This chapter examines a group of closely related pamphlets published in the late 1650s around the time of Oliver Cromwell’s death that stage a dramatic dialogue in the crypt of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, between the ghosts of Henry VIII and the freshly interred Charles I. A Messenger from the dead (to give these anonymous English and Latin texts a collective title) advances the extraordinary claim that the recent civil wars, the regicide and the nation’s descent into political turmoil represent God’s delayed punishment for Henry VIII’s alleged crimes against the Catholic Church several generations earlier. I argue that this unorthodox thesis is not unique to Messenger but enjoyed a wider circulation in seventeenth-century culture. In asking who promoted and stood to benefit from such an explanation of recent events, I explore the significant differences among the various texts of the pamphlets, including their place of publication and ideological motivation.

By the late 1590s, Joseph Hall's satirical portrait of the young English gentleman, down on his luck and seeking refuge in Ireland, was something of a commonplace. For the “threedbare malecontent” of Hall's poem who has sold his lands and whose creditors are closing in, Ireland represents a convenient if dangerous hiding place. Stereotypes aside, many Englishmen who shipped to Ireland in the sixteenth century did indeed look upon their sojourn as a form of exile. When in 1582 the courtier and poet Barnabe Googe accepted the position of Provost Marshal of Connaught at an annual salary of £40, he informed his patron, Lord Burghley, that he had done so through “mere carefulness of my poor estate” – an estate which included “a wife and a great sort of children.” Googe saw his service in Ireland as a temporary expedient for managing a financial crisis. But it was also a painful expedient: “I shall ffor thys wynter tyme have ffull experryens off the purgatory off Saynt Patryck,” he complained; “I hear lyve amongste a sort off Scythians, wantynge the comffort off mye Contrey, mye poor wyff and chyldren.” Googe remained in Ireland only until his fortunes changed in England upon the death of his stepmother in 1587 when he received his inheritance.

Although only a short-term resident, Googe belongs to an expatriate group of English writers, poets, translators, intellectuals, and humanists who in the mid to late sixteenth century secured positions in the administrative and military hierarchies of colonial Ireland.

When, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the King of Scotland's brother, Edward Bruce, was crowned King of Ireland, “there was in prospect something very like a pan-Celtic alliance against the English” in which Scots, Irish, and Welsh would join forces around “their ‘common national ancestry,’ their ‘common language’ and their ‘common custom’.” Edward Bruce died in 1318, effectively ending hopes of an alliance at this time, but English anxieties about a coalition among Irish, Welsh, Scots, and other “outlandish” peoples remained a vestigial part of the national psyche. These anxieties surfaced again early in the fifteenth century when Owen Glendower sought Scottish support for his anti-English rebellion, thus infusing it with an air of “racial conflict.” By the later sixteenth century, fears of anti-English collusion focused upon the Scots–Irish mercenaries and Redshanks (“Scottish Irishmen”) who assisted their rebellious kinsmen in the north of Ireland. The English authorities also suspected that the rebellion in Ireland was fuelling broader structures of anti-English collaboration. Fears that Welsh malcontents were in league with Irish rebels were based in part on English awareness of the residual popularity of Catholicism in Wales and the conviction that Catholics would naturally support fellow Catholics. During an invasion alarm in 1594, the president of the council in the Marches of Wales was instructed to keep all “the more dangerous recusants … at least twelve miles from the coast,” to prevent them from giving assistance to a Spanish force, while in 1597 a Spanish observer, anticipating an invasion through Wales, claimed that at Milford Haven “There are many Catholics and the people are naturally enemies of the English and do not speak their language.”

What little attention has been given to the impact of Ireland and Irish affairs upon the Elizabethan theater has usually stopped at noting allusions and tracing the emergence of the comic Irishman as a stock dramatic character. My argument, by contrast, is the larger one that Ireland – as the locus of recurrent political crises and a testing ground for categories of national identity in the 1590s – represented a compelling, if always displaced and elusive, subtext for a politically engaged public theater. In later chapters I return to Shakespeare's complex and evolving relation to the subtext of Ireland; in this chapter I want to explore further the representational strategies developed by writers both in and out of the theater for handling the “problem” of Ireland in ways that preserved the fictional distance required by the spoken and unspoken rules of censorship surrounding the performance and publication of texts. Specifically, I examine how within the British mainland, Ireland was discursively mapped in the context of a larger set of discourses about England's Celtic borderlands, discourses that made particular use of the fraught connections between Ireland and Wales. Although my discussion of Welsh materials may seem like a detour, a swerving away from the central focus on Ireland, the texts I traverse invariably point through Wales to Ireland, albeit an Ireland that often takes the form of a powerfully felt absent presence. By foregrounding two non-canonical works, David Powel's chronicle The Historie of Cambria now called Wales (1584) and George Peele's play Edward I (c.1590), I mean, first, to recover largely ignored works for a new cultural history of early modern Britain, and, second, to delineate the full breadth of the discursive field to which the canonical works of Shakespeare and Spenser belong.

On April 9, 1589, Lord Deputy Sir William Fitzwilliam informed Burghley about an unusual act of resistance among the Connaught rebels. Their leader, Sir Brian O'Rourke,

Images of the queen had been targets for her enemies in the past, but never had an act of lèse majesté in Ireland been so spectacular or proven so fascinating to English observers. Indeed, O'Rourke's desecration of the queen's statue entered the collective memory both in and out of Ireland as a touchstone of native barbarism. In 1605 Sir John Harington referred to the Irishman who “trayld Queen Elisabeth's picture at his horse tayle,” confident that his audience, Lord Mountjoy and Robert Cecil, would recognize the allusion.

On August 14, 1598 at the battle of the Yellow Ford, Tyrone routed the English and captured the crucial strategic position of the Blackwater fort in Ulster. Then, in October, rebellion spread to Munster, supposedly the most “civil” and obedient area outside the Pale. “This rebellion,” wrote an alarmed council in Dublin, “is now thoroughly sorted to an Irish war, whose drifts and pretences are, to shake off all English government, and subtract the kingdom from Her Majesty.” In response to what seemed like the imminent dissolution of English authority, Elizabeth – construing recent reversals as intolerable blows to her honor – at last seemed prepared to suspend her “wonnted myldnes.” Following the Blackwater debacle, she named Sir Richard Bingham Marshal of Ireland and dispatched him with reinforcements. And, more important, after months of deliberation, she gave the long-vacant viceregency to the Earl of Essex. With what in retrospect seems a pointed irony, the first official confirmation of his appointment was made the day before Spenser's death in London on January 13, 1599. During the Munster revolt the insurgents had burnt Spenser's home at Kilcolman, forcing him to flee with his family, first to Cork where he joined other displaced planters, and then to London where he was sent with letters from Sir Thomas Norris, the provincial president, to the English Privy Council.