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Sidney''s colonization proposal of 1568, however, involved a larger commitment than the queen had anticipated: eight garrisons, with two thousand men, in Ulster alone. When Elizabeth withheld her support from so vast and costly an endeavor, Sidney pressed on with colonization by private enterprise. He enlisted as his subalterns landless adventurers eager to seize property and wealth in Ireland.(51) "[S]uch men," Nicholas Canny has explained, "would give enthusiastic support for a military campaign the end of whichwas colonization in the hope that they themselves would benefit from the spoils."(52) In the Munster colony of Kerricurrihy, west of Cork City, these landless adventurers sought royal authorization to confiscate property so that "thies contries now possessed by disobedient people assistinge euerie rebellion to the disglorie of God and greate dislike of your Maiestie shalbe inhabited by naturall Englishe men."(53) Thecolonizers of Kerricurrihy, in truth, revealed little intention to act as a "lanterne and countenance of all cyvilitie within that province."(54) They concerned themselves rather with the quick accumulation of Irish wealth and an equally quick return to eminence in England. Through Sidney''s program of conquest and colonization, Ireland became a profit-making venue, and the exploits of these New English colonizers caused great unrest within both the Gaelic Irish and Old English communities. The English government, in the late 1560s, was "slowly groping" towards an efficient method of colonization; the experience of private enterprise had convinced the government of the necessity of the royal army''s support in a centralized process of settlement.(55) In many ways, however, the damage to Irish governance and sensibilities had already been done.
During the 1560s, Sidney''s colonization program dangerously alienated the Old English community from the royal Irish government. The imposition of unorthodox military extractions known as "cesses," the gradual exclusion of Old English influence from colonial politics, and an increasing suspicion of Old English loyalties by the New English settlers threatened to exacerbate the tensions that already existed between crown and colony. The augmented military establishment necessary to actualize Sidney''s colonization program transgressed what Steven Ellis has called the "unwritten law" of English government: that "rule of the counties lay in the hands of their native elites."(56) The principal spokesmen of the Old English community began to assert "in open speche that ther Kyngdom was kept from them by force and by such as be strangers in bloodd to them."(57) Against the advance of the military conquest and colonization of Ireland, the Palesmen advocated the delegation of power to the Old English feudal lords who could both protect Old English interests and contain Gaelic regions and Gaelic resistance. Increasingly, the Old English held up the Act for the Kingly Title as a b |
