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On Being Catholic and Irish in 17th Century Ireland

Irish Rebellion of 1641 and Cromwell

Your source for all things Irish

https://yourirish.com/history/17th-century/irish-rebellion-of-1641

The Irish Rebellion Of 1641

The Irish Rebellion of 1641 came about because of the resentment felt by the Catholic Irish, both Gael and Old English, in regards to the loss of their lands to Protestant settlers from England and Scotland.

Catholic Irish were frightened by reports that the Covenanter Army in Scotland was considering an invasion of Ireland in order to eradicate the Catholic religion. At the same time, there was also a threat of invasion by Cromwell’s Puritans who were at war against King Charles1. It was hoped that the King would redress the complaints of the Catholics and halt or even reverse the policy of plantation. It was not an act of rebellion against the Royal domain.

The uprising of 1641

The uprising was lead by Rory O’ Moore from Leix, with Sir Phelim O’ Neill and his brother Turlough of Tyrone, The Maguires of Fermanagh, the Magennis, O’ Reilly and the MacMahons.

They had planned to begin the rebellion on the 23rd October 1641 with attacks on Dublin and various other British strongholds throughout the country. However, their plans were betrayed to the British by a native Irish convert to Protestantism, Owen O’ Connolly.

Due to this information, Dublin did not fall. However the rebellion went ahead in the north and the towns of Dungannon, Newry, Castleblaney along with the fort at Charlemont fell to the rebels.

Most of the province of Ulster came under the control of the rebel leaders. The rebel army, of 30,000 men had been instructed to take no life except in battle, to arrest the gentry and to spare the Scottish planters as they were considered kindred. For a week after the rebellion, these instructions were adhered to but many of the rebels had lost their lands to the Protestant planters and they wanted revenge. They attacked farms and settlements killing and turning many people away and robbing and stripping them of all their goods.

Sir Phelim O’ Neill has been himself thought to have ordered the murder of Protestants in Tyrone and Armagh. It is thought that there were about 12000 people slaughtered although contemporary reports put the death toll as much higher. It is thought that up to 30% of the Ulster planters lost their lives whilst 10% is the figure for the whole of Ireland.

As the rebellion progressed in Ulster there were uprisings in Leinster by November and thereafter the whole of Ireland. In Munster were many English settlers were planted, the rebels did not shed much blood but they did turn out thee settlers many of whom fled back to England.

The Irish Confederate War of 1642

In 1642 the Old English formed an alliance with the Gaelic Lords at the Assembly of Killkenny. This alliance caused the rebellion to escalate into the Confederate war which would continue until Cromwell’s invasion and subjugation of Ireland 1649-1653.

In 1642 the Scottish Covenanters invaded the North and they, in turn, took to killing Catholics in revenge for the deaths of Protestants. The Covenanter Clan Campbell of Argyll took the opportunity to attack and slaughter the Catholic Rathlin Islanders who belonged to ancient enemies, Clan Mac Donald. The Covenanters also slaughtered all the Catholics (3000) on Island Magee. Catholic prisoners and traders in Newry were murdered.

This ruthless slaughtering of civilians, by both sides, was only brought under control when Owen Roe O’ Neill arrived back from exile in France to take control of the Confederate army and with Major General Robert Monroe in charge of the Covenanter Army, continued the war under the code of conduct that they had both learned on the Continent. However, the effects of the rebellion have lasted to the present day, especially in Ulster where sectarian divide remained strong during the troubles.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/rebellion-repression-retribution

University of Cambridge article about roots of the 1641 Uprising

The true course of events of the Irish rebellion of 1641 has never been fully known. Initiated by disaffected Irish Catholics rebelling against Protestant settlers, the rebellion quickly escalated in violence, resulting in widespread killing. But was the rebellion intended to be a bloodless coup that spiralled out of control, or were the thousands of Protestants deliberately driven out and massacred? What’s clear is that the years that followed were a time of savage revenge for the events of 1641 – Oliver Cromwell arrived with 30,000 English troops to conquer Ireland in the name of the English Republic and to exact ‘a just judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’ – and the groundwork was laid for Ireland’s Catholic–Protestant divide.

A curious aspect of the rebellion is that although it is the least understood of all the great massacres of European history, it is amongst the best recorded. Historical narratives in the form of eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the rebellion are still in existence in the library of Trinity College Dublin, where they have remained largely unstudied. This is chiefly because there is too much of a record of what happened and it has taken until now, with improvements in technology and the political climate, to conspire finally to make it possible for the secrets of the ‘1641 depositions’ to be unlocked. A team of scholars in Cambridge, Dublin and Aberdeen are poised to do just this. Professor John Morrill from Cambridge’s Faculty of History is chairing the three-year project, working alongside Professor Jane Ohlmeyer and Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú (Trinity College Dublin), and Professor Tom Bartlett (University of Aberdeen).

Roots of an uprising

The 1641 rebellion had roots stretching back to the mid-16th century, when the Irish provinces were heavily colonised by English settlers. Throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the English government, fearful that continental Catholic kings would use Ireland as a springboard for invading England to exploit the dynastic weaknesses (Elizabeth was, in Catholic eyes, a heretic bastard tyrant, unmarried and the last of her line), sought to impose strong Protestant control of Ireland. This led to a dreadful cycle: Catholic rebellion, repression of the uprising, replacement of Irish landowners by English as part of a ‘Plantation’ policy, then more rebellion, more repression and further Plantation.

In and after 1610, the largest of the Plantation policies, in which not only the Irish landowners but also the tenant farmers and urban elites were displaced, affected large parts of Ulster in the far north of Ireland. Previous Catholic owners and occupiers were driven into exile, where thousands either became mercenary soldiers (‘Wild Geese’) in the armies of the Habsburg kings or fell into destitution.

For 30 years, the strong authoritarian government, softened by a blind-eye to private Catholic worship, kept the dispossessed of Ulster and elsewhere in check. But in 1641, England was paralysed by the disputes that were to lead, a year later, to civil war.

King Charles I’s puritan opponents had plans to introduce much more effective religious persecution of the Catholic Irish and to make Ireland increasingly part of an enlarged English state. This provoked, from late October 1641, a series of pre-emptive strikes by members of the Catholic nobility and, in the ensuing chaos, a series of what (unless this research project tells otherwise) appear to be spontaneous revenge attacks on Protestant settlers that quickly got out of control.

An imperfect account

Although we have no idea how many people were killed during the events of 1641, the most prudent estimates are that 4000 died through acts of violence and that 6000 more died of the consequences of being driven out naked into the winter cold, while many more fled from their homes and made their way eventually back to England. So much is clear. But the precise chronology and geography of the rebellion have remained hazy at best.

The English government had to do something to protect the English Protestant settlers, but their own country was in chaos. They could not raise taxes to fund the army. So they borrowed money from 2000 venture capitalists (the ‘Adventurers’) against the promise that they would receive two million acres of Irish land once Ireland was conquered. To establish which land was to be confiscated, all (mainly Protestant) witnesses to the rebellion were questioned by government-appointed commissioners and their accounts recorded as ‘depositions’ that could be used in court.

Today, 3400 depositions are in existence, providing the fullest and most dramatic evidence we have for any event of this kind before the 20th century. They add to up 19,000 pages of testimony in crabbed 17th-century hands. Trinity College Library acquired the documents in 1741 and for centuries there they have remained, far too extensive for any one scholar to explore them all and in too poor a condition for widespread access. Even with a team of researchers, it will take a total of more than eight person years to transcribe the accounts.

A new kind of history

The spirit of co-operation between the UK and Irish governments following the Good Friday agreement has made it possible to fund a project of this size – the most ambitious British-Irish collaboration in the humanities ever undertaken. Separate but linked funding streams in the UK and Ireland have raised more than 1 million euros from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK, the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) and Trinity College Dublin.

Once the depositions are captured and online, they will constitute a database that can be arranged and re-arranged in any way a scholar would like: by date, by map reference, even by act of violence. Many of the depositions give detailed inventories of goods taken and destroyed, affording unique insights into the material culture of a colonial society. Members of the general public might even use depositions to trace family trees. There are endless possibilities for further study, both looking backwards to the pattern of exploitation that provoked the explosion of Catholic violence, and forwards to the way in which these massacres resulted in the confiscation of 40% of the land of Ireland and its transfer from Catholics born in Ireland to Protestants born in England. These are events that transformed Irish history and therefore British and world history. This collaborative project represents a new kind of history: one where the medium and the message can change how we understand ourselves in time.

For more information, please contact the author Professor John Morrill (jsm1000@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of History.

https://1641.tcd.ie/ The Online Depositions Website

Fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 Depositions

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https://yourirish.com/history/17th-century/act-of-settlement-1652

The Cromwellian Act Of Settlement 1652

With the defeat of the Irish Confederate Army and their British Royalist allies, Oliver Cromwell took measures to ensure his grip upon the Island of Ireland. His Long Parliament in London passed the Act of Settlement in 1652 with the purpose of

Punishment of the leaders of the 1641 rebellion

The seizure of Irish lands to finance the repayment of the loans the Parliamentarians had obtained from the City of London and compensate his armies in Ireland.

This act was to a large extent legalised ethnic cleansing in that it was to allow the confiscation of lands held by Catholics and the removal of the Irish from east of the Shannon to poorer lands in Connacht and Clare.

The act also called for the execution of those involved in the 1641 rebellion, all Catholic clergy and the leaders of the Confederate and Royalist forces.

The taking of land ownership

In regards to the seizure of land, anyone who had taken up arms against the Parliament was to be divested of their properties entirely and that even those who did not fight would lose three-quarters of their lands, though recompensed in kind in the province of Connaught. Hence the rise of the saying “To hell or to Connaught”.

Protestants who had sided with the Royalist/Confederate forces would be allowed to keep their properties if they made payment of fines to the Commonwealth. This was not an option opened to Catholics and as such it destroyed almost to a man the Catholic landowning class.

Catholic ownership of land fell from 60% prior to 1641 down to 8% during the Commonwealth until after the Act of Settlement in 1662 under the Restoration the percentage would rise to 20%.

Of the 12,000 Cromwellians given land in Ireland, many of them returned to England and sold their new holdings to other Protestants. Others settled and many of these actually married into the Irish Catholic population.

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https://yourirish.com/history/17th-century/restoration-act-of-settlement-in-1662

Restoration Act Of Settlement In 1662

In 1660 the Monarchy was restored in the person of Charles ll as monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland.

Those Royalists in Ireland who had land confiscated under the Commonwealth government petitioned the King to return their properties back to them. First amongst these was James Butler, the 1st Duke of Ormonde, who had led the Royalist forces in Ireland from 1641 to 1650.

Passing the Act of Settlement

In response to the pleas of the disenfranchised Royalists, the Act of Settlement was passed in 1662 by the Irish Parliament. However this parliament was totally Protestant as Catholics had been barred from standing for election and as a result, an amendment was made to specify that only those who had fought as Royalists and those who were considered to be “innocent Catholics” were to be rewarded back their properties.

The return of land ownership

Those who had been in the Irish Confederate Army were to be regarded as murders and rebels and therefore not included. In this settlement, most of those favoured were Old English and they recovered most or a large proportion of the lands confiscated from them. The Confederates, mostly Gaelic Irish, received very little.

By 1685 the proportion of Catholics owning land in Ireland grew from 8% to 20%.

The outcome of this was the establishment of the Protestant Ascendancy which governed Ireland in after years. It legalised the confiscation of lands which had been the property of those who had participated in the Rebellion of 1641 and had served or supported the Confederate forces. It also confirmed the ownership of lands given to adventurers and Cromwellians who “declared submission and obedience to us “(clause 7).

To ascertain who were entitled to regain lost lands, a Court of Claims was initiated to investigate each claim. However, this court found that there were too many innocent Catholics. To break this impasse, a further Act of Explanation was passed in 1665 which declared that Cromwellian settlers were to give back one-third of the lands they now held as a compensation to the innocent Catholics.

The Age of Protestant Ascendancy

The relative peace that existed during Charles II's reign came asunder with the accession of his brother, James II, a fervent Roman Catholic. Britain was once again plunged into civil war - the Glorious Revolution of 1688 - as Protestants mustered around the Dutch Prince William of Orange and Catholics rallied to the Jacobite cause of King James. Once again Ireland bore the brunt of the violence with the major battles - the Boyne (1689) and Aughrim (1691) - taking place on Irish soil. James was defeated and exiled to France. King William III and the Protestants now held absolute authority throughout the British Isles and, in order to prevent any further outbreak of revolt, initiated a legislative campaign - the Penal Codes - that would effectively render the Catholic population of Ireland second class citizens for over 130 years. Catholics were forbidden the right to bear a weapon or own a horse. They were not allowed to vote in elections or buy land. Roman Catholicism was outlawed and proposals to castrate all practicing priests were seriously considered in the Irish House of Parliament. The age of the Protestant Ascendancy had begun.

An estimated 450,000 Catholics fled Ireland in the years immediately following the collapse of the Jacobite cause in 1691.

http://www.turtlebunbury.com/history/history_houses/hist_hse_finnstown.htm