Eighteenth-Century Ireland (New Gill History of Ireland 4)

The Isle of Slaves – The Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland

Ian McBride

• Éditeur: Gill Books
• Année: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780717159277
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Irish History

The eighteenth century is in many ways the most problematic era in Irish history. Traditionally, the years from 1700 to 1775 have been short-changed by historians, who have concentrated overwhelmingly on the last quarter of the period. Professor Ian McBride's survey, the fourth in the New Gill History of Ireland series, seeks to correct that balance. At the same time it provides an accessible and fresh account of the bloody rebellion of 1798, the subject of so much controversy. The eighteenth century was the heyday of the Protestant Ascendancy. Professor McBride explores the mental world of Protestant patriots from Molyneux and Swift to Grattan and Tone. Uniquely, however, McBride also offers a history of the eighteenth century in which Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter all receive due attention. One of the greatest advances in recent historiography has been the recovery of Catholic attitudes during the zenith of the Protestant Ascendancy. Professor McBride's Eighteenth-Century Ireland insists on the continuity of Catholic politics and traditions throughout the century so that the nationalist explosion in the 1790s appears not as a sudden earthquake, but as the culmination of long-standing religious and social tensions. McBride also suggests a new interpretation of the penal laws, in which themes of religious persecution and toleration are situated in their European context. This holistic survey cuts through the clichés and lazy thinking that have characterised our understanding of the eighteenth century. It sets a template for future understanding of that time.

Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents

Introduction

• Part I. Horizons
• English Difficulties and Irish Opportunities
• The Irish Enlightenment and its Enemies
• Ireland and the Ancien Régime
• 
  Part II. The Penal Era: Religion and Society
• King William's Wars
• What Were the Penal Laws For?
• How Catholic Ireland Survived
• Bishops, Priests and People
• 
  Part III The Ascendancy and its World
• Ascendancy Ireland: Conflict and Consent
• Queen Sive and Captain Right: Agrarian Rebellion
• 
  Part IV. The Age of Revolutions
• The Patriot Soldier
• A Brotherhood of Affection
• 1798

Part I

Horizons

1
English Difficulties and Irish Opportunities

No man can have thought long upon the means of bringing any government to perfection without realising a host of difficulties and obstacles which flow less from its inherent nature than from its relation to its neighbours.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1756)¹

The shape of eighteenth-century Ireland—what might be visualised as the peaks and troughs of political activity—is most easily understood in relation to the chronology of European warfare. The period covered by this book began and ended with the clash of arms both within Ireland and across the continent. It has become fashionable, indeed, to speak of a ‘Second Hundred Years War’ between Britain and France, comprising six major conflicts between Louis XIV’s invasion of the Rhineland and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.² At the end of the seventeenth century the international arena was dominated by the expansionist designs of Louis XIV, who, it was believed, was attempting to establish a ‘universal monarchy’ over the other kingdoms of Europe. In the face of this threat, England joined coalitions of the other major powers for two great struggles, the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). During a quarter-century of almost continuous warfare, field armies approached an average of 100,000 men, a fourfold increase on the forces raised during the Thirty Years War.³ Following a period of peace, Anglo-French rivalry was renewed in the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48) and climaxed in the Seven Years War (1756–63), which saw the French driven out of Canada and most of their West Indian, West African and Indian territories. France exacted revenge by supporting the rebellion of the thirteen colonies (1775–83), though only at the cost of bankrupting the Bourbon monarchy. Finally, the levée en masse of 1793 inaugurated a new era of total war, as the mass armies of the revolutionary French Republic overran the European mainland. As Tim Blanning has noted, this was actually the seventeenth war fought between the European powers since the beginning of the century: ‘If there was ever a time when war was the normal means of intercourse between states, then this was surely it.’⁴

THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS WAR

The internal development of the British state—and Ireland’s position within it—were closely connected to events on distant battlefields. Take for example the Dublin legislature, which, in the shape of the magnificent Parliament House built at College Green, remains the best-known symbol of Ascendancy Ireland. The transformation of parliament during the 1690s from a rare event into a regular institution was a direct result of the War of the League of Augsburg; likewise its extinction by the Act of Union in 1800 was designed to make Ireland ‘an advantage’ to England rather than ‘a point dreadfully vulnerable in all future wars’.⁵ If we turn to the notorious penal code, we find that the first restrictions on Catholics were essentially wartime measures, such as the 1695 act prohibiting Catholics from owning weapons or horses fit for military service. Decades later it was the manpower requirements caused by the Seven Years War that prompted a reassessment of confessional discrimination when Catholics were enlisted—at first unofficially—into the British army (see Chapter 10). As the leading authority on the subject has argued, ‘it was above all the pressure of war that forced the Catholic question onto the political agenda, and kept it there’.⁶

It is a striking fact, though one seldom explored, that the inhabitants of Ireland shared an awareness that they did not determine their own history, but were ultimately dependent upon external forces. Despite the apparent confidence asserted by its Georgian country houses, Ascendancy Ireland was marked by cultural instability, and the reality or expectation of outside intervention was a recurrent preoccupation. Irish Protestants regarded the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688 as the charter of their civil and religious liberties, and throughout the eighteenth century they commemorated this great constitutional landmark with the same enthusiasm as their counterparts in Britain and North America. In Ireland, however, William III was remembered not only as the gravedigger of Stuart absolutism, but also as the glorious deliverer who rescued the Protestant settlers from the popish natives. While civic and military dignatories led an annual procession on the anniversary of William’s birthday (4 November), the battle of the Boyne was celebrated at a more popular level.⁷ Moreover, the violence of ethnic and sectarian antagonisms, unparalleled within the British state, showed little sign of abating. In 1731, when it was proposed that a public monument should be raised on the site of the battle of Boyne, one sceptical commentator warned that such a memorial would be vandalised. ‘We live in a Country’, he delicately pointed out, ‘where the vanquished Enemies continue still to be a very numerous Body of People.’⁸

An official calendar of apparently providential victories, in which the turbulent events of 1641 and 1690 provided the key dates, helped to create and maintain a distinctively Protestant culture in eighteenth-century Ireland. The miracle of deliverance, commemorated in countless sermons, speeches and toasts, has its counterpart in the ‘shipwreck’ of 1688–91 lamented by Gaelic poets, in Jacobite loyalty to ‘the king across the water’, in the aisling genre which pictured Ireland awaiting liberation, and in the well-known United Irish song:

The French are on the sea, says the Shan Van Vocht,

The French are on the sea, says the Shan Van Vocht;

The French are in the bay, they’ll be here without delay,

And the Orange will decay, says the Shan Van Vocht.

Following the departure of the ‘wild geese’ in 1691, hopes for a Stuart restoration were sustained by military instability on the continent, the continuing recognition accorded to the exiled dynasty by the Church of Rome, and the presence of the Irish regiments in France and Spain. Jacobite poets such as Raghnall Dall Mac Domhnaill and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille continued to denounce the Hanoverians as usurpers, the followers of Luther and Calvin as heretics, and the Protestant elite as foreign upstarts; they also prophesied the return of the natural order: the legitimate king restored to his throne, the true church re-established, the Catholic aristocracy returned to their ancestral estates.⁹

Although the importance of war is highlighted throughout this book, the focus is not so much on how battles were fought and won. The intention is rather to examine the nature of warfare, its impact on the economy and the civilian population, and the ways in which the clash of professional armies overseas intersected with indigenous sectarian animosities at home. Above all, it will be suggested that the pattern of European conflict determined Irish politics in two fundamental ways. The first concerns what may be labelled the ‘warfare state’ thesis, a notion that has dominated much of European historiography for the last thirty years. Briefly stated, this argues that the increased scale of armed conflict in the early modern period, the unprecedented mobilisation of armies and the financial and administrative pressures they created, led to the coalescence of powerful, centralised, bureaucratic states. In domestic terms, rulers equipped with standing armies gained greater coercive power over their subjects, enabling them to override the traditional privileges claimed by nobilities, representative assemblies or outlying provinces. Secondly, we must not forget that the eighteenth century saw a specific international system emerge in Europe. England’s difficulty, according to the well-known republican dictum, was Ireland’s opportunity.¹⁰ In the long run, however, the balance of power during this period tended to underpin rather than challenge English rule in Ireland.

Although the beginnings of the ‘military revolution’ are often dated back to the spread of gunpowder technology between 1450 and 1530, it was not until the late seventeenth century that the decisive period of military and bureaucratic expansion began.¹¹ First and foremost, this meant a dramatic escalation in the size of armies, particularly marked in the years between 1689 and 1713. Not only was the number of men in arms greater than ever before—an astonishing 181,000 men fought at Malplaquet (1709)—but states now kept large professional or ‘standing’ armies in peacetime. In France, for most of the period surveyed here, the army remained at a peacetime level of around 130,000 men.¹² This revolution in warfare set in motion a revolution in government, as the strain of paying, transporting and feeding the new monster armies led to experiments in tax collection and public borrowing. The proportion of state revenue devoted to military expenditure was normally around half of the total during peacetime and up to three-quarters in war.¹³ Generally speaking, the accumulation of armed force meant a concentration of coercive power which increased royal authority at the expense of representative institutions.

Can the ‘warfare state’ thesis be applied to the British Isles? Traditionally historians of ‘state-building’ have regarded the British state as an anomaly. Alone among the great monarchies, it resisted absolutism: no other army, apart from that of the Dutch Republic, was subject to parliamentary scrutiny. As George Story, chaplain to the Williamite expedition to Ireland, put it, Englishmen live under the rule of law, ‘a blessing that few other Nations can boast of’, partly because the sea protected them from foreign enemies, so there was no need for a standing army.¹⁴ It can be argued, however, that the evolution of representative government conceals important similarities with general European trends. John Brewer has shown that between 75 and 85 per cent of government expenditure in eighteenth-century Britain was taken up with the costs of war.¹⁵ The maintenance of England’s new role as a continental power demanded a staggering increase in taxation, the creation of a national debt, and a centralised body of professional administrators whose job it was to run the new ‘fiscal-military state’. Far from acting as a brake on centralisation, the existence of a national representative assembly at Westminster seems to have facilitated the growth of executive authority at the expense of the sorts of local or sectional interests (church authorities, city corporations, regional assemblies) that had entrenched themselves so successfully on the other side of the channel.

The political impact of Brewer’s ‘fiscal-military state’ was nowhere more obvious than in the relationship between England and her ‘sister’ kingdoms. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the common political unit in early modern Europe was not the independent nation-state, but the ‘composite monarchy’, in which one king or queen ruled over a core territory and a number of more or less dependent provinces. In this respect, the Stuarts, who united the crowns of Scotland, England and Ireland in 1603, found themselves in a similar position to the Spanish Habsburgs studied by John Elliott. Although the outlying territories were forced to accept the superiority of the core kingdom, where the royal court and administrative capital were located, they usually retained their own customary ‘liberties’ and representative institutions.¹⁶ The theory was summed up by a seventeenth-century Spanish jurist, Solórzano Pereira, who wrote that ‘the kingdoms must be ruled and governed as if the king who holds them all together were king only of each one of them’.¹⁷ In reality, of course, Castile was the core of the Spanish composite monarchy, and resentment had produced revolts in Catalonia, Portugal, Naples and Sicily. The notion of ‘sister kingdoms’, as in the British monarchy, was a fiction. During the reigns of William (1689–1702) and Anne (1702–14), however, the rise of parliamentary government, the escalating costs of war and, above all, the need to secure the Protestant succession finally made the old system unworkable. As European historians have shown, composite monarchies were prone to conflicts over the distribution of offices, access to domestic and colonial markets, and the mobilisation of resources for warfare. Since they were bound together solely by dynastic loyalty, they were also extremely vulnerable in the case of a disputed succession. When Scottish patriots claimed equality for their parliament, passing their own laws of successio...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Horizons
• Part II: The Penal Era: Religion and Society
• Part III: The Ascendancy and its World
• Part IV: The Age of Revolutions
• Abbreviations
• References
• Bibliography
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan