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Richard Stanihurst (1547-1618) and Old English identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2017

Colm Lennon
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Extract

In 1584, Richard Stanihurst, who was by then living in the Spanish Netherlands in self-imposed exile, wrote that the people of that country were ‘exceedingly amazed when they converse with a native of Ireland who professes to knowing no Irish’. That observation seemed to epitomise the position of natives of the English colony in Ireland in the sixteenth century, who found themselves facing the universal problems of colonists. Their racial origins were misunderstood by foreigners, and they were treated patronisingly in their mother-country. Some years earlier, he had referred to how the dialect of travelling Palesmen was mocked by native Englishmen who ‘judge them, upon their first repair there, to learn their English in three or four days, as though they had bought at Chester a groat's worth of English, and so packed up the rest to be carried after them to London’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 82 , September 1978 , pp. 121 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1978

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References

1 Stanihurst, Richard, De rebus in Hibernia gestis (Antwerp, 1584) p. 29 Google Scholar. (Hereafter cited as De rebus; this and subsequent quotations are translated from Stanihurst's original Latin.)

2 Stanihurst, ‘ Description of Ire. ’in Holinshed, Chronicles (1577 ed.), i, f. 3v. (Hereafter cited as ‘ Description ’).

3 T.G.D., MS 1207, deeds 179 and 199.

4 Ibid., deed 199.

5 Description', f. iiv.

6 Cal. pat. rolls Ire., Hen. VIII - Eliz., p. 71.

7 Dublin Corporation Assembly Rolls, in City Hall, Dublin, no. 4, membrane 11.

8 Ibid., no. 4, membrane 8; Extents Ir. mon. possessions, pp 43 and 121; Cal pat. rolls Ire., Hen VIII- Eliz., p. 323.

9 Campion, Hist. Ire., ed. Vossen, introduction, p. 9.

10 Ibid., introduction, pp 46–7.

11 Rothe, David, Analecta, ed. Moran, P. F. (1884), pp 235-6Google Scholar.

12 Campion, Hist. Ire., ed. Vossen, pp [181–4].

13 Ibid., p. [183].

14 Ibid., p. [184].

15 Campion, Edmund, Opuscula omnia, ed. Turner, R. (1625), p. 208 Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., p. 209.

17 Several suits of his to the government for leases and offices seemed to go unheard and ungranted for two years : Cal. S.P. Ire., pp 432, 453–4 and 464.

18 Campion, , Hist. Ire., ed. Vossen, , introduction, p. 47 Google Scholar.

19 ‘ Description ’, f. 15.

20 Ibid., f. 1.

21 Ibid., ff. I-IV.

22 Cal. S.P. Ire., 1574–85, p. 74.

23 Details of this plot are to be found in Cal. Carew MSS, 1575–88, pp 485–9; the other affair is recorded in Strype, J., Annals of the reformation and establishment of religion (Oxford, 1824), iii. 202-5Google Scholar.

24 Cal. Carew MSS, 1575–88, p. 485.

25 De rebus, p. 3. See also Stanihurst, Richard, De vita Sancti Patricii (Antwerp, 1587), p. 9 Google Scholar.

26 De rebus, p. 4.

27 De rebus, pp 11–12.

28 ‘ Description ’, f. iv.

29 Ibid.

30 De rebus, p. 4.

31 ‘ Description ’, f. 5.

32 Ibid., f. 6v.

33 Ibid., f. 7.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., f. 2.

36 De rebus, p. 16.

37 Ibid.

38 ‘ Description ’, f. 17V.

39 Ibid., f. 9v.

40 Mercator, G. (ed.), Atlas, sive cosmographicae meditationes (Dusseldorf, 1595)Google Scholar.

41 De rebus, p. 27.

42 ‘ Description ’, f. 3V.

43 Ibid., f. 2V.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., f. 3.

46 De rebus, p. 29.

47 ‘ Description ’, f. 3V.

48 De rebus, p. 29.

49 Ibid., p. 30.

50 Edwards, R. Dudley, ‘ Ireland, Elizabeth and the counter-reformation ’, in Bindoff, S. T. (ed.), Elizabethan government and society (London, 1961), pp 317-18.Google Scholar

51 ‘ Description ’, f. 12v.

52 De rebus, p. 23.

53 Ibid., p. 24.

54 Ibid., p. 28.

55 Ibid., p. 31.

56 ‘ Description ’, f. 3.

57 De rebus, p. 28.

58 Campion, , Opuscula, p. 208 Google Scholar.

59 Ibid, for testimony to James's learning; see ‘ Description ’, fF. 25 and 27V for references to other family members.

60 ‘ Description ’, f. 26v.

61 The seventh chapter of ‘ Description ’, ff. 23V-27V, contains notices of many of these scholars; see also De rebus, p. 25.

62 Campion, , Hist. Ire., ed. Vossen, , pp [5–6]Google Scholar.

63 ‘ Description ’, f. 3 ; De rebus, p. 29.

64 ‘ Description ’ f. 27V.

65 De rebus, p. 31.

66 Ibid., p. 33.

67 Ibid., pp 34–5.

68 Ibid., p. 36.

69 The Gaelic Irish military establishment is treated in ‘ Description ’, f. 28, and in De rebus, pp 40–3.

70 De rebus p. 52.

71 Ibid., pp 52–3.

72 ‘ Description ’, f. 28.

73 De rebus, p. 38.

74 Ibid.

75 ‘ Description ’, f. 28v.

76 Ibid.

77 De rebus, p. 48.

78 ‘ Description ’, f. 28v.

79 De rebus, p. 49.

80 Ibid., pp 49–50.

81 Ibid., p. 50.

82 Ibid., p. 37.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid., pp 43–4.

86 Ibid., pp 55–6.

87 ‘ Description ’, f. 28.

88 See ‘ Description ’, f. iv and De rebus, p. 58.

89 Stanihurst, Richard, ‘ A history of the reign of Henry VIII ’, in Holinshed, , Chronicles (1577 ed.), i, p. 101 Google Scholar. (Hereafter cited as ‘Henry VIU's reign ’).

90 ‘ Henry VIII's reign ’, p. 84.

91 Ibid., p. 115.

92 Ibid., p. 87.

93 Ibid., p. 85.

94 De vita, pp 5–6.

95 Ibid., p. 86.

96 Wild geese in Spanish Flanders, p. 65.

97 Loomie, Albert J., The Spanish Elizabethans (London, 1963)Google Scholar, appendix III, no. 126.

98 Archivo General de Simancas, Seccion de Estado, legajo 593, f. 65.

99 Loomie, Albert J., ‘ Richard Stanihurst in Spain: two unknown letters of August 1593 ’ in Huntington Lib. Quart., xxviii (1964), p. 153 Google Scholar.

100 It is very likely that he was involved in the drawing up of A conference about the next succession, a document dated 1594 which detailed the claims of various contenders to the English throne: see Loomie, , The Spanish Elizabethans, pp 43-6Google Scholar and ‘ Two letters ’, p. 148.

101 Loomie, ‘ Two letters ’, p. 149.

102 Ibid.; for further information on his diplomatic activities in this period see Loomie, Spanish Elizabethans, chapter five; Collect. Hib., i. 54–5 (1958); Wild geese in Spanish Flanders, p. 524 and Col. S.P. Ire., 1598–9, PP 15–16.

103 See Hoppe, Harry R., ‘ The period of Richard Stanihurst's chaplaincy to the Archduke Albert ’ in Biographical Studies 1534–1829, iii, pp 115-17 (Oct-1955)Google Scholar.

104 His criticisms are contained in O'Sullivan Beare, Hist. cath. Ibern., p. 38, and his Zoilomastix (1625) which is in National Library, Dublin, MS 2762, ff 318–63.

105 Hist. cath. Ibern., p. 38.

106 Zoilomastix, f. 332V.

107 Ibid , f. 359v .

108 Keating, Foras feasa, i. 30–43 contains his views on Stanihurst.

109 Ibid, i. 38–40.

110 St Seymour, John D., Anglo-Irish literature 1200–1582 (Cambridge, 1929), pp 145-65Google Scholar.

111 His references to Stanihurst are contained in Bradshaw, Brendan, ‘ The beginnings of modern Ireland ’, in Farrell, Brian (ed.), The Irish parliamentary tradition (Dublin, 1973), pp 77–84 Google Scholar, and The dissolution of the religious orders in Ireland under Henry VIII, (Cambridge, 1974), pp 200 and 228.

112 Bradshaw, , ‘ Beginnings ’, in Farrell, (ed.) Ir. parl. tradition, p. 83 Google ScholarPubMed.

113 Ibid., pp 83–4.

114 Bradshaw, Dissolution of the religious orders, p. 200.