Introduction
Ireland in the sixteenth century was indeed a very different place. Although there may not perhaps have been a lot of direct warfare, it was certainly a very violent place. The Tudor conquest of Ireland had seen King Henry VIII crowned King of Ireland, rather than merely Lord of Ireland, in June 1541 by the parliament summoned by St Leger , striking off a bitter cycle of oppression, violence, and warfare, until the whole of Ireland came until the nominal control of King James I in 1603. Indeed it can be said that ‘Ireland in 1534 was a land of constant war’ .The period of 1560-1603, on which I shall focus upon in this essay, saw violence and warfare become so prolific in the island that it became a catalyst for a massive population …show more content…
This was particularly aggravated by the use of the ‘Scorched-earth’ policy, a dominant and consistent feature of military campaigns in this time period. The Native Irish lived in a most precarious situation, they were highly dependent upon the land, their main crop was corn, which left them in a vulnerable position as it was both hard to grow and easy to destroy. They had a poor diet, coming mainly as it did from items from cattle, including milk and cheese, and it is clear they were only surviving from one harvest to the next. Indeed this was noted by many contemporary observers, and the continuation of the rebellion in the summer of 1600 was attributed to the fact that the Irish ‘were living upon the milk and butter of their kine grazing on the mountains and in fastnesses’. This did, indeed, drive the island’s history as it aided conquest in early modern Ireland. The ‘definite and consistent aim of the Tudors to complete the conquest of Ireland’ was, according to J.J. O’Connell, to ‘facilitate the growth of English world-power’ . By 1560, Queen Elizabeth I had been on the …show more content…
The reformation had brought about the establishment of the state religion in the Church of Ireland, when the Parliament declared Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church in the Act of Supremacy, laying the seeds for bitter sectarian violence when one considers the overwhelmingly Catholic nature of the people of the island. The period of the 1560s and the 1570s were ones of profuse revolts and massacres, such as the long convoluted fifteen years or so struggle carried out by Shane O’Neill against the encroachments of the English on Ulster, which ended only with his death. This period also saw the so called ‘Geraldine Rebellion’, which places both the rebellion of James FitzMaurice and the Geraldine League from 1569-1573, and the Desmond Rebellion of ten years later under the same heading, justified because as J.J. O’Connell argues, ‘the two were part and parcel of the same movement, springing from the same causes’. We also saw, however, perhaps the most significant of these rebellions, Hugh O’Neill’s war. It was highly significant, because due to having lived amongst the English for many years, having served through the Geraldine Rebellion on the side of the English, and processing an invaluable understanding of their policy and methods, they had no superiority over him that they had enjoyed over other would be rebels, and he