The Story of Ireland

by Neil Hegarty

  In 1688, however, Mary of Modena gave birth to a son. Now the work of Henry VIII, Elizabeth and Cromwell seemed set to be overturned by a new Catholic dynasty. For parliament, faith and liberty were indivisible – yet here was England about to be pulled back under popish rule. The Parliamentarians, therefore, began preparations for rebellion once again; and this time they looked abroad for a leader. They turned to Holland – to Prince William of Orange, who was both a leader of Protestant Europe and James’s own son-in-law, having married his daughter Mary in 1677. William himself was pragmatic: his reputation as fervent champion of Protestantism is by no means deserved, because although Holland was ostensibly Calvinist in orientation, it was a remarkably diverse and liberal society, with large populations of Catholics and Jews.

  This period in European history was dominated by a high degree of tension and frequent conflict involving France on the one hand and on the other a shifting Grand Alliance consisting of most of the other major powers of central and western Europe. The coming conflict in Ireland, indeed, was a sideshow, albeit an important one – a single component in a much larger continent-wide struggle for power that would continue into the eighteenth century. To be sure, it was partly religious in nature. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Counter-Reformation was in full flood and the boundaries of Protestant Europe had as a result been pushed back. The French revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, which since 1598 had granted civil and religious liberties to Protestants in that country, had caused several hundred thousand Huguenots to flee to England, Holland and Protestant parts of Germany and Switzerland. Yet in essence these were conflicts rooted not in religion – except in Britain and Ireland – but rather in political rivalry. At this time, William’s Dutch lands were under constant threat from rampant French armies to his south; an alliance with England would bring the power of its army and navy to his aid – and William would, as a result, hold the destiny of Ireland and England in his hands.

  So when the English parliament sought his aid against James, William seized the opportunity. When it came to the point, indeed, the so-called Glorious Revolution was effected without bloodshed and with remarkable rapidity. A Dutch army landed in southwest England in November 1688; by December, James had fled to France and his son-in-law William and daughter Mary were on the throne. At once the scene shifted dramatically to Ireland, where James’s supporters, the Jacobites, would shortly face the Williamites in a bitter two-year struggle for supremacy. This would prove to be the last war of a violent century and the final stand of Catholic Ireland against a Protestant ascendancy. And it was a campaign shot through with irony: for the Catholics were defending the rights of the legitimate King of England, Scotland and Ireland, while the Protestants were fighting in the cause of a usurper.

  The administration at Dublin Castle was in the hands of James’s appointees – most of the rest of the undergraduates and Fellows of Trinity College had fled Ireland in response to the new regime – and the Jacobites in addition controlled virtually the whole of Ireland, with the exception of pockets of resistance in Ulster. By any measure, therefore, the circumstances must have appeared bright for James when, in March 1689, he sailed from France and landed at Kinsale. He was in the company of the French ambassador and a force of French troops – and awaiting him was an Irish army of forty-two thousand men. He marched directly to Cork and from there to Dublin, cheered as he went by crowds who sensed an opportunity to win back the lands that had been confiscated almost forty years before. In Dublin, the Irish parliament declared that its English counterpart could no longer legislate for Ireland: James agreed to this measure but refused either to repeal the Act of Settlement or to establish the Catholic Church in Ireland. James’s position was of course a difficult one: he was obliged to please his Irish hosts, but did not want to do so at the expense of provoking a watching English population. As a result of this balancing act, however, his welcome in Ireland cooled substantially.

  By now the Jacobite hold over Ireland had been strengthened by further successes in Ulster, which had swept much of the province clean of resistance. Such as remained was holed up at Enniskillen and especially at Protestant Londonderry, which had proclaimed its loyalty to William and Mary and shut its gates to James’s emissaries as early as December 1688. The crowded city had remained obdurately resistant ever since, but in April 1689 James himself resolved to travel north, confident that his presence would resolve matters and win over the leaders. Instead, he was fired on from the ramparts and forced to beat a mortifying retreat; and the siege of the city, which had been closing since December, now began in earnest.

  Few held out much hope that the city could survive a siege of any duration: its fortifications had been built to withstand not modern weaponry but the raids of the surrounding Gaelic Irish; and while Derry was perched on a steep hill and surrounded almost entirely by easily defensible river and marsh, it was also encircled beyond that by even higher ground, from which the city was an easy target of enemy bombardment. Furthermore, it was by now chronically overcrowded. Hunger and disease soon became a serious issue for the population of some thirty thousand defenders and refugees; and it was doubtless of little comfort that the surrounding Jacobite army, at the end of its supply lines, had endured an uncomfortable winter and was now similarly ravaged.

  The besiegers also lacked the paraphernalia of modern warfare: they possessed little ammunition and siege equipment, and it was clear that they hoped Derry would be taken as a result of starvation and weakness rather than by force. A boom had been laid downriver to prevent any Williamite supply ships from coming to the city’s aid; and this measure worked well until 28 July, when, with conditions inside the walls now desperate, two ships did succeed in breaking through the barrier and sailing up to the quays of Derry to bring supplies to the defenders. Shortly afterwards, the 105-day siege was lifted and the disconsolate Jacobite army began to straggle away. At the same time the simultaneous siege of Enniskillen, which had pinned down Jacobite forces across much of the midlands, was raised.

  The Siege of Derry marks the apotheosis of the Ulster Protestant tradition of defiance (‘No Surrender’) in the face of adversity. Quite apart from this profound symbolic resonance, however, the event was of some political significance too, for its duration and its ultimate failure had significantly weakened James’s position in Ireland. This deterioration was further signalled a few weeks later, when the first Williamite forces sailed into Belfast Lough and took up quarters in Belfast. The winter to come consisted of stalemate, but many more thousands of Williamite soldiers arrived from England and Europe in the spring of 1690; and William himself arrived – reluctantly, for he had no wish to be diverted towards distant Ireland – in Belfast on 14 June with a force of fifteen thousand. On 30 June, the two kings met on the banks of the river Boyne in County Meath: William at the head of thirty-five thousand Danish, English, Huguenot and German soldiers, plus Ulster regiments; James leading twenty-five thousand Irish and French troops.

  The Battle of the Boyne of the following day, though it was certainly not the great decisive engagement of Irish myth, has provided one enduring image: that of William on a white charger, his vast force wholly outnumbering, outgunning and outflanking the Jacobites. Afterwards James fled, first to Dublin and then back to Kinsale: he didn’t stop, in fact, until he reached France. His reputation was damaged fatally in the process; and in addition, the Battle of the Boyne took on a practical significance that it would have lacked had James stayed to fight another day: it delivered Dublin and the province of Leinster to William. And yet the Boyne did not end Irish hopes of recovering religious liberty and lost landholdings: the Jacobites had been only scattered, not destroyed; and William would encounter a significant reverse just over a month later, as his attempt to take Limerick by storm was repelled by the city’s defenders. Shortly afterwards he sailed from Ireland, leaving final victory to his lieutenants.

  The war in Ireland ground on, in fact, for another year
– and the decisive battle was the bloodiest in Irish history. On 12 July 1691, at Aughrim in County Galway, the Williamites faced another army of Irish and French troops; each side fielded approximately twenty thousand men. The Jacobites had previously retreated west across the Shannon out of weakness – but now at Aughrim their leaders felt renewed confidence. Their situation was strong, not least because the army was under the command of the French general Charles Chalmont, Marquis de St Ruth, a name associated with the crushing of the Protestants of France. The Jacobites also had the advantage of being positioned on high ground and dug in amid the ruins of Aughrim Castle; any Williamite advance would have to be made across flat fields that even in high summer consisted of little more than bog. For St Ruth, moreover, this was holy war. Addressing his army on the eve of battle, he declared that the Jacobites were engaged in a battle for souls: ‘Stand to it therefore my dears, and bear no longer the reproaches of the heretics who brand you with cowardice, and you may be assured that King James will love and reward you, Louis the Great will protect you, all good Catholics will applaud you, I myself will command you, the church will pray for you, your posterity will bless you, God will make you all saints and his holy mother will lay you in her bosom.’19 As if to underline this fact, a phalanx of priests moved through the ranks to offer Communion just before battle commenced.

  And, at first, fortune favoured the Jacobites: their enemy advanced three times through waist-high waters, only to be repeatedly driven back and slaughtered; many Williamite soldiers drowned in the bog. It seemed to be a rout – yet at the crucial moment, the Jacobites were stymied by poor planning and incompetence. Running short of ammunition, they discovered that their reserve supply was of English design and incompatible with their French-made muskets, so the tide turned once again. The Williamites now advanced, and St Ruth – who still believed that victory was within his grasp – was decapitated by a flying cannon-ball. Now his men were thrown into confusion: their line broke, the enemy surged forward and the Jacobites were hunted across the marshy fields. At the close of battle, seven thousand had been killed: it was the biggest loss of life in any Irish battle, and the bulk of the remaining Catholic elite lay among the dead. It was at this point that the Catholic threat was extinguished for the next hundred years. Protestant control had at last been achieved: by the end of the Williamite wars, only some 20 per cent of Irish land remained in Catholic hands. Yet for all that, a sense of siege had not been wholly dissipated. It was necessary now to design a new political order – one that would eliminate the Catholic threat and secure once and for all a Protestant dominion in Ireland.

  Chapter Six

  A Divided Nation

  By October 1691, Jacobite resistance in Ireland had ended. In that month the city of Limerick opened its gates to the Williamites, and a new era in Ireland began. Among Protestants, hopes were high that the postwar settlement would bring at last the sense of security they had long craved – but just as the Irish conflict had been but one element in a wider European conflict, so too was the final treaty heavily influenced by events overseas. William’s essential pragmatism was once more in evidence: he and his officials judged it imperative to wind up operations in Ireland as rapidly as possible in order to see off a resurgent French threat closer to home. He understood clearly that this could best be achieved by giving certain limited favours to the Jacobites, including a measure of religious toleration and guarantees in relation to land ownership; and the Jacobites also knew that, their dire military situation notwithstanding, they were now in an unexpectedly strong bargaining position.

  The result was the Treaty of Limerick of 3 October 1691, which formally ended the war in Ireland. Its terms provided, somewhat ambiguously, for Catholic freedoms ‘consistent with the laws of Ireland or as they did enjoy in the reign of King Charles II’; other clauses ensured the continuation of the property and commercial rights of those who had surrendered at Limerick, provided they swore allegiance to William and Mary. Those who wished to leave Ireland for a new life in Catholic France would be permitted to do so – although they would be stripped of their property and privileges of citizenship. It is estimated that some twelve thousand individuals left for France at this time, swelling even further the Irish population in Europe; these exiles would later become known as the Wild Geese.

  The Treaty of Limerick was condemned by elements from both parties. For many Jacobites its terms were punitive; their negotiators, it was felt, might have held out for a better deal. On the other side, many Protestants felt that the king and his officials had been duped into agreeing lenient terms:

  Had fate that still attends our Irish war,

  The conquerors lose, the conquered gainers are;

  Their pen’s the symbol of our sword’s defeat,

  We fight like heroes but like fools we treat.1

  In response, the Protestant government in Dublin set about refashioning the treaty. The result was the design of a new political and cultural order in Ireland – one that was overtly punitive and anti-papist.

  The first fruits of this decision appeared in 1697, when anti-clerical legislation – the first of the so-called penal laws and a signal breach of the Treaty of Limerick – was enacted. The legal and cultural phenomenon of such legislation was, of course, far from being unique to Ireland. Statutes designed to persecute various minorities had been a feature of Europe’s cultural landscape for centuries; in Ireland itself, Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews and others had been the target of various statutes since the Reformation. The intention behind the penal legislation enacted progressively by the Irish parliament between 1691 and 1760, however, was specifically to crush what remained of Catholic power in the country.

  If the penal laws were at first defensive in nature, they soon developed into a remarkably dense maze of legislation that encompassed every aspect of daily life. Catholic priests were outlawed; Catholics were prohibited from entering parliament; from voting; from owning firearms; from marrying Protestants or adopting children; from buying land; and from owning a house valued at more than £5. New inheritance laws stipulated that any land left by a Catholic must be broken up among all his children, the idea being to ensure that no large Catholic estates could possibly survive intact for more than a generation or two. Bars were set on Catholic education – ‘no person of the Popish religion shall publicly or in public houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning within this realm’ – leading to the establishment of discreet ‘hedge schools’ across Ireland.

  The penal laws make for fascinating reading, being a heady combination of shrill paranoia and beady-eyed realism. Much of the legislation was informed by the notion of cunning papist plots and propaganda concocted in Rome to be exported wholesale to Ireland with the intention of defeating Protestantism by guile; at the same time, clear and cool attention was paid to the importance of property and land in the operation of power. Female sexuality was the subject of the usual hysterical attention, as the preamble to the law barring inter-religious marriage makes clear:

  Whereas many protestant woman, heirs or heirs apparent to land or other great substances in goods or chattels, or having considerable estates for life, or guardianship of children intitled [sic] to such estates, by flattery and other crafty insinuations of popish persons, have been seduced to contract matrimony with and take to husband, papists, to the great ruin of their estates, to the great loss of many protestant women that they forsake their religion and become papists, to the great dishonour of Almighty God, the great prejudice of the protestant interest, and the heavy sorrow of all their protestant friends….2

  But, although the intention of the penal laws was to intimidate, the legislation taken in its entirety did not succeed. Indeed, it would have required unprecedented resolve for such a vast body of law to be enforced; and – as had been the case with the Statutes of Kilkenny three centuries previously – such a resolve was not always in evidence. Sometimes, this absence of will emanated from the Irish authorities themselves
: the futility of attempting to enforce such laws must rapidly have been understood in government circles. Sometimes too, the English – and following the Union of Scotland and England of 1707, British – authorities had good political reasons for watering down much of the legislation that flooded their way from the Irish parliament. An eighteenth-century entente with Catholic Austria, for example, made aspects of the penal laws politically unpalatable. Passive resistance on the part of the population also had its effect: it would be next to impossible to pursue a renegade Catholic priest across the fields if the local community – Catholic but not infrequently supported tacitly by Ascendancy families – was determined to provide that priest with succour.

  In Ireland itself, the web of penal legislation was subject to scathing criticism. Looking back at the era, the political commentator Edmund Burke (1728–97) – whose own family had Catholic antecedents – claimed that the code was ‘a machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man’.3 Burke also criticized its short-sightedness: in oppressing the great majority of the Irish population in such a way, he claimed, the penal code had had the effect of preventing them from tasting the delicious fruits of British civilization and orienting them instead towards the siren calls of the French Revolution.

  Even if the penal laws were not everywhere enforced, they criminalized an entire culture and crucially helped to make the connection between faith and nation indivisible in the minds of its people. Faith as an expression of national identity had long been central to English culture; now, loss of land and of religious freedom became the defining marks of caste for the Irish. As for the wider purpose behind the formulation of the penal legislation, it remains an open question as to whether the Protestant administration of Ireland truly imagined it could reverse the Catholic tide in Ireland and evangelize to remake the country in an Anglican image. European models certainly existed, albeit in reverse: during the Reformation in Austrian Bohemia and Hungary, large sections of the population had embraced Protestantism, but this movement had been crushed by the Hapsburgs and these lands were now solidly Catholic once more. In parts of France where Protestants had formed the majority, the Huguenots had been expelled and their religion suppressed ruthlessly.