British and Irish diasporas: Societies, cultures and ideologies 9781526127860

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of tables
Contributors
Introduction: British and Irish diasporas: societies, cultures and ideologies
Reconceptualising diaspora: religion, persecution and identity in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1794
Irish Jacobites in early modern Europe: exile, adjustment and experience, 1691–1745
Diasporic or distinct? Scots in early modern Europe
An imperial, utopian and ‘visible’ diaspora: the English since 1800
Emigrants and exiles: the political nationalism of the Irish diaspora since the 1790s
Partners in empire: the Scottish diaspora since 1707
The Welsh diaspora
The Cornish diaspora, 1815–1914
Conclusion: towards integration and comparison?
Index

Citation preview

British and Irish diasporas

British and Irish diasporas Societies, cultures and ideologies

Edited by Donald M. MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann and J. C. D. Clark

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2019 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 2785 3   hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of tables page vii Notes on contributors viii Introduction: British and Irish diasporas: societies, cultures and ideologies Donald M. MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann and J.C.D. Clark

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1 Reconceptualising diaspora: religion, persecution and identity in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1794 J.C.D. Clark

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2 Irish Jacobites in early modern Europe: exile, adjustment and experience, 1691–1745 Éamonn Ó Ciardha

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3 Diasporic or distinct? Scots in early modern Europe Siobhan Talbott

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4 An imperial, utopian and ‘visible’ diaspora: the English since 1800 Donald M. MacRaild

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5 Emigrants and exiles: the political nationalism of the Irish diaspora since the 1790s David T. Gleeson

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6 Partners in empire: the Scottish diaspora since 1707 Tanja Bueltmann and Graeme Morton

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7 The Welsh diaspora Donald M. MacRaild and Philip Payton

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8 The Cornish diaspora, 1815–1914 Philip Payton

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Conclusion: towards integration and comparison? Donald M. MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann and J.C.D. Clark

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Index 317

Tables

4.1 The English-, Scots- and Irish-born population of the main territories of the British Empire in 1901 and the United States in 1900 page 142 6.1 Net and gross outmigration, England & Wales and Scotland, 1861–1920 220 6.2 Emigration from Scotland to non-European destinations, in thousands, and as percentage, 1853–1930 221 6.3 Male population of the states and territories of the Commonwealth of Australia at the census of 3 April 1911 223 6.4 Female population of the states and territories of the Commonwealth of Australia at the census of 3 April 1911 224

Contributors

Tanja Bueltmann is Professor of History at Northumbria University and the author of Clubbing Together: Ethnicity, Civility and Formal Sociability in the Scottish Diaspora to 1930 (Liverpool, 2014); (with Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton) The Scottish Diaspora (Edinburgh, 2013); Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society, 1850 to 1930 (Edinburgh, 2011); and, most recently (with Donald M. MacRaild) The English Diaspora in North America: Migration, Ethnicity and Association, 1730s–1950s (Manchester, 2017). Bueltmann was principal investigator of the ESRCfunded ‘European, Ethnic, and Expatriate’ project, and co-Investigator of the ‘Locating the Hidden Diaspora’ project funded by the AHRC. Jonathan Clark was educated at Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Peterhouse and a contributor to the ‘Cambridge School’ of the history of political thought. At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls College, and he was also a Visiting Professor at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. Latterly he was Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas. His work focuses on British and colonial American history in the ‘long eighteenth century’, but extends both backward and forward in time; it deals especially with the relations between political thought, religion and politics, and includes attention to the role of religion as a political mobiliser and as a source of division in social identities. His best-known books are English Society 1660–1832 (Cambridge, 1983, 2000) and The Language of Liberty 1660–1832 (Cambridge, 2004); his Thomas Paine, a study of the political, social and religious thought of England’s greatest revolutionary, was published in 2018. David T. Gleeson is Professor of American History at Northumbria University. He is the author of The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel



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Hill NC, 2001), The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill NC, 2013) and ‘Ireland in the Atlantic world’, Oxford Bibliographies (Oxford, 2015), as well as the editor of the essay collection The Irish in the Atlantic World (Columbia SC, 2010). Donald M. MacRaild is Professor of British and Irish History and Head of Humanities at the University of Roehampton. He has written or edited fourteen books. He recently wrote (with Kyle Hughes) Ribbon Societies in 19th Century Ireland and Britain: The Persistence of Tradition (Liverpool, 2018), co-authored (with Tanja Bueltmann) The English Diaspora in North America: Migration, Ethnicity and Association, 1730s–1950s (Manchester, 2017) and co-edited (with Tanja Bueltmann and David Gleeson) Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–2000 (Liverpool, 2012). Don was Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in 2010–11 and 2015–16. He also has written extensively on the Irish diaspora. He also has won major project funding from the AHRC, ESRC and Leverhulme (twice). Graeme Morton is Professor of Modern History at the University of Dundee and was previously the inaugural Scottish Studies Foundation Chair at the University of Guelph. With research interests in nationalism, national identity and diasporic studies, his recent publications include William Wallace: A National Tale (Edinburgh, 2014), The Scottish Diaspora (with T. Bueltmann and A. Hinson) (Edinburgh, 2013), Ourselves and Others: Scotland 1832–1914 (Edinburgh, 2012) and Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples (co-edited with D. Wilson) (Kingston and Montreal, 2013). Graeme is editor (post-1688) of the Scottish Historical Review and past editor of the International Review of Scottish Studies (2005–13). His current research examines the effects of meteorological variation and climate change on historical patterns of migration. Éamonn Ó Ciardha has published extensively on law and order, popular culture, cultural history, the outlaw and the use of Irish-language sources for Irish history. Formerly a Research Assistant at the University of Aberdeen and the Royal Irish Academy, he has held visiting professorships at the University of Toronto, the University of Notre Dame, the University of the Saarland, the University of Vienna and Framingham State University. He is a Senior Lecturer in History at Ulster University. Éamonn is author of the critically acclaimed Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2002). He also edited (with Micheál Ó Siochrú) The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice (Manchester, 2012). Philip Payton is Professor of History at Flinders University and Emeritus Professor of Cornish and Australian Studies at the University of Exeter

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(where he was Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies from 1991 to 2013). Recent books include The Maritime History of Cornwall (ed. with Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe) (Exeter, 2014), Australia in the Great War (London, 2015), One & All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia (Adelaide, 2016), Emigrants and Historians: Essays in Honour of Eric Richards (ed. Adelaide, 2017), and A History of Sussex (Lancaster, 2017). Siobhan Talbott is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Keele University, having previously held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Manchester and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2010. Talbott’s research interests lie in early modern British, European and Atlantic economic and social history. She examines influences on patterns of trade and commercial activity, particularly during periods of war and political change. Her work focuses on the actions of individuals and the importance of local and regional contexts in maintaining commercial links during periods of upheaval, examining the construction of commercial networks, communities and identities. Talbott’s work on Scottish and British relationships with France has won several prizes, including the IHR’s Pollard Prize in 2011. Her first monograph, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London, 2014), was awarded the 2016 Senior Hume Brown Prize for the best first book in Scottish History.

Introduction: British and Irish diasporas: societies, cultures and ideologies Donald M. MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann and J.C.D. Clark Migrations, trade, settlement, and corresponding flows of ideas, beliefs and cultures, have been shaping human societies since the earliest times.1 In the period from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, a globalising world of ‘thickening connections across national boundaries’2 framed the growing British sphere of influence. The layers of that influence were many and varied, and intertwined the islands’ peoples, whose religious roots and migratory experiences cut across apparent national lines. The expansion of England that drove the emergence of a unifying Britishness first developed at home and resulted in conflicts, both religious and territorial, against the Celtic countries, and between Protestants and Catholics. Religious conflicts saw, at times, both Catholics and Puritans excluded from the ideology that shaped the expansive ambitions of the English. It is in this context that we look not just at migrations – the movement of people – but at diasporas: that is, communities of people with shared experiences and old homeland links that shape their lives long after they leave their homelands. These diasporas were about much more than shipping lanes and population transfer; they were sometimes rooted in a common culture, some in a shared ideology, many in a co-religious commonality. For some British and Irish folk, exile, flight, grievance and disagreement shaped their identities. We show in this volume that exile, victimhood and imposed or selfascribed difference (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) framed many diasporas emanating from the British and Irish Isles from the 1500s onwards. For the early modern period in particular many of those departing were religious refugees, both British and Irish, English as well as Scots. Even later, indentured labourers, Jacobin radicals and Chartists, and displaced handicraft workers, were, to differing degrees, victims. While these types of victim diasporas from the British and Irish Isles were not the same as

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those of the Jewish exile or African slaves who were forcefully shipped across the Atlantic, some of our groups faced real personal danger if they did not flee repression. At varying times, the harshest possible punishments hung over English Catholics and Protestants, Irish and Scottish Jacobites, United Irishmen and Jacobin radicals. The extent of their victimhood should not be exaggerated over the long duration, but neither should it be ignored. In addressing these and other issues, we attempt to complicate the picture of diaspora-formation by addressing early modern religious and military diasporas on the continent, as well as seaborne settlements in North America and beyond. In so doing, the volume provides the first integrated study of the formation of national or ethnic diasporas from the islands of Ireland and Britain, with a view to scrutinising the similarities, differences, tensions and possibilities of this approach to island history.3 While Britain was not alone in propagating expansion – territorial acquisition was an ambition shared by most major European powers – ultimately, none was to come close to the range and number of settlements or sustained colonisation programmes of the British. They built an empire, a wider British World,4 by establishing colonies in the Americas, Africa and Australasia, commercial entrepôts in Asia and informal economic domination in diverse locations around the globe. Neo-Britons and neo-Irish in the colonies did not exist in isolation but became part of transnational imperial networks. Communications systems emerged along migration pathways and connected exiles and settlers across long distances through shared roots, a shared culture and common structures, such as political or educational systems. For us, one of the key features of a diaspora is that peoples who had never lived in or seen their familial or community homeland still maintained active association with it. Although far-flung, these were real as well as ‘imagined’ communities.5 Ubiquitous migration is not itself an argument for the certainty of diaspora. For one thing, as the early chapters of this book show, British and Irish diasporas were not initially only maritime in nature; important streams, such as the Puritans in the Low Countries, English and Irish Catholics across Europe, and the Scots in Scandinavia and the Baltic states, were significantly continental in frame. Moreover, even where seaborne migrations became more important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nature of overseas migration was not the same for all of the island nations. The empire may have been English or British in conception and implementation, with 350,000 English settling in colonial America in the seventeenth century; yet, in the eighteenth century, Irish and German emigrants outnumbered the English settling there.6 For these groups the sense of connection to a country of origin, a sense of nationhood even outside of the homeland, was the active agent that linked them,



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whether religious or military refugees in early modern Europe, or secondgeneration Irish nationalist activists in mid-nineteenth-century America. Equally, as this volume plainly shows, not all diasporas, especially in the early modern period, were rooted in nationhood or nationalism. These modernist notions do not apply to, for example, sixteenth-century Catholic exiles, whom Clark reveals here. Notions that there were British diasporas in colonies they founded have been challenged in an important recent study. Constantine’s pioneering essay on settlement and diaspora-formation in the Anglo-world carefully frames the peopling of these new worlds in terms of the migration of English-speaking British and Irish peoples, as distinguished from the subsequent diaspora-formations of non-English-speakers from Europe and Asia.7 For him, settlers (the British and Irish) constructed colonial or national territories in which subsequent non-British/Irish settlers (say from Europe or Asia) formed diasporas. This is a suggestive approach: one which fits into a wider, important development in the historiography. Where older studies of the colonies and dominions stressed the importance of the rise of post-colonial nation-states, newer thinking, such as Constantine’s, stresses the continued importance of ‘the lingering appeal of empire culturally as well as politically until late in the twentieth century’.8 Such views lay at the heart of ideas brought under the umbrella of a ‘British World’. Since then, the British World has yielded several essay collections and a dedicated journal,9 while the most recent study of religions within a related compass emphasises a ‘Greater Ireland’.10 Constantine’s position potentially undermines any contention that the original English-speaking settlers in the colonies may have formed diasporas. This argument also chimes with the idea that because the Anglo-culture formed by these people was primarily English, and so was the very culture against which diasporic peoples defined themselves,11 they, the English, could not express the ethnicity which later settlers expressed. The English, in other words, were ethnically invisible. Even if we accept this approach to English emigration, it still leaves open the possibility that other streams of emigrants from the British and Irish Isles could themselves be formed contra the dominant Anglo-culture of the colonies. Certainly, the Irish in particular were quick to present themselves against the English, Protestantdominated, elite culture of the US and the settler colonies. Some exponents of ethnic history have gone so far as to describe the settlement journeys of some Europeans, including the Irish, as a struggle for acceptance into ‘whiteness’.12 Lake and Reynolds’s important transnational consideration of ‘Whiteness’ makes it clear, however, that the ‘global colour line’ was drawn between white Europeans and indigenous peoples, not between whites themselves.13 While the Irish clearly had more challenging entry

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points and access ways into US life than the English, diasporic consciousness (i.e. English sense of being part of their own global community) is no longer viewed simply as a synonym for migration nor as restricted to suffering, though the term has been used most expressly to describe exile and victimhood, principally for the Jewish people, but also Africans, Armenians and others.14 Let us now consider the British and Irish specifically. British and Irish foundations Diasporas were actively forged from within the cultures of emigrants. In turn, these emigrations were first and foremost functions of political and religious conflicts, economic imperialism and of related territorial expansions. This was certainly the case in the modern period, from after the first Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the Americas. New Spain, New France, New Holland, New Sweden, New England, Nova Scotia, or the labelling of the islands of New Zealand initially for Ulster, Leinster and Munster, are names which attest to the spread of European engagement with the idea and practice of colonisation and settlement, and, through them, the potential for wealth and prestige.15 In the British Isles, a further layer of colonisation also was one of the first, most persistent and certainly the most proximate to the people themselves. What Hechter called ‘internal colonisation’ was a precursor to many English venture schemes of the colonial settlements in America. In other cases, internal colonisation was a partner to external colonisation.16 It was often undertaken by the same people. Those who held lands in the Irish plantations – Raleigh, Chichester and others – also had interests in the Americas.17 The continuing conquest of Ireland brought new determination to end the persistence of Irish opposition through the plantation of Britons – Scots as well as English – in Ulster especially. From the perspective of migration, rather than colonisation, the peoples of all of the islands and nations of the Atlantic archipelago embodied the early modern excitement for overseas expansion. Population growth, expert propaganda and schemes to send indentured and convict labour, each fuelled the fires of emigration to the Americas.18 A little later seasonal work opportunities, such as those offered by the fur trade in British North America, played their part.19 The emigrations of Britons and Irish post-dated the mass movement of Portuguese and Spanish peoples, but continued in vastly larger numbers long after movements from the Mediterranean powers had been halted by imperial decline and loss of territorial influence. Critically, these mass movements of peoples from Britain and Ireland



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were almost all-encompassing: English, Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Scots, people from the metropolis of London, or the manufacturing towns of the Midlands and North, to those from remote parts of the Highlands, Catholics as well as Protestants. Few regions had no emigrants to the New World, and few classes were excluded either. These migrations also closely shaped relations between the nations of the British and Irish Isles. In part, this was the result of English imperialism from a heartland around London and the south of England, first through Hechter’s ‘Celtic fringe’, and then on through the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia.20 Processes of subjugation are implied, but this assumption simplifies realities. While the Gaelic and Catholic Irish struggled against these processes, settler English and Scots-Irish in Ireland shared in them, quickly forming hybrid peoples who were both Irish and British. Critically, they were loyal to Britain and willing to venture in the name of the monarch. After the failure of the Scots’ Darien scheme21 and, by extension, Scotland’s own imperial dream, the Act of Union ensured that the Scots similarly became partners in empire – in fact, more strongly so than did the Irish. Arguably, the Scots had a greater influence on migration and settlement on these united terms than would have been possible had Darien succeeded and the Act of Union not occurred. Yet wherever migrants from the British and Irish Isles went in combination or separately – and they went in their millions – the Irish, Scots and English, Welsh and Cornish, co-mingled, blended and blurred. In so doing, they created new identities as neo-Britons, neo-Irish, neo-Scots – persons who were colonials, new nationals, and yet still linked to their old country and home nations. Critically, they could also hold multiple identities. Therefore, while they gradually integrated into new lives in far-flung places around the globe, British and Irish emigrants also perpetuated elements of their distinctive national cultures in music, literature, saints’ days, and broader, diffuse interactions with fellow nationals. While this could be positive, bringing together British and Irish Isle cultures in unique new ways, one feature of their co-migration and co-mingling, on occasion, was that old-world conflicts also went with them. The specific settling of neo-Britons, and their related social activities and cultural practices, have been the subject of strikingly variant historiographies. On the English, until recently, there has been next to nothing: as the largest migrant group, but seemingly without distinct cultural markers to set them apart, they have been rarely recognised as a distinct group.22 The Welsh are often hidden simply because of their comparatively low numbers and close association with the English, for they are frequently lumped together in censuses and the like under ‘England and Wales’. The Scots were more apparent in this respect, with significant stress laid on

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their contributions to building and maintaining the British Empire, as well as their distinctive impact in different host societies. Today, debates on the Scottish national question generate new interest in the idea of a Scottish diaspora.23 But it has been the Irish who, for decades, have been washed over by a torrent of works, including detailed migration profiles and studies of migrant life post-migration, as well as matters concerning the role of religion in Irish communities abroad – a scholarship generated in particular by American ethnic historians. This variety and variance is important to understand because it relates directly to the idea of how the nations of the British and Irish Isles came to view themselves as through the prism of overseas expansion and empire. From an early point in Irish history – especially from the ‘Flight of the Earls’ in 1607 –24forced emigration created a national exile narrative, and this still strongly informs Irish self-identification. We see this in Ó Ciardha’s chapter here. National writers in Ireland, in the wake of the Great Famine, acknowledged the vital role played by Irish exiles in shaping Irish identities at home, and abroad. A.M. Sullivan, assistant editor and later editor of the Nation from the 1850s until the 1880s, viewed the reluctant exile as the model of Irish ingenuity (in so doing he expressed ideas of contemporary political economy and the loss of human capital as much as ideas of national sentiment).25 For England, the eminent imperial historian and Victorian commentator J.R. Seeley considered the absence of such ideas at home in England as no great surprise, since, for him, ‘the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia’.26 Since the failures of the Darien scheme in the late seventeenth century, and through military adventuring and partnership in revolution, the Scots, too, could point to the eminent actions of its people abroad in shaping how Scots at home saw themselves. As nabob wealth flowed in, the Scots could not seriously question their connection to imperial expansion. Within this wider context we find scholars, such as Tom Devine (on Scotland), J.R.C. Young (on England) and Declan Kiberd (on Ireland), who have pointed to the transnational link between homeland and new-land, refracted through the prism of migration, return, travelling, communication and the activities of what today are often called diasporas.27 Let us consider the slippery meaning of this term now. The varied applications of diaspora For the most part, ‘diaspora’ has been deployed as a collective noun: an umbrella term to draw together all those who left given national or colonial territories for whatever reasons. More specifically, ‘diaspora’ has been



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framed in terms of the movement of people, particularly including movements that were the result of forced dispersal and exile, the latter associated too with victimhood, which thus emerged as key criteria for diasporas. For some, such as Jews or the millions of Africans in the Slave Trade, these are critical parameters indeed. However, Akenson’s most recent work explains how even in the Jewish case there is conflict between the Jewish diaspora which was forced into exile (for 2,000 years before the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948), and those who voluntarily live outside Israel today.28 For Akenson, even within scholarship on this most diasporic group, ‘mushiness in meaning was a prerequisite for popularity’.29 Clearly, this problem is not exclusive to the Jewish case: it is amplified by a much wider use of the term in present scholarship. Here diasporas are much more liberally described – too liberally in fact, as seemingly every nation has a diaspora now. There are two questions here: why has this happened, and does this terminological shift make sense?30 In some cases we can see that the term has become so general as to be inadequate as a unifying term – for instance to describe Ireland’s synchronically and diachronically diverse population movements. Enda Delaney is correct to argue that ‘diaspora implies, even superficially, a unity of purpose’; but the truth is that Ireland (like Italy or Britain) sent forth many diasporas. 31 At the same time, scholars such as Rogers Brubaker and Cairns Craig have rightly questioned the validity of the diaspora concept, arguing it has lost value through its ubiquitous application to all kinds of migratory experiences.32 The path forward is to refine our definitions to focus both on those who were victims forced into flight and those who maintained diaspora as a result of a sense of connection and community in the absence of that experience. The Irish are well established in the literature as a victim group, whether we focus on the effects of English colonialism over many centuries, or set our sights on natural disasters, such as the Great Famine, which were made worse by the British government’s callous mismanagement of relief efforts. We also show, however, that English Catholics as well as Irish ones were forced into exile, and that English workers forced into economic redundancy by technological advancement also constituted types of victim diasporas, albeit in far less dramatic ways than other peoples. At the same time, our study looks at how groups other than English Catholics, Puritans or the poor Irish also demonstrated what we term ‘diasporic consciousness’. Even those like Scottish or English industrial workers or capitalists, for example, maintained strong public rituals of national identity for decades and even centuries after they, or their forebears, left their homelands: saints’ days, pipe bands, folk festivals and Highland games are all added to what we view as cultural manifestations of belonging.

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The chapters in this collection follow necessarily varying emphases to enable this focused refinement. All historians are concerned with problems of empirical evidence: we are no different; studying diasporas is no different. We are mindful of the words of Kevin Kenny who, in a highly influential piece on the Irish diaspora, once declared that ‘historians can study diaspora discursively only to the extent that the surviving evidence permits’, going on to suggest that ‘it is difficult to find traces of diasporic sensibility among the poor and minimally literate who constitute the bulk of most mass migrations’.33 This is, of course, true. But similar points were once made about ‘history from below’ or about women’s history, and the challenge has been overcome in these fields of inquiry. In more general terms, it should be remembered that studying the past from ‘surviving evidence’ is precisely what historians aim to do. The problems of diaspora history are the problems of history writ large. In this respect, Chowdhury’s conception of three types of diaspora is very helpful: first, the one of common identity, of shared national or ethno-national origins: Irish, Scots or Welsh; Cornish, English or Northern; Catholic, Protestant or Quaker, say. Or, secondly, an identity that deliberately is one reflecting multiple layers of connections, such as is the case for those who choose British or opt to employ it together with another identity. Chowdhury’s observation that diaspora means participation, whereby membership is declared and action in the name of the diaspora is taken, is helpful in this respect. The action of naming, enhancing and promoting one’s identity as a member of this or that global community, a diaspora, is the key. But Chowdhury also sees a third definition: as a metaphor for both ‘belonging’ and ‘unbelonging’; a declaring of homelessness and exile, simultaneously with suggestions of membership of a group whose members are all similarly situated.34 Certainly, memories had to be empowered in order for shared cultures to transmit transnationally; for diasporas to exist, cultural time-depth and geographical range were necessary partners. How these memories of diaspora circulate transnationally has been the subject of important new works.35 Chowdhury’s observations naturally point to the value of multiple locations of study, which we see in all of the chapters here. Scholars in our fields find themselves comparing: Scottish and Irish Jacobites, émigré Catholics from all quarters, the Cornish and Welsh miners, the English customs and character of Canada and New Zealand, and many others. The comparison, thus enabled, potentially applies not only across groups of people, but across these groups in different locations. But in our quest to comprehend the meaning of diaspora it may not be enough simply to develop analyses in multiple locations.36 What is certain is that we must



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move beyond bipolar comparisons.37 New cultural historians, in stressing transnational rather than nation-based approaches or comparisons, have moved against the national units of measurement and strict comparisons nation by nation.38 They have de-centred traditional narratives, creating a new language of shifting ‘diaspora spaces’ in place of the once hegemonic nation.39 In such a formulation, the elitist, imperialist assumptions of ‘metropole’ versus ‘colony’ are removed, except as anthropological memories of a dead language and culture dating to when the nation was paramount. In some senses, this postmodernist ‘turn’ is understandable. Emotions and ideas are not restricted by national boundaries, and while state policies can (and do) profoundly affect the migration patterns and social and political formations we now associate with diasporas, they can only limit, not exclude, the transnational transmission of cultures. For historians, however, this cultural turn in diaspora studies raises the level of analysis from the empirical to the abstract and intensifies the problems of developing a research agenda that will be recognised as producing ‘real’ histories. It is through clearer definition and identification of how a diaspora is measured that it is possible to utilise the term more fully and ensure that its distinct utility in migration history is fully exploited. How can that be achieved? This collection highlights that a key definition of diaspora is the presence of transnational communication between members of these British and Irish Isle national or regional communities. Communication is key not only between homeland and new-land to maintain connections, but also between communities in different diaspora locations, even if to facilitate only an imagined community – a Scot in the US might not have known a Scot in New Zealand, but could well have read of shared celebrations on St Andrew’s Day in newspapers. Therefore, each author is challenged to take a dynamic approach and to test empirically the frameworks for not just a description of diaspora, but also for an empirical demonstration of diasporic connection and consciousness. It is through that demonstration that diasporas can become tangible.40 Interrogating diasporas in this way opens up a key problematic of the volume: how the concepts of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic identity’ are used. Like ‘class’ and ‘gender’, these concepts are often deployed indiscriminately and, among historians at least, have become largely accepted and unquestioned series of affinities and affective relations based on common origins. Scholars now often apply ethnicity or ethnic identity to national, religious, regional and many otherwise quite varied groups, with the result that homogeneity is imputed to immigrants and emigrants without actual testing of their togetherness. What is also often neglected is that ethnicity can be both active and passive: individuals and groups can choose actively to express an ethnicity, a particular ethnic identity (e.g. through membership

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of an ethnic association), but they can also passively receive outside ascription as ethnic, usually with negative connotations of difference or inferiority.41 Therefore, a second critical aim of this collection is to historicise ethnicity/ethnic identity, asking how did the groups and peoples we explore become nations, when did a language and culture that might suit the ascription ‘ethnic’ come into being, and how was it employed among those living beyond the home nation? Donna Gabaccia has shown how emigrants in the United States who were from pre-unification Italy began to refer to themselves as Italians – an active choice on their part – even though, when they left, Italy was not a nation-state and so they were without that level of singular ethnicity. The absence of the national (at least until 1861) made the term ‘diaspora’ problematic for early migrants: they were Venetians, Sicilians and Calabrians. After the nation was formed, they became Italians as well as, for example, Sicilians, and the term ‘diaspora’ then took on explanatory cogency.42 Such modernist notions of nation-building and diaspora do not serve us well for the early modern period. While modern diasporas are often associated with nations, we also show (especially in Clark’s contribution) that many were not. In the context of our volume, Catholic exiles from early modern England did not go on to form nations elsewhere, but instead integrated into existing Catholic networks on the continent. Ultimately, what the existing work highlights is the overlap and connection between groups from the British and Irish Isles – quite naturally because of shared history and culture, but also often very practically in activities and joint initiatives. This blurring between these groups highlights one motivation for setting out this volume deliberately to examine together the diasporas that emanated from the British and Irish Isles. So let us turn to the content of the collection. Major themes of the volume The present volume seeks to establish the origins of the diasporas formed by people of the British and Irish Isles – the underpinning and foundational migratory flows, as well as their key characteristics. Generally, scholars also to some degree assess the applicability of the concept of diaspora to their respective national or regional groups and major historical themes. While the authors, here, have applied varying interpretations and conceptualisations of the term ‘diaspora’, all are united in actually interrogating it. Such assessment is critical to enhance our understanding of what diaspora can and cannot do in terms of furthering clarity through deepening analysis.



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The express aim of the volume is thus to move beyond that approach to offer perspectives on how diaspora can – or cannot – become a tool of inquiry into migrant worlds, continued connections between the old world left behind and new worlds settled. We also seek to understand the term’s contemporary purchase in an age of consciously ethnic identity politics. The volume stresses the varying foundations and evolution of the British and Irish diasporas, the developing attachments to them and the differences in each nation’s recognition of its own diasporas. The volume explores units that have been or are nations or states in the modern period, including England, Scotland and Wales. It also explores a diaspora driven by religious hatred, the Catholic diaspora. We acknowledge that Wales sits somewhat between, having not been politically distinct from England since the sixteenth century, while for Scotland the caesura of the Union of 1707 brings up interesting questions about distinct diaspora patterns before and after that watershed. Moreover, and as we indicated in the discussion above, reference to the national level to identify and explore diasporas can only get us so far. What about groups that behave like diasporas, but do not have a national referent? To probe this the volume explores not only issues of regional identity and loyalty, for example among migrants from Yorkshire, but also includes Cornwall as a distinct diaspora. While neither a nation nor a state in the same period, Cornwall has ancient claims to the kind of ethnic and linguistic difference from England that sustains other diasporas. In assembling the present content, we also suggest that Cornwall, as it sits in the half-light, is more clearly distinct than other counties in England, with an historiography of difference which supports the suggestion. Moreover, we also note that the factors of language, culture and religion made the Welsh diaspora very clearly distinct from the English, even if political arrangements at home suggested otherwise. Importantly, an argument running through several chapters is that even old unitary states such as England were, in the modern period, less homogeneous than applications of ethnicity would have us believe: northern and southern, urban and rural, but especially Catholic and Protestant differences could militate strongly against a singular identity. In Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, the additional factor of internal colonisation by a powerful neighbour, England, may have precipitated a singular ethnicity, but here, too, religious, regional and provincial cleavages were pronounced. We thus find ourselves wondering whether Seeley was right in seeing true national identities – especially reduced, that is, simplified, ethnic identities – as being forged overseas, where homeland cleavages were less important in sometimes hostile new communities than common origins.43 Seeley was a Victorian positivist who largely ignored the role of religion in the formation of national identities, whereas, by contrast,

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historians in the last thirty years or so have given a huge amount of attention to it. Certainly, a core set of questions around ethnicity and its historical emergence will frame the chapters outlined below to enable a tightening of the analytical purchase of the concept of diaspora. The chapters covering the earlier periods shape our principal understanding straight away, namely that the preconditions of diaspora were well established by the eighteenth century. If the nineteenth century was David Armitage’s pre-history of globalisation,44 then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laid out crucial preconditions. This does not mean that the eighteenth century was merely an entrée to the centuries that followed. The earlier period had its own specific conditions and developments and deserves equal interpretive weight with the later period, and this is why we devote three substantial chapters to the pre-1800 diasporas. One of the most remarkable things about the early modern migrations from these isles, and although they were smaller in scale, is how rich and diverse they were. Clark, Ó Ciardha and Talbott, in their chapters on pre-1800 English, Scottish and Irish diaspora-formation, point not to mass migration and colonisation of the New World as a principal driver for the creation of early diasporas; instead, they locate their studies significantly in the Old World of continental Europe, and examine the ways religious émigrés sought out Catholic communities on the continent, or how military adventurers and exiles (principally Jacobites in both Scotland and Ireland) made their way to fight for Catholic monarchs. At the same time, and more generally, British and Irish holy orders, merchants and elite family networks contributed to threads of transnational activity among the peoples of both islands of the Atlantic archipelago. Clark, Ó Ciardha and Talbott all, in some way, stress the importance of military exiles and adventurers, and the role of networks of religious orders and individuals. Some of these patterns remain key in the later period, as sojourners from all parts of the British and Irish Isles made temporary homes in locations around the world, often for economic gain or to actively help build and maintain the British Empire – acting as partners in empire – as Bueltmann and Morton show in their chapter. Clark focuses on English religious emigrants and their contribution to the European networks that represented one of England’s earliest strands of diaspora. His study begins with exiled Catholics, such as Lady Lucy Herbert, who is known to us because of her study in devotion, which she wrote as a nun in Belgium, publishing her work in Bruges. Even in this early period the level of mobility was significant. Clark’s chapter identifies a forgotten phenomenon, but one extensive in time (from the 1530s to the 1790s) and in space (across continental Europe). That also holds true for those in the military. Ó Ciardha also brings such military perspective



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into his assessment, revealing much more striking patterns of enduring identity for the Irish than we find for either the English or Scottish cases covering the same period. The point is clear: the military flight into Europe of clan chiefs and their officers, men and families, reflected the onset of renewed, altered and deepened British colonisation. For the plantation of Munster and of Ulster in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was based on lands seized from these Irish lords. Talbott’s chapter begins by charting the expansion of scholarly interest in the early modern migration of Scots to continental Europe. This has been welcome, not least because scholars have considered a broad range of questions, including that of return migration. In light of the proliferation of movements and range of destinations in which early modern Scots settled, they have been described as a ‘diasporic people’, but use of the term ‘diaspora’, argues Talbott, is problematic for early modern Scots. In recognition of that, the chapter explores the range of motives that influenced the decision of early modern Scots to leave their homeland, investigating patterns in the destinations chosen. Talbott then goes on to examine how migrants accessed a variety of support mechanisms – some of which relate to measurable strength of diaspora ties – and reflect on the concept of ‘return migration’ and the role of ‘identity’. Ultimately, Talbott’s exploration of the variety of Scottish migrants that were present in early modern continental Europe, advocates that the early modern ‘Scottish diaspora’ be viewed not as a homogeneous entity, but as a collection of individuals with different aims, objectives and experiences. The question as to what extent we might speak of homogeneous diaspora groups is not only relevant to the Scots in the early modern period, however, but also comes through in Bueltmann and Morton’s chapter. Starting with the Union of 1707, the key concern of the chapter is how, after the Union, the Scots were not simply participants in empire but partners in empire. By adopting that role, and although we can find substantial evidence that attests to strong invocations of Scottishness, there was a strong element of Britishness in the making of the Scottish diaspora. Bueltmann and Morton begin their discussion with a section focused on exploring further how identity is a critical measure and structuring principle of the Scottish diaspora: diaspora is not only a term that denotes the movement of people, their transnational connections and continued homeland affinity – though these characteristics are essential to it – but is also in itself an identity concept. Following this theoretical conceptualisation, they turn to examining how the British Empire shaped the migration choices of Scots from 1707, establishing the timing and geographical scope of the Scots’ partnership in empire, but also some uniform characteristics across sites, for instance the gendered nature of the partnership as men were more likely to be

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involved. The final section of their chapter then goes on to scrutinise how, across geographies and time, the partnership of Scots in empire actually manifested itself, exploring, for instance, the role of Scots in British imperial armies. Identity, and how it relates to the making of diasporas, brings with it a plethora of further nuances that are important to recognise. What we often find too, for example, is a concentration on nostalgia: an idea that was not conceptualised until the 1790s and which was strikingly absent from the Catholic diaspora which Clark discusses. An obvious example of this is the way in which Irishness has been grasped by disparate peoples in the relatively recent explosion of interest in the celebration of St Patrick’s Day and the marketing of related Irish kitsch as well as authentic Irish products. Public displays of ethnic identity were common to all immigrant groups, since on saints’ days, Scots, Irish, Welsh and English paraded between church services and dinners, albeit not in the significant number seen among Irish Catholics ‘wherever green was worn’.45 But, as Gleeson shows in his chapter, such activity could also be tied up with politics. There certainly existed a nostalgic Irish-American militant nationalism that supported the struggle for Irish independence and reunification, to the point that, in the twentieth century, the US government drew on prominent Irish-American politicians, such as Senator Ted Kennedy, to establish an official connection with the diaspora in America that would undermine that support. Such work was critical en route to the Anglo-Irish agreement on Northern Ireland, and eventually also to the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. It was partly because of such advances that the idea of the Irish diaspora as one of ‘oppression’ has finally been replaced by one of ‘scattering’. Such a transition was never possible for substantial elements among the English who, as colonial overlords, were viewed as the oppressors rather than the oppressed; something which cannot be said of the persecuted English Catholic diaspora, nor of dispossessed handloom weavers or political radicals fleeing persecution or prosecution at home. The stress on the idea of the English as imperial aggressors provides one reason why the idea of diaspora has not been recognised for the English; another reason is the English Whig illusion that the English did not indulge in religious persecution.46 Both perspectives are challenged in Clark and MacRaild’s chapters. The latter highlights that English immigrants actively developed and maintained exactly the same types of behaviour, including the establishment of ethnic associations, that are considered key characteristics – and key measures of diaspora – for other groups, such as the Irish or Scots. Maintaining culture, but also exchange of culture, constituted parts of the life experience of ordinary English immigrants. But for the



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English these could be harder to find as they had fewer markers of cultural distinction than other groups explored in this volume. To thus find the English diaspora, MacRaild argues, it is critical to look for cultural and associational traits, and engagement with concepts such as empire, monarchy and also what can be described as the fundamental tenets of an English working-class life. But even in lands with a common tongue, which is where most English could go, their story of settlement could be protracted. Hence we also learn of complex and complicated stories of settlement, of return migration and ‘whinging Poms’. While the English, in many ways, had a more straightforward migration experience than others – after all, their numerical dominance translated into a dominance in culture and systems – there is no one size that fits all cases. That is a point worth making also for smaller diasporas, such as that of the Welsh. This was, as MacRaild and Payton establish at the outset of their chapter, like many modern European diasporas, only smaller. It was, however, that relative smallness that explains partly why the Welsh have received little attention from historians of migration and the British Empire; or rather, they have not been fully integrated into wider British narratives. Frequently lumped together with the English, it is difficult to establish discrete numbers in the first place. Other measures are critical, therefore, to capture the Welsh diaspora, with language being particularly important. Ultimately, Welsh emigration and transnational ties, communication and community that subsequently developed must be seen as a hybrid diaspora. Early migrants sought to establish themselves as distinct communities, far removed from contemporary assimilatory pressures. Yet when the Welsh actively chose to play more prominent economic and social roles, the Welsh language and Welsh culture were asserted most successfully overseas. The Welsh case also highlights the diverse nature of diaspora locations – thereby, in a sense, also setting a challenge for other groups to follow suit in such explorations – as Wales could produce migrations of a very specific character, such as the utopian cultural nationalist exodus of small numbers to Patagonia in Argentina. Yet while such specific patterns reveal diaspora characteristics unique to the Welsh, they also possessed many of the characteristics of the emigrant Irish, including linguistic distinctiveness, religious persecution and economic hardship at home. Still the Welsh sought to distance themselves from the Irish overseas. If any common cause of Celtic brotherhood existed, it was between the Welsh and the Cornish. This was the case partly because their economic roles in settlements throughout both the US and Australia, for example, were often complementary. What made the Cornish diaspora distinct, and merits its inclusion here, is not only its ancient distinctiveness from England that sustains

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other diasporas, but that it was, in terms of migratory behaviours and patterns, an emigration region like many others in Europe. Such is the premise of Payton’s chapter, which goes on to explore the principal patterns of Cornish migration to reveal not only its numerical outflows but also its wider impact, including on the Cornish sense of identity at home, which Cornwall’s experience of emigration could heighten at times. Overseas the sense of being Cornish was maintained, in no small part, through the myths of ‘Cousin Jack’ and ‘Cousin Jenny’. Employed in many a mining frontier, the image of ‘Cousin Jack’ – an emigrant Cornish miner – was used to assert that the Cornish were innately equipped above all others as superior hard-rock miners, for example. In this way it became a myth used not simply to maintain ethnic identity, but rather what Payton describes as ethno-occupational identity, deployed as an economic strategy with a clear transnational dimension. In this conceptualisation lies, therefore, another approach to the measuring of a diaspora. This introduction has framed the chapters which follow within a wide literature. We discussed the background of the British and Irish foundations of migratory and other diasporas. We then explored some of the definitions and discussions of the concept of diaspora. Finally, the discussion sought to explore in more detail the specific contribution of each chapter contained in the collection. The volume overall has broad and long-run coverage, but we know it cannot be exhaustive. We hope this discussion, and what follows, will act as a spur for further work.

Notes 1 Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (New York, 2012 edn). 2 David Armitage, ‘Is there a pre-history of globalisation?’, in Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (eds), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-national Perspective (London, 2004), pp. 165–76. 3 With due deference to the path-breaking study of emigration, though not of diaspora, Eric Richards’s Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales Since 1600 (London, 2004). 4 For further discussion around the framing and terminology of the British World, see Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London, 2003); and Kent Fedorowich and Andrew S. Thompson (eds), Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester, 2013). 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983). 6 Malcolm Gaskill, Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans (Oxford, 2014); Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of



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13 14 15

16 17

18

19 20

17

Mass Migration to North America (Philadelphia, 1999); R.J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1775 (London, 1966); and Benjamin Bankhurst, Ulster Presbyterians and the Scots Irish Diaspora, 1750–1764 (Basingstoke, 2013). Stephen Constantine, ‘British emigration to the Empire-Commonwealth since 1880: from overseas settlement to diaspora?’, in Bridge and Fedorowich (eds), British World, pp. 16–35. Ibid., p. 16. For example Bridge and Fedorowich (eds), The British World; Philip A. Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005); Britain and the World: Historical Journal of the British Scholar Society. C. Barr and H. Carey, Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1950 (Kingston, On, 2015). T. Bueltmann, David Gleeson and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Invisible diaspora? English ethnicity in the United States before 1920’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 33.4 (2014), 5–30. Expressed most recently in David R. Roediger’s Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (Cambridge, MA, 2006), which is an outgrowth of his original classic, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1999 edn). See also another crucial statement: Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008), passim. R. Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London, 1997). The literature of these migrations is vast, but see for example: Bernard Diáz, The Conquest of New Spain, edited with an introduction, by J.M. Cohen (London, 1963); Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto, 2003); Carol E. Hoffcker et al. (eds), New Sweden in America (Newark, DE, 1996). Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975). Thomas Barlett, ‘“This famous island set in a Virginian sea”: Ireland and the British Empire, 1690–1801’, in Peter Marshall (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 273–74; Audrey Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013); Gaskill, Between Two Worlds, esp. pp. 3–21. Randolphe Vigne and Charles Littleton (eds), From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Brighton, 2001); Patrick Griffin, The People with no Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, NJ, 2001). For example, Suzanne Rigg, Men of Spirit and Enterprise: Scots and Orkneymen in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1780–1821 (Edinburgh, 2011). Hechter, Internal Colonialism.

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21 See, for example, John Prebble, Darien: The Scottish Dream of Empire (Edinburgh, 2000 edn). 22 A new study by two of the co-editors of this collection challenges that established view: Tanja Bueltmann and Donald M. MacRaild, The English Diaspora in North America: Migration, Ethnicity and Association, 1730s–1950s (Manchester, 2017). 23 The volume of new work on the Scots and their experiences continues to expand. See, for instance, Rebecca Lenihan, From Alba to Aotearoa: Profiling New Zealand’s Scots Migrants, 1840–1920 (Dunedin, 2015) and Stan Neal, ‘Jardine Matheson and Chinese migration in the British Empire, 1833–1853’, unpublished PhD thesis, 2016. For a comprehensive general account, see Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton, The Scottish Diaspora (Edinburgh, 2013). 24 Where the defeated Ulster clan chiefs departed Ireland from Donegal, following their defeat in the protracted Nine Years’ War, 1593–1603. 25 A.M. Sullivan, Speeches and Addresses, 1859–1881, 4th edition (Dublin, 1886), pp. 14–19. 26 J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (Boston, 1883), p. 9. 27 Tom Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750–2010 (London, 2011); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, MA, 1997; R.J.C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford, 2007). 28 Donald Harman Akenson, ‘Introduction: is “diaspora” a live hand grenade?’, in Amitava Chowdhury and Donald Harman Akenson (eds), Between Dispersion and Belonging: Global Approaches to Diaspora in Practice (Kingston, On, 2016), pp. 3–6ff. 29 Ibid., p. 23. 30 Donald Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Kingston, On, and Belfast, 1992); see also his brief discussion, ‘Irish diaspora’, in S.J. Connolly (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford, 1998), p. 267. 31 E. Delaney, ‘Forum: the Irish diaspora’, Irish Economic and Social History, 33.1 (2006), 35–45. On Italy’s diverse contribution, see Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas: Elites, Exiles and Workers of the World (London, 2000); for Britain, see Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland and Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London, 2004). 32 Rogers Brubaker, ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28.1 (2005), 1–19; Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture (Edinburgh, 2009), as well as his ‘Empire of intellect: the Scottish Enlightenment and Scotland’s intellectual migrants’, in John M. MacKenzie and T.M. Devine (eds), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), pp. 84–87. 33 Kevin Kenny, ‘Diaspora and comparison: the Irish as a case study’, Journal of American History, 90.1 (2003), p. 143. 34 Amitava Chowdhury, ‘The diaspora symptom: global projection of local identities’, in Akenson and Chowdhury (eds), Between Dispersion and Belonging, pp. 95–110. 35 See Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (eds), Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Berlin, 2014), and the sources cited therein.



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36 See the contributors to Cohen and O’Connor (eds), Comparison and History. 37 The work of Malcolm Campbell has been an exception here. See, for example, ‘The other immigrants: comparing the Irish in Australia and the United States’, Journal of American Ethnic History, XIV (Spring, 1995), 3–22; ‘Ireland’s furthest shores: Irish immigrant settlement in nineteenth-century California and eastern Australia’, Pacific Historical Review, 71.1 (2002), 59–90; and ‘Diasporas’, New Zealand Journal of History, XXVII.2 (2003), 7–24. 38 This is, for example, the case made in the introduction to The New Oxford History of New Zealand (Melbourne, 2009), edited by Giselle Byrnes. 39 A. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London, 1997). 40 Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Diaspora and transnationalism: theory and evidence in explanation of the Irish world-wide’, Irish Economic and Social History, 33.1 (2006), 51–58. 41 For example the ‘No Irish need apply’ phenomenon, which is grounded in a passive ascription and has created considerable scholarly heat: see Richard Jensen, ‘“No Irish need apply”: a myth of victimization’, Journal of Social History, 36.2 (2002), 405–29; Donald M. MacRaild, “‘No Irish need apply”: the origins and persistence of a prejudice’, Labour History Review, 78.3 (2013), 269–99; Rebecca Fried, ‘No Irish need deny: evidence for the historicity of NINA restrictions in advertisements and signs’, Journal of Social History, 49.4 (2015), 829–54. 42 Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas. 43 Seeley, The Expansion of England. 44 Armitage, ‘Is there a pre-history of globalisation?’, pp. 165–77. 45 See, for example, D. Adair and M. Cronin, The Wearing of the Green: A History of St Patrick’s Day (London, 2002). 46 ‘Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America’, Arts and Humanities Research Council project grant AH/I001042/1; outputs include Bueltmann and MacRaild, The English Diaspora in North America and David T. Gleeson (ed.), England, the English, and English Culture in North America (Columbia, SC, 2017).

1 Reconceptualising diaspora: religion, persecution and identity in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1794 J.C.D. Clark The subject revealed In 1743 was published, in the Austrian Netherlands, a small book of Christian devotion. It was a work in a penitential, ascetic and contemplative spiritual idiom that has recently been associated with the remarkable revival of French monasticism during the early seventeenth-century wars of religion, an idiom that has also been held to have been supported especially by French elite and royalist families.1 So far, it was not unusual. But this work was published in English, and, strikingly, it concluded with a two-page invocation, ‘A Prayer for our King, and Countrey’. This prayer was overtly political. It implored God’s mercies on ‘our manifold miseries’. It asked God to ‘regard us, as you are our Pastor, as the sheep of your flock and as the poor remaines of your ancient sheepfold in England’. It asked God’s blessing on ‘the Missioners of our nation consecrated to your service’ so that ‘the spotless Religion formerly planted, may once more revive and blosome in our Land’. Specifically, the prayer then called for God’s blessings on ‘our sovereign King James, and all the Royal Family … render them Victorious over all their Enemies, Re-establish them in their Kingdomes, and give them many years to enjoy the same’.2 It was an invocation of the Stuart monarch, James III (1688–1766), and therefore treasonable in the eyes of the regime of the Hanoverian George II. For the author was Lady Lucy Herbert (1669–1744), announced on the title page as ‘Superiour of the English Augustin-Nuns’, looking forward with devotion and hope to a Stuart restoration and to a lifting of the persecution of Catholics in her native country. Her book was published not in London, but in Bruges. Who, then, was Lady Lucy Herbert, and what is her significance for diaspora studies? She wrote from exile, for she had taken a decision which many sons and daughters of Catholic



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families still took. She was the fourth daughter of William Herbert (c. 1626–96), first marquess of Powis, servant of James II and duke of Powis (1689) in the Jacobite creation, who after 1689 had left his magnificent seat, Powis Castle in Montgomeryshire, to be a courtier in the exiled Stuart court at St Germain.3 In her chosen path of life Lucy Herbert was a great success. Touring the English religious houses on the continent she had chosen the English canonesses of St Augustine at Bruges, entered their priory in February 1692, was professed in June 1693 and elected prioress in March 1709. Nor did this order own only a single priory: a sister house was located in Paris, in rue des Fossés Saint-Victor, where sympathetic visitors were accommodated, conveniently next to the Scots College. Lucy Herbert is recorded as having made many improvements to the house at Bruges; she published two works of devotion, which were often reprinted; and she clearly raised the profile of her order. But that was not all. Lucy Herbert’s mother, Lady Powis, had been governess to the young Stuart prince of Wales (b. 1688) and to Princess Louise Marie (b. 1692); in 1708, Lucy received a visit in the convent at Bruges from James, now King James III; in June 1746, after her death, Prince Henry Benedict paid a similar visit to the priory while waiting to join the rising in Scotland. After the rising of 1715, Lucy Herbert received an extended visit from two of her sisters, Mary, lady Montagu (1659–1745) and Winifrede, countess of Nithsdale (1672–1749), the second famous for rescuing her husband William Maxwell (1676–1744), 5th earl of Nithsdale, from the Tower the night before his execution for his part in the Fifteen. In 1738 Lady Montagu retired to this priory to die. Another Herbert sister, Anne, lady Carrington (1662–1748), since 1701 a rich and childless widow, was active in the Jacobite cause, visiting the convent at Bruges and owning her own house in Paris. There Prince Charles Edward called on her in June 1745, before embarking for Scotland. For it was not just the religious orders or the inhabitants of the religious houses who formed networks, but also their extended families; together they created a network of some durability. As late as 1772–74, Lucy Herbert’s niece Mary Herbert (d. 1775; daughter of the 2nd duke of Powis, 1665–1745) was still corresponding with Charles III.4 And this was just the tip of an iceberg of dealings, evidence for which is now lost; just one religious house; and just one family. There were many, many more; and they had proliferated. ‘From about ten English Catholic houses on the continent at the beginning of the seventeenth century there were a hundred or so fifty years later. Additionally, there were about forty Irish Catholic foundations and a dozen Scottish.’5 They constituted a communications network, dedicated to a cause that was at once both religious and political.

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Lady Lucy Herbert thus united in her person several key diasporic themes: an elite family, used to leadership roles, that had suffered in the cause of Charles I; exile and service to the Stuarts after 1688; Catholic devotion in exiled religious houses; continued involvement in Jacobite negotiation and conspiracy for a restoration; an explicit English national identity and patriotic identification. In this she was not alone. Indeed her small volume opens a door on a subsequently forgotten world of English, Scots and Irish religious houses and colleges on the continent of Europe, populated by successive disaporic waves of emigration from the British Isles. Now familiar only to a few historians of religion, it has yet to register in the secularised historiography of diaspora studies. It might be conceptualised as the first British diaspora, although no historical monograph has adopted that title and this chronologically and geographically extensive phenomenon has attracted no comprehensive attention in modern academe.6 Toleration, myths of origin and the historiographical suppression of the first diaspora The historiographical exclusion of this diaspora is easily explained. An older historiography depicted Britain, or at least England, as relatively hospitable to refugees and as the pioneering home of religious toleration. Familiar examples were regularly cited: the immigration of the Huguenots in the face of persecution by Louis XIV,7 the reception of Protestant refugees from the Palatinate in 1708–9,8 and the increasing acceptance of the Jewish community.9 This interpretation hardened into an unchallengeable premise. The premise survives, its parentage forgotten, in recent studies of English national identity, which have ante-dated a unified nationalism and explained it simplistically in terms of a tolerant rejection of an implicitly intolerant ‘other’: in this recent historiography Ireland and Scotland are conventionally ignored, and Catholicism is allowed no positive role, only a negative one.10 This myth of origins was historically constructed. A claim to superior religious toleration was present in some polemics of the time: it was advanced as a defence of William III’s rule, however intolerant the regime really was towards those of whom it disapproved.11 The political claim was famously mythologised by a visitor, writing primarily for French purposes. Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), a collection of twenty-four letters, began with seven addressed to religion before he turned to lesser matters like ‘Of the Parliament’ and ‘Of the Government’. According to Voltaire, ‘England is properly the country of sectarists’; the intolerant conflicts of the last four years of Queen Anne were only ‘the hollow noise of a sea whose billows still heav’d, tho’ so long after the



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storm’, since ‘religious rage ceas’d in England with the civil wars’. The proof of this point was commercial cooperation: on London’s Royal Exchange ‘the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts.’ Voltaire summed up his teaching with his most famous aphorism, perhaps only partly ironic: ‘If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people wou’d cut one another’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.’12 In Voltaire’s writings this point was briefly made by an author whose larger aim was to promote French infidelity, not English trade: the link between religious toleration and commercial prosperity was mostly made by English commentators. By 1768, this correlation had become unquestionable wisdom in England. According to Joseph Priestley, The fine country of Flanders, the most flourishing and opulent then in Europe, was absolutely ruined, past recovery, by the mad attempt of Philip the second, to introduce the popish inquisition into that country. France was greatly hurt by the revocation of the edict of Nantz; whereas England was a great gainer on both occasions, by granting an asylum for those persecuted industrious people; who repaid us for our kindness, by the introduction of many useful arts and manufactures, which were the foundation of our present commerce, riches, and power.13

By 1826, toleration could be defended in Britain by a leading reformer, James Mill, on the implicit premise that Christianity was untrue, or, at least, that any particular form of it was not demonstrable.14 This tactic reinforced the already existing argument that toleration brought material prosperity; indeed it was one of the two grounds on which the ‘Whig interpretation’ was worked out. Roy Porter was the reverse of original in reading the Whig myth as historical truth: ‘Toleration was not just good for religion: it was good for commerce as well.’15 In the archetypal vision of G.M. Trevelyan, ‘Substantially freedom of religious worship had, with certain exceptions, won the day’ with the Toleration Act of 1689. Even in the case of Catholics, ‘the infamous penal laws were usually inoperative’.16 The Catholic diaspora did not appear in Trevelyan’s pages. If England or Britain were to be depicted as a cradle, or at least a forerunner, of democracy, its intolerant stances in previous centuries had to be airbrushed out. An American historian explained how ‘religious toleration and political liberalism were attained only after a long and heroic struggle and an awful propitiation of blood’,17 and first attained

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in England. By 1997 it seemed obvious to an American that ‘Tolerating and being tolerated is a little like Aristotle’s ruling and being ruled: it is the work of democratic citizens.’18 A few historians, standing outside this national myth of toleration, advanced different analyses. Henry Kamen maintained that in the late seventeenth century ‘The retreat from religious liberty was equally strong in the country which had progressed most towards it’: England. James II’s genuine attempt to institute liberty of conscience was negated by a violent Anglican reaction, argued Kamen; William of Orange, once on the throne, failed to fulfil the terms of his declaration of November 1687 in favour of complete freedom of worship for Protestant Dissenters and a liberty of conscience for Catholics; the Toleration Act of 1689 ‘was reactionary in tone and content, and fell far short of contemporary ideals … it represented a step away from the ideals propounded by [William] Penn and his predecessors’. Consequently, England ‘continued to repress Catholic Ireland for reasons ostensibly political and economic, but also implicitly and psychologically religious’.19 Alexandra Walsham identified the conventional history of ‘the rise of toleration’ as a ‘teleological narrative’ or ‘hallowed narrative’ leading from the ‘individualism’ of the Reformation towards the ‘liberalism’ of the nineteenth century, a narrative framed by such Victorian writers as Lord Macaulay, W.E.H. Lecky and Samuel Rawson Gardiner. ‘To a greater or lesser extent, these works were also infected with the myths of English exceptionalism and Anglo-Saxon moderation.’20 Scott Sowerby focused on James II, explaining the revolution of 1688 as an intolerant reaction against the king’s policies: ‘Beginning in 1686, he settled on a political strategy that privileged reform above repression’, launching and leading a campaign to secure liberty of conscience by pressuring Parliament to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. This campaign was countered by a politically constructed ‘narrative of victimization in which the freedoms of Protestant England were about to be subverted by militant Catholicism’; the backlash was ‘not a spontaneous movement’. Yet it succeeded, and in 1689 ‘anti-popery was written into the revolution settlement’ as a system of political discrimination, followed by legislation giving effect to persecution: a double land tax, disenfranchisement, the inability to purchase land, ‘perpetuall Imprisonment’ for Catholic priests and schoolmasters.21 There were, it is true, successive minor waves of immigration into England and Ireland. Yet these were projects pressed through by the elite, and the populace was often opposed or strongly opposed to them. The emigrant experience was better captured by those English reforming exiles under Mary I who imbibed more extreme views on the continent and returned under Elizabeth I to propagate their principles, including



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deposition and regicide, in the Church of England.22 England’s, and later Britain’s, religious intolerance23 is better assessed by weighing against these cases the larger and longer-term phenomenon of Catholic exile. It is this that invites the title ‘the Catholic diaspora’. How does it relate to present-day diaspora theory? Theorising diasporas Diaspora studies are a dynamic and successful area of study, proliferating especially since c. 2005; but this undoubted phenomenon itself calls for historiographical explanation. It seems that many peoples now seek retrospective participation in a ‘diaspora’, just as many peoples have sought since the 1960s to possess their own Enlightenment; and to some degree, as with ‘the Enlightenment’, the term serves only as an emphasiser, performing no real work. The argument here is that to understand such phenomena it is necessary to trace the history of the category itself, rather than to refine it further as an ideal type. Its history is revealing. Where present-day components of ‘diaspora’ like ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationalism’ had not been conceptualised in Englishlanguage discourse before the nineteenth century, ‘diaspora’ itself certainly had, but with specific reference only to the Jewish experience.24 With time, the theological component of the Jewish understanding of their exile was overlooked by others, leaving a secular connotation of victimhood.25 In this form the term was widely useful, however: its secularisation allowed it to be adopted in African studies as a more strongly normative term for the history of slavery, and thence it spread out into post-colonial studies generally.26 Not to be outdone, students of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury emigration from Europe have appropriated the same term. Here demographic and economic considerations have established a dominant conceptualisation. The term ‘diaspora’ has, then, only recently been applied in this extended sense, and (since conceptualisation is not an empirical enterprise) this has happened in response to external polemical needs.27 Diaspora studies of the British Isles, for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, largely share common premises: that major movements of people were mainly the result of population pressure at home (‘push’), combined with the draw of economic opportunity abroad (‘pull’).28 All action, of course, has an economic dimension, and it has been explored in impressive scholarship. But for these emigrations to feature as diasporas, their participants are normally also required by present-day historians to have preserved a sense of difference that revolved around the nineteenth-century concept of ethnicity. In this primarily economic model, diaspora studies

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assume a special importance for Britain and Ireland in general, since these islands were the source of the numerically largest outflow of people in Europe. The phenomenon has been theorised predominantly on the basis of these islands’ complex but economically structured experience,29 since it has seemed, for England, inappropriate to theorise it on the alternative basis of Jewish experience.30 Indeed Jews themselves had normally treated the Jewish diasporas as unique.31 ‘Diaspora’ in ancient Greek meant merely a scattering; the Jewish experience gave the term an extended significance, and this wider meaning was transferred to ‘diaspora’ in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures undertaken for Hellenic Jewish communities of Alexandria in the third century BC (Deuteronomy 28:64, where the Jews were threatened with a catalogue of punishments, including dispersal, if they disobeyed God’s commandments). Jewish commentators reinforced the meaning of the Greek term by interpreting successive Jewish emigrations in terms of sin and divine punishment: ‘for centuries, a sin–punishment paradigm would remain the dominant lens through which the Jews viewed their historical existence’. Hence ‘it never mattered to Jews why historically they came to be spread across a vast diaspora’: economic ‘push’ and ‘pull’ did not structure this vision. ‘Just as God warned that Israel would be dispersed among the nations for breaking its covenant, God also held out the promise of protection, restoration, and redemption.’ The Hebrew language employed a number of terms to express this idea, notably galut, but from the 1950s increasingly the secularised term tfutsot, meaning dispersal as ‘a historic empirical fact’, so that ‘the language of exile … now sounds archaic in colloquial Hebrew’. Even so, Hebrew still implies the uniqueness of the Jewish experience: what other exiled peoples have is a pezura.32 Other peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries implicitly agreed that the Jewish case was special: their own emigrations, they thought, did not involve divine retribution, religious persecution or the prospect of forgiveness and return. Yet the changing historical experience of the Jewish people, including their increasing sense of being at home in a variety of countries, is arguably encouraging a sense of ‘an end of the Jewish diaspora’;33 beyond the Jewish community, this helps drain the notion of diaspora of its specific and limiting Jewish reference. Consequently, the now-dominant economic-reductionist model has had the effect of greatly increasing the number of phenomena that are accepted as having satisfied the criteria; but ‘[t]he problem with this latitudinarian, “let-athousand-diasporas-bloom” approach is that the category becomes stretched to the point of uselessness … The universalization of diaspora, paradoxically,



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means the disappearance of diaspora.’34 There has been a consequent loss of focus. At the same time, economic reductionism is weakening in a variety of areas of historical inquiry, and the rise of intellectual history seems set to have its effect on diaspora studies also. A new conceptualisation is therefore called for. This essay proposes a refocusing of the categorisation to bring into view another and significant episode which was of prior importance for the histories of Britain and Ireland. This refocusing must also attend to geographical difference in the ways in which migrations have been pictured. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the British Isles were the source of at least three different migrations, from Ireland, Scotland and England. The first two, being mythologised in the context of the nineteenth-century ideology of nationalism, occluded the nineteenth-century diaspora of the English, whose collective self-images were much older and stronger: the English were therefore slow to adopt the ideology of ‘nationalism’.35 Victimhood meant that the Irish and Scottish cases also unduly prioritised the economic dimension, foregrounding the Irish Famine of the 1840s and the Highland Clearances in Scotland. In the shadow of these assumptions, the majority of studies of any British diasporas have assumed their end points to have been in the United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand; the historiographical remedy proposed to the previous occlusion of the English has been a re-instatement of them as ‘an ethnic group’ on a par with the Irish and Scots. Such an analysis provides an important new answer to the question ‘Why was there no English diaspora?’ True, the argument runs, the English did not participate in forced exile in response to economically defined oppression, they sustained no memory of victimhood, they lacked awareness of any diasporic experience, the English at home showed little responsiveness to English communities overseas, but at least they were an ethnic group, and can be studied as such.36 Although that answer is a powerful one for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after ethnicity had been conceptualised, this essay suggests that it does not preclude other answers and other typologies. In particular, it does not preclude attention to an earlier English diaspora, examined here, that self-consciously shared important features with the contemporaneous diasporas of Ireland and Scotland, that had less to do with population pressure at home or economic opportunity abroad, that was a phenomenon of minorities rather than of majorities, that provided for the preservation and development of identities for those beyond their homeland which worked against their assimilation into their host societies, and that had quite different sources for its sense of victimhood. It was, instead, primarily a response to religious persecution.

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True, the Catholic diaspora failed in its overt goals; but a losing cause that took two centuries to lose, and that then survived another half century to mutate into something else, calls for reconsideration. It might, of course, be disqualified a priori. Diasporas can be defined as one way in direction and permanent in their results. But this would be merely definitional. As in the Jewish case, other movements of peoples in response to persecution can be perceived by them as temporary: they look for a return, a restoration. Far from being an invisible diaspora, the English Catholic diaspora was highly visible and highly self-aware; as much so as the Scots and Irish Catholic diasporas. Far from lacking a religious identity (by comparison with, say, emigrants from Ireland in the nineteenth century), English, Irish and Scots émigrés from the Reformation to the French Revolution prominently shared one.37 If a diaspora is defined differently, by a desire to return, such a return was eventually brought about by the Catholic back-migration of the 1790s, but not on its own terms: neither the reconversion to Catholicism of England and Scotland, nor the ascendancy of the Catholics in Ireland, were achieved. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, religious persecution often worked. And if earlier diasporas from Britain and Ireland can be understood in terms of religious persecution, a reconsideration may be necessary also of the terms in which the Irish and Scots came to describe their migrations in the nineteenth century.38 Earlier emigrations can be accurately understood only in terms available to their participants. Nationalism and ethnicity have to be located as a nineteenth-century coinage; historical reconstruction has to look beyond these neologisms. In question are not only the motives and structures of emigrations but also their sense of what was at issue: this included wider questions of national identity. In the early modern period there had been ‘multiple and competing narratives of English nationhood’.39 Among these, the late sixteenth-century narratives of émigré Catholics like Robert Persons and William Allen did not secure intellectual hegemony. But that failure did not mean that an alternative conceptualisation of ethnicity at once established itself. The Oxford English Dictionary formerly offered a central definition of the adjective ‘ethnic’ as ‘Pertaining to race’;40 but racial theory too was formulated only in the nineteenth century. Before that, the premises of group identity were very different. ‘Ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ were originally conceived with primary reference to Christian theology. Samuel Johnson, in A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755), defined the adjective ‘Ethnick’ as ‘Heathen; Pagan; not Jewish; not Christian’.41 Additional meanings were added later, drawn especially from historiography, ethnology, anthropology and genetics. The term is now diverse in its possible meanings, and may serve to obscure rather than to focus the subject. After a century



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like the twentieth, so much dominated by what it chose to understand as ethnicity, it is important to recall that ‘ethnicity’ itself is an historical formation and not the unchanging key to every historiographical lock. The dimensions of the diaspora Before ‘ethnicity’ in its nineteenth-century senses came religion; but ‘religion’ was not an undifferentiated category. The experience of exile itself contributed to the late emergence of a binary antagonism between newly coined identities, ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’, each including differences, each competing to propagate what later became known as ‘national identities’. From the 1550s to the 1790s, Britain and Ireland witnessed significant outflows of religious groups in successive waves, under various pressures including war and food shortage, but always displaying a religious identity and in search of religious security abroad. The emigration from England began with the imperilled circle of Bishop John Fisher under Henry VIII; it grew in numbers in the face of Elizabethan persecution;42 it was reinforced in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot; it escalated as a result of the civil wars of the 1640s, the Popish Plot of 1678–79 and the Revolution of 1688; it was sustained following the Jacobite risings, notably those of 1715 and 1745; it took new forms as part of the luring abroad of scientific and technological expertise in the early stages of industrial development. Emigration from Ireland began in the late 1580s and was not reversed after the Restoration in 1660; on the contrary, Ireland’s troubles led to new waves of migration.43 Scots had an older tradition of service abroad as mercenaries, but the Reformation created waves of Scots Catholic and Protestant exiles, supporting opposite causes. Some émigrés assimilated into their host societies, but many others did not; and the most visible self-expression of the latter group was the creation across Europe of networks of seminaries, monasteries, nunneries and religious schools. This visible dimension of the Catholic outflow was not thrown into reverse until the French Revolution, with the destruction of a swathe of religious houses and the return of their members from the continent to Britain. Indeed it was the sudden and violent phenomenon of reverse migration in the 1790s that first identified to an English academic audience the significance of what had happened. On 24 May 1798 a paper by the Abbé Mann was read in his absence before the Society of Antiquaries in London, and later published in their journal. Theodore Mann, born in Yorkshire, a convert to the Catholic Church, had been prior of the English Charterhouse in Nieuwpoort and was later secretary of the Royal Academy in Brussels and fellow of the Royal Society in London. He was famous

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across Europe as a natural scientist, a populariser of Newton and a Catholic Cisalpine theologian. Now he wrote from Leutmeritz in Bohemia where, an émigré himself, he was subsisting on an imperial pension. Keenly aware of the phenomena of persecution, exile and diaspora in the 1790s, Mann was drawn to sum up the experience of earlier centuries. But he appreciated that his subject was not now going to have a wide appeal. It was, he admitted, ‘little interesting at a time [1798] when the reigning spirit of several nations is far more disposed to destroy all the monuments of the piety of their ancestors, than to preserve the memory of them, and has already destroyed the greatest part of these I am going to mention’.44 His catalogue of religious houses (see Appendix) was not complete45 but it captured the main point: there had been a huge emigration, maintained over several centuries. Now it went into reverse: teachers from Douay returned to create Ushaw College, County Durham and St Edmund’s College, Ware; the Jesuits’ school at St Omer became Stonyhurst in Lancashire; the Benedictines’ monasteries at St Lawrence and St Gregory became Ampleforth and Downside; and there were others. Mann’s catalogue of forty-four religious houses was nevertheless remarkable, and from his long list certain features emerge. One was the geographical dispersal of the movement, from Prague in the east to Santiago in the west; from Cologne in the north to Seville in the south. Secondly, the wide variety of the religious orders concerned. Thirdly, the frequent involvement of nobility or gentry in their establishment or endowment. Fourthly, the frequent dedication of these houses to education, whether of boys and girls not destined for life as religious, or of seminarians intended for the priesthood. Fifthly, the repeated foundation of new colleges, seminaries, monasteries and convents from the 1560s to the 1660s. Sixthly, the survival of most of these houses until destroyed by what Mann called ‘the all-devouring French revolution’ in the 1790s, only a few closing in earlier decades.46 They clearly performed a variety of functions that remained important to the needs of the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish who provided sustained if fluctuating streams of recruits. But destruction in the 1790s was so widespread, and wrought such havoc in their records, that subsequent historical recovery of their roles is difficult. The Catholic diaspora: education This institutional infrastructure gave a definition to a phenomenon that was present only to a smaller degree in other cases, for example the Hugeuenots. What, then, did these houses do? An initial purpose was educational, created by ‘the diaspora of Catholic dons from Oxford and Cambridge and Catholic schoolmasters from the grammar schools’. This



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phase has been recovered in one distinguished monograph surveying 1547–1689, but the story has seldom been researched in the period following the expulsion of James II. We can, however, date the exodus of English dons from 1534, when the Act of Supremacy required an oath at the universities renouncing papal allegiance; the dons went to ‘Ireland, Scotland, Paris, Salamanca, Bologna, Padua and Louvain’. But soon they began to found their own institutions. The first Catholic school on the continent was St Ursula’s School for girls at Louvain, founded in 1548 by the canonesses of St Augustine, but larger numbers of schoolmasters followed after 1563, when the oaths of allegiance and supremacy were imposed on them in England. This wave of exodus saw the foundation of many colleges, of which the most famous was the English College at Douay.47 Because of its diasporic location, this educational enterprise was necessarily an education in something of extended significance. An international network of religious houses was central in sustaining a sense of English nationhood contrasting strongly with that being worked out by Protestant authors on the contrasting basis of ‘isolationism and exceptionalism’, Protestants framing the image of England, then Britain as ‘an enclosed world, a sanctuary for beleaguered Protestantism’.48 By contrast, sixteenthcentury Catholic activists like Robert Persons and John Wilson explored a variety of alternative images within the general picture of the British Isles as integral to western Christendom, including ‘British imperial union’ and its opposite, the socially conflicted but religiously associated archipelago of Catholic nations: England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.49 Of these colleges in exile, Catholics soon had great expectations. In 1597, an English Jesuit wrote of two grounds of hope for ‘the conversion of our country’. The first was ‘the high degree of credit our principal pillars and agents have both in R[ome] and S[pain]’. The second support of our hopes is in the continual resort of our nation to our seminaries, and their constancy in following their missions, and procuring to be qualified for their return. In the sight of man, it is marvellous that the rigour of the laws, and the severe execution thereof, these 10 or 12 years, has been the foundation of our credit, and an inducement to men to adventure their skin and bone for God’s sake, and the saving of souls. It is observed that where, before these laws, we had but one or two seminaries, and those but indifferently furnished, we have since that time eight. There are 70 scholars at Douay, 120 at St. Omer, 80 in Valladolid, 63 in Seville, 65 in St. Lucar; and in Lisbon two residences fitted for our missions. Where before only seven or eight yearly returned from our mission, there are now between 40 and 50, and the number of adventurers and labourers in England is upwards of 500, besides

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those of our society [the Jesuits], which are some 150, not including Capuchins and other religionists, to the number of 100.50

The English Act of 1581 that banished Jesuits and seminary priests therefore commanded students in colleges abroad to return within six months, penalised sending a child abroad to be educated and disabled the child from inheriting. An early Act of James I’s reign (I Jac. I, c. 4, 1603) repeated the penalties. Subsequent legislation had the same aim, including the Act of 11 and 12 William III, c. 4, while successive penal statutes in England, by placing a financial burden on the Catholic community, had the effect of draining funds from many of the colleges abroad. The English College at Douay was affiliated to Douay University; it was intended by its founder, William Allen, as a Catholic university to receive émigrés from Oxford and Cambridge, but from the 1570s evolved into a seminary for priests to be sent back on the English mission. It accepted lay students also and began admitting young boys as well as seniors. Its course of instruction was intensive and demanding. It was not the first of the new seminaries mandated by the Council of Trent,51 but it became exemplary for the English community. The English College in Rome, founded in 1579 as a Tridentine pontifical university, was another. A decade later, with travel through France to Rome disrupted by France’s wars of religion, the strategically placed colleges at Seville and Valladolid in Spain followed, as did in 1600 the Scots College in Rome, another university. This, and the persecution of schoolmasters in England, called for schools aimed at Catholic children, most notably the Jesuit school at St Omer, founded in 1593. Douay was the focus: the English College was joined by a Scottish Jesuit College, transferred from Paris in 1593, and an Irish College from 1596. Douay was an effective refuge for Catholic higher education in English; and this role only grew with time. As their leading historian wrote, ‘The rise of the Anglo-Benedictine Congregation after 1606, “from the ashes”; the establishment of the English Franciscan province in 1618; the erection of the English Jesuit province in 1620 – all these were portents. All of them too, made the neighbourhood of Douay the educational centre of the English Catholic resistance as never before.’52 The focus of the English diaspora as a whole, however, was the Venerable English College in Rome, a school and college for those between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five; about a fifth of its graduating priests were Jesuits. Yet those attending the schools and colleges spanned a wide range of life experience and motivation: they were not all zealots, dedicated from an early age.53 The students shared, however, a self-image. Diasporas can be given cohesion by the record of suffering, preserved by the exiled community



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and used in its historiography as a means of self-definition. Still clearer is this function in the case of martyrdom. The English College in Rome numbered forty-one former students who became martyrs on the English mission; the college marked each death, when news arrived, by assembling to sing a Te Deum. Douay may have followed the same custom of commemoration.54 Each death reaffirmed the status of the emigration as temporary. Military service, finance and manufactures Education and devotion were not the only channels of the Catholic diaspora; military careers provided another. The enlistment of Irish Catholics as mercenaries of Spain, Austria and France was of long standing. Service in the forces of the king of Spain began following the rising launched in 1594 by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, and enlistment continued into the seventeenth century; an Irish regiment was in Habsburg service by 1630, but the main destination for Irish mercenaries was France. In Catholic kingdoms, Irish émigrés were recognised and received as religious refugees.55 Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland allowed Charles II, in exile, to raise a series of Irish regiments under French protection, and these retained their identity until the 1660s. Some 12,000 Irish troops left their homeland under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick (1691) and enlisted in Irish regiments in the Spanish army, or mostly in the Irish Brigade in the French army. These were subsequently recruited with an explicit intention of bringing about a Stuart restoration and were large in size: ‘perhaps a total of 450000 joined the Brigades during their existence’, while ‘in the 1720s and 1730s up to 1000 a year entered their ranks’. The extent and persistence of Jacobite commitment in Catholic Ireland is still largely unknown to monoglot English historians, since evidence for it survives mostly in Gaelic, but it was large, and was evident in, for example, the French victory at Fontenoy in 1745, largely secured by Irish troops.56 These regiments continued to recruit in Ireland (the last Irish regiments in Spanish service were only disbanded in 1818), and Irish Catholic opinion had a lasting reason to look for military aid from abroad.57 William III’s victory in Ireland led to an Irish army raised and paid by James II in exile (disbanded in 1697 but re-formed in 1701), and to lasting support for the Irish Brigade under the direct command of Louis XIV. Nor were the Irish the only diasporic contingent: ‘by the 1740s there were 5000 Scots in the Royal Scots in the French service’.58 After the battle of Fontenoy in May 1745, in November the same year there landed in Scotland, in support of Charles Edward’s rising, troops from Lord Drummond’s Ecossais Royales, volunteers

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from the Irish Brigade and horsemen from Fitzjames’s Regiment; more were captured at sea when one of Prince Charles’s two ships was intercepted by the Royal Navy. Even this was not the end: the three Scots regiments were merged with the Irish Brigade in 1762, and in 1779 Dillon’s regiment, one of three still in French service, went to America, together with some of Walsh’s regiment.59 Here too, the French Revolution changed everything, opening up the possibility of service by Catholics in the British army. Soldiers and manufacturers had principled commitments too, as did, for example, the Catholic and Manchester cotton finisher, John Holker. He purchased a commission in Prince Charles’s army as it passed through his town in 1745, fought for him, was captured, escaped and served in a Jacobite regiment in the French army. According to the Whig Mrs Thrale, visiting Paris with Samuel Johnson in 1775, Holker ‘brought over the Manchester Manufacture hither from England in resentment against (the) Government which would not grant him a pardon for his Treachery in the Year 1745’. Instead, he was recruited by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, head of the Bureau of Commerce, to revitalise the Rouen cotton industry. This he did, partly by revisiting Lancashire and luring skilled workers to emigrate to France, sometimes taking machines with them; among them was John Kay and the flying shuttle. On the basis of this success, in 1756 Holker was appointed to a new post, that of Inspector General of Foreign Manufactures, and continued his industrial espionage and the facilitation of migration from England on a larger scale. On these activities much of the growing French heavy chemical industry depended. This work was continued by his son and successor in office John Holker (1745–1822), born in Manchester, who secured from England the spinning jenny and English technology for the manufacture of sulphuric acid; in turn, his son Jean-Louis Holker (1770–1844) was a major French chemical industrialist. James Neilson, a Scot who ran the Gobelins tapestry factory in Paris in 1775, was an émigré for similar reasons.60 Another participant in the Forty-Five, Sir Patrick D’Arcy, pioneered the lead mines at Poullaouen in Brittany, making use of the British invention of the reverberatory furnace. And there were many more: Thomas Le Clere, William Hide, James Macarty, John MacAuliffe, Martin O’Connor, William Stuart, Edward Warren. Such Jacobite émigrés acted as a catalyst in the French economy to such effect that by 1789 ‘France had reached technological parity with its rival’.61 The political dimension: the threat of the diaspora The institutions of the diaspora had, then, a range of practical functions. They educated the Catholic laity and preserved a powerful sense of shared



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identity at home as well as abroad. The religious houses were lasting symbols of the survival of persecution at home and were often recruited from Catholic families in ways that kept alive the memory of persecution, resistance, suffering and even the deaths of family members or, later, of ancestors. ‘Community and continuity were reinforced through the sense of a shared past: members came from families that had experienced persecution in one form or another.’62 There were no seminaries in Britain or Ireland: the continental establishments alone trained Catholic priests, who were sent back on the English or Scottish mission. They organised the shipment to and distribution in the home countries of Catholic Bibles and books. They kept Catholics at home in touch with the wider European dimension. They provided a communications network, sometimes able to send treasonable letters home, enclosed in innocent covers.63 In sum, they helped keep the Catholic interest alive in the face of continuing persecution, sometimes lax, sometimes intense. And many of them became places to visit on the Grand Tour that the English, Scots and Irish elite increasingly made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, visitor attractions for Protestants as well as Catholics, able by their hospitality to present to a much wider elite audience a witness of piety and loyalty.64 One important English exile was even converted to the Catholic Church in 1669 partly through the agency of the English nuns at Ghent, with decisive results: James, duke of York, later King James II.65 Indeed the diaspora had always been politicised. Elizabeth I’s refusal to marry led to lasting debate about the succession to the throne, two leading options being a Spanish candidate and a Scots one. The Scottish party ‘supported Mary Stuart (until her execution in 1587) and thereafter her son James VI. The other party, the Spanish, preferring Philip II, was led by [William] Allen and [Robert] Persons and the colleges in exile.’66 Charles I’s marriage to the French Catholic Henrietta Maria in 1625 opened the door to the partial de facto toleration of Catholics, but this only meant that the diaspora was inevitably politicised again from the meeting of the Short Parliament in 1640 to the Restoration. The experience of persecution was reflected in the Stuart loyalties of the diaspora after 1660; this led in turn to a series of parliamentary attempts to persecute Catholics, including an attempted Bill that would have penalised education abroad, or the sending abroad of money to support the colleges. Only the king’s dissolution of Parliament frustrated the Bill.67 The Popish Plot, a fiction devised by Titus Oates, formerly a student at St Omer but a spy, led to the judicial murder of a string of innocent Catholics. The Revolution of 1688, similarly, had a profoundly anti-Catholic dimension,68 and the Williamite conquest legitimated further anti-Catholic persecution, especially in Ireland.

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James II, in his short reign, provided subventions from his privy purse for the Scots Colleges in Douay, Paris and Rome.69 After his exile he repeatedly visited the Benedictine priory of St Edmund in Paris, which became a leading centre of Jacobite commitment; the Benedictines in turn maintained a cult of the Stuart dynasty. In due course St Edmund’s received the body of James II, placed in a catafalque in a side chapel, pending burial at home after a restoration, until it was destroyed by Jacobins in 1793.70 The Scots College in Paris assumed a leading role in Jacobite conspiracy; Lewis Innes, its principal in 1682–1713, devoted much of his time to Jacobite diplomacy, and ‘more alumni fought for the Jacobite cause than became priests’. One alumnus, the banker Aeneas Macdonald, provided the funding for Charles Edward’s expedition in 1745. On Prince Charles’s arrival in Scotland, he was dressed in the garb of a student of the Scots College Paris, and when alumni of the college came to his aid in the early stages of the campaign, they had something of the air of an ‘Old Boys’ Club’ making sure that they would not let the side down … Numbers from such a small college could not be great. Yet alumni held positions of command at the Battle of the Boyne, in the Fifteen and in the Forty-Five, while the chief Scottish actor in 1708 and one of the planners of the 1719 attempt were also from the college, and Louis Innes, both alumnus and principal, was in the highest councils of James [II and] VII and Chevalier St Georges.71

The diaspora was now, inevitably, Jacobite. This suited the Whigs: any attempt to assert the authority of the central government or to relax anti-Catholic legislation could be used to whip up anti-Catholic paranoia, as in the American colonies in 1775–76 or in London during the Gordon Riots of 1780. Even into the 1790s, that Church of Ireland Latitudinarian Edmund Burke could be falsely denounced as a graduate of the Jesuit school of St Omer.72 The existence of English, Scots and Irish houses abroad therefore played to the established Protestant antipathy to monasticism, which was familiar by the early seventeenth century. The houses represented ‘the diversities of Orders and Religions which the holy Popes have set up, not only without, but also against the holy Scripture’.73 Catholics were well aware of the role of these institutions, and a leader in their establishment mounted a defence of them as early as 1581.74 By the 1620s the proliferating religious houses were, to Protestant observers, a major threat.75 Catholic authors resisted but with little effect.76 As the chancellor of Salisbury Cathedral put it in 1714, ‘it is very plain, That the Tyranny of the Papacy, and all the Popish Corruptions of the Christian Faith and Worship, do owe both their Rise



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and Support chiefly to the Monasticks’, an argument that the author evidently held to be so self-evident as not to require proof.77 These religious houses abroad reflected a variety of contemporary reassertions of monastic ideals rather than medieval survivals. But the aspect that most concerned extreme Protestants was political. Even the houses for women religious ‘often saw themselves as exiles’, expecting to return, and might therefore ‘involve themselves with political activity at home’; ‘[t]he government recognised this, and viewed convents as centres for political conspiracy. Like the laity of the 1580s, they too became the subject of intelligence reports.’78 Such a threat also created a market for privately collected intelligence, such as that supplied to the secretary of state, the earl of Sunderland, by the Scot and professional informer John Macky in 1707. The diaspora, he warned, ‘sends us such numbers of tourists and gentlemen brought up in an aversion to our civil and religious constitution, and which carries such immense sums out of England, and does more than anything keep up our unhappy divisions amongst us’.79 English opinion was often warned of the threat that these religious houses posed. One pamphleteer in 1700 addressed an MP with ‘a List of the Seminaries and Religious Houses Abroad, maintained at the Charge of the English Papists’. He did not claim his list of fifty-one to be complete, ‘believing there are many more that have slipped my Knowledge’; still, it was a phenomenon that ‘carries vast Sums of Money yearly out of the Nation, and returns nothing in lieu thereof, but a Sort of Vermin, that are a common Nusance to Church and State. The Methods, how to prevent this growing Evil, are left to the great Wisdom of your honourable House.’80 Another author in 1703 addressed the magistrates: ‘you cannot but Execute the Laws against Papists, who are also Bound by an Oath to Subvert Her [Queen Anne’s] Government’. He too listed the ‘Seminaries and Nurseries abroad, in which Her Majesties Subjects are Bred up in Rebellion against Her Royal Person, and are instructed in the most Hellish Arts of Destruction, from whence they become Missionaries into England, Scotland and Ireland, where they mislead the People, and keep up the Romish Faction’. How to measure that threat? ‘Their Strength abroad is apparent from the Numbers of their Religious Houses’, of which he then provided a list ‘from the Memory and Knowledge of two or three private Gentlemen’. By this List you see the Number of Religious Houses and Seminaries abroad, and the Numbers of Persons therein may be easily concluded to be full as many if not more, than are Educated in the Universities of England, Scotland and Ireland … That these Monasteries Convents and other Religious Houses are kept up for the Destruction of the

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Government, the Laws, and Liberties of Englishmen, is apparent from the Plots and Contrivances [that] have been hatched and formed in those Places, and afterwards executed in England; and the Priests and Emissaries educated therein, upon their Admission are Sworn to the Subversion of the Protestant Religion in England.81

Douay, reported another observer in c. 1714, again listing the houses, had ‘One Hundred English Scholars’; at St Omer ‘there are seldom under Two Hundred English Scholars also … I know none of our Colleges in Oxford or Cambridge more Magnificent.’ The missionary priests trained there ‘Insinuate, That the Queen is to Reign in Favour of the Pretender, and that the King, as they call the Pretender, will be speedily on the Throne’. Religious houses for women were important, since ‘the Ladys contribute as much to keep up the Spirit of Party in England as the Men’.82 There was an economic dimension to such religious antipathy. Thomas Burnet, debauchee and younger son of the Whig bishop, collaborated in a calculation of the value of the religious houses seized and sold at the Reformation, and which would be imperilled by ‘the religious Duty of restoring the Abby Lands’: according to Burnet, ‘the Monks were Masters of above Fourteen Parts out of Twenty of the whole Kingdom’. Not to amuse my Reader with any farther Observations, I shall only intreat him seriously to consider, whether it can be the Interest of our Laity to hazard the Ruin both of their Bodies and Souls by a [Jacobite] Rebellion, which, if attended with Success, can have no other Consequence, than the procuring for the Clergy fourteen Parts out of Twenty of their Estates, besides that tenth Part, which they enjoy already.83

John Hildrop reminded his fellow countrymen in 1735: ‘Our Laws very wisely forbid the Educating of the Children of Recusants, in Foreign Seminaries, under Penalty of great Forfeitures, &c. Were these exacted with Rigour, what a rich Harvest wou’d such Confiscations produce to the Government!’ It would also be a wise precaution, since it may be remember’d, what continual Vexation the Plots and Conspiracies of the Seminary of English Priests and Jesuits settled at Doway created our glorious Queen Elizabeth throughout her whole Reign. Nor did their Malevolence end with the Dissolution of their first Establishment. After they were dispersed to Rheims and Rome, their several Colleges were the Hives whence issued all those Swarms of Emissaries that from Time to Time over-run our Nation, and amongst whom were form’d all the Plots that tended to the Overthrow of our Church and State.



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Now as the same old Cause is still subsisting, the same virulent Party still kept up, and the same Opportunities left to our Enemies of infesting us, and those improved by the general Connivance, one wou’d hope that the necessary Precaution of Self-Preservation shou’d make us keep a stricter Watch upon those Nests of Incendiaries, that all their Supplies from these Nations might be cut off; and that all their Remittances, either of Foreigners or Natives, shou’d be excluded, or loaded with severe Penalties.84

Since the first academic conference on English Jacobitism in 1979, the historiographical rehabilitation of that movement as a serious threat to the Williamite and Hanoverian regimes has created a context in which such seemingly paranoid statements have a renewed realism. Problems of the diaspora The diaspora was far from a unified and consensual movement. Because it was geographically extended its members had to cope with very different local political circumstances. English, Scots, Irish and Welsh might compete for the favours, and the strategic priorities, of princely or ecclesiastical patrons: where would an invasion first land, and how would the four nations combine to achieve military victory? In personnel, the diaspora comprised soldiers, politicians, merchants and scholars as well as clerics: would they take different views? Were the religious orders at one with the secular priests? There were attempts at a nationally cooperative strategy, as in 1579 when the Englishman Nicholas Sanders and the Irishman James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald headed Pope Gregory XIII’s small military expedition to Ireland, but its failure, and their deaths, underlined the rarity of such cooperation. In 1582 Robert Persons acknowledged the problem, writing of ‘a natural jealousy between the two nations of Scotland and England’, and William Allen rejected the idea of an expedition landing first in Scotland, since the English would then interpret an invasion from thence as an attempt at ‘subjecting the English to the Scottish rule’.85 This problem persisted into the eighteenth century, when the goal of the reconversion in England or Scotland, or a Catholic political regime in Ireland, had effectively given way to the lesser goal of securing religious toleration. The diaspora abroad was in part sustained from home. But there were also divisions at home, exacerbated in successive political crises. If Catholics in England were given a semblance of unity by confrontation with the Protestant regime, the Catholics themselves were torn with conflicts,

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especially between the secular clergy and the Jesuits.86 Wales developed an anti-Jesuit tradition that over time seriously weakened the Catholic Church in the Principality. From the late sixteenth century some of the colleges abroad were penetrated by government spies,87 and a few of their graduates betrayed their colleagues to advance their careers;88 the most notorious was Titus Oates, admitted to the English College at Valladolid on 1 June 1677, expelled on 30 October.89 The religious houses were owned by different orders, which did not generally cooperate; and these houses were often underfunded. Their ability to influence opinion in England was limited by official persecution, sometimes leading to the martyrdom of priests and even schoolmasters. English, Welsh, Scots and Irish émigrés might engage in rivalry among themselves along national lines that echo nineteenth-century ethnic tensions.90 The English College in Rome had been founded in 1578 by a Welshman, Owen Lewis, for English and Welsh students, but there were early conflicts between them, as well as fears that Scots and Irish would demand admission and soon, as Robert Persons predicted, ‘hould down’ the English. In 1579 the English students were indeed expelled but appealed to the Pope and successfully replaced their Welsh rector with an Italian Jesuit on the grounds of national incompatibility. Persons regarded this crisis as the beginning of a split among Catholics in England between a pro-Spanish and a pro-Scottish party, contesting the succession to Elizabeth; the colleges of Valladolid and Douay, supported by Spanish donations, were formally enlisted behind a Spanish succession, but their students were divided.91 Henceforth ‘the political activism of the Catholic diaspora, especially the English mission, increasingly came to be defined as an English project, one consisting primarily of missionary ventures in England’.92 In 1767 the Irish interest in Spain managed to amalgamate the endowment of the then-empty Scots College at Valladolid with their own Irish College at Alcalá, a coup reversed with difficulty by the rector of the English College at Valladolid.93 Nor did the seminaries achieve their primary purpose, the reconversion or political emancipation of their homelands. It is difficult to quantify religious allegiance over such a long period, since the figures do not necessarily measure the same thing, but most historians agree that numbers of Catholics declined substantially in England and Scotland between 1558 and 1794. The eclipse of the Stuart cause in the 1740s deprived the diaspora of political definition and led to a gradual repeal of anti-Catholic legislation over the next half century. Irish recruitment to regiments in the French service now fell markedly, and émigré merchants, financiers and politicians increasingly assimilated; after 1789, even the Catholic Church in Ireland, fearful of atheist Jacobinism, supported the government of George III.



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The seminaries abroad helped sustain a declining cause at home but did not turn it into a rising one. Some students who enrolled in them dropped out; some joined religious orders; some died before leaving. Often only approximately half of the arriving students were ordained and returned on the mission to their home countries.94 Many colleges were arguably too small: the Scots College founded in Madrid in 1627 is only known to have sent seventeen priests back to Scotland in the 140 years before the Jesuits were expelled from Spain in 1767.95 During the seventy-four years from 1689 to 1763, the more successful English College at Valladolid still sent back only forty-four priests.96 Probably for such reasons, the English colleges at Madrid and Seville were merged after 1767 into that at Valladolid, in which form the latter survived.97 Each religious house had its own trajectory: their degree of success was varied. The college at Valladolid founded another at Seville; they ‘began with a flourish, but settled down to obscure and leisurely vegetation till the nineteenth century’.98 The colleges remained divided on national lines: the English, Scots and Irish Catholics had their own houses. Regional differences even within Ireland and Scotland proved to be handicaps. The houses did not necessarily make common cause, just as the Jacobite movement in Britain and Ireland was also fatally divided between English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. In Spain, ‘Inter-Catholic divisions … set seculars against regulars, Jesuits against Franciscans and Dominicans, Old English against Old Irish, recently arrived migrants against established exiles and Spanish officialdom against Gaelic nobles’.99 In 1704 the Jesuit order, which staffed the colleges at Rome, proposed that the English, Scots and Irish Colleges should merge, in the cause of efficiency; but the three agreed that ‘the three nations could never live in peace in one college’, and the proposal came to nothing.100 Nor could the Papacy itself be relied on as an ally. In 1766, after the death of James III, the superiors of the Scots College in Rome welcomed his son, Charles Edward, and gave him royal honours; on the pope’s instructions, they were removed from their offices and banished. The Papacy abolished the Jesuit order, which had staffed the Scots College, in 1773; in the next twenty-five years, the College sent back only three priests on the mission to Scotland.101 In addition, the numbers of Catholics in religious houses abroad declined over time. The English Benedictine nuns at Ghent numbered forty dames and fifteen lay sisters in 1650; by the dissolution of their house in 1794, this had shrunk to thirteen dames and nine lay sisters.102 In 1591 Robert Persons claimed that the enrolment for the English College at Valladolid ‘will shortly reach 60’; after a mid-eighteenth-century falling away, and even during a revival later in the century, the college numbered at any

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time only between sixteen and twenty-four students.103 The numerical presence of these religious houses was never dominant; over time, for a variety of causes, it appreciably declined. The afterlife of the Catholic diaspora Historical phenomena of this scale often cast long shadows, but that was not to be the case with the Catholic diaspora. Despite the efforts of the Abbé Mann, the network of religious houses was soon forgotten after its destruction in the 1790s. One key aspect of the diaspora, namely postReformation English monasticism on the European continent and all that it implied, never secured its historian. This was the more remarkable since it was not equally true of preReformation monasticism in England. Its historical pioneer was Sir William Dugdale (1605–86), the three folio volumes of whose Monasticon Anglicanum were published, in Latin, in 1655, 1661 and 1673.104 They were far from politically neutral. Dugdale was a royalist, and as a herald had attended Charles I at the battle of Edgehill; his estate was sequestrated under the Commonwealth; he received his due reward after the Restoration. By his writings, Dugdale sought to root the Church of England, in peril in the 1650s, in much deeper soil. His aim was to use his impressive scholarship to vindicate the antiquity and authority of the Church of England, not least by a systematic account of its antecedents in the monastic orders – Benedictine, Cluniac, Cistercian, Carthusian, Gilbertian, Gregorian, Templar and Trinitarian – that had been destroyed at the Reformation and reviled in the Puritan era that followed. From those orders, whose story was assimilated to that of the cathedrals and therefore to the story of the episcopal governance of the Church, Dugdale traced the descent of authority to the current secular proprietors of Church lands: this was part of a paean of praise to the Anglican gentry that Dugdale carried forward in other works. Dugdale not only produced the first systematic account of English monasticism; he also inspired a series of followers who carried on his work, like John Stevens,105 Henry Wharton106 and Thomas Tanner.107 Dugdale’s Monasticon was soon translated into English,108 and launched the emerging historiography of the subject. It became, at once, a scholarly classic. Only later, in 1820, did monasticism definitely emerge as a site for the romantic imagination with Sir Walter Scott’s novel.109 No such heavyweight scholarly retrieval attended the religious houses of the diaspora on the continent. The reasons for this neglect were telling.



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First, Dugdale’s monks and nuns were undoubtedly Catholic, but they were so before there was a Protestant alternative; they could therefore seem essentially, atavistically, English rather than foreign. Secondly, the diaspora had few open elite patrons at home: it was necessarily supported secretly. Dugdale had successfully collected the patronage first of the gentry, then of the nobility;110 but there was no historian able to do for the diasporic world after 1558 what Dugdale had done for the domestic world before the 1530s. And this was so for a third reason: where the flexible medieval Church had crowned and sanctified a succession of violent claimants to the throne, the Catholic Church after the 1550s was characterised by a grand refusal. From 1688, this stance was immediately identified with one dynasty in particular. Monasticism was not identical with the English or British diaspora. Most individuals swept up in it were not in orders. But monasticism was the extreme case, the leading edge, the defining practice of a political and social movement. The first attempt at an academic history of the diaspora was Edward Petre’s in 1849;111 but this was a bland biographical and institutional catalogue that did not elevate its subject into historical importance. Only much later was there a stirring of academic attention, but it was fuelled by denominational loyalties in ways that cut it off from the now deeply Protestant academic mainstream. Despite all appearances in the 1790s, the French Revolution did not destroy the Catholic Church. Indeed that Church experienced a rebirth in the nineteenth century, and at its close, and into the early twentieth century, there was a revival in historical writing by Catholics about Catholics. It was this phase that produced a substantial work of scholarship surveying the field by an American Catholic priest, Peter Guilday, the first volume of which was published in 1914, the result of a doctoral dissertation at the University of Louvain.112 But just as the French Revolution terminated the existence of many of these bodies, so the First World War swamped academic attention to their history. No further volumes by Guilday appeared. In so far as any religious houses had re-established themselves on the continent after the French Revolution, they found themselves, like the English Benedictine nuns at Ypres in 1914, in the path not merely of an invading army, but of what it symbolised: modernity. Protestant diasporas The Catholic diaspora allows us to theorise diasporas in a way that reveals others, although they took place on a smaller scale. These may be labelled

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Protestant diasporas. England witnessed such an outflow in the reign of the Catholic Mary I (1555–58): it was an elite phenomenon, usually of theologians, who sought refuge overseas during Mary’s attempts to return her kingdom to the practice of Catholicism. A second and substantially larger migration occurred in the early seventeenth century, as those Protestants then labelled Separatists, now conventionally labelled Puritans, left England in search of the opportunity to institute their own ecclesiastical polity, first in the United Provinces, then, in larger numbers, in New England. The diasporic character of this migration is evidenced by the reverse migration of many activists, like Hugh Peters (1598–1660), eager to participate in the wars of religion that overwhelmed the British Isles from the 1640s and to seize the opportunities that war created to impose their own conception of religion on their homeland. Scotland, too, had its Protestant diaspora. Emigration from Scotland was far older: it has been estimated that during the fifteenth century some ten thousand Scots mercenaries served the French king,113 and Scotland had a long tradition of providing mercenary soldiers for a variety of foreign kingdoms. But this willingness to serve a variety of masters changed with the Reformation. The progress of reform in Scotland, often inspired by John Knox (1514–72), motivated large numbers of Scots to enlist for military service on one side in wars of religion from the ‘Revolt of the Netherlands’ in 1568; this armed assertion of the Protestant cause reached a peak in service in the Protestant armies of Denmark and Sweden during what is now labelled the Thirty Years’ War, conflicts that saw the Scottish Privy Council issue warrants to allow 40,080 men to serve against the Catholic Habsburgs. The older mercenary tradition was now often, though not always, caught up in individuals’ theological commitments.114 Scottish mercenary service overseas was now lastingly divided along denominational lines. After 1689 it was not confined to the armies of the Catholic powers, France, Spain and Austria; the United Provinces, Russia and Sweden remained destinations.115 Even Irish Protestant Nonconformists may be analysed in similar terms, since their migrations to the North American colonies in the decade before 1776 carried to America large numbers of religiously motivated political activists who played significant roles in the American Revolution on the republican side.116 Diaspora can be defined as an involuntary response to victimhood. But religious persecution is a phenomenon arranged along a spectrum of physical coercion, and is, to some degree, in the eye of the persecuted. If the Puritans or Scots Irish in the Thirteen Colonies nurtured and acted on a self-image as victims, this self-image is also a phenomenon to be explained. And here the element of religion, often downplayed or absent in accounts of migration from Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth and



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twentieth centuries, helps to illuminate relevant phenomena at earlier times. There was not one British diaspora; there were many. Appendix Thomas Mann’s catalogue, 1798 Mann divided the religious houses into orders. First, colleges for the secular clergy at Douay (1568, although in Rheims from 1578 to 1593; destroyed, 1793); at Rome (1578; run by the Jesuits, 1579–1773); at Valladolid (c. 1580); at Seville (1578); at Madrid (1578, which, being small, ‘at last fell to nothing’); at Paris (c. 1600; destroyed, 1793); at Lisbon (1622); and another school at Douay (1750). Secondly, the institutions of the Jesuits: the school at St Omer (1594; moved to Bruges, 1764; suppressed, 1773; administered by clergy from Douay, 1764–93); at Watten (1611; moved to Ghent, 1765; suppressed, 1773); at Liège (1616; turned into a school, 1773; destroyed, 1794); and at Ghent (1622; suppressed, 1773); also a house for ‘Jesuitesses’ at St Omer (1608; moved to Liege, 1629; ‘soon after’ moved to Munich). Then the Benedictines: for men, at Lamspring, Hildesheim (undated); the priory at Douay (1604 or 1605; destroyed, 1793); the priory of Dieulwart, Lorraine (1606; ‘crushed by the French revolution’); the priory at St Malo (1611), moved to Paris as St Edmund’s (1642; destroyed, 1793); and a school at La Celle in Brie (destroyed, 1793). For women Benedictines there were the abbeys at Brussels (1598; destroyed, 1794), at Cambray (1623; destroyed, 1793), at Ghent (1624; destroyed, 1794), at Paris (1651; destroyed, 1793), at Pontoise (1652; destroyed, 1793), at Dunkirk (1662; destroyed, 1794) and at Ypres (1665; destroyed, 1794). For male Carthusians, after dissolution of their nine English monasteries in 1538 and restorations under Mary I, exiled from their house at Shene in Surrey to Bruges (1559; moved to Louvain, 1578; to Mechlen, 1591; thence to Nieuport, Flanders, 1626; suppressed by Joseph II, 1783). The Brigittine nuns were exiled from Sion House, Middlesex, in 1559 and finally re-established in Lisbon. The canonesses of the order of St Augustine claimed houses at Louvain (1609; destroyed, 1794), at Bruges (1629; destroyed, 1794), at Paris (1633; destroyed, 1793) and at Liège (undated; destroyed, 1794). For Dominican friars, houses at Bornhem on the Scheld (1658; destroyed, 1794) and at Louvain (undated); and for Dominican nuns at Brussels (1690; destroyed, 1794). For Franciscan friars, houses at Douay (Recollects, 1617; destroyed, 1793) and for women at Gravelines (Poor Clares, 1603; destroyed, 1793), at Rouen (Collectines, 1648; ‘crushed by the French revolution’, 1793), at Dunkirk (Poor Clares, 1652; destroyed, 1793), at Paris (Conceptionists, 1658; destroyed, 1793), at Bruges (third

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order of St Francis, 1658; destroyed, 1794) and at Aire in Artois (Poor Clares, 1660; destroyed, 1793). The Carmelites had houses for men at Tongres (c. 1770; destroyed, 1794) and for women at Antwerp (Teresian nuns, undated; destroyed, 1794), at Lier in Brabant (undated; destroyed, 1794) and at Hoogstraete near Brabant (undated; destroyed, 1794). Notes 1 Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford, 2004), pp. 7, 17, 136–71; Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 162–63. 2 Lady Lucy Herbert, Several Methods and Practises of Devotion: Appartaining to a Religious Life (Bruges: the widow of Jonh [sic] de Cock, 1743), pp. [241–42]. 3 Melville Henry Massue, marquis de Ruvigny and Raineval, The Jacobite Peerage, ed. Roger Ararat (1904; 2nd edn, London, 1974), pp. 150–51. I am grateful to my former colleague J.S.G. Simmons for a copy of this work. 4 ‘Her house in Paris seems to have been a port of call for various Jacobites, relations and others … She corresponded a good deal with the Duke of Mar as long as he was in Rome, on Jacobite affairs.’ Lady Carrington was also in contact with the Stuart court in Rome: Henrietta Tayler, Lady Nithsdale and Her Family (London, 1939), pp. 13–16, 80, 83, 107, 110, 173, 192, 234, 247, 279. Winifrede had been married from the convent of the English Benedictine nuns at Pontoise, of which the abbess was Elizabeth Widdrington. Lord Widdrington was one of the six lords tried for their parts in the rising of 1715; ibid., pp. 17, 21. 5 John Davies, The English Catholic Diaspora: A Handbook (Wigan, 2008), p. 3. 6 There are books on particular religious houses abroad, normally with very restricted circulations, and studies of particular time frames, for example Christopher Highley, ‘“The lost British lamb”: English Catholic exiles and the problem of Britain’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 37–50. But there is no overview of the exilic movement. 7 Bernard Cottret, The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 1991); Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain (1986; 2nd edn, Brighton, 2001). 8 H.T. Dickinson, ‘The poor Palatines and the parties’, English Historical Review, 82 (1967), 464–85. Yet toleration had clear limits. When perhaps as many as 2,000 Catholics were found to be among the estimated 10,000 German immigrants, the British government had the Catholics shipped back to Holland: ibid., p. 472.



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9 Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999); David S. Katz, PhiloSemitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982); W.D. Rubinstein, A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (Basingstoke, 1996); Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2002 (Berkeley, CA, 2002). 10 For example Tony Claydon and Ian MacBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650 – c. 1850 (Cambridge, 1998). ‘Even as the new historiography of Britain eschews an Anglocentric perspective, acknowledging the rich multicultural fabric of the early-modern Atlantic Archipelago, it remains firmly embedded within an almost exclusively Protestant framework’: Highley, ‘English Catholic exiles’, pp. 38–39, 48. For an argument that ‘the predominant stance among historians, favouring anti-Catholicism as the foundation of English national identity, is too simplistic an interpretation’, see Liesbeth Corens, ‘Catholic nuns and English identities: English Protestant travellers on the English convents in the Low Countries, 1660–1730’, Recusant History, 30 (2011), 441–59, at 443–44. 11 King William’s Toleration: being an Explanation of that Liberty of Religion, Which may be Expected from His Majesty’s Declaration. With a Bill for Comprehension & Indulgence, Drawn up in Order to an Act of Parliament (London, 1689). This made clear that the author’s aim was not toleration for all, but ‘Uniting the Protestants, as our Interest, against the danger of the Papists from abroad, and at home’, pp. 9, 15. 12 [François Arouet] de Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733), pp. 34–36, 44–45. 13 Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government; and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (London, 1768), pp. 106–7. 14 James Mill, The Principles of Toleration (London, 1837), a reprint of Mill’s review of the same title in the Westminster Review (July 1826). 15 Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 188. Porter’s scenario seemed plausible only on his premise that by the eighteenth century ‘Religion seemed a shadow of its former self ’, p. 297. 16 George Macaulay Trevelyan, History of England (London, 1926), p. 474. ‘Beyond fines for non-attendance at church, irregularly levied, she [Elizabeth] had not persecuted the Catholic laity for their opinions’, p. 353; ‘During the first dozen years [of Elizabeth’s reign], although the Prayer Book was the only ritual sanctioned by law, Roman Catholics were not persecuted except by moderate fines irregularly exacted’, p. 363. Trevelyan’s story was one of Catholic aggression, whether the Jesuit mission to England after 1570, or the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. However, under Charles I ‘the growing influence of Charles’s French Queen stopped the persecution of Roman Catholics’, p. 394, and ‘The Roman Catholics were less molested under the Protectorate than under Presbyterian or Anglican Parliaments’, p. 431.

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17 W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England: From the Convention of the Long Parliament to the Restoration, 1640–1660 (Cambridge, 1938), p. 9. 18 Unfortunately, ‘All the world is not America!’: Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, 1997), p. xi. This work was published before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, after which the reputation of the United States for toleration declined. 19 Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London, 1967), pp. 201, 209–11, 240. 20 Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), pp. 6–10, acknowledging as anti-Whig forerunners Herbert Butterfield, ‘Toleration in early modern times’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977), 573–84; Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991) ‘despite the model of linearity implied by its title’; Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996); and Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (eds), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2000). 21 Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013), pp. 4–6, 261–63. 22 Jane Dawson, ‘Revolutionary conclusions: the case of the Marian exiles’, History of Political Thought, 11 (1990), 257–72. 23 For example O.W. Furley, ‘Pope burning processions in the late seventeenth century’, History, 44 (1959), 16–23; E.R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London, 1968); William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660 (Durham, NC, 1971); John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London, 1972); Carol Z. Wiener, ‘The beleaguered isle: a study of Elizabethan and early Jacobean anti-Catholicism’, Past & Present, 51 (1971), 27–62; Robin Clifton, ‘The popular fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past & Present, 52 (1971), 23–55; Jeremy Black, ‘The Catholic threat and the British press in the 1720s and 1730s’, Journal of Religious History, 12 (1983), 364–81; Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner (Cambridge, 1986); Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the structure of a prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London, 1989), pp. 72–106; Mark Goldie, ‘The theory of religious intolerance in Restoration England’, in Grell, Israel and Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration (1991), pp. 331–68; D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid Victorian England (Stanford, 1992); Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in EighteenthCentury England: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993); Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, MD, 1995); Colin Haydon, ‘“I love my King, but a Roman Catholic I hate”: anti-Catholicism, xenophobia and national identity in eighteenth-century England’, in Claydon and MacBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity, pp. 33–52.



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24 A rare English text to use the term in its title did so in the original Greek: [Edward Weston], ΔΙΑΣΠΟΡΑ. Some Reflections Upon the Question relating to the Naturalization of Jews, considered As a Point of Religion. In a Letter from A Gentleman in the Country, to his Friend in Town (London, 1754). Even here, the author argued against the assumption that the Old or New Testaments ‘are full of clear Predictions concerning the Dispersion of the Jews into all Countries, subsequent to the Destruction of Jerusalem, and the long Continuance of it’; there was hardly one text in the New Testament, and those in the Old could hardly be distinguished from dispersions ‘antecedent to the coming of the Messiah’, pp. 13–14. Weston did not, therefore, theorise the notion of ‘diaspora’, but argued to qualify current prejudices concerning it. 25 For an attempt to dispense with the negative theme of victimhood and to treat diaspora as a positive historical phenomenon see Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton, The Scottish Diaspora (Edinburgh, 2013), introduction, pp. 1–15. ‘One can present evidence that no group was victimized out of Scotland’, p. 5. 26 For the semantic dispersal of the term to promote ‘various intellectual, cultural and political agendas’, see Rogers Brubaker, ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28 (2005), 1–19, at 1. 27 Jane Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds), Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Oxford, 2003). 28 Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, Scottish Diaspora, p. 9. 29 Notably in Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, Scottish Diaspora, chapter 2, ‘Diaspora: defining a concept’, pp. 16–33, and Tanja Bueltmann and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George: English associations in the Anglo-world to the 1930s’, Journal of Global History, 7 (2012), 79–105. For the dominance of economic criteria see Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (Harlow, 2000), which focuses on the period after 1840 and, as motivation, on material disadvantage imposed by the English; T.M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora 1750–2010 (London, 2011) has an earlier starting point but the same materialist premises, as does Tim Pat Coogan, Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora (London, 2000). In this respect Devine is at one with an older study, Gordon Donaldson, The Scots Overseas (London, 1966). Even for an earlier period, economic and demographic considerations, together with military service, take precedence in L.M. Cullen, ‘The Irish diaspora of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 113–49. Such economic histories also usually tell the story of one nationality only and do not seek to analyse the English, Scots and Irish experience on a comparative basis. 30 Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, Scottish Diaspora, p. 23. 31 Werner Keller, Diaspora: The Post-biblical History of the Jews (New York, 1969), p. 5; Irving M. Zeitlin, Jews: The Making of a Diaspora People (Cambridge, 2012).

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32 Simon Rabinovitch (ed.), Jews & Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States (Waltham, MA, 2012), pp. xv–xix. 33 Caryn S. Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York, 2005), p. xvi. 34 Brubaker, ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, p. 3. 35 J.C.D. Clark, ‘Protestantism, nationalism and national identity 1660–1832’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 249–76. 36 Tanja Bueltmann, David T. Gleeson and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Locating the English diaspora: problems, perspectives and approaches’, in Tanja Bueltmann, David T. Gleeson and Donald M. MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–2010 (Liverpool, 2012), pp. 1–14; Tanja Bueltmann, David T. Gleeson and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Invisible diaspora? English ethnicity in the United States before 1920’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 33 (2014), 5–30. 37 This ‘first’ diaspora therefore requires a different model from the ‘sovereign state Diaspora’ outlined in Robert J.C. Young, ‘The disappearance of the English: why is there no “English Diaspora”?’ in Bueltmann, Gleeson and MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, pp. 222–35. Young argues, centrally, that the English in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had ‘no typical relation’ to religion, a key component part of transnational ethnicities (p. 229). This essay contends that the opposite was the case in earlier centuries. 38 Secularisation theory is now problematic as a general organising framework for this or any historical phenomenon: J.C.D. Clark, ‘Secularization and modernization: the failure of a “Grand Narrative”’, Historical Journal, 55.1 (2012), 161–94. 39 Mark Netzloff, ‘The English Colleges and the English nation: Allen, Persons, Verstegan and diasporic nationalism’, in Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley and Arthur F. Marotti (eds), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), p. 237. 40 Lesley Brown (ed.), The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2 vols., Oxford, 1993), I, p. 857 (definition B2). This reference to race has been dropped in the current online edition of the work, perhaps because of political considerations. An assumption of the present essay is that racial theory was an error of nineteenth-century natural science. That theory’s influence was, however, historically important. 41 ‘Ethnicity’ was not present in Johnson’s dictionary; the noun ‘Ethnicks’, defined as ‘Heathens; not Jews; not Christians’, was illustrated only with a single quotation from Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World (London, 1614). Absent from Johnson’s definitions were any anticipations of racial difference. 42 Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles, argues that the existing historiography ‘tended to assume that the only form of Catholic exile was a clerical one’; she explores also the laity, and contends that Peter Guilday’s estimate of 3,000 for the English Catholic community in Europe in the late sixteenth



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43 44

45

46 47 48 49

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51 52 53 54 55

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century ‘probably underestimates the lay presence on the continent’ (pp. 2, 16). Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent 1558–1795. Vol. I. – The English Colleges and Convents in the Catholic Low Countries, 1558–1795 (London, 1914) (all published), p. xx. For France, including the growth there of a cult of James II, see Nathalie Genet-Rouffiac, Le Grand Exil: Les Jacobites en France, 1688–1715 (Paris, 2007), esp. section III, ‘Les établissements religieux’, pp. 213–69. Éamon Ó Ciosáin, ‘Hidden by 1688 and after: Irish Catholic migration to France 1590–1685’, in David Worthington (ed.), British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 125–38, at 127, 131. Abbé [Theodore] Mann, ‘A short Chronological Account of the Religious Establishments made by English Catholics on the Continent of Europe’, Archaeologia, or Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity, 13 (1800), 251–74, at 251. For Mann (1735–1809) see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 17, lists twenty-two houses for women. The Welsh Protestant Mrs. Thrale, returning from a visit to Paris in 1775, wrote: ‘How all these English Convents are supported is to me astonishing. I can now reckon ten of my own Knowledge for women only’: Moses Tyson and Henry Guppy (eds), The French Journals of Mrs. Thrale (Manchester, 1932), pp. 162–63. Mann, ‘A short Chronological Account’, p. 261. A.C.F. Beales, Education Under Penalty: English Catholic Education from the Reformation to the Fall of James II 1547–1689 (London, 1963), pp. viii–ix, 17–18. Netzloff, ‘The English Colleges and the English nation’, p. 245. Further research is necessary into the analogous role of Scots and Irish Catholic exiles in framing images of identity for their home countries. For nuns, see Caroline Bowden, ‘The English convents in exile and questions of national identity c. 1600–1688’, in David Worthington (ed.), British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 297–314. Henry Twetchbourne, SJ, to Thos. Derbeshire, SJ, 2 February 1597, in Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1595–1597, preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London, 1869), p. 356. Beales, Education Under Penalty, pp. 16, 43, 115–16. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., pp. 80–81; Lucy Underwood, ‘Youth, religious identity, and autobiography at the English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 349–74. Michael E. Williams, The Venerable English College Rome: A History (2nd edn, Leominster, 2008), pp. xvii, 12. ‘Catholicism appears to have been the decisive factor in the favourable reception many Irish experienced’: Ó Ciosáin, ‘Hidden by 1688 and after’, p. 134.

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56 Murray Pittock, Jacobitism (London, 1998), pp. 57–58, 119–22. 57 Nicholas Canny, ‘Mercenaries in Ancien Régime Europe’, in Mary Ann Lyons and Thomas O’Connor (eds), Strangers to Citizens: The Irish in Europe, 1600–1800 (Dublin, 2008), pp. 12–19. 58 Pittock, Jacobitism, p. 126. 59 Mark G. McLaughlin and Christopher Warner, The Wild Geese: The Irish Brigades of France and Spain (London, 1980), pp. 4–7, 15, 17. 60 J. R. Harris, ‘John Holker (1719–1786)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; J.C.D. Clark, ‘Samuel Johnson: the last choices, 1775–1784’, in Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (eds), The Politics of Samuel Johnson (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 168–222, at 175–76. 61 Patrick Clarke de Dromantin, ‘The influence of the Jacobites on the economic development of France in the era of the Enlightenment’, in Paul Monod, Murray Pittock and Daniel Szechi (eds), Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 229–42, at 233; Patrick Clarke de Dromantin, Les réfugiés jacobites dans la France du XVIIIe siècle: l’exode de toute une noblesse ‘pour cause de religion’ (Pessac, 2005). 62 Marie B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant women, 1560–1640’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London, 1985), pp. 149–80, at 166–68; Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles, p. 164. 63 For the activity in this respect of Lady Lucy Knatchbull, abbess in 1650–96 of the English Benedictine nuns at Ghent, see Annals of the English Benedictines of Ghent. Now at St. Mary’s Abbey, Oulton in Staffordshire (Oulton, [1894]), p. 42. 64 C.D. van Strien, ‘Recusant houses in the southern Netherlands as seen by British tourists, c. 1650–1720’, Recusant History, 20 (1990–91), 495–511. 65 Walker, Gender and Politics, p. 128; Annals of the English Benedictines of Ghent, pp. v, 42. Their links with Henry Benedict Stuart lasted until 1788: pp. 63, 73. 66 Beales, Education Under Penalty, p. 51. 67 Ibid., pp. 109–14. 68 On which see, for example, Sowerby, Making Toleration. 69 Beales, Education Under Penalty, p. 233. 70 Clark, ‘Samuel Johnson’, pp. 177–86. 71 Raymond McCluskey (ed.), The Scots College Rome 1600–2000 (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 75–76, 80. James II stayed in the College in 1695; it became ‘the foremost Jacobite archive’, pp. 82, 90–91, 97. 72 The story is still sometimes repeated as truth: for example, Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Claire Grogan (Peterborough, ON, 2011), p. 75. 73 Lewis Owen, The Unmasking Of All popish Monks, Friers, and Iesuits. Or, A Treatise of their Genealogie, beginnings, proceedings, and present state (London: J[ohn] H[aviland] for George Gibs, 1628), p. 3. 74 [William Allen], An Apologie and Trve Declaration of the Institution and endeuours of the two English Colledges, the one in Rome, the other now resident in Rhemes: against certaine sinister informations giuen vp against the same (‘Printed at Mounts in Herault’, [i.e. Rheims: Jean de Foigny], 1581).



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75 ‘Religion is the least matter of a thousand, they think vpon. The onely point they aime at, is to advance the Spanish Monarchy’: Lewis Owen, The Rvnning Register: Recording a Trve Relation of the State of the English Colledges, Seminaries and Cloysters in all forraine parts. Together with a briefe and compendious discourse of the Liues, Practices, Coozenage, Impostures and Deceits of all our English Monks, Friers, Iesuites, and Seminarie Priests in generall (London, 1626), ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, n. p.; p. 118. 76 Charles Dodd [i.e. Hugh Tootell], The History of the English College at Doway: From its First Foundation in 1568, to the Present Time (London, 1713). 77 Michael Geddes, A View Of all the Orders of Monks and Friars in the Roman Church (London, 1714), p. [iv]. Entire quote originally in italics. 78 Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles, p. 162; Walker, Gender and Politics, pp. 116, 19, 103, 127. 79 Macky to Sunderland, 7 January 1707, in J.D. Alsop, ‘John Macky’s 1707 account of the English seminaries in Flanders’, Recusant History, 15 (1981), 337–41, at 338. 80 A List of the Monasteries, Nunneries, and Colleges, belonging to the English Papists, in the several Popish Countries beyond Sea. Published to inform the People of England, of the Measures taken by the Popish Party for the Reestablishing of Popery in these Nations. In a Letter to a Member of Parliament, ‘From eight Pages Quarto, London, printed in 1700’, reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany (2nd edn, London, 1753), I, pp. 425–26. 81 The Present Danger of Popery in England. Shewing, I. The Strength of the English Papists at Home and Abroad. II. An Account of their Religious-Houses in Foreign Parts and in England. III. An Abstract of the Laws in Force against Papists. IV. Reasons for putting those Laws in Execution. V. A Proposal for the same (London, 1703), Preface, pp. 3–6. 82 The Danger of Popery, from Scots and English Colleges and Seminaries Abroad (?London,?1714), pp. 1–2, 8. For the political agency of nuns, see Caroline Bowden, ‘The abbess and Mrs Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbull and royalist politics in Flanders in the late 1650s’, Recusant History, 24 (1999), 288–308; Claire Walker, ‘Loyall and Dutifull Subjects: English Nuns and Stuart politics’, in James Daybell (ed.), Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 228–42. 83 [Thomas Burnet and George Duckett], A Summary of all the Religious Houses in England and Wales, with Their Titles and Valuations at the Time of their Dissolution, and A Calculation of what they might be worth at this Day (London, 1717), pp. xii, xvii, xxiv. 84 [John Hildrop], A Caveat against Popery: being A seasonable Preservative against Romish Delusions and Jacobitism, now industriously spread throughout the Nation (London, 1735), pp. 46, 48. 85 Highley, ‘English Catholic exiles’, pp. 40–42. 86 The Jesuit Robert Persons entitled his memoir A Storie of Domesticall Difficulties wch the English Catholicke cause and promoters therof, have had in defendinge the same, not onely against the violence, and persecution of haeretikes, but also by sundry other impediments amonge themselves, of faction,

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87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104

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106 107 108

british and irish diasporas emulation, sedition, and division, since the chaunge of Religion in England, first under K. Henry the 8, K. Edward the 6, and Queen Mary, and then under Queen Elizabeth in J.H. P[ollen] (ed.), The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons, in Catholic Record Society vol. II, Miscellanea II (London, 1906), pp. 12–218, at 48. See the report on the personnel of the colleges, dated December 1598, in Guilday, English Catholic Refugees, pp. 14–18. Beales, Education Under Penalty, pp. 44–45, 53. Michael E. Williams, St Alban’s College Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence in Spain (London, 1986), p. 47. For which see Bueltmann and MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George’. Guilday, English Catholic Refugees, pp. 95–96. Netzloff, ‘The English Colleges and the English nation’, pp. 250–51. Williams, St Alban’s College Valladolid, pp. 92–5. McCluskey (ed.), The Scots College Rome, pp. 28–30, 35; Williams, St Alban’s College Valladolid, pp. 21, 46. Maurice Taylor, The Scots College in Spain (Valladolid, 1971), p. 44. Williams, St Alban’s College Valladolid, p. 55. Ibid., pp. xii–xiii. Beales, Education Under Penalty, p. 45. Patricia O’Connell, ‘The early-modern Irish college network in Iberia, 1590–1800’, in Thomas O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 49–64, at 50, 55. O’Connell lists twenty-nine Irish colleges on the continent, founded between 1578 and 1689: ibid., p. 52, nn. 10, 11. Brian M. Halloran, The Scots College Paris 1603–1792 (Edinburgh, 2003), p. 74. McCluskey (ed.), The Scots College Rome, pp. 52–53. Annals of the English Benedictines of Ghent, p. 70. Williams, St Alban’s College Valladolid, pp. 22, 109. William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, sive, Pandectae coenobiorum Benedictinorum Cluniacensium Cisterciensium Carthusianorum: a primordiis ad eorum usque dissolutionem (3 vols, London, 1655–73), vols 2 and 3 with different subtitles; subsequently reprinted 1682. John Stevens oversaw Sir William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: Or, the History of the Ancient Abbies, Monasteries, Hospitals, cathedral and Collegiate Churches, with their Dependencies, in England and Wales (3 vols, folio, London: R. Harbin for D. Browne et al., 1718). Stevens followed this with The History of the Antient Abbeys, Monasteries, Hospitals, Cathedrals and Collegiate Churches. Being Two Additional Volumes to Sir William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (2 vols, London, 1722–23), folio. Henry Wharton, Anglia Sacra (London, 1691). Thomas Tanner, Notitia Monastica (Oxford, 1695). William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: or, the history of the ancient abbies, monasteries, hospitals, Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, With their Dependencies, in England and Wales, trans. James Wright (London, 1693); republished, 1718; an extended edition with additional material, eds John



109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116

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Caley, Sir Henry Ellis, Bulkeley Bandinel and Richard C. Taylor (6 vols, London, 1817–30). [Sir Walter Scott], The Monastery: A Romance. By the Author of ‘Waverley’ (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1820). Graham Parry, ‘Sir William Dugdale’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edward Petre, Notices of the English Convents & Colleges established on the Continent after the Dissolution of Religious Houses in England, ed. F.C. Husenbeth (Norwich, 1849). Guilday, English Catholic Refugees. Guilday’s conventionally dismissive verdict on James II (p. 409) meant that he systematically underestimated the lasting political threat posed by the Catholic diaspora. T.C. Smout, N.C. Landsman and T.M. Devine, ‘Scottish emigration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move, pp. 76–112, at 77. Steve Murdoch and Esther Mijers, ‘Migrant destinations, 1500–1750’, in T.M. Devine and Jenny Wormald (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford, 2012), pp. 320–37, at 320–23; Steve Murdoch (ed.), Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War 1618–1648 (Leiden, 2001), pp. ix, 15–18. Catholic Scots’ loyalties to the House of Stuart and to the Catholic interest might conflict in the complex conflicts of 1614–48. Steve Murdoch, ‘Scotland, Europe and the English “missing link”’, History Compass, 5.3 (2007), 890–913, at 893–94; Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, Scottish Diaspora, p. 8. J.C.D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994).

2 Irish Jacobites in early modern Europe: exile, adjustment and experience, 1691–1745 Éamonn Ó Ciardha Sustained migration to Europe has characterised Ireland and Britain’s shared histories over the last fifteen hundred years. Close links with the Papacy and Europe’s great universities, religious institutions and organisations, the English Crown’s extensive possessions in France, and a lucrative trade in fish, wine and wool across the Irish Sea and English Channel account for much of this traffic in the medieval period. In the early modern era, the political, military, socio-economic and cultural effects of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation boosted the Irish continental footfall, their most sustained and catastrophic effects greatly impacting on Ireland. The English re-conquest, particularly the three wars which book-ended and bisected the seventeenth century, forced thousands of Irishmen into the European mainland hatcheries of the Reformation/ Counter-Reformation and the bloody maw of its confessional and dynastic conflicts. In the decades after the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688), which deposed the Catholic king James II, thousands of English, Irish, Scottish and, to a much lesser extent Welsh, Jacobites (supporters of the exiled House of Stuart) found themselves scattered across Europe from the Iberian Peninsula to the Russian Steppe. The Irish formed the bulk of this diverse, exiled community and would play a key role in all aspects of European society, including banking, the Church, education, trade and, particularly, soldiering.1 This chapter reappraises aspects of Ireland’s early modern military diaspora. These early modern outflows constituted a diaspora because, despite upheaval which saw so many Irish and Old English leaders and their families exiled, these people retained a strong connection to Ireland, if only in some cases because they intended one day to reclaim their patrimonies.2 The exile motif and the rage against English expropriation of their lands hardened on the battlefields of the wars of religion, and



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would prepare them for a Royalist/Jacobite restoration. Arguably, the diasporic yearning of a political soldier, such as Thomas Francis Meagher (1823–67), who raised Irish Zouaves in New York to save the union of the United States and prepare Irishmen and Irish-Americans to fight for an Irish Republic back home, simply echoed the aims of the Sarsfields, MacCarthys, Dillon, O’Neills, O’Hanlons, Talbots, Lallys and many other war-waging chiefs, gentlemen-soldiers, lords and their descendants. This appraisal of the extensive, high-profile, vibrant Irish (Jacobite) military presence on the continent between the Treaty of Limerick (1691) and the end of the War of the Austrian Succession (1748) will supplement recent developments in early modern Irish military history and historiography and explore issues of identity and ideology through a brief examination of their letters, life-stories, literary relics, memorials and memoirs. Having introduced Irish Jacobitism and provided an appropriate political and military context for Irish involvement in eighteenth-century Europe’s various dynastic wars and Jacobite plots, it will re-create something of Irish Jacobite lives, social networks and links with their former patrimony. In addition, it will examine their political, military and cultural milieux with specific reference to their role in Jacobite politics and their attitude towards their exiled king and native land. Furthermore, it proffers some tentative suggestions as to how this early modern expatriate community remained in contact with Ireland and functioned as a military, political, diplomatic and cultural group in Europe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; as well as how they organised recruitment networks at home and abroad and utilised Catholicism and Jacobitism for military, political and practical advantage. Finally, it will show how Irish clergymen, poets, propagandists, soldiers and smugglers at once played a role in recruiting for Irish regiments in all early modern theatres, as well as transferring intelligence between Ireland and the Irish military exiles. Irish priests became chaplains in these Irish regiments, they provided spiritual succour to their charges, acted as notaries and witnesses for wills and testaments, and served as guardians for their widows and orphans. Recent research has also shown that Irish-born bankers, merchants, educators, lawyers and notaries fulfilled similar functions; their careers and pan-European political, socio-economic and cultural networks tell us much about their place in the host societies.3 After all, the Irish Jacobite military formed only one part of a multi-faceted expatriate population that organised itself in host kingdoms, empires and nations. Irish banking, clerical, maritime, mercantile, political and professional communities also serviced the Irish military, looking after their educational, familial, financial and spiritual welfare and facilitating crucial links with their compatriots at home.

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The ‘Fighting Irish’: history and memory In the centuries after the Treaty of Limerick, Irish soldiers, the major focus of this chapter, manned, staffed and led in armies across the entire continent from Lisbon to Moscow, flitting between kingdoms, empires and republics, cultures, ideologies, languages and religions. Like other recruits, they joined foreign armies for many reasons, some ideological and political, others practical and professional. Irishmen fled confessional, cultural and political persecution; escaped famine, economic stagnation and the drudgery of a labouring life. Others exchanged these for adventure and opportunity. Family ties, regional loyalties and tradition helped to sustain this extensive, successful, long-standing Irish military migration. These exiles maintained strong cultural and ideological links with the land of their birth; they marched to Irish martial music and their flags carried the insignia of St Patrick, the Virgin Mary, the harp, red hand, crown, shamrock, bursting sun, Fenian phoenix and Irish-language legend. Furthermore, their trials, tribulations and triumphs animated their compatriots at home and throughout these far-flung Irish communities. Finally, they utilised genealogy, lineage, religion, republicanism and royalism to facilitate entry into (and promotion within) their chosen service; others found that these often hampered or stifled a promising military career. Leading luminaries and humble canon-fodder in this expatriate Irish military service are rendered in ink, oil, marble or stone, celebrated in funeral orations, obituaries or regimental histories and remembered in the history, literature, popular songs and the pamphlet culture of their adoptive and native countries. However, the record of its multi-layered, multi-lingual narrative, which transcends chronological, geographical and political boundaries, remains incomplete; although history, literature, journalism, art and iconography have at once articulated, recorded and supplemented its evolution, reincarnation and spread. Biographers, diarists and historians,4 Irish-language poets,5 Hiberno-Latin writers and Jacobite authors6 have both nurtured and recorded the emergence and spread of a distinct, early modern Irish nationalist identity that had loyalty to the Catholic Church and the Stuart dynasty at its core.7 In addition to articulating, celebrating and supplementing its attendant, martial ‘Fighting Irish’ cult, prickly Irish writers and commentators took great umbrage at both British slander and French, Spanish and American ingratitude. By so doing, they effectively pre-empted nineteenth-century and twentieth-century historians and writers, who lionised this Irish military tradition for their own various academic, cultural and political ends.8 In spite of this coverage, little is actually known about the lives and experiences of the ordinary soldier who fought and died in the ranks; no over-arching study has



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explored shared identities and ideologies across all the chronological and geographical expanse of Irish military migration; nor has there been an examination of the continuities, links and shared martial traditions between the early modern and modern periods. This ‘Fighting Irish’ cult, divested of its royalist (Jacobite) component by the end of the eighteenth century, later flavoured the historical and literary writings of Young Ireland Romantics and Victorian novelists alike.9 Furthermore, the ink and oil of artists from Dürer to Reigh provide a visual prop to these historical writings and literary and political re-cyclings.10 Finally, a cult (and anti-cult) of the Irish soldier can also be traced in English/British writings between Spenser and Kipling, in ‘classical’ history from Camden to Macaulay,11 as well as in the memoirs of prominent European and American military commanders from Henry IV of France to General George McClellan.12 Despite this, and the soldier’s pivotal position in the Irish nationalist (and unionist) pantheon, issues of identity, ideology and popular culture have been largely underplayed or sidelined in recent early modern Irish military history.13 This is unfortunate, given that they remained crucial frames of reference for Irish military migration, and do much to explain Irish influence abroad and the Irish emigrant experience, generally. Indeed, one could argue that the story of Irish military migration between the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) and the French Revolution (1789) and beyond is dominated by the interlocking themes of religion, national identity and martial culture. Mass migration throughout the English-speaking world and beyond since the nineteenth century has somewhat eclipsed the early modern emigrant experience. Furthermore, classic histories,14 recent academic and popular surveys,15 and the many excellent regional studies of the early modern period – particularly of eighteenth-century Irish military migrants in France,16 Spain and Spanish Flanders,17 and Central and Northern Europe18 – have tended to underplay ideology and identity, specifically the Irish Jacobite identity which infused much of their political and military discourse and traffic with Ireland in the period under discussion here. In addition, there has been an overemphasis on military history approaches. Those historians who have examined Ireland’s eighteenth-century military migrants have largely focused on regimental histories of the Irish Brigades or biographical and prosopographical examinations of Irishmen who rose to high political, military and ecclesiastical office. The Stuart Archive in Windsor Castle, arguably the single most comprehensive source for the eighteenth-century Irish émigré community in Europe, has, until recently, been effectively ignored by Irish historians.19 Social, cultural and associational aspects of the early modern, expatriate Irish military centred on a strong, distinct Irish Catholic nationalist and

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royalist identity, the cult of the exiled Stuarts and their native aristocracy, the cultivation of genealogy, heraldry and iconography and the centrality of their relationship with, and patronage of, the Catholic Church. Key events in the Jacobite calendar (births, birthdays, deaths and name days) and associated Jacobite rites and rituals provide a useful chronological, methodological and thematic platform for further research, and mirror St Patrick’s Day celebrations in George Washington’s army at Valley Forge (1778) or George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac during the American Civil War (1861–65). Irish generals, colonels-proprietor and recruiters used Jacobitism to enlist kinsmen and compatriots into various European armies, often in conjunction with their political and diplomatic traffic on behalf of the exiled Stuarts. As a prelude to discussing these narratives of exile, emigration and migration, it is necessary to examine the kingdom’s relationship with Jacobitism, the ideology and movement that helped at once to sustain the Irish military tradition and Irish nationalist identity after the Treaty of Limerick. Irish loyalty to the Stuart dynasty first manifested itself in the immediate aftermath of James VI and I’s succession to the English throne and Irish Crown in 1603. The first de facto monarch of the whole kingdom, the king’s martyred Catholic mother, his impeccable (fabricated) Gaelic genealogies, and the strategic cultural, diplomatic and theological trimming of Irish theologians and Gaelic poets and writers, ensured that he had no rivals for Irish royalist affections. This loyalty survived the trauma of the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ (1638–52), the Interregnum (1649–60) and the political frustrations and disappointments of Charles II’s reign (1660–85). On the succession of James II (1685), many Irishmen looked to the new Catholic monarch to repeal anti-Catholic legislation and restore lands they had lost fighting for his family against the English Parliament. Defeat and disillusionment at the Boyne (1690), Aughrim and Limerick (1691) initially dimmed but did not extinguish Irish enthusiasm for his fallen house.20 Through the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often in the context of a whole series of Jacobite plots and invasion scares (1692, 1695, 1708, 1715, 1719, 1745, 1759), Irish Jacobites looked to the Stuarts, and particularly to the exiled Irish aristocracy in the armies of France and Spain, to restore their confiscated lands, dissolve the Penal Laws and reverse the political, social and cultural domination of the Protestant Ascendancy. To that end, they also paid careful attention to Europe’s numerous dynastic wars and ongoing political and military rivalries and their possible ramifications for the Stuart cause. Thus, these commentators equated the king’s restoration with their own return to Ireland, the restitution of their lands and titles, and the rehabilitation of the Catholic Church; in the meantime, they looked to their exiled monarch



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for alms, access and titles to enable them to operate in the closed, often inaccessible world of ancien régime Europe. A burgeoning Irish military on the continent, often deemed traitors, rebels and fugitives or at best military and religious refugees, played a significant role in European political and cultural life. Many remained loyal to the exiled dynasty and participated in military campaigns, invasion plots, cross-channel espionage and recruitment drives in the six decades after the Treaty of Limerick.21 Catholicism and Jacobitism, inexorably linked until the death of ‘James III’ (1766), helped to hold this group together, facilitating its integration into European society and enabling its adherents to move effortlessly from Madrid to Moscow. Although the expatriate Irish military’s relationship with the homeland in the seventeenth century has been the subject of much recent research, their eighteenthcentury successors lack a modern, pan-European, interpretive history.22 ‘A Little Ireland in the army of the Great King of France’23 Approximately 19,000 Irish Jacobite soldiers left the country during and immediately after the Jacobite war (1689–91), remaining a distinct military entity under King James II until incorporated into the French army after the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) and later into the Spanish service at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1714). The famous ‘Wild Geese’ of nationalist history and hagiography became a distinct and much-lauded military force, earning a fearsome reputation on the killing-fields of eighteenth-century Europe. Arguments have raged over the exact numbers recruited for the French and Spanish service in the half century after the Treaty of Limerick. In 1729, the Irish Jacobite Sir Charles Wogan (1698?–1757?) lamented that over 100,000 Irishmen had died in the service of France since the 1690s; elsewhere, in a letter to Dr Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), dean of St Patrick’s in 1733, he claimed that 120,000 had been killed in that service.24 Writing in the early 1760s, the Abbé MacGeoghegan (1702–63), who dedicated his Histoire d’Irlande (1758) to the Irish Brigades in the French service, put the figure at 450,000 for the period between 1691 and 1745.25 Richard Hayes (1878–1958), the prolific twentieth-century Irish military historian, believed that MacGeoghegan’s figures suggested that all those who served in the Brigades were of Irish origin; Hayes himself arrived at a figure of 48,000 for the total casualties among the ranks of the Brigades in this period.26 In more recent times, Louis Cullen put forward much smaller figures for Irish recruitment, suggesting that ‘at its peak in the late-1720s and 1730s, enlistment in the French army reached, or did not fall short of 1,000 per annum’. He also

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claimed that this influx did not taper off decisively until the 1740s.27 Nonetheless, the numbers mooted in recent researches are still substantial; furthermore, this continental-based Irish military presence remained a major preoccupation for commentators on both sides of the Irish and British political, confessional and cultural divide. The disproportionately large influence of these military exiles has been acknowledged by successive generations of Irish writers and scholars; indeed, they should be considered a key component of what the Irish Jacobite writer Nicholas Plunkett calls the Irish ‘nation’, on the authority of the Irish-language poets, the exiles themselves and their Irish Protestant counterparts. Plunkett drew a cameo of this absent but vital Irish political interest in an unpublished, early eighteenth-century pamphlet entitled ‘The State of the Nation’. He identified ‘great numbers abroad and at home tho’ not enjoying lands or inheritance, yet are worthy patriots and highly capable of serving their country’. He lavishly praised ‘those Irish whom the world owns to be constant to the Catholic religion, constant for their loyalty to their prince and noted for their natural courage’.28 This selfrighteous rhetoric infused hundreds of letters from Irish émigrés now in the Stuart Archives at Windsor Castle. W.E.H. Lecky, the most famous of Ireland’s nineteenth-century historians, believed that ‘the real history of the Irish Catholics during the first half of the eighteenth century is to be found in the countries of Europe’; indeed, he marvelled at the ‘energy and ability of Ireland’s soldiers and scholars put to the service of other nations’.29 Richard Hayes, for his part, rightly suggested that Paris became the capital of Catholic Ireland in the eighteenth century.30 At home, and even after the ‘shipwreck’ of Aughrim and Limerick,31 a displaced Irish Catholic aristocratic/gentry interest remained preoccupied with Jacobite affairs on the continent; while a leaderless but seemingly unbowed peasantry made no secret of their affections for James II, his French ally Louis XIV, and their own exiled military and political elites. The latter became an army, aristocracy and gentry-in-waiting in both Jacobite and Whig writings. By far the largest group among the Jacobite exiles, their numerical dominance compensated for their relatively weak political position at the exiled court.32 However, this vocal, expatriate Irish lobby remained eternally hopeful of a Stuart restoration and a return to their confiscated estates; moreover, they kept in regular contact with their patrimony in the 1690s. Whig paranoia towards this group resonates in one contemporary account (1695), attributed to one of the Southwells, a prominent, wellinformed Irish Protestant Ascendancy family. It analysed the Irish Jacobite polity, delineated its mentality and highlighted the importance of the burgeoning Irish expatriate military community abroad. Southwell stressed



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that the Catholic peasantry’s true loyalty lay with their banished king and expatriate aristocracy and gentry.33 He specifically highlighted Irish Jacobitism’s pro-French bias and feared that a general European peace would facilitate a French-sponsored Irish military invasion or uprising: [I]f that king [Louis XIV] but make peace with the rest of his neighbours and were at leisure to attend only on the English war … the numerous army of the French king being thereby idle, he would but make little scruple of picking a fresh quarrel with us on some pretence or another. How easy were it for them to pour three or four score or a hundred thousand ejected Irish or French, and considering the potency of his fleet as being able there to maintain them, which in conjunction with the ordinary natives (though but as rapparees [outlaws]) might make it more difficult to remove them than ever yet we have found.34

Similarly, at the close of a most turbulent century, Sir Francis Brewster’s Discourse concerning Ireland and the different interests thereof (1697) provided a retrospective view of the Jacobite war and a defence of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws that had begun to appear on the statute books. His description of Irish resoluteness against Great Britain, the Holy Roman Emperor, the king of Spain and the Catholic princes of Europe during the Jacobite war flattered the most nostalgic of his Jacobite peers.35 Even after their defeat, he regarded the Catholic populace and their émigré brethren with unrelenting suspicion: And notwithstanding that there has been all along the war considerable numbers of Papists in the French service many of which remain there this very day and the ruins of demolished towns and fortresses in Ireland and the vast heaps of bones of slaughtered men in many parts of that kingdom are but too sensible monuments of their villainy.36

Thus, the Irish Jacobite army (and later the Irish Brigades in France and Spain) became a European-based microcosm of the Irish Jacobite polity that had succumbed at Aughrim and Limerick, providing a refuge for those who sought to overturn the revolutionary settlement, flee the Penal Laws or make military careers for themselves on the continent. Prominent Irish Catholic aristocrats and gentry and expatriate Jacobite generals and their descendants effectively retained their position at the head of this ‘little Ireland’ throughout the first half of the eighteenth century.37 However, others among the Irish exiles sought an immediate return to their patrimony. A letter from one Captain Charles O’Malley at St Germain to his son in Ireland before the abortive Franco-Jacobite invasion

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of 1692 declined to confer on him the patents for his Irish property and cautioned against any participation in ‘the court of claims talked of to be held’. He informed him of a planned Jacobite descent the following spring, and of his own wish that he might be restored to ‘his dear wife, his son and his country’. Similarly, a will drafted by Justin MacCarthy, viscount Mountcashel (c.1643–95), desired that he be buried in Ireland and that his cousin Florence should inherit his empty titles. He expressed the hope that his kinsman and all those who came after him would endeavour to reconquer all that the English had taken from his family and that his future heir would devote himself to the service of the Stuarts and the king of France, his legitimate sovereigns.38 A post-Limerick cult of the Irish Brigades also began to emerge in contemporary pamphlets. The English Jacobite author John Sergeant (1622–1707) provided an early example in his allegorical Historical romance of the wars between the mighty giant Gallieno and the great knight Nasonius (1694). Lauding Irish heroics at the battle of Landen (1693), he refuted the aspersions cast on their military reputation: [they] won much credit for their courageous behaviour, breaking down all before them by which they convinced the world how slanderously the reports were that were spread of them in Utopia [Ireland], for then they were not inferior to the best of the Nasonians [Williamites] when well cloathed, armed and fed.39

Likewise, Nicholas Plunkett, the prolific Jacobite evangelist and pamphleteer, boasted that ‘our troops abroad, for these twenty years past, have raised the admiration of nations, because there was no bad conduct, no division and no treachery to thwart them’.40 European peace, Irish despair However, the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), which ended the war of the English Succession/League of Augsburg and led to the subsequent disbanding of the Irish Jacobite army, dealt crushing political and economic blows to these exiles. This is manifest in a contemporary memorial from one disgruntled Irish Jacobite soldier to the French king. The author reminded Louis XIV that the Irish Jacobites ‘had fought, during ten years in defence of their religion and their legitimate sovereign, with all the zeal and fidelity which could be required of them, and with a devotion unparalleled, except among those of their unhappy nation’. They had been totally undone by a peace that had not only failed to facilitate their king’s restoration but



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had also left his Irish followers ‘deprived of their properties to which they had legitimate claims, but were likewise prohibited from returning to their country, under pain of death’.41 A 1698 letter from Walter Innes to the Rev. Charles Leslie (1650–1722), the Monaghan-born, non-juring Protestant Jacobite, added to this bleak picture of destitution among the exile Jacobite community in St Germain: ‘it would pity a heart of stone to see the court of St. Germain at present, especially now that all the English, Scots and Irish troops are disbanded’. He claimed that there are now ‘not only many hundreds of the soldiery starving, but also many gentlemen and officers that have no clothes to put on their backs or shoes to put on their feet’. Moreover, anti-Catholic legislation at home had exacerbated the situation: ‘many to escape hanging at home are daily come here to starve’.42 This melancholy continued to feature in their writings; they continually expressed resentment at the Stuart king’s favouritism towards his English and Scottish subjects and despair at the vicissitudes of contemporary and European politics. An anonymous Jacobite officer, who dedicated his ‘Groans of Ireland’ to King William III (1650–1702), most forcefully articulated their despair and resentment. He castigated the Jacobite generals Patrick Sarsfield and John Wauchope (d. 1694) for ‘building their fortunes in France on the ruins of the Irish’, and bewailed the deplorable condition of the ‘poor gentlemen and the women and children who were invited to go along with them to the continent who are now begging their bread from door to door’.43 Similarly, on receiving news of James II’s death (1701), Nicholas Plunkett lamented that ‘a great part of the Irish nobility who had the honour to serve His Majesty in the state and war at his being in that kingdom [Ireland] were stabbed to the heart at the dismal intelligence’ because ‘he could call them by their names and call them fellow sufferers’. He believed ‘that the case is somewhat altered with the enthronement of James III for unto him they are strangers’.44 Likewise, an anonymous Irish Brigade officer complained to his son that the Irish had not the pleasure of approaching the person of their prince because they spoke bad English and, although they had sacrificed everything for his cause, political expediency dictated that he preferred the English and the Scots.45 These themes continued to feature in Irish popular Jacobite discourse throughout the Jacobite period.46 In spite of these various military and political setbacks, the Irish remained an integral part of the exiled Jacobite community in the 1690s; moreover, Ireland-based Jacobites, their English and Scottish émigré brethren and their political opponents on both sides of the Irish Sea increasingly viewed this ‘other Ireland’ as key to any future Stuart restoration. All shades of political opinion deemed a landing of Franco-Irish officers to be an essential catalyst for rebellion in Ireland and an important diversionary theatre in

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any two-pronged invasion of southern England and the Scottish Highlands. This invariably provided a topic of urgent correspondence between the exiled Stuart king and his supporters before successive Jacobite invasions and plots during the first half of the eighteenth century. Recruitment to these Irish regiments in the French and Spanish armies continued to provide one of the most visible manifestations of militant Irish Jacobitism, feeding the ranks of the already large Irish expatriate community of soldiers, merchants, clergy and their families and dependants. Many Irishmen set sail for the foreign service, invariably ‘for the service of the Pretender’ or ‘James III’ in surviving accounts and depositions.47As well as resonating with reference to invasion, plots and the machinations of prominent Jacobites on the continent, these depositions uncover extensive and intricate lines of communication between Ireland and the continent, via Catholic priests, Irish soldiers, Franco-Irish privateers, Irish ship-owners and merchants. ‘On His Majesty’s Secret Service’: Irish agents, plotters, recruiters and spies Louis XIV had been forced to accept William III as de facto king of England, Scotland and Ireland under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick; however, he still recognised James II as de jure monarch and refused to banish him from his dominions. Furthermore, the demise of three ailing kings (Charles ‘El Hechizado’, the last Habsburg king of Spain, James II and William III) in quick succession (1700–1702) plunged Europe into another dynastic conflict and propelled Jacobitism back to the forefront of European politics. At the beginning of 1705, Nathaniel Hooke (1664–1738), King James III’s Dublin-born admiral-in-waiting and a trusted Franco-Jacobite agent, liaised with Scottish Jacobites to promote an armed uprising in preparation for a French invasion. Hooke left for Scotland in July 1707 and returned with numerous letters and a memorial for the French king; the Scots undertook to raise 30,000 men if Louis XIV would provide them with 18,000 infantry soldiers, additional arms and a high-ranking general acceptable to King James. After the signing of the Treaty of Union (27 January 1707) and its ratification by the English Parliament (17 March), the French ministry finally decided to organise an expedition the following year. Louis promised 6,000 men and additional financial assistance, while the pope also pledged financial support; King James chose his half-brother James Fitzjames, duke of Berwick (1670–1734) to command the expedition. James himself left St Germain on 9 March and joined the Jacobite leaders



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Perth and Midleton at Dunkirk. However, he fell ill with measles and the flotilla could not embark for Scotland until the 23rd of that month. Although Louis XIV began to doubt their chances of success, he nevertheless allowed them to proceed. Hampered by adverse weather conditions they finally reached the Scottish coast but failed to make contact with the Jacobites who had assembled at Leith. Deaf to James’s entreaties, Claude de Forbain (1656–1733), who commanded the invasion fleet, refused to allow him to disembark and they returned to Dunkirk on 7 April.48 An important source for contemporary, trans-continental Irish traffic in the run-up to this abortive Jacobite invasion of Scotland is the 1708 report from Fr. Ambrose O’Connor, a native of Sligo, provincial of the Irish Dominicans and a prominent Irish Jacobite agent.49 On his arrival in Ireland (May 1708), O’Connor found that known Jacobite leaders had been imprisoned or deprived of their horses. Despite being hounded by the authorities, he communicated with John, lord Caryll (1625–1711), Queen Mary of Modena’s (1658–1718) secretary at St Germain, and contacted leading Jacobites in Connaught.50 Lords Clanricarde and Boffin declined to meet him, pleading ill-health, but Lord Riverston professed his loyalty. Two of the other senior Connaught Jacobites, Lord Dillon and Thomas McDonogh, had been confined in Dublin. In Leinster, O’Connor received assurances of fidelity from the region’s principal Catholic peers, who all stressed their willingness to contribute to James III’s restoration.51 Lords Limerick and Fingall reported Irish readiness to hazard their lives and liberties for James III’s service on receipt of arms and reinforcements. O’Connor felt inclined to reveal the nature of his mission more extensively but reconsidered in light of the abortive invasion of Scotland.52 The authorities circulated details of his appearance at every port in the country and offered a great reward for his capture, dead or alive.53 Although such intelligence reports survive from the highest echelons of the Irish political nation, it is more difficult to glean information on the motives, opinions and sentiments of ordinary Jacobites. However, some contemporary, albeit fragmentary, accounts and recruitment depositions shed light on the motives and activities of the ordinary foot-soldiers who took shipping to the continent in the early decades of the eighteenth century. One Galwayman, serving under a military banner in Europe, sent remittances to his father in Galway, sought tidings from home and returned information on his Jacobite compatriots. Like his Jacobite contemporaries, he analysed European politics and their possible ramifications for the Stuart cause. Noting contacts between the French and Turks and their implications for the re-conquest of Spain by Phillip V, the Bourbon claim to that throne, he also pinpointed Irish despair at their young king’s

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diffidence and highlighted their distrust of their Scottish and English compeers: It was by chance that I heard of a ship from Galway going to Nantes. I came several leagues on purpose to see how my friends were and to write you a line or two privately. The French court looks very great. We hear they are in allegiance with the Turks and will put a great stop to the gaining of Spain but I assure you ye poor Irish are much down in the mouth by reason King James has dayly conference with gentlemen from Scotland as well as with the English and he has privately discussed amongst them that he is at making of underhand articles; if so they will tye his hands that it will not be in his power to do any good for Catholics. I remember my father told me that such of ye Irish Roman Catholics as followed King Charles ye second into France and left all their substance behind them to demonstrate their love and allegiance to him, when he was restored he was tyed up to such a degree that he could not show them any favour and fear now ye case will be the same.54

Finally, he warned his father of the dangers of divulging this illicit correspondence and took elaborate precautions to ensure that his identity and handwriting would not be discovered.55 Contemporary recruitment depositions also contain some of this type of political innuendo and European war news. A case in point is the depositions of Michael and William Lehy of Waterford city, concerning the recruiting activities of Toby Butler, a lieutenant in the regiment of Piers Butler, 3rd viscount Galmoy (1652–1740). In consequence of this information, the authorities proclaimed Butler as a tory and placed a £200 bounty on his head.56 Butler had purportedly emphasised to the recruits that they would serve ‘James III’, from whom he had a commission, and he promised they would return within a year to root out Protestants. As usual, the formal business concluded with the ritual drinking of the Stuart king’s health.57 Michael Lehy laid especial emphasis on the arms, clothes and money promised to recruits on their arrival in France and the extent and covert nature of contemporary conscription; he also highlighted a corollary between Irish Jacobitism and a hatred of the English language, a theme certainly borne out in contemporary Irish-language literature.58 Recruiting for the foreign service invariably became associated with communal activity, sporting occasions (hurling/‘commoning’ and football), religious services, visits to ‘holy-wells’, oath-swearing and health-drinking; and involved a cross-section of the community, including poets, priests, publicans, the surviving Jacobite Irish aristocracy and gentry, Protestant converts and farm labourers.59 The information of John Brady (1714)



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contained explicit data on the Irish Jacobite network via Dover, Bristol and Calais to France, which also linked recruiting officers with influential continental Jacobites such as the duke of Berwick, his son, viscount Tinmouth, and the Irish Jacobites, Piers Butler, 3rd viscount Galmoy (1652–1740) and [Lieutenant-] General [Arthur] Dillon (1670–1733).60 Brady met Irishmen who had joined Queen Anne’s army in Spain but now served the French king. On his arrival at the Collège des Lombardes (the Irish College) in Paris he encountered ‘a great many Irish young priests, among them one or two out of the neighbourhood of one Philip Gaffney of the parish of Currin [counties Monaghan and Fermanagh] and a great many more from Cavan, Monaghan and Ireland’. They tried to persuade him to join the French army.61 In common with many Irish military émigrés, they anticipated a timely return to their native land. Another contemporary account highlighted links between France and Ireland, identifying a priest from Cavan communicating via London through Sir Thomas Sheridan (1684–1746), later one of ‘the seven men of Moidart’ who accompanied ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ to Scotland in 1745.62 At this time of intensive recruitment and extensive traffic between Ireland and its military diaspora, Nathaniel Hooke had already undertaken secret negotiations in Scotland on behalf of the Stuart king; indeed, O’Connor’s aforementioned mission formed a distinct Irish component of this plot. He reported back that ‘the Scots require, if His Majesty pleases, that their k[ing] [James III] should be accompanied with 5,000 men’ and that ‘they would prefer the Irish troops that serve in France as being more accustomed to their manner of living and speaking the two languages of their kingdom’.63 Hooke himself surmised that ‘one may easily judge by the valour and irreproachable conduct of the Irish regiments which serve in France what their countrymen would be capable of doing at home if they had arms’. He also claimed that one Mr McClean, his Scottish contemporary, acting in concert with Colonel Arthur Dillon and Richard Piers, the Catholic bishop of Waterford, believed that the Irish ‘had sufficient force to protect the Catholic counties and given time to arm and assemble they could send thirty thousand into the field’.64 One Richard Bourke also proposed an invasion of Connaught in this period, and suggested that Lieutenant-General [Arthur] Dillon ‘of all His Majesty’s [James III’s] subjects that serves abroad is the only proper person to command such an expedition’.65 A July 1709 memorial recommended that a diversionary expedition to Britain and Ireland could provide the key to breaking the acute pressure on French forces in Flanders and the military impasse in contemporary Europe. For the success of such a venture, the author stressed the need to send all the Irish in Flanders (some 50,000 men, plus the reformed

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Irish officers) as an expeditionary force with King James at their head. Irish soldiers in France and Spain would provide the initial impetus to a successful invasion and subsequent rebellion in Ireland. Such a force, furnished with extra supplies, would raise an additional 50,000 men in fifteen days and neutralise ‘Princess’ [Queen] Anne’s skeletal garrison force of 4,000 men. To justify such a heavy French investment in Ireland, the author pointed to the fact that the Jacobite war had sapped England’s strength and frustrated the League of Augsburg for three years with only limited French expenditure. Ireland provided an obvious invasion target because Catholics formed the dominant group within the country, many of whom remained loyal to the Stuarts and upheld their traditional antipathy towards the English.66 Similarly, a treatise among the papers of Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio (1660–1728), cardinal protector of Britain and Ireland, also advocated an invasion through the ports of the south-west of Ireland. It mentioned in particular Castlehaven, Crookhaven, Bantry, Cork, Kinsale (County Cork), Kenmare, Valentia, Ventry, Dingle and Smerwick (County Kerry). The treatise claimed that the Irish Catholic clergy, its hierarchy and the heads of the great families, were well represented in the French king’s army and would lead the people.67 While the Gualterio treatise focuses on suitable locations for a descent, an anonymous invasion plan entitled ‘Memoire au sujet de l’enterprise sur l’Irlande’ (c. 1706–8) provides a list of exiled Irish aristocrats, gentry and soldiers from each province who could repair to Ireland in the event of a French invasion.68 It also proposed sending an invasion force of 6,000–8,000 men to Ulster (the vicinity of Londonderry) in the harvest time, accompanied by the reformed Irish officers in the French army who could head the regiments raised in Ireland. These forces would bring additional arms and accoutrements for a further 20,000 infantry, two cavalry regiments and 4,000 dragoons.69 Similarly, a missive from Colonel Gordon O’Neill (fl. 1650–1704), son of Sir Phelim Mac Shane of Kinard, to Louis XIV proposed that an invasion of the north of Ireland with 5,000–6,000 men would be the necessary prerequisite for a descent on Scotland. O’Neill advocated furnishing these soldiers with arms, ammunition and subsistence for the first six months; the French could provide the necessary arms, uniforms and money to raise an additional 30,000–40,000 Irish or Scots. To bind the Irish and Scots to the king’s service, he proposed giving them the same immunities, rights and privileges as his English subjects, while ensuring that Irish Protestants retained full liberty of conscience. All inhabitants of Ireland should also enjoy free trade whereby they might no longer have to ship or disembark their merchandise through English ports to the great prejudice of the king’s Irish subjects and his Irish revenues.70 This type of diversionary



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military tactic died hard in Jacobite military and political discourse. In 1716, during the next major Jacobite invasion scheme, John Erskine, 11th earl and 1st (titular) duke of Mar (1675–1732), one of James III’s key advisors, urged Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester (1663–1732), to include Ireland in any future invasion plans: You cannot forget to think of Jones [Ireland], for, if some commodities [arms and soldiers] be not likewise sent to him to set up the trade [rebellion], I see not how it will be in his power to do it to any purpose for he is barehanded, and the other traders [Hanoverian establishment] in his part full of money and all the necessary commodities.71

A further (anonymous) communication to Mar in September 1716 described a similar enterprise, and exhibited considerable awareness of the numerical and political strength of the Irish Jacobite community abroad. It advocated sending James Butler, the attainted 2nd duke of Ormonde (1665–1745), and a group of Irish officers with 3,000 stand of arms as a precursor to an Irish rising. That this anonymous author had direct intelligence from Ireland is suggested in the letter: ‘As to the Irish affair laid before you I have it from an old gentleman lately come from thence who served in the late revolution with the King’s party and who knows the exact present state of that kingdom.’72 A contemporary intelligence from Tralee, County Kerry, in January 1716 also suggests that local Jacobites believed that 6,000 soldiers of the Irish Brigades would soon arrive with Lieutenant-General Arthur Dillon at their head. Furthermore, the informant believed that if a force of 3,000–4,000 men landed in Connaught, 200–300 at a time, it would be joined by a further 20,000 within ten days. The familiarity of Catholics with the state of the king’s forces and their tendency to ridicule the peace enhanced the informant’s fears.73 Lieutenant-General Arthur Dillon’s post-invasion report to James III shared the commonly held attitude of Irish Jacobites and their exiled brethren in the French and Spanish service. He stressed that the failure to send money, arms and reinforcements to the insurgents had hampered a successful assault on the Hanoverian state.74 His emphasis on the political and military importance of the Brigades highlighted the prerequisite to curry the political patronage of their princely employers and their need, if necessary, to defy their paymasters in support of their legitimate prince: Your Majesty knows that there are five battalions and a horse regiment of your subjects in France and five battalions with two regiments of dragoons in Spain. It appears to me an essential point that you should take measures in time to obtain these troops or at least the best part of

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them … Tis to be presumed this will depend on the occurrences and on the situation of the interests of the princes who have power to give us succours. But, on the supposition of a refusal, in my opinion it will be indispensably necessary to have recourse to the only remaining expedient, which is to engage the chief commanders of the said troops underhand and even to command them on their allegiance to obey such orders as shall be commissioned to that effect. You cannot doubt the obedience and submission of the said officers in everything relating to your service. If you be reduced to take this expedient you must employ nobody but judicious persons of prudence and credit. As to Ireland, a little project for that country can be made with small charges.75

The optimism in these recurring invasion memoirs regularly featured in contemporary Irish Jacobite poetry. In his poem ‘Gile na Gile’ [Brightness of Brightness], the often pessimistic Sliabh Luachra (County Kerry) poet Aogán Ó Rathaille (1670–1728/29) hoped that the return of the lions from across the sea [‘bh-fillid na leoghan tar tuínn’] would support James III, the most fine, thrice over, of Scottish blood [‘S an duine badh ghile air chine Scoit trí h-uaire’] against the black, horned, foreign, hate-crested crew [‘adharcach fuirionn-dubh miosgaireach cóirneach buídhe’].76 His literary contemporary, the County Clare antiquarian, poet and soldier Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín (c.1680–1755) best captured Irish Jacobite hope for a Stuart restoration: A Bhanba ná meastar leat ár laochra Fáil, cé easpa dhuit a gcailleamhain gur éag an táin, mairid cuid den aicme sin ar téacht tair sáil do chaithfeas fuil do shneachta-choirp ‘na n-éiric d’fháil.77 [Oh Banba (Ireland) do not to consider that your warriors are dead, however many have been lost across the sea, Some of that group live and are coming across the sea To avenge the blood of your snow-white body].

Similarly, the anonymous poet who penned an undated lament on the exile of clanna Néill in this period expressed confidence in their timely return: D’imthig clanna Néill thar sáile ’S tá Éire cráidthe ó d’imtigh siad. Ach deánfaidh uibheacha iolair iolraidh Cibé an áit i ngorthar iad.78



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[The O’Neills went across the sea And Ireland is despondent since they left But eagle’s eggs make eagles Wherever they are scattered].

This contemporary preoccupation with the Irish Brigades continued to manifest itself most visibly through sustained recruitment. While related depositions must be treated with caution and are subject to characteristic hyperbole and sensationalism, they do nevertheless provide intriguing, invaluable information on this proscribed trade. The majority of depositions relate to the French and Spanish service, refer to prominent international Jacobite figures and reveal intricate lines of communication between Ireland and centres of émigré-Irish interest, involving Franco-Irish soldiers, clerical agents, Irish ship-owners and merchants. Whig pamphleteers and politicians used the links between recruits, privateers, rapparees (outlaws) and the greater Catholic populace to claim that they intended to embark on wholesale rebellion. These depositions often have a surprisingly accurate grasp of Jacobite high-politics. Continual promises of a speedy return to Ireland with the exiled king complement contemporary evidence of ongoing Jacobite plots and invasion plans, while affidavits placed special emphasis on commissions received directly from the Stuart claimant, the need for taking an oath to serve him and not to reveal the recruiter’s identity. Recruits sought (and received) assurances that they would only serve King James and would return to receive lands and titles. Proceedings invariably concluded with a toast to the exiled monarch. In the years after ‘The Fifteen’ debacle, Europe-based Irish Jacobites still proposed an assault on Ireland. The Franciscan friar and Jacobite agent Ambrose O’Callaghan excused the inactivity of Irish Jacobites during the abortive rebellion and provided his stoical monarch with yet another invasion proposal. Indeed, he stressed that ‘the want of a diversion in Ireland contributed to the ill success of King James’ affairs in Scotland in 1715, and it was impossible for the well-affected in Ireland to do anything for want of arms’.79 One of O’Callaghan’s correspondents, ‘Robin’ [Robert], son of the Rev. Charles Leslie, assured the friar that the gentlemen of the north would join the Jacobites and he advocated the seizure of Enniskillen, Derry, Carrickfergus and Charlemont.80 James rejected ‘mad Robin’s’ hair-brained scheme81 but resolved to send O’Callaghan to the kingdom on a fact-finding mission.82 Lieutenant General Arthur Dillon agreed with Ormonde on the impracticability of Leslie’s plan but advised James to consult Arthur Forbes, lord Granard (1685–1765), the Irish Protestant Jacobite peer.83 Although deemed impractical, it is significant that a Monaghan-born Protestant Jacobite used the good offices of an Irish clerical

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Jacobite agent to act as an intermediary with two prominent Avignon- and Paris-based Irish exiles to try to interest his Rome-based monarch in an invasion plan. Moreover, before Leslie’s invasion memoir is dismissed outright, it should be remembered that Charles Edward’s ‘rash adventure’ shook the Hanoverian monarchy to its foundations in 1745. ‘Mad Robin’ refused to disclose his ambitious plan to the duke of Mar or [Sir] David Nairne, 1st baronet (1655–1740), but did so to the Irish Jacobite cavalier Sir Charles Wogan, in whom he had full confidence. His fears may not have been totally unfounded when one considers the subsequent ‘treasonable’ activities of ‘Bobbing John’ (Mar) and his later betrayal of the Jacobite cause. Leslie’s links with Wogan also provide an international context for contemporary depositions relating to an anonymous Catholic gentleman who had earlier been accused of maintaining a correspondence with Wogan and his brother Nicholas in the run-up to Ormonde’s Spanish-sponsored invasion in 1719. This illicit contact may also explain why Leslie had vacated his native Glaslough to take up permanent residence in Dublin.84 Sir Patrick Hume, lord Polwarth, 1st earl of Marchmont’s (1641–1724) concern at this prospective invasion by Ormonde and Spanish-based Irish Jacobite exiles would be deepened by news of the continual transfer of many Irishmen from the French to the pro-Jacobite Spanish service in the aftermath of France’s disavowal of the Jacobite cause and James’s expulsion from Paris in 1715.85 Contemporary correspondence from Mar and surviving evidence of the Irish-born Protestant Jacobite the Rev. George Kelly’s (c.1680–1762) trip to Ireland on Ormonde’s behalf would suggest that the kingdom could have had an important diversionary role in contemporary high-Jacobite intrigue. Mar’s correspondence intimated that both England and Ireland would provide much-needed finances to support the continental-based Jacobite war machine. Lieutenant-General Dillon informed King James on 25 May 1717 that Kelly had arrived back from Ireland ‘with several letters for Ormonde and D. 17 [Dillon?]’ and the promise of ‘a pretty good succour in money from thence’.86 This clandestine intercourse continued throughout this period, sustaining ongoing traffic and reinforcing ideological homogeneity between Ireland and her exiled Jacobite sons.87 While invasion rumours filtered into Ireland through agents, maritime trade and recruiters, a more direct intercourse occurred between the Irish exiles and their patrimony. Captain Galway, an Irishman at Cadiz, brought news to Galway of Ormonde’s contact with General Dillon in relation to the procuring of 10,000 stands of arms for an invasion of Ireland.88 Likewise, Ormonde’s letter to George Granville, 1st baron Landsdowne (1666–1735) formed part of intercepted Jacobite correspondence which had been sent under the cover of Sir Daniel Arthur, the prominent Irish-born Parisian



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banker.89 This traffic also shed light on the activities of the irrepressible George Kelly and James Talbot, an Irish officer in the Spanish service.90 Continued Whig suspicion of a strong association between recruitment and Jacobitism is highlighted in King James’s contacts with the lieutenants of the Franco-Irish Jacobite regiments in March 1722, amid rumours of another possible invasion of England. The exiled king gave the colonelsproprietor of the Irish Brigades in the French army an effective carte blanche to use his standard for recruitment to the Brigades, thereby providing convincing proof of his surviving prestige and showing the extent to which his exiled Irish subjects pursued the Stuart agenda in their adopted lands.91 Thus, it is no surprise that numerous contemporary recruitment depositions continually emphasise the importance of the authenticity of warrants and commissions received directly from their exiled king.92 Disbanding the Irish Brigades This reciprocal dependence and relentless traffic did not pass the attention of Charles Forman (d. 1739), an Irish-born pamphleteer and former Jacobite sympathiser who had repudiated the cause, possibly in consequence of the loss of a small pension he had received from the Stuart king. His Letter to Sir Robert Sutton for disbanding the Irish regiments in the French army (1728) highlighted English and Irish Protestant anxiety in relation to recruitment, as well as assessing the political role of the Irish Brigades and their importance to the survival of Jacobitism. Reflecting the sentiments of other contemporary pamphleteers, including [Nicholas Amhurst] Caleb D’Anvers (1697–1742) and John Keogh (fl. 1740s), his treatise effectively prophesised their role in the French commander Maréchal Saxe’s abortive invasion of 1744 and their disproportionate influence in the later campaigns of the ‘Forty-five’: As long as there is a body of Irish Roman Catholic troops abroad, the Chevalier will always make some figure in Europe by the credit they give him; and being considered as a prince that has a brave and welldisciplined army of veterans at his service tho’ he wants an opportunity to employ them at present, which he expects time and fortune will favour him with.93

Forman’s treatise provides an important reflection on the Irish regiments’ influence in eighteenth-century political and literary circles. He assessed their merits and suitability for a prospective invasion of Britain, as well as reciting a litany of their triumphs from Cremona (1702), to Barcelona

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(1706), Ramilles (1706) and Almanza (1707).94 The poems of the Irish Jacobite literati, the letters of Irish exiles to the Stuart court, and the popular pamphlet press on both sides of the Irish Sea and English Channel outline the extra-political motivations with which Forman credited the proprietors and officer corps of the regiments. He claimed that some are by inclination but most are by interest entirely devoted to the Chevalier (King James III) and in hopes of being restored to their estates.95 He argued that the links forged between recruitment and Jacobitism explained the latter’s endurance in Ireland, and suggested that these recruits and colonels-proprietor made unscrupulous use of Jacobitism to entice the unwitting into their ranks: Their methods of recruiting is certainly as base as it is savage and void of all sentiments of humanity and the gallows is too mild a punishment for the vile lies they tell the poor ignorant creatures they spirit away. To support the vanity and splendid equipages of about twelve Irish colonels, Pretendership is kept up and a whole nation exposed every year to the just severities attending the resentments of their provoked sovereign.96

Forman believed that if these Irish regiments could be disseminated into the regular French and Spanish armies ‘that military nursery of inveterate enemies to His Majesty’s title will be entirely broken and dispersed’. As a result of this, ‘the officers will be too much dispersed to be brought together on occasion without giving too much alarm and will not readily obtain the connivance of the French or Irish colonels for deserting their colours when the Chevalier may have occasion for their service’. These measures would also serve to stifle recruitment: ‘The private men will also, for want of recruits, dwindle in a very few years to too inconsiderable a number to be any ways serviceable to the Chevalier or formidable to us.’97 In a virulent anti-Whig poem from the period, Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín left no doubt as to his own motives for joining Lord Clare’s (Irish) regiment. His verse reflects the militant Jacobitism and virulent anti-Hanoverian sentiments of the Gaelic literati, their émigré brethren and surviving depositions pertaining to the large numbers of recruits who ran the gauntlet of capital punishment to enlist for the foreign service: Is dóigh má ghabhaimse an cóta dearg so, leo go rachad tar sáile, a scóda leathna, ’s seolta scartha, ’s a sróll ’na mbratachaibh árda; cóir ná ceannach ní gheobhaid ó Ghallaibh



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go dtógaid sealbh a n-áitreabh, is Seoirse a thachtadh le córda casta, s is ceolmhar a screadfas an chláirseach.98 [I suppose if I put on this red coat, I will go with them over the sea, their sheets spread, their sails deployed, and silk in their high banners; no justice or recompense they receive from the foreigners until they take possession of their dwellings and strangle George with a twisted rope and musically the harp will cry.]

The ‘Wild Geese’ and the exiled leaders of the Irish Jacobite nation continued to feature prominently in the successive reports sent to the French and Stuart monarchs, the French government and the Jacobite court in St Germain; they also inspired their Jacobite literary contemporaries on both sides of the Irish Sea and later nationalist writers and historians.99 It is, however, more difficult to procure information on Irish popular Jacobite sentiment at the lower end of the proverbial food-chain. However, John Ragg, a cashiered English foot-soldier described the hatred of Britain among the members of General Andrew Lee’s regiment stationed at Calais, thereby suggesting that Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín’s sentiments would have been well received in their ranks: I was taken up by force at Calais by one who was recruiting there for this regiment, brought to Belhume and obliged to serve as a soldier in Captain Francis Mandeville’s company in General Lee’s regiment of Irish foot which is now garrisoned in that place. It is not possible for me to express the hardships of this service … In a word, I would rather be under the slavery of the Turks than in the condition I am, under pretended Christians by an implacable hatred against all such as are not like themselves, mortall enemies to the Isle of Britain and its present happy constitution.100

‘The Irish Don Quixote’ As ‘rebel’, prisoner, fugitive, agent, diplomat, soldier and statesman, Sir Charles Wogan personified the loyalty, romance and tenacity which often characterised the Irish Jacobite émigré on a pan-European stage which stretched from his native Kildare, through the north of England, to France,

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the Papal States, the Baltic, Russia and Spain.101 Col. Edward Wogan (c.1625–54), his kinsman, had saved Charles II after the Battle of Worcester (1652), thereby copper-fastening the impeccable royalist credentials of a family that had served English monarchs in Ireland for 400 years. Sir Charles would add lustre to their glowing reputation by intervening spectacularly to preserve the Stuart dynasty. At the tender age of seventeen, he had already forged strong links with the Northumberland gentry, the mainstays of post-Revolution, English militant Jacobitism. He later became actively involved, along with his fifteen-year-old brother Nicholas, in the 1715 Rebellion. Despite his tender years, he commanded the fifth troop of the English Jacobite army in Northumberland and served as aide-de-camp to General Thomas Foster (1683–1738). Imprisoned in Newgate after the Jacobite army’s surrender at Preston (November 1715) and transferred to Westminster Hall (April 1716) to be tried for high treason, Wogan escaped to France with a £500 bounty on his head.102 In 1718 he joined the FrancoJacobite regiment of his cousin, Lieutenant-General Arthur Dillon, but soon after repaired to the Papal State of Avignon, where he became a secret agent of the exiled Stuart king. Later that year, Wogan accompanied the 2nd duke of Ormonde to Russia in an effort to forge an alliance between Peter the Great and King Charles XII of Sweden, a prelude to a proposed Jacobite assault on their common enemy, King George I.103 They also sought to negotiate a marriage between King James and Anna, duchess of Courland, niece of Tsar Peter (later Anna of Russia, 1693–1740). However, political expediency hindered a union between fiery empress and stoical pretender; Russia had had its share of pretenders and false Dimitris.104 Wogan’s match-making finally took him to the Holy Roman Empire, residence of James Sobieski, son of Jan Sobieski III, warrior king of Poland, who had received a huge estate at Ohlau from a grateful Emperor Leopold I for defeating Grand Vizier Kara Mustapha at the Siege of Vienna in 1683. The charming Wogan made a lasting impression on Clementina, the prince’s second daughter, who accepted his master’s nuptial suit.105 George I could not countenance a union between James and a princess of such illustrious royal lineage. Thus, he prevailed upon Emperor Charles VI, who intercepted the wedding party, which included the princess, her mother and Sir James Hay, who stood as proxy for the Stuart king, and placed them under house arrest at Innsbruck, deep within imperial territory. Wogan persuaded Pope Clement IX, godfather of the bride, her stoical suitor and distraught father to allow him to spring the princess from captivity.106 He defied contemporary logistics and the atrocious weather conditions of the Brenner Pass to snatch the heavily guarded princess from under the noses of the imperial authorities. On their arrival in the Papal States, he became the talk and toast of Europe. Pope Clement made him a senator



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of Rome, the highest civil honour the city could bestow. King James gave him a knighthood and a colonel’s commission and he later served as a witness to the royal wedding. His audacious rescue confounded Europe, delighted his Jacobite contemporaries and even gained him the grudging respect of his Hanoverian foes, thereby sustaining both the Jacobite cause and enhancing the illustrious reputation of the Fighting Irishman abroad. Over the course of a long, illustrious career, Wogan never wavered in his loyalty to the house of Stuart. He regularly corresponded with his exiled king and retained an insatiable appetite for Jacobite plotting. Philip V of Spain later rewarded him with the governorship of La Mancha, an appropriate accolade for one of the most famous knights in Europe. However, Wogan claimed that this distinction in no way eclipsed his affection for Ireland, where he ‘should have a better estate at home than ever his [Don Quixote’s] fathers enjoyed, and a tomb too where no man of honour may be ashamed to lie’.107 Jacobite plots provided Wogan and other Irish Jacobites such as Lord Orrery, George Kelly, Dennis Kelly, Edmund Bingley, John Plunkett, Francis Glascock, Philip Neynoe, Robert Dillon, Daniel O’Carroll and a host of soldiers, spies, fugitives, double-agents and recruiters with ample scope for intrigue. Wogan’s observations to the exiled Stuart king on the possibility of an Irish invasion in 1729 re-emphasised the political motivation of the expatriate Irish military establishment, and supported the commonly held Irish Jacobite belief that salvation would only come with the return of these ‘lions over the sea’. Like other Jacobite exiles (Gordon O’Neill, Arthur Dillon, Ambrose O’Callaghan, Sylvester Lloyd and Lord Orrery), Wogan began by assessing the enemy’s numerical strength in Ireland. He also advocated sending a Franco-Irish expeditionary force, furnished with extra arms and accoutrements, to raise rebellion in Ireland and prevent troops from being sent from Ireland to counter the main attack on England.108 He based his memoir on the information received from Irish émigrés recently returned from Ireland and placed special emphasis on the suitability of Connaught and Munster for such a landing.109 Similarly, Henry O’Neill (1676–1745), the last undisputed chief of the Fews (County Armagh), who later died at Fontenoy, penned a letter to King James in June 1731 which gave precise expression to Jacobite sentiment among the Irish exiles. He highlighted his sufferings and those of his countrymen ‘that have sacrificed all for the royal cause’, and let James know that ‘there were some of them still in a condition to serve him after an exile of forty years’. He deemed himself to be one ‘of the number and the head of a family that had the good luck to render the king, his father of blessed memory, considerable service during the late wars in Ireland’ and offered him ‘with zeal what I have learned during forty years in a

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foreign prince’s service’.110 The ever dependable Wogan again highlighted Irish resilience, their willingness to avail of any opportunity to throw off their tyrants and the iron grip that the Catholic clergy exerted on their conscience: ‘Now as to the country the people are almost under the absolute domination of their parish priests who generally keep a list of their parishioners of body, strength and spirit and could be masters to send them to any rendezvous’.111 Moreover, he suggested that recent recruiting privileges granted by Britain to the French army in Ireland could be used to evaluate militant Jacobitism in the kingdom, proposing that officers related to the local gentry should be sent with French passports and commissions. With the cooperation of local clergy and under the guise of recruiting, they could easily ascertain precise numbers of those ready to serve King James.112 Wogan’s preoccupation with his native land also remained a recurring theme in his regular correspondence with King James; moreover, he vented his considerable spleen against France for ‘ill-placed and ill-timed friendship’ with England and lamented ‘the graves of one hundred thousand of our countrymen who died bravely without having been of any use in the cause that banished themselves’ and their huge sacrifice in the service of a king who had ultimately betrayed their cause.113 ‘The Irish Don Quixote’ is probably best remembered in Irish history and letters for his voluminous correspondence with Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), dean of St Patrick’s and author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). After the publication of Swift’s A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729), Wogan anonymously sent samples of his English and Latin prose and verse to the dean, asking him about the feasibility of having them published in Dublin.114 Swift reciprocated with editions of English authors, including Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Thomas Gray (1716–71) and Edward Young (1683–1765). In subsequent missives to his new mentor, Wogan railed at English injustices against Ireland and French ingratitude for Irish military service to their country. This correspondence to Swift sheds light on his patriotic émigré mentalité and resonates with pride at the achievements of Irishmen abroad; however, it is tempered by his graphic description of the sufferings of the Irish at home and the ingratitude of European states for their sterling service. He also contrasts Irish fortitude with the ‘cunning knavery’ of the English and Scots. The colourful prose is worth quoting in full: Those [Irish] who have chosen a voluntary exile, to get rid of oppression, have given themselves up, with great gaiety of spirit, to the slaughter,



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in foreign and ungrateful service, to the number of above 120,000 men, within these forty years. The rest, who have been content to stay at home, are reduced to the wretched condition of the Spartan helots. They are under a double slavery. They serve their inhuman lordlings who are the more severe upon them, because they dare not look upon the country as their own; while all together are under the supercilious dominion and jealousy of another overruling power. To return to our exiles. Mentor certainly does them that justice which cannot be denied them by any of those nations among whom they have served; but it is seldom or ever allowed them by those who can write or speak English correctly. They have shown a great deal of gallantry in the defence of foreign states and princes, with very little advantage to themselves, but that of being free; and without half the outward marks of distinction they deserved … The only fruit the Irish have reaped by their valour is their extinction; and the general fame which they have lost themselves to accrue for their country. The have the honour of Ireland at heart, while those who actually possess their country were little affected with any other glory than that of England. Upon this account the Irish were parcelled by brigades among the many armies entertained by the French king … The French never gained a victory, to which those handfuls of Irish were not known to have contributed in a singular manner; nor lost a battle, in which they did not preserve, or rather augment their reputation, by carrying off colours and standards from the victorious enemy … The Irish for having been steady to their principals, and not as cunning knaves as the two neighbouring nations, have groaned, during the last two centuries, under all the weight of injustice, calumny and tyranny, of which there is no example, in equal circumstances, to be shewn in any history of the universe.115

He also expressed characteristically forthright views on Irish history and the manner in which it had been written by Englishmen, particularly the earl of Clarendon (1609–74) and those ‘mongrel’ (Irish) historians from Richard Stanihurst (1547–1615) to William King, archbishop of Dublin (1650–1729). Thus, his missive clearly echoed Seathrún Céitinn/Geoffrey Keating (c. 1596–1644), John Lynch (1599?–1677?) and the Abbé Mac Geoghegan in refuting the calumnies levelled against them. Finally, he blames endemic warfare, disunity and the prescription of Catholic schools for Ireland’s inability to defend itself against its detractors: All this calumny has been sounded into the ears of all Europe by their enemies, both foreign and domestic; and thereby gained credit, more or less, on account of not having been sufficiently controverted or refuted

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in time. Their constant misfortunes have given a sort of sanction to all this imposture and iniquity. They could not defend themselves in the midst of so much division at home, from so many powerful and confederated enemies. In the meantime they were involved in too much war, or in too much misery, to be the relaters of their own story with any advantage; or found the English language as backward as the English nation and government, to do them common justice. Their enemies have spared them the labour with a vengeance. The mongrel historians of the birth of Ireland, from Stanihurst and Dr. King down to the most wretched scribbler, cannot afford them a good word in order to curry favour with England … In the meantime, it is impossible for an upright and good-natured spirit not to look with concern upon the inhuman slavery of the poor in Ireland. Since they have neither liberty nor schools allowed them; since their clergy, generally speaking, can have no learning but what they scramble for, through the extremities of cold and hunger, in the dirt and egotism of foreign universities; since all together are under the perpetual dread of persecution, and have no security for the enjoyment of their lives or their religion … In this uncouth attitude the Irishman must, in his own defence, and that of his whole country, be braver, and more nice in regard of his reputation, than it is necessary for any other man to be. All that he gets generally for his pains, is the character of having behaved as might be expected from an Irishman; yet if there be any crime or mistake in his conduct, not only he, but his whole country, is sure to pay for it.116

Swift finally managed to ascertain the identity of his anonymous correspondent and urged him to seek a publisher in London; possibly with a view to keeping this high-profile, attainted Jacobite at arm’s length. He also sent him two editions of his own works, one of which the chevalier Wogan immediately dispatched to the Stuart king in Rome. In what amounted to a ‘treasonable’ reply to Wogan’s missive, Swift commented: Although I have no great regard for your trade, from the judgement I make of those who profess it in these kingdoms, yet I cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland, who with all the disadvantages of being exiles and strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves by their valour and conduct in so many parts of Europe, I think above all other nations; which ought to make the English ashamed of the reproaches they cast on the ignorance, the dullness, and the want of courage, in the Irish natives; those defects, whenever they happen, arising only from the poverty and slavery they suffer from their inhuman neighbours, and the base, corrupt spirits of too many of their chief gentry.117



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In 1745 the redoubtable Charles Wogan once again spearheaded Jacobite attempts to induce the Spanish court to provide the necessary funds and arms to supply the beleaguered Charles Edward in Scotland. As part of this campaign, he published his Mémoirs sur l’enterprise d’Innsbruck (1745), his narrative of the rescue of the Princess Clementina, which he dedicated to Marie Leszczyńska, queen of France, herself a Polish princess and relative of the late Stuart queen. The Chevalier later joined Henry, duke of York (Cardinal York/‘Henry IX’, 1725–1807), King James’s younger son, at Madrid in the hope of repairing to Scotland to join the ‘Forty-five’. As part of this campaign, he also sent King James a list of Irish officers in both Italy and Oran (a port city in north-west Algeria) who would join Charles Edward in Scotland. He also reiterated his exile sentiments and his hopes for the restoration of his king and a return to his native land in a characteristically upbeat letter to James that highlighted his need for a disguise ‘because I am attainted by an Act of Parliament in England for almost 30 years which renders me incapable, as yet of my inheritance at home [Ireland]’.118 Revelling in Charles Edward’s success in Scotland, he minded his stoical monarch of the prospect of a restoration to their respective birthrights ‘and the satisfaction of seeing each other at home after so tedious and irksome a banishment’. Wogan later experienced the agonised frustration of many Irish Jacobites in both France and Spain at the apparent unwillingness of the Bourbon kings Louis XV and Philip V to fully support the ‘Forty-five’; indeed, his disdain for French duplicity echoed his criticisms to Swift in the 1730s.119 At this time, Sir Felix O’Neill (c. 1720–92) of the Fews, County Armagh, later instrumental in Charles Edward’s flight to Skye and immortalised in verse by the Ulster poet Art Mac Cumhaigh (c. 1715–73), declared a willingness to sacrifice himself in imitation of his ancestors. He laid particular emphasis on his potential usefulness in Ireland.120 Owen O’Sullivan, another of the Wild Geese, wished that he had wings to follow his prince.121 However, hard currency provided the main reason why many loyal, Spanish-based Irish Jacobites failed to assemble under the unfurled Stuart standard at Glenfinnan: You remark very well the difficulty for many of them to quit at present the employments they are in, but the other reason you hint one still stronger, besides very few of them are in a condition to make that journey if the court of Spain does not order a supply for them at the same time if it grants leave for absenting themselves, and even then ’tis not everyone who would be willing to go should he be sent.122

However, the prince’s exploits in Scotland fascinated the Irish exiles, strengthening opinion there that the European political situation augured

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well for his affairs.123 Having commended Charles Edward for his heroic endeavours to deliver ‘His Majesty’s [King James’s] subjects from tyranny and usurpation’, an unnamed member of the O’Hanlon family alluded to the Irish exiles’ hidden agenda. Attached to the French army, ‘whom we have followed in some expeditions’, he informed James Edgar, King James’s secretary, that they were ‘ever seeking a proper opportunity to push into Great Britain and join His Majesty’s forces’.124 Dominic Heguerty, a leading Paris-based Freemason and Jacobite agent, also promoted a Spanishsponsored invasion of Ireland. He conferred with senior members of the French ministry, including Le Comte de Maurepas, Le Comte D’Argenson and Orry, who desired that ‘he would give them thoughts on the manner of conveying three Brigades to England’. Heguerty assured James ‘that Your Majesty may depend on a considerable diversion in Ireland on the Spanish side’.125 As late as the 1750s, influential French-based Irish Jacobites, such as Myles MacDonnell and General Charles Edward Rothe (fl. 1733–66), the illustrious veteran of the Irish Brigades, remained confident of an improvement in Jacobite fortunes.126 Similarly, Thomas Arthur Lally, governor of Bologna (1709–66), whose military prowess had been proven on the fields of Dettingen (1743) and Fontenoy (1745) and at the walls of Bergen-opZoom (1746), remained convinced that the prince was still France’s most powerful trump card. He advocated sending a diversionary force of 8,000–10,000 men to Ireland or Scotland and shared Charles Edward’s optimism that King George II’s ailing condition and the weakness of Frederick, prince of Wales (1707–51), George’s heir, augured well for the Jacobite cause.127 Similarly, with the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), prominent Irish exiles expressed confidence in the success of a French landing in Britain and again advocated a diversionary expedition to Ireland. However, the decline of the Irish interest in French military and political life, following the death of influential Jacobites such as Lord Clare (d. 1761) and Thomas Lally (d. 1766), severed the links between the Stuart king and the Irish Brigades. James III’s decline and death (1766), and the subsequent descent of his son into alcoholism, scandal and ‘apostasy’, effectively dissolved any surviving links between the Irish exiles and the Stuart court.128 Conclusion The post-Revolution European careers, trials and tribulations of high-profile and ordinary Irish military exiles bear testimony to the flexibility, geographical mobility and longevity of the Jacobite ideology in Ireland, and among



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the Irish on the continent. Recruiters, Jacobite agents, merchants and Catholic clergymen provided crucial conduits between both groups. As a multi-layered, transnational, trans-continental and trans-confessional ideology, Jacobitism (and Catholicism, to which it was inexorably linked) enabled these Irish soldiers to negotiate the choppy waters of exile and flourish (or flounder) in ancien régime Europe. It provided a meta-narrative through which they interpreted their own exile and the persecution of their Ireland-based peers. Surviving historical and literary relics provide a fascinating insight into the complex, interconnected struggles between Irish Catholicism and Protestantism, Hanoverian and Stuart royalism, and Franco-British imperialism. The activities of these Irish Jacobite exiles in the realms of diplomacy, espionage, politics and especially warfare provide a fitting testimony to their cultural fluidity, mobility and vulnerability. Their often fraught diplomatic, military and political travails shed valuable light on the vagaries of exile, in particular the need to balance loyalty to the Stuarts with political and military duty to the Bourbons and Habsburgs. The correspondence, memoirs and musings of these named and anonymous military exiles reveal an optimistic, vibrant political ideology that ebbed and flowed with the vicissitudes of Irish, British and European politics. Moreover, they show how they coped with political adversity at home and flourished or floundered in early modern Europe, interpreted their own exile, remained preoccupied with the persecution of their Ireland-based Jacobite peers and viewed the kingdom’s role in Jacobite and European geopolitics. They display the tenacity, triumph and tragedy that characterised Irish Jacobitism, which principally sustained Irish Catholic nationalist identity between the Glorious and French Revolutions and provided a link between Ireland and its sizeable, early modern military diaspora. Recruitment to the Irish regiments provided the crucial link between the two sections of the Irish political nation through the first half of the eighteenth century; Whig writers habitually identified key members of the surviving Irish Catholic aristocracy and gentry, prominent Protestant converts, unregistered Catholic priests, smugglers and privateers for their involvement therein. Recruitment reports, invariably for ‘the Pretender’ or ‘James III’, highlight commissions received for the Stuart king and the promise that prospective recruits would only serve his cause. They often contain precise information on impending Jacobite invasions and vivid detail on important Jacobite exiles. Recruitment remained a major preoccupation, and an often nervous Irish Whig political interest continued to see the Irish regiments in the French army as the ultimate destination of these recruits. Likewise, recruitment and the heroic cult of the Brigades also preoccupied Irish Jacobite poets as well as contemporary Whig pamphleteers.

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In addition to their clandestine role in recruitment, Catholic clergymen come Jacobite agents trafficked between Ireland and its military exiles. The soldiers remained in regular contact with the expatriate clerical brethren of their native diocese, they contributed to their upkeep and entrusted them with the education of their widows and children. This is best exemplified by the proliferation of bursaries and scholarships that they bestowed on the colleges, providing education for their impoverished clergy from their own families, native parishes, baronies or diocese. In return, the colleges took care of the spiritual needs of their secular brethren, supplied chaplains to the Brigades and acted as useful ports of call for those arriving from Ireland who were unfamiliar with various European languages and customs. This expatriate Irish Jacobite military community left an indelible mark on the politics, political culture, literature and history of eighteenth-century Ireland and Europe. In conjunction with their service to temporal and spiritual masters on the continent (James II/III and the pope), these exiles retained a strong, sentimental allegiance to their native land. Links between Ireland and its clerical and military exiles influenced the elaboration, maintenance and survival of Jacobite ideology. During wars and invasion plots, the exiles vigorously lobbied for, with and on behalf of the exiled Stuarts; in periods of political inactivity, they commented on European politics, sought pensions, titles, preferment and continually dwelt on their exile and the persecution of the indigenous Irish. The Stuart king reciprocated this contact with the Irish military émigrés by repeatedly turning to Irish generals, colonel-proprietors, priests and religious to obtain favour for his loyal subjects. Émigré rhetoric bristled with Irish Jacobite selfrighteousness and their persecution mentality. They boasted of their willingness to serve the cause and return to their native lands and possessions. These declarations should not be dismissed as hollow rhetoric because many of the most influential Irish exiles kept themselves informed on the strength of the Whig garrison and they regularly and forcefully advocated an invasion of Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century.

Notes 1 See generally, D. Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994). 2 The ‘Old English’ are the descendants of the original Anglo-Norman planters who came to Ireland after 1169. For the most part, they remained Catholic after the Protestant Reformation and are so called to differentiate them



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from the predominantly Protestant ‘New English’ who arrived in Ireland during and after the Tudor re-Conquest. C. Giblin (ed.), ‘Catalogue of Material of Irish Interest in the Nunziatura di Fiandra, part 1, vols 1–50’. Collectanae Hibernica i ( Dublin) part 2, vols 51–80, in ibid., ii (1960), pp. 7–137; part 3, vols 81–101, in ibid., iv (1961), pp. 7–131; part 4, vols 102–22, in ibid., v (1962), pp. 7–126; part 5, vols 122–32, in ibid., ix (1966), pp. 7–71; part 6, vols 133g–35g, in ibid., x (1967), pp. 7–139; part 7, vols 135Hh–37Hh, in ibid., xi (1968), pp. 53–90; L. Swords, ‘Calendar of Irish material in the files of Jean Fromant, notary at Paris, May 1701–Jan. 1730’, Collectanae Hibernica, xxiv–xxv (1992–93), 77–116; xxxv–vi (1994–95), 85–140; L. Chambers, ‘Irish foundations and boursiers in early modern Paris, 1682–1793’, Irish Economic and Social History, xxxv (2008), 1–22; L. Chambers, ‘Patrick Boyle, the Irish Colleges and the historiography of Irish Catholicism’, Studies in Church History, il (2013), 317–29; A.E. Murphy, Richard Cantillon, Entrepreneur and Economist (Oxford, 1986); P. O’Connor, ‘Sir Daniel Arthur’, in J. McGuire and J. Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography, 9 vols, i (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 168–69. Such as Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh (c. 1580–a. 1630) to Tadhg Óg Ó Cianáin (d. 1614/15). Ranging from Eochaidh Ó hEódhusa (c.1568–1612) and Antaine Raiftearaí (1779–1835). Hiberno-Latin writers such as Dónall Ó Súilleabháin Béarra (1561–1613) to Charles O’Kelly (1621–95); Jacobite authors from Nicholas Plunkett (c.1629–1718) to the Abbé James MacGeoghegan (1702–63). See É. Ó Ciardha, ‘Irish-language sources for the history of early modern Ireland’, in A. Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Irish History (Oxford, 2014), pp. 439–62; M. Mac Craith, ‘From the Elizabethan settlement to the battle of the Boyne: literature in Irish, c. 1550–1690’, in M. Kelleher and P. O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2006), i, pp. 74–139. Important examples include: John Curry (d. 1780), Thomas Francis Meagher (1823–67), John Mitchel (1815–75), John Cornelius O’Callaghan (1805–83), William Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903), Richard Hayes (1878–1958), William Corby (1833–97) and the Rev. James B. Sheeren CSSR (1819–81). Thomas Davis (1814–45), Thomas Francis Meagher (1823–67), Thomas D’Arcy Magee (1825–68), A.M. Sullivan (1830–84), T.D. Sullivan (1827–1914), Emily Lawless (1845–1913), Matthew O’Conor (1773–1844), J. C. O’Callaghan (1805–83), Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle (1859–1930) and William Butler Yeats (1859–1939). Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) to J.D. Reigh (1851–1914). Edmund Spenser (1552–99) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936); William Camden (1551–1623) to Lord Macaulay (1800–59). Henry IV of France (1553–1610); General George McClellan (1826–85). For example, the Jacobite ideology is effectively written out of recent books on the Irish in Europe: T. O’Connor, The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001); T. O’Connor and M. Lyons, M. (eds), Irish Migrants in Europe after

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british and irish diasporas Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin, 2003); T. O’Connor and M. Lyons (eds), Strangers to Citizens; The Irish in Europe, 1600–1800 (Dublin, 2008). Morley rightly points out that Irish history is still obsessed with the Protestant Ascendancy and wholly dependent on English-language sources: V. Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 2017), pp. 1–14. J.C. O’Callaghan, Irish Brigades in the Service of France, repr. (Shannon, 1969); M. O’Conor, Military History of the Irish Nation (Dublin, 1845); E. Lawless, With the Wild Geese (London, 1902). A.E.C. Bredin, History of the Irish Soldier (Belfast, 1987); T. Bartlett and K. Jeffreys (ed.), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996); F. D’Arcy, Wild Geese and Travelling Scholars (Dublin, 2001); M. Dungan, Distant Drums: Irish Men in Foreign Armies (Belfast, 1993); S. McGarry, Irish Brigades Abroad: From the Wild Geese to the Napoleonic War (Dublin, 2013). N. Rouffiac, ‘Un épisode de la présence Britannique en France: les Jacobites à Paris et Saint Germain-en-Laye, 1688–1715’ (École Nationale des Chartes, 1991); N. Genet-Rouffiac, ‘La première generation de l’exil Jacobite a Paris et Saint Germain-en-laye 1688–1715’ (Thèse de Doctorat, École practique des hautes etudes sciences, historiques et philologiques, 1995); É. Ó Ciosáin, ‘A hundred years of Irish migration to France, 1590–1688’, in O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe, pp. 93–106; O’Connor and Lyons (eds), Strangers to Citizens, passim; L. Chambers, ‘A displaced intelligentsia: aspects of Irish Catholic thought in ancien régime France’, in O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe, pp. 157–74. G. Henry, Irish Military Community in Spanish Flanders 1585–1621 (Dublin, 1992); R. Stradling, The Spanish Monarchy and Irish Mercenaries: The Wild Geese in Spain, 1618–68 (Dublin, 1993); Ó. Morales, Ireland and the Spanish Empire, 1600–1825 (Dublin, 2010); I. Pérez Tostado, Irish Influence at the Court of Spain in the seventeenth century (Dublin, 2008); E. Gárcia Hernán, Ireland and Spain in the Reign of Philip II (Dublin, 2009). S. Murdoch, ‘The northern flight: Irish soldiers in seventeenth-century Scandinavia’, in T. O’Connor and M.A. Lyons (eds), The Ulster Earls and Baroque Europe: Refashioning Irish Identities, 1600–1800 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 88–109; D. Worthington, British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe: 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010); Rebecca Wills, The Jacobites and Russia, 1715–50 (East Lothian, 2002). É. Ó Ciardha, ‘Review of Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers’, History Ireland, 4.2 (1996), 53–55; J. Kelly, ‘Review of Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 11 (1994), 151–52; P. Kelly, ‘Review of Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers’, Parliamentary History, 16.pt. 2 (1996), 249–51; L. Irwin, ‘Review of Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers’, Irish Historical Studies, 30.119 (1997), 477–79. B. Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar: na Stíobhartaigh agus an t-aos léinn, 1603–1788 (Dublin, 1996); B. Ó Buachalla, The Crown of Ireland (Galway, 2006), passim; É. Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause (Dublin, 2002), passim. Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, passim; Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, passim.



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22 Henry, Irish in Flanders, passim; Stradling, Spanish Monarchy and Irish Mercenaries, passim; Ó Buachalla concurs; ‘Tá leabhar le scríobh fós ar shaol na n-imirceach sin thar lear, ach is léir, fiú ar an mbeagán den chomhfhreagras atá pléite againn, is léir a lárnaí ina shaol a bhí an Stíobhartach, pé acu Séamas II, Séamas III, nó Séarlas Óg: is léir freisin lárnaí ina gcuid machnaimh a bhí an stair – stair a muintire – agus a cheangailte a bhí an stair sin le dán na Stíobhartach’ (‘There is a book to be written on the Irish abroad but it is evident, even on the basis of the small amount of their correspondence considered here, that the Stuart, whether James II, James III or Charles Edward, played a key role in their lives; in addition, history, the history of their people and the links between history and the Stuarts, is also central in their thoughts’); Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, p. 432. John McGurk makes the same point that the psychology of Irish military migration remains an untold story; J. McGurk, ‘“Wild Geese”: the Irish in European armies (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish Worldwide: Identity and Patterns of Migration (London, 1992), p. 36. 23 M. McLaughlin and C. Warner, The Wild Geese: The Irish Brigades of France and Spain (London, 1980), p. 5. 24 É.Ó Ciardha, ‘Jacobite jail-breakers, jail-birds: the Irish fugitive and prisoner in the early modern period’, Immigrants and Minorities, xxxii.1 (2013), 1–27. 25 Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, pp. 32–33. 26 R. Hayes, ‘Irish casualties in the French military service’, The Irish Sword, 1 (1949–53), 198–201. 27 See, for example, L.M. Cullen, ‘The Irish diaspora of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in N. Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migration (Oxford, 1994), pp. 121, 124–25, tables (6.1) and (6.2), pp. 139–40. See also H. Murtagh, ‘Irish soldiers abroad, 1600–1800’, in Bartlett and Jeffreys (eds), A Military History of Ireland, pp. 294–315. Ó Buachalla concurs with Cullen’s and Murtagh’s figures, concluding that 20,000 Irishmen left the country between 1691 and 1692, and he takes 50,000 as the lowest number who left Ireland for the service of France and Spain in the years 1720–22, 1724–30 and 1739–43; Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, pp. 213–14, 336–37. 28 Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, pp. 34–35; Ó Ciardha, ‘Jacobite jail-breakers, jail-birds’, pp. 15–26. 29 W.E.H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 5 vols (London, 1892), i, pp. 250, 413. Similar views are expressed by M. O’Conor, Military History of the Irish Nation (Dublin, 1845), preface, p. vi; and W.D. Griffin, The Irish on the Continent in the Eighteenth Century (Wisconsin, 1979), pp. 46–48. 30 R. Hayes, Irish Swordmen in France (Dublin, 1934), p. ix; R. Hayes, Old Irish Links with France: Some Echoes of Exiled Ireland (Dublin, 1940), p. 29. See also T. McLaughlin, ‘A crisis of the Irish in Bordeaux in 1756’, in M. O’Dea and K. Whelan (eds), Nations and Nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth-Century Context (Oxford, 1995), pp. 129–47; O’Conor,

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british and irish diasporas Military History of the Irish Nation, passim M. O’Conor, The Irish Brigades, or Memoirs of the Most Eminent Irish Military Commanders (Dublin, 1855), passim; O’Callaghan, Irish Brigades in the Service of France, passim. The metaphor is Dáibhí Ó Bruadair’s; Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, ch. 2. Rouffiac, ‘Un épisode de la présence Britannique’, p. 337, ch. ix; Genet-Rouffiac, ‘La première generation’, pp. 331–78. ‘Discourse concerning the securing the government of the kingdom of Ireland to the interest of England’, c. 1695 (British Library, Additional Manuscript, 28, 724, fol. 4) (hereafter B.L., Add. Ms). Similar sentiments were echoed in a contemporary manuscript written by a disgruntled Jacobite émigré author entitled ‘The groans of Ireland’, which also provides a glimpse of the socio-political prestige of the ‘underground gentry’: J. Barry, ‘The groans of Ireland’, Irish Sword, 2 (1956–57), 134. See also Mephibosheth and Ziba, or an appeal of the Protestants of Ireland to the king (London, 1689), pp. 18–19, 34–35, 37–38; (B.L., Add. Ms 15, 895, fol. 15; B.L., Add. Ms 40, 775, fol. 126; B.L., Add. Ms 28, 881, fol. 6; B.L., Add. Ms 20, 311, fol. 68). ‘Discourse’ (B.L., Add. Ms 28, 724, fols 5–6). See also Historical Manuscripts Commission, Downshire Manuscripts, Vols i–iv: Papers of Sir William Trumbull (London, 1924–40) (hereafter H.M.C., Downshire), i, part 2, p. 726; N. Plunkett, ‘The King of France should make himself master of the sea’ (National Library of Ireland, Manuscript 477) (hereafter N.L.I., Ms); ‘Discourse’ (B.L., Add. Ms 28, 724, fol. 15). See also Calendar of the State Papers Domestic, 1547–1695, 81 vols (London, 1867–77) (hereafter C.S.P.D.), 1697, pp. 197, 240, 243, 503; National Archives/Public Records Office, State Papers (Ireland), 63, 359 fol. 66 (hereafter N.A./P.R.O., S.P. (Ireland)); C.S.P.D., 1698, p. 54. Sir F. Brewester, Discourse concerning Ireland and the different interests thereof in answer to the Exon and Burnstable petition (London, 1697), p. 14. There are numerous examples of this type of rhetoric; J.T. Gilbert (ed.), A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1689–91, repr. (Shannon, 1971), p. 110; ‘To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty’ [1692/97?] (B.L., Add. Ms 28, 939, fol. 329); J.S. Clarke (ed.), Life of James II, 2 vols (London, 1816), ii, p. 466; N. Plunkett, ‘Deserters of their country, the cause of its ruin’ (N.L.I., Ms 477, p. 3); Forman, A defence of the courage, honour and loyalty of the Irish nations in answer to the scandalous reflections of the Free Briton and others (London, 1731; Dublin, 1736), pp. 30, 36. In Plunkett’s opinion, ‘His Most Catholic Majesty made a false step in letting the Irish war fall’, N. Plunkett, ‘A light to the blind’ (Bodleian Library, Oxford., Carte Manuscripts 229, fol. 450) (hereafter Bodl., Carte Ms); R. Hayes, ‘Reflections of an Irish Brigade officer’, Irish Sword, 1 (1949–53), 68; J.M. Flood, The Life of the Chevalier Wogan (Dublin, 1922), p. 137. Brewester, Discourse concerning Ireland, p. 15. See also [Trenchard], A list of King James’s Irish and Popish forces in France ready when called for in answer to an argument against a land force (London, 1697); A view of the



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court of St. Germain from the years 1690–98 with an account of the entertainment Protestants met with there directed to the malcontents in England (London, 1695), p. 12; J. Dunton, Teague Land, or a merry ramble to the Wild Irish. Letters from Ireland, 1698, repr. (Dublin, 1982), p. 14; Some queries for the better understanding of a list of King James II’s Irish and popish force in France; A list of King James II’s Irish and Popish forces in France (London, 1697), quoted in T. Sweeny, Ireland and the Printed Word, 1475–1700 (Dublin, 1997), p. 315; Trinity College Dublin, Manuscript 883 (II), fol. 73 (hereafter T.C.D., Ms). For evidence that many Irish were returning or expected to return from France after the Treaty of Ryswick, see J. Vernon to Williamson, 26 Oct. 1697 (C.S.P.D., 1697, p. 444). Such men included: Patrick Sarsfield, 1st earl of Lucan, d. 1693; Justin MacCarthy, 1st viscount Mountcashel, d. 1694; Lieutenant-General Arthur Dillon, 1670–1733; Daniel O’Brien, 4th viscount Clare, d. 1693; Andrew Lee, 1650–1734; Donnogh Mc Carthy, 4th earl of Clancarthy, 1668–1734; and Colonel Gordon O’Neill, fl. 1650–1704. Captain Charles O’Malley to Teige, c. 1692, in O. O’Malley (ed.), ‘O’Malleys between 1651–1715’, Galway Historical and Archaeological Society Journal, 25 (1952), 32–46; Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, p. 188. [J. Sergeant], An historical romance of the wars between the mighty giant Gallieno and the great knight Nasonius ([Dublin?], 1694), p. 67. Plunkett, ‘Deserters of their country, the cause of its ruin’ (N.L.I., Ms 477, fol. 9). See also N. Plunkett, ‘To his Most Christian Majesty: the most humble petition of the Irish abroad in behalf of themselves and of their compatriots at home’ (N.L.I., Ms 477, p. 1); N. Plunkett, ‘A state of the nation’ (Bodl., Carte Ms 229, fol. 70); Plunkett, ‘A light to the blind’ (Bodl., Carte 229, Ms, fols 454–55). Genet-Rouffiac, ‘La première generation’, pp 380, 382. M. Henessy, The Wild Geese, p. 51, quoted in Genet-Rouffiac, ‘La première generation’, pp. 380, 382. Barry (ed.), ‘The groans of Ireland’, p. 131. Plunkett, ‘A light to the blind’ (N.L.I., Ms 477, fol. 743). ‘Lettre d’un officier Irlandois à son fils’ (Bibliothèque Nationalè, Fonds Français, Ms 12, 161, fols 7–8, N.L.I. microfilm, p. 112) (hereafter B.N., Fonds Français), edited as Hayes, ‘Reflections of an Irish Brigade officer’, 68–75. See also N. Plunkett, ‘To the Irish nobility at St. Germain: a memorandum’ (N.L.I., Ms 477, pp. 1, 3, 4, 6); N. Plunkett, ‘To the Catholics of Ireland: a memorial for the defence of their country’ (N.L.I., Ms 477, fol. 113). A memorial to James II expressed similar sentiments: ‘To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty’. The Stuart papers continually bristled with this Irish self-sacrifice mentality; see P. Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers, 2 vols (Dublin, 1996). Whig writers occasionally reminded Irish Catholics of Stuart duplicity: A letter to the clergy of the Church of England on occasion of the commitment of the Rt. Rev. Lord Bishop of Rochester to the Tower of London (London, 1722). www.jacobite.ca/documents/16930417.htm. Accessed 5 March 2017.

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47 B. Ó Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism in official documents’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 8 (1993), 128–38; Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, pp. 334–95; Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, chs 3, 4, 5. 48 Genet-Rouffiac, ‘La première generation’, pp. 142–46, 237. 49 H. Fenning, The Irish Dominican Province, 1698–1797 (Dublin, 1990), p. 33; ‘Mémoire à la Reine d’Angleterre par le Père Ambrose O’Connor, provincial des Dominicans Irlandois’ (Archives Nationalès, Fonds Guerre, Ms A1 2089, fol. 182, N.L.I., mf. p. 184) (hereafter A. N., Fonds Guerre). This has been translated in N. Hooke, The secret history of Colonel Hooke’s negotiations in Scotland in favour of the Pretender (Dublin, 1760), p. 105. See also Fenning, Irish Dominican Province, pp. 52–53; M. de la Poer Beresford, ‘Ireland in the French strategy, 1691–1789’ (M.Litt., T.C.D., 1975), pp. 53–56. É. Ó Ciardha, ‘Hooke, Nathaniel’, in J. McGuire and J. Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography, 9 vols (Cambridge, 2009), iv, pp. 781–82. The Archives Nationalès also contain a detailed account of a similar contemporary mission to Scotland by one Fleming, ‘Relation du voyage du Sieur Fleming et d’ l’etat present de ce Royaume’ (A.N., Fonds Guerre AI 2089, N.L.I. mf. p. 155). 50 Including John Bourke (Lord Bophin), 9th earl of Clanricarde (1642–1722), [Richard] Dillon (viscount Costello and Gallen, 1688–1737); Thomas Nugent, 1st baron Nugent of Riverston (d. 1715) and Colonel (‘Counsellor’) Terence MacDonagh (1640–1713). 51 Including Thomas Dungan, lord Limerick (1634–1715), Peter Plunkett, 4th earl of Fingall (1678–1718) and John Barnewall, 11th baron Trimbleston (1672–1746). 52 Lord Fingall was in contact with St Germain via one ‘Mr. White’, July–Aug. 1713; (Bodl., Carte Ms 211, fols 140, 148); also see N.L.I., Fingall private collection, no. 6; Royal Archives, Windsor (hereafter R.A.), Ms 195, fol. 53; Ms 212, fol. 145. 53 Fenning, Irish Dominican Province, p. 53. 54 Information from Nantes, 16 Aug. 1710 (N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 63/366/122). 55 Ibid. 56 Proclamation, Shrewsbury and Council, 2 Feb. 1714 (University Library, Cambridge, Hib.0.713.12) (hereafter U.L., Cambs.); Dublin Gazette, 6 Feb. 1714. 57 Examination of William Lehy, Three-mile Bridge, County Waterford, 26 Jan. 1714 (N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 63/370/219, 222). See also T.C.D., Ms 2022, fols 105–6. One Plunkett was convicted at the assizes in Maryborough in November 1714 for trying to seduce people to serve ‘James III’: J. Brady (ed.), Catholics and Catholicism in the Eighteenth-Century Press (Maynooth, 1965), p. 111, p. 311; Ó Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism in official documents’, p. 128. 58 ‘The deposition of Michael Lehy of Killoloran, in the liberties of the said city of Waterford’, 26 Jan. 1714 (T.C.D., Ms 2022, fols 105–6); ‘Proclamation by the lord lieutenant and council’, 2 Feb. 1713 (U.L., Cambs., Hib.O.713.12).



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59 Ó Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism in official documents’; Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, p. 339. 60 ‘Extract of a letter written by John Brady’, Dublin, 8 Feb. 1714 (N.A.R.O., S.P. 63/370/169). See also T.C.D., 2022, fol. 227. Brady’s name is also associated with plotting in England in the 1690s; P. Melvin, ‘Irish soldiers and plotters in Williamite England’, Irish Sword, viii.52 (1979), 276. 61 ‘Extract of a letter written by John Brady, dated Dublin’, 8 Feb. 1714 (N.A./P.R.O., S.P. 63/370/169). The charge that Catholic priests encouraged recruitment continued to be levied throughout the Jacobite period. 62 Ibid. Also see T.C.D., Ms 2022, fol. 227. Michael McDonogh, Catholic bishop of Kilmore, commended the loyalty of Sheridan and his family to King James II and the Milesian line: H. Fenning (ed.), Fottrell papers. An edition of the papers found on the person of Fr. John Fottrell, provincial of the Irish Dominicans in Ireland at his arrest in 1739 (Belfast, 1980), p. 137. For a profile of Thomas Sheridan, see J. Bruns, ‘Some details on the Sheridans (1646–1746’, Irish Sword, 2 (1954–56), 65–66; J. Bruns, ‘The early life of Sir Thomas Sheridan (1684–1746)’, Irish Sword, ii (1954–56), 256–59. For other contemporary, seditious traffic see ‘By the grand jury of the county of Dublin’, 15 Jun. 1713 (N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 63/369/175). See also Dublin Gazette, 26–30 May 1713 (U.L., Cambs., Hib.O.713, fol. 43) (U.L., Cambs., Hib.O.714. fol. 1); quoted in Hooke, Secret history, pp 110, 193, 209; ‘Mémoir au sujet de l’entreprise sur l’Irlande’ (B.N., Fonds Français., vol. 7487, fol. 171, N.L.I., mf. p. 102); Beresford, ‘Ireland’, pp. 20–23. 63 Hooke, Secret history, pp. 5, 193. 64 Ibid., pp. 191, 209. This is likely Arthur Dillon, who served James II in Ireland as a lieutenant-colonel in James II’s army, became brigadier (1702), maréchal de camp (1705) and a lieutenant-general (1706) in the French army after Ryswick (1697). He played a crucial role in the defence of Cremona (1702), fought at Mirandola and the battles of Cassano (1705) and Castiglione (1706), commanded the French left at the raising of the siege of Toulon (1707) and secured a key victory at Briancon (1709). He later led French forces at the siege of Kaiserslautern (1713) and served with the duke of Berwick at the siege of Barcelona (1714). 65 Bourke to Bolingbroke, 25 Feb. 1716, in Calendar of the Stuart papers belonging to his majesty the king preserved at Windsor Castle, 9 vols, i, pp. 511–12 (hereafter H.M.C., Stuart). In November 1715 Sir John St Leger, his Whig contemporary, was of the opinion that the Irish would rise in revolt in the event of any considerable success in Britain (B.L., Stowe Ms 750, fol. 136). 66 ‘Invasion plan’, July 1709 (B.N., Fonds Français, 7488 fol. 228, N.L.I., mf. p. 102); Beresford, ‘Ireland’, pp. 20–22. See also ‘A memorial to the Marquis de Torcy’, of 29 Aug. 1710, in J. Macpherson (ed.), Original papers: containing the secret history of Great Britain from the Restoration to the accession of the house of Hanover, 2 vols (London, 1775), ii, pp. 165–66; F. McLynn, France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh, 1981), p. 82; P. Miller, James III (London, 1971), p. 246.

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67 ‘Memoir on the means of affecting a rising in Ireland’ (c.1703–07) (B.L., Add. Ms 20, 311, fol. 68). 68 These included [Col.] Gordon O’Neill, Magennis (lord Iveagh), Maguire (lord Enniskillen), O’Donnell (lieutenant colonel in Fitzjames’s regiment), Henry O’Neill of the Fews, O’Reilly and MacMahon [Ulster]; Lord Brittas, Eugene McCarthy, MaCartie Spanach (Mac Cárthaigh Spáinneach), O’Sullivan, O’Callaghan, MacAuliffe and MacDonogh [Munster]; Nugent (brigadier and colonel of the regiment of Nugent), Colonel Cusack, Colonel Gaydon and other officers in Nugent’s regiment [Leinster] and Lieutenant-General Dillon, O’Gara, Lieutenant-General O’Shaughnessy and Captain O’Conor [Connaught]. 69 ‘Memoir au sujet de l’Enterprise sur l’Irlande’ (c. 1706–8) (B.N. Fonds Francais, 7487, fol. 171, N.L.I., microfilm, p. 102). 70 B.N., Fonds Francais, 4747, fol. 173, N.L.I., microfilm, p. 102; Beresford, ‘Ireland’, pp. 20–22. 71 Mar to Rochester, 2 Oct. 1716 (H.M.C., Stuart, iii, p. 13). See also ibid., iii, p. 10. 72 Anonymous to the duke of Mar, 10–21 Sept. 1716 (H.M.C., Stuart ii, pp. 71–72). See also ibid., ii, pp. 447, 465–66. Captain Richard Bourke, writing to Bolingbroke from Douai in February 1716, suggested that ‘it was necessary to choose a skilful officer of sense and known probity of each province to be sent on such an expedition, capable to give the commander a perfect idea of the country, of the persons fit to be employed at home and those to be sent thither, of the harbours that arms and ammunition can be safely landed’ (ibid., i, pp. 511–12). See also Patrick Sarsfield in Ostend to Dominic Sarsfield in Cork (N.L.I., Sarsfield Papers, report coll., 309 fol. 2401); Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart papers, i, p. 64; ‘Abstract of what money has been laid out on account of the King’s late expedition’, Mar. 1716 (H.M.C., Stuart, iv, p. 27); Extract of a letter from Whitworth to Lord Townsend, 1/21 May 1716 (N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 67/6/296 [149]). 73 Extract of a letter from Tralee, 10 Jan. 1716 (N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 63/374/49/N.L.I., 9606, fol. 206). An examination of Ben Padfield in December 1715 related to Richard Devereux, master of the Diana of Dublin, and a ship laden with butter for Rotterdam and purportedly containing guns, swords and a popish priest (N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 63/374/28). Other contemporary sources contained rumours of the Pretender’s invasion (N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 63/374/28, 42–9; (N.L.I., Ms 9609, fol. 206; H.M.C., Stuart, v, p. 372). 74 Dillon to James III, 26 Sept. 1716 (H.M.C., Stuart, iv, pp. 77–78). For a biographical note, see R. Hayes, Biographical Dictionary of Irishmen in France (Dublin, 1948), p. 59. 75 Dillon to James III, 26 Sept. 1716 (H.M.C., Stuart, iv, pp. 77–78. Also see ibid., iii, p. 13). This idea of French collusion in the ‘Fifteen’ features in the Secret memoirs of the new treaty of alliance with France (Dublin, 1716), p. 7. These Secret memoirs contain contemporary evidence of Jacobite contact with the West of Ireland (ibid., iii, p. 161). Hector McDonnell claims that Hannah Roche brought letters to Irish Jacobites in 1716: H. McDonnell,



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The Wild Geese of the Antrim MacDonnells (Dublin, 1996), p. 71. The fate of the Irish in the French service was a constant source of worry to émigré Jacobites (H.M.C., Stuart, iii, pp. 203, 260, 282, 323, 333–34, 388, 418). See also T.C.D. 2536, fols 297–99. A. Ó Rathaille, ‘Gile na Gile’, in P. Ua Duinnín (ed.), Dánta Aodhagáin Uí Rathaille (London, 1911), p. 20. Ó Buachalla pointed out that while Nicholas Plunkett (and Ó Rathaille) alluded to the nobility as the Irish in St Germain or ‘the lions over the sea’, Irish poets often referred to them as individuals and in a local context; Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, p. 200; ibid., pp. 205–6. For Seamus Heaney’s fine translation, see www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/08/ seamus-heaney-1939–2013/. Accessed 5 March 2017. V. Morley, An Crann Os Coill: Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín (B.Á.C., 1995), p. 45. Quoted in D. Hyde, ‘Eagles in exile’, Irish Sword, viii (1967–68), 47. ‘Paper given by Father Calchan to James III’, 5 March 1718, (H.M.C., Stuart, vi, p. 406). James III to Lieutenant Gen. Dillon, 6 May 1718 (ibid., p. 406). Rochester had similar views of the English Jacobite capacity to revolt (ibid., vii, pp. xxv–vii). Charles Leslie accompanied the Stuart king to Italy in 1717. Fearing for his health, he returned to Paris two months later. The duke of Mar commented: ‘I imagine his son Robin [Robert] did not like the place, there being little stirring there for his stirring spirit.’ This is the same ‘Mr Leslie’ who came to Venice from Florence in March 1717 and who was described as being ‘as mad as ever’; quoted in J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of Irish and British Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New York, 1988), p. 597. Charles went back to Ireland to die in 1721; J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (London, 1991), p. 144; D.C. Rushe, History of Monaghan for 200 years, repr. (Monaghan, 1996), p. 15. Swift also wrote a parody on Rev. Leslie’s sons ‘Robin’ and ‘Harry’: Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift D.D., Dean of St Patrick’s Dublin. Arranged by Thomas Sheridan A.M. With Notes Historical and Critical. A New Edition in Nineteen Volumes; Corrected and Revised by John Nicholas F.S.A. Edinburgh and Perth (London, 1801; New York, 1813), xiii, p. 325. James III to Dillon, 6 May 1718 (H.M.C., Stuart, vi, p. 406). Leslie’s failure to get a hearing at the Stuart court may have influenced his decision to return to Ireland with his ailing father in 1721; Rushe, History of Monaghan, p. 15. James III’s scepticism regarding an Irish invasion was best represented by the Irish Protestant Jacobite Admiral George Camocke’s assertion that ‘Scotland and Ireland signify not a fifth wheel of a coach to your Majesty’s affairs, old England is to pay the piper and, for God’s sake, dance to the tune of the bishop of Rochester’ (H.M.C., Stuart, vii, p. 393). James III to General Dillon, 6 May 1718 (H.M.C., Stuart, vi, p. 406). See also ibid., vii, p. 87; F. D’Arcy, ‘Exiles and strangers: the case of the Wogans’, in G. O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in EighteenthCentury Irish History (London, 1989), pp. 171–85. I. Whyte and I. Whyte, On the Trail of the Jacobites (London, 1990), p. 67. According to Peter Collins, Robert Leslie lived at Island-bridge (Dublin) at

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british and irish diasporas the time of his death in 1743: P. Collins, County Monaghan Sources in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (Belfast, 1998), p. 57. Lord Polwarth to Mr. Jeffreys, 21 Mar. 1719, Manuscripts of Lord Polwarth, 4 vols (London, 1911–61), ii, p. 106 (hereafter H.M.C., Polwarth); Dublin Impartial Newsletter, 1 Feb. 1719. Dillon to James III, 25 May 1717 (H.M.C., Stuart, iv, p. 274). Mar to Captain H. Straiton, 3 Jan. 1718 (ibid., v, p. 358). See also ibid., v, p. 479; N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 67/7/134; H.M.C., Stuart, iv, p. 274. Lettre à Monsr. Dumville dans une lettre addressé à Monsr. Thomas Wilmore, chez Monsr. Stockoer, libraire à Charing Cross’, Londres 23 Avr./4 Mai 1722 (B.L., Stowe Ms 250, fol. 3). A contemporary report even rumoured that Ormonde had arrived in Ireland (B.L., Add. Ms 47, 029, fol. 50). Genet-Rouffiac explores the association between banking and espionage, Daniel Arthur’s links with the Stuart court and Ireland in ‘La première generation’, pp. 575, 577, 583. ‘To Mr. Digby [Landsdowne or Dillon] under cover of Mr. Arthur, banker at Paris’ (B.L. Stowe 250, fol. 25[46]). See also B.L. Stowe 250, fols 6, 25, 27, 29, 33. ‘Copy of the King’s [James III’s] letters to Generals Michael Rothe, Andrew Lee, Christopher Nugent, Mr [Andrew?] Shelton [Sheldon], General Daniel O’Donnell, Cooke, Charles O’Brien, Viscount Clare and Lieut. Gen. Dillon, 1722’, 10 Mar. 1722 (R.A., Ms 58, fol. 66). See also H.M.C., Stuart, vii, p. 559. James encouraged recruitment for Irish regiments in France and Spain: List and Index Society, vol. 119, 188, 205, State Papers, France, S.P. 78, 1723–38 (London, 1975–82), 1723–38, p. 164. Contemporary reports suggest that Irish priests had been sent from St Germain to recruit in Ireland: Appendices Referred to in the Report, p. 15 (N.A./P.R.O., S.P., 67/7/147). James also appreciated the exiled Lord Clancarthy’s continued influence among the tenants of his forfeited estate (R.A., Ms 59, fol. 28). Ó Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism in official documents’; Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, pp. 339–40. C. Forman, A letter to the Rt. Hon. Sir R. Sutton for disbanding the Irish Regiments in the service of France and Spain (Dublin, 1728), p. 17. See also C. D’Anvers, The craftsman’s first letter of advice to the people of Great Britain and Ireland with respect to some French officers being arrived in Ireland in order to raise recruits for his Gallick Majesty (London, 1730), p. 1. The craftsman’s was published in Dublin; Dublin Daily Post, 25 Aug. 1739. See also Anon., The squire and the cardinal (?, 1740?). Correspondence to the Stuart court held that these pamphlets influenced George and his party (R.A., Ms 141, fol. 138). Dillon called Forman a ‘rogue and a villain’ (R.A., Ms 128, fol. 151). See also P. Chapman, ‘Jacobite political argument in England, 1714–66’ (Ph.D. Cambridge, 1983), pp. 20, 76, 110. Forman, A letter to Sir R. Sutton; Keogh recounts the tale of the British Colonel Gower who complained to the duke of Marlborough after Blenheim that he had lost his regiment against the Irish Brigade. At the same time, another English colonel present said he wished he had been there with his



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regiment. ‘I wish you were’, said Gower, ‘for I would have a regiment and you would not’; J. Keogh, A vindication of the antiquity of Ireland (Dublin, 1748), pp. 93–94. Forman, A letter to Sir R. Sutton, p. 20. Similar sentiments are manifest in other pamphlets from the period: D’Anvers, The craftsman’s first letter of advice to the people of Great Britain and Ireland, p. 1; C. D’Anvers, Craftmans Extraordinary in a letter of advice to the people of Great Britain and Ireland with respect to some French officers being arrived in the kingdom in order to raise recruits for his Gallick Majesty (London, 1730); Forman, A defence of the courage, pp. 8, 13–14, 17, 19, 24, 50; Keogh, A vindication, pp. 93–95. For the use of the Irish regiments as a political threat see H. Reilly, The impartial history of Ireland to which is annexed A remonstrance of the nobility and gentry to Charles II and The last speech and dying words of Oliver Plunkett and the case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland humbly represented to both houses of parliament by the Rev. Dr. Nary (London, 1744), pp. 140–41. On the cult of the Brigades generally, see Flood, The life of the Chevalier Wogan, pp. 136–41. Forman, A letter to Sir R. Sutton, pp. 21, 36. See also D’Anvers, The craftsman’s first letter of advice to the people of Great Britain and Ireland, p. 1; P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 1991), p. 95. Forman, A letter to Sir R. Sutton, pp. 35, 36–37. Aodh Buí, ‘Is grinn an tsollamháin chím fán Nollaig seo’, quoted in Morley, An crann os coill, p. 103. Morley suggests that the ‘screaming’ harp allusion may refer to the emblem on the regimental flag of Lord Clare’s regiment. I would like to thank Dr Morley for sharing his views with me. Seán Ó hUaithnín, the Clare Jacobite poet, also joined the ranks of the Irish Brigades in this period (1721): E. Ó hAnluain (ed.), Seon Ó hUaithnín (B.Á.C., 1973), p. 20; L. Ó Murchú, ‘Review of E. Ó hAnluain (eag.), Seon Ó hUaithnín (B.Á.C., 1973)’, Studia Hibernica, xv (1975), 199–200. Also see F. Litton, ‘Daniel Huony, Admiral of the Royal Navy in Spain’, Dál gCáis, v (1979), 51–59. Mullin, ‘The ranks of death’ (T.C.D., Ms 7108, p. 76); Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, p. 432. J. Ragg to Lord Polwarth, [10] 21 Jan. 1723 (H.M.C., Polwarth, iii, p. 225). See also Beresford, ‘Ireland’, p. 132. D’Arcy, ‘Exiles and strangers’, pp. 171–85; Ó Ciardha, ‘Jacobite jail-breakers, jail-birds’, pp. 1–27. P. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788, repr. (Cambridge, 1993); D. Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, CT, 2006); M. Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion: Preventing and Punishing Insurrection in Early Hanoverian Britain (Burlington, VT, 2005). Wills, The Jacobites and Russia; N. MacKenzie, Charles XII of Sweden and the Jacobites (London, 2002). L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, CT, 1998); P. Dukes, Making of Russian Absolutism, 1613–1801, repr. (London, 2014).

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105 F. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts, repr. (Oxford, 1991), p. 4. 106 J.T. Gilbert (ed.), Narrative of the Detention, Liberation and Marriage of Maria Clementine Stuart, repr. (Dublin, 1984). 107 Wogan to James III, 8 Oct. 1744 (R.A., Ms 260, fol. 118). 108 Wogan to James III, 10 May 1729 (R.A., Ms 127, fol. 152). 109 Ibid. 110 Henry O’Neill to Dr Cosen, 29 Jun. 1731 (R.A., Ms 146, fol. 108). O’ Neill went to France with James II and spent many years in the French and Spanish-Irish regiments. There are numerous other examples of this type of rhetoric in the Stuart Papers (R.A., Ms 130, fol. 167; R.A., Ms 146, fol. 107; R.A., Ms 188, fol. 197; R.A., Ms 191, fol. 20; R.A., Ms 200, fol. 112); Fagan (ed.), Ireland in the Stuart Papers, i, p. 314. 111 Wogan to James III, 10 May 1729 (R.A., Ms 127, fol. 152). 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. Wogan hoped that the crowned heads of Europe would suffer retribution for their sins against James (R.A., Ms 112, fol. 102). See also Flood, The Life of the Chevalier Wogan, pp. 135–36, 141–42. 114 Wogan to Swift, 7 Feb. 1732/33, in Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, xix, pp. 69–112; Swift to Sir Charles Wogan, Sept.–Oct. 1732, in ibid., xviii, pp. 95–100. 115 Wogan to Swift, 7 Feb. 1732/3, in ibid., pp. 70–75. 116 Ibid., pp. 80–87. 117 Swift to Sir Charles Wogan, Sept.–Oct. 1732, in Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, xviii, pp. 95–100. 118 Wogan to James III, 5 Jul. 1745 (R.A., Ms 269, fol. 49). 119 Wogan to James III, 5 Oct. 1745 (R.A., Ms 269, fol. 49). 120 Felix O’ Neill to Edgar, 26 Aug. 1745 (R.A., Ms 267, fol. 67). See also R.A., Ms 267, fol. 166; Ms 267, fol. 67; Ms 279, fol. 72; Ms 286, fol. 169. Ascanius, or, The young adventurer, a seditious account of the ‘Forty-five’, spoke of Charles Edward’s regard for the ‘humane’ and ‘compassionate’ O’Neill: Ascanius, or, The young adventurer: a true history (London, 1747), pp. 106–16. Mac Cumhaigh appreciated ‘Féilimí’s’ importance to the Stuart cause: ‘Agallamh le caisleán na Glasdromainne’, in T. Ó Fiaich (ed.), Art Mac Cumhaigh: dánta (B.Á.C., 1973), p. 82, line 11. Ó Fiaich’s study of the O’Neills of the Fews contains an excellent general profile on Sir Felix: T. Ó Fiaich, ‘The O’Neills of the Fews’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, vii (1973), 1–65; vii (1974), 263–315; viii (1977), 386–413; see also Hayes, Biographical Dictionary of Irishmen in France, p. 250. 121 Owen O’Sullivan to Edgar, 27 Aug. 1745 (R.A., Ms 267, fol. 69). 122 William Lacy to Edgar, 2 Sept. 1745 (R.A., Ms 267, fol. 111). 123 See J. McDonnell to Edgar, 30 Sept. 1745 (R.A., Ms 267, fol. 101). See also R.A., 267, fols 150, 156; Ms 268, fol. 72. According to McLynn, only limited numbers of Irish soldiers from France had permission to join the prince in Scotland: McLynn, France and the Jacobite Rising, p. 81.



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124 O’Hanlon to Edgar, 8 Sept. 1745 (R.A., Ms 267, fol. 157). Nevertheless, James III was unwilling to sanction a wholesale descent on Scotland by the Irish Brigades without the permission of the French king (R.A., Ms 267, fol. 183). 125 D. Heguerty to James III, 14 Sept. 1745 (R.A., Ms 268, fol. 17); McLynn, France and the Jacobite Rising, pp. 55, 67, 76, 82, 176, 186–96, 214; F. McLynn, ‘Ireland and the Jacobite rising of 1745’, Irish Sword, 13 (1977–79), 345–47. 126 Myles McDonnell to [Edgar], Corunna, 27 Dec. 1755 (R.A., Ms 360, fol. 100). See also R.A., Ms 360, fol. 162. Beresford suggests that ‘Irish integration in French society was far from complete on the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War’; Beresford, ‘Ireland’, p. 197. 127 Lally to Charles, 18 May 1756 (R.A., Ms 362, fol. 146); Beresford, ‘Ireland’, p. 192. For notes on Lally, see Hayes, Irish Swordmen in France, pp. 223–47; Marquis de Ruvigny, Jacobite Peerage (Edinburgh, 1904), pp. 119–20. 128 Griffin stated that refusal of the frustrated and dissolute prince to extend the patronage his father had granted to the exiles, the execution of Lally and the rank and file becoming increasingly foreigners dissolved the political influence of the Brigades; W. Griffin, Irish on the Continent in the Eighteenth Century (Wisconsin, 1979), p. 465.

3 Diasporic or distinct? Scots in early modern Europe Siobhan Talbott

The presence of Scots in Europe in the early modern period has long been a subject of scholarly interest, but has attracted widespread attention only in recent years.1 At a conference on early modern European migration held in Dublin in 1990 there was no paper on Scottish migration, and an essay on the subject was commissioned especially for the edited volume arising from that event.2 In the twenty-five years since that conference, research on early modern Scottish migration has expanded exponentially. The resulting studies consider a broad range of issues, including the roles played by Scots in foreign countries and the importance of the links that they maintained (or did not maintain) with their homeland. Even more recently, ‘return migration’ has received close scrutiny, as the experiences of migrants who settled permanently are compared with those who moved abroad temporarily and later returned home.3 Initially, scholarship on the Scots abroad concentrated on Protestant, northern European destinations,4 but the Scottish presence in the Catholic sphere, and in Central and Eastern Europe, has now received some attention.5 Perhaps surprisingly, one destination we still know very little about is England, though the movement of Scots to England in the early modern period is the focus of recent and current research.6 As a result of the extent to which early modern Scots have been observed migrating to a range of destinations, they have been described as a ‘diasporic people’,7 but use of the term ‘diaspora’ is becoming problematic. As Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton argue, the broad application of the term has meant that it ‘has lost functional value by its uncritical application to all kinds of migratory experiences’.8 The term traditionally describes the uprooting and re-settlement of a people, and as such its use can imply a movement that is forced, migrants who are victims and emigrations resulting in a coherent migrant group abroad.9 However, the ‘straightforward fact



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of emigration does not in itself make a diaspora’,10 and in the early modern period continental travel was frequently voluntary, comprising both permanent and temporary settlement. Further, as this chapter emphasises, Scots who went abroad in this period did not form a homogeneous community on the continent.11 Through scrutinising the variety of capacities in which Scots appeared in Europe in the early modern period, this chapter will discuss the range of motives that drove Scots to leave their homeland to travel abroad; ask whether any patterns can be discerned in the destinations chosen; consider how migrants accessed a variety of support mechanisms; reflect on the concept of ‘return migration’; examine the role of ‘identity’; and question whether the term ‘diaspora’ is a useful one to describe Scots in Europe in this period. Ultimately, this chapter argues that thinking of Scots abroad as distinct, individual members of a larger diaspora – rather than these individuals being defined by the diaspora – can have valuable results. Contemporary reflections on migration – no more so than in the current political climate – focus on numbers of migrants. Though calculations of Scottish migration to Europe in the early modern period have been attempted,12 there are significant problems in taking a quantitative approach. One issue in identifying the size of migrations is that ‘eye-catching numbers from literary sources have been cited and re-cited’.13 Nowhere is this more prominent than in studies of Scots in Poland-Lithuania. In 1632, William Lithgow published his Totall discourse of rare adventures & painful peregrenations of long nineteen yeares travayles from Scotland to the most famous kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Africa. In this volume, Lithgow spoke of Poland as ‘a large and mighty kingdom … a Mother and Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland, who are yearely sent hither in great numbers … thirty thousand Scots families that live incorporate in her bowells’.14 Lithgow’s figure of 30,000 has often been repeated, in one instance as a ‘minimum’ number of Scots in Poland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (with 40,000 as a potential maximum),15 but this has since been significantly reduced.16 It is now thought that at its peak, early modern migration to Poland-Lithuania was likely to comprise no more than 5,000–7,000 Scots.17 In identifying Scots abroad, historians come across a multitude of problems with available evidence. Many Scots, particularly vagrants and the lower strata of society, are likely to be missing from available records. Scots can be counted twice or more as they moved around on the continent,18 and foreign-born Scots can be included in migration statistics as it is often impossible to distinguish between native-born Scots and their foreign-born descendants.19 Various studies have sought to identify Scots through their names, but this approach can be very imprecise. Scottish and English names are not always easily

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distinguishable from one another,20 and in any case having a Scottish or English name does not guarantee that the individual was Scottish or English. It was common for names to be rendered into the local language when recorded – for example ‘Pierre Lavie’ (Peter Lavie), a merchant Scot who appears in Bordeaux in 1705.21 Some individuals changed their name due to adoption, ennoblement or wishing to part with their past.22 Not only is calculating migration figures or identifying individual Scots difficult, but such an approach can also present a skewed picture of the impact of migrant communities, as the influence of individuals can be more than the sum total of migrants. Older, quantitative studies of Scots in Gothenburg, for example, have reinforced the impression that Scots were few and far between in this city in the seventeenth century. These older figures have now been challenged, but in addition the significance of the individuals who were present have been shown to have outweighed their numerical presence.23 In Stockholm, too, ‘it is not the quantitative aspect of their presence that makes the Stockholm-Scots interesting – it is the qualitative nature of their presence’.24 Although this chapter presents some of the most recent and most carefully considered estimates of the size of the Scottish population in various locations abroad, readers should bear in mind the difficulties in gauging accurate figures. It is partly as a result of the impossibility of calculating the size of early modern migrations, as well as the variation in individual experiences discussed throughout this chapter, that I advocate a qualitative approach to understanding the migrant experience.25 Migrant groups One of the most widely recognised capacities in which Scots were found on the continent in the early modern period – and arguably the capacity in which they were found in the greatest number – were those who served in foreign military service. It has been observed that ‘the majority of … seventeenth-century migrants were soldiers’, a fact attributed to widespread warfare in Europe.26 The tradition of Scottish migrants contributing to service abroad had its roots in earlier periods, including as part of the medieval Auld Alliance with France, as Scots fought with their ally against their common enemy of England. Recent research has dispensed with the notion that Scottish presence in French armies – and the Auld Alliance itself – ended in 1560, documenting that Scottish soldiers continued to appear in the service of France throughout the seventeenth century.27 Scots participated in the armed forces of many European nations in the early modern period. One calculation, based on the Register of the Privy



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Council of Scotland, estimates that between 1620 and 1642 there were 10,320 recruiting warrants for France, 2,800 for the Netherlands, 800 for Spain, 200 for Russia, 1,500 for Bohemia and a likely additional 10,000 mercenaries.28 Curiously missing from this list are those Scots involved in Scandinavian armies, which has been the focus of a great deal of research in recent years. From the mid-sixteenth century Scottish troops flocked to Sweden in increasing numbers to fight for the Swedish Crown, and it has been estimated that between 1630 and 1648, a period covering the height of Swedish involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, as many as 25,000 Scots served in the armies of Sweden.29 Across the early modern period as a whole, this estimate stands at more than 50,000.30 Scots were prevalent in forces across Scandinavia: it has been argued that ‘no single country provided such a large proportion of the military elite to Denmark-Norway as Scotland did between 1625–29’, as Scottish officers outnumbered Danish and Norwegian officers by 3:1 in their own army.31 Scotland’s links to Protestant, northern European countries – particularly through the Stuart–Oldenburg alliance of 1589 and following the exile of Elizabeth Stuart, the ‘Winter Queen’, in 1620 – have encouraged focus on Scottish presence in these Protestant armies during the Thirty Years’ War. More recently, however, it has been demonstrated that Scots also appeared in Catholic service in the Habsburg lands.32 The picture of Scottish soldiers as mercenaries, or ‘soldiers of fortune’, is an enduring one, and in 1637 Robert Monro described Scotland as ‘a veritable warehouse for mercenaries’: as a society designed for war.33 Focus on military migrations, though in many ways justified, has tended ‘to dominate discussions of the movement of Scots abroad in the seventeenth century, and to overshadow the role of migrant Scots in commercial activities’.34 This is particularly true for France, where the traditional focus has been on military links, predominantly pre-1560. It is only recently that the commercial links between Scotland and France in the early modern period – and the migration that was part of this relationship – have been fully considered.35 Traditionally, Scots in Europe in a ‘commercial’ capacity have been described as pedlars – as impoverished individuals peddling their wares in various urban and rural settings, often following the armies that were present as a result of seventeenth-century European warfare.36 Not all Scots who migrated for mercantile reasons, however, were pedlars.37 Many, such as John Clerk, later of Penicuik, were hugely successful in their commercial endeavours on the continent; Clerk’s business acumen and commercial success on the continent led to the founding of the Clerk family dynasty.38 Some of those who initially migrated as pedlars were ‘quick to diversify’, trading in commodities including iron, timber, tar and tobacco.39 The range of individuals that might be categorised as ‘economic’

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migrants – that is, those involved in commercial activity – highlights the difficulties in placing migrants into these groups, as the status, as well as the capacity, of migrants needs to be considered.40 In Poland, for example, where the image of the poor pedlar has endured until recently, there were also those who were comparatively rich, and who applied for (and often received) city rights.41 I discussed in the introduction to this chapter the problems identified with appropriating the term ‘diaspora’ simply to describe people outside their homeland,42 but there were Scots on the continent who fit the traditional definition highlighted above, including those in religious exile. This included Scots exiled for their involvement in the illegal 1605 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland,43 as well as the Scottish exile community present in the Netherlands between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. Religious exiles have been described as separate ‘from mainstream emigration in the period’ as they formed a specific type of migrant group with particular aims, needs and experiences.44 Another migrant group that was set apart from mainstream emigration, though in this case exhibiting voluntary rather than forced migration, was students. The Dutch Republic has been seen as particularly welcoming to Scottish students, and it has been estimated that between 1650 and 1750 around 5,000 Scots per year visited the Dutch Provinces (including soldiers and merchants, as well as students).45 While some groups of exiles formed recognisable, distinct communities on the continent, other groups were linked not through geography but through shared motivations or interest, and intellectual migrants are a good example of what Grosjean and Murdoch describe as ‘unbounded’ communities. Scottish students were a group of migrants who did not all operate within the same geographic sphere but who formed a community of ‘mind and interest’.46 Though such categorisations of groups of migrants can be useful, and certainly highlight some of the capacities in which Scots were found in Europe in the early modern period, these labels can also be problematic. Though some Scots were firmly part of one of these groups while on the continent, some moved between groups or straddled more than one group. This includes the Jacobite sympathisers Robert Arbuthnot and Robert Gordon who, though supporters of the Jacobite cause, were not political migrants or Jacobite exiles. Both had established mercantile careers on the continent independently of any Jacobite ‘exodus’.47 That migrants actively maintained ties across spheres and across borders has been identified as a critical characteristic of a diaspora.48 Scottish students in the Netherlands interacted with broader Scottish communities, ‘relying on an almost exclusively Scottish network of sailors, merchants and bankers for daily business’.49 The Scottish community in Hamburg and the Elbe-Weser region



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comprised merchants, diplomats, artisans and soldiers, and the ‘StockholmScots’ ‘were a mix of military, mercantile and artisan families’.50 In Stockholm, the interaction between different groups frequently took place across boundaries of nationality and social hierarchy,51 and members of the mercantile and military groups of the Scottish community in Gothenburg intermarried.52 The Scottish community in the United Provinces was diverse, made up of students, soldiers, exiles and merchants, and Scottish merchants were crucial for the remittance of money abroad for all of these migrant groups.53 Throughout Europe the activities of military migrants intersected with mercantile networks, as merchants could secure access to shipping and were sources of credit.54 Further, connections went beyond geographic location, as Scots in Krakow connected with other communities across Poland-Lithuania,55 and Scots present in Catholic colleges were ‘in regular contact with each other’ through an organised postal service managed by the colleges:56 another example of an ‘unbounded community’. The range of capacities in which Scots were found in Europe in the early modern period suggests that an uncritical use of the term ‘diaspora’ has broader issues than semantic quibbles.57 Considering a homogeneous ‘Scottish diaspora’, or identifying what appear to be coherent ‘groups’ within this larger diaspora, implies that individuals fitting within these groups had similar aims, motivations and reasons for leaving home. As we shall see throughout this chapter, however, Scots who emigrated, even in the same sphere, did not necessarily share aims, motivations or experiences.58 Motivations for migration Just as diverse as migrants’ spheres of operation were their motivations for travelling abroad. It is only recently that early modern migration has been seen as a part of everyday life in the early modern period: a ‘normal activity, a regular part of the life cycle, a common response to personal ambition, economic hardship, or perceived opportunities elsewhere’.59 It is broadly understood that both push and pull factors could influence decisions to emigrate and, in the case of early modern Scotland, a key push factor that has been identified was worsening economic conditions at home – including overpopulation, lack of land, poor communication links and poor industry.60 Push factors became particularly prevalent in times of social crisis, such as when the harvest failed in Scotland in the late 1690s, prompting descriptions of a ‘Great Migration’.61 A ‘spirit of emigration’, it has been claimed, was caused by economic poverty in Scotland, as opportunities were sought in Europe that were not available

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at home.62 Such explanations cannot be applied to all regions, however, and ‘attempts to explain the influx of Scots to Poland from the perspective of Scotland’s economy leads to more questions than answers’, as it has been asserted that no political, social or economic development in Scotland can be convincingly linked to Scottish immigration into Krakow.63 Religion has long been cited as a key factor in decisions to emigrate,64 perhaps because this dovetails with a traditional definition of diaspora that suggests forced migration and exile. The Scottish Reformation, unsurprisingly, seems to have prompted the departure of ‘several waves of confessional exiles’, mostly to Catholic France and Portugal.65 Throughout the early modern period there is plenty of evidence of confessional migration, from Scotland and throughout Europe. Huguenot refugees settled in the United Provinces after the Dutch won independence from Spain in 1648, and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 this movement became ‘a steady stream’.66 For exiled Presbyterian Scots in the Netherlands between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, ‘the ebb and flow of the exile community depended purely on religious and political discontent’.67 Waves of migration that corresponded to political events are also particularly easy to discern, with this correlation perhaps being most prominent in the military sphere.68 During the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century both the Dutch and English recruited Scots to serve in their navies,69 a military migration that was initiated by European conflict. Seven thousand Scots arrived in Swedish service in 1628–30, and the large proportion of Scots in the military elite of DenmarkNorway between 1625 and 1629 was a result of Danish participation in the Thirty Years’ War.70 Events at home also influenced military migrations. Scots at officer level cited the cause of the exiled Elizabeth Stuart, queen of Bohemia, as a motivation for service, with Robert Monro writing that he fought ‘for many reasons, but especially for the libertie of the daughter of our dread Soveraigne, the distressed Queen of Bohemia’.71 For many soldiers, however, service abroad was not influenced by broader political events. After the Thirty Years’ War came to an end in 1648, Scots remained on the continent in both Protestant and Catholic service.72 Monro stated that the Scots ‘desired they should shew themselves exemplary to others … in honour of the nation, that was ever glorious abroad’.73 Though some may have wished to maintain their nation’s martial reputation, for many soldiers, particularly mercenaries, the ideology and patriotism exhibited by Monro was not a factor. In his Memoirs of the Thirty Years’ War, James Turner wrote that he had swallowed without chewing, in Germany, a very dangerous maxime, which militarie men there too much follow; which was, that so we



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serve our master honnestlie, it is no matter what master we serve; so, without examination of the justice of the quarrel, or regard of my duetie to either prince or countrey, I resolved to goe with that ship I first encountered.74

In addition to mercenaries, who are known for following pay rather than politics, some chose military service simply as an available occupation. James Spens, a drummer-major in Swedish service in the Thirty Years’ War, wrote to his wife that if she knew of any work available to him in Scotland he would rather leave service and return to take up this work and be nearer to his family.75 Travel was also a motivating factor: when Spens wrote to his parents in 1632 to inform them that he had left the Swedish army for service in the Dutch East India Company, he wrote that he ‘would not wish for gold’ but spoke of ‘the goodness that I find by travelling and visiting foreign countries’.76 For many Scots serving in the Habsburg armies, a Protestant ideology was not a driving motivation, and among the Scots serving foreign armies on the continent commitment to the ‘Winter Queen’ was not universal.77 There were, though, some blurred lines between Protestant and Catholic ideologies. In 1620, ‘about the end of May, Colonell Gray, a ranke Papist, imbarked at Leith with his captains and souldiers, to the number of fifteen hundredth, levied for the King of Boheme’s use’.78 It has been argued that ‘enforced exile was experienced by Scottish religious and political refugees after regime-changing events in 1639, 1651, 1660, 1689, 1715 and 1745’.79 Much has been said about identifiable migration ‘exoduses’ following the exile of the Catholic James VII and II to France, the Protestant William III’s accession to the British thrones in 1689, and the attempted Franco-Jacobite invasions of Scotland in 1708 and 1715.80 Between 1688 and 1746, it has been argued, ‘people had to flee from both Scotland and Ireland because they were Jacobites, and settle abroad’.81 It has been said that a ‘common aim’ of those involved in the ‘influx’ of Scottish exiles to France after the Glorious Revolution was the restoration of the Stuart monarchy,82 but although there were many Scots in post-1688 France who did harbour Jacobite sympathies, there were also many loyal to the British state – to William, Anne or the Hanoverian succession – as well as those whose actions were not governed by any political or ideological loyalty.83 Though some movement was influenced by religious or political contexts, resulting in ‘waves’ of migration, many migrations did not coincide with events either at home or abroad, and in several contexts it has been acknowledged that religious or political affiliation was not necessarily the guiding force in successful integration.84 For Scots in Poland, religious differences were not a deterrent – though Poland

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was Catholic, policies of tolerance made it an attractive destination to those of all religious persuasions, and Poland was equally hospitable to Calvinist and Catholic Scots.85 As Peter Bajer argues, suggestions that Scottish migration to Poland-Lithuania was primarily driven by religious unrest have failed to place this movement in the wider context of Scottish migrations to the continent.86 For students travelling around Europe on their Grand Tour, decisions about where to study were most frequently based on the provision of education, rather than religious affiliation. It has been claimed that the ‘Reformation tended to narrow the choice’,87 making Geneva, Leiden and Utrecht the chosen destinations for Calvinists, while ‘recusant youths studied at Catholic colleges [and] Protestant boys from both Ireland and Scotland spent time at Reformed universities in central Europe, Scandinavia and the United Provinces’.88 The popularity of Dutch institutions allegedly had ‘religion as its underlying theme’,89 and arguably ‘France became popular for Catholics who could no longer feel safe in Protestant Scotland’ after 1560.90 Even for those noblemen who adhered strictly to certain confessions of faith, however, the best education for themselves or their sons was prioritised, and religious persuasions do not seem to have been a primary factor in most decisions over where to study.91 France, though seen as an educative haven only for those scholars who were exiled Catholics, played host to a number of Protestant institutions that housed significant Scottish communities in the seventeenth century, including academies at Saumur, Sedan and Montauban.92 The Protestant University of Bourges was run by Jesuits in the first half of the seventeenth century, but this did not prevent Scottish Protestant students attending an institution underpinned by ideas of tolerance and progress.93 Although there were a number of reasons why Scots in any capacity might have travelled to Europe in the early modern period, knowing categorically why they did so is usually impossible. As Nicholas Canny has pointed out, ‘why individuals chose one form of emigration over another is speculative – appraisals of motivation were seldom stated at the moment when emigrants departed from home’.94 Scottish migrants were not all of the same mould, and motivations for migration varied between individuals, even between those migrants whose experiences might, on the surface, appear similar. By grouping migrants into convenient groups – military, religious, students, merchants – there is a danger of inadvertently applying the same motivation to everyone in these categories. The links that existed between these groups, individuals that fit into more than one of them and the existence of ‘unbounded’ communities all suggest the benefits of thinking of the Scottish migrant experience in terms of individual experiences within networks or communities that operated



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within a larger ‘Scottish diaspora’. Crucially, it is essential to separate individual experience from broader political contexts. Migrant origins and destinations As well as decisions to emigrate, decisions were made regarding where to immigrate. In some cases, specific incentives encouraged foreigners to settle. When Gothenburg was founded in 1621, the Swedish Crown granted fifteen years’ tax exemption to foreigners who settled and became burgesses there, in order to entice newcomers and establish Gothenburg as an economic centre. In addition, the usual requirements in Sweden that burgesses had to build a house in the town were initially relaxed. That Gothenburg was established with the two main purposes of defence and trade made it a favourable location for Scots, who had a long history of being on the continent in those capacities.95 Other destinations in Europe were particularly attractive to Scottish migrants, with the Norwegian city of Bergen being described as the ‘favourite port’.96 Links with Bergen were fuelled by a history of timber trade, a pattern repeated across the continent: ‘where Scottish trade flourished, Scottish communities soon emerged’.97 For Scots in Poland-Lithuania, existing commercial activity was a motive for migration, as it was for Scots in Hamburg.98 In Rotterdam, the Scottish community did not become established until the arrival of Scottish sailors, shippers and tradesmen, and their interest was in the rise of Rotterdam as a port.99 Religious exiles in the Netherlands tended to congregate around existing communities of Scots, so it is unsurprising that the most popular residences were the port of Rotterdam, followed by the university towns of Utrecht and Leiden.100 Just as in the case of emigrant motivations, religion seems a neat way of determining likely destinations of migrants in the early modern period, as discussed above. Recently, however, it has been demonstrated that a town’s economic status was more likely to be the deciding factor in settlement, with religious aspects being of secondary importance.101 Scottish commercial migrants in France, who have formed the core of my own research, forged careers by taking advantage of the best opportunities available; to limit themselves by religion would be to damage their business by adhering to factors that were, economically speaking, arbitrary.102 Even religious exiles were not necessarily pushed to specific places, but made decisions about where to go based on the existing presence of Scottish communities. A distinct Scottish exile group arrived in the Netherlands after the Restoration, but prior to 1660 the Netherlands had already welcomed a variety of Scottish migrants, largely as students.103 The existing

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presence of a Scottish community was welcome to these exiles, for all of the reasons examined above, including social, financial and practical support. The large existing community of Scots in the Dutch Republic formed a network that enabled students to travel to the United Provinces relatively cheaply and easily, and a network of merchants and bankers provided Scottish students with credit, carried letters home and acted as landlords.104 Although the Scottish student community shared an infrastructure with merchants, soldiers and exiles, however, and would have been aware of the presence of other Scottish communities, students formed their own distinct communities in university towns.105 Patterns have been discerned in the choice of specific universities among Scottish students in the Netherlands – exiles and divinity students favoured Franeker and then Utrecht, whereas those who came to study law or medicine favoured Leiden.106 Thus, within a group of migrant Scots operating in the same geographic location, motivations and destinations varied, and just as Scots in different places had different experiences, so too could Scots in the same place. Once an avenue of migration had been opened, future migration to the same areas was encouraged, thus documenting ‘chain migration’.107 When Scots began to settle in Rotterdam in appreciable numbers, this was part of a long history of Scottish settlement in the Low Countries, Middelburg, Bergen and Veere.108 Once Scots were firmly established in Bergen (encouraged by the generous burgess-policies of Christian II), more immigrants were tempted by the opportunities available, particularly as the influence of the Hansa league declined.109 By the time of the Stuart–Oldenburg alliance in 1589, Scottish citizens were promised equal status to Danes and Norwegians in the Oldenburg Empire and were afforded privileged trading status and rights of citizenship. The high number of Scotsmen admitted as burgesses between 1613 and 1630, when Scots were the third largest foreign group in the burgess-ship, suggests that this positive political climate encouraged immigration.110 When the new city of Gothenburg was established in 1621, Scots already resident in surrounding towns played a large role in attracting new migrants, as did the established presence of Scots in other Swedish towns, including Stockholm.111 The first two Scots who sat on the town council of Gothenburg (about which more below), Thomas Stewart and John Young, were not newcomers to the area – Stewart had initially been a burgess in Nylose.112 Though in Denmark-Norway and Sweden migrants were encouraged by official perks, illegal activity also sparked future migration. In Kedainiai, the presence of illegal Scottish traders encouraged an increase in Scottish immigration, despite the risk of penalties including expulsion, confiscation of goods and heavy taxation.113



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Ned Landsman argues that Scots of all ranks had little attachment to specific places, but ‘participated in a more malleable concept of community’. This allowed Scots to move around, to transfer from one place to another while remaining within their ‘community’,114 perhaps contributing to the formation of ‘unbounded’ communities. This has been described by Douglas Catterall as ‘portability of community’, as people, goods and ideas travelled between Scotland, the North Sea, the Baltic and the European continent.115 This was as true of Catholic as of Protestant Scots, as Scottish Jesuits created and preserved a network of contacts between individuals and communities with a wide geographic spread.116 Scots already in Europe took advantage of opportunities that arose elsewhere. The Kedainiai Scots community was formed from existing members of the continental Scottish diaspora, rather than from concentrated emigration from Scotland, partly a result of population displacement during the Thirty Years’ War.117 When in 1537 Prussia legislated against Scots who were trading there illegally in competition with other merchants, many Scots moved to Poland where, initially at least, they encountered less animosity.118 It is tempting to see ‘migration’ as a linear move from one place to another – from Orkney to Bergen, for example – and these moves can be explained in terms of push or pull motivations or cultural or social links. But migration was not a linear movement. David Worthington has commented on the difficulties of ascertaining where migrants came from and ended up, asserting that emigrants used their initial points of arrival to establish themselves further afield.119 This is likely to be especially true of those Scots who eventually settled in places without ports, as the Baltic and the North Sea ports acted as short-term bases for ‘a motley collection of wanderers who had made their way to locations further inland’.120 In commenting on the apparent dearth of Highlanders in the PolandLithuanian Commonwealth, Peter Bajer notes that it is likely that they moved first to the Lowlands and then overseas,121 thus appearing as migrants from the Lowlands but in fact being originally from the Highlands. There was a distinct difference between ‘point of departure’ and ‘point of origin’ that must be considered when studying patterns of migration,122 and this is a distinction that has been too infrequently made. Once on the continent, soldiers moved between regiments and into different forces as political events on the continent unfurled. The initial levy raised by James VI and I for the cause of Elizabeth of Bohemia in 1620, for example, was drawn from the Scottish-Dutch brigade already on the continent.123 It is natural for historians to examine the relationship between two nations, but it is essential to consider the migration of Scots to Europe in the early modern period holistically. Scots moved around once abroad, and enjoyed more success in some places than in others, even within the

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same nation. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for example, Scots formed large and successful congregations in Danzig, Königsberg and Elblag, but in the town of Torun tight Lutheran control prevented sizeable Scottish settlement.124 In considering where Scots settled, a local approach can be very fruitful. Integration A local approach is also productive when considering the extent to which Scottish migrants integrated into their host communities. Throughout Europe, Scottish commercial communities established themselves in the nations with whom they traded. Scottish communities in Stockholm, Gothenburg and the Netherlands were supported by established institutions – the Scottish trading staple in the Netherlands has been described as a ‘centre for market advice and commercial intelligence’, and ‘invaluable to merchants abroad’, because of the social support network it offered in providing accommodation, advice and financial assistance to both visiting and settled merchants.125 The Scots Church of Rotterdam, established in 1643, was the core institution around which ‘Scots in Rotterdam eventually consolidated their power’.126 The site of the first building for this Scots Church became the locus for Scottish settlement; the south-western harbour district became known as ‘Little Scotland’.127 The main dike, the Schiedamesdijk, was known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the Schotse dijk.128 In addition to the Scottish kirks in Rotterdam and Veere,129 there was institutional support in the Scottish trading staple in the form of a resident chaplain, whose stipend was ‘payed by a contribution to be imposed upon the merchands goods that cummes to Camphear and no utherwayes’.130 When the Convention of Royal Burghs ratified the re-establishment of the trading staple at Dordrecht in 1669, provision was made for a Scottish Reformed Church and an apothecary.131 The Scottish-Dutch brigade contributed to ‘an institutional underpinning for the Scottish-Dutch relationship … ensur[ing] the existence of the infrastructure necessary for a lively exchange in goods, people and ideas’.132 In Poland-Lithuania, Scots gave financial support to ministers, schools, hospitals, and Reformed education institutions, and had their own preachers, communions, prayer meetings and conventicles.133 In Stockholm, Scottish entrepreneurs became embedded in institutions such as the nobility, councils and Parliament, and in Gothenburg two seats were reserved on the city council for Scots.134 In Sweden, there was no limitation on numbers of Scots – they were free to join any institution in any numbers (though there were no protected seats specifically for Scots as there were in Gothenburg).135 Throughout



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the Netherlands and Sweden, coherent Scottish communities mirrored life at home, offering individuals a secure and distinctly Scottish environment in which to operate.136 This supports recent assertions that an ‘orientation to home’ – whether positive or negative – was and is a key characteristic of a ‘diaspora’.137 Support was available for Scottish Catholics through the establishment of Scots Colleges in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and between 1603 and 1688 at least 900 students attended, of which 90 per cent were Scots.138 Institutional support is one explanation given for the successful integration of immigrants. This differed from place to place, however, and even in places without this support Scots integrated into their host communities and were successful in their endeavours. While in Rotterdam there were specific places where Scots congregated, in mid-seventeenth-century Kedainiai Scots were dispersed throughout the main market square, in the centre of the city, in the German suburb of Januszowo, in the Jewish district and even in the Catholic quarter, with no specific geographic locale.139 Scottish students in the Netherlands, as discussed above, had no geographic centre but were found in all university towns.140 In France, ‘commercial interaction was undertaken by a small group of successful commercial agents rather than a large established community’, in contrast to Rotterdam, Bergen and Sweden.141 Successful integration and activity was prevalent in places where official institutional support was not abundant. In France, it was more common for independent support to be offered by fellow Scots on an ad hoc basis, rather than official institutions being established. In July 1665 James Mowat wrote to John Clerk that ‘I am much pressed by your advysse of my friends to taik a great lodging to lodge out countrymen, and others when they come’.142 In 1713 two houses were acquired in Bordeaux to provide for Scottish refugees – these were together called the ‘Scotch House’ or the ‘Scotch College’.143 Scots in France became part of institutions and local government, despite not enjoying the same political provision as Scots in the Swedish towns of Gothenburg and Stockholm. Robert Gordon became deeply integrated into the Bordeaux civic community, working for the Admiralty of Guyenne and, among other things, testifying on behalf of countrymen applying for passports either to enter France or to return to Scotland.144 The presence of Scots within society and institutions in Bordeaux helped to facilitate Scottish trade with this port, as examined below.145 The importance that has been placed on the presence of a ‘Scottish community’ to support emigrant Scots arguably clouds assessments of Scottish integration into host communities abroad. The absence of an ethnically distinct Scottish community in Bremen and Hamburg ‘enforced the integration of Scots into the formal and informal networks of their

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host communities and encouraged interaction with the host population’.146 It was perhaps those Scots who were forced to integrate, rather than those able to remain within Scottish enclaves, who were more likely to settle permanently abroad. Indeed, rather than doing business within a selfcontained national group, commercial Scots in France integrated into the civic and commercial life of their host country.147 In Dieppe, it has been suggested that Scotsmen were so at home that they ‘seem to have been absorbed by the indigenous population’.148 John Clerk is a good example of the extent to which Scots in France integrated, as he did business with the local population – Clerk consistently recommended Frenchmen to Scots in his network, reflecting a history of integrated commercial ventures.149 In some spheres, including Franco-Dutch relations, formal partnerships between merchants of different nationalities were rare,150 but in the Franco-Scottish context this appears to have been more commonplace. In 1603 a contract was drawn up between George Christie of St Andrews, master of the ship the St Michael, and the merchant brothers Jean and Jean Dorath of Bordeaux.151 In 1665 Michel Mel made a successful application to the Privy Council for a voyage to France in the Margret of Diep with salmon and herring, ‘of which vessel the master skipper and whole company (except three Scotsmen) are Frenchmen’.152 Individuals within the Scottish mercantile community in France did not operate within one geographic sphere, and involvement did not begin on arrival or end on departure, but contacts were maintained and networks precipitated across large geographic areas and over long periods of time. Although the fluidity of merchants’ movement apparently spawned disorganisation – as opposed to the organised business model promoted by geographically coherent communities – a willingness and ability to adapt facilitated the exploitation of business opportunities.153 While many Scottish migrants sought support, whether through official institutions or on a more informal basis, others emphatically did not seek familiarity. Some Scottish students were warned against too much involvement with their fellow countrymen,154 while others took it upon themselves to maintain a distance. In 1617 Alexander Erskine wrote to his father, the earl of Mar, complaining that there were too many Scots in Bourges, and that this was interrupting the education of himself and his brother Henry: ‘[I]f we had stayed still in Bourges we could not have lernit the French, in respek of the great number of Scotsmen that is ther for the present; for we met every day together at our exercise, so that it was impossible for us not to speake Scotis.’155 After nine months Alexander and Henry obtained permission to leave for Saumur, as they believed that the Scottish community there would be more reconcilable with their studies.156 Mr John Schaw, the man accompanying them on the continent, wrote to the



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earl of Mar: ‘lett not your lord be offendit at the removing of your sonnis from Burgs to Saumers, which was donne becauis of the sundried incommoditeis brough into them by the multitude of Scottisch men resident thair’.157 It is again important to consider the role of religion, as traditionally a common religion has been thought essential for successful integration. As discussed above, the division of France into regions of Catholic and Protestant influence has been seen as instrumental in where Scottish migrants chose to settle.158 It has been well documented that religious, ethnic institutions such as the Scots church in Rotterdam were essential for attracting and supporting communities of exiled Scots. This was repeated in other destinations. In Protestant-dominated cities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Scottish congregations enjoyed some success, including in Gdansk, Konigsberg and Elblag. In the Catholic town of Poznan there was a multi-ethnic congregation including Poles, Germans and Scots, but the Scots kept apart from the larger congregation, and were referred to as Reformierte (Reformed) in parish records.159 Elsewhere, though, Scots integrated into host congregations. In Vilnius, a Catholic stronghold which received its first Reformed chapel in 1553, Scots were part of a multi-ethnic congregation also including Dutch and French, as well as local Poles.160 The extent to which Scots became entrenched into the religious events of their host communities caused problems in some locations: in Kedainiai in 1638 the church authority responded to complaints about the order of service, after the Polish-speaking parishioners objected that there was little time for a sermon in Polish after the Lithuanian and Scottish services. A new schedule put the Polish service ahead of the Scottish one.161 For some migrants, of course, religion was enormously important, and some saw religious adherence as vital to integration. It has been said that ‘conversion … could be an important step on the way to assimilation’, and small numbers of Scottish Protestants who lived in peripheral, Catholic towns in Poland-Lithuania converted.162 This was true of Scots elsewhere too, though conversions were not always for religious beliefs. In 1665 John Lauder recorded the religious conversion of Alexander Strachan, noting that: ‘for Mr Alexr its some 17 years since he came to France: he had nothing imaginable. Seeing he could make no fortune unless he turned his coat, he turned Papist.’163 Conversion could thus be instigated by economic factors, and for others there might be personal reasons. George Strachan, a Catholic Scot, converted to Islam in order to marry a Muslim wife, yet on his death he left books to the Carmelite Monastery in Rome in the hope that they would ‘pray for my soul and the atonement of my sins’.164 In Scotland, too, there were regulations surrounding naturalisations that compelled Frenchmen to adhere to Protestantism. Abrahame Turrin,

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a hatmaker from Rouen, and Francis Shammo, a French feltmaker, had to testify to the Privy Council of Scotland that they were ‘of the Protestant reformed religion’ before being naturalised – though public statements of adherence tell us little about private beliefs.165 From 1598 the state religion in Sweden was Lutheran, and most Scots in Stockholm converted to Lutheranism.166 Others resisted such a conversion, however. Patrick Thomson, a devout Presbyterian merchant, distanced himself from his countrymen in Stockholm, declaring that ‘all the Scots here are Lutherans or Atheists, the English are worse if worse can be … so I come heir alone’.167 As discussed above, however, religion was not always a barrier to successful settlement or integration. ‘Marriage to a local inhabitant’ has been seen as a road to successful integration,168 but marriage patterns identified among Scots in early modern Europe suggest that this was not necessarily a deal-breaker. Some Scots specifically wished to marry a woman of their own nation. James Spens, after his wife died, stated that ‘I hop not to marie ane wyff till I get a Scots woman.’169 It was not always possible to choose whether or not you married within the local community, however. In Poland there were limited options – most migrants were male, and marriages tended to take place frequently within the local population.170 In Bergen, as well as evidence of internal cooperation and intermarriage, inter-ethnic relationships were forged beyond the Scottish community.171 Of Scots in Dutch service in the seventeenth century who married, 34 per cent married Scots, but 64 per cent married non-Scots.172 Although the military community was strong, and Scots remarrying tended to do so within military communities,173 they did not necessarily prioritise marrying other Scots. In addition to considering why or how Scots integrated in certain places, we need to ask why they did not integrate in others. As might be expected, some migrant Scots experienced hostility from their host communities. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ‘the experience of Scottish immigrants was … one characterised as much by xenophobia as by heartfelt welcome’.174 Originally, the small number of Scottish pedlars and merchants present here were able to exercise commerce freely upon payment of a small tax. But by 1537, laws were being issued in response to local complaints, and in 1551 Sigismund II issued a general edict against Jewish and Scottish pedlars selling goods in the countryside. This legislation was confirmed in 1556 and 1580.175 As the number of Scottish migrants grew, they were seen increasingly as a threat to local mercantile activities. In 1562 Scottish pedlars were named, along with Italians, as traders who were harming the local economy, and those without civil rights were banned from selling goods both in the cities and in the countryside.176 In 1564 a tax was imposed specifically on Scots, further emphasising the



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extent to which they were singled out as a threat to Polish economic activity: ‘Scots, who carry their merchandise for sale on their backs, shall pay one zloty, and those Scots who use horses to transport their goods, shall pay sixty groszy from each horse used.’177 In 1565 this was expanded, with all foreign traders being asked to ‘behave like the locals’ – swearing allegiance to the local authorities and refraining from sending local foodstuffs abroad.178 Despite these measures, in November 1569 the guild of merchants of Prussia presented a petition to their duke complaining that Scots continued to affect their business, as the sale of goods in rural areas meant that customers were no longer coming to central markets.179 In 1594 Sigismund III introduced legislation against Scots in response to the sheer quantity of Scots entering Poland – indicating that hostile legislation was not enough to stem immigration – but this had little effect. The Scottish factor in Poland, Patrick Gordon, drew up a strict code of conduct in 1616 to try to alleviate problems.180 Scots experienced problems elsewhere, too, even in places with evidence of successful integration. Despite the perks granted to foreigners settling in the new city of Gothenburg, as explored above, Swedish legislation was regularly enacted that limited foreigners’ rights to engage in domestic trade. The Handelsordination of 1607 restricted foreign traders who were not burgesses to an eight-week period of activity in Sweden per year – this was reduced to six weeks in 1612. In 1643 foreigners were forbidden to have shares in Swedish cargoes, and a law that all skippers and pilots carrying Swedish cargo must have Swedish citizenship was enforced in 1667.181 Obtaining citizenship was one way to escape the limitations imposed on foreign traders, though there were conditions to be met. In PolandLithuania, Scots (and other foreign groups) had to buy property in the location where they wanted to settle, and had to have lived in the municipality for a minimum of a year and a day.182 For historians, investigating integration through legal naturalisations can be problematic. For France, Peter Sahlins has calculated the number of Britons naturalised between 1660 and 1798, identifying 678 Irish and 270 English, but only 30 Scots. Figures for foreigners taxed between 1697 and 1707 include 172 Irish, 154 English, and only 20 Scots.183 When paired with the traditional notion that the Auld Alliance ended in 1560, and the alleged ‘economic weakness’ of Scotland, this seems a likely representation.184 The Auld Alliance, however, as I have demonstrated at length in previous work, survived 1560, 1603 and 1707.185 An eighteenth-century record of the privileges held by Scotland in France, privileges ‘they have always enjoyed and continue to enjoy at present’, specifically noted that Scots had access to these privileges ‘without taking any letter of naturalisation’.186 This explains why letters of naturalisation for Scots in France are relatively few and far between in surviving

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records. While individuals of other nations needed these letters to be able to pursue certain elements of business or avoid paying taxes as foreigners in France, Scots did not. In Poland, where Scots did not enjoy comparative privileges, the pattern is different. Of the 44 grants of naturalisation to Britons – which were granted only to foreigners of noble origins – 27 (84 per cent) were to Scots, 2 (4.5 per cent) to Englishmen and 5 (11.5 per cent) to Irishmen.187 As explored by Tamar Herzog, it is insufficient to look at official records and legislation to examine citizenship, because these records only include the minority of cases that provoked debate, whereas in the vast majority of cases individuals were ‘subject to classification by people around them … this classification was social rather than legal, implicit rather than formal’.188 Indeed, Herzog argues that in early modern Spain ‘the issuing of formal declarations of citizenship … was the exception and not the rule’. Many people acted as natives, creating a public image of themselves as citizens that was accepted.189 When considering ‘successful’ integration it is perhaps easy to conflate long-term or permanent settlement with success, but this pattern is not always discernible. Participation in Scottish networks in France was often temporary and not dependent on geographic location. The individuals present were flexible, willing to alter their itineraries depending on the opportunities that arose. In 1654, the Scottish merchant Alexander Charteris wrote to John Clerk from Paris that he ‘made a journey to Bordeaux, Rochelle and other places in these quarters where I stayed three months much longer than I intended’.190 The transiency of the individuals involved in these mercantile communities has previously led to the assumption that Scottish mercantile communities in France were disorganised and insignificant,191 but this was not the case, and individuals successfully integrated and cooperated with their host communities in France despite the temporary nature of their migration.192 Despite living in Paris for twelve years, being commercially successful and integrating fully into French society, John Clerk always intended to return home to Scotland.193 However, he came close to returning to France on a permanent basis when, ‘upon some disgust in this country [Scotland], [he] had an intention to have returned again to France, and had actually imbarqued his wife and children for that purpose, but being detain’d by contrary winds in the Road of Leith for some days, he changed his resolution and returned to Edinbr.’194 Where Clerk ended up settling depended, as so many human decisions do, on circumstance and luck – some might say fate. What this example does suggest is that not only did the length of stay not necessarily correlate to success, but also that individuals themselves did not always know whether they would be a permanent or temporary migrant. The very habit of migration could prompt people to move again,



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and premature death frequently dictated an alternative ending to the one planned.195 Further, that some migrant communities were temporary did not make them unsuccessful. Scottish students were usually temporary migrants, travelling around Europe on the Grand Tour or attending a European university, but returning home when their studies or travels were complete.196 Bourges is demonstrative of this pattern – all but three Scottish students studying at Bourges in the seventeenth century returned to Scotland.197 Political events that could not be foreseen by migrants could impact on future movement – for example, the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland in 1651 ‘made it hard for many to return, and significant numbers of refugee Scottish soldiers remained abroad’.198 Changes in local policies influenced migration. As discussed above, when Gothenburg was founded in 1621 tax breaks were offered to incoming Scots to help to establish the city as a commercial port. When in 1636 fifteen years of these privileges came to an end, some of the ‘sudden influx’ of Scots present from 1621 took this as their cue to leave.199 Considering the intricacies of the experiences of individual migrants is the only way to understand the reasons why these people chose certain locations, the extent to which they integrated and possible reasons behind the length of their settlement. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, return migration is a phenomenon that has only recently been afforded detailed attention. Like outward migration, decisions to return or to remain on the continent were individual, with a number of push and pull factors in play. While some migrants, both permanent and temporary, integrated well into their host communities, others found it difficult to settle in a foreign environment, including soldiers decommissioned after European wars – for example, the Scottish regiments released by Christian IV in 1629.200 Importantly, it was not only Scottish-born migrants who could be said to ‘return’. Foreign-born ‘Scots’ felt compelled to visit what they saw as their homeland, even if they had never been there. It has been noted that ‘in some parts of the Scottish diaspora, the Scots retained such a strong sense of their own community that contemporary observers viewed people of Scottish stock simply as Scots regardless of where they were born, or how many generations out of Scotland they may have been.’201 Returning to Scotland did not necessarily mark the end of involvement in activities abroad. John Clerk’s intention to return to Scotland was in spite of the range of business associations he maintained in Europe, and he made frequent visits back to Edinburgh to facilitate his purchase of the barony of Penicuik.202 After his return, Clerk maintained correspondence with the network of merchants that he had built up over twelve years on the continent. He remained involved in financial transactions, and his

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French contacts kept him informed of both professional and personal events.203 In Clerk’s case, geographic location did not define his migration – this was defined by his networks and contacts, which were blind to where he was situated. Identities ‘Especially when abroad, the Scots are most aggressively Scottish, needing to assert their origins and hold on to an identity.’204 Some Scots abroad retained a strong and distinct sense of ‘Scottishness’, but others did not. Scots in Kedainiai in the early modern period ‘tried to maintain their distinctiveness’, and described themselves as being ‘of the Scottish nation’.205 In other arenas, however, ‘Scots identified themselves as different abroad only as long as it was convenient or profitable to do so’.206 As previously noted, the principal difficulty for scholars lies in ascertaining the ‘nationality’ of individuals from the historical record, but this was not clear-cut for contemporaries either. Scots abroad described themselves as Scottish and British, Swedish, Dutch and others when it was expedient to do so; and identifying with a foreign community, or achieving citizenship or naturalisation, did not make their Scottish identity redundant.207 Ethnic connections, or self-identities, are rarely mentioned in surviving correspondence,208 and even when they were recorded, as they were in Poznan (discussed above), there is no way to know if the record reflected an individual’s belief. The concept of ‘nationality’ is highly subjective.209 Those Scots who ‘fully integrated’ by acquiring foreign citizenship can be particularly difficult to characterise in terms of identity. That an individual chose to take citizenship – usually to gain access to benefits only available to citizens, or to avoid paying foreign taxes210 – was not always an indication of how they chose to identify themselves. Grosjean and Murdoch have noted that it is difficult to establish whether Scots who sat in the Swedish Parliament used their ethnicity to form a particular constituency, or whether they were so well integrated into Swedish society that they sat as Swedes.211 This level of integration makes it difficult to separate these migrant Scots from their host communities. It is extremely difficult to speak of a ‘Scottish identity’ in any context, but this problem has been particularly prevalent in studies of Scottish Jacobitism. As noted above, it was not the case that all Scots involved in the ‘influx’ of Scottish exiles to France after the Glorious Revolution had as a ‘common aim’ the restoration of the Stuarts;212 thus to present James’s cause as ‘Scotland’s cause’ is a distortion of reality.213 The Jacobite movement was ‘intensely divided’, and not all, or even the majority, of Scots either



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at home or abroad identified with the Stuart vision of a Jacobite Scotland.214 Further, though the exiled Stuart court was the most obvious source of assistance for Jacobite Scots in France, there were in fact very few Scots present. In 1696, there were 153 English, 30 Irish, 20 French, 14 Italians and only 8 Scots; in 1709 there were 150 English, 50 Irish, 25 French, 10 Italians and 12 Scots.215 To understand the Scots in Europe, it is important not only to examine the links between migrant communities and their host communities, but also to look at links with other migrant groups. Scots did not only interact with other Scots or with their immediate hosts, but cooperated across boundaries of nationality and social hierarchy.216 In the context of the seventeenth century, it is particularly important to consider links between Scotland and England. In the early modern period, particularly prior to the Anglo-Scottish political union of 1707, ‘Scottish’ and ‘English’ identities may be considered very separate, but in many spheres individuals from these nations interacted, in some cases forging a recognisably ‘British’ identity or community. In Gothenburg, there was ‘significant communication’ between Scots and English, though Scots outnumbered the English.217 In other places, these links have been more firmly defined. In Hamburg, the Company of Merchant Adventurers offered support to Scottish and English soldiers, officers and refugees.218 Hamburg’s neutrality attracted political representatives from both Scots and English institutions.219 This led to a larger British community, not only in the commercial but also in the military sphere, as intelligence passed between Englishmen and Scotsmen saw ‘the formation of a pan-British military identity’.220 The same Colonel Gray described as a ‘ranke papist’ by Calderwood (see above) ‘raise[d] 2000 volunteers for Bohemia’, with orders to raise a regiment composed equally of Scots and English. Not only was this regiment perceived as British, but the soldiers within it also described themselves as British to foreign observers.221 It is well known that after 1603 British diplomacy had a distinctly Scottish tinge, with James preferring to use Scottish diplomats in his relations with foreign powers. Some of these individuals developed a ‘British’ consciousness, for example in Hamburg, ‘a special place for the observance of Anglo-Scottish political and diplomatic cooperation due to the presence of a large group of English merchants and high profile English and Scottish diplomats and officers’.222 This could cause complications – William Bruce, who was the first Stuart diplomatic agent in the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was Scottish, but was obliged to assist all subjects of James VI and I, and was responsible to the English secretary of state, creating divided loyalties.223 In the religious sphere, too, Scots were found at English churches abroad – perhaps not surprising prior to the signing of the National Covenant. 224

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Scots in Gdansk were mostly Presbyterian, and from the 1570s they gathered for services in the local churches. The ‘English’ Calvinist congregation that had existed in the city from the mid-seventeenth century included Scots.225 The first ‘British’ congregation to be recognised by the Dutch authorities was the ‘English’ Reformed church in Amsterdam, established in 1607; this was in contrast to the Scots kirk in Rotterdam, which was exclusively Scots.226 In Elblag, there was a ‘British’ congregation to which John Durie preached in the 1630s as an ordained minister of the Scottish Presbyterian Church,227 and this followed a history of an established British community, as an integrated Scottish and British trading company had been established here as early as 1578.228 Between 1652 and 1654, the Scot William Spang acted as minister of the ‘English’ Reformation Church in Middelburg.229 In France, the formation of ethnically driven trading patterns is particularly striking. In 1650 James Mowat wrote from Paris to John Clerk in Edinburgh that ‘if you werre hier you could gaine what you please, for theris many english and severall Scots that you might deall with’.230 The Scottish mercantile community in France was made up not only of Scots but included links throughout the indigenous French community as well as with other nations. However, British commercial presence in some ports in France was delineated along ethnic lines. In Bordeaux, Scots dominated British trade throughout the seventeenth century, whereas in Nantes it was Irish merchants who were most active. As I have argued in other work, there was a correlation between trading patterns and integration: certain societies were particularly welcoming to those of some ethnic backgrounds due to local customs, policies of naturalisation, presence in civic institutions, and both formal and informal institutional support.231 Scottish merchants dominated in Bordeaux, where they were particularly well integrated into society, and the same patterns can be observed in the case of the dominance of the Irish in Nantes. In La Rochelle, a much more recognisably British dynamic was apparent, as commercial transactions saw Scottish, Irish and English merchants more commonly working together.232 There is little evidence in this port of distinctions between national groups, presenting a context in which common nationality was not a driving force in forging business links. In March 1662 a Scot based in Bordeaux, William Robertson, brought a case to the Admiralty Court of La Rochelle on behalf of Anthoine Hal, an English merchant based in Ireland who was owed 800 livres by Daniell Smythe, a native Scot based in La Rochelle.233 In this case, loyalty between Robertson and Hal was stronger than that between Robertson and Smythe. In La Rochelle, rather than an exclusive national identity being the guiding force in commercial relationships, English, Irish and Scottish merchants displayed shared



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interests, and worked together in developing these. It is thus clear that recognisably ‘British’ commercial activity was taking place before this relationship was formalised in the Parliaments of Westminster and Edinburgh in 1707.234 Such ‘British’ cooperation pre-1707 can be observed elsewhere in Europe – the Elie skipper Alexander Gillespie received protection from a Newcastle convoy as he pursued trade during the Third Anglo-Dutch War.235 Conclusion The experiences of migrants of any nation can be difficult to discern. Some migrant Scots put their experiences into print – including William Lithgow and Robert Munro.236 Others, like John Clerk and James Spens, have left behind correspondence that allows us to learn something about their activities.237 The letters of James Spens are particularly revealing as it is difficult to access the experience of ‘ordinary’ migrants – the experiences of army officers, published writers or prominent merchants whose correspondence has been preserved usually dominate studies of the migrant experience. This study of Scots in Europe in the early modern period is of course not exhaustive either in scope or content, but I hope that it has suggested several things about the study of Scots abroad, regarding both previous research and future work. There is an increasingly desperate need for truly comparative studies, and I am not the first historian to have called for this.238 Although identifying the presence of Scots abroad and examining their behaviour can allow us to assess, to some degree, their actions and significance, this is much more effective when their activities are looked upon both in comparison to other nations abroad and in comparison to the experiences of their compatriots elsewhere in Europe, as well as across the globe. In Sweden, for example, Scots became far more integrated in the Riksdag than did individuals of other nations.239 In Cracow Scots were relatively slow to integrate, partly due to their desire to retain religious ‘exclusiveness’, whereas the Germans present in that town integrated fully and smoothly.240 A number of themes common to both Scottish and Irish migration have been identified, including diplomacy and international relations, the Grand Tour and education, migration networks and the formation of communities abroad. Jane Ohlmeyer suggests that rather than being viewed in ‘unconnected national contexts’, Scottish and Irish developments might fruitfully be viewed in a comparative and integrated framework.241 The discussion of the ‘British’ dimension to migration discussed above suggests that this may be true of English migration also. Crucially, Britons, and Scots, were

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not unique. The Dutch, despite being from a small territory and with a small population, were arguably even more globally enterprising than the Scots.242 Though studies of early modern Scottish migration have reflected in detail on Scots leaving home and travelling abroad, much less has been said about immigration into Scotland, which should be viewed as part of the international relationships and networks that were integral to Scottish continental activities in this period. The networks within which Scottish migrants operated need to be considered in more detail. Trade that took place in Bordeaux, to give just one example, was seldom a Franco-Scottish affair, but incorporated actors based throughout Europe, operating as part of a network stretching across the continent.243 Although studies of Scottish migration to and communities throughout Europe continue to proliferate, there remain some crucial gaps. Our understanding of Scottish migration to England is scant, despite recent research actively being undertaken on the subject, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter. There have been calls for Hungary to be given more attention, and it has been celebrated that ‘new’ locations, including the Iberian peninsular, the Italian peninsular, and south and south-east Asia are receiving more attention.244 I question, however, as has Keith Brown, how much this is to be celebrated.245 As David Allan cautions: ‘[I]t is not unknown for Scottish historians to be accused (in fact, to accuse each other, only half in jest) of “jock-spotting” – meaning the arid pursuit of individuals with more or less tenuous Scottish affiliations whose historical significance in almost any field of human endeavour can then be proudly proclaimed.’246 If they are to have broader significance, studies of the presence of Scots in Europe must be linked to wider political, economic and commercial contexts.247 We now know that Scots ‘were not a remote, insular people sitting on the fringe of civilisation, but a cosmopolitan people exceptionally prone to emigrate in order to seek their fortunes in another country’.248 Armed with this knowledge, rather than extending our search for Scots to ever more remote parts of the world our next step should be to think in more detail about how we consider the distinct individuals and migrant groups that made up a larger ‘Scottish diaspora’. Through an examination of the variety of Scottish migrants present in Europe in the early modern period, this chapter advocates that the ‘Scottish diaspora’ be viewed not as a homogeneous entity but as a collection of individuals with different aims, objectives and experiences. As has been seen throughout this chapter, activity in a common sphere, settlement in the same town or the offer of support between migrant groups did not mean that individuals had the same migratory experience. As such, qualitative approaches to migration can yield more accurate results about



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the ‘migrant experience’ than attempts at quantitative evaluations, though this, of course, throws up its own problems as individual experiences are rarely, if ever, representative of migrant experiences as a whole. Yet, the stories told here, and many others explored by scholars of early modern Scottish migration, indicate the value of viewing the Scottish migration experience through individuals, rather than lazily applying the term ‘diaspora’ to any and all Scots abroad.

Notes 1 J.H. Burton, The Scot Abroad, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1864); T. Fischer, The Scots in Germany (Edinburgh, 1902); T. Fischer, The Scots in East and West Prussia (Edinburgh, 1903); T. Fischer, The Scots in Sweden (Edinburgh, 1907); A.F. Steuart, Scottish Influences in Russian History (Glasgow, 1913); A. Fischer (ed.), Papers Relating to the Scots in Poland, 1576–1793 (Edinburgh, 1915); T.C. Smout (ed.), Scotland and Europe, 1200–1850 (Edinburgh, 1986); G. Simpson (ed.), The Scottish Soldier Abroad, 1247–1967 (Edinburgh, 1992); J. Galloway and I. Murray, ‘Scottish migration to England, 1400–1560’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 112.1 (1996), 29–38. 2 N. Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), preface, p. xi; the resulting chapter is: T.C. Smout, N. Landsman and T. Devine, ‘Scottish emigration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, pp. 76–112. 3 M. Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester, 2005); M. Varricchio (ed.), Back to Caledonia: Scottish Return Migration from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Edinburgh, 2012); D. Leishman, S. Murdoch, S. Talbott and J. Young, Exil et Retour: Contextes et Comparaisons/Exile and Return: Contexts and Comparisons (Grenoble, 2010). 4 For example, D. Catterall, Community Without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic, c. 1600–1700 (Leiden, 2002); G. Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (East Linton, 2004); A. Grosjean and S. Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2005); E. Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’: Scottish Students, Charles Mackie and the United Provinces, 1650–1750 (Leiden, 2012); S. Murdoch, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 1603–1746 (Leiden, 2006); K. Zickermann, Across the German Sea: Early Modern Scottish Connections with the Wider Elbe-Weser Region (Leiden, 2013). 5 For example: S. Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London, 2014); D. Worthington, Scots in Habsburg Service,

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7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

british and irish diasporas 1618–1648 (Leiden, 2004); D. Worthington, British and Irish Experiences and Impressions of Central Europe, 1560–1688 (Aldershot, 2012); B. Halloran, The Scots College Paris, 1603–1792 (Edinburgh, 1997). S. Murdoch, ‘Scotland, Europe and the English missing link’, History Compass, 5.3 (2007), 895–96; Justine Taylor, A Cup of Kindness: The History of the Royal Scottish Corporation, a London Charity 1603–2003 (East Linton, 2003); G. Cameron, The Scots Kirk in London (Oxford, 1979). ‘The Scots in England’ is the focus of research being undertaken at the University of Manchester under the direction of Professor Keith Brown, following the award of an AHRC Networking Grant to Professor Brown and the present author for a project entitled ‘Anglo-Scottish Migration and the Making of Great Britain’ in 2012–14. D. Armitage, ‘The Scottish diaspora’, in J. Wormald (ed.), Scotland: A History (Oxford, 2005), p. 272. T. Bueltmann, A. Hinson and G. Morton, The Scottish Diaspora (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 17. T. Devine, ‘A global diaspora’, Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford, 2012), p. 159. Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, The Scottish Diaspora, p. 18. J. Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland and Scotland and their wider worlds’, in T. O’Connor and M. Lyons (eds), Irish Communities in EarlyModern Europe (Dublin, 2006), p. 462; A. Grosjean and S. Murdoch, ‘Introduction’ to Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, p. 2. For example, Smout, Landsman and Devine, ‘Scottish emigration’. Devine, ‘A global diaspora’, p. 161. W. Lithgow, Totall discourse of rare adventures & painful peregrenations of long nineteen yeares travayles from Scotland to the most famous kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Africa (Glasgow, 1906 edition), p. 368. Smout, Landsman and Devine, ‘Scottish emigration’, p. 85. W. Kowalski, ‘The placement of urbanised Scots in the Polish Crown during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, p. 63. P. Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Leiden, 2012), p. 343. Worthington, Scots in Habsburg Service, p. 17. S. Murdoch and E. Mijers, ‘Migrant destinations, 1500–1750’, in Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, pp. 327, 335; Bajer, Scots in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, p. 84. A. Little, ‘A comparative survey of Scottish service in the English and Dutch maritime communities, c.1650–1707’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, p. 371. Archives Départementales de la Gironde [ADG] 6 B 22, fos 8v–9r; Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, p. 147. S. Murdoch, ‘The database in early modern Scottish history: Scandinavia and Northern Europe 1580–1703’, Northern Studies, 32 (1997), 93.



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23 A. Grosjean and S. Murdoch, ‘The Scottish community in seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, pp. 193–94. 24 S. Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce: the Stockholm-Scots in the seventeenth century’, in D. Worthington (ed.), Emigrants and Exiles from the Three Kingdoms in Europe, 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010), p. 59. 25 Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, pp. 3–7, 38. 26 Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland and Scotland’, p. 470. 27 M. Glozier, Scottish Soldiers in France in the Reign of the Sun King (Leiden, 2004), p. 31; Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, pp. 24–25. 28 T.C. Smout, ‘The culture of migration: Scots as Europeans, 1500–1800’, History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995), 111. 29 Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, p. 195. 30 A. Grosjean and S. Murdoch, ‘Scottish involvement in the Swedish Riksdag of the seventeenth century: the period from Parliamentarianism to Absolutism, c. 1632–1700’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 34.1 (2014), 2. 31 S. Murdoch, ‘Kith and kin: John Durie and the Scottish community in Scandinavia and the Baltic, 1624–34’, in P. Salmon and T. Barrow (eds), Britain and the Baltic: Studies in Commercial, Political and Cultural Relations 1500–2000 (Sunderland, 2003), p. 31. 32 Worthington, Scots in Habsburg Service, p. 273. 33 R. Monro, His Expedition with a worthy Scots regiment called Mac-Keyes, 2 vols (London, 1637), p. xix. 34 S. Murdoch, ‘Scotland and Europe’, in B. Harris and A. MacDonald (eds), Scotland: The Making and Unmaking of the Nation, c. 1100–1707 (Dundee, 2007), p. 131. 35 Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations; S. Talbott, ‘Beyond “the antiseptic realm of theoretical economic models”: new perspectives on Franco-Scottish commerce and the Auld Alliance in the long seventeenth century’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 31.2 (2011), 149–68; S. Murdoch, ‘The French connection: Bordeaux’s “Scottish” networks in context, c. 1670–1720’, in G. Leydier (ed.), Scotland and Europe, Scotland in Europe (Newcastle, 2007), pp. 26–55. 36 For example, A. Bieganska, ‘A note on the Scots in Poland, 1550–1880’, in Smout (ed.), Scotland and Europe, p. 157. 37 Murdoch, Network North, pp. 129–30. 38 S. Talbott, ‘The letter-book of John Clerk of Penicuik, 1644–45’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, XV (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 1–54; S. Talbott ‘Clerk, John (1611–1674)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 39 Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce’, p. 42. 40 T. Brochard, ‘The socio-economic relations between Scotland’s northern territories and Scandinavia and the Baltic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, International Journal of Maritime History, 26.2 (2014), 229; Murdoch, ‘Scotland and Europe’, p. 136. 41 Kowalski, ‘The placement of urbanised Scots’, p. 67.

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42 Devine, ‘A global diaspora’, p. 160; Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, The Scottish Diaspora, p. 17. 43 S. Talbott, ‘“My heart is a Scotch heart”: Scottish Calvinist exiles in France in their continental context, 1605–1638’, in Worthington (ed.), Emigrants and Exiles, passim. 44 G. Gardner, ‘A haven for intrigue: the Scottish exile community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, p. 278. 45 E. Mijers, ‘Scottish students in the Netherlands, 1680–1730’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, pp. 301–2. 46 Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Introduction’, p. 19. 47 S. Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite court: Scottish migrants in France, 1688–1718’, in K. German, L. Graham and A. Macinnes (eds), Living with Jacobitism (London, 2014), pp. 100, 106–7. 48 Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, The Scottish Diaspora, p. 18. 49 Mijers, ‘Scottish students’, p. 318. 50 K. Zickermann, ‘“Briteannia ist mein patria”: Scotsmen and the “British” community in Hamburg’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, p. 272; Zickermann, Across the German Sea, pp. 5, 237; Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce’, pp. 35, 57. 51 Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce’, p. 57. 52 Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, pp. 206, 216. 53 Mijers, ‘Scottish students’, p. 301; Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’, pp. 31–32; Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community, p. 80. 54 Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland and Scotland’, p. 476. 55 W. Kowalski, ‘Scoti, Cives Cracovienses: their ethnic and social identity, 1570–1660’, in Worthington (ed.), Emigrants and Exiles, p. 84. 56 T. McInally, ‘Scottish Catholics abroad, 1603–1688: evidence derived from the archives of the Scots Colleges’, in Worthington (ed.), Emigrants and Exiles, p. 274. 57 Such as those highlighted by Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, The Scottish Diaspora, p. 17. 58 See S. Murdoch, ‘The Scots and early modern Scandinavia: a 21st century review’, Northern Studies, 45 (2013), 30. 59 A. Games, ‘Migration’, in D. Armitage and M. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 33. 60 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, p. 341. 61 Smout, Landsman and Devine, ‘Scottish emigration’, p. 88. 62 M. Brander, The Emigrant Scots (Edinburgh, 1982), p. 17; Brochard, ‘Socioeconomic relations’, p. 228. 63 W. Kowalski, ‘Krakow citizenship and the local Scots’, in T. Devine and D. Hesse (eds), Scotland and Poland: Historical Encounters, 1500–2010 (Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 270, 278. 64 L.H. van Voss, S. Sogner and T. O’Connor, ‘Scottish communities abroad: some concluding remarks’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, p. 383.



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65 Murdoch, Network North, p. 93. 66 A. Drummond, The Kirk and the Continent (Edinburgh, 1956), p. 91. 67 Gardner, ‘A haven for intrigue’, p. 278; see also D. Catterall, ‘Fortress Rotterdam? Rotterdam’s Scots community and the Covenanter cause, 1638–88’, in Worthington (ed.), Emigrants and Exiles, p. 88. 68 For descriptions of these ‘waves’ of migration, see for example, Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland and Scotland’, p. 470; Murdoch and Mijers, ‘Migration destinations’, p. 231. 69 Little, ‘A comparative survey’, p. 333. 70 Murdoch, ‘Kith and kin’, pp. 31–32. 71 Monro, Expedition, vol. 2, pp. 61–62. 72 Worthington, Scots in Habsburg Service, pp. 275, 277. 73 Monro, Expedition, vol. 2, p. 82. 74 J. Turner, Memoirs of his own life and times (Edinburgh, 1829), p. 14. 75 National Records of Scotland [NRS] RH9/2/236, James to his wife, Elizabeth Baillie, Riga, 1 October 1628. These letters offer an illuminating insight into the experiences of a common soldier in this conflict, and have been preserved only because they were kept, by error, with the correspondence of Sir James Spens of Wormiston. A. Grosjean, S. Murdoch and S. Talbott, ‘Drummer Major James Spens: letters from a common soldier abroad, 1617–1632’, Northern Studies, 47 (2015), 76–101. 76 NRS RH9/2/242: James Spens to his father and mother, Agnes Walker, Guinea Coast, 23 February 1632. 77 Worthington, Scots in Habsburg Service, p. 273; D. Worthington, ‘Scottish exiles at the court of the Habsburgs’, in S. Murdoch (ed.), Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648 (Leiden, 2001), p. 54. 78 D. Calderwood, History of the Kirk of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1845), p. 444. 79 Murdoch and Mijers, ‘Migrant destinations’, p. 323. 80 Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite court’, p. 99. See, for example, D. Szechi, ‘The Jacobite movement’, in H. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), p. 92; E. Cruickshanks and E. Corp, ‘Introduction’, to E. Cruickshanks and E. Corp (eds), The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites (London, 1995), p. ix; E. Cruickshanks, The Glorious Revolution (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 2, 59; B. Lenman, ‘The Jacobite diaspora 1688–1746: from despair to integration’, History Today, 30 (1980), 8; R. Wills, The Jacobites and Russia, 1715–1750 (East Linton, 2002). 81 Lenman, ‘The Jacobite diaspora’, p. 8. 82 Cruickshanks and Corp, ‘Introduction’, p. ix. 83 Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite court’, p. 100; C. Nordmann, ‘Les Jacobites Ecossais en France au XVIIIe siècle’, in M. Plaisant (ed.), Regards sur l’Ecosse au XVIIIe Siècle (Lille, 1977), p. 82. 84 See Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite court’, p. 107 and passim. 85 Bieganska, ‘A note on the Scots in Poland’, p. 157; P. Bajer, ‘Scotsmen and the Polish nobility from the sixteenth to eighteenth century’, in R. Unger and J. Basista (eds), Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795 (Leiden, 2008), p. 340.

130 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

british and irish diasporas Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, p. 41. Smout, ‘The culture of migration’, p. 112. Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland and Scotland’, p. 466. Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’, p. 34. Murdoch and Mijers, ‘Migrant destinations’, p. 323. Talbott, ‘“My heart is a Scotch heart”’, pp. 199–203. Ibid., p. 201. M. Tucker, ‘Scottish students and masters at the faculty of Law of the University of Bourges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in T. van Heijnsbergen and N. Royan (eds), Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland (East Linton, 2002), p. 112. N. Canny, ‘In search of a better home? European overseas migration, 1500–1800’, in Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move, p. 282. Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, pp. 192, 195, 196. T.C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union, 1660–1707 (Edinburgh, 1963), p. 154. S. Murdoch, ‘Children of the diaspora: the “homecoming” of the second generation Scot in the seventeenth century’, in Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings, p. 55. Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, p. 343; Zickermann, ‘“Briteannia ist mein patria”’, p. 251. Catterall, ‘Fortress Rotterdam?’, p. 90. Garder, ‘A haven for intrigue’, p. 281. Kowalski, ‘The placement of urbanised Scots’, p. 76. Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite court’, p. 108. Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community, p. 4. Mijers, ‘Scottish students in the Netherlands’, pp. 303, 319–20; Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’, p. 3. Mijers, ‘Scottish students in the Netherlands’, pp. 303, 325. Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’, pp. 46–47; Mijers, ‘Scottish students in the Netherlands’, p. 323. Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Introduction’, p. 15; Murdoch, ‘Scotland and Europe’, p. 137; Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, The Scottish Diaspora, p. 5. D. Catterall, ‘Scots along the Maas, c.1570–1750’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, p. 173. N. Pedersen, ‘Scottish immigration to Bergen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, pp. 162–63. Ibid. p. 163; Murdoch, ‘Kith and kin’, pp. 25–26. Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, pp. 195, 197–98; E. Grage, ‘Scottish merchants in Gothenburg, 1621–1850’, in Smout (ed.), Scotland and Europe, p. 112. Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, p. 197. R. Zirgulis, ‘The Scottish community in Kedainiai, c.1630–c.1750’, in Grosjean and Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad, pp. 227–28.



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114 Landsman, National and Province in the First British Empire, p. 21, cited in Catterall, ‘Scots along the Maas’, p. 171. 115 Catterall, ‘Fortress Rotterdam?’, p. 104. 116 McInally, ‘Scottish Catholics abroad’, p. 274. 117 Zirgulis, ‘The Scottish community in Kedainiai’, p. 231. 118 Ibid., p. 227. 119 Worthington, Scots in Habsburg Service, p. 14. 120 Ibid., p. 35. 121 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, p. 346. 122 D. Worthington, ‘“Men of noe credit”?’, in Devine and Hesse (eds), Scotland and Poland, pp. 93, 102. 123 S. Murdoch, ‘James VI and Scottish-British military identity’, in S. Murdoch and A. McKillop (eds), Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience, c. 1550–1900 (Leiden, 2002), p. 19. 124 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, p. 253. 125 A. Cummings, ‘Scotland’s links with Europe, 1600–1800’, History Today, 35 (1985), 47. 126 Catterall, ‘Scots along the Maas’, p. 178. 127 Ibid., p. 182; Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’, p. 32. 128 Catterall, ‘Fortress Rotterdam?’, p. 91. 129 Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, p. 191; R. Houston, ‘The Scots kirk, Rotterdam, 1643–1795: a Dutch or Scottish church?’, in J. Roding and L. van Voss (eds), The North Sea and Culture, 1550–1800 (Hilversum, 1996), pp. 266–84; Catterall, Community Without Borders, p. 91. See Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, p. 39. 130 L. Taylor (ed.), Aberdeen Council Letters, 6 vols (Oxford, 1942–61), vol. 1, Instructions to Alexander Jaffray, Baillie, January 1630, p. 313. 131 7 July 1669, J. Marwick (ed.), Records of the Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland: with Extracts from other Records Relating to the Affairs of the Burghs of Scotland, 1295–1711, 5 vols (Edinburgh, 1866–80), vol. 3, pp. 675–88. 132 Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’, p. 3. 133 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, pp. 347, 349. 134 Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce’, pp. 31–66; Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, p. 191. 135 Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce’, pp. 48–49, 33. 136 S. Talbott, ‘“If it please god, I come home”: Scottish return migration from France in the long seventeenth century’, in M. Varricchio (ed.), Back to Caledonia: Scottish Return Migration from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Edinburgh, 2012), p. 62; Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and FrancoScottish Relations, p. 39. 137 Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, The Scottish Diaspora, pp. 18–21. 138 McInally, ‘Scottish Catholics abroad’, p. 261. 139 Zirgulis, ‘The Scottish community in Kedainiai’, p. 236. 140 Mijers, ‘Scottish students in the Netherlands’, p. 325. 141 Murdoch and Mijers, ‘Migrant destinations’, p. 326.

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142 NRS GD18/2505/7, James Mowat to John Clerk, 6 July 1655, Paris. 143 Major Fleming to Mar, 29 December 1716, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of Stuart Papers belonging to His Majesty the King, preserved at Windsor Castle, 7 vols (London, 1902–23), vol. III, p. 370; Murdoch, ‘The French connection’, p. 39. 144 ADG 6 B 59, 1717–8. 145 Talbott, Commerce, Conflict and Franco-Scottish Relations, pp. 39, 147. 146 K. Zickermann, ‘Scottish return migration from Northwest Germany during the early modern period’, in Varricchio (ed.), Back to Caledonia, pp. 83–84. 147 Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, p. 145. 148 M. Mollat, Le commerce maritime normand a la fin dy Moyen Age: etude d’histoire economique et sociale (Paris, 1952), p. 508. 149 Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, p. 146. 150 H. de Bruyn Kops, A Spirited Exchange: The Wine and Brandy Trade between France and the Dutch Republic in its Atlantic Framework, 1600–1650 (Leiden, 2007), p. 56. 151 NRS RH9/5/5, 30 May 1603, Bordeaux. 152 19 January 1665, Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 38 vols (Edinburgh, 1877–1970), 3rd series, vol. 2, p. 5. 153 Talbott, ‘“If it please god, I come home”’, p. 58 and passim. 154 Mijers, ‘Scottish students in the Netherlands’, p. 320. 155 22 December 1617, Henry Erskine to the earl of Mar, HMC Supplementary Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Mar and Kellie (London, 1930), p. 81. 156 Tucker, ‘Scottish students’, p. 117. 157 NRS GD124/15/32/8, 22 December 1617, John Schaw to the earl of Mar. See Talbott, ‘“My heart is a Scotch heart”’, pp. 201–2. 158 S.G.E. Lythe, The Economy of Scotland under James VI and I (Edinburgh, 1960), p. 171. 159 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, pp. 253–55. 160 Ibid., p. 254. 161 Zirgulis, ‘The Scottish community in Kedainiai’, p. 231. 162 Kowalski, ‘The placement of urbanised Scots’, p. 79. 163 Murdoch, ‘French connection’, p. 27. 164 Murdoch, Network North, pp. 88–93; for the case of George Strachan, see p. 91. 165 14 September, October 1686, Edinburgh, Records of the Privy Council of Scotland, 3rd series, vol. 12, pp. 450–51, 478. 166 Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce’, p. 36. 167 NRS RH15/106/608, Patrick Thomson to Andrew Russell, 22 April 1686, Stockholm, cited in Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce, p. 36. 168 Kowalski, ‘The placement of urbanised Scots’, p. 79. 169 NRS RH9/2/239: James Spens to his mother, Agnes Walker, Riga, n. d. 170 Kowalski, ‘Scoti, Cives Cracovienses’, p. 84. 171 Pedersen, ‘Scottish immigration to Bergen’, pp. 161–62.



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172 M. Glozier, ‘Scots in the French and Dutch armies during the Thirty Years’ War’, in Murdoch (ed.), Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War, p. 135. 173 Ibid., p. 136. 174 Worthington, ‘“Men of noe credit”?’, p. 92. 175 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, p. 175; Kowalski, ‘The placement of urbanised Scots’, p. 56. 176 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, p. 174. 177 State Archives of Lithuania, Vilnius, II, 40, n. 665, cited in ibid., pp. 175–76. 178 Ibid., p. 174. 179 Ibid., p. 173. 180 Murdoch, ‘Scotland and Europe’, p. 136. 181 Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce’, p. 41. 182 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, pp. 188–89. 183 P. Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (London, 2004), p. 159. 184 Catterall highlights that some scholars have worked from the assumption that Scotland was impoverished and peripheral, particularly prior to 1707: ‘Scots along the Maas’, pp. 187–88. 185 See Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, ch. 1, pp. 15–34, and passim. 186 Archives Diplomatiques de la Corneuve, Paris, Affaires Étrangères, Mémoires et Documents (Angleterre) 7, fos 120v–23r: ‘Extrait des registres du Conseil d’estat’ [1739]. I am grateful to Professor Daniel Szechi (University of Manchester) for providing me with images of this document. 187 Bajer, ‘Scotsmen and the Polish nobility’, pp. 337–38. Ten were granted to men of ‘unknown British origin’, which is in itself interesting as the migrant usually had to prove their noble origin with a birth brieve. 188 T. Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, CT, 2003), p. 205. 189 Ibid., p. 4. 190 Alexander Charteris to John Clerk, 8 April 1654, Paris, NRS GD18/2528/3; cited in Talbott, ‘“If it please god, I come home”’, p. 58. 191 I. Guy, ‘The Scottish export trade’, in Smout (ed.), Scotland and Europe, p. 67; T. Pagan, The Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland (Glasgow, 1926), p. 151. 192 Talbott, ‘“If it please god, I come home”’, pp. 58–59. 193 Ibid., pp. 62–63. 194 J.M. Gray (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (Edinburgh, 1892), p. 4. 195 Games, ‘Migration’, pp. 33–34. 196 Talbott, ‘“My heart is a Scotch heart”’, p. 199; Mijers, ‘News from the Republick of Letters’, p. 33. 197 Tucker, ‘Scottish students’, p. 118. 198 Murdoch, ‘Scotland and Europe’, p. 133; Murdoch and Mijers, ‘Migrant destinations’, p. 324. 199 Grage, ‘Scottish merchants in Gothenburg’, p. 112.

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200 Murdoch, ‘Children of the diaspora’, pp. 59–60. 201 Ibid., pp. 56, 58. 202 NRS GD18/2466, Madame Cuthbert to Clerk, 3 February 1645; James Arnott to Clerk, 13 December 1645. 203 NRS GD18/2439, Account, John Clerk and William earl of Lothian, 20 January 1645, Edinburgh; NRS GD18/2542, Michel Mel to John Clerk, 30 October 1655, Dieppe; NRS GD18/2445, same to same, 7 July 1663. See Talbott, ‘“If it please god, I come home”’, pp. 63–64. 204 Brander, The Emigrant Scots, p. 13. 205 Zirgulis, ‘The Scottish community in Kedainiai’, p. 231. 206 Van Voss, Sogner and O’Connor, ‘Scottish communities abroad’, p. 390. 207 Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Introduction’, pp. 18–19. 208 Zickermann, Across the German Sea, p. 239. 209 Murdoch, ‘The database in early modern Scottish history’, pp. 85, 93. 210 Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, p. 186. 211 Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Scottish involvement in the Swedish Riksdag’, p. 1; Van Voss, Sogner and O’Connor, ‘Scottish communities abroad’, p. 387. 212 Cruickshanks and Corp, ‘Introduction’, p. ix. See Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite court’, p. 99. 213 M. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London, 1991), p. 114. 214 Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite court’, p. 100; Nordmann, ‘Les Jacobite Ecossais’, p. 82. 215 E. Corp, ‘The Scottish Jacobite community at Saint-Germain after the departure of the Stuart court’, in German, Graham and Macinnes (eds), Living with Jacobitism, p. 28. 216 Murdoch, ‘Community, commodity and commerce’, p. 57; Zickermann, Across the German Sea, p. 6. 217 Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, p. 206. 218 Zickermann, Across the German Sea, p. 181. 219 Zickermann, ‘Briteannia ist mein patria’, pp. 250, 253–54. 220 Ibid., p. 257. 221 Murdoch, ‘James VI and Scottish-British military identity’, pp. 19–20. 222 Zickermann, Across the German Sea, pp. 135, 181. 223 A. Kalinowska, ‘“Pardon me my Lord, that I wrytte to your honor in Scottish…”: William Bruce as the first Stuart diplomatic agent in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth’, in Devine and Hesse (eds), Scotland and Poland, pp. 57–58. 224 Zickermann, ‘Briteannia ist mein patria’, p. 259. 225 Kowalski, ‘The placement of urbanised Scots’, p. 56. 226 Drummond, The Kirk and the Continent, pp. 95, 97. 227 P. Salmon and T. Barrow, ‘Introduction’, to Salmon and Barrow (eds), Britain and the Baltic, p. xii. Murdoch has identified Durie preaching to an integrated British Presbyterian congregation as early as 1624: Murdoch, ‘Kith and kin’, p. 34. 228 Murdoch, ‘Kith and kin’, p. 26.



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229 Zickermann, Across the German Sea, p. 186. 230 NRS GD18/2505/6, James Mowat to John Clerk, 22 January 1650, Paris. 231 Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, pp. 135, 136, 146–49. 232 S. Talbott, ‘British commercial interests on the French Atlantic coast, c. 1560–1713’, Historical Research, 85.229 (2012), 408–9. 233 Archives Départementales de la Charante-Maritime, La Rochelle, B309, 4 March 1662. 234 Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, p. 149. 235 University of St Andrews Special Collections, ms38352, Alexander Gillespie’s logbook, p. 36. 236 Murdoch, ‘Scotland and Europe’, p. 127. 237 Talbott, ‘The letter-book of John Clerk’; Grosjean, Murdoch and Talbott, ‘Drummer Major James Spens’. 238 D. Armitage, ‘Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic world, 1542–1707’, Past and Present, 155 (1997), 35–37; Murdoch, ‘The database in early modern Scottish history’, p. 85; D. Worthington, ‘Migration and diaspora in European history prior to 1650’, Kultura – Historia – Globalizacja, 2 (2008), 45. 239 Grosjean and Murdoch, ‘Scottish involvement in the Swedish Riksdag’, pp. 19–20. 240 Kowalski, ‘Scoti, Cives Cracovienses’, p. 85. 241 Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland and Scotland’, pp. 458–59. 242 B. Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1988), p. 2. 243 Murdoch, ‘The French connection’, pp. 41–42, Talbott, ‘The letter-book of John Clerk’, pp. 2, 6–7. 244 Murdoch and Mijers, ‘Migrant destinations’, p. 336. 245 K. Brown, ‘Seducing the Scottish Clio: has Scottish history anything to fear from the New British History?’, in G. Burgess (ed.), The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715 (London, 1999), p. 243, cited in Worthington, ‘Migration and diaspora’, p. 42. 246 D. Allan, ‘The Enlightenment and the book’ (review), Library, 8.4 (2007), 457. 247 Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, p. 10. 248 Smout, ‘The culture of migration’, p. 116.

4 An imperial, utopian and ‘visible’ diaspora: the English since 1800 Donald M. MacRaild

During one of those grand tours of the empire, which became popular among wealthy Victorians, the novelist and essayist, Anthony Trollope made some sharp observations on the effect distance had on patriotism. Writing in 1873, Trollope stated that the New Zealander, descendant of the English, is the most ‘John Bullish’ and ‘admits the supremacy of England to every place in the world, only he is more English than any Englishman’.1 Trollope’s point aligned with the oft-cited comment of the nineteenth-century historian and devotee of empire, J.R. Seeley, that ‘the history of England is not in England, but in America and Asia’.2 The proudest expressions of conscious Englishmen occurred not at home but in the colonies. More recently, R.J.C. Young has affirmed this idea that English ethnicity was an invention of (and for) people born beyond England’s shores.3 With such a belief in England, the English in the colonies developed many of the accoutrements of a functioning diaspora: ethnic clubs, Empire Day, Magna Charta celebrations, a truly global Anglicanism, and many others. Despite such evidence of English ethnicity, scholars have characterised the largest of the British Isles’ emigrant groups largely as invisible.4 Associational culture was one measure of ethnic consciousness, and, even at home, where demonstrations of Englishness were rare, there was some evidence of an ethnic awakening. English consciousness was, for example, manifest in 1894 when the Royal Society of St George was set up to promote Englishness around the world. The Society merely reflected an extant but unstructured English expression of opinions and values that amounted to a national identity. Empire, political institutions, legislative freedoms and protections, and the acts of union, were key characteristics of the idea of England. So, too, was a particular reading of English ‘drum and trumpet’ history (even if pioneers of social history abjured it).5 Activities at home, however, were never as clearly nationalist as in the colonies. For



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the English who went abroad – even to colonies where culture and language were familiar – the England they left behind took on newer, sharper meaning, as they confronted their identity, and sometimes its enemies. Moreover, the sense of England, as upheld by neo-Angles in America or the colonies, could pass from one generation to the next: in other words, like the Irish, Scots or others, they showed persistent and transnational memory of their diaspora.6 Generally, scholarship hardly considers English aspects of Greater Britain overseas at all.7 Indeed, writers lurch from one extreme to another in assessing whether the very empire itself was a real presence in ordinary British minds.8 They certainly purport no concept of a global Englishness hanging together across oceans. Unlike for many other immigrant groups, there is no real sense of a diaspora in English print culture, since only a few short-lived newspapers, such as The English-Speaking World, existed. Such titles paled next to the proliferation of German or Polish newspaper culture. Language differences required Jewish and non-English-speaking Europeans to establish expatriate information chains for which the English, who could read American papers, had little need. In addition, the political nationalism that inspired so many diasporas in the nineteenth century was absent in England, for England had an empire; England was not a nation in the making, or waiting for post-imperial emancipation. Consequently, historians generally have not thought of the international community of English emigrants as a diaspora. Moreover, in debates about the ‘whiteness’ of immigrants in 1890s America, we find that in index of ‘excellent Americans’ compilesfrom entries in biographical dictionaries, the English produced thousands more than all Europeans combined and nearly six times as many as the Scots.9 The racialisation of the Irish in the 1840s and 1850s had been replaced by a pseudo-science of eastern and southern European inferiority. The English never suffered such a fate. The domination of Anglo-culture in Britain’s former colonies in the Americas, Africa and Australasia means that the English are generally viewed as empire-builders not diaspora-makers. They were, after all, the national group against which other ethnic groups were defined. There is some merit in this view, but it underplays the equivalence in behaviour of emigrants from all parts of Europe as they settled into alien, sometimes hostile, environments. If there were many reasons why the English seemed invisible, it is also true that they demonstrated many instances of ethnicity which looked remarkably like those of the Scots or Irish, and others. It is the purpose of this chapter to discuss some of the conundrums and difficulties which arise from a situation of English invisibility. The first part charts the major patterns of English emigration and settlement since 1800 and explores the cultural results of these processes through

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the prism of an awakening national consciousness shaped abroad rather than at home. We then seek to show that the English bore characteristics of a diaspora in terms of their folk cultural transfers, in their promotion of association collectivism and in their continued struggles against capitalism, through advanced trade unionism and the like. The argument acknowledges the relative ease of transfer of a skilled English artisan or a wealthy merchant as compared with a poor, unskilled, illiterate Irish agricultural labourer or Polish peasant, for a core assumption with the English is that they were better off than many counterpart groups. However, this chapter also introduces the notion that, for a broad swathe of English emigrants, leaving home was also about rejection, detachment and the search for a future that was in keeping with the folk-utopian aspirations of the earliest settlers in the New World and was at odds with ideas of easy assimilation. The English diaspora was a site of utopian ambitions for workers and independent landowning for farmers; it was a place where the poor and political émigré activists, as well as businessmen and labour elites, sought to find their place. Yet, ultimately, the discussion cannot promote ideas of political nationalism within a diaspora in the style of the Irish, and certainly does not suggest that the poorest English can be compared to the poorest Europeans. The English, at least in the modern period, were not exiles. Diaspora-forming: patterns of English migration The English were the largest group of emigrants in the British World. Their migrations were the first and overall the largest British and Irish waves that re-peopled North America from the late sixteenth century onwards. However, as Dutch, Ulster-Scots, Scots and Germans began to arrive in increasing numbers – adding to millions of bonded Africans, colonies such as Pennsylvania, areas of the Upper South and at the western margins of the established colonies – other ethnicities contributed characters that clouded, reduced or replaced the Anglo-culture that dominated in the Tidewater regions.10 At the end of the eighteenth century, when the young American Republic was founded, Englishness shared a domain with many national groups. We must note too that the American Revolution also was a founding moment in the formation of the basis of modern Canada. It enforced an English, Protestant, conservative ideal that, despite massive Irish, Scottish, Catholic, Presbyterian and other migrations, retained real strength and resonance in the mores of modern Canada.11 In demographic terms, if we accept the traditional meaning of diaspora as the movement of people, then the English, who settled all over the



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world, were the most diasporic of all Europeans. While measuring the birthplaces of immigrants in censuses provides us with basic data, the larger ethnic group (those of a shared national descent) is much more slippery. Some censuses, such as the Canadian ones of the nineteenth century, also counted the population by parental birthplaces, allowing for a snapshot of larger groups by national origins. In such cases, the wider ethnic communities were three and four times larger than those of the first generation of settlers. In Canada, some 6.5 million people listed their ethnic origins as English, the largest ancestry group from the British Isles.12 Origins surveys in the US recently showed that while 50 million and 36 million Americans of a total of 307 million identified as German and Irish (the top-ranked countries), England still elicited nearly 28 million.13 Pastoralists were important for the colonies, particularly in earlier periods, but most nineteenth-century emigrants from Britain and Ireland went to towns and cities. As with Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester, American and Australasian cities developed many of the cleavages of the homeland, although the sharp elevation of class difference was less pronounced and of course was not marked by the existence of aristocracy. But we find considerable degrees of sectarian animosity as nativist and immigrant Protestants lined up against Catholic newcomers, especially the Irish, who themselves were capable of redoubtable acts of both defensive and offensive aggression. British immigrants included arrivals from Ulster, Wales, Scotland and England who carried fierce anti-Catholicism with them.14 Indeed, uncompromising Protestantism and innate anti-Catholicism connected more of these colonial peoples than it separated. The characteristics of those leaving Britain were reflective of the nature of the homeland economy. England, Scotland and Wales were producing surpluses of skilled men while replacing some handicraft workers with machines. In 1851, nearly three-quarters of British immigrants into the USA had prior experience of working in industrial trades before disembarking. Moreover, most of the people we are describing were English.15 Such migrants unsurprisingly took up settlement in the most industrial part of America. Around 20 per cent settled in New England and a further 50 per cent in New York and Pennsylvania.16 English industrial migration also showed strong regional origins. Numbers from Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the industrial Midlands, are particularly pronounced, though the sheer size of London meant it, too, was a major sender of emigrants to the US. Cotton, wool and silk workers headed for the American NorthEast, where the bulk of the textile trade was under rapid development in the mid-nineteenth century. Equally, many of those flowing into the same region were workers from dying trades, such as handloom weavers, who presumably went to the US in hope rather than expectation. They certainly

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featured quite prominently in the lists of people receiving poor relief from ethnic associations, such as Philadelphia’s Sons of St George established in the 1770s for precisely this purpose.17 The work of charitable societies certainly shows how the English immigrant community did not have it all their own way. There was, from the mid-eighteenth century, a clear recognition that those arriving on the wharves of American ports included poor and folk in need of help. Equally, the established working classes in the US, like their homeland counterparts, could slide into poverty when times were difficult. True, the English were, as a group, better off than any settling group. However, poverty and alienation from an industrialising country were greater than might be expected of a group with shared roots with the Americans. At any rate, these factors contributed to high return emigration rates. Few groups returned home more than the English.18 Even the most optimistic accounts, notably Erickson’s, show that the normal life of an English immigrant included disappointment and anxiety.19 Some English emigrants warned families against emigration because labour protection was so weak. In response, many English certainly remained stalwart trade unionists after migration to the US, while others simply treated the US as part of a flexible labour market around which they freely migrated. Miners, engineers, sailors and others numbering thousands travelled back and forth across the Atlantic and further afield.20 The Dillingham Commission reported that in 1899 and 1910 only the more numerous Italians had travelled to and from the US more times than the English-born.21 Settlers further afield also sometimes faced disappointments. For instance, the overstocking of New Zealand mines with English workers in 1875 meant that many who made the longest migratory journey were met by an absence of work.22 Richard Hill’s significant study of the colonial police in New Zealand demonstrated the extent of disaffection among those alienated and far from home.23 Miles Fairburn’s highly original social scientific study of colonial society in nineteenth-century New Zealand argued strongly for the lack of community bonds and the ennui and atomisation of wandering migrants in Britain’s newest colony, even though some have challenged this view.24 As Amy Lloyd has shown, some in Canada sustained hostility towards the haughty, complaining English, when a small war of words was fought out in the press.25 The language was redolent of the Australasian characterisation of the ‘whinging Pom’, who has become a catch-all for the immigrant from England who moans about the new country in any of its facets. In both cases, the English showed some incapacity for settling in. Some, at least, lived unhappily between worlds: alienated by class-bound England and disappointed by the earthy, more basic colonies.



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Yet, of those who left England, the majority did not return home. Moreover, in 1910 each of the Australasian colonies was still very British and Irish. In New Zealand, one-quarter of the population had been born in the United Kingdom. In Australia, the figure was a little under one-fifth. In Canada, in 1911, the British-born accounted for 7.3 per cent of the total, though none of these figures includes those of British and Irish descent, which would expand each of them very significantly. These three main colonies of settlement – Australia, New Zealand and Canada – were, notwithstanding the importance of French culture in Canada, and indigenous cultures, still very English in sentiment and initiative. Loyal to the monarch, committed to the defence of the empire, willing participants in England’s wars until well into the twentieth century, and strongly favouring British and Irish immigration, it would be after the Great War before new-nation nationalism had taken over the dominant strains of homeland identity. If anything, the patterns of migration after federation (in 1867 for Canada and 1901 for Australasia) enforced the importance of British interests. Just when these new nations emerged, reliance on British trade links grew and London control of news culture hardened. Belich writes of ‘recolonization’, with quicker transportation and refrigeration, tightening, not loosening, the connection to the old land; while Potter has described London’s monopoly on media knowledge just as the colonies became Dominions.26 Migration was certainly fundamental to the character of the colonies in the nineteenth century; for decades after, British and Irish flows would consolidate the old-world importance. Looking more broadly, we can see that, apart from with the USA, the English were dominant all over the English-speaking world. The 1901 census of the British Empire shows that over one million English-born emigrants, imperial servants and military were living across the empire and colonies. When added to nearly 850,000 English-born in the United States, 1.9 million were located in the main territories of the Anglo-world. In addition, a few thousands were found in minor colonies in the Caribbean, South America and the oceanic islands. Meanwhile the English-born and wider British-born populations in the US were dwarfed by the number of Irish-born, as we see in Table 4.1. The English otherwise were dominant everywhere: in all the colonies of settlement and in commercial entrepôts like Hong Kong. Below the level of the nation or territory, other patterns emerged. The English were proportionately more important in South Australia and Tasmania, where they outnumbered the Irish three-fold, than in the other Australasian territories, including New Zealand, where the proportion was more like two to one. The census remarked on the rapid rise of urban

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british and irish diasporas Table 4.1  The English-, Scots- and Irish-born population of the main territories of the British Empire in 1901 and the United States in 1900 England & Wales

English-born Scots-born 316,838 Irish-born 426,585 Hong Kong English-born 1,305 Scots-born 375 Irish-born 110

Scotland Ireland 134,023 205,064

South Australia English-born 38,654 Scots-born 6,965 Irish-born 11,243

Ceylon

77,441 9,325 9,682

4,520 772 451

Cape Colony

Natal

Orange River

Canada

63,449 15,709 8,605

25,891 8,704 2,229

13,692 3,095 1,703

203,803 83,631 101,629

NSW

Victoria

Queensland

129,739 80,717 59,945

117,708 35,751 61,512

68,580 19,934 37,636

Newfound-land NZ English-born 1,083 Scots-born 324 Irish-born 545

76,977 30,101

India Empire

113,348 47,858 43,524

Western United Australia Tasmania States 26,285 5,400 9,862

12,942 2,986 3,887

GRAND TOTAL

840,513 1,949,953 233,524 555,070 1,615,439 2,336,976

Source: Census on the British Empire, 1901, Report with Summary […] (London, 1906), Table 7, pp. 54–63; Abstract of the 12th Census of the United States, 3rd edn (Washington, 1904), Table 8, p. 8.

centres such as Melbourne and Sydney, where the English were strongly represented. In other fast-growing centres, such as Montreal, French roots meant the English were not so strongly present.27 As Table 4.1 shows, the Irish-born were more numerous than the English in the United States. However, the English were more numerous than the Irish and all other groups from the British Isles in all other English-speaking colonies and major imperial possessions. The table points to a reversal, in the US, of the typical homeland imbalances, in which the English were dominant. In the US, the Irish superiority in numbers could make for some interesting tensions, with greater Irish assertiveness than was possible



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elsewhere.28 While, even for the English, the number of those going to the US was staggering, they were matched and exceeded in the middle and later decades of the century by emigrants from Germany and other European countries. By then, the English were less important to the US population. In Southern Africa, the figures shown in Table 4.1 do not include the larger ethnic group identified with each of the homeland countries. In Natal, for example, the figure for the English-born is 25,891, with over 50,000 in total identified as English in a broader sense, that is, by descent.29 Places brought informally under British purview also attracted many English. Even where there was not huge migration, enough English people migrated to ensure the circuits of empire continued to operate in this way. Argentina was perhaps the most significant example, in terms of population flows from England, outside of the colonies themselves.30 English administrators, trading companies, banks, industrial manufacturers and investors invested finances and positioned representatives in most Asian city-states of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Malacca. The number of people was not huge, but their effect certainly was. Major companies had outposts in these places: enough to foster branches of gentleman’s clubs, sporting grounds, cricket and football matches, pyjama parties, and major dinners and civic events for ambassadors, viceroys, governor and monarchy. Public schools were legion across the world, developing among the colonial English from New Zealand to Kenya, as much as in Kent.31 Interestingly, specific societies also promoted the teaching of patriotism (albeit not influentially). The Royal Society of St George in Palmerston had, in its ‘primary objects’, ‘to further the direct and systematic teaching of Patriotism in schools of every grade’.32 Within the colonies and Dominions, English settlement varied. English people were, for example, more important in the migration flows to New Zealand than in Canada or Australia. As Brad Patterson states: ‘That English culture was New Zealand’s foundational culture is beyond question.’33 In many ways, New Zealand, the last of Britain’s colonies of settlement, was also the most English. Settlers arriving there from England, between 1800 and 1945, only once fell below half of all British and Irish immigrants (46.6 per cent, 1853–70). In the earliest phases, they corresponded to 62 per cent; between 1891 and 1945, their share was over 60 per cent.34 These numbers were even heavier in some settlement areas, such as Wellington, Nelson and, later, Canterbury. The importance of English streams was already an established truth by 1918, when new waves of British emigrants left for the colonies under the terms of the Empire Settlement Act. In this period, however, no distinction is made between the English and British. Between 1935 and 1938, 82 per cent of 125,000

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British emigrants went to the colonies.35 In the 1930s and 1940s, excepting the war years, rates of migration to the US were between 15,000 and 25,000 per annum.36 Yet, while English, Scots and Welsh emigrants overwhelmingly chose the familiar Anglo-cultures of their former colonies, not all did so. Outside the former territories of Britain, Argentina was a major recipient. Thousands went to a place that was, in the nineteenth century, an informal part of the empire, so strongly linked to the City, supported by large-scale British inward investment and British food markets, that by the 1930s up to 60,000 were found there. These were not only English and Welsh (with the latter prominent in Patagonia), but also Scots.37 Englishness was a hook used by certain regressive colonies to appeal to potential immigrants who lamented the decline of older ways of life at home. Throughout the twentieth century, when asked where they wanted to emigrate to, English folk still gave preference to the familiar ex-colonial destinations.38 In this period, though, a significant number went to African colonies, such as Rhodesia, where a backward-looking, racial monoculture of Englishness was a key sales pitch to potential immigrants.39 Before the Second World War, most settlers in Australia were from Britain and Ireland. This changed rapidly after the peace, with more than 228,000 Italians, nearly 180,000 Germans and Dutch, and almost 50,000 settlers from Yugoslavia. ‘White Australia’ was abandoned in 1978, and this saw Asian numbers climb. The question is: what was the effect of this on the nation’s once-dominant Anglo-culture as the population diversified?40 Until the 1970s, Australia and New Zealand continued to be important recipients of the English. Figures are difficult to compare since different ministries and agencies collected data using varying methods over different periods. In addition to North American and Australian flows, there also were significant migrations to African colonies, or former colonies, such as Rhodesia and South Africa, with smaller flows to Hong Kong, India and South America.41 Between the Second World War and the mid-1970s, British immigrants dominated flows to New Zealand, with the farthest former colony showing strong attractive powers. In 1976, 300,000 (10 per cent of the total) persons in New Zealand were from the UK, and among this group the English were still dominant. While this reflects England’s greater size, it also shows how certain immigration schemes favoured them. However, the overall assessment is that the Irish and Scots were proportionately more numerous than were the English.42 However, a diaspora requires more than migration. Their cultural and ethnic traces must remain strong if a diaspora is to be ascribed to them. In all places of settlement described in this section (albeit to varying degrees) Englishness was deeply rooted in systems of government and



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schooling, religion and pastime, values and ideas; and in each of them accoutrements of Englishness culture could be noted. It is true, however, that the idea of a homeland reduced to, or defined by, a moment or movement of political struggle was less apparent. English people evoked 1066, Magna Carta or great naval victories in defence of the island nation. However, England was not Scotland, Ireland or Wales. There was no struggle, no external other: not since the Normans, at least. Indeed, we can deduce the English were the other to everyone else, certainly in the empire and colonies of settlement. At the same time, this does downplay other forms of (non-nationalism, non-ethnic) struggle that informed English identity. One of those was the utopian struggle against class oppression at home: Levellers, Chartists and trade unionists evoked the nation in their claims to citizenship or economic advancement. The idea of searching amid the gloom of frightening social and economic change shaped many ordinary lives in key moments such as during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. Some of the resulting values and desires were taken with emigrants. Capital, class and the utopian diaspora? During the nineteenth century, English identity became increasingly tied to the prestige of a growing empire. However, its riches were unevenly spread. The empire was, for centuries, a free trade zone, in the sense that the producers could theoretically move goods unhindered, even if most production occurred in Britain and its emerging white, European colonies of settlement. There also was an empire of expropriation, where the raw materials and riches of indigenous peoples were consumed and transformed by British industries and markets. Imperial infrastructure, systems of governance and military placement each contributed significantly to the fact that the English far outnumbered all other UK or Irish nations beyond the colonies, in the non-settlement territories of empire, such as India, Hong Kong and the like. Industrialisation featured prominently in the lives of English folk in the nineteenth century, and industrial workers, as well as those dispossessed by industrialism, formed an important element of the waves of migrants travelling to the United States and colonies. Most of these migrants were urban workers and farmers; labourers on farms or in towns became more important as the century progressed. The professions were well represented; New World bureaucracies were staffed by many white-collar workers from the old land; capital and capitalists, and larger farmers, also sought their fortunes beyond British and Irish shores. Anglicanism, and

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Catholicism, provided opportunities for thousands of English and Irish immigrants.43 America and the colonies were highly attractive to a wide range of English society; however, for workers there was an at times utopian impetus to seek out higher wages, better labour relations and a much higher standard of living. Indeed, exile to America features prominently in British labour history, where historians have argued that migration was, to some workers, a rejection of old-world class verities. For others, exile was the alternative to prison or the gallows. The struggle to maintain craft independence, to achieve freedom of speech and an unfettered press, and struggles against manufacturers and a repressive state, brought class imperatives heavily into the national identity of many Englishmen and women. Such narratives gained traction with the flow of trade union leaders, Chartists, handloom weavers, and many others driven out by risk, uncertainty or desperation. In the context of rapid economic and social change, the US (and other colonies) could embody a utopian ideal that fitted well within the narrative of the ‘free-born Englishman’. The US also produced commentators who fed these illusions of idealism. Many such writers and journalists, in the early nineteenth century, made unfavourable comparisons between Britain and America. Hezekiah Niles, whose Baltimore-based Niles’ Weekly Register was an opinion-forming paper in the early decades of the nineteenth century, regularly compared the grim conditions of labour and life in Britain with superior happiness of workers in the United States. In June 1829, he carried clippings from London’s Morning Chronicle which denoted the pauperised condition of the weavers of London and Manchester, who were said to be ‘a mass of hideous poverty … [that was] enough to sicken the heart.’ In the north, the replacement of handicrafts by mechanised processes was exacerbated by ‘the swarms of Irish linen and stuff weavers, who crowd all our manufacturing towns’.44 Niles was playing to populism, since the workers at the bottom of the pile were certainly no better off in the US, since the Poor Law system in Britain protected them at least to some degree. Many emigrants, regardless of their social status when they left, achieved better lives; others found the US in particular, but also some of the colonies, trying, and experienced harsh conditions, especially in times of economic depression. Rapid labour unionisation in Australia, the ‘workingman’s paradise’, from the 1880s, provided a case in point. Migration was, certainly in the 1840s and perhaps much later, partly fired by the quest to found a utopian diaspora. Equally, poor English handloom weavers, who flocked to mid-nineteenth-century America, only to find their skills no less redundant there than at home, were similar contributors to the idea of a diaspora of the technologically displaced. They stood alongside Chartists,



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persecuted trade unionists and machine-based cotton workers who found labour conditions harsh in the mill towns of New England; the workers in antiquated trades felt themselves adrift from societies at home and abroad. They certainly had reason to fall on the mercy of the English charities, named for St George, Albion or England, which became common in big American cities and Canadian centres. It is in fact a very questionable approach to label entire national groups as monolithic diasporas, just as it is difficult to exclude the poor English helped out by St George’s societies and other charities just because Anglo-elites founded universities, ran businesses or practised professions.45 British workers were sought after in early phases of industrial development. For example, they pioneered the development of cotton, wool and silk mills in the American North-East. In Lawrence and Lowell, both in Massachusetts, the initial establishment of mills once again relied on the English: engineers, factory managers, overseers and regular workers all were drawn from Lancashire and Yorkshire.46 Large-scale transfers also occurred, for example when shifting silk manufacturing from Cheshire and Warwickshire to New Jersey.47 Generally, English workers in the US found conditions were poor and that employers were hostile towards unionism. English spinners tried to establish unions in the 1840s and 1850s, and continued to support their old communities in Lancashire, not least by contributing to strike funds, also in the 1850s.48 This communicating to and fro is what the key scholar of these workers called ‘the transnational culture of Lancashire’.49 In the wider British Empire, indicators of class position, such as domestic service, were less common than at home. In 1901, 1.9 per cent of males and 10.6 per cent of females in England were in domestic service. One-third fewer were similarly engaged in Australia (1.2 per cent of males, 6.3 per cent of females), and only a quarter as many men (0.5 per cent) and a little over half as many females (5.6 per cent) were domestics in New Zealand. Lesser class hierarchies, larger families (meaning more children to put to work in their own domestic settings) and greater numbers of solid, but not rich, families contributed to these clear differences.50 Industrial work was less common in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa than it was in England and Scotland, though mining was similarly important. Textile work was three to four times more common in England and Scotland than anywhere else in the empire. However, agricultural work was much more important for labour in the colonies than at home.51 If this brief survey creates the impression of clear differences between the colonies and home countries with respect to many trades and occupations, the way English folk came together once they had left the homeland was, in many ways, much more ‘English’ than it was at home. While we

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must not overestimate the participation of any working-class group in a particular form of social activity, whether society membership, sports or church-going, scholars have under-emphasised the importance of a distinctive Englishness in, for example, the US. As Lamontagne argues in a recent study on Lancashire workers in late nineteenth-century Falls River, Massachusetts, ‘English culture and “Englishness” were understood as being particularly distinctive … and remained a touchstone for the descendants of these immigrants’.52 Such a presence supports the idea, which aligns with more general observations about how diasporas function, that being English was more important overseas than at home. Indeed, as we shall see in the next section, being English took on a new importance precisely because England had been left behind. Indeed, in one of the commonest expressions of shared identity, English folk, like so many other Europeans, clubbed together for convivial and protective purposes. The extent of immigrant collectivism was remarkable. English associations Associational culture is a rich facet of life among immigrants to this day, and the English are no exception. English clubs and societies which provided cultural and financial support for migrants were widely prevalent in all territories of settlement.53 Names such as the Sons of St George or the Albion Society captured their English heart, even though they comprised both English-born members and those of sometimes distant English descent. National societies sprung to life very early in terms of the stages of colonial migration,54 with Charleston’s St George’s Society, formed in 1733 the first. New York (1770) and Philadelphia (1772) followed suit. Canada’s St George’s societies first appeared from the 1830s.55 Membership was normally restricted to those born in England or their descendants, though there was some inclusion of the numerically weaker Welsh.56 Welshmen were eligible in Baltimore, which formed its society in the 1850s.57 From inception, these early societies were all elite charities, which cared for fellow countrymen and women in distress.58 While North American examples were legion, neither were they in short supply in locations with only small numbers of English migrants, such as Argentina, where there was an English Literary Society.59 While the seaboard cities of the American colonies first planted English associations, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed a huge efflorescence in activities as colonisation gathered pace. By the 1850s, the St George’s Society tradition had spread across the Midwest and South; by the 1880s,



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it had reached the Rockies and the West coast.60 Similarly, in the Australasian colonies, the tradition first was established from the 1840s, in Melbourne.61 By the Edwardian period, there were St George’s societies from Perth in the west, to Sydney, New South Wales and Launceston in Tasmania. The Royal Society of St George, founded to unify the disparate groupings dedicated to celebrating Englishness, opened branches all over the world, across all British possessions in Africa, Asia and the Pacific and India.62 .Meanwhile, the growth of English societies in South Africa was shaped primarily by tensions with the larger Afrikaner population. Lambert has done much to recognise the flowering of various societies and associations in South Africa as focal points for expressing British identity in an increasingly hostile environment. Although not as numerous as in other Dominions, St George’s societies and the Sons of England thus were more important in South Africa.63 Such societies played no role in early colonial New Zealand. To explain this, Fairburn would stress the lack of a proper social fabric for the thousands of itinerant agricultural workers, such as sheepshearers.64 Nevertheless, Auckland had some celebratory events for the English patron saint in the 1850s and 1860s.65 It was only settled from the mid-nineteenth century, and migrants who arrived there tended to be better off in socio-economic terms than those migrating to other parts of the world. More recent work by Bueltmann has shifted this emphasis, stressing that, amid a fast-developing social state and democratic institutions, friendly society culture was less necessary, with the result that ethnic organisations in New Zealand focused on sports and sociability.66 New Zealand’s first branch of the Royal Society of St George did not open until 1936, when Auckland established one. Wellington followed suit one year later, and Palmerston North followed suit in 1951.67 It is an interesting feature of the English migrations of the modern period that county associations were formed by emigrants from several counties, but not all. Yorkshire and Lancashire societies were especially noteworthy. Folk from Dorset, Kent, Northumberland and Durham made similar efforts.68 English county associations were similarly organised by the better-off migrants. They were framed by county references, such as local foodstuffs, literature from the home county, lectures and talks of the land of their births, and so on. However, not every county demonstrated such strong regional or national identity in these New World settings. Why was this? Partly, it was a result of a lack of strong county identities in most parts of England. An absence of significant emigrants from certain counties also played an important part. Certainly, James Watson, who has written about Yorkshire societies in New Zealand, sees the density of county settlers as crucial.69 Similarly, Adelaide, between the 1850s and 1880s, attracted large waves of homogeneous, micro-local Cornish folk,

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who established long-living cultural institutions.70 In Upper Peninsula, Michigan, one can, today, buy a Cornish pasty, echoing the mining heritage that brought these south-westerners to the region.71 There is considerable debate in regional history circles about the extent to which counties are acceptable units for measuring identity below the national level.72 Yorkshire, for example, was a large and varied county stretched across three ridings, and its physical and psychological identity stretched from the Trent to the wild North Yorkshire Moors.73 The territory and the people were as varied as any county in England: industrial Sheffield and Rotherham, the commercial and banking centre of Leeds, the mills around Bradford, Huddersfield and up the Pennines towards Lancashire. The fat farming lands of the Vale of York, and the harsher sheep country of the Dales and high Pennines, abutting County Durham and Westmorland – in more than one sense, there existed many Yorkshires. However, migration flattened such distinctions, and focused the minds on particular markers of culture: Yorkshire pudding, roast beef, tea, and many other things.74 Whether Yorkshire folk or English men and women, forms of celebration were similar. Dinners, feasting, toasts and merrymaking – all embroidered with ritual form and etiquette – were fundamental outward expressions of civic, ethnic and group identity by English societies. For civic identity, in which immigrants framed their contribution to new societies in expressions of sober and intelligent trustworthiness, is an often overlooked function of the active diaspora, regardless of national origin. In this regard, the English were no different from a plethora of other membership associations: in the club world of New York as much as small-town Kingston, Ontario, dinners were key milestones in the annual events calendar of societies, serving to bring together members and guests for a common activity. St George’s Day dinners were usually the most elaborate annual gatherings, offering an important show of unity – and one not only between members sitting at the dinner table, but also with other societies both nationally and transnationally. Messages were received from the same brethren to which they had been sent. Typical were those from ‘one hundred jolly Englishmen’ in Guelph and the ‘300 strong’ Oswego St George’s Society, both of which groups sent ‘fraternal greetings’ and hopes for ‘good health’ to their ‘brethren in Kingston’.75 But gatherings in the English saint’s name were not all about expressing identity. Dinners were often attended by civic dignitaries from beyond a society’s own ranks and offered an opportunity to raise additional funds for charitable good works. Wellington’s Yorkshire Society was established in 1895, and was marked with a traditional dinner of ‘sheep’s trotters, stewed tripe and onions’ and



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Yorkshire pudding. ‘The object of the society was to promote social feeling among Yorkshiremen, to aid in charitable work, and … to read and receive papers upon the antiquity of the county.’76 This harmless expression of county identity was, of course, closely aligned with wider English variants: after all, Yorkshiremen were not the only English folk who ate roast beef. Moreover, Yorkshire folk were indistinguishable from other countrymen in celebrating aspects of identity that were less innocent than reciting regional poetry or quaffing local ales. We explore this aspect now. The Anglo-world and its critics The work of English associations reflected these changes, commemorating the Queen’s anniversaries with growing gusto, alongside remembering military victories such as the 100th anniversary of Trafalgar in 1905.77 In 1901, there were large-scale celebrations of the 1000th anniversary of ‘England’s darling’, King Alfred, the monarch who arrested Norse power in England.78 Meanwhile, the colonies also took on the quest to mark Empire Day, a project driven by the energies of Lord Meath.79 The Australian branches of the Royal Society of St George demonstrated this patriotic intent in November 1904 by asking the Australian prime minister to adopt the reigning monarch’s birthday as Empire Day.80 Magna Charta day also entered the St George’s Society calendar and was sponsored, in the 1920s, by the Magna Charta Day Association.81 Described as ‘an English-speaking Union’, the Association convinced newspapers in diverse places of marking the shared liberties enshrined at Runnymede in 1215.82 Beyond this, the Royal Society of St George, for example, promoted England’s identity in ways that were political as well as cultural. This occurred especially from the 1890s, with Anglo-American rapprochement. The fierce reaction against British aggrandisement, especially manifest in almost total European disdain for the Southern African War (1899–1902), further strengthened English-speaking connectivity.83 This was the period when, in response to what was a civil war in the British World (with participants from every colony), new patriotic societies were founded, such as the Canadian Club, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire, and the Victoria League: the last two formed by and for women. In the post-Boer War period, the National Society of Magna Charta Dames and Barons, and the Ulster League of America (which mixed fundraising for the Ulster Volunteer Force with pro-imperial rhetoric) were among many other organisations that pursued what today political scientists call ‘soft power’.

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While elite networking is the subject of growing scholarly attention, contributions by activists (citizen diplomats) and the organisations and associations they formed have been subject to much less historical inquiry. The many individuals who went persistently about the business of forming societies and seeking influence have been much less heavily drawn.84 Scholars such as Peter Clarke note that pre-Churchillian interest in the ideas of the English-speaking peoples came at first from the left of politics.85 What emerged in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, and in the framework on British imperialism and America’s growing external presence, was a more politically conservative and intellectually imperialist activism from within the middle classes – not in Britain so much as in the wider Anglo-world. Monarchical jubilees, notably the huge global ensemble of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897,86 and the Boer War prompted many ethnic organisations to declare their public support for a common peoplehood of English or British stock. For Britons, markers of togetherness often drew on deeply rooted English, even Anglo-Saxon, traditions, such as language, notions of democracy and the sovereign parliament tradition; great symbols, such as the Magna Charta, became foci. As well as states, lesser individuals also evoked modern communication systems and fast transport to foster an Anglo-world alliance. The Canadian-American of English and Scottish stock, James Hamilton, met with his far-flung counterpart, the British-Australian doctor, James Barrett, in the International Magna Charta Day Association, an organisation which Hamilton had founded in 1907.87 Barrett joined virtually every other Anglo-Saxon association too, including the EnglishSpeaking Union, which was foregrounded by Walter Besant’s Atlantic Union, which promoted Anglo-American amity through associational formation.88 Besant himself put it more grandiloquently, hoping for ‘a great solid confederacy between the English-speaking races’.89 In turn, he was a regular communicator with Howard Ruff, co-founder of the Royal Society of St George. The English-Speaking Union then brought together Evelyn Wrench, Harry Brittain and many politicians whom they sought to influence in the direction of a common cultural and political sphere; Brittain then went on to found the Pilgrim Society, which was dedicated to peace between the UK and USA.90 Thus, below the level of diplomatic activity there was a world of practical connection penetrating component societies and functioning independently of politicians and states. These groups and their ideas, which underpinned popular notions of what we today call the ‘special relationship’, and the wide global reach of Britain and then the US, were a key component of the English diaspora. Anglo-Saxon associationalism, with its emphasis on ‘race’ superiority and imperial domination, received a strong counterblast in emergent Irish



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nationalism, especially in the US. The Irish in Boston, in 1887, provided a spectacular case, as thousands sought to scupper celebrations for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee by surrounding a public hall to prevent the banquet.91 This, in turn, fired the English and Anglo-Americans to revive the BritishAmerican Association (BAA).92 The BAA spread quickly in the North-East of the country, and into the Mid-West.93 At Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations of 1897, Irish Catholic priests once more preached against British power.94 A few years later, both in Ireland and the diaspora, nationalist sympathies evoked a degree of anti-imperial feeling and in South Africa, during the Second Anglo-Boer War, where the Dutch settlers directly resisted the empire, there also was profound hostility. The Irish-American press was powerful, persistent and loud. Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World and Industrial Liberator, America’s most prominent Irish nationalist newspaper, regularly attacked England’s (that is to say, Britain’s) Irish policies. Patriotic gatherings of Englishmen on St George’s Day were obvious targets for nationalist ire. In 1898, the paper lambasted the ‘Anglomaniacs’, men ‘born on American soil’ who ‘are more English than the English themselves’, who criticise all things American.95 The warmth of transatlantic relations clearly irked a newspaper dedicated to removing the British from Ireland, hopefully with American help. The same theme was picked up in animated fashion again in 1899 when the newspaper attacked the British, what it dubbed the pro-British administration in Washington, Protestant ministers and the St George’s Society of New York under the heading ‘Anglo-Saxons to Rule the Earth’.96 The words sit easily alongside the preferred Germanic metaphor of the new Society of St George in Salisbury, where, in 1900, during the Boer War, the empire was described as a ‘mighty Zollverein of the Anglo-Saxon race’.97 Indeed, the War fired new levels of imperial patriotism with the English diaspora, not one simply derived from the motherland, but also articulated by colonials in Australia and New Zealand, as part of what Schreuder and Ward call ‘race patriotism’,98 the form of identity that had supplanted general notions of English liberties as cornerstones for emerging or new nations. Political scientist David Haglund has shown that, in the USA, prior to and during the First World War, both German and Irish ethnic groups worked against British national interests, at least seeking to weaken AngloAmerican relations. An editorial in the Irish-American Chicago Citizen in 1908 was not uncommon: ‘There is not an Irishman in America today, in whose veins good red blood is flowing, who would not rejoice to hear that a German army was marching in triumph across England from Yarmouth to Milford Haven.’99 Putting aside the shaky geography on display here (Milford Haven is in Wales), the editor captured, admittedly in lurid

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terms, what many Irishmen in the United States wished for. If the pre-war mood was one of growing anti-Englishness, the war itself intensified ethnic enmity manifold. Indeed, some American-Irish and ethnic Germans also sought US military support against the English; while English knowledge of these moves, according to Haglund, awakened the English sense of ethnicity.100 Pastime, folk culture and St George Some forms of English identity evinced in the diaspora were more benign. English culture, like all cultures, takes on open public form, whether through pastimes, festivals or days of remembrance. But it also operated at a more ingrained level. Englishness might encompass discussions of Anglican religion or Trafalgar Day, but it also embraced values which the people of England would like to believe are specific to their identity: ‘fair play’ or democracy, as evinced in the acceptability of drawing a cricket match, to the idea of Magna Charta as the wellspring of Anglo-world democracy. Culture transfer and adoption can mean that the most English of customs or practices become so deeply attached to new societies that these societies claim them for their own. Beer is a perfect example of this, since it lubricates all instances of other culture interchange. Let us consider the New Zealand example, so brilliantly evoked by historian Greg Ryan.101 By the early 1860s, when the colony was still very young, New Zealand was importing over one million gallons of beer per year. By 1864, this amounted to 6.3 gallons per person per year. The English were not the only beer drinkers, even if Shakespeare felt they could drink more of it than most. As Iago, the Spaniard, observed in Othello: ‘I learned it in England, where indeed, they are most potent at potting; your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander—Drink ho!—are nothing to your English.’102 Certainly the English, Scots and others applied themselves to indigenous brewing, as Shakespeare had it spot on. More than one hundred brewers existed at one time or another (though not all at once) in New Zealand’s colonial period. Ryan shows how the culture of drinking beer was brought in by immigrants, among whom the English were most numerous; was maintained on ships, which supplied passengers with liberal quantities of beer during the crossing; and, importantly, was no more than a continuation of working-class life back home, where the tavern and pub were centrepieces of everyday pastime culture. Just as surely as English beer imports, and English beer manufacturers setting up in New Zealand, were at the heart of New Zealand’s culture of heavy beer-drinking,



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so too indigenous production rose to reduce and replace direct English importation. Major brewers from the 1850s to the 1900s engaged English brewers and brew-masters, advertising the fact as a kite-mark of quality. Additionally, as in other fields, New Zealand brewers were also known to head to England to learn more about their craft.103 Modest amounts of alcohol flowed in the name of St George, whose name was understandably usually associated with English societies. George was, however, used in dramatic and literary allusions too; but he was not alone. Robin Hood and Maid Marian were regularly deployed icons of England, along with Little John and Morris Dancers. In the period before the Great War, for instance, the New Zealand papers printed pieces reflecting on English folk culture, notably the story of Robin Hood, which ‘touches every Englishman’s heart’.104 Historical characters, such as Good Queen Bess (Elizabeth I) and Sir Francis Drake, were often set among the folk legends within the pastime cultures of Englishmen abroad. St George’s societies were not, overall, part of deep or rich folk culture. Urbanisation, industrialism and the rise of Protestantism contributed in unequal shares to the decline of essentially medieval folk culture. ‘Merrie England’ rose, but it also declined, as Hutton’s classic study showed.105 Scholars of ethnicity and nationalism have generally been sceptical about the importance of folk customs in English cultural life. Certainly, Robert Tombs has little truck with the idea of this customary culture as a plank of English national identity. Such ‘“folk culture”’, he writes, was ‘pallid by comparison with the ebullient and assertive popular nationalism of Hungarian, Czech, Finnish and Russian art and music’.106 Tombs accepts that this applied best to the English in England, for they had no reason to pronounce on their identity. But for those abroad (echoing Seeley) components of identity were acutely needed.107 As with French and German cultures, England’s variety was cosmopolitan and commercial. It was, Tombs says, a world-culture. Certainly, several of England’s most important cultural figures (e.g. William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens) were global cultural icons, whose texts were owned by humanity, rather than just the English. While Tombs is broadly correct, it is also true that the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a folk revival in England too. Moreover, the revival of interest in figures and legends, such as King Arthur and Robin Hood, also revealed something interesting about the class binary referred to in a previous section. Broadly speaking, it has been argued, the Arthurian myth excited the interests of scholars, poets and artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites; while Robin Hood and his band of class warriors, robbing the rich to pay the poor, piqued the interests of the working class, and their writers and poets.108

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Versions of these myths and legends spread to the colonies and the United States. The tradition of celebrating May Day in an English way first emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, often out of communities, such as Conway, western Massachusetts, founded by the English and named for an English officer of the colonial army.109 These examples were not marked by ideas of class distinction. Indeed, they focused on a variety of Englishness with an ancient, folk connotation: a ‘Merrie England’ factor with roots in medieval rituals, such as parading the boar’s head (which was said to date to Oxford in the Middle Ages) and plays and pageants about history. Equally, the permeability of history and culture meant that, in the 1920s, the Wellington Evening Post could report a grand historical pageant in England, in which their country was represented by a Maori maiden, and the other nations similarly characterised by a young woman in native or national costume, while each period of English history was reflected in historical characters such as King Alfred, Henry V, Drake, Collingwood, and so on.110 Individually, the sports, customs and cultures that English migrants took with them around the world capture the connection and the disconnection within transatlantic relationships. Together, but in different ways, they might be taken to endorse American self-perceptions that theirs was a wholly different, a new, world. In the first of these elements, there is the connection: English culture was warmly regarded and much appreciated. Indeed, it was looked up to, and sometimes revered. The utility of Shakespeare is a case in point. As the United States rose to become the key centre of Anglo-world theatre, and with the carriage of Shakespeare around the world, and further with the emergence in Britain of middle-class enjoyment of theatre, Shakespeare could become the presentation of heritage for empire.111 The Bard’s plays became vehicles in which the history of England was presented in simplified, vivid chunks. The reception of English literary traditions in the United States suggested, at once, a stage of cultural development, with English and European cultures being appreciated and consumed, and then supplanted by home-grown variants. Shakespeare theatre waned in popularity in post-1850 America, or else was dumbed down. The literature itself remained universally important, and literary societies and Shakespeare clubs drew in members of all national origins. Shakespeare, the universal bard, was owned not merely by the English. The enormous interest in the 1916 tercentenary of the Bard’s death is a case in point.112 But this is no surprise. In America, there was enormous approval for most good English literature. Later, middle-brow culture, such as Gilbert and Sullivan, and the performances by British actors, such as H. Beerbohm Tree, the greatest Shakespearean of his day, cemented this sort of approval.113



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However, in this manifestation the emphasis is on Americans (and others) inculcated with English culture. The presence of immigrants is no necessary precondition for such occurrences. At the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations in New York in 1916, the performances of the Bard’s plays were interspersed with folk interludes: from all sides, a jocund festival pours into the illuminating space … the folk-festival of Elizabethan England. Simultaneously, in different parts, as a merry rural affair, various popular artists and pastimes begin, and continue together: Morris dancers and pipers, balladists and playactors, folk dancers, fiddlers, clowns, and Punch-and-Judy performers romp …114

Such an admixture of history, popular culture and folk memory typified customary English gatherings. Decades later some of this mélange of offerings still existed in forms of English-style celebration. The reinvention of traditions such as the ‘Boar’s Head’ parade spread to the US and Canada. In 1961, the Milwaukee Sentinel set the parade in its historical context with a flourish: ‘Knights, heralds, and scullions will parade the garlanded “boar’s head”, symbolic of a medieval English pageantry.’ According to the Sentinel, the example at St John’s military academy is ‘unique in North America’, otherwise only observed at Queen’s College, Oxford.115 The limits of folk transmission to the New World There is another interpretation concerning the English diaspora: that is, the way English folk cultures failed to transition into distinctive cultural features of American folk life. In this respect, the consideration is upon an English or European sense of the word ‘folklore’, rather than the American one; one which encompasses not just song and ballad culture, but the broader dimensions of popular culture – what was called ‘popular antiquities’ before, in 1846, William John Thoms coined the word ‘folklore’.116 The alleged lack of transmission of English folk culture to the USA is amply demonstrated in the words of Richard M. Dorson, father of American folklore studies.117 Dorson discusses what he sees as the lack of transfer of English popular cultural traditions – by which he expressly means folk traditions – to the United States. Such non-transmission fitted into an American self-image of a class-less, fluid society, one in which Americans grew afresh from the ‘naked earth’ (his term). Dorson argued that few English folk traditions, other than ballads and a few other songs, were

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left behind by immigrants. Such material was not appropriate in the US. Dorson is worth quoting at length: True, the English and Scottish popular ballads have fared even better across the Atlantic than in their original homeland, while American English has preserved many proverbial expressions of the King’s English. But calendar custom and domestic usage, the heart of England’s folklore, have made little impress on the mobile civilization of the United States, and folk-narrative, a weak point in merry England, has for the most part had to make its own way under the Stars and Stripes.118

Dorson was promoting the concept of America as a cultural melting pot; a nation on a unique path.119 He believed that, since English folklore was only collected consistently in the second half of the nineteenth century by the likes of Cecil Sharp, the originator of the English Folk Music Society, it stood to reason that an American folk culture had already emerged which was different from that of the old country. Sharp was indeed a main player in the English folk scene who also made trips to Canada and the United States, not only collecting ballads in the Appalachians, but also bringing his Morris troupes to perform. An avid collector of ‘antique tunes from the lips of old-fashioned players’,120 Sharp was a typical middleclass reinventor of tradition, in the style of Hobsbawm and Ranger.121 Dorson rejected the cultural continuities which Sharp claimed were extant in the early twentieth century. He also argued that English localism – an important feature of all manner of folk matters, from music to stories of hauntings and the supernatural – did not transpose well onto the fluid American society, which is back to his first point about exceptionalism. Each reason helped to obscure the role of the English immigrant in American life. The exception is the remoter backwoods of the Appalachians, where the English, Scots and Scots-Irish were settled into relatively static communities.122 Cecil Sharp himself went there to collect songs during the Great War and helped spur on the development of folklore studies in the US, inspiring, among others, Dorson himself. Sharp found many songs and ballads which he identified as derived from the old countries. Dorson argues, however, that the traditions found in the backwoods were not typical: None of this typical English folklore took root in the Atlantic seaboard colonies. The popular English phrase ‘custom and usage’ means little or nothing in the United States. These terms imply the inheritance of long-established household and community practices by deeply



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conservative social groups. But life in the colonies did not faithfully emulate and reproduce life in the mother country … A more fluid class structure and a far greater physical mobility altered the character of Englishmen and their descendants in North America.123

Such exceptionalism is not, however, entirely tenable. True, America developed its own working-class popular culture, drawing upon influences (Latin American, African-American and Native American) which were not present in Europe. But the popular culture of England was not so weakly formulated as Dorson claims. Moving beyond folk stories and traditional music, we also find much more Englishness in America. Even the slightly specialist music and stories beloved of Sharp and Dorson were spread more widely than the ‘Hill-Billy’ country of the Upper South. What really happened in America is that successive waves of immigrant cultures transposed themselves onto older cultures to such an extent that, over time, a new American culture had taken shape. Thus, until the 1840s New York musical culture was highly influenced by English musicians, composers and styles. As Germans and Jewish folk began to arrive in large numbers at mid-century, their influence – along with those of the French and Italians – took a greater hold.124 English culture was not absent so much as washed over by waves of new cultures brought in by new immigrants from Europe and elsewhere. Indeed, what emerges from sweeping the press for terms associated with English culture, such as ‘St George’s Society’, ‘Sons of England’, ‘cricket’, or even more obscure terms, such ‘as tiddly-winks’ or ‘egg-rolling’, is a plethora of sports, pastimes and other activities which are resolutely English in origin. It seems that English culture was, for a time, very much alive and well in America. One of the greatest markers of an ongoing English culture in North America emerges in the usage of English folk traditions on May Day each year. During the twentieth century, May Day became most readily associated with labour and trade union parades.125 Prior to that Americans and Canadians began, during the early nineteenth century, to celebrate a quainter, rustic tradition of May Day with galas, fetes and pageants which ran concomitantly with the Labour Day events. As the Labour Day tradition declined the folk dimensions of May Day have continued. The persistence of American folk traditions around May Day has been noted by historians; but the fact they first emerged in consciously English communities has largely been overlooked.126 One feature of May Day, as it was reported in the newspapers, was the widespread and repeated telling of the story of how, in pre-industrial England, May Day saw the emergence of a ritual of celebrating the onset of summer. With folklorists such as Sharp, cultural revival was laced with feelings of race and nationhood. As Vic Gammon

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and others have argued, one of the aims of the early twentieth-century folk dance revival, which Sharp was central to, was to imbue young English people with a pure, physically active and yet morally restrained pastime which chimed with their nationhood and race: something that was natural to them because it was pure and English.127 In North America, the vision of folk dance as a morally and physically uplifting experience was taken on board. Today, May Day ála ye olde England remains popular in small towns and colleges across America.128 The purity of its English roots was celebrated too, but as an historical artefact rather than as ethnic fact. After all, commitment to old lands, quaint and customary cultures, ethnic identifiers such as clubs and churches or language, were closely entwined with the process of migration and settlement, cutting against the grain of the teleology of modernity. When located within a swirling story of overlapping elements – migration, English history, moral and physical improvement, and pastime spectacle – the persistence of May dances, carnival queens and the panoply of seasonal ritual seems logical enough. This is not, however, the end of what was not a static story of migrant transplantation. What is more surprising is what Allison Thompson has described in detail in her study: the still very widespread commitment to May Day festivities among sorority girls and small-town communities in the United States.129 English culture was supported approvingly by the US press. Indeed, there was a craze for it in the early twentieth century, when tensions between the US had given way to a more cooperative spirit. Long historical essays in newspapers, most garnered from the writings of English experts in folklore and music, published in such organs as the Musical Times, provided contextual narratives of the meaning of Sherwood Forest and enlightening reminders of the provenance of Morris-men: the ‘Moorish Men’.130 Perhaps these newspaper stories, which portrayed modern Morris traditions in a wholly positive light, were part of Cecil Sharp’s propaganda machine: some of his many obituaries certainly felt Sharp had a section of the press behind his folk campaigns.131 Furthermore, Sharp had the ear of the government by the time of his death in 1924, having for example successfully campaigned for the introduction of folk dance to the national educational curriculum in 1909.132 Even casual readers of provincial newspapers in the United States could not have failed to see these items of old English culture relived in the towns near them. May Day gradually evolved into an opportunity for juvenile participation; in New York there were processions which borrowed from both English and French May Day lore; in New England there was the hanging of baskets of flowers.133 In a tradition that lives to the present time, it also became an occasion for college graduates to organise grand



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costume dramas.134 Newspaper stories of English May Day traditions in Canada showed that people north of the border were mirroring the Americans’ appreciation of colourful folk pageants and festivals.135 An element of folk revival was grafted onto such events later, with pioneers such as Cecil Sharp and his one-time collaborator and later bitter rival, Mary Neal, the honorary secretary of the Esperance Guild of Morris Dancers. Neal and her team spent four months touring and teaching in 1909 and 1910, encouraging the use of English folk traditions.136 Following Neal’s encouragement, a variety of communities deployed May-poles and organised pageants involving classic figures from English folk stories: Robin Hood, Maid Marian and Little John, who represented different aspects of fertility, according to folklorists.137 In New Zealand, the May dance was well established by the 1880s, as press adverts for social events showed.138 However, the culture of England was hardly built on granite, for these images often were blended with girls in German, Czech or French national dress, just to demonstrate ethnic inclusiveness. But small markers of the clarity of thought of the organisers can be discerned, such as the tradition of children dressed as chimney sweeps, thus showing faithfulness to the English tradition. For ‘[d]uring the second half of the eighteenth century, the chimney-sweepers in England appropriated the first of May for their festivities’, snatching the ‘erstwhile pagan holiday from the milkmaids’.139 Sport was another area of cultural transfer where English traditions were transplanted but did not become mainstream. In short, they can be characterised as experiencing two stages of development: introduction by immigrants; and adoption and absorption by the host, or by other groups. In the later nineteenth century, for instance, Chicago had four cricket teams and regularly scheduled games with teams as far away as Philadelphia. Cricket, rugby, polo and rowing regattas were all part of the immigrant English culture of Argentina.140 The English national cricket team also travelled to America in the 1890s. But today, in the US, it is a game for immigrant Indians or West Indians. What is more interesting to us are the strange sports-cum-pastimes, like Cumberland wrestling and tiddly-winks, which were English popular pastimes which faded fast. By contrast, the Easter tradition of egg-rolling seems to have passed quickly to the American mainstream, so that during the early twentieth century one even saw the tradition played out on the lawns of the White House. While the United States wrestled with its Anglo-inheritance, and replaced many obvious parts of it (not least of all sports) with its own cultural traditions, the process of distancing was slower and less complete in the Southern Hemisphere. At the outset, from the mid-nineteenth century, cricket took on greater and global significance. It was a purely English

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export; it could not be confused as British; cricket captured the mission of the Anglo-Saxon, according to Dean Allen. It was the outward expression of England unsullied by other forces.141 Australia did not abandon cricket for Aussie rules football; instead, its people became better at the sport than their British counterparts. New Zealanders retained cricket and rugby, and became by far the best the world has seen with the oval ball. Indians developed cricket into a national obsession, South Africans and West Indians excelled at one or more imported sports. Indeed, the characteristics of Englishness evinced through cricket and rugby were evident in the colonies of settlement and, in the case of cricket, in the Indian sub-continent too. Today, both games are played at the highest level only by countries that were once part of the British Empire. Argentinian rugby is an exception, but only in so far as the country was an informal branch of the same empire, with many settlers from the British and Irish Isles. The invisible English: the limits of the English diaspora By and large the English rapidly assimilated into host societies that, in many cases, their forebears had formed. If the English were a founding people – and they were – then those who came later freighted with ethnic attributions were in fact defined against the character and culture of the Anglo-world which the English had formed. Such thinking was highly influential among historians of ethnicity, especially in the United States.142 Indeed, R.J.C. Young says that the English share of the 20-odd million who left the British and Irish Isles between 1500 and 1900, and who formed ‘one of the largest diasporas ever known’, has disappeared, rather than being invisible.143 Large numbers have not guaranteed visibility. Indeed, the opposite has been a strong theme among scholars of the English. Canadian historian Arthur R.M. Lower contrasted English immigrants with Irish and Scottish ones, remaking that they were ‘almost without feature and untraceable’;144 in other words, invisible. More recently Pauline Greenhill, also writing of Canada, this time from an anthropological perspective, has acknowledged the low recognition of English ethnicity: ‘lacking a carnivalesque tradition’, she states, ‘they are usually located solely in the domain of power’.145 This invisibility thesis has been applied to the English everywhere in the English-speaking world, and for understandable reasons. As Bruce Elliot posits, in reflections on Lower’s views, ‘the English emigrant experience seemed not to have been punctuated with episodes of historical high drama’, such as the Irish Famine or Scotland’s



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Highland Clearances.146 As we shall see, however, the concept of English invisibility has been challenged by new scholarship, which demonstrates that lack of interest and research may be a more important factor than actual invisibility.147 What happened to the English is a function of contemporary academic construction as much as an easy intermingling with English-speaking host populations. Thus, while Harper and Constantine have written the English into their study of colonial migrations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they say little of their culture,148 a trend also notable in Australian studies of English settlement.149 Hence, Hammerton and Thomson’s path-breaking study of post-war mass emigration from Britain to Australia stresses their invisibility, often using the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’ interchangeably to label the people born in England.150 The same is true of Barber and Watson’s study of the English in post-war Canada.151 Among the few works which specifically examine the Australasian English, Jupp’s general account offers an interesting but superficial exploration, and in any case does not investigate English ethnicity.152 In New Zealand there is no specific study of English ethnic cultures, though the migrations from England are discussed in all general accounts and in Arnold’s classic three-volume micro-history.153 Phillips and Hearn’s recent study of British Isle migration to New Zealand gives recognition to the English as a distinct migrant group; however, the authors’ focus has largely been on establishing a migration profile of the English rather than their ethnic culture – though some suggestions as to English legacies are made.154 Patterson’s wide-ranging overview of English culture in New Zealand is the first such study, and by far the best.155 In the post-war period, the New Zealand government sought to finance large-scale migration. The ‘Ten Pound Poms’ were named after their contribution to a scheme overwhelmingly paid for by the New Zealand taxpayer. David Pearson, one of the foremost historical sociologists of settler society, also has explored the post-war ‘Ten Pound Pom’ generation and those who came after them, drawing on many interviews. Pearson is revealing on why these English emigrants came to New Zealand, but his essay also exposes the absence of Englishness as much as showing its presence. Indeed, this is not really a study of the English in the ethnic sense. While Pearson’s sample of over eighty long interviewsfocuses on the English, it is difficult for him to draw out characteristics that define the group. A certain kind of culture of beer-drinking men enjoying the outdoor life, of organised middle classes, women arranging fundraisers, whist-drives or barbecues. It is unlikely that the Scots and Irish who came to towns such as Masterton in the Wairarapa in the 1950s or the Hutt Valley in the 1970s would have varied from the English in their motivations.

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What this suggests is that, as much as searching for Englishness, we should be searching for other motivations and identities.156 Young’s work helps us with the issue of which attributes to look for in the English.157 For him, the English were not a group that stood out as racially or ethnically distinct – not even in the nineteenth century, when there was a craze for racial hierarchies. Robert Knox’s study of races confirmed what Daniel Defoe had said more than a century earlier: that the English formed a mixed, ‘Mongrel’, nation.158 Young presents the English as a nation of individuals, who, since at least the publication of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help in the late 1850s, stressed the idea of individualism as a credo. For the English, ‘individualism means that they do not easily then form collectivities’.159 Perhaps this cultural trait contributed to the factor of nationalist reticence at home. However, emigration changed the setting and assumptions dramatically. Moving to the colonies, or the US, saw challenges laid down to the idea of the English as a contented, individualistic majority. The Irish outnumbered them in most US cities. Indigenous peoples did so in Africa and Asia; and other Europeans together challenged the dominance of the English worker around the world. Even in Canada, there was some marked hostility, a subject requiring further exploration. Where the English were reduced to smaller proportions of the whole (Rhodesia or South Africa), or where other whites dominated politics (Apartheid South Africa), the power of Englishness came to the fore.160 There is no question that England, the English and their Englishness were important to Canada. Yet, according to Barber and Watson’s new study, English ethnicity was largely invisible, thus mirroring the classic work of Charlotte Erickson on the English in the nineteenth-century US, and James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson on twentieth-century Australia.161 Barber and Watson’s study draws upon rich oral interviews to portray post-war Canada as a place settled by waves of English who left an impoverished homeland in search of better, more secure lives in North America. This was the generation of Churchill’s ‘rats’ deserting a sinking ship. They went to Canada and found freedom from rationing and enjoyed choices in consumer goods which were not available at home. Canada stood in stark contrast to ‘austerity Britain’.162 Barber and Watson balance between traditional social and economic history, with good analysis of the nature of Canadian society and the skills and attributes of the immigrants, and rich oral materials. Basing most of their analysis on more than seventy interviews, including a small number conducted by Hammerton, the work is rich, vivid and human. The authors wrestle with the same questions of English identity as Hammerton and Thomson did in their work on Australia. Were the English in Canada to be known as



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English, or British, and did they assume Canadian identity? Did the mulch of homeland identities contribute to invisibility? The drift and opaqueness of their identities clearly were encouraged by the changing nature of Canadian society and the move from the concept of British citizenship to Canadian identity. One thing making Canada different from Australia, and which struck English immigrants, was the Anglo-phone/Franco-phone dichotomy, and the ‘quiet revolution’ (liberal reforms in the 1960s and 1970s) which exerted Québécois nationalism with greater determination in just the period these migrants came to Canada.163 Similarly, in New Zealand, an unquestioning loyalty to mother Britain, which must have made life seem more secure for immigrants, began seriously to be challenged by the rise of New Zealand nationalism, Britain’s inability to defend its eastern empire during the Second World War, and the decision of the UK to join the Common Market. For all its familiar identification with Englishness, monarchy and the empire, entering Canadian society still presented English immigrants with something of a culture shock as they settled into a new life. New Zealand and Australia reported many of the same effects for the ‘whinging Poms’. In Canada work was different; neighbours more diverse; pubs were (universally considered to be) worse; pot luck barbecues were the regular social event of choice; and, of course, the English in Canada faced all the same fears and longings that affected immigrants of any stripe. While these English had full knowledge of the language, dialect, diction and vocabulary caused some confusion between them and the Canadians. As with many other immigrant groups, they combined with like-minded fellow nationals to join associations (such as the St George’s Society, the Union Jack Club and the Royal Overseas League) or other agencies of adjustment and social and mental prosperity. One immigrant in Canada, who works in computing having arrived in the 1970s, reported his belief in the balance of absorption and resistance that marked out how immigrants like him approached the culture of the new country. He clearly felt that to be an immigrant was both to remember the old land and embrace the new.164 Many emigrants must feel like that. Conclusion This chapter has tried to show that while most English folk were (and are) happy with the designation ‘British’, there was a strand of English culture in the US and colonies which, though less significant for other immigrant diasporas, nevertheless prevented the English being as ‘invisible’ as some scholars have claimed. Effortless integration into what were, at

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heart, Anglo-cultures laid down in all colonies by their forebears, has characterised the way others viewed the English. Ultimately, the entanglements of homeland and empire for a century or more offered a global narrative of identity over and above Englishness, and even Britishness. Basil Hare Duke left the Sudanese Political Service and joined the Indian army. Writing to his mother in 1942, having spent most of his adult life outside the country of his birth, he said: ‘I am more of a citizen of Empire than of England’.165 Distance from home did not deaden Duke’s veneration for England. Duke’s respect for empire was based on his sense of duty about keeping it. English immigrants actively developed and maintained the types of clubs and societies normally associated with groups such as the Irish or Scots. So, if the history of ethnicity in North America and elsewhere is to reach its fullest possible extent, it is vital to recognise that members of the English ethnic group, wherever they come from, express national pride in a variety of ways, from buying food from the homeland in speciality shops toand following their English football club in bars in Chicago, or on Australia’s Sky TV. English folk in southern Spain flock together. Where the English overseas stand out, eating English breakfasts in cafés on the Mediterranean, or in social events run by English-born members of the Women’s Institute of Hutt Valley, near Wellington, New Zealand, there has been little connecting this with the idea of ethnic difference. At best, the English disappeared; at worst, they stood out as ‘whinging Poms’, or as quaint cultural nationalists. In some ways, such characterisation is fair. They keep alive their homeland in unremarkable, cultural ways. The current changes in politics in the UK may give these people reasons to act like a diaspora which, unlike the case ofthe Irish and nationalism, they never previously had. Similar things might also be said of the Scots and any support for independence (though the Scots abroad are more likely than the folk at home to be unionist). Values shift over the decades, and cultural affiliations change. AngloSaxonism was once a common condescension against humanity shared by English and some Americans alike. English literature, customs, law and ideas travelled widely; indeed, they travelled with greater impression than the ‘invisible English’, as they are so often cast. Maintaining culture, but also exchanging of culture, constituted parts of the life experience of ordinary English immigrants. Even in lands with a common tongue, which is where most English could go, the story of settlement could be protracted. If we assert the existence of an English diaspora, then we must not look only for those things which other diasporas had, did or believed. There was no different language, no distinct print culture; religion was



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distinctive, mostly Protestant, with Anglicanism a global Church. But the sense of difference was not so great as if most of the English had been Irish Catholics. In seeking the English diaspora, we must look for cultural and associational traits, and engagement with concepts such as empire, monarchy and, for example, the fundamental tenets of an English workingclass life. Among the Yorkshire folk and Lancastrians in New England or New Zealand, food, clothing, song, stories and labour organisation were recognised parts of the immigrants’ contribution. It was in these areas that the English made their mark. Yet these were primarily short-lived or short term: the English diaspora was a phase of immigrant transfer, not a permanently forged culture-within-a culture. Their traits were not different enough for that.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (Leipzig, 1873), p. 292. J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883; Chicago, 1971), p. 13. Robert J.C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (New York, 2008). Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY, 1992); for a critique, see Tanja Bueltmann, David Gleeson and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Invisible diaspora? English ethnicity in the United States before 1920’, Journal of American History, 33.4 (Summer 2014), pp. 5–30. J.R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London, 1874), preface. See Charia de Cesari and Ann Rigney (eds), Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Berlin, 2014), introduction. Robert Colls, The Identity of England (Oxford, 2002), chapter 6; Jeremy Paxman, The English (London, 1998), chapter 3. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London, 2001); Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004). David Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness: How American Immigrants Became White (New York, 2006), and the sources cited therein. The literature is vast, but see, by way of a wide-ranging introduction, Bernard Bailyn, Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (New York, 1991). Between 1815 and 1860, over five million persons left Britain and Ireland. The US attracted three-fifths of the total. Canada slid in this period from principal recipient to accounting for just 10 per cent. Australian numbers picked up quickly in the second half of the century. Bureau of Census, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, 1860), ‘Introduction’, Table: ‘Emigration from Great Britain and Ireland’, p. xxv.

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12 Statistics Canada, 2006 Census of Population, catalogue no. 97–562XCB2006006 (Canada, Code01), www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/ 2006/dp-pd/index-eng.cfm. Accessed 26 March 2017. 13 2009 American Community Survey, Table 52: ‘Population by selected ancestry group and region’, www2.census.gov/library/publications/2010/compendia/ statab/129ed/tables/10s0052.xls. Accessed 29 March 2017. 14 Bureau of Census, Population of the United States in 1860, ‘Introduction’, Table: ‘Emigration from Great Britain and Ireland’, pp. 62–63. 15 William E. van Vugt, Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth Century Immigrants to the United States (Urbana and Chicago, IL, 1999), Table B5, p. 168. 16 Ibid. 17 Tanja Bueltmann and Donald M. MacRaild, The English Diaspora in North America: Migration, Ethnicity and Association, 1730s–1950s (Manchester, 2017), pp. 78–82. 18 Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1992), p. 44. See also Randy William Widdis, With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration in the United States and Western Canada, 1880–1920 (Montreal, 1998), especially chapter 5, pp. 294–304; also Marjory Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester, 2005), especially the essay by Mark Wyman. 19 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants; but also see Wilbur S. Shepperson, Emigration and Disenchantment: Portraits of Englishmen Repatriated from the United States (Norman, OK, 1965); also his British Emigration to North America (Oxford, 1957). 20 Frank Thistlethwaite, ‘Migration from Europe overseas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ and ‘Postscript’, in R.J. Vecoli and S.M. Sinke (eds), A Century of European Migrations 1830–1930 (Champaign, IL, 1991), passim. 21 61st Congress, 3d Session, Doc. 756, Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 3, Distribution of Immigrants, 1850–1900, Table 37, p. 359. 22 Marjorie Harper and Steven Constantine, Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series: Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2010), p. 100. 23 Richard Hill, Policing the Colonial Frontier: The Theory and Practice of Coercive Social and Racial Control in New Zealand, 1767–1867 (Wellington, 1986); The Colonial Frontier Tamed: New Zealand Policing in Transition, 1867–1886  (Wellington, 1989); and The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove: The Modernisation of Policing in New Zealand 1886–1917 (Wellington, 1995). 24 Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Foundation of Modern New Zealand Society, 1850–1900 (Auckland, 1989), though Bueltmann and others have challenged this perspective with studies of community and associational bonds. See her Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society, 1850–1930 (Edinburgh, 2011). 25 Amy Lloyd, ‘“The Englishmen here are much disliked”: hostility towards English immigrants in early-twentieth-century Toronto’, in Tanja Bueltmann, David Gleeson and Donald M. MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–2010 (Liverpool, 2012), pp. 135–49.



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26 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of New Zealand (Honolulu, 2001) and Replenishing the Earth:The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the AngloWorld (Oxford, 2011); Simon Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford, 2003). 27 Census of the British Empire, 1901, Report with Summary […] (London, 1906), p.xxii. 28 Bueltmann and MacRaild, English Diaspora, chapter 5. 29 Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire, p. 129. 30 David Rock, ‘The British of Argentina’, in Robert Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Overseas (Oxford, 2014), pp. 18–44. 31 John Londsdale, ‘Home country and African frontier’, in Robert Bickers (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series: Settlers and Expatriates (Oxford, 2010), p. 79. 32 National Archives, Wellington, NZ, AATJ W5385/7945/8, 1951–52, Royal Society of St George, Palmerston North Branch, Rules (dated 11 December 1951), p. 2. 33 Brad Patterson, ‘Cousin Jacks, new chums and Ten Pound Poms’, in Bueltmann, Gleeson and MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, p. 151. 34 Ibid., Table 3, p. 153, derived from the estimates of Jock Phillips and Terry Hearn in Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland and Scotland (Auckland, 2008). 35 Julius Isaac, British Post-war Migration (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 218–19. 36 Ibid. 37 Rock, ‘British of Argentina’. 38 Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2010), p. 347. Gallup surveys on seventeen occasions, from 1948 to 1975, had Britons favouring the familiar. 39 Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesia, 1890–1980: the lost dominion’, in Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates, p. 129. 40 Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration: Canada and Australia Compared (Kingston, ON, 1991), p. 263. 41 saac, Post-war Migration, pp. 86–87; table 57, p. 115; pp. 130ff. 42 Constantine and Harper, Migration and Empire, p. 105. 43 Joseph Hardwick, An Anglican British World: The Anglican Church and the Settler Empire, c.1790–1860 (Manchester, 2014); Hilary M. Carey (ed.), Empire of Religions (Basingstoke, 2008); Hilary M. Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 (Bloomington, IN, 2012); Colin Barr and Hilary Carey (eds), Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1969 (Montreal and Queen’s, ON, 2015). 44 Niles’ Weekly Register, 27 June 1829, p. 292. 45 Gillian I. Leitch, ‘The importance of being English: English ethnic culture in Montreal, c.1800–1864’, in Bueltmann, Gleeson and MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, pp. 100–117, very specifically challenges the concept of invisibility in Canada; also see the other essays therein. 46 Mary H. Blewett, ‘USA: shifting landscapes of class, culture, gender, race and protest in the American Northeast and South’, in Lex Heerma van Voss,

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48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57

58

59 60

british and irish diasporas Els Hiemstra-Kuperus and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (eds), The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000 (London, 2010), pp. 531–58 (data on Lowell at p. 534). William E. van Vugt, ‘British (English, Scottish, Scots Irish, Welsh) and British Americans, 1870–1940’, in Elliott R. Barkan (ed.), Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration, 4 vols (Santa Barbara, CA, 2012), II, p. 237. Mary Blewett, Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in NineteenthCentury New England (Amherst, MA, 2000), pp. 94ff; Blewett, ‘Shifting landscapes’, pp. 535–36, 542. Blewett, ‘Shifting landscapes’, p. 542. Census of the British Empire, 1901, p. xxxii. Ibid. Kathryn G. Lamontagne, ‘“Lancashire in America”: the culture of the English textile mill operative in Fall River, Massachusetts, 1875–1904’, in David T. Gleeson (ed.), English Ethnicity and Culture in North America (Columbia, SC, 2017), p. 89. See for example the comparison of the English with Germans and Scots in Bueltmann and MacRaild, English Diaspora, chapter 6. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2001), especially chapter 11; also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989). Toronto (1834), Quebec (1836) and Ottawa (1844): Charters and B ye-laws of the St George’s Society of Toronto… 1862 (Toronto, 1863), p. 4; Quebec St George’s Society, Officers and Members, with the Reports for 1846 (Quebec, 1846), front cover; for Ottawa: Anson A. Gard, The Hub and the Spokes: Or the Capital and its Environs (Ottawa, 1904), p. 47. The act of incorporation and bye-laws of the St George’s Society of Montreal, founded by Englishmen in the year 1834, for the purpose of relieving their brethren in distress (Montreal, 1867), pp. 3, 8. Baltimore St George’s Society Records, Minute Book, 6 December 1866, Maryland Historical Society, MS 1881; Constitution, By-laws and Standing Rules and Orders of the British Columbia St George’s Society (Victoria, 1886), p. 2. Rules and constitution of the Society of the Sons of St George (Philadelphia, PA, 1772), p. 6. See also the minutes of the founding meeting, held on St George’s Day 1772, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (PHi)1733. Rock, ‘British of Argentina’, pp. 31–32. Wisconsin Patriot (Madison), 23 August 1856; Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 12 March, 3 and 26 April 1858; Chicago Tribune, 2 May 1861 and 26 April 1864; also Chicago Times, 16, 22, 27, 28 and 31 March 1864; Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 11 May 1891; Knoxville Journal, 18 February 1891; Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), 14 November 1885; Rocky Mountains News (Boulder), 2 January 1887; Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1885, 6 April 1887, 1 January 1891, 25 April 1895, 25 April 1904.



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61 Argus, 19 March 1847. Though Mr Booth, an early English settler, states that St George’s Day was marked early as ‘1842 or thereabouts’; also Herald (Melbourne), 2 July 1897; South Australian Register (Adelaide), 18 January 1845; Courier (Hobart), 23 April and 16 May 1851; Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 1893; West Australian, 24 June 1898 and 28 April 1900; Brisbane Courier, 25 October 1904 and 1 February 1913. 62 Hawaiian Gazette, 29 April 1868; Madras Mail, 20 April 1888; Rhodesia Herald, 24 April 1890; Pioneer, 13 June 1900; Central African Times, 29 April 1905; Bulawayo Chronicle, 2 May 1903; Central African Times, 12 November 1904; and 14 January, 11, 12, 25 March, 1, 29 April 1905; 14 April 1906; 3 April 1907; Straits Times, 12 April 1904; Rhodesia Herald, 1 April 1912; East African Standard, 19 and 26 April 1913; Bulawayo Chronicle, 30 August 1918. 63 John Lambert, ‘Maintaining a British way of life: English speaking South Africa’s patriotic, cultural and charitable associations’, Historia, 54.2 (2009), 55–76; John Lambert, ‘South African British? Or Dominion South Africans? The evolution of an identity in the 1910s and 1920s’, South African Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 206; John Lambert, ‘“An unknown people”: reconstructing British South African identity’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37.4 (2009), 599–617. 64 Fairburn, Ideal Society. 65 Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, 7 May 1859; Daily Southern Cross (Auckland), 17 April 1860 and 23 April 1861. 66 Bueltmann and MacRaild, English Diaspora, chapter 7. 67 Mathieson Archive, Palmerston North, Royal Society of St George, Palmerston North Branch, series 1–4: Programme Commemorating [a] Combined Meeting of the Auckland, Wellington, and Palmerston North Branches […] 27–29 October 1962, p. 2. 68 Evening Post (Wellington), 19 October 1909, 31 January 1933, 22 February and 3 and 28 April 1936, 25 November and 16 December 1937, and 24 April 1939. 69 James Watson, ‘“Cooked in true Yorkshire fashion”: regional identity and English associational life in New Zealand before the First World War’, in Bueltmann, Gleeson and MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, p. 173. Constantine and Harper, Migration and Empire, p. 107. 70 James Jupp, The English in Australia (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 8–9. 71 Leslie Cory Shoemaker, ‘Passionate for the pasty: the Cornish pasty in Michigan’s upper peninsula’, in Harlan Walker (ed.), Food and the Memory: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2000 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 245–53. More broadly, Russell M. Magnaghi, Cornish in Michigan (East Lansing, MI, 2007). 72 For views against the county, see J.D. Marshall, ‘Discussion article: regionalism and regional scholarship’, Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 10.1 (Summer, 1990), 67–68; Charles Phythian-Adams (ed.), Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History (Leicester, 1993), p. 19.

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73 Diana Newton, ‘Borders and bishopric: regional identities in the premodern North-East, 1559–1620’, in Adrian Green and A.J. Pollard (eds), Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300–2000 (Stroud, 2007), pp. 69–71. 74 David Neave, ‘The identity of the East Riding of Yorkshire’, in Edward Royle (ed.), Issues of Regional Identity: In Honour of John Marshall (Manchester, 1998), pp. 184ff. 75 British Whig, 24 April 1878. 76 Evening Post (Wellington), 16 January 1896; also, 2 July 1898, 23 December 1913. English regional migrant legacies are briefly discussed in Phillips and Hearn, Settlers, pp. 167–68. See also Raewyn Dalziel, ‘Popular protest in early New Plymouth: why did it occur?’, New Zealand Journal of History, 20.1 (1986), 3–26; Evening Post (Wellington), 2 November 1895. On county societies, see James Watson, ‘English associationalism in the British Empire: Yorkshire societies in New Zealand before the First World War’, Britain and the World, 4 (2011), 84–108; for the wider context, see Patterson, ‘Cousin Jacks, new chums and ten pound poms’. 77 St John Daily Sun, 11 October 1905. 78 Joanne Parker, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester, 2007). 79 J.O. Springhall, ‘Lord Meath, youth and empire’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5 (1970), 97–111; Jim English, ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958’, Historical Journal, 49.1 (2006), 247–76. 80 Society of St George, letter from secretary, J.C. Langley, to the prime minister, National Archives of Australia, A2/1904/2695, 26 November 1904. 81 Brisbane Courier, 15 June 1922; Mercury, 18 June 1928; Argus, 4 April 1930. For more on this, see Donald M. MacRaild, Sylvia Ellis and Stephen Bowman, ‘Interdependence Day and Magna Charta: James Hamilton’s public diplomacy in the Anglo-world, 1907–1940s’, Journal of Transatlantic History, 12.2 (2014), 140–62. 82 See for example the approving tone of articles in the Iowa Press Citizen, 13 October 1921, and the Register, 3 September 1923. 83 Keith Wilson (ed.), The International Impact of the Boer War (Chesham, 2001). 84 MacRaild, Ellis and Bowman, ‘Interdependence Day and Magna Charta’. 85 Peter Clarke, ‘The English-speaking peoples before Churchill,’ Britain and the World, 4.2 (2011), 199–231. 86 Tanja Bueltmann and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Globalising St George: English associations in the Anglo-world to the 1930s’, Journal of Global History, 7.1 (2012), 79–81. 87 MacRaild, Ellis and Bowman, ‘Interdependence Day and Magna Charta’. 88 W. Besant, ‘The Atlantic union’, The Forum (October 1900), pp. 245–56; W. Besant, Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant: With a Prefatory Note by S. Squire Sprigg (New York, 1902), p. 270; Antony Best and John Fisher (eds), On the Fringes of Diplomacy: Influences on British Foreign Policy, 1800–1945 (Aldershot, 2011), pp. 139–40.



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89 ‘Sir Walter Besant’s proposed Anglo-American institute’, Harper’s Weekly, 40 (8 February 1896), 135. 90 Stephen Bowman, The Pilgrim Society and Public Diplomacy, 1895–1945 (Edinburgh, 2018). 91 In a city where the Irish had fought hard to secure a political bridgehead against the Brahmin elite: Thomas H. O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, MA, 1995), pp. 95–165. Also, Rowland T. Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1953). 92 Boston Daily Advertiser, 22 October 1887. 93 Rules and regulations of the British American society 1830, St John: Donald A. Cameron, 1830, Rule 1, p. 3. Milwaukee Sentinel, 24 October 1888, 1 November 1889, 19 May 1892. 94 North American, 23 June 1897. 95 Irish World and Industrial Liberator, 3 June 1899. See James McConnel, ‘“Time and circumstance work great changes in public sentiment”: royal statues and monuments in the United States of America, 1770–2010’, in Gleeson (ed.), English Ethnicity and Culture, pp. 155–76. 96 Irish World and Industrial Liberator, 29 April 1899. Classic among proliferating Anglo-Saxon literature is: J.R. Dos Passos, The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English-Speaking People (New York and London, 1903); see also John L. Brandt, Anglo-Saxon Supremacy or Race Contributions to Civilization (Boston and Toronto, 1915). 97 Rhodesia Herald, 24 April 1900. 98 Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward, ‘Introduction’, in Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Wards (eds), Australia’s Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series (Oxford, 2008), p. 21. 99 Alan J. Ward, ‘America and the Irish problem, 1899–1921’, Irish Historical Studies, 16 (March 1968), 64–90, quote at 73–74. 100 David Haglund, ‘Is there a “strategic culture” of the special relationship? Contingency, identity, and the transformation of Anglo-American relations’, in Alan Dobson and Steve Marsh (eds), Contemporary Anglo-American Relations: A ‘Special Relationship’? (London, 2013), pp. 26–51. 101 Greg Ryan, ‘“Burton Ale”, London Porter and Kentish hops: English custom and nineteenth-century New Zealand drinking culture’, in Lyndon Fraser and Angela McCarthy (eds), ‘Far from Home’: The English in New Zealand (Dunedin, 2012), p. 61. 102 William Shakespeare, Othello in The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1854), p. 213, c2. 103 Ryan, ‘“Burton Ale”’, pp. 75–76. 104 New Zealand Truth, 2 June 1907. 105 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merrie England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994). 106 Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (London, 1994), p. 490. 107 Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identity, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (London, 1998), pp. 213–14.

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108 Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford, 2000). 109 North Adams Transcript, 26 May 1915. 110 Evening Post (Wellington), 3 March 1924. 111 Nigel Cliff, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in NineteenthCentury America (London, 2007), pp. xxi, 257, 259ff. 112 Monika Smialkowska, ‘An Englishman in New York? Celebrating Shakespeare in America, 1916’, in Bueltmann, Gleeson and MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, pp. 205–21. 113 New York Times, 4 July 1909. 114 Percy MacKaye, Caliban by the Yellow Sands (New York, 1916), quoted in Smialkowska, ‘Englishman in New York?’, p. 205. 115 Milkwaukee Sentinel, 24 November 1961. This is not, however, true: twelve years earlier, the English of Montreal had held their own equally magnificent parade. 116 See ‘A foreword on folklore’, in Richard M. Dorson, American Folklore (1959; Chicago, 1977 edn), pp. 1–6. 117 Richard Dorson, Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States (Chicago, 1964). 118 Richard M. Dorson, ‘The shaping of folklore traditions in the United States’, Folklore, 78.3 (1967), 161–62. 119 Such is the argument of William A. Wilson, ‘Richard M. Dorson’s theory for American folklore: a Finnish analogue’, Western Folklore, 41.1 (1982), 36. 120 Daily Picayune, 16 October 1909. 121 D. Harker, ‘May Cecil Sharp be praised’, History Workshop Journal, 14.1 (1982), 45–62. 122 Ibid. 123 Dorson, ‘Shaping of folklore traditions’, p. 161. 124 Delmer D. Rogers, ‘Public music performances in New York City from 1800 to 1850’, Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical, 6 (1970), 5–50. 125 As evinced in an important recent study: D.T. Haverty-Stacke, America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867–1960 (New York, 2009). 126 Allison Thompson, May Day Festivals in America, 1830 to the Present (Jefferson, NC, 2009). 127 Vic Gammon, ‘“Many useful lessons”: Cecil Sharp, education and the folkdance revival, 1899–1924’, Cultural and Social History, 5.1 (2008), 75–98. 128 Thompson, May Day Festivals. 129 Ibid. 130 For informed explanations of the Moorish roots of the dancers, and the ancient dance rituals surrounding English folk traditions, see Syracuse Herald, 17 June 1923 and 20 February 1927. On Robin Hood, Weekly Argus Democrat (Madison, WN), 12 June 1855. The explanatory detail on the morris tradition is almost word for word from H.C. Macilwaine, ‘The revival of morris dancing’, Musical Times, 47.766 (1906), 802–5.



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131 See for example L.E. Broadwood, ‘In memoriam: Cecil James Sharp (1859–1924)’, Folklore, 35.3 (1924), 287. 132 Gammon, ‘“Many useful lessons”’, p. 70. 133 Described in close detail in many American newspapers, but see Newark Daily Advocate, 23 April 1897. 134 Thompson, May Day Festivals. 135 For example Manitoba Free Press, 19 May 1905. 136 ‘To teach America Old Morris Dance’, Duluth News Tribune, 11 December 1909. 137 An interesting debate on provenance and meaning can be found in P. Valentine Harris, ‘Who was Robin Hood?’, Folklore, 67.2 (June 1956), 103–5; Barbara Lowe, ‘The final truth about Robin Hood?’, Folklore, 67.2 (June 1956), 106–9; and D.N. Kennedy, ‘Who was Robin Hood?’, Folklore, 66.4 (1955), 413–15. 138 Evening Post (Wellington), 21 January 1885. 139 George L. Phillips, ‘May-Day is sweeps’ day’, Folklore, 60.1 (March 1949), 217. 140 Rock, ‘British of Argentina’, p. 31. 141 Dean Allen, ‘Englishness and cricket in South Africa during the Boer War’, in Bueltmann, Gleeson and MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora. 142 Where Charlotte Erickson was influential. See her American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860–1885 (New York, 1958); ‘English’, in S. Thernstrom, A. Orlov and O. Handlin (eds), Harvard Encyclopaedia of American Ethnic Groups (2nd edn, Cambridge, MA, 1980); ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1841: part I: emigration from the British Isles’, Population Studies, 43 (1989), 347–67; ‘Emigration from the British Isles to the USA in 1841: part II: who were the English emigrants?’, Population Studies, 44 (1990), 21–40; Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY, 1992). 143 R.J.C. Young, ‘The disappearance of the English: why is there no “English Diaspora”?’, in Bueltmann, Gleeson and MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, pp. 222–35. 144 Arthur R.M. Lower, Canadians in the Making: A Social History of Canada (New York, 1959), p. 196. 145 Pauline Greenhill, Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario (Montreal and Kingston, 1994), p. 4. 146 Bruce Elliot, ‘Regional patterns of English immigration and settlement in Upper Canada’, in Barbara J. Messamore (ed.), Canadian Migration Patterns from Britain and North America (Ottawa, 2004), pp. 52–53. 147 The most sustained case is made by Bueltmann and MacRaild, English Diaspora. 148 Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire. 149 For example, Janet Doust, ‘Two English immigrant families in Australia in the nineteenth century’, History of the Family, 13 (2008), 2–25. 150 James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson, Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (Manchester, 2005), pp. 11–15.

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151 Cited in M. Barber and M. Watson, Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945 (Winnipeg, 2015). 152 Jupp, English in Australia. 153 Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington, 1981); New Zealand’s Burning: The Settler’s World in the Mid-1880s (Wellington, 1994); Settler Kaponga, 1881–1914: A Frontier Fragment of the Western World (Wellington, 1997). 154 Phillips and Hearn, Settlers, especially pp. 68ff and pp. 158ff. 155 Patterson, ‘Cousin Jacks, new chums and Ten Pound Poms’. 156 David Pearson, ‘Arcadia reinvented? Recounting the recent sentiments and experiences of English migrants to New Zealand’, in Fraser and McCarthy, ‘Far from Home’, pp. 145–64. 157 Young, Idea of English Ethnicity. 158 Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (London, 1850). For a contemporary discussion of the limitations of race and especially ethnicity in describing the English, see Young, Idea of English Ethnicity, passim. 159 Young, ‘Disappearance of the English’, p. 227; Also see the credo expounded by Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With an Illustration of Character and Conduct (London, 1859), passim. 160 As discussed eloquently in Young, ‘‘Disappearance of the English’, pp. 224–25. 161 Barber and Watson, Invisible Immigrants. 162 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London, 2010). 163 Barber and Watson, Invisible Immigrants. 164 See the testimonies in Barber and Watson, Invisible Immigrants, ch.7. 165 Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates, p. 4.

5 Emigrants and exiles: the political nationalism of the Irish diaspora since the 1790s David T. Gleeson In February 1995, President Mary Robinson gave an address to a joint session of the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) titled ‘Cherishing the Diaspora’, explaining in more detail the promise in her inaugural speech to ‘represent’ the ‘over 70 million people of this globe who claim Irish descent’.1 Irish emigration had long been in the consciousness of the Irish people, but it seemed to many that the story had ended at the water’s edge. Quoting poet Eavan Boland’s ‘The Emigrant Irish’, Robinson noted that the Irish who left were ‘Like oil lamps, we had put them out the back, of our houses, of our minds.’ They now, she believed, had to be brought back to the front of the Irish mind. She had kept a light on in Áras an Uachtaráin (the Irish president’s official residence) to remind Ireland of its ‘diaspora beyond our shores’. This use of ‘diaspora’ in describing the Irish and their descendants overseas was new to the lexicon of Irish politicians. Having chosen the term ‘diaspora’ with care, she felt the need to explain it to the assembled members of Parliament before her. She stated: ‘Diaspora, in its meaning of dispersal or gathering, includes the many ways, not always chosen, that people have left this island.’2 Thus, she acknowledged a view that Irish migration was, for many, not one of choice but of force. Historians have long examined the compulsive element of Irish emigration. Kerby Miller, for example, incorporated the idea of Irish emigrants as ‘exiles’ into the title of his extensive study of Irish emigration to North America. He did not, however, use ‘diaspora’ to describe this phenomenon of exile. The first scholar to apply the term was Lawrence McCaffrey in his survey of the Irish in America published in 1976. The Irish Diaspora in America (amended in 1997 to The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America) deliberately made comparison with the immigrant group most associated with the term ‘diaspora’: the Jews. The change in title recognised the fact that feelings of diaspora were prevalent among Irish Catholic emigrants.

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Indeed, one historian argues that Catholicism, and its institutional spread, are key to understanding the significance of the Irish diaspora.3 Ultimately, then, these Irish Catholics, more than their Protestant neighbours, felt they were like the Jews taken into captivity in ancient Babylon, and forever afterward scattered to the four corners of the globe. They believed that they had been forced to leave because of who they were, and not for mere economic reasons.4 In 1997 Robert Cohen recognised the new resonance of diaspora in the study of immigrant groups. He decided it needed some analysis and described five types: labour, trade, cultural, imperial and victim. Cohen included the Irish under ‘victim diaspora’, mainly because of the Great Famine, which left over a million dead and led to nearly two million emigrating.5 This defining of Irish emigration purely through the Famine’s prism is problematic and Miller in particular has been criticised for this focus. Despite this cataclysmic event over a ten-year period (1845–55), the reality was that more Irish left Ireland both before and after the Famine era. Why, then, was the famine frame so important? Sheer numbers were, of course, vital. More people left Ireland in the ten years of the Famine than had departed in the previous 300 years. But critics highlight that Irish America was just one element of the Irish diaspora story.6 Yet, the rhetoric of exile was strong among many who left Ireland, and even if it was not a completely forced migration, historians must ‘take seriously the experience and sensibilities of those who lived through the catastrophe and came to America or Britain feeling themselves exiles banished from their native land by British iniquity’.7 Miller argues that, whether ‘rightly or wrongly’, lots of Irish migrants ‘believed that they were really involuntary exiles’ because of ‘the malevolence of England’.8 Assessing how deep and wide this belief was is difficult but its use by leading, and popular, Irish nationalists indicates its strength. The Famine focus, for example, benefited from one of the first and most enduring studies of the diaspora and Ireland itself as victims of a forced starvation. The writings of the Famine-era Irish nationalist John Mitchel would be vital to this creation of the belief that emigration was exile. This feeling is important because it was the key element in the development of an Irish identity in the nineteenth century that would define larger efforts to create a new Irish nation. Declan Kiberd, in his tour de force study of the literature of the nineteenth-century Irish cultural renaissance, describes it as ‘inventing Ireland’. He recognises too the vital role that Irish emigrants played in this invention. Indeed, it was in the diaspora that ‘the idea of Ireland’ was preserved. Oscar Wilde, for example, thought that ‘the Irishman only discovered himself when he left Ireland’.9



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Wilde was in some ways speaking of his own personal experience, caught between his Irishness and his admiration for British culture, but for many Irish it was the diasporic milieu into which they entered when they left Ireland that helped them develop their own idea of Irishness. This idea of oppression forcing their emigration took particular hold in the nineteenth century. The legacy of the ‘Flight of the Earls’ in the early seventeenth century and the ‘Wild Geese’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had, as Ó Ciardha’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, established exile as a reality of the Irish struggle against English/ British interference in Ireland. It was after 1800, however, that the view of Irish emigration as a diasporic forced migration really took hold. It became a defining grievance of a developing Irish nationalism culminating in the push for Irish ‘Home Rule’ and the ‘Irish Republic’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both of these campaigns for Irish ‘freedom’ and self-determination had strong diasporic connections overseas, both economic and ideological, which David Brundage has aptly described as ‘long-distance nationalism’.10 This chapter, then, focuses on the creation and nurturing of this victim diaspora because it was so important in the creation of Irish nationalism and eventually the Irish state. It is interpretive and, as a result, it does create an issue highlighted by Kevin Kenny. When one focuses on just one element of it, the full story of the Irish diaspora ‘loses some of its religious, regional, socioeconomic, and temporal diversity’.11 In this chapter it means, for example, choosing a strong focus on the Irish in America, over the diaspora in other countries. The much larger numbers who went to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and who have claimed Irishness since then play a role in that choice. More importantly, I do so because it was in Irish America that the idea of emigration as exile was strongest. David Fitzpatrick, for example, found almost no references to the exile motif among emigrants to Australia, even though some of them really were exiles, that is, victims of the British penal system.12 It was in America, then, among the Irish-American communities, that immigrants and their descendants had the largest role in defining Ireland through the lens of victim diaspora and in bringing it back to Ireland. It was there that the idea of diaspora as exile was created, nurtured and exported back to Ireland. Origins of the victim diaspora The origins of this idea of the diaspora as exile came with the Society of United Irishmen exodus to the United States during the Irish political

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turmoil of the late 1790s and early 1800s. This leaving of political exiles, many of whom had faced execution or banishment to an Australian penal colony had they stayed in Ireland, in some ways echoed those of the earlier ‘flights’, but this emigration was larger and mostly to one country. Between 1790 and 1800 some 60,000 Irish emigrated to the United States, with a particular surge towards the end of the 1790s during the tumultuous period leading up to and after the 1798 rebellion. These arrivals in America were predominantly Ulster Presbyterians, the birthplace and stronghold of the Society of United Irishmen, though perhaps about 20 per cent were Catholic.13 They took an immediate and active interest in American politics which has been recognised as very significant by US historians.14 It is their retained interest in Irish politics, however, which is important for this essay. These radical Irish émigrés, who had established new cultural as well as political symbols for the Irish in Ireland, maintained and expanded them in America. Some, like John and Benjamin Binns, came via the Irish community in Britain and sojourns in revolutionary Europe.15 Whatever their path to America, these radicals founded new ‘Hibernian’ societies with the cultural monikers of the United Irishmen, the harp and the shamrock, which future generations of Irish emigrants and Irish-Americans adopted as their own. Mathew Carey, for example, Irish immigrant and noted American economist, who sympathised with the United Irish cause from Philadelphia, founded a Hibernian Society to rival the more conservative, Friendly Sons of St Patrick. It quickly became the organisation to which new Irish immigrants arriving in the city affiliated. The Hibernian Society in Charleston, South Carolina, founded in 1799, and reorganised in 1801, by Presbyterian migrants, chose the harp and shamrock for its emblem and elected the local Catholic priest as its first president to symbolise the continued viability of uniting ‘Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter’ under a common United Irishman banner.16 The ‘’98 men’, as they became known, also began the tradition of writing histories of the Irish struggles against Britain.17 John Daly Burk, a County Cork native who had escaped Ireland in 1796 to become a newspaper editor and publisher in America, published an account of the United Irish rebellion just one year after its failure. Describing the uprising as the ‘Late War in Ireland’, it presented the failed attempt of the United Irishmen to overthrow ‘ascendancy rule’ as a noble one supported by most of the Irish people. Those who opposed the rebellion were vicious traitors. Burk emphasised loyalist atrocities while failing to mention United Irish ones. His book was not objective history but a polemic against the British control of Ireland. He described in detail the loyalist destruction unleashed against the United Irishmen, and Ireland as a whole, in almost biblical terms. The Ireland before British rule he portrayed as an idyllic proto-republican



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democracy, a system he saw around him in America, under threat from the pro-British Federalist Party.18 The triumph of Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800 eased his concerns about America’s future. In his History of Virginia, published in 1804, Burk extolled Jefferson’s home (to where he had moved from Boston) as a model in republican democracy. Here, too, he made favourable mentions of Ireland, declaring it ‘rich in every species of genius’.19 Burk would go on to preserve and edit a large volume of Irish songs and poetry before his untimely death in a duel in 1808.20 The United Irish diaspora in America thus began and maintained the idea of Irish emigration as enforced by the hands of an oppressor. They were, however, a distinct minority within the general Irish emigrant population, especially after 1815 when emigration to America rose precipitously as the Irish economy collapsed in the post-Napoleonic peace. These migrants were economic ones, not political exiles. They entered a United States beginning its ‘Era of Good Feelings’ in which the United Irish exiles had picked the winning side, that is, the Democratic Republicans over the Federalists.21 The ethnic leadership they encountered, though predominantly Irish Protestant and much wealthier than they were, still believed in an Irishness that included ‘Catholic, Protestant [Anglican], and Dissenter’. Thus, the Irish Volunteers militia unit of Charleston, South Carolina (founded in 1802), had the 1798 Presbyterian exile, John Magrath as its captain. His son, born in Charleston, would succeed him in the role and as president of the St Patrick’s Benevolent Society, founded by Irish artisans to provide funerary benefits to members’ widows. Nearby in Savannah, Georgia, the Presbyterian-led Hibernian Society collected substantial funds to pay destitute Irish canal workers who had been left without support when their company failed, and its members also intervened with the local authorities when Catholic immigrants objected to the use of the King James Bible in the local ‘free schools’.22 Politically, too, the ’98 generation continued to propagate the idea that all of Ireland’s woes were caused by British misrule. In New York, former United Irishman Thomas Addis Emmet kept the flame of violent opposition to British control of Ireland through a campaign to maintain the memory of his late brother, Robert. The younger Emmet had failed in his rebellion in 1803 and gone to the gallows, proclaiming that no one could write his epitaph until Ireland ‘took her place among the nations of the earth’. The elder Emmet became the most prominent United Irish politician on becoming attorney-general for the state of New York. In this role, he had a platform to condemn British rule in Ireland and support efforts to ameliorate its effects. In particular, Emmet, and other ’98 exiles, supported Daniel O’Connell’s efforts for Catholic Emancipation.23 There was an irony

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here as O’Connell was a critic of the rebellion and some United Irish exiles in America thought him too conciliatory to British rule, but both sides called a truce for the larger cause. Former United Irishmen used their Hibernian Society networks to create an American version of the ‘Catholic Rent’ where money was collected to support O’Connell’s cause. On St Patrick’s Day, in particular, Hibernians were keen to remind all that Catholic Emancipation was its cause. In 1824, just one year after the foundation of O’Connell’s Catholic Association, the Savannah Hibernian Society, for example, toasted ‘Ireland’s new hero’, while in Charleston Hibernians argued that 1823 ‘should be marked with a bright stone in the calendar of Ireland’s history’ because it marked the end of Britain’s ‘reign of terror’ in the country since the United Irish rebellion.24 The growing focus of Catholicism as the cause of Irish nationalism did, however, create sectarian tensions and ‘United Irish leaders of the movement’ had ‘to sustain a precarious unity’.25 The campaign for Catholic Emancipation was successful in 1829 and Irish-Americans revelled in the success along with O’Connell. Yet, it marked a turning point in the definition of the diaspora in that, though it had been founded and maintained in large part by Irish Protestant radicals, it became increasingly associated with Irish Catholics. O’Connell’s sheer power and charisma, along with the growing political participation of Catholics in Ireland, helped move that process along. The increasing Catholic dominance of Irish leaving Ireland reinforced the transition. For O’Connell, the relationship with the Catholic diaspora continued on to his next campaign, ‘Repeal of the Union’ (between Britain and Ireland). By this time, large amounts of money from the diaspora in the United States were vital to the funding of the new campaign. The Repeal movement in the United States reflected even further the move from the ’98 generation to the more recent Catholic migrants. This reality came to the fore when O’Connell and the Repealers in the United States fell out over the issue of slavery. Always an opponent of slavery, O’Connell created controversy in the US when, in 1842, he supported a petition initiated by the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society addressed ‘from the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Women in America’ calling on them to oppose slavery and ‘unite with the abolitionists’. Using the logistical machinery of the Repeal campaign, the petition circulated to meetings throughout Ireland and thousands signed it. The African-American abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond delivered the petition to William Lloyd Garrison, who received it with great pomp and fare at a public meeting in Boston and publicised it widely in his journal The Liberator.26 The petition’s arrival and dissemination in America provoked an immediate furore from Repeal associations throughout the United States.



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American Repealers wrote to O’Connell pleading with him to stay out of American affairs, especially slavery. The irony here was that many ’98ers had found slavery distasteful, and a few had opposed it, but ultimately their alliance with the party of Jefferson led to accommodation and acceptance of America’s ‘peculiar institution’. A new alliance by the contemporary generation of immigrants with the party of Andrew Jackson (himself the son of Ulster emigrants), a more avowed ‘party of the white man’, reinforced Irish support for slavery in the US. O’Connell refused to back down, declaring that he would consider Irish supporters of slavery no longer Irish. The South Carolina Repeal association reacted by disbanding not ‘as the alternative presented to us by Mr. O’Connell’, loyalty to him or their adopted state ‘we say South Carolina forever.’ Most other associations wished to maintain diasporic links and managed to keep O’Connell’s abolitionism separate from the campaign for Repeal (they only abandoned him when he advocated in 1845 that if the UK came into conflict with the US over the annexation of Texas, that Irishmen should join the British army).27 Their campaign against British rule in Ireland remained of more importance than anything else, including ending slavery. Garrison recognised this when trying to understand why the Irish had failed to ‘unite with the abolitionists’ as instructed by their great ‘Liberator’, O’Connell. He wrote that the Irish ‘were wholly engrossed with their one idea of “Repeal”, and did not seem able to comprehend how the warmest love for the oppressed of Ireland was compatible with sympathy for the oppressed of all other climes, especially for the three millions of manacled slaves in the South’.28 Diasporic feelings of victimhood trumped any claims to the values of universal human liberty. Consolidating the victim diaspora The breaking with O’Connell moved Irish nationalism in America back to its roots, increasingly supporting a return to the physical violence tradition of the United Irishmen. Various Friends of Irish Independence movements sprang out of the old Repeal Associations to support the efforts of ‘Young Ireland’, which had split from O’Connell in 1846 over his opposition to using violence to gain Irish independence. As one of their leaders, Thomas Francis Meagher, put it: ‘Be it for defence, or be it for the assertion of a nation’s liberty, I look upon the sword as a sacred weapon.’29 This rhetoric was music to the ears of the ’98 exiles and their descendants in America. In New Orleans, for example, Irish immigrants founded an ‘Emmet Club’ to support Young Ireland and collected over £1,000 to send to its leader, William Smith O’Brien.30

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In Britain, too, Irish immigrants showed their radical colours, bringing with them their secret society traditions. The focus here is the United States, but the revolutionary Atlantic connected American, French and Irish radical traditions, influencing particularly the Irish in Britain. At each turn, they made their own impression upon the politics of the day. E.P. Thompson certainly saw Irishmen at the forefront of many of Britain’s most radical, lower-order traditions. They were certainly responsible for giving articulacy to the voice of the English and Scottish working classes. Trade unions, radical movements for political reform, repeal of the Union, improved working conditions, all bore the impress of the activism of Irish radicals, first-generation workers whose thinking was advanced and whose contribution was astute.31 The ‘Ribbon’ movement was a specific example of this effect. A predominantly urban phenomenon, it combined ‘popular political radicalism or republicanism with anti-Orange Catholic sectarianism’.32 It was in some ways a transitional movement between the United Irishmen and the more formal Irish nationalist movements of later in the nineteenth century. It adapted well to British towns too, where thousands of Irish immigrants found work in the mills, factories and public works of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. British-based Ribbonmen remained connected to Ireland through representation on a ‘National Council’. Many linked with British radicals too, on one occasion plotting to kill King George IV.33 This scheme never really got off the ground but many Irish in Britain, despite opposition from the Catholic Church and Daniel O’Connell, supported the radical Chartist movement which called for universal suffrage throughout the United Kingdom. Its most prominent leader was the Irish-born former friend of O’Connell, Feargus O’Connor, the son and nephew of United Irishmen. He sought to combine Irish nationalism and British reform. Interestingly, he called his newspaper the Northern Star, partly for its location in the north of England (Leeds), a hotbed of Chartism, but it was also the name of the most prominent United Irish newspaper of the 1790s. Beyond O’Connor, Irish supporters of Chartism seem to have been influenced by the United Irish tradition.34 The Young Ireland movement (which officially evolved into the ‘Irish Confederation’ after the split with O’Connell) became very popular among the growing Irish population in Britain (already over 400,000 in 1841 and 700,000 a decade later). It provided a new impetus for Chartist reform.35 Some Irish nationalists like Meagher believed that Irish immigrants connected to the Chartists would support an Irish rebellion.36 John Mitchel’s trial in the spring of 1848, on the back of the revolution in France, did excite the Irish in Britain into demonstration which on occasion became violent. Emigration and the ’98 tradition had thus also radicalised these Irish into diasporic feelings.



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However, the Confederates and Chartists were ill-connected; the hoped for twin rising was a dream; and, as John Saville argues, the British state was too strong. As regimes fell across Europe, in the climacteric year, 1848, Britain held firm, and relatively easily so.37 More importantly during this period, the massive influx of the Great Famine migrants to Britain and North America increased dramatically the idea of diasporic exile. The Famine also drove a wedge between the Irish and natives, as the latter looked on the hungry, often disease-ridden immigrants as competition in already hard-pressed market-places.38 Charleston’s pre-Famine Irish Repealers, for example, had re-formed as the pro-Irish Confederation ‘Association of the Friends of Irish Independence’ in 1848 but now its organisers included men with predominantly Catholic names like Hogan, O’Neill and Ryan. These new groups endorsed the view that the new movement for independence would be successful if it could create a ‘remnant of that fierce spirit which burst forth in ’98’.39 The Famine exodus meant that the Irish-born population of the United States exploded to over 1.6 million by 1860 and the Irish in Britain numbered over 800,000 in 1861.40 The attitude of the Irish abroad was more radical than those at home, where a certain fatalistic view of the Famine devastation held sway, that it was somehow God’s punishment for previous misdeeds.41 The diasporic milieu created by earlier generations of migrants, however, was key to harnessing a growing resentment in Ireland, especially after the revision of the Poor Law Act in 1849. This legislation made evictions of poor tenants a lot easier, increasing the opinion that the tragedy was more man-made than natural disaster. In particular, the former Young Ireland leaders, who like many of their United Irish predecessors, sought refuge in America, exploited this grievance to the full. After escape from imprisonment in Australia, they received heroes’ welcomes upon arrival there in the early 1850s. They toured the country and were feted by large crowds, made up of immigrants and natives alike. They thus used their fame as a platform to expound their views of the Great Famine. The most important of these was John Mitchel, who founded a newspaper, The Citizen, in New York City to focus on British misrule in Ireland. Though he fell afoul of the local archbishop, John Hughes, he did use his paper (and later the Southern Citizen, published in Knoxville, Tennessee) to compose and collate his views. His writings in both papers became the basis for his two most important books: Jail Journal (1854) and The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (1861).42 The former was a memoir of his conviction for ‘treason’ and transportation to Australia, and the latter his detailed explanation of the Great Famine. The Famine, Mitchel believed, was not something natural or God’s will but one created by the British government (in collusion with

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Irish landlords) to subjugate the Irish people. He put it succinctly: ‘The integrity of Empire was to be threatened no more by those ordered masses of “the Irish Enemy,” with their growing enthusiasm and rising spirit, and their yet more dangerous discipline, were to be thinned, to be cleared off.’ They were ‘to be pushed out onto the highways’ where the ‘choices’ presented by the government in this great ‘thinning’ were ‘America, the poor house, or the grave’.43 Those in the grave were gone of course, and those in the poor house not much better off, but those in America were still alive and some were prospering. It was they who were to feel the resentment of exile and preserve the hatred of what Britain had done as the Irish lay prostrate under British control. The growing spread of nationalist journals in Ireland and in the diaspora meant that Mitchel’s and others’ rhetoric helped create ‘a transnational [Irish] identity’ through ‘the columns of a globally integrated, yet uniquely Irish popular press’.44 These diasporic press connections disseminated feelings of victimhood which quickly paid practical dividends for the Irish national cause; the creation of the Fenian movement. Founded ‘simultaneously’ on St Patrick’s Day in 1858 in New York City and Dublin, the Fenian Brotherhood (called the Irish Republican Brotherhood [IRB] in Ireland) became the most popular group ever for the violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland. The organisers were three former Young Irelanders – John O’Mahony and Michael Doheny in New York, and James Stephens in Ireland – who had all been involved in the abortive Young Ireland Rebellion near Ballingarry, County Tipperary, in 1848. They had also absorbed Mitchel’s more radical views, including an economic nationalism. Unlike most of the other leading Young Irelanders, Mitchel, inspired in part by the writings of colleague James Fintan Lalor, who had died in 1849, acknowledged that there was an economic element to Irish freedom. In the Last Conquest he railed against ‘English and Scotch capitalists’ exploiting Irish natural resources.45 Thus, the Fenians, in a Proclamation at the beginning of their rebellion in March 1867, declared that ‘The soil of Ireland, at present in the possession of an oligarchy, belongs to us, the Irish people, and to us it must be restored.’ They also endorsed universal suffrage and ‘separation of Church and state’. The American context of the movement was vital to these inclusions. The movement only really took off during the American Civil War (1861–65) where Fenian organisers like Stephens recruited among the c.180,000 Irish soldiers in the Union army. Their first ‘national conventions’, held in Chicago in 1863 and 1864, were dominated by Irish soldiers. This American influence made it easier for the Fenian movement to embrace an Irish republic, universal suffrage, separation of Church and state and the national ownership of land. The US was a republic which had (white)



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universal male suffrage by the mid-1860s, separation of Church and state enshrined in its Bill of Rights and, with the 1862 Homestead Act, promised free land in the west to new settlers. Thus, ‘with its aggressive republicanism, it fit more closely with official American ideology than the Repeal movement’ it became ‘the first really mass-based movement in Irish American history’.46 As a result, the Irish in America had a much more direct influence on Irish politics than on previous occasions. Despite the importance of Irish diaspora funds to the Repeal campaign Daniel O’Connell had remained firmly in control of the movement. With the Fenians it was different. Arrests and the closure of its newspaper in Ireland in 1865 meant that leadership remained firmly in the diaspora. Some who had been born in the United States and never set foot in Ireland, for example, were key members of military operations in Ireland and Britain. Irish-American John McCafferty, who had served in the Confederate army, and Thomas Kelly, County Galway-born but a Union army veteran, led a failed plan to capture Chester Castle. Kelly had already succeeded James Stephens as the leader of the 1867 rebellion in Ireland. The plan failed miserably, as did all the rebellion efforts in Ireland, but Kelly’s capture and imprisonment in Manchester led to the most spectacular effort of the whole campaign. British Fenians sprung him from a prison van and in the process killed a police officer. A resulting manhunt led to the capture of a number of Fenians involved, three of whom would be executed, becoming icons of Irish nationalism as the ‘Manchester Martyrs’. A song written in their honour, ‘God Save Ireland’, became the de facto national anthem. The ‘Martyrs’ and other Fenians impressed some British politicians too, especially William Gladstone, who took it upon himself to solve the ‘Ireland issue’ as a result. When becoming prime minister for the first time in 1868, he declared that he would ‘pacify Ireland’.47 The victim diaspora and the rise of political nationalism The Irish in the diaspora, then, had been central to the ideology and logistics of the Fenian efforts in Ireland and Britain. This reality meant that they were also central to its failure to overthrow British rule in Ireland. A major reason for this was the obsession with striking a blow against the British in Canada, rather than in Ireland. In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, tensions between Britain and the US were high, especially over the CSS Alabama, a Confederate raider constructed in England, which had destroyed American shipping during the war. Many Americans felt that Britain had been a de facto supporter of the

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Confederacy. With these heightened tensions, some American Fenians, led by William Roberts, a Cork-born New York City merchant who had emigrated during the Famine, thought that an easier way to attack Britain was through Canada, thus provoking war with the United States. Irishbased Fenians like Stephens opposed this idea but an 1865 crackdown by government authorities had lessened their influence. The ‘Roberts faction’ plan also led to a split within the movement in America. Nevertheless, there were a number of Canadian ‘invasions’, the most prominent in 1866 when Fenian forces went over the border near Buffalo and clashed with British/Canadian forces at Ridgeway, Ontario, in early June.48 Another failure: it did not provoke war between Britain and the United States. On the contrary, it, and the other later Fenian incursions, led to the Treaty of Washington in 1870 which settled the remaining Anglo-American issues, including recognition of Irish immigrants’ naturalisation in the United States. Until the treaty, the British government had refused to acknowledge Irish-Americans as US citizens but only as British subjects, liable to charges of treason for expressing violent opposition to the British rule in Ireland. The Fenian incursions into Canada did nothing for Irish freedom but they did lead to the citizenship rights of Irish-Americans being guaranteed.49 Despite the Fenian military failures, the late nineteenth century saw the highpoint of Irish national feeling among the diaspora. In the United States, Clan na Gael succeeded the Fenians in the 1870s as the most prominent keeper of the flame of Irish militant nationalism. John Devoy became its leader after organising the famous Catalpa raid in 1875. It was a classic case of how the Irish diaspora kept up the fight against the British. Devoy himself was the personification of the victim diaspora. Born in County Kildare in 1842, he became an early Fenian, meeting John Mitchel in Paris in 1861, and was the group’s organiser within the British army. Arrested in 1866, he was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour. Under pressure from Irish-Americans and a local campaign in Ireland, as part of the negotiations around the Treaty of Washington, the British government released him and some other Fenian prisoners, on condition they left Ireland. Devoy made his way to America and immediately began plotting the escape of the last Irish prisoners. These were a number of men who had served in the British army and joined the Fenians whom army authorities vetoed releasing. They were held in remote Freemantle, Western Australia, to discourage any attempt at escape. Devoy, with the help of prominent journalist and another former Fenian, John Boyle O’Reilly, raised the funds to charter a whaling ship in the US, the Catalpa. Using diaspora contacts in Australia, they managed to spring six of the seven remaining prisoners and get them, under an American flag, to the US. It



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was an amazing feat of rescue and for Irish-Americans, it was, as Devoy later described, ‘an expedition which brought humiliation to England’.50 In 1877 Devoy exploited the notoriety of the Catalpa expedition to revitalise Clan na Gael by taking over its so-called ‘Skirmishing Fund’ headed by another former Fenian, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Devoy eventually forced Rossa to resign in 1879 and was then able to hatch his new plan to achieve Irish freedom, the ‘new departure’, a term first coined in a New York Herald article. The idea of a ‘new departure’ for Irish republicans dedicated to the violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland had been around before the late 1870s. Its adoption meant that the movement could support the parliamentary system through the endorsement of certain candidates who promised to agitate for Irish independence. The Home Rule Party, founded in 1874 to elect Irish MPs dedicated purely to an Irish interest, took a more radical turn in 1877 when some of its members, led by Joseph Biggar and Charles Stewart Parnell, adopted a policy of obstruction in Parliament. This shift paved the way for the new departure. It was consummated when the Fenian Michael Davitt visited America and Devoy in 1878. Davitt was the new leader of the Irish National Land League, founded in 1879, the first Irish mass movement focused on overthrowing the landlord system in Ireland. He was also of the diaspora, having left County Mayo with his parents for Lancashire to work in a mill. His emigration experience radicalised him and he joined the Fenians in 1865, becoming its north of England and Scotland organiser. This trip to America had brought him into close contact with Devoy and Clan na Gael and helped forge this new departure in Irish nationalism. Devoy and American Fenians promised to refrain from armed violence and support the land campaigns and Home Rule. With this new departure, Devoy, for example, sent funds once earmarked for military activities to the new Land League instead.51 Reflecting the influence of the late Fintan Lalor on the diaspora, Devoy defended his support for the Land League over another military expedition on the premise that: ‘I believe in Irish independence, but I don’t think it would be worthwhile to free Ireland if that foreign landlord system were left standing.’ With that view, Devoy saw Davitt’s campaign opposing ‘arbitrary evictions and the creation of a peasant proprietary as a step in the right direction’.52 Though the diaspora-driven Fenian movement had ostensibly been, on its own terms, a failure, in that it had been unsuccessful in provoking war between the United States and Britain or violently overthrowing British rule in Ireland, its sheer size and reach meant that the Famine diaspora, particularly in America, would have a large role in every Irish political campaign up to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The new departure, for example, was key to raising funds for the Land League. Parnell toured

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the United States extensively, making speeches throughout the country. In 1880, he made an eight-week tour, raising over $250,000. He spoke to Congress and made major speeches in centres of Irish influence like New York and Chicago. He was not just welcome in these major centres. He visited Louisville, Kentucky, for example, where he spoke in a local German Hall, as no Irish venue was big enough, to a packed house. The Germans had waived the fee and tickets to attend had been sold at fifty cents. Knowing his audience well, Parnell spoke of 350,000 poor Irish tenants facing ‘starvation’. His loudest cheer came when he stated that ‘if the landlords do not give up the feudal system of land tenure, the Irish people will give up the landlords.’53 Irish women in America came into this diasporic feeling, too. The Ladies’ Land League, founded in New York in 1880 by Parnell’s sister Fanny, spread throughout Ireland and, through his other sister Anna, the diaspora in Britain from 1881.54 From the 1870s women came to dominate the numbers of Irish emigrating abroad. For various demographic reasons, including decreasing Irish marriage rates after the Famine and the male dominance of land tenure in Ireland, many young single women sought economic advancement outside of Ireland. Usually finding work in domestic service, though pay was often poor, with shelter and sustenance provided as part of service, Irish women could save their wages, however meagre they may have been. As a result, they could have savings that the Irish labourer could never accumulate. From a financial standpoint, then, they became vital to funding any Irish diasporic cause, the Church, Catholic schools and Irish national movements.55 Diasporic feelings, however, led some Irish-Americans to reject the new departure. The ousted O’Donovan Rossa provided the impetus with some money he had skimmed from the Skirmishing Fund. In particular, Rossa and other Irish in America supported a ‘dynamiting campaign’ in Britain. Its origins lay before the new departure when Rossa had worked with the most prominent Irish journalist/editor in America, Patrick Ford, and Irish-American former Confederate guerrilla, John McCafferty, to plan a campaign to bomb Britain. Irish-American Civil War veterans were also key elements of the bombing campaign, both in training would-be bombers in the ‘science of bombing’ through, for example, the ‘Brooklyn dynamite school’, and in planning and carrying out attacks. Between 1881 and 1885 over a dozen bombs were exploded in Britain, and though they took very few lives they complicated efforts for Home Rule.56 They did not, however, derail it, and Prime Minister William Gladstone’s introduction of a Home Rule bill to Parliament in 1886 marked a major turning point in the history of Irish nationalism. Though it failed to pass and divided Gladstone’s Liberal Party, it symbolised the importance of the Irish diaspora’s



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influence on British politics. Along with Irish-American money, the Irish diaspora in Britain played a role, too. Not only did they collect funds but they could also vote in British elections. In 1885, for example, the voters of the predominantly Irish immigrant constituency of Liverpool Scotland elected Westmeath native Thomas Power O’Connor as their member of Parliament. Irish voters throughout the rest of Britain gave their support to the Liberal Party and became one of its electoral mainstays.57 Those Irish on the other side of Home Rule, the Irish Unionists, also began to display their immigrant strength. Large numbers of Protestants, particularly from Ulster, moved to Britain, British North America and the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unlike their Scots-Irish ancestors of the eighteenth century, these migrants were generally industrial ones bringing, for example, shipbuilding skills to the Clyde, Tyne and Delaware rivers. The most visible expression of them bringing Ireland with them, like the Catholic Irish did, was through their ethnic societies. In particular, the Orange Order saw a spectacular rise in Britain and Canada, and its beginnings in the United States. They offered an alternative view of Ireland that saw its strength in connection with Britain.58 This Orange diasporic community, though not as large, rich or influential as the nationalists in the US, also used the tools of diaspora to support their own causes back home. In Pittsburgh, for example, a centre of Ulster steel workers, the local ‘strong Orange element’ persuaded the local mayor to refuse a reception for visiting Irish nationalist leaders.59 Did they, too, feel that they were part of a ‘victim’ diaspora, or did they see themselves as just moving within the worldwide Anglosphere? It was likely that they felt the latter. Loudly proclaiming loyalty to a British monarch, while acceptable in places like Canada and Australia, was problematic in the United States. They tried to counter this issue by naming lodges in honour of American presidents like Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield. Participation in organisations like the Scotch-Irish Society of America, founded in 1889, which claimed that Ulster immigrants were the backbone of America, helped too. The Scotch-Irish Society, however, was not as explicit in their link with contemporary Irish politics. Though they received congratulatory messages from the Unionist lord mayor of Belfast, they were more likely to support Irish Home Rule than the maintenance of the United Kingdom. The Scots-Irish diaspora looked to Andrew Jackson, not Unionist politicians, for inspiration, something that was very frustrating to some recent Ulster migrants.60 Thus, this confused counter-narrative of Ireland’s situation and its relationship with Great Britain was no match for clear diasporic feelings in Irish nationalism. Even after the decline of Clan na Gael, the downfall of Parnell and the failure of Home Rule in the 1890s, Irish America was

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at its public zenith. The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) had by 1898 an estimated 160,000 members spread throughout the country. For Catholics only, it adopted the ideology of diaspora, seeing itself as protector of Irish interests against ‘English’-sponsored nativism. The American Protective Association (APA) had grown in the 1890s as an organisation explicitly opposed to ‘Catholic influence’ and the AOH rose to oppose the nativists. The AOH was ‘the clearest demonstration of the strength of the ethnocentric revival of the Irish’ at the end of the century.61 Feeding this new growth of ethnic awareness was a new influx of immigrants. Over 80 per cent of the AOH’s leadership in Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, was Irish-born. The land struggles and the rising tide of nativism in some ways revitalised diasporic feelings, and blaming the English oppressor became prominent again. Thus, explicit Irish ethnicity, while provocative to groups like the APA, gave the Irish in America, still the largest population of Irish outside of Ireland, an organisation and focus on a defence of Irishness and Ireland that would have appeal back in Ireland.62 When the Order reunited after a split with the Irish and British (Board of Erin) Hibernians in 1898, the AOH in the United States formed a close relationship with its brothers over the Atlantic and joined them in renewed support for the Irish Home Rule movement under John Redmond. The passage of the Third Home Rule bill in 1912 raised the possibility that Ireland would become, as the original Young Irelander Thomas Davis had put it in his famous song, ‘a nation once again’. The role of the exile could finally diminish. There were, however, those still critical of Home Rule. The new departure had gone with Parnell in the 1890s and, as a result, in Ireland, as well as in America, a newer, more radical form of Irish nationalism, embodying John Mitchel’s hatred of British rule in Ireland, was reborn. This new movement, as one of its leaders put it, would not be ‘free merely, but Gaelic as well’.63 The cultural revival movement began in Ireland with the Victorian antiquarian tradition of seeking to preserve old Irish customs and traditions. The Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League, founded in 1884 and 1893 respectively, began as purely cultural movements but quickly became politicised. They grew among the diaspora too, where the cultural revival could be easily linked to the diasporic tradition of England as Ireland’s oppressor. In music, in particular, the diaspora was vital to the preservation and renaissance of a Gaelic culture. Preserving the musical traditions of home in America, Irish immigrants took advantage of the greater publishing, and eventually recording, opportunities in their adopted home. Born in the Famine era, Francis O’Neill of County Cork, for example, eventually settled in Chicago and joined the police force there. He rose to chief of department in 1901. An avid traditional flute player, O’Neill used his connections and influence



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to recruit Irish musicians in, and passing through, Chicago to play concerts. He began collecting their tunes and eventually published O’Neill’s Music of Ireland in 1903, and later eight books of biographies of traditional Irish musicians, all ‘becom[ing] standard resources of Irish music around the world’.64 To economics and politics was now added culture.65 This cultural addition helped revive the more militant nationalist tradition both in the diaspora and at home, but in some ways it was led by the diaspora. One man never reconciled to the new departure was Tom Clarke. Born in England, he was of the diaspora but came to its ideology later after his Irish father, serving in the British army, was stationed in Dungannon, County Tyrone. It was here that Clarke discovered his Irishness and as a young man was sworn into the IRB. After a run-in with the Royal Irish Constabulary he fled to America and came under the wing of O’Donovan Rossa, who sent him to England to blow up London Bridge as part of the dynamite campaign in 1883. The scheme failed and Clarke received a lengthy prison term, only being released in 1898. Upon that release, he went to America, where he worked for John Devoy at Devoy’s newspaper, the Gaelic American.66 Devoy’s newspaper had become his main focus after a major split in Clan na Gael in 1889 over the murder of his Chicago colleague Dr P.H. Cronin after an accusation that Cronin was a British agent. Cronin’s murderers were probably aligned with the faction opposed to Devoy and he left the organisation.67 Devoy’s departure from the Clan indicated he would become just another ‘has-been’ in the history of the Irish national struggle. However, his connection with Clarke revived his diasporic view of England as Ireland’s oppressor, with which there could be no compromise. He supported Clarke and, when the latter returned to Ireland in 1907, his shop in Dublin became the centre of IRB activity in Ireland. Clarke befriended Sean MacDiarmada, who became the national organiser of the IRB in Ireland. Both were key to reviving Fenianism in Ireland, always with the support of Devoy in America.68 Clarke, and another of his protégés, Bulmer Hobson, were key in sending a young fiery cultural nationalist and the operator of an all-Irish school, Patrick Pearse, to America on a fundraising trip in early 1914. Pearse, needing money to support his school, sought the support of Irish America. Hobson, through Clarke, introduced him to Devoy and the Gaelic American. Devoy endorsed the trip wholeheartedly, but before Pearse left for America to establish his bona fides among the radical diaspora, Hobson enrolled him in the IRB. The trip was a major success and his speeches were well attended, among them his talk on ‘John Mitchel and 1848’, one undoubtedly very popular in Irish America. Upon his return, Pearse, infused with a new surge of Irish patriotism, rose to greater prominence in the IRB and the Irish Volunteers. His finest hour, and ultimate rise to leadership, came

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in 1915 when he gave the funeral oration for old Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.69 By that stage the First World War had begun, Home Rule was suspended, and the Irish Volunteers divided. The latter had split over the war when John Redmond and the Home Rule party endorsed the war effort and encouraged Irish volunteers to join the British army in the fight against Germany. Tens of thousands of Irish in Ireland, Britain and the rest of the empire answered Redmond’s call. They retained some of the rhetoric of diaspora in the units they formed. In the North-East of England, for example, large numbers of the diaspora joined the Tyneside Irish Brigade, while other large areas of Irish settlement, Liverpool and London, also provided ethnic Irish regiments.70 Pearse and the IRB, however, were having none of that, and endorsed a strategy of ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. Irish America rallied to this new effort to exploit ‘English difficulty’. Though many had supported Home Rule through the United Irish League of America, the League declined precipitously after Redmond’s support for the British war effort. It left a vacuum in Irish American nationalism which Devoy and his cohorts were ready to exploit.71 Rossa’s funeral was a key element of the propaganda behind that strategy. Bringing a dead patriot home from the diaspora had been done before when Young Irelander Terence Bellew McManus, who had been imprisoned in Australia with John Mitchel, died in penury in San Francisco in 1861. Initially the AOH in San Francisco wanted to build a prominent memorial to him in their city by asking ‘Irishmen across America to show sympathy for Ireland’s cause and to display their hostility to the oppressive British government’ by collecting money for the monument.72 The nascent Fenian movement decided to take better advantage of his death by bringing him back to Ireland. Paying for his removal to New York City, where he lay in state, McManus’s body arrived back in Ireland in late October. Despite some strong opposition (unlike in America) from Catholic bishops, his funeral brought out large crowds and was a major boon to the Fenian cause. O’Donovan Rossa had been one of the Fenians organising the Dublin funeral and recognissed its great value.73 Appropriately, then, his funeral could have the same effect. Pearse was keen to revive the Irish republican spirit and did so immediately by declaring that on this occasion of the funeral of ‘this unrepentant Fenian’ all those present had ‘to pledge to English rule in Ireland our hate’. This ‘definition of Irish freedom’ was that ‘of [Wolfe] Tone’ and ‘of [John] Mitchel’, one of total independence from Britain and not some type of Home Rule inside the empire.74 Along with diasporic rhetoric, the usual financial support from the Irish abroad, particularly in America, would help provide the means for the next strike against ‘English rule’. John Devoy agreed that England’s



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difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity and actively opposed any and all attempts to push the United States into the war on the side of Britain. He also collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for the remaining rump of Irish Volunteers who had not agreed with Redmond’s call to arms, now controlled by the IRB. His campaign against British rule in Ireland in the Gaelic American drew the attention of the German ambassador and therefore, through Devoy, the IRB got German support, in particular guns, for their planned uprising in 1916. Ultimately five of the seven men who would sign the Easter Proclamation of the Irish Republic had met and received support from Devoy.75 Though British forces intercepted the German arms, the rebellion planned for Easter of that year went ahead anyway. The leaders recognised the role of the diaspora prominently in their ‘Proclamation’ of a new ‘Irish Republic’. Explicitly acknowledging the ‘support’ of Ireland’s ‘exiled children in America’, the proclamation was full of the rhetoric of diaspora, claiming, as Mitchel and the old Fenians had, the ‘ownership of Ireland’, condemning the ‘long usurpation’ of that Irish nation ‘by a foreign people and government’. An ‘alien government’ had long fostered ‘differences’ between the Irish people, but those days were now over. Two men from the diaspora were among the seven signatories of the proclamation, James Connolly, born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Tom Clarke, who was given the honour by commander Pearse, of being the first to sign.76 The new republic lasted less than a week but as their headquarters in the Dublin General Post Office collapsed around them, the rebels sang the ‘Soldier’s Song’ for comfort. Written in 1907 by IRB member and co-founder of the Irish Volunteers, Peadar Kearney, the song’s chorus celebrated that for their ‘coming fight’ with Britain ‘some have come from a land beyond the waves’ to free their ‘ancient Ireland’ from the ‘despot’. Years later Kearney wrote that Devoy was the most ‘potent’ and inspiring of ‘Fenians’. A member of the diaspora coming home to fight for Irish freedom was Piaras Béaslaí, born Percy Frederick Beasley in Liverpool, the son of Irish immigrants. He had become enamoured with the Irish language, and moved ‘home’ to Ireland to learn it and promote it through writing plays and poetry. He was second in command of the 1st Dublin Battalion of the Irish Volunteers, and led the rebel forces in the Dublin Four Courts.77 Of course, the highest-ranking commander of the rebellion to escape execution was Éamon de Valera, who had been born of an Irish mother in New York City in 1882.78 De Valera’s survival meant that he emerged as the leader of the Irish republican cause, which included his election as an MP for East Clare in 1917 and, in 1919, his selection as ‘president of the Irish Republic’ (revived since the failure of the Easter Rebellion). De Valera was indeed

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American-born, but had returned to Ireland as a child. He did, however, like his nationalist predecessors, know the vital importance of Irish America. In late 1919, he went to America to raise funds from the diaspora to fund the new Irish Republic and its growing war against the Crown forces in Ireland. De Valera exploited the old connections, including Devoy, who had, as so many times before, taken an Irish exile under his wing to further the cause. Devoy helped found the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) to support from America the War of Irish Independence. Liam Mellows had escaped Ireland after the Rising and found work with Devoy on the Gaelic American. Mellows would become de Valera’s tour manager in the US. De Valera also exploited new contacts like Joseph McGarrity, a colleague of Devoy’s in Philadelphia who had helped with getting German guns for the Irish Volunteers, as well as organisations such as the AOH, to raise over five million dollars for the cause.79 Irish women in the diaspora, as they had done during the Land/Home Rule campaign of the 1880s, used the new burst of diasporic nationalism to promote their own political participation. Dr Gertrude Kelly, who had arrived in America from Tipperary as a child in the late 1860s and become a physician, was involved in the Ladies’ Land League but came to the fore through her activities for women’s suffrage in New York. She was also heavily involved in the Gaelic revival organisations in America as well as the movement for Irish Home Rule. Her vocal opposition to Redmond’s decision to support the British war effort gained her prominence in Irish nationalist circles. She told one meeting: ‘May I as an Irishwoman and physician, spokeswoman of hundreds, thousands of my sisters at home and abroad, ask our leaders what is it they propose Ireland to do—commit suicide?’ Echoing the rhetoric of Mitchel and the Famine era, she continued: ‘Is Home Rule to be secured for the cattle and the sheep when the young men of Ireland are slaughtered, the old men and the old women left sonless, the young women obliged to bring up sons for men of other climes?’80 Redmond’s loyal following of British policy, she believed, would lead to the demise of the Irish people. Kelly became the founder of the Irish Progressive League, which sought to prevent American entry into the war on the side of Britain. The US’s eventual entry in 1917 was disappointing but Kelly and other newer Irish arrivals still sought to support the more radical nationalist cause. Katheen O’Brennan had arrived in America in 1914 and become involved in the labour politics of the west coast but her connection to her sisters back in Ireland, both of whom were involved in Cumman na mBan, the female auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers, and in the Easter Rising, gave her standing among the IrishAmericans eager for news of events in Ireland. O’Brennan was a key member of the White Cross in America, dedicated to raising money for,



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and awareness of, the Irish war for independence. She also used her labour organising skills in the American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War Aims, founded in 1920 to picket British diplomatic posts in the US. They did so for Irish independence, which fit well with ‘America’s War Aims’, especially ‘self-determination’.81 Managing the victim diaspora Ironically however, at this high point of diasporic influence on Irish nationalism, the son of the diaspora, de Valera, sought to undermine its influence. Though successful financially, de Valera damaged the close relationship between Irish America and the Irish cause. Demanding and controlling, he alienated many who had worked long and hard for Irish nationalism in America. Ultimately, he split the movement by encouraging the establishment of a rival organisation to the FOIF, the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic (AARIR). Devoy, in particular, came to despise him, and Irish/Irish diaspora relations were eased when de Valera returned to Ireland in 1921. The old Fenian stated that ‘instead of dying by an English bullet or the hangman’s noose, I am driven out by the Chief Officer of the Irish Republic’. The fallout continued though, and included Kelly’s Irish Progressive League being expelled from the FOIF and, later, from the AARIR. De Valera’s opposition to the AngloIrish Treaty and the resulting civil war split Irish America too. Indeed, the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, and de Valera’s eventual accommodation with it in 1926 when he founded the new political party Fianna Fáil, removed one of the key elements of Irish diasporic feeling. Ireland now was in some ways a nation, even if not a complete one.82 The Great Depression undermined Irish-American organisations further as members just could not afford dues. Therefore, the Irish-American response to continued British rule in Northern Ireland was not as robust as before. The fresh radicalising blood of new Irish immigrants declined too, as the 1924 Immigration Act introduced national quotas for immigrants. Although the Irish Free State had one of the largest quotas, it was limited to 28,000 people per annum and then 17,000 in 1929. Between 1901 and 1910 nearly 330,000 Irish came to America but in the 1920s that fell to 220,000. In the 1930s only 13,000 arrived and just 17,000 in the 1940s.83 Irish neutrality in the Second World War, set by Prime Minister de Valera, further distanced Irish America from Ireland, particularly after the US entered the conflict in late 1941. American involvement in the war reinforced the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States, which included the stationing of American forces in Northern Ireland. After the

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war, despite Ireland declaring itself a full republic and leaving the British Commonwealth in 1949, a key diasporic aim going back to the United Irishmen, Irish people continued to leave Ireland in large numbers. On this occasion, however, they headed mostly for Britain. There they continued the diaspora traditions of celebration of Irish traditions and customs in their new homes as well as maintaining contact with family at home but in the sense of a cultural rather than a victim diaspora.84 Irish America regained some importance in the 1950s and 1960s as John Ford’s movie The Quiet Man (1952) and other films, as well as President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Ireland in 1963, increased Irish-American interest in Ireland. The new modern-focused Ireland, introduced by Prime Minister Sean Lemass, both before and after de Valera’s retirement in 1959, exploited this renewed interest by opening Ireland to tourism.85 The beginning of the Northern Ireland Troubles in the late 1960s also revived the IrishAmerican diaspora’s interest in Irish politics. Irish America, for example, proved crucial to funding the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in the 1970s and 1980s. The Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), founded in 1970, was led by Michael Flannery, who had fought in the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21 before going to the United States. The spirit of John Devoy lived as Flannery and NORAID collected money for PIRA, funds that ‘helped considerably in sustaining the Provisionals’ War’.86 The Northern Ireland Troubles restored a political Irish America in the fashion of the older versions; resurrecting a diasporic obsession with ‘perfidious Albion’. Unlike the previous revivals emanating from Irish America, however, the Irish in Ireland did not, for the most part, take the same view of the conflict in the North. Opposing the cries from Irish America, the Irish government pursued PIRA with vigour, especially after 1972. From 1973 the focus moved more towards Europe when Ireland joined the European Economic Community. In the 1980s, with a young growing population, after many Irish in Britain had returned to Ireland and fewer people had left the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ireland declared itself the home of the ‘Young Europeans’. Emigration took off again in the mid-1980s, but no one blamed the British government for it. When voluntary, it was seen as a development opportunity, when involuntary, the fault of Irish governmental economic policy.87 Feelings of diaspora did continue to exist, especially among the Irish in Britain. Though many emigrants found economic opportunity in post-war Britain, they often faced native hostility, especially when looking for housing. This anti-Irishness had deep antecedents which was resurrected with a new influx of Irish immigrants. It helped ‘to polarise the Irish community’ in Britain and ‘force those who wished to assert an Irish identity to develop



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it within an Irish ethnic enclave’.88 The outbreak of the Troubles and the IRA’s launching of a bombing campaign in Britain exacerbated these attitudes. The notorious pub bombs in Guildford (Surrey) in May 1974, which killed five and injured sixty-five, and Birmingham, just six months later, which left 21 dead and over 180 injured, created a sense of outrage that had a negative impact on many innocent Irish in Britain. Many felt that the Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed hastily after the Guildford attack, targeted all Irish and not just the IRA. Notoriously, the arrest and conviction of a number of innocent Irish for these attacks, only acknowledged after they had spent more than fifteen years in jail (or died before their exoneration), left a lot of bitterness.89 Nonetheless, the fact that the Irish in Britain had, under the British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Ireland Act of 1949, lost ‘alien’ status and gained unique rights that no other immigrant had, including the right to vote, provided an avenue for the Irish to express any diasporic frustrations at the ballot box.90 They usually did so by voting for the Labour Party, which, as a result, remained sympathetic to Irish issues, such as state-supported Catholic schools, independent Catholic hospitals and, rhetorically at least, the idea of a United Ireland ‘by consent’.91 The miscarriages of justice in Britain after IRA violence and the republican hunger strikes of the late 1970s and early 1980s still made the Irish government nervous of a revival of an Irish diasporic militant nationalism in support of PIRA in the US. They thus sought to undermine it quickly by enlisting the support of prominent Irish-American politicians such as Senator Ted Kennedy, highlighting that the Irish government, not a terrorist republican rump, truly represented Ireland’s interests, thus re-establishing official government connections with the diaspora in America. It was these links which were key to American support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement on Northern Ireland in 1985 and eventually for the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In return for their support for the peace process, the Irish government included the diaspora in the constitutional amendment that replaced the ones claiming Northern Ireland as part of the republic. Ireland seemed more confident in reaching out to its diaspora for things other than support for nationalist struggles. On one occasion, as the Irish economy boomed in the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years (1994–2008), one politician claimed that Ireland was ‘spiritually closer to Boston than Berlin’ not because of old nationalist causes, but because of new ones around similar economic philosophies.92 The focus now was economic development, not support for Irish unity, as the government expanded its diplomatic presence in countries with diasporic connections. The United States remained central to this effort, with over 40 million claiming to be in some way ‘Irish American’. It’s not guns or men for the

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struggle for Irish freedom that’s wanted in Ireland now but instead the diaspora coming back to spend and invest.93 Conclusion There still remains a memory of the ‘old cause’ in Irish America. Driven in some ways by the rediscovery of white ethnicity in the post-Civil Rights era, it was the sesquicentennial of the Great Famine in 1995 which provided the spark. In her recognition of the Irish diaspora to the Irish Parliament, President Robinson recognised that the Famine was at its centre. She pointed out that ‘remembrance of the famine …. points us toward a single reality that commemoration is a moral act’.94 Many in Ireland saw it as an opportunity to connect Ireland with contemporary campaigns against poverty and hunger internationally, but Irish America believed it a chance to restore the traditional narrative of British oppression causing Irish emigration. Over forty Irish Famine memorials have been unveiled in America since the early 1990s, with another eighteen in Canada. There are over eighty throughout the island of Ireland, but only four in Britain. The Irish in America took advantage of the moment too to place the Famine on the school curriculum in states like New York and New Jersey, comparing the study of the Famine to the study of the Holocaust. 95 John Mitchel’s idea of the Famine as genocide still holds stronger sway in the United States. So much so, that one memorial organiser and fundraiser refused to use the word ‘famine’ in his efforts because ‘There was no scarcity of food … The English stole land from the Irish.’96 Despite the best efforts of some in America to revive the old view of diaspora, the Irish government opposed it, denying that the Famine was ‘genocide’.97 It has since the Good Friday Agreement sought to embrace some of the events of Irish history to create a narrative different from that defined by the diaspora. The recent commemoration of the 1916 Rising is a classic example. The government embraced the Rising’s centennial as an attempt to promote Ireland in 2016. Its initial promotional film released in 2014, however, provoked a backlash when it failed to feature much about the rebellion itself, instead focusing on ‘present[ing] our best to the world’ and constructing ‘a new legacy of hope, belief, possibility, and confidence’. With a brief call to ‘remember our past’ and quick flash of the Easter Proclamation, it looked like the centennial was an excuse to bring Ireland out of its post-2008 crash funk.98 The criticism, though, had an effect. Newer versions were designed through 2015 where, according to Prime Minister Enda Kenny, Irish people could ‘celebrate and have pride in Ireland’s independence, and honour those who gave their lives



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so that the dream of self-determination could be a reality’.99 This invitation was extended to the diaspora too, with funds to promote events wherever those of Irish descent lived. The diaspora were one of ‘seven strands’ (just as there were seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic) where events and commemorations were planned, including places like Phoenix, Arizona, which had very little, if any, link with the Rising itself.100 The Irish government had taken an event they had once found problematic and used it to create a cultural event to bind the diaspora closer to it, and its definition of what happened in 1916, denying it to those who might have exploited it to revive violent opposition to the continued British control of Northern Ireland. Twenty years after Mary Robinson called on the Irish in Ireland to ‘cherish the diaspora’, the build-up to the 2016 centennial also proved to be the time when the Irish government finally launched a policy document entitled, ‘The Global Irish’. The fifty-eight-page document opens with the statement: ‘The Irish Nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural heritage and identity.’ Its driving ‘Vision’ is ‘a vibrant diverse Irish global community, connected to Ireland and to each other’.101 It seems, then, that the idea of the diaspora as one of ‘victimhood’ has finally been replaced by one of ‘scattering’. Yet, it was the former which created a sense of victimhood that was vital in constructing a sense of a distinct Irish identity within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. This sense, along with major financial support from the diaspora, led to the formation of the modern nation of Ireland. Without this belief among the diaspora in America that their, or their ancestors’, emigration had not been voluntary but enforced by the British government, Ireland might have remained part of the United Kingdom, or, if it had still left, done so in a much less violent way. Notes 1 Mary Robinson, ‘Inaugural speech’, 3 December 1990, available at www.cfwd.org.uk/uploads/Robinson%20Speech.pdf. Accessed 25 February 2017. 2 Mary Robinson, ‘Address by Uachtarán na hÉireann Mary Robinson to joint sitting of the Houses of the Oireachtas’, 2 February 1995, available at www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/addresses/2Feb1995.htm. Accessed 25 February 2017. Emphasis added. 3 Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the nineteenth-century Irish diaspora’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35 (April 1984), 188–207. 4 Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1985); Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Diaspora in

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

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18 19 20 21

british and irish diasporas America (Bloomington, IN, 1976), republished as The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America (Washington, DC, 1997). Robert Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London, 1997), pp. 3–6, 21. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, p. 280. The strongest critiques are David Noel Doyle, ‘The remaking of Irish America, 1845–1880’, in W.E. Vaughan (ed.), New History of Ireland, VI: Ireland Under the Union, 1870–1921 (New York, 1996), pp. 725–63, and Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto, 1993). Kevin Kenny, ‘Diaspora and comparison: the global Irish as a case study’, Journal of American History, 90 (June 2003), 144. Emphasis added. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, p. 10. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp. 1–2, 21, 37. David Brundage, Irish Nationalism in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798–1998 (Oxford, 2016), p. 4. Kenny, ‘Diaspora and comparison’, p. 145. David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 616–17. David A. Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, NY, 1998), p. 2. See, for example, Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, KS, 1997). Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 8–14; John Binns, Life of John Binns: Twenty Nine Years in Europe and Fifty Three in America (Philadelphia, PA, 1854). Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, p. 155; Arthur Mitchell, History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina, 1799–1981 (Charleston, SC, 1981), pp. 1–5; Arthur J. O’Hara, Hibernian Society, Savannah, Georgia, 1812–1912: The Story of a Century (Savannah, GA, 1997), pp. 1–3. For United Irish ideology see Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Notre Dame, IN, 1996), pp. 59–98. Martin Burke, ‘Piecing together a shattered past: the historical writings of the United Irish exiles in America’, in David Dickson, Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion (Dublin, 1993), pp. 297–306. John Daly Burk, History of the Late War in Ireland (Philadelphia, PA, 1799). John [Daly] Burk, The History of Virginia: From its First Settlement to the Present Day, 4 vols (Petersburg, VA, 1804–5), quote in v. 3, p. 469. John Junius Burk, Some Materials to Serve for a Brief Memoir of John Daly Burk (Albany, NY, 1868), p. 13. Cormac O’Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History (Oxford, 1994), pp. 158–59; Daniel Walker Howe, What God Had Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 91–95.



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22 David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013), pp. 6, 28; Thomas Paul Thigpen, ‘Aristocracy of the heart: Irish Catholic lay leadership in Savannah, Georgia, 1820–1870’ (PhD dissertation, Emory University, 1995), pp. 89–90. 23 Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, p. 18. 24 Substance of a Discourse Delivered before the Hibernian Society of Savannah (Charleston, SC, 1824), p. 52; A.G. Magrath, An Oration delivered at the Cathedral of St. Finbar before the Hibernian Society, the St. Patrick Benevolent Society and the Irish Volunteers (Charleston, SC, 1837), pp. 20–23. 25 Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, p. 168. 26 Boston Liberator, 25 March 1842; Bruce Nelson, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (Princeton, NJ, 2012), pp. 65–66. For the roots of O’Connell’s abolitionism, see also Patrick M. Geoghegan, Liberator: The Life and Death of Daniel O’Connell, 1830–1847 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 197–205. 27 David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), pp. 130–31. The best work on this controversy is Angela F. Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal (Baton Rouge, LA, 2010). 28 Boston Liberator, 24 November 1843. 29 Quoted in Thomas Francis Meagher, Meagher of the Sword: Speeches of Thomas Francis Meagher in Ireland, ed. Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 1916), p. 36. 30 Earl F. Niehaus, The Irish in New Orleans, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1956), pp. 151–52. 31 Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, CT, 1982); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964), pp. 168–71, 439–41; Donald M. MacRaild, The Irish Diaspora in Britain, 1750–1939 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 110–23. 32 James S. Donnelly, Jr, Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 (Madison, WI, 2009), pp. 20–21; Tom Garvin, ‘Defenders, Ribbonmen and others: underground networks in pre-Famine Ireland’, Past & Present, 96 (August 1982), 133–55; M.R. Beames, ‘The Ribbon Societies: lower class nationalism in pre-Famine Ireland’, Past & Present, 96 (November 1982), 128–43. 33 Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Irish politics and labour: transnational and comparative perspectives, 1798–1914’, in Niall Whelehan (ed.), Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History (London, 2015), pp. 51–56. 34 ‘O’Connor, Feargus’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 41, pp. 400–402, available at www.oxforddnb.com. Accessed 13 June, 2018. Dorothy Thompson, Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation (London, 1993), pp. 121–25. 35 Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 43; David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 66–67. 36 Meagher, Meagher of the Sword, pp. 189–90. 37 John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 142, 148, 151, 219–21.

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38 Neville Kirk, The Growth of Working-Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (Urbana, IL, 1985), pp. 312–24; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York, 1992), pp. 4–15. 39 Charleston (SC) United States Catholic Miscellany, 20 May and 8 July 1848; quoted in Robert H. Griffin, Anniversary Address before the Hibernian Society of Savannah on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th, 1848 (Savannah, GA, 1848), n. p. 40 Joseph C.G. Kennedy, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC, 1864), p. 621; MacRaild, Irish Migrants, p. 43. 41 Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Princeton, NJ, 1999), pp. 208–9. 42 Bryan P. McGovern, John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist (Knoxville, TN, 2009), pp. 92–101; Gleeson, The Green and the Gray, pp. 20–21. 43 John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (Glasgow, 1882), p. 72. 44 Cian T. McMahon, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation and the Popular Press, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), p. 2. 45 Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland Before the Famine, 1798–1848 (Dublin, 1990), pp. 197–202; Mitchel, Last Conquest, pp. 212–13. 46 The Times, 8 March 1867; Timothy J. Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York, 2005), pp. 204–5. 47 R.V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–1882 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 135–37; Leon Ó Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma (London, 1971), pp. 126–28, 192–208; Richard Parfitt, ‘“Oh, what matter, when for Erin dear we fall?”: music and Irish nationalism, 1848–1913’, Irish Studies Review, 34 (Autumn 2015), 485–86; Ian St. John, Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics (New York, 2010), pp. 170–71. 48 Patrick Steward and Bryan P. McGovern, The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1876 (Knoxville, TN, 2013), pp. 125–29. 49 Christian Samito, Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans and the Politics of Citizenship in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY, 2009), pp. 194–216. 50 Terry Golway, Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Irish Freedom (New York, 1999), pp. 16, 36–39, 57, 65–72; John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York, 1929), p. 251. 51 T.W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–1882 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 257–58. Steward and McGovern, The Fenians, p. 213. 52 Quoted in Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA, 1966), pp. 90–91. 53 John R. O’Connor, ‘Parnell visits “the Ireland of America”’, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 69 (April 1971), 140–49. 54 Jane McL. Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriot Sisters (London, 1991), pp. 4–9.



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55 Janet K. DeBrake, ‘Irish peasant women in revolt: the Land League years’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (May 1992), 64–65, 69–73; Janet Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 (Lexington, KY, 1989), pp. 13, 113; Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD, 1993), pp. 103–5, 137–38. 56 Niall Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. xiii–xiv, 155–68. 57 D.A. Hamer, ‘The Irish Question and Liberal politics’, Historical Journal, 12 (1969), 511–32; Alan O’Day, ‘The political organisation of the Irish in Britain, 1867–90’, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989), pp. 183–211. 58 Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Wherever orange is worn: Orangeism and Irish migration in the 19th and early 20th centuries’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 28–29 (Fall 2002–Spring 2003), 98–117; and his Faith, Fraternity and Fighting: The Orange Order and Irish Migrants in Northern England c.1850–1920 (Liverpool, 2005); Elaine McFarland, Protestants First: Orangeism in Nineteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990); Cecil J. Houston and William Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto, 1980). 59 Donald M. MacRaild, ‘The Orange Atlantic’, in David T. Gleeson (ed.), The Irish in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2010), pp. 319–21; David Fitzpatrick, Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution (Cork, 2003), pp. 141–42. 60 David T. Gleeson, ‘Smaller differences: “Scotch Irish” and “real Irish” in nineteenth century America’, New Hibernia Review, 10 (Summer 2006), 68–91. 61 Albert C. Stevens, The Cyclopedia of Fraternities (New York, 1899), p. 212; Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928 (Notre Dame, IN, 2001), p. 241. 62 Meagher, Inventing Irish America, p. 243. 63 Patrick Pearse, ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace’, speech at Glasnevin, Dublin, 1 August 1915, available at www.easter1916.net/oration.htm. Accessed 13 June 2018. 64 Scott Spencer, ‘Transatlantic migrations of Irish music in the early recording age’, in Gleeson (ed.), Irish in the Atlantic World, pp. 62–63. 65 Timothy G. McMahon, Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910 (Syracuse, NY, 2008); Úna Ní Bhroméil, Building Irish Identity in America, 1870–1915: The Gaelic Revival (Dublin, 2003); ‘Oration of P. H. Pearse over Rossa’s Grave’, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, available at http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000128123. Accessed 15 May 2017. 66 Golway, Irish Rebel, pp. 145, 181–82. 67 Gillian O’Brien, Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2015). 68 Golway, Irish Rebel, pp. 191, 201. 69 Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London, 1979), pp. 184–98, 235–38.

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70 Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1–68; John Sheen, Tyneside Irish, 24th, 25th, 26th, & 27th (Service) Battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers: A History of the Tyneside Irish Brigade Raised in the North East in World War One (Barnsley, 2010); John Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse: The History of the Liverpool Irish, 1800–1939 (Liverpool, 2007), pp. 253–54. 71 Francis M. Carroll, ‘The collapse of Home Rule and the United Irish League of America, 1910–1918: the centre did not hold’, in Miriam Nyhan Grey (ed.), Ireland’s Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising (Dublin, 2016), pp. 35–38. 72 Thomas Brophy, ‘On church grounds: political funerals and the contest to lead Catholic Ireland,’ Catholic Historical Review, 95 (July 2009), 494. 73 Ibid.. 74 ‘Oration of P. H. Pearse over Rossa’s Grave’. 75 Golway, Irish Rebel, pp. 201–5, 215–25; Robert Schmuhl, Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising (Oxford, 2016), pp. 25–29. 76 ‘The Provisional Government of Ireland to the people of Ireland’ [Proclamation of the Irish Republic], 24 April 1916, available at http://the1916proclamation.ie/. Accessed 15 May 2017. 77 R.F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 (London, 2014), pp. 12–13, 394; quoted in Schmuhl, Ireland’s Exiled Children, p. 2; ‘Biographical note’, Piarais Béaslaí Collection, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, available at www.nli.ie/pdfs/mss%20lists/beaslai.pdf. Accessed 15 May 2017. 78 Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (London, 1993), pp. 7–9, 73–78. 79 Ibid., pp. 190–95; Golway, Irish Rebel, p. 289; Stephen Kelly, ‘James O’Mara and the first American bond-certificate drive, 1919–23’, New Hibernia Review, 15 (Winter 2011), 75–94. 80 Quoted in David Brundage, ‘“In time of peace, prepare for war”: key themes in the social thought of New York’s Irish nationalists, 1890–1916’, in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (eds), The New York Irish (Baltimore, MD, 1996), p. 330. 81 Catherine M. Burns, ‘Kathleen O’Brennan and the American identity in the transatlantic Irish Republican movement’, in Gleeson (ed.), Irish in the Atlantic World, pp. 176–94; Derek Heater, National Self-Determination: Woodrow and His Legacy (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 40–46. 82 Golway, Irish Rebel, pp. 285–97; Troy D. Davis, ‘Éamon de Valera’s political education: the American tour of 1919–1920’, New Hibernia Review, 10 (Spring 2006), pp. 65–78; quoted in Schmuhl, Ireland’s Exiled Children, p. 40; Marie V. Tarpey, ‘Joseph McGarrity, fighter for Irish freedom’, Studia Hibernica, 11 (1971), 164–80; Burns, ‘Kathleen O’Brennan’, p. 185. 83 Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (Harlow, 2000), pp. 181–83. 84 Bryce Evans, Ireland During the Second World War: Farewell to Plato’s Cave (Manchester, 2016), pp. 134–35; Troy Davis, Dublin’s American Policy: Irish



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86 87 88 89 90 91

92

93 94 95

96 97

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American Diplomatic Relations, 1945–1952 (Washington, DC, 1998); Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 2, 163–64, 258–59. Brian Girvin and Gary Murphy, ‘Whose Ireland? The Lemass era’, pp. 4–5 and Roddy Flynn, ‘A semi-state in all but name? Sean Lemass’s Film Policy’, in Brian Girvan and Gary Murphy (eds), The Lemass Era: Politics and Society in the Era of Sean Lemass (Dublin, 2005), p. 182; Harvey O’Brien, ‘Culture, commodity, and Céad Míle Fáilte: U.S. and Irish tourism films as a vision of Ireland’, in Kevin Kenny (ed.), New Directions in Irish-American History (Madison, WI, 2003), pp. 248–62; Sylvia A. Ellis, ‘The historical significance of President Kennedy’s visit to Ireland in June 1963’, Irish Studies Review, (Spring 2008), 113–30. Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford, 2003), p. 117. Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora (London, 2004), p. 31; Kenny, The American Irish, pp. 223–25. John A. Jackson, ‘The Irish in Britain’, in P.J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland and Britain Since 1922 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 135–36. Robert Kee, Trial and Error: The Maguires, the Guildford Pub Bombings and British Justice (London, 1989); Chris Mullin, Error of Judgement: The Truth about the Birmingham Pub Bombings (Dublin, 1990). Enda Delaney, The Irish in Post-war Britain (Oxford, 2007), pp. 72–73. Ibid., 191–94; Melinda Sutton, ‘Anglo-Irish relations and the British Labour Party, 1981–1994’, in Laurence Marley (ed.), The British Labour Party and Twentieth-Century Ireland: The Cause of Ireland, the Cause of Labour (Manchester, 2015), pp. 222–23. Kenny, The American Irish, pp. 250–57; Article 2, Bunreacht na hÉireann (Constitution of Ireland), available at www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Historical_ Information/The_Constitution/February_2015_-_Constitution_of_ Ireland_.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2017; ‘Remarks of Tánaiste Mary Harney to American Bar Association meeting at the Irish Law Society of Ireland in Blackhall Place, Dublin, July 21, 2000’, Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Government of Ireland, available at www.entemp.ie/ press/2000/210700.htm/. Accessed 1 June 2017. See, for example, www.discoverireland.ie/The-Gathering-Ireland. Accessed 28 June 2017. Robinson, ‘Address’. Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument (Liverpool, 2013), pp. 68–75, 85–87, 282–94; Thomas J. Archdeacon, ‘The Irish Famine in American School curricula’, in Kenny (ed.), New Directions, pp. 280–301. See also Dr Mark-Fitzgerald’s website for detailed descriptions of these memorials: https://irishfaminememorials.com/. Accessed 14 July 2017. Jim Coyne, quoted in Mark-Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine, p. 85. Mark-Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine, pp. 86–87.

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98 ‘Don’t mention the war: 1916 video fails to mention the Rising’, Irish Times, 13 November 2014, available at www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/dont-mention-the-war-1916-video-fails-to-mention-rising-1.1999460. Accessed 14 July 2017]. 99 ‘Easter Rising commemorative programme launched’, Irish Times, 31 March 2015, available at www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/easter-risingcommemorative-programme-revealed-1.2160368. Acessed 14 July 2017. 100 Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland, ‘Ireland 2016 global and diaspora programme announced’, available at www.dfa.ie/our-role-policies/our-work/ casestudiesarchive/2015/june/ireland-2016-global-diaspora-programme/. Accessed 14 July 2017. 101 Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland, Global Irish: Ireland’s Diaspora Policy, available at www.dfa.ie/media/globalirish/global-irish-irelands-diasporapolicy.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2017.

6 Partners in empire: the Scottish diaspora since 1707 Tanja Bueltmann and Graeme Morton

In early 1884 the Otago Daily Times published a series of letters to the editor from local pioneer settlers and more recent arrivals to New Zealand at the heart of which lay the question of identity post-migration.1 It was an identity defined in no small part by national stereotypes, their use fuelling, for weeks, an increasingly bitter debate between Scotsmen and Englishmen in the region, leading one English writer to conclude that he was ‘happy, most happy, to see that … [the English are not] connected by descent with the Scotch’.2 With the Scots and the English cast as fundamentally different in character, the debate served to entrench an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality. This was, of course, neither helpful to community relations nor particularly accurate, not least because identities often overlap and can be multiple.3 This multiplicity is particularly relevant in the case of the UK’s home nations: while they have their separate identities, underpinned by uneven social structure, cultural symbols, traditions and practices, Britishness provided a potential umbrella and could serve to unite – to the point that, for some, Britishness became the principal identity focus. Still: Britishness, the very idea of Britain itself, and the relationship with the southern neighbours, remains a complex question for Scots to this day. In our period post-1707, it certainly was. In three letters published in 1826, for example, Sir Walter Scott invoked the dangers of a false unanimity in his defence of the Scottish bank note. And while the wide use of the term ‘North Britain’ to describe Scotland took hold in the nineteenth century, it was less popular in the preceding and following centuries. The forces of opposition to the Union remained episodic, from the first wave of Jacobite uprisings to the earliest groups advocating constitutional realignment, their proposals ranging from a local national parliament, British or Imperial federalism or a devolved assembly, to an independent Scotland.4

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What makes these developments important for us here is that they played out not only in Scotland or within the British and Irish Isles, but also in empire – the antagonisms we see expressed in Otago newspapers are only one example of this. For some Scots the principal problem lay in the fact that they found ‘the Empire run on English lines’. To this, in the analysis of Australian-Scot Theodore Napier, they will object, for ‘[t]hey are quite agreeable to a British Federated Empire but not an English one’.5 The Scots were prominent in building and peopling the British Empire: in fact, after 1707, they became partners in empire. This was a partnership for which a shared sense of Britishness was essential. Situated in this context, this chapter offers an exploration of the partnership that developed, utilising the concept of diaspora framed through identity to examine the nature and scope of the partnership. Ultimately, the chapter seeks to offer further nuance to Scottish diaspora studies that extends the framework we have, collectively and individually, developed over recent years,6 probing some of our ideas further in relation to all of the British diasporas with which this volume is concerned. We begin our discussion with a section focused on exploring how identity is a critical measure and structuring principle of the Scottish diaspora: diaspora is not only a term that denotes the movement of people, their transnational connections and continued homeland affinity – though these characteristics are, as we have set out elsewhere,7 essential to it – but it is also in itself an identity concept. Following this theoretical conceptualisation, we turn to examining how the British Empire has shaped the migration choices of Scots since 1707. The chapter thus establishes not only the timing and geographical scope of the Scots’ partnership in empire, but also some uniform characteristics across sites of settlement and sojourn, for instance the gendered nature of the partnership, as men were more likely to be involved in it than women. The final section then goes on to scrutinise how, across geographies and time, the partnership of Scots in empire actually manifested itself and was utilised. Diaspora: an identity concept The genesis for internal migration and emigration was broadly similar for the people of all of Britain’s home nations. Causes for their decision to migrate came from agricultural and industrial transformation, under- and un-employment, limited and inadequate welfare support, and aspirations for economic opportunities otherwise unrealisable.8 In parliamentary debate, with support from philanthropic interventions in civil society, emigration was advanced repeatedly as a solution to concerns over



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increasing vagrancy, social unrest and the threat to property.9 Responding to the reading of Ernst Georg Ravenstein’s paper on the ‘Laws of Migration’, presented to the Royal Statistical Society in March 1885, the society’s president, Sir Rawson W. Rawson, thought many in the room would have personal experience of ‘the actual facts of migration in different parts of the kingdom, affecting as they did their criminal population, their increase in population, and also their social existence’. Rawson had picked up on migration, not emigration, as the greater challenge because, he reasoned, ‘the influx of the population from the agricultural into the urban and manufacturing districts was one of the immensely difficult problems of the present day’.10 Yet people were exactly what was needed elsewhere, above all else, to maintain and to boost the partnerships of empire. Emigration from Britain was advanced as the solution to the under-population and the under-capacity of the new territories of empire, with agents and promoters competing to attract Scots to different corners of the New World.11 The migrants’ choice of destination followed predictable patterns. Until the twentieth century, although to some extent Scots still then continued to follow the same pathways when eschewing migration to England, the unskilled looked to Canada and Australia; those with industrial experience and some recognisable skill joined the middle classes in sailing for America and South Africa.12 The great majority took the imperial route and in that regard they were little different from other European migrants in following well-defined and long-established streams of population movement.13 For all the nuances, characteristics and elements of distinctiveness, some of which are undoubtedly significant, understanding migration is best approached from the viewpoint of the demographer. Outside of identifiable population trends, Ravenstein did not differentiate between the people of Britain when explaining his principles of migration.14 How far the migrants travelled and the number of steps and intervening stages they took determined Ravenstein’s classifications, not nationality.15 These flows and counter-flows, whether short or long, whether financially or emotionally challenging or supported by state or sponsor, always involved ‘an origin, a destination, and an intervening set of obstacles’.16 However rootless the migrant, the act of migration itself is rooted in regularities of lifecycle and experience. Climate-affected harvests marked out the fragility of rural lives, and trade cycles of around twenty years in length have been observed between Britain and North America, when stagnation on one side of the Atlantic coincided with prosperity on the other side.17 In both the leaving and receiving country there developed unbalanced sex ratios, a rising age of marriage and an accompanying scattering and splintering of families.

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It is within this wider context of migration movements and their study that the concept of diaspora sits. We acknowledge that a broadening of its definition in recent years has challenged the diaspora concept.18 This must be recognised: an expansion in how the term has been used has eviscerated conceptual definition for the scholar interested in the movement of people.19 The intellectual landscape has become a diasporama that has inured some scholars from the need for precision and intellectual coherence.20 The Jewish exemplar has been utilised to analyse other migratory groups who have similarly sought a homeland, or who have been dispersed by force, catastrophe or victimhood; the example has also been used to exclude from analysis migrant groups who fail to match its criteria. Other scholars have watered down these conditions in order to capture those migrants who ‘remain orientated’ to the homeland, and those who maintain a relationship with the homeland, albeit one that is not idealised or warmly sought.21 The aim here is for diasporic analysis to represent the proliferation of population movements that followed the conclusion of the Second World War.22 If Tölølyan is right to conclude that diaspora is the ‘exemplary community of late modernity’, we should not shy from complexity in order to describe and analyse its conditions.23 As the concept has been challenged, so a recalibration has taken place, from static categorisation to dynamic fluidity, from a focus on description to a concern with analysis.24 When we consider whether the concept of diaspora can add to the study of migration, we start from the following basis. The social and economic pressures that lay behind the decision to migrate; the work of emigration agents or private, philanthropic or public-funded emigration schemes; the efforts made at various times by the receiving countries to attract migrants through advertising and the offer of passage or guaranteed employment; the push and pull factors of respective labour markets and the relative wage, housing and food costs in each location – these are indeed the kinds of processes and factors that account for the formation of diasporic groups, but they are features of the mechanical acts of migration.25 Critically, in themselves, these factors do not make a diaspora. Emigration might be ‘the natural method’ of relieving old countries of surplus population and populating ‘new countries’ – ‘[an] operation designed by Providence for at once mitigating the evils of civilisation and eradicating those of barbarism’26 – but there is no natural or divine corollary that a diaspora will form. We propose to leave behind historians who utilise the word ‘diaspora’ as nothing more than a convenient label for migrant activity. Thus, we question not why T.M. Devine’s To the Ends of the Earth offers only one reference to diaspora as a concept – in the preface – and only one further mention of diaspora in over 400 pages. What we



the scottish diaspora since 1707  213

question is why, given the author’s concern with the reasons for comparatively high levels of outmigration from Scotland, and for examples of the disproportionate economic activity of Scots within the empire – the concerns of migration – the book’s subtitle should be ‘Scotland’s global diaspora’.27 The interests of the diaspora historian are aroused only when analysis switches from identifying patterns of movements, settlement and community formation, to evidence of social action: it is only when we can locate diaspora agents (individual migrants or migrant collectives) in diaspora structures (in essence these are all structures that help establish a transnational community of Scots, real or imagined) that we reach that point.28 Built upon the emigrant departures of sojourners, settlers and others, we conceive the British Empire as the connecting conduit through which the diaspora concept is propelled to explain the dialectic of metropolitan centre and New World periphery. Correctly, we believe, Said’s deployment of a counterpoint, or contrapuntal reading of imperial cultures, explains the juncture at which diasporic action is formed. Said’s analysis situates the migrant’s diasporic identity coterminously in the periphery and in the centre, not as essentialisations, ‘but as contrapuntal ensembles, for it is the case that no identity can ever exist by itself and without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions’.29 The exile and the migrant are the ‘inhabitants of both the culture of the periphery and the culture of the centre’, occupying a place between the two, possessing ‘the stereoscopic equipment to hear the counterpoints to which the monocultural is necessarily deaf ’.30 This version of transnationalism finds the migrant not simply operating across national boundaries, but existing in spaces between boundaries. The boundaries create complex and eddying spaces in their wake. London is core to Scotland’s periphery; Scotland is core to the migrants’ periphery; Scots settled in Melbourne or Ottawa are peripheral to both Scotland and Britain, with a diasporic identity contrapuntally interplaying with a Scottish and a British core. The poly-focal partnerships of empire could have it no other way. Diaspora historians have adorned the ongoing connection between the Scots and their homeland – their temporal coincidence – with slogans such as ‘transplanted communities’, a ‘kingdom of the mind’ and ‘ties of blood, kin and country’.31 By asserting diaspora as a contrapuntal concept, social, economic and political formations distinctive to diasporic activity are recognised. The most visible and therefore the more successful and economically better off Scots migrants have long been the first to be historicised.32 Yet, there has been a failure to situate correctly a more pernicious historiographical strand that contends a dominant and domineering national character is exported along with the blood, brain and brawn of the migrant, and that this form of acculturation has been to the benefit

214  british and irish diasporas

of the receiving country.33 Popular histories have fed a breast-beating of national pride convoying the migrant exemplar to claim Scots ‘invented’ the nations of settlement and even, when confidence is strongest, ‘invented the modern world’.34 Such narratives have inspired peoples from north-west Europe, but also more widely and irrespective of their own natal origins, to seek out a version of historical Scotland that supports their personal identity. Commentators have confirmed such essentialised versions of Scotland sit as an historical narrative best read via the novelistic and filmic fantasies of ‘Neverland’, Brigadoon and Brave, and have been repudiated for being constructed ideologically upon myths of the homeland. But such constructions are not the misunderstandings of a displaced population, or of individuals and groups without ancestral roots, but are the identities of diasporic connection.35 For the same reason the recurrent mis-reading of Tartan Day, assumed to be a fanciful example of how much diasporic Scots fail to ‘get’ being Scottish, and reliance on uncritical conceptions of Highlandism and Highland victimhood, shows how deaf the homeland can be to the counterpoints and to the fragmentations of the identity of these Scots abroad.36 We agree with Craig’s analysis that Said is proposing not a reading from the periphery being fed back to the core, but a reading that goes back and forth contrapuntally.37 This is an active process, not a static measurement, and represents the outcome of agency. Not all migrants, wherever they end up, are straightforwardly diasporans. For those that come under the orbit of the concept, though, ‘it is their readiness and willingness to engage themselves with the building of a transnational imagination and connections that constitutes the “threshold” from ethnic to diasporic identification’.38 We deploy the concept of diaspora because it supports the examination of those migrants who are not an extension of an ethnic or national group but who live and act within coterminous imagined communities.39 We disagree with scholarship that either conflates Scots and Highland Scots within the concept of migrant ethnicity, or assume ‘ethnicity increases’ in step with migrant flows. Both arguments have been made in order to claim an international comparison or to contrast British migrants in settlement locations.40 We conceive diasporic communities as possessing the potential to be as concrete as those in the natal land, and the obligation of the diasporan towards a homeland, ancestral or chosen, can be equal or greater than the obligation of someone born, bred and unmoved from their homeland.41 The refashioning of the heroic Scot narrative into diasporic forms is but one example of diasporic identity reflecting its homeland, one that has been long splintered by imperial migrations. By conceptualising migrants whose identity has moved beyond either core or periphery to form polyvocal diasporans, we remove analysis from



the scottish diaspora since 1707  215

futile attempts to liken the Scottish case study to the oft-used example of the Jewish scattering. Association with the Jewish expulsion from Palestine sets the tone, and victimhood has become paradigmatic when combined with exile.42 Reciting the expatriate’s Psalm was enough to link the pain of emigration to the Jewish context in the sermon of Rev. Neil Macnish, preaching to the Sons of Scotland in Cornwall, Ontario, in 1894.43 These were sentiments of loss, of distance from loved ones, but it is the element of force – of burning cottages and eviction – that has stuck to previous and erroneous definitions of Scotland’s diaspora.44 In analysis of both the Irish and the Scottish examples there has been an assumption that because force and compulsion were prominent at one phase of the modern migration history, then that alone is sufficient to meet the criteria of diaspora.45 This supposition has been sufficiently persuasive to lead some politicians to monetise the narrative: The loss of so many people over such a period of time has rightly been viewed with great sadness by Scots and the loss of so many talented people and the pain of separation is still felt. The sorrow, and in some cases the anger, of so many either choosing to leave or having to depart cannot be ignored nor should it ever be forgotten. However, the global world we now inhabit affords an opportunity to turn their presence elsewhere into an asset.46

That forced clearance came at the mature stage of Scotland’s migration experience rather than at its origins, or at the time of peak flows, appears not to worry proponents. In by far the greater number of cases, emigration through force amounts to one factor among many and does not remain a constant over time. Even when physical force has elided into economic duress, the argument is still notable for its denial of agency.47 The Scots have been – and perhaps it is fair to say to the greater of degrees – a willing and enthusiastic migrant group, ready proselytisers of their religious and ethical beliefs, aggressive and persistent traders, and enforcers of the British claim to territory under the command of the imperial army. Scotland’s migration history is not a diasporic creation because of the use of physical force and expulsion. Nor does it qualify because the characterisation of exile leads in turn to the best-drawn imagination of homeland, one to which Scots might pin a longing to return. Such markers are ahistorical, with the consequence that scholars question the very value of the diaspora concept itself. Yet, it is the very ahistoricity of such identity markers, Renan reminds us, that is so germane to the formation of national identity.48 Rooted in imagined, sentimental and material concerns, the concept of diaspora we support is deployed to explain the collaboration between

216  british and irish diasporas

the periphery and the homelands of Scotland and Britain.49 We maintain Scotland meets the diaspora paradigm, and indeed is paradigmatic in this respect, with an identity that is neither national nor straightforwardly transnational. The space for this identity to form – between and across core and periphery, between and across the national and the transnational – is captured in the partnership of empire. This interaction, this space, this partnership, is the mirror of a homeland that has been fractured by migrations. As we have framed it, the concept of diaspora is not about locating a category of migrants, it is about locating a category of identity. We are presenting diaspora as a particular version of transnational identity formed within the wide and varied parameters of imperial exploration, expansion and then decline. The Scottish diaspora contains a range of identities – some stronger, some weaker, some coherent, some jumbled – that display a mix of enlarged and false consciousness.50 This diaspora is maintained in the orientation of migrants to homeland, their continued expression of cultural traditions or use of ethnic networks – indeed almost anything may be analysed to represent identities that are transnational and which are ‘informed, negotiated and presented’ in the manner of a national identity.51 The Scots populated imperial space in large numbers, and through that process came the most direct and most decisive engagement with empire itself; but also with the idea of Britishness. Populating imperial space While diaspora is not synonymous with migration, the movement of people is, as it were, the foundational layer of any diaspora. Consequently, it is important to establish the principal patterns of Scottish migration overseas to understand our wider assessment of the Scottish diaspora as identity and as partners in empire. The history of Scottish migrants is a long one, rooted firmly in medieval and early modern traders’ routes to England, Ireland, Central and Eastern Europe, and later also the Far East. Even prior to the Union of 1707 Scots certainly also went further afield, for instance making their way to the English colony at Jamestown and looking to settle their own colonies in Nova Scotia (1622) and New Galloway (1629) in Canada. The most notable – yet tragic – such attempt was of course made on the isthmus of Darien in the 1690s; it was the failure of this Scottish settlement scheme that went some way to enabling the Union of 1707.52 Having been excluded from the English overseas empire since 1660, the Union brought the Scots into all aspects of trade and administration of what became the British Empire.53 As the bicentenary of the 1707



the scottish diaspora since 1707  217

Union approached, a contributor to The Scotsman stressed the advantages that political union had given to the Scots. With access to imperial trade, the resulting partnership had achieved Britain’s new ‘commanding position in Europe and the world’. To global benefit, two non-hostile governments in 1707 had directed their own destiny: for it ‘gave to Scotsmen, equally with Englishmen, the government of a great Empire, bounded by distant seas, not the narrow limits of an insignificant island’.54 When the time came for the Convention of the Royal Burghs to mark the bicentenary, they chose to invite the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, to toast ‘The United Kingdom’. Indicating that the constitutional celebration was one of some importance to the partner nations of empire, they also invited the Colonial Premiers, although none were in the country in time to attend.55 While Scottish nationalists in the first two decades of the twentieth century were strongly supportive of the empire, and the majority of nationalist leaders up to the 1970s had gained their formative life experiences from imperial engagements,56 there was increasing concern that Scotland was being left impoverished by the emigration of skilled workers. When F.J. Robertson, a local government official from Edinburgh, addressed the Scottish Home Rule Association of New York in 1913, his purpose was to convince those gathered that Home Rule for Scotland would follow once Home Rule for Ireland was secured. Supporting societies were formed in Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Boston, Albany, Vancouver and Winnipeg. But this initial enthusiasm was dragged down by worry that Scots were still leaving their homeland in deplorably high numbers. Robertson warned that any imperial government not modernised by Home Rule would suffer the continued and detrimental loss ‘of tens of thousands of the best young men’ to emigration.57 By the 1930s, Scottish nationalists were unequivocal in denouncing the loss of population to the countries of empire. In response to Glasgow hosting the British Empire Exhibition in 1938, it was asked ‘what they [the Dominions] could do for Scotland rather than what they [the Scots] could do for the Dominions’.58 The newly formed Scottish National Party used the slogan ‘Scotland within the Empire’ to promote the idea of imperial federation,59 but as the likelihood of war loomed large, the party instructed its members to resist forced conscription to the British army. Once war was underway, many in the party, its leader Douglas Young especially, stood tall to encourage opposition to an ‘unwanted conflict’ being played out in the name of empire.60 Before such questions were raised, however, we know that Scots seized the opportunities the British Empire offered with great gusto – as of course did many others. Around sixty million migrants are estimated to have left Europe between 1815 and 1914, making their way to the New World.61

218  british and irish diasporas

Over two million of these migrants were from Scotland, with Scots thus being disproportionately represented in terms of the home population.62 They certainly were ‘an old people finding a new role on the world stage’.63 Prior to the age of mass migration, and despite the fact that the Act of Union removed restrictions on trade and settlement to allow the development of a genuinely British empire, overseas movements of Scots remained fitful. In the immediate half-century after the Union, only about 30,000 Scots arrived in North America.64 Land was a critical pull factor, which made planned settlements an attractive option.65 It was also of interest to new colonial governments, however, as settlements were usually designed to advance underdeveloped areas. Once such example is the settlement of Cape Fear Valley in North Carolina. It was thanks to its Scottish governor, Gabriel Johnston, that several thousand acres of land were secured for settlement, with 350 immigrants arriving from Argyllshire in 1739. They established what would become America’s largest Highland settlement. Here the expansion of colonial worlds was a direct consequence of Scottish leadership in empire through Johnston’s facilitation. Initially, however, the Cape Fear Valley settlement grew only slowly – a fact mirrored across the American colonies – and it was only after the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 that numbers increased.66 From that point until the 1775 outbreak of the American Revolution an estimated 25,000 Scots settled in America.67 A good number of them were discharged soldiers from regiments such as the 42nd (Black Watch) or the 78th (Fraser’s Highlanders) – among the first Highland regiments to serve in North America, and thus regiments that included many of the first Highlanders to join the British army after the unsuccessful 1745 Jacobite uprising.68 By the end of the American revolutionary war, over 4,000 Highlanders had become involved, helping to further cement the Highland regiments’ importance within the British army.69 Of the Scottish settlers who came, we can say that they largely settled in the same areas in North America, and this differed somewhat compared with the English. The English primarily made their way to Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, while over two-thirds of Scots went to New York and North Carolina. Generally, however, it took some time after the Revolution for Scottish emigration to the United States to return to pre-1775 levels. The ongoing war between Britain and France until 1815 was one critical external factor, but so was the diversification of destinations, with Canada emerging as the preferred one among those who did make a move to North America.70 By the time the first reliable emigration statistics are available in 1825, the number of Scots making their way to the US was still only in the low hundreds, which was less than half of those who opted for Canada.71 Even prior to the nineteenth century a good number



the scottish diaspora since 1707  219

of Scots had had ties with Canada through the fur trade, either as trappers – many only working seasonally in Canada – or in lead positions in one of the fur-trading companies. Of the North West Company’s 128 senior figures between 1760 and 1800, for example, seventy-seven had a Scottish background.72 Overall, however, these figures were small. In the United States, it was not until the late 1840s that the number of Scottish immigrants became more sizeable, exceeding 10,000 for the first time. Aided by improved and cheaper means of transport, the number of Scots entering the United States was consistently over 10,000 in the 1880s, sometimes exceeding 20,000. This level was sustained into the next century, with a total of over 170,000 Scots arriving between the turn of the century and 1910. After the First World War numbers reached their peak in 1923 at 46,343, exceeding the number of arrivals from England. For Canada, the principal milestone in terms of migration numbers was the 1867 British North America Act, which formed the Dominion of Canada. While initially it encompassed only Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, efforts soon bore fruit and other provinces joined, including Manitoba and British Colombia. With this expansion came the need for further settlers, especially in the prairies. Land grant schemes facilitated this, as did the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Over time this did indeed increase the inflow of migrants from the British Isles. As well as being enticed by increasingly sophisticated promotional techniques, at various points between 1867 and 1914 Scots could take advantage of a limited number of assisted emigration schemes to Canada. In an effort to attract greater numbers of agricultural workers and female domestic servants, between 1872 and 1888 the Canadian government offered subsidised fares to both these classes of immigrants. As noted above, free land was another form of enticement, and not only in the west. In 1872 the provincial government of New Brunswick permitted the establishment of a ‘Scotch Colony’ and granted it 50,000 acres; it was named New Kincardineshire, as most of its settlers were recruited from that area in Scotland.73 The first 750 settlers who arrived were able to take advantage of land grants that could be up to 200 acres in size. As with many others around the world, this organised settlement scheme was one of community emigration, experimental in relocating a large number of settlers to one area. Community schemes such as this, as well as chain migration and movements facilitated through kinship networks, were critical in peopling the British Empire. They certainly played their part in Canada, which by the 1901 census had an enumerated population of 5.371 million people; 30.7 per cent were identified as being of French origin, 23.5 per cent were of English origin, 18.4 per cent were of Irish origin and 14.9 per cent were of Scottish descent.74 Many of them had

220  british and irish diasporas

been attracted through the kinds of government subsidies and schemes discussed above, which enabled the British state to direct migration, and by maintaining and sustaining transnational regulation – managing onboard conditions, or the military and Crown agencies overseeing the control and access to settler lands – this eased migration towards places of empire.75 Various indicators show the number of migrants who had left Scotland. According to estimates of Anderson and Morse, around 1.46 million Scots natives were enumerated in non-European destinations in the period 1861 to 1913.76 Over the period 1853–1930, some 61 per cent of Scotland’s natural increase was lost to outmigration. The equivalent for England and Wales was a loss in the region of 36 per cent. When return migration is factored into the analysis, for the period 1861 to 1911 Scotland lost 30.2 per cent of its natural increase to outmigration. Again the comparison with England is significant, where the loss was less than 9 per cent.77 These figures underscore the social and economic dimension to migration, for the migrant, the host territory and for the country left behind. The principal flows of movement from across the British Isles are shown in Table 6.1, while Table 6.2 provides details on the overseas destinations of Scottish migrants. The diversification of destination countries we can see in Table 6.2 was driven not only by economic considerations, but also by practical ones in terms of, for example, the desire to find a new location for the transportation of convicts. This was to be Australia, which, with the arrival of the

Table 6.1  Net and gross outmigration, England & Wales and Scotland, 1861–1920

1861–70 1871–80 1881–90 1891–1900 1901–10 1911–20

Net outmigration/1,000

Gross emigration/1,000

E&W

Scotland

E&W

Scotland

1.0 0.7 2.3 0.2 1.5 1.7

3.9 2.8 5.8 1.3 5.7 3.5

2.8 4.0 5.6 3.6 5.5 4.0

4.6 4.7 7.1 4.4 9.9 7.3

Source: Michael Anderson and Donald J. Morse, ‘High Fertility, high emigration, low nuptiality: adjustment processes in Scotland’s demographic experience, 1861–1914, part I’, Population Studies, 47.1 (1993), 8.

the scottish diaspora since 1707  221



Table 6.2  Emigration from Scotland to non-European destinations, in thousands, and as percentage, 1853–1930

USA

British North America

Other nonEuropean Australasia destinations

To all nonEuropean destinations

Year

000s

%

000s

%

000s %

000s %

000s

%

1853–60 1861–70 1871–80 1881–90 1891–1900 1901–10 1911–20 1921–30

35.1 76.7 88.1 178.2 118.4 187.6 91.1 157.4

29 51.8 53.2 64.8 63.7 41 26 35.3

28.4 24.3 25.8 35.2 16.6 169.6 169.9 161.6

23.5 16.4 15.5 12.8 8.9 37.1 48.6 36.2

54.6 42.3 41.1 45 13 31.1 48.1 85.8

2.8 2.3 4.9 3.3 10.7 6.5 16.8 6.1 38 20.4 69.2 15.1 40.8 11.7 41.5 9.3

120.9 148.2 165.7 275.2 186 457.5 349.9 446.3

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

45.2 28.5 24.8 16.4 7 6.8 13.7 19.2

Source: Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 64 (table 3.4).

First Fleet in 1788, became part of the British imperial project. From that initial point of expansion Australia transitioned to a settler colony, becoming an increasingly popular destination. Pull factors such as the Victoria gold rush played their part. Overall, the Scots accounted for 15 per cent of Australia’s UK-born migrants between 1861 and 1945. Across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand – the last of the British Empire’s colonies to be settled – foundations of settlement were not laid in the transportation of convicts, but rather the transportation, as it were, of religion. After the Disruption of 1843, it was Free Church adherers who believed their future lay not in Scotland, but overseas, with a large contingent of them settling in Dunedin – Gaelic for Edinburgh – brought there through the Otago Association, an offshoot of the New Zealand Company. Founded on the principles of systematic colonisation developed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the Company was critical in organising the early settlement of New Zealand. A significant number of Scots were among the early arrivals not only in Otago, however, constituting nearly a quarter of all UK-born migrants to New Zealand overall. This makes the Scots the third largest migrant group, after the English and Irish, in Australia, and the second largest, after the English, in New Zealand. These numbers are substantial, but they become all the more remarkable when read alongside the Scots’ population share in the UK: this had decreased from approximately 15 per cent in the

222  british and irish diasporas

eighteenth century to 12 per cent in 1901.78 In the Antipodes, then, the Scots were overrepresented in terms of their population share at home in the British Isles, and especially markedly so in New Zealand. This contributed to the prominence of Scots in lead positions in both colonies, as well as the prominent role of Scottish practices in the making of colonial society – Scots were, for example, instrumental in establishing New Zealand’s first university in Dunedin, and based the system on the Scottish honours system. Of course, while we speak of Scottish migrants here it is worth noting that, certainly in the early phase, male migrants were in the majority. For our investigation of partners in empire this is a problem: we must be alert to the fact that this partnership was largely gendered. This was the case not by specific design, but rather an effect of the status of women over the period we are primarily looking at; the kinds of places that were being settled; and the wider issue of the relative invisibility in records of women migrating in the period. If we take the population of Australia (Tables 6.3 and 6.4) as a mirror on wider patterns, the difference in numbers between males and females is certainly striking even in the early twentieth century. By that point a number of policies had long since been adopted to address the gender imbalance, but still it existed. Across the British Empire, in the period 1861 to 1911, male migrants outnumbered female migrants both in proportion and in volume for every decade, and this tended to be the pattern for earlier decades, too.79 Such was the difference that the government of New South Wales channelled funds through the Emigration Commissions in the 1870s to subsidy the passage of female domestic servants, with the expectation that the men who had previously migrated would welcome the opportunity to secure a wife from the old country.80 Analyses of the period 1877 to 1907 find Scottish and English women remarkably similar in age, marital status and whether accompanied by children in their movement to and from the United States, and in comparison with Ireland – where greater numbers of single women were drawn to emigration81 – women were generally more reluctant leavers.82 One explanation, certainly in the early period of settlement, was that pioneer life – rough and ready as that could be – was not conducive to family life, nor an appealing prospect for single women.83 Yet, although it has been the case that more men moved overseas than women, this does not mean that their general migrant behaviour and pathways were particularly different. In terms of distance moved, for instance, the longitudinal data examined by Pooley and Turnbull indicates that women did move long distances in the period 1850 to 1930 when migrating for family reasons. Older women in particular were certainly prepared to move further than average to join their family – the pull of



Table 6.3  Male population of the states and territories of the Commonwealth of Australia at the census of 3 April 1911 Victoria

Queensland

South Australia

Western Australia

Tasmania

Northern Territory

Federal Capital

Total (Commonwealth of Australia)

74,754 2,791 19,403 24,098 261

48,063 1,495 14,200 19,169 187

38,583 1,491 12,146 16,186 102

16,753 537 3,298 3,695 47

20,866 890 4,702 5,733 72

5,230 156 1,145 1,046 11

121 13 43 47 0

71 1 15 26 1

204,441 7,374 54,952 70,000 681

Source: Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1911 – Birthplaces. Catalogue No. 2112.0. Australian Bureau of Statistics, www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/ [email protected]/Lookup/2112.0. Last accessed 15 June 2018.

the scottish diaspora since 1707  223

England Wales Scotland Ireland Isle of Man

NSW

England Wales Scotland Ireland Isle of Man

NSW

Victoria

Queensland

South Australia

Western Australia

Tasmania

Northern Territory

Federal Capital

Total (Common wealth of Australia)

47,342 1,591 11,857 22,558 106

38,629 1,195 12,377 22,308 102

26,683 1,129 8,384 15,413 55

13,145 1,348 2,353 4,302 27

11,987 435 2,221 3,718 31

3,758 101 927 1,109 5

24 2 4 8 0

21 0 8 18 0

141,589 5,801 38,131 69,434 326

Source: Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1911 – Birthplaces. Catalogue No. 2112.0. Australian Bureau of Statistics, www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/ [email protected]/Lookup/2112.0. Last accessed 15 June 2018.

224  british and irish diasporas

Table 6.4  Female population of the states and territories of the Commonwealth of Australia at the census of 3 April 1911



the scottish diaspora since 1707  225

kinship ties was always strong. What this evidence also counters, moreover, is the suggestion that long-distance migration was simply about work and dominated by men.84 Family in particular was a key factor, though within the context of family decisions to migrate there could be issues around the actual migration decision that meant that women were not always agents in that decision, but rather just participants in their husband’s decision. Such was the case, for example, for Mary Black. Married to the Rev. William Bell, it was his job prospects – or rather the lack thereof in Scotland – that prompted the move abroad. Aged thirty-seven, William had made up his mind to leave Scotland, and when an opportunity arose in Upper Canada he was convinced that it was his calling. The decision to move was made in such haste that William only told his wife once plans were well under way, and only by letter. Mary’s opposition was cast aside, and on 5 April 1817 she, William and their six children left Scotland for Canada.85 Yet, even when women migrated without the reservations that Mary held, reluctance could persist, manifesting itself in the new homeland through a sense of homesickness, a longing for family and friends left behind. Such certainly was the view of Martha Graham, who had migrated to New Zealand with her husband James. Writing to his brother, James observed that ‘[t]here is one thing that you must know and that is that she [Martha] has got no friends here’ and that upset her very much.86 Having explored some of the principal migratory patterns of the Scots and key characteristics of their movements – the foundations of the making of any diaspora – we now move to the final section of the chapter to explore how, against the background of these patterns, diaspora is an identity concept through which we can understand how Scots actively engaged as partners in empire. Diasporic identity, Britishness and partnership in empire When a review of Charles Dilke’s Greater Britain appeared in the Edinburgh Review of April 1869, enough evidence was gathered to show ‘how much men of our own lineage have accomplished in colonising and civilising the globe’. With optimism, the reviewer implored more was yet to come ‘of the enormous empire which owns the supremacy of England’ and which showcases the respected and prosperous Scot throughout the world.87 In contrast, John MacKenzie notes, the imperial historians Sir John Seeley and Sir Reginald Coupland had little to say about the Scottish experience. Coupland bound Scotland’s imperial history to English endeavours, and identified the Union as the solution to ongoing problems of economic

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hardship and political uncertainty in Scotland.88 Seeley, in The Expansion of England (1883), simply left Scotland out of his analysis.89As we have argued elsewhere, the eighteenth-century use of patronage created a trading and intellectual dynamic through which Scots could travel to imperial destinations and establish a reputation that went beyond ethnic ties.90 As missionaries and as soldiers, Scots provided a trope of imperial heroism that appealed to future migrants.91 David Livingstone embodied this mix of Scottish contribution to empire and the values of benign settlement and economic opportunity. His was an imperial exemplar that filled the pages of Samuel Smiles’s Self Help (1859) as it did the content of homilies, philanthropic societies’ pamphlets and local, national and international newspapers.92 With the inspiration of characters like Livingstone and Mary Slessor, William Jardine and James Matheson, William Baird and Thomas Lipton, each operating in different sectors, the empire appeared ‘a combination of English institutions with the Scottish ethic’. MacKenzie concludes that in this partnership Scots adduced their identity: ‘it seems to me that the Empire far from being a source of Scots servitude, was actually a means whereby Scotland asserted her distinctiveness in relation to England. To withstand the power of a large neighbour, Scotland required a greater entity to which she could cleave.’93 What he delineates is Scotland’s identity in the homeland reflected in the counterpoints and the fragmentations of imperial partnership. This identity was also a coterminous – or hyphenated – British identity, admixed with English national character formations – and clichés – such as individual perseverance and masculinity alongside motifs of phlegmatic behaviour, eccentricity, the unemotional man and the amateur sportsman.94 In the partnership, the Scots’ identity – formed from opposites, negatives and oppositions to England, made within the British Isles, and to Britain, made within empire – blended into Britishness. By the act of migration, boundaries were crossed, spaces were formed, the homeland and periphery were fractured only to be reassembled in new configurations: In fact Empire, in establishing those world-wide connections and global loops, had just as much effect upon the preservation and strengthening of the distinctive identities of the Scots and the other ethnicities of Greater Britain. Diasporas have their origins in considerable distress, but ultimately they invariably strengthen the ethnic and nationalist causes from which they stem. Empire was as capable of producing an enlarged consciousness as a false consciousness.95

In more recent years, and with much of it shaped by MacKenzie’s scholarship and editorial eye, we have extended our understanding of



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how Scotland’s partnership with Britain was interwoven.96 Through focus on religious and philosophical scholars, environmentalists and scientists, together with the more usual run of traders, military personnel and adventurers, the community of empire has been enlarged.97 We are led, then, to ask how the myriad of diasporic identities was located in partnership with empire, what did this look like and how did it manifest? As would be expected with migrants establishing themselves in lands less economically complex from the one they left, settlement activity involved regular patterns of emulation. The connection of the mind between natal and host destination expedited the replication of institutions, administrations, sanctions and objectives. Especially given the relative weakness of administrative infrastructure that would only form later with the maturity of government and state, there was reliance on autonomous and semiautonomous institutions of civil society. Improvement and fraternity societies; book, music and literary societies; political, trades union and professional societies; religious, cultural and philanthropic societies: each was instituted – and in some cases branched from native societies – to create a world of familiarity. The Scottish influence on Princeton University and on the disciplines of philosophy and what became sociology in America; and the wider higher education sector in Canada, including medical education, are all examples of how the boundaries of homeland and host are crossed.98 These civic formations, shorn of overt ethnic markers, were signs of diasporic agency; as such, they were no different from those for which the homeland was the organising ethnic principle. When the North British Society was formed in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1768, it was the start of a significant associational footprint left in diasporic locations by Scottish migrants.99 The St Andrew’s Society of St John, New Brunswick, was established in 1798 and similar societies were formed in step with the incorporation of major towns, such as was the case with Montreal (1835), Toronto (1836), Kingston (1840) and Ottawa (1846), and with smaller locations such as St Catherines (1835), Brantford (1850), Stratford (1862) and Petrolia (1870).100 These were philanthropic societies that tailored their relief to those born in Scotland and to two generations of descendants of such settlers.101 Andrew Hinson is one historian who has stressed the elite status of those who ran the St Andrew’s Society of Toronto. Its late Victorian alumni included William Allan, member of the Legislative Assembly and first president of the St Andrew’s Society; George William Allan, eleventh mayor of Toronto and son of William Allan; John Strachan Jr, son of Bishop John Strachan; John Ewart, contractor who built Osgoode Hall; William Christie, founder and owner of Christie Cookies; Sir Oliver Mowat, premier of Ontario; and George Brown, politician and founder of the Globe newspaper.102

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Yet while the membership of St Andrew’s societies in Canada, and elsewhere, tended to come from the elite, they catered for the needs of a much wider group of Scottish migrants. Their philanthropic help benefited those Scots who struggled to continue in their adopted lands, with funds provided to stave off starvation or, in some cases, to return home. Critically, Scottish ethnic associations could and did serve groups of people transnationally. This happened ‘in spirit’ – such as through the dispensation of greetings on St Andrew’s Day – but also through annual membership, the annual dinner or ball, the regular dispensation of monies, and through networking and interlinkage with other societies. St Andrew’s, Scottish, Celtic, Caledonian, Highland and Thistle societies were part of a matrix of associations that included Sons of Scotland, Burns and Walter Scott societies, curling clubs, musical societies and regular Highland games, each offering their own contrapuntal reading of culture. The numbers crossing the border into England and settling in various countries led to Scottish societies being formed, including in Sheffield (1822), Leicester (1878), Leyton (1903), Cheltenham (1929), Cambridge (1936) and Wolverhampton (1938). One example was the Highland Society of London. Established in a London coffee house in 1778, the society sought to restore Highland dress and preserve the music of the Highlands. Its council looked to promote Gaelic, promote agricultural improvement and provide relief for distressed Highlanders ‘when at a distance from their native homes’.103 By the 1840s, its objectives included the establishment of schools not just in London but also ‘in the Highlands of Scotland, and in other Parts of the British Empire’.104 This desire was underpinned by the society having adopted a branch system, which served to better connect associate members in all parts of the empire.105 By the mid-nineteenth century branches existed in Madras (1814), Bombay (1822) and Canada (1818), with affiliates in Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, Toronto, Niagara, Hamilton and Nova Scotia, among others. It is through the activities of ethnic associations that we find significant potential to measure a diaspora. But at the core also lies the purpose of ethnic associations as loci for identity – and not necessarily just a Scottish one as a sense of Britishness could also be expressed. Celebrating Burns in India or Scotland’s patron saint in South Africa have both been analysed as occasions for imperial networks of commercial, social and political power to be weaved.106 Burns clubs have primarily been examined as examples of Scottish ethnic identity – not least because their members illustrate and mobilise their gatherings with tartan, heather, genealogy and religion in brash reflexive honour of Scotland’s national Bard. As carriers of national identity in the diaspora, Burns and other Scottish ethnic associations are, while ethnic at the core, institutions of civil society. The transformation



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of cultural patterns into easily understood symbols formed in and from material culture and performance was but a conduit to identity formation in the day-to-day lives of diasporans. Importantly, also, one does not have to be involved directly in ethnic culture or organisations to still ‘be’ and ‘feel’ Scottish.107 With second and subsequent generations, the transmission is located within museums and in the work of ethnic scholars and organisations ‘which attempt to maintain the old cultures which support themselves in part by supplying ethnic nostalgia, and some ethnics may aid such organizations if only to assuage their guilt at having given up ancestral practices’.108 What is clear from the latest research on the afterlife of Robert Burns is that the scale of the poet’s commemoration on the anniversary of his birth was unbounded, a life and reputation that spoke to contemporary concerns. To observers it seemed as if every village and town in Scotland had organised a celebratory occasion and every city offered a choice of dinners and speechmaking, with the numbers overseas smaller but no less impressive.109 In New York, the Burns Club met at the Metropolitan Hotel in 1858, and around 150 people gathered to celebrate the penultimate birthday before the centenary would be reached.110 Dinner was served, a Highland piper performed (‘dressed in the Gaelic costume’) and the partnerships between nations were projected with the flags of St Andrew, St George and the Stars and Stripes. These diasporic connections were carried over into the toasts: to the ‘birth day of Nature’s own poet’, the ‘genius of Burns’, ‘Scotland, the land of our fathers’ and ‘America, the land we live in’. Not to be outdone, the Burns Anniversary Association meeting in the Mozart Hall on Broadway was decorated with a transparency of Burns along with the Stars and Stripes as toasts were made to the poet. Showcasing an idealised version of history, Burns was celebrated as the greatest patriot since Bruce, a democrat and on a par with John Knox. These events were precursors for the anniversary year when kindred associations throughout the world telegraphed simultaneously at 10pm, New York time. The first mention of tartan at an event held in the city’s Tammany Hall was upon the entrance of the piper, but the venue was decorated with the flags of all nations.111 This kind of celebration was all the more pronounced in countries still part of the empire. At Burns celebrations in New Zealand, for example, reference was frequently made to Great Britain rather than Scotland.112 At times this prompted the singing of ‘Rule Britannia’; a practice most prominent at times of crisis when evocations of Britishness came to the fore.113 The contrapuntal deployment of Scottish symbols can be evidenced from throughout the Scottish diaspora, and can be seen to reach new heights during the First World War. Hong Kong Scots, like many others, suspended their normal annual festivities, in this case the annual St Andrew’s

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Ball. But the day itself was still marked. In 1914, the society organised a concert in the Theatre Royal, the funds raised from which were donated to the Prince of Wales’s Fund. The aim to help those most directly affected by the war remained a constant. Thus, in 1916 the society established Heather Day, ‘a scheme inaugurated for the purpose of … providing comforts and little extras for our brave Scottish laddies at the front’.114 A year later there was also a St Andrew’s Fair, hosted to raise funds ‘to help the ever-growing needs of the Home hospitals in which our brave wounded soldiers are being treated’.115 Such activities could be found around the diaspora, including, for example, in Nairobi, where the local Caledonian Society also contributed funds to many a British war relief effort.116 At the heart of such fundraising and charitable contributions lay a desire to help those fighting in the war, but a wider sense of British patriotism and duty to empire was also critical in underpinning the associations’ activities. This sense was nowhere more pronounced, however, than in the contributions of Scottish soldiers to the British imperial armies. As P.E. Dove, a leading member of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, noted in 1853, Scottish soldiers were ‘seen foremost in every hard-won field’.117 Through their victories – depicted in, for example, Robert Ker Porter’s epic panoramas – the Scots played out their national identity on an imperial stage.118 Queen Victoria’s patronage helped consolidate this vision,119 and Africa provides a particularly pertinent case, where Scottish soldiers were involved in campaigns from Egypt to South Africa. By contributing so prominently to these campaigns, the Scots received ‘accolades as empire-builders’.120 In fact, as was noted by Richard Finlay, ‘[u]ndoubtedly, the military contribution of the Scottish regiments was the most important factor in the propagation of a distinctive Scottish input into British imperial activity.’121 This is all the more remarkable given that the number of Scottish soldiers in the British army was actually comparatively low when measured against Scotland’s population. This emphasis on Britishness was commonplace. At a St Andrew’s Day banquet held in the Cape Colony in 1901, for example, Sir Gordon Sprigg, the colony’s prime minister, emphasised that the colony had assisted the empire very much by putting an army of 18,000 in the field, many of whom were Scottish.122 Sprigg combined a spirit of empire with militarism. This was usually very successful in stirring a strong sense of identity, as Scottish heritage and the role the Scots had played in fighting for the British Empire could be directly connected to these ideas. As members of the Johannesburg Caledonian Society made clear in greetings sent to their Bulawayo counterpart, ‘“[t]he Empire never shall recede while Scottish chiels wi’ Scottish wit, wi’ Scottish pluck and Scottish grit, stand steady in our Empire’s need.”’123 Or, as was stated at a dinner in 1910, ‘where the



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dead have laid thickest, where the world has stretched widest, there you [Scottish soldiers] have been; the skirl of the pipes sounds through the story of Empire’.124 The fact that the Anglo-Boer War involved not only every Scottish infantry regiment, but also Scotland’s auxiliary forces, emphasises the infusion of this Scottish sense of Britishness in empire.125 These soldiers provided an immediate link between Scotland and South Africa; the presence of auxiliaries, citizen soldiers, intensified this significantly, with Scots at home ‘intensely proud of the men from their own localities who had volunteered’.126 Scots were engaged disproportionately by the navy and land forces of the British army, with the gun and the bayonet sustaining the empire against indigenes and rival imperial powers alike. But this transnationalism did not just connect back to Scotland, it also served to link across Scottish diaspora locations. One practical example is the establishment of the Scottish Horse. This brings us back to the London Highland Society, which had been asked by the marquis of Tullibardine for their ‘co-operation and influence … in raising two hundred and fifty men (Scotsmen preferred) for the Scottish Horse’ that was being set up in Johannesburg.127 It is probably because of the Highland Society’s role in the organisation of the London Scottish Volunteer Corps that it was approached.128 In the end, the Highland Society, again through the Volunteer Corps, ‘raised 400 men’ for the Scottish Horse.129 Yet, despite this transnational militarism, it was also from this sense of militaristic spirit bound up in both Britishness and Scottishness that frictions could emerge when former colonies developed their own identity and yet another layer was added to the already multiple identities and loyalties. The abolition of national regiments in Australia offers one prism on this issue as it also affected Australia’s kilted regiments. The debate over kilted regiments was not new, as several Australian politicians had suggested for some time that national regiments were no longer useful.130 But it was in 1912 that the question spilled out into the open. Earlier that year Victorian senator James Hiers McColl, at the request of a local Caledonian Society, had sent a letter to the minister of defence to ask about the future of kilted regiments.131 The answer made it clear that Highland uniforms could, in future, only be worn ‘on certain occasions’, and that all members of the Australian defence force would have ‘a uniform type’ of uniform.132 Scottish ethnic associations throughout Australia were, however, not going to give up without a fight, initiating coordinated action. As was explained in the Scottish Australasian, [I]t may be admitted at once that the retention of the kilt is just sentiment,—true national sentiment, the God-given endowment of patriotism.

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By its aid work of majestic import may be accomplished, and without its inspiring impetus the Commonwealth will never attain to a leading position among the nations of the world. The value of such patriotism to the community cannot be too highly regarded … Now the loyal enthusiastic and patriotic Australian Scot, with the blood of a heroic ancestry flowing through his veins, and the history of his race in his mind, tenders his services for the defence of Australia.133

The purpose the kilt served was identified to be much wider than just representing a sense of Scottishness: loyalty to the empire was critical. Framed in this way, the Scottishness the kilt represented was neither insular nor exclusionary, but, in the words of MP Hugh Sinclair, evidence of the Scots’ willingness ‘to spill their blood in the service of the Empire’. As a result, Sinclair argued, the proposed abolition of national regiments would serve only one purpose: ‘damp the [soldiers’] enthusiasm’.134 Debates continued for some time,135 but eventually the fight to maintain kilted regiments was lost. Notwithstanding defeat, this episode highlights powerfully the extent to which partnership in empire was intrinsic to the Scottish diaspora not just in actions, but also the recognition that Scottish symbols and cultural markers carried significant currency that was, at times, also simultaneously British and transnational.136 But it was not just through the obvious outlets of ethnic associations and the military that Scottish partnership in empire found ready outlets: missionary activity was another principal pillar. When, in late 1871, journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley had finally managed to find Scottish missionary David Livingstone at Lake Tanganyika in what is now Tanzania,137 Livingstone’s accounts of his missionary activities and wider explorations in Africa had amassed, from all over the world, an audience on tenterhooks.138 Livingstone, and explorers like Mungo Park, had placed Africa on the Scottish diaspora map, but also made knowledge of Africa more accessible to ordinary people around the world through their charting of unknown lands.139 This work was also one that connected Scots in Africa directly and strongly to the British imperial mission. Consequently, when the Livingstone centenary was celebrated in 1913, the number of notables from Church and civic life that came together was significant. In London, they gathered around Livingstone’s grave at Westminster Abbey for a memorial service, with a second gathering later held at the Royal Albert Hall. The commemoration was a celebration, too, of how Scottish missions in Africa were part of a wider imperial network of missionary activity. In part, and certainly also in Livingstone’s case, this was because early Scottish missionary activity was channelled through one of the English mission societies. Although the foreign mission movement in Scotland was formalised at about the same time as that in England – the



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Scottish Missionary Society and the Glasgow Missionary Society were both established in the mid-1790s – there was, at that point, only limited interest in Scotland to directly send missions overseas.140 Consequently, those Scots who wanted to go overseas in this period tended to join one of the English mission societies.141 What is particularly important here is that involvement in overseas missions powerfully legitimised the Scots’ role as a ‘race of Empire builders’.142 This became all the more clear after the Disruption in the Established Church of Scotland in 1843: apart from the actual split – the reverberations of which were noted particularly in Canada143 – one consequence was competition between the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland that extended into the sphere of missionary activity, with both increasing their presence overseas. As Esther Breitenbach observes, the evangelical energy released by Disruption, and the ten years of frustration that pre-dated it, prompted a rapid growth in the foreign mission movement.144 In South Africa, the Free Church alone had 13 missions in Kaffraria, 14 missions in the Transkei and 5 missions in Natal, with a total of 144 Scottish missionaries by the mid-1800s. What is more, these missions employed a significant number of native staff and looked after hundreds of schools, with over 15,000 pupils in total.145 It is in this realm that we can get a glimpse of how Scottish women, too, were partners in empire. This brings us to Mary Slessor, whose important missionary work in West Africa stands out strongly. Slessor is best known for her work at Calabar mission. In his analysis of how national identity has been shaped by empire, MacKenzie confirms that Slessor was ‘one of the principal heroines of missionary endeavour in Africa’.146 She was one of a significant number of female missionaries actively engaged abroad, many of whom were supported by societies at home in Scotland, such as the Greenock Ladies’ Overseas Missionary Association or the Glasgow Ladies’ Association for the Advancement of Female Education in India. The reason Slessor stands out stems partly from the esteem in which she was held in Africa: when she died at her station in Africa, ‘her body was transported down the Cross River to Duke Town for the colonial equivalent of a state funeral’.147 That the markers of Scottish national identity represented by Slessor were so highly regarded in West African culture should not surprise us. Standing in some foreign field, Slessor represents another facet of diasporan activity forged in partnership with the British Empire. Conclusion: Scottish identity and imperial partnership From Scottish ethnic associations as platforms for consolidating a sense of Britishness to the role of Scottish missionaries in cementing the empire,

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the partnership of Scots in the empire was profound and enduring. But, viewed through the lens of diaspora as an identity concept, the implications of this partnership go further than just the empire. MacKenzie picks up on the reluctance of Scottish historians to adopt the concept of diaspora. Devine, as we have noted, chose to work free from the constraints of a definition in To the Ends of the Earth. Theorising the Scottish diaspora as a scattering of peoples, exiled and fleeing victimhood, is unsatisfactory. We have argued that the diaspora is a transnational identity rooted in imagined, sentimental and material concerns that explain the collaboration between the periphery and the homelands of Scotland and Britain. If we are to stress the ineluctable and organic link to the nation which remained with the individual even after emigration,148 then it is perhaps for this reason that Lowenthal described diasporas as ‘heritage hungry’.149 Having reviewed the period with which we are concerned, Tom Nairn found identity in the homeland deformed by its diasporic manifestations; his ire strongest when trained on the late Victorian kailyard literature.150 Yet, an alternative reading of Scottish national identity can be recognised – neither deformed nor failing – when this identity is framed within the structures of the British Empire. Highland games are not less authentic, Burns suppers are no less maudlin, ethnic associations are no less civic in structure, and the types of anxieties around the abolition of kilted regiments we have explored above can equally be viewed as banal and everyday expressions of identity. The Union has persisted, the empire also, with the latter’s contextualising influence ending only in the 1960s.151 The empire facilitated the creation of a form of popular imperialism that shaped Scottish identity within an essentially British frame. What this meant is that the activities we have highlighted here, where Scots were partners in empire, underpinned a transnational identity upholding, and sustained by, a loyalty to the British state.

Notes 1 For example: ‘English v. Scotch’, Otago Daily Times, 2 February 1884. 2 Ibid. 3 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992), p. 6. See also Peter Mandler, ‘What is national identity? Definitions and applications in modern British historiography’, Modern Intellectual History, 3.2 (2006), 271; G. Morton, ‘Scotland is Britain: the Union and Unionist nationalism, 1807–1907’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 1.2 (March 2008), 127–41; Frank Bechhofer and David McCrone, ‘Imagining the nation: symbols of culture in England and Scotland’, Ethnicities, 13.5 (2012), 545–46;

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4

5 6

7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer, Understanding National Identity (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 22–42. Malachi Malagrowther [Walter Scott], Thoughts on the Proposed Change of Currency, and Other Late Alterations, as they Affect, or Are Intended to Affect, the Kingdom of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1826); A Second Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Weekly Journal … (Edinburgh, 1826); A Third Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Weekly Journal … (Edinburgh, 1826); for the idea of ‘North Britain’, see also Paul Langford, ‘South Britain’s reception of North Britain, 1707–1820’, in T.C. Smout (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603–1900 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 143–70; Alvin Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707–2007 (Oxford, 2013); for the Jacobites, see for example Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans: The Jacobite Army in 1745 (Edinburgh, 2009). Theodore Napier, The Arrogance of Englishmen, A Bar to Imperial Federation (Edinburgh, 1895), p. 4. See for example Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton, The Scottish Diaspora (Edinburgh, 2013); Tanja Bueltmann, Clubbing Together: Ethnicity, Civility and Formal Sociability in the Scottish Diaspora to 1930 (Liverpool, 2014), pp. 12–13; G. Morton, ‘Applying the diasporic lens to identity and empire in twentieth-century Scotland’, in J.M. MacKenzie and B.S. Glass (eds), Scotland, Empire and Decolonisation in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2015), pp. 46–49. See ‘Introduction’, in Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, Scottish Diaspora. Malcolm Gray, ‘The course of Scottish emigration, 1750–1914: enduring influences and changing circumstances’, in T.M. Devine (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 20; D.F. Macdonald, Scotland’s Shifting Population, 1770–1850 (Philadelphia, PA, 1978), p. 140. Roy Parker, Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867–1917 (Bristol, 2010), pp. 6–7. To take one example, see Hansard, House of Commons debate, 10 May 1969, vol. 196, cc471–538 with the proposed formation of a select committee to inquire into proposing emigration as a solution to pauperism in England. E.G. Ravenstein, ‘The laws of migration’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 48.2 (June 1885), 228. M. Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2004), pp. 115–36. M. Flinn et al., Scottish Population History: From the 17th Century to the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977), p. 445. E.S. Lee, ‘A theory of migration’, Demography, 3.1 (1966), 53. Ravenstein, ‘The laws of migration’, 167–235. Ibid., 228. Lee, ‘A theory of migration’, 49. Gray, ‘The course of Scottish emigration’, 27. Rogers Brubaker, ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28.1 (2005), 2.

236  british and irish diasporas 19 Khachig Tölölyan, ‘Diaspora’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 3.2 (Fall 1994), 235; Khachig Tölölyan, ‘Diasporama’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 9.2 (Fall 2000), 309–10. 20 Tölölyan, ‘Diasporama’, 309. 21 See also M. Baumann, ‘Diaspora: genealogies of semantics and transcultural comparison’, Numen, 47.3 (2000), 313–37. 22 Kim D. Butler, ‘Defining diaspora: refining a discourse’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 10.2 (2001), 190. 23 Khachig Tölølyan, ‘The nation-state and others: in lieu of a preface’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1.1 (Spring 1991), 4. 24 Roza Tsagarousianou, ‘Rethinking the concept of diaspora: mobility, connectivity and communication in a globalised world’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 1.1 (2004), 55. 25 Dudley Baines, ‘European emigration 1815–1930: looking at the emigration decision again’, London School of Economics & Political Science, Working Papers in Economic History No. 5/92 (1992), 3–5. 26 ‘ART. VIII.1. Twelfth report on the colonial land and emigration commissioners’, North British Review, November (1852), 259. 27 T.M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora (London, 2011), p. xv (‘diaspora concept’) and pp. 286–88 (‘diaspora engagement’). A similar criticism can be made of Donna Gabaccia’s, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Abingdon, 2003), which does not discuss the term. 28 See also Bueltmann, Clubbing Together, pp. 12–13. 29 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1994), p. 52. 30 Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 219–8. 31 Bernard Aspinwall, Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820–1920 (Aberdeen, 1984); Murray S. Leith and David Sim (eds), The Modern Scottish Diaspora: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives (Edinburgh, 2014); Peter E. Rider and Heather McNabb (eds), A Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada (Montreal and Kingston, 2006); Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton (eds), Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora (Guelph, 2009); T. Brooking and J. Coleman (eds), The Heather and the Fern: Scottish Migration and New Zealand Settlement (Dunedin, 2003). Use of Anderson’s term ‘temporal coincidence’ is found in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983), pp. 56–57; Craig, Intending Scotland, p. 204; Graeme Morton, ‘Identity out of place’, in Trevor Griffiths and Graeme Morton (eds), A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800 to 1900 (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 256–87. 32 Cairns Craig, ‘Empire of intellect: the Scottish Enlightenment and Scotland’s intellectual migrants’, in John M. MacKenzie and T.M. Devine (eds), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), pp. 84–117; Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850–1939 (Manchester, 2013); David Armitage, ‘The Scottish diaspora’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland: A History (Oxford, 2015), pp. 274–303.



the scottish diaspora since 1707  237 33 Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism upon Britain since the Mid-Nineteenth Century  (Harlow, 2005); Graeme Morton and Trevor Griffiths, ‘Closing the door on modern Scotland’s gilded cage’, Scottish Historical Review, 234 (April 2013), 56–59. 34 Arthur Melville, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York, 2002); Ken McGoogan, How the Scots Invented Canada (London, 2010). For an academic analysis on the Scots influence on America, see A. Hook, From Goosecreek to Gendercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History (East Linton, 1999); D.W. Howe, ‘Why the Scottish Enlightenment was useful to the framers of the American Constitution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31.3 (1989), 572–87; Richard ZumkhawalaCook, ‘The mark of Scottish America: heritage identity and the tartan monster’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 14.1 (Spring 2005), 109–36; Alexander Murdoch, Scotland and America, c.1600–c.1800 (London, 2010), pp. 144–57. 35 David Hesse, ‘Finding Neverland: homecoming Scotland and the affinity Scots’, in M. Varricchio (ed.), Back to Caledonia: Scottish Homecomings from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Edinburgh, 2012); David Hesse, Warrior Dreams: Playing Scotsmen in Mainland Europe (Manchester, 2014); A.P. Cohen, ‘Personal nationalism: a Scottish view of some rites, rights, and wrongs’, American Ethnologist, 23.4 (1996), 802–-15; G. Morton, William Wallace: A National Tale (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 200–208. 36 Edward J. Cowan, ‘Patriotism, public opinion and the “People’s Chair” of Scottish history and literature’, Scottish Historical Review, 92.2 (2014), 177–94; John M. MacKenzie, ‘Scots in New Zealand and elsewhere in the British Empire: an international perspective’, Immigrants & Minorities, 29.2 (2011), 154–74; Paul Basu, Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora (London, 2007); Michael Fry, ‘The Scottish diaspora and the Empire’, in Murray Stewart Leith and Duncan Sim (eds), The Modern Scottish Diaspora: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 45–46. Fry accuses ‘Devine and his acolytes’ of supporting the idea ‘that Scots at home and abroad are united by ‘Highlandism’, ibid., p. 45. 37 Craig, Intending Scotland, p. 217. 38 Tsagarousianou, ‘Rethinking the concept of diaspora’, 58, 59. 39 Ibid., 52. 40 Devine, To the Ends of the Earth, pp. 15–18. Nor can we agree that the diaspora is little more than the subgroup of the ethnicity of the nation, as claimed in W. Safran, ‘The Jewish example in comparative and theoretical perspective’, Israel Studies, 10.1 (Spring 2005), 37–38. 41 Rubin Patterson, ‘Transnationalism: diaspora–homeland development’, Social Forces, 84, (June 2006), 1896. 42 Brubaker, ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, 2. 43 N. Macnish, A Sermon Preached at St John’s Church, Cornwall,on the 26th November 1893, before the Sons of Scotland (Cornwall, On, 1894). 44 An example of how memories of clearance have been socially constructed is revealed in D. Macleod, Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland: Versus

238  british and irish diasporas

45

46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sunny Memories (Toronto, 1857) and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 2 vols (New York, 1854); see, here, C.W.J. Withers, ‘Landscape, memory, history: Gloomy Memories and the 19th-century Scottish Highlands’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 121.1 (2005), 29–44. For later periods, see Basu, Highland Homecomings, p. 192; Laurence Gouriévidis, ‘Heritage, transnational memory and the rediasporisation of Scotland’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 22.4 (2016), 278. ‘ John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs grew rich on meat and wool, the people died of cholera and starvation or, evicted from the glens to make way for sheep, were forced to emigrate to foreign lands. Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’, The Times.’ Quote from www.amazon.co.uk/Highland-Clearances-John-Prebble/ dp/0436386046/ref=pd_sim_14_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=Q2 QBA1RB2Y4RWGJ23C1T. Accessed 1 July 2017. Kenny MacAskill and Henry McLeish, Wherever the Saltire Flies (Edinburgh, 2006), p. 9; see also research conducted for the Scottish government: D. Ancien, M. Boyle and R. Kitchin, The Scottish Diaspora and Diaspora Strategy: Insights and Lessons from Ireland (Edinburgh, 2009). Also of interest is Jim Hunter, A Dance Called America: The Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada (Edinburgh, 1994), which documents Scots celebrating departure, something in contrast to, for example, Kerby Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford, 1985), where we hear of sadness and despair. Though it is worth noting that New Zealand land reformers included Scots whose desire for busting up big estates was shaped by Clearance narratives, for example Sir Donald McLean: see Alan Ward, ‘McLean, Donald’, Te Ara –, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1m38/ mclean-donald. Accessed 12 July 2017. Ernest Renan, ‘What is a nation?’ [1882], reprinted in G. Eley and R.G. Suny (eds), Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford, 1996), pp. 42–53; Morton, William Wallace, pp. 60, 152. Patterson, ‘Transnationalism’, 1892. Brubaker, ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, 7; Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2010), pp. 36–38. Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, Scottish Diaspora, pp. 25–49. Ned C. Landsman, ‘Immigration and settlement’, in Ned C. Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600 to 1800 (Lewisburg, PA, 2001), p. 15. Bruce P. Lenman, ‘Colonial warfare and imperial identity’, in Ned C. Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600 to 1800 (Lewisburg, PA, 2001), p. 77. The Scotsman, 1 May 1907. The Scotsman, 13 March 1907.



the scottish diaspora since 1707  239 56 Morton, ‘Applying the diasporic lens to identity and empire’, pp. 49–50. 57 New York Times, 27 September 1913. 58 Empire Exhibition Scotland – 1938: Official Catalogue (Glasgow, 1938); Deborah Hughes, Contesting Whiteness: Race, Nationalism and British Empire Exhibitions, 2012, p. 223. 59 Krishan Kumar, ‘Empire, nation and national identities’, in Andrew Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2011), pp. 305–6. 60 Douglas Young, Scotland (London, 1971); Wendy Wood, Yours Sincerely for Scotland: The Autobiography of a Patriot (London, 1970), pp. 70–76; J.M. MacCormick, The Flag in the Wind: The Story of the National Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2008 [1955]); Hughes, Contesting Whiteness, p. 223; Glasgow Herald, 10 July 1942; Glasgow Herald, 27 July 1942; D. Young, The Free Minded Scot: Trial and Defence of Douglas Young (Glasgow, 1942); The Scotsman, 26 April 1947. 61 Donald H. Akenson, ‘The Great European Migration and indigenous populations’, in Graeme Morton and David A. Wilson (eds), Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples (Montreal and Kingston, 2013), p. 23. 62 Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 59–61. 63 John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities: the case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6.8 (1998), 220. 64 T.C. Smout, Ned C. Landsman and T.M. Devine, ‘Scottish emigration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), p. 98. 65 See for example John P. MacLean, An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America Prior to the Peace of 1783 (Cleveland, OH, 1900), p. 182. 66 Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732–1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1961), p. 68. 67 Gordon Donaldson, ‘Scots’, in Stephan Thernstrom (ed.), The Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA, 1980), p. 910. 68 David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens, GA, 1994), p. 96. 69 Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and the War of the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 266. 70 Donaldson, ‘Scots’, p. 910. 71 N.H. Carrier and J.R. Jeffrey, External Migration: A Study of the Available Statistics, 1815–1950 (London, 1953). 72 Frits Pannekoek, The Fur Trade and Western Canadian Society, 1670–1870 (Ottawa, 1987), p. 12. 73 Harper, Adventurers and Exiles, p. 156. 74 Census of the British Empire 1901 [Cd 2660] (London, 1906), p. xlix. 75 Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire, p. 343.

240  british and irish diasporas 76 Michael Anderson and Donald J. Morse, ‘High fertility, high emigration, low nuptiality: adjustment processes in Scotland’s demographic experience, 1861–1914, part I’, Population Studies, 47.1 (1993), 8. 77 Ibid.,p 9. 78 See Christopher G.A. Bryant, The Nations of Britain (Oxford, 2006), p. 40. 79 J.M. Brock, The Mobile Scot: Emigration and Migration, 1861–1911 (Edinburgh, 1999), p. 135. 80 Saturday Review, 24 February 1872, p. 244. 81 Carrier and Jeffrey, External Migration, p. 50. 82 Rosalind McLean, ‘Reluctant leavers? Scottish women and emigration in the mid-nineteenth century’, in Brooking and Coleman (eds), The Heather and the Fern, pp. 103–16. 83 An account of married life in Coburg, Upper Canada among the Chippewa and Mississauga Indians, comes from the English-born Susanna Moodie who in 1831 crossed the Atlantic with her Orcadian husband John Moodie: Susanna Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush (London, 1852), pp. 23–26. See also ‘Lyell’s travels in North America’, Edinburgh Tait Magazine, September 1845, pp. 599–603. 84 Colin G. Pooley and Jane Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (London, 1998), p. 189. The data come from life histories produced by genealogists. 85 Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton, ‘Observations of a Scottish moralist: indigenous peoples and the nationalities of Canada’, in Morton and Wilson (eds), Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, pp. 222–23. 86 Graham Family correspondence, Dunedin, 17 March 1861, Hocken Library (Dunedin), Misc-MS-1343. 87 ‘ART. VI – Greater Britain; a record of travel in English speaking countries, during 1866 and 1867’, Edinburgh Review, April 1869, p. 485. 88 Sir John Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1883); Sir Reginald Coupland, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism (London, 1954); John M. MacKenzie, ‘Essay and reflection: on Scotland and the Empire’, International History Review, 15.4 (1993), 714. 89 Discussed in MacKenzie, ‘Essay and reflection’, 714. 90 Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, Scottish Diaspora, pp. 38–55; Ibid., pp. 724–25, 731. 91 Andrew MacKillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (Edinburgh, 2000). 92 MacKenzie, ‘Essay and reflection’, 727–28, 734–35. 93 Ibid., 737–38. 94 MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities’, 217. 95 Ibid., 231. 96 John M. MacKenzie and T.M. Devine, ‘Introduction’, in MacKenzie and Devine (eds), Scotland and the British Empire, pp. 4–9. 97 Tsagarousianou, ‘Rethinking the concept of diaspora’, p. 60; Devine, To the Ends of the Earth, pp. xiii–xvi.



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98 K. Kehoe, ‘Catholic identity in the diaspora’, in Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton (eds), Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie, p. 93; T. Brooking, ‘Sharing out the haggis: the special Scottish contribution to New Zealand history’, in T. Brooking and J. Coleman (eds), The Heather and the Fern, p. 59. 99 J.S. Macdonald, Annals of the North British Society of Halifax, Nova Scotia with Portraits and Biographical Notes, 1768–1903 (Halifax, N.S., 1905). 100 I.A. Jack, History of St. Andrew’s Society of St. John, N.B., Canada, 1798–1903 (St. John, N.B., 1903); Sir H. Allan, St. Andrew’s Society of Montreal (Montreal, 1844); St. Andrew’s Society of Toronto, One Hundred Years of History, 1836–1936 (Toronto, 1936); and J. Thorburn and A.E. Cameron, History of the First Century of the St. Andrew’s Society of Ottawa, 1846–1946 (Ottawa, 1946). 101 St Andrew’s Society of Montreal Handbook (Montreal, 2001), p. 4. 102 A. Hinson, ‘Migrant Scots in a British city: Toronto’s Scottish community, 1881–1911’ (PhD dissertation, University of Guelph, 2010). 103 John Sinclair, An Account of the Highland Society of London, from its Establishment in May 1778, to the Commencement of the Year 1813 (London, 1813), pp. 6–7. 104 Constitution in The Highland Society of London, and Branch Societies; with Alphabetical Lists of Members (London, 1846), p. 3. 105 The Highland Society of London … (London, 1856), pp. 15–16. 106 Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj: private and public celebrations of Scottishness in Late Imperial India’, Scottish Historical Review, LXXXI.2, 212, October (2012), 215–16; Graeme Morton, ‘Ethnic identity in the civic world of Scottish associational culture’, in Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton (eds), Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie, p. 42. 107 H.J. Gans, ‘Symbolic ethnicity: the future of ethnic groups and cultures in America’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2.2 (1979), 14. 108 Ibid., 17. 109 C.A. Whatley, Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People (Edinburgh, 2016). 110 New York Times, 26 January 1858. 111 Ibid., 26 January 1859. 112 Tanja Bueltmann, ‘“The image of Scotland which we cherish in our hearts”: Burns anniversary celebrations in colonial Otago’, Immigrants & Minorities, 30.1 (2012), 78–97. 113 Otago Witness, 30 January 1896. 114 Hong Kong Daily Press, 1 December 1916. 115 South China Morning Post, 3 December 1917. 116 Minutes of the Adjourned Annual Meeting held in the Victoria Hotel, Nairobi, 15 September 1915, Caledonian Society of Kenya Minutes, D1356/1/1/1, Highland Archive Centre Inverness. 117 P.E. Dove, The National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights: Address to the People of Scotland and Statement of Grievances (Edinburgh, 1853), p. 1.

242  british and irish diasporas 118 David Forsyth, ‘Empire and Union: Imperial and national identity in nineteenth-century Scotland’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 113.1 (1997), 6. 119 E.M. Spiers, The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854–1902 (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 4ff.; also E.M. Spiers, The Victorian Soldier in Africa (Manchester, 2004). 120 Spiers, Scottish Soldier and Empire, p. 1. 121 Richard J. Finlay, A Partnership for Good? Scottish Politics and the Union since 1880 (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 27. 122 Beira Post, 14 December 1901. 123 Izwi Labantu (East London), 10 December 1901. 124 East African Standard (Mombasa), 3 December 1910. 125 T.M. Devine, ‘Soldiers of Empire’, in John M. MacKenzie and T.M. Devine (eds), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), pp. 176–95, p. 195. 126 Spiers, Scottish Soldier and Empire, p. 182. 127 Morning Post (London), 31 December 1900. 128 This was supported jointly with the Caledonian Society: see John Douglas, The Chronicles of the Caledonian Society of London (London, 1930), p. 131. 129 The Caledonian, May 1920, p. 57. 130 The Highland Society of New South Wales, for instance, referred to the question of ‘kilted regiments’ in its annual report in 1910: MLMSS.4738 2(7), State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. 131 Daily Herald (Adelaide), 15 February 1912. 132 Ibid. 133 Scottish Australasian, June 1912, p. 253. 134 Shoalhaven News and South Coast Districts Advertiser, 20 July 1912. 135 Advertiser (Adelaide), 22 November 1912. 136 Highland Society of New South Wales, annual report for 1913: MLMSS.4738 2(7), State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. 137 Clare Pettitt, Dr Livingston, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire (London, 2007); see also John M. MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: the construction of the myth’, in Graham Walker and Tom Gallagher (eds), Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 24–42. 138 David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London, 1857). 139 George Shepperson, ‘Mungo Park and the Scottish contribution to Africa’, African Affairs, 70.280 (1971), 277–81. 140 Devine, To the Ends of the Earth, p. 194. 141 The London Missionary Society ‘recruited missionaries disproportionately from Scotland’; see Esther Breitenbach, ‘Scots churches and missions’, in MacKenzie and Devine (eds), Scotland and the British Empire, p. 210. 142 T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London, 2000), p. 366. 143 Craig, Intending Scotland, p. 237. 144 Esther Breitenbach, Empire and Scottish Society: The Impact of Foreign Missions at Home, c. 1790–1914 (Edinburgh, 2009), p. 4. 145 John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007), p. 123.



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146 MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities’, p. 224. 147 J.H. Proctor, ‘Serving God and the Empire: Mary Slessor in South-eastern Nigeria, 1876–1915’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 30 (2000), 45. 148 A.D. Smith, National Identity (Oxford, 1991), p. 11. 149 D. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (London, 1996), p. 9. 150 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 2nd edition (London, 1981); see also, Marinell Ash, The Strange Death of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1980); Colin Kidd, ‘The strange death of Scottish history revisited: constructions of the past in Scotland, c.1790–1914’, Scottish Historical Review, LXXVI, 1.201 (1997), 86–102. 151 J.M. MacKenzie, ‘The persistence of Empire in metropolitan culture’ in S. Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001), p. 32.

7 The Welsh diaspora Donald M. MacRaild and Philip Payton

Introduction The Welsh diaspora was a miniature version of the wider European mass migration, but it has received much less attention from historians of the British Empire than it should have.1 A small country whose emigrant population was dwarfed by that of the Irish, English, German or Scots, the Welsh nevertheless produced significant population outflows conditioned by industrial modernisation and improved communications and transport. Moreover, the Welsh also colonised certain places with particular intensity and a lasting impact and impression. Language, culture, custom and mutual support held the Welsh together as a group in a variety of immigrant settings, in a way that was often more durable than for other groups from other parts of these islands. As Hickey’s work on the Kansas cattlemen has indicated, an anthropological analysis suggests that the combination of sharing, communication and a thrifty carefulness with resources all added to the competitive advantage of the Welsh overseas.2 Language is a key feature of many diasporas, and the smallness of the Welsh diaspora certainly was offset by the extent and durability of native language usage. This factor ensured a noticeable and distinct diasporic culture. The diminishing Welsh contingent in Patagonia, for example, was still using the native language extensively in the 1960s.3 Such linguistic durability was by no means assured, since, paradoxically, the Welsh language was coming under increasing pressure in Wales itself from the effects of industrialisation, including internal migration from rural to urban areas and large-scale immigration from England. In this sense, the diaspora was important. With the widespread emigration overseas of Welsh-speaking skilled miners, quarrymen and artisans, so Welsh communities abroad led to the emigrants being hailed increasingly as great bastions of Welshness.



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We would be right, therefore, to see the sons and daughters of Wales as maintaining one of the hardier emigrant cultural identities, certainly in the United States of America. By 1872, for example, there were no fewer than 384 Welsh-language Nonconformist chapels in the United States, concentrated mostly in industrial Pennsylvania and rural Wisconsin, areas where there were extensive Welsh-speaking communities.4 In Wales, individual and collective decisions to leave for destinations overseas varied widely in the eighteenth century, ranging from issues of religious and political freedom to opportunities for social and economic improvement. Departure abroad was encouraged, at times, by the already long-established trading links across the Atlantic, such as the habitual harbouring of Nantucket whalers at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire.5 Myths of ancient affinity also played their part. In 1792 William Jones, a teacher and country healer who worked among the weavers of Montgomeryshire (their stockings were routinely exported to America), suddenly announced the discovery of the ‘Lost Brothers’, a tribe of ‘Welsh Indians’ supposedly descended from the legendary figure Madoc, a Welsh prince said to have ‘discovered’ America three hundred years before Columbus. A devotee of Voltaire, a radical and a Welsh nationalist, William Jones claimed extravagantly that these Welsh Indians, located on the far Missouri, comprised ‘a free and distinct people … who … have preserved their liberty, language and some of their religion to this very day’.6 He urged his fellow countrymen to join them, to throw off the shackles of oppression at home and re-create Wales in the newly won Land of Liberty. Shortly after, his cry was echoed by Morgan John Rhys, a Baptist minister at Pontypool in Monmouthshire and another follower of Voltaire, who ventured to America and on Bastille Day in 1795 proclaimed the frontier west of Ohio as a new national homeland for the Welsh people. As he wrote in his Journal, reinventing Madoc as a Welsh Jacobin: ‘Dyma ni yn awr ar daith ein gobaith – Here we are now on the journey of our hope’.7 This may have been the first, but it would certainly not be the last idealistic call for the Welsh nation to re-establish its identity and way of life afresh in ‘purer’ utopian communities in distant lands. Meanwhile, the Madoc myth, newly popularised in support of multifarious political and religious movements, found itself manipulated in new ways, the persistent rumours of the lost tribe of Welsh Indians later inspiring the Mormons, for example, who sought out the elusive descendants of the prince (claiming to have discovered Welsh words in the Hopi language) as affirmation of the Book of Mormon.8 Later, during the nineteenth century, new pressures prompted the Welsh to look to the New World. Wales had experienced rapid industrialisation in concentrated zones in the south. But there also was a period of

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proto-industrialisation, where many small farmers worked as miners and iron-makers while still retaining smallholdings. Such hybrid husbandmenworkers came under pressure in the slump of the 1840s, the so-called ‘Hungry Forties’, when their loss of industrial income could not be offset by the modest yields of the then much smaller land plots. Consequently, many families left for Pennsylvania and Ohio, in search of established Welsh colonies and better times.9 As in England, proportionately large-scale emigration was a corollary of industrial development. The expansion of Wales’s industrial base was well in train by the 1830s, just as in Scotland or the North-West of England. Industrialisation in South Wales, focused on coal mining, copper and iron smelting, and the growth of transport networks, fuelled developments in Swansea (‘Copperopolis’, as it was known) and in the valleys north of Cardiff, as well as in Cardiff itself and other lesser coastal towns. Carmarthenshire, Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire were fast creating new classes of skilled and semi-skilled workers, whose expertise would be increasingly sought overseas. Experienced Welsh miners and managers went to Ireland, for example, along with their Cornish counterparts, to lend their leadership and technical know-how to metal mining there. Thus, the industrial culture established in significant parts of Wales ensured that Welsh emigration included skilled men, such as miners and smelters and engineers, with the technical know-how to make good livings in emerging industrial and mining communities in the United States of America, Canada, South Africa and Australia.10 Sometimes they went alone, leaving wives and families behind, expecting either to return to Wales some day or to send for their relations once they had established themselves in the new lands. Some went abroad as single men, hoping to save enough money to marry sweethearts back home, intent on persuading their future brides to join them on the frontier. These emigrants looked very much like the Cornish miners, alongside whom they often resided. Indeed, as Winfred Blevins observed in his classic Dictionary of the American West, as we see in the Cornish chapter in this book and elsewhere, the term ‘Cousin Jack’ was generally understood to refer to an emigrant Cornish miner. However, ‘sometimes Cousin Jack meant a Welshman’, so similar were the Welsh and Cornish in the eyes of third-party observers. Likewise, while an emigrant Cornish woman was a ‘Cousin Jenny’, her Welsh equivalent, according to Blevins, was ‘Cousin Anne’.11 Wales could also produce migrations of a very specific character, such as the utopian cultural nationalist exodus of small numbers to Patagonia in Argentina, an historical experience that still resonates in Welsh folkmemory, exemplified in the well-known novels of Richard Llewellyn, Up, Into the Singing Mountain (1960) and Down Where the Moon is Small



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(1966), both set in South America and written as sequels to his classic How Green was My Valley (1939). But, as a general backdrop to all these global Welsh emigrations, was the tendency of the Welsh – like the Irish and Scots – to migrate internally (and more prosaically) to other nations within the United Kingdom, with the largest numbers moving to England. Do we count these settlements of Welsh people in these neighbouring countries as diasporic? Our inclination might be to say no, since, for example, Liverpool was the often-cited ‘capital of North Wales’, and migrations across Offa’s Dyke went both ways and were clearly manifestations of interregional economic exchange. Yet, culturally, the Welsh in England clearly maintained distinctiveness. Liverpool, for example, had its own Eisteddfod from the nineteenth century, along with districts where the Welsh clustered and worshipped together in chapels in their own language. The conception that the Welsh in parts of England might have been, at least linguistically and culturally, a distinct ethnic community requires some consideration.12 We are certainly content with the idea of the Welsh creating a ‘near diaspora’. Generally, Welsh emigration overseas resembled wider British migration pathways and characteristics, with a heavy emphasis on those groups or individuals who possessed industrial skills. In this sense, the Welsh were a hybrid of cultural distinctiveness, marked by language and religion, and civic integration more in keeping with the English. Welsh folk were not isolated minorities. Along with the Cornish, they were among the most important and sought-after groups of migrant miners throughout the Atlantic world, and in Australasia and South Africa, too. The communities they formed were comparatively similar: industrial work provided their bedrock; their number included supervisors and town officials as well as miners and engineers; and their religion, language and leisure culture rose markedly into prominence. This blend could be observed in New South Wales as much as Pennsylvania, in South Africa as well as Michigan. Welsh migration also corresponded to that of Northern England, Cornwall and industrial Scotland. However, the Welsh also bore the key hallmarks that scholars of Irish migration have long associated with those who had left the sister isle in such massive numbers. Wales may have lacked the dramatic disruption of Ireland’s ‘Great Famine’, but economic circumstances were often very difficult for large numbers of the poorest land workers, small farmers and handicraft workers. Not for nothing was Wales a centre of resistance to modernity in the countryside, evoked by the Rebecca Riots against toll-roads in the 1830s and 1840s, and the emergence, contemporaneously in the 1830s, of the Chartist movement, with John Frost’s rising at Newport in 1839 providing one of Britain’s

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most striking examples of the disturbances of urban workers.13 Likewise, the Merthyr rising of 1831 had seen an insurrection of politically motivated ironstone miners and skilled furnace puddlers who defiantly raised the red flag over Merthyr Tydfil.14 If Irish folk sought emancipation from poverty, and English handloom weavers and Chartists quested after a utopian future, some Welsh workers and their families pursued both. A closer reading of the Welsh situation suggests another break from the wider British model. Indeed, in some respects it shows a greater affinity with the Irish and some Scottish experiences, at least in cultural terms. For Wales has its own language, a factor that was even more important 150 years ago, when half of the population spoke Welsh.15 Explanatory manuals, guides and other literatures were very popular as aids to emigration, and among those groups targeted by propagandists for British Empire settlement and overseas migration were the Welsh. Similar emigration aids were published in most major European languages, many European countries managing their own emigration programmes, and it is significant that in Britain some publications appeared in Welsh. As historian Bill Jones has shown, the target groups in Wales spawned emigration literature written in both the Welsh and English languages, aimed at monoglot Welsh-speakers (or those for whom Welsh was their first language) as well as at the increasingly large number of Englishspeaking industrial workers and miners, especially in south-east Wales. Manuals encouraging emigration to the United States appeared in both Welsh- and English-language editions, as did those enticing the Welsh to Australia.16 Moreover, the emigrant Welsh were adept correspondents, writing home to Wales and choosing to pen lines for newspapers, including Welsh-language ones. Such letters, it has been argued, influenced people far more than the manuals, and again it is significant that such missives were often written and published in Welsh.17 Not only were Welsh-speakers sought after overseas and encouraged to emigrate, but the Welsh language itself also proved a successful medium in the recruitment process: we need only consider the sheer volume of emigrant literature produced in the Welsh tongue, or the amount of interest shown by Welsh-language papers. Yet, for many Welsh (as for many English, Irish and Scots) ‘British’ was a serviceable identity. Indeed, when British identity emerged forcefully in the period after the acts of union (1707 and 1801), it encompassed all groups on the larger island, as well as many of the Irish (not only Protestants but also loyal Catholics).18 However, this new Britishness did not mean the erosion of its existing constituent identities; far from it. Overwhelmingly, the Welsh subscribed to a Protestant identity, whether high- or low-church, Anglican or Dissenting, and this congruence with the religious tenets of



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British identity made the Welsh look, at face value at least, the very epitome of Britishness. Yet, while the Welsh (like the Cornish) could stress their identity as the original ‘Ancient Britons’, exemplars par excellence of this new Britishness, they could also emphasise their cultural and ethnic ‘difference’ when it was in their interests to do so, especially in ‘exiled’ communities beyond Wales. Sarah Prescott’s work on London’s mostly Welsh Society of Ancient Britons (founded in 1714), for instance, problematises this ambiguity, showing how Welsh sermons and other discourses conducted within the society propagated a distinct and at times critically Welsh identity. Sometimes the Welsh were typically British, sometimes they were not.19 This chapter tries to explore these different layers of diasporic identity of the Welsh in a variety of locations around the world, over the early modern and modern periods, and via the prism of different cultural attributes: linguistic, religious and occupational. First, we consider some statistical impressions. The numbers: where, why, how many? Calculating Welsh population statistics in the British World is a problem, since Wales was so often lumped together with England. In the period 1820 to 1860, only 7,935 Welsh persons were counted into ports in the United States, compared with 47,890 Scots.20 The Census of the British Empire, 1901, folds the Welsh into an England-and-Wales grouping, thus making the Welsh impossible to disaggregate.21 In the same year, the first census of the new Commonwealth of Australia included Welsh figures for all states except South Australia, where, ironically, the Welsh had been prominent in the copper-smelting industry since the 1840s. Minus this one former colony, the Welsh-born numbered 9,356, which is less than the Scots-born population of either New South Wales (30,717) or Victoria (35,751) alone. The Welsh were more numerous than all continental European groups in Australia, except for the Germans, who numbered almost forty thousand across all states.22 In Canada, the Welsh largely were not enumerated separately.23 Censuses of the United States are much more helpful, though inclusion with the English did sometimes occur. In the United States, we see the Welsh vastly outnumbered by other British groups, notably the Scots, whose propensity to migrate was (in proportion to population) much more significant than that of the Welsh. In 1901, the Welsh-born numbered 93,744, compared with 234,699 for Scotland.24 As the century progressed, more Welsh resided in America’s principal cities, but the numbers were tiny. In New York, in 1870, 584 Welsh-born were set alongside 7,562 Scots-born.25

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Beneath the simple statistics, and in many of their general characteristics, the Welsh followed patterns of migration to the United States that echoed the more numerous English and Scots, together with the comparable Cornish: they spread generally in smaller numbers, but also formed larger clusters around certain industries, especially mining, metal manufacture and salt extraction, which mirrored the work they had done back at home. In the nineteenth century, the Welsh were mostly to be found in the North-East, the Mid-West and in mining districts further west, for example digging and blasting in the hard rock of the Rockies and beyond. In New York in the 1820s, although tiny in number, the Welsh clustered noticeably with the Scots and English, and away from the Irish.26 Even then, the full complexity of Welsh settlement was often hidden by the fact that the Welsh were routinely slotted into the English group for statistical purposes. Although any study of the Welsh has naturally to deal with smaller numbers than the Scots, the totals are high enough to show that emigration was an important feature of modern Welsh life, as it was for other Britons, the Irish and in fact for all European peoples. Indeed, Welsh emigration was almost certainly considerably higher in numerical terms than the available statistics imply. Moreover, since this chapter is an exploration of the Welsh diaspora, it is not solely concerned with the movement of people, but with a group of people connected transnationally through a shared culture and roots. This approach certainly offers historians one way to enhance understanding, moving beyond the numbers to explore the wider imprints left by the Welsh abroad. Taking a longer view, over a period of nearly a century the English immigrants, who had comprised the largest arriving group in the American colonies in the seventeenth century, happened also to constitute 80 per cent of the 2,760,360 people (of specified national origins) who left Britain for the United States between 1820 and 1910. Meanwhile, the Scots accounted for 488,789 (17.7 per cent) and the Welsh for 59,540 (2.2 per cent).27 Drilling down into the regional clusters of Welsh, in 1900 Pennsylvania, with its mines, ironworks, slate quarries and so on, attracted 35,435 of all Welsh-born folk resident in the US. The Pittsburgh region was home to over 20,000 of these, concentrated into three counties: Allegheny, Lackawanna and Wilkes-Barre.28 Within the complexity of actual and hidden numbers, the social memory of the Welsh abroad remains strong. Today, in the United States, if anything notions of Welshness are growing. Diaspora studies in Wales has gained significant traction in the past twenty years, thus chiming with, and enforcing, the consolidation of contemporary identities. While noticeably fewer than the other British and Irish emigrants, the Welsh were always culturally visible and distinctive. In 2009, the United States Census bureau



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reported that 1.9 million Americans claimed Welsh ancestry, approximately one-third as many as claimed Scottish descent.29 In 2013, the Welsh accounted for 1.4 million Americans claiming multiple heritage; the Scots figure was 3.7 million.30 These contemporary remains of an age of historical Welsh migration reflect the proportions of people leaving the United Kingdom. Since Wales’s population was smaller than Scotland’s, and dwarfed by England’s, the United States survey of ethnicity rings true as a reflection of origins. Nevertheless, the relatively small numbers of Welsh emigrants have clearly been a factor in limiting the Welsh voice and its ability sometimes to be heard in the wider community. Walley’s detailed demographic study of the Iowa Welsh explains how much better remembered and resourced are the constituent German, Swedish and Norwegian populations today in terms of museums, festivals and so on.31 Much larger in number than the mostly Welsh miners and their families who went to the Mid-Western states, these other groups stand out in the presentation and performance of contemporary heritage culture. Only latterly, in the early twenty-first century, have Americans of Welsh descent begun to assert their identity more strongly. The early emigrations in the American colonies and beyond Welsh migrants were among the first settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, in the early seventeenth century, although the bulk of the earliest settlers in the American colonies arrived in the mid-seventeenth century, when Welsh Baptists settled in New England, notably at a place called Swanzey [sic]. Likewise, there was a short-lived, failed settlement called Cambriol in 1620s Newfoundland, when the Welsh, like the Scots, sought to build a New World homeland. The Welsh were also a small but important part of the colonisation of Ireland in the seventeenth century.32 In the same period, the Welsh featured in most English plantations in the Americas; they also went to Asia, not least through the East India Company, in which their London patronage networks seemed to have given them an advantage over Irish and Scots.33 Welsh folk also found their way, sometimes as convicts, to Barbados.34 From the 1680s, Welsh Quakers began to settle in Pennsylvania, and by the early 1700s there were approximately 2,000 of them there.35 These colonists were lesser-gentry folk, with the wherewithal to buy land, and possessed the language skills and mentality to work within an Anglo-world while retaining their Welsh culture. Later in the eighteenth century, however, from around 1793, the settlers that followed were more middle class in disposition, at a time when poor harvests and

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generally difficult economic circumstances had made emigration attractive.36 These migrants were mainly farmers, weavers and artisans, and their numbers grew during the economic crises in Wales in 1795–96 and 1800–1801. Those who did not settle in Pennsylvania made for Ohio, where the first American-born governor of the state was the son of a weaver from Llanbrynmair.37 Behind much of this emigration was the work of Nonconformist preachers – Congregationalists, Independents, Baptists and Methodists – whose pursuit of religious freedoms and self-improvement prompted them, like the Quakers before them, to advocate emigration. The same spirit also saw them connecting across the Atlantic and Europe, with others pursuant of the ‘Christian Republick’.38 Although William Penn’s promise of a ‘Welsh Baronry’ had come to nothing, his deputy, Thomas Lloyd, from Montgomeryshire, organised an overflow of Welsh settlers into what became known as the ‘Welsh Tract’ of neighbouring Delaware. From there, growing in numbers, the Welsh planted settlements in the Carolinas, especially on the Peedee River at a place called Welsh Neck. Pennsylvania, however, remained the focus of Welsh colonisation in this period. Books in the Welsh language were published in Philadelphia, where a St David’s Society was launched as early as 1792, and in western Pennsylvania a Welsh ‘freedom settlement’ at Beula flourished, albeit briefly. Other emigrants from Wales continued to find a home in Ohio, at Paddy’s Run and Welsh Hills, and at Utica in New York state.39 Then, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, particularly from the 1830s, settled immigrants in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania more generally and in Delaware began to push into the Mid-West, especially into Ohio and beyond, mirroring the westerly thrust of American society generally.40 At the same time, the Welsh language started to be heard in places where previously it had not been noticed. As early as the 1820s, for example, it was first detected among the small Welsh communities of New York City.41 But now the sudden lure of the West was everywhere apparent, and the Welsh, like other groups, suddenly dissatisfied with their lot, began to clamour for what they imagined to be the abundant prospects of the continent’s near interior. In 1842, for instance, one John Evans wrote home to Wales to complain that the ‘land in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio is very poor’. Moreover, he said, ‘the banks sometimes fail, there are no laws protecting the Sabbath, the law is uneven in its punishment of violence’.42 Searching for a new utopia, men such as John Evans, joined by a new wave of recruits from Wales itself, largely from Montgomeryshire, headed into Tennessee. Steered by Samuel Roberts, an Independent minister and political radical, and Michael D. Jones (principal of the Independent College at Bala), the newcomers purchased



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a thousand acres of land for their venture. Alas, they were cheated, for their properties were not the contiguous blocks they had imagined but were rather scattered fragments, hardly conducive to the close-knit community they had planned. Eventually, the experiment failed, and during the Civil War the Welsh farms were largely destroyed as the competing armies marched back and forth, the settlers themselves dispersed. Indeed, out of the ruins of Tennessee arose the later scheme for a Welsh colony in Patagonia.43 The Welsh in the British near diaspora In the same way that the skilled workers of industrial Wales were attracted to overseas destinations such as the United States and Australia, so they were also enticed to other parts of Britain. No single urban centre in the world received more Welsh migrants than Liverpool. Few attracted so many as Manchester or Birmingham, and even in pre-industrial times there had been noticeable Welsh communities in London. Moreover, the major mining districts of England and Scotland received large flows of Welsh who, along with the Cornish, could sometimes be persuaded to adopt the role of strike-breakers. Sunderland, in particular, acted as a magnet for the Welsh, where they were drawn by coal and iron.44 In Manchester, the Welsh population was relatively large, at 2 per cent.45 Pooley and Doherty’s detailed longitudinal study of Welsh migration to Shrewsbury, Liverpool and Middlesbrough illustrates well the importance of distance, size and culture in the shaping of these communities. Shrewsbury’s migration was more localised; Liverpool’s more diverse; and Middlesbrough’s industrially specific, with ironworkers from Merthyr Tydfil and especially Dowlais, the major ironworks towns of South Wales, feeding North-East England’s own growing iron industry. This research also shows how relatively solid Welsh households and neighbourhoods were. Welsh folk in British towns sought each other out, preferred to accommodate lodgers from their home country, and overall gravitated to the Welsh chapel. 46 Primes inter pares in these matters was Liverpool. The Welsh had long been a sizeable presence in the great Atlantic sea-port, the largest population centre neighbouring Wales in the nineteenth century. Liverpool was throughout its history a magnet for Welshmen from the northern parts of their homeland, who sought advancement in business, commerce and the professions. In 1851, the census recorded 20,262 Welsh-born in the city, which was around 5.4 per cent of the population. Religion was an important feature of their identity. A religious census of the Welsh in

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Liverpool in 1874 underscored their alignment with low-church Protestantism. As elsewhere all over the world, the Welsh chapels there were Baptist, Methodist, Calvinist or Independent.47 Springing from its Nonconformity, Welsh Liverpool was generally Liberal in its political allegiance. Nonconformist, linguistic and Welsh social proclivities leaned heavily in a Liberal direction.48 Watkin Williams described Liverpool’s tens of thousands of Welsh as ‘lovers of freedom and liberty … born Liberals’.49 The Liberal Welsh also ran for political office, with the city’s Scotland Road parliamentary division from 1863 being represented by a local builder, William Williams.50 By the end of the nineteenth century, the Welsh-born and their offspring constituted at least one-tenth of the population of the city, and were a recognisable ethnic group. The Liverpool Review estimated a total of 70,000.51 These Welsh men and women had made their mark. Builders like William Williams contributed to the city’s impressive religious fabric of churches and chapels, but also to the more general civic architectural culture in one of Britain’s most impressive regional centres. They contributed distinctive house- and shop-building, and spread to building societies, land ownership, surveying and other elements of the building cycle.52 Tom Price, later premier of South Australia, had, like many of his countrymen from north-east Wales, lived in Liverpool prior to his emigration to Australia. He preached in the Wesleyan Methodist chapel, attended nightclasses at the Liverpool Mechanics Institute and joined the Liverpool Reform Association. When he had completed his apprenticeship, he was duly admitted into the Liverpool Masons’ Society.53 As Tom Price’s example indicates, the Welsh were not all focused entirely or even mainly on their distinctive culture and language but contributed more widely to Liverpool’s society and economy. Indeed, many lauded the role played by the Welsh in their new surroundings. In 1917, for example, W.H. Saunders gave a paper to Liverpool’s Philomathic Society, in which he described Liverpool as the ‘meeting-place of the four kingdoms’. He noted how the great imperial-maritime city had ‘more Welsh than any Welsh town except Cardiff, more Irish citizens than any Irish town except Dublin and Belfast, and more Scottish citizens than any but the three or four of the great towns of Scotland’.54 Community-level research has since posited the notion of the Irish as a lower-order community ‘ghettoised’ by social and economic restrictions. The Welsh, by contrast, are presented asbenefiting from more propitious economic circumstances and broader access to society, their cultural attributes, notably language and religion, seen as strengths.55 Wales also was so close to Liverpool that its expatriate community was regularly topped up by new arrivals, even more markedly than were Irish and Scottish communities.



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If the Welsh were culturally distinctive, they did not live in ghettos. However, they did cluster in some districts, creating strong cultural preserves which made their cultural face prominent and recognisable. Strong, continuing connections to Wales itself were intimate and easy to maintain. They frequented Welsh-language chapels; Welsh-language newspapers, notably Yr Amserau, were products of the Welsh diaspora in Liverpool, as was the thriving local Welsh-language book publishing industry. There were also the numerous Welsh festivals, the ubiquitous eisteddfodau.56 The Welsh faced none of the problems experienced by the ‘outcast’ Irish. Indeed, they were viewed sympathetically by their fellow Liverpudlians. Writing in 1900, the Liverpool Review welcomed the retention of Welsh ‘national customs’, and was pleased that the Welsh ‘in the midst of this great Saxon population, have a little Wales of their own’.57 Yet, the Welsh themselves recognised that their community in Liverpool did not always share the benefits enjoyed by the Scots in the city. R.W. Jones, speaking in 1901 to the Welsh National Society in Wales, pointed to the language difficulties experienced by some monoglot Welsh folk in Liverpool, and observed how the Scots were more firmly entrenched in the Liverpool middle and commercial classes than the Welsh. Even those who were middle class and successful, Jones claimed, routinely returned to Wales to enjoy their success.58 The linguistic familiarity of home, a sense of being comfortable, may have been one reason for this return migration. Indeed, Wales was so close that migration to Liverpool may always have been seen as a temporary condition. The Welsh in industrial America By the middle of the nineteenth century, Welsh emigration to the United States had already acquired a new dimension, as America’s quest for industrialisation (and its attendant determination to become self-sufficient in the supply of key minerals) attracted skilled Welsh miners and other industrial workers. Indeed, the expansion of the international mining frontier throughout the Anglophone World – including Australia, Canada and New Zealand – had likewise attracted Welsh migrants to destinations across the globe. Migration from industrial South Wales (and, on a smaller scale, the north-east around Wrexham) was shaped by the varying state of the Welsh economy but it also reflected the fluctuating demand for Welsh skills from overseas. Occasionally, spectacular ‘pull’ factors, such as the gold rushes in the 1850s and 1860s in California, Victoria (Australia) and New Zealand, called to hundreds of potential prospectors. Mostly, however, larger and more general crises at home were the principal drivers

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of Welsh emigration. The 1840s, for example, witnessed widespread emigration in the face of destitution and want, and the 1870s saw major downturns in coal and iron, prompting further waves of emigrants. Ironically, those who went to Canada and the United States during the 1870s found similar stagnation there. Scottish colliers, who had established new mines in Illinois, or Welsh and Cornish miners who dominated mining in Pennsylvania in towns such as Scranton and counties like Wilkes Barre, were brought in for their deep-mining expertise. Indeed, the Welsh shared with the Cornish, and to a lesser extent the men of the Midlands and North of England, a stranglehold on the best mining jobs in North America, restricting all immigrant groups but the Swedes to very low numbers of miners: at least in the settlement and development phases until the 1870s. The Welsh and Cornish were a strong presence in the mining communities of the intermountain West – the states of Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Here they mined mostly for metals, including silver and gold. Although immigrants from Wales were thus widely distributed in industrial America, they tended (like other smaller migration streams, for example the Cornish) to be found in regional clusters. While no Welsh settlement could compare to the prodigious numbers of Irish in most towns and cities, they had a marked impact in the towns in which they clustered. Moreover, the Welshman’s status was ‘good’ in the estimation of potential employers and in the eyes of American society at large. Only 3 per cent of the Welsh in New York in the 1820s, for example, were classed as labourers. And, unlike the Irish, they were almost invisible in the building trade. Welsh women were also underrepresented as domestic servants, with just 15 per cent accounting for this type of work.59 In many respects, throughout the urban-industrial settlements of their diaspora, the Welsh looked to be perfectly placed between the needs of an expanding economy and the financial solidity provided by industrial trades and better classes of bluecollar work. We see evidence of urban-industrial clustering across the American continent in contemporary Welsh travel writing. Utica, for example, in upstate New York, had a long-established Welsh presence. The Welshman William Davies, writing from Utica when it was a town of 500 dwellings in 1821, and with the Erie Canal still a few years from completion, anticipated the positive effects that would be enjoyed there when Lake Erie and the Hudson were finally connected.60 In 1840 Edward Jones published an advice manual for intending Welsh emigrants, containing details on the Welsh community of Utica.61 Such developments helped give Utica its distinct ‘British’ character, with the Welsh heavily represented in the town’s population of 8,000 or so in the 1830s.62 By 1870, however,



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the number of Welsh-born had fallen to under a thousand (992), although there were certainly greater numbers of American-born residents of Welsh parentage or descent. At any rate, Utica retained a strong Welsh identity into the twentieth century, and with it a developed sense of community. Welsh-speakers were common there until the end of the twentieth century, and the local Presbyterian church was a focal point of low-church Welsh Protestantism in the town. Where the Welsh stood out most clearly was in the anthracite coal mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where British–Irish, or Welsh and Cornish versus Irish, conflict and violence were immortalised in the story of the Molly Maguires.63 Not surprisingly, Scranton has been the subject of the best book on the Welsh in the United States, a detailed and illuminating study from the pen of William D. (‘Bill’) Jones.64 In 1870, the Welsh-born in Scranton numbered 6,491. Ten years later, this figure had declined to 3,616, although even in the 1890s Scranton could boast 7,500 people with at least one parent born in Wales, comprising 10 per cent of the town’s population.65 Scranton was still by far the largest Welsh community in the United States. More broadly in Pennsylvania, there were 1,036 Welsh-born in Pittsburgh in 1870, the second-largest of America’s Welsh-born communities after Scranton.66 By 1880, the figure had nearly doubled to 2,012.67 The preponderance of industrial workers among these relatively small, but highly mobile, Welsh migrant streams ensured that, between 1899 and 1910, they had a return rate to Wales of 20.4 per cent. This was lower than the English propensity to return: one-third of emigrants from England later returned home. The key here is that both Welsh and English (together with the Cornish) had a tendency to re-emigrate, suggesting that miners, engineers and the like worked back and forth across the Atlantic, a phenomenon which Thistlethwaite had noticed as early as 1911 in various European migrant groups, including the Welsh.68 Scranton was home to overlapping and connected traditions within systems of labour organisation. The town and its mining environs gained national notoriety for harbouring a movement of violent proto-trade unionists, mostly Irishmen, who imported some of the techniques and tactics of particularly Ulster Ribbonism to industrial and communal relations in the new community. Violent Irish association in the coalfields manifested itself as the Molly Maguires. As with the strategies adopted by later Fenian operatives, the Mollys used legitimate fronts to hide their activities. Their mystique of the oath- and ritual-bound secret society blurred with an embryonic trade unionism. It was in places such as Scranton that miners who had known each other in Britain or Ireland – Irishmen, Welshmen and Cornishmen – once more found themselves mixing in close proximity and characteristically uneasy relations.69 Arguably, the

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Welsh were primarily responsible for the antagonisms that developed at Scranton, as they routinely employed systems of contracting out, which enabled skilled Welsh miners to exploit the Irish labourers working for them. This was one of the factors that caused Irish Molly Maguires to target Welsh foremen.70 The Mollys represented workers’ interests against local authorities, mining chiefs and their agents and managers; they meted out numerous lesser acts of violence and intimidation. The Irish also sought reprisals against Welsh and English foremen for perceived discrimination and poor working conditions. What Kevin Kenny described in 1998 as the emergence of a protean trade union movement was seen by others – both contemporary commentators and historians writing prior to his work – as an essentially Irish Catholic, pro-nationalist conspiracy of secrecy and violence.71 What is clear is that the large numbers and prodigious organisational skills of the Irish at Scranton set them on a regular collision course with both British and American workers, including the Welsh and Cornish. As Dai Smith has observed, the Welsh in particular tended to look down upon other migrant groups, ‘celebrating their advantaged positions and sense of social superiority’, especially as ethnic divisions of labour became increasingly apparent.72 In 1910 a visitor to Scranton observed the pecking-order that by now characterised the workforce in the mines. At the top, in managerial positions, were the Welsh. Below them were the Irish. The less skilled mining tasks were performed by Poles and Lithuanians, and menial labouring work fell to the Slovaks, Ruthenians and Italians.73 Class distinctions mattered, and the upwardly mobile Welsh in Scranton found themselves clustered in the Hyde Park district, a precinct comprising ‘two whole blocks stuffed with Welsh-run stores, banks, businesses, professional men and churches’.74 There were also local newspapers, in both Welsh and English, notably the long-running Y Drych, and the Scranton Welsh projected themselves as the defining voice of Welsh identity in America.75 There were Eisteddfodau and numerous other cultural expressions of Welshness, many centred on the chapels and churches. The Welsh told stories about themselves, as did the Cornish, asserting their superiority as migrants and miners, as well as stressing their status as model American citizens.76 Welsh national characteristics chimed perfectly with American society, it was claimed, not least Welsh virtues such as morality, respectability, temperance, sobriety and thrift. When reality appeared to suggest something different – one contributor to the Scranton newspaper Y Drych in 1870 reckoned that ‘the morals of Hyde Park’ were ‘second to those of Sodom, and the equal of Gomorrah’ – it was simply ignored by the Welsh elite, or glossed over.77 A veil could be drawn quietly over drunkenness, fornication, illegitimacy,



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even dancing and billiards, but when rugby football emerged as the favourite sport of industrial South Wales (in 1893 the Welsh team defeated the other three home countries for the first time), there was alarm at Scranton, the Cambrian, an influential Welsh-American newspaper, warning in 1896 that ‘there are tendencies observable in its popularity which point to a national danger’.78 Different conceptions of ‘Welshness’ were by now apparent, the imagined Wales of the emigrant Welsh in America already distinct from the lived experience of contemporary Wales, especially industrial South Wales. In the early 1880s, William Davies Evans wrote a series of articles for the Welsh-language newspaper, Baner Amserau Cymru. These writings were the product of his travels from Wales to the west coast of the United States. He visited dozens of Welsh settlements across the country. Here he found thriving communities, small but well supported by familiar cultural groups, such as churches, with an emphasis on the language seemingly everywhere apparent. Evans visited many of the places discussed above. Although by the time he was travelling and writing, the principal focus of Welsh impact in America had shifted to the newer industrial centres, the older, eastern settlements provided remarkable evidence of the resilience of Welsh culture over time. In Oneida, in New York state, the Welsh were still speaking fluent Welsh three generations after the original settlers had arrived. Chapel culture remained strong, and Eisteddfodau endured.79 The Welsh in Australia Just as mining and industrial development had drawn skilled Welsh workers and their families to the United States in the nineteenth century, so a similar movement can be discerned in Australia. Founded in 1836, the new British colony of South Australia burst onto the global stage of the expanding international mining frontier in the mid-1840s when spectacular discoveries of copper were made in the bush country north of the capital, Adelaide, first at Kapunda and then at Burra Burra. Later, in 1859–60, there were further significant copper finds at Wallaroo and Moonta, on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. Although found among the ranks of miners, it was as smelters that the Welsh made their mark. Swansea’s burgeoning technological know-how was swiftly transferred to South Australia, in rudimentary form at Kapunda and Burra Burra (at the latter the Welsh clustered in the small townships of Penclawdd and Llychr) and then on an altogether more impressive scale in the vast smelting works erected at Wallaroo. During the 1860s skilled workers were recruited for

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Wallaroo from the Swansea copper-smelting district, from Taibach, Cwm Avon, White Rock and the famous Hafod Works.80 A visible (and audible) Welsh community was swiftly established at Wallaroo, many of the immigrants worshipping in their own language in the Congregationalist ‘Welsh chapel’, with articles in Welsh appearing on occasion in local newspapers.81 As Bill Jones has observed, the Welsh at Wallaroo had much in common with the Cornish, the predominant group on northern Yorke Peninsula. They both had ‘Celtic origins’ and ‘many shared characteristics’.82 Both groups claimed to be ‘Ancient Britons’, more British than the English, and both developed strong ethno-occupational identities centred on the mining industries – in Britain and in transnational communities overseas, including Australia. Religious Nonconformity gave them a shared outlook on life, with a tendency towards political radicalism and common cultural and social patterns. In 1930 one Welshman on Yorke Peninsula recalled fondly the ‘happy association of the Cornish and Welsh at Wallaroo, Moonta and Kadina in musical, social and public gatherings’.83 Bill Jones has also remarked upon the ‘acknowledged Welsh prominence in the Australian Labor movement’.84 Especially notable was Tom Price, born at Brymbo near Wrexham in industrial north-east Wales in 1852.85 A Methodist local preacher and a Rechabite, he arrived in South Australia in 1883 and found work as a stonemason. He later became secretary and president of the stonecutters’ union, and in 1900 was appointed chairman of the United Labor Party in South Australia. In 1905, as leader of the Labor Party in Parliament, Tom Price became premier of South Australia in a Labor–Liberal coalition that lasted until his early death in 1909. From his earliest days as a politician, Price had acquired a reputation as ‘a frequent and favourite speaker … the Celtic fire … burned high, and the rushing eloquence of the young Welshman was a source of delighted wonder to many’.86 Price himself was conscious of his Welsh credentials. He had joined the Order of Ancient Britons, and emerged as a firm advocate of Home Rule, arguing that ‘Ireland, Scotland and Wales are as capable of governing themselves as Australia, Canada and South Africa’.87 Tom Price called himself a Christian socialist, explaining that his religious and political convictions were inextricably entwined and were aimed at the achievement of social justice here on earth. Here he placed himself centrestage in the Welsh Nonconformist-Radical tradition in Australia, of which he was indeed an exemplar. As coal miners, the Welsh were much in demand in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, and especially so on the Ipswich coalfield in Queensland, south-west of Brisbane. Centred on the appropriately named town of Blackstone, the Welsh founded what was to be one of the most enduring



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Welsh communities in Australia, where many facets of ethnicity existed. The Blackstone United Welsh Church brought together Welsh Nonconformists of different denominational persuasions, and became the focus of the town’s vigorous linguistic, cultural and religious life. Its Sunday school was said to be ‘a virtual nursery of the Welsh language in the Ipswich area’, and the Church initiated Blackstone’s St David’s Society, as well as organising the town’s first Eisteddfod in 1887. In the previous year, 1886, the Brisbane Cambrian Society had successfully lobbied Queensland’s agent-general in London to appoint a Welsh-speaking recruiting lecturer, a measure of the influence of the Welsh in Ipswich and its neighbourhood, and of the continuing need to attract Welsh miners to the district. This was also a reflection of the standing of Lewis Thomas, originally from Talybont in Cardiganshire, who through hard work and a good deal of luck had risen to become the undisputed ‘coal king of the Queensland coalfields’, and whose ‘palatial home’, Brynhyfryd, on Blackstone Hill, became a focal point for the Welsh in the locality, as well as a seat of local political and social power.88 Perhaps the most significant concentration of Welsh people in Australia, however, was on the Victorian goldfields, especially in Ballarat and neighbouring Sebastopol.89 As the Welsh newspaper Y Gwladgarwr noted in 1865 (and given here in translation): Ballarat and some of its suburbs, such as Sebastopol, form a sort of small Welsh Principality. There, Welsh is spoken, written, preached and sung, Welsh music is performed, and from time to time Welsh literary meetings are held where the great Welsh families, Jones, Davies, Thomas, Evans, Lloyd and Williams, amuse themselves in a way which would please the bards of old.90

The Welsh had been among the first groups to arrive in Victoria in early gold-rush days, the miners and quarrymen among them hoping that their status and experience would stand them in good stead in the freefor-all of ‘the diggings’. As early as 1854, there were 2,326 Welsh-born in Victoria. By 1857 the numbers had swollen to 4,576, and by 1861 the figure stood at 6,055. These numbers were sufficient to spawn two Welshlanguage newspapers, Yr Australydd and Yr Ymwelydd, which in turn reported the activities of such bodies as the Ballarat Welsh Independent Church and the Ballarat Welsh Bible Society, along with events like the annual St David’s Day celebrations in Sebastopol and the outings of the Calvinistic Methodist Church Band of Hope. Anticipating the later experience of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the Welsh clustered in Hyde Park and diversified into all manner of commercial enterprises, so the Ballarat

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Welsh clustered in Sebastopol and by the mid-1850s were already establishing their own firms. William Williams from Merthyr Tydfil, for example, ran a grocery shop on Morgan Street, and in nearby Queen Street William Jones from Tredegar set up his Monmouth Bakery, early evidence for what Robert Llewellyn Tyler has called ‘the proliferation of Welsh-owned businesses … which was at its zenith in the 1860s and 1870s’.91 Like the Welsh in Scranton, the Ballarat Welsh believed that they possessed all the credentials and attributes necessary to succeed as model citizens in their new home: the type of claim Scots regularly made. However, while declarations of allegiance in Scranton were to a new host polity, the United States of America, in Ballarat, by contrast, affirmations of loyalty were to Victoria as part of the British Empire. Although the Welsh in Victoria, and in Australia at large, strove to maintain their separate identity, not least their language (some of its advocates even admitting that its very existence was threatened by the proximity of English), they also clamoured to be heard as enthusiastic British imperialists. Here again was their much vaunted but paradoxical status as ‘Ancient Britons’, enabling the Welsh to express their original and superior ‘Britishness’ but also allowing them to express unequivocal solidarity with the idea of Great Britain and its empire. At the St David’s Day celebration in Melbourne in 1857, for example, it was emphasised that the Welsh ‘had not met that evening like the Americans, to celebrate another nationality, but to take their part in founding another empire in connection with the dominion of Britain’.92 Some even believed that assertions of Welsh identity, including preservation and promotion of the language, added materially to the lustre of the British Empire. In December 1867, at the Victorian Eisteddfod in Ballarat, one enthusiastic participant explained that he felt proud to be Welsh, to belong to a people who had brought ‘so much to the glory, honour and prosperity of the British empire’ and who, he continued, would ‘maintain that character in Australia which had been assigned to them in Europe [i.e. in Wales] as an integral part of the British empire’.93 Welsh cultural nationalism, it appeared, was by no means incompatible with a wider British patriotism. Again like Scranton, the Ballarat Welsh were careful to stress their qualities of religiosity, thrift, virtue and sobriety – they were God-fearing, they said, and law-abiding. As the Ballarat Star recorded in March 1873, the Welsh were ‘comparatively free from those degrading habits which had been the ruination of other nations’. Indeed, it was reported: ‘[h]abits of industry, social and moral principles, had been emplanted in them as a nation for centuries’.94 At the Ballarat Eisteddfod in March 1887, one speaker drew an explicit comparison with the United States. ‘In America’, explained the Rev. Dr Bevan, ‘no class earned more the respect of their



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citizens than the residents of the Welsh settlements’. Moreover, he explained, the Welsh were ‘essentially an intellectual people’ and ‘the most evangelical people on the face of the earth’, abhorring theft, violence, drunkenness and immorality.95 Needless to say, when there was evidence to the contrary it was quietly passed over by the Welsh elite. Court records reveal a variety of misdemeanours which brought Welsh men and women before the law, from indecent exposure and prostitution to larceny, inebriation and vagrancy. Occasionally such details found their way into the press, no doubt to the chagrin of Welsh opinion leaders, as in March 1868 when the Ballarat Star reported the case of Lewis Lewis of Sebastopol who was fined £2 and ordered to pay 5s. costs for entertaining drunk and disorderly persons in his house.96 Ultimately, despite the very best efforts of the various chapels and churches and the many Eisteddfodau, the Welsh language on the Victorian goldfields gave ground to encroaching English. English was the universal language of education, of the law, and of commerce. Many, probably the overwhelming majority, of Welsh emigrants to the goldfields – and to the rest of Australia – had been motivated by economic considerations, rather than any desire to create a Welsh utopia. They were susceptible to the pressure of English, and attachment to the Welsh language became seen mainly as one of sentiment or ‘duty’ rather than necessity. Consciousness of Welsh identity, and a desire to express Welshness as part of the greater pantheon of Britishness, endured. But increasingly this was done through the medium of the English language, as Welsh gradually lost its utility in Australian communities. The South American experiment In marked contrast to Welsh migration to neighbouring Liverpool, often temporary and essentially pragmatic, were the altogether different utopian migrations to South America in the mid-nineteenth century, which were driven mainly by the desire to preserve the Welsh language, unhindered by pressure from English. An attempt to found a Welsh-speaking ‘Nova Cambria’ in the early 1850s in the Rio Grande do Sul in the south of Brazil had failed, as had the short-lived Welsh community in Tennessee. Yet, out of these reverses emerged a strengthened determination to found a more robust and more durable Welsh colony overseas, and from this the Patagonia Movement was born. Its advocates embarked on lecture tours across Wales, deploying personal networks and engaging in energetic public persuasion.97 It is said that when Edwin Roberts (who had previously been in Wisconsin, where he had seen the spectre of assimilation) visited

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Cardiganshire to drum up support for the Patagonia project, such was the enthusiastic response that one old woman promptly declared: Rwy nawr yn bedwar ugain oed Ac ni welais long erioed Ond os caniata fy Nuw Af finnau I Batagonia I fyw98

(I am now eighty years old / And have never seen a ship / But if my God allows /I too shall go to live in Patagonia). Intriguingly, this enthusiasm for the Patagonia Movement extended to Welsh ‘exiles’ in Liverpool (the first emigrants sailed from Liverpool docks). Intense global interest generated by the project was reflected in the similar emigrations of Australians to South and Central America in the 1880s in search of a utopian society based on cooperative socialist principles, free from the ravages of capitalism. Nonetheless, fewer than 200 persons took part in the initial experiment in 1865 in Patagonia, a land then claimed by both Argentina and Chile. The colony’s architects dreamt of a new self-sufficient Welsh state free from British control, where there would be no state Church and where, critically, the English language would not be required for social or economic transactions. As those in the first contingent that left Liverpool on board the Mimosa on 28 May 1865 put it: Ni gawsom wlad sydd well, Yn y Deheudir pell, A Phatagonia yw, Cawn yno fyw mewn hedd, Heb ofni brad na chledd, A Chymro ar y sedd: Boed mawi I Dduw.99

(We have acquired a better country / In the distant South / And it is Patagonia / We shall live there in peace / Without fear of treachery or the sword / And a Welshman in the seat / Praise be to God). The ordinary folk who undertook the migration were, however, mostly driven by poverty, being unemployed miners, quarrymen and agricultural labourers. When they arrived at New Bay on 28 July 1865, they saw that their new country was an arid wilderness, rocky and covered in thorny scrub. But gradually the tough land of Patagonia was tamed and turned over, with irrigation systems employed to counter the dry environment. Wheat was grown and livestock grazed. Cheered by this success (news of which was relayed by immigrant settlers determined to maintain their



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culture) more Welsh from the homeland and from the United States joined the colony in the 1870s.100 By the end of the nineteenth century, indeed, a tight-knit prosperous Welsh-speaking community had been created in the Camwy Valley, despite the harsh conditions the emigrants had endured. In 1884 there were 350 farms, each about 280 acres in size, and the population had expanded to some 1,600 souls, with 300 children attending 6 schools, the total number of Welsh people in Argentina rising to some 2,500 by the turn of the twentieth century. However, beneath this veneer of success were new pressures that began to threaten the utopian tenets of the Welsh community in Patagonia. Migration had ceased in the 1880s as Argentinian control became stronger, and there was conflict over military service and the requirement to run schools in Spanish, not Welsh. Disastrous floods in 1900 and 1901 ruined much of the colony’s painstakingly constructed canal network, and a visit from the Canadian government immigration agent from Cardiff made it clear that Canada would be a good alternative destination. Although the Canadians had hitherto experienced difficulties in recruiting emigrants from Wales for their Prairie Provinces, the Patagonian Welsh now appeared more amenable. Floods, political difficulties and the Canadians’ ‘hard sell’ meant that by 1902 205 Patagonian Welsh were prepared to travel to Winnipeg to work farms that already had been surveyed and secured. Soon there were 52 Welsh families in the area around Saltcoats, Saskatchewan.101 Here, as in Patagonia, the Welsh worked tirelessly to husband their land grants, build schools and develop the public face of their culture. Chapels, language and Eisteddfodau would be important elements of their new life on the Prairies. Meanwhile, back in Patagonia, the Welsh experienced growing hostility for their perceived unwillingness to integrate into Argentinian society, with the Welsh language now seen as a threat to Argentinian national identity and integrity. By the 1920s assimilation was at hand, Eluned Morgan, daughter of one of the original settlers, observing sadly that the ‘old Colony has been fast decaying over these last few years’. She complained that, with the spread of Spanish, ‘there is not much lustre to the old Welsh language now’, and she regretted that, as the earlier generation passed on, ‘the population will then be Welsh Spaniards’.102 As Robert Owen Jones has concluded, the ‘history and survival of the Welsh Colony in Patagonia is in one sense a wonder if not a miracle, but on the other hand the embodiment of a dire tragedy’. Despite difficult conditions, he contends, the Patagonian settlers had achieved success in ‘the economic, social, religious, educational, cultural and politico-administrative fields’, attaining a sustainable prosperity and maintaining a stable community.103 The English language was not a corrosive factor, as it had been at home in Wales, and

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Welsh was the only language passed on to children by their parents and teachers. Unfortunately, extraneous political and other factors undermined this achievement, although it was as significant as it was remarkable that Welsh survived on the lips of at least some Patagonians at the turn of the twenty-first century. National culture overseas As the Patagonian experiment had demonstrated yet again, the Welsh everywhere were keen to make their culture visible, to proudly assert their identity, and to create conditions in which the Welsh language might flourish. Not surprisingly, this desire to associate and to promote Welshness extended to active participation in the ‘club culture’ that had emerged in Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century. Peter Clark’s brilliant exploration of the rise of this club culture illustrates dramatically how the age of cosmopolitanism and social politeness generated huge interest in such clubs among like-minded men (they were all male preserves in the pre-1800 period).104 Such persons joined each other in pursuit of shared values. They debated and toasted, enjoying sometimes excessive conviviality over dinner, drinks and rituals. There was also a sober side to many clubs, including the dispensation of charitable good works. These clubs or societies, often named for countries and national saints, were places where the pursuit of shared values was mixed with regional, local, national and ethnic expression. London in particular saw a huge efflorescence of such societies in the eighteenth century. Scotland and Ireland had fewer than England; but even in the earliest days the overseas colonies developed such instruments of collective action. The Welsh were no different. In London, the patriotic Society of Ancient Britons offered a direct play on the idea of Wales as the heartbeat of the original Britannic tribe. The society celebrated St David’s Day alongside its ‘uncommon zeal’ for the Hanoverian dynasty and for the Union with Scotland. Its dinners engendered patriotic declarations, and, for the wider benefit of society around them, the Ancient Britons, like so many other such organisations, raised funds for charitable good works, including building a school and supporting poor Welsh folk in the capital who had no right of settlement under the terms of the poor law.105 The Ancient Britons thus differed from an emerging number of Welsh societies, for example the Cymmrodorion and the Gwyneddigion, which focused exclusively on linguistic and cultural matters.106 Yet the Ancient Britons, despite their fawning loyalty to the new royal lineage and to the new political arrangement in Great Britain,



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also worried about the fate of the Welsh language and, ultimately, about the survival of the very idea of Wales.107 Colonial America witnessed the emergence of national associations that were an offshoot of the efflorescent associational scene back in Britain and Ireland. The colonies, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, recorded English, Scottish and Welsh societies. Later, German, Irish and others would follow suit. Charitable groups, organised with the idea of helping the poor of their particular nationality, were usually named for the nation’s patron saint. Thus, in 1729 we first read of a Welsh Society of Philadelphia, whose members gathered on St David’s Day and ‘walk’d in regular order with Leeks in their Hats, to the Church, where was preach’d in the old British language [i.e. Welsh], an excellent sermon’. The society also enjoyed a fine dinner, and had stewards to uphold this ‘Yearly Custom’ – though there was no talk of charity at this point.108 A couple of decades later, in 1759, Philadelphia had a ‘British Club’, as the Society of the Sons of England was labelled. This was some thirteen years before the benevolent society of the same name was founded at Byrne’s Tavern on St George’s Day 1772.109 Even after its formation, the Philadelphia Sons of St George existed alongside other societies, such as the Ancient Britons.110 Like the Sons of Hermann for the Germans or the St George’s Society, the St David’s Society was established as a wide-ranging benevolent society whose primary aim was to give support to new immigrants from Wales. What did this mean for the Welsh? In fact, the Englishmen of these colonial ports responded to the difficulties experienced by the Welsh in finding enough numbers to form their own societies. The St George’s associations, for example, often declared responsibility for the Welsh poor. Much later, in the mid-nineteenth century, the St George’s Society of Kingston, Ontario, reflected the realities of limited Welsh numbers by declaring itself to ‘consist of native born Englishmen and Welshmen, and the sons and grandsons of such Englishmen and Welshmen’.111 Montreal’s St George’s Society, in 1834, embraced ‘those who are natives of England, or descendants of natives of England’. By-laws from the 1860s make further membership specifications that resonate with those elsewhere: ‘Any person who is a native of England or Wales, born in the British Possessions, may become a member of this Society, after being proposed and elected by open voting … and paying a subscription fee of no less than three dollars.’112 Welshmen were also ‘eligible as members’ in Baltimore (although ‘natives of Scotland and Ireland’ were excluded), while the St George’s Society of British Columbia had the sole concern of ‘bringing together Englishmen for their mutual benefit’.113 Regardless of whether they were English or Welsh, the process of electing members was common

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for most associations. The Sons of England relaxed the English-only requirements as time went by. In the 1892 version of their constitution, for example, they were expressly admitting ‘Welshmen and those from the Isle of Man, Anglesey and the Channel Islands’. ‘Welsh national societies’, as the Victorians called them, were active in all Welsh communities outside Wales that were large enough to sustain them. They did not have to be large communities for this to occur. Bangor, Pennsylvania had only a few hundred Welsh, but they sustained various societies, choirs, and cultural organisations and events. The Independent Order of the True Ivorites, a friendly society dating to 1836, was present in Bangor, just as the Druids order appeared in other towns and counties.114 London had numerous such groups. Liverpool had several. Other smaller but concentrated industrial settlements of Welsh also gave rise to them. For example, London, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Sunderland and Durham had branches of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, an organisation founded in London in 1751 dedicated to the promotion of Welsh language and culture.115 The society organised dinners on St David’s Day and undertook charitable work with the Welsh poor. Liverpool’s Welsh associational culture included the Young Wales Society, which promoted the advancement of young Welsh folk and counselled against the social and moral risk of life in the big city.116 Liverpool also had a Cambrian Society, which fostered cultural events, a library, and other signs of improvement and learning.117 Indeed, the Cambrians were elites who held positions in the civic hierarchy and promoted Welsh integration. Thus, they were not sponsors of the language but quite the opposite: assimilationists. They looked after the ‘poorer sons of the Principality resident in this town’ and promoted the adoption of English as the route to integration, happiness and prosperity. In 1865, at the society’s fifty-eighth anniversary St David’s Day dinner, the Rev. W. Hughes made this position on the Welsh in Liverpool clear: ‘were not the ancient Britons some of its merchant princes? Did they not sit in the council chamber? (Applause) … Amalgamate, he said, with Anglo-Saxons – in other words, the English.’118 Anglo-Saxon connections were taken to a further extent by Denbighshireborn John Henry Puleston. Puleston was the founder of a St George’s Society that pre-dated the Royal Society of St George (1894). Puleston was a driving force, having observed similar cultural expressions when he was working in the United States, where St George’s societies were established long before the Royal Society of St George. Puleston had spent time, at mid-century, in the United States working as a newspaper editor and banker. When he returned to the United Kingdom in the 1860s, he became member of Parliament for Devonport from 1874 to 1892.119 In 1892, he launched an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against David



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Lloyd George in the Caernarvonshire election. Paradoxically, Puleston was also a fiercely proud Welshman, and something of a Welsh nationalist. He was vice-president of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, treasurer of the National Eisteddfod Association and first chairman of the committee of the London Welsh Club.120 Eisteddfodau were a most remarkably consistent and omnipresent element in Welsh communities all over the world, whatever their size. These gatherings were not narrowly conceived. Welsh people sought active civic roles and were not inward-looking, and they freely shared their culture through Eisteddfodau. Indeed, the organisers of the first Eisteddfodau in Birkenhead spoke against the constrictions of a chauvinistic linguistic nationalism. The Eisteddfod took exception, on behalf of the hosts, to such narrow introspection: ‘The idea of wishing to separate in any way from our brave and generous English neighbours never entered the wildest head amongst us – bardic or laic’, the Rev. Professor Griffith averred. Indeed, he continued, ‘A more thoroughly and persistently loyal people is not to be found under the sun.’121 The great national festivals, periodically held thereafter on Merseyside (Birkenhead 1879 and 1917, Liverpool 1884, 1900 and 1929), garnered praise in the local press. In the choral competition, where 1,000 singers in 100 choirs took part, men from Nelson, New Zealand, won, and the Swansea men came second.122 To English commentators, this was ‘the truest and best form of Welsh Nationalism’. As well as these five large events in the two major towns, there also were smaller events, such as the Bootle Eisteddfod for children of Welsh descent, and the Good Templars Eisteddfod, held in central Liverpool.123 Such celebrations of Welsh culture extended well beyond Liverpool. In 1855, the Welsh Congregationalist Church of New York heard a lecture on Welsh history, which when published ran to over 100 pages.124 Eisteddfodau had been consistent features in Ballarat cultural life since the mid-nineteenth century (they were still going strong in 1911), while Sydney had its own annual celebration of Welshness.125 New Zealand also held these national Welsh celebratory occasions.126 In 1928, as if to show the transnational swirl of Welshness, there was an Eisteddfod in Sydney, where the contralto singing competition was won by a New Zealander, Miss Jessie W. Shaw.127 Eleven years later, in 1939, her compatriot, Betty Welch, won at Sydney Eisteddfod, too.128 Increasingly, however, such Eisteddfodau became more secular in flavour, as the religious dimension was diluted, while English became the medium through which the proceedings were conducted, as well as the language of literary and musical performance. As early as 1877, for example, Joseph Jenkins, famous as the ‘Welsh swagman’ of Australia, denounced the Ballarat Eisteddfod because of the overwhelmingly

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English content of its programme. Likewise, the Welsh-language newspapers of Victoria – Yr Australydd and Yr Ymwelydd – criticised the trend but they too had succumbed to such assimilatory forces by the end of the 1870s.129 Conclusion Eisteddfodau in many ways typified the Welsh journey from noticeable ethnic community to assimilated (mostly) English-speaking citizen of the New World. Welsh families brought their children up in homes steeped in Welsh culture, with the arts, literature, music and language stressed. Forces for integration also work into each. The culture influence of Welsh song clearly extended far beyond the Welsh themselves, while external cultures also merged Welsh traditions. Individual life stories show something of this interchange. Carmarthenshire-born doctor, John D. Thomas, described as ‘an ardent Welshman’, in the 1860s presided over the early Eisteddfod Society in Sydney.130 Another Welshman, David L. Lewis, a fine singer, was an important leading figure in the Australian Eisteddfod movement, along with dozens of others.131 All the while, though, the English walked on Welsh lawns. The English content of Eisteddfodau, which sometimes was complained about, can partly be explained by English and Scottish enthusiasm for the Eisteddfodau, which attracted the attentions of performers with no direct Welsh lineage. James Brophy, Melbourne-born son of Irish parents, was a founding member of the Canberra Eisteddfod Society in 1938, and William Clemens, the son of a Cornish miner, was the president before his death in 1941.132 In the 1950s and 1960s, he was a long-serving president of the national society.133 Scottish-born and Glasgow University-educated Mary Gunn helped found the Sydney Eisteddfod in the 1930s, and was assistant secretary for several years.134 Perhaps changes in the nature of such Eisteddfodau had hastened assimilation into the broader community; these events were never exclusive or chauvinistic: indeed they embraced the civic role of the Welsh. Yet, perhaps, too, the inexorable pace of acculturation had already made such changes necessary. Overall, the Eisteddfodau adapted to the changing environment as best they could, projecting Welshness in new ways but safeguarding the notion of the Welsh as a literary, musical, educated people. In the broader sense, the Welsh experience of diaspora was in many ways deeply paradoxical. Despite the later demand for Welsh industrial skills in America, Australia and elsewhere, much early Welsh emigration was motivated by a desire to establish a new utopia beyond the demands of the modern world, where religious freedom and the Welsh language (the



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two went hand in hand) might flourish. Such desire was characteristic of the earliest settlements in America but it was apparent, too, in the later colonisation of Patagonia. Yet, such utopias proved temporary and highly conditional, if not illusory. Even as Welsh culture was celebrated, so the intrusive presence of English was felt, just as it was in Wales itself. In Patagonia, where English was not a corrosive force, it was Spanish that eventually came to play the role of the dominant neighbouring language. Nonetheless, if there were powerful assimilatory forces at work which the Welsh language found difficult to resist, it was cultural assertion rather than cultural resistance that best typified the Welsh settlements overseas. The Welsh language and other cultural attributes were seen as powerful symbols of identity – both by the Welsh themselves and their host societies – and were deployed to ensure the Welsh a distinctive place and a distinctive voice in the New World countries in which they settled. Likewise, the Welsh were able to project themselves as model citizens in host societies such as America and Australia, conforming to all the norms and expectations of those societies and demonstrating their unconditional loyalty – whether to the United States or the British Empire. The Welsh also projected themselves as superior migrants, not only as upright citizens but as possessors of important industrial skills vital to the economic development of their host countries. Intriguingly, the emigrant Welsh possessed many of the characteristics of the emigrant Irish – an ethnic group that had experienced religious persecution and economic hardship at home, and which was linguistically and culturally distinct from the dominant nationality in the United Kingdom: the English. And yet, as we have seen, the Welsh sought to distance themselves from the Irish overseas, instead of claiming the common cause of Celtic brotherhood. In Wales itself, Irish immigrants were often unwelcome, their presence thought to have a generally depressing effect on social conditions and labour relations. There was also considerable anti-Catholic feeling in Wales, especially among the more hard-line Nonconformist denominations, and the Irish were seen as a dangerous and subversive people. In emigrating to America and elsewhere, the Welsh took these prejudices with them, burnishing them anew in their host societies. In the United States, as we have seen, the Welsh asserted their economic and social superiority over the Irish, and professed their deference and loyalty to American institutions, to which Irish secret societies such as the Molly Maguires were seen to pose a threat. And while the Irish, consigned to urban ghettoes, often constituted the labouring classes, the Welsh could vaunt their industrial skills and play a wider role in a generally welcoming society. In 1842, John H. Evans, writing from New York to John Richards, vicar of Llanowddin in Montgomeryshire, expressed in

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passing his ambivalent attitude towards his Irish neighbours. ‘I do not think they punish thieves with death as often as they do in England’, he wrote approvingly, although ‘it is generally said there is no great punishment for killing an Irishman’.135 Significantly, if there was any evidence of a ‘Celtic brotherhood’, then it was in the relationship between the Welsh and the Cornish.136 In America and Australia, their economic roles were often complementary, and although they told similar stories about themselves – not least emphasising their skills as miners – there were sufficient employment opportunities for them rarely to be in competition for what might otherwise have been scarce jobs. Instead, they colluded in the attempted exclusion of third parties, including the Irish. The Cornish shared the Welsh hostility to the Irish. All three groups might claim to be ‘Celtic’, as they progressively did in the later nineteenth century. But for increasing numbers of Irish, to be ‘Celtic’ was to be non-British and even anti-British. For the Welsh and Cornish, however, to be ‘Celtic’ was to be ‘Ancient Britons’, quintessentially and loyally British (or Protestant American).137 Ultimately, the Welsh emigrant population must be seen as a hybrid diaspora. Early migrants sought to establish themselves as distinct communities, far removed from contemporary assimilatory pressures. Yet, when the Welsh language and Welsh culture were asserted most successfully overseas, it was when the Welsh chose to play prominent economic and social roles in the new modern societies of which they became conspicuously a part, such as industrial America and Australia, seeking integration rather than exclusion. But the price of such success, paradoxically, was linguistic assimilation, as Welsh gave way to English, although the Welsh continued to give voice to their identity through the medium of the English language – as the Cornish did, their language having disappeared by the late eighteenth century. Notes 1 Neil Evans, ‘Writing Wales into the Empire: rhetoric, fragments – and beyond?’, in H.V. Bowen (ed.), Wales and the British Overseas Empire: Interactions and Influences, 1650–1830 (Manchester, 2011), pp. 15–40, in a volume which seeks to address the imbalance more generally. 2 Joseph V. Hickey, ‘Welsh cattlemen of the Kansas flint hills: social and ideological dimensions of cattle entrepreneurship’, Agricultural History, 63.4 (1989), 56–71. 3 Glyn Williams, ‘Social conflict and change within the Welsh colony in Patagonia’, Anthropological Quarterly, 44.2 (1971), 78–93. 4 Janet Davies, The Welsh Language (Cardiff, 1993), p. 47.



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5 E.T. Ashton, The Welsh in the United States (Hove, 1984); Richard Allen, ‘Nantucket Quakers and the Milford Haven whaling industry, c.1791–1821’, Quaker Studies, 15.1 (2010), 6–31. 6 Cited in Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh (London, 1985), p. 140. 7 Ibid., p. 141. 8 Winfred Blevins, Dictionary of the American West (New York, 1993), p. 256; see also Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Cardiff, 1979), and Geraint H. Jenkins, The People’s Historian: Professor Gwyn A. Williams (1925–1995) (Aberystwyth, 1996), pp. 8–9. 9 Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (Syracuse, NY, 1993), pp. 2–3. 10 W.E. van Vugt, ‘British and British Americans (English, Scots, Scots Irish, and Welsh), to 1870’, in Elliott R. Barkan (ed.), Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration, 4 vols (Santa Barbara, CA, 2013); William E. van Vugt, British Buckeyes: English, Scots and Welsh in Ohio (Kent, OH, 2006); Lewis Lloyd, Australians from Wales (Penygroes, 1988). 11 Blevins, Dictionary of the American West, p. 65. Sometimes these terms of affection were applied more generally to the English. See, for example, Brad Patterson, ‘Cousin Jack, new chums and Ten Pound Chums: locating New Zealand’s English diaspora’, in Tanja Bueltmann, David Gleeson and Donald M. MacRaild (eds), Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–2010 (Liverpool, 2010), pp. 150–68. 12 Emrys Jones, ‘The Welsh language in England c.1800–1914’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Social History of the Welsh Language: Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Cardiff, 1998), pp. 231–59. 13 Robert M. Morris, The Rebecca Riots (Oxford, 1989); Rhian E. Jones, Petticoat Heroes: Rethinking the Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, 2015); David J. Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (Oxford, 1986). 14 Gwyn A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (London, 1978). 15 Russell Davies, People, Places and Passions: ‘Pain and Pleasure’: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1870–1945 (Cardiff, 2015). 16 Bill Jones, ‘Representations of Australia in mid-nineteenth-century Welsh emigrant literature: Gwladyr Aur and Awstralia A’r Cloddfeydd Aur’, Welsh History Review, 23.2 (2007), 51–74. 17 Alan Conway (ed.), The Welsh in America: Letters from the Immigrants (Cardiff, 1961), pp. 4–5. 18 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992). 19 Sarah Prescott, ‘“What Foes more dang’rous than too strong Allies?” AngloWelsh relations in eighteenth-century London’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69.4 (December 2006), 535–54; Thomas Jones, The Rise and Progress of the Most Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons, established in Honour to her Royal Highness’s Birthday, and the Principality of Wales, on St. David’s Day, the First of March, 1714–15 (London, 1717).

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20 Bureau of Census, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, 1860), ‘Introduction’, Tables, p. xxxii. 21 Census of the British Empire, 1901, Report with Summary […] (London, 1906), Table 7, pp. 54–63; Abstract of the 12th Census of the United States, 3rd edn (Washington, 1904), Table 8, p. 8. 22 Abstract of the 12th Census of the United States, p. 8. 23 Sessional Papers, vol. A, Third Session of the Ninth Parliament of the Dominion of Canada, Session 1903, vol. xxxvii. 24 Report of the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census, part 1 (Washington, DC, 1894), Table 33, p. 735. 25 Bureau of Census, Population of the United States in 1860, Introduction, ‘Principal Cities and Towns; Native and Foreign Population’, pp. xxxi– xxxii. 26 Ernst, Immigrant Life, pp. 44–45. 27 61st Congress, 3d Session, Doc. 756, Reports of the Emigration Commissioners: Statistical Review of Immigration, 1820–1910, vol. 3: Distribution of Immigrants, 1850–1900 (Washington, DC, 1911) [chair: William P. Dillingham], Tables 8, 13. A further 793,801 did not specify origins. 28 Robert Llewellyn Tyler, ‘Culture maintenance, occupational mobility and social status: the Welsh in a Pennsylvanian slate town, 1900–1930’, Welsh History Review, 28.1 (2016), 115–45. 29 United States Census Bureau, 2009 American Community Survey, table 52, ‘Population by Selected Ancestry Group and Region’, www.census.gov/ compendia/statab/2012/Tables/12s0052.pdf. Accessed 18 May 2017. 30 United States Census Fact Finder, http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/ jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?refresh=t. Accessed 20 January 2017. 31 Cherrilyn Walley, Welsh Iowa (Cardiff, 2009). 32 A.H. Dodd, The Character of Early Welsh Emigration to the United States (Cardiff, 1957), pp. 4–5. 33 Andrew Mckillop, ‘A “reticent people”? The Welsh in Asia, c.1700–1815’, in Bowen (ed.), Wales and the British Overseas Empire, pp. 143–67; also Bowen, ‘Asiatic interactions: India, the East India Company and the Welsh economy, c.1750–1830’, pp. 168–92, in the same volume. 34 Trevor Burnard, ‘From periphery to periphery: the Pennants’ Jamaican plantations and industrialisation in North Wales’, in Bowen (ed.), Wales and the British Overseas Empire, pp. 114–42. 35 E.T. Ashton, The Welsh in the United States (Hove, 1984), pp. 31ff. 36 Dodd, Character of Early Welsh Emigration, pp. 12–14. 37 Williams, When Was Wales?, p. 161. 38 David Ceri Jones, ‘Welsh evangelicals, the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world and the creation of the “Christian Republick”’, in Bowen (ed.), Wales and the British Overseas Empire, pp. 87–113. 39 Ibid., pp. 156–57, pp. 171–72; see also Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Morgan John Rees and his Beula’, Welsh Historical Review, 3.4 (1967), 441–72, and Gwyn A. Williams, The Search for Beula Land (London, 1980).



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40 Walley, Welsh, chapter 1, provides an excellent overview of these migrations. 41 Ernst, Immigrant Life, p. 45. 42 Gwyn Williams, The Land Remembers: A View of Wales (London, 1977), p. 193. 43 Ibid. 44 Minoro Yasumoto, The Rise of a Victorian Ironopolis: Middlesbrough and Regional Industrialisation (Suffolk, 2011), p. 122; Table 4.10, p. 123. 45 R. Lewis and D. Ward, ‘Culture, politics, and assimilation: the Welsh on Teesside, c.1850–1940’, Welsh Historical Review, 17.4 (1996), 555–70; C.G. Pooley, ‘The Welsh migration to England in the mid-nineteenth century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 9 (1983), 287–306; Graeme Milne, North East England, 1850–1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime Industrial Region (Suffolk, 2006), p. 42. 46 Colin G. Pooley and John C. Doherty, ‘The longitudinal study of migration: Welsh migration to English towns in the nineteenth century’, in Colin G. Pooley and Ian D. Whyte (eds), Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration (London, 1991), pp. 143–73. 47 John Belchem and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, in Belchem (ed.), Liverpool 800 (Liverpool, 2007), pp. 311–92. 48 ‘Words of warning and advice’, Liverpool Young Wales, 19 January 1893. 49 ‘Great Welsh demonstration’, Daily Post, 28 October 1880. 50 Catholic Times, 29 October 1875. 51 Belchem and MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’. The lord mayor, speaking at the Eisteddfod in 1900, referred to 19,500 Welsh surnames in Gore’s Directory. 52 John Richard Jones, The Welsh Builder on Merseyside: Annals and Lives (Liverpool, 1946); J.A. Picton, Memorials of Liverpool, 2nd edition (Liverpool, 1903, ii), p. 353. 53 Philip Payton, One and All: Labour and the Radical Tradition in South Australia (Adelaide, 2016), pp. 152–53. 54 W.H. Saunders, ‘The making of Liverpool’, Proceedings of the Liverpool Philomathic Society, 63 (1917–18), xxxi–lvi. 55 C.G. Pooley, ‘The residential segregation of migrant communities in midVictorian Liverpool’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2 (1977), 364–82. 56 R. Merfyn Jones, ‘The Liverpool Welsh’, in R. Merfyn Jones and D. Ben Rees (eds), The Liverpool Welsh and their Religion (Liverpool, 1984), pp. 20–43. 57 ‘The Welsh in Liverpool’, Liverpool Review, 5 May 1900, and ‘The cherub does the Eisteddfod’, Liverpool Review, 22 September 1900. 58 R.W. Jones, Welshmen in Liverpool in the 19th Century and Earlier (Liverpool, 1921). 59 Ernst, Immigrant Life, pp. 68–69; Tables 1–2, pp. 24–25. 60 Davies to Rev. Ellis Evans, Denbighshire, 24 September 1821, in Conway, The Welsh in Americapp. 64–65, and see passim for the Welsh in Utica.

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61 Edward Jones, The American Traveller; or Advice to Emigrants from Wales to America (Aberystwyth, 1840). 62 James S. Pula, Ethnic Utica, (Oneida, NY, 2005). 63 Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York, 1998). 64 William D. Jones, Wales in America: Scranton and the Welsh (Cardiff, 1993); see also William D. Jones, ‘The Welsh language and Welsh identity in a Pennsylvanian community’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Cardiff, 1998), pp. 261–86. 65 Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (1 June 1880) (Washington, 1882), Table XVI – Foreign-born population of fifty principal cities, pp. 538, 540; Dai Smith, Wales! Wales? (London, 1984), p. 30. 66 Bureau of Census, States Embracing the Tables of Race, Nationality, Sex, Selected Ages, and Occupations, from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870), under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC, 1872), pp. xxxi–xxxii. 67 Department of the Interior, Census Office, United States … Tenth Census, Table XVI, pp. 538, 540. 68 Reports to the Immigration Commission, 42 vols, Statistical Review of Immigration, 1820–1910, document 756, presented by Mr W.P. Dillingham (Washington, DC, 1911), vol. 3, Table 37, p. 359. 69 For the most thorough treatment, see Kenny, Making Sense, esp. pp. 14–34. Mark Bulik, The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War (New York, 2015). 70 Jones, Wales in America, p. 213. 71 Ronald C. Brown, Hard-Rock Miners: The Intermountain West, 1860–1920 (College Station, TX, 1979), p. 8; see also pp. 108–9, 114–15. 72 Smith, Wales! Wales?, p. 31. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Aled Jones and Bill Jones, Welsh Reflections: Y Drych and America, 1851–2001 (Llandysul, 2001). 76 Jones, Wales in America, p. 246. 77 Y Drych, 18 August 1870; cited in Jones, Wales in America, p. 204. 78 Smith, Wales! Wales?, p. 28. 79 William Davies Evans, From Aberystwyth to San Francisco: The Welsh Community in America, 1880–1908, trans., edited, with an introduction by Margaret Morgan Jones (Llanrwst, 2013), pp. 27–33. 80 State Library of South Australia, BRG40/537 Wallaroo Mines Proprietors, Out-Letter Books 1860–1870, Mair to Neill, 27 February 1863; Anon to Young, 21 June 1866. 81 Wallaroo Times, 19 July 1865. 16 October 1867. 82 Bill Jones, ‘Cousin Dai and Cousin Dilys? South Australia’s nineteenthcentury Welsh heritage’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, 27 (1999), 40.



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83 Advertiser (Adelaide), 11 April 1930. 84 Jones, ‘Cousin Dai and Cousin Dilys?’, p. 40. 85 Stephanie McCarthy, Tom Price: From Stonecutter to Premier (Adelaide, 2016). 86 T.H. Smeaton, From Stone Cutter to Premier and Minister of Education: The Story of the Life of Tom Price, a Welsh Boy Who Became an Australian Statesman (Adelaide, 1926), pp. 144–45. 87 Herald (Adelaide), 1 March 1902. 88 A.F. Hughes, ‘The Welsh’, in James Jupp (ed.), The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins (Sydney, 1988), p. 844. 89 Bill Jones, ‘Welsh identities in colonial Ballarat’, Journal of Australian Studies, 68 (2001), 34–43; Kerry Cardell, Cliff Cumming, Peter Griffiths and Bill Jones, ‘Welsh identity on the Victorian goldfields in the nineteenth century’, in Kerry Cardell and Cliff Cumming (eds), A World Turned Upside Down: Cultural Change on Australia’s Goldfields 1851–2001 (Canberra, 2001), pp. 25–60; Robert Llewellyn Tyler, The Welsh in an Australian Gold Town: Ballarat, Victoria, 1850–1900 (Cardiff, 2010). 90 Y Gwladgarwr, 14 January 1865, cited in Tyler, Ballarat, p. 7. 91 Tyler, Ballarat, p. 17. 92 Argus (Melbourne), 5 March 1857; cited in Tyler, Ballarat, p. 115. 93 Address of the President, Dr D.J. Jones at the Eisteddfod held at the Theatre in Ballarat on the 25 December, 1867 (Melbourne, n. n.), p. 1; cited in Tyler, Ballarat, p. 116. 94 Ballarat Star, 3 March 1873; cited in Tyler, Ballarat, p. 101. 95 Ballarat Star, 5 March 1887; cited in Tyler, Ballarat, p. 101. 96 Ballarat Star, 5 March 1868; cited in Tyler, Ballarat, p. 113. 97 Russell Davis, People, Places and Passions – ‘Pain and Pleasure’: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1870-1945 (Cardiff, 2015); Chris Moss, Patagonia: A Cultural History (Oxford, 2008). 98 R. Bryn Williams, Cymry Patagonia (Aberystwyth, 1942), p. 19; cited in Robert Owen Jones, ‘The Welsh language in Patagonia’, in Jenkins (ed.), Language and Community, p. 293. 99 Jones, ‘Welsh language in Patagonia’, p. 295. 100 E.G. Bowen, ‘The Welsh colony in Patagonia, 1865–1885: a study in historical geography’, Geographical Journal, 132 (1966), 24–25. 101 Lewis H. Thomas, ‘Welsh in Saskatchewan, 1902–1914’, Western Historical Quarterly, 4.4 (1973), 447. 102 Cited in Jones, ‘Welsh language in Patagonia’, p. 316. 103 Ibid., p. 287. 104 British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000). 105 Sir Thomas Jones’s account of its founding, The Rise and Progress of the Most Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons (1717); Prescott, ‘“What Foes?”’, pp. 535–54.

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106 Glenda Carr, ‘William Owen Pughe and the London societies’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature, c.1700–1800 (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 168–86. 107 Prescott, ‘“What Foes?”’, pp. 543–44. 108 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Welsh Society of Philadelphia, Wj 502, vol. 1 [1980]; Pennsylvania Gazette, quoted in George Edward Hartmann, The Welsh Society of Philadelphia: History, Charter and By-laws, pamphlet produced for the 250th anniversary (Philadelphia, 1979), p. 3. 109 For the Philadelphia Society of the Sons of St George, see minute book vol. 1; this includes the minutes of the founding meeting, held on St George’s Day 1772. Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Phi) 1733, Sons of St George Archive. For a global perspective on English associationalism, see Tanja Bueltmann and Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George: English associations in the Anglo-World to the 1930s’, Journal of Global History, 7.1 (2012), 79–105. 110 Peter Thompson, ‘“The friendly glass”: drink and gentility in colonial Philadelphia’, e Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 113.4 (October 1989), 556–77. 111 ADOA, XM-72A, St George’s Society Kingston, Minutes, ‘Constitution and bye-laws’, dated 6 April 1858, p. 4. 112 The act of incorporation and bye-laws of the St George’s Society of Montreal, founded by Englishmen in the year 1834, for the purpose of relieving their brethren in distress (Montreal, 1867), pp. 3 and 8. 113 Maryland Historical Society, MS 1881, St George’s Society Baltimore, Minutes, 6 December 1866; Constitution, By-laws and Standing Rules and Orders of the British Columbia St George’s Society (Victoria, 1886), p. 2. 114 Tyler, ‘Welsh in a Pennsylvanian slate town’, pp. 122–23. 115 Glenda Carr, ‘William Owen Pughe and the London societies’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c. 1700–1800 (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 168–86. 116 ‘Police intelligence’, Daily Post, 20 March 1863. 117 See, for example, a rare early minute book: National Library of Wales (NLW), NLW MSS 2225–26, Liverpool Cambrian Society, Minutes 1856–57. 118 See the reports of St David’s Day dinners in Daily Post, 3 March 1863, and Liverpool Mercury, 2 March 1865 and 1866. 119 Gwynne Jones, ‘Puleston, Sir John Henry (1829–1908)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, http://yba.llgc.org.uk/en/s-PULE-HEN-1829.html. Accessed 21 January 2017. 120 Ibid. 121 ‘Eisteddfod at Birkenhead’, Daily Post, 27 December 1864; ‘Liverpool and Birkenhead Eisteddfod’, Liverpool Mercury, 26 December 1867. 122 Evening Post (Wellington), 12 August 1929. 123 See the reports in Liverpool Weekly Mercury, 4 February and 30 December 1911.



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124 The Cymry of ’76; or, Welshmen and their Descendants of the American Revolution. An Address: with an Appendix, available at https://archive.org/ details/cymryof76orwelsh00jone. Accessed 1 June 2018. 125 Grey River Argus, 9 June 1911. 126 Press (Christchurch), 26 May, 20 July 1937. 127 Evening Post (Wellington), cxxviii, 51, 29 August 1939. 128 New Zealand Herald (Auckland), 2 September 1939. 129 Hughes, ‘The Welsh’, p. 844. 130 Bryan Gandevia, ‘Thomas, David John (1813–1871)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/thomas-david-john-2724/text3839, published first in hardcopy 1967. Accessed 17 April 2017. 131 J. Lawry, ‘Edwards, Lewis David (1885–1961)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/edwards-lewis-david-6095/text10443, published first in hardcopy 1981. Accessed 17 April 2017. 132 Canberra Times, 5 September 1941. P.D. Gourley and M.F. Stewart, ‘Clemens, Sir William James (1873–1941)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/clemens-sir-william-james-5680/text9597, published first in hardcopy 1981. Accessed 17 April 2017. 133 Hilary Kent, ‘Brophy, James (1889–1969)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, ANU, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ brophy-james-9593, published first in hardcopy 1993. Accessed 17 April 2017. 134 Martha Rutledge, ‘Gunn, Mary (1884–1967)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gunn-mary-10378/text18385, published first in hardcopy 1996. Accessed 17 April 2017. 135 Conway, The Welsh in America, pp. 62–63. 136 Bill Jones and Philip Payton, ‘Industrial skills and the construction of ethnic identities: Australia’s Welsh and Cornish compared’, unpublished paper, Mining Communities and Cultures Conference, Newquay, Cornwall, 27 January 2001. 137 Philip Payton, ‘Competing Celticities: Cornish and Irish constructions of Australia’, in Pamela O’Neill (ed.), Celts in Legend and Reality: Papers from the Sixth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, University of Sydney, July 2007 (Sydney, 2010), pp. 463–83.

8 The Cornish diaspora, 1815–1914 Philip Payton

‘Cornwall was probably an emigration region comparable with any in Europe.’1 This was the considered opinion of emigration historian Dudley Baines, who demonstrated that between 1861 and 1900 Cornwall lost no less than 10.5 per cent of its male population overseas and a further 7 per cent to other counties (far and away the greatest percentage loss of any English or Welsh county), with a corresponding loss of 5.3 per cent of the female population overseas and 7.1 per cent to other counties. This amounted, Baines concluded, to some 118,500 people. As he observed, this was ‘not as high as from the famous regions of Italy’. But, he added, ‘it must be remembered that mass emigration from Italy lasted not much more than twenty years’.2 By contrast, the Cornish emigration was counted in decades. Nor were the Cornish statistics to be taken lightly. Between 1861 and 1900, 44.8 per cent of the Cornish male population aged fifteen to twenty-four left for destinations abroad, with a further 29.7 per cent departing for other counties. Over the same period and in the same group, 26.2 per cent of Cornish females went overseas, while 35.5 per cent left for other parts of Britain. Indeed, if we lift our sights to the nineteenth century as a whole, it seems reasonable, as A.C. Todd argued, ‘to suppose that Cornwall lost at least a third of its population’.3 Bernard Deacon estimated that as many as 230,000 people left Cornwall for overseas destinations during the century, with a perhaps similar number going to other parts of the British Isles.4 This was at a time when the population of Cornwall itself never reached anywhere near half a million (in 1861, for example, it was 364,848, falling to 358,141 by 1871) and, even allowing for double-countings and the complexities of multiple emigrations and returned migrations, the numbers speak volumes. Before the 1830s, at the dawn of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’, as it became known, the Cornish population had grown at a mean



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16 per cent per decade, precisely the same as that of England and Wales. During the 1830s the Cornish growth rate faltered (although still remaining within 1 per cent of that of England and Wales). By the 1840s, however, massive net emigration had become endemic, a prelude to the decades of sustained emigration that lay ahead. Emigration peaked in the 1870s – the ‘Exodus of the Seventies’5 as A.K. Hamilton Jenkin dubbed it – but fell back in the 1880s and 1890s, as these two end-of-century decades experienced higher rates of return migration.6 Taken in isolation, the statistics are arresting, and demonstrate Baines’s point that not only was Cornwall an emigration region of consequence, but that aspects of that emigration experience were unique. In contrast to every English and Welsh county, more people from Cornwall went overseas than to England and Wales, while Cornish men specifically were more likely to emigrate than any other group at county level in England and Wales.7 Yet, numbers are but one part of the story. Explanations must be offered for the size and complexity of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’, while the cultural, social, economic and political impact on Cornwall itself as well as on the receiving or ‘host’ societies should also be assessed, ranging across issues of ethnicity, religion, gender and much else. To what extent, indeed, did a Cornish transnational identity exist in the nineteenth century, and how did it express itself? Not surprisingly, a vigorous historiography has emerged in recent years to address these and other questions. Initially, there were the three ‘classic’ volumes on the Cornish in America – those of A.C. Todd (1967), A.L. Rowse (1969) and John Rowe (1974) – which elucidated the Cornish influence in North America (principally the United States) in great detail, dealing especially with the role of Cornish hard-rock miners in the opening up and expansion of the American mining frontier.8 To these was added a second generation of volumes in the same genre, designed to ‘fill the gaps’ and expand the purview beyond America to other countries and continents. Notable here were A.C. Todd’s The Search for Silver: Cornish Miners in Mexico, 1824–1947 (1977), Philip Payton’s The Cornish Miner in Australia: Cousin Jack Down Under (1984), Richard D. Dawe’s Cornish Pioneers in South Africa: ‘Gold and Diamonds, Copper and Blood’ (1998) and, more recently, Sharron P. Schwartz’s The Cornish in Latin America: Cousin Jack in the New World (2016).9 Much of this work was synthesised in Philip Payton’s The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s Great Emigration (2005), which argued that the emigrant Cornish had played a major role in the expansion of the international mining frontier in the nineteenth century, and in so doing had forged a transnational identity of which the Cornish themselves were acutely aware, and which they routinely deployed to their advantage overseas throughout the century.10

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However, this burgeoning historiography began to reveal its limitations. ‘Filling the gaps’ emphasised national and continental destinations, sometimes at the expense of global perspectives, and narrative was often the predominant method, the telling of individual and collective stories, sometimes to the detriment of analysis and explanation. Moreover, as their titles often revealed, the volumes on Cornish emigration history were often gender-blind, bound up in a masculine world of mines and miners, machinery and technology, Cornish wrestling and male-voice choirs, a male-oriented epic which overlooked the fact that Cornish women were a vital part of the process at home and abroad. Subsequently, in the early twenty-first century, a more nuanced appreciation of the nature and characteristics of Cornish emigration emerged, one which attempted to address these and other shortcomings, and to set the Cornish experience within the wider debates of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘global diasporas’.11 Significant here was a new focus on issues of identity. Long considered ‘a land apart’, Cornwall’s ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with England – ‘in’ England but not ‘of ’ England – was increasingly the subject of academic attention.12 The significance of Cornish ethnic identity – and its separateness from ‘Englishness’ – in the early modern period has been examined at length by Mark Stoyle.13 In the subsequent period, it has been argued, despite the subjugation of Cornwall in the Civil War, the accelerated decline of the Cornish language, and the onset of early and rapid industrialisation, Cornwall retained and even ‘reinvented’ this distinctive identity.14 In 1851, for example, the novelist Wilkie Collins could remind his readers that Cornwall was ‘a county where, it must be remembered, a stranger is doubly a stranger, in relation to provincial sympathies’. As he explained, in Cornwall ‘the national feeling is almost entirely merged in the local feeling; where a man speaks of himself as Cornish in much the same way that a Welshman speaks of himself as Welsh’.15 In the same decade, George Henwood could observe in the pages of the Mining Journal that the Cornish were ‘particularly proud of their parentage, to a degree rivalling that of the Welsh, and refer to King Arthur and [Bishop] Trelawney as demigods and patterns of virtue and patriotism’.16 Even at the end of the century, W.H. Hudson, the naturalist, could describe ‘the remote and most un-English county of Cornwall’, adding that there were few ‘Englishmen in Cornwall who do not experience that antipathy or sense of separateness in the mind of the people they live with, and are not looked at as foreigners’.17 Such opinions were echoed by contemporary Cornish writers, who had crafted what was effectively an ‘ethnic history’, designed to distinguish themselves from the people of neighbouring Devon and beyond. As early as 1796, William Borlase in his Antiquities Historical and Monumental of



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the County of Cornwall insisted that, ever since King Athelstan had fixed the Cornish border at the River Tamar in the tenth century, ‘we are to consider Cornwall under the Saxon yoke’.18 Likewise, in 1824, Hitchins and Drew in their History of Cornwall had complained of Athelstan’s ‘first subjugation of the Cornish by the English’.19 That such things continued to rankle was evidenced in 1867 when Francis Harvey from Hayle (writing in South Africa, not insignificantly) could boast that Cornwall was ‘yet superior by far to England, if really “not of it”’.20 As Harvey’s outburst suggests, Cornwall’s experience of emigration served sometimes to heighten this sense of identity, especially as expressed overseas. Cornwall was not alone in this, of course. But Cornwall in the first half of the nineteenth century, at least, led the world in deep hard-rock mining and associated steam engineering. As D.B. Barton put it, ‘by 1850 Cornishmen had more experience of deep mining, and with it deep pumping, than the rest of the world put together’.21 One of the first regions to industrialise, Cornwall was the home of industrial prowess and technological advance, and this deeply affected popular culture. ‘The Cornish are remarkable for their sanguine temperament, their indomitable perseverance, their ardent hope in adventure, and their desire for discovery and novelty’, wrote one admiring observer in 1859, and ‘to this very cause has science to boast so many brilliant ornaments who claim Cornwall as their birthplace’.22 When, in the years after 1815, Cornish skills and technologies were increasingly in demand in the often rapid expansion of the international mining frontier, so Cornish pride likewise expanded to express immense satisfaction at the Cornish role in the development of America, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere. A revealing glimpse at the way in which this sentiment was entwined in popular culture is afforded in Charles Lee’s novel Paul Carah, Cornishman, published in 1898, where the book’s hero, a Cornish emigrant, returns home triumphant after many years’ absence. As he exclaims: There edn’ no smell on earth like the smell of Cornish ground. An’ there edn’ no kingdom on earth to come up to Cornwall; nor no nation fit to stand up in the sight o’ the Cornish nation. ‘Wan n’ all’ agin the world. That’s we, brothers all! Hoorah for home an’ a lovin’ welcome, an’ pilchers an’ saffern an’ true friends and pasties!23

As Robin Cohen has observed, by looking afresh at such experiences, new insights into the dynamic relationship between emigration and ethnicity might be obtained. ‘Scholars of nationalism, international migration and ethnic relations need new conceptual maps and fresh case studies to understand the growth of complex transnational identities’, argued Cohen

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in 1997: ‘The old idea of “diaspora” may provide this framework..24 A decade earlier, Gill Burke had already advanced the Cornish as such a case study, insisting in her milestone chapter ‘The Cornish diaspora of the nineteenth century’ that an examination of the emigration patterns of Cornish miners ‘is saved from parochialism in part because of the part such migrations played in the development of capitalist organisation of world metaliferous mining and investment, and in part because of the possible contribution such an examination can make towards the development of theoretical perspectives’.25 Cohen thought that, although ‘often conceived in terms of catastrophic dispersion’, an expansion of the term ‘diaspora’ to ‘include trade, imperial, labour and cultural diasporas can provide a more nuanced understanding of the often positive relationships between migrants’ homelands and their places of work and settlement’.26 Burke agreed, adding that emigration (and return migration) from and to Cornwall, while sharing some aspects in common with other migrations from the British Isles, ‘also differed in important ways’, emphasising its significance as a comparative case study.27 Cousin Jack and Cousin Jenny On the international mining frontier, for example, Cornish ethnooccupational identity was deployed as an economic strategy, in the process developing a significant transnational dimension. In the years after 1815, as the Cornish made their mark on the rapidly expanding international mining frontier – first in Latin America and then in the United States – there emerged the ‘myth of Cousin Jack’, as it has been called. ‘Cousin Jack’ was an emigrant Cornish miner, and his myth, deployed with ever-increasing insistence, asserted that the Cornish were innately equipped above all others as superior hard-rock miners, and were to be preferred to potentially competing ethnic groups. ‘They plainly tell me that I am obnoxious to them because I was not born in Cornwall’, complained the youthful Robert Stephenson in Mariquita, Colombia, in December 1825: ‘they tell me it is impossible for a North countryman to know anything of Mining’.28 It was an opinion that sometimes offended, as Stephenson’s testament suggested, but it was also highly persuasive, encouraging British investors – such as the Colombian Mining Association, formed to develop Andean copper and silver mines (and which had employed Stephenson) – to accept that Cornish skills were essential if their overseas enterprises were to prosper. Ronald M. James, in his study of the Cornish on the western mining frontier of North America in the nineteenth century, reckoned that Cornish



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migrants – English-speaking, White, Protestant – might have assimilated seamlessly into the wider Euro-American population. ‘They could have blended in easily’, he wrote, ‘and yet they did not.’ As he concluded: ‘How and why the Cornish retained [their] identity … raises deeper questions about the nature of ethnicity and the immigrant adaption to the mining West … it appears they chose to perpetuate their ethnic identity as an economic strategy to secure preferential employment in the mines.’29 In this way, the Cornish acquired (and cultivated) a reputation of ‘clannishness’ and ‘sticking together’, and, often clustered together in large numbers in remote mining communities, expressed and maintained their identity through a range of institutions – Methodist churches, trade unions, Freemasonry, friendly societies – and in folkways and foodways, from the ubiquitous Cornish pasty to distinctive sports such as Cornish wrestling.30 Part of their success was that the Cornish could have it both ways. Unlike some ethnic groups, they appeared to offer no overt threat – racial, religious, cultural, political – and could readily demonstrate their social compatibility with the norms and expectations of host societies, such as the United States and British colonies. As Horst Rossler has noted in his discussion of emigrant Cornish quarrymen and stonemasons in Australia, South Africa and North America: ‘craft tradition, union membership, and ethnic background combined to earn the Constantine and other Cornish granite stonemasons a privileged position in an atmosphere where immigrant labour was often viewed with hostility’.31 At Grass Valley, in the Californian goldfields, the Cornish nurtured their reputation as ‘highly respectable families’, the Grass Valley Telegraph in August 1853 commenting favourably on this apparently ‘moral and peaceful village’.32 Yet, when it was in their interests to do so, the Cornish could assert a powerful separate identity, insinuating their superiority over ostensibly less desirable groups. Indeed, at Grass Valley (and no doubt elsewhere), there were those – ‘galvanized Cousin Jacks’, as they were known pejoratively – who attempted to acquire or appropriate Cornish credentials, passing themselves off as Cornish ‘to gain a commercial or personal advantage’, such were the attractions of sporting a Cornish identity.33 In his novel The Long Winter Ends, first published in 1941, Newton G. Thomas (himself a Cornish emigrant to the United States) tells the story of fictional Jim Holman, a Cornish miner who has emigrated to the copper country of the Keweenaw peninsula in Upper Michigan. It is a tale steeped in the myth of Cousin Jack: ‘Another mine. This was part of their history; it was written in their marrow. Another mine and another until in some dark gut of the earth they found a place for their skill. Every Cornish miner answered the question … Mining was his trade.’34 In his perceptive introduction to the 1998 Wayne University Press edition of The Long

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Winter Ends, William H. Mulligan pondered the paradox of the Cornish emigrant experience in North America. As he observed: The Cornish are an extreme case of the phenomenon identified by Charlotte Erikson in her Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth Century America (1972). As English-speaking Protestants with economically-valuable skills as underground miners, the Cornish were able to enter into American society with few difficulties.35

Yet, as Mulligan emphasised: On the Michigan mining frontier, the Cornish were not invisible and played a major role in the development of the mining industry and its early communities … Because of their expertise, the Cornish defined the language of American mining and established its earliest industrial organization … in the tiny mining communities of the Keweenaw and Marquette range, they clung to their traditions in the mines and in the Methodist chapels they established.36

As early as the 1770s, Cornish miners from Redruth had been prospecting for copper along the shores of Lake Superior, and in 1816 Richard Trevithick, inventor of the railway locomotive, had travelled from Cornwall to Chile and Peru, erecting high-pressure pumping engines in those countries.37 This early technology transfer set the pattern for the decades ahead, the expanding international mining frontier benefiting not only from the individual skills of emigrant miners, but also from the machinery, terminology and mining organisation and practices that accompanied them from Cornwall. In March 1825, for example, the Melopmene – escorted by three other vessels, the Courier, General Phipps and Sarah – sailed from Falmouth, its passengers reported to be a ‘party destined for the Real del Monte Mines’ in Mexico. Said to number 350-strong, this large body of Cornish miners and mechanics was accompanied by nine Cornish beam-engines (for pumping, winding and crushing), together with Cornish boilers, Cornish shovels, hammers, drills, capstans, iron bars, wagons and a mass of other accessories supplied by the Cornish engineering foundry, Harvey & Co. of Hayle.38 Catastrophically, disaster struck at Vera Cruz, where the lighters carrying the machinery ashore overturned in the surf, depositing many of the items in the shallows. Those components that did make it to the beach sank in the soft sand. Yet, such was the value of this equipment, including its absolute necessity for developing the silver mines, that an expedition was mounted from Real del Monte to ensure its recovery.



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It took more than a year to collect the machinery and transport it over 300 miles of difficult country to the mines, where it was refurbished, installed and eventually put to work.39 Only marginally less dramatic was acquisition of Cornish machinery for the exploitation of the fabulously rich Burra Burra copper mine in South Australia in the late 1840s. As the workings became deeper, so it became more difficult to keep them ‘in fork’ – free from water – and in August 1847 Henry Ayers, secretary of the South Australian Mining Association which ran the Burra mine, wrote to the association’s agents in Liverpool. ‘The Directors wish to procure for them as soon as possible’, he began, ‘a second hand steam engine as used in mines in Cornwall.’ As Ayers explained, it was ‘to have a fifty inch cylinder with eight or nine feet stroke and seventy fathoms of pitwork complete, including ten inch plunger lift, matching pieces, seatings, buckets, windboxes, strapping plates, castings for balance bobs, pulleys for shears, centres for capstan, lathe, and two new boilers’. All this, he added, ‘had better be shipped in parts and put together here … as our mine is nearly a hundred miles inland and the only means of cartage is by Bullock Drays’.40 Should a second-hand pump engine of this specification be unavailable (as proved the case), then Ayers authorised the Liverpool agents to approach the various Cornish foundries for tenders for the construction of a brand new one. He also requested that Captain Robert Roach of the Tresavean mine in Cornwall (an uncle of Captain Henry Roach, from Redruth, who managed the Burra mine) be allowed to inspect the pitwork (pump rods and pipes) before it was dispatched to South Australia. Subsequently, the Perran Foundry was commissioned to build the pump engine, with plans for engine house, stack and boiler house sent out immediately so that construction of these buildings could start as soon as possible. In early 1849, Henry Ayers wrote to the association’s London agents, asking them to obtain tenders from the Perran and Hayle foundries for a 30-inch whim (winding) engine, together with winding gear and chains, and stipulating that the relevant foundry ‘cast the name “Burra Burra Mines” on the engine bob [beam]’. Five months later, Ayers was ordering a 30-inch stamps engine (to be used in ore-crushing), and in December 1849 he requested from Cornwall a vast amount of mining machinery, from pitwork to iron nails.41 During the early months of 1850, it became apparent that yet further pumping equipment would be necessary to keep the ever-deeper Burra mine ‘in fork’. This time Ayers placed an order for a massive 80-inch pump engine, to be constructed by the Perran Foundry. He stressed that the engine would have to arrive no later than March 1851, before the winter rains began. Any delay, he added, would lead to ‘an event I dread

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to contemplate’.42 Yet, by March 1851 not even the plans for the engine house had arrived, and Ayers was fearful that further loss of time ‘will be attended with most disastrous consequences to the interests of this Company, and to a great number of our workmen’. As he admitted: ‘we have too much reason to apprehend that our present appliances will be inadequate in keeping our water in fork during the coming winter, and the stoppage of our operations would then be inevitable’.43 Fortunately, Ayers’s worst nightmares were not realised, and the great pump engine finally arrived during 1852, being transported in kit form from Port Adelaide to the Burra mine on a great ‘jinker’, a giant dray drawn by forty bullocks. It was erected by the chief engineer, John Congdon, from the Caradon mines in Cornwall, and was started amidst joyous celebrations on 16 September. By now, the acquisition of all manner of spare parts, supplies and stores direct from Cornwall had become routine at the Burra mine. In May 1851, for example, the South Australian Mining Association ordered three copies of copper ore tables published by F. Symons of Redruth, together with another three copies of a ‘small work common in Cornwall, being Tables for ascertaining the quantity of water contained in ores’.44 Numerous miscellaneous items, from turpentine to iron bars and emery paper and chemicals, were supplied by J.C. Lanyon Jun. of Redruth, with crucibles (essential for accurate assaying) obtained from the Calenick smelting works, near Truro. Other copper mines in South Australia followed the example of the Burra, not least the mighty Wallaroo and Moonta mines, discovered on Yorke Peninsula in 1859–60. Between 1866 and 1868, for example, a vast array of equipment – kibbles (ore buckets), dialling (surveying) instruments, six jigging (processing) machines, four Cornish boilers, 400 fathoms of whim (winding) chain – was acquired by the Wallaroo mine from William West’s foundry at St Blazey. In 1862 ‘100 Cornish shovels’ were imported from Cornwall, and in 1864 copies of Penrose’s Ore Tables were procured, with a large 60-inch pump engine purchased from Harvey & Co. of Hayle in 1876.45 Likewise, the Moonta mine acquired a wide range of items from Cornwall, including expensive theodolites from W. Wilton of St Day. In 1862 it ordered a 60-inch engine from Harvey & Co., this being the famous Hughes engine, which performed the bulk of the mine’s pumping duties until its closure in 1923. Cornish practice also dominated mining terminology in the South Australian copper industry. A ‘costeen’ was an exploratory trench, an ‘adit’ a drainage tunnel, a ‘vugg’ an underground cavity, ‘attle’ mine refuse, ‘killas’ clay-slate, ‘mundic’ pyrites, and so on. Depths were measured in ‘fathoms’ and managers were ‘captains’. The prefix ‘wheal’ – a mine working – was a component in mine names across South Australia: Wheal Fortune,



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Wheal Friendship, Wheal Harmony, Wheal Emma, Wheal Fanny, Wheal Maria, and many more.46 In North America, the Cornish linguistic influence was nearly as great. R.W. Raymond’s mining glossary, published in 1881, included thousands of industrial terms not found in Standard English, identifying nearly a third as being of Cornish origin. When coal mining terms were excluded (being mainly of Welsh or English Midlands origin), then the Cornish contribution to hard-rock mining vocabulary in America was reckoned to be at least a half of those words recorded.47 It was a short step from language to mining lore, and just as the North American mining industry adopted Cornish terms, so it absorbed Cornish folklore. Most notable here were the ‘Tommyknockers’. A long-established element of folklore in Cornwall, ‘knockers’ were supposed to be underground sprites. They might warn miners of impending disasters, such as rock falls, but could be fickle and unhelpful, especially if offended in any way. Such was the strength of this belief that it was transported to North America, where the knockers became the familiar Tommyknockers of Western mining lore.48 Hand in hand with technology, terminology and mining lore went the tribute and tutwork system of employment and remuneration. So ingrained in Cornish practice was this system that it was adopted in virtually every mining field on the international mining frontier where the Cornish were present. Here the miners performed part of the entrepreneurial function themselves, in contracts that related to the value of ore won or the amount of ground excavated. The former was known as ‘tributing’. Individual sections of the mine (‘pitches’) were contracted out to individual miners (‘tributers’) or – more usually – small groups of miners (‘pares’) as a result of open competitive bidding on ‘survey day’. Prior to this bidding, each pitch was inspected by an experienced ‘underground captain’ who would estimate the value of ore that it contained. Each pitch would then be offered at ‘captain’s prices’. For a rich section of ground the captain’s price might be as low as a few shillings in the pound (or a fraction of a dollar), so that for each pounds-worth of ore raised, the individual tributer or pare received only a couple of shillings. For lower-grade pitches, however, the price might be considerably higher, an incentive for a tributer or pare to work indifferent ground. Usually, there was lively downward bidding between rival tributers or pares, especially for attractive sections of ground. A pitch was awarded to the lowest bidder, often at a figure well below captain’s prices, and the tributers – being in a sense self-employed – were expected to provide their own tools, candles, blasting-powder, timber and other requirements. Tributing was thus something of a gamble. An apparently rich section of ground might suddenly fail, leaving the tributer with little remuneration.

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Yet, sometimes apparently indifferent ground might suddenly yield pockets of high-grade ore (‘sturts’, in Cornish parlance), affording a tributer substantial earnings during that particular ‘take’ or contract period. Tutworking operated in similar fashion, although here contracts were concerned with the amount of ground mined rather than the value of ore won, and were let at so much a fathom, again as a result of bidding between rival ‘pares’ of ‘tutworkers’. Such contracts were normally reserved for the sinking of shafts or the driving of levels, which involved the removal of ‘dead’ ground with no intrinsic value. There remained an element of risk, however, for apparently soft ground might lead unexpectedly to much harder rock, with the tutworkers unable to sink or drive as fast as they had hoped, their remuneration cut short accordingly.49 Despite the uncertainties, the tribute and tutwork system was well liked by Cornish miners at home and abroad, not least because it offered the opportunity to prosper as a result of their skill, energy and enterprise. It was also seized upon by the developers of new mines overseas, who in seeking skilled Cornish miners also wished to adopt their methods, including the system of remuneration. At the Kapunda copper mine in South Australia, for example, discovered in the mid-1840s, the co-owners – Charles Bagot and Francis Dutton – decided from the first to employ Cornish practice. ‘I agreed with Robert Nicholls, a Cornish miner, for a twelve month to work on tribute’, Bagot explained: ‘He forthwith began, and in a little time had turned out a fine pile of good ore.’50 As Dutton added: ‘Among the general population of the colony were some few Cornish miners … we gave them a liberal “tribute” for the first year (3s 6d per £) to set the thing going.’51 Evidently, the Cornish miners responded enthusiastically to this generous tribute. Only later, in the large industrial complexes that emerged in the latter part of the century – such as at Calumet and Hecla in Michigan or Moonta and Wallaroo in South Australia – did the miners come to see such contracting as a device used by mine management to restrict remuneration and keep earnings low. Nonetheless, contracting of various types did survive at these large conglomerates (at Moonta and Wallaroo until the mines’ closure in 1923), and at the Grass Valley gold mines in California tributing continued until as late as the 1950s, such was its inextricable entwinement in the culture and practices of the mining industry of the American West.52 As William H. Mulligan suggested, this enduring influence in the American (and global) hard-rock mining industry reflected the early Cornish presence on the emerging international mining frontier – quite literally, as we have seen, the Cornish were there first. Faith in Cornish technology and management practices, as well as the adoption of terminology, mirrored faith in the skills of the miners themselves, in effect extending



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the myth of Cousin Jack to things inanimate, from mining machinery to technical terms. Yet, it remained a determinedly masculine myth. There was, however, a parallel ‘myth of Cousin Jenny’, in which it was asserted that emigrant Cornish women – just like their menfolk – also exhibited superior qualities that enabled them to flourish on the harsh mining frontiers of the New World, establishing domesticity and order where others might fail. Co-opted into the stories the emigrant Cornish told about themselves, ‘Cousin Jenny’ lent a powerful feminine gender dimension to narratives of the Cornish diaspora. In nineteenth-century Cornwall, women had toiled considerably beyond the domestic sphere, not least as bal-maidens, female mineworkers who were employed at surface to sort and grade the ore brought from underground.53 Comparatively well paid and often single, they exhibited an independence of spirit which (as well as increasingly discomforting those men who thought such women should be confined to home duties) cultivated an air of professional self-confidence. The bal-maiden’s chant, first recorded in the copper mining parish of Gwennap in 1837, boasted technical competence – an ability, for example, to ‘buddy’ (operate the buddles, where ore was washed) and to ‘looby’ (literally, to toss ore) – as well as asserting an equality with male mineworkers, plus the happy knack of humouring the surface or grass captain, the ‘old Jan’: I can buddy; and I can rocky, And I can walk like a man I can looby and shaky, And please the old Jan.54

Significantly, there appear to be few instances of women employed in similar roles in Cornish mining communities overseas. Trade union pressure and governmental legislation, not least in Australia, combined to ensure that a mine was no place for a woman. Instead, women were supposed to be confined to the domestic sphere, to bearing and rearing children, and to performing the multiplicity of chores around the house. In 1873 a visitor to Moonta Mines, the impromptu village of makeshift miners’ cottages constructed on the mineral leases at Moonta in South Australia, pondered the industrial landscape, but paused to consider ‘the cottages all round, with the trim housewife waiting for her husband to come home after morning core [shift], the glimpses of the snugness and comfort within’.55 Oswald Pryor, who had himself been a surface captain at Moonta, published his folksy local history Australia’s Little Cornwall in 1962. He observed that the cottages on the mineral leases were ‘whitewashed, inside and out, every Christmas’, and explained that the ‘inside of a cottage was

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spotless – Cousin Jenny never neglected the sweeping, cleaning and dusting’. Moreover, he insisted: ‘No Cousin Jack miner’s wife regarded her home as complete until the “best room” had a carpet on the floor, with a harmonium – a book of Wesley’s hymns lying on its cover – a round table with the family album right in the centre, and half a dozen polished cedar chairs with crocheted antimacassars spread over the backs’.56 As Pryor implied, Cousin Jenny had managed to bring domestic order and comfort, even cosiness, to her modest home, despite being surrounded on every side by the noise and filth of deep mining, and despite the arid environment of extreme heat, water shortages, flies, dust, sand storms, and much else. During the 1870s, when ‘black measles’ and ‘colonial fever’ decimated the infant population of the mineral-lease dwellers, the woman bore the brunt, nursing their dying children and providing solace for the survivors. This, then, was the myth of Cousin Jenny in action – she had triumphed over adversity on the inhospitable frontier, where lesser women would have succumbed.57 However, as her myth suggested, Cousin Jenny’s daunting role on the mining frontier was not only to provide domestic security in the midst of an unpromising industrial landscape and hostile environment. Her task also required stoicism and strength of character if she were to succeed. Here, paradoxically, despite the apparent confinement to the domestic sphere, her erstwhile status as a self-reliant and physically strong bal-maiden (as many of them had been in Cornwall) meant that Cousin Jenny was well equipped to play a wider role in achieving communal security. As Oswald Pryor conceded, when building cottages on the mineral leases, such as those at Moonta Mines and Wallaroo Mines, ‘[w]ives usually gave a hand, and some of them could use a shovel as skilfully as a man’. As he explained: ‘Usually these were “bal-maidens”, who had worked as oredressers at mines in Cornwall.’58 The practical, ‘hands on’ character of Cousin Jenny was exemplified in the fictional Mary Elizabeth ‘Polly’ Thomas, the heroine of Phyllis Somerville’s novel Not Only in Stone, published in 1942. Born, supposedly, in St Ives, Cornwall, Polly arrived in South Australia in 1838, in the early days of the infant colony. She died in Adelaide in 1927, according to her creator, after a long and difficult but triumphant life in which she had stood firm against all the hardships fate had thrown at her. Her sister Ellen, we are told, died not long after Polly’s arrival in the colony. Polly then lost her life’s savings in a property swindle, and was faced with the growing disability of her husband Nathan, a copper miner who was soon unable to work in his traditional occupation. Worst of all were the premature deaths at Wallaroo Mines of two of her four children, her son Alan drowning in a ‘leat’ (drain) on the mine workings, her daughter Annie succumbing to ‘colonial fever’.



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At Wallaroo Mines, Polly and Nathan had acquired one of the minerallease cottages, thrown up hastily by a miner with the tacit approval of the mine company. Improvements and expansions, usually to accommodate growing families, were allowed, normally following an approving nod from one of the mine captains. Polly, self-willed Cousin Jenny that she is, decides that she needs a garden, and determines to move the fence surrounding her cottage to encompass some adjoining unoccupied land. Her bemused neighbours watch as she moves the fence outwards, ‘sapling by sapling, and redriving each post firmly in the ground … Nobody questioned her right to do this, but many stopped to remark on it.’ When at last her husband Nathan comes home from the mine, he is amazed: ‘“Polly”, he called, as he opened the door, “Polly, where ’ee to?”’. ‘Well’, said Polly, coming forward, ‘what now, Nat’? ‘Thees ’ave shifted the fence?’ ‘I ’ave!’ This with a hint of pride. ‘Land o’ Goshen, oo gave un leave?’ ‘Nobody gave un, so I just took un.’ ‘What’ll cap’n say?’ said Nathan in a hushed voice. ‘If cap’n da say aught I’ll up an’ tell un I ’ad to ’ave me garden an’ ’twere easier to move fence than ’ouse, any day.’ Nathan rubbed a calloused hand across his chin and looked at Polly, and there was awe as well as admiration in his eyes.59

Here is Polly, the archetypal Cousin Jenny. Later, when Nathan is unable to work, the family moves to nearby Moonta, where Polly becomes the breadwinner, opening a successful millinery shop. By now she has acquired a reputation across the community for her tenacity and resourcefulness, and is often called upon for assistance in desperate times: ‘“Go for Mrs Thomas!” came to be the cry for help that went out from many homes in Moonta; and Polly’s stout little figure was often first to cross a troubled threshold, even before doctor or minister had been called.’60 Although, of course, there had never been any question of Polly working as a balmaiden in South Australia, in establishing her own millinery business she had established independence of a kind beyond the domestic sphere. The cry ‘Go for Mrs Thomas!’ also indicated her stature in the community beyond the domestic sphere – or at least in the collectivity of domestic spheres in which local women cooperated and supported one another – and established Polly Thomas as an exemplary Cousin Jenny, as no doubt Phyllis Somerville had intended. The myth of Cousin Jenny, while rescuing the female Cornish emigrant from potential invisibility and according her a status to a degree equivalent

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to that of Cousin Jack, nonetheless perpetuated a sense of gender division on the international mining frontier. On occasion, however, the distinction became blurred, as in the intriguing example of Sidwell Woolcock, a former bal-maiden. Born in Illogan, Cornwall, she arrived in South Australia as a single woman in 1855, accompanying other members of her family. In 1858 she married a Norwegian, Henry Kruge, and by 1870 they were living at remote Priory Station, a pastoral property in outback New South Wales, some forty miles from what later became the township of Cobar. Clearly, Woolcock was well known in the locality as a former mineworker, and when a party of well-sinkers discovered some ‘coloured stones’ they were advised to seek her professional opinion. She immediately identified the samples as copper carbonates, and, according to one contemporary report, ‘She spoke so strongly as to the value of the find that the contractors returned to the place and took up a 40-acres lease.’61 This became the site of the Great Cobar mine, soon to be one of Australia’s leading copper producers. There was no doubting Sidwell Woolcock’s expertise, nor the seriousness with which the well-sinking party took her advice. However, it is telling that she was not invited to join the syndicate that so promptly acquired the lease (nor was the Aboriginal guide, Budgery Bill, who was also present at the find). A male Cousin Jack, perhaps, offering similar specialist identification (together with the prospect of further technical help), might well have been co-opted into the team. Likewise, despite the significance of the discovery, Woolcock received no particular recognition. In 1894, the Sydney Mail dismissed her somewhat pejoratively as ‘an old Cornish jenny’,62 and later she earned a certain notoriety, partly as a result of her second and unhappy marriage (she was reported as having separated from her new husband) and partly due to her curmudgeonly nature as she descended into dementia and old age. After her death, the Cobar Herald noted merely that Woolcock had ‘worked in the copper mines of Cornwall’. But the newspaper did recount her decline, and how for the last eighteen months of her life she had been bed-ridden, almost blind and suffering ‘senile decay’. She was reputedly seventy-nine when she died but, as the Cobar Herald put it, ‘there is reason to believe that the old lady had lost count, for many who knew her verily believe that she was at least ten years older than stated’.63 If it was difficult for women to break through this particular ‘glass ceiling’, there were other opportunities for Cousin Jenny to demonstrate gender solidarity. Most famously, Cornish women played distinctive roles in strikes and industrial action at Moonta and Wallaroo in South Australia and at Broken Hill in New South Wales. In the so-called ‘Great Strike’ at Moonta and Wallaroo in April 1874, the men at both mines had struck



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in protest at a reduction in wages. Blacklegs, however, kept the pump engines working, so that the mines would not be inundated. The threat of flooding was a key bargaining chip, as the miners recognised, and local women volunteered to persuade the blacklegs to abandon their posts. They promised ‘to do their best with their mallee poles’ – brooms made from sticks of mallee scrub – and literally swept the blacklegs from their engine houses, bringing the pump engines to an abrupt halt.64 According to one contemporary newspaper account, at Moonta Mines the ‘women went vigorously to work with their brooms, charging in all directions … The females attached to the sweeping regiment numbered about a hundred strong … carrying, many of them, brooms, poles and pine branches.’65 As the newspaper opined: Never before, perhaps, was such an extraordinary spectacle witnessed as here presented itself … an area covering acres of ground, was alive with people of all classes, miners, mechanics, tradesmen and travellers, boys and girls, women (some with children in their arms) excitedly talking, shouting, laughing and hurrying towards the engine houses.66

At neighbouring Wallaroo Mines, the women were likewise in action, moving systematically from one engine house to the next, ejecting the beam-engine drivers, firemen and boiler-tenders. At one engine house, a driver was threatened that he would have his ‘brains knocked out’ by the enraged women, and at another a woman was reportedly wrestled to the ground by the cornered engine-man.67 When W.G. Spence, a trade union representative from union headquarters in Creswick in neighbouring Victoria, visited Moonta and Wallaroo in 1889 to adjudicate in an industrial dispute, he found that Cousin Jenny’s exploits were still fresh in memory, some fifteen years after the event. At the local hotel where he was staying, Spence recalled, the publican ‘told us that a big Cornish-woman had just been there to borrow his stable broom because, as she said, “it had plenty of wood in ’en” and she “might want to sweep Captain Hancock [chief captain at the mines] out”’.68 Spence negotiated a compromise deal between the mine owners and the trade unionists, but there were anxious moments as the terms were put to the men – and women. As Spence explained: The delivery of our report … was a scene never to be forgotten. Excitement ran high. The brooms were ready, and their plucky owners equally so. No sooner had the bell rung for knock-off work at 5pm than the men assembled around the platform of the tramway, from which we were to speak. All hands came just as they were. The women stood

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generally in the outer circle of the crowd. They left the work of decision to the men, but were prepared to loyally carry it out, whatever it might be, even if it meant going hungry in order to secure justice.69

Eventually, the meeting decided to accept Spence’s recommendations, a strike was averted, and thus, as he put it, there was ‘no need for that broom with “plenty of wood in ’en”’.70 In November of the same year (1889), however, a self-styled Women’s Brigade, the ‘daughters of the union’, was in action in the silver-lead mining district of Broken Hill in New South Wales, where many Cornish people had settled, including contingents from Moonta and Wallaroo. The Brigade, said to be 400-strong, marched to the mines, armed with brooms and mops, and swept them clear of blacklegs, in some cases stripping recalcitrants down to their underwear.71 Such was its success that the strategy was employed again in July 1882, when blacklegs once more were driven from the mines by women brandishing brooms, mops and poles, action ‘now part of a [Broken Hill] tradition’, as Brian Kennedy has described it.72 But if women were elevated to heroic status for their courageous – and gender-specific – role in the dramatic events of these great strikes, it did not prevent the trade union movement at Broken Hill from systematically excluding women from virtually all kinds of paid employment in the city and its environs. Likewise, despite eulogistic depictions of Cousin Jenny as the epitome of virtue and homeliness – in ‘South Australia the Cousin Jennies virtually found a “Promised Land”’,73 according to John Reynolds – life on the frontier could be brutal for Cornish women. There was sexual harassment. In September 1888, for example, Richard Mayne, a miner, was forced to apologise publicly to ‘Miss Beatrice Williams’ for ‘having on several occasions … trespassed on the premises occupied by you at Wallaroo Mines, and solicited you to allow me to have sexual intercourse with you’. He regretted ‘having been guilty of this conduct’ and undertook ‘not to anywise interfere with or molest you in the future’.74 Similarly, married women found themselves at the mercy of the mines themselves. Geoffrey Blainey has told the tragi-comic story of a man at Broken Hill charged with the melancholy duty of breaking the sad news to the wife of a miner who has just been killed in an accident. Arriving at the deceased miner’s house, the man’s insistent knocking brought the housewife hurrying to the door. Doffing his cap in a respectful manner, he said: ‘Good afternoon, Widow Tregonning’. She instantly objected: ‘I’m no widow. My husband’s down there, working’. The man paused for just a moment: ‘Would you like’, he said, ‘to take a bet on it?’75 Mrs Tregonning’s further reactions are not recorded but the news-breaker, like the community as a whole, would have



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expected her to conduct herself with the quiet stoicism and self-restraint becoming of a Cousin Jenny in adversity on the mining frontier. An emigration culture If myths of Cousin Jack and Cousin Jenny underscored much of the fabric of the Cornish ‘diaspora’, explaining the mechanisms by which the Cornish maintained and expressed separate identity in their overseas host societies, then the means by which emigration from Cornwall was perpetuated in the period 1815–1914 also requires elucidation. Here it is necessary to appreciate the ‘emigration culture’ that progressively took root in Cornwall in the years after the Napoleonic wars. Integral to this ‘culture’ was a ‘culture of mobility’ and an ‘emigration trade’, both of which facilitated movement overseas, speeding Cornish emigrants from one destination to another. Cornwall being an essentially maritime region,76 the Cornish acquired an early familiarity with North America, and soon too with Australia and other far-flung places as their horizons lifted and European ‘discovery’ of new lands continued apace. In contrast, perhaps, to inland or land-locked parts of Britain, Cornwall, with its sea-faring tradition and its comings and goings to and from distant shores, opened a window onto the New World which excited the interest of its inhabitants. At any rate, emigration became one of the key themes of the religious (largely Nonconformist) and political radical movement that came to characterise Cornish society after 1815. There had already been considerable criticism in Cornwall, as elsewhere, of the penal colonies of Australia. Soon, these same critics would enthusiastically endorse the ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his radical circle, who in the 1830s advocated the ‘systematic colonisation’ of New Zealand and South Australia on ‘model’ lines. William Molesworth of Pencarrow, near Bodmin (a ‘Radical Aristocrat’, as his biographer has termed him), was one such advocate, who, as well as encouraging his own brother Francis to emigrate, articulated the radical ideology of emigration then taking shape in Cornwall, with its firm insistence that emigration was to the mutual benefit of all. Molesworth, and others like him, proposed the abolition of transportation to the penal colonies, and argued instead for the creation of free British colonies founded upon the principles of equality of opportunity, civil liberty and religious tolerance. As he wrote to his brother: ‘Go then’ I said ‘… and make for yourself a career in a new world of your own creation, and be assured that in seeking in this manner to advance your own interests, you will confer a great and lasting benefit

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upon your natural country’. And this advice which I have given to him, I give to all persons who find this island too thickly populated.77

Methodists, in their several denominational guises – principally Wesleyans, Bible Christians and Primitive Methodists – along with other Nonconformists, such as Baptists and Unitarians, echoed such aspirations, with emigration seen as a radical ‘improving’ cause deserving of their support. As Brian Elvins has observed, the radical-Nonconformist West Briton newspaper, founded in Cornwall in 1810, ‘emerged as a supporter of emigration’, especially ‘for those Cornish desirous for leaving for economic, political or religious reasons’. Moreover, as Elvins explained, when the West Briton ‘referred to “the rage for emigration”, as it frequently did, it did so in sympathetic terms’.78 Although Britain had only recently been at war with the United States, the final defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815 allowed the development of a more stable relationship with America. Potential emigrants from Cornwall were keen to take advantage of this more cordial atmosphere, and began to leave in significant numbers. The Tory Royal Cornwall Gazette (deadly rival of the radical West Briton) voiced its disapproval of this trend, expressing its hostility to the United States and its pretensions as the land of freedom and opportunity, as well as pouring scorn on those malcontents (as it saw them) who were seduced by pro-American propaganda: The rage for emigration to the United States will be checked for neither the deluders nor the deluded can so easily pretend that they are departing to a land flowing with milk and honey …. can such things be in this modern Utopia …. this happy region which ignorance and sedition are so apt to compare with England, and sigh at the comparison?79

Such criticism cut little ice in Cornwall. In May 1818, for example, fifty eager emigrants left the port of Charlestown, near St Austell, for America.80 A year later such voyages had become routine, the Royal Cornwall Gazette complaining again that: A vessel sailed last week from Charlestown to America with upwards of 60 passengers, principally farmers and husbandmen from the vicinity of St Austell. From all that we have heard of these wholesale emigrations we have every reason to believe that most of them are instigated by interested parties who dexterously avail themselves of the discontent excited in the minds of the ignorant by a certain class of our public writers.81



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This, of course, was the era of widespread discontent after 1815, a prelude to the agitation (of which the West Briton was a prime instigator in Cornwall) that led inexorably to the Great Reform Act of 1832.82 It was also the period in which the Bible Christian denomination was formed (in the border parishes of Week St Mary and Launcells), leading to its rapid growth all across north Cornwall and the adjoining districts of north Devon. Objecting to the payment of tithes to the Church of England and railing against high taxes and high rates, the Bible Christians were enthusiastic adherents of emigration, advocating the re-creation of Bible Christian communities overseas and founding a Bible Christian Missionary Society to recruit trained preachers for service abroad. As Donald Meek has observed, the Bible Christians were not unlike the evangelical Nonconformist groups in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, deploying a sense of ‘kinship’ to manage emigration and the founding of new settlements in distant lands. As Meek has explained, this was not ‘kinship’ in the ‘blood-relative’ meaning of the word, but rather in the ‘spiritual’ sense experienced by ‘a particular group or community with a distinctive set of cultural or social values and an assumed common origin or ancestry’.83 In this way, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Bible Christian families left north Cornwall during the first half of the nineteenth century, their tightknit communities springing up in localities such as south-west Wisconsin in the United States and Quebec, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick in Canada. A sense of intimacy was maintained across the Atlantic – ships constructed in Prince Edward Island might be registered in Padstow, for example84 – and there was among the Bible Christians an all-pervading atmosphere of improvement and mutual goodwill and common benefit. When the Collina dropped anchor at Prince Edward Island in May 1830, for example, the Charlottetown Royal Gazette noted approvingly that the newly arrived emigrants consisted of seventy-four ‘men, women and children … a good many who seem to be in comfortable circumstances. The men consist of Farmers, Labourers and Mechanics, and are chiefly from the Counties of Devon and Cornwall.’85 Likewise in April 1831, the North Devon Journal was gratified to report that many recent emigrants from the two counties were ‘respectable farmers and their families who carry with them considerable property, thus transferring their property, their talents and, their influence, to another land’. Indeed, the newspaper added, ‘such is the rage for emigration, that a female who had given birth to a child but three days before [the ship sailed], would not be persuaded by the most urgent entreaties of her friends to remain behind for another season’.86 By now Cornwall’s ‘emigration trade’ was developing apace, with significant elements of the community and both public and private interests

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involved in the recruitment of potential emigrants and their efficient dispatch overseas. Government officials, emigration agents, shipping agents, local provisioners, newspapers, publicans, coaching operators, clergymen, solicitors and many others were swept up in this burgeoning trade.87 Businesses looking to diversify were attracted by the possibilities. In June 1820, for example, when a party of emigrants sailed from Fowey to join the Guernsey schooner Phoenix bound for Baltimore in the United States, applications for passage had been handled by Messrs Pomery & Walkom, drapers of St Austell, who were looking for new opportunities, it was reported, commerce being generally dull at the time.88 Cornish shipping and legal interests were also keen to become involved in this increasingly lucrative trade, as in March 1837 when it was advertised that the Caroline of Gweek (a small quay on the Helford River) was due to sail shortly for Philadelphia. Described as an A1, copper-fastened fast sailing ship of 400 tons burthen, the Caroline was commanded by one John Broad (a local man, one suspects, given his surname), with inquiring passengers invited to contact the Gweek offices of the Penzance solicitors, Messrs Cornish & Borlase, for details.89 The Great Reform Act of 1832, sweeping away the worst excesses of rotten and pocket boroughs and extending the franchise (albeit fractionally), was a triumph for the reformists. However, for many there remained too many issues unresolved or unaddressed, and, with little prospect (they imagined) of further reform, they set their sights on emigration. The United States remained a favoured destination but one product of these ‘Reforming Thirties’, as they were known, was the new province of South Australia, founded according to Wakefield’s ‘systematic’ principle (where emigration would be financed by and linked to land being made available for purchase and settlement) in 1836. This new colony soon acquired a reputation as a ‘Paradise of Dissent’. Nonconformists had been prominent among its promoters, and Cornwall was identified as a likely source of preferred colonists – self-motivated artisans, mechanics, yeoman farmers and agricultural labourers, together with their families. John Marshall, South Australia’s emigration agent in London, visited St Austell ‘at the request of numerous applicants in this part of Cornwall [to] hold a meeting … for the purpose of affording information as to the terms and conditions on which free passage may be obtained’.90 Marshall was followed shortly by Rowland Hill, secretary to the South Australian Commissioners, who held a similar public meeting at Falmouth intended to recruit a ‘number of persons of the labouring classes’ for the new colony.91 Agents were appointed up and down Cornwall to assist in the recruitment process, and none was more diligent than Isaac Latimer, a journalist on the staff of the West Briton. He had joined the newspaper as its chief



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reporter in 1837, having worked previously in London and the Midlands for the radical Morning Chronicle. Through the pages of the West Briton, he advanced the cause of emigration, especially to South Australia, and in March 1839 was made the Commissioners’ agent for Truro and district. As he explained, he was seeking ‘[e]very kind of laborer [sic] and artisan [who] may, if married, of good character, and within the age limit prescribed by the Commissioners, obtain a free passage to this flourishing colony’.92 Latimer held public meetings at Chacewater, Bodmin and St Austell to explain the Wakefield system to potential emigrants, and at the latter town ‘[m]any letters of the most pleasing nature were read, which had been received from Cornish emigrants, who all spoke in the most flattering terms about the new province, and invited their friends to come over and join them’.93 Such letters found their way into newspapers, including the West Briton, and others became the subject of emigration posters and leaflets circulated in the larger towns. In all this, Latimer was careful to emphasise that ‘NO CONVICT SHALL EVER BE TRANSPORTED THITHER’. As he put it: ‘the vice and demoralisation of Australia, has reference only to the penal colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, and Norfolk Island … the morality of South Australia is secured in every way that can be thought of ’.94 Newspaper articles, letters to the editor, posters, leaflets and public meetings became integral to Cornwall’s ‘emigration culture’ and its ‘emigration trade’, mechanisms by which popular opinion and emigration choices became remarkably well informed. In the case of South Australia, some 10 per cent of all applications for free passage to the colony lodged in the United Kingdom in the period 1836–40 were from Cornwall, resulting in a sizeable Cornish contingent among the province’s early population. Not all these migrants were miners, and indeed there had not yet been any mineral discoveries in the infant colony. However, as Francis Dutton explained (see above), when those mineral deposits were found, there was already a sufficient reservoir of Cornish expertise in South Australia from which the fledgling mining companies could draw. Meanwhile, in the years after 1815, as Latin American countries sought one by one to shake off their European colonial masters – Spain and Portugal – so British capitalists took advantage of the resultant new opportunities opening up before them. Copper, silver and gold drew British investment, which in turn mobilised Cornish expertise. Alongside the ‘official’ emigration agents, such as Isaac Latimer, engaged to find Cornish emigrants for burgeoning British colonies, was a small army of ‘unofficial’ recruiters – often mine captains – contracted to entice skilled workers to the developing mines of Latin America. Thus, for example, in March 1838: ‘Wanted to go to Mexico immediately, 2 pitmen, 4 engine-men and 5

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sumpmen. Apply Mr Thomas Lean, Marazion.’95 And in September 1846: ‘Wanted for Mexico, an engineer competent to prepare drawings for engine work, also a smith and carpenter; both well accustomed to mine work. Apply Edwin O. Tregelles, Falmouth.’96 Many such emigrants ended up in the silver mines of Pachuca and Real del Monte, where substantial Cornish communities were soon established. The copper mines of Cuba were another early magnet. The Cobre mine was active from the mid-1830s, and in the period 1836–39 the Cornwall-based agent for the Cobre Mining Association, which sought to develop the mine, was Alfred Jenkin of Trewirgie House, near Redruth. Jenkin recruited 136 Cornish miners and mechanics, arranging for their medical examinations and for the acquisition of mining machinery and supplies (such as safety fuses) to be sent out with the migrants. He preferred young single men, and insisted that they be physically fit and of sober manners. He offered £100 per annum plus free accommodation, supplying each successful applicant with a Bible plus £10 for expenses and £10 as an advance on wages. The terms seemed generous but the Cornish were much affected by the climate and environment that greeted them in Cuba. Yellow fever, malaria, typhoid and other life-threatening diseases took their toll: of a groupof twenty-four miners which sailed from Portreath, near Redruth, on 15 June 1837, six were seriously ill within six months and a further nine were dead already. James Whitburn, one of the sick, was sent back to Cornwall on the Tom Gringle but died during the voyage: ‘His mother went to Portreath to meet him, but received only his clothing.’97 When, in the autumn of 1839, James’s father, William Whitburn, returned home to Gwennap from Cuba, where he too had been employed, he was scathing about Cuba and the Cubans. In an address to the Redruth Institution, he condemned the ‘pride, indolence and ignorance of the Cubans’, and explained that among them ‘morality and intellectual intelligence are at a fearfully low ebb’. Most appalling was the practice of slavery, anathema to all Cornish Methodists (Whitburn was a Wesleyan local preacher), which in Cuba existed ‘in its worst form’, ethno-religious prejudice reinforcing the antipathy Whitburn felt for the country that had taken his son’s life.98 The Cuban experience in the 1830s reflected the complexity that Cornish emigration had acquired already. South Australia sought married couples as permanent colonists, while Cuba required temporary male sojourners. Moreover, potential emigrants were presented with increasingly sophisticated information upon which to make their choices, enabling them to weigh up the benefits and risks of different destinations. Distant South Australia appeared benign, although the long and hazardous voyage (conveniently not mentioned by Latimer) had to be considered, as did



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the likelihood of a lifetime’s separation on the other side of the world from loved ones in Cornwall. Cuba, by contrast, held the prospect of a short but lucrative visit, assuming one’s health held out, with the possibility of making further emigrations – temporary or permanent – at some point in the future, especially as new potential destinations became available. Global knowledge – and global experience – thus became a significant element of the Cornish transnational identity. Chile had attracted Cornish miners during the 1820s and 1830s, and remained an important destination thereafter, by 1880 achieving first place among the world’s copper producers. As early as 1825, the Chilian [sic] and Peruvian Mining Company had been recruiting miners in east Cornwall and western Devon. Later, public meetings were held in Truro and Redruth to discuss the possibilities of emigration to Chile, and in January 1826 a letter from Valparaiso appeared in the Western Luminary, explaining that ‘This country is overrun with miners and miners’ followers’.99 Indeed, the Cornish were already prominent at Coquimbo, north of Valparaiso, and remained so for many years, distinguished as ever by their distinctive names: Pelmear, Buzza, Leggo and so on, together with the typical patronymics Richards, Reynolds and Williams. So, too, at Tocopilla (originally in Bolivia but later annexed by Chile): Combellack, Carne, Gerrans, Annear, Lean and many more, and likewise at Copiapo where the Cornish were much in evidence. Bolivia, Colombia and, especially, the goldmines of Brazil also attracted considerable numbers of Cornish, with many other Latin American destinations, from Nicaragua to Argentina, taking their quotas of Cousin Jacks (and sometimes Cousin Jennys). Together, the Latin American countries, as they achieved their political independence, had laid the first foundations for the emergence of a truly international mining economy, and with it an international labour market in which the Cornish were already key players. Much of what would later characterise Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’ was first established in Latin America. Return migration was evident from the beginning, on the expiry of contracts in Cuba or Chile, as were multiple migrations, as individuals returned again to Latin America after a period of respite in Cornwall. In the 1850s, writing in the Mining Journal, George Henwood described the village of Chacewater as ‘a colony of miners who have worked in mines in various parts of the world … Mexico, California, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Spain’. He added that ‘Portuguese and Spanish is [sic] well and generally spoken by them when conversing on the subject of their foreign experience’, and noted that ‘the first who went out to Cuba to work the copper mines suffered far greater loss by death than later emigrants to that country … Many have returned a second time, and some remained in the country for fifteen years and upwards.’100

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Henwood also noted the economic effect of return migration to Cornwall. ‘Nearly all secured a little competency’, he said of the returning miners, ‘to enable them to get into some way of business, a public-house or beershop being the principal and favourite speculation. Some few have realised sufficient to maintain themselves in a state of independence.’101 Remittances, or ‘home-pay’, were also an early feature of employment in Latin America. The Real del Monte Mine in Mexico, for example, was at pains to organise home-pay, requiring employees with dependants back in Cornwall to allocate a proportion of their wages to be sent home. On 16 March 1867, for example, the company arranged for £4,619 to be transferred to Cornwall as remittances, some £633 of this going to Redruth to be administered by Messrs Williams & Co. of that town. We find that James Job sent £6 to Margaret Curnow (his fiancé, perhaps), while diligent James Kinsman remitted a generous £32 to Grace Kinsman, his wife or possibly mother.102 In October 1863, the West Briton, despite its support for emigration as an improving activity, admitted that the scale of recent departures was ‘becoming a matter of grave consideration … those who go abroad are the very bone and sinew of the country’. Nonetheless, the newspaper added, it was ‘highly gratifying that wherever the Cornish miner goes, he … rarely fails not only to benefit himself, but those of his friends remaining at home, by the welcome remittances which arrive by almost every mail’.103 A decade and a half later, according to the West Briton, ‘Thousands of people in Cornwall’ were now supported by these emigrants, for the Cornish miner ‘leaves the women, the children and the old people behind – not on the parish, be it said to his honour’.104 Remittances, of course, implied the existence back in Cornwall of dependants who, for various reasons, had not accompanied their menfolk overseas. As Lesley Trotter has observed, there has been a popular perception that ‘those left behind’, typically the wives of miners trying their luck abroad, were quite often simply abandoned, left to their own devices and possible destitution. There are, indeed, instances of such desertion, and sometimes overseas miners and their wives in Cornwall did lose touch. When remittances dried up, as they sometimes did (especially if a husband had died overseas), then dependent wives were sometimes thrown on the mercy of the Poor Law Guardians. But, as Lesley Trotter has shown, more often the decision for the wife and other dependants to remain at home was a pragmatic one, designed to improve the family’s financial situation through a husband’s temporary sojourn abroad. Women, spared the burden of continual child-bearing, often benefited from such separation, and a matriarchal society of sorts emerged in mining parishes such as Gwennap where many of the working men were overseas at any one time.105



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The ‘Reforming Thirties’ were followed by the ‘Hungry Forties’, which in Cornwall were felt keenly as the potato crop – a staple in the mining districts – failed in 1845 and again in 1846. Food riots, characteristic of Cornwall in earlier decades, became commonplace once more, as angry and starving miners forced ‘fair prices’ for corn, preventing the export of wheat and barley from Cornish ports and demanding the distribution of bread to the poor. In such circumstances, existing conduits of emigration became ever more important in relieving Cornwall of its distressed population. But so, too, did the continued expansion of the international mining frontier. Lead had been mined in Wisconsin in the 1830s, with the Cornish prominent in the mining communities at Mineral Point and neighbouring Linden, but in the 1840s came the spectacular discoveries of copper on the Keweenaw Peninsula in Upper Michigan, which remained a magnet for the emigrant Cornish even as late as 1914. In 1943 Angus Murdoch published his wonderfully evocative Boom Copper: The Story of the First U.S. Mining Boom, based on his youthful memories of the peninsula. His recollection of Cornish church worship has an authentic ring: the Cornish preferred … Methodism to the formalized religion of the Church of England. No chanting and ceremonial rites for Cousin Jack. Whenever original ideas of the hereafter occurred, he liked to stand right up in church and air them. He was highly articulate, if uneducated, and took turns with fellow Wesleyans in preaching the weekly sermons. In fact, Methodist churches had no regular preachers in the early days on the range … it … made for livelier sermons.106

At the same time that Cornish emigrants were making for the freezing winter climes of the north-eastern United States, so others were heading into the arid interior of South Australia, where the copper discoveries at Kapunda and (especially) Burra Burra had suddenly placed Australia centre-stage on the map of the international mining frontier. ‘There are mines in the province that are worth all Cornwall’, claimed Peter Medler [Medland] in a letter to his relations at St Blazey, ‘hundreds and hundreds of tons of pure copper on the surface’. He reckoned that in ‘a short time miners’ wages will be £3 to £4 per week’, adding that ‘we should be glad to see all the miners of Biscovey and Turnpikegate out here … in such a flourishing country’.107 Henry Ayers, the South Australian Mining Association secretary, developed a close relationship in this period with J.B. Wilcocks, an emigration agent based in Plymouth who ran a team of sub-agents scattered throughout Cornwall. As a result, a steady stream of Cornish emigrants was dispatched to South Australia, even in the early 1850s when production at the Burra was disrupted by miners leaving to

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try their luck in the goldrush in Victoria. As Ayers wrote to Wilcocks in November 1852: ‘We have for many years past experienced the benefit of your judicious selection of Cornish and Devonshire Miners for this Colony … We could find employment for a thousand hands consisting of Miners, Smiths, Engineers, Carpenters and others employed at Copper Mines – at rates varying from £6 to £10 per month.’ As Ayers also observed: ‘Such wages should be sufficient inducement to the thousands in your district who cannot in the best of times expect to make more than a third of this.’108 But as Henry Ayers appreciated, despite the inherent attractions of the Burra Buura Mine for intending emigrants in Cornwall, there were now other potential destinations competing for the attention of the Cornish. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 drew Cornish miners northwards from Mexico but the full-scale rush of 1849 created much excitement in Cornwall itself. In March that year an advertisement in the West Briton asserted that ‘If ever there was a call for the skilled labour of Cornwall … this gold district demands it.’109 Likewise, in June 1851, in a classic statement of the myth of Cousin Jack, another contributor to the West Briton insisted that the Cornish were ‘the most accomplished of all miners. The Californians cannot do without Cornishmen.’110 At any rate, California caught the imagination of Cornwall and, as streaming and ‘placer’ mining in river beds gave way by the 1860s to deep hard-rock mining amidst the quartz, so the Cornish came into their own. By 1861 Grass Valley, in particular, was thought to be ‘the Cornwall of California’.111 A decade later, and the Grass Valley Union newspaper could agree that: The Cornishman is probably the most skilful foreign miner that comes to our shores … [he] is of a quiet disposition, although very headstrong … [Cornish miners] are mostly stalwart, good-looking fellows, dress better than any other class of miners and are very fond of women. They also appear more clannish than any other foreigners and a majority of them are very good singers.112

The Cornish transnational experience developed a further dimension when, in the early 1850s, Cornish emigrants from California turned up on the newly discovered Australian goldfields, first in New South Wales in 1850 and then (and more importantly) in Victoria in the following year. Shortly they were joined by large numbers of Cornish from South Australia, and from Cornwall itself. In the early days, the Cornish formed themselves into small syndicates, panning for gold or sinking shallow pits. In 1854, for example, Henry Giles arrived in Victoria with thirty other Cornish emigrants, ‘principally from St Day and Chacewater and three from St Ives’. Among those who accompanied him to the Creswick



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diggings, he explained, was a group of miners from Zennor and one ‘from Sancreed called George Thomas’. As Giles added: ‘George Thomas is my mate, he and me do belong on one pit … John and Richard Harvey is together on another pit. Arthur Chellew is with William Wearne from St Just in another pit, so we shall all share alike on the gains.’113 As in California, the Cornish came into their own in Victoria as the gold mines became ever deeper, helping to put such places as Ballarat and Bendigo onto the mining map of the world.114 The discovery of new massive copper deposits – at Wallaroo in 1859 and Moonta in 1861 – helped swing the tables back in favour of South Australia. Hundreds moved across from Victoria but thousands more came from Cornwall directly. Paradoxically, the rise of Wallaroo and Moonta on South Australia’s northern Yorke Peninsula occurred alongside the rapid demise of the Cornish copper mining industry itself. Overseas competition had been felt for many years. In September 1845, for example, it had been claimed that the ‘copper of Chili and Cuba is at present the great bugbear of Cornwall’.115 By 1861, the Kapunda Northern Star could assert that South Australia was now ‘out-Cornwalling Cornwall altogether’.116 The great crash of Cornish copper came in 1866, when scores of copper mines were closed almost literally overnight, with Wallaroo and Moonta among the main beneficiaries of the subsequent exodus from Cornwall.117 Geoffrey Blainey has argued, probably correctly, that the settlements of Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina – ‘Australia’s Little Cornwall’ – were ‘possibly the largest Cornish communities beyond Land’s End’.118 Certainly, Moonta and environs carved out for themselves a distinctive place in the pantheon of the Cornish transnational identity – ‘if you haven’t been to Moonta, you haven’t travelled’ – and by the 1870s numbered a population some 25,000 strong.119 In the 1881 census, an astonishing 80 per cent of the local populace was recorded as Methodist, a measure of the pervading influence of Cornish cultural identity. There were the inevitable Cornish pasties, together with saffron cake, chapel tea-treats, Cornish carols, Cornish wrestling, brass bands, Cornish dialect stories in local newspapers, and much else. In 1874, Rev. John Thorne, a Bible Christian minister, explained that he ‘felt very much at home on the [Yorke] Peninsula’ as it was ‘like Cornwall, almost surrounded by sea and insulated in position’. Moreover, ‘the miners preserved the same rugged characteristics that marked them in Cornwall’, he said, ‘and preserved their independence. Wherever they went they never forgot themselves as Cornishmen.’ Indeed, he added, ‘they carried their principles and convictions with them and never failed to give them expression and effect’.120 Methodist local preachers were among the early trade unionists at Wallaroo and Moonta, and were a major influence on the United Labor Party as it

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emerged in South Australia in the late nineteenth century. One such preacher, born in Cornwall in 1848, was Richard ‘Dicky’ Hooper, past president of the Moonta branch of the Amalgamated Miners’ Association, who became the first Labor member of the South Australian House of Assembly. His colleague, John Verran, a Moonta miner born in Gwennap in 1856, was premier of South Australia in 1910–12 and leader of South Australia’s – and the world’s – very first majority Labor government.121 The crash of Cornish copper was followed in the 1870s by the faltering of Cornish tin, when many tin mines in Cornwall were abandoned, largely as a result of Tasmanian competition. Meanwhile, the international mining frontier continued to expand, drawing the Cornish to destinations as diverse as Nevada and Colorado in the United States, to New Zealand and New Caledonia, and to Queensland and Western Australia. The last great destination, however, was South Africa, where the Cornish toiled in their hundreds in the diamond and gold mines in the 1880s and 1890s. By the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa had become a ‘lifeline for Cornwall’, as Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson have described it, remittances from the Rand helping to keep Cornish society together as mining at home continued its long decline.122 In January 1902 the Cornubian newspaper, published in Redruth, lamented: ‘We are living off South Africa’. Five years later the Cornish Post could add that: ‘When the button is pressed in Africa, the bell rings in Cornwall … a change in thought and action in South Africa affects the little western county which has contributed so much of the labour … to the land of gold and diamonds’.123 Yet, by 1913 there was a steady stream of miners returning to Cornwall from South Africa. By the eve of the Great War, indeed, the ‘Great Emigration’ had all but run its course, the distinctive migratory patterns of the preceding century challenged now by the demand for new types of mining skills, ones that could not be found in Cornwall. Cornwall was no longer the centre of the mining world, as its mining industry decayed, and the myth of Cousin Jack sounded increasingly hollow to those who might still be persuaded to listen to its extravagant claims. The reality, hard as it was for Cornwall to accept, was that leadership and technological expertise on the international mining frontier was now vested firmly in the more scientifically trained mining engineers of America and Australia.

Notes 1 Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 157–59.



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2 Ibid., see also p. 232. 3 A.C. Todd, The Cornish Miner in America (Truro, 1967), p. 19. Here Todd also notes that Leonard Courtney MP, in a lecture to the Royal Institution of Cornwall in Truro in 1897, predicted that a total of 230,000 people would have departed by the end of the century. 4 Bernard Deacon, ‘Cornish emigration’, unpublished paper (Redruth, 1995), p. 5, cited in Philip Payton, The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s Great Emigration (Exeter, 2005), p. 28. 5 A.K. Hamilton Jenkin, The Cornish Miner (Newton Abbot, 2nd ed. 1972), pp. 321–35. 6 Bernard Deacon, ‘“We don’t travel much, only to South Africa”: reconstructing nineteenth-century Cornish migration patterns’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Fifteen (Exeter, 2007), pp. 90–116. 7 Ibid., p. 95. 8 Todd, Cornish Miner; A.L. Rowse, The Cornish in America (London, 1969); John Rowe, The Hard-Rock Men: Cornish Immigrants and the North American Mining Frontier (Liverpool, 1974). 9 A.C. Todd, The Search for Silver: Cornish Miners in Mexico 1824–1947 (Padstow, 1977); Philip Payton, The Cornish Miner in Australia: Cousin Jack Down Under (Redruth, 1984); Richard D. Dawe, Cornish Pioneers in South Africa: ‘Gold and Diamonds, Copper and Blood’ (St Austell, 1998); Sharron P. Schwartz, The Cornish in Latin America: Cousin Jack in the New World (Truro, 2016). 10 Payton, Cornish Overseas. 11 An early example of this more sophisticated approach was Gill Burke, ‘The Cornish diaspora of the nineteenth century’, in Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (eds), International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives (London, 1984), pp. 57–75 and pp. 244–47. See also Sharron P. Schwartz, ‘The making of a myth: Cornish miners in the New World in the early nineteenth century’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Nine (Exeter, 2001), pp. 105–26; Sharron P. Schwartz, ‘Cornish migration studies’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Ten (Exeter, 2002), pp. 136–65; Sharron P. Schwartz, ‘Migration networks and the transnationalization of social capital: Cornish migration to Latin America, a case study’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Thirteen (Exeter, 2005), pp. 256–87; Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson, ‘Remittances revisited: a case study of South Africa and the Cornish migrant, c.1870–1914’, in Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Thirteen, pp. 288–306; Bernard Deacon, ‘“We don’t travel much’”, pp. 90–116; Bernard Deacon and Sharron Schwartz, ‘Cornish identities and migration: a multiscalar approach’, Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 7.3 (2007), 289–306; Lesley Trotter, ‘Desperate? Destitute? Deserted? Questioning perceptions of miners’ wives in Cornwall during the Great Emigration, 1851–1891’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Nineteen (Exeter, 2011), pp. 195–224; Lesley Trotter, ‘“Husband abroad”: quantifying spousal separation associated with emigration in nineteenth-century Cornwall’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Twenty (Exeter, 2012), pp. 180–98.

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12 Philip Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall: Historical Experience and the Persistence of ‘Difference’ (Redruth, 1992). 13 Mark Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish Identities in the Modern British State (Exeter, 2002); Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven and London, 2005) – see especially chapters 2 and 9. 14 Philip Payton, ‘Industrial Celts? Cornish identity in the age of industrial prowess’, in Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Ten, pp. 116–35. 15 Wilkie Collins, Rambles Beyond Railways (London, 1851), p. 124. 16 George Henwood, cited in Roger Burt (ed.), Cornwall’s Mines and Miners (Truro, 1972), p. 220. 17 W.H. Hudson, The Land’s End: A Naturalist’s Impressions of West Cornwall (London, 1981), p. 34 (first published in 1908). 18 Quoted in Payton, ‘Industrial Celts?’, p. 124. 19 Ibid., p. 125. 20 Francis Harvey, Autobiography of Zethar: St Phillockias, Cornu-waille, England (Durban, 1867), p. 29. 21 D.B. Barton, The Cornish Beam Engine (Truro, 1965), p. 252. 22 Burt (ed.), Mines and Miners, p. 232. 23 Charles Lee, Paul Carah, Cornishman (London, 1898), pp. 13–14, cited in Philip Payton, A Vision of Cornwall (Fowey, 2002), p. 54. ‘One and All’ is the Cornish motto; ‘pilchers’ are pilchards; ‘saffern’ is saffron cake. 24 Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London, 1997), p. ii. 25 Burke, ‘Cornish diaspora’, pp. 57–58. 26 Cohen, Global Diasporas, p. ii. 27 Burke, ‘Cornish diaspora’, p. 58. 28 Robert Stephenson Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, USA, Robert Stephenson to Richard Illingworth at Bogota, 8 December 1826. 29 Ronald M. James, ‘Defining the group: nineteenth-century Cornish on the North American mining frontier’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Two (Exeter, 1994), p. 32. 30 See, for example, Mike Tripp, ‘“Where there were two Cornishmen there was a ‘rastle’”: Cornish wrestling in Latin and North America’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Twenty-one (Exeter, 2013), pp. 238–59. 31 Horst Rossler, ‘Constantine stonemasons in search of work abroad’, in Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Two, p. 77. 32 Grass Valley Telegraph, 22 September 1853; see also Shirley Ewart, Highly Respectable Families: The Cornish of Grass Valley, California, 1854–1954 (Grass Valley, CA, 1998). 33 Gage McKinney, When Miners Sang: The Grass Valley Carol Choir (Grass Valley, CA, 2001), p. 239. 34 Newton G. Thomas, The Long Winter Ends (London, 1941; repub. Detroit, 1998), p. 43. 35 William H. Mulligan, ‘Introduction’ to ibid., p. viii. 36 Ibid., p. ix. 37 Jenkin, Cornish Miner, p. 323.



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38 West Briton, 1 April 1825. 39 Todd, The Search for Silver, pp. 45 and 55–56. 40 State Library of South Australia (SLSA) BRG22/960 South Australian Mining Association, Directors’ Letter Books, Ayers to Bibby, 9 August 1847. 41 SLSA BRG22/960, Ayers to Hallett, 28 April 1849; 25 August 1849. 42 Ibid., 4 May 1850. 43 Ibid., Ayers to Hallett, 24 March 1851. 44 Ibid., Ayers to Hallett, 10 May 1851. 45 SLSA BRG40/537, Wallaroo Mines Proprietors, Out-Letter Books 1860–70, Mair to Young, 25 November 1862; SLSA BRG40/539, Wallaroo Mines Proprietors, Out-Letters to Superintendent 1875–82, Davidson to Higgs, 8 June 1875. 46 Payton, Cornish Overseas, pp. 163–64. 47 James, ‘Defining the group’, pp. 35–36. 48 Ronald M. James, ‘Knockers, knackers and ghosts: immigrant folklore in the western mines’, Western Folklore, 51.2 (1992); Juanita Kennedy Browne, Thomasina and the Tommyknocker (San Diego, 1993), p. iii. 49 Philip Payton, One and All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia (Adelaide, 2016), pp. 39–40. 50 SLSA 1384 Pioneer Association of South Australia Publications No. 9, A Holograph Memoir of Captain Charles Hervey Bagot of the 87th Regiment (n. d.), pp. 24–25. 51 Francis Dutton, Australia and Its Mines (London, 1846), p. 281. 52 Frederick Wolf, Bruce Finnie and Linda Gibson, ‘Cornish miners in California: 150 years of a unique socio-economic system’, Journal of Management History, 14.2 (2008), 144–60; for the importance of tributing in inter-war California, see Gage McKinney, The 1930s: No Depression Here (Grass Valley, CA, 2009), p. 71. 53 Sharron P. Schwartz, ‘“No place for a woman”: gender at work in Cornwall’s metalliferous mining industry’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Eight (Exeter, 2000), pp. 69–98. 54 C.C. James, A History of the Parish of Gwennap in Cornwall (Penzance, 1947), p. 242. 55 South Australian Register, 10 June 1873. 56 Oswald Pryor, Australia’s Little Cornwall (Adelaide, 1962), p. 66. 57 Philip Payton, Making Moonta: The Invention of Australia’s Little Cornwall (Exeter, 2007), p. 28. 58 Pryor, Little Cornwall, p. 65. 59 Phyllis Somerville, Not Only in Stone (Sydney, 1942; republished Adelaide, 1973), pp. 58–59. 60 Ibid., p. 199. 61 Australian Town and Country Journal, 2 June 1988. 62 Sydney Mail, 24 February 1894. 63 Cobar Herald, 18 April 1913. 64 W.G. Spence, Australia’s Awakening: Thirty Years in the Life of an Australian Agitator (Sydney, 1909), p. 29.

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65 Yorke’s Peninsula Advertiser, 10 April 1874. 66 Ibid., see also South Australian Register, 8 April 1874. 67 Keith Bailey, James Boor’s Bonanza: A History of Wallaroo Mines, South Australia (Bailey, 2002), p. 31. 68 Spence, Australia’s Awakening, p. 29. 69 Ibid., p. 30. 70 Ibid., p. 30. 71 Barrier Miner, 12 November 1889; Pictorial Australian, November–December 1889. 72 Brian Kennedy, Silver, Sin and Sixpenny Ale: A Social History of Broken Hill, 1883–1921 (Melbourne, 1978), p. 70; The Leader, 3 September 1892. 73 John Reynolds, Men and Mines: A History of Australian Mining 1788–1971 (Melbourne, 1974), p. 17. 74 Kadina and Wallaroo Times, 15 September 1888. 75 Geoffrey Blainey, The Rise of Broken Hill (Melbourne, 1978), p. 94. 76 See Philip Payton, Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe (eds), The Maritime History of Cornwall (Exeter, 2014). 77 Cited in Alison Adburgham, A Radical Aristocrat (Padstow, 1990), p. 54. 78 Brian Elvins, ‘Cornwall’s newspaper war: the political rivalry between the Royal Cornwall Gazette and the West Briton, part two, 1832–1855’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Eleven (Exeter, 2003), pp. 57–84. 79 Royal Cornwall Gazette, 3 July 1819. 80 Western Luminary, 26 May 1881. 81 Royal Cornwall Gazette, 22 May 1819. 82 Brian Elvins, ‘Cornwall’s unsung political hero: Sir John Colman Rashleigh (1772–1847)’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Six (Exeter, 1998), pp. 81–95. 83 Donald Meek, ‘The fellowship of kindred minds: some religious aspects of kinship and emigration from the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century’, in Anon. (ed.), Hands Across the Water: Emigration from Northern Scotland to North America – Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference of the Scottish Family History Societies (Aberdeen, 1995), p. 19. 84 Payton, Cornish Overseas, p. 70. 85 Royal Gazette (Charlottetown), 1 June 1830. 86 North Devon Journal, 14 April 1831. 87 Philip Payton, ‘“Reforming Thirties” and “Hungry Forties”: the genesis of Cornwall’s emigration trade’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Four (Exeter, 1996), pp. 107–27. 88 West Briton, 23 June 1820. 89 Ibid., 10 March 1837. 90 Ibid., 27 April 1838. 91 Royal Cornwall Gazette, 29 September 1838. 92 West Briton, 13 September 1839. 93 West Briton, 30 August 1839. 94 Emigration poster c.1839, Courtney Library Collection, Royal Institution of Cornwall.



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95 West Briton, 23 March 1838. 96 West Briton, 25 September 1846. 97 Michael Tangye, ‘Cornish miners in Cuba 1836–1838’, in Terry Knight (ed.), Old Redruth: Original Studies of the Town’s History (Redruth, 1992), p. 24. 98 West Briton, 29 November 1839. 99 Western Luminary, 7 February 1826. 100 Quoted in Burt (ed.), Mines and Miners, p. 163. 101 Ibid. 102 Payton, Cornish Overseas, pp. 108–9. 103 West Briton, 23 October 1863. 104 West Briton, 23 January 1879. 105 Trotter, ‘Desperate? Destitute? Deserted’; Trotter, ‘Husband abroad’. 106 Angus Murdoch, Boom Copper: The Story of the First U.S. Mining Boom (Calumet, MI, 1964), pp. 202–3 (first published 1943). 107 South Australian News, January 1848. 108 SLSA BRG 22/960, Ayers to Wilcock, 3 November 1852. 109 West Briton, 1 March 1849. 110 West Briton, 31 October 1851. 111 Grass Valley National, cited in Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849–1870 (Stanford, CA, 1982), pp. 86–87. 112 Grass Valley Union, 28 May 1871. 113 SLSA D6029/68/69(L) Letters Written Home by Emigrant Cornish folk who Emigrated to Australia in the Nineteenth Century; Henry Giles to his Parents, 15 November 1854, 3 December 1854. 114 Charles Fahey, ‘From St Just to St Just Point: Cornish migration to nineteenthcentury Victoria’, in Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Fifteen, pp. 117–40. 115 South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, 25 September 1845. 116 Northern Star, 20 July 1861. 117 Philip Payton, ‘Cornish emigration in response to changes in the international copper market in the 1860s’, in Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies: Three (Exeter, 1995), pp. 60–82. 118 Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining (Melbourne, 1963), p. 119. 119 Payton, Making Moonta. 120 Yorke’s Peninsula Advertiser, 10 April 1874. 121 Payton, One and All. 122 Magee and Thompson, ‘Remittances revisited’ p. 295. 123 Cornubian, 31 January 1902; Cornish Post, 20 December 1906.

Conclusion: towards integration and comparison? Donald M. MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann and J.C.D. Clark A volume on so vast a topic as that of the diasporas forged by the peoples of the British and Irish Isles has no claim to being exhaustive. It patently cannot be a final word. What we, the editors and authors of this collection, hope, however, is that what is presented here is an integrated and focused assessment that will stimulate further work. We certainly hope to see still greater interrogation of labels and concepts. As historians, we must seek always for new empirical evidence with which to unite the theory. Collectively, the contributions to this volume throw up a number of areas in particular that merit further exploration, and we want to highlight these here to conclude. The first striking point worth noting is the similarity we have seen between the groups examined in this volume. Welsh scholars have long recognised the unity of purposes which linked Cornish and Welsh, but English or British scholars might pay more attention and explore further the extent of similarity and difference among British diaspora groups. The well-established understanding of Irish religion émigrés or of Scots Jacobite flight must also be enhanced with as clear an understanding of English religious exile, beyond the migration of the Puritans who established Massachusetts. English Catholics also fled persecution. Examining the extent of uniformity in diaspora behaviours and responses – a uniformity that exists in part because of an underpinning thread of Britishness and imperial connectedness – will enhance further our understanding of what was genuinely British about the diaspora, and what is best examined at a sub-national level. However, this will only happen if we understand that the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries cannot be shoehorned into modernist models which apply to the age of imperialism and nationalism. Interestingly, even groups that were less strongly linked, such as Irish and Welsh migrants, bore many similar characteristics. That this was the



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case even though they were often divided by religion and often were at odds with each other in the new communities in which they had settled deserves further scrutiny. Language bound them, as did global celebrations of national culture: omnipresent Eisteddfodau and globalised St Patrick’s Day events being cases in point. These cultural markers also were shared with the Scots, whose literature, music and sports became features of new community life. Likewise, national figureheads served as important anchors for many groups. The worldwide celebration of Burns had striking Scottish inflexions, while Shakespeare’s tercentenary (1916) was effectively owned by all cultured people, not merely an English diasporic offshoot. The wider appeal and focus of activities that are, at the outset, overtly ethnic and rooted strongly in old homeland culture is something that also needs to be examined more. While recent advances in the history of ethnic associations have gone some way to improve understanding of the ethnic and civic interstices in diaspora communities, more can be done to untangle these activities. In particular, a glaring gap remains in the absence of a study that examines the role of churches as associations not only for religious purposes, but rather also ethnic ones. Beyond questions of similar diaspora behaviour and analysis of the ethno-cultural practices of migrants and ethnic associational life, a plethora of unploughed research fields remain, especially in what we might suitably call diaspora politics. Particularly pertinent and timely are questions concentrating on nationalism and identity politics. While we see no nationalism emanating from the British Isles that had the power of the Irish cause as evinced in Irish America, it would be wrong to assume there was no diasporic role in homeland politics among the Scots or the Welsh. Indeed, with the Welsh language under threat at home, Welshlanguage culture in the diaspora – which endured to the 1960s in Argentina for example – offers a very clear indication of the diasporic nature of, at least, a form of cultural nationalism. Further north, Scotland provides more recent examples of a new type of cultural nationalism, one that expressly seeks to connect the diaspora with the old homeland around a national agenda channelled through culture and framed by a newly buoyant Scottish national consciousness. The 2009 and 2014 Homecoming Scotland programmes provide the clearest example. Yet, in England now too identity politics are at the forefront, for bound up in the issue of Brexit is also the question of England’s place in the world and what it means to be English. Finally, the contributions in this volume have had it as a central theme to explore what actually makes a diaspora. Authors have engaged with this question in different ways, but what we want to highlight as we conclude is that more needs to be done for one particular aspect: the question of smaller, sub-national diasporas. Thus, here, the Cornish serve as a case

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in point to illustrate the value and importance of an examination that transcends the national level. It is through the probing of links, historical and contemporary, at the level below the nation that a new richness can be revealed that significantly enhances our understanding of British and Irish diasporic behaviours and characteristics. We hope that this volume has gone some way towards facilitating further exactly that.

Index

Africa 2, 5, 101, 137, 143–44, 149, 164, 230, 232–33, 303 Ancient Order of Hibernians 192, 194, 196 Anglo-world 3, 141, 151–54 passim, 156, 162, 251 anti-Catholicism 139 Argentina 15, 143–44, 148, 161, 246, 264–65, 303, 315 Asia 2–3, 5–6, 124, 136, 143–44, 149, 164, 251 associational culture 136, 141 associationalism 152 associations 148–51 Australasia 2, 137, 139–41, 149, 163, 221, 247 Australia 15, 27, 141–44, 146–47, 151, 153, 162–66, 179–80, 185, 188, 191, 194, 210–11, 220–24, 231–32, 246, 248–49, 253–55, 259–63, 269–72, 281, 283, 285, 287–88, 290–94, 296–97, 300–3, 305–8 Adelaide 149, 259, 288, 292 Ballarat 261–63, 269 Brisbane 260–61 Broken Hill 294, 296 Burra Burra 259, 287–88, 305–6 Cobar 294 Kadina 260, 307 Kapunda 259, 290, 305, 307

Melbourne 142, 149, 213, 262, 270 Moonta 259–60, 288, 290–96, 307–8 New South Wales 149, 222, 247, 249, 260, 294, 296, 301, 306 Perth 149 Queensland 142, 260–61, 308 South Australia 141–42, 223–24, 249, 254, 259–60, 287–88, 290–94, 296–97, 300–2, 305–8 Sydney 142, 149, 269–70, 294 Victoria 142, 221, 223–24, 227, 231, 249, 255, 261–63, 270, 295, 306–7 Wallaroo 259–60, 288, 290, 292–96, 307 Western Australia 142, 188, 223–24, 308 Austria 33, 44 Béaslaí, Piaras 195 Boer War 151–53, 231 Bohemia 30, 103, 106, 111, 121 Brazil 263, 303 British Empire 6, 12–15 passim, 141–42, 147, 162, 210, 213 Britishness 1, 13, 166, 209–10, 216, 225–33, 248–49, 262–63 Burk, John Daly 180–81 Burns clubs 228–29

318  index Cambrian Society 261 Canada 8, 27, 138–43, 148, 157–58, 161–65, 187–88, 191, 200, 211, 216, 218–19, 225, 227–28, 233, 246, 249, 255–56, 260, 265, 299 Kingston 150, 227–28, 267 Montreal 142, 227–28, 267 Ottawa 213, 227 Toronto 227–28 Vancouver 217 Winnipeg 217, 265 Cape Colony 142, 230 Carey, Matthew 180 Catholic 1–3, 5, 7–8, 10–12, 14, 20–46 passim, 56–86 passim, 100, 103, 105–8, 111, 113, 115, 138–39, 146, 153, 167, 177–78, 180–85, 190–92, 194, 199, 248, 258, 314 anti-Catholic 271 Catholicism 22, 24, 28, 44, 57, 61, 85, 146, 178, 182 anti-Catholicism 139 Celtic Tiger 199 Ceylon 142 Chile 264, 286, 303 Church of England 25, 42, 299, 305, Clan na Gael 188–89, 191, 193 Clarke, Tom 193, 195 clearance 215 see also Highland Clearances conflict 1, 5, 22, 39–40, 44, 106, 183, 197–98, 217, 257, 265 dynastic 56, 66 religious 4, 56 Cornish 5, 8, 15–16, 149–50, 246–47, 249–50, 253, 256–60, 270, 272, 315 Cousin Jack 16, 246, 281, 284–97 passim, 303, 305–6, 308 Cousin Jenny 16, 246, 284–97 passim, 303 cricket 143, 154, 159, 161–62 Cuba 302–3, 307

Davis, Thomas 192 de Valera, Éamon 195–98 Denmark 44 Denmark-Norway 103, 106, 110 Devoy, John 188–89, 193–98 diaspora Catholic 11, 14, 23, 25, 28, 30–33, 40, 42–43, 177, 182 concept 7, 212–13, 215 historiography of 22 identity concept 13, 210, 225, 234 Jewish 7, 26 utopian 145–48 victim 1, 7, 178–200 passim Disruption (Church of Scotland) 221, 233 Doheny, Michael 186 East India Company 107, 251 Easter Rising 196 education 30–33, 35, 57, 86, 108, 112, 114, 123, 227, 263 Eisteddfod 247, 261, 269 Eisteddfod Society of Sydney 270 Eisteddfodau 255, 258–59, 262–63, 265, 269–70, 315 Eisteddfodau Association 269 emigration 3–6 passim, 15–16, 22, 25–33 passim, 44, 60, 100–1, 105, 108, 111, 137, 140, 163–64, 177–81 passim, 184, 189, 198, 200–1, 210–12, 215–22 passim, 234, 245–56 passim, 264, 270, 280–84, 297–308 passim Empire Day 136, 151 England 1, 5–6, 10–12, 15, 20, 22–44 passim, 66, 70, 74–75, 77, 79–84, 100, 102, 121, 124, 136–67 passim, 178, 184, 187, 189, 192–94, 211, 216, 219–26 passim, 228, 232, 244, 246–49, 251, 253–56, 266–68, 272, 281–83, 298, 315 Englishness 136–38, 144–45, 148–49, 154, 156, 159, 162–66, 282 anti-Englishness 154

Established Church of Scotland 233 ethnicity 3, 9–12, 25, 27–29, 120, 137, 154–55, 162–64, 192, 200, 214, 251, 261, 281, 283, 285 see also identity European Economic Community 198 exile 1–12 passim, 20–23, 24–27, 29–33, 35–37, 41, 45, 56–58, 60–66, 70–86 passim, 103–10, 115, 120–21, 138, 146, 177–86 passim, 192, 195–96, 213, 215, 234, 249, 264, 314 expatriate 57–59, 61–63, 66, 79, 86, 137, 254 Fenian Brotherhood 186 Fenian movement 186, 189, 194 Fenians 186–89, 194–95 Fintan Lalor, James 186, 189 folk culture 154–58 football 68, 143, 162, 166 France 4, 23, 32–34, 44, 56, 59–84 passim, 102–3, 106–9, 113–18 passim, 121–22, 184, 218, 298 Bourges 108, 114, 119 Montauban 108 Saumur 108, 114 Sedan 108 Free Church 221, 233 Friends of Irish Freedom 196–97 Gaelic 5, 33, 41, 60, 76, 192–93, 195–96, 221, 228–29 Gaelic revival 196 German 2, 113, 115, 123, 137–39, 144, 153–55, 159, 161, 190, 195–96, 244, 249, 251 Germany 106, 143, 194 Bremen 113 Hamburg 104, 109, 113, 121 Glasgow Missionary Society 233 Good Friday Agreement 199–200 Grand Tour 35, 108, 119, 123 Great Famine 6–7, 178, 185, 200, 247

index  319 Hibernian societies 180–82 Highland Clearances 27, 163 see also clearance Hobson, Bulmer 193 Home Rule (Irish) 179, 189–96 passim Hong Kong 141–45, 229 Hood, Robin 155, 161 identity 8, 13–14, 16 cultural 307 ethnic 9–11, 14, 16, 228, 282, 285 national 7, 22, 28, 59, 122, 136, 146, 149, 155, 215–16, 228, 230, 233–34, 265 regional 11 religious 28–29 transnational 216, 234, 281, 303, 307 see also ethnicity identity politics 11, 315 Immigration Act (US, 1924) 197 Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire 151 India 142, 144–45, 149, 162, 228, 233 invasion 39, 60–61, 63, 66–67, 69–75 passim, 79, 84–86, 107, 188 Ireland 2–7, 11–12, 20–44 passim, 56–86 passim, 107–8, 122, 139, 142, 144–45, 153, 177–201 passim, 216–17, 222–24, 247, 251, 257, 260, 266, 267 Irish Brigades 59, 61, 63–64, 71, 73, 75, 84 Irish language 58, 62, 68, 195 Irish Northern Aid Committee 198 Irish Republican Army 199 Irishness 14, 179, 181, 192–93, 198 Jacobite 21–22, 29, 33–34, 36, 38, 41, 104, 107, 120–21, 209, 218 Jacobites 2, 8, 12, 107 Irish 56–86 passim Jacobitism 39, 57, 56–86 passim, 120

320  index Jefferson, Thomas 181, 183 Jewish 2, 4, 7, 22, 25–26, 28, 113, 116, 137, 159, 212, 215 Kearney, Peadar 195 Kelly, Gertrude 196 Kelly, Capt. Thomas 187 Kennedy, Edward 14, 199 Kennedy, John F. 198 Kenya 143 kilt 231–34 passim Ladies Land League 190, 196 Land League 189 Latin America 159, 281, 284, 301, 303–4 Lemass, Sean 198 Livingstone, David 226, 232 London Highland Society 231 McCafferty, John 187, 190 McCaffrey, Lawrence J. 177 McGarrity, Joseph 196 McManus, Terence Bellew 194 Magna Charta 136, 151–52, 154 Magna Charter Day Association 151–52 Magrath, Andrew Gordon 181 Magrath, John 181 Martyrdom 33, 40 material culture 229 Meagher, Thomas Francis 57, 183–84 mercenaries 29, 33, 44, 103, 106–7 Mexico 281, 286, 301–4, 306 missionaries 37, 226, 233 missionary 38, 40, 232–33, 299 Mitchel, John 178, 184–86, 188, 192–96, 200 Morris dancers 155–61 passim Napier, Theodore 210 Natal 142–43, 233 Netherlands 44, 103–4, 106, 109–10, 112–13 Leiden 108–10

Rotterdam 109–10, 112–13, 115, 122 Utrecht 108–10 Veere 110, 112 networks 10, 12, 21, 29, 57, 105, 108, 113–14, 118, 120, 123–24, 182, 216, 219, 228, 246, 251, 263 New Caledonia 308 New Zealand 4, 8–9, 27, 137, 140–44 passim, 147, 149, 153–55, 161–63, 165–67, 209, 221–22, 225, 229, 255, 269, 297, 303, 308 Dunedin 221–22 Wellington 143, 149–50, 156, 166 North America 2, 4, 138, 144, 148, 157, 159–60, 164, 166, 177, 185, 191, 211, 218–19, 221, 256, 281, 284–86, 289, 297 Northern Ireland 14, 197–99, 201 Norway Bergen 109–11, 113, 116 see also Denmark-Norway O’Brennan, Kathleen 196 O’Connell, Daniel 181–84, 187 O’Connor, Feargus 184 O’Connor, Thomas Power 191 O’Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah 189–94 passim O’Mahony, John 186 O’Reilly, John Boyle 188 Orange Order 191 origins, myth of 22 Parnell, Charles Stewart 189–92 Parnell, Frances 190 Pearse, Patrick 193–95 pedlar 103–4, 116 persecution 14–15, 20–46 passim, 58, 82, 85–86, 271, 314 Peru 286 Poetry 72, 151, 181, 195 Poland-Lithuania 101, 105, 108–9, 111–12, 115, 117, 121

Presbyterian 106, 116, 122, 138, 180–81, 257 Protestant 1, 2–3, 5, 11, 22, 24, 29, 31, 35–39, 43–44, 60, 62, 68, 70, 73–75, 85, 100, 103, 107–8, 111, 115–16, 139, 153, 167, 178, 180–82, 191, 248, 254, 257, 272, 285–86 Protestantism 31, 85, 115, 139, 155, 254, 257 Provisional Irish Republican Army 198 Quakers 8, 251–52 recruitment 40, 57, 61, 66–69, 73, 75–76, 85–86, 248, 300 Redmond, John 192, 194–96 refugees 1, 3, 22, 33, 61, 106–7, 113, 121 religious houses 21–22, 29–31, 35–38, 40–45 passim return migration 13, 15, 100–1, 119, 220, 255, 281, 284, 303 Rhodesia 144, 164 Ribbon movement 184 Ribbonism 257 Roberts, William 188 Robinson, Mary 177, 201 Royal Society of St George 136, 143, 149, 151–52, 268 rugby 161–62, 259 Russia 44, 78, 103 St Andrew’s Day 9, 228, 230 St Andrew’s societies 227, 228 St David’s Day 261–62, 266–68 St David’s societies 252, 261, 267 St George’s Day 150, 153, 267 St George’s societies 147–51, 153, 155, 159, 165, 267–68 Scotch-Irish Society 191 Scotland 5–6, 11–12, 21–22, 27–28, 31, 33, 36–37, 39–41, 44, 66–70, 73, 83–84, 100–25 passim, 139, 142, 145, 147, 162,

index  321 189, 195, 209–34 passim, 246–47, 249, 251, 253–54, 260, 266–67, 299, 315 Scots-Irish 5, 158, 191 Scottish Home Rule Association of New York 217 Scottish Missionary Society 233 Scottishness 13, 120, 231–2 seminaries 29–32, 35, 37–38, 40–41 Slessor, Mary 226, 233 Society of United Irishmen 179–80 soldiers 34, 39, 44, 57–73 passim, 79, 85–86, 102–6, 110–11, 119, 121, 186, 218, 226, 230–32 Sons of England 149, 159, 267–68 Sons of St George 140, 148, 267 Sons of Scotland 215, 228 South Africa 144, 147, 149, 153, 164, 211, 228, 230–31, 233, 246–47, 260, 281, 283, 285, 308 Spain 32–33, 40–41, 44, 59–60, 63, 66–71, 78–79, 83, 103, 106, 118, 166, 301 Stephens, James 186–87 Sweden 44, 78, 103, 109–10, 112–13, 116–17, 123 Gothenburg 102, 105, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 119, 121 Stockholm 102, 105, 110, 112–13, 116 Tasmania 141–42, 149, 223–24, 308 Launceston 149 Thirty Years’ War 44, 103, 106–7, 111 toleration 22–25 passim, 35, 39 Trafalgar 151 Trafalgar Day 154 Trevithick, Richard 286 Ulster 4, 13, 70, 83, 139, 180, 183, 191, 257 Ulster-Scots 138 Ulster League of America 151 Ulster Volunteer Force 151

322  index United Kingdom 141, 184, 191, 201, 217, 247, 251, 268, 271, 301 Birmingham 199, 253 Cornwall 11, 16, 247, 280–308 passim Edinburgh 119, 122–23, 217, 221 Glasgow 139, 217, 233 Lancashire 30, 34, 139, 147–50, 189 Liverpool 139, 191, 194–95, 247, 253–55, 264, 268–69, 287 London 5, 20, 23, 29, 36, 69, 82, 139, 141, 146, 193–94, 228, 231–32, 249, 251, 253, 261, 266, 268, 287, 300–1 Manchester 34, 139, 146, 187, 253 Midlands 5, 139, 256, 289, 301 Newcastle 123 Yorkshire 11, 29, 139, 147, 149–51, 167 United States 10, 27, 57, 141–42, 145–46, 154, 156–58, 160–62, 179–200 passim, 218–19, 222, 245–46, 248–71 passim, 281, 284–85, 298–300, 305, 308 Boston 153, 181–82, 199, 217 California 255, 285, 290, 303, 306–7 Cape Fear Valley 218 Charleston 148, 180–82, 185 Chicago 153, 161, 166, 186, 190, 192–93, 217 Grass Valley 285, 290, 306 Illinois 256 Keweenaw 285–86, 305

Mineral Point 305 New Jersey 147, 200 New York 57, 139, 148, 150, 153, 157, 159–60, 181, 185–86, 188–90, 194–96, 200, 217–18, 229, 249–50, 252, 256, 259, 269, 271 Ohio 245–46, 252 Pennsylvania 138–39, 218, 245–47, 250–52, 256–57, 261, 268 Philadelphia 140, 148, 161, 180, 196, 217, 252, 267, 300 Scranton 256–59, 261–62 Seattle 217 Washington 153, 188 Victoria League 151 Victoria, Queen 230 Diamond Jubilee 152–53 Golden Jubilee 153 Victorian 6, 11, 24, 59, 136, 192, 234 Wales 5, 11, 15, 31, 40, 139, 142, 145, 153, 220, 222–24, 244–72 passim, 281 Washington, George 60 Welsh Club 269 Welshness 244, 250, 258–59, 263, 266, 269–70 Whig interpretation 23 Wild Geese 61, 77, 83, 179 World Wars First 43, 153, 194, 219, 229 Second 144, 165, 197, 212 Young Ireland 59, 183–86, 192, 194