Religion was now injected into the continual strife of Ireland. In English eyes there were at least three categories of Irishmen: the wild Irish beyond the Pale, the Old English (the Anglo-Norman families who remained loyal to the Catholic Church), and the small section of Protestant English settlers within the Pale. The Irish (including the Anglo-Irish) were proud of their fighting prowess and their ruthlessness against their enemies—and fighting they always were, whether in rebellion against the Crown or in affrays between themselves. There was always some Irishman raising a standard against another, and in their apparent bloodlust the Irish had not advanced in civilization and humanity, in English eyes, since the days of MacMurrough, who had once, in front of his English allies, seized the severed head of one of his hated enemies and gnawed on it, offending the Englishmen’s innate sense of moderation—decapitation, okay; gnawing, no way.
Ireland: England’s Tijuana
Yes, that’s more or less how the English saw it. It was cheap to live there, colorful in a way, tantalizingly foreign, but also more than a little sketchy and dangerous—and cheap only if you discounted the risk of crime and mob violence, for the native Irish were not just poor but shockingly lacking in moral scruple. In the words of Sir Henry Sidney, writing at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, “Surely there was never a people that lived in more misery than... [the Irish] do, nor as it should seem of worse minds, for matrimony among them is no more regarded in effect than conjunction between unreasonable beasts. Perjury, robbery and murder counted allowable. Finally, I cannot find that they make any conscience of sin. . . .”4
Queen Elizabeth I, wearied by the constant stream of murderous news from Ireland, endorsed this view and discovered in Irish barbarism a scope for English duty: it was necessary “to bring that rude and barbarous nation to civility.”5 Indeed the common view among English observers was that there was no more barbarous land on the planet. If Ireland were ever to be made habitable for civilized people, harsh measures were necessary—and at length, one part of the answer seemed to be the establishment of “plantations,” the opening up of Ireland with land grants for English settlers. But the settlements remained precarious. Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, the Earl of Tyrconnell, led a fierce rebellion against England, burning out the colonists wherever they could find them. The rebellion lasted nine years (1594–1603)—nine years of fire and bloodshed, disease and famine, killing tens of thousands; and it raised for England the haunting specter of Ireland as a seat not only of rebellion but of foreign invasion: an army of four thousand Spaniards had arrived in Ireland to aid the rebels. After enormous hard slogging the English defeated the Irish rebels and granted them lenient terms—they were allowed to keep their lands, if not their private armies and political authority. But after four years of chafing under the restraints of peace and the recusant fines levied on Catholics by the Protestant authorities, “The O’Neill” and O’Donnell fled the country in “the flight of the Earls” (1607), apparently hoping to raise a foreign army to invade Ireland and drive out the English. Instead, their departure allowed King James I of England (who reigned from 1603 to 1625) to declare their lands forfeit. Ulster, which had been one of the most “Irish” parts of Ireland, was now to become an enormous plantation for English and Scotch settlers—complicating the religious differences in Ireland even further.
The Fighting Irish
“I am with all the wild Irish at the same point as I am with bears and mad dogs when I see them fight: so that they fight earnestly indeed, and tug each other well, I care not who have the worst.”
Sir Nicholas Arnold, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, 1565, quoted in Paul Johnson, Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1996), p. 32
For the Irish, Catholicism was a matter of principle and identity, even if they might be poorly catechized. For the English, Anglicanism was a matter of state policy; it was the only way to make sure that conflict was avoided and everyone agreed on the same faith (except it wasn’t and they didn’t) and to guarantee freedom of religion (except for Catholics and some Protestant dissenters). The lowland Scotch Presbyterians were different altogether. They were certain, as Calvinists, that they were saved, just as they were convinced that everyone else was predestined to hell. This could make them uncomfortable neighbors, especially as England fell into a civil war between Anglican Royalists and Puritan Roundheads, with the Catholic Irish becoming allies of the former and targets of the latter.
War, War, and More War
The Irish rose in rebellion—a phrase that could be inserted virtually anywhere in Irish history—under the leadership of Sir Phelim O’Neill and Rory O’More as putative allies of the king against parliament in 1641, but paradoxically they also pursued the objective of driving the Protestants from Ireland. It is true that the Stuart kings leaned in a Catholic direction (Charles I’s wife was Catholic, Charles II was a crypto Catholic, and James II publicly embraced the faith), which made the Stuarts particularly attractive to the “Old English” in Ireland, but it is equally clear that the rebels and the king had separate goals that only sometimes worked in concert. There was no way, for instance, that Charles I could condone or countenance the massacre of the Protestant men, women, and children of Portadown (and elsewhere) by the rebels; and loyalist armies took to the field to fight the Irish, while a Scotch army arrived in Ulster to fight the Presbyterian corner against the royalist Anglicans.
After the execution of Charles I in 1649, Oliver Cromwell, leader of the parliamentary armies, put Ireland in his sites; his enemy was the whole bloody island. Catholics were the enemy, loyalists were the enemy—and indeed they had been one and the same after the Catholic Confederacy (led by Anglo-Irishmen) had made a formal alliance with the Royalists. The whole island needed to be subdued and made Puritan. The result was slaughter on a massive scale: Ireland lost at least a quarter of its population (estimates go as high as half). Some fell by the sword, others fled to find sanctuary. If the rising of 1641 had given Protestants their martyrs, Cromwell’s murderous troops gave the Catholics plenty in return—and in Ireland, neither Catholic nor Presbyterian was inclined to forget. Cromwell judged the massacre of Catholic men, women, children, babies, priests, and monks at the town of Drogheda to be God’s judgment; other Irish towns rapidly capitulated to avoid the same fate. With Ireland firmly in his hand, Cromwell multiplied the Ulster plantations, exiling Catholic landholders to the west, to the rocky lands of Connacht and County Clare, and waged an unceasing war of persecution against the Catholic Church.
Good Time Charlie and the Siege of Derry
With the restoration of the monarchy under the charming and broadminded Charles II, hope returned to Ireland, but Protestant extremism at home limited Charles’s options. While James II, his brother, was much more active in expanding toleration—and even preference—to Catholics, he was a far less savvy politician; James lost his throne in a Protestant coup d’etat mounted by his son-in-law William of Orange. James II then went to Ireland, raised an army, and marched on Londonderry in an event that became an epic in Irish history. The city fathers felt they had no alternative but to let James’s army in, until thirteen young apprentices slammed the gates shut (“the Apprentice Boys” are now a Protestant fraternal society famous for its marches in Northern Ireland); the Protestant commander Robert Lundy thought resistance futile and snuck out of the city to escape (“Lundy” is now a term of abuse in Protestant Northern Ireland); and when the besieging Jacobites demanded the city’s capitulation, the Protestant answer came back then (and now), “No surrender.” Of course another great Protestant rallying cry was “no popery”—though the pope, and the Catholic Habsburgs of Austria, supported Britain’s Protestant King William III against the Catholic James II, because the Habsburgs and the Vatican were at odds with James’s ally France.
The “Siege of Derry,” begun on 18 April 1689, was broken by English ships on 28 July. James’s other crippling
defeat came at the hands of William himself, who led his army to defeat the Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July 1689. After two more years of hard fighting, the Jacobites were finished,6 and with defeat came swingeingly punitive anti-Catholic laws—enacted, it is important to note, by the parliament in Dublin, not London. All this was the result of the Irish fighting on behalf of the former king of England. Catholic Irishmen could no longer vote, hold office, bear arms, or even transmit property to their heirs (instead they became tenant farmers for Protestant landlords). From the rebellion of 1641 the proportion of Irish land held by Irish Catholics fell from far more than half (about 59 percent) to an estimated 14 percent in 1695 to only 7 percent in 1714.7
Yet eighteenth-century Ireland seemed a country finally beginning to emerge into prosperity. The English landowners built lavish country houses. Dublin was a major and bustling European city. Irish writers (Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinley Sheridan) and politicians (Edmund Burke, Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington) were of the highest caliber. In some ways, the Protestant Ascendancy of Ireland should not have been surprising. As Lord Macaulay noted of Ireland’s history,The English settlers seem to have been, in knowledge, energy, and perseverance, rather above than below the average level of the population of the mother country. The aboriginal [Irish] peasantry, on the contrary, were in almost a savage state. They never worked till they felt the sting of hunger. They were content with accommodation inferior to that which, in happier countries, was provided for domestic cattle. Already the potato, a root which can be cultivated with scarcely any art, industry, or capital, and which cannot be long stored, had become the food of the common people. From a people so fed diligence and forethought were not to be expected. Even within a few miles of Dublin, the traveller, on a soil the richest and most verdant in the world, saw with disgust the miserable burrows of which squalid and half naked barbarians stared wildly as he passed.8
“To this day,” Macaulay noted, “a more than Spartan haughtiness alloys the many noble qualities which characterize the children of the victors, while a Helot feeling, compounded of awe and hatred, is but too often discernible in the children of the vanquished.”9 Such was the state of Ireland, though of course on the surface normal life carried on, and relations between the Spartan English and the Helot Irish could be cordial enough, though the imperial English—who would govern races as diverse as the Maoris and the Zulus, the Pathans and the Burmese—would always remain fundamentally baffled by the Irish in a way they were not by more exotic peoples.
Reform and Famine
The Anglo-Irish ruling class was so successful that it soon began bruiting about the idea that it deserved more of a hand in governing, even perhaps an independent Ireland. Indeed, simultaneous with the American War for Independence, the Protestant Irishman Henry Grattan led a movement for free trade and an independent Irish legislature. It is, perhaps, an irony of Irish history that many of the leading calls for Irish independence in the eighteenth and nineteenth century came from Protestants, and that in the twentieth century many of the agitators for Irish independence were half English or at least only half Irish (including Eamon de Valera, the dominant political figure of the Irish republic who was born in New York City to an Irish mother and a Spanish-Cuban father).
Indeed, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Ireland (if not all its priests) was almost always on the side of maintaining the Union with England after Parliament began repealing the penal laws against Catholics in the late eighteenth century. As a supranational institution, the Church distrusts nationalism, even Irish nationalism; and the Church condemns secret societies, especially those prone to violence, which meant that, for instance, in the twentieth century, members of the Irish Republican Army were held to be excommunicated. Moreover, since its foundation in 1795, the British government had provided a generous subsidy to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, and Catholic seminarians took an oath of loyalty to the British Crown. And it did not go unnoticed that so many independence movements were led by Protestants, which made the Catholic hierarchy suspect some devilish heresy was afoot.
The evocatively named Wolfe Tone gave Catholic bishops plenty of reason for pause, despite his pleas for Catholic toleration. He was an Enlightenment radical, which meant, among other things, that he was a Protestant who had imbibed heavy doses of agnosticism; one of his allies, and rivals, was the equally wonderfully named Napper Tandy. Tone led the Presbyterian-dominated United Irishmen, meant to unite Protestant Dissenters and Irish Catholics against England. The French Revolution made Francophiles of Tone and Tandy, and Tone was actually commissioned in Napoleon’s army. He returned to Ireland to lead an uprising with the help of the French in 1796 and again in 1798. Both were miserable failures, and after the latter, he was captured. Threatened with hanging, he died of self-inflicted wounds in prison.
These rebellions—however easily stifled—were a reminder that Ireland remained a possible springboard for an invasion of Britain, then embroiled in its long war against Napoleonic France. The logical solution was to hug Ireland closer to the bosom of Britannia, and in 1800, Ireland was integrated fully into the Parliament at Westminster with the Act of Union (effective 1 January 1801). The Union with Scotland (1707) had been a success, and it was hoped union with Ireland would end that unhappy country’s endless turmoil. Of course it did not. At first Catholics greeted the Union as they had greeted the restoration of the Stuart monarchy—with hope, for the Irish people, despite their contumacious cussedness, are naturally conservative, and peace and prosperity, such as England might offer, would have been a refreshing change. But they soon found themselves swept up by a charismatic leader who spoke for Catholic emancipation and whose goal was dissolving the Union while keeping Ireland under the Crown in a sort of self-governing commonwealth status. This was the patrician Catholic Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), a man naturally conservative by his aristocratic birth and political inclination, who became a champion of Irish reform. It was he who created the populist support within Ireland that led the Tory government of the Duke of Wellington (Anglo-Irish himself) to grant toleration to Irish Catholics in the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, allowing them to vote and serve in Parliament.
Though Ireland remained ever turbulent, there were certainly hopeful signs in the prosperity of Ulster and the removal of the penal acts against Catholics. But all this was put at hazard by the Irish potato famine (1845–49), which Irish farmers could not overcome and which British relief efforts could not alleviate to anywhere near a sufficient degree. It is clear, despite pernicious mythmaking to the contrary (mythmaking enshrined in law by the state of New York, which requires that the Irish potato famine be—outrageously—compared to “genocide, slavery, and the Holocaust”10) that there was no intentional effort to starve the Irish or inflict genocide on Ireland. There was, however, a misguided sense among some members of the British government that relief efforts that violated laissez-faire would only make matters worse, and it was hard for the British government to comprehend the full extent of the calamity.
The government of Sir Robert Peel responded to the potato blight with the lifting of the Corn Laws—which protected British farmers from free trade and thus kept prices artificially high. Peel’s assumption was that free trade would help lift the Irish economy and provide jobs for the poor tenant farmers squeezed unto death between the demands of their landlords and the failed crop. When famine propagandists talk about starving Ireland exporting food to England, this is what they mean—Ireland did indeed export food to Britain, but the money earned from the exports was supposed to create Irish jobs. However misguided the policy, it was meant to help the Irish, and it was so unpopular with the agricultural lobby in England that the Peel government fell.
Along with the Corn Laws (1846), the Navigation Laws were repealed (1847), allowing relief supplies from other nations to go directly to Ireland rather than first being transferred to British ships. In addition, the Peel government imported
corn from America specifically to feed the hungry Irish—though the Irish didn’t know what to do with the corn, as it required a relatively complicated process to make it edible—and set up a vast, if mismanaged, system of poor relief, which the successor government of Lord John Russell developed into subsidized government works projects that failed to achieve their aims.
The botched response to the famine, when Britain prided itself on bringing good government to Ireland, could only engender bitterness in the Irish who suffered horribly—not only from famine, but from a concurrent outbreak of cholera. There were numerous private charities—endorsed by the Queen—devoted to famine relief, but even these caused resentment; starving Catholic Irishmen did not like having Protestant pamphlets foisted on them with their soup.
There is no telling with certainty how many died, though we know that poorer areas suffered most, and that Ireland’s population fell by about two million people between 1845 and 1851. More than half this number was made up of emigrants, many of whom left for America—an exodus that would continue in startling numbers over the next half century. In 1846, Ireland’s population was about eight million people. In 1901, it was about four million. There were some, it is true, who took a Malthusian view—that the famine was the inevitable result of Irish overpopulation, or the inevitable result of a hapless, improvident people. But there were many others in England who considered the Irish famine a problem that should have been dealt with by the wealthy Anglo-Irish landowners; to their mind it was the Protestant Ascendancy’s failure, not England’s. It was nevertheless a catastrophe for the Irish, and a direct repudiation of the advertised benefits of British rule.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Page 8