British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland available in Hardcover, Paperback
British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland
- ISBN-10:
- 0521835305
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521835305
- Pub. Date:
- 01/06/2005
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521835305
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521835305
- Pub. Date:
- 01/06/2005
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521835305 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2005 |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.98(d) |
About the Author
Ciaran Brady is Lecturer in History at Trinity College, Dublin. His previous publications include The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536-1588 (1995).
Jane Ohlmeyer is Erasmus Smith Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin. Her previous publications include Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (1993), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660 (1995), Kingdom or Colony?: Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (2000).
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Cambridge University Press
0521835305 - British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland - Edited by Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer
Excerpt
| 1 | Making good: new perspectives on the English in early modern Ireland |
| Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer | |
| Cromwell came over, and like a lightning passed through the land.1 | |
Bishop Nicholas French's dramatic, though retrospective, summary of the violent rupturing of Irish history which occurred in the middle years of the seventeenth century is so striking, so synoptic of the fundamental changes wrought during that epoch, that it has proved irresistible to writers seeking an appropriate expression to indicate a decisive terminal point signalling the end of one era and the beginning of another. Both as terminus ad quem and terminus a quo the years immediately surrounding Cromwell's campaign in Ireland have served historians remarkably well. They mark the final and well-nigh indisputable eclipse of the two great social and cultural groups whose complex interactions had determined the fundamental patterns of Irish history over the previous five centuries. As an internal political force in the land, the Gaelic Irish were now utterly destroyed, the few pockets of survival in Ulster, the midlands and in Munster which had been the loci of their final resistance now suppressed and their lands given over to English occupiers. The 'Old English' - as the descendants of the Anglo-Norman colonial community had for some time chosen to identify themselves - had likewise been brought low. The common fate of disempowerment, dispossession and dislocation which they were now to share with the native Irish served as an appropriate nemesis to the ambivalent and disingenuous relationship which they had deliberately maintained with their Gaelic neighbours over the previous centuries.2
At the same time, the 'old religion', the common bond of allegiance to the pope and to Roman Catholicism which had provided the strongest sinews of association between the two groups, was itself broken as a political force, its own internal divisions making it all the more vulnerable to policies of intolerance and outright persecution. The disagreements of the 1640s, which reached a head in 1648 with the papal nuncio's censure of those Catholic Confederates who supported a truce with their Protestant opponent Lord Inchiquin, painfully exposed these splits. After the Restoration the acrimony became embroiled in the 'Remonstrance Controversy', which instead of clarifying the nature of allegiance between a Protestant king and his Catholic subjects, exacerbated these divisions.3 Only the accession of a Catholic monarch in 1685 briefly resolved the dilemma. However, by supporting James Ⅱ with such enthusiasm Irish Catholics further alienated their Protestant compatriots, the English parliament and the new sovereigns who succeeded James. The Catholic strategy for survival which had centred on kingship, and the willingness of the monarch to protect them was no longer a viable option.4
From another perspective, however, this was an era of 'new foundations', or, more precisely, of the consolidation of other political and social groups whose grasp on power had hitherto been both uncertain and intermittent. It was in these years that the 'New English', the members of the administrative, military, legal, planting and commercial subgroups, whose common sense of identity had first been fused by the hostility and then by the vulnerability of the older communities of the island, now established their ascendancy. Redefining themselves as the 'Old Protestants' of Ireland, they were now in the process of exploiting the ambitious aspirations and practical ignorance of the Cromwellian victors, in the manner that they had once exploited the weaknesses and divisions of their Old English rivals, to establish their dominance both as landholders and as controllers of the island's institutions of local and regional administration.5 Another more recent group whose position in Ireland at the beginning of the seventeenth century had been uncertain, the migrant Lowland Scots, now asserted their hegemony over Ulster. They consolidated their hold on extensive territories east of the Bann and deepened their penetration into the settlements established under the official plantation of central and west Ulster.6
The collective result of each of these developments amounted to little short of a political and social revolution: the total displacement of two hitherto dominant groups and their replacement by two new and quite different forces. Through such means and in a far more radical way than its original proponents had ever envisaged, the objective of establishing comprehensive English rule over the whole of the island which had been fought for over the previous century and a half had at last been accomplished. The political and administrative institutions of the island, its legal structures and procedures, and, most importantly of all, its means of acquiring, managing and disposing of property through sale, conveyance, mortgage, lease and inheritance, were all now established in ways that were recognisably English.7 The aspiration of making a little England in Ireland promoted in so many ways by reformers, propagandists and adventurers since the beginning of the sixteenth century had at last been brought to pass.8
For these reasons the unity and coherence of the century and a half or so stretching back from the 1650s to the earliest indications of revived English interest in Ireland under the early Tudors has seemed both obvious and unquestionable. And as long as the themes of political domination and territorial conquest remain central in the main historical narrative of the period, it is not surprising that such a periodising framework should have remained unchallenged. Yet there have always been problems underlying this neat schematisation which have occasionally given rise to some interpretative discomfort, often from quite different perspectives. Historians of the latter half of the seventeenth century, for instance, have always found little profit in attempting to seal off the central political, social and religious issues with which they must grapple from trends which were becoming quite apparent in the earlier part of the century and before.9 And the more research advances into that most neglected segment of Irish history, the more striking its continuities with earlier periods appear.
I
The phenomenon of Catholic 'survivalism' after 1660 is particularly significant in this regard. Though apparently nullified as a major political force in the island, Catholicism remained the religion of the majority of the population and prospered despite the rabid anti-Catholicism that characterised both the early 1670s and the early 1680s. Gaelic literature and culture, as the recent scholarship of Joep Leersson, Breandán Ó Buachalla and Éamonn Ó Ciardha highlights, also flourished during the later decades of the seventeenth century.10 Despite the plantations and tenurial upheavals of the early and mid-seventeenth century, a sizeable number of Catholics, especially members of the social and economic elite, clung on to their landed estates. Denied a political voice in the Restoration House of Commons, Catholic lords nevertheless maintained a presence in the upper chamber and a vocal group represented the 'Catholic interest' at the royal court in Whitehall.11 After 1660 recusant students flocked back to the Inns of Court in London, where they trained as lawyers, returning to Ireland to practise alongside Patrick Darcy and Nicholas Plunkett, themselves distinguished ex-Confederates who had trained at the Inns in the prewar years. As in the earlier period, these lawyers continued to act as particularly effective mediators negotiating local settlements that, at the very least, protected Catholic interests and, where possible, exploited the English legal system to the advantage of their native clients. Little wonder that the earl of Anglesey, writing in 1681, wanted to legislate against 'the continuance of such dangerous instruments as the popish lawyers' whom he maintained made 'use of their learning and skill for subversion of government and good order. So that Ireland is never like to be quiet if they be tolerated.'12 Equally, Old English Catholic mercantile networks, which often dated back to the Middle Ages, became increasingly sophisticated, criss-crossing continental Europe and feeding directly into the expansion of the English, French, Habsburg and even Portuguese global empires. Likewise, Catholic migrants, many of whom had been forced from their homes during the 1650s, prospered and, over time, became effective colonists, especially in the West Indies.13
On the earlier side of the mid-seventeenth-century divide, other sources of disquiet have also begun to emerge. In terms simply of the master narrative of conflict and dispossession alone, scholars have uncovered significant interruptions, disjunctions and contradictions which, even if they do not override it, substantially complicate the traditional account of conquest. Thus examinations of the thinking behind the reform initiative of the 1540s, or the 'composition' policies of the 1570s and 1580s, or even of the Commission for Defective Titles of the early seventeenth century, all tend to suggest a more complex approach to the aims and manner of anglicisation on the part of English political strategists than the simple account of confrontation and exploitation which the dominant narrative of conquest has allowed.14 The effect of such work has not, of course, been to deny the reality of what actually occurred. Its principal effect, rather, has been to open up interesting and hitherto unaddressed questions as to why the complex processes involved in the attempt to make Ireland English should have been reduced to such a simple formulation.
Disjunctions and divisions among English agents in Ireland of a rather less lofty nature have also been discovered by historians. Concerns about career, factional loyalties and rivalries and private entrepreneurial opportunism coloured the policy-making process at all stages, something that many of the chapters in this volume highlight.15 The manner in which the personal ambitions or needs of principal figures in English politics, such as Robert Dudley, first earl of Leicester, influenced the conduct and shaped the outcome of policy in Ireland has been demonstrated on several key occasions.16 Similarly, the duke of Buckingham's reckless exploitation of the machinery of Irish government in the early seventeenth century for his own aggrandisement has been revealed through the superb detective work of Victor Treadwell.17 Such major interventions in Irish policy represented, however, only the most egregious examples of a much broader and chronic practice which shaped the operation of diplomacy, of war-making, of plantation and land settlement, and of routine administrative practices at all levels of the governing system. It need not be suggested that the sum of such private interventions was sufficient in itself to divert the main flow of English policy in Ireland, any more than it need be claimed that more sophisticated arguments as to what anglicisation implied wholly impeded the imperative that it must be proceeded with. Yet, taken together, they amount to a demonstration that the outcome of political actions was in most cases rather different from what had been originally envisaged. Consequently, the character and effects of what was actually done have been revealed to be more complex and untidy than more simple narratives based upon patterns being established and agendas being set have been inclined to concede. The history of an institution such as the Court of Wards provides a revealing instance of this process. During the early decades of the seventeenth century it became a particularly effective instrument for enriching royal coffers, and yet the Court of Wards totally failed in its original purpose as a vehicle of anglicisation and conversion. As Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, writing in justification of its abolition, bluntly observed in 1661:
The main objection against taking down the Court of Wards is that thereby a hopeful means of converting the Irish is suppressed; but . . . there is no arguing against experiment, and we cannot find six instances in the memory of man of any converted to the Protestant religion by the education of the Court of Wards; and an English education and an Irish religion is much more dangerous than if both were Irish.18
Reservations that have arisen in such a relatively subtle manner in regard to the major political arguments and actions of the period become altogether more obvious in the areas of religious and social history. The salient fact in the history of religion in early modern Ireland - that the Reformation failed even as the process of political conquest triumphed - has long been familiar.19 Yet beyond reinforcing the comforting traditional view that the hearts and minds of the native Irish were never won over though their bodies were subjugated (expressed in its most modern form in the conclusion that the project of 'making Ireland British' was in this sense a total failure) the implications of this truism have never been adequately addressed. That the Reformation's failure was due, in part, to the inherent strength and pull of traditional Catholicism throughout the island and, in part, also to the weak and half-hearted nature of initial attempts to impose it are traditional explanations that have generally received assent. Yet less attention has been given to the distinctive character of the form of religious practice and belief whose introduction into Ireland was being essayed by English administrators and ecclesiastics.20
A church which depended for its authority and legitimacy on the recovery and re-presentation of a distinct national tradition of Christian practice had either to work to uncover such continuities in the actual historical record of the country over which it sought authority, or else to create them artificially, whether through consensus or by force. The construction of such an Hibernian tradition to parallel the Anglican one on which the Church of England rested was from the outset, however, fraught with difficulty.21 It possessed, in the first instance, little appeal to the majority of the native Irish for whom, given the distinctive origins, character and practices of the Celtic church, it was a cultural impossibility. But, even more seriously, its implicit challenge to the old colonial community, whose claim to legitimacy in Ireland was based precisely upon the assertion of the superiority of their English religious and cultural practices over the degenerate ways of the pre-conquest Celtic church, threatened to rob it of the support of the group on whom English government in Ireland most depended. The inherent contradictions of Hibernicanism - or, in other words, of an Irish Anglicanism - created from the outset most fertile ground for the flourishing of resistance and dissent and, as several of the chapters below illustrate, were the source of the nervous and often contradictory reactions of the Reformation's proponents to the challenge presented to them by the island's indigenous Catholic majority.22
The flowering of dissent of a different kind, imported in the main from Scotland, has by contrast long been familiar to scholars, fuelling interpretative doubts about the assumption that the most important sources of religious conflict that had developed since 1536 had been drastically simplified along confessional lines in the century thereafter.23 But one of the most exciting and fruitful results of recent research has been the uncovering of a more pervasive form of religious dissent arising from a growing dissatisfaction with the spiritual and pastoral defects of the churches, both Catholic and Protestant. Discovering forces of conflict and division within groups where none had been supposed to exist, and revealing similarities and associations across confessional divides, the new approach to the history of popular religion has wonderfully complicated and enriched our understanding of both the political and cultural history of the early modern period.24
But, above all, what this critical review of the causes of the Reformation's difficulties in Ireland has highlighted is a contradiction that lay at the heart of the entire project of engineering social and cultural change in the island. Confident at first of the feasibility of constructing an institutional framework for the reform and propagation of faith in Ireland similar to that in England, the reformers had simultaneously recognised the necessity of ensuring that their endeavours marked no radical historical caesura, but were in strict continuity with the underlying patterns of history. Not for propagandist purposes only, but genuinely to vouchsafe the legitimacy of their mission, they were required to show that their apparent assault on an existing set of institutions was not merely destructive, but an essential part of a programme of reconstruction which, when finally completed, would recover from obscurity the true continuities persisting within. In order to justify their mission of doing good, they were charged with the responsibility of making good. The reformers' dilemma, caught between the desire to change some malign prevailing practices and the need to preserve others in a manner which would validate and legitimate their efforts, was paralleled by the experience of those whose desire both to institute and to control social change was inspired by motives rather less noble: the men on the make.
II
Of all the interpretative challenges presented to it, the paradigm of conquest and expropriation has best been able to explain the motivations and actions of the parvenu. The planters who gained possession of attainted native lands, the soldiers who made their fortunes exploiting their office, using martial law or sheer terror to extort the unfortunates under their rule, the lawyers and administrators who used the knowledge and privileges of the law to secure extensive estates for themselves, collectively embodied the most powerful force of aggressive social change in Ireland in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.25 Research into their operations has been extensive, imaginative, and often ingenious. It has conclusively demonstrated just how powerful this group became, how deeply they penetrated into every aspect of Irish social and economic life, and how extraordinary was their influence in shaping the course of Anglo-Scottish relations, Anglo-Irish relations, and even English political developments over the course of the seventeenth century.
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