Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians

Abstract

Et virum bonum quom laudabant, ita laudabant, bonum agricolam bonumque colonum.—Cato,De agri culturaIn 1578 Hubert Languet wrote to his young protegee Philip Sidney concerning the latter's plan to assist the Low Countries in their fight against Spain. Surprisingly, the old republican Calvinist monarchomach vetoed the idea, bluntly informing the impulsive teenager that “you and your fellows, I mean men of noble birth, consider that nothing brings you more honour than wholesale slaughter, and you are generally guilty of the greatest injustice.” This hostile assessment of the aristocratic warrior ethos — what Languet derides as “mere love of fame and honour and … displaying your courage” — bears witness to a major ideological upheaval of the early modern period: the attack on the aristocratic politics of violence and, to quote another Elizabethan, “glory got by courage of manhood.”