‘I doe add this treatise, as a supplement of mine owne experience’

In the 1620s, the proud Old Englishman John Cusack composed and addressed two legal tracts to King Charles I. These made bold proposals: the first, ‘The Kingdomes crye’, argued for the arraignment of Sir Edward Coke for high treason; the second, ‘Irelands Comfort’, sought reformation of the common laws, setting out the distinctions between the Irish and English jurisdictions and the limits of each. Cusack’s boldness was avowedly rooted in personal experience. ‘Irelands Comfort’ opens with a statement of the inherent value of honesty and a declaration of his interest: ‘Wherfor Consideringe how my priuat experience of twenty years oppression, on the occasion of my repaire to your Maiesties Courts … doth warrant my attempt of bringinge them, & their necessary reformations to light’. Presenting himself as a loyal colonial subject, Cusack cites classical and contemporary authorities, in particular Cicero on the poor execution of natural justice as the cause of rebellion. His own writing is positioned in relation to these precedents: ‘Whearevnto I doe add this treatise, as a supplement of mine owne experience, declaring vnto yor Maiesty the present imperfect state, & Condition of those Common lawes’. The legal treatise is secondary, derived from bitter experience at the hands of the law: ‘ffor the Common lawes of England, & Statuts of Ireland hauinge vniustly denyed me their healps, & a certaine Court, for the recouery of my inheritance’. ¹ Cusack had been blocked in his attempts to retrieve legacies from his father and great-uncle, Sir Thomas Cusack, former lord chancellor of Ireland. He had been embroiled for seven years in court (in which he was opposed by Coke, then chief justice of the common pleas) and subsequently imprisoned for twelve years, allegedly a victim of corruption and embezzlement. Cusack’s is therefore not a work of autobiography, but it is driven and justified by his own experiences of adversity and sense of injustice. His own life is inextricable from his legal treatise. The narrative frame wears its autobiographical heart on its sleeve, but the manuscript’s legal apparatus—not least its structuring around twenty closely argued chapters of precedent and parameter—averts the reader’s gaze. Reading Cusack through the prism of autobiography can yield new perspectives on the subjective qualities of writing in this period. This essay draws on recent theories of life-writing and 50subjectivity in order to illuminate emerging literary-historical scholarship that examines divergent forms of Anglophone autobiographical writing, the articulation of the self, and the gendered subject in early modern Ireland.