Ireland in crisis

War, politics and religion, 1641–50

Patrick Little

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526126726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The crisis that befell Ireland in the 1640s has always fascinated historians. This volume of essays presents cutting-edge research on various aspects of the Irish wars, notably regionalism, the nature of English interventions, popular politics and the problems of allegiance, authority and legitimacy in church and state. The chapters include studies of the earl of Cork in Munster, the earl of Clanricarde in Connacht and Lord Montgomery in Ulster, as well as the Confederate Catholic engagement with popular politics. The role of the marquess of Ormond, the Irish Parliament and the Church of Ireland are also examined in new ways, and the volume ends with a fresh look at the war of words between Oliver Cromwell and the Catholic Church. Ireland in crisis presents a very different view of the period that challenges existing assumptions. It will appeal to lecturers, students and the general reader.

1

Holding on: the earl of Cork’s Blackwater army and the defence of Protestant Munster, 1641–43

DAVID EDWARDS

In Making Ireland British, published in 2001, Nicholas Canny observed a major gap in the military and political history of the 1640s to that point – the dearth of detailed local studies of the spiralling ethnic and religious conflict that spread throughout the country after October 1641, affecting almost every area.¹ There has been but a modest improvement in the interim. With the notable exceptions of Kevin McKenny’s exemplary analysis of the Laggan Valley and Aoife Duignan’s as yet unpublished thesis tracing the 1640s story in Connacht, few local or regional studies of the conflict have been attempted.² There remains a pressing need for detailed investigation of the fractures experienced by local communities in the traditional ‘four loyal shires’ of the Pale, for instance, and the continued absence of any serious consideration of the midlands as a distinct military and political theatre is likewise frustrating.

Arguably the biggest gap in regional coverage of the early 1640s, however, is the southern province of Munster. Although simultaneously the chief destination of English and Protestant colonists arriving in early Stuart Ireland, and the region most open to continental and Catholic influence along its Atlantic seaboard, the conflict that erupted in the province has received almost no close scrutiny. Prior to Canny’s overview, the prevailing outline of events in the south could be traced backed directly to Richard Cox’s highly partisan history, published in England in 1689.³ The account of the 1640s given by Charles Smith, the eighteenth-century antiquarian of counties Cork, Waterford and Kerry, was heavily reliant on Cox; in turn, Smith’s version, several times republished, informed later outlines that appeared in the Victorian period.⁴ More recently Pádraig Lenihan, Robert Armstrong and David Dickson each brought a welcome academic rigour to discussions of the province during 1641–49; yet, engaged as they were in more general studies, they tended to sweep quickly over the pattern of events in Munster, especially when commenting on the pivotal early phase of the conflict, between autumn 1641 and autumn 1643.⁵ This chapter is a contribution towards plugging that gap.

Focusing on the wealthiest and most powerful figure in the province, Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, the chapter attempts to reconstruct the pattern of events as the conflict between planter and native, Protestant and Catholic unfolded in the two-year period prior to the earl’s death at Youghal in September 1643. It has long been recognised that Cork and his family played a significant role in the Munster war, particularly in the Blackwater Valley that runs through the borderlands of counties Waterford and Cork.⁶ Indeed, it has become the accepted view to state that the army of tenants that Earl Richard put in the field was a key factor in ensuring the failure of the insurgents to secure the strategically vital strip of coastline from Youghal to Kinsale. By helping to keep the supply lines from England open, the old earl’s final achievement before his death was to preserve the English Protestant presence in the province. In broad terms this interpretation is correct. However, it is also misleading, failing to grasp the complexity of the situation on the ground. In the Blackwater Valley by September 1643 the Protestant and government interest had to rely on the confederate Catholic leadership in Kilkenny, and the terms of a ceasefire it had negotiated with King Charles’s government, to survive.⁷ The civil war in England, and the confederates’ desire to help the king saved the Munster Protestants. The defensive line that had been sustained by the earl of Cork was actually on the brink of collapse. His achievement had been to prevent it collapsing earlier.

Drawing upon Cork’s extensive archive of private letters and estate papers, this chapter shows how, from the onset of hostilities in the province in late 1641, the task assigned to the earl and his followers of guarding Youghal and the Blackwater was difficult and uncertain. While historians have noted the earl’s political rivalry with the English lord president, Sir William St Leger, the extent to which their differences destabilised the Protestant war effort has not been fully appreciated. Of particular importance, St Leger’s harsh policies towards the native population cut across the old earl’s regional influence, and reduced his military capacity by alienating many of his Irish soldiers – a key component of the earl’s ‘colonial’ army. Then there was the scale of the threat presented to Cork by the Catholic insurgents; this was both more sustained and more penetrative than hitherto acknowledged. The battle of Liscarroll made little difference. Long thought to have broken the Catholics’ military strength, in the Blackwater region it proved otherwise. In the last months of his life the earl faced a relentless enemy moving ever closer to overrunning all of his positions.

The chapter gives marked attention to individuals and groups usually overlooked in histories of the period – those living beneath the earl and his family: from neighbouring knights and fellow landowners to his servants and tenants.The composition and organisation of the earl’s tenant army are described for the first time, partly because his papers record such information in considerable detail,⁸ but also because it allows us to better appreciate the fact that the Blackwater Valley was a community as well as a possession. As shown, the strains placed on such people by the 1641–43 war led to the utter transformation of the region, from a place where English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic had muddled along side by side for years, sometimes uneasily, but without significant confrontation, to a region increasingly characterised by religious and ethnic hatred, suspicion and polarisation. This would prove a more lasting legacy than the survival of the Blackwater forts or the guarding of Youghal.

When the earl of Cork returned to Ireland from the English court in October 1641,⁹ he was confident that his main holdings in Munster were ready, if necessary, to withstand an insurgent assault. His confidence seemed well founded. For nearly four decades, following his purchase from Sir Walter Raleigh of the great Blackwater seigniory of Inchiquin (December 1602), he had paid scrupulous attention to the question of plantation security. From the outset he had invested in native informers to keep close watch on the movements of former rebels, requiring his agents to give specific heed to their contacts with the exiled Irish military community in Spain and the Low Countries. He had actively recruited former captains and junior officers decommissioned by the crown after the Nine Years War to take up tenancies on his estates and to help him keep the natives of the region in check. He had acquired large quantities of weapons and other military equipment, which he later had stored in his armoury at Lismore Castle. Most significantly, he had seized the opportunity to earn royal approval by creating a large tenant militia – a private army – on his plantation lands, initially establishing a force in the Blackwater Valley which mustered annually at Tallow, before later authorising a second force in the Bandon Valley which mustered at Bandonbridge.¹⁰

Although it was a part-time force, from ver...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: the confederate wars revisited
• 1 Holding on: the earl of Cork’s Blackwater army and the defence of Protestant Munster, 1641–43
• 2 The Sea Adventure to Munster and Connacht, July and August 1642
• 3 ‘To hold a good opinion of my loyalty and zealous affections’: the earl of Clanricarde and the royalist cause in Connacht, 1643–46
• 4 ‘Clotworthy is a zealous man, yet hath his purse well lined’: Sir John Clotworthy, John Davies and the politics of supply, 1644–45
• 5 The Irish Parliament after the rebellion, 1642–48
• 6 The recruiter returns to the Irish Parliament, 1642–48
• 7 The politics of preferment: the marquess of Ormond, Archbishop Ussher and the appointment of Irish bishops, 1643–47
• 8 The marquess of Ormond, Lord Montgomery of the Ards and the problem of authority in Ulster, 1649
• 9 The confederate Catholics of Ireland and popular politics
• 10 Oliver Cromwell, priestcraft and the ‘deluded and seduced’ people of Ireland
• Index