The Irish leadership at this time was split between the Old Irish — led by Owen Roe O’Neill, Hugh O’Neill’s nephew — and the Old English, led by the earl of Ormond from the Butler family. Although O’Neill and Ormond agreed that Ireland should remain Catholic, they opposed Cromwell for different reasons. Whereas O’Neill wanted Ireland to be independent, Ormond opposed Cromwell because he saw him as a usurper against the real king, Charles II. This ideological difference made it difficult for them to work together and ultimately aided Cromwell’s campaign of conquest.
It took Cromwell until 1649 to clear up things at home sufficiently to launch his Irish campaign, but, when he came, he meant business. Cromwell’s army of 20,000 was efficient, well armed, and prepared for a bloody war. The army’s initial engagements were marked by extreme savagery; Cromwell wanted revenge for the supposed Catholic butchery of 1641, and he wanted to terrify the rest of Ireland into surrendering.
Here were some of Cromwell’s less admirable achievements:
He destroyed Drogheda, massacred the population, sent the heads of the leaders to Dublin on poles, and sold the survivors to slave plantations in Barbados.
Also in Drogheda, he burned down St. Peter’s Church to abolish the people who sought asylum inside; he later called his acts “a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.”
Again at Drogheda, he had his soldiers kill the garrison commander by beating out the man’s brains with the commander’s own wooden leg.
He massacred the people of Wexford, including 300 women seeking clemency at the town cross.
He had all the Catholic citizens of Cork expelled from their homes.
At Bishop’s Rock in Inishbofin, off the coast of Connemara, he tied a priest to a rock and forced his comrades to watch as the tide washed over him.
Cromwell aimed to terrify the population, and he certainly succeeded. By 1653 the Irish resistance was completely destroyed.
One of Cromwell’s goals in Ireland was to break the power of the Catholic Church, and for a time he succeeded. While on campaign, he had Catholic priests hunted down and banished. Throughout the country he had churches desecrated and their sacred books and art destroyed. The priests who escaped his army had to disguise themselves in order to remain on the island. Although Irish Catholicism was by no means destroyed, it would take decades to recover.
Once English control was firmly established in 1653, Parliament passed an act to confiscate all Catholic-owned land in Ireland. Cromwell wanted to transplant all Catholics to the western province of Connacht so that he could settle his own soldiers and Protestant supporters on the more fertile land of Munster, Leinster, and Ulster. Although the eventual settlement didn’t force all Catholics off their land, thousands of families were forced to leave their homes and resettle on the rocky terrain of Connacht.
Cromwell lingers on in Irish memory. Up until modern times, Irish mothers would use Cromwell as a bogeyman to frighten their children — “eat your greens or Cromwell will get you!” He is also used to explain the sorry state of ruined buildings all across Ireland — “that used to be a beautiful castle, but then Cromwell showed up. . . .”
The radical Protestant initiatives of Cromwell’s Parliament took a back seat after Cromwell’s death. His son, Henry Cromwell, carried the banner for a while, but the English were getting tired of the Cromwells and their Puritanism. In 1660 came the Restoration, in which Charles II reclaimed the throne.
Charles II was more lenient toward the Irish than Cromwell had been. He restored some former supporters to their previous positions — notably the earl of Ormond, who had joined him in exile. He was a Protestant, however, and while he didn’t share Cromwell’s enthusiasm for radical social engineering, he wasn’t interested in restoring land or position to Ireland’s Catholics.
A wave of excitement went through Ireland when James II rose to the English throne in 1685. James II was the first Catholic monarch in England since Mary, Queen of Scots. Former landowners who had lost their positions and property thought that James would restore them to their former glory. James boosted these men’s confidence when he appointed the earl of Tyrconnell, a Catholic, as his viceroy in Ireland.
To show James his support, Tyrconnell raised a Catholic army in Ireland. But Tyrconnell had misjudged — this wasn’t the sort of support that James needed just then. The king’s religion had made his reign shaky from the start. Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments were strong in England at that point, and an Irish-Catholic army was about the most alarming thing a good English Protestant could have imagined. Things went from shaky to really, really shaky, and in 1688 James fled to France.
49 { The Williamite War
Once James had run off, Parliament gave the crown to his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, in what became known as the Glorious Revolution. It wasn’t so glorious for Catholics, but it did result in the English Declaration of Rights — William and Mary had to grant their citizens certain basic rights if they wanted to remain on the throne. It was a crucial act in legal history.
In Ireland, however, people still supported James II. James borrowed an army from France’s Louis XIV, a fellow Catholic, and sailed to Kinsale Harbor in 1689. He joined up with Tyrconnell’s Irish army and began to set up a power base from which he could regain the throne.
William, meanwhile, was skillfully working the European political scene. Once he’d promised to treat Ireland’s Catholics well, he got the support of the Danes, Germans, and Dutch. Even the pope supported him; although popes had lobbied for a Catholic monarch in England for more than 100 years, Pope Alexander VIII was fighting against Louis XIV, so he opposed Louis’s ally James as well.
King William III arrived in Ireland in 1690 with an international army of 36,000 soldiers. His forces swept through James’s smaller Franco-Irish army at the Battle of the Boyne in July. James still had substantial resources that he could call up on his home territory, but he got spooked and fled to France again.
James’s Catholic allies were left with the task of regrouping and facing William twelve months later at the Battle of Aughrim. This was another decisive victory for William.
The Irish army made its last stand at Limerick, but it had no chance of success. It sued for peace on the conditions that Catholics be spared religious persecution and that they have a guarantee of the same limited religious freedoms they’d had under Charles II. William agreed to the terms.
William did not stick to the terms agreed to at Limerick, however.
As soon as he didn’t need his European allies, he rolled back all his promises. A new round of confiscations robbed Catholics of their land, and a series of penal laws imposed harsh restrictions on the civil and economic rights of Catholics. This period of Irish history is known as the Protestant Ascendancy.
While the Williamite victory marked a downfall in the status of Ireland’s traditional population, it also initiated an era of peace. The 500year period from the arrival of Strongbow to William’s total victory was marked by constant warfare. The English conquered, the Irish lords fought to take their land back, and then the English returned to conquer again. The fighting only got more vicious once the Protestant Reformation added a religious element to the conflict. The preceding years of Viking conquests hadn’t been terribly peaceful either.
It is fair to say, then, that the Protestant Ascendancy brought to Ireland a kind of peace and prosperity that it had never known. The shame is that the prosperity only applied to those at the top.
50 { Protestants Take Hold
During this period, the Anglican social elite dominated Ireland. They comprised about 25 percent of the population, but they owned most of the property and controlled law, politics, and society. For the island’s native Catholic majority, however, it was a time of poverty and oppression.
The Treaty of Limerick of 1691 ended the violent wars that had ravaged Ireland in the seventeenth century. In the treaty, King William promised that Ca
tholics would retain the right to practice their religion, and he gave the general impression that they would be treated fairly once they gave up their arms. Unfortunately, this proved not to be true. The king’s true intention was to install a ruling class of Protestant landowners who would be loyal to the British Crown.
The victorious English government seized Catholic land to give to its Protestant supporters. The same thing had happened under the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Cromwell. This time, however, the English were playing for keeps.
Members of the Protestant upper class had very mixed feelings about their new home and their place in it. Aristocrats who had moved from England felt as if they were living on a frontier, almost like colonists in the New World or in Africa. Some of them definitely didn’t like Ireland and spent as little time there as possible; these were known as absentee landlords, who lived off the proceeds of Irish land and labor but contributed nothing themselves.
But Ireland simply wasn’t the place to be if you wanted to further a career in England, and this frustrated many gentlemen. Jonathan Swift in particular hated living in Ireland. At the same time, he was quite conscious of the problems facing Ireland, most of which were brought on by its colonial status. The older he got, the more he identified with his adoptive homeland, and this was the inspiration for many of his more biting critiques, such as his “A Modest Proposal.”
The now-Protestant Parliament enacted a series of infamous penal laws designed to limit Catholic power by curtailing Catholics’ economic and social rights. Catholics were not allowed to bear arms, send their children to other countries for school, acquire land from Protestants, or make wills. Instead of deciding for themselves how their children would inherit, Catholics had to divide their property equally among all their sons, which resulted in increasingly small farms. There was an insidious catch, however — if the oldest son converted to the Protestant Church of Ireland, he inherited everything.
Irish clergy were expelled from the country. The Irish were not allowed to maintain schools, and in 1728 they lost the right to vote. All Irish culture and music was banned.
The penal laws didn’t outlaw Catholicism, but they did make life very difficult for Catholics. The purpose of the laws was to keep Catholics from achieving enough wealth or legal power to challenge their Protestant rulers, and in that they were successful. It took more than 100 years before Catholics were able to mount any serious opposition to their subjugated state.
The penal laws didn’t just hit Catholics; Ulster was home to a number of Scottish Presbyterians (the Scotch-Irish) who also refused to accept the strictures of the Church of Ireland, and they too lost a good deal of political power. When push came to shove, though, the Ulster Presbyterians generally joined forces with their fellow Protestants against the Catholics.
51 { Catholic Life
In response to the penal laws, a few of the educated folks converted to Protestantism and kept their jobs and property. Most Catholics, though, were forced to give up their lands and their careers and move. Thousands ended up in the south and west of Ireland, especially in rocky Connacht.
Peasants who had been property owners now had to rent property from local landlords. Leases were often short, as little as one year, which made it impossible for people to accumulate belongings or store food from year to year. Throughout the 1700s, periodic famines killed many poor people.
The Protestants took over most of the existing large churches, but The Protestants took over most of the existing large churches, but that didn’t prevent Catholics from hearing Mass. Priests performed Mass out in the open countryside on large, flat stones called Mass stones; the people would post lookouts to spot approaching armies and warn the participants in time for them to escape. This could be a dangerous business; tales from this period tell of the English hunting priests for sport or of expriests turning in their former colleagues to collect bounties.
As the 1700s wore on, the Protestants relaxed their enforcement of the penal laws. A Catholic middle class began to appear as Irish Catholics, forbidden from owning land, poured their energies into trade. Some of them were quite successful. As this happened, Protestants began to identify more with Catholics; they still didn’t want to grant them equal rights, but they were united by their resentment of the British government.
Nevertheless, the penal laws were kept on the books; Protestants were only too aware that their property had originally been in Catholic hands, and they wanted to keep the laws even if they weren’t often enforced. Irish Protestants were particularly worried that the British Parliament might one day cave in to Catholic pressure and change laws to Protestant disadvantage.
52 { The Second City of the British Empire
Dublin thrived in the eighteenth century, becoming the fifth-largest city in Europe. The ruling class supported arts and higher education and produced some of the most famous thinkers of the day.
The city of Dublin flourished during the Ascendancy. Aristocrats built themselves grand houses in the Georgian style. Urban planners designed a system of bridges and roads that allowed Dublin to expand into a city that stunned visitors from other countries who didn’t expect to find urban grandeur in Ireland.
The stability of the 1700s allowed professional and intellectual societies to develop and the arts to flourish. The Dublin Society was founded in 1731 to encourage the arts, manufacturing, and agriculture; its members helped develop a distinctively Irish style of architecture and sponsored many large projects, such as botanical gardens and drawing schools. The Royal Irish Academy, founded in 1785, encouraged the study of Irish culture and history.
Many of Ireland’s most beautiful country estates, gardens, and urban architecture date to the Protestant Ascendancy period. One impressive estate is Powerscourt House in Enniskerry, near Dublin (its famous gardens weren’t built until the nineteenth century). Phoenix Park, opened in 1747, is one of the largest city parks in the world — more than twice as big as New York’s Central Park. The Custom House, built in the 1780s, was the first major project of the famous architect James Gandon. He followed this project with designs for the Four Courts, consisting of the High Court and Supreme Court of Ireland. Gandon also had a hand in renovating the cupola of the spectacular Rotunda Hospital, opened in 1757 as Europe’s first maternity hospital.
Trinity College came into its prime in the 1700s. Queen Elizabeth I founded it in 1592 to provide an institute of higher education for Protestants in Ireland; for most of its history, it has been completely Protestant. (Catholics were admitted in 1793, but it wasn’t until 1970 that Catholics could enroll without being excommunicated from the Catholic Church; the majority of current students are Catholic.)
Many of the college’s most important buildings were designed and built in the 1700s, including the Old Library, which now houses the Book of Kells. Trinity College was open to a variety of social classes; though everyone who went there was Anglican (and male), they were certainly not all noblemen. Many famous Irishmen of this period got their start there.
53 { Protestant Irish Nationalism
Once the Protestants had the Catholics under control, they started to examine their own situation vis-à-vis a larger power. Since Ireland had its own parliament, the Anglo-Irish questioned why the British Parliament had the right to pass legislation for Ireland.
The Protestants in Ireland began to see the Emerald Isle as their home, and they wanted it to be a nation distinct from Britain. Economics were a big concern; the British government regularly obstructed Irish economic development by restricting Irish trade. As Irish businessmen expanded their operations, they wanted to export their products, and British law often didn’t allow that. Consequently, the Irish Protestants began to take a keener interest in the political process. This was the start of Protestant Irish Nationalism; its proponents became known as “patriots.”
Now, the Irish Parliament, which the Normans brought to Ireland in the 1100s, was no paragon of democratic virtue. In the early eighteent
h century, it consisted solely of members of the established Church of Ireland. The House of Lords was full of conservative bishops, and the House of Commons was composed of local clergy sent to Parliament on behalf of their wealthy patrons. Most of these men were more interested in feathering their own nests than in tackling constitutional issues, but at least they constituted a modicum of representational government independent of Britain.
The American War of Independence was bad news for British rule in Ireland. The Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, saw Britain’s treatment of Ireland as analogous to its treatment of the American colonies, and they observed the American Revolution with keen interest. The American Declaration of Independence was greeted in Ireland with glee. The British responded by cracking down further on Ireland, trying to limit its trade with America.
In 1779, Henry Grattan, a young Irish Protestant, made a motion in Parliament to abolish the British restriction on Irish exports. He won this argument and proceeded to lead the Irish Parliament until the end of the century; the Parliament of this period is known as Grattan’s Parliament.
Many Irish people, both Protestant and Catholic, were fully behind the Nationalist patriots. In the late 1770s, groups of Protestant men, known as Volunteers, joined the Irish cause — by 1779 there were Volunteers all over Ireland. Their main goals were to secure Irish free trade and to fight English interference with Irish government.
Grattan and other leaders realized they couldn’t achieve independence from Britain without the help of the Catholic majority. So in 1778, Grattan pushed a Catholic Relief Act through Parliament; this act repealed some of the prohibitions on Catholic property ownership and inheritance. Grattan continued to rally his supporters and in 1779 won free trade rights for Ireland.
The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland Page 8