Political Thought in Ireland Since the Seventeenth Century

D. George Boyce, Dr Robert Eccleshall, Robert Eccleshall, Vincent Geoghegan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134981366
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

These pioneering essays provide a unique study of the development of political ideas in Ireland from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The book breaks away from the traditional emphasis in Irish historiography on the nationalism/unionism debate to focus instead on previously neglected areas such as the role of the Scottish Enlightenment and early Irish socialism and conservatism. A wide range of original primary sources are used from pamphlets to journalism, devotional tracts to poetry.

1 James Our True king

The ideology of Irish royalism in the seventeenth century

Breandán Ó Buachalla

I

The notion of change pervades seventeenth-century Irish literature. From the opening decade of the century to the last, even a superficial reading of the literature – particularly of the poetry – reveals common themes enunciating again and again that Ireland had changed, that old ways were being forsaken, that new fashions and new classes were in the ascendant, that Ireland was under attack, in danger of being submerged, her future uncertain. It was such common sentiments which led and which still lead modern scholars to interpret the cataclysm of the seventeenth century solely in terms of despair and terminal decay. A typical illustration is the last chapter of Flower’s The Irish Tradition, significantly entitled ‘The end of the tradition’:

By the beginning of the seventeenth-century Ireland lay exhausted and panting and what seemed the final blow to all her hopes and to the old order of things under which the poets had flourished was dealt by the mysterious flight of the two Northern Earls, Tyrone and Tyrconnel in 1607, an event that led directly to the plantation of Ulster and as an inimitable result to the rising of 1641…. One of their poets has expressed all that this fateful moment meant for those to whom the old Irish order was the only way of life they had known and who were now to see that order crumbling into ruins about them.

This night sees Ireland desolate

Her chiefs are cast out of their estate

Her men, her maidens weep to see

Her desolate, that should peopled be.

O’Donnell goes in that stern straight

Sore stricken Ulster mourns her fate

And all the Northern shore makes moan

To hear that Aodh O Neill has gone.

Her chiefs are gone, there’s none to hear,

To bear her cross or lift her from despair,

The grieving lords take ship

With these our very souls pass overseas.¹

The fact that the poet to whom that elegiac poem is generally ascribed (Fear Flatha Ó Gnímh) received a royal pardon in 1602 and was subsequently patronized by Martha Stafford, daughter of Sir Francis Stafford, an English official in Ireland, and wife of Sir Henry O Neill,² suggests, at least, that the poem should not be taken as being totally representative of his ceuvre as a whole nor of his attitude to contemporaneous affairs.

That the seventeenth century in Ireland was an era of unprecedented upheaval cannot be gainsaid. It was, undoubtedly, a watershed and for the hereditary learned classes in particular the beginning of the end of their priviliged position in Irish society, as the socio-economic system on which their status depended slowly gave way. The end of the bardic order should not be interpreted, however, as the demise of a culture, language or society. In socio-cultural terms that order represented but the tip of an iceberg which, ironically, revealed more and more of its variety and complexity over the next two centuries. As the professional hereditary class of literati gradually lost their privileged status in society and their control of literary tastes and canons they were replaced by other types hitherto unknown in Irish literary annals – the gentleman-poet, the priest-poet, the amateur poet, the prose writer – and by a new class of semi-professional literati who had to adapt their traditional training and attitudes to changing circumstances. New metres, new themes, new poetic surnames, new literary classes, new modes of writing – in prose and verse – emerge. As a consequence, the seventeenth century was also a major period of literary diversification and of reorganization: it must be placed with the twelfth and seventh centuries among the great periods of creativity and literary renewal. A paradigm of change alone will not suffice in dealing with the seventeenth century; the apposite framework is change within continuity – the central pattern of the Irish cultural tradition. There is, moreover, another perspective which cannot be ignored: the general European background. For Europe as a whole, the seventeenth century was also one of upheaval; of social, political and religious strife of such proportions to warrant the title ‘the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’ in the historiography. The origin of that crisis was not in essence political, although it had political implications, but intellectual, what Mousnier labelled ‘an intellectual mutation’, one which essentially redefined the relationship between people and the state.³ Since religion underlay all political ideologies in Western Europe, it subsumed not only practice and belief but also matters of state. The application of the principle cuius regio eius religio not only determined the denominational/sectarian character of the emergent centralized monarchies and states but for many of Europe’s peoples it inextricably intertwined religion with national consciousness. In England and Ireland, in particular, religious allegiance and national identity coalesced, Protestant and Catholic being perceived as synonymous with English and Irish respectively. There was a fundamental difference, of course. In England, Protestantism (the Anglican variety) enjoyed the privileges and status of a state-church whereas, in Ireland, Catholicism, the religion of the majority, was denied legal rights or official recognition. In rejecting the Reformation, the Irish found themselves in an anomalous and unique situation in Western Europe in that a Catholic majority was ruled by a Protestant sovereign. Therein lay the kernel of the politico-religious nature of Ireland’s problem and the ultimate source of the major changes that ensued. Of all the changes evidenced for seventeenth-century Ireland one of the most far-reaching and most significant was an ideological shift among the learned classes, an intellectual mutation which necessitated the redefinition of an Irishman, the rewriting of Irish history, the reformulation of Irish distinctiveness; above all a rethinking of attitudes and policies towards the temporal authority. The immediate sources of this mutation were politico-religious in nature. One is the fact that by the end of the sixteenth century the Irish upper classes – the equivalent of the political nation in the English context – had irrevocably aligned themselves to the Church of Rome. The second is that after the battle of Kinsale and particularly after the Flight of the Earls the overriding attitude of those classes was one of accommodation of the new order. Central to that accommodation was the evolution of a rapprochement with the temporal authority as represented by the King.

The accession of James I to the Crown of the three kingdoms in 1603 was a source of hope and joy to the Catholics of the towns and boroughs of Ireland. His mother being a Catholic, it was assumed that he would be lenient and understanding, if not positively tolerant. In this expectant mood Catholic churches were reopened, Mass was celebrated openly, public religious processions organized and Protestants banished. In a letter to the King of Spain, O Neill and O Donnell gave their explanation of that hope: ‘When the Queen died and this King, who was before King of Scotland, succeeded to her, the Irish hoped, on account of their old friendship with the Scots, that they would receive from the King many favours and, in particular, their liberty of conscience.’⁴ The same optimistic hope underlies two poems in Irish written by two Ulster poets immediately on James's accession. In one of them, Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa, a poet from County Fermanagh, who as a ‘deserving native’ received 300 acres under the terms of Ulster plantation, contrasts the metamorphosis of Ovid to the changes for the better which James’s accession has brought about. Although the poem’s discourse is stilted and rather arcane, the message is obvious:

Many a thing – need it be said – in the beginning changed to evil; much more propitious now is the fate that causes everything to turn for the better …

The brilliant sun has lit up, King James is the dispersal of all mist; the mutual mourning of all, he has changed to glory; great the signs of change.

More remarkable than that is the fact that we, the troubled people of Ireland, that each one of us has forgotten the tribulation of all anxieties …

It is meet for us, though I say so, to bid farewell to our yoke of anxiety; the helping eye of our King supersedes the lasting force of our sorrow …

May no reversal come soon again either from evil or from envious eye or from reversal of fortune; we have experienced every transformation.⁵

The second poem, by a Donegal poet (Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird), is much more concrete and less abstruse. He states clearly the hereditary basis of James’s claim and invokes the twin validatory mechanisms of genealogy and prophecy to legitimize his unquestionable right to the crown of Ireland:

Three crowns – ‘tis fitting for him – shall be placed on James’s head; the utterance of the books is no secret, every seer confirms it …

That young Prince so high of mind, James Stewart, shall have Ireland’s wondrous crown – an honour, I know, he well deserves …

For three hundred years – lasting their effect – is it in the possession of the high-king’s ancestors … Scotland of the smooth-earthed land was held by nine of his family before him; I will give you their names …

O prince whose hand gives straight judgments – it will now be said – talk not of ‘taking new territory’; thou hast already a right to red-sworded Ireland …

The Saxons’ land has been long – ‘tis well known – prophesied for thee; so likewise is Ireland due to thee, thou are her spouse by all the signs …

There is no high-king’s blood, however noble – save that of the Virgin’s son – that surpasses thine.⁶

The emphasis, in both poems, on James dispersing enmity and strife; on him, in the second poem, giving ‘straight judgments’ could, obviously, be applied to contemporary affairs but they also reflect traditional notions of legitimate and righteous kingship. For Mac an Bhaird to address James as ‘Ireland’s spouse’ was to bestow on him not only an honorific accolade but the ultimate seal of legitimacy; Ireland’s spouse in traditional Irish ideology was synonymous with the rightful king who would bring peace, banish strife, and under whom, because of his rightfulness, Ireland would prosper and abound in beneficence.⁷ Indeed it is in such millenarian terms that Ireland, under James I, is described in the social satire Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis: ‘When King James ascended the throne, as a result of his goodness and graciousness, under him Ireland was filled with peace and prosperity for a long time and Clann Tomáis set about sending their children to school and to study for the priesthood.’⁸ The adoption of James I by the Irish learned class and his absorption by them into the Irish scheme of things is reflected most vividly in the work of the genealogists. Overnight an impeccable genealogy was bestowed on him; as Mac an Bhaird declared, only the son of Mary had more noble blood than he. James’s descent was, in fact, of particular interest to the literati and it constituted one of the causes of dissension in the ‘Contention of the Bards’, one faction claiming that James was descended from a Munster King, another that he was of Ulster origin.⁹ They were not, in fact, conflicting claims as the official genealogy proved conclusively that on his mother’s side James was descended from the Ulster King Fergus, the first Irish King of Scotland, whereas on his father’s side he was descended from Core, the fifth-century king of Munster. Moreover, it was subsequently shown that he was also related directly to the kings of Con-naught and Leinster: an impeccable unquestionable genealogy.¹⁰

The accommodation by the learned class of James I and the facility by which an appropriate niche was found for him in the inherited Irish value-system is merely a working out in intellectual terms of a shift which had already been accomplished in the theological and religious spheres. The crucial development was the appointment of Peter Lombard as Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland in 1601 and the subsequent implementation of his policy of acceptance of the status quo.¹¹ Lombard believed that the cause of Catholicism in England and Ireland could best be advanced by accepting James as the lawful king. This was not merely a strategic ploy, it was a conscious decision based on a realistic assessment of recent politico-religious developments in Europe; it was moreover based on the new theological formula which had been developed and advanced by the Jesuit theologians, Bellarmine and Suarez. According to their teaching, as temporal and spiritual authority were to be clearly distinguished it was possible for a Catholic people to give allegiance at l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. James our true king: the ideology of Irish royalism in the seventeenth century
• 2. Anglican political thought in the century after the Revolution of 1688
• 3. The school of virtue: Francis Hutcheson, Irish Presbyterians and the Scottish Enlightenment
• 4. The emergence and submergence of Irish socialism, 1821–51
• 5. Trembling solicitude: Irish conservatism, nationality and public opinion, 1833–86
• 6. Denis Patrick Moran and 'the Irish colonial condition', 1891–1921
• 7. Green on red: two case studies in early twentieth-century Irish republican thought
• 8. Unionist political thought, 1920–72
• Index