Complaint, reform and conflict: Treatise writing in late Elizabethan Ireland, 1579–1594

Abstract

This chapter proposes a revision of our understanding of political discourse in late Elizabethan Ireland and public policy there more generally. Previously it has largely been contended that officials in Ireland at this time began to believe that the country was beyond ‘reform’ and that a harsh brand of military subjugation would have to be employed to create a tabula rasa on which an English society could be constructed. Converse to this the chapter argues that officials were actually deeply critical of Tudor policy in Ireland itself at this time. Accordingly they argued that what was needed was a more conciliatory approach to the governance of the country and reformation of the gross levels of militarisation and corruption which had become endemic there. These views were clearly laid out in a literature of complaint which emerged in the ‘reform’ treatises being written at this time. The chapter is primarily an exploration of this literature of complaint. It also examines the treatises attendant upon the inception of the Munster Plantation. Finally, it examines attitudes towards the problem posed by Ulster in the 1580s and early 1590s and queries what policies were promoted for the province in the years preceding the outbreak of the Nine Years War in 1594.