Vladimir Bukovsky: Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity. Alyona Kojevnikov translation. Middletown: Ninth of November Press, 2019 (1996).

 

Among the courageous dissidents who opposed the Soviet regime, the late Vladimir Bukovsky will remain among the most honorable. ‘Hospitalized’ by the Communists in the early 1960s (he had photocopied Milovan Djilas’ The New Class, a telltale act of insanity in the eyes of the comrades), he eventually earned a degree in neuropsychology in England, where he resided after his expulsion from his homeland in 1976. He was best known in the West for his campaign against the Soviet abuse of psychiatry for political purposes.

Bukovsky published the first edition of Judgment in Moscow in France in 1995; a Russian edition appeared the next year. He intended to expose the character of the Soviet regime and the geopolitical strategy which derived from that character by presenting and commenting on a substantial selection of the Kremlin documents he’d copied during the brief period when the regime’s archives were open to the public, beginning in 1991. These documents not only show the malice, duplicity, and self-delusion of Lenin’s heirs; they also show how Western politicians, journalists, and businessmen blundered repeatedly in formulating their own policies, primarily because they failed to understand the persistently Leninist mindset of their counterparts. That failure explains the long delay in publishing the English translation—its uncompromising denunciation of Mikhail Gorbachev being among its many offenses to genteel progressives in the United States and England. Revising it for this long-delayed edition, Bukovsky reports that he made no significant revisions. “Alas, my worst forecasts have come true: failure to finish off the Soviet system conclusively has led to its revival. Clearly Putin and his KGB cohorts would have never climbed to power if Russian society had the courage to launch what we advocated twenty-three years ago: a Nuremberg-style trial and lustrations. Without it, the country went full circle and reverted back to the USSR.”  

“To bring to justice those who took part in Nazi atrocities is a sacred task, the duty of one and all. But God forbid that you should so much as point a finger at a communist (let alone his fellow traveler): that is improper, a witch hunt.” And yet the Soviet Union’s crimes were no less heinous than those of Nazi Germany; the Soviets murdered many more people than the Nazis did, admittedly with a much larger population under its tyranny. Why the double standard? On a less bloody but equally insidious matter, the roil over Russian interference, real and alleged, in the 2016 U.S. elections met with cries of outrage among progressives, the same progressives who were so conspicuously silent when Moscow funneled tens of millions of dollars to Communist parties not only in the United States but around the world. Nor was there much clamor on the American Left concerning the some 40,000 paid ‘agents of influence’ the Soviets bankrolled in their countries, perhaps because so many of these were, well, American leftists, organizers of ‘peace’ movements here and in Europe. In those days, merely to mention their existence was to invite charges of ‘McCarthyism.’

Bukovsky divides his book into two main parts: “In the East” and “In the West.” He begins his account of the Soviet empire with its end, “the euphoria of 1991,” when Boris Yeltsin began his presidential term as the first post-Soviet Russian president. “A shoddy tragicomedy” ensued, “in which former second-rate party bosses and KGB generals played the part of leading democrats and saviors of the country from communism.” Having returned to Moscow for research into the Soviet archives, Bukovsky saw that “the main thing was not to allow the party a respite for recovery. It is imperative, I said again and again, to create a commission to investigate all the crimes of communism, preferably an international commission, so there could be no accusations of political bias and cover-ups.” Russians had been told “that even though the communists were guilty of crimes against their own people, of repressions and destruction of the economy, in external matters they were just like everyone else, neither better nor worse.” This was “a dangerous delusion,” in light of the activities revealed in the files Bukovsky recovered. “The Soviet Union had no ‘normal’ foreign policy, and what it called foreign policy was nothing less than decades of criminal activity against humanity,” including narcotics trafficking, bribery, blackmail, and disinformation. The KGB itself was a powerful political organization, with substantial funds in foreign banks, front organizations, and businesses abroad—resources that will enable it continue “for at least another decade even if it is closed down in Moscow.” 

This being so, the KGB archives were soon closed to the likes of Bukovsky. Only Yeltsin could have intervened effectively, but Yeltsin proved a caricature of a Russian, sunk in alcoholic distraction. He was not alone. “Nobody in our immense country, devastated by [the Cold War] was moved by a sense of duty—to history, to truth, to the memory of [the regime’s] victims.” This was the ethos of the regime, lingering in the years after its formal removal. “Born in falsehood, raised on deceit, Soviet man is firmly convinced that the world is created on the principle of a matrioshka doll: what is on the outside is just an illusion for fools, whereas what is inside, real, is completely different…. Therefore, even before you’ve opened your mouth, he is firmly convinced that you intend to cheat him, while his aim is to cheat you. What kind of a basis is this for any business?” Or any civil society at all? By 1993 the Central Committee of the Communist Party archives were shut, too, and Bukovsky had obtained all the information about the inner workings of the Soviet Union that he, or anyone else, would ever uncover for the next 25 years and counting.

The fall of the Communist regime had been predicted, first by Andrei Amalrik (Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?), by Solzhenitsyn (The Oak and the Calf), and by Bukovsky himself (To Build a Castle). Bukovsky expected it to survive about a decade longer than it did, but it would not have lasted even as long as Amalrik supposed, had the West “accepted our advice” in the 1970s “and taken the path of sharpening relations” with the regime instead of embarking on the policy of ‘détente.’ But to expect a revolution by the Russians themselves, absent outside pressure, was a chimerical hope. Bukovsky’s pessimism was well stated in a 1979 article, when he observed that “a person deprived of liberty knows nothing of his rights, and is, in any case, too debased to demand any rights at all,” living as he does among “a mass of disunited, embittered people.” The regime fell not because Soviet Man’s dead soul had revived but because the regime’s sclerosis and the West’s belated exertions of pressure beginning in the early 1980s, made it unsustainable. 

In response to that pressure the regime elevated Gorbachev to his position of undeserved prominence. His reforms—glasnost or a cautious ‘opening’ of Soviet society to the West and perestroika or a cosmetic restructuring of Soviet ruling institutions—should have been instantly recognized by anyone with even passing acquaintance with the history of the regime as a replay of the policy Lenin concocted in the 1920s. Faced with the predictable ruin of the Russian economy under Marxist policy, Lenin imposed his ‘New Economic Policy,’ whereby he lured capitalist investment with token gestures toward capitalism. As soon as there was so much as a suggestion that the policy might spin out of Communist control, Stalin shut it down, with a vengeance. “Gorbachev’s ‘reforms’ were aimed at preventing, at all costs, the formation of those independent social forces that could ensure stability in the transitional period.” As Gorbachev himself explained in a March 1985 speech to his Kremlin colleagues, “our economy needs more dynamism,” and it can achieve it if we follow “the right, correct and genuine Leninist policy.” “Legalizing private property was never contemplated”; “Gorbachev’s favorite slogan, right up to his resignation was ‘give socialism a second wind.'” The problem, from the standpoint of the regime, was that it had no available Stalin to reverse course in time to prevent its collapse. The problem from the standpoint of Russia, however, was that the liberties Gorbachev permitted “had been gifted,” not won by the Russian people themselves. “What has been gifted and not earned makes it akin to something stolen: it can be taken back, accompanied by a slap on the head.” The Western fans of ‘Gorby’ at least had the excuse of having “never lived under this regime,” but that lack of experience, Bukovsky notices, hadn’t stopped the West from changing the regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan after the Second World War. Gorbachev’s shallow cunning, Russian inertia and Western ignorance caused the dissident movement itself to split, as the celebrated dissident Andrei Sakharov accepted the president’s invitation to share a podium with him in spring 1989.

At its height, under Stalin, the Soviet Union was “a conveyor belt of death, working nonstop and according to plan, just like Soviet industry in its entirety.” Death quotas were imposed as readily as work quotas, although the death quotas were more likely to be met. As Stalin followed Lenin, Khrushchev Stalin, Brezhnev Khrushchev, Andropov Brezhnev, and finally Gorbachev Andropov, the Western intelligentsia lauded each in turn as a liberalizer. Repeated disappointment never bridled their wishful thinking. Soviet rulers themselves indulged in the supreme form of wishful thinking, Marxism-Leninism, which called for heroism at one moment and humble obedience to regime commands the next. On occasion, reality broke through, as in the CCCP’s frightened response to the anti-communist Hungarian revolution in 1956: “the wave of uprisings in Eastern Europe, and especially the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was definitely connected” with the “spirit of rebellion” which “wartime heroism” of the 1940s had stoked. This “electrified the atmosphere in the Soviet Union itself,” a Politburo-commissioned study explained. From then forward, Soviet leaders—”all of them from Khrushchev to Gorbachev”—”strove only to smother this spark of hope, justifiably seeing it as a threat to their power.” Even Khrushchev was too liberal for his successors. As veteran Bolshevik Andrei Gromyko put it in a 1984 meeting of the Politburo, Khrushchev “inflicted an irreparable blow on the positive image of the Soviet Union” when he ventured to criticize Stalin in a well-publicized “Secret Speech” before a Party Congress in 1956. The spirit of dissidence continued within the country, as well; “by the 1970s the regime had practically lost the young people, and our influence on them grew by leaps and bounds.” 

From the start, the Soviet regime suffered from a fatal contradiction. Like all regimes, it needed a set of laws. To be effective, laws must be definable and stable. But the animating principle, dialectical materialism, posited endless conflict and change until ‘the end of history.’ That is, it enshrines contradiction as the engine of ‘history.’ The supposed ‘iron laws of history’ were made of anything but iron; they demanded infinite flexibility and defied codification. Under the Marxist ideology, rulers needed to rule not by law but “behind its back, as it were.” “The law transforms into a fiction, an offshoot of propaganda calculated to create an attractive image of ‘the world’s most democratic’ socialist state.” “The country was governed” not be law but “in accordance with an endless stream of departmental, state, and party instructions and resolutions,” a bubbling hash of incompatible ingredients. At times the discrepancy between the laws ‘on the books’ and regime policy could be worked by the dissidents to their advantage, as they could cite the law against the policy and demand exoneration in court. They seldom got it, but they did illustrate the illegitimacy of the regime to their fellow subjects and to the outside world—a counter-toxin to regime propaganda. Dissidents first deployed this tactic during the 1965 trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, when they demanded that their banned books be introduced as evidence in court, thus violating the ban.

Eventually, as in the celebrated case of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Politburo threw up its hands and expelled the malefactor. As Aleksei Kosygin exclaimed at one meeting, “For some years Solzhenitsyn has been attempting to take over people’s minds.” One may be excused for thinking that Comrade Kosygin somewhat lacking in a sense of irony, but this is why a handful of dissidents worried the rulers so much. “The system could survive only on the condition of the monopolistic rule of the party and the ideology over the country—above the law, logic, and common sense. The appearance of an opposition, no matter how insignificant in numbers, even one person, heralded its end.” And when dissidents were able to persuade the United States and other foreign governments to criticize violations of human rights within the Soviet empire—in accordance with a treaty the Soviets themselves had signed—the cracks in the monolith began to widen. 

Himself expelled, Bukovsky met with U.S. president Jimmy Carter in February 1977 to discuss human rights. Or, as the Soviet Union reported in its inimitable prose, “Today, President of the USA J. Carter received criminal Bukovsky… who is well known as an active opponent of the development of Soviet-American relations.” International criticisms of human rights abuses violated the principles of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which call for non-interference in the domestic affairs of any country by any foreign power. The invocation of a treaty signed some three centuries earlier by the crowned heads of then-Christian Europe by Kremlin Leninists recalls Marx’s mot about how ‘history’ repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Détente must be saved! At least, it must be saved so long as (in the words of one set of instructions distributed to Party members) the Communists’ “ideological struggle, a struggle for social and political perceptions of the world… does not cease even in a period of international détente.” Ideological struggle is one thing, but “ideological sabotage” by foreigners who support “illicit organizations” in the Soviet empire—well, we can’t have that.

Besides, critics of Marxism-Leninism, the world’s one and only scientific socialism, must be irrational, indeed mad. “The number of those declared insane in our cases… increased significantly”; diagnoses such as ‘reformist delusion’ and ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ were invented for the occasion. “We were earmarked for psychiatric repression,” and although the outcry against such practices in the West delayed full implementation of the program to build “a psychiatric gulag,” it didn’t prevent such a thing. In the Soviet Union, “The misuse of psychiatry as an instrument in political repressions was the outstanding crime against humanity in the postwar epoch.” 

Did Politburo members believe their own ideology? Bukovsky isn’t sure. While “it is undeniable that Khrushchev had a somewhat naive, genuine peasant’s belief in socialism,” what did his successors think of it? They were rather persons steeped in Marxism-Leninism, not so much followers of its “the philosophical tenets” as psychological mirrors of those tenets. In a witty reversal of Soviet psychiatry, Bukovsky suggests that “Communist ideology is definitely deeply paranoid,” attributing conspiracy to all who disagree with it. “As is habitual for dim-witted people who know little about life in the West,” Soviet communists “ascribed their own methods, intentions, and morality to their opponents, responding to imaginary ‘schemes’ with real ones, and with slander against ‘slander. Like a boxer sparring with his own shadow, they could never win.”

Because the regime’s subjects were familiar with Soviet lies, “Soviet propaganda and disinformation were much more effective in the West than in the USSR.” Typically, this propaganda would appeal to the decent impulse among Christians (and especially ‘christians’ or secularized post-Christians) to blame themselves before blaming others for the evils of the world. Worried about nuclear war, injustice, poverty, environmental destruction? Look to yourself, sinner, Soviet atheists would proclaim. More, “most Western specialists on Russia,” to whom the average citizen looked for policy guidance, “were dependent on the regime by virtue of the fact that they needed to travel to the USSR from time to time”; passports were easily denied to those who spoke out in ways the regime disapproved of. Similar techniques could be used against exiled dissidents. Bukovsky recounts Sinyavsky’s “complicated games with the KGB”; his wife engaged in the “endless squabbles” among the émigrés, taking the line that dissidents should shut up. 

The supreme exploitation of Western naiveté came near the end of the regime, when Gorbachev sold ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ not only to “the Soviet intelligentsia, which was always up for grabs,” but to “the whole world.” Anyone who took a realistic look at the Soviet regime knew “it was impossible for a liberal reformer to climb to the top of the party ladder. Such miracles do not occur. But everyone yearned for a miracle!” No need for a Hitlerite triumph of the will when you can enjoy a Gorbastic triumph of the wish. Again parodying the pseudo-psychiatric language of his persecutors, Bukovsky calls this “a kind of mass psychosis.” It was at least a foolish illusion. While “the regime still continued to kill people, suppress the opposition, harass prisoners with impunity,” the world “worried that this might harm the main hangman.” 

“These were the hardest, bitterest years of my life,” made worse by the sometimes well-intentioned liberal democrats among whom Bukovsky lived in his time of exile. He turns to the West in the second half of his book. 

As a critic of détente and an arms-control skeptic, Bukovsky rapidly found himself labeled a ‘right-winger’. And indeed, “I reject ‘moderate’ improvements of the communist system; I do not even want socialism with a human face!” And as for nuclear weapons, he tried “to explain as politely as possible that the Soviet games of ‘arms limitation’ was not worth a brass farthing, it was deceit from start to finish.” No grant money from the Ford Foundation was forthcoming. But “imagine for a moment Nelson Mandela, released as the result of a lengthy public campaign, facing this question at his first press conference: ‘How do you feel about apartheid with a human face?'” “Yet what was apartheid by comparison with communism”—apartheid, which “pos[ed] no threat to anyone outside South Africa,” did “not try to impose on anyone its version of a bright future for all of humanity,” and (it might be added) hadn’t murdered tens of millions of people. The Soviet regime did resemble South Africa’s regime in one way, however: like the rulers of the apartheid system, it exploited those it didn’t kill.

The West’s treatment of Soviet dissidents registered its generally shallow knowledge of Soviet tyranny and the ideology that inspired it. The Soviet regime was qualitatively different from the czarism it replaced, latter-day czarism having been an increasingly sclerotic ‘Holy-Alliance’ sort of thing—oppressive and incompetent, to be sure, subject to the character of whomever sat on the imperial throne, as all hereditary monarchies are. Marxism-Leninism, however, held charms for leftist ideologues in the West, especially the social democrats who honored many of its claims. Sure enough, German social democrats had been conducting negotiations with Moscow “behind the backs of their allies” in NATO since 1969. “The German social democrats knew full well that the USSR had no intention of fulfilling its obligations regarding human right, and they were not inclined to protest against this,” and in the 1980s they marched in the vanguard of the mass disarmament campaigns that nearly neutralized the Western alliance. “Not even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan [in 1979], which exercised a sobering effect on Western public opinion, had much influence on the policy of the German social democrats,” whose “main aim remained saving détente,” imagining it to be the bridge toward the ‘convergence’ of democracy and communism in the persons of persons such as themselves. “Yet as we know from the history of their relations, the Mensheviks propose, and the Bolsheviks dispose.”

This gave Moscow an opening. The Kremlin “quickly turned human rights into an instrument for subverting European socialists, by selective rewards only for those who had moved closer to ‘rapprochement’ with them.” The only ‘progressive’ thing about that was the progressive infiltration of the European socialist parties by the KGB. By the end of the 1970s, European socialists quietly discarded their demand for human rights. “From now on, détente had only one meaning—disarmament.” 

All this notwithstanding, Bukovsky reserves some of his most stinging criticisms for the United States and the American people. “I did not like America from the very first moment I found myself there. It was enough for me to see, at one of my first appearances in one of the universities in February 1977, all those eternally shining eyes, burning with enthusiasm, to realize that I would never be able to explain anything to these people.” Feeling “overqualified to live there,” Bukovsky likens the country to “an institution for mentally retarded adolescents,” a people “engaged in what their Declaration of Independence defines with the quaint expression the ‘pursuit of happiness,'” a people that never lives in the same place long enough to acquire a real culture, “moving forward in a state of permanent amnesia” in “a land of conformists, ruled by constantly arising epidemics of a feverish nature; all of a sudden, everyone starts jogging, because it is allegedly good for one’s health.” “It is hard to imagine a nation more enslaved by any craze, even the most idiotic ones, by any petty charlatans who thought it up”—”enslaved by the pursuit of happiness” in the alleged ‘land of the free,’ misinformed by a mass media that “creat[es] celebrities, blowing them up from nothing, and then just as artificially bringing them down by trumpeting a scandal—again out of nothing.” “At times it seems that Americans, unable to bear the burden of freedom, simply seek someone to enslave them.” In sum, Bukovsky is very much a European despiser of America and all he believes it embodies.

As for the American ‘intellectual’ class, it’s no better than its European counterpart, puffed up with “overweening narcissism, belief in their ‘enlightening’ mission, and the right to a privileged elite position,” albeit in the shaky ground of leftist egalitarianism. The only redeeming feature of such over-educated mindlessness is its feebleness. Communist ideology won’t “be able to conquer the USA—simply because this ideology is too complex, too conceptual, and presumes at least some knowledge of history.” (More recently, American intellectuals have overcome that problem by offering a cartoon version of American history, obviating the need for knowledge of it.) “The American elite still believes the myth of the ‘noble savage,’ the innate good nature of Man, ruined by bad institutions.” Knowing no history, they are oblivious to the failure of socialist ideas, continuing to entertain them long after they had led the nations on whom they were imposed to ruin. Hence the folly of American scientists in the 1940s who “willingly shared atomic secrets with Stalin”; hence “the ease with which Soviet intelligence was able to operate in American leftist circles.” It was “the bogey of McCarthyism, shamelessly exploited by American leftist intellectuals for a good fifty years,” that enabled them to become the establishment by making anticommunism “shameful and practically criminal.” 

“Naturally, all this did not occur without Soviet help and would not have escaped their attention.” When Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev announced at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in 1971 that “the balance of forces on the world arena has shifted to the side of socialism,” he could point toward what seemed to him the likelihood that the United States, riven by domestic conflict over the Vietnam War, student unrest, and race relations, would eventually be induced to leave Europe to Soviet domination. With access to European industry in hand, the Soviet Union would have the fulcrum with which to tip the geopolitical scales in its favor, once and for all. “The fall of the prestige of the political system of the USA,” as one Central Committee document put it in 1973, coupled with “the growing interest of capitalist business circles in establishing trade and economic relations with the Soviet Union,” would do America in, and with it the ‘bourgeois democratic’ regimes it supported. At the same time, “stringent measures were in force to prevent any Western influence on the Soviet population.” In short, Soviet policy of the 1970s presaged Chinese Communist policy in the following century, with the necessary difference that the Soviet strategy was Eurocentric at its core, Chinese policy centered on Asia.

U.S. president Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sensed America’s weakness but increased it by embracing détente, which they made the centerpiece of their policy toward the Soviet Union. Nixon later claimed that Americans had misunderstood the policy, taking it for the alternative to the Cold War, “but it was precisely Nixon and Kissinger who created that misunderstanding.” After leaving office, Nixon wrote, “Political differences, not arms, are the root causes of war, and until these are resolved, there will be enough arms for the most devastating war no matter how many arms control agreements are reached.” Bukovsky adds, “the main ‘political difference’ in this case is Marxist-Leninist ideology,” which Soviet rulers had “no intention of abandoning… in exchange for any benefits.” “America tried to buy off the Soviet aggressor,” but the Soviets were not so bourgeois. During the decade of détente, the Soviets gained an advantage in strategic nuclear weapons and aided the extension of Communist rule more than a dozen countries. “But the worst result of détente was the loss of the will to resist that afflicted the West.” As the Central Committee documents show, “the Kremlin leaders were sure that time was on their side.” 

Their weakness was their Marxism, which dismissed public opinion as epiphenomenal. The human rights campaign dissidents spearheaded began to win converts. “The French leftist intelligentsia proved to be our closest ally,” having read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In Italy, too, it was the Left that sided with the dissidents. In England and Germany, by contrast, the Right backed them, and in the United States an unusual combination of trade-union-oriented liberal democrats (most prominently Senator Henry Jackson) and reliably anti-communist conservatives (most prominently former California governor and 1976 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan) rejected détente and vindicated human rights against Marxist dialectic. None of this would have mattered politically except for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of the decade. This demonstrated that the appeasers were mistaken, that the dissidents had been right all along. Even President Carter, never a geopolitical wizard, admitted that he had “learned much more about the Soviet Union” in December 1979 than he had “over his entire life.” The path to Reagan’s election to the presidency was cleared, widened already by the economic stagnation and monetary inflation which had persisted throughout the decade. Impeded in their pursuit of happiness, disillusioned by their representatives’ assurances of peace through accommodation, Americans stood up—quite unaccountably, given Bukovksy’s acerbic description of them. It would be the English and German Left which would continue to agitate for arms control in the 1980s, although they eventually failed to make their case. It became obvious to less ideologically-charged elements in Europe that nuclear disarmament would result in Soviet domination of the continent, given the vast superiority of ‘conventional’ Soviet forces there.

“One should follow this simple rule: never be useful to the USSR or its policies.” But simplicity is never good enough for many people—”the intelligentsia in particular,” who “are extremely arrogant, egotistic animals, considering themselves smarter than anyone else in the world, and certainly smarter than their governments.” “A member of the intelligentsia cannot simply force himself to do his job without contrivances and pretensions. He cannot just teach children to read and write—not, he has to ‘raise future generations’; he cannot just prescribe pills for a patient and ease his suffering—no, he needs to concern himself with the health of all mankind. A priest, meanwhile, is convinced that God Himself has put him in the pulpit for the salvation of one and all.” None will admit “that the basic motive of his boisterous social activity is a desire for power.” 

This being said, one can only feel gratitude for the proverbial stupidity of the Poles. They proved much too ‘simplistic’ to believe in the good faith of Russian Communists or their puppets in Warsaw. “The biggest setback to the peacemakers’ campaign was the events in Poland”—the government’s ham-handed declaration of martial law in response to protests launched by, well, the proletarians, men and women evidently too stupid to understand that the Polish Communists were their wise and just defenders. How inconvenient for social democrats in other parts of the continent, as they insisted that the imagined prospect of nuclear war was a bigger crisis than the reality of tyranny. “It is hard to say which aspect of the Polish crisis had the greatest effect on the peacemakers: the threat of a Soviet invasion, which hung over Poland for almost a year and a half, the crushing of a popular movement by the army, or that movement itself, which extended to practically the entire working population of the country.” As for Kremlin strategists, “even years later, Moscow could not understand the nationwide nature of the opposition movement” in Poland. In terms of the iron laws of Marxist history, it simply made no sense. Martial law restored ‘socialist order’ in Poland, without the need for Soviet military assistance, but that only drove the opposition movement underground while preventing the West from returning to the complaisant somnolence of its preferred attitude of wishful thinking.

“By 1984 even the most thick-skinned member of the Politburo realized that the situation was hopeless,” as the Party faced strengthened resistance in the United States and Europe, along with worsening economic problems at home, problems exacerbated by corruption of “epic proportions.” Whereas most revolutions in modern, centralized states result from the formation of alternative groups within civil society, what Tocqueville calls civic associations, Russian opposition to the central state came from uncivil associations—mafia-like local chieftains who ran local commerce beyond the reach of a fragmented bureaucracy of Party apparatchiks. “This explains why in 1992 all the break-away ‘independent’ republics ended up under the rule of the local party nomenklatura.” They had already set up their own networks of influence, years earlier. The Soviet state found it “easier… to occupy a neighboring country, suppress a full-fledged national rebellion in another, or, on the contrary, incite a revolution on the other side of the globe than to supply its own people with salt.” The stated objective of the socialist state for Marxists was to guide the way to communism by rearranging social and economic institutions so radically that the inequalities of society would not merely be erased but become permanently unthinkable by transformed human beings. Quite the contrary: actual socialist rule resulted in new forms of inequality, ineradicable ‘from above’ or ‘from below.’

“The Western leftist intellectual ‘elite’ did not want to accept that the crisis of the Soviet system in the 1980s was first of all a crisis of socialism.” They dismissed the Soviet ‘experiment’ as one based on a faulty ‘model’ of socialism. “But there are no ‘models’ of socialism, there are only various scenarios for the failure of the economy,” given socialism’s core aim of redistributing wealth instead of producing it. In Russia, the regime “lasted so long simply because Russia is a fabulously rich country,” with huge mineral resources. “The laziest ruler could rule over it without a care in the world and with no crises,” as indeed many of the czars did; “it required an ‘idea’ to bring about an economic collapse,” and the Marxists provided a very effective one. Socialism “did not so much drain as bankrupt the country, causing an incredible delay in development,” whereby Russians couldn’t exploit their “own natural resources effectively.” Costly imperial ambitions only added to the self-imposed burdens. The Reagan Administration’s arms buildup triggered collapse, a collapse hastened when the U.S. struck a deal with the Saudis to reduce the price of oil, thereby reducing one of oil-rich Russia’s few reliable sources of revenue. “The Soviet Union lost more than a third of its hard currency income in one year.”

With the peaceful anti-communist revolution in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s, “the mighty Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe fell apart.” Bukovsky suspects that the revolution itself was surreptitiously backed by Moscow, which didn’t want to repeat the Polish debacle of a few years earlier. “According to the Gorbachev plan, the ‘popular revolution’ should have brought a new generation of manipulators to power in Eastern Europe, just like themselves.” But Gorbachev botched the job. Instead of some fake democrats, he got Vaclav Havel. Since no one saw Gorbachev’s fingerprints on the original scheme, Gorbachev went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize as a genial liberalizer. The same blundering led to reunification of Germany, again not on the Kremlin’s terms, and not on the terms of Western elites (including Kissinger, British Prime Minister John Major, and French president François Mitterrand), but according to the timetable of the simple-minded German common folk (acting rather like Poles) who wanted to get their country back in one piece. Across Central Europe, “what was planned as quite moderate, inter-system changes got out of control and grew into a revolution, exposing the fundamental and incompatible difference between the intentions of the leaders and the hopes of the people.” 

Back in Russia, Gorbachev intended to ‘liberalize’ or ‘restructure’ the political system under the slogan of ‘socialist pluralism,’ whereby the KGB would infiltrate newly-allowed independent parties. “By that time most party leaders were mainly occupied by the problem of personal survival,” to be accomplished by pocketing Communist Party funds for themselves and transferring them to foreign bank accounts. When things began to spin out of control in Eastern Europe, as they had done in Central Europe, Gorbachev didn’t hesitate to send in the troops, which performed “mass killings” in Tbilisi (1989), Baku (1990), Vilnius (1991), as the Chinese comrades did at Tiananmen Square in 1989. When the disorders reached Moscow itself, Gorbachev’s days at the summit of Soviet power were just about finished. 

But not for want of support from the West. Even such firm anti-communists as Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lauded him to the end. “This was the tragedy of our time, that if one part of humanity had a perfect understanding of the essence of the communist idea (but sympathized with it), the other part, seemingly hostile to it, did not understand it, believing the symptoms of the disease to be the disease itself. People who understood that it was the communist idea that was the root of all evil, that the regime is not inhuman because it persecutes people for their convictions, but, on the contrary, does everything because it is inhuman—were few and far between,” and fewer still of those belonged to “the establishment” in the West. There were more “real anti-communists” in the Soviet Union than there were in the West. In the case of Thatcher, Bukovsky enjoyed the genuine if poignant pleasure of showing her, in 1992, documentary proof that Gorbachev had signed off on funneling a million dollars to striking British coal miners in 1984, a move Gorbachev had assured Thatcher he knew nothing about. “This was my long-awaited moment of triumph: ‘The difficulty of “doing business” with communists is that they have the disgusting habit of lying while looking you in the face,’ I said slowly and clearly, enjoying every word.” There are limitations to the capitalist mindset. “Alas, the conservatives proved totally incapable of grasping the principles of ideological warfare.” (Here, one might give a bit of credit to those frivolous Americans, who did in fact sponsor anti-communist radio broadcasts into the Soviet empire throughout the decades of the Cold War.)

“Despite all our efforts, even the more conservative Western circles did not want to understand that dozens and hundreds of millions behind the Iron Curtain were their natural and most powerful allies and not a ‘humanitarian problem.’ Communism could only really be defeated together with them.” But without a strategy based on building up civil, not uncivil, society in Soviet Russia there could be no well-organized struggle against the Communists there. “Weak and inexperienced opposition forces needed forging in the process of fighting the old regime in order to develop into a proper political structure, capable of sweeping the nomenklatura from all levels of state rule. Only a struggle like this could produce real leaders, popular organizers in every district, in every industrial plant, thereby creating a genuine political alternative” to the Communists. “Without this struggle there could be no system changes, and the new putative system would not have the necessary support.” Upon returning to Russia, Bukovsky advocated a general strike, which would have been a peaceful way of confronting a regime now in disarray but still capable of regrouping, while simultaneously setting up conditions in which anti-communists could organize themselves and begin to run the country. “This was the core of the problem: the country was ready to throw the regime out, but it was the new elite that was not ready, the new ‘democrats’ that grew up under perestroika,” under Gorbachev’s fake liberalization. The result was the rule of the hapless drunk, Boris Yeltsin, who blundered along long enough for the Communists to repackage themselves as Russian nationalists. 

Enter Vladimir Putin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor.

William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing.

 

Shakespeare’s only English comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor is also the purest of his comedies—the merriest, the most thoroughly funny of them, a bedroom farce in which almost no one gets into a bedroom. Set in continental Europe, Much Ado About Nothing threatens to veer into tragedy at any moment.

At Windsor, the English knight, Sir John Falstaff, scion of erstwhile warrior-aristocrats, has turned not merely to commerce but to the lowest commerce, the kind that has no respect for property upon which commerce depends, trafficking in swindles, more generally to speculating on what is not legitimately his own, with his schemes of adultery. He illustrates the self-contradiction of the commercial spirit, which, taken in its purest form, undermines itself.The only other ‘sir’ in the play is another figure of fun, a Welsh parson, in a regime where foreigners are funny. In commercial England, the most serious characters are bourgeois gentlemen and gentlewomen—the former a bit too serious, the latter witty but never dangerous avengers.

Not so on the continent. There, peaceful commerce has yet to replace war. There, the aristocrats are lords and ladies, rulers of states. They make war as well as love, alliances as well as money. Foreigners could be marriageable friends or deadly enemies. Much Ado About Nothing isn’t. It’s a comedy because it ends happily, but nearly does not. 

Likely performed first at the Garter Feast on St. George’s Day, in Greenwich, following the election of the new knights, preceding their installation at Windsor, The Merry Wives of Windsor has gentlewomen outsmarting one knight while teaching their husbands a lesson. As in so many Shakespearean comedies, the women are wittier than the men and act as the real rulers of society, but here their wit instructs the knights-elect in the audience, who are brought to witness the hazards of being laughable. The story goes that Queen Elizabeth, who had delighted in Sir John Falstaff as the most memorable comic figure in the English History Plays, wanted to see him in love. Since Falstaff is by nature incapable of being ‘in love,’ loving only food and drink, sex and money, Shakespeare entangles him in not one but two love triangles, which are really sex triangles as far as the rotund and covetous knight is concerned.

An English comedy might well turn on comic twists of the English language. This one does, throughout, with word-benders foreign and domestic hacking their way into the weeds of self-deception. At the outset, Justice of the Peace Robert Shallow complains of abuses of English law he’s suffered at the hands of Sir John. His cousin, Slender, reverses the meanings of “successors” and “ancestors”—deranging time, that course upon which legitimacy in both law courts (with their respect for precedent) and marriages (with their need for heirs) both run. Meanwhile, the Welsh parson, Hugh Evans, mixes up “luces,” a species of fish, with “louses,” a species of insect; the parson verbally deranges not time but nature. As a churchman he stands ready to reconcile legalist Justice Shallow and lawless Sir John, but the judge would rather keep things out of the divine realm and take the case to the Star Chamber. Parson Evans then falls back on the attempt to deflect the men’s attention toward a plot to marry Slender to Anne Page, a young lady of substantial dowry. If the churchman can’t overcome Shallow’s natural anger with divinely blessed peacemaking, he might do it with natural love.

They knock on the door of the father of Miss Page, but Falstaff is there, reviving Justice Shallow’s animosity. “He hath wrong’d me, Master Page” (I.i.91). He has beaten my men, killed my deer, and broken open my lodge. Indeed I have, Falstaff replies in his own defense, but the Council will laugh at your charges. In the mind of Sir John, property claims in men, beasts, and buildings made by commoners will amount to very little among his fellow aristocrats. Slender has his own charges against Falstaff’s companion, Pistol, whom he alleges to have picked his pocket. Slender draws a sober lesson from the experience: “I’ll ne’er be drunk whilst I live again, but in honest, civil, godly company, for this trick. If I be drunk, I’ll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.” (I.i.162-66). In Slender, Pastor Evans has found a pious soul indeed, hoping to be Spirit-filled when next spirits-filled.

“The question is concerning your marriage,” Pastor Evans declares (I.i.197-98), getting things back on track. Imitating the court-language he would have picked up from his cousin on ‘the reasonable man,’ Slender allows that “I will marry her upon any reasonable demands” (I.i.102-03)—specifically, the command of the justice of the peace, whom Slender purposes to obey as if he were his father. But the pastor wants dimwitted Slender to love, not to reason: “Let us command to know that of your mouth or of your lips; for divers philosophers hold that the lips is parcel of the mouth” (I.i.204-07). For the first “mouth” he means “mind”; as for the second “mouth,” he is right literally—the lips can be considered part of the mouth—while contradicting his first assertion, which distinguishes merely verbal assurances from the true intent of the mind. In his Welshman’s mangling of English, he continues to garble nature. He defines love agapically—”can you carry your goot will to the maid? (I.i.207-08)—while Justice Shallow defines it more naturally, more mundanely—”can you love her?” (I.i.209). Slender remains the man of reason who cannot think for himself: “I hope, sir, I will do as it shall become one that would reason,” a human being, a rational animal (I.i.210-11). At further prompting, Slender avers to his cousin with malaproprian determination, “I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance” (I.i.220-22); of that “I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely” (I.i.225-26). “I think my cousin meant well,” Justice Shallow construes (I.i.229).

The audience first sees Falstaff at The Garter Inn, his natural habitat, where he drinks in the presence of the inn’s Host, along with Sir John’s four sometime partners in crime. He plots the seduction of Mrs. Ford, the wife of a substantial Windsor citizen; “she gives the leer of invitation” to me (I.iii.41)—a supposition his confederate Pistol takes to be wishful. “He hath studied her well, and translated her will out of honesty into English” (I.iii.45-46). In his own way truly English, Sir John’s motive isn’t so much erotic as economic; the lady “has all the rule of her husband’s purse” (I.iii.49-50). As if to illustrate how dishonest English can be, Falstaff reads a love letter he has composed both to Mrs. Ford and the equally rich Mrs. Page, its language a parody of the English one reads in a medieval romance or a poem by Dante. In Falstaff, chivalry is dead, money’s what counts and what one counts, aristocracy has reached its comedic nadir.

Unfortunately for Sir John, there really is no honor among thieves. Pistol will tattle on Falstaff, doubtless angling for a material reward for himself.

The audience next meets the other rival suitors for the hand of Miss Page. They are Dr. Caius, a French physician, and Fenton, a young gentleman. Dr. Caius mistakes Pastor Evans as his rival; the pastor has sent a message to the doctor’s acquaintance, Mistress Quickly, asking her to intervene with Miss Page on behalf of Slender’s suit, and the doctor assumes he must be angling for himself. For her part, mischievous Mistress Quickly separately assures both Caius and Fenton that Miss Page loves him and him alone, although she dismisses Fenton’s chances: “I know Anne’s mind as well as another does” (I.iv.147-48).

Falstaff’s identical letters meet with the indignation of both respectable married ladies. They plot revenge upon him. But in one respect they differ. Mrs. Ford’s husband is a jealous man; Mrs. Page’s husband is not, and his disposition is not improved when Falstaff’s false pals inform him of Falstaff’s intentions toward his wife and her alleged attraction to him. Therefore, the wives’ counterplot against Falstaff’s scheming must not only punish Falstaff but correct Ford. Eventually, they will need to run three counterplots, one after the other, as Sir John persists in his lechery and avarice, and Ford remains adamant in his jealousy.

Letters are composed of words, which are composed of letters, all capable of being rearranged for comic effect, usually by provoking anger, whether the indignation is righteous, foolish, or both at the same time. When Falstaff describes Mr. Ford as a peasant, cuckold, and knave to Ford disguised as another man, Ford sputters with fury at the imagined infidelity of his wife and the verbal affronts to his honor. When the French doctor challenges the Welsh parson to a duel over Anne Page, Justice Shallow asks, mockingly, “What, the sword and the word! Do you study them both, Master Parson?” (III.i.40-41). The Host arrives at the dueling site and plays the real peacemaker: “Disarm them, and let them question; let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English” (III.i.70-71). Let there be peace between “soul-curer and body-curer” (III.i.89). “Am I politic? am I subtle? am I a Machiavel? Shall I lose my doctor? No; he gives me the potions and the motions. Shall I lose my parson, my priest, my Sir Hugh? No; he gives me the pro-verbs and no-verbs,” the ‘dos’ and the ‘don’ts’ (III.i.91-95). Since verbs are words of action and actions speak louder than words, Gentlemen, do nothing injurious to one another. The Host gets at the essence of comedy, if not the Word of God.

In the first of the ladies’ counterplots against Falstaff, they lure him to Ford’s house. He woos Mrs. Ford but she proves the more adroit manipulator of words: “Well, heaven knows how I love you,” she accurately replies to his suit; “and you shall one day find it,” she rightly predicts (III.iii.69-70). “Keep in that mind; I’ll deserve it,” Falstaff returns, condemning himself unknowingly. When on cue Mrs. Page approaches, announcing the imminent arrival of Mr. Ford, they hide Falstaff in a laundry basket and have him carted away, with instructions to the servants to dump him in the Thames. This reprises the scene in Aristophanes’ The Clouds in which Socrates is hoisted up toward the heavens in a basket; the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is Socrates as Aristophanes portrays him, a ridiculously false claimant to wisdom. His baptism in good English waters won’t cleanse his soul.

For his second go at Mrs. Ford (urged upon him by the duplicitous Mistress Quickly), Falstaff again shows up at the Ford house. He falls for the same routine, as Mrs. Page arrives to warn of Mr. Ford’s approach. This time they disguise him as a woman for, as Mrs. Page tells her friend, “We cannot misuse him enough. / We’ll leave a proof, by that which we will do, / Wives may be merry and yet honest too” (IV.ii.88-91). That is, the proof of wit and honor won’t be in ever-elusive, ever-manipulable words, the things to which Mr. Ford gives too much credence, but in irrefutable actions. When the self-beleaguered Ford does arrive, he’s told that the disguised Falstaff is his wife maid’s aunt, a witch, a fortune-teller, a spell-caster—that is, an abuser of words who exploits the witless. Out-witted and gulled once again by words, Ford beats ‘her’ out of his house, thus expediting the escape of the man he expected to capture in flagrante. 

Finally told of his own folly, Ford reforms, acknowledging his wife’s honor and chastising himself with such vigor that Mr. Page intervenes to tell him to “be not as extreme in submission as in offense” (IV.iv.11). But bruised, humiliated Falstaff still won’t give up. As water and blows haven’t worked, the ladies turn to spiritual terror and a suggestion of hellfire. Mrs. Page recalls a legend of Windsor Forest, an old wives’ tale about Herne the Hunter, the late gamekeeper, whose spirit returns every winter, decked with “great ragg’d horns,” changing the milk in cows to blood and frightening all those who see him (IV.iv.30). She proposes that they tell Falstaff to rendezvous with them in the forest, disguised as Herne. They will arrange for local children disguised as urchins, elves, and fairies to encircle him, dance, pinch him and burn him with candles. After “the unclean knight” has been so tormented, “we’ll all present ourselves; dis-horn the spirit, / And mock him home to Windsor” (IV.iv.56, 63-64). Pastor Evans pronounces this a set of “fery honest knaveries” (IV.iv.79-80).

Meanwhile, Sir John is concealing his most recent humiliation, defending his remaining illusions of aristocratic honor with lying verbiage. The Host of the Garter Inn hears that a fat old woman has gone up to Falstaff’s room. Falstaff claims that yes, there was a woman, but she is gone now, after having “taught me more wit than ever I learned before in my life, and I paid nothing for it neither, but was paid for my learning” (IV.v.54-56). This is another parody of the life of Socrates, who tells the tale of Diotima, his teacher in the philosophy of love. Socratic eros begins with love of beautiful bodies, ascends to love of beautiful souls, and culminates in the love of “beauty as a whole,” of philo-sophia, the love of wisdom. Falstaff indeed would do well to begin his ascent on this ladder of love, but he will need a hard-earned lesson in modest practical wisdom before he can aspire to the heights.

He isn’t the only erotic schemer in Windsor. All of Anne Page’s suitors know she will participate in the Falstaff-tormenting fairy dance. Each plans to spirit her away. Mr. Page tells Slender that his daughter will appear in white; Mrs. Page tells Dr. Caius that she’ll be dressed in green. Anne has feigned to consent to both parents, but she’s written to her favorite, Fenton, saying that others will be dressed in those costumes and that she will elope with him. 

All goes according to the lovers’ plan, as inscribed within Anne’s parents’ plan. Slender makes off with the figure in white, Caius with the figure in green, Anne and Fenton with one another to a waiting vicar. Falstaff receives his just reward, after Anne, as the Fairy Queen, intones, “Evil be to him that evil thinks” (V.v.67). Here at last the right words fit the right deeds, as the children, singing “Lust is but a bloody fire,” singe the old bounder with candles. Duly mocked, Falstaff admits to having been an ass, while Ford vows never to distrust his wife again. When Pastor Evans mocks Falstaff in his heavy Welsh accent, Falstaff exclaims, “Have I liv’d to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?” (V.v.136-37). He has, indeed, and as Anne Page as the Fairy Queen has suggested, it’s the thought that makes language and action good or bad. Mr. Page promises him forgiveness at the price of further ridicule at dinner.

But what of the deceived suitors? Slender reports first, complaining that the fairy he ran off with was “a great lubberly boy” and, compounding the indignity, the son of a postmaster (V.v.176). Slender resolutely attempts to salvage a shred of dignity by averring, “If I had been married to him, for all he was in woman’s apparel, I would not have had him” (V.v.182-83). Deceived by words and apparel, he can at least uphold the natural standard. Dr. Caius wasn’t so lucky. The French physician didn’t identify the nature of his ‘bride’ until the ceremony had finished. “I’ll raise all Windsor,” he declaims, a move that may not improve his reputation in the town (V.v.197).

As Mr. Ford understates it, “This is strange” (V.v.200). “Who hath got the right Anne?” (V.v.200). The young lady herself stops by, husband by her side, asking her parents’ pardon for her disobedience. Fenton offers the apologia for love according to the principles of nature fake-Socratic Falstaff could never learn from his fake Diotima—that is, from himself. “You would have married her most shamefully, / Where there was no proportion held in love” (V.v.208-09). In love reciprocity is the natural way, as indeed the merrily indignant wives and the jealous husband had understood, when thinking of themselves and the rogue knight. Not only nature but God is on the true lovers’ side: “Th’ offense is holy that she hath committed; / And this deceit loses the name of craft, / Of disobedience, or unduteous title, / Since therein she doth evitate and shun / A thousand irreligious cursed hours, / Which forced marriage would have brought upon her” (V.v.212-17). Even Falstaff sees this, saying to the Pages, “I am glad, though you have ta’en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanc’d” (V.v.221-22). Both Fenton and Falstaff have spoken in better English than any Slender or Caius could have offered, and the Pages, defeated at their own game of wit against each other and against their daughter’s good, concede defeat with grace and good humor. Mr. Ford is satisfied that he will sleep tonight with Mrs. Ford.

Shakespeare’s English comedy defends the right use of the English language, the right use of convention in the service of just love, love in proportion, the reciprocal love that animates the reciprocal rule of a husband and a wife over their household. The Falstaff of the comedy differs from the Falstaff of the history plays; he is ‘lower,’ less clever, because in the histories he operates in the presence of warring kings, whom he cannot underestimate, while here he finds himself in the presence of mere gentrymen and women, whom he can and does underestimate. Commercial, no longer aristocratic, English civil society lends itself to comedy in its denizens’ readiness to make sharp deals by hawking falsely advertised merchandise. In this kind of society, where there are no lions but plenty of foxes, nature as seen in love must live by the wits of true lovers. They can triumph, achieve comedy’s happy ending, but only if their prudence in plotting counter-deceptions equals their ardor.

The Continental regimes enjoy no peace. They are always warring or preparing for war. The aristocrats are noble or, in one instance, evil, not figures of fun. The witticisms have sharper points. Love and marriage unite ruling families, not merely prosperous ones, and a failed courtship might ruin an alliance, incite a war. Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy without merriment. It ends happily, but only just. The fathers here are rulers, not merchants, and there are no mothers; the women are witty and good (more precisely, one is more witty than good, the other more good than witty), but they are daughters and nieces, and do not rule the action.

Leonato is the governor of Messina in the Kingdom of Sicily. Don Pedro is a prince of Aragon, under which kingdom Sicily thrived as a subordinate but largely self-governing regime. Aragon itself had merged with Castile in 1479, forming the nucleus of modern Spain, Tudor England’s great rival. The Spanish Armada had sailed only ten years before Shakespeare wrote the play. 

Don Pedro arrives in Messina in triumph, having won a battle as it were comically, happily, his troops having suffered few casualties. “A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers” (I.i.7-8), Leonato tells his daughter, Hero, and his niece, Beatrice—eligible young ladies who themselves might well be ‘doubled’ or married to eligible suitors. They hear that a young Florentine named Claudio has acquitted himself well in the fight, “doing, in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion” (I.i.12). He will prove a fitting hero for Hero. As for Beatrice, she inquires about a “Signor Mountanto,” by whom she means Signor Benedick of Padua, a man she denigrates as a trencherman and lover-boy (both his name and his nickname suggests as much), leaving the audience wondering why a lady of her stature would inquire after such a nullity. But he is no nullity, the messenger from Don Pedro insists; he is a man of virtue, a brave soldier. Ah, but “You must not, sir, mistake my niece; there is a kind of merry war betwixt Signor Benedick and her; they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them” (I.i.53-54). Beatrice immediately claims near-total victory in their last war of words, after which “four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man govern’d with one,” leaving him at best human-all-too-human, “a reasonable creature” but little more (I.i.58-59, 62-63). Serves him right, too, as he “wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the next block” (I.i.66-67). 

Claudio loves Hero, openly. Benedick exchanges verbal arrows with Beatrice, concluding, “I will live a bachelor” (I.i.213). Don Pedro wisely doubts it. But Claudio has no inclination to camouflage his feelings: Having looked upon Hero “with a soldier’s eye” before the war, having “had a rougher task in hand / Than to drive liking to the name of love,” upon returning, with “war-thoughts… left in their places vacant, in their rooms / Come thronging soft and delicate desires, / All prompting me how fair young Hero is, / Saying I lik’d her ere I went to wars” (I.i.261-67). Don Pedro promises to intervene with Leonato and Hero on his friend’s behalf.

But Don Pedro’s bastard brother, Don John, resents his brother’s patronage. “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace” (I.ii.22)—a sentiment anticipating Milton’s Satan, who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. And like Satan, Don John knows himself: “It must not be denied that I am a plain-dealing villain” (I.ii.25-26), who, “if I had my liberty, I would do my liking” (I.ii.28-29). Don John is an aristocrat who defines liberty like a democrat, as doing whatever he wants. Upon hearing that his brother has negotiated the beginning of a courtship between Claudio and Hero, he vows, “If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way” (I.ii.58). He has no interest in the lovers whose happiness he would ruin, wanting only to injure his gracious brother. To him, the lovers are mere collateral damage. Unlike Falstaff, his vice is unnatural; he is not so much a bad man as an evil one who would ruin both brotherly love and chaste erotic love.

For her part, Beatrice echoes Benedick’s anti-marital vow. “Not till God make men of some other metal than earth” shall she take one as her husband (II.i.51-52). More wittily, “Adam’s sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred” (II.i.55-56)—and there is indeed a touch of brotherly-sisterly raillery in the repartee of the obviously well-matched pair.

Don John’s first plot against his brother has him lie to Claudio, telling him that Don Pedro really woos Hero for himself. When he confides his anger to Benedick, the scheme quickly dissolves, as Benedick tells Don Pedro, who announces the real result of his suit, confirmed by Leonato: “Count, take of me my daughter, and with her my fortunes; his Grace hath made the match, and all grace say Amen to it!” (II.i.271-72). So the romance seems to conclude, with joy. Don Pedro then purposes to exercise his matchmaking skills on a harder challenge posed by Benedick and Beatrice, enlisting Claudio and Hero as his allies.

But Don John won’t surrender. I will “cross this marriage” (II.ii.7), thanks to a plan thought up by his follower, Borachio. Borachio’s lover is Margaret, one of Hero’s gentlelady attendants. If Don John can arrange to have Don Pedro and Claudio near her chamber window at night, Borachio will address her as Hero, letting them ‘discover’ Hero’s infidelity. This scheme has the advantage over Don John’s abortive one, as it arranges for its victims to see and hear for themselves. 

At the same time, Don Pedro plots his own much more benevolent deception of Benedick, letting it drop that Beatrice is secretly in love with her verbal fencing partner. Don Pedro deplores the lady’s unwisdom in this, but Leonato, who’s in on the scheme, excuses his niece, saying, “O my lord, wisdom and blood combating in so tender a body, we have ten proofs to one that blood hath the victory” (II.iii.150-51). Claudio chimes in with the claim that Hero has told him that poor Beatrice will surely die if Benedick continues to spurn her. Don Pedro adds, “I love Benedick well; and I could wish he would modestly examine himself, to see how much he is unworthy of so good a lady” (II.iii.189-90). This combined appeal to Benedick’s real if unrealized love for Beatrice, his Christian humility combined with his aristocratic pride (sure to make him want to prove that he is indeed worthy of so good a lady), has exactly the intended effect on the young nobleman, who has been ‘secretly’ (so he imagines) listening in to the well-planned conversation. “If I do not take pity of her,” he tells himself, “I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew” (II.iii.239-40). “I will go get her picture,” that is, go see her and fall more fully in love (II.iii.240-41).

And Hero goes to work on Beatrice, with the identical strategy: a conversation with her other attendant, Ursula, fashioned for the ears of her ‘eavesdropping’ friend, whom she describes as too prideful and self-absorbed to respond to Benedick’s love, which she has duly reported. “Nature never fram’d a woman’s heart / Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice. / Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, / Misprising what they look on; and her wit / Values itself so highly that to her / All matter else seems weak.” (III.i.50-54). After they leave, Beatrice steps forward, ashamed of herself and ready to requite Benedick’s love. Later, Hero will see that she’s come down to natural equality with others of their sex, “look[ing] with your eyes as other women do” when they are in love (III.iv.81-82).

At this point, Benedick and Beatrice are well on the way to a comedic finale, but Claudio and Hero have been charted as firmly toward a tragic end as Romeo and Juliet are, by as malignant a villain. Enter, however, a band of English-like clowns who will blunder themselves into saving the day. Constable Dogberry selects a night-watch, charging them to guard Leonato’s door, “for the wedding being there tomorrow,” there must be no disturbance tonight (III.iii.84). From this post, the watchmen hear Borachio tell another of Don John’s followers how well his scheme worked, how Don Pedro and Claudio heard him courting Margaret-as-Hero, with Claudio swearing that he would go to the wedding ceremony and expose her betrayal to all the guests. The watchmen determine to report this, “the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth,” to the good Constable (III.iii.152-53). Initially, however, when Dogberry attempts to tell Leonato of the plot, he is too buffoonish to get to the point, and the governor can only tell him to go back and complete his investigation of the men he’s arrested.

At the church, Claudio accuses Hero (“She’s but the sign and semblance of her honor”); Don Pedro testifies against her (“upon my honor”); Don John condemns her vices as being beyond the “chastity” of language to be uttered in polite company; her father wishes she were dead or better, never born (IV.i.32,87,96). Under the weight of these sudden, false accusations, Hero collapses. Among the nobles, only Benedick doubts the charge; only Beatrice defends her.

But unlike the notoriously foolish, corrupt, ineffectual clergymen elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays, the Friar who was to have performed the marriage ceremony shows perception (“I have marked / A thousand blushing apparitions / To start into her face”), prefers not to exclaim or declaim, and speaks with the authority of both religion and experience without expecting any to defer to him on account of them (IV.i.158-60), while insisting that “there is some strange misprision in the princes” (IV.i.185). This gives Benedick an opening to express suspicion of “John the Bastard, / Whose spirits toil in frame of villainies” (IV.i.189), which in turn makes Leonato doubt his daughter’s accusers: ” If they wrong her honor, / The proudest of them shall well hear of it” (IV.i.191-92). That is, he will chastise even a prince of the kingdom that rules, albeit lightly, over the kingdom in which he governs one region. The same honor that inspires aristocrats to defend their countries and their allies stands in defense of their families, and if family honor is impugned civic honor will be shaken.

Harmless as a dove, but prudent as a serpent, only Friar Francis sees the way to satisfy the requirements of honor and to defend civic peace, a way that exists because human nature is what it is, a way that the Friar sees because he understands human nature and also knows how it may be brought to follow justice. “Pause awhile, / And let my counsel sway you in this case” (IV.i.200-01). Hero has fainted and her accusers have walked out; let them believe her to be dead. This alone will change “slander to remorse” (IV.i.211). Hero will be “lamented, pitied, and excus’d, / Of every hearer; for it so falls out / That we have we prize not to the worth / Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost, / Why, then we rack the value, then we find / The virtue that possession would not show us / Whiles it was ours. So it will fare with Claudio.” (IV.i.216-22). Benedick puts his own honor on the line, telling Leonato that he will find a way to vindicate his daughter.

But first he must deal with his enraged fiancée, who demands that he kill Claudio. This is her love test, set for the man she’d accused of waywardness at the beginning of the play. In her ferocity, she wishes she were a man so that she could “eat his heart in the marketplace”—a use of the marketplace that would not occur to the English at Windsor. Although he tries to calm her, she extracts a vow to challenge the calumniator. Again, tragedy threatens.

Fortunately, the forces of the English common law, remarkably at play in Messina, are still on the case. Constable Dogberry calls his officers to order, inquiring, “Is our whole dissembly appear’d?” (IV.ii.2). Dissembling schemers Borachio and his accomplice, Conrade, are indeed present, and the interrogation of the accused and their accusers wends its way eccentrically toward establishing the facts of the case. They report back to the governor’s house in time to interrupt Benedick, who has duly challenged Claudio, then departed. Borachio confesses. But Leonato continues his own plot, telling Claudio that although innocent Hero is dead, he has a niece who looks just like her, who stands to inherit not only his own estate but the estate of his brother, Antonio. Claudio happily accepts the substitute wife (it is a comedy, after all), and the wedding is set for the morrow.

As for Benedick, he must return to a conversation with a lady who expects him to return with his shield or on it. He returns with it, his shield being his wit.  After telling her that he has indeed challenged Claudio, who will either answer it or be deemed a coward, he distracts her from her anger by reinitiating their badinage, asking her to say “for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?” (V.ii.52-53). Why, “for all of them together; which maintain’d so politic a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them” (V.ii.54-56)—an anticipation of the kind of arguments Publius will unfold in Federalist 51. This will be a marriage of separate and balanced powers.

“Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably,” Benedick remarks (V.ii.63). Hardly so on your side, the maid replies, since the wise man rarely praises himself by calling himself wise. “An old, an old instance, Beatrice, that liv’d in the time of good neighbors; if a man do not erect in this time his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps” (V.ii.66-69). Benedick is an aristocrat who understands the modern world, where humility no longer wins honor because neighbors no longer know or love you. For once Beatrice can bring no ready counter-witticism to mind. When Ursula interrupts with the news that Hero was falsely accused, Don Pedro and Claudio abused, and that Don John has fled the country, they hurry to the governor’s house.

There, Hero unmasks herself, as Leonato explains, “she died…but whiles her slander lived” (V.iii.66); her slander now dead, her honor vindicated thanks to the Friar’s wise ruse, she has risen. She will marry Claudio. And after a bit more verbal sparring, which they begin by telling one another that they love one another “no more than reason” (V.iii.75,78), Benedick and Beatrice are kindly exposed by the newlyweds, who produce letters from each confessing love for the other. “A miracle!” Benedick pronounces it. “Here’s our own hands against our hearts” (V.iii.91). He silences any more less-than-beatific chatter by kissing his bride-to-be; the man Beatrice had derided as Signor Mountanto delivers a sermon from the mount in loving action, winning their war of words as surely as he had won the war which preceded the play’s beginning. That makes two miracles, uniting two couples; Much Ado About Nothing is as close to a divine comedy as Shakespeare would ever write. 

When Leonato tries to delay a celebratory dance, Benedick makes bold to countermand his order, telling him to get a wife, as “there is no staff more reverend than one tipp’d with horn,” a merry joke about cuckoldry in the wake of one wedding and in prospect of his own (V.iii.117-19). A messenger then brings word that Don John has been captured and will return to Messina tomorrow, under armed guard. It isn’t Governor Leonato but Benedick who concludes, “Think not on him till tomorrow. I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him. Strike up, pipers.” (V.iii.121-23).

And why not? He and Beatrice were the first among the aristocrats to suspect Don John’s perfidy, Hero’s innocence, and the others’ error. Although decent Claudio and Hero are the heirs to the fortune of the Governor and his brother, Benedick and Beatrice will be the real rulers of the city, as the wittiest and wisest aristocrats in town. A victory is twice itself when the victor brings home full number, Leonato had intoned. He has just been shown how his aphorism might be enacted.

In his English comedy, Shakespeare shows how a decadent aristocracy in a peaceful, commercial society can be well supplanted by the wit of the gentry class or upper ‘bourgeoisie’—crucially, by the wit of women, wives whose virtues can now rule because commerce has supplanted war. But on the continent, wars will continue. In Shakespeare’s continental comedy, the witty woman needs to find her match in an equally witty, or even wittier man. And even they will need the assistance of a wise, politic churchman who knows how to moderate the tempers of still-indispensable warrior-aristocrats while awaiting the ascendance of the better angels of their nature. In commercial England, a tavern host serves as peacemaker, the parson as a good-natured foreign language-bender.

In England, English words prove unreliable in dealings commercial and marital; actions speak louder. On the continent, words might prove unreliable, lying, but also whetstones of wit; actions bespeak love (a kiss to silence a too-contentious mouth) and harmony (a betrothal dance). In England, love requires the wit of deception to defend itself against the low, farcical eroticism commerce encourages. On the continent, love requires the wit of perception to defend itself against malignant scheming and excessive aristocratic spiritedness. In England, wit and prudence defend love against base assaults and surmises; on the continent, they defend love by contriving ‘miracles’.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edmund Spenser: A View of the Present State of Ireland: Discoursed by Way of a Dialogue between Eudoxus and Irenaeus. In William P. Trent, ed.: The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1903.

Edmund Curtis: A History of Ireland. London: Methuen and Company, Ltd., 1950 [1936].

 

“Lord! How quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!”

Eudoxus

 

In his elegant and judicious introduction to Spenser’s works, William P. Trent declares that “no idealist, no sensitive lover of ethereal beauty, no reader endowed with an ear trained to delight in the subtlest melodies and most exquisite harmonies, no dreamer enamored of the stately and romantic past, no willing prober of allegories and symbols, and, above all, no soul in love with essential purity can possibly remain indifferent to the appeal made by the poet and, to a considerable degree, by the man.” For any such reader, “to know Spenser at all thoroughly is to love him deeply” as the author of poems “gentle, pure, and lovely, rather than sublime.”

“But,” Trent continues, “idealists, symbolists, ethereal natures, and readers trained to enjoy the subtlest poetic harmonies are, and always have been, rare. This is a work-a-day world actuated by a rather overpowering sense of the real.” In the modern world, he writes “the great national dramas killed allegory.” Trent wrote those words with the First World War little more than a decade distant. And with still worse to come, the taste for epic poetry along the lines of The Faerie Queene would lie even more deeply buried under the rubble left by tyrannic cruelty and egalitarian vulgarity.

Had Spenser no sense of the real, though? He saw war. In his prose if not his poetry he unhesitatingly urged harsh measures against the enemies of his people, his queen, and his family. So much so, that Spenser’s literary admirers seem not quite to know what to make of his dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in which one character recommends the use of famine to break Irish resistance to English imperial rule, citing Machiavelli’s Discourses as an authoritative guide to mastering rebels. Spenser had to gather his wife and four children to flee an advancing Irish army, which burned his County Cork home down to the first floor. If an ‘idealist,’ he felt all the fury of a disillusioned one. Or would a closer reading of his poetry reveal toughness beneath the ethereality?

The Spensers had been living on the forfeited estate of the Earl of Desmond, in the manor and castle of Kilcolm. How London-raised Edmund Spenser, son of a clothier, scholarship boy at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, found himself living in southern Ireland itself requires a mind-clearing draft of real Irish history, as served by Professor Curtis.

Once a people centered in modern-day Austria but driven off by the Romans, the Celts arrived in Ireland around 350 BC. Spenser would have known the later Celtish claim, dating from medieval times, that they descended from the fierce Scythians, who established a nomadic empire in Central Asia in ancient times. Such claims notwithstanding, the Celts, with their “warlike, aristocratic, and masterful temper,” conquered the existing rulers, whose ancestors themselves had conquered peoples who’d arrived before them. The Gaels, as this branch of the Celts called themselves, practiced Druidism; the Roman authors Spenser would have read claimed that the Druids or priestly class practiced human sacrifice. The Druids shared authority with an aristocratic warrior class (in Caesar, the equites). In addition, the Fili—poet/seers who cast spells—served as “hereditary keepers of the ancestral lore and learning of Ireland as expressed in the Irish language.” Finally, the Gaels developed a set of laws, not written down until the eighth century AD, eventually called the Brehon laws, after the Brehons or judge-arbitrators who presided over cases under it.

Gaelic rule did not go uncontested, as chiefs of non-Gaelic peoples brought Gauls in as military allies. The strategy failed, but many Gauls stayed, settled, and became absorbed into the Irish population. Charles de Gaulle traced some of his ancestors to this population, and later English dealings with Ireland may have added to his list of grievances against perfidious Albion. For although the Romans never ruled Ireland, the Anglo-Saxons, who arrived in Britain in the fifth century AD, would eventually make the attempt.

The Anglo-Saxons may have been brought in as military guardians against the Celts, who were feared raiders in the region, poorly guarded since the end of Roman rule there, in 410. A young Christian born only about twenty years earlier, Patricius, son of Calpurnius, had been seized by Celtic raiders and served as a slave there—tending sheep, David-like, before escaping first to Britain and then to Gaul, where he studied for the priesthood at Auxerre. Dreaming that the voices of the Irish were calling on him to return and save them from Druidism, he received authorization from the Church of Gaul (then a more powerful element of the Roman Catholic Church than Rome itself) to launch an evangelizing mission. Consecrated as a bishop, in 432 the Church sent him on the mission which would indeed begin the end of Druidism and earn him recognition as a saint of the Church.

Culturally, Gaelic Ireland thus became a blend of Fili tradition and Roman-Church learning, and remained so. The Norse conquerors who ruled for nearly two centuries left no lasting political or cultural mark. Eventually called the “Ostmen,” they became “in spirit and habit almost Irish.” Of much more political significance were the Normans, who arrived in 1166, one hundred years after they had conquered Britain and a dozen years since they had lost control of the English throne to the Plantagenets. Perhaps wanting to give this “aggressive baronial race” something to do, and following a precedent set by his Norman maternal grandfather, Henry I, Plantagenet king Henry II had already given them liberty to attack Wales. There they mixed with the native Celts and gained a knowledge of Celtic customs useful in dealing with the Irish. With superior fortifications and military equipage, they quickly established a substantial foothold in eastern and southeastern Ireland.  In October 1171 Henry II landed at Waterford, on Ireland’s southern coast, giving the first charter for Norman-English rule to Dublin, on the east coast. He appointed a viceroy and assumed control of land-titles, per English law. Staying only six months, he left the Norman-English “gentleman buccaneers” in de facto control of the territories they had seized.

This established the fundamental political dynamics that persisted, in one permutation after another, throughout Spenser’s lifetime. The Norman-English, also called the Anglo-Irish and eventually the “Old English,” struggled for control with some of the Celts while intermarrying with others; they also struggled with the English monarchy whenever it attempted to exert greater control over its colonies. The Celts fought with one another, too.

The viceroy or royal Deputy served as supreme judge, political ruler, and commander of the feudal levy in the Dublin government, whose territory was called ‘the Pale,’ a term referring to a fence made of stakes and meaning a boundary. Assisting the viceroy was an exchequer, a chancellor, a treasury, and a judiciary that followed English common law. The Magna Carta was extended to Ireland in 1217. Thus the Anglo-Irish enjoyed English rights. The Crown reserved the power of legislation to itself, consistent with the English understanding of the monarch as the ‘defender of the realm’ and ruler of imperial holdings. Locally, the English section established the shire form of government. But the native Irish there were reduced to the status of feudal villeins—essentially serfs with no rights under the English common law but no protection under the Brehon law, which the common law replaced.

Independent of and sharply contrasting with the Pale, northern Ireland was ruled by Gaelic kings who observed the Brehon law. They maintained their sovereignty with the aid of Scottish mercenaries, the formidable ‘galloglasses,” capable of fighting even the warlike Normans. The Anglo-Irish called these kingdoms the “land of war.” In the central and southern areas, a compromise was worked out. There weren’t enough English settlers to rule there, but the king nonetheless claimed sovereignty. He devised an arrangement whereby Irish chieftains would rule by royal grant. Called the “march lands” or the “feudal Liberties,” these areas served as fields of conflict for centuries.

As a result of these political arrangements, the Irish remained incapable of unifying against their conquerors but often could defend themselves locally. The Norman-English settlers also quarreled among themselves while at the same time intermarrying with the Irish and adopting many of the customs of the country—becoming increasingly Anglo-Irish. By the 1330s, Edward III had grown sufficiently alarmed that he abridged Anglo-Irish rights, provoking the formation of the first “Patriot party,” men unified not on the basis of Irish nationalism but by shared antipathy to political control centralized in Westminster. Edward assigned his second son, Lionel of Clarence, to settle the Irish question. Lionel called the Parliament of Kilkenny in 1366; to prevent Anglo-Irish “degeneracy,” he forced through a set of laws requiring the Anglo-Irish to maintain English language, laws, usages, even fashions, instead of adapting those of the “Irish enemies.” To counteract the charm of the Irish Fili, the new laws prohibited the employment of Irish minstrels, poets, and story-tellers as entertainers in English households. Violations of these laws would result in forfeit of lands—controlled, it will be recalled, by the monarch. Irish living within the Pale were excluded from all Anglican cathedrals and abbeys. This legislation succeeded in reinforcing ‘Englishness’ in the Pale, while effectively giving up on efforts to extend it in the other territories. Further, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw England distracted by more urgent matters than the governance of Ireland. Wars in France and the civil War of the Roses, which began in 1455, enabled the Irish to make political gains in some fifty to sixty provincial regions, where Irish barons, bards, and Brehons prevailed.

During the English civil war, the Irish supported the Yorkist challenge to the Lancastrian dynasty. Retreating from England, the Yorkists found in Ireland a springboard for counterattacks. In the provinces west of the Pale, Anglo-Irish lords were ascendant, eventually dominated by Thomas, Earl of Kildare. Gerald, the eighth earl, called Garret More by the Irish, was the most impressive of the line. Edward IV attempted to rein him in by sending Leonard, Lord Grey, to replace him, but Lord Grey failed.

So did the Plantagenets. When the Tudor king Henry VII ascended to the throne in 1485, replacing Richard III and ending the War of the Roses, England had its first genuinely ‘modern’ king—that is, a determined state-builder or ‘centralizer’ of English political authority. But in Ireland, the Earl of Kildare backed the anti-Tudor pretender, Edward VI, sending an expedition of Anglo-Irish and German mercenaries into England in 1487. They were crushed, and Henry had Kildare removed from power in 1494. He appointed Sir Edward Poynings as the new viceroy, tasked with “bridling the Irish Parliament,” as Curtis puts it, and with ending home rule by Yorkist aristocrats in Dublin. In doing so, Poynings secured the Pale. Recalling Poynings in 1496, Henry then reversed course and effectively co-opted Kildare, making him his Deputy in Ireland—a Deputy now unconstrained, but also unaided, by the parliament in Dublin and mindful that Henry could ‘unmake’ him as soon as ‘make’ him. Henry used Kildare this way for the next seventeen years. Dissatisfied with continued Anglo-Irish and Irish recalcitrance, Henry finally ruined the House of Kildare in the 1530s, reappointing Grey as his Lord Deputy. Grey called the “Reformation Parliament” in 1536, which attainted the Kildare family and revived the long-unenforced bans against Anglo-Irish marriage, employment of Irish minstrels and poets by the Anglo-Irish, and Irish styles of dress. To these regime changes to the Anglo-Irish way of life, the centralizing state added structural regime changes: reform of the Irish Church along more strictly Anglican lines; the end of aristocratic Home Rule; suppression of Brehon law; the territorial extension of the Pale. Henry had himself installed as the king of Ireland. Treaties with many of the Irish and Anglo-Irish lords allowed them to keep their lordships at the price of accepting tenure in office under the Crown. Henry’s successor, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, who might have been expected to be more sympathetic to Irish and Anglo-Irish claims, in fact extended Henry’s policy by confiscating lands in the midland section of the island, replacing Irish landlords with English.

This, along with the church reforms, led to a series of rebellions in the next half-century. It had been “hoped on the English side that the great lords and chiefs would gradually introduce and enforce in their own countries the English law, religion, and language.” But by the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1558 it had become clear “what a determined opposition the old Gaelic and Brehon order was capable of, even among the Old English.” The poets and bards had persisted in their role as “the chief inspirers of the native tradition,” maintaining “the haughty pride and warlike spirit of their patrons by their encomiums in verse.” The Brehons and chroniclers “kept up the native law and all its records.” Old-regime loyalists upheld an ethos in which the finest human type was held to be aristocrats who, Curtis writes “still lived in the heroic age, in the atmosphere of battle and foray, and who were expected by their poets, historians, and followers to be warriors rather than statesmen.” With the modernizing young queen on both the English and the Irish thrones, “the old Gaelic world, which had existed for two thousand years, was now to clash with the modern world as represented by the Tudor government.”

The Reformation Parliament in the 1560s imposed the Book of Common Prayer on church services; established the monarch as the head of the Church of Ireland; and confiscated Catholic cathedrals and churches for use by the Church of England. Curtis summarizes the rebels’ motives in the phrase, “religion, land, and local lordship.” In religion, the Catholic Counter-Reformation was now underway, with Jesuits sharpening the issues with their astute use of dialectic and Puritans answering with their astute use of doctrine. This promised international support for the rebels. The land issue centered on the insecurity of land-titles held by Anglo-Irish aristocrats in Leinster and Munster, where they were threatened by the introduction of English-born planters. And the political issue centered on threats to the feudalism introduced by the Normans and to the even older Irish chieftanships. The modern state tolerated neither.

Born in 1552, Spenser saw reports of the first rebellions against Elizabeth. In 1566 she appointed Sir Henry Sidney as Lord Deputy of Ireland. He enforced Westminster policy vigorously from Dublin. The First Desmond Revolt—named for the Earldom of Desmond, its locus—began in 1569. The Fitzgerald family, which held the Earldom, expected military assistance from Philip II of Spain. Preoccupied with his own rebels in Spanish-ruled Netherlands and with the expenses of ruling his extensive New-World colonies, Philip could offer very little to the Geraldines. Even with his own poorly-disciplined troops carrying the fight, the Earl managed to sustain the rebellion for five years before giving it up.

In 1579, twenty-seven-year-old Edmund Spenser was introduced to the Earl of Leicester by his young friend and fellow-poet, Philip Sidney, son of the now-former Lord Deputy. Spenser became his secretary, but soon found a new patron: Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who was appointed as Lord Deputy the following year, bringing Spenser with him as his aide.

By then the Second Desmond War had erupted. Initiated by James FitzMaurice Fitzgerald, commanding forces that included papal troops, this was (as the rebels put it) “a war for the Catholic religion and against a tyrant who refuses to hear Christ speaking by his Vicar”—namely, Pope Pius V, who had excommunicated Elizabeth a decade earlier. Henry Sidney, now on the Privy Council, supported stern repression. Arthur warred against the rebels unmercifully but ineffectively, and was recalled to face criticism in 1582. Among the decisions criticized was his conduct of the siege of Smerwick, a town west of Dingle on the southwestern shore of the island; Spanish and Italian soldiers had surrendered but were nonetheless massacred by Arthur’s troops. Yet Spenser never ceased to admire him, calling him in a set of verses of dedication to The Faerie Queene “Most Noble Lord, the pillar of my life, / And Patron of my Muses pupillage.” Writing his book from the “savage soyle” of Ireland, Spenser defended the Tudor policy of Anglicization in Ireland, and spared no pity on those who resisted it.

The rebellion ended in 1583 with the Crown forces triumphant. Beginning in 1586 English colonists were installed on the Munster Plantation in County Cork. Spenser was among them; his influential friend, Sir Walter Raleigh (who introduced him to the Queen a few years later) amassed some 40,000 acres; Spenser had to be content with a mere 3,000, residing in the confiscated manor and castle of the Earl of Desmond. He also won appointment as the Clerk of the Office of Munster.

Catholic resistance to Anglican rule hardly ended with the Desmond Wars. Most spectacularly, the Spanish Armada was wrecked only two years later; had the expedition succeeded, the lives of the English settlers would have been forfeit. And in 1594 the Tyrone War, also called the Nine-Year War, resulted in the aforementioned destruction of Spenser’s home.

The provinces of Tyrone and Ulster are nowhere near Munster. They are located to the northwest and northeast, respectively, of the Pale. In Ulster the old Gaelic regime had continued, and there “Red” Hugh O’Neill initiated the conflict, soon joined by his brother-in-law, Hugh O’Neill. They won several victories over the English, but with no artillery or siege weapons they failed to take Dublin. Hoping for Spanish aid, they nonetheless intended to prolong the war until the now-elderly Elizabeth died, in the hope of extracting a better settlement from her successor, James VI of Scotland. Enraged by the early defeats, Elizabeth appointed Sir Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy as Royal Deputy. In Curtis’s words, Mountjoy “decided that the war could only be ended by a general famine” brought on by burning crops—a policy Spenser’s patron, Arthur, had already tried. A war of containment and attrition followed. Mountjoy used this induced scarcity as a prelude to buying off many commanders and their vassals. Modest Spanish military assistance did come, but it was ineffective, and Hugh O’Neill surrendered in March 1603, four years after Spenser’s death. When James ascended to the English throne in the same year as James I he inherited a largely pacified Ireland.

Published in 1596, Spenser’s dialogue on Ireland may or may not have had some influence on the militarily successful English policy. It wasn’t published until 1633, but it circulated in manuscript shortly after Spenser completed it. Spenser also prepared a brief report to the Queen, giving her the gist of his argument. What is certain is that it provides arguments in favor of harsh means for achieving the end of regime change in Ireland, whereby it might be more firmly fixed in the Empire.

The interlocutors are Eudoxus, which means ‘Good Opinion,’ and Irenaeus, which means ‘Peace.’ Irenaeus has just returned from Ireland, reporting on its “good and commodious soil.” Eudoxus begins with a statement of wonder: “I wonder that no course is taken for the turning thereof to good uses, and reducing of that savage nation to better government and civility.” Irenaeus says that “good plots” have been devised for doing those things, but “they say”—he never identifies them—that all such plots or plans fail for four reasons, two ‘pagan’ and two Christian. They say the “genius” of the soil interferes with good plots; a “genius” is a presiding spirit, good or evil, determining the character of a person, place, or thing. It is present from the beginning—hence the root it shares with ‘generation—and is ineradicable. “They” also say the influence of the stars interferes; in Renaissance astrology, “genius” itself may be determined by the alignment of the stars at the time of origin. More pious persons say that God has not yet appointed the time of Ireland’s reformation, or that God may be reserving Ireland “in this unquiet state” to use it as a scourge of England.

Mr. Good Opinion knows bad opinions when he hears them. He dismisses them as “vain conceits of simple men” who “judge things by their effects, and not by their causes.” The real causes of failure must be unsound counsels and plans or else “faintness in following and effecting” them. “Through wisdom, [Ireland] may be mastered and subdued,” “since the poet sayeth, ‘The wise man shall rule even over the stars,’ much more over the earth.” [1] Eudoxus’ inclination to wonder, and his desire to get to the real causes of things marks him as more than merely a man of good opinion but as a political philosopher, or a would-be political philosopher, or perhaps a political man who seeks practical wisdom. He asks Irenaeus to enumerate the evils he’s observed there, as a “wise physician” diagnoses the disease before he treats the patient. This reinforces the impression that Eudoxus guides himself by the light of nature, not revelation ‘ancient’ or ‘modern.’

Irenaeus deplores “the infinite number” of evils in Ireland, which he likens to Pandora’s box. But the worst, “most ancient and long-grown” of these are the laws, the customs, and the religion.

How can laws, intended for the good of the commonwealth, be a source of evil? Eudoxus asks. Irenaeus replies that it is with laws as it is with a physician’s remedies: a given regimen may be good in itself but bad in the circumstances; or it may have been good in the original circumstance, bad when that circumstance changed. What is more, if medical or legal prescriptions are not consistently followed, evils will result.

By laws, Eudoxus asks, do you mean English common law or statutes enacted by Parliament? Both: the common law, brought over by William the Conqueror, “fitted well with the state of England then being” because the English at that time were a peaceable people tyrannized by their king, eager for change. William and the Norman laws were looked upon as improvements by this law-abiding population. “But with Ireland it is far otherwise, for it is a nation ever acquainted with wars, though but amongst themselves, and in their own kind of military discipline, trained up over their youths.” Indeed, “they scarcely know the name of law,” having “kept their own law,” the Brehon Law, which Irenaeus judges to be scarcely worthy of the name of law at all. Like the English common law, it is unwritten and traditional, but unlike the common law it is “in many things repugning quite both to God and man’s law.” For example, in criminal cases the Brehon does not so much judge as arbitrate between the parties to determine compensation. Even murder cases are settled with payment. More, the Brehon is appointed and controlled by the local lord, and can be depended upon to “adjudgeth for the most part the better share unto his lord.”

These practices continue despite the Irish acknowledgment of Henry VIII’s sovereignty and of English law. “What boots it to break a colt,” Irenaeus asks, “and to let him straight run loose at random?” The current generation disavows any agreement made by their fathers, since they Irish are not bound by oaths sworn by any previous generation. And indeed they are not so bound, under their own laws of succession, which are based not on inheritance but on tanistry: In Ireland, after a lord or captain dies his people elect a new ruler, usually a brother or cousin of the deceased, not one of his children. What they do respect and adhere to are “all the former ancient customs of the country.” This includes the rule that property not be ceded to strangers, “especially the English.” Tanistry ensures that they will have adult rulers, better defenders of the land than boy-kings or girl-queens dominated by their regents.

Eudoxus asks, how can this be remedied? Mr. Peace invokes Cicero: “all is the conqueror’s as Tully to Brutus saith.” Henry VIII did not sufficiently force the recognition of the right of conquest on the Irish, although the Irish parliament gave lip service to obedience. But perhaps, Eudoxus suggests, “it seemed better under that noble King to bring them by their own accord unto his obedience, and to plant a peaceable government among them, than by such violent means to keep them under.” And surely his daughter Elizabeth can rectify matters.

Irenaeus doesn’t think regime change comes so readily. “It is no so easy now that things have grown into a habit and have their certain course, to change the channel, and turn the stream another way, for they now have a colorable pretense to withstand such Innovations, having accepted other laws and rules already.” Ireland is no blank slate. Further, the William the Conqueror stayed “in person to overlook the Magistrates, and to overawe the subjects with the terror of his sword and the countenance of his Majesty,” whereas in Ireland neither the Plantagenet Henries nor the Tudor Henries did any such thing for a sustained period. Further, and crucially, “laws ought to be fashioned unto the manners and customs of the people, to whom they are meant, and not to be imposed unto them according to the simple rule of right; for else… instead of good they may work ill, and pervert Justice into extreme Injustice. For he who would transfer the laws of the Lacedaemonians to the people of Athens should find a great absurdity and inconvenience.” The Lacedaemonians were a military people, like the Irish, although better disciplined.

When the Irish grow weary of war “they sue for grace, til they have gotten new breath and recovered their strength again.” For this reason, “it is vain to speak of planting laws, and plotting of policies, til they are altogether subdued.” But were they not subdued by Henry II? Yes, but the Irish then retreated “into the deserts and mountains,” beyond the reach of the laws, as the English could not do in 1066. The Anglo-Norman settlers stayed under the law and enjoyed its benefits among themselves, but when the Irish returned, desperate for food and shelter, they were placed under vassalage by the foreign aristocrats, “who scarcely vouchsafed to impart unto them, the benefit of those laws, under which themselves lived, but every one made his will and commandment a law unto his own vassal.” The law of England “was never properly applied unto the Irish nation, as by a purposed plot of government”; the aristocrats evaded it. Then, when the War of the Roses began, the Anglo-Irish left to fight. The Irish, seeing the countryside “so dispeopled and weakened,” repossessed many of their former lands. And so Ireland has gone ever since—sporadic English attempts to rule interspersed with Irish rebellions in times of English weakness or distraction.

Satisfied with this account of the efficient causes of disorder in Ireland, Eudoxus requests an analysis of the problems of adapting English common law to the circumstances there. Irenaeus sets down as a first principle that laws must “take their first beginning” from “the manners of the people and the abuses of the country” for which they are “invented.” The aim of the laws should be justice, by which he means the prevention of “evils” and the safety of the commonwealth. So, for example, under ordinary circumstances it is wrong to punish thoughts—only words or acts—except when “devis[ing] or purpos[ing] the death of the king.” Regicide threatens the safety of the commonwealth itself, and must be punished capitally even if detected at the planning stage. “So that jus politicum, though it be not of itself just, yet by application, or rather necessity, it is made just; and this only respect maketh all laws just.” English common law, though invented in Normandy, fit the character of the English people; it does not fit the Irish people.

For example, English common law provides for jury trials, with juries “chosen out of the honestest and most substantial freeholders.” But a jury of Irish freeholders will always decide in favor of the Irishman against the Englishman, even against the Queen herself. In the latter cases, the Crown loses revenues. In their dealings with the English generally, the Irish “are most willfully bent,” never hesitating to perjure themselves or to cheat, a “cautelous and wily-headed” people, especially when armed with a smattering of legal knowledge. And if (as Eudoxus) suggests, English magistrates appoint English juries, then the Irishman will “complain he hath no justice.” And if, per impossibile, this could be done without stoking further resentment, witnesses called from “the base Irish people will be as deceitful as the verdicts” of Irish juries—”so little feeling have they of God, or of their own souls’ good.”

Would “heavy laws and penalties” against perverse jurors reform the courts? No, Irenaeus answers: “When a people are inclined to any vice, or have no touch of conscience, nor sense of their evil doings, it is bootless to think to restrain them by any penalties or fear of punishment; but either the occasion is to be taken away, or a more understanding of the right, and shame of the fault is to be imprinted.” For if the lawgiver had prohibited theft among the Lacedemonians or drunkenness among the Flemish, “there should have been few Lacedemonians then left, and fewer Flemings.” Other Irish acts of exploitation, abuse, and evasion of the common law include clever ways of dodging responsibility for the receipt of stolen property. Even outright rebels can avoid confiscation of their lands by the Crown if they convey those lands into a trust, prior to rebelling. They can enjoy their profits from the comfort of exile in some country ruled by “her Majesty’s professed enemies.” Generally, in Ireland and indeed in England, the great lords have too much power and can too readily defy the authority of the monarchy in their struggles to shift the regime toward de facto aristocracy.

In addition to being antiquated, many statute laws, too, are misapplied because the judges have too much leeway in their interpretation. “It is dangerous to leave the sense of the law unto the reason or will of the judges, who are men and may be miscarried by affections, and many other means. But the laws ought to be like unto stony tables, plain steadfast, and immovable.” In Ireland the rule of law is a hard principle to maintain, as when a lord is charged with treason he is required to “bring forth” his kindred in order to be “justified”; he thus assembles a small army of men who serve under the accused traitor, “who may lead them to what he will.” Eudoxus shudders, “In very deed, Irenaeus, it is very dangerous, especially seeing the disposition of all these people is not always inclinable to the best.”

At Eudoxus’ request, Irenaeus turns to a consideration of Irish customs, the Irish way of life, which underlies Irish law. Three peoples have contributed their customs to the Gaelic people: Scythians, Gauls, and English. This comes as no surprise, as “no nation now in Christendom, nor much farther, but is mingled and compounded with others.” Ethnic purity is a myth. And this is a good thing because God in His providence brought northern European nations to the south, where they encountered Christianity.

The interlocutors discuss the difficulty of tracing specific influences by consulting tradition. There can be no “certain hold of any antiquity which is received by tradition, since all men be liars, and may lie when they will.” For example, it is well-established that a people arrived in Ireland from Spain, but they might have been Gauls, Spaniards, Goths, or Moors. Of these peoples, however, the Gauls were the ones who had an alphabet, so he considers them the likely immigrants.

Such mingling can be good or bad, depending on the various sets of customs and the way they mix. The English colonizers have now “degenerated and grown almost Irish.” Eudoxus wonders, again: “What hear I? And is it possible that an Englishman, brought up naturally in such sweet civility as England affords, can find such liking in that barbarous rudeness, that he should forget his own nature, and forgo his own nation?” Yes, as a matter of fact, thanks to “the first evil ordinance of that Commonwealth,” by which Irenaeus evidently means Ireland, not England. But before going any further on that theme, he analyzes the evil traits which now characterize the Irish nation.

Scythians contributed seven. Like their Scythian ancestors, the Irish live in waste spaces, pasturing cattle, which leads to licentiousness, a life beyond the reach of the law. They wear mantles, allowing an outlaw “to cover himself from the wrath of heaven, from the offense of the earth and from the sight of men.” The mantle serves rebels and thieves alike, concealing weapons and booty. Prostitutes disguise themselves and swaddle their bastard children in the mantle, and even housewives can “lie and sleep in it, or… lowse themselves in the sunshine,” evading work. They wear their hair long, enabling themselves to mask their identities. “Uncivil and Scythian-like,” they howl in battle and indulge in “immoderate wailings” at funerals; this “Irish hubbabowe” gives vent to their savage passions. In their battle they go forth in a “confused order of march, in heaps, without any order or array.” Their barbaric religious customs include swearing by their swords and drinking bowls of blood to solemnize their warrior-bonds before battle. And the Irish, like the Scythians, claim that they turn into wolves once a year. The fact that they make such a claim bespeaks a longing for subhuman ferocity in predation.

The Goths contributed the customs of revering and supporting bards and drinking the blood of enemies. As for the English, their decent customs have been perverted by “liberty and ill example.” Making “private wars against each other,” English lords recruit allies among the Irish themselves; this corrupts the English and emboldens the Irish. The English “are now grown to be almost as lewd as the Irish,” except for the ones who live in the Pale. And this is no wonder, as “proud hearts do oftentimes (like wanton colts) kick at their mothers,” including their mother-country. Alliance often entails intermarriage, too. “Great houses there be of the old English of Ireland, which through licentious conversing with the Irish, or marrying, or fostering them, or lack of good nurture, or other such unhappy occasions, have degenerated from their ancient dignity, and are now grown as Irish as Ohanlan’s breech,” which is very Irish indeed.

Eudoxus can only gasp, “Where the lords and chief men wax so barbarous and bastardlike, what shall be hoped of the peasants, and base people?” Irenaeus brings him back to a more sober view. “It is but even the other day since England grew to be civil.” In Henry II’s day, English customs themselves were “very rude and barbarous.” That is to say that the English colonies in Ireland were themselves ill-founded.

For example, the English in Ireland abused their own language by speaking “Irish.” Eudoxus finds this strange, inasmuch as “it hath been ever the use of the conquerors to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his,” as the Romans did. [2] Irenaeus explains this by recalling the English habit of intermarrying with the Irish and/or giving their children to Irish nurses. “The child that sucketh the milk of the nurse, must of necessity learn his first speech of her, the which being the first that is enured to his tongue, is ever after most pleasing to him,” even if he learns English later on. And not only speech: Anglo-Irish children also learn Irish “manners and conditions,” for “small children be like apes, which will affect and imitate what they see done afore them, especially of their nurses whom they love so well, they moreover draw unto themselves, together with their suck, even the nature and disposition of their nurses; for the mind followeth much the temperature of the body; and also the words are the image of the mind, so as, they proceeding from the mind, the mind must needs be affected with the words.” An Irish heart will come from Irish speech, “for out of the abundance of the heart, the tongue speaketh.” The most intimate of infant experiences proves the path to a different regime.

So does the most intimate of adult experiences. Intermarriage with a foreign people is “a dangerous thing in all commonwealths,” as “the simplest sense” perceives. “How can such matching” of English with the Irish “but bring forth and evil race, seeing that commonly the child taketh most of his nature of the mother.” By mothers children “are first framed and fashioned,” and what they learn at her knee will be “hardly ever after forgot.”

Mr. Peace leaves no doubt regarding what habits of heart will be learned from the Irish. They are the habits of warriors. Although Eudoxus thinks that Irenaeus’ description of Irish garb, which reflects Irish spiritedness, takes them away from their discussion of customs, it is not so. If Irish customs underlie all Irish law, warfare underlies all Irish customs. They are Scythians and Goths first, civilized English only superficially if at all.

Thanks to the Goths, they have bards to urge them on. Irenaeus distinguishes bards from poets. They share with poets the task of “set[ting] forth praises and dispraises of men in their poems and rhymes.” “None dare to displease them for fear of running into reproach through their offense, and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men.” They mold public opinion. Mr. Good Opinion asks how they differ from poets. They differ, not in their art but in their use of their art. Poets “do labor to better the manners of men, and through the sweet bait of their numbers, to steal into young spirit a desire of honor and virtue.” Poets “are worthy of great respect.” Not so “these Irish bards.” “Far from instructing young men in moral discipline,” it is “they themselves [who] do more deserve to be sharply disciplined.” They praise not “the doings of good men for the ornaments of their poems, but whom soever they find to be the most licentious of life, most bold and lawless in his doings, most dangerous and desperate in all parts of disobedience an rebellious disposition, him they set up and glorify in their rhymes, him they praise to the people, and to young men make an example to follow.” They excoriate the English and encourage the “lewd liberty” of the Irish. “Evil things are decked out and suborned with the gay attire of goodly words, may easily deceive and carry away the affection of a young mind,” leading it to honor its own passions. As a result, Irish youth are “brought up without awe of parent, without precepts of masters, without fear of offense, not being directed, or employed in any course of life, which may carry them to virtue.” With bardic encouragement, a boy “waxeth most insolent and half mad with the love of himself, and his own lewd deeds; for such a youth, “his music was not the harp, or the lays of love, but the cries of people, and clashing of arms.”

Irish political customs also conduce to disorder. The Irish hold popular assemblies on hills, where disputes between townships are settled. This practice originated not among Scythians or Goths but among the Saxons, but in Ireland it is abused by “the scum of base people,” who “confer of what they list,” inflaming those desires as they do so. As a result, Englishmen who have ventured to attend such meetings have been murdered. Local democracy practiced by “a people so evil-minded” must be restrained. Eudoxus, who harbors republican sentiments, regrets the proposal but Irenaeus firmly insists that the meetings be abolished. The Irish are not ready for self-government; they need a stronger hand, and one not their own. Their very militancy makes them ungovernable: In this “country of war” with armies “scatter[red] around the country,” soldiers routinely requisition food and lodging from civilians. This provokes “great detestation of soldiers” among the common folk, which issues “into hatred of the very government, which draweth upon them such evils.” If soldiers are not seen as protectors but as plunderers, government itself will be distrusted, whoever attempts to govern. This too feeds licentiousness.

The last custom Irenaeus describes is economic. Landlords and freeholders rent farms to tenants on a year-to-year basis, or even during pleasure. Nor will tenants take land for longer periods. As a result, tenants fear landlords’ peremptory demands for both horses and humans, not knowing when their landlord will requisition either or both. The landlord, expecting the departure of his tenant at any time, “hover[s] in expectation of new worlds”—new tenants, new relations. With this unstable combination of liberty and arbitrary rule, tenants never invest in the land, which for them is here today, gone tomorrow. Their homes are “rather swine-steads than houses.” This here today, gone tomorrow attitude toward property injures not only local economies but the commonwealth as a whole.

On religion, his third set of Irish evils, Irenaeus will have “little to say.” The Irish profess Catholicism, but they are “so blindly and brutally informed (for the most part) as that you would rather think them Atheists or Infidels.” The problem stems from “the first institution and planting of religion” in Ireland. By then, religion had been “generally corrupted by [the] popish trumpery” of the priests. “What other could they learn from them, than such trash as was taught them and drink of that cup of fornication with which the purple harlot had then made all nations drunken?” Irenaeus asks, a touch rhetorically. Priests, pope, and people “have all erred and gone out of the way together.” So far, no reform has been possible, again because Ireland has been continually at war. “Instructions in religion needeth quiet times, and ere we seek to settle a sound discipline in the clergy, we must purchase peace unto the laity; for it is an ill time to preach amongst swords.” That is, civil or regime reform and stability must precede ecclesiastical reform.

It isn’t that Irenaeus lauds the Church of England. Simony, greed, “fleshly incontinence,” and sloth infect that church, too. It’s simply that the Roman Church is even worse. Merely replacing English with Irish clergy won’t help, as Irish prejudice against the English will prevent any real reform.

Given these legal, conventional, and religious evils, what is to be done? Irenaeus first highlights actions that haven’t worked. Certain military captains will not prosecute war vigorously, worrying that if they win they will be out of work. Some of the Crown’s appointed governors also do little, hoping to prolong their appointments. Other governors will conceal problems, passing them on to their successor. “The governors usually are envious one of another’s greater glory.” As a result, there is no peace. “The longer that government thus continueth, in the worse course will that realm be; for it is all in vain that they now strive and endeavor by fair means and peaceable plots to redress the same, without first removing all those inconveniences and new framing (as it were in the forge) all that is worn out of fashion.” The Irish will continue to resist, and resist successfully, any reform because they fear expropriation of their property, as happened when the Norman English first occupied their island, so long as dilatory half-measures prevail.

“Therefore, the reformation must now be the strength of a greater power,” for “it is vain to prescribe laws, where no man cares to keep them, nor fears the danger of breaking them.” The sword must come first. “All these evils must first be cut away with a strong hand, before any good can be planted,” as a tree must be pruned in order to “bring forth any good fruit.” Mr. Peace does not shrink from the task: “Where no other remedy may be found, nor no hope of recovery had, there must needs this violent means be used.”

He hastens to say that he does not recommend what we now call genocide. “Far be it from me that I should ever think so desperately, or wish so uncharitably.” It is “not the people which are evil.” And those among them who are evil “by good ordinances and government may be made good; but the evil that is of itself evil will never become good.”

Irenaeus then offers a detailed and comprehensive plan for regime change. First, England must send an army adequate to put down the ongoing rebellion. This means a force of 10,000 foot soldiers and 1,000 cavalry. It will take them about eighteen months to do it. These men must be well provisioned (as they are not now), so that they won’t need to requisition supplies from civilians. Military efforts should focus on the strongest rebel force, the one led by the Earl of Tyrone. Because the Irish are guerrilla fighters, it is useless to pursue them. Instead, set up four encampments in Ulster. From these encampments, gather intelligence on the enemy’s movements and drive him from one English stronghold to another. Do it in winter, when there will be less cover, more hardship. Offer amnesty to all those who surrender in twenty days from the beginning of the campaign.

After this, the remaining rebels will be the hardened and incorrigible ones, men upon whom no compassion need be wasted. Above all, lay waste to their food supply—cattle and grain. This worked in Munster (where Spenser had served), and Irenaeus doesn’t spare Eudoxus a picture of the result. After eighteen months, the rebels there “brought to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; the spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat of the dead carrions, happy were they if they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, insofar as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves.” “In all that war, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine, which they themselves had wrought”—presumably by their refusal to surrender sooner. Eudoxus can only say, “It is a wonder that you tell and more to be wondered how it should so shortly come to pass.”

No need to wonder, Irenaeus rejoins. The battle-ready Irish have no secure property. Accustomed to live off the land, they readily take from one another, up to and including devouring one another. As for the English destruction of livestock and crops, “this is very necessary to be done for the soon finishing of the war.”

Eudoxus sees a problem. When Arthur, Lord Grey imposed exactly this policy, the Queen’s compassion was aroused and those around her claimed that “he regarded not the life of her subjects no more than dogs.” Irenaeus agrees that “the Good Lord [was] blotted with the name of a bloody man,” when he was in fact a “gentle, affable, loving, and temperate” man acting under “necessity.” At Smerwick he made no promises to the Spaniards, who were not “lawful enemies”—having admitted to being adventurers, sent by neither the Spanish king nor the pope—and therefore not protected by the law of nations. As for his dealings with the rebellious lords, “he spared not the heads and principals of any mischievous practice or rebellion, but showed sharp judgment on them, chiefly for example’s sake, and that all the meaner sort, which also then were generally affected with that evil, might be terror thereof be reclaimed and saved, if it might be possible.” [3]

Irenaeus insists that before this harsh course of action be initiated, “it must be foreseen and assured, that after once entering into this course of reformation, there be afterwards no remorse or drawing back for the sigh of any such rueful objects as must thereupon follow, nor for compassion of their calamities, seeing that by no other means it is possible to recure them, and that these are not of will, but of very urgent necessity.” The property of those executed for their crimes should go to their heirs, not to the Queen. In this Irenaeus takes a thought from Machiavelli, he observes that men feel the sting of losing their patrimony more sharply than that of losing their father. Perhaps to strengthen Elizabeth’s resolution, Irenaeus recalls that she had raised up the chief rebel, the Earl of Tyrone, who now takes advantage of her kindness. And if any might question the right of England to rule Ireland in the first place, Ireland belongs to England by right of conquest, a feature of the law of nations—the right the Anglo-Irish themselves invoke against the Crown, when they resist its authority. [4] Lands owned by rebels who are not executed will be confiscated and added to Crown lands.

Very well then, Irenaeus, once the war is over, what do you propose to do with the victorious troops? Will they not be dangerous if they return to England, or hire themselves out as mercenaries for foreign powers? Irenaeus would maintain 6000 of the troops in garrisons on Irish soil; the remainder should be given farms there. Some will be assigned duty in Munster, the likely point of any Spanish attack. Few if any will return to England.

The enemy must be disarmed and all but the leaders should be given land to farm. Other Irish commoners can be made tenant farmers on English-owned plantations, so that they can be watched, with the garrisons on call if any serious trouble arises. The plantation owners will pay for the soldiers’ upkeep, needing them for protection; this will relieve the Queen of any burden.  Indeed, such a standing army will prove less expensive than sending troops over to Ireland every seven years or so, to quell the latest rebellion. This simply reprises the Roman policies when they conquered England. The lack of such policies explain why Henry II’s conquest didn’t issue in civil peace.

Further, each garrison would have a town associated with it, a commercial town populated by additional English settlers. With civil peace assured, increased prosperity for Ireland, and increased revenues for the Crown will surely follow.

Irenaeus disapproves of locating the Lord Deputy’s office in Dublin, within the Pale, on the western shore. He should rule from Athy, “the main-mast of the ship,” located in the Earldom of Kildare along the River Barrow.  Kildare is the section directly west of the Pale, and therefore a strategic borderland where Irish and Anglo-Irish influences meet—an inflection point, as it were, and also the place where the rebel Fitzgeralds live. From there, the Lord Deputy should act on the general guidelines established by the Queen’s council of ministers, but he should be supervised, and subject to review by a new officer, the Lord President, a man trusted by the Queen for his justice and equity. However, within that framework of safeguards, he should be given much greater discretion to act with energy and rapidity as a genuine executive of the laws, not needing to consult with his superiors before making a move. In recurring to this point near the end of the dialogue, Irenaeus will add, that “this (I remember) is worthily observed by Machiavel in his discourses upon Livy, where he commendeth the manner of the Roman government, in giving absolute power to all their Consuls and Governors, which if they abused, they should afterwards dearly answer it: and the contrary thereof he reprehendeth in the States of Venice, and Florence, and many other principalities of Italy who used to limit their chief officers so straightly, as that thereby oftentimes they have lost such happy occasions as they would never come into again.”

After a detailed discussion of specific actions to be taken to pacify the several most rebellious regions, Irenaeus concludes with his recommendations to remedy the three main “evils” he had outlined earlier. Regarding law, at this point “we cannot now apply laws fit for the people, as in the first institution of commonwealths it ought to be,” and as he had wished it had been done by Henry II and his colleagues. With English common law longstanding, “we will apply the people, and it them to the laws.” This can become possible only because many more English will settle in Ireland and participate in the Irish parliament, and because in the aftermath of the war the Irish will be more submissive. Irenaeus also recommends that the Irish upper house be packed with English aristocrats. Since the Irish nobles fomented the rebellion, not the people, they deserve to be shouldered aside, at least to some extent, in the Irish House of Lords.

Irish submissiveness can be prolonged, and civility enhanced, if the Crown divides the country into small, easily policed subsections. This will rid the country of the bandits and will also facilitate a regularized system of tithing. The precedent here is what King Alfred did in England when it resembled Ireland in its lawlessness, with “every corner having its Robin Hood in it.” With officials appointed by the Crown and answerable to it, these English-style shires will ensure that revenues are “withdrawn from [the] lords, and subjected to [the] Prince.” “By this the people are broken into man small parts, like little streams, that they cannot easily come together into one head,” “adhering unto great men.” In all this one readily sees the lineaments of a modern state, wherein a subordinated and co-opted aristocracy finds itself replaced by agents of the central government.

Irenaeus is confident that these new legal and institutional arrangements will foster reform of the Anglo-Irish aristocrats who exploit their tenants, cheat Her Majesty out of her rightful revenues, and become too Irish. The Old English “need a sharper reformation than the very Irish, for they are much more stubborn, and disobedient to law and government than the Irish be, and more malicious to the English that daily are sent over.” This elicits a shudder from sober Eudoxus: “Lord! How quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!” Irenaeus demurs, a bit: “No times have been without bad men…. Neither is it the nature of the country to alter men’s manners, but the bad minds of them, who having been brought up at home under a straight full of duty and obedience, being always restrained by sharp penalties from lewd behavior, so soon as they come thither, where they see laws more slackly tended, and the hard restraint which they were used unto now slacked, they grow more loose and careless of their duty; and as it is the nature of all men to love liberty, so they become flat libertines, and fall to all licentiousness, more boldly daring to disobey the law, through the presumption of favor and friendship, than any Irish dare.” With reformed laws, some of the dangers of English and Irish living together will be diminished, especially if they both must pay the same tithes.

As his final legal stroke, Irenaeus would ban the use of Irish names. New family names should be chosen, a surname description of the man’s trade, or “some quality of his body or mind,” or the name of his dwelling place. No more “Oes and Macks”—O’Brian (for example) meaning the grandson of Brian, McDonald meaning the grandson of Donald. The Irish way of naming was introduced for “the strengthening of the Irish” by recalling family lineages. Prohibiting the practice will help to blend the English and Irish populations rightly, so that each Irishman “shall in short time quite forget his Irish nation.”

As for customs, what Eudoxus calls the “manner of life,” Irenaeus intends to tame Irish warlikeness. Each non-freeholder shall have a trade. All trades are either manual, intellectual, or mixed. First and foremost, Irish commoners should become agriculturists, as agriculture is “the enemy of war,” replacing aggression with patience, contempt for property with respect for it. Husbandry is “the nurse of thrift, and the daughter of industry and labor.” In this it contrasts with herding, which conduces to habits of command, to marshaling masses of the obedient, and to long periods of idle dreaming which stoke ambitions of conquest—all consonant with a warlike people.

For others, a liberal education is indispensable, especially for “the sons of lords.” “That wretched realm of Ireland wanteth the most principal [trade], that is, the intellectual; therefore, in seeking to reform her state, it is especially to be looked into.” Liberal education can teach the arts of “civil conversation”—precisely what glory-loving would-be warrior scions of the Irish aristocracy need, if they are to participate in a civil not military society.

As a last-resort discouragement to the old way of life, and to give teeth to the new one, the Queen should appoint Provost Marshalls to patrol the countryside with a set of deputies. These men will round up stragglers and runaways, “terrify[ing] the idle rogues,” and wielding power of life and death over them.

Eudoxus calls liberal education second only to “the knowledge and fear of God.” Irenaeus has a few thoughts on religion. In noticeable contrast to the civil order, religious orthodoxy “is not sought forcibly to be impressed into [the Irish] with terror and sharp penalties, as now is the manner, but rather delivered and intimated with mildness and gentleness, so as it may not be hated afore it is understood, and [its] Professors despised and rejected.” Nor should Englishmen take the forefront. “Discreet ministers of their own countrymen” should be “sent among” the Irish, so as not further to associate Protestantism with the English. Irenaeus esteems the examples of St. Patrick and St. Columba, who proved that converting the Irish to Christianity was not impossible, even if they left the job woefully incomplete. He criticizes Anglican ministers for lack of energy in their missionary work, unlike their rivals, the Jesuits. He recommends repairing churches, in order to draw the people into them voluntarily.

Returning to matters secular, Irenaeus would build not only churches but better transportation infrastructure—roads and bridges which would support bigger markets and more national unity. He wants to see more market towns, with a ban on black markets supplemented by the branding of livestock, which will discourage both cattle-rustling and livestock smuggling.

He ends by adjuring his countrymen to remove legal corruption respecting public offices. The Lord Deputy must not sell offices “for money,” nor sell pardons, shares of bishoprics, or commercial licenses. The same prohibition goes for cronyism.

Spenser himself succinctly summarized his thoughts for the benefit of the Queen in “A Briefe Note of Ireland,” dated October 1598, a year before he died. First, “there can be no conformity of government where there is no conformity of religion”; second, “there can be no sound agreement between two equal countries” within the same empire; third, “there can be no assurance of peace where the worst sort are stronger.”

Of these precepts, the matter of religious conformity would be more effectively solved by religious toleration, or better, religious rights so long as the practices claimed by the religious do not violate civil order. That is (and to use an anachronism) the liberalism Spenser himself exhibits in his intention to shift the Irish, and especially Irish and Anglo-Irish aristocrats, away from war and toward peaceful civil and commercial ways of life would be supplemented by religious freedom. In this, he is seriously handicapped by his lack of a theory of natural right which might undergird the practice of religious liberty.

The matter of empire would be solved by the end of genuine empires and, in the case of what was soon to become Great Britain, the establishment of the British Commonwealth. As for the claim that peace cannot prevail when the evil predominate, that stands, despite the efforts of Bernard Mandeville and other ultra-Machiavellian political thinkers and practitioners. Like the later liberals, Spenser would dilute the evil influences within all human hearts by carefully-designed political institutions.

In considering regime change, Spenser enjoys the advantage of knowing what a regime is, in all its dimensions. The purposes of a good regime may be seen in the names of his interlocutors, “Peace” and “Good Opinion.” He clearly identifies who will rule in Ireland. He sets down the ruling structures to be established by law. And he understands the importance of custom, the way of life of a people. He sees how all these regime elements relate to each other.

Americans have undertaken regime change for themselves, and for nations they have defeated in war, on several occasions. Like Spenser, they have found that lasting regime change occurs only if the ruled consent to it (as did the Amerindian nations the Washington administration reformed) or, alternatively, if the ruled are first devastated and then supervised by the conqueror (as in Germany and Japan, after the Second World War). Half-measures induced by humanitarian critics prove ineffective and ultimately inhumane.

 

Notes

1. The poet cited is Jeun de Meun in The Romance of the Rose. He is following Thomas Aquinas, in contradistinction to William Gower’s Confessio Amantis, in which not the wise man but the prayerful, pious man rules the stars by the grace of God.
2. Not quite so: one must recall the Trojan-Latin settlement, described in the Aeneid.
3. In his 1598 report to Elizabeth, “A Briefe Note of Ireland,” Spenser took up this matter directly with Her Majesty. “Great force must be the instrument and famine must be the means, for till Ireland be famished it can not be subdued.” (See The Poetical Works, p. 849.)
4. The right of conquest proceeds from the mercy the conqueror has shown the conquered: he has allowed him to live. Obviously, this can apply only if the conqueror fought a just war in the first place. The English likely could have claimed that their war of conquest was just because the Irish had raided English shores repeatedly, for many years.