Riotous Assemblies

by William Sheehan

  In certain riots, the participants can be seen to discriminate between potential sites of confrontation. Donald Horowitz talks of crowds being ‘risk-averse’, choosing locations for protest that reduced the danger to participants.39 In Limerick in 1599, displeasure with the soldiers cessed on the city was publicly displayed when they were attacked in residential streets and then in St Mary’s cathedral, but the fact that the citizens avoided conflict at the dilapidated fortress of King John’s Castle, called ‘the queen’s castle’, made the point that they were not challenging the person of the monarch but the abuses of those who claimed to act in her name.40 Fittingly, the public spaces of towns were used also to disseminate warnings to those who might consider disturbing the peace. In Youghal in 1624, ‘Several proclamations from the Lord Deputy and Council of Ireland in regard of riots and unlawful assemblies were read in the most noted parts of the town’: the procedure was probably replicated in other major towns.41

  Riot and revel were interlinked. There was a large degree of cross-pollination between traditional festive customs and popular protest. The use in the 1599 Limerick riot of a game as an excuse for riot is familiar from England, where rioters might use football matches or other games as a cover for the assembly of crowds with more illegal intent. If it resembled any of its later namesakes, the game of ‘fox to hole’ in which the boys of Limerick were engaged would have been a rowdy one, in which it would have been easy to cause or manufacture offence.42 That games could easily lead to confrontations is seen by an ordinance in Clonmel in 1640 ‘to prevent severall abuses frequently committed at the footebale’: once the portreeve of the town had signalled the end of the game, anyone continuing to play ‘shalbe comitted and punished as a breaker of the peace and a violater of the laws of the kingdome’.43

  It is also clear that, as elsewhere, Irish rioters ‘often drew on rituals already familiar to many from the festive calendar to rally protestors’.44 The soldiers who dressed in clerical and women’s clothing in protests against the activities of the peace commissioners in Galway in 1589 reflected the element of cross-dressing and disguise that was common in popular festivities on holidays like Halloween and Christmas. The activities of Preston’s troops in Kilkenny in 1628, when they brought a drunken John Seix through the town riding on the Earl of Desmond’s chief horse, which was dressed with the earl’s own richly embroidered ‘foot-cloth’, drew many of its elements from English skimmington traditions. Skimmingtons, also called rough music, ridings or riding the stang, were crowd actions usually designed to punish and shame those responsible for domestic violence, adultery, cuckoldry or scolding, usually involving the forcible public ‘riding’ of the victim on a mule, broom handle or cowlstaff (used for carrying heavy loads over the shoulders).45 They were also used against officials charged with wrongful prosecutions (as Seix was in this case, since he had apprehended an alleged adulterer) or inadequate decision-making and, it seems, against soldiers ‘whose behavior ... endangered relations with the civil populace’.46 In an inversion of the standard procedure, rather than being carried on a miserable mount, Seix was brought on a richly appointed thoroughbred. The implication was that Seix had usurped the earl’s authority, and being deposited prostrate in the street returned him to his rightful station. The insult also targeted the mayor, who was powerless to prevent this mistreatment of one of his officials, to protect the townspeople from the fright they experienced at being woken by the noise of drums and shooting or to punish the perpetrators. Mockery and laughter are often overlooked elements of crowd actions. We assume riot and protest to be a serious business, but it was often more effective to undermine targets by the use of scorn and derision than to subject them to violence.

  Certain times of the year might likewise allow crowds a degree of festive licence that left room for the expression of grievances. The most obvious case of this is the 1629 St Stephen’s Day riot, but it is possible to point to other occasions as well. For example, it may not be a coincidence that Norreys’ troops mutinied and proceeded to Dublin in Rogation week in 1590, arriving to present their petition on Ascension Thursday.47 The authorities badly misjudged the timing of the execution of O’Devany and O’Loughran, carrying it out on 1 February 1612, St Bridget’s Day and the eve of the important Marian festival of Candlemas, used by the citizens as an excuse to prolong the demonstrations and masses said on that occasion.48 That the 1599 Limerick riot occurred on the day after St Martin’s Day, the feast day associated with young men, may also be significant.49 From the examples cited above, it seems that the summer months, especially May, were the most likely times for crowd actions to occur. This was the campaigning season for troops, and could be a time when food shortages began to bite as stores began to run low in advance of the new harvest. But the festivities of May, Rogation tide, Corpus Christi, Midsummer and Lúnasa may also have provided the carnivalesque intervals and imaginative resources that prompted and facilitated protest.50

  Noise was a standard element. Shouting, clapping, music and shooting are all noted as being used during Irish crowd actions. A drum and fife announced the 1590 mutineers, Preston’s soldiers in 1628 had their drummer precede them and finished proceedings with a volley of shot, and the citizens of Galway in 1580 marched through the streets to the sound of drums, loudly excoriating the ‘English churls’ in their midst. Bell-ringing may also have featured. Some British and Irish towns kept a bell that might be sounded in times of crisis to warn the citizens – Dublin housed one such bell in the tholsel, and during the election riots of 1612 attempts were made to ring ‘the alarum’, but it was under lock and key.51 Noise registered protest and drew attention. Sound could fill and, metaphorically, take over a space; it could unite performers and hearers in a common action; and it could intimidate people or evoke emotions like indignation or sorrow. However, certain elements of the soundscape of Irish protests were quite unusual.

  Two key vocal acts or performances seem to have been extremely important: ‘raising the cry’ and keening. In the case of the 1599 Limerick riot in St Mary’s, hundreds of armed men arrived promptly when the cry was raised; in the disturbances at the house of Edmund Sexton in 1636, the raising of the cry immediately brought reinforcements ready and willing to intervene on the side of the Sexton family. The Castle Chamber proceedings even give some detail on the manner of the raising of the cry: at one point ‘Joane Sexton went upp into an upper roome of the said howse and putt her hands out of a window and clapped her hands, and raised the Irish Crye’, leading to the arrival of so many people that soldiers needed to be called to disperse them. The performance thus involved both the noise of the cry and the gesture of clapping the hands.52 In the medieval period in Britain, the whole community had been obliged to turn out to attempt to apprehend malefactors once the ‘hue and cry’ was raised. However, though the tradition of hue and cry has been little studied for the early modern period, it seems that in most areas of England at least, communities were no longer expected to participate in such hunts and the cry gradually fell into disuse. Some Irish towns, however, renewed the obligation to answer the cry in the sixteenth century – in 1505 Galway corporation passed an ordinance that ‘every man that answerith not the crye or skrimishe53 at every of the town gates, at the beginning, with his feansabull [defensive] weapon, to pay and forfayte xiid’.54

  What Barnaby Rich dismissively called ‘the Irish Hubbub’ was still alive and well over 100 years later: he sneered at the frequency with which the Irish raised the cry, even ‘upon ... sleight occasions’, and also at the fact that ‘as these Hubbubs are thus raised in cases of anger and discontent, so they use to give the Hubbub againe in matters of sport and merriment’. Fynes Moryson recorded that the Irish ‘are by nature very Clamorous, upon every small occasion raysing the hobou (that is a dolefull outcrye) which they take one from anothers mouthe till they putt the whole towne in tumult’. Edmund Spenser seems to have seen the hubbub as being so removed from hue and cry that he believed that ‘the manner of ra
ysinge their Crye in their conflictes, and at other troblesome tymes of uprore’ was a remnant of the Scythian origins of the Irish.55 The cry had the potential to create consternation and escalate minor incidents into major ones. For example, one of the charges against Charles Egerton, constable of Carrickfergus Castle, who with several of the warders had assaulted Captain Rice Mannfyelde on 18 August 1596, was that as a result ‘a great tumult and outcrye was raised in the saide towne of Carrigfergus’, and the intervention of the townspeople could have caused ‘great peril to all her maties Guarrison theire’ except that the town’s mayor and ‘some well affected’ had calmed the situation.56

  Spenser distinguished the Irish hubbub from the ‘other soarts of cryes, allso used among the Irishe ... as their lamentacons at their burialles, with dispairefull outcryes, and imoderate waylinges’, so seemingly the two sounds were different to one another.57 Seventeenth-century writers noted that funeral keening, like raising the cry, was both a physical and a vocal performance. Keening women accompanied the lament with gestures such as the loosening and tearing of the hair and clothing, the clapping and raising of the hands, the embracing of the dying or dead person, and even the drinking of their blood. Anthropologists and folklorists who have looked at ritual laments in Ireland and in other parts of Europe, especially Greece, have commented on their role not only in expressing sorrow for the dead but as an outlet for protest that was particularly important for women – a ‘weapon of the weak’. Laments might chastise the deceased person for dying and leaving his wife and family behind, or might even berate him for his mistreatment of them during life.58 In the case of those condemned to death, the keen might be used to protest at the authorities as well as to mourn the fate of the victim. The importance of ritual lament to Irish protest is clear when Rich talks of the citizens of Dublin watching the progress of Bishop O’Devany to execution crying ‘as if Saint Patricke himself had bin going to the gallowes’ and then spending ‘the fore part of the night in heathenish howling’: that latter in particular must have been especially intimidating as the Protestants of the city lay in their beds. A Catholic account of the execution confirmed that ‘when he was mounting the scaffold, the people raised a terrible wail, and shed copious tears, and uttered such tender laments that even the executioners were softened’.59 But the mix of protest with mourning seems to be evident at other executions as well and is likely to have been part of the reason for a scene witnessed by William Brereton in 1636, when he watched a condemned man being led back to the castle in Wexford following the Assizes: ‘the women and some other following making lamentation, sometimes so violent as though they were distracted, sometimes as it were in a kind of tune singing; one of them (’twas said) was his wife’.60

  Brereton’s chance note of this spectacle reminds us again of the difficulties of divining the true extent of protest in early modern Ireland, and understanding its meaning. We can be so caught up in the activities of British governors, Old English elites and Irish nobles that we sometimes miss the voices of the ordinary people of Ireland, natives and newcomers, as they negotiated their places in a changing society. The authorities in Ireland gave them more credit, believing they did have strong opinions and might act to defend their rights. We see in many cases that protest had some impact, especially when used in combination with other resistance tactics such as petitioning, lobbying and non-cooperation. As in England, the authorities were often forced to treat popular grievances seriously. Protest, especially protest with the threat or use of violence, reminded those in charge that some element of consent was needed in return for acquiescence to their rule. By distinguishing ‘faces in the crowd’, by attending to the use of space, time, ritual and gesture, and by listening as their voices express opinions, rather than closing our ears to a meaningless hubbub, we can get closer to the experiences of the ordinary inhabitants of early modern Ireland.

  2

  THE DUBLIN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, 16131

  STEPHEN CARROLL

  Reflecting upon the parliamentary elections of 1613, the Protestant commentator William Farmer declared that:

  ... many hollow-hearted papists were produced for knights of the shire and burgesses of the parliament, and amongst all other[s] many of the citizens of Dublin, who were always accounted the patrons of loyalty ... and paragons of obedience to the kings of England, were now found to be possessed with other spirits.2

  Farmer questioned the loyalty of Irishmen because of their choice of Catholic candidates for Parliament, but he cited the citizens of Dublin in particular, as they had remained loyal subjects until 1613, when they instigated a tumult in the tholsel court of the city council. The fracas arose from a number of grievances, which reached tipping point in the tense atmosphere prior to Parliament. Catholics on Dublin city council had experienced the silencing of their political voice, a challenge to their religious beliefs and the loss of customs privileges. They saw a new Protestant elite taking on responsibilities traditionally reserved for them. This alienation pushed them into alliance with an emerging Catholic interest in the country as a whole. This chapter will analyse their actions to show how Catholics on the council expressed their political consciousness in a period of transformation.

  English monarchs, since the conquest of 1171, had bestowed privileges on Dublin through charters and parliamentary acts, granting it certain trade exemptions and a measure of self-governance. Throughout periods of expansion and contraction, the port towns had largely remained loyal to the crown, protecting the colony from the Gaelic Irish within and foreign intrigue without. The wars of the late Elizabethan period attested Dublin’s loyalty to the English administration. The city council used its revenue to defend the city from rebels, maintaining a watch by night and day. At night there was a standing watch of twenty at the gates and on the walls, and a running watch of twenty in the town. Short-term loans from Dublin merchants to the government offset delays in shipping treasure from London or in raising cess (tax).3

  In April and May 1603, following the death of Elizabeth and the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War, a number of hitherto loyal Leinster and Munster towns asserted their corporate independence and liberty of conscience by rising up in arms and openly celebrating mass. Dublin had remained aloof in this cause, yet the new administration of Sir Arthur Chichester focused on the city for a revival of the Reformation in Ireland. In targeting the Catholic clergy and the city’s elite, Chichester hoped to bring Dublin and, in turn, all Ireland to conformity in religion. To Chichester, Dublin was ‘the lantern of this whole kingdom, & in this matter the only place whereon the eyes and expectation of all the rest are earnestly fastened’.4 The city council came under scrutiny from November 1604 as Chichester insisted the leading officers of the city take the oath of supremacy to the king – an oath, so leading Jesuits insisted, that a Catholic ought not to take.5 This ensured that subsequent mayors, recorders and leading sheriffs would be conforming Protestant men. The following November twenty-two wealthy citizens, many aldermen among them, were issued with letters or mandates calling on them to attend Protestant worship.6 Failure to obey these missives resulted in heavy fines and imprisonment. The unenthusiastic response to this policy by the English privy council brought an end to the sending of mandates in summer 1607, yet this provocation caused lasting resentment among the elite.7

  On 4 July 1605 a proclamation ordered all clergy deriving their authority from Rome to leave the country by 10 December that year. The proclamation outlined the perceived threat the clergy posed: they ‘not only seduce our people there to embrace their superstitious Ceremonies, but do maliciously endeavor to alienate the hearts of our Subjects from Us, by insinuating and breeding a distaste in them, both of our Religion and civil government’.8 Priests, and Jesuits especially, were viewed as fomenters of rebellion, a permanent link between Ireland and Spain. This link led to periodic rumours of invasion, particularly following the Flight of the Earls to the continent in 1607.9 In February 1612 the Dublin government, ac
ting on directions from London urging the exemplary punishment of clergy, executed two Catholic clerics on charges of treason.10 The execution of Bishop Conor O’Devany and Fr Patrick O’Loughran proved to be a huge public event in the city, with the streets thronged with people. Among the crowd were said to be the wives and relatives of leading citizens. Both Protestant and Catholic commentators noted the huge numbers present at the execution site, from which people took away countless relics.11 The two clergymen were subsequently venerated as martyrs, strengthening the resolve of the Catholic populace and creating further tension between them and Dublin Castle just before Parliament convened.

  The merchants of Dublin found it was not just their religious beliefs that London was challenging, but also their trading privileges, as the Dublin and London governments sought to maximise crown revenues in Ireland. Following the financially crippling Nine Years’ War, the government targeted port cities and began moves to end their customs exemptions. In 1608 Dublin lost the right to keep the great and petty customs of the city in negotiations between their agents, Richard Bolton and Robert Ball, and the king’s judges at Serjeants Inn in London. Their right to poundage was upheld by an Act of Parliament of 1500 that exempted the freemen of Dublin, Drogheda and Waterford from this duty.12 However, the collection of poundage was to form the basis of a customs farm that was being auctioned off in London court circles. The crown stood to profit greatly from this auction, thereby pushing the Dublin government to more forceful measures. In October 1611 the crown used the great seal of Ireland to create a customs payment comparable to poundage in Dublin, Drogheda and Waterford, thereby by-passing the statutory exemption of freemen outlined in 1500. Without the assent of merchants from these cities, the new tax was likely to face resistance in the courts, so an Act of Parliament would be needed.13