by Neil Hegarty
The new political climate proved alarming to the Catholic Old English community in Ireland. Some of its members, in spite of the travails of the previous century, had made the assumption that they would be in close communion with the English administration rather than in opposition to it – but the increasing identification of the State with Protestantism gave the lie to such notions. For James I, it was a political imperative that the established Church be supported wholeheartedly: as the son of Mary Stuart, he remained the object of scrutiny on the part of his Protestant subjects, who were alert at all times to any sign of secret Catholic sympathies. The relatively liberal policies pursued in Ireland in the opening years of his reign, therefore, rapidly gave way to forms of anti-Catholic repression; and the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 bred an anti-papist sentiment that could not readily be dispersed.
The legislative environment, however, was at first less harsh towards Catholicism than it might have been. James was equally required to foster a sense of unity among the quarrelling component parts of his new realm, and this fact did not permit an outright campaign against the substantial Catholic populations of Ireland and Britain: the legislative programme of 1612, for example, included laws enacted against Jesuits and seminarians, but was in general limited in its anti-Catholic scope. Several years later, though, the campaign was stepped up and directed specifically against the laity: the government now tilted decisively and publicly against the Catholic faith – and this, paired potently with political harassment, had the result of placing both the Gaelic Irish and the Old English firmly on the back foot. As for the Catholic Church itself, it was inevitable that it would emerge as an oppositional political movement.
James died in March 1625 and his son was crowned Charles I in February of the following year. The new king embodied many of the ambiguities of the age: although a shy and diffident man, he was also inflexible in his views and, like his father before him, wholly dedicated to the principle of the divine right of kings. He was no ideologically committed Protestant: rather, he was cosmopolitan and a religious moderate; his consort, Henrietta Maria, was a French Catholic princess. From the very beginning, therefore, the king was in conflict with the increasingly Puritan English parliament. He was required to walk a tightrope at all times, and the increasing fragility of his rule was expressed in the political incoherence of these years. The state’s policies in Ireland inclined first in one direction and then in another, reacting to the climate of the world outside as much as to the state of Ireland itself. When, in the 1620s, the long peace between England and Spain ended abruptly, the Old English families in Ireland sought to make political hay by demonstrating their public loyalty to the Crown. The result – the ‘Graces’ agreed in 1628 between Charles and Old English representatives, guaranteeing existing property rights and an end to land expropriation – symbolized a certain grudging understanding between the two sides. However, when peace negotiations with Spain were once more taken up in the spring of 1629, many of these Graces fell by the wayside and anti-Catholic policies and land confiscations soon began again. To Ireland’s Catholics Charles was no ally, but he was a far better bet than the Protestant English parliament that regarded itself as purified and democratic and was now bent on checking the monarch’s powers.
Increasingly, the Crown struggled to assert itself in both England and Scotland. In 1639, in order to shore up his declining authority in Scotland, Charles attempted to impose the Book of Common Prayer in the kingdom. The Calvinist Scots would have none of it: they responded by occupying northern England and demanding autonomy from the Crown; this in turn destabilized English politics and empowered the English parliament, with the result that Charles lost control of the political process not only in Scotland but also in England. The monarch infuriated the Parliamentarian side yet further by ordering the raising of an army of Irish Catholics to cross the Irish Sea and intervene on the Royalist side in England itself – thus tapping into the latent English fear of the Irish arriving in the night to murder them in their beds. Fearful of what might be in store should a vengeful Puritan parliament gain the upper hand, the Irish Catholics made a fateful decision: they would strike first in support of the Crown.
The Irish Confederacy formed at this time was by no means a separatist league. Instead, it brought together what remained of the Catholic elite – both the Old English families and the Gaelic chieftains who had survived Elizabeth’s wars – in what was in essence a rising in defence of Catholicism in Ireland. Time would show that this was far from a united group: on the contrary, it was riven with dissent, for its conglomeration of leaders had fundamental differences and varying aspirations. For now, however, a limited degree of common purpose sufficed. Although the leaders of the rising anticipated that support could be gathered from across Ireland, it was clear from the outset that their muscle would come principally from Ulster, where grievances were at their keenest. So when the rebellion began on 23 October 1641, its principal aim was to seize not only Dublin Castle, the seat of English authority in Ireland and stocked with a great store of arms, but also the main forts and centres of power across the north. But the rising was ill planned and disorganized from the outset. In Dublin, the administration was tipped off in the nick of time and the castle reinforced just enough to prevent its capture; and in Ulster, while the rebellion swept across much of the centre of the province, Londonderry and the chain of strongholds stretching south of the city remained in government hands.
By winter’s end, however, the unrest had spread across the country. A Scots army crossed to Ulster and engaged the rebels, rapidly gaining the upper hand; but in July 1642, the Spanish-educated Owen Roe O’Neill – nephew of Hugh O’Neill – landed at Sheephaven Bay in north Donegal to direct the rebels’ efforts. The administration in Dublin began to dispatch punitive expeditions to quell the unrest: these targeted not only the Ulster rebels but Catholics across the Pale and into Munster. The events of the rising, however, are best remembered in Ulster, where events would escalate swiftly and get out of control: thirty years of plantation and dispossession exploded into violence, as Irish Catholics who had once been submissive tenants now turned on the Protestant settlers. The subsequent unravelling of Ulster society remains a defining moment in Irish history, marking as it does the onset of the province’s first round of sectarian blood-letting.
As winter descended, Protestant planters were attacked across central Ulster and expelled from their homes. The attacks were at first focused on property, as the rebels descended on farmsteads and made off with whatever goods could be carried on their backs. Before long, though, the settlers themselves became targets and the attacks heavily ritualized attempts to sever – sometimes literally – the Protestant presence from the land: the planters, in a symbolic echoing of Catholic dispossession, were stripped of their garments and possessions before being driven from their properties. Tellingly, the precious documents giving planters leasehold to the land were frequently seized too and destroyed. Refugees straggling south towards Dublin told stories of corpses unearthed from Protestant graveyards; flesh sliced from the bodies of living animals in Protestant-owned flocks and herds; planters forced to convert at the point of a pike. This was a world turned on its head, violently and traumatically.
There was no over-arching plan to exterminate planter culture. Rather, the widespread chaos and anarchy took the leaders of the rising by surprise, and calls for discipline went unheard. Atrocity and massacre became commonplace as a host of local grudge matches, simmering personal bitterness and vendettas found expression: approximately four thousand settlers were killed, and another eight thousand refugees died from cold and starvation. The most notorious episode took place at the market town of Portadown in County Armagh, where in November 1641 a group of some hundred Protestant men, women and children who had previously been expelled from their lands were assembled at the crossing of the river Bann. Here they were stripped before being herded into the water; if they did not drown or die from exposure,
they were shot or beaten to death with the oars of rowing boats. A survivor named Elizabeth Price saw her five children murdered; she testified later that ‘those that could swym and come to the shore they either knockt them in the heade & soe after drowned them, or els shott them to death in the water’. Reprisals against Catholics followed: at Islandmagee in County Antrim, for example, dozens of Catholics – women and children included – were killed, many hacked to death; and this was not an isolated incident.
The events of 1641 have reverberated in the culture of Ulster Protestantism ever since. Long-term lessons were drawn from the examples of Portadown and other violent incidents: first, that the sense of embattlement that had from the outset characterized the Scots settlement of Ulster had been wise and prescient, foretelling as it had the shocking events to come; and second, that the native Catholic community in Ireland – inherently treacherous, disloyal and opportunistic – could simply never be trusted. The story of the rising acted, generation after generation, both as a warning and as a reminder to Protestants that they were indeed a chosen people, to be tested by God. It led to the creation of a specific persecution narrative; and it laid down a firm template for the course of history still to come.
The flames were further stoked by the actions of the Puritan-dominated English parliament which, from the end of 1641, began systematically amassing sworn evidence against ‘these bloody Papists’ guilty of ‘cruelties and tortures exceeding all parallel, unheard of among Pagans, Turks, or Barbarians’.7 These depositions (many now held in the Library of Trinity College Dublin) were witness statements with a very political purpose: central planks in what became a major propaganda exercise in order to raise an army to reconquer Ireland. They provide – all thirty volumes of them – a window into the nature of contemporary life in Ireland in general and in Ulster in particular. Ordinary people told their stories of what had happened in the early months of the rebellion: these were narratives that consisted principally of an inventory of stolen possessions, cattle and household goods. Very quickly, however, the commission that was set up to take these depositions began specifically to seek evidence of massacres by the native Irish; at the end of the rebellion, such testimony could be used to demand the execution of the leaders.
The result was a series of accounts of various atrocities that had taken place – some related by eyewitnesses, others second-and third-hand accounts – published in pamphlets that received large print runs in England throughout the course of the 1640s. The evidence detailed in the depositions tended to be magnified: Protestant deaths, for example, were estimated to run to over 150,000 – greatly exceeding, in fact, the entire Protestant population of Ulster at the time. The violence against person and property that accompanied the rising was rendered even more lurid by further allegations: Protestant babies had been jammed on to the points of pikes; settlers roasted alive on spits like pigs; women in the act of childbirth driven through the fields to drown in the nearest river. Significantly, many of these dreadful images are stock stories, atrocity tales that abounded in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were adapted here to a specifically Irish context. In the process, it becomes virtually impossible to ascertain the cold facts of these cases: the dividing line between historical detail and hysterical propaganda becomes too blurred. The depositions, then, were in part a seventeenth-century ‘dodgy dossier’ that would justify the horror soon to be visited on Ireland.
For the moment, however, the Parliamentarians had the monarch himself in their sights. In London Charles was under growing pressure, and he moved now to abandon his putative Irish allies. With highly coloured atrocity stories from Ireland on everyone’s lips, and a growing clamour for action, Charles signed into law the Adventurers’ Act of March 1642. Under its terms, 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of Irish land were confiscated – to be given in parcels to anybody willing to finance a war against the rebels. For a mere £200, an English adventurer could secure 400 hectares (1000 acres) of Irish land. One Parliamentarian who came forward with £600 was a man driven less by land hunger than by the imperative of bringing divine vengeance and English law to the barbarous Irish: Oliver Cromwell.
We have seen the many tides that one time or another have joined the inhabitants of the western islands, and even in Ireland itself, offered a tolerable way of life to Protestants and Catholics alike. Upon all of these Cromwell’s record was a lasting bane. By an uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic religion, by the bloody deeds already described, he cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds…upon all of us there still lies the curse of Cromwell.8
Even in the fraught context of the relationship between Ireland and England, Oliver Cromwell is a uniquely polarizing figure. Against the image of the English Lord Protector, democrat and defender of religious liberty, is set that of a genocidal tyrant wading knee-deep in Irish blood. Yet Cromwell was more complex a character than allowed for in either of these versions. Born in Cambridgeshire in 1599 into a family of middling rank – ‘by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity’9 – he rose to power in an age when religion, politics and ethnicity were fused to heady effect, and when the absolutist power structures of a feudal age were giving way to government guided by a new kind of moral identity, answerable to both God and parliament.
Cromwell’s moral universe largely mirrored that of the Puritan faction of which he was a product. However, his opinions on the subjects of Catholicism in general and of Irish Catholicism in particular were relatively ambiguous. He held the Catholic clergy in profound contempt – a view that stemmed from his own fervent sense of a sacred and personal relationship with God. The idea that a priest must mediate that relationship revolted him; and in the same way, he regarded the Catholic emphasis on ritual to be little better than witchcraft. But his attitude towards lay Catholics was rather more liberal: so long as they kept themselves to themselves and resisted the temptation to evangelize among good Protestants, they were free to worship whom they chose – in private. At a very fundamental level, after all, Cromwell’s belief that Catholics were damned to burn in hell enabled him to leave them well alone: if God had washed his hands of them, then in the normal course of events Cromwell should do likewise. (It was Royalists, rather than Catholics, that he hated with a passion.)
His ideas about specifically Irish Catholicism, however, had been fixed by the experience of the 1641 rising in Ulster – or, rather, by the manner in which the rising had been represented in England. He considered the Catholic Irish not merely a barbaric popish race destined for eternal damnation but also a people who were overdue a hefty repayment for their onslaught on the Protestant settlers of Ulster. Add to this the persistent vein of racial hatred of the Irish that ran through Puritan culture, and the Irish role in the savage civil war that scarred English society in the 1640s, and it is possible to grasp the unique combination of factors that moved Cromwell to action.
Both the 1641 rising in Ireland and the civil war in England were elements in a much larger political, military and ideological conflict that raged across Ireland and Britain throughout the whole decade. This ‘War of the Three Kingdoms’ was further complicated in Ireland by foreign interventions, notably by the papacy, which dispatched a representative, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini (complete with military supplies), to direct operations. Such additional elements confused yet further an already anarchic situation. On the one hand, both Owen Roe O’Neill and Rinuccini aspired to the creation of a Catholic government in Ireland. On the other, many Old English leaders of the Irish Confederacy were fundamentally Royalist, supportive of Charles I’s efforts to keep his throne in England and hopeful of creating a status quo that would permit both self-government for Ireland and full and equal rights for Catholicism. It complicated matters significantly that Charles had signed the Adventurers’ Act – but in spite of this fact, many members of the confederacy still held to the b
elief that the monarchy was their best defender against the Puritans. Other members of the confederacy, however, did not support the monarchy, placing their faith instead in the idea of European intervention. Indeed, the Spanish and French governments – now observing an ever-increasing influx of Irish Catholics, as soldiers and university students scattered across the continent – set about sending modest flows of aid to Ireland.
By 1648, a socially and politically chaotic Ireland hosted armies from a multitude of factions – Gaelic Irish, Old English, Royalist – which were (usually) opposed to the English parliament but cannot neatly be categorized by religion or ethnicity. Finally, and in the face of what seemed Cromwell’s fait accompli in England at the end of the civil war, an uneasy and fractious alliance was made: the Earl of Ormond, Charles’s representative in Ireland, agreed to respect Catholic rights and to grant legal recognition to the Church. This was a mere promise, but in the face of the gathering storm it was enough for some of the Catholic leadership; accordingly, they threw in their lot with Ormond on 17 January 1649. Whether or not the king would honour the agreements was never put to the test: on 30 January Charles was executed in London and the Puritan political ascendancy in England confirmed. A month later the papal nuncio – who had been holding out for complete recognition of Catholicism and a restitution of all confiscated lands, and who had, as a result, not been a success in Ireland – took ship at Galway, bound for Rome.
Ormond now moved hastily to consolidate his position. On paper, this was strong: Parliamentarian forces held only the immediate hinterland of Dublin and a small and rapidly shrinking enclave in Ulster. In early July Ormond captured Drogheda, a mere 50 kilometres (30 or so miles) north of Dublin, with the intention of using the port as a springboard for an assault on the capital itself. But the Dublin garrison could now call on the might of Puritan England, and at the end of July was duly strengthened by an infusion of English troops. In early August, Ormond’s Royalist armies were defeated in an engagement just south of the city; and on 15 August, Cromwell himself landed unopposed outside Dublin at the head of an army of twelve thousand men, plus a consignment of modern artillery. As he set out for Ireland, John Milton, the greatest English poet of the time, had urged him to end the ‘absurd and savage customs’ of the Irish who had been made ‘devils’ by popery. This was language wholly in keeping with the spirit of the age, and Cromwell was not about to disappoint his poet friend. Another reconquest of Ireland had begun.