Tempt not god too long, o queen: Elizabeth and the irish crisis of the 1590s

We use the term ‘Elizabethan Ireland’, even though Elizabeth I was never in Ireland. The term remains an apt one because the English queen’s reign had a huge impact there. The decisions she made in relation to Ireland, the decisions she omitted to make, and what she simply let happen there had enormous significance in the country’s history. Yet until very recently little attempt was made to pass judgement on Elizabeth’s relationship with Ireland and her Irish subjects. This is because we had come to see Elizabethan Ireland from the standpoint of Elizabeth’s lord deputies – Sussex, Sidney, Fitzwilliam, Grey, Perrot, Russell, Burgh, Essex, and Mountjoy – and, surprisingly, not from the perspective of the monarch who hired and fired them. No doubt this stemmed from the fact that, while there was plenty of contemporary comment on and criticism of Ireland’s erstwhile governors, there was never any complaint in public of the queen’s own performance of her Irish office. In fact there was only one major exception – a little-known manuscript entitled ‘The supplication of the blood of the English most lamentably murdered in Ireland, cryeng out of the yearth for revenge’, which at the end of 1598 passed a damning verdict on the queen and her lack of direction in Irish affairs. This chapter, following a detailed analysis of the queen’s role in the protracted and deepening crisis, makes the case for the planter-poet Edmund Spenser being the hitherto unidentified author of this superlative piece of prose.