New light on Richard Hadsor, II: Select documents XLVII: Richard Hadsor’s ‘Discourse’ on the Irish state, 1604

Abstract

Between folios 179v and 181v of volume 216 of the state papers for Ireland is a document entitled ‘Discourse humbly presented by Richard Hadsor ...’ which a later hand has endorsed as having being written ‘probably some time in 1604 when Tyrone & Tyrconel were in peace’. In 1854 an anonymous scholar (possibly E.P. Shirley) published a transcript of the document in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, but without appending either notes or commentary on the text or investigating its authorship. In the first volume of the Jacobean series of the Calendar of State Papers, Ireland the editors, C. W. Russell and J.P. Prendergast, provided an almost complete transcript, suggesting that they too found it noteworthy. But since then the ‘Discourse’ has received virtually no further attention from historians. Yet it contains, among other things, the earliest articulation of a ‘three kingdoms’ approach to the new Stuart multiple monarchy. Two reasons may account for its neglect: first, neither the anonymous editor of 1854 nor Russell and Prendergast paid any attention to the question of the authorship of the treatise — the former being apparently of the view that certain sections of the text would be of interest to the journal’s antiquarian readership, while the latter mistakenly attributed the tract to either a Richard or a John Hudson, neither of whom was identifiable; secondly, its contents are odd, a mixture of useful information and relatively unconventional opinion.