Forging the Father: James Ware’s Irish Histories and Robert Ware’s Fakes
This omnibus folio edition of the works of the Dublin historian Sir James Ware was compiled and translated by his son Robert and the London printer Andrew Crook. Adorned with engravings, multiple tables of contents, frequent rubrication, a new biography of the author, and new translations of James Ware’s Latin works, the deluxe spectacle of this edition also works to conceal amid its grandeur and heft the tricks of an adept forger and his conniving publisher.
A renowned historian and collector of manuscripts, Sir James Ware (1594-1666) dedicated much of his life to composing and compiling treatises on the historical antiquities, politics, and ecclesiastical establishment of Ireland. Aside from his own annals of Irish history, De Hibernia & Antiquitatibus ejus Disquisitiones (1654) and his masterful compendium of Irish authors from the 5th to the 16th century, De Scriptoribus Hiberniae (1639), later translated as Two Books of the Writers of Ireland, Ware was the first to transcribe and publish a version of Edmund Spenser’s reformist treatise, qua humanistic dialogue, in 1633 which he titles A view of the state of Ireland. In the pursuit of being as moderate of a historian as one could expect of the son of an English settler in colonial Ireland, Ware learned enough Irish to read basic texts and regularly employed a native Irish-speaking scholar to translate what he could not work out himself. With such a measured, academic, and remarkably even-handed body of work, when reading Ware one often forgets that he wrote throughout one of the most tumultuous periods of Ireland’s history. “He recognized,” writes the 20th-century bibliographer Philip Wilson, “that the genuine antiquary must have neither political nor religious prejudices.” Upon his death in 1666, James Ware’s manuscripts were inherited by his second son, Robert Ware (1639-97), who did not inherit his father’s liberal disposition.
A polemical provocateur par excellence, Robert Ware entered the historical scene during the late 17th century as a Protestant fanatic within Restoration Ireland. From his fictional and polemical account of the spurious Pope Joan, a supposed “she-pope” of the 10th century, to his scurrilous edition of the prophecies of the famed James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh (who was his father James Ware’s dear friend and teacher), Robert invented, manipulated, and scandalized the historical record with such gusto that one can hardly help but admire his partisan passion for historiographical perfidies. Robert’s well-survived and spectacular accounts of “popish foxes” and prophetic Protestant bishops were clearly popular, doubtless encouraging his lifelong pursuit of a career in print. His many pamphlets, though peppered with the fantastical inventions native to vulgar and tabloid spectacle, purported solid foundations in authentic sources and first-hand manuscript evidence drawn from his father’s vast and authoritative historical collection.
There was, however, one problem with this creative method of citation: mixed among his father’s papers were reams of fake documents fabricated and interpolated into James Ware’s collection by none other than Robert himself. One of his era’s most famous provocateurs was moonlighting as a forger of the historical record and, eventually, even of his father’s own “works.”
Though popularly acclaimed for his own writing, the fiery upstart Robert Ware received much of his initial legitimacy from his inherited family name, coasting off of his father’s reputation well after his death. His fabricated documents have deceived scholars for three centuries, until relatively recent scholars have outed Robert’s manuscripts as confections of the author’s own imagination and catalogued their disastrous impact on Reformation history. As much as James would surely have paled at his son’s Potemkin scholarship and its disastrous aftermath within early modern historiography, Robert himself would ultimately cede his deeply tenuous control over the Ware family’s reputation after his own death in 1697 when his longtime publishers Matthew Gunne and Eliphal Dobson took possession of the Ware family papers that had not already been sold to the book collector Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of Clarendon in 1686, whose collection is now housed in Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries.
In 1705, some forty years after James’s death and nearly a decade following Robert’s, Crook printed his omnibus of James Ware’s complete works for Gunne and Dobson in Dublin, much of which had been translated from Latin into English there for the first time. Supposedly derived from Robert’s personal work, this new edition reprinted James’s Irish antiquities, his Irish annals, his ecclesiastical history of Ireland, and his two books on the writers of Ireland as The Antiquities and History of Ireland, all alongside Sir John Davies’s political discourse on the conquest of Ireland. Presented to the public here was a veritable palimpsest of James Ware’s historiographical oeuvre now translated into English by his own son, or, perhaps, his son’s publishers. Even from beyond the grave, Robert Ware’s hand was moved by his posthumous printers to a final gesture of literary embellishment. “It is not certain,” the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, “who finally edited the material, though in his petition to the [the city of Dublin], Gunne implied that it was himself. Gunne nevertheless presents the text as if edited by the late Robert Ware.”
While there are signs of Robert Ware’s and Gunne’s meddling throughout the 1705 edition of James Ware’s work, one of the more remarkable and politically significant additions to the edition was Robert’s supposed discovery of his father’s theretofore unpublished “Annals of Ireland During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth.” “Nothing my father has not written is present” claims Robert in a conspicuous, if also slightly deceptive, deployment of a double negative. “I shall hereto add the Annals of Queen Elizabeth, being transcripts out of the papers and records of my said father Sir James Ware, and some of them by him written, and fitted (upon a review) to be published.” The “Annals of Elizabeth” serve as punctuation, indeed an anti-Irish-Catholic exclamation point, to James Ware’s original Irish Annals, which he originally published in Latin in two volumes during his own lifetime—the first part covering the reigns Henry II through Edward IV, the second the reigns of Henry VII through Mary I.
To write so openly on Elizabeth I would have been unthinkable for the elder James Ware, who refused to bring his history of Irish writers closer to the period of his own lifetime lest he relay bias toward contemporary authors or their patrons. Coming to age as a historian in Dublin during the early 17th century, James Ware spent his entire career acutely aware of the political weight of writing about Ireland for an occupying and imperialist English audience. While James had carefully cultivated a reputation for objectivity and even-handedness, his historiographical work was by no means intended to be received as the inert musings of a curious scholar. James prefaced his annals of the first Tudor kings up to Mary I writing quantum investigando potui colligere, adjunxi unde derivari possunt praecepta, quae nonihil communi utilitati inservient (“I have added as far as I could learn, the reason and design of their being done; from whence maxims may be drawn, which may be of no small utility to the public”). Both father and son attempt, as the historian Mark Empey has put it, to create “a usable past,” though the tone of the supposed annals of Elizabeth, almost certainly written by Robert and not by James, shifts from descriptive history to an account of scandal so suddenly that one cannot help but wonder to what end Robert intended the public’s use of them.
Beyond his imaginative additions to his father’s historiographical corpus, and the editorial liberty he took in arranging James Ware’s original texts, Robert’s Latin translations were themselves of such an abysmal quality that they might as well have amounted to mere inventions. Intent on keeping the drama within the Ware family, it was Robert’s own grandson-in-law, Walter Harris, who ultimately undertook properly to retranslate and republish James Ware’s Latin works himself in 1739 as The Whole Works of Sir James Ware Concerning Ireland, which were then duly reprinted in 1764, having found that Robert Ware’s prior efforts had “very often mistaken the writer’s [i.e., James’s] sense, and perverted his meaning, which I frequently marked with a pen. But finding the errors endless, I was induced to believe it would be useful to give my author a new English dress, and to present him to the public with the same truth and fidelity, as he wrote.” Harris also saw fit to remove entirely Robert Ware’s annals of Elizabeth I from this new edition, finally putting an end to the vexed family drama of the Ware nachlass. Hoping quietly to obliterate the memory of his forger grandfather-in-law, Harris simply refers to Robert Ware as “the Translator” in his preface, preferring to turn the spotlight squarely back upon Sir James Ware.
—Daniel T. McClurkin
Bibliography
Arthur Freeman, Arthur Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts relating to Literary Forgery, 44 BC–AD 2000 (Quaritch, 2014), nos. 391-394; Arthur Freeman, Robert Ware’s Irish Forgeries 1678-1690 (Quaritch, 2021); Mark Empey, “‘A real credit to Ireland, and to Dublin’: the scholarly achievements of Sir James Ware,” in Kathleen Miller and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Dublin: Renaissance City of Literature (Manchester University Press, 2017); Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Foxes, Firebrands, and Forgery: Robert Ware’s Pollution of Reformation History,” The Historical Journal 54.2 (2011): 307-346; Mark Empey, “Creating a Usable Past: James and Robert Ware,” in Mark Empey and Alan Ford (eds.), The Church of Ireland and Its Past: History, Interpretation and Identity (Four Courts Press, 2017).
