‘Nothing but the First Chaos’: Making Sense of Ireland

Abstract

This essay explores one way in which we might examine the attitudes that English settlers and administrators held about Ireland and the Irish in the seventeenth century. It attempts to do so by investigating the contexts in which a particular phrase was used: Ireland was described as a 'blank' or 'white' paper. The intellectual enquiry which formed its starting point was rather more ambitious. There was a seeming coincidence between the prominence of Irish empiricist philosophers in the late seventeenth century and the frequency with which the phrase 'white paper', with which such philosophers described the mind before it started to accumulate empirical knowledge, had been used to describe Ireland and the Irish earlier in the century.1 More wide-ranging connections between the growth of empiricist philosophy and Anglo-Irish experience in Ireland have, however, yet to be made. Within this paper, dealing with the early and mid-seventeenth century, the phrase seems to have been applied in two distinct, but interlinked, areas of enquiry. Firstly, some commentators viewed Ireland's potential in terms of the exploitation of its physical resources. This would only be possible, however, if the people then inhabiting the land were cleared off it. Others saw the people themselves as a resource, believing that the tense and violent history between Ireland and England could be ended if both peoples were reformed according to civilised morals. The definition of civilisation was a cultural construct formed from subjective criteria, imposed by the conqueror, but nevertheless dictated by the more humanistic reform associated with educating the conquered by providing them with exemplars.There has been no shortage of work on Ireland in the Renaissance period that studies the attitudes of the English. However, the volume of work, the diversity of the disciplines involved and the complexity of the numerous individuals whose contemporary comments about Ireland can be studied, makes for a confusing picture. It is not easy to distil a notion of dominant attitudes or hegemonic ideas from a pool of source material in which every commentator expressed (usually) his personal opinion, based on his experience. As such, writing within the disciplines of literary and cultural studies has tended to highlight the most alarming views of the Irish situation, such as those expressed by Barnaby Rich or Edmund Spenser.2 Historians have tended to steer clear of potentially subjective topics, such as the distillation of opinion, and instead outlined events and traced the history of the English subjugation of Ireland, from the humanistic attempts at reform in the early sixteenth century to the military victories of Cromwell and the post-restoration and Williamite settlements.3This piece offers a contribution towards another means of discovering attitudes; steering a path between the cultural studies and the historical approaches. By charting the use of a single phrase, this essay is exploratory and suggestive, rather than aiming at definitiveness. By studying one phrase, it is necessarily limited. An analysis which takes as its starting-point language and linguistic usage, is, in some ways, alien to the historiographical tradition, though there have been historical studies of the way in which the use of language can shift in order to accommodate changes in thinking. In 1992, for example, a doctoral thesis by Patricia Weightman Stewart tackled the terms 'heresy' and 'hypocrisy', concluding that whilst in a medieval context they had been seen as virtually synonymous, under the strain of Reformation polemic, heresy came to be a term which Catholics applied to Protestants and 'hypocrisy' an attack which Protestants used against Catholics. Under the influence of these polemics, the two terms shifted their meaning - in her phrase, became 'unhinged' - and this reflected shifting attitudes and beliefs.4 This particular examination of the use of the phrase 'blank paper' makes a start on this process, suggesting that the uses of the phrase are reflective of genuine shifts in ideas and policies. …