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

Ross, Ian Campbell ; Markey, Anne

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)

Early in the novel, we read that the Prince--already in love with Marinda but uncertain as to how to behave towards the Irish gentlewoman--leaves Clonmel in search of solitude:

 when he had walked about half a mile, he found himself on top of
 a Hill, whence after having looked a while on the adjacent Town,
 and with a curious Eye searched out that part of it, which his
 admired Beauty made happy with her presence, he laid him
 down under the shade of two or three large Trees, whose
 spreading Boughs nature had woven so close together [...] they
 seemed to have been the first planted there, for the shelter of
 those who came thither to drink; for just by there bubbled up a
 clear and plentiful Spring [...] (pp. 43-4)) (11)

This well has a significance more problematic than modern novel readers may immediately discern. Importantly, it links the principal narrative of the prince and his future-princess Marinda (which takes place in 1690) and the interpolated story of an earlier Irish princess Cluaneesha (set at an unspecified moment in the pre-Norman past). Holy wells, of course, have had a very real, if sometimes contested, importance in Irish life, from their origins in mythology through early Christianity, the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Penal Era, to the present day. Venerated as a source of healing, such wells were particularly associated with mass demonstrations of popular Roman Catholic devotion. Vertue Rewarded was published just two years before the passing of the first of the Penal Laws, or the Laws in Ireland for the Suppression of Popery, designed to secure the religious, social, economic, and political ascendancy of the Protestant--specifically Anglican--community in Ireland. As part of the extension of the penal legislation, a specific law would be passed in 1705 to the effect that 'whereas the superstitions of popery are greatly increased by the pretended sanctity of [...] wells to which pilgrimages are made by vast numbers, all such meetings and assemblies shall be adjudged riots, and unlawful assemblies, and punishable as such'. (12) Far from being merely an element of local colour, in other words, the holy well is an ideologically charged intrusion into the romance narrative that contains it, its principal interest lying in the cultural and political implications of the interpolated tale associated with it.

The Story of Cluaneesha

It is when the Prince reaches the well that the narrator, leaving him lying in the shelter of the surrounding trees, offers the reader the story of Cluaneesha, taken--he claims--from 'an ancient Irish Chronicle' (p.44). The story of this Irish princess, only child of 'Macbuain, King of Munster' (p.44), requires retelling. Two of the King's servants attest that the princess, who is suffering from a suspicious swelling, is guilty of an illicit relationship with one of her father's courtiers. Her sickly father banishes her to a convent and names her uncle, his brother, as his successor. The courtier flees abroad and, on the very night he goes on pilgrimage, a vision of a glorified nun, Edith, appears to the abbess of the convent to which Cluaneesha has been despatched, (13) informing her that Cluaneesha's innocence will be proved by a well that springs from a hill near Clonmel. The abbess gets word of this to the king, whose tale-bearing servants are forced to drink the spring water, as a result of which they swell and die. A citizen of Clonmel who witnesses the event and hears their dying confession inveigles his wife, whom he suspects of adultery, into drinking the water. She, too, swells and dies in great torment. Finally, the Princess, protesting her innocence, drinks the water, whereupon her swelling subsides and her beauty increases. Diverted by her father's death from her intention to build a nunnery beside the well, Cluaneesha devotes herself to the cares of the crown. The well, we are told in conclusion, was 'long after reverenced, and for the quality it had of discovering Unchastity, it was much resorted to', though as after-times became increasingly wicked, 'by disuse this Well lost its Fame, and perhaps its Vertue' (p.48). The narrator then undertakes to 'no longer tell such tales' and returns his attention to the Prince, who overhears his Marinda simultaneously confess her love for him and protest her own virtue.

On first reading, the tale of Cluaneesha seems to be a digression from the principal narrative. To those familiar with the conventions of story-telling in Irish, it might also appear that a piece of genuine seanchas confirms the unknown author's familiarity not only with Clonmel and its environs, but with Gaelic culture more generally. (14) However, while the description of the location has a demonstrable basis in fact, the legend of Cluaneesha turns out to be an authorial fiction for which no source exists. (15) The story does, it is true, retain some residual hints of a connection with genuine Irish material, notably in resemblances to aspects of various legends of Irish female saints, including St Brigid and St Dympna, laudatory accounts of whose lives appear in the (generally hostile) chronicles of Ireland most likely to be familiar to an English reader of the late-seventeenth century: those of Edmund Campion, Meredith Hanmer, and Edmund Spenser, included in the compilation The Historie of Ireland, published in Dublin in 1633. (16) Saints Brigid and Dympna, however, retained their virginity, renounced earthly ambition, and went on to found convents. The interpolated tale of Cluaneesha, by contrast, does not simply draw attention to the novel's advertised theme of 'virtue rewarded' but anticipates also the work's concern with questions of political legitimacy, for the Irish princess repudiates her own original intention of following the conventual life and decisively resolves the by now problematic question of the royal succession by inheriting her father's kingdom.

Contrary to the narrator's assertion, this legend is not taken from any Irish chronicle to which the unknown author could have had access at the time the novel was written, certainly in printed English form. There is reason to insist on both 'English' and 'printed' since it also seems certain that the novelist had, at most, only the slightest acquaintance with the Irish language. (17) This may be inferred most directly from the fact that the central character in the supposed legend bears a name that might seem Irish but is, in reality, impossible. A name that appears not to exist outside of the pages of Vertue Rewarded, 'Cluaneesha' would at best be not a personal but a place name though it could represent an attempted authorial derivation from Cluain Meala, the 'plain of honey', the Irish name of Clonmel itself. (18) Other Irish names to feature in the story--seeming guarantors of its authenticity--are less problematic but still difficult to gloss with certainty. So Macbuain--the name of Cluaneesha's supposed father--could variously be an anglicization of Mac Mhumhain (son of Munster); an English compositor's error for Macbrian (the name of various kings of Munster); or even be taken from an actual 'Macbuaine', the name given by Hanmer to the first master of Saint Patrick, on the future saint's arrival in Ireland. (19)

Despite the narrator's insistence on the veracity of the tale and its source in Irish legend, however, the story of Cluaneesha essentially draws on no authentic Irish material whatsoever. If it may have convinced its first English readers, who had little with which to compare it--and might still deceive modern non-Irish speaking readers--its source is just as likely to be found in European literature; so, the setting of Cluaneesha's story, in which the Prince of S--g falls asleep near the spring and awakes to hear Marinda declare the attraction she feels for the Prince, echoes--in pastoral rather than bawdy vein--that of the convent gardener Masetto de Lamporecchio who, resting under some trees, overhears nuns discussing the travails of chastity in Novella one of the third day of The Decameron. (20) In brief, whatever the story's source--if it has or indeed needs one--the tale of Cluaneesha, the Irish princess, is not folklore but fakelore. (21)

If the tale is not Irish, why does any of this matter? The most important answer is because the story of Cluaneesha is used to promote a positive view of the civility of ancient Irish society, possibly unique in English-language fiction of the late-seventeenth century. The conclusion of the story makes the point decisively. When the narrator declares that 'the Well was long after reverenced, and for the quality it had of discovering Unchastity, it was much resorted to' adding, by way of explanation, that:

 the Inhabitants of Ireland (how barbarous soever the partial
 Chronicles of other Nations report'em) were too nice in Amour to
 take a polluted Wife to their Bed (p.48).

The versions of pre- and even post-Norman Gaelic Ireland against which the tale of Cluaneesha is to be judged are, it is clear, hostile English accounts of the country, including those of Spenser, Campion, and Hanmer. Edmund Campion, for instance, alleged of the Irish that even following the introduction of Christianity the 'Honourable state of marriage they much abused'--though charges that women were common property, or chastity of no consequence, were made of many, if not all, 'barbarous' societies. (22) The partiality of English accounts of Ireland was a common complaint in the late-seventeenth century, despite counter-chronicles such as Peter Walsh's A Prospect of Ireland (1652) and Roderick O'Flaherty's Ogygia (1685). A slightly later writer, Sarah Butler, would make a similar point still more vigorously in her fictional Irish Tales (1716), defending her presentation of the Gaelic Irish by noting that:

 altho' they may [not] seem so now, in the Circumstances they lie
 under, (having born the heavy Yoke of Bondage for so many
 Years, and have been Cow'd down in their Spirits) yet that once
 Ireland was esteem'd one of the Principal Nations in Europe. (23)

The author of Irish Tales, however, had access to genuine accounts of Gaelic Ireland, for the novel is based on a detailed and ingenious reworking of material from an Irish- or English-language manuscript of the Foras Feasa ar Eireann by Seathrun Ceitinn (Geoffrey Keating). (24) Remarkably, the less well-informed author of Vertue Rewarded was so anxious to counter hostile English views and present a positive view of the native Irish as 'nice'--here, civilized in their attitudes towards female chastity and marriage, in contrast to barbarous societies--that in the absence, or inaccessibility, of genuine material to support this thesis, a legend was simply invented, attributed vaguely to 'an ancient Irish chronicle', and tricked out to appear authentic.

Less than two years after the Treaty of Limerick confirmed the power of the English-speaking Protestant minority in Ireland, in other words, the story of Cluaneesha both anticipates the advertised thematic centre of the novel--virtue and its rewards--and engages critically with the issues of the relationship between colonizer and colonized that characterizes the second, much longer interpolated narrative in Vertue Rewarded: 'The Story of Faniaca' (pp.64-109).

'The Story of Faniaca'

Opening in Peru, the story of Faniaca is related by an American Indian woman of that name. She narrates her upbringing in the province of Antis (more usually Antisuyu), an area of South America bordering on the Inca empire (or Tahuantinsuyu, in Quechua). Faniaca's narrative continues with the tale of how she saved the life of a Spanish officer, with whom she eventually fell in love, and how she accompanied him on his escape from execution, to the coast, where she was captured, and taken to Spain, eventually making her way, via England, to Clonmel, in search of her lover. (25) Besides the provincial Irish setting of Vertue Rewarded--itself unfamiliar to a London audience in the 1690s--the settings of other of the 'modern novels' published by Richard Bentley in his compilation included Portugal, Hungary, Spain, Majorca, and Poland. Even by these standards, Peru stands out as unusually exotic to an English readership and the story of Faniaca has recently been described by Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor as 'a lurid interpolated tale of Peruvian cannibalism [that] looks forward if anything to Swift'. (26) Like other commentators on Vertue Rewarded, however, Keymer and Sabor fail to notice that this lurid fiction is firmly based on a major work of seventeenth-century historical scholarship, widely known throughout Europe but only very recently translated fully into English.

The history drawn on by the anonymous author of Vertue Rewarded is the Royal Commentaries of Peru (1688), a translation by Sir Paul Rycaut of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) and Historia General de Peru (1617). (27) The source is doubly intriguing, since Royal Commentaries offer a decidedly critical view of Spanish colonialism in South America while recognizing the Incas as imperialists in their turn. So, the clash of cultures described by Garcilaso is not only that between the Incas and the colonizing Spanish but between the empire of the Incas and that of other American Indians, here specifically the inhabitants of Antisuyu, in the upper Amazon. Garcilaso was the son of a Spanish conquistador, Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega, and an American Indian mother, Isabel Suarez Chimpo Ocllu. An Inca princess, Isabel was related to both of the two last Inca rulers, the Inca Huascar and Atahuallpa. Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega later married off the mother of his eldest son to a commoner, to facilitate his own marriage to a Spanish woman. In these biographical details are contained the seeds of the stories of both Marinda, the heroine of Vertue Rewarded, who marries the Prince of S--g, once he has abandoned his attempts to seduce her, and of Faniaca, who marries her Spanish lover. (28)

The story of Cluaneesha, we have seen, only appears to be derived from a genuine Irish chronicle. By contrast, the story of Faniaca--understood by modern readers as an apparently extravagant fiction--draws very closely indeed on Rycaut's translation of Garcilaso's history. The daughter of an American Indian priest in the province of Antis, Faniaca falls in love with a Spanish conquistador, Astolfo, who has made common cause with the Incas in their attempt to conquer the people of Antisuyu. Saving the life of Faniaca's father by shooting dead one of his own Inca soldiers, who was about to kill the priest, Astolfo gains the gratitude of the father, and the love of Faniaca. Permitted to leave Antisuyu, Astolfo later returns, only to be captured and condemned to death. Faniaca pleads for his life but when Astolfo's return is taken as evidence of an incorrigible desire to impose his will on her people, she can find no way to save him but to effect his escape and her own. Fleeing to the coast, the lovers are captured by buccaneers and, despite Faniaca's pleading, separated.

While Vertue Rewarded's account of the inhabitants of Antis is undoubtedly 'lurid', it is notably less so than the historical materials on which it is based. In the Irish novel, the Peruvian narrator begins her story thus:

 My Name is Faniaca, my Father was a Brachman, an Indian Priest
 in the Province of Antis, which Countrey having never been
 conquered by the Incas, kept up the ancient Barbarity, not being
 Civilized by their Laws, as those Nations were, who had yielded
 to their Government (p.66).

That the people of Antisuyu had never been conquered by the Incas is made clear in Royal Commentaries, where Garcilaso sums up his account of Antian barbarity by explaining: 'Such are the Idols and manner of living of these Brutes, because the Government of the Incas was never received into their Countrey, nor hath it any Power there at this day'. (29) The author of Vertue Rewarded draws directly on Royal Commentaries when Faniaca continues her account of the religious differences between the sun-worshipping Incas and the inhabitants of Antisuyu, a polytheistic people with several deities, 'the two chief of which were the Tyger, and a large Serpent, which we called Amaru' (p.66), a close version of Garcilaso's 'In those Provinces of Antis they commonly worshipped Tygers for their Gods, and great Serpents, much thicker than a Man's Thigh, and twenty five, or thirty foot in length, though some others might be less, called Amaru'. (30)

To such items of exotic local colour, Faniaca adds a much more chilling account of the practices of her people. '[I]t was our custom', she relates, 'to sacrifice Human Blood; they commonly fed on nothing else but Captives, and if we had no Captives, we were forced to find them the same sort of Food from among our selves' (p.66). A lack of captives is not a major problem, however, since the people of Antisuyu live in a state of near-continual war, not just with the Incas but also with the Spanish and their own Indian allies who 'sent Parties far into our Countrey to take Booties, and make discoveries of the Land, in order to a farther Conquest' (p.67). This was a war her people were losing and Faniaca's own story begins at a time when the Spanish from their 'great Colony' at 'Cosco' (that is, Cuzco) had encroached so far into Antisuyu that 'they had driven us over the Madalena, that great River, being very deep, of a strong swift Current, and at that place about a League broad' (p.67), (31) so that it seemed that the warring peoples were irrevocably separated and indeed both had built substantial towns, which faced each other on either side of the river.

During the second of two attacks on the Antisuyu city, Astolfo is captured and sentenced to death in precisely the manner so vividly described in Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries. Since virtually every detail has its counterpart in Vertue Rewarded, the passage is worth citing at length:

 those who live in Antis eat Mens Flesh, and are more brutish than
 the Beasts themselves, for they know neither God, nor Law, nor
 Vertue, nor have they Idols or any Worship, unless sometimes the
 Devil presents himself to them in the form of a Serpent, or other
 Animal, they then adore and worship him. When they take any in
 the War, if he be an ordinary Fellow, they quarter him, and divide
 him to be eaten by their Wives, Children and Servants, or perhaps
 sell him to the Shambles; but if he be of Quality, or Noble, they
 call their Wives and Children together, and like Officers of the
 Devil, they strip him of his garments, and tye him to a stake, and
 then alive as he is, they cut him with Knives, and sharp Stones,
 Paring off slices from the more fleshy parts, as from the Buttocks,
 Calves of the Legs, and the brawny places of the Arme; then with
 The Bloud they sprinkle the principal Men and Women, and the
 remainder they drink, and eat the Flesh as fast as they can, before
 it is half broiled, lest the miserable Wretch should dye before he
 hath seen his flesh devoured, and intombed in their bowels: The
 Women, more cruel and inhumane than the Men, wet the nipples
 of their Breasts with the bloud, that so the Infants which suck
 them may take a share of the Sacrifice. All this is performed by
 way of a religious Offering with mirth and triumph, till the Man
 expires, and then they complete the Feast in devouring all the
 remainder of his Flesh and Bowels, eating it with silence and
 reverence, as sacred, and partaking of a Deity. If in execution of
 all this torment the Patient was observed to sigh and groan, or
 make any distorted faces, they broak his Bones, and with contempt
 threw them into the fields and waters; but if he appeared stout,
 and enduring the anguish and pains without shrinking at them,
 then his Bones and Sinews were dryed in the Sun, and lodged on
 the tops of the highest Hills, where they were deified, and
 Sacrifices offered to them. (32)

This, we may need to remind ourselves, is 'history'. No wonder then that when Denis Vairasse d'Allais, author of the imaginary travels, L'Histoire des Severambes (1675-77), insisted on the close relationship between factual and fictional histories, he had his publisher declare that 'the Histories of Peru, Mexico, China, &c. were at first taken for Romances by many, but time has shewed since that they are verities not to be doubted of'. (33)

Given the fact of Astolfo's return alongside the enemies of her people, Faniaca initially considers such a fate well deserved and declares not only that Astolfo should suffer death but tells him that 'to shew how little I pity you, I will go to see you Sacrificed, and eat the first bit of you my self' (p.77). Only when she discovers that Astolfo has, in fact, come back to take his saviour and her family away as a sign of the gratitude he feels for his earlier reprieve, does Faniaca undergo a change of heart and, faced with witnessing the killing of her lover in barbaric circumstances, manages to substitute another of the Spanish prisoners, who is then put to death:

 The poor wretch was cut to pieces slice after slice, and lived long
 enough to see his own Flesh broiled, and eaten by the Company;
 you must think this was a terrible sight to the rest, who saw by
 their Companion what they were to suffer (p.83).

Perceiving his daughter's ploy, Faniaca's father marks out Astolfo as the next victim. A fire is lit to cook his flesh, he is tied to a tree, and the priest takes a knife and 'fetched Blood from the brawny part of his Arm (p. 84)', (34) at which point Faniaca faints, putting a temporary end to the proceedings. Before the execution is resumed the following day, Faniaca distracts the guards with 'a large Pot full of pleasant Liquor, made of our Sacred Plant the Coca' (p.86), (35) and enables her lover to escape, joining him in his flight.

Much of the background to this and the continuation of the narrative, which involves an encounter with buccaneers, retains a clearly discernible basis in Royal Commentaries. When Faniaca is forcibly separated from Astolfo and brought to Spain, however, the narrative model changes decisively once more. A Spanish sea captain gifts Faniaca to his wife as a servant. During the sailor's subsequent absence, Faniaca claims to have learned the art of foreseeing the future from her father and tells her mistress, who scoffs at Faniaca's supposed powers, that her husband will return home the following day. Later that evening, Faniaca witnesses the wife entertaining a young lover to a hearty supper when, much to their consternation, the captain returns home. The lover is hidden in a chest and to allay her husband's suspicions, the wife claims to have prepared supper in preparation for his homecoming, which had been predicted by Faniaca. The soothed cuckold then orders that the chest, which he believes to contain food supplies, be brought to his ship. Faniaca averts potential disaster for her mistress by claiming that the chest now contains an evil spirit that she had inadvertently raised during her fortune-telling exercise. As a result of this deception, the lover escapes, the adulterous wife avoids detection, and Faniaca negotiates her passage to England in pursuit of Astolfo. (36)

In contrast to the historical material that has previously informed Faniaca's narrative, the episode of the adulterous wife very closely resembles both international folktales and their literary counterparts. (37) Although her story draws on elements of the tale tradition, however, Faniaca differs from the traditional trickster who is characteristically a clever, unscrupulous deceiver, for while Faniaca is revealed as sharper than her Spanish master and mistress she usurps neither their power nor possessions, seeking only the opportunity to search out Astolfo. Ultimately, her story shows that virtue--here, fidelity in love--is the most powerful weapon available to a powerless woman. Once again, what initially appears to be a digressive narrative serves to underscore the main theme of the novel, and does so in the context of a complex engagement with shifting notions of colonized and colonizer, barbarism and civilization.

That Faniaca eventually follows Astolfo--who has joined the Williamite army--to Ireland brings her tale full circle, while pointing up the parallels between the Spanish conquest of Peru and English attempts to subdue Ireland that go back to the twelfth-century Norman invasions. When the contemporary English--or Irish--reader is told in Vertue Rewarded, that those who live 'in the Province of Antis kept up the ancient barbarity' (p.66), parallels with English accounts of the 'barbarous' Irish become clear. It was Andrew Trollope who, in 1585, wrote that the Irish 'were not thrifty and civil or human creatures, but heathen or rather savage and brute beasts', and Edmund Spenser who, a decade later, declared the Irish to be 'in the most barbarous and loathly conditions of any people under heaven'. (38) The once 'barbarous' Faniaca has become a model of civility, however, suggesting a progressive 'fictional' narrative at odds with the degenerative 'historical' accounts of Ireland offered by English writers.

In a preface, the author of Vertue Rewarded had, in fact, averted to the interweaving of narratives of quite different kinds, declaring that:

 the main Story is true, I heard of a Gentleman who was
 acquainted with the Irish Princess, and knew all the Intrigue, and
 having from him so faithful a Relation of it, I made the Scene the
 very same where it was transacted, the time the same, going on all
 the way with the Truth, as far as conveniency would permit; I only
 added some few Circumstances, and interlined it with two or
 three other Stories, for variety sake (p.vii).

To modern readers, this may appear primarily as early novelistic convention. Aphra Behn opened Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688) with the assertion that 'I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this royal slave, to entertain my reader with the adventures of a feigned hero, whose life and fortunes fancy may manage at the poet's pleasure. I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down'. (39) As regards Vertue Rewarded, however, the assertion is not only accurate, but a distinct echo of the author's Peruvian source, where the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega repeatedly insists on the importance of eyewitness accounts as evidence of the veracity of his own writing. So, in describing the allegedly barbarous behaviour of the inhabitants of Antisuyu, Garcilaso writes that Pedro de Cieza de Leun, one of his principal sources, 'affirms, that he saw it with his own eyes'. (40) Such a claim--and the status of Garcilaso's work has been much debated--is not greatly different from the claim by the author of Vertue Rewarded that this acknowledged fiction has its basis in truth. (41)

While the story of Cluaneesha, set within a modern narrative in realistic mode that demonstrably draws on local knowledge of Clonmel during the Williamite wars, adds invented material purportedly taken from an Irish chronicle, 'The Tale of Faniaca', firmly based in a major work of Renaissance history, recently translated into English, is set off by further interpolations employing international folktale motifs. The clearly discernible morals of both interpolated narratives, however, serve to reinforce the theme of the main plot--the story of the Prince of S--g and Marinda--emphasizing the practical rewards of virtue, in stories that insistently cross national, cultural, and social boundaries, in their interrogation of the polarities of civilization and barbarism.

'The Incomparable Marinda'

What did contemporary readers make of all this? Here, we run into a seeming conundrum. From the evidence of Bentley's compilation, we can infer that Vertue Rewarded was a very late addition to the series. It is the only work to bear the title-page date of 1693; it appears in the twelfth and final volume of the 1692-3 collection. Examination of the volume's title-page shows Vertue Rewarded to have been a very late substitution for the third and fourth titles: the twelfth volume contains titles numbered I, II, III (Vertue Rewarded) and V, the title of Vertue Rewarded being a paste-over. (42) Moreover, the dedication and preface to the novel offer strong evidence that the author had in mind a very particular audience indeed. The dedicatory epistle is written to 'the Incomparable MARINDA' (p.iii) and the author addresses the dedicatee directly, declaring that 'in describing the Marinda of this Novel, I borrow from you, not only her Name, but some of the chief Beauties I adorn her with' (p.iii). These beauties, however, are of a very special kind, for the fictional Marinda's 'true Character suits very well with you: She was an Innocent Country Virgin, ignorant of the Intrigues and Tricks of the Court Ladies; her Vertue, like yours, untainted and undecayed, needed none of their Artificial Embellishments to guild it over; and that Innocence which appears eminently in both of you, little wants these Ladies Artifices to set it off' (p.iv). In a contemporary Irish context, this praise of rural innocence over the deceits of the court is no mere novelistic cliche but a direct and readily apprehensible allusion to the tendency of the Protestant settler community in late-seventeenth century Ireland to portray itself in just such terms, in contrast to the metropolitan centre represented by England.

It is worth looking again, however, at the precise wording of the dedicatory epistle, when the author writes that 'in describing the Marinda of this Novel, I borrow from you, not only her Name, but some of the chief Beauties I adorn her with' (pp.iii-iv). Whatever we make of the compliment--in novelistic or political terms--the author insists that he borrowed the heroine's name from the dedicatee and reinforces still further the fact that the dedicatee was an actual, historical person in the preface, when declaring that he 'printed it [Vertue Rewarded] for the ease of her whom it was made for' (p.vii).

Could there be a real Marinda for whom Vertue Rewarded was written and to whom it is dedicated? In fact, a candidate readily presents herself. Despite the use in the novel of type names--Astolfo is a character in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532) while Celadon, the confidant of the Prince, shares a name with one of the pastoral heroes of Honore d'Urfe's celebrated prose romance, L'Astree (1607-33).

Marinda was not a familiar name in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the only Marindas in contemporary literature appear to be: a character in Thomas Betterton's low comedy The Revenge (1680); a Spanish woman who retained her chastity under threat of rape by keeping raw beef under her armpits until it rotted, as recounted in The Glory of God's Revenge against the detestable sins of murder and adultery (1685); and a very minor and unsympathetic figure who appears briefly in Sir Richard Blackmore's heroic poem, Prince Arthur (1695). (43) The most famous contemporary 'Marinda' was the coterie name adopted by Mary Molesworth, later Mary Monck, daughter of Robert Molesworth, who printed a volume of poems by and to his daughter after her death in 1715. Although Mary Molesworth's date of birth is not certain, she was most likely born in 1682, making her nine or ten years of age when Vertue Rewarded was published. (44)

Her coterie name apart, Mary Molesworth is an intriguing candidate for the dedicatee of Vertue Rewarded by reason of her family background. Robert Molesworth, a staunch supporter of William III, became celebrated, or notorious, for his Account of Denmark, as it was in the year 1692 (1694), which suggested Lutheran Denmark to be an arbitrary and tyrannical society, attacked the connection between church and state, and offered a defence of liberty that did not go unchallenged in contemporary England, still less in Ireland in the immediate aftermath of the post-Williamite settlement. A well-known figure in contemporary Irish political and literary circles, Molesworth was also in the early 1690s in close epistolary and personal contact with Sir Paul Rycaut, the translator of Garcilaso de la Vega's Royal Commentaries.

Born in 1629, Rycaut had had a full and varied career as a diplomat, especially in Turkey, North Africa, and the Levant, and as a writer, notably as author of The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1667). He was knighted in 1685 and, in the following year, appointed Chief Secretary to Ireland, in which role he accompanied the new lord lieutenant, the Earl of Clarendon, to Dublin. Rycaut had family connections with Ireland--his brother was a prominent Dublin lawyer--and he became a member of the privy council, a judge of the Admiralty, and was elected to the council of the Dublin Philosophical Society. (45) When James II began to implement his process of Catholicization, Clarendon was replaced as lord lieutenant by Tyrconnell, and both Clarendon and Rycaut left Ireland in 1687. After a spell in London, Rycaut was appointed by the new monarchs William and Mary to be Resident in the Hanseatic towns. Known to Molesworth in Ireland in the 1680s, Rycaut corresponded with him in 1691-2, and entertained first him, and later Lady Molesworth and her family, in Hamburg, as they made their separate ways back from Denmark, after Molesworth's recall, in July 1692. (46)

The possible relevance to a reading of Vertue Rewarded of a personal and political connection between Rycaut and Molesworth--based on their complementary criticisms of aspects of English policy at home and abroad--is evident enough. Although, on first acquaintance, the romance narrative appears conventional for its time, the novel offers complex accounts of different human societies, riven by war, conquest, imperial ambition, and political and religious difference. The multiple unions with which the work concludes involve the marriage of a European prince to a member of the Irish Protestant gentry; of the English officer Celadon to Marinda's cousin Diana; and of the Spanish conquistador Astolfo to the American Indian Faniaca, the celebrations being deferred until Faniaca has been baptized (the wedding ceremony of the 'fair Convert' is seemingly conducted by a Roman Catholic priest). (47)

Other writers have observed that Vertue Rewarded appears to endorse the values of the Irish Protestant settler community, following both the confiscations under the viceregality of the Earl of Tyrconnell and the Williamite settlement after the 1691 Treaty of Limerick. (48) However, though broadly correct, such a reading does little justice to the complexity of the historical perspective introduced by the story of Faniaca, with its double colonizing narrative: of Spaniards and Incas, and of Incas and the inhabitants of Antisuyu. (49) Throughout the Royal Commentaries, both the Inca Garcilaso and his translator Rycaut make the reader aware of a conflict between civilization and barbarism, seen from opposing perspectives. The Spaniards justify their actions by claiming to bring civilization to the Incas, while the Incas consider the earlier and concurrent expansion of their own empire as an attempt to civilize the population of Antisuyu (and other American Indian populations). A laudatory account of Inca civilization had indeed been offered very recently by Sir William Temple, whose positive reconsideration of four 'exotic' empires in 'On Heroick Virtue' (1690) ranged explicitly from China to Peru. (50)

A close reading of Garcilaso's account in the original or in Rycaut's translation--Temple almost certainly depended on the abridgment in Purchas his Pilgrimes--makes it hard to regard either of these civilizing narratives as tenable, at least in simple form. If the inhabitants of Antisuyu--like the pre-Inca peoples--are frequently characterized as barbaric, then the expansion of the Incan empire prefigures the Spanish conquest in its dependence on high levels of violence. By making Faniaca an inhabitant of Antisuyu, however--instead of an Inca, as might have seemed more familiar to the original audience, and easier to integrate into a short romance--the author of Vertue Rewarded chooses a heroine from the most barbarous people in his historical source and yet shows her to be capable of sensibility, courage, gratitude, intelligence, fortitude, and fidelity.

Strikingly, the 'civilizing' Spanish are shown in a very unflattering light, not only by the mestizo Garcilaso--both Spanish and Inca--but by his translator also. So, in his preface to Royal Commentaries, Rycaut recounts at some length the bewilderment of the friendly natives of Peru when faced by the Spanish conquistadors. Having entertained the first Spaniards as demi-gods, the Incas soon receive a rude awakening, being:

 strangely surprized, whilst in a peaceable manner they were
 treating with the good men, and whilst Friar Valverde, with a Cross
 in his hand, was preaching to Atahualpa their King; that then,
 without any Cause given, they should be killed with Swords and
 Lances, and five thousand of them massacred before the face of
 their Prince. (51)

Though he notes that the Incas treat the Spanish as viracochas, or descendants of the Sun, and revere them accordingly, Rycaut declares himself amazed at the continuation of Incan benevolence, in the face of such barbarous treatment. He adds, since the 'flexible and good nature of this People did not soften the haughty mind of the Spaniards towards them, who esteeming the rest of the World Slaves to them, oppressed the Indians with such servitude and slavry as the nature of man was not able to sustain'. (52) Here, Rycaut, like Garcilaso, aligns himself with those from Bartolome de las Casas in the sixteenth century to Jorge Basadre in the late-twentieth, who applied the term 'barbarians' to the Spanish conquistadors for their treatment of the Inca population and its civilization. (53)

In a work dedicated to one Catholic monarch, James II, Rycaut perhaps thought it prudent to the foreground attempts by another, Charles V, to protect the Incas 'from that inhumane Tyranny which one man ought not to exercise towards another'. (54) Yet he continues immediately by relating how the Spanish conquerors behaved towards the native population in the most barbarous manner regardless. Having recounted the story of repeated atrocities committed by the 'civilizing' Spaniards, Rycaut declares that before long there was not to be found a common soldier among the Spanish but 'fansied that the whole Government and Wealth of Peru was not a sufficient Reward for a person of his high Merit and Extraction'. He concludes his preface with heavy irony:

 How well they have improved that Countrey and used those riches
 which God hath given them, and how humanely they have treated the
 poor Natives; I leave to the Historians of our modern times: and
 for the Valour and Bravery which of late years they have used in
 defence of that Countrey; I refer my self to the Relation of the
 Bucaniers. And so to proceed on with this History. (55)

Sir Paul Rycaut was no desk-bound historian. Before his brief employment in Ireland, he had taken part in military expeditions against North African privateers, and it was his long residence in Turkey that prompted the writing of The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, a work that enjoyed considerable political and literary renown, being translated into five European languages within a decade. The view of the dubious virtues of European colonialism, coupled with the assertion of the responsibility of the colonized for their own predicament, here anticipate the writing of Jonathan Swift, who would later use Rycaut's translation of Garcilaso as a source for one of his most celebrated works. (56) The story of Peru under the Spanish is one in which the natives are destroyed 'half by force, and half by consent', as Swift would describe the fate of Ireland in 'The Story of the Injured Lady' (1707; published in 1746), while the 'humane' treatment accorded the native by conquerors who are themselves mere buccaneers recalls similarly ironic comments in Gulliver's Travels (1726; IV, ch. xii). (57)

If Vertue Rewarded does offer a view of the Protestant planter community to that community, then it offers a sharp warning as well. When a fashionable young man comes down to Clonmel from the metropolis, the 'Breeding' he displays 'elevated him so far above' even his Protestant country counterparts, in his own eyes, 'that they did look like our wild Irish to him' (pp.30-1). By the 1690s, there was a long established tradition of representing the native--Gaelic, Catholic--population as 'wild Irish', in the work of Spenser, Campion, and Hanmer among others. (58) The dangers of creating divisions not only within Ireland as a whole but even within the Protestant community are deftly suggested here. More importantly, an awareness of the ease with which a 'civilizing' mission can turn into barbarism runs through the entire novel.

All ends well, of course, with the elevation of Marinda to the status of princess being the clearly understood reward for her virtue in resisting the misguided attempts at seduction by her royal admirer, the Prince of S--g. Yet the multiple marriages with which Vertue Rewarded concludes are not driven solely by the demands of romance. Rather, all three romance narratives exemplify Margaret Anne Doody's contention that seventeenth-century fictions operate at the nexus of the public and the private, the author of Vertue Rewarded joining Madeleine de Scudery, Johann Jakob Christofell von Grimmelhausen, and Aphra Behn as writers whom Doody understands as 'politically conscious and analytical', understanding life itself as a political affair. (59) The union of the English officer Celadon and the Irish gentlewoman Diana suggests the close ties that should bind Ireland to the metropolitan society (the author could not know how quickly these ties would loosen, as Swift would reveal in a telling reworking of the marriage plot in 'The Story of the Unfortunate Lady', where England deserts the virtuous Ireland for the ill-favoured, disloyal Scotland). The marriage between the Prince of S--g and Marinda suggests the high estimate the settler community had of itself in the wake of the Williamite wars. In doing so, however, it not only brings the Irish narrative full circle but points up the ambiguity in the novel's title: offering readers a second princess, a successor to the virtuous Cluaneesha, who had ruled Ireland in the distant past. That the Prince of S--g is a European ruler, whose principality will not support him in the manner he desires, ensures that he will settle in Ireland, confirming the contemporary perception of Ireland as a country whose very identity is to be understood in terms of a dynamic of repeated conquest. (60) It also reminds the settler community that its future has been secured by another Protestant European prince, William of Orange, married to Mary, daughter of the Roman Catholic James II.

The most striking of the three marriages with which Vertue Rewarded concludes, however, is that between Astolfo and Faniaca. There can, surely, be no other work of early fiction in English where one of the principal female figures, eventually set up as a paragon of virtue, has earlier threatened, with complete seriousness, to eat the man she eventually marries. As an inhabitant of Antis, Faniaca belonged to the most barbarous of barbarous societies, despised as much by the Incas, as by the Spanish, one of whom she will marry. In Ireland, it had been a source of complaint since the Middle Ages that English settlers intermarried with the native Irish and, instead of civilizing them, became hiberniores hibernis ipsis or, more Irish than the Irish themselves. As one Munster planter had complained earlier in the seventeenth century, settlers 'by marriage with the Irish [...] became mere Irish again'. (61) Faniaca's tale wholly reverses the trajectory of this narrative of moral and cultural decline. Following the transference of her allegiance from her own barbarous people to the civilizing Spanish, her mastery of their language, and of English, her natural virtue, and her conversion to Christianity, Faniaca herself acts as a guarantee that marriage can be a means of raising once more a formerly polite, later barbarous, people to a state of civility.

That a 'modern novel', set in Ireland and published in London, should have melded folklore and fakelore with abundant local detail drawn in part from a carefully researched account of the Williamite wars in Ireland in the summer of 1690; and a notable account of European colonial history told from the viewpoint of the conquered, translated by a former Chief Secretary of Ireland, is remarkable enough. That it was most likely written by someone in close contact with Rycaut or Molesworth or both in the early 1690s, and dedicated to Mary Molesworth, 'Marinda', a daughter of Robert Molesworth, is still more intriguing. Whatever we make of this, Vertue Rewarded merits comparison with much better-known works, such as Oroonoko, in using the romance form as the basis for a cautionary tale of colonial overreaching, interrogating the attempted distinction between civilization and barbarism that underpinned contemporary European imperial expansion in Ireland as elsewhere. Behn's novel is set in Africa and Surinam, Vertue Rewarded in Peru and an Ireland that was, perhaps, no less exotic for a contemporary English audience. The need in the 1690s for just such a cautionary tale as Vertue Rewarded, directed at an English or Protestant settler community so shortly to embark on the implementation of harsh penal legislation designed to contain the 'wild Irish'--a people yet not so 'barbarous ... as the partial Chronicles of other Nations report 'em'--cannot be doubted. For modern readers, resituating this London-published, English-language romance in Irish and South American colonial contexts may also help further pluralize the wider history of fiction into 'the multihistoricity of simultaneous local emergences', (62) here resisting the too easy incorporation of Irish writing of the long eighteenth century into an unreflective literary tradition based on an uncontested English imperial culture.

NOTES

(1.) See Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), especially pp.25-64. For a differently focussed engagement with such issues, see Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

(2.) 'Fakelore' is a term coined to describe a synthetic product claiming to be authentic oral tradition but actually tailored for mass edification; see Richard M. Dorson, Folklore and Fakelore (Cambridge, Massachusetts. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), p.5.

(3.) [Various], Modern Novels, 12 Vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1692-3); forty-eight 'novels' are listed on the title-pages of the several Volumes but one work, listed on the title-pages of Volume II as The Perplext Prince, appears only in volume III, as The Perplex'd Prince. In this essay, all quotations from Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess are taken from the Modern Novels, Vol. 12, and page references are given parenthetically in the text.

(4.) Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess, edited with an introduction by Hubert McDermott. Princess Grace Library: 7 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), especially pp.xxviii-xl; McDermott offered a text with modernized spelling and punctuation. For possible connections between Vertue Rewarded and Richardson's novel, see also Paul Salzman, 'Vertue Rewarded and Pamela', N&Q, New Series, 26 (1979), pp.554-5, and Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558-1700 (Oxford: Oxford and New York, 1985), p. 340.

(5.) Siobhan Kilfeather, 'Sexuality 1685-2001', The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane et al, 5 Vols (Derry: Field Day, 1991-2002), 4, pp.767-8; Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially p.177, pp.183-4; Aileen Douglas, 'The Novel before 1800', in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, edited by John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 23-4.

(6.) The early mention of the Prince of S--g is likely to make any reader familiar with seventeenth-century European history think of Frederick (Duke of) Schomberg, one of William III's finest military commanders. Rolf and Magda Loeber, indeed, have recently made this identification, suggesting Vertue Rewarded to be a roman a clef; see Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, with Anne Mullin Burnham, A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650-1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), p. 58. In fact, the Duke of Schomberg, who is eventually mentioned in the novel by name (p.96) was killed at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, before the supposed events of the novel take place. The Schomberg who commanded the troops that entered Clonmel later in the summer of 1690 was one of the duke's sons, Count Meinhard Schomberg--but the use of S--g as a name for the prince seems to be either an authorial tease or a coincidence.

(7.) Vertue Rewarded, p.4 ff.; pp.143-4.

(8.) Story's authorship was revealed when the work was reissued in London in 1693, in which year Story also published A continuation of the impartial history of the wars of Ireland from the time that Duke Schomberg landed with an army in that Kingdom, to the 23d of March 1691/2, when Their Majesties proclamation was published, declaring the war to be ended ... together with some remarks upon the present state of that kingdom (London, 1693). A consolidated version of the two parts, An important history of the wars in Ireland, with a continuation thereof ... also appeared in London in 1693, separately paginated. The author of Vertue Rewarded could have drawn on any of these editions for most of the information included, although one episode concerning rapparees in the vicinity of Clonmel only occurs in the Continuation and the consolidated work; see Vertue Rewarded, pp.82-4, and A continuation of the impartial history of the wars in Ireland (1693), p.55, p.62.

(9.) 'Introduction', pp. v-x (p. ix).

(10.) For a fuller consideration of the uniquely specific spatial and temporal presentation of a provincial town in late-seventeenth century fiction, see Anne Markey and Ian Campbell Ross, 'Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess: Clonmel in a Seventeenth-Century Irish Novel', in Tipperary Historical Journal (2007), 45-54.

(11.) The perceived significance of the episode is confirmed by its inclusion in Kilfeather, 'Sexuality 1685-2001', 4, pp.767-8.

(12.) 2 Ann c. 6 (1703), sec. 26. See also, for example, Michael P. Carroll, Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion (Baltimore, Maryland, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Elizabeth Healy, In Search of Ireland's Holy Wells (Dublin: Wolfhound, 2001), and Diarmuid O Giollain, 'Revisiting the Holy Well', Eire-Ireland, 40, 1 & 2 (2005), 11-41.

(13.) There are two saints Edith: St. Edith of Poleswoth, or Tamworth (c. 901-937), daughter of King Edward the Elder of England, and St. Edith of Wilton (961-84), daughter of King Edward the Peaceable; both saints are associated with female monasticism, suggesting that the name was not chosen at random. It is also possible, however, that 'Edith' is here a version of Ita or Ida (480-570), an Irish saint with a strong cult in Munster, and again associated with monasticism, though not of royal birth.

(14.) See J. H. Delargy, 'The Gaelic Story-Teller', Proceedings of the British Academy, XXXI (1945), pp.6-7. For the use of seanchas in an eighteenth-century Irish novel, see Ian Campbell Ross, 'Thomas Amory, John Buncle, and the Origins of Irish fiction', Eire-Ireland, XVIII, 3 (1983), 71-85.

(15.) For the location of the well (now known as the Ragwell), see Markey and Ross, "Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess: Clonmel in a Seventeenth-Century Irish Novel', pp.49-50.

(16.) The Historie of Ireland, collected by three learned authors viz. Meredith Hanmer Doctor in Divinitie: Edmund Campion sometime Fellow of St Johns College in Oxford: and Edmund Spenser Esq (Dublin, 1633).

(17.) In any case, the story is not recorded either in major Irish language annals, such as Lebor Gabala Eireann, Annala Rioghachta Eireann, or Seathrtin Ceitinn's Foras Feasa ar Eirean, all of which were available only in manuscript form at the end of the seventeenth century.

(18.) Siobhan Kilfeather suggested a derivation from the Irish for Ite's Meadow, 'Sexuality, 1685-2001', 4, p. 767, and this suggestion has been followed by Aileen Douglas who, like Kilfeather, sees a connection with the tradition of dinnseanchas, the Irish lore of place; 'The Novel before 1800', pp.23-4. To Dr Prionsias O Drisceoil we owe the further tentative suggestion that the name Cluaneesha could derive from 'cluain' (a clearing in a wood) and 'uisce' (water). In any case, Cluaneesha must, in origin, be a place, not a personal, name.

(19.) For the difficulties English compositors had with Irish-language names see, for example, Ian Campbell Ross, '"One of the Principal Nations of Europe": The Representation of Ireland in Sarah Butler's Irish Tales', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 7. 1 (1994), p.5 n. 10. For the first master of St Patrick, see Meredith Hanmer, The Chronicle of Ireland, p.40; Campion gives the name as 'Mackbiam', Historie of Ireland, p.37.

(20.) Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, edited by Vittore Branco, 2 Vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), Giornata III, Novella 1, 1, pp.328-37.

(21.) For 'fakelore', see n. 2 above.

(22.) Campion, Historie of Ireland, p. 16; for similar comments on other cultures, including that of the American Indians, see Anthony Pagden, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp.22-3.

(23.) Sarah Butler, Irish Tales (London, 1716), [n.p.]; see Ross, '"One of the Principal Nations in Europe', p.2.

(24.) Geoffrey Keating [Seathrun Ceitinn], The General History of Ireland, translated by Dermod O'Connor (London, 1723); see also Diarmaid O Cathain, 'Dermot O'Connor, Translator of Keating', Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an Da Chultur, 2 (1987), 67-87.

(25.) Faniaca's tale involves a considerable telescoping of its source material, which involves not just a single lifetime but runs from pre-Incan society, through the heyday of the Incan empire, its overthrow by the Spanish, and takes the action up to the late-sixteenth century; for a similar telescoping of history in the interests of fictional narrative, see Ross, '"One of the Principal Nations of Europe"', especially pp.8-9.

(26.) Keymer and Sabor, p.183; Vertue Rewarded does share a South American setting, however, with Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688).

(27.) El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales (Lisbon, 1609) and Historia General del Peru (Cordoba, 1617). The combined texts first became known in English in heavily-abridged form, as part of Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625); a French translation, by Jean Baudoin, published as Le commentaire royal; ou l'histoire des Yncas, Roys de Perou (Paris, 1633) and Histoires des guerres civiles des Espagnols dans les Indes (Paris, 1650) was also known in England, John Locke citing it in Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690). For a more general consideration of the use of Rycaut's Royal Commentaries by Irish writers, see Ian Campbell Ross, 'Ottomans, Incas and Irish Literature: Reading Rycaut', Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 22 (2007), 11-27.

(28.) See Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, translated by Paul Rycaut, Royal Commentaries, 'The Translator to the Reader', p.iii.

(29.) Royal Commentaries, Book I, Chap. iv, p.7.

(30.) Royal Commentaries , Book IV, Chap. xvii, p.119.

(31.) Here, the account of the River Madalena, emphasizing its size and the speed of the current, is drawn from Garcilaso: 'The first is that great River, which is now called the Madalena, falling into the Sea between Cartagena, and Santa Maria; the mouth of which, according to the Sea-charts is eight Leagues wide, having its head, or source, from the high Mountains of Peru: The fierce swiftness of the current with which it falls into the sea is such, that for ten or twelve Leagues the forcible streams are sensibly perceived to reach into the Seas, the fury thereof contending with the Waves of the Ocean', Royal Commentaries, Book VIII, Chapter xxii, p.338.

(32.) Royal Commentaries, Book I, Chapter iv, p.7.

(33.) Quoted by McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, p.111.

(34.) Compare Rycaut's translation: 'the brawny places of the Arme', Royal Commentaries, p.7.

(35.) Compare 'They worshipped also the Plant Cuca, or Coca, as the Spaniards call it'; Royal Commentaries, Book IV, Chapter xvii, p.119.

(36.) See Vertue Rewarded, pp.93-108.

(37.) See the group of international folktales classified under the Aarne/Thompson system as Type 1358--the trickster surprises adulteress and lover; variants of this tale type include accounts of how the food intended for the lover goes to the husband, how the husband attempts to carry off the box containing his wife's lover, and how the unfortunate paramour is taken for the devil; see Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1964), p.403. The story of Faniaca also contains variations on a number of motifs found in folktales throughout the world, including K1549.8--woman prepares food for paramour; K1550.1.2--adulteress discovered by food prepared for paramour; K1521.2--paramour successfully hidden in chest; K1555.2--the devil in the barrel; and K1574.2--trickster discovers wife's paramour, hides him, and is rewarded by husband; see Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-book and Local Legends, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955-1958) 6 Vols, Vol. 4. p.406, p.407, p.403, p.408, p.410. A literary version containing the same motifs--though in a decidedly bawdier form--is to be found in the story of Pietro di Vincolo of Perugia and his wife and her lover in the tenth tale of day five of The Decameron; see Decameron, 2, pp.692-705: Boccaccio's story itself has a clear source in Apuleius, Metamorphoses, ix, 114-28. There are parallels too with other tales in Decameron, including Giornata 7, Novella 2 and Giornata 9, Novella 2 (Decameron 2, pp.798-804; pp.862-75).

(38.) Andrew Trollope ('Republicae Benevolus'), quoted in Nicholas Canny, 'Identity Formation in Ireland: the Emergence of the Anglo-Irish', in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p.168; Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, p.50, in The Historie of Ireland (1633).

(39.) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, in Oroonoko and other writings, edited by Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 6. The question of Behn's knowledge of Surinam, long doubted, is now well established, however; see, for example, Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996), pp.37-52.

(40.) Royal Commentaries, p.8.

(41.) Commentators have variously viewed Garcilaso's Comentarios reales (1609) and La historia general del Peru (1617), the two parts of Royal Commentaries, in Rycaut's consolidated translation, as objective historical scholarship; defective history; the central translation of Inca culture and history for a European audience, and as utopian novel; see, variously, Margarita Zamora, Language, Authority and Indigenous History in the Comentarios reales de los Incas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Maria Antonia Garces, 'The Translator Translated, Inca Garcilaso and English Imperial Expansion', in Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, edited by Carmine G. di Biase (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p.203.

(42.) Examination of the copy held in the British Library (12410.c.29) shows that the work it replaced was not a 'novel' at all but rather a political work whose title--given as Means to Free Europe from French Slavery--allows for its identification as the anonymous Means to Free Europe from the French usurpation; and the advantages which the union of the Christian princes has produced, to preserve it from the power of an anti-christian prince (London: Printed for Richard Bently [sic], 1689).

(43.) Thomas Betterton, The Revenge; or, A Match in Newgate (London, 1680); Thomas Wright, The Glory of God's Revenge against the bloody and detestable Sins of Murder and Adultery (1685; second edition, London, 1688), 'Van Zwerts and Marinda', pp334-38. Sir Richard Blackmore, Prince Arthur: An Heroic Poem in Ten Books, X, lines 284-90

(44.) For many points of detail on the family history of Robert Molesworth, the authors are greatly--and gratefully--indebted to Hugh Mayo, who shared the results of his own researches (see also n. 46 below). J. M. Ezell tentatively suggests a 1677 date of birth for Mary Molesworth, but does not state her grounds for this; see 'Mary Monck [nee Molesworth]', ODNB, 38, pp. 592-93. The second daughter of the seventeen children of Robert Molesworth and his wife Laetitia, daughter of Richard, Lord Coote of Coloony, Mary would marry George Monck of Dublin, who later became member of the Irish parliament for Philipstown, thanks to the patronage of his father-in-law, though little is known of their marriage.

(45.) For the best general account of Rycaut, see Sonia P. Anderson, 'Sir Paul Rycaut (1629-1700)', ODNB, 48, pp.439-442; and see also Anderson, An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna 1667-1668 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). For Rycaut in Ireland, see Patrick Melvin, 'Sir Paul Rycaut's Memoranda and Letters from Ireland 1686-1687', Analecta Hibernica, 27 (1972), 123-82, and K. T. Hoppen, Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683-1708 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1980), p.189.

(46.) The authors are again indebted for information on these points to Hugh Mayo, who also generously provided us with his transcripts of correspondence between Rycaut and Molesworth held in the British Library (BL Lansdowne 1153C, BL Lansdowne 1153D, and BL Add Mss 19514). See also Hugh Mayo, 'Investigating the Roots and Impact of Robert Molesworth's Account of Denmark', the author's defence of his PhD thesis at Odense University, 3 May 2000, accessed at http://hjein.getznet.dk/hmayo/rm_forsvar_x.html

(47.) Vertue Rewarded, pp.174-84.

(48.) Hubert McDermott, 'Introduction', p.xi; Nicholas Canny in 'Identity Formation in Ireland: the Emergence of the Anglo-Irish', p.202; Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, p. 201, n. 78; Kilfeather, 4, p.767; Keymer and Sabor, p.183.

(49.) See Margarita Zamora, pp.72ff.

(50.) The four non-Christian civilizations treated of by Temple were China, Scythia, Arabia, and Peru; for Peru, see The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart, 2 Vols (London: 1720), i, pp.205-11.

(51.) Royal Commentaries. 'The Translator to the Reader', pp.iv-v.

(52.) 'The Translator to the Reader', p.v.

(53.) See Pagden, p.24 and Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, The Novel, and the New World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.206.

(54.) 'The Translator to the Reader', p.v.

(55.) 'The Translator to the Reader', p.v.

(56.) Compare Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Book IV, Chapter xii. For Swift's use of Rycaut elsewhere, see Ian Campbell Ross, '"A very Knowing American": The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Swift's Modest Proposal', Modern Language Quarterly, 68.4 (2007), 493-516.

(57.) For an incisive account of Rycaut's concern with cultural difference and the political and mercantile implications of the various seventeenth-century translations of Garcilaso's Comentarios reales and La Historia General del Peru, see Garces, 'The Translator Translated, Inca Garcilaso and English Imperial Expansion', pp.203-25.

(58.) See Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality (1986; Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 1996).

(59.) Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p.263.

(60.) See Vertue Rewarded, p. 6; Canny, 'Identity Formation', p.159.

(61.) Quoted in Canny, 'Identity Formation', p.179.

(62.) Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p.331; see also 'Conclusion'.