The soldiers as referenced in the above quotation are those who fought in the Nine Years’ War, 1596–1603, between what was termed the Gaelic order of lordships and the rule of the Tudors in Ireland. At the start of this war, Sir Henry Wallop, the English Treasurer at War, had petitioned Sir Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, to request money to buy Hibernia (Irish) mantles to protect their soldiers against the weather and the Irish agues (strains of typhus) as evidenced in detail in the quotation. However, the marginal comment greeted the request with a warning that the wearing of this mantle would function as a mechanism to associate the civilised (England) too closely with the primitiveness of the Irish identity. In fact, by 1600, mantles in the Irish style were issued to the army, possibly in response to the war dispatches that reported more soldiers dying of ‘poor food, poor lodgings and the raw, wet Irish climate than through any military engagements’. Wallop was not alone in his observations of the underlying science of how the mantle was used to protect health in that ‘raw, wet climate’.