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Thecolonial New English refused to acknowledge these differences in religion and culture that distinguished the Old English and Gaelic Irish communities. As articulate members of the Old English community asserted their civility and loyalty, the New English actively stripped them of both qualities. Nicholas Canny has shown that a dramatic reconceptualization of the Gaelic Irish and Old English identities accompanied, and indeed justified, the widespread colonization of Ireland. Sidney was profoundly critical of the Old English feudal society but admitted that English colonization would reform it on the model of English civility. William Gerrard, one of Sidney''s subordinates, argued similarly that only force could subdue the Gaelic Irish but that the "rodd of justice" would reform the feudal Old English, for "in theim yet resteth this instincte of Englishe nature generally to feare justice."(73) By the 1590s, however, New English perceptions had begun to change. Edmund Spenser''s A View of theState of Ireland, written around the year 1598, reflected a subtle yet striking shift in the New English understanding of the task of reforming Ireland. Spenser''s View revealed neither a recognition of the differences between the Old English and the Gaelic Irish nor any suggestion that the Old English could participate in the reformation process. The conditions of Irish society, he argued, had made legal reform impossible:
So the lawes were at first intended for the reformation of abuses, and peaceable continuation of the subject; but are sithence disannulled, or quite prevaricated through change and alternation of times, yet they are good still in themselves; but, in that commonwealth that is ruled by them, they worke not that good whichthey should, and sometimes also that evill which they would not.(74)
Spenser condemned both the Act for the Kingly Title and the parliament of 1584, instances of Old English self-assertion, as detrimental to the English reformation of Ireland; both suggested to Spenser the intractability of the Old English and their disloyalty to the crown. Nothing, however, revealed this disloyalty more clearly than did the Old English allegiance to Roman Catholicism:
[T]here bee many ill disposed and undutifull persons of that realme, like as in this point there are also in this realme of England, too many, which being men of good inheritance, are for dislike of religion, or danger of the law, into which they are run, or discontent of the present government, fled beyond the seas [to the Catholic kingdoms of the continent], where they live under Princes, which are her Maiesties professed enemies, and converse and are confederat with other traitors and fugitives which are there abiding. The which nevertheless have the benefits and profits of their lands here, by pretence of such colourable conveyances thereof, formerly made by them unto their privie friends heere in trust, who privily doe send over unto them |
