Revisiting Smerwick: Spenser and Massacre

In early November 1580, the English forces in Ireland faced what they had long dreaded: the arrival of a papal force, in support of the Desmond rebellion. The recently appointed Lord Deputy, together with his trusty secretary, one Edmund Spenser, and ‘only … 500 men’, journeyed to the western reaches of county Kerry to face ‘thousands at the least’. Following a parley and surrender of the fort, Grey moved swiftly, not to take prisoners but to kill them: “Then putt I in certeyn bandes, who streight fell to execution. There were 600 slayne; munition & vitteile great store, though much wasted through the disorder of the Souldier, which in the furie could not bee helped.”

Spenser and Grey’s account of the massacre has been central to scholarly analyses of Smerwick, although multiple alternative accounts exist in Italian, Latin, English and Gaelic. And what happened at Smerwick has strong connections to events – political and cultural – in Europe, north Africa and the northwest Atlantic. Nor should we neglect modern responses to Smerwick by Irish poets, as a way of understanding the longer-term effects of such brutal colonial histories.

This paper proposes that we use a wider global (and temporal) frame to understand both the massacre and the reports about it, as well as its significance in English Renaissance culture and beyond. 

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