queen's reign.
The motivations that animated the conflict that marked the final nine years of Elizabeth's reign in Ireland are obscure. This chapter argues that political brinkmanship related to the royal succession played a very prominent role in shaping the conflict, a role hitherto unappreciated. The succession informed the strategic thinking of many of the most prominent actors in the ‘Nine Year's War’ at critical junctures. It is argued that Tyrone and Essex each sought to gather around himself a wider interest among the Irish aristocracy and gentry in the hope of using that political capital to advance his own aim in the context of a foreseen Jacobean succession. The battle lines of the conflict hid the strategic games being played in the context of anticipated dynastic change.
A woman gives birth to a monster. An army of mice invades a rural area. Three suns are seen in the sky. Today, such phenomena epitomize the intellectually marginal, relegated to the journalism of the supermarket checkout line. There have been, however, many societies where these events were not marginal, but important clues to understanding the nature of the cosmos and the destiny of human society. The transformation of this attitude to one resembling ours in a particular society, that of late Stuart England, is the subject of this book. One term that the people of seventeenth-century England used to refer to such bizarre natural phenomena was 'prodigy'. The word had many uses, but its core meaning was that of a strange and aberrant event, the occurrence of which appeared to be outside the usual order of nature. The most important status a prodigy could have was that of a providential sign from God. Prodigies had been interpreted as divine messages since ancient times. Prodigies were a particularly important site for competing discourses concerning God, nature, and politics because England lacked an official body or profession charged with the investigation and interpretation of alleged wonder. Prodigies were involved in the major political crises of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England, from the Restoration itself to the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crises, to the revolution of 1688 and the accession of the House of Hanover.
continued to view prodigies and other unusual natural phenomena in a providential context, see Notebooks of Whitelocke Bulstrode, vol. IV: fos 51-8, 77-85 (Folger Library): and the report of Bulstrode's charge to the Grand Jury of Middlesex in Annals of King George, vol. 4 (London, 1718): 396-7. A more straightforward view of the aurora as a positive phenomenon may have been taken by a pamphlet advertised in the Evening Post, no. 1035 (March 22-24, 1716): The Meteor a Good Omen, Prov'd by a parallel Instance in the 2d Year of Queen Elizabeth's Reign; Whereunto is Premis
with Gypsies for one month or ‘counterfeiting, transforming or disguising’ by adopting their clothing, habits, or lifestyle. 52 Literary sources also emphasized their foreignness and strangeness by stressing their mobility, their dress, and their separateness as a group. 53 Despite these harsh laws and some instances of large group banishment, expulsions ceased by the middle of Elizabeth's reign. 54