Dear Anne,

I'll check into this more.  I don't know when the title "Flail of
Connaught" began... it is legendary today, and sounds suspiciously
Victorian, but who knows?  Maley in the *Spenser Chronology* suggests that
Spenser accompanied Norris, President of Munster, north into Connaught
after a large part of the Armada (19 ships) crashed all along the western
and northern Irish coasts in 1588.  Bingham could also  easily have met Sp
in Dublin, etc.; there's no way that Sp couldn't have known ABOUT him.
Also, the Variorum *View* notes the possibility of Bingham having read Sp's
MS of the *View*, given similar diction in some of Bingham's letters.
That's a long shot, though.

At the moment, I can say that most histories of that period in Ireland (by
Colm Lennon, Steven Ellis, Nicholas Canny, Richard Bagwell et al.; see also
Niall Fallon's *Spanish Armada in Ireland* book, which has at least a full
chapter on Bingham, including portrait of the man in armor not in Highley)
discuss Bingham, esp. in relation to the "Composition of Connaught," a
mid-1580's taxation scheme that was Lord Deputy Perrot's chief
administrative achievement.  Perrot hated Bingham and vice-versa, as Perrot
chastized Bingham for being too harsh to the "natives," but Bingham
certainly profited from this scheme, as he and his brother George, Sheriff
of Sligo, were large landholders in the area around Sligo, in north-west
Connaught.  Martial law was handy in this regard:  you find the miscreant
guilty, you take his land.

The defeat of the Egalitarian Giant could be tied allegorically to this, in
that the old Irish Tanaist system of communal landholding was replaced by
the  patriarchal common-law private-property schema of the New English
administration.  The Composition met with mostly favorable reactions from
the southern Connaught lords, such as the earl of Thomond, but the real
losers were the more traditional, native Irish lords in northern Connaught,
such as the Bourkes and O'Rourkes of the Sligo (i.e., Bingham) area, much
vilified in the *View*, and including pirate queen Grace O'Malley
(Radigund?), whom Philip Sidney met in the 1570's, etc.  Feeling the
English squeeze for quite some time, they openly rebelled after the Armada
crashed on their shores, giving them some stores and Spanish survivors to
fight with (cf. CSPI), but were by 1591 well suppressed by Bingham et al.,
who helped themselves to their land.

[To toot my own clarion, I discuss this in the fourth chapter of my
dissertation, which links the Souldan episode, long seen as an allegory for
the Spanish Armada, with events surrounding the Armada crash in Ireland and
subsequent rebellion there.  For is not the Souldan episode a land-war as
well?  Etc etc.]

I wonder, furthermore, if Talus (Bingham?) shoving the Giant off the cliff
to be splintered on the rocks below doesn't also reflect the glorious
smashing of the Armada on the western coast of Ireland, and smashing of
subsequent rebellions, since the Spanish helped to maintain the status-quo
of "communal" Irish land tenantry.

The flail/apocalypticism metaphor is spot-on in my opinion, given the work
of Richard Mallette on Book V and the nature of militant Protestant warfare
in Ireland (and the Low Countries).

Incidentally, the descendant of the Bingham family is Lord Lucan (cf. the
"Lucan" outside of Dublin on the main motorway to Maynooth), who fled the
country and vanished in the early 1970's (?) after a woman was found
brutally murdered on his property.  The Lucans still own land around Sligo,
but the Lord can't collect rent unless he's in the country.  --Tom H.


>Thanks, Tom--how can Spenserians find out more about Bingham the
>"flail"? Would Spenser have known about him? Of course flails have their
>own history (Aptekar has a picture of Jove with one). I'm convinced myself
>that although fewer scholars fuss over cosmology than they did a few years
>ago that the flail is important for the zodiac/astrology/cosmology
>here. the political relevance of having Talus a harvest figure (you use
>flails in agriculture, of course), I would assume, is to point ambiguously
>to apocalyptic issues and the not so very comfortable aspects of Last
>Things that seem both pending and suspended. But this has been much
>said. Who called Bingham a flail? Anne Prescott.
>