Riotous Assemblies

by William Sheehan

  However, ‘one of the shot’ demanded money, at which the deputy lost his temper and ‘turned his horse upon him, calling him baggage, mutinous knave’. In his attempt to hold back the horse, the soldier raised his gun and the deputy, thinking himself threatened, drew his rapier and called on his retinue to disarm the soldiers, to which they acceded peacefully – in any case, the bridge was so thronged that the soldiers would not have been able to use their weapons. (Sir George Carew noted indignantly that some of the confiscated weapons were stolen in the fracas.) Despite his fury about the incident, Fitzwilliam ended his report to London on a conciliatory note, acknowledging that the soldiers had some cause for complaint given that ‘they see some that were but latelie their boies in better condicon then [sic] themselves’. Though the perpetrators were imprisoned for a time, they were subsequently pardoned.19

  In some cases of crowd actions by soldiers, they may have been acting less on their own initiative than on the suggestion or orders of their commanding officers, or at least in the knowledge that their activities would be unlikely to be punished. In September 1628 Richard Rothe, mayor of Kilkenny, described to the Earl of Ormond how that town’s mayor of the bullring and former captain of the watch, John Seix, had been taken in for questioning, and imprisoned in the dungeon of the castle of Richard Preston, Earl of Desmond. By some means he was ‘made stark drunk’, and at eleven in the evening he was brought out by some of the soldiers in Preston’s company and ‘mounted upon one of the said earl’s chief horses, having one of his honour’s foot cloths under him’.20 From the castle he was brought through the town:

  ... having two of either side to bear him up: many torches lighted before him and most of his Majesty’s soldiers under his lordship’s command being armed and marching before the said Seix with the drum of that company through the city street with matches burning until they came to my house where, being denied entrance [they] left the said Seix prostrate upon the street and discharged two great volleys of shot ... to the great terror of his Majesty’s subjects dwelling within this city.

  The reason given for the mistreatment of Seix was that, as an officeholder charged with regulating the conduct of the young men of the town and punishing those who frequented brothels and engaged in other sexual misdeeds, he had ‘apprehended one for adultery who was a dependant of one of the said Earl of Desmond’s servants, and ... committed the said adulterer to prison for his offence by way of punishment’. Whether or not Preston was ultimately behind the humiliation of Seix and the implicit insult to Mayor Rothe, this incident drew attention to the conflicting claims to jurisdiction over an urban area by the corporation, the army and the local magnate. Preston, the recently created earl, sought to take the Earl of Ormond’s place as overlord in the Kilkenny area. He had increased pressure on the people of Kilkenny by various actions, including placing cannon on the battlements of his castle ‘all bent towards this his Majesty’s City of Kilkenny to the great terror of his Majesty’s subjects’. Rothe’s claim that Seix’s ordeal had made other ‘officers of the city ... terrified in doing of their duty by punishing of offences’ may have been exaggerated, but nonetheless it indicates the pressure citizens were under during a period of what David Edwards calls ‘crown assault’ on Catholic landholding and office-holding.21

  There are parallels between this case and the disturbances engaged in by the troops of Richard Bingham, the colourful and ruthless president of Connacht, in 1589. When Thomas Jones, bishop of Meath, John Garvey, bishop of Kilmore, Sir Robert Dillon, Sir Nicholas White and others were appointed as commissioners and dispatched to Galway to agree a pacification between Bingham and the O’Flahertys, Burkes and other Connacht lords, the president was reluctant to co-operate. When two of the Burkes and a member of the O’Malley family came to Galway for negotiations, six soldiers, including two recognised as being part of Bingham’s company, assaulted the house of Alderman Roebuck French in which the Irish delegates and commissioners were staying, throwing stones at the windows and trying to break down the door. Ten other soldiers stood by to assist the attackers, and the occupants of the house armed themselves to repel any attempt to enter, but none was made. When the commissioners complained, ‘Sir Richard excused the soldiers, saying in all likelihood they were soldiers lately come to the town ... which sought for lodgings’. A few days later the commissioners ventured forth from Galway to meet other of the Burkes, including William Burke, the Blind Abbot, claimant to the title of MacWilliam Burke, who had refused to come into the town for fear of their lives. While waiting at St Francis’ Abbey for a boat to Newcastle, where the meeting was to take place:

  There came into the Abbey two of Sir Richard’s household men, and one of Sir George Bingham’s men. Two of them were apparelled in women’s mantels and caps, and the third in a black gown. They passed through the abbey into the cloister, we being in the upper part of the chancel. I, the Bishop of Meath, said, Let us go and tarry no longer, for I see they do begin to mock us already. So soon as we were in the boat they three, accompanied by others, came into the chancel, and there challenging to themselves the names of Her Majesty’s Commissioners, one said: I am the Bishop of Meath; another said, I am the Bishop of Kilmore; and another said, I am Sir Robt Dillon; and so of the rest. He that challenged the name of the Bishop of Meath began on this wise, saying, Now speaks the Bishop of Meath. You are they which have put out those men into rebellion against Her Majesty, to spoil the country and to hurt the subjects. How are you able to answer this? Another of themselves rose up, and with a low courtesy began to say, I trust your Lordship shall be better informed. To the like effect a descant was made of the other four Commissioners.22 The three first mentioned actors then in that disguised sort went through the streets of Galway, saying thus: Room for the Queen’s Commissioners. I am the Bishop of Meath, said one; another said, I am the Justice Dillon, reverence for the Queen’s Commissioners, etc.23

  Such acts of mockery were particularly provocative since they were directed at men conscious of their dignity as senior clerics and gentlemen and, more importantly, as representatives of the queen herself.

  Similar reasons explain why a series of disturbances in Limerick in May 1636 ended up in the Court of Castle Chamber and drew thousands of pounds of fines upon their protagonists. Edmund Sexton, a former mayor and one of the few native Protestants still persisting in that faith in the city, was on his deathbed, and several Protestant clerics who attempted to visit him were energetically impeded by members of his family and neighbours who were themselves Catholics and were determined that he would die in that faith. When ministers did manage to enter the house they were abused, threatened and impeded with ‘such an outcrie and Clamor’ that they were obliged to desist. Over the next few days when several ministers and the bishop of Limerick himself attempted to visit Sexton’s chamber, they were either shut out or, when they managed to enter the house, were impeded in their prayers – even during communion – by noise and were vigorously abused by Sexton’s children and wife Joan. On a number of occasions the ‘Irish Crye’ was raised, bringing large numbers of people to surround the house and intimidate and abuse the clergymen. After Sexton died (as a Catholic, his family claimed), Joan Sexton and Edmund Sexton the younger were convicted of ‘high impiety and inhumanity’ and fined £5,000 apiece in the Court of Castle Chamber; Joan’s daughter Mary was fined £1,000. They were also to be imprisoned, to apologise to the bishop and ministers, to be pilloried in Limerick during the assizes, and to repent of their offences publicly in the Court of Castle Chamber and Four Courts in Dublin. It is unlikely that the fines were ever paid, though some of the other penalties may have been carried out.24

  The fate of the Sextons is a sign of how confessional allegiance had increasingly made certain Catholics vulnerable to discrimination and prosecution because of their religious stance. Access to formal political structures was also greatly restricted from the later sixteenth century. As attempts intensified to secure the appointment of amenable (
and, if possible, Protestant) governors and officials in both Dublin Castle and in the towns, the agents of the state increasingly intervened in election and appointment processes, and in other internal matters. This inevitably led to protests, as was the case during the elections to the Irish Parliament of 1613, discussed elsewhere by Stephen Carroll, when riots broke out in a number of constituencies when attempts were made to ensure the return of Protestant candidates. While some of the disorder was attributed, as in Dublin, to ‘the ruder part of the citizens’, more detailed accounts demonstrate that it was the freeholders, free citizens and gentlemen of constituencies, and their servants, who became most involved in disturbances, seeking not merely to elect the candidates they favoured, but also to defend their basic right to vote.25

  Challenges to the moral authority of Ireland’s governors were also very evident, on a smaller but still significant scale, on occasions of the capture and execution of those defined as criminals. The state papers make regular reference to the violent rescue of prisoners in Irish towns, particularly priests and members of religious orders. For example, in 1596 a Jesuit captured by the bishop of Limerick was rescued, ‘the whole town for the most part rising and taking the prisoner perforce as he was going to jail’.26 Though the St Stephen’s Day riot in Dublin in 1629, dealt with by Mark Empey, was in part provoked by wider political issues, including the cessing of soldiers on Dublin, its immediate cause was the raiding of the Franciscan chapel at Cook Street, and women, youths and country people acted assertively to free some friars who had been seized. Executions likewise might precipitate protests, ranging from ‘murmerings’, gestures of sympathy towards those condemned, to outright demonstrations, both on the part of the condemned and the audience. The citizens of Galway showed their disapproval in 1589 of the killing, on the orders of Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, of Armada survivors – whose lives had previously been spared – by ensuring they received spiritual support and proper burials. The Augustinian friars of the town ‘who served them as chaplains exhorted them to meet the death struggle bravely’, and ‘the matrons of Galway piously prepared winding sheets [shrouds] for the bodies’.27 The best-recorded examples are the cases of those who were perceived to be martyrs for the Catholic faith, such as Bishop Conor O’Devany and Patrick O’Loughran, killed in 1612 for high treason. The citizens of Dublin lined the route, loudly lamenting as the clerics passed, stormed the gallows to gather relics from their bodies and spent the night in ‘heathenish howling’ and attending masses at the execution site.28

  On many of these occasions it is clear that religious grievances fed (but were not the sole cause of) tensions between government officials and townspeople. Religious feeling might ignite conflict at other times of heightened emotion as well. For example, a number of reports of riots at funerals survive from the early seventeenth century, especially at times when Protestant ministers sought to take over the funerals of Catholic women.29

  There was room also in Ireland’s towns for rather more straightforward cases of riot when groups sought to defend their economic and personal interests. In May 1641 groups of women were involved in food riots in Belfast (problems of restricted food supplies, compounded by the necessity of victualling Wentworth’s Irish army, also caused conflict elsewhere in April and May that year).30 Special interest groups and corporate bodies such as members of town corporations and trade guilds might act in concert to preserve their rights, privileges and property. In Youghal in 1616, the Company of Butchers ‘disturbing the markets and taking away the victuals of foreign butchers [i.e. those not possessing the freedom of the town] resorting hither, were for their misdemeanour many of them committed to the marshall’s [prison]; the ringleaders were fined, and paid their several fines before they were discharged’.31 That year a group of aldermen, merchants and ‘Dyvers other of the Inhabitantes’ of Limerick, led by their mayor, William Hally were accused of plotting to entangle Edmund Sexton (he whose tumultuous deathbed has been mentioned) in lawsuits over his possession of ‘the late Abbey or Monestery Called St Maryhouse’. The abbey had been granted to Sexton’s grandfather, also called Edmund Sexton, following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1540s, but the corporation had long claimed it, and the matter must have become more urgent when Sexton started building there. On 4 August 1615, the conspirators ‘armed in warlike and hostile manner with swords, head peeces, gunnes, staves and other weapons offensive and defensive’ had gone to the site and driven away carpenters working there, returning four days later to ‘dispoyle, breake and plucke downe to the ground the mayne tymber of the house the said Edmund Sexten [sic] had then lately sett uppe and erected upon the said tenements’.32 It is a scene reminiscent of English enclosure riots, where the privatisation of communal resources often provoked robust defiance.33 Sexton was a determined adversary, and the case ended up in the Court of Castle Chamber, the mayor being fined £20 and eighteen others £10 each.

  However, the butchers of Youghal were prosecuted within their own town, and it is unlikely that their fines were unusually high, or that they were imprisoned for very long. In a town the size of Youghal, those charged with dealing with them would also have been their friends, neighbours and customers. Before the crown started on a more determined course to check their powers in the seventeenth century, the citizens of Ireland’s towns were generally protected from serious repercussions by the special legal status conferred by their charters, even on occasions of more serious disturbances. The judicial powers accorded to the mayors or sovereigns of corporate towns, and other officials, allowed them considerable leeway in arresting and releasing alleged malefactors, and it is clear that they often exercised their rights in a manner that prioritised and protected their own interests and those of their colleagues.

  One report from the late 1590s claimed that ‘The mayors are justices of peace, but they never apprehend or commit any traitors, though many in their times have been committed by others; but their service consisteth in bailing, in enlarging, and rescuing prisoners.’34 It was alleged that their special privileges allowed considerable room for stonewalling, evasion and partiality, with the result that, rather than attracting punishment, certain kinds of urban crowd actions – and even murders – were ignored or even colluded in by town authorities. The killing of soldiers in Limerick during the 1599 riots was effectively condoned by the mayor: the coroner’s court over which he presided failed to find anyone guilty of murder. If a mayor or sovereign refused to exercise his judicial powers over the free citizens of a town and their families, they were effectively immune from prosecution, unless a plaintiff had the wherewithal to pursue a case in the Court of Castle Chamber. Increasingly, however, clashes arose between town officials and the garrisons housed within their walls, as attempts to exempt soldiers from civil law and subject them instead to martial law threatened the mayors’ authority.35

  Their anomalous legal position was clearly exploited by soldiers, especially those not of officer status, to excuse or explain riotous actions. Military men could to some extent claim to be outside the law, since they were subject to the orders of their captain, and could demand the right to be tried according to martial rather than civil law. Their frequent involvement in disturbances must thus be attributed not only to the fact that they had weapons and knew what to do with them, but also to hard-headed calculations about the likely repercussions. Likewise, when seventy-six men, or when corporate bodies such as members of corporations or trade guilds, acted in concert to defend their interests they effectively spread, and at the same time minimised, the potential consequences to individuals.

  John Walter’s comments on the concern of early modern crowds with ‘how to have a riot and not get done for it’ are pertinent here. His article on ‘Faces in the crowd’ reminds us that early modern crowds were socially diverse. The involvement of members of the highest echelons of town society in protest reminds us also that crowds were not necessarily solely made up of members of the lower orders. The mayor and aldermen of Limer
ick were prominent participants in the riots of 1599 and the attack on Edmund Sexton’s properly in 1615, and the election riots of 1612 involved the gentlemen, landowners and free citizens who sought to defend their rights to vote.

  Walter also points out that crowds comprised both men and women, and the early modern crowd was often youthful.36 For example, youths and women were prominently involved in the 1629 St Stephen’s Day riot, and in Limerick in 1636 Edmund Sexton’s wife, his youngest son and two of his daughters were the prime movers in the riots over his soul and his dying body. There was a tactical element to their activities, since women and young people could easily justify their actions by stressing their vulnerability and innocence: mistreatment of them went against the duty of those in power to protect the weak and helpless, and drawing attention to this brought shame on the perpetrators. Moreover, since in law they were technically subject to their fathers, masters or husbands they were less likely to be prosecuted than men.37

  As Mark Harrison has commented, ‘there is a theatrical element in almost every large gathering of people’.38 In Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, we see the theatrical and tactical exploitation of space, symbol and ritual, of special times and meaningful gestures, by protesting crowds. Above all, such crowds exhibited a strong sense of space and place: the aim was to draw attention to grievances, so the more prominent the place of protest, the wider the audience and the more effectively that aim was fulfilled. The fact that even the largest of Ireland’s towns and cities were relatively small focused protest into certain areas and ensured it was noticed by most of the inhabitants. In Galway in 1589, for example, Bingham’s cross-dressed soldiers initially made their point to the peace commissioners as they waited for a boat in St Francis’ Abbey, outside the walls, but then repeated their demonstrations in the streets of the city. An audience also helped to minimise the repercussions for those involved. Once there were witnesses for their actions, it would be more difficult for officials to retaliate, to shirk responsibility for dealing with grievances or to trump up charges in retrospect. Norreys’ mutinous company brought their petition in person right to the gates of Dublin Castle, the greatest symbol of crown authority in Ireland. By gathering at the gate they ensured that the councillors would eventually have to deal with their requests. In the butchers’ riot in Youghal in 1616, the participants targeted their competitors in the market place, rather than waylaying them outside the town: punishment was therefore inevitable, but the aim of challenging the interlopers and differentiating them from themselves was achieved. In Kilkenny in 1628 the unfortunate John Seix was conveyed through the centre of the town to the mayor’s house, and despite the late hour ‘many torches’ were lit to illuminate the proceedings.