New Gill History of Ireland

Eighteenth-

Century Ireland

The Isle of Slaves

Ian McBride

Gill & Macmillan

For

Elizabeth Magill

Contents

Cover

Title page

Dedication

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Horizons

Chapter 1: English difficulties and Irish opportunities

The second Hundred Years War

Occupied Ireland?

Conclusion

Chapter 2: The Irish Enlightenment and its enemies

The Irish Republic of Letters

‘Candid, unprejudiced men’: William Molyneux

Reason and religion: John Toland

New light: Francis Hutcheson

‘Politeness, virtue and learning’: Charles O’Connor

Conclusion: the revolutions of Ireland

Chapter 3: Ireland and the Ancien Régime

‘A very good country to live in’

The landed interest

Alternative elites

Middlemen and farmers

Townspeople

The lower orders

Gender relations

Conclusion

Part II: The Penal Era: Religion and Society

Chapter 4: King William’s wars

A Europe of multiple kingdoms

The reconquest of Ireland, 1689–91

Keeping the faith: Jacobite alternatives

Chapter 5: What were the Penal Laws for?

Securing the Protestant interest

A Europe of confessional states

Persecution and toleration

Conclusion

Chapter 6: How Catholic Ireland survived

Church and state in the penal era

Continental connections: the Irish colleges

The social bases of Catholicism

Conclusion

Chapter 7: Bishops, priests and people

The priesthood

Popular belief

New doctrines?

Conclusion

Part III: The Ascendancy and its World

Chapter 8: Ascendancy Ireland: conflict and consent

Politics in a depending kingdom

The insolence of the Dissenters

Pamphlet wars

The whole people of Ireland?

Conclusion

Chapter 9: Queen Sive and Captain Right: agrarian rebellion

‘Most gentlemen’s houses here are like garrisons’: agrarian protest after 1760

Rites of violence

The politics of Whiteboyism

Part IV: The Age of Revolutions

Chapter 10: The patriot soldier

The age of revolutions

Terror and counter-terror

Chapter 11: A brotherhood of affection

Nations and states

‘Reading at the newspapers’

The jewels of Cornelia

A spark of Hibernicism

Chapter 12: 1798

1798 from below

Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders

Defenders and United Irishmen

Wexford

Abbreviations

References

Bibliography

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill & Macmillan

Preface and Acknowledgments

Anyone who embarks on a book of this kind is asking for trouble. Some of the pitfalls are identified in John Tosh’s valuable survey, The pursuit of history (2000). Since a comprehensive examination of an extensive period must frequently rely upon the work of fellow scholars, the writer ‘is inevitably placed in the position of making emphatic statements about topics based on no more than a reading of the standard secondary authorities’. Such works are liable to be overtaken by new research and new trends in scholarship: the eighteenth-century volume of the multi-authored New History of Ireland (1986) was famously out of date before it even appeared. And if this were not a sufficient deterrent, Tosh warns that the general survey is also open to ‘nitpicking criticism by the specialists whose fields have been trespassed upon’.[1] Given the volume of historical writing now appearing in Ireland, Britain and the U.S.A., the rapid turnover of doctoral theses and the proliferation of new specialist fields, it is virtually impossible to keep up with the secondary literature, let alone find time to visit new archives. Finally, there are the interpretative problems involved in making an assessment of an entire age or society: ‘Whose standards should be adopted—those of the rich or the poor, the colonised or the colonisers, Protestant or Catholic?’[2]

What could tempt someone to step into such a minefield? The obvious answer is simple curiosity. The pursuit of history is remarkably habit-forming. Like most people who write about the Irish past, I think it is important for any society to think intelligently and critically about where it has come from. But ultimately I do it because I enjoy doing it. And although I became an eighteenth-century historian largely by accident, I have never regretted my choice of ‘period’. The century of Swift and Burke, of the penal laws, of Presbyterian radicals and the United Irishmen holds enormous interest for Irish people on both sides of the border and beyond. So many central features of our modern world have their origins in that period—the rights of man (if not yet women), the ideals of national independence and republicanism, newspaper journalism and mass print culture, religious toleration, and the experiences of revolution and total war. It was during the eighteenth century that the elegant Georgian terraces of Dublin were built, that dozens of market towns and estate villages were laid out, and that the urban network of Ulster’s linen triangle, where I grew up, first took shape.

The other major attraction of Irish historiography is the example and encouragement provided by fellow scholars in the field. I am grateful to Roy Foster and Marianne Elliott for inviting me to present a paper on the penal laws at the Conference of Irish Historians in Britain in 2004, and for everything they have done to make Irish history thrive in British universities. For various suggestions and references I am indebted to David Dickson, Robin Frame, Gráinne Gillen, Colin Kidd, Pádraig Lenihan, David W. Miller, James Moore, Colm Ó Conaill, William O’Reilly, Nicholas Phillipson, Guy Rowlands, Jim Smyth, M. A. Stewart and Andrew Thompson. I am grateful to David Hayton and Michael Page (Surrey History Centre), for permission to cite references from their forthcoming edition of the Brodrick papers. Liam Chambers and Jon Bergin both offered stimulating comments on chapters of this book relating to Catholicism. I have learned a great deal from conversations with Sean Connolly. It will be obvious that his Religion, law, and power (1992) has profoundly influenced my own approach, in spite of important differences in our conclusions.[3]

One of the benefits of studying a small country is the possibility of sampling the primary material for most topics. We are not limited, like John Tosh’s grand surveyor, to dependence on secondary authorities. For every chapter in this book I have tried to familiarise myself with an extensive range of primary sources, and I have tried where possible to employ fresh printed and archival material. A number of librarians and archivists have given me valuable assistance. I must mention in particular the staff of the Royal Irish Academy and the National Library of Ireland. I am also indebted to Dean Cassidy and Loraine Frazer (Armagh Public Library), Gina Douglas (Linnean Society of London), T. M. May (Galway Diocesan Archives), Brian McGee (Cork Archives Institute), Carol Quinn (Boole Library, University College Cork), and especially David Sheehy (Dublin Diocesan Archives). On a series of trips to Rome I was made welcome by the staff at the Archivio Segreto Vaticano and by Giovanni Fosci at the Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide, Father Séamus Tuohy at San Clemente, and Father John O’Keeffe at San Isidoro.

For the eighteenth century, the corpus of manuscript poems in the Irish language is especially rich. Like the vast majority of eighteenth-century historians, I have no competence in this material, and this is one area where I really have been forced to rely on others. I would like to thank Vincent Morley for comments on several of the chapters below, for advice on Irish sources and for permission to use his translation of Píobaire Chluana. In a number of important areas, including gender relations and agrarian protest, it seems likely that future research utilising both languages will cause us to rethink our ideas. A single-volume bilingual history of the eighteenth century is much to be desired. In the meantime I have tried to indicate at a number of points in this book where Irish sources have most to contribute.

Fergal Tobin, a patient editor and a perceptive critic, is not the only one to wonder whether this volume would ever see the light of day. The book was written in fits and starts during the last seven years, usually squeezed between teaching and administrative commitments. It generated a large number of puzzles and loose ends for my painstaking and good-humoured copy-editor Colm Croker. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (as it then was) for funding a term of leave in the spring of 2004. By far my greatest debts, however, are to my close friends and colleagues who kept me sane during the last seven years.

In Armagh my parents have tolerated long, generally antisocial visits, given me space to think, and reminded me of why I became interested in Irish history in the first place. At the Irish and Local Studies Library in Abbey Street, Mary McVeigh and her staff went out of their way to make me welcome. In Dublin, as always, John McBratney has been a generous and ebullient host, in spite of my chaotic and last-minute travel plans. In 2002 I was introduced to the Vatican Secret Archives by Cammy Brothers, and without her encouragement Catholicism would never have become such a major theme of this book. On later visits Toby Osborne proved an indefatigable companion and unbeatable tour guide to archives, churches and bars.

Above all, I am indebted to my friends in London. Ultán Gillen has been very generous with his time, providing helpful comments on most of the book, and a sounding-board for observations and arguments of varying quality. I owe a special debt to Richard Bourke, who has been a regular source of inspiration, critical energy and provocation, and whose combination of intellectual integrity and scurrilous gossip has made him an indispensable booster of morale.

For five years I inflicted grim moods and a jungle of A4 sheets on my housemates on Fournier Street: Hugo Glendinning, Tamzin Griffin, Meredith MacNeill, Harriet Quick, Simon Vincenzi, Erica Whyman and the beautiful gatecrasher Emily Wolfe. I will never forget their kindness. If not for Elizabeth Magill, I wouldn’t have met any of them, and I would have missed out on much else besides, hence my dedication of this book to her.

Introduction

Once regarded as a quiet backwater, the eighteenth century has become the new boomtown of Irish historiography. Thirty years ago it was still possible for J. C. Beckett to comment that the years between 1690 and 1800 were ‘marked by few great events’, and that the recurrent conflict over the constitutional relationship between England and Ireland provided ‘the only continuing theme’.[1] Political activity, it was assumed, was confined to parliamentary in-fighting and aristocratic rivalries, punctuated by a series of dramatic clashes between Dublin Castle and College Green: the Woollen Act of 1699, the Wood’s Halfpence dispute, the Lucas affair and the ‘revolution’ of 1782. Since then our understanding of the period has been transformed by an outpouring of monographs and articles; many longstanding assumptions have been overturned; and a wide range of new subjects opened up to exploration. Where historians once described a century of tranquillity, they now focus on deep-seated tensions—between Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, settler and native, landlord and tenant—all culminating in the explosion of 1798. Although several excellent studies have illuminated central aspects of Ascendancy Ireland there is as yet no up-to-date volume covering the entire period. A general study, appraising recent work on the ‘long’ eighteenth century and evaluating the rival approaches and models suggested by historians, is long overdue.

The traditional picture, as outlined by Beckett and elaborated by his colleagues in the eighteenth-century volume of the New History of Ireland (1986), centered on the themes of stability and oligarchic rule, suddenly terminated by insurrection in the 1790s. In several regrettable respects the ‘New Historians’ perpetuated the approach of their Victorian predecessors. First, the eighteenth-century volume maintained a chronological bias towards the eighteen years of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, with the rest of the century relegated to the pre-history of what they called ‘colonial nationalism’. Froude’s notorious statement that during the decades before 1760 ‘Ireland was without a history’ was not seriously challenged.[2] Yet these were the years when the penal laws were implemented and when the threat of a Jacobite invasion—militia arrays were held in 1708, 1715, 1719, 1727, 1745 and 1756—remained a very real one.[3] This was the period when the famine of 1740–41 led to the death of up to 15 per cent of the population and when large-scale emigration to North America commenced. Bitter controversies raged between Anglicans and Presbyterians; at the same time Christians of all denominations struggled to accommodate the new philosophies of Locke and Newton whilst also repelling the heresies of Socinianism and Deism. Even in the sphere of parliamentary politics the old emphasis on clientage and connection has been shaken by David Hayton’s research on Whig and Tory loyalties and Jacqueline Hill’s account of the lively political culture which existed in Dublin under the first two Hanoverians.[4]

Secondly, the eighteenth century remained the ‘Protestant Century’, with the other four-fifths of the population accorded only minor roles. Following W. E. H. Lecky, members of the New History team such as J. G. Simms, J. L. McCracken and R. B. McDowell were primarily concerned with high-political, constitutional and administrative matters. Even David Dickson’s exemplary New foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (1987) was ‘deliberately constructed as a study of the victors of 1660 and their political world’. In spite of an unrivalled chapter on the economy, it deals only marginally with the religious and social history of Catholic Ireland.[5] In part, this top-heaviness reflects the common bias of historical sources towards the educated and the literate. In Ireland, however, there are additional difficulties presented by Irish-language material, at last attracting the attention it deserves from scholars such as Breandán Ó Buachalla, Vincent Morley and Niall Ó Ciosáin. The most conspicuous attempt to rectify the denominational imbalance has concentrated on the Defenders, the lower-class, overwhelmingly Catholic organisation which spread through much of Ireland in the 1790s. Inspired by the example of E. P. Thompson, scholars such as Marianne Elliott, James Donnelly and Jim Smyth have demonstrated the urban and industrialised nature of the Defenders, the sophistication of their organisation, and the extent to which their oaths and iconography blended revolutionary ideas imported from France with more conventional Jacobite sentiment.[6] At the same time Catholic religious practices and social structures have been illuminated by a series of brilliant studies by Louis Cullen, Kevin Whelan and others.[7] Sadly, Hugh Fenning’s masterly work on the Irish Dominicans, drawing on decades of research in Rome and Dublin, is read by the cognoscenti alone.[8]

Perhaps the most exciting development in eighteenth-century historiography has been the recovery of Catholic attitudes during the zenith of the Ascendancy. It is still often assumed that patriotic sentiment was the preserve of Protestants, from Molyneux and Swift to Grattan and Flood, and that the loyalties of Catholics, in contrast, were primitive and localised in character. Before the 1770s the majority population was largely (though not, it should be stressed, completely) excluded from the world of print culture, and Catholic representatives hoped for the improvement of their position through a strategy of discreet diplomacy. Historians have relied disproportionately on the declarations of the hierarchy, expressing gratitude for the enjoyment of their liberty and property and enjoining obedience on their adherents. Yet other, less familiar sources suggest a very different picture. Nicholas Plunkett’s manuscript A light to the blind attests to the survival of ‘faith and fatherland’ conceptions of nationhood after the Boyne and Aughrim.[9] While the remaining Catholic gentry and the merchant classes hoped for a gradual amelioration of their position in return for public professions of Catholic loyalty, Jacobites continued to attack Protestant landowners as foreign upstarts, Anglican clergymen as preachers of heresy, and the Hanoverian dynasty as usurpers.[10] Even in the 1790s the radical Cork poet Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin would blend invocations of the union of creeds with references to ‘claon-shliocht Chailbhin Bhréin’ (the foul, perverse descendants of Calvin), and laments for the arrest of Arthur O’Connor and the death of Edward Fitzgerald with anticipations of the victory of ‘Crú glan éachtach Eibhir Fhinn’ (the pure, heroic, native Irish).[11]

As these brief remarks suggest, eighteenth-century Irish studies are currently enjoying a period of flux and revitalisation. For some scholars, such as Jim Smyth, an investigation of the underworld of agrarian and artisanal rebels reveals the weakness of the ‘tension-free’ model of the eighteenth century favoured by the ‘New Historians’. The social and political stability of the period was a ‘façade’, masking the reality of a deeply divided society, and the 1798 rebellion represents the inevitable product of ‘politico-religious tensions which had been simmering for one hundred years’.[12] This reaction against the New History outlook has been accelerated by the work of literary critics such as Luke Gibbons and Seamus Deane, influenced by varieties of post-colonial theory. Deane’s brilliant studies of Swift and Burke have had a profound influence on the ways in which historians approach Anglo-Irish politics and culture. Both writers helped to create a literary tradition caught inescapably between ‘an ideal of a stable and traditional civilisation and . . . the experience of an unstable and disrupted country’.[13] Ultimately it is the resulting tensions and insecurities, Deane suggests, that explain the intensity and energy of their political writings, and indeed the inevitable failure of their ambitions. In very different ways, Swift and Burke were lifelong critics of the political corruption that they believed had undermined the English connection, yet neither could imagine a fundamental revision of its source, the Williamite settlement of the 1690s. In Deane’s analysis every Irish Protestant appears as a potential Gulliver, worshipping the civilised, rational Houyhnhnms, but forced in the end to confront his similarities to the Yahoos—the subject race whose incorrigible addiction to nakedness, filth and sloth recalls the ‘savage old Irish’ as they were perceived by the English.[14]

Earlier attempts to construct a colonial framework for Irish history were generally inspired by the nationalist writings of the Gaelic revival, which identified Irishness with the resistance of the ‘hidden Ireland’ to anglicisation. Alternatively, they were influenced by the ‘green Marxist’ school which believed, as Marx and Engels had, that the liberation of England’s first colony was a precondition of socialist revolution in both countries.[15] Post-colonial literary criticism aspires to greater theoretical sophistication and concerns itself less with economic exploitation than with the cultural representation of colonised peoples. Its exponents, following Michel Foucault and Edward Said, claim that the production of knowledge is unavoidably bound up with the exercise of power. Knowledge, for these purposes, encompasses all the texts—parliamentary speeches, legal records, novels, topographical surveys, even maps—which have formed the staple primary source material of the historian. The insights to be gained from ‘anti-authorial’ readings, exposing the hidden assumptions, contradictions and blind spots of such texts, are often valuable—especially when we rely upon the writings of a privileged minority for most of our information about the large, voiceless majority.

Knowledge also includes the writing of history itself. The professionalisation of Irish history that began with the launch of Irish Historical Studies (1938), and which pitted ‘scientific’ research procedures against popular nationalist (or unionist) myths, is now regarded by many cultural critics as part of an ideological backlash against the revolutionary republicanism of 1916–22. The New History team, with their claims to impartiality, their emphasis on local variation, complexity and the role of accident, stand accused of airbrushing the atrocities of colonialism in order to provide a legitimation of the partitionist settlement of the 1920s. With the resurgence of republican violence in Belfast and Derry in the 1970s, this task was given urgency and momentum. ‘Revisionist’ history was not simply, as its practitioners imagined, the re-evaluation of received opinions in the light of new evidence, but was itself an ideological construct. And revisionist accounts of the past, for all their commitment to objectivity, turn out to be just as partial and self-serving as the old nationalist works they had replaced. A number of historians, most notably Kevin Whelan, have welcomed this controversial critique, using it to dismiss the historical writings of their opponents (though not, of course, their own) as political interventions of the crudest kind.[16] In doing so they have inverted the mistake of previous generations who assumed that professional historians were distinguished by their impartiality. No one these days thinks, as one literary critic once did, that historians are ‘pure vegetarians who existed at a level of consciousness far above that of politicians and other carnivores’.[17] New directions in the discipline are obviously related to the broader intellectual and political trends that shape the cultural environment within which historians work. But this does not mean that scholarly writing should be explained primarily in terms of ideological factors. Most historians write with a diverse audience in mind, not simply as the mouthpiece of a political party or an ethnic group; their reputation is measured by their ability to address both civil society at large and specialised academic communities that transcend national boundaries.

Although the ‘post-colonial’ position has been careful to distance itself from old-fashioned nationalism, its practical effect has been to reassert the primacy of the struggle for national liberation as the ‘meta-narrative’ in Irish history.[18] Its organising theme is the antagonism between an exploitative ruling class and an oppressed majority, originating in the seventeenth-century land confiscations, maintained by the systematic discrimination of the penal code and, in the last resort, armed force. In adopting this approach, it inevitably risks reactivating familiar distortions associated with the Gaelic revival. One of the most influential surveys of Irish literature published in recent years refers to the penal code as ‘a system of apartheid between the one-fifth Anglican minority and the rest of the population’.[19] This astonishing statement (which, incidentally, ignores the fact that half of the ‘Anglican’ minority was actually Presbyterian) is not unique. It exemplifies a curious revolution (or reinvention) of the academic wheel, whereby the rhetorical simplifications of old-style nationalist historiography have begun to re-enter Irish historiography via the literary backdoor.

Eighteenth-century Ireland: the isle of slaves accentuates the European dimensions of eighteenth-century Irish experiences, but this book is not intended as a rejection of ‘colonial’ or ‘post-colonial’ approaches. Between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries there were a series of overlapping colonising projects, briefly described in Chapter 4, which radically altered the basis of landownership in Ireland. The resulting ethnic antagonisms and inequalities exerted a determining force in Irish social life throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. Of course, Ireland had claims to ‘regnal’ status—to the possession of its own crown, parliament and law courts—that could be dated back to the invasion of Henry II in 1171–2 and had no parallel in the New World colonies. Its ecclesiastical structures could be traced back even further, to the early Christian era, and the boast that Gaelic Ireland had enjoyed a golden age of saints and scholars was defended by Protestant and Catholic alike. Pre-Norman Ireland had possessed all the social and cultural attributes (kingship, a hierarchical society, clerical learning) of those societies which England acknowledged as civilised; and this would facilitate the increasing identification of Protestant intellectuals with Gaelic antiquity, a process culminating in the establishment of the Royal Irish Academy (1785). The spokesmen of the Protestant Ascendancy sometimes behaved as if they had roots deep in the Irish past. They saw themselves as the heirs of a constitution that was more than five centuries old, and when the first Williamite parliament met in 1692 they followed the procedures of the Modus tenendi parliamenta in Hibernia, allegedly introduced by Henry II.[20] At the same time, however, Ascendancy families regarded themselves as the descendants of more recent settlers, deriving from the conquests of Elizabeth, the Stuarts and Cromwell. And more importantly, perhaps, this is how they were seen by the Catholic people they ruled.

This book stresses the continuity of internal colonisation throughout the eighteenth century, often conducted in the guise of agricultural ‘improvement’. One well-known example, discussed in Chapter 12, took place on the Forkhill estate in south Armagh, where a trust was established to provide landholdings and looms for Anglicans who would make ‘our savages happy against their will by establishing trade and industry amongst them’.[21] More often the colonies consisted of Presbyterians from the north, whose weaving skills made them attractive to southern landlords. On paper these population shifts were enthusiastically projected as a sort of transplantation of Ulster, in which the superior manners and working habits attributed to the so-called ‘linen triangle’ of Dungannon/Lisburn/Newry would be imposed on less prosperous districts in the south. In practice, of course, these initiatives had little long-term impact on either the religious demography of Ireland or the development of its regional economies. Nevertheless, they reveal much about the assumptions of the Protestant elite, reflected for example in the work of the Physico-Historical Society (1745–52), founded with the aim of publishing a series of county surveys of Ireland, investigating its natural history, geography and antiquities. One of its members was Walter Harris (1686–1761), whose historical writings included a four-volume history of William III and a defence of the penal code against the Catholic publicist John Curry. In his Ancient and present state of the county of Down (1744) Harris condemned the ‘gross misrepresentations’ of contemporary English writers who portrayed Ireland as ‘rude’ and barbarous. Lest such slurs should deter further Protestant settlement, Harris reeled off the achievements that were transforming Ulster: Protestant demographic increase, the establishment of charter schools, the decline of the Irish language, the growth of the linen industry, and improved communications, not least the Newry Canal, an ambitious project designed to supply Dublin with coal from County Tyrone.[22]

‘Improvement’, one of the great buzzwords of the eighteenth century, was the new ‘civility’, adding fresh moral force to the attempts of the Anglican elite to drag their underdeveloped, priest-ridden land into the eighteenth century. It stood for the extension of metropolitan manners into the provinces, but also for the reformation of the ‘barbarism’ that characterised an alien people. Another vigorous exponent of these ideas was the important but neglected figure of William Henry, the rector of a County Tyrone parish for nearly three decades before his appointment as Dean of Killaloe in 1761. At the ‘Spreading Colony’ he established in Ballymote, he encouraged Ulster Protestant settlers, hoping to give each man ‘a bible and backsword to defend it’ and each woman ‘a prayer book and spinning wheel’. In his more optimistic moments he dared to hope that ‘in Less than 50 years more Conaught will Become another Ulster’.[23] Henry too was an active member of the Physico-Historical Society, and wrote on the natural history and topography of the area around Lough Erne. He was also a significant pamphleteer, launching angry assaults on the constitutional pretensions of Irish ‘patriots’, on whiskey-drinking, and above all on the Dublin radical agitator Charles Lucas. The following description of Gaelic Ireland, written under the pseudonym ‘Britanno-Hibernus’, is worth quoting in full:

It was divided into several petty Kingdoms, which were continually at Wars with one another; And in each of these were a Multitude of petty Tyrants, and their Septs, whose hatred and intestine Quarrels were implacable and endless. Every Landlord, or little Kearn in his District was an absolute Tyrant, who by exacting Coyne and Livery, by Cosherings, and endless Oppressions, kept all under him in the most wretched Slavery. The Tenants, if such they might be called, were of all Human Creatures the most forlorn Slaves, whose Lives were at the Mercy of their Lords; their Wives and Daughters the daily sacrifices of their Lust, and their Sons obliged to run to die in their Quarrels, whenever a sudden fit of Drunkenness or Lust disposed any one of these Tyrants to plunder another. This condition put a stop to all Arts and Sciences, to Husbandry and every Improvement. For to what purpose was it to plow or sow, where there was little or no Prospect of reaping?—to improve where the Tenant had no Property? This universal Neglect of Husbandry covered the Face of the Kingdom with thickets of Woods and Briars; and with those vast extended Boggs, which are not natural, but only the Excrescences and Scabs of the Body, occasioned by Uncleanliness and Sloth.[24]

Denunciations of ‘coyne and livery’—the system of billeting whereby the retainers of a medieval Irish lord were quartered upon his tenants—were a regular theme of Protestant apologists, who claimed to have liberated the Irish peasantry from the tyranny of their masters. Only the subjugation of Ireland, Henry claimed, and the subsequent imposition of English law, had ‘moulded’ Ireland’s barbarous inhabitants into ‘humanity’.[25] It was this uncompromising defence of English colonialism that prompted Charles O’Conor’s first (anonymous) venture into print.

It will become obvious, nevertheless, that I share some of the unease expressed by many eighteenth-century historians about the increasing popularity of colonial paradigms. Such reservations reflect a widespread and deeply entrenched suspicion of the nationalism produced by the Gaelic revival. The usual reference point here is Daniel Corkery’s study of Munster poets, The hidden Ireland (1925), a work now more often ridiculed than actually read. Corkery was blamed, somewhat unfairly, for establishing a heroes-and-villains caricature of eighteenth-century Ireland in which the vast middle ground between the ‘big house’ of the Anglo-Irish and the ‘smoky cabin’ of the Gaelic peasant vanishes. It is unlikely that this view will ever recover completely from the critique of the economic historian Louis Cullen, who has both undermined the reliability of Irish-language poetry as a historical source and established beyond any doubt the increasing prosperity and complexity of rural society from the 1740s.[26] While attempts to apply post-colonial theories to Irish society are by no means exhausted, they have so far tended to minimise the multifaceted character of social relationships.

A second problem results from the adaptation of theoretical categories based on twentieth-century Africa and Asia by those working on very different periods and places. Post-colonial studies have generated what David Armitage has called ‘proto-colonial studies’, imposing modern preoccupations with culture and imperialism upon early modern writings without sufficient sensitivity to differences of context.[27] In particular, there has been a tendency to project onto the early modern period racial notions of selfhood and otherness that were not crystallised until much later. The risk of anachronism should be obvious. The problem is not just the obvious one—that ultimately the otherness of the eighteenth-century Irish was attributed to their religious beliefs rather than their racial origins—but that the distinctiveness of eighteenth-century perceptions of race is lost. Committed to the belief that all mankind was descended from a common ancestor, eighteenth-century writers were ignorant of the ‘polygenist’ theories which regarded racial characteristics as biologically fixed. At a time when biblical, sociological and biological explanations of ethnic difference were not clearly distinguished from each other, it is far from clear how exactly those of New English stock conceived of their relationship with the Gaelic world.[28] For the most part, Protestant writers seem to have regarded the maintenance of distinctions between conqueror and conquered as unnatural, and hoped for the eventual assimilation of the natives—in terms of ‘law’, ‘interest’, ‘nation’ or ‘religion’—drawing upon European or biblical models rather than parallels with the Americas.

The real challenge for historians, then, is not so much to deplore the colonial dimensions of Ascendancy Ireland, but to understand them fully. An obvious place to begin is with the (rare) writings of those Protestant preachers and writers who reflected upon the subject themselves. One example is Robert Howard (1683–1740), a talented clergyman who would eventually become Bishop of Elphin, and whose parents were well-connected to members of the political and intellectual Dublin elite, including the Dopping and Molyneux families. In 1722 Howard was chosen to preach before the Lords Justices on the anniversary of the 1641 rebellion, and used the occasion to present a fascinating historical analysis of the Irish problem. Like many of his class, he believed that the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland was part of a providential plan for the extension of ‘the Arts of Government and decent Manners of Life’, comparable to the migration of Saxons and Normans into England, of Franks into Gaul, and of Goths into Spain and Italy. And like others too, he was perplexed by the endurance of ethnic antagonisms in Ireland. In every other case the settlers and natives had become ‘blended together’ in one national community, whereas the English, even after five hundred years, were looked upon ‘as Foreigners and Invaders’. The following passage reveals the predictable anxieties of the Ascendancy class; but it also reminds us, perhaps unexpectedly, that the shared origins of the human race, as described in the Book of Genesis, remained an unquestioned belief well into the eighteenth century:

When God was pleased by the Confusion of Languages to disperse Men over the face of the Earth, the World began to be Inhabited, and by degrees Colonies were spread into the remoter parts, as Families encreased, and grew too large for the Countries they at first possessed; and this not only before those Countries were Inhabited, but even since, Families and Nations have with great Variety transferred and changed their Seats, and by Force or Compact, or Connivance, or many other methods, have possessed themselves of Lands, and by degrees fixed themselves in a quiet Legal Establishment; by these means the World has undergone so many Changes, as to the Possessors of it’s [sic] several Countries, that it is ridiculous and impossible to set up the Right of Aborigines, or Original Possessors to any Country, and Consequently the Legal Possession must certainly remain in those, who have been long possessed of Power, quietly submitted to, and Property Legally enjoyed under it.[29]

To understand the ideological defences of the Ascendancy, we need to put aside the deterministic racial theories that did not emerge fully before the nineteenth century, and the same injunction applies to eighteenth-century criticisms of colonial rule. ‘Native’ views of the Irish past relied ultimately upon the medieval Leabhar Gabhála or ‘Book of Invasions’ in which Gaelic Ireland itself was interpreted as the product of different waves of settlement. Geoffrey Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn (1629–34), circulated in manuscript in seventeenth century and published in English translation in 1723, celebrated the ancient civilisation of the Gaels or Milesians, a colony who allegedly migrated from Egypt via Spain around 1000 B.C.; but it also praised the achievements of the earlier settlers—Partholonians, Firbolgs and Tuatha Dé Danann—who had preceded them. According to Charles O’Conor, the eloquent voice of Gaelic Ireland for much of the eighteenth century, these earlier inhabitants had come from Britain and preserved their natural rights just like ‘the latter Colonies Planted here by Henry II’.[30] Decades later the Wexford Catholic and republican Edward Sweetman published an intriguing denunciation of English colonialism, drawing upon political thinkers as diverse as Sir John Davies, David Hume and Machiavelli. During the reign of Henry II, he claimed, ‘every means which fraud could invent, avarice suggest, or violence enforce, were employed to plunder and destroy the brave and simple aborigines of the isle’. Yet Sweetman identified himself not with the natives, but with the Old English who, unlike the ‘modern settlers’, sought to bury animosity ‘in the mutual peace and harmony of a final coalition and incorporation’.[31]

For all their commitment to humanitarian causes, the political thinkers of the Enlightenment did not produce a body of anti-imperial thought to match the outpouring of anti-slavery writings from Montesquieu onward. ‘Before the late eighteenth century’, as Sankar Muthu has observed, ‘those who sympathised with the plight of colonised peoples and those who launched explicit criticisms of Europeans’ relations with the non-European world … generally decried the abuses of the imperial power, but not the imperial mission itself.’[32] Even the most passionate critics of the violence and hypocrisy of the Europeans in the New World believed that imperial rule could be justified by the extension of Christianity, commerce and the cultivation of the Earth. Jonathan Swift specialised in exposing within his ‘civilised’ countrymen examples of the same cruelty and perversity that they attributed to their ‘savage’ subjects. But when he complained that the English treated the kingdom of Ireland ‘as if it had been one of their Colonies of Out-casts in America’, he spoke not for the oppressed common Irish but for their indignant Protestant masters.[33] The Dublin radical Charles Lucas shocked his contemporaries with the remark that the medieval English settlers had treated the ‘poor Irish’ even worse than ‘the Spanish used the Mexicans, or as inhumanly as the English, now, treat their Slaves in America’.[34] Yet this sensational claim was in fact based on an entirely respectable source, Sir John Davies’s A discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued (1612), which argued that the greatest failure of the Anglo-Normans had been to compromise with the Gaelic social system instead of obliterating it. And Edmund Burke, who devoted so much energy to the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, believed that the answer to imperial corruption in India—as in Ireland—was not less English government but more of it.

Even as a description of economic realities, references to Ireland’s colonial status often obscure as much as they illuminate. A promising starting-point might be the mercantile system that regulated Ireland’s trade in the interests of England. It was the controversy over the Woollen Act that forced Charles Davenant, the most brilliant economic writer of the era, to reformulate the English national interest in terms fitting for a commercial empire based on maritime trade. Davenant supplied the ‘political arithmetic’ that justified England’s domination of the seas and its exploitation of the captive markets under its control, from Ireland to the West Indies.[35] Since Ireland, with a similar climate, well-situated ports and cheaper labour costs, was a direct competitor to England’s vital woollen trade, the kingdom was debarred from England’s trading system, with the liberty of exporting cattle to England as the only compensation.[36] The assumption that the economic development of Britain’s dependencies must be subordinated to metropolitan needs was also made plain in the economic writings of the influential Bristol merchant John Cary.[37] While the debate over the Woollen Act provoked blunt assertions of Ireland’s subordinate status, however, the legislation itself was a backbench measure rather than official policy.[38] British thinking on Ireland, such as it was, continued to be shaped by military strategy rather than economic exploitation. More importantly, the swings and fluctuations of Irish agriculture, and even the development of textiles and of the provisioning trade, reflected economic dependence on England rather than formal legislative restrictions. The great subsistence crises of the century, such as the famine of 1740–41, were general European crises—although they may have been aggravated by peculiarly Irish factors. Similarly, the disastrous troughs in linen sales experienced in 1772–3 and 1777–8 reflected depressed market conditions in England too.

On what might dubiously be described as the ‘benefit’ side, Irish merchants were drawn into colonial trading networks, perhaps the most obvious example being the cluster of Galway families with commercial interests in the West Indies. The Kirwans, Lynches, Frenches and Skerretts were all established in Antigua, and members of the latter two also settled in Saint-Domingue as sugar planters and traders.[39] (Their sugar and coffee plantations would have offered them ample opportunity to test the comparison, so casually made by contemporary writers, between the condition of the Irish peasant and that of the West Indian ‘negro’.) There were Irish settlers too on the tiny island of St Croix, bought from the French in 1733 by the Danish West India Company. When two Irish Dominicans arrived in 1759, they found about 250 of their countrymen on the island, including Bourkes, MacEvoys and Skerritts; twelve were planters, others were merchants and traders, and ‘about one hundred lads of our country’ acted as overseers on the plantations.[40] Outnumbered by fifty to one, they were saved by the militia from ‘a design the negroes had of rising up against the white people’ before their first year had passed.[41] In the north-east of Ireland, meanwhile, the West India trade was a vital stimulus in the transformation of Belfast from a small market town into a significant port and manufacturing centre. Waddell Cunningham, the first chairman of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce and reputedly the richest man in the town, possessed a sugar estate on Dominica, as did the venerable Dr Alexander Haliday, for long the Whig conscience of the northern capital. Valentine Jones the younger, a wine merchant and rum and sugar importer, spent several years living in Barbados where he also held administrative office; other Belfast merchant houses, like the Blacks, Ewings and Thompsons, had Caribbean interests. The granting to Ireland of ‘free trade’, hailed as a great victory by the Volunteers, effectively meant that slave produce, primarily Virginian tobacco and West Indies sugar, could now be imported directly into Ireland. Sugar refining and the cotton industry were vital to Ulster’s economic take-off, while some of Belfast’s shoemakers, who numbered more than 300 by the 1790s, manufactured shoes especially designed for slaves.[42]

It has become common to contrast the colonial approach to Ascendancy Ireland with the ancien régime model discussed in Chapter 3 below. Several historians have recently explored Ireland’s similarities with other societies of ancien régime Europe, but the most sophisticated and sustained treatment of this theme is Sean Connolly’s Religion, law, and power (1992). Here the Ireland of the Protestant Ascendancy is characterised as follows:

It was a pre-industrial society, ruled over by a mainly landed elite, in which vertical ties of patronage and clientship were more important than horizontal bonds of shared economic or social position, and in which even popular protest was conducted within the assumptions that underlay the existing social order. It was also, like the rest of Europe, a confessional state, in which religion remained a central aspect of personal and political motivation, and in which differences in religious allegiance were a cause of fundamental conflict.[43]

As Connolly has acknowledged, a typical ancien régime is just as hard to locate as a typical colony. Without an essentially European framework, he nevertheless argues, it is impossible to understand the key features of Irish life between the Restoration and the long reign of George III. Many of those aspects of Hanoverian Ireland commonly regarded as the product of colonialist policies—such as massive social inequalities, the restriction of political power to a tiny propertied elite, and the imposition of legal penalties on religious dissent—can be found in most parts of eighteenth-century Europe.[44] We err, in other words, when we apply our own democratic assumptions to an age of oligarchy.

It might be imagined that the vogue for the term ‘ancien régime’ and its ecclesiastical counterpart, the ‘confessional state’, reflects the belated influence of French or German debates on Irish historiography. In fact this vocabulary was borrowed from the British historian Jonathan Clark, whose polemical book English society, 1660–1832 first appeared in 1985. Clark was engaged in a frontal assault on what he saw as the mainstream of English historiography—the Whig interpretation of history and its liberal and Marxist offshoots. His aim was the construction of an alternative, deliberately Tory historical framework organised around survivals rather than origins, and his themes were the persistence of aristocratic dominance, the continuing validity of Jacobitism, divine-right monarchy, and patriarchalism. But in spite of his title, the primary concern of Clark’s book was not with social relations at all; nor indeed was he particularly interested in continental comparisons. His central focus was political and ecclesiastical institutions and the ideologies which underpinned them. In this picture of the unreformed British state the questions which preoccupied previous historians, such as the use of patronage to control the House of Commons or the unrepresentative nature of the electoral system and the franchise, are of little importance. Instead the principal target of the disaffected was the ecclesiastical establishment: ‘the ubiquitous agency of the State was the Church, quartering the land not into five hundred constituencies but into ten thousand parishes, impinging on the daily concerns of the great majority, supporting its black-coated army of a clerical intelligentsia, bidding for a monopoly of education, piety and political acceptability’.[45] The flipside of this argument concerns the nature and sources of political opposition and disaffection in eighteenth-century England. The greatest threat, it is argued, came not from social and economic changes—industrialisation, urbanisation, the rise of the middle classes—but from religious heterodoxy, and in particular from those groups who rejected the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity enshrined in the Anglican creed.

To say that Clark’s polemical crusade has not attracted widespread acceptance would be an understatement. Rival surveys of eighteenth-century England have stressed its modernity rather than traditionalism. For John Brewer, the England that emerged from the Glorious Revolution was a dynamic ‘fiscal-military state’, and its ability to wage war successfully was expanded dramatically by a new system of public deficit financing, a centralised bureaucracy, and a single sovereign legislature capable of overriding corporate privilege.[46] Meanwhile the social and economic forces dismissed by Clark have been invited back onto centre stage in Paul Langford’s A polite and commercial people (1989). Although Langford agrees that there was no sustained movement for the empowerment of a middle class during the eighteenth century, he traces the manifold ways in which the influence of the ‘middling sorts’ was felt—in town corporations, parish vestries, in the new world of associations and philanthropic societies, and in the cultural codes of ‘politeness’.[47] Even Linda Colley, whose influential Britons (1992) explores the centrality of Protestantism to Britishness, is concerned less with old theologies, and more with new national identities built upon a broad historical sense of separateness from the allegedly superstitious, backward and slavish peoples of the continent.[48] Each of these important studies has as much as Jonathan Clark’s to contribute to our understanding of England’s oldest dependency.

The political and cultural structures of Ascendancy Ireland have been attached to both ‘ancien régime’ and colonial models, and historians continue to debate whether the Irish experience has been closer to that of Europe or that of colonised non-European countries. It should come as no surprise to discover that the colonial and ancien régime models are not in fact mutually exclusive alternatives. Each illuminates certain aspects of early modern Ireland while obscuring others. In many ways Ireland had the outward appearance of a European kingdom; but the legacy of Tudor and Stuart conquests meant that Irish society was repeatedly conceptualised in terms of settlers and natives. It is clear that these historiographical quarrels will not be resolved by the accumulation of further research alone. Very often scholars have agreed on ‘the facts’ but disagreed on how to interpret them. Since these disagreements have often been related to differences over Northern Ireland, and over the political violence of the Troubles, it is tempting to conclude that our scholarly conflicts will someday fade quietly into the past along with the Troubles themselves. In the meantime the construction of comparative frameworks based on the New World and on mainstream Western Europe has been an instructive exercise, causing us to think again about old questions, and expanding our modest conceptual vocabulary. What is so far lacking from these debates, however, is any attempt to get beyond simplistic definitions of the ancien régime or of colonialism and to begin the comparative investigation of Ireland and its European neighbours.

This brings us to a third major deficiency in the New History school. For obvious reasons, much of the conceptual equipment used by Irish scholars is borrowed from England and replicates the insular approach of English historiography. It is rare indeed to find Ireland treated as part of a broader continental unit, despite the multifarious links—confessional, military and dynastic—with continental powers. Of course, it is undeniable that the profound fissures left by seventeenth-century conquest and colonisation distinguished the Irish from their neighbours in important respects, yet the study of societies and cultures in isolation can lead to misleading conclusions. It has been argued, for example, that one effect of Protestant Ascendancy was to leave the Catholic Church institutionally weak, decentralised and inefficient, so that the clergy was unusually dependent on the laity until the end of the eighteenth century. More obviously, it has been assumed that Irish social structures diverged in several ways from the European norm, with a relatively small, mobile elite, an underground gentry of dispossessed landowners, and a large band of middlemen existing between landlord and tenant. Such hypotheses and generalisations may well be true, but their importance can only be grasped by contrasting Ireland with the Europe to which it belonged politically, culturally and religiously.

The location of eighteenth-century Ireland in a European context can be justified, first and foremost, by the fact that contemporaries themselves often viewed their country in this way. In their 23 October commemoration sermons, for example, Anglican clergymen linked the depredations of the Ulster rebellion of 1641 to the persecutions of Waldenses and Albigensians, the brutality of the Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day and, more recently, the attempted destruction of the Protestants of France and Savoy under Louis XIV.[49] Even in the 1740s, when France was acknowledged to be ‘most civilised’, Protestant preachers warned their congregations of the horrors faced by their co-religionists across the English Channel. ‘Scarce a year passes without executions on that account,’ noted the Rev. Benjamin Bacon, ‘and some with exquisite tortures.’[50] This search for continental parallels reminds us that during the early modern period both Protestant and Catholic rulers had sought to assert state control over ecclesiastical institutions and to penalise those who refused to conform.[51] Alternatively, Catholic pamphleteers such as Charles O’Conor, in their attempts to persuade Protestant public opinion that some of the economic restrictions imposed upon their co-religionists should be eased, looked to the continent for examples of interdenominational tolerance. In particular, they sought to extract political capital from the fact that the rulers of Britain and Ireland had extended protection to their Catholic subjects on the continent. It is too easily forgotten that the Europeanisation of the British monarchy, begun under William III, was strengthened by the accession of the House of Hanover, so much so that George I and II (1714–60) were often accused of putting their German territorial interests before those of their British subjects. Catholics were regarded as loyal subjects in Hanover, Prussia and Holland, prompting Charles O’Conor to ask ‘Are Irish Catholics alone irreclaimable?’[52]

When we turn to analyse the periodic constitutional wrangles between the Dublin and London legislatures, we must remember that the ‘multiple kingdom’ or ‘composite state’ was the predominant form of political organisation in early modern Europe. As a result of conquest, dynastic union or voluntary agreement, royal houses such as the Stuarts, Bourbons and Habsburgs governed multi-ethnic collections of kingdoms and provinces rather than unitary nation-states.[53] Poynings’ Law, which regulated the legislative activities of the Dublin parliament, was a perfectly conventional ancien régime mechanism for administering composite monarchies, similar to the use by the kings of Spain of the council of Aragon and the council of Italy with regard to the capitoli proposed in the parliaments of Sicily, Naples and Sardinia, and by the Spanish council of state in relation to the states general of the Netherlands. Even the Declaratory Act, by which Westminster asserted a jurisdiction superior to the Dublin legislature, had a counterpart in the claims of the Catalan cortes to exercise legislative authority over Sardinia.[54]

Most early modern monarchs coexisted—usually uneasily—with representative assemblies. Political theorists were familiar with the distinction between consensual regimes or dominium politicum et regale, and the absolute or dominium regale monarchies where the crown was able to tax subjects without the consent of representative assemblies. The patriot argument that Ireland was a separate kingdom, linked to England only by voluntary allegiance to the crown, can only be understood against the background of recent European history, which had seen several monarchies manage to govern without summoning their parliaments, or even abolish them altogether. Thus Henry Maxwell, in his Essay upon an union of Ireland with England (1704), exploited contemporary fears that England and Ireland might succumb to absolutism, as France, Spain, Sweden and Denmark had.[55] The best known of all Irish patriot works, William Molyneux’s The case of Ireland stated (1698), ended with a similar warning that parliamentary government, once universal in Europe, had all but vanished. ‘Our King’s Dominions’, he asserted, ‘are the only Supporters of this noble Gothick Constitution, save only what little remains may be found thereof in Poland.’[56] Molyneux’s contemporary, the famous ‘Commonwealthsman’ and Irish landowner Viscount Molesworth, published his classic Account of Denmark in 1693 and later translated Hotman’s Franco-Gallia, the well-known French constitutionalist treatise (1711). Both works were designed to explain the triumph of tyranny and priestcraft in what had once been the free states of Europe and, by implication, to warn against the same tendencies within the British constitutional system.

The juxtaposition of diverse kingdoms, principalities and republics within a relatively small geographical area allowed for the interchange of peoples and cultures across Europe. The seventeenth-century wars of religion, which threatened to re-divide the continent along confessional lines and led to the displacement of minority groups, complicated this process further. Huguenots, Palatines and Moravians, victims of persecution in France or the Habsburg empire, crossed the channel to England and Ireland. All Irish Catholic priests were trained at continental universities, and a number of them would teach there too, including Michael Moore (1640–1726), whose reputation as a critic of Cartesian philosophy earned him distinguished appointments at the Collège de Navarre and the University of Paris.[57] Meanwhile the recruitment of Irishmen into continental armies continued throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, boosted by the increasing scale and duration of early modern warfare.[58] While the 20,000 ‘wild geese’ who followed Sarsfield into exile were casualties of war, those who enlisted in the 1720s or 1730s—between 1,000 and 1,500 each year—were making a career move. They were part of an established social pattern, requiring financial support from their families as they trained and then established themselves in a regiment, and, very often, returning home still young men. Commercial networks were also established with major Irish centres in Cádiz, Bordeaux, Nantes, Bruges and Rotterdam. Hence Lecky’s remark, seldom followed up, that the real history of Catholic Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century was to be traced in the countries of Europe.[59]

Ironically, then, the penal code had the effect of strengthening the continental character of Irish Catholicism. Just after the Seven Years War (1756–63) Sir James Caldwell warned of the dangers posed by Irish links to France and Spain: ‘There is not a Family in the Island that has not a Relation in the Church, in the Army, or in Trade in those Countries.’[60] Such ties were not confined to Catholics, however, as Caldwell’s own career demonstrated. A substantial Protestant landowner from County Fermanagh, he had been created Count of Milan by the Empress Maria Theresa following a distinguished military career in the Austrian service. His younger brother, Hume Caldwell, followed his example, and fought with honour in Silesia during the Seven Years War. On one occasion, having accidentally started a fire in his lodgings in Prague, he was bailed out by the friars of the Irish Franciscan college, who were happy to repay his brother’s generosity to his Catholic neighbours. It is true, of course, that the self-image of Irish Protestants, just as much as their English counterparts, was shaped by hostility to Catholic Europe and particularly to France, the cultural superpower of the age. As we have seen, Protestant patriots like Molyneux and Molesworth prided themselves on having escaped from the general pattern of European development, in which ‘Gothic’ liberties had fallen victim to popery and slavery.[61] In his Reflections and resolutions proper for the gentlemen of Ireland (1738), the Anglican clergyman and ‘improver’ Samuel Madden urged his fellow countrymen to cherish the distinction of being ‘English-men’ since it was ‘a Badge of those Privileges and Liberties which are utterly unknown to the rest of the World’.[62] Yet this was the same period that saw the Grand Tour, usually to France and Italy, become a standard part of upper-class education, and the excursions of the young Irish magnates facilitated their entrance into an increasingly internationalised aristocracy in Europe.

Even the Presbyterians of the north sometimes found their way to the continent. This may seem surprising. Barred from the Anglican preserve of Trinity College Dublin, the adherents of the Synod of Ulster and its various offshoots looked primarily to the Scottish universities, where they enrolled to study the arts, medicine and divinity. These students, who signed the matriculation register as ‘Scoto-Hiberni’ (Scots-Irish), were important exporters of Enlightenment thought not only to Ulster but to the American colonies as well.[63] The lively and fractious intellectual traditions sustained by Glasgow and to a lesser extent Edinburgh graduates, vital to an understanding of Ulster radicalism, is explored in Chapter 2 below. But some Dissenters travelled further. During the 1750s William Campbell, a Presbyterian minister from Newry, spent seven years in France as a tutor in the Bagwell family of Clonmel, including a brief spell in a Paris prison following his refusal to kneel while the Host was being carried through the streets.[64] The European co-ordinates of Irish Presbyterians, however, were set by the Calvinist (or what we might call ‘post-Calvinist’) churches. The spread of liberal theology within the Synod of Ulster was facilitated by the adoption of Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianae at Glasgow University by Francis Hutcheson, the Armagh-born philosopher, while one of Hutcheson’s students, William Crawford of Strabane, translated the works of the Genevan theologian J.-A. Turrettini in the 1770s.[65] The most remarkable example of these continental connections is an album of testimonials collected by the Rev. Samuel Haliday of Belfast, which contained the names of ninety-six professors and pastors from Leiden, Utrecht, Neuchâtel, Geneva, Zurich, Berne, Heidelberg, Basel, Lausanne and Rotterdam.[66]

These interactions and interconnections all suggest the validity of comparative exercises. All too often those Irish scholars who do look to the continent erect models of ancien régime society based on the atypical case of Bourbon France when other comparisons might be more instructive. The patriot tradition which flourished in the 1770s bears comparison not only with the United Provinces, where the regenten defended their local autonomy against the Stadtholder,[67] but also with the Helvetic Society founded in Switzerland in 1761. Both the Dutch and Swiss republics had successfully thrown off foreign rule, and both combined Protestant and Catholic populations, hence their adoption as a model by some Irish patriots on the eve of legislative independence.[68] It has been suggested that the situation of Protestant colonists was similar to that of Catalan immigrants in Sardinia.[69] Even if such comparisons only serve to confirm the colonial, non-European dimension of the Irish experience, they will at least introduce a new precision into theories of Irish exceptionalism by clarifying the areas of similarity and divergence between the different countries of Europe. Every society has a unique history, but, as John Elliott has said, ‘the special concern of historians should be with the particular nature and extent of that uniqueness’.[70]

In this introduction I have attempted to outline some of the directions in which historical scholarship has been moving since the appearance of the New History of Ireland. I began by citing a remark of J. C. Beckett’s as an example of earlier approaches and assumptions that have now become outdated; and I would like now to return to Beckett, this time to examine the values and assumptions that underpinned his writing. In his inaugural lecture ‘The study of Irish history’ delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in 1956, the constitutional and high-political orientation of Beckett’s generation, now decisively out of fashion, was much in evidence; but his reflections on the problems posed by the Irish past have a longer-term interest. What troubled Beckett was that Irish history, at least since the arrival of the Anglo-Normans, appeared to have no ‘pattern’. English history, he believed, possessed an overriding framework supplied by the institutions of the nation-state which could be traced back, in some sense at least, to the Norman Conquest; but in Ireland there was no unified political community or single centre of authority. It is a contrast that dismayed many eighteenth-century observers, not least Edmund Burke, and it still poses a fundamental problem for Irish historians. As Beckett pointed out, the problem of Irish history was related to the problem with the very term ‘Irish’—sometimes used to mean all the inhabitants of the island; sometimes those of Gaelic descent, as opposed to the colonists; or the Roman Catholics, as opposed to the Protestants.

Beckett had already rejected a number of solutions. The centre of gravity for Irish historiography could not be found in Ireland’s political institutions, since these had been imposed by external forces in the seventeenth century and were controlled by colonists. To focus on resistance to government authority, in the form of literature, agrarian protest or rebellion, would result in an equally unbalanced picture. Both options were unsatisfactory, in his opinion, since they led to a narrow concentration on Anglo-Irish relations. Instead Beckett looked for a pattern in Irish history in the relationship between ‘the land’ and its peoples: ‘It is in Ireland itself, the physical conditions imposed by life in this country, and their effect on those who have lived here, that [the historian] will find the distinct and continuing character of Irish history.’[71] By land, presumably, he meant landscape, a sense of place, the climate and the physical environment, all of which transcended divisions between the ‘settlers’ and ‘the earlier population’. But to the student of the long eighteenth century, forced to wrestle with acts of attainder, the legal technicalities of gavelkind, or the ‘collusive discovery’ by which some Catholics were able to retain their estates, the notion that land might supply the stable or unifying element of Irish history will seem strange indeed.

Beckett’s historical standpoint—best viewed as moderate, liberal, and above all Anglican—was not unusual among the New History generation.[72] The historical philosophy of Theo Moody, founder of the journal Irish Historical Studies and originator of the New History enterprise, has been described as ‘moral, rational and in a deep non-technical sense religious’.[73] Like R. B. McDowell, the most influential eighteenth-century scholar of their generation, both men were northerners. Yet their strong sense of Irishness—an inclusive, rather patrician, thirty-two-county Irishness—precluded any genuine identification with the Stormont regime, or indeed its southern counterpart. It also helps to explain their faith in the integrative, conciliatory potential of the historian, and their optimistic belief that a ‘scientific’ approach to the evidence would gradually erode dangerous popular traditions, whether orange or green.[74] Beckett’s political ruminations, recorded in his diaries, were often interesting, but hardly profound or systematic. His central conviction, that the Anglo-Irish tradition (or an idealised version of it) offered a via media between the sectarian excesses of Gaelic nationalism and Ulster loyalism, is easily mocked.[75] There is no consensus, however, on what should replace it.

Today few professional historians share Beckett’s intense Christian faith, or even his vision of history as a moral endeavour. As we have already seen, the attempts of the New History generation to replace nationalist and unionist ‘myths’ with a more scientific ‘history’ has been denounced, especially by post-colonial critics who have demonstrated that the pioneers of professional Irish history carried ideological baggage of their own. In Europe and the United States, more importantly, the whole idea of objectivity in the social sciences has been repeatedly attacked by post-modernists who argue that the ‘meta-narratives’ or schemes around which Western cultures have organised their history are all, ultimately, ideological constructs manipulated by states who seek to discipline their populations in the name of progress, science or truth.[76] At the same time, the rise of new forms of social and cultural history, and above all the impact of women’s history, has generated hostility to the idea that political life should provide the core of historical writing. Where most Americans once accepted ‘a single narrative of national history’, they are now faced with ‘an increasing emphasis on the diversity of ethnic, racial, and gender experiences’ and asked to accept a pervasive relativism as the necessary price to be paid for the democratisation of higher education.[77] Even in England the dominance of ‘history from below’, the proliferation of local studies, and the ‘three kingdoms’ approach of the ‘new British history’ mean that we can no longer find, as Beckett did, a ‘natural and overriding unity’ in the national past.[78]

My intention in this book has been to write the history of Ireland from the outside in—to begin, that is, with the central features of eighteenth-century Europe and to trace the ways in which they were mapped onto the Irish situation, complete with its sectarian and colonial fault-lines. This may not disclose any grand pattern of events, but I hope at least to avoid some of the pitfalls identified by Beckett. By placing Anglo-Irish relations and Protestant/Catholic antagonisms in a wider perspective, I hope also to promote greater detachment in eighteenth-century historiography. In speaking of detachment, needless to say, I do not mean the naïve commitment to scientific research and value-free writing that has often been attributed to Moody and his collaborators. Nor is it my intention, as will become clear, to distract attention from the ‘pain’ in Irish history. But I do share with the ‘New Historians’ the belief that historical scholarship does not benefit from a close engagement with political debate; and I share their hostility to the self-congratulation, wishful thinking and parochialism that characterised the work of many earlier writers. The kind of detachment I have in mind involves respect for the complicated business of evaluating historical verdicts and the frank recognition that our interpretations are inevitably partial and provisional. It demands the sort of self-awareness required to suspend our own judgments and to explore sympathetically different perspectives, however alien or objectionable they might seem. These values, however elusive their philosophical foundations may be, are the same values applied by professional historians when they mark essays or interview candidates for jobs. They are also the same values that we prize—or claim to—in democratic societies, particularly where they are troubled by difficult and divided pasts.

The opening section of the book is organised around three broad themes. (Absolute beginners lacking a basic chronological knowledge of the period might prefer to read this section last.) Each of the three chapters is intended to show how European history, as both a series of contexts and as a framework for comparison, can help to illuminate aspects of Ascendancy Ireland. At the same time, they tell us something about the limits of the possible for eighteenth-century Irish people, in military and diplomatic affairs, in intellectual resources and in social resources. One theme is the idea of the ancien régime social order, already outlined above. A second is the Enlightenment, the ferment of ideas which has traditionally given eighteenth-century Europe its primary claim on the attention of the historian. My starting-point, however, is international relations, Ireland’s place in the European order, and in particular the impact of war. This may at first seem perverse. The Williamite settlement, as Beckett commented, inaugurated the longest interval of internal peace that Ireland had ever known.[79] Yet Britain was at war with France for half of the period covered by this book: 1689–97, 1702–13, 1739–48, 1756–63, 1775–83 and 1793–1802. These wars, many of them forgotten today, were very costly. In proportion to the European population, the number of battlefield deaths in the eighteenth century was seven times as great as in the nineteenth.[80] Irishmen fought in each of these overseas conflicts, usually on both sides, and partly because they believed that the future of Ireland itself was at stake. Granted that Ireland functioned—in some sense—as a colony, it is worth asking why it should have remained so. Why was the hope, repeatedly expressed by Anglican clergymen and intellectuals, that Ireland’s various communities should be ‘blended’ into one people not realised? Why, on the other hand, were the Protestant settlers not expelled or, as they often feared, reduced to ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’? The answers to these questions, as contemporaries well knew, were largely to be found outside Ireland itself. ‘Every commotion in Europe’, wrote an Anglican clergyman in 1743, ‘gives us some alarms and apprehensions at home.’[81] These commotions form the subject of my first chapter.

Part I

Horizons

1

English Difficulties and Irish Opportunities

No man can have thought long upon the means of bringing any government to perfection without realising a host of difficulties and obstacles which flow less from its inherent nature than from its relation to its neighbours.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1756)[1]

The shape of eighteenth-century Ireland—what might be visualised as the peaks and troughs of political activity—is most easily understood in relation to the chronology of European warfare. The period covered by this book began and ended with the clash of arms both within Ireland and across the continent. It has become fashionable, indeed, to speak of a ‘Second Hundred Years War’ between Britain and France, comprising six major conflicts between Louis XIV’s invasion of the Rhineland and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.[2] At the end of the seventeenth century the international arena was dominated by the expansionist designs of Louis XIV, who, it was believed, was attempting to establish a ‘universal monarchy’ over the other kingdoms of Europe. In the face of this threat, England joined coalitions of the other major powers for two great struggles, the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). During a quarter-century of almost continuous warfare, field armies approached an average of 100,000 men, a fourfold increase on the forces raised during the Thirty Years War.[3] Following a period of peace, Anglo-French rivalry was renewed in the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48) and climaxed in the Seven Years War (1756–63), which saw the French driven out of Canada and most of their West Indian, West African and Indian territories. France exacted revenge by supporting the rebellion of the thirteen colonies (1775–83), though only at the cost of bankrupting the Bourbon monarchy. Finally, the levée en masse of 1793 inaugurated a new era of total war, as the mass armies of the revolutionary French Republic overran the European mainland. As Tim Blanning has noted, this was actually the seventeenth war fought between the European powers since the beginning of the century: ‘If there was ever a time when war was the normal means of intercourse between states, then this was surely it.’[4]

THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS WAR

The internal development of the British state—and Ireland’s position within it—were closely connected to events on distant battlefields. Take for example the Dublin legislature, which, in the shape of the magnificent Parliament House built at College Green, remains the best-known symbol of Ascendancy Ireland. The transformation of parliament during the 1690s from a rare event into a regular institution was a direct result of the War of the League of Augsburg; likewise its extinction by the Act of Union in 1800 was designed to make Ireland ‘an advantage’ to England rather than ‘a point dreadfully vulnerable in all future wars’.[5] If we turn to the notorious penal code, we find that the first restrictions on Catholics were essentially wartime measures, such as the 1695 act prohibiting Catholics from owning weapons or horses fit for military service. Decades later it was the manpower requirements caused by the Seven Years War that prompted a reassessment of confessional discrimination when Catholics were enlisted—at first unofficially—into the British army (see Chapter 10). As the leading authority on the subject has argued, ‘it was above all the pressure of war that forced the Catholic question onto the political agenda, and kept it there’.[6]

It is a striking fact, though one seldom explored, that the inhabitants of Ireland shared an awareness that they did not determine their own history, but were ultimately dependent upon external forces. Despite the apparent confidence asserted by its Georgian country houses, Ascendancy Ireland was marked by cultural instability, and the reality or expectation of outside intervention was a recurrent preoccupation. Irish Protestants regarded the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688 as the charter of their civil and religious liberties, and throughout the eighteenth century they commemorated this great constitutional landmark with the same enthusiasm as their counterparts in Britain and North America. In Ireland, however, William III was remembered not only as the gravedigger of Stuart absolutism, but also as the glorious deliverer who rescued the Protestant settlers from the popish natives. While civic and military dignatories led an annual procession on the anniversary of William’s birthday (4 November), the battle of the Boyne was celebrated at a more popular level.[7] Moreover, the violence of ethnic and sectarian antagonisms, unparalleled within the British state, showed little sign of abating. In 1731, when it was proposed that a public monument should be raised on the site of the battle of Boyne, one sceptical commentator warned that such a memorial would be vandalised. ‘We live in a Country’, he delicately pointed out, ‘where the vanquished Enemies continue still to be a very numerous Body of People.’[8]

An official calendar of apparently providential victories, in which the turbulent events of 1641 and 1690 provided the key dates, helped to create and maintain a distinctively Protestant culture in eighteenth-century Ireland. The miracle of deliverance, commemorated in countless sermons, speeches and toasts, has its counterpart in the ‘shipwreck’ of 1688–91 lamented by Gaelic poets, in Jacobite loyalty to ‘the king across the water’, in the aisling genre which pictured Ireland awaiting liberation, and in the well-known United Irish song:

The French are on the sea, says the Shan Van Vocht,

The French are on the sea, says the Shan Van Vocht;

The French are in the bay, they’ll be here without delay,

And the Orange will decay, says the Shan Van Vocht.

Following the departure of the ‘wild geese’ in 1691, hopes for a Stuart restoration were sustained by military instability on the continent, the continuing recognition accorded to the exiled dynasty by the Church of Rome, and the presence of the Irish regiments in France and Spain. Jacobite poets such as Raghnall Dall Mac Domhnaill and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille continued to denounce the Hanoverians as usurpers, the followers of Luther and Calvin as heretics, and the Protestant elite as foreign upstarts; they also prophesied the return of the natural order: the legitimate king restored to his throne, the true church re-established, the Catholic aristocracy returned to their ancestral estates.[9]

Although the importance of war is highlighted throughout this book, the focus is not so much on how battles were fought and won. The intention is rather to examine the nature of warfare, its impact on the economy and the civilian population, and the ways in which the clash of professional armies overseas intersected with indigenous sectarian animosities at home. Above all, it will be suggested that the pattern of European conflict determined Irish politics in two fundamental ways. The first concerns what may be labelled the ‘warfare state’ thesis, a notion that has dominated much of European historiography for the last thirty years. Briefly stated, this argues that the increased scale of armed conflict in the early modern period, the unprecedented mobilisation of armies and the financial and administrative pressures they created, led to the coalescence of powerful, centralised, bureaucratic states. In domestic terms, rulers equipped with standing armies gained greater coercive power over their subjects, enabling them to override the traditional privileges claimed by nobilities, representative assemblies or outlying provinces. Secondly, we must not forget that the eighteenth century saw a specific international system emerge in Europe. England’s difficulty, according to the well-known republican dictum, was Ireland’s opportunity.[10] In the long run, however, the balance of power during this period tended to underpin rather than challenge English rule in Ireland.

Although the beginnings of the ‘military revolution’ are often dated back to the spread of gunpowder technology between 1450 and 1530, it was not until the late seventeenth century that the decisive period of military and bureaucratic expansion began.[11] First and foremost, this meant a dramatic escalation in the size of armies, particularly marked in the years between 1689 and 1713. Not only was the number of men in arms greater than ever before—an astonishing 181,000 men fought at Malplaquet (1709)—but states now kept large professional or ‘standing’ armies in peacetime. In France, for most of the period surveyed here, the army remained at a peacetime level of around 130,000 men.[12] This revolution in warfare set in motion a revolution in government, as the strain of paying, transporting and feeding the new monster armies led to experiments in tax collection and public borrowing. The proportion of state revenue devoted to military expenditure was normally around half of the total during peacetime and up to three-quarters in war.[13] Generally speaking, the accumulation of armed force meant a concentration of coercive power which increased royal authority at the expense of representative institutions.

Can the ‘warfare state’ thesis be applied to the British Isles? Traditionally historians of ‘state-building’ have regarded the British state as an anomaly. Alone among the great monarchies, it resisted absolutism: no other army, apart from that of the Dutch Republic, was subject to parliamentary scrutiny. As George Story, chaplain to the Williamite expedition to Ireland, put it, Englishmen live under the rule of law, ‘a blessing that few other Nations can boast of’, partly because the sea protected them from foreign enemies, so there was no need for a standing army.[14] It can be argued, however, that the evolution of representative government conceals important similarities with general European trends. John Brewer has shown that between 75 and 85 per cent of government expenditure in eighteenth-century Britain was taken up with the costs of war.[15] The maintenance of England’s new role as a continental power demanded a staggering increase in taxation, the creation of a national debt, and a centralised body of professional administrators whose job it was to run the new ‘fiscal-military state’. Far from acting as a brake on centralisation, the existence of a national representative assembly at Westminster seems to have facilitated the growth of executive authority at the expense of the sorts of local or sectional interests (church authorities, city corporations, regional assemblies) that had entrenched themselves so successfully on the other side of the channel.

The political impact of Brewer’s ‘fiscal-military state’ was nowhere more obvious than in the relationship between England and her ‘sister’ kingdoms. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the common political unit in early modern Europe was not the independent nation-state, but the ‘composite monarchy’, in which one king or queen ruled over a core territory and a number of more or less dependent provinces. In this respect, the Stuarts, who united the crowns of Scotland, England and Ireland in 1603, found themselves in a similar position to the Spanish Habsburgs studied by John Elliott. Although the outlying territories were forced to accept the superiority of the core kingdom, where the royal court and administrative capital were located, they usually retained their own customary ‘liberties’ and representative institutions.[16] The theory was summed up by a seventeenth-century Spanish jurist, Solórzano Pereira, who wrote that ‘the kingdoms must be ruled and governed as if the king who holds them all together were king only of each one of them’.[17] In reality, of course, Castile was the core of the Spanish composite monarchy, and resentment had produced revolts in Catalonia, Portugal, Naples and Sicily. The notion of ‘sister kingdoms’, as in the British monarchy, was a fiction. During the reigns of William (1689–1702) and Anne (1702–14), however, the rise of parliamentary government, the escalating costs of war and, above all, the need to secure the Protestant succession finally made the old system unworkable. As European historians have shown, composite monarchies were prone to conflicts over the distribution of offices, access to domestic and colonial markets, and the mobilisation of resources for warfare. Since they were bound together solely by dynastic loyalty, they were also extremely vulnerable in the case of a disputed succession. When Scottish patriots claimed equality for their parliament, passing their own laws of succession in 1703, they were bullied into the Act of Union. In Ireland, meanwhile, pretensions to legislative independence were answered with the Declaratory Act of 1720, which asserted the right of the Westminster parliament to make laws ‘to bind the People and Kingdom of Ireland’.

The years between 1688 and 1720 witnessed the fundamental transformations that created Brewer’s fiscal-military state. The period was dominated by three interlocking struggles: for the Revolution settlement and the Protestant succession in Britain, for the Anglican monopoly in Ireland, and for the continental balance of power, or what Whigs called ‘the liberties of Europe’.[18] Brewer’s Sinews of power (1989) describes how dominant social groups first sought to reverse bureaucratic expansion, the growth of the armed forces and high taxes, as the landed classes were called upon to carry the bulk of the financial burden while the new ‘monied interest’ in the city of London made fortunes. They succeeded in imposing restrictions on the standing army (in England), in curbing the political influence of office-holders and subjecting the government to a measure of financial accountability. Gradually, however, as taxation was shifted onto other groups, they learned to colonise the fiscal-military state, investing in government stock and securities and directing it towards their own priorities.[19]

In Ireland the pattern was similar. Superficially at least, the dominant theme of the period appeared to be the rise of Protestant resentment at Ireland’s economic subordination, especially the Woollen Act of 1699, or what we used to call ‘colonial nationalism’. Underneath the rhetorical extremism that marked this period there lay a pragmatic understanding of the mutually dependent relationship between the London administration and the Protestant ‘political nation’ in Ireland. As David Hayton, James McGuire and others have argued, Irish politicians may have been humiliated by the sporadic interventions of the Westminster parliament, but they were able to carve out for themselves a parliamentary constitution within the wider state system centred on London. The key to this relationship was the evolution of a stable system of parliamentary supply. As Ivar McGrath has shown, the English chief governor was forced to concede the right of the Irish Commons to initiate revenue legislation by drawing up the ‘heads of bills’. The principle of regular parliaments was then secured by the voting of short-term ‘additional duties’ on a two-year basis. Finally, a series of committees enabled the Commons to set the amount of supply or ‘quantum’ and to examine the state revenue papers. In Ireland, as in England, the eighteenth-century constitution owed less to the liberties vindicated by the Glorious Revolution than to the inexorable financial needs created by war with Louis XIV’s France.[20]

The turning-point in eighteenth-century warfare was the Seven Years War (1756–63). The Peace of Paris (1763) marked the zenith of British imperial achievement, confirming the expulsion of the French from North America, the seizure of French and Spanish possessions in the West Indies, and the establishment of a new colony in West Africa. What had been known as ‘the British Empire’ since the late seventeenth century was in fact an assemblage of diverse territories whose inhabitants were bound together solely by their allegiance to the crown. Nowhere in the vast corpus of English constitutional law and political theory was there anything resembling a systematic definition of the Empire and its workings. From the 1690s English writers had often referred to Ireland as a colony—though confusingly they compared the Dublin legislature not only to the ‘proprietoryships’ granted to the settlers in North America, but to the principality of Wales, the counties palatine of Chester, Lancaster and Durham, and the Isle of Man.[21] This uncertainty should not surprise us, given that the status of the North American colonies was not very clear either. Though economic writers, most prominently Charles Davenant, had analysed colonial possessions as sources of raw materials and markets for finished products, the discussion of Britain’s maritime empire was limited to writings on international trade.[22] The legal and constitutional status of the colonies had never been adequately defined on a theoretical level. Even within England itself the character of the parliamentary monarchy emerging in the 1690s was dimly understood, and it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the concept of a sovereign, law-making parliament won widespread acceptance. As for the periphery, imperial relations had been regulated piecemeal by a series of navigation acts passed from the 1650s, prohibiting colonial trade with rival foreign powers. While it was assumed in England that the colonies were politically and economically subordinate to the metropolitan government, as the recurrence of parent–child metaphors implied, there was no agreement as to whether the North American territories had been acquired through settlement or, as Blackstone would later affirm, ‘by right of conquest’.[23]

What tied together the inhabitants of Britain, Ireland and the American colonies, as Peter Marshall and others have shown, was not institutional ties but a common heritage. This was an empire consisting of ‘Protestant communities of British origin, enjoying the specifically English rights to representative government and to the security of person and property guaranteed by the common law’.[24] The political classes of Edinburgh, Dublin and Philadelphia as well as those of London were united by the constitutional rights and representative structures of ‘Englishmen’, purchased at so great a cost in the struggles of the seventeenth century, their faith in the superiority of British values and political institutions, their pride in British commercial expansion and naval power, and above all by their common Protestantism—or at least their hostility to ‘popery’.[25] Already, of course, there were large populations—Catholics in Ireland, African slaves in North America and the West Indies, those who lived in the British trading settlements in Africa and Asia—who were excluded from this sense of community and who could not be expected to share in the general enthusiasm for British expansion. The massive territorial gains of the Seven Years War brought with them millions of Indians under the East India Company, the French colonists in Quebec, and further subject populations in the West Indies and Senegal. How these heterogeneous overseas dominions were to be held together, given continuing French and Spanish aggression, was a profoundly difficult question. For the first time writers such as Malachi Postlethwayt were prompted to investigate the empire in a systematic fashion. Significantly, his mammoth study, Britain’s commercial interests explained and improved (1757), saw the long-term solution to imperial problems as closer integration, a key part of which was to be an Irish act of union.[26]

In the short term, however, the answer was the traditional one: more troops. The conquests of the Seven Years War and the expanded demand for men led to the augmentation of the army on the Irish establishment. The political priorities for Dublin Castle, as always, were men and money—not just soldiers but recruitment officers, food, training, arms, the building and upkeep of barracks. In return for passing a revised augmentation bill in 1769, the Irish parliament succeeded in extracting a security clause which give it some control over the forces on the Irish establishment, together with a commitment that 12,000 troops would always remain in Ireland. As Thomas Bartlett has shown, however, the constitutional conflicts surrounding the augmentation led Viscount Townshend to dismantle the undertaker system and to establish what he called a ‘new system’ of direct management of the House of Commons which necessitated not only constant residence by the Lord Lieutenant but the clawing back of the vast powers of patronage, and in particular of the Irish Revenue Board, to bring them under the control of Dublin Castle.[27]

Although Ireland’s fate was dependent on the vicissitudes of international affairs, the island was, in every sense, peripheral to the deliberations of the great powers. Jacobite historians, in both Britain and Ireland, have often been tempted by the what-ifs and might-have-beens of military campaigns. A case in point is the French victory over a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet at Beachy Head, which made Tourville master of the English Channel in June 1690. England was now threatened with invasion, and it was feared that Tourville would cut the Williamite communications, leaving the king stranded in Ireland. A century later a combination of bad communications, bad timing and bad luck conspired to prevent the naval expeditions of the French Republic co-ordinating with a domestic insurrection. Suppose Hoche’s expedition in December 1796 had not been dispersed off Bantry Bay, but had reached Ulster where United Irish leaders awaited his 20,000 soldiers? These contingencies remind us that war during the long eighteenth century, as today, was an unpredictable business. And yet the repeated failure to overturn the Williamite settlement was hardly an accident. Why, it is worth considering, might one great power invade the territory of another?

Without doubt the most important cause of military aggression was strategic interest.[28] The recurrent military flashpoints were often frontier zones such as Hungary, or communication lines such as the ‘Spanish Road’ that ran from the north of Italy to the Low Countries. A case in point is Louis XIV’s aggression in Franche-Comté, Flanders, Alsace and Luxemburg, all in the interests of establishing an easily defensible border. Another consideration, predictably, was the opportunity for economic exploitation, particularly important as the eighteenth century went on. Trade, noted the Scots political theorist Andrew Fletcher, had become ‘the golden ball, for which all nations of the world are contending’.[29] The emergence of Prussia as a great power dates from Frederick the Great’s wild-card seizure of Silesia from Austria in 1740. Although a legal justification was duly concocted, the annexation of a province rich in agriculture, mineral deposits and textile manufacturing was a spectacular example of naked opportunism.[30] In an age when aristocratic codes of honour were still powerful, however, the vindication of dynastic rights was not simply a smokescreen for raison d’état, but was often an end in itself. As the numerous wars of succession demonstrated, rulers were reluctant to surrender titles to land derived from inheritance or from treaties, even when they were long dormant. Thus the legal pretexts by which Louis XIV justified the seizure of lands in the Netherlands and Germany, however spurious they seem today, were taken seriously at the time. Judged by any of the criteria outlined above, unfortunately, the Irish had little to offer. No other power had any strategic, economic or dynastic interest in the kingdom of Ireland.

Instead French expeditions to Ireland were chiefly diversionary in character; behind them lay the satisfying prospect of forcing perfidious Albion to fight with one hand tied behind her back. An indication of official thinking in France can be found in an anonymous ‘Mémoire sur l’estat de l’Irlande’ drawn up during the War of the Spanish Succession, which proposed sending 5,000 men, 200 horses and a large quantity of arms to Ireland. It was forecast that such a force would rally 40,000 Irish Catholics in five days, and that the Protestants of the north would be compelled to come to terms. The goal, however, was not to liberate the Irish but to paralyse the English, ‘les plus formidables’ of Louis XIV’s enemies. Just as William III had been forced to divert financial resources from Flanders to Ireland in 1689–91, so it was confidently predicted that Queen Anne would be forced to abandon her allies and pull her troops out of Europe.[31] Consequently, ‘il faut transporter la guerre’ to the British Isles. It was not until the 1790s, in very different circumstances, that the French played the Irish card once again, but the motivations were similar. Those who favoured an invasion of Ireland, such as Carnot and Hoche, wanted to cripple the English war effort, much as London had fomented royalist revolts in the Vendée. To this end, it was hoped that a successful landing in Ireland would spark a mutiny among the Irish sailors who made up such a disproportionate part of the Royal Navy.[32]

International alignments after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713–14) involved a series of established principles and practices: a code of behaviour in which any territorial gains made by one party were counterbalanced by ‘compensation’ paid to the others; in which alliances were formed for short-term specific goals; in which national (or rather dynastic) interests defined objectives rather than ideology; and all paid lip-service to the ideal of a balance of power.[33] It was during this period that Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, Hume and Rousseau began to picture Europe as a family of nations. ‘Christian Europe’, according to Voltaire, resembled a ‘great republic divided into several states’, united by religion, law and ‘the wise policy of maintaining among themselves as far as possible an equal balance of power’. This ‘well-known principle’ was given its classic definition in Le droit des gens (1758) by the Swiss international lawyer Emmerich de Vattel: ‘an arrangement of affairs so that no state shall be in a position to have absolute mastery and dominate over the others’.[34] Despite these philosophical credentials, however, proposals for the partition of major states were actually not uncommon: plans had been drawn up to dismember Spain (1702–13), Sweden (1701–21), the Habsburg monarchy (1740), Prussia (1756–63) and the Ottoman empire (recurrently).[35] Yet in practice it was rare for one state to fish in the territorial waters of another; the preferred option was for a combination of great powers to prey upon the lesser fry, with the overall balance maintained by careful compensation arrangements. The vulnerable areas, once again, were the intermediate states—the smaller German and Italian principalities, the Spanish Netherlands and, later, Poland.

The balance-of-power system offered Britain an in-built advantage. Whereas France was primarily a land-based power, usually forced to fight on several fronts, Britain was a naval power with little interest in continental territory (the controversial exception being the German electorate of Hanover). The tendency, demonstrated most clearly by the Seven Years War, was that Britain made commercial and colonial gains at the expense of France or Spain while the continental powers fought themselves to exhaustion or stalemate. Only in circumstances of diplomatic isolation would a partition of the British Empire be thinkable, and this is precisely what happened after 1763. As the Irish politician and writer Edmund Burke commented, Britain found itself ‘at the Circumference’ of European affairs as great-power ambitions shifted to the Polish and Ottoman questions.[36] With its borders for once secure, France offered aid to the American rebels and launched a naval build-up, formally declaring war in July 1778. Her ally, Spain, followed a year later. What had begun as a civil war between Britain and its colonists was transformed into a global war, as the English and French fought in the West Indies, in India, and on the high seas. The situation worsened further as tensions over trade led to war with the Dutch and provoked the hostility of the League of Armed Neutrality led by Catherine the Great. By the end of the conflict more than a quarter of a million British and Irish subjects were serving in the forces, with another 60,000 enrolled in the Irish Volunteers. Making allowances for those who died, deserted or were discharged, it has been calculated that somewhere between one-seventh and one-eighth of the male population of military age saw service during the years of the war.[37] The outcome was Britain’s first defeat since its emergence as a major power under William III.

This nightmare scenario saw the pattern of previous confrontations reversed: free from the entanglements of a continental war, France was able to devote its entire resources to the humiliation of an overstretched Britain. This time England’s difficulty really was Ireland’s opportunity, and a new Irish nation—albeit a Protestant one—clothed itself in the uniform of the Volunteers and declared legislative independence for itself. Even in this situation, however, the idea of dismantling the British monarchy was not seriously considered. France knew very well that the other powers, chiefly Austria, would not permit such a crushing defeat, for the consequent vacuum in the great-power system would be too dangerous. The chief war aims of Vergennes, the French foreign minister, were the right to fortify Dunkirk and various colonial gains in the West Indies and Senegal. The real impetus for an invasion of the British Isles actually came from his Spanish counterpart, the Count de Floridablanca. Since an attack on England would entail the commitment of 70,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry, Vergennes suggested a joint expedition to Ireland of less than half that number. In the event, his expectation that the Irish, particularly the radical Presbyterians, would rise against England was never put to the test. In the Treaty of Versailles, signed in September 1783, Spain was awarded Florida and Minorca, but failed to satisfy its primary obsession: what Floridablanca had envisaged was the establishment of a foothold in the British Isles which could then be exchanged at the peace table for the strategic asset of Gibraltar.[38] Once again, it seems that no significant figure imagined anything like a permanent reconfiguration of Anglo-Irish relations.

The Declaration of Independence, by which the rebellious American colonies claimed the right to become ‘Free and Independent States’ acting among ‘the powers of the earth’, had a major impact on Irish patriots, explored in the final chapters of this book. Its importance in stimulating Irish debates over natural rights and parliamentary reform is well known. But the American Revolution also raised the general question of when a nation might legitimately secede and establish a state of its own for the first time, and it offered a model of political action to secessionist movements. In the 1790s the United Irishmen would send a series of emissaries to Paris, just as the Americans had done two decades earlier. Wolfe Tone, the best known of them, modelled his negotiations with the Directory on American precedents, without considering either the motives behind France’s intervention on the side of the United States, or the exceptional circumstances that permitted it. As Thomas Bartlett has commented, Ireland could offer nothing to compare with the Continental Congress or the unified military command under Washington.[39] In retrospect, it is all too easy to forget that even the rebels assembled in Congress feared that the alternative to British victory would be a partition of the colonies among the European powers in the traditions of ancien régime diplomacy. To Richard Henry Lee, who proposed the Declaration of Independence, the disappearance of Europe’s largest state with the first partition of Poland in 1772 confirmed that European courts still maintained ‘the assumed right of disposing of Men & Countries like live stock on a farm’.[40]

Since the rules were loaded against small players such as Ireland, it followed that the transformation of Ireland’s position depended on a transformation of the international system itself. This was not easy to imagine. It is true that, from time to time, philosophers had suggested that if Europe was ‘a sort of republic’ as Vattel and others claimed, then it needed a sort of government.[41] Inspiration came from Sully’s ‘Grand Design of Henry IV’ (1638), a proposal for a federal council of Europe to settle international disputes, which was republished several times during the eighteenth century.[42] Perhaps the best-known peace plan was the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe, first published in 1712. But there was no room in these schemes for the modern concept of national self-determination; indeed, the proposals were not based on a world of nations at all, but on the overlapping authorities of the ancien régime. When Rousseau published a revised version of Saint-Pierre’s writings, he proposed a federation comprised of ten monarchs (France, Spain, England, Denmark, Portugal, Prussia, Sweden, Poland, Naples and Savoy–Piedmont), the Russian emperor, three republics (Dutch, Venetian and Swiss), the Holy Roman Emperor, the Electors of Bavaria and the Palatinate, the ecclesiastical electors and the pope. Moreover, the scheme was designed to freeze the borders of European states established at the Peace of Utrecht, and it therefore contained provisions to enforce each sovereign’s authority against domestic rebellion.[43] In any case, most readers probably believed, as Voltaire did, that the peace schemes of Saint-Pierre and Rousseau were ridiculous, since there was no binding law of nations recognised by any state.[44]

What finally cut through this web of dynastic, feudal and ecclesiastical allegiances was the French Revolution, with its insistence that the state was—or rather ought to be—the embodiment of the national will. The French Revolution was an attack on the basic assumptions of the international system: the renunciation of all wars of conquest in 1790 was the prelude to the Edict of Fraternity promising assistance to ‘all peoples who wish to recover their liberty’. It was this mood which Tone hoped to capture in his appeal to the Ulster radicals:

Where is the dread now of absolute power, or the arbitrary nod of the Monarch in France? Where is the intolerance of Popish bigotry? The rights of man are at least as well understood there as here, and somewhat better practised. Their wise and venerable National Assembly representatives . . . have . . . renounced the idea of conquest, and engraven that renunciation on the altar, in the temple of their liberty: in that Assembly, Protestants sit indiscriminately with Catholics.[45]

War, it was now possible to believe, was a product of the ancien régime and its corrupt rulers—of kings, aristocrats and priests. And yet rather than transforming the international system, the revolution fell victim to the structural rivalries of Europe as the republic gave way to civil war, terror and aggressive nationalism. The armies of revolutionary France ‘looted, raped, murdered, requisitioned, levied, conscripted forced labour, and caused general mayhem’.[46] Whether the French would have established themselves in Ireland as liberators or conquerors will never be known. In his negotiations with Carnot and Hoche, Wolfe Tone insisted that there would be no representative of France in the Irish government, as there was in the satellite republic of Holland. Ireland, he explained, rather ‘resembled the situation of America, in the last war’.[47] A United Irish republic would make an alliance, ‘offensive and defensive’, with the French Republic, accompanied by a commercial treaty. In the circumstances, however, even the optimistic Tone thought that it would be necessary to have a military government at the outset.

OCCUPIED IRELAND?

Ireland is much more open and exposed to Invasion than any other country in Europe, from having more Harbours unfortified, and deeper Shores; besides the French, expecting Encouragement and Assistance from the Popish Inhabitants, knowing that our Regular Forces are but few in Number, often taken out of the Kingdom to defend distant or remote Colonies, or sent to Gibraltar or Minorca, and that our Protestant Inhabitants are unused and ignorant of Arms, are determined to make an Attempt upon us whenever a new War breaks out.

AN ESSAY ON THE USE AND NECESSITY OF ESTABLISHING A MILITIA IN IRELAND (1767)[48]

Among Irish historians the eighteenth century has often been thought of as ‘the long peace’. Yet warfare, as we have seen, dominated the entire era, with military conflict taking up a large part of it. As the newspaper columns reveal, each outbreak of hostilities was solemnly announced in the capital and in a large number of provincial towns, usually accompanied by a procession of corporation officials, burgesses and freemen, sometimes with drums, music and rousing slogans. No doubt sectarian tensions also intensified as the disarming of local Catholics began.[49] With the brief exception of Thurot’s landing at Carrickfergus in 1760, there was no fighting on the island itself between the evacuation of the ‘wild geese’ from Limerick at the end of 1691 and Humbert’s landing in Mayo in 1798. But Britain was at war for almost half of the intervening years and drew increasingly on its Irish subjects for both manpower and revenue. Throughout the century Ireland was also garrisoned by British troops. How meaningful is it, then, to speak of Ascendancy Ireland as an occupied country? To what extent was the maintenance of Protestant Ascendancy dependent on military force?

These questions are clearly relevant to the broader debate over whether Ireland should be regarded as a colony or not. English politicians and pamphleteers during the great constitutional debates of the 1690s, 1720s and 1760s had little hesitation in classifying Ireland as a colony in the sense of a subordinate constitutional entity. To patriots, conversely, Ireland was a sister kingdom, subordinate only to the crown. Yet most Irish Protestants also acknowledged frankly their ultimate reliance on English arms. This much is implicit in the comments of Archbishop William King of Dublin, one of the most powerful patriot voices during the first half of the century, in a letter to Archbishop Wake of Canterbury written around the time of the Declaratory Act:

The Protestants of Ireland are sensible that they have no other security for their estates, religion, liberty or lives but their union to England and their dependence on the Crown thereof, and therefore in all events that have happened since the Reformation, they have ever stuck close to it, and ever will, and must whilst there are six or seven Papists for one Protestant in it.[50]

This brutal reality was even more starkly expressed decades later, during the controversy over the augmentation of the army of the Irish establishment, by a pro-government writer. Ireland, he wrote, was much more vulnerable to invasion than Britain, since a foreign force could count on the help of ‘our own discontented and disaffected Fellow-Subjects’. Consequently, the only security for the Protestant minority lay in the British connection, for there was no other reason ‘why the Religion of the Majority is not in this Country, as well as in others, the Religion of the State; as it would soon become, if once the Protection of Great-Britain was withdrawn’.[51]

The ambiguity of the army’s role in Ireland has been stressed in the work of recent scholars such as Thomas Bartlett and Sean Connolly. It is, of course, true that the regiments on the Irish establishment were ‘Irish’ only in the sense that they were paid for by Irish taxes. Their size and structure were regulated by acts of the English (after 1707 British) parliament; their officers were answerable ultimately to the viceroy at Dublin Castle; and their men were recruited for the most part in England or Scotland. But the 12,000 soldiers stationed in Ireland were employed in activities—at least in the period before the upheavals of the 1790s—not greatly different from those in England. Most scholars have hesitated to classify them as an army of occupation in any straightforward sense. The important point here is not so much that the Irish military establishment was often characterised by incompetence, neglect and corruption; it is rather that the two main uses of the military were as an aid to the civil power (as in England itself) and as a reserve for other parts of the Empire. In the absence of a serious internal threat, the army was not regarded as a counter-insurrectionary force. The ‘Darling Children of Saint Patrick’, as Lieutenant-Colonel Scott complained from Limerick in 1750, were enjoying ‘the blessed effects of Long Peace and Plenty, as if the chance of War, or day of Rebellion would never come no more’.[52] And yet some nagging doubts about the civilian character of Irish government still remain.

Ireland in the early decades of the eighteenth century supported a military establishment out of all proportion to its size, with half of the entire British army stationed there in peacetime.[53] Dublin possessed four or five battalions, the largest concentrated military presence in the British Isles, rivalled only by the garrisons in Gibraltar and Minorca.[54] The number of troops was fixed at 12,000 by the English disarming act of 1699, with 2,000 men to be stationed overseas; but the War Office in London was able to increase (or reduce) numbers as the circumstances of war demanded. At the beginning of the Seven Years War there were 17,000 soldiers on the Irish establishment; in 1761–3 this figure rose to 24,000 men, of whom 8,000 were serving abroad.[55] Looked at as a whole, what is most striking is the small size of the British army—around the same size as that of Savoy–Piedmont—considering its vast continental and colonial commitments.[56] Following the large accession of territory at the Peace of Paris (1763), however, the need for a greatly expanded force which could be rotated throughout ‘the British Dominions’ led to the expansion of the Irish military establishment, and after 1769 its (official) numbers increased to 15,000, with 3,000 allocated to ‘imperial’ defence.[57] After the outbreak of war with revolutionary France in 1793 the number of regular troops maintained by Ireland increased exponentially until by 1800 it had reached 60,000, predominantly used for internal defence. This spectacular expansion, a fourfold increase, is just one way of measuring the great gap that separates the revolutionary decade from the rest of the century.

It was normal for this force to be distributed widely throughout the island. In the middle of the century, for example, there were 250 companies of foot, twenty-four troops of horse and thirty-nine troops of dragoons in Ireland; these were scattered across sixty-nine towns and forts, the vast majority of them south of a line from Dublin to Galway, with regiments being rotated once a year. Many soldiers were concentrated in the large garrison towns such as Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford, and above all Dublin. For the rest, dispersed across so many small posts and consigned to policing duties, the opportunities for advanced training and drill were few.[58] Unlike England or the continent, where soldiers arranged their own accommodation with innkeepers or were billeted on the civilian population, the entire army in Ireland was normally based in barracks. Around the turn of the century the House of Commons had voted money for a barracks scheme totalling a hundred places for 270 troops and companies, and the majority were quickly completed.[59] By the 1740s most were in a pretty shoddy condition. The walls, it was revealed, were ‘cemented with Clay Mortar, Clay Plaisterings and Renderings, Wattle Partitions, and [a] slight Scantling of Sapling Timber’.[60] They were not built to last.

How far was the army in Ireland actually capable of defending it? This is a difficult question to answer. As elsewhere, army efficiency was hampered by the purchase system, by which commissions were bought rather than allocated on merit, and consequently absenteeism as well as incompetence was a problem among the officer corps. Not only commissions, but the offices relating to supplies and the maintenance of barracks were a form of property to be exploited by Dublin Castle. The drunkenness, disorder and lack of discipline that characterised regiments from Ireland were often the subject of comment. The fact that the men of an Irish regiment often spent little time quartered together, since its companies might be stretched over several villages, combined with the routine of policing duties, led to a deterioration of discipline. Yet the true weakness of Irish defence was structural. The one successful French landing before the 1790s, the capture of Carrickfergus by François Thurot in February 1760, has been described as ‘a quintessentially Georgian mixture of valour and farce’.[61] This was a diversionary raid, to be accompanied by more serious attacks on Essex and the west coast of Scotland, neither of which actually materialised. The real problem at Carrickfergus was lack of ammunition rather than lack of discipline, with the English garrison forced to throw bricks and stones from the castle walls before suing for terms. Even in the 1790s the defence of the kingdom was poorly organised.

After the outbreak of war with the French Republic on 1 February 1793 the number of regular troops actually stationed in Ireland (as opposed to the number paid for by the Irish) actually fell. Between August 1795 and May 1796 an impressive total of 35,000 troops was dispatched to the West Indies—the largest single expeditionary force Britain had ever attempted, and more than three times the force sent to Ireland in 1798. The obsession of Dundas with the Caribbean was partly a recognition of the economic aspects of warfare—‘If we lose our Sugar Islands,’ George III is supposed to have said, ‘it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war.’ The vulnerability of a credit system dependent upon overseas investments was one factor; British ministers also placed great confidence in the superiority of the Royal Navy, which, it was hoped, might quickly isolate a French invasion force sent to Ireland.[62] When Lieutenant-General Dalrymple learned of the arrival of the French fleet in Bantry Bay in 1796, it was reported that he had ‘from Corke to Bantry less than 3,000 Men, two pieces of artillery, and no Magazine of any kind, no Hospital, no Provisions’.[63] His instructions were to abandon Cork to the 9,000-strong French force and to join the main army assembling in Tipperary.[64]

In any case, the principal function of the Irish military establishment, at least before the revolutionary era, was not to maintain a garrison but to provide a military reserve for other parts of the Empire. The bulk of the British army was kept in Ireland, not because its defence needs were regarded as particularly urgent, but because the traditional objections of English Whig and ‘country’ M.P.s to the maintenance of a standing army during peacetime made it politically expedient to do so. Ireland served as a ‘nursery’ or ‘college’ of soldiers, as one Irish patriot noted, allowing the English to ‘relieve their garrisons by entire regiments, and replenish their army by perpetual drafting’.[65] In times of emergency Irish regiments were transferred to Britain or elsewhere and recruited or drafted up to full strength, and new regiments were raised at home to take their place. In 1715 five regiments were sent to help suppress the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland, and two battalions (out of six) were shipped there during the rising of 1745. Four battalions were dispatched to England in 1719 when a Spanish fleet, headed by the Jacobite conspirator Ormond, sailed from Cádiz; and six in 1722 when Ormond planned another invasion along with Irish officers in the Spanish service to coincide with the British general election of that year. As the invasion attempts of 1715, 1719 and 1722 demonstrate, Jacobite strategy was focused on England, with diversionary raids planned for Scotland. ‘Irish’ troops were also drafted to various other locations. In 1741, at the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession, a battalion of 700 men drawn from Irish regiments was sent to America, and 2,600 more were transferred to the continent in 1744–5.[66]

It is regrettable that these statistics are all too often regarded as the preserve of specialist military historians, for they form just the surface of a vital political and social phenomenon in eighteenth-century Ireland, one which has never received the attention it deserves. Soldiers were widely dispersed throughout the island and were a particularly significant presence in the ports—Limerick, Kinsale, Derry, Youghal, Waterford. They spent their pay, paltry as it was, in local towns; they married local girls and got into fights with local men. They played an important part in the civic ritual that defined the Ascendancy regime in the localities, and they intervened in party politics during the heyday of Whig–Tory rivalry. In 1710, for example, when the trial of the high-church preacher Sacheverell triggered widespread rioting across England, the Whig garrison at Limerick subjected the local bishop to several nights of harassment, singing outside his home, beating ‘frying pans, brass candlesticks and suchlike instruments’, pelting his slate roof with stones and on one occasion masquerading as ghosts, ‘some by stripping themselves naked, and others by putting on white garments’.[67] In Derry six years later the city garrison staged an elaborate celebration to mark the anniversary of George I’s accession complete with effigies of the Pope, the Pretender, Ormond, Mar and Bolingbroke.[68]

Soldiers were clearly a frequent sight on the streets of Dublin, and not just during periods of disorder; as retainers of the viceregal court they played an important role in the rituals of state power. In Dublin it was customary for the military to accompany anniversary parades, the most important being William III’s birthday (4 November), led by the Lord Lieutenant (or in his absence the Lords Justices) from Dublin Castle to salute the statue of William III at College Green.[69] There were as many as 200 soldiers constantly on guard duty in the capital, including a full company manning the castle gate, a town guard, and smaller detachments at Newgate prison and various public buildings such as the Tholsel, the Custom House and the Bank of Ireland.[70] Every day troops marched to and from the barracks along the northern quays, accompanied by fifes and drums. Among those who attended the parades, field days and reviews of the Dublin garrison in the Phoenix Park, the largest exercising ground in the British Isles, was the young Theobald Wolfe Tone. Looking back years later, as an adjutant-general in the French army, preparing to sail with Hoche’s invasion fleet from Brest, he recalled the days he spent ‘mitching’ as a teenager:

I trace to the splendid appearance of the troops, and the pomp and parade of military show, the untameable desire which I ever since have had to become a soldier, a desire which has never once quit me, and which, after sixteen years of various adventures, I am at last at liberty to indulge.[71]

Tone’s earlier military enthusiasms, as historians have ironically noted, might easily have taken him in very different directions. His brother William had run away from home at the age of sixteen to enlist in the East India Company.[72] He worked for the Maratta rulers of western India, and his study of the Maratta people, published in 1799 (and dedicated to Henry Dundas, of all people), has been regarded as an early example of orientalist anthropology.[73] Tone himself was determined to enlist, first as an ensign in a regiment of foot, later as a volunteer in the British army during the war with the American colonies. As a law student at the Middle Temple in London (1787–9) he was a zealous consumer of the tales of soldiering and seafaring that fired the imperial imagination of Georgian Britons. His reading included A cruising voyage round the world (1712) by Woodes Rogers, a privateer who had sought to overturn the French and Spanish monopoly of trade in the South Sea, and who had in the process discovered the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk, whose adventures inspired Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).[74] And like many others he was fascinated by the Pacific expeditions of Captain James Cook, the subject of immense public interest and national celebration in the metropolis. It was in this context that Tone drew up his proposal to establish a British military colony on the newly discovered Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) as a counterweight to Spanish power and submitted it to 10 Downing Street. This was a ‘Feudal plan’ for the establishment of a colony of soldiers, to be rewarded with confiscated land and indigenous women, who would ‘temper the savage ferocity of the natives by the arts of European culture and the mild precepts of the Christian religion’.[75] Tone made one final, unsuccessful attempt to enlist, presenting himself and his younger brother at India House in Leadenhall Street, only to find that the recruiting season had closed. They may well have been encouraged by the rapid rise of Laurence Sulivan (c. 1713–86), director of the East India Company, and a number of his Cork kinsmen, at a time when the British in southern India were fighting both French forces and the rulers of Mysore.[76] Tone’s later musing on how in different times ‘instead of planning revolutions’ he might have been ‘carrying on a privateering war . . . on the coasts of Spanish America’ was no idle jest.[77]

There are curious similarities between the Tones and the Wellesley brothers, Richard (1760–1842) and Arthur (1769–1852), who spent part of their childhood at the family town house in Grafton Street, Dublin, where Matilda Tone’s family lived. The Wellesleys were of noble birth, and Richard’s education took him to Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, where he won the chancellor’s prize for Latin verse on the subject of the death of Captain Cook. Following the death of his father in 1781, he returned to Ireland as the second Earl of Mornington, was made a Knight of St Patrick when the order was founded in 1783, and identified himself with the Grattanite patriots in the Irish House of Lords, where he was a strong advocate of Catholic Emancipation. But Wellesley is best remembered as Governor-General of Bengal during the crucial years when the British consolidated control of the Indian subcontinent, defeating Tipu Sultan of Mysore, forcing the Nizam of Hyderabad into an alliance, and partitioning the northern kingdom of Oudh, before confronting the Marattas. In 1797, while Cornwallis was forced to stay in Ireland by rising discontent, Richard was sent to Madras in his place, following his younger brother Arthur, an ambitious and ruthless officer who would command the southern army in the decisive war against the Maratta confederacy, while the army of the north was commanded by General Gerard Lake (1744–1808), who had disarmed Ulster in 1797 and crushed the Wexford rising of the following year. While Tone would be remembered as the undisputed icon of Irish resistance to British rule, Mornington is sometimes regarded as the personification of the spirit of the ‘second British Empire’. His brother Arthur, created Duke of Wellington during his successful Peninsular campaign, would decide the fate of Europe.

The Tone family offers a rather bizarre example of the Anglo-Irish military tradition, already well established by the outbreak of the American war. By 1760, it has been suggested, somewhere between a quarter and a third of officers in the British army were Irish Protestants.[78] The profession of soldiering, alongside the church and the law, was a traditional outlet for the aristocracy and gentry. As Archbishop William King put it, those gentlemen who could not persuade their sons to study ‘divinity, law or physick’ would purchase a commission in the army as ‘the last refuge’.[79] This applied only to officerships, ensigncies and cadetships; recruitment to the lower ranks was a very different matter. Following the collapse of the Jacobite regime, the enlistment of Irish Protestants to the lower ranks was made illegal. This extraordinary step was taken partly because it was feared that Irish Catholics might pass themselves off as conformists, and partly to avoid any weakening of the Protestant population in Ireland. Attempts to enforce this ban were taken seriously in the first half of the century. During the 1745 rebellion, however, the prohibition on local recruitment was relaxed to allow the admission of sixteen companies of Ulster Protestants. A survey of the British army units sent in North America in the summer of 1757 shows that 27.5 per cent were born in Ireland (compared with 30 per cent English and 27.5 per cent Scots).[80]

Catholics, needless to say, were regarded as unreliable; but it seems unlikely that they were ever completely excluded from the British forces. In spite of repeated protests by the Irish House of Commons and the Lords Justices during the 1690s, it was admitted that many private soldiers on the Irish establishment were ‘mere Irish, by extraction and descent . . . in natural aversion to the law, government and religion of England’.[81] According to an official at the War Office in London, one regiment shipped to Flanders in 1708 lost as many as 130 men who ‘all went off to the Irish, and fought against us at Malplaquet’.[82] When war broke out in 1739, it was reported that ‘great numbers’ of Irish had travelled to Britain to enlist, and five years later recruiting officers in England and Wales were warned ‘not to receive any Irishman or any known Roman Catholick’.[83] By 1762 Lord Trimleston, a Catholic landowner who regarded himself as the spokesman of Catholic Ireland, felt official attitudes were beginning to change and offered to raise 3,000 Irish Catholics to serve George III—or rather his ally, the King of Portugal. Although blocked by the Dublin parliament, Trimleston’s proposal was favourably received by the government, and Catholic recruitment proceeded in the 1770s. It is well known that during the Napoleonic wars there were tens of thousands of Irish Catholics serving in the British army. By the 1790s they already made up a significant proportion of both the regular army and the forces of the East India Company. Following Cornwallis’s victory over Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1792, a number of celebratory songs were performed at the Royal Saloon and New Amphitheatre in London, including the following:

From sweet Tipperary, to pick up some honour,

I am here to be sure, little Patrick O’Conner

With Dennis O’Neal, Trupy Blane and O’Carty,

By my soul we have routed the black-a-moor party.

Now d’ye see the queer chief would have fain made us bellow,

But for gallant Cornwallis, that fine British fellow;

While Tipoo made sure how, to kill us and eat us,

With half of his kingdom we made him to treat us.[84]

Already by 1796 United Irish propaganda was claiming that British power depended on Irish manpower. In addition to the huge sums voted by the Dublin parliament, Thomas Russell claimed in 1796 that 150,000 Irish soldiers had been employed in the war, including ‘men torn, without even the form of legal process, from their destitute innocent families under the name of defenders, by a set of detestable ruffians; crammed on board ships of war, and there forced to fight in a cause which, perhaps, they thought wrong’. The actual figures were rather more modest. Between 1793 and 1796 a total of 38,653 men were raised in Ireland, including marines and seamen. To this number we should probably add a substantial quantity of Irish living in Britain: over 80 per cent of the recruits raised in some London parishes in 1796–7 had been born in Ireland. Russell was probably on firmer ground when he estimated that almost a third of the seamen in the British navy were Irish.[85] What scanty research has so far been done suggests that between 20 and 30 per cent of the men serving on the ships of the Royal Navy in the late eighteenth century were Irish-born.[86] Assumptions that the spectacular series of mutinies that took place at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 were inspired partly by Irish republicans appear to have very little basis in evidence, although United Irish conspiracies were certainly detected aboard the Caesar and the Defiance in the summer of 1798.[87] The major disadvantage of Irish recruits was not disloyalty but their notorious tendency to desertion, especially in Ireland itself, where men enlisted in one regiment after another, collecting their bounty money before disappearing. In January 1797 the Belfast News-Letter reported that one serial offender had been apprehended and, when asked by a magistrate for his trade, had replied: ‘An’t please your worship, I’m a recruit.’[88]

As we have already seen, the uses of the army and the way it was funded were political issues. Throughout the century military expenditure dominated public revenue. There were frequent complaints in the House of Commons about the abuses of the barrack-masters, and in 1747 a major scandal involving Arthur Neville Jones, the Surveyor General, was the occasion of a full-scale power struggle between the Speaker and Archbishop Stone. During the Townshend viceroyalty the augmentation of the troops on the Irish establishment dominated political debate. Questions of defence policy were particularly urgent, of course, during the American and French revolutions, as described fully in the final chapters of this book. The release of 4,000 troops for service against the rebel colonists in 1776 occasioned fierce debates in the Irish House of Commons, and opinion was even more bitterly divided out of doors. The struggle for control of the armed forces in Ireland—the Volunteers, the fencibles, the militia—was just as important as the issues of constitutional reform. After the arrival of a French invasion fleet in Bantry Bay at the end of 1796 political debate was dominated by accusations of terror and counter-terror. During the next two years the regular forces stationed in Ireland were reinforced, the Yeomanry was raised, the powers of the magistracy were increased, radicals were arrested, imprisoned and disarmed, and parts of the country were placed under effective military rule. The theme of state coercion became the focal point of republican propaganda.[89] The appeal of the people of Ulster (1797), distributed as far afield as Kilkenny, Dublin, Wexford and Wicklow, presented a grim picture of Ulster under martial law, no doubt intended as a warning for the people of the south: ‘Our best citizens are entombed in Bastilles, or hurried on board Tenders, our wives and our children are become the daily victims of an unconstrained and licentious foreign soldiery.’[90]

The social and cultural impact of military garrisons was also profound. Swift and Sheridan observed that veterans who returned from Flanders after the War of the Spanish Succession aspired to be ‘the Dictators of Behaviour, Dress and Politeness’ in the coffee-houses and drawing-rooms of Dublin, where their foreign accomplishments were ‘copyed as the Standard-Patterns of whatever was refined in Dress, Equipage, Conversation, or Diversions’.[91] The visibility of officers and their men in Irish life was suggested by their appearance on the stage. One of the best-known comedies of the era was George Farquhar’s The recruiting officer (1706), which may have owed something to the author’s experience as a grenadier in the Earl of Orrery’s regiment. It was performed more than five hundred times in London during the eighteenth century, and was apparently the first play ever staged in Australia, performed by convicts in 1789. Dublin editions appeared in 1727, 1732 and 1741, and it was included in later collections of his complete works. For obvious reasons, The recruiting officer remained a favourite until the end of the century, being performed in Belfast three times between 1775 and 1780. In the later eighteenth century John O’Keeffe’s The poor soldier (1783), set in the Irish countryside and incorporating some of Carolan’s Irish airs, was another runaway success.

Advocates of the British military presence argued that Ireland, or rather the Protestant interest in Ireland, benefited from English soldiers who settled there and began families.[92] During the famine of the early 1740s the children of soldiers accounted for more than half of those baptised in Kinsale. When regiments were suddenly withdrawn from Ireland in 1762, a single Dublin parish was left with 392 destitute children whose fathers were soldiers.[93] In 1764 an appeal was launched to found the Hibernian Society’s School for the Children of Soldiers, since ‘upon the removal of regiments and of drafts from regiments to foreign service, great numbers of children had been left destitute of all means of subsistence’. A school capable of accommodating 348 boys and 162 girls was opened in 1767.[94] In Dublin and in garrison towns, no doubt, there were also prostitutes or ‘lewd women’ serving the army. Certainly one of the prosecution witnesses at the trial of Father Nicholas Sheehy was denounced as ‘a lady of easy virtue, well-known to the common soldiers’.[95]

The final issue to be considered here concerns relations between the army and the civilian population. This is a neglected subject but an important one. As in England, the most common operations of the army were putting down riots, aiding revenue officers and assisting magistrates in the routine maintenance of law and order. It is only recently that James Kelly and Vincent Morley, by their painstaking trawls through newspapers, have begun to explore these activities. The uses of the armed forces in tackling tories and bandits, smugglers and agrarian unrest are explored in Chapter 9. Some of the tensions that resulted can be glimpsed in the papers of Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel Bagshawe of the 93rd Regiment of Infantry. Born into a Derbyshire nonconformist family, Bagshawe had run away from school to enlist in the Cameronian Regiment as a private soldier, and had spent seven years in Gibraltar and lost a leg at the siege of L’Orient. In Ireland he married into the military Fermanagh family of the Caldwells and eventually became M.P. for Tallagh, County Waterford. His attitudes towards the Irish were summed up in 1750:

The common people of this Country are naturally fond of times of Confusion because they have an Oppertunity [sic] of indulging some favourite appetites such as Thieving and Cruelty; and if it were not that they stand in awe of a Set of Folks in my Neighbourhood We should have had some Instance of both, but we use so little Ceremony with ’em that they do not have any Disputes [where] We are concerned.

Such assumptions may have been confirmed by a riot in Cork in July 1753, which followed a series of attacks on the sentries who manned the gates of the city. On 27 July, when two sergeants of the main guard were savagely attacked within fifty yards of the guard-house, a group of soldiers ‘without waiting for orders’ pursued the assailants. One man died when they fired shots into the crowd from a distance. This killing, Bagshawe noted, ‘is by the Mob charged to the Soldiers & has raised them to such a Pitch of Fury that I am informed they [intend] to hough and destroy every Soldier [that] shall fall in their Way & that the Sons of the Deceased have taken an Oath to have Blood for Blood’. Bagshawe proposed the introduction of a night-time patrol to prevent the outrages that followed. Sentries posted at the gates of the town were to have orders to stop anyone carrying firearms, swords or other weapons ‘who had not the Appearance of Gentlemen’, but he was informed by his commanding officers that he did not have the authority to give such an order.[96]

A glance through the newspaper columns of the eighteenth century will reveal frequent reports of soldiers involved in brawling, rioting and breaking open jails. Sometimes these clashes had a ritualistic or recreational quality to them, reminiscent of urban faction-fighting. In 1725, for example, a fight started when a mob gathered for hurling on Oxmantown Green in Dublin and one of the local men ‘accidentally’ hit a soldier with a dead cat. A large group of soldiers suffered the humiliation of being beaten back to their barracks yard.[97] In Limerick, a large garrison town where the gates were shut between 10 p.m. and daybreak, gangs of soldiers (and their wives) were alleged to have terrorised the inhabitants during the 1720s.[98] In this case military violence and harassment seems to have been related to the political ambitions of the governor of the garrison. Disturbances involving off-duty soldiers continued to be common, especially in Dublin, in the second half of the century. From the early 1770s, however, when Townshend permitted recruitment parties for both Irish and British regiments to extend their tours into Leinster, Munster and Connacht for the first time, relations with townspeople grew more ugly as somewhere between fifty and a hundred soldiers were ‘houghed’ in a spate of ritualised attacks.[99] Houghing was a traditional form of violence, usually directed at livestock rather than men, in which the hamstrings of animals were severed by agrarian protestors, often resulting in death. This form of mutilation also featured in the ongoing warfare in Dublin between the weavers of the Liberties and the journeymen butchers of Ormond Market. Throughout the period of the American war, as Vincent Morley has pointed out, the houghing of army personnel was reported in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Clonmel, Waterford, Kilkenny and Cashel.[100] There were probably ten or twelve attacks each year. The perpetrators, often named in newspapers but not always caught, were shoemakers, carpenters and carriers. As we might expect, groups of soldiers frequently retaliated. The Dublin garrison rioted in February 1780; in June the Galway garrison was withdrawn from the town when they attacked the jail following the acquittal of a suspected hougher; in September 1781 many were injured when a ‘lawless mob’ of soldiers ran through Cork after a soldier was fatally stabbed by three men. Following the last incident, the Catholic clergy read an exhortation in the city’s chapels. The Catholic inhabitants were urged ‘to consider the military that had been sent here for our defence, as their best friends and protectors’.[101] There is no evidence to suggest that houghing represented ideological resistance to the war, as opposed to resistance to recruitment campaigns, but the ‘colonial’ character of the garrisons may have been a factor. Significantly, the one area free from such attacks was Ulster. In the north the opposition among the Presbyterian communities to the American war was, of course, well known. Whether because of religious and cultural similarities, or because Ulster was itself an established recruiting ground, relations between soldiers and civilians were nevertheless relatively cordial.

CONCLUSION

Ascendancy Ireland was the product of the military conquests of the 1640s and 1690s. The legacy of these conflicts could still be felt in the bitter ethnic and religious divisions within Irish society. Yet this was not, Sean Connolly has argued, ‘a society held down by force’, and most historians have agreed. Instead, Connolly continues, ‘government depended on the continued willingness of the many, most of the time, to accept the domination of the few’.[102] Can these conclusions be justified? As always, the peculiar social world of eighteenth-century Ireland demands a degree of caution on the part of the historian. The absence of large-scale or constant coercion certainly does not imply consent. Nothing in this chapter, or anywhere else in this book, suggests that Irish Catholics were willing participants in their own subordination. The repeated reports of Catholic (and Presbyterian) ‘insolence’ from magistrates suggest a different picture. Following the outbreak of Anglo-Spanish hostilities in 1718, for example, the Bishop of Meath described the response of the populace: ‘The Popish Natives have a Firm Perswasion that their Religion &c are to be restor’d to them by the Spaniards, & yt this is ye Time when these Fine Prophecies of theirs are to be fulfill’d.’[103] Similar references to the insolence and prophetic hopes of the Catholic population are scattered throughout this book.

Of course, the day-to-day running of Ascendancy Ireland did not depend on the regular use of force. As we have seen, the role of the army did not differ greatly from that in England. Travellers’ accounts of eighteenth-century Ireland, of which there are many, make frequent reference to all sorts of Irish anomalies, but they do not give the impression of an unusually militarised society. Historians are perfectly right to avoid such terms as ‘army of occupation’, since this twentieth-century terminology is of doubtful use. The threat of French invasion was always taken seriously during wartime. But Britain was a maritime power: ultimately the defence of Protestant Ascendancy, like the Protestant succession and the Revolution settlement, did not depend on the army at all, but on the maintenance of British naval supremacy. Without a French or Spanish expedition, it seemed reasonably certain, the Catholic masses could not present an effective threat to Protestant Ascendancy. Although they formed a large majority of the population, Sir Richard Cox argued that ‘6 of 8 of all the Irish live in a brutish nasty Condition, as in Cabins, with neither Chimney, Door, Stairs nor Window; feed chiefly upon Milk and Potatoes, whereby their Spirits are not disposed for War’.[104] Yet the possibility of foreign intervention, the persistent theme of the Jacobite poets, could never be entirely dismissed.

2

The Irish Enlightenment and its Enemies

‘In the present enlightened and improving period of Society, it is not for the IRISH ROMAN CATHOLICS alone to continue silent.’ So began the manifesto of the newly formed Catholic Society of Dublin, a radical group associated with the United Irishmen, in 1791.[1] In keeping with what the author described variously as ‘a philosophic age’, an ‘age of toleration’ and ‘this enlightened age’, the Society called for the abolition of the entire penal code. Writing in the same year, the young Protestant barrister Theobald Wolfe Tone contrasted the religious bigotry of the ‘dark ages of superstition’ with the ‘days of illumination’ at the close of the eighteenth century. His famous Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland was addressed to the ‘enlightened republicans’ of Belfast, recommending to them the example of the French National Assembly, where Protestants and Catholics sat together in peace.[2] He was echoed by Father John Nassau, a Catholic priest trained at Douai and Louvain, who was acquainted with the works of Montesquieu, Gibbon and Hume and was confident that ‘every enlightened man now acknowledges that Freedom ought to be restored to Roman Catholics’.[3] These pamphlets, and dozens of others like them, make it abundantly clear that the Irish radicals of the 1790s, like their counterparts in France, saw themselves as the heirs of the great philosophers, Locke, Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire, and celebrated their collective triumph over the ignorance and superstition of the past. Yet the relationship between radicalism and the Enlightenment was a complex and difficult one, and nowhere more so than in Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country ruled by what most Europeans had come to regard as the most progressive nation in the world.

It is for its intellectual and cultural achievements, its reputation as ‘the age of reason’, that the eighteenth century has been celebrated as laying the foundations of modern European life. The optimistic belief in human improvability, the elevation of human reason above traditional assumptions, and the defence of individual judgment against the censorship of church and state—all were valued as widely in Ireland as any other European kingdom. Recent discussions of the Enlightenment often begin with the answer put forward by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his essay ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ (1784), and this still serves as a useful point of departure for students of the period. Enlightenment, according to Kant, represented the coming of age of mankind, our release from childish superstition and inherited prejudice. A similar sense of human emancipation is conveyed by Diderot’s Encyclopédie, where the philosophe was described as one who, ‘trampling on prejudice, tradition, universal consent, authority, in a word all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for himself’.[4] This was a self-consciously progressive age. To the French it was the ‘siècle des luminères’; to the Germans, Aufklärung. For the first time Europeans had made up their minds that the present was preferable, in intellectual and material terms, to the past.

To move from general perceptions of the eighteenth century as an enlightened age to definitions of a unified movement called ‘the Enlightenment’ is no easy matter. Once an exclusively French club, confined to the salons of Paris, the rules of membership have been greatly relaxed. Each nation now boasts an enlightenment of its own. In practice, admittedly, most surveys still begin with the Parisian avant-garde—Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau; and the Encyclopédie, that great compendium of learning launched by Diderot and d’Alembert in 1751, is still regarded as its greatest monument. But all the French enlighteners, it is usually acknowledged, looked to English exemplars, most obviously Isaac Newton’s revolution in physics and John Locke’s theory of human understanding. The seminal importance of England is now fully recognised, and the broader cultural character of the English-speaking Enlightenment has begun to get the attention it deserves. Another early centre of new learning was Amsterdam, where Pierre Bayle edited his model literary review Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684–7). For the Dutch historian Jonathan Israel, the real innovators were Spinoza and his circle, and the boldest achievements of the Enlightenment were already over by the 1740s.[5] Increasingly, however, it is Scotland that appears as the enlightened nation par excellence: no other country can surpass the novelty, range and sheer intellectual power of David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames and William Robertson. It no longer seems, as it once did, that the mental world of eighteenth-century Europeans grows darker as we move further away from Paris. In one view, indeed, the Enlightenment flourished most on the European periphery—in places such as Naples, Poland and Hungary ‘where the contact between a backward world and a modern one was chronologically more abrupt, and geographically closer’.[6] This certainly fits the Scottish case, where the juxtaposition of the rapidly commercialising Lowlands and the ‘backward’ clan structures of the Highlands stimulated interest in the new science of political economy.

As the geography of the Enlightenment has become more complicated, the interests of historians have shifted from the philosophes themselves to the production and consumption of ideas, from the exclusive society of the salon to the bustle of the coffee-house. It is no longer the pioneers who attract most attention, but the popularisers. As Roy Porter urged, Enlightenment thought should not be seen as a canon of classical works but as ‘a living language, a revolution in mood, a blaze of slogans, delivering the shock of the new’.[7] The emblematic figure is now less likely to be Voltaire or Hume than the polite essayist and journalist Joseph Addison, whose ambition it was to take philosophy ‘out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses’.[8] The historians of this most convivial and clubbable of centuries are more concerned with the media of the Enlightenment than the message, with its characteristic modes of association and sociability, with reading practices and the book trade, with its impact on childhood and family life.[9]

Why is it, then, that the words ‘Irish’ and ‘Enlightenment’ are never uttered in the same breath? Until very recently Ireland has been conspicuously absent from the burgeoning world of Enlightenment studies. This neglect is surely unjust. It cannot be denied, of course, that Ireland contained no philosophes of the stature of Voltaire, Kant or Hume. Yet Irishmen made very significant contributions, as we shall see, especially the radical freethinker John Toland (1670–1722) and the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). Toland was the main spokesman of the Deists, a cluster of intellectuals who rejected biblical revelation and claimed that humans had access to the necessary truths of ‘natural’ religion through the use of reason alone. The importance of Hutcheson, the son of a Presbyterian minister in Armagh, who became master of a Dissenting academy in Dublin during the 1720s and then professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University from 1730 until his death in 1746, is now beyond dispute—thanks, it must be confessed, to historians of Scotland rather than Ireland. It was Hutcheson’s arrival at Glasgow, in the view of the moral philosopher Dugald Stewart, that marked the beginning of a Scottish Enlightenment that was all the more remarkable given the ‘intolerance, bigotry, and barbarism of the preceding century’.[10] A few decades earlier an Italian scholar, reviewing the Scottish Enlightenment, had wondered if ‘IRELAND might become the seat of science and literature’, citing the examples of Swift, Hutcheson and Berkeley as ‘proof that the IRISH are capable of equalling any of the northern nations in erudition and elegance, in criticism and philosophy’.[11]

Ireland did not, alas, replace Scotland as the intellectual powerhouse of the north, but other significant thinkers, such as the scientist William Molyneux and the Catholic reformer Charles O’Conor, were unmistakably Enlightenment figures. William Molyneux is best known to Irish historians as the author of The case of Ireland stated (1698), but he was also a friend and correspondent of John Locke, and a key figure in bringing the ‘new learning’ to Ireland. Because of the popularity of the ‘Molyneux problem’ he occupies a footnote in European philosophy; more importantly, his correspondence sheds light upon the stirrings of the scientific revolution in Ireland. Charles O’Conor divided his intellectual energies between two connected projects, the antiquarian reconstruction of pre-Norman Ireland and the political rehabilitation of the Catholics. Moreover, Edmund Burke, once regarded as a forerunner of romanticism, is now seen increasingly as a late Enlightenment figure, drawing not only on Scottish moral philosophy and history, but upon the lessons of his early Irish experiences. All of these writers are examined below, but it should be borne in mind that their shared assumptions and values are just as important as the individuals themselves. The object of this chapter is not simply to draw attention to a number of interesting intellectuals, but to situate them within the correspondence and publishing networks that provided the context for Enlightenment thinking.

THE IRISH REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

‘To be born in IRELAND’, lamented the poet and essayist James Arbuckle, ‘is usually looked upon as a Misfortune.’[12] A key member of the so-called ‘Molesworth circle’, Arbuckle was a Belfast Presbyterian who had tried his hand at poetry, political agitation and theological controversy while still a student at Glasgow. Abandoning plans to enter the ministry, he settled in Dublin to establish the Dublin Weekly Journal with the assistance of Robert Molesworth. Although his loyalties were clearly Whiggish, patriotic and latitudinarian, Arbuckle steered clear of party controversies and concentrated instead on the reformation of manners, the encouragement of domestic manufactures and trade, and what he called ‘the Commonwealth of Learning’.[13] The manifesto of his ‘Letters of Hibernicus’, serialised in the Dublin Weekly Journal in 1725–6, set out his goals in terms that echoed the civic moralism of Francis Hutcheson and reveal how closely he modelled his paper on the massively influential Spectator, produced by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele:

To impress my Readers with a just Sense of Life and its Enjoyments; to make Virtue appear in its native Beauty and Lustre; . . . to recommend universal Benevolence, publick Spirit, and the Love of our Country; to correct a false Taste of Writing, and banish Nonsense, Indecency and Impertinence from the public Diversions . . .[14]

One of the grievances regularly aired by Arbuckle was that men of letters were forced to quit Ireland because of lack of encouragement at home. ‘Many an excellent Piece has been conceived among our Hibernian Bogs’, he complained, ‘which now passes as the genuine Production of Cam or Isis [i.e. Cambridge and Oxford].’[15] For the Ascendancy class in particular the cultural capital was London, the home (for some of the time at least) of Molesworth, Swift, Burke, Sheridan and Goldsmith. The radical writer John Toland celebrated London as the new Rome of the West, not only the ‘largest, fairest, richest, and most populous City in the World’ but also the most free.[16] Throughout the century the stage Irishman was a stock fixture in the London theatre. Characterised as hard-up, stupid and with an unfortunate propensity for duelling, his speech was marked by lisping, a heavy brogue, and ridiculous malapropisms or ‘bulls’ (even Burke, an accomplished parliamentary orator, was mocked as ‘Edmund Bonnyclabber’). Irish squires, it was believed, were relentless in their pursuit of the wealthy heiress. James Gillray’s satirical cartoon, ‘Paddy on horseback’ (1779), pictured a shabby Irishman, hurtling towards London sitting back-to-front on a bull, with a guide entitled ‘New Systems of Fortune-Hunting’ and a list of potential victims headed by ‘Lady Mary Rotten Rump, St James’s Square, £30,000’.[17] There would have been little point in such caricatures, of course, if Irish gentlemen were not making their way in the metropolis as writers, lawyers and soldiers as well as social climbers. Not the least of their successes, indeed, was in the theatres of Covent Garden; as early as 1743 the emergence of a positive counter-stereotype was announced by Thomas Sheridan’s farce, The brave Irishman; or Captain O’Blunder.

London, the largest city in Europe, was a cultural magnet. Its unrivalled clusters of professional writers, reviewers and artists, galleries and concerts, as Arbuckle feared, were soaking up Irish talents. One of the greatest celebrities to emerge from Grub Street was Oliver Goldsmith, the son of a County Longford curate, who is now best remembered for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and plays such as She stoops to conquer (1771). His first book, An inquiry into the present state of polite learning in Europe (1759) celebrated the modern city as a ‘larger university’, whose fortunate members were able to ‘catch manners as they rise, study life not logic, and have the world as correspondents’.[18] Many of his fellow countrymen would have agreed. The Rev. Matthew Pilkington, a protégé of Swift, first went to London in the 1730s to negotiate a collected edition of Swift’s works, and later produced a compendium The gentleman’s and connosseur’s dictionary of painters (1770) which remained the standard critical survey of the subject for many decades. The breezy Memoirs (1748) of his divorced wife Laetitia, meanwhile, was a contemporary succès de scandale, and has recently attracted attention for its original proto-feminist attack on the sexual double standard.[19]

In the theatre, already mentioned briefly, George Farquhar, son of an Anglican clergyman from Derry, arrived in the metropolis to sell his first play Love and a bottle (1698) about—appropriately enough—a young Irish lothario in London. The well-known actor Charles Macklin was a Catholic from Donegal who converted to Protestantism in time to capitalise on the patriotic reaction to the Jacobite invasion of 1745 with his tragedy Henry VII, or, The popish imposter. The history painter James Barry (1741–1806) was a Catholic from Cork who had studied at the drawing school of the Dublin Society and won acclaim for his picture ‘The baptism of the King of Cashel’, purchased for the House of Commons in 1763. With the backing of Edmund Burke, the volatile painter moved to London the following year and then studied in Paris and Rome. His monumental series in the Great Room of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce was intended to portray the progress of man from ‘a savage state . . . through several gradations of culture and happiness’.[20] The six paintings celebrated the achievements of Greek civilisation as a prelude to ‘Commerce, or The triumph of the Thames’, in which the river, guided by Captain Cook and others, disgorged the manufactures of the English midlands around the world, in return for European wine, Asian silk and cotton, American fur and African slaves. One of Barry’s finest portraits was of Christopher Nugent, Burke’s father-in-law, a member of Dr Johnson’s Literary Club and the author of An essay on the hydrophobia (1753). But no one contributed more to the cultural life of the metropolis than the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), who had developed a ‘strong Inclination to the study of the Works of Nature’ while a schoolboy in Killyleagh, County Down. Sloane established a hugely successful medical practice in Bloomsbury, becoming physician-extraordinary to three monarchs—Queen Anne, George I and George II. It has even been suggested that Sloane secured the Protestant succession by prolonging Queen Anne’s life long enough for the Elector of Hanover to consolidate his position! In the 1690s Sloane became secretary of the Royal Society and was responsible for the revival of its Philosophical Transactions; following Newton’s death in 1727 he was elected president. At 4 Bloomsbury Place he established a museum for his plant collection, manuscripts and printed books, the basis for what became the British Museum.[21] Correspondents from Dublin and Belfast nevertheless found him obliging enough when they bombarded him with requests for the commodity they desired most: books.

It was during the eighteenth century that printed books, previously confined to a narrow elite, became accessible to the majority of people. Since there are no reliable sources for literacy in Ireland before the census of 1841, we are forced to resort to educated guesswork. In that year almost half of the population over five years of age was able to read, although there were vast regional differences, from 85–90 per cent in parts of Ulster to just 10–15 per cent in parts of Connacht. By projecting backwards from the 1841 data, using age cohort figures, it has been estimated that literacy in the later eighteenth century had already reached 55 per cent among men and 34 per cent for women.[22] Once more, the regional distribution was uneven:

Men (%)

Women (%)

Ulster

70

52

Leinster

65

45

Munster

48

24

Connacht

37

15

These figures reveal, unsurprisingly, that Ireland lagged behind England, where male and female literacy rates stood at 60 per cent and 40 per cent respectively around the middle of the century, and even further behind Scotland; but they compare favourably with France, where literacy had reached 47 per cent for men and 27 per cent for women by the 1780s.[23] Literacy can mean many things, from the ability to sign one’s name, to the ‘intensive’ reading of the worshipper who possesses only a much-thumbed Bible or catechism, to the ‘extensive’ reading of the cultivated professional person. It is significant, however, that in the later eighteenth century commentators took it for granted that the ‘lower classes’ possessed their own distinctive literature, not only the cheap ‘Burtons’, with their stories of robbers and pirates, and chivalrous romances, but also ‘useful or innocent books of voyages, travels, history and novels’.[24]

Ironically, perhaps, the creation of a mass reading public was not the achievement of the enlighteners, but of the clergymen whose activities they so often mocked. The most conspicuous areas of mass literacy, such as the Dutch Republic, the Scottish Lowlands and Sweden, were areas of Protestant dominance. Scripture, as the Reformed were often reminded, had urged the necessity of instructing the people in their own vernacular (unless, apparently, the vernacular was Irish). On the other hand, Catholic suspicion of lay initiatives remained a significant obstacle, and the famous papal bull Unigenitus (1713) had condemned the proposition that the reading of scripture was for all. It is not so surprising, then, that the United Irishman Arthur O’Connor should boast that Ulster possessed ‘the best educated peasantry in Europe’.[25] In the north-west, as Graeme Kirkham has shown, denominational background was a more reliable indicator than wealth of a tenant’s ability to sign a lease.[26] Early printing in Belfast was stimulated by the controversy within the Synod of Ulster over subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith: James Blow published the works of the non-subscribers, while Robert Gordon set up business on behalf of the orthodox. Later in the century the names of Belfast’s printers’ shops still bore testimony to their religious origins: James Magee at ‘The Bible and Crown’, John Hay at ‘The Two Bibles’, Robert Smith at ‘The Sign of the Gilt Bible’. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the large northern towns had circulating libraries, and there were book clubs in villages such as Doagh, Portaferry, Newtownards, Ballynahinch, Banbridge, Dromore and Hillsborough.[27]

Confessional allegiance was nevertheless only one of several factors bearing on the development of Irish print culture. It has been suggested that regions of cultural and confessional division in early modern Europe had higher literacy rates than homogeneous ones; among mixed or adjoining populations, such as those on the Rhineland, denominational competition encouraged schools and other forms of religious instruction to avoid losing ground to their rivals. The 1731 inquiry revealed the existence of at least 549 illegal ‘popish schools’ in Ireland, and the launch of the Anglican charter school movement quickly forced Catholic ecclesiastics to devote more energy to teaching. By the beginning of the nineteenth century as many as 400,000 children were being taught in private or ‘pay’ schools—the majority of them Catholic.[28] In the first decades after the Williamite war local authorities attempted to prevent the importation of Catholic (and sometimes Presbyterian) books from outside Ireland. Some devotional and doctrinal works, composed in Latin or English, nevertheless found their way into Ireland from Paris, Louvain and other continental cities. Martin Marley’s Good confessor (Douai, 1743) and Thomas Myles Burke’s Catechism moral and controversial (Lisbon, 1752) show the dependence of the Irish mission on its overseas colonies right up to the 1750s. As late as 1762 the imprint of Bishop Thomas Burke’s magnum opus Hibernia Dominicana, probably published by James Stokes of Kilkenny, prudently gave Cologne as the place of publication. Thanks to Hugh Fenning, we know that priests such as the Dominican John Donnelly were able to build up impressive libraries, in his case strongly French. We also have a list of books owned by the Augustinians of Galway from the 1730s, including Jansenist authors such as Pascal, Quesnel and Nicole.[29] If we turn to writers rather than readers, however, we find that only Cornelius Nary managed to break the Protestant monopoly of the public sphere in a significant way. His New history of the world (1720), printed for the Catholic bookseller Luke Dowling with the support of 150 subscribers, set out to combat the ‘Atheists, Deists, Pre-Adamites and Libertines of this age’.[30]

This situation was transformed in the second half of the century. Although they were excluded from full membership of the Guild of St Luke, Catholic printers established themselves in Dublin, where Ignatius Kelly printed around 120 works between 1738 and 1753, including an ‘Eye-Chart’ of Catholic doctrine designed to be hung on walls.[31] From the 1770s the rich bookseller Patrick Wogan produced very large print-runs of school primers and Catholic devotional works—somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 for schoolbooks and 6,000–10,000 for catechisms.[32] In the ports (Waterford, Cork, Limerick), and later in a number of inland towns (Kilkenny, Strabane and Carrick-on-Suir), Catholic printers gradually surfaced, with religious titles once more prominent on their lists. This is not to say that Catholics confined their leisure hours to devotional works: by the middle decades of the century priests in the diocese of Cashel were urged to steer people away from all ‘idle and pernicious’ books. Into this capacious category fell ‘most playbooks, novelles and romances’, for the inevitable reason that they ‘serve only to fill the heads of the young folks with folly and their hearts with the love of the world and its vices’.[33] Even in the early decades, it is becoming clear—thanks once again to the painstaking research of Hugh Fenning—that Catholic Ireland was never entirely silenced. Short pamphlets and handbills were produced to oppose penal bills during the reign of Queen Anne, arguing that anti-Catholic measures constituted ‘a Breach of the Publick Faith’ (i.e. a betrayal of the Treaty of Limerick).[34] The chance survival in the Vatican Secret Archives of a number of handbills written by Catholic priests and gentlemen makes us wonder how many other ephemeral publications have been completely lost.[35]

The expansion of print was closely linked to urbanisation and to the growing communications network that accompanied it. It was not just the presence of bookshops and coffee-houses that mattered, but the critical mass of lawyers, doctors, teachers, traders and printers living in towns, all of whom needed to be able to read and write to advance their careers. By the 1730s the convert Cornelius O’Callaghan, a small Cork landowner, successful Dublin barrister and (briefly) M.P., had amassed more than a hundred books, including legal treatises, published sermons, Irish histories (Molyneux’s Case of Ireland stated, Hugh MacCurtin’s Brief discourse in vindication of the antiquity of Ireland and Geoffrey Keating’s General history of Ireland), eight volumes of the Spectator, Pope’s poems and Gulliver’s Travels. Another M.P., Jeffrey Paul, collected 188 volumes, stronger on Protestant theology, politics and the new learning (he owned both Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding and Pemberton’s View of Newton’s philosophy).[36] The countryside lagged far behind the towns. Even small farmers and weavers, however, benefited from basic reading skills as market transactions became more essential to the Irish rural economy. In the 1690s there were already printworks in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. A century later there were presses in thirty-four towns and cities, thirteen of them in Ulster.[37] The Irish book trade was heavily dependent on England, importing much of its material. Since Ireland was not subject to the British copyright act of 1709, the Irish printers were able to flourish by producing cheap reprints of London works without paying fees. By the mid-1780s there were eighty printers working in Dublin alone, although the figure declined thereafter.[38]

Reading was thus able to cross, if not transcend, the lines of religious division in Ireland. The same was true of gender boundaries. For the leisure classes at least, ladies were encouraged to read widely, if selectively. Bishop Edward Synge advised his young daughter to read ‘books of instruction, in virtue, politeness, or something that may improve your mind’; books of ‘innocent entertainment’ might be permitted, but not, he made clear, romances, which give the mind ‘a very fantastical, if not, a wrong turn’.[39] Both the novel and the moral weekly magazine were understood to have an appeal for female as well as male readers. The huge popularity of epistolary novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–8), both of which went through a number of Dublin editions, of Goethe’s Sorrows of young Werther, Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses was related to their use of the private letter as a means of exploring the intimate and domestic world of female subjectivity. In 1786 William Drennan recommended the Dangerous connections to his sister Martha McTier ‘as Mrs B., Mrs C. etc., etc., all read it in public—it is a most masterly piece of dangerous seduction in style and sentiment’.[40] A few years later Wolfe Tone and two other Irish students at the Inns of Court in London produced their spoof Belmont Castle, or Suffering sensibility, ‘a burlesque novel’, as Tone described it, ‘intended to ridicule the execrable trash of the Circulating Libraries’.[41] Women, however, were not only interested in the themes of love, sexuality and marriage. In 1770 Elizabeth Shackleton, wife of the Quaker schoolmaster at Ballitore, wrote to David Hume to correct his account of Quaker beliefs, ‘both in thy much-admired History of England, and in thy Essay on superstition and enthusiasm’.[42]

One notable feature of the book trade was the absence of print in the Irish language. For most, if not all of the century, Irish continued to be the language spoken by the majority of the population. The evidence for linguistic change is impressionistic, sometimes contradictory, and often tendentious. In 1711 an enthusiastic advocate of Irish-language preaching warned his fellow Anglicans that two centuries of hostility to the Gaelic tongue had achieved very little. ‘Nay the Irish Language is so far from being abolish’d’, he warned, ‘that as many British proportionately speak Irish, as Natives speak English.’[43] Frustratingly, the bilingual subcultures hinted at in such throwaway statements are lost to us, but other curious glimpses are scattered here and there through surviving correspondence. In 1740 the young Protestant lady Letitia Bushe was attended by ‘an Irish Physician’ who entertained her with ‘his manner of knocking words out of joint & a mixture of bad French, bad English & good Irish’.[44] Four years later Barbara Reilly of County Westmeath worried that her young son ‘speaks nothing but Irish’, and that his formal education might consequently suffer.[45] Presumably, like many of the landed elite, she entrusted the upbringing of her children to Irish-speaking servants. Since books and newspapers were often read aloud to groups, however, printed texts in English nevertheless penetrated communities which were still partly Irish-speaking. The anonymous author of ‘Bualadh Ros Mhic Thriún’, a contemporary Irish poem about the battle of New Ross (1798), rejoiced at Napoleon’s victory over the Austrians ‘mar do chualas insa news dá léamh’ (as I heard it read in the newspaper).[46]

From the 1730s there is very little sense that Irish—viewed as the language of the common people or, in a few cases, as a subject for antiquarian investigation—presented any kind of cultural threat. Samuel ‘Premium’ Madden, the Anglican clergyman and leading ‘improver’, was satisfied that Catholics were being assimilated to English customs and manners, and that the decline of the Irish language was breaking down the ‘great Partition wall, that kept us estranged and divided’.[47] Yet it seems clear enough that, outside polite society, the vernacular was still widely spoken. On New Year’s Day 1747, when Bishop Peter Creagh of Waterford preached to the (Catholic) people of Carrick-on-Suir, his audience ‘prayed him loudly about the middle of his discourse to give the rest in Irish’.[48] In the ‘wild and miserable’ regions of the west, meanwhile, the new Bishop of Killaloe discovered that the common people spoke nothing but Irish.[49] When Finn’s Leinster Journal reported a Whiteboy robbery in Clonmel in 1775, it was thought worthy of note that the culprits were generally ‘above the lower order of people, were decently dressed and spoke the English language very well’.[50] Working backwards from nineteenth-century census statistics, Garret FitzGerald has suggested that more than 90 per cent of the population in Munster and Connacht were Irish-speakers as late as the 1770s. The proportions in urban communities ranged from Cork and Waterford (40–49 per cent), to Kilkenny and Limerick (30–39 per cent), to Dublin and Drogheda (10–19 per cent). As might be suspected, the linguistic geography of the eighteenth century bears similarities to the spread of literacy, with varieties of English dominant in two separate core areas: the first, a broad strip running from Dublin to Wexford but extending also into parts of the midlands; and the second, what might be called ‘inner’ Ulster (most of Antrim and Down, north Armagh and north-east Londonderry).[51]

The link between English, literacy and print, a product of Ireland’s political and economic subordination, was already well established. None of the major statements of the Catholic position was in Irish. Ireland’s case briefly stated (1695), apparently written by the Catholic lawyer Hugh Reily, was reprinted in 1720, 1742, 1749, 1754 (twice), 1762 and 1768, before a belated Irish manuscript translation was made by Uilliam Ó Murchú of County Cork.[52] Even the two surviving manuscript histories of the Williamite war, the Old-English A light to the blind and the Old Irish Macariae excidium; or, The destruction of Cyprus were in the English language. Outside the island, meanwhile, the Abbé MacGeoghegan published his great Catholic-Jacobite work, Histoire de l’Irlande, ancienne et moderne, tirée des monuments les plus authentiques (Paris, 1758–62) in the language of his adopted country. Even at the Collège des Lombards, where Conor Begley and Hugh MacCurtin prepared their Irish–English dictionary (1732) and Andrew Donlevy issued his Irish catechism An teagasg Criosduidhe, do reir ceasda agus freagartha (1742), English was said to be the ‘maternal’ language.[53]

For those able to read English, access to the classic Enlightenment works was relatively easy, and even the French philosophes were widely admired. It was the overwrought Rousseau who, as Hume remarked, ‘acquired the most enthusiastic and most passionate admirers’ of all the philosphes.[54] Inspired by the ancient republics of the Greeks and Romans, this brilliant, paranoid autodidact launched a series of attacks on Parisian high society, elevating feeling and imagination against reason, classical virtue and fraternity against commercial progress, spontaneity and sincerity against polish and refinement. On one level, Rousseau’s effusions fitted into the broad cultural revolution that marched under the banner of sentiment and sensibility, pitting the individual emotion against conventional morality. On another, his belief that only the sovereignty of the people could make government legitimate, and that man’s natural ‘goodness’ had been warped by his social environment, were profoundly subversive. Among the other philosophes, Montesquieu had admired (without understanding very exactly) the British parliamentary system, while Voltaire pinned his hopes for reform on an enlightened monarchy. Only Rousseau, who signed his works ‘Citizen of Geneva’, could be described as a democrat and a republican.

Rousseau was the first ‘cult’ writer. His ability to evoke benevolence and virtue, especially in his novel La nouvelle Héloïse, literally reduced his readers to tears.[55] A Dublin edition of Rousseau’s first major work appeared as the Discourse on the arts and sciences in 1751, just months after it appeared in French. The anonymous translator had sufficient misgivings about Rousseau’s assault on European culture to wonder whether ‘even a false urbanity and affected mild manners’ were not preferable to the continual disturbances that would surely result ‘by each savage mind’s being visible in all its uncouth and unpolished behaviour’. Would Rousseau really prefer travelling among the Arabs or the ‘savages’ of America to taking the Grand Tour across Europe?[56] The sceptical editor may have been the London-Irish writer Thomas Nugent, who translated Émile in 1765, offering a measured defence of Rousseau’s ‘natural fire and impetuosity of imagination’ as the result of ‘a manly spirit of liberty’ and his ‘desire of shaking off the yoke of prejudice’.[57]

Among many Irish converts was the radical reformer William Drennan. On reading Rousseau’s infectious Confessions, Drennan commented that the exhibitionist author ‘was quite mad when he wrote it but his heart was as sound as ever’.[58] The socially awkward Belfast physician and pamphleteer took great pleasure in noting his imagined similarities with the citizen of Geneva: ‘social yet solitary, without address, art, dissimulation, prudence, hating vulgarity, loving the vulgar, gentle in manner, yet a stern republican’.[59] For the Bastille Day celebrations of 1792, Drennan chose a motto for the Belfast Volunteers from Rousseau’s Dernière réponse (1752) to Charles Borde, a relatively obscure work, not yet translated.[60] Rousseau, as his devotees well knew, recollected reading his favourite Plutarch and becoming a ‘Roman’ at the age of twelve. Drennan, in a particularly Rousseauesque mood, added to his will the instruction that his sons be given the New Testament for their education, followed by Plutarch’s Lives, which

first blew my infant spark of reason into a glow of enthusiasm which will burn even in my ashes, [a] delightful, head-instructing, heart-inspiring, life-conducting book which I used to read when a very child, on the rocks near Craigavade, while the Carrickfergus bell, in distant toll, was wafted over the Lough.[61]

The intensity of Drennan’s identification with a Genevan philosopher, the remarkable intimacy of the connection between the writer and the reader, and the notion that books (other than the Bible) might appear as actors in someone’s biography—all testified to the reading revolution that took place in the eighteenth century. And as this chapter hopes to demonstrate, the Irish were not merely consumers of Enlightenment literature, but vigorous participants in the key debates of the era.

‘CANDID, UNPREJUDICED MEN’: WILLIAM MOLYNEUX

The Enlightenment in Ireland began with a thought experiment. Suppose that a man, who had been blind since birth, had learned to distinguish between a cube and a ball by touch alone. Now imagine that, as the result of some medical breakthrough, he is enabled to see for the first time, and the cube and ball are set before him on a table. Would he be able to tell them apart without touching them first? The answer to this puzzle, the famous ‘Molyneux problem’, may at first seem straightforward, but it raises important questions about our perceptions of the world around us, and about the way in which these perceptions are related to the formulation of ‘ideas’ or concepts in our minds. Many of the best-known philosophers and men of letters rose to Molyneux’s challenge, including Berkeley, Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot, La Mettrie and Condillac. They can be ranked as empiricists, like Molyneux himself, Locke and Berkeley who answered in the negative, or as ‘rationalists’, such as Leibniz, who took the opposing side. The question is still debated today by specialists in developmental psychology and neurophysiology.[62]

The problem takes its name from a Dublin scientist, lawyer and politician, who had come across a French extract of Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding in the Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique, an influential periodical edited by Jean Le Clerc in Amsterdam. William Molyneux is known principally for his Case of Ireland stated (1698), the controversial work of constitutional law that formed the basis of Ireland’s claims to ‘legislative independence’ throughout the eighteenth century. But he had already acquired a reputation as a gifted scientist, following his design of a combined dial and telescope, described in his treatise Sciothericum telescopium (1686), and his election to the Royal Society in the same year. In 1678 he had married Lucy, a daughter of the Attorney General for Ireland Sir William Domville, who soon afterwards lost her eyesight as the result of a serious illness. Taking refuge in Chester during the Williamite war, Molyneux completed his Dioptrica nova: a treatise of dioptricks (1692), dealing with the nature of sight, the properties of lenses, telescopes and microscopes, acknowledging the assistance of the astronomers John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley. It was the fulsome tribute to John Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding contained in this work that inaugurated six years of warm friendship and correspondence between the two men.[63] Various comments and criticisms were subsequently relayed from Dublin and incorporated by Locke into the second edition of his Essay, published in 1694. One of them, added to the chapter on perception, was the ‘Molyneux problem’.

Perhaps the most enduring image of the Enlightenment era is John Locke’s description of the human mind as a blank sheet of paper, a clean slate upon which the data supplied by our five senses would be recorded. Locke’s overriding concern in his Essay concerning human understanding (1689) was with epistemology, that is, how we acquire knowledge, and, in particular, knowledge of the moral rules which ought to govern our behaviour. Against the established belief in the existence of innate principles, programmed into each human being, Locke concluded that all knowledge could only be derived from our five senses, recorded on the white paper of the mind. This enormously influential work applied the ‘experimental’ technique championed by the Royal Society in London to epistemological questions, producing an analysis of human psychology that was seen by many as the counterpart to Newton’s revolutionary account of the physical universe. It was Locke’s hope that the propositions of morality would one day be capable of ‘demonstration’ just like those of mathematics. For many orthodox Christians, however, his claim that all knowledge was founded on sense-impressions seemed to place moral values on a dangerously subjective and slippery ground. Locke’s concern with the problem of how the mind works opened up new theories of human nature in which the deity played a conspicuously detached role. His subsequent work, The reasonableness of Christianity (1695), with its notable silence on the doctrine of the Trinity, did little to appease his orthodox critics. Yet Locke himself was cautiously optimistic that humans, guided by rational reflection and scriptural revelation, could attain enough knowledge to live morally; or, as he put it in another key image, ‘the Candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our Purposes’.[64]

The reasonableness of Christianity, like the later editions of the Essay, owed something to Molyneux’s promptings.[65] For Irish historians, the significance of this close friendship lies not just in what we learn about Molyneux himself, but about his wider intellectual circle. The foundation of the Dublin Philosophical Society in 1683 had marked the arrival of the ‘new learning’ in Ireland.[66] Its origins lay in the agreement of William Molyneux, then aged twenty-five, to contribute a natural history of Ireland for Moses Pitt’s English atlas. As an undergraduate, Molyneux had already read the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and the works of the philosophers Descartes, Bacon and Gassendi. Even at Trinity College Dublin, according to his son, ‘he Conceived a Great Dislike to the Scholastick Learning’ of his teachers and was converted to ‘Lord Bacons Methods & those prescribed by the Royal Society’.[67] Along with St George Ashe, professor of mathematics at Trinity and later Bishop of Derry, he consequently founded the Dublin Philosophical Society, modelled on the Royal Society of London, and the group ‘met weekly in a private room at the coffee house . . . merely to discourse of philosophy, mathematicks, and other polite literature’. By the end of 1686 the society was attempting to open up a correspondence with Pierre Bayle, editor of Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, but the ‘troubles’ of James II’s reign intervened.[68] The society was revived in 1693–5 and again 1707, when the new members included the brilliant mathematician and natural philosopher George Berkeley, soon to publish his own landmark work on the psychology of perception, An essay towards a new theory of vision (1709).

Most of the moving spirits, like Berkeley, were fellows of Trinity College Dublin and/or clergymen of the Established Church. Among the founders, for example, was Sir Patrick Dun, a physician from Aberdeen who became a doctor of physic at Trinity; Samuel Foley, later Bishop of Down and Connor, who published an account of the Giant’s Causeway in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions; John Stearne, later Bishop of Clogher, who bequeathed the rare items of his extensive collection to Marsh’s Library in Dublin and his manuscripts, including the famous depositions of the 1641 rising, to Trinity College. All testified to the availability of extensive libraries of English, Italian, French and Latin works, another example being Dr Edward Worth, who left around 4,500 volumes, including philosophy, politics, history as well as medicine, to Dr Steevens’ Hospital in 1733.[69] Their careers also demonstrate the close Anglo-Irish connections reactivated by the upheavals of the Williamite war. Molyneux, as we have seen, sat out the ‘troubles’ writing in Chester; but Ashe spent the war in Vienna, as chaplain to the English ambassador, and pursued his scientific studies there, and Edward Smyth amassed a fortune as chaplain to the Smyrna Company before spending four years in the Low Countries as chaplain to William III. Another Dubliner, the mathematician and naval administrator George Tollet, moved to England permanently, but maintained a regular correspondence with his old colleagues.

The Dublin Philosophical Society was an easy subject of ridicule. It has always been assumed that the mad scientists described in Gulliver’s Travels, engaged in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, were based on Swift’s Dublin contacts. The well-regarded anatomist and surgeon Allen Mullin, whose reputation was founded on his dissection of an elephant killed in a fire in 1681, performed a series of experiments on dogs before the Society, pumping water into one, injecting opium and brandy into another’s jugular vein, and cutting out a piece of another’s lungs.[70] Yet the exponents of the experimental method saw themselves, with some justification, as practical men contributing to the betterment of human life. As we have seen already, Molyneux, like other self-consciously progressive thinkers, contrasted the work of the scientific revolution with that of Aristotle and his ‘scholastic’ heirs. In his Sciothericum telescopicum (1686), for example, he typically dismissed the old learning which ‘consisted rather in disputes, and verbose empty stuff, than in curious discovery of nature’s actions’. Like others in the society, he counterposed the discredited ‘cant’ and ‘jargon’ of the scholastics, the kind of learning that was ‘buried in cloysters’, with ‘real and useful knowledge’ based on empirical observation rather than deductive reasoning.[71]

There was another vital way in which Molyneux and his associates regarded themselves as pioneers. The ‘Republic of Letters’, the network of learned communication to which they affiliated themselves, was implicitly contrasted with the divided kingdoms of Europe, engaged in two great wars of unprecedented destruction between the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Against the established hierarchy of social orders, its citizens prized the reciprocal exchange of knowledge among intellectual equals. The communities of scholars and savants that flourished in the later seventeenth century strove to be cosmopolitan and non-sectarian, avoiding, insofar as they could, political and particularly religious controversies in the interests of furthering useful learning.[72] As with Enlightenment thought generally, however, professions of toleration were directed against the Roman Catholic Church above all others. Throughout the Reformed world, intellectuals had bruising encounters with the guardians of orthodox Calvinism, whether Jean Barbeyrac at Berlin, Jean Pierre de Crousaz at Lausanne or Jean Le Clerc at Geneva. Nevertheless, all three men reserved their most bitter animosity for the Jesuits, as befitting members of the Huguenot diaspora, and they tended to express solidarity with victims of Catholic persecution wherever they might be.

The correspondence between Locke and Molyneux, collected for publication as Some familiar letters (1708), also exemplified a model of friendship dedicated to reasonableness and the pursuit of truth. The affectionate relationship between the two men began when Molyneux praised the Essay on human understanding by the ‘incomparable’ Mr Locke in his Dioptricks, and the Dubliner quickly joined those intimates who encouraged Locke to attempt a work showing that morality was ‘demonstrable according to the mathematical method’.[73] In 1695 Molyneux suggested that a Latin translation of the Essay be undertaken in Ireland and persuaded the Rev. Ezekiel Burridge to do it. The correspondence makes it clear that there was a substantial audience for Locke’s writings. Molyneux discussed Locke’s work with William King, then Bishop of Derry, and author of De origine male (1702), a response to the scepticism of Pierre Bayle, and with the Ulster M.P. James Hamilton.[74] He introduced the Essay to St George Ashe, with the result that it had been adopted at Trinity College by the end of 1692. He corresponded with Bishop Edward Synge the elder, whose Gentleman’s religion (1695) he recommended to Locke with a revealing backhanded compliment: ‘Tho’ the book shews not that freedom of thought as you or I, perhaps, may expect, yet it shews enough to incense his own herd against him, for there is little of Mystery or Enthusiastick in it.’[75] That same year, he reported, Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity was well received among ‘candid, unprejudiced men’ in Dublin.[76] In 1697 Molyneux welcomed a ‘candid free thinker, and a good scholar’ named John Toland, whom Locke had recommended to him; he deplored the indictment of Toland’s book Christianity not mysterious by a Dublin grand jury and its condemnation by the Irish parliament, who regarded the author as a Socinian (someone, that is, who denies the divinity of Christ). After Toland’s disastrous visit, described in more detail below, Molyneux mentioned to Locke ‘a most strict socinian’ in Dublin who had avoided censure by his discreet behaviour.[77] In the light of the nods and winks that characterised the correspondence of Locke, also widely reputed to be a Socinian, it is tempting to suspect that the prudent heretic of Dublin was Molyneux himself.

One way to approach the Enlightenment is to think of it as a tone of voice—the attitude of reasonableness that runs throughout the letters cited above and that was soon being popularised in literary journals. There were very few speculative matters, Locke confidently informed Molyneux, ‘wherein two thinking men who impartially seek truth can differ if they give themselves the leisure to examine their hypotheses and understand one another’.[78] Interestingly, however, as Molyneux soon discovered, the vexed relationship between the kingdoms of England and Ireland was one such topic. As secretary to the Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations Locke had become involved in the conflict between English and Irish woollen manufacturers which soon escalated into a full-scale debate over the right of the Westminster parliament to legislate for Ireland.[79] Molyneux, unaware of how closely Locke was connected with the English woollen lobby, rushed off several copies of his treatise The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated (1698) to London. Prompted by the threatened imposition of English legislative restrictions on Irish woollen exports, Molyneux mobilised a mass of legal precedents to prove that Ireland was not a dependent territory like the English territories in America, but ‘a Compleat Kingdom within it self’, united to England only by a shared allegiance to the crown. In London it looked as if the ungrateful Williamites of Ireland, having been delivered from their enemies with English money and manpower, were assuming the rebellious mantle of the Jacobites who had so recently threatened to destroy them. Molyneux’s arguments were indeed grafted onto an older tradition of Catholic constitutional thought, and were embarrassingly close to the position adopted by the ‘rebellious’ Confederate Catholics at Kilkenny in the 1640s. Although the text was not, as is often alleged, burned by order of the English House of Commons, it met with a hostile response among defenders of the Glorious Revolution across the water. Ireland, as one prominent English writer bluntly rejoined, might regulate its own internal affairs, but not wider ‘imperial’ matters: these must be determined by the King, Lords and Commons of England, ‘by whose Arms and Treasures Ireland ever was, and must always be defended’.[80]

These borrowings are not as strange as they might at first seem. In his research for the Irish section of Moses Pitt’s English atlas, Molyneux had befriended Roderic O’Flaherty, the poverty-stricken Gaelic antiquarian from County Galway. But he showed no interest in the politics of Ireland’s pre-colonial past, or in the early parliamentary traditions later analysed by Charles O’Conor. For Molyneux, the controversy over the privileges of the Dublin legislature could only be resolved by establishing how Ireland came to be annexed to the crown of England in the first place. Using the twelfth-century account of Giraldus Cambrensis, he was able to show that the submission of the Gaels to Henry II in 1172 was voluntary and thus could not confer the rights of conquest, as Sir Edward Coke and other English authorities claimed. The kingdom of Ireland, he believed, was created by an original contract—and here he consciously echoed the language of the orthodox Whig theory of the Glorious Revolution—by which Henry II had extended the common law and granted Ireland its own parliament as a self-governing kingdom. The native rulers of medieval Ireland were thus summoned for a brief moment onto the historical stage for the purpose of legitimising the ancient constitution, and then abruptly forgotten.

The case of Ireland stated was not an Enlightenment tract. Even allowing for the fact that ‘it was done in haste’ (as Molyneux informed Locke), it exhibited little of the bold spirit of the ‘new learning’, and the members of the Dublin Philosophical Society were divided in their reactions to it.[81] It failed to address the transformation of the British monarchy that was taking place against the background of the War of the League of Augsburg. No attempt was made, as in the writings of the Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, to set the relationships within the three kingdoms in the context of the wider European state-system.[82] No attention was given to the structural changes in the distribution of land, the organisation of armed forces or the analysis of ‘manners’ which would provide the key issues for the ‘philosophical’ historians of the future. But the work must be judged on its own terms. Locke himself had distinguished between political theory, ‘the original of societies and the rise and extent of political power’, for which he recommended his own Two treatises, and ‘the art of governing men in society’, for which he recommended the Whig antiquarians William Petyt, James Tyrell and William Atwood.[83] Like Molyneux, the latter all ransacked the legal records to find evidence that the rights and liberties of the Englishman had been continuously asserted, and that the exercise of royal authority had always been subject to parliamentary constraints. The case of Ireland stated should not be seen as a proto-nationalist tract; nor was it a contribution to Enlightenment political science. It represented a provincial variant of the same Whig political culture that came to dominate political debate in Lowland Scotland and colonial America, where local elites asserted their own claims to the common rights of Englishmen in much the same way as the parliamentarians of Dublin.

If Molyneux’s writings suggest something of the limitations of Enlightenment thinking in Ireland, his personal connections and experiences reveal how far public discussion of the ‘new learning’ was confined to adherents of the Established Church. The confessional peculiarities of Ireland, where almost nine-tenths of the population were excluded from the state religion, did not obstruct the basic structures of intellectual life that allowed the Enlightenment to flourish elsewhere. As we have seen, Dubliners were able to participate in the new Republic of Letters, and they enjoyed a relatively expansionary book trade. They were restricted to one university, but it was the physical as well as intellectual heart of the Ascendancy’s showpiece capital. In comparison with Scotland, where landowners, lawyers and professors, all committed to the economic welfare of the kingdom, were closely associated in societies dedicated to the progress of the arts, sciences and manufactures, clublife in Dublin and Cork was undistinguished.[84] Yet the Philosophical Society was not without its successors. The best known is the Dublin Society, founded in 1731, which would later in the century run an experimental farm, an art school and a botanical garden, and won the admiration of Montesquieu.[85] Its membership overlapped with that of the Physico-Historical Society, founded in 1744 by twenty-three ‘Lords and Gentlemen’ meeting in the committee room of the House of Lords to promote the investigation of ‘the ancient and present state of the several counties of Ireland’, and attracting not only bishops and peers but landed gentlemen, lawyers, doctors, apothecaries and printers. The eclectic range of topics discussed was typical of the Enlightenment, particularly in the potential for agricultural and commercial development, blending the study of Irish fisheries, inland navigation, soils and climate with a growing antiquarian enthusiasm for round towers and dolmens.[86] In the short term at least, however, their historical inquiries confirmed their belief in the superiority of the Protestant interest. The improvement of Ireland, in both ‘manners’ (social and cultural life) and in material terms, stemmed from the Williamite settlement, which enabled, as one member explained, ‘the Establishment of Civil Society, security of property and a long peace; from whence Arts & Sciences are derived, Trade flourishes & Countries [i.e. counties] before occupied with rude & barbarous Inhabitants become Civilised and Improved’.[87] But perhaps the best illustration of the intellectual and social boundaries of Enlightenment in Ireland was the reaction to a momentous book published in 1696 with the mischievous title Christianity not mysterious.

REASON AND RELIGION: JOHN TOLAND

In September 1720, just a year and a half before his death, John Toland scoffed his way through the revised edition of Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1716), reading the now-forgotten book three times, twice with his pen in his hand, scrawling observations and asides—abusive, humorous, erudite and impious—in the margins and between the lines, ‘some to supply his defects, and others to expose his negligence’. In earlier days Toland had disputed with Leibniz in Berlin and offered assistance to the great Pierre Bayle in Amsterdam as he was preparing the second edition of his celebrated Dictionary. A close friend of Robert Harley, he had been secretary to the English ambassador at Hanover, and he had won the admiration of the Electress Sophia (heir to the British throne), Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia and Prince Eugene of Savoy, the military hero of the Protestant cause in Europe. Now penniless, in poor health and drinking heavily, he had fled the pollution of London for Putney, where he lived, surrounded by his books and manuscripts, in a rented room in a carpenter’s house. What financial assistance and intellectual camaraderie he still enjoyed came from his last patron, Robert, Viscount Molesworth, a fellow-countryman and fellow hater of corruption in church and state, who would soon vent his own frustration with the ‘credulous ignoramus’ Martin. In his marginal notes Toland showed off, citing extracts from Homer, Tacitus and Herodotus, displaying his arcane knowledge of ancient footwear, correcting mistranslations. But some of his observations were of a more personal kind, as when he came to Martin’s discussion of the seasonal migration of swans to the isle of Lingay. ‘The swans come also in great plenty to Loch-foile in hard Winters,’ he noted. ‘This is the river, or inlet on which Londonderry stands, on the banks of wch I was born & in yt toun till my 14th year bred.’[88]

More than twenty years previously John Toland had been one of the authors discussed in the correspondence between Molyneux and Locke. This Irish-born firebrand was perhaps the most subversive thinker of his age, in both political and religious affairs.[89] No one else could match the bold leaps that structured his spiritual biography. Uniquely, Toland had been a Catholic, a Protestant and a Dissenter, before establishing his reputation as the most notorious ‘freethinker’ of his time. More than any other work, it was Toland’s Christianity not mysterious (1696) that defined ‘Deism’—the radical, minimalist creed that became fashionable among the avant-garde of the early Enlightenment and would be revived in the age of the French Revolution by democratic radicals like Tom Paine. At the same time, Toland practically invented the literary canon of the ‘real Whigs’ or ‘commonwealthsmen’ by preparing new editions of the republican writings of James Harrington and Algernon Sidney and a biography of John Milton. Since Toland was not only an intellectual innovator, but a quarrelsome, incendiary personality, he repeatedly got into trouble with both the civil and the ecclesiastical courts. He was chased out of Oxford, where the great philologist Edward Lhuyd had found him ‘a man of excellent parts, but as little share as may be of modesty or conscience’ and Edmund Gibson (later Bishop of London) condemned his ‘insolent conceited way of talking’.[90] A few years later, as the outrage over Christianity not mysterious boiled over, he was chased out of Dublin too. Toland had alienated all parties, Molyneux informed Locke, by ‘his unseasonable way of discoursing, propagating, and maintaining’ his opinions in coffee-houses.[91]

This helter-skelter career is all the more remarkable when we consider Toland’s background: he was Gaelic Irish, from the Inishowen peninsula, and rumoured to be the illegitimate son of a Catholic priest. Later he would employ his ability to read ancient Gaelic texts to good effect. In 1693 he worked at the Bodleian Library in Oxford on an Irish dictionary and on a dissertation designed to prove that the Irish were originally a colony of the Gauls. In 1707–8 he wintered at the Irish Franciscan college in Prague, where his ethnic origins won him the sympathy of the friars, several of them Ulster Catholics. In the following year he discovered an Irish manuscript of the Gospels at The Hague, on which he was to base his claim in Nazarenus (1718) that the religion of the ancient Celts was the same minimalist creed that formed the core of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and was ‘extremely different from the religion of the present Irish’.[92] His Specimen of the critical history of the Celtic religion and learning, written in 1719 but not published until after his death, was both an impressive antiquarian study of the pagan worship of the druids and an extension of his polemic against ‘priestcraft’—the corruption inherent in all forms of organised religion. The achievements of the Milesian civilisation of pre-colonial Ireland had already been valorised as a golden age in Geoffrey Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn and Roderic O’Flaherty’s Ogygia (1685). While Toland affirmed the intellectual achievements of the island’s scholars, he had little time for its saints. In typically inflammatory fashion, his account of early Christianity inverted the usual moral of the story, arguing that the Irish welcomed Christianity so readily not because of their moral purity, but rather because the monopoly of the druids over education had already produced a priest-ridden people.[93]

Toland’s linguistic virtuosity and his impecunious wanderings on the continent, his rejection of Catholicism, his interest in Judaism and the Jews, his fascination with Gaelic Ireland and his conviction that the history of pre-colonial Ireland attested to wider, European truths, have tempted literary scholars to draw comparisons with a later Irish maverick, James Joyce. Unlike Joyce, however, Toland showed little concern with Ireland’s future, as opposed to its past. He was at times strikingly unsentimental about his Irish background, complaining that he was being molested in Ireland ‘where he was only fortuitously born’ for a book he had, after all, published in London; and describing himself as ‘an Inhabitant of England’ when it suited him.[94] In 1697, as pressure mounted in London for legislative restrictions on Irish woollens, he was reported to be the author of an attack on the constitutional pretensions of the Dublin parliament. In part, his stated objections to Irish legislative autonomy were economic, concentrating on the natural resources, favourable climate, cheaper labour and advantages in geographical location which, it was alleged, made Ireland such a dangerous rival. But Toland also sought to discredit the Protestant Irish by suggesting that their experience as a minority, encircled by hostile population, had engendered a despotic mentality injurious to the liberties of England. His conclusion that Ireland, in both commercial and constitutional matters, should be firmly subordinated to Westminster outraged Archbishop King, who feared that his fellow Anglicans, who had conquered Ireland on behalf of England, were now to be deprived of ‘the Liberty of English Men, which I think Consists in being Governed by Laws to which they have given their Consent’.[95]

In the fluid party politics of the post-revolutionary period, as in so much else, Toland was something of a shapechanger. He was not above hack journalism either. It was understandable, moreover, that he might have little love for the Irish House of Commons after it had condemned his book and ordered the arrest of the author. For whatever reason, Toland unwittingly kicked off the minor pamphlet war that culminated in Molyneux’s Case of Ireland stated. Such contempt for Irish representative institutions may seem to be out of character for someone who specialised in republishing the canonical works of the English republican or ‘commonwealthsman’ tradition. In the later 1690s, and again in the 1720s, the commonwealthsmen or ‘real Whigs’ supplied the language of political dissent, exposing corruption in the guise of standing armies, public credit and patronage, the three pillars of the ‘Whig oligarchy’ constructed as part of William III’s continental war effort and perfected in the reign of Sir Robert Walpole. Their enemy was not kingship per se, but rather the absolute monarchies which, they believed, had supplanted the ancient constitutions of continental Europe and now threatened the English too. Anticipating—with his usual relish—the accusation that he favoured a republican form of government for ‘the Britannick Islands’, Toland replied mischievously that England was already a commonwealth, since the commonwealth was simply ‘a Government of Laws enacted for the common Good of all the People’, as opposed to an absolute monarchy.[96] Sadly, it was a notable feature of English republicans that they seldom extended to the inhabitants of their colonies and dependencies the liberties that they claimed for themselves. In James Harrington’s classic Oceana (1656) Panopea (Ireland) is ‘the soft Mother of a slothful and pusillanimous People’ whose subjugation by the arms of Oceana (England) was necessary.[97] We have no idea what Toland, who republished Oceana in 1700, thought about this grim parallel, which culminated in Harrington’s proposal that the island should be replanted with the Jews. By 1720, at any rate, Toland had shifted his ground and was now preparing an attack on the Declaratory Act, sponsored by Molesworth, which denounced the ‘altering of a Constitution, which has lasted above five hundred Years’.[98]

To a large extent Toland’s intellectual formation belonged not so much to Gaelic Ireland as to the northern Calvinist (or rather post-Calvinist) world; he had travelled the same Presbyterian networks that characterised Francis Hutcheson’s career, considered below. Having attended school at Redcastle near Derry, he enrolled at Glasgow University in 1687, and was maintained there by Presbyterian patrons who apparently hoped that he might become a Gaelic-speaking missionary. In 1689, still intending to proceed to ordination, he moved to Edinburgh, where he received his M.A. in 1690. He continued to mix in Dissenting circles in London, and defended the leading Presbyterian Daniel Williams in the Bibliothèque universelle—the same journal in which Molyneux published some of his scientific papers. In return he received an annual grant to pursue his studies at Leiden and Utrecht, where he concentrated on biblical criticism and associated with Dutch Arminians, and then at Rotterdam, where he met the Dutch theologians Philip van Limborch and Jean Le Clerc, who furnished him with a letter of introduction to John Locke. By the time he composed his Christianity not mysterious, then, Toland was already familiar with the most celebrated proponents of religious toleration in Europe. Locke had written his Letter concerning toleration (1689) while an exile in Holland, where he was in close contact with Limborch and Le Clerc. It is no accident that freedom of worship should be most vigorously defended among the intellectuals of the Huguenot diaspora, driven out of France by the brutally repressive policies of Louis XIV. Nor is it surprising that they continued to equate persecution with ‘popery’. For Locke, toleration could not be safely extended to churches which owed a primary allegiance to an authority outside or above civil society. This meant the papacy, which allegedly dispensed Catholics from oaths of allegiance, released them from promises made to ‘heretics’, and claimed the power to depose rulers on religious grounds. Irish scholars have not always appreciated that Toland likewise accepted limits to religious toleration, excluding ‘POPERY, and such other Rites and Notions as directly tend to disturb or dissolve Society’.[99]

It makes little sense, consequently, to suggest that the violent reception of Toland in Dublin indicates a peculiarly Irish tradition of Anglican conservatism. Some scholars have argued that the hostile response from Anglican clerics such as Peter Browne and Edward Synge can be explained by their realisation that Toland’s opposition to established religion undermined the basis for the penal code.[100] We seem to have here another instance of ‘Malcomson’s Law’, the belief that every Irish event should be assigned a specifically Irish cause.[101] It is true that high-church Anglicans often portrayed Deists (along with Presbyterians, Quakers and anyone else they disliked) as papists in disguise; and at a practical level it arguable that Deists, by dividing Protestants among themselves, were indeed serving the interests of the Church of Rome. But Irish Anglicans were far from unusual in their conviction that the Established Church was in danger during the turbulent decades that followed the Glorious Revolution. They might have pointed to Edinburgh, where a student named Thomas Aikenhead was executed after he had declared that Christ was an impostor, his miracles were ‘pranks’, and the doctrine of the Trinity was nonsensical.[102] (This was 1697, the same year that Toland was hounded out of Dublin.) Or they might have pointed to England, where a blasphemy act was passed in 1697 in an attempt to halt the tide of attacks on the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and the divine authority of the Bible. One of the most spectacular, albeit unintended, consequences of the Glorious Revolution had been the dismantling of the confessional state. The disciplinary machinery of the national church had been shattered by the passing of the Toleration Act in 1689; six years later the expiry of the licensing act, which had provided the legal mechanism for pre-publication censorship, permitted a sudden burst of heterodox and anticlerical books of which Christianity not mysterious was only the most notorious. In ordering the public hangman to burn this heretical tract, the Dublin grand jury was simply following the example of the grand jury of Middlesex in mid-May 1697.

The defenders of the Church of Ireland were thus reacting to a much wider crisis afflicting both church and state, and it is difficult to interpret their writings as a distinctively Irish school of thought, determined by the conditions of Protestant Ascendancy. Anglican Christianity had provided the basic framework within which notions of political authority, law and the family made sense; at the parish level the church courts still attempted to monitor the moral and religious life of the people.[103] Toland was interpreted by Irish Anglicans, reasonably enough, as implying that the Christianity taught by the Anglican establishment was little more than a great riddle, a mix of ‘dark aenigmatical Allusions, and absurd irrational and unintelligible Notions’.[104] Moreover, the Irish critics of Toland came from both ends of the Anglican spectrum. Edward Synge, Archbishop of Tuam, whose Gentleman’s religion (1698) was, in part, a response to Toland, was a staunch Whig with some sympathy for Dissenters and even for the Gallican wing of Catholicism. Peter Browne, whose Letter in answer to a book entitled ‘Christianity not mysterious’ (1697) was rewarded with the provostship of Trinity in 1699, was a noisy high-church Tory. Indeed, Browne and Synge fought a fierce pamphlet war over the practice of drinking toasts to the memory of the dead, in which Browne was accused of being disrespectful to that of William III.

As the Toland episode quickly revealed, Anglicans were in fact deeply divided over the relationship between church and state, and in particular over the political influence of the clergy. William Molyneux, who had long been acquainted with Browne, was appalled by the latter’s call to have the civil magistrate punish religious opinions.[105] ‘We may confute his Errors,’ Browne had said of Toland, but only the government could ‘suppress his Insolence’.[106] The backlash against Christianity not mysterious, viewed in the longer term, actually did more to stimulate debate and disagreement among orthodox Anglicans that to unite them behind the confessional state. Interestingly, this pattern repeated itself some years later with the imprisonment of the Rev. Thomas Emlyn, a Dublin Presbyterian who had published a refutation of the doctrine of the Trinity. The immediate response of the Synod of Ulster was a renewed determination to enforce subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith as a requirement for all ministerial candidates, a hardline position which led the Belfast Society, discussed at greater length below, to begin questioning all creeds and confessions. Several decades later another Dublin Presbyterian, John Leland, would compile the classic defence of the Christian revelation of this period, A view of the principal Deistical writers that have appeared in England in the last and present century (1754). But Leland’s philosophy was firmly Lockean, and his sermons, representing Christianity as ‘a moral religion consisting of divinely ordained duties that can be refounded on rational grounds’, were entirely in keeping with an enlightened age.[107]

In Britain and Ireland, then, the impact of Deism was not to undermine religion, but to stimulate minimalist or ‘latitudinarian’ versions of Christianity which could be presented as perfectly compatible with the discoveries of natural and moral philosophers, apparently demonstrating that revelation was in accord with reason. Many of the values shared by Toland and Molesworth were absorbed into Protestant thought with surprisingly little strain. We saw earlier how the two men enjoyed sniggering at the pretensions of Martin Martin, a fellow of the Royal Society who was nevertheless apparently a stranger to experimental observation. One source of much amusement was Martin’s discussion of ‘second sight’, the ability to see otherwise invisible objects, such as smoke around someone’s face fortelling their death, which Molesworth thought ‘a meer invention of Popish preists taken first from paganism & designed to promote ye notion of Purgatory’. At another point Toland noted that ‘cunning’ priests in league with a local family had produced ‘holy’ trout in a well in his native Donegal. But Catholics, as both men were aware, did not possess a monopoly on such impostures. All sects, in their turn, had propagated fables and falsehoods in order to bolster their own authority over the ignorant: ‘Superstition’, Toland observed, ‘is pritty equal on both sides.’[108]

At this point traditional Protestant objections to ‘popery’ became subsumed into a generalised condemnation of clerical domination or ‘priestcraft’. It was a mistake, Molesworth had argued in the conclusion to his Account of Denmark (1694), to suppose that ‘the Popish Religion is the only one, of all the Christian Sects, proper to introduce and establish Slavery in a Nation’. Catholicism, it was true, was the ‘darling’ of absolute monarchs, but other religions, and particularly the Lutheran, served their purposes just as effectively, instilling the ‘Doctrine of a blind Obedience’ among their subjects.[109] Once again, however, liberal Protestants assimilated these apparently subversive insights without much difficultly. The cause of conflict was not Christianity itself, they maintained, but the perversion of it by ambitious rulers and grasping priests who sought political power in order to persecute their rivals, a historical narrative that resonated with critics of Roman Catholicism. This disease, they recognised, afflicted every denomination. But for admirers of John Locke, toleration was not so much a secularising impulse as a logical extension of the Reformation principle that religion was a matter between God and each individual. Even the Presbyterian radicals of the 1790s sometimes presented the United Irish movement as liberating Catholics from ‘popery’. Protestantism remained closely identified with freedom of conscience, while priestcraft, superstition, ignorance and persecution were the hallmarks of the Roman Church, still regarded as the principal enemy of Enlightenment.

NEW LIGHT: FRANCIS HUTCHESON

Looking back across the intellectual advances of the eighteenth century, the prominent Edinburgh philosopher Dugald Stewart suggested that the ‘liberality of sentiment’ and the ‘refinement of taste’ for which Scotland was now famous could be dated from the lectures given by Francis Hutcheson at Glasgow University between 1730 and 1746.[110] Renowned as Glasgow’s star performer, Hutcheson possessed an eloquence and personal charm capable of inspiring remarkable devotion among his students. Both his charismatic style and his innovative curriculum were envied at Edinburgh, where the courses of his counterparts were admitted to be dull and derivative.[111] In spite of his long-established reputation as ‘father’ of the Scottish Enlightenment, however, Hutcheson was almost entirely ignored by Irish scholarship for most of the twentieth century. Interest in his contribution to Scottish philosophy was rekindled by W. R. Scott’s Francis Hutcheson (1900), and it was left to Scott (who, incidentally, coined the term ‘Scottish Enlightenment’) to investigate the vital connections between Glasgow and the ‘Molesworth circle’, the coterie of intellectuals who met at the home of Viscount Molesworth just outside Dublin.[112] This pattern has been replicated in recent decades, with the painstaking reconstruction of Hutcheson’s scholarly and social networks in Ulster and Dublin by two distinguished scholars of Scottish intellectual life, M. A. Stewart and James Moore. Their ability to combine archival spadework with the technical and conceptual demands of the history of ideas has seldom been matched on the other side of the Irish Sea.[113]

In the shaping of Hutcheson’s philosophy, the overlapping Presbyterian communities of Ulster, Glasgow and Dublin all played significant parts, and it would be unwise to distinguish too rigidly between them. It is sometimes assumed that Presbyterian Ulster was a cultural desert before the 1720s, its inhabitants patiently waiting for the irrigation provided by the return of a fresh generation of students bringing the ‘New Light’ from Scotland. In that decade a series of dramatic clashes over the practice of subscription to Westminster Confession of Faith heralded the liberalisation of religion within the Synod of Ulster. The subsequent spread of ‘New Light’ theology was an important ingredient in the intellectual and cultural flowering of the late eighteenth century, when Ulster was celebrated as ‘the early advocate of freedom and the school of political science’.[114] This picture is misleading on several counts. A number of academies had already appeared in the north, in spite of official hostility. The first was established in the 1670s by the Rev. Thomas Gowan (1631–83), a Scottish settler under the protection of Viscount Massereene, at Antrim Castle. His Latin textbooks, Ars sciendi (1681) and Logica elenctica (1683), combined the traditional logic commended by Reformed scholastics with the natural philosophy of Descartes; he was also apparently familiar with the recent work of the French Jansenists based at the convent of Port Royal in Paris. Gowan’s texts would later be studied in English Dissenting academies and at Harvard College. They may also have been used at James Macalpine’s ‘philosophy school’ at Killyleagh, County Down, which Hutcheson attended before matriculating in Glasgow in 1710. Little is known about Macalpine, but his students, who were said to have numbered around 160 at that time, covered the equivalent of the first three years of the Scottish university curriculum, enabling some to transfer straight into final-year or magistrand studies at Glasgow.[115]

Other Ulster academies, less well known, flourished briefly. John Hutcheson, father of Francis, taught philosophy for several years at Newtownards, County Down, after 1679.[116] He was one of several Ulstermen to correspond with Robert Wodrow, the great ecclesiastical historian in Glasgow. In Belfast, meanwhile, the Rev. John McBride declined a divinity chair at Glasgow, where he took refuge from Tory magistrates in 1705–8, but apparently offered divinity lectures at home for a local audience. McBride was one of several northerners to keep in touch with Hans Sloane in London, who regularly dispatched copies of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions to Belfast. Another was the Belfast physician Victor Ferguson, who had once intended to settle in London himself, and who complained that there was ‘none worth a farthing here to converse with or improve by’. Ferguson reckoned he had ‘the marrow of all Antient and modern Authors till about 1688’, but inquired after new books on medicine and natural history.[117] The young Samuel Haliday (1685–1739), whose father had ministered in a variety of congregations from Donegal to Edinburgh, acted as tutor to Sloane’s nephew on the Grand Tour in 1716–17, writing to him regularly with news of physicians and philosophers in Osnabrück, Geneva, Turin and Venice.[118]

Haliday’s peripatetic training, admittedly an exceptional case, suggests that the intellectual dependence of Ulster on Glasgow should not be overemphasised. His travels took him to the major centres of continental Calvinism, all of them experiencing bitter divisions as the church authorities were challenged by ‘new’ doctrines. Of these theological trends the most common was labelled Arminianism, which became a catch-all term for a whole series of deviations from orthodox Calvinism. Although they came in different shapes, Arminians rejected the bleak doctrine of predestination, believing that salvation was not settled irrevocably by divine grace alone, but by a combination of God’s determinations and the free responses of the human individual. Arminians were often regarded as lifting the latch for their more advanced cousins the Arians and Socinians, who further called into question the divinity of Jesus Christ. From their early beginnings in the Dutch Republic the Arminians had formed tactical alliances with other forces opposed by the ecclesiastical authorities; their optimistic emphasis on human capacities, moreover, implied a greater readiness to question clerical control. Following his graduation at Glasgow, Haliday studied theology at Leiden, the birthplace of Arminianism, where Belfast-born Robert Milling was minister of the Scots Church, one of four Ulstermen to hold that position. He was then licensed at Rotterdam, still apparently an orthodox Calvinist, but subsequent travels in Switzerland altered his theological position. In 1708 he chose to be ordained in Geneva, where the terms of church communion were no longer ‘narrowed by any human Impositions’.[119] After the War of the Spanish Succession, when he served in Flanders as chaplain to Colonel George Preston’s Cameronian Regiment, he spent several years in London lobbying government officials on behalf of the Synod of Ulster and was one of two Ulster clergymen to attend the Salter’s Hall debates, where English Dissenters split over the issue of clerical subscription. It is not entirely surprising, then, that when Haliday at last returned to Ireland he refused to declare his adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith.

In Ulster, meanwhile, discontent with the Westminster Confession had been simmering for some time. In 1705 the Rev. John Abernethy of Antrim had formed a discussion group of clergymen, theological students, and laymen (including Dr Ferguson) known as the Belfast Society. Their latitudinarian views, suspected as a cover for unorthodox ideas, were dubbed the ‘New Light’. At their meetings sermons were preached on such subjects as ‘the nature, and Scriptural Terms, of the unity of the Christian Church; the nature, and mischief of Schism; the Rights of conscience, and of private judgement; the sole dominion of Christ in his own kingdom’.[120] In their efforts to find common ground that might unite all Protestants, they resolved to examine ‘the customs and usages of the Lutherans and Calvinists, the churches of the Episcopal, the Presbyterian, and Congregational forms, the venerable ancient Vaudois and Piedmontese, who never submitted to Rome, and the Greek churches’.[121] At the same time, their meetings served as a kind of circulating library, with each member submitting a report on what he had read, so that ‘a bookish disposition was encouraged and kept up in all’.[122] Although the members were already very prominent in the synod’s affairs, they avoided public controversy until Abernethy’s non-subscribing manifesto Religious obedience founded on personal persuasion (1720) launched a generalised attack upon the right of church courts to compel professions of belief, defending the right of private judgment against the interference of church and state alike.

During the 1720s the Synod of Ulster—representing the main body of Presbyterians in Ireland—was paralysed at all levels, right down to the individual kirk session (congregational committee), over the issue of clerical subscription. This conflict saw the publication of over fifty pamphlets, the segregation of the Non-subscribers into their own presbytery, and the creation of new, breakaway congregations as elders and laymen turned against their ministers. The effect was to radicalise the non-subscribers even further. Abernethy, Haliday and their colleagues did not simply assert the priority of individual conscience over the courts or ‘judicatories’ of the church; they saw the two forces as diametrically opposed, and in time the entire history of Christianity came to be retold in terms of a fundamental clash between the right of private judgment and ecclesiastical authority. For the Non-subscribers, personal persuasion was the very essence of religion; while the imposition of creeds and confessions constituted a usurpation of Christ’s sovereignty over the church, entailing the adulteration of the Word of God with human sentiments. In 1724 another minister, Thomas Nevin of Downpatrick, was expelled from the synod after a ten-day trial in which he refused to declare his belief in the orthodox doctrine of Christ’s divinity on the grounds that the synod was acting like the Spanish Inquisition.[123] This had become a common rhetorical move among the New Light ministers: man-made formulations of religion were to be equated with ecclesiastical tyranny, idolatry, priestcraft, inquisitions—in a word, with ‘popery’. For Hutcheson’s father, a much-respected Old Light man, this was too much: ‘We must look on the Parallel which they so invidiously make between our Synods and the Roman Antichrist, as most unjust and highly scandalous to all the reformed Churches as well as ours.’[124] But with the passing away of veterans of the Restoration era, like John McBride and the elder Hutcheson, the Old Light lost its intellectual custodians within the synod.

Once again, it would be unwise to explain the Subscription Controversy as a simple outgrowth of Scotland’s Enlightenment. The great Victorian historian of Irish Presbyterianism, James Seaton Reid, traced all the errors of the eighteenth century to Glasgow and specifically to the divinity professor John Simson, tried for a number of heresies in the 1710s and 1720s. As we have seen, however, the Belfast Society had been meeting since 1705, and its originators had in fact been Simson’s contemporaries rather than his students. It was not only the New Lights, furthermore, who had allies in Glasgow. The Westminster Confession was a surprisingly recent import from Scotland, only adopted as an official creed in the later 1690s. Glasgow connections were vital to the crystallisation of a pro-subscription party in Ulster, a subject usually neglected by historians. The Old Light leader Charles Mastertown was a Scots immigrant who forwarded his polemics for comments and revisions to Robert Wodrow of Eastwood, the ecclesiastical historian whose History of the sufferings of the Church of Scotland had just appeared. When Mastertown launched a new subscribing congregation in Belfast, the headquarters of the New Light, a wealthy merchant was dispatched to raise funds from the Glasgow town council and local magistrates. He was tailed by the young James Arbuckle (later ‘Hibernicus’), who distributed handbills on behalf of the non-subscribers, anxious to prove that they were ‘entirely of Presbyterian principles, and have given all due Evidences of their Orthodoxy and soundness in the faith’.[125]

On this occasion at least, it seems that Ulster controversies had spilled over into Scotland, rather than the other way round. By the later 1720s, indeed, one of Simson’s opponents, outraged that he had compared his own church authorities to the Spanish Inquisition, accused him of importing the language of the non-subscribing Presbytery of Antrim: ‘His Eloquence and Learning here is wholly Hybernian, and borrowed from the worst Set of Men in that Kingdom.’[126] Ulster-Scots connections thus need to be viewed from a wider perspective. In Geneva itself, the citadel of Calvinism, Jean-Alphonse Turrettini (1671–1737), professor of theology, had opposed clerical subscription to the Formula consensus Helvetica (1675) devised by his father, François Turrettini, while the narrow theological boundaries of the Dutch Reformed Church had come under sustained attack from the Arminians. Many of the great Huguenot enlighteners—Philip van Limborch, Jean Le Clerc, Pierre Bayle—fought their own battles against church courts. As we saw earlier, theories of toleration were often connected with the emergence of small Protestant minority groups; indeed, they flourished best where minorities within these minorities struggled to express themselves freely, as with the presbytery of Antrim.

When Hutcheson took up his Glasgow position in 1730, he naturally came tainted with the New Light of the Irish Dissenters. In addition to his philosophy classes, he offered supplementary lectures every Sunday evening, using as a text De veritate religionis Christianae (The truth of the Christian religion) by the Dutch Arminian Hugo Grotius, an early opponent of compulsion in religious matters. During the 1710s, having embarked on the six years of training required of a minister in the Presbyterian Church, he must have been aware of the accusations circulating against John Simson, suspected of being unsound on original sin, election and salvation. The first of two great heresy trials before the general assembly of the Church of Scotland stretched between 1714 and 1717, dragging in the presbytery of Glasgow, the university authorities and the local political elite. The experience of the unfortunate Simson, eventually suspended from teaching in 1729, may help to explain why Hutcheson steered clear of theological controversy throughout his career. In 1738 he was himself accused of teaching doctrines contrary to orthodox religion; but by now Hutcheson had built up a strong party among the professors behind his efforts to ‘put a new face on theology in Scotland’.[127] A group of students published a vindication of their teacher, declaring that he merely ‘pleaded for a universal toleration by the State, toward all peaceable Subjects of whatever Religion’.[128] A more explicit rejection of religious persecution can be found in his translation of The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742), which he sent to his old friend Thomas Drennan in an attempt to promote sales in Belfast.[129] In this work he noted how the charge of ‘rebellion against the state’ had been used to justify Catholic persecutions in France and Protestant persecutions in England and Scotland, and expressed his disapproval of ‘penal laws about such religious opinions and forms of worship as are in no way hurtful in society’.[130]

In philosophy as in theology, Hutcheson personified the traffic of ideas between Scotland and Ireland. When he first arrived at Glasgow, he had already studied logic, metaphysics and moral philosophy at Killyleagh; he was probably familiar with Samuel Pufendorf’s De officio hominis et civis (1673), as well as the political writings of John Locke, now the basis of the university curriculum. Both Pufendorf and Locke had attempted to construct a minimalist political theory extrapolated from one simple belief, upon which they assumed everyone would agree: the right of self-preservation. Ultimately, they contended, society was based on the self-interest of the individual rather than a benevolent concern for others. As a student at Glasgow, however, Hutcheson had been captivated by ‘the immortal sublimities’ of classical poetry and philosophy and ‘the abundant elegance and scope of Cicero’s writings in all branches of philosophy’.[131] A portrait by Allan Ramsay, painted around 1745, shows Hutcheson with Cicero’s De finibus in his hand. As his inaugural lecture, ‘On the natural sociability of mankind’ (1730), made clear, it was Hutcheson’s overriding ambition to reconcile these two influences—the defence of classical virtue and the natural-law philosophy of Pufendorf, and to do so in a way consonant with the experimental method. The ‘grand instructor’ on morals was Pufendorf, he acknowledged, whose reasoning was superior to the ‘generality of the school-men’. Yet Hutcheson worried that Pufendorf’s account of human psychology was too pessimistic. As a result of Pufendorf’s influence, he feared that ‘the old Notions of natural Affections, and kind Instincts . . . are almost banish’d out of our Books of Morals; we must never hear of them in any of our lectures for fear of innate Ideas’.[132] Morality, Hutcheson thought, was not so much a matter of what we can know about the world as what we feel about each other. This led him to announce the discovery of a ‘moral’ sense, analogous to the five physical senses, which responds to virtuous acts in the same way that our aesthetic taste responds to beauty, and which had been implanted by the Creator.[133]

It was in Dublin that Hutcheson first outlined his theory in two works that established his international reputation, An inquiry concerning the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue (1725) and An essay on the nature and conduct of the passions and affections (1728). His arguments were developed in ‘frequent conversation with some few speculative friends’ in the capital.[134] The vital connection here was Molesworth, the friend of Molyneux and patron of John Toland, who had returned to Dublin in the 1720s. His literary circle, the recurrent if rather shadowy presence behind the Irish Enlightenment, included the journalist James Arbuckle and a number of other former Glasgow students. It was in Arbuckle’s Dublin Weekly Journal that Hutcheson first elaborated his moral sense theory. His first books were published by a bookselling and publishing business at ‘the Philosopher’s Head’ on the Blind Quay, which also issued a new edition of Harrington’s Oceana (1737), complete with Toland’s preface. One of the partners, William Smith, soon moved to Amsterdam, where he became editor of a new journal, the Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe.[135] The moving spirit, however, appears to have been William Bruce, the acknowledged political leader of the Dissenting interest in the middle decades of the century, and an unjustly neglected figure. Bruce was a cousin of Hutcheson and had extensive connections in the north. He collaborated with John Abernethy in a series of pamphlets calling for the repeal of the Test Act, and also defended the Irish linen interest and the privileges of the Irish parliament against the encroachments of the British government. In November 1737 Hutcheson sent him the manuscript of his magnum opus, A system of moral philosophy, to circulate among his Irish friends and relatives for criticisms and observations.

When pressed to take up the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy in 1744, Hutcheson refused, pleading ‘rheumatick disorders’, along with his desire to return to Ireland, where he hoped ‘to spend the dregs of life among a numerous set of old comerads [sic] and kinsmen’.[136] College business, he explained to a friend some years before, meant that he had little time for research and writing. These problems cannot have been helped by a series of brilliant philosophical works by David Hume, which set out to prove that morality was a purely human creation—or, as we would now say, a social construct. In his Philosophical essays (1748) Hume praised Hutcheson for teaching that morality is ‘entirely relative to the sentiment or mental taste of each particular Being’.[137] It was certainly true that Hutcheson made moral distinctions dependent on our inner feelings or sentiments rather than our reason, but his aim had been to provide Christian values with a new scientific foundation in order to avoid precisely the sort of relativism suggested by Hume. He had already become dissatisfied with his Dublin treatises, and his System made very slow progress. A few years previously, indeed, he had almost abandoned it, finding himself, in spite of a multitude of suggestions from William Bruce and other friends, ‘quite bewildered’.[138]

If Hutcheson ultimately lost confidence in his philosophical projects, this did little to diminish the influence of his writings. About a third of the students who graduated from Glasgow were Irish Presbyterians, or ‘Scoto-Hiberni’ as they appear in the college records. As clergymen, schoolmasters and physicians they played an important role in exporting the Scottish Enlightenment not only to Ireland but also to the American colonies.[139] Some became private tutors, for example James Bruce (a nephew of the printer), who supervised Robert Stewart, the future Lord Londonderry, on his Grand Tour and circulated Hutcheson’s works in Geneva.[140] Others taught in local schools or in the academies, for example the Rev. William Crawford of Strabane, who published a translation of Dissertations on natural theology (1777) by the Genevan post-Calvinist Jean-Alphonse Turrettini, designed to combat ‘dark unintelligible metaphysics’ in favour of ‘real and useful knowledge’. His notes included the claim that the moral sense had been ‘proved to the entire satisfaction of many, by the celebrated Dr Hutcheson’.[141] Another ‘Scoto-Hibernus’, Archibald Maclaine, was responsible for having one of Hutcheson’s works translated into French.[142] Following his studies at Glasgow, Maclaine became assistant to his father-in-law, Robert Milling, at the Scots Church in The Hague. He became an internationally renowned scholar in his own right, best known for his annotated translation of Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical history (1765). In a supplement to the second edition he added an essay defending the Protestant Reformation from the strictures of David Hume, objecting to the frequent references to ‘fanatical and enraged reformers’ in his History of England and his essay ‘Of superstition and enthusiasm’. In a style of argument common to revolutionary apologists, he explained that the intolerance displayed by early Protestants did not stem from the spirit of the Reformation, but was ‘engendered in the bosom of popery’.[143] A further essay sought to demonstrate that Protestantism and science were natural allies:

For as the foundations of popery are a blind submission to an usurped authority over the understandings and consciences of men, and an implicit credulity that adopts, without examination, the miracles and visions, that derive their existence from the crazy brains of fanaticks, or the lucrative artifice of impostors, so it is unquestionably evident, that the progress of sound philosophy, and the spirit of free inquiry it produces, strikes directly at these foundations.[144]

Nothing written by Hutcheson and his Scoto-Hiberni disciples challenged the basic assumption, shared with their latitudarian friends in the Established Church, that Enlightenment was simply the logical continuation of Reformation.

‘POLITENESS, VIRTUE AND LEARNING’: CHARLES O’CONOR

In theory—the confessional theory that underpinned the public sphere in Ascendancy Ireland—the respected antiquarian Charles O’Conor (1710–91) should never have existed. His entire life was spent within the shadowy spaces created by the loopholes and imperfections of the penal code. This gentleman scholar from Roscommon was able to bridge worlds which, according to the statute book, should have been kept rigidly separate. When O’Conor and his friend John Carpenter, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, were both invited to become corresponding members of the Dublin Society in 1770, O’Conor hailed this breakthrough as a ‘revolution in our moral and civil affairs’. In his younger days, he informed his son Denis, ‘such a man would only be spoken to through the medium of a warrant and constable’.[145] This revolution was testimony above all to O’Conor’s own modest diplomacy. For more than two decades he had struggled to make Gaelic antiquity and Catholic devotion politically acceptable, the vindication of the former generally being taken as an implicit argument for the respectability of the latter. He was the chief advocate of the ‘Milesian’ civilisation that had allegedly flourished in Ireland under the legendary king Ollamh Fodhla a millennium before Christ. His Dissertations on the antient history of Ireland (1753) was the primary conduit through which the Milesians and their fabled achievements entered the ‘Anglo-Irish’ literary tradition. And all the while that he was ‘digging in the rubbish of the ancients’ O’Conor was also churning out anonymous political pamphlets designed to undermine the automatic equation of popery and disloyalty which had provided the intellectual justification for the penal code.[146]

In some ways O’Conor was an unlikely advocate of reconciliation. A descendant of Ruaidhrí Ó Conchobhair (Rory O’Conor), the last High-King of Ireland, he belonged to the remnants of Ireland’s displaced Catholic elite. His paternal grandfather had fought with the Jacobites during the Williamite war, and his great-uncle Owen O’Conor had been Jacobite governor of Athlone; the family estate at Belanagare was subsequently forfeited, only a portion being restored on grounds of a legal technicality in 1703. His mother, Mary O’Rourke, was the daughter of a colonel in the French army who was killed fighting in Italy in 1702. Among other relatives, she corresponded with Owen O’Rourke in Vienna, a veteran of the Boyne and Aughrim, who was appointed ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor by ‘James III’ in 1727. With Owen’s support, Father Bernard O’Rourke would later be appointed to the bishopric of Killala in 1739, a position previously held by Charles O’Conor’s uncle Thaddeus O’Rourke. Strictly speaking, under the Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697, both men were outlaws. As Bernard’s coded lobbying with ‘the head Landlord’ [the Pretender] in connection with ‘ye farm of Killala’ [the bishopric] suggests, there are good reasons for assuming that Charles O’Conor would have been familiar with the clandestine world of the Jacobite diaspora.[147]

As far as we know, however, O’Conor never veered from his policy of patient accommodation with the realities of post-revolutionary Britain: accommodation, that is, with the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty, with the ancient ‘Gothic’ constitution, with an Erastian church committed to a latitudinarian theology, and with a commercial society, dedicated to the expansion of trade and the growth of military and naval power overseas. O’Conor was, however improbably, a Gael, a Catholic and a Whig. A few tenuous precedents can be identified. The most significant was the unscrupulous Dermot O’Connor, a scribe and heraldic artist from Limerick, who became associated with a network of Gaelic scholars in Dublin including Seán and Tadhg Ó Neachtain, Stephen Rice and Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín (Hugh MacCurtin). This O’Connor (apparently no relation to Charles) was hired as a translator by the Anglican vicar Anthony Raymond, who had begun work on a corrected edition of Geoffrey Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn in 1719. Unfortunately for Raymond, his assistant absconded to London, where he had the temerity to publish his own translation of Keating’s work, The general history of Ireland (1723), probably with the assistance of John Toland.[148] While still in his teens, Charles O’Conor was also connected to the Ó Neachtain circle, and he quickly became a noted collector of Gaelic manuscripts, including an original text of part of the Annála Ríoghachta Éireann, commonly known as the Annals of the Four Masters, compiled by the Franciscan Mícheál Ó Cléirigh and his assistants at Louvain. Soon he was being approached by anglophone historians seeking translations from the manuscripts in his possession, and thus began the series of contacts and collaborations that would lead to his membership of the Dublin Society’s Committee of Antiquarians. As he confided with characteristic caution to his son, while preparing to dine with Dr Leland of Trinity, ‘I am well, too well perhaps, treated here by the literati.’[149]

Any presentation of Gaelic antiquity in positive terms carried clear political overtones. O’Conor’s source material, after all, was derived from Geoffrey Keating and other scholars, generally associated with the Irish colleges on the European mainland, who repudiated the charges of racial inferiority derived from colonial apologists such as Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies. In the seventeenth century a close ideological link already existed between the myth of an ancient Gaelic civilisation and the doctrinal weaponry of the Counter-Reformation. By the 1720s, however, a number of Anglicans, led by two English bishops, William Nicolson and Francis Hutchinson, had begun to explore the ancient history of their adopted country with more sympathy; they laid the groundwork for the more ambitious projects of Thomas Leland, Thomas Campbell and Edward Ledwich, all Anglican clergymen who flourished in the more liberal atmosphere of the 1770s and 1780s. These antiquarian enthusiasms cannot necessarily be taken as an indication of any political u-turn within the Ascendancy world. Nicolson, indeed, was a fervent supporter of the Declaratory Act of 1720 who feared that the ‘seditious’ example of Archbishop King and Dean Swift was promoting anti-English sentiment in Dublin.[150] That the Gaelic revival of the eighteenth century was spearheaded by Anglican parsons reflected the leisure, learning and access to libraries with which they were privileged; it also followed naturally from their self-image as the successors of the early Irish Christians, who they believed had formed a national church independent of Rome and could therefore be portrayed as Protestant (or even Presbyterian) avant la lettre. Nevertheless, their work brought the Anglican antiquarians into contact with Catholic scholars and collectors such as the Dublin physician John Fergus, the Limerick surgeon Sylvester O’Halloran, and Charles O’Conor himself. It was this delicate rapprochement that enabled Leland, the librarian at Trinity College, to grant O’Conor access to the library’s Gaelic manuscripts in 1766. So devoted was Leland to the pursuit of the pre-colonial past that he once joked to O’Conor that he might have been a Milesian himself, ‘instead of a Cromwellian’.[151] Sadly for O’Conor, his true Cromwellian colours were later to be revealed.

Faced with the ideological rigidity of the Ascendancy regime, and the customary suspicion within the Catholic hierarchy of lay initiatives, O’Conor needed all the moral support he could find. It might be assumed that the philosophes, with their public commitment to a wide range of humanitarian causes, would have denounced the Ascendancy regime in Ireland, but this is not the case. Anyone who consulted the peculiar entry on ‘Irlande’ in the famous Encyclopédie would have learned nothing at all of the penal laws. The island, it blithely explained, was the most considerable ‘des isles britanniques’ after Great Britain, to which it was subjected. The inhabitants were ‘les Bretons’ mixed with Danish and Norman settlers. Although the article touches on ancient history, the climate and the physical landscape, there are two striking silences. On the subject of religion, readers of the Encyclopédie learned simply that the Church of Ireland was divided into four archbishoprics and nineteen bishoprics, but nothing at all about the confessional upheavals of the early modern period. On politics, the author explained that he would not cover the kingdom’s ‘various revolutions’ (ses diverses revolutions), but thought it sufficient to note that ‘there has been peace for a long period; Dublin, the capital, breathes only loyalty and affection to the established government’ (elles paroissent assoupies pour long-temps; Dublin la capitale, ne respire que l’attache et l’affection au governement établi).[152] The complacent author was the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who elsewhere described the plantation of Ulster as a noble enterprise that brought the rule of law and agricultural skills to savage people, and thus ‘introduced humanity and justice to a nation which had never previously risen above the utmost barbarity’.[153]

The celebrated Voltaire also viewed Irish troubles from the perspective of England, where he had spent two formative years in 1726–8. Although he was an admirer of Swift, Berkeley and Toland, there is no indication that he was interested in (or even understood) their backgrounds. Despite his admiration for Swift’s satires—he once noted approvingly that A tale of a tub had done more damage to the Catholic Church than Henry VIII[154]—he said nothing about British policy in Ireland, as denounced in the Drapier’s Letters or the Modest proposal. As for their Catholic countrymen, he seems to have regarded them as ignorant, superstitious, priest-ridden, or simply as an irrelevance. Voltaire’s depiction of the Irish in his poem La bataille de Fontenoy (1745) was not actually unfavourable, though the insufficient attention given to the Irish hero Lally of Tollendal provoked an attack from John Drumgold, a French resident of Irish origins. Later, in his account of the battle of the Boyne in the Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), Voltaire commented that the Irish, though they fought well for France and Spain, made bad soldiers at home, and were inferior to the English intellectually, economically and militarily. ‘There are some nations’, he remarked, ‘which seem to be made to be subject to another’, prompting further objections from a Catholic Irishman in the Mercure de France of June 1753.[155] The Siècle de Louis XIV had condemned the Sun King, not only for revoking the Edict of Nantes, but for his recognition of James III as King of England. Like all Enlightenment histories, it also deplored the jurisdictional encroachments of Rome over civil authority, and Voltaire applauded the Four Gallican Articles of 1682, which (he believed) had liberated the French clergy from papal supremacy by subordinating them to that of their king.[156] Voltaire’s French experience, as Graham Gargett comments, meant that he always regarded the Catholic clergy as ‘the perpetrators rather than the potential victims of persecution’.[157] Not surprisingly, then, he compared the Ulster rising of 1641 to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, whose anniversary he apparently marked each year by throwing up.[158]

The problem was partly that the philosophes (with the usual exception of Rousseau) were captivated by les anglais, and that the groans of Ireland were drowned out by praise of the mixed constitution, religious diversity and freedom of the press that existed across the channel. For the most part, French knowledge of Ireland was second-hand, derived from the hostile accounts of English observers. In the second half of the eighteenth century a few ‘native’ sources of information became available, such as Bishop John O’Brien’s ‘Mémoire’ on Macpherson’s Ossian in the Journal des Savants of 1764. The only substantial treatment, however, was the Abbé James MacGeoghegan’s Histoire d’Irlande (1758–62), probably the most important piece of Irish Jacobite scholarship published during the eighteenth century. But when the second and third volumes of his work were brought before Malesherbes, the French censor well-known for his attempts to shelter the philosophes, MacGeoghegan was ordered to delete a passage in which the Irish were described as ‘forced to submit to a hateful yoke’.[159] As negotiations to bring the Seven Years War to an end continued, Malesherbes was anxious not to offend the British government, a telling indication of French priorities.

It would be comforting to conclude that the indifference of the philosophes towards Ireland resulted from a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, but this is not a fully adequate explanation. The devotion to Rome and to the Stuart dynasty praised by MacGeoghegan were unlikely to win sympathy in the Parisian salons. The French enlighteners, moreover, had at least some direct experience of the Irish through the presence of the Irish seminaries—there were 180 Irish students in Paris alone—but these convents, with their monastic privileges and theological obscurantism, were reminders of everything that seemed most offensive about the Catholic Church. Something of the reputation acquired by the Irish clerics is revealed by the contemporary usage of the term Hibernois to mean someone given to theological disputation and outmoded scholastic learning. In the 1739 Lamartinière dictionary, ‘hair-splitter’ is offered as one meaning of Hibernois, since the Paris Irish were renowned for the ‘philosophical frivolities over which they quarrel with great subtlety and noise’.[160] In the major port of Bordeaux, meanwhile, Baron de Montesquieu must have encountered the forty students at the Irish college there; indeed, it was an Irish Jesuit, Bernard Routh, who tried to convert Montesquieu on his deathbed.[161] The reputation of the Irish colleges lies behind the unflattering portrait drawn by Montesquieu in the thirty-sixth of his Persian Letters of ‘an entire nation, expelled from its native land, to cross the seas and settle in France, without any means of subsistence except a formidable talent for disputation’ (une nation entière chassèe de son pays, traverser les mers pour s’établir en France n’emportant avec elle pour parer aux necessités de la vie, qu’un redoubtable talent pour la dispute).[162]

There was one aspect of Enlightenment thought, however, which was more hospitable towards the Catholic Irish. This was the new science of political economy, defined not just in the narrow sense, but as ‘a more complex, and more ideological, enterprise aimed at establishing the moral, political, cultural, and economic conditions of life in advancing commercial societies’.[163] By the 1690s a new field of study called ‘political arithmetic’ had been pioneered by the Anglo-Irish natural philosopher and administrator Sir William Petty (1623–87) and was already bringing statistical precision to the investigation of agriculture, industry and population. During the two great continental wars that followed the accession of William III attention was focused increasingly on the shifting social and economic foundations of the British state, as the creation of the Bank of England and the National Debt revolutionised finances and a new preoccupation with England’s preeminent position as a trading nation took hold. In his comparative study of intellectual life in Scotland and Naples, John Robertson makes a persuasive case for putting the emergence of political economy ‘as a systematic explanation of economic behaviour and guide to policy’ at the very centre of the Enlightenment.[164]

Ireland was a ‘backward’ kingdom, rather like Scotland and Naples, on the periphery of Europe. The famine of 1728–9 stimulated a new concern for agricultural and industrial improvement which found an institutional focus with the foundation of the Dublin Society (1731). Within the space of a few years an impressive series of economic treatises had appeared in Dublin, including Sir John Browne’s Seasonable remarks on trade (1728) and Arthur Dobbs’s Essay on the trade and improvement of Ireland (1729–31), all of them unjustly neglected by historians who have preferred Swift’s gruesome Modest proposal. They were soon followed by Bishop Berkeley’s famous Querist, issued in three parts in 1735, 1736 and 1737, perhaps the most original contribution to monetary theory before David Hume’s Essays; and by Reflections and resolutions for the gentlemen of Ireland (1738), a lengthy manifesto for improvement written by Berkeley’s friend, the Rev. Samuel Madden.[165] Another member of this group, the Limerick merchant David Bindon, produced the first English translation of Jean-François Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce (1738), a key study of economic competition between commercial societies. It was launched with the support of 535 subscribers, ranging from the Archbishop of Armagh and a strong showing of Anglican bishops, to politicians and office-holders such as John Bowes, Luke Gardiner, Robert Jocelyn and Nathaniel Clements, grandees like Lord Grandison, bankers such as Latouche and Henry, Dissenters like John Abernethy and James Arbuckle, and a variety of Catholics such as Sir Edward Bellew, the Coppingers, Pierce Creagh and James Cantillon.

Although the literature of improvement ranged widely over such standard subjects as absenteeism, the moral dangers of importing luxury goods, currency questions and the need to create employment, it had direct political implications for the penal system. A common theme of the improvers was the pragamatic acceptance of Ireland’s dependent status following the passage of the Declaratory Act in 1720, and the search for alternative outlets for patriotism, chiefly in schemes for cultural and economic reform. ‘Our remedies’, as Madden warned, ‘must begin with ourselves rather than our neighbours.’[166] Increasingly, it became obvious that this domestic patriotism required a re-evaluation of traditional attitudes towards Catholicism. The inventor of political arithmetic, Sir William Petty, had already suggested that the proverbial laziness of the Irish derived from ‘want of Imployment and Encouragement’ rather than ‘the natural abundance of Flegm in their Bowels and Blood’. The real problem with the natives, in his view, was the potato-based diet ‘where of the Labour of one Man can feed forty’.[167] In 1729 Arthur Dobbs, M.P. for Carrickfergus and later governor of North Carolina, calculated that £325,000 was lost by the observance of ‘popish’ holy days, and called for laws to be implemented more rigorously to make the natives work; but Dobbs also came to the more novel conclusion that it was the shortness of the leases available to papists that caused them to ‘waste and impoverish’ the land.[168] Madden reiterated the standard line that popery was the chief cause of the idleness and misery of the population. Not only were the Irish impoverished by the maintenance of priests, friars, monasteries, the cost of pilgrimages, penances, confessions, absolutions, dispensations and indulgences, but the observance of Lent was damaging their health. Yet Madden was also surprisingly optimistic that the increase of wealth among Catholic merchants and ‘mechanicks’ had facilitated their assimilation to the language and manners of the English, and would eventually lead to the adoption of the same religion too. Until this happened, he maintained, Ireland could never prosper, for the religious animosity that divided its inhabitants ‘makes us Spiritless and unactive, as a Paralytick body when one half of it is dead or just dragg’d about by the other’.[169]

In spite of their faith in the ultimate objectives of the penal code, Dobbs and Madden represented a decisive shift from earlier writers on Irish trade, whose analyses were premised upon the intractability of competing sectarian interests. The Kerry merchant Francis Brewster, for example, had opposed the English Woollen Bill of 1698 because it would destroy the wealth of ‘the English Interest and the Established Church’ and conversely favour the Presbyterians, who monopolised the linen manufacture.[170] Alternatively, staunch Whigs like Molesworth favoured the naturalisation of foreign Protestants, even if (or especially if) this obstructed the narrow brand of Anglicanism symbolised by the sacramental test. In the 1690s it was generally accepted that Irish policies must be designed to further Protestant colonisation of the island so that Connacht could become another Ulster.[171] This aspiration still survived in the attenuated form of schemes for the settlement of northern weavers on southern estates, and Madden himself deplored the fact that Ulster Presbyterians were emigrating to the American colonies when they should be migrating instead to Munster and Connacht. It was nevertheless Madden’s opinion, reflecting the more complex economics of the 1730s, that Ireland’s sects were ‘closely united, and must as inevitably flourish and decay together’.[172] Similar views were repeated in an economic tract entitled Some considerations on the laws which incapacitate papists from purchasing lands (1739), perhaps the first serious proposal for Catholic relief. The Irish, declared the anonymous author, were ‘a prolifick, strong and healthy people’, whose successes overseas proved that their supposed indolence was in fact the result of ‘some unhappy Circumstances under which they lye oppressed at Home’. In a ringing phrase he went on to warn that the incapacity of the majority to acquire property gave rise to two imaginary interests, ‘of the People against the Power of the Nation, and of the Power of the Nation against the People’.[173]

This style of economic patriotism culminated in the writings of the philosopher George Berkeley, who returned to Ireland as the Bishop of Cloyne in 1734. Unlike the other works considered here, Berkeley’s Querist, with its innovative argument that money should really be regarded as ‘a ticket or counter’, merits a mention in any history of political economy.[174] It was also unusual among improvement tracts in arguing that Ireland needed not more foreign commerce but less. There was no point, Berkeley thought, in an underdeveloped agricultural nation trying to emulate England, France or Holland by exporting the resources that were so desperately needed to feed its own starving population. Berkeley’s image of Ireland as a ‘vile matron’ who gave away or squandered ‘the necessaries of life from her naked and famished children, in exchange for pearls to stick in her hair’ is as memorable as anything found in Swift. Against the established mercantilist view that the export trade was the key to national prosperity, Berkeley argued that the wealth of a nation consisted in its ability to feed, clothe and provide homes for all its inhabitants. The object of state policy should be to stimulate industrious habits among the dirty, slothful people of Ireland by creating the desire to consume meat and wear shoes. This could only be done, he concluded, with the development of a self-sufficient economy, a national bank responsible to the legislature, and the circulation of a paper currency. Like his friends in the Dublin Society, Berkeley was convinced that any scheme for ‘the Welfare of this Nation’ ought to encompass ‘the whole Inhabitants’. One of his queries (slipping, as he tended to, between religious, ethnic and social categories) asked whether ‘it be not a vain attempt, to project the flourishing of our Protestant Gentry, exclusive of the Bulk of the Natives?’[175] In his final economic pamphlet, A word to the wise (1749), Berkeley appealed directly to the Roman Catholic clergy, ‘as my Countrymen, as Fellow-Subjects, as professing Belief in the same Christ’, in his campaign to rectify the laziness of the Irish. If Catholics in France, Flanders and Piedmont were capable of working and washing, then why not in Ireland?[176]

This anticipated the pragmatic line taken by O’Conor in his own anonymous publications. For O’Conor, caught between the hostility of the establishment to the principles of popery, and the desire of the church hierarchy to maintain its monopoly over Catholic public utterances, pamphleteering was a risky and complicated business—hence the many references to the need for ‘the greatest caution and secrecy’ in his letters.[177] His tracts were published anonymously, for O’Conor knew that his intended audience, the members of the House of Commons, were unlikely to be swayed by the arguments of a Catholic.[178] He wrote in the guise of a liberal Protestant, and explicitly praised the examples of Madden and especially Berkeley.[179] Above all, O’Conor sprinkled references to Montesquieu throughout his pro-Catholic pamphlets.[180] Not only had Montesquieu analysed the political systems of various nations in relation to their physical and climatic influences and their social and historical developments, but he was also an opponent of penal laws—not surprisingly for a Frenchman who was married to a Hugnuenot and who was a descendant of Protestants himself. The argument had frequently been made that the persecution of religious minorities, often associated with particular trades or professions, was damaging to economic prosperity. In Ireland the Presbyterian clergy complained that Anglican restrictions had driven thousands of Ulster weavers to the American colonies. Just as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was believed to have hindered the commercial development of France, O’Conor contended that the Irish penal laws discouraged labour, drained the island of specie, and left Catholic tenants with no interest in reclaiming or improving land. In April 1757, a year of famine conditions in his native Roscommon, he lamented the fact that one million Irish were leading the lazy life of a pasturage economy, resulting in depopulation. ‘One Part . . . of this Nation’, he remarked in a close echo of Madden, ‘lyes a dead and insupportable Burden on the other.’[181]

The same ideological commitments shaped O’Conor’s reconstructions of Irish antiquity. His Dissertations on the antient history of Ireland (1753), dedicated to Robert Jocelyn, president of the Physico-Historical Society, set out to prove that Ireland had been characterised by ‘Politeness, Virtue and Learning’ before the Norman invasions. In politics, he asserted, the ancient inhabitants of Ireland held regular elections, and their monarchs were ‘under the Restraint of Popular Councils’, much like the Carthaginians, Spartans, Romans or ‘the Gothic Governments, so much celebrated by some modern Writers’. Their extensive trading interests made them ‘the prime Emporium of the Northern Commerce’. The custodians of the past, it is pleasing to report, received state funding, in the form of hereditary endowments for the ‘Fileas’ (i.e filí, the traditional bardic caste). Above all, the wise Milesians had opposed the use of force or compulsion in religious matters. As a critic of the penal code, O’Conor had sought to turn the tables on the Protestants by suggesting that the infliction of pains and penalties on the grounds of religious belief was ‘Popish Ecclesiastical Policy, in Disguise’—a legacy of Catholic corruption which had no place in a more philosophical age. As an enlightened historian, he deplored the encroachments of ecclesiastical authority upon civil society, expressing his admiration for the early popes and missionaries who avoided interfering with civil authority ‘whatever those of later Times might have essayed’. In language deliberately designed to appeal to liberal Anglicans, he continued:

It were to be wished that this was still the Case, without temporal Rewards to allure, Incapacities to corrupt, and Inquisitions to torture Men into the true Religion; and until this is the Case, until Government desists from the Encouragement of Apostacy, and consequently of every kind of hypocritic Immorality, it will be Burlesque to talk of Liberty in the Sense that the wise Antients understood it: On any other Terms, sacred Freedom is, in Fact, but a mere Monopoly, and the Property only of those, who are compelled to come in.[182]

Pierre Bayle had published a classic work on toleration in 1696 entitled Commentaire philosophique sur les paroles de Jésus Christ ‘Contrains les d’entrer’ (A philosophical commentary on the words of Jesus Christ ‘Compel them to come in’). The same text, from Luke 14: 23, was the basis of Bishop Synge’s The case of toleration consider’d (1725), discussed in Chapter 5 below. Ancient Ireland was thus the kind of place where an enlightened Huguenot refugee or a liberal Anglican bishop might easily have felt at home, and a model for the tolerant society which O’Conor tirelessly promoted for more than three decades.

CONCLUSION: THE REVOLUTIONS OF IRELAND

By the 1760s the failure of Ireland to produce a ‘philosophical’ historian was becoming an embarrassment. Philosophical, in this context, meant impartial—understood in typically Enlightenment terms as distanced from the political and ecclesiastical factionalism that disfigured the early modern era. It also implied an interest in the structural changes—in the distribution of land, the control of the military force, the development of manners—that underpinned political ‘revolutions’. The hope that Ireland might yet be blessed with a Robertson or a Hume was shared by Protestant and Catholic scholars alike. David Hume had set new literary standards with his revisionist History of England (1754–62), which exploded the myth of the ancient English constitution and revealed the menacing role of religious enthusiasm in shaping party conflict. William Robertson, leader of the ‘moderate’ faction in the Church of Scotland and principal of Edinburgh University, was best known for his three-volume History of the reign of Charles V (1769). This work began with a magisterial overview of the ‘Progress of Society in Europe’ from the fall of the Roman Empire, combining the socio-economic analysis typical of the Scottish school with admirably polished prose. For a Hibernian Robertson or Hume, of course, the intractability of ethnic and sectarian divisions would present a daunting challenge. No other example could be found, as Archbishop King had once observed, ‘of a country above 500 years in the possession of a people without settling it in a prospect of peace or bringing the conquered into the interest of the conquerors’.[183] Whether the problem was posed in terms of English oppression or Irish lawlessness, the enduring violence and instability that characterised Irish history required a ‘philosophical’ explanation.

The problem involved bridging the gap between two apparently irreconcilable viewpoints. The Catholic question, as Clare O’Halloran has noted in her authoritative survey of the subject, was the ‘critical sub-text’ in most Irish antiquarian writing.[184] Attitudes towards the eighteenth-century penal code still shaped scholarly interpretations of the Gaelic polity that existed before the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century. The growing tendency among liberal Protestants such as Leland to depict brehon law in a more positive light seemed to go hand-in-hand with the extension of religious toleration in the 1770s, and was abruptly reversed during the Rightboy disturbances of the later 1780s. Then, as in more recent times, Irish historians revealed their prejudices more freely in private. Edward Ledwich, a trenchant critic of the Milesian myth, informed one fellow antiquarian that it was a moral duty to praise the English, who had ‘humanised the Irish, who otherwise at this day would be perfect babars’; consequently, he should steer clear of John Curry and ‘the scribbling popish friars’.[185] But the key test of loyalties was still the Ulster rising of 1641, the horrors of which, recalled each 23 October, provided the justification for the penal code. The motives behind the rising, the role of the priesthood and the extent of the massacres committed by Catholics were still debated with ferocity. Even Hume, whose sceptical History of England (1754) had overturned so many sacred cows, uncritically followed Sir John Temple’s Irish rebellion (1646) in his account of the Ulster massacres. Accustomed to discovering the two Christian diseases of ‘superstition’ and ‘enthusiasm’ at the bottom of every civil disturbance, Hume saw 1641 as the natural product of popery, ‘the most violent efforts of barbarism and bigotry united’. The discreet lobbying of O’Conor and Curry, aided by Edmund Burke in London, eventually persuaded Hume to moderate his tone in the 1770 edition of his work, with the rather anticlimactic result that ‘barbarous savages’ was changed to ‘enraged rebels’ and ‘insulting butchers’ softened to ‘insulting foes’.[186]

Philosophical history did not take root in Irish soil. John Curry, a Catholic physician and a close ally of O’Conor, entered the fray with Historical memoirs of the rebellion of 1641 (1758), in which he contended that the Catholic atrocities in Ulster had been greatly exaggerated, and that they had been provoked by misrule. In London Burke made sure that Curry was received favourably in the Critical Review, even though O’Conor himself felt that the result was ‘a mere justification on our side, and a disguised invective on the other’.[187] O’Conor pinned his hopes on the college librarian Thomas Leland, whose History of Ireland from the invasion of Henry II (1773) covered the entire modern period up to the Williamite war, but was, unfortunately, a flop. Another, more promising candidate was Thomas Campbell, an Anglican parson from County Tyrone who had spent time with Dr Johnson and his literary circle in London. His Philosophical survey of the south of Ireland (1777), although in many respects an endorsement of Ascendancy values, contained the following memorable critique of the penal laws:

We keep the Irish dark and ignorant, and then we wonder how they can be so enthralled by superstition; we make them poor and unhappy, and then we wonder that they are so prone to tumult and disorder; we tie up their hands, so that they have no inducements to industry, and then we wonder that they are so lazy and indolent.[188]

Campbell’s plans for a modern history, to be entitled The revolutions of Ireland received the encouragement of O’Conor and Burke, but were never completed. Since his preliminary sketch on the Irish constitution, published in 1783, turned out to be a demolition of the patriot tradition from Molyneux to Grattan, this was perhaps no bad thing.

In the 1760s, and again in the 1780s, Charles O’Conor himself gathered materials for a study of laws, manners and politics since the second century. This project too was to be called The revolutions of Ireland, but it never materialised. No doubt he had other scholarly priorities, being repeatedly distracted by continuing controversies over the pre-colonial period. But it is tempting to speculate that O’Conor may also have been deterred by the periodic intrusion of sectarian disputes in Irish political life. In April 1765 he interrupted his antiquarian work to supply Burke with an analysis of the Whiteboy insurrection, which he saw as a class conflict between the Munster cottagers and their (Catholic) landlords. With bitter sarcasm, he described reluctantly turning from his favourite ‘ages of barbarism and ignorance’ to ‘our own enlightened days of good sense and sound policy’.[189] A prolonged and highly irregular legal campaign led to the execution of Father Nicholas Sheehy in Clonmel, a victim of local Protestant bigotry (see Chapter 9). Even O’Conor, normally so optimistic and politique in his outlook, was despondent. When Patrick Delany, one-time companion of Swift and still a prominent literary figure, praised the Dissertations, adding charitably that he wished the author might free himself from the ‘Chains of Rome’, O’Conor was furious. ‘I should march along with Sheehy, Buxton and Farrell to the fatal Tree’, he wrote to Curry, ‘rather than enjoy the few remaining Days under the Guilt of Infamy and Apostasy!’[190]

Of all the false starts and displacements that characterised the search for Ireland’s philosophical historian, however, the greatest related to Edmund Burke himself. In the early 1760s, while he was serving as secretary to William Gerard Hamilton at Dublin Castle, Burke was rumoured to be writing a history of Ireland. He certainly drafted a substantial analysis of the penal laws at this time, which he gave to John Curry of the Catholic Committee. Against ‘those miserable performances which go about under the names of Histories of Ireland’, he sought to demonstrate that the 1641 rebellion was the direct product of religious persecution.[191] This work, written against the background of the Whiteboy disturbances in Munster, was abandoned without publication, perhaps for career reasons (Curry certainly believed that Burke had temporarily dropped his Catholic correspondents because ‘he has been publicly Maltreated in the English Newspapers for favouring Us’).[192]

It used to be common to present Burke’s thought as a ‘revolt against the eighteenth century’, in the sense that his work supplied an antidote to the excesses of the Enlightenment, with its elevation of cold reason above revealed religion and tradition.[193] Such readings focus on his Reflections on the revolution in France, where Burke presented the French Revolution as a conspiracy of alienated intellectuals against church and state, inspired by the impious vacuities of Voltaire and Rousseau. In England the revolution was welcomed by the Rev. Richard Price, a Rational Dissenter admired by radicals everywhere (and once, incidentally, invited to become minister of Belfast’s First Presbyterian meeting-house).[194] Against Price’s depiction of the English constitution as a social contract in which the people retained the right to ‘cashier’ their governors for misconduct, Burke famously argued that society was founded upon a contract of duties and obligations rather than natural rights, a contract spanning generations, made between ‘those who are living . . . those who are dead and those who are to be born’.[195]

Yet Burke was no romantic, nor did he show any nostalgia for the pre-modern world. He saw himself rather as the spokesman for the distinctive form of modernity that had emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, and above all in the commercialised polity of England. If anything, Burke believed, it was the revolutionaries who were turning the clock back by plunging Europe into a new war of religion, or something very like it. His historical understanding of European civilisation, founded upon the ‘spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion’, owed much to Robertson and even to the atheistical Hume. Above all, he was indebted to Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), with its core message that the bewildering diversity of human laws and political institutions could only be understood in terms of the specific social and environmental conditions of each nation. The first English translation of Montesquieu’s masterpiece, amended with the co-operation of the author himself, was carried out in 1750 by Thomas Nugent, generally thought to be the brother of Burke’s father-in-law Christopher Nugent.[196] That Burke knew him, like so much else about his Irish connections, is tempting to suppose, if difficult to prove. At any rate, his admiration for The spirit of the laws was consistent from his unpublished Abridgement of English history (1757) to his Appeal from the new to the old Whigs (1791). Most recent scholars have accordingly stressed Burke’s debt to the Enlightenment, or at least the moderate strands of it. The Reflections on the revolution in France, as Richard Bourke comments, forms ‘an Enlightenment defence of European civilisation against what appeared to him to be a resurgent and highly politicised kind of fanaticism’.[197]

What is most striking about Burke’s writings on Ireland is that they revolve around the theme of conquest and its legacies. None of the other writers discussed above, or the various coteries and constituencies they represented, addressed centrally the problem that has recently dominated the agenda of so many cultural critics: the colonial character of Irish political and social structures. Molyneux’s Case of Ireland stated, strange though it might seem, was principally concerned to deny that Ireland had ever been conquered in the first place. Toland was periodically interested in pre-Norman Ireland, but primarily as a means of extending his polemic against modern priestcraft; his own political loyalties were framed by the European struggle against Louis XIV, and he was a consistent supporter of the Protestant succession in the British Isles. Hutcheson’s System of moral philosophy (1755) dealt extensively with the rights of conquest and, more unusually, with the relationship between mother countries and colonies; yet his remarks were directed at the problems of long-distance rule involved in ‘grand unwieldy empires’.[198] O’Conor, like all antiquarians, narrated the invasion of Ireland by successive colonies, and more controversially condemned the medieval English setters as a ‘set of turbulent free-booters, who denied the natives the benefit of the law’. Yet he interpreted the modern plantations primarily in the context of the wars of religion that had set Europe ‘ablaze’ for two centuries.[199] As we have seen repeatedly in this chapter, that feature which more than anything else defined Irish resistance to England, loyalty to Counter-Reformation Catholicism, was regarded as the antithesis of everything the enlighteners stood for. Even O’Conor could not openly contest the basic assumption that English colonisation was ultimately a beneficial, essentially modernising force in Irish history.

Like Protestant apologists from Sir John Davies to William King, Burke attributed Irish instability to incomplete conquest, though he naturally drew different conclusions. In all other countries, he observed, the passage of time had ‘blended and coalited the conquerors with the conquered’. Thus the Normans had been gradually ‘softened’ into the English; the Romans had become intermixed with the Gauls. Only the Protestant settlers in Ireland continued to see themselves as ‘a sort of colonial garrison to keep the natives in subjection to the other state of Great Britain’. What was more unusual, however, was Burke’s discovery that the modern revolutions of Ireland were not really ‘a contest between two religious factions’ at all, but, at a more profound level, a clash between ‘two adverse nations’.[200] Whether for good or ill, Burke did not extend these insights into a general critique of colonial expansion per se, or a more general exploration of national hatreds. The history of Europe, after all, was the history of the expansion of some societies at the expense of others, and ultimately Burke provided no explanation for the strange aberrations of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. It seems very probable, however, that his Irish experiences help to explain Burke’s preoccupation with the ethics of political power. In his analyses of Ireland after the Williamite settlement, of Bengal after the battle of Plassey, and even of France after August 1789, Burke was continually forced to grapple with both the moral and political dimensions of conquest and pacification within an imperial and an international framework.[201] Among the Irish political and philosophical writers of the eighteenth century, he was the only one to see that religious zeal was not the only enemy of Enlightenment, and that the progress of civil society was threatened by new ideologies and hatreds every bit as murderous as the superstition and enthusiasm of the past.

3

Ireland and the Ancien Régime

How should we characterise the social world inhabited by eighteenth-century Irish men and women? Contemporary visitors, struck by the great social and cultural chasm between the landed gentry and the common people, sometimes searched for exotic parallels to describe what they saw. The Irish poor, observed Lord Chesterfield, ‘are used worse than negroes by their lords and masters, and their deputies of deputies of deputies’.[1] In an elaborate comparison between Ireland and southern Africa, Lord Clonmell cast the English administration in the role of Dutch planters, with the common people apparently as ‘divided, oppressed, pillaged and abused’ as the Hottentots.[2] Eye-catching comments such as these have long proved irresistible to many historical and literary scholars. They are certainly more memorable than the measured reflections on the lower orders just as frequently found in elite sources. The gentlemen and common people of Ireland, it is worth remembering, were still recognisably gentlemen and common people, and the division of society into ‘sorts’ or ‘orders’ was well established. As the influence of post-colonial literary criticism on Irish studies has grown, however, the well-worn Hottentot references have been dusted off and pressed into service once again, drowning out the more humdrum social vocabularies that framed contemporary discourse.

Unfortunately it is rare to find the close analysis of literary texts combined with a serious exploration of social and economic relationships. In a thoughtful introduction to post-colonial criticism in Ireland, Joe Cleary has sought to defend the view that ‘it is the wider historical and geographical span of modern colonial capitalism that constitutes the proper contextual frame for the study of modern Irish society’.[3] Building on the typologies suggested by the comparative sociologist George Fredrickson, he argues that the Protestant Ascendancy resembled the settler colonies of South America. Like Creole nationalists, eighteenth-century ‘patriots’ fought a war on two fronts, struggling to maintain their monopoly of privilege against both the native population and the interference of the mother country. Such comparisons deserve to be pursued. To date, however, most post-colonial scholars have been concerned with the analysis of discursive systems of representation, rather than social structures. The economic specialists, for their part, have inherited a strong distrust of literary sources. The pioneering research of Louis Cullen during the 1960s and 1970s, after all, showed us that England’s restrictive policy on the export of Irish woollens, which provoked Molyneux’s celebrated Case of Ireland stated, actually had little impact on Irish trade; that Gaelic poetry did not reflect the mental and material conditions of ordinary people but of comfortable Catholic farmers; and that a Catholic big-farm interest was able to thrive during the eighteenth century in spite of the bleak portrait of the penal era relayed by numerous Catholic pamphlets.[4]

The last two decades have seen the development of a rival tendency, pulling eighteenth-century scholars in contrary directions. A number of historians have emphasised the similarities between Ireland and other societies of ancien régime Europe.[5] The continental terminology given to this approach, as we saw in the introduction, conceals a rather unusual paternity. The term ‘ancien régime’ and its ecclesiastical counterpart, the ‘confessional state’, were borrowed from the British historian Jonathan Clark, who led a controversial crusade against the ‘Whig’ interpretation of English history in the 1980s. Defining himself as a ‘revisionist’ outsider in a profession dominated by liberals and Marxists, Clark protested that the Hanoverian period had been completely distorted by left-wing historians obsessed with social and economic change, class conflict and ‘radical’ movements for parliamentary reform. The key features of the era, Clark countered, were not these precocious intimations of modernity, but rather its traditionalism: this was a hierarchical society, bound together by ties of patronage and deference, dominated by an aristocratic elite, an assertive monarchy and established religion. Clark’s ad hominem attacks on the grand old men of British historiography caused a sensation, now largely forgotten. Scholars who had been burrowing away for years in the unfashionable niches of ecclesiastical history were thrilled, as the differences between ‘Arian’ and ‘Socinian’ views of the Trinity were discussed in excited seminar rooms. Specialists trained in the reconstruction of Augustan high politics or Hanoverian foreign policy were surprised to find that their archival research had suddenly become ‘relevant’. Outside these fields, meanwhile, there was outrage. As one recent survey of English historiography comments, Clark became ‘probably the most hated living historian’ in Britain.[6]

Somewhat perversely, Irish historians appropriated the concept of the ancien régime not from the École des Hautes Études in Paris but from All Souls College, Oxford. It is a striking illustration of our dependence on English historiographical models. Clark’s notion of an English ancien régime, furthermore, was not underpinned by a sustained engagement with French historiography. Instead the unfamiliar continental terminology served primarily as a device to warn his readers that the eighteenth century should not be coupled together with the nineteenth in one single Whig narrative of benign progression. On a conceptual level, this remains Clark’s greatest contribution: the idea of a ‘long’ eighteenth century (1660–1832), disconnected from the vocabulary of nineteenth-century political and social science, conceived of in terms of religious beliefs rather than liberalism or radicalism, and dynastic allegiance rather than nationality. Similarly, in Irish history the notion has helped us to understand that eighteenth-century political mentalities were often very different from those associated with nineteenth-century nationalism. Sean Connolly, the major exponent of this view, aims not to construct ‘a tight sociological model’, but rather to emphasise that corporate privilege, massive social inequality and ‘the concentration of political power in the hands of a propertied elite’ were not peculiar to Hanoverian Ireland but were the norm throughout eighteenth-century Europe.[7] Connolly’s carefully crafted book has been subjected to much criticism and a fair amount of misjudged abuse. His adoption of the ancien régime terminology has been regarded in some quarters as a ‘rhetoric of normalisation’, an attempt to exonerate the Protestant Ascendancy from well-founded accusations of brutality and exploitation.[8] Faced with these sometimes acrimonious debates, the average reader might well throw up his or her hands in despair.

Fortunately there is in fact a large area of agreement between the two tendencies. Joe Cleary has engaged fully with the chief objections raised by historians against post-colonial perspectives. He accepts, for example, that the Irish did not generally identify with colonised peoples outside in Asia or Africa, but tended to compare themselves with white settler groups (such as French Canadians in the 1770s) rather than indigenous peoples. By the late eighteenth century, indeed, they were already participating, like the Scots, in the imperial enterprise. The languages of opposition to British rule, such as Jacobitism, patriotism and republicanism, were not ‘anti-colonial’ in character, but closely conformed to British and European ideological patterns. Connolly, meanwhile, acknowledges that the expropriation of native landowners and the plantation settlements that occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had no equivalent in western Europe. He recognises that ‘vertical’ attachments between landlords and tenants which promoted social stability elsewhere were disrupted by the exclusion of Catholics from the state-sponsored festivities that defined the public sphere. The differences are not so much about the facts but about how much weight should be placed upon them. There is no need, then, to cast the ancien régime and the colonial frameworks as mutually exclusive approaches. Connolly himself has suggested that the key to Ireland lies in its ambiguity: ‘too physically close and too similar to Great Britain to be treated as a colony, but too separate and too different to be a region of the metropolitan centre; inheriting an undoubted division between settler and native, yet without the racial distinctions that could make these absolute’.[9] This in-betweenness, sometimes obscured by the overheated polemics of historiograhical debates, is precisely where the fascination of eighteenth-century Ireland lies.

‘A VERY GOOD COUNTRY TO LIVE IN’

The amiable and reflective judge Edward Willes (1704–68) is not one of the better-known commentators on eighteenth-century Ireland, but his correspondence captures neatly the blend of the outlandish and the familiar which so often struck foreign visitors. One of many Englishmen appointed to the Irish judicial bench, Willes had enjoyed a successful if unspectacular career before his appointment as Chief Baron of the Irish Court of Exchequer in 1757. During nine happy years in Ireland he received ‘great civilities’ from the ‘natives’ (meaning the Protestant nobility and gentry) and he came to lament the unfounded prejudices of his own countrymen concerning their neighbours across the water.[10] The years he spent in Ireland, dominated by the Seven Years War (1756–63), have all too often been neglected by historians. This was in fact a vital transitional period. Ireland was still recovering from the famine of 1740–41, which led to the deaths of between 12 and 20 per cent of the population, and the near-famine of 1744–5.[11] Yet signs of prosperity could be detected in most parts of the island. In the political world, the fears revived by the Jacobite invasion of Britain in 1745 were still fresh, and the landing of Thurot at Carrickfergus in 1760 rattled nerves once more. In Munster the predictable rumours of French agents operating in Ireland were revived by the Whiteboy disturbances which broke out in Tipperary in 1761, and rumours of planned massacres of Protestants were circulated.[12] Yet the crisis of 1744–5 proved to be the last invasion scare which led to the precautionary machinery of penal laws being cranked into gear: at the outbreak of the Seven Years War magistrates went through the motions of arresting Archbishop Michael O’Reilly of Armagh, but the chapels remained open. This was not such a bad time, then, for a newcomer to take the temperature of social relations in Hanoverian Ireland.

For the most part, Willes’s detailed observations, carefully recorded for his patron the Earl of Warwick, steer clear of the pejorative references to barbarism that other, less curious visitors found. Having made all five judicial circuits—Leinster, Munster, Connacht, the North-West and the North-East—Willes decided that, all in all, Ireland was a fine country, even if underdeveloped agriculture and low population density left it half a century behind England.[13] He noted all around him the indications of the long era of economic growth that had begun in the 1740s and would stretch right into the 1800s. Predictably, perhaps, he praised the diffusion of industry in Ulster, which he thought well-cultivated, populous and even beautiful: ‘Every little cabin has an orchard and garden belonging to it, and spinning or weaving or some branch of the linnen trade going on.’ At its peak, in the 1780s, linen-weaving involved one in five Ulstermen of all denominations. Like other English visitors, Willes found the ‘improved’ landscape of the north congenial, and was much taken by its neat dwellings and bleach-yards, but the pleasant surprises did not stop there. In County Meath he was impressed by the magnificence of the gentlemen’s seats and commented that ‘the taste of building and improving seems to be the universal passion of the kingdom’.[14] Admittedly, he noted two great exceptions to Ireland’s economic progress, in Kerry and in the rough terrain of the Mourne Mountains. Crossing the latter, where he discovered that Lord Annesley was blowing up rocks and draining bogs, he remarked that the smoky cabins of the Irish were like ‘Indian huts and I presume the inhabitants not much better’.[15] More often, however, the comparisons he drew were with England: the ruined castles of Leinster, for example, reminded him of Kenilworth in his home county of Warwickshire. Much of the countryside, he thought, resembled Dorsetshire or Devonshire; Meath was exactly like Northamptonshire; while the poor housing of the Cork well-to-do called to mind ‘the worst part of Holborn’.[16]

In addition to the geological curiosities so beloved of eighteenth-century travellers, Willes was naturally struck by repeated reminders of Ireland’s turbulent past. At Cong he visited a tomb reputed to be that of Rory O’Conor, the last High-King of Ireland, in the beautiful ruins of an old abbey. On several occasions he described the remnants of ecclesiastical buildings which were still revered by the common people; at Ballinrobe, for example, he found that the ruins of a very fine abbey were considered by the locals ‘very holy ground and many covet to be buried there’.[17] Near Limerick he learned that the crumbling town of Killmallock had suffered as hard a fate ‘as the poor city of Prague’, having been destroyed during the Desmond rebellion, the Cromwellian war and again during the Jacobite occupation.[18] At Dundalk he visited the obelisk erected to commemorate the battle of the Boyne, and he also toured other Williamite ‘sites’ at Carrickfergus and Enniskillen. Perhaps the high point of his excursion occurred at Derry, where he was shown the Jacobite colours and standards preserved in the cathedral, and managed to procure a relic of the siege—a six-pound cannon-ball dug up some time before.[19]

Willes’s reflections on Irish legal and political structures fit comfortably with neither the ancien régime paradigm nor the colonial. Among the great evils he discovered was ‘a disobedience and resistance of the laws’—not simply, he explained, a high incidence of individual crimes, but the ‘resistance with armed force of the civil process’. In the ‘charges’ ritually announced to grand juries during the assizes, he was required to denounce unfamiliar problems—the enlistment of men to foreign service, the overseas education of Catholics and all infringements of the ‘Popery Laws’ in general.[20] Nevertheless, it was hard not to conclude that things were getting better, even in the remote district of Iar-Connacht, where the ‘antient’ Irish had still not been made ‘amenable to the laws’. As recently as 1757 the ‘Irish chief’ Morgan O’Flaherty had taken possession of an estate purchased by the St George family and had burnt a Protestant settlement there. Consequently, the Duke of Bedford (then Lord Lieutenant) had ordered the construction of a new road through the area, and workmen were already building a barracks, under the protection of 100 troops from the garrison at Galway. This was not the only sign of violent resistance to Protestant Ascendancy: the common people of Cork, he thought, had ‘the boorishness and brutality of a seaport, super added to the rigid bigottry of a low Irish Papist’ and were kept under control only by the presence of regular troops.[21] But that such turbulent elements nevertheless could be controlled he seems to have taken for granted.

The most striking feature of Willes’s surveys was the anxiety with which he charted the demographic health—or malaise—of the Protestant population. In Waterford he bleakly recorded a Catholic preponderance of eleven to one, in Cork city he estimated that Protestants were outnumbered by ten to one and worse, that the Catholics had many of the chief merchants; while in the county as a whole, a return of all men able to bear arms made in 1745 had listed 18,000 Catholics and just 2,600 Protestants. Although he noted that some Catholics were permitted to carry arms in spite of the penal laws, he was confident that ‘the zeal of the Protestants assisted by some few of the regular forces will always be sufficient to keep the Papists under’.[22] The west, he discovered, was worse still. In Ennis, where Willes faced the indignity of attending a special assize sermon in an empty church, he noted that the confessional ratio in County Clare was a dismal twenty to one; in part of the diocese of Elphin, where Bishop Synge had carried out a detailed census, it was as bad as twenty-four to one.[23] Even in Ulster, the Protestant stronghold, there was less comfort than might be expected. On the north coast he noted that the majority of inhabitants were ‘of the Kirk of Scotland’. Their obstinacy, reinforced by missionaries from the Scottish Seceder movement, was uncompromising, and made them even more troublesome than Catholics with regard to the payment of tithes to the Established Church.[24]

Notwithstanding these peculiarities, Willes believed that Ireland was ‘a very good country to live in’.[25] The improvements of the previous twenty-five years meant that the reputation of a landlord now depended on how far he encouraged manufactures, drained and reclaimed bogs and mountain, sewed flax or planted trees. Just two decades before, of course, it had all been very different. Crop failures had led to famine or near-famine in 1710, 1728–9, 1740–41, 1744–5, 1756–7, and lesser crises would follow in 1762–3, 1770–71, 1782–4 and 1800–01. Every Irish man or woman who lived to the age of forty had thus experienced catastrophic food shortages, with large-scale starvation and disease, more than once in his or her life. These were general European crises, but the Irish suffered more severely than most of their continental neighbours. Two particularly vicious peaks of dearth and mortality stand out. A run of bad harvests in the later 1720s created famine conditions, with Ulster, in spite of its embryonic linen industry, being particularly hard hit. These deadly years prompted much of the century’s most influential economic writing, by Thomas Prior and Arthur Dobbs among others; and it was shortly after an extended visit to Markethill, County Armagh, that Swift composed his notorious satire, A modest proposal, with its gruesome recommendation that Irish baby skins could make ‘admirable Gloves for Ladies, and Summer Boots for fine Gentlemen’.[26] The three years of dearth also saw heavy emigration to the American colonies from the north. In the summer of 1728 it was reported that over 3,000 people had left the northern ports for Pennsylvania and New England; this was sufficiently worrying to prompt a government inquiry into Ulster emigration and a public debate on the grievances of Presbyterians over both rents and tithes.[27]

The absolute low point came with the apocalyptic conditions created by the ‘Great Frost’ of 1740 and the bliain an áir (year of slaughter) that followed. Almost entirely forgotten today, the dearth of 1740–41 was actually more severe than the Great Famine of the 1840s, causing somewhere between 310,000 and 480,000 deaths in a population of less than 2.5 million. Ireland may have lost an eighth of its people in just over one and a half years.[28] The winter of 1740 was the longest stretch of acute cold in the history of modern Europe. A drought followed in the spring of 1740, causing devastating fires in towns such as Carrick-on-Suir, Thurles, Moate and Wexford. As stocks of food became exhausted a mass vagrancy problem was created, and food riots erupted in Drogheda, Cork and Dublin; by the end of the year outbreaks of smallpox and fevers were reported. Ulster, convulsed in 1727–9, was spared the worst this time. The northern poor subsisted on a diet of oatcake, coarse bread and stirabout, and rural Ulster was better supplied with the American grain that was now being shipped into Irish ports. It was in the dairy-farming and sheep-ranching districts of Munster that the destruction of potatoes by the frost caused the greatest suffering. By the spring of 1741, when dysentery and typhus were widespread, contemporaries like Richard Cox in west Cork could only compare the situation to the ‘dreadfullest’ civil war or to a raging plague:

A Man can hardly put any Laws in Execution this Season, there is such a Universal Poverty reigning through the Country that even Thieving is become necessary for Self-Preservation—Mortality is no longer heeded; The Instances are so frequent—And Burying the dead, which used to be one of the most Religious acts amongst the Irish, is now become a Burthen: so that I am daily forced to make those who remain carry Dead Bodies to the Church yards, which would otherwise rot in the open Air; otherwise I assure you the Common Practice is to let the Tree lye where it falls, & if some Good natured Body covers it with the next Ditch, it is the most to be expected.[29]

There were reports of similar desolation elsewhere. In spite of relief projects in many towns, including Cork, Galway, Waterford, Cashel, Clonmel, Castlelyons and Bandon, multitudes perished and their bodies left to rot in fields and in ditches. The roads were littered with corpses, reported one pamphleteer, ‘the Colour of the Docks and Nettles which they fed on; two or three, sometimes more, on a Car going to the Grave for want of Bearers to carry them’.[30]

By the 1760s, when Willes was writing, the remarkable upswing of the eighteenth century was well under way. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this revolution was unprecedented population growth. In the absence of census material or parish registers, scholars have been forced to reconstruct demographic patterns on the basis of hearth-tax returns, a task fraught with interpretative difficulties. Nevertheless, the outlines are clear. For seven decades, from the 1750s to the 1820s, Ireland experienced a remarkable period of uninterrupted population growth. This spectacular phenomenon, which saw the population double from around 2.5 million in 1750 to more than 5 million in 1800, was unparalleled in western Europe, though the closest comparison, significantly, was England. The demographic balance in the British Isles was then very different from later centuries. When the Act of Union was passed, the Irish population total was more than half (5.3 million) that for England and Wales (9.2 million); it was three times that of Scotland or Switzerland and greater than Belgium and the Netherlands combined.[31]

Table 1: Population increase in the eighteenth century (millions)

Year

Leinster

Munster

Ulster

Connacht

Total

1712

0.64

0.63

0.59

0.30

2.16

1725

0.73

0.72

0.61

0.32

2.38

1753

0.77

0.64

0.67

0.32

2.40

1791

1.18

1.20

1.43

0.61

4.42

Source: L. A. Clarkson and Liam Kennedy, ‘Birth, death and exile: Irish population history, 1700–1921’ in B. J. Graham and L. J. Proudfoot (eds), Historical geography of Ireland (London, 1993), p. 161.

Population growth was uneven. In the second half of the century it was Ulster, with growth rates of over 2 per cent per annum, that made the greatest gains, increasing its share of the total population from just over a quarter to just under a third. Another shift was taking place from countryside to town. Compared with England, admittedly, urbanisation was slow and modest. In 1750 no more than 7 per cent of Irish people lived in towns, defined as concentrations of 10,000 or more, while the corresponding figure for England was 16.7 per cent. By 1800 these figures had risen to 7.4 and 20.3 respectively. Even if we take Scotland, perhaps a better comparison, we find there a rise in the urban population from 9.2 per cent to 17.3 per cent.[32] In parts of Europe, it is true, the urban population actually declined during the century, the most obvious example being the Netherlands. Even the French cities experienced moderate decline, from 9.2 per cent of the population (1700) to 8.8 per cent (1800). It is also true that Irish urbanisation, though slow in relation to overall population growth, was still very substantial in absolute terms, with the total number of people living in towns of 10,000 inhabitants or more reaching 369,000 in 1800.[33] Dublin, the second city of the Empire, was an exceptional case: the number of inhabitants trebled from 60,000 to 180,000 during the eighteenth century. The northern towns, tiny by comparison, also expanded, with the Belfast population increasing from 13,105 in 1782 to 18,320 just nine years later (Table 2).[34] Yet the fact remains that Ireland was among the most rural countries in Europe, lagging behind southern Italy, Spain and Portugal, never mind its dynamic neighbour to the east.

Table 2: Robert Hyndman’s Belfast census, 1791

Butchers

39

Bakers

67

Barbers

30

Coopers

115

Carpenters

169

Cabinet-makers

40

Chandlers

29

Hatters

38

Hosiers

16

Masons

68

Nailers (one female)

41

Painters

17

Ropers

35

Reed-makers

6

Shoemakers (two females)

312

Sadlers

22

Sawyers

37

Smiths

69

Staymakers

15

Tailors (one female)

100

Tanners and Curriers

45

Weavers (six females)

679

Watchmakers

22

Wheelwrights

6

Sundry other trades

220

Tobacco spinners, giving employment to 20 children of both sexes (decrease in 9 ½ years, including children employed, 165: the consequence of impolitic revenue laws)

5

Publicans under licence for spirits and strong beer, being one to every 17th house: a great number of them persons who have trades

167

Number of inhabitants in the town and suburbs of Belfast

18,320

Source: Belfast News-Letter, 25 Oct. 1791.

It seems that demographic growth, as in England, was propelled by increased fertility, but with more spectacular results. Even the small, relatively well-off Quaker communities in Ireland had larger families than their English brethren, partly because the age of marriage was lower, and partly because intervals between births were shorter.[35] As contemporaries like Arthur Young appreciated, the cheapness of food and housing contributed to ‘the generality of marriage’: the Irish rate of nuptiality was consistently high throughout this period.[36] In addition to the adoption of potatoes, the subdivision of land plots and the spread of linen-weaving facilitated early marriage, especially in the north. Not only was the potato cheap; it was also nutritious. However poor their material circumstances may have been, Irishmen seem to have been healthier than their English counterparts. Information on the mean height of Irishmen, often used by economic historians as a measure of nutritional environment, has been derived from the records of East India Company, which recruited 1,446 Irish soldiers between 1778 and 1783. These men, overwhelmingly described as labourers, and mostly drawn from Dublin city and other parts of Leinster, were likely to be an inch taller than the English, with the mean height greater in rural areas.[37] French peasants, as one thoughtful traveller reported, were less athletic than the Irish.[38] A malnourished people is less likely to multiply; a healthy diet, on the other hand, advances the onset of sexual maturity and reduces the risk of miscarriage. This expanding, youthful population stimulated competition for landholdings; it also supplied the labour that reclaimed wasteland and transformed the Irish landscape.

Most Irish people lived on the land, and agricultural output was central to economic development. Chief Baron Willes, as we have seen, noted the craze for ‘improvement’ on gentlemen’s estates throughout the kingdom. Between the 1740s and the 1790s the value of land rocketed, with rents increasing at least tenfold. The key factor was external demand for Irish produce, especially beef, mutton and butter. The Irish political economists of the 1720s and 1730s, such as Prior, Dobbs and Madden, attributed Ireland’s backwardness to a panoply of deficiencies—the high levels of absentee landlordism, the shift from tillage to pasture, the proverbial laziness of the natives, the legislative restrictions on trade imposed by Westminster—but the underlying cause was the absence of foreign markets. By the middle decades of the century this situation was being transformed by the expansion of the British and French colonies in the West Indies and the accompanying increase of transatlantic shipping. Irish economic growth was thus part of a wider continental pattern, as the balance of economic power continued its long shift away from the Mediterranean towards the thriving Atlantic ports of Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nantes, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow. Even the older trade routes with southern European ports such as Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon and Cádiz were harnessed to these transatlantic developments, with re-exports and naval victualling displacing older functions. Ironically, the concession of ‘free trade’ in 1780, which gave Ireland equal access to British colonies, marked the end of this cycle. During the last two decades of the century Irish agriculture was redirected towards the growing urban population of Britain itself. By 1800 the dependence of the Irish economy on the harvest had been replaced by dependence on the English market.

Most forms of industrial activity also took place in the countryside, utilising raw materials derived from the soil. In some parts of the island the rural population included a large range of non-agricultural workers. This was true, for example, of the south-eastern triangle linking Dundalk, Wexford and Cork, where small tillage farmers were joined by artisans employed in coopering, milling and brewing. But the most remarkable developments took place within the domestic linen industry, beginning in the Lagan valley and extending through most of Ulster, and then into north Connacht and Louth, with offshoots in Longford and Meath. Like cattle production, sales of quality linens depended on the thriving British and colonial markets, and were vulnerable to cyclical recessions, as revealed most disastrously in the early 1770s. In Ulster families shifted between the shuttle and the spade, and in many areas, notably Armagh, linen production became the primary economic activity. Many historians have traced the rural disturbances of the Oakboys in the 1760s and the Steelboys in the 1770s to the discontents of the tenant-weaver class. The independence of linen workers may also have contributed to the sectarian battles in County Armagh between Defenders and Peep o’ Day Boys; one contemporary, at any rate, believed that ‘the great influx of cash and plentiful markets of provisions among the lower orders . . . prompts them to intoxication and riot, before they have well digested their mother’s milk’.[39]

The export of linen and cattle products, directed generally towards Britain and its overseas possessions, produced an integrated market for the first time as the provincial ports and their hinterlands were drawn into a single national economy. Fairs and markets, numbering around 3,000 by the 1770s, spread throughout the island. Looking back from the 1750s, the Sligo gentleman Charles O’Hara reflected on the changes that had taken place since the Williamite war, when Connacht had been devastated by the military presence. At the beginning of the century, he believed, the whole county of Sligo had been covered with ‘cottage tenants’, who ‘having no foreign demands for the produce of their farms mostly paid their rents in kind, in duties and in work’. The area was cut off from the rest of the country, and the only money in local circulation came from the army and the small amount of lean cattle sold to ‘Leinster graziers’. Consequently, the landed estates of the region, while they provided for a comfortable lifestyle at home, were as yet incapable of supporting a landlord living abroad.[40] By the 1720s, however, economic activity was already increasing as ‘the better sort’ introduced flax seed and ‘made their tenants’ wives spin the produce’, leading to links with Ulster drapers. O’Hara himself had promoted the linen manufacture by encouraging weavers and bleachers from the north to settle around Collooney. The following decade saw the first hesitant signs of increasing demand for cattle as Munster graziers came to Connacht markets. ‘Our people are now grown rich,’ O’Hara concluded with evident satisfaction.[41]

Dublin was not just the political and administrative capital of Ireland, but its social and cultural focal point. Between 1692 and 1800 parliamentary sessions were held every two years, and from the mid-1780s annually. Parliament itself was a generator of wealth: it was claimed in 1800 that the average M.P. spent £1,400 per annum in the city. Clubs, coffee-houses, public assemblies, theatres and bookshops all benefited from the influx of country gentlemen who came to Dublin for the winter season. By the 1760s there were 300 barristers and 700 attorneys too. The capital was also a national market-place. Indeed, the eighteenth century was ‘the only time Dublin was the unrivalled social and economic centre for the whole island’.[42] Grain and flour, assisted from 1758 by the introduction of a parliamentary subsidy, were carried overland to feed the capital’s population, not just from Leinster, but from Kilkenny, Tipperary, Galway and Roscommon. In the middle decades links between the north and the capital were also strengthened as Dublin dealers offered credit to Ulster bleachers; Dublin intermediaries supplied northern weavers with linen yarn from the west and the midlands and subsequently exported Ulster cloth to overseas markets. By 1791, when many of the merchants and manufacturers of Belfast and Dublin were collaborating in the formation of United Irish societies, the north-east was already developing direct economic links with Britain, bypassing the capital altogether.

Economically as well as politically, Ireland was thus a country of puzzling contrasts. Its people were apparently healthy and robust, but lived in deplorable material circumstances; by European standards, the population was increasing at a remarkably high rate, but with an unusually low level of urbanisation; its sophisticated and commercialised agriculture was not matched by the improvement of living standards. By the 1760s, however, it is clear that Ireland’s modest ports and inland towns were being integrated into a unified market centred on Dublin. Rising prices for agricultural exports, combined with the diffusion of the linen industry outside the north-east, meant that rural communities were able to withstand food shortages, since they were able to supplement their earnings with new sources of income. ‘The lower people now rely more upon their industry,’ noted Charles O’Hara in his survey of Sligo, ‘which opened an access to other markets, in case of scarcity at home.’[43] Among the propertied classes, meanwhile, Chief Baron Willes commented sardonically on the huge quantities of claret and other French wines imported into the country, and ‘the vast quantities of brandy, tea, lace, and ten thousand French fopperings and bagatelles which are smuggled in upon us’.[44] This was still a pre-industrial society; but the trouble with the term ‘pre-industrial’, like the term ‘traditional’, is that it conjures up images of a static social order in which property and authority were securely linked, sure of their own moral legitimacy. In the 1760s the political, social and economic dominance of the Ascendancy class had reached its height; but economic growth had already laid the basis for the wealth of middle groups in rural society and the trading classes in the towns, and just at this moment the ruling elite discovered that it was deeply divided within itself.

THE LANDED INTEREST

On the surface there was nothing very unusual about the rulers of Ireland or about their relationships with subordinate social groups. The landed elite that governed Ireland between the 1690s and the 1790s was numerically insignificant (around 5,000 families), but nevertheless sought to maintain its monopoly on all forms of political, social and economic power. The ownership of land marked off the ruling classes from the rest of society; it was the key to political influence at both county and national levels. More than any other form of wealth or political office, landed property offered the best security for invested capital, and conferred social prestige. Every European country, with the exception of some of the Swiss cantons, possessed a hereditary class of nobles. There was, admittedly, a huge amount of variation. At one end, Britain and Ireland were in many ways exceptional: only peers were technically noblemen, the elite did not enjoy fiscal exemptions as in France, and the law of primogeniture ensured that titles passed to the eldest son alone. At the other end, it was not until the ‘Table of Ranks’ in 1722 imposed a superficially westernised hierarchy on the Russian boyars (magnates) and dvoriane (knights). Nevertheless, rule by a tiny group of privileged landowners was the basis of the social structure right across the continent, and the assumption that landed property translated into political power was universal. The common people ‘must continue Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water, whoever prevails’, observed Bishop Edward Synge in 1725, ‘and are full as easy under Protestant Landlords, as under those of their own Religion’.[45] At the end of the century William Coppinger, the Catholic Bishop of Cloyne and Ross, warned ordinary Catholics against the seductive promises of the United Irishmen, explaining that ‘the poor will still be the poor, under every form of Government’.[46] (What the poor themselves thought about this, as we shall see, is less clear.)

The Hanoverian era was a golden age for the great landed families, who benefited from rising rent rolls after 1760, invested in government stock, and sponsored industry on their estates. In both Britain and Ireland the peerage not only controlled the upper house of parliament, but strengthened its grip on the Commons too, so that M.P.s as well as Lords were often ‘hereditaries’. During the long reign of George II (1727–60) more than half of the 669 members who sat in the Irish Commons were landed gentlemen; of the rest, 128 were lawyers, 88 had held commissions in the army, and only 30 to 35 were merchants.[47] This was typical of the balance of power in Ascendancy Ireland. Borough seats, many of them under the influence of landed patrons, were regarded as another species of private property; it was entirely in keeping with eighteenth-century values that the British government spent £1,260,000 compensating Irish magnates for the 108 boroughs abolished by the Act of Union of 1800. Like their cousins across the water, the aristocratic rulers of Georgian Ireland were frequently flamboyant, venal and shamelessly materialistic. And as in England, marriages were determined by what Horace Walpole called ‘the spirit of collateral calculation’.[48] The couplings of the Kingsborough clan of County Cork, culminating in a sensational elopement and a murder trial in 1797, provide some striking illustrations of the financial manoeuvring that accompanied aristocratic marriages: the dynasty had acquired the heiress Caroline Fitzgerald with a sweetener of £12,000 to pay off her father’s debts—refundable in the event that the fifteen-year-old bride should die before bearing children.[49]

The unusual prominence of self-made men and their sons in the political life of Ascendancy Ireland has often been noted. The Williamite war produced the last great wave of forfeitures, and although the amount of land redistributed was small in comparison with the Cromwellian years, a number of canny speculators made their fortunes as a result. Among them was William Conolly (1662–1729), future Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and the most accomplished political operator of the Walpole era. In the early years of the Hanoverian succession Conolly emerged as the government’s chief manager or ‘undertaker’ in the Irish House of Commons; he was a Lord Justice and his post as chief revenue commissioner gave him access to an unrivalled source of patronage. In 1722 he began building Castletown in County Kildare, designed by Alessandro Galilei, destined to become the archetype of the great country houses of Georgian Ireland. Seven years later it was Conolly who laid the foundation stone of the greatest of all physical monuments to the Ascendancy class, the Parliament House at College Green. Yet this emblematic figure had distinctly humdrum origins. Born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Conolly was the son of a second-rank Catholic gentry family who had conformed to the Established Church some time before the Restoration. Like so many other arrivistes, he had a legal background, but by the 1690s he was acting as land agent to Captain James Hamilton of County Down, and he had been elected to the Irish House of Commons as M.P. for Donegal borough. Equally vital was his advantageous marriage to Katherine Conyngham in 1694. This not only connected Conolly to the most important families in west Ulster, but brought a dowry of £2,300 that enabled him to buy his first estates in County Meath. The later acquisition of an estate in Limavady gave him a valuable electoral interest in County Londonderry, where he was collector of the revenue (1697–1729) and sat as M.P. from 1703 until his death.

This was an age of significant social mobility. It has been estimated that by the 1730s less than 5 per cent of the European nobility could trace their ancestry back as far as the medieval period, and that more than half had acquired their titles since the beginning of the seventeenth century.[50] In Ireland the arriviste gentleman was no doubt a particularly conspicuous phenomenon, as a relatively small landed class expanded to meet the multiplying demands of both central and local government. Conolly’s rise illustrates the parvenu character of the early eighteenth-century Ascendancy. The Speaker was dismissed as ‘a shoe-boy’ by Jonathan Swift, whose own forebears, it should be remembered, carried a similar whiff of carpet-bagging about them. The dean’s father had crossed the Irish Sea following the Restoration; he and his brothers advanced themselves with the support of Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls and author of the classic Irish rebellion (1646).[51] In England, meanwhile, the meteoric rise of ‘Prince Conolly’ was satirised by the Whig propagandist John Trenchard, later author of the famous ‘Cato’s Letters’ (1720–22), who mocked the political pretensions of ‘these Trinculo’s and fantastick Vice-Roys, these errant Sancho Pancha’s, and Squire-like Governours of their wild and inchanted Island’.[52] But Conolly also exemplified another characteristic of Ascendancy Ireland. The barrier created by the penal laws could be crossed, in a way that no barrier based on colour could ever be. Although most Catholic landlords who were integrated into the Ascendancy world were of Old English stock, the O’Briens of County Clare, the O’Haras of County Sligo and the O’Neills of County Antrim were Gaels in origin. In his famous 1782 speech on ‘the Rights of Ireland’ Henry Grattan was able to point to members of the latter two families, ‘the descendants of kings’, sitting on the benches of the Irish House of Commons. ‘Are the American enemies to be free,’ he asked in one of his more bizarre rhetorical flourishes, ‘and these royal subjects slaves?’[53]

The importance of ‘convert’ families is considered more fully in Chapter 6 below. Here it is sufficient to note that for a significant number of families, like the Conollys, the Malones and the Burkes, legal practice provided a bridge to conformity and respectability. On the other hand, some of the best-known Catholic families, such as the Brownes of Kenmare, the Mathews of Tipperary and the Colcloughs of Wexford, were actually ‘New English’ in origin, that is, descendants of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century settlers. The surprising mutability of ethnic distinctions was demonstrated in a different way by the (admittedly eccentric) Edward Stratford, second Earl of Aldborough. His parents were John Stratford, the upwardly mobile M.P. for Baltinglass, and Martha O’Neale, daughter of the Archdeacon of Leighlin, County Carlow. In spite of his family’s relatively recent elevation to the peerage—or perhaps because of it—Aldborough claimed Anglo-Saxon, Norman and ‘Grecian’ forebears; but he took special pride in his mother’s alleged descent from ‘Oneal, head of the Oneals, King of Ulster and for a time of Ireland’.[54] Such exotic imaginings admittedly did little to offset the ingrained hostility to the Gaelic world so common in Ascendancy Ireland. Even in the early decades of the century, however, some Anglican scholars and antiquarians had objected to the depictions of the ancient Irish as universally degenerate, complaining that English historians often passed over the ‘Piety, Learning, and Courage’ of the nobility and gentry, to dwell on ‘the baser sort of people’.[55] This distinction between the upper and lower ranks of the old natives, drawn ultimately from the Counter-Reformation historian Geoffrey Keating, provides another example of the complex ways in which ethnic differences were moderated by notions of social hierarchy.

One feature of Irish aristocratic life that attracted persistent censure from contemporary writers was the high number of absentee landlords. It has been calculated that more than £300,000 per annum—or somewhere between one-sixth and one-quarter of the total rental collected in the kingdom—was paid to non-resident landlords, much of it subsequently spent in London, Newmarket or Bath.[56] From the appearance of Thomas Prior’s List of the absentees of Ireland (1729), frequently updated and reprinted throughout the century, absenteeism was a regular target of patriot ire, and there were repeated attempts from 1773 onwards to introduce an absentee tax. Some of the criticism was undoubtedly deserved. In 1790 Lord Donegall was accused of ‘draining a manufacturing county of £36,000 a year . . . to build palaces in another land, where he is unknown or disregarded’. He had a small estate in Staffordshire in addition to his vast County Antrim fiefdom (which included Carrickfergus and Antrim town), almost the whole barony of Inishowen in County Donegal, and Dunbrody Park in Wexford.[57] But absenteeism is a good example of the dangers of using literary evidence as a guide to economic realities. A. P. W. Malcomson once warned against ‘the typically Irish conviction that every Irish problem or grievance must be exclusive to Ireland’.[58] Most of the offenders were not in fact resident in England at all, but were internal absentees, dividing their time between estates scattered across the country, acquired as a result of marriage alliances, and a base in the capital. By the 1760s the County Sligo gentleman and ‘improver’ Charles O’Hara seems to have maintained houses at Batheston and Harrow as well as Annaghmore and Dublin, and attended race meetings at Newmarket as well as the Curragh. Yet O’Hara counted himself as a resident landlord, whose virtues, he explained, were not just economic: from the model landlord a host of material and moral benefits trickled down to the ‘the poorer sort’, including ‘the great political virtues of temperance, economy and justice’.[59] Those who were soldiers or diplomats had to move for career reasons, while political ambition drew many to London or to Dublin, particularly from the mid-1780s, when the Irish parliament began to meet annually. The great patriot Lord Charlemont, for example, spent much time at Marino, his country house near Dublin.

One of the chief ways in which members of the Irish elite asserted their social and economic superiority was through the cultivation and diffusion of continental tastes. At the very same time that they proclaimed their local ‘patriotism’ as improving landlords, the sons of the Ascendancy were becoming more closely integrated into a wider British ruling class, and beyond that into the trans-national aristocracy of Europe. By the 1690s the cultural centre of gravity had shifted decisively from the Italian city-states to Versailles and Paris. In 1685 the Huguenot intellectual Pierre Bayle had predicted that the French language would become the means of communication for all Europe; almost a century later the Louis Antoine de Caraccioli proclaimed in his L’Europe français (1776) that in terms of learning and literature at least ‘every European is now a Frenchman’.[60] Máire Kennendy has uncovered evidence of proficiency in French among leading Ascendancy families, of French readings in more fashionable circles, and of a growing market, pioneered by Huguenot settlers, for French literature.[61] The key mechanism for turning Irishmen (and some women) into Europeans was, of course, the Grand Tour, and the outstanding example was James Caulfeild, the first Earl of Charlemont. In 1746, accompanied by his private tutor Edward Murphy, Charlemont embarked on a nine-year voyage that ventured far beyond the usual destinations—the Low Countries, Italy and France—and included Germany, Spain, Turkey, Greece and Egypt. For five years he resided in Rome, where he was part of a circle that included Joshua Reynolds, the great history painter and founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, and the architects Robert Adam and William Chambers; he also spent time with the philosophers David Hume and Montesquieu. Few could match the geographical range and scholarly attainments of Charlemont. Like modern backpackers, most of the Grand Tourists who visited the continent for pleasure followed well-worn itineraries and used conventional guidebooks. They returned from Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples, sometimes with a commissioned portrait by Batoni or a volume on Palladian architecture.

A vast gulf separated the great landowners from the ‘half-mounted’ gentlemen of the provinces. At one end were the great Anglo-Irish magnates, like Arthur Hill, second Marquis of Downshire, who possessed estates on both sides of the Irish Sea. With a rental in 1801 of £34,000, Downshire was the wealthiest landowner in County Down, probably in the whole country. He was also the most powerful political broker in the late eighteenth century, with—on paper at least—nine parliamentary seats at his disposal. In addition to one of the County Down seats, prestigious and closely fought, he had the ‘family’ seat of Hillsborough, the borough of Blessington which his father had inherited with the County Wicklow estate, and he had purchased the borough of Fore, County Westmeath, in 1796 for £13,000. While his principal residences were at Hertford and Hillsborough Castles, his peripatetic lifestyle also entailed the maintenance of town houses in Hanover Square, London, and Gloucester Street, Dublin, Blessington House in Wicklow and a villa in Surrey. Since he had titles in both England and Ireland, he had the bizarre distinction of having voted in favour of the Union in the British House of Lords in February 1799 and against it in Dublin a year later.[62] County Down had a large gentry class, encompassing around one hundred landlords with substantial tenants, and some of these, such as the Hamiltons of Killyleagh, the Crawfords of Crawfordsburn and the Montgomerys of Grey Abbey, sought to mobilise their freeholders under the banner of the ‘independent interest’.[63] One manifestation of this divide, by no means confined to the north-east, was the appearance of a small ‘patriot’ party in the House of Commons after the 1761 election, the first sign of the parliamentary turbulence that characterised the later eighteenth century.

ALTERNATIVE ELITES

One of William King’s central arguments in his State of the Protestants of Ireland (1691), the key work justifying the Williamite revolution in Ireland, was that James II’s promotion of Catholics to civil and military office had inverted the natural social order: ‘One that a few days before was no other than a Cowherd to his Protestant Landlord, perhaps was set before him on the Bench as a Justice of the Peace.’ The sheriffs and deputy lords lieutenant appointed by James were ‘generally poor and mean people’, while the lower army officers included ‘Cow-herds, Horse-boys or Footmen’ and those who had ‘live wild on the Mountains’.[64] These claims of social superiority were rejected by the Jacobites. From the examples discussed above, it should already be obvious that the Protestant Ascendancy was strongly shaped by the rapid turnover of property and office in the relatively recent past. (King himself, despite his later hatred of Ulster Presbyterians, was the son of Scottish emigrant to Antrim who was rumoured to have been a miller or merchant.) The Ascendancy was admittedly a diverse group, containing the descendants of Anglo-Normans and Elizabethans as well as the detested Cromwellians. Yet there was some justification behind Father Cornelius Nary’s lament that many gentlemen who had once made ‘a considerable figure’ in the kingdom ‘are nowadays, when they walk with canes or sticks only in their hands, insulted by men armed with swords and pistols, who of late arose from the very dregs of the people’.[65] Upstart families like the Warings of County Down elevated themselves into the local squirearchy by offering financial services to absentee landlords or investing in the forfeited estates. While they covered their tracks with a university education and continental travel, the proximity of the former proprietors—in this case the Magennises of south Down—served as reminders of the former social order.[66]

One of the curious anomalies of eighteenth-century Ireland, often ignored, was the survival of a small Catholic landowning class, including families with hereditary titles. Of 119 peers enumerated in 1721, there were eleven Catholics, a small but significant proportion.[67] In the 1770s there were still seven Catholic peers: the Earls of Fingall and Kenmare, Viscounts Dillon, Gormanston and Netterville, and Lords Cahir and Trimleston, as well as gentry families such as the Bellews of County Louth, the Butlers of Kilkenny, and the Blakes, Kirwins and Brownes in Galway and Mayo.[68] Among these landed families the Old English clearly predominated: of the Catholic dynasties restored to their lands by the Court of Claims (1697–9), there were fifteen Plunketts, thirteen Nugents, twelve Roches, nine Dillons, dozens of Fitzgeralds and several Butlers; by contrast, there were only two O’Neills, two MacCarthys, and two O’Briens, one of them a Protestant, to represent the Gaels. Almost half of the remaining Catholic estates lay west of the Shannon, but there were pockets elsewhere, such as Lord Clancarty’s fiefdom in Muskerry. Perhaps the best known was the widely respected Lord Kenmare, who worshipped with some discretion, as Willes discovered on his Munster circuit: ‘He very politely on Sunday ask’d the parson of the parish to dine with me, but never introduc’d his priest.’[69]

As Catholics, the titles inherited by these noblemen had no legal validity, and they were not able to sit in the House of Lords. This did not prevent them from attempting to maintain their traditional lifestyles, and the same was true of gentry families further down the social scale. When John O’Brien became a candidate for the bishopric of Cloyne and Ross in 1747, a group of Cork gentlemen forwarded to the Pretender a letter attesting to his ‘nobility’. His ancestors, they declared, had ‘never degenerated by following any vile or mechanical profession, but have always lived in a decent and credible manner in the farming way’, like other Roman Catholic gentlemen following the forfeiture of their estates.[70] The conjuction of straitened circumstances with boasts of proud lineages was often attributed to Catholic Ireland by Protestant reformers. Kenmare, as Willes noted, had a private chapel in his house, and this must have been true of other large landowners. For the majority of wealthy Catholics, however, social distinctions were displayed in public worship, where private seats were reserved for those who could afford them. A well-dressed visitor to Cashel in 1777 recorded that the people in the chapel ‘made way for me, and some of them offered to conduct me to where the quality sat’.[71] Similarly, it was not only Protestants who latched on to the new refinements associated with that quintessentially eighteenth-century phenomenon, ‘politeness’. In 1751 Charles O’Conor sent his young cousin Denis to Dublin to acquire a ‘becoming Pronunciation’ so that he would be able to cut a figure in ‘polite Company’. But O’Conor’s original plan, to approach a Catholic gentleman named Fagan for Latin and Greek tuition, was scrapped when a close friend in the capital advised that it was only graduates of Trinity ‘whose Language & Pronunciation are really elegant and pleasing’.[72]

The status-consciousness of elite Catholics in Ireland was not fundamentally dissimilar from their counterparts in Britain and the continent, with whom they were often connected by economic ties and occasionally intermarriage. This was especially true of the Jacobite diaspora considered in Chapter 4. Catholic noblemen attached themselves to the Jacobite court in exile at St-Germain-en-Laye; indeed, Patrick Sarsfield’s widow, Honora, married James II’s natural son, the Duke of Berwick. Not surprisingly, they regarded the middling and lower ranks with the same condescension exhibited by landed families elsewhere. In a well-known denunciation of ‘the pride, drunkenness and sloth of the middling sort among the Irish’, Kenmare denounced the middlemen who extorted large rents from their dairymen, spent the proceeds in the alehouse, and set up their sons for ‘priests, physicians, or French officers’.[73] In the 1690s a disillusioned Jacobite officer who described himself as ‘the Chief of an ancient family in Ireland’ regretted the appearance of servants, shopkeers, clerks, attorneys and ‘pedling merchants’ among the Irish officers in France.[74] The anonymous author of the Jacobite history A light to the blind (c. 1698), probably Colonel Nicholas Plunkett, son of the Earl of Fingall, resented the uppishness of the newly wealthy, and wished that ‘there were established a solid Distinction between true Gentry, and Those, who really are not so in the Predicament’.[75] Complaints about newcomers, normally associated with Jacobite attacks on ‘Cromwellians’, were also directed at other Catholic families. If a common faith did not always promote solidarity between landowners and the middling ranks, there was even less fellow-feeling with the poor. George Ryan of Inch, County Tipperary, who had been educated in Spain and held military office in Peru before inheriting the family estate, regarded the Irish peasantry with contempt. Writing from Toulouse at the outbreak of the French Revolution, he sought to reassure his relatives that he had little to fear from a series of bread riots at the corn market, adding:

There is one thing very much to the Credit of the mob in this country, which is, that there is never a drunken person to be seen among them, so a person not nearly concerned in the object of their tumult has nothing to dread. How different from the members of our Irish mobility whose knuckles are generally on the itch for a whack at their next neighbours right or wrong. . . . I am pretty certain that there is more blood spilt at a Gingerbread pattern in Ireland than there has been all over France (Paris excepted) since the commencement of this Revolution.[76]

Toby Barnard has recently explored the experiences of Ascendancy families on the Grand Tour, using the travel journals and memoirs of Samuel Waring, Robert Black, Pole Cosby and Robert French. But a few Catholics also travelled on the continent, including the Ryans, one of the most prominent Catholic landed families in Munster. In his ‘Journal of a tour of France and the Low Countries’ John Ryan carefully described the routes taken, distances travelled and modes of transport, the state of the agriculture and manufacturers of each region, and the prominent buildings of the towns. Setting out from Limerick on 13 March 1775, with the laudable objective of ‘improvement mix’d with some enjoyment’, he crossed from Holyhead to Chester twelve days later. In London he visited Lord Clare (presumably a relative of the Jacobite officer Charles O’Brien, ninth Earl of Thomond), who gave him a letter of introduction to a Mr Blake at Paris. Ryan then embarked for Holland, which he found ‘a perfect Garden’, stopping at Rotterdam, The Hague and Delft. In Paris, having shaken off his ‘Ennui’, he was a constant visitor at the ‘Spectacles’—the Luxembourg, the Tuileries, the Palais Royale, the public gardens, the comedies and operas, ‘the rendezvous of all the Beau monde’. The French metropolis, he decided, was not as handsome or elegant as London, nor as clean: the streets were narrow and dirty, and the carriage-drivers insolent. So far he had travelled by ‘public’ transport—the diligence (stage-coach)—but finding these were full of lower-class company, he bought his own cabriolet (a kind of chaise) for the journey to Orléans. During his time in France Ryan visited a number of towns and cities with Irish connections: there were the Irish colleges in Paris, Toulouse and Bordeaux, and at Avignon the papal legate still resided in the Palais des Papes. At St Germain, where the exiled Stuarts once held court, he noted that there were ‘a good many Irish’ in the town, and that the old castle now belonged to Lord Dillon’s family. Surprisingly, however, there is little evidence that Ryan’s Irish background coloured his experiences. If anything, he seems to have felt more at home with ‘our English Gentry’, and his comments in defence of London’s superiority over Paris suggested that his primary identification was as a subject of George III.[77]

The persistence of another alternative elite, and perhaps a more significant one, has been highlighted by Kevin Whelan, the only major historian so far to combine the new insights of post-colonial studies with traditional social and economic research. As Arthur Young and other visitors to Ireland observed, the descendants of old Catholic landowning families, although relegated to the status of middlemen and large farmers, continued to act as the de facto leaders of Catholic society. As early as the 1680s Robert Southwell, a Kinsale landowner who pursued a successful political and diplomatic career in England, warned against ‘the old proprietors who evermore haunt and live about those lands whereof they were dispossessed, and cannot forbear to hope and reckon and day of repossession’.[78] A few years later William King, then Bishop of Derry, complained about the ‘pretended Title and Gentility’ of men who had sold or lost estates but still behaved as if they were the owners. So great was their influence over ‘the poor Tenants of their own Nation and Religion’ that the lower classes regarded them as ‘a kind of Landlords’ and continued to entertain them ‘in their Coshering Manner’.[79] In a bravura exploration of the social and mental world of Catholic middlemen, Whelan argues that the survival of this ‘underground gentry’ sets Ireland apart from ancien régime societies, forcing us to ‘restore colonial contexts as a defining feature of eighteenth-century Irish life’.[80] On some estates it seems clear enough that the classic underground gentleman must have existed. In the depressed decades after the Williamite war Protestant landlords sought to secure a stable rental by granting multiple leases to ‘head tenants’ who could in return guarantee a regular cash rent. In areas where substantial Protestants were thin on the ground landowners turned to the dispossessed Catholics, who may also have smoothed relations with the tenantry. One result of Ireland’s incomplete colonisation, then, was that English settlers were unable to live without the conquered; yet the old proprietors, by their very survival, perpetuated the memory of conquest and represented a moral alternative to the Williamite order.

This picture certainly has some validity at a general level: the old proprietors who so disturbed Southwell seem to have occupied a special place in the popular imagination, as did the prospect of their ‘day of repossession’. There is little reason to doubt the Catholic officer who claimed in the 1690s that the native nobility and gentry of Munster had ‘a far more commanding and natural ascendant over the inclinations of the mobile [i.e. mob] in the respective counties they live in (even in their poverty) than the best Lord of the English birth of Ireland’.[81] But the complexities of Irish land tenure mean that it is hard to trace straightforward confrontations between Protestant gentlemen and their shadowy counterparts at a more specific level. For an illustration of the difficulties we have to look no further than the huge estate of James Butler, Lord Cahir (d. 1786), cited by Whelan. Here, and in other parts of south Tipperary, substantial Catholic head tenants were the dominant social group, with more than two-thirds of the 141 leases held by Catholic families. Crucially, this branch of the Butlers refused to conform; and as so often, Catholic middlemen thrived because they were shielded by Catholic or crypto-Catholic landowners. They were indebted, in other words, to those who had some stake in the propertied order, and had often come to some kind of accommodation with Protestant Ascendancy. Some of the Cahir middlemen (Keating, Kearney and Meagher) were the descendants of former proprietors who had been expropriated in the seventeenth century; but others (MacCarthy, Nagle and Scully) were recent arrivals. The well-established groups seem to have coexisted on good terms with their Protestant neighbours, with whom, it was reported in 1766, ‘they lived in the highest hospitality, frequently receiving and returning visits’. The destabilising element, in fact, was not the old proprietors at all, but parvenu leaseholders such as James Buxton, Edmund ‘Buck’ Sheehy and James ‘Buck’ Farrell who had recently demonstrated their capacity to outbid Protestants.[82] It was perhaps the youth and flamboyance of these men (suggested by the nickname ‘Buck’), in contrast to the low-profile and circumspect strategies of the displaced proprietors, that led to them being targeted by vengeful Protestant magistrates in the Whiteboy panics of the 1760s (see Chapter 9).

In other areas Whelan’s thesis carries more weight. One is south Wexford, where families such as the Suttons of Clonmines, the Herrons of Butlerstown, the Fitzhenrys of Kilkevan, the Devereuxs of Sallystown, the Roches of Nash and the Rossiters of Newcastle (all, incidentally, Old English) found themselves leasing back a portion of the estates they had once owned. The United Irishman Miles Byrne recalled that his father had often shown him ‘the lands that belonged to our ancestors now in the hands of the sanguinary followers of Cromwell, who preserved their plunder after the restoration of that scoundrel Charles II’.[83] In Tenerife Thomas Wadding carefully preserved the deeds and indentures relating to his family’s former estate of Ballycogley, which ‘my fore Fathers enjoyed for many ages till the Usurpation of the Tyrant Olliver Cromwell’.[84] His bitterness, like Byrne’s, was directed specifically at Charles II for leaving Irish estates in the hands of ‘Cromwellian rebbles’. Dispossession in County Wexford, with its substantial settler communities, was a particularly recent experience; in many other regions, by contrast, the Restoration had seen favoured Catholics restored to a portion at least of their hereditary estates. A second zone of influential displaced gentry, analysed by Marianne Elliott, could be found in the Ulster borderlands, especially around the barony of Mourne and the towns of Downpatrick, Loughbrickland and Ballynahinch.[85] Along this cultural interface prominent Catholic families like the MacArdles, Magennises and Byrnes retained their influence. The land agent on Lord Downshire’s estates attributed the ‘refractory disposition’ of the tenants to these old families, who had instilled ‘into the minds of a numerous banditti of cottiers under them, that you are only entitled to chiefry upon the lands, and cannot dispossess them’.[86] Like County Wexford, south Ulster was a recurrent flashpoint during the political and sectarian disturbances of the 1790s, described fully in Chapter 12.

MIDDLEMEN AND FARMERS

Ireland’s social structure, as contemporary pamphleteers generally agreed, was the wrong shape. We have already seen that the number of landlords who did not reside on their estates was a regular subject of criticism from ‘improving’ writers such as Thomas Prior. The cruelty and oppressive demands of Irish landlords was also a very common grievance. A ‘True Patriot’, writing after the famine of 1744–5, believed that the lack of industry among the Irish was partly attributable to the country gentlemen who reduced their tenants to ‘slavish Poverty and Ignorance’.[87] A more fundamental deficiency was the apparent lack of a ‘yeomanry’—the class of substantial independent farmers who were often credited with stimulating agricultural development in England. Arthur Dobbs, perhaps the most erudite of the Irish political economists, argued in 1729 that the most effective outlet for patriotic energies would be the creation of a yeomanry, the ‘true Source of All Industry’ and ‘the chief Bulwark in support of the Liberties of the Nation’ as the example of England demonstrated.[88] Charles O’Hara, the County Sligo landowner, echoed a common complaint when he grumbled that Ireland had no social strata between ‘gentlemen farmers’ and ‘cottage tenants who were the very lowest species of slaves’.[89]

The want of sturdy yeomen was usually coupled with denunciations of the parasitic class of ‘head’ tenants who took leases and then sublet the land in whole or in part. Long before the term ‘middleman’ was popularised by the economic writer Arthur Young, the phenomenon was singled out for censure by improvers and reformers. Perhaps the first significant attack appeared in James Arbuckle’s Tribune (1729). ‘The several Gradations of Landlords and Tenants’, the author noted, ‘are more numerous in this Country, than any other in the universe.’ The existence of a bastard class of ‘intermediate Landlords’ or ‘Sub-Gentry’ had filled the country with ‘a Sort of idle half Gentry, half Commonalty, who abound at all Races, Cockfights, and Country Fairs; and are the very Pest and Bane of this Nation’. Arbuckle condemned their wasteful extravagance, their flamboyant dress, and the hunting-drinking-fighting lifestyle later similarly deplored by Arthur Young.[90] Ireland’s greatest affliction, explained the ‘True Patriot’ in 1745, was ‘our having no Class of People amongst us between the Gentleman and the Beggar’. He attributed the slowness of agricultural improvement to the custom of letting excessive quantities of land to a chief tenant, ‘who wears as long a Sword at an Assizes, and rides in as well proved a Brace of Pistols as his Landlord’.[91] What really bothered Arthur Young and other reformers about the middleman system was that it broke the natural connection between the landowner and the actual occupiers, thus depriving him of any influence over the improvement of his estate.

Recent historians have been kinder. To begin with, the term ‘middlemen’ hid a multitude of rather different sinners. Some were speculators or ‘land-jobbers’, who bought up leases (or interests in leases) during periods of inflation; but others were gentlemen or substantial farmers who held a number of leases in a single area, working part of the land themselves and subletting the rest. As David Dickson long ago remarked, this was not a uniquely Irish feature: there were European parallels in the ‘tacksman’ of the seventeenth-century Scottish Highlands or the gabellotti of nineteenth-century Sicily. To some extent this tenurial pattern was a direct product of the Tudor and Stuart plantations, especially in Ulster and Munster. In the unstable conditions of the seventeenth century, New English landlords found it necessary to lease townlands on favourable terms to substantial tenants from England or Scotland who would in turn covenant to organise the enclosure and improvement of land. Protestants were preferred as agents of ‘civilisation’, not simply in the sense that they were bearers of English manners and reformed religion, but on the assumption that they were open to agricultural innovations and were likely to engage in planting, enclosuring and building. Like the old proprietors who survived as thirty-one-year leaseholders, they were valued because they could guarantee regular payment of a cash rent.[92] Nor were the middlemen without their defenders. Contemporaries argued that intermediate tenants not only made the management of large estates easier, but were sometimes agents of improvement themselves. The real problem was that the under-tenants, whom Young believed should be the sole recipients of leases, did not have sufficient capital to stock a farm on their own. When the absentee Earl of Egmont proposed dividing up some lands on his Cork estate in order to let them directly to the occupiers, the move was resisted by his trusted agent: ‘I would always choose to set to a wealthy man who could bear the shock of bad prices for a year or two, or the loss of part of the stock by diseases or severe weather.’[93]

The debate on middlemen offers another example of both the fascination and the perils of literary evidence on economic matters. The slavish condition of the Irish peasantry, as we have seen, was commonly observed both by travellers and by natives; it was a persistent motif running throughout the literature of political economy from the 1720s to the 1820s. During the Whiteboy disturbances of the 1760s one pro-Catholic writer noted that the common people ‘in their Food, Habitations, and Cloathing, be necessarily more miserable than the Plantation Negroes in America’, though ‘not Slaves by Law’.[94] Just after the Act of Union a Protestant reformer claimed that the Irish peasantry ‘suffered all the hardships of slavery . . . without any of those benevolent relations which might be supposed to exist between a lord and his vassals’.[95] That Ireland, five hundred years after English settlement, was still an isle of slaves was obviously a damning admission of the failure of the Ascendancy class to achieve its own self-defined aims. It was a major justification of English colonisation, after all, that the introduction of common law had liberated the natives from the petty tyranny of the Gaelic chieftains and a tenurial system based on coyne and livery. Far better—for Protestant reformers at least—to shift the blame for economic problems on to the iniquitous chain of men who stood between the peasant and the proprietor. There is now general agreement among economic historians that these contemporary reflections are profoundly misleading. Independent farmers grew in number during the late eighteenth century as landed proprietors followed Young’s advice and began to break the middlemen system and to manage their estates directly. The most important development was the rise of small and medium-sized farmers, earning somewhere between £5 and £20 per annum, who formed around 30 per cent of the population by the 1790s. Only a relatively small 11 per cent, including gentlemen, large farmers, middlemen, merchants, professionals and manufacturers, earned more.[96] By this time, of course, the fragmentation of landholdings and the growth of the rural population was already far advanced, and even those landlords who directly managed their estates were powerless to reverse the trend.

TOWNSPEOPLE

Irish towns, supposedly centres of civility, were yet another sign of the gap between the theory and practice of Hibernia Anglicana. Under Cromwellian rule, urban settlements were intended to be exclusively Protestant strongholds, and in the aftermath of the Williamite war there were fresh calls for the exclusion of Catholics from city boundaries. What small hopes the authorities had of enforcing the old residency restrictions quickly faded in the face of the early eighteenth-century immigration that fuelled urban growth. By the 1720s Catholics were probably a majority once again in almost every town of more than 10,000 inhabitants—Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Kilkenny, Galway, Clonmel, Drogheda and Carrick-on-Suir; even in the capital they would soon outnumber Protestants. The two exceptions, Belfast and Newry, were both centres of Protestant Dissent and offered little consolation to members of the Established Church. Although Belfast’s mercantile community was composed of families with a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, its Scottish character had become increasingly prominent in the second half of the seventeenth century. In 1679 an inhabitant of Lisburn, a solidly English district, complained of the Belfast merchants that ‘those Scotch have got all the general commissions from the London merchants for the trade into their hands and not one Englishman in these parts is so employed’. If anything, the situation worsened with the influx of Scots migrants in the 1690s.[97] During the ‘rage of party’ of Queen Anne’s reign the tight-knit communities within the Synod of Ulster were accused of attempting to monopolise trade, and it was said that Dissenters only accepted apprentices from their own ‘meetings’. Without references from their clergy, it was apparently difficult for Dissenters to change their masters or to move from one district to another. These mysterious ‘certificates’, according the Rev. William Tisdall, were the ‘one Main Spring’, that determined ‘all the lesser Wheels in their Political Machine’.[98]

Ever since the pathbreaking articles published by Maureen Wall in the 1950s and 1960s historians have recognised the importance of the expanding Catholic merchant class which transformed the towns, and especially the ports, of eighteenth-century Ireland. It used to be assumed that such families thrived in spite of, or even because of, the penal laws: unable to purchase land or lend money by a mortgage on landed property, they were compelled to invest in trade, which remained open to all denominations. It is true that Catholics complained bitterly of ‘quarterage’ tax, the payments which gave them the economic privileges of guild membership without any of the political rights normally accorded to freemen in the corporate towns. But Wall’s view, that quarterage was an irritant rather than a significant financial burden, has been generally accepted. By the 1730s a Protestant pamphleteer complained that Catholics had a monopoly of both domestic and foreign trade in Cork (though he reserved some abuse for the ‘costive-faced’ Presbyterians in the city).[99] Catholics, he added, dealt with and employed one another: ‘If a Papist at the Gallows wanted an ounce of Hemp, he’d skip the protestant Shops, and run to Mallow-lane to buy it.’[100] From the 1750s onwards critics of the penal code complained that the national economy suffered because the profits of Catholic trading were exported overseas rather than invested in property-owning and mortgaging at home. When the Catholic Committee became a major force in the 1790s, it was dominated by Dubliners like John Keogh, a silk merchant with land in Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon as well as Dublin, the wealthy poplin merchant Richard McCormick, Edward Byrne, whose distilling and sugar businesses made him reputedly the richest man in Ireland, joined by the physicians William James MacNeven and Theobald McKenna and the brewer John Sweetman.[101]

More recently, thanks to David Dickson, a more nuanced picture of Catholic trade has emerged. First, Dickson’s research shows the dangers of overestimating the Catholic share of mercantile wealth. In 1758 Catholics made up only one-fifth of those merchants in Cork who were engaged in foreign trade, even though they formed more than two-thirds of the population. The picture at Waterford was similar. In Dublin by 1780 Catholics made up three-eighths of the merchant population. Banking was almost entirely monopolised by Anglicans. What disadvantaged Catholics was not quarterage or the formal restrictions of the penal laws, but the continuing legacy of the seventeenth-century revolution in landownership. Wholesale merchants were recruited mostly from younger sons of gentlemen leaseholders who could afford the cash portions necessary for apprenticeship to an export house and subsequently the initial capital required for setting up in foreign trade—altogether something in the order of £600–£800. The effect of seventeenth-century forfeitures, Dickson suggests, was not to push energetic Catholics into the mercantile elite of the ports but, on the contrary, to strip them of the substantial resources required to establish themselves in wholesale trade.[102] Inevitably, moreover, the Ascendancy regime generally froze out Catholic entrepreneurs; the vast patronage of the expanding eighteenth-century state, including lucrative contracts for army and navy provisioning, were not likely to be shared among the enemies of the Protestant constitution.

Just as in the countryside, then, the surface calm of urban life concealed the instabilities and contradictions of Ascendancy Ireland. In Dublin and Cork Catholics were involved in the committees of merchants formed around 1770, anticipating the chambers of commerce of the next decade. In Wexford the subscribers to the Charitable Society for the Relief of the Sick Poor, connected to the Franciscan friary, were dominated by Catholic maltsters, ships’ captains and corn merchants (14 per cent were actually Protestants). Although excluded from public life by the penal laws, the Catholics of the town joined their Protestant counterparts in signing merchant petitions in 1757, 1779 and 1781.[103] Yet visitors to towns with sizeable Protestant populations would have found Catholics marginalised in the wholesale trades and merchant guilds; and everywhere the guilds upheld the legal monopoly of Protestants on civic institutions. In Dublin Catholics were unable to speculate in the building boom that was creating a neo-classical showpiece capital. The upwardly mobile were excluded from the grand residential streets and squares laid out by Luke Gardiner and others, and remained confined to the close-knit communities that lurked behind the Georgian terraces and wide streets.

Table 3: Members of Wexford Town Charitable Society, 1782–3

Merchant

25

Publican

2

Maltster

20

Cooper

2

Ship’s Captain

17

Sailor

2

Butcher

13

Ropemaker

1

Priest

8

Brazier

1

Draper

7

Coachman

1

Gentleman

6

Servant

1

Shopkeeper

6

Mason

1

Joiner

6

Tidewaiter

1

Shoemaker

4

Glazier

1

Broguemaker

3

Wigmaker

1

Clothier

3

Skinner

1

Carpenter

3

Ironmonger

1

Weaver

3

Widow

1

Farmer

3

Stonecutter

1

Baker

3

Watchmaker

1

Tanner

3

Staymaker

1

Distiller

2

Saddler

1

Tobacconist

2

Wheelwright

1

Unidentified

85

Total

244

Source: Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’ in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence: Catholic Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990), p. 150. (Whelan’s total figure of 248 has here been corrected to 244.)

All three of the professions mentioned by Kenmare as destinations for the sons of the Catholic gentry involved education and training abroad. For the wealthier families it was not uncommon to maintain links with relatives scattered across France, Austria and northern Italy. Mary O’Conor, mother of the renowned antiquarian, corresponded with her kinsman Owen O’Rourke in Vienna, a Jacobite exile who had been appointed ambassador to the Emperor Charles VI by the Pretender in 1727. In 1737 she summarised her own family strategy: she had ‘two sons in Rome these Eight years past yt Deseigns for ye Church, and one at home a priest yt studied in Paris I’ve two Small Boys more that I am told are promising which I Design for ye army’.[104] Both priests and returned army officers, if not actually outlaws, were certainly enemies of the Ascendancy regime. Until the foundation of Maynooth College in 1795 all Catholic priests were required to spend several years at one of the Irish colleges on the continent. Of those who returned to Ireland—there were about 1,500 priests in the country—few could expect a life of comfort. The sons of wealthy gentry and trading families spent longer in Paris and Rome before being catapulted into the hierarchy. Others were from poor backgrounds, and they got poorer as the century wore on. Already in 1732 Father Cornelius Kelly of Tuam was complaining that the only candidates for ordination were ‘the sons of shopkeepers and peasants, all of whom wish their children to become priests’.[105]

During the 1720s and 1730s it has been estimated that somewhere around 1,000 Irishmen were enlisted in the French army each year; thereafter the number declined.[106] Munster, which had supplied many of the original ‘wild geese’, continued to be strongly represented, as were the landed families of north Connacht, such as the O’Conors and O’Rourkes, already mentioned, and the O’Dowds and Plunketts. During the Seven Years War (1756–63), the Duke of Bedford, then Lord Lieutenant, believed that there were 1,600 Catholics in the country who had acquired military experience in foreign service.[107] Their social position, a highly anomalous one, must often have seemed degrading. As officers and gentlemen, they were accustomed to carrying arms. Perhaps they were also distinctive in appearance: in 1762 it was assumed that some Whiteboy protestors in the Blackwater valley ‘in laced clothes and completely accoutred’ must be Catholics returned from the French service.[108] But they were loathed by the Protestant elite. In the early 1730s a recruitment drive led by Colonel Richard Hennessy, permitted by London to enlist 750 men for the Irish Brigade, created serious sectarian tensions in County Cork. The Hennessy mission was an exceptional concession made during the Anglo-French entente of 1716–31. Just four years previously Moses Nowland of Carlow, convicted for enlisting men for the service of the Pretender, had been hanged, drawn and quartered.[109] As late as 1752 two French recruiting officers, Denis MacCarthy and Thomas Herlihy, were executed.[110] The Catholic radicals of the 1790s included Edward Sweetman of Wexford and James Plunkett of Roscommon, both of whom had experience of service in the French army.[111] The resentments common to their class were evident in the remarkable speech delivered by Sweetman to the freeholders of Wexford in September 1792. Sweetman introduced himself as a ‘man born a victim to the popery laws, and driven at an early period into foreign climes for prohibited, imperfect education and scanty bread’. He began his remarkable denunciation of English colonialism, complete with references to Machiavelli’s Prince, Sir John Davies and David Hume, with the words ‘I shall speak like a soldier’.[112]

A career in medicine, on the other hand, afforded Catholics wealth and status without attracting the hostility of the authorities. There were many well-known examples, including Christopher Nugent, Edmund Burke’s father-in-law in Bath, John Martin of Limerick, and the United Irishman William James MacNeven, who attended the medical college at Prague, where his uncle was chief physician to the Empress Maria Theresa, before graduating from the University of Vienna in 1783.[113] John Curry, the Catholic historian and activist, had been sent by his merchant father to study medicine in Paris, his family having forfeited their properties in County Cavan during the Cromwellian and Williamite confiscations. Although he is best remembered for his Historical memoirs of the Irish rebellion in the year 1641 (1758), his first publication was An essay on ordinary fevers (1743). Another well-known historian, Sylvester O’Halloran, was a surgeon in Limerick. The third son of a substantial County Clare farmer, he was related through his mother to Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill, founder of the ‘court of poetry’ of Coshma, and his brother held chairs in rhetoric, philosophy and divinity at the Jesuit college in Bordeaux. His medical works, influenced partly by the French literature on surgery, dealt with glaucoma and leg amputation. In an appendix to his Complete treatise on gangrene and sphacelus (1765) he defended the achievements of the ancient Irish in science and medicine.[114] On a less positive note, his Treatise on injuries of the head (1793) commented on the injuries sustained at fairs, patterns and hurling matches in Munster:

. . . our people, insensibly brave, notwithstanding the cruel oppressions they have suffered for a century past, and highly irritable, soon catch fire: a slight offence is frequently followed by serious consequences; and sticks, stones, and every other species of offence next to hand, are dealt out with great liberality! To this add the frequent abuse of spirituous liquors, particularly whiskey, which has, unhappily for the morals and constitutions of the people, found its way to every part of the kingdom![115]

As we have already seen, the legal profession was a key part of the Protestant Ascendancy: the laws were made by Protestant legislators, enforced by Protestant magistrates, constables, judges and (where possible) Protestant juries. Through the assizes and quarter-sessions the criminal justice system penetrated into local communities more effectively than central government. The oratorical talents of lawyers and their familiarity with constitutional issues made them good parliamentarians: around 40 out of 300 Irish M.P.s in 1695 were lawyers or legal office-holders, while 128 sat in the House of Commons during the reign of George II (out of a total of 669).[116] During the seventeenth century Catholics had already been squeezed out of the judicial bench; now they were formally disqualified from becoming barristers or attorneys. Those who survived, like the counsellor-at-law Joseph Nagle, were often vulnerable. Remembered by his niece, Nano Nagle, as the most hated Catholic in Ireland, this ‘reputed popish solicitor’ was caught up in an anti-Catholic panic that swept Munster in the early 1730s and led eventually to the arrest of the Bishop of Cork. Following allegations made by the disaffected parish priest of Doneraile, Nagle’s lodgings were raided by the collector of Mallow, and documents were seized relating to a fund established to lobby officials against proposals for two new penal measures, one for disarming Catholics, and one directed at Catholic solicitors. A parliamentary committee established to investigate the matter in 1733 claimed that his brother, Garrett Nagle, was the Pretender’s agent in Flanders.[117] Since Catholics were denied access to the legal profession they were also excluded from one of the major routes to landed wealth. There would be no Catholic (or indeed Presbyterian) equivalent of the humble attorney Robert Roberts from County Wexford, who climbed via the remembrancer’s office in the Court of Exchequer to a seat in parliament and eventually a country estate south of Dublin.[118]

THE LOWER ORDERS

The House of an Irish Peasant is the Cave of Poverty; within, you see a Pot and a little Straw, without, a Heap of Children tumbling on the Dunghill. . . . In every Road the Ragged Ensigns of Poverty are displayed; you often meet Caravans of Poor, whole Families in a Drove, without Clothes to cover, or Bread to feed them.

BISHOP GEORGE BERKELEY, A WORD TO THE WISE (1749)[119]

The vast majority of Irish people belonged to that class normally described as the ‘lower’ or ‘meaner’ sort or simply ‘the poor’. Almost 60 per cent of the population, it has been estimated, earned less than a meagre £5 per annum. These were the hewers of wood and drawers of water, those whose lives were dominated by physical labour. Protestants were obviously no exception: the overwhelming majority were not landowners or merchants, but belonged to the lower orders themselves, not only in Ulster, but everywhere from Dublin, where Protestants formed a majority in the first half of the eighteenth century, to counties like Roscommon, where they amounted to just 3 per cent of the population. For many commentators, nevertheless, a simple equation between religious allegiance and economic status was tempting, and Irishness and Catholicism were instinctively associated with poverty.

Contemporaries employed terms such as ‘the poor’, ‘the lower orders’ and ‘the peasantry’ without much precision. But the common people exhibited social gradations of their own. The liberal Protestant Robert Bell, writing just after the Act of Union, divided the peasantry into tenants, cottiers and spalpeens (an anglicised version of spailpíní). In the first group, he noted, it was common for five or six families to act as joint tenants on a holding of somewhere between thirty and forty acres. Such tenant partnerships, perhaps owning or hiring some livestock, had predominated in the seventeenth century. In the grazing and dairy-farming districts of the south, however, many had been forced onto marginal land as landlords shifted to pasture. As a result, they were often pushed downwards into Bell’s second category, the labourer or cottier class, who might occupy an acre or two for potatoes, perhaps with the right for a cow to graze on pasture grounds, in addition to payment for their labour.[120] The third class were the seasonal labourers or spalpeens, who migrated annually to another part of Ireland or to England at the beginning of the autumn and found work for a shilling or eighteen pence a day. To these rural groups must be added the urban artisans, apprentices and ‘mechanics’. In Dublin there were thousands of silk, woollen and linen weavers, crammed into the dense lanes and alleys of the Coombe and the Liberties, as well as a large number of domestic servants—a remarkable total of 12,000 women and 6,500 men by the 1790s—and labourers employed in the building and carrying trades. In Armagh, a modest market town in spite of its ecclesiastical status, labourers and servants made up 30 per cent of the population with a further 20 per cent employed in manufacturing.

Table 4: Occupations in Armagh city, 1770

Number

Percentage

Agricultural

Farmer

1

0.2

Cow Doctor

1

0.2

Mining and quarrying

Stonecutter

5

1.1

Brickmaker

1

0.2

Waterborer and pumpman

3

0.6

Building

Mason

1

0.2

Bricklayer

1

0.2

Plasterer

1

0.2

Carpenter

8

1.7

Glazier

2

0.4

Slater

1

0.2

Manufacturing

Machinery (hacklemaker)

1

0.2

Vehicles (carmaker 1, wheelwright 6)

7

1.5

Metals (brazier 1, nailer 5, smith 13, whitesmith 2)

21

4.5

Leather (broguemaker 2, saddler 2, shoemaker 29)

33

7.0

Wood (cooper 5, sawyer 1, turner 1)

7

1.5

Textiles (flaxdresser 1, stocking weaver 2, weaver 8)

11

2.3

Clothing (hatter and milliner 5, mantua-maker 2, breeches-maker 5, seamstress 1, tailor 11)

24

5.1

Food (baker, breadman, gingerbread-maker 6, brewer 1, maltster 5)

12

2.5

Watch and print (watch 3, print 3)

6

1.3

Transport

Carman

8

1.7

Carrier

5

1.1

Waterman

1

0.2

Toll-collector

1

0.2

Dealing

Clothes and textiles (clothes shop 3, yarn dealer 1, linen trade 4)

8

1.7

Food dealer (butcher 11, dairy keeper 1, fruit dealer 5, mealman 2, flour and bread dealer 1)

20

4.2

Drink-seller

49

10.4

Chandler

5

1.1

Shopkeeper

25

5.3

Merchant

1

0.2

Pedlar and huckster

8

1.7

Labouring

Labourer

70

14.9

Public and professional service

Army

1

0.2

Government

10

2.1

Religion

10

2.1

Legal

5

1.1

Medical

8

1.7

Education

11

2.3

Art and amusement

4

0.8

Domestic and personal service

Living-in servant

59

12.5

Other servant

5

1.1

Barber and wigmaker

10

2.1

Total

471

99.8

Source: L. A. Clarkson, ‘An anatomy of an Irish town: the economy of Armagh, 1770’, Irish Economic and Social History, v (1978), pp 44–5.

No foreign visitor to Ireland failed to comment on the poverty he found there, or on the low standards of clothing and housing endured by the people. It was usually the cottiers who attracted their notice, living in hovels, sleeping on straw, easily pushed into destitution and vagrancy during the periodic subsistence crises; but the difference between small landholders and day labourers was often very small. The Whiteboy insurrections of the 1760s were viewed by the Catholic campaigner Charles O’Conor as a kind of class war between the Munster cottagers and their landlords (who were in many cases Catholic).[121] Social tensions of this kind occurred where landholders shifted between tillage, dairying and grazing systems in order to take advantage of market conditions. The resulting disturbances were not inherently sectarian in character, but rather conservative responses to the commercialisation of farming or, in other words, ‘improvement’. The enclosure, drainage and reclamation of land, generally associated with increased agricultural productivity, often threatened cottiers who had customarily enjoyed access to common ground. Likewise, it was the creation of turnpike roads in south Ulster, a key component of the new communications network, that sparked off the protests of the Oakboys in 1763. The potential clash between traditional rights or expectations—what historians call the ‘moral economy’—and the increasing commercialisation of agriculture are described in strikingly familiar language in Charles O’Hara’s attempt to make his Sligo tenantry ‘industrious’ in 1752:

I went yesterday to divide a very large mountain farm among its inhabitants, who according to their own tradition had lived under me these 500 years: ’tis their phrase. With great difficulty, I divided them into four villages though ’twas an innovation but I told them they must be modernised.[122]

In Dublin and Cork, with their large, more anonymous working communities, resistance to ‘modernisation’ took the form of intimidation and strike action against both masters and competitors. As early as the 1720s illegal ‘combinations’ of skilled workers and journeymen had appeared; later in the century they employed oaths and secret rituals rather like the Whiteboys, and by the 1790s there were more sophisticated associations with committees and subscriptions.[123]

How should these strains of social protest be interpreted? For Sean Connolly, the central features of Irish life were the great differences of wealth and status that divided all European populations, against which ethnic and religious identities counted for little. The penal laws, which appeared such a grievous burden to the nineteenth-century middle class, were only a theoretical grievance to the eighteenth-century masses. Organised resistance to the extension of the market economy, as in England, was carried out within the accepted terms of a hierarchical social order. This emphasis on the limited and conservative nature of popular protest is supported by older scholarship, which suggests that before the militia riots of 1793 agrarian unrest was characterised by an ‘tacit understanding’ between the governed and the government.[124] Harmony rather than conflict normally characterised social relationships. As we shall see in Chapter 9, agrarian rebels presented themselves as reformers, correcting abuses and innovations such as the ‘canting’ of leases to the highest bidder, but they did not challenge the tenurial system itself. Normally the targets of their violent campaigns were intermediaries, such as tithe-proctors, rather than landlords. For Kevin Whelan, on the other hand, the sense of displacement so keenly felt by the old proprietors was diffused throughout the big-farmer class and eventually percolated down through the lower orders. This view certainly finds some support from surviving Jacobite poetry, where social divisions are apparently transcended by the ethnic and religious hatred between the clanna Gael and the búir an Bhéarla.[125] As yet, however, there is very little agreement on how far the aisling poem can be taken as evidence of lower-class sentiment.

The difficulty here is not simply the limitations of a historiographical tradition that has largely confined itself to English-language sources. It is true that Irish was the language of the majority of the people during the eighteenth century, but the majority of the people did not record their thoughts for the benefit of posterity. ‘Peasants do not write,’ as one Indian historian has observed; ‘they are written about.’[126] And they are written about in the language of the magistrate’s report and the assize courtroom. The rich collections of Irish-language poetry that have survived in manuscript contain information on many aspects of contemporary culture, from diet to sexual habits, but for the most part they reflect the values of the wealthy. Their usefulness as evidence of political sentiments, discussed further in Chapter 4, is limited by the fact that the aisling poem was ‘essentially a stylised composition for a literary audience’.[127] Although it is extremely difficult to reconstruct the experiences of ordinary people, of those who survive in the records only because they were taxed, tithed or taken to court, the problems are not so very different from those faced by English or French or Italian historians. Print culture—now a very fashionable topic among European historians—meant English print, with the exception of a relatively small number of dictionaries and key devotional works. There were no Irish-language newspapers, pamphlets or handbills. English was the language of commerce and the law: diaries, memoirs and correspondence, business records and inventories, indictment books, grand jury presentments and parish registers were all in English (while the diocesan reports of Catholic bishops were in Latin or Italian). Even the anonymous threatening letters issued by Captain Right and his shadowy comrades were, as far as we know, written in English, probably by schoolmasters. There are ways in which historians can compensate for this imbalance, by reading official forms of documentation ‘against the grain’, or by a sensitive treatment of the incidental information they sometimes contain. But when the history of the Catholic masses is written, it will be a history based largely on English-language sources.

How far, in practice, was the bond between landlord and tenant distorted by racial and religious animosities? Ultimately the economic power of the landlord rested on the option of not renewing a lease, an option that was entirely hypothetical in districts where desirable tenants were thin on the ground. Seventeenth-century planters had repeatedly discovered this to their cost. In the remote lands he acquired in south Kerry, for example, the economist Sir William Petty intended to attract English settlers who were ‘willing to take pains, skilled in their employments, have some stock and . . . do delight in improvement and husbandry’. But just as his investments in ironmaking and fishing came to rather little, he found it necessary to lease land to the existing tenants whatever their religious allegiance or agricultural skills.[128] After the Williamite victories it was a general assumption among the ruling elite that ‘a Confluence of all sorts of Foreign Protestants would very much contribute to the Plantation, and enriching of Ireland’, but there was no general ‘settlement’ of land in the 1690s, and no obvious source of acceptable migrants.[129] Half a century later Abel Ram of Gorey wrote to an English correspondent about his improvements in agriculture:

Humphreys is getting a Plow man for me, for those Irish Land-burning Rascals know nothing in nature. If I could get 2 or 3 English men over, I would give them ye best Farms I had at a much lower Rent than I get here. But none that are worth any thing will venture into this Potatoe Country, for fear of starving.[130]

The letter testifies both to the enduring colonial preferences of Protestant landlords, and to the practical obstacles they confronted.

In many areas landlords were keen to sponsor manufacturing on their estates as part of a broader attempt to reshape the environment in accordance with new standards of civility and ‘improvement’. Alongside investments in internal communications and the creation of artificial estate villages, attempts at social engineering were not uncommon. The prosperity brought by textiles in Ulster was broadly diffused down the social scale, ultimately to the landlord’s benefit. Throughout the southern counties landlords and agents hatched projects to lure northerners with manufacturing skills to settle on their estates. One such area, of great interest to students of the 1798 rebellion, was north Wexford. In the decades after the Hanoverian succession Thomas Watson Wentworth attempted to establish a Protestant settlement on his estate in south Wicklow and north Wexford, shipping catechisms and seeds from England in a characteristic blend of Protestantism and agricultural improvement. In Carnew, along the Wicklow/Wexford border, he hoped to found ‘a new colony of industrious people’ to supplant the ‘lazy, sluggish’ inhabitants.[131] Many of the prisoners massacred at Scullabogue during the ’98 rising were middling and lower-class Protestants from relatively recent colonies at Foulkesmills, Fethard and Tintern, and it has been suggested that the burning of Old Ross was a result of animosity towards the Palatine settlement there, with its alien names (Hess, Hartrick, Horneck, Jekyll, Frizell).[132]

In his authoritative study of south Munster, David Dickson has emphasised the importance of ‘English plantations’, including Palatines on the estate of Sir Thomas Southwell at Rathkeale. In west Cork, meanwhile, Sir Richard Cox initiated an ‘English’ plantation at Dunmanway in the mid-1690s.[133] His grandson, the noted improver of the same name, established a model town on his estate with the purpose of introducing the linen manufacture. Within two years he saw the Protestant population swell from 250 to 405, mostly owing to the migration of northern tradesmen and their families; but he also warned that ‘the Natives ever hate Strangers’, not only because ‘they are not of their Clan’, but because they raised the price of land.[134] The Earl of Grandison built the village of Villierstown on his Dromana estate and established the linen industry there in the early 1750s, encouraging Protestant weavers to settle.[135] Other settlements were established by Petty in south Kerry (already mentioned) and by Richard Hedges at a Macroom. There were twenty or more of these ventures in south Munster alone, requiring significant investment in schools, the supply of flax seed and spinning-wheels, the organisation of linen markets and bleach-greens. The most enthusiastic promoters, such as Richard Cox junior and Lord Grandison, tended to be stalwarts of the charter school movement and members of the enlightened Dublin Society. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Catholic Viscount Kenmare also encouraged northern Dissenters to settle in Killarney, as part of an attempt to establish a foothold in the linen trade, and he offered a stipend to their minister ‘which the papists don’t much approve of’.[136]

Behind these internal-colonial enterprises, seldom solid enough to outlive their sponsors, was a mixture of sectarian and economic logic. In Ballymote, County Sligo, the Rev. William Henry claimed that his encouragement of Protestant settlements in Connacht not only strengthened the ‘British interest’ but improved an underdeveloped and underpopulated province: ‘Its extended plains, before almost Desart, begin to be covered with Men instead of Beasts.’[137] His optimism was corroborated by the investigations of the Physico-Historical Society, of which William Henry himself was a notable ornament. The much-vaunted skills of the northern Presbyterians, it was fondly imagined, would spread by a kind of osmosis. In the year of the Great Frost, with all its attendant disasters, a pamphleteer clung to the hope that the establishment of ‘tilling and trading colonies’ might still lead to the reclamation of the native Irish. The very sight of thriving Protestants among them, he hoped, ‘wou’d in time make them ashamed of their sloath and beggary’. Regarding the failure of colonies of husbandmen in the south, however, he mentioned that one of the great discouragements was the ill-treatment that Protestant settlers received from the popish inhabitants: ‘Their cattle have been houghed and stolen, their stack yards, and sometimes their very houses burnt, and a combination entered into by all their Popish neighbours to carry on all points of business or law against them.’[138]

The standard tenurial arrangement in the eighteenth century was a lease for three lives for Protestants (i.e. three successive generations, specifically named in the document), or thirty-one years for Catholics. Many of the poor, nevertheless, were tenants at will. Most did not lease directly from the landlord, but from intermediate farmers and rentiers. Leasing policies often reflected confessional loyalties and preferences. In the barony of Inishowen it was reported that the Donegall family let land to Protestants only; the ‘original Irish’, as one under-tenant complained in 1765, were ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’.[139] In Wexford, as Kevin Whelan has shown, the religious composition of the middleman class, the key social brokers in the county, depended on landlord attitudes. In the south, on the estates of Catholic or crypto-Catholic landlords like the Colcloughs (Tintern), Leighs (Rosegarland) and Devereuxes (Carrigbyrne), Catholic middlemen were the norm. Segregation extended further down the social scale to the under-tenants, so that in the hilly Wexford/Wicklow borderlands solidly Catholic townlands alternated with wealthier Protestant ones.[140] Elsewhere, however, greater latitude was customary. The policy of John Perceval, the first Earl of Egmont, was to give Protestant bidders preferential treatment in the leasing of farms to newcomers, but not against sitting tenants whom he considered to be ‘honest’ Catholics.[141] Under his son similar practices prevailed. In 1751 the Egmont land agent, Richard Purcell, reported that he had received a bid for a farm from one Callaghan Carty. The offer, which was eventually accepted, included a covenant to carry out various improvements—the building of a stone house and the planting of an orchard—within three years. Purcell wrote in the applicant’s favour:

This man (who is a Papist) has lived at Cooleann since I knew it, where he improved, behaved quietly, and paid his Rent well. I believe him to be very equal to this Undertaking, and as likely to be a good Tennant as any Papist of his Station, which I deem to be above that of a Cotter, and beneath that of a Gentleman Farmer.[142]

In general, he seems to have respected the claims of Catholics provided that they were, as he put it, ‘quiet’ and ‘industrious’ men.[143]

One final measure of landlord paternalism worth brief consideration was charitable relief.[144] Unlike England and Scotland, Ireland had no national system of welfare provision under which each parish could be compelled to maintain its own poor. Parliamentary bills along the lines of the English poor law were introduced in 1695 and 1697, which would have enabled any parish in the country to tax its inhabitants for the relief of the distressed. Although they won considerable support in the House of Commons, these proposals never made it onto the statute book. In Dublin a workhouse was established in 1704, funded by a tax on the householders, which soon came to take in foundlings and orphans, not only from Dublin but from the countryside. Pressure on the workhouse led Jonathan Swift, one of the governors, to propose a notorious parish scheme in 1737 for the badging of the ‘deserving’ poor. The patriot and agricultural reformer Viscount Molesworth was another advocate of poor relief, but not for those permitted

most shamefully to live under Hedges, in Ditches and Hutts, worse than Hogsties; from whence you shall often see creeping out like Vermin, whole swarms of Bastards; the Produce of Adultery and Incest, and whereof, there are many more in the Neighbourhood of Dublin, than any other part of the World; a Race of People like Gypsies, which no Priest takes any care of; yet are the Seminaries of All Rebellion, dangerous in Plague Times, revengeful at all Times, in burning Barns and Houses of such as are not kind to them . . .[145]

Sometimes regarded as an expression of a peculiarly Irish mindset, such attitudes were entirely in keeping with traditional attitudes to vagrancy. For centuries philanthropists and reformers had favoured registering the deserving poor to beg within their own parish, while simultaneously calling for the whipping of shirkers and the expulsion of outsiders.

In a survey of the 1740–41 famine throughout Europe, John Post has suggested that the particularly high mortality experienced in Ireland was a result of administrative inadequacies, and he contrasts Ireland with other kingdoms of the ancien régime where the central bureaucracy was more responsive to local needs. Post may have underestimated the scale of the problem confronting the Irish government, which saw the failure of both grain and potatoes compounded by cattle losses and an embargo on maritime trade; he may also have underestimated the scale of the achievement which left the Dublin workhouse feeding more than 8,000 people. Nevertheless, his criticisms of the Irish relief effort still stand. Part of the problem, certainly, was related to the country’s religious divisions. This is not to suggest that the philanthropy of the Protestant ruling classes was strictly confined to the lower sorts of their own community, although some religious bias usually operated. In west Cork Richard Cox lamented the plight of the Catholic smallholders, albeit with a rather bad grace: ‘The Papists though They are bad members in this society, are yet better than none.’[146] In the 1760s it was the Rev. Richard Woodward, the future Bishop of Cloyne, a conspicuously hardline defender of the Established Church and its privileges, who campaigned for the introduction of a national welfare system involving a ‘house of industry’ in every county to provide the destitute with ‘a subsistence in time of distress’.[147]

The problem lay rather with the weakness of Ireland’s relief infrastructure. The parish vestry, the administrative basis of welfare provision, was feeble, particularly in areas where Anglicans formed less than a fifth of the population. It possessed no statutory authority to levy a cess for the poor. The Anglican clergy organised collections for poor relief, sometimes with high-profile charity sermons, and distributed the money—presumably to their own congregations. We can assume that other denominations did the same: in 1740, for example, the four Presbyterian congregations of Belfast established a joint committee which raised £150 which was distributed to 850 needy residents.[148] The size of the Protestant population must have been one reason why the earliest badging schemes were concentrated in Ulster. Moreover, the county elites who were expected to fund and implement these welfare schemes seldom displayed the public spirit demanded by improvers. The interests of the Established Church and the country gentlemen clashed not only over poor relief, but also over schemes for the conversion of the natives and even clerical dues such as the tithe of agistment, applicable to pasturage for dry and barren cattle, essentially scrapped by the House of Commons in 1735.

GENDER RELATIONS

This chapter began by asking how the social world of eighteenth-century Irish people might best be interpreted. So far, however, there has been no explicit discussion of women. Even by Irish standards, remarkably little research has been carried out on this vast topic. Gender is now a well-established part of mainstream historiography in the United States, Britain and France, but still struggles for recognition in Ireland. The 1790s offer a partial exception to this rule. The role of women in the age of revolution is beginning to be explored by Nancy Curtin, Catriona Kennedy and others (see Chapter 11). It is salutary to note, nevertheless, that the recent compilation entitled 1798: a bicentenary perspective (2003), which stretches to thirty-three essays spread over more than 750 pages, contains just one general survey focused on women. Remarkably, there is no entry for ‘gender’ in the index. For good or ill, moreover, what research that has been done steers clear of the heavily politicised debates on theory and methodology common elsewhere. Some of the most interesting work, including important essays by Toby Barnard and James Kelly, has grown organically from research on archival and newspaper sources. There has been surprisingly little expectation that a focus on gender will change the way that Irish history is written.[149]

Such a conspicuous silence can partly be explained by the lingering prejudice that gender history, concerned primarily with the family, the household and private life, has no serious implications for the study of established political or social themes such as Anglo-Irish relations, the penal code, agrarian insurgency or politicisation. It also reflects the genuine difficulties presented by the source material. While historians have done much in recent decades to illuminate the ‘hidden Ireland’ of the Catholics, they have shed very little light on Catholic women. No Catholic female novelists or pamphleteers have been identified. What little correspondence that survives among the scanty papers of the Catholic gentry concentrates on financial matters.[150] Even in the 1790s, when the wives and sisters of Tone, Drennan and McCracken come into view, the female Keoghs, MacNevens and Teelings remain stubbornly obscure. Gaelic poetry, meanwhile, was a male preserve, with the possible exception of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (Lament for Art O’Leary, c. 1774), traditionally but inconclusively attributed to his widow Eileen, and Máire Bhuidhe Ní Laoire’s Ar lecain na gréine (‘On the sunny slopes’, c. 1796), an aisling inspired by the Bantry Bay invasion attempt, and apparently written for a world in which the French monarchy had not been abolished and the Stuarts were still preparing for the restoration of their three kingdoms.[151]

All religious denominations in eighteenth-century Ireland subscribed to a patriarchal model of society in which the authority of the adult male over his household was rarely questioned. In early modern Europe, indeed, the power of the father within the domestic sphere had often been likened to that of a king. Although women convicted of felony were usually executed in the normal way, a wife found guilty of murdering her husband, or a female servant who murdered her master, were sentenced to be burnt to death, since they owed ‘a special obedience and subjection’ to the victim. This was the fate of Catherine Beaghan, convicted at the County Kildare assizes in 1746 for the murder of her husband.[152] The family, which was understood to include servants and other dependants, was the basic building-block of the social order. It was the essential means through which reputation and status were established, and within its framework ordinary men and women were socialised into the habits of deference (or in some cases, perhaps, of ‘insolence’) which maintained established patterns of social conflict and cohesion.

As we have already seen, contemporaries often commented that the Irish married young. In England, Jonathan Swift observed, labourers, mechanics, servants and cottagers saved money before marrying. ‘But, in this Kingdom, the Case is directly contrary, where many thousand Couples are yearly married, whose whole united Fortunes, bating the Rags on their Backs, would not be sufficient to purchase a Pint of Buttermilk for their Wedding Supper.’[153] The selection of a partner normally involved some mixture of romantic or physical attraction on the one hand, and social and economic advantage (as judged by parents) on the other; but the balance varied massively according to social standing. Predictably, almost all the information we have relates to men and women of property. In 1737 Lord Egmont summarised the qualities of his prospective daughter-in-law, Lady Catherine Cecil, thus: ‘Her age eighteen, her health good, her face and person beautiful and graceful, her education virtuous and careful, her sense and temper remarkably good. She will have £20,000, of which I take but £12,000.’[154] Some of the tensions involved in the elaborate business of elite matrimony were conveyed by the complaint of Frederick Mullins that trustees of his marriage settlement were unnecessarily delaying ‘my taking possession of the charming Phoebe’ because they were not ‘so eager for a f—k as I am’.[155] For sons at least, however, parental control was not absolute. Lord Orrery was probably expressing a common view in 1728 when he eagerly anticipated his father finding ‘a woman whose person shall please me, and whose fortune will please him’.[156]

It goes without saying that the romantic and sexual experiences of the overwhelmingly majority of the population are very poorly documented. It seems likely, however, that the importance of mutual attachment in the selection of partners existed in inverse relation to the social status of the couple. We can be confident too that the day-to-day reality of married life departed from the neat hierarchical ideas prescribed in sermons and conduct literature. For the smallholders, labourers and cottiers whose lives depended on the state of the harvest, marriage meant economic interdependence. Wives played a vital role in the domestic economy, where they managed most routine expenditure; they also brought to the marital home essential goods or money in the form of their ‘portion’. For women, marriage did not guarantee security, but certainly made it more likely; marriage brought social respect and conferred authority over single girls. At elite level the traditional role of the midwife was being usurped by the accoucheur or obstetrician, but married women still assumed the authority to examine the bodies of single women, servants and neighbours to resolve disputes over virginity, pregnancy or infanticide.[157] Violence against women was probably tolerated as long as it remained within the bounds of ‘reasonable correction’, but not if the harmony of the local community was threatened. The Whiteboys sometimes settled family disputes with ruthless efficiency, as was discovered by a furze-cutter and wife-beater named Walsh in March 1775. He was carried by a crowd of more than 150 to a turnpike gate near Callan, hung by the neck until he lost consciousness, and subsequently given the choice ‘to take with his wife or to divide half his worldly substance with her’. The band then proceeded to a nearby place named the Lime Tree, where an unmarried couple were living in ‘scandal’. The man and his mistress were forced to swear that they would part and were informed that the Whiteboys would return and strangle them both if they refused.[158]

A rare glimpse of the female presence in the workforce can be found in an unofficial census of Carrick-on-Suir, collected by a team combining an English army officer, a local gentleman and a Gaelic scholar. At the end of the eighteenth century there were more than 5,800 females in the town, making up 53 per cent of the population. A third of these were married and 11.6 per cent were widows. Among women aged 45–49, only 9 per cent were single. The census rarely registered the occupations of women, except those of widows, servants, and those whose trade was clearly different from their husbands and fathers. Throughout ancien régime Europe domestic service was the largest category of female employment, accounting for approximately 10 per cent of the urban population. In Carrick the figure was almost a quarter, but this was dwarfed by the 1,200 involved in textiles, virtually two-thirds of the overall figure. Carrick was one of the major woollen towns of Ireland, although it was now in sad decline. The textile industry was still run on a domestic basis and depended on a cheap pool of female (and child) labour, working in workshops as spinners and carders.[159] Elsewhere, in the cities and in the garrison towns, women also earned money illegally as prostitutes. In 1777 alone more than 200 ‘night walkers’ or ‘strolling women’ were confined in Dublin’s House of Industry.[160] A decade earlier the Dublin Magdalen Asylum was established by benevolent clergymen and Lady Arbella Denny, its first governess, with the aim of providing religious instruction and employment for penitent females. Between 1767 and 1774 a modest total of eighty women were admitted, of whom a third had been ‘reclaimed’ and had settled into ‘honest’ employment. The Rev. Richard Woodward nevertheless took some comfort in the fact that lewd women might be reclaimed, even in ‘a country where they are the refuse of the people, and prejudiced against our advice by bigotry to the Romish church’.[161]

Table 5: Female and Male Occupations, Carrick-on-Suir, 1799

Occupations

Females (number)

Employed females (%)

Males (number)

Employed males (%)

Textiles

1,200

64.9

792

24.2

Clothing and footwear

34

1.8

307

9.4

Food, drink, tobacco

39

2.1

207

6.3

Other manufacture

11

10.6

706

21.5

Lodging, innkeeping

28

1.5

14

0.4

Shopkeepers

13

0.7

22

0.7

Pedlars, hawkers

59

3.2

23

0.7

Transport, dealers, traders

6

10.3

347

10.6

Clerks

0

0.0

81

2.5

Professional

9

0.5

146

4.5

Domestic and personal services

442

23.9

132

4.0

Labourers

0

0.0

494

15.1

Ladies, gentlemen

7

0.4

6

0.2

Paupers

45

47

Dependants

3,954

2,170

Percentage of population employed

31.9

59.6

Source: L. A. Clarkson, ‘Love, labour and life: women in Carrick-on-Suir in the late eighteenth century’, Irish Economic and Social History, xx (1993), p. 26, Table 3.

Ever since the classic works of Lecky and Froude historians have been intrigued by the phenomenon of abduction, which persisted—and indeed flourished—in Ireland throughout the eighteenth century, even though the practice had more or less disappeared from most of western Europe. It should be made clear that ‘abduction’ was a euphemism used to describe what was generally an appalling act of sexual violence. In a small minority of cases, it is true that daughters were seized in what appeared to have been collusive arrangements. A visitor to Kilkenny in 1776 thus described actual or threatened abduction as a ‘strategem’ deployed when ‘a man is in love with a woman, but is repulsed by her relations’—adding that it seldom failed.[162] More commonly, however, abduction began with the kidnapping of a teenage girl from a wealthy family by an armed gang. The victim was then taken to a prearranged location, often some distance away (and occasionally out of the country), where a Catholic priest or ‘couple-beggar’ was waiting. There she was persuaded or coerced into marriage and usually, in the language of the day, ‘deflowered’—sometimes before witnesses. Widows were also a common target because they possessed personal wealth. The typical abduction, as James Kelly’s authoritative analysis demonstrates, was a kind of hostile takeover bid in the marriage market, in which otherwise respectable men used rape as a weapon in the struggle for material gain.[163]

To ‘carry away’ an heiress was, of course, illegal. Abduction was made a capital offence in 1707, following the seizure of a thirteen-year-old girl, Margaret Macnamara, who stood to inherit £2,000 from her father, in County Clare. The culprit, Jack O’Bryan, brought her before a couple-beggar and obtained her ‘consent’ to marriage by threatening to rape her. The fact that O’Brien was a Catholic, while Miss Macnamara was a Protestant, and that the ceremony was performed by a Catholic friar, ensured widespread publicity. Any marriage performed by a priest who had been episcopally ordained was regarded by the Protestant authorities as valid; this applied even to unregistered Catholic priests or regulars—in spite of the fact that their very presence in the country was a crime under the Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697. Under the eighteenth-century criminal justice system, it was the responsibility of the victim and her family to initiate legal proceedings. In any case, the social asset in question—the girl’s virginity—could not be recovered by legal action. In this situation, the only option was for the girl and her family to reconcile themselves to their fate. Very few abduction cases proceeded to trial; but at least twelve of the fifty-nine reported between 1707 and 1760 went to court, resulting in eleven guilty verdicts (and seven executions).

There were regular calls during the reigns of George I and George II to strengthen the law. Irish Protestants were increasingly dismayed by the rising number of clandestine marriages involving Protestants but solemnised by Catholic priests (in abduction cases the involvement of couple-begging priests exceeded that of degraded Anglican clergymen). In 1725 parliament consequently increased the already substantial corpus of law aimed at mixed marriages by determining that a Catholic priest or degraded clergyman who married either two Protestants or a Protestant and a Catholic was guilty of a felony punishable by death. At least one degraded clergyman was executed in consequence; other clergymen were dismissed from their livings for failing to observe the rules governing marriage. But the problem of clandestine mixed marriage did not disappear, and further legislation in 1735 and 1745 made little difference. Indeed, a fresh outbreak of kidnappings and abductions committed by lower gentry or strong farmers in the 1750s marked a significant upturn in abductions, and levels remained high, especially in Dublin and in Munster and south Leinster (Limerick, Tipperary, Cork, Waterford, Kilkenny and Carlow accounted for over half the total sample of reported cases). By the 1780s, however, ‘polite’ public opinion was turning against the kidnappers, and the practice had come to be regarded by the press as ‘a remnant of barbarity’ that ‘disgraced the national character’.[164]

Abduction cases provide an extreme illustration of the ways in which women could become victims of a harsh code of public morality which reduced female virtue to the traditional qualities of chastity, modesty and obedience. Equally grim conclusions can be drawn from the 235 cases of infanticide recorded between 1721 and 1800. The murder of children—by drowning, beating, suffocation, stabbing or exposure—must partly be explained by the economic burden placed on the poor; yet James Kelly has convincingly argued that women were driven to infanticide primarily by the stigma of illegitimacy. (Similar attitudes account for the abandonment of the thousands of children received by the Dublin Foundling Hospital.) The crime, made a capital offence in 1707, was almost entirely specific to unmarried women, some of whom resorted to primitive abortifacients or even suicide rather than face the shame of childbirth outside marriage. Female servants, a large social group, were particularly vulnerable since their social position depended upon their reputation, while their work environment exposed them to sexual pressure from masters and male servants. Significantly, while societal condemnation of extramarital pregnancy was never openly challenged, attitudes towards the perpetrators of child murder among the lower orders seem to have been more sympathetic than among the legislators.[165]

The subjects of marriage and sexual behaviour in eighteenth-century Ireland still await detailed investigation. In the nineteenth century the chastity of Irish women would be a frequent boast. Catholic parish registers surviving from the late eighteenth century suggest that illegitimacy rates in Ireland were lower than the European norm.[166] As we shall see in Chapter 7, however, priests had little cause for complacency during the previous century. The visitation book of James Butler, Archbishop of Cashel, covering the years between 1752 and 1764, contains a wealth of information on marital and sexual problems. Cases of matrimonial discipline were very regularly referred to the synods and conferences held by Archbishop Butler in the 1750s. At Hospital chapel (County Limerick), for example, a certain ‘Daniel D.’ of Kilteely sued for divorce from ‘Margaret K.’ in September 1751, on the grounds that they were relatives within the fourth degree of consanguinity and that the necessary dispensation had never been granted. In all probability this was an attempt to exploit a common technical irregularity in order to resolve a serious marital problem. Daniel swore an oath that Margaret had ‘refused beding’ with him about three months after their marriage in 1735, cohabited with a ‘common soldier’ for seven years with whom she had several children, and then ‘adhered’ to three or four other men. This request for a practical ‘divorce’ seems to have been successful, though it did not (officially at least) entitle him to remarry.[167]

More frequently the ecclesiastical authorities were asked to deal with men who had deserted their wives. In July 1752 a conference at Thurles heard that Denis D. had left his wife Catherine and ‘sticks to several whores’. The couple seem to have been reconciled. In the same year James F. of Hospital, who was living ‘in adultery’ in Corbally, was ordered ‘to stick by his lawful wife’. A case of alleged breach of contract, another common problem, was apparently resolved when Cat. D. had Wm S. thrown into jail, ‘where they were marryd for a rape she swore agst. him’.[168] In August 1755 William E. of Hospital was brought before the ecclesiastical authorities. He had recently married Mary D., but it transpired that he had previously had carnal knowledge of Catherine D.—a cousin of his wife. (In a revealing detail, apparently quite typical of kinship relations among the ‘lower’ Irish, the minutes note that the two girls were related through both Catherine’s father and mother.) Catherine did not claim that any contract had been made, but successfully secured 20 shillings damages ‘for her loss of time and fame’ (i.e. reputation).[169] A more intriguing case was that of Derby McK. who sued for divorce from Catherine D. of Ballynahinch in 1752. The two had married in 1745, concealing the fact that they were related in the third degree of consanguinity (that they shared, that is, a common great-grandparent). After cohabiting for half a year with the girl’s parents, Derby eloped with another woman from County Clare, with whom he had several children. Following the birth of their first child, he returned to Ballynahinch with a proposal to accept Catherine (and her ‘portion’—the household goods, cash or livestock normally contributed to the marriage by the wife and her family); but this attempted reconciliation met with a hostile response from Derby’s father-in-law, who accused him of horse-stealing. Fortunately for all concerned, Derby had never had sex with Catherine, ‘her father and mother having fixed themselves betwixt s[ai]d Derby [Mc]K. and his s[ai]d wife at night in bed’. The girl, it transpired, was only eleven years old at the time of her marriage. Her parents, clearly pleased to be shot of a wayward chancer, confirmed that the two were related.[170]

The Cashel visitations, never properly analysed, raise the intriguing possibility that the irregularities associated with clandestine marriages, notably the frequent breaches of the rules on consanguinity, could be exploited by those eager to obtain a divorce—whatever ‘divorce’ meant in practice. The Catholic Church, since the Council of Trent, had regarded marriages as fully lawful only if they were celebrated by the local parish priest and were preceded by the publication of banns for three successive Sundays. In large parts of Ireland, however, the Tametsi decree had never been formally promulgated, and the reading of the banns, designed to allow time for impediments to marriage to be discovered, seems to have been dispensed with throughout much of the south. More serious irregularities arose from the willingness of couples of all denominations to resort to couple-beggars or ‘tack’ems’. These were clergymen (usually Anglican or Catholic) who had either never obtained a parish or had been suspended and subsequently made a living from marriage fees. Alternatively, some Catholics turned to the Dominicans or Franciscans, who were outside the jurisdiction of the episcopal hierarchy. Some of the reasons for resorting to a couple-beggar were suggested by Archbishop Troy in 1789, when he condemned those who ‘fly immediately to a profligate, excommunicated priest generally as intoxicated as themselves, who runs over the marriage ceremony without the smallest inquiry about kindred, consent of parents, difference of religion, a former contract of marriage, or other impediments’.[171] The problem of clandestine marriages was no doubt exacerbated by the penal laws, which hampered the exercise of episcopal discipline within the church.

Further information on the expectations and disappointments that accompanied matrimony can be inferred from Martin Marley’s The good confessor (1748), a manual for Catholic priests which contained a chapter entitled ‘The reciprocal obligations of wedded persons’. By the 1740s the model parish priest was not only seminary-trained but equipped with a variety of such manuals and devotional works. The following questions, recommended for the confessional, tell their own story:

Do you disturb the Peace by your Peevish, Noisy and Scolding Temper? Does this happen often? This is a Fault incident to Women, and is the occasion of many Sins.

Did you treat your Wife as if she had been your Servant? . . . Did you use her Body immodestly? Did you use it contrary to the dictates of the Law of Nature, the holiness of Matrimony, or the ends of Generation? How often? Did you domineer over your Husband, or refuse to obey him in all lawful Matters?

Did you waste, or squander away your own or your Wife’s Fortune . . .? . . . Did you force her to give up her own Maintenance, or to sign any Contract to her great Prejudice?[172]

Marley also devoted several pages to sins of the flesh, producing an impressive list of deviant sexual practices. Penitents were to be questioned about masturbation, sodomy, deriving erotic pleasure from the sight of beasts copulating in the fields, being in possession of lewd books, pamphlets, pictures or statues (!), going to balls and dances, and reading love-letters.[173] When examining physicians and apothecaries, interestingly, confessors were expected to inquire whether their penitents had done anything ‘to prevent Conception or to procure Abortion’.[174]

As we have already seen, the lives of eighteenth-century women were not confined to the domestic realm. Some of the absentees frequently denounced by ‘improvers’ were landlords who spent parts of the year in Dublin or London, leaving their wives to oversee their estates. Widows and mothers of sons who had not yet reached adulthood might play similar roles. Control over land, moreover, brought with it political influence. Elaine Chalus has shown that elite women were sometimes politically influential in late eighteenth-century England in the vital business of entertaining, mediating and lobbying.[175] Catriona Kennedy has demonstrated how the operation of the same familial political culture in Ireland enabled elite women such as Sarah Tighe, Lady Moira and Lady Lucy Fitzgerald (sister of Lord Edward) to intervene in patronage networks, especially where they had an ‘interest’ in a parliamentary borough. Sarah Tighe, for example, inherited the borough of Inistiogue, County Kilkenny, from her father Sir William Fownes in 1778; in addition, the death of her husband left her in charge of the family interest in County Wicklow—at least while her son was on the Grand Tour.[176] The archetype of the high-political wife was Katherine Conolly, who helped facilitate the rise of Speaker Conolly in the early decades of the century and managed his estate interests following his death in 1729. Her attitudes to marriage were, however, entirely conventional, as evidenced by a letter written for her niece, Molly Conyngham, outlining her duties to her soon-to-be husband in her ‘new steat of life’:

His parson and all his consarns [are] to be yr chife delight. It is yr intrist as it is yr duty to be kind and affact[iona]te to him, to make your parson and hummer [humour] allwayes esey and aggreable to him. If any thing, as its impossable but sometimes there will, shold make him unesey or out of hummer . . . find out what has made him soe, and if it be any action of yu indever never to do soe agane. If it be anything as to famally affears, spear no pines nor care to prevent it not hapning again, for a kind look and a soft word may turn away much wroth and sorrow from yr self.

Katherine’s public role began with her longstanding charitable activities, most famously during the Great Frost of 1740–41, when she distributed bread to the poor, had an obelisk constructed at Castletown, and promoted the benefit performance of Handel’s Messiah. It continued with her support for the buy-Irish sentiment of the 1720s, best expressed in Swift’s Proposal that all ladies and women of Ireland should appear constantly in Irish manufactures (1729), but dating back to 1719, when Dubliners were first encouraged to reject foreign silks, calicoes and linens. Katherine Conolly became the prototype of the female brand of consumer patriotism so prominent in the 1780s. She also worked to maintain the extensive patronage network built up by her husband, and intervened directly in electoral politics. In 1727, for example, as her son-in-law Frank Burton sought the support of voters in County Clare, she claimed to have written forty letters on his behalf.[177]

What we have discovered about Katherine Conolly and other Ascendancy women fits neatly with recent work on eighteenth-century women in England. For Catholic women, however, opportunities for participation in public life were practically non-existent. The outstanding exception was Honora (Nano) Nagle, founder of the Presentation Sisters, who belonged to the wealthy Nagle family of Ballygriffin, near Mallow. Although Nano Nagle had a privileged education, and was sent to Paris to obtain the ‘politer accomplishments’, she was unable to forget the poverty and ignorance of the lower-class Irish. With the support of her family she returned to Cork in the later 1740s to establish a school for poor girls. A legacy from her rich uncle Joseph Nagle enabled her to expand her activities, and she soon supervised seven schools in different parts of Cork, all in contravention of the penal laws. Surprisingly, however, it was her own co-religionists who gave her most trouble. Critics denounced her as an impostor, squandering her money ‘for the sole purpose of getting a name’, and branding her schools as ‘a seminary of prostitution’. By the time of her death in 1784 the Presentation Sisters had nevertheless established their first convent in Cove Lane, and Nano’s reputation—her knees were discovered to be ‘a state of ulceration’ from hours of daily prayer—was secure.[178]

Nano Nagle’s foundation had grown out of negotiations with the Ursulines in Paris. By 1750 there were more than 10,000 Catholic nunneries in Europe, compared with 15,000 monasteries for men. In France (where, unusually, nuns outnumbered monks) there were probably 55,000 females in 5,000 convents.[179] In sharp contrast, Ireland contained just a dozen small communities of nuns divided between Franciscans (c. 65), Dominicans (c. 75), Augustinian (c. 25) and Carmelite (c. 12), all of them entrusted with the education of girls from Catholic families. This meant fewer than 180 nuns at a time when there were around 800 males in religious orders. The surplus daughters of the gentry were therefore much less likely than their brothers to enjoy a life of pious celibacy. Inevitably there were complaints from Catholic reformers that the absence of formal enclosure and the religious habit led to indiscipline and ‘scandal’, but almost nothing is known of life in Irish convents, or even of the elite women who sometimes patronised them, for example the Countess of Fingall, the Duchess of Tyrconnell and Mrs Coppinger.[180] Many more women participated in the confraternities and other charitable organisations that sprang up in the later decades of the eighteenth century. In Wexford, for example, 609 of the 681 members who enlisted in the Confraternity of the Cord of St Francis between 1763 and 1789 were female.[181] Sadly, once more, their motivations and activities remain the subject of guesswork. The argument is sometimes made that the weakness of ecclesiastical structures permitted greater scope for initiatives among wealthy Catholic laywomen, but there is little evidence to sustain it. Nor can we discover hard information about the wives of convert Catholics who supervised the devotional lives of their children while their husbands conformed for pragmatic reasons. The most extraordinary case that has so far come to light is the Maguires of County Fermanagh. In the last quarter of the century the family patriarch, Hugh Maguire, built an Anglican church in Tempo and served as sheriff of the county, while simultaneously defending his right of presentation over the Catholic parishes of Tempo and Enniskillen through Denis Maguire, Bishop of Kilmore, and Father James Cowan, guardian of St Isidore’s College in Rome. Since Hugh had conformed, nominees to the parish were presented via his eldest daughter Frances, a devout Catholic; but this hardly constitutes female ‘agency’.[182]

Until we know much more about eighteenth-century women, especially Catholics, it is impossible to say whether the impact of women’s history will be ‘substitutive’ or merely ‘additive’—how far, that is, we will need to rethink the basic concepts and arguments that have shaped eighteenth-century historiography. It is worth considering, however, that Enlightenment writers believed that the position of women, the evolution of gender codes and the politics of love and marriage were all pivotal to the progress of society. This was particularly true of the Scottish historians and economists who narrated the history of mankind as the passage from a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence, through pastoral and agricultural phases, into a modern commercialised economy. In The history of women from the earliest antiquity (1779) William Alexander contended that the condition of women in any country would indicate ‘the exact point in the scale of civil society, to which the people of such country have arrived’.[183] In the British Isles the eighteenth century presented ladies of the gentry and middling sorts with expanding opportunities for education, sociability and refinement. An impressionistic survey suggests that the development of a polite, urban society, and the whole range of new recreations that came with it, meant comparatively little to Irish Catholic women. Although subject to no penal laws themselves, their social and cultural invisibility is a striking manifestation of the distorted society that existed during the penal era.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has attempted to explore the character of social relations in Ascendancy Ireland. A full examination would entail coverage of a much wider range of topics, many of them discussed elsewhere in this book. The annexation of Ireland to the British ‘multiple kingdom’, described in the next chapter, raises further questions about the colonial dimensions of the Protestant Ascendancy. More can be deduced about habits of authority and deference from an analysis of the penal laws and the ways in which they were implemented (Chapter 6) and from agrarian disturbances (Chapter 9). In different ways, these themes remind us that the ancien régime model, just like the concept of a colonial society, is a theoretical construct. It would be odd to find eighteenth-century societies neatly conforming to an ideal European type. Indeed, as the Scottish Highlands remind us, it was possible to find radically different social structures within the same country. Each of the two approaches illuminates certain aspects of early modern Ireland while obscuring others. It is hardly surprising, then, that contemporary visitors to Ireland such as Edward Willes found there a combination of the strange and the familiar.

In this changing society, as in other European kingdoms, examples of petty snobberies and insecurities abounded. The gradations of the social hierarchy in Ireland followed, with the usual time-lag, those across the water, even if polite society was more intimate and the means more modest. Archbishop King, warning that Irish gentlemen in London were the subject of ridicule and contempt, advised gloomily that ‘a nobleman that would appear with credit, reputation and splendour in his own country, sinketh there below the ordinary rate of gentleman’.[184] Within Ireland social pretensions and ambitions were closely monitored. Around 1690 the recorder of Dublin felt it necessary to distinguish ‘men of fashion, substance and education’ from the ‘merchants or men of inferior callings’.[185] Half a century later one pamphleteer preferred ‘our polite gentry’ and ‘men of mode’ to ‘simple gentlemen’.[186] It was not just occupation or income that conferred respectability, or even that great buzzword of the eighteenth century, ‘politeness’. Education and travel mattered, as did demonstrations of public spirit and philanthropy such as membership of the Dublin Society. Nobility, as Arbuckle’s Tribune explained, was a hereditary quality; but gentility depended on riches, and was open to merchants, the learned professions, and all those who make a ‘handsome Appearance in the World’.[187]

This was an intensely status-conscious world whose inhabitants jostled to display their wealth, politeness or gentility on all public occasions, including Sunday worship. God, in theory, was no respecter of persons, but in practice Anglican churches seated their congregations ‘suitable to their qualities’ or according to their ‘rank and ability’.[188] Titled lords and ladies, together with households, sat in the gallery, while squires, tradespeople and shopkeepers rented pews in the body of the church. In County Wexford the Sweetman family had a private gallery in Newbawn chapel, while the Franciscan church in Wexford town, supported by the wealthy Suttons of Clonard, was furnished with a ‘grand gallery’ for those who paid ‘pew money’; the plebs, needless to add, stood.[189] The northern Presbyterians, despite their notorious lack of deference, also observed the custom that ‘each man in his own proportion should have the choice of his seats according to his payment’.[190] Disputes over congregational seating frequently troubled the kirk sessions and the presbyteries of the Synod of Ulster. Status within the Dissenting communities was indicated by the proximity of a family seat to the pulpit, and by the number of servants that could be accommodated there. Those who faced relegation to the back of the meeting-house did not always accept their fate meekly, and violent incidents were not unknown. In Burt, County Donegal, one member of the congregation who had lost his seat branded the minister a liar and stabbed his rival in the hand with his sword.[191] Protestants, Catholics and Dissenters might worship in different churches, but they nevertheless inhabited the same social world.

The notion of two antagonistic Irelands—the world of the Gaelic underclass, the cottier’s cabin and the hedge-school, abruptly juxtaposed against that of the Big House—is obviously a misleading one. Rural Ireland possessed an increasingly complex hierarchy of middlemen, large and small tenant farmers, dairymen, artisans, cottiers and labourers.[192] Post-colonial interpretations have tended to overlook this diversity, defaulting instead to a flattened-out picture of Irish society, split into monolithic blocs of dominators and resisters. In part, this stems from a preference for the study of cultural politics (rather than, say, theological debate) and for the analysis of ‘literary’ writers. In part, too, this tendency reflects the Manichean politics of influential post-colonial theorists. The most obvious, perhaps, is Franz Fanon, who depicted the Algerian struggle as a straightforward fight between French colonialism on the one hand and the peasantry and lumpenproletariat on the other. For post-colonialists, at any rate, the subtle social distinctions that were constantly being displayed, debated and policed in Ascendancy Ireland are always subordinated to the overriding antipathy between settler and native. The same is true of the various religious identities of Catholics, Anglicans and Dissenters. For a number of reasons this approach does not easily accommodate the ‘convert interest’—a vitally important social group, discussed further in Chapter 6, which ultimately acted as a stabilising force in Irish society. Nor does it help us understand how landowners and politicians of Gaelic descent might attain such prominence—men like William Conolly, the unofficial ‘Prime Minister’ of the 1720s, Anthony Malone, Charles O’Hara, or even the Fermanagh landowner Hugh Maguire.

Comparisons between Ireland and other British (or French or Spanish) colonies also discourage us from investigating the many social and cultural links between Catholic Ireland and the continent. Paradoxically, the Cromwellian and Williamite wars brought the Irish closer to ancien régime Europe. The majority population adhered to a church, a displaced nobility and a monarch that were all essentially and increasingly European in character. Irish priests and physicians studied and sometimes settled in Paris, Louvain and Rome; Irish gentlemen became officers in the armies of France, Austria and Spain; and Irish merchant houses intermarried with their local counterparts in Cádiz or Bordeaux. Without these close connections, it is impossible to explain the survival of Jacobitism within Catholic communities. In the 1780s and 1790s one of the factors pushing the Catholic Committee towards more aggressive positions was the return of army officers from France, such as Edward Sweetman of Newbawn. As another Wexford radical, James Devereux, pointed out, the talents and virtues of Irish Catholics ‘have been rewarded in other countries with offices of the highest trust’—so why not in Ireland?[193] None of these limitations is a reason for rejecting colonial models altogether; but cumulatively they help to explain why the characterisation of Ascendancy Ireland as a colonial society often seems so strained.

The values that underpinned social classification in Ireland—the shifting vocabulary of ‘gentility’, ‘credit’, ‘reputation’ and ‘politeness’—clearly cut across confessional and ethnic divides, but could never entirely transcend them. Traditional ideas of privilege and hierarchy, shared with other eighteenth-century societies, clashed with the legacy of the social disruption that marked the previous century. Most obviously, the boundaries of citizenship, defined by the right to hold public office, exercise the vote, or simply to carry a sword or a pistol, excluded the majority population. One of the reasons why Protestant tenants were valued more than Catholics was that landlords with electoral ambitions had the option of enfranchising them by creating freeholds on their estates. A combination of political and social prejudices also led southern landlords to promote experiments in ‘internal’ colonisation by attracting weavers from Ulster’s linen triangle to settle in new estate villages. Outside the world of formal politics, social status was affected by the penal system in myriad ways. Dress and diet—then, as now, obvious means of signifying social superiority—may have provided two examples. In 1728, for example, one observer on the Fitzwilliam estate in County Wexford explained that Catholics were able to outbid Protestants for farms because ‘a Roman and his whole family can live upon potatoes and buttermilk the whole year through’, while his Anglican counterparts ‘must have beef and bread and much better clothes’.[194]

Inequality between confessional communities existed at all levels of society, in ways that reflected Ireland’s complex history of overlapping colonies. Although very little is known about the subject, it seems that confessional tests were applied at the lowest level of public life. In 1732 a porter working for the linen trustees in Dublin converted to Protestantism when threatened with dismissal.[195] This was an age, moreover, of significant social mobility, as the prominence of self-made men among the spokesmen of the Ascendancy attests. Talented sons from undistinguished backgrounds were able to acquire fortunes and advance the standing of their families through office-holding or legal practice, avenues closed to both Catholics and Dissenters. ‘Every Dissenter is a Sharer in the Infamy,’ explained the Rev. John Abernethy, a leading Presbyterian clergyman in Dublin, and the most articulate critic of the Test Act. Even if it were true that few Presbyterians were wealthy enough to serve as justices of the peace, it was natural for men ‘in low Stations’ to hope that their children or grandchildren might ‘have Merit to recommend them to the favour of their Prince, and the Esteem of their Country’.[196] One of Edmund Burke’s arguments against the penal code was that, by preventing Catholics from buying estates, it deprived the landed gentry of both the capital and ‘the bold and liberal spirit of improvement’ found among those who had been ‘bred to trade’. Ireland was consequently unable to benefit from the ‘happy alliance’ of land and commerce.[197] These comments are particularly striking when they are read side-by-side with Burke’s later analysis of the French Revolution. It was a similar disjunction of land and trade in France, Burke believed, that led men of commerce, unable to infiltrate the aristocracy, to work instead for its overthrow.

It might be seen as something of an embarrassment for the proponents of the ancien régime thesis that Edmund Burke, the most implacable enemy of the French Revolution and all it stood for, was also the most articulate critic of Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. After all, Burke’s classic treatise, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790), was the most powerful and influential defence of the old European order, based on the twin pillars of aristocratic government and established religion. Yet Burke identified the principle of Protestant Ascendancy not with the ancien régime but with its enemies: there was a continuity, he insisted, between the malignity of the Irish penal code, ‘Indianism’ and French Jacobinism, since all of these forces drove a wedge, within their respective societies, between the many and the few. In his Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792), calling for the admission of Roman Catholics to the franchise, Burke described the Protestant Ascendancy as a ‘plebeian oligarchy’, a contradiction in terms, or, as Burke put it, a ‘monster’. The Protestant community was not sufficiently numerous to form a ‘democracy’ on their own, but too large to fulfil the function of an aristocracy. The natural relationship between property and authority, he believed, had become twisted by ethnic and religious antagonisms so that Protestant tradesmen and servants felt themselves superior to Catholic noblemen, while Catholic landowners, merchants, and even titular bishops were grouped together with ‘an oppressed and licentious populace’ merely because of their religious allegiance.[198]

Although Burke praised the English aristocracy as those ‘great oaks that shade a country’, he consequently denounced the Protestant settlers in Ireland who continued to see themselves as ‘a sort of colonial garrison to keep the natives in subjection to the other state of Great Britain’. (In this view, the counter-revolutionary anticipated the Irish Jacobin Wolfe Tone, who described the landed class as ‘a colony of strangers, forming not above one tenth part of the population, [who] have always looked to England for protection’.)[199] The Whig spokesman who praised the 1688 Revolution as the struggle of the English people to preserve their ancient constitution was perplexed by its outcome in Ireland, where it seemed to be reversed: ‘the establishment of the power of the smaller number at the expense of the civil liberties and properties of the far greater part’.[200] It was Burke’s view, moreover, that the religious divisions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been superimposed upon even older ‘national’ antagonisms stretching back to the anti-Gaelic Statute of Kilkenny (1366). Protestant Ascendancy, as Burke reminds us, meant more than the privileges of the Anglican landed elite: it stood for the political dominance of Protestants, of all ranks and stations, over their Catholic counterparts.[201] Like the colonial model of eighteenth-century Ireland, the ancien régime theory also fails, on its own, to accommodate all the key features of Irish society during the penal era. The utility of these two analytic categories depends on how far they are permitted to combine with and cut across each other. Irish men and women located themselves within a series of hierarchies arising from the evolution of a society of ranks, the social meanings of religious conformity and dissent in a confessional state, and the large-scale redistribution of land that resulted from early modern conquest. At a general level, these hierarchies were mutually reinforcing, but they rarely coincided exactly, and each one is indispensable to understanding the social anatomy of Ascendancy Ireland.

Part II

The Penal Era: Religion and Society

4

King William’s Wars

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

JUDGES 21: 25

Like many another British statesman, William of Orange thought it a ‘terrible mortification’ to have to go to Ireland, where he would be ‘as it were, out of knowledge of the world’.[1] The three years of military campaigning which climaxed at the battles of the Boyne and Aughrim were for William a wearisome distraction: the reduction of Ireland was necessary in order to secure the English crown, and the value of England itself lay in its contribution to the European alliance against Louis XIV. As historians have often reminded us, William’s triumph over the Catholic James II was more complicated than the black-and-white—or orange-and-green—struggle consecrated in the folk memory of Ulster loyalists. First and foremost, William was captain-general of the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Stadtholder (chief magistrate) of Holland. Dutch considerations were always uppermost in his mind. One recent evaluation rates him ‘alongside Louis XIV, the most remarkable monarch of his generation’ and, more mischievously, as ‘England’s last monarch to be blessed with a keen intelligence’.[2] As the architect of the ‘Grand Alliance’ (Austria, Spain, Savoy, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Hanover, Saxony, and now England) the Prince of Orange-Nassau was less concerned with saving parliamentary institutions from the absolutist designs of James II than with blocking Louis’s attempt to establish a ‘universal monarchy’ over Western Europe.

Nor was William the militant Protestant crusader depicted on Orange banners and gable walls; after all, the Grand Alliance had the tacit backing of Pope Innocent XI. It is true, admittedly, that many of Louis’s opponents believed that the very survival of the European Reformation was at stake. The ‘Sun King’ had apparently signalled his intention to reopen the wars of religion by the brutal suppression of Protestantism in France, culminating in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The subsequent exodus of Huguenots united Protestant opinion in outrage. Around 200,000 fled, among them the Duke of Schomberg, who would command the multinational Williamite army that landed at Bangor, County Down, in August 1689. The depredations suffered under the ‘popish yoke’ formed the insistent highnote of Orangist propaganda in England, and on his arrival in Dublin William announced his resolution ‘to deliver you from the tyranny of popery and slavery, to protect the Protestant religion and to restore your liberties and properties’.[3] But the Stadtholder, by upbringing a Calvinist, had long been an advocate of religious toleration on pragmatic grounds, having worked happily with Jewish contractors and financiers as well as Catholic army officers. In defiance of the Dutch provincial synods, he had protected the Catholic majority in the small German territory of Lingen, and he had assured the rulers of Austria and Spain that the Catholics of Britain and Ireland would enjoy religious freedom.[4]

And yet there are good reasons for William’s subsequent apotheosis as the iconic ‘deliverer’ of Protestant Ireland. The ‘shipwreck’ famously lamented by the Gaelic poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair was indeed one of the great watersheds of Irish history. Throughout the seventeenth century Irish Protestant leaders had lobbied for the implementation of a comprehensive penal code against Catholicism, but government policy had swung erratically between periods of repression and conciliation. Stuart monarchs, hard-pressed for money and locked in conflict with their own parliaments, had sought to broaden the basis of English rule in Ireland, extending favour to those ‘trustworthy’ Catholics who placed their customary loyalty to the English crown above their allegiance to the papacy. It was the Glorious Revolution that resulted in the final, irreversible destruction of the old Catholic ruling class. The so-called ‘Patriot Parliament’ of 1689 would be the last constitutional body to represent Catholic Ireland before the first Dáil Éireann of 1919. For all his politique commitment to religious toleration, for all his promises to Austria and Spain, William was obliged to give way to Protestant zealotry, completing the long process of dispossessing and degrading Irish Catholics.

To account for these pivotal developments, it is necessary to reattach the Irish campaigns of 1689–92 to their wider contexts, not only British but also European. The armies who met at the Boyne and Aughrim were fighting three interlocking wars, as suggested by their international composition. Danes, Huguenots, Dutchmen, Englishmen and Ulster planters fought with William; the French and Irish lined up against him. The Cogadh an Dá Rí (War of the Two Kings) completed the long-drawn-out conquest of Ireland which had begun under Elizabeth, but it was merely a sideshow in the war for the English succession, the so-called Glorious Revolution. In turn, the struggle for the crown of Great Britain was subsumed into two colossal European conflicts, the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), dramatically transforming England from a marginal kingdom into a great power. These three conflicts—Irish, British and European—are usually treated separately, but they overlapped in both their origins and their outcomes. In London the constitutional crisis ignited by James II’s pro-Catholic policies was resolved by the Convention of 1689, which plumped for confessional security rather than hereditary succession by offering the crown to William and Mary. In Ireland the Catholic threat was ended by the Treaty of Limerick, signed in October 1691 and belatedly ratified by the Protestant parliament in 1697. But neither the Revolution settlement nor the Protestant Ascendancy was safe until successfully defended on the battlefields of Flanders and guaranteed by the Peace of Utrecht (1713).

A EUROPE OF MULTIPLE KINGDOMS

Early modern Ireland belonged to a Europe of ‘multiple kingdoms’.[5] The formal annexation of Ireland to the English crown in 1541 can be viewed as part of the same process which saw the Tudor dynasty incorporate the linguistically and ethnically different territory of Wales in 1536 and would see the crowns of Scotland and England united under James VI & I in 1603. Far from being an aberration, the absorption of outlying territories by a dominant core conformed to a common European pattern of state formation. Perhaps the classic example is the Spanish monarchy, a union of the crowns of Castile, Léon, Navarre and Aragon, joined by the territories of Catalonia and Valencia. Its traditional rival, the French crown, had likewise expanded from the Île de France, across the adjacent territories of Brittany, Gascony, Burgundy and Flanders, capitalising on a variety of dynastic and legal claims. In each case the multiple titles claimed by the monarch were consolidated by the enactment of more formal ties, whether voluntarily negotiated or violently imposed. Underlying this trend towards centralisation was the growing cost of war, which compelled rulers to maximise their manpower and financial resources, giving rise to inevitable conflicts between core and periphery. By the end of the seventeenth century Europe’s larger political units had expanded spectacularly to the cost of their weaker neighbours; one survey of early modern state formation has noted ‘a kind of political Darwinism at work, with the politically fit surviving at the expense of the weak’.[6]

The Irish were not the only casualties in this process, and yet their experience differed in important ways from the rest of the British Isles and from the European mainland. Irish society, as it entered the eighteenth century, was both recognisably part of a wider social order, the ancien régime, and yet conspicuously different. In general, the incorporation of peripheral regions, whether by marriage, inheritance or conquest, entailed the creation of patronage networks between the central ruler and existing administrative elites. The impact of centralising initiatives was also tempered by the preservation of local institutions, laws, customs and identities. By contrast, the integration of Ireland into the English (or, after 1707, British) state involved the violent expropriation of an entire ruling class. Furthermore, the ‘New English’ landlords who arrived between 1560 and 1660 were just the conspicuous tip of a colonial iceberg: settlers of Scots or English descent expanded in numbers from less than 2 per cent of the population in 1600 to 27 per cent a century later, most obviously in Ulster, where intensive settlement had begun with the plantation of 1609–25. In the northern province taken as a whole, Protestant settlers came to outnumber the natives, though the denominational balance varied dramatically across the region from the strongholds of Antrim (3:1) and Down (2:1) to the border counties of Monaghan (1:2) and Cavan (1:3).[7]

There are no close parallels for this catastrophic rupture. Some early modern historians have pointed to the central European kingdom of Bohemia, where a rising of the Protestant nobility against the Austrian Habsburgs was crushed at the battle of the White Mountain in 1620. The political elite was subsequently uprooted, as Protestant rebels saw their lands confiscated, and up to 150,000 fled to escape Catholic persecution. While this constituted a ‘social revolution in which over fifty per cent of landed wealth changed hands’,[8] the upheaval was neither as thorough nor as permanent as the transferral of land in Ireland. Although the new proprietors included Austrian and Hungarian families, foreign soldiers and courtiers, the majority were native Bohemians, as were almost all the chief officials of the kingdom. By contrast, the Protestant Ascendancy which emerged in Ireland after 1692 would cling to its political and social power base for the next two hundred years, until the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 enabled a new class of Catholic tenants to buy out their landlords, subsidised by the British taxpayer.

The Anglo-Irish relationship has also been compared to the position of Sardinia under Spanish rule.[9] The island of Sardinia, like Naples and Sicily, was an overseas dominion of the rulers of Aragon (later of Spain). While Catalan and Aragonese noble families were introduced into all three, settlement was most extensive in Sardinia, conquered by the Aragonese in the fourteenth century. Even cities, including the capital Cagliari, were settled by Catalans, and the native population expelled. Although the result was the creation of ‘a colonial ruling class’,[10] there were no legal barriers between newcomers and natives, and a gradual merger of the Catalan and Sardinian ruling elites followed. It would be difficult to argue that this process of assimilation was the result of greater tolerance for other peoples: at the same time that the plantation of Ulster was undertaken some 300,000 Moriscos were expelled from Spain, constituting ‘the largest mass deportation in early modern history’.[11] But the Catalan colonists in Italy did not find the sharp linguistic, social or religious differences that the English experienced in Ireland. And the Mediterranean basin was—as its name suggests—at the centre of the world. Its densely populated cities served as both commercial and cultural centres, and there was every incentive to leave existing elites undisturbed. Like Bohemia, the Italian principalities and city-states were potential assets; for the English, however, Ireland was first and foremost a potential liability.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the most obvious parallels to the Anglo-Irish relationship are to be found elsewhere in the British Isles. As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Anglo-Norman lords and settlers had advanced into the outlying territories of the British Isles, establishing the ‘first English empire’. In much of Wales, as in Ireland, an unusually centralised and uniform English state encountered ‘a world of fragmented and fluid polities, of intermittent warfare and apparent indiscipline, of Welshries and Irishries and even no-go areas’.[12] It was during this period of expansion that tenacious habits of cultural stereotyping were acquired, as historical writers such as Giraldus Cambrensis (1146–1223) characterised both Irish and Welsh as wild, uncouth, lax in morality, warlike and lawless.[13] Although Ascendancy Ireland had its origins in more recent ‘New English’ plantations, and was comprised of the Protestant families who had acquired estates as a result of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century confiscations, its spokesmen saw themselves as continuous with older, Catholic colonisation. In identifying themselves as the possessors of the ancient kingdom of Ireland, the leaders of the Anglican ascendancy forged during the 1690s claimed for themselves a five-hundred-year history. Their parliamentary rights, they believed, were guaranteed by an ancient constitution founded upon an original contract between the English monarchy and the people of Ireland. That the people in question were the native Irish and the ‘Old English’—those settlers of medieval origin who had remained faithful to Rome—did not seem to trouble them.

The Anglo-Norman penetration of Ireland, and to a lesser extent the rest of the Celtic world, was just one of several expansionary movements during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which saw the frontiers of Latin Christendom pushed into the peripheral regions of the continent. As the distinguished medievalist Robert Bartlett has reminded us, Europe itself was the product of conquest, colonisation and cultural upheaval. Early English colonisation in the British Isles had its counterparts in the drive of the Christian kingdoms of the Spanish peninsula to reclaim territory from Moors, the imposition by the Normans of a unified kingdom of Sicily upon the ethnic and religious diversity of southern Italy, and the movement of German settlers into eastern Europe. In the last case, for example, the ecclesiastical structures and social patterns of Latin and Frankish Europe were extended among the pagan peoples who lived east of the Elbe and around the shores of the Baltic. In this tangled region, comprised of ‘Wends’ (the Slav peoples between the rivers Elbe and Oder), their distant ‘Balt’ relatives (the Prussians, Lithuanians and Latvians) and the Livonians, Estonians and Finns, ethnic boundaries were often sharply defined. A Norman colonial settlement in Munster, Bartlett suggests, would have in many ways resembled its German equivalent in Brandenburg. ‘The incursion of a feudal cavalry elite, the immigration of peasant settlers, the formation of chartered towns, the introduction of the more widely diffused documentary literacy and coinage—all these aspects of Irish history can be paralleled in other areas experiencing the expansionary wave of the High Middle Ages.’[14]

Once again, admittedly, there were also vital differences, most obviously concerning religion, that have persuaded Bartlett that Ireland was in many ways anomalous. The peoples of the Baltic region were pagan, while the ‘reconquest’ of Spain and Sicily pitted Latin Europe against the Muslim world. Ireland, by contrast, was a long-established centre of Christian missionary activity and monastic culture. Yet the Irish were regarded as outlandish and deviant in spite of their Christianity, not only by the English, but by the French and Italians. Differences in culture and social organisation, the absence of a territorial church or a unitary kingship, and the very distinctive system of kinship, all marked off Ireland as a ‘backward’ region. The case of Ireland was exceptional, moreover, in bringing about the permanent political subordination of one region to another. The dominions of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia and Livonia, by way of contrast, ‘were autonomous replicas, not dependencies, of western and central European polities.’[15] And yet it is easy to see why the different communities of eighteenth-century Ireland saw themselves as a product of this wider European movement. In 1691 one Protestant writer, stung by the accusation that the English were ‘intruders’ in Ireland, replied that they had been in possession of the island for five hundred years. If that was not enough, he challenged, ‘what shall we say of the Race of King Pepin? how injuriously has the King of Spain dealt with the Moors? the Emperor with the Hunns? the Northern Kings with the Goths and Vandals?’[16] The Protestant understanding of the Anglo-Norman conquest was derived ultimately from the medieval writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, refracted through the seventeenth-century accounts of Sir John Davies, Sir John Temple and Sir Richard Cox, whose Hibernia Anglicana (1689–90) was composed in England during the Jacobite ‘occupation’ of Ireland. Consequently, when Bishop Anthony Dopping of Meath came to preach his famous sermon of thanksgiving for the end of the war on 26 November 1691, he began his long denunciation of the rebellious Irish with 1172: ‘They have carried on these designs from the first settling of an English Colony in this Country to this very day and will eternally doe so notwithstanding all the Articles of peace that are granted them.’[17]

In the Tudor period, likewise, Ireland has been depicted as a semi-autonomous ‘borderland’, not unlike Wales or the Anglo-Scottish frontier. Following the break with Rome, all three areas were subject to greater intervention as problems of internal security were exacerbated by religious differences.[18] Again, the cultural aggression of colonial officials such as Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies reflected a continuing social and cultural gap. The quality of land in the frontier regions was relatively poor, the landscape was less densely populated with fewer towns, the gentry and ‘middling sort’ were weak or non-existent, and political authority remained decentralised and unstable. With the accession of James I in 1603, and the consequent union of all three kingdoms under one monarch, a more systematic drive began to ‘civilise’ the inhabitants of Ireland, the Highlands and Islands, and the Anglo-Scottish borders. Once more the instability of ‘those rude partes’ was attributed to the cultural degeneracy of the inhabitants, and similar problems were tackled with similarly draconian solutions. The plantation of Ulster represented a dramatic extension of James’s policy for the Western Isles of Scotland of ‘rooting out the barbarous and stubborn sort, and planting civility in their rooms’.[19] In 1595–1602, 1605 and 1609 attempts were made to settle the forfeited Isles of Lewis and Harris with Lowlanders, though all three ventures failed. A campaign to destroy the social and cultural basis of clanship was launched with the Statutes of Iona (1609) under Andrew Knox, Bishop of the Isles and later Bishop of Raphoe in Ireland. Moreover, it is sometimes forgotten that the last frontier to be closed within the British Isles was not in Ireland but in the Highlands. Here cultural and ethnic differences continued to fuel atrocities such as the Glencoe massacre of 1692, the notorious ‘war crime’ of William’s reign, and the systematic devastation of the Highlands after the failed rising of 1745.[20] Remarkably, however, the dismantling of the clan system was followed by the assimilation of the Jacobite elite into the ruling class, while a strong tradition of Highland recruitment for British army service began during the Seven Years War.[21] As the 1790s would demonstrate, Scotland largely escaped the legacy of religious and racial animosity that so disfigured Ireland.

No other European kingdom or province, then, was subjected to such extensive and sustained colonisation; and nowhere else did the consequent antagonisms exert such an enduring and controlling pull over subsequent history. This had led many scholars to suggest that the correct interpretative framework for early modern Ireland is a non-European one. The major exponent of an ‘Atlanticist’ approach, Nicholas Canny, has emphasised the parallels between the plantations in Ireland and the colonisation of the New World. Both were driven by the same ideology of racial supremacy, which justified the spoliation of Gaels and American Indians by reference to their political, economic and cultural backwardness: where there was no civil society, it was argued, colonial officials were liberated from the moral constraints that allegedly governed European affairs. The logical extreme of this ideology, found in Edmund Spenser’s A view of the present state of Ireland (1596), argued that Gaelic laws and customs were irremediably corrupt, and advocated the starvation of the native Irish under a draconian system of martial law. In both cases, moreover, distinctively colonial, crisis-ridden identities evolved among the settlers and their descendants, resentful of their subordination to the imperial centre and yet contemptuous of the native language and culture.[22]

As we have seen already, the categorisation of Ireland as a colony has also been influenced by ‘post-colonial’ literary criticism, which analyses the cultural representation of colonised peoples in Western literature.[23] Whereas the Atlanticists focus on the ‘first’ British empire in North America, the post-colonialists are more interested in the relationship between culture and imperialism established in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and Asia. The emphasis, consequently, is on the notions of racial difference or ‘otherness’ ascribed to subject populations by the coloniser, in this case the canonical writers of the ‘Anglo-Irish tradition’ such as Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke or Maria Edgeworth. Most post-colonialists share an ‘anti-authorial’ method of reading, in which the critic pulls at the loose threads of elite writings, exposing their contradictions and blind spots, with the result that the text is forced to undermine its own position. Unlike the historians, the post-colonial scholars are usually frank in espousing a political agenda. At its crudest, this means asserting a moral equivalence between England’s treatment of Irish Catholics and the position of non-white groups in North America, Africa or Asia. Even in its more thoughtful variants, the post-colonial approach tends to subsume the diversity of Irish political languages (New English, Old English, Gaelic Irish, Ulster Scots, Anglican, Catholic, Dissenter) within a simple polarity between Irish resistance and English colonialism, often obscuring as much as it illuminates.[24]

Certainly the colonial model corresponds with the self-perception of Irish Protestants in the aftermath of the Williamite war, who continued to see themselves as ‘the English’ in Ireland, as opposed to ‘the natives’. The evidence for this settler mentality has sometimes been obscured by the tendency of contemporaries to slip back and forth between the two distinct meanings of ‘colony’: the first, in the sense of ‘province’ or ‘dependency’, referring to a political entity; the second, in the sense of a ‘plantation’ or ‘settlement’, referring to a community of people. In the first sense, William Molyneux and other constitutional writers sought to prove that Ireland was not a colony, comparable to Virginia, New England or Maryland, but had the status of a kingdom, with its own autonomous legislative, judicial and ecclesiastical institutions.[25] Molyneux insisted that the true parallel for Ireland’s position lay much closer to home: ‘If it be said, that Scotland is an ancient and separate and distinct kingdom from England; I say, so is Ireland.’ As we shall see in Chapter 8, Molyneux’s ideas were endorsed by the Irish parliament in 1719, when the House of Lords based its jurisdictional claims upon the ancient constitution created by a contract between Henry II and the native Irish in 1172. Yet Molyneux did not hesitate to identify himself as a descendant of ‘the English and Britains’ who had first come to Ireland with Henry II and had conquered ‘the Antient Race of the Irish’.[26] Another Protestant ‘patriot’ writer distinguished between ‘Colonies for Trade’ and ‘Colonies for Empire’. In the first, which included the West Indies, Africa and the East Indies, a small number of settlers were required to regulate the plantation of commodities or trade with the natives. The second, which included Ireland, were quite different: here inhabitants of the mother country were ‘planted to keep great countries in subjection and prevent the hazard of standing armies’.[27]

When they faced constitutional challenges from the ‘mother country’, Irish Protestants employed a model of colonialism which, like the word itself, was derived from imperial Rome.[28] Often they stressed that as Rome subjugated new territories it had incorporated their populations within the state. Thus Sir Francis Brewster, a merchant, economic writer and Irish M.P., admired ‘the Wisdom of the Romans, in making the Privilege of a Roman Universal, through their whole Conquest’.[29] But there were other examples of colonial societies, drawn from the history of Israel in the Old Testament, which shaped the self-perception of the Protestant population. This biblical language referred not to the relationship between metropolis and periphery, but to the conflict between settler and native. The most striking example is taken from the way in which Saul’s children treated the Gibeonites, as ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’, described in Joshua 9: 21–3.[30] In 1706 Sir Richard Cox reassured an English correspondent that following the destruction of the Irish nobility five-sixths of the Catholics were ‘poor, Insignificant slaves, fit for nothing but to hew wood & draw water’.[31] Explaining the recognition of William III by Irish Anglicans, William King told how Irish Catholics had vowed, on the accession of James II, that they would take possession of Protestant churches and estates and that ‘if they suffer us to live, they would make us hewers of wood and drawers of water’.[32] The phrase crops up as late as the 1790s, when Wolfe Tone informed the French government that the Catholics, or ‘the Irish, properly so called’, made up almost the entire body of the peasantry in Ireland. The great bulk of them, he explained, were ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ who lived in wretched hovels, labouring incessantly for their ‘petty despots’.[33]

It is easy to point to the parallels between the extension of English authority within the British Isles and the contemporaneous imperial expansion overseas. Ireland and America were linked in the writings of Elizabethan and Jacobean colonialists; English settlement in the two areas overlapped and involved some of the same officials and entrepreneurs; and similar defects were imputed to the ‘wild Irish’ and the American Indians. But can it really be said that the historical experience of the Irish has been closer to that of colonised, non-European peoples than to those of Western Europe? ‘Irish history’, as Toby Barnard has observed, ‘needs to be seen both in contrast to and as part of European experience.’[34] The uncertainty of modern historians reflects the confusion of contemporary observers, who more often saw their kingdom as part of a Europe still torn by the legacy of the Reformation. As we have already seen, moreover, there was no clear-cut division between European and colonial experiences. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find the political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli advocating colonisation as one technique for maintaining control within composite monarchies.[35] As we have seen, the English state engaged in the same economic exploitation, cultural aggression and social engineering in the territorial margins of the British Isles as in its overseas possessions. But close physical proximity, a history of population exchange across the Irish Sea and the racial and cultural ties between Ireland, Scotland and Wales all make it difficult to classify Ireland as part of an extra-European empire. Some of the complications involved can be highlighted by considering briefly two minority communities, the ‘Old English’ and the Ulster Scots.

For centuries the English had lamented what they saw as the backwardness of Irish society—its pastoral economy, the fragmented and primitive authority exercised by the native Irish and Old English lordships, the antiquated modes of land tenure and military service. Nevertheless, Ireland more clearly resembled the European ideal of ‘civil society’ than North America. The dispossession of the indigenous Americans was often legitimised according to the res nullius doctrine which held that the ‘empty places’ of the New World remained common property until they were put to agricultural use.[36] It could hardly be claimed, however, that Irish land was unoccupied. Most obviously, the island had been subject to waves of Anglo-Norman or Old English settlement stretching back to the twelfth century, and the New English found it necessary to invalidate the prior claims of these earlier generations as well as those of Gaelic landowners. As a consequence, the major confiscations of Irish lands were carried out by forfeiture, following the rebellion of Irish noblemen against their lawful sovereign, the English monarch. In this sense the dispossession of the Gaelic lords of Ulster bore similarities to the redistribution of land in northern England following the revolt of the earls (1569) or the annexation of Highland estates to the crown following the defeat of the Jacobites in 1746.

Questions of landownership in Ireland therefore produced the same conflicts of law and custom, dynastic and confessional allegiance common elsewhere in Europe. When a Protestant historian such as Sir Richard Cox (1650–1733) attempted to explain the obduracy of the Irish, he referred to racial and cultural factors (‘the difference of Humors, Manners and Customs’), and to the resentments caused by conquest and confiscation, but he concluded that the chief source of disaffection was religion, ‘they conceiving us to be obstinate incorrigible Hereticks’.[37] Ultimately the ideological defence of Protestant Ascendancy depended less on the racial inferiority imputed to the Irish than on the conviction that ‘popery’ was a false religion, which denied the legitimacy of Protestant states, released Catholics from their natural duty of obedience to ‘heretical’ rulers, and propagated itself by brutally violent means. The medieval legacy of incomplete conquest also encouraged the post-Reformation settlers to think of themselves as part of a much older history of the English presence in Ireland. In claiming that Irish Protestants were the heirs of a consensual system of government established by Henry II, William Molyneux and his followers were echoing their Old English predecessors, who had first formulated the argument that Ireland was an ancient kingdom whose inhabitants possessed the same rights as any other subjects of the crown.

Secondly, there is the problem of the northern Presbyterians. As Karl Bottigheimer has pointed out, ‘the most notable, numerous, and enduring migration of early modern Irish history was clearly that of the Scots to Ulster’.[38] In both its chronology and geography, Scots settlement can only partly be explained by the official ‘Ulster plantation’ which took place between 1609 and 1625.[39] The Presbyterian heartland lay in Antrim and Down, outside the six escheated counties (Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone), and immigration continued until the 1690s, when famine conditions in Scotland drove thousands across the North Channel. The movement of population was not determined by state policy but followed older patterns of migration. Since Ireland was a dependency of the English crown, moreover, these Scots settlers occupied an anomalous position. ‘If understanding the relations of the three kingdoms creates a Trinitarian problem of Nicene complexity,’ John Morrill has written, ‘then the constitutional role of the Scots in Ireland must represent the filioque clause.’[40] Close proximity to their homeland allowed a continuous exchange of ideas, books, ministers and migrants across the North Channel. In 1653, indeed, the Cromwellian regime had seriously considered transplanting the Presbyterian congregations of Ulster to Kilkenny, Tipperary and Waterford in order to weaken their ties to Scotland.[41] The Synod of Ulster, founded in 1690, was simultaneously an offshoot of the established Church of Scotland and a dissenting organisation which, under the Anglican confessional state in Ireland, had no legal right to exist at all. As we shall see, this anomaly ensured that Irish politics was never a straightforward collision of Protestant and papist or ‘English’ and ‘Irish’ interests. There were not just two sides to every Irish story, but three.

THE RECONQUEST OF IRELAND, 1689–91

On 12 March 1689 a reluctant James II landed at Kinsale, the first monarch to set foot in Ireland since the Middle Ages.[42] Earlier that year the deposition of the last Stuart king had been formally sanctioned by parliamentary conventions in England and Scotland, and William and Mary had been declared joint sovereigns. In desperation James had fled to France, and might have spent the rest of his days vegetating at St-Germain-en-Laye, had not Louis XIV dispatched him to Ireland along with a French fleet under the command of Conrad von Rosen. In the kingdom of Ireland, alone among James II’s dominions, the majority of the population shared the religion of their ruler, and there had been no ‘Glorious Revolution’ in favour of William. Instead James’s viceroy, the Earl of Tyrconnell, had established control over most of the island; even in Ulster the last pockets of Protestant resistance were being mopped up, and only the besieged garrisons of Derry and Enniskillen remained. Increasingly the administration, the town corporations, the judiciary and, above all, the army were being purged of Protestants. Old English nobles, Catholic priests and Gaelic bards all looked forward to reversing a century of Protestant dominance. Behind them was the dominant power in Europe, Louis XIV’s France.

In 1688 Louis XIV had reached the full extent of his influence. Following the Franco-Dutch war (1672–8), he had maintained a standing (i.e. peacetime) army of 140,000 men, an unprecedented figure. Over the next decade, through a combination of intimidation and armed force, he secured the ‘reunification’ to France of a range of borderland territories, including Franche-Comté, Alsace and Lorraine. Among other lands occupied was the principality of Orange on the Rhône, whose ruler, Prince William, had been the principal opponent of French expansion since 1672. This left one last great fortress, Philippsburg, the capture of which would secure the Rhine. Coupled with Louis’s quest for defensible frontiers was an increasingly vicious campaign to cleanse France of ‘heresy’. In Protestant areas the army was billeted upon the civilian population to terrorise them into conversion, prompting the exodus of thousands of Huguenots to Holland, Brandenburg, Switzerland and England. The savagery of the so-called dragonnades, shocking even by seventeenth-century standards, combined with Louis’s apparently insatiable appetite for territorial aggrandisement, created the basis for an anti-French coalition: by 1688 the States General of the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Elector of Brandenburg and the King of Spain all had good reasons to fear the Sun King.[43]

The final piece of this jigsaw was England—or rather the three kingdoms that made up the Stuart composite monarchy. In theory, the making of England’s foreign policy was the prerogative of the crown, but in practice the king operated within the constraints set by the obsessive anti-Catholicism of the population. Closely connected to popular hostility towards ‘popery’ was a recurrent suspicion that the Stuarts aimed to rule as absolute monarchs, destroying the liberties of Englishmen. Exactly what these liberties were was the subject of perennial debate; but the core principle, which could be traced back to Magna Carta and beyond, was that the monarch could not tax his subjects without the consent of their representatives in parliament. Fears for civil and religious liberty had undermined Charles I, beheaded by his own subjects in 1649. Discontent continued during the Restoration (1660–88) when his sons, Charles II and James II, aligned themselves with Catholic France and against the Protestant Netherlands. In the public clauses of the Treaty of Dover (1670) Charles II promised support for France and toleration for his Catholic subjects; in secret he undertook to convert England to Catholicism—with the aid of French troops if necessary. His brother James, an open Catholic, also looked to France, despite the marriage of his daughter Mary to the Prince of Orange.

By the middle of the eighteenth century Irish Protestants, like their contemporaries throughout the various kingdoms and colonies which made up the British Empire, assumed that the political world they inhabited had its origins in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. From their perspective, the break in the succession was a constitutional watershed, the moment when England’s drift towards absolutism was halted and a parliamentary monarchy was created. It was easy to believe that the Revolution settlement had vindicated John Locke’s theory of limited government, placing conditions on the ruler, guaranteeing the rights of individuals, and demonstrating the legitimacy of resistance to tyrants. In fact the decisive factor in the downfall of James was not popular resistance but the invasion of England by a Dutch fleet four times the size of the Spanish Armada. It was not William’s intention to be the ‘Great Restorer’ of English liberties hailed in Locke’s Two treatises on government (1689); and we can safely assume that he had no intention of following Locke’s advice to ‘make good his title’ by grounding it ‘in the consent of the people’.[44] Conversely, the Convention of 1689 which offered the crown to William and Mary had not intended to commit itself to a military struggle that would consume 80 per cent of England’s revenues and see one in seven adult males serve in the army. In seeking the protection of Louis, however, James had internationalised the conflict. In April 1689 the English House of Commons voted for war with France, a war that initially would have to be fought in Ireland.[45]

The War of the League of Augsburg, contrary to the expectations of Louis and his war minister Louvois, became a war of attrition that exhausted the major participants. It marked a decisive change in the scale and organisation of armed conflict, completed by the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). In William’s reign (1689–1702) England’s army doubled to reach a total of 87,500 men; it rose further under Anne (1702–14), when it averaged almost 93,000.[46] These protracted struggles were characterised by indecisive confrontations and inconclusive peace settlements: this was a world where soldiers were more often engaged in slow manoeuvres or sieges than in pitched battles, where monster armies were depleted by disease and desertion rather than by combat, and where ongoing diplomatic initiatives were conducted alongside the actual fighting. These new ‘universal wars’, as the political theorist Andrew Fletcher observed, were managed by ‘the power of money’, with the result that not only the theatres of conflict were involved, but ‘the remotest village and most solitary cottage’.[47] This was certainly the case in Britain, now emerging as a major power, requiring a permanent army and the tax revenue to keep it in the field. Before 1689 the annual income of the crown had amounted to less than £2 million; in William’s reign it rose to between £5 and £6 million. The revolution in warfare would spawn a revolution in fiscal administration, with profound implications for all three British kingdoms.

It has become fashionable lately to write rather disparagingly of Ireland’s place in King William’s wars. A good example is the fifteen-week siege of Derry that began in April 1689. As one recent scholar has commented, ‘there was little about any aspect of the siege of Londonderry to impress the professionals’,[48] and military historians have often doubted whether this famous paradigm of Protestant Ulster’s siege mentality counts as a siege at all. To begin with, the town’s defences were so weak that its two battalions abandoned it for England, taking many of the civil and military leaders with them. With 30,000 inhabitants and refugees squeezed into two square kilometres, the prospects looked bleak. The defenders had neither professional training nor adequate arms; when they advanced to meet a Jacobite force at Clady on 15 April, they panicked and fled. But the conduct of the besiegers, under the command of the French generals Maumont and Rosen, was equally unimpressive. With just two cannon, the Jacobites opted to blockade the town in an attempt to starve the garrison into submission. As Conrad Rosen, maréchal d’Irlande, complained, the Irish were hampered by poor equipment and lacklustre commanders. They were also badly affected by sickness and desertion, encamped for several months without tents in a country where, as one French officer lamented, ‘it rains almost every day’.[49] If the expertise was continental, the terrain and the weather were unmistakably Irish.

On the continent, meanwhile, this was the golden age of siege warfare, dominated by the brilliant Vaubon, Louis XIV’s master engineer. The techniques of siegecraft had been revolutionised by the construction of star-shaped fortresses, with thickened walls, complex outworks, and triangular bastions which allowed the defenders to cover the entire perimeter of the fortress, depriving the enemy of the shelter of ‘dead’ zones. In 1692 the capture of Namur, one of the strongest fortresses in the Netherlands, would cost Louis 2,500 dead and 3,000 wounded. During a twenty-seven-day siege the French had made use of sixty engineers, two-thirds of whom lost their lives; 150 cannon and mortars were used to fire 50,000 solid shot and 11,000 bombs.[50] Neither Britain nor Ireland had been much affected by these technological developments, though the two sieges of Limerick, unlike that of Derry, were much closer to textbook operations. In other ways, too, conditions in Ireland differed from the principal theatre of the War of the League of Augsburg—the heavily fortified frontier that stretched from the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium and Luxemburg) to the lower Rhineland. The three campaign seasons of 1689–91 saw something of a culture clash as up-to-date military technology, developed in the fertile regions of the continent, was imported into an agrarian country with low levels of population density, commercial activity and urbanisation, not to mention a primitive road network. Only six of the twenty-five Jacobite officers at the rank of major-general or above were from Ireland: for the most part, leadership came from French generals such as Lauzun and St Ruth. Like Rosen, they were often appalled by Ireland and the Irish, though their criticisms were no doubt heightened by the need to exonerate themselves from responsibility for failure. A more reliable witness, the English Jacobite John Stevens, found the Irish ‘raw and undisciplined . . . very ragged and ill-shod’ but still noted their bravery.[51] In 1690 the Jacobites exchanged 5,387 Irishmen under Justin MacCarthy, first Viscount Mountcashel (c. 1643–94), for a French force of 6,666 (many of whom were actually Walloons and Germans). The ‘Mountcashel Brigade’, the core of the eighteenth-century Irish Brigade, quickly distinguished themselves in Savoy in September 1690 and later in Catalonia in the summer of 1691.

The Williamite forces were even more international in composition. The Duke of Schomberg, a German who had fought at various times for the Dutch Republic, Sweden, France and Brandenburg, was succeeded by a Dutchman (Ginkel) and then a French Huguenot (Henri de Ruvigny). Their forces—Huguenot, Dutch, Danish and English—included some of the most experienced troops in Europe. In comparison, the ‘native’ contribution was small, consisting of the 6,000 troops of the Derry and Enniskillen battalions. The latter, ‘half-naked with sabre and pistols, hanging from their belts, looked like a horde of Tartars’.[52] Initially, under the ageing Schomberg, they achieved very little. Supplies of bread and beer were slow to arrive, and the troops were compelled to live on local mutton which ‘cast a great many into fluxes’.[53] Camped on marshy ground at Dundalk in the autumn of 1689, one-quarter of the Williamite forces perished from disease—dysentery, typhus and pneumonia; an even greater number were said to have died at Lisburn during the following winter. In these harsh conditions, as one Huguenot noted, the English soldiers were particularly vulnerable, since ‘accustomed to living well, they could not endure privation’.[54] It was not until William assumed personal command, and most of the available forces were committed, that the military tide began to turn.

Both England and France committed substantial resources to the Irish war. The total number of troops at the battle of the Boyne, for example, was probably 62,000, not very far short of the 80,000 that clashed at Fleurus during the same year. As an indication of the logistical problems involved in provisioning the troops, it is worth considering that contemporary Dublin, the second city in the British Isles, had a peacetime population of 60,000 inhabitants.[55] During the campaigning seasons of 1689–91, therefore, the equivalent of a large capital city was being moved around the island. In addition to weapons, ammunition and clothes, it had to be supplied with food, drink and—to judge by the better documented campaigns of the continent—women. The royal proclamations issued by James were concerned largely with provisions, transport and relations between the army and civilians. Losses were small at the Boyne, but at Aughrim in the following year the Irish lost over 7,000 men, ‘the flower of their army and nation’.[56] It is regrettable that the social, as opposed to the military, impact of Aughrim has never been examined systematically. It was undoubtedly the key turning-point in the ‘shipwreck’, and while Protestants chose to remember 1690, Catholic folk memory would focus on 1691. In addition to Ó Bruadair’s An longbhriseadh, the popular poem Ar treascradh in Eachroim (‘All who fell at Aughrim’) was written by Eoghan Ó Caoimh (1656–1726) following his eviction from a farmholding on the Kerry/Limerick border in 1692.[57] The blind poet Séamus Dall Mac Cuarta (c. 1645–1733) does not mention the Boyne, despite his close links with the area, while his lament Tuireamh Shomhairle Mhic Dhomhnaill takes Aughrim as the landmark in the subjugation of his country by the heretic English.[58]

There were many points during the war when things might have turned out differently. At Aughrim, for example, the Franco-Irish force appeared to be close to victory when the Jacobite commander St Ruth was suddenly decapitated by a cannon-ball. Ultimately, however, Tyrconnell was reliant upon French military support, and at every stage the support provided was inadequate. If this was true of the number of troops he commanded, it became even more obvious with respect to sea power. Although Cork and Kinsale could be reached relatively easily from Brest, Louis and his naval minister Seignelay refused to risk French ships before James had consolidated his position. Even with the island under Jacobite control, the French committed a squadron of only three frigates; Seignelay chose to rely instead on French privateers, mostly based at Saint-Malo. But the greatest missed opportunity of the war was undoubtedly the Comte de Tourville’s victory over the combined Anglo-Dutch fleet off Beachy Head on the day before the battle of the Boyne. Drastically short of supplies, the cautious Tourville failed to exploit his control of the channel and opted to return to France. After the defeat of the French at La Hogue (19–24 May 1692) the French fleet trailed behind the maritime powers. Guerre d’escadre, the deployment of a full battle fleet to establish control of the sea, was abandoned for guerre de course, small-scale commercial raids by small squadrons or private entrepreneurs. A number of factors dictated this shift, including the position of the French naval bases, a shortage of materials and the redirection of war expenditure. But there were also more fundamental problems in French strategy, problems that would recur throughout the eighteenth century. First, the French had no clear objective in Ireland. As one study of French military policy has concluded, Louis was unable to decide ‘whether he wanted to make Ireland strong and independent, as a permanent diversion on William III’s flank, or whether he intended to use it as a stepping-stone to restore James II to his English throne’.[59] As the war escalated, moreover, Louis’s priority became the defence of his own borders. If London was concerned about the Irish revolt, Versailles faced its own domestic threat, with the Huguenots and nouveaux convertis in the coastal areas of the south.

Although it is the set-piece battles and sieges that have dominated Irish folk memories, much of Williamite warfare actually consisted of scouting, foraging or skirmishing. The importance of irregular forces should be stressed, particularly in the later stages of the war. Following the landing of Schomberg in Belfast Lough on 13 August 1689, all adult Catholic males were ordered to arm themselves. In those areas recovered by the Williamites, meanwhile, militia units were raised from the local Protestant inhabitants, perhaps totalling 15,000 men by the spring of 1691. These amateur forces spent much of their time dealing with the ‘rapparees’, the Catholic irregulars whose knowledge of the local landscape, as George Story explained, enabled them to harry the English invaders:

When the Rapparees have no mind to show themselves upon the Bogs, they commonly sink down between two or three little Hills, grown over with long Grass, so that you may as soon find a Hair as one of them. . . . You may see a hundred of them without Arms, who look like the poorest humblest Slaves in the World, and you may search till you are weary before you find one Gun: but yet when they have a mind to do mischief, they can all be ready in an Hours warning.[60]

It was not only the Williamite forces who might suffer in strange, sometimes inaccessible terrain, as Jacobite foot-soldiers discovered in the lakes and marshes of Fermanagh. The Anglican clergyman Andrew Hamilton, who fought at the battle of Newtownbutler on 31 July 1689, recorded how the defeated forces of Justin MacCarthy were pursued through bogs, pools and loughs. All night the Enniskilleners beat the bushes and scoured the turf banks until the fugitives were all killed, taken prisoner or drowned.[61]

The impact of the war on civilians is hard to gauge. Although writers on international law such as Grotius and Pufendorf distinguished between armed forces and non-combatants, ordinary soldiers frequently did not. The War of the League of Augsburg had begun with Louis’s infamous devastation of the Palatinate, a throwback to the brutality of the Thirty Years War. Between the autumn of 1688 and the following summer some twenty cities and towns in the German territories of the Palatinate, Baden and Württemberg were razed to the ground, and their inhabitants ordered to resettle in France.[62] As so often, fighting was particularly ferocious where political divisions were exacerbated by religious differences. Just a few years earlier, Louis had turned his attention to the Vaudois, a small Protestant community across the French border in Piedmont, believed to be sheltering Huguenot refugees. Under pressure from Versailles, the Duke of Savoy sent a joint Franco-Piedmontese force into the Alpine valley in an operation that, according to the most recent account, ‘amounted to genocide’.[63] Although the Vaudois offered guerrilla resistance, they were quickly crushed. In May the French commander reported that the country was ‘completely desolated’ and expressed the hope that ‘the race of Barbets [Vaudois] will be entirely eliminated’.[64] Between ten and twelve thousand captives were held in prison camps, where many died of malnutrition or disease; the remnant of the Protestant population, around 5,000 people, was resettled in Germany. (Ironically, the French seem to have considered resettling the valleys with displaced Irish Catholics.)[65]

In Ireland there was no official policy of targeting the general population, though civilians found themselves under siege in Derry, Athlone and elsewhere, and they inevitably got in the way of armies, foraging parties and bands of deserters. Most of the evidence concerning civilians—and this is particularly true of contemporary pamphlets and engraved prints—was produced by the Williamite side; inevitably we have more information on atrocities committed against Protestant communities. In Scotland, for example, Presbyterian refugees from Ulster brought horrific stories of Irish cruelty: one told of five pregnant women slaughtered ‘because they bred hereticks’.[66] Many of these reports were no doubt manufactured or exaggerated, such as the claim that between forty and fifty thousand Protestants had been stripped of their clothes and paraded through the streets of Dublin. More credible, perhaps, are those instances where commentators censured the sectarian excesses of their own side. One well-known example is the Rev. George Story, a chaplain in Schomberg’s army, who was appalled by the revenge taken by local Presbyterians following the surrender of the Irish garrison at Carrickfergus: most of the men were disarmed and most of the women stripped. ‘So rude were the Irish Scots’, he commented, that Schomberg was forced to ride among them with his pistol in his hand ‘to keep the Irish from being murdered’.[67] Jean Francois de Morsier, a Calvinist émigré from the Pays de Vaud region of Switzerland who landed with the Williamite troops in August 1689, later recalled the ‘mopping up’ operations that followed the battle of the Boyne: ‘Our soldiers, especially the English, perpetrated atrocities against several women they came across and against the peasants in their houses, and one man was sent to the scaffold as punishment for this behaviour.’[68]

The reports of Jacobite atrocities dispatched to London were part of a propaganda campaign designed to win British sympathy. Inevitably they recalled the insurrection of 1641, and they make equally problematic evidence for historians. Half a century earlier the grisly face-to-face violence of Sir Phelim O’Neill’s rising was immortalised in 3,142 eyewitness accounts and later preserved in Trinity College Dublin, where they remain a source of controversy and fascination. These ‘depositions’ supplied the raw material for the Master of the Irish Rolls, Sir John Temple, whose classic History of the Irish rebellion (1646) appeared to confirm all the worst fears entertained by the British settlers about their Irish neighbours. The most notorious massacres occurred in County Armagh—from Portadown, where a hundred Protestant men, women and children, were ‘driven like hogs’ into the River Bann, and Kilmore, where English and Scots settlers were burnt to death in a thatched cottage. It is only recently, thanks largely to the work of Nicholas Canny, that we are beginning to appreciate how widely such sectarian and ethnic slaughter occurred in other parts of the island. In Sligo jail, for example, thirty-eight Protestant prisoners were murdered by insurgents armed with ‘swords, skeins, and smith’s sledges’, while in Kilkenny seven Protestants, including the Rev. Thomas Bingham, were beheaded and their remains desecrated.[69]

As in the 1640s, Londoners who lived through the Glorious Revolution were treated to lurid accounts of the numerous atrocities inflicted on the beleaguered Protestant colonies across the water. One of the earliest, An account of the transactions of the late King James in Ireland (1690), described the brutal treatment of the Protestant inhabitants of Bandon under James, and the imprisonment for fifteen months of Sir Thomas Southwell, following his capture by the Jacobite sheriff of Galway. By monopolising food supplies in the capital, the author alleged, some Catholics intended to starve the Protestant population: ‘and some of them swore in Coffee-Houses, it would never be well with the good Catholick Subjects, till the one half of the Protestants were Hanged and the other half Starved’.[70] Even worse, he claimed, were the seasoned soldiers of d’Avaux:

The French had not been two days in Dublin when they murdered two or three Protestant Clothiers, in a part of the City called the Comb; for that great Crime of protecting their Wives from being made Prostitutes to the French. . . . About the same time some of them took a Country-Maid that came to Market with her Father, and defloured her in the open Street at Noon-day.[71]

Whatever the truth of these allegations (and they will sound depressingly familiar to students of early modern warfare), it is nevertheless obvious that military discipline never broke down as completely as it had done fifty years before. Both William and James were too concerned with the propaganda war outside Ireland to tolerate another general settling of racial and religious scores. Thus, although Protestant prisoners complained of privations and hard usage, there is little evidence of the sort of revenge killings that took place in the 1640s.

This conclusion can be confirmed by comparing the 1641 depositions with the large collection of letters carefully preserved by Anthony Dopping (1643–97), Anglican Bishop of Meath. Like William King, Dopping had chosen to stay in Ireland under Tyrconnell’s regime, and he was one of four bishops to take his seat in the House of Lords when the Jacobite parliament met in May 1689. Indeed, Dopping had the unusual distinction of swearing allegiance in person to two rival British monarchs. As a strong upholder of the traditional Anglican doctrines of the divine right of kings, non-resistance and passive obedience, he headed a delegation of Anglican clergymen who met James II on 27 March 1689, just after his arrival in Dublin. Sixteen months later, just days after the battle of the Boyne, he led another party to William’s camp at Finglas to announce that James had now forfeited his crown. In the intervening period he acted as the chief spokesman for the Irish Protestants who remained in Ireland, frequently petitioning the Jacobite authorities for the protection of the Protestant population, its churches and its property. Perhaps Dopping had literary ambitions; perhaps he even hoped that his correspondence would make him the John Temple of his generation. In the end, however, it was Bishop King’s State of the Protestants that became the classic Anglican narrative of the Jacobite ‘occupation’. Dopping’s letters were never published, and few archival historians are aware of their existence.

Protestant accounts of 1641 had devoted a great deal of attention to attacks on Anglican clergymen and the targeting of Bibles and churches for ritualised desecration. Some faint echoes of this vicious confessional conflict can be heard in a letter from the Rev. Edward Waller concerning ‘Romish’ aggression at Athlone, written in September 1689. On Sunday 18 August, Waller explains, Sarsfield was in Dublin, leaving over 3,000 of his soldiers in the town, accompanied by women and children. The Protestant community assembled for worship, having obtained a promise of protection from one of the chief Jacobite officers. The service was halted when one hundred soldiers surrounded the church, threatening the inhabitants and throwing stones at the windows. A subsequent letter relates that on the next Sunday a crowd of three hundred Catholics drove an ox and cow into the church shouting ‘Come out you Rebelly Dogs and Rogues.’[72] Wisely, no doubt, Waller had the church barred up and resigned himself to preaching in a private house. Similar complaints were gathered concerning the seizure of churches by priests in Rathfarnham and Donnybrook (Dublin), Great Island, Carrigaline and Cloyne (County Cork), Lynally, Ballyboy, Callan and Kilmacow (King’s County), Durrow (Queen’s County) Ardnurcher, Kilbeggan, Ballyloughloe and Rathconrath (Westmeath), Lanesborough (Longford), and Naas, Kilkenny, Carlow and Tallow, while Passage and Waterford cathedral were occupied. In a number of cases communion tables and pulpits were dismantled, seats ripped out and Bibles torn.

These experiences would help to define a distinctive community, which regarded itself as the ‘Protestant’ or ‘English’ interest of Ireland, and would a century later identify with the ideal of ‘Protestant Ascendancy’. They also help us to understand at a less rarefied level the ‘shipwreck’ of the Catholics immortalised by Dáibhidh Ó Bruadair for his aristocratic patrons. In July 1691, for example, Bishop Dopping received an account of the capture of Athlone from John Lestrange. The English town of Athlone—the part, that is, on the Leinster side of the Shannon—held out for two days before it was reduced to rubble by Ginkel’s fourteen heavy siege guns; but it was not until a week later that the Irish town on the Connacht side was taken. Over a period of ten days a total of 12,000 cannon-balls, 600 mortar-bombs and many tons of stone fell on the town.[73] Lestrange described the scene as follows:

Last night about six a Clock it was stormed by a party of choice men being about 1500 ffoot. . . They went on most Curageously they have killd many but wer very mercifull in saving about 300 men Including officers. The Irish Camp lay 3 myles from Athlone. What became of ’em we doe not yet know, nor may any man goe with a purs of Gould from this [place] to Athlone without danger. I was at Ballimore when it surrendered and did not see a mans face that I knew but Bartoll [Bartholomew] Dillon, for most of this and that Country are dead by ye sword as well as ffamine and the Remnant that are alive & have but breath in them still [are] dying in ditches and high wayes.[74]

The mere presence of troops in the towns and fields had disastrous consequences. Shortly after the departure of King William the Anglican Archbishop of Tuam complained of the ‘sufferings of ye Protestants here, even by our own Army, spoiling and plundering them of w[ha]t ye other Left’.[75] The recollections of the Swiss soldier de Morsier were generally dominated by the condition of his stomach. On the road to Dundalk he was restricted to standard peasant food: a gruel of oatmeal flour, brown griddle ‘what they call quaiques [cakes]’, washed down with beer and ‘stagnant bogwater’.[76] For much of the time, however, the armies ‘lived off the country’, the normal euphemism for the requisitioning or stealing of food supplies, horses and carts, livestock and tools—anything. As a result, agricultural activity was disrupted, sometimes for several years. To deny resources to the enemy, the Jacobites also adopted a scorched-earth policy, burning the countryside as they retreated. Story’s account of the Williamite advance from Carrickfergus through County Down often makes eerie reading: Schomberg found the villages of Hillsborough and Loughbrickland deserted, while both Newry and Carlingford had been burnt. In the hinterland around Newry corn lay rotting on the ground, ‘for the People were all gone, the Protestants the March before, and the Irish now, at the retreating of their Army, some fled for fear, and those that had a mind to stay, were forced away by the Army, with their Cattel, and whatever else was portable’.[77]

The large-scale migration referred to by Story was commented upon by all. In areas where they were numerous, as in Ulster, Sligo or Bandon, Protestants had initially formed armed associations and attempted to resist the Jacobite troops; elsewhere they fled to the north or to England. By 1689 it was claimed, no doubt with some exaggeration, that 5,000 Irish Protestants had sought refuge in London; others had crossed to Bristol, Chester and Liverpool.[78] In the capital charitable relief was organised for the ‘poor Mechanicks, Husband-men, and Labourers’ from Ireland, and pressure quickly built up for gentlemen to return to those areas ‘liberated’ by the Williamites.[79] Many Ulster Scots, meanwhile, including a large number of Presbyterian clergymen, fled to Scotland, where calls for voluntary contributions for Protestant refugees ‘received a warm response’.[80] Again, much less is known about the fate of the Catholics, but a report of the surrender of Carrickfergus in 1689 claimed that there were no ‘papists’ in Ulster except 2,000 who had fled to the Glens of Antrim for fear of being spoiled by the Protestants.[81] While the ‘War of the Two Kings’ has received a great deal of attention, the war of the foot-soldier, the rapparee and the ordinary civilian still awaits its historian.

KEEPING THE FAITH: JACOBITE ALTERNATIVES

Il y a près de quatre vingts anns que je suis au monde, ma vie n’a été qu’un tissu de peines, du travaux, de miseres et de Calamités. Quand je rapelle dans mon esprit tout ce qui s’est passé de mon temp en Europe, surtout dans notre malheureuse patrie, je n’y vois qu’un enchainement de rebellion, d’Exils, de meutres et de massacres.

‘LETTRE D’UN OFFICIER IRLANDOIS À SON FILS OFFICIER, SUR LES

AFFAIRES D’IRLANDE À LA FIN DU RÈGNE DE LOUIS XIV’, C. 1733.[82]

In 1692 Ireland was once again a conquered country under English control. The ‘Cromwellian dogs’ were back, though only a fool would have ruled out the possibility of another sudden revolution of the political wheel. In the creation of a Protestant Ascendancy, the years between the Treaty of Limerick and the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714 would be just as formative as the Williamite victories at the Boyne and Aughrim. The really decisive battles for the Protestant succession and the Revolution settlement were those fought in Flanders, and the security of the Anglican dispensation in Ireland was bound up with the construction of a new balance of power in Europe. In less obvious ways, too, the Ascendancy regime was shaped by international events. With the benefit of hindsight, the confiscation of the Jacobite estates may seem inevitable, the logical conclusion of a process that had begun under the Tudors. But the fate of the forfeited estates actually remained a source of controversy throughout William’s reign. Nor should it be assumed that the enactment of the penal code and the rise of an exclusively Protestant parliament in Dublin were foregone conclusions. It was far from obvious that the new monarch would accept a Protestant monopoly that conflicted with his own inclinations towards religious toleration, or a parliamentary system of government that he regarded with thorough distaste. As the Treaty of Limerick immediately demonstrated, the possibility that Protestant interests might be sacrificed to political expediency was still very real. All these developments are interrelated, and all are connected to the continuation of King William’s War.

That war did not end with the sailing of the ‘wild geese’. Limerick, it turned out, would be the last major engagement between two regular forces on the island; but the continental conflict was not ended until 1697, and it left a substantial body of Irish Catholics in the regiments of Louis XIV, keen to fight another day. Britain was invaded in 1715 and 1745, triggering two civil wars fought largely on Scottish soil. But Ireland also witnessed invasion scares in every decade right up to the accession of George III: in 1692, 1695–7, 1708, 1715–16, 1719, 1722, 1739–40, 1743–4, 1756 and finally 1759–60. Protestant gentlemen anxiously reported upon the ‘insolence’ or ‘dejection’ of their Catholic neighbours, fluctuating in tandem with military fortunes in Europe. Nerves were also rattled by reports of Catholic priests illegally returning to the southern ports, of Catholic soldiers being recruited for service abroad, and rapparee disturbances in the west.[83] In the short term a breathing-space of sorts was allowed by the peace agreed at Ryswick in 1697; and in the same year the Treaty of Limerick was ratified by the Irish parliament. Within just five years, however, the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), ignited by the death of the childless Carlos II, brought a new series of exhaustive clashes between the great powers.

At stake was the massive empire of Spain, comprising not only Central and South America, but also half of Italy (Sicily, Naples, Milan, Sardinia) and the southern Netherlands. In a sense this struggle was also an integral part of King William’s War. In 1698 the Prince of Orange had signed a partition treaty with Louis in an attempt to avoid armed conflict, an indication of his enhanced status on the European stage. When this agreement collapsed, William once again assembled an anti-French coalition, the Grand Alliance of The Hague, centred upon the maritime powers and Austria. Under his military successor, the Duke of Marlborough, it became clear that Britain was now the major driving force in the alliance.[84] After a quarter of a century of almost continuous fighting the era of French predominance was at last brought to an end by the Peace of Utrecht (1713). The threat of a union between the thrones of Paris and Madrid was averted, and a businesslike partition of the Spanish empire ensued, in which the smaller states were, as usual, treated as bargaining counters. Britain made gains in Canada (Hudson’s Bay, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia) and the Mediterranean (Gibraltar, Minorca), as well as acquiring the Asiento, the lucrative contract to supply African slaves to the Spanish American colonies. Finally, Louis agreed to expel the Pretender from France, and the Protestant succession was at last underwritten by the great powers of Europe.

While Marlborough was driving the forces of Louis XIV from Germany and the Low Countries, Jacobite intrigue focused on Scotland, where widespread discontent was provoked by the imposition of an Act of Union in 1707. Colonel Nathaniel Hooke, the Irish-born agent to the French court who carried out two secret missions to Scotland in 1705 and 1707, proposed a landing in Scotland, followed by the seizure of Newcastle (designed to deprive London of coal). The Scots force could then proceed to ‘make themselves masters of the great part of England and even to take London—possession of which decides who holds the crown’.[85] Ireland itself was largely irrelevant: it was only in 1716, desperately seeking a diversion, that the Pretender considered an Irish venture as ‘a good pis aller’.[86] The absence of any significant domestic threat permitted the Dublin Castle administration to withdraw troops for service in Scotland during the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. The pattern was repeated in 1759: as Choiseul prepared for an Irish expedition most of the trained regiments on the Irish establishment were in America or Europe. In January 1758 the Lord Lieutenant, Bedford, had protested in vain to Pitt about the withdrawal of further regiments of foot from Ireland. The country was already drained of men, he complained, and those regiments left consisted of Irish—probably Catholic—recruits whose reliability was, to say the least, doubtful. Even in peacetime, Bedford added regretfully, the Irish government found military force essential ‘to give sanction to the laws’.[87] The deplorable state of Ireland’s defences was a consistent feature of the entire period, emphasised by Jacobite conspirators and Castle officials alike. Even the militia companies arrayed in 1756, although very substantial on paper (totalling 106,295 men), were poorly armed, dispersed throughout the countryside, and disproportionately concentrated in Ulster.

From 1688 until his death in September 1715 the mainstay of Jacobite support continued to be the Sun King, Louis XIV. Shortly after the battle of the Boyne, James II had returned to the chateau of St-Germain-en-Laye where the French court had offered him asylum. Among the two hundred servants that comprised his royal household were around thirty Irish notables, led by the Earl of Clancarty, Viscount Galmoy, Richard Hamilton, Dudley Bagnall, Daniel and Randal MacDonnell and Arthur Magennis; over the next decade their number increased, with Bourkes, Nagles and Fitzgeralds all receiving new appointments.[88] Here the deposed monarch remained, oscillating between diplomatic intrigue and monastic retirement, until his death in 1701; and here his successor James Francis Edward Stuart plotted his restoration until he was forced, by British diplomatic pressure, to quit France in 1713. Louis remained stubbornly attached to his Stuart cousins, who ostentatiously advertised their claims to majesty by continuing to ‘touch for the king’s evil’—the medieval practice of curing scrofula (a form of tuberculosis) which was traditionally held to be a mark of divine-right kingship. The French court appealed to other Catholic rulers for help; they backed invasion plans in 1696 and 1708; and following the death of James II, Louis recognised his son as King of Great Britain and Ireland, against the better judgment of most of his ministers. Financial support was offered to prominent Jacobite leaders, while a large number of poor Irish refugees were prevented from starving by French charity.

Nevertheless, Irish historians would be unwise to make too much of Louis’s dogmatic stance on the British succession issue. His commitment was to the principle of dynastic legitimacy—not to anything so insubstantial as the wishes of the English, Scots and Irish peoples; and this principle had to be weighed against ‘reason of state’. Bizarre though it might seem, Louis considered the possibility of reconciling dynastic justice with the realities of post-Revolution Britain by the typically ancien régime solution of compensating the Stuarts for their losses. Shortly after the Jacobite surrender at Limerick the Emperor Leopold had proposed that a joint expedition by France and the maritime powers should seize Egypt as a substitute kingdom for James II; and in 1697, on the death of the Polish king, John Sobieski, Louis suggested that James might accept the elective crown of Poland–Lithuania.[89] Failing such exotic solutions, the Grand Roi was adept at pacifying British ministers while keeping one foot in the Jacobite door. In the negotiations resulting in the Treaty of Ryswick, signed in September 1697, Louis refused to expel the Stuarts from his territory, but agreed not to assist the enemies of William III and his successors; finally, with the fourth and fifth articles of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), he at last promised to recognise the Protestant succession.

Admittedly, the Bourbons were always willing to consider projects for a descent on the British Isles when diplomacy failed or continental campaigns went badly. Even then, however, the vagaries of wartime strategy counted for more than the wishes of the Court of St Germain or of the Irish exiles who gathered there. Such ventures were always more likely to be diversionary tactics rather than wars of liberation. Jacobite adventures were consequently hobbled by internal tensions and conflicting interests. The Irish exiles, preoccupied with the prospect of recovering their ancestral lands, eventually came to favour the establishment of an independent Irish kingdom under French guarantee; the tendency of French strategy was more often directed towards a temporary occupation of some part of the British Isles, with the ultimate aim of forcing the recovery of recent colonial losses in the New World, Africa and India. The cost of maintaining an independent Ireland, needless to say, was rarely addressed with any seriousness. Invasion projects pitched to the war ministers in Paris and Madrid were frequently marked by wishful thinking. Patrick Murphy’s ‘Essai historique et politique sur l’Irlande’, forwarded to the French and Spanish authorities in February 1760, predicted that Ireland would be capable of maintaining a standing army of 20,000 men, together with a fleet of twenty ships of the line and thirty frigates.[90] Shortly before this, however, the French had calculated that the defence of an independent Irish state would have required a permanent garrison of 40,000, four times the size of the British regular forces on the island, who (wisely or not) placed great faith in the protection of the Royal Navy.[91]

Further problems arose from clashes within the Stuart court itself, where English, Scots and Irish exiles competed for favour. During the most propitious moment for a successful rebellion, between 1704 and 1709, Irish Jacobites had been disorganised both at home and overseas. The two experienced generals Patrick Sarsfield and Justin MacCarthy had died a decade earlier, and the illustrious careers of Arthur Dillon, Charles O’Brien and Daniel O’Mahony were only just beginning. Their lack of influence was partly offset by the prominence of the Duke of Berwick, James’s bastard son, who had married Patrick Sarsfield’s widow in 1695. Appointed maréchal de France, Berwick had drawn up proposals for a landing at Cork in 1701–2, but was removed to Iberia in 1703. This helps to explain why the author of the ‘Memoire au sujet de l’entreprise sur l’Irlande’ (1706–8) visualised the landing of between 6,000 and 8,000 Irish soldiers in Derry, led by the O’Neills, Magennises, Maguires and O’Donnells.[92] (One recurrent—and unfounded—Jacobite assertion was that the Ulster Scots, who had famously resisted James II at Derry, were now anxious for the restoration of his son.)[93] A significant number of Irishmen became key players at the Jacobite court, including Arthur Dillon, ambassador to Versailles from 1717 and 1725, but they were still overshadowed by English and Scottish appointments. This helps to explain the disillusionment of the ‘Lettre d’un officier irlandois à son fils officier’ quoted at the beginning of this section, perhaps the only near-contemporary account we have of the position occupied by the Irish at St Germain. The author, an eighty-year-old veteran of the Irish regiments, complained that the most important court posts were filled by the English and the Scots, and that the Irish were treated with indifference by their sovereign and were badly paid. In fairness, these accusations were not fully justified; James and Mary of Modena had not only pressed Louis XIV to aid the impoverished Irish, but had sold their own jewels to raise funds for their demobilised soldiers after the Treaty of Ryswick. Nevertheless, James II’s advice on Irish affairs to his son, recorded in 1692, centred on the necessity of anglicising the rebellious natives, who ‘beare with great impatience the English yoak’.[94]

The remarkable Anglo-French alliance that endured between 1716 and 1731, fragile and unpopular though it was, reversed the normal pattern of eighteenth-century diplomacy, depriving the exiled Stuarts of their natural support base, and was probably decisive in allowing the new Hanoverian dynasty to stabilise itself. The key figure in maintaining the alliance was Cardinal Fleury, who periodically exerted diplomatic pressure upon Walpole to soften the impact of the penal laws in Ireland. This was poor compensation for the end of the special relationship between the Stuart court and France. In 1726 Fleury advised the Abbé James Dunne that, without abandoning their loyalty to the Stuarts, the Irish might ‘live quietly under a government that protected them . . . without undertaking anything that may bring a persecution on them’.[95] When one of the proviseurs at the Collège des Lombards drew up a memoire soliciting financial assistance for the Irish in Paris, Fleury carefully struck out the words ‘leur souverain légitime’ before the name of James.[96] In spite of a disastrous Jacobite rebellion in Scotland in 1715, the cause of the Stuarts nevertheless remained viable as long as the British had enemies. In 1719 a Spanish invasion fleet sailed from Cádiz, led by the Anglo-Irish exile the Duke of Ormond, bound for Scotland. At the same time James Francis Edward Sarsfield, the second Earl of Lucan, travelled to Ireland, presumably to encourage a rising. He returned disappointed within a month. Nevertheless, according to one Protestant, Catholics eagerly anticipated an invasion, and ‘I dare say a very little encouragement would have made them throw off the mask.’[97]

The legacy of the Williamite wars, as the remarks above suggest, can be measured in many ways. Its most obvious physical manifestation was the continuing presence of a large body of Irish soldiers in the service of France. In addition to the original Irish Brigade—three regiments of 5,300 troops exchanged for a contingent of French troops in 1690—there were around 15,000 men evacuated to Brittany at the end of 1691, accompanied by up to 4,000 women and children.[98] The ‘flight of the wild geese’ after Limerick laid the basis for a flow of recruits—mostly from Tipperary, Clare, Kerry, Cork, Waterford and Kilkenny—that peaked in the 1720s and 1730s at around 1,000 a year and then declined in the 1740s.[99] For most of the period recruitment was illegal, and as late as 1756 a new act (29 Geo. II, c. 17) made service in the French forces a capital offence. Covert recruitment, a violation of the penal laws which prohibited Catholics from bearing arms, may have boosted the morale of the defeated Irish; it certainly panicked the authorities. In January 1722 Munster Protestants (and, indeed, propertied Catholics) were terrified by armed gangs of two or three hundred men marching through the countryside, on this occasion destined for Spain, while magistrates were powerless to stop them.[100] St John Brodrick wrote from Midleton, County Cork:

You cannot imagine the confusion & dread that every body in this Countrey is in on Account of the vast Numbers of men that are daily enlisted & transported for the service of the King of Spain. They appear publickly in great Numbers, 60, 80, 100, in a Gang, with their officers at the head of them, & when the wind is fair they march down to the sea side, & are shipt off; when tis not, they skulk up & down the Countrey till another opportunity.[101]

A French request for licensed recruitment in Ireland made in December 1727 was favourably received by Walpole in London but withdrawn three years later after an outcry in Dublin. The intermittent enlistment of Irishmen nevertheless continued with English connivance, and many officers subsequently returned to Ireland, where they apparently lived free from harassment. It was estimated that in 1758 there were 1,600 Catholics in the country with military experience acquired in foreign service.[102]

Why did hundreds of Irishmen continue to enlist for service on distant battlefields? The answer might seem obvious. After all, the officers of the Irish regiments emphasised the political loyalties and religious fidelity which had led them to follow their king into exile. Historians sympathetic to the Jacobite cause have cited evidence of ideological commitment culled from magistrates’ reports and legal proceedings relating to recruiting officers and their enlistment rituals. Perhaps the most striking example comes from Tipperary in 1722, where a recruit ceremoniously denounced George I as ‘a rapparee Dane that keeps away our king’s crown by extortion and violence’.[103] Another favourite source is the maverick ex-Jacobite pamphleteer Charles Forman, who called for the absorption of the Irish troops into the regular French army in 1728. ‘As long as there is a Body of Irish Roman Catholick Troops Abroad’, he noted, ‘the Chevalier will always make some Figure in Europe by the Credit they give him.’ The proprietors and recruiters of the Irish regiments, he claimed, continued to seduce new men by promising the overthrow of the Williamite settlement. As Forman recognised, however, members of the Irish diaspora were regarded by some contemporaries as no more than soldiers of fortune.[104] Among recent historians, Louis Cullen has argued that enlistment was not necessarily a political act (an expression, that is, of Jacobite fidelity) so much as an economic one—part of a old pattern of ‘natural’ migration from a peripheral area of Europe with relatively few employment possibilities to the advanced regions where the colossal armies of France, Spain and Austria had created a new permanent demand for manpower. Those who enlisted, he has remarked, ‘were frequently criminals, vagabonds, or opportunists who accepted a premium on enlistment and hoped to desert at the first opportunity’.[105]

As so often, it makes little sense to press distinctions between political and economic motives too far. The reliability of the source material is also open to question, as demonstrated by a series of prosecutions at the end of Anne’s reign concerning recruiting agents in Dublin, Cork and Waterford. At the beginning of 1714 William Lehy of Waterford testified that he and a dozen others had been enlisted by Lieutenant Toby Butler to serve ‘King James the Third’ in Lord Galmoy’s regiment, being assured that they would return ‘in less than a year’s time with an army to destroy and root out the Protestants’.[106] Other recruits around this time were allegedly assured that their reward would be the opportunity to see an rí ceart. One was Henry Murphy, who testified that a Dublin merchant named James Roch had told him that ‘he should march to Lorraine and see the young King’. A set of examinations taken before the mayor of Cork, and regarded as trustworthy by Alan Brodrick, revealed that men enthusiastically volunteered for the Pretender’s service (as opposed to the lesser offence of soldiering for the King of France), sealing their treacherous oaths with ceremonious toasts to the Stuarts. The trouble is that these examinations, like a great deal of similar material, were actually rejected by the courts. At both the Cork and Waterford assizes the accused men were indicted for the misdemeanour of enlisting ‘in the service of a certain unknown Prince’ and suffered only minor punishments. One of the Privy Councillors in Dublin who doubted the accuracy of the original testimony observed that ‘there were 500 Justices of the Peace in the Kingdom who would for half a crown a piece insert anything into an examination’. Meanwhile the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Richard Cox, one of the chief architects of the penal laws, concluded that all the enlisted men were simply ‘poor people who not being able to get their bread at home were necessitated to go into foreign service’.[107]

The Irish Brigades were presumably comprised of both the hard-core and the hard-up. A small nucleus of doctrinaire loyalists was augmented by a larger pool of the disaffected, the embittered and the indigent. But even the most simple career soldier, in joining Sarsfield’s original ‘wild geese’ and their gallicised descendants, must have realised that he occupied an established position in the messianic poems and songs of the Gael, the schemes cooked up by conspirators at St Germain and the foreign news recycled in the Dublin press. For seventy years the Irish regiments remained the focal point of Catholic fantasies and Protestants alarms. Their value system was no doubt reinforced by the masters of the Lombard College and by the expatriate priests who served as chaplains. Among the later, for example, was Abbé MacGeoghegan, whose Histoire de l’Irlande (1758–62), dedicated to the Irish Brigade, embarrassed the French authorities by its unrepentant Jacobite allegiance and Catholic confessionalism.[108] As late as the summer of 1759 news arrived of the build-up of French naval forces in Brest, Toulon and Dunkirk, while only 5,000 troops were left in Ireland. Desperate following the French defeats in Quebec and India, Choiseul, the new foreign minister, now sought to claw back some ground at home. Among four invasion plans submitted to his office was the ‘Mémoire sur l’Irlande et sur les moyens de rendre cette ile independente de l’Angleterre’ by Dominick Hegarty, a seasoned Jacobite agitator. Its main emphasis was the potential damage that would be caused to British commerce by the exclusion from liberated Irish ports of the Royal Navy, whose sailors he estimated to be one-third Irish. It was assumed that the Irish Brigade would be commanded by Charles O’Brien, Viscount Clare and Earl of Thomond, who had been created maréchal de France in 1757 and was military governor of Roussillon and Languedoc; indeed, Clare’s name was now put forward as a candidate for the throne of an independent Ireland, the Young Pretender having forfeited Irish sympathies following his belated conversion to Anglicanism in 1750.[109] Shortly before the Seven Years War, Francis Burton of Buncraggy, County Clare, met Clare in Paris and dined with him often. He was surprised to find that the earl knew all the landed gentlemen of County Clare and their private affairs ‘as if he had lived among them’, and that he kept ‘an exact rent roll’ and register of all his own confiscated estates, in case he lived to reclaim his patrimony.[110]

If the character and significance of the Irish regiments remains open to dispute, the same can be said of two other legacies of King William’s War. The first is the rapparees, whose campaigns of plunder and extortion provoked sporadic bursts of legislative activity into the middle of the century. In Éamonn Ó Ciardha’s controversial study of Jacobitism, the rapparees are portrayed as Jacobite partisans, a sort of people’s army whose relationship with the wider Catholic community was reinforced by the government policy of levying heavy fines on the local community in response to popular disturbances.[111] For other scholars, the rapparee was little more than a new incarnation of the old tory bandit. Certainly it would be unwise to portray rappareeism as primarily an ideologically driven movement. Initially the term itself, derived from the Irish word for the half-pike, was used not only for elements of the Jacobite army (sometimes for auxiliaries, sometimes for disbanded men) but for irregular Williamite forces too. ‘We Labour under our remedy as well as our disease,’ the Bishop of Raphoe lamented, ‘and ’tis much alike to the impoverished whether they are rapperied and undone by the Danish, French, Dutch, English or by the Irish Tories.’[112] Guerrilla warfare continued after the restoration of Protestant control, sometimes leading to substantial fatalities. Sir Richard Cox, having completed his Hibernia Anglicana in Bristol, returned to Ireland in 1690 and was appointed governor of Cork in the following year. For several months he directed the local militia in a vicious local campaign against irregular Jacobite forces, supplying twenty-two garrisons along an eighty-mile frontier from Tallow to Sherkin. By his own reckoning, Cox had ‘killed and hanged not less than 3,000’ and captured £12,000 worth of cattle and other goods.[113]

Secondly, as historians of Jacobitism never tire of reminding us, the Stuarts enjoyed the right of nominating Irish bishops until 1766. This was not simply a reward from the papacy for a dynasty recognised throughout Europe as martyrs to the Catholic faith; it was also the only form of diplomatic recognition that the Stuarts consistently enjoyed. Even here, however, the situation is more complicated than it appears at first glance. The correspondence of the exiled court, examined by Cathaldus Giblin over fifty years ago, demonstrates that a total of 129 Irish episcopal appointments were made during the reigns of James II and James III, all but five of whom were royal nominees.[114] The exact significance of this statistic is much harder to establish. Anyone turning to the Nunziatura di Fiandra papers—the records of the Brussels nuncio who supervised the Catholic churches of Britain and Ireland—might easily form the impression that the Pretender’s right of nomination was a diplomatic courtesy rather than a decisive factor in papal appointments. The petitions received from clergy and parishioners in Ireland, the activities of the agents of various bishops in Rome, the struggle between secular and regular camps and the views of the Brussels nuncio and the cardinals at Propaganda Fide restricted the Pretender’s room for manoeuvre. He was just one among several sources of preferment, and by no means the most important one. In at least one case, the nomination of the Hugh MacMahon to Armagh in 1715, James III recommended a candidate against his better judgment in order to please Clement XI.

Some of the difficulties in interpreting the significance of the Jacobite soldiers, rapparees and priests are common to historians of all three British kingdoms (and it should never be forgotten that Jacobitism was a ‘three kingdoms’ phenomenon), or of any underground conspiracy for that matter. Among British historians there have been sharp exchanges between ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’ over the gravity of the Jacobite threat. Many of the sources that survive, such as the correspondence with the Stuart court on the continent, or the intelligence assessments of Whig observers, are notoriously unreliable, since both Whig governments and Jacobite conspirators had obvious reasons for exaggerating the strength of disaffection. But no aspect of the subject has proved quite so controversial as the political poetry of the Gaelic-speaking world, not least because the majority of eighteenth-century historians are unable to read it. To some scholars, the lingering attachment to the Stuart cause expressed in Munster poetry was nothing more than ‘idle pub talk’.[115] The most influential has been Louis Cullen, who has shown the difficulties in establishing a link between the essentially ‘aristocratic feeling’ of the aisling or ‘vision’ poem and the social unrest of the 1760s, concerned with specific grievances such as tithe, enclosure, cess and competition for land. ‘The aisling was a literary form,’ says Cullen, ‘not a message for the people.’ Even if they knew the words to the songs, Cullen has rather perversely insisted, the ordinary people could not have shared their aspirations.[116] In his more conciliatory moments, however, even Cullen admits that the common people may have absorbed some of the dispossession mentality of the Catholic elite, that the poems contain references to contemporary events, and that they convey a sense of common national identity, ‘heightened by the struggle between the two races’ that ‘fused sectional interests that might otherwise have proved divisive’.[117]

The overwhelming message conveyed by Irish political poetry was the enduring legacy of sectarian and racial hatred that resulted from the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements.[118] This is true even of very late examples such as Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin, who would absorb something of the more inclusive republicanism of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. The fundamental premise of all his work, as Breandán Ó Buachalla has observed, was the intractable struggle between two mutually exclusive communities for supremacy in Ireland. The poetry tells of the dispossession, humiliation and exile of the Irish (clanna Gael, clanna Mhíle, na Gaeil) by their enemies, described variously as foreigners (Danair, literally ‘Danes’; Gaill), the English (Sacsanaigh); the followers of Luther (aicme Lúitir), the progeny of Calvin (sliocht Chailbhin), heretics (eiricigh).[119] To this communal division, conceived of in terms of religion, race, land and language, was added a second great theme, the moral legitimacy of the Stuart claimants, sprung as they were from an ancient, royal, Irish dynasty, and distinguished by their steadfastness in the Catholic faith. The theory of the divine right of kings was conveyed symbolically in the aisling genre by the spiritual marriage between the goddess of Éire and her rightful, hereditary king.

What really distinguishes Jacobite poetry from ‘idle pub talk’ is the recurrence of political prophecies. All Jacobite poets predicted a sharp reversal of ethnic fortunes. The expectation of a millenarian upheaval in which the tables would be turned, of revenge for the accumulated humiliations of the Gael and, not least, the centrality of firearms in Irish life were all conveyed in the well-known Céad buidhe le Dia (‘A hundred thanks to God’), written by Ó Bruadair’s contemporary, Diarmuid Mac Cárthaigh, to celebrate the reign of James II:

Sin iad Gaedhil go léir i n-armaibh,

gunnaoi is púdar púirt is bailte aca,

Presbyterians féach gur treascaradh,

is braidhm an diabhail i ndiaidh na bhfanatics. . . .

‘You popish rogue’ ní leomhaid a labhairt rinn,

acht ‘Cromwellian dog’ is focal faire againn,

nó ‘cia súd thall’ go teann gan eagla;

‘Mise Tadhg’ géadh teinn an t-agallamh.

[Behold there the Gaedhil in arms, every one of them, / They have powder and guns, hold the cities and fortresses, / The Presbyterians, lo, have been overthrown, / And the Fanatics have left an infernal smell after them. . . . ‘You popish rogue’, they won’t dare to say to us / But ‘Cromwellian dog’ is the watchward we have for them / Or ‘who goes there?’ said sternly and fearlessly; / ‘I am Tadhg’, though galling the dialogue.][120]

Throughout the following century Gaelic poets predicted that the boorish followers of Luther would be expelled from Ireland and the poor Irish restored to their ancestral lands. The exile of the king was inextricably associated with the dispossession of Ireland’s nobility, the persecution and degradation of her clergy, and the decline of the learned classes. These poems were highly formulaic. Topical references to warfare on the continent do very little to offset the general impression of an ossified mental world. In spite of the absorption of new concepts—prionsa (sovereign), ríoghacht (kingdom), náision (nation) and, by the 1720s, saoirse and daoirse (freedom and slavery)—Jacobite poetry was not a vehicle for abstract political argument or analysis. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, there is an unmistakable sense that both the poets and their aspirations had migrated down the social scale. A vast social distance separates Ó Bruadair from later poets such as Art Mac Cumhaigh, who worked as a labourer and gardener. Their verse came to employ the more popular amhrán metre, and their words were sung to Jacobite airs such as ‘The king shall enjoy his own again’ and ‘The white cockade’. Often the poets envisaged a communal liberation (‘We will take over their residences and they will be in subjugation mowing and hoeing and standing in trenches’).[121] And a popular audience of some kind was suggested by the fights between the ‘popish rabble’ and the ‘Whig mob’ that took place in Dublin on the Pretender’s birthday. Once again, the evidence is frustratingly inconclusive. It remains puzzling, for example, that Protestant analyses of Catholic disaffection simply ignored the role of the poets, although their existence was known to everyone. Ultimately, however, there seems little reason to doubt that both the sense of a past marked by collective loss and the often apocalyptic expectation of future deliverance struck a chord with the overwhelming majority of Irish people who rejected the legitimacy of the social, political and religious order installed after 1691.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Protestant gentlemen, alarmed by the activities of French recruiting agents, by the return of Irish soldiers from continental armies, and by the continuous traffic between the traders and smugglers of the south-west with the Irish colonies established in French and Spanish ports, were repeatedly troubled by fears of conspiracy and subversion. As usual, genuine anxieties were compounded by sectarian reflexes and opportunistic attempts to remind Dublin Castle that Catholicism and disloyalty were still inextricably linked; but they also had a firm basis in reality. The assumption that the majority of Catholics of all social classes were wholly disaffected was seldom questioned. After Limerick it was taken for granted that the deference displayed by the ‘meaner sort’ towards the English was ‘forced’, and that ‘the Peasants secretly . . . retain the same veneration for ye late King James and ye Irish gentry &c. as ever’.[122] Even after the recognition of the House of Hanover by Rome, Catholic disaffection, linked to French invasion prospects, stubbornly survived. In a relatively calm assessment, Sir James Caldwell of County Fermanagh, a veteran both of continental campaigns and of counter-insurgency operations against the Whiteboys in 1762, conceded that the Catholic with an interest in land or trade did not want to make ‘his native country . . . the repository of all his property, a seat of war’, but still assumed that the lower classes would join the French.[123]

For a final example of the sectarian tensions generated by invasion scares we might return to the Jacobite heartland of Munster. Local reactions to the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’ Ear are charted in the correspondence of Richard Purcell of Kanturk, land agent for the Earl of Egmont’s estate in north-west Cork, who dispatched regular reports to his absentee master in London. Relations between England and France had deteriorated in the early 1730s, and as usual Dublin Castle was instructed to move troops to England and Scotland in April 1734 to counteract and French intervention. War with Spain over Caribbean trade, narrowly averted in 1738, finally came in the following year. Towards the end of 1739, as talk of a pact between France and Spain receded, Purcell noted the dejection of the local ‘Raps’.[124] Demoralisation was naturally exacerbated by the Great Frost and attendant hardships in the winter of 1739–40: ‘I believe the loss of the potatoes, which is the very worst war to them that could happen, will cool their courage.’ Although robberies had now become common, these were motivated by ‘the great necessities of the common people’, and there were no provisions to support an invasionary force.[125] On 21 March 1740 Purcell nevertheless noted that the lower classes, in spite of approaching famine, were ‘surprizingly elated’ with hopes of a Spanish expedition. Unless a landing actually took place, however, he was confident that order would be maintained: ‘I cannot think them mad enough to rebel on their own bottoms.’[126] This remained his consistent view: although he never doubted the rebellious inclinations of the Catholic population, he was convinced that without arms and ammunition they would remain quiescent.[127] There is every reason to believe that this was an accurate reading of the Irish situation.

5

What Were the Penal Laws For?

Few subjects have generated so much controversy among Irish historians as the collection of parliamentary statutes known as the penal code. This ‘machine of wise and elaborate contrivance’, in the words of Edmund Burke, was ‘as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people . . . as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man’.[1] Catholic and nationalist historians have echoed this verdict, as have many liberal Protestants including the great Victorian scholar W. E. H. Lecky. In recent years, inevitably, the penal laws have become one of the principal battlefields in the conflict between those who have categorised the system of Protestant Ascendancy as a variety of colonialism and those historians who have emphasised eighteenth-century Ireland’s similarities with other societies of ancien régime Europe. Some see the penal laws primarily as a systematic attempt to subjugate an entire culture; others, following Sean Connolly, counter that all European states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries strove to be ‘confessional states’, in which membership of the political community was coterminous with membership of a single national church, enjoying the full support of the civil power. While the first tend to regard the ‘religious bar’ as a sort of ethnic marker, distinguishing the privileged colonial elite from the inferior Gaelic Irish, the latter are more likely to take seriously the clique of zealous reformers within the Established Church who aimed at the conversion of the population.[2]

Since religious belief, ethnicity and the ownership of land were so closely intertwined in Ascendancy Ireland, it should be obvious that there is no simple choice to be made between these rival positions. The aim of this chapter is rather different. In the discussion below I seek to establish three points that have not been sufficiently recognised in recent work. The first concerns the severity and violence of the ‘popery laws’. While a study of the legislative process supports Connolly’s view that the penal laws were ‘a ragbag of measures’ that ‘did not reflect any clear purpose’, a survey of the pamphlet literature reveals a variety of comprehensive schemes for the eradication of Catholicism as a serious political, social or religious threat.[3] Secondly, it is important to examine the European context for the penal laws, looking at confessional conflict in France, Savoy–Piedmont, the Palatinate and the Habsburg lands. Parallels between Irish Catholics and Protestant groups in these Catholic states were repeatedly drawn by contemporaries, and they help us to understand why observers of Irish conflicts believed that Catholicism could be eradicated. Finally, this chapter will consider the intellectual framework within which ideas of persecution and toleration were discussed, in an attempt to demonstrate that the case for religious coercion was both more sophisticated and more respectable than historians have appreciated. It should come as no surprise to discover, by way of conclusion, that the ‘colonial’ and ‘ancien régime’ models are not in fact mutually exclusive alternatives.

SECURING THE PROTESTANT INTEREST

It may seem surprising to begin by emphasising both the severity of the penal code and the violence of the thinking behind it. Recent historians have been unable to find any clear or coherent programme behind the major penal laws, which were, after all, stretched out from the 1690s to the 1720s, a period of more than thirty-five years. Even in the 1740s, indeed, new legislation was proposed to prevent interdenominational marriage and to stop priests travelling between Ireland and the continent. In the most authoritative account to date, Sean Connolly has concluded that anti-Catholic statutes were the ‘product of a particular political context and of a complicated and often muddled legislative process’, and this is undoubtedly true. A series of important articles published several decades ago by J. G. Simms traced the convoluted origins of various penal acts, including the two most notorious, the Bishops’ Banishment Act (1697) and the Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery (1703).[4] Partly because of the Poynings’ Law procedure, which allowed for the alteration of Irish bills by the Privy Council in London, and partly because of the bitter rivalry of Whig and Tory factions in the Irish parliament, it has proved very difficult to assess the motives behind any particular piece of legislation. A careful examination of parliamentary business, taking into consideration the different interests represented at Whitehall, Dublin Castle and the Irish parliament, supports Connolly’s main conclusion that the entire penal code was characterised by a ‘lack of central planning’.[5] But to disaggregate anti-Catholic legislation into its component parts prevents us from understanding the broader significance of what contemporaries generally called ‘the popery laws’. The picture becomes more complicated when we turn to other categories of evidence, and in particular the abundance of contemporary sermons and pamphlets which have still to be fully exploited by researchers.

Although in retrospect the establishment of Protestant Ascendancy is usually dated to the Williamite victories at the Boyne, Aughrim and Limerick, a more comprehensive analysis shows that a combination of continuing Anglo-French warfare, dynastic instability and party divisions in England all determined that the Protestant position in Ireland remained uncertain until the 1720s. As the hastily concluded Treaty of Limerick immediately demonstrated, it was all too possible that Protestant interests would be sacrificed to political expediency. This was certainly the view of Bishop Anthony Dopping of Meath, one of the chief spokesmen of the Anglican community, who had remained in Ireland during the Jacobite occupation, opposing legislation on tithes and the land settlement in the House of Lords, and petitioning the authorities for the protection of Anglican churches and property. On 26 November 1691, preaching at a service of thanksgiving for the end of the war, he condemned the Treaty of Limerick, citing twenty-two ‘general’ and forty-four ‘local’ rebellions that had taken place since 1172 to prove that there was no point in attempting to negotiate a settlement with the Irish.[6] As another, more colourful writer put it, admittedly in the heat of the war, it was futile to treat the Irish with indulgence: ‘They are like their Boggs, never to be trusted to by going gently over, nor safely but by cutting your way to the bottom.’[7]

Anglicans like Dopping feared that, yet again, they would be denied the absolute monopoly of political control that they believed was essential to their security. For his outspoken attack, indeed, Dopping found himself suspended from the Privy Council at the beginning of 1692. Looking back to the watershed of 1641 and to the subsequent Restoration settlement, Sir Walter Harris warned that ‘the Papists have always had such Influence on the Councils of England, as on the conclusion of every Rebellion, they have been left in a condition to renew them at pleasure’.[8] More specifically, he was well aware that relations with the Catholic members of the League of Augsburg, particularly the Emperor Leopold, would be jeopardised by a legislative onslaught against the Catholic Church in Ireland. As we shall see below, Leopold was indeed using his influence with William in an attempt to restrain the Dublin parliament. Harris’s reassurances, that the Catholic princes of Europe would understand that penal statutes were directed against the Irish ‘because they are Rebels . . . not because they are Papists’, were not very convincing.[9] In fact any Catholic prince would have found it hard to swallow what followed in Harris’s lengthy pamphlet. In addition to the forfeiture of the Jacobite estates, he demanded the expulsion not only of priests and friars, ‘the chief Incendiaries to Rebellion in all Ages’, but of lawyers too, and the transportation of Catholic soldiers to the plantations or to Hungary (where, presumably, they might fight in the service of Austria, William’s ally). As for those papists who would be permitted to remain in Ireland, he thought it only reasonable that ‘they be excluded from living in Cities, Walled Towns, and Corporations, which are the strengths of the Kingdom’.[10] This last point, recalling the expulsion of Catholics from towns and ports during the 1650s, testified to the survival of Cromwellian hopes that towns might serve as bastions of civility in a barbarous land.

Harris was one of many Protestant voices demanding the imposition of a comprehensive penal code on Catholic Ireland. References to his lengthy pamphlet appeared in a Discourse concerning the securing the government of the kingdome of Ireland to the interest of the English nation, also written about 1691 by someone close to the Southwell family, who possessed considerable landholdings around the port of Kinsale.[11] Sir Robert Southwell (1635–1702), a government official who had met William of Orange during a diplomatic mission to Europe in 1680, had travelled with the king to Carrickfergus in 1690 as his Secretary of State for Ireland. Although he had returned to London by October 1690, he retained some influence over Anglo-Irish affairs. The author of the Southwell manuscript took it for granted that measures would be adopted to keep the landed men, lawyers, priests and soldiers of Catholic Ireland in ‘a slave-like servile way’. In the long term, however, more rigorous action was necessary to reduce their number. A moderate man, at least in his own eyes, he rejected those who said ‘let us destroy the Nitts least in time they come to be Lice’. He nevertheless believed it necessary that all papists must be barred from possessing arms, from holding office, from participating in elections and (less predictably) from keeping any house of public entertainment. Further legislation was needed to ensure that Protestant gentlemen educated their children as Protestants and employed only servants of the Established Church. The most imaginative of these proposals concerned a graduated taxation system in which all ‘absolute Papists’ would be made to pay double, while those who were merely ‘Popishly affected or reputed Papists’ would contribute an extra 50 per cent.

The religious and political leaders of Protestant Ireland subscribed to a pessimistic reading of Irish history as a recurrent, unending cycle of rebellion and deliverance, perhaps predicated upon a fundamental incompatibility between the two populations. In the aftermath of the Williamite war it often seemed that religious and ethnic allegiances were indissolubly linked. During the parliamentary session of 1692 Bishop Edward Wetenhall of Cork counselled the Lord Lieutenant and members of both houses that ‘only the Power of our Enemies is abated, not their Malice or bloody Minds’. Wetenhall had joined the Protestant opposition in the Jacobite parliament and was subsequently imprisoned in Cork during Marlborough’s siege in September 1690. We catch a rare glimpse of relations on the ground in his complaint that the common people remained confident of French relief and dared to boast that ‘They will yet have a Day for it’.[12] Another writer, describing himself as ‘an English Gentleman of Ireland’, cited over a hundred insurrections during the previous five hundred years to prove that the Irish were ‘an incorrigible Generation, and that Rebellion is so rooted in them, that they are utterly incurable’.[13] On 23 October 1698 the Rev. John Travers informed the House of Commons that:

We are really in an Enemies Country, The Irish have all along born us an inveterate hatred, and we have no reason to believe the least change of that Disposition; they are the same men still, and have as ill a will to our Sion as ever. And therefore it stands upon us not to lye down in our peace and take our rest, least the Philistines be upon us.[14]

The Church of Ireland solemnly commemorated 23 October as a holy day each year, to remember the victims of the 1641 rising, variously numbered at 154,000, 250,000, or even 300,000.[15] Abolished by the Jacobite regime, the annual service was quickly reinstated by the Williamite parliament. The deliverance of the Protestant interest from the native Irish, like the liberation of the children of Israel from Egypt, was interpreted as a providential blessing bestowed by the deity upon his chosen people.[16] No 23 October sermon was complete without a cautionary reminder that the Catholics had embarked on rebellion at a time when relations between the sects were relatively harmonious, and when Catholics enjoyed both security of property and the free exercise of their religion.[17] The lesson was clear: conciliation did not work, and the only alternative was coercion. Consequently, Bishop Wetenhall exhorted his audience to avoid all interaction with papists, and to remove their capacity to challenge the Williamite settlement lest, in thirty or forty years, another English rescue mission should become necessary. ‘They must be held in like the Horse and the Mule … with Bitt and Bridle,’ John Travers informed the House of Commons on 23 October 1698. ‘They are no more to be govern’d without restraining Laws, than a School of unruly Boys without Rods and Ferula’s.’[18]

In retrospect, the penal laws themselves can be divided into four distinct categories.[19] The first, and least controversial, acts were military in character, designed to deal with the immediate armed threat posed by Jacobitism, and they followed on naturally from emergency wartime measures. The best example is the 1695 disarming act which prohibited Catholics from owning weapons or horses worth £5 or more (i.e. horses fit for military service). It is sometimes forgotten that many later acts also had a military context—the actual or threatened invasions of 1708, 1715 and 1719. More controversial was the second category of anti-Catholic legislation, the statutory assault on the ecclesiastical organisation of the Roman Catholic Church. The key piece of legislation here was the 1697 ‘Act for banishing all papists exercising any ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and all regulars of the popish clergy out of the kingdom’, often abbreviated to the ‘Bishops’ Banishment Act’. The net was tightened around the ordinary clergy in 1704, when the ‘Act for registering the popish clergy’ required all priests to register with magistrates and provide security for good behaviour, and by the oath of abjuration (1709), by which all priests were required to renounce Jacobite loyalties. In addition, Catholic schools were prohibited, while pilgrimages and visits to holy wells were outlawed.

The third aspect of the Protestant offensive was economic, and aimed at the destruction of the Catholic landowning class. By the ‘Act to prevent the further growth of popery’ (1704), Catholic estates were to be divided equally among male heirs (the ‘gavelkind’ clause); and Catholics were prohibited from purchasing or taking long leases on land owned by Protestants. In 1709 a further ‘Act for explaining and amending an act intituled “An act to prevent the further growth of popery”’ strengthened its predecessor in various ways, principally by introducing the ‘discoverer’ clause. Finally, the popery laws dealt with political rights. While restrictions on landholding and religious worship could sometimes be evaded, the exclusion of Catholics from the public world of Irish politics was complete. The two houses of parliament, the municipal corporations, the magistracy and the legal profession were all closed. Finally, in 1728 the Catholics, most of whom were already unable to vote because of their objections to the oath of abjuration, were formally disfranchised.

In addition to the penal legislation that was passed between 1695 and 1709, a welter of alternative proposals circulated which never found their way onto the statute book but are often just as interesting as those that did. After the Boyne and Aughrim victorious Protestants called for a state-sponsored plantation scheme to reinforce those which had followed the earlier Elizabethan and Cromwellian conquests. In 1691 William Petty’s Political anatomy of Ireland appeared, with its bizarre proposal for ‘the transmuting one People into the other’—a process of reciprocal colonisation in which 200,000 Irish natives were to be exchanged for the same number of Britons.[20] The anonymous author of The true way to render Ireland happy and secure (1697), apparently an associate of the great patriots Robert Molesworth and William Molyneux, recommended that some of the forfeited estates be granted to Huguenot communities. By erecting towns among ‘the ruder Irish’, it was predicted that the French refugees would improve the manners and religion of the native population.[21] Another pamphlet dealing with the forfeited estates, published in 1694 and reissued in 1704, advised that in addition to fining papists for not going to church and forbidding popish schools, the government should establish British pales (zones of settlement), particularly on the coast, from which the Irish would be expelled.[22] If some writers believed that Catholics should be excluded from cities and towns, others took a directly contrary view. In 1698 Bishop Foy of Waterford attributed the survival of superstition and idolatry amongst the Irish to ‘their wild savage way of Living in single Cottages, and dismal Unhabitable places’. Accordingly, he believed that the increase of Protestant clergy would not be sufficient to convert ‘this miserable nation’, and he proposed the reduction of ‘the Irish Nation’ into towns and villages where they would be compelled to send their children English-speaking schools.[23]

Schemes of religious reform were frequently coupled with experiments in social engineering. Such radical measures, however, were ruled out for practical economic reasons. There were small settlements of Huguenots, most famously on the 36,000-acre Portarlington estate confiscated from the Jacobite Sir Patrick Trant, where Henri de Ruvigny, the Earl of Galway, built two churches, two schools and more than a hundred houses for his disbanded soldiers and other Huguenot refugees; later 3,000 German Palatines were transferred from London to Limerick, Wexford and elsewhere, where they quickly discovered that the charity of Anglican landlords was limited.[24] The policy of colonisation held few attractions for William III, who planned on using the forfeited estates to reward his favourites. Furthermore, sceptical commentators predicted that the some Protestants were actually opposed to another plantation because they preferred tyrannising over their slavish Catholic tenants. As late as 1749 the improving landlord Sir Richard Cox had offered a premium to every Protestant child born on his County Cork estate in an effort to settle northern Protestants and stimulate linen production.[25] While these efforts at improvement sometimes left a legacy of bitter sectarian resistance, they had no impact at all on the population balance.

Although Protestant migration was encouraged by landlords throughout the eighteenth century, these private initiatives were on a small scale. To landowners who sponsored manufacturing on their estates, built new roads and constructed model villages, Protestant settlers were valued as much for their industrial skills as their religious habits.[26] Visions of a reshaped landscape surfaced again in the 1730s, when the charter school movement developed momentum. Bishop Henry Maule of Dromore looked forward to the day ‘when instead of miserable Hutts and Cottages, [and] a Mass-House’, there should flourish ‘a fair little Protestant Village rising up, composed of a Church, an English School, and a House for a Protestant Clergyman’. For him the charter schools were both nurseries of the true religion and motors for economic development; and he envisaged a new generation of industrious tenants with the Bible in one hand and a copy of Jethro Tull’s tracts on husbandry in the other.[27]

A survey of Protestant opinion in the 1690s and after, as expressed in pamphlets, sermons and correspondence, adds an important dimension to our understanding of the penal system. If we investigate the gestation of individual parliamentary bills, the picture that results is inevitably a haphazard one. It is true, for example, that the Bishops’ Banishment Act originated as a bill to suppress friaries and to expel the regular clergy (i.e. members of religious orders) alone; it was only at a late stage that the bill was redrafted to include bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries. Even more mysterious was the addition to the ‘Act to prevent the further growth of popery’ of a clause excluding Protestant Dissenters from public office—the so-called sacramental test. As Daniel Defoe protested, it was ‘a most scandalous Ingratitude’ that Irish Presbyterians should be ‘ranked in the same Class with the Introducers of that Popery they laid down their Lives to oppose’.[28] And yet neither of these measures was an accident: each had a much longer history stretching back into the seventeenth century. At times of international tension it had become common to arrest Catholic priests, especially regulars, and twice in the 1670s royal proclamations had required all titular archbishops, bishops and others ‘exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction’ to leave the country by a fixed date. The Test Act, meanwhile, simply brought Ireland into line with England, where those who held civil or military offices had since 1673 been required to qualify by taking the sacrament in an Anglican church.

Even the most notorious anti-Catholic measure, the failed bill of 1719 which provided for the castration of unregistered Catholic priests, was not an isolated phenomenon. The parliamentary politicking behind this proposal—originally for the branding of the offender—is confusing, and some historians have suggested that it was not intended seriously. In London, certainly, the clause was regarded as ‘very ridiculous’.[29] Attitudes in Dublin may have been different. Castration was, of course, still part of the sentence of execution prescribed for males convicted of high treason—although for the condemned man, confronted with the prospect of being hanged, disembowelled and quartered, it was perhaps an academic refinement.[30] Such was the fate of Charles Carragher, a tory convicted of murder, rape and robbery at Dundalk in 1719, and three of his associates.[31] Pamphlets arguing for the ‘gelding’ of Catholic priests were published in London in 1689 and Dublin in 1710. Sexual voracity and various kinds of deviance had long been ascribed to priests by Protestant propagandists, and in both cases the punishment was depicted as peculiarly fitting for the crime, or at least the criminal.[32]

By the 1730s the ritualistic announcement of penal legislation in successive parliamentary sessions had taken on tones of desperation and unreality. For those like Dean Swift, who consistently regarded the Ulster Presbyterians as the more serious threat to the Anglican Church, the anti-Catholic excesses of Whig politicians had become a subject for mockery. In 1731, when Swift was preoccupied with the Presbyterian campaign for the repeal of the sacramental test, a pamphlet appeared which mimicked the savagery of penal legislation with the same remorseless, deadpan logic that characterised his notorious Modest proposal:

If any Priest unregistered, any Monk, Fryar, Jesuit or Nun, be found in the Kingdom after the 25th of March, such Priest, Monk, &c shall stand in the Pillory, and suffer for his Contumacy. But as it may be expected to give some Allowances to the Softer Sex; there may be a Clause, That every Nun convicted be three times whipp’d about the Town, and afterwards sent to hard Labour in the Workhouse, unless the Discoverer, or other such charitable Friend do take her for his Wife, to whom he shall be married by the Parish-Minister, and bedded before proper Witnesses.[33]

Even more bleak was a parody published the following year, entitled A serious proposal for the entire destruction of popery in Ireland. The main recommendation was that all ‘popish’ girls at the age of eleven should be compelled to renounce their faith publicly or ‘be splayed and so rendered incapable of ever bearing children to inherit the obstinacy of their unfortunate parent’. With a characteristically Swiftian eye for vicious detail, the proposer moves on to discuss possible uses of the ovary: ‘This nice Morsel being somewhat glandulous, will be nothing inferior to our Sweetbreads, and would make an excellent Ingredient in scorch’d Colllops.’[34] Among the other recommendations was one for the castration of Catholic priests. These satires offered a reductio ad absurdam of the Williamite mindset, a service that Swift particularly relished. The targets, more vulnerable by the 1730s, were nevertheless taken seriously. Just before the first Williamite parliament met in 1692 the Lord Lieutenant, Viscount Sidney, warned the Secretary of State of ‘the violence that there will be against the Papists, for they do hate and despise them to the greatest degree imaginable’. His predictions were amply borne out by the legislative onslaught against Catholic worship, property and political rights that dominated the next three decades.[35]

A EUROPE OF CONFESSIONAL STATES

It is generally assumed that the Irish penal code forms a uniquely black episode in the long history of religious persecution in Europe. All early modern rulers, it is true, accepted that the secular authorities had a sacred obligation to enforce true religion. The confessional instability resulting from the Reformation had fuelled rebellions and conspiracies against the Tudors and Stuarts, civil war and assassination in France, and sustained revolt in the Spanish Netherlands. Consequently, the principle of cuius regio eius religio—the right of the prince to prescribe the forms of religious worship within his own borders—was regarded not only as a spiritual duty but a matter of political common sense. Religious difference was equated with political disloyalty. By the eighteenth century the theological temperature had cooled, but all major kingdoms supported church establishments, or, as they are sometimes called, ‘confessional states’. Religious minorities consequently found themselves excluded from political participation or public office; restrictions were placed on their right to worship; and in many cases they suffered severe disabilities in landholding, trading and manufacturing. But Irish Catholics were not, of course, a religious minority: they made up the vast bulk—somewhere around 80 per cent—of the kingdom’s population. In this sense Ireland was an exception to the European rule.

This point, tirelessly repeated from Canon Burke’s classic Irish priests in the penal times (1914) down to our own day, deserves more scrutiny than it has hitherto received. There is indeed no exact parallel for the situation in eighteenth-century Ireland, but to let the matter rest there may be misleading. In the Dutch Republic the Reformed Church embodied the religion of the state, but in some provinces Catholics were in the majority.[36] Just across the Irish Sea the militant Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland, established as recently as 1690, found itself opposed by close to half of the population, including the strongly Episcopalian landowner class; and as in Ireland, the disaffected remained loyal to James II and his heirs. In the 1689 parliament it was reported that the Presbyterians were ‘more zealous and hotter’ but Episcopalians ‘more numerous and powerful’.[37] In England itself Protestantism had been imposed from above upon a largely reluctant people. Historians of the Elizabethan church have demonstrated that the new religion, re-established in 1559, was not popular: ‘everywhere it was a minority faith, and in many places it was a tiny sect’.[38] Of course, the balance of forces in Scotland was much closer; and there, as in England, the struggle was fought out between rival tendencies for control of the same reformed church. The important point, however, is that the coercion of large communities of religious dissenters was the norm; and, what is more, it worked. The religious map of Europe did not reflect swings of ‘public opinion’, a concept which had no currency before the late eighteenth century, but the vicissitudes of dynastic politics and military force.

What can be learned by considering Irish confessional legislation in its European context? The usual comparison is with France, where Protestants, some two million people, made up perhaps a tenth of the total population at the beginning of the seventeenth century.[39] As a result of the Edict of Nantes (1598), the Huguenots enjoyed not only freedom of worship but the possession of up to fifty fortified towns. In those areas of the south and west where the Huguenots were numerically strong they had been guaranteed not only freedom of worship but access to public offices and the right to be tried in special bi-confessional courts, the chambres de l’édit. Following the year-long siege of the Huguenot garrison of La Rochelle (1628) and the invasion of Béarn, their political and military privileges were withdrawn, and only a limited form of religious toleration continued. From the beginning of Louis XIV’s personal reign in 1661 these too were chipped away. The brutal policy of the Most Christian King culminated in the quartering of soldiers on Huguenot households to compel them to convert—the infamous dragonnades—which produced mass conversions in the south-west of France. Around 200,000 merchants and artisans left the country, mostly fleeing to the United Provinces, England and Brandenburg. The dragonnades seriously tarnished the reputation of Louis XIV throughout Europe—though it is important to realise that it was not the principle of religious uniformity that shocked contemporaries, but the violent methods employed to achieve it.

One extension of Louis’s attempt to purify French soil was the ‘war of extermination’ carried out against the Vaudois population of the Alpine valleys above Turin in the 1680s.[40] This small community, numbering around 15,000, was all that remained of the medieval religious sect known as the Waldenses. In 1686 around 3,000 were forcibly converted, while the remainder were killed, imprisoned or deported, their lands sold to Catholic colonists, and their children seized, forcibly baptised and raised as Catholics. There are curious Irish connections here, notably in the figure of the great Huguenot general Henri de Massue, Marquis de Ruvigny, better known to Irish historians as the Earl of Galway.[41] In 1694 Ruvigny was sent to Turin as commander of British forces and envoy to its duplicitous ruler, Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy. In this role he succeeded in persuading Victor Amadeus to issue an edict of toleration offering limited protection to Protestants, and he floated the idea of establishing a settlement in Ireland for the exiled Vaudois then in Switzerland. Ironically, the French had recently considered resettling the Alpine valleys with displaced Irish Catholics.[42]

There was one other outgrowth of Louis’s dragonnade policy. The Palatinate, the Rhineland territory which included Heidelberg, Mannheim, Pforzheim, Baden and Rastatt, had a Reformed or Calvinist majority, with minorities of Lutherans and Catholics. In 1685, the same year that James II came to the throne in England, the Catholic Duke Philip William of Neuburg inherited the Palatinate, following the extinction of the local Calvinist dynasty. Like James, Philip William promised to uphold the position of the majority—in this case Reformed—while securing freedom of public worship for Catholics. Under his successors, however, Catholics advanced in both numbers and legal standing. The War of the League of Augsburg, which began with Louis XIV’s infamous ‘ravaging of the Palatinate’, brought further ecclesiastical changes, confirmed by the Treaty of Ryswick (1697). The position worsened further, and emigration began, renewed during the War of the Spanish Succession. This was the origin of the 13,000 ‘poor Palatines’ who arrived in England during Queen Anne’s reign, 3,000 of whom were shipped to Ireland in 1709.[43]

The other great Catholic power on the continent was the Habsburg monarchy. Significantly, there was no accepted terminology for the disparate Habsburg lands; contemporaries referred to the territorial hotchpotch simply as ‘Austria’, just as they often spoke of the three Stuart possessions simply as ‘England’.[44] By 1700, although large Protestant communities remained in Hungary and Silesia, the Habsburg monarchy was securely Catholic, the most stunning success of the Counter-Reformation. Just a century earlier, however, the picture had been very different. Everywhere the teachings of Luther and Calvin had taken root, so that the Catholic Church had become ‘a head without a body’.[45] In Bohemia Protestants had triumphed; in Hungary Calvinism had spread through the Magyar population to become dominant in those parts free from the Turks and in Transylvania, where they enjoyed the protection of their native prince. The business of Counter-Reformation, moreover, stretched into later decades of the seventeenth century. In Silesia, for example, there was little success until 1650. ‘Fines, Catholic appointments, expulsion of preachers, dragonnades, prohibition of Protestant marriage and burial: all reaped a brutal harvest.’[46] Similarly in Hungary, it was not until the 1670s that the Counter-Reformation reached its climax. As in France, Protestant liberties were subsequently eroded, although the resulting discontent still helped to fuel the major Rakoczi uprising of 1703–11.

Even this comparative survey, admittedly a very superficial one, might help to refocus our understanding of Irish exceptionalism. Like the Stuart dynasty, the Bourbons and the Habsburgs presided over centralising regimes in which religious dissent was increasingly defined as disloyalty and prohibited—even in areas where the dissidents enjoyed majority support. The issue of numbers is not the only, or even the primary, contrast between Ireland and other parts of Christendom. Most obviously, the legacy of English colonisation in Ireland must be considered. Despite the intrusion of Austrians and Hungarians into Bohemia after the battle of the White Mountain, considered in the previous chapter, relations between Czechs and Germans were not central to religious change. In Hungary there was a strong overlap between the defence of Protestant liberties and the preservation of the constitutional privileges of the Magyar nobles, but no close fit between the two causes. Only in Ireland had ‘race’ and religion become so closely entangled. As Robert Southwell explained shortly before the Glorious Revolution, the ancient animosities between English and Irish had been subsumed, during the confessional conflicts that followed the Reformation, into ‘an universall Quarrell of Religion and there was nothing afterwards but Protestant and Papist in the Question’.[47]

There were other differences, of course: the successful examples of large-scale confessionalisation from above all relate to Catholic monarchies. Protestantism, often divided into competing Lutheran and Calvinist strands, lacked the doctrinal unity, institutional power and international resources of Catholicism. While the Habsburgs could call on Jesuit missionaries, the English had only the voluntarist campaigns of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In every case considered above, moreover, missionary activity was accompanied by overwhelming armed force. The British state, by contrast, was unable or unwilling to commit forces on anything like this scale before the ‘dragooning of Ulster’ in 1797, when a sundry collection of militia, yeomanry and fencibles, commanded by General Lake, disarmed the Presbyterian radicals of the north. During the 1680s Louis XIV had kept 200,000 troops in arms, the first large ‘standing army’ to be maintained in peacetime.[48] The result was one soldier for every 100 subjects of the king. Although the British army swelled massively during wartime, its peacetime army numbered around 35,000 in the first half of the eighteenth century, at a time when the combined populations of Britain and Ireland amounted to 8,500,000.[49] This gave the Hanoverian monarchy an army roughly equal to that of Savoy–Piedmont. Even if the regiments in Ireland had expanded to their maximum strength of 12,000 men—and they usually fell far short—the ratio was at best one soldier for every 200 people. In any case, there is no indication that either William or Anne, inhibited by their dependence on their Austrian allies and the constitutional qualms of their subjects regarding the employment of standing armies, would have tolerated these methods.

Secondly, there was the question of timing. Religious persecution on the continent continued well into the eighteenth century. The harassment of Huguenots was revived intermittently. Seventeenth-century legislation against French Protestants was reinforced by the declaration of 14 May 1724 which stipulated that those exposed as Protestants by Catholic priests would have their marriages invalidated, their children treated as illegitimate, and would themselves be subject to deportation, galley labour or, in the case of pastors, death.[50] An international crisis was sparked off by events in the Polish town of Thorn (Torün), when disturbances on the feast of the Virgin of Mount Carmel resulted in the beheading of twelve Protestant burghers. All Protestants were expelled from Salzburg by the archbishop in 1731. It is important to set the penal laws in this wider context because that is just what contemporaries did. Accounts of Thorn were circulated in sermons, pamphlets and handbills, including Charles Owen’s An alarm to Protestant princes and people, which recommended the transportation to Catholic countries of every Catholic in Ireland.[51] The incident was seized upon as further proof that there could be no security for Protestants under Catholic rulers, even when their rights and privileges were guaranteed by treaties.[52] The Dublin Catholics were even goaded into printing their own version of the incident, arguing that the Protestants had overtaxed the Catholic inhabitants, despoiled their churches and attacked the local Jesuit college.[53]

While the construction of the Irish penal code grew out of distinctively Irish conditions and possessed its own internal dynamic, its evolution was also shaped by contemporary European developments. In fact the major rulers of Europe, all of them dedicated to maintaining the ‘true’ religion, and all of them confronted with significant bodies of religious dissent, at times came close to recognising that a tacit principle of reciprocity placed practical restrictions upon their actions within their own kingdoms. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Irish Protestants were concerned that the policies of William’s ministers would meet with diplomatic pressure from Catholic states on the continent. In 1695 the first attempt to expel the religious orders from Ireland was blocked by the English Privy Council following the intervention of the Emperor Leopold’s agent in London, Auersperg.[54] At various points over the next two decades the Vatican was able to persuade the ministers of Austria, Spain, Tuscany, Savoy and later France to exert pressure on London. Repeated attempts were made in government negotiations to link explicitly the cause of the Catholic Irish with the disadvantaged Protestant communities on the continent. In 1697, for example, Bishop Dominic Burke of Elphin, then exiled in Cologne, published his Libellus supplex ecclesiasticorum Hibernorum exulum contrasting the sympathy of ‘heretic’ princes for the Huguenot refugees with the failure of Catholic rulers to speak to William.[55] When the castration bill was received in London, it was feared that this proposal would be ‘a Handle to the Elector Palatine to continue his Persecution of Protestants in his Dominions’ at a time when George I and other Protestant princes were making representations to him.[56] The exertion of diplomatic pressure by foreign embassies on behalf of Catholic Ireland was a recurrent factor in English policy-making from the 1690s to the 1730s, almost entirely ignored by historians. Although their positive achievements were limited, they serve as another reminder that the Irish penal code was an integral part of European history.

PERSECUTION AND TOLERATION

On 23 October 1725, the anniversary of the Irish rebellion of 1641, members of the House of Commons assembled for worship at St Andrew’s Church in Dublin. This anniversary, as we have already seen, was the high point of the Church of Ireland’s calendar, the day on which church and state joined together to recall the horrific massacres of 1641 and their subsequent deliverance from their enemies. No historical experience, not even the Williamite war, had been so crucial to the formation of a distinctive Irish Protestant identity. From Anglican pulpits in Dublin and in other cities and towns, it had become customary for preachers to recycle the atrocities memorialised in Sir John Temple’s Irish rebellion (1646) and to draw the appropriate lessons concerning Catholic duplicity, brutality and irredentism.[57] Few clergymen departed from this well-worn script. On this occasion the text, ‘Compel them to come in’ (Luke 14: 23), was a familiar one, but the message was very different. The preacher was Edward Synge (1691–1762), then prebendary of St Patrick’s Cathedral, and later Bishop of Elphin. The Synge family was the most remarkable clerical dynasty in the history of the Church of Ireland.[58] Like his father, Edward Synge, Archbishop of Tuam (1659–1741), the young preacher was well-connected, erudite and intellectually adventurous. Both men were prolific controversialists and engaged seriously with Enlightenment thought in many of its varieties. The younger Synge was a member of the so-called ‘Molesworth circle’, the progressive intellectual coterie that met at the home of Viscount Molesworth of Swords (1656–1725), and an associate of Francis Hutcheson, tutor at a Dissenting academy in Dublin and later professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow.[59] His controversial sermon, quickly published as The case of toleration consider’d with respect both to religion and civil government (1725), is often taken as marking the end of serious attempts to enforce anti-Catholic legislation. The furore which followed brought to the surface many of the tensions and contradictions surrounding the penal code.

Synge’s audacity, as he later explained to the Archbishop of Canterbury, was prompted by the beginning of a new parliamentary session with calls for yet more ‘sanguinary Laws against Papists’. It was his duty, he believed, to ‘check such a spirit’, and in this he spoke for an influential body of opinion within the Anglican hierarchy.[60] At the end of the same year a resolution was passed in the House of Lords recommending the licensing of a number of Catholic parish priests under specific conditions. This idea had already been floated by Viscount Molesworth two years previously when he made the remarkable suggestion that Catholic priests should be given a state salary.[61] In turn, any such licensing scheme raised the problem of devising an oath of allegiance which might prove acceptable to both parties. Synge’s father, the Archbishop of Tuam, had been involved in discussions with some local Catholics in 1722, and had drafted such a formula, declaring loyalty to George I and renouncing the Pretender, in order ‘to distinguish such as are honest from those who are not so’.[62]

As the elder Synge’s negotiations with local priests suggest, there were hints of a convergence at this time between the more latitudinarian Anglican clergy and a section of the Dublin Catholic community interested in trading declarations of loyalty to the Hanoverians for some degree of legal protection. The key figure among the Catholics was undoubtedly Cornelius Nary (1658–1738), parish priest of St Michan’s, who wrote in defence of the younger Synge’s The case of toleration consider’d and drafted his own oath of allegiance around the same time.[63] We shall return to him later. Even more remarkably, however, the Archbishop of Tuam had opened a correspondence with Francis Martin (1652–1722), a theologian from Galway, now based at the University of Louvain, whose Latin treatise Brevis tractatus (1721) argued that the power of the pope to depose secular rulers was not an essential article of faith but merely a theological opinion. Their discussions concerned not just the Fourth Lateran Council, but an investigation of the terms upon which the reunion of Christendom might take place.[64] The European background to this dialogue was vital. The 1720s witnessed violent struggles in France over Louis XIV’s ecclesiastical policies, just as dramatic in their way as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had been. The crackdown on Jansenism (described below in Chapter 7), culminating with the papal bull Unigenitus (1713), prompted the reassertion of Gallican positions in France which would divide church, parlements and public opinion for decades to come. At the same time, disputes over Jansenism in the Dutch Republic led to the creation of the schismatic Chapter of Utrecht, a Catholic communion (in a Protestant state) that disowned the papal supremacy. In addition, Synge’s optimistic overtures had a respectable precedent: Archbishop William Wake of Canterbury had explored the possibility of union—or at least some sort of intercommunion—between the Church of England and the Gallican church with theologians of Jansenist sympathies at the Sorbonne.

Nothing came of the elder Synge’s interdenominational dialogues. His initiative, and the positive response from Cornelius Nary, led to the formation of personal contacts, but these had no chance of winning institutional backing. Martin died in 1722; and, as we shall see, he was an isolated and untrustworthy figure in any case. But in the long term Synge’s policy, the arguments behind it, and even the draft oaths would be recycled in the 1750s and again in the 1770s. What is remarkable, surely, is that these little cracks in the theological ice occurred at all. The intellectual history of this fascinating encounter still has to be written; but when it is, the debate on toleration will appear to be more subtle than historians have recognised. The writings of the two Synges constitute a sustained reflection on church–state relations that makes them the most superior Irish writers on the subject in the first half of the eighteenth century—equal even to Presbyterian polemicists such as John Abernethy.

For the younger Edward Synge, it was not Catholicism but ‘popery’ that formed the legitimate target of the penal laws. Restrictions on Catholics, in other words, were necessitated because their beliefs threatened the security of the state. This position, as Synge himself pointed out, was in essence the same as that of ‘the celebrated Mr Locke’, whose Letter concerning toleration (1689), perhaps the most famous work on the subject, had been written in Holland in 1685, partly as a response to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[65] The state or ‘civil magistrate’, the tolerationists argued, did not possess the authority to punish or restrain religious opinions on behalf of the church, because Christ’s concern was with inward conviction alone. The only means of influencing matters of conscience, as Synge explained, were ‘Calm Reasoning, Persuasion, explaining our own Opinions, shewing the Falshood and Absurdity of other Men’s’.[66] The use of force in religion did not produce sincere converts but merely hypocrites.

Nor could the magistrate punish or restrain religious opinions on behalf of the state, since the state’s concern was with civil matters only, that is, with the preservation of public order. The problem, of course, was that some religious opinions were destructive of the public good. Many Anglicans, it should be remembered, included Presbyterians in this category: the Synod of Ulster, it was frequently alleged, claimed ‘a direct jurisdiction over the Civil Magistrate, to Judge of his Right and Title; [and] to Absolve Subjects from their Allegiance’.[67] If Presbyterians were sometimes accused of acting like a state within the state, Catholics were much more dangerous, since they recognised an external source of authority which claimed to override national jurisdictions. At this point, inevitably, Synge fell back on the time-honoured objections to Rome, and in particular the ‘deposing’ power of the papacy, formulated at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and developed by the Jesuit resistance theorists Bellarmine and Suárez. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine had argued in his De potestate summi pontificis (1610), among other things, that Catholic subjects were under no obligation to obey a heretical ruler, while Francisco Suárez combined papal supremacy with popular sovereignty to justify rebellion against tyrants, or even the assassination of usurpers by private individuals.[68]

What was to be done when the proponents of toleration were faced with a religious creed whose very essence, they believed, was persecution? Tactfully, Synge did not deny the right of the civil magistrate to confiscate property, exclude Catholics from fortified places, educate their children to be ‘good Christians’, and even expel them from the country.[69] Yet such policies were not practicable, not least for economic reasons. In an intriguing passage Synge recommended the example of the children of Israel in the land of Canaan. Although it was God’s will that the indigenous peoples of the Promised Land should be driven out and destroyed, this was to be a gradual process, ‘lest a Desolation should ensue, lest the Land should be in a great measure uninhabited, uncultivated and over-run with wild Beasts’.[70] But the driving force of Synge’s argument came from his insistence that the use of ‘pains and penalties’ was not only counterproductive, but reduced Irish Protestants to the same level as the very papists they condemned. Were Irish Catholics to be converted by the methods employed by Louis XIV in the Cévennes, or the Polish Jesuits at Thorn?[71] And here Synge contrasted the category of lesser restraints, or what he called ‘moderate and wholesome Severities’ with more ‘sanguinary’ measures—the promotion of religion by ‘fire and faggot’—which were the methods employed by Rome. Synge pointed to the Gallican Articles of 1682, to the writings of Ellies Du Pin, Archbishop Wake’s correspondent at the Sorbonne, and to Francis Martin’s Brevis tractatus as evidence that Catholicism was not a monolith.[72] Instead of compulsion, Synge proposed that Catholics should be permitted 500 secular priests under state regulation, while Anglicans should concentrate on increasing the number of their own resident clergy and promoting English-speaking schools.

Edward Synge, a relatively familiar figure to historians, is the more acceptable face of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. It is safe to say that few scholars have bothered to read the cumbrous arguments of his belligerent opponent, the Rev. Stephen Radcliffe, vicar of Naas. The growth of religious toleration has long been regarded as one of the central themes of the Enlightenment period, and it is all too easy to assume that the defenders of the penal code were crude bigots. In fact the case for religious coercion has to be taken seriously, and those who believed that the power of the state might be employed as an instrument of religious evangelisation were able to draw upon a rich and sophisticated body of thought. No one in the first half of the eighteenth century questioned the need for a single national church, established by law and funded by tithes. No one advocated the position that we would now call pluralism, or what was then still regarded as ‘schism’ or ‘heresy’. Until very recently ‘toleration’ itself had been a pejorative term. To permit the Roman Catholic clergy to remain in Ireland, noted one writer, was contrary to the articles of the church, for ‘the Toleration or conniving at Idolatry, is a Land-destroying sin’.[73]

‘Compel them to come in’, the words of Jesus Christ recorded in Luke 14: 23, had long been a favourite text of those who believed in the duty of the civil power to repress heterodox belief.[74] Above all, defenders of the confessional state turned to St Augustine, that great coercer of his fellow Christians, who had supported the repression of the Donatist schism in north Africa in the early fifth century. Augustine’s injunction compelle intrare was quoted by Anglican divines such as Samuel Parker in Restoration England, when the rise of high-church Toryism had brought together the ecclesiastical and civil powers in a systematic attempt to secure confessional uniformity by coercive means. The phrase was also frequently employed by French theologians in the 1680s during Louis XIV’s offensive against the Huguenots. The key argument against forcing men’s consciences—that external force cannot produce inward conviction, but only hypocrites—may be a clincher for modern audiences, but the Restoration divines had an effective answer to it. Their position was not that coercion produced sincere converts, but that physical force caused the deluded to question fixed positions, inherited prejudices and habits of thought. Penal laws, as Augustine taught, could exert pressure on heretics and schismatics ‘until they become weary in their vain opinions’, so that those who are ‘first compelled by fear or opinion . . . might afterwards be influenced by teaching’.[75] In 1685 Thomas Tennison (later Archbishop of Canterbury) granted that ‘no man’s mind can be forced, for it is beyond the reach of human power’, yet ‘good governors do not use severity to force men to dissemble their minds, and to make them hypocrites, but to move them, after a trial of fair means, to greater consideration’.[76] On the other hand, as Radcliffe contended, the logical conclusion of Synge’s argument against forcing conscience was that the state should tolerate sincere Quakers, Jews, Turks and Deists. He appealed to the Old Testament examples of godly kings suppressing idolatry and argued that without ‘Outward Straights & Necessities’, the Reformation itself could not have succeeded.[77]

While Anglican clergymen and policy-makers debated the justice and efficacy of the penal code the Irish Catholics for the most part remained silent. The one important exception was Cornelius Nary, whose Case of the Roman Catholics (1724), was the sole significant statement of Catholic principles in the first half of the century. Nary did not argue for freedom of worship as an abstract principle. (Theories of religious toleration were almost exclusively connected with Protestant minorities.) Rather, his arguments were pragmatic, combined with an appeal to historical experience and, above all, to the Treaty of Limerick. Not surprisingly for someone who had spent a decade at the University of Paris, Nary’s outlook was European or, more specifically, Gallican. When warning his readers about what happens to those who break the public faith, he concentrated on Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the humiliations which had followed it—not only the peace terms imposed on him at Ryswick, but the death of his sons and grandsons. He also warned that it was impolitic to pass more anti-Catholic legislation in Ireland at a time when George I was trying to intercede on behalf of Protestants in Poland. Finally he pointed to the German and Dutch examples where Protestant rulers had granted full liberty of conscience to Catholic subjects.[78] It is probably no coincidence that Nary’s translation of the New Testament, which had occupied him for ten years, had been condemned by the Vatican in 1722 for Jansenist tendencies, or that he hinted that he was prepared to sacrifice the regulars in pursuit of an accommodation with the authorities.

Not all Irish Catholics, it should be obvious, were as willing as Nary to praise King William ‘of happy memory’, even for diplomatic reasons.[79] Chief among his critics was the zealous Jacobite Sylvester Lloyd, the future Catholic Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, educated at Douai, Lisbon and St Isidore’s in Rome. In December 1727, when a group of Dublin Catholics led by Lord Delvin drew up an address of loyalty on the succession of George II, they were denounced both in public and in private by Lloyd. The address, he claimed, was the work of a small junto of just eighteen or twenty people, and their breakthrough statement, that loyalty to the monarch was ‘a religious duty, which no power on earth can dispense’, was unorthodox.[80] The indirect power of the pope, once a burning issue in European thought, was, of course, by now entirely hypothetical; but it was still a theoretical can of worms, and the Vatican did not like people opening up the question, especially if they were laymen. It would take another fifty years, the death of the Pretender and a damaging split among the Irish bishops before such an oath at last became acceptable.

CONCLUSION

The religious divisions of eighteenth-century Ireland had their origins in conquest and colonisation, but they cannot be understood outside the context of a deeply divided continent. The collective memory of the struggles over Reformation and Counter-Reformation exerted a powerful hold over political life throughout Europe. Religious antagonisms continued to express a whole range of political, social and cultural tensions. The rulers of Ireland regarded their world as the product of recent wars, insurrections and massacres, all carried out in the name of religion, and they were not at all unusual in doing so. The harshness of the penal code, as this chapter has shown, was of a piece with the religious conflicts of seventeenth-century Europe; less so with the eighteenth, where the engineering of large-scale confessional change was restricted by economic considerations. Those who framed it looked anxiously towards the continent, where they saw the ruin of Protestantism in France, in Savoy–Piedmont, in Hungary and Transylvania, Poland, Bohemia and the Palatinate.[81] And the solutions they found also had parallels elsewhere: even the most notorious penal bill, the proposal to castrate Catholic priests, was based on allegedly ‘successful’ legislation in Sweden.[82] As the debate over toleration demonstrated, Protestants and Catholics alike drew on a complex moral vocabulary in their discussions of religious persecution, and this too was a shared European discourse.

It is important to appreciate that the penal laws, for all their peculiarities, were part of a common European experience. In the coming decades the champions of toleration, most notably, perhaps, Voltaire, established their intellectual dominance on the continent. There were also a number of practical victories against the Counter-Reformation church, most notably the expulsion of the Jesuits. From this point onwards structures of confessional discrimination in Ireland came to look increasingly vulnerable. By the 1760s Charles O’Conor was pointing to the toleration of Catholics in the Protestant states of Hanover and Brandenburg and asking ‘Are Irish Catholics alone irreclaimable?’[83] And in 1780 similar arguments appeared in Arthur Young’s influential A tour in Ireland, revealing the fingerprints of his friend Edmund Burke. In all other parts of Europe, Young pointed out, the Catholic religion had grown milder; even in Spain and Portugal the Inquisition had disappeared. It was vital, he warned, that Ireland keep pace with the spirit of the age:

The enlightened spirit of TOLERATION, so well understood and practised in the greatest part of Europe, is making progress every day, save in Ireland alone: while the Protestant religion enjoys peace and protection in Catholick countries, why should a nation, in all other respects so generous and liberal as the Irish, refuse at home what they receive and enjoy abroad?[84]

6

How Catholic Ireland Survived

What greater Liberty and Moderation, or rather what greater Tenderness and Indulgence can Papists expect, than what they have experienced from his present Majesty? Their Nunneries are publickly known, even in the Metropolis, as well as in most Counties of this Kingdom; and their Seminaries of Regulars as well as their Schools, are everywhere extreamly numerous: Their Clergy officiate in every Parish without Fear or Restraint, and for some Years past, France has poured such Swarms of itinerant Priests into these Kingdoms, that the People of that Religion are oppressed, and complain of the beggarly Abundance.

HONEST ADVICE TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND (1745)[1]

Did the penal laws really matter? A century ago such a question would have been dismissed as heretical. The enduring picture presented in W. P. Burke’s Irish priests in the penal times (1914) was of a downtrodden Catholic population, oppressed, impoverished and degraded under the weight of rigorously enforced penal statutes.[2] In another standard account Cardinal Patrick Moran described the Catholics as ‘mercilessly trampled on’ and insisted that the penal laws were ‘in full force throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom’ for the entire eighteenth century.[3] The stock images of eighteenth-century religion—the mass rock, a fugitive clergy, the priest-hunter—were popularised by the generation that had fought for Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s. By that stage, of course, the vast body of discriminatory legislation had long since been repealed; but the picture of a persecuted people, enduring poverty and degradation rather than forsaking their faith, appealed to O’Connellite pamphleteers as it would appeal to later generations of Catholic clerics who struggled to tread a thin line between the British state and popular nationalism. It was generally assumed that penalties for nonconformity were consistently enforced, with disastrous results for the political rights and economic status of the vast majority of Irishmen.

Since the 1950s, however, historians have reassessed both the consequences of legal discrimination and the motivations behind it; some, indeed, have questioned whether the series of statutes passed after the Williamite war amounted to a systematic ‘penal code’ at all. Following the pioneering studies of Maureen Wall, attention turned to the emergence of a prosperous Catholic middle class in the towns of eighteenth-century Ireland. The wealth of Catholic merchants and manufacturers, she revealed, increased in spite of religious disadvantage; if anything, the penal laws had assisted this development, as dispossessed Catholic gentlemen were forced to divert their energies into trade. Such evidence of Catholic resilience, moreover, was not confined to the laity. Even in the early decades of the century, when efforts to implement the penal code were more determined, the church was able to reconstruct an efficient, centralised administration in defiance of the Protestant regime. By the late 1730s the church had weathered the storm—an official inquiry of 1731 revealed that Ireland contained 1,700 priests, 892 mass-houses and 549 schools—and after 1745 the laws against Catholic priests and bishops were allowed to fall into disuse.[4]

The conventional story of the penal era has suffered further, more radical, revisions at the hands of Louis Cullen, Sean Connolly and others. Focusing on land rather than trade, Cullen has demonstrated how the statistical decline of Catholic landownership—from 14 per cent in 1704 to 5 per cent in 1776—obscures much more than it reveals. To begin with, the major redistribution of property had already been achieved through the landed confiscations of the previous century. More importantly, Catholic landed families were able to evade legal restrictions by a variety of strategies including reliance on trustees, the friendly legal action known as the ‘collusive discovery’, and nominal conversions, while an examination of leasehold (as opposed to fee) interests reveals that the number of acres in Catholic hands actually expanded during the eighteenth century. Meanwhile Connolly has reminded us that religious inequalities must be seen within the wider context of a hierarchical, pre-industrial society dominated by a landed elite. In a polity based on property rather than numbers, the denial of political rights to the masses was a purely hypothetical disability. Or, to put the matter counterfactually, a Jacobite victory at the Boyne or Aughrim would have made little difference to the political or social position of the Catholic trader or tenant farmer of the eighteenth century, and none at all to the common people so beloved of nationalist historiography.[5]

The scholars mentioned above differ greatly in approach and method, but all are agreed that the penal code had little impact on the vast majority of the population. This chapter attempts to re-evaluate the effects of legal discrimination on both the ecclesiastical organisation and the social status of Catholics.[6] It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something missing from the more optimistic accounts of Catholic Ireland typical of recent historiography. The last penal statue was passed as late as 1756; further unsuccessful bills were subsequently proposed; and the first moves towards Catholic relief were bitterly resisted by mainstream Protestant opinion. If the penal code consisted of petty inconveniences rather than systematic oppression, and if its provisions were so easily evaded, why then did Anglicans fight tooth-and-nail to preserve it?

The answer begins with the recognition that all penal legislation in ancien régime states was used selectively. Prevailing notions of punishment, famously denounced in one of the most influential works of the Enlightenment, Cesare Beccaria’s Delle delitti et delle pene (1764), favoured a system of sporadic law enforcement, based on deterrence by occasional but violent displays of ‘justice’, rather than a uniform, consistent law code. Secondly, the penal laws were successful in limiting the public expression of Catholicism, and this was vital to the viability of Protestant Ascendancy. By the 1720s it was clear that the institutional structure of the Catholic Church had survived; it was obvious too that the injection of new Protestant settlements into southern estates did not have sufficient momentum to bring about the anticipated creation of a ‘new Ulster’ in Munster or Connacht. Meanwhile a sophisticated body of opinion, led by the new political economists (Arthur Dobbs, Samuel Madden, Bishop Berkeley) took for granted the interdependence of Protestant gentry and Catholic masses and favoured a more secular approach to Irish problems in which Catholic ‘laziness’ was to be analysed in more sociological terms. The maintenance of the penal code was one way of protecting the Protestant monopoly of the public sphere in this increasingly complex, increasingly Catholic society. Thirdly, regular calls for the full implementation of the penal laws, issued at the beginning of parliamentary sessions, had little chance of winning support in London, but they succeeded in intimidating the Catholics; they signalled that there was no alternative but compliance with Protestant Ascendancy; and, equally important, they helped Protestants convince themselves of the moral value and practical sustainability of their own position. In 1731, as another bill was forwarded from Dublin for disarming Catholics, an English official noted ‘how zealous people are here to keep the papists in awe, whose licentiousness and growing insolence has given great offence’.[7] The real significance of the penal laws between the 1720s and 1770s was bound up with Catholic ‘insolence’ and the resolve of Protestants to overawe their enemies—a struggle experienced predominantly at the local level. Before we turn to social relations between Protestants and Catholics, however, it is necessary to understand the reasons for Catholic resilience.

CHURCH AND STATE IN THE PENAL ERA

La Religione Cattolica sera affatto distrutta. Li pochi Missionarij che qui sono fanno del bene assai, ma’ saranno forzati a partire, se li tempi non si mutano perche non possono vivere[;] so’ di certo che non possono pernottare due nutti in un Luogo. Dopo che io sono arrivato ne pure io posso remanere due notti nel medii luogo temendo oguno il rigore delle Leggi.[8]

[The Catholic religion will be completely destroyed. The few missionaries that are left do their best, but they will be forced to leave unless times change, for they cannot spend two nights in the same place. Nor, since I arrived, have I been able to do so, as everyone fears the rigours of the laws.]

HUGH DE BURGO, O.P., TO CARDINAL GRIMALDI (1709)

Under the old Julian calendar, which continued to operate in Britain and Ireland until 1752, 25 March was the first day of the new year. And so it was that 25 March 1710 was chosen as the day that, in the eyes of the law at least, the Catholic priesthood in Ireland would cease to exist. The Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697 had decreed that every remaining bishop, vicar general and regular priest (one, that is, subject to the ‘rule’ or regulations of a religious order) should be expelled from the country. Without bishops, there could be no new ordinations, and the supply of clerics from abroad was also prohibited. Thus, ‘by an infallible rule’, as one of the intended victims predicted, ‘there will be no more priests to administer the holy sacraments nor to assist the faithful in this poor kingdom’.[9] This left only the existing ‘secular’ or parish priests, almost 1,100 of whom had been granted legal recognition under the terms of the Registration Act (1704), in return for accepting restrictions on their movements and for two sureties of £50 to guarantee their behaviour. Now, however, they were placed in an impossible position by the introduction of an oath of abjuration, requiring them to renounce their exiled king, ‘James III’. ‘La Religione Cattolica sera affatto distrutta,’ a desperate Dominican friar wrote to Brussels; Catholicism would be destroyed.

These predictions did not come true, and with the benefit of hindsight it is hard to imagine that things might have turned out differently. Historians have generally accepted the claim of the Dublin priest and controversialist Cornelius Nary that no more than thirty-three out of the 1,100 seculars registered.[10] The Abjuration Act, it soon became clear, marked an important turning-point in penal legislation: the parish priests went underground, and the authorities discovered that there was very little they could do about it. Many contemporaries nevertheless hoped or feared that the extinction of the priesthood would be complete within a generation. Protestant optimism on this score was the result of the conviction that the strength of popery lay in the absolute dominion of the priesthood over the consciences of their people: if a link was removed from the ‘fatal chain’ which led to Rome, the whole edifice of idolatry and superstition would surely collapse.[11] It is abundantly clear from the correspondence of the Brussels nuncio that for twenty years the basic functions of the Irish church were seriously disrupted. After the Banishment Act of 1697, 153 regulars were transported from Dublin, 170 from Galway, 75 from Cork, and 26 from Waterford, making a total of 424. Of the eight bishops in the country when the act was passed, two left, one was arrested, and the rest went into hiding. The imprisonment of Bishop Sleyne in a Cork jail provoked a minor international scandal, ended only when the eighty-year-old was exiled to Portugal in 1703.[12] In Dublin, meanwhile, where Archbishop Patrick Russell had died in an underground cell in the summer of 1692, his successor Peter Creagh perhaps wisely decided to govern his see in absentia: he died in Alsace in 1705 where he was auxiliary bishop in the diocese of Strasbourg.[13] Meanwhile the regulars, all of whom were theoretically expelled by the Banishment Act, were forced underground, as were the small communities of nuns. It was not until 1720, for example, that the Dominicans were able to hold their first provincial chapter of the century.[14]

Communications to Brussels and Rome, sometimes written in code, had to be smuggled out of the country by merchants. To travel, particularly in possession of testimonial letters, was dangerous. As late as the summer of 1739 Bishop Michael MacDonogh of Kilmore was arrested on the way to Coleraine with the Dominican provincial, John Fottrell. He was carrying indulgences and faculties granted to him by the pope, letters from Dominicans in Ossory and Leghorn, his pectoral cross and episcopal ring, and, intriguingly, a satirical pamphlet ridiculing converts to Protestantism. Although he escaped from prison, a reward of £200 was offered for his capture, and he left Ireland for Rome.[15] A furious Sylvester Lloyd, the Jacobite Bishop of Waterford, reported to the Stuart court that the seizure of ‘some stupid Missioners’ letters’ had led to priests being apprehended and two nunneries in Dublin being searched for arms.[16] This incident, a reaction to the mounting international tension between Britain and Spain just before the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, was by now untypical. During earlier peaks of religious persecution, however, the situation was much more serious, and this was particularly true of 1710. Fears that wealthy Catholics and some priests would take the oath were very real. Although it soon became clear that the damage was limited, a spasm of persecution ensued, priests dispersed to their hiding-places, and it became impossible to say mass or administer the sacraments except in private houses.[17] Even then the risk was considerable, since anyone over sixteen could now be obliged to appear in court and disclose on oath details of when he had heard mass, and the names of the celebrant and assistants, on pain of imprisonment or a fine. In Rotterdam the nuncio received a letter from ‘Thomas de Witt’, an alias for Ambrose MacDermott, the new Bishop of Elphin, relaying his fears that some of his priests might come to terms with the Protestant state; something similar had happened in the Dutch Republic, after all, when the Archbishop of Sebaste, leader of the schismatic Chapter of Utrecht, had been deposed for Jansenism.[18]

Throughout the summer Count Gallas, the Emperor Joseph’s envoy in London, assisted by the representatives of Tuscany and Savoy, lobbied on behalf of Catholic Ireland, and by October it was reported that chapels were being reopened.[19] The situation slowly improved. Even in the 1690s, as the English bookseller and writer John Dunton discovered, Dublin priests were learning ‘the art of living incognito’.[20] Edmund Byrne, Archbishop of Dublin (1707–24), was harassed by magistrates and informers, but when he was actually arrested by the priest-catcher John Garzia in 1718, he was quietly released by the authorities.[21] The government in London, always anxious about relations with its Catholic allies, did not want the embarrassment of more Catholic dignitaries in Irish jails. In the last year of his life an angry pamphleteer claimed that Byrne was going ‘constantly and publickly [about] his Visitations with his Chaise and Retinue, without any Question or Interruption’.[22] A parliamentary committee of inquiry into the state of Catholicism reported in 1723 that evasion of the penal laws was widespread, and the full extent of Catholic resilience was revealed by the parliamentary inquiry of 1731. More and more penal laws were being framed, and yet prospects of implementing them successfully became more and more remote. How, then, can this persistent failure be explained?

Three answers were suggested by the reflective William King, Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, and a consistent critic of the proliferating anti-Catholic legislation.[23] The first was the greed of Protestant landlords who leased their farms to the highest bidder—usually a Catholic—rather than giving preferential treatment to Protestant tenants. Economic necessity had encouraged a grudging toleration. While they collectively upheld the same goals, individual members of the Protestant elite were not prepared to make great sacrifices. A study of domestic service offers illustrations of this failure at the microcosmic level of the household. Domestic servants accounted for a very considerable proportion of the Irish population—about 17 per cent of Dubliners in the 1690s, for example, and something like 15 per cent of towns like Armagh and Carrick-on-Suir in the later eighteenth century. Outside the north-east only a small number of notables, such as Bishop Synge of Elphin, insisted that their staff conform to the Established Church. Sometimes, no doubt, Anglican coachmen and cooks could not be found; for whatever reason, many Ascendancy gentlemen were content to leave the rearing of their children to ‘popish’ natives, who must often have been Gaelic-speakers too. Protestant improvers feared that their co-religionists were undercut by Catholics who worked for low wages or even ‘for meat, drink and clothing only’, and that employers enjoyed the ‘despotic power’ they could wield over them. It seems that Nicholas Peacock, a land agent in County Limerick, far from bringing his servants to Anglican worship, gave them extra money on ‘pattern’ days.[24] The second obstacle identified by Archbishop King was a more obvious one, the physical threat posed by the Catholic ‘mob’. In the streets of Dublin, he explained, it was only necessary to shout ‘priest-catcher’, and immediately ‘you shall have a mob of five hundred or six hundred unknown faces to fall on him, and it is well if he escape with a severe beating’.[25] The limitations of law enforcement were frequently demonstrated. In March 1711, for example, hundreds of Dubliners assembled in Fishamble Street to attack Henry Oxenard, who had recently testified against a number of priests. The rioters chased the priest-catcher through the streets, throwing ‘stones, brick batts and dirt at him in so violent a manner that his life was greatly endangered’. In the absence of a professional police force, the amateur constables and watchmen were unable to prevent such displays of ‘insolence’. The regular soldiers, stationed at Dublin Castle or at the Oxmantown barracks, were slow to mobilise, and dispersed large crowds only with difficulty. They could not prevent an outraged mob attacking a Quaker meeting-house following the execution of the Cork Jacobite James Cotter in 1720, or crowds from harassing Protestant clergymen.[26] They had little success in suppressing the frequent pitched battles fought between the (Protestant) Liberty Boys and the (Catholic) Ormond Boys, the cause of hundreds of deaths.[27]

The resistance of the Catholic ‘mob’ was not confined to the streets of Dublin, where force of numbers no doubt guaranteed anonymity. In 1725 a riot was provoked in Ballyneil, County Londonderry, when an itinerant preacher from Limerick, who pretended that he had been in a trance for ten hours, claimed that he had been ‘ascertained by the Virgin Mary, that all were inevitably damned that were not of the Church of Rome’. The troublemaker, calling himself William Smith, gathered a crowd of 3,000–4,000, including some Protestants who turned up ‘out of curiosity’. A local curate tried to arrest Smith with a small guard of seven armed men, but was beaten back with stones and staves. In this case, however, the magistrates eventually triumphed: Smith was convicted of blasphemy and riot, was whipped, branded and banished to America.[28] The authorities were less fortunate in the inaccessible terrain of neighbouring Donegal, where there was just one road, linking Ballyshannon and Raphoe, in the whole county. In March 1734, when the Bishop of Raphoe removed ‘a quiet inoffensive priest’ and gave his parish to ‘a turbulent fellow’, a local magistrate named Dr Rogers issued a warrant for his arrest. The priest was taken to the county jail by a guard of Protestants, but a large body of Catholics attacked them and carried him off.[29] Several months later a dispute between two priests over a Donegal parish led to the capture of Father Charles Kerighan of Kilgarvin, who was subsequently fatally wounded when a rescue party composed of his parishioners clashed with soldiers.[30] As late as 1751 the high sheriff of County Carlow was pelted with stones by a 500-strong mob for imprisoning a priest.[31] A final example taken from 1754 concerns Father Daniel Neale, who was an accomplice in the abduction of Susanna Grove, a Protestant heiress from Tipperary town. With a price of £100 on his head, Neale was later arrested. But as he was being transferred from Clonmel jail to Limerick by a party of soldiers, a mob variously estimated at between 500 and 3,000 staged a successful rescue bid, seriously wounding the sub-sheriff of County Tipperary and several of the soldiers.[32]

The final explanation offered by Archbishop King for the vitality of Catholicism was the widespread belief that Dublin Castle was actually opposed to the rigorous execution of the penal laws and disapproved of those who attempted it. The frequent official pronouncements made against priests, taken by Canon Burke and Cardinal Moran as evidence of vigorous legal action, were actually the reverse, signs of magisterial impotence. As the judges admitted to the Commons in 1703, hardly any of the twenty-seven regulars arrested since 1698 had actually been expelled from the country. The local authorities were also hesitant about the suppression of Catholic public worship, so much so that when a Dublin mass-house was closed in 1707, Primate Marsh felt it necessary to deny any part in the affair.[33] Before the 1720s, of course, official attitudes towards the Catholic threat varied depending on whether Whigs or Tories were able to dominate the ministry in London. Only the Whig Thomas Wharton, Lord Lieutenant in 1709–10, maintained a consistently tough anti-Catholic policy. As we saw in the previous chapter, the architects of the penal code were well aware of the international pressures operating in favour of Catholics at the Court of St James in London. In the summer of 1723, following the interception of seventeen friars returning to Ireland, parliament rushed through ‘A bill for explaining and amending the acts to prevent the growth of popery and for strengthening the Protestant interest in Ireland’. This bill, the culmination of years of Protestant frustration, prescribed the penalty of high treason—death, that is, by hanging, drawing and quartering—to any unregistered priest, bishop, vicar general or regular found in country after 25 March 1724, and simple capital punishment for anyone convicted of sheltering a popish dignitary.[34] The alarm was soon raised by Giuseppe Spinelli, the internuncio at Brussels, and Cardinal Imperiali, the Protector of Ireland. Pope Innocent XIII appealed to the King of Spain, while the Secretary of State wrote to the nuncios in Vienna, Paris, Madrid and Lisbon. At the same time a Dublin priest, probably Sylvester Lloyd, was sent to Versailles to secure the support of Cardinal Fleury, who acted as first minister to the young King Louis XV for seventeen years. During the period of Anglo-French alliance, from 1716 to 1731, Fleury was successful in blocking further anti-Catholic measures.[35]

These considerations help to flesh out the common view, usually assumed rather than demonstrated, that the early modern state—or at least the Irish variant of it—did not have the resources to cope with a task of this magnitude. This may have seemed less obvious to contemporaries who knew, after all, that Bohemia had been forcibly Catholicised after the revolt of 1618, or that the Jesuits had followed Imperial troops into Hungary in the 1680s, re-establishing Catholic worship in towns and villages. In these cases of countries recovered from Protestantism, military conquest was followed by the establishment of religious orders. Often soldiers and missionaries went hand in hand. Support from Catholic rulers was also indispensable. In Ireland, meanwhile, central government was dependent upon local, unpaid officials, freelance ‘discoverers’ who initiated legal actions against Catholic landlords, and priest-catchers such as the notorious John Garzia, a converted priest from Spain.[36] The interests of the English ministry, Dublin Castle, and local magistrates did not necessarily coincide.

CONTINENTAL CONNECTIONS: THE IRISH COLLEGES

A full explanation of Catholic vitality during the penal era requires consideration of both internal and external factors. Chief among the latter was the system of Irish colleges scattered through Spain, France, Italy, and the diverse territories that made up the Holy Roman Empire. More than forty Irish colleges had been established on the continent since the reign of Elizabeth, some of them admittedly small and short-lived. The success of this extraordinary life-support system depended ultimately on the vast international resources of the Church of Rome, and of the monarchs who regarded themselves as its protectors. But it is also important to remember that the penal code constructed under William and Anne merely systematised the anti-Catholic proclamations that stretched back for more than a century. The continent had received repeated waves of Catholic immigrants and refugees since the reign of Elizabeth, peaking in 1653 when over a thousand bishops, priests and nuns had been expelled on pain of death. For more than a century of spasmodic harassment, then, Irish Catholicism had successfully renewed itself through a process of continuous adaptation. By the outbreak of the French Revolution, as the table below shows, there were 27 masters and 478 students in these institutions; and to these must be added the novices of the various religious orders trained at Rome, Louvain and elsewhere. Although other subjects of ‘heretical’ princes—Germans, English and Scots—were also reliant on overseas education, this level of commitment on the part of the ancien régime monarchies was unique.

Table 6: ‘State of the establishments on the continent for the education of Irish Catholic clergymen, previous to the French Revolution’ (1808)[37]

Masters

Scholars

Paris, Collège des Lombards

4

100

Paris, Rue Cheval Vert

3

80

Nantes

3

80

Bordeaux

3

40

Douai

2

30

Toulouse

1

10

Lille

1

8

Total in France

17

348

Louvain

2

40

Antwerp

2

30

Salamanca

2

32

Rome

2

16

Lisbon

2

12

Total Elsewhere

10

130

Combined Total

27

478

The earliest Irish colleges were set up in Spain and Portugal; they included Salamanca and Lisbon, where small numbers of Irish still studied in the eighteenth century, until the disruption caused by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the suppression of the Jesuits shortly after. Before 1700 the southern Netherlands—usually known simply as Flanders—was a Spanish territory, and Irish ‘houses’ were established there too: three were founded at Louvain in the early seventeenth century, one at Antwerp, and a convent of Irish Benedictine nuns at Ypres (1682). These were conveniently located for Irish shipping, and benefited from close proximity to the papal nuncio at Brussels, who provided the key link between the Congregazione de Propaganda Fide (the Congregation for Propagating the Faith) and the missionary territories in Britain and Ireland. The University of Louvain, one of the foremost European centres of learning, was also near Spa, frequented by Irish gentlemen among others, who travelled there for leisure and for health reasons.

After the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) sovereignty over the Spanish Netherlands—and the Irish houses established there—passed to the Austrian Habsburgs, enabling the Louvain colleges to benefit from links with Irish officers in the Austrian service who were stationed nearby. The emperor had intervened to prevent the passing of penal laws in the 1690s and already maintained separate Irish colleges at Prague and Cologne.[38] In the Holy City itself, meanwhile, the renowned theologian Luke Wadding had obtained St Isidore’s for the Irish Franciscans in the 1620s, while the Dominicans had their twin foundations at San Clemente and St Sisto since 1667. By the 1750s there were nineteen Irish Dominicans and as many as eighty Franciscans in Rome.[39] The secular clergy, meanwhile, attended their own Irish college, established by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, the Protector of Ireland and a friend of Wadding, and often known as the ‘Ludovisian’. Its students, who generally numbered only six or eight, attended classes at the Jesuit Collegio Romano. For obvious reasons, the ‘Romans’ were disproportionately influential and their access to powerful patrons in the Vatican was resented. Both seculars and regulars employed ‘agents’ at Rome, though they seldom acted in concert. John Purcell, described by the Archbishop of Dublin in 1750 as ‘l’Agente di questa nazione alla corte di Roma’, was in practice the representative of the archbishop and his circle of zelanti; in the same year Primate Michael O’Reilly traced the insolence of the regulars in Ulster to the malign influence of Patrick Brullaughan, their allegedly omnipotent agent at the Minerva.[40]

From the seventeenth century, however, the principal refuge of the Irish priesthood was France. The Collège des Lombards, originally a medieval foundation for poor Italians studying in Paris, became Irish property in 1677 and was divided into two roughly equal communities. The ‘Communauté des Prêtres’ consisted of ordained priests who spent around six years of study in Paris before returning to the Irish mission, while students in the ‘Communauté des Clercs’ arrived in their early teens and spent ten or more years there. A large number of the latter never returned, and many of them were presumably sent overseas with the specific intention of obtaining preferment in France. The Lombard College was placed under the authority of the Archbishop of Paris in 1728, and flourished under its great benefactor, the Abbé de Vaubrun, in the 1730s. The priests supported themselves by bourses established by affluent Catholics, by mass stipends and by occasional services in Parisian churches. There were recurrent disputes over funding, complicated by the overlapping jurisdictions and confused precedents that characterised ancien régime institutions. (This was also true of Louvain, for example, where the Brussels nuncio had to fend off the claims of the council of Brabant.) One student from Armagh, arriving in 1785, claimed that he found the Parisian students in ‘a state of abject slavery’ and fought a four-year battle against the superior of the college, John Baptist Walsh, to recover the ‘ancient rights’ of the student body to elect their superiors.[41] Other sources paint a picture of disharmony among the masters and insubordination in the student body.[42] A report sent to Propaganda Fide around 1750, when there were 250 student priests in Paris, claimed that the Irish had been involved in riots outside the college in 1720, 1723, 1734, 1737 and 1744.[43] The majority of priests, naturally, would take the royalist side in the French Revolution, as would the remaining officers of the Irish Brigade; and it was the Abbé Edgeworth, a former student of the Irish College at Toulouse, who accompanied Louis XVI to the guillotine on 21 January 1793.

At first glance, it might appear that the Irish college system involved a considerable amount of wastage, since many priests slipped into a French parish or a chaplaincy with a wealthy family rather than return to minister to a poor congregation in a language they had half forgotten.[44] Studies of the colleges, most of them by now rather dated, have generally confined themselves to the narrow channels of ecclesiastical history. It has not been sufficiently emphasised that a close connection existed between the expatriate clergy and the Irish mercantile communities in ports such as Cadiz, Bordeaux and Nantes. Cardinal Grimaldi, the Brussels internuncio, sometimes communicated with Irish bishops through an Irish merchant at Rotterdam named Harper.[45] Complaints that the Irish college system served as an escape route for upwardly mobile Irishmen, a problem particularly noticeable in Bordeaux, need to be viewed in the context of this wider diasporic network. During the negotiations at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession three Franciscan friars were dispatched to European courts to drum up diplomatic support for the Irish Catholics: they included Bonaventure de Burgo, guardian of St Isidore’s in Rome, who travelled to Venice, Vienna, Prague, Cologne and Dusseldorf.[46] The well-known writer Bernard Routh, a pupil and later rector of the Jesuit lay school at Poitiers, travelled to Vienna in the autumn of 1748 as a representative of Irish Catholics, one more example of the different ways in which continental ‘losses’ could often benefit the church.[47] Some expatriate clergymen became chaplains to regiments in the Irish Brigade, including the Abbé James MacGeoghegan of St Merri in Paris, whose Histoire de l’Irlande (1758–62) was probably the most important Jacobite publication of the century. Others took up posts in the Collège des Lombards or other colleges of the University of Paris. Among them were John Plunkett, royal professor of theology at the College de Navarre, and James MacDonagh, professor of philosophy in the College du Plessis-Sorbonne.

Odd though it might seem, another vital part of the Catholic communications network was Protestant London, now the largest city in Europe. By the beginning of the eighteenth century London had already 575,000 inhabitants; half a century later the total had risen to 675,000, and by 1800 it was something like 900,000. This spectacular growth depended on a steady stream of migrants; perhaps 10,000 arrived every year. Long ago Tony Wrigley suggested that something like a sixth of England’s population at some point in their lives resided in the city, and they were joined, of course, by a constant inflow of Scots, Welsh and Irish.[48] In the 1690s new buildings such as St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange and the Custom House proclaimed the rise of a great power, whose centre was the financial institutions of the city. At this very time links between London and Dublin were strengthened as Protestants from Ireland sought refuge towards the end of James II’s reign. Over the next century Irish gentlemen continued to flock there to advance their careers, in spite of Archbishop King’s warning that Irish visitors in the metropolis ‘converse only with one another, without making any figure or having any interest’.[49] But London was also the home of many Irish Catholics of all social classes. In the middle of the eighteenth century it was estimated that around a hundred Irishmen and women arrived in the capital every week, where they quickly became ‘the most profligate and abandon’d Wretches’. The predictable vices attributed to these immigrants—Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, swearing and whoring—caused so much concern that one pamphleteer proposed a scheme for their repatriation. If the public could raise £30,000 by voluntary subscription, he suggested, an office could be opened in St Giles where Irish immigrants could claim 15 shillings each to assist their passage home.[50]

Apart from the inevitable court proceedings, the poor naturally left little evidence of their activities in the archives. About 14 per cent of those executed at Tyburn during the eighteenth century had been born in Ireland, most of them Catholic. Many of them had been soldiers; others had served as tailors, weavers, shoemakers or labourers. In 1733, for example, the Irishmen who mounted the scaffold included a former captain of an Irish regiment in the French service (originally from Belfast), a Dublin weaver convicted of raping his master’s daughter, and a veteran of the siege of Derry who had killed the doorkeeper of the Haymarket gaming-house.[51] Jacobite recruiting officers in London depended on a network of Irish taverns. The first man hanged for treasonable practices under William III was an Irish recruiting officer, Patrick Harding; while an Irish chairman in St James’s Park spat three times in the face of the Princess of Wales in 1719.[52] Dense Irish colonies were well established in St Giles’s and Marylebone and were the subject of hostile reports from the overstretched parish authorities; increasingly they extended into the east end towards Wapping, where the docks offered opportunities to casual labourers. In July 1736 the eastern parishes of Shoreditch, Spitalfields and Whitechapel succumbed to three nights of vicious anti-Irish rioting as crowds of between 2,000 and 4,000 attacked Irish public houses. The immediate trigger was the dismissal of English builders employed in the reconstruction of Shoreditch church and their replacement by Irish workers at reduced wages, but there was also a longer history of Irish weavers undercutting Londoners.[53]

But the Catholic Irish were not always found at the sharp end of the legal system. At the Inns of Court, it was reported, Catholic lawyers trained, deferring conformity for as long as possible before returning to Ireland.[54] A surprising number of clerics lived in London at some point, sheltering in the embassy chapels of foreign kingdoms. Patrick Fitzsimons (1695–1769), the future Archbishop of Dublin, spent most of the 1720s in London serving in the chapel of the Spanish ambassador; his successor, John Carpenter, had acted as secretary to Viscount Taaffe in London in the winter of 1767–8.[55] Both seem to have made government contacts. Patrick Brullaughan (or Bradley), appointed Bishop of Derry in 1751, had enjoyed a long period as rector in the chapel of the Sardinian embassy so much that he resigned his new diocese within a year, returning to London, where he remained until his death in 1760.[56] The Dominican friar James Dillon, ordained at Malines (near Louvain) in 1739, was based at the Neapolitan chapel in the 1750s and at the Portuguese chapel in the 1760s before returning to Ireland in 1769.[57] Later in the century the Capuchin monk and controversialist Arthur O’Leary (1729–1802), from Dunmanway, County Cork, served as a chaplain to the Spanish embassy. After twenty-four years in France and a turbulent career in Cork, he left Ireland in 1789 for the more congenial atmosphere of Soho Square, London, where he founded St Patrick’s Chapel.[58]

The success of this remarkable support network helps to explain why the Irish hierarchy could never regard the interests of their people as something separable from the interests of the wider church. In the later eighteenth century, however, the continental colleges suffered a series of devastating blows. The religious orders were by now increasingly under attack from an alliance of enlightened reformers and centralising governments. The Jesuits, who supplied so many teachers and lecturers, were suppressed in Portugal (1759), France (1765), Spain (1767) and finally dissolved by the pope in 1773. As part of a consolidated campaign to subordinate church to state, the Emperor Joseph II closed half of the monasteries in his dominions, including the (Irish) College of the Immaculate Conception at Prague (1786), while numbers at the Irish seminaries at Louvain were restricted. In this sphere, however, as in so many others, the French Revolution triggered a massive acceleration of the centralising tendencies already demonstrated by absolute monarchies. On 4 August 1789 the privileges of the French clergy, including tithe, were abolished; within a year church lands were nationalised and religious orders were dissolved; and papal jurisdiction was removed by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy on 12 July 1790.

This disaster was one of the reasons, of course, why Irish bishops viewed the upheavals of the 1790s in a European context. By May 1791 Archbishop Troy, worried that Irish students would be required to take the new clerical oath or lose their property, was already praying for ‘a counter revolution’.[59] As the armies of the French Republic swept across western Europe, the convents were abolished along with the other ‘corrupt’ institutions of the ancien régime. Louvain fell in 1794, and nineteen Irish Franciscans fled to St Isidore’s. In 1796 Troy received news from his agent at San Clemente of the terror experienced in Rome as the Holy City was occupied by the godless French. Under the Roman Republic established in 1798, the city’s economy was absorbed by the French war machine, with altar plate, paintings and other church furnishings all seized to pay the enormous debts exacted by the conquerors. St Isidore’s, San Clemente and the Irish Augustinian house were suppressed in May 1798; the convents themselves were used as warehouses or barracks or demolished for building materials.[60] From Ypres, meanwhile, Troy received news of the suppression of the Benedictine nunnery there.[61] Just after the outbreak of rebellion the archbishop urged his people to give up their arms and renounce the United Irish societies, reminding them of the fate of continental Catholics:

Look to Brabant and Holland, to Avignon and Rome, to Savoy and Lombardy, to the Rhine and Switzerland; in a word, to the different Countries and States they have conquered or republicanised under the mask of friendship: in every one of them you may observe, that anarchy has succeeded to regular government, poverty and distress to affluence and competency, infidelity and licentiousness to religion and morality.[62]

To many ordinary Catholics, perhaps, this appeal must have seemed rather abstract; but to Troy, who had been educated in Rome and ordained at Louvain, and who had visited Avignon, Lyon and Paris, the new satellites of the French Republic were not just faraway places. The continental seminaries were the lifeboats that preserved the Irish priesthood following the shipwreck of 1691. For the Catholic hierarchy and many of their parish priests, there was something much greater at stake in the bloody struggles of the 1790s than the future of Ireland. The revolutionary wars on the continent, and the widening gap between elite and popular perceptions of these conflicts, created the most severe internal crisis faced by Irish Catholicism before the end of the twentieth century.

THE SOCIAL BASES OF CATHOLICISM

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Irish Protestants, although greatly outnumbered, controlled the civil and military administration, monopolised arms and were periodically arrayed in the militia. Occasional optimists like Sir Richard Cox boasted that Catholic Ireland no longer presented an immediate threat. With their gentry families ravaged by defeat and exile, he calculated with evident satisfaction ‘That 5 in 6 of the Irish are poor, Insignificant slaves, fit for nothing but to hew wood & draw water’.[63] Even the concessions over Catholic property and worship stipulated in the Treaty of Limerick had been unscrupulously clawed back by factious parliaments after 1692, in spite of Catholic diplomacy in Europe. Yet English policy in Dublin continued to be subordinated to continental priorities, and hopes for a wider social revolution in Ireland were stymied by the limited resources at the disposal of the Ascendancy regime. The upper echelons of Catholic society had been brutally removed, but the composition of the gentry changed less than surface appearances would suggest. It was not just the hewers of wood and the drawers of water whose sullen presence would have to be tolerated; in many areas it was the holders of extensive leases, the solvent tenants, and even sometimes the agents who collected the rent—a laborious, twice-yearly business. Protestant landlords would have to come to terms with Catholic middlemen and Catholic tenant farmers; and by the middle of the century the increasing wealth of the latter groups was visible to all.

The customary picture of penal-era Catholicism as a religion of the poor must consequently be adjusted. If anything, the opposite was more accurate. ‘Catholicism as an institutional force’, Kevin Whelan has argued convincingly, was ‘most strongly entrenched in the richer areas, the upper social classes and the towns’.[64] Geographically, the key divide was a line running across the island roughly from Galway to Dundalk. The recovery of Irish Catholicism began in mid-Munster and south Leinster and spread only belatedly to Ulster and north Connacht. This division reflected not only patterns of Catholic landownership, but the increased commercial activities of the towns of Leinster and Munster, with their acquisitive, self-confident merchants. In particular, the ports of Galway, Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Wexford, closely connected as they were with Cadiz, Bordeaux and Nantes, presented increased opportunities for commercial ventures, and facilitated access to major continental centres of learning. It was these towns and their hinterlands, as Whelan has shown, that led the Catholic revival—evident in the building of mass-houses, the keeping of parish registers and the introduction of new devotions and religious fraternities. Even the small communities of nuns were connected to these concentrations of wealth. Nano Nagle (1718–84), the founder of the Presentation Order, was one of the Ballygriffin Nagles; her father Garret was a merchant and landowner who had been accused of acting as the Pretender’s agent in Flanders during the Jacobite scare of 1733, while her mother was one of the prosperous Mathews of County Tipperary.[65]

In the northern province the Catholic landed interest had been almost completely eradicated by the plantation and subsequent settlements. Here, especially in the east, Protestant society achieved the critical mass necessary to establish itself successfully. Given the economic and social influence exercised by landowners, it followed that there were few comfortable Catholics at lower social levels too: Ulster was poorly represented in the Irish colleges, in the merchant communities overseas and Dublin business circles, and in the continental armies. Northerners had few connections with the Catholic Committee between the 1750s and the 1770s, and they made little impact on the world of print. It was only in the 1780s that the new wealth of Catholic bleachers and merchants in the ‘linen triangle’ brought men like Bernard Coyle and Luke Teeling into public life. As Teeling’s son later recalled, the rapid increase of Catholic weavers ‘in the bosom of a Protestant Colony, excited feelings of jealousy and alarm, in the minds of those who had long been accustomed to look upon Ulster as an exclusively Protestant Province’.[66] The result, of course, was the appearance of an ‘organised system of predatory warfare’, as the clashes between Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders described in Chapter 12 culminated in the so-called ‘battle of the Diamond’ of 1795.

At the other extreme, meanwhile, the remnants of the Catholic gentry in Galway and Mayo survived as the core of another quite distinctive region. In the west, powerful converts, such as the Dalys in Galway or the Brownes of Westport, had established control of county or borough parliamentary seats; their Cromwellian counterparts, with exceptions such as the rabid Stratford Eyre, had little choice but to adjust. Other families, the best example being the Bellews of Mount Bellew, remained Catholic, evading the fragmentation of their estates through a combination of adroit legal subterfuge and the good luck of having only one male heir. As in Ulster, the composition of the landed class shaped the character of lower social groups, hence the importance of Galway families in the Atlantic trade. Wholesale merchants were recruited mostly from the younger sons of the gentry, whose parents provided them with the sizeable cash portions to pay for apprenticeship to an export house and the initial capital required for setting up in foreign trade.[67] The younger Bellew sons, for example, were lured into commercial enterprises, some of them settling in the West Indies, Cádiz and Bordeaux.[68] From an early stage too the sons of substantial convert families from the west were entering the legal profession: in 1709, for example, the convert rolls recorded the conformities of Gerald Burke, Denis Daly junior and Patrick French, all Galway lawyers.[69]

Other regional groupings of broad-acred Catholics and crypto-Catholics could be found throughout the south: they included the Talbots of Malahide and vestiges of the old lords of the Pale who still endured in Counties Kildare, Meath and Dublin, and were generally quietist in their politics; they also extended to the Bellews, Taaffes and Plunketts of Louth. Perhaps the most important, in political terms at least, was Robert Barnewall, the twelfth Baron Trimleston (c. 1704–79). Although their Anglo-Norman ancestors had possessed substantial estates in Meath and Dublin, the Barnewalls had been attainted after the Cromwellian conquest and again when the tenth baron, Robert’s uncle, fought (to the death) on the side of the Jacobites. Trimleston himself, who retained part of the estate salvaged by the Court of Claims, spent many of his earlier years travelling in Europe and indulging his enthusiasms for botany and medicine. Charles O’Conor preferred to work with Viscount Taaffe, regarding Trimleston as an arrogant and useless ‘dictator’.[70] It was Trimleston, nevertheless, who offered to raise six regiments for George III during the Seven Years War, and who took it upon himself to negotiate on behalf of Catholic Ireland with the British government without reference to either the Catholic Committee or the hierarchy.

Outside Galway and Mayo, the continuing presence of Catholics, especially in Munster, provoked sporadic harassment from the local Anglican establishment. This was particularly true of a band of prosperous Catholics, linked by intermarriage, stretching all the way from north Wexford and south Carlow, through Kilkenny and south Tipperary, Clare and Limerick, to south Kerry and Cork. Along this sloping axis sectarian tensions bubbled under the surface calm of eighteenth-century life and occasionally broke into the open: the execution of James Cotter in Cork on 7 May 1720, the recruitment scare of the early 1730s, and the killings of Morty Oge O’Sullivan (1754) and Art O’Leary (1773), all testify to the suppressed violence of social relations on this interface—as indeed does the Wexford rising of 1798. It was on the Munster circuit that Chief Baron Willes encountered his ‘red hot Protestants’ in 1760, that Edmund Burke denounced the ‘mungril’ Irish landlords who hunted down and executed Whiteboys, and that Louis Cullen has located ‘the law-and-order, papist-fearing, and hanging element’ in the Ascendancy who bear (he has argued) the ultimate responsibility for the slaughter of 1798.[71] The assertiveness of Catholic interests in these areas was fiercely resisted, and the strength of M.P.s from the region at College Green ensured that their local quarrels received a national airing. The disputed Tipperary election of 1761 offers a good example. One of the victors was Thomas Mathew, who had converted to Protestantism as recently as 1755. The Mathew family, although Catholic, was of New English background, having married into the (mixed) Ormond family in 1620 and migrated from south Wales to a New English settlement at Silvermines. In recent generations they had formed marriage alliances with the O’Haras of Sligo and the family of the ill-fated James Cotter. In January 1762 the House of Commons overturned the election result following a petition from Sir Thomas Maude, who claimed that a large number of Mathew’s voters had failed to produce their conversion certificates, had admitted they were the children of Catholic parents or had married Catholic wives, and that ‘great mobs of Irish papists’ had intimidated him during the poll.[72]

Reference has been made to the three notorious killings that shook this region, those of James Cotter, Morty Oge O’Sullivan and Art O’Leary, recalled in the popular laments of Munster poets, most obviously the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire (Lament for Art O’Leary) attributed to his widow Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. To these might be added the execution of Father Nicholas Sheehy, a relative of the Nagles, discussed in Chapter 9 below. None of these men lost their lives as a result of the penal code. Sheehy was convicted, on disgracefully thin evidence, for the distinctly secular crime of murdering John Bridge, a Whiteboy informer who had disappeared in 1764. In fact no priest was executed for a ‘penal’ offence (in contrast to the contemporary French experience), unless we count Timothy Ryan, convicted at the Limerick assizes of 1726 for officiating at a ‘mixed’ marriage.[73] This offence, motivated by concerns over the inheritance of land, was not directed solely at ‘popish priests’, however, as the unfortunate Edward Sewell, a ‘degraded’ Anglican clergyman, discovered in 1740.[74] The other three named above were reckless Catholic gentlemen, each of them subjected to a long campaign of harassment and legal proceedings. James Cotter was convicted on a rape charge made against him in 1718, in spite of pleas for clemency from Viscount Middleton and other local Protestant magnates. Morty Oge O’Sullivan, an army recruiter, smuggler and murderer, was killed by an expeditionary force from Cork to Berehaven peninsula. Finally, the twenty-six-year-old O’Leary, also from west Cork, was shot dead by a contingent of soldiers led by the local magistrate Abraham Morris, whom he had challenged to a duel.[75]

What all these men had in common—from an Ascendancy perspective—was that they were persistent troublemakers. Each refused to conduct himself with the deference expected of the conquered Irish. A particularly revealing example of Catholic ‘insolence’ was James Cotter, son of a prominent Jacobite, who had retained possession of his ancestral estate under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick. In east Cork, home both to the Whig political base of the Brodricks of Midleton and a surviving cluster of Catholic landed families, the Cotter house of Ballinsperrig was the focal point for a confident and self-assured network of propertied Catholics, conspicuous for their links with the local Catholic clergy and their continuing patronage of the Gaelic intelligentsia. Cotter was hanged in 1720 for the rape of a local Quaker woman. But he also had a history of political activism, and his refusal to play the passive role expected of Catholics presented a challenge to Protestant Ascendancy that could not be ignored. Notoriously, traditional accounts of Cotter describe him going to court ‘with his hat on and with a sword at his side’, driving a carriage with four or six horses, or hunting a fox with an Orange lily tied to it.[76] Whatever the truth behind these legends, he had certainly immersed himself in the turbulent party politics of Dublin towards the end of Queen Anne’s reign, when he had earned hostility ‘for raising mobs at elections’. As Arthur St Leger, heir to the Doneraile estate, commented, he had been ‘very much hated by the county’. Recent archival research has shown that Cotter’s execution was not, as once believed, a ‘judicial murder’, orchestrated by local magistrates; but he was nevertheless mourned in popular laments as ‘Hibernia’s hero’, a victim of Protestant persecution.[77]

By guaranteeing a Protestant monopoly of public symbolism and ritual, the penal laws were designed to put a stop to displays of Catholic insubordination. The deference demanded of Irish Catholic gentlemen must have seemed particularly galling for those, like O’Leary, who had served as officers in the Irish regiments of France or the Habsburg empire. As Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire put it,

D’umhlaidis Sasanaigh

Síos go talamh duit,

Is ní ar mhaithe leat,

Ach le h-aonchorp eagla.

[The Protestants would bow to the ground before you, and not for their liking of you, but through the extent of their fear.][78]

Memorialised as a courageous and defiant martyr, O’Leary was, during his short life, more likely to be regarded by other propertied Catholics as a dangerous hothead. His nemesis Abraham Morris was also an intemperate man, incapable of uniting local Protestant opinion behind him when he was tried for murder. The vendetta between the two men, a mixture of personal violence and insult, protracted legal proceedings and newspaper propaganda, revolved around two obscure incidents when Morris demanded O’Leary’s horse for £5, as he was entitled to do under the infamous penal law of 1695, and when O’Leary seized a gun from Morris’s servant. Penal legislation originally concerned with military security was now employed, as Cullen remarks, ‘to keep O’Leary in his place’.[79] Likewise, Father Sheehy’s offence was not that he was a priest, but that he was a Catholic priest who refused to keep a low profile. Bishop Thomas Burke of Ossory, relating the circumstances of Sheehy’s execution to Rome, was distinctly unsympathetic. Sheehy had been recalled from the parish of Clogheen at the beginning of the Whiteboy troubles, he explained, but remained there in defiance of his bishop. Remarkably, Burke chose to view the Sheehy affair primarily as an illustration of the insubordination prevalent among parish priests, which he attributed to the influence of the ‘Parisians’ within the church.[80] The Catholic campaigner John Curry, meanwhile, described the controversial priest as ‘a giddy, officious, but not ill-meaning, man’ who cast himself as the champion of ‘all those whom he fancied to be injured or distressed’.[81]

One final aspect of Catholic society, worth considering in some detail, was the existence of a ‘convert interest’, an amphibious species of conformist Catholic who moved between the worlds of the Anglican elite and the old Catholic gentry. Success in conversion was, on the face of it, a triumph for the Protestant interest; but in practice this curious phenomenon actually functioned to the advantage of Catholic society and even of the Catholic Church itself. The convert interest, as Thomas Power has commented, was ‘a hybrid class of crypto-Catholics who had conformed in order to maintain or improve their landed status, career prospects, or political opportunities’.[82] Given time, of course, many of those who conformed would become assimilated fully to the Anglican establishment. Indeed, some, like John Fitzgibbon, first Earl of Clare (1748–1802), became conspicously zealous defenders of it. Earlier generations, for the most part, were rather different. Clare’s father, a lawyer and M.P. for a County Dublin borough, was undoubtedly more typical than his ruthless son. Descended from minor gentry and physicians, the elder John Fitzgibbon (1708–80) studied medicine in Paris for a short time before enrolling in London’s Middle Temple in 1728. Three years later he was called to the bar and his name was entered on the convert rolls following the usual recantation of his ancestors’ faith. Not surprisingly, perhaps, much of Fitzgibbon’s lucrative practice—he would leave an estate worth £100,000—was based on penal litigation arising from the efforts of Catholic families to protect their land from the gavelkind clause in the Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery. He also defended James Nagle, one of Edmund Burke’s Catholic kinsmen, who was accused of complicity in the Whiteboy disturbances of the early 1760s. Burke later recalled that when he met old Fitzgibbon in 1766 he ‘spoke like a good Irishman’ and was concerned for those of ‘his countrymen and blood’ who were suffering for their faith.[83]

It has been suggested that Edmund’s father, Richard Burke, was the Catholic attorney of that name who acted for the Jacobite James Cotter before his notorious execution in 1720, but subsequently conformed to the Established Church in 1722, seven years before Edmund’s birth. Although the evidence for this thesis remains inconclusive, it is clear enough that Burke’s family life was typical of the so-called ‘convert interest’. Of Edmund’s mother Mary Nagle, from the pre-eminent Catholic gentry family on the Blackwater, it was said that she ‘practised the duties of the Romish religion with a decent privacy’. His sister Juliana was brought up as a Catholic, in spite of the 1733 penal law which disqualified attorneys who permitted their children to be educated in ‘the papist religion’. In 1757 Edmund himself married the daughter of an Irish Catholic physician, Jane Nugent, who had conformed to the Church of England but was also said to be ‘a genteel, well-bred woman, of the Roman faith’.[84] When Burke visited France in 1773, he moved in Irish circles, meeting the banker Thomas Sutton and the military officer and mathematician Patrick Darcy, both from wealthy expatriate families, and visiting the Collège des Lombards. In this, as in so much else, the Burkes’ social world was that of the convert interest, and this family background is crucial in explaining Edmund’s lifelong commitment to Catholic Emancipation. It helps us to understand his brilliant attacks on the penal code, which he held responsible for turning sons against their fathers; his hostility to the Glorious Revolution in Ireland for establishing ‘the power of the smaller number, at the expense of the civil liberties and properties of the far greater part’, and his admission that William III could be termed ‘a regicide usurper’.[85]

Between 1704 and 1800 a total of 5,797 names were recorded on the convert rolls.[86] Almost a third of these (around 1,700) were well-off, describing themselves as aristocrats, esquires, gentlemen, ‘misters’ or farmers, and a surprisingly high number (67) as ‘Reverend’. Around 380 of the total conformed on more than one occasion, including, for example, Burke’s kinsman Garret Nagle, one of the forty propertied Catholics arrested in the Whiteboy inquiry of 1765–6.[87] The number of ‘reconformists’, however, was probably counterbalanced by the number of unrecorded conversions, so the general figure of 5,800 remains valid. A history of multiple conformities was not, of course, an indication of spiritual vacillation. Conformity was rarely an act of faith, but primarily an economic decision, a way of securing land against legal challenges. George O’Malley of Snugborough, for example, explained that his father Laughlin had conformed to the Established Church so that he could legally bear arms at a time when he found himself ‘much persecuted and pointed at by the upstart Cromwellian Race that Infest the Country’.[88] More often, of course, the motive was the protection of land. This point can be borne out by examining the chronology of the convert rolls, which reveals peaks in 1734, 1747, 1757, 1759, 1761 and 1768. These can be explained by periodic waves of anti-Catholic hysteria, either for domestic or international reasons (1734, 1757), the desire to vote in parliamentary elections (1761, 1768), or legal developments (as in the O’Farrell case of 1759, when a legal technicality seemed to call into question the registration of converts).

Not surprisingly, as landowners dodged the provisions of the popery acts through various kinds of settlements, private securities and trusts, complaints began to be heard that the legal profession itself was being infiltrated by crypto-Catholics. In 1733, spurred on by the Archbishop of Armagh, Hugh Boulter, the government passed new two acts ‘to regulate the admission and practice of Catholic lawyers’ and ‘to exclude converts with Catholic wives or educating their children as Catholics from the office of justice of the peace’. A pamphleteer of 1714 complained of the ‘New Converts’ who deferred conforming for as long as possible at the Inns of Court in London. On returning home, he explained, they retained ‘their former Intimacy with the Papists, and are as well and as cordially received by them as ever’. Although they occasionally attended worship in the Established Church, they corresponded with France, Spain and Rome, they collected money for the Catholic interest and maintained agents in London.[89] Another Protestant, writing in the same year, argued that these new converts were also responsible for shielding priests, and explained that the ties of family and friendship would trump the ostensible confessional loyalties of the conformist: ‘Can he be so deaf to the Ties of Relation, as to give up a Priest his Cousin, or perhaps, Brother, to be prosecuted according to the Law, when only his winking can save him?’[90]

It was feared that these paper converts would continue to educate their children as papists and retain priests in their houses. As we have already seen, the overwhelming majority of converts remained sympathetic to their former co-religionists and used their social and political connections to protect them. Thus Caesar Colclough of Tintern Abbey, County Wexford, who renounced his faith in 1712, maintained close relations with other branches of the family who remained Catholic at Duffrey Hall and Ballyteigue; his heirs continued to maintain Catholic middlemen and lease-holders on their estates and were liberals in politics. In the west the prominent parliamentarians Denis Daly and Robert French, both from convert families, favoured relief measures for Catholics, as did the independent country gentleman Charles O’Hara, a Sligo M.P. for more than thirty years. Even in Ulster there were examples of convert families, such as the Maguires of Tempo, County Fermanagh. Bizarrely, Hugh Maguire, who had conformed to the Anglican Church in 1743, maintained the family claim to the right of patronage over the parish priest of Enniskillen, in the face of opposition from the Catholic bishop. When the dispute was referred to Rome, one of Maguire’s supporters explained that he was ‘not a Protestant through hatred or malice but solely of necessity’.[91]

The explanation for the resilience of Irish Catholic worship thus lies partly in the resilience of Irish Catholic social patterns. Despite the experience of confiscation, banishment and legal repression, the continuity of social and economic structures is remarkable. The fate of the Catholic elite, as Whelan has found in County Wexford, was not one of outright dispossession, but ‘one of lateral translation, an internal, low key dislocation’.[92] As Jacobite Ireland was squeezed by the terms of the Williamite settlement, its higher social echelons were driven beneath the surface of public life. This does not mean, however, that they were pushed down to the swollen base where the vast majority hewed wood and drew water. Rather, they were reduced to the level of middlemen and leaseholders, the ranks from which the comfortable gentlemen farmers of the later eighteenth century emerged; or they sought to escape through the traditional cracks and outlets afforded by the continental regiments and the merchant houses of Bordeaux, Nantes, Cádiz and other Irish colonies overseas; or they secured estates, legal careers and even public office by means of tactical conformity to the Established Church. The key to the persistence and renewal of Catholicism was the wealth and influence possessed by Catholic and crypto-Catholic landlords and by the big farmers and traders who flourished under their protection. And the church itself was another essential part of these social patterns. Thomas Bray, who became Archbishop of Cashel in 1792, was the son of a Waterford wine merchant with brothers in the Ulster linen trade, the Spanish wine trade, one in London, one in Portugal, and another practising as a doctor in Falmouth. Through his mother, Margaret Power, he also had connections in the French church.[93]

At a local level, as we have seen, social relations between the confessional communities were characterised by a mixture of sporadic coercion and unofficial connivance. The same combination shaped ecclesiastical developments. From the 1720s the practice of the Catholic religion was seldom disrupted, but was always exercised with circumspection. In contrast to the parish churches of the Anglican establishment, situated on principal streets and with large graveyards, ‘popish’ mass-houses were usually tucked away on narrow lanes in overcrowded residential areas. Often they were converted stables or warehouses. Inside they might be furnished with railed-in altars, gilt candlesticks, paintings of the Blessed Virgin or of saints, and seating including special galleries reserved for ‘the better sort’.[94] But the city chapels were generally known not by their dedications but simply by their locations: Liffey Street, Arran Quay, Mary’s Lane, Francis Street, Cook Street, Dirty Lane, Rosemary Lane, Hawkins Street, Bridge Street, John’s Lane. In rural Ireland they were often pushed to the fringes of estates: the Loftus family of County Wexford, for example, tolerated the construction of a chapel on their estate only on condition that it was situated in a hollow, with fake chimneys to resemble an ordinary dwelling.[95] In the years after 1745 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal began to publish respectful obituary notices for Catholic ecclesiastics such as Bishop Colman O’Shaughnessy of Ossory, ‘a man truly pious’, Bishop Laurence Richardson of Kilmore, ‘an Eminent Roman Catholic Divine’, and Archbishop Lincoln of Dublin, ‘a man who was only governed by the Dictates of Religion, Humanity, and Friendship’. Strictly speaking, all were outlaws.[96]

In its public declarations, meanwhile, the Catholic Church during the penal era adopted the language of patient resignation and, from the 1760s, the cautious hope for some amelioration of its legal position. Above all, the hierarchy urged a resolute obedience to the powers that be. The bishops regularly condemned riots and disturbances. As early as 1729, when food shortages led to grain riots in Dublin, the local priests denounced the disturbances of ‘the common people’ from the altar.[97] They even praised the authorities for their leniency. The Catholics of Dublin ‘never dared Erect or Establish a Publick Chapple’, wrote one apologist during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but always chose ‘the least inoffensive [sic] place for their divine Service’. While the Lord Lieutenant was in residence they avoided causing provocation by continuing sermons or evening prayers. ‘They were content so that they got the needful, that is to say, the hearing of Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, which it self they take care to have over as soon as possible, for fear of being taken Notice of by the respective Congregations, or giving the least Umbrage to the higher powers.’[98]

The unspoken bargain of the penal era, then, demanded deference and supplication from the Catholics in return for de facto toleration. Increasingly those Protestants who sought to reform the ramshackle penal code aimed to regularise this situation. In the later 1750s, for example, Lord Clanbrassil sponsored a bill for putting a limited number of Catholic priests on a legal footing. Priests who registered under the scheme would be required to renounce the usual subversive doctrines attributed to them: that Catholics were not bound by oaths made with heretics, and that the papacy possessed a deposing power over Protestant rulers. But they were also required not to challenge the public dominance of the Established Church. Full penalties were to be imposed on any ecclesiastic who ‘shall presume to appear publickly in his Habit, or attempt any Procession without the Walls of the said Mass-house’.[99] Under the relief act of 1782, which finally abolished restrictions on Catholic worship, Catholics were still prohibited from public ceremonial and erecting towers or steeples. The penal church was not an underground organisation in the sense that the notion of a ‘hidden’ Ireland might suggest. The Protestant authorities accepted its unobtrusive presence in their towns and estates; what they could not stomach, however, was popery with attitude. Lucius O’Brien, an M.P. for County Clare who supported Catholic relief, no doubt spoke for many of his fellow parliamentarians when he shuddered at the thought of ‘Franciscans and Cordeliers going about the streets in their clerical dress’ or the titular Archbishop of Dublin ‘coaching about in his church habiliments with his crozier’.[100]

CONCLUSION

We are now in a better position to address our original question. This chapter has tried to explain the failure of the penal laws to destroy organised Catholicism by examining the resources available to both the Ascendancy regime and the Catholic Church. At the same time, it has suggested some of the reasons why Protestants nevertheless regarded the penal code as essential to their own safety. We have explored the means by which legal restrictions shaped the ‘combination of coercion and mutual accommodation’ that characterised Irish social relations in the localities.[101] In doing so we can better understand the apparent contradictions of the penal laws, which, as Anthony Foster (1705–79), Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer, famously explained to Arthur Young in 1776, ‘were severe in the letter, but they were never executed’.[102] Foster, whose son became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Speaker of the House of Commons, exemplified many of the conflicting attitudes of the Ascendancy towards confessional discrimination. He was the founder of a colony of fifty families of Protestant tradesmen from England and France at Collon, County Louth, and a resolute defender of the penal code; yet he was quick to assure Young that a mass-house was permitted in his own town. It may help, by way of conclusion, to restate more explicitly some of the reasons why the Ascendancy regime clung so tightly to this massive but muddled legislative apparatus, in spite of the fact that no one seriously believed that it could be rigorously enforced.

Part of the answer is that the optimistic interpretation of Catholic society, as Wall, Cullen and Connolly have all conceded, is only one-half of the picture. Wall’s focus on a rising Catholic middle class has been challenged by David Dickson, who has argued that the forfeiture of landed estates deprived Catholics of the capital resources necessary for education, a successful marriage or a career in wholesale trade. Turning to the propertied elite, we find that the bulk of Catholic estates had already been confiscated before 1704; the pattern of landholding was determined by seventeenth-century conquest rather than eighteenth-century legislation. Yet the objective of Protestant policy-makers was not to effect a revolution in land title but to prevent one: there were to be no Catholic inroads into the Protestant monopoly of land of the kind that had taken place after the Restoration. Finally, as Connolly recognises, anti-Catholic legislation was not aimed solely at the landed elite. In practice, the right to vote, formally restricted to Protestants after 1728, may often have meant little more than the ‘right’ to defer to a landlord’s preference. Yet English historians have emphasised that the electoral relationship between patron and voter was a delicate one, based on reciprocal obligations rather than intimidation, while even the unfranchised expected to play a role in the political process through participation in electoral parades and festivities. The limits of landlord influence were recognised by Lord Moira in 1800 when he explained that if he coerced his tenants, he would ‘revolt those who on other occasions give me real weight by following my influence’.[103]

The conditions of Catholic life between the 1720s and the 1770s, while seldom very oppressive, were nevertheless marked by profound insecurity. Families struggled with legal problems for many decades. In Wexford, for example, the Esmondes of Ballynestragh, the Redmonds of Killagowan and the Talbots of Castle Talbot were all plagued with litigation resulting from the penal laws.[104] Continuing social and political pressures were reflected in the number of conversions, which rose in successive decades until it peaked at an average of 131 a year in the 1760s. The bitter sectarianism provoked by the Whiteboy disturbances also had a traumatic effect on upper-class Catholics. Sir Patrick Bellew, disillusioned by the defeat of the mortgages bill of 1762, noted that the failure to secure such a modest concession ‘inclines many of our persuasion to think of breaking ground to settle in other countries of liberty and equality’, while Michael Bellew thought of leaving for France five years later ‘to preserve the religion of our posterity’.[105] Around the same time Thomas Wyse of Waterford, who had been one of the driving forces behind the Catholic Committee in the 1750s, considered emigrating, while David Nagle, the richest Catholic landowner in County Cork, left Ireland for the genteel anonymity of Bath.[106]

Secondly, Catholic clerics and gentlemen did sometimes fall foul of the law during periods of international tension. The earliest penal statutes had been military measures designed to ‘secure the Protestant interest’. Executions of French recruiting officers continued into the 1760s, the last being Dillon M’Namara, sentenced to death in 1764.[107] At the outbreak of the Seven Years War (1756–63) Archbishop Michael O’Reilly of Armagh was arrested on the evidence of an informer and brought before the local magistrate. Sometimes such measures may have been almost ritualistic in character. During the invasion scare of 1708, for example, the Catholic noblemen Antrim, Fingall and Mountgarrett were confined in Dublin Castle for refusing to take the oaths of supremacy and abjuration, but were expected to be speedily released following news that the French fleet had turned back.[108] Perhaps inevitably, such precautionary measures overlapped with forms of petty harassment. The Dublin priest Cornelius Nary complained that, at every rumour of invasion, Roman Catholic gentlemen ‘were sure to be taken up, to have the arms, which the few of them had, taken from them … to have their saddle and even their draught or plough-horses taken from them, and kept while the alarm continued’.[109] The penal law forbidding Catholics to carry arms was not repealed until 1793. It was enforced irregularly throughout the century at times of heightened tension. In June 1762, as Whiteboy agitation mounted in Tipperary, the arms prohibition was implemented at the Clonmel assizes and a reward offered by twenty-seven freeholders to anyone who apprehended Catholics in breach of it. In the 1770s the Wexford authorities offered rewards for prosecuting Catholics who had arms, and the closure of chapels where Whiteboys allegedly met was threatened in Counties Wexford, Carlow and Queen’s County.[110] In the same decade a series of prosecutions on the arms issue formed the background to the killing of Art O’Leary. Indeed, the mysterious fracas which led to O’Leary’s death began when he refused to sell his horse to Abraham Morris for £5 (strictly speaking, £5 5s)—as he was obliged to do under the 1695 ‘Act for the better securing the government by disarming papists’. One more example might suffice. The Armagh disturbances of the 1780s were triggered by advances in the social and political status of Catholics, most visibly and immediately their arms-bearing. At a time when liberal Volunteer companies suggested opening their ranks to all denominations, hostility mounted against upwardly mobile Catholics, those who ‘have taken the oath of allegiance, having got long leases, and of course … arms to shoot the sparrows from their grain’.[111] In the absence of any response from the county magistrates, local Protestant gangs who soon became known as the Peep o’ Day Boys staged a serious of nocturnal raids on Catholic homes, ‘supposing they might be justified in taking arms from those who were not qualified by Law to possess them’.[112]

In the face-to-face context of the village or parish, the penal laws were thus used to maintain and reinforce power relations. Another dramatic illustration of their function was the clampdown on Catholics in the early months of 1734, after the Bishop Thaddeus MacCarthy Reagh of Cork (1727–47) had been accused of collecting money for the Pretender. The complex background to this localised panic began in 1730 with the recruiting mission of Colonel Richard Hennessy, a French officer, to the Blackwater valley, where he had permission to enlist 750 men for the Irish Brigade. During the following year tensions were exacerbated by the report of a parliamentary inquiry into the extent of popery in Ireland. At the same time fresh penal measures concerning firearms and legal practice were blocked in London, partly, it seemed, as a result of lobbying organised by Thomas Woulfe in Dublin and Joseph Nagle in Cork.[113] The immediate trigger for trouble was the dismissal of a ‘scandalous’ priest, John Hennessy of Doneraile, from his parish by Bishop MacCarthy Reagh. This opportunist turned to the civil authorities, accused his bishop of collecting money for the Jacobite cause, and alleged that the Archbishop of Cashel himself had forwarded a papal bull granting a plenary indulgence to anyone who contributed money towards the restoration of ‘le Pretendant’. The authorities then seized the bishop’s papers, which included a list of donations made to a fund established for the lobbying of M.P.s. Cashel reported to Brussels that most chapels were closed for six weeks, that all correspondence was opened, that more parliamentary legislation was threatened, and that the clergy ‘live in fear and are always on their guard’ (nous fait reste dans la crainte, et sur nos gardes).[114]

Another way of making this argument is to distinguish, in terminology borrowed from the political scientist James C. Scott, between the ‘public’ and the ‘hidden transcripts’ of eighteenth-century Irish society. Scott’s theories, it should be made clear from the beginning, originated in anthropological field studies of class relations in a Malaysian village during the late 1970s, and may appear to be of questionable relevance to Cork or Tipperary under the Hanoverians. From his work on the peasants of south-east Asia, however, he has increasingly written more generally about the powerless, from Russian serfs and American slaves to colonised peoples. His work has also been profoundly influenced by E. P. Thompson’s analysis of food riots in eighteenth-century England and the ‘moral economy’ theory discussed in Chapter 9 below. Scott’s principal objective was to rectify the assumption that peasants who were not engaged in direct confrontation were assumed to be quiescent. Like Ascendancy Ireland, the very diverse cases studied by Scott are all cases where open insurrection or public protest was likely to lead to brutal retaliation. His focus has been on what he calls ‘infrapolitics’, that is, low-profile, everyday forms of resistance to authority that typically include foot-dragging, dissimulation, desertion, pilfering and arson, and which, he believes, are just as important as the more spectacular examples of open revolt that historians have long studied.[115]

Appearances, in such unequal societies, can be deceptive. In public life, according to Scott, ‘a carefully calculated conformity prevails’ on the part of those who cannot afford the luxury of organised political mobilisation.[116] Subordinate groups have a strategic interest in colluding with the ruling elite and in acting out the submissive roles proscribed by their superiors. But under the surface (or ‘offstage’, as Scott puts it) the language of the poor, their alternative histories, folksongs and rituals, form a ‘hidden transcript’ that belies the outward posture of deference. The historian might interpret the apparent acquiescence of the ruled as a fatalistic acceptance of the idealistic social order propagated by the rulers. In the Irish case, certainly, eighteenth-century Catholics have often been pictured as supine or inert. Alternatively, the rituals of deference can be viewed as routine or hollow, and the historian can attempt the more difficult task of searching for evidence of the everyday, local acts of insubordination through which Catholics made their presence felt. The temporary imprisonment of prominent Catholics as a wartime measure, like the harassment of the ‘titular’ Catholic hierarchy, served a practical, defensive purpose. Such acts also had symbolic functions: like the mutual understanding which kept mass-houses away from town centres and main thoroughfares, they offered symbolic reassurance to the vastly outnumbered Protestant elite. By keeping the contradictions and anomalies of eighteenth-century Ireland out of public view, the penal code permitted the Ascendancy to admire its own confident self-portrait, undisturbed by the continuing challenge posed by the resilience of the majority faith on the island.

Ample evidence exists, of course, of continuing Protestant insecurity. For several decades after the Williamite war the Protestant authorities regularly reported on the ‘insolence’ or ‘dejection’ which they found among the Irish Catholics depending on the vicissitudes of European warfare and diplomacy. Nerves were particularly rattled during the war of 1702–13, when most of the key penal statutes were passed. In 1704 news of minor French advances ‘did so much to exalt the Papists in this kingdom, that they grew insolent and took liberty of talking more largely than ever they durst since 1691’, while the Catholics grew so ‘insolent’ before Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim that one correspondent believed they were ‘ripe for a new rebellion’.[117] During the long Anglo-French détente announced in 1716 Jacobite hopes turned towards Spain. Towards the end of 1718, welcoming news of the measures taken against Spain in the English parliament, the Bishop of Meath warned that the ‘Popish Natives’ were ‘Sanguine beyond measure’ that their religion would soon be restored.[118] A Spanish fleet was dispatched from Cádiz in the following spring with the aim of invading Scotland, but was dispersed by storms. In Cork a Protestant gentleman reported that papists were in ‘nightly expectations’ of the planned invasion, adding that ‘a very little encouragement would have made them throw off the mask’.[119] In October 1745, with Scotland under Jacobite occupation, the mask did begin to slip. William Cooley, the steward of Lohort Castle, reported that the ‘insolencies’ of the Irish were already beginning with minor offences such as sheep-stealing. A servant he had dismissed sneered to Cooley’s wife that ‘he hoped soon to see the day he would not be obliged to slave for 5d a day’. Another servant, refused the loan of a horse by a local gentleman named Thornhill, replied that ‘he soon hoped to take the best in his Stable and give him no Thanks’.[120] Unsurprisingly, then, Catholic professions of loyalty and peaceableness were taken with a pinch of salt. In situations such as this, as Scott has argued, deference should not be taken to imply consent, nor is it taken this way by the dominant group. Instead this ‘public transcript’ should be regarded as a sham performance.[121]

To some extent the same was true of the more elevated pronouncements of the Catholic hierarchy. The importance of public order, of subjection to the higher powers (whatever their religion might be), and the wickedness of riot and disorder, were the consistent themes of Catholic teaching, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century. Grain rioters, faction-fighters, workers’ combinations, Whiteboys, Rightboys and Defenders were all condemned from the pulpit, as, of course, were the United Irishmen. Yet the injunctions of loyalty were essentially prudential. The Hanoverian succession, endlessly praised as a guarantor of Britain’s Protestant faith, could not be seen as part of the historical fabric of Catholic Ireland. Unlike their Anglican and Presbyterian counterparts, Catholic priests seldom troubled their parishioners with accounts of the origins of political power or the evolution of the ancient constitution, but simply recorded their gratitude for the ‘mildness’ of Hanoverian governments. The glorious memory of William III received a limited acknowledgment, at least in retrospect, for his commitment to religious toleration, and up to the 1790s Catholic pamphleteers recalled his generous treatment of Roman Catholics in Holland.[122] Likewise, the first two Hanoverians were commended as European rather than as British rulers. That the loyal declarations of the hierarchy were regarded as essentially tactical was suggested by a protest sent to the Catholic clergy of Lazer’s Hill, in Dublin, following the excommunication of several United Irishmen:

We never before thought any of our clergy false or ill heard we thought they ware men of piaty men of love men of god Until last Sunday we often heared their admonitions which we apprehended was to keep them selves from the cinsure of government but how great was our astonishment on last sunday when we could hear ourselves Cursed and excommunicated like by the ministers of that Very Church we are suffering for.[123]

If we are to understand fully the role of penal statutes in underpinning Protestant Ascendancy, then, we must move away from material considerations to examine more elusive psychological factors. Along with the charter school movement, the penal legislation helped to paper over the painful gap between the official view of Ireland as a Protestant kingdom and the troubling reality of a recalcitrant, largely Catholic population. It concealed the realities of continued social and political conflict, for the most part experienced at the level of everyday, face-to-face relationships, with the illusion of permanence and stability. Ultimately the penal code was not about conversion so much as control, and systems of control work best when the dominant social groups are able to project their view of the world as part of the natural order. In this respect, as in the ecclesiastical and economic spheres, the penal code achieved only a temporary and partial success. Nevertheless, for much of the eighteenth century the popery laws succeeded in marking the boundaries of the public sphere in a Protestant kingdom where the state religion was rejected by nine-tenths of the population. Conversely, the abandonment of the penal code signified the admission that Protestants had failed in their mission to bring Ireland into conformity with English norms, and that they were destined to remain a permanent minority in a hostile land.

7

Bishops, Priests and People

In June 1753 Bishop John Brett of Elphin wrote to Cardinal Lercari in Rome to recommend a former student for a bishopric. Brett recalled his first meeting with Lercari at ‘the Minerva’, and the kindness the cardinal had shown him both in Rome and in the papal enclave of Avignon.[1] Commendations for ecclesiastical positions were the most common theme in letters between Ireland and the Vatican, just as matters of patronage and preferment dominate most formal correspondence of all kinds from the mid-eighteenth century. Occasionally, however, a casual detail helps to animate the sparse biographies of Irish priests, about whom so little is known. Today, ‘the Minerva’—the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva—is popular with tourists, who gather around Michelangelo’s statue of ‘Christ bearing the Cross’ or Filippino Lippi’s series of frescoes on the life of St Thomas Aquinas. During the eighteenth century, as the headquarters of the Dominican Order, it was one of several churches at Rome through which Irish business was occasionally routed. At other times communications were directed to the beautiful church of San Clemente, granted to the Irish Dominicans in 1677, or occasionally to San Isidoro, home of the little Irish Franciscan college. Brett had spent several years in Rome, as a teacher at the Dominican college and as ‘penitentiary’ at Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the most splendid basilicas in the city.[2] In 1743, however, he returned to Ireland, at first to the impoverished bishopric of Killala and subsequently to Elphin. Now, a decade later, he found himself apologising to Lercari for his rusty Italian and lamenting his fate as ‘a poor exile in this Siberia of the west’.[3]

The diocese of Elphin, it hardly needs stressing, was a long way from the baroque splendour of the Eternal City. In Rome a gifted Irish cleric had the opportunity of close contact with popes, cardinals and prominent members of the religious orders. He might attend the royal court of the exiled Stuarts: at least one, Michael MacDonogh, was briefly chaplain to his sovereign, ‘James III’, and acted as confessor to his son and heir Prince Charles Edward.[4] Several Irishmen became permanent residents, including Charles O’Kelly of Roscommon, who moved there from Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755 destroyed the Irish college of Corpo Santo. As theologian of the magnificent Casanatense library at the Minerva, O’Kelly spent another forty years in Rome.[5] Most of his fellow-countrymen, of course, returned to the Irish mission. On leaving Rome, they would make their way through the Catholic heartland of southern Europe, through cities where the public spaces were dominated by Catholic cathedrals and churches, where the habit was publicly worn, where religious confraternities were a vital part of the social fabric, and the annual calendar was organised around fasts and feast-days. Eventually they would embark for Ireland, perhaps at Bordeaux or Lisbon, sometimes disguised as merchants. Ahead of them lay the islands of the ‘haeretici’ (heretics), where bishops signed their letters ‘ex loco refugii’—or, as we might put it today, ‘on the run’.[6]

Another distinguished ‘Roman’ in the Irish church, John Thomas Troy, kept a journal for seven weeks as he travelled back from San Clemente in 1777. It offers a rare glimpse of the cultural distance that separated Ireland from the continent. The long journey began with four days in the well-cultivated lands of the Papal States—all ‘Hills and Villages interspersed with Corn, Vines, Olives and fruit Trees’—before reaching the Tuscan city of Siena. The next day Troy was welcomed in Florence by the prior of the monastery of Santa Maria Novella, where he spent Holy Week. In nearby Prato, likewise, Troy was well received by a number of Dominicans whom he knew from the Minerva. Here, and at Pistoia, Lucca and Pisa, he visited churches, listened to well-known preachers, and drank hot chocolate with local priests. Rather less pleasant was the rough crossing from the Italian port of Leghorn (Livorno) to Marseille. During six days at sea Dr Troy found he could keep nothing in his stomach but chicken broth. Predictably, given his education, he disapproved of the French church with its Gallican (or anti-papal) tinge. In Marseille and Aix he judged the friars ignorant, undisciplined and corrupted by the ‘heresy’ of Jansenism (see below). After three days in Avignon, a papal enclave until it was annexed by the French National Assembly in the early years of the revolution, Troy set out for Lyons and then Paris, taking ‘the Diligence’, a kind of stage-coach. It transpired that one of his fellow travellers was Thomas Knox, M.P. for Carlingford.[7] Troy’s itinerary, ironically, was not that different from the Grand Tour popular among the young gentleman of the Ascendancy: he had visited the art collections of the Uffizi, the Boboli Gardens, the ‘Hanging Tower’ of Pisa, and Versailles. Once back in Ireland, of course, the status of these two men would be very different indeed.

Although the route home sometimes varied, other Irishmen had similar experiences. In the summer of 1763 James Lyons, a student at the Collegio Urbano, made the journey from Rome to Sligo. He too set sail from Leghorn, a cosmopolitan town whose 45,000 inhabitants included Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Turks and around thirty-six English families.[8] After six days at sea, unable to eat, he complained that even the smell of the boat made him feel sick. Like Troy, he disliked French ecclesiastical ceremonies.[9] For the majority of students, in particular those training in Paris or Louvain, the journey was obviously much shorter, but sometimes arduous: in 1777 it still took eighteen days for a County Tyrone priest to get to Paris.[10] Wherever they travelled, however, these students had access to the remarkable Irish diaspora, which was so vital to the survival of Irish Catholicism. Troy encountered Irishmen at almost every turn: priests who had settled on the continent, students on the way to Rome, officers of the Irish regiments, and a variety of other emigrants such as one Mr Brennan, a ship-chandler from Kilkenny who had settled at Leghorn.[11] Many ports in France and Spain had significant Irish colonies. In Cádiz, for example, the Irish numbered 125 families by 1773, having increased significantly after the monopoly of trade with the Indies was transferred from Seville in 1717.[12] When Father John Kavanagh, a Wexford priest serving on a French man-of-war, went ashore there in 1782, he met a shoemaker from Cork, a priest from the diocese of Ossory, Father Felix McCabe, chaplain to a French gentleman, and three Augustinian friars, one of them chaplain to the Ulster regiment in the Spanish service. At this time, indeed, the governor of the city was Count Alexander O’Reilly, originally of County Cavan.[13]

Unlike the Presbyterian ministers who went to Glasgow or Edinburgh for a university education, Catholic priests did not have the option of returning home for part of the year; and often the period they spent abroad was surprisingly long. John Brett’s gifted pupil, Thomas Burke, arrived in Rome at the age of thirteen, took the habit at San Clemente in 1724, and continued to study and teach there for eighteen years. Troy himself arrived at the Irish Dominican convent in 1756 and remained there for twenty-one years.[14] Both men later served as Bishop of Ossory; and Troy, who succeeded to the archbishopric of Dublin in 1786, would become the most influential ecclesiastic of his day. In what sense can it be said that the formative experiences and mental outlook of these two key figures were ‘Irish’? The same question might be asked of Patrick Plunkett, who led the ‘Gallican’ party against Troy in the 1780s: after all, he had spent twenty-seven years in France before his postulation to the bishopric of Meath. It was Plunkett who later won the admiration of Wolfe Tone, when he dined with the Ulster bishops in 1792 and was surprised to find them ‘men of such manners and understanding’.[15] In the nineteenth century critics of the dour graduates produced by Maynooth would recall with nostalgia their predecessors who had acquired in Paris ‘a polished demeanour … and an appreciation of the refinements and delicacies of life’.[16] There were also drawbacks, as we saw in the previous chapter, including the loss of a large number of Irish students who found employment on the continent. One critic of the Irish church, writing in 1751, complained that ‘stupid, idle, and unlearned fellows’ were immediately given parishes while the most able clerical students ‘settle abroad, and never come home, or come home so late in life, that they are not very useful’.[17]

While the merits of the Irish colleges might be debated, it seems likely that such prolonged absences led to culture clashes between priests and people. For one thing, students at the continental colleges sometimes ‘forgot’ their Irish. When James Lyons returned to Ireland after eight years, he spent some time in Dublin before travelling to Connacht, ‘learning my native language (which I forgot in Rome)’.[18] In 1782 the priest of Termon, County Tyrone, asked to be transferred to another parish, the ostensible reason being that, ‘the Irish language is the prevailing one of which I am not a master’.[19] It is true that the Collège des Lombards also contributed significantly to the survival of Gaelic learning. Andrew Donlevy, whose Irish catechism, An teagasg Criosduidhe, do reir ceasda agus freagartha (1742), was published in Paris, was a superior at the Lombard College. Ten years earlier, Conor Begley and Hugh MacCurtin had dedicated their Irish–English dictionary to the Abbé Vaubrun, the great patron of the Irish College.[20] Later John O’Brien dedicated his Focaloir Gaoidhilge–Sax-Bhearla: or, An Irish–English dictionary (1768) to Cardinal Castelli, the Prefect of Propaganda. Appealing to Rome for financial assistance in 1764, he pointed out that the majority of Catholics, living in the country, in villages or in small towns, could not speak English; they learned their catechism, recited their prayers, and made their confession all in Irish.[21] O’Brien himself preached fluently in Irish, but other clerics were often unwilling or unable to use their native tongue. On New Year’s Day 1747, when Bishop Peter Creagh of Waterford preached at Carrick-on-Suir, the people ‘prayed him loudly about the middle of his discourse to give the rest in Irish’.[22]

THE PRIESTHOOD

Bishops such as Brett, Burke and Troy, with their amphibious backgrounds, were learned and ‘polite’ figures; but what of the ordinary priests they found in their dioceses? For much of the penal era the priesthood, and in particular the regulars, received a bad press. Reports to the Brussels nuncio or to Propaganda Fide were, more often than not, negative. As always, it is important to bear in mind that Irish Catholicism was riddled with factional rivalries—longstanding provincial loyalties, the mutual suspicion of the ‘Romans’ and those trained at the Collège des Lombards, and the recurrent clashes between seculars and regulars. The last category of dispute was particularly ferocious, with each side pursuing its grievances in hyperbolic denunciations regularly dispatched to the continent. In the case of a bishopric falling vacant, a flurry of letters would pass between Ireland, the Brussels nunciature, Propaganda Fide, and the king of Catholic Ireland, ‘James III’. There were recommendations from various bishops, declarations of support from diocesan chapters, and petitions from local gentlemen—including some who had converted to Protestantism.[23] There were proviseurs at the Collège des Lombards, masters at Louvain and Antwerp making representations on behalf of friends, in addition to relatives and associates. And finally, in Rome itself, there were various agents, sometimes working together but more often not. Solidarity in the face of adversity, as Hugh Fenning once remarked, has never been an Irish virtue.[24]

Of all these fault-lines, it was the long-running tension between seculars and regulars that eventually provoked the major crisis of the period. Their mutual animosity even extended to the remote mission field of Montserrat, where an excitable Irish Dominican likened the secular priests to the Williamite army of 1691. God, he complained, ‘permits our enemy to attack us from behind to be sacrificed as the Irish troops at Aughrim on their rear’.[25] From the 1720s, when the Ascendancy’s confessional drive began to falter, Catholic calls for reform gathered momentum, culminating in two remarkable decrees promulgated by Pope Benedict XIV. Under the first, issued in 1741, Irish bishops were forbidden to ordain more than twelve priests during their lifetimes, a restriction that soon prompted a flurry of requests for dispensations. In 1750 a second devastating blow came when the religious orders were prohibited from receiving novices within Ireland. By the 1760s there were already complaints from bishops that the scarcity of priests meant that many of the rural poor ‘die without the help of a clergyman and even without the sacraments’.[26] As we saw earlier, almost half the total number of priests in the kingdom was made up by Franciscans, Dominicans, Discalced Carmelites and Augustinians. In theory, their novices were to be of good family and exemplary conduct and were required to spend one year of probation in a religious house under the strict supervision of a master, where they should have acquired Latin and some vocational training. In practice, however, many were not worthy of the habit.[27] Part of the problem was the expense of the continental college system. It had become customary for both secular and regular priests to proceed to ordination before they left for their continental training; young Irish students were thus assured of a small income from saying masses, and their parents were certain of a return on the financial investment they had made. The major drawback, according to the proviseurs at the Collège des Lombards, was that these older, ordained priests were poorly educated and ill-disciplined, and consequently their behaviour had become a source of some embarrassment in Paris.[28]

The criticisms directed at the Irish church were by no means confined to the regulars, but there were two particular reasons why the religious orders became scapegoats. One was financial hardship. Contemporaries commented that priests and friars were drawn ‘from the very lowest of the people, and extremely poor’, with the exception of bishops and other dignitaries.[29] The picture was rather more complicated than that. In 1800, when statistics were gathered in advance of the Act of Union, it was revealed that the average income for a parish priest was £65 per annum, but this conceals massive variation from as much £300 in the united diocese of Kildare and Leighlin to £25 in the wardenship of Galway.[30] On the face of it, these figures did not compare very unfavourably with the stipends received by Presbyterian ministers. On the eve of the Act of Union only two Presbyterian clergymen earned more than £150; and 70 per cent of them (131) earned less than £60, the Synod of Ulster’s proposed minimum stipend.[31] Exact comparisons are admittedly very difficult to make, given other sources of income (from the keeping of schools, payments in kind, etc.) and outgoings (a parish priest might pay £10 for a curate). The Synod of Ulster also had the advantage of the regium donum, an annual state subsidy received directly from the crown. Although the amount was small—rising from just £1,600 (1718) to £2,600 (1784) to £3,100 (1792)—it was a guaranteed lump sum divided evenly between the clergy.[32] Even the Established Church, funded by the state and the landed gentry, complained of limited resources. In the 1730s it was estimated that there were about 700 beneficed Anglican clergymen in Ireland, with half as many again in holy orders—either working as curates (assistants), or as teachers in colleges, schools or as family chaplains. Very few parishes could provide more than £500, and most considerably lower, so that the church allegedly found it hard to attract members of the best families in the kingdom. It was said that lucky ordinands, who might pay up to £300 for their education, could expect a cure of £30 or £40 per annum, followed by promotion to a living somewhere between £70 and £100.[33] Many of the beneficed clergy, of course, possessed more than one living, and might also supplement their income with private resources.

Just as important as the amount received by the parish priest was the manner in which it was collected. The main sources of income were Christmas and Easter dues, paid by the heads of families, combined with the fees charged for marriages, baptisms, funerals and various other services. Often collections took place at the chapel gate or at parishioners’ houses. In some cases ‘offerings’ were levied when the penitent received absolution—provoking one critic to protest at the shocking prospect of ‘the spiritual Director extending one hand to give the absolution, and the other hand to receive his six pence’.[34] A variety of payments in kind, depending on local custom, might also be expected. Finally, priests relied on the hospitality of their parishioners, both at christenings or marriages, and after a ‘station’—the holding of confession and communion in a private house. Bishops, in addition to receiving an income from one or two ‘mensal’ parishes attached to the diocese but worked by a curate, levied an annual charge from their diocesan clergy, and also charged for dispensations granted to couples who wanted to marry without the proclamation of banns.[35] Although these charges sometimes became the target of popular resentment, most notably during the Rightboy disturbances of the 1780s, they amounted to a sophisticated system of communal organisation outside—and, in a sense, against—the formal structures of the state.

The parochial clergy, then, were often forced to go ‘questing’ about the parish in much the same way that the mendicant friars did. Clashes of jurisdiction between regulars and seculars were a feature of all Catholic communities; but in Ireland both groups begged for food in the countryside in competition with each other.[36] A second cause of division was the tendency of the Protestant authorities to reserve their harshest condemnation for the regulars. The framers of the first penal laws had attached particular importance to the expulsion of the orders, since they were not only an economic burden but ‘bear a greater sway amongst the people than the secular priests and are more irreconcilable to their majesties’ government’.[37] Consequently, it has been suggested that a number of Dublin ecclesiastics, led by Archbishop Richard O’Reilly, were prepared to sacrifice the religious orders in the interests of a rapprochement with the government. In this way they might take advantage of the ‘registration’ scheme first floated by Bishop Edward Synge in the 1720s, which combined a limited toleration for parish priests who took the oath of allegiance, together with the expulsion of all ‘friars’. Significantly, Cornelius Nary, the Dublin priest who explored the possibility of an oath of allegiance to the Hanoverians, hinted that he was willing to sacrifice the regulars in return for a legal footing.[38]

Repeated calls for the reform of Irish abuses came from various quarters at home and abroad. In 1733 John Bourke, one of the four clerical proviseurs at the Lombard College, protested to Rome that the standards of neither clergy nor laity had improved since the sixteenth-century Council of Trent.[39] He recommended a drastic reduction in the supply of priests in order to put an end to the scandals that resulted from the exorbitant number ‘roving about without any function but to say Mass, to marry young couples, and to empty barrels’. In particular Bourke complained of Dominic O’Daly, the Dominican Bishop of Achonry, who, if not stopped, ‘will ordain enough for the whole kingdom’—ordination, of course, being another obvious source of fees.[40] In support of his view he enclosed a copy of a letter from Archbishop Christopher Butler of Cashel lamenting the conduct of his confreres ‘qui multiplient les etres sacrez sans necessité et sans choisir des sujets convenables’ and calling for a papal decree which would prohibit for five years all ordinations and the admission of novices to religious profession in Ireland.[41] Bizarrrely, then, after four decades of anti-Catholic legislation, the Archbishop of Cashel found himself calling for a freeze on the ordination of regular priests. Nothing could be further from the traditional picture of the penal era.

There was still worse to come. At the end of 1738 the Congregation of Propaganda Fide received an anonymous letter written on behalf of the ‘zelanti di Dublino’, complaining of non-residence among the Irish bishops. The zealous men of Dublin were led by Archbishop John Linegar and by the two vicars general, Patrick Fitzsimons and John Clinch. The most conspicuous offenders, they claimed, were the Bishops of Killaloe, Meath and Kilmore, none of whom had lived in their dioceses during the last ten years. As a result, the lower clergy had grown negligent, the catechism was not taught, and all this at a time when the Protestant charter school movement was gaining momentum.[42] In particular they singled out Sylvester Lloyd of Killaloe, who had not spent a month in his diocese for five years, but preferred to rove around western Europe looking for money.[43] (Whether these peregrinations were linked to Lloyd’s activities as a Jacobite conspirator is not clear.) This reform policy was continued by Linegar’s successor, Richard Lincoln (1757–63), who lobbied to extend further his authority over both the regular orders and the confraternities. He urged his Roman agent to warn the Prefect of Propaganda about the scandal caused by ‘pecuniary sodalities, expositions of the Blessed Sacrament perhaps twice a weak ad nauseam populi to swell their collections at the door, [and] processions of three or four score lubberly fellows with scapulars about their shoulders’.[44]

Crucially, there were three cardinals in Rome at this time with unhappy experience of Irish affairs. Silvio Valenti-Gonzaga and Giuseppe Spinelli had both been nuncios in Brussels, while Nereo Corsini was Protector of Ireland from 1737 to 1770. A fourth cardinal, Domenico Passionei, had organised an episcopal visitation of the Irish Franciscan college at Prague, while he was nuncio in Vienna. The result was a scorching report, submitted in 1739. Among the Dominicans of Louvain and the Franciscans of Prague, apparently, there was little of the formal observance required in monastic communities: the students were allegedly ignorant and violent, and were eating, drinking and consorting with women outside the college. Even at St Isidore’s, the Franciscan convent in Rome, there were reports of personal quarrels, riots and poor educational standards.[45] In Paris, meanwhile, there were repeated complaints about indiscipline at the Lombard College during the 1730s and 1740s.[46] The upshot of all this criticism was the appointment of John Kent, president of the Irish College at Louvain, as a ‘visitator’ to Ireland in the summer of 1742, who duly furnished the unflattering evidence required to curb the flow of novices from Ireland. Thus it was that the friars, having survived repeated attempts to enforce the expulsion order contained in the Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697, fell victim to their enemies within the Catholic Church.

How then should we measure the pastoral standards of the Irish church during the penal times? The qualifications of the exemplary pastor were laid out in the ‘constitutions’ of the diocese of Cashel, circulated by Archbishop Christopher Butler in 1737 and reissued in 1750. Butler drew inspiration from the epistles of St Paul and the Psalms, the Church Fathers and the Counter-Reformation saint Charles Borromeo of Milan. Above all, he adhered to the decisions of the Council of Trent (1545–63), which established the doctrinal and pastoral standards that still dominated Catholic Europe in the eighteenth century. Butler stressed the dignity and authority of priests at the altar, in the confessional seat and in the pulpit. All should be able to recite the Breviary (the daily service), and should be diligent and devout; confessors must be free from censure in their own lives and not be lenient towards their penitents. Butler feared the scandal caused by ‘some of us reveling, perhaps from the market place, from idle company and conversation, into a Church or Chapel and then hurrying on the sacred ornaments to mount the altar’.[47] Priests should not be seen in taverns or ‘tippling houses’; they should avoid playing cards, dice and the ‘public sports’ that were customary on Sundays and holy days; they should shun balls, dancing and horseracing.[48] Their functions should be performed with devotion and gravity, and priests were not to be seen ‘galloping’ over the Office of the Dead.[49] It was vital that on Sundays and other festival days the children in every parish were to be taught carefully the rudiments of the faith and the importance of obedience to both God and to their parents.

How should this document be interpreted? To assume that such high standards were actually demanded and enforced by eighteenth-century bishops would be excessively optimistic. In the case of one particularly odious abuse, the possibility that a confessor might ‘solicit his penitent to any carnal commerce’ or confer on ‘unclean and lascivious matters’, Cashel noted that his diocesans were mercifully free from suspicion; otherwise he gives the impression of dealing with very real problems.[50] Yet what had moved him to draw up the ‘constitutions’ in the first place was his conviction that the brief Latin statutes previously available had made little impression.[51] In the same year that they first appeared an Irish Dominican at Louvain got into trouble with the Holy Office at Rome for publishing a handbook for priests on the Irish mission. This was the unfortunate Dominic Brullaughan, whose De missione et missionariis catalogued in uncomfortable detail the temptations faced by missionaries; the book was suppressed lest it should be ‘a cause of scandal to the faithful and be derided by Protestants’.[52] With chapter headings like ‘De ebriete, quae est causa spriritualis caecitas & ignorantiae’ (Of drunkenness, the cause of spiritual blindness and ignorance), this was perhaps no surprise.[53]

If the constitutions of Cashel offer an idealised image of the saintly pastor, the historian can turn to the mission reports of John O’Brien, the cantankerous Bishop of Cloyne and Ross, for grim accounts of some of the sinners. The first half of the eighteenth century was the golden age of missionary activity on the continent, particularly in the rural heartlands of France, Spain and Italy; not since the early centuries of Christianity had the Catholic Church been activated by such a vigorous missionary impulse. Teams of Jesuits, Capuchins and Particular Redemptorists conducted lengthy visitations, held large open-air masses, catechised, preached, and provided assistance to the poor. Typically, a week or more of spiritual exercises would climax with the examination of the sinner’s conscience in preparation for confession and communion. Often too the faithful were subjected to the hellfire sermons and shock tactics of ‘the Italian method’ made famous by Father Paolo Segneri, who travelled barefoot through the Papal States and northern Italy in the later seventeenth century, inspiring a whole generation of self-flagellating revivalists. Their repertoire involved processions of penitents, some of them wearing crowns of thorns or carrying a cross, and culminated in the spectacle of a missionary scourging himself before a groaning crowd.[54]

Under the penal code, this sort of theatricality was avoided—one reason, perhaps, why the spread of new devotions such as the Sacred Heart or the Stations of the Cross came relatively late to Ireland. Nevertheless, Bishop O’Brien advocated the adoption of missions throughout Ireland, and so in the summers of 1765 and 1766 he conducted full-scale campaigns throughout his two dioceses, lasting for four months and requiring around fifteen clergymen to assist him. In each parish, apparently with the approbation of local Protestant magistrates, he spent around four days, engaged in instruction, mass, general confession and communion. It is worth noting that O’Brien was another Irish bishop with a long continental background: he had spent eighteen years on the European mainland, studying for degrees in both theology and canon law in Toulouse and at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then working as a tutor to an Irish noble family in the Spanish service. There are signs that he was not the easiest man to get on with; and he certainly maintained a long-running feud with the Butlers of Cashel. So dreaded was his summons that the path to his house near Castlelyons was known as bóithrín an chrá (the avenue of torment).[55]

O’Brien was dismayed to discover that many of his flock had never been to confession before, and, as we shall see, he was shocked by the prevalence of ‘incest’. The most troublesome sexual irregularities, however, were not those of the laity but those of his own parish priests. In 1765 he found nine or ten women in the parish of Glanworth who had been raped in the confessional chamber (qui ont été corrompues par force dans la chamber ou leur curé entendoit leur confession). The occasions included confession before marriage and Easter duties; others declared that while he was giving extreme unction ‘il se mettoit dans leur lit et les corrompoit lorsquelles ne pouvoient pas lui resister’. Each woman, apparently, had been corrupted many times, and then ‘absolved’ for what she had done. What made this case particularly shocking was that the priest, Patrick Nagle, had been in the running for a bishopric. In the following year O’Brien complained to the Prefect of Propaganda about Jeremiah Donovan of Kilmeen, the alleged father of a horde of illegitimate children.[56] Lastly, he fought a long campaign against Florence MacCarthy of Clondrohid, a concubinary for more than twenty years who was guilty of similar crimes to Nagle.[57]

The issues of clerical concubinage and of solicitation in the confessional were just two more examples, albeit particularly ugly ones, of the gap between continental ideals and Irish realities.[58] The celibacy of priests was central to post-Tridentine Catholicism. By their sexual abstinence, the priesthood elevated themselves above the profane world, not to mention their Protestant counterparts; they also exposed themselves to particular temptations. Archbishop Christopher Butler had urged his suffragans to preach through the example of their lives, clinging to ‘the amiable virtue of purity and continence’ and never forgetting their vows of chastity.[59] In Galway Patrick O’Brien, denouncing ‘impurity and drunkenness’ as the two great vices of the Irish church, warned that a priest would be reviled ‘if publicly without shame and honour, nay in spite and in contempt of his superior’s orders, he entertains a strumpet’.[60] In much of Europe concubinage had not been a major issue after 1600, though problems persisted in rural areas well into the eighteenth century.[61] The same was true of ‘solicitation’ in the confessional, which covered both suggestive conversation and actual sexual contact.[62] One of the advantages of the confessional box, first introduced by Charles Borromeo of Milan, was that it discouraged the sexual harassment of female parishioners by confessors. In Ireland, however, priests met their penitents, as Archbishop Butler of Cashel explained, ‘in wretched cabins and often by a ditchside’.[63]

Even egregious examples of sexual incontinence, as Bishop John O’Brien discovered, could prove difficult to resolve. There were several branches of Nagles clustered around the Blackwater valley of north Cork, forming one the most important Catholic landed families to survive the seventeenth century confiscations. They were wealthy, they had connections both in London (including Edmund Burke, a first cousin of Patrick Nagle) and at the Jacobite court; and their influence explains why the women of Glanworth were afraid to challenge their parish priest.[64] Jeremiah Donovan also had powerful relatives, this time including Protestants. Even more infuriating was Florence MacCarthy: O’Brien suspended him in front of a public assembly of parishioners, only to discover that the recalcitrant priest enjoyed the backing of James Butler I, Archbishop of Cashel, his relative John Butler, Bishop of Cork, and ‘some Protestant friends’.[65] The church, perhaps more anxious to protect the authority of its priests than the welfare of their parishioners, avoided washing its dirty linen in front of the Protestants, and the situation was slow to improve. In 1750 Felix Cleary, parish priest of St John’s, Waterford, was accused by a sailor of getting his wife pregnant, and was deprived by his bishop.[66] Five years later a parish priest in the city of Limerick was suspended after two women claimed to have borne children by him.[67] In both cases, interestingly, the degraded priests retained popular support, and clergymen sent to replace them came under physical attack by local mobs.

Perhaps the most fundamental requirement of ‘Tridentine Catholicism’ was the residence and activism of bishops, the central agents in implementing reform. For two or three decades after the Bishops’ Banishment Act it was difficult for bishops to live in their dioceses, let alone hold annual synods or visit their parishes. Complaints of episcopal non-residence in the 1730s, on the other hand, are harder to explain. Matters first came to a head in 1735, when the nuncio, Archbishop Silvio Valenti-Gonzaga, brought the problem to the attention of Rome. At this time the Bishop of Waterford, now an old man, was living in France; the Bishop of Kilfenora lived at Tournai, where he held a canonry and was treasurer of the cathedral; and the Bishop of Ferns was constantly on the move without a valid explanation; while Silvester Lloyd of Killaloe was at Spa in Flanders because of ill-health. In the diocese of Achonry, meanwhile, eight priests reported that Bishop Dominic O’Daly resided fifty miles away, and visited his diocese just once a year to extort money from his impoverished priests.[68] In the following year Propaganda Fide issued a decree enforcing residence on the Bishops of Waterford and Kilfenora.[69] Long after Protestant attempts to enforce the Bishops’ Banishment Act had been abandoned, it was still understandable that bishops might want to spend much of their time in the capital. In 1751 Laurence Richardson, Bishop of Kilmore, listed six reasons why he should be permitted to reside in Dublin, concentrating on the poverty of his diocese, the continuing threat of persecution, and the inaccessibility of the terrain; while visiting the remoter parts of his diocese, he claimed, he was completely out of contact with the outside world.[70]

Of the parish clergy, it was claimed in the middle of the century that some were ‘of a notorious bad life’, that others were so ignorant that they could ‘neither speak nor write three words to the purpose on any familiar subject’, that priests were sometimes greedy, supporting their relatives by exacting excessive dues from their flocks or becoming ‘great farmers and stock-jobbers’ when they should rest content with ten or twelve acres.[71] A particularly common accusation was that of frequenting the ‘tipling house’. One reforming bishop wondered how a layman might feel, in the extremity of death, when confronted with ‘an Irregular priest whom he has often seen drunk and besotted, when going to others upon ye like occasions, not able to walk, and when arrived happens to be without sense or speech’.[72] In 1749 Archbishop O’Reilly of Armagh prevented the consecration of John Brullaughan, the Bishop-elect of Derry, on the grounds of his drunkenness, violence and concubinage.[73]

A further problem, no doubt exacerbated by the absenteeism of bishops, concerned violent disputes among the priesthood. In 1744 a student from Ulster was ejected from the Dominican convent in Rome for pulling a knife on the prior.[74] In 1758 a jurisdictional controversy among the bishops aroused such popular feeling that Bishop Peter Creagh of Waterford was almost killed by a mob in Mitchelstown when he attempted to visit Archbishop James Butler of Cashel.[75] Some years later Butler himself was violently assaulted by one of his parish priests just as he was about to say mass.[76] In the summer of 1784 the Bishop of Kilmore, a Franciscan accused of giving his best parishes to friars rather than ‘needy priests’, had his horses killed and his house set on fire while he slept.[77] What made these divisions particularly damaging was the temptation for parish priests to involve the local Protestant authorities. This was by no means as unusual as it may sound. In 1751, for example, when the vicar general of Raphoe tried to intervene in a dispute over the Donegal parish of Stranorlar, he was stopped at the River Finn by an agent of the Protestant Ramsay family and warned that if he proceeded, he would never return.[78]

POPULAR BELIEF

Of all the temptations to which eighteenth-century men and women were subjected, the most dangerous were inevitably related to sexual desire. In the past Irish historians have suggested that ‘the full Christian demands in the matter of sexuality had come to be very widely accepted among Catholics of all classes—pre-marital continence and marriage as a lifelong commitment’.[79] It is certainly true that by the early nineteenth century the Irish laity was acquiring a reputation for chastity and that sexual immorality was rare in the priesthood.[80] The source material regarding the previous century, however, is much thinner. The Cashel visitation records, sometimes cited as evidence of Irish virtue, cannot be accepted as a clean bill of health without some hesitation. Sexual irregularities of various kinds in fact constituted the routine business of the clerical conferences held by the Archbishop of Cashel in the 1750s. There were frequent cases of couples cohabiting, of elopement and adultery. Among the recorded examples of carnal knowledge, one man had sex with his sister-in-law, one with two sisters, one with a married woman and her daughter, and another with his own mother-in-law. There were a number of cases of rape, several concerning incest, and eight of bestiality.[81]

On the ‘missions’ carried out by John O’Brien in the summers of 1765 and 1766, already mentioned above, the bishop was dismayed to discover that many of his flock had never attended confession before. What shocked him most, however, was the prevalence of incest. So great was the poverty of the Catholics, he explained, that parents and children slept in the same bed, and this led to mortal sins as they grew older:

. . . l’etat de misere ou nos Païsans sont reduits, esclaves comme ils sont des Protestans les met dans une circonstance bien triste et bien terrible pour leur salut; C’est que leur extreme pauvreté les oblige de faire coucher leurs enfans de deux sexes pele-mêle, ou promiscueusement tous ensemble sur un meme tas de paille avec leurs Peres et Meres dans le Litter commun; et c’est la source malheureuse de tous leurs peches d’impureté. La malheureuse circonstance de coucher avec leurs Peres et Meres leur apprend avant l’age de la puissance des pratiques honteuses, freres et soeurs ensemble que nous trouvons etre des peches mortels, quia malita supplet aetati. De la toute sorte d’impureté contre la nature dans l’age plus mure.[82]

The significance of this indictment is difficult to assess. At least one other bishop enjoined all his pastors to ensure that children of different sexes were not put in bed together ‘promiscuously’ after the age of five or six.[83] On the other hand, the liberal Anglican clergyman and writer Thomas Campbell concluded that longstanding slurs about the incestuous natives of Ireland had no foundation. It was true, he admitted, that the poor lived in a ‘beastly’ manner, with ‘a husband and wife, the multitudinous brood of children, all huddled together upon straw or rushes, with the car and cow, the calf, pig, and the horse, if they are rich enough to have one’. But their habitual nakedness, far from being a sign of degeneration, was reminiscent of the primitive simplicity so praised by the French philosopher Rousseau.[84] What O’Brien had discovered in his diocese was not a peculiarly Irish phenomenon, but perhaps another reflection of the culture lag between the urban centres of Catholic Europe and rural Ireland; his reactions may also reflect his distaste at the living conditions of the poor more accurately than their sexual behaviour.

Marriage, according to Bishop O’Brien, was the ‘rock’ on which the Irish church foundered. One of the key tests of Tridentine reform was that the laity should regard marriage as a sacrament.[85] Previously all that was necessary for a marriage to be recognised was the private exchange of promises followed by sexual intercourse. By the Tametsi decree, however, marriages were declared to be invalid or ‘clandestine’ unless they were public ceremonies, performed by the local parish priest, before two or more witnesses, and preceded by the proclamation of banns—that is, the reading of the couple’s names before the congregation—for three successive Sundays. For a number of reasons, including the obvious need to protect priests from the magistrates, it had become normal in Ireland to omit the proclamation of the banns of marriage.[86] Moreover the Tametsi decree, strictly speaking, only applied where it had been formally promulgated, a process that in Ireland was drawn out over several centuries. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century Galway, Meath and the entire ecclesiastical province of Dublin were still outside its ambit. Once again, the explanation lay in the desire to avoid offending Protestant sensitivities by drawing attention to the exercise of papal jurisdiction in Ireland.

Throughout the century it remained very common for Irish Catholics (and, indeed, Protestants) to resort to ‘couple-beggars’ or ‘tack’ems’. These priests, often degraded, made their living from marriage fees, and were more inclined to overlook impediments to marriage than the local parish priest. In addition, clandestine marriages were no doubt cheaper, quicker, and offered escape from other difficulties such as the absence of parental consent. Other typical impediments included the existence of prior contracts and the fact that one party was a Protestant. By far the most common problem, however, was the proposed marriage of two relatives. For Roman Catholics, consanguinity was prohibited up to the fourth degree, that is, between couples who shared the same great-great-grandparent. In 1749 Patrick O’Brien of Galway composed a pastoral denouncing those ‘rebellious wretches’ who renounced their lawful pastors for ‘some apostate priest or friar’ and did thereby ‘enslave themselves for the rest of their lives, in ye bondage and chains of Satan’. Such clandestine unions could be disastrous. There were, first of all, the obvious practical difficulties that could result when a canonical impediment, such as a previous marriage, was discovered. O’Brien warned of ‘strangers and vagabonds, who make a trade of deluding as many crazy and lew’d widdows and Girls as they possibly can’, assuring them and their pastors that they were free from all previous engagements. The inevitable result was the damnation of many souls, ‘growning under the wait [sic] of the most enormous iniquities, either of adultery, incest, concubinage and very often all three’.[87] Yet the church itself was not entirely free from blame. Marriages within the prohibited degrees were often allowed by dispensation. Under Archbishop Blake of Armagh the frequency of marriage between near relations was so great that it ‘Inclined the Ignorant to imagine that dispensations in the prohibited degrees were only Invented to put money in the Bishops pockett’.[88]

In their attempts to impose meaningful order on their relationship with the natural world and with each other, early modern people showed little concern for doctrinal rectitude. The ritualistic milestones of the individual life-cycle—baptism, marriage and burial—were not only sacred rites, but an important part of social reproduction in the household and the wider community. Repeatedly, priest and people clashed over the pagan or unorthodox aspects of popular Irish religion, especially the wake. In the annual calendrical cycle too, Tridentine doctrine overlapped with an older, local system of ritual. From midsummer to Christmas there were the principal church feasts, a formal part of the liturgy. Other festivals, such as St John’s Day (24 June), were partially or wholly rejected by the hierarchy, but were vital occasions for reaffirming communal bonds nonetheless. Alongside the sacraments of the church, European historians have recovered a multitude of minor rites and benedictions known as ‘sacramentals’, typically centring on holy water or other objects blessed by the clergy and valued by the laity for their protective or curative properties.[89] The Rituale Romanum, translated in 1776 by Archbishop John Carpenter of Dublin, contained ceremonies for blessing water, candles and images; there were also blessings for houses, crops and the marriage bed, and exorcisms against storms. These in turn shaded into a complex range of blessings, prayers, conjurations and charms coping with the anxieties of everyday life.

And there was plenty to be anxious about. The drastic harvest failures of 1708–9, 1721–2, 1727–9, 1739–41 and 1744–5 were only the most severe tests faced during the first half of the century. Concerns over fertility and health, both human and animal, and the vagaries of the weather often dominated life, particularly for those at subsistence level. The remains of ‘Heathenism’, according to Martin Marley, included cures for diseases in humans and cattle such as ‘Billets, certain Words, Prayers not approved by the Church, Herbs gathered before Sun rise, or on certain Days only, a little Stove, or Flint-Arrow dipt in Milk, Ale, or Water’.[90] Similarly, Archbishop Christopher Butler instructed his diocesans to correct anyone ‘addicted to witchcrafts or practicing cures for distempers that are unlawful and superstitious’.[91] The church, of course, offered a kind of magic of its own. John Dunton, who visited Ireland in the 1690s, mentioned an old friar and ‘famous exorcist’ named Father Keveen, who treated cattle that were ‘overlooked’ (bewitched), and made money from selling holy water and ‘other consecrated Trinckhams’ to be used for casting out devils.[92] Bishop John O’Brien’s Monita pastoralia et statuta contained a section on superstitions such as the bewitching of cattle and milk, which could be remedied by a combination of reciting the First Commandment, using the ritual and holy water.[93] A final, dramatic example of ecclesiastical magic concerns the supernatural powers attributed to priests during the Wexford rising of 1798. Eleven priests, out of a total of eighty-five in the county, were actively involved in the rebellion—one of them mentally unbalanced, and the others united by gregariousness, a history of drunkenness and insubordination towards their bishops. Notoriously, scapulars were distributed to some rebels as talismanic protection against injury, while the two Fathers Murphy encouraged stories that they were invulnerable to gunfire.[94] Rumours circulated that when soldiers shot at Father Philip Roche the bullets ‘fell soft as feathers’ as soon as they touched him.[95]

From the 1770s, if not sooner, the bishops made concerted efforts to suppress, or at least clean up, the popular festivals known colloquially as ‘patterns’ (patrons) in which official religion and traditional magic were closely intertwined. On such feast-days pilgrims visited sacred sites—usually holy wells—dedicated to Christian saints to recite prayers and to make a prescribed number of circuits or ‘stations’, sometimes barefoot or on their bare knees. But pattern days were also communal celebrations which attracted hawkers and tradesmen who erected stalls to supply food and drink. Many attended, as one French traveller was told, ‘to do what the others do and to see the women’.[96] The most popular (such as the midsummer festivals held at the two wells associated with St John in County Meath and at Kilmainham on the outskirts of Dublin) attracted thousands, but there were smaller events all over the country. As early as 1761 Bishop Thomas Burke of Ossory had issued a proclamation forbidding the giving of alms to beggars at St John’s Well near Kilkenny, the site of an annual pilgrimage on 24 June. Apparently the convergence of ‘swarms’ of vagrants, many of them pretending to be lame, gave rise to ‘Mobbing, Rioting, Cursing, Swearing, Thieving, excessive Drinking, and other great Debaucheries’, and was bringing the Catholic religion into disrepute. As a more decorous alternative, Burke arranged for a charity box to be built within the chapel, its money to be distributed by the parish clergy.[97] In the 1780s his successor, John Thomas Troy, declared war on the ‘intemperate use of whiskey’, which he blamed for recreational violence at fairs and on pattern days. According to Troy, these holy days, once spent in prayer, were now devoted to wickedness:

They profane the name of God and everything else that is sacred by the most execrable Oaths, and finish the day by the perpetration of the grossest impurities, by shedding their neighbour’s blood, by murder, and the transgression of every law.[98]

One notable exception to these episcopal censures was St Patrick’s Purgatory, the famous pilgrimage site at Lough Derg, County Donegal. The respectability of the holy island and its devotions was well established, both at home and on the continent; and the severity of the ordeal undertaken by pilgrims was described by Dominic Brullaughan in a small Latin work published at Louvain in 1735.[99] This involved nine days of mass and confession, with just one meal a day of oaten bread and water, accompanied by specific ‘stations’ performed by the barefoot pilgrims. Each year, as Bishop Hugh MacMahon reported in 1714, thousands came to the island, completed the cycle of mortification, and took home ex votos, such as wooden staffs, pebbles or water from the lake, which were believed to have protective powers. Although the site was staffed by many priests, mostly Franciscans, it was tolerated by Protestants. Indeed, it was alleged that a local Protestant clergyman named Alexander Calhoun ran a ferry service to transport ‘popish pilgrims’ across Lough Derg, and had set up a small market on the shore.[100] The culmination of the pilgrimage was a twenty-four-hour fast in the ‘purgatory’ cave—actually two cramped stone vaults, one for each sex. The ‘immemorial custom’ of saying a requiem mass for the pilgrims as they descended to the cave, not surprisingly, attracted the disapproval of Bishop MacMahon, and it seems to have been eventually abandoned some time in the 1780s.[101]

If patterns occasioned excessive merriment and drinking, so too did wakes, the traditional nocturnal vigils over the dead in which the old amused themselves by ‘smoking tobacco, drinking whiskey and telling stories’ in the room where the corpse was laid out, while the young men and their sweethearts ‘dance[d] away the night to the melodious pleasing of a bagpipe’.[102] Since the seventeenth century the ecclesiastical authorities had tried to stamp out such profane festivities. In part, they objected to the practice of keening (from caoineadh), the customary lament for the deceased in which a formal eulogy was accompanied by cries of grief. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Archbishop Bray of Cashel was still condemning as pagan ‘all unnatural screams and shrieks and fictitious tuneful cries and elegies at wakes, together with the savage custom of howling and bawling at funerals’.[103] What really infuriated the bishops, however, was the degree of sexual licence traditionally permitted on these occasions. In his constitutions of Cashel, Archbishop Christopher Butler noted that there existed in many parts of the country ‘a most barbarous and ungodly custom of playing off certain obscene and scandalous plays at the wakes of deceased persons’, and he urged that anyone who took part should be excommunicated.[104] The best known of these ‘Hellish Artifices’ was the kissing game known as ‘frumsy framsy’ which, according to Marley’s confessional manual, ‘the devil makes use of to convey without scruple unchaste Love’.[105] Other traditions included mock marriages and even spoof confessions in which the priesthood was satirised. As Sean Connolly has demonstrated, these differences between official Catholic teaching and popular belief and practice survived into the 1840s, more than half a century after the penal era had ended.[106]

NEW DOCTRINES?

So far in this chapter continental Europe has featured as a positive model for Tridentine reformers. If we turn from pastoral standards to the doctrinal matters, however, Paris and Louvain also appear as sources of ‘heresy’ in the form of Jansenism, and of the anti-papal or ‘Gallican’ approach to church authority that often accompanied it. As we saw earlier, the ‘secular’ or parish clergy were frequently at odds with the religious orders; in the 1730s, for example, it was complained that ‘James III’ was promoting ‘a parcel of rambling friers’.[107] The regulars, for their part, retaliated by accusing their secular rivals of being theologically unsound. Archbishop Troy—a Dominican friar presiding over what he called ‘our National Church’[108]—liked to portray Irish Catholicism as torn between two factions. On the one hand, the ‘Romans’, together with those who had studied in Spain or Portugal before the suppression of the Jesuits, were loyal to the Holy See. The majority of the diocesan clergy, on the other hand, had studied at the Irish colleges in France and were in favour both of ‘new doctrines’ and the Four Gallican Articles of 1682 which had asserted the independence of the French church against the Roman curia.[109] In his correspondence with Rome, Troy sought to discredit ‘Gallican’ bishops such as Philip MacDevitt of Derry, who was noble ‘but French’ (ma Francese), or Hugh MacMullan of Down and Connor, whom he labelled ‘a fiery Parisian’ (Parigino fiero).[110] Around the same time there were fears that some Irish priests and even the students at the Ludovisian College in Rome had fallen under the influence of the Italian Jansenist Tamburini.[111]

This contrived paranoia echoed the panicky 1730s, when fears that the Irish priesthood had been contaminated by ‘new doctrines’ were more understandable. As early as 1725 the friars seized on a pastoral letter published by Bishop Bernard Dunne of Kildare and Leighlin which, they claimed, contained thirty-seven suspect propositions concerning sacramental penance and the doctrine of indulgences. Although he ‘corrected’ the pastoral to the satisfaction of the Holy Office, Dunne was consequently tarred with the Jansenist brush for the rest of his life.[112] One Dominican prior, complaining in 1735 of the Archbishop of Tuam’s attacks on the regular clergy, claimed that he and his ‘Parisian’ priests had introduced practices and doctrines at variance with those of Rome. For supporting the doctrine of papal infallibility, he grumbled, the regular clergy were being persecuted and stigmatised as the ‘Pope’s Dragoons’.[113] On a number of occasions between the 1720s and the 1750s regular clergy forwarded to Rome lists of books by secular priests which they argued were Jansenist or Gallican in tone. These included Cornelius Nary’s New Testament (1718), withdrawn at the behest of the Brussels nunciature, despite the support of the Archbishop Byrne, who maintained that Catholics were resorting to Protestant Bibles in the absence of a Catholic translation. With more justice, perhaps, the regulars denounced Sylvester Lloyd’s translation of the ‘Montpellier Catechism’, a popular work by the French Jansenist Bishop Colbert, banned by the Holy Office in 1725.[114] There were even suggestions that Irish students should be prevented from attending the Collège des Lombards, the alleged fountain of all error.[115]

As with so many other party labels in ecclesiastical history, Jansenism was not so much an acknowledged school of thought as a pejorative term applied by one faction in order to discredit another.[116] Like Puritanism in Elizabethan England, it might be said of Jansenism that it was ‘not a thing definable in itself, but only one half of a stressful relationship’.[117] In this case the self-proclaimed champions of orthodoxy were the Jesuits, the confessors of kings, educators of the social elites, and censors of books. Their target was a cluster of theological tendencies found amongst the disciples of St Augustine, which they portrayed as a sort of Protestantism by the backdoor. To many, the charge seemed all too convincing. The teaching of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), a professor at Louvain and later Bishop of Ypres, consisted of an elucidation of the deeply pessimistic theology of St Augustine. Like Luther himself, Jansen emphasised the corruption of human nature by original sin, the belief that man was saved not through good works but by grace given by God, and that Jesus Christ died not for all humanity but for those elect few who had been predestined for salvation. As the Jesuits rightly protested, this position seemed to leave no room for free will in the work of salvation.

The Society of Jesus was backed not only by Rome but also by the French monarchy. Jansen, and his later followers Antoine Arnaud (1612–94), Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719), all ended their days in prison or in exile; their spiritual headquarters, the convent of Port-Royal, was razed to the ground in 1711. Eradicating the doctrines was not so straightforward. A series of clumsily formulated papal bulls climaxed with the notorious Unigenitus (1713), published at the request of an aged Louis XIV, who had long abandoned his obstinate Gallicanism in the course of his campaign to crush all dissent within his kingdom. When four bishops appeared before the Sorbonne to appeal for a general council of the church to consider the bull, they were excommunicated by Pope Clement XI; they were joined, however, by 385 of the 450 curés in the diocese of Paris.[118] Under Cardinal Fleury, effectively ruler of France between 1726 and 1743, the state continued its policy of repression. Unigenitus was reinforced by a royal declaration which required all priests to accept it, and an ugly clerical war ensued as supporters of the bull refused the sacraments to their dying opponents. As one French historian has recently noted, the ancien régime thereby nailed its colours to ‘a pre-Reformation Catholicism increasingly unacceptable to many literate Frenchmen, making any challenge to the Catholic Church into one against the state and thereby provoking religious opposition to the monarchy itself’.[119]

Jansenism survived, however—partly because it claimed the unimpeachable authority of St Augustine, and partly because its core doctrines allied themselves with other spiritual and ideological tendencies within the French church. Many cared less about the difference between ‘sufficient’ and ‘efficacious’ grace than about the much-vaunted pastoral rigorism of Jansenists. By way of contrast with the laxity of Jesuit missionaries, they were renowned for their strict line on the sacrament of penance. To be absolved, the Jansenists argued, penitents must act from love of God (‘contrition’) and not just fear of damnation (‘attrition’), and they were prepared to turn away those who did not meet their exacting standards. After Unigenitus, moreover, Jansenism became a constitutional battlefield as questions were raised both about the internal organisation of the church and its relationship with the state. Like previous efforts to eliminate dissent, Unigenitus backfired: although it marked a defeat for Jansenism within the church, the campaign against Rome—and now, by extension, the Bourbon monarchy—was taken up by the parlements, leading to prolonged confrontations between the crown and the Paris parlement in 1732 and 1752–3. There is, of course, an irony here. The Gallicans, whose greatest champion had been Louis XIV, were now adopted by a variety of forces opposed to the Bourbon monarchy—the parlements, the lower clergy, and, after the launch of the remarkable underground newspaper Nouvelles écclésiatiques in 1728, the emerging force of public opinion.

In the current state of research, it is difficult to gauge precisely the impact of the Jansenist controversy on the Irish church. In the seventeenth century a number of Irish theologians on the continent were friends of Jansenism, including Luke Wadding, founder of St Isidore’s, the Irish Franciscan college at Rome. The real threat, however, came from Paris, as we have seen, and from Louvain, where Bernard Van Espen, author of the conciliarist treatise Jus ecclesiasticum universum (1700), was eventually deprived of his academic rights as a result of his anti-papal teaching. A decade later, during the years of British occupation, the Galway-born professor Francis Martin had his brief flirtation with Jansenist ideas; but Martin, as we saw in Chapter 5, actually owed his position at Louvain to a record of militant opposition to Jansenism which had attracted the notice of Archbishop Précipiano of Malines.[120] In Ireland itself, meanwhile, there is little evidence of opposition to Unigenitus. The major exception concerns the existence of a couple of high-placed sympathisers with the schismatic Chapter of Utrecht, whose archbishop had been deposed for Jansenist leanings in 1702. Following his death in 1710, there was no bishop to ordain priests for what had become a small, independent Catholic communion. In 1715 three Dutchmen consequently travelled to Ireland for ordination by Luke Fagan (1656–1733), Bishop of Meath; another three groups followed. When Fagan began to get cold feet, an Irish ecclesiastic named Marison, acting as a go-between, suggested approaching another bishop, in a remote diocese, ‘de meilleure composition’.[121] Fagan, in spite of suspicions about his role in the affair, went on to become Archbishop of Dublin.

Martin and Fagan were almost certainly rare exceptions. A number of Catholic bishops, in spite of the penal laws, were able to accumulate impressive collections of theological and devotional works. If the surviving catalogues are anything to go by, learned Catholics might have a few Jansenist authors on their shelves, but these were utterly outnumbered by orthodox Counter-Reformation titles.[122] In the early 1730s one of the proviseurs of the Lombard College protested that anxieties about Jansenism were being exploited by priests and friars in Rome who sought any opportunity to discredit the Parisian students in favour of their own. Of around three hundred Irish in Paris, he insisted, only three or four were in the ‘Jansenist cabal’.[123] Almost certainly this was not far from the truth. Around this time three Irish doctoral students embarrassed the authorities by their extreme denunciation of Jansenist ideas. All had their theses suppressed by the parlement of Paris, outraged at their conspicuous failure to endorse the Four Articles of the Gallican church.[124] Interestingly, the Irish defended their conduct on the grounds that signing up to the Four Articles would single them out for disfavour when they returned to Ireland.[125] Few Irish names are to be found among the ‘appellants’, those who followed Cardinal de Noailles in appealing against Unigenitus; on other hand, hostile references to Irish students recurred in Nouvelles écclésiastiques, where insults such ‘Esclave des Jésuites’ (slave of the Jesuits) were thrown at priests trained at the Lombard College.[126]

If anything, the fascination with Jansenism among French historians has increased in recent years. In part, this reflects the conviction that the clashes between the monarchy and the parlements in the 1730s and 1750s over Unigenitus witnessed a novel attempt on both sides to mobilise the new force of public opinion. These disputes, it has even been asserted, did more to damage the ancien régime than the writings of the philosophes. In Ireland, by way of contrast, the fierce battles over Unigenitus seem to have been exploited opportunistically, and there is little evidence of significant theological divisions. Even in the 1770s, when the bishops split over an oath of allegiance devised for ‘loyal’ Catholics, ideological differences remained muted. Predictably, perhaps, the dispute saw Archbishop James Butler II and his Munster bishops ranged against the Dominican Bishop of Ossory, Thomas Burke, and his supporters, in what might appear to be a struggle between the ‘French’ and the ‘Roman’ parties. Yet Butler was just as concerned as his opponents about rumours of Jansenist influences in the Irish College in Rome.[127] And while he appealed to the authority of the Sorbonne in justifying his decision to take the oath, the forwardness of the Munster bishops can partly be explained by the recrudescence of Whiteboyism in the 1770s, which made it all the more necessary for Butler and his suffragans to distance themselves publicly from disorder.

CONCLUSION

To draw conclusions regarding the long-term impact of penal legislation on the character of Irish Catholicism is not a simple matter. The evidence is patchy, particularly where popular attitudes are concerned; and it is scattered through the correspondence of the government, its agents in the localities, the archives of Propaganda Fide and other continental sources. While official instructions, such as Butler’s constitutions or Brullaughan’s handbook, tell us how priests were expected to behave, and the disciplinary measures taken by O’Brien identify some of their shortcomings, there is much less information about the ordinary, run-of-the-mill clerics who lived in peace with their parishioners. The picture is further distorted by the factional rivalries and personal animosities which colour the correspondence between Ireland, Brussels and Rome. When the Franciscan Felix Cleary was suspended from his parish by Bishop Creagh, allegedly for fathering a child, the Chancellor of Waterford sought to mobilise the Franciscans of Louvain and Rome in defence of their brother. Dr Creagh, he protested, ‘ought not to be allowed to proceed in this despotick, absolute, and arbitrary Manner against either Priest or Friar; nor suffer to ruin their Reputation by flinging Dirt at them at Home and abroad without Proof or Conviction’.[128] Mud-slinging was indeed a striking feature of the eighteenth-century church, if the surviving sources can be taken as reliable. The romantic image of an underground priesthood heroically enduring harassment and privations quickly gives way to the jockeying and back-stabbing of clerical factions who scrambled to obtain their share of the church’s insecure but still substantial income.

Would Irish Catholic practice really have been so different without the penal code? Contemporaries sometimes minimised the impact of legal restrictions, though often they did so for propagandist purposes. Thus John Bourke, the reforming proviseur at the Lombard College, contended that the government would ‘wink’ at the priests and friars if ‘their loose behaviour, the clandestine marriages, their public quarrels did not discover them’.[129] The question is how far the prevalence of ‘loose behaviour’ was, in the first case, exacerbated by the hostility of the state. As we saw in the previous chapter, the reorganisation of the Catholic Church in the second half of the century was closely linked to the increase of Catholic landed and commercial wealth in and around the towns of Leinster and Munster. Ultimately the difficulties faced by reforming bishops owed much more to the basic structural inequalities resulting from the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements than to the sporadic harassment of the clergy. Nevertheless, the tendency for Irish priests to appeal to the Holy See against their superiors must have been encouraged by the ramshackle government of a ‘hidden’ church: while the Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697 failed to prevent the ordination of priests, it certainly seems to have obstructed the exercise of episcopal discipline over them.[130]

As this chapter demonstrates, it is possible to highlight several areas of clerical and lay behaviour where the disjunctions between continental prescriptions and local realities can be pinpointed. Yet Ireland was not the only country where rural communities proved resistant to Tridentine reform well into the eighteenth century. The same is true of large areas in the south-west of France, Andalusia in Spain, and the Italian Mezzogiorno; reform was also slow in parts of the Habsburg lands, where Catholicism had been reimposed by military force during the seventeenth century.[131] To apply the key indicators, educational standards among the clergy remained low, clerical concubinage continued to be a problem, marriage was not regarded as a sacrament by many of the laity, and attempts to eradicate popular ‘superstitions’ were resisted. In his study of the Terra d’Otranto, the region of Naples that forms the heel of Italy, David Gentilcore has found that the devotional and sacramental forms of the church comprised just one part of ‘the entire ritual complex, existing alongside ways of sensing and approaching the supernatural which originated from below, responding to local needs and traditions’.[132]

It is hard, furthermore, to find a close correlation between the relaxation of the penal system and the improvement of discipline. In the 1780s Bishops Plunkett and Troy were still complaining of how many adults ignored the obligation to confess once a year.[133] Episcopal residence, the most basic Tridentine requirement, certainly improved after the low point of the 1730s; but the most notorious example of absenteeism actually comes from the second half of the century, when the primate, Anthony Blake, effectively paralysed the diocese of Armagh between 1768 and 1782 through non-residence. A number of disputed successions resulted, notably the parish of St Nicholas in Dundalk, giving rise to a series of suspensions, ‘Rome-running’, and divisions among congregations.[134] By 1780, as a furious local priest complained, ‘the scandal at Drogheda encreases, Dundalk to the great prejudice of morality and souls, is unsettled, Cooley is in a state of anarchy, the most abandoned of our priests are the most cherished, and religion sensibly decaying over this Diocess [sic]’.[135] Archbishop Carpenter of Dublin, the special envoy Anthony Nowlan and eventually Archbishop Troy were all commissioned by Rome to restore the peace, but each ended up being sucked into the factional quagmire, until at last Blake was suspended for non-residence, neglect and financial irregularities.

In highlighting ‘scandals’ and ‘abuses’, this chapter has echoed the preoccupations of the reforming bishops who strove to bring Irish Catholicism into line with Tridentine standards. To conclude without reiterating earlier warnings about the partial nature of episcopal sources would be unwise. The customs of celebrating pattern days and waking the dead were not simply, as reformers saw them, ‘superstitions’, but remnants of an older religious system which carried its own spiritual and social values. Marriages within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, sinful in the eyes of the church, were no doubt vital to communities where kinship greatly mattered. This was a period when priests were torn between the instructions of their superiors and a popular culture in which neighbourliness, conviviality and severe economic hardship must have counted for more than doctrinal rectitude. Priests who, from the perspective of Rome, Paris or Louvain, appeared to be unruly were sometimes obeying other, unwritten rules, with a continuing logic of their own. Bearing these points in mind, it becomes easier to see why Archbishop Butler of Cashel might, in the end, congratulate the ordinary clergy of his ecclesiastical province:

Who cannot choose but be amazed to see our Romish pastors (as they term them) performing with alacrity the most laborious and mortifying functions in the service of the most miserable of all slaves: by night and by day, in cold and hunger, in dangers of rivers, dangers of boggy roads, dangers of precipices & wildernesses and dangers of every kind; and all that without hopes of any temporal reward[?][136]

Part III

The Ascendancy and its World

8

Ascendancy Ireland: Conflict and Consent

F.R. Leavis’s classic essay ‘The irony of Swift’ (1934) began with the ‘truism’ that Swift was ‘a great English writer’.[1] Today, as Irish Studies enjoy unprecedented international respectability and vitality, such a statement would raise eyebrows, if not howls of protest. Not only are we used to thinking of Swift as an Irish (or at least ‘Anglo-Irish’) writer, but it is precisely in the savagery of his irony that his Irishness manifests itself most explosively. The ferocity of his writing, the disorientating effects of his satires, and the emotional intensity of his assault on human vice, folly and corruption have all been attributed to the peculiar, essentially colonial contradictions of Ascendancy Ireland. Like Burke after him, Swift devoted much of his life to defending a particular version of English civilisation embodied by the Anglican Church, yet knowing all the time how it felt to be treated not as one of the conquerors but as one of the conquered. Had Swift remained in London, it seems unlikely that he would have taken us through the series of topsy-turvy landscapes that make up Gulliver’s Travels, all to demonstrate the same demoralising lesson—that humans stink.

Ireland, Swift insisted, was a country which provided the exception to every European rule. According to received economic wisdom, for example, the population of a nation constituted its wealth. ‘Nothing makes Kingdoms and Commonwealths, Mighty, Opulent and Rich,’ observed the Irish merchant and M.P. Francis Brewster, ‘but multitudes of People.’[2] Yet in Ireland the contrary appeared to be true, and the only way of converting its inhabitants from liabilities into assets was state-sponsored cannibalism. Turning to constitutional relations, Swift complained that Ireland’s relegation to a ‘depending kingdom’ under the Declaratory Act (1720) had introduced ‘a Modern Term of Art’ not to be found in any of the established authorities on government.[3] And, in one sense at least, he was correct: either Ireland was a self-governing possession of the crown, as Scotland had been before 1707, or it was a dependency of England, like the colonies in America, but it could hardly be both. Finally, the state religion was rejected by nine-tenths of the people. Rather than reinforcing the political and material position of the Established Church, however, successive ministries intervened in favour of its most implacable enemies, the Presbyterians of the Ulster. The inhabitants of Ireland were apparently unlike those of any other country in the ‘civilised’ world, and in an age addicted to travel literature, Swift found them comparable only to such exotic peoples as Muscovites, Laplanders or the Topinamboo Indians of Brazil.

When we refer to Swift as Irish, of course, we must be careful, for neither he nor his fellow Anglicans considered themselves to be Irish—at least not in any straightforward sense. Though he famously addressed his fourth Drapier’s letter to ‘the Whole People of Ireland’, Swift did not speak for the majority population on the island, but for ‘the True English People of Ireland’—that is, the nobility, gentry and middling sorts who traced their ancestry back to Elizabethan, Stuart or Cromwellian settlers, who worshipped according to the Anglican Church and controlled the Dublin parliament. What irritated him most, indeed, was the apparent inability of the English themselves to make this vital distinction. ‘Our Neighbours . . . look upon Us as a Sort of Savage Irish’, complained the Drapier, ‘whom our Ancestors conquered several hundred Years ago.’[4] As late as 1737 he reprimanded Alexander Pope for failing to distinguish between the ‘English colonies’ (i.e. Protestant settlements), which were more civilised, he claimed, than many counties in England, and the ‘savage old Irish’.[5] Yet, as Conor Cruise O’Brien once suggested, Irishness is not a matter of genetic make-up, but is ‘the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it’.[6] And it is hard to think of a public figure, during the eighteenth century or since, who has been mauled by Ireland quite so dramatically as the splenetic Dean of St Patrick’s.

The title of this book, as many readers will recognise, is an allusion to Swift’s bitter denunciations of English policy. Wherever Ireland appears in his pamphlets and correspondence references to ‘slaves’ and ‘slavery’ cannot be far away. ‘Government without the Consent of the Governed’, as his celebrated Drapier’s Letters put it, ‘is the very Definition of Slavery.’[7] This rhetoric was by no means original to the controversial dean but was derived from earlier ‘patriot’ works such as William Molyneux’s controversial Case of Ireland stated (1698). From the Williamite war to the French Revolution practically every major statement of Irish political thinking resonates with the same contrast between the freeman and the slave. In the 1780s, in a series of brilliant letters intended to breathe new life into the parliamentary reform movement, William Drennan adopted the nom de guerre of ‘Orellana an Irish helot’, and began each letter with the ironic salutation ‘Fellow Slaves!’. The reference to the helots, the subject populations of the ancient Spartan republic, acknowledged a debt to Joseph Pollock’s Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial (1779), with its bitter reflection that those nations who most valued liberty themselves had been the greatest tyrants over others: ‘The Spartans have had their Helotes, and the English HAVE THEIR IRISH!’[8] The choice of the name Orellana, meanwhile, was one Drennan later regretted, since he was a slave who, ‘not being able to accomplish his purpose in raising a mutiny, leaped with his companions into the sea’.[9]

As many historians and literary critics have remarked, there appears to be a central flaw in the protestations of Anglican patriots like Molyneux and Swift, and even of later Presbyterians radicals like Pollock and Drennan, for their definition of the nation excluded the vast majority of the island’s inhabitants. Government without consent was slavery, unless, that is, the governed were Catholics. Neither Molyneux nor Swift addressed the fact that the Catholics, 80 per cent of the population, had no parliamentary representation. Under an English statue of 1691, membership of the Irish parliament was restricted to those who were prepared to subscribe the oath of allegiance, renounce the temporal authority of the papacy, and make a declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation. For modern readers, the humiliations suffered by the Protestant landowning class seem petty in comparison with vast oppressive machinery of the penal laws. It was during this same period, the very ‘age of Molyneux and Swift’, that the Anglican monopoly of political and social power was copperfastened, until in 1728 Catholics were formally disfranchised merely for being Catholics. When the Catholic publicist and gentleman scholar Charles O’Conor added an incautious reference to the ‘enslaved’ Irish in the preface of his famous antiquarian work, Dissertations on the antient history of Ireland (1753), a prudent friend advised him to expunge the word. No papist could put his name to those writings ‘that treat of our Slavery’.[10]

When we describe the patriotism of the Protestant nation as flawed, we are, of course, applying modern secular and democratic assumptions which Swift’s audience would have found incomprehensible. Part of the historian’s task is to reconstruct the mental world in which Swift’s view of ‘the people of Ireland’ made sense. It is dangerous to assume, as one influential critic has done, that the dean ‘must have grasped’ that his definition of slavery could be applied to the disfranchised majority population.[11] Swift’s ‘vehemence and rapidity of mind’, noted by Samuel Johnson and many others, made him a brilliantly innovative satirist, but as a political thinker his ideas were entirely commonplace.[12] To be free, as his contemporaries well knew, was to live under laws to which we have given our consent; to be dependent on the will of another, by contrast, was to be reduced to the condition of servitude. Just before the Woollen Act of 1699 was passed Archbishop King of Dublin explained that all property held by ‘the arbitrary pleasure of another’ was worthless; and consequently ‘if I shall be taxed and bound by laws to which I am no party, I shall reckon myself as much a slave, as one of the Grand Signior’s mutes’.[13] This notion of liberty has its origins in the Roman republican tradition, as recorded by Livy, Sallust and Cicero; it was taken up in the Renaissance by defenders of the Italian city-states such as Machiavelli. During the seventeenth-century struggles between the Stuart monarchs and their parliaments it was absorbed into English constitutional thought through the works of the ‘commonwealthsmen’, Milton, Harrington, Sidney and Locke.[14] In the 1690s the tradition was revived yet again by those who called themselves ‘real’ or ‘true’ Whigs to distinguish themselves from the degeneracy of the establishment. Often denounced as republicans by their opponents, their leaders included the Irish-born writers Viscount Molesworth and the free-thinker John Toland (see Chapter 2).

In his influential declaration of faith, The principles of a real Whig (1711), Molesworth defended Britain’s mixed constitution and did not hesitate to classify it as a commonwealth: ‘For where in the very frame of the constitution, the good of the whole is taken care of by the whole (as it is in our case), the having a king or queen at the head of it alters not the case.’[15] His protégé James Arbuckle, launching his new journal, The Tribune (1729), chastised those who thought the name of commonwealthsman was a term of reproach, for a commonwealth was merely ‘a Government where the Good of the Whole is consulted by the Whole’.[16] The vital distinction, as one leading Locke scholar has explained, was not between monarchies and republics as they are normally understood, but between a tyranny like France and free state like England, that is, ‘between a system in which the people are passive subjects (“slaves”), as in the theories of Filmer and other absolutists, and one based on consent in which the people engage in governing their governors, as in the theories of Milton, Harrington, Sidney and Locke’.[17] It was to this Whiggish—even quasi-republican—tradition that the Drapier appealed when he ranked ‘the famous Mr Molineaux’ along with ‘Dangerous Authors’ such as Molesworth, Locke and Sidney, ‘who talk of Liberty as a Blessing to which the whole Race of Mankind hath an Original Title’.[18] All of these writers believed that monarchs should be subjected to the rule of law and to the limitations imposed by parliamentary assemblies. None of them, however, equated ‘the people’ with a democratic majority or anything like it, but with a body of propertied citizens.

If Swift’s political thinking requires careful examination, the same can be said for his reputation as a representative of the ‘colonial nationalism’ which is still assumed to be the dominant feature of the era. By the 1720s a patriot culture of complaint had become established in Dublin, but Swift’s personal frustrations and party commitments gave his writings a uniquely anti-English twist. The first section of this chapter explores the relationship between the rhetorical pyrotechnics of the Drapier and the political realities of Anglo-Irish relations. As Sean Connolly has warned us, Swift’s reliability as a historical witness is questionable. So compelling was the weaving together of his private and public disappointments that it is easy to forget that Swift sometimes actually got his own way. The triumphant campaign in the Drapier’s Letters (1724) against Wood’s Halfpence—the royal patent granted to an English ironmonger for minting copper coins for Ireland—was the most spectacular example; but the Irish parliament also successfully blocked English attempts to repeal the sacramental test in 1719 and 1731–3 (examined in the second section below). The defeat of Wood’s Halfpence turned an ageing Tory clergyman into a popular hero, the subject of anonymous songs and ballads, medals and shop signs. Hence Swift’s boast to Alexander Pope that he never walked the streets of Dublin ‘without a thousand blessings from my friends the Vulgar’.[19]

The final sections of this chapter will suggest that the Protestant elite was never as insulated from popular pressures as it sometimes seems. The conventional picture of a narrow, ossified political world, confined to Dublin Castle and College Green, is partly dependent on a narrow definition of politics. The lower classes, or at least the lower-class Protestants who still formed a majority in Dublin as well as the northern towns, regularly participated in the mass celebrations customarily held to mark royal and patriotic anniversaries. More surprisingly, perhaps, Catholics continued to play an attenuated role in the political process. A drinking song written by Tadhg Ó Neachtain in the 1720s introduced saoirse (freedom) as an abstract idea, juxtaposed with daoirse (slavery). In both Irish poetry and English prose, Catholics conceived of their oppressions as an Egyptian bondage and looked forward to their day of deliverance.[20] By the 1790s such claims were made publicly by a more outspoken generation. ‘Born a Catholic,’ wrote William Paulet Carey in his Appeal to the people of Ireland (1794), ‘my slavery commenced with my existence.’[21] In actual fact Carey had studied art at the school of the Dublin Society and won a prize for his paintings at the Dublin Academy; but his sense of alienation was representative of the younger Catholic middling sorts. Another example was the United Irishman Edward Sweetman, author of a remarkable condemnation of English colonialism in Ireland published in 1792. ‘Taxed without being represented, bound without their consent,’ he wrote of his former co-religionists, ‘their situation is the very definition of slavery.’[22] By this stage the political goals of the Catholic Committee had already become known—in yet another reference to classical enslavement—as Catholic emancipation.

POLITICS IN A DEPENDING KINGDOM

The Protestants of Ireland are sensible, that Nature and Circumstances, as well as Constitution and Original Right, have placed them under a Dependance [sic] upon their Mother Country, whose Protection and Justice they have the utmost Confidence in . . . because they cannot depend upon themselves, much less upon them whose Properties they enjoy, and whose Enmities can never be extinguished, as long as the Motives of Interest, Religion, and National Aversion endure.

A DEFENCE OF ENGLISH COMMODITIES (1720)[23]

In April 1720 the constitutional ambitions of the Irish Protestants came to an abrupt halt. Since the Revolution of 1688–9 the Westminster parliament had passed legislation on Irish matters, first restricting the export of Irish woollen manufactures (1699) and then redistributing the Irish estates forfeited by Jacobite landowners (1700). Fears of a growing trend towards central intervention were apparently corroborated by the determination of the English House of Lords to establish itself as the final source of appeal in Irish legal cases. The question of appellate jurisdiction resurfaced with the case of Annesley v. Sherlock (1717–19), when the English (or ‘British’ after 1707) Lords overturned the judgment of their Irish counterparts. The underlying issue here was the most fundamental one of all: the location of sovereignty (or what contemporaries called the ‘supream’ authority) within the British imperial system. With the passage of the Declaratory Act, the parliament of Britain had formally subordinated the parliament of Ireland, in theory a separate and distinct kingdom, to its authority. In the British House of Commons Lord Molesworth and the other ‘friends’ of Ireland were treated to a lecture on the brutal realities of Anglo-Irish relations. As one prominent English lawyer succinctly explained, there were two kinds of people in Ireland: the Irish natives, who were a conquered people, and the English, ‘a Colony transplanted thither, and as a Colony Subject to the Laws of their Mother Country’.[24] Protestant Ireland had apparently lost its battle for self-government.

The ‘enslaving act’, as Archbishop King called it, marked a new low point in Anglo-Irish relations. By declaring that appeals to the Irish House of Lords were null and void, the Declaratory Act unnerved Irish landed gentleman, who were alarmed that their estates ‘wou’d be unsettl’d at one stroke’.[25] Some, like Lord Perceval, feared that henceforth the Dublin legislature would not dare refuse the additional duties required by the crown for fear of being taxed directly by Westminster. ‘This cloud will always hang over our heads,’ he grumbled, and Ireland would be bullied into accepting corrupt demands ‘not only in mony matters but even the takeing off the [sacramental] Test’.[26] In the debate in the Irish House of Lords over Annesley v. Sherlock, the Duke of Bolton bristled at ‘the warm expressions of certain men’s being slaves who are to be bound by laws where they have no representatives’. It was at this point that William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland stated, initially regarded as something of an embarrassment, emerged as the handbook of Irish Protestant liberties, cited not only by Whigs but by Thomas Lindsay, the staunchly Tory Archbishop of Armagh.[27] The book was first reprinted in 1706, at the time of the negotiations over the Anglo-Scottish union; further editions followed in 1719 and 1720, during the controversy over the Declaratory Act, and in 1725 at the height of the Wood’s Halfpence dispute. Indeed, the publication history of the Case serves as a barometer of Anglo-Irish constitutional tensions in the eighteenth century: after a long absence, it suddenly resurfaced during the heated Dublin election of 1749, while a later spate of editions, in 1770, 1773, 1776 and 1782 charted the rise of patriot feeling before the revolution of 1782.[28]

The debates of 1717–20 were the culmination of the mutual suspicions which had bedevilled Anglo-Irish relations since 1688. From London, it seemed entirely unreasonable that Ireland, protected by England’s fleet, should ever be allowed to rival the mother country in its ‘darling’ woollen industry, or that the estates forfeited by Jacobite officers should be appropriated by the king rather than being used to recompense the English taxpayer for the cost of fighting the Williamite war. How could the ‘thoughtless Statesmen’ of Dublin imagine that England, having suppressed more than forty Irish rebellions at its own expense, would grant them ‘a distinct State govern’d entirely by its own Laws, and might carry on what Trades and Manufactures they pleased, even to the Ruin of their Mother Country’?[29] The first signs of self-assertion on the part of Irish parliamentarians were inevitably taken as bids towards ‘independency’. Even before the Treaty of Limerick, Protestants in Ireland felt they were misunderstood across the water, where their kith and kin regarded them as ‘a People setting up for our selves’ and—not for the last time—‘wish[ed] this Island sunk in the Sea’.[30] The most extreme reaction came from Molesworth’s friend and protégé John Toland. With his usual knack for going too far, Toland implied that England’s highhandedness would eventually bring about a union of Protestants and papists. ‘History cannot afford one example’, he added, ‘where any Out-province or remote Colony, ever rebell’d against the mother country, or chief seat of Government, but thro insupportable rigor and oppression.’[31] It was, of course, an empty threat, but it was repeated by so respectable a figure as the Earl of Egmont, and it may have been an accurate psychological description of the desperation of the Protestant elite.[32]

In fact the Protestants of Ireland were never actually reduced to slavery, at least not according to their own conventional definition of the term. For Westminster to have imposed taxes directly on Ireland would have involved a contravention of accepted constitutional practice so shocking that even the most opportunistic Whig ministries seem to have baulked at the idea. Neither the turbulent parliamentary session of 1692, when opposition M.P.s claimed the ‘sole right’ to initiate financial legislation, nor the crisis in Anglo-Irish relations caused by the money bill dispute of 1753 prompted Dublin Castle to reconsider its fundamental approach to government. At the beginning of the century, of course, the novelty and unpredictability of the ‘rage of party’ and the new techniques required to manage a parliamentary system of government made everyone uneasy. Tories committed to the divine right of kings and the doctrine of non-resistance struggled to come to terms with the change of dynasty in 1688 and again in 1714; churchmen were forced to recognise the legalisation of Dissent; country gentlemen groaned under the seismic transformations brought about by the wars of 1688–1713 and, most of all, the maintenance of a standing army, funded by high taxation and an expanding national debt. It was a period, unsurprisingly perhaps, when traditional methods of political management were combined with reckless constitutional innovations. Faced with the continuing Jacobite threat from abroad and numerous discontents at home, Whig-dominated parliaments simply eliminated rival sources of authority, such as the convocation of the Church of England, suspended in 1717, and the Edinburgh parliament, abolished in 1707. That Ireland kept its own—apparently emasculated—parliament was a sign of its relative unimportance. Underneath these drastic measures, however, it is possible to discern the re-emergence of an old pattern, in both Ireland and Scotland, of subcontracting power to local elites, a system entirely in keeping with the traditional governance of composite monarchies.[33] From the 1720s pragmatism, rather than political conflict, usually characterised the operation of the eighteenth-century Irish constitution.

It is true, admittedly, that the tone of government in Ireland, whatever the aspirations of its political elite, depended on the make-up of the English House of Commons. The head of the Irish executive, the Lord Lieutenant, was chosen by the king and his English ministers, as were many of the significant office-holders in the civil, military and ecclesiastical establishments. Since the viceroyalty was regarded as ‘great in itself but often a step of disgrace to some men who have been or expect to be in the closer parts of the Administration’, its occupants kept their sights fixed firmly on English politics.[34] With the exception of the Ormond viceroyalty (1710–13), the position was nevertheless regarded as too important to be entrusted to an Irishman. The real Anglo-Irish, those with estates on both islands, might hope to influence the direction of policy and the disposal of patronage through their marital and political connections, as the Ponsonbys did under the Duke of Devonshire (1755–7). A decade later the County Down landlord Robert Stewart married a daughter of Lord Hertford, the Lord Lieutenant, whose patrimony included a vast estate and parliamentary borough at Lisburn. A later marriage, to Frances Pratt, a sister of the Earl of Camden, who became Lord Lieutenant during the unstable years of 1795–8, brought Stewart much closer to the centre of power. His second son, Viscount Castlereagh, would eventually become British Foreign Secretary; but it is chastening to note that he was originally thought unfit to serve as Chief Secretary in Ireland because of his background; Cornwallis found it necessary to reassure the Home Secretary that Castlereagh was well suited for the post, as he was ‘so very unlike an Irishman’.[35]

Ireland’s administrative structure, like Scotland’s, is best described as ‘part provincial and part colonial’.[36] In both cases English authority was mediated through local interests—the ‘undertakers’ who could deliver parliamentary votes in return for a share of devolved power; in both cases their affairs were considered largely irrelevant to real parliamentary business at Westminster. None of the Anglo-Irish magnates, however, was as powerful as Archibald Campbell, third Duke of Argyll, the unofficial minister for Scottish affairs from 1725 to 1761, or as closely integrated into metropolitan structures of government. And whereas Scotland retained its independent legal system and its distinctive Presbyterian Kirk under the Anglo-Scottish union, Ireland’s implanted legal and ecclesiastical institutions were prey to ambitious interlopers from across the water. Often the plum positions in the church, the law and the army went to Englishmen. Local resentment peaked after the Wood’s Halfpence débâcle, when Robert Walpole, convinced that the Lord Lieutenant had become too reliant on the principal undertaker, William Conolly, set out to create an ‘English interest’, beginning with the promotion of Hugh Boulter, the Bishop of Bristol, to the archbishopric of Armagh. By 1720 disputes over church preferment had already produced national tensions between the ‘English’ and ‘Irish’ interests within the episcopate. Since bishops were not merely spiritual guides but also ex officio members of the House of Lords, ecclesiastical appointments could have wider political implications. At the height of the Annesley v. Sherlock dispute, when the Irish Lords ordered the arrest of the barons of the exchequer for following the orders of the British House of Lords, only eight members protested, five of them Englishmen appointed since the accession of George I. The English bishops also favoured relief measures for Dissenters in Ireland, a view more popular in London than in Dublin; and when a toleration act was passed in 1719, the five once again found themselves voting against their brethren.[37] Following the death of William King in 1729, the archbishopric of Dublin also went to an Englishman, leaving Cashel and Tuam for the ‘natives’, a pattern that was reproduced throughout the century.

Most of the evidence concerning these ‘national’ tensions is taken from the papers of King, Boulter and Archbishop Wake of Canterbury, and is largely confined to the reign of George I (1714–27). During these years Irish churchmen, Swift among them, were directly affected by a peculiar conjunction of controversies over ecclesiastical patronage in the Irish episcopate, the question of the appellate jurisdiction of Irish House of Lords and the conflict over the legal status of Dissent. Outside these circles expressions of anti-Englishness were less common but not unknown. English lawyers, such as Robert Jocelyn (1687/8–1756) and John Bowes (1691–1767), were just two among several newcomers promoted to high legal office: both men became Lord Chancellor and, as such, one of the Lords Justices who formed the executive during the viceroy’s absence. During the Dublin election contest of 1748–9 the notorious radical Charles Lucas complained that each new viceroy brought with him ‘a brood of starved rooks, wretched, worthless dependants, of every class’ who were offered vacancies in church, state or army regardless of their merit; two decades later a patriot lamented that the ‘Dregs of Westminster-Hall’ were being sent over as judges.[38] To these simmering discontents was added the knowledge that Irish Protestants were treated ‘as Strangers and Foreigners’ by their kith and kin across the water.[39] Long before the appearance of stage characters like Captain O’Blunder and Lucius O’Trigger, the Protestants had already been assimilated to older Irish stereotypes that emphasised comical stupidity and poverty. ‘The Character of Irishman’, as Arbuckle’s Tribune complained, signified ‘a Composition of Imprudence and Absurdity’; and so proverbial was the ignorance of the Irish that ‘all remarkable Blunders in Speech [are] christened by the Name of Iricisms’.[40]

As in England, members of the ruling elite alternated between denouncing the expanding apparatus of the fiscal-military state and clambering on board the bandwagon along with all the other office-holders, placemen and stock-jobbers. A number of Irish Protestants—Frederick and Hans Hamilton, Richard Ingoldsby, William and Moses Leathes and Richard Waring—embarked on spectacular military careers, especially during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). At home the jewel in the crown was the Revenue Commission, the most rapidly expanding department of state, which employed several hundred officers at a cost of almost £50,000 a year. The number of officials accountable to the seven members of the Revenue Board grew from 1,100 in the 1720s to 1,600 in the 1750s.[41] It is no coincidence that the Revenue Board formed the power base of William Conolly, the first of the great ‘undertakers’ who came to dominate Irish parliamentary life (and who, like several of the military success stories, was a native of the north-west). Throughout ancien régime Europe a distribution of sinecures and the appropriation of fees were the normal means of supplementing salaries. The collection of revenue on behalf of the state was devolved to Irish gentlemen and their dependants, and one writer noted that ‘the public money passed fluent as water through so many sieves, though we may with reason presume that each vessel was sufficiently wet by the way’.[42] The architects of Ascendancy Ireland also avoided one of the greatest burdens of the warfare state by successfully blocking the revival of the land tax after 1698. Along with the biennial sessions of the Irish parliament, the development of the bureaucracy and armed forces provided ample compensation for the formal surrender of legislative independence, largely illusory in any case.

At the centre of Anglo-Irish relations was the undertaker system that ensured parliamentary majorities for the executive at Dublin Castle. The viceroy did not reside in Ireland permanently, but only during sessions of parliament (six months in every two years); nor did he sit in either the Lords or Commons. He had no intimate knowledge of local parliamentarians, and he possessed no ‘interest’ of his own—the adherence of a grouping bound together by ties of kinship and friendship, mutual advantage (‘jobbing’) and personal loyalty. Ever since the court had absorbed the Brodricks and their ‘sole right’ followers into the administration after the disastrous parliament of 1692, it had become normal to contract out parliamentary management to political grandees who undertook to secure government legislation in the Commons in return for a share of the spoils—influence over the distribution of posts in the judiciary, the church, the army and the revenue service, of pensions, places and peerages. As Speaker from 1733, for example, Henry Boyle demanded the ‘place’ of First Commissioner and later the sinecure of Chancellor of the Exchequer; in return he offered the support of his ‘Munster squadron’, combined with a cohort of Ulster members led by Arthur Hill, amounting to a base of sixty M.P.s. Such parliamentary connections were consolidated and maintained by the patronage at the disposal of the undertakers, but also by the less tangible factors of personal reputation and talent. The great families consequently avoided any appearance of explicit bargaining with the Lord Lieutenant; it was important to preserve at least the appearance of independence in order to avoid what Alan Brodrick described as the ‘odious’ name of undertaker.[43]

The limits of governmental authority in Ireland were demonstrated spectacularly in 1723–4 when the structures of British rule were paralysed by the controversy over Wood’s Halfpence. When both houses of parliament and the grand juries passed resolutions rejecting the hated coinage, the Lords Justices who formed the executive during the absence of the viceroy were powerless. Not even William Conolly, the chief revenue commissioner, Speaker of the House of Commons, a Lord Justice and the leading parliamentary ‘undertaker’, felt able to back the administration. Lord Carteret, the new Lord Lieutenant who arrived at the end of 1724, discovered that those leading politicians suspected of favouring Wood’s patent found it impossible ‘to retain any credit in this country or ever after be serviceable to his Majesty’. Similarly, Hugh Boulter, the Englishman promoted to the archbishopric of Armagh, discovered that the great politicians feared the disapproval of parliament (or at least pretended to), while parliament feared ‘the madness of the people’.[44] The undertaker system which had managed parliament for successive viceroys had simply broken down. It became apparent, moreover, that when the undertakers either could not or would not co-operate, as was the case with Conolly in 1719–20 and 1724–6, nothing could be done. As Lord Chesterfield cynically observed after the money bill crisis of the 1750s, viceroys ‘must necessarily rule by a faction, of which faction for the time being they are only the first slaves’.[45]

Where confrontations over fundamental principles occurred, as in 1717–20, the Dublin parliament was put firmly in its place; but in practice the day-to-day administration of the kingdom continued to rely on local expertise. There were very few instances, after Wood’s Halfpence, of the provocative use of power that had characterised the reigns of William and Anne. Sparing use was made of London’s powers to veto Irish bills or to impose legislation on Ireland at Westminster. And on the other hand, once the furore over Wood’s Halfpence had subsided, many Irish writers quietly accepted Ireland’s colonial status and searched for alternative outlets for patriotism, chiefly in schemes for cultural and economic reform. Since Ireland relied on Britain’s fleet for defence, as James Arbuckle noted, it always had to be viewed in two respects, ‘both as it is the Habitation of a numerous and free People . . . and likewise as a Colony of another great and powerful Nation . . . whose interest ought to be considered, and taken due care of, in all Undertakings’.[46] Sensitivity over repeated snubs and slights from the English was real enough, but jibes about the ‘Potato Understandings’ of Irish Protestants did not produce anything like cultural nationalism.[47] Rather, as we have seen, patriot writers up to the 1750s and beyond stressed the ties of blood, political principles, religious beliefs and dynastic allegiance which bound them to Britain, claiming equal rights with other ‘Englishmen’ or ‘Britons’. And like Whigs in Newcastle, Glasgow or Philadelphia, they repeatedly contrasted the benefits of the British constitution with the ‘Gallic Slavery’ endured by their traditional enemies on the continent.[48]

At the core of this mutually advantageous, if uneven partnership was the importance of local government in the eighteenth century. There was no professional bureaucracy in the three British kingdoms, so government depended upon the co-operation of the county elites. Dublin Castle, in other words, needed the Protestant gentry and the middling sorts, because it was the local magistrates who maintained law and order and acted as intermediaries between the centre and the localities; and the magistrates in their turn required the co-operation of constables, militiamen, sheriffs and jurors. The bulk of the inhabitants of Ireland, as Edward Willes, Chief Baron of the Irish Court of Exchequer, discovered, ‘know very little of government but what they see at the assizes’.[49] Twice yearly the assize courts met with some pomp and splendour, occasions not just for criminal prosecutions, but for social and commercial transactions. The grand juries, as Arthur Young observed, were composed of ‘the resident gentlemen, their agents, clergy and respectable tenantry’.[50] In addition to the criminal justice system, their functions included the upkeep of courthouses and jails, the watch and the local militia, and (from 1765) maintenance of the county road network, all of these funded by a land tax or ‘cess’ paid by the local inhabitants; it was the grand juries who were responsible for implementing the penal laws, and for a range of economic and social regulations including the setting of wage rates. For the vast majority of the population, the House of Commons may have seemed very distant, but civil authority was experienced at the level of the county or parish and intruded into the lives of ordinary people. Power was exercised not just, or even mainly, by parliamentarians, but by town councils and guilds, commissions of the peace and grand juries, landlords and their agents, militia officers, clergymen and tithe-proctors, lawyers, churchwardens and collectors of rates.

On both sides of the Anglo-Irish relationship co-operation was consequently preferred to conflict. The turning-point came with the Seven Years War, which had its origins in the colonial antagonism between Britain and France, and which led to the expulsion of the French from North America and the seizure of French and Spanish possessions in the West Indies. By 1762 there were almost 24,000 soldiers on the Irish establishment, of whom 8,000 were serving abroad.[51] In Ireland, as throughout the Empire, Protestants celebrated the great victories of Louisburg (1758) and Québec (1759); but underneath the surface cracks were beginning to emerge. What had been known as the British Empire since the late seventeenth century was in fact a ramshackle assemblage of territorial possessions whose inhabitants were linked together by the authority of the crown alone. The colonists, extending from Hudson Bay and Newfoundland down through the eastern seaboard to the Caribbean islands, tended to view the Empire as a partnership between more or less equal communities, all of them enjoying the rights of Englishmen; London meanwhile became increasingly uneasy about the task of ensuring security and subordination within its far-flung dominions. One of Ireland’s principal functions for many decades had been to act as a military nursery for Britain, and the expanded demand for men quickly led to the controversial augmentation of the army on the Irish establishment. Although the augmentation was carried in October 1769, the political struggle over the issue brought about the final destruction of the undertaker system, and the institution of direct parliamentary management by George, Viscount Townshend. At the same time, parallels between Irish and American issues began to be drawn on all sides, perhaps inevitably, with little comfort for Dublin politicians. In the British parliament, as one patriot discovered, it was said that ‘Ireland was no more than a Colony; that it might be taxed without its Consent; that it was a dependent Country’.[52] American opposition to the Stamp Act (1765) initiated the first serious exploration of the imperial system on either side of the Atlantic, and ended with the passage of a Declaratory Act (1766) by the Rockingham ministry, asserting the right of the Westminster parliament to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.

One of the authors of the Declaratory Act was an Irishman, Edmund Burke, also the most memorable voice among American sympathisers during the dramatic confrontations that led to the Declaration of Independence. Burke’s position—that imperial unity depended upon the British parliament possessing the rights to tax the Americans, but not actually exercising that right—has often seemed paradoxical or even nonsensical. He vigorously upheld the theory of British parliamentary sovereignty while advocating practical compromise. In part, no doubt, the apparent contradiction reflects the vicissitudes of party politics as the Rockinghamite Whigs moved in and out of office; but the survey of Anglo-Irish relations above raises the possibility that Burke was also drawing upon Irish experience. Having devoted so much time to the Whiteboy disturbances and an analysis of the penal laws, Burke believed that there were many things wrong with Ascendancy Ireland, but the constitutional framework underpinning the Dublin parliament was not one of them. The Declaratory Act of 1720, which had allegedly proclaimed the Irish ‘slaves’, had in fact given the Anglican propertied class much of what it wanted. Between the 1720s and the 1770s no sustained attempt was made to govern Ireland in a way that was at variance with the fundamental interests of its elite. It was an era, for the Protestant Ascendancy at least, of government by consent.

THE INSOLENCE OF THE DISSENTERS

Political conflict in Ascendancy Ireland was structured around three great issues. The first of these, the constitutional position of the Dublin parliament within the British monarchy, has been considered above. More fundamental still was the construction and maintenance of the penal code against the Catholic majority, discussed in earlier chapters of this book. It should never be forgotten, however, that there were in fact two religious majorities excluded from Ascendancy Ireland. The Ulster Presbyterians, who enjoyed a local numerical preponderance in the north-east, were sometimes regarded as a threat equal to, or greater than, that posed by the Catholics. Their territorial supremacy, and implicitly their claims to political equality, were asserted by the Rev. John McBride of Belfast in his Vindication of marriage as solemnized by Presbyterians in the north of Ireland (1702), a work prompted by a series of lawsuits questioning the legality of marriages performed by Dissenting ministers. It was well known, McBride began, that ‘a considerable Body of British Protestants, who go under the Name of Presbyterians, have long possessed the North of Ireland’.[53] This sort of language could not go unchallenged, and the Anglican Dean of Down and Connor soon rejoined that Presbyterians owned less than a ‘fortieth part’ of the northern province. The possessors of the land, he explained revealingly, were those ‘who have the property of it’, that is, the social elite.[54] A decade later McBride returned to this curious disagreement in his cumbrous volume A sample of jet-black prelatick calumny (1713): the Presbyterians possessed Ulster in the same way that ‘the Children of Israel possess’d the Land of Canaan, when the Canaanites dwelt in it, with Them’.[55] For those who knew their Old Testament, the parallel was not a comforting one.

From the end of the seventeenth century the episcopal courts were once more clamping down on Presbyterian marriages, funerals and schools, and a vigorous campaign was mounting for the full implementation of the penal laws against Dissent. This high-church backlash, which reached a high point under the Tory administration of 1710–14, was restrained by the metropolitan government; but the Established Church secured an important and lasting victory with the passage of the Test Act of 1704, which made the taking of the Anglican sacrament an essential qualification for public office. Before this, according to William Tisdall, the splenetic vicar of Belfast and one-time associate of Swift, the Dissenting aldermen, burgesses and freemen were approaching ‘a Parity of Power with the Church’ in municipal government. Recent research confirms their increasing influence in the corporations of Belfast, Coleraine, Derry and Carrickfergus.[56] In Derry Dissenters formed a powerful faction in the corporation, and William King, bishop between 1691 and 1703, was unable to prevent the election of nonconformists to the post of mayor.[57] The Presbyterians flaunted their local ascendancy, with members of the corporation parading to the meeting-house in their civic regalia; when Bishop King published his famous attack on nonconformity, A discourse concerning the inventions of men in the worship of God (1694), the local Dissenting minister issued a rejoinder ostentatiously dedicated to ‘the mayor, aldermen and burgesses of Derry, of the Presbyterian persuasion’.[58]

The imposition of the Test was consequently a bitter blow; and it came as relations between the English and Scottish parliaments reached an all-time low. As John McBride reported to a friend at Glasgow, there was ‘much talk of sending down forces to Ulster to keep us from joining with you against England’.[59] Historians have generally assumed that the Test had little impact, yet this ‘Badge of Slavery’ was bitterly resented, and proposals for its repeal provoked determined opposition in 1707, 1709, 1719 and 1731–3.[60] Why? Only dozen or so J.P.s, it was repeatedly asserted, were ejected as a result, since few Presbyterian landowners possessed sufficient wealth to qualify for magisterial office; and even the expulsion of Presbyterian aldermen and burgesses in Derry and Belfast was partially offset by the election of Whigs sympathetic to the Dissenting cause. It should be remembered, however, that both towns were of considerable economic importance, and Derry in particular had links with the national political scene. The erosion of nonconformity among the landed patrons who wielded electoral influence in close boroughs and counties was also significant. We are dealing with small numbers here—from a total of nine M.P.s on the eve of the Test, Dissenting representation declined to four or five; but even a single landowner could provide an important boost, as the example of the Uptons of Templepatrick, tireless ambassadors for the northern Presbyterians, demonstrates. Moreover, one of the arguments made for retaining the Test in the 1730s was that the confessional bar was actually working. A considerable number of persons ‘of Fortune and Credit’ had already been brought over to the establishment, one apologist noted, and soon the Dissenting community would surely be reduced to ‘the lower Sort of People’ who without leadership would ‘conform by Degrees’.[61]

In the three or four decades after 1690 the fierce antagonism between the Anglican establishment and the Presbyterian population was also experienced by the ordinary people who were called upon to enforce or resist the decisions of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities at parish level.[62] The physical presence of Dissenting meeting-houses, where Presbyterian worship was now openly observed, was a novel provocation. The creation of a rival ecclesiastical structure under the Synod of Ulster posed a direct challenge to the Established Church, and the Presbyterian system of church government, now functioning openly and efficiently for the first time, became an obsession with Anglican magistrates. Worse still, the Presbyterian practice of holding large open-air communion ceremonies could be intimidating. One alarmed curate reported in 1694 that Samuel Haliday (1637–1724) had organised a communion festival at Ardstraw, County Tyrone, with seven tables of eighty communicants, each presided over by five ministers.[63] Strictly speaking, these services were still actually illegal. In addition to frequent prosecutions over marriages and schools, Presbyterians complained that some landlords refused to permit meeting-houses on their estates. A case in point was Cookstown, County Tyrone, where a Presbyterian congregation led by the Rev. John Mackenzie, a veteran of the siege of Derry, had built a meeting-house on common ground. When the Rev. John Richardson, a high-churchman best known for his advocacy of Irish-language catechisms, had the doors barred, the congregation began to dismantle it and remove the materials for erection elsewhere. The exasperated rector obtained a warrant to arrest twenty protestors and had them tried for riot at the next assizes.[64] Finally, the confessional state also involved the oversight of births, marriages and deaths, and attempts to enforce this role also sparked violent incidents. An address to Queen Anne issued by the Presbyterian clergy and gentlemen of the north in 1712 denied that there had been assaults on ministers of the Established Church, but admitted ‘some Acts of Indiscretion, whereof some few of the meaner sort were guilty, while the Clergy were performing the Office for the Burial of the Dead’.[65]

Given repeated Presbyterian assertions that the defence of Protestant Ireland was largely in their hands, it was galling for a senior Anglican like Bishop Nicolson of Derry to admit that most of the Presbyterian ‘Commonalty’ were listed in the local ‘Trained Bands’—even if fewer than one in twenty were qualified to be commissioned officers.[66] Before the 1750s the enrolment of Dissenters was a delicate matter, and each invasion scare, simply by mobilising Protestant communities, allowed the old tensions between Church and Dissent to resurface. In 1708, when a French invasion fleet was prevented by the Royal Navy from joining Jacobite nobles in Scotland, the Anglican clergyman of Carrickfergus actually came to blows with the local Presbyterian minister during the militia array.[67] Neglected by the Tory administration in the last years of Queen Anne’s reign, the militia was revived by the Whigs to meet the invasion scare of 1715. A memorial drawn up for the Lords Justices by Archbishop Lindsay of Armagh and Bishop Smyth of Down and Connor, entitled The insolence of the Dissenters against the Established Church (1716), claimed that Presbyterians were searching the houses of Anglican clergy and gentlemen and taking arms from them on the pretext that they were disaffected to the government.[68] In this context, the publication of a sermon preached on the birthday of George I to the Belfast ‘Independent’ Volunteers by the Rev. Robert McBride, was calculated to offend the Tories.[69] Under the last of the Stuarts, the Tories had enjoyed the support of a devoutly Anglican queen; the first of the Hanoverians, on the other hand, was a Lutheran and known to be sympathetic to Protestant Dissent. On a thanksgiving day held to mark the Hanoverian succession the Rev. James Blair stressed George I’s commitment to toleration and pointedly praised the forbearance that existed between Lutherans and Calvinists in his German lands.[70] In 1745, as Charles Stuart was leading his Jacobite army to Carlisle, loyalist associations were formed by the Dissenting congregations in Dublin and the Rev. Thomas Drennan of Belfast was asked to draw up a survey of all those able to bear arms in every northern congregation in order to ‘show the importance of the Dissenting Interest in the time of Danger’.[71] The Lord Lieutenant, Chesterfield, sent commissions to a number of Dissenting gentlemen and ministers; and a favourable resolution of the House of Commons expressing gratitude was eventually followed by the passage of 29 Geo. II, c. 24 (Ireland), which made it possible for Dissenters to receive commissions in the militia.[72] It is no accident that the final abolition of the Test (1780) took place against a later, and much more momentous mobilisation, in the shape of the Irish Volunteers.

The decade after the Revolution provided a dramatic boost to Irish Presbyterianism as a massive wave of Scottish immigrants poured into the northern province. ‘It is really deplorable’, the Rev. William Tisdall whined, ‘to observe several Parts of the North, which the English Colonies, who were Conformists had improv’d, almost entirely possessed by Presbyterians, who flowed in upon us since the late Revolution.’[73] Demographic research has emphasised the importance of the final decades of the seventeenth century in establishing the denominational pattern of modern Ulster. In the 1690s, when low rents in Ulster coincided with a series of bad harvests in Scotland, the last great burst of Scottish immigration took place, estimated at somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 people by the defenders of an increasingly beleaguered Anglican Church. While these contemporary figures are certainly too high, the rapid growth of the Scottish settlements was visible in church expansion. Of the 148 Presbyterian congregations in existence in 1720, over half had been established since the Restoration, with as many as 44 originating in the years between 1691 and 1715. Whereas English settlements had generally been dependent on landlord sponsorship, Scots migrants and their descendants possessed their own capital resources and were consequently more independent and more mobile. By the early eighteenth century Presbyterians enjoyed secure majorities through much of Antrim and Down; they had recently overturned Anglican predominance in Londonderry, east Donegal and Tyrone; and they were beginning to move south from mid-Armagh to Counties Monaghan and Louth.[74] Fear of Scots territorial expansion helps to explain the legal harassment of Dissenting congregations at Drogheda (1708) and Belturbet (1712), and outraged complaints that the Ulster presbyteries were using government funds (the regium donum) to ‘enlarge their borders’.[75]

The Presbyterians were very keen to stress that they were part of a common British community in Ireland; but they were not English (and they certainly did not, until much later, consider themselves to belong to an Irish nation). John McBride’s Sample of jet-black prelatick calumny, quoted above, was intended to show the services of the ‘Ulster Scotch’ to the Protestant interest since the plantation under James I.[76] His Belfast colleague, the Rev. James Kirkpatrick, reporting on the implementation of the Test to a friend at Glasgow, explained that ‘we are Scotsmen and Presbyterians too, two great evils in the eyes of our enemies’.[77] Three-quarters of the Presbyterian clergymen who ministered in Ireland between the Restoration and the mid-1690s, including Kirkpatrick himself, had been born in Scotland; perhaps as many as fifty had fled there during the Jacobite wars.[78] At least some Scots reciprocated these feelings of kinship. The famous patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun sympathised with the ‘Scots-Irish, who are a people of the same blood with us’.[79] To Nicholas French, Catholic Bishop of Ferns and author of The bleeding Iphigeneia (1675), the ‘Scotch’ were ‘an ingenious cunning people’ who were in ‘full possession’ of most of the northern province and were now spreading into the other three.[80] The Anglican clergyman Ezekiel Burridge, friend of William Molyneux and translator of Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding, condemned those Whigs who encouraged ‘the Scotch Presbyterians of the North’, since they were ‘a great Body of furious and very unruly people’.[81] Although there was no significant Scottish immigration after the 1690s, Anglican writers still feared that ‘new Swarms of hungry Scots’ were poised to gobble up all the minor posts in the revenue as well as army commissions as soon as the sacramental test was lifted.[82] A defender of the Test Act in 1733, most likely Swift himself, asked ‘Whether the Scottish Ulster Presbyterian Farmers, Tradesmen and Cottagers . . . be not a more knavish, wicked, thievish Race, than even the natural Irish of the three other Provinces?’[83]

What it meant to be a Scot in Ireland, and the processes by which this potent sense of separate national origin would diminish in the first half of the eighteenth century, are questions that have never been addressed. The Presbyterians gave to the north the ‘intolerable “Scoto-Hibernic” jargon’ which, as William Carleton observed in his Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry, ‘pierces the ear so unmercifully’.[84] Between 1750 and 1850 more than sixty volumes of Ulster-Scots poetry were published. The best-known of the ‘rhyming weavers’ were James Campbell of Ballynure (1758–1818), Samuel Thomson of Carngranny (1766–1816) and James Orr of Ballycarry (1772–1816). A Belfast edition of Burns’s poems appeared in 1787, just after the first Edinburgh edition, and there were further reprintings in 1789, 1793 and 1800.[85] But interest in Scottish vernacular writing can be dated much further back. Alexander Montgomerie’s The cherrie and the SLAE was printed in Belfast as early as 1700. Scots poetry was already being published in the 1730s, although more often than not in spoof form. In The North Country-man’s description of Christ’s Church (1733), for example, Swift made fun of two gormless Presbyterians from Portaferry, visiting Dublin for the first time.[86] In the same year he wrote The grunter’s request:

But giff ye graunt no our Request,

And cancell that ungodly Test,

Which braunds iss lik a Herd o’ cattel,

Why then, my Lauds, faight y’er ain Battel;

We reckna, we caun flit awa’

To sattle in America:

The Kingdom of a Scot, like Cain,

Is ony Kingdom, bar his ain.

He thraives in outher cauld or Hot Land,

Or ony Nation, but in Scotland.[87]

Ulster-Scots verse thus appears to be a rare example of a literary genre in which the parody established itself in print before the genuine article.

Another factor that remains to be fully explored by historians concerns the impact upon the Church of Ireland of the abolition of prelacy in Scotland, where the victory of Williamite forces in 1689 led swiftly to the creation of a Presbyterian establishment. This was a revolutionary shock, and the representatives of the ‘Church Party’ in Ireland clearly feared something similar.[88] Anglican propagandists relayed horrific reports of the ‘rabbling’ of Episcopalian ministers—a violent, protracted process whereby recalcitrant clergymen were expelled from their livings.[89] There is some evidence to suggest that, following the liberation of Ulster by William, Presbyterians in the north-west refused to pay tithes to the church, and that Anglican ministers were ejected from their own parishes. High-churchmen also suspected that the synod remained true to the militant Calvinism of the Scottish Covenanters whose rebellion against Charles I had precipitated the civil wars of the 1640s. For twenty years, according to the Rev. William Tisdall of Belfast, ‘Scotch strollers and peddlers’ had gone from house to house selling copies of the Solemn League and Covenant along with their small wares. In 1697 the surveyor of the Custom House at Belfast reported that scores of the regicide tract The hind let loose had been imported from Scotland. This set out to demonstrate ‘the utter Independency of the Kirk from the Civil Power; to justifie the Murther of Princes, in their opinion Tyrannical, who obstruct the Progress of what they call Christ’s Kingdom’.[90] Like popery, it seemed, Presbyterianism could never be safely tolerated. Were not both of them intolerant creeds which threatened to dissolve the bonds of civil society by elevating spiritual authority over the temporal? On the other hand, the synod could now point to Scotland as proof that a Presbyterian establishment was compatible with an Anglican monarchy. How could their synods and judicatories be prejudicial to the royal prerogative if they were now established in ‘North Britain’ as a fundamental article of the Act of Union?

How can we explain intransigence of many Anglicans, particularly between the 1690s and the 1730s, on the issue of relief for their Dissenting ‘brethren’? To dismiss the numerous examples of discrimination and petty harassment noted above as inexplicable products of religious intolerance would be a mistake. In Britain and in most of Europe political elites continued to uphold the ideal of a national church which enjoyed a monopoly of religious worship and education, which marked the rites of passage from the cradle to the grave, and which policed the moral life of local communities through church courts which enjoyed the full backing of the civil authorities. Religious diversity, it was believed, inevitably led to civil discord, the most common reference point being the civil wars of the 1640s, when the determination of Charles I to impose uniformity upon all his subjects embroiled all three kingdoms in a devastating series of conflicts. Church and state, one pamphleteer remarked, ‘are so interwoven and united, that whatever Affects the one, must inevitably Affect the other’.[91] Even the two most powerful surviving republics, Venice and Holland, had confessional tests. For two religions to share political power was as absurd as ‘for two contrary Souls to be in one and the same Body’.[92] The Toleration Act, belatedly extended to Ireland in 1719, was a major landmark in the long retreat of the confessional state, and the clash between the ideal of a single national church and the reality of religious division was a painful one.

At the same time, disputes over the status of Dissent touched on the question of sovereignty. As we have seen, there were repeated fears that the Test might be repealed by an act passed at Westminster; indeed, it has been plausibly suggested that the Declaratory Act was intended to be the prelude to such a move. Influence over decision-makers at St James’s Palace and at Westminster was often more effectively exerted by private lobbying in London than politicking in the Dublin parliament. Swift himself knew this only too well, having spent several hectic years in the metropolis negotiating for tax concessions on behalf of the Irish clergy between 1707 and 1709. The Synod of Ulster employed a succession of agents to lobby in London, including both ministers (Francis Iredell, Robert Craghead, Thomas Drennan) and northern landowners (Colonel Clotworthy Upton, Alexander Stewart). Swift, whose first parish was the Ulster-Scots stronghold of Kilroot, also had personal experience of the frustrating inability of Irish magistrates to enforce the laws against nonconformity. By 1695, when Swift was installed in the ‘black north’, the Presbyterians enjoyed the tacit protection of the government; their ministerial stipends were topped up by the regium donum or royal bounty renewed by William III, and they were asserting their presence in the corporations of Belfast, Derry, Carrickfergus and Coleraine. Just three years before, when the Archdeacon of Down, the prophetically named Lemuell Matthews, arrested a Presbyterian minister for preaching, the high sheriff of the county intervened to have the warrant stopped, and Matthews was ordered by Dublin Castle to refrain from any further legal proceedings.[93] At this time, of course, Dissenting meeting-houses were still actually illegal, and attempts to pass a toleration bill in 1692 and 1695 ran up against the intransigence of the Irish House of Commons. As J. C. Beckett once pointed out, ‘Presbyterian ministers were paid by the government to perform functions which had been declared illegal by act of parliament’.[94] Here was the sort of ironic disjunction between English theory and Irish practice that so incensed Swift.

The first pamphlet on Irish affairs published by Swift was A letter from a member of the House of Commons in Ireland . . . concerning the sacramental test, dated 4 December 1708. Towards the end of 1707 the Speaker of the Irish Commons, Alan Brodrick, was soliciting on behalf of the Irish Presbyterians in London, and it was suggested that the ministry might bypass Irish opposition by having the Test repealed in the English parliament. Swift was furious, and it is surely significant that his first public protest against England’s interference in Irish affairs was a defence of the 1704 Test Act. How could Brodrick, formerly the great champion of Irish parliamentary independence, drag the English parliament into ‘a Matter purely national’?[95] In October 1718 the Synod of Ulster had requested its friends in England to ‘use your interest at the next session of the British Parliament for the removal of the S.T.’[96] An anonymous pamphlet soon appeared in both London and Dublin, entitled Some considerations upon the late attempt to repeal the Test Act (1719), never included in any collection of Swift’s works. Revealingly, however, the anonymous author could not resist linking the agitation of the despicable Presbyterians with the recent tendency to reward English favourites with Irish posts. These intruders arrived in Dublin with the conviction that they were dealing with ‘a Race of inferior Mortals’; and, worse still,

The Words Province, Colony, Plantation, Conquest, and depending Kingdom are ever in these Mens Mouths, without knowing that the universal Opinion of Civilians is against them, and without being able to apprehend that one Kingdom does not lose its Legislature, by being under the same Administration with another. For if Slavery were to be defined by the strictest Rules of Logick; there could be no other Notion of it, than that of being governed by Laws, to which we do not Consent.[97]

The fierce antagonism between Church and Dissent, often overlooked by historians, was thus a central, persistent theme in the politics of Ascendancy Ireland. For Swift at least, the survival of the sacramental test was the most urgent political question of the post-Revolution era, and provided the context within which his definition of Irish slavery first crystallised.

PAMPHLET WARS

Are Printers to make and repeal Laws? Must one of the lowest and meanest of Tradesmen, without Learning, without any opportunity of conversing with Men of Knowledge, and Experience, dictate from behind his Counter to the Government, to the Magistrates of his Country, and not only pretend to instruct, but reproach and vilify them?

THE CHARGE OF THOMAS MARLEY, LORD CHIEF JUSTICE . . . TO THE

GRAND JURIES OF THE COUNTY AND CITY OF DUBLIN (1749)

Swift may have composed as many as a hundred pamphlets and broadsheets on Irish affairs, beginning with the allegorical Story of the injured lady, written at the time of the Scottish union but not published until 1746. No other writer expended so much energy on the problems of economic development, the legal privileges of the Established Church, or the constitutional status of the kingdom of Ireland. Even Swift’s outrageous toilet humour was capable of being turned to patriotic purposes. In his City cries (1732), an apparently innocuous discussion of urban life, Swift raised a problem seldom discussed by urban historians, the ‘immense Number of human Excrements’ to be seen in the backstreets of the city. With a characteristic mixture of outlandish speculation and mock sobriety, he considered the malicious rumour that these ‘Heaps’ were in fact planted by British agents to counteract the ‘Clamour of Poverty’ among Dubliners, and to suggest that ‘our Irish Vulgar’ were actually well-fed:

They would confirm this, by pretending to observe, that a British Anus being more narrowly perforated than one of our own Country; and many of these Excrements upon a strict View appearing Cople-crown’d, with a Point like a Cone or Pyramid, are easily distinguish’d from the Hibernian, which lie much flatter, and with less Continuity. I communicated this Conjecture to an eminent Physician, who is well versed in such profound Speculations; and at my Request was pleased to make Trial with each of his Fingers, by thrusting them into the Anus of several Persons of both Nations, and professed he could find no such Difference between them as Ill-disposed People alledge. On the contrary, he assured me, that much the greater Number of narrow Cavities were of Hibernian origin. . . . I had almost forgot to add, that my friend the Physician could, by smelling each Finger, distinguish the Hibernian Excrement from the British, and was not above twice mistaken in an Hundred Experiments, upon which he intends very soon to publish a learned Dissertation.[99]

The dean’s outpourings, and especially the invention of the Drapier, heralded the emergence of a distinctively Irish political culture. The 1720s, with its constitutional upheavals and its economic catastrophes, was the key decade in this development. Far from putting an end to constitutional debate in Dublin, the Declaratory Act stimulated a culture of pamphleteering that proved capable of sustaining itself. This does not mean, as historians have sometimes suggested, that there was no public debate before the Drapier took up his pen. The previous three decades had witnessed the rapid development of the press, first in London, then in Edinburgh and Dublin. Many Irishmen had first-hand experience of the ideological disputes produced by the Glorious Revolution, arguably, as Jonathan Israel has written ‘the most intensely ideological and philosophical of all major episodes in English history’.[100] In 1689 alone more than 2,000 political tracts were published in England, most of them dealing with the constitutional and theological implications of the Revolution settlement. In that same year it was claimed, no doubt with some exaggeration, that 5,000 Irish Protestant refugees were living in London.[101] It was no surprise when, three years later, the first session of the Irish parliament was disrupted by ‘English troublemakers’ who attempted to replicate the constitutional checks and procedures of the English parliament. The ringleaders were in fact Irish landowners such as James Hamilton, James Sloane and Sir Francis Brewster, who had served their political apprenticeship in London, and who now talked of repealing Poynings’ Law, of demanding a habeas corpus bill and ‘twenty other extravagant discourses’.[102]

The next quarter-century would be dominated by the ‘rage of party’, dividing gentry, merchants and professionals, farmers, artisans and even the ‘mob’ into Whigs and Tories. In this golden age of pamphlet warfare a number of Irishmen played a conspicuous part. Swift himself, in London for much of this period, became the most brilliant propagandist of the Tories. His famous manifesto The conduct of the allies (1711) denounced the Whig ministry for prolonging the war over the Spanish succession, the disastrously expensive conflict that many believed was shifting wealth and power away from the landed interest towards the financiers and creditors in the city of London. The pamphlet rapidly went through six London editions, with further printings in both Edinburgh and Dublin. Another prolific journalist was Charles Leslie, an Irish Anglican clergyman whose resolute commitment to the theory of the divine right of monarchy would not permit him to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary, with the consequence that he was deprived of his clerical position. As the most articulate spokesman of the non-juring Anglican community in London, he edited the biweekly newspaper The Rehearsal (1704–9), tirelessly attacking the Revolution settlement in all its political, constitutional and theological aspects, including the distinctively Irish variety of Whig political culture just beginning to take shape in Dublin. It was Leslie who responded to William King’s State of the Protestants of Ireland (1691), the manifesto for the Irish Williamites, taunting the future Archbishop of Dublin with his record as a zealous defender of the traditional Anglican principles of non-resistance and passive obedience before the Williamite invasion.[103] He also issued a rejoinder to Molyneux’s Case of Ireland stated, generally ignored by Irish historians. The mischievous Jacobite took great pleasure in pointing out that William III’s title to the crown of Ireland depended on two acts made by the English parliament in 1691, so that ‘the English, as well as the Irish, in Ireland, are in the Condition of Slaves; and to be disposed of, both as to their Lives and Fortunes, without any Consent of their own’.[104]

At a more general level, it is possible to demonstrate the influence of London newspapers and periodicals across the Irish Sea. In 1709 Daniel Defoe’s Review, the principal organ of the Whigs, was being received in Carrickfergus.[105] Defoe, incidentally, was the anonymous author of The parallel (1705), a defence of the Ulster Presbyterians repeatedly denounced by Anglican ministers such as William Tisdall of Belfast.[106] Irish opinion was predictably divided over the controversial trial of the high-church preacher Dr Sacheverell in 1710, whose sermon The perils of false brethren, both in church and state was a coded attack on the ‘Revolution principles’ of 1688.[107] In Belfast, for example, it was said that a local clergyman was ‘whooted at, and called (as the utmost Mark of Infamy) Dr Sacheverell’, to the great merriment of the leading citizens.[108] Bishop Benjamin Hoadly, the radical Whig churchman, was widely read in Ireland by both Anglicans and Presbyterians, as were his orthodox opponents in the ‘Bangorian controversy’ of 1717–20. When Bishop William Nicolson arrived in Derry in 1718, he was welcomed with a visitation sermon attacking Hoadly and other prominent Whiggish clerics in England and urging the audience to close ranks around the ‘tottering Church of Ireland’.[109] Five years later, stopping at Larne, Nicolson and his children were taunted with cries of ‘the Bishop of Rochester, the Bishop of Rochester’—a reference to the high-churchman and Jacobite traitor Francis Atterbury—in spite of his attempts to conceal his identity and hopes that ‘the money we scatter’d amongst them, would have secured us against any insults of the populace’.[110] In the 1710s most constituencies were divided along party lines, and contested elections took place in many boroughs, including Carrickfergus, Derry, Limerick, Wicklow, Kilkenny and Dublin. Of twenty-two corporation minute books surviving from the period, sixteen contain evidence of factional disputes.[111]

One of the reasons why historians have sometimes failed to appreciate the vitality of party controversy in post-revolutionary Ireland is that they seldom read sermons, still the most common form of public pronouncement on political affairs. For most eighteenth-century people, political, social and religious concerns were still inextricably interwoven. The local Anglican clergyman was a symbol of temporal as well as spiritual authority; the assizes and quarter-sessions, the town corporations and the parish vestry were all different manifestations of same government. Sean Connolly’s recent study of sermons preached on 30 January, the fast-day dedicated to the royal martyr Charles I, stresses the sophistication of Irish preachers who were expected to adapt the principles of hereditary succession and non-resistance to the rapidly changing political circumstances of the post-revolutionary world.[112] During Queen Anne’s reign (1702–14) high-churchmen and Tories tended to dominate, attacking resistance theories. A good example was John Winder, Swift’s successor at Kilroot, whose sermon entitled The mischief of schism and faction to church and state (1714) was a rant against republicans, Deists and Dissenters, all of whom he sought to identify with the radicals of the 1640s and 1650s.[113] Winder’s neighbour, the Rev. Edward Mathews, preached a sermon to the Antrim assizes in 1713 which denounced those who substituted ‘a wild and imaginary State of Nature’ for God’s providence, and warned against the subversive Whig notions of contract and resistance which rendered government subject to the ‘the Ebbings and Flowings of the wavering Passions of the Crowd’. The targets of this invective, if not already obvious, were identified in Mathews’s footnotes, where he cited Calvin and the Scottish resistance theories of John Knox, Samuel Rutherford and the militant Covenanters.[114]

Whigs, on the other hand, were generally uncomfortable with radical depictions of 1688 as a popular revolution, preferring to emphasise the invasion of William of Orange—a lawful ruler, with a recognised claim to the throne, who intervened on behalf of ‘an Oppressed People’ just as Elizabeth I had supported the Dutch Republic.[115] Not surprisingly, it was the northern Presbyterians who were least inhibited about adopting the language of contract and resistance.[116] The ‘Celebrated Elder and Patriot’ Clotworthy Upton, for example, outraged local Tories when he had ‘the Hardiness to Drink at a Publick Table, To his Sovereign Lord the People’.[117] Whereas the Tories regarded themselves as ‘the Church party’, coupling their defence of the confessional state with devotion to the monarchy of Queen Anne, the Whigs or ‘honest gentlemen’ saw themselves as the guardians of the Ireland’s parliamentary constitution and campaigned vigorously for further penal laws against Catholicism. Although they were often hostile to high-church interference in politics, and supported both toleration and the naturalisation of continental Protestant refugees, their sympathy for Protestant Dissenters stopped well short of the repeal of the Test. Before the Octennial Act of 1768, which made the House of Commons more vulnerable to electoral pressures, it was only the handful of M.P.s who were themselves Presbyterians, and a few other northern representatives, who actively supported the Dissenting cause.

By the middle of the 1720s ‘party’ questions were no longer seen as seriously divisive, but a dynamic culture of debate within the Protestant Ascendancy had now been established, and the ‘pamphlet war’ would continue to be its primary medium.[118] The Wood’s Halfpence affair inspired around forty pamphlets, compared with the dozen or so prompted by the Woollen Bill (1696–8), about sixteen on the proposals for an Irish national bank (1720–21), and around twenty-five on the attempts to repeal the Test Act in the early 1730s. Even short occasional pieces might be forwarded by anxious officials at Dublin Castle to their superiors in London. A case in point was James Maculla’s Ireland’s consternation (1723), with its bold declaration that supporters of Wood’s copper coins were traitors to their country. Walpole, always attentive to shifts in public opinion, described it as ‘ye most Errant Grub Street paper I ever read in my life’.[119] The first Drapier’s letter, printed in an edition of 2,000 copies, reached an exceptionally wide audience, but even arguments from the more recherché economic tracts of the 1720s could be recycled in the newspapers. The queries format, the list of rhetorical questions sometimes thought to have been invented by Bishop Berkeley, was in fact used as early as 1691 with the short tract Weighty queries, a demand for a punitive land settlement.[120] In addition to pamphlets of varying length, political propaganda included a range of more ephemeral forms such as broadsides, single sheets and ballads. The ‘last speech’, usually a broadside reporting the gallows confession of a condemned criminal, and the funeral elegy were both popular genres adapted by satirists for political purposes. When a scheme to launch a national bank—construed as another attempt to subordinate the Irish economy to English interests—was thrown out by both houses of the Irish parliament, Swift celebrated with the satirical Last speech and dying words of the Bank of Ireland (1721).[121] In several other punning pieces attacking the bank project he identified money and faeces with ‘an explicitness to delight the hearts of Freudians’.[122] One of them, a mock advertisement entitled The wonderful wonder of wonders (1720), depicts the bank employing pamphlets ‘on both sides with great impartiality’ to wipe its arse.[123]

During the turbulent Dublin by-election contest of 1748–9, when the apothecary Charles Lucas campaigned for the reform of the city corporation, more than 150 pamphlets were aimed at around 4,000 voters (from a total population of 130,000).[124] They included a series of notorious addresses to the free citizens and freeholders of Dublin composed by Lucas himself, who also launched a weekly newspaper, The Censor, or The Citizen’s Journal. His tenth and eleventh addresses summarised Molyneux’s doctrine of the ancient Irish constitution; they also blamed previous Irish rebellions on English misgovernment, claiming that the Anglo-Norman conquerors had treated the native Irish ‘as the Spaniards used the Mexicans, or as inhumanly as the English now treat their slaves in America’. His translation of a Latin charter issued by Edward iv in 1462, published as The great charter of the liberties of the city of Dublin (1749), was prefaced with a dedication to George II which complained that the English parliament had treated Ireland as ‘a conquered province or a dependent colony’.[125] The resulting witch-hunt eventually led to a set of resolutions in the House of Commons calling for the author’s prosecution for sedition, and Lucas fled to the continent rather than face imprisonment in Newgate.

The money bill dispute of 1753 produced a further avalanche of pamphlets, with 60 appearing in 1753, another 75 in 1754, before dropping to 40 in 1755. In essence, this was a factional struggle within the Irish political elite, in which George Stone, the self-aggrandising Archbishop of Armagh, challenged the chief undertaker, Henry Boyle, with the backing of the Duke of Dorset’s administration at Dublin Castle. What transformed a high-political skirmish into a major crisis, however, was the decision of Boyle and his allies to appeal to public opinion. The constitutional issue at stake—whether the right to dispose of any surplus arising from Irish revenues lay with the crown or parliament—aroused fears that Irish M.P.s would become mere ‘Adjectives’ and their legislation reduced to the force of ‘a petty Act of Vestry’.[126] While Boyle was portrayed, somewhat improbably, as the very embodiment of the independent country gentleman, a series of scurrilous pamphlets represented Archbishop Stone as a meddling high-priest and a sodomite who chose ‘to worship in the Temple of Cloacina, before that of Venus’. Spoof correspondence was revealed, purporting to be Stone’s love-letters to a young Hibernian Ganymede. Addressed to ‘my dear Cunny’, they railed against women and defended pederasty before signing off with the postscript ‘P.S. Come in by the Back Stairs’.[127] In January 1754 it was reported that the Irish publicly insulted the archbishop ‘by turning up their children’s backsides and saying what a fine pair of buttocks they are’.[128] By this stage Dublin Castle was prepared to sponsor its own writers, such as Christopher Robinson, whose Considerations on a late bill (1754) appeared in a print-run of 1,500 copies and was circulated widely.[129] Indeed, the press itself, and the influence of pamphlet wars on the public, now became a topic for debate. ‘There is not a Cobler now’, declared the author of A letter upon libels (1753), ‘ who would not rather have it said, that he had made a fine Harange at one of the Meetings of the Sons of Liberty (as they are termed) than that he had made a handsome Earning by his Day’s Labour for his famishing Family.’[130]

If ‘the people’ sometimes meant the political nation, then it also increasingly meant the wider audience imagined by the lawyers, clergymen and hacks who produced pamphlets, squibs and letters to newspapers, and on behalf of whom they staked their claim to a voice in political discussion. When a collected edition of the Drapier’s Letters had been issued in 1725, the preface explained that they were written in a ‘plain and easy’ style because they were ‘for the Benefit of the whole People of Ireland’.[131] Swift’s creation naturally spawned many imitators, and the persona of the Drapier was revived by pamphleteers in 1729, 1731, 1745, 1754, 1760, 1767 and 1778. And just as the Drapier’s initials ‘M.B.’ were thought to stand for Marcus Brutus, a host of other writers adopted classical republican pseudonyms—Cato, Brutus, or ‘Cato Ultonensis’ [the Ulster Cato], whose deliberately commonsense appeal, A word of advice (1724), was aimed at all ‘Ranks and Degrees’.[132] What is striking is not simply the image of the pamphleteer as a citizen—male, propertied and rational—but the appeal to the productive classes of the community against an oppressive government. The Drapier’s Letters were cast as the homespun logic of a simple tradesman. In the 1750s even one of Dublin Castle’s hired pens, protesting about the deluge of patriot polemic that was corrupting journeymen and apprentices, would describe himself as ‘L.B. Haberdasher’ and entitle his piece A letter to the tradesmen, farmers, and the rest of the good people of Ireland (1754).[133]

Molyneux’s Case of Ireland stated, a lengthy treatise of common law, could only have been read in full by the learned. Its original title was ‘An humble remonstrance to the parliam[en]t of England in relation to Ireland’, and we must assume that it was intended to influence opinion at Westminster.[134] It did so, though not in the way Molyneux had intended: the work was considered worthy of public condemnation by the English House of Commons and of lengthy refutations by major English writers on trade and constitutional matters (John Cary, Charles Davenant and William Atwood). In the panicky years before the Declaratory Act The case of Ireland stated was again published, and was now said to be ‘daily animating the Populace to assert their Irish liberties, exempt from the Dominion of (what they call) Forreigners’.[135] It certainly received the imprimatur of the Irish House of Lords, who in their representation to George I adopted the theory of an original contract made between Henry II and the Irish chiefs.[136] Molyneux’s was not the only book to be discussed at Westminster: the debate on the Declaratory Act opened with an attack on Toland’s Reasons most humbly offer’d to the Hon[oura]ble House of Commons (1720), which implied that English oppression was driving loyal Protestants into a rebellious alliance with papists.[137] Pamphlets were printed—and sometimes reprinted—to coincide with the opening of parliamentary sessions, and were clearly designed to furnish members with arguments.

At first glance, it might seem that Catholics were entirely excluded from this world of print, but this was not quite the case. In the six decades between the appearance of Hugh Reily’s Case of Ireland briefly stated (1695) and the foundation of the Catholic Committee in 1756 it is true that Catholics generally avoided public discussion of their principles. As Father Cornelius Nary’s theological and historical works demonstrate, there was no general policy of censorship with regard to Catholic Ireland, but the authorities were hostile towards any direct challenge. A broadside attack upon Pierre Boyer’s History of the Vaudois (1692), written by Thady O’Brien and allegedly aimed at ‘the lower Sort of People’, was suppressed in 1743 by the mayor of Cork following a complaint from the Protestant bishop; the same fate befell a Cork reprint of Charles O’Conor’s Case of the Roman-Catholics of Ireland in 1755.[138] A number of short pamphlets and single sheets, apparently aimed at M.P.s, contested particular penal laws during the reign of Queen Anne.[139] When a loyal Catholic address appeared following the succession of George II, in which the deposing power of the papacy was disowned, the Jacobite priest Sylvester Lloyd issued his Queries on the Popery Bill (1731), accusing the gentlemen responsible of ‘making a new Creed’ for Irish Catholics.[140]

Pamphlets, broadsides and ‘flying papers’ were not only available in bookshops, but were, in the usual phrase, ‘hawked thro’ the streets’ by newsboys.[141] Already by the 1690s advanced literacy was common among the middling sorts, including skilled craftsmen and traders, supplying the booksellers and printers with their market.[142] Closely related was the development of the newspaper, another novelty of the decades after the Revolution. The number of titles available, often short-lived ventures, increased from 9 in 1701–5 to 22 in 1711–15 to 29 in 1726–30.[143] Although the growth of newspaper production was modest before the 1760s, it had already spread outside the capital to Cork, Limerick, Belfast and Derry. When the American historian James Donnelly conducted his pioneering research on the Whiteboys of the 1760s, he was able to track the arrest and trial of Cork rioters through the columns of Faulkner’s Dublin Journal and the Belfast News-Letter. That the inhabitants of Belfast might follow reports of French involvement in Whiteboyism as far away as Tipperary testifies to the appearance of a nationwide communications network. The press did not simply reflect the emergence of public opinion, but helped to create it, by connecting different denominational communities and regional economies into a single national unit focused ultimately on the Dublin parliament.

The contents of eighteenth-century Irish newspapers included information about local events (assizes, trials and executions, philanthropic projects), business news and, by the middle decades of the century, political meetings, resolutions and letters on current affairs; but Irish subject-matter was always overshadowed by remarkably extensive coverage of foreign affairs and continental warfare, mostly lifted straight from the London papers following the arrival of the ‘British pacquet’. War and trade were obviously as relevant to the Catholic middle classes as to the Protestant. In 1745 one observer noted that the Catholics avidly followed the successful campaigns of the French in Flanders. ‘Pues [Occurences] is their paper, the Protestants prefer Faulkner’s,’ he explained; ‘and it is diverting how they fight each other with their different intelligences.’[144] By this stage it was also common to see lists of political toasts inserted in the newspapers. Guests at public dinners and banquets had long concluded their evenings by drinking to the health of the royal family, King William, to the Revolution of 1688 and to the First of August (the Hanoverian succession). In the 1730s Dean Swift and the Drapier were both popular toasts in Dublin; in the 1750s patriots sought to associate themselves with the British constitution (Magna Carta, Locke, etc.), but also with active resistance to tyranny, as when they toasted the Whig martyrs Sidney and Russell who had conspired against Charles II. Ritual toasts were generally not spontaneous, but carefully orchestrated affairs designed to publicise the loyal sentiments of civic elites and popular societies alike. Any suggestion that they were simply harmless festivities should be dispelled by the serious trouble courted by those who proposed disloyal toasts.[145] In April 1744, during a Jacobite invasion scare, James Heggarty was sentenced to be pilloried at Derry for drinking the health of the Pretender. A demonstration followed in which the crowd burned effigies of James II and his two sons. Seven years later John Costello of County Clare was imprisoned and pilloried for calling for a toast to ‘James III’.[146]

THE WHOLE PEOPLE OF IRELAND?

What did Swift really mean when he addressed his fourth Drapier’s letter to ‘the whole people of Ireland’? He seems to have identified ‘the people’ with those formal bodies that comprised the political nation: the two houses of parliament, the town corporations, the commissions of the peace and the freeholders.[147] Such an assumption was certainly in keeping with early modern usage. In all Thomas Hobbes’s works, for example, the term ‘people’ signifies a legally constituted body or ‘civil person’, such as the House of Commons, in contrast to the term ‘multitude’, which referred to a mere aggregate of private individuals.[148] In 1792 a pamphleteer signing himself as ‘a Protestant Whig’, an admirer of Locke and Montesquieu who clearly regarded himself as an enlightened man, drew the same contrast with ‘the multitude’. The author was infuriated by Catholic propagandists who boasted that they spoke for the majority of the population. ‘If majority were reason why the people should govern,’ he retorted, ‘tumult and anarchy must be the inevitable consequence.’ Although Catholics had numbers on their side, the Protestants had education and property on theirs, while most Catholics were ‘a lawless rabble’.[149] Under the pressure of radical agitation from the United Irishmen and the Catholic Committee, conservatives now found it necessary to articulate what they had previously taken for granted. Certainly it is clear enough that the oppression that bothered Swift most was that of the settlers rather than the natives. His Proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacture (1720) complained that ministers ‘look down upon this Kingdom, as if it had been one of their Colonies of Out-casts in America’.[150]

Most politicians at least paid lip-service to the notion that government was dependent upon the consent of the people, but what they meant by ‘people’ is harder to discern. In 1796 Edmund Burke, irritated by the radical claim that the war against revolutionary France was opposed by ‘the will of the people’, attempted a statistical definition of the British public. That section of society which ‘in any political view’ might be called the people was restricted to able-bodied adults with access to information and sufficient leisure time to discuss it. On Burke’s calculations, this meant around 400,000 out of a total population of 8 million.[151] Happily, this figure accords surprisingly closely with the boundaries of ‘the political nation’ as fixed by historians. An analysis of the various petitioning movements around the time of the American war, for example, suggests that about 25 per cent of England’s adult male population was politically active, at a time when the electorate included only 3.1 per cent of the entire population.[152] In Ireland, before Catholics were readmitted to the franchise in 1793, there were approximately 60,000 voters, accounting for 5.5 per cent of the Protestant population, or one in five adult males.

Eighteenth-century Ireland was a society where hereditary privilege and vast inequalities of wealth were regarded as a natural or unavoidable fact of human existence. Liberty was not associated with equality before the French Revolution pitted the Third Estate against the First and the Second. Nor was the idea of parliamentary representation closely associated with regular elections. Before the Octennial Act (1768), which limited the lifespan of a parliament to eight years, general elections were called only on the accession of the monarch. Parliament was accordingly dissolved following the deaths of William III (1702), Anne (1714) and George I (1727). With an election every decade, the House of Commons might reasonably be said to reflect the views of the people, at least in the narrow sense of the word. But this changed with the long reign of George II (1727–60). There was no general election in the 1730s, 1740s or 1750s, although there were, of course, by-elections, occasioned by the death of a sitting member, which periodically revealed lively debate within the constituencies. Moreover, representation varied greatly, even among the prestigious county seats which had larger electorates. Of the 150 constituencies, each electing two members to the Commons, more than three-quarters were boroughs (a figure comparable to England and Wales), divided into a bewildering variety of categories. In more than fifty boroughs, including Belfast, the members of the town corporation constituted the electorate; in another thirty-six the franchise extended to a larger body of ‘freemen’; while in eleven ‘potwalloping’ boroughs all male householders could vote. Even in the ‘open’ constituencies a landlord often promised his ‘interest’ to a candidate on the assumption that he could deliver his tenants as a bloc vote. The outcome of an election, then, was dependent not on organised constituency parties, but on the influence of landed patrons. Much also turned on the sheriff who scrutinised the qualifications of the voters, and on the House of Commons itself, which received petitions in the case of disputed elections. Successful petitions, needless to say, had less to do with the strength of the candidate’s arguments than on the extent of his connections within the House.

Parliament consequently represented the propertied community rather than the electors, and it was not until the heyday of volunteering that demands for greater accountability became a factor in contested elections. Yet the historiographical trend in both England and Ireland has been to stress the vitality of popular electoral politics, moving towards a measured rehabilitation of the unreformed electoral system.[153] Unsurprisingly, the ordinary voter was often held in low esteem by his social superiors. As one borough patron commented in 1727, ‘We can hardly expect poor people can refuse £50 or more for a vote, which is the case in some places amongst us.’[154] But the maintenance of a landlord’s interest required attentive diplomacy, even in tiny corporation boroughs. Lord Orrery was reminded in 1740 that ‘without much application, good words and kind promises, few people have success in elections’.[155] Considerations of personal honour as well as pecuniary advantage were sometimes at stake. The possession of a forty-shilling freehold—the qualification for the county franchise—was a social and economic as well as a political privilege. This was one reason why Protestant tenants were preferred by landlords, at least until the enfranchisement of Catholic forty-shilling freeholders in 1793 equalised the situation. One Catholic campaigner explained the everyday material benefits attached to the suffrage:

Is it not a shield for the poor man against the persecution of the rich? Does it not improve the manners of a people, by increasing the points of contact between the higher and lower orders of society? Does it not serve to raise the man, whose lot it is to be humble, and to subdue the insolence, and pride of him, whom chance has placed in an elevated station? . . . Will not the poor man mingle his labour more willingly with the soil, if he be in possession of a freehold? And will not the landlord be more ready to grant a freehold, if the tenant can derive a vote from it?[156]

Catholics, taxed without being represented, were undeniably ‘slaves’, yet their exclusion from the political process was never quite as watertight as historians have generally assumed. In the 1761 election, for example, one of the candidates elected for County Tipperary (subsequently overturned), was the convert Thomas Mathew, who had allegedly ‘professed the popish religion many years after the age of 12’ and had not educated his children in the Established Church. His opponent complained that a large number of Mathew’s voters had failed to produce their conversion certificates, or to admit that they were the children of Catholic parents or had been educated in the Catholic religion, or that they had married Catholic wives, and also that ‘great mobs of Irish papists’ had intimidated him in the election hall.[157] Tipperary, where local politics had long centred on the electoral ambitions of the Mathew family, was admittedly an unusual case. Four converts (out of a total of eight M.P.s) were returned for the county in 1713, including George Mathew. Another successful candidate, Sir Redmond Everard, was said by his Whig opponent to have been ‘set up by a popish interest’. When the Mathew family candidate was returned at a by-election in 1735, it was claimed that the sheriff (one Theobald Mathew) had deliberately delayed the opening of the poll to allow Catholic landlords time to create more freeholders.[158] In 1755, when the Ponsonbys and the Gores clashed during a contested election in County Wexford, a petition to the House of Commons alleged that some voters were nominal converts with Catholic wives.[159]

Catholics might therefore influence the outcome of electoral contests in several ways. By going through the motions of a nominal conversion, a Catholic might qualify to vote. Protestant freeholders, meanwhile, were vulnerable to pressure from their landlords, regardless of their religious allegiances. The Bellews, a prominent Catholic family with substantial estates in both Galway and Louth, are an obvious example. In 1768 Sir Patrick Bellew wrote to a kinsman asking him to put pressure on his Protestant tenants, adding that ‘I am determined to make a score of freeholders at Newtown Bellew, which I shall certainly give for the future to [Denis] Daly and Robin French of Monivea who I think very deserving of his country’s favour.’ Like the Mathews, both candidates came from families who had conformed within one or two generations and who could be relied upon to support the dismantling of the penal laws.[160] As we have seen, however, the Catholic ‘mob’ might also play a role in electioneering. When a council election in Limerick was disputed by the politically ambitious commander of the garrison in October 1726, the streets were apparently crowded with Catholics ‘a great many of whom had Clubs and other offensive Weapons in their hands’.[161] Later election crowds may also have included Catholic tradesmen, journeymen or apprentices. At the height of the Lucas affair the Catholic clergy certainly thought it necessary to issue a declaration instructing their parishioners not ‘to join any mob, tumult or meeting . . . or even appear about the place of election, as they have no matter of concern whatsoever therein’.[162]

Outside the formal political structures of the parliamentary system, the role of ordinary citizens—or rather ordinary Protestants—in public life had long been acknowledged. In England, as Nicholas Rogers and others have shown, the symbols and rituals of the urban crowd were frequently used both to maintain and to challenge the underlying assumptions of political life. Since the Restoration, days of royal and national celebration had been promoted by the authorities as a means of legitimising the political and social order as a whole, and their own status as its guardians in particular. The elaborate pageantry of these anniversary processions, their hierarchical structures and the largesse displayed by the ruling classes, all underlined the power, dignity and liberality of the elite. As Daniel Defoe observed, they made ‘deep impressions upon the minds of the people’.[163] The conclusions that emerge from Arlette Farge’s study of Parisian crowds are not dissimilar. The people of Paris, she emphasises, were regularly called upon for the purposes of acclamation, even if this meant that they simply looked on while urban oligarchies processed through the streets. During the Seven Years War (1756–63), for example, Commissioner Thierry was given orders on seven different occasions to organise illuminations and the saying of the Te Deum, and copies of the instructions were posted throughout the city. On religious festivals and military victories, on the entrance of the monarch into a city, and when masses were said following a royal birth or a royal recovery from illness, acts of collective jubilation or mourning were expected. These customary festivals, with their spectacular firework displays and illuminations, constituted the primary means by which the unwritten social contract between the king and his people was ritually reaffirmed. The corollary, of course, was that the failure of the lower sorts to play their allotted role was understood as the withholding of their consent.[164]

A range of popular celebrations, focused on the great constitutional and religious struggles of the seventeenth century, had become firmly rooted in the ‘national’ consciousness of Protestant Ireland.[165] These struggles were part of a common political culture, originally constructed in England and exported to the subordinate kingdoms and colonies of the British Empire. Royal birthdays and accession days, naval and military victories and constitutional landmarks all offered festive occasions for the celebration of Britain’s ‘happy’ constitution. Among those dates which received the official blessing of church and state were 4 November (the birthday of William III) and 5 November (the anniversary of both the Gunpowder Plot and William’s landing at Torbay in 1688). These holy days were associated with the Whigs; more to the Tories’ liking were 30 January (the martyrdom of Charles I) and 29 May (the restoration of the monarchy), occasions which were often used to launch attacks from the pulpit on Dissenters. A further, distinctively Irish, holy day fell on the 23 October, the anniversary of the 1641 rebellion. These were broadly political rather than military turning-points, and William was accordingly remembered as a parliamentary monarch rather than a conqueror. But Irish Protestants, especially at lower social levels, seem to have welcomed the anniversaries of Williamite victories as occasions for military triumphalism, and even during the 1690s commemorations of ‘the overthrow of the Irish at the Boyne’ had already been instituted. This ritualised and repetitive calendar of commemoration allowed Irish Protestants to reaffirm their common history of vigilant defence, their sufferings at the hands of Catholic rebels, and ultimately their deliverance by a benign God.

The general pattern for Dublin anniversaries—whether of 1641 or 1688–91—began with a solemn procession of the Lords Justices (or, when in residence, the Lord Lieutenant himself), attended by members of the Lords and Commons, judges and army officers, to St Patrick’s Cathedral or Christ Church. Here the lessons of history were spelled out in a sermon preached by a bishop or one of the rising stars in the Anglican firmament. On 23 October clergymen were directed to read the 1662 statute instituting the day of remembrance, solemnly recounting the barbarous massacre of ‘many thousand British and Protestants’ and the infliction on further thousands of ‘the most exquisite tortures that malice could suggest’.[166] At noon the ‘great guns’ at Dublin Castle were discharged, and after 1727 it became customary for an army regiment to assemble on Oxmantown Green and respond with a rifle volley. The celebration of the constitutional monarchy shared by Britain and Ireland was also physically built into the landscape of the metropolis, most obviously with the Grinling Gibbons equestrian statue of King William in College Green, ceremoniously unveiled on the eleventh anniversary of the Boyne (1 July 1701), and statues of George I on Essex Bridge (1722) and George II on St Stephen’s Green (1753), both erected by the Dublin Corporation. After a splendid dinner and the drinking of toasts, alcohol was supplied for gentlemen, soldiers, and in some instances the populace, to drink the king’s health. The day was ended, as the newspapers invariably reported, with the ringing of bells, bonfires and ‘other demonstrations of public joy’.

Outside the capital, a number of cities and towns organised their own ceremonial parades, assertions of their civic pride but also their loyalty to the Revolution. The Corporation of Cork inaugurated an annual commemoration for the relief of the city on 29 September 1690, just two days after the Williamites re-established control. Local bodies such as Galway Corporation had smaller-scale events. In some cases they may also have been encouraged by the presence of English soldiers in the ports and towns. In 1716, for example, the Derry garrison staged an elaborate celebration to mark the anniversary of the accession of the first Hanoverian king, George I, complete with effigies of the Pope, the Pretender, and the leading Jacobites Ormond, Mar and Bolingbroke.[167] Two years later Bishop Nicolson recorded in his diary, the ‘Bloody flag’ was ‘hoisted ye first time on ye steeple’, to mark the anniversary of the relief of Derry in 1689, the great guns were discharged, and the day closed with a ‘Splendid treat in ye Tolsel. Fireworks and illuminations.’[168] In the middle decades of the century the anniversary was marked by dinners organised by the Derry Corporation and by services in the cathedral.[169]

By July 1740, the fiftieth anniversary of the Boyne, a number of fraternal organisations such as the Boyne Club and the Protestant Society had been established with the purpose of holding annual marches on Williamite anniversaries. Sometimes these were paramilitary in character, anticipating the Orange parades of the late 1790s. Members of the Protestant Society of Dublin, for example, who included ‘gentlemen, shopkeepers, dealers and tradesmen’, began the First of July (the Old Style anniversary of the Boyne) with a procession to St Catherine’s Church for a sermon, after which they retired for dinner and the ritual toasting of King William. Later in the day, however, they paraded through the main thoroughfares of the city, wearing Orange cockades in their hats and carrying banners, to the accompaniment of drums and trumpets, cheering and pistol shots fired into the air. A number of other groups were dedicated to the commemoration of particular events or personages—the Aughrim Society, the Prince George Society, the Culloden Society and the Cumberland Brotherhood. The last two were in honour of William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, who crushed the Jacobite rebels at Culloden in 1746 and supervised the bloody reign of terror in the Highlands that followed. Even before Culloden, celebrations of the duke’s birthday had been initiated in Ulster towns such as Coleraine and Randalstown.[170]

The titanic conflicts that dominated the middle of the eighteenth century—the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years War (1756–63)—not only brought new military and naval landmarks in the long history of Anglo-French rivalry, but apparently also renewed interest in the Williamite era. A growing number of centres now hosted First of July celebrations, including small towns such as New Ross, Ballymahon, Dunleary, Newtownmountkennedy and Loughrea, as well as larger centres such as Derry and Drogheda.[171] In the 1740s many town corporations also staged festive celebrations of royal birthdays, with the usual bonfires, illuminations, fireworks, volleys of shots from the local regiment or militia, and food and drink for the populace. In the village of Ballymena, for example, on the Prince of Wales’s birthday in 1747, the ‘volunteers’ of the town, commanded by Clotworthy O’Neil, fired three volleys to mark the occasion, before being entertained by their captain.

The culture of patriotic commemoration even spread to major landed estates. In County Cork Richard Purcell, agent on the Egmont estate, organised a large party at Lohort Castle after the battle of Dettingen (27 June 1743), when the British and Hanoverians (commanded personally by George II himself) and their Austrian allies had defeated the French. About forty gentlemen and over 600 tradesmen and labourers attended. As Purcell reported to the Earl of Egmont, ‘There was not a Gentleman who did not drink to be Gay, and many were drunk; and the common People were all so, at the Expence of about seven Pounds, for Spirits, for Punch and Cyder, and about five Dozen of your Lordships Claret.’[172] A large bonfire was lit at the front of the castle, the windows were illuminated, and a group of fifty-two Protestants were ‘placed on the Battlements & fired ten Vollies there’. According to Purcell’s report, the entire company drank to the Protestant succession and other loyal toasts, the usual centrepiece of such festive occasions. The patriotic spectacle, the fireworks and volleys of cannon, the distribution of free drink (and, in the cities, the solemn processions of office-holders, soldiers and citizens) were all regular components in the dramatic representation of a hierarchical social order. Revealingly, Purcell also arranged for an account of the Lohort proceedings to be placed in the Dublin newspapers. Patriotic ritual and newspaper reporting, as one American historian notes, were mutually reinforcing, as descriptions in the press allowed such ceremonies to be mimicked in other localities.[173]

The Whig establishment sought to legitimate its position by reference to a conservative interpretation of ‘Revolution principles’, and these state-sponsored festivals were used to underline the existing political dispensation. But the 1688 Revolution was open to rival interpretations, and Whig iconography was repeatedly appropriated by opposition politicians. In the mid-1750s the press teemed with addresses from corporations, assize meetings, ‘loyal inhabitants’ and ‘independent electors’ and toasts relating to the politics of the money bill crisis. Indeed, the Universal Advertiser, published in Dublin by Lawrence Dunn, consisted of little else. In May 1755 John Bowes, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, noted ‘how greatly these [polemics] are read and attended to thro’ the country’.[174] ‘Patriot Clubs’ were founded by gentlemen, merchants and freeholders in ten counties (Antrim, Down, Tyrone, Armagh, Londonderry, Louth, Meath, Westmeath, King’s and Queen’s) and ten boroughs (Newry, Downpatrick, Killyleagh, Monaghan, Antrim, Letterkenny, Dublin, Kilkenny, Cork and Kinsale).[175] Their meetings centred around anniversary dinners, sometimes followed by celebrations involving the local populace. Often regarded as the first extra-parliamentary political organisations, these patriotic associations were clearly an outgrowth of the commemorative culture reviewed above. The patriots were thus able to adapt the rituals of public celebrations—processions, bellringing, bonfires and illuminations—for oppositional ends. They were followed in the 1770s by the Volunteers, who turned a traditional parade to William’s statue on 4 November 1779 into the centrepiece of their campaign for commercial and constitutional reform, and by the Society of United Irishmen, who originated, appropriately enough, in the anniversary celebrations held to mark Bastille Day 1791.

CONCLUSION

The loyal parades and processions of Hanoverian Ireland, like the pamphlet wars of the era, are still neglected subjects. Even so, the brief survey above calls into question the traditional assumption, inherited from the great Victorian scholars Lecky and Froude, that Irish politics really only began with the impact of the American and French revolutions. In the golden era of the undertakers, of course, networks and ‘connections’ were more important than ideological divisions. This was certainly the view of Colonel Henry Seymour Conway, who explained that in Ireland it was ‘the great business of life to stuff and be stuffed’. ‘Immoderate eating is among the prime social virtues,’ he informed the Duke of Newcastle in 1755, ‘but immoderate drinking lifts you up to the skies.’[176] Yet in the 1720s, and again in the 1750s, appeals to ‘the people’ were made to legitimise opposition to the threat of enslavement by English ministers. The emergence of the press as a new and threatening political force was noted by the Irish Lord Chancellor in November 1754. ‘The spirit of Dissension’, as he explained to the Prime Minister, had been ‘fomented by licentious & scandalous libels’, with the result that ‘the notion of a National Interest, distinct from that of the English Government in this Kingdom, has been so industriously propagated, that the infection has spread itself in every part of this country’. Interestingly, Dublin Castle had reacted not only by arresting a number of printers—a futile gesture since the subsequent prosecutions were blocked by the grand juries—but also by sponsoring ‘several well wrote Papers in defence of his Majesty’s Rights’.[177] The authorities themselves found it necessary to adapt to the new public sphere. Ideas concerning constitutional rights and patriotic commitment were never insignificant: they were repeatedly discussed in newspapers, pamphlets and broadsides, elaborated from the pulpit, toasted in taverns and enacted in the streets.

Catholics, of course, were excluded from the franchise, from service in the militia, and from the many festivities sponsored or at least tolerated by the authorities. Presbyterians were second-class citizens, permitted to vote but not to hold public office. Yet both groups, significantly, were repeatedly drawn into the political struggles of the Anglican community during the middle decades of the century. One bizarre example of this phenomenon was the Smock Alley Theatre riots of January 1747, triggered by Thomas Sheridan’s scathing comments on the impolite gentry of Dublin. Charles Lucas in his Barber’s Letters could not resist the absurd accusation that the disturbances were fomented by ‘professed Papists or worse, mercenary Converts’ in preparation for a foreign invasion or insurrection.[178] He therefore had little cause for complaint when, during the height of the Dublin election contest of 1749, Richard Cox made the equally fanciful allegation that Lucas was a Jacobite agent and the offspring of an Irish popish priest.[179] During the same election the outraged reaction to Lucas’s comments on medieval Ireland provoked an anonymous defence of Gaelic society from Charles O’Conor. Fears concerning the electoral leverage of Presbyterian freeholders, made during the pamphlet wars sparked off by the money bill dispute, had rather more basis in reality. Since 1753, it was alleged, the Dissenters of the north had been ‘carried out of their Orbits, raised in their own Conceits to the Rank of Statesmen and Philosophers, where you see them aping their Betters and setting out the Bounds of their Authority’.[180] The more vibrant the political culture of Ascendancy Ireland, the more anxious its rulers became that the Anglican monopoly of power was under threat. And at precisely this moment, as described in the next chapter, organised violence throughout extensive areas of both Ulster and Munster was turning the material conditions of ‘peasant’ life into a political issue for the first time.

9

Queen Sive and Captain Right: Agrarian Rebellion

Last Thursday Pierce Bailey was executed at Mitchelstown, according to his Sentence; and on Saturday, Robert Stackpole was executed at Glanworth, and Pierce Moore at Fermoy. They were dress’d in the uniform of Whiteboys, viz. Shirts over their Cloaths, in the View of a great Concourse of People. The Party of Horse Militia that marched with the Prisoners on Wednesday were quartered, and most elegantly entertained by Col. Hyde, at his Seat at Fermoy.

FAULKNER’S DUBLIN JOURNAL, 29 JUNE–3 JULY 1762[1]

If not for their arrest and execution, carried out with such pointed ceremony, Pierce Bailey, Robert Stackpole and Pierce Moore would have left no trace in the historical record. Bizarrely, at least to modern readers, ‘Captain’ Stackpole had presided over a ‘council of war’ attended by several hundred Whiteboys near Fermoy in March 1762, at which a bay gelding was beaten with sticks and shot—the symbolic victim in what appears to have been a proxy trial. The horse belonged to a local magistrate named James Grove, and had been captured from one of his servants who was escorting a Whiteboy to jail.[2] All the insurgents were dressed in white uniforms and wore white hankerchiefs around their hats. Since evidence was given that Moore played on the fiddle, the proceedings, or some part of them, presumably had a festive air. The arrests must have provoked a local controversy, for shortly afterwards a Cork printer was imprisoned for publishing a paper taking the insurgents’ side—a reminder that ‘rural’ unrest was seldom separate from the urban world with its lively, politicised print culture.[3] In spite of protests, however, the men were convicted. The hangings, staggered over three locations for maximum effect, were intended as a political statement. This curious episode recalls the popular disturbances studied by E. P. Thompson, the pioneering Marxist historian of eighteenth-century England who was fascinated with the ways that rulers and ruled ‘performed theatre and countertheatre to each other’s auditorium’.[4] The elaborately staged execution, just like the macabre slaughter of James Grove’s horse, was a deliberate exercise in the public display of power.

Newspaper reports from County Cork reveal that ‘Whiteboys’ or ‘levellers’ were put on trial during the spring and summer of 1762 for resisting the exactions of tithe-farmers and the enclosure of common land. Most commonly their crimes involved the destruction or ‘levelling’ of fences, ditches, and walls around land recently enclosed by landlords. Yet men like Robert Stackpole did not regard themselves as criminals. Historians have generally concurred. Rather than adopt the perspective of the M.P.s who debated legislation at College Green, or of the magistrates who implemented the criminal law, most scholars have accepted that these forms of agrarian protest were informed by the cultural practices and moral values of the common people. The Whiteboys acted in defence of what they perceived to be their traditional rights and customs, and they seem to have won the support, or tolerance, of their wider community. Like the episodes of food rioting, smuggling and poaching analysed by early modern historians of England and Europe, ‘Whiteboyism’ has been classified under the concept of ‘social crime’—that is, a category of illegal acts which present ‘a conscious, almost a political, challenge to the prevailing social and political order and its values’.[5] The Whiteboy disturbances were not, as observers sometimes thought, the product of Irish ‘lawlessness’, but evidence that the Irish lower orders were resolved to uphold laws of their own making.

Although the Whiteboy agitation peaked in March 1762, echoes could still be heard in the middle of the decade.[6] The magistrates of Munster, the ‘monsters of Inhumanity’ deplored by the influential politician and writer Edmund Burke,[7] went on to claim a much more precious scalp. Alongside the ‘levellers’ tried at the summer assize of 1762, the Cork press reported that two Catholic priests had been presented by the grand jury for the exercise of ‘Ecclesiastick Functions’.[8] It was a reminder of the continuing insecurity of the priesthood, always vulnerable during periods of political turbulence. Britain had been at war with France since 1756 (the Seven Years War), and rumours circulated of French agents operating in Ireland. In the same month three more unregistered priests were charged at Clonmel. One of these was Father Nicholas Sheehy of Clogheen, County Tipperary, a hotbed of Whiteboy agitation. Sheehy came from a wealthy family, part of the close-knit Catholic gentry that still survived in the region. For reasons considered below, he had become the object of something like a witch-hunt. Enraged by their inability to secure convictions of Whiteboys, a hardline faction among the county magistrates prosecuted Sheehy for the murder of John Bridge, an informer who had disappeared in 1764. Although the evidence against him was scandalously flimsy, Sheehy was convicted.[9] On 15 March 1766 he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Clonmel. Burke, who was distantly related to Sheehy via his Nagle kinsfolk, was sickened by the combination of paranoia, bigotry and opportunism exhibited by the Munster Protestants, and the episode seems to have crystallised his implacable hostility to ‘the unfeeling tyranny of a mungril Irish Landlord’.[10]

The killing of Nicholas Sheehy was a traumatic event for prominent Catholics who had hoped that the worst days of the penal laws were over. The open recruitment of Irish Catholics into the British army was under consideration, following proposals from Lord Trimleston to raise six regiments to fight for George III in his capacity as Elector of Hanover or, failing that, for Portugal (then an ally of Britain). At the same time, the introduction of the ‘mortgage bill’, which would have allowed Catholics to lend money on the basis of landed security, was accompanied by public claims that the penal laws were damaging the Irish economy.[11] At least one moderate commentator believed that whole Munster ‘plot’ was concocted to extinguish support for the Catholic relief bill in the House of Commons.[12] Local anxieties were further sharpened by the bitter Tipperary election of 1761 in which the convert Thomas Mathew was stigmatised as a representative of the popish interest. For John Curry, whose Historical memoirs of the Irish rebellion in the year 1641 (1758) was the first major challenge to official anti-Catholicism, Sheehy was a martyr to religious hatred just like ‘the unfortunate Calas’ in France.[13] He was referring to the Protestant merchant Jean Calas, broken on the wheel by order of the Toulouse parlement in 1762. Calas had been convicted on a spurious charge of murdering his own son—in order, it was alleged, to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. Like Nicholas Sheehy, Calas was the victim of regional prejudice rather than national policy: Toulouse was a virulently anti-Protestant area, and a Huguenot minister, François Rochette, had been hanged there the previous year.[14] But the Calas affair became an international cause célèbre, the first of several great miscarriages of justice taken up by Voltaire in his campaign against religious intolerance.[15] There would be no public outcry, by contrast, over the execution of an Irish Catholic priest. The affair nevertheless lingered in the collective memory of Catholic Ireland, and Sheehy was portrayed in an Irish lament by Seán Cundún as a martyr for both his faith and his fatherland. It made a lasting impression, as we have seen, on Edmund Burke, who served as assistant to the Chief Secretary of Ireland in the early 1760s and was an active supporter of Curry and the Catholic Committee. Something of the popular reaction can be gauged from reports that ‘Multitudes of the Lame, the Blind, and the Diseased’ made pilgrimages to Sheehy’s grave, drawn by the healing powers attributed to it.[16] This cult reached a grisly climax in 1770 when the hangman who had ‘turned off’ Father Sheehy was stoned to death by a crowd in Philipstown, King’s County.[17]

What does agrarian unrest in eighteenth-century Ireland reveal about the political attitudes of the common people—the people who attended the trial of James Grove’s horse and those who avenged Father Sheehy’s death? The question is an important one, because ‘Whiteboyism’, or ‘agrarian outrage’ as it would be labelled the nineteenth century, was to become a recurrent feature of Irish social relations. Every decade between the 1760s and the Great Famine of the 1840s saw at least one major outbreak of rural unrest, organised by oath-bound secret societies or ‘combinations’. In 1793, as Ireland was convulsed by protests against the militia bill, a northern magistrate was able to rhyme off the ‘Oakboys, Steelboys, Whiteboys, Rightboys, Peep of Day Boys and Defenders—all of which I have seen in my time’.[18] The apparently endemic nature of Whiteboyism has prompted some commentators to detect in these insurrections an underlying struggle between a specifically colonial ideology of ‘improvement’ and the traditional cultural and landholding ethos of the old Gaelic order.[19] The ‘levellers’ of 1762 certainly swore mysterious oaths of allegiance to Queen Sadhbh (or Sive), wife of the legendary King of Munster, Ailill Ólom.[20] In the 1780s a menacing letter sent to the magistrate John Bagwell and denouncing ‘heretick dogs’ was signed ‘Shivane Mescula’, another feminine figurehead adopted by the insurgents.[21] Contemporary observers, on the other hand, were less concerned about fairy queens than the exiled Stuarts: in 1762 a large party of Whiteboys marched to the barracks at Cappoquin, accompanied by a piper playing ‘The lad with the white cockade’, a popular tune with Jacobite connotations.[22] Certainly it was widely alleged at the time that the Munster disturbances were part of an elaborate conspiracy, backed by French officers and money. In the 1780s, long after hopes of a Stuart restoration had died, the followers of ‘Captain Right’ were believed to be planning a reversal of the Williamite settlement. It was claimed by one pamphleteer in 1787 that ‘in their soberer hours they have parcelled out the lands among them, reviving the claims of their ancestors’.[23]

More often, historians have rejected the suggestion that the Whiteboy protests should be interpreted as ‘proto-nationalist’ or ‘anti-colonial’. Drawing on the painstaking reconstructions of James S. Donnelly, which demonstrated how closely rural unrest was linked to innovations in traditional farming practices, they have highlighted the local, economic objectives of these ‘peasant’ revolts. Rather like the food riots of eighteenth-century England, the subject of an influential analysis by E. P. Thompson, Whiteboy agitation is commonly interpreted as a defence of customary social relationships—the ‘moral economy’—against the extension of market forces into the Irish countryside.[24] In one of the most forceful expositions of this view, Thomas Bartlett has emphasised what the Whiteboys were not: they were not inspired by nationalism; they were not opposed to the social structure established by the Williamite confiscations; and they were not especially violent.[25] Far from seeking the overthrow of the landed elite, they aimed to compel their social superiors to acknowledge the mutual obligations and responsibilities which linked rulers and ruled. In the language of political theorists, it was not their intention to dissolve the social contract, but merely to force the authorities to live up to their part of the bargain. Before the crisis of the 1790s Irish social relations were characterised by harmony rather than conflict, by paternalism and deference rather than open hostility.[26]

As so often, the task of striking the right balance between the ‘colonial’ and the ‘ancien régime’ dimensions of eighteenth-century Irish society is not easy. One thing can be said for certain: the evidence of anti-colonial motivation in rural agitation is very thin indeed. Ireland’s agrarian troubles did, to some extent, reveal a clash of cultures between plebeians and patricians; but if we look closely at the symbolism and ritual employed by protestors, we find that the cultures concerned were not specifically Irish, but rather European. Those who believe that Whiteboyism can somehow be equated with the resistance of the Gaelic underclass to an English colonial elite must also account for the appearance of simultaneous Protestant risings in the north. If we look beyond Ireland, we can quickly locate French equivalents of Whiteboyism in the forest revolts of the ‘Demoiselles’, white-shirted peasants who first appeared in Franche-Comté in 1765, and most famously in the forests of the Ariège in 1830.[27] There are obvious similarities too with the ‘Blacks’ of Waltham Chase and Windsor Forest, bands of smugglers and deer-stealers who appeared around 1718.[28] The Waltham Black Act of 1723 created more than fifty capital offences relating to hunting, poaching, arson and the issuing of threatening letters. (The first victim, in fact, was not a poacher but an Irish blackmailer, hanged at Tyburn in 1725, partly on the evidence of a threatening letter containing ‘Irish blunders’).[29]

None of this means that Whiteboyism was somehow ‘pre-political’. To suppose that early modern protest must be categorised as either economic or political in character is obviously unhelpful. As we saw in the last chapter, there is much more to eighteenth-century politics than the formalised structures of parliamentary debates, petititions and elections. For a growing number of early modern historians, politics is just as likely to be found in the village community, where local customs clashed with new understandings of ‘order’, or even within the family, whenever the patriarchal authority of fathers and husbands was challenged. Increasingly they have also drawn inspiration from James C. Scott’s work on the ‘infrapolitics’ of the powerless, the low-profile forms of defiance which tested the boundaries of power relationships by withholding the expected deferential language or behaviour.[30] We are best advised to search for politics, as anthropologists have done, wherever the exercise of power and the social distribution of resources are contested. Clashes over the increasing commercialisation of agricultural practices—the enclosure of common land, the growth of lease speculation, the more ‘efficient’ collection of arrears or of the tithes and ‘small dues’ claimed by the clergy—constitute what has been called ‘the politics of the parish’.[31] In each case those who resisted squires, parsons, or ‘middlemen’ farmers, graziers and landlords appealed to their own communal notions of justice. In many cases too the hardships from which they suffered were described as ‘oppressions’ inflicted by the rich, while the Whiteboys and other redresser movements posed as ‘levellers and avengers for the wrong done to the poor’.[32]

‘MOST GENTLEMEN’S HOUSES HERE ARE LIKE GARRISONS’: AGRARIAN PROTEST AFTER 1760

Is it advisable to speak of ‘Whiteboyism’ as a single, unified phenomenon? There were three distinct phases of Whiteboy activity in the south, each differing somewhat in motivation, social composition and levels of violence. The first Whiteboys, as we have seen, originated in south Tipperary, then spread to the neighbouring counties of Waterford, Cork and Limerick before fading. These agrarian combinations, predominantly composed of labourers and cottiers, but with a smattering of urban tradesmen, aired grievances concerning the enclosure of common land, the increase of rents for conacre (potato ground), and the tithe of potatoes. A second campaign of Whiteboy agitation, stretching from 1769 to 1776, was concerned principally with the tithe of corn, but was also directed against evictions of tenants and high rents. It not only lasted longer, but covered a wider geographical area (Tipperary, Kilkenny, Wexford, Carlow, Queen’s, Kildare). The third and most extensive agrarian rebellion took place in the years 1785 to 1788 and provoked a parliamentary debate and a pamphlet war over the financial exactions of the clergy of the Established Church during which the term ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ was first coined. Although the older name of Whiteboys continued to be used, the later perpetrators were more often known as Rightboys after their fictional leader ‘Captain Right’. Whereas earlier forms of Whiteboyism had focused on the grievances of the poor, the protestors of the 1780s were predominantly concerned with tithes and were led by ‘gentlemen’ Rightboys including, on occasion, some Protestants. They also employed new techniques of mobilisation: by organising marches from one parish to another and large swearing-in ceremonies held in Catholic chapels, they were able to reach an unprecedented level of mobilisation.[33]

To the dismay of the authorities, Whiteboyism, or something very like it, also surfaced in the ‘loyal’ province of Ulster. There were two spectacular explosions of organised protest led by the ‘Hearts of Oak’ (1763) and ‘Hearts of Steel’ (1770–72). Each resembled the southern insurrections in its organisation, activities and aims, though they also revealed a distinctively northern inflection. They have often been ignored, particularly by scholars working with colonial models of Irish society, but they were regarded as extremely dangerous by the authorities. The first movement originated in the linen country of north Armagh—in the Brownlow estate at Lurgan, and nearby villages like Markethill, Richhill and Tandragee—the very same districts that would later form the heartland of Orangeism. From there it quickly radiated outward into Tyrone, Londonderry, Fermanagh, Monaghan and Cavan, terrorising Anglican clergymen and gentlemen for a month in the summer of 1763. The modus operandi of the Hearts of Oak (or ‘Oakboys’) was the open show of strength rather than the nocturnal raid. Mass demonstrations, estimated at 8,000, 10,000 or even 20,000 people, were mounted to protest against the level of county cess—the tax levied by grand juries to maintain local roads and bridges and to fund new road construction. Previously the upkeep of roads had been the responsibility of parish vestries, under a voluntary scheme in which all men in the parish offered six days’ labour a year. Growing prosperity, reflected in the increase in road-building, led to grand juries taking over this responsibility, and now county cess was collected in each barony by the constables.[34] At the same time rectors were attempting to extract the full values of their tithes, and to make more effective the collection of ‘small dues’ (the fees charged for marriages, funerals and baptisms). The unrest was frequently, though not exclusively, associated with Presbyterian tenant farmers. In the Newry area, for example, it was reported that notices had been pinned to meeting-house doors calling on the people of County Down ‘to rise and assert their liberties’.[35]

The insurrection of the Hearts of Steel, lasting from the summer of 1770 to the end of 1772, posed an even more serious threat. Although disturbances spread into Armagh, Tyrone and Londonderry, they were concentrated in the predominantly Presbyterian areas of Antrim and Down, largely untouched by previous agitation. The Steelboys terrorised large parts of east Ulster, burning houses and haystacks, maiming cattle and ruining crops, as well as levying contributions on the local people to fund their activities. The general background to the Steelboy revolt was an economic downturn caused by three successive crop failures (1769–71) and a simultaneous reduction in the foreign demand for linen. The specific trigger, however, was the wholesale renewal of leases on the Upton and Donegall estates in south Antrim. The Steelboys’ quarrel was not just with their landlords, who sought to capitalise on rising land values by increasing rents and impose high renewal fines, or even with prosperous Belfast merchants like Thomas Greg, who had leased large areas of land and then sublet them to under-tenants at a profit. This was partly a revolution of rising expectations on the part of the under-tenant class who sought to acquire direct leases for themselves and believed that long occupation combined with the ‘improvements’ made by them and their ancestors gave them a moral entitlement to do so. Since it was the practice to restrict each bidder to one written bid, the sitting tenant was placed under immense pressure to agree to almost any price. A further complicating factor was the subdivision of landholdings made possible by the expansion of the linen industry, so that many under-tenants depended largely on weaving for their livelihood. It is interesting to note that the authorities were often sympathetic towards the rebels, including Captain James Erskine, stationed at Dungannon, who explained that in most parts of Antrim ‘lands are subsett six deep, so that those who actually labour it are squeezed to the very utmost’.[36] The grievances of the Hearts of Steel were summed up by the presbytery of Templepatrick, which condemned agrarian violence but also deplored ‘the excessive price of land and the unfriendly practices of many who contribute to the oppression by proposing for their neighbour’s possessions, by which means they are too often deprived of the improvements made by their forefathers and themselves’.[37]

No one has attempted anything like a sustained comparison of these northern and southern protests, despite the fact that they were often linked at the time. ‘In England’, Arthur Young observed, ‘we have heard much of Whiteboys, Steelboys, Oakboys, Peep-of-day-boys, &c’, and he was not alone in lumping these regional uprisings together as manifestations of Irish disorder. The timing of the Oakboy and Steelboy campaigns, overlapping so conspicuously with the first and second Munster outbreaks, certainly suggests the importance of underlying economic factors. On closer inspection, however, Young warned that the various groups of insurgents were not to be treated as a homogeneous phenomenon. All were ‘manufacturing Protestants’ in the north, except the Whiteboys, who were composed of ‘labouring Catholicks’ aggrieved by the severity of tithe exactions combined with a ‘great speculative rise in rents’.[38] Another philosophical traveller, Thomas Campbell, agreed that while the Ulster and Munster disturbances were economic in their origins, they had little more in common. Yet Campbell was intrigued by the way in which Whiteboys, Oakboys and Steelboys had all snowballed into movements for wider reform. ‘The many-headed monster being now roused’, he noted of the Oakboys, ‘did not know where to stop, but began a general redress of grievances, whether real or imaginary.’[39] In each case the sources of discontent lay in immediate, localised circumstances, but agrarian agitation was able to spread quickly, tapping into a wide range of rural complaints focused on county cess, tithes and high rents.

This era of agrarian protest coincided with the beginning of a long period of agricultural prosperity in the middle decades of the century. These years witnessed the spread of that ‘taste of building and improving’ which the English-born judge Edmund Willes found in the 1750s to be ‘the universal passion of the kingdom’.[40] ‘Improvement’, as we have seen, embraced a bewildering variety of activities. It involved the conscious reshaping of the rural landscape, as country houses were rebuilt and demesnes were modelled in the ‘natural’ style of rolling parkland, complete with ha-ha’s—the concealed ditches that prevented grazing animals from coming too close to the orchards and gardens of the house. But it also meant the enclosure of common land, the introduction of novel crops and agricultural techniques, the reclamation of wasteland, the expansion of estate villages with market facilities, and the construction of new roads and canals. It was the increase in local taxation by the grand jury of Armagh that fuelled the anger of the early Oakboys: in Lurgan, for example, the diversion of county taxes by the landlord and local M.P. William Brownlow towards the construction of roads on his own estate was regarded as blatant opportunism. As early as 1761 crowds destroyed turnpike gates on the new roads between north Armagh and Belfast.[41] The desire to maximise rents—letting land to the highest bidder over the heads, if necessary, of the existing tenants—was the background to the trouble on the Upton and Donegall estates in the early 1770s. The presence of intermediate landlords also posed a threat to sitting occupants who had made ‘improvements’ of their own. A petition from John Wolfenden, an under-tenant on the Donegall estate, explained that he had spent over £400 on establishing a bleach-green and erecting linen mills on his holding; now his access to supplies of water was jeopardised by re-leasing, leaving him ‘in the power’ of the middleman.[42]

Broad generalisations about the commercialisation of rural Ireland or the encroachment of the market economy conceal a complex variety of economic and social factors. The Steelboys encompassed a wide social spectrum. Of fifty-two insurgents punished in November 1772, thirty-six were identified as yeomen (farmers) and ten as weavers; there were also two shoemakers, two blacksmiths, one carpenter and a hatter. Their leader, David Douglas, who like many of his comrades eventually emigrated to America, rented a farm of fifty acres near Templepatrick.[43] The original Whiteboys, on the other hand, were labourers and cottiers. In Tipperary, as in north Armagh, the spirit of improvement manifested itself in the building of new turnpike roads from the 1750s, and turnpike gates were destroyed by agrarian bands who objected to paying the new tolls. But the main grievances of the first Whiteboys, such as the conversion of communal land to grazing, conacre rents, and the tithes levied on potatoes, were those of the rural poor. The subsistence economy of the Munster peasantry was described by the Catholic campaigner John Curry. Suppose, he mused, a labourer worked for 300 days of the year, for a wage of 4d a day. His annual earnings, Curry calculated, would amount to 100 shillings. But the rent for an acre of potato ground cost at least 91 shillings, leaving just 9s left over, to pay tithe (5s), hearth money (2s) and the rent for a cabin (at least 2s). Where, then, was a poor man to find money for his garden seed, salt for his potatoes, ‘rags’ for his family, a little ‘firing’ for food, one shilling per annum for his priest and a few pence to spend at ‘the patron’?[44] What was often imprecisely defined as common land, where peasants had customarily grazed their animals without charge, could make a crucial difference. With the sharp rise in land values during the Seven Years War (1756–63), landlords began to withdraw this inferior land either for their own landstock or for subletting to new tenants. Peasant anger was directed not only against the new walls and ditches, but also against the dwellings of new tenants and the orchards and deerparks appearing around their landlords’ demesnes.

As Thomas Power’s study of County Tipperary demonstrates, the geography and social character of agrarian protest shifted substantially over time, even within a single county.[45] The more savage Whiteboy attacks of the 1770s were concentrated in the south-west of the country, around the triangle formed by Cashel, Cahir and Carrick-on-Suir. From 1770 agricultural trends were thrown into reverse, as farmers around the Suir valley moved to the cultivation of corn, a more labour-intensive activity. In response to an influx of spailpíní fánacha (migrant labourers) drawn from south-west Munster by the expansion of cereal cultivation, local workers formed ‘combinations’—primitive trade unions—to avoid being undercut by interlopers. Thus in February 1774 a Whiteboy group marched through Freshford, County Kilkenny, searching cabins for Munster spalpeens and threatening destruction to anyone who dared to employ them. They showed a similar hostility towards dairymen from Waterford, who were beaten and expelled from parts of Tipperary.[46] In the following decade the appearance of Rightboy protests across eleven counties coincided with a further acceleration of grain production, stimulated by the new export bounties provided by Foster’s Corn Law of 1784. As farms were converted from pasturage—exempt from tithe since the 1730s—occupants resented having to share the new bounties with the tithe-proctor. This was an issue that cut across social classes, and the participation of ‘gentlemen Whiteboys’ in the regional agrarian insurrection caused considerable debate. It was clear enough that the backbone of the movement consisted of cottiers and agricultural labourers. John Barter Bennett, an apothecary from Cork city, published a series of open letters to the Rightboys, most of whom, he believed, were ‘day labourers’ who possessed their holdings ‘from year to year’. He warned the common people that they were being used by the ‘warm scollogue who pays thirty or forty pounds a year rent and has ten or a dozen milch cows coming to his bawn’. One gentleman reported that the people of Tipperary town, ‘the lower class I mean’, had taken the Rightboy oath. Richard Woodward, the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, remarked upon the ‘unreserved appearance of many persons (almost all papists) of easy circumstances’, while a physician noted the involvement of ‘many persons of a rank superior to the peasantry, though I believe none who merited the appellation of gentleman’. In Kilkenny, meanwhile, it was noted that ‘the better sort of farmers’ abandoned ‘those wretches who still wish to promote sedition’ once the authorities took firm action against the agrarian rebels.[47]

More than any other factor, opposition to tithes provides the continuity between all the movements considered above. The Established Church claimed a tithe, or tenth part, of the national wealth, whether derived from crops (predial tithes), from animals, milk, cheese and eggs (mixed), or from labour, trade and manufacturing (personal). By the eighteenth century the collection of tithes in kind was often replaced by monetary payments, according to a formal agreement between the tithe-owner and the parishioner, the modus decimandi. There were wide regional variations. Ulster had its own ‘tything table’, dating back to the Jacobean plantation and confirmed in 1695, which set monetary payments for a wide range of tithable goods and services at fixed rates. In Munster and south Leinster, where the Anglican clergy ministered to a much narrower section of the population, tithe rates nevertheless tended to be higher than in the north. In these regions, where rates fluctuated with the market economy, the potato was subject to tithing, a particular source of discontent. Economic growth in the middle decades of the century was stimulated by the repeal of the Cattle Acts following the continental cattle murrain of 1739–40, by the abolition of duties on the export of salted beef, butter, pork, tallow and bacon, and by the increased demand in Engand for salted beef and butter during the Seven Years War. Increasing prosperity, evident in towns such as Clonmel and Kilkenny, as well as the ports of Cork and Waterford, encouraged speculation in the tithe system as the clergy sought to extract the full value of their clerical income. An important figure in this development was the tithe-proctor, who received a commission for evaluating and collecting tithes for the clergyman and was, consequently, the immediate embodiment of an oppressive system.[48] As we shall see, he frequently suffered for it.

The Irish tithe system, though based on the English model, had many peculiarities. Following a resolution passed by the House of Commons in 1735, a time of strong anticlerical feeling among landowners, pasture land was effectively exempt from the church’s demands. Given the importance of butter and beef to the Irish economy before the 1780s, tithes constituted a highly regressive form of taxation, favouring the large grazier to the disadvantage of the mass of the poor. Although agrarian protestors were careful not to question the ecclesiastical establishment, it cannot have helped that almost ninety per cent of the population derived no benefit from the Anglican ministry. The Oakboys and Steelboys had both been predominantly Presbyterian movements, and both had complained of tithes. The former in particular singled out ‘High-Flying’ clergymen such as William Henry and Edward Golding as targets.[49] The Catholic gentleman James Buxton, executed alongside Father Sheehy in 1766, believed that the Whiteboy trouble sprang from the desire to end ‘the oppressive and arbitrary valuation of tithe jobbers’ and to restore the previous system where it was possible ‘to deal for tithes with none but the immediate proprietor’.[50] Similarly, two Whiteboys executed in Clonmel in April 1776 protested that they and their brethren had no other design ‘but the infatuated one of discouraging proctors and tythe jobbers’.[51] The 1770s was a particularly dangerous decade for proctors. Some had their horses maimed or killed, others were buried alive in graves lined with furze or broken glass. In the next decade the followers of ‘Captain Right’ also sought to eliminate the various intermediaries who made up an increasingly visible part of the Anglican machinery, the proctors, canters and tithe-farmers. A notice on a chapel gate in County Cork advertising a Rightboy meeting early in 1786 invited all those oppressed ‘by pamper’d theologians whose God was their belly and whose religion was a hogshead of wine’.[52]

Too often the attention of historians has been restricted to Whiteboyism in the south, and the extent to which it can be said to prefigure the Catholic nationalism and mass mobilisation of the nineteenth century. Yet in terms of scale the Ulster risings rivalled the Munster outbreaks. If in March 1763 it was estimated that 14,000 insurgents were in arms in Tipperary, the Oakboy ‘siege’ of Derry four months later was rumoured to have assembled 40,000.[53] While this is no doubt a gross exaggeration, it reflects the sheer panic of the authorities during that month. Tithe-farmers, clergymen and magistrates all fled to the walled citadel. One resident clergyman reported that ‘There is scarce a rector or tythe farmer within 40 miles but what is come to us for fear of the . . . Hearts of Oak.’[54] Similar anxiety was evident in Fermanagh, where Sir Ralph Gore, worried about the unreliability of his Presbyterian tenants, confesssed in July 1763 that ‘We can have no dependence upon anything but the king’s troops.’[55] Almost ten years later the Hearts of Steel presided over a reign of terror in County Londonderry. ‘Most gentlemen’s houses here are like garrisons,’ wrote Eliza O’Neill from Portstewart; ‘they have six soldiers and a captain at my uncles’s now.’[56]

Wherever they surfaced, the agrarian insurgents were at their most dangerous when one or more of their number had been imprisoned. The climax of the first Munster disturbances was the so-called ‘battle of Newmarket’ in September 1764, when a crowd of 300 attacked a party of light dragoons who were escorting captured insurgents to Kilkenny. In the ensuing fracas two officers were killed.[57] A confrontation at Newtownstewart, County Tyrone, following the capture of an Oakboy leader by the Rev. James Knight, the rector of Omagh, ended with ten Oakboys dead and a hundred taken prisoner.[58] Even more spectacular, however, was the occupation of Belfast by between 500 and 600 Steelboys, armed with firelocks, on 23 December 1770. The invaders threatened to burn the town if the farmer David Douglas, who had been imprisoned for houghing, was not released. The Steelboys got their way, but not before troops had fired into the crowd, killing three of their number.[59] Earlier that year a Presbyterian minister had been killed during the ‘battle of Gilford’, an attack on the house of Richard Johnston, an active magistrate who had formed a defence association composed of around fifty of his neighbours and tenants. When Johnston captured four men at a Steelboy meeting on 5 March, a well-armed mob of 2,000 laid siege to his house. The Rev. Samuel Morrell, a young Presbyterian minister, was shot dead as he tried to escape from a window.[60]

At times, indeed, groups of insurgents not only put on shows of strength but directly challenged the crown forces. All the redresser movements seem to have been well armed, in spite of the fact that Catholics were not legally entitled to bear arms until 1793. On 1 March 1762 a large body of rioters broke into the house of the parish clerk of Affane, County Waterford, and carried him off in a hand-barrow full of thorns. When this broke, they marched him naked for two miles to Cappoquin, stopping on the way to dig a grave in which they threatened to bury him alive. He was ‘half dead with cold and fear’ by the time they reached their destination.

They then entered the Town in Triumph with pipers and Fidlers playing disaffected tunes, drew up in an open part of the Town, Fired Several Shots, paraded up and down the Streets, Went to the Barracks gates in the most insulting manner, Shouting and huzzaing, where a troop of Dragoons were there quartered (who gave them no molestation, having at that time no orders from the Government) and then dispersed in the most triumphant manner.[61]

Another example was the ‘battle of Ballyragget’, an interesting instance of the way in which agrarian protest led the Catholic elite to join with the Protestant authorities. Ballyragget, County Kilkenny, was the estate village of the Catholic landowner Robert Butler, brother of the Archbishop of Cashel, James Butler II. As a demonstration of what the archbishop called ‘their zeal for the public tranquillity’ as well as ‘loyalty and submission to government’, the Butlers had formed an armed association of Catholics to suppress rural unrest. On 22 February 1775 hundreds of insurgents gathered from the surrounding area, dressed in white uniforms, ‘some with lighted sods of turf, threatening fire and devastation to the whole town’. Butler and his comrades killed at least three of them, but attacks on the town continued for several weeks until a troop of horse was quartered there.[62] Ironically, Butler was dependent on the assistance of local magistrates, including the militant Protestant Christopher Hewetson.

In July 1763 large Oakboy crowds clashed with companies of infantry led by local magistrates. In south Ulster Charles Coote gathered a posse of gentlemen and their servants to assist the local detachment of troops; he speedily earned a reputation as an Oakboy-hunter and was even made a Knight of the Bath for his exertions. On 19 July his group killed one protestor at Castleblayney and fatally wounded four others; eleven more were killed at skirmishes in County Fermanagh. Normally, as we have seen, agrarian rioters presented their actions as the desperate last resort of loyal subjects, respectful of the authorities. Physical attacks on the gentry or clergy were rare. Sometimes, however, the mask of deference slipped. At Castleblayney an assault on Coote by the Oakboy commander offers an example of how dangerous such face-to-face encounters could be, and how they might bring to the surface social tensions that were normally suppressed:

M’Donald advanced two or three Steps from his party towards Mr Coote in an insolent Manner, and upon Mr Coote telling him he was a Magistrate for the County, and that he should approach him with more Respect and his Hat off. Upon these Words M’Donald leaped at Mr Coote like a Tiger, and seized him by the Throat.[63]

Of course, the Hearts of Oak, like their southern counterparts, left no evidence that they imagined an alternative order. Their objective was the symbolic reaffirmation of traditional paternalistic relationships—a world where Anglican magistrates and clergyman agreed to wear oak sprigs in their hats and listened to the grievances of the poor. Yet M’Donald was not the only Oakboy commander to express dissatisfaction with local social hierarchies. When the Rev. Theodorus Martin, a rector from County Tyrone, and his wife were stopped on the road by around 500 ‘Green Boys’, a tailor and publican named ‘Captain’ John McCallum spat out: ‘Damn you, with your eight hundred a year, and your horses . . . and we working for sixpence a day.’[64] Part of the significance of these dramatic clashes, surely, is that they familiarised eighteenth-century people with what contemporaries referred to as the ‘insurrections’ or ‘risings’ of the poor against oppression.

RITES OF VIOLENCE

A common feature of rural protest groups, both north and south, was their adoption of military or quasi-military discipline together with a hierarchy of officers. Most obviously, they often wore some kind of uniform. In addition to white shirts and blackened faces, the Whiteboys of the 1760s dressed in white waistcoats and white cockades and attached veils to their hats in order to disguise their faces.[65] The Rev. John Hewetson, one of the most active magistrates during the 1760s, recalled seeing parties of Whiteboys mounted on stolen horses and ‘headed by Officers deck’d with white sashes and hats fringed with white muslin’. Armed with pistols and swords, they ‘marched in a military form thro’ the country always preceded by the musick of bagpipes or the sounding of horns’.[66] These uniforms served to conceal their identity, allowed them to identify each other in the dark, and perhaps also fostered solidarity, creating the sense of participating in a movement. In the north, meanwhile, newspapers described large detachments of Oakboys ‘marching in order’. According to one report, for example, a traveller from Newry to Armagh found that the Oakboys occupied at least two miles of the road near Markethill, and went on to describe how they were ‘formed into companies, with each a standard, or colours, displayed; of which he says he counted thirty with drums, horns, fidlers, and bagpipes’.[67] Almost certainly the Oakboy organisation owed something to the Protestant militia arrayed at the beginning of the Seven Years War and mobilised again after Thurot’s landing at Carrickfergus in 1760. It was reported that they also contained many disbanded soldiers in their ranks and that they were well supplied with guns, swords and bayonets.[68] It may also be significant that the name ‘Hearts of Oak’ was derived from a popular song celebrating the wooden ships of the Royal Navy following the celebrated naval victories of 1759 when Admiral Hawke had dispersed the French Brest fleet in the battle of Quiberon Bay, ending the last serious Jacobite invasion attempt.

This point is worth emphasising, for it has been claimed that that the Whiteboys of the 1760s provide the most extensive example of disturbances by men dressed as women. The adoption of a female persona, it has been suggested, legitimised peasant resistance, since disorderly women were traditionally accorded a degree of licence; alternatively, such cross-dressing can be seen as an act of symbolic transgression.[69] Men frequently adopted female titles and wore female garb, as with the ‘fairies’ in the Beaujolais who attacked surveyors in the 1770s. In Edinburgh the famous Porteous Riots of September 1736, which saw an army officer lynched by a mob of 4,000, seems to have involved men disguised as women and a leader called Madge Wildfire.[70] A century later the Rebecca Riots in Wales involved attacks on turnpikes by men dressed in women’s clothes. The best-known example, however, is probably the ‘War of the Demoiselles’, a series of disturbances in the department of Ariège in the Pyrénées, when men in long white shirts asserted their traditional rights to wood and pasturage against the Forest Code. It is certainly true that some of the mythical figures invoked in the Whiteboy manifestoes were female; and in one area the Whiteboys of the 1760s were also known as ‘fairies’. Thomas Rafter, a Whiteboy captain jailed in Clonmel in 1773, used the alias of Shevane Meskill.[71] So far, however, no evidence has been produced to suggest that the Whiteboys were political transvestites. Much nonsense was written at the time about the significance of the white shirt. The Fermanagh landlord and military entrepreneur Sir James Caldwell claimed that the Whiteboy dress was intended to resemble the French military uniform; another commentator offered the bizarre suggestion that the costume was borrowed from the Camisards, the French Protestants who fought a guerrilla war in the Cévennes in the later years of Louis XIV’s reign. But no one suggested that the Whiteboys were dressing as women, and the noms de guerre adopted by their leaders—Calfskin, Cropper, Madcap Setfire, Slasher and Thumper—speak for themselves. Far from adopting a female persona, the insurgents, in putting on their white shirts, were adopting the traditional identity of a soldier.

And like soldiers everywhere, their effectiveness depended upon the threatened or actual use of force. It is well known that agrarian insurgents preferred to target property rather than people, and that very few died as a result of their actions. This was particularly true in the north. The Steelboys were responsible for no more than four deaths, including the murder of the Rev. Samuel Morrell at the battle of Gilford. No one at all seems to have died at the hands of the Oakboys, who orchestrated rather carnivalesque visits to resident gentry and Anglican clergy, forcing them to swear publicly not to collect tax or small dues. Patterns of collective violence and intimidation in the south, while they bore little relation to the mass violence of the 1790s, appear to have been have been more bloody. Apart from the two officers killed in the battle of Newmarket, the only Whiteboy victim in the 1760s that we know of was the informer John Bridge, whose two killers were supposed to have confessed to Father Sheehy.[72] In addition to the spectacular assassination of the magistrate Ambrose Power in 1775, the Whiteboy disturbances of the 1770s included a significant number of physical attacks, particularly on tithe-proctors and their families: one was killed and another fourteen were shot at or mutilated.[73] Two hangmen were also killed, and two enemies of the Whiteboys died as a result of particularly vicious beatings. Even in the more extensive Rightboy campaigns of 1785–7, only six murders were committed.[74] Much of the violence, as historians have often stressed, was disciplined and restrained. There were two particularly common methods of symbolic punishment, the erection of gallows across roads and the digging of open graves. In May 1775, for example, when Hugh O’Donnell was warned not to replace his existing dairymen, a grave was dug on the road from Clonmel to Carrick, ‘that it should be the better observed by all those passing that road, and thereby strike a terror into those who oppose their nocturnal schemes’.[75]

Levels of violence do indeed seem to have been low on both sides, though not as low as traditionally suggested. The total number who died as a result of agrarian unrest, taking into consideration both popular violence and judicial repression, is often put at a mere fifty; the actual figure was probably closer to 200. As we have seen, the number killed by the insurgents was small, amounting to eighteen or so. But the victims of state justice, the best documented category, were much more numerous. A survey of newspaper reports suggests that there were something like 110 capital convictions, with around 85 hanged.[76] To these must be added a large group of fatalities often omitted from the standard accounts: those killed in skirmishes with detachments of regular soldiers. At the battle of Newmarket, for example, eight fell on the spot, six died later from wounds, and the evidence suggests that there were further unrecorded deaths. There was at least one other attempted rescue that resulted in several deaths. In October 1773 two Whiteboys were fatally wounded in Carlow; one Whiteboy captain was killed near Enniscorthy 1775; and at least three in the attack on Ballyragget. Meanwhile in Ulster something like twenty Oakboys and twenty-four Steelboys were ‘killed in action’.[77] A total figure of 70 would not be unreasonable. And that makes the number of reported deaths from agrarian disturbances something in the order of 170.

Repeated references to the restraint and discipline involved in agrarian protest should not be allowed to obscure the fact that both men and animals were horribly maimed and killed. Various forms of torture were inflicted on proctors, tithe-farmers, or those who simply got on the wrong side of Captain Right. Often they were buried alive—that is, forced into a pit lined with briars or broken glass. Others were forced to ride on the ‘white horse’: in this case a board with nails driven through it was fastened onto a horse, a man was placed on it and carried for several miles. A third punishment was ‘carding’, when a wool-card was applied to the victim’s naked body ‘till he bled every pore’.[78] One James Fannin died in October 1770 when 300 Whiteboys, objecting to the tithes of potatoes, pulled him out of his bed, laid him naked across a horse and whipped him around Carrick-on-Suir before giving him a severe beating.[79] Stephen Bourke, alias Captain Squib, was condemned at the spring assizes 1763 for cutting off part of the tongue and leg of an alleged informer.[80] A decade later, when the Tipperary Whiteboys revived, they set fire to the corn of Mrs Glass, a tithe-farmer in Carrick, then took her employee, ‘tied him, cut off one of his ears, cut part of his tongue off, and broke one of his legs’, before leaving him, still tied up, in a pond.[81] In 1774–5 mutilation was particularly evident, and proctors had their ears cropped or slit, were buried in mock graves, or were maimed and disfigured.[82] In the north levels of violence were lower: for the most part the Hearts of Steel confined themselves to destroying the houses, crops or livestock of tenants who took farms over the heads of the previous occupiers. There seems to be no direct northern parallel to the mutilations of the south, although the Steelboys were responsible for the vicious ‘houghing’ of Charles Glass of the 57th Regiment of Foot, as he lay asleep in a field near the Belfast barracks, after one of the soldiers had given evidence against them.[83]

It should be obvious by now that the resources available to the Hanoverian state for coping with this sort of disorder were limited. It is only recently, however, that historians have begun to examine the machinery of law and order in detail. By the early eighteenth century ‘justice’ meant the formal courts meeting at the assizes and quarter-sessions, and staffed by trained professionals. Earlier, more informal means of resolving disputes had been eradicated, in contrast to the Scottish Highlands, where feuding continued. The exception was the continuing resort to duelling as a means of satisfying honour. Among other forms of violent behaviour, the gentlemen of Ireland were considered to be all too quick to issue a challenge. The ‘improving’ clergyman and philanthropist Samuel Madden complained in his Reflections and resolutions proper for the gentlemen of Ireland (1738) that those who fought duels were treated with such indulgence that ‘it is safer to kill a Man than steal a Sheep or a Cow’.[84] Many Irishmen, as a recent study of duelling concludes, were willing to put ‘their individual reputations above their lives, their families, their religion, and the law’.[85] Madden’s complaint reflects the wider perception, particularly common amongst English visitors and those Irish gentlemen who aspired to metropolitan standards of ‘polite’ conduct, that the Irish were especially disorderly. Lord Chief Baron Willes, shortly after his arrival from England, found that major crimes were so frequent ‘that one cannot pronounce this kingdom civilised yet’.[86] As so often, it may be that our picture of Irish behaviour has been distorted by the natural comparisons made with England. The destruction of so many Irish court records makes a comprehensive study impossible, but a recent analysis of two surviving assize indictment books from County Armagh and County Tyrone suggests that murder was more common than in England but not out of line with rural areas of France. Certainly prosecutions for murder were infrequent.[87]

At the beginning of the century Ireland was still troubled by outlaw bands of tories and rapparees, the two terms now used interchangeably. In 1718 an Irish correspondent of Archbishop Wake reported that ‘We have had frequent Alarums from ye Rapperees in the North who in defiance of ye civil & Military Government have committed several Robberys, and trusting to their bogs & Mountains have carried off a good deal of money.’ These disturbances had died down more because of wet weather than military action, but in the meantime a new ‘Parcel of Villains’ around Cork and Limerick was stealing daughters ‘to marry or abuse them’.[88] By this time large-scale toryism was confined to specific parts of the country. In the south-west, as the depredations of the tories revealed, large areas continued to be effectively outside the law well into the eighteenth century. Some ‘heads of Irish clans’, as Captain Richard Hedges reported in 1714, had ‘gained the ascendant over the civil power by their insolence and number so that the ordinary course of the laws cannot be put in force against them’. Several years before, as part of a long campaign in Cork and Kerry, Hedges had sent armed groups in pursuit of tories and imprisoned anyone suspected of sheltering them. Their leader, Dermot Bane O’Sullivan, retaliated by beheading the foster-father of one of Hedges’ men.[89]

Another region noted for its ‘lawlessness’ was Iar-Connacht, the centre of a major outbreak of ‘houghing’ in 1711–12. Like later agrarian rebels, the Houghers were reacting to agricultural change—in this case the conversion of farm land from tillage to pasture—by cutting the hamstrings of cattle and sheep; they were also known to blacken their faces and wear white shirts over their clothes. Thousands of sheep and bullocks were slaughtered, proclamations were issued from the ‘councill-chamber’ of the Houghers, and money was extorted from surrounding communities. Some sort of paramilitary structure is suggested by the fact that Thomas Menin, hanged and quartered at Galway in April 1712, was described as a ‘Lieutenant of the Houghers’. The rapid spread of these disturbances, to Clare, Mayo, Sligo, Leitrim, Roscommon, and as far as Fermanagh, caused parliament to pass an act in 1710 making the maiming of livestock a felony (i.e. a capital offence); at the same time magistrates were instructed to establish ‘nightly watches’, and military reinforcements were sent to the troubled areas. The core of this shadowy movement remained the Iar-Connacht region of County Galway. ‘The sheriffs of this county’, noted a visitor in 1709, ‘scarce dare appear on the west side of Galway bridge, which, though Ireland is now generally esteemed wholly civilised, may well be the end of the English pale.’ This continued to be the case into the 1750s, when the erection of a barracks led the Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer to hope that the ‘ancient Irish’ who inhabited the area ‘will soon be reduced to live under the obedience of the laws’.[90]

Outside these pockets, however, day-to-day law enforcement remained in civilian hands. In 1760 it was estimated that there were just over 2,000 justices of the peace in the kingdom, the figure rising to 3,000 by the close of the century. Many of them, perhaps the majority of them, were not conspicuously active. Almost all were landed gentlemen, the natural ruling class of the counties, but around ten per cent were clergymen of the Established Church, fusing together the spiritual and the temporal authority in a single person.[91] The latter highlighted the anomalous nature of Ascendancy Ireland at the local level, sometimes to their own cost. An example was the Rev. William Hamilton, a clerical magistrate in the Presbyterian stronghold of the Laggan area between the Rivers Foyle and Swilly. In 1792 Hamilton published Letters on the principles of the French democracy, a rather Burkean attack on Rousseau, the French Revolution, and the doctrine of the rights of man which had so ‘infatuated’ the northern Dissenters. ‘We behold governors and subjects, masters and servants, parents and children, and all that inequality of rights so legibly delineated over the face of nature’, he observed, ‘that it is a matter of astonishment how it could be overlooked for a moment.’[92] His opposition to the Presbyterian radicals was not simply literary, for he also led detachments of troops searching for arms around the time of the Bantry Bay scare in 1796–7. In March 1797 he was assassinated by a crowd of United Irishmen while visiting the house of a neighbouring clergyman. Hamilton’s fate shows the limitations of the local system of order—‘the magistrate and his constable’—that had worked successfully for most of the century. When faced with organised sedition, the usual methods were no longer sufficient. Having looked in vain for assistance from the gentlemen of his barony, ‘whose anxieties are naturally kept close to their own houses’, and unable to get a detachment of troops sent to his remote district, Hamilton rallied local churchmen and forced Dissenters to take the oath of allegiance ‘under the penalty of broken heads or Banishment’. Although he claimed to have ample information on the leaders of the conspiracy, he hesitated to move—‘anxious to avoid the sources of future animosities among my Parishioners’—and preferred to wait for military aid to disarm them.[94]

Although much less serious than the disturbances of the 1790s, Whiteboyism also demonstrated the limitations of the ‘normal’ law-and-order apparatus. By March 1762 the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Halifax, was forced to send troops into the disturbed areas of Munster including Lord Drogheda’s regiment of light dragoons and Sir James Caldwell’s regiment of light horse. Both were recruited mainly from Ulster and had experience of operations against smugglers and illicit distillers. Although a series of swoops produced 500 prisoners, obtaining convictions proved to be a problem. In July of the following year four troops of Lord Drogheda’s light dragoons were sent from Munster to Lurgan and Newry and four more from Sligo to Enniskillen and Belturbet.[95] Once again a large number of (Oakboy) prisoners were brought to trial at Armagh, Omagh and Monaghan, but widespread sympathy among the Presbyterian farmers and shopkeepers meant that crown lawyers were unable to secure a single capital conviction. At Derry there was one exception, an Oakboy named McDill, who was convicted of treason for having treated a clergyman ‘very ill’ and was eventually hanged in 1771.[96]

For the inhabitants of eighteenth-century Europe, it was entirely natural that the punishment of those criminals who had been apprehended was violent, involving the infliction of pain, physical injury and death. The Huguenot Jean Calas, as we have seen, was broken on the wheel—a grotesquely prolonged form of death, in which the convict was laid upon a large wheel and had his bones broken with an iron bar. In Amsterdam thirty-six felons died this way in the first half of the eighteenth century.[97] England’s reputation as an enlightened society rested partly on its repudiation of such forms of torture and cruelty, even in its Irish backyard. Nor was there anything in Ireland like the grisly dismemberment of the regicide Robert-François Damiens, who had tried to assassinate Louis XV in 1757: crowds watched as ‘his flesh [was] torn off with red hot pincers from his breast, arms, legs, and thighs’, following which ‘melted lead, boiling oil, and scalding pitch’ were poured on his body.[98] Nevertheless, the penalty for high treason, as a summary of Irish law explained in 1775, retained the Gothic refinements of the Middle Ages:

The Offender shall be drawn on a Hurdle or Sledge to the Place of Execution, and there be hanged by the Neck, to be cut down alive, his Privy Members cut off, his Bowels ript up, taken out and burnt before as Face, his Head severed from his Body, and his Body divided into four Quarters, which are to be disposed of as the King shall think fit.[99]

In the early decades of the eighteenth century at least, the gruesome procedure was still observed. Such was the fate of the tory Charles Carragher, executed at Dundalk in 1719.[100] An even more gruesome description survives of the execution of his accomplice:

When Collmore was brought to the Gallows, he Hung for a small Time, he was Cut down while alive, when the hangman was cutting off his privities, he cry’d out, then the Sheriff ordered his Throat to be Cut, the Hangman could not do it readily, for he struggled very much, his Head was afterwards Cut off, his Chops open’d and shut, tho’ his Head was a Yard from his Body, his Carcass was divided into 4 Parts, and set up in 4 several Parts of the Country.[101]

The unfortunate Collmore, as the above report concluded, died ‘very obstinately’. An ‘ordinary’ hanging was less horrific. Usually the condemned man or woman asphyxiated within minutes; if necessary, the crowd would pull on their feet to hasten the end. But what is interesting about gallows ritual is not just the barbarity involved but the way in which executions were designed to achieve maximum publicity. These theatrical events were staged by magistrates and clergymen like a kind of morality play, intended to reflect their own social values and assumptions. The prisoner was taken to the scaffold on an open cart, sometimes accompanied by troops. In Cork city during the 1730s, the local serjeants attended the spectacle dressed in robes, and the procession was accompanied by the ‘fatal sound of trumpets’.[102] The felon’s address or ‘last dying speech’, prepared in collaboration with a clergyman, followed. Most of the condemned accepted the justice of their sentence, expressing sorrow and repentance for what they had done. The typical ‘last dying speech’, often printed in handbill form and circulated at the execution, amounted to an endorsement of the social order. Intended, as one Charles Donnell observed before his execution in 1712, for the ‘Instruction and Amendment of Life’, they offered an autobiographical account of the felon’s slide into delinquency, a sort of domino theory of criminality in which sabbath-breaking, drunkenness and the company of ‘lewd women’ led inexorably to more serious offences.[103]

Public execution thus remained one of the principal methods by which the power of the state was demonstrated. What is more intriguing, perhaps, is that no clear distinction was made between the criminal and the sinner, at least during the first half of the century. The presence of a clergyman was obviously crucial, working to reconcile the felon to his fate and to prepare him for the next world. His sermon legitimised not only the punishment being suffered by the individual felon, but also the wider political and social structures in whose name his life was forfeited.[104] Sometimes, at least, this worked. In 1728, for example, a Dublin surgeon who had been convicted of murdering his servant prayed and sang psalms; others read from the scriptures or said the rosary.[105] James Commins, a Catholic from County Kildare, was probably sincere when he declared from the gallows: ‘I cannot expect to see the Face of Christ, with a Lye in my Mouth.’[106] Although one Protestant pamphleteer proposed in 1707 that Catholic priests should be prohibited from instructing capital offenders, on the grounds that they ‘assured’ prisoners of salvation, this does not seem to have happened.[107] An exception was the execution of two Whiteboys, James Hayes and William Downie, at Clonmel in January 1776 for the murder of a magistrate. The two were executed after sunset in the manner of traitors: they were cut down while still alive, quartered and beheaded; and they were denied the consolations of religion, presumably to underline the particular horror of their crime.[108]

Ideally, the various actors in the gallows drama stuck to a well-known script. Sometimes, of course, the lower orders refused to play the role allotted to them. In Limerick a man was shot dead in 1743 when a crowd tried to rescue a convicted robber from the gallows. In February 1778 a large crowd gathered at St Stephen’s Green to throw stones at a hangman, fracturing his skull as he quartered the body of a Whiteboy murderer.[109] A few chose to ‘die hard’—that is, to disappoint the public by withholding a display of contrition.[110] They included Father Sheehy, who not only maintained his innocence, but used his last dying speech to explain how he had been visited in Kilkenny jail by two magistrates, the Rev. Laurence Brodrick and the Rev. John Hewetson, who tried to bully him into confessing that there was to be ‘a Massacre & Rebellion, French officers, Commissioners & money paid’ and to give evidence against ‘Men of Weight & fortune’. Those executed with him, James Farrell and James Buxton, also had pressure exerted upon them to implicate prominent Catholic landowners, bishops and merchants.[111] When seven Steelboys were hanged at Carrickfergus following the Antrim spring assizes of 1772, most refused to acknowledge their guilt. Both the importance of the scaffold as a propaganda tool, and the dangers of it backfiring, were summed up by the sub-agent of Lord Donegall: ‘I would have wished that a general confession had taken place, as it would have had a proper weight with the lower class, who will be glad to have any reason for thinking them innocent and of course proclaiming that they have died martyrs.’[112]

For obvious reasons, Irish research on agrarian insurgency has tended to follow English models, above all E. P. Thompson’s pioneering essay, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, first published in 1971.[113] The most common form of disturbance in England was the food riot, an outburst of violent collective action in times of dearth and high prices. England saw ‘insurrections’ or’ ‘risings of the poor’ in 1709, 1740, 1756–7, 1766–7, 1773, 1782, and especially 1795 and 1800–01. These violent episodes, Thompson demonstrated, were not mindless, but had specific, limited aims, and were underpinned by a shared understanding that the harvesting and marketing of grain and bread should be supervised in the interests of the wider community. Against the new practices of a ‘free’ market economy based on the profit motive, the crowd appealed to an older paternalist model of economic relationships, assuming for themselves the role of local officials, enforcing the sale of grain or bread at a ‘just’ price, with the support of wider community. In France the ‘moral economy’ had its counterpart in the notion of taxation populaire. There were many examples price-fixing from below, most notably the ‘Flour War’ of 1774, which saw more than 300 riots throughout the Paris basin in less than a month, leading to the deployment of 25,000 troops.[114] Although less common in Ireland, food riots were far from unknown. There were serious disturbances during the famine of 1729 in Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Clonmel, Drogheda and Dublin, when crowds broke into corn warehouses or boarded ships and barges, and then sold the contents at a ‘fair’ price. In Cork protests got out of control and three or four rioters were shot dead by the army when they destroyed the mayor’s house. In 1740–41, when harvest failure led to more than 300,000 deaths, there were bread riots in Dublin, Drogheda, Galway, Sligo and Belfast. In 1741 boats transporting corn for the relief of the poor between Carrick-on-Suir and New Ross required military protection since the area was ‘famous for its popish rioters’.[115]

Thompson’s moral economy model has proved enormously influential among scholars of the pre-industrial era, not just in Europe but in America and Asia as well. On the continent, meanwhile, there has been just as much interest in the more anthropological approach to popular disturbances pioneered in Natalie Davis’s article ‘The rites of violence’ (1973). Working on sectarian street conflict in sixteenth-century France, Davis showed how patterns of confessional violence were shaped by religious rituals, liturgical forms and biblical ideas. Such violence was designed to preserve the unity and purity of the community and to define its boundaries against enemies whether external or internal.[116] Both Thompson and Davis were also fascinated with charivari, the noisy processions used to bring public shame upon those who had violated sexual norms, in particular wife-beaters and adulterers. In England, the offenders were usually ‘ridden’ backwards on a horse or pole through the neighbourhood to the accompaniment of ‘rough music’—singing, shouting and the beating of pots and pans. Known in the West Country as ‘skimmington rides’, these rowdy processions were closely linked with calendar customs, especially the festivities associated with May and midsummer, and they were sometimes accompanied by mock proclamations parodying legal proceedings or religious rituals.[117] The type of shaming rituals directed against sexual offenders could be turned against blacklegs or even magistrates. In the 1720s Dublin apprentices objecting to the employment of outsiders in their workshops subjected the offenders to ‘colting’, or making them ‘ride a long pole carried on men’s shoulders through the city, often having music going before them’.[118] Natalie Davis has investigated the youth organisations known as ‘abbeys’ that flourished in early modern France but were also found in many other parts of rural Europe. In their origins these ‘abbeys’ had mimicked monastic structures. Sixteenth-century Lyons contained around twenty of them, complete with abbots, barons, captains, admirals and judges of misrule. Their ‘courts’ claimed jurisdiction over communal morals, publicly humiliating husbands who were dominated by their wives and other offenders by riding them through the town facing backwards on a donkey, to the accompaniment of pots, pans, bells and horns. Often masked and costumed, they used the threat of rough music to extort fines from widowers who decided to marry a second time, especially in cases where there was a large age gap between the intended bride and groom. They also planted ‘May bushes’ outside the houses of marriageable girls, demanding drink, flowers, or gifts in return for granting their ‘permission’ for the wedding ceremony.[119] Although charivaris and skimmington rides are generally associated with light-hearted mockery, these punitive rituals sometimes involved serious physical as well as verbal violence.[120]

There is tantalising evidence to suggest that in Ireland, as elsewhere, forms of collective protest were related to both ‘recreational violence’ and to the forces of social and moral regulation in village communities. Violence was a fact of rural life, denounced repeatedly by the Catholic hierarchy. The most common forms of recreational violence were itemised in a pastoral issued by Bishop Troy of Ossory in 1782, when he condemned riots at fairs, lamented that patron days were marred by ‘the shedding of their neighbour’s blood’, and forbade ‘the requiring and giving garlands, globes and other decorations generally known by the appellation of May Balls’ because of the tumults following.[121] There is some evidence to suggest that Whiteboyism was in part an outgrowth of communal festivity. Darby Brown, a Whiteboy hanged and quartered at Waterford on 7 July 1762, confessed that he had been a captain ‘such as the May-Boys have’, and referred to another ‘Leveller’ who ‘that Night was May-Boy Captain’.[122] There were many other occasions which brought together large numbers of the common people, including pilgrimages and hurling matches, and which fell under the suspicion of the authorities.[123] In 1732, for example, a Catholic priest was killed when he tried to break up a fight at a hurling match in County Meath.[124]

One special category of recreational violence was the faction-fight, recently analysed by James Kelly.[125] Faction-fighting was common at patterns and fairs in a wide variety of locations, and involved gangs of young men, united by territorial or occupational identifications and determined to defend their honour against rivals. Interestingly, Kelly has observed that reports of factional disorder were particularly common in Counties Cork, Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Queen’s and Carlow—the same regions of Munster and south Leinster that formed the heartland of agrarian protest. But it was in the densely populated artisan districts of Dublin that the ritualistic feuding of the Ormond Boys and Liberty Boys became a major problem. In the 1720s the first urban faction appeared, the Kevan or Cavan Bail, named in part after St Kevan’s Port in the Protestant district of the Liberties and in part after their specialism of rescuing prisoners from the local authorities. From the following decade the most serious clashes related to the ongoing war between the weavers of the Liberties and the journeymen butchers of Ormond Market. These quickly became endemic: in September 1748, for example, the Dublin Weekly Journal noted that on the previous Sunday ‘there was a riot as usual between the Ormond and Liberty Boys, in which several were wounded on both sides’.[126] The rival urban factions were also capable of enforcing popular justice. In August 1734, having captured a zealous (and probably corrupt) constable, the two gangs joined forces for a grisly ritual killing. In imitation, perhaps, of public executions, the policeman was paraded through the streets of Dublin, castrated, mutilated and hanged.[127]

For reasons that remain mysterious, this violence had clear peaks in 1729–32, 1734–7, 1739–42, 1748, 1750–51 and 1765–70. Violent clashes took place at the fairs held annually at Donnybrook and Oxmantown Green, or on Sundays. Fatalities and serious injuries were common, as both sides were armed with swords, knives and bludgeons, and the Ormond butchers were known to ‘hough’ or hamstring their enemies. Though the evidence is hazy, there seems to have been some overlap between factional organisation and the journeymen societies and ‘combinations’ which also appeared in the 1720s. These agitated for shorter hours and better wages; in the 1730s and again in the 1770s they also responded to campaigns in favour of home manufactures by attacking shops that stocked English textiles. The Dublin Corporation struggled to limit the occasions for riot by prescribing the erection of May bushes, bull-baiting, and the setting up of booths at St James’s Fair. In Cork city between the 1750s and the 1770s rivalry between the Blackpool, Fair Lane and Blarney Lane Boys began with clashes over who would ‘bring home’ the May bushes, a struggle for territorial control.

Sometimes agrarian protest resembled these carnivalesque traditions of misrule, symbolically expressing popular disapproval against those who offended the core values of the community. This boisterous mixture of festive drama and brutal intimidation was perhaps most evident during the public demonstrations of the Oakboys, whose classic technique was to force resident gentlemen and Anglican clergymen to make declarations before large crowds that they would not attempt to collect taxes or small dues. Those refusing to turn out with the Oakboys, it was reported in 1763, ‘are immediately taken and made to ride a mile upon a stick, and they are heartily ducked’.[128] In the same year, and with rather more menace, a man named Timothy Loughnan, who had leased the tithes of Newcastle, County Tipperary, was seized by a mob of up to a hundred people, who ‘put him on horseback and carried him near half a mile; made part of a grave and threatened to bury him alive if he did not promise to give up his bargain’.[129] There were also links, as we have seen, with festivals such as May Day and St John’s Eve (23 June). The Steelboy ‘confederacy’ was said to have begun in May 1770 on a fair day.[130] Sometimes, as in England, the agrarian protestors of the south acted as enforcers of communal standards of sexual morality. The Whiteboys of the 1770s intervened in a family feud, punished a wife-beater (by hanging him until he lost consciousness), and forced one man to separate from his mistress.[131] Reading the violent protests of the Whiteboys in this light, with the focus on the ritualised and theatrical dimensions of crowd activity, strongly suggests that we should regard Irish disturbances as a variant on a common European theme rather than a specifically colonial form of rebellion.

THE POLITICS OF WHITEBOYISM

There is an infinite difference between popular discontent in Ireland, and England; the utmost to be dreaded from a mob in England is a few days idleness, and drunkenness, and a few broken windows in a house or two that are inhabited by unpopular persons; but in Ireland a Popish mob is the most dreadful instrument that could possibly fall into the hands of either a foreign or domestick enemy, and will always endanger for a time, the subversion of the state.

[SIR JAMES CALDWELL], ADDRESS TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS (1771)[132]

The oath-bound networks which terrorised large tracts of the Irish countryside were far from unique. The ‘Blacks’ of Waltham Chase (Hampshire) and Windsor Forest engaged in similar activities, stealing deer, but also rescuing offenders from constables, issuing threatening letters, and setting fire to houses and haystacks. They too were rumoured to be orchestrated by agents of the Pretender. By way of response, their fictional leader, ‘his Mock Majesty King John’ printed a manifesto insisting that they were faithful subjects of the House of Hanover.[133] In Sussex, meanwhile, gangs of smugglers fought what was virtually a guerrilla war with troops between 1740 and 1750. This became a national matter after the killing in February 1748 of a revenue officer by a gang of west Sussex smugglers. He was first tied underneath a horse and ridden for some miles; his captors then ‘cut off his nose and privities, [and] broke every joint in him’. Sometimes the gestures of defiance made by the smugglers included verbal support for the Stuarts. Eventually thirty-five were executed and another ten died in jail.[134] English food rioters cried ‘Long live the Pretender’ in 1743, threatened that ‘the French w’d be here soon’ in 1753, and nailed up a notice hoping that ‘our exiled king could come over’ in 1766.[135] Yet as Sir James Caldwell, who had led a regiment of light horse against the Whiteboys of Munster, suggested, the religious demography of Ireland meant that its agrarian troubles were more serious. In 1771, as agitation revived in the south-east, Caldwell advised that ‘the most sensible of the Titular Bishops and Priests, as well as the Roman Catholicks of landed interest and in trade’ did not want to destablise their own country; but he still believed that the ‘Popish mob’ would join a French expeditionary force.[136]

The peculiar vulnerabilities of Ascendancy Ireland shaped the response of the authorities to any large-scale outbreak of organised protest. It was not impossible that widespread disorder would make Ireland more tempting to foreign enemies; and some of the Franco-Irish invasion schemes preserved in the Parisian archives conjure up a romantic image of ‘garcons-blancs’ massing at night all over country to dispense their brand of popular justice. In the early stages of the American war one proposal for a descent on Cork argued that not only was Ireland less ‘soignee’ (well-organised, looked after) than England, since the regular forces had been diverted to America and there was no militia system, but that an expeditionary force might ‘rally together all the brigands, who are often in effect a government in themselves’.[137] In other ways, too, popular protest irresistibly brought to mind the unfinished business of the 1640s and 1690s, never far from the decorous surface of the eighteenth century. It is no coincidence that the Bagnells of Clonmel brought out a joint edition of Temple’s Irish rebellion and King’s State of the Protestants in 1766, the year of the Sheehy execution, or that the Anglican clergymen who were confronted by the Oakboys of mid-Ulster instinctively attributed the disturbances to the ‘Covenanters’. What united all redresser movements, finally, was resentment at the financial impositions of the Established Church. In their opposition to tithe, above all else, rural protestors reminded the Anglican elite of its narrow demographic base. The Munster Rightboys of 1785–8 were anticlerical rather than anti-Protestant, but this distinction carried little weight with alarmed conservatives who noted that the insurgents ‘openly profess themselves to be Papists, who assemble at their respective Mass-Houses, and bind themselves by solemn oaths, at the feet of their Altars, to abolish Tithes, or to establish some very inadequate modus or commutation in their place’.[138]

It could be argued, then, that Whiteboyism worked structurally, if not necessarily ideologically, in opposition to Protestant Ascendancy. The most alarming aspects of the redresser movements were their oaths, their command structures and their mimicking of legal forms, all of which enabled them to exercise the functions of an alternative government. In 1762 the Whiteboys of County Cork were supposed to have had a president and council who received petitions, issued threatening letters regulating rents and leases and summoning persons to swear allegiance to the ‘Sovereign Queen Sive Oultagh’.[139] In County Down, as the presbytery of Dromore protested in March 1772, the Steelboys had not only compelled men ‘to sign leases at whatever valuation they please’ but had also assumed ‘to themselves the power of courts of justice, consulting and decreeing in all causes referred to them and putting their determinations in force by the most violent means’.[140] Fifteen years later, at the height of the anti-tithe protests in Munster, Dominick Trant claimed that ‘the internal Cabinet of the white-boy republic’ aimed to spread its oaths through the entire kingdom, so that all ‘the lower orders of the Roman Catholics may become sworn confederates in the general cause of confusion and sedition’.[141] The profound instabilities that perpetuated themselves beneath the surface of Irish society meant that the existence of a kind of subaltern ‘state’ within the state caused particular alarm. At the same time, the emergence of new political divisions within the county elites, together with the growing independence of freeholders, prevented them from united action in defence of the established order. This was most obvious in the Ulster counties, where the Belfast News-Letter expressed measured sympathy for Oakboy grievances concerning non-resident clergy and tithe-proctors, and M.P.s feared that support for the use of troops against demonstrators would damage their reputation with electors.[142] Electoral considerations also played a part in Munster, where the Rightboys of the later 1780s were influenced by the Farmers’ Club of Blarney, a curious association founded in the mid-1770s to protect the poor from proctors and tithe-farmers, and by John Colthurst, an unsuccessful candidate for the independent interest in the 1783 election.[143]

Finally, we should resist the temptation to conclude that rural agitators had no ‘serious’ political beliefs of their own. In July 1763 the Derry authorities received an ultimatum from ‘the royal, sincere, loyal Hearts of Oak’ of Dawson’s Bridge who described themselves as ‘reformers of abuses in church and state’. If this is not a fake—and the almost parodic language of covenanting does raise some doubts—it is a truly remarkable document:

Sir, It is with astonishment we find your mayor has not obeyed our orders to him, which were to turn out of the once loyal city of Londonderry (which our forefathers so bravely defended, against a most hellish, damned set of Papists, with the poltroon James at their head) those high-flying Clergy, I mean those who call themselves High Churchmen. Indeed sir, they are only occasional Protestants, which we call hypocrites, who would overset the church of God, as by Law established, and our most undefiled Church of Scotland. Mind, sir, the Solemn League and Covenant.—Sir, these men would turn out a good young King, and impose on us a Papist Stuart, and overset our Constitution, that we may become of the tribe of Antichrist, you know who I mean,—the Pope.[144]

Not only did the Oakboy letter appeal to the principles of the Glorious Revolution, and the more subversive history of the Scots Covenanters, but it went on to insult the ‘impostor Bute’, a reference to George III’s unpopular Tory prime minister.

Until further work has been done on Irish-language sources we must also reserve final judgment on the politics of Whiteboyism. At least one extant poem, by Pádraig Ó Riada, placed the clashes between the Tipperary levellers and crown forces in a Jacobite context. His verses on the ‘battle of Newmarket’ expressed disillusionment with France and Spain for abandoning the Irish but looked forward to a day when the tables would be turned:

Tá mo shúilse le Máire agus ar chuaigh uainn thar sáile

go mbeimidne lá éigin faoi ghradam—

ár gcampaí go láidir, agus Light Horse dá gcarnadh

agus ‘hurú’ aige Fir Bhána á dtreascairt.

[My hope is in Mary and in all who departed from us overseas [the Irish Brigades] that we will some day have status—our camps powerful, with the Light Horse falling in heaps and the Whiteboys hurrooing as they destroy them.][145]

In the absence of any more substantial evidence, much significance has been attached to an anonymous report in the Cork Evening Post dated 25 May 1762 in which it was claimed that the Whiteboys had adopted the slogan ‘Long live King George the 3rd, and Queen Sive’.[146] This unlikely pairing of the Hanoverian monarch and the Irish fairy queen has been taken as evidence that the Munster insurgents were apolitical or even ‘loyal’. This was certainly not the conclusion drawn by contemporary observers. The anonymous correspondent cited this bizarre slogan only to dismiss it as a smokescreen: the true aim of the conspiracy, he believed, was a ‘change of government’ and the restoration of the Roman Catholic religion. While the report may well be true (and why else should the author place an obstacle in the path of his own argument?), its importance has been blown out of all proportion by historians. Richard Aston, an English judge who conducted an official inquiry into the disturbances, formed the view that the Whiteboy outrages of the early 1760s stemmed from local grievances rather than disaffection to the Hanoverian regime. His findings contradicted the conspiracy theorists among the Munster gentry and brought a halt to legal proceedings against another forty Catholics who had been arrested in 1765–6. But Aston did not conclude that the Irish common people could be relied upon in the event of a French invasion. As he informed his associate Edmund Burke, the Irish would surely join ‘a prince of any religion, either for the sake of revenge, redress, or exchange of state, rather than continue in their conceived wretchedness’.[147] Aston’s assessment of Whiteboyism, at once sceptical of Protestant alarmism and yet suspicious of the Catholic masses, is probably as close as we can get to a balanced verdict on the thousands of Irishmen who rallied to the banners of Queen Sive and Captain Right.

Part IV

The Age of Revolutions

10

The Patriot Soldier

On Saturday 10 November 1798 Theobald Wolfe Tone stood before a military tribunal in Dublin Barracks, accoutred in the lavish uniform of an adjutant-general of the French Republic. A contemporary account of the proceedings described his dress in minute detail: ‘a large and fiercely-cocked hat, with broad gold lace, and the tri-coloured cockade; a blue uniform coat, with gold embroidered collar, and two large gold epaulets; blue pantaloons, with gold-laced garters at the knees; and short boots, bound at the tops with gold lace’.[1] The trial naturally caused a stir—not least because many Dubliners from right across the political spectrum had affectionate memories of the witty, gregarious barrister who had helped to found the United Irish movement and who had been exiled from Ireland in May 1795. In Belfast, just before he departed, Tone had climbed to the top of the Cave Hill with a number of radical comrades, including the dashing half-pay officer Thomas Russell, the cotton manufacturer Henry Joy McCracken, the rich woollen draper Samuel Neilson and the tanner Robert Simms, and there sworn a solemn oath ‘never to desist in our efforts, until we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and asserted her independence’.[2] As ‘Citizen Smith’, Tone acted as an undercover ambassador from the Irish republicans to revolutionary France, negotiating three unsuccessful French expeditions to Ireland in 1796–8. The last of these, hampered by discontents over the non-payment of wages and repeatedly harassed by British vessels, limped as far as Lough Swilly, where Tone was finally captured. He was held briefly in Derry jail before being transferred to the capital.

One thing was certain: Tone would be sentenced to death. But it was the manner of his execution that really mattered. The prospect of a public hanging, the shameful punishment of a common criminal, filled him with horror. As an officer in the French service, he had insisted on wearing full-dress uniform as he was taken to Dublin; now he made a futile plea for the death of a soldier—by firing-squad. When the charges of treason were read, Tone responded with a defence of his attempts to liberate his country by means of ‘open and manly war’, citing the examples of George Washington in America and Tadeusz Kościuszko in Poland. Deploring the atrocities committed by both loyalists and republicans during the recent rebellion, he expressed regret that ‘any tyranny of circumstances or policy should so pervert the natural dispositions of my countrymen’. On the following Monday the sentinel who went to rouse Tone discovered that the prisoner had severed his windpipe with a penknife. Informed by a military surgeon that the wound was not mortal (incorrectly as it turned out), Tone is supposed to have commented: ‘I find then I am but a bad anatomist.’[3] Like ‘patriots’ everywhere in Europe, Wolfe Tone admired the stoicism and self-discipline of classical role-models such as Cato, who had committed suicide as the Roman Republic fell. In Paris, where Tone had spent two frustrating years in exile, as many as twenty-seven members of the National Convention emulated the heroes of classical antiquity, opting for self-inflicted death rather than dishonour. In choosing the republican way of death, as in so much else, Wolfe Tone was a characteristic product of the age of revolution.[4]

No single event has received more attention from the current generation of Irish historians than the rebellion of 1798. The entire eighteenth century has often been treated as an extended preface to the bloody dénouement of its closing decade. Dozens of monographs and essay collections and conferences have been devoted to exploring the United Irishmen and their extraordinary success in constructing the largest insurrectionary movement in Irish history. The historiography of 1798 has become a serious subject of study in its own right. Interest in the rising was stimulated by the extensive programme of commemorative events organised by the Irish government to mark the bicentenary in 1998, the enthusiastic public response, and the perceived relevance of the United Irish ‘project’ to the development of the peace process in Northern Ireland. A great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to contemporary newspapers, estate papers, magistrates’ reports and the writings of the United Irishmen themselves, including Tone’s sparkling journal. And yet the more we discover about the revolutionary crisis in Ireland, the less comprehensible it all seems.

The great themes of the 1790s—the diverse tensions between Catholic and Protestant, Anglican and Presbyterian, landlord and tenant, the kingdoms of Ireland and England—had deep roots, traced in earlier chapters of this book. But the pace of political life in Ireland accelerates dramatically in the last quarter of the century, and in the final decade it careers out of control. The spectacular realignments within and between the three major confessional blocs overturned a hundred years of entrenched hostilities. The alliance of advanced reformers from the Protestant middle classes with their counterparts in the Catholic Committee, signalled by the formation of the Society of United Irishmen in 1791, would have seemed unimaginable just a decade before. Within a few years ‘emissaries’ sent by the Presbyterian merchants and manufacturers of Belfast were negotiating an even more remarkable pact with the Defenders, the lower-class insurgents of the Ulster borders whose political commitments have been aptly described as ‘gut Catholic nationalism’.[5] This extraordinary coalition of sects had been prefigured, moreover, by shifts in British policy dating back to the Seven Years War (1756–63), when Dublin Castle began experimenting with concessions for Catholics in return for access to that valuable and so far untapped source of military manpower, the Irish peasantry. The policy of Catholic assimilation reached its high point in 1792–3, when William Pitt and his Home Secretary Henry Dundas sought to unite ‘all lovers of order and good government’, whatever their religion, against the ‘abettors of anarchy and misrule’.[6] A Catholic relief bill, granting the vote to forty-shilling freeholders, was forced through the Irish parliament, a severe blow to the confidence of the Protestant Ascendancy, hand-in-hand with a militia bill ending the prohibition on Catholics bearing arms. By 1796 the predominantly Catholic militia already totalled more than 17,000 men; but by then the pressure of mounting social disorder in the countryside had forced Dublin Castle to revert to the more traditional option of a Protestant Yeomanry. Even Pitt and Dundas, it turned out, would have to bend before ‘the tyranny of circumstances’ cursed by Tone.

In a well-known contemporary engraving entitled ‘The unfortunate Theobald Wolfe Tone’ the prisoner appears as a still boyish figure, strutting in his rather foppish uniform.[7] It was perhaps a fitting image for someone so obsessed, from his youth, with the glamour of the officer’s life. One of Tone’s earliest memories was of watching the Irish Volunteers linking hands during a parade in the Phoenix Park. It provides an uncanny echo of Rousseau’s account of the impact upon him, as a boy in Geneva, of seeing the regiment of St Gervais performing their exercises and then dancing.[8] On 4 November 1779, against the background of the American war, the Volunteers had introduced the gun into Irish politics. Watched by a massive crowd, ten Dublin companies staged a spectacular demonstration around the statue of King William in College Green, demanding ‘A free trade or else’. Having forced the repeal of restrictions on Irish trade, the Volunteers, galvanised by a political convention of Ulster companies held at Dungannon, went on to extract ‘legislative independence’, including the repeal of the hated Declaratory Act. The so-called ‘revolution of 1782’, as Tone later realised, was ‘the most bungling, imperfect business’.[9] A decade later he would personally supervise the elections for a still more revolutionary body, a national Catholic Convention. But the patriot movement, under the charismatic leadership of Grattan and Flood, had briefly captivated a generation of Irish people—Protestants, Dissenters and even Catholics. At their peak, it is possible that as many as 80,000 Irishmen were serving in Volunteer units. In the north the widespread acquisition of arms and military skills greatly alarmed the government, and helps to explain why Ulster remained the centre of insurrectionary activity until the vicious ‘dragooning’ of 1797. The lower orders there, as a well-informed observer noted, ‘are of a military turn, capable of being immediately formed into excellent soldiers’.[10] Outside Ireland, meanwhile, the great wars of 1775–1815, far surpassing previous conflicts of the European powers in both nature and scale, were turning thousands more Irishmen into soldiers—this time fighting for the British crown.

In the cultural sphere, equally, the late eighteenth century was an age of revolution, and the Sturm und Drang feel of European life, especially in the visual arts, offers another striking reflection of the renewed militarisation that characterised the period. Linda Colley has drawn attention to the cult of military heroism in Britain, the growing emphasis on new kinds of manliness, and the vogue for gorgeous military uniforms that swept through polite society.[11] The most famous painting of the period, Benjamin West’s ‘Death of General Wolfe’ (1771), broke with the conventional models of antiquity to produce the first great commemoration of patriotic self-sacrifice in Britain. The defining image of the British war hero, mortally wounded just as Québec was taken from the French in 1759, was reproduced on thousands of prints and ceramics, stimulating national and imperial pride. The influence of West (among others) is evident in the best-known Irish painting of the era, Francis Wheatley’s ‘A view of College Green with a meeting of the Volunteers on 4 November 1779’, exhibited in Dublin in 1780 and later reproduced in line engravings. The subject was the spectacular ‘free trade’ demonstration that had overawed a British government; and Wheatley’s portrayal combines a throng of foot and cavalry corps assembled around William III’s statue with numerous portraits of prominent Volunteers ranging from the Duke of Leinster to the radical agitator Napper Tandy. Its grand scale and striking contemporaneity made the painting, in the Irish context at least, unique.[12] The self-assurance of the Volunteers, and the heady lesson that the patriotic Irish might be makers of their own history, was reiterated in portraits of individual commanders, in marble busts, transfer-printed pottery and printed linen. It is no surprise, then, to find Tone confessing himself ‘pleased as Punch’ to walk through Belfast in the uniform of the town’s First Volunteer Company in September 1792, with the local soldiers saluting him as he passed, or that four years later he showed off his full regimentals in Paris ‘as pleased as a little boy in his first breeches’.[13]

In France itself, meanwhile, no artist aroused more intense fervour, or captured more dramatically the Rousseauisme of the educated classes, than Jacques-Louis David, whose ‘Oath of the Horatii’ was exhibited in the Salon of 1785. Strikingly original in its stark lighting and its disjointed composition, this huge painting focused on the outstretched arms of the three sons of Horatius, pledging to fight to the death for Rome. Four years later it was followed by David’s ‘The lictors return to Brutus the bodies of his sons’, probably inspired by the revival of Voltaire’s tragedy on the subject in 1786. Both paintings depicted the radical disruption of a family circle as (in sharply contrasting circumstances) a father accepted the sacrifice of his sons as the necessary price for the defence of liberty. In the Salon of 1791 these two great canvases were joined by a third, unfinished work, depicting the deputies of the States General, their hands raised as they swore the Tennis Court Oath. David’s neo-classical republicanism was partly a rejection of the frivolous excesses of the rococo court style. As the stern moral purpose of the revolutionary age began to establish itself, feminine guile and flesh were out, and the simple virility of self-renunciation and principled martyrdom were in. (Famously, David himself had attempted to take his life when he was denied the Grand Prix prize, though he opted for the rather ineffectual method of locking himself in his room without any food.) The republican virtue of the ancients had always been celebrated by those who contrasted love of country (patria) and devotion to the public good with service to the royal court.[14] David’s rugged martial themes, as Anthony Smith notes, ‘lent themselves to a nationalist ideology centred on authenticity and sacrifice, in opposition to worldly corruption and alien tyranny’.[15] In an age when both ancien régime governments and revolutionaries appealed to the people, the severe manliness of the elder Brutus and the fraternal ritual of the Horatii would come to signify the intense collective commitment of those mobilised on behalf of that new moral and political entity: the sovereign nation.

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

It is an age of Revolutions, in which everything may be looked for. The intrigue of Courts, by which the system of war is kept up, may provoke a Confederation of Nations to abolish it: and an European Congress, to patronise the progress of free Government, and promote the civilisation of Nations with each other, is an event nearer in probability, than once were the Revolutions and Alliance of France and America.

TOM PAINE, RIGHTS OF MAN (1791)[16]

Nothing like the French Revolution had happened before. The collapse of the ancien régime apparently swept away centuries of superstition and prejudice, promising an end to tyranny and privilege everywhere, and the radicals of Belfast and Dublin were quick to catch the utopian mood. Although 1789 was frequently linked in radical propaganda with the revolt of the American colonies, and had initially been compared with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, most observers struggled helplessly to find parallels for the convulsions that shook Paris between the storming of the Bastille and the execution of Louis XVI. One recurrent image was a sudden burst of illumination, as brightness spread across a darkened globe; another was a violent breaking of chains as thirty million slaves were freed.[17] It seemed that European civilisation had entered a new era. The cataclysm of 1789, as Samuel Neilson pointedly declared in the Belfast Northern Star, was the most glorious of all revolutions: whereas the English Revolution was merely ‘local’, the French, ‘like the dew of heaven, inspires all Europe, and will extend the blessing of liberty to all mankind as citizens of the world, the creatures of one Supreme Being’.[18] This was a world-historical event, a transformation that held out the promise of emancipation for all humankind.

Initially the French Revolution expressed itself in expansive declarations of abstract political theory addressed to all the inhabitants of the globe and translated into accessible English by Thomas Paine’s Rights of man (1791), the most widely read political work in eighteenth-century Ireland. The effect was to unlock the radical potential within the traditional Whig rhetoric of ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’. The conventional patriot view of the British state as a composite monarchy, linking equal jurisdictions under a single crown, was superseded as revolutionary separatism became thinkable for the first time. ‘We have no national government,’ declared the manifesto of the Belfast Society of United Irishmen; ‘we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen, whose object is the interest of another country.’[19] The formal exclusion of Catholics from political life was now regarded as an insult to humanity. As the revolution in France intensified, the principles of aristocratic privilege and social hierarchy were subject to a sustained assault. Radical propagandists mobilised hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women from the middling and lower orders in a massive underground conspiracy against the Dublin Castle administration. In the countryside, as one moderate observer reported, lower-class Catholics ‘talked of the famous system of liberty and equality in the most extravagant manner’.[20] Some of these ideas had already been broached on the radical fringe of the Volunteer movement in the early 1780s, but they had never been voiced with such confidence. Almost from the beginning, moreover, ‘French principles’ were associated with popular violence—the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the ‘October Days’ when the palace of Versailles was occupied by a hungry crowd. Irish public opinion was polarised into rival camps of ‘aristocrats’ and ‘democrats’, not simply by new ideals but by the violent episodes across the channel that dramatised them. The killing of de Launay, governor of the Bastille, was rather tastelessly celebrated by the opposition press and his fate held out as an example to ‘all treacherous Governors and corrupt Placemen’; while the invasion of Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber led the conservative Freeman’s Journal to predict that France was heading for ‘the most horrid scenes of civil bloodshed, riot, plunder and devastation’.[21]

The energies released by the revolution would soon take more concrete forms. Anyone searching for a unifying pattern to the last decades of the century might start with the accelerating struggle between Britain and France for global dominance, and the exhaustive measures adopted by wartime governments to break through the constraints imposed by social privilege, constitutional bodies and localism. France, humiliated in the Seven Years War (1756–63), and subsequently bankrupted by its intervention on behalf of the American colonists, still commanded resources vastly greater than any other state. No one in the revolution’s early stages foresaw the dramatic revival of the greatest power in Europe. The British watched complacently as the Bourbon monarchy was paralysed by constitutional upheavals; the Austrians and Prussians looked forward to an old-fashioned bout of territorial asset-stripping. After all, the National Assembly had renounced all wars of conquest in May 1790, a remarkable act praised in Tone’s Argument on behalf of the Catholics, which apparently presaged a new age of world peace. It is seldom noticed that Tom Paine’s Rights of man begins by addressing the problem of international conflict and ends by looking forward to a general revolution in Europe, in which the ‘intrigue of Courts, by which the system of war is kept up’ would be replaced by a confederation of nations.[22]

United Irish propaganda, described more fully in the next chapter, was very often anti-war propaganda in which all the hardships of the heavily taxed poor were attributed to unjust military action against the French. Free nations, it was argued, did not fight one another; international conflict was the artificial product of the old balance-of-power system, where kings, aristocrats and priests waged war in pursuit of glory and the fantasy of religious uniformity, reducing their subjects to slaves in the process. Any impartial student of British history, Thomas Paine suggested, would be forced to conclude that ‘Taxes were not raised to carry on Wars, but that Wars were excited to carry on Taxes’. This point was emphasised in the Derry edition of Rights of man, the first of many Irish reprints, brought out by the editor of the Londonderry Journal, George Douglas. A long footnote was added, summarising the history of conflict between the great powers and the development of what we now call the ‘fiscal-military state’, from its origins in William III’s reign through the subsidies paid by George II to Hanover, to the aftermath of the American war when the national debt stood at £250 million. ‘What’, Douglas demanded, ‘had IRELAND to do with those mad, continental extravagancies?’[23] More and more people asked themselves this question when war between the British Empire and the French Republic was declared on 1 February 1793.

Utopian visions of a new era of global peace had abruptly foundered as the Brissotin party campaigned for vengeance against the enemies of the revolution: ‘If the cabinets of foreign courts try to raise up against France a war of kings,’ one radical deputy warned, ‘we shall raise up a war of the peoples against the kings.’[24] Increasingly paranoid governments in Paris were now confronted by an international conspiracy to restore the ancien régime and by a series of provincial revolts at home, linked by popular attachment to Catholic tradition. News that the French National Assembly had voted for war against Austria on 20 April 1792 initiated a quarter-century of devastation, which saw the revolution wage total war against its enemies with unprecedented ferocity, covering more of the globe than any previous conflict, inflicting greater casualties, and provoking domestic risings and revolutions everywhere from the West Indies to Naples. After the levée en masse conscription decree of 23 August 1793 the other European powers were forced to match the military dynamism and patriotic over-exertion of the French Republic—not to mention its application of state terror to the disaffected groups within its own borders. Britain was no exception. ‘It was not the French Revolution which created the modern world,’ as Tim Blanning has quipped; ‘it was the French revolutionary wars.’[25]

In Ireland a clear connection had already been established between military mobilisation, constitutional reform and the progress of Catholic relief. This pattern too can be traced back to the Seven Years War, the major struggle that led to the expulsion of the French from North America and the seizure of French and Spanish possessions in the West Indies. Of fourteen battalions serving in Ireland, two embarked for America in February 1756 and another seven were dispatched in the spring of 1757. In Protestant Ulster two battalions were subsequently raised to make good this loss.[26] The elder Pitt predicted that thousands of recruits would be found among the Protestants, a ‘zealous, brave and flourishing people’.[27] This turned out to be unduly optimistic. But the first hints of a new policy of Catholic assimilation came in 1762 with Lord Trimleston’s offer to raise 3,000 Catholics for the King of Portugal (an ally of Britain). Even this cautious proposal for backdoor recruitment, favourably received at Whitehall and Dublin Castle, was vetoed by the suspicious parliamentarians of College Green. In reality, however, regiments in Ireland had been restocking their depleted ranks with local recruits for some time, and inevitably a large proportion of these were despised ‘papists’. In some cases, indeed, Catholics were presenting themselves with forged certificates supplied by Anglican clergymen.[28] During the Seven Years War the troops that sailed from Irish ports to North America already contained a high proportion of local men—not only in the 27th or ‘Inniskilling’ but also in nominally ‘English’ battalions such as Bragg’s 28th Foot.[29] From 1771 Townshend authorised recruiting parties from British regiments to beat up in the three provinces of Leinster, Munster and Connacht, notwithstanding the fact that ‘all the lower class of people are Roman Catholics’.[30] When Camden sought ‘English’ reinforcements to suppress the ’98, the Duke of Portland ruefully informed him that ‘so large a part of our regular infantry is composed of recruits or men raised in Ireland’ that there was no longer any such thing as an ‘English’ regiment.[31]

The dramatic hibernicisation of Britain’s armed forces, one of the least studied developments of this era, was already far advanced.[32] At the outbreak of the French wars in 1793 British military strength was put at 175,000 troops; by 1801 the figure was already 300,000. If we assume (as contemporaries often did) that around one-third of the army consisted of Irishmen, then we must conclude that there were 100,000 serving by the end of the century, and within a decade that number would more than double. The proportion of Irishmen serving in the Royal Navy was exaggerated by United Irish propagandists at the time (and by many historians ever since), but was probably somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent. (Their involvement in the spectacular mutinies at Spithead and the Nore in the spring of 1797 has also been persistently overestimated; only a fifth of Irish recruits in the Channel Fleet were regarded as disaffected by their captains.) A conservative estimate, then, would suggest that 24,000 Irish were serving in the navy in 1797, and one contemporary put the figure as high as 40,000.[33] As part of a naval recruitment campaign in 1782, posters were produced depicting Hibernia and Britannia embracing, with slogans such as ‘We’ll kick them before us’ obligingly rendered in Irish.[34] An anonymous poem, ‘Píobaire Chluana’ (The piper of Cloyne), most likely dating from the same period, laments the fate of an Irishman carried off by a recruiting gang in a tavern near Cork and beaten with a rope when he refused to play music:

Do sheinneas an ceol dóibh is d’ardaíomar seolta

’gcionn dul go Hanover i gcomhaireamh an rí

níl fear bhí ar bord ann nár ghlaoigh suas ar nóimeint

ansin do seoladh sinn ins na Marines.

Fuaireas-sa gunna is do scaoileas mo phíob

‘Come, handle your firelock, my Irish Paddy!’

Chuireas-sa slán chun na háite úd ’na mbínn,

is chun na mná mánla do thál orm cín

[I played them the air and we hoisted sail

to go to Hanover for the king’s muster;

there wasn’t a man on board who didn’t speak up at once,

and then we were sent into the Marines.

I received a gun and left down my pipes.

‘Come, handle your firelock, my Irish Paddy!’

I bade farewell to the place I used to frequent

and the gentle woman who nursed me at her breast.][35]

It is hard not to suspect that during the 1790s an even greater number of Irishmen died outside their country fighting for the British than fighting against them at home.

The insatiable manpower requirements of the British state provide an important underlying theme in the political turbulence of the later eighteenth century. A second, closely related tendency was the greater willingness of British ministers to override both longstanding political commitments and established constitutional practices in their search for new sources of men and money. This centralising process was a messy, confused business, a jagged pattern of advance and strategic retreat rather than a simple straight line, but the overall direction was unmistakable. Following the Seven Years War the sprawling North American empire, with its increasingly diverse population of Scots-Irish, Germans, French Canadians, African slaves and Native Americans, clearly required a permanent military presence. The American possessions comprised a ramshackle accumulation of colonies, each with its own legislature exercising jurisdiction over its own internal affairs. Imperial reorganisation was long overdue. A series of controversial measures was soon drawn up to compel the colonies to make a greater contribution to their own defence, beginning with the Stamp Act of 1765. The problem was that for much of the eighteenth century a large measure of self-government had been permitted throughout the British dominions, and metropolitan interference was deeply resented. The position in Ireland was not very dissimilar: notwithstanding the provocative Declaratory Act passed in 1720, the Westminster parliament had been reluctant to intervene in internal administration. In 1768 the new Lord Lieutenant, Viscount Townshend, failed to secure backing for the augmentation of the Irish establishment to 15,325 men, an increase of 25 per cent. The constitutional crisis that resulted has been ranked by one historian alongside the Wood’s Halfpence affair of the 1720s and the money bill dispute of 1753.[36]

So began a radical overhaul of Irish governance that would take five years to complete. Faced with a revolt by the great parliamentary magnates Ponsonby and Shannon, and their opportunistic appeals to patriot opinion out-of-doors, Townshend abruptly dismantled the power base of the undertakers. The creation of his ‘new system’, founded on the direct management of the House of Commons by Dublin Castle, demanded the constant residence of the Lord Lieutenant for the first time, a measure which underlined the constitutional subordination of Ireland. The vast powers of patronage which had once launched the spectacular careers of Conolly, Midleton and Shannon were now reclaimed, and the Irish Revenue Board was brought under the control of the Castle administration. Townshend’s initial efforts to build up his own parliamentary base among the independent country gentlemen by embarking on an exhausting round of ‘eating, drinking, sleeping [and] riding out’ were not very successful.[37] And yet, with the important exception of 1782, the Castle was able to command solid working majorities in the Commons right up to the Act of Union. Hence the manifesto of the Society of United Irishmen of Belfast, noted earlier, which complained that ‘we are ruled by Englishmen’ and sought to eliminate the corrupting effects of government patronage by ‘a complete and radical reform’ of the constitution.[38] The eventual absorption of Ireland into a new United Kingdom in 1800, a severe shock to patriots of all shades, was the logical extension of this general tendency towards greater centralisation. In working towards a legislative union, a measure he assumed would be accompanied by Catholic Emancipation, William Pitt’s political instincts were little different from those of Lord North or Townshend before him. Union, as the Lord Lieutenant Camden reasoned in 1797, was only way to make Ireland an advantage to England instead of ‘a point dreadfully vulnerable in all future wars’.[39]

If European geopolitics dictated the adoption of reformist policies in London, the same factors can help us to understand attitudes in Ireland’s other overseas capital, Rome. During the later eighteenth century the Catholic Church was confronted with new dangers both at home and abroad. In pastoral matters, admittedly, the return of John Thomas Troy, first to Ossory (1777), and then to the metropolitan see of Dublin (1786), marked the beginning of an era of sustained progress. In the last two decades before the Union the number of priests increased (as, of course, did the population); higher standards were being demanded of the priesthood, if not always met; devotional works were more widely available than before; and Confraternities of the Christian Doctrine had spread to almost every diocese. Above all, the school system was consolidated (240 Catholic schools in the diocese of Meath alone), and dozens of chapels were being built or enlarged.[40] As always, signs of improvement were accompanied by the familiar complaints that the peasantry remained addicted to alcoholic excess, clandestine marriage, and the raucous improprieties of the pattern and the wake. Priests, moreover, were still in relatively short supply. Bishop Dominic Bellew toured the poor diocese of Killala in 1781, searching in vain for suitable candidates for the priesthood.[41] At College Green the passage of relief acts in 1778 and 1782, designed to mollify the leaders of Catholic Ireland at a time of imperial crisis, repealed all penal restrictions on landownership and on ecclesiastical organisation. Initial concerns about the proposed exclusion of the regular clergy from the 1782 bill alarmed Troy and his Dominican friends, ‘sorry to see in the one hand the olive branch and in the other the Iron Rod’.[42] But the outcome was more or less what the bishops had desired. Nine decades after the Treaty of Limerick freedom of worship was at last restored to Catholic Ireland, without any compromise over the hierarchy’s independence—or, to put it another way, their dependence on the Court of Rome.

Suddenly these substantial gains were thrown into jeopardy by the outbreak of revolution in Paris. Once again, radical ideologies rooted in the Enlightenment intersected to devastating effect with the longer-term centralising tendencies of the warfare state. The suppression of the Jesuits in all Catholic states between 1759 and 1773 marked the advance of a general reaction against the contemplative life and the ultramontane orders, and renewed calls were made for the reduction of saints’ days and holy days. Protestant reformers were soon citing these developments as evidence that popery was decaying all over Europe; Ireland would inevitably follow suit ‘unless we prop [up] their superstition with their resentment, and keep their prejudices alive by maintaining our own’.[43] Just a few years after Bishop Troy was consecrated in Brussels, where the papal nuncio still bore responsibility for Britain and Ireland, the Emperor Joseph II began an extensive reform programme throughout his far-flung possessions, prompted in part by the Habsburg disappointments of the Seven Years War. The monastic communities became the principal target of an enlightened monarch who resented their apparently parasitic way of life and coveted their property.[44] In European historiography the term ‘Josephism’ denotes the campaign to dislodge the Roman Catholic Church from its monopoly over education and poor relief, the corresponding extension of state control into these vital areas of civic life, and the toleration of Protestant, Greek Orthodox and Jewish minorities. The emperor’s dominions included the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium), home of a cluster of Irish colleges, and Prague. By January 1793, when the seals of the French Republic were placed on the Dominican college at Louvain, the Irish convents in the Empire had already suffered a decade of restrictions and reforms and their communities had begun to disperse.[45]

The revolution in France effectively collapsed the church into the Third Estate, dissolving the monastic orders, dismantling the status of the clergy as a separate constitutional order, severing papal jurisdiction in France and nationalising church property. Once again the Irish colleges—in Paris, Nantes and Bordeaux—were among the casualties. These policies were radical enough to drive the majority of the French clergy into opposition to the revolution; and the revolution, increasingly volatile and overheated, was in turn driven into an outright attack on Catholicism itself. Jacobinism was an assault on the Church of Rome (and indeed on all civil establishments of religion), so much so that the only parallel Edmund Burke could find was the ‘theoretick dogma’ of the Reformation.[46] At Propaganda Fide, Cardinal Antonelli’s instructions to the Irish Catholics were to keep out of politics, especially the kind of radical politics associated with the northern Presbyterians.[47] As early as May 1791 concern that the Irish colleges would be compelled to take the oath or lose their property caused Troy to pin his hopes on a ‘counter revolution’ imposed by Austria and Prussia. As he must have realised, the recent edicts of the Parisian revolutionaries announcing the exclusion of papal jurisdiction, the disbandment of the regulars and the imposition of a new oath of allegiance echoed the penal statutes imposed under William and Anne. At the very time when the majority of the Irish population could practise their faith with new freedom, a more deadly penal code was being inflicted upon the overwhelming majority of the French people, this time by an ‘infidel French Assembly’ which rapidly proved itself capable of levels of brutality and coercive power that a Williamite Irish parliament could only dream of.[48] In the summer of 1798 the Catholic authorities accordingly denounced the relatively small number of rebel clergymen as ‘the excommunicated priests, the drunken and profligate couple-beggars, the very faeces of the church’, while maintaining a conspicuous silence about state repression.[49]

Since the beginning of the decade the Irish prelates and their friends among the old landed nobility had struggled to contain a revolt within their own Third Estate. Not only had the Catholic Committee, hitherto a rather ineffectual body, thrown up tribunes of the people such as the wealthy merchants John Keogh and Thomas Braughall, but signs of greater self-assertion among the Dublin middling sorts—Protestant and Catholic alike—were followed by the remarkable courtship between the more advanced radicals of the Catholic Committee and the Dissenters of Belfast, a town synonymous with republicanism and subversion. To begin with, the patriots who campaigned for the legislative independence of the Dublin parliament had displayed all the usual Protestant aggression associated with Irish parliamentary opposition. The first significant breaches in the penal code, as we have seen, originated in London; the relief legislation was pushed through College Green with the crucial backing of Castle pensioners and placemen—the very same instruments of executive power which reformers sought to eliminate. At the celebrated Dungannon Convention of February 1782, however, Grattan’s patriot party sought to counter the perception that Ulster was still the bastion of anti-Catholic bigotry. In a carefully choreographed move, the Newry Dissenter and radical Joseph Pollock proposed a resolution welcoming the relaxation of the penal code. He was seconded by a Presbyterian minister from County Down, who declared that the Catholics had abandoned ‘those bigoted and superstitious notions by which their ancestors were governed’.[50] These resolutions were endorsed by Volunteer corps in Dublin, Limerick, Clonmel and Waterford, as well as in various northern towns. Ultimately the battle for legislative independence, like that for free trade, was really won in the colonies, where the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown led to the collapse of Lord North’s government in London. But a spectacular combination of parliamentary oratory, Volunteer mobilisation and fierce rioting in Dublin created the impression that the ‘revolution of 1782’ was indebted to the sovereign power of the people—and that, in some rather virtual sense, the ‘people’ included Irishmen of every religious persuasion.

Such ‘liberality of sentiment’ depended on the growing assumption that ‘popery’ had entered irreversible decline, its superstitious and backward tenets no longer able to withstand the rational arguments of an enlightened age. The very first issue of the Northern Star, the best-selling paper of the Belfast United Irishmen, welcomed the suppression of 4,500 religious houses in France and the opening up of their libraries, apparently containing more than four million volumes.[51] It was an image nicely calculated to appeal to traditional Protestant prejudices. If the age of reason had dawned upon Catholic France, might it not also illuminate Catholic Ireland? The Dissenters of the north, particularly those of the latitudinarian or ‘New Light’ variety, were able to draw upon a long tradition of polemical theology opposing the use of coercion in matters of faith. It was not simply that the state had no business in religious affairs: the whole of human history, in their view, was an apocalyptic struggle for religious truth against the antichristian union of secular and spiritual authority. Presbyterians of all shades were taught that Jesus Christ’s position as sole king and lawgiver of the church had been usurped by human authorities—most obviously, but not exclusively, the Roman papacy—who had replaced the simple teachings of the scriptures with their own flawed creeds and confessions of faith. This was one reason why the north was such fertile ground for the writings of Thomas Paine. In opposing freedom of conscience to hierarchical priesthoods, in denouncing religious establishments as ‘human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind’ and in his hostility to the ‘adulterous connection of church and state’, Paine was speaking a language long familiar to the disputatious Dissenters of Belfast.[52]

Patriot politicians and pamphleteers sometimes spoke as if the middling Catholics of Ireland’s cities, ports and county towns had existed in a state of suspended animation until beckoned onto a bright stage by a noble band of enlightened Protestants clad in their magnificent Volunteer uniforms. The reality was naturally more complicated. Catholics had prospered during the agricultural boom years after the 1750s. They too were angered by the embargo on export provisions imposed at the beginning of the American war and by the disruption of continental trade following the intervention of France. The middling sorts of all denominations seem to have supported the non-consumption agreements of 1779. In part, these tentative inroads into the public sphere followed naturally from the quickening pace of economic life after 1750. In Wexford town, for example, Catholics had lobbied on commercial issues, accounting for 14 of the 24 signatories to a merchants’ petition in 1757. In 1779 a small group of Catholic gentry, middlemen and merchants pledged financial assistance to an independent Volunteer company, and in the same year 49 Catholics joined with 119 local Protestants to sign an anti-importation agreement in Wexford town.[53] Even before the repeal of the penal laws Catholics were gradually asserting their presence in public life, although they avoided any direct challenge to the Protestant monopoly of political power. The key turning-point, once again, was the outbreak of war with the American colonies. The requisite loyal addresses were quickly engineered by the old nobility—Fingall, Gormanston, Dillon, Trimleston, Cahir and Kenmare—but also from less predictable quarters. In April 1778, for example, 311 Catholics signed an address drawn up at a public meeting in Newry, County Down.[54] During the Franco-Spanish invasion scare of the following year, addresses of loyalty poured in from all quarters—Derry, Galway, Kilkenny, Roscommon and Waterford. Among them, ironically, were the names of 147 Wexford Catholics willing ‘to risk their lives and fortunes in defence of his Majesty’s crown’, presented by none other than George Ogle, the county’s militantly Protestant M.P.[55]

TERROR AND COUNTER-TERROR

It has been the argument of this chapter so far that British state formation determined the pace of political events in late eighteenth-century Ireland. This is not to deny that popular politicisation, the central theme of most recent writing on the 1790s, had its own internal dynamics. The great seismic shifts in the political landscape, such as the patriot campaigns for free trade and legislative independence, the northern calls for parliamentary reform, and the Catholic Convention of December 1792, had a momentum of their own, stemming from the social transformations described in Chapter 3 and the ways in which these interacted with the sectarian fissures that were never far from the placid surface of Ascendancy Ireland. But the development of Irish radicalism was intimately tied to events in America and France, not simply by ideological resonances, but by the impact of military mobilisation upon sections of society which seldom came into direct contact with the state. The best example is the Volunteer movement itself, whose spectacular rise transformed the patriot movement from a small group of parliamentarians, never representative of more than a minority of the ruling elite, into a massive citizen militia capable of exerting sufficient pressure to force London into a series of humiliating climbdowns (discussed further in Chapter 11). It was precisely to avoid a repetition of political volunteering that Westmorland’s response to the declaration of war by revolutionary France was to issue orders to embody the Irish militia.

In the summer of 1793 Dublin Castle began to receive ominous reports of a series of ‘insurrections’, ignited by the raising of new militia regiments by a compulsory ballot system. Half of the thirty-two counties in Ireland were affected. In Carlow seven rioters were killed when a party of 500 ‘banditti’ attacked the sheriff and twenty-two dragoons. In the mountains along the border between Queen’s County and Kilkenny local constables were forcibly prevented from drawing up the necessary lists of local inhabitants by the area’s colliers and quarrymen. In Meath, already disturbed by Defenderism in 1792–3, protestors swore oaths to resist the militia, robbed houses for arms, shot dead an informer, killed two soldiers in a skirmish at Athboy, and were said to be manufacturing pikes. Even more interesting, perhaps, was similar news from Wexford: oaths were sworn against the levy, weapons were allegedly procured, and threatening letters were issued. There was trouble at New Ross, Newtownbarry and Enniscorthy. As elsewhere, handbills were distributed, in one case accompanied by ‘a drawing of a spear as a pattern for the common people to arm themselves with’. In July the attempted rescue of two prisoners led to the death of Major Charles Valloton, struck with a scythe as he attempted to parley with a mob of 3,000 demonstrators. Here, and in a number of other areas, hostility was directed not only at the constables but also at Catholic priests who co-operated with the authorities in the levy. Near Athlone, for example, it was reported that a priest was ‘strung up by his own flock and nearly hung to death for preaching the necessity of submission to the Militia Act’.[56]

That Munster, the traditional centre of agrarian outrage, was also affected is hardly surprising. In Dingle, for example, troops killed twelve rioters when a crowd of 5,000 disrupted a meeting in the Session House, ‘threatened the magistrates, tore all the papers, parish lists, etc. they could lay their hands on’. More unexpected, however, was the involvement of Connacht, especially Sligo, Roscommon and Mayo, where the local authorities encountered the most violent resistance of all. Clashes with soldiers flared at Carrick-on-Shannon, Manorhamilton, Boyle and Erris, all leading to significant numbers of fatalities; in the last case soldiers of the 39th Regiment fought with a 1,000-strong crowd armed with pikes and some muskets, leaving thirty-six rioters dead.[57] Already there was some evidence of contamination by ‘French principles’. An agent on the Wynne estate in County Sligo reported that the lower classes had been led to believe that the relief act would produce not only religious equality but an ‘Equality of Property’.[58] Ironically, it was the radical heartland of Ulster that remained most calm. There had been disturbances in Cavan, Donegal (where a priest was abused ‘for being a Protestant because he has recommended subordination’) and Rathfriland in south Down, already a centre of Defender activity. But Presbyterian radicalism was the dog that didn’t bark in 1793. Westmorland attributed the ‘sullen silence’ of Belfast to a military riot in March, when General Whyte encouraged his dragoons to single out the houses of United Irishmen for attack.[59] For many Belfast reformers, here was confirmation that their most fundamental constitutional liberties had been extinguished, a turning-point as significant in its own way as the militia riots themselves. The watchmaker and radical Thomas McCabe left his shattered windows to stand as a memorial, and hung a sign on his shop with the words ‘McCabe, an Irish slave’.[60]

It has been argued that the savage violence of 1793 marked the end of the ‘moral economy’, the relatively harmonious social order where agrarian unrest was characterised by a ‘tacit understanding’ that limited violence between the rulers and the ruled.[61] This may seem an unduly rosy picture: earlier outbreaks of Whiteboyism, after all, were generally treated as a direct expression of the longstanding hostility of the Irish common people to the Williamite settlement. Yet the impression that something in the social fabric had snapped runs through the correspondence of those spring months. One simple explanation for the escalation of violence, seldom commented upon, was the greater availability of firearms. In the last few decades of the century Ireland was awash with weapons, a problem greatly exacerbated by volunteering. Firearms were in the hands of many Catholics long before the penal bar was lifted. During the government ‘terror’ of 1797–8 crown forces seized a staggering total of 48,000 stand of arms and 70,000 pikes from rebels; presumably as many again were successfully hidden.[62] The arms raid was the hallmark of Defenderism: between 1793 and 1795 gentry houses were plundered by nocturnal bands right across the midland counties. Dis-arming—the flushing out of hidden weapons by flogging, rape and house-burning—subsequently became the principal activity of the loyalist forces in the eighteenth months before the rebellion. This was what hawks such as Brigadier-General Knox of Dungannon meant when they called for a wholesale policy of ‘terror’. The vicious dragooning of Ulster in 1797 under General Lake severely disrupted the United Irish movement in its northern fastness, while the extension of free quarters to the south-east in the early months of 1798 provided the impetus behind the Wexford uprising.

It was inevitable that service in the militia would be resisted, particularly by the Catholic majority, previously excluded from such schemes and alienated from the local authorities who levied the ballots. The appearance of parish constables, whose task it was to make a return of all men in the locality between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, along with details of their rank and occupation, constituted a novel and particularly menacing extension of state power. Militiamen were naturally recruited from the lower classes (the price of exemption being a £10 fine), and many husbands and sons feared they would be sent overseas. The poor harvest of 1792 led to a threefold increase in the price of potatoes, and the complaints of the rioters quickly became bound up with the traditional peasant grievances associated with Whiteboyism. From Kilkenny, for example, it was reported that the objectives of the protestors included ‘the lowering of rent and the abolition of tythes’; the Dingle rioters were taken with the idea ‘that liberty and equality should only govern in future’; and, even more ominously, ‘some of those dying claimed to expect foreign aid’.[63]

How was communal hostility to the militia ballot translated into this new-found political assertiveness? The most obvious answer is the impact of the Catholic Convention. The defining year for the new force of Catholic democracy was undoubtedly 1792, beginning with the rejection of a Catholic petition during a heated debate in the House of Commons when a ‘great deal of inflammatory stuff was spit out’. With its credentials once more called into question, the Committee called a nationwide election for a Catholic Convention in which it was made plain that ‘the nomination of delegates is authorised by all the people’.[64] The elections were a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the College Green parliament and its claim to represent the people. They were viciously divisive at the local level. Meetings of the (Protestant) grand jury and freeholders were held in at least eighteen counties to denounce the Committee’s campaign. Among Catholic gentlemen, traders, clergy and the general public, conversely, the election procedure generated a feeling of empowerment, with expectations of wider social gains. The Catholics, as Westmorland reported to Dundas, ‘have been taught that the elective franchise will improve their condition and they connect it with the non-payment of rent, tythes and taxes, the only object of their consideration’.[65]

The ultimate beneficiaries of the militia riots were the United Irishmen of Belfast and Dublin. As we have seen, Pitt and Dundas aimed to abolish sectarian distinctions and to unify all Irishmen in defence of the Empire. An essential component of this policy was the eradication of the independent Volunteer associations which had revived in Belfast and Dublin in the wake of the French Revolution. It was particularly alarming that patriots in Belfast and a number of nearby towns had staged celebrations of the unexpected French victory at Valmy (20 September 1792), a largely symbolic triumph of French esprit over Prussian discipline. As the militia was phased in, then, the old Volunteers were abolished by proclamation, and conventions were outlawed for good measure. In the two or three years before the French invasion attempt at Bantry Bay the United Irishmen built up a vast insurrectionary movement, without wholly abandoning hopes that reform might be achieved by constitutional means. Already the Belfast radicals had exploited Volunteer companies, Masonic lodges, Presbyterian congregations and town meetings as vehicles for political agitation. In 1793 they achieved two important moral victories when their public aims—parliamentary reform, Catholic Emancipation and opposition to the war—were endorsed at a Dungannon convention held in February and at the annual meeting of the Synod of Ulster. Now they were busy constructing a mass network or ‘system’ of oathbound cells, governed by baronial, county and provincial committees, creating an underground Irish republic in waiting. Late in 1795 Dublin Castle received intelligence concerning a ‘junction’ between the Belfast radicals and the leaders of Defenderism in the western and midland counties. The exact nature of this alliance is still vague and probably always will be. The Teelings of Lisburn were one vital point of contact; the firebrand priest Father James Coigly was another. Everywhere there were frequent reports that the ubiquitous ‘emissaries’ and ‘ambassadors’ of Belfast were circulating. Ironically, the militia units embodied in 1793—also constantly on the move—acted as carriers of the Defender contagion (just as the Yeomanry later brought the Orange Order into the southern counties).

In Belfast Neilson and his associates now provided a focal point for the various types of combustible material throughout the island. Actually co-ordinating these diverse forces was a different matter. In Paris Wolfe Tone sketched out the plans for a free Ireland with Carnot, Hoche and their subordinates. A national convention was to be formed by the General Committee of the Catholics and delegates from the Dissenters, who between them ‘would be actually the representatives of nine-tenths of the people’.[66] All allegiance to the British government would be forbidden under penalty of treason and English property in Ireland would be confiscated. Naturally the convention would make a commercial treaty and a military alliance with the French Republic, but Tone bristled at the idea of a representative of France sitting in the new government. Ireland, unlike Holland, would be not a conquered country but a liberated one, and so he insisted that France had no right to intervene in domestic affairs.[67] The French, it has to be said, were less interested in a war of independence than in a chouannerie—the kind of sporadic, vicious peasant insurgency that the English had encouraged in Brittany and in the Vendée.

It was Tone’s view that without French direction, the Irish ‘would not move, unless in local riots and insurrections, which would end in the destruction of the ringleaders’.[68] His prediction was not far off the mark. The northern United Irishmen, who had all along supplied the backbone of the republican movement, were victims of their own success. The key year in the mobilisation of Ulster was 1797 when numbers peaked in the months after Bantry Bay; but from the spring General Lake began his brutal pacification of Ulster. He was able to draw on the regular troops (11,000 in the Northern district, compared to 7,400 in Munster), the militia and the recently embodied Yeomanry. As house-burnings, floggings and other forms of torture were employed to subdue the rebels, thousands took the oath of loyalty and surrendered their weapons. Above all, the cellular organisation of the United Irishmen was disrupted as the authorities removed the top tier of the military command, leaving in charge subordinate leaders whose influence was limited. When the signal came to rise, the northern movement was consequently paralysed. ‘The arresting of a colonel threw the whole battalion into disorder,’ as David Bailie Warden commented; ‘instead of the forces meeting at any point in collected and organised bodies, they met rather by accident than by design; and they were in no better order than a mere country mob.’[69]

The erosion of Ulster republicanism in 1797 was the most important factor in determining the final shape of the United Irish rebellion. Of the original Cave Hill conspirators, Neilson and Russell were now in prison. Robert Simms was now adjutant-general for County Antrim; but when news arrived that insurrection had erupted in Leinster, he resigned his command, leaving Henry Joy McCracken to lead 1,500 men in a futile attack on Antrim town on 7 June. Dublin had replaced Belfast as the focus of the conspiracy, and since the beginning of the year the centre of gravity within the movement had shifted decisively to the south-east. In Dublin too the rebel organisation was crippled by the betrayal of the Leinster directory by an informer and the subsequent arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The epicentre of the rising, County Wexford, had few connections to the United Irishmen before 1795, with Bagenal Harvey and Edward Sweetman being the obvious exceptions. It appears that subsequent organisation was not the work of Thomas Addis Emmet and William James MacNeven—the ‘men of education and wealth’ (according to the informer McNally) who hoped for a bloodless revolution backed by a French expedition—but rather of the latecomers Arthur O’Connor and Lord Edward Fitzgerald whose associates were ‘mostly men in the lower orders of society, a few priests and a number of mechanics’.[70]

Comparisons between the ’98 rebellion and the savage civil war fought between the armies of the French Republic and the rebels of the Vendée region were made by contemporaries and have been echoed by a number of recent historians.[71] Of all the new terms borrowed from the French republicans, ‘terror’ was one of the most important. Its first practitioner was Lord Carhampton (perhaps significantly, an Irishman himself), who was entrusted with the pacification of Roscommon and Leitrim after widespread rioting in May 1795. Hundreds of ‘rebels’ and vagrants were rounded up, without any legal cover, and dispatched for service in the Royal Navy. Under the terms of the Insurrection Act of 1796, Carhampton’s dubious methods were legalised and extended. The dragooning of Ulster by General Lake was partly a response to the fears of isolated loyalists in the north who felt abandoned by Dublin Castle. ‘If there is a rebellion and His Majesty’s loyal subjects murdered,’ the Marquis of Downshire informed Dublin Castle on 24 February, ‘let it be on your heads that are comfortably sitting in your closets in Dublin.’[72] It was no coincidence that Downshire’s fiefdom in south Down witnessed some of the worst loyalist atrocities, including the killing of twenty people at the beginning of June by the Ancient Britons, a regiment of fencible cavalry recently quartered at the village of Forkhill. The Ulster borderlands, from Newry and Dundalk through Armagh and Dungannon, were entrusted to Brigadier-General Knox, who vigorously cultivated the Orangemen as a counterweight to the United Irishmen. For the local inhabitants, an ‘official’ house search must have seemed little different from a sectarian raid.

By November 1797 Dublin Castle faced widespread criticism in the English press of what ministers privately admitted to be a policy of terror. ‘It is not a thing which can be openly declared,’ Thomas Pelham wrote to London, ‘but the Fact is that without British Troops & British Officers the Murders and Outrages would be unrestrained.’ He acknowledged that there had been some regrettable incidents. Perhaps the strangest was an affray at Cookstown in which the Kerry Militia attacked local yeomen wearing Orange ribbons. Following a ‘court of inquiry’ Lord Blayney was consequently relieved of his command. Other incidents were sadly more predictable, such as the raid on the Northern Star office by the Monaghan Militiamen, whose ostentatious loyalty was no doubt encouraged by the execution of four privates at their Blaris camp for taking the United Irish oath. In his defence, however, Pelham stressed just how desperate the situation had become. Since the disturbances had begun to spread south one magistrate had been killed and another wounded; a constable had been murdered and ‘his Limbs cut to pieces and afterwards placed on a Hill with a label in his hand threatening the same treatment to anyone who should bury him’; a farmer, his wife, maidservant and livestock had been killed, and ‘the Bowels of the Farmer torn out and a label on his Belly threatening all Informers’.[73] Houses were burnt in many parts of the country where arms and pikes were found. As the violence spiralled out of control it was not always clear whether the authorities were responding to the United Irishmen or whether organised republicanism was itself a product of the indiscriminate use of house-burning and whipping. In Munster the emergence of a structured, oath-bound movement was not apparent until the spring of 1797, by which time rumours of Orange pogroms in the north were circulating widely.[74] The experience in much of Leinster was probably not that different.

The slaughter inflicted by loyalist forces during the 1798 rebellion, brutal and indiscriminate though it often was, differed both in scale and character from the policy of systematic extermination adopted by the armies of the French Republic in the Vendée region. Estimates of just how many were killed in Wexford are highly tentative: against the customary figure of 20,000, Louis Cullen has recently suggested that 5,600 is more plausible. This still constituted around one-sixth of the adult male population of the county.[75] Elsewhere in Ireland fatalities seem to have been counted in hundreds rather than thousands. There are enough references to suggest that the rape of local women was also common. The new Lord Lieutenant, Cornwallis, reflecting on his experience in the American colonies, predicted that anyone in civilian clothes found within several miles of the fighting was likely to be ‘butchered without discrimination’.[76] His own policy, however, has been described as one of ‘moderate severity’.[77] What did not happen in 1798 was the systematic treatment of an entire population as combatants. How could it? Since 1793 the British war effort had depended heavily upon the open recruitment of Irish Catholics, both as regular soldiers and as militiamen. Despite appalling desertion rates and evidence of United Irish infiltration, the militia contributed substantially to the defeat of the rebels: the Westmeath Militia and the Royal Irish Dragoons fought courageously at New Ross, as did the Monaghan Militia at Antrim.

The ‘pacification’ of the Vendée in 1794, by contrast, was apocalyptic. The generally accepted figures, taken from Jean-Clément Martin’s balanced analysis, indicate almost a quarter of a million fatalities, or one-third of the whole population, to which we must add tens of thousands of the Republic’s soldiers.[78] In the west and in Brittany disaffection with the revolution originated with the imposition of an oath of loyalty on the clergy in November 1790; a majority of priests refused and, supported by their parishioners, maintained an underground church in defiance of the Republic. But the trigger for full-scale civil war came on 24 February 1793 when the National Convention passed a decree for the conscription of 300,000 men. (Parallels with Ireland are certainly tempting, since it was precisely at this time that militia riots spread across Ireland.) Barère de Vieuzac of the Committee of Public Safety had informed the National Convention that the only way to bring the revolt to an end was the adoption of a scorched-earth policy. Indeed, he described the Vendée as the ‘Palatinate of the Republic’, thereby implying that it deserved the same treatment as that inflicted on that region by Louis XIV. Only by the mass killing of civilians, the razing of whole towns and villages and the destruction of their economic base would it be possible to ‘exterminate this race of rebels’. In January 1794 General Louis Marie Turreau was given command of 100,000 regular troops, divided into a dozen ‘colonnes infernalles’, and the staggering task of eliminating the entire population within six days. This insane target proved impossible, but the resulting carnage was still sufficient to place the Vendée ‘in the front rank of the atrocities of modern European history’.[79]

We have seen in this chapter how the British state intruded increasingly into the lives of Irish people of all social classes and all denominations from the middle of the eighteenth century. The concession of legislative independence in 1782, though it certainly helped to destabilise political management at College Green, did nothing to obstruct this long-term trend. But comparisons with revolutionary France remind us that even in 1798 the British state never entirely lost its civilian character. Security policy was repeatedly complicated by the continuing dependence of Dublin Castle on the deeply divided gentry in the counties. Indeed, recent interpretations of the Wexford insurrection, discussed further in Chapter 12, emphasise the failure of the magistrates to disarm their county. Political pressure from the Irish ‘cabinet’ for an all-out policy of counter-terror was condemned by a number of army leaders, most famously General Abercromby, who resigned as commander-in-chief following his public denunciation of crown forces. Almost all the prominent political prisoners arrested in 1796–7 were released because of difficulties in obtaining evidence. Government informants refused to testify in open court—and in spite of the Insurrection Act, legal proceedings were still vital. The culmination of government frustration was the ‘Kilmainham treaty’ agreed between the Castle and the state prisoners in July 1798. Desperate to suppress criticism from liberals in both islands, the government agreed to spare the lives of the rebel leaders in return for full confessions. A similar balance of forces shaped the Act of Union itself, passed on the assumption that it offered the only framework within which full emancipation could be implemented, and with the informal co-operation of Archbishop Troy and the Catholic bishops. Like the negotiations surrounding the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707, the horse-trading of 1799–1800 represented a gross extension of ‘normal’ methods of parliamentary management rather than a complete departure from them. Addresses were obtained from grand juries, corporations and county meetings; hundreds of pamphlets were written, suggesting that public opinion was taken very seriously. There continued to be deep divisions within the British and Irish governing classes over the policy of Camden, which as everyone recognised had deliberately precipitated the rebellion. As the curiously gentlemanly dialogue between Fitzgibbon and the state prisoners revealed, the outcome of the propaganda war was too close to call.

A minor part of that war was fought out in Dublin Barracks on 10 November 1798, when Wolfe Tone defended himself against the charge of treason. Tone’s suicide, described at the beginning of this chapter, was a botched job. It took seven agonising days for the founder of the United Irishmen to die, from inflammation of the lungs. In choosing the death of a Roman, however, Tone denied the legitimacy of English government in Ireland. It seems fitting to end this chapter by returning to the extraordinary achievements of the Cave Hill conspirators and their fellow republicans. Tone himself was partly responsible for the French fleet that sailed from Brest to Bantry Bay in December 1796 with a cargo of 14,450 troops and 41,644 stand of arms. Although the rebellion ignited on 23 May 1798 was fragmented and poorly co-ordinated, the entire island had been under martial law since 13 March, and rebels would be tried by military tribunals in twenty-eight out of thirty-two counties.[80] Around 200,000 men were said to be sworn into the United Irish organisation by the spring of 1798, a figure accepted by Dublin Castle. Not all framed their political and social aspirations in terms of the Irish nation as the Belfast and Dublin radicals saw it. In parts of the north Presbyterian radicals were known as ‘Liberty Men’, while the primary allegiance of most Catholics was probably to Defenderism. In much of Munster and Leinster a series of loose, overlapping layers of national organisation were imposed upon combinations that formed and reformed themselves, often labelled ‘Defenders’ or ‘United Irishmen’ by authorities who did not know how else to describe them.[81] Naturally there were varying degrees of ideological commitment. Many no doubt joined for security, or, as Neilson put it, because the United Irishmen were believed to be ‘the strongest party in the state’.[82] But we are still left with that astonishing number of 200,000 men—close to a quarter of the adult male population. Their experiences and motivations are explored in the final two chapters of this book.

11

A Brotherhood of Affection

Wolfe Tone was the first Irish nationalist—or the first, at any rate, whose mental world can be convincingly reconstructed. This claim may cause alarm bells to ring. For several decades, after all, revisionist historians have very properly struggled to rescue the ‘real’ Tone from the anachronistic perspectives which cast him as a direct forerunner of Patrick Pearse or Bobby Sands.[1] The kind of emancipated Ireland envisaged by the United Irishmen was certainly very different from the Republic proclaimed on the steps of the G.P.O. in 1916. Occasionally, it is true, Tone distinguished the members of the Established Church, who could be regarded as ‘a colony of strangers’, from the Catholics, who were ‘the Irish, properly so called’. But Roman Catholicism itself was profoundly offensive to his enlightened sensibilities, and he maintained ‘a strong objection to letting priests into the [United Irish] business at all’. In his posthumous memoirs, revered as the gospel of republican nationalism by the rebels of 1848, 1867 and 1916, Tone’s more contemptuous remarks about the Catholic priesthood—‘very bigoted and very ignorant, slaves to Rome’—were carefully excised by his family.[2] It was Tone’s assumption that national freedom would make Ireland not more Catholic, but less. ‘Persecution bound the Irish Catholic to his Priest . . . the bond of union is drawn tighter by oppression,’ he instructed; ‘relaxation will undo it.’[3]

If modern scholars have established that Wolfe Tone was deeply hostile to the religious faith of the majority of Irish people, they have also emphasised his indifference to indigenous culture. Admittedly, Tone seems to have contributed ‘Ierne united’, a song celebrating the virtue and learning of pre-colonial Ireland, to the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792. Thanks to the work of Mary Helen Thuente, students of revolutionary Ireland are now much better acquainted with the torrent of similar poems and ballads printed in radical papers such as the Northern Star and the Press and in the various editions of the popular songbook, Paddy’s resource. Beginning with the celebration of Enlightenment abstractions such as ‘Freedom’ and ‘Reason’, the United Irish poets soon came to concentrate on bards, harps, shamrocks and political martyrdom—all the images, in short, that we associate with the literary nationalism of Thomas Moore or the Young Ireland poets.[4] Ancient Ireland, rendered all the more acceptable in the classical garb of ‘Hibernia’, or in her later, more Ossianic incarnation as ‘Erin’, was an increasingly popular literary and visual presence in the commercialised, highly literate world of the gentry and middling sorts after 1760. Yet the radicals of the 1790s never framed their aspirations for independence in terms of ethnic or cultural difference. From the perspective of the 1840s, or of later Gaelic revivalists, what stands out is the lack of interest shown by the United Irishmen in rediscovering the native language as the basis of Irish national identity.

These are all good reasons for distinguishing Tone’s philosophy from the very different ideological worlds of Young Ireland romanticism or the Fenian tradition. Tone’s Ireland would be enlightened and anticlerical rather than Catholic, self-consciously cosmopolitan rather than Gaelic. But—and this is the decisive idea from which so much of his thinking springs—it would be an independent Ireland that would take its place in a world of independent nation-states. Even his Argument on behalf of the Catholics (1791), in many respects a rather cautious proposal to admit propertied Catholics to the franchise, had announced that there was ‘no one position, moral, physical, or political that I hear with such extreme exacerbation of mind as [that] which denies to my country the possibility of independent existence’.[5] This was a remarkable claim, made at a time when the most advanced Irish radicals confined their ambitions to the constitutional objectives of parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation. In private Tone had already confided to his closest friend Thomas Russell his belief that separation from Britain would mean the ‘regeneration of this country’ (‘regeneration’ being one of the keywords in the rich lexicon of the French revolutionaries), though he realised that this view was too advanced for most reformers.[6] For the meantime he simply predicted that ‘Whenever the necessity does arise, as at some time it infallibly must, it will be found that we are as competent to our own government, regulation and defence, as any State in Europe.’[7]

Tone’s fighting talk reminds us that the project of constructing a united Ireland took shape against the background of the military escalations surveyed in the previous chapter. The rapid expansion of British recruitment in Ireland, the economic dislocations of the American and French wars, the implementation of the Militia Act and the dragooning of Ulster all brought the state into violent confrontation with its Irish subjects. War made the mobilisation of Irish nationalism possible, and made some kind of nationalist response almost inevitable. This chapter turns to examine the distinctive cult of the nation that flourished in the age of revolution. The extraordinary impact of the revolutionary festivals designed in Paris, described in both newspapers and contemporary prints, can be gauged from the Bastille Day celebrations throughout the north in 1791 and 1792. They help us to appreciate that nationalism is not simply a political ideology but a larger cultural system capable of uniting the living and the dead, and of demanding exceptional sacrifices and commitments from its individual members.[8] Indeed, a number of scholars have argued that nationalist passions and commitments are best understood in comparison to the ritual and symbolic practices of religions, and that the nation itself can be regarded as a kind of ‘sacred communion’.[9] The first section below describes how the idea of independent statehood emerged in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, closely related to the new doctrine of popular sovereignty. In the second and third sections the focus shifts to the United Irish propaganda campaign and the ways in which the republican message was made relevant to ordinary people. Particular attention is devoted to the politicisation of Irish women and the phenomenon of ‘female patriotism’. Finally we return to the cultural implications of Tone’s nationalism and the more inclusive sense of Irishness that he hoped would replace the antagonistic identities of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.

NATIONS AND STATES

Unlike mathematicians or physicists, historians do not possess a technical vocabulary of their own, but are compelled to use the everyday language of the politician, the journalist and the citizen. We constantly need to remind ourselves that words such as ‘state’, ‘colony’ or ‘republic’ had different resonances during the early modern period. But the concept of the nation is perhaps the most slippery fish of all. Hundreds of historians, sociologists and political scientists have laboured to construct satisfactory definitions of nationhood, while popular usage has remained stubbornly vague and often contradictory. By the mid-eighteenth century the shifting meanings of this vital term were already established, so that ‘nation’ was employed liberally as a synonym for state, people, or ethnic community (a people, that is, sharing common cultural characteristics such as language, customs or religious beliefs). The work we know today as Gulliver’s Travels, to take a random example, was originally published as Travels into several remote nations of the world (1726). The question therefore is not whether our eighteenth-century predecessors used this loaded word, but rather when and how it became an organising concept in political discourse. For readers of the Encyclopédie, that great compendium of Enlightenment learning, ‘nation’ meant ‘a considerable number of people who inhabit a certain stretch of country, enclosed within definite limits, who obey the same government’ and who share a ‘particular character’.[10] What was missing from such definitions was the modern notion that the nation is the only legitimate bearer of sovereignty, or, in other words, ‘a body of people capable of acting collectively and in particular of conferring authority on political institutions’.[11] As an explicit political principle this idea can be dated with surprising precision to the year 1789.

If ‘nation’ was an old term, ‘nationalism’ was by contrast a very new one. It was probably coined by the German thinker Johann Gottfried Herder in 1774 and did not enter common usage anywhere in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. The United Irishmen were more likely to speak of themselves as ‘patriots’, the same term used by the respective assertors of English, American, French or Dutch liberties for half a century or more. A number of new (or newly revived) labels were also increasingly employed, including ‘democrat’ and ‘republican’. When these ideas are put together, however, it becomes evident just how far the United Irishmen had outgrown the more conventional modes of Irish self-assertion inherited from Molyneux and Swift. In an essay ‘On the English connection’ drafted in June 1790 Tone posed the question of whether Ireland was bound to support Britain in the event of war with Spain over the Nootka Sound dispute (prompted by the arrest of three British merchant-men by Spanish warships off Vancouver Island). Ireland, he proclaimed, was ‘of infinitely greater extent and internal resources than Denmark, or Sweden, or Portugal, or Sardinia [i.e. Piedmont], or Naples, all sovereign states’.[12] The implication that the Irish nation should exercise sovereignty over itself was a distinctly novel development. ‘What is it that degrades you,’ Tone challenged, ‘that keeps you without a court, without ambassadors, without a navy, without an army?’[13] When he published his pamphlet Spanish war! (1790) a few months later, he reverted to the classic patriot argument that the Anglo-Irish connection was a kind of composite monarchy similar to the Habsburg empire. But Tone’s call for Ireland to assert its ‘rank among the primary nations of the earth’, like his demand for an independent foreign policy, a navy and national flag, signalled the appearance of a new kind of separatism.[14]

The idea of an independent Irish republic was an invention of the 1790s. Contemporary readers of Molyneux or Swift had not inhabited a world of unitary nation-states, but a more diverse world of composite monarchies, empires and city-states whose jurisdictional boundaries were defined by custom and precedent. The British monarchy that had emerged under the Stuarts belonged to the category that the Encyclopédie referred to as ‘États composés’. Patriots from Molyneux to Grattan were consequently concerned with the maintenance of checks on executive power. Although they sometimes spoke of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’, they generally equated both with the kingdom of Ireland and its institutions. The rights they sought to vindicate were positive rather than natural rights, defined by the common law; they pertained not to the population as a whole, but to constitutional bodies that could trace their descent from the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century. What these earlier patriots demanded was not the assertion of national sovereignty, but simply the correction of the power balance between the three elements of the ancient constitution—king, lords and commons.

It might be supposed that the writings of Molyneux’s Catholic contemporaries, the Jacobite scholars Charles O’Kelly and Nicholas Plunkett, would provide more fertile ground for nationalist ideas; and at least one scholar, Patrick Kelly, has credited them with a highly evolved theory of nationalism. Plunkett, author of the important manuscript A light to the blind (c. 1698), certainly regarded the Irish Catholics as a distinct, historic nation, marked off from the inhabitants of England and Scotland (and from the Cromwellian settlers and their descendants) by their innate qualities. But what he had in mind, interestingly, was not their language or customs, but their unshaken loyalty to their legitimate king. This enduring commitment he regarded both as a part of their genetic make-up and as a product of their adherence to the true church. In addition to a range of political, social and economic reforms, Plunkett proposed that Geoffrey Keating’s manuscript history Foras feasa ar Éirinn (1629–34) be translated into English and the ‘pretended’ accounts of English and Scottish historians be ‘cancell[ed] by publick authority’. As Kelly admits, however, the ‘nationalism’ of Plunkett, never elaborated in any detail, was subordinated to his prior allegiance to the Catholic faith and the Stuart dynasty. The political objective for which he contended was a reordering of the Stuart composite monarchy rather than its dismembering. ‘It is a great Debilitation to the British Empyre’, he consequently pleaded, ‘to have the thir[d] Part of her might kept purposely feeble.’[15] Rather like William Molyneux, he was appealing to his king to favour all his royal children equally.

It was not until the two great watersheds of 1776 and 1789 that the concept of the nation was pushed to the centre of political debate. The American colonists had traditionally viewed the British Empire as a partnership between more or less equal communities, all of them enjoying the rights of Englishmen, the freedom to worship as Protestants of various sorts, the economic benefits of British commerce and naval power, and the superiority of British values and political institutions. In celebrating these blessings, they routinely contrasted their good fortune with the ‘enslaved’ peoples of continental Europe and above all France. Anyone familiar with the rhetoric of the Drapier’s Letters would have recognised instantly the language employed in A letter to the people of Pennsylvania (1760): ‘Are you not of the same stock? Was the blood of your ancestors polluted by a change of soil? Were they freemen in England and did they become slaves by a six-weeks voyage to America?’[16] The parallels between the colonists’ case and the arguments of the small group of patriots in the Irish House of Commons were obvious. Although they would eventually repudiate the British constitution, the colonists initially took their stand on the ground of the ancient constitution, claiming the ‘hereditary Rights of British Subjects’, inherited from their forefathers and enshrined in American laws and customs.[17]

On 23 August 1776 the Belfast News-Letter carried the text of the Declaration of Independence—the first paper in Europe to do so. The news that the rebellious colonies had proclaimed themselves ‘Free and Independent States’, who would henceforth exercise the right to make war and conduct trade among ‘the powers of the earth’, was no doubt hard to comprehend. Perhaps the nearest precedent was the act of abjuration by which the provinces of the Dutch Republic had renounced their allegiance to Spain in 1581. The notion that legitimate government was founded upon a social contract was, of course, familiar to anyone with the slightest knowledge of Locke’s Two treatises (1689). But the foundational contracts long favoured by Whigs and radicals were either associated with remote documents such as Magna Carta, or lay outside history altogether at a time when human beings lived in a ‘state of nature’. Talk of an original contract functioned as a metaphorical device for reminding corrupt ministries of their moral obligations to the governed; there was no suggestion that a people might tear up its constitution and create a new one.

Among the Enlightenment thinkers, only the ‘Scoto-Hibernus’ Francis Hutcheson had discussed the problem of when a colony or province might legitimately secede and establish an independent state for itself. In cases where the government of the mother country degenerated into absolutism, or where oppressive laws were enacted, Hutcheson confirmed that colonies possessed the same right of resistance as the metropolitan body politic. The construction of ‘grand unwieldy empires’, he observed, had been ‘one great source of human misery’.[18] None of Hutcheson’s contemporaries took up this issue. Before 1776 political thinkers apparently regarded the division of mankind into discrete peoples more or less for granted, and assumed that these peoples corresponded to existing political units. Now the Americans, by renouncing their allegiance to the British monarch and pledging their loyalty to an abstract set of laws, had wrenched the social contract out of the textbooks and into the realm of practical politics. In doing so they provided an alternative model of government to the British constitution, long presented as the perfect balance of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy by its patriot admirers. Detailed accounts of the 1787 convention and the Grand Federal Processions which accompanied the ratification of the United States constitution in 1788 appeared in the columns of Irish newspapers, especially the London-Derry Journal, whose readers had probably more familiarity with transatlantic emigration than any other part of the island.

The American war, as Linda Colley has pointed out, was the first where the British government found it necessary to orchestrate the signing of pro-war petitions.[19] Loyalist propaganda became more sophisticated, designed to counteract not merely the indifference and self-interest of the populace, but also the principled opposition of intellectuals and politicians to Lord North’s policy of coercion. It was the pulpit, however, that still functioned as the most effective vehicle of government propaganda. The announcement of a general fast in December 1776, the first of several, presented clergymen with political choices that could not easily be avoided. ‘To have offered up prayers for success to the English arms’, recalled one Presbyterian minister, would have been ‘a solemn mockery of things divine, approaching perhaps to blasphemy’.[20] The strength of pro-American feeling was reinforced by the ethnic bonds between Presbyterian Ulster and the colonies. Between 1769 and 1774 alone, something in the order of 40,000 people left the northern province, the most recent of several great waves of emigration. By 1790 they formed over 10 per cent of the population in New York, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, while as many as 21 per cent of Pennsylvanians, 24 per cent of South Carolinians and 27 per cent of Georgians could claim Ulster descent.[21] The term ‘Scotch-Irish’, coined as early as 1695 by Thomas Laurence, Secretary of Maryland, was not commonly used before the 1820s; but these communities retained their ethnic distinctiveness until the revolutionary period, resisting any attempt to classify them along with the Catholic Irish. In petitions they characterised themselves as ‘inhabitants of the Kingdom of Ireland . . . being Protestants’, or as settlers ‘originally from north Britain but Last from Ireland’, while their first congregation in Boston was known simply as the ‘Church of the Presbyterian Strangers’.[22] For the Dissenting communities of the north, consequently, the ideological conflict of loyalties was also experienced at a more intimate level, as the Rev. William Steel Dickson explained in a fast-day sermon entitled ‘On the ruinous effects of civil war’. ‘How many Parents’, he wondered, ‘are agitated with the most painful Anxiety for the uncertain Fate of favourite Children whose Habitations have become the Seat of War?’[23]

In 1775, when the Continental Congress sought to win over the people of the North Carolina backcountry to the patriot cause, they decided to send two Presbyterian ministers, one of them a native of County Armagh, as missionaries among them.[24] The Congress was also assisted by a group of Pennsylvania ministers who circularised a letter addressed to their North Carolina brethren comparing the patriots to ‘our forefathers that fought for liberty at Londonderry and Enniskillen in King James’ time’.[25] The author was Francis Alison (1705–79), a Scotch-Irish emigrant from Donegal who had disseminated the ‘moral sense’ philosophy of Francis Hutcheson (see Chapter 2) in the Academy of Philadelphia. In South Carolina too, Presbyterian missionaries toured the frontier, preaching in favour of the American cause and calling on the inhabitants to take up arms in defence of their country.[26] One unusual example was the Rev. Alexander Craighead, the nephew of a prominent Derry clergyman. In 1743, the centenary of the Solemn League and Covenant, Craighead had renewed the Covenants with his congregation at Middle Octorara, Pennsylvania, earning the censure of the Synod of Philadelphia. During an elaborate ceremony, with four swords pointed to the four winds, his followers had called for ‘a defensive War against all Usurpers of the Royal Prerogative of the glorious Lamb of God: against all Usurpers of an unscriptural Power over the Church of Christ, or the Consciences of Men’, and had declared themselves to be in a state of rebellion against George II. Craighead subsequently became attached to the Presbyterian settlement in the Waxhaws, on the border between North and South Carolina—a region, as one Anglican minister explained, inhabited by ‘the most lowest vilest Crew breathing—Scotch Irish Presbyterians from the North of Ireland’. The influence of Craighead and his nephew David Caldwell may be one reason why the Scotch-Irish town of Charlotte was so quick to denounce British authority after Lexington, with the adoption of a series of resolutions known as the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence (May 1775).[27]

Interest in transatlantic affairs was not confined to Dissenting congregations. In attempting to gauge Catholic opinion, historians have too seldom looked beyond the ostentatious loyalty of bishops and landowners who sought to capitalise on an imperial crisis that many regarded as a Calvinist revolt. Bishop Troy condemned the Americans and the ‘specious notions of liberty’ that had corrupted them.[28] But a sharply contrasting picture emerges from the traditions of vernacular poetry and song maintained in Munster and along the Ulster/Leinster border. Obviously the usual words of caution concerning this type of source material must apply. In the most sophisticated analysis of Irish-language poetry during this period, Vincent Morley has argued that a vibrant literature in Irish was preserved by substantial tenant farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, publicans, priests and schoolteachers; more controversially, he has taken their sentiments as representative of the ‘rural masses’.[29] No conclusive evidence has been offered in support of this view, because none exists. On the other hand, there is no good reason to suggest that Morley’s assumptions, however intuitive they may be, are wide of the mark. They are certainly in keeping with the ingrained attitudes of Protestant contemporaries such as George Ogle, who maintained that even if the ‘better sort’ of Catholics were ‘well affected’, the same could not be said for the common people.[30] It makes little sense to imagine that the Jacobite poets were seriously out of step with those sections of society—the farmers, schoolmasters and priests—from which they were drawn, or indeed with the sub-tenants, labourers, pupils and parishioners who depended upon them.

The basic moral template of Jacobite verse was well established: the six hundred years of foreign oppression suffered by the Gael. The departure of British troops from Irish ports for colonial service triggered the usual Pavlovian response among those who looked forward to the day when the Cromwellian boors would be kicked out of their slated mansions. Just as Aindrias Mac Craith of Limerick and Father Liam Inglis of Cork had celebrated French victories during the ’45 rebellion and the Seven Years War, so too their successors, Tomás Ó Míocháin and Uilliam Ó Lionnáin of County Clare or Seán Ó Muláin of County Cork, rejoiced in the sudden reversal of British military fortunes.[31] But the ideological limitations of the hidden Ireland are just as striking as its continuities. Early references to the American revolt, such as the verses of Uilliam an Chreatháin Ó Dábhoireann or Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, showed little distinction between the ‘English-speaking herd’ besieged in Boston and ‘the Presbyterian army’ raised in the colonies.[32] Their focus was the European theatre where, with perverse tenacity, they predicted the restoration of the Stuarts by the Bourbon powers. Although admiration was sometimes expressed for the courageous Washington, the fundamental issues raised during the constitutional debates of the 1760s and 1770s apparently made little impression. Within a few years the same pattern was repeated when Irish poems were written in praise of the martial posturing of Grattan, Flood and the Volunteers without revealing any trace of the debates over free trade and legislative independence. If Jacobite verse is a reliable guide to the political mind of Catholic Ireland, it suggests no interest in the constitutional principles so vigorously debated in the press.

More than any other single factor, however, it was the extension of independent military associations across the island, especially from the summer of 1779, that transformed the Irish nation into a new kind of imagined community by clothing its members in the splendid uniform of the Irish Volunteer. It was an image that would very soon be mass-produced on flags and banners, pottery and glassware. The fact that the Irish Volunteers never actually fired a shot in anger did nothing to damp the enthusiasm of the chaplains, pamphleteers and poets who flattered them with hyperbolic eulogies. It is hard to believe that Volunteer parades and drills were taken seriously in Versailles and Madrid, but they were nevertheless credited with saving Ireland’s coastal cities and towns from the horrible depredations of Gallic invaders. The ‘revolution of 1782’, the constitutional crisis which finally delivered the legislative independence demanded by Molyneux and Swift, owed more to the American victory at Yorktown than the resolutions passed at Dungannon, but the Volunteers claimed the credit for that too. For those fortunate enough to participate in the great reviews, sham fights and conventions, these years would never be forgotten. Volunteering was a massive rush of oxygen to the collective head of the Protestant nation. Observers ranked Ireland’s brave defenders alongside the citizen militias of the Greek and Roman republics, and the freedom fighters of the Swiss cantons and the Dutch provinces (both, significantly, references to previous wars of independence). In poems such as The patriot soldier and Libertas, both published in 1789, the aisling genre was reinvented for the age of revolution, as the dejected maiden Hibernia, her emblematic harp inevitably unstrung, met her dashing saviour in the shape of a youthful Volunteer.[33] It is scarcely surprising, then, that the Volunteer craze stimulated hopes of a national revival, encapsulated in the challenge posed by one pamphlet with the splendidly self-explanatory title The usurpations of England the chief sources of the miseries of Ireland (1780): ‘Are we miserable at home and contemptible abroad? Is Ireland known, only to be the scorn of the nations of Europe?’[34]

Just to wear the uniform of a Volunteer was in itself to make an ideological statement. There were hundreds of companies scattered throughout the four provinces, and their character varied considerably depending upon the local social and religious make-up. In the south-eastern towns of Wexford and Kilkenny, for example, Volunteer corps were superimposed upon the armed companies of Protestant gentry and tenants formed to counteract the resurgence of Whiteboy agitation in the early 1770s. Here, presumably, landlords simply mustered their tenants as they had always done, and the Volunteer craze acted to reinforce local hierarchies rather than destabilise them. In other areas, however, and above all in Belfast and its hinterland, Volunteering was more ‘bottom-up’ in character. Often the initiative came from the alternative elites of the north—the independent country gentlemen, the wealthy merchants and manufacturers of the towns, and not least the Dissenting clergymen. Belfast was the crucible of Volunteering, and its companies were pointedly independent, self-financing, democratic in structure, and committed to remaining outside government control. In the city of Derry, similarly, three companies were formed in June 1778, one of them composed wholly of tradesmen, leaving the cautious mayor and corporation little choice but to swim with the tide.[35] The very idea of the citizen-soldier, contrasted with the standing armies employed by absolute monarchs, implied a right of participation in the political process. Whereas the discipline of the conventional militiaman produced ‘a slavish subordination’, the experience of the Irish Volunteer offered ‘a new lesson of equality’. Simply by mobilising, as Francis Dobbs explained, they were also politicising:

The aristocracy is taught, even by its own vanity, to court the democracy. The intercourse between the officer and the private Volunteer softens the sentiments of the one, and elevates those of the other. . . . The poorest Volunteer feels himself a member of a free, and of a strong state; his ideas expand, his character is ennobled. . . . He is no longer a timid slave, who conceals his substance, but a free subject, proud that he can afford a uniform.[36]

The participation of thousands of Irishmen, predominantly but not exclusively Protestant, in drilling and training, purchasing uniforms and arms, drawing up articles of association, electing their officers, instructing their delegates for the great conventions held at Dungannon and Dublin, or just drinking their favourite patriotic healths and confusions, all contributed to greater political awareness. The exhilarating sense of empowerment described by Dobbs would not be easily surrendered.

The alternative political structure created by annual reviews, meetings and provincial conventions received a new injection of vitality from the international excitement surrounding the French Revolution. In Ulster the remarkable Bastille Day celebrations of the early 1790s were not simply civilian occasions; they took the now familiar form of Volunteer reviews. The Society of United Irishmen was a direct product of the spectacular anniversary parade held in Belfast on 14 July 1791; that year also saw more modest commemorations in Lisburn, Downpatrick, Newry, Randalstown, Derry, Ballymoney, Castlereagh, Tipperary and Dublin. Perhaps the smallest of these was Randalstown, a parliamentary borough with a monthly cloth and yarn market, described in contemporary guides as ‘inconsiderable’.[37] And yet even here a Volunteer meeting chaired by Captain Adam Dickey enunciated the new understanding of the nation as a rational, sovereign community, progressing through time in intellectual and moral character and exercising the right to reshape its political forms accordingly:

We believe that a nation has a right to form, maintain, and perfect its constitution, and to regulate at pleasure everything relating to government. We believe a nation has an inherent right to change its constitution, and therefore we believe the Revolution in France to be founded in the law of nature and of nations; caused by tyranny and oppression, and sanctioned by dire necessity.[38]

The Bastille Day festivals of July 1792 were on an even grander scale. Once again Belfast led, with around 5,000 people attending a spectacular parade complete with the latest ‘emblematical devices’.[39] The flags of the five ‘free nations’—Ireland, France, America, Poland and Britain—were carried through the streets, along with pictures depicting Mirabeau, the liberation of the prisoners of the Bastille, and an Irish Volunteer. Ominously, an address to the National Assembly of France had been drawn up by William Drennan, wishing success to the armies of the revolution: ‘May your soldiers, with whom war is not a trade, but a duty, remember that they do not fight merely for themselves, but that they are the advance-guard of the world.’ Wolfe Tone’s parallel address to the people of Ireland amplified this theme, rejoicing that France had renounced all wars of conquest in favour of ‘an universal brotherhood and an eternal peace among nations’.[40]

Why Belfast? Over and over the name of this provincial town of just 20,000 inhabitants, already regarded as the capital of the north, crops up in the correspondence of the late eighteenth century as a byword for republicanism and disaffection. New wealth had transformed this centre of Dissent, derived partly from the growing demand across the water for Ulster livestock, partly from the retailing of the manufactured products of industrial Britain, and above all from the expanding linen industry in the triangle formed by Dungannon, Lisburn and Newry.[41] The success of the town’s White Linen Hall allowed the northern drapers to operate independently of Dublin, and confirmed that Belfast, rather than its close rival Newry, was ‘the warehouse of the North’.[42] The great controversy over subscription in the 1720s, combined with the town’s proximity to Presbyterian Scotland, had stimulated the local printing-presses, and the News-Letter was the most advanced paper of the 1780s. It was the people of Belfast who raised the first Volunteer company, on St Patrick’s Day 1778, and its annual reviews attracted dozens of companies from all over the province. Its reputation as the ‘Boston’ of Ireland was confirmed in 1781, when well over 5,000 Volunteers assembled on the Falls meadows outside Belfast, the largest Volunteer gathering hitherto.[43] (Boston, incidentally, was then of a comparable size, 17,000, with New York at 20,000 and Philadelphia at 25,000.)[44] By the end of 1796 the Lord Lieutenant, Camden, was seriously concerned about the threat posed by ‘the organised system which has been established at Belfast’. Everyone knew that its secret committees were linked to disturbances throughout the north, where they already claimed 50,000 members, and that they had agents in Dublin and the other provinces and, of course, in Paris.[45] At the same time, as the shareholders and journalists behind the Northern Star office, they mass-produced the key political works of the decade, ranging from dense millenarian tracts to the revolutionary songbook Paddy’s resource and the Gaelic magazine Bolg an tSolair.

It was an assumption of earlier patriots, such as Molyneux and Swift, that a people or nation had no existence outside the incorporated forms given to it by the ancient constitution. But for the theorists of the French Revolution, such as the Abbé Sieyès, the nation existed independently of all constitutional bodies and processes. According to the third article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the nation was the source of all sovereignty, a principle echoed by Tom Paine’s Rights of man. ‘Sovereignty’, Paine observed in his conclusion, ‘appertains to the Nation only, and not to any individual; and a Nation has at all times an “inherent and indefeasible right” to abolish any form of Government it finds inconvenient and establish such as accords with its interest, disposition, and happiness.’[46] It was only when the ancien régime structures of government broke down that this new ideological component crystallised and the nation became the basis of competing political claims. Although this crisis of legitimacy was felt by all Europeans, it was experienced most dramatically in Paris as the States General turned itself into the National Assembly, and it was the French revolutionaries who attached to the nation a particular kind of dynamism that quickly reverberated through the coffee-houses of neighbouring countries. The image of a sovereign body of people creating a new system of government was, as noted earlier, a commonplace of political philosophy; but the social contract had always functioned rather like a political fiction, with only vague historical and anthropological references to substantiate it. Now Jacques-Louis David’s painting, ‘The Tennis Court Oath’ (1791) captured the foundational moment when the elected representatives of the Third Estate achieved spiritual unity as a single national will. The swirling mass of figures, their right arms inevitably outstretched, was said by one commentator to ‘breathe with the love of the patrie, of virtue and liberty. Everywhere one sees Catos ready to die for them.’[47] Even more than 1776, the revolution of 1789 demonstrated that the social contract was not just something that belonged to the primordial mists of time, but something that could be done in the present.

‘READING AT THE NEWSPAPERS’

One of the most influential books ever written about nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined communities (1983), argues that the key to the new national solidarities that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century was the development of new technologies of communication. The novel and (more especially) the newspaper made possible the interaction of social groups whose horizons had previously been limited to their immediate localities.[48] By the Seven Years War (1756–63) the advent of the provincial press had established a national circuit of communication for the first time. The broadening of horizons brought about by the gradual extension of mass print was just as significant as the more sudden transformations caused by the telegraph, the television or the internet. In his analysis of the origins of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke remarked that a ‘silent revolution’ in the cultural sphere had prepared the way for the political upheavals of the fin de siècle. Its central features were the growth of correspondence in the ‘monied’ and mercantile world, the literary activity of the academies, and, above all, the impact of the press in creating ‘a kind of electrick communication everywhere’.[49] The metaphor of electricity was a recurrent one. The appearance of the Belfast News-Letter in 1737, according to one United Irishman, had an ‘electrical effect’ on Ulster; a government informer attributed the sudden ‘revolution in the Catholic mind’ that took place in the early 1790s to the relaying of United Irish addresses and resolutions which filled the multitude with ‘electrical celerity’.[50]

A disproportionately large amount of this dangerous electricity was generated by one single source—the Northern Star of Belfast, whose regular contributors included the Derry lawyer William Sampson and a number of Presbyterian clergymen such as James Porter, author of the immensely popular satire Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand. Launched in January 1792, the first issue of the Northern Star bragged of the ‘increasing commerce, population and wealth of the Province of Ulster, which are daily producing new establishments in every art and manufacture’. For five years it hammered home the central Paineite message that the end of the eighteenth century was an age of revolution, an age marked by material improvements and more particularly by the massive extension of information and knowledge, and one which would inevitably see the destruction of tyranny and superstition. Its immediate objectives were the removal of obstructions to commerce, the reform of parliament, and the union of all Irishmen. The editor, Samuel Neilson, promised his readers to specialise in news concerning the American Congress and the National Assembly of France.[51] With a print-run of 4,000 (compared with the 2,750 of its more cautious rival, the Belfast News-Letter) it became the best-selling paper of the day. And along with the Northern Star were distributed a large number of handbills printed at its Belfast office. To the Derry conservative Alexander Knox, it seemed that the ‘flying sheets’ that poured out of Belfast were a like a ‘miasma of mental pestilence’ that had gradually extended its reach ‘to every farm-house and to every cottage’.[52] Although the extensive network of the Northern Star was naturally concentrated in the Presbyterian districts of the north, copies were ‘hawked about’ at Dublin barracks and coffee-houses, and the paper was distributed as far away as Waterford.[53]

There were also local papers in Derry, Strabane and Newry, and in Sligo, Wexford, Waterford and Kilkenny; and there were a number of specifically United Irish ventures such as the Southern Star (Roscrea) and the Harp of Erin (Cork). These were not merely regional variations on the Belfast theme. In the north-west, as Breandán Mac Suibhne has shown, the ‘brotherhood of affection’ was a natural outgrowth of pre-existing debates and networks, above all a vigorous local tradition of Volunteering, particularly in areas where Presbyterians outnumbered their Anglican counterparts. In 1772 the twice-weekly London-Derry Journal was founded by George Douglas, with agents in Letterkenny, Raphoe, Ballybofey, Castlefinn, Strabane and Enniskillen.[54] Everywhere these newspapers contained a mix of local events (assize and freeholder meetings, trials and executions, philanthropic activities), business news, details of commerce and shipping, political debates, toasts and resolutions, and large numbers of advertisements. In Munster, for example, it was considered wise to advertise leases in the local press, for ‘middling people and farmers get them, and it immediately spreads’.[55] Pamphlets were serialised; indeed, many had begun life as letters printed in the newspapers and then collected together. It was newspaper announcements and advertisements which made possible the Bastille Day celebrations of 1791 and 1792 and subsequently relayed their contents around the island.[56] Above all, the newspaper columns of the 1790s were taken up with discussions of foreign affairs and the war. Never before had the military campaigns of the European powers been reported in such detail, so quickly, and to so many people.

In Dublin itself there were more than fifty printers, including well-known members of the United Irishmen such as Patrick Byrne and John Chambers. In addition to the rather classical pronouncements of the United Irish Society, they produced mountains of handbills—single-sheet flyers designed for the lower orders and distributed by pedlars and carmen to village fairs and markets. Radical journalists such as Watty Cox and John Burk also distributed ephemeral literary productions around the dense network of lower-class clubs and societies that made up the Dublin underground. A number of short-lived papers sprang up on the radical side, culminating in Arthur O’Connor’s Press and Watty Cox’s Union Star. Both appeared in 1797, by which time debates over reform and emancipation had been displaced by the urgent themes of state brutality, the effective imposition of martial law over large parts of the country under the Insurrection Act, and speculation concerning the reliability of militiamen and regular soldiers in the event of an insurrection. A pretty convincing answer to this last question was provided when the machinery and type of the Northern Star and the Press were destroyed by detachments from the Monaghan and Cavan Militia in May 1797 and March 1798 respectively.

During the last two or three decades historians have become fascinated by the remarkable propaganda machine of the United Irishmen.[57] The explosion of print culture in the 1790s included not only pamphlets, handbills and newspapers, but popular poems and ballads, religious prophecies, resolutions, addresses and petitions, spoof creeds and catechisms. Much of what we know about this torrent of propaganda comes from letters and enclosures sent to Dublin Castle by loyalist gentlemen, magistrates and informers; presumably a great deal more has not survived. From the same sources we know that public readings of seditious material had become widespread. In the north particularly, newspapers were often linked with the establishment of book clubs and reading societies, and there is evidence that the Northern Star was being read to clusters of lower-class people from 1792–3. William Richardson, a loyalist who lived on the Armagh/Tyrone border, explained that the agricultural labourers of the north had seldom troubled themselves with ‘politicks or grievances except rarely and under local circumstances’ until they were ‘debauched’ by the small merchants, shopkeepers and innholders of the country towns, whose trade connected them with the ‘great democrats’ of Belfast and Newry. As early as 1793 ‘seditious’ newspapers and copies of Paine’s works were circulated in Westport, County Mayo, brought back from Dublin by local shopkeepers. By 1794 an Anglican clergyman and magistrate reported from Jonesborough on the astonishing politicisation of the natives of south Armagh. ‘Formerly a newspaper would have been a phenomenon amongst them,’ he commented, but now ‘they vie with the northerns in their thirst after politics’. Those who could read collected large audiences around their cabins, although, he added, ‘their hatred of a Presbyterian seems as rooted as ever’. In later years the geography of loyalist complaints was pushed further into the south and the west. In May 1797 an informer reported that republican propaganda was disturbing Carlow town, where ‘every Sunday two fellows comes after Mass is over and reads what the[y] plase to the ignorant contry peopel’; while in County Tipperary ‘great numbers of printed papers on half sheets had been dispersed all over the hills’.[58]

In their attempts to communicate with new social constituencies who had little or no experience of formal political debate, the United Irishmen naturally highlighted the tangible benefits which would follow from parliamentary reform, with the abolition or at least reduction of tithes, hearth money, excise taxes and the county cess all high on the agenda. Like the English radical Thomas Paine, they believed that social and economic distress could largely be attributed to the monopolisation of political power by the landed elite and their lackeys rather than the structural inequalities of the landlord system per se. Often the tone was crude and abusive. Ad hominem attacks were made on magistrates, spies and informers, and on the venal politicians who imposed crushing taxes and supported the war while lining their own pockets. Although they very seldom used the embryonic language of class, the United Irish propagandists adopted a conflict model of social relations, sometimes speaking of ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’, rather than the older, more harmonious chain of ‘orders’ or ‘ranks’.[59] Among the ‘Toasts and Sentiments’ listed in the first Paddy’s resource songbook were ‘The Industrious Poor; confusion and disgrace to their enemies’ and ‘Success to the labours of the Plow and the Loom’.[60] By the 1790s the figure of ‘Paddy Whack’ or ‘poor Paddy’ was already a stock feature of popular verse; but the bumbling peasant was now transformed into a hardworking Irish plebeian.[61] Among the songs in Paddy’s resource was ‘Paddy’s advice to John Bull’:

NOW, arah! JOHN BULL, I would have you be easy,

Brave PADDY no longer will suffer your yoke;

With taxes and tithes, and bastiles so cruel,

You long plunder’d PADDY and laugh’d at the joke.[62]

A small number of radical tracts directly addressed economic inequalities. The most interesting was the anonymous Union doctrine; or Poor man’s catechism [1796?], which echoed the proposals made in Paine’s Rights of man (Part Two) for a kind of welfare system in which the protection of pregnant women and the elderly and the education of the young would be financed by confiscating the lands of the Established Church. As historians have noted, the author also appealed to historic wrongs by advocating the restoration of the ‘ancient estates’ to the descendants of ‘those families, who were pillaged by English invaders’, providing ‘every person without exception’ the means of a comfortable livelihood. But the Poor man’s catechism should not be dismissed as the old Jacobite wine in a new Jacobin bottle. More typical of the general thrust of this tract was the Paineite insistence that the character of the nobility in every country was rotten: aristocrats owed their position not to superior virtue or talent, but to accident, adventure or crime; ‘but time and Revolutions hath concealed their hateful origin’. Readers were assured that in an independent Ireland not only would trade and agriculture be extended, but a more equal society would follow as ‘representative government’ and the abolition of religious establishments was accompanied by ‘a fair division of the land’.[63]

One popular genre, discussed further in the next chapter, was the political prophecy. Northern Catholics attributed to Colum Cille predictions that a massacre of their people, culminating in an exodus to Galway and Mayo, would be followed by a French invasion. Their Presbyterian neighbours apparently preferred biblical passages from Daniel and Revelations.[64] In March 1797 a Tyrone magistrate forwarded to Dublin Castle a small, four-page pamphlet entitled Christ in triumph, coming to judgment! published by Andrew Gamble, the Presbyterian bookseller in the town of Strabane. Like many other prophetic works issued or reissued during the revolutionary decade, it sought to connect the great wars on the continent with scriptural predictions concerning the last days. In these turbulent times, it was confidently claimed, tyrannical rulers would be punished, and ‘the poor will be had in equal (or perhaps superior) estimation with the rich’. A discharged soldier named William Follis, an old man formerly of the 12th Regiment of Foot, had been found hawking about bundles of these tracts along with other books and papers at the fair held in the village of Gortin and was promptly dispatched to Armagh jail. ‘The Ignorant Country people will take many meanings out of it that suit their present way of thinking,’ the local magistrate explained, ‘as there is a Levelling principle meant by it.’[65] The ultimate source of this ‘levelling’ was the oldest one of all, the biblical promise that one day the first shall be last and the last first.

As many historians have emphasised, the Irish countryside was now awash with flyers, newspapers and pamphlets, often written in simple and direct language. What has not been fully appreciated, perhaps, is the extent to which denunciations of ministerial corruption, the millenarian theme of the world turned upside down, resentment against taxation, and criticisms of the existing social hierarchy, were all drawn together by an assault on that most characteristic product of the ancien régime—warfare. In James Porter’s satire, Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand (1796) the paranoid buffoon Squire Firebrand complains of a local Presbyterian minister who devotes all his time to ‘railing against the war, against the tithes, and against game laws’, and, to cap it all, ‘he’s still reading at the newspapers’.[66] Few aspects of the French Revolution prompted so much international excitement as the decree of 22 May 1790 renouncing wars of aggression. To readers of Paine’s Rights of man, warfare was an anachronism, the artificial product of monarchs, aristocrats and church establishments, something that could be abolished along with the rest of the ancien régime. In January 1792 the Northern Star featured ‘An ode for the new year’, rejoicing that ‘The age Millennial is decreed, / But War’s alarms must cease’.[67] Like the comforting hope that the mighty would one day be cast down and the humble exalted, the establishment of an empire of peace was also imagined in the language of the scriptures. The key verse was Isaiah 2 : 4, the subject of a sermon preached to three Masonic lodges in 1795 by the Rev. Thomas Ledlie Birch of Saintfield: ‘Swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not lift sword against Nation, neither shall they learn war any more!’[68]

In Paris the rhetoric of universal peace and human brotherhood was soon drowned out by demands for a crusade against the princes of Europe. As early as January 1791 the members of the National Assembly, arms raised in the familiar salute of the ancient Romans, had sworn to fight to the death for their constitution.[69] To liberals and radicals, the problem was not the French nation, of course, but its enemies: the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church, who had intrigued with the despots of Austria and Prussia. The Northern Star ran numerous articles interpreting the European war in providential terms. In the summer of 1796, for example, Bonaparte’s Italian victories were hailed as signs of ‘the approaching downfall of the Pope’.[70] One market day in February 1797, around the same time that William Follis was carting bundles of Christ in triumph, coming to judgment! around County Tyrone, an unusual number of people crowded into Belfast to hear the exciting news from Italy (presumably Napoleon Bonaparte’s decisive victory over the Austrians at Rivoli, which gave the French Republic control of the Italian peninsula). General Barber noted that ‘uncommon pains’ were taken to distribute a tract denouncing ‘this Royal, Religious, Civil, Prudent, and Money-making War’.[71] When the 105th and 113th Regiments mutinied at Cork in September 1795, handbills were circulated linking the grievances of the common soldiers with the wartime disruption of trade, fears of being shipped to the West Indies, and sympathy for ‘the unfortunate and enslaved natives of Africa’.[72]

The vision which these handbills sought to create was of a world turned upside down, where the lazy robbed the industrious, the clergy twisted a religion of love and charity into a vehicle for military aggression, where the defence of the country was taken out of the hands of the brave Volunteers and entrusted to foreign oppressors, where virtuous reformers were imprisoned and transported while magistrates connived at the violent expulsion of Catholics from County Armagh. Opposition to the war thus figured in radical propaganda as part of the wider attack on a corrupt oligarchy. More specifically, the war was described as an English quarrel. For Thomas Russell, the cause of the bloodshed was England’s financial interests, the desire for ‘cloves, and nutmegs, and contracts, and slaves’; it had nothing to do with the Irishmen who made up a third of the navy and supplied, he claimed with some exaggeration, 150,000 soldiers to the British army. ‘Now let every person seriously ask himself what injury did the French do to the Irish,’ he challenged, ‘and how are we justified in making war on them.’[73] Moreover, Russell confidently predicted that a neutral Ireland would make it impossible for England to maintain its commercial pre-eminence or to man its armed forces.[74] Criticism of Britain’s participation in the second coalition culminated with the Northern Star’s publication of Arthur O’Connor’s Address to the electors of County Antrim in January 1797 in which he condemned ‘a war that has been undertaken for the destruction of liberty abroad and for the preservation of a system of corruption at home’. Following this inflammatory challenge, Colonel Lucius Barber raided the Northern Star office and arrested Tone’s old friends the Simms brothers; four months later the most remarkable Irish newspaper of the eighteenth century was finally suppressed.[75]

THE JEWELS OF CORNELIA

If neo-classical republicanism reached its visual climax with Jacques-Louis David, the decadent rococo style it displaced was exemplified by the eroticised female bodies depicted by François Boucher. Among his paintings can be found the most famous representation of Irish femininity in the eighteenth century—though few Irish historians are aware of it. It is a remarkable feature of Boucher’s nudes that very little is permitted to distract the viewer from the sexual availability of the female and the implicit gratification of the male. His Blonde odalisque (1752) is the image of a disrobed, plump, adolescent girl stretched out on a sofa. She appears to exist for no other purpose than to be consumed (if consuming is really the mot juste: she lies on her belly with her rump tilted in an attitude best described as expectant). The model (as far as we know) was the fifteen-year-old Louise O’Murphy, the daughter of an Irish shoemaker, and current favourite at the Parc aux Cerfs, the brothel at Versailles so vital to the needs of Louis XV that a special department of government had been created to run it. In contrast to Boucher’s passive female fleshiness, the most striking feature of neo-classicist paintings was the taut musculature of a monumental series of republican superheroes who had resolved to put fatherland before family. In literary ‘republicanism’ too, and above all among devotees of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the link was repeatedly made between feminine refinements and the decadence of the ancien régime—best exemplified by the Paris salons. We can perhaps detect a hint of Rousseau in a long diatribe printed in the Northern Star against the aristocratic bluestockings of London, who had reduced the Republic of Letters to ‘an association of illiterate Literati, stale old Maids, and antiquated beaux’.[76]

For some scholars, the revolutionaries’ hatred of effeminacy and (it is further argued) their basic misogyny was not merely incidental to their republicanism but essential to it: as the political boundaries of the ancien régime were suddenly loosened, they erected new ideological barriers that excluded women from public life. A great deal of work has now been published by American, French and British historians on the relationship of women to the public sphere and on exceptional individuals like Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges who have long been regarded as the key precursors of modern feminism. In contrast, the experience of Irish women in the 1790s (and, indeed, throughout the eighteenth century) is the most unjustly neglected topic of the whole era. Until very recently women featured in accounts of the ’98 rebellion only in minor supporting roles—as eyewitnesses to the rebel atrocities tirelessly recycled in loyalist pamphlets, or as patriotic mothers, wives and sisters. At last there are signs that this imbalance is beginning to be rectified.

One approach has been to scrutinise the gendered construction of nationalist discourse. In particular, a number of scholars have highlighted the use of family metaphors in representations of the Irish nation. United Irish iconography featured a fairly predictable cast of goddesses and maidens such as Liberty, Hibernia and the ‘genius’ of Ireland (a spirit or guardian angel), as well as the maniac Mary Le More, a mentally deranged victim of rape. Perhaps the most curious image of Ireland was conceived by the Presbyterian minister James Porter. His famous satire Billy Bluff, originally serialised in the Northern Star, was rather unexpectedly interrupted by the ‘Vision at Athlone’, in which the ‘genius’ of Ireland appears as a beautiful angel clad in white robes. Mysteriously, she brings her message of liberty, peace and union to crowds of people, of whom some could speak only English, some only Irish, ‘but the greatest number could speak both English and Irish’.[77] As the dragooning of Ulster in the spring of 1797 confirmed the suspension of normal civilian government, the popular poetry of the United Irish press inevitably became much darker. The 1798 edition of Paddy’s resource contained a song written in memory of two privates of the Kildare Militia, Daniel Mahon and Thomas Carty, shot in the Phoenix Park in June 1797 for ‘their Attachment to the Cause of Ireland’. Over their dead bodies hovered ‘Ierne’s Genius’, warning readers not to mourn, ‘For happy he, who sheds his blood, / In Freedom’s glorious cause’.[78] As the gallantry of the Volunteer poems gave way to a more demotic call to arms, the role of women remained primarily one of inspiration. The tutelary deities of the Irish nation—Hibernia, Liberty and the genius of Ireland—could be represented as female precisely because women were not themselves regarded as political agents.

The female personification of Ireland as mother or young maiden had a long history, as had the conceptualisation of the Anglo-Irish relationship as a familial one. One of the best-known examples was Swift’s very first assault on English misgovernment, The story of the injured lady, written at the time of the Act of Union with Scotland (1707) but not published until much later. Ireland’s constitutional inferiority had just been underlined by the rejection of a series of petitions in 1703, 1707 and 1709 for inclusion in the new United Kingdom. The beautiful and loyal Ireland had been seduced ‘half by Force, and half by Consent’ and then cruelly treated by a villainous gentleman who acted ‘like a Conqueror’.[79] As literary scholars have pointed out, the treatise offers an allegorical counterpart to William Molyneux’s The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated (1698), but one in which Molyneux’s voluntary compact between equals is replaced by an act of violation.[80] It is rarely noted that the driving force of Swift’s indignation was actually anti-Scots, anti-Presbyterian resentment, fuelled by the growing assertiveness of the Presbyterian colony in Ulster. Nor indeed that the key family metaphor chosen by Molyneux to introduce his Case of Ireland stated was the gender-blind appeal to William III as ‘the Common Indulgent Father’ of the three kingdoms, who would surely have ‘an Equal Regard to the Birth-Rights of all Your Children’.[81]

During the Union pamphlet wars of 1798–1800 shotgun marriages, rapes and restitutions of conjugal rites all figured. A more significant question than the uses of these marital metaphors concerns the participation of female radicals in political agitation. Unfortunately the answer redirects us away from the easily accessible literary sources towards the laborious task of sifting through archives and newspapers. At first glance, the classical model of the arms-bearing citizen, so vital to the Volunteer movement of 1778–85, would seem to leave little room for the ladies of Ireland (even if a number of fashionable women in both Britain and Ireland appeared in customised versions of military uniform). The identification of patriots everywhere with the classical tradition of republican stoicism offered role models for self-control and manliness, most obviously the elder Brutus and Cato of Utica, premised upon the sacrifice of personal emotions, ties and duties. Roman matrons remained behind the scenes, the best-known example being Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, whose jewels were her virile sons. But this did not mean that women were wholly excluded from the cult of the citizen-soldier. The high point of the Volunteer calendar in Ulster was the summer review season, when companies from all over the province converged on the county towns. The largest annual reviews, held in the Falls meadows outside Belfast, were great festive occasions, lasting several days and attracting thousands of spectators. In the evenings the local ladies were invited to dine with the officers, and the reviews were often accompanied by assemblies and balls. In contemporary paintings such as ‘The Lisburn and Lambeg Volunteers’ (1782) and ‘The Belfast Volunteers commemorating the storming of the Bastille’ (1792) women are very prominent as spectators. In the 1776 election the victory of the Dissenters’ candidate for Antrim was celebrated by a procession of 10,000 men in blue cockades, 400 Freemasons, and 500 girls described as ‘daughters of liberty’ and ‘patriot virgins’, dressed in white and carrying green boughs.[82] More surprisingly, women also attended the parliamentary debates over free trade in 1779–80; we know that women sat in the front row of the public gallery (capable of holding 700 in total), as they did during the Union debates of 1799–1800.[83] But was their presence simply decorative?

Since the 1720s, when Swift had inveighed against Irish women for importing French and English fashions, the wearing of locally manufactured clothes had provided a respectable outlet for female patriotism. This rather innocuous form of economic nationalism, ostentatiously observed by several incoming viceroys, acquired a defensively anti-English edge in 1778 when Irish free-trade legislation was opposed by organised lobbies from Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester and Glasgow. In direct imitation of the American colonists, non-importation associations were formed in Dublin and other significant towns (though not in Ulster, where the linen manufacture was already closely linked to British markets). In April 1779 a group of Dublin ladies formed their own non-importation association. The editorial in the next issue of the Hibernian Journal saluted the ‘female patriots of Ireland’ for their attempts to revive commerce: ‘Let Fame tell the surrounding nations, that the Daughters of Ireland restored to Happiness and Prosperity their Country long groaning under the Shackles of Restriction.’[84] As so often, ostensible gains made by women are capable of being read in more than one way. The politics of consumption presented women with new opportunities to display their patriotic allegiances alongside their husbands and fathers; but at the same time consumer issues could be portrayed as part of the traditional domestic concern of the wife. There are suggestive parallels here with riot and popular protest, where women expressed grievances over food prices, employment conditions and the activities of priest-catchers, but not over taxes or parliamentary legislation.[85] When women lobbied or demonstrated, they did so not to improve the status of women, but to vindicate the rights of an Irish nation still defined in masculine terms. On the surface of political life, the empowerment of women—in voting, marital relations and divorce, even education—was not an issue.

Unlike the situation in the French Republic, then, there were no public debates in Ireland over the question of female political representation, nor did radical Irish women organise themselves as did their French counterparts in the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Although a letter purporting to be from the secretary of the ‘Society of United Irishwomen’ was published in the Northern Star in 1796, no evidence has been found to suggest that such a society ever existed.[86] It is true that the loyalist writer Samuel McSkimmin later claimed that women had formed ‘teapot clubs’ whose activities were the gathering of information and fundraising. Whether these groups had any continuous institutional existence, or were simply ad hoc committees established to raise subscriptions for the relief of prisoners, is not clear.[87] If they existed at all, they probably conformed to the prevailing notion that organised female activity should be restricted to philanthropic and domestic concerns. The case of the Greg sisters of Belfast, ‘notorious encouragers of the United Irishmen’, might be relevant here: their family home was attacked by the Monaghan Militia in 1797 after they had sent ‘liquor and money’ to four militiamen court-martialled for sedition.[88] On a more mundane level, the Ulster Catholic radical Charles Teeling recalled how in all ‘rustic festivities’ young men were given the cold shoulder by girls if they had been too timid to take the United Irish oath.[89] Women also took part in military operations, carried messages and suborned soldiers.

When the Dublin Society of United Irishmen established a committee in January 1793 to produce a plan of parliamentary reform, bitter divisions quickly emerged. The committee was split over the extent of the franchise, with ‘universal’ suffrage narrowly triumphing over a property restriction; there were differences too over whether the viva voce system of voting should be replaced by a secret ballot. As far as we know, however, even the most advanced reformers in Ireland did not believe that female suffrage was worth serious consideration. Revealingly, the issue was only ever raised by conservative and moderate critics, who complained that ‘the theory of human rights’, pursued to its logical conclusion, entailed ‘the admission of women, of persons under age, and of paupers, to suffrage of elections’.[90] And what could be more absurd than women exercising the franchise? The most important exception to this total disregard for female rights was William Drennan, who accepted the principle that women should have the right to vote and hoped that in future generations female suffrage would seem entirely natural:

Neither reason nor women have yet had their full and proper influence in the world, and till they come nearer to that point we can only guess at their power. Much perhaps of the perfection of which society is capable depends on a nearer equality of the sexes and on their accumulated talents and joint endeavours being applied to most of the studies, and occupations, and offices in life, in short, in bringing their respective powers into use, and not separating, but conjoining their efforts for the public good, mental as well as corporeal.[91]

It is quite possible, of course, at a time when the extension of rights to all denominations, all social groups and African slaves was so widely discussed, that women in private challenged their exclusion from political life. Certainly Mary Ann McCracken wrote that ‘The female part of the Creation as well as the male should throw off the fetters with which they have been so long mentally bound.’[92] There were other highly politicised women such as the Quaker Mary Shackleton Leadbetter, who read and discussed French and English critical philosophers, including Wollstonecraft and Godwin.

Perhaps the most respectable outlet for female patriotism lay in literary activity. One example was Henrietta Battier, best known for her lampoon ‘The Gibbonade’, a vicious attack on the hardline Lord Chancellor Fitzgibbon. She had previously celebrated the controversial role of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in the election of 1784 (‘The fairest fair of Britain’s isle, / To grace the public weal, / For every vote bestows a smile / Of patriotic zeal, / When canvassing she goes’).[93] During the Regency Crisis Mary O’Brien had written ‘Paddy’s solicitation to the Right Honourable William Pitt’ (1790) and Mary Birkett made a philanthropic appeal to ‘Ierne’s gentle daughters’ in The African slave trade: addressed to members of her own sex (1792). With the benefit of hindsight, however, the most significant female writer was undoubtedly Charlotte Brooke, daughter of Henry Brooke, often regarded as a pioneer of Celtic revivalism. In the preface to her Reliques of Irish poetry (1789) she modestly insisted that her work was derivative of O’Conor, O’Halloran and Vallancey; like the matrons of ancient Rome, she aspired only ‘to strew flowers in the paths of these laureled champions of my country’.[94] Poems selected from the Reliques, along with an Irish grammar, prayers and a glossary, were included in the Gaelic magazine Bolg an tSolair (1795), edited by Patrick Lynch, a teacher of Irish sponsored by the Belfast United Irishmen.

Perhaps the most exciting archival source relating to a ‘female patriot’ is the collection of correspondence, numbering almost 1,500 letters, written between Martha McTier of Belfast and her brother Dr William Drennan, a founder member of the United Irishmen and author of the popular poem ‘When Erin first rose’. Their father, the Rev. Thomas Drennan, had managed a Dissenting academy in Dublin during the 1720s with the philosopher Francis Hutcheson before settling in Belfast in 1736. He was regarded as an elegant scholar, and his close friends and correspondents included not only Hutcheson but also the Rev. John Abernethy of Dublin and James Arbuckle, the poet and editor of the Dublin Weekly Journal (see Chapter 2). The family was both genteel and highly educated but not especially wealthy. In 1773 Martha married a chandler, Samuel McTier, a radical activist who chaired the first meeting of the Belfast Society of United Irishmen in October 1791. They were never financially secure, and when Samuel died in 1795 without leaving a will, Martha lost a legal battle with her brother-in-law for the rights to her own house, and was forced to rely on family assistance during a long, impoverished widowhood. Her letters record the painful humiliations that resulted from the charitable gestures made by family friends. Meanwhile Martha noted around her the remarkable expansion of Belfast and the social mobility that accompanied urban growth: ‘rich upstarts who, skipping from the counter to the carriage, run one down with force of wealth which sanctions ignorance and vulgarity, and now gives them a lead and fashion’.[95]

In 1791 William Drennan had just transferred his medical practice to Dublin, when he quickly circulated a privately printed paper calling for the establishment of a Masonic club to be called the Irish Brotherhood. Drennan’s republicanism was of the neo-classical kind. He was a fervent admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ever since he discovered the story of Ulysses as a young boy, Drennan once explained, ‘the love of country has been in my breast, not merely a classical image, or a cold principle, but an animating spring of action’.[96] In the addresses he supplied for the Dublin United Irishmen the patriotic self-sacrifice of the classical republicans was married with the febrile intensity typical of the age of sentiment. Not surprisingly, Drennan was obsessed with the kind of solemn collective oaths depicted in Jacques-Louis David’s paintings. Following the news of the Paris uprising of 10 August, he wrote: ‘There has not been a more soul-expanding sight since Rome was sacked than the stretching forth their hands to Heaven, while the noise of the cannon was heard and swearing to die at their post for liberty and equality.’[97] As we have already seen, however, his devotion to Rousseau and to the cult of the citizen-soldier were not incompatible with an advanced position on the politics of gender.

Drennan’s paper was entitled Idem sentire, dicere, agere, a tag from his favourite Cicero. ‘We are separate nations met and settled together’, he lamented, ‘like the image which Nebuchadnezar saw, with a head of fine gold, legs of iron, and feet of clay, parts that do not cleave to one another.’[98] The four provinces of Ireland were ignorant of each other; differences of rank and religious persuasion had erected ‘brazen walls of separation’ between them. Drennan’s solution, typical of his rather elitist radicalism, was the organisation of a kind of ‘Constitutional Compact’. If the diverse regions of the island were not yet prepared for unification, a few individuals from each quarter might draw up the articles of a single ‘political faith’ as the basis for a Masonic-style society and defend it ‘when necessary—with their Blood’. In the meantime he pictured his Irish Brotherhood engaged in secret ceremonial, wearing amulets to symbolise the ‘spark of hibernicism’ that bound them together. More pragmatically, they would communicate with the Jacobin club in Paris, the Revolution Society in England and the Committee for Reform in Scotland, with the aim of drawing up a plan of parliamentary reform. The conspiracy was to be sealed on the approaching Bastille Day. The body that eventually emerged from the celebrations of 14 July 1791, the Society of United Irishmen, was largely unencumbered by Drennan’s neo-classical fantasies, but it did adopt his oath or ‘test’, committing members to the extension of a ‘brotherhood of affection’ among Irishmen.

One of the most striking aspects of the correspondence between Martha McTier and her hypersensitive brother was their immersion in the literature of the time, from novels, poetry and drama to history and political journalism. Not surprisingly, given the close intellectual connections between Belfast and Glasgow, one of the greatest influences upon them was the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Both disliked David Hume’s notorious reflections on his approaching death, taken as confirmation of his cheerful atheism.[99] They were equally familiar with the writings of the French philosophes, including Rousseau’s scandalous Confessions which, as Drennan wryly advised, ‘none but men or very learned ladies ought to read’.[100] Martha was less impressed by Rousseau and dismissed even his best-selling epistolary novel Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761): ‘It has its beauties no doubt but as for touching the heart or interesting it, there is but one letter in the whole collection reached mine’.[101] The two also clashed over William Godwin’s Memoirs of the author of ‘A vindication of the rights of woman’ (1798), which scandalised conservatives with its frank account of Mary Wollstonecraft’s unconventional sexual behaviour. Rather uncharacteristically, Drennan teased that the book was worth its price of four shillings just for the print of the rather fine-looking Miss Wollstonecraft affixed to it (taken from John Opie’s portrait); he added that ‘her example shows that the rights of women are not to be exercised for some time, without the control of man or God’. Martha’s indignant response was to dismiss Godwin’s memoir as ‘a coarse, ill-written catch-penny’: the religious and moral opinions revealed in Wollstonecraft’s ‘very clever’ Rights of woman were no doubt questionable, ‘but nobly did she assert her sex’s independence’.[102] Nor did Drennan’s own political writings escape his sister’s scathing criticism: she informed him that one early paper ‘contains many good things and pretty expressions—but like Bryson’s sermons, that is all’.[103]

Martha McTier published nothing herself. As Catriona Kennedy has argued, however, her correspondence with Drennan enabled her ‘to negotiate an identity for herself as a member of the critically debating public, in a process that involved the self-conscious rejection of dominant models of eighteenth-century epistolary femininity’.[104] Unusually, indeed, her letters acquired for her a public reputation. Letter-writing then (as now) was often regarded as an intimate and ‘familiar’ form of communication, and the growing association between letter-writing and femininity was reinforced by the popularity of the epistolary novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Rousseau’s Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse. But written correspondence was also fundamental to all intellectual activity, commerce and government. The complex and sometimes unpredictable history of individual letters, as we shall see, frustrates any attempt to distinguish neatly between public and private life. They were passed along chains of readers, or sometimes read aloud to gatherings. (It was a private letter to Thomas Russell, read by Fitzgibbon in the House of Lords on 10 July 1793, that led to Wolfe Tone’s exile.) Hundreds of eighteenth-century pamphlets were framed as letters, from Swift’s Drapier’s Letters to Burke’s Reflections on the revolution in France (1790).[105] Martha McTier’s private correspondence to her brother commented at length on most of the major events and issues of the age of revolution. One of the earliest surviving letters recommends Richard Price’s Additional observations on the nature and value of civil liberty, and the war with America (1777) before asking ‘What weak quarrelsome proud female could have made a more wretched figure in politics than the K[ing] and ministry have done?’[106]

The Drennan–McTier correspondence was also an important channel of communication between Belfast and Dublin in the early days of the United Irishmen. It is generally assumed that meetings of freeholders and townspeople were exclusively male gatherings, but Martha McTier sent William Drennan detailed reports of the Belfast debates over the Catholic question during the early 1790s. When a Belfast town meeting drew up an address to Earl Fitzwilliam following his controversial recall, McTier remarked that she was the only woman to attend.[107] The authorities quickly became interested in her political opinions. When Drennan first suspected that their letters were being intercepted by the ‘petty hirelings’ of the Post Office, he confidently assured his brother-in-law that ‘if they have opened Matty’s letter, they will never think that a woman wrote it’.[108] He was wrong. In May 1794 Martha received a threat, apparently written on Post Office paper, warning that if she continued her ‘high flown letters’, she would wind up ‘matron to a madhouse in Botany Bay’.[109] No doubt the anonymous sender was aware that a (perfectly innocent) letter from Martha had been found among the papers of the Scottish reformer Thomas Muir, tried for sedition in 1793 and transported to Australia. When the letter was read in court, its style was highly commended, to the delight of both brother and sister.[110]

The Belfast postmaster, Thomas Whinnery, must have been quite familiar with Martha McTier’s peremptory style. In May 1797 he notified the secretary to the Irish Post Office that Martha was corresponding with Jane Greg, whom he reported to be ‘at the head of the Female Societies’ in Belfast.[111] That Martha’s letters were being copied for Dublin Castle as well as passed around Drennan’s friends in Dublin demonstrates the thin line that separated private correspondence from the largely masculine preserve of the public sphere. On a number of occasions McTier also wrote to figures of authority, supporting her husband’s application for an official post in January 1781 and defending her brother against a charge of sedition.[112] She also intervened on behalf of Joseph Crombie, a young man arrested for his involvement in the ’98 rebellion. His father, the Rev. James Crombie (1730–90), had been minister of the First Belfast congregation and had published three rousing Volunteer sermons in 1778–81. The Crombies were among Martha’s closest family friends, and Joseph’s treachery was blamed by some on the influence of Samuel McTier and ‘his wife, well known as a violent republican’.[113] Martha petitioned General Nugent, in appropriately deferential terms, begging that Joseph be allowed to emigrate. After repeated attempts to recruit someone ‘fitter & more respectable in the cause of humanity’, she began, there was no alternative but to overcome her ‘female timidity’ and take up her pen. In the end Crombie was lucky: it seems he was subsequently allowed to escape and made his way to America.[114] McTier was also lucky: other women, lacking her polite accomplishments and social connections, bartered everything they possessed on behalf of their male relatives. It was said that Lord Kingsborough of the North Cork Militia ‘exultingly owned . . . that a number of pretty women had come to him on behalf of their husbands, fathers and brothers’; his only regret was that ‘out of all I have only had two maidenheads’.[115]

Martha McTier belonged to a Presbyterian elite. She worshipped at the meeting-house of the First Belfast congregation, where her father had once been the minister; this was the richest Dissenting congregation in Ulster, and the very quintessence of the urban, liberal ‘New Light’ strand of Presbyterianism. Yet it is clear that McTier, although unusual in her literary and political sophistication, was not at all unique. Mary Ann McCracken, mentioned above, belonged the Third Presbyterian congregation (Old Light), whose minister, Sinclare Kelburn, was a prominent United Irishman. At the conservative end of the factious world of Ulster Presbyterianism were the Seceders, whose rigid brand of Calvinism, imported from Scotland in the 1750s, flourished among the less well-off who were alienated by the dominant liberalism in the Synod of Ulster. One of their members was Margaret Duncan, who had emigrated to Philadelphia shortly before the America war, but who kept in touch with William Weir, a merchant in Stewartstown, County Tyrone. In December 1774 she wrote to him defending the imposition by Congress of a trade embargo with the three kingdoms. The British parliament had misrepresented the situation ‘in saying we refused to pay taxes for we payed our full part of the expense of the last war’. In any case, she added, ‘it is not the tax but the mode of taxing we dispute’. Like many Ulster immigrants, she contrasted American liberty and equality with European corruption: ‘If ministers and congregations would rise and come here they might in a short time be settled out of the power of landlords and tythmasters.’[116]

As in France, the turbulent decades at the end of the eighteenth century thus saw gender relations pulled in two contradictory directions. International revolution, political upheaval at home and the demands of continental warfare after 1793 meant that women, like men, were brought into contact with the British state and mobilised by radical political campaigns as never before. Just as the boundaries of political activity were widened, however, the link between citizenship and masculinity was articulated more explicitly and forcefully than in the past.[117] Most of the ideological resources upon which Irish radicals drew were explicitly gendered forms of political discourse. This was particularly true of classical republicanism, which identified liberty with the political structures, military virtues and public spirit of the ancient world. For Irish women, it has consequently been argued, the exercise of citizenship meant simply ‘republican motherhood, sacrificing husbands, brothers, and sons to the national struggle’.[118] It cannot be denied that the role of women in the republican movement was regarded as at best an ancillary one. Yet it would be wrong to conclude, as some historians of revolutionary France have, that the 1790s was simply a decade of masculine reaction.[119] In 1798 women accompanied the insurgents in Wexford, as they did in Antrim and Ballynahinch. As we shall see in the next chapter, female rebels in Wexford apparently relished the public humiliation of Protestant ladies, and attempted to pressure their social superiors into being re-baptised as Catholics. It is true that there was no ‘women’s movement’, and the enfranchisement of women was simply not publicly debated. Yet the examples of well-read, articulate women such as Martha McTier, Jenny Greg, Mary Ann McCracken and Mary Shackleton (all, significantly, Protestant Dissenters) make a nonsense of the Rousseauian claim that the proper role of women was confined to child-rearing. When Drennan published his Letter to His Excellency Earl Fitzwilliam (1795), setting out a plea for the establishment of a national educational system, Martha suggested to him the establishment of newspaper rooms in the country towns. ‘So much have I gained by newspapers,’ she wrote in January 1795, ‘and so ardently have I seen them sought for and enjoyed by the lower orders, that I intend for their good to institute a gratis news room with firs and candle.’[120] As with so many of the assertions of female patriotism noted above, Martha McTier’s resolution was double-edged. On one level her philanthropic intentions resembled the religious and charitable activities in which women could safely claim a legitimate interest. At the same time, however, her self-conscious participation in the public sphere, as both beneficiary and benefactor, demonstrates the inadequacy of the assumption—still very prevalent—that an understanding of politicisation can be derived from the recorded experiences of men alone.

A SPARK OF HIBERNICISM

Nationalism is not simply a political doctrine; it is also a way of understanding our place in the world.[121] During the eighteenth century, as historians have begun to appreciate, questions of national character and culture became more salient. What changed was not that people suddenly discovered a sense of belonging to a wider national community, or that the achievement of national dignity suddenly became an essential part of an individual’s self-worth; it was rather that these feelings came to be seen as a central part of what makes life meaningful. It makes little sense to assume, as Irish historians generally have done, that explanations for the rise of Irish nationalism can be located within Ireland itself. The language of nationhood was an international currency, a pattern of claims and counter-claims in which the assertions of one nation modified the self-understanding of the others. Some of the key developments, as we saw in the previous chapter, were related to changes in the state system, where composite monarchies endeavoured to turn themselves into more compact, unitary states. Hence the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, in his influential manual of international relations entitled The law of nations (1758), was able to define the nation as ‘a sovereign state, an independent political society’, and as ‘a moral person’ possessed of an understanding and a will of its own.[122]

That human beings can be categorised by nationality is so self-evident to us that it is almost impossible to imagine an alternative view. But subjects of the Hanoverians (or, indeed, of the exiled Stuarts) were not continually reminded, as we are in so many subliminal ways, of their place in a world of nations. The vast majority never saw a national flag on a public building; they probably did not own a map of Britain or Ireland, and were not familiar with the territorial outline of their own island; they had not visited a national museum or gallery. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, however, the nation suddenly made its appearance in a whole range of contexts. During the money bill crisis of 1753 Dublin patriots claimed to speak on behalf of ‘the nation’; at precisely the same time claims about the rights and privileges of the French nation were inserted into the remonstrances of the parlements, as quarrels over taxation and the suppression of Jansenism in the church raised the more general issue of their right to block royal legislation. In Enlightenment literature, meanwhile, a wider linguistic shift in the conceptual vocabulary of Europeans was taking place, in which nation was joined by society, public and public opinion—all signifying forms of political community which received their origins not from any external principle (God, the monarchy), but from the natural human urge to collaborate for mutual benefit. Once again the breakthrough occurred in the middle decades of the century, with the publication of François Ignace d’Espiard de la Borde’s Essai sur le genie et la caractère des nations (1743), soon to be plagiarised by Oliver Goldsmith; David Hume’s essay ‘On national characters’ (1748); and a series of histories by Voltaire which took the concept of moeurs or manners as their central subject.[123]

Paradoxically, the much-vaunted cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century probably did more than anything else to facilitate the emergence of national chauvinism. In England the influence of French fashions and literary models goaded writers and intellectuals into intensely personal vindications of their native traditions. The phenomenon began in the visual arts, where William Hogarth called for a domestic school of painting to counteract the swelling tide of foreign influence: and Hogarth’s ‘The gate of Calais, or The roast beef of Old England’ (1749), depicting slavish Frenchmen drooling over a huge joint of English beef would be its greatest monument. Declarations of cultural independence from France were soon heard among dramatists (such as Samuel Foote and David Garrick), and among poets and novelists (James Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith, Tobias Smollett). That many of these figures were actually Irishmen or Scots seldom troubled their metropolitan audience, for whom Britishness was simply Englishness writ large. This kind of cultural nationalism, championing the Saxon ‘genius’ against the cultural dominance of Bourbon France, came to maturity in the decades around the Seven Years War. It achieved institutional expression with the chartering of the Society of Antiquaries (1751), the opening of the British Museum (1759) and the foundation of the Royal Academy (1768), whose rooms at Somerset House were opened to the public in 1780. During the same years Samuel Johnson prefaced his Dictionary of the English language (1755) with the warning that the English tongue had for a century ‘been gradually departing from its original Teutonic character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology’, and the morose moralist John Brown published his francophobic Estimate of the manners and principles of the times (1757–8), denouncing the Grand Tour and insisting that the education of young men should be formed to ‘the Genius, of their own Country’.[124]

The Irish Protestants of the early eighteenth century had regarded themselves as upholders of English civilisation in a backward land. Like previous generations of colonists, they sought to legitimise their claims to a monopoly of wealth and influence by denigrating Gaelic culture, echoing the categories of earlier colonialists such as Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, and, beyond them, the medieval cleric Giraldus Cambrensis. For more than half a century the standard response to metropolitan slurs and humiliations was to reassert the essential Englishness of the Irish Protestant community. Patriotic writers during the first half of the eighteenth century stressed the ties of blood, political principles, religious beliefs and dynastic allegiance which bound them to Britain, claiming equal rights with other ‘Englishmen’ or ‘Britons’. But the English had already acquired an irritating habit of confounding the loyal Protestants of Ireland with their popish enemies. From the 1690s, encouraged no doubt by the animosity surrounding the Woollen Bill, the traditional stereotypes of the Irish as bellicose and bibulous began to be expanded to include the Protestant gentry. In a scurrilous pamphlet entitled A trip to Ireland, being a description of the country, people and manners (1699) an English writer explained with some relish why Ireland was ‘the Fagg-end’ of Europe, so much so that the French call it ‘the Devil’s Piss-pot’. Although his insults were limited for the most part to the ‘mere’ Irish, he could not resist making sideswipes at Trinity College and the Church of Ireland; and he poured ridicule on William Molyneux’s argument that Ireland ‘should be independent on the British nation’.[125] For all their talk of Derry and the Boyne, Irish Protestants found themselves treated as foreigners by the mother country. Henceforth, as the merchant and M.P. Francis Brewster lamented, they would have to ‘rest satisfied with the odious Character of an Irish-man’.[126]

Those best acquainted with English condescension had experienced it at first hand. Some were taken to London by political business, or like Wolfe Tone trained as lawyers at the Inns of Court; some joined the ranks of the literary adventurers on Grub Street like Henry Brooke; others were simply tourists shocked by what Thomas Campbell christened the ‘Angloism’ [i.e. rowdiness] of theatre audiences in Covent Garden.[127] But it was no longer necessary to visit another country in order to feel its prejudices. The proliferation of novels, periodicals, pamphlets and satirical prints allowed for the diffusion of a powerful sense of military, economic and cultural competition between nations through the middling sorts. Those who had never visited the continent could still read the travel literature inspired by the Grand Tour. They might encounter the construction of elaborate national stereotypes in bulky works such A comparative view of the French and English nations (1785), in which the prolific writer John Andrews plodded through an exhaustive range of topics—dress, intellectual life, food, lawyers and the legal system, attitudes to foreigners, the working conditions of servants, humour, dancing, freedom of the press—in order to confirm the familiar contrast between French frivolity and Saxon honesty.[128] The spread of mass communications meant that eighteenth-century Europeans were able not simply to imagine themselves as a collective national community, but to imagine themselves as one of many such nations, each with its own distinctive characteristics. Hence the outrage caused by the publication of Richard Twiss’s A tour of Ireland in 1775 (1776), which delighted in revealing the deficiencies of the Irish in the fine arts, architecture and drama, the savage behaviour of the inhabitants of Connacht, and the excessively thick legs of Irish females. Indignant squibs and letters poured into patriotic papers such as the Freeman’s Journal and the Hibernian Journal, echoed by comments in provincial papers in Belfast, Derry, Limerick and Kilkenny; a hostile play was performed ridiculing the author; and thousands of chamberpots were manufactured with a satirical image of the offending tourist stamped inside so that ‘Every one who likes may p— / Upon the learned Doctor T—’.[129]

Perhaps the most interesting feature of these national sensitivities is the way in which Protestant gentlemen were stigmatised with reference to—and subsequently appropriated for themselves—the symbols and rituals associated with the ‘natives’. Thus the controversial playwright Henry Brooke, in his Essay on the antient and modern state of Ireland (1759), complained at length about the tendency of ‘our’ neighbours to describe ‘us’ as the wild Irish despite the fact that ‘we’ were in possession of letters, laws and civility before the arrival of Julius Caesar in Britain. Had not the ancient Milesians described by Charles O’Conor demonstrated their aptitude for philosophy, poetry, politics, music and the cultivation of science? Brooke went on to lament the ‘constant Fate of our Country Men in Britain, where, whoever is not smartly expert in the English Language, is immediately denominated a Teague, a Paddy, or I know not what’.[130] Catholic scholars like Charles O’Conor (1710–91) and Sylvester O’Halloran (1728–1807), whose defence of Gaelic antiquity was clearly related to the Catholic campaign against the penal laws, were now joined by Protestants like Charles Vallancey (1721–1812). The climax of this trend was the Royal Irish Academy, established in 1785 and granted a royal charter which contained a fulsome tribute to ‘the kingdom of Ireland, which was in ancient times famous for its schools and seminaries of learning’.[131] At a symbolic level at least, the Royal Irish Academy effected a remarkable, if rather superficial, composite of the fragmented materials available to the Irish cultural nationalist. Its figurehead was Charlemont, the Volunteer earl and very embodiment of elite patriotism, who contributed an essay to the first volume of the Transactions on the antiquity of the Irish woollen manufacture, a conscious echo of Molyneux. In 1788 the Academy secured the papers of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare in return for an annual pension of £100. In Rome, meanwhile, the antiquary’s errant grandson, also named Charles, was employed to search the Vatican archives while studying for the priesthood. The first manuscript acquired by the Academy was the Book of Ballymote, and Patrick Lynch, a Gaelic scholar and schoolmaster at Carrick-on-Suir, was promptly hired to translate it. Perhaps the most significant prize of all was the Book of Lecan, removed from Trinity College Dublin by King James and his retinue to the Court of St Germain and eventually deposited in the Lombard College in Paris.[132] Following initial contacts with the Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman (1732–1809), an army officer in the French service and an antiquary, the superiors of the college returned the manuscript in 1787.[133]

How can we explain this apparent u-turn in the cultural allegiances of Ascendancy Protestants? During the Williamite war, when Sir Richard Cox published his Hibernia Anglicana, it seemed that the denigration of the native Irish was absolutely fundamental to their self-image. And yet there were always a number of slender bridges connecting Protestant colonists to the Gaelic world, bridges which illustrate some of the dangers in applying simplistic colonial models to Ascendancy Ireland. Most obviously, early Irish Christianity had intrigued Protestant clergymen since the pioneering attempts of Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) to establish that Anglicans were the legitimate successors of St Patrick. Even Sir Richard Cox had paid the customary homage to Ireland’s ancient reputation as the ‘Insula Sacra’, instancing the familiar figure of the 7,000 scholars who were said to have attended the university at Armagh. Ussher had apparently demonstrated that the faith of the ancient Irish was based upon the scriptures, which they allegedly read in the vernacular, that they subscribed to the Protestant doctrines of free will, predestination and justification, and above all that they rejected the papal supremacy.[134]

Secondly, the coincidence of confessional differences and ethnic origins in eighteenth-century Ireland was never an exact one. The importance of the convert interest, stressed elsewhere in this book, was relevant here also. When Dermod O’Connor published the first English translation of Geoffrey Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn in 1723 it was dedicated to William O’Brien, the (Protestant) Earl of Inchiquin, and prefaced with the standard protestations against ‘illiterate and unjust Men, who insolently attempt to vilifie and traduce the lineal Descendants of the great Milesians (a martial, a learned, and generous Race) as a Nation ignorant, mean-spirited, and superstitious’.[135] Keating, himself of Old English stock, may have been attracted to the stories of the late eleventh-century Leabhar Gabhála Éirinn (or ‘Book of Invasions’), in part because they confounded any attempt to draw straightforward distinctions between natives and settlers. The Milesians, after all, were conquerors whose civilisation displaced earlier waves of invaders, the shadowy Partholonians, Firbolg and Tuatha Dé Danann. In the moral social order constructed by Keating, Ireland belonged not to any indigenous group, but to those settlers (like his Norman forebears) who built churches and abbeys and endowed the church—as opposed to the treacherous Elizabethans whose legacy was purely destructive.[136]

Finally, it should never be forgotten that Charles Vallancey and his colleagues were interested in the scholarly promotion of an ancient language, comparable to classical Greek and Latin, or to Sanskrit, the ancient language of India recently rediscovered by Sir William Jones. (In addition to his claim that the Irish were the descendants of a colony of Phoenicians, Vallancey had once identified the Irish with the ancient Persians, suggesting that ‘Erin’ was a corruption of ‘Iran’.) His concern, as he brusquely informed his readers, was with ‘the old language of Ireland, still fortunately preserved in ancient books, not in any jargon yet spoke by the unlettered vulgar’.[137] In this he was actually at one with Geoffrey Keating, who made it clear he was not interested in defending the lower orders or ‘rabble’, but rather the elaborate society of ranks founded by the sons of the Spanish king Míl.[138] The barriers of social class that separated Protestant gentlemen of the Royal Irish Academy from the Catholic scribes and translators they employed were insurmountable. Even Charles O’Conor, descendant of the High-Kings of Ireland, was appropriately deferential in his correspondence with the immigrant military engineer General Vallancey.[139] In this sense too the return of the Book of Lecan had marked the end of an era. Gaelic culture was no longer associated with Counter-Reformation learning as it had been in the seventeenth century, nor with the ‘wild geese’, because the Irish diaspora had ceased to exist as a potent social or political presence. One reason that Protestants could so confidently claim ownership of ancient Irish civilisation was that there were no rival contenders left in the field.

How was the desire to vindicate Irish civilisation from the aspersions of foreign writers related to the assertion of Irish sovereignty by Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen? There was no necessary connection between cultural patriotism and radical politics, as can be demonstrated by the fate of Dr William Hamilton. Like many of the pioneers of Irish antiquity and natural history, Hamilton was an Anglican clergyman, best known for his writings on the Giant’s Causeway and the Antrim coastline. Like other members of the Royal Irish Academy, he identified fully and unself-consciously with Ireland’s pre-colonial past. ‘We are all along execrated by the English writers as a nation of barbarians,’ he complained in 1786, setting out to counter the common picture of Ireland as a wilderness of forests and bogs. Angered by English writers who dismissed Ireland as ‘a nation without laws, without monuments, without records, without any traces whatever of former civilisation’, he invoked the round towers of Ireland as sufficient evidence that ‘we had public monuments before the arrival of the English’. He also defended the fragments of ‘our Brehon laws’. It was only during the period after Henry II’s invasion, he continued, that the island offered ‘a wistful scene of misery and desolation’.[140] Unfortunately for Hamilton, however, his devotion to Ireland’s natural history and antiquity was combined with unshakable loyalty to the propertied order established at the Glorious Revolution. He became an active magistrate in the Presbyterian territory between the Rivers Foyle and Swilly, where he scoured the countryside for arms during the winter of 1796. In March 1797, while visiting the house of a neighbouring clergyman, he was ‘butchered in the most inhumane manner’ by a crowd of fifty United Irishmen, a horrific murder that shook the establishment.[141]

Although the cult of the Milesians had unmistakably patriotic connotations, it entailed neither separatism nor sympathy for the consolidation of a ‘brotherhood of affection’ between religious denominations. The political ambitions of the Earl of Charlemont, president of the Royal Irish Academy, were firmly restricted to the advancement of Protestant, propertied Ireland. He was opposed to Catholic Emancipation, as was the patriot orator Henry Flood, whose successfully contested will endowed a chair at Trinity for the Irish language. Charles Vallancey, champion of the ‘Iberno-Celtic’ language, was a British army officer and military engineer. These diverse figures, whose political stance pointed towards a respectable loyalism rather than republicanism, were able to appropriate the monuments of the Milesians for the Protestant Ascendancy, just as the present-day Republic of Ireland has appropriated the country houses of the Ascendancy, because the political elite whose history they symbolised was now a spent force.

Such complications remind us that we have all along been using the term ‘nationalism’ in a rather unorthodox manner. For most scholars, the doctrine of nationalism ultimately rests upon cultural distinctions (language, religion, customs) which can be used to underwrite the legitimacy of the polity. This view helps to explain the resistance of historians, noted at the outset of this chapter, to apply the term ‘nationalism’ to the political thought of the 1790s; at best, the era of the American and French revolutions is seen as a transitional period. The ethnic mix found among the American colonists (including as we have seen, a large number of ‘Scotch-Irish’) hardly served to distinguish them from the inhabitants of the British Isles. In France the neo-classical ideal of patria (the fatherland) did not require loyalty to a pre-political ethnic group whose authentic culture was the indispensable condition of complete nationhood. Ultimately, what mattered most in the eighteenth century was less the ethnic differences that separated peoples than the moral distinction between the free citizen and the passive subject or ‘slave’. In the English-speaking world no contemporary political writer appealed to the nation as frequently as Thomas Paine; yet no one has ever suggested that this citizen of the world, who defended the rights of Britons, Americans and the French in quick succession, should be classified as a ‘nationalist’.

And yet, when we read Wolfe Tone, we find the patriot ideology of the ancien régime combined with anticipations of the full-bodied nationalism usually associated with the nineteenth century, so that it becomes difficult to disentangle one from the other. Tone’s Address to the people of Ireland, the revolutionary manifesto written for Hoche’s expedition to Bantry Bay, described an independent Irish republic in which commerce would flourish, roads and canals were constructed, mines opened and harbours deepened, and—an echo of his early enthusiasms—a navy built up, all so that ‘our name shall be known among the nations’.[142] Irish independence was not envisaged as the reawakening of an ancient, primordial community—how could it be?—but as the destruction of old ethnic identities in the name of a new national will. ‘We shall be a Nation not a Province,’ he promised, ‘Citizens not Slaves.’[143] But concern for democratic political institutions was connected to the injured amour propre so typical of Tone and so absent from the writings of his predecessors: ‘Is there a man among you that is not convinced, and has not felt, that even the meanest Englishman considers himself as your superior, and despises an Irishman in his heart?’[144] Moreover, Tone’s nation was not simply imagined as a sovereign community, but as a historical one, shaped by the wrongs of centuries:

Six hundred years of continual intestine wars, marked with every circumstance of horror and barbarity, with the desolation of whole provinces, with massacres and confiscation and plunder, with fire, famine and pestilence, with murder to that horrible extent, that at length it was decreed, even by your own Legislature, to be no crime in an Englishman to kill a mere Irishman.[145]

No longer committed to the institutions of the ancient kingdom established by Henry II in 1172, the United Irishmen were logically driven back to the ‘nation’ that existed prior to and outside the constitutional framework defended by Molyneux and Swift. Consequently, it was the historicity of the Irish people—rather than their parliament—that became the crux of political argument. And what apparently united the Irish people across six centuries was not a common language or a common religion, but a history of common struggle—what Tone bluntly described as ‘a hatred of England so deeply rooted in my nature that it was rather an instinct than a principle’.[146]

12

1798

Poor Pat . . . who knows what we may make of him yet?

WOLFE TONE (1796)[1]

Sometimes disagreements among historians over political events and processes in the past are actually disagreements over the nature of political life itself. There are many reasons why historical orthodoxies are suddenly contested: perhaps new sources are discovered, or new techniques are borrowed from neighbouring disciplines, or contemporary preoccupations (such as the gendered character of republican ideology) compel us to re-examine subjects we thought we understood. When such ‘scholarly’ factors are subtracted from historical controversies, however, one is tempted to attribute the residual differences to the ideological temperament of the historians themselves. This is particularly true of the wide-angle questions concerning major upheavals like the French Revolution or the Irish rebellion of 1798. According to the theories of subversion prevalent during the ancien régime, the behaviour of the ‘mob’ or the ‘multitude’ was dictated primarily by their stomachs; whatever political understanding they possessed was very weak. The participation of such simple people in political activity was therefore explained by the seductive promises held out by ‘artful’ and ‘designing’ men to the credulous. ‘The peasant will love a revolution’, Bishop Joseph Stock of Killala commented, ‘because he feels the weight of poverty, and has not often the sense to perceive that a change of masters may render it heavier.’[2] Since our knowledge of lower-class protest is derived from the reports of jittery magistrates and unscrupulous informers, it should not be surprising that the conservative assumptions of Bishop Stock have enjoyed a vigorous afterlife in the writings of twentieth-century historians. For scholars working in the ‘history from below’ tradition, on the other hand, the problem is very different. The paternalistic view of social relations conveyed in estate papers and assize records, they contend, is as much an ideological construct as a neutral description of reality. The problem for them is not to explain rebellion, but why the common people did not rebel sooner or in greater numbers.

In the case of Ireland this left/right axis is complicated by a variety of opinions regarding the relationship between Irish nationalism and the British state. Whether consciously or not, most historians since the 1960s have been committed to ‘scientific’ or value-free methods of research; and whether consciously or not, they have contrasted these methods with ‘myth’ or propaganda or popular tradition. In practice, the general tendency has been to equate the advance of historical research with the triumph of impartial scholarship over crude, moralising nationalism. Revisionist writing on eighteenth-century Ireland, as on seventeenth-century England, is better understood as a mood rather than as a movement, a mood characterised by impatience with the simplifications and anachronisms that made nationalist narratives seem so outmoded.[3] As explained in Chapter 1, such attitudes have come under increasing attack in recent years. These sorts of controversies are common in most democratic societies, and it would be unrealistic to expect to find a consensus among historians on the great revolutions that have shaped the modern world. The recent debates over 1798 cannot be resolved simply by sifting the evidence more carefully. Questions of responsibility—and irresponsibility—have lost none of their purchase. To acknowledge the existence of these underlying ideological assumptions, however, is emphatically not the same thing as concluding that historiography is merely politics by other means. Professional historians aim to distinguish themselves from amateurs by their aspirations to a range of academic practices and values—the kind of prolonged immersion in the source material that facilitates a ‘feel’ for the veracity or plausibility of contemporary witnesses; sensitivity towards context; open-mindedness; and the conscious effort to avoid distorting or omitting or explaining away awkward facts.

The 1798 rebellion, precisely because of its perceived relevance to Irish political life during the last two centuries, continues to be the subject of noisy, acrimonious debate. The central bone of contention in recent years concerns the relative weight that should be accorded to political, religious and economic factors in explaining the mobilisation of tens of thousands of Irish people. Most of the sparring naturally focuses on County Wexford itself, where a series of surprise military victories permitted rebels to establish control of much of the county between 26 May and 16 June. In both Belfast and Dublin, by contrast, a year or more of legal prosecutions, infiltration by informers and military repression had severely disrupted the upper levels of the republican organisation. In addition to the formal battles such as Wexford and New Ross, there were many smaller clashes between insurgents and troops. Although the insurrection did not begin until 23 May, the entire island was already under martial law by 13 March, as Thomas Bartlett has pointed out, and rebels were tried by military tribunals in twenty-eight out of the thirty-two counties.[4] The government, it is worth repeating, accepted that somewhere in the range of 200,000 men had been sworn into the United Irish movement. In recent controversies over 1798, then, the character of Defenderism is also at stake, as are the causes of the Armagh disturbances that culminated in the creation of the Orange Order, and beyond that the whole question of the political motivations of the Catholic masses.

1798 FROM BELOW

In the last two or three decades there has been an unmistakable trend in historical writing on the United Irishmen away from generally conservative assumptions to a more radical angle of vision. The turning-point was Marianne Elliott’s Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (1982), centred on the diplomatic adventures of Irish emissaries in revolutionary Paris. Inspired by the example of E. P. Thompson, her findings also stimulated interest in the other major revolutionary organisation of the 1790s—the lower-class Defenders, whose support the United Irishmen had enlisted. Where previous historians tended to categorise the Defenders along with conventional forms of agrarian protest, Elliott demonstrated the more urban and industrialised nature of their support, the sophistication of their organisation, and the extent to which their oaths and iconography blended revolutionary ideas imported from France with more conventional Jacobite sentiment.[5] The turn towards popular politicisation—the current buzzword among late eighteenth-century historians—built upon the foundations laid by Elliott and subsequently consolidated by Nancy Curtin, who demonstrated the more populist, militant character of Ulster radicalism long before the recall of the liberal viceroy Fitzwilliam in 1795.[6] Elliott’s pioneering research on Defenderism was also extended in new directions by Jim Smyth’s vigorous study of popular politics, The men of no property (1992). Whereas Curtin’s sympathies were broadly revisionist, Smyth was inspired partly by left-wing republicans of the early twentieth century like Liam Mellows, and partly by the controversial critique of revisionism mounted by Brendan Bradshaw. He briskly rejected the ‘tension-free’ model of eighteenth-century Irish society offered by R. B. McDowell and his cohorts in the New History of Ireland, stressing instead the deep fissures resulting from seventeenth-century colonisation. Yet Smyth also sought to apply to Ireland the insights of E. P. Thompson and of George Rudé, the great historian of the revolutionary crowd. His chief focus was the interaction between what Rudé had termed ‘inherent’ ideas—the folk memory of dispossession, the customary rights associated with the moral economy and price-fixing—and the new language of the ‘rights of man’ derived from the newspapers and popular tracts.[7]

All the historians discussed here were committed to the writing of ‘history from below’. The single most important historiographical influence was undoubtedly the English Marxist E. P. Thompson. At the same time, most scholars writing during the 1980s also emphasised the continuing depth of sectarian antagonisms in revolutionary Ireland and the tensions and contradictions that tarnished the broad republican movement. In doing so, it might be suggested, they were not immune from the wider public concerns of their own times and, above all, from the apparently intractable violence of the Troubles. This was a generation, after all, that had witnessed the international excitement and idealism of 1968; one that had seen the street protests of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association give way to loyalist reaction and the terrorist campaign of the Provisional I.R.A. When they turned to the 1790s, many historians saw the idealistic reformers of Belfast and Dublin falling victim to the darker, atavistic forces which they had helped to unleash—their secular, cosmopolitan ideals tragically overwhelmed by the racial and religious impulses of the Catholic lower classes. A major theme of Nancy Curtin’s work, for example, was the fragile nature of the link between the United Irishmen and the Defenders. In such a view, the ’98 rebellion appeared as the negation rather than the fulfilment of the United Irish vision: the ‘brotherhood of affection’ of republican theory gave way to the blood-letting of Scullabogue barn and Wexford Bridge. Even scholars hostile to revisionism did not shy away from the sectarian violence of the revolutionary decade, or from the opportunistic attempts of United Irish agents to exploit popular rumours of the ‘extermination oath’ allegedly sworn by all Orangemen. All were agreed that, as Jim Smyth put it, ‘the United Irishmen must share responsibility for exacerbating sectarian tensions’.[8]

As the ’98 bicentenary approached, a number of young historians were already turning to the neglected ground of Wexford itself—though as so often it was the veteran Louis Cullen who set the research agenda. His target was the established view of the Wexford rebellion as a spontaneous reaction to government repression, often combined with the accusation that the uprising degenerated into a sectarian bloodbath propelled by priests. In a series of influential articles Cullen explored the local and national political frameworks that shaped the violence of 1798. The fierce debates which followed the French Revolution certainly extended to Wexford town, and new political allegiances were superimposed upon pre-existing divisions within the county elite—particularly over the key issue of Catholic Emancipation. Central to the politicisation of the 1790s were the bitterly contested elections of 1790 and 1797 which saw the triumph of a hardline ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ faction led by the Marquis of Ely and George Ogle at the expense of a coalition of liberal Protestant families with close Catholic links. A number of Wexford liberals had associated with the Dublin United Irishmen during their constitutional phase, and a new generation of Catholics (Edward Hay, James Edward Devereux and Edward Sweetman) had rejected the deferential style of politics advocated by Bishop James Caulfield and the senior clergy in favour of a more confrontational stance. As evidence of the depth of Catholic politicisation, Cullen pointed to the 20,000 names affixed to the 1792 Wexford petition for Catholic relief, the enthusiastic participation of Wexford delegates in the Catholic Convention elections of the same year, and a second petition calling for the reinstatement of the pro-Catholic Fitzwilliam as Lord Lieutenant in 1795.[9] Crucially, the bitter disagreements produced by the Catholic campaigns within the Protestant county elite prevented the formulation of a coherent response to popular unrest in the twelve months preceding the outbreak of rebellion.

Cullen’s pathbreaking essays were built upon several decades of research into social and economic structures; and like all his previous work they stressed the assertive nature of resilient and upwardly mobile Catholics. In the 1960s Cullen had begun his long career with a series of exemplary exercises in historical revisionism, successfully overturning the old nationalist view of the eighteenth-century economy which presented a picture of poverty, depression and stagnation attributed to the legislative interference of the Westminster parliament. In The emergence of modern Ireland (1981) he began charting the ways in which the upheavals of the 1790s were shaped by the settlement patterns created by seventeenth-century colonisation, particularly in Wexford and Armagh.[10] His first attempt to construct a general interpretation of the 1798 rebellion, in fact, had adopted a multi-layered perspective, encompassing the structural legacy of conquest and colonisation, the economic expansion of Catholic leasehold, trade and manufacturing interests, and the deep-rooted anxieties which surrounded the gradual abandonment of the penal code from the 1770s. In his determination to correct the oversimplifications of earlier interpretations, however, Cullen became increasingly convinced that complex political divisions, centring on electoral rivalry among the gentry, formed the indispensable context for understanding the ’98 rising—to the exclusion of the sectarian, millenarian and agrarian factors so deeply rooted in the historiography. As a number of his contemporaries noted, there was a considerable irony here, since Cullen’s earlier work remains the most sensitive exploration of the sectarian and ethnic interfaces in County Wexford.[11]

The 1998 bicentenary commemorations sponsored by the government of the Republic of Ireland accelerated the tendency to reduce the complexities of the ’98 rising to a series of rather black-and-white issues. With eighteenth-century historians suddenly in heavy demand, the lines between the academic specialist, the popular textbook writer and the speechmaker sometimes became blurred. Kevin Whelan, whose early work attributed United Irish success in Wexford to the ‘fusion of political, economic and sectarian issues’, now presented these factors as mutually exclusive.[12] ‘The United Irish rebellion’, he wrote, ‘was not spontaneous or chaotic: neither did it emerge out of agrarian or sectarian issues. Instead it issued from politicisation.’[13] The promotion of Whelan’s arguments under the label of ‘post-revisionism’ overlooked the extent to which his own previous research, following Cullen’s lead, was premised upon the sectarian geography of County Wexford. The 1798 bicentenary, rather like the spectacular bicentenary of the French Revolution that took place nine years before, thus produced ‘a slightly uneasy mixture of analysis and celebration’.[14] It was no doubt prudent for government ministers to emphasise the progressive ideals of democracy, pluralism and north–south unity, and to downplay the more divisive aspects of the rebellion. But for historians to furnish the academic respectability for this sanitised version of events was less excusable. The effect of the ‘post-revisionist’ interpretation, according to one formidable adversary, was ‘to make the Rebellion abstract rather than concrete, a matter of ideology rather than of killing, of idealism rather than of intolerance; to make it, in effect, how the United Irishmen, at their most romantic, envisaged it’.[15] To the Irish government, post-revisionism offered a politically correct, chaste republicanism fit for an era of peace and reconciliation; to the post-colonialist it promised an empowering exercise in the deconstruction of loyalist propaganda; and to the old-style Catholic nationalist it held out the comforting reassurance that all the sectarianism had been on the other side after all.

The major reassessments of the 1790s were driven by the deconstruction of old sources more than the discovery of new ones. Contemporary accounts of the rebellion, as Cullen has demonstrated beyond all doubt, must be regarded as polemical interventions in the unfinished business of the Catholic question. The most important was Richard Musgrave’s best-selling Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland (1801), explicitly designed to discredit those liberals who favoured a conciliatory policy towards Catholicism. The core idea of this massive work is a very simple one: 1798 was just another re-enactment of 1641—a fanatical, priest-led rebellion, grim testimony to the intractable desire of papists to exterminate Protestants. It was Musgrave, accordingly, who elevated the Wexford atrocities to their pre-eminent position in the elaborate demonology of militant loyalism. Altogether something in the order of 500 Protestant men and women were killed, most of them (300–400 prisoners) executed in the rebel camp at Vinegar Hill, with around 100 incinerated in Scullabogue barn and a smaller number piked to death on Wexford Bridge. Following the example of Sir John Temple’s Irish rebellion (1646), Musgrave compiled depositions from various localities recording the sufferings of the loyalists. His questionnaires reflected his assumption that the ‘brotherhood of affection’ between Presbyterian and papist was unnatural, and some of his correspondents obligingly confirmed that the two sects combined only ‘for the purpose of making tools of each other’ and that ‘the rooted antipathy which ever existed between them did & does still remain’.[16] Such partiality is hardly unexpected. At the same time, many of the actual incidents described by Musgrave, often in impressive detail, are confirmed by other sources. No one has suggested that his massive compendium should be completely discarded. Indeed, Louis Cullen’s case for the existence of a substantial United Irish organisation in Wexford depends partly on a list of rebel leaders, allegedly found in the house of the Wexford ‘governor’ Matthew Keugh, for which we are indebted to Musgrave.

Musgrave’s primary motive was to prevent further concessions to the Catholics. Equally misleading, however, was the damage limitation exercise mounted by liberal Protestants and Catholic apologists who sought to affirm the basic loyalty of the Catholic community, to minimise the extent to which Wexford had been part of an organised republican conspiracy, and to portray the rebellion as the spontaneous revolt of an inherently law-abiding population inflamed by military excesses and Orange brutality. For a significant body of liberal opinion, in both islands, the responsibility for the insurrection lay squarely with the policy of coercion adopted by Lord Camden; and Catholic Emancipation remained the only long-term solution to Irish discontent. Edward Hay’s History of the insurrection of the county of Wexford (1803) thus portrayed a hastily improvised popular rising ignited by the unbearable abuses of the crown forces. The most horrific of these were undoubtedly the execution of more than fifty Catholic yeomen, suspected of disaffection, in two separate incidents at Dunlavin and Carnew on 24 and 25 May. Until then the insurrection’s unfortunate leaders, the two clergymen Michael Murphy and John Murphy, had been conspicuous opponents of the United Irishmen, but they were helplessly propelled into the ‘political vortex’ by fears of further mass killings.[17]

No more than a handful of United Irishmen existed in Wexford before this, Edward Hay maintained, and these were sworn into the movement only ‘in a detached manner, unconnected by any organisation’. Throughout the duration of the three-week Wexford uprising, he portrayed the ‘principal inhabitants’ as engaged in a struggle to protect individual Protestant prisoners from popular vengeance. Repeatedly these ‘leaders’ found that they had little influence over ‘the outrageous multitude . . . collected from the northern parts of the county’.[18] So we are presented with an essentially peaceful populace driven into resistance by reports of Orange pogroms, leaving respectable citizens like Hay himself no option but to assume positions of authority during the rebel ‘occupation’. Just like Musgrave’s Memoirs, of course, Hay’s History of the insurrection was aimed at the ongoing debates over Emancipation: 500 copies of the book were apparently sent to London. Nevertheless, its value as an eyewitness account of the Wexford ‘republic’ is not in doubt. Indeed, it is the only surviving source for the 22,251 signatures collected for Hay’s petition against the sudden recall of the liberal viceroy Fitzwilliam. This figure, testimony to the high levels of political awareness in Wexford, has been accepted by all historians.

Our greatest debt to Louis Cullen lies in the field of source criticism, where he has taught us to interrogate a range of primary accounts once taken at face value. The post-rebellion debate which raged into the nineteenth century has now become an important historical subject in its own right. The benefits of the more polemical aspects of post-revisionism, on the other hand, are less certain. Part of the problem lies in the tendency to posit ‘politicisation’ and ‘sectarianism’ as mutually exclusive categories. The fact that the first historians of the ’98 rebellion had their respective axes to grind does not, on its own, necessarily mean that the interpretation of 1798 as a war of religion should be rejected. The endurance of ancestral antagonisms is a common feature of the memoirs of Catholic rebels such as Miles Byrne, Thomas Cloney, James Coigly, and Charles Teeling. Indeed, in their earlier work both Cullen and Whelan demonstrated how densely populated Protestant and Catholic areas intersected in both Armagh and Wexford to create cultural frontiers where sectarian friction was never far beneath the surface.[19] The most promising way forward would seem to be a compromise, in which we attempt to reconstruct the multi-layered explanations abandoned by the post-revisionists, while accepting the need for a more sophisticated approach to the primary sources. In doing so, it makes sense to begin with the first outbreaks of violence in County Armagh, which had such a vital impact on relationships between Protestants and Catholics throughout the island.

PEEP O’ DAY BOYS AND DEFENDERS

Although the Orange Order was not founded until 1795, there was an ugly history of sectarian skirmishing in County Armagh which stretched back over more than a decade.[20] The first writer to mention its predecessor, the shadowy Peep o’ Day Boys, was the agricultural expert Arthur Young, who classified these bands of ‘manufacturing Protestants’ along with other redresser movements like the Oakboys and Steelboys.[21] By 1788, when the Presbyterian minister of Armagh city sent a lengthy report on the subject to the Earl of Charlemont, the Peep o’ Day Boys had established an unenviable reputation as bands of Protestant vigilantes or ‘wreckers’ who confiscated firearms from Catholics—in doing which ‘they thought they acted legally’.[22] Other local sources confirm that daybreak raids on Catholic homes by lower-class Protestants searching for weapons had become widespread in the later 1780s. The possession of arms, as the Volunteers frequently boasted, was the distinction between a freeman and a slave. It appears that some local Volunteer companies, in breach of penal legislation not lifted until 1793, had distributed arms to Catholics, as indeed had a number of local landlords. John Byrne’s Impartial account of the late disturbances in the county of Armagh (1792), an immensely rich primary source for this topic, noted that many local Catholics had taken the oath of allegiance, ‘having got long leases’; and of course ‘they must have arms to shoot the sparrows from their grain’.[23] Although the disturbances of the 1780s extended westwards to Benburb (County Tyrone) and eastwards to Rathfriland (County Down), the Peep o’ Day Boys were very much an Armagh phenomenon. It may therefore be worth paying attention to the local peculiarities of that county, probably the most heavily populated in Ireland outside Dublin.

Armagh was special. The county boasted a large ‘independent’ interest, and elections were consequently close-run affairs; it was the home of Charlemont and the launch-pad of Volunteer politics; it was also a centre of the linen manufacture, and the domestic production of brown linen had created a large class of tenant weavers. But what was most explosive about Armagh, as David W. Miller has emphasised, was its highly volatile ethnic and sectarian mix. The intricate topography of the county can be divided into three distinct but overlapping zones. The north-east, dominated by the Brownlow estate and the towns of Lurgan and Portadown, was predominantly Anglican, with Catholic communities confined to the marshy areas around Lough Neagh. In the parish of Seagoe, for example, the English language was universal, apparently unsullied by either the ‘Scotch accent’ of County Down or the ‘broad brogue’ of south Armagh and Louth. Unusually, there was no Presbyterian meeting-house in this bastion of the established religion. By the early nineteenth century the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne was already well established as the ‘great holyday’ marked by its inhabitants.[24] It was in these parishes that the notorious ‘expulsions’ took place following the ‘battle of the Diamond’ in 1795, sometimes regarded as the first instance of ethnic cleansing in modern Irish history. Liberal opinion throughout the country was horrified as hundreds of Catholic families were forced out of their homes by Orangemen, and many more were allegedly ‘robbed, ravished, maimed or murdered’.[25] North Armagh Protestants, conversely, had their own memories of ethnic cleansing, carefully preserved for a hundred and fifty years. In the 1760s John Black, whose family had a lucrative business in Belfast and Bordeaux, resided in the townland of Balintegart—a ‘barbarous’ name, meaning the priest’s land, which he accordingly replaced with the more civilised ‘Blamont’. This parish, he explained to his sons, had been the scene of massacres in 1641, when ‘150,000 damned heretics’ were slaughtered. The force of his long, ranting explanation is not at all inhibited by the absence of punctuation:

Some of the houses and places where these butcheries were then committed appear in ruinous heaps of stone to this day, a proper warning to the present generation to prevent for the future such Cherockee machinations of Roman profession to commit such horrid crimes of inhumanity and to abolish if possible the remembrance of them by giving civilised names to places as Richill [sic] now for teaguish Legacorry and Lisburn now having been then reduced by fire to ashes was formerly called Lisnagarpah [Lisnagarvey] . . .[26]

What really set this region apart, however, was not just its strong anti-Catholicism, but the solidity of Anglicanism at all social levels, permitting the emergence of a distinctive cross-class movement in the shape of the Orange Order. This demographic pattern was quite different from the middle parishes of Armagh, a substantial buffer zone in which Presbyterians were the most numerous sect. Dissent was strong in the village of Markethill and across the hilly country running from Keady to the substantial commercial centre of Newry; from here tentacles of Scottish settlement had radiated out through the Ulster borderlands and then more tenuously across Mayo, Meath, Louth, everywhere outnumbered by the native population. All accounts agreed that the initial sectarian disturbances were between the ‘Scots’ and the Irish. But as trouble spread north the new Orange societies—mutating out of pre-existing Masonic lodges just as many United Irish cells had done—were quickly adopted by a number of families just outside the county elite—second-rank men like the Verners, Blackers and Warings, and their associates among the clergy of the Established Church.

The rugged terrain to the south of the county formed a third distinctive sub-region. The parishes of Creggan (Crossmaglen), Forkhill and Jonesborough were not only strongly Catholic but largely Irish-speaking, despite their links with the prosperous towns of Newry and Dundalk. Indeed, this was one of the major centres of Irish vernacular poetry, still flourishing in the 1760s when Art Mac Cumhaigh composed his well-known laments for the O’Neills of the Fews, the Stuart cause and the Catholic faith. Internal colonisation recurred here throughout the eighteenth century in the guise of agricultural ‘improvement’. In the 1730s, for example, the small settlement of Johnston’s Bridge began to thrive under the barrack-master John Johnston, who was credited with clearing the roads between Armagh and Dundalk of ‘the rogues that used to infest the country’.[27] Improving landlords were soon encouraging Scots settlements at Creggan and at Newtownhamilton, where a patent for markets and fairs was granted in 1746. By the 1790s many bleach-yards had been opened, new farms had been limed, and Newtownhamilton boasted a busy weekly linen market. One optimistic observer noted the emergence of a ‘strong yeomanry’ in the area and praised the new houses and roads crisscrossing what was formerly ‘a perfectly black mountain’.[28]

The epicentre of religious animosity was the Forkhill estate, where the recently deceased landlord, Richard Jackson, had established a trust to provide landholdings and looms for an Anglican colony. One of the trustees, the Rev. Edward Hudson, rapidly found himself considering moving his family to Newry for safety:

Many cases of savage life still remain amongst us—the same laziness and Improvidence—the same unrelenting ferocity in their Combats, the same love of intoxication—the same hereditary Enmities handed down from generation to generation—add to this that they are all related to each other.[29]

By the end of 1789, when Hudson’s horse was shot under him, the Defenders controlled the territory from Newtownhamilton through the parish of Creggan to the town of Louth. The government had already sent a detachment of troops to the area to counter the threat of lower-class insurgency. Meanwhile Captain James Dawson of the Orior Volunteers (and, incidentally, the originator of the Dungannon Convention of 1782) had apparently enlisted the support of local Peep o’ Day Boys in some distinctly irregular police work. Popular hostility now settled on Hudson’s bailiff and tithe-collector William Duncan, who was held responsible for the conviction and execution of two Defenders at the autumn assizes in 1790. In the following January a revenge gang, enraged by an assault on the parish priest of Forkhill, set out to ambush Duncan. Unable to find him, they proceeded instead to the house of his brother-in-law, Alexander Barkeley, the recently appointed schoolmaster of Forkhill, who refused to teach the ‘Irish’ prayers to Catholic children as his recent predecessor had done. The frenzied attack that followed still makes chilling reading. Barkeley, his wife and his brother-in-law were repeatedly stabbed, presumably as proxies for their hated relative. But the peculiar manner of their mutilation—the assailants cut out their tongues and chopped several fingers off their right hands—constituted a rare if not unique refinement to the sort of grisly punishment meted out to informers and tithe-farmers.[30]

It is easy to see why Orangeism has often been viewed as part of a deliberate divide-and-rule strategy pursued by the British, but the pattern of events in Armagh is rather more complicated. As status distinctions between the confessional communities became blurred in the 1780s, lower-class Dissenters had taken direct action to enforce the penal code, provoking organised resistance in turn from their enemies. Initially most local gentry regarded the Peep o’ Day Boys or ‘wreckers’ as the aggressors and sympathised with their victims. Like one local M.P., William Richardson of Richhill, they attempted to suppress the vigilantism among their Protestant tenantry; some went so far as to lend arms to Catholics for their self-defence. Volunteer units were also employed to break up riots. By the end of the decade, however, the violence began to escalate as skirmishes at fairs and markets gave way to provocative demonstrations designed to assert the territorial dominance of one side or the other. In 1787, for example, John Moore of Drumbanagher had not hesitated to discipline a servant suspected of participating in anti-Catholic raids. And when he received a threatening letter signed by ‘John Tormentor’ on behalf of ‘the lads for Justice, vulgarly call’d the Break-of-day boys’, he remained convinced that he could deal with the malcontents without military assistance.[31] Over the next two years, as the Defenders clashed with local Volunteer companies, this confidence evaporated. On 8 December 1788 hundreds of Defenders armed with firelocks, swords and spears assembled around a bleach-green at Benburb, intending to apprehend two Volunteers employed there. A twenty-four-hour siege ensued before the attackers were eventually dispersed by soldiers sent from Armagh city.[32] In the summer of 1789 a fresh outburst of violence was triggered following a mysterious fracas between Moore’s Volunteer company, a Protestant mob and a large body of Catholics who had apparently gathered for a St John’s Eve celebration. With the countryside for ten miles all around now in a state of rebellion, Moore at last swallowed his pride, requested extra ammunition from the government, and announced his decision to distribute arms among ‘the Protestant Boys’.[33]

As the disturbances escalated, then, magistrates reluctantly took sides in what looked increasingly like an outbreak of organised Catholic insurgency. The spread of Defenderism, far from being an understandable response to Protestant harassment, now came to be seen as the core of the problem. This was, of course, in microcosm the dilemma also faced by the British state, and the same pattern of alignments was replayed at provincial and then national levels. Just as the ‘wreckers’ were co-opted into Volunteer units, so the new Orange lodges would be co-opted into the Yeomanry after 1796 by an administration thrown back onto its traditional and resentful alliance with the Protestant gentry and their retainers. At each step the authorities responsible for maintaining law and order found it expedient to compromise with those responsible for the disorder in the first place. The significance of the Orange Order itself should not be overestimated: a careful reconstruction of the history of the early lodges demonstrates that the total Orange membership in March 1798 did not exceed 20,000; that the Grand Lodge of Ireland set up in that month was not in effective control of the movement; and that in Dublin, as in Armagh, the landed elite remained aloof.[34] After the abortive French expedition to Bantry Bay, however, the Orange Order was presented by local magistrates as the only method to counterbalance the penetration of the United Irishmen into mid-Ulster. ‘By using the Yeomanry system as a filter and control,’ as the most thorough examination of the subject concludes, ‘the government tried to compromise between the danger of arming the entire Orange body and a strategically suicidal policy of drift.’[35]

DEFENDERS AND UNITED IRISHMEN

What kind of movement was Defenderism? Sectarianism in the common-sense meaning of the word—competition and antagonism between religiously defined groups—was inevitably part of its protean make-up. Individuals and groups were targeted for violence because of their religion. In Armagh the activities of the Peep o’ Day Boys were often sectarian in the most straightforward way: they assaulted a priest near Tandragee; they attacked a chapel on the Obins estate near Portadown, where they destroyed a stone crucifix purchased on the continent by the landlord; they destroyed the vestments and chalice of the parish priest of Forkhill.[36] Defender violence was initially reactive in character, shaped by the intimidation of one confessional community by another. The wave of arms seizures that spread through the midlands was also directed at Protestants—if only because figures of authority were by definition Protestant. Frequently cited reports that Defenders aimed ‘to knock the Protestants on the head’ or to destroy the Protestant religion tend to come from hostile sources, either local magistrates or the evidence given by government witnesses in court.[37] But there is simply too much evidence of the ethnic and sectarian dimensions of these frontier conflicts to be dismissed as mere propaganda. Along the border with Cavan, as one ‘friendly’ witness reported, there were ‘numerous tribes of Presbyterians’, called by the common people ‘Scotch’, who existed in a state of ‘hereditary animosity’ with the lower orders of Irish who surrounded them.[38] The breakaway Seceders were particularly strong in Monaghan and Cavan; these ultra-orthodox congregations had a history of antagonism with the mainstream Synod of Ulster, and they appear to have thrived among the more recent Scots settlements that penetrated into the borderlands and beyond in the early decades of the eighteenth century. In May 1794 up to thirty people were killed when the Cavan Defenders stormed a fair announcing that ‘they would destroy every Scotsman or Presbyterian they should find’.[39]

Sectarian animosity, it hardly needs adding, had become intertwined with social stratification in complex ways. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that sectarian or ethnic differences are likely to remain innocuous unless they interact with other social differences.[40] John Byrne, our main contemporary source for the Armagh troubles, described the warring parties as the ‘mountainy Irish’ and the ‘lowland Scotch’, a reminder that the best arable land was still occupied by planters and their descendants.[41] Even the grisly Barkeley incident was provoked, as Byrne explained, by the ‘banishing’ of Catholics from the Jackson estate at Forkhill and by the dismissal of the existing schoolmaster by Hudson. Small-scale settlements, mostly of Presbyterians, were scattered right along the Defender belt that stretched from Louth all the way to north Connacht. As in Forkhill, these experiments in ‘improvement’ generally began with the advertisement of cheap, renewable leases, the purchase of a royal patent for the establishment of a weekly market and annual fairs, and the creation of artificial villages for tradesmen and shopkeepers; they also involved the disruption of ‘native’ communities. It is no coincidence that the only significant example of communal violence during the brief French occupation of Mayo was an assault on a Presbyterian meeting-house near Ballina, where a relatively recent colony of 1,000 weavers had been established on the Earl of Arran’s estate. The targeting of these northern villagers was justified as direct revenge for the expulsions of Catholics in Armagh.[42] But Arran’s estate village was also a typical example of informal colonisation, the attempted transplantation of Ulster, whereby settlements of northerners would at once kick-start the linen manufacture and help to diffuse Protestant values and ‘manners’. It is hardly an accident, either, that one of the main targets of the Wexford rebels was the German Palatine settlement of Old Ross.[43] Nor that the tenant farmers and artisans burned to death at Scullabogue—the most infamous rebel atrocity—were largely inhabitants of the Protestant enclaves recently established at Foulkesmills, Fethard, Tintern and Adamstown.

Although informal settlements sometimes gave popular unrest a sharper edge, as indeed they had done during the original Whiteboy campaigns in Tipperary,[44] their significance was secondary. The key destabilising issues of the 1790s were linked to the state—the possession of arms, the extension of the franchise, the implementation of the militia scheme, and the proclaiming of districts under the Insurrection Act. In Armagh the casus belli was the instability created by the erosion of the penal code in general, and the prohibition on Catholic arms-bearing in particular. As we saw in Chapter 6, prosecutions of Catholics for carrying weapons continued into the second half of the eighteenth century, most controversially in the case of the ill-fated Art O’Leary. Sometimes the enforcement of the firearms prohibition functioned as an institutionalised form of petty harassment. In 1766 the grand jury of Meath offered a reward for the prosecution of any Catholic keeping arms without license; a similar resolution was passed in 1780 directed at assemblies of armed Catholics. It is no surprise, then, that the admission of Catholics to some Volunteer corps prompted the formation of a Protestant Association at Trim, or that a hardline faction later opposed the 1793 Catholic relief bill, taking its cue from John Foster, Speaker of the Commons and M.P. for neighbouring county of Louth.[45] In the south-east, meanwhile, legal action on the arms issue was closely connected to fears of resurgent Whiteboy activity. In March 1776, for example, a Wexford Volunteer association formed by George Ogle offered £5 reward to anyone successfully prosecuting a Catholic for keeping unlicensed weapons.[46]

These nervous calls for prosecution, whether issued by grand juries or private initiatives, are worth bearing in mind because it is sometimes assumed that the penal code had no practical impact outside the privileged circles of the landed elite. Status differences between Protestants and Catholics of the middling or lower ranks were not, as the ancien régime model of eighteenth-century Ireland might suggest, wholly subsumed within the vast structural inequalities shared by all the hierarchical societies of pre-industrial Europe. Only a tiny number of men possessed sufficient landed wealth to qualify as magistrates or to enter the House of Commons. But ordinary Protestants enjoyed greater access to power—defined more broadly to encompass social advantage, participation in the public sphere, and the favour of the civil and military authorities. Although the Meath Defenders were armed, they apparently discharged their pieces ‘awkwardly’; the Presbyterians meanwhile had the advantage of some military training, the encouragement or connivance of some magistrates, and the support of some regular soldiers. In the aftermath of their initial victories, ‘the Scotch’ overran the county, the magistrates allegedly looking the other way, and ‘pillaged, plundered, burned without requiring any mark of guilt but religion’.[47] Elsewhere too there seems to have been a considerable degree of overlap between the ‘official’ Volunteers and local gangs of Protestant ‘wreckers’.

If the origins and development of Defenderism cannot be dissociated from confessional conflict, we might also pause before rejecting suggestions of continuity with longstanding traditions of agrarian protest. Once again, a great deal depends on what ‘agrarian’ means. Earlier outbreaks of Whiteboyism in the south were occasioned by abrupt shifts in the agricultural economy, such as the enclosure of common land or a deterioration of market conditions. In seeking to rectify such local grievances, the Whiteboys typically combined to level hedges and walls, to maim cattle or destroy crops, or to impose controls upon the marketing of grain and bread in order to protect the ordinary consumer. The patterns of Defenderism, on the other hand, differed not only in their geography, but in social composition and methodology. Information compiled by Dublin Castle in 1795 suggested that the Defenders were ‘alehouse-keepers, artisans, low schoolmasters and perhaps a few middling farmers’.[48] This was not simply a peasant revolt. Defenderism was novel in other ways too. The Whiteboy protesters of previous decades, terrifying as they sometimes were, had not intended to overturn the established social hierarchies of rural Ireland; their aim was simply to hold their social superiors to account. Although resentments were frequently expressed on behalf of ‘the poor’, their anger was chiefly directed at perceived interlopers in the local social structure—especially tithe-proctors—rather than the authorities themselves. And whereas Whiteboy violence had often been symbolic—the issuing of threatening letters, the erection of gallows, the digging of open graves—the Defenders concentrated on raiding for arms. They were also markedly less reluctant to use them. In April 1795 Defenders near Drumsna in County Leitrim set fire to a building in which they had trapped revenue officers, and then hacked eleven of them death.[49]

These contrasts are certainly important, but they should not be overstated. Episodes of agrarian agitation had a habit of absorbing the whole package of traditional rural grievances including county cess, tithes and high rents. A sympathetic County Limerick land agent reported in March 1762 that the Whiteboys ‘have dispersed several letters declaring their intention is only to relieve the poor and to oblige the oppressors of them to let them have the land at a reasonable value to plant potatoes for the support of their families’. As one menacing letter explained, Sieve Oultagh and ‘her company’ intended ‘to relieve the poor who are oppressed by most people and especially by tithe-mongers’.[50] Frequently their goal was to ‘fix’ the price of land, labour and potatoes; and they posted notices on chapel doors determining the payment of church cess, tithes and even the fees traditionally claimed by their own priests. Price-fixing, a common feature of popular protest in ancien régime Europe, continued to be a significant feature of Defenderism in Meath, Roscommon and elsewhere during the 1790s. Perhaps the greatest continuities, however, were organisational ones, such as the trademark rituals of oath-taking. No doubt the Defenders benefited from a more sophisticated command structure of ‘committee-men and captains’, and their secret signs and signals apparently enabled them to assemble at short notice. As early as 1792 they practised their ‘military evolutions’ at night, and there were even reports, probably ill-founded, of arms smuggled from France.[51] Like earlier lower-class solidarities, however, the use of oaths and intimidation to enforce popular notions of communal justice was fundamental. Traditions of ‘agrarian’ violence, like pre-existing patterns of sectarian hostility, cannot be completely disentangled from the popular mobilisation of the 1790s.

This brings us finally to ‘politicisation’ in the sense that Smyth has used the word. Defenderism, as he comments, was ‘a hybrid of traditional agrarian aspirations and half-digested “French” principles’.[52] This was also the view put forward in A candid and impartial account of the disturbances in the county of Meath (1794). The anonymous author, a liberal opponent of the Ascendancy party, described a complex spectrum of Catholic opinion ranging from the loyal declarations of Bishop Plunkett and his circle to the political clubs of Navan, apparently including a branch of the United Irishmen. In his anxiety to dissociate propertied Catholics from the local ‘banditti’, he emphasised that the lower classes were perfectly capable of forming opinions of their own, though he described these in the usual derogatory fashion. ‘They talked of the famous system of liberty and equality in the most extravagant manner,’ he reported. There was thus no need for the far-fetched conspiracy theories attributing organised disaffection to the hidden hand of the clergy. Defenderism could be explained more simply as ‘a rude imitation of French politics, which any Plebeian could have extracted from the public papers’.[53] As the network spread through adjacent districts of Down, Louth, Monaghan and Cavan, Meath, and then on to Kildare and Dublin, its revolutionary potential became increasingly apparent, and plans for some sort of general insurrection with French assistance were apparently linked with expectations of a transfer of land and political power from Protestants to the Catholics. Defender catechisms juxtaposed references to the French Revolution with Masonic imagery (Jericho, Joshua, the rod of Aaron) and decidedly incongruous hopes for the restoration of the true religion. First-hand information on the secret handshakes, passwords, oaths and declarations of the Defenders was transmitted to the government by the ill-fated Franciscan friar, Father Phillips. Most intriguingly, they included rough drawings representing revolutionary doctrines, such as a sketch of a Tree of Liberty with branches representing the different states of Europe, all of them bearing roses in different stages of bloom. At the top, naturally, there was ‘a rose full blown from France’.[54]

There is abundant evidence of the ideological penetration of ‘French principles’ into rural Ireland. It would be difficult otherwise to understand the close relationship formed between the radicals of Belfast and the Defenders. As always, the evidence must be treated with caution. Historians have often assumed (as did many contemporary observers) that a coalition of enlightened Dissenters and plebeian Catholics could only have been based on the most cynical opportunism. According to the informer William Bird, for example, the Belfast supremo Samuel Neilson viewed the Defenders as an ‘undisciplined rabble’ whose instincts were essentially monarchical, but nevertheless hoped that ‘with proper Rulers, they might be made of very great Service to the Cause’.[55] No doubt Bird’s modus operandi, which essentially involved getting very drunk with the Northern Star crowd, produced mixed results. By the time the Belfast republicans were in their cups, he once confessed, ‘I am little better myself’.[56] Moreover, the information relayed to the Castle coincided too neatly with the ‘official’ view of disaffection, in which an unthinking populace was being duped by the self-serving incendiaries of Belfast. Yet Bird’s cynicism cannot be wholly discounted. The Defender alliance certainly depended upon the mediation of a close-knit circle of comfortable Catholic families running from Carrickmacross and Dundalk to Newry and Rathfriland—Carolans, Teelings, Magennises, Coiglys and Coyles—whose links with the Belfast radicals Neilson, Russell and Henry Joy McCracken went back to the early days of the United Irishmen and whose social position in the Ulster borderlands resembled the ‘underground gentry’ of the south. Probably the most important were the Teelings of Lisburn, a town apparently noted for its ‘polished manners and social feeling’.[57] Luke Teeling had provided financial backing for the electoral campaign of Robert Stewart (later Viscount Castlereagh) in 1790, although he was himself denied the right to vote. Presumably he already knew the prominent Dissenters who organised the Stewarts’ campaign, such as the Rev. William Steel Dickson and Neilson.[58] While they lived on the fringes of the Ulster gentry, the family was credited with great influence over the native inhabitants. But how was the Northern Star interpreted by the lower-class Catholics whom the younger son Charles Teeling called the ‘segregated sons of Ulster’?[59]

That Neilson tailored the republican message to suit a number of different audiences can also be demonstrated from his efforts to cultivate the orthodox or Old Light Dissenters, including the unreconstructed back-woodsmen who adhered to the breakaway congregations of the Seceders and Covenanters. The key to winning their support was the rapid growth of millenarian sentiment in the 1790s as the fall of the European monarchies, the captivity of the pope and the rise of Bonaparte were all interpreted as fulfilling the scriptural prophecies. Millenarianism—the belief that the second coming of Christ would herald the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth—was not just for cranks. Reputable Protestant divines on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted the events of the French Revolution as indications that the world was entering upon the last days, of whom the best known was the Birmingham preacher and chemist Joseph Priestley, greatly admired by the United Irishmen. In Ulster many ‘enlightened’ Presbyterians also identified the Church of Rome with Antichrist, and they consequently welcomed the French attack on established religion—first at home and then in Belgium and Italy—as evidence that the prophecies contained in the books of Daniel and Revelation were about to be fulfilled.

But Neilson and his colleagues opportunistically exploited a whole range of millenarian tracts, including a number produced by Calvinist enthusiasts whose writings were distinctly out of sync with Enlightenment rationalism. In 1795 the Northern Star carried advertisements for the radical Baptist James Bicheno’s The signs of the times at a reduced price of 1s 1d; a pamphlet entitled An examination of Scripture prophecies, respecting the downfall of Antichrist, available at Belfast, Lisburn, Coleraine and Derry, which explained how the French Revolution had been foretold in the Bible; and John Owen’s The shaking and translating of Heaven and Earth, a Cromwellian classic republished both by John Brown of Monaghan and the Northern Star office. A new edition of Robert Fleming’s A discourse on the rise and fall of Anti-Christ (1795) warned that the time was fast approaching when ‘men will cast off the chains of slavery’. Many of these texts were edited by the Rev. William Stavely of Knockbracken, who also expounded his own theories at some length in War proclaimed, and victory ensured; or, The Lamb’s conquests illustrated in March 1795. A year later the Northern Star advertised a sermon by the Rev. Josias Wilson of Donegore, entitled The guilt and danger of the nation (1796), containing extracts from the prophecies of Richard Brothers, the self-proclaimed Prince of the Hebrews, and the author’s thoughts respecting the downfall of popery and the commencement of the millennium.[60] Both men belonged to the wilder, ultra-orthodox reaches of the Presbyterian galaxy: Stavely was leader of the small ‘Covenanter’ sect whose history of opposition to the Anglican state was especially militant, while Wilson belonged to the thriving Seceder presbyteries. In this context, William Bird’s report that Neilson had placed ‘a foolish old Prophecy’ in the Northern Star to please the ‘Country Readers’ is entirely believable.[61]

Since the Belfast radicals have so often been accused of manipulating religious anxieties and aspirations—thereby working with entrenched sectarian feelings rather than against them—it seems worth considering the obvious fact that United Irish propaganda was also drenched with idealistic injunctions to set aside religious discord and leave the past behind. The message was summed up in ‘Advice to Paddy’, one of the popular songs contained in Paddy’s resource:

Arrah, Paddy, my joy,

What makes you so shy

To join with your Protestant brother, your brother?

Sure you never can thrive

If you both do not strive

To live on good terms with each other, each other.[62]

In 1792 several United Irishmen took part in a well-known mission to the Ulster borderlands in which they were concerned with winning over the Peep o’ Day Boys just as much as their enemies. In the summer of that year Tone, John Keogh and Richard McCormick travelled to Rathfriland and Newry in order to establish the cause of rioting in the area and to mediate between the two factions. They were met there by Neilson, whose father was the Presbyterian clergyman of nearby Ballyroney. The peacemakers received the support of several Volunteer captains, including Alexander Lowry and the Rev. Samuel Barber, then engaged in a struggle with the adherents of the Marquis of Downshire over the local corps. Keogh, accompanied by a Newry grocer of the O’Hanlon clan, made a second journey to Rathfriland in spite of hostility from some local Dissenters. The United Irishmen apparently enjoyed some successes, since one corps, originally raised on ‘Peep-of-day-boy principles’, was now on such good terms with their neighbours that local Catholics attended their parades and lent them arms.[63] As part of this reconciliation drive Keogh produced a handbill entitled Common sense, addressed ‘To the Presbyterians of the Province of Ulster’, containing a violent denunciation of the Beresford and Foster families.[64] Another handbill printed at Newry and distributed through Armagh, Down and Louth denounced the anti-French coalition as ‘a combination of kings fighting to destroy a wise and enlightened nation’ in an attempt to re-establish ‘that dark system of despotism and superstition’.[65] It is quite possible that tactics evolved following the Armagh expulsions, and that radicals sought to capitalise on Catholic fears of Orangemen. By 1797 ‘confused talk’ about Orangemen who had supposedly sworn a ‘diabolical’ oath to wade ankle-deep in Catholic blood had certainly circulated widely among the lower orders in parts of both Leinster and Munster.[66] In the Ulster borderlands, however, the evidence suggests that the United Irishmen had set out to challenge sectarianism where it was most virulent.

WEXFORD

There are good reasons for supposing that the mix of ‘secular’ politics, confessional divisions and social tensions exhibited by the history of Defenderism also shaped the rebellion in south Leinster. Indeed, Wexford has sometimes been called ‘the Armagh of the south’ since sectarian divisions could be found at all levels of society—gentry, middlemen and tenants. The northern half of the county (along with southern Wicklow) had a substantial Protestant population, amounting to 20–30 per cent in some parishes. This binary social structure was the product of the plantation of the 1620s, although many Old English families had held on to their lands until the Cromwellian settlement. Louis Cullen was the first scholar to plot the sectarian frontiers that marked the county, and the first to compare them with Armagh. Kevin Whelan, in his early work, also believed that the dense Protestant settlements of the north of the county were vital to the Wexford experience. In the baronies of Scarawalsh and Gorey, the storm centres of the rebellion, predominantly Protestant townlands were juxtaposed with Catholic ones. As in Ulster, social inequalities were closely related to confessional differences. The town of Enniscorthy, on the Portsmouth estate, resembled some of the planter towns of the north (including Armagh itself). Protestant families almost completely monopolised the slated houses around the Market Square and Church Street, while the Catholics clustered in the thatched cabins of Irish Street and the suburbs stretching towards Vinegar Hill. In the surrounding countryside, too, Catholic disadvantage can be charted all the way down the social ladder.[67] Jane Barber, whose family rented a medium-sized farm of twenty acres and a woollen workshop, recalled that their neighbours ‘of the better class’ were all Protestant, but those they employed were entirely Catholic.[68]

The economic resurgence of Wexford Catholics in the later eighteenth century was paralleled by their increased visibility as a religious presence. Their wealth was evident in chapel-building, and in the spread of new devotions and confraternities and charitable organisations. Just as the character of Wexford landlords might determine the composition of the tenants on their estates, so too the distribution of mass-houses and chapels was often shaped by landlord policy. Ordinary Catholics, while they may not have suffered directly from the penal laws, consequently felt the knock-on effects. Where Cromwellian gentry were in control, as in the baronies of Forth and Bargy, worship was confined to mass rocks and wooden scáthlanna. Elsewhere in County Wexford mud-walled and thatched mass-houses were spreading in the 1730s and 1740s, and by the 1780s there were more chapels opening in towns, in more prominent locations.[69] Catholic landowners like the Esmondes, Talbots and Devereuxes protected chapels, as did wealthy farmers such as the Sweetman family of Newbawn. In the north, meanwhile, hardline Protestant landlords might at best tolerate a chapel on the outer fringes of the estate.

Superimposed on this complex, divided society was an equally complex, divided political class. The dominance of a conservative Ascendancy group, led by the Loftus family (the Marquis of Ely), the Ogles, Rams and Tottenhams, was challenged by a vigorous liberal faction based on the Grogan, Colclough and Harvey families. Outside the county elite were the wealthy Catholic families who were prominent in the Catholic Committee from the 1780s—the Talbots, Esmondes, Hays, Devereuxes, Suttons and Mastersons. Some were the descendants of old dispossessed families, such as Thomas Cloney, who spoke scornfully of the ‘knot’ of Cromwellians in the Enniscorthy area who were ‘ever tenacious about the tenure by which they held their possessions and ever ready to crush the slightest ebullition of popular feeling’.[70] The Hay brothers were from a Norman, landed family whose land had been forfeited in the 1650s. Their father, Harvey, became a justice of the peace in 1793, the first Catholic juror for two hundred years in County Wexford.[71] James Edward Devereux complained of the air of superiority assumed by Protestant landlords and their retainers when they talked to Catholics, ‘not from any superiority of birth, fortune or talents’, but simply from their religion.[72] Prosperous Catholics, buoyed up by the agricultural boom in the third quarter of the century, deplored the ‘ignorant’, ‘low-bred’, ‘upstart’, ‘illiterate’, ‘vulgar’ magistrates pulled from the ranks of the minor Protestant gentry.[73] It was this latter group, Protestant middlemen like Hunter Gowan, Hawtrey White and the Rev. Roger Owens of Camolin, who formed the first Orange lodges along the Wicklow/Wexford border early in 1798 when militia units, many of them from the north, arrived bringing their Orange regalia with them.

In Wexford (as in Armagh) divisions within the gentry class were so bitter that magistrates were unable to co-operate in order to suppress disorder in 1797–8. Such party feeling was not new. In the aftermath of the money bill dispute of 1753, political resentments among the Wexford elite ran so high that a circuit judge reported that ‘they will not eat together even at assizes’.[74] In the 1770s the Wexford authorities had offered rewards for the prosecution of Catholics in possession of arms, and the closure of chapels allegedly used for Whiteboy meetings was threatened in Wexford, Carlow and Queen’s County.[75] Politicisation, in most recent work on Wexford, principally denotes the growth of such factionalism within county elites over the repeal of the penal laws. This is politicisation from above—from the ranks of the landed magnates, the lower gentry and middleman sectors—in which the views of the masses have to be inferred from a small amount of evidence concerning their betters. Practically nothing is known about the popular impact of the 1790 and 1797 elections—so central to Cullen’s thesis—which appear to have produced no pamphlets or handbills. Contrast this silence with the 1783 County Down election, which produced more than a hundred pages of addresses, songs and squibs, or that of 1789 when 144 separate items were printed.[76] In contemporary accounts of the Leinster risings there are certainly references to the use of symbols and rituals in creating a popular political culture—the world of fraternal oaths, secret passwords, green ribbons and handkerchiefs, and the Tree of Liberty—but not the longer build-up of Bastille Day celebrations, political banquets, parades and radical sermons.[77]

For most eighteenth-century historians, the development of the public sphere is associated above all with the growth of the press. Although the twice-weekly Wexford Herald was established in August 1788, few issues have survived, apart from several months in 1792–3.[78] Unlike the Northern Star, editorial comment was rare, and there were relatively few local letters of the kind that enable us to reconstruct something of Belfast’s rich hinterland. Yet the paper provided coverage of Burke’s Reflections on the revolution in France and published advertisements for political pamphlets on the Catholic question. Calls for meetings of freeholders and the resolutions of local bodies such as the Association of the Friends of the Constitution, Liberty and Peace were combined with accounts of radical demonstrations in other parts of Ireland, for example the Bastille Day celebrations in Dublin and the north and Catholic meetings in Meath and Waterford. There were signs too of the ripples caused by Edward Sweetman’s extraordinary speech to the Wexford freeholders’ meeting of September 1792, defended by a ‘Plain Farmer’ the following month. Along with Harvey and a handful of Wexford gentry and professional men, Sweetman had joined the Dublin Society of United Irishmen soon after its foundation. In its early years the Dublin meetings were troubled by recurrent squabbles, partly along moderate/radical lines and partly between denominational blocs. It was on one such occasion that Sweetman, a nominal conformist to the Established Church, boldly declared that ‘save and except some late exertions of the Presbyterians, the Catholics were the only people that ever contended for the independence of Ireland’.[79] He was also a prominent speaker at a Catholic Committee meeting in Dublin held in October 1792 to justify the organisation of the Convention. On this occasion he claimed that the Catholics were ‘the national strength and consequence’ of Ireland. ‘This country would not have the name of nation’, he pointedly remarked, ‘but for us.’[80]

Since Sweetman’s speech at the freeholders’ meeting appears to be the sole literary expression of Wexford radicalism, it is all the more remarkable that it has been so frequently overlooked by historians. By definition, the Wexford freeholders were all Protestants, so it must have been a bizarre experience to listen to a lecture from someone introducing himself as a man ‘born a victim to the popery laws, and driven at an early period into foreign climes for prohibited, imperfect education and scanty bread’.[81] That Irish mines were unexplored, fisheries neglected, trade and commerce restricted, and lands unimproved, was attributed to ‘the wide wasting pestilential influence of England’.[82] References to David Hume, Adam Smith and Arthur Young demonstrated Sweetman’s familiarity with the best-known political economists. But the most interesting aspect of his thought was his colonialist analysis of the Irish question. Although his bluntly assertive style sometimes recalls Tone’s Argument on behalf of the Catholics, Sweetman’s interpretation of Irish history, drawing on Sir John Davies and the ‘philosophical’ histories of Leland and Campbell, actually resembles the Irish writings of Edmund Burke. Following the invasion of Henry II, he believed, ‘every means which fraud could invent, avarice suggest, or violence enforce, were employed to plunder and destroy the brave and simple aborigines of the isle’, a criminal episode renewed in the seventeenth century with the Ulster plantation. Sweetman identified himself not with the aborigines, however, but ‘our English ancestors’—that is, the medieval Norman colonists who unlike ‘modern settlers’ sought to bury animosity ‘in the mutual peace and harmony of a final coalition and incorporation’.[83]

Wexford magistrates were not regular contributors to the Dublin Castle intelligence network. That Sweetman and his friends had built up a popular base in Wexford town during the 1792 Catholic campaign is suggested by Bishop Caulfield’s report that James Edward Devereux had acquired influence over the people ‘by his haranguing and specious promises of total emancipation’. Indeed, Caulfield thought the whole population ‘violent beyond belief’.[84] But hard evidence of popular politicisation in Wexford, the ‘hybrid of traditional agrarian aspirations and half-digested “French” principles’ found by Jim Smyth in Meath, has yet to be discovered. Even the Irish-language sources, surprisingly neglected by post-revisionists, have little to offer. As James Alexander observed in his contemporary account of the rebellion, the common people of Wexford spoke Irish amongst themselves.[85] The overwhelming message conveyed by Irish political poetry, however, was the legacy of sectarian and racial hostility that resulted from the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements. This is true even of Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin, who would absorb something of the more inclusive republicanism of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. Ó Longáin’s Cork yields more evidence of political awareness than Wexford town. In spite of his sympathy for Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Arthur O’Connor, however, his poem on the Wexford rising, Beir litir uain do’n Mhumhain (‘Carry a letter from us to Munster’) characterises the conflict as a straightforward bid to drive the ‘foreign boors’ out of the ancestral lands of the Gael.[86] The Ireland addressed by United Irish propaganda was not only a bilingual society, but was in a period of transition from a largely oral culture to an age of mass literacy, in which priests and schoolmasters supplied the crucial link between print and oral culture. Ó Longáin’s poem suggests some of the ways in which the republican message was transformed in the act of translation, and illustrates the difficulty of disentangling the new revolutionary politics from the old religious categories of thought.[87] On its own, then, the politicisation model fails to explain the character of the Wexford rising, or to account for the complexity of popular rebel mentalities, insofar as we are able to recapture them.

Inevitably, much of this chapter has been concerned with the deficiencies, blind spots and ideological slant of the primary sources. Fortunately our attention has recently been drawn to a handful of unpublished memoirs by Protestant women of either loyalist or liberal sympathies. Mostly written for private consumption, they are distinguished by a degree of sensitivity and humanity lacking in the more polemical works. Interestingly, they contain very little evidence of violence directed against women by the insurgents: in this respect the behaviour of the rebels contrasted sharply with that of the loyalists, for whom the abuse and rape of women was routine. Yet the experience of Protestant women was in many ways traumatic. Perhaps the most striking recurring theme in these personal testimonies is the ‘forced’ conversions or baptisms that took place in the areas controlled by the insurgents—reflecting the belief, prevalent among Protestants and Catholics alike, that all captives who refused to renounce the heresies of Luther and Calvin would lose their lives. Rumours circulated everywhere of intended massacres of Protestant civilians.

It was against this background, Elizabeth Richards claimed, that Father John Corrin of Wexford offered written ‘protections’ for fearful Protestants who were willing to abjure their faith: ‘Unless we consented to be christened by a Priest, we must die.’[88] The Richards family belonged to the more liberal-minded elements of the local gentry, for whom social connections with Catholics were part of everyday life. Almost certainly Father Corrin’s role was more benign than she appreciated. What he had in mind seems to have been a kind of ‘collusive’ conversion in which priests were prepared to go through the motions simply to shield Protestant individuals from ‘the mob’. Ordinary Catholics similarly attempted to protect their neighbours. Jane Barber, who lost fourteen uncles and cousins in the rising, related that her young siblings were handed a Catholic prayer-book by an Enniscorthy baker as a means of protection.[89] For some Protestants, however, these conversions involved public humiliation. Isabella Brownrigg, the wife of a Wexford barrister, was another lady with liberal connections. On 2 June she reported that ‘Mrs Lehunte and many many others went to the Chapel, renounced their Religion, were christened (for it seems we are not Christians), and were marched in Procession through the town.’[90] Dinah Goff, a Quaker girl aged just fourteen at the time of the rebellion, later described how her cousins Richard and Ann Goff were told by the United men that if they ‘refused to unite in the Roman Catholic forms of worship, they should be put to death & their house burned’.[91]

Another common feature emerging from the memoirs of Wexford women concerns the rituals of social inversion that accompanied the rebel seizure of power. Many of the women’s accounts record instances of politeness and kindness on the part of rebel men in which deference to their higher social status was made evident. They received food and assistance from complete strangers. But encounters with rebel women could be very different. Elizabeth Richards and her female relatives, shunted about from house to house, met three women who ‘sneered at us and looked exultingly at our shabby equipage’.[92] The sense of personal release, sudden elation and schadenfreude, is unmistakable. Later a Catholic acquaintance named Mary Byrne gloated with delight when Elizabeth and her relatives were persuaded to discuss baptism with Father Corrin. Accompanied by a servant bearing an enormous pike, Byrne ‘entered our parlour with an air of exultation’ and announced that a massacre of Protestants was about to take place.[93] It was a male rebel, however, who broke into the house of Jane Adams and advised her to send for a priest. The intruder, she recalled, quoted the prophecy of Jesus that ‘the first shall be last, and the last shall be first’, adding that ‘we had been first long enough’.[94] The sudden collapse of the deferential conduct that normally characterised social interaction in provincial Ireland, and the millenarian expectations generated by the initial rebel victories, should probably be viewed against the popular Jacobite tradition which looked forward to a final settling of ethnic scores.

The evidence reviewed above suggests that we need to be cautious when considering the role of sectarianism in 1798. Recent scholarship has helped to rehabilitate the Wexford ‘republic’ of June 1798, and to defend the local insurgents against charges of religious bigotry and the rank and file against indiscipline or brutality. Many of the leaders, including the unfortunate Bagenal Harvey, were probably civilian radicals. They had been active in the clubs of the early 1790s and no doubt retained links to the more moderate wing of the United Irishmen associated with Thomas Addis Emmet and William James MacNeven; but they had little direct involvement in the military structures recently extended into the county. Perhaps they were the ‘detached’ members of the United Irishmen mentioned by Edward Hay, whose public role in the agitation over Emancipation and reform had given them influence over the popular base. The prominence of Protestants such as Harvey, Anthony Perry and Matthew Keugh certainly conflicts with the absurd notion that 1798 was some kind of popish plot. Whatever authority these men possessed quickly disintegrated, however, as exhilaration gave way to the prospect of failure. Harvey or Keugh might have hoped to escape the executioner, as Edward Hay did. But summary execution was the most likely fate for the ordinary rebel. As many loyalist sources made clear, anyone found in civilian clothes, whatever their religion or political creed, was likely to be cut down by the motley ranks of regular and irregular crown forces. In this situation, it is not difficult to imagine how a small number of determined individuals—such as Captain Thomas Dixon at Wexford Bridge or John Murphy at Scullabogue—might instigate the systematic killing of loyalist prisoners. These notorious atrocities, seized upon by loyalists as proof of the incorrigible barbarity of Catholic Ireland, were not a product of the Wexford ‘republic’, but of its collapse.

It is equally true, of course, that the killing of Protestants at Scullabogue barn and Wexford Bridge were not wild aberrations. They were continuous with the sectarian anxieties of the previous few years—the rumours of impending massacres and the millenarian fantasies which circulated widely. The heightening of religious tensions in the spring of 1798 was attributed not just to the arrival of Orange-tinged militia units but to the spread of Defender cells from the Ulster borderlands, bringing with them prophecies of bloodshed. From around the middle of 1797, as we saw earlier, ‘confused talk’ about Orangemen had spread among the lower orders who abandoned their cabins to sleep ‘in ditches and old walls’.[95] Such graphic fears can be easily explained. From the beginning of 1798 carloads of dissidents were transported through the county, guarded by troops of cavalry, on their way to Duncannon Fort, where large numbers were dispatched to the fleet. James Alexander heard many cases of suspected rebels being flogged or strangled in the barrack-yard at Ross, and was convinced that these severities led to the rebellion breaking out prematurely (a view shared by many other liberal Protestants).[96] The basic elements of sectarian hatred in Wexford, including forced conversions, figure in accounts of all political shades, in both private diaries and high-profile publications. It was perhaps not surprising that Isabella Brownrigg should conclude that the Enlightenment ideals of the United Irishmen had not penetrated very far through their mass base. ‘The Rebel Leaders said they fought for Liberty, Emancipation, and Reform,’ she observed; ‘their Soldiers that they fought for Religion, to punish the Protestants, and to save their own lives.’[97]

It seems fitting to leave the last word to another of these Protestant ladies, whose memoirs have afforded a glimpse of the mixed feelings and clashing sympathies evident at a more personal level. The confusion and messiness of the Wexford rising and its brutal aftermath is vividly conveyed in their writings—the old grudges being settled, the mixed motivations of the insurgents, the examples of kindness and co-operation between Protestant and Catholic neighbours, and the vicious ineptitude of the government forces who mistook loyalists for rebels, confiscated provisions, and dispensed summary justice without hesitation. Elizabeth Richards has been quoted several times already. One of the more liberal voices among local Protestants, her father was a supporter of Catholic Emancipation, and several of her cousins were in fact United Irishmen. It comes as no surprise, then, that Elizabeth’s joy at the victory of crown forces at Vinegar Hill was complicated by distaste for loyalist excesses. All around her she heard the screaming of female rebels. When Elizabeth made her way to the family home, her relief at the restoration of order was consequently tinged with sympathy for some of the defeated insurgents, whose lives now depended upon the protection of their liberal Protestant neighbours. They included a relative of Father Corrin, the parish priest of Wexford town:

On our return home we saw from the garret windows houses in flames. I ought to be ashamed perhaps to own it, but it gave me pleasure. I considered this as a sign of the approach of the army.

About 5 o’clock we walked to the avenue-gate. The green boughs and pikes had nearly disappeared. Crowds of women and children and a few men were flying from Wexford. Many sought refuge at our house. They said the King’s troops were camped at the Wind Mill Hills, that they plundered every house and shot every man they saw.

We again went to Fairfield. Mr Codd, who had commanded the Rathaspick corps, and Mr O’Brien, nephew of Mr Corrin, the priest, were there. They wore their swords, cross belts, and green collars. The deep, the manly regret that Mr O’Brien seemed to feel for the overthrow of his party interested me for him. His countenance expressed despair. His arms were folded, his mind seemed abstracted from the surrounding objects. Some one observed, ‘We shall now have the blessings of peace restored.’

‘Yes,’ he replied with a smile of agony and indignation. ‘There will be peace, but we shall all be slaves.’[98]

Abbreviations

Arch. Hib.

Archivium Hibernicum

A.P.F.

Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide, Vatican City, Rome

A.S.V.

Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vatican City, Rome

B.L.

British Library

B.N.L.

Belfast News-Letter

Coll. Hib.

Collectanea Hibernica

C.S.P.D.

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic

D.D.A.

Dublin Diocesan Archives

E.C.I.

Eighteenth-Century Ireland

E.H.R.

English Historical Review

F.D.J.

Faulkner’s Dublin Journal

F.M.

Fondo Missioni (A.S.V.)

H.J.

Historical Journal

I.E.R.

Irish Ecclesiastical Record

I.E.S.H.

Irish Economic and Social History

I.H.S.

Irish Historical Studies

N.A.I.

National Archives of Ireland

N.H.I.

New History of Ireland

N.L.I.

National Library of Ireland

N.L.S.

National Library of Scotland

N.S.

Northern Star

P. & P.

Past and Present

P.R.I.A.

Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy

P.R.O.N.I.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

R.I.A.

Royal Irish Academy

S.O.C.G.

Scritture Originali Riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali (A.P.F.)

T.C.D.

Trinity College Dublin

T.N.A.

The National Archives, London

U.C.C.

University College Cork

U.C.D.

University College Dublin

References

Preface and Acknowledgments

1.John Tosh, The pursuit of history: aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history (3rd ed., Harlow, 2000), p. 101.

2.Ibid., p. 121.

3.The writing of this book was completed in December 2007. Consequently, I have been unable to take account of Professor Connolly’s own recent survey, Divided kingdom: Ireland, 1630–1800 (Oxford, 2008).

Introduction

1.J. C. Beckett, The Anglo-Irish tradition (London, 1976), p. 47.

2.Thomas Bartlett, ‘A New History of Ireland’ (review article), P.&P., no. 116 (1987), p. 210.

3.D. W. Miller, ‘Non-professional soldiery, c. 1600–1800’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds.), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), p. 324.

4.D. W. Hayton, Ruling Ireland, 1685–1742: politics, politicians and parties (Woodbridge, 2004); Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin civic politics and Irish Protestant patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997).

5.David Dickson, New foundations: Ireland, 1660–1800 (2nd ed., Dublin, 2000), p. xi.

6.See Marianne Elliot, ‘The origins and transformation of early Irish republicanism’, International Review of Social History, xxiii (1978), pp 405–28; also the essays reprinted in C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and popular protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987).

7.L. M. Cullen, ‘Catholics under the penal laws’, E.C.I., i (1986), pp 23–36; Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic Church in County Tipperary, 1700–1900’ in William Nolan (ed.), Tipperary: history and society (Dublin, 1985), pp 215–55; James Kelly, ‘The Catholic Church in the diocese of Ardagh, 1650–1870’ in R. G. Gillespie and Gerard Moran (eds.), Longford: essays in county history (Dublin, 1991), pp 63–91.

8.Hugh Fenning, The Irish Dominican province, 1698–1797 (Dublin, 1990).

9.Patrick Kelly, ‘“A Light to the Blind”: the voice of the dispossessed elite in the generation after the defeat at Limerick’, I.H.S., xxiv (1985), pp 431–62. There is still some uncertainty as to the authorship of this text.

10.Vincent Morley, Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–83 (Cambridge, 2002).

11.See Tom Dunne, ‘Subaltern voices? Poetry in Irish, popular insurgency and the 1798 rebellion’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22/3 (Nov. 1998), pp 31–44.

12.Jim Smyth, The men of no property (Basingstoke, 1992), pp 10, 14, 32.

13.Seamus Deane, A short history of Irish literature (London, 1986), p. 36. See also idem, Strange country: modernity and nationhood in Irish writing since 1790 (Oxford, 1997), esp. pp 181–97.

14.Donald T. Torchiana, ‘Jonathan Swift, the Irish, and the Yahoos: the case reconsidered’, Philological Quarterly, liv, no. 1 (winter 1975), pp 195–212.

15.For an overview see Joseph Ruane, ‘Colonialism and the interpretation of Irish historical development’ in Marilyn Silverman and P. H. Gulliver (eds), Approaching the past: historical anthropology through Irish case studies (New York, 1992), pp 293–323.

16.Kevin Whelan, ‘The revisionist debate in Ireland’, Boundary 2, 31/1 (2004), pp 179–205.

17.Tom Paulin, Ireland and the English crisis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1984), p. 155.

18.Colin Graham, ‘“Liminal spaces”: post-colonial theories and Irish culture’, Irish Review, xvi (1994), pp 36–7; Stephen Howe, Ireland and the Empire: colonial legacies in Irish history and culture (Oxford, 2000).

19.Declan Kiberd, Irish classics (London, 2000), p. 74.

20.Anthony Dopping (ed.), Modus tenendi parliamenta et concilia in Hibernia (Dublin, [1692]).

21.David W. Miller, ‘The Armagh troubles, 1784–95’ in Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly, jr (eds), Irish peasants: violence and political unrest, 1780–1914 (Madison, Wis., 1983), p. 177.

22.Walter Harris, The ancient and present state of the county of Down (Dublin, 1744), pp vi, 17–19, 108–9, 112–19. See also Eoin Magennis, ‘“A land of milk and honey”: the Physico-Historical Society, improvement and the surveys of mid-eighteenth-century Ireland’, P.R.I.A., cii, sect. C (2002), pp 199–217.

23.William Henry to Duke of Newcastle, 23 Sept. 1765 (B.L., Add. MS 32970, f. 25).

24.W. Britanno-Hibernus, An appeal to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1749), p. 8.

25.Ibid., pp 5, 9.

26.L. M. Cullen, The hidden Ireland: re-assessment of a concept (Mullingar, 1988).

27.David Armitage, ‘Literature and empire’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, i: The origins of empire: British overseas enterprise to the close of the seventeenth century (Oxford, 1998), p. 102.

28.See Colin Kidd, British identities before nationalism: ethnicity and nationhood in the Atlantic world, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999).

29.Robert Howard, A sermon preached in Christ-Church, Dublin; before their Excellencies the Lords Justices, on Tuesday October the 23d, 1722 (Dublin, 1722), pp 11–12. For the background see Hannah Franziska Augstein, ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), Race: the origins of an idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol, 1996).

30.[Charles O’Conor], A counter-appeal to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1749), p. 8.

31.The speech of Edward Sweetman, captain of a late independent company, at a meeting of the freeholders of the county of Wexford (Dublin, 1792), pp 5, 6, 8, 16.

32.Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, 2003), p. 3.

33.Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver and genocide: barbarism and the European imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford, 1991,) pp 81–2.

34.Charles Lucas, An eleventh address to the free citizens, and freeholders, of the city of Dublin (Dublin, 1749), p. 8.

35.Istvan Hont, Jealousy of trade: international competition and the nation-state in historical perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), ch. 2.

36.David Armitage, The ideological origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 6.

37.John Cary, A vindication of the parliament of England (London, 1698).

38.Patrick Kelly, ‘The Irish Woollen Export Prohibition Act of 1699: Kearney revisited’, I.E.S.H., vii (1980), p. 28.

39.L. M. Cullen, ‘Galway merchants in the outside world, 1650–1800’ in Diarmuid Ó Cearbhaill (ed.), Galway: town and gown, 1484–1984 (Dublin, 1984), pp 63–89.

40.Hyacinth Kennedy to Charles O’Kelly, 23 Apr. 1760, in Hugh Fenning, ‘The mission to St Croix in the West Indies: 1750–1769’, Arch. Hib., xxv (1962), pp 84–5.

41.Dominic Allen to Charles O’Kelly, 29 Apr. 1760, ibid., pp 86–7.

42.Nini Rodgers, Equiano and anti-slavery in eighteenth-century Belfast (Belfast, 2000).

43.S. J. Connolly, Religion, law, and power: the making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), p. 2.

44.S. J. Connolly, ‘Tupac Amaru and Captain Right: a comparative perspective on eighteenth-century Ireland’ in David Dickson and Cormac Ó Gráda (eds), Refiguring Ireland: essays in honour of L. M. Cullen (Dublin, 2003), p. 95.

45.This claim is retained in the much-revised second edition: English society, 1660–1832: religion, ideology and politics during the ancien régime (Cambridge, 2000), pp 320–21.

46.John Brewer, The sinews of power: war, money and the English state, 1688–1783 (London, 1989).

47.Paul Langford, A polite and commercial people: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989).

48.Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven & London, 1992).

49.Among many examples see Duke Tyrell, A sermon preach’d at St Andrew’s, Dublin, before the Honourable House of Commons, on Friday October 23d. 1719 (Dublin, 1719), p. 24; Thomas Campbell, A philosophical survey of the south of Ireland (London, 1777), pp 325–6.

50.Benjamin Bacon, A sermon preach’d at St Andrew’s, Dublin, before the Honourable House of Commons, on Sunday the Twenty-Third of October, 1743 (Dublin, 1743), p. 7.

51.For the confessional state see R. P. Hsia, Social discipline in the Reformation: central Europe, 1550–1750 (London, 1989).

52.Nicholas, Viscount Taaffe [Charles O’Conor], Observations on affairs in Ireland, from the settlement in 1691 (Dublin, 1766), p. 25; see also pp 10, 21.

53.J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of composite monarchies’, P.&P., no. 137 (Nov. 1992), pp 48–71.

54.H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘The Italian parliaments from their origins to the end of the eighteenth century’, Journal of Italian History, i (1978), pp 18–49.

55.[Henry Maxwell], An essay upon an union of Ireland with England (repr., Dublin, 1704), p. 5.

56.William Molyneux, The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated (Dublin, 1698), p. 174.

57.Liam Chambers, Michael Moore, c. 1639–1726: Provost of Trinity, Rector of Paris (Dublin, 2005).

58.L. W. B. Brockliss and P. Ferté, ‘Irish clerics in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, P.R.I.A., lxxxvii, sect. C (1987), pp 527–72.

59.W. E. H. Lecky, A history of Ireland in the eighteenth century (5 vols, London, 1892), i, 250.

60.Sir James Caldwell, A brief examination of the question whether it is expedient in either a religious or political view, to pass an act to enable papists to take real securities for money which they may lend (2nd ed., Dublin, 1764), p. 27.

61.Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms’, H.J., 39/2 (1996) pp 361–82.

62.Samuel Madden, Reflections and resolutions proper for the gentlemen of Ireland (Dublin, 1738) p. 107.

63.Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American college ideal (New York, 1971), ch. 2.

64.Thomas Witherow (ed.), Historical and literary memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland (2 vols, Belfast, 1879–80), ii, 174.

65.Norman Vance, ‘Volunteer thought: William Crawford of Strabane’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political discourse in early modern Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp 257–69.

66.William Bruce, ‘The progress of non-subscription to creeds’, Christian Moderator, i (1827), p. 274.

67.See Joep Leerssen, ‘Anglo-Irish patriotism and its European context: notes towards a reassessment’, E.C.I., iii (1988), pp 16–21; Oliver Zimmer, A contested nation: history, memory and nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891 (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 2.

68.[Joseph Pollock], Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial (Dublin, 1779), pp 15–18.

69.H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘Composite states, representative institutions, and the American Revolution’, Historical Research, lxii (1989), pp 135–53.

70.J. H. Elliott, National and comparative history: an inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 10 May 1991 (Oxford, 1991), p. 20.

71.J. C. Beckett, ‘The study of Irish history: an inaugural lecture’, reprinted in idem, Confrontations: studies in Irish history (London, 1972), p. 23. For a tough-minded critique see J. J. Lee, ‘Irish history’ in Neil Buttimer, Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin (eds), The heritage of Ireland (Cork, 2000), pp 117–19.

72.Alvin Jackson, ‘J. C. Beckett: politics, faith, scholarship’, I.H.S., xxxiii, no. 130 (Nov. 2002), pp 129–50.

73.F. S. L. Lyons, quoted in Bartlett, ‘A New History of Ireland’, p. 207.

74.T. W. Moody, ‘Irish history and Irish mythology’ (1978), reprinted in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish history: the debate on historical revisionism, 1938–1994 (Dublin, 1994), p. 71.

75.See the remarks about Beckett made by Carole Fabricant in ‘Swift as Irish historian’ in Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley (eds), Walking Naboth’s vineyard: new studies of Swift (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995), pp 40–41.

76.Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the twentieth century: from scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge (Middletown, Conn., 1997).

77.Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the truth about history (New York, 1994), p. 1.

78.Beckett, ‘Study of Irish history’, p. 13.

79.J. C. Beckett, ‘Introduction’ in T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland, iv: Eighteenth-century Ireland, 1690–1800 (Oxford, 1986), p. xxxix.

80.Paul Schroeder, The transformation of European politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), p. v.

81.Bacon, Sermon preach’d at St Andrew’s, Dublin . . . the Twenty-Third of October, 1743, p. 21.

Chapter 1: English Difficulties and Irish Opportunities

1.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Abstract and judgement of Saint-Pierre’s project for perpetual peace’ (1756) in Stanley Hoffman and David P. Fidler (eds), Rousseau on international relations (Oxford, 1991), p. 54.

2.John Brewer, The sinews of power: war, money and the English state, 1688–1783 (London, 1989); T. C. W. Blanning, The culture of power and the power of culture: old regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002). The phrase was first used by J. R. Seeley.

3.John Childs, The Nine Years War and the British army, 1688–1697 (Manchester, 1991), p. 1.

4.T. C. W. Blanning, The origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), pp 37–8.

5.Patrick M. Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: a study in high politics, 1798–1801 (Dublin, 1999). p. 5.

6.Thomas Bartlett, ‘“A weapon of war yet untried”: Irish Catholics and the armed forces of the crown, 1760–1830’ in T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds), Men, women and war: Historical Studies XVIII (Dublin, 1993), p. 67.

7.James Kelly, ‘“The Glorious and Immortal Memory”: commemoration and Protestant identity in Ireland, 1660–1800’, P.R.I.A., xciv, sect. C (1994), p. 31.

8.[Philostelus], A letter to the Right Honourable Sir Ralph Gore (Dublin, 1732), p. 13. The foundation stone of a memorial obelisk on the Boyne was laid in 1736. It was blown up in 1926.

9.Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘James Our True King: the ideology of Irish royalism in the seventeenth century’ in D. G. Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political thought in ireland since the seventeenth century (London, 1993), pp 7–35.

10.This statement is often attributed to Tone himself but appears to date from the late nineteenth century. I am grateful to C. J. Woods for advice on this matter.

11.André Corvisier, Armies and societies in Europe, 1494–1789, trans. Abigail T. Siddell (Bloomington, Ind., 1979).

12.Frank Tallett, War and society in early-modern Europe, 1495–1715 (London, 1992), p. 8.

13.Ibid., p. 177.

14.George Story, An impartial history of the wars of Ireland (London, 1693), pp [iv–v].

15.Brewer, Sinews of power.

16.The classic works here are J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of composite monarchies’, P.&P., no. 137 (Nov. 1992), 48–71, and H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘Dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale: monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe’ in idem, Politicians and virtuosi (London, 1986), pp 1–25. For the British variant see John Robertson’s excellent ‘Union, state and empire: the Britain of 1707 in its European setting’ in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An imperial state at war: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1993), pp 224–57.

17.J. H. Elliott, ‘Revolts in the Spanish monarchy’ in Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene (eds), Preconditions of revolution in early modern Europe (Baltimore & London, 1970), p. 113.

18.See William King, Europe’s deliverance from France and slavery: a sermon preached at St Patrick’s Church, Dublin, on the 16th of November, 1690 (Dublin, 1691), pp 2, 8.

19.John Brewer, ‘The eighteenth-century British state: contexts and issues’ in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An imperial state at war: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1993), pp 52–71.

20.Charles Ivar McGrath, The making of the eighteenth-century Irish constitution: government, parliament and the revenue, 1692–1714 (Dublin, 2000).

21.See, for example, [Simon Clement], An answer to Mr Molyneux his ‘Case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated’ (London, 1698), p. 44.

22.See David Armitage, The ideological origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 6.

23.Quoted in Jack Greene, Peripheries and center: constitutional development in the extended polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga. & London, 1986), p. 24. For the background see Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge, 1961), ch. 3; Martin Stephen O’Flaherty, ‘The Empire strikes back: Annesley v. Sherlock and the triumph of parliamentary sovereignty’, Columbia Law Review, lxxxvii (1987), pp 593–622.

24.P. J. Marshall, The making and unmaking of empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), p. 160.

25.Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and national identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge, 1998).

26.Malachi Postlethwayt, Britain’s commercial interests explained and improved (2 vols, London, 1757). For the background see James Kelly, ‘The origins of the Act of Union: an examination of unionist opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1800’, I.H.S., xxv, no. 99 (May 1987), pp 236–63.

27.Thomas Bartlett, ‘The augmentation of the army in Ireland, 1767–1769’, E.H.R., xcvi (1981), pp 540–59.

28.Tallett, War and society in early-modern Europe, pp 16ff.

29.Andrew Fletcher, Political works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1997), p. 193.

30.H. M. Scott, ‘Prussia’s emergence as a European Great Power, 1740–1763’ in Philip G. Dwyer (ed.), The rise of Prussia, 1700–1830 (Harlow, 2000), pp 159–64.

31.‘Mémoire sur l’estat de l’Irlande’ (Bibiothèque Nationale [Rue de Richelieu] Paris, Manuscrits Français, Nouvelles Acquisitions, 7487, ff 228–30).

32.Marianne Elliott, Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (London, 1982), pp 136–40.

33.Paul Schroeder, The transformation of European politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), ch. 1. This last principle first came to the fore in the Treaty of Utrecht: see Andreas Osiander, The states system of Europe, 1641–1990: peacemaking and the conditions of international stability (Oxford, 1994), ch. 2; Michael W. Doyle, Ways of war and peace (New York, 1997), ch. 5.

34.F. H. Hinsley, Power and the pursuit of peace: theory and practice in the history of relations between states (Cambridge, 1963), pp 162–3, 166.

35.Schroeder, The transformation of European politics, pp 17–18.

36.Quoted in H. M. Scott, British foreign policy in the age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990), p. 202.

37.Stephen Conway, ‘Britain and the impact of the American war’, War in History, 2/2 (July 1995), pp 127–50.

38.See Jonathan R. Dull, The French navy and American independence: a study of arms and diplomacy, 1774–1787 (Princeton, 1975), esp. pp 34n, 129–34. See also Orville T. Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French diplomacy in the age of revolution, 1719–1787 (Albany, 1982), p. 268.

39.Thomas Bartlett, ‘This famous island set in a Virginian sea: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801’ in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii: The eighteenth century (Oxford, 2001), p. 270.

40.David Armitage, ‘The Declaration of Independence and international law’, William and Mary Quarterly, 59/1 (2002), p. 47.

41.Richard Tuck, The rights of war and peace: political thought and the international order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999), p. 194.

42.Hinsley, Power and the pursuit of peace, pp 24–9.

43.Rousseau, ‘Saint-Pierre’s project for perpetual peace’, pp 69, 72, 81, 90.

44.Merle L. Perkins, Voltaire’s concept of international order (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, xxxvi) (Geneva, 1965), ch. 4.

45.[Theobald Wolfe Tone], An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (Belfast, 1791), p. 24.

46.T. C. W. Blanning, ‘Liberation or occupation? Theory and practice in the French revolutionaries’ treatment of civilians outside France’ in Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (eds), Civilians in the path of war (Lincoln, Nebr., 2002), p. 131.

47.Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998), p. 592.

48.An essay on the use and necessity of establishing a militia in Ireland (Dublin, 1767), p. 15.

49.For an example see Cornelius G. Buttimer, ‘An Irish text on the “War of Jenkins’ Ear”’, Celtica, xxi (1990), pp 80–81.

50.Abp King to Abp Wake, 5 Mar. 1720, quoted in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: the man, his works, and the age, iii: Dean Swift (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 153.

51.Reasons for an augmentation of the army on the Irish establishment (Dublin, 1768), p. 12.

52.Lt-Col. Caroline Frederick Scott, ‘Irish remarks, or Observations on discipline’ (1750), quoted in J. A. Houlding, Fit for service: the training of the British army, 1715–95 (Oxford, 1981), p. viii.

53.Thomas Bartlett, ‘Army and society in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in conflict: the revolutionary war in Ireland and its aftermath (Belfast, 1990), pp 173–82.

54.Houdling, Fit for service, p. 55.

55.K. P. Ferguson, ‘The army in Ireland from the Restoration to the Act of Union’ (Ph.D. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1980), p. 60.

56.Houlding, Fit for service, pp 8–10.

57.Reasons for an augmentation of the army on the Irish establishment, p. 5.

58.Houlding, Fit for service, pp 52–5.

59.Ferguson, ‘Army in Ireland’, p. 78.

60.The secret history and memoirs of the barracks in Ireland (London, 1747), p. 22.

61.Alan J. Guy, ‘The Irish military establishment, 1660–1776’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), p. 226.

62.Michael Duffy, Soldiers, sugar and seapower: the British expeditions to the Caribbean and the war against revolutionary France (Oxford, 1987), pp 134–5.

63.Beresford to Auckland, 28 Jan. 1797 (B.L., Add. MS 34454, f. 99).

64.Carhampton to Dalrymple, 24 Dec. 1796 (B.L., Add. MS 33102, f. 413).

65.[Sir Hercules Langrishe], Considerations on the dependencies of Great Britain. With observations on a pamphlet intitled ‘The present state of the nation’ (London, 1769), p. 44.

66.Ferguson, ‘Army in Ireland’, p. 99.

67.T. C. Barnard, ‘Athlone, 1685; Limerick, 1710: religious riots or charivaris?’, Studia Hibernica, no. 27 (1993), pp 71–2.

68.An account of the procession at Londonderry, August 1st 1716 (Dublin, n.d.) (N.L.I., LO folder 9/15).

69.James Kelly, ‘“The Glorious and Immortal Memory”: commemoration and Protestant identity in Ireland, 1660–1800’ in P.R.I.A., xciv, sect. C (1994), p. 25.

70.Ferguson, ‘Army in Ireland’, p. 98.

71.Bartlett, Life of Tone, p. 17.

72.William Henry Tone, A letter to an officer . . . being an attempt to illustrate some particular institutions of the Maharashtra people; principally relative to their system of war and finance (Bombay, 1799; repr., London, 1799).

73.See C. A. Bayly, ‘Ireland, India and the Empire: 1780–1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., x (2000), p. 383.

74.Elliott, Tone, ch. 3.

75.Ibid., p. 56.

76.Richard Joseph Sullivan’s works include the anonymously published Analysis of the political history of India. In which is considered the present situation of the East, and the connection of its several powers with the Empire of Great Britain (London, 1779).

77.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, p. 34. See also Nancy J. Curtin, ‘The Belfast uniform: Theobald Wolfe Tone’, Eire–Ireland, 20/2 (summer 1985), pp 40–69.

78.Toby Barnard, A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (London, 2003), p. 178.

79.Ibid., p. 177.

80.Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: the British soldier and war in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 318.

81.Quoted in Terence Denman, ‘“Hibernia officina militum”: Irish recruitment to the British regular army, 1660–1815’, Irish Sword, xx, no. 80 (winter 1996), p. 150.

82.Charles Forman,. A defence of the courage, honour and loyalty of the Irish-nation (5th ed., Dublin, 1735), p. 49.

83.Denman, ‘Irish recruitment to the British regular army’, p. 154.

84.P. J. Marshall, ‘“Cornwallis triumphant”: war in India and the British public in the late eighteenth century’ in Laurence Freedman, Paul Hayes and Robert O’Neill (eds), War, strategy, and international politics: essays in honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford, 1992), pp. 62–3. I am grateful to Peter Marshall for bringing this verse to my attention.

85.Thomas Russell, A letter to the people of Ireland, on the present situation of the country (Belfast, 1796), pp 20, 22.

86.N. A. M. Rodger, ‘Mutiny or subversion? Spithead and the Nore’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 561–2.

87.Ibid., p. 554.

88.Denman, ‘Irish recruitment to the British regular army’, pp 163–4.

89.The appeal of the people of Ulster to their countrymen, and to the empire at large [Belfast, 14 Apr. 1797].

90.Ibid., p. 1.

91.Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, The Intelligencer (London, 1729), pp 86–7.

92.Reasons for an augmentation of the army on the Irish establishment, p. 13.

93.Barnard, New anatomy, p. 323.

94.Ferguson, ‘Army in Ireland’, p. 23.

95.Maurice J. Bric, ‘The Whiteboy movement in Tipperary, 1760–1780’ in William Nolan (ed.), Tipperary: history and society (Dublin, 1985), p. 158.

96.Lt-Col. Samuel Bagshawe to Thomas Waite, 29 July 1753, in Alan J. Guy (ed.), Colonel Samuel Bagshawe and the army of George II, 1731–1762 (Publications of the Army Record Society, vi) (London, 1990), pp 117–18.

97.A full . . . account of a . . . battle which was fought on . . . the 28th day of February, 1724–5, in Oxmantown-Green, between the mobb of the town and the standing army (Dublin, 1725) (single sheet).

98.A true state of the present affairs of Limerick (London, 1726), p. 13.

99.These figures are taken from a forthcoming article by Martyn Powell on the subject of urban houghing. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to read this in advance of publication.

100.Vincent Morley, Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (Cambridge, 2002), pp 181–3, 255–62, 271–2, 315–16.

101.Ibid., p. 271.

102.Connolly, Religion, law, and power, p. 217.

103.Bp John Evans to Abp Wake, 10 Dec. 1718 (Christ Church, Oxford, Wake MSS, vol. xiii, no. 30).

104.Sir Richard Cox to Edward Southwell, 24 Oct. 1706 (B.L., Add. MS 38154, f. 6).

Chapter 2: The Irish Enlightenment and its Enemies

1.Declaration of the Catholic Society of Dublin (Dublin, 1791), p. 3.

2.[Theobald Wolfe Tone], An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (Belfast, 1791), pp 22, 24.

3.John Nassau, The cause of the Roman Catholicks pleaded (Dublin, 1792), p. 3.

4.Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (2nd ed., Basingstoke, 2001).

5.J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001).

6.Franco Venturi, Utopia and reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), p. 133; John Robertson, ‘Franco Venturi’s Enlightenment’, P.&P., no. 137 (1992), pp 183–206.

7.Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world (London, 2000), p. 3.

8.Ibid., p. 88.

9.For a historiographical summary see John Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), introduction.

10.The collected works of Dugald Stewart, ed. William Hamilton (11 vols, Edinburgh, 1854–60), i, 428, 429n.

11.Carlo Denina, An essay on the revolutions of literature, trans. John Murdoch (London, 1771), p. 283.

12.[James Arbuckle et al.], A collection of letters and essays on several subjects, lately published in the Dublin Journal (2 vols, London, 1729), i, 259.

13.Ibid., p. 368.

14.Ibid, pp 324–5.

15.Ibid., p. 3.

16.The Oceana of James Harrington, Esq. and his other works [ed. John Toland] (Dublin, 1737), pp i, iv.

17.David Hayton, ‘From barbarian to burlesque: English images of the Irish, c. 1660–1750’, I.E.S.H., xv (1988), pp 5–31.

18.[Oliver Goldsmith], An inquiry into the present state of polite learning in Europe (London, 1759), pp 183–4.

19.Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, ed. A. C. Elias (2 vols, Athens, Ga., 1997).

20.James Barry, An account of a series of pictures, in the Great Room of the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (London, 1783), p. 40.

21.Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Sir Hans Sloane: collector, scientist, antiquary, founding father of the British Museum (London, 1994).

22.Figures taken from Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and popular culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 38.

23.John Brewer, Pleasures of the imagination: English culture in the eighteenth century (London, 1997), p. 167; Roger Chartier, ‘Do books make revolutions?’ in idem, The cultural origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C., 1991), p. 69.

24.Whitley Stokes, Projects for re-establishing the internal peace and tranquillity of Ireland (Dublin, 1799), p. 41.

25.R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the age of imperialism and revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979), p. 473.

26.Grame Kirkham, ‘Literacy in north-west Ulster, 1680–1860’ in Mary Daly and David Dickson (eds), The origins of popular literacy in Ireland (Dublin, 1990), pp 73–96.

27.J. R. R. Adams, The printed word and the common man: popular culture in Ulster, 1700–1900 (Belfast, 1987), pp 37–9.

28.S. J. Connolly, Religion, law, and power: the making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), pp 151–2; McDowell, Ireland in the age of imperialism, pp 90–91.

29.Hugh Fenning, ‘The library of a preacher of Drogheda: John Donnelly, O.P. (d. 1748)’, Coll. Hib., xviii–xix (1976–7), pp 72–104; idem, ‘The library of the Augustinians of Galway in 1731’, Coll. Hib., xxxi–xxxii (1989–90), pp 162–95.

30.Thomas O’Connor, ‘Religious change, 1550–1800’ in Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (eds), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii: The Irish book in English, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 2006), p. 186.

31.Ibid., p. 187.

32.Máire Kennedy, French books in eighteenth-century Ireland (Oxford, 2001), p. 18.

33.Robert F. Cummins with Hugh Fenning, ‘The constitutions of the diocese of Cashel: “The New Psalter of Cashel” (1737) and three pastoral letters of Archbishop Christopher Butler’, Arch. Hib., lvi (2002), p. 158.

34.The case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland: in relation to the bill against the growth of popery (repr., Dublin 1703).

35.See Z.L., A letter from a gentleman of the Church of Rome, in the diocess of Cloyn to his neighbours of the same profession (handbill, n.p., 1750). The only known copy is in the Vatican Archives, Fondo Missioni, 117, reprinted in Hugh Fenning, ‘Some eighteenth-century broadsides’, Coll. Hib., xii (1969), pp 52–4.

36.Toby Barnard, ‘The languages of politeness and sociability in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political discourse in early modern Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp 199–201.

37.Colm Lennon, ‘The print trade, 1700–1800’ in Gillespie and Hadfield (eds), Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii, 75, 76 (map).

38.Ibid., p. 87.

39.Marie Louise Legg (ed.), The Synge letters: Bishop Edward Synge to his daughter Alicia, Roscommon to Dublin, 1746–1752 (Dublin, 1996), p. 210.

40.Drennan to McTier, [1786], in Jean Agnew (ed.), The Drennan–McTier letters (3 vols, Dublin, 1998–9), i, 255. Drennan was then living in Newry.

41.Marion Deane (ed.), Belmont Castle, or Suffering sensibility by Theobald Wolfe Tone and divers hands (Dublin, 1998), p. 2.

42.Mary Leadbetter, Memoirs of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton (London, 1822), pp 52–3.

43.John Richardson, A proposal for the conversion of the popish natives of Ireland (Dublin, 1711), p. 22.

44.Sean Connolly, ‘A woman’s life in eighteenth-century Ireland: the case of Letitia Bushe’, H.J., 43/2 (2000), p. 443.

45.S. J. Connolly, ‘Family, love and marriage: some evidence from the early eighteenth century’ in Margaret McCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women in early modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991), p. 286. The day-to-day care of children was generally confided to servants.

46.Tom Dunne, Rebellion: memoir, memory and 1798 (Dublin, 2004), p. 156.

47.Samuel Madden, Reflections and resolutions proper for the gentlemen of Ireland (Dublin, 1738), p. 103.

48.Hugh Fenning, The undoing of the friars of Ireland: the novitiate question in the eighteenth century (Louvain, 1972), p. 8.

49.Bp Patrick McDonough (1748), quoted ibid., p. 43.

50.J. S. Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion: the Whiteboys of 1769–76’, P.R.I.A., lxxxiii, sect. C (1983), p. 312.

51.Garret FitzGerald, ‘Estimates for baronies of minimum level of Irish-speaking amongst successive decennial cohorts: 1771–1781 to 1861–1871’, P.R.I.A., lxxxiv, sect. C (1984), pp 117–155.

52.Patrick Kelly ‘“A Light to the Blind”: the voice of the dispossessed elite in the generation after the defeat at Limerick’, I.H.S., xxiv, no. 96 (Nov. 1985), p. 432 n. 6; Ó Ciosáin, Print and popular culture, p. 105.

53.‘Précis of the reply of Messrs Bourke and Daton, provisors of the Irish College, Paris, to the memoir of the Irish priest-students of the same college’ in Patrick Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers (2 vols, Dublin, 1995), i, 231 and n. 11.

54.Arthur M. Melzer, The natural goodness of man: on the system of Rousseau’s thought (Chicago, 1990), p. ix.

55.Robert Darnton, ‘Readers respond to Rousseau: the fabrication of Romantic sensitivity’ in idem, The Great Cat Massacre (London 1984), pp 235–6.

56.The discourse which carried the praemium at the Academy of Dijon, in MDCCL (Dublin, 1751), pp vi–vii.

57.John James Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia; or, An essay on education, trans. [Thomas] Nugent (2 vols, Dublin, n.d.), translator’s preface.

58.Drennan to McTier, [1784], Drennan–McTier letters, i, 184.

59.Drennan to McTier, 14 Oct. 1794, ibid., ii, 103.

60.Drennan to Samuel McTier, [July 1792], ibid., i, 410.

61.Drennan to McTier, 23 Aug. 1802, ibid., iii, 63–4. Cf. Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: the early life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (London, 1982), pp 24–5.

62.M. J. Morgan, Molyneux’s question: vision, touch and the philosophy of perception (Cambridge, 1977); Shaun Gallagher, How the body shapes the mind (Oxford, 2005).

63.Patrick Kelly, ‘Locke and Molyneux: the anatomy of a friendship’, Hermathena, no. 126 (1979), pp 38–54.

64.John Locke, An essay concerning humane understanding (5th ed., London, 1706), p. 3.

65.John Marshall, John Locke: resistance, religion and responsibility (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 9.

66.K. Theodore Hoppen, ‘The Dublin Philosophical Society and the new learning in Ireland’, I.H.S., xiv, no. 54 (Sept. 1964), pp 99–118; J. G. Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin, 1656–1698, ed. P. H. Kelly (Blackrock, 1982).

67.See the account of Molyneux’s life in the Birch Collection, apparently written by his son sometime around 1730 (B.L., Add. MS 4223. f. 34v).

68.‘Minutes of the Philosophical Society of Dublin’ (B.L. Add. MS 4811, f. 141).

69.Muriel McCarthy, ‘An eighteenth-century Dublin bibliophile’, Irish Arts Review, iii, no. 4 (winter 1986), pp 29–33.

70.Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: the man, his works, and the age, i: Mr Swift and his contemporaries (London, 1962), ch. 8.

71.Sciothericum telescopicum; or, A new contrivance of adapting a telescope to an horizontal dial for observing the moment of time by day or night (Dublin, 1686), ‘epistle’.

72.Anne Goldgar, Impolite learning: conduct and community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (London, 1995), esp. ch. 4.

73.Locke to Molyneux, 16 July 1692, Molyneux to Locke, 17 Aug. 1692, in Some familiar letters between Mr Locke, and several of his friends (London, 1708), pp 1, 5.

74.Ibid., pp 4, 17, 19, 235.

75.Molyneux to Locke, 24 Dec. 1695, ibid., p. 133.

76.Molyneux to Locke, 26 Sept. 1696, ibid., p. 163.

77.Ibid., pp 190, 216.

78.Locke to Molyneux, 26 Dec. 1692, ibid., p. 20.

79.Patrick Kelly, ‘The Irish Woollen Export Prohibition Act of 1699: Kearney revisited’, I.E.S.H., vii (1980), pp 22–43.

80.Charles Davenant, An essay upon the probable methods of making the people gainers in the balance of trade (London, 1699), p. 114.

81.K. T. Hoppen, The common scientist in the seventeenth century: a study of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1708 (London, 1970), p. 145.

82.Andrew Fletcher, Political works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1997).

83.Martyn P. Thompson, ‘Significant silences in Locke’s Two treatises of government: constitutional history, contract and law’, H.J., 31/2 (1987), pp 292–3.

84.N. T. Phillipson, ‘Culture and society in the eighteenth-century province: the case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’ in Lawrence Stone (ed.), The university in society (2 vols, Oxford, 1975), ii, 407–48.

85.Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The spirit of the laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge, 1989), p. 238.

86.Eoin Magennis, ‘“A land of milk and honey”: the Physico-Historical Society, improvement and the surveys of mid-eighteenth-century Ireland’, P.R.I.A., cii, sect. C (2002), pp 199–217.

87.James Cuffe, ‘A short natural description of western coast of Ireland . . .’ (May 1739) (Armagh Public Library, Physico-Historical Society Papers).

88.J. A. I. Champion, ‘Enlightened erudition and the politics of reading in John Toland’s circle’, H.J., 49/1 (2006), pp 111–41. Martin Martin, A description of the Western Islands of Scotland (2nd ed., London, 1716), with annotations by John Toland and Viscount Molesworth, is in the British Library, c.45.c.1. The quotations are taken from Toland’s handwritten preface and p. 71.

89.See R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Stephen Daniel, John Toland: his methods, manners, and mind (Kingston, 1984); Justin Champion, Republican learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003).

90.Champion, ‘Enlightened erudition’, pp 132–3.

91.Some familiar letters, pp 215–16.

92.John Toland, Nazarenus: or, Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity (2nd ed., London, 1718), p. x.

93.Clare O’Halloran, Golden ages and barbarous nations: antiquarian debate and cultural politics in Ireland, c. 1750–1800 (Cork, 2004), pp 74–7.

94.An apology for Mr Toland (London, 1697), p. 40.

95.[John Toland?], A letter from a gentleman in the country, to a member of the House of Commons, in reference to the votes of the 14th instant (n.p., n.d), esp. p. 4; Patrick Kelly, ‘A pamphlet attributed to John Toland and an unpublished reply by Archbishop William King’, Topoi, iv, no. 1 (1985), p. 88.

96.The Oceana of James Harrington [ed. Toland], pp vii–viii.

97.Ibid., p. 35.

98.[John Toland?], Reasons most humbly offer’d to the Hon[oura]ble House of Commons, why the bill sent down to them from the Most Hon[oura]ble House of Lords, entitul’d, ‘An act for the better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland upon the crown of Great Britain’, should not pass into a law (London, 1720), p. 25.

99.The Oceana of James Harrington [ed. Toland], p. iii.

100.This is the view of David Berman, recently restated in the introduction to David Berman and Patricia O’Riordan (eds), The Irish Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment (Bristol, 2002), vol. i.

101.See p. 116 below.

102.Michael Hunter, ‘“Aikenhead the Atheist”: the context and consequences of articulate irreligion in the late seventeenth century’ in idem, Science and the shape of orthodoxy: intellectual change in late seventeenth-century Britain (Woodbridge, 1995), pp 308–32.

103.G. V. Bennett, The Tory crisis in church and state, 1688–1730: the career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975).

104.Peter Browne, A letter in answer to a book entitled ‘Christianity not mysterious’ (Dublin, 1697), p. 7.

105.Some familiar letters, p. 227.

106.Browne, Letter in answer to a book, p. 169; see also pp 174–5.

107.Victor Nuovo and M. A. Stewart, ‘Leland, John (1691–1766)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

108.Martin, Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, pp. 29, 141, 313–4, marginalia (see n. 88 above).

109.Account of Denmark as it was in the year 1692 (3rd ed., London, 1694), pp 235–6

110.Collected works of Dugald Stewart, i, 428.

111.J. H. Burton (ed.), The autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805 (2nd ed., London, 1910), pp 55, 78, 95.

112.W. R. Scott, ‘James Arbuckle and his relation to the Molesworth–Shaftesbury School’, Mind, viii (1899), pp 194–215.

113.See in particular M. A. Stewart, ‘John Smith and the Molesworth circle’, E.C.I., ii (1987), pp 89–102; James Moore, ‘The two systems of Francis Hutcheson: on the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’ in M. A. Stewart (ed.), Studies in the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 1990), pp. 37–59. See also Michael Brown, Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–30 (Dublin, 2002).

114.Charles Hamilton Teeling, Personal narrative of the Irish rebellion of 1798 (London, 1828), p. 203.

115.‘Communication from Rev. David Stewart’, Irish Book Lover, i, no. 1 (Aug. 1909), p. 11.

116.James Kirkpatrick, An historical essay upon the loyalty of Presbyterians (London, 1713), p. 505. I am grateful to M. A. Stewart for information on the elder Hutcheson.

117.Ferguson to Sloane, 14 July 1691 (B.L., Sloane MS 4036, f. 106).

118.See his correspondence in B.L., Sloane MS 4045.

119.Samuel Haliday, Reasons against the imposition of subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith (Belfast, 1724), p. iv.

120.See James Kirkpatrick’s ‘Conclusion’ in James Duchal, A sermon on occasion of the much lamented death of the late Reverend Mr John Abernethy (Belfast, 1741), pp 48–62.

121.Ibid., p. 54.

122.Ibid., pp 51–2.

123.The trial of Thomas Nevin (Belfast, 1725), p. x.

124.[John Hutcheson], A brief review of a paper intitled ‘A letter from the Presbytery of Antrim’ (Dublin & Belfast, 1730), p. 27; see also pp 52, 50.

125.‘Advertisement’, 24 Sept. 1722 (N.L.S., Pamph. 1.7, no. 48).

126.[Allan Logan], An Inquiry into Professor Simson’s sentiments on the doctrine the Trinity (Edinburgh, 1729), p. 42.

127.Hutcheson to Thomas Drennan, [autumn 1743] (P.R.O.N.I., T/3060/15).

128.A vindication of Mr Hutcheson from the calumnious aspersions of a late pamphlet (Glasgow, 1738), p. 19.

129.Hutcheson to Drennan, 31 May 1742 (P.R.O.N.I., T/3060/11).

130.The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Glasgow, 1742), pp 38–9.

131.Thomas Mautner (ed.), Francis Hutcheson on human nature (Cambridge, 1993), p. 125.

132.[Arbuckle et al.], Letters and essays, i, 79.

133.Francis Hutcheson, An essay on the nature and conduct of the passions and affections (London, 1728), p. xvii.

134.Hutcheson, 6 Sept. 1727, in Séamus Deane et al. (eds), Field Day anthology of Irish writing (3 vols, Derry, 1991), i, 786.

135.M. A. Stewart and James Moore, ‘William Smith (1698–1741) and the Dissenters’ book trade’, Bulletin of the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, xxii (1993), pp 20–27.

136.Hutcheson to Lord Minto, 4 July 1744 (N.L.S., Minto Papers, 11004, f. 57).

137.Ian Ross, ‘Hutcheson on Hume’s treatise: an unnoticed letter’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, iv (1966), pp 69–72.

138.Hutcheson to Drennan, 15 June 1741 (P.R.O.N.I., T/3060/8).

139.See Ian McBride, ‘The school of virtue: Francis Hutcheson, Irish Presbyterians and the Scottish Enlightenment’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political ideas in Ireland since the seventeenth century (London, 1993), pp 73–99.

140.James Bruce to William Bruce, [1753], 15 July, 12 Nov. 1753 (P.R.O.N.I., D/2673/1/14–16).

141.John Alphonso Turretine [Turrettini], Dissertations on natural theology, trans. William Crawford (Belfast, 1777), p. 279, note.

142.Maclaine to Samuel Bruce, n.d., n.d., (P.R.O.N.I., d/2673/2/1; d/2673/1/10).

143.Archibald Maclaine, A supplement to the quarto edition of Dr Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical history (London, 1768), pp 5, 6.

144.Ibid., p. 12.

145.Charles O’Conor to Denis O’Conor, 9 Mar. 1773, in Catherine Coogan Ward and Robert E. Ward (eds), The letters of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare (2 vols, Ann Arbor, 1980), ii, 42. Carpenter had been a member of the Gaelic circle that gathered around Tadhg Ó Neachtain in the later 1740s.

146.Quote from O’Conor to Burke, 25 Apr. 1765, O’Conor letters, i, 191.

147.Brian de Breffny (ed.), ‘Letters from Connaught to a Wild Goose’, Irish Ancestor, x, no. 2 (1978), p. 94.

148.Diarmaid Ó Catháin, ‘Dermot O’Connor, translator of Keating’, E.C.I., ii (1987), pp 67–87.

149.Charles O’Conor to Denis O’Conor, 9 Mar. 1773, O’Conor letters, ii, 42.

150.Bp Nicolson to Abp Wake, 1 Sept. 1719 (B.L., Add. MS 6116, f. 89).

151.O’Halloran, Golden ages and barbarous nations, p. 130.

152.Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers (Paris, 1753), under ‘Irlande’.

153.Éamon Ó Ciosáin, ‘Attitudes towards Ireland and the Irish in Enlightenment France’ in Graham Gargett and Geraldine Sheridan (eds), Ireland and the French Enlightenment, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 129.

154.Graham Gargett, ‘Voltaire’s view of the Irish’, ibid., 155.

155.Ibid., p. 159; see also p. 169 n. 19.

156.J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and religion, ii: Narratives of civil government (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 6.

157.Gargett, ‘Voltaire’s view of the Irish’, p. 161.

158.Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (2nd ed., Basingstoke, 2001), p. 35.

159.Vincent Geoghegan, ‘A Jacobite history: the Abbé MacGeoghegan’s History of Ireland’, E.C.I., vi (1981), pp 36–55.

160.Ó Ciosáin, ‘Attitudes towards Ireland’, p. 144.

161.Maurice Cranston, Philosophers and pamphleteers: political theorists of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1986), p. 25.

162.Liam Swords, The Irish–French connection (Paris, 1978), p. 50. My translation.

163.J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The political economy of Burke’s analysis of the French Revolution,’ reprinted in idem, Virtue, commerce, and history (Cambridge, 1985), p. 194.

164.Robertson, Case for the Enlightenment, p. 325.

165.Patrick Kelly, ‘The politics of political economy in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Sean Connolly (ed.), Political ideas in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp 105–29; Salim Rashid, ‘The Irish school of economic development: 1720–1750’, Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, liv (1988), pp 345–69.

166.Samuel Madden, A letter to the Dublin Society, on the improving their fund; and the manufacturers, tillage, &c. in Ireland (Dublin, 1739), p. 8.

167.William Petty, The political anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691), pp 98–9.

168.Arthur Dobbs, An essay on the trade and improvement of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1729), ii, 78, 95, 97.

169.Samuel Madden, Reflections and resolutions proper for the gentlemen of Ireland, as to their conduct of the service of the country (Dublin, 1738), pp 92, 94. My italics.

170.A discourse concerning Ireland (London, 1698), pp i, 23–37. This pamphlet has generally been ascribed to Brewster.

171.See also The true way to render Ireland happy and secure (Dublin, 1697), p. 25. The author of this pamphlet claimed to write with the approval of Molesworth.

172.Madden, Reflections and resolutions, pp 92–3.

173.Some considerations on the laws which incapacitate papists from purchasing lands, from taking long or beneficial leases, and from lending money on real securities (Dublin, 1739), pp 9–10, 27.

174.Patrick Kelly, ‘Berkeley and Ireland’, Études Irlandaises, no. 11 (Dec. 1980), pp 7–25; idem, ‘Ireland and the critique of mercantilism in Berkeley’s Querist’, Hermathena, no. 139 (1985), pp 101–16;

175.[George Berkeley], The Querist (London, 1736), p. 34.

176.[George Berkeley], A word to the wise: or, an exhortation to the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland (Dublin, 1749), pp 4–5, 35, 37–8.

177.Walter D. Love, ‘Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s “Philosophical” History of Ireland’, I.H.S., xiii, no. 49 (Mar. 1962), p. 7.

178.Ibid., p. 9.

179.[Charles O’Conor], Seasonable thoughts relating to our civil and ecclesiastical constitution (Dublin, 1753), pp 40, 41.

180.See, for example, [Charles O’Conor], Maxims relative to the present state of Ireland (Dublin, 1757), pp iv, 8, 9, 22, 23.

181.[Charles O’Conor], The Protestant interest, considered relatively to the operation of the popery-acts in Ireland (Dublin, 1757), p. iv.

182.[Charles O’Conor], Dissertations on the antient history of Ireland (Dublin, 1753), pp xxxi, 4, 56, 73, 75, 85–6; [O’Conor], Seasonable thoughts, p. 42.

183.Toby Barnard, A new anatomy of ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (London, 2003), p. 1.

184.O’Halloran, Golden ages and barbarous nations, p. 5.

185.Quoted ibid., p. 139.

186.David Berman, ‘David Hume on the 1641 rebellion in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, lxv (summer 1976), pp 101–12. For Burke see Walter D. Love, ‘Edmund Burke and an Irish historiographical controversy’, History and Theory, ii (1962–3), pp 180–98.

187.Walter D. Love, ‘Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s “philosophical” history of Ireland’, I.H.S., xiii, no. 49 (Mar. 1962), p. 25.

188.Thomas Campbell, Philosophical survey of the south of Ireland (London, 1777), p. 253.

189.O’Conor to Burke, 25 April, 1765, O’Conor letters, i, 191.

190.[O’Conor to Curry], 5 June 1766 (R.I.A., MS BI1, unnumbered letter).

191.Edmund Burke: Pre-revolutionary writings, ed. Ian Harris (Cambridge, 1993), p. 99.

192.Love, ‘Edmund Burke and an Irish historiographical controversy’, p. 182 n 5.

193.Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the revolt against the eighteenth century (London, 1929).

194.Alexander Haliday to [William Bruce], [1799] (Linen Hall Library Belfast, Joy Letters, 9/14).

195.Edmund Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France (London, 1790), p. 144.

196.The amendments were in the second, Dublin edition, The spirit of the laws. Translated from the French of M. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu [by Thomas Nugent] (Dublin, 1751).

197.Richard Bourke, ‘Sovereignty, opinion and revolution in Edmund Burke’, History of European Ideas, 25 (1999), p. 118.

198.Francis Hutcheson, A system of moral philosophy (Glasgow, 1755), pp 308–9.

199.Charles O’Conor, ‘Advertisement’ in John Curry, Historical memoirs of the Irish rebellion, in the year 1641 (4th ed., Dublin, 1770), pp v, vii, xiii.

200.Edmund Burke, A letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, M.P. in the kingdom of Great Britain, to Sir Hercules Langrishe (London, 1792), pp 41–2.

201.Richard Bourke, ‘Edmund Burke and the politics of conquest’, Modern Intellectual History, 4/3 (2007), pp 403–32.

Chapter 3: Ireland and the Ancien Régime

1.Quoted in S. J. Connolly, Religion, law, and power: the making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), p. 129.

2.W. J. Fitzpatrick, Curious family history, or, Ireland before the Union (6th ed., London, 1880), p. 33.

3.Joe Cleary, ‘“Misplaced ideas”? Colonialism, location, and dislocation in Irish studies’ in Clare Carroll and Patricia King (eds), Ireland and postcolonial theory (Cork, 2003), pp 16–45, quotation on p. 21.

4.The literature is reviewed in S. J. Connolly, ‘Eighteenth-century Ireland: colony or ancien régime?’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The making of modern Irish history: revisionism and the revisionist controversy (London, 1996), pp 15–33.

5.Connolly, Religion, law, and power, p. 2.

6.Ronald Hutton, ‘Revisionism in Britain’ in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to historiography (London, 1997), p. 387.

7.S. J. Connolly, ‘Tupac Amaru and Captain Right: a comparative perspective on eighteenth-century Ireland’ in David Dickson and Cormac Ó Gráda, Refiguring Ireland: essays in honour of L. M. Cullen (Dublin, 2003), p. 95.

8.Emer Nolan, ‘Swift: the patriot game’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxi (1998), pp 50–51.

9.Connolly, ‘Colony or ancien régime?’, p. 26.

10.James Kelly (ed.), The letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick, 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990), p. 29.

11.David Dickson, Arctic Ireland: the extraordinary story of the Great Frost and forgotten famine of 1740–41 (Belfast, 1997).

12.An alarm to the unprejudiced and well-minded Protestants of Ireland (Cork, 1762), p. 18.

13.Kelly (ed.), Letters of Edward Willes, p. 96.

14.Ibid., pp 27, 31.

15.Ibid., p. 39; see also p. 52.

16.Ibid., pp 82, 23, 37, 47.

17.Ibid., pp 65, 68, 88.

18.Ibid., pp 53, 54.

19.Ibid., pp 35, 102, 107.

20.Ibid., pp 29, 30.

21.Ibid., pp 47–8, 85–6.

22.Ibid., pp 43, 46, 47.

23.Ibid., pp 79, 95.

24.Ibid., p. 38.

25.Ibid., p. 120.

26.[Jonathan Swift], A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burthen to their parents, or the country (Dublin, 1729), p. 4.

27.E. R. R. Green, ‘The “strange humours” that drove the Scotch-Irish to America, 1729’, William and Mary Quarterly, 12/1 (1955), pp 113–23.

28.Dickson, Arctic Ireland, passim.

29.Richard Cox to Walter Harris, 23 Apr. 1741 (Armagh Public Library, Physico-Historical Society Papers).

30.The groans of Ireland: in a letter to a member of parliament (Dublin, 1741), p. 3.

31.Jan de Vries, European urbanisation, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 36.

32.L. A. Clarkson and Liam Kennedy, ‘Birth, death and exile: Irish population history, 1700–1921’ in B. J. Graham and L. J. Proudfoot (eds), Historical geography of Ireland (London, 1993), p. 161, Table 5.5.

33.de Vries, European urbanisation, pp 30, 39.

34.Belfast News-Letter, 25 Oct. 1791.

35.D. E. C. Eversley, ‘The demography of the Irish Quakers, 1650–1850’ in J. M. Goldstrom and L. A. Clarkson (eds), Irish population, economy and society: essays in honour of the late K. H. Connell (Oxford, 1981), pp 57–88.

36.Kennedy and Clarkson, ‘Birth, death and exile’, p. 162.

37.Joel Mokyr and Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The height of Irishmen and Englishmen in the 1770s: some evidence from the East India Company records’, E.C.I., iv (1989), pp 83–92.

38.James St John, Letters from France to a gentleman in the south of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1787), i, 74.

39.D. W. Miller (ed.), Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders: selected documents on the County Armagh disturbances, 1784–96 (Belfast, 1990), p. 46.

40.Thomas Bartlett, ‘The O’Haras of Annaghmore, c. 1600–c. 1800’, I.E.S.H., ix (1982), p. 40.

41.Ibid., pp 43–4.

42.David Dickson, ‘The place of Dublin in the eighteenth-century Irish economy’ in T. M. Devine and David Dickson (eds), Ireland and Scotland, 1600–1850: parallels and contrasts in economic and social development (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 189.

43.L. M. Cullen, ‘Economic development, 1691–1750’ in N.H.I., iv, 149.

44.Kelly, Letters of Edward Willes, p. 118.

45.Edward Synge, A vindication of a sermon preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons of Ireland (Dublin, 1726), p. 79.

46.William Coppinger, A remonstrance addressed to the lower orders of Roman Catholics, in the Diocess of Cloyne and Ross (Cork, 1798), p. 5.

47.Connolly, Religion, law, and power, p. 59.

48.A. P. W. Malcomson, The pursuit of the heiress: aristocratic marriage in Ireland, 1750–1820 (Belfast, 1982), p. 33.

49.Janet Todd, Rebel daughters: Ireland in conflict, 1798 (London, 2003).

50.Olwen Hufton, Europe: privilege and protest, 1730–1789 (2nd ed., Oxford, 2000), p. 30.

51.Harold Williams (ed.), The correspondence of Jonathan Swift (5 vols, Oxford, 1965), iii, 493–4.

52.[John Trenchard], A letter from a souldier to the Commons of England (London, 1702), p. 20.

53.That, at any rate, is how the speech was reported in Daniel Owen Madden (ed.), The speeches of the Right Hon. Henry Grattan (Dublin, 1854), p. 68.

54.Malcomson, Pursuit of the heiress, p. 1

55.Anthony Raymond, A short preliminary discourse to the history of Ireland (London, 1725), p. 4.

56.L. M. Cullen, An economic history of Ireland since 1660 (London, 1972), pp 45, 83, 170.

57.A. P. W. Malcomson, ‘Absenteeism in eighteenth-century Ireland’, I.E.S.H., i (1974), pp 15–35.

58.Ibid., p. 27.

59.Ibid., p. 21. For his English interests see Bartlett, ‘O’Haras of Annaghmore’, pp 45, 47.

60.T. C. W. Blanning, The culture of power and the power of culture (Oxford, 2002), p. 50; Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment, (London, 1968), p. 146.

61.Máire Kennendy, French books in eighteenth-century Ireland (Oxford, 2001), esp. ch. 3.

62.A. P. W. Malcomson, ‘The gentle Leviathan: Arthur Hill, second Marquis of Downshire, 1753–1801’ in Peter Roebuck (ed.), Plantation to partition: essays in Ulster history in honour of J. L. McCracken (Belfast, 1981), pp 102–18.

63.Peter Jupp, ‘County Down elections 1783–1831’, I.H.S., xviii, no. 70 (Sept. 1972), pp 177–206.

64.William King, The state of the Protestants of Ireland (London, 1691), pp 22, 23, 26.

65.[Cornelius Nary], ‘The case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, humbly represented to both Houses of Parliament, 1724’, reprinted in Hugh Reily, The impartial history of Ireland (London, 1754), p. 106.

66.Toby Barnard, ‘What became of Waring? The making of an Ulster squire’ in idem, Irish Protestant ascents and descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin, 2003), pp 235–65.

67.Toby Barnard, A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (London, 2003), p. 29.

68.S. J. Connolly, Priests and people in pre-Famine Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 2001), p. 51.

69.Kelly, Letters of Edward Willes, p. 61.

70.‘Attestation of the nobility of Fr John O’Brien by the gentlemen of the country of Cork’, 3 July 1747, in Patrick Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers (2 vols, Dublin, 1995), ii, 69–70.

71.Connolly, Priests and people, p. 55.

72.Michael Reilly to Charles O’Conor, 2 Nov. 1751 (R.I.A., MS BI1, Charles O’Conor Letters, no. 49).

73.Edward MacLysaght (ed.), The Kenmare Manuscripts (repr., Shannon, 1970), p. 230.

74.John Gerard Barry, ‘The groans of Ireland’, Irish Sword, ii, no. 6 (summer 1995), pp 130–36.

75.Patrick Kelly, ‘The improvement of Ireland’, Analecta Hibernica, no. 35 (1992), p. 83.

76.George Ryan to unknown correspondent, Aug. 1789 (U.C.C., Ryan of Inch Papers, BL/EP/R/419).

77.John Ryan, Journal of tour of France and the Low Countries (ibid., BL/EP/R/371, quotations on pp 26, 6, 14, 64).

78.Robert Southwell, ‘Some general hints of Ireland’, 1684 (B.L., Egerton MS 917, f. 88).

79.King, State of the Protestants, p. 32

80.Kevin Whelan, ‘An underground gentry? Catholic middlemen in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in idem, The Tree of Liberty: radicalism, Catholicism and the construction of an Irish identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996), p. 56.

81.Barry, ‘Groans of Ireland’, p. 134.

82.Thomas Power, Land, politics and society in eighteenth-century Tipperary (Oxford, 1993), pp 113–24, 250.

83.Memoirs of Miles Byrne, edited by his widow (new ed., 2 vols, Dublin, 1907), i, 3.

84.‘The ancient inheritance of the Waddings of Ballycogley’ (N.L.I., MS 5193, p. 154).

85.Marianne Elliott, ‘The Defenders in Ulster’ in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin 1993), pp 222–33.

86.Thomas Lane to Downshire, 12 Oct. 1799 (P.R.O.N.I., D/607/G/200).

87.A True Patriot, A view of the grievances of Ireland (Dublin, 1745), pp 4–5.

88.Arthur Dobbs, An essay on the trade of the improvement of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1729), ii, 77.

89.Quoted in Barnard, New anatomy, p. 243.

90.[James Arbuckle], The Tribune (London, 1729), pp 127–8.

91.View of the grievances of Ireland, p. 6.

92.David Dickson, ‘Middlemen’ in Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (eds), Penal era and golden age: essays in Irish history, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp 162–85.

93.Richard Purcell to Egmont, 2 Sept. 1746 (B.L., Add. MS 46997, f. 74).

94.Alarm to the unprejudiced and well-minded Protestants, p. 9.

95.Robert Bell, A description of the condition and manners . . . of the peasantry of Ireland (London, 1804), pp 1–2.

96.David Dickson, New foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (2nd ed., Dublin, 2000), ch. 4.

97.Jean Agnew, Belfast merchant families in the seventeenth century (Dublin, 1996), p. 13.

98.[William Tisdall], The conduct of the Dissenters of Ireland (Dublin, 1712), p. 96.

99.Alexander the Coppersmith, Remarks upon the religion, trade, government, police, customs, manners, and maladys of the city of Corke (Cork, 1737), pp 2, 9.

100.Ibid., p. 100.

101.Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: prophet of Irish independence (New Haven, 1989), ch. 8.

102.David Dickson, ‘Catholics and trade in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990), p. 93.

103.Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’, ibid., pp 150–51, 157.

104.Mary O’Conor to Owen O’Rourke, 29 Jan. 1737, in Brian de Breffny (ed.), ‘Letters from Connaught to a Wild Goose’, Irish Ancestor, x, no. 2 (1978), p. 86.

105.Hugh Fenning, The undoing of the friars of Ireland: a study of the novitiate question in the eighteenth century (Louvain, 1972), p. 39.

106.L. M. Cullen, ‘The Irish diaspora of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the move: studies on European migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), p. 124.

107.Marcus de la Poer Beresford, ‘Ireland in the French strategy, 1691–1789’ (M.Litt. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1975), p. 237.

108.Toby Barnard, Making the grand figure: lives and possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (London, 2004), p. 252.

109.James Kelly (ed.), Gallows speeches from eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2001), pp 208–11.

110.L. M. Cullen, ‘The contemporary and later politics of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire’, E.C.I., viii (1993), p. 17.

111.L. M. Cullen, ‘Late eighteenth-century politicisation in Ireland: problems in its study and its French links’ in L. M. Cullen and Louis Bergeron (eds), Culture et pratiques politiques en France et en Irlande XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, [1991]), pp 151–2.

112.The speech of Edward Sweetman . . . at a meeting of the freeholders of the county of Wexford (Dublin, 1792), pp 2, 6, 16.

113.For some examples see Barnard, New anatomy, pp 129, 131, 132, 136, 140.

114.[Sylvester O’Halloran], A complete treatise on gangrene and sphacelus; with a new method of amputation (London, 1765), pp 285–6.

115.J. B. Lyons, ‘Sylvester O’Halloran, 1728–1807’, E.C.I., iv (1989), pp 65–74, quotation on p. 67.

116.T. C. Barnard, ‘Lawyers and the law in later seventeenth-century Ireland’, I.H.S., xxviii, no. 11 (May 1993), p. 281.

117.A report from the committee appointed to inspect the original papers seized in the houses or lodgings of one MccCarthy [sic] alias Rabah, a reputed titular bishop, and Joseph Nagle, a reputed popish solicitor, both of the city of Corke (Dublin, 1733), p. 6.

118.Barnard, New anatomy, pp 154–6.

119.George Berkeley, A word to the wise: or, An exhortation to the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland (Dublin, 1749), p. 6.

120.Bell, Description of the condition and manners, pp 6–8.

121.O’Conor to Burke, 25 Apr. 1765, in Catherine Coogan Ward and Robert E. Ward (eds), The letters of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare (2 vols, Ann Arbor, 1980), i, 191.

122.Bartlett, ‘O’Haras of Annaghmore’, p. 45.

123.David Dickson, ‘“Centres of motion”: Irish cities and the origins of popular politics’ in Cullen and Bergeron (eds), Culture et pratiques, p. 120; Jim Smyth, The men of no property: Irish radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Basingstoke, 1992), ch. 6.

124.Thomas Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish militia disturbances in 1793’, P.&P., no. 99 (1983), p. 42.

125.Breandán Ó Buachalla ‘From Jacobite to Jacobin’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), p. 87.

126.Shahid Amin, Event, metaphor, memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Oxford, 1995), p. 1.

127.L. M. Cullen, ‘Catholics under the penal laws’, E.C.I., i (1986), p. 32.

128.T. C. Barnard, ‘Sir William Petty, Irish landowner’ in Hugh Lloyd-Jones et al. (eds), History and imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), pp 207–8.

129.A just and modest vindication of the Protestants of Ireland (London, 1689), p. 16.

130.Abel Ram to John Ellis, 2 Sept. 1746 (Linnean Society, London, John Ellis Correspondence, vol. 2, no. 53). Minor changes to spelling and punctuation.

131.Barnard, New anatomy, pp 96, 247.

132.Kevin Whelan, ‘The religious factor in the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in Patrick O’Flanagan et al. (eds), Rural Ireland, 1600–1900: modernization and change (Cork, 1987), p. 72.

133.David Dickson, Old World colony: Cork and south Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork, 2005), p. 177.

134.A letter from Sir Richard Cox, Bart, to Thomas Prior, Esq. (Dublin, 1749), pp 37, 47.

135.Grandison to Villiers, 21 Mar. 1754 (P.R.O.N.I., Villiers Stuart Papers, T/3131/D/6/11).

136.Kelly, Letters of Edward Willes, p. 61.

137.William Henry to Newcastle, 23 Sept. 1765 (B.L., Add. MS 39270, f. 25).

138.Triptolemus [Philip Skelton], The necessity of tillage and granaries (Dublin, 1741), pp 33–4.

139.Dickson, ‘Middlemen’, p. 180.

140.Whelan, ‘Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’, pp 144–5.

141.Dickson, Old World colony, p. 181.

142.Richard Purcell to Egmont, 5 Sept. 1751 (B.L., Add. MS 47003, f. 46).

143.Richard Purcell to Egmont, 14 Nov. 1751 (ibid., f. 58).

144.David Dickson, ‘In search of the old Irish poor law’ in Rosalind Mitchison and Peter Roebuck (eds), Economy and society in Scotland and Ireland, 1500–1939 (Edinburgh, 1988), pp 140–59.

145.[Robert, Viscount Molesworth], Some considerations for the promoting of agriculture, and employing the poor (Dublin, 1723), pp 40–41.

146.Richard Cox to Walter Harris, 23 Apr. 1741 (Armagh Public Library, Physico-Historical Society Papers).

147.See R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the age of imperialism and revolution (Oxford, 1979), pp 54–8.

148.Dickson, Arctic Ireland, p. 18.

149.Cf. Joan Scott, ‘Women’s history’ in Peter Burke (ed.), New perspectives on historical writing (Cambridge, 1991), pp 42–66. The best introduction is Mary O’Dowd, A history of women in Ireland, 1500–1800 (Harlow, 2005).

150.Karen Harvey, The Bellews of Mount Bellew: a Catholic gentry family in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1998).

151.Angela Bourke et al. (eds), The Field Day anthology of Irish literature, iv: Irish women’s writing and traditions (Cork, 2002), pp 288–90.

152.James Kelly, ‘Capital punishment in early eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Serge Soupel (ed.), Crime et châtiment dans les Îles Britanniques au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 2001), p. 170.

153.Jonathan Swift, A proposal for giving badges to the beggars in all the parishes of Dublin (Dublin, 1737), p. 14.

154.Malcomson Pursuit of the heiress, pp 35–6.

155.Ibid., p. 33.

156.S. J. Connolly, ‘Family, love and marriage: some evidence from the early eighteenth century’ in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women in early modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991), p. 280.

157.Laura Gowing, Common bodies: women, touch and power in seventeenth-century England (New Haven, 2003), esp. ch. 2.

158.J. S. Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion: the Whiteboys of 1769–76’, P.R.I.A., lxxxiii, sect. C (1983), p. 309.

159.L. A. Clarkson, ‘Love, labour and life: women in Carrick-on-Suir in the late eighteenth century’, I.E.S.H., XX (1993), pp 18–24.

160.David Fleming, ‘Public attitudes to prostitution in eighteenth-century Ireland’, I.E.S.H., xxxii (2005), p. 5.

161.Richard Woodward, A sermon preached before the vice-patroness, governesses and guardians of the Asylum for Penitent Women (Dublin, 1774), p. 11 and appendix.

162.[Mark Elstob], A trip to Kilkenny . . . in the year 1776 (Dublin, 1779), pp 167–8.

163.James Kelly, ‘The abduction of women of fortune in eighteenth-century Ireland’, E.C.I., ix (1994), pp 7–43.

164.Ibid., p. 34.

165.James Kelly, ‘Infanticide in eighteenth-century Ireland’, I.E.S.H., xix (1992), pp 5–26.

166.S. J. Connolly, ‘Illegitimacy and pre-nuptial pregnancy in Ireland before 1864: the evidence of some Catholic parish registers’, I.E.S.H., iii (1979), pp 5–23.

167.Christopher O’Dwyer (ed.), ‘Archbishop Butler’s Visitation Book’ part 1, Arch. Hib., xxxiii (1975), pp 23–4, 30.

168.Ibid., pp 23, 27, 38.

169.Ibid., pp 16–17.

170.Ibid., pp 43–4.

171.Connolly, Priests and people, p. 195.

172.Martin Marley, The good confessor: or, Instructions for the due and worthy administration of the sacrament of penance (Douai, 1748), pp 89–91.

173.Ibid., pp 161–70.

174.Ibid., p. 130.

175.Elaine Chalus, ‘Elite women, social politics and the political world of late eighteenth-century England, H.J., 43/3 (2001), pp 669–97.

176.In this section I am heavily reliant on Catriona A. Kennedy’s pioneering work. See her ‘“What can women give but tears?” Gender, politics and Irish national identity in the 1790s’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 2004).

177.Toby Barnard, ‘Katherine Conolly of Castletown: a tale of three sisters’ in idem, Irish Protestant ascents and descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin, 2004), pp 266–89, appendix. Minor changes to punctuation.

178.William Coppinger, The life of Miss Nano Nagle (Cork, 1794), pp 23–4. See generally Rosemary Raughter, ‘A discreet benevolence: female philanthropy and the Catholic resurgence in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Women’s History Review, vi (1997), pp 465–84.

179.Derek Beales, Prosperity and plunder: European Catholic monasteries in the age of revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), pp 2, 86.

180.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, pp 44–5, 198–9.

181.Raughter, ‘A discreet benevolence, pp 471–2.

182.Anselm Faulkner, ‘The right of the Maguires of Tempo’, Clogher Record, ix/2 (1977), pp 167–86.

183.Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment debate on women’, History Workshop Journal, XX (1985), p. 114.

184.Barnard, New anatomy, p. 69.

185.Ibid., p. 53.

186.Ibid., p. 70.

187.[Arbuckle], Tribune, p. 86.

188.Barnard, New anatomy, p. 239.

189.Whelan, ‘Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’, p. 155.

190.Barnard, New anatomy, p. 239.

191.Patrick Griffin, The people with no name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the creation of a British Atlantic world, 1689–1764 (Princeton, 2001), p. 34.

192.See L. M. Cullen, The hidden Ireland: re-assessment of a concept (Mullingar, 1988).

193.James Devereux, Observations on the factions which have ruled Ireland (2nd ed., London, 1801), p. 131.

194.Whelan, ‘Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’, p. 146.

195.Barnard, New anatomy, p. 144.

196.John Abernethy, Scarce and valuable tracts and sermons (London, 1751), p. 64.

197.Edmund Burke: Pre-revolutionary writings, ed. Ian Harris (Cambridge, 1993), pp 97–8.

198.A letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, M.P. in the kingdom of Great Britain, to Sir Hercules Langrishe (London, 1792), p. 15.

199.Ibid., p. 42; Thomas Bartlett (ed.), Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998), p. 604.

200.Burke, Letter . . . to Sir Hercules Langrishe, p. 41.

201.J. C. Beckett, The Anglo-Irish tradition (London, 1976), p. 45.

Chapter 4: King William’s Wars

1.Quoted in D. W. Hayton, ‘The Williamite revolution in Ireland, 1688–91’ in Jonathan Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch moment: essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world impact (Cambridge, 1991), pp 202–3.

2.Julian Hoppit, A land of liberty? England, 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), pp 132, 134.

3.David Hayton, ‘The propaganda war’ in W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in conflict: the revolutionary war in Ireland and its aftermath (Belfast, 1990), p. 113.

4.Jonathan I. Israel, ‘William III and toleration’ in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp 129–70.

5.J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of composite monarchies’, P.&P., no. 137 (Nov. 1992), pp 48–71. For Ireland and its British context see Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British problem, C. 1534–1707: state formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Cambridge, 1998).

6.Mark Greengrass, ‘Introduction’ in idem, (ed.), Conquest and coalescence: the shaping of the state in early modern Europe (London, 1981), p. 4. For warfare see G. Parker, The military revolution: military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988).

7.W. H. Crawford, ‘Ulster economy and society in the eighteenth century’ (Ph.D. thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1983), p. 26.

8.R. J. W. Evans, ‘The Habsburg monarchy and Bohemia, 1526–1848’ in Greengrass, Conquest and coalescence, p. 142. See more generally R. J. W. Evans, The making of the Habsburg monarchy, 1550–1700 (London, 1973).

9.H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘Composite states, representative institutions, and the American Revolution’, Historical Research, lxii (1989), p. 144.

10.H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘The Italian parliaments from their origins to the end of the eighteenth century’, Journal of Italian History, i (1978), p. 36.

11.Henry Kamen, Early modern European society (London, 2000), pp 49–50. Earlier, following a revolt in 1568–70, the Morisco population of Granada had been transplanted to Castile and replaced by settlers from Galicia, Asturias and León.

12.R. R. Davies, The first English empire: power and identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000), pp 109–110.

13.John Gillingham, ‘The beginnings of English imperialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, v (1991–2), pp 392–410.

14.Robert Bartlett, The making of Europe: conquest, colonisation and cultural change, 950–1350 (London, 1993), p. 21.

15.Hence Bartlett’s conclusion that Ireland alone ‘can perhaps be termed a colony in the modern sense’ (ibid., p. 309).

16.England undeceived . . . By an English gentleman of Ireland (London, 1691), p. 16.

17.Bp Anthony Dopping of Meath, sermon preached in Christ Church, 16 Nov. 1691 (T.C.D., Dopping Sermons, 1688/2, vol. ii, p. 80).

18.Steven G. Ellis, Tudor frontiers and noble power: the making of the British state (Oxford, 1995).

19.Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘“Civilizinge of those rude partes”: colonisation within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, i: The origins of empire: British overseas enterprise to the close of the seventeenth century (Oxford, 1998), p. 135.

20.Paul Hopkins, Glencoe and the end of the Highland war (Edinburgh, 1986); Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Slaughter under trust: clan massacres and British state formation’ in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (eds), The massacre in history (Oxford, 1999), pp 127–48.

21.Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), pp 117–32.

22.Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and colony: Ireland in the Atlantic world, 1560–1800 (Baltimore, 1988).

23.For some examples see T. O. McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland: Irish voices against England in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1999); Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’ in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said (eds), Nationalism, colonialism and literature (Minneapolis, 1990).

24.For critical responses see Joseph Ruane, ‘Colonialism and the interpretation of Irish historical development’ in Marilyn Silverman and P. H. Gulliver (eds), Approaching the past: historical anthropology through Irish case studies (New York, 1992), pp 293–323; Stephen Howe, Ireland and the Empire: colonial legacies in Irish history and culture (Oxford, 2000).

25.William Molyneux, The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated (Dublin, 1698), p. 148.

26.Ibid., p. 19.

27.[Francis Annesley?], Some thoughts on the bill depending before the Right Honourable the House of Lords, for prohibiting the exportation of the woollen manufactures of Ireland to foreign parts (Dublin, 1698), pp 6, 8–9.

28.Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the world: ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500– c. 1800 (London, 1995), ch. 1; David Armitage, The ideological origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000).

29.[Francis Brewster?], A letter to a member of the House of Commons on a proposal for regulating and advancing the woollen manufactory (London, 1698), p. 9.

30.This term can be found as early as Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, An answer to a scandalous letter lately printed and subscribed by Peter Walsh (London, 1662), pp 64–5 (though it should be noted that Orrery actually questions the applicability of the analogy).

31.Richard Cox to Edward Southwell, 24 Oct. 1706 (B.L., Add. MS 38154, f. 86).

32.William King, The state of the Protestants of Ireland (London, 1691), p. 18.

33.Thomas Bartlett (ed.), Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998), pp 606–7.

34.T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, P.&P., no. 127 (1990), p. 44.

35.Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge, 1988), ch. 3: ‘Of composite monarchies’ (De principati misti). Louis XII of France, Machiavelli argued, had lost his possessions in Italy partly because he did not place colonies there.

36.Pagden, Lords of all the world, ch. 3.

37.[Sir Richard Cox], Aphorisms relating to the kingdom of Ireland (London, 1689), p. 3.

38.Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and colony’ in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair (eds), The Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool, 1978), p. 56.

39.P. S. Robinson, The plantation of Ulster: British settlement in an Irish landscape, 1600–1670 (Dublin, 1984).

40.John Morrill, ‘The fashioning of Britain’ in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725 (London, 1995), p. 17.

41.T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English government and reform in Ireland, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 1975), p. 123.

42.The last royal visitor had been Richard II in 1394–5 and again in 1399.

43.See John Childs, The Nine Years War and the British army, 1688–1697: the operations in the Low Countries (Manchester, 1991), ch. 1.

44.John Locke, Two treatises of government (1690), ed. Peter Laslett (student ed., Cambridge, 1988), p. 137.

45.Jonathan I. Israel, ‘General introduction’ in idem (ed.), Anglo-Dutch moment.

46.John Brewer, The sinews of power: war, money and the English state, 1688–1783 (London, 1989), p. 31.

47.Andrew Fletcher, Political works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1997), p. 205.

48.John Childs, ‘The Williamite war, 1689–1691’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), p. 199.

49.J. G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 1685–91 (London, 1969), p. 110.

50.Childs, Nine Years War, p. 190.

51.Simms, Jacobite Ireland, p. 132.

52.Ibid., p. 126.

53.Ibid.

54.Pádraig Lenihan and Geraldine Sheridan, ‘A Swiss soldier in Ireland, 1689–90’, Irish Studies Review, 13/4 (2005), p. 484. I am grateful to the editors for an advance copy of this article.

55.J. G. Simms, ‘Dublin in 1685’, I.H.S., xiv, no. 55 (Mar. 1965), pp 212–26.

56.Quoted in Simms, Jacobite Ireland, p. 228.

57.Máirtín Ó Murchú, ‘Ó Caoimh, Eoghan (1656–1726)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

58.Nollaig Ó Muraíle, ‘Mac Cuarta, Séamas Dall (c. 1645–1733)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

59.Geoffrey Symcox, The crisis of French sea power, 1688–1697: from the Guerre d’Escadre to the Guerre de Course (The Hague, 1974), p. 79.

60.[George Story], A true and impartial history of the most material occurrences in the kingdom of Ireland during the last two years (London, 1691), pp 152–3.

61.Andrew Hamilton, A true relation of the actions of the Inniskilling-men (London, 1690), p. 43.

62.John A. Lynn, ‘A brutal necessity? The devastation of the Palatinate, 1688–1689’ in Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (eds), Civilians in the path of war (Lincoln, Nebr., 2002), pp 79–110.

63.Ibid., p. 101.

64.Quoted in John A. Lynn, The wars of Louis xiv, 1667–1714 (London, 1999), p. 181.

65.Christopher Storrs, War, diplomacy and the rise of Savoy, 1690–1720 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 302 n. 111.

66.John R. Young, ‘The Scottish response to the siege of Londonderry, 1689–90’ in William Kelly (ed.), The sieges of Derry (Dublin, 2001), p. 62.

67.[Story], True and impartial history, p. 10.

68.Lenihan and Sheridan, ‘Swiss soldier in Ireland’, p. 487.

69.Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), pp 485, 498, 509–10.

70.An account of the transactions of the late King James in Ireland (London, 1690), pp 52–3.

71.Ibid., p. 62.

72.Rev. Edward Waller to Bp Dopping, 20 Sept.1689, 11 Nov. 1689 (Armagh Public Library, Dopping MSS, vol. i, nos 108, 114).

73.Richard Doherty, The Williamite war in Ireland, 1688–1691 (Dublin, 1998), p. 166.

74.John Lestrange to Dopping, 1 July 1691 (Armagh Public Library, Dopping MSS, vol. ii, no. 191). Minor changes to punctuation.

75.Abp John Vesey to Sir Robert Southwell, 4 Sept. 1690, inlaid in Gilbert Burnet, History of his own time (6 vols, London, 1809), iii, 88 (Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., V.b. 267).

76.Lenihan and Sheridan, ‘Swiss soldier in Ireland’, p. 484.

77.[Story], True and impartial history, p. 14.

78.Animadversions on the proposal for sending back the nobility and gentry of Ireland (London, 1690), p. 32.

79.The character of the Protestants of Ireland (London, 1689), pp 10, 24.

80.Young, ‘Scottish response to the siege of Londonderry’, p. 67.

81.A journal of what has past [sic] in the north of Ireland, since the landing of the Duke of Schomberg, to the surrender of Carrick-Fergus (London, 1689), single sheet, dated Belfast, 25 Aug. 1689 (copy in B.L., 816m23/64).

82.Bibiothèque Nationale, Paris, Fonds Français, Fr 12161.

83.Thomas Doyle, ‘Jacobitism, Catholicism and the Irish Protestant elite, 1700–1710’, E.C.I., xii (1997), pp 28–59.

84.Brewer, Sinews of power.

85.Claude Nordmann, ‘Louis xiv and the Jacobites’ in Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis xiv and Europe (London, 1969), p. 93. My italics.

86.Marcus de la Poer Beresford, ‘Ireland in the French strategy, 1691–1789’ (M.Litt. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1975), p. 131.

87.Ibid., pp 236–7.

88.Edward Corp, ‘The Irish at the Jacobite court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye’ in Thomas O’Connor, The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001), pp 147–8.

89.Nordmann, ‘Louis xiv and the Jacobites’, pp 86, 89–90.

90.Beresford, ‘Ireland in the French strategy’, pp 245–7.

91.Ibid., p. 221.

92.Ibid., pp 20–26, 32–5.

93.Sylvester Lloyd to Col. Daniel O’Brien, endorsed 4 Feb. 1726, in Patrick Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers (2 vols, Dublin, 1995), i, 67–8.

94.Corp, ‘The Irish at the Jacobite Court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye’, pp 149–50; R. J. Hayes, ‘Reflections of an Irish Brigade officer’, Irish Sword, i/2 (1950–51), pp 68–74.

95.Abbé James Dunne to John Hay, 8 July 1726, in Fagan (ed.), Stuart Papers, i, 80.

96.John Bourke to James Edgar, 15 Nov. 1733, ibid., p. 186.

97.Quoted David Dickson, ‘Jacobitism in eighteenth-century Ireland: a Munster perspective’, Éire–Ireland, 39/3–4 (fall–winter 2004), p. 49.

98.Guy Rowlands, ‘An army in exile: Louis xiv and the Irish forces of James II in France, 1691–1698’, Royal Stuart Papers, lx (2001), pp 2, 5. See also Colm James Ó Conaill, ‘The Irish regiments in France: an overview of the presence of Irish soldiers in French service, 1716–1791’ in Eamon Maher and Grace Neville (eds), France–Ireland: anatomy of a relationship (Oxford, 2004), pp 327–42.

99.Harman Murtagh, ‘Irish soldiers abroad, 1600–1800’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 294–314.

100.St John Brodrick to [Lord Midleton], 9 Jan 1721/2 (Surrey History Centre, Midleton Papers, MS 1248/5/254–5). I owe this and the later references in this chapter to the kindness of David Hayton and Michael Page (Surrey History Centre), who permitted me to read and cite from their forthcoming edition of the Midleton Papers in advance of publication.

101.St John Brodrick to [Lord Midleton], 31 Jan 1721/2 (ibid., MS 1248/5/180–81).

102.Beresford, ‘Ireland in French strategy’, p. 237.

103.Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism in official documents’, E.C.I., viii (1993), pp 131–2.

104.Charles Forman, A letter to the Right Hon. Sir Robert Sutton, for disbanding the Irish regiments in the service of France and Spain (London, 1728), pp 19–20, 43.

105.L. M. Cullen, ‘The Irish diaspora of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the move (Oxford, 1994), p. 121.

106.‘Attested copy of deposition of Wiliam Lehy of Three Mill Bridge, Waterford, taken before Francis Barker, mayor, and Richard Christmas’, 26 Jan 1714 (Surrey History Centre, MS 1248/3/159).

107.‘Account by Alan Brodrick of the examination of persons enlisted in the Pretender’s service, 1713–14’ (ibid., MS 1248/3/324–31).

108.Vincent Geoghegan, ‘A Jacobite history: the Abbé MacGeoghegan’s History of Ireland’, E.C.I., vi (1991), pp 36–55.

109.Beresford, ‘Ireland in the French strategy’, ch. 5.

110.James Kelly (ed.), The letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick, 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990), p. 79.

111.Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite cause, 1685–1766: a fatal attachment (Dublin, 2000), p. 53.

112.Ibid., pp 73–4.

113.Sir Richard Cox to unknown recipient, 8 Oct 1691 (T.C.D., MS 1180, p. 159); K. P. Ferguson, ‘The army in Ireland from the Restoration to the Act of Union’ (Ph.D. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1981), pp 45–6.

114.Cathaldus Giblin, ‘The Stuart nomination of Irish bishops, 1687–1765’, I.E.R., 5th ser., cv (Jan.–June 1966), pp 35–47.

115.L. M. Cullen, ‘The Blackwater Catholics and County Cork society and politics in the eighteenth century’ in Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelius Buttimer (eds), Cork: history and society (Dublin, 1993), p. 561. It should be noted that Cullen is one of the few historians who has used Irish-language source material extensively.

116.L. M. Cullen, The hidden Ireland: re-assessment of a concept (Mullingar, 1988), pp 11, 16.

117.Ibid., pp 16, 48.

118.Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘Poets and politics in early modern Ireland,’ E.C.I., vii (1992), 170–74.

119.Breandán Ó Buachalla ‘From Jacobite to Jacobin’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), p. 87.

120.J. C. MacErlean (ed.), Duanaire Dháibhidh Uí Bhruadair: The poems of David Ó Bruadair (3 vols, London, 1910–17), iii, 97.

121.Breandán Ó Buachalla ‘Irish Jacobitism and Irish nationalism: the literary evidence’ in Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan (eds), Nations and nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland, and the eighteenth-century context (Oxford, 1995), p. 111.

122.[Sir Robert? J. Southwell], Discourse concerning the securing the government of the kingdome of Ireland to the interest of the English nation, c. 1691 (B.L., Add. MS 28724; quotations from p. 4).

123.[Sir James Caldwell], An address to the House of Commons of Ireland: by a freeholder (n.p., 1771), pp 10–11.

124.Purcell to Perceval, 30 Oct. 1739 (B.L., Add. MS, 47001A, f. 20).

125.Purcell to Perceval, 5 Feb. 1739/40 (ibid., f. 41).

126.Purcell to Perceval, 21 Mar. 1739/40 (ibid., f. 53).

127.See also Purcell to Perceval, 6 Mar. 1743/4 (ibid., MS 47001B, f. 51).

Chapter 5: What Were the Penal Laws For?

1.A letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, M.P. in the kingdom of Great Britain, to Sir Hercules Langrishe (London, 1792), p. 87.

2.S. J. Connolly, ‘Eighteenth-century Ireland: colony or ancien régime?’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The making of modern Irish history: revisionism and the revisionist controversy (London, 1996), pp 15–33.

3.S. J. Connolly, Religion, law, and power: the making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), pp 263, 275.

4.J. G. Simms, ‘The making of a penal law (2 Anne, c. 6), 1703–4’, I.H.S., xii, no. 46 (Sept. 1960), pp 105–18; idem, ‘The Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697’, I.H.S., xvii, no. 66 (Sept. 1970), pp 185–9.

5.Connolly, Religion, law, and power, p. 274.

6.Bp Anthony Dopping of Meath, sermon preached in Christ Church, 16 Nov. 1691 (T.C.D., Dopping Sermons, 1688/2, vol. ii, p. 95).

7.The mantle thrown off: or, The Irish-man dissected (London, 1689), p. 9.

8.[Sir Walter Harris], Remarks on the affairs and trade of England and Ireland (London, 1691), p. A2v; see also p. 57.

9.Ibid., p. 62.

10.Ibid., pp 57–61.

11.[Sir Robert?] Southwell, Discourse concerning the securing the government of the kingdome of Ireland to the interest of the English nation, c. 1691 (B.L., Add MS 28724; quotations from pp 2, 7).

12.Edward Wetenhall, A sermon setting forth the duties of the Irish Protestants, arising from the Irish rebellion, 1641 and the Irish tyranny, 1688 (Dublin, 1692), p. 16.

13.England undeceived. In answer to a late pamphlet, (intituled, ‘Some ways for raising of money, humbly offered to the consideration of the parliament, by a person of quality’) (London, 1691), pp 15, 18.

14.John Travers, A sermon preached in St Andrew’s Church, Dublin. Before the House of Commons the Twenty Third of October, 1698 (Dublin, 1698), p. 13.

15.See T. C. Barnard, ‘The uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant celebrations’, E.H.R., cvi (1991), pp 889–920; Robert Eccleshall, ‘Anglican political thought in the century after the Revolution of 1688’ in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political thought in Ireland since the seventeenth century (London, 1993), pp 38–41.

16.Edward Walkington, A sermon preached Octob. 23. 1692 in St Andrew’s Church, Dublin; before the House of Commons (Dublin, 1692), p. 7.

17.Ralph Lambert, A sermon preach’d to the Protestants of Ireland, now residing in London: at their anniversary meeting on October XXIII. 1708 (London, 1708), p. 6; John Vesey, A sermon preach’d to the Protestants of Ireland, in and about the city of London, at St Mary le Bow in Cheapside, Octob. 23. 1689 (London, 1689), p. 28; Edward Walkington, A sermon preach’d in Christ-Church, Dublin, on Saturday the 23d of October, 1703 (Dublin, 1703), p. 10.

18.Travers, Sermon preached . . . the Twenty Third of October, 1698, p. 14. A ferula is a flat rod.

19.For general treatments see also S. J. Connolly, ‘The penal laws’ in W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in conflict: the revolutionary war in Ireland and its aftermath (Belfast, 1990), pp 157–72; C. I. McGrath, ‘Securing the Protestant interest’, I.H.S., xxx, no. 117 (May 1996), pp 25–46.

20.William Petty, The political anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691), p. 29.

21.The true way to render Ireland happy and secure (Dublin, 1697), p. 9.

22.Proposals for raising a million of money out of the forfeited estates in Ireland: together, with the answer of the Irish to the same, and a reply thereto (London, 1694; repr., Dublin, 1704), p. 11.

23.Nathaniel Foy, A sermon preached in Christ’s-Church, Dublin; on the 23d of October, 1698 (Dublin, 1698), pp 27–8.

24.Vivien Hick, ‘The Palatine settlement in Ireland: the early years’, E.C.I., iv (1989), pp 113–31.

25.Sir Richard Cox, A letter to Thomas Prior, Esq. (Dublin, 1749), pp 23–4.

26.L. M. Cullen, The emergence of modern Ireland, 1600–1900 (London, 1981), pp 38, 78, 205–9.

27.Henry Maule, A sermon preached in Christ-Church, Dublin; before His Grace Lionel, Duke of Dorset, and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, in parliament assembled. Tuesday, the Twenty-Third Day of October, 1733 (Dublin, 1733), pp 21, 26.

28.[Daniel Defoe], The parallel: or, Persecution of Protestants the shortest way to prevent the growth of popery in Ireland (Dublin, 1705), p. 3.

29.Stanhope to Delafaye, 28 Sept. 1719 (T.N.A., SP 43/2, f. 165v).

30.Every man his own lawyer: or, A summary of the laws now in force in Ireland, in a new and instructive method (Dublin, 1755), p. 346.

31.James Kelly (ed.), Gallows speeches from eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2001), p. 143.

32.A brief collection of some memorandums: or, Things humbly offered to the consideration of the members of the Great Convention, and of the succeeding parliament (Dublin, 1689), p. 2; Reasons humbly offer’d to both Houses of Parliament, for a law to enact the castration or gelding of popish ecclesiastics, in this kingdom (Dublin, 1710), esp. pp 7–9. See also The priest gelded: or, Popery at the last gasp (London, 1747).

33.A seasonable proposal to prevent the further growth of popery heartily recommended to every true Protestant. By a lover of his country (Dublin, 1731), p. 6.

34.A serious proposal for the entire destruction of popery in Ireland. Humbly Offered to the consideration of our great ***** ([Dublin], 1732), p. 12.

35.Sidney to Nottingham, 28 Sept. 1692, C.S.P.D. 1695 & Add. 1689–95, p. 205.

36.Other examples include Silesia, which continued to have a Protestant majority but was officially Catholic. Protestant worship was, however, permitted in three of its duchies and in the town of Breslau. In Prussia, meanwhile, Calvinist monarchs ruled over a Lutheran people.

37.A. L. Drummond and J. Bulloch, The Scottish church, 1688–1843 (Edinburgh, 1973), p. 4.

38.Christopher Haigh, ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), The English Reformation revised (Cambridge, 1987), p. 8.

39.See Élisabeth Labrousse, ‘Calvinism in France, 1598–1685’ in Menna Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), pp 285–313.

40.Geoffrey Symcox, Victor Amadeus II: absolutism in the Savoyard state, 1675–1730 (London, 1983), ch. 6, quotation at p. 93. See the essays in Albert de Lange (ed.), Dall’Europa alle Valli Valdesi: atti del Convegno ‘Il Glorioso Rimpatrio 1689–1989’ (Turin, 1990).

41.Patrick Kelly, ‘Lord Galway and the penal laws’ in C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough and J.-P. Pittion (eds), The Huguenots and Ireland (Dún Laoghaire, 1987), pp 239–54.

42.Christopher Storrs, War, diplomacy and the rise of Savoy, 1690–1720 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 302 n. 111.

43.John Stoye, ‘Europe and the Revolution of 1688’ in Robert Beddard (ed.), The revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991), pp 193–4.

44.Grette Klingenstein, ‘The meanings of “Austria” and “Austrian” in the eighteenth century’ in Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott (eds), Royal and republican sovereignty in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp 423–78.

45.R. J. W. Evans, The making of the Habsburg monarchy, 1550–1700: an interpretation (Oxford, 1979), p. 17.

46.Ibid., p. 120.

47.Sir Robert Southwell, ‘Some general hints of Ireland’ [1684] (B.L., Egerton MS 917, f. 81v).

48.Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1815 (London, 1983), p. 36.

49.J. A. Houlding, Fit for service: the training of the British army, 1715–95 (Oxford, 1981), p. 9.

50.Dale Van Kley, The religious origins of the French Revolution: from Calvin to the civil constitution, 1560–1791 (London, 1996), p. 127.

51.Charles Owen, An alarm to Protestant princes and people (Dublin, 1725). The author was an English Presbyterian minister based at the Warrington Academy.

52.Robert Howard, A sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of St Patrick, Dublin . . . on February the 10th 1724 (Dublin, 1725), pp 18–19.

53.The speech of the reverend father, the advocate for the Jesuits of Thorn in the High Court of Chancery of Poland, demanding justice against the Protestants of the said city, upon account of the late tumult there (Dublin, 1725).

54.Simms, ‘Bishops’ Banishment Act’, pp 187–8.

55.Dominick Burke, Ad SS. D.N. Innocentium Papam XII. Libellus supplex ecclesiasticorum Hibernorum exulum, nec obscurorum, nec paucorum. De praesenti Acatholicorum molimine ad Catholicam religionem in Hibernia extirpandam (n.p., 1697), p. [21].

56.Stanhope to Delafaye, 28 Sept. 1719 (T.N.A., SP 43/2, f. 165v).

57.Toby Barnard, ‘1641: a bibliographical essay’ in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: aspects of the rising (Belfast, 1993), pp 172–86.

58.I am grateful to Marie-Louise Legg for information on the Synge family.

59.M. A. Stewart, ‘John Smith and the Molesworth circle’, E.C.I., ii (1987), pp 89–102.

60.Edward Synge (junior) to Abp Wake, 7 Apr. 1726 (Christ Church College, Oxford, Wake Papers, vol. xiv, f. 251); Henry Downes, A sermon preach’d in Christ’s-Church, Dublin, on Friday, October 23d, 1719 (Dublin, 1719), p. 21.

61.[Robert, Viscount Molesworth], Some considerations for the promoting of agriculture, and employing the poor (Dublin, 1723), p. 30.

62.Abp Synge to Abp Wake, 27 June 1722 (Dublin City Library, Gilbert Collection, MS 28, p. 169).

63.See Patrick Fagan, Dublin’s turbulent priest: Cornelius Nary, 1658–1738 (Dublin, 1991).

64.Abp Synge to Abp Wake, 27 June 1722 (Dublin City Library, Gilbert Collection, MS 28, p. 169).

65.Edward Synge, A vindication of a sermon preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons of Ireland. On Saturday the 23rd of October, 1725 (Dublin, 1726), p. 34. For Locke on toleration see James Tully, An approach to political philosophy: Locke in contexts (Cambridge, 1993), pp 47–62.

66.Edward Synge, The case of toleration consider’d with respect both to religion and civil government (Dublin, 1725), p. 23.

67.William Tisdall, The nature and tendency of popular phrases in general (Dublin, 1713), p. 12. See Ian McBride, ‘Ulster Presbyterians and the confessional state, 1689–1733’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political discourse in early modern Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp 169–92.

68.See J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Catholic resistance theory, Ultramontanism, and the royalist response, 1580–1620’ in J. H. Burns (ed., with Mark Goldie), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp 219–53.

69.Synge, Case of toleration consider’d, pp 38–9.

70.Ibid., p. 40.

71.Synge, Vindication, pp 6, 28, 30.

72.Synge, Case of toleration consider’d, p. 50; idem, Vindication, pp 66–8.

73.[Walter Harris], Remarks on the affairs and trade of England and Ireland (London, 1691), pp 59–60.

74.See Mark Goldie, ‘The theory of religious intolerance and Restoration England’ in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp 331–68.

75.Ibid., p. 347.

76.Ibid., p. 349.

77.Stephen Radcliffe, A letter to the Reverend Mr Edward Synge, prebendary of St Patrick’s, occasion’d by late sermon preach’d in St Andrew’s, Dublin, before the Honourable House of Commons, October 23, 1725 (Dublin, 1725).

78.[Cornelius Nary], ‘The case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, humbly represented to both Houses of Parliament, 1724’ in Hugh Reily, The impartial history of Ireland (repr., London, 1754), pp 103, 115, 118, 122.

79.Ibid., p. 113.

80.Patrick Fagan, An Irish bishop in penal times: the chequered career of Sylvester Lloyd, O.F.M., ‘1680–1747 (Dublin, 1993), p. 101.

81.Reasons . . . for a law to enact the castration or gelding of popish ecclesiastics, in this kingdom, esp. pp 9–10.

82.Ibid., esp. pp 7–9.

83.Nicholas, Viscount Taaffe [Charles O’Conor], Observations on affairs in Ireland, from the settlement in 1691 (Dublin, 1766), pp 25, 29, 30.

84.Arthur Young, A tour in Ireland (2nd ed., 2 vols, London, 1780), ii, 146.

Chapter 6: How Catholic Ireland Survived

1.Honest advice to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1745), p. 18.

2.For a summary of the historiography see S. J. Connolly, ‘Eighteenth-century Ireland: colony or ancien régime?’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The making of modern Irish history: revisionism and the revisionist controversy (London, 1996), pp 15–33.

3.Patrick F. Moran, The Catholics of Ireland under the penal laws in the eighteenth century (London, 1899), pp 2, 8.

4.S. J. Connolly, Religion, law, and power: the making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), ch. 5.

5.L. M. Cullen, ‘Catholics under the penal laws’, E.C.I., i (1986), pp 23–36; Connolly, Religion, law, and power, passim.

6.The standard works are John Brady and P. J. Corish, The church under the penal code (Dublin, 1971); P. J. Corish, The Catholic community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dublin, 1981); T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990).

7.Cary to Delafaye, 10 Dec. 1731 (T.N.A., SP 63/394/142).

8.Hugh de Burgo to Cardinal Grimaldi, Dec. 1709 (copy) (A.S.V., Segr. Stat., Fiandra, 102, f. 24). A translation can be found in Cathaldus Giblin, ‘Catalogue of material of Irish interest in the collection of Nunziatura di Fiandra, Vatican Archives: Part 4’, Coll. Hib., v (1962), p. 9.

9.Patrick F. Moran, Spicilegium Ossoriense: being a collection of original letters and papers illustrative of the history of the Irish church (3 vols, Dublin, 1874–84), ii, 322–3.

10.[Cornelius Nary], ‘The case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, humbly represented to both Houses of Parliament, 1724’ in Hugh Reily, The impartial history of Ireland (London, 1754), pp 102–22.

11.Nathaniel Foy, A sermon preached in Christ’s-Church, Dublin; on the 23d of October, 1698 (Dublin, 1698), p. 4.

12.W. P. Burke, The Irish priests in the penal times, 1660–1760 (Waterford, 1914), p. 137.

13.Hugh Fenning, ‘The Archbishops of Dublin, 1693–1786’ in James Kelly and Daire Keogh (eds), History of the Catholic diocese of Dublin (Dublin, 1999), p. 175.

14.Hugh Fenning, The undoing of the friars of Ireland: the novitiate question in the eighteenth century (Louvain, 1972), p. 79.

15.Hugh Fenning, ‘Michael MacDonogh, O.P., Bishop of Kilmore’, I.E.R., 5th ser., cvi (July–Dec. 1966), pp 147–8.

16.[Sylvester Lloyd?] to James Edgar, 27 Aug. [1739], in Patrick Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers (2 vols, Blackrock, 1995), i, 292.

17.Anthony French, O.F.M., to Cardinal Grimaldi, 29 Mar. 1710 (copy), in Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., v (1962), p. 21.

18.Bp MacDermott to Cardinal Grimaldi, 25 June 1710, ibid., p. 25.

19.Ibid., p. 30.

20.Remarks on my conversation in Ireland. By an honourable lady (1699), reprinted in John Dunton, The Dublin scuffle, ed. Andrew Carpenter (Dublin, 2000), p. 280.

21.Fenning, ‘Archbishops of Dublin, 1693–1786’, pp 175–6.

22.Considerations upon ‘Considerations for the promoting of agriculture, and providing for the poor’ (Dublin, 1723), p. 58.

23.Abp King to Abp Wake, 12 July 1727, quoted in Patrick Fagan, ‘The Dublin Catholic mob (1700–1750)’, E.C.I., iv (1989), p. 133.

24.Toby Barnard, A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (London, 2003), pp 253–4, 297, 303.

25.Fagan, ‘Dublin Catholic mob’, p. 133.

26.Ibid., pp 134, 136–7.

27.See James Kelly, The Liberty and Ormond Boys: factional riot in eighteenth-century Dublin (Dublin, 2005).

28.Patrick J. Larkin, ‘“Popish riot” in south Co. Derry, 1725’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, viii, no. 1 (1975–6), pp 97–110, quotations on p. 99.

29.Burke, Irish priests in the penal times, p. 289.

30.Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., ix (1966), p. 42.

31.A proclamation, offering a reward for discovering, apprehending, and convicting the persons concerned in insulting George Brereton, Esq. (Dublin, 1751).

32.James Kelly, ‘The abduction of women of fortune in eighteenth-century Ireland’, E.C.I., ix (1994), p. 19.

33.Thomas Doyle, ‘Jacobitism, Catholicism and the Irish Protestant elite, 1700–1710’, E.C.I., xii (1997), p. 49.

34.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, pp 95–6.

35.Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., xiv (1971), pp 40–41.

36.Burke, Irish priests in the penal times, pp 221, 223.

37.John Healy, Maynooth College: its centenary history, (Dublin 1895), app. x, pp 696–7. This document is dated 1808.

38.For Prague see Bernard Jennings, ‘The Irish Franciscans in Prague’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxviii (1930), pp 210–22.

39.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, pp 242, 245. The Franciscan total includes 20 at Capranica.

40.John Linegar to Cardinal Lercari, 30 Oct. 1750 (A.S.V., F.M., 117); Fenning, Undoing of the friars, p. 208; Abp O’Reilly to unknown correspondent, 15 Dec. 1750 (A.S.V., F.M., 117).

41.Dáire Keogh (ed.), A patriot priest: the life of Father James Coigly, 1761–1798 (Cork, 1998), pp 30–31.

42.Abp Le Clerc de Juigné of Paris to Abp James Butler II, 3 Feb 1787 (N.L.I., Cashel Papers, JBII/1787/2).

43.‘Les abus des ordinations précipitées des prêtres en Irlande’ (A.P.F., S.C. Irlanda, 10, ff 448–53).

44.L. W. B. Brockliss and P. Ferté, ‘Irish clerics in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a statistical study’, P.R.I.A., lxxxvii, sect. C (1987), pp 527–72.

45.Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., v (1962), p. 10.

46.See, for example, Bonaventure de Burgo, to [Cardinal Paulucci], 2 Nov. 1709 (A.S.V., Segr. Stat., Lettere di Particolari, 104, ff 464–5), describing his audience with the Emperor Joseph I.

47.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, pp 168–9.

48.E. A. Wrigley, ‘A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and economy, 1650–1750’, P.&P., no. 37 (1967), p. 49.

49.Barnard, New anatomy, p. 69.

50.A candid enquiry why the natives of Ireland which are in London, are more addicted to vice than the people of any other nation (London, 1754), pp 5, 14, 16–18.

51.Peter Linebaugh, The London hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth century (London, 1991), p. 291.

52.Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English people, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), pp 107, 120.

53.See George Rudé, Paris and London in the eighteenth century: studies in popular protest (London, 1970), pp 204–12.

54.The conduct of the purse of Ireland (London, 1714), p. 14.

55.Fenning, ‘Archbishops of Dublin’, pp 200, 208.

56.Hugh Fenning, The Irish Dominican province, 1698–1797 (Dublin, 1990), pp 230–31.

57.Hyacinth Kennedy to Charles O’Kelly, 23 Apr. 1760 (San Clemente, Rome, Miscellanea, 67a).

58.James Kelly, ‘“A wild Capuchin of Cork”: Arthur O’Leary, 1729–1802’ in Gerard Moran (ed.) Radical Irish priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp 37–59.

59.Abp Troy to Abp Butler II, 5 May 1791, in Patrick O’Donoghue, ‘The Catholic Church and Ireland in an age of revolution and rebellion, 1782–1803’ (Ph.D. thesis, University College Dublin, 1975), p. 138.

60.Karen J. Harvey, ‘Religion and money: Irish regular colleges in the Roman republic of 1798–99’, E.C.I., viii (1993), pp 73–82.

61.Concannon to Abp Troy, 2, 9, 16 July 1796, 2 Sept. 1797, 24 Feb. 1798 (D.D.A., Troy Papers, AB2/116/6 (1794–96), 118, 120, 121; AB2/116/7 (1797–99), 14, 45). For Ypres see Abbess C. Lynch to Mr Coughlan, 6 Feb. 1798 (ibid., AB2/116/151).

62.John Thomas Troy, Pastoral instruction to the Roman Catholics of the archdiocess of Dublin (1798), pp 8, 41.

63.Sir Richard Cox to Edward Southwell, 24 Oct. 1706 (B.L., Add. MS 38154, f. 86).

64.Kevin Whelan, ‘The regional impact of Irish Catholicism, 1700–1850’ in W. J. Smyth and Kevin Whelan (eds), Common ground: essays on the historical geography of Ireland presented to T. Jones Hughes (Cork, 1988), p. 253.

65.T. J. Walsh, Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters (Dublin, 1959).

66.Charles Hamilton Teeling, Observations on the ‘History and consequences’ of the ‘battle of the Diamond’ (n.p., 1838), p. 14.

67.David Dickson, ‘Catholics and trade’ in Power and Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence, p. 94.

68.Karen Harvey, ‘The family experience: the Bellews of Mount Bellew’, ibid., ch. 7.

69.T. P. Power, ‘Conversions among the legal profession in Ireland in the eighteenth century’ in Daire Hogan and W. N. Osborough (eds), Brehons, serjeants and attorneys: studies in the Irish legal profession (Blackrock, 1990), p. 156.

70.Charles O’Conor to John Curry, 12 May 1761, in Catherine Coogan Ward and Robert E. Ward (eds.), The letters of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare (2 vols, Ann Arbor, 1980), i, 110–11.

71.James Kelly (ed.), The letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick, 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990), p. 46; Edmund Burke to Charles O’Hara, [23 Aug. 1762], in The correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al. (10 vols, Cambridge, 1958–78), i, 147; L. M. Cullen, ‘The 1798 rebellion in its eighteenth-century context’ in P. J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, rebels and establishments: Historical Studies XV (Belfast, 1985), p. 111.

72.Thomas Power, Land, politics and society in eighteenth-century Tipperary (Oxford, 1993), p. 230.

73.Burke, Irish priests in the penal times, p. 189; John Brady, Catholics and Catholicism in the eighteenth-century press (Maynooth, 1965), p. 45.

74.The genuine declaration of Edward Shuel [Sewell], a degraded clergyman of the Church of Ireland (Dublin, [1740]).

75.L. M. Cullen, ‘The contemporary and later politics of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, E.C.I., viii (1993), pp 18–21.

76.Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘The making of a Cork Jacobite’ in Patrick O’Flanagan and C. G. Buttimer (eds), Cork: history and society (Dublin, 1993), pp 469–98.

77.David Dickson, ‘Jacobitism in eighteenth-century Ireland: a Munster perspective’, Éire–Ireland, 39/3–4 (fall–winter 2004)pp 79–80. See also Neal Garnham, ‘The trials of James Cotter and Henry Baron Barry of Santry: two case studies in the administration of criminal justice in early eighteenth-century Ireland’, I.H.S., xxxi, no. 23 (May 1999), pp 328–42.

78.Cullen, ‘Politics of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, p. 23.

79.Ibid., p. 12.

80.Bp Thomas Burke to Cardinal Giuseppe Castelli, 31 Mar. 1766 (A.S.V., F.M., 58, uncatalogued).

81.[John Curry], A candid enquiry into the causes and motives of the late riots in the province of Munster in Ireland (London, 1767), p. 7.

82.Power, ‘Conversions among the legal profession’, p. 153.

83.Edmund Burke to Richard Burke, 20 Mar. 1792, Burke correspondence, vii, 101–2.

84.Conor Cruise O’Brien, The great melody: a thematic biography and commented anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1992), pp 10, 63–4.

85.Ibid., pp 484, 479.

86.Thomas P. Power, ‘Converts’ in Power and Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence, p. 102.

87.L. M. Cullen, ‘Burke’s Irish views and writings’ in Ian Crowe (ed.), Edmund Burke: his life and legacy (Dublin, 1997), p. 66.

88.‘Present state of the name and fameyley of O’Malley in Ireland yr of our Lord 1776’ in Sir Owen O’Malley, ‘O’Malleys between 1651 and 1725’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, xxv, nos 1–2 (1952), p. 34. Spelling corrected.

89.Conduct of the purse of Ireland, pp 14–16.

90.The resolutions of the House of Commons in Ireland relating to the Lord-Chancellor Phips, examined (London, 1714), p. 21.

91.W. A. Maguire, ‘The estate of Cú Chonnacht Maguire of Tempo’, I.H.S., xxvii, no, 106 (Nov. 1990), pp 130–44.

92.Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’ in Power and Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence, p. 139.

93.Notes by Sr M. Claude (N.L.I., Calendar of Papers of Dr T. Bray, Special List 170c).

94.Nuala Burke, ‘A hidden church? The structure of Catholic Dublin in the mid-eighteenth century’, Arch. Hib., xxxii (1974), p. 89.

95.Whelan, ‘Catholic Community in Eighteenth-Century County Wexford’, p. 154.

96.Charles O’Conor, ‘George Faulkner and the Irish Catholics’, part III, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxviii (1939), pp 489–90.

97.Brady, Catholics and Catholicism, p. 49.

98.An apology for the Roman Catholics. Most humbly addressed to His E[xcelle]n[c]y P[hi]l[I]p, E[ar]l of Ch[este]r[fiel]d, L[or]d L[ie]u[tenan]t of Ireland &c. ([Dublin, 1745?]), pp 4–5.

99.Heads of a bill for a general register of popish priests (Dublin, 1757), p. 34. For the background see John Brady, ‘Proposals to register Irish priests, 1765–7’, I.E.R., 5th ser., xcvii (Apr. 1962), pp 209–22.

100.Eamon O’Flaherty, ‘Ecclesiastical politics and the dismantling of the penal laws in Ireland, 1774–1782’, I.H.S., xxvi, no. 101 (May 1988), p. 47.

101.The phrase is Sean Connolly’s: see Religion, law, and power, p. 2.

102.Arthur Young, A tour in Ireland (2nd ed., 2 vols, London, 1780), i, 125; my italics. Young’s equally famous reply was to cite Edmund Burke’s dictum that ‘connivance is the relaxation of slavery, not the definition of liberty’.

103.Frank O’Gorman, Voters, patrons, and parties: the unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989), p. 239.

104.Whelan, ‘Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’, p. 133.

105.Harvey, ‘Bellews of Mount Bellew’, p. 193

106.Cullen, ‘Politics of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, pp 12–13.

107.Brady, Catholics and Catholicism, p. 319.

108.Rachel, Viscountess Massareene to Viscount Massareene, Mar. 1708 (P.R.O.N.I., D/562/193).

109.Patrick Fagan, Dublin’s turbulent priest: Cornelius Nary, 1658–1738 (Dublin, 1991), p. 116.

110.Maurice Bric, ‘The Whiteboy movement in Tipperary, 1760–1780’ in William Nolan (ed.), Tipperary: history and society (Dublin, 1985), pp 154, 166.

111.D. W. Miller (ed.), Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders: selected documents on the County Armagh disturbances, 1784–96 (Belfast, 1990), p. 18.

112.Rev. William Campbell to Rev. Benjamin McDowell, 10 Aug. 1788 (N.L.I., Bruce Papers, MS 20874/3).

113.L. M. Cullen, ‘The Blackwater Catholics and County Cork society and politics in the eighteenth century’ in O’Flanagan and Buttimer, Cork: history and society, pp 560–61.

114.‘Copia di lettera sentta a Mons. le Nunzio di Brusselles da’ Monsr le arcivescovo di Cassel’, 12 Apr. 1734 [Abp Christopher Butler of Cashel to Silvio Valenti-Gonzaga, the Brussels nuncio] (A.S.V., Segr. Stato, Fiandra, 130, f. 217).

115.See James C. Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts (London, 1990).

116.James C. Scott, Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance (London, 1985), p. xvii.

117.Connolly, Religion, law, and power, p. 234; Doyle, ‘Jacobitism, Catholicism and the Irish Protestant elite’, p. 41.

118.Bp John Evans to Abp Wake, 10 Dec. 1718 (Christ Church, Oxford, Wake Papers, vol. xiii, no. 30).

119.Quoted in Dickson, ‘Jacobitism in eighteenth-century Ireland’, p. 49.

120.William Cooley to Perceval, 11 Oct. 1745 (B.L., Add. MS 47005A, f. 106).

121.Scott, Domination and the art of resistance, p. 3.

122.A review of the strictures of the declaration of the Catholic Society (Dublin, 1792), p. 28.

123.Address of the United men of the Star Division, ‘To the Revd Doctor Morriss, Mr Smyth, Mr Grace, Mr Devine, etc etc’ (N.A.I., Rebellion Papers, 620/51/224).

Chapter 7: Bishops, Priests and People

1.Cardinal Nicola Lercari, Archbishop of Rhodes, was secretary of Propaganda Fide (1743–57), and had earlier been vice-legate at Avignon (1739–44).

2.Thomas Burke, Hibernia Dominicana. Sive historia provinciae Hiberniae Ordinis Praedicatorum (Cologne [Kilkenny?], 1762), pp 506–7.

3.‘La prego di scusare la rozza e stroppiata Toscana d’impovoro Fuorloro esiliato in questa Siberia occidentale’, Bp John Brett to Cardinal Lercari, 24 June 1753 (A.S.V., F.M., 117, uncatalogued).

4.Hugh Fenning, ‘Michael MacDonogh, O.P., Bishop of Kilmore, 1728–46’, I.E.R., 5th ser., cvi (July–Dec. 1966), pp 138–53.

5.The Casanatense Library was founded by the Dominicans of the monastery of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and opened to the general public, according to the will of Cardinal Girolamo Casanate, in 1701.

6.For the most part these refuges were cottages, their location often well known to the authorities.

7.Knox later voted for Catholic relief in 1778 and 1793: see Edith Mary Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish parliament, 1692–1800: Commons, constituencies and statutes (6 vols, Belfast, 2002), v, 48–9.

8.See the entry for ‘Leghorn’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1797 edition.

9.Hugh Fenning, ‘The journey of James Lyons from Rome to Sligo, 1763–65’, Coll. Hib., xi (1968), pp 95–6.

10.Liam Swords, ‘Collège des Lombards’ in idem (ed.), The Irish–French connection, 1578–1978 (Dublin, 1978), p. 51.

11.Mary Purcell, ‘The way back from Rome’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, lxviii (1979), pp 269–70.

12.Samuel Fannin, ‘The Irish community in eighteenth-century Cádiz’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Irish migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin, 2003), p. 138

13.Richard Hayes, ‘An unpublished eighteenth-century Franco-Irish manuscript’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxviii (1939), pp 475–84.

14.For Troy see Hugh Fenning, The Irish Dominican province, 1698–1797 (Dublin, 1990), p. 439.

15.Thomas Bartlett (ed.), Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998), p. 143.

16.S. J. Connolly, Priests and people in pre-Famine Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 2001), p. 65.

17.The layman turned preacher: or, The honest advice of a friend to the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland (1751), [p. 10] (Galway Diocesan Archives, Archdeacon Papers, box 16, folder c/44). This anonymous manuscript pamphlet was never published.

18.Fenning, ‘Journey of James Lyons’, p. 104; also pp 107, 108.

19.Fr M. Corr to Abp Troy, 5 Jan 1782 (D.D.A., Troy Papers, 29/7/169).

20.The English–Irish dictionary: An foclóir Béarla–Gaoidheilge (Paris, 1732).

21.John O’Brien, Focaloir Gaoidhilge–Sax-Bhearla: or, An Irish–English dictionary (Paris, 1768); Frederick M. Jones, ‘The Congregation of Propaganda and the publication of Dr O’Brien’s Irish dictionary, 1768’ in I.E.R., 5th ser., lxxviii (Jan. 1953), p. 32.

22.Hugh Fenning, The undoing of the friars of Ireland: a study of the novitiate question in the eighteenth century (Louvain, 1972), p. 38.

23.In 1776 Bishop Thomas Burke forwarded a petition to Propaganda from the laity of Clonfert including the names of eighteen converts who remained sympathetic to Catholicism: ‘Sequentes, qui quamvis ab avita Fide infeliciter deviaverint, erga tamen Catholicos bene affecti semper persistunt’ (A.S.V., F.M., 50).

24.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, p. 35.

25.Thomas Devenish, to Charles O’Kelly, 27 Apr. 1763 (San Clemente, Rome, miscellanea, 80b). Spelling modernised.

26.Charles O’Kelly to Abp Patrick Fitzsimons, 3 Mar. 1764, in Hugh Fenning, ‘Some problems of the Irish mission, 1733–1774’, Coll. Hib., viii (1965), p. 82.

27.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, pp 82, 90–91.

28.Liam Chambers, ‘Rivalry and reform in the Irish College, Paris, 1676–1775’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Irish communities in early modern Europe (Dublin, 2006), pp 103–29.

29.James Kelly (ed.), The letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick, 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990), p. 48.

30.Dáire Keogh, ‘The French disease’: the Catholic Church and radicalism in Ireland, 1790–1800 (Dublin, 1993), pp 10–11.

31.See I. R. McBride, Scripture politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998), p. 58

32.Robert Black, Substance of two speeches, delivered in the General Synod of Ulster (Dublin, 1812), app. v.

33.An apology for the clergy of Ireland. in respect of their civil rights, especially as to agistment for dry and barren cattle (Dublin, 1738), p. 15.

34.Layman turned preacher, pp 15–16.

35.Connolly, Priests and people, p. 72.

36.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, p. 47; Cathaldus Giblin, ‘Catalogue of material of Irish interest in the collection of Nunziatura di Fiandra, Vatican Archives: Part 5’, Coll. Hib., ix (1966), p. 68.

37.J. G. Simms, ‘The Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697’, I.H.S., xvii, no. 66) (Sept. 1970), p. 185.

38.[Cornelius Nary], ‘The case of the Roman Catholicks of Ireland’ in Hugh Reily, The impartial history of Ireland (London, 1754), p. 122.

39.John Bourke to unnamed correspondent, 6 Dec. 1733, in Fenning, ‘Some problems of the Irish mission’, pp 60–61.

40.Ibid., p. 63.

41.Abp Christopher Butler to John Bourke, 20 Jan. 1733, ibid., p. 62 n. 5.

42.The letter is reprinted in Hugh Fenning, ‘John Kent’s report on the state of the Irish mission, 1742’, Arch. Hib., xxviii (1966), pp 72–3.

43.‘Laonensis autem a quinquennio per integrum mensem in sua Dioecesi non resedit. Interim tamen Angliam, Galliam, Flandriam, et Germaniam inferiorem pecuniis et pensionibus inhians pluries perambulavit’ (Fenning, ‘John Kent’s report’, p. 73).

44.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, p. 264.

45.Ibid., pp 71–4. See the Liber Discretorialis, 17 Apr. 1745 (Archives of St Isidore’s, Rome) for a student riot on Good Friday 1745. For a later report on the Ludovisian College see Cardinal Mario Marefoschi, Relazione della visita apostolica del Collegio Ibernese fatta dall’eminentissimo (Rome, 1772).

46.Swords, ‘Collège des Lombards’, pp 44–62.

47.Robert F. Cummins, with Hugh Fenning, ‘The constitutions of the diocese of Cashel: “The New Psalter of Cashel” (1737) and three pastoral letters of Archbishop Christopher Butler’, Arch. Hib., lvi (2002), p. 143.

48.Ibid., pp 155–6.

49.Ibid., p. 161.

50.Ibid., pp 184–5.

51.Ibid., p. 137.

52.Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., ix (1966), pp 65–6; Fenning, Irish Dominican province, p. 165.

53.Dominic Brullaughan, Opusculum de missione et missionariis (Metz, 1745), p. 29.

54.Robert Bireley, The refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp 98–100. For missions see also David Gentilcore, From bishop to witch: the system of the sacred in early modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, 1992), ch. 3; Trevor Johnson, ‘Blood, tears and Xavier-water: Jesuit missionaries and popular religion in the eighteenth-century Upper Palatinate’ in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds), Popular religion in Germany and central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp 183–202; John McManners, Church and society in eighteenth-century France, ii: The religion of the people and the politics of religion (Oxford, 1998), pp 83–93.

55.Diarmaid Ó Catháin, ‘An Irish scholar abroad: Bishop John O’Brien of Cloyne and the Macpherson controversy’ in Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelius Buttimer (eds), Cork: history and society (Dublin, 1993), p. 504. O’Brien returned to France several times. In May 1767 reported that he was going to Spa, near Liège, for health reasons, and he died in France the following year.

56.Bp John O’Brien to Cardinal Ghilini, [Oct. 1765], 17 Oct. 1766 (A.S.V., F.M. 51).

57.Bp John O’Brien to Cardinal Castelli, 30 May 1767 (A.S.V., F.M., 58).

58.For a later (apparently isolated) example of solicitation see A.P.F., Udienze, 1782, f. 253), in which Bishop Philip MacDavett of Derry seeks the faculty of absolving John Maclosky of Banacor, ‘accusatus de Sollicitatione ad actus turpes pro Confessionali’.

59.Cummins and Fenning, ‘Constitutions of the diocese of Cashel’, p. 152.

60.Patrick O’Brien, pastoral, 1749 (Galway Diocesan Archives, Archdeacon Papers, box 16, folder c/44), pp 11–12. Spelling and syntax modernised.

61.Bireley, Refashioning of Catholicism, p. 145

62.Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the confessional: a sacrament profaned (Oxford, 1996), pp 56–9.

63.Cummins and Fenning, ‘Constitutions of the diocese of Cashel’, p. 184.

64.Bp John O’Brien to Cardinal Ghilini, 9 Sept. 1765 (A.S.V., F.M., 51). See also Ghilini to O’Brien, 27 Sept. 1765, O’Brien to Ghilini, [Oct. 1765?] (ibid.); O’Brien to Cardinal Castelli, 30 Dec. 1765 (ibid., 58). For the Nagles see L. M. Cullen, ‘The Blackwater Catholics and County Cork society and politics in the eighteenth century’ in Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelius Buttimer (eds), Cork: history and society (Dublin, 1993), pp 534–84; The correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al. (10 vols, Cambridge, 1958–78), i, 288 n. 3.

65.John O’Brien to [Cardinal Castelli], 25 Nov. 1766 (A.S.V., F.M., 51). John Butler, Bishop of Cork and a relative of the archbishop of Cashel (James Butler I), passed a favourable sentence on Father Florence MacCarthy, ‘contre mon propre jugement’: see ‘Copie d’une lettere de l’Eveque de Cloyn ecrite sans date à Mgr le Nonce’, enclosing ‘Traduction d’une Lettre Angloise, ecrite de Corke ‘par l’Eveque de Cork le 22 xbre 1766 à l’Eveque de Cloyne’ (ibid., 57).

66.See the three letters from A.S.V., F.M., 117, reprinted in Fenning, Undoing of the friars, pp 8–9; Cardinal Valenti to Crivelli, 10 July 1751, in Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., xiv (1971), p. 77.

67.Connolly, Priests and people, p. 81.

68.Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., ix (1966) pp 49–50, 51–3, 58. See also ibid., pp 35–7; xiv (1971), p. 63.

69.Fenning, ‘John Kent’s report’, p. 60.

70.Bp Laurence Richardson of Kilmore to Cardinal Valenti, 28 Feb. 1750/51 (A.S.V., F.M., 117).

71.Layman turned preacher, pp 5–6, 16.

72.Patrick O’Brien, pastoral, 1749 (Galway diocesan Archives, Archdeacon Papers, box 16, folder c/44), pp 11–19.

73.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, pp 195–6.

74.Ibid., p. 233.

75.Ibid., p. 38: Bp John O’Brien of Cloyne to Bp Peter Creagh of Waterford, 5 Aug 1758 (A.P.F., S.O.C.G., 789, ff 145–6).

76.Bp Thomas Burke to Cardinal Castelli, 31 Mar. 1766 (A.S.V., F.M., 58).

77.Fenning, Undoing of the friars, pp 52–3.

78.Latin copy of letter from James Gallagher to Bp Anthony O’Donnell, 23 Apr. 1750/51 (A.S.V., F.M., 117).

79.Patrick J. Corish, The Irish Catholic experience: a historical survey (Dublin, 1985), p. 134.

80.Connolly, Priests and people, p. 84.

81.Christopher O’Dwyer (ed.), ‘Archbishop Butler’s Visitation Book’, part 1, Arch. Hib., xxiii (1975), pp 1–90.

82.Copy of an extract from Bp John O’Brien to Cardinal Ghilini, 17 Oct. 1766 (A.S.V., F.M., 51).

83.Patrick O’Brien, pastoral, 1749 (Galway Diocesan Archives, Archdeacon Papers, box 16, folder c/44), p. 15.

84.Thomas Campbell, A philosophical survey of the south of Ireland (London, 1777), pp 144–5, 148–9.

85.Patrick J. Corish, ‘Catholic marriage under the penal code’ in Art Cosgrove (ed.), Marriage in Ireland (Dublin, 1985), pp 67–77.

86.P. J. Flanagan, ‘The diocese of Clogher in 1714’, part 2, Clogher Record, i/3 (1955), p. 42.

87.Patrick O’Brien, pastoral, 1749 (Galway Diocesan Archives, Archdeacon Papers, box 16, folder c/44), pp 6–7, 8–9.

88.Fr John Markey to Bp Troy, 7 Dec. 1781 (D.D.A., Troy Papers, 29/7/166).

89.R. W. Scribner, ‘Cosmic order and daily life: sacred and secular in pre-industrial German society’ in idem, Popular culture and popular movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987), pp 1–16.

90.Martin Marley, The good confessor (Douai, 1748), p. 73.

91.Cummins and Fenning, ‘Constitutions of the diocese of Cashel’, p. 165.

92.John Dunton, The Dublin scuffle, ed. Andrew Carpenter (Dublin, 1999), p. 177.

93.James Coombes, A bishop of penal times: the life and times of John O’Brien, Bishop of Cloyne and Ross, 1701–1769 (Cork, 1981), p. 50.

94.Kevin Whelan, ‘The role of the Catholic priest in the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in idem (ed.), Wexford: history and society (Dublin, 1987) pp 296, 309.

95.John D. Beatty (ed.), Protestant women’s narratives of the Irish rebellion of 1798 (Dublin, 2001), p. 105.

96.Connolly, Priests and people, p. 144.

97.Hugh Fenning, ‘Some eighteenth-century broadsides’, Coll. Hib., xii (1969), p. 56.

98.P. F. Moran, Spicilegium Ossoriense (3 vols, Dublin, 1884), iii, 379.

99.Dominic Brullaughan, Opusculum de Purgatorio Sancti Patritii Hyberniae Patroni (Louvain, 1735).

100.John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Bagshawe MSS, Caldwell Papers, 3/2/88–9. I am very grateful to Professor David Hayton for this reference.

101.P. J. Flanagan, ‘The diocese of Clogher in 1714’, part 1, Clogher Record, i/2 (1954), pp 129–30; James S. Donnelly, jr, ‘Lough Derg: the making of the modern pilgrimage’ in William Nolan, Liam Ronayne and Mairead Dunlevy (eds), Donegal: history and society (Dublin, 1995), pp 491–508.

102.Quoted in Connolly, Priests and people, p. 152.

103.Ibid., p. 163.

104.Cummins and Fenning, ‘Constitutions of the diocese of Cashel’, p. 163.

105.Marly, Good confessor, p. 165.

106.Connolly, Priests and people, esp. ch. 3.

107.A.B. to James III at Rome, 20 Nov. 1736, in Fenning., ‘Some problems of the Irish mission’, pp 69–70.

108.Fr John Markey to Bp Troy, 7 Dec. 1781 (D.D.A., Troy Papers, 29/7/166).

109.‘I Francese sono Amanti di Dottrine novelle e Propugnatori indefessi delle quattro famose, Proposizioni gallicane, procurando unanimamente d’introdurre le opinioni ed Usanze della Francia in questo Regno’ (Bp Troy to Cardinal [Leonardo] Antonelli, 21 Aug. 1780 (A.S.V., F.M., 117)).

110.‘Nomina episcoporum in regno Hiberniae, 1781’ (ibid.).

111.Abp James Butler II to Cardinal Marefoschi, 13 Apr. 1778 (N.L.I., Cashel Papers, JB II/1777/5); Fr Luke Concannon to Abp Troy, 16 Jan. 1796 (D.D.A., Troy Papers, AB2/116/6, no. 116).

112.Fenning, Irish Dominican province, pp 128, 131–32; Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., v (1962), pp 116–19; ix (1966), pp 34–5; xiv (1971), pp 40, 42–5, 48.

113.Hyacinth Kiaghry to the Cardinal Protector, 28 Oct. 1735, in Fenning, ‘Some problems of the Irish mission’, p. 64.

114.Fenning, ‘Archbishops of Dublin’, p. 182.

115.Giblin, ‘Nunziatura di Fiandra’, Coll. Hib., xiv (1971), pp 55–6.

116.The best introductions are William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic resistance to authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Basingstoke, 2000); John McManners, Church and society in eighteenth-century France, ii: The religion of the people and the politics of religion (Oxford, 1998), part V; Dale Van Kley, The religious origins of the French Revolution: from Calvin to the civil constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, 1996).

117.Patrick Collinson, quoted in John Spurr, English Puritanism, 1603–1689 (New York, 1998), p. 4.

118.McManners, Church and society in eighteenth-century France, ii, 394.

119.Van Kley, Religious origins of the French Revolution, p. 16.

120.L. Ceyssens, ‘François Martin (1652–1722): professeur à l’Université de Louvain’, Augustiniana, xlvi (1996), pp 371–404.

121.Ruth Clark, Strangers and sojourners at Port Royal: being an account of the connections between the British Isles and the Jansenists of France and Holland (Cambridge, 1932), p. 212.

122.Hugh Fenning, ‘The library of Bishop William Daton of Ossory, 1698’, Coll. Hib., xx (1978), p. 31.

123.John Bourke to unnamed correspondent, 6 Dec. 1733, in Fenning, ‘Some problems of the Irish mission’, pp 60–61.

124.Priscilla O’Connor, ‘Irish clerics and French politics of grace: the reception of Nicholas Madgett’s doctoral thesis, 1732’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Irish migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin, 2003), pp 182–202.

125.Nouvelles écclésiatiques, 30 Oct. 1733, p. 158; see also ibid., 10 Apr. 1758, p. 62.

126.Clark, Strangers and sojourners, p. 216

127.Abp James Butler II to Cardinal Marefoschi, 13 Apr. 1778 (N.L.I., Cashel Papers, JB II/1777/5).

128.Thomas Hogan to Fr James Nugent, 11 May 1751 (English copy) (Archives of San Isidoro (Rome), 3.2).

129.John Bourke to unnamed correspondent, 6 Dec. 1733, in Fenning, ‘Some problems of the Irish mission’, p. 62.

130.For complaints about such appeals see Bp Thomas Burke to Cardinal Castelli, 31 Mar. 1766 (A.S.V., F.M., 58).

131.R. P. Hsia, The world of Catholic renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), pp 57–8; R. J. W. Evans, The making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: an interpretation (Oxford, 1979).

132.Gentilcore, From bishop to witch, p. 36.

133.Connolly, Priests and people, pp 104–5.

134.On this episode see Patrick Whelan, ‘Anthony Blake, Archbishop of Armagh, 1758–87’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, v, no. 2 (1970), pp 289–323; Brendan Hoban, ‘Dominic Bellew, 1745–1812: parish priest of Dundalk and Bishop of Killala’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, vi, no. 2 (1972), pp 333–71.

135.Fr John Markey to Bp Troy, Jan. 1780 (D.D.A., Troy Papers, 29/7/1).

136.Cummins and Fenning, ‘Constitutions of the diocese of Cashel’, p. 160.

Chapter 8: Ascendancy Ireland: Conflict and Consent

1.F. R. Leavis, ‘The irony of Swift’, reprinted in A. N. Jeffares (ed.), Swift: modern judgements (London, 1968), p. 121.

2.Francis Brewster, New essays on trade (London, 1702), p. 51.

3.Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s letters to the people of Ireland, ed. Herbert Davis (2nd ed., Oxford, 1965), p. 78.

4.Ibid., p. 81.

5.Charles Firth, ‘The political significance of Gulliver’s Travels’ in idem, Essays historical and literary (Oxford, 1968), pp 230–31.

6.Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Irishness’ in idem, Writers and politics (London, 1965), p. 99.

7.Swift, Drapier’s Letters, p. 79.

8.[Joseph Pollock], Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial (Dublin, 1779), pp 11–12.

9.William Drennan to William Bruce, [1785](P.R.O.N.I., D/533/36).

10.Civicus [Michael Reilly] to [Charles O’Conor], 10 Nov. 1749 (R.I.A., MS BI1, no. 42).

11.Declan Kiberd, Irish classics (London, 2000), p. 85.

12.See Irvin Ehrenpreis, ‘Swift on liberty’, reprinted in A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), Swift: modern judgments (London, 1968), pp 59–73; quotation from Leavis, ‘Irony of Swift’ p. 125.

13.Bp King to Bp Lindsay, 13 May 1698, quoted in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: the man, his works, and the age, iii: Dean Swift (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 265.

14.See Philip Pettit, Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government (Oxford, 1997); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before liberalism (Cambridge, 1998).

15.Robert Molesworth, The principles of a real Whig (London, 1711; repr., London, 1775), p. 7; Caroline Robbins, The eighteenth-century commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).

16.[James Arbuckle (ed.)], The Tribune (London, 1729), p. 15.

17.James Tully, ‘Placing the Two treatises’ in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds), Political discourse in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), pp 261–2.

18.Swift, Drapier’s Letters, p. 108.

19.Ehrenpreis, Swift, iii, 2.

20.Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism and Irish nationalism: the literary evidence’ in Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan (eds), Nations and nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the eighteenth-century context (Oxford, 1995), p. 112.

21.William Paulet Carey, Appeal to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1794), p. 40.

22.The speech of Edward Sweetman . . . at a meeting of the freeholders of the county of Wexford (Dublin, 1792), p. 4. See also John Nassau, The cause of the Roman Catholicks pleaded (Dublin, 1792), pp 16–18.

23.A defence of English commodities. Being an answer to the proposal for the universal use of Irish manufactures (Dublin 1720; repr., London, 1720), p. 19. Ironically, this pamphlet has been attributed to Swift.

24.Several speeches in the House of Commons in England, for and against the bill for the better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1720), p. 9.

25.[John Toland?], Reasons most humbly offer’d to the Honourable House of Commons, why the bill . . . entitul’d, ‘An act for the better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland upon the crown of Great Britain’, should not pass into a law (London, 1720), p. 13.

26.Perceval to Abp King, 10 Mar. 1720 (B.L. Add. MS 47029, f. 26v).

27.D. W. Hatyon, ‘The Stanhope/Sunderland ministry and the repudiation of Irish parliamentary independence’, E.H.R., cxiii (1998), p. 618.

28.Patrick Kelly, ‘William Molyneux and the spirit of liberty in eighteenth-century Ireland’, E.C.I., iii (1988), pp 133–48.

29.[John Trenchard], A letter from a souldier to the Commons of England (London, 1702), pp 4, 20.

30.Considerations concerning Ireland, in relation to England (n.p., [c. 1691]), pp 2, 3.

31.[Toland?] Reasons most humbly offer’d, pp 23, 24.

32.[John Perceval, Earl of Egmont], Some observations on the present state of Ireland (Dublin, 1731), pp 21, 23.

33.David Hayton, ‘Constitutional experiments and political expediency, 1689–1725’ in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725 (London, 1995), pp 276–305.

34.A. J. Guy, ‘Irish military establishment, 1660–1776’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), p. 224.

35.Patrick M. Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: a study in high politics 1798–1801 (Dublin, 1999), p. 49. By ‘Irishman’ Cornwallis was clearly referring to the Ascendancy class.

36.Alexander Murdoch, The people above: politics and administration in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980), p. 3.

37.Patrick McNally, ‘“Irish and English interests”: national conflict within the Church of Ireland episcopate in the reign of George I’, I.H.S., xxix, no. 115 (May 1995), pp 295–314.

38.Charles Lucas, The political constitutions of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1751), p. 221; A letter to the Right Hon J[ohn] P[onsonby] S[peake]r of the H[ous]e of C[ommon]s (London, 1767), p. 33.

39.[Francis Brewster], A discourse concerning Ireland (London, 1698), p. 47.

40.[Arbuckle (ed.)], The Tribune, p. 17. See David Hayton, ‘From barbarian to burlesque: English images of the Irish, c. 1660–1750’, I.E.S.H., xv (1988), pp 5–31.

41.Eoin Magennis, The Irish political system, 1740–1765: the golden age of the undertakers (Dublin, 2000), p. 47.

42.Toby Barnard, A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (London, 2003), p. 169.

43.Magennis, Irish political system, p. 21. The first chapter of this book provides an excellent introduction to the undertaker system.

44.Patrick McNally, ‘Wood’s Halfpence, Carteret, and the government of Ireland, 1723–6’, I.H.S., xxx, no. 119 (May 1997), pp 361, 362.

45.Quoted in Magennis, Irish political systems, p. 11.

46.[James Arbuckle et al.], A collection of letters and essays on several subjects, lately published in the Dublin Journal (2 vols, London, 1729), i, 297.

47.The secret history of the trust (London, 1702), p. 4.

48.A letter upon libels (Dublin, 1753), p. 4; An address from the free electors of the province of Ulster, to Anthony Malone, Esq. (London, 1754), p. 18.

49.James Kelly (ed.), The letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick, 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990), p. 30.

50.Neal Garnham, ‘Local elite creation in early Hanoverian Ireland: the case of the county grand jury’, H.J., 4/3 (1999), p. 634.

51.Magennis, Irish political system, p. 52.

52.Letter to the Right Hon J[ohn] P[onsonby], p. 23.

53.John McBride, A vindication of marriage as solemnized by Presbyterians in the north of Ireland (n.p., 1702), p. iii. My italics.

54.[Ralph Lambert], An answer to a late pamphlet, entitl’d ‘A vindication of marriage, as solemniz’d by Presbyterians in the north of Ireland’ (Dublin, 1704), pp 4, 6.

55.[John McBride], A sample of jet-black prelatick calumny (Glasgow, 1713), p. 49.

56.William Tisdall, A seasonable enquiry into that most dangerous political principle of the kirk in power (Dublin, 1713), p. 27; David Hayton, ‘Exclusion, conformity and parliamentary representation: the impact of the sacramental test on Irish Dissenting politics’ in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The politics of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin, 1997), pp 52–73.

57.J.C. Beckett, ‘William King’s administration of the diocese of Derry, 1691–1703’, I.H.S., iv, no. 14 (Sept. 1944), pp 174–5.

58.J. S. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (3rd ed., 3 vols, Belfast, 1867), ii, 429.

59.John McBride to John Stirling, 15 Feb. 1704/5 (Glasgow University Library, MS. Gen. 207, Stirling Papers, 117).

60.John Abernethy, Scarce and valuable tracts and sermons (London, 1751), p. 63.

61.Plain reasons against the repeal of the Test-Act (Dublin, 1733), p. 7.

62.Ian McBride, ‘Presbyterians in the penal era’, Bullán, 1/2 (autumn 1994), pp 73–86.

63.John Brisbane to Bp King, 21 May 1694 (T.C.D., Lyons MS 357).

64.Reid, Presbyterian Church in Ireland, ii, 491 n. 6.

65.The present state of religion in Ireland (London, [1712]), p. 25.

66.Bp Nicolson to Abp Wake, 7 June 1719, in F. G. James, ‘Derry in the time of George I: selections from Bishop Nicolson’s letters, 1718–1722’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd ser., xvii (1954), p. 177.

67.Samuel McSkimmin, The history and antiquities of the county of the town of Carrickfergus (Belfast, 1823), pp 76–7.

68.The insolence of the Dissenters against the Established Church (London, 1716), pp 3–4.

69.Robert McBride, A sermon preach’d at the desire of the Independent Company of Volunteers in Belfast, May 28th 1716 (Belfast, 1716).

70.James Blair, Divine Providence, the security of the crown and subject (Belfast, 1715), pp 21–2.

71.James Duchal to Thomas Drennan, 12 Nov. 1745 (P.R.O.N.I., D/1759/3B/6, p. 9).

72.J. C. Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, 1687–1780 (London, 1948), p. 84.

73.[William Tisdall], The conduct of the Dissenters of Ireland (Dublin, 1712), p. 27.

74.L. M. Cullen, The emergence of modern Ireland, 1600–1900 (London, 1981), pp 55–8.

75.[Tisdall], Conduct of the Dissenters, p. 3.

76.McBride, Sample of jet-black prelatick calumny, p. 154

77.James Kirkpatrick to John Stirling, 13 Nov. 1704 (Glasgow University Library, MS Gen. 207, Stirling Papers, 118).

78.Richard L. Greaves, God’s other children: Protestant nonconformists and the emergence of denominational churches in Ireland, 1660–1700 (Stanford, Calif., 1997), p. 177.

79.Andrew Fletcher, Political works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1997), p. 42.

80.[Nicholas French], Iniquity display’d, or, The settlement of the kingdom of Ireland (n.p., 1704), p. 65. This work was first published in 1668.

81.Ezekiel Burridge, A short view of the present state of Ireland (n.p., 1708), p. 20.

82.Some queries upon the demand of the Presbyterians to have the sacramental test repealed ([Dublin], 1733), p. 12.

83.Ibid., p. 11.

84.Ivan Herbison, Language, literature and cultural identity: an Ulster-Scots perspective (Dunclug, 1989), p. 3.

85.Ibid., passim.

86.The North Country-man’s description of Christ’s Church, Dublin; in a letter to a friend [Signed: J.S.] (Dublin, 1733).

87.The grunter’s request, to take of the Test ([Dublin], 1733), p. 3.

88.Abp John Vesey to Sir Robert Southwell, 13 Sept. 1690, inlaid in Gilbert Burnet, History of his own time (6 vols, London, 1809), iii, 100 (Folger Library, Washington, D.C., V.b. 267).

89.Two letters from a person in Scotland to his friends in Ireland (n.p., [1702]), esp. pp 3–9.

90.[Tisdall], Conduct of the Dissenters, pp 67–73.

91.The natural impossibility of better-uniting Protestants and securing the constitution in church and state by repealing the Test (Dublin, 1732), p. 12.

92.Ibid., pp 15–6, 24–5.

93.John Davis to Sir Arthur Rawdon, 1 Apr. 1692, John Davis to Rev. Lemuell Matthews, 1 Apr. 1692 (B.L., Add MS 30149, f. 111).

94.Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, p. 114.

95.Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies in prose and verse (London, 1711), p. 318.

96.Hatyon, ‘Stanhope/Sunderland ministry, p. 633.

97.Some considerations upon the late attempt to repeal the Test Act . . . by a person of quality (London & Dublin, 1719), p. 17.

98.The charge of the Right Honourable Thomas Marley, Esq; Lord Chief Justice of His Majesty’s Court of King’s-Bench in the kingdom of Ireland, to the grand juries of the county and the city of Dublin (Dublin, 1749), pp 12–13.

99.[Jonathan Swift], City cries, instrumental and vocal: or, An examination of certain abuses, corruptions, and enormities, in London and Dublin (Dublin, 1732; repr., London, 1732), pp 8–10.

100.Jonathan I. Israel, ‘General introduction’ in idem (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch moment: essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world impact (Cambridge, 1991), p. 6.

101.Animadversions on the proposal for sending back the nobility and gentry of Ireland (London, 1690), p. 32.

102.James I. McGuire, ‘The Irish parliament of 1692’ in Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (eds), Penal era and golden age: essays in Irish history, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp 14–15.

103.[Charles Leslie], An answer to a book intituled ‘The state of the Protestants in Ireland’ (London, 1692), p. 113.

104.[Charles Leslie], Considerations of importance to Ireland, in a letter to a member of parliament there; upon occasion of Mr Molyneux’s late book (n.p., [1699]), p. 3.

105.J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the press: propaganda and public opinion in the age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979), p. 2.

106.[Daniel Defoe], The parallel: or, Persecution of Protestants the shortest way to prevent the growth of popery in Ireland (Dublin, 1705); [Tisdall], Conduct of the Dissenters, p. 75.

107.S. J. Connolly, ‘Reformers and Highflyers: the post-revolution church’ in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds), As by law established: the Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, 1995), p. 159.

108.[Tisdall], Conduct of the Dissenters, p. 20.

109.Connolly, Religion, law, and power, p. 241.

110.Bp Nicolson to Abp Wake, 7 May 1723 (B.L., Add MS 6116, ff 131–2).

111.D. W. Hayton, ‘Ireland and the English ministers, 1707–16: a study in the formulation and working of government policy in the early eighteenth century’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1975), pp 145, 147.

112.S. J. Connolly, ‘The Church of Ireland and the royal martyr: regicide and revolution in Anglican political thought, c. 1660–c. 1745’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, liv, no. 3 (July 2003), pp 484–506.

113.John Winder, The mischief of schism and faction to church and state (Dublin, 1714), p. 12.

114.Edward Mathews, The divine original of civil government (Dublin, 1714), pp 10–11, 23.

115.Samuel Synge, The case of King Charles the First & King James the Second stated and compared (Dublin, 1707), pp 21–2.

116.See Ian McBride, ‘Ulster Presbyterians and the confessional state, 1689–1733’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political discourse in early modern Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp 169–92.

117.[Tisdall], Conduct of the Dissenters, p. 41.

118.Patrick McNally, ‘The Hanoverian accession and the Tory Party in Ireland’, Parliamentary History, xiv (1995), pp 263–83.

119.Walpole to Grafton, 24 Sept. 1723 (T.N.A., SP 63/381/141–3). A copy of James Maculla’s pamphlet, Ireland’s consternation in the losing of two hundred thousand pound of their gold and silver for brass money [Dublin, 1723], can be found in T.C.D.

120.Weighty queries relating to the past, present, and future state of Ireland (London, 1691).

121.[Jonathan Swift], The last speech and dying words of the Bank of Ireland (Dublin, [1721]).

122.David Nokes, Jonathan Swift: a hypocrite reversed (Oxford, 1987), p. 268.

123.[Jonathan Swift], The wonderful wonder of wonders (Dublin, 1720), p. 3.

124.Seán Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas and the Dublin election of 1748–1749’, Parliamentary History, ii (1983), p. 99.

125.Ibid., p. 97.

126.Address from the free electors of the province of Ulster, to Anthony Malone, p. 25.

127.An address from the ladies of the provinces of Munster and Leinster (London, 1754), pp 9, 13. See also The royal mistake, or, A catechism for the Irish parliament (London, 1753), pp 6–7.

128.Bob Harris, Politics and the nation: Britain in the mid-eighteenth century (Oxford, 2002), p. 207.

129.Ibid., pp 210, 213.

130.A letter upon libels (Dublin, 1753), pp 6–7.

131.Fraud detected: or The Hibernian patriot, containing all the Drapier’s letters to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1725), preface. As Ehrenpreis suggests, it is possible that this preface was written by Swift himself.

132.A word of advice: or A friendly caution to the collectors of Ireland, in relation to Wood’s brass-money (Dublin, 1724), pp 3, 8.

133.L.B. Haberdasher [John Gast], A letter to the tradesmen, farmers, and the rest of the good people of Ireland (Dublin, 1754), pp 6, 20, 22.

134.P. H. Kelly, ‘The printer’s copy of the MS of William Molyneux, “The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated”, 1698’, Long Room, 18–19 (spring/autumn 1979), pp 6–13.

135.Bp Nicolson to Abp Wake, 1 Sept. 1719 (B.L. Add. MS 6116, f. 89).

136.The humble representation made to the King’s Majesty, by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the parliament of Ireland (London, 1720). See also A letter from a member of the House of Commons of Ireland to a Gentleman of the Long Robe in Great-Britain (Dublin, 1720).

137.Several speeches in the House of Commons in England, for and against the bill for the better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland, p. 3.

138.[Robert Clayton], A replication to the rejoinder: being a state of the case together with the history of popery (Dublin, 1743), p. 5; Hugh Fenning, ‘The Catholic press in Munster in the eighteenth century’ in Gerard Long (ed.), Books beyond the Pale: aspects of the provincial book trade in Ireland before 1850 (Dublin, 1994), p. 20.

139.See, for example, The case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland: in relation to the bill against the growth of popery, and other bills now under consideration (repr., Dublin, 1703).

140.[Sylvester Lloyd], Queries on the Popery Bill, with the address of the Roman Catholics of Ireland to His Present Majesty King George the Second ([Dublin], 1731), p. 1.

141.See, for example, Harris, Politics and the nation, p. 213; James Kelly ‘Political publishing’ in Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (eds), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii: The Irish book in English, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 2006), p. 220.

142.T. C. Barnard, ‘Learning, the learned and literacy in Ireland, c. 1660–1760’ in T. C. Barnard, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and Katharine Simms (eds), ‘A miracle of learning’: studies in manuscripts and Irish learning (Aldershot, 1998); idem, ‘Reading in eighteenth-century Ireland: public and private pleasures’ in Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy (eds), The experience of reading: Irish historical perspectives (Dublin, 1999), p. 61.

143.James Kelly (ed.), Gallows speeches from eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2001), p. 24.

144.Douglas Simes, ‘Ireland, 1760–1820’ in Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (eds), Press, politics and the public sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 114.

145.Martyn J. Powell, ‘Political toasting in eighteenth-century Ireland’, History, xci (2006), pp 508–29.

146.James Kelly, ‘“The Glorious and Immortal Memory”: commemoration and Protestant identity in Ireland, 1660–1800’, P.R.I.A., xciv, sect. C (1994), pp 39–40.

147.Swift, Drapier’s Letters, p. 68.

148.Richard Tuck, Philosophy and government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 312.

149.Observations on the declaration of the Catholic Society of Dublin (Dublin, 1792), pp 12–14, 19–22, 23–7, 35, 48–51.

150.Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver and genocide: barbarism and the European imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford, 1991,) pp 81–2.

151.Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the prospect of a regicide peace (London, 1796), pp 16–17. See also F. P. Lock, ‘Edmund Burke and the rhetoric of numbers’, Studies in Burke and his Time, xx (2005), pp 17–37.

152.John A. Phillips, ‘Popular politics in unreformed England’, Journal of Modern History, lii (1980), pp 599–625.

153.See, for example, Frank O’Gorman, Voters, patrons, and parties: the unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989); Paul Langford, ‘Property and “virtual representation” in eighteenth-century England’, H.J., 31/1 (1988), pp 83–115.

154.A. P. W. Malcomson, ‘The parliamentary traffic of this country’ in Bartlett and Hayton (eds), Penal era and golden age, p. 149.

155.Ibid., pp 137–61, quotation on p. 146.

156.A review of the strictures on the declaration of the Catholic Society (Dublin, 1792), pp 24–5.

157.Thomas P. Power, Land, politics, and society in eighteenth-century Tipperary (Oxford, 1993), pp 228, 230.

158.Ibid., pp 222–3.

159.Magennis, Irish political system, p. 103.

160.Karen J. Harvey, The Bellews of Mount Bellew: a Catholic gentry family in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1998), p. 146.

161.A true state of the present affairs of Limerick (London, 1726), p. 25.

162.Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas and the Dublin elections of 1748–1749’, pp 105–6.

163.Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and cities: popular politics in the age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), p. 356.

164.Arlette Farge, Fragile lives: violence, power and solidarity in eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge, 1993).

165.Kelly, ‘Glorious and Immortal Memory’, pp 25–52.

166.T. C. Barnard, ‘The uses of 23 October and Irish Protestant celebrations’, E.H.R., cvi (1991), pp 889–920.

167.An account of the procession at Londonderry, August 1st 1716 (Dublin, n.d.) (copy in N.L.I., LO folder 9/15).

168.John Hempton, The siege and history of Londonderry (Derry, 1861), p. 411.

169.See, for example, minutes of the common council, 20 Aug. 1753 (P.R.O.N.I., Corporation of Londonderry Minute Book, 1742–53, LA/79/2A/6, p. 124).

170.Kelly, ‘Glorious and Immortal Memory’, p. 40.

171.Ibid.

172.Purcell to Egmont, 8 July 1743 (B.L., Add. MS 47001B, f. 25).

173.David Waldstreicher, In the midst of perpetual fetes: the making of American nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), p. 26.

174.Magennis, Irish political system, p. 96.

175.Harris, Politics and the nation, pp 219–24.

176.Conway to Newcastle, 8 May 1755 (B.L., Add. MS 32854, f. 422).

177.Harris, Politics and the nation, p. 12.

178.[Charles Lucas], A second letter to the citizens of Dublin by A.F. Barber and Citizen (Dublin, 1747), p. 10.

179.Seán Murphy, ‘Charles Lucas, Catholicism and nationalism’, E.C.I., viii (1993), p. 90.

180.Serious thoughts concerning the interest and exigencies of the state of Ireland (Dublin, 1757), p. 30.

Chapter 9: Queen Sive and Captain Right: Agrarian Rebellion

1.F.D.J., 3 July 1762.

2.The fullest account can be found in the Gentleman’s and London Magazine (June 1762), p. 370. See also J. S. Donnelly, jr, ‘The Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, I.H.S., xxi, no. 81 (Mar. 1978), pp 20–54.

3.F.D.J., 22 June 1762.

4.E. P. Thompson, Customs in common (London, 1991), p. 57.

5.See E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Distinctions between socio-political and other forms of crime’, Society for the Study of Labour History Bulletin, 25 (autumn 1972), pp 5–6. For some examples see Douglas Hay, ‘Poaching and the game laws on Cannock Chase’ in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (London, 1975); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and hunters: the origin of the Black Act (London, 1975); and for a critical approach, P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and poachers: the English game laws, 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981).

6.Three years later another man was charged in connection with the killing of James Grove’s horse: see F.D.J., 9 Mar. 1765.

7.Edmund Burke to Charles O’Hara, [23 Aug. 1762], The correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al. (10 vols, Cambridge, 1958–78), i, 148.

8.F.D.J., 15 June 1762.

9.Thomas P. Power, ‘Father Nicholas Sheehy, c. 1728–1766’ in Gerard Moran (ed.), Radical Irish priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp 62–78.

10.Burke to O’Hara, [23 Aug. 1762], Burke correspondence, i, 147. For the background see L. M. Cullen, ‘Burke, Ireland, and revolution’, Eighteenth-Century Life, xvi (1992), pp 21–42.

11.Sir James Caldwell, A brief examination of the question whether it is expedient in either a religious or political view, to pass an act to enable papists to take real securities for money which they may lend (2nd ed., Dublin, 1764).

12.An alarm to the unprejudiced and well-minded Protestants of Ireland (Cork, 1762), pp 25–6.

13.[John Curry], A candid enquiry into the causes and motives of the late riots in the province of Munster in Ireland (London, 1767), preface.

14.Haydn Mason, Voltaire (London, 1981), p. 98.

15.D. D. Bien, The Calas affair: persecution, toleration and heresy in eighteenth-century Toulouse (Princeton, 1960).

16.Maurice Bric, ‘The Whiteboy movement in Tipperary, 1760–1780’ in William Nolan (ed.), Tipperary: history and society (Dublin, 1985), p. 161.

17.Philip O’Connell, ‘The plot against Father Nicholas Sheehy: the historical background’, I.E.R., 5th ser., cviii (July–Dec. 1967), pp 380–81; anonymous correspondent to Chatham, 28 Dec. 1770 (T.N.A., Chatham Papers, HO 3/8/89).

18.Thomas Conolly to Duke of Richmond, 30 Mar. 1793 (T.N.A., HO 100/43/169–72).

19.Luke Gibbons, ‘Identity without a centre: allegory, history and Irish nationalism’ in idem, Transformations in Irish culture (Cork, 1996), pp 134–47.

20.James Kelly, ‘The Whiteboys in 1762: a contemporary account’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, xciv, no. 253 (Jan.–Dec. 1989), p. 20.

21.‘Some account of the proceedings of the Whiteboys and of the conduct of some of their abettors from the year 1785 to 1786’(N.L.I., MS 1461, John Barter Bennett MS).

22.Donnelly, ‘Whiteboy movement’, pp 22–3.

23.The insurrection: or, A faithfull narrative of the disturbances which lately broke out in the province of Munster, under the denomination of White or Right-Boys (Dublin, 1787), p. 15.

24.E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, P.&P., no. 50 (1971), pp 76–136.

25.Thomas Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish Militia disturbances of 1793’, P.&P., no. 99 (1983), esp. p. 42.

26.Ibid., p. 62: ‘Paternalism was, in general, rewarded with deference.’

27.Peter Sahlins, Forest rites: the War of the Demoiselles in nineteenth-century France (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1994).

28.See Thompson, Whigs and hunters.

29.E. P. Thompson, ‘The crime of anonymity’ in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (London, 1975), p. 286.

30.James C. Scott, Domination and the art of resistance: hidden transcripts (New Haven & London, 1990).

31.Keith Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’ in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The experience of authority in early modern England (London, 1996), pp 10–46.

32.Bric, ‘Whiteboy movement in Tipperary, 1760–1780’, p. 153.

33.J. S. Donnelly, jr, ‘The Rightboy movement, 1785–8’, Studia Hibernica, nos 17/18 (1977–8), pp 120–202.

34.J. S. Donnelly, jr, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, Studia Hibernica, no. 21 (1981), pp 7–73.

35.Eoin Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”? Reconsidering the Hearts of Oak disturbances of July 1763’, I.H.S., xxxi, no. 122 (Nov. 1998), p. 168.

36.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 55.

37.Ibid., p. 51.

38.Quoted D. W. Miller (ed.), Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders: selected documents on the County Armagh disturbances, 1784–96 (Belfast, 1990), p. 9.

39.Thomas Campbell, A philosophical survey of the south of Ireland (London, 1777), p. 310.

40.James Kelly (ed.), The letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick, 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990), p. 27.

41.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 13 n. 21.

42.Ibid., p. 31.

43.Ibid., pp 47, 48–9.

44.Curry, Candid Enquiry, pp 35–6.

45.Thomas P. Power, Land, politics and society in eighteenth-century Tipperary (Oxford, 1993), ch. 5.

46.J. S. Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion: the Whiteboys of 1769–76’, P.R.I.A., lxxxiii, sect. C (1983), pp 303–4.

47.Donnelly, ‘Rightboy movement 1785–8’, pp 134, 137, 140–41.

48.Maurice J. Bric, ‘The tithe system in eighteenth-century Ireland’, P.R.I.A., lxxxvi, sect. C (1986), pp 271–88.

49.Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”?’, p. 172.

50.Last declaration of James Buxton, 3 May 1766 (Sheffield City Library, WWM, Burke MS 8/7).

51.Power, Land, politics and society in eighteenth-century Tipperary, p. 203.

52.Donnelly, ‘Rightboy movement, 1785–8’, p. 152.

53.Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”?’, p. 171.

54.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 16.

55.Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”?’, p. 182.

56.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 41.

57.Donnelly, ‘Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, pp 49–50.

58.Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”?’, pp 171–2.

59.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 38.

60.Ibid., p. 42.

61.Kelly, ‘Whiteboys in 1762’, p. 22.

62.Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion’, pp 306–7; Bric, ‘Whiteboy movement in Tipperary’, p. 165.

63.[Samuel Bayly], A genuine account of the progress of Charles Coote Esq; in pursuing and defeating the Oak-Boys in the counties of Monaghan, Cavan, and Fermanagh (Dublin, 1763), p. 7.

64.Brian Trainor (ed.), Aspects of Irish social history, 1750–1800 (Belfast, 1969), p. 35.

65.Kelly, ‘Whiteboys in 1762’, p. 21.

66.Bric, ‘Whiteboy movement in Tipperary’, p. 154.

67.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 8.

68.Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”?’, pp 178–9.

69.Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on top’ in idem, Society and culture in early modern France (Cambridge, 1987 ed.), pp 146–9.

70.H. T. Dickinson and K. Logue, ‘The Porteous Riot: a study of the breakdown of law and order in Edinburgh, 1736–1737’, Scottish Labour History Review, 10 (1976), 21–40.

71.See also Donnelly, ‘Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, p. 29 n. 47.

72.A letter from the Revd Mr Nicholas Sheehy, to Major S——, in Dublin (handbill, 14 Mar. 1766) (copy in Shefield City Library, WWM, Burke MS 8/10).

73.Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion’, pp 300–01.

74.Donnelly, ‘Rightboy movement, 1785–8’, pp 183–4.

75.Bric, ‘Whiteboy movement in Tipperary, 1760–1780’, p. 163.

76.These figures are based on a trawl through Donnelly’s articles, cited above. It seems that 26 Whiteboys were sentenced to death between 1762 and 1765; some were pardoned, but at least 21 went to the gallows. To these must be added Sheehy and his three companions in 1766. This makes a total of 30, with at least 25 confirmed deaths. If we turn to the 1770s, we find three separate groups of hangings. Before 1774, 13 men received capital convictions. At least five executions took place in the summer of 1775. Thirty men were convicted in the early months of 1776, of whom at least three were pardoned. This makes a total of 48. Perhaps as many as 40 of them actually went to the gallows. Finally, between 1785 and 1788, there were 19 capital convictions, with around 12 executed. The northerners, thankfully, appear more straightforward: just one Oakboy executed and twelve Steelboy convictions (nine at Antrim and two at Down in the spring of 1772; one at Antrim summer assizes), of whom at least seven were executed.

77.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 19, counts 15 Oakboys, but Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”?’, p. 172 makes it 20 or more.

78.The insurrection: or, A faithfull narrative of the disturbances which lately broke out in the province of Munster, p. 9, note.

79.Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion’, p. 314.

80.Donnelly, ‘Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, p. 48.

81.Bric, ‘Whiteboy movement in Tipperary’, p. 161.

82.Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion’, p. 301.

83.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 84.

84.Samuel Madden Reflections and resolutions proper for the gentlemen of Ireland (Dublin, 1738), p. 152.

85.James Kelly, ‘That damn’d thing called honour’: duelling in Ireland, 1570–1860 (Cork, 1995), p. 280.

86.Neal Garnham, ‘How violent was eighteenth-century Ireland?’, I.H.S., xxx, no. 119 (May 1997), p. 390.

87.Ibid., pp 390–92.

88.Unknown correspondent to Abp Wake, 11 Dec. [1718] (Christ Church, Oxford, Wake MSS, vol. xiii, no. 31).

89.Sean Connolly, ‘Violence and order in the eighteenth century’ in Patrick O’Flanagan et al. (eds), Rural Ireland, 1600–1900: modernisation and change (Cork, 1987), pp 44–5, 46.

90.Ibid., p. 47. For a fuller treatment see S. J. Connolly, ‘Law, order and popular protest in early eighteenth-century Ireland: the case of the Houghers’ in P. J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, rebels and establishments: Historical Studies XV (Belfast, 1985), pp 51–68.

91.S. J. Connolly, Religion, law, and power: the making of Protestant Ireland, 1600–1760 (Oxford, 1992), p. 198; R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the age of imperialism and revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979), pp 65–6.

92.William Hamilton, Letters on the principles of the French democracy (Dublin, 1792), p. 12.

93.William Hamilton to Dublin Castle, 15 Feb. 1797 (N.A.I., Rebellion Papers, 620/28/269).

94.William Hamilton to Robert Marshall, 14 Jan. 1797 (ibid., 620/28/99).

95.Donnelly, ‘Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, pp 44–5.

96.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, pp 20–22.

97.Pieter Spierenburg, The spectacle of suffering: execution in the evolution of repression: from preindustrial metropolis to the European experience (Cambridge, 1984), p. 74.

98.[J.W.], A particular and authentic narrative of the life, examination tortures and execution of Robert Francis Damien, trans. Thomas Jones (London, 1757), pp 16–17.

99.Every man his own lawyer: or, A summary of the laws now in force in Ireland, in a new and instructive method (Dublin, 1755), p. 346.

100.James Kelly (ed.), Gallows speeches from eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2001), p. 143.

101.Ibid., p. 146.

102.James Kelly, ‘Capital punishment in early eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Serge Soupel (ed.,) Crime et châtiment dans les Îles Britanniques au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 2001), p. 169.

103.Kelly (ed.), Gallows speeches, p. 100.

104.J. A. Sharpe, ‘Last dying speeches: religion, ideology and public execution in seventeenth-century England’, P.&P., no. 107 (1985), pp 153–4, 159–61.

105.Kelly (ed.), Gallows speeches, p. 44.

106.Ibid., p. 117.

107.Kelly, ‘Capital punishment in early eighteenth-century Ireland’, p. 162.

108.Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion’, pp 308, 327.

109.Ibid., p. 308

110.Kelly (ed.), Gallows speeches, p. 36.

111.‘Copy of the last dying speech of Father Nicholas Sheehy (3 May 1766)’ (Sheffield City Archives, WWM, Burke MS 8/3).

112.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel, p. 69 n. 301.

113.In addition to Thompson, ‘Moral economy of the English crowd’, see John Stevenson, ‘The “moral economy” of the English crowd: myth and reality’ in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds), Order and disorder in early modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp 218–38.

114.Cynthia A. Bouton, The Flour War: gender, class, and community in late ancien régime French society (University Park, Pa., 1993).

115.Eoin Magennis, ‘In search of “moral economy”: food scarcity in 1756–57 and the crowd’ in Peter Jupp and Eoin Magennis (eds), Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 197.

116.Natalie Z. Davies, ‘Rites of violence: youth groups and charivari in sixteenth-century France’, P.&P., no. 59 (1973), pp 53–91; see also idem ‘Anthropology and history in the 1980s’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xii/2 (autumn 1981), pp 267–75.

117.Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture” in early modern England’, P.&P., no. 105 (1984), pp 79–113.

118.Connolly, ‘Violence and order’, p. 54.

119.Natalie Z. Davis, ‘The reasons of misrule’ in idem Society and culture in early modern France (Cambridge, 1987 ed.), pp 97–123.

120.John Cashmere, ‘The social uses of violence in ritual: charivari or religious persecution?’, European History Quarterly, xxi (1991), pp 291–319.

121.Bp Troy, pastoral address, 12 Dec. 1782, in Patrick F. Moran (ed.), Spicilegium Ossoriense (3 vols, Dublin, 1874–84), iii, 37–9.

122.Gentleman’s and London Magazine (July 1762), pp 436–7.

123.Robert Bell, A description of the condition and manners as well as of the moral and political character, education, &c. of the peasantry of Ireland (London, 1804), pp 21–2.

124.S. J. Connolly, Priests and people in pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (2nd ed., Dublin, 2001), p. 218.

125.James Kelly, The Liberty and Ormond Boys: factional riot in eighteenth-century Dublin (Dublin, 2005).

126.Ibid., p. 28. My italics.

127.Neal Garnham, ‘The short career of Paul Farrell: a brief consideration of law-enforcement in eighteenth-century Dublin’, E.C.I., xi (1996), pp 46–52.

128.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 8.

129.Bric, ‘Tithe system in eighteenth-century Ireland’, p. 282.

130.W. A. Maguire, ‘Lord Donegall and the Hearts of Steel’, I.H.S., xxi, no. 84 (Sept. 1979), p. 355.

131.Donnelly, ‘Irish agrarian rebellion’, p. 309.

132.[Sir James Caldwell], An address to the House of Commons of Ireland: by a freeholder (n.p., 1771), p. 14.

133.The history of the Blacks of Waltham in Hampshire; and those under the like denomination in Berkshire (London, 1723), p. 6.

134.Cal Winslow, ‘Sussex smugglers’ in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (London, 1975), quotation on p. 137.

135.E. P. Thompson, ‘The English crowd in the eighteenth century’, P.&P., no. 50 (1971), p. 127.

136.[Caldwell], Address to the House of Commons of Ireland, p. 10.

137.See the memoirs by Patrick Wall, ‘Supplément au mémoire présenté au ministère au mois de Mars 1778, relative à un projet de descente qu’on a proposé’, 15 Feb. 1779; and ‘Mémoire politique et militaire sure l’Irlande’, 4 Mar. 1780, from the Archives de la Guerre (Vincennes), appended to Marcus de la Poer Beresford, ‘Ireland in the French strategy, 1691–1789’ (M.Litt. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1975), pp 413–23.

138.[Patrick Duigenan], An address to the nobility and gentry of the Church of Ireland, as by law established (Dublin, 1786; repr., London, 1786), p. 2.

139.Kelly, ‘Whiteboys in 1762’, pp 21–22.

140.Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, p. 41.

141.Dominick Trant, Considerations on the present disturbances in the province of Munster (Dublin, 1787), p. 57.

142.Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”?’, pp 183–4; A letter to the Right Hon. J[ohn] P[onsonby] S[peake]r of the H[ous]e of C[ommon]s (London, 1767), p. 37.

143.Donnelly, ‘Rightboy movement, 1785–8’, pp 120–202.

144.Gentleman’s and London Magazine (Aug. 1763), p. 502. There are also two copies in Burke’s papers: Sheffield City Archives, WWM, Burke MSS 8/15, 16.

145.Vincent Morley, Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 50.

146.Reprinted in the Gentleman’s and London Magazine (June 1762), p. 372 (the relevant issue of the Cork Evening Post has not survived). For the recent debate on this question see Vincent Morley, ‘George III, Queen Sadhbh and the historians’, E.C.I., xvii (2002), pp 112–20; S. J. Connolly, ‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and republicans: varieties of disaffection in eighteenth-century Ireland’, E.C.I., xviii (2003), pp 63–79.

147.Richard Aston to William G. Hamilton, 24 June 1762, Burke correspondence, i, 137–41.

Chapter 10: The Patriot Soldier

1.Proceedings of a military court held in Dublin Barracks on Saturday the Tenth of November, for the trial of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1798), p. 7.

2.Thomas Bartlett (ed.), Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998), pp 107–8. For a full examination of Tone’s career see Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: prophet of Irish independence (New Haven, 1989).

3.Trial of Theobald Wolfe Tone, pp 11, 14, 18–9.

4.Dorinda Outram, The body and the French Revolution: sex, class and political culture (New Haven, 1989), esp. ch. 6.

5.Jim Smyth, The men of no property: Irish radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Basingstoke, 1992), p. 183.

6.Thomas Bartlett, ‘Counter-insurgency and rebellion’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), p. 253.

7.The sketch, from Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, is reproduced in Elliott, Wolfe Tone, plate 50.

8.A letter from M. Rousseau of Geneva, to M. d’Alembert, of Paris, concerning the effects of theatrical entertainments (London, 1759), pp 187–8, note.

9.[Theobald Wolfe Tone], An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (Belfast, 1791), p. 10.

10.On the defence of Ireland (Dublin, 1795), pp 5–6, note.

11.Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992), pp 177–93.

12.Fintan Cullan, Visual politics: the representation of Ireland, 1750–1930 (Cork, 1997), pp 50–66.

13.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, pp 151, 599.

14.On David, see Thomas Crow, Emulation: making artists for revolutionary France (London, 1995).

15.Anthony D. Smith, Chosen peoples: sacred sources of national identity (Oxford, 2003), p. 225.

16.Thomas Paine, Rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke’s attack on the French Revolution (Londonderry, 1791), p. 84. This and all subsequent references are to the Derry edition.

17.For an example see the editorial of the second issue of the Northern Star, 7 Jan. 1792.

18.N.S., 7 Nov. 1792.

19.‘Declaration and resolutions of the Society of United Irishmen of Belfast’, reprinted in Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, pp 298–9.

20.A candid and impartial account of the disturbances in the county of Meath, in the years 1792, 1793, and 1794 (Dublin, 1794), p. 8.

21.Dublin Evening Post, 6 Aug. 1789; Freeman’s Journal, 5 Dec. 1789. I owe these references to Ultán Gillen. See further his ‘Monarchy, republic and empire: Irish public opinion and France, c. 1787–1804’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2005), ch. 2.

22.[Tone], Argument on behalf of the Catholics, p. 24; Paine, Rights of man, esp. pp ii–iii, 83–4.

23.Paine, Rigts of man, p. 32, note.

24.T. C. W. Blanning, The origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), p. 109.

25.Ibid., p. 211.

26.K. P. Ferguson, ‘The army in Ireland from the Restoration to the Act of Union’ (Ph.D. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1980), p. 100.

27.Terence Denman, ‘Hibernia officina militum’: Irish recruitment to the British regular army, 1660–1815’, Irish Sword, xx, no. 80 (winter 1996), p. 156.

28.Ibid., p. 157.

29.Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: the British soldier and war in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 74.

30.Denman, ‘Irish recruitment to the British regular army’, p. 158.

31.Bartlett, ‘Counter-insurgency and rebellion’, p. 257.

32.The following paragraph owes much to Thomas Bartlett, ‘Militarisation and politicisation in Ireland, 1780–1820’ in L. M. Cullen and Louis Bergerac (eds), Culture et pratiques politiques en France et en Irelande, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1991), pp 101–22.

33.N. A. M. Rodger, ‘Mutiny or subversion? Spithead and the Nore’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), esp. p. 562; Leonard McNally cited in Bartlett, ‘Militarisation and politicisation’, p. 127.

34.Poster enclosed with Captain MacBride to Admiralty, 24 June 1782 (T.N.A., ADM, 1/2123).

35.Vincent Morley (ed.), Washington i gceannas a ríochta: cogadh Mheiriceá i litríocht na Gaeilge (Dublin, 2005), pp 108–9. I am grateful to Dr Morley for drawing my attention to this poem, and for permission to use his unpublished translation.

36.Thomas Bartlett, ‘The augmentation of the army in Ireland, 1767–1769’, E.H.R., xcvi (1981), p. 544.

37.Ibid., p. 554.

38.‘Declaration and resolutions of the Society of United Irishmen of Belfast’, reprinted in Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, pp 298–9.

39.Patrick M. Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: a study in high politics, 1798–1801 (Dublin, 1999), p. 5.

40.Patrick O’Donoghue, ‘The Catholic Church and Ireland in an age of revolution and rebellion, 1782–1803’ (Ph.D thesis, University College Dublin, 1975), p. 34.

41.Bp Bellew to Cardinal Antonelli, 31 July 1781 (A.P.F., S.C. Irlanda, vol. 15, f. 75): ‘cercando in tutto e per tutto di far il bon pastore’.

42.James Dillon to Bp Troy, 2 Mar. 1782 (D.D.A., Troy Papers, 29/7/186).

43.[Peter Burrowes], Plain arguments in defence of the people’s absolute dominion over the constitution (Dublin, 1784), p. 53.

44.Derek Beales, Prosperity and plunder: European Catholic monasteries in the age of revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 8.

45.Hugh Fenning, The undoing of the friars of Ireland: a study of the novitiate question in the eighteenth century (Louvain, 1972), ch. 13.

46.Conor Cruise O’Brien, The great melody: a thematic biography and commented anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1992), p. 452.

47.‘Il catolicismo d’Irlanda non dovea prendere con i medesimi alcuna parte, e far i medesimi un sol corpo, ma sibbene atternersi ad un puro stato d’indifferenza’ (Cardinal Antonelli to Charles O’Conor, 24 Dec. 1791 (D.D.A., Troy Papers)).

48.Abp Troy to James Butler, 5 May 1791, quoted in O’Donoghue, ‘Catholic Church and Ireland’, p. 138.

49.Veritas, A vindication of the Roman Catholic clergy of Wexford (2nd ed., Dublin, 1798), p. 18.

50.Vincent Morley, Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 288.

51.N.S., 4 Jan. 1792.

52.Thomas Paine, The age of reason (Paris, 1794), pp 3, 4.

53.Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’ in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990), p. 156.

54.Address of Newry Catholics, 8 Apr. 1778 (T.N.A., sp 63/462, f. 24).

55.Morley, Irish opinion and the American Revolution, pp 233–4.

56.Thomas Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish Militia disturbances of 1793’, P.&P., no. 99 (1983), pp 41–64 (quotations from pp 52 (n. 62), 53). Cf. Ivan F. Nelson, ‘“The first chapter of 1798”? Restoring a military perspective to the Irish Militia riots of 1793’, I.H.S., xxxiii, no. 132 (Nov. 2003), pp 369–86.

57.Quotation from Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy’, p. 54.

58.‘Extract of letters received respecting the disturbances in Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon & Sligo’, 26 May 1793 (T.N.A., HO 100/44/10).

59.Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy’, p. 58.

60.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, p. 226.

61.Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy’, p. 42.

62.Ferguson, ‘Army in Ireland’, p. 165.

63.Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy’, pp 50, 54.

64.Eamon O’Flaherty, ‘The Catholic Convention and Anglo-Irish politics, 1791–93’, Arch. Hib., xl (1985), pp 21–2.

65.Westmorland to Dundas, 17 Nov. 1792 (T.N.A., HO 100/83/70–82).

66.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, p. 615.

67.Ibid., p. 592.

68.Marianne Elliott, Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982), p. 81.

69.Narrative of ‘William Fox’ (N.A.I., Rebellion Papers, 620/4/41).

70.Louis Cullen, ‘The internal politics of the United Irishmen’ in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin, 1993), pp 194–5.

71.J. E. Devereux, Observations on the factions which have ruled Ireland (2nd ed., London, 1801), pp 118–19.

72.Deirdre Lindsay, ‘The Rebellion Papers: an introduction to the Rebellion Papers collection in the National Archives, Bishop Street, Dublin’, Ulster Local Studies, xviii, no. 2 (spring 1997), p. 36.

73.Thomas Pelham to Whitehall, 2 Nov. 1797 (T.N.A., HO 100/70/181).

74.David Dickson, ‘Smoke without fire? Munster and the 1798 rebellion’ in Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective, pp 147–73.

75.Louis M. Cullen, ‘Rebellion mortality in Wexford in 1798’, Journal of the Wexford Historical Society, 17 (1998–9), pp 7–29.

76.Cornwallis to Portland, 28 June 1798, in The correspondence of Charles, first Marquis Cornwallis, ed. Charles Ross (3 vols, London, 1859), ii, 357.

77.Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish nation: the Catholic question in Ireland, 1760–1830 (Dublin, 1992), p. 242.

78.Hugh Gough, ‘Genocide and the bicentenary: the French Revolution and the revenge of the Vendée’, H.J., 30/4 (1987), pp 977–88; Michael Rowe, ‘Civilians and warfare during the French Revolutionary Wars’ in Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey (eds), Civilians in wartime Europe, 1618–1900 (London, 2007), pp 93–132.

79.Tim Blanning, The pursuit of glory: Europe, 1648–1815 (London, 2007), p. 345.

80.Thomas Bartlett, ‘Why the history of the 1798 rebellion has yet to be written’, E.C.I., xv (2000), pp 181–90.

81.Dickson, ‘Smoke without fire?’.

82.The report from the secret committee of the House of Commons (Dublin, 1798), p. 317.

Chapter 11: A Brotherhood of Affection

1.For a review of the literature see Ian McBride, ‘The harp without the crown: republicanism and nationalism in the 1790s’ in Sean Connolly (ed.), Political ideas in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp 159–84. The standard work is Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: prophet of Irish independence (New Haven, 1989).

2.Thomas Bartlett (ed.), Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998), pp 494, 604, 606–7.

3.[Theobald Wolfe Tone], An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (Belfast, 1791), p. 23.

4.Mary Helen Thuente, The harp re-strung: the United Irishmen and the rise of Irish literary nationalism (New York, 1994), esp. ch. 5.

5.[Tone], Argument on behalf of the Catholics, pp 23–4.

6.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, p. xvii.

7.[Tone], Argument on behalf of the Catholics, pp 23–4. Original emphasis.

8.Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (2nd ed., London, 1991), pp 9–12.

9.Anthony D. Smith, Chosen peoples: sacred sources of national identity (Oxford, 2003), ch. 2.

10.Pierre Nora, ‘Nation’ in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds), A critical dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London, 1989), p. 743.

11.David Miller, On nationality (Oxford, 1995), p. 30.

12.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, p. 435.

13.Ibid., p. 436.

14.[Theobald Wolfe Tone], Spanish war! An enquiry how far Ireland is bound, of right, to embark in the impending contest on the side of Great-Britain? (Dublin, 1790), pp 23, 31, 42.

15.Patrick Kelly, ‘The improvement of Ireland’, Analecta Hibernica, xxxv (1992), pp 55, 79.

16.T. H. Breen, ‘Ideology and nationalism on the eve of the American Revolution: revisions once more in need of revising’, Journal of American History, 84/1 (June 1997), p. 32.

17.Jack Greene, Peripheries and center: constitutional development in the extended polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1606–1788 (London, 1986), p. 34.

18.Francis Hutcheson, A system of moral philosophy (Glasgow, 1755), pp 308–9.

19.Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992), pp 137–45

20.William Campbell, ‘Sketches of the history of Presbyterians in Ireland’ (1803) (Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, Belfast, Campbell MSS, p. 236).

21.David Noel Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, and revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Cork, 1981), p. 52.

22.Ralph Stuart Wallace, ‘The Scotch-Irish of provincial New Hampshire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1984), pp 33, 42, 159–60; James McGregor to Samuel Shute, 27 Feb. 1720, in Edward L. Parker, The history of Londonderry . . . N.H. (Boston, 1851), p. 68.

23.‘On the ruinous effects of civil war’, 27 Feb. 1778, in William Steel Dickson, Sermons on the following subjects . . . (Belfast, 1778), p. 45.

24.E. R. R. Green, ‘The Scotch-Irish and the coming of the revolution in North Carolina’, I.H.S., vii, no. 26 (Sept. 1950), p. 83; A. Roger Ekirch, ‘Poor Carolina’: politics and society in colonial North America, 1729–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1981), chs 6–7.

25.‘An address to the ministers and Presbyterian congregations in North Carolina’, 10 July 1775, in William L. Saunders (ed.), The colonial records of North Carolina (30 vols, Raleigh, 1886–90), x, 222–8.

26.‘A fragment of a journal kept by Rev. William Tennent’ in R. W. Gibbes (ed.), Documentary history of the American Revolution (New York, 1855), pp 225–39.

27.Green, ‘Scotch-Irish and the coming of the Revolution’, pp 77–86.

28.Vincent Morley, Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 135.

29.Ibid., pp 2, 14.

30.Quoted ibid., p. 188.

31.Ibid., pp 1–14, 63–8, 201–2, 281–2.

32.Ibid., p. 107.

33.The patriot soldier; or, Irish Volunteer. A poem by a member of the First Belfast Company (Belfast, 1789); James Glass, Libertas (Belfast, 1789).

34.The usurpations of England the chief sources of the miseries of Ireland (Dublin, 1780), p. 7.

35.Breandán Mac Suibhne, ‘Whiskey, potatoes and Paddies: Volunteering and the construction of the Irish nation in northwest Ulster, 1778–1782’ in Peter Jupp and Eoin Magennis (eds), Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp 54–5.

36.[Francis Dobbs], Thoughts on the conduct and continuation of the Volunteers of Ireland (1783), pp 18–19.

37.John Angel, A general history of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1781), ii, 127

38.B.N.L., 26 July 1791.

39.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, p. 59. Tone put the number as high as 6,000.

40.The best account of these celebrations is contained in Ultán Gillen, ‘Monarchy, republic and empire: Irish public opinion and France, c. 1787–1804’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2005), chs 2–3. For the addresses see An account of the Belfast review and celebration of the French Revolution (Edinburgh, 1792), pp 8, 10.

41.W. H. Crawford, ‘Change in Ulster in the late eighteenth century’ in Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton, (eds), Penal era and golden age: essays in Irish history, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp 186–203.

42.W. H. Crawford, ‘The Belfast middle classes in the late eighteenth century’ in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin 1993), pp 66–8.

43.I. R. McBride, Scripture politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998), pp 125–6.

44.Gary B. Nash, Urban crucible: social change, political consciousness, and the origins of the American Revolution (London, 1979), pp 54–5, 313.

45.Marianne Elliott, Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982), p. 106.

46.Thomas Paine, Rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke’s attack on the French Revolution (Londonderry, 1791 ed.), p. 81.

47.Simon Schama, Citizens: a chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989), p. 572.

48.Anderson, Imagined communities, passim.

49.Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the prospect of a regicide peace (London, 1796), pp 126, 127–8.

50.Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: popular politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–98 (Oxford, 1994), p. 202; Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: radicalism, Catholicism and the construction of Irish identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996), p. 64.

51.‘To the people’, N.S., 4 Jan, 1792.

52.Breandán Mac Suibhne, ‘Politicisation and paramilitarism: north-west and southwest Ulster, c. 1772–98’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 258–9.

53.See Gillian O’Brien, ‘“Spirit, impartiality and independence”: the Northern Star, 1792–97’, E.C.I., xiii (1998), pp 7–23; Curtin, United Irishmen, ch. 8.

54.Breandán Mac Suibhne, ‘Politicisation and paramilitarism’, p. 247, fig. 13.1.

55.David Dickson, Old World colony: Cork and south Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork, 2005), p. 360.

56.See B.N.L., 17 June 1791, for the Belfast Volunteer committee’s plans for the first Bastille Day celebration.

57.J. S. Donnelly, jr, ‘Propagating the cause of the United Irishmen’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, lxix (1980), pp 5–23.

58.Rev. Edward Hudson to Charlemont, 3 Aug. 1794 (Charlemont manuscripts and correspondence (2 vols, H.M.C., London, 1891–4), ii, 246; Donnelly, ‘Propagating the cause’, p. 7; Whelan, Tree of Liberty, pp 64, 69, 70.

59.McBride, ‘The harp without the crown’.

60.Thuente, Harp re-strung, p. 144.

61.[William Carey], Both sides of the gutter (Dublin, 1789), pp 11, 29; An appeal to the people; or, A political olio (Dublin, 1792), p. 75.

62.The Irish harp (attun’d to freedom): a collection of patriotic songs; selected for Paddy’s amusement (Dublin, 1798), p. 14.

63.Union doctrine; or Poor man’s catechism (n.p., [1796?]), pp 4, 6, 8.

64.Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and popular culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 193.

65.Arthur Cole Hamilton to Dublin Castle, 2 Mar. 1797 (N.A.I., Rebellion Papers, 620/29/8); quotations from pp 1, 7 of enclosure.

66.[James Porter], Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand: or, A sample of the times (Belfast, 1796), p. 3.

67.‘An ode for the new year’, N.S., 14 Jan. 1792.

68.N.S., 29 June 1795.

69.David A. Bell, The first total war: Napoleon’s Europe and the birth of modern warfare (London, 2007), p. 116.

70.N.S., 20 June 1796.

71.Lucius Barber to Edward Cooke, 10 Feb. 1797 (N.A.I., Rebellion Papers, 620/28/248).

72.Address of the 105th and 113th Regiments, Cork, 4 Sept. 1795 (National Army Museum, MS 6807/370).

73.Thomas Russell, A letter to the people of Ireland (Belfast, 1796), pp 20–22.

74.Ibid., pp 6–7.

75.Curtin, United Irishmen, pp 210–11.

76.Quoted in M. J. Powell, The politics of consumption in eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 87.

77.[Porter], Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand, p. 12.

78.Mary Helen Thuente, ‘Liberty, Hibernia and Mary Le More: United Irish images of women’ in Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds), The women of 1798 (Dublin, 1998), p. 11.

79.Jonathan Swift, The story of the injured lady (London, 1746), p. 4.

80.Emer Nolan, ‘Swift: the patriot game’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxi (1998), esp. p. 41.

81.William Molyneux, The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated (Dublin, 1698), p. [3].

82.Henry Joy (ed.), Historical collections relative to the town of Belfast (Belfast, 1817), p. 135

83.Mary O’Dowd, ‘The women in the gallery: women and politics in late eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Sabine Wichert (ed.), From the United Irishmen to twentieth-century Unionism: essays in honour of A. T. Q. Stewart (Dublin, 2004), pp 35–47.

84.Ibid., pp 41–2.

85.John Bohstedt, ‘Gender, household and community politics: women in English riots, 1790–1810’, P.&P., no. 120 (1988), pp 88–122.

86.N.S., 17 Oct. 1796.

87.Samuel McSkimmin, Annals of Ulster (Belfast, 1906), p. 38.

88.Thomas Pelham to Whitehall, 2 Nov. 1797 (T.N.A., HO 100/70/181).

89.Charles Hamilton Teeling, Personal narrative of the Irish rebellion of 1798 (London, 1828), p. 12.

90.[William Bruce and Henry Joy (eds)], Belfast politics (Belfast, 1794), p. 19.

91.William Drennan, ‘Plan of parliamentary representation for Ireland’ (N.A.I., Rebellion Papers, 620/20/1).

92.John Gray, ‘Mary Ann McCracken: Belfast revolutionary and pioneer of feminism’ in Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds), The women of 1798 (Dublin, 1998), p. 54.

93.Henrietta Battier, The protected fugitives (Dublin, 1791), p. 160.

94.Mary O’Brien, The political monitor; or Regent’s friend (Dublin, 1790), pp 9–12; Mary Birkett, The African slave trade: addressed to members of her own sex (Dublin, 1792); Charlotte Brooke, Reliques of Irish poetry (Dublin, 1789), p. iii.

95.Martha McTier to William Drennan, [1787], in Jean Agnew (ed.), The Drennan–McTier letters (3 vols, Dublin, 1998–9), i, 272.

96.John Larkin (ed.), The trial of William Drennan (Dublin, 1990), p. 125.

97.Drennan to Samuel McTier, 18 Aug. 1792, Drennan–McTier letters, i, 411.

98.William Drennan, Proposal for an ‘Irish Brotherhood’ (June 1791), Report from the committee of secrecy, of the House of Commons in Ireland . . . August 21, 1798 (London, 1798), pp 86–92.

99.McTier to Drennan, 9 Apr. [1777], Drennan–McTier letters, i, 14.

100.Drennan to McTier, [1784], ibid., p. 184.

101.McTier to Drennan, [1785], ibid., p. 204.

102.Drennan to McTier, 21 Mar. 1798, McTier to Drennan, 11 Apr. [1798], ibid., ii, 382, 386–7.

103.McTier to Drennan, [1783], ibid., i, 101. James Bryson, author of Sermons on several important subjects (Belfast, 1778), was minister of the Second Belfast Presbyterian congregation.

104.Catriona Kennedy, ‘“Womanish epistles?” Martha McTier, female epistolarity and late eighteenth-century Irish radicalism’, Women’s History Review, 13/4 (2004), pp 650–51.

105.Clare Brant, Eighteenth-century letters and British culture (Basingstoke, 2006).

106.McTier to Drennan, 9 Apr. [1777], Drennan–McTier letters, i, 14.

107.McTier to Drennan, [Mar. 1795?], ibid., ii, 136–7.

108.Drennan to Samuel McTier, [28 Dec. 1792], ibid., i, 454.

109.McTier to Drennan, 17 May 1794, ibid., ii, 56

110.Drennan to McTier, 11 Oct. 1793, ibid., i, 568.

111.Kennedy, ‘“Womanish epistles?”’, p. 660

112.Martha McTier to William Eden, [Jan. 1781], Drennan–McTier Letters, i, 58.

113.McTier to Drennan, [1798], ibid., ii, 421.

114.‘Petition of Mrs McTier for Joseph Crombie, 1798’ (draft) (P.R.O.N.I., D/531/4).

115.Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish nation: the Catholic question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), pp 239–40.

116.Margaret Duncan to William Weir, Dec. 1774 (P.R.O.N.I., D/1140/2).

117.In this section I am heavily reliant on Catriona A. Kennedy’s pioneering work. See her ‘“What can women give but tears?” Gender, politics and Irish national identity in the 1790s’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 2004).

118.Nancy J. Curtin, ‘“A nation of abortive men”: gendered citizenship and early Irish republicanism’ in Marilyn Cohen and Nancy J. Curtin (eds), Reclaiming gender: transgressive identities in modern Ireland (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 34; idem, ‘Matilda Tone and virtuous republican femininity’ in Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds), Women of 1798 (Dublin, 1998), p. 32.

119.Joan B. Landes, Women and the public sphere in the age of the French Revolution (London, 1988).

120.McTier to Drennan, 25 Jan. 1795, Drennan–McTier letters, ii, 125.

121.See Ian McBride ‘The nation in the age of revolution’ in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds), Power and the nation in European history (Cambridge, 2005), pp 248–71. In addition to the works cited there, see Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham, 1997); Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and modernity’ in John A. Hall (ed.), The state of the nation: Ernest Gellner and the theory of nationalism (Cambridge, 1998), pp 191–218.

122.Emmerich de Vattel, The law of nations (1758) (Dublin, 1787), p. 1.

123.David A. Bell, The cult of the nation in France: inventing nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), chs 1–2.

124.Gerald Newman, The rise of English nationalism: a cultural history, 1740–1830 (London, 1987), quotations on pp 82, 116.

125.[Edward Ward], A trip to Ireland, being a description of the country, people and manners (n.p., 1699), pp i, 3–4, 10–11.

126.[Francis Brewster], A discourse concerning Ireland (London, 1698), p. 46.

127.James Clifford (ed.), Dr Campbell’s diary of a visit to England in 1775 (Cambridge, 1947), p. 45.

128.John Andrews, A comparative view of the French and English nations (London & Dublin, 1785).

129.M. J. Powell, The politics of consumption in eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 188.

130.[Henry Brooke], An essay on the antient and modern state of Ireland (Dublin, 1759), pp 6–7, 35.

131.Clare O’Halloran, Golden ages and barbarous nations: antiquarian debate and cultural politics in Ireland, c. 1750–1800 (Cork, 2004), p. 166.

132.The Marquess MacSwiney, ‘Notes on the history of the Book of Lecan’, P.R.I.A., xxxviii, sect. C (1928–9), pp 31–50.

133.R. Hayes, ‘A forgotten Irish antiquary: Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman, 1732–1809’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxx (1941), p. 590.

134.Richard Cox, Hibernia Anglicana: or, The history of Ireland (2 vols, London, 1689–90), i.

135.Geoffrey Keating, The general history of Ireland, trans. Dermod O’Connor (London, 1723), translator’s dedication.

136.Bernadette Cunningham, The world of Geoffrey Keating: history, myth and religion in seventeenth-century Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 2004).

137.Charles Vallancey, A grammar of the Iberno-Celtic, or Irish language (Dublin, 1773), [d].

138.Cunningham, Keating, p. 152.

139.O’Halloran, Golden ages and barbarous nations, ch. 2.

140.William Hamilton, Letters concerning the northern coast of the county of Antrim (Dublin, 1786), pp 36–9. My italics.

141.Mac Suibhne, ‘Politicisation and paramilitarism’, p. 267.

142.[Theobald Wolfe Tone], An address to the people of Ireland on the present important crisis (Belfast, 1796), pp 17, 18, 24.

143.Ibid., p. 18.

144.Ibid., p. 7. My italics.

145.Ibid., p. 5.

146.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, p. 48.

Chapter 12: 1798

1.Thomas Bartlett (ed.), Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998), p. 528.

2.A narrative of what passed at Killala . . . during the French invasion in the summer of 1798 (Dublin, 1800), p. 99.

3.Cf. John Morrill, Revolt in the provinces: the people of England and the tragedies of War, 1630–1648 (2nd ed., Harlow, 1999), introduction.

4.Thomas Bartlett, ‘Why the history of the 1798 rebellion has yet to be written’, E.C.I., xv (2000), pp 181–90.

5.See also Marianne Elliott, ‘The origins and transformation of early Irish republicanism’, International Review of Social History, xxiii (1978), pp 405–28.

6.Nancy J. Curtin, ‘The transformation of the United Irishmen into a mass-based revolutionary organisation, 1794–6’, I.H.S., xxiv, no. 96 (Nov. 1985), pp 463–92; idem The United Irishmen: popular politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford, 1994).

7.Jim Smyth, The men of no property: Irish radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Basingstoke, 1992), p. 3.

8.Ibid., p. 160; see also p. 172.

9.See L. M. Cullen, ‘The 1798 rebellion in its eighteenth-century context’ in P. J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, rebels and establishments: Historical Studies XV (Belfast, 1985), p. 104. Cullen’s most influential article in this area has been ‘The 1798 rebellion in Wexford: United Irishman organisation, membership, leadership’ in Kevin Whelan (ed.), Wexford: history and society (Dublin, 1987), pp 248–95.

10.L. M. Cullen, The emergence of modern Ireland (London, 1981), esp. ch. 10; Kevin Whelan, ‘The religious factor in the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in Patrick O’Flanagan et al. (eds), Rural Ireland, 1600–1900: modernization and change (Cork, 1987), pp 62–85.

11.In a later article Cullen wrote: ‘I felt uneasy that, in giving at last full weight to the political factors involved in Wexford, the sectarian dimensions, whether in killings or enforced baptisms, may be dismissed as large parts of the general equation’ (L. M. Cullen, ‘The United Irishmen: problems and issues of the 1790s’, Ulster Local Studies, xviii, no. 2 (spring 1997), p. 24).

12.Kevin Whelan, ‘Politicisation in County Wexford and the origins of the 1798 rebellion’ in Hugh Gough and David Dickson (eds), Ireland and the French Revolution (Dublin, 1990), p. 160. My italics.

13.Kevin Whelan, ‘Reinterpreting the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds), The mighty wave: the 1798 rebellion in Wexford (Blackrock, 1996), pp 23–4.

14.Alan Forrest, The French Revolution (Oxford, 1995), p. 4.

15.Tom Dunne, Rebellion: memoir, memory and 1798 (Dublin, 2004), p. 139.

16.George Lenox Conyngham to Sir Richard Musgrave, c. 1800 (P.R.O.N.I., D/1449/12/292A).

17.Edward Hay, History of the insurrection of the county of Wexford (Dublin, 1803), p. 88.

18.Ibid., pp 86–7, 100, 107, 122, 219–20.

19.See n. 10 above.

20.David W. Miller, ‘The Armagh troubles, 1784–95’ in Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly, jr (eds), Irish peasants: violence and political unrest, 1780–1914 (Madison, Wis., 1983), pp 155–91; idem, ‘The origins of the Orange Order in County Armagh’ in A. J. Hughes, F. X. McCorry and R. Weatherup (eds), Armagh: history and society (Dublin, 2001).

21.Quoted D. W. Miller (ed.), Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders: selected documents on the County Armagh disturbances, 1784–96 (Belfast, 1990), p. 9.

22.William Campbell to Charlemont, 9 Feb. 1788 (R.I.A., Charlemont Papers, MS 12, R15/5).

23.Miller, Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders, p. 18.

24.William Shaw Mason, A statistical account or parochial survey of Ireland (3 vols, Dublin, 1814–19), i, 527, 528, 531.

25.Dáire Keogh (ed.), A patriot priest: the life of Father James Coigly, 1761–1798 (Cork, 1998), p. 37.

26.John Black to Alexander and James Black, 2 Aug. 1766 (P.R.O.N.I., D/719/78).

27.W. H. Crawford, ‘The reshaping of the Borderlands, c. 1700–1840’ in Raymond Gillespie and Harold O’Sullivan (eds), The Borderlands: essays on the history of the Ulster–Leinster border (Belfast, 1989), p. 94.

28.Ibid., p. 96.

29.Edward Hudson to Charlemont, 7 Dec. 1789 (R.I.A., MS 12, R15/67).

30.See also Kyla Madden, Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics (Liverpool, 2005), ch. 2.

31.Letter dated 15 Feb. 1787, enclosed in John Moore to Gosford, 23 Feb. 1787 (R.I.A., MS 12, R14/84–5).

32.Robert Livingston to Charlemont, 17 Dec. 1788 (ibid., R15/26).

33.Edward Hudson to Charlemont, 11 July 1789, John Moore to Charlemont, 15 July 1789 (ibid., R15/54, 56).

34.James Wilson, ‘Orangeism in 1798’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 345–62.

35.Allan Blackstock, An Ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), p. 96.

36.Miller, Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders, pp 78, 79, 108.

37.A full and accurate report of the trial of James Bird, Roger Hamill, and Casimir Delahoyde . . . in the criminal court of Drogheda (Dublin, 1794), pp 12, 17.

38.A candid and impartial account of the disturbances in the county of Meath, in the years 1792, 1793, and 1794 (Dublin, 1794), p. 2.

39.Smyth, Men of no property, p. 108.

40.An ethnic community is usually defined as a group sharing a common culture or heritage and united by common descent (often, in fact, fictitious).

41.Miller, Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders, p. 34.

42.A narrative of what passed at Killala, pp 101, 104.

43.Whelan, ‘Religious factor’, p. 72.

44.Martyn J. Powell, ‘Popular disturbances in late eighteenth-century Ireland: the origins of the Peep of Day Boys’, I.H.S., xxxiv, no. 135 (May 2005), pp 249–65.

45.Ibid., p. 255.

46.Whelan, ‘Politicisation in County Wexford’, p. 157.

47.Candid and impartial account of the disturbances in Meath, pp 3–4.

48.Thomas Bartlett, ‘Defenders and Defenderism in 1795’ (select documents), I.H.S., xxiv, no. 95 (May 1985), p. 394.

49.Camden to Portland, 27 Apr. 1795 (T.N.A., HO 100/57/203–5).

50.Quotations from J. S. Donnelly, jr, ‘The Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, I.H.S., xxi, no. 81 (Mar. 1978), p. 28.

51.Candid and impartial account of the disturbances in . . . Meath, pp 2, 8.

52.Smyth, Men of no property, p. 3.

53.Candid and impartial account of the disturbances in . . . Meath, pp 4–5, 8, 33, 35.

54.Bartlett, ‘Defenders and Defenderism in 1795’, pp 385, 391.

55.Information of ‘John Smith’ [William Bird], [1796] (N.A.I., Rebellion Papers, 620/27/1).

56.Thomas Bartlett, ‘Informers, informants, and information: the secret history of the 1790s re-considered’ in Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective, p. 417.

57.Charles Hamilton Teeling, Personal narrative of the Irish rebellion of 1798 (London, 1828), p. 17.

58.Ibid., p. 16.

59.Ibid., p. 210; Charles Hamilton Teeling, Observations on the ‘History and consequences’ of the ‘battle of the Diamond’ (n.p., 1838), p. 15.

60.N.S., 17 Aug. 1795, 30 Mar. 1795, 4 May 1795, 11 May 1795, 4 June 1795, 25 June 1795, 20 June 1796.

61.Information of ‘John Smith’, 1796 (N.A.I., Rebellion Papers, 620/27/1).

62.J. S. Donnelly, jr, ‘Propagating the cause of the United Irishmen’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, lxix (1980), p. 14.

63.Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, p. 147.

64.[John Keogh], Common sense. To the Presbyterians of the province of Ulster (handbill, Sept. 1792) (copy in T.N.A., HO 100/38/5).

65.A copy of this handbill, printed at Newry in 1794, can be found in the Joy Papers, Linen Hall Library, Belfast.

66.James Alexander, Some account of the first symptoms of the late rebellion in the county of Kildare (Dublin, 1800), p. 22; David Dickson, ‘Smoke without fire? Munster and the 1798 rebellion’ in Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective, pp 147–73.

67.Whelan, ‘Religious factor’, pp 62–5.

68.John D. Beatty (ed.), Protestant women’s narratives of the Irish rebellion of 1798 (Dublin, 2001), p. 71.

69.Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’ in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990), pp 152–3. See also idem, ‘The Catholic parish, the Catholic chapel and village development in Ireland’, Irish Geography, xvi (1983), pp 1–15.

70.Whelan, ‘Religious factor’, p. 78.

71.Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, ‘Edward Hay: historian of 1798’, E.C.I., xiii (1998), pp 121–34.

72.J. E. Devereux, Observations on the factions which have ruled Ireland (2nd ed., London, 1801), pp 114–15.

73.Whelan, ‘Politicisation in County Wexford’, pp 161, 163.

74.Bob Harris, Politics and the nation: Britain in the mid-eighteenth century (Oxford, 2002), p. 223.

75.M. J. Bric, ‘The Whiteboy movement in Tipperary, 1760–80’ in William Nolan (ed.), Tipperary: history and society (Dublin, 1985), pp 154, 166.

76.An historical account of the late election of knights of the shire for the county of Down (n.p., 1784); Down election pamphlets, 1789–90 (P.R.O.N.I., MIC 361).

77.Alexander, Some account of the first symptoms of the late rebellion, p. 20.

78.I am grateful to Ultán Gillen for a copy of his unpublished paper on ‘The press and politicisation in 1790s provincial Ireland’.

79.Louis Cullen, ‘The internal politics of the United Irishmen’ in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin, 1993), p. 184.

80.Proceedings at the Catholic meeting of Dublin . . . October 31st, 1792 (Dublin, 1792), p. 28.

81.The speech of Edward Sweetman, captain of a late independent company, at a meeting of the freeholders of the county of Wexford, convened by the sheriff, on September 22, 1792 (Dublin, 1792), p. 2.

82.Ibid., p. 20.

83.Ibid., pp 5–6, 8.

84.Whelan, ‘Politicisation in County Wexford’, p. 169

85.Alexander, Some account of the first symptoms of the late rebellion, pp 28, 37, 47.

86.Dunne, Rebellion, pp 281–2.

87.Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and popular culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 191.

88.Beatty (ed.), Protestant women’s narratives, pp 34–5.

89.Ibid., pp 79–80.

90.Ibid., p. 100.

91.Ibid., p. 56.

92.Ibid., p. 42.

93.Ibid., p. 35.

94.Ibid., p. 165.

95.Alexander, Some account of the first symptoms of the late rebellion, p. 23.

96.Ibid., pp 23, 28.

97.Beatty (ed.), Protestant women’s narratives, p. 105.

98.Ibid., p. 48.

Bibliography

PRINTED PRIMARY SOURCES

— Abernethy, John, Reasons for the repeal of the sacramental test (Dublin, 1733)

— ———Scarce and valuable tracts and sermons (London, 1751)

— An account of the Belfast review and celebration of the French Revolution (Edinburgh, 1792)

— An account of the procession at Londonderry, August 1st 1716 (Dublin, n.d.)

— An account of the transactions of the late King James in Ireland (London, 1690)

— An address from the free electors of the province of Ulster, to Anthony Malone, Esq. (London, 1754)

— An address from the ladies of the provinces of Munster and Leinster (London, 1754)

— An alarm to the unprejudiced and well-minded Protestants of Ireland (Cork, 1762)

— Alexander the Coppersmith, Remarks upon the religion, trade, government, police, customs, manners, and maladys of the city of Corke (Cork, 1737)

— Alexander, James, Some account of the first apparent symptoms of the late rebellion in the county of Kildare (Dublin, 1800)

— Andrews, John, A comparative view of the French and English nations (London & Dublin, 1785)

— Angel, John, A general history of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1781)

— Animadversions on the proposal for sending back the nobility and gentry of Ireland (London, 1690)

— [Annesley, Francis?], Some thoughts on the bill depending before the Right Honourable the House of Lords, for prohibiting the exportation of the woollen manufactures of Ireland to foreign parts (Dublin, 1698)

— An apology for the clergy of Ireland. In respect of their civil rights, especially as to agistment for dry and barren cattle (Dublin, 1738)

— An apology for the Roman Catholics. Most humbly addressed to His E[xcelle]n[c]y P[hi]l[I]p, E[ar]l of Ch[este]r[fiel]d, L[or]d L[ie]u[tenan]t of Ireland &c. ([Dublin, 1745?])

— The appeal of the people of Ulster to their countrymen, and to the empire at large [Belfast, 14 Apr. 1797]

— An appeal to the people; or, A political olio (Dublin, 1792)

— [Arbuckle, James (ed.)], The Tribune (London, 1729)

— [———et al.], A collection of letters and essays on several subjects, lately published in the Dublin Journal (2 vols, London, 1729)

— Bacon, Benjamin, A sermon preach’d at St Andrew’s, Dublin, before the Honourable House of Commons, on Sunday the Twenty-Third of October, 1743, being the anniversary of the Irish rebellion (Dublin, 1743)

— Baggs, Stephen, The insurrection: or, A faithfull narrative of the disturbances which lately broke out in the province of Munster, under the denomination of White or Right-Boys (Dublin, 1787)

— Barry, James, An account of a series of pictures, in the Great Room of the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (London, 1783)

— Battier, Henrietta, The protected fugitives (Dublin, 1791)

— [Bayly, Samuel], A genuine account of the progress of Charles Coote Esq; in pursuing and defeating the Oak-Boys in the counties of Monaghan, Cavan, and Fermanagh (Dublin, 1763)

— Bell, Robert, A description of the condition and manners as well as of the moral and political character, education, &c. of the peasantry of Ireland (London, 1804)

— [Berkeley, George] The querist (London, 1736)

— [———], A word to the wise: or, An exhortation to the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland (Dublin, 1749)

— Birkett, Mary, The African slave trade: addressed to members of her own sex (Dublin, 1792)

— Black, Robert, Substance of two speeches, delivered in the General Synod of Ulster (Dublin, 1812)

— Blair, James, Divine Providence, the security of the crown and subject (Belfast, 1715)

— [Brewster, Francis?], A discourse concerning Ireland (London, 1698)

— [———?], A letter to a member of the House of Commons on a proposal for regulating and advancing the woollen manufactory (London, 1698)

— ———New essays on trade (London, 1702)

— A brief collection of some memorandums: or, Things humbly offered to the consideration of the members of the Great Convention, and of the succeeding parliament (Dublin, 1689)

— Britanno-Hibernus, W., An appeal to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1749)

— Brooke, Charlotte (ed.), Reliques of Irish poetry (Dublin, 1789)

— [Brooke, Henry], An essay on the antient and modern state of Ireland (Dublin, 1759)

— [———], The secret history and memoirs of the barracks in Ireland (London, 1747)

— Browne, Peter, A letter in answer to a book entitled ‘Christianity not mysterious’ (Dublin, 1697)

— Bruce, William, ‘The progress of non-subscription to creeds’, Christian Moderator, i (1827), pp 271–4

— [———and Joy, Henry (eds)], Belfast politics (Belfast, 1794)

— Brullaughan, Dominic, Opusculum de missione et missionariis (Metz, 1745)

— ———Opusculum de Purgatorio Sancti Patritii Hyberniae Patroni (Louvain, 1735)

— Bryson, James, Sermons on several important subjects (Belfast, 1778)

— Burke, Dominick, Ad SS. D.N. Innocentium Papam XII. Libellus supplex ecclesiasticorum Hibernorum exulum, nec obscurorum, nec paucorum. De praesenti Acatholicorum molimine ad Catholicam religionem in Hibernia extirpandam (n.p., 1697)

— Burke, Edmund, A letter from the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, M.P. in the kingdom of Great Britain, to Sir Hercules Langrishe (London, 1792)

— ———Thoughts on the prospect of a regicide peace (London, 1796)

— ———Reflections on the revolution in France (London, 1790)

— ———The correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland et al. (10 vols, Cambridge, 1958–78)

— ———Edmund Burke: Pre-revolutionary writings, ed. Ian Harris (Cambridge, 1993)

— Burke, Thomas, Hibernia Dominicana. Sive historia provinciae Hiberniae Ordinis Praedicatorum (Cologne [Kilkenny?], 1762)

— Burridge, Ezekiel, A short view of the present state of Ireland (n.p., 1708)

— [Burrowes, Peter,], Plain arguments in defence of the people’s absolute dominion over the constitution (Dublin, 1784)

— Byrne, Miles, Memoirs, edited by his widow (new ed., 2 vols, Dublin, 1907)

— [Caldwell, Sir James], An address to the House of Commons of Ireland: by a free-holder ([Dublin?], 1771)

— ———A brief examination of the question whether it is expedient either in a religious or political view, to pass an act to enable papists to take real securities for money which they may lend (2nd ed., Dublin, 1764)

— Campbell, Thomas, A philosophical survey of the south of Ireland (London, 1777)

— ———Dr Campbell’s diary of a visit to England in 1775, ed. James Clifford (Cambridge, 1947)

— A candid and impartial account of the disturbances in the county of Meath, in the years 1792, 1793, and 1794 (Dublin, 1794)

— A candid enquiry why the natives of Ireland which are in London, are more addicted to vice than the people of any other nation (London, 1754)

— Carey, William Paulet, Appeal to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1794)

— [———], Both sides of the gutter (Dublin, 1789)

— Cary, John, A vindication of the parliament of England (London, 1698)

— The case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland: in relation to the bill against the growth of popery, and other bills now under consideration (repr., Dublin, 1703)

— The character of the Protestants of Ireland (London, 1689)

— The charge of the Right Honourable Thomas Marley, Esq; Lord Chief Justice of His Majesty’s Court of King’s-Bench in the kingdom of Ireland, to the grand juries of the county and the city of Dublin (Dublin, 1749)

— Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of, The correspondence of Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (6 vols, London, 1932)

— [Clayton, Robert], A replication to the rejoinder: being a state of the case together with the history of popery (Dublin, 1743)

— [Clement, Simon], An answer to Mr Molyneux his ‘Case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated’ (London, 1698)

— Coigly, James, A patriot priest: the life of Father James Coigly, 1761–1798, ed. Dáire Keogh (Cork, 1998)

— The colonial records of North Carolina (30 vols, Raleigh, 1886–90)

— The conduct of the purse of Ireland (London, 1714)

— Considerations concerning Ireland, in relation to England (n.p., [c. 1691])

— Considerations upon ‘Considerations for the promoting of agriculture, and providing for the poor’ (Dublin, 1723)

— Coppinger, William, The life of Miss Nano Nagle, (Cork, 1794)

— ———A remonstrance addressed to the lower orders of Roman Catholics, in the diocess of Cloyne and Ross (Cork, 1798)

— Cornwallis, Charlies, Marquis, The correspondence of Charles, first Marquis Cornwallis, ed. Charles Ross (3 vols, London, 1859)

— [Cox, Sir Richard], Aphorisms relating to the kingdom of Ireland (London, 1689)

— ———Hibernia Anglicana: or, The history of Ireland (2 vols, London, 1689–90)

— ———A letter to Thomas Prior, Esq. (Dublin, 1749)

— [Curry, John], A candid enquiry into the causes and motives of the late riots in the province of Munster in Ireland (London, 1767)

— Davenant, Charles, An essay upon the probable methods of making the people gainers in the balance of trade (London, 1699)

— Declaration of the Catholic Society of Dublin (Dublin, 1791)

— A defence of English commodities. Being an answer to the proposal for the universal use of Irish manufactures (Dublin, 1720; repr., London, 1720)

— [Defoe, Daniel], The parallel: or, Persecution of Protestants the shortest way to prevent the growth of popery in Ireland (Dublin, 1705)

— Denina, Carlo, An essay on the revolutions of literature, trans. John Murdoch (London, 1771)

— Devereux, James, Observations on the factions which have ruled Ireland (2nd ed., London, 1801)

— Dickson, William Steel, Sermons on the following subjects . . . (Belfast, 1778)

— Dobbs, Arthur, An essay on the trade and improvement of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1729)

— [Dobbs, Francis], Thoughts on the conduct and continuation of the Volunteers of Ireland (Dublin, 1783)

— Dopping, Anthony (ed.), Modus tenendi parliamenta et concilia in Hibernia (Dublin, [1692])

— Downes, Henry, A sermon preach’d in Christ’s-Church, Dublin, on Friday, October 23d, 1719 (Dublin, 1719)

— Drennan, William, Proposal for an ‘Irish Brotherhood’ (June 1791), Report from the Committee of Secrecy, of the House of Commons in Ireland . . . August 21, 1798 (London, 1798)

— [Duigenan, Patrick], An address to the nobility and gentry of the Church of Ireland, as by law established (Dublin, 1786; repr., London, 1786)

— Dunton, John, The Dublin scuffle, ed. Andrew Carpenter (Dublin, 2000)

— [Egmont, John Perceval, Earl of], Some observations on the present state of Ireland (Dublin, 1731)

— [Elstob, Mark], A trip to Kilkenny . . . in the year 1776 (Dublin, 1779)

— Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers (17 vols, Paris, 1751–65)

— England undeceived. In answer to a late pamphlet, (intituled, some ways for raising of money, humbly offered to the consideration of the parliament, by a person of quality) (London, 1691)

— The English–Irish dictionary: An foclóir Béarla–Gaoidheilge (Paris, 1732)

— An essay on the use and necessity of establishing a militia in Ireland (Dublin, 1767)

— Every man his own lawyer: or, A summary of the laws now in force in Ireland (Dublin, 1755)

— Fletcher, Andrew, Political works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1997)

— Forman, Charles, A defence of the courage, honour and loyalty of the Irish-nation (5th ed., Dublin, 1735)

— ———A letter to the Right Hon. Sir Robert Sutton, for disbanding the Irish regiments in the service of France and Spain (London, 1728)

— Foy, Nathaniel, A sermon preached in Christ’s-Church, Dublin; on the 23d of October, 1698 (Dublin, 1698)

— Fraud detected: or The Hibernian patriot, containing all the Drapier’s letters to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1725)

— [French, Nicholas], Iniquity display’d, or, The settlement of the kingdom of Ireland (n.p., 1704)

— A full . . . account of a . . . battle which was fought on . . . the 28th day of February, 1724–5, in Oxmantown-Green, between the mobb of the town and the standing army (Dublin, 1725)

— A full and accurate report of the trial of James Bird, Roger Hamill, and Casimir Delahoyde . . . in the criminal court of Drogheda (Dublin, 1794)

— [Gast, John], L.B. Haberdasher, A letter to the tradesmen, farmers, and the rest of the good people of Ireland (Dublin, 1754)

— Glass, James, Libertas (Belfast, 1789)

— [Goldsmith, Oliver], An inquiry into the present state of polite learning in Europe (London, 1759)

— Grattan, Henry, Speeches, ed. Daniel Owen Madden (Dublin, 1854)

— The groans of Ireland: in a letter to a member of parliament (Dublin, 1741)

— The grunter’s request, to take of the Test ([Dublin], 1733)

— Haliday, Samuel, Reasons against the imposition of subscription to the Westminster-Confession of Faith (Belfast, 1724)

— Hamilton, Andrew, A true relation of the actions of the Inniskilling-men (London, 1690)

— Hamilton, William, Letters concerning the northern coast of the county of Antrim (Dublin, 1786)

— ———Letters on the principles of the French democracy (Dublin, 1792)

— Harrington, James, The Oceana of James Harrington, Esq. and his other works [ed. John Toland] (Dublin, 1737)

— Harris, Walter, The ancient and present state of the county of Down (Dublin, 1744)

— [Harris, Sir Walter], Remarks on the affairs and trade of England and Ireland (London, 1691)

— Hay, Edward, History of the insurrection of the county of Wexford (Dublin, 1803)

— Heads of a bill for a general register of popish priests (Dublin, 1757)

— An historical account of the late election of knights of the shire for the county of Down (n.p., 1784)

— The history of the Blacks of Waltham in Hampshire; and those under the like denomination in Berkshire (London, 1723)

— Honest advice to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1745)

— Howard, Robert, A sermon preached in Christ-Church, Dublin; before Their Excellencies the Lords Justices, on Tuesday October the 23d, 1722 (Dublin, 1722)

— ———A sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of St Patrick, Dublin . . . on February the 10th 1724 (Dublin, 1725)

— The humble representation made to the King’s Majesty, by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the parliament of Ireland (London, 1720)

— Hutcheson, Francis, An essay on the nature and conduct of the passions and affections (London, 1728)

— ———A system of moral philosophy (Glasgow, 1755)

— [Hutcheson, John], A brief review of a paper intitled ‘A letter from the Presbytery of Antrim’ (Dublin & Belfast, 1730)

— Ireland’s consternation in the losing of two hundred thousand pound of their gold and silver for brass money [Dublin, 1723]

— The Irish harp (attun’d to freedom): a collection of patriotic songs; selected for Paddy’s amusement (Dublin, 1798)

— J.S., The North Country-man’s description of Christ’s Church, Dublin; in a letter to a friend (Dublin, 1733)

— [J.W.], A particular and authentic narrative of the life, examination, tortures and execution of Robert Francis Damien, trans. Thomas Jones (London, 1757)

— A journal of what has past [sic] in the north of Ireland, since the landing of the Duke of Schomberg, to the surrender of Carrick-Fergus (London, 1689)

— Joy, Henry (ed.), Historical collections relative to the town of Belfast (Belfast, 1817)

— A just and modest vindication of the Protestants of Ireland (London, 1689)

— Keating, Geoffrey, The general history of Ireland, trans. Dermod O’Connor (London, 1723)

— King, William, Europe’s deliverance from France and slavery: a sermon preached at St Patrick’s Church, Dublin, on the 16th of November, 1690 (Dublin, 1691)

— ———The state of the Protestants of Ireland (London, 1691)

— Kirkpatrick, James, ‘Conclusion’ in James Duchal, A sermon on occasion of the much lamented death of the late Reverend Mr John Abernethy (Belfast, 1741), pp 48–62

— ———An historical essay upon the loyalty of Presbyterians (London, 1713)

— [Lambert, Ralph] An answer to a late pamphlet, entitl’d ‘A vindication of marriage, as solemniz’d by Presbyterians in the north of Ireland’ (Dublin, 1704)

— ———A sermon preach’d to the Protestants of Ireland, now residing in London: at their anniversary meeting on October XXIII. 1708 (London, 1708)

— [Langrishe, Sir Hercules], Considerations on the dependencies of Great Britain. With observations on a pamphlet intitled ‘The present state of the nation’ (London, 1769)

— Leadbetter, Mary, Memoirs of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton (London, 1822)

— [Leslie, Charles], An answer to a book intituled,’ The state of the Protestants in Ireland’ (London, 1692)

— ———Considerations of importance to Ireland, in a letter to a member of parliament there; upon occasion of Mr Molyneux’s late book (n.p., [1699])

— A letter from a member of the House of Commons of Ireland to a Gentleman of the Long Robe in Great-Britain (Dublin, 1720)

— A letter to the Right Honourable J[ohn] P[onsonby], S[peake]r of the H[ous]e of C[ommon]s (London, 1767)

— A letter upon libels (Dublin, 1753)

— [Lindsey, Thomas], The insolence of the Dissenters against the Established Church (London, 1716)

— [Lloyd, Sylvester], Queries on the Popery Bill, with the address of the Roman Catholics of Ireland to His Present Majesty King George the Second ([Dublin], 1731)

— Locke, John, An essay concerning humane understanding (5th ed., London, 1706)

— ———Some familiar letters between Mr Locke, and several of his friends (London, 1708)

— ———Two treatises of government (1690), ed. Peter Laslett (student ed., Cambridge, 1988)

— [Logan, Allan], An enquiry into Professor Simson’s sentiments on the doctrine the Trinity (Edinburgh, 1729)

— Lucas, Charles, An eleventh address to the free citizens, and free-holders, of the city of Dublin (Dublin, 1749)

— ———The political constitutions of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1751)

— ———A second letter to the citizens of Dublin by A.F. Barber and Citizen (Dublin, 1747)

— [McBride, John], A sample of jet-black prelatick calumny (Glasgow, 1713)

— ———A vindication of marriage as solemnized by Presbyterians in the north of Ireland (n.p., 1702)

— McBride, Robert, A sermon preach’d at the desire of the Independent Company of Volunteers in Belfast, May 28th 1716 (Belfast, 1716)

— Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge, 1998)

— Maclaine, Archibald, A supplement to the quarto edition of Dr Mosheim’s ‘Ecclesiastical history’ (London, 1768)

— Madden, Samuel, A letter to the Dublin Society, on the improving their fund; and the manufacturers, tillage, &c. in Ireland (Dublin, 1739)

— ———Reflections and resolutions proper for the gentlemen of Ireland, as to their conduct for the service of the country (Dublin, 1738)

— The mantle thrown off: or, the Irish-man dissected (London, 1689)

— Marcus Aurelius, The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Glasgow, 1742)

— Marefoschi, Cardinal Mario, Relazione della visita apostolica del Collegio Ibernese fatta dall’eminentissimo (Rome, 1772)

— Marley, Martin, The good confessor: or, Instructions for the due and worthy administration of the sacrament of penance (Douai, 1748)

— Martin, Martin, A description of the Western Islands of Scotland (2nd ed., London, 1716)

— Mason, William Shaw, A statistical account or parochial survey of Ireland (3 vols, Dublin, 1814–19)

— Mathews, Edward, The divine original of civil government (Dublin, 1714)

— Maule, Henry, A sermon preached in Christ-Church, Dublin; before His Grace Lionel, Duke of Dorset, and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, in parliament assembled, Tuesday, the Twenty-Third Day of October, 1733 (Dublin, 1733)

— [Maxwell, Henry], An essay upon an union of Ireland with England (repr., Dublin, 1704)

— [Molesworth, Robert, Viscount], Account of Denmark as it was in the year 1692 (3rd ed., London, 1694)

— ———The principles of a real Whig (London, 1711; repr., London, 1775)

— ———Some considerations for the promoting of agriculture, and employing the poor (Dublin, 1723)

— Molyneux, William, The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated (Dublin, 1698)

— Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, The spirit of the laws. Translated from the French [by Thomas Nugent] (Dublin, 1751)

— ———The spirit of the laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge, 1989)

— Mosheim, J. L., An ecclesiastical history, ancient and modern, trans. Archibald Maclaine (2 vols, London, 1768)

— [Nary, Cornelius], ‘The case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, humbly represented to both Houses of Parliament, 1724’ in Hugh Reily, The impartial history of Ireland (repr., London, 1754)

— Nassau, John, The cause of the Roman Catholicks pleaded (Dublin, 1792)

— The natural impossibility of better-uniting Protestants and securing the constitution in church and state by repealing the Test (Dublin, 1732)

— O’Brien, John, Focaloir Gaoidhilge–Sax-Bhearla: or, An Irish–English dictionary (Paris, 1768)

— O’Brien, Mary, The political monitor; or Regent’s friend (Dublin, 1790)

— Ó Bruadair, Dáibhidh, Duanaire Dháibhidh Uí Bhruadair: The poems of David Ó Bruadair, ed. J. C. MacErlean (3 vols, London, 1910–17)

— Observations on the declaration of the Catholic Society of Dublin (Dublin, 1792)

— O’Conor, Charles, ‘Advertisement’ in John Curry, Historical memoirs of the Irish rebellion, in the year 1641 (4th ed., Dublin, 1770)

— [———], A counter-appeal to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1749)

— [———], Dissertations on the antient history of Ireland (Dublin, 1753)

— [———], Maxims relative to the present state of Ireland (Dublin, 1757)

— [———], Nicholas, Viscount Taaffe, Observations on affairs in Ireland, from the settlement in 1691 (Dublin, 1766)

— [———], The Protestant interest, considered relatively to the operation of the popery-acts in Ireland (Dublin, 1757)

— [———], Seasonable thoughts relating to our civil and ecclesiastical constitution (Dublin, 1753)

— ———The letters of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare, ed. C. C. Ward and R. E. Ward (2 vols, Ann Arbor, 1980)

— [O’Halloran, Sylvester], A complete treatise on gangrene and sphacelus; with a new method of amputation (London, 1765)

— Orrery, Roger Boyle, Earl of, An answer to a scandalous paper lately printed and subscribed by Peter Walsh (London, 1662)

— Owen, Charles, An alarm to Protestant princes and people (Dublin, 1725)

— Paine, Thomas, The age of reason (Paris, 1794)

— ———Rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke’s attack on the French Revolution (Londonderry, 1791)

— The patriot soldier; or, Irish Volunteer. A poem by a member of the Belfast First Company (Belfast, 1789)

— Petty, Sir William, The political anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691)

— [Philostelus], A letter to the Right Honourable Sir Ralph Gore (Dublin, 1732)

— Pilkington, Laetitia, Memoirs, ed. A. C. Elias (2 vols, Athens, Ga., 1997)

— Plain reasons against the repeal of the Test-Act (Dublin, 1733)

— [Pollock, Joseph], Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial (Dublin, 1779)

— [Porter, James], Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand: or, A sample of the times (Belfast, 1796)

— Postlethwayt, Malachi, Britain’s commercial interests explained and improved (2 vols, London, 1757)

— The present state of religion in Ireland (London, [1712])

— ‘Present state of the name and fameyley of O’Malley in Ireland yr of our Lord 1776’ in Sir Owen O’Malley, ‘O’Malleys between 1651 and 1725’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, xxv, nos 1–2 (1952), pp 32–46

— The priest gelded: or, Popery at the last gasp (London, 1747)

— Proceedings of a military court held in Dublin Barracks on Saturday the Tenth of November, for the trial of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1798)

— Proceedings at the Catholic meeting of Dublin . . . October 31st, 1792 (Dublin, 1792)

— A proclamation, offering a reward for discovering, apprehending, and convicting the persons concerned in insulting George Brereton, Esq. (Dublin, 1751)

— Proposals for raising a million of money out of the forfeited estates in Ireland: together, with the answer of the Irish to the same, and a reply thereto (London, 1694; repr., Dublin, 1704)

— Radcliffe, Stephen, A letter to the Reverend Mr Edward Synge, prebendary of St Patrick’s, occasion’d by late sermon preach’d in St Andrew’s, Dublin, before the Honourable House of Commons, October 23, 1725 (Dublin, 1725)

— Raymond, Anthony, A short preliminary discourse to the history of Ireland (London, 1725)

— Reasons for an augmentation of the army on the Irish establishment (Dublin, 1768)

— Reasons humbly offer’d to both houses of parliament, for a law to enact the castration or gelding of popish ecclesiastics, in this kingdom (London, 1700; repr., Dublin, 1710)

— Remarks on my conversation in Ireland. By an honourable lady (1699), reprinted in John Dunton, The Dublin scuffle, ed. Andrew Carpenter (Dublin, 2000)

— A report from the committee appointed to inspect the original papers seized in the houses or lodgings of one MccCarthy [sic] alias Rabah, a reputed titular bishop, and Joseph Nagle, a reputed popish solicitor, both of the city of Corke (Dublin, 1733)

— The report from the secret committee of the House of Commons (Dublin, 1798)

— The resolutions of the House of Commons in Ireland, relating to the Lord-Chancellor Phips, examined (London, 1714)

— A review of the strictures on the declaration of the Catholic Society (Dublin, 1792)

— Richardson, John, A proposal for the conversion of the popish natives of Ireland (Dublin, 1711)

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ‘Abstract and judgement of Saint-Pierre’s project for perpetual peace’ (1756) in Stanley Hoffman and David P. Fidler (eds), Rousseau on international relations (Oxford, 1991)

— [———], The discourse which carried the praemium at the Academy of Dijon, in MDCCL (Dublin, 1751)

— ———Emilius and Sophia; or, An essay on education, trans. [Thomas] Nugent (2 vols, Dublin, n.d.)

— ———A letter from M. Rousseau of Geneva, to M. d’Alembert, of Paris, concerning the effects of theatrical entertainments (London, 1759)

— The royal mistake, or, A catechism for the Irish parliament (London, 1753)

— Russell, Thomas, A letter to the people of Ireland, on the present situation of the country (Belfast, 1796)

— St John, James, Letters from France to a gentleman in the south of Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1788)

— Sciothericum telescopicum; or, A new contrivance of adapting a telescope to an horizontal dial for observing the moment of time by day or night (Dublin, 1686)

— A seasonable proposal to prevent the further growth of popery heartily recommended to every true Protestant. By a lover of his country (Dublin, 1731)

— The secret history of the trust (London, 1702)

— A serious proposal for the entire destruction of popery in Ireland. Humbly offered to the consideration of our great ***** ([Dublin], 1732)

— Serious thoughts concerning the interest and exigencies of the state of Ireland (Dublin, 1757)

— Several speeches in the House of Commons in England, for and against the bill for the better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1720)

— Sheehy, Nicholas, A letter from the Revd Mr Nicholas Sheehy, to Major S——, in Dublin (handbill, 14 Mar. 1766)

— Shuel [Sewell], Edward, The genuine declaration of Edward Shuel, a degraded clergyman of the Church of Ireland (Dublin, [1740])

— Some considerations on the laws which incapacitate papists from purchasing lands, from taking long or beneficial leases, and from lending money on real securities (Dublin, 1739)

— Some considerations upon the late attempt to repeal the Test Act . . . By a person of quality (London & Dublin, 1719)

— Some queries upon the demand of the Presbyterians to have the sacramental test repealed ([Dublin], 1733)

— The speech of the reverend father, the advocate for the Jesuits of Thorn in the High Court of Chancery of Poland, demanding justice against the Protestants of the said city, upon account of the late tumult there (Dublin, 1725)

— Steward, Dugald, Collected works, ed. William Hamilton (11 vols, Edinburgh, 1854–60)

— [Stock, Joseph], A narrative of what passed at Killala . . . during the French invasion in the summer of 1798 (Dublin, 1800)

— Stokes, Whitley, Projects for re-establishing the internal peace and tranquillity of Ireland (Dublin, 1799)

— Story, George, An impartial history of the wars of Ireland (London, 1693)

— [———], A true and impartial history of the most material occurrences in the kingdom of Ireland during the last two years (London, 1691)

— [Sullivan, Richard Joseph], Analysis of the political history of India. In which is considered the present situation of the East, and the connection of its several powers with the Empire of Great Britain (London, 1779)

— Sweetman, Edward, The speech of Edward Sweetman, captain of a late independent company, at a meeting of the freeholders of the county of Wexford, convened by the sheriff, on September 22, 1792 (Dublin, 1792)

— [Swift, Jonathan], City cries, instrumental and vocal: or, An examination of certain abuses, corruptions, and enormities, in London and Dublin (Dublin, 1732; repr., London, 1732)

— ———The Drapier’s letters to the people of Ireland, ed. Herbert Davis (2nd ed., Oxford, 1965)

— [———], The last speech and dying words of the Bank of Ireland (Dublin, [1721])

— ———Miscellanies in prose and verse (London, 1711)

— [———], A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burthen to their parents, or the country (Dublin, 1729)

— ———A proposal for giving badges to the beggars in all the parishes of Dublin (Dublin, 1737)

— ———The story of the injured lady (London, 1746)

— [———?], The wonderful wonder of wonders (Dublin, 1720)

— ———The correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (5 vols, Oxford, 1965)

— ———and Sheridan, Thomas, The Intelligencer (London, 1729)

— Synge, Edward, The case of toleration consider’d with respect both to religion and civil government (Dublin, 1725)

— ———A vindication of a sermon preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons of Ireland. On Saturday the 23rd of October, 1725 (Dublin, 1726)

— ———The Synge letters: Bishop Edward Synge to his daughter Alicia, Roscommon to Dublin, 1746–1752, ed. Marie-Louise Legg (Dublin, 1996)

— Synge, Samuel, The case of King Charles the First & King James the Second stated and compar’d (Dublin, 1707)

— Taaffe, Nicholas, Viscount [Charles O’Conor], Observations on affairs in Ireland, from the settlement in 1691 (Dublin, 1766)

— Teeling, Charles Hamilton, Observations on the ‘History and consequences’ of the ‘battle of the Diamond’ (n.p., 1838)

— ———Personal narrative of the Irish rebellion of 1798 (London, 1828)

— [Tisdall, William], The conduct of the Dissenters of Ireland (Dublin, 1712)

— ———The nature and tendency of popular phrases in general (Dublin, 1713)

— ———A seasonable enquiry into that most dangerous political principle of the kirk in power (Dublin, 1713)

— Toland, John, Christianity not mysterious (London, 1696)

— [———?], A letter from a gentleman in the country, to a member of the House of Commons, in reference to the votes of the 14th instant (n.p., n.d)

— ———Nazarenus: or, Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity (2nd ed., London, 1718)

— [———?], Reasons most humbly offer’d to the Hon[oura]ble House of Commons, why the bill sent down to them from the Most Hon[oura]ble House of Lords, entitul’d, ‘An act for the better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland upon the crown of Great-Britain’, shou’d not pass into a law (London, 1720)

— [Tone, Theobald Wolfe], An address to the people of Ireland on the present important crisis, (Belfast, 1796)

— [———], An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (Belfast, 1791)

— [———], Spanish war! An enquiry how far Ireland is bound, of right, to embark in the impending contest on the side of Great-Britain? (Dublin, 1790)

— ———The life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, compiled and arranged by William Theobald Wolfe Tone, ed. Thomas Bartlett (Dublin, 1998)

— ———et al., Belmont Castle, or Suffering sensibility, ed. Marion Deane (Dublin, 1998)

— Tone, William Henry, A letter to an officer . . . being an attempt to illustrate some particular institutions of the Maharashtra people; principally relative to their system of war and finance (Bombay, 1799; repr., London, 1799)

— Trant, Dominick, Considerations on the present disturbances in the province of Munster (Dublin, 1787)

— Travers, John, A sermon preached in St Andrew’s Church, Dublin. Before the House of Commons the Twenty Third of October, 1698 (Dublin, 1698)

— [Trenchard, John], A letter from a souldier to the Commons of England (London, 1702)

— Triptolemus [Philip Skelton], The necessity of tillage and granaries (Dublin, 1741)

— Troy, John Thomas, Pastoral address, 12 Dec. 1782, in Patrick Francis Moran (ed.), Spicilegium Ossoriense (3 vols, Dublin, 1884), iii, 37–9

— ———Pastoral instruction to the Roman Catholics of the archdiocess of Dublin (Dublin, 1798)

— A True Patriot, A view of the grievances of Ireland (Dublin, 1745)

— A true state of the present affairs of Limerick (London, 1726)

— The true way to render Ireland happy and secure (Dublin, 1697)

— The tryal of Thomas Nevin (Belfast, 1725)

— Turretine [Turrettini], John Alphonso, Dissertations on natural theology, trans. William Crawford (Belfast, 1777)

— Two letters from a person in Scotland to his friends in Ireland (n.p., [1702])

— Tyrell, Duke, A sermon preach’d at St Andrew’s, Dublin, before the Honourable House of Commons, on Friday October 23d 1719 (Dublin, 1719)

— Union doctrine; or Poor man’s catechism (n.p., [1796?])

— The usurpations of England the chief sources of the miseries of Ireland (Dublin, 1780)

— Vallancey, Charles, A grammar of the Iberno-Celtic, or Irish language (Dublin, 1773)

— Vattel, Emmerich de, The law of nations (Dublin, 1787; first published in French, 1758)

— Veritas, A vindication of the Roman Catholic clergy of Wexford (2nd ed., Dublin, 1798)

— Vesey, John, A sermon preach’d to the Protestants of Ireland, in and about the city of London, at St Mary le Bow in Cheapside, Octob. 23. 1689 (London, 1689)

— A vindication of Mr Hutcheson from the calumnious aspersions of a late pamphlet (Glasgow, 1738)

— Walkington, Edward, A sermon preach’d in Christ-Church, Dublin, on Saturday the 23d of October, 1703 (Dublin, 1703)

— ———A sermon preached Octob. 23. 1692 in St Andrew’s Church, Dublin; before the House of Commons (Dublin, 1692)

— [Ward, Edward], A trip to Ireland, being a description of the country, people and manners (n.p., 1699)

— Weighty queries relating to the past, present, and future state of Ireland (London, 1691)

— Wetenhall, Edward, A sermon setting forth the duties of the Irish Protestants, arising from the Irish rebellion, 1641 and the Irish tyranny, 1688 (Dublin, 1692)

— Winder, John, The mischief of schism and faction to church and state (Dublin, 1714)

— Woodward, Richard, A sermon preached before the vice-patroness, governesses and guardians of the Asylum for Penitent Women (Dublin, 1774)

— A word of advice: or A friendly caution to the collectors of Ireland, in relation to Wood’s brass-money (Dublin, 1724)

— Young, Arthur, A tour in Ireland (2nd ed., 2 vols, London, 1780)

— Z.L., A letter from a gentleman of the Church of Rome, in the diocess of Cloyn to his neighbours of the same profession (handbill, n.p., 1750)

SECONDARY SOURCES

— Adams, J. R. R., The printed word and the common man: popular culture in Ulster, 1700–1900 (Belfast, 1987)

— Agnew, Jean, Belfast merchant families in the seventeenth century (Dublin, 1996)

— ———(ed.), The Drennan–McTier letters, (3 vols, Dublin, 1998–9)

— Amin, Shahid, Event, metaphor, memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Oxford, 1995)

— Anderson, Benedict, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (2nd ed., London, 1991)

— Appleby, Joyce, Hunt, Lynn, and Jacob, Margaret, Telling the truth about history (New York, 1994)

— Armitage, David, ‘The Declaration of Independence and international law’, William and Mary Quarterly, 59/1 (2002), pp 39–65

— ———‘Literature and empire’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, i: The origins of empire: British overseas enterprise to the close of the seventeenth century (Oxford, 1998), pp 99–123

— ———The ideological origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000)

— Augstein, Hannah Franziska, ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), Race: the origins of an idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol, 1996)

— Barnard, T. C, ‘1641: a bibliographical essay’ in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: aspects of the rising (Belfast, 1993), pp 172–86

— ———‘Athlone, 1685; Limerick, 1710: religious riots or charivaris?’, Studia Hibernica, no. 27 (1993), pp 61–75

— ———‘Crises of identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, P.&P., no. 127 (1990), pp 39–83

— ———Cromwellian Ireland: English government and reform in Ireland, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 1975)

— ———‘Katherine Conolly of Castletown: a tale of three sisters’ in idem, Irish Protestant ascents and descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin, 2004), pp 266–89

— ———‘The languages of politeness and sociability in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp 193–221

— ———‘Lawyers and the law in later seventeenth-century Ireland’, I.H.S., xxviii, no. 111 (May 1993), pp 256–82

— ———‘Learning, the learned and literacy in Ireland, c. 1660–1760’ in T. C. Barnard, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and Katharine Simms (eds), ‘ A miracle of learning’: studies in manuscripts and Irish learning (Aldershot, 1998), pp 209–35

— ———Making the grand figure: lives and possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (London, 2004)

— ———A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (London, 2003)

— ———‘Reading in eighteenth-century Ireland: public and private pleasures’ in Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy (eds), The experience of reading: Irish historical perspectives (Dublin, 1999), pp 60–77

— ———‘Sir William Petty, Irish landowner’ in Hugh Lloyd-Jones et al. (eds), History and imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), pp 201–17

— ———‘The uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant celebrations’, E.H.R., cvi (1991), pp 889–920.

— ———‘What became of Waring? The making of an Ulster squire’ in idem, Irish Protestant ascents and descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin, 2003), 235–65

— Barry, John Gerard, ‘The groans of Ireland’, Irish Sword, ii, no. 6 (summer 1955), pp 130–36

— Bartlett, Robert, The making of Europe: conquest, colonisation and cultural change, 950–1350 (London, 1993).

— Bartlett, Thomas, ‘Army and society in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in conflict: the revolutionary war in Ireland and its aftermath (Belfast, 1990), pp 173–82

— ———‘The augmentation of the army in Ireland, 1767–1769’, E.H.R., xcvi (1981), pp 540–59

— ———‘Defence, counter-insurgency and rebellion’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 247–93

— ———‘Defenders and Defenderism in 1795’ (select documents), I.H.S., xxiv, no. 95 (May 1985), pp 373–94

— ———‘An end to moral economy: the Irish Militia disturbances of 1793’, P.&P., no. 99 (1983), pp 41–64

— ———The fall and rise of the Irish nation: the Catholic question in Ireland, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992)

— ———‘This famous island set in a Virginian sea: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801’ in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii: The eighteenth century (Oxford, 2001), pp 253–75

— ———‘Informers, informants, and information: the secret history of the 1790s reconsidered’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 406–22

— ———(ed.), The life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998)

— ———‘Militarisation and politicisation in Ireland, 1780–1820’ in L. M. Cullen and Louis Bergeron (eds), Culture et pratiques politiques en France et en Irlande, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1991), pp 101–22

— ———‘A New History of Ireland’ (review article), P.&P., no. 116 (1987), pp 206–19

— ———‘The O’Haras of Annaghmore, c. 1600–c. 1800’, I.E.S.H., ix (1982), pp 34–52

— ———‘“A weapon of war yet untried”: Irish Catholics and the armed forces of the crown, 1760–1830’ in T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds), Men, women and war: Historical Studies XVIII (Dublin, 1993), pp 66–85

— ———‘Why the history of the 1798 rebellion has yet to be written’, E.C.I., xv (2000), pp 181–90

— Bayly, C. A., ‘Ireland, India and the Empire: 1780–1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., x (2000), pp 377–97

— Beales, Derek, Prosperity and plunder: European Catholic monasteries in the age of revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003)

— Beatty, John D. (ed.), Protestant women’s narratives of the Irish rebellion of 1798 (Dublin, 2001)

— Beckett, J. C., The Anglo-Irish tradition (London, 1976)

— ———‘Introduction’ in T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland, iv: Eighteenth-century Ireland, 1690–1800 (Oxford, 1986)

— ———Protestant Dissent in Ireland, 1687–1780 (London, 1948)

— ———‘The study of Irish history: an inaugural lecture’ reprinted in idem, Confrontations: studies in Irish history (London, 1972), pp 11–25

— ———‘William King’s administration of the diocese of Derry, 1691–1703’, I.H.S., iv, no. 14 (Sept. 1944), pp 164–80

— Bell, David A., The cult of the nation in France: inventing nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001)

— ———The first total war: Napoleon’s Europe and the birth of modern warfare (London, 2007)

— Bennett, G. V., The Tory crisis in church and state, 1688–1730: the career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975)

— Beresford, Marcus de la Poer, ‘Ireland in the French strategy, 1691–1789’ (M.Litt. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1975)

— Berman, David, ‘David Hume on the 1641 rebellion in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, lxv (1976), pp 101–12

— ———and O’Riordan, Patricia (eds), The Irish Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment (6 vols, Bristol, 2002)

— Bien, D. D., The Calas affair: persecution, toleration and heresy in eighteenth-century Toulouse (Princeton, 1960)

— Bireley, Robert, The refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 1999)

— Blackstock, Allan, An Ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998)

— Blanning, T. C. W., The culture of power and the power of culture: old regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002)

— ———‘Liberation or occupation? Theory and practice in the French revolutionaries’ treatment of civilians outside France’ in Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (eds), Civilians in the path of war (Lincoln, Nebr., 2002), pp 111–35

— ———The origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986)

— ———The pursuit of glory: Europe, 1648–1815 (London, 2007)

— Bohstedt, John, ‘Gender, household and community politics: women in English riots, 1790–1810’, P.&P., no. 120 (1988), pp 88–122

— Bottigheimer, Karl, ‘Kingdom and colony’ in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair (eds), The Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool, 1978), pp 45–64

— Bourke, Angela, et al. (eds), The Field Day anthology of Irish literature, iv: Irish women’s writing and traditions (Cork, 2002)

— Bourke, Richard, ‘Edmund Burke and the politics of conquest’, Modern Intellectual History, 4/3 (2007), pp 403–32

— ———‘Sovereignty, opinion and revolution in Edmund Burke’, History of European Ideas, xxv (1999), pp 99–120

— Bouton, Cynthia A., The Flour War: gender, class, and community in late ancien régime French society (University Park, Pa., 1993)

— Boyce, D. George, and O’Day, Alan (eds), The making of modern Irish history: revisionism and the revisionist controversy (London, 1996)

— Bradshaw, Brendan, and Morrill, John (eds), The British problem, c. 1534–1707: state formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Cambridge, 1998)

— Brady, John, Catholics and Catholicism in the eighteenth-century press (Maynooth, 1965)

— ———‘Proposals to register Irish priests, 1765–7’, I.E.R., 5th ser., xcvii (Apr. 1962), pp 209–22

— ———and Corish, P. J., The church under the penal code (Dublin, 1971)

— Brant, Clare, Eighteenth-century letters and British culture (Basingstoke, 2006)

— Breen, T. H., ‘Ideology and nationalism on the eve of the American Revolution: revisions once more in need of revising’, Journal of American History, 84/1 (June 1997), pp 13–39

— Brewer, John, ‘The eighteenth-century British state: contexts and issues’ in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An imperial state at war: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1993), pp 52–71

— ———Pleasures of the imagination: English culture in the eighteenth century (London, 1997)

— ———The sinews of power: war, money and the English state, 1688–1783 (London, 1989)

— Bric, Maurice J., ‘The tithe system in eighteenth-century Ireland’, P.R.I.A., lxxxvi, sect. C (1986), pp 271–88

— ———‘The Whiteboy movement in Tipperary, 1760–1780’ in William Nolan (ed.), Tipperary: history and society (Dublin, 1985), pp 148–84

— Brockliss, L. W. B., and Ferté, P., ‘Irish clerics in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a statistical study’, P.R.I.A., lxxxvii, sect. C (1987), pp 527–72

— Brown, Michael, Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–30 (Dublin, 2002)

— Brumwell, Stephen, Redcoats: the British soldier and war in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002)

— Burke, Nuala, ‘A hidden church? The structure of Catholic Dublin in the mid-eighteenth century’, Arch. Hib., xxxii (1974), pp 81–92

— Burke, W. P., The Irish priests in the penal times, 1660–1760 (Waterford, 1914)

— Burns, J. H. (ed.) with Mark Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991)

— Burton, J. H. (ed.), The autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805 (2nd ed., London, 1910)

— Buttimer, Cornelius G., ‘An Irish text on the “War of Jenkins’ Ear”’, Celtica, xxi (1990), pp 75–99

— Caldicott, C. E. J., Gough, H., and Pittion, J.-P. (eds), The Huguenots and Ireland (Dún Laoghaire, 1987)

— Calhoun, Craig, Nationalism (Buckingham, 1997)

— Canny, Nicholas, Kingdom and colony: Ireland in the Atlantic world, 1560–1800 (Baltimore, 1988)

— ———Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001)

— ———(ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, i: The origins of empire: British overseas enterprise to the close of the seventeenth century: (Oxford, 1998)

— Cashmere, John, ‘The social uses of violence in ritual: charivari or religious persecution?’, European History Quarterly, xxi (1991), pp 291–319

— Ceyssens, L., ‘François Martin (1652–1722): professeur à l’Université de Louvain’, Augustiniana, xlvi (1996), pp 371–404

— Chalus, Elaine, ‘Elite women, social politics and the political world of late eighteenth-century England’, H.J., 43/3 (2001), pp 669–97

— Chambers, Liam, Michael Moore, c. 1639–1726: Provost of Trinity, Rector of Paris (Dublin, 2005)

— ———‘Rivalry and reform in the Irish College, Paris, 1676–1775’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Irish communities in early modern Europe (Dublin, 2006), pp 103–29

— Champion, J. A. I., ‘Enlightened erudition and the politics of reading in John Toland’s circle’, H.J., 49/1 (2006), pp 111–41

— ———Republican learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003)

— Chartier, Roger, ‘Do books make revolutions?’ in idem, The cultural origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C., 1991), pp 67–91

— Childs, John, The Nine Years War and the British army, 1688–1697: the operations in the Low Countries (Manchester, 1991)

— ———‘The Williamite war, 1689–1691’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 188–210

— Clark, J. C. D., English society, 1660–1832: religion, ideology and politics during the ancien régime (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2000)

— Clark, Ruth, Strangers and sojourners at Port Royal: being an account of the connections between the British Isles and the Jansenists of France and Holland (Cambridge, 1932)

— Clarkson, L. A., ‘An anatomy of an Irish town: the economy of Armagh, 1770’, I.E.S.H., v (1978), pp 27–45

— ———‘Love, labour and life: women in Carrick-on-Suir in the late eighteenth century’, I.E.S.H., xx (1993), pp 18–34

— ———and Kennedy, Liam, ‘Birth, death and exile: Irish population history, 1700–1921’ in B. J. Graham and L. J. Proudfoot (eds), Historical geography of Ireland (London, 1993), pp 158–84

— Claydon, Tony, and McBride, Ian (eds), Protestantism and national identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge, 1998)

— Cleary, Joe, ‘“Misplaced ideas”? Colonialism, location, and dislocation in Irish studies’ in Clare Carroll and Patricia King (eds), Ireland and postcolonial theory (Cork, 2003), pp 16–45

— Cobban, Alfred, Edmund Burke and the revolt against the eighteenth century (London, 1929)

— Colley, Linda, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992)

— Connolly, S. J., ‘The Church of Ireland and the royal martyr: regicide and revolution in Anglican political thought, c. 1660–c. 1745’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, liv, no. 3 (July 2003), pp 484–506

— ———‘Eighteenth-century Ireland: colony or ancien régime?’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The making of modern Irish history: revisionism and the revisionist controversy (London, 1996), pp 15–33

— ———‘Family, love and marriage: some evidence from the early eighteenth century’ in Margaret McCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women in early modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991), pp 276–90

— ———‘Illegitimacy and pre-nuptial pregnancy in Ireland before 1864: the evidence of some Catholic parish registers’, I.E.S.H., vi (1979), pp 5–23

— ———‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and republicans: varieties of disaffection in eighteenth-century Ireland’, E.C.I., xviii (2003), pp 63–79

— ———‘Law, order and popular protest in early eighteenth-century Ireland: the case of the Houghers’ in P. J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, rebels and establishments: Historical Studies XV (Belfast, 1985), pp 51–68

— ———‘The penal laws’ in W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in conflict: the revolutionary war in Ireland and its aftermath (Belfast, 1990), pp 157–72

— ———Priests and people in pre-Famine Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 2001)

— ———‘Reformers and Highflyers: the post-Revolution church’ in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds), As by law established: the Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, 1995), pp 152–65

— ———Religion, law, and power: the making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992)

— ———‘Tupac Amaru and Captain Right: a comparative perspective on eighteenth-century Ireland’ in David Dickson and Cormac Ó Gráda (eds), Refiguring Ireland: essays in honour of L. M. Cullen (Dublin, 2003), pp 94–111

— ———‘Violence and order in the eighteenth century’ in Patrick O’Flanagan et al. (eds), Rural Ireland, 1600–1900: modernisation and change (Cork 1987), pp 42–61

— ———‘A woman’s life in eighteenth-century Ireland: the case of Letitia Bushe’, H.J., 43/2 (2000), pp 433–51

— Conway, Stephen, ‘Britain and the impact of the American war’, War in History, 2/2 (July 1995), pp 127–50

— Coombes, James, A bishop of penal times: the life and times of John O’Brien, Bishop of Cloyne and Ross, 1701–1769 (Cork, 1981)

— Corish, Patrick J., The Catholic community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dublin, 1981)

— ———‘Catholic marriage under the penal code’ in Art Cosgrove (ed.), Marriage in Ireland (Dublin, 1985), pp 67–77

— ———The Irish Catholic experience: a historical survey (Dublin, 1985)

— Corp, Edward, ‘The Irish at the Jacobite court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye’ in Thomas O’Connor, The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001), pp 143–56

— Corvisier, André, Armies and societies in Europe, 1494–1789, trans. Abigail T. Siddell (Bloomington, Ind., 1979)

— Cranston, Maurice, Jean-Jacques: the early life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (London, 1983)

— ———Philosophers and pamphleteers: political theorists of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1986)

— Crawford, W. H., ‘The Belfast middle classes in the late eighteenth century’ in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin, 1993), pp 62–73

— ———‘Change in Ulster in the late eighteenth century’ in Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (eds), Penal era and golden age: essays in Irish history, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp 186–203

— ———‘The reshaping of the Borderlands, c. 1700–1840’ in Raymond Gillespie and Harold O’Sullivan (eds), The Borderlands: essays on the history of the Ulster–Leinster border (Belfast, 1989), pp 93–106

— ———‘Ulster economy and society in the eighteenth century’ (Ph.D. thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1983)

— Crow, Thomas, Emulation: making artists for revolutionary France (London, 1995)

— Crowe, Ian (ed.), Edmund Burke: his life and legacy (Dublin, 1997)

— Cullan, Fintan, Visual politics: the representation of Ireland, 1750–1930 (Cork, 1997)

— Cullen, L. M., ‘The 1798 rebellion in its eighteenth-century context’ in P. J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, rebels and establishments: Historical Studies XV (Belfast, 1985), pp 91–113

— ———‘The 1798 rebellion in Wexford: United Irishman organisation, membership, leadership’ in Kevin Whelan (ed.), Wexford: history and society (Dublin, 1987), pp 248–95

— ———‘The Blackwater Catholics and County Cork society and politics in the eighteenth century’ in Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelius Buttimer (eds), Cork: history and society (Dublin, 1993), pp 535–84

— ———‘Burke, Ireland, and revolution’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 16/1 (Feb. 1992), pp 21–42

— ———‘Burke’s Irish views and writings’ in Ian Crowe (ed.), Edmund Burke: his life and legacy (Dublin, 1997), pp 62–75

— ———‘Catholics under the penal laws’, E.C.I., i (1986), pp 23–36

— ———‘The contemporary and later politics of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire’, E.C.I., viii (1993), pp 7–38

— ———‘Economic development, 1691–1750’ in N.H.I., iv, 123–58

— ———An economic history of Ireland since 1660 (London, 1972)

— ———The emergence of modern Ireland, 1600–1900 (London, 1981)

— ———‘Galway merchants in the outside world, 1650–1800’ in Diarmuid Ó Cearbhaill (ed.), Galway: town and gown, 1484–1984 (Dublin, 1984), pp 63–89

— ———The hidden Ireland: re-assessment of a concept (Mullingar, 1988)

— ———‘The internal politics of the United Irishmen’ in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin, 1993), pp 179–96

— ———‘The Irish diaspora of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the move: studies on European migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), pp 113–52

— ———‘Late eighteenth-century politicisation in Ireland: problems in its study and its French links’ in L. M. Cullen and Louis Bergeron (eds), Culture et pratiques politiques en France et en Irlande, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1991), pp 137–58

— ———‘Rebellion mortality in Wexford in 1798’, Journal of the Wexford Historical Society, 17 (1998–9), pp 7–29

— ———‘The United Irishmen: problems and issues of the 1790s’, Ulster Local Studies, xviii, no. 2 (spring 1997), pp 7–27

— Cummins, Robert F., with Fenning, Hugh, ‘The constitutions of the diocese of Cashel: “The New Psalter of Cashel” (1737) and three pastoral letters of Archbishop Christopher Butler’, Arch. Hib., lvi (2002), pp 132–88

— Cunningham, Bernadette, The world of Geoffrey Keating: history, myth and religion in seventeenth-century Ireland (2nd ed., Dublin, 2004)

— Curtin, Nancy J., ‘The Belfast uniform: Theobald Wolfe Tone’, Éire–Ireland, 20/2 (summer 1985), pp 40–69

— ———‘Matilda Tone and virtuous republican femininity’ in Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds), Women of 1798 (Dublin, 1998), pp 26–46

— ———‘“A nation of abortive men”: gendered citizenship and early Irish republicanism’ in Marilyn Cohen and Nancy J. Curtin (eds), Reclaiming gender: transgressive identities in modern Ireland (Basingstoke, 1999), pp 33–52

— ———‘The transformation of the United Irishmen into a mass-based revolutionary organisation, 1794–6’, I.H.S., xxiv, no. 96 (Nov. 1985), pp 463–92

— ———The United Irishmen: popular politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–98 (Oxford, 1994)

— Daniel, Stephen, John Toland: his methods, manners, and mind (Kingston, 1984)

— Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre: and other episodes in French cultural history (London, 1984)

— Davies, R. R., The first English empire: power and identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000)

— Davis, Natalie Z., ‘Anthropology and history in the 1980s’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xii/2 (autumn 1981), pp 267–75

— ———‘The reasons of misrule’ in idem Society and culture in early modern France (Cambridge, 1987 ed.), pp 97–123

— ———‘Rites of violence: youth groups and charivari in sixteenth-century France’, P.&P., no. 59 (1973), pp 53–91

— ———‘Women on top’ in idem Society and culture in early modern France (Cambridge, 1987 ed.), pp 124–151

— Deane, Seamus, ‘Introduction’ in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said (eds), Nationalism, colonialism and literature (Minneapolis, 1990)

— ———A short history of Irish literature (London, 1986)

— ———Strange country: modernity and nationhood in Irish writing since 1790 (Oxford, 1997)

— ———et al. (eds), Field Day anthology of Irish writing (3 vols, Derry, 1991)

— de Breffny, Brian (ed.), ‘Letters from Connaught to a Wild Goose’, Irish Ancestor, X, no. 2 (1978), pp 81–99

— de Lange, Albert (ed.), Dall’Europa alle Valli Valdesi: atti del Convegno ‘Il Glorioso Rimpatrio, 1689–1989’ (Turin, 1990)

— Denman, Terence, ‘“ Hibernia officina militum”: Irish recruitment to the British regular army, 1660–1815’, Irish Sword, XX, no. 80 (winter 1996), pp 148–66

— de Vries, Jan, European urbanisation, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)

— Dickinson, H. T., and Logue, K., ‘The Porteous Riot: a study of the breakdown of law and order in Edinburgh, 1736–1737’, Scottish Labour History Review, 10 (1976), pp 21–40

— Dickson, David, Arctic Ireland: the extraordinary story of the Great Frost and forgotten famine of 1740–41 (Belfast, 1997)

— ———‘Catholics and trade in eighteenth-century Ireland: an old debate revisited’ in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990), pp 85–100

— ———‘“Centres of motion”: Irish cities and the origins of popular politics’ in L. M. Cullen and Louis Bergeron (eds), Culture et pratiques politques en France et en Irlande, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1991), pp 101–22

— ———‘In search of the old Irish poor law’ in Rosalind Mitchison and Peter Roebuck (eds), Economy and society in Scotland and Ireland, 1500–1939 (Edinburgh, 1988), pp 140–59

— ———‘Jacobitism in eighteenth-century Ireland: a Munster perspective’, Éire–Ireland, 39/3–4 (fall–winter 2004), pp 38–99

— ———‘Middlemen’ in Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (eds), Penal era and golden age: essays in Irish history, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp 162–85

— ———New foundations: Ireland, 1660–1800 (2nd ed., Dublin, 2000)

— ———Old World colony: Cork and south Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork, 2005)

— ———‘The place of Dublin in the eighteenth-century Irish economy’ in T. M. Devine and David Dickson (eds), Ireland and Scotland, 1600–1850: parallels and contrasts in economic and social development (Edinburgh, 1983), pp 177–92

— ———‘Smoke without fire? Munster and the 1798 rebellion’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003) pp 147–73

— Doherty, Richard, The Williamite war in Ireland, 1688–1691 (Dublin, 1998)

— Donnelly, J. S., jr, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, Studia Hibernica, no. 21 (1981), pp 7–73

— ———‘Irish agrarian rebellion: the Whiteboys of 1769–76’, P.R.I.A., lxxxiii, sect. C (1983), pp 293–331

— ———‘Lough Derg: The making of the modern pilgrimage’ in William Nolan, Liam Ronayne and Mairead Dunlevy (eds), Donegal: history and society (Dublin, 1995), pp 491–508

— ———‘Propagating the cause of the United Irishmen’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, lxix (1980), pp 5–23

— ———‘The Rightboy movement, 1785–8’, Studia Hibernica, nos 17–18 (1977–8), pp 120–202

— ———‘The Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, I.H.S., xxi, no. 81 (Mar. 1978), pp 20–54

— Downie, J. A., Robert Harley and the press: propaganda and public opinion in the age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979)

— Doyle, David Noel, Ireland, Irishmen, and revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Cork, 1981)

— Doyle, Michael W., Ways of war and peace (New York, 1997)

— Doyle, Thomas, ‘Jacobitism, Catholicism and the Irish Protestant elite, 1700–1710’, E.C.I., xii (1997), pp 28–59

— Doyle, William, Jansenism: Catholic resistance to authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Basingstoke, 2000)

— Drummond, A. L., and Bulloch, J., The Scottish church, 1688–1843 (Edinburgh, 1973)

— Duffy, Michael, Soldiers, sugar and seapower: the British expeditions to the Caribbean and the war against revolutionary France (Oxford, 1987)

— Dull, Jonathan R., The French navy and American independence: a study of arms and diplomacy, 1774–1787 (Princeton, 1975)

— Dunne, Tom, Rebellion: memoir, memory and 1798 (Dublin, 2004)

— Dunne, Tom, ‘Subaltern voices? Poetry in Irish, popular Insurgency and the 1798 rebellion’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22/3 (Nov. 1998), pp 31–44

— Eagleton, Terry, Jameson, Fredric, and Said, Edward W., Nationalism, colonialism and literature (Minneapolis, 1990)

— Eccleshall, Robert, ‘Anglican political thought in the century after the Revolution of 1688’ in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political thought in Ireland since the seventeenth century (London, 1993), pp 36–72

— Ehrenpreis, Irvin, ‘Swift on liberty’, reprinted in A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), Swift: modern judgments (London, 1968), pp 59–73

— ————Swift: the man, his works, and the age, i: Mr Swift and his contemporaries (London, 1962)

— ———Swift: the man, his works, and the age, iii: Dean Swift (London, 1983)

— Ekirch, A. Roger, ‘Poor Carolina’: politics and society in colonial North America, 1729–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1981)

— Elliott, J. H., ‘A Europe of composite monarchies’, P.&P., no. 137 (Nov. 1992), pp 48–71

— ———National and comparative history: an inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 10 May 1991 (Oxford, 1991)

— ———‘Revolts in the Spanish monarchy’ in Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene (eds), Preconditions of revolution in early modern Europe (Baltimore & London, 1970), pp 109–30

— Elliott, Marianne, ‘The Defenders in Ulster’ in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin 1993), pp 222–33

— ———‘The origins and transformation of early Irish republicanism’, International Review of Social History, xxiii (1978), pp 405–28

— ———Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982)

— ———Wolfe Tone: prophet of Irish independence (New Haven, 1989)

— Ellis, Steven G., Tudor frontiers and noble power: the making of the British state (Oxford, 1995)

— ———and Barber, Sarah (eds), Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725 (London, 1995)

— Evans, R. J. W., ‘The Habsburg monarchy and Bohemia, 1526–1848’ in Mark Greengrass (ed.), Conquest and coalescence: the shaping of the state in early modern Europe (London, 1991), pp 134–54

— ———The making of the Habsburg monarchy, 1550–1700: an interpretation (Oxford, 1979)

— Eversley, D. E. C., ‘The demography of the Irish Quakers, 1650–1850’ in J. M. Goldstrom and L. A. Clarkson (eds), Irish population, economy and society: essays in honour of the late K. H. Connell (Oxford, 1981), pp 57–88

— Fabricant, Carole, ‘Swift as Irish historian’ in Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley (eds), Walking Naboth’s vineyard: new studies of Swift (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995), pp 40–71

— Fagan, Patrick, ‘The Dublin Catholic mob (1700–1750)’, E.C.I., iv (1989), pp 133–42

— ———Dublin’s turbulent priest: Cornelius Nary, 1658–1738 (Dublin, 1991)

— ———(ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers (2 vols, Blackrock, 1995)

— ———An Irish bishop in penal times: the chequered career of Sylvester Lloyd, O.F.M., 1680–1747 (Dublin, 1993)

— Fannin, Samuel, ‘The Irish community in eighteenth-century Cádiz’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Irish migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin, 2003), pp 135–48

— Farge, Arlette, Fragile lives: violence, power and solidarity in eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge, 1993)

— Faulkner, Anselm, ‘The right of the Maguires of Tempo’, Clogher Record, ix/2 (1977), pp 167–86

— Fenning, Hugh, ‘The Archbishops of Dublin, 1693–1786’ in James Kelly and Dáire Keogh (eds), History of the Catholic diocese of Dublin (Dublin, 2000), pp 175–214

— ———‘The Catholic press in Munster in the eighteenth century’ in Gerard Long (ed.), Books beyond the Pale: aspects of the provincial book trade in Ireland before 1850 (Dublin, 1994), pp 19–32

— ———The Irish Dominican province, 1698–1797 (Dublin, 1990)

— ———‘John Kent’s report on the state of the Irish mission, 1742’, Arch. Hib., xxviii (1966), pp 59–102

— ———‘The journey of James Lyons from Rome to Sligo, 1763–65’, Coll. Hib., xi (1968), pp 91–110

— ———‘The library of a preacher of Drogheda: John Donnelly, O.P. (d. 1748)’, Coll. Hib., xviii–xix (1976–7), pp 72–104

— ———‘The library of Bishop William Daton of Ossory, 1698’, Coll. Hib., xx (1978), pp 30–57

— ———‘The library of the Augustinians of Galway in 1731’, Coll. Hib., xxxi–xxxii (1989–90), pp 162–95

— ———‘Michael MacDonogh, O.P., Bishop of Kilmore’, I.E.R., 5th ser., cvi (July–Dec. 1966), pp 138–53

— ———‘The mission to St Croix in the West Indies: 1750–1769’, Arch. Hib., xxv (1962), pp 75–122

— ———‘Some eighteenth-century broadsides’, Coll. Hib., xii (1969), pp 45–61

— ———‘Some problems of the Irish mission, 1733–1774’, Coll. Hib., viii (1965), pp 58–109

— ———The undoing of the friars of Ireland: a study of the novitiate question in the eighteenth century (Louvain, 1972)

— Ferguson, K. P., ‘The army in Ireland from the Restoration to the Act of Union’ (Ph.D. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1980)

— Firth, Charles, ‘The political significance of Gulliver’s Travels’ in idem, Essays historical and literary (Oxford, 1968), pp 210–41

— FitzGerald, Garret, ‘Estimates for baronies of minimum level of Irish-speaking amongst successive decennial cohorts: 1771–1781 to 1861–1871’, P.R.I.A., lxxxiv, sect. C (1984), pp 117–55

— Fitzpatrick, W. J., Curious family history, or, Ireland before the Union (6th ed., London, 1880)

— Flanagan, P. J., ‘The diocese of Clogher in 1714’, Clogher Record, i/2 (1954), pp 39–42; i/3 (1955), pp 125–30

— Fleming, David, ‘Public attitudes to prostitution in eighteenth-century Ireland’, I.E.S.H., xxxii (2005), pp 1–18

— Forrest, Alan, The French Revolution (Oxford, 1995)

— Gallagher, Shaun, How the body shapes the mind (Oxford, 2005)

— Garnham, Neal, ‘How violent was eighteenth-century Ireland?’, I.H.S., xxx, no. 119 (May 1997), pp 377–92

— ———‘Local elite creation in early Hanoverian Ireland: the case of the county grand jury’, H.J., 42/3 (1999), pp 623–42

— ———‘The short career of Paul Farrell: a brief consideration of law-enforcement in eighteenth-century Dublin’, E.C.I., xi (1996), pp 46–52

— ———‘The trials of James Cotter and Henry Baron Barry of Santry: two case studies in the administration of criminal justice in early eighteenth-century Ireland’, I.H.S., xxxi, no. 123 (May 1999), pp 328–42

— Gentilcore, David, From bishop to witch: the system of the sacred in early modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, 1992)

— Geoghegan, Patrick M., The Irish Act of Union: a study in high politics, 1798–1801 (Dublin, 1999)

— Geoghegan, Vincent, ‘A Jacobite history: the Abbé MacGeoghegan’s History of Ireland’, E.C.I., vi (1991), pp 37–55

— Gibbes, R. W. (ed.), Documentary history of the American Revolution (New York, 1855)

— Gibbons, Luke, ‘Identity without a centre: allegory, history and Irish nationalism’ in idem, Transformations in Irish culture (Cork, 1996), pp 134–47

— Giblin, Cathaldus, ‘Catalogue of material of Irish interest in the collection of Nunziatura di Fiandra, Vatican Archives’, Coll. Hib., v (1962), pp 7–130; ix (1966), pp 7–70; xiv (1971), pp 36–81

— ———‘The Stuart nomination of Irish bishops, 1687–1765’, I.E.R., 5th ser., cv (Jan.–June, 1966), pp 35–47

— Gillen, Ultán, ‘Monarchy, republic and empire: Irish public opinion and France, c. 1787–1804’, (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2005)

— Gillingham, John, ‘The beginnings of English imperialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, v (1991–2), pp 392–410

— Goldgar, Anne, Impolite learning: conduct and community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (London, 1995)

— Goldie, Mark, ‘The theory of religious intolerance and restoration England’ in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp 331–68

— Gough, Hugh, ‘Genocide and the bicentenary: the French Revolution and the revenge of the Vendée’, H.J., 30/4 (1987), pp 977–88

— Gowing, Laura, Common bodies: women, touch and power in seventeenth-century England (New Haven, 2003)

— Graham, Colin, ‘“Liminal spaces”: post-colonial theories and Irish culture’, Irish Review, xvi (1994), pp 29–43

— Gray, John, ‘Mary Ann McCracken: Belfast revolutionary and pioneer of feminism’ in Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds), The women of 1798 (Dublin, 1998), pp 47–63

— Greaves, Richard L., God’s other children: Protestant nonconformists and the emergence of denominational churches in Ireland, 1660–1700 (Stanford, Calif., 1997)

— Green, E. R. R., ‘The Scotch-Irish and the coming of the revolution in North Carolina’, I.H.S., vii, no. 26 (Sept. 1950), pp 77–86

— ———‘The “strange humours” that drove the Scotch-Irish to America, 1729’, William and Mary Quarterly, 12/1 (1955), pp 113–23

— Greene, Jack P., Peripheries and center: constitutional development in the extended polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1606–1788 (Athens, Ga., & London, 1986)

— Greengrass, Mark (ed.), Conquest and coalescence: the shaping of the state in early modern Europe (London, 1991)

— Grell, Ole Peter, Israel, Jonathan I., and Tyacke, Nicholas (eds), From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England (Oxford, 1991)

— Griffin, Patrick, The people with no name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the creation of a British Atlantic world, 1689–1764 (Princeton, 2001)

— Grimsley, Mark, and Rogers, Clifford J. (eds), Civilians in the path of war (Lincoln, Nebr., 2002)

— Guy, Alan J. (ed.), Colonel Samuel Bagshawe and the army of George II, 1731–1762 (Publications of the Army Record Society, vi) (London, 1990)

— ———‘The Irish military establishment, 1660–1776’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 211–30

— Haigh, Christopher, ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), The English Reformation revised (Cambridge, 1987)

— Haliczer, Stephen, Sexuality in the confessional: a sacrament profaned (Oxford, 1996)

— Hampson, Norman, The Enlightenment (London, 1968)

— Harris, Bob, Politics and the nation: Britain in the mid-eighteenth century (Oxford, 2002)

— Harvey, Karen J., The Bellews of Mount Bellew: a Catholic gentry family in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1998)

— ———‘Religion and money: Irish regular colleges in the Roman Republic of 1798–99’, E.C.I., viii (1993), pp 73–82

— Hay, Douglas, ‘Poaching and the game laws on Cannock Chase’ in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (London, 1975), pp 189–253

— Hayes, Richard, ‘A forgotten Irish antiquary: Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman, 1732–1809’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxx (1941), pp 587–96

— ———‘Reflections of an Irish Brigade officer’, Irish Sword, i/2 (1950–51), pp 68–74

— ———‘An unpublished eighteenth-century Franco-Irish manuscript’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxviii (1939), pp 475–84

— Hayton, D. W., ‘Constitutional experiments and political expediency, 1689–1725’ in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725 (London, 1995), pp 276–305

— ———‘Exclusion, conformity and parliamentary representation: the impact of the sacramental test on Irish Dissenting politics’ in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The politics of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin, 1997), pp 52–73

— ———‘From barbarian to burlesque: English images of the Irish, c. 1660–1750’, I.E.S.H., xv (1988), pp 5–31

— ———‘Ireland and the English ministers, 1707–16: a study in the formulation and working of government policy in the early eighteenth century’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1975)

— ———‘The propaganda war’ in W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in conflict: the revolutionary war in Ireland and its aftermath (Belfast, 1990), pp 106–21

— ———Ruling Ireland, 1685–1742: politics, politicians and parties (Woodbridge, 2004)

— ———‘The Stanhope/Sunderland ministry and the repudiation of Irish parliamentary independence’, E.H.R., cxiii (1998), pp 610–36

— ———‘The Williamite revolution in Ireland, 1688–91’ in Jonathan Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch moment: essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world impact (Cambridge, 1991), pp 185–213

— Healy, John, Maynooth College: its centenary history (Dublin 1895)

— Hempton, John, The siege and history of Londonderry (Derry, 1861)

— Herbison, Ivan, Language, literature and cultural identity: an Ulster-Scots perspective (Dunclug, 1989)

— Hick, Vivien, ‘The Palatine settlement in Ireland: the early years’, E.C.I., iv (1989), pp 113–32

— Hill, Jacqueline, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin civic politics and Irish Protestant patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997)

— Hinsley, F. H., Power and the pursuit of peace: theory and practice in the history of relations between states (Cambridge, 1963)

— Hoban, Brendan, ‘Dominic Bellew, 1745–1812: parish priest of Dundalk and Bishop of Killala’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, vi, no. 2 (1972), pp 333–71

— Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘Distinctions between socio-political and other forms of crime’, Society for the Study of Labour History Bulletin, 25 (autumn 1972), pp 5–6

— Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of trade: international competition and the nation-state in historical perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)

— Hopkins, Paul, Glencoe and the end of the Highland war (Edinburgh, 1986)

— Hoppen, K. T., The common scientist in the seventeenth century: a study of the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1708 (London, 1970)

— ———‘The Dublin Philosophical Society and the new learning in Ireland’, I.H.S., xiv, no. 54 (Sept. 1964), pp 99–118

— Hoppit, Julian, A land of liberty? England, 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000)

— Houlding, J. A., Fit for service: the training of the British army, 1715–95 (Oxford, 1981)

— Howe, Stephen, Ireland and the Empire: colonial legacies in Irish history and culture (Oxford, 2000)

— Hsia, R. P., Social discipline in the Reformation: central Europe, 1550–1750 (London, 1989)

— ———The world of Catholic renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998)

— Hufton, Olwen, Europe: privilege and protest, 1730–1789 (2nd ed., Oxford, 2000)

— Hunter, Michael, ‘“Aikenhead the Atheist”: the context and consequences of articulate irreligion in the late seventeenth century’ in idem, Science and the shape of orthodoxy: intellectual change in late seventeenth-century Britain (Woodbridge, 1995), pp 308–32

— Hutton, Ronald, ‘Revisionism in Britain’ in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to historiography (London, 1997), pp 377–91

— Iggers, Georg G., Historiography in the twentieth century: from scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge (Middletown, Conn., 1997)

— Ingram, Martin, ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture” in early modern England’, P.&P., no. 105 (1984), pp 79–113

— Israel, Jonathan I., ‘General introduction’ in idem (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch moment: essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world impact (Cambridge, 1991)

— ———Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001)

— ———‘William III and toleration’ in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp 129–70

— Jackson, Alvin, ‘J. C. Beckett: politics, faith, scholarship’, I.H.S., xxxiii, no. 130 (Nov. 2002), pp 129–50

— James, F. G., ‘Derry in the time of George I: selections from Bishop Nicolson’s letters, 1718–1722’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd ser., xvii (1954), pp 173–86

— Jennings, Brendan, ‘The Irish Franciscans in Prague’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxviii (1939), pp 210–22

— Johnson, Trevor, ‘Blood, tears and Xavier-water: Jesuit missionaries and popular religion in the eighteenth-century Upper Palatinate’ in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds), Popular religion in Germany and central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp 183–202

— Johnston-Liik, Edith Mary, History of the Irish parliament, 1692–1800: Commons, constituencies and statutes (6 vols, Belfast, 2002)

— Jones, Frederick M., ‘The Congregation of Propaganda and the publication of Dr O’Brien’s Irish dictionary, 1768’, I.E.R., 5th ser., lxxviii (Jan. 1953), pp 29–37

— Jupp, Peter, ‘County Down elections, 1783–1831’, I.H.S., xviii, no. 70 (Sept. 1972), pp 177–206

— Kamen, Henry, Early modern European society (London, 2000)

— Kelly, James, ‘The abduction of women of fortune in eighteenth-century Ireland’, E.C.I., ix (1994), pp 7–43

— ———‘Capital punishment in early eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Serge Soupel (ed.), Crime et châtiment dans les Îles Britanniques au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 2001), pp 155–72

— ———‘The Catholic Church in the diocese of Ardagh, 1650–1870’ in R. G. Gillespie and Gerard Moran (eds), Longford: essays in county history (Dublin, 1991), pp 63–91

— ———(ed.), Gallows speeches from eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2001)

— ———‘“The Glorious and Immortal Memory”: commemoration and Protestant identity in Ireland, 1660–1800’, P.R.I.A., xciv, sect. C (1994), pp 25–52

— ———‘Infanticide in eighteenth-century Ireland’, I.E.S.H., xix (1992), pp 5–26 ————(ed.), The letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick, 1757–62 (Aberystwyth, 1990)

— ———The Liberty and Ormond Boys: factional riot in eighteenth-century Dublin (Dublin, 2005)

— ———‘The origins of the Act of Union: an examination of unionist opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1800’, I.H.S., xxv, no. 99 (May 1987), pp 236–63

— ———‘Political publishing’ in Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (eds), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii: The Irish book in English, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 2006), pp 215–33

— ———‘That damn’d thing called honour’: duelling in Ireland, 1570–1860 (Cork, 1995)

— ———‘The Whiteboys in 1762: a contemporary account’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, xciv, no. 253 (1989), pp 19–26

— ———‘“A wild Capuchin of Cork”: Arthur O’Leary, 1729–1802’ in Gerard Moran (ed.), Radical Irish priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp 37–59

— ———and Keogh, Dáire (eds), History of the Catholic diocese of Dublin (Dublin, 1999)

— Kelly, Patrick, ‘Berkeley and Ireland’, Études Irlandaises, no. 11 (Dec. 1980), pp 7–25

— ———‘Ireland and the critique of mercantilism in Berkeley’s Querist’, Hermathena, no. 139 (1985), pp 101–16

— ———‘The improvement of Ireland’, Analecta Hibernica, no. 35 (1992), pp 45–84

— ———‘The Irish Woollen Export Prohibition Act of 1699: Kearney re-visited’, I.E.S.H., vii (1980), pp 22–44

— ———‘“A Light to the Blind”: the voice of the dispossessed elite in the generation after the defeat at Limerick’, I.H.S., xxiv (Nov. 1985), pp 431–62

— ———‘Locke and Molyneux: the anatomy of a friendship’, Hermathena, no. 126 (1979), pp 38–54

— ———‘Lord Galway and the penal laws’ in C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough and J.-P. Pittion (eds), The Huguenots and Ireland (Dún Laoghaire, 1987), pp 239–54

— ———‘A pamphlet attributed to John Toland and an unpublished reply by Archbishop William King’, Topoi, iv, no. 1 (1985), pp 81–90

— ———‘The politics of political economy in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Sean Connolly (ed.), Political ideas in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp 105–29

— ———‘The printer’s copy of the MS of William Molyneux, “The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated”, 1698’, Long Room, 18–19 (spring/autumn 1979), pp 6–13

— ———‘William Molyneux and the spirit of liberty in eighteenth-century Ireland’, E.C.I., iii (1988), pp 133–48

— Kelly, William (ed.), The sieges of Derry (Dublin, 2001)

— Kennedy, Catriona A., ‘“What can women give but tears?” Gender, politics and Irish national identity in the 1790s’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 2004)

— ———‘“Womanish epistles?” Martha McTier, female epistolarity and late eighteenth-century Irish radicalism’, Women’s History Review, 13/4 (2004), pp 649–67

— Kennedy, Máire, French books in eighteenth-century Ireland (Oxford, 2001)

— Keogh, Dáire, ‘ The French disease’: the Catholic Church and radicalism in Ireland, 1790–1800 (Dublin, 1993)

— ———(ed.), A patriot priest: the life of Father James Coigly, 1761–1798 (Cork, 1998)

— Kiberd, Declan, Irish classics (London, 2000)

— Kidd, Colin, British identities before nationalism: ethnicity and nationhood in the Atlantic world, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999)

— ———‘North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms’, H.J., 39/2 (1996)pp 361–82

— Kilcullen, John, Sincerity and truth: essays on Arnauld, Bayle, and toleration (Oxford, 1988)

— Kirkham, Grame, ‘Literacy in north-west Ulster, 1680–1860’ in Mary Daly and David Dickson (eds), The origins of popular literacy in Ireland (Dublin, 1990), pp 73–96

— Klingenstein, Grette, ‘The meanings of “Austria” and “Austrian” in the eighteenth century’ in Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott (eds), Royal and republican sovereignty in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp 423–78

— Koenigsberger, H. G., ‘Composite states, representative institutions, and the American Revolution’, Historical Research, lxii (1989), pp 135–53

— ———‘ Dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale: monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe’ in idem, Politicians and virtuosi (London, 1986), pp 1–25

— ———‘The Italian parliaments from their origins to the end of the eighteenth century’, Journal of Italian History, i (1978), pp 18–49

— Labrousse, Élisabeth, ‘Calvinism in France, 1598–1685’ in Menna Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), pp 285–313

— Landes, Joan B., Women and the public sphere in the age of the French Revolution (London, 1988)

— Langford, Paul A polite and commercial people: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989)

— ———‘Property and “virtual representation” in eighteenth-century England’, H.J., 31/1 (1988), pp 83–115

— Larkin, John (ed.), The trial of William Drennan (Dublin, 1991)

— Larkin, Patrick J., ‘“Popish riot” in south Co. Derry, 1725’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, viii, no. 1 (1975–6), pp 97–110

— Leavis, F. R., ‘The irony of Swift’, reprinted in A. N. Jeffares (ed.), Swift: modern judgements (London, 1968), pp 59–73

— Lecky, W. E. H., A history of Ireland in the eighteenth century (5 vols, London, 1892)

— Lee, J. J., ‘Irish history’ in Neil Buttimer, Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin (eds), The heritage of Ireland (Cork, 2000), pp 117–36

— Leerssen, Joep, ‘Anglo-Irish patriotism and its European context: notes towards a reassessment’, E.C.I., iii (1988), pp 7–24

— Lenihan, Pádraig, and Sheridan, Geraldine, ‘A Swiss soldier in Ireland, 1689–90’, Irish Studies Review, 13/4 (2005), pp 480–97

— Lennon, Colm, ‘The print trade, 1700–1800’ in Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (eds), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii: The Irish book in English, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 2006), pp 74–87

— Levene, Mark, and Roberts, Penny (eds), The massacre in history (Oxford, 1999)

— Lindsay, Deirdre, ‘The Rebellion Papers: an introduction to the Rebellion Papers collection in the National Archives, Bishop Street, Dublin’, Ulster Local Studies, xviii, no. 2 (spring 1997), pp 28–42

— Linebaugh, Peter, The London hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth century (London, 1991)

— Lock, F. P., ‘Edmund Burke and the rhetoric of numbers’, Studies in Burke and his Time, xx (2005), pp 17–37

— Love, Walter D., ‘Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s “philosophical” history of Ireland’, I.H.S., xiii, no. 49 (Mar. 1962), pp 1–25

— ———‘Edmund Burke and an Irish historiographical controversy’, History and Theory, ii (1962–3), pp 180–98

— Lynn, John A., ‘A brutal necessity? The devastation of the Palatinate, 1688–1689’ in Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (eds), Civilians in the path of war (Lincoln, Nebr., 2002), pp 79–110

— ———The wars of Louis xiv , 1667–1714 (London, 1999)

— Lyons, J. B., ‘Sylvester O’Halloran, 1728–1807’, E.C.I., iv (1989), pp 65–74

— McBride, Ian, ‘The harp without the crown: republicanism and nationalism in the 1790s’ in Sean Connolly (ed.), Political ideas in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp 159–84

— ———‘The nation in the age of revolution’ in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds), Power and the nation in European history (Cambridge, 2005), pp 248–71

— ———‘Presbyterians in the penal era’, Bullán, 1/2 (autumn 1994), pp 73–86

— ———‘The school of virtue: Francis Hutcheson, Irish Presbyterians and the Scottish Enlightenment’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political ideas in Ireland since the seventeenth century (London, 1993), pp 73–99

— ———Scripture politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998)

— ———‘Ulster Presbyterians and the confessional state, 1689–1733’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp 169–92

— McCarthy, Muriel, ‘An eighteenth-century Dublin bibliophile’, Irish Arts Review, iii, no. 4 (winter 1986), pp 29–33

— McDowell, R. B., Ireland in the age of imperialism and revolution (Oxford, 1979)

— McGrath, Charles Ivar, The making of the eighteenth-century Irish constitution: government, parliament and the revenue, 1692–1714 (Dublin, 2000)

— ———‘Securing the Protestant interest’, I.H.S., xxx, no. 117 (May 1996), pp 25–46

— MacGregor, Arthur (ed.), Sir Hans Sloane: collector, scientist, antiquary, founding father of the British Museum (London, 1994)

— McGuire, James I., ‘The Irish parliament of 1692’ in Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (eds), Penal era and golden age: essays in Irish history, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp 1–31

— Macinnes, Allan I., ‘Slaughter under trust: clan massacres and British state formation’ in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (eds), The massacre in history (Oxford, 1999), pp 127–48

— McKay, Derek, and Scott, H. M., The rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1815 (London, 1983)

— McLoughlin, T. O., Contesting Ireland: Irish voices against England in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1999)

— MacLysaght, Edward (ed.), The Kenmare Manuscripts (repr., Shannon, 1970)

— McManners, John, Church and society in eighteenth-century France, ii: The religion of the people and the politics of religion (Oxford, 1998)

— McNally, Patrick, ‘The Hanoverian accession and the Tory Party in Ireland’, Parliamentary History, xiv (1995), pp 263–83

— ———‘“Irish and English interests”: national conflict within the Church of Ireland episcopate in the reign of George I’, I.H.S., xxix, no. 115 (May 1995), pp 295–314

— ———‘Wood’s Halfpence, Carteret, and the government of Ireland, 1723–6’, I.H.S., xxx, no. 119 (May 1997), pp 354–76

— McSkimmin, Samuel, Annals of Ulster (Belfast, 1906)

— ———The history and antiquities of the county of the town of Carrickfergus (Belfast, 1823)

— Mac Suibhne, Breandán, ‘Politicisation and paramilitarism: north-west and south-west Ulster, c. 1772–98’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 243–78

— ———‘Whiskey, potatoes and Paddies: Volunteering and the construction of the Irish nation in northwest Ulster, 1778–1782’ in Peter Jupp and Eoin Magennis (eds), Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp 35–82

— MacSwiney, Marquess, ‘Notes on the history of the Book of Lecan’, P.R.I.A., xxxviii, sect. C (1928–9), pp 31–50

— Madden, Kyla, Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 1787–1858 (Liverpool, 2005)

— Magennis, Eoin, ‘In search of the “moral economy”: food scarcity in 1756–57 and the crowd’ in Peter Jupp and Eoin Magennis (eds), Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp 189–211

— ———The Irish political system, 1740–1765: the golden age of the undertakers (Dublin, 2000)

— ———‘“A land of milk and honey”: the Physico-Historical Society, improvement and the surveys of mid-eighteenth-century Ireland’, P.R.I.A., cii, sect. C (2002), pp 199–217

— ———‘A “Presbyterian insurrection”? Reconsidering the Hearts of Oak disturbances of July 1763’, I.H.S., xxxi, no. 122 (Nov. 1998), pp 165–87

— Maguire, W. A., ‘The Estate of Cú Chonnacht Maguire of Tempo’, I.H.S, xxvii, no. 106 (Nov. 1990), pp 130–44

— ———(ed.), Kings in conflict: the revolutionary war in Ireland and its aftermath (Belfast, 1990)

— ———‘Lord Donegall and the Hearts of Steel’, I.H.S., xxi, no. 84 (Sept. 1979), pp 351–76

— Malcomson, A. P. W., ‘Absenteeism in eighteenth-century Ireland’, I.E.S.H., i (1974), pp 15–35

— ———‘The gentle Leviathan: Arthur Hill, second Marquis of Downshire, 1753–1801’ in Peter Roebuck (ed.), Plantation to partition: essays in Ulster history in honour of J. L. McCracken (Belfast, 1981), pp 102–18

— ———‘The parliamentary traffic of this country’ in Thomas Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (eds), Penal era and golden age: essays in Irish history, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp 137–161

— ———The pursuit of the heiress: aristocratic marriage in Ireland, 1750–1820 (Belfast, 1982)

— Marshall, John, John Locke: resistance, religion and responsibility (Cambridge, 1994)

— Marshall, P. J., ‘“Cornwallis triumphant”: war in India and the British public in the late eighteenth century’ in Laurence Freedman, Paul Hayes and Robert O’Neill (eds), War, strategy, and international politics: essays in honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford, 1992), pp 57–74

— ———The making and unmaking of empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005)

— Mason, Haydn, Voltaire (London, 1981)

— Mautner, Thomas (ed.), Francis Hutcheson on human nature (Cambridge, 1993)

— Melzer, Arthur M., The natural goodness of man: on the system of Rousseau’s thought (Chicago, 1990)

— Miller, David, On nationality (Oxford, 1995)

— Miller, David W., ‘The Armagh troubles, 1784–95’ in Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly, jr (eds), Irish peasants: violence and political unrest, 1780–1914 (Madison, Wis., 1983), pp 155–91

— ———‘Non-professional soldiery, c. 1600–1800’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 315–34

— ———‘The origins of the Orange Order in County Armagh’ in A. J. Hughes, F. X. McCorry and R. Weatherup (eds), Armagh: history and society (Dublin, 2001), pp 583–608

— ———(ed.), Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders: selected documents on the County Armagh disturbances, 1784–96 (Belfast, 1990)

— Mokyr, Joel, and Ó Gráda, Cormac, ‘The height of Irishmen and Englishmen in the 1770s: some evidence from the East India Company records’, E.C.I., iv (1989), pp 83–92

— Monod, Paul, Jacobitism and the English people, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989)

— Moody, T. W., ‘Irish history and Irish mythology’ (1978), reprinted in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish history: the debate on historical revisionism, 1938–1994 (Dublin, 1994), pp 71–86

— Moore, James, ‘The two systems of Francis Hutcheson: on the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’ in M. A. Stewart (ed.) Studies in the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 1990), pp 37–59

— Moran, Patrick F., The Catholics of Ireland under the penal laws in the eighteenth century (London, 1899)

— ———(ed.), Spicilegium Ossoriense: being a collection of original letters and papers illustrative of the history of the Irish church (3 vols, Dublin, 1874–84)

— Morgan, M. J., Molyneux’s question: vision, touch and the philosophy of perception (Cambridge, 1977)

— Morley, Vincent, ‘George III, Queen Sadhbh and the historians’, E.C.I., xvii (2002), pp 112–20

— ———Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–83 (Cambridge, 2002)

— ———(ed.), Washington i gceannas a ríochta: cogadh Mheiriceá i litríocht na Gaeilge (Dublin, 2005)

— Morrill, John, ‘The fashioning of Britain’ in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725 (London, 1995), pp 8–39

— ———Revolt in the provinces: the people of England and the tragedies of war, 1630–1648 (2nd ed., Harlow, 1999)

— Munsche, P. B., Gentlemen and poachers: the English game laws, 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981)

— Murdoch, Alexander, The people above: politics and administration in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980)

— Murphy, Orville T., Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French diplomacy in the age of revolution, 1719–1787 (Albany, 1982)

— Murphy, Seán, ‘Charles Lucas and the Dublin election of 1748–1749’, Parliamentary History, ii (1983), pp 93–111

— ———‘Charles Lucas, Catholicism and nationalism’, E.C.I., viii (1993), pp 83–102

— Murtagh, Harman, ‘Irish soldiers abroad, 1600–1800’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 294–314

— Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, 2003)

— Nash, Gary B., Urban crucible: social change, political consciousness, and the origins of the American Revolution (London, 1979)

— Nelson, Ivan F., ‘“The first chapter of 1798”? Restoring a military perspective to the Irish militia riots of 1793’, I.H.S., xxxiii, no.132 (Nov. 2003), pp 369–86

— Newman, Gerald, The rise of English nationalism: a cultural history, 1740–1830 (London, 1987)

— Nokes, David, Jonathan Swift: a hypocrite reversed (Oxford, 1985)

— Nolan, Emer, ‘Swift: the patriot game’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxi (1998), pp 39–53

— Nolan, William (ed.), Tipperary: history and society (Dublin, 1985)

— Nora, Pierre, ‘Nation’ in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds), A critical dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London, 1989), pp 742–53

— Nordmann, Claude, ‘Louis XIV and the Jacobites’ in Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Europe (London, 1969), pp 82–111

— Nuovo, Victor, and Stewart, M. A., ‘Leland, John (1691–1766)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)

— O’Brien, Conor Cruise, The great melody: a thematic biography and commented anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1992)

— ———‘Irishness’ in idem, Writers and politics (London, 1965), pp 97–100

— O’Brien, Gillian, ‘“Spirit, impartiality and independence”: the Northern Star 1792–97’, E.C.I., xiii (1998), pp 7–23

— Ó Buachalla, Breandán, ‘From Jacobite to Jacobin’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 75–96

— ———‘Irish Jacobitism and Irish nationalism: the literary evidence’ in Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan (eds), Nations and nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland, and the eighteenth-century context (Oxford, 1995), pp 103–18

— ———‘Irish Jacobitism in official documents’, E.C.I., viii (1993), pp 128–38

— ———‘James Our True King: the ideology of Irish royalism in the seventeenth century’ in D. G. Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political thought in Ireland since the seventeenth century (London, 1993), pp 7–35

— ———‘The making of a Cork Jacobite’ in Patrick O’Flanagan and C. G. Buttimer (eds), Cork: history and society (Dublin, 1993), pp 469–98

— ———‘Poets and politics in early modern Ireland,’ E.C.I., vii (1992), pp 149–75

— Ó Catháin, Diarmaid, ‘Dermot O’Connor, translator of Keating’, E.C.I., ii (1987), pp 67–87

— ———‘An Irish scholar abroad: Bishop John O’Brien of Cloyne and the Macpherson controversy’ in Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelius Buttimer (eds), Cork: history and society (Dublin, 1993), pp 499–533

— Ó Ciardha, Éamonn, Ireland and the Jacobite cause, 1685–1766: a fatal attachment (Dublin, 2000)

— Ó Ciosáin, Éamon, ‘Attitudes towards Ireland and the Irish in Enlightenment France’ in Graham Gargett and Geraldine Sheridan (eds), Ireland and the French Enlightenment, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp 129–51

— Ó Ciosáin, Niall, Print and popular culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 1997)

— Ó Conaill, Colm James, ‘The Irish regiments in France: an overview of the presence of Irish soldiers in French service, 1716–1791’ in Eamon Maher and Grace Neville (eds), France–Ireland: anatomy of a relationship (Oxford, 2004), pp 327–42

— O’Connell, Philip, ‘The plot against Father Nicholas Sheehy: the historical background’, I.E.R., 5th ser., cviii (July–Dec. 1967), pp 372–84

— O’Connor, Priscilla, ‘Irish clerics and French politics of grace: the reception of Nicholas Madgett’s doctoral thesis, 1732’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Irish migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin, 2003), pp 182–202

— O’Connor, Thomas, The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001)

— ———‘Religious change, 1550–1800’ in Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (eds), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii: The Irish book in English, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 2006), pp 169–93

— O’Conor, Charles, ‘George Faulkner and the Irish Catholics’, part III, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxviii (1939), pp 489–90

— O’Donoghue, Patrick, ‘The Catholic Church and Ireland in an age of revolution and rebellion, 1782–1803’ (Ph.D. thesis, University College Dublin, 1975)

— O’Dowd, Mary, A history of women in Ireland, 1500–1800 (Harlow, 2005)

— ———‘The women in the gallery: women and politics in late eighteenth-century Ireland’ in Sabine Wichert (ed.), From the United Irishmen to twentieth-century Unionism: essays in honour of A. T. Q. Stewart (Dublin, 2004), pp 35–47

— O’Dwyer, Christopher (ed.), ‘Archbishop Butler’s Visitation Book’, part 1, Arch. Hib., xxxiii (1975), pp 1–90

— O’Flaherty, Eamon, ‘The Catholic Convention and Anglo-Irish politics, 1791–93’, Arch. Hib., xl (1985), pp 14–34

— ———‘Ecclesiastical politics and the dismantling of the penal laws in Ireland, 1774–1782’, I.H.S., xxvi, no. 101 (May 1988), pp 33–50

— O’Flaherty, Martin Stephen, ‘The Empire strikes back: Annesley v. Sherlock and the triumph of parliamentary sovereignty’, Columbia Law Review, lxxxvii (1987), pp 593–622

— O’Flanagan, Patrick, and Buttimer, Cornelius G. (eds), Cork: history and society (Dublin, 1993)

— O’Gorman, Frank, Voters, patrons, and parties: the unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989)

— O’Halloran, Clare, Golden ages and barbarous nations: antiquarian debate and cultural politics in Ireland, c. 1750–1800 (Cork, 2004)

— Ohlmeyer, Jane H., ‘“Civilizinge of those rude partes”: colonisation within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, i: The origins of empire: British overseas enterprise to the close of the seventeenth century (Oxford, 1998), pp 124–47

— Ó hÓgartaigh, Margaret, ‘Edward Hay: historian of 1798’, E.C.I., xiii (1998), pp 121–34

— Ó Muraíle, Nollaig, ‘Mac Cuarta, Séamas Dall (c. 1645–1733)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)

— Ó Murchú, Máirtín, ‘Ó Caoimh, Eoghan (1656–1726)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)

— Osiander, Andreas, The states system of Europe, 1641–1990: peacemaking and the conditions of international stability (Oxford, 1994)

— Outram, Dorinda, The body and the French Revolution: sex, class and political culture (New Haven, 1989)

— Pagden, Anthony, Lords of all the world: ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500– c. 1800 (London, 1995)

— Parker, Edward L., The history of Londonderry . . . N.H. (Boston, 1851)

— Parker, G., The military revolution: military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988)

— Paulin, Tom, Ireland and the English crisis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1984)

— Perkins, Merle L., Voltaire’s concept of international order (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, xxxvi) (Geneva, 1965)

— Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government (Oxford, 1997)

— Phillips, John A., ‘Popular politics in unreformed England’, Journal of Modern History, lii (1980), pp 599–625

— Phillipson, N. T., ‘Culture and society in the eighteenth-century province: the case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’ in Lawrence Stone (ed.), The university in society (2 vols, Oxford, 1975), ii, 407–48

— Philpin, C. H. E. (ed.), Nationalism and popular protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987)

— Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and religion, ii: Narratives of civil government (Cambridge, 1999)

— ———‘The political economy of Burke’s analysis of the French Revolution’, reprinted in idem, Virtue, commerce, and history (Cambridge, 1985), pp 193–214

— Porter, Roy, Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world (London, 2000)

— Powell, Martyn J., ‘Political toasting in eighteenth-century Ireland’, History, xci (2006), pp 508–29

— ———The politics of consumption in eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, 2005)

— ———‘Popular disturbances in late eighteenth-century Ireland: the origins of the Peep of Day Boys’, I.H.S., xxxiv, no. 135 (May 2005), pp 249–65

— Power, T. P., ‘Conversions among the legal profession in Ireland in the eighteenth century’ in Daire Hogan and W. N. Osborough (eds), Brehons, serjeants and attorneys: studies in the Irish legal profession (Blackrock, 1990), pp 153–74

— ———‘Father Nicholas Sheehy, c. 1728–1766’ in Gerard Moran (ed.), Radical Irish priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp 62–78

— ———Land, politics and society in eighteenth-century Tipperary (Oxford, 1993)

— ———and Whelan, Kevin (eds), Endurance and emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990)

— Prestwich, Menna (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985)

— Purcell, Mary, ‘The way back from Rome’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, lxviii (1979), pp 200–12

— Rashid, Salim, ‘The Irish school of economic development: 1720–1750’, Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, lvi (1988), pp 345–69

— Raughter, Rosemary, ‘A discreet benevolence: female philanthropy and the Catholic resurgence in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Women’s History Review, vi (1997), pp 465–84

— Rawson, Claude, God, Gulliver and genocide: barbarism and the European imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford, 1991)

— Reid, J. S., History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (3rd ed., 3 vols, Belfast, 1867)

— Robbins, Caroline, The eighteenth-century commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)

— Robertson, John, The case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005)

— ———‘Franco Venturi’s Enlightenment’, P.&P., no. 137 (1992), pp 183–206

— ———‘Union, state and empire: the Britain of 1707 in its European setting’ in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An imperial state at war: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1993), pp 224–57

— Robinson, P. S., The plantation of Ulster: British settlement in an Irish landscape, 1600–1670 (Dublin, 1984)

— Rodger, N. A. M., ‘Mutiny or subversion? Spithead and the Nore’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 549–64

— Rodgers, Nini, Equiano and anti-slavery in eighteenth-century Belfast (Belfast, 2000)

— Rogers, Nicholas, Whigs and cities: popular politics in the age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989)

— Ross, Ian, ‘Hutcheson on Hume’s treatise: an unnoticed letter’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, iv (1966), pp 69–72

— Rowe, Michael, ‘Civilians and warfare during the French Revolutionary Wars’ in Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey (eds), Civilians in wartime Europe, 1618–1900 (London, 2007), pp 93–132

— Rowlands, Guy, ‘An army in exile: Louis XIV and the Irish forces of James II in France, 1691–1698’, Royal Stuart Papers, lx (2001)

— Ruane, Joseph, ‘Colonialism and the interpretation of Irish historical development’ in Marilyn Silverman and P. H. Gulliver (eds), Approaching the past: historical anthropology through Irish case studies (New York, 1992), pp 293–323

— Rudé, George, Paris and London in the eighteenth century: studies in popular protest (London, 1970)

— Sahlins, Peter, Forest rites: the War of the Demoiselles in nineteenth-century France (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1994)

— Salmon, J. H. M., ‘Catholic resistance theory, Ultramontanism, and the royalist response, 1580–1620’ in J. H. Burns (ed., with Mark Goldie), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp 210–53

— Schama, Simon, Citizens: a chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989)

— Schroeder, Paul, The transformation of European politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994)

— Scott, H. M., British foreign policy in the age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990)

— ———‘Prussia’s emergence as a European Great Power, 1740–1763’ in Philip G. Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830 (Harlow, 2000), pp 159–64

— Scott, James C., Domination and the art of resistance: hidden transcripts (New Haven & London, 1990)

— ———Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance (London, 1985)

— Scott, Joan, ‘Women’s history’ in Peter Burke (ed.), New perspectives on historical writing (Cambridge, 1991), pp 42–66

— Scott, W. R., ‘James Arbuckle and his relation to the Molesworth–Shaftesbury school’, Mind, viii (1899), pp 194–215

— Scribner, R. W., ‘Cosmic order and daily life: sacred and secular in pre-industrial German society’ in idem, Popular culture and popular movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987), pp 1–16

— Sharpe, J. A., ‘Last dying speeches: religion, ideology and public execution in seventeenth-century England’, P.&P., no. 107 (1985), pp 144–67

— Silverman, Marilyn, and Gulliver, P. H. (eds), Approaching the past: historical anthropology through Irish case studies (New York, 1992)

— Simes, Douglas, ‘Ireland, 1760–1820’ in Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (eds), Press, politics and the public sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2002), pp 113–39

— Simms, J. G., ‘The Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697’, I.H.S., xvii, no. 66 (Sept. 1970), pp 185–99

— ———‘Dublin in 1685’, I.H.S., xiv, no. 55 (Mar. 1965), pp 212–26

— ———Jacobite Ireland, 1685–91 (London, 1969)

— ———‘The making of a penal law (2 Anne, c. 6), 1703–4’, I.H.S., xii, no. 46 (Sept. 1960), pp 105–18

— ———William Molyneux of Dublin, 1656–1698, ed. P. H. Kelly (Blackrock, 1982)

— Skinner, Quentin, Liberty before liberalism (Cambridge, 1998)

— Sloan, Douglas, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American college ideal (New York, 1971)

— Smith, Anthony D., Chosen peoples: sacred sources of national identity (Oxford, 2003)

— Smyth, Jim, The men of no property: Irish radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Basingstoke, 1992)

— Spierenburg, Pieter, The spectacle of suffering: execution in the evolution of repression: from preindustrial metropolis to the European experience (Cambridge, 1984)

— Spurr, John, English Puritanism, 1603–1689 (New York, 1998)

— Stevenson, John, ‘The “moral economy” of the English crowd: myth and reality’ in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds), Order and disorder in early modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp 218–38

— Stewart, M. A., ‘John Smith and the Molesworth circle’, E.C.I., ii (1987), pp 89–102

— ———and Moore, James, ‘William Smith (1698–1741) and the Dissenters’ book trade’, Bulletin of the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, xxii (1993), pp 20–27

— Storrs, Christopher, War, diplomacy and the rise of Savoy, 1690–1720 (Cambridge, 1999)

— Stoye, John, ‘Europe and the Revolution of 1688’ in Robert Beddard (ed.), The revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991), pp 191–212

— Sullivan, R. E., John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)

— Swords, Liam, ‘Collège des Lombards’ in idem (ed.), The Irish–French connection, 1578–1978 (Dublin, 1978), pp 44–62

— ———The Irish–French connection, 1578–1978 (Dublin, 1978)

— Symcox, Geoffrey, The crisis of French sea power, 1688–1697: from the Guerre d’Escadre to the Guerre de Course (The Hague, 1974)

— ———Victor Amadeus II: absolutism in the Savoyard state, 1675–1730 (London, 1983)

— Tallett, Frank, War and society in early-modern Europe, 1495–1715 (London, 1992)

— Taylor, Charles, ‘Nationalism and modernity’ in John A. Hall (ed.), The state of the nation: Ernest Gellner and the theory of nationalism (Cambridge, 1998), pp 191–218

— Thompson, E. P., ‘The crime of anonymity’ in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (London, 1975), pp 255–308

————Customs in common (London, 1991)

— ———‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, P.&P., no. 50 (1971), pp 76–136

— ———Whigs and hunters: the origin of the Black Act (London, 1975)

— Thompson, Martyn P., ‘Significant silences in Locke’s Two treatises of government: constitutional history, contract and law’, H.J., 31/2 (1987), pp 275–94

— Thuente, Mary Helen, The harp re-strung: the United Irishmen and the rise of Irish literary nationalism (Syracuse, N.Y., 1994)

— ———‘Liberty, Hibernia and Mary Le More: United Irish images of women’ in Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds), The women of 1798 (Dublin, 1998), pp 9–25

— Todd, Janet, Rebel daughters: Ireland in conflict, 1798 (London, 2003)

— Tomaselli, Sylvana, ‘The Enlightenment debate on women’, History Workshop Journal, XX (1985), pp 101–24

— Torchiana, Donald T., ‘Jonathan Swift, the Irish, and the Yahoos: the case reconsidered’, Philological Quarterly, liv, no. 1 (winter 1975), pp 195–212

— Tosh, John, The pursuit of history: aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history (3rd ed., Harlow, 2000)

— Trainor, Brian (ed.), Aspects of Irish social history, 1750–1800 (Belfast, 1969)

— Tuck, Richard, Philosophy and government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993)

— ———The rights of war and peace: political thought and the international order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999)

— Tully, James, An approach to political philosophy: Locke in contexts (Cambridge, 1993)

— ———‘Placing the Two treatises’ in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds), Political discourse in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), pp 253–82

— Vance, Norman, ‘Volunteer thought: William Crawford of Strabane’ in D. G. Boyce and R. R. Eccleshall (eds), Political discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp 257–69

— Van Kley, Dale, The religious origins of the French Revolution: from Calvin to the civil constitution, 1560–1791 (London, 1996)

— Venturi, Franco, Utopia and reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971)

— Waldstreicher, David, In the midst of perpetual fêtes: the making of American nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997)

— Wallace, Ralph Stuart, ‘The Scotch-Irish of provincial New Hampshire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1984)

— Walsh, T. J., Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters (Dublin, 1959)

— Whelan, Kevin, ‘The Catholic Church in County Tipperary, 1700–1900’ in William Nolan (ed.), Tipperary: history and society (Dublin, 1985), pp 215–55

— ———‘The Catholic community in eighteenth-century County Wexford’ in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990), pp 129–70

— ———‘The Catholic parish, the Catholic chapel and village development in Ireland’, Irish Geography, xvi (1983), pp 1–15

— ———‘Politicisation in County Wexford and the origins of the 1798 rebellion’ in Hugh Gough and David Dickson (eds), Ireland and the French Revolution (Dublin, 1990), pp 156–78

— ———‘The regional impact of Irish Catholicism, 1700–1850’ in W. J. Smyth and Kevin Whelan (eds), Common ground: essays on the historical geography of Ireland presented to T. Jones Hughes (Cork, 1988), pp 253–77

— ———‘Reinterpreting the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds), The mighty wave: the 1798 rebellion in Wexford (Blackrock, 1996), pp 9–36

— ———‘The religious factor in the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in Patrick O’Flanagan et al. (eds), Rural Ireland, 1600–1900: modernization and change (Cork, 1987), pp 62–85

— ———‘The revisionist debate in Ireland’, Boundary 2, 31/1 (2004), pp 179–205

— ———‘The role of the Catholic priest in the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in idem (ed.), Wexford: history and society (Dublin, 1987), pp 296–315

— ———The Tree of Liberty: radicalism, Catholicism and the construction of Irish identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996)

— Whelan, Patrick, ‘Anthony Blake, Archbishop of Armagh, 1758–87’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, V, no. 2 (1970), pp 289–323

— Wilson, James, ‘Orangeism in 1798’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 345–62

— Winslow, Cal, ‘Sussex smugglers’ in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (London, 1975), pp 119–66

— Witherow, Thomas (ed.), Historical and literary memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland (2 vols, Belfast, 1879–80)

— Wrightson, Keith, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’ in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The experience of authority in early modern England (London, 1996), pp 10–46

— Wrigley, E. A., ‘A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and economy, 1650–1750’, P.&P., no. 37 (1967), pp 44–70

— Young, John R., ‘The Scottish response to the siege of Londonderry, 1689–90’ in William Kelly (ed.), The sieges of Derry (Dublin, 2001), pp 53–74

— Zimmer, Oliver, A contested nation: history, memory and nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891 (Cambridge, 2003)

Gill & Macmillan

Hume Avenue

Park West

Dublin 12

Ireland

www.gillmacmillanbooks.ie

© Ian McBride 2009, 2014

First published by Gill & Macmillan 2009

This ebook edition published by Gill & Macmillan 2014

978 07171 1627 0 (print)

978 07171 5927 2 (epub)

978 07171 5926 0 (mobi)

Cover design by www.anu-design.ie

Cover image courtesy of the Irish Image Collection

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission of the publishers.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The website addresses referred to in this book were correct at the time of first publication.

About the Author

Professor Ian McBride teaches Irish and British History in the Department of History at King’s College, London. A native of Armagh, he is the author of The Siege of Derry in Unionist Imagination, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century and editor of History and Memory in Modern Ireland.

Prior to joining the department in 2000, Ian McBride lectured at the University of Durham following three years as a research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He received his PhD from the University of London, and his BA from Jesus College, Oxford.

Professor Ian McBride has written on various aspects of modern Irish history. He continues to publish work in this period, particularly on the experiences of Irish Catholics during the ‘penal times’ and on the Irish writings of Jonathan Swift. Professor McBride’s second major field of research focuses on the controversial role of collective memories and commemorations in Irish culture. His edited collection of essays History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001) is generally recognised as the starting point for scholarly discussion in this rapidly growing area. His recent research focuses on debates over truth and reconciliation in Northern Ireland since 1998, and the relationship between political violence, representations of the past and professional historiography.

About Gill & Macmillan

Gill & Macmillan’s story begins in 1856 when Michael Henry Gill, then printer for Dublin University, purchased the publishing and bookselling business of James McGlashan, forming McGlashan & Gill. Some years later, in 1875, the company name was changed to M.H. Gill & Son. Gill & Macmillan as we know it today was established in 1968 as a result of an association with Macmillan of London. There was also a bookshop, popularly known as Gills, located on Dublin’s O’Connell Street for 123 years until it eventually closed in 1979. Today our bookshop can be found online at www.gillmacmillanbooks.ie.

Gill & Macmillan is proud to publish a broad range of non-fiction books of Irish interest, from history to economics, politics to cookery and biography to children’s. Since 1968, we have published outstanding authors and groundbreaking books such as the Encyclopaedia of Ireland, David McWilliams’ The Pope’s Children, Noël Browne’s Against the Tide, Garret FitzGerald’s All in a Life, Augustine Martin’s Soundings — not to mention three generations of Ballymaloe’s Allen family on our cookery list.

We also publish a wide range of educational books and resources for all levels — primary, secondary, college and university — and we provide a distribution service for the majority of Ireland’s independent publishers.

For more information about us, our titles, or to join our mailing list, please visit www.gillmacmillanbooks.ie.