Rory Rapple, Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub in association with Trinity’s School of Histories and Humanities, is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Rapple has spent the past three months at Trinity College working on his research project ‘Sir Humphrey Gilbert, archaic globalization and the beginnings of empire’, and his forthcoming book about the notorious explorer and political thinker.
During his time here he has been working with the Library of Trinity College archives which he says are “second to none” and contain “tremendously rich” manuscripts, as well as underutilised sources relating to Gilbert's campaign in Ireland
Brutal Beginnings
In the early 1580s, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a letter from Ireland, during the second of the Desmond Rebellions, recommending that Gilbert be sent to alleviate the situation. Ralegh claimed that the Irish spoke of him in hushed terms remembering him as a man riding on a devil. Professor Rapple said this striking image prompted him to name the book he is currently working on Devil Rider: Sir Humphrey Gilbert and the Dark Beginnings of Empire.
The title also relates to one of the most famous anecdotes about Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s brutality. Professor Rapple explains ‘When campaigning in Ireland, Gilbert boasted that he made the Irish rebels submit to him personally by crawling through the decapitated heads of their loved ones.’ The title ‘Devil Rider’ in many respects, argues Professor Rapple gets to the core of Gilbert’s personal style but also alludes to the manner in which he sought to be portrayed and how he believed this would advance his career.
“What is it that makes him believe that portraying himself like this will make him attractive?”, queries Professor Rapple in this new study of the political and cultural significance of Gilbert’s life, commenting that he has come to realise that “there’s a whole load of strategising and to some extent rational thinking that informs this self-presentation.”
In order to fully appreciate the compelling individual Gilbert was Professor Rapple must go back to the beginnings of empire, when his character appears to stand at odds with the accepted sober image of the Elizabethan era. “For the English, the Elizabethan achievement is something that is of tremendous importance as part of their ‘national portfolio’ and their identity.” As Professor Rapple highlights, the basis for this achievement, and one that is referenced by a lot of English historians, is built around the efficiency of the way things were done in Tudor times, and the view that English administrators were “neat, clean and well-advised.” Gilbert is a remarkable counter example of this, Professor Rapple claims. “He’s appetitive, he’s angry, he’s compulsive, he’s sexually voracious from what we can tell, and he has what would be deemed very non-commonsensical views about the nature of political power. He doesn’t believe in constitutional checks and balances, all of the things an Elizabethan is not mean to really be.”
But it is this contradiction represented in Gilbert’s style, action led - but also his ruthlessness and brutality, which according to Professor Rapple could signify ‘‘we’re missing something essential about the Elizabethan era that explains that person’’.
The ambition of Empire and Brexit
During the Elizabethan period, Gilbert is the initial driving force behind opening up the New World for colonies, becoming, in essence, the “tipping point between discovery and permanent settlement.” Rather than “cognising and cogitating about it” as many other bureaucratic figures at the time were doing, Professor Rapple says that Gilbert risked everything, went out and did it. He is famed for being the first Elizabethan to be given a commission to settle part of North America and is the first person on behalf of Elizabeth I to lay claim to part of North America – Newfoundland.
Indeed, the cosmopolitan outlook of the time, espoused particularly by characters such as Gilbert, was very much at the core of the ambition of empire. “The English at the time certainly see themselves as cosmopolitan. Gilbert is very much cosmopolitan in where he’s getting his ideas from and he’s clearly interested in legal and political thought in both France and Italy.” The English Protestantism of the time, as Professor Rapple highlights, saw itself as highly cosmopolitan, reaching out to Italian and French scholars, and being part of this international protestant community.. “He’s self-consciously drawing on very cosmopolitan ideas in order to draw together this very absolutistic view of the prerogative that enables the push towards empire.” While Britain now looks toward repositioning itself on the world stage, Professor Rapple argues that “every nation is prey to being taken in by its own projection of itself.”
In an era of Brexit and strongman leaders, the parallels to be drawn with the beginnings of empire are particularly resonant. Professor Rapple is however, reluctant to make any extensive comparisons with Britain’s travails today, reflecting simply that ‘’Brexit is to a large degree a symptom of the English difficulty in getting their head around the fact that they are ‘post-imperial.’’ In relation to the question of the Irish border, he says, as an empire, there’s almost a certain sense of being able to ‘forget about the intricacies’ of your actions and their consequences. “Far away in dear old Cyprus or in Kenya’s dusty land; where we bear the white man’s burden in many a strange land”, Professor Rapple concludes citing the line from the satirical Brendan Behan Song ‘The Captains and the Kings.’
About Rory Rapple
Professor Rory Rapple researches and publishes in political, intellectual, cultural and social history in the early-modern period. He is the author of Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: English military men in England and Ireland 1558- 1594 (Cambridge, 2009) and many scholarly articles. He earned his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and was a Research Fellow in Intellectual History at St John’s College, Cambridge. He got his BA in History at Trinity College, Dublin and was winner of the Cluff Memorial Prize.