Maura Cronin
William Sheehan
1
DISORDER AND COMMOTION
Urban riots and popular protest in Ireland,
1570–16401
CLODAGH TAIT
In May 1577 there was a disturbance in Waterford. The lord president of Munster, William Drury, rushed in a state of indignation to meet Lord Deputy Henry Sidney at New Ross, ‘to complaine of the disorder and commotion of the Cittizens of Waterfforde in assaltinge the Quenes howse holde, where my La[dy] of Thame his wyffe, children, and some of his familys lay’. Lord Barry was hot on the president’s heels, to protest at the taxation (‘cess’) imposed on his lands to pay for Drury’s garrison and household in Munster.
In the same letter in which he noted his pacification of Drury and Barry, Sidney reported that rumours were circulating of an imminent invasion by James Fitzmaurice, leader of the first Desmond rebellion, aided by France, Spain and the pope, and that ‘his confederates here are in dayly expectauncye of his arryvall’. Further, he claimed that agitation against cess in Dublin ‘hath wrought soche an opinion amongst the common sorte as many refuse to pay cesse, which otherwayes, most willingly would have’.2 Though we have no further details of the proceedings at Waterford, or their consequences, we can guess from this context that, like their counterparts in Dublin, the citizens’ actions probably largely derived from their objections to the burden of paying for the billeting of both soldiers and the households of senior officials at a time of heightened tension in the country.
In recent times, historians have strongly challenged the assumption that politics in the early modern period was a matter engaged in largely by elite men. It is increasingly clear that, throughout the islands, people of all social backgrounds knew a lot about current affairs and ongoing debates about government, law and justice. There was a variety of means by which all sections of society, both men and women, might engage in meaningful ‘popular polities’. As well as discussing issues and grievances among themselves, they could also seek to influence those in authority for personal, communal and political gain, and to resist changes and policies they perceived to be disadvantageous to them. It also seems they had an acute sense of the options open to them, as John Walter states, ‘to take advantage of the law or to avoid its consequences’. Elsewhere, Walter reminds us of the ‘fragile relationship between rulers and ruled’ in early modern societies, and ‘the obligation it forced on the government to enter into a dialogue with the people’.3 Despite the rhetoric they might resort to, subjects ‘were never merely the passive victims of a process that they were powerless to affect’, and they could be articulate and proactive in local politics, finding a variety of ways by which to lobby those with influence and attempting to manipulate the decisions and behaviour of both officeholders and those involved in central governance.4
Steve Hindle points out ‘the fragility of sanctions open to the government, especially when it was confronted with subtle, creative and communal resistance’: even brute force was of little use against certain forms of opposition.5 Tactics, ranging from non-cooperation, petitioning, rumour, slander and libel, to riot, violence and rebellion, were the means by which populations could attempt at least to make their voices heard when they felt their interests were being compromised. They engaged in various gestures of protest, and exploited the weaknesses of the state and the threat of disorder and violence to achieve their aims. This was as much the case in Ireland as in Britain.
The Irish Resisting the Toll at Roche’s Castle, Cork, by J. Fitzgerald, c.1880, depicting a seventeenth-century scene.
Courtesy of the Port of Cork Company.
It is, however, less straightforward to investigate such issues when it comes to Ireland. There are a number of reasons for this. Though historians like Raymond Gillespie have begun to get at popular political attitudes during the period, the grand narrative of conquest, coercion and rebellion has focused attention primarily on ‘high polities’, on the shifting political landscapes of the Irish lordships and on attempts to make sense of the inconsistent policies applied to the Irish situation by successive chief governors.6 Large-scale revolts such as the Kildare, Baltinglass and Desmond rebellions, the Nine Years’ War, the 1641 Rising and subsequent Wars of the Three Kingdoms have supplied so much conflict to be getting on with that smaller-scale demonstrations, riots and disputes risk passing ‘under the radar’.
The paucity of surviving documents from the period is also a major difficulty. Rarely is it possible even to attempt to imitate the kinds of forensic micro-historical examination of episodes of rioting and protest that have been used so fruitfully by colleagues in France and Britain. Such examinations enable us not only to consider the causes and immediate context of crowd actions, but also to explore how protestors exploited factors such as space, gesture, language, notions about gender roles, and knowledge of the law to maximise impact while, at the same time, minimising the potential consequences of their actions for individual participants.
There was a limited native print-culture, and Ireland just does not possess the kinds of legal documents, for example, that historians of England have used so productively: rioters there were often taken to court and their stories are recorded, however partially, in court records, allowing us to pick through the differing opinions and self-presentation of the various protagonists. Irish records were less carefully kept and many were lost in the Public Record Office fire in 1922. The partial and piecemeal nature of what survives also makes it particularly difficult to compile adequate biographies of the background to crowd actions. Street demonstrations and riots were usually the final acts in a series of verbal and other clashes as grievances simmered up and boiled over, but most if not all of this context is usually lost. Mayors and corporations of towns might have a vested interest in failing adequately to record or even investigate incidents of riot, while the increasing use of provosts marshal and commissions of martial law meant that troublemakers might be dealt with informally and often quite harshly.7
To justify heavy-handed measures, there was a strong tendency on the part of the authorities to lump together everything from local riots and the depredations of bandits to fights between groups of retainers and outspoken protests at the activities of soldiers as ‘rebellion’, while the word ‘riotous’ was used to describe an array of threatening actions. For example, the state papers indicate that there were significant disturbances in the midlands and north of Ireland in mid to late 1628 and early 1629, related to grievances over the activities of garrisons and food shortages caused by a dearth that affected Britain as well as Ireland. However, the use of martial law to quash these disturbances, and the tendency universally to refer to the protagonists as rebels, serves to obscure the scale and nature of the activities and intent of the protestors. The records of the Court of Castle Chamber are full of people doing things ‘riotously and routously’, but as this was a catch-all phrase designed to indicate a large degree of force, it is often impossible to distinguish protest actions from assaults, affrays and other disagreements.8
Despite this, it is possible to catch glimpses of the inhabitants of Ireland taking to the streets to protest about a variety of issues. I focus on some of the kinds of crowd actions that occurred in urban areas, particularly between 1570 and 1640. In this period, most of Ireland’s towns were comparatively small, in both area and population. It has been estimated that Dublin’s population in 1600 was about 5,000; cities like Galway, Cork, Waterford and Limerick had 2,400 to 4,000 people, and Youghal, Kinsale, Kilkenny, Clonmel and others had about 2,000 inhabitants each. In most of these urban centres, the limited group of freemen (citizens entitled by birth, marriage or completion of apprenticeship to trade within town walls and to participate in the political life of the civic community) was dominated by a small coterie of families of wealthy merchants and craftsmen. These families were knit together by ties of marriage and business, and they provided the bulk of the candidates taking positions as al
dermen, mayors, sovereigns or other officials. They also dominated the trade and craft guilds that were increasingly set up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The charters extended to the Irish towns often granted them privileges far wider than those possessed by their counterparts elsewhere, reflecting the crown’s reliance on them as outposts that were to some degree amenable to co-operation with the central administration.9 As was the case for other early modern towns, such privileges were jealously defended against threatened encroachment by the state or by local gentlemen and peers.
However, ordinary conflicts might be exacerbated in Ireland by particularly acute clashes of interests. Great vigilance and skill was required to negotiate the smoothest path between the financial good and safety of town communities and the influence of local magnates whose concerns often differed quite starkly from those of the monarchs who granted town charters and might also find reasons to revoke them.10 Fissures grew as it became evident that most towns had majority Catholic populations, despite the fact that they were counted on to be the most ‘civil’ parts of Ireland and most amenable to cultural influences from England.11 The perils inherent in their situation became especially acute during times of warfare and rebellion, when trading with their hinterlands might leave town populations open to charges of treason, while refusals to co-operate with local rebels might raise more immediate threats to the townspeople’s livelihoods and property. The example of Youghal may have been an instructive one: it was sacked by the Earl of Desmond’s troops in 1579, and subsequently punished by the loyalist Earl of Ormond, then president of Munster, who hanged the mayor for his lack of backbone in allowing the rebels access to the city to collect some wine.12 But, apart from Youghal in 1579 and Kinsale in 1601–2, the fact that no other major town was captured by, or capitulated to, rebels before the 1640s is testimony to their special character and the skill with which their leaders and citizens managed to balance competing claims on their allegiance and maintain a large degree of independence. In this context of closely guarded privileges and closely packed spaces, intermittently closely watched by the agents of central government, urban crowd actions, ranging from small, relatively peaceful demonstrations to larger, more violent incidents of riot, represented in microcosm some of the larger issues of the time.
One of the most frequently reported provocations of crowd actions in early modern Ireland was the activity of soldiers. Times of outright rebellion and warfare, especially in the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign and the 1640s and 1650s led to increased recruitment of troops from England, Wales and further afield, but greater or lesser numbers of soldiers were deployed in various parts of the country throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.13 It was rarely the case that local strongholds had the capacity to house anything other than small numbers of men, or that the infrastructure of the state was adequate to keep them clothed, paid and fed. More often, travelling companies were authorised to exact food and lodgings from the areas through which they moved, while the towns and cities were obliged to provide for the needs of garrisons either directly, by billeting them in their houses and providing for them, or indirectly through levies of money or foodstuffs (cess or purveyance). Repayments for these services were usually inadequate or tardy. As we have seen in the case of the attack on William Drury’s family, the households of officials also needed to be supported, and soldiers often extorted or commandeered far more than they were officially entitled to.14
Not surprisingly, a variety of grievances might arise on all sides, civilians resenting the calls on their financial resources and food stores and the behaviour of their visitors, and the soldiers finding fault with provisions that were often grudgingly given or with the general attitudes displayed towards them. Armed soldiers were in a position to back up their claims and grievances with the threat of force, while in a highly militarised society their hosts and opponents were equally prepared to defend their own interests violently. Furthermore, differences between the protagonists in political viewpoints, social status, ethnicity and religion might heighten tensions. In a series of riots in Limerick in 1599, for example, many of these kinds of issue came to the fore. On two occasions, complaints by soldiers about the unsatisfactory provisions they received led to retaliation by the townsmen and resulted in street brawls and casualties. An all-out assault by the citizens on the church being used as a vantage point by the army ostensibly resulted from a disagreement between the soldiers and the young men of the town who had been whiling away the evening with a game called ‘fox to hole’. However, the rhetoric of the attackers revealed a host of other provocations – contempt for the ‘English churls’ (the Old English townspeople of Limerick on other occasions expressed their opposition to the garrisoning there of the Earl of Thomond’s native Irish troops as well); the idea that they were ‘defiling’ the church by their presence; and, perhaps most importantly, the claim that they were being fed ‘fatt on bread and milk’ in a time of food shortages. Moreover, these incidents occurred within the wider context of an ongoing conflict over jurisdiction between the town and local gentlemen, particularly the Earl of Thomond, and partly as an expression of frustration aimed at the government for its lack of response to complaints about the erosion of the mayor’s authority when attempts were made to implement martial law within the city in criminal cases involving soldiers.15
Though they were reported in less detail, similar ‘frays’ between soldiers and citizens seem regularly to have occurred in other Irish towns as well. The vice-president of Munster, Sir William Herbert reported to Lord Burghley in June 1588 of the tensions between civilians and soldiers in Munster:
... those two bands of footmen that are in this province are grown into quarrel and dislike with sundry of these parts, as lately there hath been a fray between Mr Vice-President’s (Thos Norreys) band and the citizens of Cork, and continual jars daily increasing between Sir Edward Denny’s band and the townsmen of Youghal, and these jars of discord, howsoever they be salved up for the time, leave scars of discontentment behind them unfit for this time.16
Though many of these incidents arose in the heat of the moment, others were calculated and stage-managed to remind the authorities of the limits to townspeople’s forbearance. Disorders in Galway in July 1580, which were probably related to the need to equip and support extra troops at the height of the Desmond rebellion, just as the Baltinglass revolt was breaking out in Leinster, were followed by further demonstrations that were not violent but were nonetheless designed to be provocative. Sir Nicholas Malby decried ‘the bravery used by them after the fury appeased in marching up and down the streets with sound of drum, with spiteful speeches of their conquest against the English soldiers, terming them and all the rest no better than English churls’. He argued that a fine be imposed on the citizens and put towards the building of a stronghold ‘without which the governor and English shall ever be in danger of those odious people upon every drunkard’s quarrel’.17 It is unlikely that anything came of this. It was more often the case that officials were forced to take notice of the grievances expressed on such occasions, and to step back from provocative policies. For example, the disturbances in Limerick in 1599 led to some efforts on the part of the Irish council to limit the numbers cessed on the town, especially those from the troublesome native Irish companies led by Thomond.18
On occasion, companies of soldiers themselves showed familiarity with the conventions of protest and some appreciation of the advantages of formal peaceful (if armed) public demonstrations over violent confrontation. For example, the mutiny in May 1590 of the band led by the president of Munster, Thomas Norreys (already mentioned in the context of disturbances in Cork), was initially carried out in an orderly way. Seventy-six soldiers made their way from Limerick to Dublin ‘without officer or Ensigne’, arriving on 28 May (Ascension Thursday) ‘armed and weaponed’ and ‘with drum and fife’ to the gates of Dublin Castle ‘and possessed the whole length of the bridg with a martiall warde’. The members of
the Irish council who had been attending a meeting of the Court of Castle Chamber were obliged to pass by the soldiers on their exit, and to accede to requests for Sir Edward Waterhouse to present a petition on their behalf. The formally worded petition complained that they had ‘remayned without victualling ... and have not of long time had their paye’, that their credit was used up and that they were unable ‘to endure without reliefs any longer’. They claimed that they had not been paid in five months, and that the old bands were being neglected, while new bands that had recently been formed were being paid monthly. The situation escalated the following day, when the soldiers rejected offers made to them and attempted to pester members of the council who were on their way on horseback to Christchurch cathedral. As Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam passed the soldiers pressed forward:
... and besought his Lo[rdship] to have consideration of them, and to be good unto them, with sundry such like words. His Lo. turning his horse about unto them, said, ‘What is he that speaks?’ They at an instant answered, ‘All, all, all!’ Whereupon his Lo., as I think, replied to himself only, ‘Very well, I will think on you’, or some such like speeches, and passed on, being by this time past the armed men about the middest of the bridge.
Riotous Assemblies Page 2