James Charles Roy ’63 and Th e Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland

JAMES CHARLES ROY ’63

James Charles Roy ’63 has written innumerable articles on Irish history and seven distinguished books, including The Fields of Athenry and Islands of Storm, a Book-of-the-Month and History Book Club selection. A prolific author of books and articles on history and travel, he has been published by leading imprints in the U.S., Ireland and Germany. His most recent publication, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, has received high praise by noted scholars such as Nicholas Canny of the National University of Ireland, David Fitzpatrick and Dr. Laurie Kaplan (www.jamescharlesroy. com). Renowned Irish history scholar Roy Foster, author of Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, describes Jim’s book as “a richlytextured, impressively researched and powerfully involving story, written with a full realization of its tragic and haunting relevance for future times.” The following is Jim’s description of the evolution of The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland.

THERE WAS NEVER A PRECISE MOMENT WHEN I BEGAN THIS BOOK. It is, in fact, an evolution from my previous work on Irish subject matter, both books and articles, but it did not attain real focus until 2010 when I stumbled across one or two references to a minor functionary in the English administration at Dublin Castle, Lodowick Bryskett, and the luncheon party he gave at his rural retreat outside the city in 1582. His guest list included Edmund Spenser, one of the most famous and influential poets in the English canon, but no longer widely read today (regarding The Faerie Queene, Virginia Woolf once wrote that no one ever wished it a single word longer). The manuscript was completed in 2016, whereupon the frustrating search for a publisher ensued, a process from which I am battle-scarred veteran many times over. More often than comforting, I felt kinship with those many nameless pilgrims described so beautifully by Chaucer: From every shire end of England they wend, The holy blissful martyr for to seek.

That’s the problem: Middle to end-of-list writers are generally ignored in today’s publishing industry, always on the search for hot authors and trends. The kind of writing I do, narrative non-fiction, is considered déclassé and outdated in today’s marketplace. Historians I have spent my entire working life admiring – Barbara Tuchman, Robert Massie, Alan Moorhead, David Howarth – would all probably have problems getting in print today. What a mess. I think I received over fifty pink slips for this book alone... and I even have an agent (getting an agent, by the way, is tougher than getting a publisher). The only advice I can offer aspiring authors (not that any have asked), is perseverance. Without it, you won’t get far.

In any event, this magnum opus of mine is fi nally in print, an English publisher doing the honors who did a magnifi cent production job. I urge all my friends and classmates to at least admire the beautiful illustrations!

And what a story it tells, a fi ft y-year catalogue of war, treachery, genocide, and unrelieved misery, whereby this fertile but essentially ungovernable island was fi nally subdued by its substantially more powerful and resourceful neighbor. It is a tale superfi cially centered on power, religion and storied individuals (the Tudor kings and queens, the Great O’Neill, the tragically fl awed Robert Devereux, earl of Essex), but fundamentally it is story of property. By the time the Elizabethans were fi nished securing their military triumph, Catholic-Irish ownership of land began an irreversible slide, reaching near a conclusion in the mid 1650s, when a mere 22% of landed wealth remained in Catholic hands (down to 14% by 1700). Th e reverberations of the Elizabethan Conquest remain largely unresolved even today.

Kilcolman Castle in County Cork, in front of which I was photographed by my incomparable wife, Jan, was Spenser’s home for about ten years. Spenser was the prototypical Elizabethan adventurer. He had no scruples occupying a tower house that he did not build or inherit, nor farming the 4,000 acres that was expropriated from its previous Catholic owner; nor did he hesitate to quarrel with his neighbors when they objected to further losses of rights and properties. Yet it was here that he composed most of Th e Faerie Queene. I can only say, with less eloquence than Virginia Woolf, that if you enjoy puzzles, read the poem.

During the great Irish rebellion of 1598, Kilcolman was sacked and burned by marauders. It is said that Spenser lost a child during the tumult there. He and his wife fl ed to Cork City, from whence the poet volunteered to undertake a hazardous journey to Elizabeth’s court in London to report on the rising. Th ere he became ill, lingered on for a few days, and then died. Poets rarely enrich themselves from their writing (nor writers of narrative non-fi ction!); as Spencer lay on his death bed, a patron off ered him a bag of gold coins, which Spenser refused, saying he had not the time to spend them. Ireland has broken more hearts than any place I know.

PRAISE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CONQUEST OF IRELAND

Roy’s book The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland is a marvellous thing. It is amazing to see how he keeps a hold of hundreds of names and personages and how he weaves together events to provide a coherent, fast-moving, breath-taking tale.

– Josephine Fenton, The Irish Examiner

James Charles Roy invariably takes an original, challenging and creatively oblique view of Irish history, and his study of the Elizabethan regime’s attempts to subdue the country is no exception. Bryskett’s Cottage surveys and explores not only the catalogue of war, conquest and attempted settlement, and the campaign of Elizabethan soldiers and statesmen to create (or suborn) a local aristocracy; the book also focuses on the intellectual efforts of Englishmen to come to terms with a country which they variously depicted as exotic, seductive, savage, irreconcilable and religiously subversive. The manner in which Irish themes infuse the poet Edmund Spenser’s work, and the refl ections of his Irish experience through his complex analysis of statecraft and monarchical authority, forms a central thread - teased out through the recurring focus on a kind of symposium in the eponymous ‘Cottage’, where Spenser played an important part. Overall, Roy’s book both delineates the tortuous and often brutal story of English rule in Ireland during this transformative era; it also traces out themes (religious, intellectual and psychological) which would characterise the tangled relationship between the two countries for the ensuing centuries. It is a richly-textured, impressively researched and powerfully involving story, written with a full realization of its tragic and haunting relevance for future times.” – Roy Foster, author of Modern Ireland, 1600-1972

… I have long been an admirer of Roy’s work and had the honour of commissioning his magnifi cent edition of Henry Stratford Persse’s Letters from Galway to America, 1821-1832 for the series Irish Narratives. Jim Roy is remarkable for his wide intellectual range, erudition, penetrating analysis, capacity for sustained research, and deep familiarity with sources relating to Elizabethan Ireland. – David Fitzpatrick, Trinity College, Dublin. Author of The Two Irelands

I thought the book was particularly interesting because it focused on the people—the main players in the Tudors’ transactions with the Irish—rather than on the policies. The narrative exposes not only the ineptitude of the people behind the negotiating and treaty-making, but also a Queen unable to focus her mind on answering letters and wresting results from her courtiers’ long years of what appeared to be exile to Ireland and away from court. – Professor Laurie Kaplan, Academic Director of George Washington University’s England Center