interpreters and the politics of translation and traduction in sixteenth-century ireland

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Interpreters and the Politics of Translation and Traduction in Sixteenth-Century IrelandAuthor(s): Patricia PalmerSource: Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No. 131 (May, 2003), pp. 257-277Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30006929 .

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IRISH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Vol. XXXIII No. 131 May 2003

Interpreters and the politics of translation and traduction in sixteenth-century Ireland

T he story of late Tudor Ireland is, in part, a story of language. The political and military developments that brought New English and native

Irish into a closer and increasingly violent proximity also brought two languages into confrontation. The issue of language difference became caught up in the wider conflict: the Irish language joined glibs, brehons and pastoral nomadism as yet another element in the Elizabethans' dystopic assessment of Gaelic Ireland; in turn, the promotion of English - and the linguistic colonisation which that entailed - assumed its place in their agenda of conquest.1 Leaving aside larger questions of policy and ideology, language itself - and the experience of language difference - was part of the texture of that encounter. Yet the question of precisely how exchanges across the language frontier were managed has been largely ignored. The misunderstand- ings between Elizabethan newcomers and the Gaelic Irish were, at their simplest level, literal. Again and again, their meeting would have been marked by linguistic fumbling: by sign language and pidgin phrases, by mis- pronunciations and mistakes, by staggered exchanges mediated by interpreters. Historians are inclined to take the transparency of language for granted. They can cheerfully record the burden of a parley without wonder- ing about the mechanics of precisely how it was conducted. Exceptionally, Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh pauses to ask 'whether they [natives and newcomers] could speak the same language' and recognises an historiographi- cal gap:'The question is of obvious importance when dealing with relations between different societies, yet nothing specific has been written on this topic.' R. W. Bailey concurs:'we know virtually nothing of the truchmen and truchwomen who served to bridge the linguistic divide' of sixteenth-century Ireland.2 In 1589 the administration brought charges of misconduct against Sir Richard Bingham, the lord president of Connacht, which included the allegation that he had blocked Provost-Marshal Fowle from 'draw[ing] the rebels to a treaty'. Bingham retorted that he had not sent Fowle to parley

1Both issues are explored in Patricia Palmer, Language and conquest in early modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001).

2Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, 'The English presence in early seventeenth- century Ireland' in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Natives and newcomers: essays on the making of Irish colonial society, 1534-1641 (Dublin, 1986), p. 189; R. W. Bailey, Images of English (Cambridge, 1991), p. 29.

257



258 Irish Historical Studies

with the Burkes,'for that he understoud not their language'.3 Bingham's exas- perated response highlights the questions addressed in this article: How were such negotiations managed? And how far did the management of cross- cultural communications catch the inflection of the wider political conflict?

I

Sixteenth-century Ireland was overwhelmingly hibernophone. English was under pressure even in the Pale;4 beyond, Irish was paramount almost everywhere. It was, Sir Henry Sidney noted, the first language of the princi- pal lords of Munster whom he met in 1575, when he had to rely on Lord Louth, 'being of this Countrye Birthe and of their Language ... [to] per- swade theim to leave their Barbaritie'.s When Conor O'Brien, the third earl of Thomond, joined James FitzMaurice's rebellion in 1580, Sidney sent Ormond and Ralph Rokeby, the chief justice of Connacht, to parley with him. Thomond delivered his 'very obstinate and arrogant terms' in Irish, which Ormond had to translate for Rokeby, who 'understood no Irish'.6 In Connacht the only 'cheefe gents: of the province that speaketh english' were, it was reported to Burghley in 1591, the earl of Thomond, the bishop of Killlaloe, the baron of Inchiquin, the earl of Clanricard's son, the bishop of Clonfert, the archbishop of Tuam, Lord Bermingham, Donough O'Connor Sligo and David O'Dowd.7 English had made even less headway in Ulster. In Fermanagh in the 1560s English was so rare as to be almost as good as a cipher. The precocious anglophone Shane Maguire wrote to the lord lieutenant, the earl of Sussex,'bechetching you to wrytte me no more letters in Latyn, becausse that I wold not that nother clerke nor non other man of his contrey shuld knowe your mynd, wherfor doo you wryte all your mynd in Englys'. Even at the end of the Nine Years War, Fynes Moryson could report that all the gentlemen and commoners of Ulster 'and the very jurimen putt upon life and death and all tryalls in law, commonly spake Irish, many Spanish, and fewe or none could or would speake English'."

3'Report of... commissioners into Connaught',4 May 1589 (Cal. S.R Ire., 1588-92, p. 173); 'Answer of Sir Rd Bingham to the matters wherewith he is charged', Nov. 1589 (P.R.O., SP 63/148/39).

4E.g. S.P Hen. VIII, ii, 6, 8,162,229,479; Lord Chancellor Gerrard to commissioners, 29 Mar. 1578 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1574-85, p. 130);'H.C.' to Essex, Mar. 1599 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1598-9, p. 507); Holinshed's Irish chronicle, 1577, ed. Liam Miller and E. E. Power (Dublin, 1979), p. 14; Art Cosgrove, 'Hiberniores ipsis Hibernis' in idem and Donal McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish history presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), p. 14; Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland (Cork, 1996), p. 23.

5Letters and memorials of state..,. written and collected by Sir Henry Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney and his brother, Sir Robert Sidney, ed. Arthur Collins (2 vols, London, 1746) (henceforth cited as Sidney letters), i, 91.

6Ciaran Brady (ed.),A viceroy's vindication? Sir Henry Sidney's memoir of service in Ireland, 1556-1578 (Cork, 2002), p. 74.

7[Henry Malby?], 'Discourse addressed to L[or]d Burghley', 1591 (P.R.O., SP 63/161/52).

8Thomas Wright (ed.), Queen Elizabeth and her times (London, 1838), pp 110-11; Charles Hughes (ed.), Shakespeare's Europe (London, 1903), p. 214.



PALMER - Interpreters and politics in sixteenth-century Ireland 259

Conversely, as Christopher Nugent, baron of Delvin, lamented,'feawe or none of the Englyshe natione borne and bredd in England, ever had [the] gifte' of mastering Irish.9 Captain Tom Lee, despite his long sojourn in frontier society, could muster only 'broken Irishe' when confronted by an Irish- speaking O'Byrne, and fell back on the translation services of Piers Hackett.'o Though raised in Oriel, Henry Bagenal had to rely on interpreters: he learned from Conor Roe Maguire that Hugh Maguire was con- spiring with O'Neill and O'Donnell,'Phelim O'Hanlan [lord of Orior] being interpreter'; he needed the assistance of James MacManus, who 'speaketh English perfectly being in times past servant to Sir Lucas Dillon', when gathering evidence against Hugh O'Neill.n1 Sir Nicholas Malby, uniquely among his compatriots, earns a mention from the Four Masters for being 'foglamtha i mbdrlaibh agus i tteangthoibh oildn iarthair eorpa'. (Nicholas Dawtrey too had some command of Irish which he happily flaunted in his 'Booke of questions and answars': the Irish enemies 'cry Hughat an slo, or Hughat an Sassany'; they sail in boats 'called lunge pladd'.)12

Often, therefore, the meeting of native and newcomer was an encounter with language difference. Recourse to interpreters was inescapable - especially since some of the leading Irish spoke no English. So Sir Robert Gardiner and Anthony St Leger discovered when negotiating with Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell. When O'Neill moved away, leaving them alone with O'Donnell, they 'conceived [that] although he did understand English yet could hardly speak it'. Gardiner immediately 'called Sir Henry Duke to interpret his speeches, by whom I did learn what he said'. Similarly, when Owney MacRory joined Hugh O'Neill and the queen's commissioners at a parley, Ormond, the chief commissioner, had to switch to 'using long speeches in Irish to that lewd young man, because he spake not English'.13 Richard Bingham's account of how an informer alerted him to the where- abouts of thirty 'knaves' - whom he then slaughtered as they 'weare makinge merrie rostenge of Beefe' - reveals the limits of their shared language (though it does not allow us to guess whether that language was Irish or English). Bingham explains that Maguire, the informer, surprised him in the hall of Boyle castle:'I demaundinge what he was; he answered that he was a poore man and had some secret busines with me wherupon I wente asyde and tooke Renolds to interpret betweene us.' Their shared language is adequate for preliminaries but not for serious disclosure. (In a graphic illustration of the violence that often infested cross-cultural communications, Renolds's closing assignment in this affair was to bring Bingham's brother George the fruit of his linguistic mediation, 'a horse loade of heads').14

9Facs. nat. MSS Ire., iv, pt 1, p. xxxv. 10Deposition of Brian McTurlagh McPhelim Boye, May 1598 (P.R.O., SP 63/202,

II/88 ix). I am indebted to Kenneth Nicholls for this reference. "Supplement to Bagenal's journal, Nov. 1593 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1592-6, pp 181-2). '2'Learned in the languages and tongues of the islands of western Europe'

(A.EM., iii, 1814-15); 'A booke of questions and answars concerning the warrs or rebellions of the kingdome of Irelande', ed. Hiram Morgan, in Anal. Hib., no. 36 (1995), pp 96, 122.

13Gardiner to privy council, 16 Mar. 1594 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1592-6, p. 224); Bishop Jones to Burghley, 22 Mar. 1597[/8] (Cal. S.P Ire., 1598-9, p. 87).

14Sir Richard Bingham to George Bingham, 17 Dec. 1593 (P.R.O., SP 63/172/38 ii).




Hibernophone leaders were accustomed to dealing with the administration through interpreters. Conn O'Neill used Latin-speaking monks as interpreters, while Manus O'Donnell communicated with the Dublin administration through the Old English merchant John Fagan. Patrick MacRory MacMahon's priest handled his communications with Sussex through Latin. Shane O'Neill's engagement with the English-speaking world was managed by the Flemings of Meath. One of Hugh O'Neill's sons sent John Fleming to Sir Samuel Bagenal with a message to be delivered 'by worde off mouth for fear off interception' and a letter in Irish. (Fleming's translation of the letter for Bagenal included hibernicisms like 'labanaghes' (ldbinach, boor); Bagenal, whose grasp of Irish seems to have been unsteady, superscribed the technically incorrect gloss 'new men'.) The archbishop of Cashel'lent' Teig O'Corkran to Maguire, who had 'great use of his pen and his English tongue' when dealing with Lord Deputy Chichester.s

Until well into the second half of the century Latin was the main lingua franca. The leading Gaelic Irish figures used Latin-trained secretaries to communicate with the government, as Sir John O'Doherty did when tipping off Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam that MacSweeney was harbouring Armada survivors. At times Latin provided valuable conversational common ground. Sir Henry Sidney enjoyed the comfort of a shared language at the end of a pun- ishing journey through Mayo:'I found Mac William [Iochtar, i.e. Sein Mac Oliver] verie sencible, though wantinge the Englishe Tongue, yet understanding the Lattin'. At Greenwich, Grace O'Malley conversed with Elizabeth I in Latin.16 Throughout Europe Latin was in decline as the language of diplomacy by the late 1500s; in Ireland the colonial administration's mistrust of clerical Latinists and its concerted promotion of English ensured that by the 1580s English was emerging as the replacement lingua franca.'7

II

Curiously, little of the complex linguistic texture of sixteenth-century Ireland finds its way into Elizabethan accounts of Ireland. Irish is strangely absent from the colonial tracts; the interpreter is almost nowhere to be seen. Repeatedly English correspondents presented speeches delivered in Irish

15Thomas Wright, The history of Ireland, (3 vols, London, 1848), i, 1356; Brendan Bradshaw, 'Manus the Magnificent' in Cosgrove & McCartney (eds), Studies in Ir. hist., p. 98; E. P. Shirley, The history of the county of Monaghan (London, 1879), p. 42; James Hogan, 'Shane O'Neill comes to the court of Elizabeth' in S6amus Pender (ed.), FJilscribhinn Torna (Cork, 1947), p. 167; Sir Samuel Bagenal to - , n.d. (P.R.O., SP 63/206/149); examination of Teig O'Corkran, 11 Aug. 1606 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1603-6, pp 567-8).

16Advertisements from Duke, 26 Oct. 1588 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1588-92, p. 64); Sidney letters, i, 104; Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O'Dowd (eds), Women in early modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991), p. 164.

17Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance diplomacy (London, 1955), pp 236-7. English anglicisation policy is reviewed in Palmer, Language & conquest, ch. 4.




as though they had been made, uncomplicatedly, in English. For example, in his version of another parley with O'Neill and O'Donnell, Bishop Jones records:' "Thsh", said Tyrone' - as indeed Tyrone could have done; but Jones's O'Donnell too is impossibly fluent in English: 'I will allow no Englishman either to dwell in my country, or to have any government in any of the lands that I challenge.' Even when the interpreter is solidly inside the frame, he is not necessarily listed in the credits: Sir William Russell's journal records that the proclamation of O'Neill and O'Donnell as traitors was 'delivered by one - both in English and Irish'.'8 There is, I would suggest, more at work here than simple narrative convention. When compared with their Spanish contemporaries, English colonists seem notably inattentive to native languages.9 The absence of linguistic self-reflexiveness which char- acterises sixteenth-century English narratives of discovery and colonisation had political significance. Ciaran Brady remarks on the Elizabethans' 'quite deliberate decision to minimise the distinctiveness of Gaelic culture as an entity in itself ',20 and their consistent erasure of Irish was one way of down- playing the salience of Irish dissent. Interestingly, arrangements elided in accounts from Ireland were spelled out when exported. Thus St Leger's report to Henry VIII on Murrough O'Brien's surrender makes no mention of how those negotiations were handled. A later dispatch, however, detail- ing arrangements for the investiture of Murrough and his nephew Donough at Greenwich, forthrightly announces that James Sherlocke, a Waterford merchant, will accompany them, 'whiche James can well speake the language to interprete the same to your Highnes'. When a spymaster in Flanders sent an Irish gentleman with intelligence from the Spanish camp to Essex, he specified that 'he should be examined with an Irish interpreter, being unable to utter his mind in any other language'. Moreover, officials were happy to co-opt the translation process when it reinforced their own message. The preamble to the Latin indenture between 'Sir Donald O'Conchyr, alias O'Connor Sligo' and Elizabeth in January 1568 records that O'Connor came to Hampton Court and declared 'in his Irish tongue by an interpreter' that he was submitting to the illustrious princess, forgoing the uncivil practices of his ancestors.21

But in Ireland there was no such explicitness.'The declaration of Charles Egerton, taken before the Council in Ireland: 25 September, 1579' illustrates the pattern by simultaneously enacting and unmasking it. Egerton reports on a meeting between the chief citizens of Carrickfergus and Thrlough Luineach O'Neill. His narrative consistently occludes questions of language: all the action is narrated in a mixture of direct and indirect speech, as though transacted, without interruption, in English:

18Bishop Jones to Burghley, 18 Apr. 1598 (Cal. S.F Ire., 1598-9, p. 119); Lord Deputy Russell's journal, 23 June 1595 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1589-1600, p. 232).

19See Palmer, Language & conquest, ch. 1. 20Ciaran Brady, The chief governors: the rise and fall of reform government in

Tudor Ireland, 1536-1588 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 245. 21St Leger to Henry VIII, 14 May 1543 (S.P Hen. VIII, iii, 450, 454); James Digges

to Essex, 20 Oct. 1598 (H.M.C., Salisbury, viii, 401); indenture with Sir Donal O'Connor Sligo, 20 Jan. 1568 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1515-74, p. 378).




Then hee [Turlough] asked what they had brought him, one tould him both beere and wyne; it was well for them said hee that they have done so, yf they had not come my horses should have eaten their corne, my men their beefes, and their towne should have been burnt.

With both sides seated in a circle on the floor of Thrlough's camp, O'Neill launched with equal extravagance into drink and speechifying, making 'manie more badd speaches', reported by quotation and paraphrase. Only the context hints that their exchanges crossed the faultline between Irish and English; the conjectured crossings are invisible in a narrative where all the characters speak English with almost baroque fluency. Indeed, the text might force recon- sideration of the extent to which English had penetrated Ulster were it not for its very last sentence, which throws all the crisscrossings that preceded it into relief: 'All theis speeches were interpreted by Nicholas Wylles, Mayor, and William Piers, junior,William Doben, Alderman, and Michaell Savage, Sherife, and John Trondell, lieutenant to Brewerton.'22 Translation, especially unacknowledged translation, always offers the possibility of inflecting the original meaning with the values of the target language: the 'badness' of Turlough's 'badd speaches' is a question, quite literally, of interpretation.

To reinsert the interpreter into the narrative of the Elizabethan conquest, therefore, is to restore the complex texture of cross-cultural exchanges in sixteenth-century Ireland. Though the reconstruction is complicated by the invisibility of interpreters in the colonial record, texts which at first seem sealed off from Irish are scored by a tracery of hair-line cracks, little hints in the texts which allow us to glimpse languages in contact and infer the presence of interpreters. Sometimes the existence of interpreters can be guessed at only from almost imperceptible wrinkles in the syntax which point to a linguistic baton-change, as in the following example between'utterance' (by Drury and Fitton) and 'delivery' (by persons unknown):'which words so by me uttered and delivered at my request to some of them hath undoubtedly bred no small terror in their minds'. On another occasion the chieftains Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne and Waiter Reagh Fitzgerald meet with Russell; of the parley itself we hear nothing except that 'the effect of theyr speech was to desier' pardon. Sidney's roundabout reference to holding 'interpar- lance by commissioners' with Sorley Boy MacDonnell obscures the identity of his intermediaries but implies their presence.23 Elsewhere translators are tucked away behind passive, impersonal constructions. Malby sent the lord deputy 'Sorley Boy's petitions Englished'. Fitzwilliam intercepted a letter from Hugh MacMahon and 'cawsed it to be translated'. Similarly, in a note to Cecil, George Carew obscured the identity of his translator behind an uninformative past participle: 'to ease you from translatinge of Irishe, I do send you the originall, and the copie unto you, Englished', as did Bingham when referring to a letter from Hugh O'Donnell 'wch is translated into

22The Walsingham letter-book, ed. James Hogan and N. McNeill O'Farrell (Dublin, 1959), p. 191.

23Drury and Fitton to privy council, 20 Nov. 1578 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1575-88, p. 141); James Perrott, The chronicle of Ireland, 1584-1608, ed. Herbert Wood (Dublin, 1933), p. 92; Brady (ed.), A viceroy's vindication?, p. 82.




Englishe'.24The passive past participle again points to the shadowy presence of an interpreter in William Farmer's version of a story that enjoyed some currency at the end of the Nine Years War. Sir Arthur Chichester is riding through a wood when his party 'felt a great savour'. He sends soldiers to inves- tigate. They find five children roasting the thighs, arms and sides of their dead mother over a slow fire. Chichester goes, predictably, 'to see it' - the Elizabethans consistently privilege the sights they see over the words they hear - but sight then gives way to speech: he 'demanded of them why they did so; they answered they could not get any other meat'. But the passive voice that then takes over - 'It was demanded where their cows were ...it was demanded when the wod kearne were there ... It was asked of them ...'- must mark the point where an unacknowledged interpreter steps in. Only such a figure can explain the seemingly fluent catechesis otherwise implausible in an area - Killultagh in Ulster - where even the jurymen knew no English.25 A similar pattern emerges in Hooker's account of Captain Walter Raleigh's encounter with a band of Irishmen outside Rathkeale. Knowing that kern came to scavenge as soon as the English struck camp, Raleigh stayed behind to waylay them. Among the foragers who duly turned up was a man carrying withy halters. Hooker's text ignores the language impediment, yet preserves the trace of its presence and its management. Campaigning in Munster in the 1580s, where English was almost unknown outside the cities of Limerick, Cork and Waterford, Raleigh would have relied on interpreters much of the time - as he seems to do here: the halter-bearer is seized 'and being demanded what he would doo with them, and whie he caried them; gave answer, that they were to hang up English churis'. The awkwardly interposed passive - 'being demanded' - and the con- cealed identity of the agent there and in 'gave answer' hint at the intervention of an interpreter. Tellingly, the only character to speak inside quotation marks is Raleigh:'It is so (quoth the capteine) well, they shall now serve for an Irish kerne', and the withy halter is promptly translated into a noose.26

III

Such textual markers of absence prompt us to fill in the gaps. Only rarely in the exhaustive colonial inventories do we find reference to a singularly

24Malby to Fitzwilliam, 19 Oct. 1573 (Cal. SP. Ire., 1509-73, p. 525); Shirley, Monaghan, p. 84; Daniel MacCarthy, The life and letters of Florence Mac Carthy Reagh (London, 1867), p. 289; 'Copie of an Irish letter sent by odonnell to Sir Richard Bingham', 14 Nov. 1595 (P.R.O., SP 63/184/25).

25William Farmer,'Chronicles of Ireland' in E.H.R., xxii (1907), pp 129-30; Henry Morley (ed.), Ireland under Elizabeth and James the First (London, 1890), p.363.

26John Hooker, 'The Irish historie ... unto ... 1587' in Ralph Holinshed (ed.), Chronicle of England, Scotland and Ireland (6 vols, London, 1807-8), vi, 437. The Irishmen in shadowy attendance on Raleigh - his 'verie good guide'; Patrick Fagaw, the soldier who saved his life - or Captain Piers, identified above as the translator of TIhrlough Luineach's 'badd speaches' and who served with Raleigh in Munster, could have doubled as interpreters.




elusive figure: '£27 7s. 6d. the Irish interpreter'. The first earl of Essex's 'Estimate of the Charges in the Province of Ulster' included 16d. a day for 'Edmonde Boy', the earl's interpreter. (His guide earned a penny more, but the serious money - 2s. a day - lay in piping.)27 William Dunne/Doyne and Thomas Cahill are the only two official interpreters listed in the Liber munerum publicorum Hiberniae. To these can be added a number of men who interpreted for the administration in at least a semi-official capacity. Patrick Fox, deputy clerk of the Irish council, provided ancillary services as informer and translator. John Lye interpreted for Sir Henry Sidney. In 1591 he was in London at Brian na Mtrtha O'Rourke's treason trial, where he 'did expound and declare in Irish ... all speeches uttered by the Judges', and was on hand at Tyburn to interpret between O'Rourke and the disputatious spectators at his execution.28 Patrick Crosby translated for the government; the shadowy services which he provided for George Carew, Richard Boyle and Lodowick Bryskett may have been, in part, linguistic.29 When Owen MacHugh O'Neill came to Mountjoy in April 1600,'in the night secretly by a privy way, disguised', he needed an interpreter in order to sell his tale to Mountjoy: on hand was 'one interpreter named Edward Tatle'.30

By teasing out textual clues, we can piece together a surprisingly diverse list of casual additions to this scanty roll-call of official interpreters. Thomond's and Carew's split-screen narration of Ormond's capture by Owney MacRory points to their linguistic division of labour:'I, the Erle of Tomond, willed Owney to put backe his men, and I, the Presydent, desyred his Lordship to be gone.'31 Captain Humphrey Willis, who sailed with Sir Henry Docwra on the expedition to establish an English garrison on Lough Foyle, sent his cousin Simon, secretary to Cecil, a journal of the voyage out from Chester. His narrative is, characteristically, unforthcoming about how the language barrier was managed: 'During our anchoring there, a pinnace was sent ashore two several times, and did talk with the enemy.' Screened behind the metonymic 'pinnace' was the unidentified agent who actually 'did talk'. In all likelihood, the emissary was Willis himself, whom Docwra reveals elsewhere to have interpreted for O'Doherty:'for him I sent first in the place of Captain Thornton because of his language'.32

27Fynes Moryson, An history of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1735), i, 68; Shirley, Monaghan, p. 48.

28Liber mun. pub. Hib., pt ii, 183; B.M. cat. Ir. MSS, i, 483; John O'Donovan,'Military proclamation in the Irish language, issued by Hugh O'Neill in 1601' in U.J.A., 1st ser., vi (1858), pp 57-65; Donald Jackson, 'The Irish language and Thdor government' in tire-Ireland, viii (1973),p.24; petition of Lye to Elizabeth I, 5 Jan. 1587 (Cal. S.R Ire., 1586-8, p. 244); John Stow, Annales (London, 1631), p. 763.

29Bryskett to Cecil, 1600 (H.M.C., Salisbury, x, 463). Crosby himself points us towards another language mediator in a letter to Cecil. Lamenting that the queen's earl of Desmond had been deprived of the services of one Captain Price during his ill-fated visit to Ireland, he riddlingly comments: 'I would that he had the lik still about him to holde the helme, so he could speak the languadge' (MacCarthy, Florence Mac Carthy Reagh, p. 493).

30O'Neill's articles of detection, 17 July 1600 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1600, p. 310). 31Facs. nat. MSS Ire., pt 1, p. liv. 32Humphrey Willis to Simon Willis, 25 May 1600 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1600, p. 201);

Docwra to privy council, 24 May 1600 (ibid., p. 195).




Commissioners Wallop and Gardiner held talks with O'Neill and O'Donnell in January 1596. Their narrative creates the impression that all speeches are made in English, but stray pointers to intensive translation intrude. We see but cannot hear the first day's pantomime, staged on horse- back when the Irish delegates refuse to get out of the saddle. Only the phras- ing- 'We gathered from [O'Donnell's] speeches' - hints at meanings arrived at through indirect pathways of translation. The precise routing is revealed only when the commissioners report that Hore, Wallop's secretary, a Wexford man, 'hath by our sending had daily conference with them ... which Hore we rather use for that he had been interpreter betwixt us and O'Donnell'. Hore's role is further clarified when O'Neill and O'Donnell are asked to set down their terms, 'according to which they assented, requiring us to send Philip Hore to translate into English their demands, which we have performed accordingly'.33

Sir Richard Bingham's reports from Connacht are, through the twelve years of his governorship, largely impervious to the majority language. But the occluded layer of language activity - translators, interpreters, and the whole ambient world of Irish which his rendition habitually turned into English or silence - was disclosed when political necessity made a virtue of transparency. In 1590 the former lord deputy Sir John Perrot was tried for treason. The charges included encouraging Conn O'Clery to write seditious verses against the queen.34 When Bingham was questioned about the rhymes, he was forced into a new explicitness about how language difference was handled. He did 'not generallie remember' the rhymes, except one which propounded that 'occonnor Duns... should be a swifte hungery grey- hound, and should dryve all thenglishemen over the salte sea'. Suddenly, in a sequence of letters to Burghley, Bingham's desire to distance himself from treasonable taint leads him to expose a team of translators hitherto hidden from view. Edward White, clerk of the council of Connacht, detained in connexion with the offending verses, emerges as, inter alia, an indispensable translator when Bingham appeals that he be restored to office 'in respect of his long experience and the language'. In upholding White's continued detention, Fitzwilliam too nudges another language worker out of the shadows: he counters that one Brereton, an M.A.'and knowing the language of this country', has been appointed in his stead. Before this investigation is concluded three further translators make their appearance: Patrick Morgan, who had expounded the terms of the composition of Connacht 'in Irish to such as could not speak English', 'White his boy Coursye, and Henry Renolds', who, Bingham records, 'had the interpreting of the rithmes'.3s

33Commissioners to Russell, 23 Jan. 1596 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1589-1600, p. 144). 34Pauline Henley,'The treason of Sir John Perrot' in Studies, xxi (1932), pp 404-22;

Hiram Morgan,'The fall of Sir John Perrot' in J.A. Guy (ed.), The reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1995), pp 109-25.

35Examination of Bingham, 26 Feb, 1590[/1] (P.R.O., SP 63/157/24); Bingham to Burghley, 27 June 1591 (ibid., SP 63/158/57); Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 30 Oct. 1591 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1588-92, p. 432); Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001), p. 96; Bingham to commissioners, 1 Nov. 1591 (P.R.O., SP 63/161/1).




The individual who crosses the lines, linguistically at least, often enters the text only between the lines. But, given his chance, the interpreter can fill in the gaps in his employers' texts. Lord Deputy Leonard Grey and Stephen Ap Parry36 wrote parallel accounts of their journey through Munster and Connacht in 1538. By concentrating on processes, Ap Parry's version provides a syncopated accompaniment to Grey's no-nonsense focus on outcomes: for once, the 'how' supplements the 'what'. Grey records only the fait accompli: O'Carroll 'cam to me', Dermot O'Kennedy 'submitted himself unto Your Grace', as did 'McObrynes Arays', 'Dermound Omolrean','Ullyck Oburgh','Hugh Oflart','Molaghlyn Omadyn','Ochonor Roo' and others; only the misshapenly anglicised names hint at the presence of another language. Grey mystifies the linguistic manoeuvres that lay behind the completed Latin indentures, mentioning only that Brian O'Connor Faly and Ap Parry 'was they, whom I appoyntyd to tracte and comen' with the natives. Ap Parry has no such reticence, specifying that the Irish

have a custome that they will have 'Sayers' betwen them, of all suche demaundes as the Lord Deputie shall demaund of them;wherin I and OChonour have byn'Sayers', by my Lord Deputie, bytwen hym and all them afore rehersid; but we knew my Lordis plesure in every poynt, or we made any end with them.37

Ap Parry's forthright exposition for once privileges the dimension of translation which is otherwise left to conjecture in Elizabethan reports of cross- cultural encounter.

Interpreters negotiating their delicate relationship with an administration predisposed to distrust bilinguals were keen to put their services on the record. Florence MacCarthy trumpeted his usefulness when sending Carew an intercepted letter 'in Irishe' from Donal MacCarthy to the 'Stigan Earl' of Desmond'which I interpreted'. Christopher Nugent, drawing attention to his contribution in bringing Sir Robert Dillon to trial for plotting with Brian O'Rourke, was at pains to tell Burghley that he had received a letter from a witness, the priest Shane McConganny, and 'the letter being in Irish I translated it'. Later, at a time when his nephew Richard was, rather embarrass- ingly, out with the rebels, he transmitted to the lord deputy over a dozen letters bagged by 'the intelligencer'. Those from Desmond and Owney MacRory, he explained officiously, he had 'translated verbatim' but had time only to prepare 'a brief of their differences' for the rest because of the messenger's haste. Archbishop John Garvey of Armagh backed his appeal to Burghley, requesting 'remyttall of the first Fruites', by stressing that 'in all Iorneyes of Comyssion I am one for interpretacion sacke'. Characteristically, it is the Irish chronicler of Sussex's journey into

"Ap Parry seems to have been a Welshman settled in Laois. In 1538 he was described as being'of Rathangan, gent' (indictment against Peter Fitzgerald, 13 May 1538 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1509-73, p. 40)). He may not have been the only Welsh interpreter. Owen Wood, the dean of Armagh, sent Sir John Perrot a letter from Brian na Mtirtha to Thrlough Luineach 'according to the best interpretation as followeth' (26 Jan. 1590) (P.R.O., SP 63/150/21).

"37Grey to Henry VIII, 26 July 1538 (S.P Hen. VIII, iii, 58-63).




O'Carroll's country in 1558, Philip Butler, 'Athloon Pursuivant d'Armes', who identifies William Cantwell, 'my Lord's interpreter'.38

If interpreters were keen to step out of the wings, those whose utterances were translated, fearful that their meanings could be distorted, also high- lighted the process.'Sheane McCongawney's Relation, written by himself in Irish, and translated afterwards into English' represents the deliberate attempt of a witness caught up in a conspiracy trial to safeguard himself against the perils of translation:

The cause why I have written this is, for the Council do not understand my language, and also for another reason, that I know not what the interpreter declares, and that I wot not but that'he might leave some things unexpounded to the Lord Deputy or the Council which I should speak.39

But an interpreter could also be used to scramble the message conveniently. After his flight from Ireland in 1607 Rory O'Donnell sent a Franciscan, Eoghan Gruama Mig Craith, to his wife, Brigid Fitzgerald, with eighty-one pieces of gold, apparently to fund her passage to the Continent. Lord Deputy Chichester, keen to learn how much she knew about Rory's flight, subsequently questioned her about the encounter. Her reply is a masterpiece of imprecision, focusing so obsessively on the process of interpretation as to diffuse, and quite obscure, the message itself. The friar, she recalls, arrived 'with one Denis O'Morcan (I think), a priest'; all three walked in Moyglare garden, with O'Morcan interpreting. But she distracts us from the content of their speeches by remarking that the priest soon 'went from us'. A 'Mr Bryan' arrives, but again the impediment of translation is used to screen the message: 'Upon Mr Bryan's coming to me, the friar uttered some words which (as near as Bryan in his broken English could interpret) was to wish me not to be grieved.' Receiving this narrative of imperfect translation, Chichester cannot have been left much the wiser."

IV

The interpreter is a necessarily hybrid figure, inhabiting and moving between two linguistic worlds. There were many such figures in Elizabethan Ireland. Their mixed heritage placed the Old English, in particular, in the linguistic middle ground. In 1520 the newly appointed lord lieutenant, the

38MacCarthy, Florence Mac Carthy Reagh, p. 292; Lord Delvin to Burghley, 13 Sept. 1592 (Cal. S.R Ire., 1588-92, p. 577); Lord Delvin to Mountjoy, 26 Apr. 1600 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1600, p. 125); Garvey to Burghley, 2 Mar. 1590 (P.R.O., SP 63/157/28); 'A journey made by the earl of Sussex', 25 July 1558 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1515-74, p. 274).

39'Sheane McCongawney's Relation', Sept. 1593 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1589-1600, p. 76).

4"Brigid, countess of Tyrconnell, to Chichester, Oct. 1607 (Cal. S.P. Ire., 1606-8, pp 296-7); Cathal 0 Hainle,'Flattery rejected: two seventeenth-century Irish poems' in Hermathena, cxxxviii (1985), pp 5-27.




earl of Surrey, met O'Carroll. Surrey never explains how he and the Irish leader managed their exchanges, but his passing reference to O'Carroll, the eighth earl of Ormond and Sir William Darcy 'communing to gathers in Irish' solves that puzzle. That Darcy, who had written a tract on the 'Decay of the Pale' in 1515 denouncing the incursion of Irish into the colony, had himself not escaped contagion emphasises that, however ambivalently they may sometimes have viewed the qualification, Palesmen were particularly suitable to act as interpreters.41

English-Irishmen appear throughout the colonial texts, oiling exchanges between the two sides so expertly that hardly a squeak is picked up in the official record. The orders for establishing the Connacht presidency required Sidney 'to select a suitable man of the country, learned in the laws, and with a knowledge of the Irish tongue, to act as assistant to the Chief Justice of the Province, Ralph Rokeby'. In June 1569 one Robert Dillon was 'accordingly' appointed. Dillon's ubiquity at negotiations with local lords thereafter hints at how the language barrier, almost never alluded to, was managed.42 One Walter Tallent interpreted when Donal Groome informed on Niall Garbh O'Donnell; he was also on hand when Shane MacManus Oge O'Donnell needed a translator to help him make some incriminating disclosures.While Nicholas Stafford's command of Irish did little to advance his ecclesiastical career, it allowed the secretary of state to use him 'to tem- porise with the rebels'.43

Meanwhile the increasing anglicisation of the Gaelic 61ite was bringing on a new crop of interpreters.44 Gaelic poets too were to the fore in negotiations between the two cultures. The anonymous legate who landed at Smerwick with James FitzMaurice in 1579 noted that poets were always chosen as intermediaries. When FitzMaurice declined to confront Lord Deputy Perrot in single combat, he sent the poet 'Cono Roe Oharnan' with a 'cunning and subtle excuse'. Fiach MacHugh sent a 'rhymer' with a message to Sir Henry Harington before routing him at Great Water.45 Clergymen, particularly the handful of native Protestants, often doubled as translators and interpreters. Christopher Bodkin, archbishop of Tuam, assisted Dunne, the state interpreter, in a case heard before the council of

41Sir William Darcy to the English council, 24 June 1515 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1515-74, p. 7); Surrey to Henry VIII, 23 July 1528 (ibid., p. 9).

42Philip O'Sullivan Beare, Ireland under Elizabeth, trans. M. J. Byrne (Dublin, 1903), p. 34; H. T. Crofton, Crofton rnemoir (York, 1911), p. 46; report of the commissioners for Connacht, 14 May 1589 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1588-92, p. 177); Fitzwilliam to privy council, 10 Sept. 1590 (ibid., p. 362); Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 14 May 1591 (ibid., p. 394).

43'Information against Neale Garve', 25 Apr. 1602 (Cal. S.I Ire., 1601-3, pp 374, 376); Fenton to Cecil, 27 Nov. 1600 (Cal. S.? Ire., 1600-01, p. 36).

44Brian 6 Cuiv, 'The Irish language in the early modern period' in New hist. Ire., iii, 90.

45Reginald Walsh,'Irish manners and customs in the sixteenth century' in Archiv. Hib., v (1916), p. 19; Richard Rawlinson (ed.), The history of Sir John Perrott (London, 1728), p. 62; Harington to Loftus, 29 May 1599 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1599-1600, p. 59).




Connacht. Perplexed by a prophecy linked in the popular imagination to Hugh O'Donnell, the Irish council called on William Daniel, translator of the Old Testament and Book of Common Prayer, for an exegesis. When Hugh O'Neill's 'secretary for the Irish tongue' caught up with Commissioners Ormond, Fenton and Jones as they rode away from a parley and proceeded to read them a letter from O'Donnell, Miler Magrath, archbishop of Cashel, provided a spontaneous translation.46

References to translations provided by less exalted personages show that a knowledge of English was spreading among the common people. Mountjoy received Art O'Neill's demands 'by interpretation from the mouth of a barbarous messenger'. The queen, alarmed at the number of Irishmen serving in her army, decreed that no band should comprise more than five natives, 'and they to serve for guides and interpreters'.47 But the ranks continued to swell with Irish recruits, many of whom availed of their opportunity to learn English. The tension between mercenary allegiance and cultural loyalty produced a remarkably open weave in communications between the opposing sides.

The cast-list of the colonial texts includes not only the principals, both Irish and English, but also lesser actors whose roles are never quite defined and who shadow the main characters or move back and forth between them with an ease and importance that is never quite explained. One such figure is John Benyon, sent by the administration with proposals for reconciling Turlough Luineach and Hugh O'Neill. He reports that he 'delivered both the letters and his message by mouth'. When Hugh undermined Benyon's mediation attempts by raiding Turlough's cattle, Benyon attempted to re- cover them 'with the mildest words of persuasion'. Why Benyon was chosen as messenger and how he dealt with the hibernophone Turlough, or in what language the 'mild words' were uttered, is left a mystery. It is only when Fitzwilliam is called to account for the considerable sums he 'imprested' for his journey into Connacht that circumstantial evidence receives the confirmation of testimony: he justifies having kept Captain Benyon and Edward Byrne on his books because 'they be in credit with the Irishry and have the language'.48

Three other figures illustrate the same balance between disclosure and omission in the records of the colonial administration. Henry Duke, Sir William Warren and his half-brother Garrett Moore regularly took up position at the elbows of monophones, appearing suggestively in the pose of interpreters. When Commissioners Wallop and Gardiner met O'Neill and

46Bodiclogh's statement, 14 Mar. 1570 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1509-73, p.428); C.P. Meehan, The fate and fortunes of Hugh O'Neill and Rory O'Donnell (Dublin, 1887), p. 268; Jones to Burghley, 28 Dec. 1597 (Cal. S. Ire., 1596-7, p. 486).

47Mountjoy to privy council, 9 June 1600 (Cal. S.F Ire., 1600, p. 229); Russell to privy council, 12 Sept. 1594 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1592-6, p. 269).

48Examination of John Benyon, 6 May 1588 (Cal. S.F Ire., 1586-8, p. 515); Fitzwilliam's note of the dividend, 31 May 1589 (Cal. S.F Ire., 1588-92, p. 195). Benyon's sometime companion, Captain Nicholas Merriman, seems to have played a similar role (see Russell's journal, 28 June 1597 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1589-1600, p. 232); Merriman to Walsingham, 13 Nov. 1589 (Cal. S.P. Ire., 1588-92, p. 261)).




O'Donnell in January 1596, they were accompanied by Duke and Moore. When the Englishmen paired off, one with O'Neill, the other with O'Donnell, one or other of the settlers must have brokered the exchange with O'Donnell.49 Sir William Warren moved back and forth constantly with messages between O'Neill and the government. But the colonial record, in a striking illustration of both its vagaries and its inattention to language even when the issues come closest to the surface, confirms the supposition only in the case of Duke. Predictably, it is largely left to the translator himself to put the record straight. His intelligence reports use a hybrid lexicon that positions him midway between source and target languages: he notifies Fitzwilliam that the rebels in Brenny have made a 'keayshe' over the river; he records the midnight arrival of 'an Irish Shenovine'.5 He forwards to Fitzwilliam an 'Irishe letter', sent by O'Rourke to MacMahon,'translated, worde by worde'. His report on the 'dailie outrages' of O'Neill's followers seems to be written with the vigour of an Irish debate still ringing in his ears: he urges that the rebels' 'Irishe Sheanames shall no longer prevaile in clock- ing [cloaking] theire Rebellious attempts'. (The trace of Irish clinging to his translation - seanaim 4, 'I deny it' - meant that a marginal gloss, 'Irish Denialls', had to be supplied for Fitzwilliam.) The only English confirmation of his role comes in a report which mentions that he interpreted between them and Hugh O'Donnell.1 One of the most intriguing things about these enigmatic figures is that they included several Irish-born members of New English families. Henry Duke grew up in the Meath marches, the son of a Kentish father. Captain William Piers, who helped translate Turlough Luineach's 'badd speaches' for the Carrickfergus delegation, was second- generation New English.52

Doubly invisible in texts focused on male deeds are the women interpreters who were often well placed to move between the two languages. Sidney's accounts of his dealings with Thrlough Luineach set the pattern: the role of the woman as a linguistic go-between is first overlooked, then confirmed. At regular intervals in the 1570s Sidney sent reports to London of his meetings with Thrlough. All skated around the issue of how he managed to communicate with this truculent Irish speaker; many refer vaguely to Thrlough's wife, Agnes Campbell, the earl of Argyll's sister. When she vis- ited Sidney in Armagh in November 1575, for example, he confined himself to observing that she was'verye well spoken'. When Turlough made excuses for not meeting the lord deputy in the following year, Sidney blamed 'the fayre

49Wallop and Gardiner to council, Jan. 1596, 26 Jan. 1596 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1589-1600, pp 134,139).

5oCeis, a causeway of hurdles: Duke to Fitzwilliam, 9 Jan. 1588 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1586-8, p. 466); seanbhean, old woman: John Dowdall to Fitzwilliam, 20 Apr. 1594 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1592-6, p. 235).

51Duke to Fitzwilliam, 7 Oct. 1588 (PR.O., SP 63/137/10 xii); Duke to Fitzwilliam, 1 May 1594 (P.R.O., SP 63/174/37 viii); Gardiner and St Leger to privy council, 16 Mar 1594 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1592-6, p. 224).

52In 1574 he offered to send his 'secret interpreter' to Turlough Luineach 'until my coming unto him, which I hope shall do much good' (articles of Capt. Piers, Nov. 1574 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1515-74, p. 491)).




Speaches, and lewd Counsell of his Wyffe'. A year later Turlough re-entered negotiations - and, as a necessary corollary, a translation process. (That process has left only the merest trace, in the remark that O'Neill 'exhibited his Peticions in Writinge'. We know, however, that negotiations across the language divide were often conducted at arm's length through the exchange of duly translated position papers: for example, Shane O'Neill's protracted negotiations in Whitehall were conducted largely through interrogatories and letters.) Sidney's only reference then to Agnes was that she 'hath bene an Instrument, and cheife Counsellor, to frame hym to this Order of Obedience'; he suggested that Elizabeth'bestowe a Garment upon her, as a Token of your Favor'. It is only when Sidney sent Walsingham a memoir of his years in Ireland in 1583 that her role moves into focus. Not only was she 'a reverent speaker of the Queen's Majesty' but 'a grave, wise, and well- spoken lady, both in Scots-English, and French'. Another probable interpreter thus steps out of the shadows. Similarly, Hugh O'Neill's sugges- tion that Fiach MacHugh send his wife, the enigmatic Rose O'Toole, to the parley between O'Neill and Norris must have been influenced in part by her ability to negotiate in both languages.53

English and Irish were not the only languages spoken in late sixteenth- century Ireland. With Spanish intervention came a new language, and new strands were added to the weave of cross-cultural communications. Philip II wrote to Hugh O'Neill in Latin; O'Neill's 'English' secretary, Momford, replied in the same language. A chaplain in O'Neill's household, Patrick Duffe, and a servant 'went creeping on all fours to the walls of Kinsale and there ... making known unto the watch in Latin who they were ... were let in'.54 Armada survivors who had acquired Irish opened another pathway to understanding. When Pedro Blanco and seven companions whom Hugh O'Neill had harboured sought to return home with Alonso de Cobos, the legate advised them to stay 'to serve as interpreters, guides and spies, being so well acquainted with the language and the country'. Blanco later acted as intermediary between O'Neill and the Spanish commander in Ireland, Don Juan del Aguila.55 Many continentally trained priests and returning soldiers knew Spanish; so too did Bermingham, another of O'Neill's secretaries, and Florence MacCarthy, who 'haith ben anye tyme this seven or eight yeares greatlie addicted to learne the Spanysh tonge'.56

A sense of hectic translation, of the kind that must have characterised so many encounters in late sixteenth-century Ireland, is captured in George Cawill's report of Alonso de Cobos's meeting with the Irish lords in Lifford

53Sidney letters, i, 77, 164, 218; Hogan, 'Shane O'Neill comes to the court of Elizabeth', p. 166; Brady (ed.), A viceroy's vindication?, p.76; B. G. MacCarthy,'The riddle of Rose O'Toole' in Pender (ed.), Fdilscribhinn Torna, p. 175.

54Philip II to Hugh O'Neill, 22 Jan. 1596 (Cal. Carew MSS, 1589-1600, p. 141); O'Neill and O'Donnell to Philip II, 27 Sept. 1595 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1592-6, p. 406); intelligences from Tyrone, 10 Nov. 1601 (Cal. S.P. Ire., 1601-3, p. 185).

55M. K. Walsh, 'The anonymous Spaniard of the flight of the earls' in Ir. Sword, iii (1957-8), pp 88-90.

56Fenton to Cecil, 15 Apr. 1597 (Cal. S.P. Ire., 1596-7, p. 264); MacCarthy, Florence Mac Carthy Reagh, p. 30.




in June 1596. James Lynch, 'an Irishe man which came out of Spayne with Alonso, borne in Gallwais... was interpreter' between the Spaniard and the two Hughs. Hugh Boy O'Davitt, 'Odonnells man, and his interpretor' who had served under Sir William Stanley in Flanders, 'hath the Spanishe tongue perfectlye'. Cawill himself, 'because he could speak some Spanish', was retained by Cormac O'Neill to impress on de Cobos how much Cormac had contributed to the war effort.With the help of Salomon,'wch was ould [Turlough Luineach] oneals secretarye' and who was busily working between Latin and Irish, Cawill was charged with conveying to de Cobos that Cormac 'was the first wch hath nowe begunne the warrs against the Queene of England'. Cawill also conveys a lively sense of the frustrations of trying to translate in the thick of negotiations. De Cobos's secretary, Santiago, was 'ymployed continually in wrytinge'; when he finished, Hugh Boy read his efforts aloud in Spanish. Cawill, however,'standinge farr of when it was red .. could not tell... the noyse of the Irishe people beinge very great'; strug-

gling to understand, he nonetheless hazarded a summary of its contents. Caught in a web of scheming, Cawill is a mysterious figure. His allegiance to Cormac seems provisional; rumours circulated that he was a double agent, sent to Ireland by Cecil and Raleigh. Eventually he was executed for con- spiring to take Dublin Castle for the rebels.57

V

This ambivalent positioning was the hallmark of the interpreter. Blessed, fittingly perhaps, with names like Lye and Tattle, interpreters were mistrusted figures. To cross between languages was, in a way, to slip across enemy lines. Hybridity was a troubling commodity for the Elizabethans, and, linguistically, the interpreter was a half-caste whose pureza de sangre was ever in doubt. Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam complained that Sir Henry Duke was 'a busybody, vain, and full of words'. Sir Henry Docwra commended his own interpreter, Captain Willis, 'in whom I find singular use and honesty', but Willis's Irish birth was enough to put a question-mark over his loyalty for the anonymous author of a memorandum on the causes of the war: 'Certain captains were raised to companies, as Willis, Fuller, and others, who, being this countrymen .. it is a disputable question whether it were better to have them all against

us, or with us.'s58 Barnaby Rich ridiculed the practice of using the increasingly mistrusted Old English as intermediaries in parleys:

Those that were to appoint arbitrators in the behalf of the lion, made special choice of the fox and the sheep. The fox, being an ally to the wolf and very near in affinity to him, would not press him further than the wolf himself liked.

57Examination of George Cawill, 24 June 1596 (P.R.O., SP 63/190/42 i; ibid., SP 63/190/47 i); Gardiner to Cecil, 17 Oct. 1598 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1598-9, p. 288); Loftus, Gardiner et al. to privy council, 31 Oct. 1598 (ibid., p. 308).

58Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 23 June 1590 (Cal. S.P. Ire., 1588-92, p. 353); Docwra to Cecil, 2 Nov. 1600 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1600-01, p. 13); paper on the causes of the rebellion, Dec. 1600 (ibid., p. 123).



PALMER Interpreters and politics in sixteenth-century Ireland 273

These 'English with the Irish hearts', he sneered, were ever ready to speak for the rebels and to advance their case.59 O'Connor Sligo, caught between irreconcilable allegiances to O'Donnell and the English authorities, sent a messenger, Mulrony Oge, to the administration with four blank sheets sym- bolising, apparently, his inability to commit himself to anything without O'Donnell's endorsement. Confronted with his Irish-speaking emissary, the officials too drew a blank:'Mulrony durst not tell the cause of these blanks, for lack of a trusty interpreter both to the State and to O'Connor.' The English commissioners investigating allegations of treason made against former Lord Deputy Perrot were forced to examine Bishop Malachy O'Molony in Latin because 'they dare not use the service of an Irish interpreter'.60

The deepening religious divide and the corresponding identification of Latin with the Counter-Reformation gave a new edge to Englishmen's mistrust of translation. That anxiety is signalled in Lord Deputy Bellingham's demand that an (unidentified) Irish lord cease writing to him in Latin and find instead a 'trusty man who can understande and wryt englyshe' because he doubted that 'lattyn letters' would 'be truly expounded' by 'fals and decytfull fryers'. Implicit in Justice Saxey's exasperation with Old English lawyers is an anxiety that they used their bilingualism to subvert due process. He recommended that English judges be appointed and that official, English-born interpreters replace the informal system of translation provided by the mistrusted Irish officials:

for an interpreter sworn (as is used in Wales) who is subject to everyman's censure, if he interpret untruely, is more meet to inform the Court, than one of the Judges unsworn, whose untrue interpretation will be either favourably construed, or by silence allowed.

So suspicious were the English of Irish interpreters that when Juan Wall, an Irishman, turned up in London as interpreter to Ztfiiga, the Spanish ambas- sador, the English refused to deal with him and had him arrested.61

That the Elizabethans' mistrust of Irish interpreters was well founded is confirmed by Irish writers who could listen in on the other side of the language barrier. Stanihurst, whose ignorance of Irish was less complete than he sometimes affected, is alert to the potential for manipulating the gap between a bilingual's agility and a monoglot's incomprehension when he recounts how Lord Deputy Skeffington 'rewarded' Kildare's constable,

59Barnaby Rich, 'A looking-glass for Her Majesty', May 1599 (Cal. S.P. Ire., 1599- 1600, pp 48, 50).

60'Account of the messages sent by O'Connor Sligo', Sept. 1599 (ibid., p. 159); Fenton et al. to Hatton and Burghley, 9 Sept. 1590 (Cal. S.P. dom., 1581-90, p. 688).

61Bellingham to -, 24 Nov. 1548 (P.R.O., SP 61/1/139); William Saxey, 'Im- perfections in the state of Munster', 5 Dec. 1598 (Cal. S.F Ire., 1598-9, p. 394); M. K. Walsh, Hugh O'Neill (Dublin, 1996), p. 41. Zdfiiiga had previously asked Richard Stanihurst to be his interpreter (see Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner, 1547-1618 (Dublin, 1981), p. 56).




Parese, for his unchivalrous betrayal of Maynooth castle with the pieces of silver which had bought his (dis)loyalty - and a sentence of beheading. Parese rues his misjudgement. Boyce, a Pale 'Gentleman of worship' and retainer of Kildare 'standing in the preasse, saide in Irishe, Antragh, which is asmuch in English as "too late"'. Skeffington seeks a translation, but Boyce, who has a different message for his English auditor, delivers a mis- chievously loose rendition:

M. Boyce willing to expounde his owne wordes, stept forth and answered,'My Lord, I said nothing, but that Parese is seized of a towne neere the water syde named Baltra, and I woulde gladly know how he wil dispose it before hee bee executed.'

Skeffington, 'not mistrusting that M. Boice had glozed', directed Parese to resolve the financial details 'and presently caused him to be cut shorter by the head'.62

Philip O'Sullivan Beare's account of the siege of Smerwick, where, in his view, brutality confronted pusillanimity, reveals only one honourable figure, 'an Irish gentleman of the Plunkett family' whom James FitzMaurice had left as interpreter for San Giuseppe, the commander of the Spanish and Italian forces. Here, on the far side of the looking-glass, the interpreter's duplicity is endorsed as heroic subversion. Plunkett becomes the fulcrum of a narrative where bold language confronts merciless deeds. While San Giuseppe, 'a man of cringing disposition' keen to surrender, approaches Lord Deputy Grey bareheaded, the interpreter keeps his head defiantly covered. Determined that the defenders should hold out against Grey, Plunkett interpreted their speeches opposite ways, making the commander say to the viceroy that he would lose his life rather than surrender, and making the viceroy say to the commander that he was determined to give no quarter to the besieged.

For once, the reader is positioned alongside the devious interpreter, privy to mistranslations which those reliant on Plunkett can infer only from ges- tures. O'Sullivan and his contemporary Dominic O'Daly, who also tells this story, cast their glances in different directions when recording the opposed monophones' mutual realisation that meanings are grossly distorted. O'Sullivan has San Giuseppe 'perceiving the false translations of the interpreter by the inconsistency of the viceroy's face', while for O'Daly 'the expression of Plunkett's features, and the fiery indignation of the Spaniard, caused Lord Grey to suspect that his words had not been rendered faith- fully'. In O'Sullivan's version, the doomed Plunkett is arrested by San Giuseppe, in O'Daly's by Grey.63 The interpreter's power over language is ultimately circumscribed by his masters' power over him.

It is remarkable how often language difference features in episodes of deceit and chicanery. Skulduggery often had a linguistic component, with double-dealing conspirators crossing back and forth between Irish and English. One bilingual caught exploiting the opportunity to traduce his

62Holinshed's Irish chronicle, ed. Miller & Power, pp 279-80. 630'Sullivan Beare, Ire. under Eliz., p. 24; Dominic O'Daly, The rise, increase and

exit of the Geraldines, trans. C. P. Meehan (Dublin, 1878), pp 96-7.




monoglot master was 'Davies Omey', the young Scot that 'writeth' for Thrlough Luineach. Escaping Thrlough's surveillance as he moved from Irish into Latin and English, Omey altered O'Neill's intended message by adding accusations against Perrot, at the behest, apparently, of Sir Patrick Barnewall and Sir Henry Bagenal. Denouncing these 'bad practices', Perrot made Omey produce

the copy of the Irish letter which was the ground of that Latin letter which Turlough meant to have sent to Her Majesty at the first, with the translation thereof in English, under the hand of the said Davies.

Perrot was also able to send Burghley a letter, presumably in translation, from Turlough which said: 'If there be any more in the Latin than is in the Irish it is falsely inserted by the translators.' Perrot could then conclude tri- umphantly:'All which being compared with the Latin letter that was devised and sent to Her Majesty will lay open the whole practice how I have been used therein.'64

The case of Captain Thomas Lee was used by a disgruntled New English official, Andrew Trollop, to reinforce his argument that all Irishmen - and all Englishmen married to Irishwomen - should be excluded from the army. In 1587 Lee, hoping to entrap the rebel Walter Reagh Fitzgerald, had sought to enlist one of Waiter's associates. But when Lee engaged his wife, Elizabeth Eustace, 'as an interpreter between him and the fellow', she betrayed her husband's plot and his 'good purpose was prevented'. Describing a similar incident in 1600, the earl of Ormond, freed by his kid- napper, Owney MacRory, sent the queen a satisfied account of trumping the rebels linguistically at close of play. Just before releasing him, his captors had produced a document for him to sign - one clearly designed to impli- cate him in their 'traiterous actions'. But the absence of their own secretary and of

Archer the Jhesuith and such others of them as understood the English tonge enforced the traitors to committ the writing of that bill to one that wished better unto me, then unto them as by the stile thereof may appeare.65

The bilingual and his unidentified accomplice-translator once more gull the monophones.

Terence Ranger reminds us that Patrick Crosby and Francis Shane, the 'lynx-eyed native servitor' who translated an Irish document on landhold- ings for Burghley,'had a foot in each camp, pursuing a course of profound ambiguity in the margin of rebellion, acting for all parties and especially themselves'.6 The whiff of subterfuge that hung over Miler Magrath's con- duct as interpreter in the interrogation of Thrlough O'Kynai also sur-

64perrot to Burghley, 17 July 1587 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1586-8, p. 390). 65Trollop to Burghley, 27 Oct. 1587 (ibid., p. 428); James Graves, 'The taking of the

earl of Ormond, A.D. 1600' in R.S.A.I. Jn., vi (1860-61), p. 428. 66Terence Ranger,'Richard Boyle and the making of an Irish fortune, 1588-1614'

in I.H.S., x, no. 39 (Mar. 1957), p. 273; George Hill, The flight of the earls (Belfast, 1878), p. 21.




rounded his mediation between Brian O'Rourke and the spectators at his execution at Tyburn: while Stow complacently reported that he was translating the crowd's 'good exhortations', the O'Rourke genealogical tract records that the Franciscan apostate and Protestant archbishop 'tug absol6id 6s iosal dhd'.67 The shadowy career of James McGnode illustrates the murky middle ground between the two languages. McGnode/Knowde not only wrote letters for Owney MacRory but, at Tom Lee's behest, carried messages to the rebels and conspired with the notorious Blackadell and Farraugh MacHugh O'Kelly to assassinate Hugh O'Donnell.68

VI

The figure of the interpreter in Robert Wilson's The three lords and three ladies of London confirms that, by the 1590s, the unreliable interpreter was emerging as a stock Irish type. Wilson's play is a xenophobic celebration of the Armada defeat. Among the stage-Spaniards receiving their come- uppance is Spanish Pride, who, not deigning to speak English, insists on using Latin. The 'Trowch man' necessitated by this insolence is Shealty, whose name Lord Pollicie glosses as 'An Irish word, signifieng liberty, rather remisnes, loosnes, if ye wil'.69 Sir Henry Wotton came to Ireland in 1599 as Essex's secretary and was on hand when he negotiated with O'Neill. The experience left him bitterly mistrustful of Irish interpreters, as he himself wrote:

Whatsoever we have done, or mean to do, we know what will become of it, when it comes amongst our worst enemies, which are interpreters. I would there were more O'Neales and Macguiers and O'Donnells and MacMahons, and fewer of them.70

More was at stake in the Elizabethans' reluctant dependence on interpreters than the risk of duplicitous translation. Sir Christopher Nugent fol- lowed his lament about the newcomers' failure to acquire Irish by intimating that their consequent reliance on interpreters left dangerous gaps in understanding between the two language communities. Nugent, who regularly translated for the English, was aware, in a way that they were not,

67'Gave him absolution in a whisper'. See Lawrence Marron,'Documents from the State Papers concerning Miler McGrath' in Archiv. Hib., xxi (1958), p.166; Stow, Annales, p. 764; James Carney (ed.), 'Tract on the O'Rourkes' in Celtica, i (1950), p. 245.

68'Examination of Knowde', 16 Feb. 1601 (Cal. S.P dom., 1598-1601, p. 569); Lee to Blackadell, 24 Dec. 1600 (Cal. S.P Ire., 1600-01, p. 103); --- to Cecil, 14 Feb. 1601 (ibid., p. 194).

69Robert Wilson, The three lords and three ladies of London, ed. H. S. D. Mithal (New York, 1988), 11 1622-3, 1731-2. Wilson is probably punning on scaoilte, 'loose', which had the advantage over the more grammatically and lexically apposite adjec- tival form scaoilteach, 'loose-tongued', of rhyming with 'Fealty', Shealty's English opposite.

70Wotton to [John Donne?], [1599] (L. P. Smith, The life and letters of Sir Henry Wotton (2 vols, Oxford, 1907), i, 308).




of losses inherent in translation. He envisaged the Irish primer which he presented to Elizabeth in 1562 as a means of overcoming the 'defect' of translation. As the vernacular was 'the spetiall mean' whereby subjects 'learne obedience, and their Prynces, or Governors, understande their greves and harmes', a message 'delyvered by an interpretor, cann never carye that grace, or proper intellygence, which the tonge itselfe beinge understode expressith'.71 To bring the interpreter back into the narrative of sixteenth-century Ireland, as this article has sought to do, is to restore some- thing of the discursive texture of the period and to recognise that a conflict- ual dialogue was starting to open up between natives and newcomers. Language difference and literal incomprehension were an ineluctable part of the meeting of cultures in sixteenth-century Ireland; in an increasingly polarised society, the interpreter was not simply a conduit for undisputed meanings but a combatant armed with a forked tongue.

PATRICIA PALMER

Department of English and Related Literature, University of York

7tFacs. nat. MSS Ire., iv, pt 1, p. xxxv.

