Restoration Ireland

Always Settling and Never Settled

Coleman Dennehy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367669683
• eBook ISBN: 9781317064749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

In recent decades, the historiography of early modern Ireland in general, and of the seventeenth century in particular, has been revitalised. However, whilst much of this new work has focused either on the critical decades of the 1640s or the Williamite wars, the Restoration period still remains largely neglected. As such this volume provides an opportunity to explore the period between 1660 and 1688, and reassess some of the crucial events it witnessed. For whilst it may lack some of the high drama of the Civil War or the Glorious Revolution, this was a time that established a political and social settlement, based upon the maintenance of the massive land confiscations of the 1650s, that would underpin the social and class structure of Ireland until the end of the nineteenth century. Including contributions from both established and younger scholars, this collection provides a set of interlocking and interrelated essays that focus on the central concerns of the volume, whilst occasionally reaching beyond the chronological and thematic barriers of the period as required. The result is a homogenous volume, that not only addresses a glaring historiographical gap in critical areas of the Restoration period; but also serves to take stock of the work that has been done on the period; and as a consequence of this it will help stimulate and provoke further argument, debate, and research into the history of Ireland during the Restoration period. Directed primarily at an academic audience, this collection will be useful to a range of scholars with an interest in seventeenth century political, social and religious history.

Chapter One
Restoration Ireland – Themes and Problems

Tim Harris

It is both pleasing and exciting to note that Restoration Irish history is alive and well and thriving, as this volume testifies. For a long time the Restoration period remained a relatively neglected area of study, for England and Scotland as well as Ireland, especially when compared to the immense amount of scholarship dedicated to exploring the troubles that bedevilled the early Stuarts and the roots and causes of the mid-century revolution. The last couple of decades, however, have seen a renaissance of interest in the Restoration era, although the progress has been somewhat uneven across the three kingdoms. The advances came earliest for England; indeed, I commented on the new-found dynamism of the field in a historiographical review published back in 1997.¹ The other two kingdoms were slower to catch up. Scottish historiography for the period 1660–88, in particular, continued to be seriously neglected, and only very recently has this begun to change.² Restoration Irish history, to be fair, was never in such an unhealthy state. The relevant volume of the New History of Ireland, published in 1976, contains excellent chapters covering the years 1660–91, and we also have important major studies of the Restoration land settlement, of the political settlement, of Restoration dissent, and of the corporation of Dublin (to cite but a few examples).³ Nevertheless, it is true to say that the Restoration era has not captured the imagination of Irish historians in quite the same way as the early Stuart and Cromwellian periods or the period immediately following the Revolution of 1688–9. Brendan Fitzpatrick’s valuable survey of seventeenth-century Ireland is perhaps reflective of the historiographical balance that prevailed when the book first appeared in 1988: it contains just one brief chapter – out of a total of 10 – on the period after 1660.⁴

This relative neglect has always struck me as surprising. If we are to understand why the world was to be so different by the early eighteenth century, for all the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland, then we surely need to focus as much attention on the later Stuart period and the successful revolution of the late-seventeenth century as on the failed revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. By making such a claim I do not wish to minimise the importance of the upheavals of the mid-century nor to deny their revolutionary credentials. Furthermore, the mid-century revolution in Ireland was only partially undone after 1660; there was no attempt in Ireland, as there was in both England and Scotland, to restore the world as it had been prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, a fact which in itself is crucial to understanding subsequent historical developments. Nevertheless the late-seventeenth century, for all three kingdoms, was a period of significant and dynamic change, one that it is important for us to understand if we are fully to appreciate how the seventeenth-century world transformed into that of the eighteenth.

Ireland is a particularly important part of this story, since the events which frame the Restoration era took place in Ireland. The train of events that were to lead ultimately to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 were set in motion in Ireland, with the seizure of Dublin Castle in December 1659 by disaffected officers in the Irish army who then forced the calling of a parliament which, when it met in February 1660, proceeded to support the restoration of Charles Stuart. As the second Earl of Clarendon was later to recall, ‘of all his Majesties Subjects’ it was the English in Ireland who ‘made the Earliest advances towards his Majesties Restoration when the 3 Kingdoms were Governed by Usurpers’.⁵ Indeed, the first Earl of Shaftesbury later claimed that General Monck, the commander of the army in Scotland, would never have acted against the English army and forced the dissolution of the rump Parliament in England without knowing that he had the support of the army in Ireland – and that in this sense the Restoration was made in Ireland.⁶ No one needs to be reminded that the last, tragic scene of the Restoration monarchy was to play itself out in Ireland in the war of 1689–91. Undoubtedly there are important themes and issues for the Restoration period in Ireland that merit closer attention if we are to gain a full understanding of what was, after all, a century-long process of revolutionary change.

What, then, are the important themes and questions to explore for the Restoration period in Ireland, and how should we go about studying them? As most readers will be aware, I began my own professional career as a historian of Restoration England, and my research interest in Irish history developed when I undertook to write a three-kingdoms history of the reigns of Charles II and James II. This might make me immediately suspect to some as a practitioner of the so-called New British History. As an approach to the study of the British and Irish past, the New British History has generated much criticism, especially from historians of Ireland – a topic to which I shall return. Let me state at the outset, however, that I have always believed in the importance of preserving the integrity and autonomy of the separate national histories of the three kingdoms that comprised the Stuart political inheritance. Neither do I subscribe to the view that the Britannic perspective is the only way forward for Stuart historiography. It is important to maintain a plurality of approaches to the study of the past and there are going to be various types of Irish history that we will need to write in order to advance the field of Restoration studies. First and foremost, we need to continue the pursuit of what we might call autonomous Irish history (to adapt Glenn Burgess’s terminology):⁷ that is, history which is focused on Ireland and the study of the Irish past for its own sake (rather than for what it can tell us about what was going on in England). Yet because of Ireland’s complicated situation as an English dependency – in theory a kingdom in its own right since 1541, though one which was nevertheless ‘united and knit to the imperial crown of the realm of England’⁸ and in practice often treated by the English as little more than a colony – England is inevitably going to intrude into the study of the Irish past. Thus there will always be the need for some sort of Anglo-Irish or British archipelagic history, although here we might distinguish two types: English imperial history, which is essentially externalist or metropolitan (the view of Ireland as seen from England); and what I would call genuine three-kingdoms history, which is internalist in the sense that it studies Irish (or alternatively Scottish) history from within and for its own sake, but with an eye to shedding light on the interactions between the three kingdoms and the problems involved in managing the Stuart multiple-kingdom inheritance.

Let us start, then, with what I have called autonomous Irish history. By this I mean the study of the Irish past which is dictated by questions, concerns and issues that come out of Ireland, a history that seeks to address the preoccupations of the various peoples who inhabited Ireland, and one whose themes, chronologies and methodologies are directed by the Irish problematic. As Toby Barnard has reminded us, the English state in Ireland ‘never permeated all areas of Irish life. Numerous relationships survived or revived which owed little or nothing to the English link’. Some of these, Barnard continues, were ‘introspective and parochial’.⁹ Thus one variant of autonomous Irish history might indeed be ‘insular’ history; another would be local history. Both have become somewhat unfashionable of late. Long accused of insularity themselves, historians of England have finally begun to set the study of their early modern past in a more international context – whether that context be British (or British and Irish), European, or trans-Atlantic. Indeed, Nicholas Canny has recently urged ‘all historians of the early modern period, whether of Britain, Ireland, or the Atlantic’, to broaden their focus, to study ‘people rather than places’ (and recognise that ‘people born in the various parts of Britain and Ireland were more geographically mobile and intellectually venturesome than was previously thought’), so that we can shed light on the ‘European (and for that matter on global) experiences’ of such people. Only in this way, Canny believes, can we hope to satisfy modern-day students ‘who live in a global age’.¹⁰ Unquestionably more of the kind of history that Canny favours would be welcome. But this does not mean we should abandon local studies. Why cannot we have both? Besides, are the two necessarily incompatible? An economic history of a port town, for example, might focus on a place rather than people (who often in economic histories tend to be somewhat invisible), but this might be a very fruitful way of shedding more light on global interactions.¹¹

There is clearly much more local Irish history to be done. We might heed Jacqueline Hill’s call for more work on Irish towns; the potential benefits are amply revealed by her own excellent study of the corporation of Dublin.¹² Perhaps there would be much to be gained from a collective study of Irish corporations akin to that undertaken by Paul Halliday for England (though this might necessitate adopting a broader chronological time-frame than simply the Restoration).¹³ Likewise more county and regional studies are needed. Dave Edwards has shown what can be done for the Ormond lordship in county Kilkenny, although his account stops in 1642.¹⁴ Is it possible to duplicate such studies for the later seventeenth century, and should we be doing counties, regions, or provinces? Such approaches will tell us much about the important power brokers who dominated in town and countryside.

We also need more history from below – which may or may not take the form of local history, though will always likely involve some sort of local contextualisation. We need to find out more about the lives of ordinary inhabitants of Ireland at the grassroots level. An excellent example of the sort of thing that can be achieved is provided by the work of Raymond Gillespie on popular religion.¹⁵ Likewise, we have begun to learn more about Irish ‘popular culture’. Recent research points to a major transformation in the culture of the Irish peasantry in the years after 1650, as they became more integrated into an increasingly commercial and monetary economy: more of them began to speak English, they began to abandon their traditional dress and hairstyle, agricultural practices began to change, and there were also changes in the family and sexual discipline. As Sean Connolly has remarked, by the reign of Charles II ‘cultural change was making it more difficult to see the Catholic lower classes as the equivalent of the native populations of North America and other overseas colonies’ whilst ‘economic development was making it impractical to think of treating them as such’.¹⁶ We now know much more about the outlooks and mindsets of the various Protestant and Catholic communities of Ireland of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as well as about radical dissent and political conspiracy in Ireland after the Restoration.¹⁷ In pushing for more history from below, one wonders whether there is scope for writing a history of the crowd in Restoration Ireland; certainly scholars have increasingly begun to incorporate evidence of popular protest and collective agitation out-of-doors into their larger accounts of this period.¹⁸

Before setting too ambitious an agenda, we need to acknowledge the limitations of our sources, which are nowhere near as rich as they are for England during the same time period (either because they have been lost or destroyed or were never created in the first place) and which tend to be dominated by Protestants. The problems are indeed real. Yet we also need to ask ourselves if we are doing as much as we can. The latest research suggests that with imaginative methodologies and some hard graft we can probe much more deeply and get closer to writing history from the bottom up than we once thought.

Irish history for its own sake is rarely likely to be tota...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Tables
• Conventions
• 1 Restoration Ireland – Themes and Problems
• 2 The Irish Restoration Land Settlement and its Historians
• 3 The Restoration Land Settlement in Ireland: A Statistical Interpretation
• 4 The Restoration Irish Parliament, 1661–6
• 5 A Play Supposedly Fitter for the Fire than for the Stage: The Fiction of Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery and the Re-casting of History
• 6 Changing Their Path: Quaker Adaptation to the Challenge of Restoration, 1660–1680
• 7 Catholic Clerical Responses to the Restoration: The Case of Nicholas French
• 8 ‘A Proportionable Mixture’: William Petty, Political Arithmetic, and the Transmutation of the Irish
• 9 ‘Grace and favour’: The Cabal Ministry and Irish Catholic Politics, 1667–73
• 10 ‘Dividing the bear’s skin before she is taken’: Irish Catholics and Land in the Late Stuart Monarchy, 1683–91
• 11 Conclusion: Restoration Ireland
• Index