To plant and improve: justifying the consolidation of Tudor and Stuart rule in Ireland, 1509 to 1625

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the ideologies employed in justifying English conquest and plantation of Ireland between 1509 and 1625. It adopts the methodology of a contextualist intellectual history, which situates the sources within the intellectual and material world, and in relation to the publically approved paradigms, available to the authors. The thesis encompasses a range of source material - correspondence, policy papers and published tracts - from major and minor figures in government and undertakers of colonisation schemes. The source material will be examined with respect to the major upheavals in intellectual culture in late medieval and early modern England and, in particular, the impact of major pan-European movements, the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. Focussing on the ethics associated with the spread of Renaissance humanism and Calvinist Protestantism, it explores socio-political ideas in England and examines the ways that these ideas were expressed in relation to Ireland. A key theme is the humanist idea of the commonwealth, a neoclassical framework for thinking about the public good, which gave the English sanction to pass policies which would absorb the native Irish into an English state system. The second major movement, Protestantism, is found to be intimately linked with the theme of improvement. As the predestinarian ideas of Calvin gained traction, diligent toil and the ensuing material rewards were deemed to be evidence of personal salvation. As social paradigms shifted, the English became more aggressive in their pursuit of Irish land to farm and industrialise. By occupying and improving Irish soil, the English were performing service on behalf of God and the commonwealth. It concludes that the evolution of English colonial thought was synchronous with the progression of humanism and Protestantism. Importantly for the historiography of colonial thought, this thesis finds that neoclassical and biblical imperatives were being used to justify colonial enterprise from at least the early sixteenth century. The moral and ethical arguments for colonisation applied to early modern Ireland predated the apex of the colonial "improving" movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a legacy unknowingly conveyed by Tudor theorists to their imperial British successors.