Seventeenth-Century Ireland (New Gill History of Ireland 3)

Making Ireland Modern – The Quest For a Settlement

Raymond Gillespie

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780717159215
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia irlandese

In Seventeenth-Century Ireland, Professor Raymond Gillespie, one of Ireland's most eminent historians, tries to understand Ireland in the seventeenth century in a new way. Most surveys of seventeenth-century Ireland approach the period using war, conquest, plantation and colonisation as their organising themes. It does not see Ireland as a passive receptor of colonial ideas imposed from above. In fact, Professor Gillespie argues that the seventeenth century was a uniquely creative moment in Ireland's history, as the various social and political groups within the country tried to forge new compromises. He also shows how and why they failed to do so. Well-established ideas of monarchy, social hierarchy and honour were under pressure in a fast-changing world. Political, religious, social and economic circumstances were all in flux. The common ambition of every faction was the creation of a usable focus of governance. Thus plantations, the constitutional experiments of Wentworth in the 1630s, the Confederation of the 1640s, the republican 1650s and the royalist reaction of the latter part of the century can be seen not simply as episodes in colonial domination but as part of an on-going attempt to find a modus vivendi within Ireland, often compromised by external influences. This book is not simply a narrative history of politics in seventeenth-century Ireland. It is a social history of governance that, while dealing with the main political, religious and economic developments, has at its interpretative core the process of making a new society out of competing factions.

Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents

• Introduction: Seventeenth-Century Ireland and its Questions
• 
  Part I. An Old World Made New
• Distributing Power, 1603–20
• Money, Land and Status, 1620–32
• The Challenge to the Old World, 1632–9
• 
  Part II. The Breaking of the Old Order
• Destabilising Ireland, 1639–42
• The Quest for a Settlement, 1642–51
• Cromwellian Reconstruction, 1651–9
• 
  Part III. A New World Restored
• Winning the Peace, 1659–69
• Good King Charles's Golden Days, 1669–85
• The King Enjoys His Own Again, 1685–91
• 
  Epilogue: Post-War Reconstruction, 1691–5

1

Introduction: Seventeenth-Century Ireland and its Questions

Seventeenth-century Ireland was an enigma to many contemporaries. Some attempted to sort out the apparently labyrinthine political, religious and economic problems characteristic of the country by committing to paper ideas on how they thought that system worked and, more often, how it should be reformed. These anatomisers of Ireland, from Edmund Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland written in the 1590s to William Petty’s Political anatomy of Ireland (published in the 1690s, though it had been written in the 1670s), were, in the main, theorists with particular political or ideological agendas and their impact on the shaping of Irish society was limited. They dealt in ideas rather than realities. Others abandoned the intellectual and political challenges that Ireland presented. As one M.P. in the English ‘Addled Parliament’ of 1614 declared, ‘Ireland is not a thorn in our foot but a lance in our side. If [there is] a revolt there what shame and disgrace would it be either to leave [it] or misery to recover it.’¹ Such ambivalent attitudes towards seventeenth-century Ireland are not the sole prerogative of contemporaries. As one modern historian has characterised the situation, ‘Whether we attempt to view the British problem [in the early modern period] as an example of the development of “composite monarchies” or as an aspect of the colonial expansion of the Atlantic seaboard powers, Ireland is a special case. It just will not fit into any of the established patterns.’²

This perplexity as to how to describe seventeenth-century Ireland is, to some extent, of our own making. We attempt to use models which, ultimately, fail to take cognisance of all the evidence. Some have attempted to characterise the period as ‘an age of disruption’ or the age of ‘wars of religion’. However, such attempts conceal as much as they reveal. They emphasise division in society, which certainly existed, at the expense of shared assumptions of God, hierarchy, deference and honour that made social arrangements work. Large numbers of the Old English gentry, for example, shared a common educational formation with settlers through their training at the Inns of Court in London which provided both groups with a shared common-law context for their understanding of the world. Again, those educated in colleges on continental Europe and Trinity College Dublin shared assumptions about the importance of hierarchy and order. Though ethnic and economic fault-lines ran through Irish society, the elite shared many common social assumptions, and from their position of strength they dictated taste, manners and morals, convinced of the importance of their leadership both culturally and politically. Much of the conflict in Ireland was, paradoxically, between people who shared similar values and assumptions about how society worked.

One example of this problem of trying to describe seventeenth-century Irish society in slogans is the understanding of that society as the product of a revolution. Evidence for this sense of a revolutionary age is not wanting. In some respects it shared in processes that can be traced in outline across contemporary Europe. The centralisation of authority in Dublin after the end of the Nine Years’ War in 1603 and the undermining of powerful local magnates such as Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, for example, reflect trends at work elsewhere in Europe. The state increasingly monopolised violence and the machinery of war at the expense of local nobilities. Similarly, the economic transformation of Ireland, with the rise of a market economy and the greater commercialisation of economic life, echoed a broader European process. In religious terms too, the progress of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ireland needs to be seen in a European context, if only to emphasise some of the aberrant features of the Irish experience.

In other areas the development of Irish society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was unique. The composition of the Irish social and political elite underwent a dramatic shift in the years between 1580 and 1700 in a way that did not happen in most other countries. Only in parts of the Holy Roman Empire, for instance Bohemia after 1620, was there a similar change in the social elite as Catholics replaced Protestants as part of a process of changing political configurations. The Irish peerage summoned to the parliament of 1585 was drawn from five Gaelic or gaelicised families and twenty Old English landed families who thought of themselves as the descendants of the medieval Anglo-Norman settlers. By the end of the seventeenth century, of the fifty-nine elite families who were summoned to the House of Lords, thirty-nine (or about two-thirds) were drawn from New English settler families, most of whom had arrived in the country in the half-century before 1641. A further five were from settler families of post-1641 origin. Old English families had thirteen representatives, while just two were of native Irish extraction. Confessionally, in 1613 the Irish House of Commons was fairly evenly divided between Protestants and Catholics, yet after 1690 it was entirely composed of members of the Church of Ireland. The changing composition of parliament reflects a major transfer of power from one social group to another. Underpinning this transfer of political influence was a dramatic shift in the pattern of Irish landownership as land passed from Catholic to Protestant landowners through both formal plantation and informal colonisation, reflecting shifts not simply in economic power but in social relationships also. However, the traditional estimates of the fall in the proportion of Irish land held by Catholics from 61 per cent in 1641 to 22 per cent in 1688 and by 1703, after the Williamite land settlement, to 15 per cent, may be too sweeping. The simple equations of Protestant with settler and Catholic with native are far from perfect. At least some new settlers, such as the Hamilton family, Earls of Abercorn in Ulster, or the Browne family, Lords Altamont in Mayo, were Catholic. Some former Catholic families, such as the Butlers, Earls of Ormond, converted to Protestantism. Yet the shift in landholding patterns is striking enough to delineate, at least in outline, the decline of one elite and its replacement by another.

Such patterns of change are the stuff of history, but they are rarely as simple as they appear at first glance. Only occasionally is it possible to see anything which might even resemble a single, coherent revolution. Irish Catholics may have lost land, but in many cases they retained considerable social prestige. As Archbishop Oliver Plunkett of Armagh noted in Ulster during the 1670s, many of the ‘ancient vassals’ who were now reduced to the rank of tenants living on land owned by new settlers ‘are more or less so well disposed to their former overlords that they always give them some contribution’.³ It may have been easy to effect a change in landownership, but social attitudes proved more difficult to alter. In the sphere of religion, too, it is possible to map out the institutional revolution that took place in early modern Ireland. However, the effects of these developments on religious belief are much more problematic because the laity shaped their own ideas about God for day-to-day use in the world. Changes in the various spheres of human existence happened at differential rates. Some areas of experience, such as belief or social attitudes, shifted only slowly, while other aspects, such as economic status or institutional change, responded more quickly to external stimuli. To this already complex situation it is necessary to add a consideration of regional variation in the distribution of power and wealth. Such variations in power and wealth help to explain why the province of Ulster, where the social and political vacuum which followed the flight to Europe of the northern earls in 1607 allowed a major social engineering project to be carried out, was so different from County Longford, in north Leinster, where local native families devised survival strategies to minimise the impact of plantation. All of this suggests that early modern Ireland did not undergo a single revolution but rather a series of interlinked revolutions moving at varying speeds. Their differential progress in various parts of the country may go some way to explaining not only the highly localised nature of early modern Irish society but also why large-scale movements, such as the Reformation, comprising a series of linked revolutions in institutions and beliefs had the character that they did.

If the idea of revolution proves a more complex interpretative tool than seems at first glance, equally problematical are the two politico-geographical contexts in which Ireland is usually viewed: on the one hand a colony like the world of North America, which was settled by colonists in the same manner as Munster in the 1580s and Ulster at the beginning of the seventeenth century, or, on the other, a European-style kingdom, with the associated political structures. Clear as these paradigms may appear, in reality they present enormous interpretative difficulties. The new worlds of North America slowly came to influence English and Scottish sensibilities during the seventeenth century as information about them became available. Ireland, and especially the east coast, was well known by people in England and Scotland through trading contacts and Irish migration to London, Glasgow and Wales in the sixteenth century. In 1604 10.8 per cent of those arrested for vagrancy in England were of Irish origin, with much higher proportions on the west coast, while the occurrence of Irish names among the apprentice population in London suggests a more settled community there. Moreover, those arriving in Ireland during the seventeenth century discovered that the country had a well-established social structure and a system of governance not unlike that found in most of Western Europe, both features which were lacking in North America.

However, economic and demographic experiences, at least initially, showed some similarities between the world of the North American colonies and Ireland. In the early part of the seventeenth century, at least, the driving force in population growth in both regions was immigration, encouraged by the availability of land as a result of confiscations. In consequence, Ireland’s population growth was more rapid than that of Europe, but it was somewhat slower than that of North America. By 1700, however, while migration continued to be significant in some regions of Ireland, the dynamic of population growth was moving away from immigration to natural increase. The limits on Irish resources meant that Ireland’s capacity to absorb large numbers of immigrants was much reduced, whereas in the colonial world large-scale settlement was still possible. In economic terms also, Irish and colonial trade showed similar characteristics in the seventeenth century. Both were concerned with the export of raw materials. This situation arose from similar economic problems: shortage of capital and skilled labour. However, in the later seventeenth century economic trends diverged as the Irish economy developed, producing more processed goods for export to a European market. Thus, in demographic and economic terms, Ireland lay somewhere between the colonial model of North America and the experiences of the kingdoms of mainland Europe.

The paradox of Ireland’s position is clear: an Old World kingdom underpinned by social arrangements which seem entirely colonial in their nature. The position of a Protestant governing elite, who claimed their place on the basis of social and moral authority to rule, was in effect guaranteed by a series of apparently colonial land settlements and economic structures. The full vigour of colonial exploitation was, in effect, constrained by the political ideas of hierarchy, deference and honour associated with a kingdom. Such contradictions were commonplace in seventeenth-century Ireland, and understanding what some of these were will help to elucidate the difficulties with which those who lived in seventeenth-century Ireland had to grapple.

CONTRADICTIONS OF KINGSHIP

The most basic statement on the organisation of the government of seventeenth-century Ireland was an unambiguous one. Henry VIII’s 1541 act which framed Ireland’s constitutional position declared that ‘the king’s highness, his heirs and successors, kings of England, be always kings of this land of Ireland’ and that they were ‘to have, hold and enjoy the said style, title, majesty and honours of king of Ireland . . . as united and knit to the imperial crown of the realm of England’. When King James I succeeded to the crown in 1603, he was greeted with expressions of loyalty not only from his settler subjects but also from their Old English and Gaelic Irish counterparts. The poets Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bhaird and Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa hailed the new king with verse that celebrated a monarch who would bring peace, banish strife and under whom Ireland would prosper. Mac an Bhaird provided the king with a suitable Irish genealogy, through his Scottish ancestors to Fergus mac Eirc, the first Irish King of Scotland, and in doing so provided the basis for the powerful royalism which the Irish repeatedly demonstrated throughout the seventeenth century. Few disagreed with this proposition. In the 1620s an unrealistic proposal was floated among some of the Irish in Spain that the country might be declared a republic in order to prevent bickering between the O’Neill and O’Donnell factions over who should be king in a reconquered Ireland. Again in the early 1640s a small group in Limerick, possibly influenced by Dutch settlers there, called for a ‘free state of themselves as they had in Holland’.⁴ Such views were firmly in a minority. Throughout the seventeenth century the dominant political idea in Ireland was that of monarchy. Support of monarchy underpinned both seventeenth-century Irish Catholicism and the Church of Ireland. As the Franciscan author Bonaventure Ó hEodhasa put it starkly in his commentary on the fourth commandment (on honouring parents), ‘Not only are we bound to honour our fathers and mothers but we are likewise bound to give the same honour to every superior either of church of state.’⁵ Protestants too felt uneasy without the stability a king could offer, and in 1656, during the Protectorate, seventeen of Ireland’s thirty M.P.s at Westminster voted to offer the crown to Oliver Cromwell. Equally, Irish Protestants were prominent in bringing Charles II back to the throne in 1660.

The problem with monarchy in seventeenth-century Ireland was not the idea itself but rather its implications. First, kingship created a particular set of governmental structures which were similar to those found in kingdoms across contemporary Europe. The principal division in society was between the ruler and the ruled, the ruler having no superior but God. All power rested in the hands of the king and from thence it proceeded, creating a long chain of dependence which bound king and people together. Authority and liberty flowed not from political organisations but through the structure of personal relationships. As a result, the ruled were regarded as an organic, coherent body, a hierarchical order rather than a society with internal divisions. This made discord within the order of the ruled particularly difficult to deal with. Social hierarchy could be accommodated within the traditional language of deference and subversion, well set out and satirised in the Irish tract Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis of the 1630s. However, the religious fractures which criss-crossed those governed by the King of Ireland were more difficult to contain. Divisions such as this opened gaps in the ideal world of hierarchy. In such interstices of power, difficulties in practical government emerged. Whereas in most other European countries the principle of Augsburg (1555) that the religion of the ruler was also the religion of the ruled applied, in Ireland that was not the case. This presented a dilemma for personal relations within the world of the ruled and often required resort to the language of rebellion and disloyalty or allegations of unworthiness regarding one’s place in the social order so as to stigmatise an opposition. It also created a powerful incentive to emphasise loyalty, hierarchy, authority and social deference over division, a trend some of the Old English used to good effect when playing politics in the early seventeenth century.

Such relationships with the king and one’s peers not only defined an individual’s place in society, but also determined what functions a person could play in that society. The status of the gentry was determined by a combination of economic power and cultural capital. Both of these were under the control of the king, who made grants of land and conferred honour through titles and offices. There was a bewildering range of such offices linked in a long chain from the king through to local sheriffs, justices of the peace, churchwardens and parish constables. In the 1670s it was estimated there were some 40 sheriffs, 400 sub-sheriffs and 900 justices of the peace in Ireland. Assuming that parishes appointed churchwardens, this would have swelled the administrative ranks by over 4,500 part-time officials. This figure does not include the clergy, who were also government agents, or the salaried office-holders in the customs or revenue service. Some of these offices were for life, but others, such as parochial office, were annual appointments involving the middling sort of people, whose behaviour and suitability for office were therefore under continual scrutiny. Thus government business was carried out not by impersonal bureaucracies but by people who were known to each other. Government authority was intimate, none of its activities too insignificant to be dealt with by a prominent local official. Local administrative and judicial offices were held by neighbourhood gentry whose lack of knowledge of the law was more than offset by the respect they commanded in the local community. The power of local sheriffs and magistrates, the main link between central and local government, lay in their local superiority. Law could often be what they said it was, and as a result legal proceedings were as much about social judgments as they were about findings upon the facts of a case. This was a society that thrived on the public exploitation of private power. The greater one’s private position, the greater one’s public office. As a result, government service, such as office-holding or advising the king in parliament, was part of a duty which was held to be commensurate with social rank. Important offices were, in theory, to be held by those whose talents, wealth and, above all, social authority allowed it. Government effectiveness depended on local interest, while local gentry depended on government office to validate their social position. Thus attacks on local magistrates were not simple episodes of mugging, but were viewed as ‘tending to overthrow and supplant the root, and to dry up the fountain and spring-head of justice without which no commonwealth can exist’.⁶

There were varying reactions to these types of social constructs across Ireland. Those who were most familiar with them, those who thought of themselves as the descendants of the Anglo-Norman settlers of the country and who by the early seventeenth century referred to themselves as Old English, saw the King of Ireland as a central focus of loyalty and patronage. As David Rothe, later Catholic Bishop of Ossory, arguing for toleration of religious diversity, expressed it in 1614,

That as a body natural, compounded of many dissimilar parts—flesh, bone gristles, muscles and sinews—yet, in one and the selfsame integrity of a total form, is moved, fashioned, ruled and quickened by one natural form of the animating soul, which overswayeth and governeth all those parts and members—even so the politic body of this republic, plotted and compacted of divers nations not agreeing in one idea and form of religion (though but one true) may stand upon one frame of civil allegiance and be swayed under one sceptre, under one Imperial diadem.⁷

The leader of the convinced Catholic recusants in the 1613–15 Dublin parliament reflected a similar view when declaring that James I was the King of Ireland, ‘whereof we no more doubted than the day is day and the night is night’.⁸ From a Gaelic Irish perspective, many agreed. Throughout the seventeenth century the vast majority of the Old English and native Irish were deeply and profoundly royalist. In practical terms, the King of Ireland, like his predecessors, could not reside in the country (except briefly in 1689–90) since he was also King of England and Scotland, and hence appointed a provincial administrator to...