Rocking the Boat: A Response to Hiram MorganAuthor(s): Andrew HadfieldSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 14, An Ghaeilge: The Literature and Politics of Irish(Autumn, 1993), pp. 15-19Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735702 .

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Rocking the Boat: A Response to Hiram Morgan

ANDREW HADFIELD

liiram Morgan's assessment of the recent historiography of Early Modern Ireland (Irish Review 11) is in many ways a model example of

balanced and lucid analysis, an especially praiseworthy achievement

given: a) the often bitter exchanges in print between Irish historians

which sometimes appear to outsiders to be motivated by personal

animosity and egotism as much as a desire to enlighten readers, and b)

that it was presented in a journal designed 'to serve a general rather

than a specialist readership'.

Morgan argued that a perception of Ireland as 'an English stepping stone to North America' was based on an observation of the long-term effects of policy rather than a consideration of the original motives of

the policy makers who, according to Morgan, saw Ireland as a crucial

part of a 'multiple-kingdom' and used colonisation as one possible method of solving a fundamentally constitutional problem. Morgan claims that what colonisation did take place in Ireland resembles

contemporary European enforced population displacements rather

than trans-Atlantic migrations and that discontented Irish aristocrats

adopted 'nationalist ideologies as did other embattled aristocracies'

rather than behaving like 'Amerindian chiefs even though English commentators may have denigrated them as such'. Historians who

have pushed the colonial comparison have all too often been guilty of

reading position papers or plantation surveys without due regard for

their context and thus providing 'a skewed view of history which

ignores the meat and drink of politics ?

warfare, marriage alliances, faction fighting, litigation and prosecution, the bribery of officials, the

selection of JPs and sherrifs, the billetting of troops, the holding of

parliament and the constant manoeuvring at Court' [my emphasis].

Similarly, these same historians have frequently ignored the differ?

ences between the colonial situation and the Irish one: whereas the

Gaelic Irish were marked out for assimilation as 'model Englishmen', the Amerindians were 'more likely to be killed or enslaved than

assimilated'. More seriously still they have been guilty of believing the deliberate lies of the New English who 'must have known that the

allegation of nomadism was false' [my emphasis] just as they 'were

well aware that the Irish diet included cultivated oats as well as dairy

15

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16 ANDREW HADFIELD

products' and would have considered their own lower classes as

equally superstitious as the Irish. Morgan concludes with two further

European parallels which powerfully back up his argument; other

sixteenth-century travellers to Ireland like the Armada survivor,

Captain Francisco de Cuellar, regarded the native Irish to be savages, so one can conclude that such an observation was not part of a colonial

attitude; today, the revolutions of Eastern Europe have thrown up a

dozen other 'Ulsters', the result of the continent's numerous multiple

kingdoms. Much of this analysis I can agree with and I am grateful to Dr.

Morgan for forcing me to think through many of my hazy and ill

formulated suppositions. Nevertheless it seems to me that there are

problems with the thorough-going revisionism elaborated here.

Morgan's analysis reminded me of Karen Kuppermann's Settling with the Indians: the meeting of English and Indian cultures in America, 1580-1640 (1980); this useful work set out to demonstrate that those

Englishmen and women who went to the Virginia colonies mixed

happily with the natives and perceived them as equals rather than the

savages propagandists at home saw the Amerindians to be. Whilst

Kuppermann clearly had a strong case in arguing that historians who

had simply gone through the mass of propagandist writings and

concluded that the Indians were either described as tabulae rasae or

irredeemably savage cannibals had ignored the concrete situation of

the settlers, she provided some extremely distorted readings of

evidence and was forced to conclude improbably that the 1622

uprising was more or less an unfortunate accident.

Kuppermann's problem was that she could only work in the world

of either/or and not the world of both/and. This seems to me to be Dr.

Morgan's error also. I have no problem at all in accepting his positive

proposals ?

although there is a danger that viewing Ireland only as a

'multiple-kingdom' is to see matters solely through the eyes of the

crown. This, if I have read matters correctly, is at the heart of Brendan

Bradshaw's objections to Steven Ellis's attempts to dismiss nationalist

historiography, a debate raging in recent issues of Irish Historical

Studies. But when we are told that 'native aristocrats did not behave

like Amerindian chiefs even though English commentators denigrated them as such' [my emphasis], it seems as though Dr. Morgan has

started to believe some forms of propaganda whilst dismissing others.

As Peter Hulme has pointed out in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the

native Carribean, 1492-1797 (1986), the English in the New World seem to have misread persistently the motives and actions of the complex and high-ranking officials with whom they had to deal. There is a

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A RESPONSE TO HIRAM MORGAN 17

danger of a European ethnocentrism in assuming that to make this

sort of comparison ? Irish:Amerindian

? is to insult the former by association. It is the case that

? theoretically at least

? the Irish were

given the status of subjects and were supposed to be assimilated,

certainly after St. Leger's policy of Surrender and Regrant in the 1540s.

But it has to be said that Amerindians were not simply marked out for

destruction; the most cursory glance through the pages of Hakluyt's

Principal Navigations reveals the deep-seated ambivalence in the ways in which natives of the New World were represented by English observers. On the one hand they were seen as willfully damned

savages who had failed to advance, or, as some put it, 'natural slaves'; on the other they were seen as blank sheets of paper, a sort of

pre-Lockean fantasy, creatures so devoid of ideas that anything could

be scrawled upon them. The crucial distinction between Irish and

Amerindian was that one group existed within the boundaries of

state, the other outside and so each were believed to be subject to

different types of laws. However, this does not mean that they were

ipso facto envisaged differently; and Morgan's statement that the

English 'never seriously considered' making Amerindians into model

Englishmen 'who were more likely to be killed or enslaved than

assimilated' could surely be also applied to the history of sixteenth

and seventeenth-century Ireland which contains more than a few

wars, famines and massacres.

My point here is not that Irish and Amerindian were the same sort

of peoples or that the English always represented them in identical terms but that in dealing with unfamiliar and alien peoples the

comparison was sometimes made. To pick an example at random:

Luke Gernon, an English judge in Ireland, writing to a friend in 1620, assures his correspondent that the Irish are not like the cannibals (a

word which could only have associations with the New World in the later sixteenth century). Why does he bother to write this unless it had

occurred to one of them that they were similar? Barnaby Rich got himself into deep water when he made the same comparison in The

New Description of Ireland (1610) and was forced to apologise; Sir John Dowdall, during a seige in the Nine Years War, also referred to the

Irish as 'cannibals'. Many other examples could be cited but I am in

danger of merely repeating what Canny and Quinn have already documented at length.

But Dr. Morgan's explanation for this sort of comparison is that it is

propaganda, used by the settler class to promote their own interests, even though they 'must have known that they were telling deliberate

lies'. This is to beg numerous questions; the past conditional is a

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18 ANDREW HADFIELD

dangerous tense for the historian. How do we know that they knew?

How confident can we be of reconstructing the context of an utterance

so perfectly that we can know exactly what was intended? When Lord

Deputy Mountjoy came across fields of corn growing in Ulster

towards the end of the Nine Years War and remarked that it was

'incredible in so barbarous a country' it seems, pace Dr. Morgan, more

difficult to dismiss this as a deliberate lie, especially if one notes that

the comment appears both in a document collected in the state papers and the travel book of his secretary, Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617). Neither Mountjoy nor Moryson appears to have known with

any certainty that Ulsterman were not nomadic. The same sort of

comparisons can be found in the writings of numerous other New

English settlers, soldiers and officials. What needs to be pointed out is

that chroniclers and propagandists in both England and Ireland were

copying the comments of Gerald of Wales written in the 1180s during the first English invasion of Ireland, something recognised on both

sides of the Irish sea. John Hooker in his translation of Gerald's

Conquest of Ireland, included in the second edition of Holinshed's

Chronicles (1586), berated English historians for their refusal to acknowledge that their information came from Gerald;

Geoffrey Keating in his famous and often quoted comparison of

English historians to the dung beetle wallowing in ordure and

ignoring the truth and beauty of the land, chastised them because they were all copying from Gerald.

Dr. Morgan asserts that allegations of Irish paganism must be

refuted and suggests that many English writers would have perceived their own lower classes as equally superstitious. Two points need to

be made: first, English writers did not tend to claim that the Irish they encountered were pagan but that they were catholics whose faith had

become so diluted, heretical and perverse that it was condemned by

Spanish and Italian visitors to Ireland. In other words, a discourse of

savagism or barbarism has become entwined with a perception of

religious difference, something noted by Seamus Deane in his

pamphlet Civilians and Barbarians (1983). The second point, that

English writers regarded their 'own lower classes' in similar terms is

undoubtedly correct; a comparison of official tracts aimed to deal with

the catholic revolts known as The Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-7) and

The Northern Rebellion (1569-70) reveals many similar descriptions and representations of the enemy. But this does not necessarily mean, as Dr. Morgan assumes, that Ireland was not sometimes perceived as

a colony; again, our logic does not have to be either/or instead of

both/and. Stephen Greenblatt has observed that 'one man's tinker

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A RESPONSE TO HIRAM MORGAN 19

was another man's Indian' and many commentators on colonial texts

have observed that in the colonial scene 'race' and 'class' often offset

each other. Think of the Pocahontas legend and the way it has been

used and still is; think of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Things do not

always have to be either exotic or domestic. Representations and

discourses can overlap and, I would argue, this is exactly what

happened in English representations of early Modern Ireland. On the

one hand Ireland was seen to be a kingdom under the sovereignty of the English crown; on the other it was believed by many to be

populated by a recalcitrant, disloyal people who threatened the very

legitimacy of that rule. Yet, these were sometimes portrayed as

savages and Ireland could often be represented as a colony (in its

modern rather than its sixteenth-century sense; to Dr. Morgan's credit

he is careful to distinguish between these definitions, unlike many

historians). Land and people were very carefully separated, an old

colonial story. Dr. Morgan's piece deserves attention and is full of useful sugges?

tions for further research and comparative analysis. But I part

company with him when he provides a list of 'the meat and drink of

politics' which tabulates only events and not modes of representation or what some would call discourses. This is to separate 'fact' from

'fiction' in a way which is dangerously over-confident. As Natalie

Zemon Davis has argued, the archives are not free of fictions because

evidence cannot exist without being narrated and once something is

narrated it becomes a story and has to develop narrative strategies which relate it to fiction. Every piece of writing has to be composed. There is no such thing as an eye-witness account beyond represent? ation ? which is not to concede everything to Hayden White, whose

Metahistory (1973) appeared to suggest that as all facts are completely relative the historian can choose to write how he or she wishes.

Rather, it is a question of acknowledging that everything is mediated

and that the question of evidence and its use is by no means cut and

dried as the recent symposium in the Chicago journal Critical Inquiry demonstrated. Dr. Morgan is right to criticise historians who have

examined tracts and papers regardless of their context in order to

arrive at grand generalisations about subjects like colonialism and I

for one shall look at some of my own work with a colder eye as a

result. But this does not mean that we can dismiss the way that things are written up or fictionalised and return to an Eden of fact.

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