The Kingdom of Ireland, 1641-1760

Toby Barnard

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

How did the Protestants gain a monopoly over the running of Ireland and replace the Catholics as rulers and landowners? To answer this question, Toby Barnard: - Examines the Catholics' attempt to regain control over their own affairs, first in the 1640s and then between 1689 and 1691
- Outlines how military defeats doomed the Catholics to subjection, allowing Protestants to tighten their grip over the government
- Studies in detail the mechanisms - both national and local - through which Protestant control was exercised Focusing on the provinces as well as Dublin, and on the subjects as well as the rulers, Barnard draws on an abundance of unfamiliar evidence to offer unparalleled insights into Irish lives during a troubled period.

Chapter 1: Land and Peoples

Ireland before 1641

The English intention to rule Ireland had first been acted on when (in 1169) Henry II, king of England and duke of Normandy, was authorized by the pope to invade and annexe the island. Until the sixteenth century, English control waxed and waned. During those centuries, its authority seldom extended beyond the capital, Dublin, a narrow corridor of land around Dublin and the eastern seaboard (known as the Pale from the ditch which demarcated its boundary), and a few ports strung along the coast, such as Waterford, Cork, Drogheda and Limerick. In 1541, worries over security made Henry VIII’s advisers assert English authority in Ireland more aggressively. This aggression matched similar initiatives in the north and far west of England and in Wales. The most legible sign was an act, devised in England and passed by the Dublin parliament, which declared Henry VIII king of Ireland. Before this, he and his predecessors were styled simply as the lords of Ireland. The act for the kingly title of 1541 announced an ambition: to bring Ireland completely under English rule and to turn it into a provincial dependency little different from northern and western England or Wales. Distance, an unwillingness of England to spend heavily on the venture, the interference of other European states, and – above all – the distinctive cultures and attitudes of the inhabitants of Ireland conspired to defeat the scheme.

Notwithstanding the setbacks, reputation obliged successive English monarchs to persist with efforts to subject Ireland. Moreover, arguments of security warned that England itself would never be safe so long as Ireland eluded proper control. The Tudors and Stuarts were surrounded by potential and actual enemies: pretenders to their thrones and rivals among continental monarchs. Ireland offered ground from which troublemakers might assault England. Accordingly, the troublesome and costly English engagement with Ireland continued. Throughout the sixteenth century, and into the seventeenth, efforts were concentrated on trying to extend the systems of English law and administration deeper into the Irish provinces. The creation of shires throughout the kingdom was followed by the introduction of law courts – assizes and quarter sessions – in each. From the 1530s, the danger of Ireland either being wrested from English control or used as a base to destabilize the Tudor or Stuart monarchy became intertwined with the question of religion. Once the Tudors had opted for Protestantism as their state religion, they had to impose it across all their territories. By the end of the sixteenth century, this had been accomplished throughout much of England and portions of Wales, but notoriously not in Ireland. The stubborn devotion of Ireland to Catholicism challenged the contemporary axiom that religious disunity within any state risked serious destabilization.

Before 1641, English progress towards its goals in Ireland was erratic and disappointing. Methods alternated between minimalism, recommended as cheap and less likely to provoke local uproar, and force. The recalcitrance of many local leaders – landowners, priests and lawyers – expressed itself through obstruction in the occasional parliaments, non-cooperation in the localities and (more rarely) in open rebellion. Conspiracies and uprisings strengthened the hands of those impatient with conciliation, and keen on rougher methods. If, as seemed the case, the obstinate Irish would never willingly accept the religion and habits of lowland England, then they should be swept from power and replaced by the tractable.

This political thinking chimed well with the economic pressures which were impelling emigrants westwards from England, Scotland and Wales. Ireland had long beckoned to those seeking seasonal work, permanent betterment, or freedom from the constraints of their own communities. The relative ease of sailing across the narrow, although often stormy, waters between Britain and Ireland meant that many from the western margins already knew Ireland and had kindred and connections there. In the sixteenth century, as more from Britain uprooted themselves to try new lives in America, the popularity of Ireland as a destination for the restless also grew. The government and private investors traded on these impulses, and encouraged immigrants to establish themselves on the properties confiscated from the unruly Irish. First, in the Irish midlands – King’s and Queen’s Counties, later known as Laois and Offaly – then more widely in the southern province of Munster during the 1580s and most conspicuously in the northern province of Ulster early in the seventeenth century, settlement by Protestants from Britain (and beyond) was promoted. The official schemes supplemented the spontaneous movement of peoples westward into Ireland in search of subsistence or improvement.

The resulting settlements seldom achieved the size or economic and social impact that had been desired. Yet, in a few districts – the northern counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down and Londonderry and in south Munster around the towns of Youghal, Tallow, Bandon and Kinsale – changes were apparent. By 1641, perhaps 15,000 newcomers from Britain had been attracted into eastern Ulster; and 22,000 into Munster. By 1660 each of the two provinces may have had as many as 30,000 Protestant inhabitants. Thereafter, natural increase among the existing residents added to the stock in Munster. In Ulster, renewed immigration, primarily of Scots, driven out by grim conditions at home, swelled numbers, especially in the 1690s. The landscape took on fresh aspects as English and Scottish styles of building and cultivation were introduced. Houses of stone and lime with chimneys and glazed windows were erected. They were surrounded with orchards, and the holdings fenced, ditched and hedged. Small towns hosted a larger if still restricted range of specialist craftsmen. Forty-six new parliamentary boroughs were incorporated during James’s reign, almost doubling the previous total. More settlers were granted the rights to hold markets and fairs in their townships in the hope that they would stimulate trade and industriousness. Over 500 sites were authorized between 1600 and 1641, but many remained on parchment.¹ Not all welcomed the immigrants. Those forced from lands to make way for the newcomers understandably schemed how to regain what had been lost. Even those who had adjusted to – and often profited from – the newcomers watched warily.

The government in Ireland, having invited the newcomers, favoured them, treating them as exemplars of Protestantism, industry and civility. Favours included grants of the most fertile and accessible lands, and appointment to local and national offices. By 1641, it was difficult to thrive in this world of English Ireland unless a member of the established Protestant church, the Church of Ireland. Catholics, having for so long controlled property and power, were understandably discomfited. Some converted to Protestantism, but most protested and considered how best to reverse the trends. Notwithstanding the arrival of Protestant immigrants and the pressures on Catholics to embrace Protestantism, the percentage of Protestants in the kingdom remained small: hardly 10 per cent before 1641. Without mass defections of the Catholics, natural increase was not likely to transform Ireland into a Protestant kingdom, and so threatened to delay indefinitely that vital precondition for making it peaceful and prosperous.

Natives and New Settlers

Two uprisings by the Catholics – during the 1640s and between 1689 and 1691 – challenged the trends. Their failure precipitated further social and economic engineering. On both occasions, the defeated were stripped of property and offices. The redistribution of land in the 1650s, after the Cromwellian reconquest, aimed to introduce approximately 35,000 new proprietors in place of the old. The Catholics’ share of land plummeted. In 1641, they had owned an estimated 59 per cent of the profitable acreage; by 1688, only 22 per cent. Further seizures following a fresh war and further defeats for the Catholics between 1689 and 1691 reduced their total to about 14 per cent. This dramatic change in property-ownership was the basis for the emerging Protestant ascendancy. A few Catholics managed to avoid loss of lands and status. This was easiest west of the River Shannon, in the province of Connacht, but not impossible elsewhere, even in the Pale close to Dublin. The fertile county of Meath was noted at the end of the eighteenth century for a heavy concentration of Catholic notables.² The exceptions hardly masked the fact that this was a revolution unlike any seen in either England or Wales, or indeed in Scotland, during the period. The dethroning of a long-established élite paralleled what happened in other European counties: for example, in Bohemia after 1620, where Protestants were supplanted by Catholics.

In Ireland, the redistribution of property was conceived as the prelude to a more thorough imposition of English manners and religion. Successes were at best patchy and frequently superficial. Fewer than hoped of the new owners came to reside on their estates. A landed élite consisting of 3000 to 5000 families emerged. Absentee owners leased their holdings to others, often on generous terms which allowed the principal tenants to flourish. Most landlords expressed a preference for Protestants as tenants. Except in eastern Ulster, there were too few to permit the exclusive ordinance to be enforced. Catholics were able to rent the farms which once they had owned. Even then, by a law of 1704, they were debarred from taking leases longer than 31 years. Legal trusts allowed these prohibitions to be evaded. Ingenuity and subterfuges were required for Catholics to retain even a semblance of the possessions that they enjoyed before 1641, and left them a constant prey to insecurities lest their sleights be discovered and denounced.

Ardent Protestants, having willed this situation and enthusiastically backed the seizures of land, questioned the results. By the eighteenth century, it was alleged – but without compelling evidence – that Catholics had consoled themselves for the loss of lands by moving into urban trade.³ The stated intention behind English policy was to rid Ireland of those traditionally identified as subversives: the Irish Catholic magnates, priests, lawyers and soldiers. The corpus of Catholics, having been decapitated, would be content to toil as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And indeed the bulk of the labouring population, whether in countryside or town, was composed of Catholics. At the same time, towns, long conceived as agencies of Protestantism and industry, were to be made into Protestant preserves. The government of chartered boroughs was turned into a Protestant monopoly during the 1650s. This control was eroded in the 1670s and briefly overturned in the 1680s, only to be firmly re-established after 1690. Contemporary wisdom made towns, with their councils and trading guilds, ‘the best school for the vulgar to learn and to practise virtue and public spirit’. By excluding Catholics and (after 1704) rigid Protestant dissenters from full membership, much of the population was debarred from the associational education which might train them in citizenship.⁴

It was easier to enforce an exclusively Protestant policy on urban office-holding, which was the key to parliamentary representation in the 109 borough and eight county borough constituencies, than in trade and property-owning. Legal barriers had been raised against Catholics owning houses in the strategically important walled towns and ports in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest, but these were either lowered or evaded. Nevertheless, Protestants tended to own the most desirable properties in towns, as well as in the countryside. But, just as farms could not be tenanted and worked without Catholics, so few towns outside eastern Ulster would thrive unless they shared trade and work with Catholics. Realists knew that an expulsion of ‘Irish papists’ would lay waste ‘most of our towns and lands which are mostly tenanted by them’.⁵ Some Catholics clawed their way upwards into the middling ranks. Obliged to be reticent and frugal so as not to attract the attention of vindictive Protestants, they generally crouched in the shadows. Only as an aggregation can the importance of the Catholic town-dwellers be sensed. In Dublin, probably by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Protestant preponderance in numbers – itself a product of the 1640s and 1650s – ended. Elsewhere in the island, Catholics had remained a majority notwithstanding the penalties. In 1732, Catholics constituted about two-thirds of the population of Cork city, maybe 70 per cent in Limerick, slightly over three-quarters in Drogheda and perhaps four-fifths in Kilkenny. In the western port of Galway, Protestants may have been no more than one-eighth of the total.⁶ Catholics tended to be pushed into the poorer districts – often called Irishtowns – beyond the town walls. This tendency can be discerned in Galway in the 1720s. Within the walls, Catholic households constituted 63 per cent of the 343. However, the extramural dwellings divided between 360 Catholics and 75 Protestants. In general, Catholics lived in less commodious houses. In Athlone – within the walls – the average size of the 99 Protestant households was 2.4 hearths; that of the 79 neighbouring Catholic dwellings, 1.7 hearths.⁷ Even so, in inner Galway, Catholics had houses with an average of three hearths.⁸ This contrasted with the situation at Limerick, with Galway a traditional Catholic stronghold. There Protestants had a bare majority within the walls, owning 50.7 per cent of the houses. Only 5 per cent of the 539 Catholic houses in intramural Limerick had more than three hearths. The average was 1.6.⁹

Catholics come into focus chiefly when the authorities harassed them. They were suspected of attachment to the foreign enemies of England or of involvement in local unrest. Their worship, clandestinely practised early in the eighteenth century, but more openly thereafter, helped to define them, both in their own and in their adversaries’ eyes. A fondness for relics, pilgrimages, resort to holy wells and the continuing celebration of festivals were noticed.¹⁰ More reticent communal activities, focused on sodalities and confraternities, are harder to spot.¹¹ The traditionalism in the beliefs and behaviour of much of the Catholic laity did not invariably delight their spiritual directors. Priests imbued with the ideals of the counter-reformation and lay-people besotted with the new dogmas of politeness and respectability shuddered at habits which smacked too much of carnival, clannishness, vendetta, riot and superstition. Rifts opened – as in Protestant communities – between the avowed reformers and those content with the customary ways. Sometimes they coincided with divergent political stances: whether to accept the new Protestant order or adhere still to the exiled Stuart dynasty.¹² The nuances in Catholic practice interested Protestants less than the resilience of much that was proscribed. By the 1720s, Protestants were aghast that stringent laws passed during the previous 30 years were failing to destroy the ordained priesthood or the cult to which it ministered.

The cultural differences tended to coincide with and be reinforced by social and economic diversification. Protestant Ireland, estimated to number 300,000 to 400,000, had a gilded pinnacle of the prosperous and professionals, but the solid foundations lay among artisans, cottiers and labourers.¹³ Neither Catholics nor Protestant dissenters had many high in society, and were disproportionately well represented among the poorer sort. Remote rural areas were, by the late seventeenth century, being drawn more forcefully into a commercial instead of a barter economy. Markets and fairs proliferated. At them, the humble labourer sold what had been garnered – often dairy produce like butter – in the hope of earning enough to pay the rent and buy necessities, such as salt, tobacco, cloth and meal. Beef preserved in barrels and animal skins and fat rendered down into tallow were other staple products in demand among local consumers and as exports. Few required great technological skill or were manufactured. One critic lamented ‘that lazy, sleepy, easy way of getting so much money as will just buy them brogues and sneezing and strong beer’.¹⁴ Early in the 1760s, it was reckoned that it took £5 8s 6½d to support a householder in the west for a year. The same household, it was thought, could earn an annual £13. On the Sligo estate of the enquirer who made these calculations, a skilled carpenter was paid 1s 6d daily. Shearers, hired seasonally, received either 10d or 3d each day, depending on age and experience. In contrast, the unskilled hired to cut and save turf and to gravel paths, each received a daily pay of 5d.The least regarded, ‘spalpeen labourers’, were given anything from 2 ½ d to 5d for a day’s toil. In 1772, it was still supposed that peasants earned no more than five to seven old pence for a day’s labour.¹⁵ These sums resembled those in rural Wales at much the same date.¹⁶ Further east, especially in the towns, better wages were to be had. In Dublin, journeymen in the textile industries agitated for a rise in weekly wages beyond nine shillings. Craftsmen routinely earned a daily 12d, but it could reach double that figure; general labourers, 10d. Skilled needlewomen and dressmakers could make 4s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Land and Peoples
• Chapter 2 Rebellions and Reconquests, 1641–1691
• Chapter 3 Governing Ireland, 1692–1760
• Chapter 4 Parliament, Improvement and Patriotism, 1692–1760
• Chapter 5 Rulers and Ruled
• Chapter 6 Catholic Masses and Protestant Élites
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index