A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  His subsequent campaigning was more moderate. He observed the terms of surrender at Clonmel in 1650, even though his army had been badly mauled in attacking it. Cromwell departed Ireland shortly after taking Clonmel, leaving the command to Ireton. The cost to Ireland as a whole was catastrophic: about 20 per cent of the population died from violence, famine and disease between 1649 and 1653. An account published in London in 1652 said, ‘You may ride 20 miles and scarce discern any thing or fix your eye upon any object, but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets’.

  64. Books of Survey and Distribution, mid-seventeenth century

  There are very few plainer objects in this selection, but none that is more consequential. The so-called Books of Survey and Distribution, compiled between the 1650s and 1680s, record in microcosm the seismic shift in the ownership of land in Ireland after the Cromwellian conquest. The class of Catholic proprietors, of both indigenous and Anglo-Norman descent, was all but swept away.

  These pages, from Book 17, show what happened in just one parish: Kilcaruan in Duleek, Co. Meath. On the left-hand page are the names of the owners of lands in 1641, when the great Catholic uprising broke out. On the right-hand page are the names of those to whom the land was given after it had been expropriated. Accompanying the pages is the hand-drawn map of Meath from the Down Survey, which was used to record the major land holdings throughout Ireland so that the project of expropriation could be conducted properly.

  Thus, we can see that most of the land in Kilcaruan was held in 1641 by what would then have been called Old English families—descendants of much earlier post-Norman settlers: Plunkett, Luttrell, Moore, Talbot, Allen. After 1641 these ethnic distinctions have been sunk in the crude code written after their names in the book: ‘Ir. Pa.’—Irish papist. That in itself justifies the transfer of their lands to Protestant ownership—overwhelmingly to the earl of Anglesey. In each case the number of acres held in 1641 is the same as the number transferred—the expropriation was wholesale.

  After the defeat of the Catholic rebellion, the Commonwealth administration undertook an extraordinarily ambitious programme of social engineering. Under the guise of the punishment of traitors, about half of all land in Ireland was taken from its owners and given to adventurers who had funded Cromwell’s armies or to those who had served in his campaigns. The policy was modified but continued after the collapse of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy. The scale of change was remarkable: the amount of land in Protestant hands went from 41 per cent of the total to 78 per cent in just 20 years.

  It is not surprising that the names on the left-hand page feature heavily on the Jacobite side of the wars of the 1680s. A later Simon Luttrell, for example, was a prominent Jacobite cavalry commander and afterwards a colonel in the service of the Spanish monarchy. The new owner of the lands in Kilcaruan, on the other hand, was himself Irish. The earl of Anglesey was born plain Arthur Annesley on Fishamble Street in Dublin; his father was secretary of state for Ireland under Cromwell’s son Henry. Arthur supported the parliamentary side during the civil war, but he then became a key figure in the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, being rewarded with an earldom and the lucrative position of vice treasurer and receiver general of Ireland from 1660 to 1667. He embodies, indeed, the great irony of the seventeenth-century land settlement: it was initiated by rebels against the crown but created a loyalist ruling class.

  65. King William’s gauntlets, c.1690

  On the morning of 14 July 1690, King William III presented these fine doeskin gloves to John Dillon, in whose home in Lismullin, Co. Meath, he had stayed the previous night. The king had won a major victory over his rival King James II at the nearby River Boyne two days previously. Gloves were often given as presents, but there is reason to think that William may have worn these at the battle, in which he personally commanded the cavalry. William is often depicted wearing heavy, fringed gauntlets such as these in several ‘battle’ paintings by various artists.

  The elaborate gold lace border on the right glove is worn away, and the left glove shows signs of heavy use. If Protestants believed in relics, these remnants of the ultimate hero in his finest hour would surely be holy.

  The battle may be the most famous in Irish history, but it was shaped by two events beyond Ireland. One was the succession to the English throne of James II. He alienated parliament and the nobility by his conversion to Catholicism and insistence on the absolute rights of the monarchy. The other event was the French king Louis XIV’s invasion of the Rhenish Palatinate and the Netherlands. William of Orange emerged as a key figure in the broad anti-French front that emerged in response. These two issues became one when William, who was James’s nephew and son-in-law, arrived in England in November 1688, with 15,000 troops. He and his wife, James’s daughter Mary, were crowned king and queen.

  James landed in Kinsale in March 1689. His forces failed to establish complete control of the island, with Derry heroically withstanding a siege from April until its relief in August. William followed James to Ireland and hoped for a single decisive battle. The Battle of the Boyne, with 36,000 troops on William’s side and 25,000 on James’s, was indeed the largest ever fought on Irish soil. It was a pan-European affair, with soldiers from the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Poland, as well as from Britain and Ireland. Frenchmen fought on both sides, with some Huguenot Protestants fighting for William and an army of 6,500 men sent by Louis supporting James.

  The decisive action was at the village of Oldbridge. William’s flanking manoeuvres drew off most of the Jacobite army, leaving a rump, outnumbered three to one, to face the main attack. The fighting nevertheless lasted for 12 hours, and William’s hopes of catching the Jacobites in a pincer movement were dashed. James was able to retreat westwards with the bulk of his army. He escaped to France via Dublin and Cork; most of his Irish army fought on. In that regard, the Boyne was not decisive: the Battle of Aughrim, in July 1691, was far bloodier and more conclusive. Nor was the Boyne the simple sectarian triumph of subsequent legend: William’s shock troops, the Dutch Blue Guard, were Catholic, and his allies included the Vatican and Vienna, where Te Deums were sung to celebrate the Boyne victory. Conversely, much of the Protestant hierarchy remained loyal to James. Nevertheless, the personal presence of the two kings gave the Boyne a mythic power that turned it into the ultimate Protestant triumph.

  66. Crucifixion stone, 1740

  In 1950, during rebuilding works on an old house in Summerhill in Co. Meath, this rough piece of sandstone was found behind a blocked doorway. It had been in a window recess of a secret, sealed-up chamber. On its face is a carving of the Crucifixion, with the symbols of Christ’s Passion and the date 1740. The imagery is vernacular and earthy: the rope used to tie Jesus’s hands, the cock that crowed to mark his betrayals by Judas and Peter, the dice thrown by the Roman soldiers, the hammer and pincers used in the Crucifixion and the temple of Jerusalem. The shape of the cross suggests it was based on those sold to pilgrims at Lough Derg.

  The stone was clearly used for secret Catholic worship, and its date coincides with one of the first attempts by the state, in 1739–40, to enforce laws penalising Catholicism. It speaks both to the severity of attempts to repress Catholicism and to their failure. Irish Jacobite resistance, and hopes for a reversal of the transfer of lands from Catholics to Protestants, ended with the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, which seemed to secure Catholics’ existing property and religious rights. It promised the same level of tolerance

  as they did enjoy in the reign of King Charles the second: their majesties...will endeavour to procure the said Roman Catholics such farther security...as may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account of their said religion.

  Catholic members of the landed gentry who swore allegiance to the new regime could keep their lands.The Irish parliament refused to comply. Instead, a series of penal laws against Catholics was put in place. The Protestant ascendancy did not regard itself as secure: France remaine
d a threat, as did the papacy’s continuing support for the Stuart cause. Some former Jacobites remained active as ‘rapparee’ or ‘tory’ outlaws. In 1695, the parliament passed laws prohibiting Catholics from bearing arms without a licence, owning militarily useful horses or travelling to the Continent to be educated.

  Gradually, concerns with security became a more nakedly religious project of penalising Catholicism. Laws ‘for the suppression of Popery’ passed in 1697 and 1703 required bishops, deans, vicars general and friars to leave the country and remaining clergy to register with the authorities; other laws excluded Catholics from parliament, corporations, the army and navy, the legal profession and civic offices; and prevented Catholics from buying land, leasing it for more than 31 years or running schools.

  The laws helped to underpin Protestant domination of landholding. The Catholic share of the land fell from 14 per cent in 1702 to 5 per cent by 1776 (many landowning families were converts or crypto-Catholics). In general, the laws were a failure. The majority of the population remained Catholic, and sporadic persecution failed to stop the training of Irish priests in continental seminaries. Catholic worship continued, albeit, as this stone shows, discreetly. The penal laws were evaded, flouted or, if necessary, endured. They did not ‘suppress Popery’.

  67. Conestoga wagon, eighteenth century

  Conestoga wagons were first made by German immigrants in eastern Pennsylvania in the 1730s. Longer and deeper than European wagons, covered at first with hemp and later with canvas, and having small, manoeuvrable wheels, they were capable of carrying families and heavy freight over rough terrain, making them the ubiquitous vehicle of the push by European settlers westwards across the Appalachian Mountains into the Native American-occupied territories. These wagons also became the characteristic shape of the great migration from Ulster in the half-century after 1718. In all, about 200,000 people left Ulster for colonial America, most of them Presbyterians whose origins lay in Scotland.

  This exodus changed both Ireland and America. Here, it affected the balance between the Protestant and Catholic populations. On the other side of the Atlantic, the so-called Ulster Scots or Scotch-Irish destroyed British government efforts to limit the western expansion of the white colony; grabbed huge amounts of Native American land; and became one of the largest components of European settlement in Virginia, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas and Georgia. From the classic image of the frontiersman to country music, and from the populism of Andrew Jackson to evangelical religion, they left a huge imprint on American culture.

  Why did they leave Ireland? Presbyterian ministers tended to stress religious persecution as the primary factor—the Test Act of 1704 excluded Presbyterians from public office and ended recognition of their clergy—but economics were almost certainly more important. During the 1710s and late 1720s, Ulster suffered a succession of bad harvests. Leases given in the aftermath of the Williamite victory were running out and landlords sought higher rents. Ulster migrants were not refugees. The lure of free land in America was enhanced by economic discomfort at home.

  The Ulster Scots were initially welcomed by the Calvinist communities of New England, but they gradually came to be seen as burdensome and fractious. This, along with their hunger for land, encouraged them to push beyond the established frontiers, bringing them into conflict with a fellow Irishman and convert from Catholicism, William Johnson, who controlled relations between the colonists and the Native American nations. Johnson railed against the Ulster Scots who ‘think they do good Service when they Knock an Indian in the Head’. Neither Johnson’s efforts nor frequent and bloody conflicts with Native Americans could prevent the push westwards.

  Their dynamism and the independent spirit of their Presbyterianism made the Ulster Scots a powerful force in the shaping of an emerging American identity. It is telling that the Declaration of Independence was printed by Tyrone–born John Dunlap; first read in public by John Nixon, a first-generation Ulster Scot; and signed by Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, who was also of Ulster Presbyterian descent.

  68. Wood’s halfpence, 1722

  In 1722, the British government granted English iron manufacturer William Wood permission to proceed with a patent to coin £100,800 worth of copper halfpence for Ireland. The patent had originally been granted to the duchess of Kendal, one of George I's mistresses, who then sold it to Wood for £10,000. Almost immediately, most of the Dublin establishment was expressing its outrage. There was a widespread belief that the issuing of copper money would devalue Irish coinage and damage the local economy. In July 1722 the archbishop of Dublin, William King, wrote to the lord lieutenant, the duke of Grafton, warning that he found:

  the generality of people here alarmed and greatly dread the consequence ofsuch a project…This is in my opiniona matter of vast consequence both to Majesty and the subjects for if it be not managed with the utmost caution, it will drain the Kingdom of the little gold and silver that is left in it, and complete the general misery which is already intolerable.

  Opposition to the so-called brass money became a rallying cry for both the Protestant establishment and much of the populace of Dublin. There was no challenge to the right of the king to issue coinage, but there was deep resentment at what was seen as exploitation of Ireland. The campaign against Wood’s halfpence was blessed, moreover, with the services of a propagandist of genius, Jonathan Swift, dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, who was a great literary ventriloquist. He invented the character of a Dublin ‘Drapier’ as the author of several open letters attacking the coinage. He also wrote anonymous poetic broadsides. The title of the first, ‘A Serious Poem upon William Wood, Grazier, Tinker, Hard-Ware Man, Coiner, Counterfeiter, Founder and Esquire’, gives a good flavour of their tone.

  The British government under Robert Walpole refused to withdraw the patent. The Dublin parliament, which had been humiliated by the Declaratory Act of 1720—which made it subordinate to Westminster—then sent a resolution to London attacking the coinage. By April 1724 Grafton was replaced as viceroy by Lord Carteret, and a committee of the privy council recommended that the amount of coinage issued be reduced to £40,000. These concessions were accompanied by an insistence from London that ‘the affair of the coinage was now come to be an affair of State wherein the honour of the King and the English Nation were more materially concerned’. The halfpence had become a point of principle for both sides. In the end the government capitulated. In August 1725 Wood’s patent was withdrawn—he was secretly compensated with a pension of £3,000 a year from Irish revenues.

  The affair marked the emergence of a strain of Protestant ‘patriotism’, one that did not seek to include Catholics as citizens but did insist on the idea of Ireland as an independent and equal kingdom. ‘You ARE’, wrote Swift’s Drapier, ‘and OUGHT to be as FREE a People as your Brethren in England’. It was a notion that would have an ambiguous life in Protestant Ireland but eventually a more potent one in America.

  69. Dillon regimental flag, 1745

  By the terms of the treaties of Galway (22 July 1691) and Limerick (3 October 1691) that ended Jacobite resistance in Ireland, members of the defeated army were allowed to enter the service of Catholic powers on the continent. About 20,000 went immediately to France, and over the first half of the eighteenth century the so-called Wild Geese continued to seek their fortunes in the armies of France, Spain and Austria. The numbers were not large, some 6,500 between 1716 and 1791, but, especially for the sons of dispossessed Catholic landowners, foreign military service acted as a way of clinging to a lost status.

  Dillon’s Regiment was unique—it was continuously under the command of members of the same family for more than a century. It was first raised to fight for James II in 1688 by Theobald Dillon, who was killed at Aughrim. In 1691 it was part of the Irish brigade that joined the French army, and served in Piedmont and Savoy. It also served at the capture of Barcelona in 1697 and the defence of Cremona in 1702. The most famous battle in which the regim
ent and the larger Irish brigade took part was at Fontenoy, near Tournai in Belgium in May 1745, at which this flag was flown. This was a crucial episode in the war of 1740–48, when France and Prussia clashed with Britain and the Netherlands over who would succeed Charles VI of Austria.

  The French, under the Marechal de Saxe, were losing to the Anglo-Dutch force under the duke of Cumberland when 4,000 men of the Irish brigade counter-attacked with the cry of ‘Remember Limerick’. The butchery at Fontenoy achieved little in the long-term: the war eventually ended with roughly the same balance of power as existed at its beginning. Nevertheless, Fontenoy was idealised, especially on its centenary, as a glorious Irish victory over England.

  The male descendants of former Jacobite landowners proved to be remarkably adept adventurers. Some joined the British imperial service: Peter Warren, from a Jacobite crypto-Catholic family in Co. Meath, joined the British navy and made his fortune from captured Spanish ships and astute American trading, founding Greenwich Village in New York. His nephew William Johnson left Meath for the wilds of upstate New York in the 1730s and ended up as both a Mohawk chief and a British baronet. On the other side of the fence, Sir Charles Wogan acted as the most dashing fixer for the Stuart pretenders, ending up as a senator of Rome and governor of La Mancha, in Spain.