From Clonmel to Peru: barbarism and civility in Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess.(Critical essay)

Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess (1693) is one of the earliest recorded works of Irish prose fiction in the English language. Published just two years after the victory of the Protestant armies of William III over the Catholic forces of James II, it is also one of the most complex contemporary fictions in English: a romance that welds a uniquely specific rendering of provincial Ireland, a detailed account of the Williamite military campaign of 1690, purported Irish folklore, and an interpolated South American tale into a complex reflection on contemporary colonial identity.

This essay opens by considering the novel's contemporary setting in Clonmel, County Tipperary, in 1690, and the struggle between Williamite and Jacobite forces for military superiority before and during the first siege of Limerick in the summer of that year. Attention then turns to the work's two interpolated narratives: the story of Cluaneesha, allegedly taken from 'an ancient Irish Chronicle' and 'The Story of Faniaca' with its exotic South American setting. Two decades have passed since Michael McKeon argued that seventeenth-century novels characteristically draw on a variety of generic categories, including history and romance--an argument that now seems a commonplace of criticism of early English fiction. (1) The present essay reveals that Vertue Rewarded is an exceptionally dense interweaving of history, both Irish and Peruvian--the author demonstrably drawing in both cases on the most up-to-date sources--alongside romance, together with what purports to be genuine Gaelic folklore but which reveals itself, on closer examination, to be highly sophisticated fakelore. (2) This powerful if improbable generic mix, it is argued, results in a novel that offers a provocative critique of contemporary distinctions between 'civilization' and 'barbarism' used to underpin the colonial enterprise in Ireland and the Americas alike.

The Irish Background

Published by the London bookseller Richard Bentley, Vertue Rewarded formed part of a multi-volume compilation of forty-six 'novels', mostly reprints, and including many translations from the French, under the general title Modern Novels (1692-3). (3) The work is anonymous and was not reprinted in its own day. Unusually for an early work of Irish fiction, Vertue Rewarded has been republished in modern times, in an edition by Hubert McDermott, who offered a brief account of the novel's immediate historical context while following Paul Salzman's suggestion that it influenced a much more famous text, with which it shares part of its title: Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded. (4) Most recently, the novel has been discussed in different contexts by critics including Siobhan Kilfeather in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (2002), Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, in Pamela in the Marketplace (2005), and Aileen Douglas, in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (2006). (5)

The main plot of Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess concerns the attempted seduction by a foreign military commander, the Prince of S--g, of the Irish maiden, Marinda, her virtuous resistance, and her reward in the couple's eventual marriage, which makes the heroine the 'Irish princess' of the title. Exceptionally for English-language fiction of the period, this romance narrative is set in a clearly identified geographical location, at a precise historical moment in the immediate past. The story takes place in Clonmel, in the summer of 1690, shortly after Protestant forces occupied the town, in advance of the unsuccessful siege of Limerick in that year. (6) Among various historically verifiable episodes are those involving the quartering of troops on the town, the subsequent march of a detachment to reinforce the army besieging Limerick, and the temporary abandonment of the siege by the Williamite forces, after a daring raid by a small force under the Jacobite commander Patrick Sarsfield disrupts the army's supply line and destroys some of its carriages and provisions. (7)

The details of the war in Ireland, against which the principal narrative is set, necessarily reminded English and Irish readers of events in the recent history of the two countries that would effectively ensure English (later British) dominance in Ireland for the following century. These details are given with considerable exactitude. Of such importance were the events of 1689-91 in the affairs of the neighbouring islands that many contemporary accounts of the Irish military campaign found their way into print, including the anonymous An Account of the Victory Obtained by the King in Ireland (London, 1690) and Samuel Mullenaux's A Journal of Three Months Royal Campaigns of His Majesty in Ireland together with a True and Perfect Diary of the Siege of Lymerick (London, 1691). Vertue Rewarded draws not only on the familiar outlines of the conflict but seems to turn, for specific local detail, to one of the best-known and most successful accounts of the military campaign: A true and impartial history of the most material occurrences in the kingdom of Ireland during the last two years with the present state of both armies: published to prevent mistakes, and to give the world a prospect of the future success of Their Majesties arms in that nation; written by an eye-witness to the most remarkable passages (1690), a work originally published anonymously, whose author was revealed in later, and expanded, editions to be George Story, a chaplain to Sir Thomas Gower's (later the Earl of Drogheda's) regiment. (8) From the outset, then, Vertue Rewarded takes out a claim to historicity--a claim that, as we shall see, this politically aware romance later self-consciously reinforces.

Although McDermott did not greatly concern himself with the local details of the war in Ireland, or the political implications of the account the novel contains, he did argue that the description of the town of Clonmel suggested local knowledge on the part of the anonymous author, drawing particular attention to an interpolated story that features a holy well. (9) In general, McDermott's observations are well made. What is especially worth noting, however, is that the novel's local materials--the account of Clonmel in July 1690--do not provide merely an accumulation of circumstantial detail in the interests of verisimilitude but, integrated into the romance narrative itself, act as signposts to the author's political preoccupations. (10)