against the Irish in which, as the English general put it, “We spare none of
what quality or sex soever.” But still the Irish fought on.
When military campaigns proved ineffective, the English hit upon two
other policies. The first was to replace the natives with English and Scots
colonists. This was the policy adopted by James I: by 1603, with help from
the Scots, the English had almost completely cleared Ulster of Irish farm-
ers. Then in 1607, the same year as the first successful move to Virginia,
the British sent commissions to Ireland to survey the country and organize
it into “plantations” for incoming English and Scots colonists. They also
began to remove the Irish to reservations, as they would later do to the
Indians.
Even isolated on reservations, the Irish remained a potential danger, so
over the following years, the British also engaged in what today we would
call “sanctions”—economic restrictions, particularly in the Navigation Acts
of the 1660s, that weakened and starved Ireland. Irish beef could not be
exported to England, and the Irish woolen industry was crippled. As the
Spaniards would do to the Indians in America, the English tried to sup-
press the religion of the Irish to break their cultural tradition and morale.
As a result, as Jonathan Swift observed, the Irish were “dying and rotting
by cold and famine and filth and vermin.” Thus began the process that
would devastate Ireland in the eighteenth century, when about 10,000 gave
up and left for America.
Similarly, Scotland was reduced. In addition to commercial restrictions,
its civil liberties vanished. If juries failed to return the convictions officials
demanded of them, they were imprisoned; when the accused did not volun-
tarily confess, they could be tortured with a new device imported from
Muscovy, the thumbscrew—it was found to be better than the torture “boot”
then in common use in Scotland because, as an English historian com-
mented, the boot “was unsuitable for [malnourished] people with thin legs.”
Embattled as it was, Britain needed an ally in Europe; Holland was the
logical candidate. Like England, Holland was a dynamic commercial soci-
ety, and like England it was deeply divided religiously. In the middle of the
seventeenth century, nearly 1 million of the 2 million Dutch people were
Catholic, but the government was Protestant. The Protestants were them-
selves split into congeries of sects which forced upon them a degree of reli-
Society and Wars in the Old Countries 77