The Roots of Ireland's Troubles

Robert Stedall

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526742193
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Over the course of three decades in the late twentieth century, Northern Ireland was embroiled in the Troubles, a conflict characterized by the violent and bitter struggle between nationalists and unionists. Many books in recent years have attempted to make sense of the Troubles. Primarily political and nationalistic, it also had a sectarian dimension. Undeniably it was fueled by historical events, and yet most only look so far back as the 1916 uprising. In Ireland’s Troubles, Robert Stedall argues that we need to take a longer historical view to truly understand the complex factors at play in Ireland’s history that ultimately led to the Troubles. Comprehensive in its approach, it ranges from Plantagenet intervention among the warring Gaelic chieftains, to Cromwell’s restoration of British rule following the English Civil War and William Pitt’s resignation over the Irish Catholic’s Emancipation question. Inextricably linked with the history of Britain, Stedall guides the reader through Ireland’s turbulent but rich history. To understand the causes behind the twentieth-century conflict, which continues to resonate today, we must look to the long arc of history in order to truly understand the historical roots of a nation’s conflict.

Part 1

The Reformation and its impact on British efforts to dominate Ireland

Chapter 1

The arrival of British settlers in Ireland c. 1540 – 1635

Following the English Reformation, it was of critical importance for England’s security that the Catholic powers in Continental Europe should be prevented from using Ireland as a base to launch a Counter-Reformation into England. The obvious course of action for Henry VIII was to infiltrate Protestant preachers into Ireland to demonstrate to the Gaelic Irish the shortcomings of Roman Catholicism. He had been extremely successful with this policy in Scotland, where visiting preachers were able to show up the moral shortcomings inherent in the extremely wealthy Scottish Catholic Church. Protestantism offered a less financially demanding alternative by promoting the Reformation as it swept across northern Europe. Yet Ireland was different. Its Roman Catholic Church, which had developed through monastic foundations, was neither overly wealthy nor morally depraved, and it was serving its nation well, providing schooling and teaching Latin, the only common language for communication with its neighbours in England and elsewhere. Yet only the educated minority learned Latin. Protestant preachers arriving from abroad could rarely communicate in Gaelic to impart their message, and the Irish were stubbornly determined to retain their traditional forms of worship and Gaelic culture. The English had no moral justification for their approach. Just as in Scotland, their motives were entirely political. To maintain their uncertain control, the English moved in politicians and Protestant clergy, supported by a formidable array of military garrisons. They ‘established’ a Government in Dublin to maintain English law and they created an Anglican Church, the Church of Ireland, which imposed its doctrines throughout the country through a diocesan structure with a hierarchy of bishops. Former Catholic Church lands were granted to the newly established church administered by a local network of Anglican clergy. Thus, the principals in the Irish Government and the Irish ‘Established Church’ supported the English Crown out of mutual self-interest. This new Church was expensive to maintain. It was funded out of a tithe, often paid in kind, and imposed on the entire populace regardless of religious persuasion. Even though it was very quickly realised that Irish Catholics were unlikely to conform, and efforts by the English to enforce conversion lapsed, the tithe remained as a bone of contention, paid in the main by the poor to fund the religious persuasion of the rich.

Having failed to enforce Irish conformity with the newly established Church of Ireland, the English concluded that a more promising means of achieving order would be to expropriate land from any Irish opposing their rule and to grant it to English settlers moved in to ‘civilise’ the natives. It was also a convenient way of settling overdue back pay for soldiers and other officials involved in trying to maintain control. By this time, considerable areas had been confiscated from those Gaelic chieftains who had dared to resist English incursions, and it was hoped that arriving settlers would be able to establish order by force of numbers and by introducing English customs, religious doctrine and farming methods to the local inhabitants.

Even before the arrival of the English, there had been almost continuous conflict between rival Irish clans, resulting in complex networks of allegiance between them. Every chieftain could call on his clansmen to provide trained fighting men when needed. In the meantime, these fighting men (or ‘wood-kerne’) foraged in the surrounding woodlands. They found themselves out of work when a Gaelic chieftain was deposed, but they hid away waiting for an opportunity to make a concerted push to rid the land of settlers. They survived by terrorising farming communities of both settlers and the more amenable native Irish in their quest for sustenance.

The process of expropriating land from Irish rebels was extremely unfair. Under Gaelic law, land was vested in native farmers as co-partners with their chief in return for an obligation to provide military service when required. It was the farmers who lost out from the confiscation of a chieftain’s lands, even though they might not have transgressed against English rule. Yet, if the chief was rebelling, the English believed that it was reasonable to assume that his community was a part of it. They also argued that Irish farmers would be relatively more secure as tenants of British settlers. Although they were now required to pay rent to their British landlord, they no longer faced the uncertainty of their former military obligation.

The native Irish were also embittered by unfamiliar farming methods being imposed upon them. Irish farmers had been nomadic, driving cattle, sheep and pigs across-country to time-honoured grazing grounds. British settlers, who wanted to till their land, needed enclosure to keep livestock away from growing crops. This interfered with historic Irish practices, notwithstanding that these were often extremely primitive. The Irish would plough ‘by the tails of their garrons [horses] and not after the manner of the English Pale [the area under English control around Dublin]’, where the plough was harnessed to a horse with a yoke.1 Their methods were self-evidently inefficient and cruel, causing the deaths of large numbers of animals. Furthermore, the Gaelic Irish made no effort to improve soil fertility, to drain bog-land or to reclaim salt marshes.

Despite being granted lands in Ireland, many English landlords had no intention of settling there and farming themselves. The land was offered to ‘undertakers’ who took over larger areas for subletting in smaller parcels to new arrivals. It was always assumed that the native Irish would provide farm labour. This was particularly necessary, because many settlers, often former soldiers, had little or no farming experience. English arrivals were thus completely dependent on Irish labour for farming support and to construct their dwellings. With the native Irish having been deprived of their ancestral lands, there were outbreaks of belligerence, which only detracted from Ireland’s appeal to newcomers. Undertakers often found themselves with insufficient settlers to occupy the available lands, and found the native Irish only too willing to pay good rents to remain in situ. The Irish showed such determination that they outbid settlers when land became available to rent, almost regardless of price, enabling absentee English landlords to raise prices, which the Irish in their desperation agreed to pay. With the letting income finding its way back to Britain, Ireland was sucked dry of the resources necessary to develop its rural economy. Furthermore, large numbers of natives remained on the settled land, when the objective was to reduce them. This did nothing to improve farming methods.

With fewer settlers arriving than had been hoped, security was always an issue. This was worsened by a confusion over land measurement. There were no accurate maps, and Irish lands were divided into ‘balliboes’. (There were different names in different areas.) According to traditional Irish measurement, a balliboe, which the English renamed a ‘townland’, was ‘sixty acres of profitable land’. It was not a finite area but a measure of economic worth. This resulted in areas on the ground being much larger than indicated by initial estimates, and settlers were dispersed much more widely than anticipated. Although efforts were made to group them into fortified villages for mutual security, this was impracticable for those trying to farm areas some distance from their village. For settlers wary of the wood-kerne, Ireland was a lonely and dangerous place. Although the unexpected land surplus meant that there was often enough to allow native Irish to stay put, they were generally allocated to the more remote or less fertile areas and this rankled with them.

When James VI of Scotland became King of England as James I in 1603, he was anxious to attract inland Scots to move to Ireland, and wanted them to intermingle with their English counterparts. This proved impracticable, as many settlers arrived in family groups or from the same districts, and were determined to stay together. Poor weather conditions had caused several periods of crop failure in Scotland, particularly during a mini-ice age in the late sixteenth century. Scots were attracted by the opportunities of fertile land only four hours’ boat ride from the Galloway coast. They began arriving in Antrim and Down in the late sixteenth century and, by 1606, were settling in large numbers. T. M. Devine has stated:

The Scots who made the move to Ulster seem to have been a relatively balanced cross-section of the national population. At the upper end of the scale were small landowners and substantial tenants who saw the venture as an unprecedented opportunity for economic advancement … Below this élite class was a broad social spread which included artisans and labourers as well as farm servants and cottars. Significantly for every four men, three women moved to Ulster … this was an important influence which helped to maintain the distinctive identity of the Ulster Scots.2

There were soon far more of them than English settlers. They were experienced farmers, who started to plough and grow crops with great success, and they soon dominated the area round Belfast. In James’s attempt to assure security for the settlers, he insisted on making any Irish presence in ‘plantation’ areas illegal. Yet the need for labour by the English made this objective totally unrealistic.

The Scots faced a problem. They were Presbyterians, as established by John Knox in 1560 to the exclusion in Scotland of all other creeds of Christian worship. They did not conform to the ‘Established’ Church of Ireland any better than the Catholics. Initially, this did not create great difficulty, and many Presbyterians shared Protestant churches and even services with the more puritan English Non-Conformists. Yet they were obliged, like the Catholics, to pay a tithe to the Established Church with its hierarchy of bishops, of whom they did not approve. With Scottish Presbyterians starting to promulgate freedom of religious belief, they soon formed their own congregations and meeting houses in eastern Ulster and later in Dublin, holding, as a principal tenet of their Calvinist faith, an absolute belief in the word of the bible. The Scots were horrified when the later Stuart monarchs started to impose ‘high church’ doctrine onto both the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. This placed them at odds with the Dublin Establishment. It was a requirement for Presbyterians to conform to the very Anglican principles that had forced these more dogmatic Scottish ministers to leave their Scottish livings in the first place. Many brought their congregations across the North Channel to Ireland, sowing seeds of ‘dissent’ on arrival against the Church of Ireland.

The arrival of the British in Ireland in large numbers resulted in Gaelic culture and language becoming frowned upon. This was a tragedy for the native Irish. ‘They were a conquered people, and their illegal presence on lands assigned to under takers … depended on the whim of landlords.’3 They found themselves facing eviction from their properties at the beginning of winter before the harvest had been gathered in. Those from Ulster were generally offered smaller areas of inferior land in remote areas such as co. Monaghan. Very often they preferred to take their chances as labourers for British tenants in familiar surroundings rather than face the tortuous task of uprooting completely and starting elsewhere. They saw the arrival of Scots in large numbers as a greater threat. Not only were Scots at opposite extremes of religious doctrine, but, as successful and self-sufficient farmers, they had no need for their labour. Although the English arrived in lesser numbers than expected, the natives were still left not knowing when and if they would be forced to move.

Although some ‘deserving’ Irish, who had supported the English against rebellious clans, were offered freeholds, only 20 per cent of Ulster’s total land area was retained by them. They were not restored to their traditional lands, and new land grants were generally significantly less than they had enjoyed previously. As ‘freeholders’, they were required to fulfil jury duty, which involved them in substantial expense and time in travelling to assize courts. Very often, they proved inefficient farmers and were forced to sell areas to make ends meet until left with nothing at all.

The wood-kerne caused continuous outbreaks of violence, forcing settlers to organise themselves into armed posses for protection. Until his death in 1616, the Irish in Ulster lived in the hope that the Earl of Tyrone, who had escaped with other Irish chiefs to the continent, would return with a powerful force supported by European Catholic powers to recover what had been lost. Sir Thomas Phillips, one of the military servitors retained to protect the settlers, stamped on an uprising in 1615 by arresting the ring-leaders before it began.

In 1635, Charles I was facing a growing conflict with Parliament in his desperate effort to raise money to finance his extravagant foreign policy. Having failed in his attempt to raise taxes without calling Parliament, he expropriated the London Livery Companies’ estates in co. Londonderry granted to them in 1610 by James I. Charles was acting on the advice of Thomas Wentworth, his Lord Deputy in Ireland appointed in 1632. The Companies had been reluctant participants in the Ulster plantation, believing that this was not an appropriate role for merchants to fulfil, but the Crown had forced them into it. They had been required to build and fortify both Londonderry and Coleraine and to bring in British settlers to establish peace in the locality. In fairness to Charles, the Companies had failed to meet their obligations to attract sufficient settlers to ensure peaceful coexistence with their Gaelic counterparts. Yet, the King’s expropriation of the land granted left any remaining tenant settlers completely unprotected. Furthermore, Wentworth alienated both settler and native Irish tenants by attempting to raise rents.

Chapter 2

The development of Protestantism in Europe c. 1517 – c. 1567

The two principal branches of Protestantism that developed in sixteenth century Europe were Lutheranism, as espoused by Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) in the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire, and Calvinism, as developed by John Calvin (1509 – 1564) and others in Geneva. The theological thinking of both movements was designed to counter growing abuses and profligacy in the Roman Catholic Church.

Lutheranism adopted many of the liturgical practices and sacramental teachings of the Roman Catholic Church but differed from it in holding that scripture is the final authority in all matters of faith, while Roman Catholics held that divine authority came from both scripture and tradition as promulgated by the Roman Curia. Roman Catholic laymen had no authority to question their church hierarchy. It was only the clergy who could read and interpret the scriptures, but Lutherans wanted bibles to be translated from Latin into languages that everyone could read and assimilate for themselves. They advocated a doctrine of justification ‘by grace alone through faith alone on the basis of scripture alone’. In the Edict of Worms in 1521, the Holy Roman Emperor banned Lutherans from defending or propagating ideas which sought to ‘reform’ traditional practices. This led to an inevitable Lutheran schism with Roman Catholicism. Yet Lutheranism retained the Eucharist at the heart of its sacramental teaching and adopted a structure of bishops to administer its clergy and church practices. There was always an ultimate hope of achieving reconciliation.

John Calvin was one of a number of ‘Reformed’ theologians who sought to redefine Christian faith by placing scripture as the source of all authority, but Calvinism denied the bodily presence of Christ in the sacrament, believing that his presence was spiritual ‘as a means of grace’. This was an important distinction, as from the safety of republican Geneva, Calvin was questioning whether earthly kings were anointed as the embodiment of Christ with divine authority. Calvinists held that each member of a congregation could come to faith as he saw fit, and bishops and clergy had no right to impose any particular doctrine. This resulted in many variations of Reformed thinking being developed in ‘confessions of faith’, but there was consensus that the inclusion of bishops in a church hierarchy was superfluous.

When Henry VIII, who had been appointed by the Pope as his fidei defensor, the defender of the Roman Catholic faith, failed to persuade his Roman Catholic bishops that he should divorce Catherine of Aragon, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn to provide a male heir to the English throne, he turned to Lutheranism. His clergy adapted its dogma to make him, as a spiritually anointed king, head of an Anglican church in place of the Pope. He retained bishops, so important to his control of Church administration, and many of them conveniently and pragmatically switched from Catholic to Anglican, rather than face the less appealing alternative of martyrdom by being burnt at the stake.

In the meantime, a young Scottish Catholic priest, John Knox (c. 1513 – 1572), had been influenced by a group of English Protestant preachers, including George Wishart. Wishart had been sent to Scotland to destabilise both the Scottish Catholic Church and the Scottish Government led by the Queen Dowager, Marie of Guise, mother of Mary Queen of Scots. With Marie of Guise benefitting from powerful French and Catholic support, Henry lacked the military strength to impose his will on Scotland. Marie sidestepped his attempt to arrange a marriage between his son, Prince Edward, and her daughter, the infant Mary Queen of Scots, by sending her to France for her education and subsequent marriage to the French Dauphin, later Francis II.

Wishart was well received in Scotland by a group of the Scottish nobility seeking to break the power of Cardinal David Beaton (or Bethune) who dominated Scottish politics with his control of the purse-strings of the extremely wealthy Scottish Catholic Church. When, in 1546, Wishart was arrested in Edinburgh for s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Also by the same author
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Reformation and its impact on British efforts to dominate Ireland
• Part 2 Events leading up to the English Civil War
• Part 3 The Restoration and the Williamite Wars
• Part 4 The development of Dissenter theology in the cause of republicanism
• Part 5 Britain’s determination to retain control over Irish Government
• Part 6 The seeds of revolution to establish republicanism in Ireland
• Part 7 Events leading to Union and emancipation
• Part 8 Famine, destitution and agitation for independence
• Part 9 Parliamentary agitation for Irish Home Rule
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• References
• Plate section