This is a series of seven documents found the Irish State Papers. They were calendared separately under 1598, 1599 and 1601 to represent certain events then taking place or where the date seemed most convenient but they make more sense when they are combined and analysed together and indeed acquire significance as such. As recognized by the titles given by the calendar editors to some of the documents, they are in fact passages and notes for a projected history. Apart from an account of the Battle of the Yellow Ford in Ulster, these writings mainly concern the 1598 revolts in Munster and South Leinster and their aftermath. What they amount to is an apology for the actions of Thomas Butler, earl of Ormond, as Lord Lieutenant General of Ireland in this crisis period. Indeed they incorporate a number of documents, relating to Ormond or which passed to and from him at this time that serve to justify the actions he took. Most notably it includes an explanation of why Field Marshal Sir Henry Bagenal rather than Ormond led crown forces to relieve the Blackwater Fort in Ulster as well as the earl's own role immediately after that disaster in saving the Munster towns from the spread of revolt in the South. Specifically these documents carry unique information about the terror campaign of the McSheehys against the Munster plantation, about the outbreak of 1598 revolt in Munster, the failure of the provincial presidency's response, the flight of the planters to the towns, the state the towns were then in and the twists and turns of Mountgarrett and other gentry across the south as Ormond sought to restore order. The execution of Murrogh Óg McSheehy in Cork city and flights of Justice William Saxey and Bishop William Lyon out of harm's way are vividly portrayed. There is also a reference to Edmund Spenser's property at Kilcolman in North County Cork being attacked not in 1598 but in 1597. Interestingly, although the author makes reference to the massacre of fleeing planters, he does not recite the atrocity stories luridly told by English commentators at the time of the 1598 revolt.
In stylometric tests of the first six documents along with other Munster revolt-related manuscripts, the author was revealed as the conservative Welsh churchman, Dr Meredith Hanmer (1544/5–1604).1 These documents matched exactly with text from his early Irish history entitled The Chronicle of Ireland, which was published posthumously by Sir James Ware in 1633. This is made more obvious when one recognizes that that the author of both lots of text uses 'Anno' to introduce a new year and refers to the audience as 'gentle reader'. Furthermore the apologetic element and access to archival materials is easily explained when one realizes that Hanmer was Ormond's military chaplain in this period and went on campaign with him. This determination permits the addition of the seventh document from 1601 - 'Notes of certain events' which also has Ormond information and uses 'anno' - that the calendar editor Robert Pentland Mahaffy supposed to be by Hanmer. Although Mahaffy had not edited the manuscript portions in the previous two volumes and made no retrospective linkage, he clearly recognized Hanmer's handwriting as he was responsible for calendaring the Hanmer papers at the end of the following 1601-03 volume. The identification of the author of these seven documents also dates their writing to sometime between the Battle of Kinsale and Hanmer's death in 1604. Overall the documents reveal considerable knowledge of the plantation of Munster and a scurrilous view of the planters, Protestant clergy and English administrators of the province. Here Hanmer had personal experience as a holder of benefices in Waterford and Cork, though he may also be echoing the opinions of Ormond himself. Added into the mix with the rest of the Hanmer's papers on medieval matters, it looks like these documents were intended to form part of a second follow-up chronicle by him on Ireland since the Norman conquest. In it Hanmer was plainly setting out to repay the patronage he had received from Ormond by presenting a positive picture of him to posterity following the latter's captivity and effective retirement from politics. Hanmer's death prevented this exercise coming to fruition. In the event Ormond's historical image was burnished by a Neo-Latin epic by Irish poet Dermot O'Meara but it is a great pity that Hanmer's history was never completed as his might otherwise have provided us with a marvellous gutting of the Tudor Conquest of Ireland from inside the belly of beast.2
Apart from switching the first two documents, the rest have been put in the same order as they appear in the calendar. The rough and incomplete nature of the work, still plainly in the early stages of research by the author, is indicated in a host of ways. There are gaps on various pages for information to be filled in, a large number of interlineations including some on flaps pasted to the relevant page, deletions some of which were later reused elsewhere and blanks left for details such as Christian names to be added. The deletions are here shown crossed out whilst blanks are indicated by two hyphens. Where marginal annotations originally occurred, they have now been set adjacent in the body of the text in square brackets. Minor additions to make sense of the text in certain places have been underlined. All the documents are now fully transcribed. Commissions and letters inserted by the author that were summarized in the calendars appear in italics. The long list of Irish — mostly Ryans — in revolt in Tipperary and Kilkenny previously truncated is complete. Also omitted text, indicated by a long ellipsis in the calendar, relating to the colonists being stripped naked has been restored. The idea of ‘the women covering with their hands that which nature commanded to be kept secret’ was obviously too indecorous for Victorian editor Ernest George Atkinson!
School of History, UCC