The Spanish Catastrophe Lithgow sails from Youghal to western France and then travels through northern and western Spain and Portugal – unimpressed by Madrid and Toledo but admires the Escorial – via Granada to Malaga – arrested there as an English spy – grievously tortured on the governor’s orders – handed over to the local Inquisition as a heretic and sentenced to be burnt alive – fortuitously freed on the intervention of the English ambassador in Madrid

In making these observations on Ireland and the Irish, Lithgow was echoing what various others had said before him. A substantial part of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary is devoted to the detailed history of Ireland in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods and the military campaigns there, since he spent some three years in Ireland, serving as secretary to the Lord Deputy Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and taking part in various military adventures. His youngest brother Richard served under the Earl of Essex and eventually became, as Sir Richard Moryson, Vice President of Munster.14 Both Moryson and Lithgow were writing within the tradition of British travellers and observers of this period who were unfavourably impressed by what they saw of Celtic Ireland; concerning the former writer, Andrew HadÀ eld and John McVeagh have remarked that ‘It is probably fair to say that only the Turks receive a worse press than the native Irish in the Itinerary’. A notable À gure in the evolving of the English image of Celtic Ireland had been the poet Edmund Spenser. Spenser À rst came to Ireland in 1580 as secretary to the new Lord Deputy, Arthur Lord Grey, and spent most of the remaining nineteen years of his life there; in 1588 or 1589 he acquired the lease of an estate at Kilcolman, north of Cork as one of the ‘undertakers’ for the plantation of Munster. His intended work on the antiquities of Ireland was unfortunately never written, but his View of the Present State of Ireland was written in 1595-96 during a visit back to England. This inÁ uential work was not actually published until nearly forty years later, but English views of Ireland were already moulded by the published works of several other observers, such as Barnabe Rich in his A New Description of Ireland, and Edmund Tremayne, and Lithgow would in any case have been made well aware of prevalent attitudes from his stay in the entourage of the Lord Deputy St John.15