The English Irish Souldier

I stumbled across this satire entirely by luck of the binding, since this is part of the same volume as Helaclitus Dream and I was trawling through for illustrations. Fortunately, since the illustration is in woodblock and the type is in a large size, the EEBO photo looks comparatively good. Thus, I can skip ahead to other kinds of notes.

The vast majority of this bound volume concerns the Civil War and concurrent colonial battles in Ireland. Immediately preceding The English Irish Sovldier (669.f.6.12) is The letter of Master Alexander Williams in Ireland to his father here resident in London (669.f.6.11). It's a pair of letters, printed on a single half-sheet, that can stand metonymically for the contents of this volume.

In the first letter, from Dublin in 3 May 1642, Alexander describes the results of his expedition: the losses of men, his bullet-wounds and near-wounds. Towards the end, he describes the overwhelming numbers against his force at two battles in biblical terms. At one battle, he writes that his force was so outnumbered that the enemy had "caſt lots the day before for our garments." His force succeeded, he says, because "it was God that did fight our battell for us." He closes the letter by noting, "Wee have fired above an hundred Iriſh Townes."

In the second letter, from Dublin on 30 April 1642, Alexander begins by describing the natives' warfare against animals. His force had to recover cattle that were allegedly stolen from their garrison in Cork. Afterwards, he reports that the "rebels" took 14 horses at Carbory (?)--but rather than use them in battle, the horses suffered mutilation:

but no ſooner poſſeſſed of their bodies, but they cut their throats under their tongue rootes, and pulled out their tongues thorough it, otherſome they pulled their eyes out...

I don't mean to dwell on this letter, except to use it as an example of the wartime reporting available in this volume.

Both The letter of Master Alexander and The English Irish Sovldier seem preoccupied with the right use of animals in war. There seems to be no tension whatever between two positions that contemporary vegans would find hypocritical. In the first case, Alexander recognizes the brutality of killing animals and mutilating their corpses. In the second case, the English-Irish soldier sustains himself on the flesh of "Hens and Bacon." There may be a hint of tension, though,  on the premise that The English Irish Sovldier is a satire. The gluttonous desires of that soldier are excessive, and may indicate some recognition of the violence inherent in the Irish colonial project.

It is fascinating, after all, that The English Irish Sovldier metaphorizes the weapons and wounds of war as foodstuffs. I have to wonder whether I'm missing some essential trope that characterizes the Anglo-Irish as rapacious.

And in terms of tropes, it's tempting to view the English Irish soldier as a prototype of the Roundhead. The English Irish soldier wears a pot on his head, but this offers little insight. With this detail, I return again to the problem of food:

This Pot, my Helmet,  
muſt not be forſaken,
For loe I ſeiz'd it
full of Hens and Bacon.