"One of the Principal Nations in Europe": The Representation of Ireland in Sarah Butler's Irish Tales

"One of the Principal Nations in Europe": The Representation of Ireland in Sarah Butler's Irish Tales Ian Campbell Ross Among the many sixteenth and seventeenth-century accounts of Ireland by English writers, one of the most influential in shaping English perceptions of the neighbouring island and its people was Sir James Ware's Histories ofIreland, published in Dublin in 1633. Sir James Ware (1594-1666), member of parliament for the University of Dublin, Auditor-General of Ireland, and one of the most significant figures in Irish historiography, printed Edmund Spenser's A View of the State of Ireland, Meredith Hanmer's Chronicle ofIreland, another Chronicle of Ireland by Henry Marleburrough [sic], and The History ofIreland by the Jesuit Edmund Campion. Ware was a notable apologist for contemporary Ireland and removed many of the more offensive references to the country from the texts he printed. Inevitably, however, he was forced to acknowledge the frequently negative view of Ireland and its refractory inhabitants his authors shared. Writing in 1571, Campion might be thought to have spoken for them all when he argued "how much Ireland is beholding to God for suffering them to be conquered, whereby many of [their] enormities were cured, and more might be, would themselves be EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 1, October 1994 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION plyable."1 It was just such a view—with its juxtaposition of a barbarous Irish past and a partly civilized present under English domination—that provoked many seventeenth and eighteenth-century Irish writers to respond in defence of their country, past and present. Among these, none was more strenuous than Sarah Butler, who cites Ware, Spenser, Hanmer , and Campion—among many others—in her Irish Tales, published in London in 1716, in which she declared provocatively to her English readers that, however decayed contemporary Ireland might appear after centuries of English oppression, "yet that once Ireland was esteem'd one of the Principal Nations in Europe."2 Of the many works of fiction published by Irish writers in the course of the eighteenth century,3 none, perhaps, is more remarkable or—in the manner of its publication—-more curious than Butler's Irish Tales: or, Instructive Historiesfor the Happy Conduct ofLife, which was advertised in London by its publishers, Edmund Curii and John Hooke, in June 1716. Despite its title, the work is a continuous narrative, which Sarah Butler herself described as a "Novel," though the fiction's concerns with "Heroic Fortitude" and "Martial Glory" and the central conflict between love and duty, in an historically remote and exotic setting, might lead the modern reader to think of the work more readily as a romance, an idea reinforced by the ten events specified on the title-page: I The Captiv'd Monarch IIThe Banish'd Prince IIIThe Power of Beauty IVThe Distrest Lovers V The Perfidious Gallant VIThe Constant Fair-One VIIThe Generous Rival VIIIThe Inhuman Father IXThe Depos'd Usurper X The Punishment of Ungenerous Love. The use of prose romance for political purposes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, not least by women writers, is by 1 Edmund Campion, Historie ofIreland, in Histories ofIreland, ed. James Ware (Dublin, 1633), p. 15. 2 Sarah Butler, Irish Tales: or, Instructive Historiesfor the Happy Conduct ofLife (London, 1716). Butler's references to Ware, Spenser, Hanmer, and Campion occur in the preface, p. xviii. References are to this edition. Page references to the preface, which is unpaginated, are given in roman numerals. 3 For an account of later eighteenth-century Irish fiction, see Ian Campbell Ross, "Fiction to 1800," The Field Day Anthology ofIrish Writing, ed Seamus Deane, 3 vols (Deny: Field Day, 1991), 1: 682-759, esp. 682-87. IRELAND IN SARAH BUTLER'S IRISH TALES 3 now well known (even if those political purposes have not always been agreed upon). Aphra Behn's most celebrated work, Oroonoko (1688), has been read as both an attack upon and a defence of James p.4 Behn also wrote chroniques scandaleuses, such as Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684-87)—a fictionalized account of the elopement of Lord Grey of Werke with his sister-in-law—which...