England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 8) (Volume 8) 9781843834687, 1843834685

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
PRELUDE: Survivors and Victims
1. Introduction: Irish Relief and British Problems
2. Distress and Great Necessity: The Experience of Survival in 1641
3. The Hand of God and the Works of Man: Narrations of Survival
4. Imagining the Rebellion: Atrocity, Anti-Popery, and the Tracts of 1641
5. ‘A World of Misery’: The International Significance of the 1641 Rebellion
6. Many Distressed Irish: Refugees and the Problem of Local Order
7. Local Charity: Contributions to the Irish Cause
8. Hard and Lamentable Decisions: The Distribution and Decline of Irish Relief
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

Irish Rebellion:Irish Rebellion 16/06/2009 13:31 Page 1

J o S E P h C o P E is Associate Professor of history at the State University of New York at Geneseo.

CoVER DESIGN: SIMoN LoXLEY

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 www.boydell.co.uk www.boydellandbrewer.com

England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion

JosEph CopE

Front cover: Assaults on English Protestants during the 1641 Irish Rising. From Ireland: or, a Booke, Together with an Exact Mappe, of the Most Principal Townes, Great and Small, in the Said Kingdome (London, 1647).  British Library shelfmark E.1175.(3), 160. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.

England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion

The 1641 Irish Rebellion has long been recognized as a key event in the mid-17th century collapse of the Stuart monarchy. By 1641, many in England had grown restive under the weight of intertwined religious, political and economic crises. To these audiences, the Irish rising seemed a realization of England’s worst fears: a war of religious extermination supported by European papists, whose ambitions extended across the Irish Sea. England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion explores the consequences of this emergency by focusing on survivors of the rising in local, national and regional contexts. In Ireland, the experiences of survivors reflected the complexities of life in multiethnic and religiously-diverse communities. In England, by contrast, pamphleteers, ministers, and members of parliament simplified the issues, presenting the survivors as victims of an international Catholic conspiracy and asserting English subjects’ obligations to their countrymen and coreligionists. These obligations led to the creation of relief projects for despoiled Protestant settlers, but quickly expanded into sweeping calls for action against recusants and suspected popish agents in England. England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion contends that the mobilization of this local activism played an integral role in politicizing the English people and escalating the political crisis of the 1640s.

JosEph CopE

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY

Volume  8

England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107 Series editors Tim Harris Stephen Taylor Andy Wood I Women of Quality Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 Ingrid H. Tague II Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690 Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas Clare Jackson III Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 Andrew C. Thompson IV Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 Nick Harding V The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 Grant Tapsell VI Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England Jason McElligott VII The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 Politics, Culture and Ideology Gabriel Glickman



England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion

Joseph  Cope

THE BOYDELL PRESS

©  Joseph Cope 2009 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Joseph Cope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2009 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN  978–1–84383–468–7

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for 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. This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vi ix xi

Prelude: Survivors and Victims

1

1. Introduction: Irish Relief and British Problems

9

2. Distress and Great Necessity: The Experience of Survival in 1641

32

3. The Hand of God and the Works of Man: Narrations of Survival

57

4. Imagining the Rebellion: Atrocity, Anti-Popery, and the Tracts of 1641

76

5. ‘A World of Misery’: The International Significance of the 1641 Rebellion

89

6. Many Distressed Irish: Refugees and the Problem of Local Order

104

7. Local Charity: Contributions to the Irish Cause

119

8. Hard and Lamentable Decisions: The Distribution and Decline of Irish Relief

143

Conclusion

161

Bibliography Index

165 185

List of Tables

1. County Contributions to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan

129

2. Parish Contributions to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan, Salisbury Division of Wiltshire

134

3. Disbursements of Relief Money to Irish Refugees

147

In Memory of David and Grace Bleakley

Acknowledgements

Any work of scholarship generates enormous of personal and intellectual debts. A number of individuals and institutions have helped alleviate some of the challenges of conducting a research project on the seventeenth-century British Isles from the United States. The staff of Information Delivery Services at Milne Library, SUNY Geneseo, has been very helpful and patient with my many requests. This project simply could not have been completed without their assistance. From 2004 to 2007, I also benefited from an appointment as Visiting Fellow at the Institute for European Studies, Cornell University, which provided access to the collections of the Cornell University Library. This project also has benefited from the advice and assistance of the staff of Trinity College Dublin Library, the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, the National Archives of the United Kingdom (formerly the Public Record Office), the House of Lords Record Office, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Wiltshire County Record Office, the Cheshire County Record Office, and the Bristol City Record Office. I have also received generous funding support from the Pennsylvania State University (Edwin Erle Sparks Fellowship in the Humanities) and travel funds from SUNY Geneseo (Presidential Summer Research Fellowship). The editorial staff at Boydell & Brewer also deserve my gratitude, as do David Armitage, Tim Harris, Stephen Taylor, and Andy Wood. My thinking on this project was shaped in important ways during my participation in a 2003 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the Folger entitled ‘Sites of Cultural Stress from Reformation to Revolution’. The co-directors of the institute, David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, put together a stimulating and challenging program. My conversations with the visiting faculty and other participants in the institute have had an immeasurable impact on both my teaching and my research. A number of other colleagues and friends have at various times offered comments and criticism of my work, including Bill Pencak, Kumkum Chatterjee, E. Paul Durrenberger, Brendan Kane, D. Alan Orr, Tze-ki Hon, Emilye Crosby, and my fellow faculty in the History Department at SUNY Geneseo. Dan Beaver deserves many thanks. I have not been as conscientious as I should be in acknowledging and thanking Dan for his many years of guidance and mentorship. Since our very first conversation about my interest in early modern British history on a cold March morning in 1995, he has ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

devoted countless hours to my work and has provided an important model of what a teacher and scholar ought to be. I also owe enormous thanks to my family. My mother Margaret has been a source of inspiration and strength. My wife, Sarah, has lived with this project for a number of years and has provided boundless patience, understanding and support. Finally, it is difficult to express how important my daughter, Sibyl, has been in centering my life and giving me perspective on what is truly important.



Abbreviations

BCRO Bristol City Record Office BL British Library CJ Journals of the House of Commons (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1802). Cheshire Record Office CRO CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I, 1625–1647 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1858–97) DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Colin Matthew and Brian Howard Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) HLRO House of Lords Record Office HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission LJ Journals of the House of Lords (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1802) NLI National Library of Ireland PCRS P. Hume Brown (ed.), Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 2nd ser. Edinburgh: General Register House, 1906) PJLP Willson H. Coates, Anne Steele Young, and Vernon F. Snow (eds), Private Journals of the Long Parliament (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982–92) SR Statutes of the Realm (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963) Trinity College Dublin TCD TNA The National Archives of the United Kingdom WCRO Wiltshire County Record Office

xi

Prelude: Survivors and Victims

When Elizabeth Danvers appeared in Dublin to report on her family’s losses in the Irish rebellion on 14 August 1645, she must have been a piteous sight. Having been driven from her home in county Cork twice, she and her family had lived as refugees for the better part of four years. During this time, they had seen their possessions plundered and had been threatened on several occasions with physical harm. For a time, they had lived in hastily thrown-up lodgings on the boundaries of a New English planter estate in county Cork, barely subsisting. When she made her deposition, Danvers was completely destitute and had lost at least one of her children as a result of the depredations she and her family had suffered. To English readers of hundreds of tracts and pamphlets published in late 1641 and 1642, the Irish rebellion was an episode of spectacular violence in which bloodthirsty Catholics slaughtered the primarily Protestant and English population of the Stuart plantations. The Danvers deposition contains many of the same ingredients as the tracts, including frightening rebels, deep poverty, forced eviction, and flight. However, in contrast to contemporary printed accounts of the rebellion, Elizabeth Danvers’s story contained scant information about violence and focused instead on the experience of survival. Danvers documented escape and perseverance, and did so in ways that challenged the crude depictions of the Irish rebellion pamphlets. Elizabeth Danvers, her husband Thomas, and their six children were resident at their home in Mogeely, county Cork, when the rebellion broke out on 22 October 1641. Although estimates of property value in the deposition must viewed with skepticism in the absence of corroborating evidence, the information in Danvers’s account generally suggests that her family were of the ‘middling sort’ of English settlers. Elizabeth estimated that they had approximately £200 in goods, food, clothing, and livestock at their farm, and she noted that they dwelt in an English-style house. The family was connected to the outside world well enough to know a bit about the progress of the rebellion. Elizabeth and her husband grew anxious in late October 1641 over reports from the north of ‘the cruelties of the Irish and the general robbing and stripping of all the English’. Fearing signs of increasing rest

The following paragraphs make reference to the deposition of Elizabeth Danvers, TCD Ms. 820, 316–18.  Ibid., 316.



ENGLAND AND THE 1641 IRISH REBELLION

lessness among their Irish neighbors, Thomas Danvers made the decision to evacuate his family from their farm in early November. The fact that they did not seek mutual defense or assistance from their neighbors or local kin, but rather traveled almost forty-five miles to Waterford, suggests much about the Danvers’s relative isolation. Elizabeth Danvers’s deposition described a slow slide into rebellion, which was typical of the provinces of Munster and Leinster. She recalled that rumors of massacres and violence in Ulster were widespread by the beginning of November 1641, but her deposition also indicates that local conditions were fairly safe. The family had ample time to gather together most of their stored food and household supplies, arrange safe transportation, and travel through the countryside to Waterford. In the town, the family survived off of their preserved property. Presumably, they thought that the rebellion would be short-lived and that they could return to their home once the troubles had passed. In contrast to Ulster, where crimes against English settlers were common, the province of Munster did not witness widespread acts of physical violence. Indeed, Elizabeth Danvers reported that her husband felt it was safe to return to the family home in Mogeely in late December 1641. He departed Waterford on December 27, more than two full months after the rising had begun in the north and at a time that lurid accounts of rebel atrocities were being voiced in Westminster and printed in London. Elizabeth and her six children remained behind. Elizabeth’s experiences in Waterford were apparently dramatic, but are unfortunately obscure. After Thomas’s departure, the family continued to subsist using the personal property that they had rescued from their home. When Waterford fell to the rebels in late February 1642, Elizabeth and her children remained in the town. Although Elizabeth complained that she had been ‘imprisoned’ at several times, she also noted that she had benefited from a kinship connection to Sir Richard Butler of Kilcash, a prominent Old English Catholic. Butler occupied a liminal position in the Irish rising. His elder brother was James Butler, earl of Ormond, a Protestant of Old English ethnicity and commander of the royal forces charged with putting down the rebellion. Richard Butler, however, had drifted into rebellion in December 1641. In this he was not alone, as many of his kinsmen and other Catholic gentry in Munster and Leinster had also chosen to side with the northern rebels as the New English state officers at Dublin Castle inflexibly defined the war as a Catholic rising. It is impossible to reconstruct Elizabeth 

M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Montreal, 1994), 252–60; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), 524–34.  Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 240–1.  Canny, Making Ireland British, 525–7. According to Canny, Richard Butler’s embrace of the rebellion had much to do with his conviction in false rebel claims that Charles I had converted to Catholicism and had encouraged the rising.



SURVIVORS AND VICTIMS

Danvers’s specific relationship to Richard Butler, but her deposition makes it clear that he offered some manner of protection. By early March 1642, however, this fortuitous connection started to lose some of its power, and the local inhabitants of Waterford drove Elizabeth and her children away. The Danvers family returned to Mogeely, where they found Thomas safe and most of their property secure. For an indeterminate period of time, the family remained in the area, but at some point in the spring of 1645 abandoned their home in favor of temporary lodgings closer to the nearby estate of Sir Nicholas Pyne. In the shadow of a plantation castle, they carved out a living in the company of other English settlers. Elizabeth Danvers’s deposition ends with a fairly detailed account of occurrences during the six weeks preceding her arrival in Dublin. In June 1645, a well-organized Catholic Confederate Army under the command of James Touchet, third earl of Castlehaven, raided in Munster as part of his campaign against English enclaves in the province. At Nicholas Pyne’s estate, Castlehaven negotiated a surrender that allowed noncombatants to travel to the port at Youghal with whatever property they could carry. Despite promises of safety, however, the English settlers found themselves robbed on the roads soon after they departed. In this context, Elizabeth’s connections to Sir Richard Butler once again proved useful. She complained of her family’s treatment directly to the earl of Castlehaven, whose sister, Lady Frances Touchet, was married to Sir Richard Butler. Castlehaven arranged safe transport for the Danvers family to Sir Richard Butler’s home in Kilcash, county Tipperary. There, Lady Frances assisted Elizabeth and arranged a guard to convey the family to the Butler estate at Carrick-on-Suir, where they stayed for a fortnight. Richard Butler ‘gave them monies for defraying their charges and furnished them with one man and horses, and safely sent them to the town of Catherlagh’. Catherlagh (modern Carlow) lay within the patrol area of the English army at the time, and the soldiers conveyed the family to Dublin. At the time of her deposition, Elizabeth and her family had been in 

The Pyne estate was leased to Henry Pyne by Sir Walter Raleigh in the sixteenth century as part of the Munster plantation. Although the terms of the lease generated a long running dispute when Raleigh’s lands passed into the hands of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, the Pyne estate was also widely recognized as an example of a successful English plantation. By the early seventeenth century, the Pynes boasted a fortified castle, English-style houses, and enclosed fields. See Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford, 1986), 186–7, 229.  Throughout the period of the Catholic Confederacy, Castlehaven saw military action, serving under Thomas Preston and Owen Roe O’Neill, Irish commanders who had gained military experience on the continent and returned to Ireland after the outbreak of hostilities. In the spring and summer of 1645, Castlehaven organized a series of attacks on settler enclaves in eastern county Cork, culminating in an abortive siege of Cork city. The assault on Pyne’s estate took place within this context. T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin, and F.J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1976), 309. For the Catholic Confederacy in general, see Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999); Pádraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49 (Cork, 2000).



ENGLAND AND THE 1641 IRISH REBELLION

the city for several days ‘in great deal of distress, want and misery’. After this, the unfortunate Danvers family disappears from the historical record. Ireland’s Tragical Tyranny, a short tract by John Robinson published in February or March 1642, provides a telling counterpoint to Elizabeth Danvers’s deposition. Like the Danvers deposition, the tract claimed to provide authentic eyewitness testimony of the rebellion. Unlike the deposition, however, the main witness was mute, her tongue allegedly having been cut out by the rebels. This ‘speechless damsel’ could only be represented by letters purportedly written by her father, an inhabitant of Londonderry named John Robinson, who sought to record for posterity his daughter’s suffering and ‘other remarkable passages performed by the blood-thirsty rebels’. According to the story that Robinson told, his daughter had been seized by rebels early in the rising. During an attempted rape, ‘her hair was torn from her head, because she would not yield to their lust’. When the enraged rebels tried to coerce the unfortunate woman to convert to popery, ‘her tongue was cut out of her mouth, because she would not blaspheme against her maker’. In John Robinson’s narration, the woman’s body was itself a text: ‘a woeful spectacle have I sent unto you, that when you have seen her perplexity … you may bewail her calamities’.10 Her body provided physical evidence of the rebels’ cruelty that mere words could not describe. Ireland’s Tragical Tyranny is a deeply problematic text. There is no clear indication that John Robinson was a real individual, and the sheer number of tracts published in 1641–2 that invented obviously false stories about the Irish rebellion casts doubt on the veracity of the account. Several components of the text seem to have been designed to address the problem of authenticity. Robinson complained that many in England ‘will not believe anything to be true, unless it be done against their own persons’ and expressed his hope that his narrative would overcome this skepticism.11 The title sheet also indicated very specific information about the woman’s arrival in England, including details on her arrival on 18 January 1642, and her intention to take up lodging in the household of an uncle ‘who liveth near to Miniard in Somersetshire’.12 The publication of Robinson’s letter in London guaranteed a much wider audience than Elizabeth Danvers’s short deposition in Dublin. Regardless of whether the story was true or not, Robinson’s letter had a compelling moral, which the author claimed gave readers insight into the nature of the

  10 11 12

Deposition of Elizabeth Danvers, TCD Ms. 820, 317–18. John Robinson, Ireland’s Tragical Tyranny (London, 1642), unpaginated cover sheet. Ibid., sig. A2. Ibid., sig A2f. Ibid., unpaginated cover sheet.



SURVIVORS AND VICTIMS

Irish rebellion and the character of its perpetrators. Robinson’s daughter was presented as the victim of a sexual and physical assault that humiliated the victim and marked her permanently with a sign of the rebels’ base cruelty. Despite obvious hardship and trauma, however, she remained honorable and loyal, fighting off the rebels’ advances and refusing to stoop to popery. Her marred body thus not only documented the barbarity of the rebels, but also testified to Anglo-Protestant righteousness and perseverance. The story is, of course, also a far cry from the narration of Elizabeth Danvers. Whereas Danvers’s deposition reflected a complicated and often confusing social setting, in which kinship, religion, and ethnicity were constantly in flux, the Robinson pamphlet distilled the rebellion into a simple formula of righteous Protestants struggling against bloodthirsty papists. The Robinson tract also points to the problem of political activism. The author of Ireland’s Tragical Tyranny asked that readers ‘bewail her calamities’ and suggested England’s moral obligation to engage in other kinds of activism. Readers of this and other similar stories from Ireland, the tract implied, should witness and assist those who had resisted and suffered at the hands of the rebels. This in turn demanded greater political action. ‘Let us approve ourselves to be bold hearted Englishmen’, Robinson wrote as he described instances of settler resistance against the rebels, ‘and fight for our country’s honor against these papistical enemies of truth.’13 There exists an obvious discontinuity between the accounts of Elizabeth Danvers and John Robinson. Danvers described a disintegrating social order that was characterized by anxiety and disruption. Within this social order, however, and particularly through social networks and reputations that predated the rebellion, individuals found ways to survive. Amid the chaos within the survival stories told by Elizabeth Danvers and hundreds of other Anglo-Irish deponents, it is possible to discern a kind of order and to reconstruct at least the outlines of the society that preceded the calamity of 1641. Robinson’s tract also reflected order in chaos, but the stakes were much different. Whereas Danvers’s deposition suggests the social networks that existed in Ireland’s multiethnic and religiously diverse communities, Ireland’s Tragical Tyranny depicted Irish society as neatly divided into two camps. The violence enacted against Robinson’s Protestant daughter by the Irish ‘papistical enemies’ reflected this simple division. This book argues that the discontinuity between the experience of and the representation of the rebellion was important within the context of the political meltdown underway in the British Isles in the 1640s. Depositions like that made by Elizabeth Danvers reveal that Irish society prior to the outbreak of the rebellion saw significantly muddled social identities. Like

13

Ibid., sig. A3.



ENGLAND AND THE 1641 IRISH REBELLION

Danvers, many deponents fashioned survival strategies that relied on prerebellion social relations. Settlers proved remarkably able to refashion ethnic and religious identities, even in the midst of calamity. For example, witnesses related that conversion to Roman Catholicism, often apparently uncoerced and nominal, presented a viable survival strategy. The blurring of social identity occurred among actors in the rebellion as well. In Kings county, the depositions reveal evidence of Catholics working alongside the Anglo­Protestant defenders of Birr Castle and assisting endangered settlers in a variety of different ways. This extended to the very top of the rebellion. In county Cavan, several of the men who led the rising in 1641 also protected English settlers, sometimes drawing the ire of their own kinsmen. Violence, dislocation, and hardship certainly were important during the rebellion, but there could also be order and opportunity within the chaos. Whereas a critical reading of the 1641 depositions as survival stories reveals a social order in which categories of religion and ethnicity had become fragmented and deformed, the tracts and pamphlets of 1641 and 1642 imposed a much less complicated interpretation on the rebellion. The rising represented the most recent convulsion of violence plotted by an international popish enemy whose perfidy and cruelty knew no bounds. The pamphleteers, ministers, and politicians who contributed to print discourse framed the rebellion as an extension of the Thirty Years’ War and as part of a broad plot to exterminate the Protestant religion. Far from being merely a sideshow in the general British crisis of the midseventeenth century, this book argues that the association of the Irish rebellion with international popery had enormous significance in 1641 and 1642. Imbedded in works like Ireland’s Tragical Tyranny was a call to arms, which summoned well-affected Protestants in England to the defense and relief of their coreligionists and countrymen. This conceit appears like a refrain throughout the tracts and pamphlets of the period, and seeped out of print culture and into political culture. When letters from the Lord Justices of Ireland first announced the rebellion at Westminster, members of parliament fashioned responses that demanded vigilance and activism on the part of the English people. Mayors and sheriffs received instructions to shore up local defense and increase local surveillance. At the same time, ordinary English men and women found themselves bombarded with calls to do something for Ireland. In the metropolis, fast day sermons by parliament-selected ministers exhorted listeners to reflect, grieve, and pray for Ireland. Printed versions of these sermons, augmented by a torrent of pamphlet and tracts on the war, emphasized England’s danger during this Irish crisis, claiming that the rebels might launch an invasion or lend assistance to a covert plot by a fifth column of papist sympathizers at home. Meanwhile, parliament also encouraged activism of a different sort in authorizing the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan, a national effort that called upon all well-affected English 

SURVIVORS AND VICTIMS

subjects to also contribute their money and time to the distressed victims of the rebellion. This book argues that the bodies of Irish war victims and the stories told by Irish survivors played an integral role in the politicization of the English people. One of the consistent themes in English discourses on the rising – from the atrocity tracts, to the fast day sermons, to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan – was an argument in favor of the moral obligations between English Protestants and their distressed brethren and countrymen in Ireland. This argument asserted the spiritual duty of Englishmen to pray, to reflect, and to relieve. At the local level, bodies posed more practical social and economic problems. Hundreds of men and women from Ireland arrived destitute in English communities in the 1640s. They brought with them few material possessions and many problems. They were poor strangers, and because of this they were also potentially dangerous. They thus necessitated the imposition of procedures to manage and contain their destabilizing potential. The English people confronted persons displaced by the Irish war in two parallel, but linked ways: as disruptive and expensive presences in local communities and as abstracted victims of a dangerous international plot. Managing these twin threats required vigilance and necessitated popular action. This mobilization played an integral role in the evolving British crisis of the early 1640s. This book finally attempts, albeit imperfectly, to recapture the historical experiences of war victims and survivors, an issue that has generated limited scholarship in the context of the ‘age of religious war’. In 2009, as in 1641, the bodies of victims and survivors play a central role in how we come to terms with and attempt to give meaning to natural and manmade catastrophes. Victims and survivors elicit our prayers, our contributions, and in some cases, our collective sense of outrage. The gap between experience and representation, and the political importance of abstract constructions of victims and survivors, links us in important ways to the men and women who lived through the events of the 1640s.



1 Introduction: Irish Relief and British Problems

On 25 October 1641, the Lord Justices and Council of Ireland penned the first in a long series of frantic letters about the Irish rebellion to correspondents in England. Their news was dire, reporting ‘a most disloyal and detestable conspiracy intended by some evil affected Irish papists’. The Lord Justices at the time, Sir William Parsons and Sir John Borlase, interpreted the rising unambiguously, presenting it as a Catholic rebellion. When their letters reached Whitehall and Westminster on 1 November, they generated considerable anxiety and distress. Subsequent days saw the arrival of evermore terrifying news from Ireland. On 5 November – the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up the king and parliament and a date obviously resonant with fears of popish plots – their letters from Dublin warned that all the Protestants in the kingdom, were never in so great danger to be lost as at this instant, no age having produced in this kingdom an example of so much mischief done in so short a time as now we find acted here … by killing and destroying so many English and Protestants in several parts, by robbing and spoiling of them and many thousands more … and all their wickedness acted against the English and Protestants with so much inhumanity and cruelty as cannot be imagined from Christians even towards infidels.

From their very first letters, the Irish Lord Justices asserted that the rebellion was part of a long-anticipated popish plot that had been encouraged ‘by the incitement of jesuits, priests and friars’. This, they claimed, was part

 

HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, vol. 2 (London, 1902), 1–6. CJ, vol. 2, 300. Within hours of learning of the rising, a conference between the Lords and Commons agreed to take defensive measures in London and vulnerable ports, and voted to request a £50,000 emergency loan from the City for an Irish army. They also proposed to examine ‘popish strangers’ in and about London, secure the persons and estates of prominent Catholics in positions of authority in England, and demanded that restrictions be placed upon the Catholic priests in the Queen’s entourage.  HMC, Ormonde, vol. 2, 12.  Ibid., 4.



ENGLAND AND THE 1641 IRISH REBELLION

of the rebels’ aim ‘totally to extirpate the English and Protestants and not to lay down arms until by an act of parliament here the romish religion be established’. Accounts of violence were central to these reports. The Lord Justices’ correspondence of November 5 described general chaos throughout most of Ulster and along the borders of the Pale, characterized by widespread instances in which ‘the rebels barbarously not only murdered but as we are informed hewed [settlers] to pieces’. Later in November, Parsons and Borlase’s letters repeated gory rumors of rebels who had ‘cut off some men’s hands and put out their eyes, and so they take pleasure to let them go away naked, destitute of sight to guide them or hands to guide them’. The stripped and mutilated settlers were left ‘as they were born, knowing that most of them must so perish in the ditches and fields even through cold’. Parliament responded to these horrific dispatches from Dublin in conflicted ways. On the one hand, the news from Dublin confirmed the worst suspicions of many in the Commons. Reflecting in the late 1660s on what he witnessed at Westminster during those fearful days of early November 1641, Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon, recalled that ‘there was a deep silence in the House … and a kind of consternation, most men’s heads having been intoxicated, from their first meeting in parliament, with imaginations of plots and treasonable designs through the three kingdoms’. In the long view, however, parliament took a painfully long time to develop a response to the crisis. Members of parliament quickly approved measures for putting England into a posture of defense, but military mobilization and projects for assisting war victims came more slowly. Although the Scots volunteered to send ten thousand men to put down the rising, suspicions of their motives by both the crown and English parliament delayed this deployment until April 1642. Charles I and his English parliament also viewed each other with suspicion during this key period in the lead-up to the civil war, with both sides fearing the political advantages that might be gained from military intervention in Ireland. This hostility resulted in interminable disputes over prerogative and logistics even as the military situation in Ireland worsened in late 1641 and early 1642. Charitable works on behalf of those left homeless and impoverished by the rebellion came slowly, even as Charles I, members of parliament,    

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 18, 20. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, vol. 1, ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford, 1888), 397. For a discussion of the many rumored plots circulating in 1641, see Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983).  The complexities of various attempts to respond to the rising are addressed extensively in Robert Armstrong, ‘The Long Parliament Goes to War: The Irish Campaigns’, Historical Research 80 (2007), 73–99; Robert Armstrong, Protestant War: The ‘British’ of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Manchester, 2005), 47–51; David Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates: Scottish-Irish Relations in the Mid-Seventeenth Century (Belfast, 1981), 44–80.

10

IRISH RELIEF AND BRITISH PROBLEMS

ministers, and pamphleteers expressed their sympathy for the Protestants in Ireland. Parliament first discussed measures for informal collections on 13 December 1641, only after letters from the Irish Lord Justices threatened to evacuate hundreds of impoverished women and children to English ports. The first charitable collections for victims of the rebellion occurred almost as an afterthought to English concerns with their own spiritual security. Political leaders in the Commons argued in favor of days of fasting on behalf of Ireland, eventually settling on 22 and 23 December 1641 for fasts at Westminster, London, and the suburbs. Parliament intended these as days of self-sacrifice, reflection, and prayer. On the eve of the fast, John Pym suggested that the days of prayer and repentance could also be convenient times for ‘a public collection for the poor distressed women and children come out of Ireland’.10 The Commons gradually took steps to transform these informal measures into a formal relief project for Ireland. On 18 December, the Commons began discussion of a bill for a ‘general contribution thorough [sic] England’ as an intended accompaniment to a national day of fasting to be held on 20 January.11 Although the Commons, the Lords, and the crown expressed enthusiasm for such a project, the bill – which eventually passed as the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan for the Relief of His Majesty’s Distressed Subjects of the Kingdom of Ireland – did not receive Charles I’s assent until after the January fasts had passed.12 The intervening weeks were, of course, a time of turmoil, which saw violent clashes at Westminster, the crown’s failed attempt to arrest radical members of the Commons inside their meeting hall, the beginning of the provincial petitioning campaigns, and the king’s flight from London. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan no doubt suffered as a result of these distractions, but passage also stalled because of intense scrutiny of the bill in the House of Lords. Partially this reflected attempts by the Lords to insure their place in the distribution of contribution money, but the upper house also expressed concerns about the language and scope of the legislation, at one point insisting that references to the rebellion as ‘popish’ be expunged.13 When it was finally passed into law, the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan mandated collections of charity in England and Wales to be used to relieve the ‘great multitudes of godly and religious people’ in Ireland who had been despoiled and had ‘nothing left to depend upon but the charitable benevolence of well disposed persons’. The statute required local churchwardens, overseers of the poor, and local ministers to coordi10

Simonds D’Ewes, The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the First Recess of the Long Parliament to the Withdrawal of King Charles from London [hereafter D’Ewes, Journal], ed. Willson Havelock Coates (New Haven, CT, 1942), 278; CJ, vol. 2, 344. 11 D’Ewes, Journal, 308; CJ, vol. 2, 349. 12 LJ, vol. 4, 529. 13 Ibid., 515.

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nate local collections, maintain close records of the funds raised, and remit all materials related to the charity to London via the county sheriffs.14 A variety of public exhortations to charity, prayer, and activism buttressed these works. Sermons, tracts, newsletters, and street rumors dredged up, and in many cases simply invented news of Ireland’s miseries.15 As early as mid-November 1641, London ministers used the pulpit to exhort their congregations to remember Ireland. A sermon entitled Ireland’s Advocate by the London radical preacher John Goodwin in November 1641 promoted contributions ‘for the present relief of the Protestant party in Ireland’.16 Goodwin argued that Ireland’s danger was more pressing than any other concern that his listeners and readers might have. ‘Ireland must be looked after and provided for’, he wrote, ‘as if we had neither wives, nor children, nor charge, nor were poor, nor wanted money, nor knew what to do with our money otherwise.’17 The parliamentary fast sermons emerged as one forum for articulating the link between English security, Irish Protestant war victims, and charity. The Commons chose Edmund Calamy and Stephen Marshall, two well-known puritan preachers, and James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, to give sermons at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster on the 22 December 1641 fast day. The Commons also ordered these sermons to be printed, and they thus became important public documents that could be read, preached, and dissected by interested parties. The selection of Calamy and Marshall as preachers was itself an act of political partisanship and no doubt fueled some of the king’s concerns about the ways that the war in Ireland could be manipulated by his opponents. Both ministers had been active in the campaign against episcopacy and had appeared at Westminster on several occasions in 1641 in connection with the ‘Root and Branch petition’ against popery in the Church of England.18 Edmund Calamy’s sermon entitled England’s Looking Glass proposed a 14 15

SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141–2. The tracts and pamphlets are discussed in Ethan Howard Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997), 4–34 and Keith J. Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish Historical Studies 18 (1972–3), 143–76. For the wider context of news on the 1641 rebellion, see David A. O’Hara, English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion: 1641–1649 (Dublin, 2006). 16 John Goodwin, Ireland’s Advocate (London, 1641), 1. 17 Ibid., 35. 18 Marshall and Calamy both had extensive contact with the parliamentary opposition leader John Pym. In 1641, Calamy’s home in London hosted informal gatherings for a group of high-profile puritan ministers, including Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and John White. While in disagreement on many specifics, this group generally agreed on the twin dangers posed by popery and the Laudian bishops. For more on the key issues at stake, see Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement c.1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997); Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (Oxford, 1992); John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640–1648 (Princeton, 1969).

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sad vision of England’s failures as a Christian nation, presenting the kingdom as absorbed in petty disputes while Irish Protestants bled: Methinks I see (do not you so also?) the poor people of Ireland looking out of their windows, and crying out…. Why is aid so long delayed? Where are England’s bowels? Methinks I see the very flames of this great fire that is kindled in Ireland. Oh, let this fire melt our hard hearts into pity and compassion.19

Marshall and Calamy both asserted that relief for Ireland must not end with charity and prayer. Rather, they separately argued for speedier military assistance and measures to put down popish intrigue at home. Calamy complained that although reformers in the Long Parliament had ‘stubb’d up many unprofitable trees and … removed a great deal of rubbage’, more needed to be done in order to root out the dangerous forces of popery still plotting at home.20 Marshall went further, suggesting that the continued presence of ‘relics of idolatry’ in the English churches, preserved by the machinations of ‘magistrates and ministers [who have] taken sin’s part and … join with sin against God’ had drawn the Lord’s anger, and that the bloodshed in Ireland represented a prelude to direr punishments in store for England.21 Explicitly these sermons demanded greater activism by members of parliament in the audience and an attitude of contrition and repentance in order to divert divine anger. Although originally addressed to members of parliament, both sermons entered print culture in subsequent weeks, exposing a wider audience to this call for assistance. The body of devotional literature associated with the crisis in Ireland soon increased. Beginning in February 1642, Parliament mandated monthly fasts for Ireland. These were intended as days of reflection and prayer, but also created regular opportunities for ministers to articulate the connections between the nation’s religious and political circumstances. Although the monthly fast sermons quickly became partisan in the context of mobilization for war in England, appeals for Irish relief endured.22 In Meroz Cursed, arguably the most widely circulated of the fast sermons, Stephen Marshall in February 1642 exhorted English Protestants to make ‘your contributions … more frequent and ordinary … for the relief

19 20 21 22

Edmund Calamy, England’s Looking-Glass (London, 1642), 36–7. Ibid., 53. Stephen Marshall, Reformation and Desolation (London, 1642), 53, 38. For the development of the fast sermons, see Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, esp. 22–59; H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament’, in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change and Other Essays, 2nd edn (London, 1972), 294–344; William Sheils, ‘Provincial Preaching on the Eve of the Civil War: Some West Riding Fast Sermons’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honor of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge, 1994), 290–312.

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of our distressed brethren in Ireland’.23 As a primer for the fast sermons published early in 1642 suggested, successful intervention on behalf of those ‘now groaning under the tyrannical cruelty of [the] rebellious miscreants in Ireland’ required prayer, self-reflection, and the eradication of the sources of sin in England.24 To many, the war in Ireland thus reflected a fundamental spiritual crisis throughout Charles I’s kingdoms. Assessing the impact of the Irish relief projects that arose in this period depends largely upon how one defines success. The charitable collections prescribed by parliament raised fairly small sums. According to an account drawn up in September 1646, the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan and a subsequent 1643 ordinance for collections raised £43,931 in free contributions and an additional £9,330 in loans.25 Historians agree that this was a small sum.26 On the other hand, in comparison to other English collections for the relief of Protestant war victims this was a significant achievement. At several points in the 1620s and 1630s, England conducted collections for the relief of Protestant victims of war on the continent. Such collections generated meager responses. During a series of collections staged nationwide between 1628 and 1632, for example, the English people raised only £9,478 for the despoiled inhabitants of the Palatinate.27 Against this mark, the Irish collection appears much more successful. Moreover, the Irish project drew out a large number of small contributors. London parishes alone raised a total of £9,032 14s 6d under the terms of the Act, and returns preserve the names of 6,872 individual contributors.28 Local returns, which are discussed in more detail in chapter 7 below, indicate that between one-third and two-thirds of the inhabitants of parishes voluntarily gave something to the cause.29 From the perspective of war victims, however, the English collections were a miserable failure. Few funds were ever sent into Ireland, and the Lord Justices’ correspondence consistently complained of the hardships faced by the despoiled settler population. Throughout the 1640s, large numbers 23

Stephen Marshall, Meroz Cursed (London, 1642), 54. For other examples, see Edmund Calamy, God’s Free Mercy to England (London, 1642), 50 and Simeon Ash, Best Revenge for the Most Oppressed (London, 1642), 55. 24 Wonderful Effects of a True and Religious Fast (London, 1642), sig. A4f. 25 TNA SP 16/539, 421. 26 Hugh Hazlett, ‘The Financing of the British Armies in Ireland 1641–9’, Irish Historical Studies 1 (1938–9), 29–31; Karl S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971), 54–5. Armstrong suggests that the collections were primarily intended as a ‘goodwill gesture’. Armstrong, Protestant War, 53. 27 The Thirty Years’ War collections are discussed in Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603–1642 (Leiden, 1989), 176–84. 28 TNA SP 16/539, 421; Joseph Cope, “‘Ireland Must Be Looked After”: Problems of Survival and Relief during the 1641 Irish Rebellion’, Ph.D. thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 2001, 299. 29 For general comments on the success of the collection, see Hazlett, ‘Financing of the British Armies’, 29–31; John Morrill, ‘Introduction’, in John Wilson (ed.), Buckinghamshire Contributions for Ireland 1642 and Richard Grenvilles’s Military Accounts 1642–1645 (Oxford, 1983), vii–xiii.

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of individuals inhabited makeshift housing on the outskirts of Dublin and their depositions were full of complaints about poverty. The Commons freely diverted funds from charity to military purposes, and in Ireland the Lord Justices complained that they too often had to make the ‘hard and lamentable’ decision to use English relief monies to pay troops defending Dublin.30 Protestants who fled to England discovered that their reception in English parishes could be equally cold. Although the evidence from English parishes is scattered, it reveals that the Irish war refugees experienced long-term dislocations. Local churchwardens’ accounts described bands of war victims, many of them widows and orphans, throughout the 1640s. Parliament, while cognizant of the problem, only rarely directed contribution money to these wandering poor. Although the victims of the 1641 rebellion loom large in the print culture of the early 1640s, it is also clear that the needs of the survivors often went unmet. The problem of settler survival is still one of the least understood aspects of the Irish rebellion. In the words of Jane Ohlmeyer, a gaping hole in recent scholarship surrounds ‘the survival strategies adopted by beleaguered Protestants during the 1640s’.31 Chapters 2 and 3 of this book seek to address this issue, and contend that the depositions reveal extensive evidence of cross-cultural negotiation and cooperation, even in the worst moments of the rising. Equally important is the obvious gap between the experience of survival and the representations of war victims. To understand this issue, it is necessary to conceive of survival not merely as an Irish local problem, but as something situated within a broader British context, in which the bodies of Anglo-Protestant war victims were infused with enormous cultural and political significance. Within the last several decades, a great deal of scholarship has pursued ‘British’, ‘archipelagic’, or ‘three kingdoms’ approaches to mid-seventeenth-century history. This reflects a broader historiographical movement, which seeks to move beyond narrowly defined national histories in order to understand important regional contexts inclusive of the whole of the British 30

NLI Ms. 2542, 241–2. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan defined relief as charity to Irish war victims, but also suggested that funds might be used ‘for the raising of men to suppress the said rebellion’; see SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141. For a brief discussion of the Act in the context of English military policy in Ireland, see Hazlett, ‘Financing of the British Armies’, 21–41. Information on appeals to the Netherlands for relief after 1643, along lines similar to the Act, can be found in Ole Peter Grell, ‘Godly Charity or Political Aid? Irish Protestants and International Calvinism’, Historical Journal 39 (1996), 734–53. 31 Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘Introduction: A Failed Revolution?’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995), 7–8. One exception can be found in a chapter entitled ‘Experiencing Rebellion in Ireland’ in Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638–1661 (London, 2000), 44–74. Bennett summarizes accounts of survival in the depositions but does little to analyze the context in which survival (and violence) occurred, the complicated negotiations engaged in by endangered English settlers, or the interplay between deponents and the Dublin authorities who recorded their statements on the conflict.

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Isles as well as the Atlantic basin.32 The three kingdoms reflected internal diversity – including different religious cultures, different social structures and customs, and, frequently, different languages – but were at the same time linked structurally by historical, social, and economic ties. When James VI of Scotland took the English throne as James I in 1603, the once independent kingdoms of Scotland and England formed the core of a new composite British monarchy even as the two nations maintained separate and distinctive political, legal, social, and religious structures and institutions.33 Ireland occupied a complicated position within this new polity. Only with the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War in 1603 could England claim to have even partially subordinated key Native Irish interests, and the stability of this conquest was tenuous. Matters of religion complicated matters enormously. Although many issues separated the presbyterian Kirk in Scotland from the episcopalian Church of England, both national churches adhered to a Protestant theology and, as a result of historical experiences, espoused a stridently anti-popish worldview. In Ireland, by contrast, the piecemeal nature of the English conquest and the association of Protestantism with the ‘New English’ meant that by the time of James I’s accession as a British king, the technically prescribed Roman Catholic religion was still practiced by a majority of the Irish population.34 32

The origins of the ‘New British History’ can be traced to J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 601–28. The subsequent thirty years have seen an enormous expansion of scholarship with a British focus, although the methods and approaches vary considerably; for a recent critical analysis of key works, see Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘The “Old” British Histories?’, Historical Journal 50 (2007), 499–512. Significant contributions include: Ciaran Brady and Jane H. Ohlmeyer (eds), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005); Allan Macinnes and Jane H. Ohlmeyer (eds), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbors (Dublin, 2002); Glenn Burgess (ed.), The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715 (London, 1999); S.J. Connolly (ed.), Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1400 (Dublin, 1998); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge, 1998); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (New York, 1996); Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London, 1995); Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995); Ronald Asch (ed.), Three Nations: A Common History? (Bochum, 1993). 33 For the union of the crowns, see: Jenny Wormald, ‘The High Road from Scotland: One King, Two Kingdoms’, in Grant and Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdoms?, 123–32; Allan Macinnes, ‘Regal Union for Britain, 1603–1638’, in Burgess (ed.), New British History, 33–45; Roger A. Mason, Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge, 1994); Keith Brown, Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603–1715 (New York, 1992); Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana, IL, 1990); Brian Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford, 1987), 185–92; Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1986). 34 For key works on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ireland, see: Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005); Vincent Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (eds), Taking Sides? Colonial and Confessional Mentalités in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2003); Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003); Karl S. Bottigheimer and Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘The Irish Reformation in European Perspective’, Archiv

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Historians have pursued various approaches to ‘British’ history in the era of the union of the crowns. An important strand of scholarship explores the extension of English authority throughout the British Isles and beyond. This transpired through conquest and settlement, but also necessitated the manipulation or creation of constitutional relationships as new territories were absorbed into the English legal and political system.35 This approach, however, also runs the risk of Anglocentrism. English power and politics remain the central analytical issues in many of these works, often obscuring other contexts.36 For the seventeenth century, when England’s political and economic ascendancy was only partially formed, John Morrill has suggested that historians should pay closer attention to the ‘dialectical processes

für Reformationsgeschichte 89 (1998), 268–309; Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin, 1997); Samantha Meigs, The Reformations in Ireland: Tradition and Confessionalism, 1400–1690 (New York, 1997); Alan Ford, J.I. McGuire, and Kenneth Milne (eds), As By Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, 1995); Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal 21 (1978), 475–502. Also important in this historiography is the debate between Karl Bottigheimer, Brendan Bradshaw, and Nicholas Canny on the nature of the Reformation in Ireland. See Karl S. Bottigheimer, ‘Revisionism and the Irish Reformation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000), 581–96; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Revisionism and the Irish Reformation: A Rejoinder’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000), 587–91; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The English Reformation and Identity Formation in Ireland and Wales’, in Bradshaw and Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity, 43–111; Nicholas Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: Une Question Mal Posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30 (1979); 423–50; Karl S. Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the Reformation in Ireland: Une Question Bien Posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), 196–207. 35 Problems of Ireland and the constitution are treated in Patrick Little, ‘The English Parliament and the Irish Constitution’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s: Essays in Honour of Dónal Cregan (Dublin, 2001), 106–21; Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Catholic Confederates and the Constitutional Relationship between Ireland and England, 1641–1649’, in Brady and Ohlmeyer (eds), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, 207–29; Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge, 2000); Hiram Morgan, Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin, 1999); Michael Perceval-Maxwell, ‘Ireland and the Monarchy in the Early Stuart Multiple Kingdom’, Historical Journal 34 (1991), 279–95; ­Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore, 1988); Hans S. Pawlish, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge, 1985); Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979). The extension of English authority into Ireland can be profitably examined in comparison with the expansion of state power into other corners of the British Isles, particularly Wales. See Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Ciaran Brady, ‘Comparable Histories? Tudor Reform in Wales and Ireland’, in Ellis and Barber (eds), Conquest and Union, 64–86; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Tudor Reformation and Revolution in Wales and Ireland: The Origins of the British Problem’, in Bradshaw and Morrill (eds), The British Problem, 39–65; Nicholas Canny, ‘Irish, Scottish and Welsh Responses to Centralization, c.1530– c.1640’, in Grant and Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom?, 147–69; Jenny Wormald, ‘The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Core and Colonies?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 2 (1992), 175–94; Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley, 1975). 36 Canny, for example, complains that that ‘much of what appears as “new British history” is nothing but “old English history” in “three kingdoms” clothing, with the concern still being to explain the origin of events that have always been regarded as pivotal in England’s historical development’. Canny, ‘Irish, Scottish and Welsh Responses to Centralization’, in Grant and Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom?, 147–8.

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involved’ in the British Isles, as the constituent nations negotiated around each other.37 A related strand of scholarship focuses on the ways that English-created colonies, including the Irish plantations, drew the peoples of the Isles together in unprecedented ways.38 The Ulster plantations, inaugurated after key Native Irish leaders went into exile in 1607, represents one example of this melding of British subjects occurred. The redistribution of Irish land to English and Scottish settlers had the effect of creating communities comprised of English Protestants, Scots Presbyterians, Native Irish Catholics, and Old English Catholics. As Nicholas Canny has argued, the result ‘was a hybrid … [and was] described as “British” by both English and Scottish observers’.39 Beneath the surface, unresolved conflicts and new grievances simmered, but these men and women also found ways to work around the ‘tension between living together and living apart’.40 For a number of historians, this accommodation represents the ‘Britishness’ of seventeenth-century history. 37

John Morrill, ‘The British Problem, c. 1534–1707’, in Bradshaw and Morrill (eds), The British Problem, 1–2. 38 An important strand of historical analysis attempts to situate ‘British’ history within a transatlantic and colonial, rather than archipelagic, context. For reviews of this literature, see especially David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, 2002); Nicholas Canny, ‘Writing Early Modern History: Ireland, Britain, and the Wider World’, Historical Journal 46 (2003), 723– 47; Nicholas Canny, ‘Writing Atlantic History: Or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America’, Journal of American History 86 (1999), 1093–1114; Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘SeventeenthCentury Ireland and the New British Histories’, American Historical Review 104 (1999), 446–62; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’, American Historical Review 87 (1982), 325–8. Key works situating British history within an Atlantic context include: Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson, Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection (Leiden, 2006); Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Armitage and Braddick (eds), British Atlantic World; David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000); Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 1999); David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review 104 (1999), 427–45; Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999); Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998); Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991); Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicolas P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair (eds), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Detroit, 1979). 39 N.P. Canny, ‘Fashioning “British” Worlds in the Seventeenth Century’, Pennsylvania History 64 (1997), 39. See also Canny, Making Ireland British, 23–6 and Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape 1600–1670 (Dublin, 1984), 194. 40 Alan Ford, ‘Living Together, Living Apart: Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland’, in Ford and McCafferty (eds), Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, 13. Ford argues that this period saw ‘superficially convivial relations … underpinned on both sides by the threat of violence’; ibid., 14. In contrast, Raymond Gillespie has suggested that ‘the commonalities which existed across confessional and social divisions’ offered a broad ground for compromise and negotiation in the plantations. Annual ritual cycles, religious rites of passage, and shared ideas about providence and the afterlife crossed confessional and ethnic lines, resulting in a ‘mixed theology’ that facilitated cooperation and a reasonably functional social order. See Raymond Gillespie, A Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), 10, 148.

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In the 1630s, the policies of Charles I exposed key tensions inherent in the British composite monarchy. In Scotland, attempts at greater centralization and liturgical reform, which would have made the Kirk more similar to the Church of England, failed miserably and led to protest and full-scale rebellion.41 In Ireland, Sir Thomas Wentworth, elevated to first earl of Strafford in 1640, spearheaded policies that in the name of centralizing authority managed to alienate much of the Catholic and Protestant population. Many of these controversies reflected Ireland’s religious and ethnic diversity. Protracted negotiations over the ‘Graces’, which would have lifted key legal sanctions against some Roman Catholics in Ireland in exchange for payments to the crown, infuriated the Old English even as they repeatedly avowed their loyalty to the Stuart regime.42 Projected land confiscations in previously unplanted territory threw landed Catholics, both Old English and Irish, into a panic. On the other side of the confessional divide, Protestants also feared for their future under Wentworth’s regime. Scots Presbyterians found themselves penalized because they did not fit into Charles I’s vision of one national, episcopal Church of Ireland, and when the Bishops’ Wars began in Scotland, Scots who supported the Covenant found themselves subjected to harsh legal penalties. The New English also harbored grievances over their perceived marginalization under Wentworth’s new regime.43 It is difficult to understand these interconnected disputes without paying due attention to events in all three Stuart kingdoms.44 Charles I encountered 41 For the Bishops’ Wars and the Covenanters, see: Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), chapters 2 and 3; Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge, 1994); Allan I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641 (Edinburgh, 1991); Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 1990); J.S. Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh, 1990); Maurice Lee, Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–37 (Urbana, IL, 1985); David Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters (New York, 1974). 42 Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–1642 (Ithaca, NY, 1966), 75–89. See also Aidan Clarke, The Graces, 1625–41 (Dundalk, 1968). 43 Wentworth’s career and the associated controversies are covered in: Hugh F. Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633–1641: A Study in Absolutism (Manchester, 1959); Clarke, Old English in Ireland, esp. 60–110; J.F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, 1996); Patrick Little, ‘The Earl of Cork and the Fall of the Earl of Strafford’, Historical Journal 39 (1996), 619–35. 44 An increasing number of works attempt to situate the conflicts of the mid-Stuart period within a British context, exploring the interactions between the three kingdoms. These include several comprehensive works on the early civil wars, for example: Alan I. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (New York, 2005); Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven, CT, 2005); David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms 1637–49 (New York, 2004); Trevor Royle, The British Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1638–1660 (New York, 2004); Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002); Bennett, Civil Wars Experienced; John Morrill, ‘The War(s) of the Three Kingdoms’, in Burgess (ed.), The New British History, 63–91; John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998); John R. Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 1997); Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, 1638–1651 (London, 1997); J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Atlantic Archipelago and the

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multiple political and logistical problems during the Bishops’ Wars, culminating in the disastrous defeat of Charles I’s army at Newburn in August 1640 and the Scots occupation of Newcastle. This in turn necessitated the king to open unwelcome and potentially dangerous negotiations with his critics in the English parliament. In the late 1620s, Charles I had an increasingly confrontational relationship with this institution over matters of economy, religion, and political principle. This culminated in the 1629 dismissal of parliament, a moment that saw the king’s messengers barred from entering the House of Commons as angry members of the Commons held the Speaker in his chair and read a list of grievances into the official record. For eleven years, Charles I ruled without a parliament – and as a consequence, without a regular and reliable source of income – until the economic demands of the Scottish army in the north made one unavoidable. The Long Parliament, summoned in November 1640 after the dissolution of the acrimonious and short-lived parliament of April and May 1640, brought English members of parliament into direct contact with Scottish and Irish affairs. This parliament helped negotiate peace with the Scots, tried and convicted Sir Thomas Wentworth for his conduct in Ireland, dealt with the fallout from the 1641 rebellion, and raised an army for war against the king in 1642. Conrad Russell, in The Fall of the British Monarchies and Causes of the English Civil War, attributes the mid-seventeenth century crises to difficulties inherent in reconciling the Stuart monarchs’ desire for unity across their realms with the distinct religious identities and political systems of the three kingdoms.45 In this analysis, Charles I played a key role, as he consistently misunderstood the nature of composite monarchy and miscalculated the extent of his authority.46 In the early 1640s, Charles found some room to negotiate around his enemies. With the outbreak of the 1641 rising, however, the perceived connections between the Irish rebels and the Roman Catholic Church represented for John Pym and other parliamentary critics of the Stuart regime ‘a validation of all their worst fears and a justification for the most stringent measures to root out the lingering popery in their midst’.47 Under these circumstances, the king could not dissolve his increasingly agitated parliament ‘without sacrificing one of his three kingdoms, or without branding himself forever as the ally of the papists’.48 Russell’s approach to British history has elicited a number of criticisms, many of which focus on the high-political and Anglo-centric focus of his work. John Morrill complains that Russell’s perspective privileges the significance of the English civil war and ultimately asserts ‘that to understand what War of the Three Kingdoms’, in Bradshaw and Morrill (eds), The British Problem, 172–91; Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies. 45 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 28–9. 46 Conrad Russell, Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), 185. 47 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 415. 48 Russell, Causes of the English Civil War, 18.

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happened in England in 1642 we need to see what happened first in Scotland and Ireland, so that we can see how that allows us to understand English history’.49 On the other hand, other historians have more explicitly accepted the centrality of England to the story of the 1640s. In a recent work on the civil war era, Austin Woolrych, for example, justifies this focus, claiming ‘that England was where most of the crucial decisions were taken, and most of the crucial battles fought, which determined the fates of all three kingdoms. Sheer intelligibility commands a closer focus on England.’50 Likewise, David Scott asserts that England’s political and economic centrality was ‘a fundamental truth about the relative power and importance of the constituent parts of the Stuart dynastic agglomeration’.51 On the other hand, a number of works focusing on Ireland in the 1640s have decentered England, presenting a more balanced picture of the interplay between Ireland and the metropolis. H.F. Kearney’s Strafford in Ireland and Aidan Clarke’s Old English in Ireland, for example, both situate affairs in Ireland within a British context. Wentworth and many of the Old English operated within a transnational context, and in many ways their histories are incomprehensible without paying equal attention to Ireland and England.52 Jane Ohlmeyer has likewise conducted a balanced study of Randall MacDonnell, second earl of Antrim, whose political maneuvering encompassed the court of Charles I, the Scottish Isles, and the Ulster plantations.53 Thanks to M. Perceval-Maxwell’s The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Micheál Ó Siochrú’s Confederate Ireland, and Robert Armstrong’s The ‘British’ of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, we now have an excellent Britannic history of Irish affairs spanning the 1640s, which clearly shows the interplay between the three kingdoms. The Irish involved in plotting the 1641 rising ‘had a good grasp of English events’ and felt pushed into rebellion by perceived aggressions by anti-popish interests in Scotland and

49

John Morrill, ‘The Causes of Britain’s Civil Wars’, in his Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993), 259. For a similar criticism from an Irish historian’s perspective, see Nicholas Canny, ‘Review of Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies’, Irish Economic and Social History 19 (1992), 112–15. 50 Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 3. The point is similarly articulated by John Adamson, who suggests that ‘anglocentrism is not just a chauvinist quirk of twentieth-century historiography; it was, arguably, an unavoidable reality in the seventeenth-century’. Based on English economic and political power and population size, Adamson sees a fundamental ‘asymmetry’ among the British kingdoms and contends that the breakdown of English hegemony during the Bishops’ Wars and Irish rising represent brief lapses within a longer history of English expansion. See John Adamson, ‘The English Context of the British Civil Wars’, History Today 48 (November 1998), 23–9; quote on 27. 51 Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1–2. Although neither Woolrych nor Scott cover the internal dynamics of the 1641 rebellion in much detail, they do, however, acknowledge the fundamental importance of the Irish rising in stirring up English parliamentary activism and moving the nation towards civil war. See ibid., 33–6; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 192–208. 52 Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 78–80; Clarke, Old English in Ireland, 69–79. 53 Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randall MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683 (Cambridge, 1993).

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Ireland.54 Ó Siochrú’s work on the Catholic Confederates demonstrates that deep-running divisions worked against cooperation between the Old English and Irish. In the mid-1640s, this resulted in a complicated dance between an internally divided Catholic leadership, Irish Protestant Royalists including the earl of Ormond, and English Royalists.55 Whereas Ó Siochrú’s work reveals the disintegration of the Catholic Confederates beneath the weight of conflicting aspirations and mutual mistrusts, Armstrong points to the knitting together of various Protestant interests into an aggressively antiCatholic bloc. At the onset of the Irish rising, Armstrong sees significantly blurred religious and ethnic identities and suggests that Dublin Castle officials initially framed opposition to the rebellion as encompassing diverse ‘forces of social order, mobilizing … against tumult from below’.56 With the escalation of the war came a failure ‘to make distinctions between the more and less guilty’ as Irish Protestants came to view loyal Catholics with increasing suspicion.57 By the time of Oliver Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland, the Protestant interest had become fairly cohesive and closely aligned with the English parliament. Each of these works on Ireland in the 1640s demonstrates the important connections between the three Stuart kingdoms and the importance of understanding the interplay between different interests situated throughout the British Isles. Evidence from local communities complicates attempts to bring an inclusive ‘British’ perspective into histories of the mid-Stuart crisis. A number of Irish historians, for example, suggest that the conflict that exploded in Ireland in October 1641 reflected tensions specific to local communities. Economic tensions arising from the redistribution of land and wealth during the plantations played a key role in at least some of the violence that occurred during the Irish rising.58 As the 1640s wore on, retributive violence also tended to reflect local experiences.59 Shifts in local power relationships during the period of plantation also shaped the rising. In a detailed work on county Sligo, Mary O’Dowd explores the long-term resentments that arose as the once powerful O’Donnell sept steadily lost power to New English settlers after 1603. This marginalization in turn led directly to the O’Donnells’

54 55 56 57 58 59

Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 116–17. Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 55–87. Armstrong, Protestant War, 24. Ibid., 39. These issues are treated at length in Canny, Making Ireland British, particularly chapter 8. For retributive violence, see: Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641–1653’, Past and Present 195 (2007), 55–70; Armstrong, Protestant War, 33– 6; Kenneth Nichols, ‘The Other Massacres: English Killings of Irish, 1641–2’, in Edwards, Lenihan, and Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity, 176–91; Robin Clifton, ‘ “An Indiscriminate Blackness?” Massacre, Counter-massacre, and Ethnic Cleansing in Ireland’, in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (eds), The Massacre in History (New York, 1999), 113–16.

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participation in the 1641 rising.60 Interpersonal tensions related to plantation policies also could be important locally. Raymond Gillespie’s important article on the murder of Arthur Champion, a Dublin merchant and landowner in county Fermanagh, focuses on the divisive actions that directly informed rebel attacks. Contemporaries described Champion and several of his New English associates as ‘proud and haughty … [and] failing to conform to the social rules of friendship marked by courtesies, such as etiquette at meetings, gift giving or hospitality’. Champion’s failures as a neighbor led directly to his selection as a target of violence when the structures of law and order fell apart in 1641.61 From the English side, a great deal of scholarship has likewise explored the importance of localism in the civil war period.62 Central to many of these works are questions of political awareness and engagement, particularly the extent to which ‘ordinary’ English men and women understood the events around them, decided to take sides in the developing conflict, and acted on these decisions. Historians recognize the importance of the Irish rebellion in this process, but differ in their assessments of the specific significance of the conflict. The Irish rising generated hundreds of print representations, many of them presenting graphically violent accounts of atrocities by rebel Catholics. As much as 15 per cent of London’s total print output in 1641 and 1642 was devoted to the rebellion, and Protestant refugees from Ireland added to the confusion by spreading ‘stories of the cruelties practiced by the Irish on the Protestants’ in English towns and villages.63 Keith Lindley suggests that the greatest impact of tales of atrocity and bloodshed occurred in regions that were geographically proximate to Ireland, where fears of an Irish invasion raised local anxieties and occasionally triggered panics.64 Robin Clifton’s work also focuses on provincial panics, but argues that these arose from a complicated mixture of pre-existing local tensions, an awareness of national political problems, and concerns about the news arriving

60

Mary O’Dowd, Power, Politics and Land: Early Modern Sligo, 1568–1688 (Belfast, 1991), 56–9. 61 Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Murder of Arthur Champion and the 1641 Rising in Fermanagh’, Clogher Record 14 (1993), 57–9. 62 Key works on the interplay between the English people and political leaders in the civil war period include: David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006); David Cressy, ‘Revolutionary England 1640–1642’, Past and Present 181 (2003), 35–71; John Walter, ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’, History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 171–82; John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648 (London, 1999); John Morrill, Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650 (London, 1976); Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1978). An expansive body of local history on the civil wars also deals with these issues; for a somewhat dated introduction, see R.C. Richardson, The English Civil Wars: Local Aspects (Stroud, 1997). 63 Lindley, ‘Impact of the 1641 Rebellion’, 144–7. For the period October 1641 to April 1642, the percentage is much higher, with Lindley identifying 205 of 842 tracts that referred to the rebellion. 64 Ibid., 155.

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from Ireland. When provincials mobilized, they spoke of defending themselves against Irish rebels, but their actions revealed a wider concern that ‘all Catholics [were] actual or potential traitors’. Local magistrates in late 1641 and 1642 feared that the Irish rebellion created a situation in which ‘a sudden assault by Catholics’ living secretly in England could be coordinated with an Irish invasion.65 In this analysis, the apparent seriousness of the Irish rebellion had an important effect in concretizing vague fears about local defense and Catholic recusants. These fears were not limited to coastal areas with easy access to Ireland.66 The intersection between local fears and high political activism has also been the subject of considerable attention. Lindley’s work suggests that parliamentary leaders engaged in the opportunistic manipulation of news from Ireland. Recognizing that news from Ireland would be ‘one of the most effective weapons in the parliament’s propaganda arsenal’, John Pym and his allies in parliament seized upon the rebellion as a pretense for stepping up attacks on the king.67 Other historians focus on the dialectical relationship between parliament and the people in 1641 and 1642. Anthony Fletcher’s work on the London crowds and provincial petitioning campaigns in The Outbreak of the English Civil War provides a good example of this approach. In December 1641, the people of London took to the streets partially as a response to ‘wildly exaggerated assessment of the popish danger’ arising from the Irish rising.68 This had been encouraged by members of parliament who framed the Irish war as a popish massacre, but even the most radical actors did not anticipate the Londoners’ response and expressed ambivalence about the London crowd. In context, Pym and his allies had little room ‘to condemn the demonstrations once they had begun’ but also worried that the 65

Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past and Present 52 (1971), 30–1. 66 By contrast, David Cressy suggests a deeper and more general crisis in print culture in 1641 and 1642. As the mechanisms of Stuart censorship broke down, the nation found itself saturated with sensationalized publications, which ranged over a wide variety of topics. The effect of this explosion in print was a breakdown in deference. As readers encountered new and often competing ideas, they debated and questioned what they read, and this process ultimately led to an increased ‘insolence and refractoriness’ towards the whole of the Stuart social order. Cressy, England on Edge, 281–309; quote on 347. In Cressy’s analysis, the Irish rebellion played a fairly marginal role, primarily serving to confuse an already chaotic popular political climate. See ibid., 354–64. 67 Lindley, ‘Impact of the 1641 Rebellion’, 164. Other historians also have discerned opportunism in the ways that discourses on the rebellion were manipulated to serve the pre-existing political agendas of parliamentary radicals. See Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 197–201; Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 32–3; J.H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, MA, 1941), 182–4. Jason Peacey suggests that Parliamentary radicals were especially capable of using print accounts of the rising to back up their wider political agenda, claiming that the 1641 rising was ‘a carefully stage-managed news event’. He argues that leaks of letters from Ireland and parliamentary orders to print official account of the rising occurred at moments of political tension and were designed to provide ‘the domestic reading audience … timely reminders of the popish threat’. Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004), 241–2. 68 Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (New York, 1981), 173.

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longer the protests raged, the more they ‘seemed to confirm the worst fears of his enemies’.69 In this analysis, Parliamentary radicals only partially shaped politics at the end of 1641 and often found themselves propelled forward on a course that they feared.70 John Walter’s Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution takes a microhistorical approach to the intersections between local anxieties, high politics, news of the Irish rising, and the anti-popish worldview. A closely argued analysis of the August 1642 attack on Sir John Lucas’s house in Essex and subsequent riots in the Stour Valley, Walter’s work provides a solid example of the continuous interplay between local anxieties and national politics in the early 1640s.71 Lucas managed to attract ‘micropolitical’ hostility as a result of an enclosure dispute with the corporation of Colchester, and ‘high political’ hostility as a result of his reputation as an ‘active enforcer of royal policy’ in the late 1630s and early 1640s.72 The Irish rebellion proved a decisive point in transforming these simmering resentments into action. Many of the publications and parliamentary speeches about Ireland disseminated an argument ‘which emphasized the role of God’s people in the developing religious and political conflict’.73 By this logic, the English people had an important role in defending themselves against the nation’s enemies. The inhabitants of Essex engaged themselves in this process in January and February 1642, directing petitions to Westminster that underlined their local grievances, their popular support for more strident measures against the ‘malignant party’, and their hopes that something could be done to end the Irish rebellion and defend against domestic popish plots.74 Parliamentary initiatives in early 1642, particularly the publication of the Protestation, reinforced the local assumption of ‘a popular right to police

69 70

Ibid., 176. The significance of the tumults of December 1641 and January 1642 has received detailed scholarly attention, and they are often identified as important in mobilizing Charles I’s decision to flee the metropolis. See Cressy, England on Edge, 384–91; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics (Oxford, 1961). On the other hand, Conrad Russell downplays the importance of the London crowds, acknowledging that they posed ‘an ugly scene’, but claiming that the protestors never posed a sufficient threat ‘to justify Charles’s later claim that he was facing a threat to his life and to those of his wife and children’. See Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 445. The importance of the crowd during other moments of anti-popish anxiety in the Stuart period has been discussed in: Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Culture in Early Modern England (New York, 2002); Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), 141–2; Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987). 71 John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999). 72 Ibid., 141. 73 Ibid., 290. 74 Ibid., 304, 319. The petitioning campaign could also work in the opposite direction, with the crown using the county assizes in 1642 as an arena for crafting petitions for order and lawful obedience. See ibid., 310; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 300–11.

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the confessional boundaries of local society’. The attack on Lucas’s property, which quickly expanded to include Laudian ministers and suspected recusants, was triggered ‘not only [by] fears prompted by belief in a popish plot … but also [by] the many cues that parliament and preachers had given them’.75 A number of key issues are apparent in the historiography of the British crisis of the 1640s. One is the question of how to write a ‘British’ history that is truly inclusive of the Stuart kingdoms without unduly privileging the English side of the story. A second is the question of how to reconcile local with national or high-political contexts. As outlined above, many recent British approaches to the history of the 1640s tend to focus on high politics, the interplay and tensions between different centers of power in the Isles, and the problems of religious diversity and constitutional ambiguity in the three kingdoms. Several key works have branched into social and cultural history. Mark Stoyle’s Soldiers and Strangers, for example, provides a provocative interpretation of the importance of ethnicity in the English civil war, suggesting that the tumults of the 1640s were partially driven by ‘a dramatic upsurge in xenophobic feeling among the English people’.76 Social histories that adopt a British perspective are more limited.77 This book attempts to address these issues by exploring a set of issues that cannot be understood in a purely English or Irish context and that requires attention to both the local and national. Survivors of the Irish rebellion occupied multiple British worlds: as inhabitants of the composite communities of the Irish plantations, as subjects of print and political discourses about the nature and scope of the rising, and often as refugees who moved from one British kingdom to another. Irish survivors also provide the opportunity to explore the interconnections between local and high-political contexts. The Irish Lord Justices and the English parliament both fashioned projects for managing the bodies of those who fled from the Irish provinces in the

75 Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution, 305. Dan Beaver likewise finds a complex layering of local tensions, anti-popery, and cues from parliament in favor of local political action in his analysis of the October 1642 attack on the Gloucester estate of Lionel Cranfield, first earl of Middlesex. See Dan Beaver, ‘The Great Deer Massacre: Animals, Honor and Communication in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), 187–216. Walter and Beaver both challenge the conclusions of Brian Manning, who describes the Stour and Gloucester riots as economic protests, ‘indicative of underlying class hatred which cloaked itself in legitimacy by choosing for attack those aristocrats who could be identified by reference to parliament’s generalized denunciations of “papists” and “malignants” ’. See Brian Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (London, 1996), 50. 76 Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, 204. 77 Jane H. Ohlmeyer, for example, writes: ‘Processes, especially state formation and religious reformation, have attracted the greatest interest from historians, whilst the debate had become focused on issues around identity formation as literary scholars have become increasingly involved. By contrast, less attention has been devoted to the social, economic and cultural history of the three kingdoms, whilst comparative history and cross-disciplinary scholarship on the “British” theme has been limited to a few pioneers.’ Ohlmeyer, ‘The “Old” British Histories’, 502.

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1640s. The depositions of men and women like Elizabeth Danvers reveal a great deal of ambiguity in identity, a blurring of social categories, and a range of survival strategies that reflected the refashioning of religion and ethnicity. However, when the Lord Justices communicated with their potential benefactors in England, they presented the Protestant settlers of Ireland as united and deserving victims of a cruel popish menace. This representation played an important role in discourses on the rising in England as well. Parliamentary projects for Irish war victims and print representations of the conflict stressed the deserving nature of the Irish settlers and the enormous danger posed by this most recent expansion of the papist threat. In English local communities, however, Irish refugees encountered apprehensive locals who feared that they might be papist agents planning trouble in coordination with recusants. The repeated references to popery are significant, because they point to one of the limitations of the new British history of the period. John Morrill has argued that the British wars of the 1630s to the 1650s were ‘wars of religion’, similar in structure to the wars that convulsed the European continent in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although cognizant that the British crisis never broke down neatly along confessional lines, Morrill contends that ‘the dynamism of religious language and argument in the years before the outbreak of the war’ played an instrumental role in the conflict.78 Many individuals took sides in the conflict out of a sincere belief that ‘England was in the process of being subjected to the forces of Antichrist, [and] that the prospects were of anarchy, chaos, the dissolution of government and liberties’.79 The papist enemy operated in an international rather than purely British context, with some of the most dangerous manifestations of the threat appearing from the European continent. As Peter Lake has argued, assumptions about popery in the early seventeenth century were rooted in a shared sense of history. Within England’s national spiritual narrative, the ‘anti-religion’ of the Catholic Church had orchestrated any number of plots, including several attempts to assassinate Elizabeth I, the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Treason, and invasion scares associated with the Thirty Years’ War. Accordingly, ‘every generation of English people between the 1580s and the 1640s had personal experience of a popish assault on English independence’.80 The inherent instability and expansiveness of the anti-popish stereotype added to this anxiety. The term popery could refer to any perceived corruption of God’s will, not merely Roman Catholic theology and forms of worship. Thus, anti-popish controversialists often conflated popery with tyranny, arguing that the papacy had ‘usurped’ the natural 78 79 80

Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution, 37–9; quote on 39. Ibid., 63. 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, 1603–1643 (London, 1989), 80.

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political rights of kings by claiming to be God’s representative on earth.81 The excessive or arbitrary use of political power by a sitting monarch, even one claiming to be a Protestant, could also be labeled as a manifestation of popish tyranny. One of the central tensions of Stuart Britain thus arose from basic uncertainty about what guise popery would take in its relentless march against the godly.82 For those concerned with tracking the rise and progress of the popish Antichrist before 1641, the European continent provided a wealth of examples. With the Protestant war effort in Germany collapsing in the early phase of the Thirty Years’ War, Thomas Cogswell and Peter Lake have both found that parliament and the English people began to take an active interest in international events in the later years of James I’s reign. The pamphlets of Thomas Scott, popular plays from the mid-1620s such as Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess, and crowd actions like the 1625 protests staged outside the London home of the Spanish ambassador, provide important evidence of popular political mobilization in favor of English intervention against continental papists.83 Work on the 1630s and early 1640s suggests that this concern continued up until the eve of the breakdown in 1641–2. Caroline Hibbard, for example, finds evidence of significant hostility towards Charles I’s Catholic and French wife, members of the queen’s household and entourage, and the men of the court and English church hierarchy who seemed to lend Henrietta Maria a sympathetic ear.84 Henrietta Maria, as an English queen and the royal mother, represented a close danger, but many in England also believed that the popish enemy plotted more dangerous intrigues from the continent. The scale of confessional war on the continent and the dire straits that the forces of Protestantism faced in the late 1630s and 1640s lent credence to these fears. This is a central theme in Allan Macinnes’s British Revolution, which contends that ‘civil wars within the British Isles were part of the wider European theater of the Thirty Years War’.85 Jonathan Scott likewise argues for an inclusive Euro81 82

Ibid., 79. Carol Z. Weiner, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, Past and Present 51 (1971), 27–62. For the ways that anti-popish discourses infused print culture, theater, and popular politics in the early seventeenth century, see Peter Lake and Michael Questier, Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, 2002), esp. chapter 11. Cynthia Herrup also address the expansive nature of the stereotype, arguing that the broad range of crimes grouped together under the term ‘sodomy’ could be perceived as manifestations of popery. See Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford, 1999), 37. 83 Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, Historical Journal 25 (1982), 808–9, 823–4; Cogswell, Blessed Revolution, 141–2. Cogswell frames his work as a challenge to Conrad Russell’s suggestion in Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979) that the English people were uninterested in national politics in the 1620s, and had only a vague sense of their political identity. 84 Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 39–42, 48–57, 87–8. 85 Macinnes, British Revolution, 4. Macinnes suggests that the ‘new’ British history, by focusing on

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pean perspective on the war. The seventeenth century, he argues, was ‘the century in which Protestantism had to fight for its survival’. With all corners of Europe in danger, England ‘found itself thrust into the front line’ against the papists.86 Charles I for his part was equally motivated by an internationalist worldview, suspecting the loyalties of Calvinist-inspired discourses on religion and politics and fearful of a ‘treasonous puritan and republican conspiracy for control of the powers he inherited under God’.87 Competing sensibilities about dangerous ideas emanating from the continent thus caused the nation to cleave into two hostile camps as the nation moved towards open civil war. Irish Catholics maintained many connections to the continent in the seventeenth century and in the sixteenth century had cultivated important ties to the Spanish monarchy. Many in England no doubt perceived the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland as especially dangerous because of this unique situation.88 Responses to the refugees of the 1641 rising suggest that this perspective deserves greater attention. In Ireland, the evidence from survivor depositions reveals divisions within the ranks of those who supported the rebellion. Mistrust between the Old English and Irish appeared from the start of the war and structured many of the later controversies associated with the cessation and negotiations with the crown. Likewise, divisions between the Scots and English Protestants, and later between Royalists and Parliamentarians plagued the settlers. However, when the English talked about the conflict in interactions between the three kingdoms, has diverted needed attention from continental connections to Scotland and Ireland in particular. Ibid., 2–4. 86 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), 29–30. 87 Ibid., 109–10. Scott’s work is partially informed by works on the ‘general crisis’ of the seventeenth century, drawing parallels to the structural defects of composite monarchy and the disruptive effects of religious and political agitation associated with Calvinism and Counter-Reformation theology. Attempts to situate the British crisis within this ‘general crisis’ include: Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Crisis of the Spanish and Stuart Monarchies in the Mid-Seventeenth Century: Local Problems or Global Process?’, in Brady and Ohlmeyer (eds), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, 252–79; Aidan Clarke, ‘Ireland and the General Crisis’, Past and Present 48 (1970), 79–99. Key contributions to the ‘general crisis’ thesis are collected in T.H. Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560– 1660: Essays from Past and Present (London, 1965); and Geoffrey Parker and Leslie M. Smith (eds), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn (London, 1997). John Morrill, who has otherwise advocated a sensitivity to the significance of British connections to the continent in the 1640s, particularly issues associated with the fear of popery, also warns that the search for connections to the continent can go too far: ‘there were in fact no foreign banners or soldiers owing military allegiance to a foreign prince engaged in the archipelagic wars; and no troops owing allegiance to Charles or his enemies engaged in the continental theaters of the Thirty Years War and no British representatives at the treaties of Westphalia that ended the war. There is a European context for the British wars. … But it is no more necessary … to be aware of it for the 1640s than for any other decade.’ Morrill, ‘War(s) of the Three Kingdoms’, in Burgess (ed.), The New British History, 80. 88 See Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth Century Ireland and Scotland and Their Wider Worlds’, in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin, 2006), 457–83; Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘The Strategic Involvement of Continental Powers in Ireland, 1596–1691’, in Pádraig Lenihan (ed.), Conquest and Resistance: War in Seventeenth Century Ireland (Leiden, 2001), 25–52.

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the key years of 1641–2, all these complexities melted away. At issue was a united papist offensive, fomented by the minions of Rome, Spain and France, which had as its aim the extermination of Protestantism. English responses to the 1641 rising reflected this international, as opposed to British, interpretation of the conflict in Ireland. Evidence pertaining to the bodies of Irish survivors and victims and the attempts to relieve them, it is suggested in the following chapters, provides a foundation for exploring and integrating the local, national, British, and international perspectives on the tumultuous events of 1641–2. Survival was an essentially local problem in Ireland. Settlers came into contact with the rebels and their conflicted aims and fashioned survival strategies within local communities. Because so many settlers did not stay in the provinces, Irish refugees also posed broader regional challenges. Impoverished provincials fled into Dublin, taxed the local economy and presented a significant social problem for the English administrators of Dublin Castle. Many more fled from Dublin to havens in England and Scotland, posing a ‘British problem’ in the truest sense of the term. From the beginning of the rebellion, the Irish Lord Justices recognized that they lacked the resources necessary to fight a war and relieve thousands of displaced persons. Thus, over the course of the war, they repeatedly insisted in correspondence across the Irish Sea that Ireland’s catastrophe endangered England. They found a receptive audience for this argument. To men and women made anxious by foreign and domestic politics in the 1630s and early 1640s, the Irish rebellion represented a predictable expansion of popish aggression. These fears intersected with the sensationalized print industry, which flooded English bookshops with gory accounts of Protestant suffering in Ireland. Ample evidence from England reveals an abstract sympathy for the war victims. However, relief also arrived slowly and often took a back seat to military and political affairs. In English communities, anxieties and suspicions about the refugees exacerbated the practical problems posed by the arrival of hundreds of Irish poor who relocated to England. In port communities, Irish were viewed as economically burdensome, and correspondence from coastal towns reveals that local officials primarily concerned themselves with evacuating refugees before they became a permanent part of the local landscape and poor rolls. As refugees from the Irish rebellion moved through the parishes of England, they did not receive much better treatment. In the Wiltshire cases discussed later in this book, English churchwardens treated Irish refugees no differently from the wandering Irish poor of earlier decades. Responses to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan, however, represent a more charitable facet of the English response to the rebellion. Although local economic conditions and the commitment of the local parish 30

IRISH RELIEF AND BRITISH PROBLEMS

officers affected the success of the collections, local and national evidence reveals a significantly positive response to the call for charity, both in terms of the money raised for the Irish and in terms of the percentage of local populations who gave to the cause. Irish war victims moving through the region offered tangible evidence of the rebellion’s horrors. However, the parishes that saw such refugees responded more positively and consistently to the national relief project, suggesting that the constructed argument for deserving Protestant victimhood was in fact more persuasive than the more immediate evidence provided by the refugees themselves. Finally, the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan reflected international concerns. The statute exemplified a tradition of confessional relief. Adopting the rhetoric of confessional obligations, the English collections for Ireland closely paralleled projects from the 1620s and 1630s, which attempted to raise contributions for Protestants displaced by the Thirty Years’ War. Printed publications on the 1641 rising reinforced this parallel, explicitly comparing and linking Protestant victims in Ireland to Protestant victims in Germany and France. English relief reflected the assumption that the Protestants of Ireland deserved sympathy and assistance, but also arose from fears over the papists’ next attack. To contemporary observers, the victims of the war testified to the reality of the threat of international popery. The bodies of Irish Protestants, brutalized by representatives of an enemy who could soon extend the offensive to England itself, mobilized activism in ways that were singularly important in the politicization of the English people in the early 1640s.

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2 Distress and Great Necessity: The Experience of Survival in 1641

The tale that Elizabeth Danvers told in August 1645 remains tantalizingly unfinished. After giving her account of close calls, survival, and eventual poverty in Dublin, she simply disappears, like the majority of other deponents. Historiographically, the survivors of 1641 also have tended to disappear. A wealth of scholarship over the past two decades has focused on the history of the 1641 rebellion and has allowed the recovery of this history from crude sectarian interpretations and misuses. However, the problem of survivors’ experiences has merited significantly less attention than violence, the causes of the rebellion, and the impact of the rising on Anglo-Irish relations in the seventeenth century. The relative inattention to survival and the 

Within this past twenty or so years, there has been a significant expansion of historical writing on the 1641 rebellion. This reflects new concerns with ‘British’ perspectives on the mid-seventeenth century as well as the rehabilitation of the 1641 depositions as sources. Key contributions include: David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007); Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002); Canny, Making Ireland British; Pádraig Lenihan (ed.), Conquest and Resistance: War in Seventeenth Century Ireland (Leiden, 2001); Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49; Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001); Bennett, Civil Wars Experienced, 44–74; Kathleen Noonan, ‘The Cruel Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth Century Policy and Propaganda’, Historical Journal 41 (1998), 151–77; Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord’; Nicholas Canny, ‘Religion, Politics and the Irish Rising of 1641’, in Judith Devlin and Ronan Fanning (eds), Religion and Rebellion: Papers Read before the 22nd Conference of Historians (Dublin, 1995), 40–70; Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995); Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion; Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising, 2nd edn (Belfast, 1993); Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms; Aidan Clarke, ‘The Genesis of the Ulster Rising’, in Peter Roebuck (ed.), Plantation to Partition: Essays in Ulster History in Honour of J.L. McCracken (Belfast, 1991), 29–45; O’Dowd, Power, Politics and Land; O’Dowd, ‘Women and War in Ireland in the 1640s’, in MacCurtain and O’Dowd (eds), Women in Early Modern Ireland, 91–111; Conrad Russell, ‘The British Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Historical Research 61 (1988), 166–82; Raymond Gillespie, ‘The End of an Era: Ulster and the Outbreak of the 1641 Rising’, in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Dublin, 1986), 191–248; Jerrold I. Casway, Owen Roe O’Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland (Philadelphia, 1984); M. Perceval-Maxwell, ‘The Ulster Rising of 1641 and the Depositions’, Irish Historical Studies 21 (1978–9), 144–67; Lindley, ‘Impact of the 1641 Rebellion’.

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experience of victims has created a significant gap in our understanding of both the social and cultural history of the 1641 rising. This chapter attempts to address this silence by reconstructing the experiences of those who survived the rising. Integral to this is an understanding of the massive archive of survivor testimony collectively known as the 1641 depositions at Trinity College Dublin. Historians have found a number of different ways to use the depositions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these documents provided fodder for contentious and often sectarian-tinged debates about the extent of violence during the war. More productively, in the past several decades, important works have used the depositions to reconstruct a better sense of the chronology and regional impacts of the rising. Nicholas Canny has produced a particularly extensive body of scholarship based on the depositions, which have been persuasive in reconstructing the different regional manifestations of the war, particularly in Ulster versus Leinster and Munster, and in decoding the ways that religious, ethnic, and particularly economic contexts, informed these differences. Important essays by Raymond Gillespie and Hilary Simms have used the archive to dissect specific acts of violence, unraveling the social context and



Aidan Clarke, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, in Peter Fox (ed.), Treasures of the Library: Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, 1986), 111–22.  R. Dunlop, for example, argued that the archive was so deeply tainted by Protestant prejudice that it was ‘impossible for us to disseminate between what was false and what was true in them’; R. Dunlop, ‘The Depositions Relating to the Irish Massacres of 1641: A Response’, English Historical Review 2 (1887), 338–9. Similar statements can be found in J.T. Gilbert, ‘Manuscripts of Trinity College Dublin’, in HMC, 8th Report, Appendix, 572–624; and Thomas Fitzpatrick, The Bloody Bridge and Other Papers Relating to the Insurrection of 1641 (Dublin, 1903). From the opposite side, but no less uncritical is Mary Hickson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century: Or, the Massacres of 1641–2, Their Causes and Results (London, 1884), which asserted that information on atrocities in the depositions can be accepted as fact. See also Mary Hickson, ‘The Depositions Relating to the Irish Massacres of 1641’, English Historical Review 2 (1887), 133–7.  Much of the inspiration for this can be traced to the unfinished work of Walter D. Love. For his preliminary comments, see ‘Civil War in Ireland: Appearances in Three Centuries of Historical Writing’, Emory University Quarterly 22 (1966), 57–72. For the chronology of the rising, see Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 214–39, and Perceval-Maxwell, ‘The Ulster Rising of 1641 and the Depositions’, 148–67. Key regional studies include O’Dowd, Power, Politics and Land, esp. chapters 6 and 7; Nicholas P. Canny, ‘The 1641 Depositions as a Source for the Writing of Social History: County Cork as a Case Study’, in Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelius Buttimer (eds), Cork: History and Society (Dublin, 1993), 249–308; Raymond Gillespie, ‘Mayo and the Rising of 1641’, Cathair na Mart 5 (1985): 38–44; Kevin Forkan, ‘The South Ulster Borderland as a Political Frontier in the 1640s’, Breifne 10 (2004), 270–89; Kevin Forkan, ‘Scottish Protestant Ulster and the Crisis of the Three Kingdoms’, Ph.D. dissertation, National University of Ireland Galway, 2003; Aoife Duignan, ‘All in a Confused Opposition to Each Other: Politics and War in Connacht, 1641–9’, Ph.D. dissertation, University College Dublin, 2005; Sara Willett Duke, ‘New and Old Settlers in Ireland: The County of Wexford Community, 1609–1649’, Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1992. Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rising, and Canny, Making Ireland British, also base much of their discussion of regional and comparative issues on work in the depositions.  See Canny, Making Ireland British, 461–550 and the extensive bibliography of Canny’s works on 1641 in ibid., 592–3.

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by extension the logic of key episodes. Gillespie has also been an important pioneer in using the depositions as documents for social and cultural history, exploring the everyday negotiations and accommodations that occurred in the plantations prior to the 1641 rising. The material presented in this and the next chapter begins with the assumption that the 1641 depositions must be treated as an archive of survivor stories. On some level, although frequently obscured by the prescriptive format of the deposition process, each of the documents preserves a narration of survival. These were stories told by individuals who escaped the rebels and whom the commissioners in Dublin charged with gathering depositions deemed credible. From these documents it is possible to reconstruct in a general way the options that survivors faced. A cumulative portrait of survival, including the experience of flight, the basic rhythms of life in Dublin, and the difficulties inherent in securing relief and assistance in the early modern context is present in the documents. It is also possible to reconstruct a more detailed picture of prewar social relationships and the specific ways that settlers engaged in self-fashioning and negotiation as they attempted to broker survival strategies in the midst of the conflict that began in 1641. Unfortunately, it is difficult to say much in concrete terms about the interplay between witnesses and the deposition examiners. Dr Henry Jones, dean of Kilmore, emerged as chief commissioner of the depositions by March 1642 and witnessed hundreds of depositions during the 1640s. He had been victimized during the rising, and his experiences are recorded in a particularly full deposition as well as two 1642 tracts printed in London. In 1642 he traveled at least twice to England to present digested versions of the depositions to parliament. Jones’s A Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland can be read as a self-consciously authoritative account of the Irish rebellion, which used the depositions to make general conclusions about the intentions of the rebels. Jones heavily edited and excised the depositions, producing a sympathetic 

Gillespie, ‘The Murder of Arthur Champion’, 52–66; Hilary Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh’, in Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641, 123–38.  Gillespie, A Devoted People, 33–4, 54–5, 110–14. See also Clodagh Tait’s use of deposition evidence on the desecration of Protestant corpses and the folklore surrounding ghosts and apparitions associated with atrocities committed during the 1641 rebellion; Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (New York, 2002), 94–5, 137–8.  Henry Jones, Remonstrance of the Beginning and Proceedings of the Rebellion in the County of Cavan (London, 1642); Henry Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland (London, 1642). For Jones’s visit to Westminster, see CJ, vol. 2, 480. Jones came from a prominent Church of Ireland family: his father was Lewis Jones, bishop of Killaloe, and his mother was Mabel Ussher, sister to James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh. Jones’s engagement in public life continued long after the depositions. In 1647 he wrote a long justification for the 1632 destruction of the Catholic shrine known as St Patrick’s Purgatory and worked with the Cromwellian regime in prosecuting rebels in the 1650s. Into the 1670s, he continued to write antiCatholic screeds. See DNB, vol. 30, 511–13.

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THE EXPERIENCE OF SURVIVAL IN 1641

portrayal of Anglo-Protestant suffering, which smoothed over much of the chaos and complexity reflected in the actual depositions. When it was printed under parliamentary orders in the spring of 1642, the Remonstrance offered the English reading public a purportedly firsthand and reliable look at the savagery of the rebels and the expansive danger posed by their actions. A fixed set of topics outlined by the Lord Justices of Ireland in late December 1641 structured the depositions. According to the 23 December commission, which inaugurated the depositions, the commissioners should interview witnesses regarding ‘robberies and spoils’, ‘traitorous or disloyal words, speeches or actions’, and details of ‘violence or other lewd actions’.10 The depositions simply do not preserve the pauses, clarifications, or leading questions that may have occurred in this context, much less the practical ramifications of the power imbalance between witnesses and examiners. However, the interplay between deponents and the commissioners was clearly more fluid than the prescribed question list suggests. None of the depositions takes the form of a list of answers, although many of the shorter depositions adhere closely to the main topics spelled out in the commission. Some depositions were obviously written out in advance and longer depositions, like that of the minister George Creichton – which runs to more than thirty handwritten pages – could not have been the result of simple oral testimony.11 It is possible to imagine multiple different contexts in which information might have been presented. Some deponents may have arrived with prepared narratives, had them witnessed by the commissioners, and then moved on. Others may have presented information and then elaborated statements based on questions from the commissioners.12 In some cases, individuals privy to more extensive evidence about the rebellion may have been actively solicited to prepare a fuller account for the commissioners. At some point, all deponents appeared before the commissioners, and most of the original depositions are either signed or marked by the deponent and two of the commissioners.13



Joseph Cope, ‘Fashioning Victims: Dr Henry Jones and the Plight of Irish Protestants’, Historical Research 74 (2001), 370–91. Jones was the chief lobbyist and publicist for the Irish Protestant cause, but was assisted by seven commissioners in Dublin: John Watson, William Hitchcock, Roger Puttock, John Sterne, Randall Adams, Henry Brereton, and William Aldrich. Most had suffered robberies or other hardships in the rebellion. A ninth commissioner, Philip Bysse, traveled through the province of Munster in 1642 and 1643; Bysse was killed in the process of this work in the early fall of 1643. See Clarke, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, 116. 10 Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 13–14. 11 Deposition of George Creichton, TCD Ms. 832, 145–60. 12 The sheer number of depositions taken early in the process – more than six hundred between 31 December 1641, and mid-March 1642 – suggests that this was the procedure early on. 13 There are a number of complexities in the archive, reflecting the fact that what exists today is an amalgamation of several different bodies of evidence. Although the depositions are today organized by county, this was apparently the result of work of eighteenth-century archivists at Trinity College Library. TCD Mss. 809–839 include the original depositions taken under the commission of the

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Only a few weeks after issuing the December 1641 commission, the Lord Justices revised the list of prescribed interrogatories. The commissioners now received instructions to press Protestant ministers for detailed information on the rebels and their crimes and to record hearsay information from all deponents on ‘what numbers of personal have been murdered by the rebels or perished afterwards in the way to Dublin’. The new commission also acknowledged a need to collect testimony on the names of ‘persons or clergymen, or other Protestants [who] have become papists’.14 By 1643, the concerns of the Lord Justices and the commissioners evolved even further. Although Dublin Castle did not issue a new set of questions, the depositions from 1643–4 contain extensive intelligence, almost all of it negative, on the impact of the cessation and shifting allegiances among Irish Protestants.15 The Elizabeth Danvers deposition, which is relatively silent on occurrences in the early 1640s but is very detailed in documenting the hostile actions of the Catholic Confederate Army, partially reflects these later preoccupations. On a more basic level, it is impossible to recover what participants in the deposition process, on both sides of the table, thought they were accomplishing. The commissions did not state what this information would be used for. Based on the ways that Henry Jones extracted information from the depositions in his published tracts and reports to the English parliament, it is clear that the commissioners used the depositions as an archive from which they could extrapolate the intentions or dispositions of the rebels.16 The firsthand testimony of victims could also be used to argue for more timely assistance from England.17 Finally, in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest, the depositions served as a foundation for further investigations of criminal conduct during the war and also generated a new round of depositions.18 Deponents in the early 1640s seem to have conceptualized the process in various ways. Many of the depositions are very brief, detailing losses and the

Lord Justices and Council beginning in 1642. The most extensive of these were taken by Jones and the other commissioners in Dublin, but a smaller set of Munster depositions were taken on site by the traveling commissioner Philip Bysse. The Bysse depositions are structurally very different from the others, as they reflect testimony of English settlers still living in the provinces in 1642 and 1643 and tend to adhere closely to the Lord Justices’ list of questions. Many of the original depositions taken by the Dublin-based commissioners are duplicated in heavily edited and excised copies that are interspersed throughout the different county volumes. The deposition collection also includes statements recorded in late 1641 as the Lord Justices investigated the abortive rising in Dublin, and additional statements taken in the 1650s when criminal prosecutions (under Henry Jones’s direction) were initiated against rebel leaders. See Clarke, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, 112–18. This chapter focuses primarily on the first category of evidence, that is, depositions taken in Dublin under the terms of the 1641 commission of the Lord Justices and Council. 14 Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 15. 15 Aidan Clarke, ‘The 1641 Rebellion and Anti-Popery in Ireland’, in Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising, 151. 16 Ibid., 150–5. 17 Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 11–12. 18 Clarke, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, 116.

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names of responsible rebels.19 It is likely that deponents intended this testimony as evidence to be used in the event of future prosecution or restitution, similar in many respects to the kinds of criminal depositions that English settlers would have been familiar with in the courts. In early 1642, some settlers lobbied parliament for grants of land in recompense for property stolen at the start of the war, which also may have colored some deponents’ assumptions.20 In at least some cases, the depositions also appear to have functioned as an opportunity for individuals of indeterminate loyalty to fashion and present a sympathetic self-portrait. One particularly compelling example of this occurs in the deposition of George Charlton, a joiner from county Wexford. Admitting that he had participated in assaults on several English-owned castles in the southeast, Charlton argued that he had been ‘forced for safety of his life yet against his will’ to take the mass and fight with the rebels. Presumably he hoped that his deposition, a detailed account of his frequent victimization by the rebels, would cement the claim that he was ‘a soldier but indeed a prisoner’.21 The depositions made in the early 1640s thus emerged from a complicated exchange between witnesses and survivors of the rebellion, the formalized interrogative structures prescribed by Dublin Castle, and the commissioners. The nature of this exchange, and the difficulties inherent in reconstructing the social space in which depositions were made, raises questions about certain kinds of information in these documents. Although crime and violence has been one focus of historical work on the 1641 archive, the testimony in the depositions is complicated by the presence of hearsay evidence, rumor, and confused intelligence. This issue is further muddled by the fact that Dublin Castle and the commissioners actively sought out accounts of violence and focused on the most graphic atrocities when reporting to London. By treating the depositions as narratives of survival, some of these problems are less significant. Not all deponents commented on their survival experiences, but

19

Among the depositions recorded before 8 March 1642, for example, 41 per cent recorded only losses and the names of rebels. Cope, ‘Fashioning Victims’, 381. 20 Certain Propositions Whereby the Distressed Protestants of Ireland Who Have Lost Their Goods and Personal Estates There ... May Be Relieved (London, 1642). The economic information in the depositions, although it has been used by historians to reconstruct aspects of socio-economic conditions in the plantations, is suspect. Canny has suggested, in ‘Marginal Kingdom’, 45–50, that information on losses is relatively reliable. On the other hand, it has been persuasively argued that the suspiciously round figures found in the archive, the fact that deponents often listed future profits on crops and rents as losses, and the absence of any mechanisms to check the reliability of settler claims renders much of this dimension of the materials suspect. Economic information in the depositions should thus be viewed as a general index of deponents’ status. See Duke, ‘New and Old Settlers in Ireland’, 20–8. 21 Deposition of George Charlton, TCD Ms. 818, 11–12. Suspicions of Irish settlers’ religious loyalties were fairly common in the seventeenth century. See David Edwards, ‘A Haven of Popery: English Catholic Migration to Ireland in the Age of Plantations’, in Ford and McCafferty (eds), Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, 95–126.

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those who did reflected on the many different strategies for self-preservation that emerged from the chaos of October 1641. One of the biggest lessons to be drawn from the depositions is the high level of confusion that accompanied the beginning of the 1641 rebellion. The rising began on the evening of 22 October 1641, as a revolt of the leading Irish lords and gentry in Ulster. Since February 1641, the heads of key Native Irish septs – including the Maguires of county Fermanagh, Sir Phelim O’Neill of county Armagh, the O’Mores of county Longford, and the O’Reillys of county Cavan, with additional input coming from Owen Roe O’Neill, the exiled leader of the O’Reilly sept serving with the Spanish army in the low countries – had planned a two-pronged rising to uproot the plantation settlements in the north and to surprise the English troops at Dublin Castle.22 When put into action, problems of coordination began almost immediately. On the eve of Connor Lord Maguire’s intended assault on Dublin, treachery within the ranks unraveled the plan. Owen O’Connolly, the key figure in this episode, represents another liminal figure in seventeenth-century Ireland. A foster brother to one of the conspirators, O’Connolly had converted to Protestantism and was employed as a servant to Sir John Clotworthy, a New English settler and member of parliament at Westminster. Hearing of the plot on 22 October (allegedly during an evening of excessive drinking with his kinsman), O’Connolly relayed the news to Sir William Parsons, who set in motion the arrest of the chief partisans in Dublin.23 A coalition of Native Irish lords and gentry plotted the rising, conceiving of their actions as a defensive response to a feared offensive against Catholicism in Ireland by the English parliament.24 Divisions among the rebel ranks appeared early, reflecting the different aspirations of the leadership and those who followed them into rebellion. In county Cavan, the O’Reilly rebels worked in a relatively orderly fashion to disarm the settlers. The leaders used their positions of political power – the main actors included the county sheriff, a member of the Irish parliament, and a justice of the peace – to justify their actions. They also produced forged royal commissions to suggest the rising was a police action authorized by the crown. County Fermanagh, by contrast, saw more extensive disorder, with the local rebel leader, Rory Maguire, attacking settlers and gaining a notorious reputation for brutality.25 In the midst of this elite-initiated rebellion, a ‘popular’ rebellion erupted. Nursing decades-old grievances, some Irish saw the rising as an opportunity 22 23

Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 204–12. Ibid., 210–11. O’Connolly’s examination before the Lord Justices was one of the first concrete pieces of information on the rising presented in England, read from the floor of the Commons by John Pym on 1 November 1641. In reward for his service, parliament voted O’Connolly a reward of £500 and an annual pension. See CJ, vol. 2, 306. 24 Clarke, Old English in Ireland, 156–9; Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 206. 25 For Rory Maguire, see Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 218–19, 227, 235–6.

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for score-settling and proceeded to rob, assault, and occasionally kill the New English settlers whom they deemed responsible.26 While Sir Phelim O’Neill expressed in both word and print his opposition to violent excesses, many parts of the north saw unrestrained attacks by semi-autonomous Irish rebels.27 As the rising progressed into November and December 1641, the position of the Old English grew more complicated. Although Roman Catholic, the Old English of the Pale had significant differences from the Native Irish, and with some exceptions most were not involved in the plot or early stages of the rising. Indeed, upon first news of the attacks in Ulster, a core group of Catholic Old English pledged their allegiance to the English crown and offered to take up arms in the service of the state. This reflected the liminal position of the Old English in the mid-seventeenth century. Propertied, often of high social status, and English in ethnicity, they had an important stake in Ireland’s stability and claimed loyalty to the Stuart monarchy. On the other hand, the fact that so many Old English adhered to Roman Catholicism made them suspect to many of the New English Protestants at Dublin Castle.28 Thus, from the very first news of the rising, the Lord Justices’ interpreted and framed the rising as a Roman Catholic rebellion, plotted by ‘evil affected Irish papists’.29 This in turn alienated many Old English some of whom, as early as mid-November 1641, began to take part with the Ulster rebels.30 To the Lord Justices, defections by members of the Old English justified further offensive measures, and by March 1642 the English army at Dublin began to harass and drive away Old English living in the Pale. Even in the midst of this, however, there were a number of Old English lords – the Protestant earl of Ormond and the Roman Catholic earl of Clanricarde being the most prominent examples – who sided with Dublin Castle and the New English in resisting the rebellion. Family structures were a casualty of the confusion that marked the first weeks of the rising. The deposition archive reveals that a substantial number of women were thrust into roles as primary caregivers. A number of widowed deponents specifically complained that their husbands had been murdered or

26 Canny, Making Ireland British, 512–17. Canny suggests that some of the more bizarre accounts of violence and degradation – for example, the burning of Protestant corpses to render out saltpeter – was driven by ‘an intense animosity towards all English and Protestant presence’ and a desire ‘to degrade the memory and remains of former residents within their community’. Ibid., 516. See also Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 229–33. 27 See The Petition of Sir Philomy Oneale (London, 1641). 28 See Clarke, Old English in Ireland, 162–4; Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 240–2. 29 HMC, Ormonde, vol. 2, 1. 30 Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘The Irish Peers, Political Power and Parliament, 1640–1641’, in Brady and Ohlmeyer (eds), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, 174–5. Ohlmeyer suggests that the Lord Justices’ actions in November 1641 also had the disastrous effect of destroying any hope for ‘a negotiated settlement to the crisis’.

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died from other causes during the rebellion. Elizabeth Hankin, for example, reported that she and her husband were driven from Dundalk, county Louth, to her father’s home at Trim in county Meath. There, Hankin witnessed the execution of her husband and father by the rebel Myles O’Reilly. In the aftermath, she was ‘enforced (being big with child) to fly with her mother and six more of her brothers and sisters to the city of Dublin’.31 Such attacks also occurred on the roads, as reported by Ann Dudd, whose husband Richard was hanged by a band of rebels as they fled towards Dublin through county Cavan.32 Isabell Gowrly simply noted that she had lost track of her husband when the family had been burned out of Armagh town in May 1642. Gowrly fled to Dublin with a number of small children, two of whom apparently died of illness on the way.33 Widows and single mothers were not the only individuals who faced the disintegration of family in 1641. Owing to the fact that men seem to have been specifically targeted for violence in Ulster, a number of male deponents reported that they abandoned their wives and children when they fled for safety. Thomas Keble of Diamore, county Meath, reported that he feared an imminent attack, and therefore left his wife and four small children behind when he escaped the county. He assumed that all had died at the hands of rebels.34 The panic that accompanied some of these flights is illustrated well in the deposition of Erasmus Borrowes, the high sheriff of county Kildare. On November 1, noting the rebels who had ‘daily increased in number and were grown to a great head and multitude’, Borrowes felt that as a crown servant he would assuredly be killed once the presumed attack came. He thus fled the county in the middle of the night, leaving his wife and twelve children behind. When he made his deposition in early March 1642, he had heard nothing from his family.35 In other cases, circumstances – especially cases of illness or families with particularly young or old members – necessitated what must have been difficult decisions to break up the family. Roger Puttocke, who eventually became one of the deposition commissioners, reported that one of his three children was too young to survive a long overland journey to Dublin. Puttocke chose to leave the child behind in Navan with a Native Irish acquaintance.36 In the 31

Deposition of Elizabeth Hankin, TCD Ms. 834, 14. This story was corroborated in the deposition of Hankin’s mother, Jane Prossick, TCD Ms. 816, 131. 32 Deposition of Ann Dudd, TCD Ms. 831, 9–10. 33 Deposition of Isabell Gowrly, TCD Ms. 836, 57. For more on the caregiving responsibilities of women, see O’Dowd, ‘Women and War in Ireland in the 1640s’, in MacCurtain and O’Dowd (eds), Women in Early Modern Ireland, 91–111; Bernadette Whelan, ‘Women and Warfare 1641–1691’, in Lenihan (ed.), Conquest and Resistance, 317–44. 34 Deposition of Thomas Keble, TCD Ms. 816, 168–70. 35 Deposition of Erasmus Borrowes, TCD Ms. 813, 298–30. For a similar account, see deposition of John Anthony, TCD Ms. 812, 33–4. The deposition of Elizabeth Moore, TCD Ms. 839, 8, relates the experience of a mother who had to leave children behind in county Antrim. 36 Deposition of Roger Puttocke, TCD Ms. 816, 132.

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midst of his flight to Dublin out of county Cavan, Richard Morse similarly calculated that his children would fare better if left behind. Halfway through the journey from Fermanagh to Dublin, with one child having died of hypothermia and three others desperately ill, Morse decided to leave some of his children in Belturbet with a group of other refugees. Morse, his wife, and two older children then moved on to Dublin.37 The problem of preserving property weighed heavily on those settlers who chose to flee the Irish provinces. Facing a long overland journey through winter conditions and rough landscapes, settlers necessarily abandoned whatever goods they could not carry. For many, protecting unmovable property for the future was a major concern, and a number of deponents reported on the measures that they took in this regard. George Boothe’s testimony from county Meath exemplifies the kind of arrangements that settlers hastily arranged with their Irish neighbors. Fearing an attack by the rebels, and ‘thinking Thomas Geoghogan (which was this deponent’s landlord) to be a loyal subject’, he left goods and property behind upon ‘the said Thomas his faithful promise to be true and just to this deponent’. Unfortunately for Boothe, soon after his flight to Dublin, Geoghogan appropriated the goods under his protection. In this case, the robbery was a crime of opportunity committed after the settler’s departure and presumably under the assumption that Boothe would not return to reclaim his property.38 Some neighbors proved more predatory, using the rebellion as an opportunity to plunder their English neighbors as they fled their homes. In a welldocumented episode from Arklow, county Wicklow, servants of lord Esmond promised to store the goods of endangered settlers. Once thousands of pounds of goods from ‘diverse other English Protestants’ were conveyed into the castle, however, the servants ‘in mere treachery set open the gate of the said castle … and suffered the rebels to enter’. Not only did the settlers lose their moveable property and livestock, but they were subsequently evicted from the region.39 In cases where evictions occurred, deponents reported that the responses of their neighbors and friends could be difficult to predict, especially as the local circumstances changed. In Synrone, county Kildare, Marmaduke Clapham testified that John O’Carroll ‘promised that for his old acquaintance and good neighborhood, he would keep him for one year’ in exchange for a payment of agricultural goods. However, within a week ‘the said John O’Carroll told the deponent that he would keep him no longer for fear 37

Deposition of Richard Morse, TCD Ms. 835, 28. Likewise, see deposition of Thomas Watson, TCD Ms. 812, 35–6. 38 Deposition of George Boothe, TCD Ms. 816, 108. Boothe’s deposition, dated 23 February 1642, indicates that correspondents in Meath had recently communicated information of the robberies to him in Dublin. This in turn suggests that even at this late date, the fluid and evolving situation in Ireland made communication between Dublin and areas in rebellion possible. 39 Deposition of Richard Nathcrosse, TCD Ms. 811, 86.

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that the country should rob him of his cattle for hatred of the deponent’. O’Carroll not only expelled the Clapham family, but also reneged on a promise to help convey them safely to Dublin.40 Other depositions confirmed that otherwise sympathetic neighbors might abandon refugees under their protection when circumstances became dangerous. Depositions occasionally note explicit threats by active rebels against Catholics who harbored evicted settlers or their property.41 Likewise, at least one deponent related the experience of a Catholic neighbor in Carlow who was plundered by other locals who objected to the assistance that he offered to Protestants.42 A fair amount of opportunistic crime also seems to have transpired. In November 1641, rebels from the O’Reilly family promised safe passage to Dublin for English settlers living in Belturbet and provided an armed guard to convey the settlers to English-controlled territory. Once away from the town, however, the guard found themselves under attack by local Irish, whom they eventually joined in plundering the settlers.43 Deponents also complained about Irish neighbors who did not participate in plundering but refused to offer assistance. Robert Basse reported that his neighbor, a Barnaby Dun of Brittas in county Meath, could have protected a large number of English in his fortified house. However, Dun ‘refused to … spend one penny to support this deponent being in extreme distress’ and assisted the rebels in forcing ‘the English most cruelly out of his house in the heat of the rebellion in the depth of winter’.44 William Garton of county Cavan likewise complained about a gentry landowner named Thomas Burrows ‘who not only refused to afford us any victuals or lodging, but caused us to depart thence towards the mountains where … it did rain and snow’.45 In these cases, deponents presented the refusal of charity as an act of cruelty, suggesting that a kind of moral economy informed their sense of honorable and dishonorable conduct. Although the depositions tend to focus primarily on accounts of victimization and the betrayal of social bonds, they also preserve significant evidence of assistance, occasionally from unlikely sources. Even as the rebellion put pressure on pre-war relationships, some old friendships endured. Thus, William Lincoln reported that he was freed from imprisonment by rebels in Galway when ‘one Robert Noone, an Irish fisherman to whom the deponent had done former courtesies came and begged both his life and liberty’.46

40 41 42 43

Deposition of Marmaduke Clapham, TCD Ms. 814, 53. Depositions of David Dempsie, TCD Ms. 815, 8; and James Sawles, TCD Ms. 821, 30–1. Deposition of Thomas Watson, TCD Ms. 812, 36. Deposition of Richard Lewis, TCD Ms. 832, 47, and Christopher Airey, TCD Ms. 832, 51. This incident is also recounted in Jones, Remonstrance of the Beginnings and Proceedings of the Rebellion, 7. 44 Deposition of Robert Basse, TCD Ms. 815, 21–2. 45 Deposition of William Garton, TCD Ms. 832, 165. 46 Deposition of William Lincoln, TCD Ms. 830, 142.

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A similar instance led to the survival of George Butterwick, a planter in rural Drumlane, county Cavan. At the start of the rebellion, local rebels from the MacGowran family threatened serious bodily harm to Butterwick’s wife unless she admitted the location of rent monies they believed were hidden in the house. In this tense situation, Butterwick’s Irish manservant intervened and dissuaded the MacGowrans, telling the rebels that there was no hidden store of treasure in the house, as he personally ‘knew his master had not received his rents yet and that money was very scarce with him’. In this case, Butterwick believed that the prompt intervention saved his life.47 Landlord–tenant relations also could prove useful in English bids for survival. Thomas Crant, who lived in Cavan town for several months after the outbreak of the rising, learned in December 1641 that his captors planned to execute him ‘fearing, as they alleged, that [he] being so well acquainted with the country should do them much hurt’ if he were allowed to leave the county. The linchpin in Crant’s subsequent bid for survival was his landlord, Katherine Maguire, who intervened with one of her sons to procure the Crant family’s escape from the county.48 More obscurely, Timothy Pate of county Wicklow explained that a friend introduced him to Colonel Luke Byrne, leader of the local rebels, who refused to allow the family to leave fearing that ‘they should be murdered’ on the way to Dublin. Pate referred to his eighteen-month stay at the home of Byrne as a kind of imprisonment, but also admitted that it kept him alive.49 Strangers, particularly members of the gentry and nobility, also sometimes intervened to protect refugees. In contrast to examples in which common neighbors helped one another, in these cases benefactors may have acted out of a deeper sense of social responsibility or to protect their own reputations should the rebellion fail. In county Cavan, George Creichton and Thomas Crant both indicated that Patrick Plunkett, the ninth Lord Dunsany, was a powerful Old English advocate of the despoiled English.50 Likewise, Arthur Culme’s deposition recorded assistance, including food and protection, offered by a member of the O’Reilly sept who while generally supportive of his rebellious kinsmen nonetheless was ‘a most civil man, much troubled with those distempers’.51 Throughout Ireland, over fifty depositions detail similar cases. These involved a large number of nobles and gentry, for example: Richard Nugent, the first earl of Westmeath, Donough McCarty, the second viscount Muskerry, and James Touchet, third earl of Castlehaven.52 Especially prominent among Native Irish named as relievers was the mother 47 48 49 50

Deposition of George Butterwick, TCD Ms. 832, 49. Deposition of Thomas Crant, TCD Ms. 832, 76. Deposition of Timothy Pate, TCD Ms. 811, 170–3. Deposition of George Creichton, TCD Ms. 832, 150; deposition of Thomas Crant, TCD, Ms. 832,

77. 51 52

Deposition of Arthur Culme, TCD Ms. 832, 115. Cope, ‘Ireland Must Be Looked After’, 115–16, 383–7.

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of Sir Phelim O’Neill, who ‘preserved twenty-four English and Scots in her own house and fed them for thirty-seven weeks out of her own store … she used often to say she had never offended the English except in being mother to Sir Phelim’.53 In some cases, assistance offered by Irish and Old English partisans in the rebellion may have been cynical. By relieving refugees, and by extension having this relief preserved in the official record of the depositions, they may have self-consciously attempted to protect themselves against a future backlash by the English. Some of these men and women were also intermediary figures, who moved in overlapping circles of kinship, ethnicity, and religion. Richard Butler, protector of the Elizabeth Danvers family, seems to have played such a role. Butler was fully immersed in the rebellion, but maintained some correspondence with his brother, the earl of Ormond. In a number of depositions, Richard Butler’s advocacy on behalf of war victims is prominent.54 This may have reflected any number of motives, including his complicated kinship ties, a conflicted stance on the rebellion and particularly the violence associated with the lower sort of rebels, and an attempt to position himself should the rebellion fail. For those who had to take to the roads, accounts of robberies, intimidation, and brutal environmental conditions dominate the depositions. The most detailed depositions on these kinds of issues are also the most grim, full of horror stories of settlers ‘turned naked … into the cold air and exposed to the extremity of want and weather upon the wild barren mountains from whence in that posture and state, they wandered toward the city of Dublin’.55 Robberies and further assaults, often crimes of opportunity committed as settlers passed through other counties, added to the misery. In a flight out of county Fermanagh, for example, Richard Walker reported constant harassment and three separate instances in which he was robbed and stripped.56 A deponent from county Monaghan claimed that bands of Irish women followed the group he traveled with, robbing and murdering the stragglers.57 Ann Dudd of county Leitrim summed up the combined horrors of the Irish landscape, weather, and rebels, claiming that ‘there came in one company with her this deponent thirty and seven poor stripped English people. But of all the said number there came no more but eight to Dublin; and all the rest (as she is assured) were either starved, killed, drowned, or hanged by the 53

Deposition of Robert Maxwell, TCD Ms. 840, 9. In the 1680s, the duke of Ormond compiled a list of Catholics who had similarly secured the lives and property of Protestant settlers, but whose work had gone unrecorded. See Oxford, Bodleian Library, Carte Ms. 63, 126–7. 54 Depositions of John Moore, TCD Ms. 812, 198; Peter Pynshon, TCD Ms. 812, 200; Robert Howell, TCD Ms. 812, 244; and James Benn, TCD Ms. 812, 213–14. 55 Deposition of Edward Philpott, TCD Ms. 832, 72. 56 Deposition of Richard Walker, TCD Ms. 835, 68. 57 Deposition of Martha Culme, TCD Ms. 834,79

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rebels in the way.’58 The high level of detail found in these depositions does not necessarily imply that such experiences were typical, but rather likely reflects a common interest between the deponents in telling these experiences and the deposition commissioners in preserving them. Although most deponents indicated flight towards Dublin, sources on their experiences in the city are extremely limited. Even basic questions about the numbers of refugees in Dublin, their housing and subsistence, are largely unanswerable. As a baseline figure, the Irish Lord Justices complained in the summer of 1642 that more than 7,500 refugees crowded into a city whose pre-war population was less than fifty thousand.59 Although this figure represents a round estimate, it seems at least plausible. Just under nine hundred individuals who fled from the Irish provinces into Dublin made depositions by the end of August 1642, and evidence in the deposition archive suggests that individual depositions may have reflected as few as eight to ten per cent of the actual refugees in the city. This would represent a refugee population of at least nine thousand.60 At the very least it is clear that the war refugees presented a problem of significant proportions in a city that had a difficult time dealing with poverty and order under the best of circumstances. Survival in Dublin was at best a tenuous prospect. In his 1646 book The Irish Rebellion, John Temple devoted significant ink in to conditions in Dublin as refugees began to arrive in the city in the winter of 1641–2. His description of the city dripped with pathos: Many persons of good rank and quality covered over with rags and some without any covering than a little twisted straw to hide their nakedness. Some reverend ministers and others that had escaped with their lives, sorely wounded. Wives came bitterly lamenting the murders of their husbands, mothers of their children barbarously destroyed before their faces, poor infants ready to perish and pour out their souls in their mothers’ bosom: some over-wearied with long travel, and so surbated [sic], as they came creeping on their knees; others froze up with cold, ready to give up the ghost in the streets.61

Temple’s account, of course, is problematic. Written by a vehement antipapist, four years after the outbreak of the rebellion, and in the context 58 59

Deposition of Ann Dudd, TCD Ms. 831, 10. NLI Ms. 2542, 345–6. For Dublin’s population, see Moody, Martin, and Byrne (eds), New History of Ireland, vol. 3, 390, 448. 60 This figure is based on extrapolated data regarding the evacuation of Birr Castle in Kings county, discussed in more detail in chapter 3 below. Of the between 300 and 600 refugees who were living within the castle walls, only twenty-five made depositions after the castle was surrendered to the Catholic Confederate army in January 1643. Based on this rough figure, the ratio of deponents to actual refugees stands somewhere between 1:12 and 1:36. 61 John Temple, The Irish Rebellion: Or a History of the Beginning and the First Progress of the General Rebellion Raised within the Kingdom of Ireland (London, 1646), 61–2.

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of Charles I’s negotiations with the Confederates, which Temple strongly opposed, the grim account served a variety of political purposes.62 Even so, what archival records do survive suggest that conditions in Dublin were difficult. An account of poor relief expenditures in St John the Evangelist parish in the city, for example, noted the burial of more than 140 paupers in this one parish in 1643.63 Housing for refugees seems to have been a particularly significant problem. A handful of deponents reported that they lived in the churchyards adjoining St Patrick’s and Christchurch cathedrals.64 Others lived beyond the limited protection of the city walls in hastily thrown-up shacks in the liberties.65 Temple noted that since many Protestants in the city had fled to England when the rebellion erupted, there were ‘many empty houses in the city [that] were by special direction taken up for them’ and that ‘barns, stables and outhouses … under stalls … [and] the churches were the common receptacles of the meaner sort of them’.66 Because deponents primarily commented on losses, it is difficult to determine what property and goods they preserved through the flight to Dublin. A report from the Lord Justices in March 1642 specifically stated that of the six thousand who had fled into the town, approximately two-thirds had conveyed enough property out of the provinces to support themselves for a short time in the city.67 Limited evidence from deponents suggests the same. For example, Edward Blond included in his list of losses the £120 he had laid out in expenses incurred while living as a refugee in Dublin.68 A petition from women despoiled by the rebellion in July 1642 also alluded to the liquidation of preserved property. The petitioners, most of them wives of the New English gentry, complained that having sold or bartered away all other possessions, they had been forced into ‘the selling away of their ordinary attire and necessary wearing apparel at great undervalue’ in order to purchase food. While the petitioners argued that this was a severe hardship, 62

That The Irish Rebellion continued to elicit powerful reactions is evident in the fact that it was reprinted in Ireland during moments of sectarian tension through the nineteenth century. See Toby Barnard, ‘ “Parlour Entertainment in an Evening”: Histories of the 1640s’, in Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis, 20–43; T.C. Barnard, ’1641: A Bibliographical Essay’, in MacCuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641, 178–9; Kathleen M. Noonan, ‘“Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies’, Albion 36 (2004), 223–55. 63 NLI Ms. 1618, 74–80. The parish records – unique for Dublin during this period, and unfortunately incomplete for much of the 1640s – indicate that over £10 yearly was being distributed to the poor and that more than £1 was required to bury the pauper dead. The records also suggest general poverty in the city: whereas in 1640, five households were assessed poor rates of £1 per year, only two were able to pay this rate in 1643. Dublin is also discussed in Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Irish Economy at War, 1641–1652’, in Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660, 163–4. 64 Depositions of George Gascoigne, TCD Ms. 835, 11, and Thomas Middlebrook, TCD Ms. 835, 142. 65 Deposition of Randall Dymock, TCD Ms. 809, 276. 66 Temple, Irish Rebellion, 62. 67 NLI Ms. 2542, 173–6. 68 Deposition of Edward Blond, TCD Ms. 816, 153.

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it also illustrates that they had at one point maintained substantial reserves of goods.69 On the other hand, many deponents explicitly testified that they arrived in the city without any possessions of value. Thus, George Buttern reported that his family came to the city with nothing more than ‘some several pairs of rags which some of the more merciful Irish gave to hide their nakedness’. He went on to note that his family had been living on a diet of mostly cabbage leaves.70 Richard Davys reported that he and his family arrived out of county Meath with ‘all of their means taken from them to their utter undoing’.71 Likewise, Jane Prossick, whose husband and son-in-law had been killed in Trim, reported that she, her pregnant daughter, and six other children came to Dublin ‘and now live in great want and poverty, having nothing wherewith to be maintained’.72 The social conditions that prevailed in Ireland’s chief city after the outbreak of the rebellion did little to increase the refugees’ comfort. Like most large towns in the British Isles, even in years of relative peace the city had a significant problem with poverty. The records of the Dublin municipal corporation on several occasions in the 1620s and 1630s complained of the large numbers of ‘strange and sturdy beggars … lurking about’ and of the difficulties inherent in providing assistance to the deserving poor in the city.73 In the 1640s, Dublin’s strained network of informal charity represented the only source of subsistence for displaced and destitute persons. A number of depositions refer to ‘the charity of good people in Dublin’ or ‘the relief … of well-affected people’ in the city.74 Henry Jones reported to the English parliament that the Dublin clergy were at the forefront of these efforts. Some ministers fasted during the week, donating their unconsumed food to the less fortunate poor, and almost all divines labored conscientiously ‘to visit and distribute to the poor in Dublin who depend on weekly distributions’.75 Elite flight from Dublin damaged the city’s capacity for assisting refugees. According to observers, many of those high-status Dublin families who were most able to provide charity instead used their money to purchase passage out of the troubled kingdom as refugees from the provinces began to arrive in the city.76 Henry Jones complained that almost all of those best equipped to assist the poor had ‘departed with their estates into England for safety’. 69

Petition of the Despoiled and Distressed Ladies and Gentlewomen Now Residing within the City of Dublin, TCD Ms. 840, 27. 70 Deposition of George Buttern, TCD Ms. 832, 49–50. 71 Deposition of Richard Davys, TCD Ms. 816, 101. 72 Deposition of Jane Prossick, TCD Ms. 816, 131. 73 John T. Gilbert (ed.), Calendar of the Ancient Records of Dublin, vol. 3 (Dublin, 1892), 168–9, 181, 221, 298–8, 303–4, 317–18. 74 Depositions of Ann Daniel, TCD Ms. 811, 135–6, Edward Philpott, TCD Ms. 832, 72–3, Sarah Doughtie, TCD Ms. 809, 273, and Thomas Williams, TCD Ms. 810, 70. 75 Petition of the Despoiled Ministers of Ireland, TCD Ms. 840, 36. 76 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Carte Ms. 63, 129.

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To Jones, this mass exodus of Dublin’s elites represented an abandonment of social obligations and demonstrated the lack of Christian sympathy among the city’s Protestants, who seemed content to turn away as hundreds ‘died on heaps, as before they did in the fields upon their travel’.77 Temple, although predictably more sympathetic to the state officers residing in Dublin, also affirmed that the exodus of New English left the city ill equipped to deal with a large influx of war victims.78 Temple’s harshest words, however, were directed towards the Catholic population of the city, a group upon whose conduct Jones was conspicuously silent. According to Temple, Irish Catholics in the city acted as heartlessly as their coreligionists in the provinces, ‘refusing to minister the least comfort unto them’.79 The evolving military situation in the Pale added to Dublin’s woes. In December 1641, the Old English of the Pale, who had been previously reluctant to join the rebels, began to participate in the rising.80 This had a disastrous impact on the city. Temple recalled that as the rebellion spread, participants ‘so blocked up the ways as the poor churles that lived somewhat distant from the city, could not carry their corn thither without apparent danger, whereby the market began to be very ill provided and great want and scarcity was much feared’. The Lord Justices’ actions exacerbated the subsistence crisis. In late 1641, they ordered soldiers to scavenge what they could from the agricultural lands around the city and burn whatever could not be immediately harvested.81 In so doing, they hoped to keep resources out of the hands of the rebels and their sympathizers, but also limited their own food supply. Provisioning the large number of soldiers in Dublin posed additional subsistence problems. In February 1642, the Lord Justices complained to the English parliament that the soldiers stationed in Dublin and Drogheda had not received any pay since the start of the rising. To forestall a riot in Dublin, they reported that they had ‘with some extreme pressure enforced some small loans’ from the already impoverished inhabitants of Dublin. ‘For keeping the soldiers from starving’, they also felt it necessary to liquidate most of the surplus supplies in the castle, thus leaving themselves vulnerable in case of a siege and unable to assist settlers arriving from the provinces. Under such conditions, the Lord Justices warned, mutiny would be increasingly likely and cautioned that if supplies and money did not arrive

77 Henry Jones, Perfect Relation of the Beginning and Continuation of the Irish Rebellion (London, 1642), 9. 78 Temple, Irish Rebellion, 64. In the same passage, Temple suggested that those who fled with their possessions reaped the reward of divine providence, as many perished in shipwrecks in the passage across the Irish Sea. 79 Ibid., 62. 80 Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 252–9; Canny, Making Ireland British, 501–2. 81 Temple, Irish Rebellion, 30.

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from England soon, the army would ‘either perish or break forth into open violence as well against us as upon the small remnant of people now left in this city’.82 By March 1642, the Lord Justices’ fears were at least partially realized. Soldiers had begun to die in Dublin ‘partly through cold for want of clothes and partly for want of wholesome meat’, while the most able-bodied ‘for mere want [began to] … rob and pillage some good subjects in this very city’.83 After arriving in Dublin, refugees had the choice to stay or flee to England or Scotland. For those who chose the former, conditions in Ireland were difficult. Dublin Castle had few resources for relief. In the spring of 1642 the Lord Justices prescribed monthly fast days in the city and suburbs, expressing their hope that participants would use the occasion to relieve ‘such indigent persons as by these traitors by their rapine and cruelty have been deprived of their fortunes and left naked and miserable’. In order to further this charitable aim, they asked that ‘every householder and master of family should design and contribute in alms upon every Sunday … the value of so much as was [by] the former work spared and saved … [for] the relief and succor of the poor aforementioned’.84 Reflecting a typical early modern concern with the idle poor, the Lord Justices also sought to set the Dublin refugee population to work. Refugee males found themselves conscripted into military service in 1641 and 1642.85 These untrained and poorly armed troops reappear in the historical record as casualties when deployed in battle, the most notorious example being the November 1641 rout at Julianstown, during which rebels ambushed and killed six hundred raw recruits.86 The Lord Justices also made attempts to put idle women and children to work. During the first two weeks of their work, the commissioners in charge of the depositions asked witnesses to indicate their future plans and their prospects for work in the city. A few claimed that they would not need to seek charity or employment, as they planned to leave Dublin at the earliest possible opportunity.87 Some women 82 83

NLI Ms. 2542, 147–8. Ibid., 164. At least one deposition from the mid-1640s included missing back pay as a loss and suggests that wounded soldiers joined the ranks of the city’s destitute population. See deposition of William Blackburne TCD Ms. 810, 264. 84 NLI Ms. 2541, 117. 85 Initially, the commissioners of the depositions seem to have solicited men to join the army. For examples, see the depositions of Adam Glover, TCD Ms. 833, 1; Thomas Negus, TCD Ms. 835, 152; Henry Reynolds, TCD Ms. 833, 57; Thomas Middlebrook, TCD Ms. 835, 142; Raphe Carr, TCD Ms. 831, 27; Lawrence Whitmore, TCD Ms. 836, 11; Philip Whitman, TCD Ms. 833, 86; Thomas Vennibles, TCD Ms. 833, 75; Thomas Knowles, TCD Ms. 835, 132; and John Hinten, TCD Ms. 811, 58. 86 Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 222–3; Pádraig Lenihan, ‘ “Celtic” Warfare in the 1640s’, in Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars, 127–8. Depositions also record ambushes of untrained soldiers. See deposition of Elizabeth Parr, TCD Ms. 810, 237; Alice Steele, TCD Ms. 832, 54; and Mary Beddell, TCD Ms. 832, 55–6. 87 Deposition of Jathnell Mawe, TCD Ms. 835, 51.

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indicated their willingness to ‘be set on work at spinning and knitting’ or to ‘become a seamstress’.88 Many others, however, indicated that given the hardships of their journey from the provinces and their responsibilities in caring for uprooted children, they were too ‘sick for the present’ to work or ‘old and not able’.89 The Lord Justices’ reports to Westminster occasionally noted attempts to find employment for these idle hands. In July 1642, for example, they suggested that charitable individuals in England should send raw materials rather than money into Ireland. This, they hoped, would keep ‘many hundreds of poor … at work and maintained’ for an extended period of time.90 The experiences of Scots-Irish in Ulster differed considerably from those of the New English. Scottish settlers in Ireland tended to live in more concentrated numbers in the Ulster plantations. Their greater strength of numbers, combined with the rebel leadership’s decision to avoid engagement with the Scots during their early endeavors, meant that fewer Scots than English experienced dislocation early in the war and were therefore more successful in organizing for self-defense. In northwest Ulster, for example, the Scots undertakers Sir William Stewart and Sir Robert Stewart, the latter a veteran of military service in Europe as part of Gustavus Adolphus’s Protestant forces, mobilized their tenants against the rebels in early November 1641. The resulting ‘Laggan Army’ succeeded in blocking rebel advances around Derry and Coleraine, and remained an important part of the military equation in Ireland until the Cromwellian conquest.91 Likewise, areas of heavy Scottish settlement in counties Antrim and Down remained relatively peaceful until January 1642, when Scottish Catholic soldiers raised for local defense by Randall MacDonnell, earl of Antrim, took up with the Ulster rebels.92 Individual Scots found themselves spared even in more ethnically diverse plantation settlements. In Virgina, county Cavan, for example, the Scottish minister George Creichton received promises that the rebels ‘would not meddle with the deponent’ because they had no quarrel with the Scots.93 88

Depositions of Margaret Baly, TCD Ms. 818, 60; Alice Tibbs, TCD Ms. 835, 179; Anne Underwood, TCD Ms. 833, 77; and Thomas Sprage, TCD Ms. 835, 175. 89 Depositions of Anne Capper, TCD Ms. 809, 261; Katherine Grant, TCD Ms. 816, 106; Jane Mansfield, TCD Ms. 816, 122; Dorothy Talbot, TCD Ms. 835, 175; and Isabell Staples, TCD Ms. 833, 60. 90 NLI Ms. 2542, 333, 345–6. This was consistent with English poor law practices. See Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), 113–31 and Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (Cambridge, 1995). 91 See Kevin McKenny, The Laggan Army in Ireland, 1640–1685: The Landed Interests, Political Ideologies and Military Campaigns of the North-West Ulster Settlers (Dublin, 2005). 92 Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates, 100–1. These Catholic Scots, under the command of Alasdair MacColla, played an important role in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms until MacColla’s death in 1647. In 1644, they formed the core of a Royalist invasion force into Scotland where they fought in the campaigns of James Graham, first marquis of Montrose. See ibid., 172–8. 93 Deposition of George Creichton, TCD Ms. 832, 145. By January 1642, however, local rebels

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Contemporaries noticed this pattern, and some of the accounts complained that the Scots refused to intervene to protect English settlers. A number of historians have commented on this component of the rebellion, suggesting a variety of explanations for the fact that Scots were largely insulated from early attacks. At a basic level, the decision seems to have been driven by strategic considerations. By avoiding conflict with the Scots, rebel leaders could concentrate on the focused aim of dislodging English setters. The strategy also had the effect of muddling the situation on the ground, making it easier for rebel leaders to ‘confuse and deceive their opponents’.94 The policy may also have reflected the conflicted ethnic relations in the planted areas of Ulster. Nicholas Canny has suggested that the different experiences of English and Scots settlers reveals evidence of deep ethnic divisions within the planter population. The Irish drew on these tensions, banking on Scots hostility towards English settlers and the fact that some Scots may ‘have derived some grim satisfaction from witnessing the humiliation of the English’ after having been for decades subjected to abuse and discrimination by the English authorities in Ireland.95 Many settlers fled from the provinces and sought passage for Scotland. In January 1642, letters directed to the Irish Lord Justices from the mayor of Londonderry, Sir John Vaughan, warned that ‘all the shipping that hath been here is employed to carry people into Scotland’.96 William Parrat, mayor of Coleraine, separately complained of ‘three thousand women and children, which came hither for safeguard’. These dependants, Parrat concluded, must be sent into Scotland, ‘for if they continue here with us our want of victuals will be suddenly very extreme’.97 Refugees from Ireland posed problems in Scotland.98 The history of this migration is somewhat complicated by the fact that Scotland had been receiving displaced persons from Ireland since the imposition of the ‘black oath’ by Lord Thomas Wentworth in 1639. Intended as a tool for rooting out supporters of the Scottish covenant, refusal to take the oath resulted in severe penalties, and a number of Scottish and English settlers from Ulster

of the O’Reilly family threatened Creichton, claiming they ‘had a sorer matter to put in execution against the Scots so soon as the English were gone’. Ibid., 147. 94 Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 218. See also ibid., 234–5; Canny, Making Ireland British, 478–82; Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates, 83–95. Rumors of Scots colluding with the Irish rebels also appeared in print, see Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 3. 95 Canny, Making Ireland British, 483. 96 James Hogan (ed.), Letters and Papers Relating to the Irish Rebellion between 1641–46 (Dublin, 1936), 4. 97 Ibid., 10–11. 98 The most substantive coverage of this topic appears in John R. Young, ‘ “Escaping Massacre”: Refugees in Scotland in the Aftermath of the 1641 Ulster Rebellion’, in Edwards, Lenihan, and Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity, 219–41. As Young notes, this topic is an underexplored issue that merits additional attention, particularly in the context of ‘British’ historiography of the 1640s.

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fled these measures in the years before the 1641 rebellion.99 Local officials responsible for poor relief seem not to have differentiated between these earlier refugees and later waves of displaced settlers. On 3 November 1641, for example, the provincial assembly of Lothian and Tweeddale heard a petition for relief from the widow of John Trewman, ‘credibly reported to be cruelly put to death for avowing of the Scots covenant’.100 Trewman’s family clearly were victims of the proceedings surrounding the ‘black oath’, and John Trewman’s death had been the subject of an inflammatory pamphlet published in England at the time of Wentworth’s trial for high treason six months earlier.101 Although the Trewman case was unconnected to the Irish rebellion, the provincial assembly took notice of the petition during the same session in which it made preparations for various responses to the rising.102 Even into the mid-1640s, when Scots-Irish petitioned for charitable assistance, they identified abuses under the Wentworth regime as the beginnings of their sufferings. Thus Thomas Ffleeming, a petitioner to the presbytery of Lothian and Tweeddale in 1643, complained that he was ‘troubled by the proud lord deputy Wentworth … and thereby was put to daily trouble and thrice imprisoned and fined’. His condition worsened after the outbreak of the rebellion, but the primary cause of his hardship rested in Wentworth’s regime.103 As in England, the announcement of the Irish rebellion in Scotland caused anxiety. Charles I, who was in Edinburgh to conclude the peace with Scotland, received first word of the rising. On 28 October, the crown presented information to the Scots Estates, ‘showing the Irish had lepin [sic] out in Ireland in open rebellion’.104 In a lengthy address, the king dismissed rumors that the rebels had connections to the French or Spanish, but also warned that ‘if their hopes proceed from the papists of England, then he thought the business of a greater consequence and of a more transcendent nature’.105 In context, news of the rebellion was no doubt troubling to many in Scotland. Only two weeks earlier, Edinburgh had been stunned by revelations of ‘the Incident’, a shadowy plot allegedly intended to arrest and kill the crown’s chief critics in the Scottish nobility.106 In these times of confusion, rumors of 99

Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates, 18–19. Stevenson refers to this as ‘a flood of refugees’, ibid., 20. 100 James Kirk (ed.), The Records of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, 1589–1596, 1640–1649 (Edinburgh, 1977), 121. 101 The Irish Martyr: Or a True Relation of the Lamentable Sufferings of Mr. John Trewman (London, 1641). 102 Kirk (ed.), Records of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, 121–3. Young suggests that the timing of the Trewman widow’s petition was intentional, implying that John Trewman had been a victim of the Irish rebels, ‘presumably to gain extra sympathy’. Young, ‘Escaping Massacre’, 226. 103 Kirk, Records of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, 144. 104 James Haig (ed.), The Historical Works of Sir James Balfour, vol. 3 (Edinburgh, 1824), 119. 105 Ibid., 120. 106 Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 190–1; Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 322–8; Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 238–41.

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rebel claims to be acting in the king’s name could well have added to some suspicions of Charles I’s actions and intentions.107 Scottish responses to the rising reflected the tense religious atmosphere and the complicated political relationship between the three kingdoms. In early November, James Stewart, fourth duke of Lennox spoke from the floor of the Scottish parliament against proposals for a day of fasting for Ireland, complaining that a fast would ‘encourage the enemy, who would say that we could do no more than betake ourselves to our prayers and fasting, since warlike preparations were more necessary’.108 Lennox, who resided in England for much of the 1630s and 1640s, had a tense relationship with the Scottish parliament, having been initially denied his seat during Charles I’s visit to Edinburgh in 1641 as a result of his refusal to take the oath of the covenant. Lennox’s opponents in the parliament berated his opposition to the fast as ‘impious’, criticizing his earlier stance on the covenant as much as his skepticism about the Irish project.109 The constitutional relationship between England, Scotland, and Ireland proved a vexing problem. A committee comprised of three representatives from each estate sat in Edinburgh beginning on 2 November and proposed sending ten thousand men and arms for an additional three thousand soldiers to Ireland. These initiatives, however, also acknowledged England’s main responsibility for Ireland, with the committee suggesting that Scottish expenditures should be eventually repaid by the English parliament.110 Ultimately, attempts to raise a Scottish army for Ireland floundered amid political and constitutional controversies. Members of the English parliament worried that the intervention of the Scots might serve as a means to introduce a greater Scottish influence on Irish affairs. The Scots for their part hesitated in part out of fears that costs would fall solely on their shoulders.111 In the end, Scottish soldiers only began arriving in Ulster in April 1642, six months after the outbreak of hostilities. The Scottish privy council dealt with the problem of refugees from Ireland 107

In London, tracts and pamphlets reported rumors of the king’s alleged involvement in the plot. Henry Jones’s report to parliament, for example, noted rebel claims to possess ‘a commission from his highness’ and that ‘his highness was among them in the north of Ireland, riding up and down disguised and with glass eyes, desiring not to be discovered’. Jones’s commentary made it clear, however, that these stories were obviously the product of the rebels’ ‘vain and ambitious thoughts’ rather than evidence of Charles I’s support for the rising. See Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 5–6. 108 Haig (ed.), Historical Works of Sir James Balfour, 133. For more on Lennox’s actions during the Bishops’ Wars, see Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 234, 239–40. 109 Haig (ed.), Historical Works of Sir James Balfour, 133. 110 Ibid., 134. 111 Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates, 48, 56–7. In particular, English members of parliament feared that the Scots would use the war as a pretense to grab territory in Ulster. These fears were no doubt worsened by proposals emanating from Edinburgh in late 1641 and 1642 that such an expedition could be funded by transferring ownership of the disputed Londonderry plantation to Scottish undertakers. See ibid., 60.

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throughout 1642. On 1 February, it ordered collections throughout the nation for those of ‘his majesty’s good subjects and our countrymen that are daily forced to flee out of Ireland’. Some evidence suggests that the English Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan served as a model for this Scottish project. By this time, news of an Irish collection had been circulating in England for several weeks, and the Act had been signed by Charles I on 31 January 1642, just two days before publication of the Scottish collection. The Scottish privy council ordered all ministers to use ‘their sermons and other ways, to stir up their flocks liberally and cheerfully to contribute’. Individual ministers would send parish contributions to the presbytery, which would then forward funds on to privy council-appointed commissioners in Edinburgh and Ayr.112 The conditions faced by Irish refugees in Scotland can be reconstructed in outline. In late February 1642, the Scottish privy council received correspondence from the presbyteries of Ayr and Irvine on the west coast, informing them of ‘great numbers’ of Irish languishing there.113 Subsequent letters in June 1642 complained that there were ‘above four thousand persons … like to starve’ in the two presbyteries.114 The Firth of Clyde also served as a major point of disembarkation, with the local minister in Dunoon sending information to Edinburgh on upwards of five hundred Irish on the Isle of Bute.115 As in England, some refugees left the coastal communities and made their way to larger cities and towns. In March 1642, for example, the privy council created a committee to look into a group of Irish living in Edinburgh who had petitioned for some of the relief money.116 Throughout the Scottish collections for Ireland, administrative inefficiency seems to have been a problem. In April 1642, nearly four months after the publication of the collections, the Scottish privy council complained that many collections had not transpired and that many parishes had failed to pay funds in to the designated moderators and collectors, warning that the entire project ‘is like to miscarry, and the poor people in Ireland are like to be defrauded thereof, to the great offense of God and scandal of the gospel’.117 Even in cases where the privy council directly intervened to assist displaced men and women from Ireland, charity was slow in coming. In December 1642, the presbytery of Dunoon petitioned the privy council for relief, noting that none of the £1,000 of charity that had been designated for refugees in the previous April had arrived.118 As the 1640s wore on, official responses to

112 113 114 115 116 117 118

PCRS, vol. 7, 190; Young, ‘Escaping Massacre’, 221. PCRS, vol. 7, 209–10. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 546. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 500–1.

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refugees became less and less common, although displaced settlers continued to present petitions for relief to the synods throughout the decade.119 The needs of displaced settlers from the Irish plantations presented a ‘British problem’. Many of the plantation settlers occupied multiple worlds. They were inhabitants of Ireland, but they remained connected to Scotland and England by ties of kinship, ethnicity, and often religion. When the rebellion began, some found it possible to carve out a position of safety because of the social relationships that they had laid down in Ireland. Their experiences were ‘British’ in the sense that they lived within a multiethnic society where English, Scots, and Irish found ways to live with each other. Others had to fall back on older social ties, fleeing Ireland either through choice or necessity. In England and Scotland, these men and women became British problems. In many cases they arrived destitute and with few if any local connections. As they took to the roads and taxed local poor relief structures, refugees presented local officials and the state with significant economic problems. As strangers, they also raised suspicions and local anxieties. Although the Scots played a role in relief for displaced settlers, Dublin Castle realized early on that assistance for these displaced persons would have to rely on English efforts. The Lord Justices complained to the English parliament as early as December 1641 that Dublin ‘is not able to entertain and nourish such multitudes of poor distressed people’. While they had set able-bodied men to work as soldiers, they still had many women and children to maintain. Accordingly, they desired that parliament might stir up the English people to ‘take some consideration of their distress and great necessity and extend some relief towards them by making contributions, which contributions they desire may be reserved … to be employed only to the relief of the poor distressed people’.120 In March 1642, a petition from Protestant ministers in Dublin reiterated this appeal, begging that England, ‘which hath always been ready to distribute to the necessity of the saints’, would now see to Ireland’s needs.121 Dublin, for many refugees, was a stop-over on the way to England. Some depositions indicate that despoiled settlers simply took passage where they could find it, not even bothering to go to Dublin.122 Many of those who did 119

See Young, ‘Escaping Massacre’, 239–40. In 1649, for example, the synod of Lothian and Tweeddale complained that general assembly requests for charity for individuals who ‘pretend to come from Ireland to their friends in Scotland’ strained local resources ‘to the prejudice of the poor of every parish’. Kirk (ed.), Records of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale, 292. 120 HLRO, Main Papers, 14 December 1641. 121 Petition of the Despoiled Ministers of Ireland, TCD Ms. 840, 36. See also Petition of the Despoiled and Distressed Ladies and Gentlewomen Now Residing within the City of Dublin, TCD Ms. 840, 27; and Petition of Henry Jones on the behalf of the Distressed Ministers of the Gospel in Ireland, TCD Ms. 840, 29. 122 In Leinster, the ports at Wexford and Youghall seem to have been especially active. See depositions of John Archer, TCD Ms. 818, 19; John Symmes, TCD Ms. 818, 28; and John and Elizabeth

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pass through Dublin did not even tarry long enough to make a deposition before securing passage to Chester, Bristol, or ports in Wales.123 Deponents themselves noted that they were either immediately going to depart the kingdom or had already shipped their families across the seas.124 The Irish Lord Justices actively encouraged this migration. In December 1641, they warned parliament that many of the poorest widows and children would have to be ‘transported by ship into England’ should charity not arrive soon.125 In the summer of 1642, they repeated this warning, reminding the Commons that the poor ‘if not set on work here to keep them alive, must go thither to beg’.126 Henry Jones also alluded to this eventuality during his lobbying trip to London in 1642. While the ties of religious brotherhood and sympathy towards the estate of Ireland’s Protestants should stoke England’s mercy, he also suggested that charity sent into Ireland would prevent ‘mischiefs and inconveniences’, including ‘their coming over into England, which otherwise must of necessity ensue, to the infinite trouble of your honors’.127 It is impossible to ignore the thinly veiled threat implicit in the warning that thousands of impoverished women and children might soon descend upon England. In an era in which poor relief institutions possessed limited resources to deal with the local poor, and in which English local officials repeatedly received orders by royal proclamation to discipline the loose and wandering poor, the notion of packed ships disgorging hundreds of utterly destitute souls into English ports was no doubt frightening to parliament and the English people who would be charged with relieving their Irish brethren. The ambiguous identity of Irish Protestants added to this anxiety. The settlers of Ireland occupied a complicated position within the cultural politics of the British Isles. They were English by ethnicity, but not necessarily by birth, and their loyalties, particularly in matters of religion, could be suspect. A closer look at individual settlers’ experiences in Ireland at the start of the rising reveal how uncertain settler identities could be.

Collins TCD Ms. 820, 11. In the north, Carrickfergus absorbed a number of settlers, and probably exported some to Scotland or the Wirral. See Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 215. 123 Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 80–1, suggests that ‘not the five hundred part hath appeared’ to make depositions, with ‘many gone into England’. 124 For examples, see the depositions of Jathnall Mawe, TCD Ms. 835, 51; William Duffield, TCD Ms. 836, 48; John Leiges, TCD Ms. 810, 162; and John and Herbert Sturgion, TCD Ms. 818, 127. 125 HLRO, Main Papers, 11 December 1641. 126 NLI Ms. 2542, 333–4. 127 Petition of Henry Jones on the behalf of the Distressed Ministers of the Gospel in Ireland, TCD Ms. 840, 29.

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3 The Hand of God and the Works of Man: Narrations of Survival

The 1641 depositions are in many respects an archive of survival stories. Imbedded within individual depositions are narrations that shed light on the ways that settlers saved themselves during the rising and provide clues about the fate of many other settlers who remained behind. This chapter focuses on several sets of depositions that are especially full in detail. They present information on a wide variety of survival strategies implemented by deponents and those with whom they interacted with in the provinces. In many cases, the stories that deponents told reveal confusion, ambiguities, inconsistencies, and often manipulation. A microhistorical view reveals detail and specifics about local circumstances, for example ties of kinship and neighborhood that facilitated some settlers’ survival. In especially well-documented cases, it is possible to reconstruct the steps that individuals took and the social networks that individuals moved through as they attempted to secure their safety. A microhistorical approach to the depositions also reveals the existence of a ‘dark figure’ of survivors. We know quite a bit about those who fled into Dublin in the early 1640s thanks to the 1641 depositions. The depositions also, however, refer to a number of settlers, English in ethnicity and Protestant in religion, who for various reasons stayed on the plantations. Many of these individuals never made a deposition, and their experiences and actions are therefore only preserved through the words of other deponents. The nature of the evidence makes it difficult to quantify how typical these kinds of experiences were. However, the survival strategies reflected in a close reading of the most detailed depositions reveals a range of different possibilities and important tensions within the Protestant ‘community’ of seventeenth-century Ireland. County Cavan lies on the border between Ulster and the Pale. At the beginning of the 1641 rising, this was an area populated with large contingents of Old Irish, New English planters, and seventeenth-century immigrants from Scotland. The county’s proximity to the Pale also allowed significant contact 

For county Cavan in the seventeenth century, see Forkan, ‘The South Ulster Borderland’, 270–89; Raymond Gillespie, ‘Faith, Family and Fortune: The Structures of Everyday Life in Early Modern

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with Old English Catholics during the rising as many took up inhabitance on abandoned planter properties. The residents of the large plantation towns of Belturbet, Cavan town, and Virginia were therefore well-placed to comment upon the conditions of settler refugees. They themselves experienced exile and flight. In the earliest days of the rebellion, they also witnessed the treatment of refugees from further north, particularly county Fermanagh, who passed through the county towards Dublin. Most settlers in county Cavan first learned of the rebellion on the evening of Friday, 22 October as English messengers from county Fermanagh, which had risen earlier in the day, rode through the county on their way to Dublin. According to deponents, Cavan saw its first robberies and assaults the next afternoon. On Sunday, 24 October, men from the O’Reilly sept approached Belturbet, Cavan town, Butlersbridge, and Virginia. The O’Reillys demanded the surrender of all English weapons and for the next several days disarmed, harassed, and sometimes plundered more remotely settled English. On 1 November the O’Reillys returned to the larger towns, robbed and drove away some of the unarmed English. Some settlers stayed behind, some seeking collective self-defense on larger estates and some eking out survival as best they could in their old neighborhoods. Cavan’s geographic location meant that settlers from planted areas of west Ulster often passed through on their way to Dublin. Witnesses who remained in Virginia, the easternmost English settlement of consequence in the county, reported that during the first two weeks of November the roads were choked with hundreds of refugees. Examples from the town of Belturbet provide important evidence on the confusion that accompanied the first days of the rising. According to deponents, the rebel force that demanded the surrender of the town on 24 October was led by important Irish county officers. They included: Philip MacHugh MacShane O’Reilly, one of the knights of the shire for the county; Myles O’Reilly, the high sheriff of Cavan; and Philip MacMulmore O’Reilly, an uncle of the high sheriff and a justice of the peace. Well-known and locally powerful in their own right, the O’Reillys also supported their actions by referencing royal authority. Upon their arrival at Belturbet, the rebels sent Richard Ashe, an English Catholic, into the town. Ashe claimed Cavan’, in Raymond Gillespie (ed.), Cavan: Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 1995), 99–114.  Depositions of Richard Lewis, TCD Ms. 832, 46–7; Arthur Culme, TCD Ms. 832, 115–19; and George Creichton, TCD Ms. 832, 145–7. For more specific information on the rebellion in this region, see Donald M. Schlegel, ‘A Clogher Chronology: October 1641 to July 1642’, Clogher Record 16 (1997), 79–94, and Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 219–23.  For Belturbet, see the depositions of Richard Lewis, TCD Ms. 832, 46–7; and Thomas Smith, TCD Ms. 832, 142; for Cavan town, see the deposition of John Whitman, TCD Ms. 832, 57–8; for Virginia, see the deposition of George Creichton. TCD Ms. 832, 145–7.  Depositions of Thomas Smith, TCD Ms. 832, 142; and Richard Lewis, TCD Ms. 832, 46–7.  Deposition of George Creichton, TCD Ms. 832, 147.

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that the sheriff possessed a warrant from Charles I giving the O’Reillys permission to ‘come and destroy all the town and all the inhabitants’ if they did not surrender all their weapons. The display of coercive force combined with similar references to the crown’s sanction accompanied rebel activities throughout the county. It is difficult to believe that the English in Belturbet had much confidence in the legitimacy of the royal warrant, but the indefensible military situation of the settlement rendered resistance to the O’Reillys futile. Prescriptions in the Ulster plantation scheme, which mandated extensive defensive construction, the maintenance of armories, and military drilling by settlers, had never been enforced. Thus, deponents reported that only the parish church in Belturbet could be considered a structure of any defensible strength. The only men with military experience in the area, a small garrison based in the town, had left for Dublin upon first news of the war. Pragmatism thus informed the English settlers’ decision to surrender. They were no doubt also encouraged by the O’Reillys’ promises of religious liberty and affirmations that they would allow the disarmed English to ‘peaceably and quietly possess and enjoy their estates’. George Creichton, a Scots-Irish Protestant minister from the town of Virginia, provided a particularly detailed story of his survival under these circumstances.10 Creichton was a Church of Ireland minister and a reasonably successful farmer in the town of Virginia, about twenty-five miles southeast of Belturbet. He had lived there long enough to have cultivated a fairly wideranging network of contacts with men of Old and New English, Scottish, and Irish backgrounds. Initially spared by the O’Reilly rebels, he remained in Virginia until mid-September 1642. His deposition, taken in April 1643,

 

Deposition of Richard Lewis, TCD Ms. 832, 46. Deposition of John Whitman, TCD Ms. 832, 57. References to a commission from the crown appear in a number of depositions, but have no basis in fact. They may reflect rumors of Phelim O’Neill’s claims in 1641 to possess a royal warrant to ‘use all politic means and ways possible to possess … all the forts, castles, and places of strength and defense within the kingdom … also to arrest and seize the goods, estates and persons of all the English Protestants’. Although O’Neill alleged that the commission had come from Charles I in Edinburgh, in fact it was a forgery, bearing a seal cut from a patent stolen during the assault on Charlemont castle on 22 October 1641. See R. Dunlop, ‘The Forged Commission of 1641’, English Historical Review 2 (1887), 527–33; quote on 530. The commission is also discussed in Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 218–19.  For the many failures of plantation policies in Ulster, see Canny, Making Ireland British, 205–42. Other important works on the Ulster plantations include: Gillespie, ‘The End of an Era: Ulster and the Outbreak of the 1641 Rising’, in Brady and Gillespie (eds), Natives and Newcomers, 191–248; Robinson, Plantation of Ulster; M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (London, 1973); T.W. Moody, The Londonderry Plantation, 1609–41: The City of London and the Plantation in Ulster (Belfast, 1939).  Deposition of Richard Lewis, TCD Ms. 832, 46. See also Jones, Remonstrance of the Beginning and Proceedings of the Rebellion, 4–5. 10 Joseph Cope, ‘The Experience of Survival during the 1641 Irish Rebellion’, Historical Journal 46 (2003), 295–316.

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described the intervening months during which time Creichton found himself frequently endangered and saw the death of his wife as a result of illness. Creichton’s Scottish ethnicity was, at least initially, the key to self-preservation. When rebels unexpectedly appeared in the woods surrounding Virginia in late October 1641, Creichton feared that he would be killed. However, leaders of the O’Reilly family promised that ‘the Irish will do no hurt to you nor to any of your countrymen’.11 Creichton used these promises of personal protection to help assist his other Protestant neighbors. He opened his house to English settlers in the area and as stripped refugees from Fermanagh began to pass through Virginia towards Dublin, he expanded these efforts by distributing food and offering shelter to the travelers.12 Creichton proved skillful at utilizing his pre-war reputation and manipulating divisions among the rebel ranks in order to preserve his personal safety in the face of growing danger. By January 1642, however, he had cause for concern. Among the Old English leaving the Pale, one of the first to arrive in Virginia was Christopher Plunkett, the second earl of Fingal. Creichton, unfortunately, had bad relations with the Plunketts, having been involved in a long-running and contentious legal dispute over land with the first earl of Fingal, Christopher’s father. Upon arriving in Virginia, and for several months after, Fingal repeatedly pressed the O’Reillys to evict or execute the Scottish minister, expressing dismay at their decision to allow such a distasteful advocate of the Protestant religion and plantation policies to dwell among them. Creichton worked just as hard to remind his neighbors that he had always tried to remain on good terms in the community, despite religious differences with local Catholics. The O’Reillys responded positively to this argument and intervened on behalf of Creichton, at one point telling the earl that ‘Mr. Creichton was a kind neighbor to us and we have thought it was fit we should be thankful to him and deal well with him as he did with us’.13 Clearly Creichton found ways to transcend religious and ethnic differences during his year in Virginia. The Creichton deposition speaks to the existence of a ‘dark figure’ of English settlers in the area. His deposition alluded in several places to other English and Protestants living in the environs of Virginia.14 Determining how this ‘dark figure’ survived is difficult, but the depositions raise some possibilities. Creichton complained at the end of his account of the rebellion that while he had remained loyal to his religion, many others in the Cavan plantations had no such loyalties. He believed that most of those who converted were ‘profane and irreligious Protestants [who] thought to gain something’, but also admitted that the promises of safety that accompanied 11 12 13 14

Deposition of George Creichton, TCD Ms. 832, 145. Ibid., 146–7. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 153–5.

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requests to convert were attractive.15 On one occasion, the Catholic rebels solicited Creichton himself, making him the attractive offer that ‘if you will go to mass, you shall be accepted and want nothing’.16 References to conversion as a survival strategy run throughout the depositions, often with more detail on the circumstances. In Cavan, a tenant farmer of English descent reported in his deposition that his landlord, Mulmore O’Reilly, offered his personal protection to any that ‘would deny the King and go to mass’.17 Thomas Crant, also from Cavan town, reported that even Protestant clergymen were not immune to such appeals. Within days of the rebellion’s outbreak, a local minister named Parsons sought out the Catholic titular bishop of Kilmore and ‘recanted his Protestant profession and there did swear to continue in the Romish Catholic religion during his life’.18 In a national context, conversion seems to have been a widespread survival tactic. Of the 576 depositions taken by 8 March 1642, fifty-four make mention of conversion to Catholicism as a form of survival.19 The Lord Justices saw this as a severe and widespread problem, instructing the commissioners of the depositions to track the names of all those who ‘have become papists’.20 Although George Creichton condemned this flexibility in religion, to some settlers it seems to have represented a viable means of accommodating with the rebels. Some men involved in the rising broke rank with other rebels and provided assistance to settlers. Perhaps the best-documented case of such a figure in the depositions is Philip MacMulmore O’Reilly, a justice of the peace in county Cavan who joined his kinsmen in early attacks on English settlers in the area.21 Deponents who observed Philip MacMulmore O’Reilly early in the rebellion noted that he repeatedly voiced his conviction that the disarming of Protestant settlers had been authorized by Charles I. On 24 October, at Cavan town, he claimed that the O’Reillys ‘had a commission to take away all the arms and ammunition from the English in the country’ and persuaded the men of the town to turn over their private arms.22 As November 1641 progressed, however, Philip MacMulmore came to question the existence of a royal commission, and was at one point called ‘an old doting fool’ by Mulmore O’Reilly, sheriff of county Cavan, when he asked to

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Ibid., 158. Ibid., 153. Deposition of Thomas Tailor, TCD Ms. 832, 60. Deposition of Thomas Crant, TCD Ms. 832, 74. Cope, ‘Fashioning Victims’, 385–6. Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 16. Philip MacMulmore O’Reilly was one of sixty-five Irish and Old English whom the Lord Justices outlawed in February 1642 as ‘notorious, ungrateful, wicked, vile and unnatural traitors and rebels’. John T. Gilbert, Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652, vol. 1 (Dublin, 1879), 385–93. 22 Deposition of John Whitman, TCD, Ms. 832, 57.

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see the proclamation.23 On another occasion, Philip MacMulmore upbraided other O’Reilly rebels, complaining that ‘you told me you had the King’s broad seal to rise in arms, that you would but disarm the English … and so suffer them all to enjoy their goods, but you have deceived me and I will believe you no longer’.24 By the end of November, he openly criticized his rebellious kinsmen and in response several O’Reillys ‘came into his house and threatened to burn it [and] took himself prisoner’.25 Philip MacMulmore O’Reilly’s journey into rebellion took a final turn towards the end of 1641. On 29 November, a rebel force largely drawn from the O’Reillys surprised a contingent of English soldiers that had been hurriedly raised in Dublin for the defense of Drogheda. Owing to confusion and poor discipline among the untrained English recruits, the rebel ambush at Julianstown sparked a rout and by the end of the day, all but a handful of the English soldiers were dead.26 Hearing news of the victory and having endured several weeks of imprisonment, Philip MacMulmore O’Reilly’s opinion on the war again changed. According to one deponent, O’Reilly at one point said that ‘the said overthrow of the said six hundred … must needs be done by the hand of God and not by man’ and that ‘he himself therefore resolved to take up arms and go into open hostility’.27 According to deponents, in the period after his imprisonment, Philip MacMulmore O’Reilly still went out of his way to lodge, relieve, and preserve those English who remained in the county. Deponents reported that he had a well-deserved reputation among the region’s settler population as ‘a great reliever … [who] saved many of them from perishing’.28 Several deponents reported that they lived at O’Reilly’s home in Lismore until he arranged their flight from the county in late December 1641 and others noted acts of charity and interventions to improve conditions for imprisoned English settlers.29 Gratitude was not, however, the only response to O’Reilly’s actions. A number of deponents read his charitable countenance 23

Deposition of Richard Castledine, TCD, Ms. 832, 123. Much of Castledine’s information on Philip MacMulmore O’Reilly was derived from a series of conversations while imprisoned by the Cavan rebels in late 1641, raising the possibility that he was being manipulated. 24 Deposition of Elizabeth Woodhouse, TCD Ms. 832, 100. 25 Deposition of Richard Castledine, TCD Ms. 832, 124. While imprisoned in December 1641, O’Reilly had several conversations with English settlers in which he again criticized the rising. See depositions of John Whitman, TCD Ms. 832, 58, and Arthur Culme, TCD Ms. 832, 116. At one point O’Reilly confided to a settler that he might ‘draw up a writing to my lord [Sir William] Parsons [one of the Lord Justices] and to the state and I will acquaint them with all their proceedings and crave of them that I may be made provost martial. … The many tenants I have … and all my neighbors … and many of the British, when the warrant comes down, shall be strong enough for the whole county.’ In the event, however, O’Reilly lost his nerve and would not draw up the letter ‘for fear it would be intercepted’. Deposition of Richard Castledine, TCD Ms. 832, 124. 26 Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 222–3. 27 Deposition of John Whitman, TCD Ms. 832, 58. See also depositions of Richard Castledine, TCD Ms. 832, 124; and George Creichton, TCD Ms. 832, 150. 28 Deposition of Arthur Culme, TCD Ms. 832, 116. 29 Depositions of Elizabeth Woodhouse, TCD Ms. 832, 100; Elizabeth Goughe, TCD Ms. 832, 119;

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as a cynical attempt at self-preservation. Henry Jones was very skeptical, reporting that O’Reilly had reneged on a promise to protect the Jones family and their property.30 George Creichton took a similarly dim view of O’Reilly, claiming in his deposition that he seemed almost too willing to voice his distrust of the other rebels in public. Creichton noted that O’Reilly had made a public oath in November of 1641, rejecting the legitimacy of the rebels’ cause. His insistence on having several English and Protestant observers present and the fact that ‘no man required any such oath of him’ suggested to Creichton an act of manipulative self fashioning.31 ‘If the castle of Dublin had fallen into the rebels’ hands’, Creichton concluded, ‘[he] would have proved another man.’32 Although George Creichton’s deposition recorded his sense of isolation in Virginia, groups of settlers found ways to survive elsewhere in Cavan. Belturbet, in north central Cavan, witnessed in 1642 one of more extensively reported atrocities from the rebellion. At some point in mid-winter, deponents reported that rebels drowned a number of settlers in the River Erne. This comparably well-documented atrocity offers insight into the condition of English settlers who remained in the plantations several months after the outbreak of the war and the tensions that arose from their situation. Although rebels had been in command of county Cavan since the start of November 1641, depositions from the ‘Belturbet bridge massacre’ indicate that between thirty and sixty individuals of Anglo-Protestant or Scots-Irish backgrounds remained in the environs of the town.33 On an evening sometime in mid-February 1642, men of the O’Reilly and Mulpatrick families rounded up some of these survivors and marched them to the banks of the River Erne. There, the rebels hanged two of the more prominent planters, James Carr and Timothy Dickonson (or Dickson). They forced the remaining prisoners ‘together into the water of Belturbet and cast off the bridge there’.34 Those who attempted to swim to the shore ‘were thrust into the river with long pikes and therewith held down into the water until they were drowned’.35 A particularly strong Englishman ‘swam under the water at least three hundred yards’, only to be killed on the spot by ‘one cruel and base rebel … [who] run him through the bowels with a pike and thrust him into the water again’.36 After the massacre, the bridge at Belturbet became the focus of local

Richard Thurbane, TCD Ms. 832, 56; John Whitman, TCD Ms. 832, 58; and Richard Castledine, TCD Ms. 832, 125. 30 Deposition of Henry Jones, TCD Ms. 840, 32. 31 Deposition of George Creichton, TCD Ms. 832, 149. 32 Ibid., 159. 33 Deposition of Thomas Smithe and Joane Killin, TCD Ms. 832, 142. 34 Deposition of Richard Bennett, TCD Ms. 832, 81. 35 Deposition of Thomas Smithe and Joane Killin, TCD Ms. 832, 142. 36 Deposition of Richard Bennett, TCD Ms. 832, 81.

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superstition. According to deponents, ‘the plenty of fish formerly taken in that river went away’.37 Bodies appeared on the surface of the river for several weeks afterwards, causing much consternation among the locals. The physical appearance of these corpses was apparently unsettling, as one deponent reported the common rumor that they were ‘not torn, nor eaten with fish, nor devoured’.38 Deponents also alleged that the Irish believed ghosts of the dead haunted the area. In a chilling description, a deponent reported a conversation he had had with one Turlogh McGawghran, who claimed to have witnessed ‘the drowned carcass of a woman, whose face upon their view … turned into its perfect color, and the eyes opened and the skin of her forehead [broke] out, [and] blood issued thence’.39 What is especially interesting about these accounts is the fact that they came from the mouths and pens of other settlers who had remained in the region long after the massacre had occurred and yet found ways to survive. As late as February 1644, English settlers recently arriving in Dublin from Cavan related versions of the Belturbet bridge murders.40 A close look at the sources for the Belturbet bridge massacre reveals the kinds of problems inherent in understanding reports of violence during the Irish rebellion. Sixteen depositions from county Cavan referred in some manner to the massacre. Of these, six depositions – those of John Anderson, William Bloxham, Elizabeth Poke, William Gibbes, Joane Woods, and the joint deposition of Thomas Smithe and Joane Killin – came from self-identified residents of the town. The others were made by individuals who were living in the area and had heard of the massacre from others. Only one of the deponents explicitly claimed to have been an eyewitness: William Gibbes of Belturbet testified that he had been taken to the place of execution and was going to be hanged alongside Carr and Dickonson. At the last minute, Gibbes asserted, a local connection proved helpful as Donnell O’Reilly, ‘the deponent’s old acquaintance’, intervened to spare his life.41 Other deponents claimed to have witnessed the aftermath of the massacre. Richard Bennett, a carpenter in Belturbet reported that he had been one of several English prisoners forced to pull bodies out of the river and bury them.42 William North and Elizabeth Poke, also residents of Belturbet, alluded to their having participated in the removal of corpses as well.43 37 38 39 40

Deposition of William Gibbs, TCD Ms. 832, 140. Deposition of John Hickman, TCD Ms. 832, 142. Deposition of John Anderson, TCD Ms. 832, 68. Deposition of Thomas Smithe and Joane Killin, TCD Ms. 832, 143–4. Another deponent related an even more disturbing tale, recalling that ‘it was a common report amongst the very Irish themselves, thereabouts, that none durst come unto nor stay at the bridge at Belturbet, because some spirit or ghost came often thither and cried revenge, revenge’. Deposition of Awdrey Carington, TCD Ms. 832, 109. 41 Deposition of William Gibbes, TCD Ms. 832, 140. 42 Deposition of Richard Bennett, TCD Ms. 832, 81. 43 Depositions of Elizabeth Poke, TCD Ms. 832, 126; and Richard North, TCD Ms. 832, 108.

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From a critical perspective, the paucity of firsthand testimony from the massacre is a problem. The deposition commissioners made no concerted effort to differentiate between eyewitness and hearsay evidence. Indeed, the commissions specifically indicated that deponents should be encouraged to augment reports on their own sufferings with ‘any others to their knowledge’.44 In the case of the Belturbet incident, at least some of the information was likely the product of hearsay evidence recorded as fact. Some of the depositions may also reflect later contacts as settlers shared stories and experiences with other survivors they met on the roads or in Dublin. In this context, cross-fertilization with other atrocity reports no doubt occurred. In the case of the incidents at Belturbet, one deponent clearly had been influenced by accounts of a similar set of drownings at Portadown.45 As a result, the depositions on the events at Belturbet contain a variety of inconsistencies. For example, deponents put forward widely differing dates for the massacre, with several claiming that it occurred in January or February 1642, but another claiming that the killings transpired the following May.46 Further complicating matters, some deponents seem to have used their testimony as an opportunity to engage in varying degrees of self-fashioning. Some deponents may have used the process of testifying as a means of clearing themselves of guilt by association with the rebels. Richard Bennett, one of the men who claimed to have participated in the clearing of corpses from the Erne, seems to have been a candidate for this kind of self-fashioning. In his deposition, Bennett presented himself as a victim, describing himself as a prisoner of the O’Reillys and claiming that he frequently feared for his life. He was spared and deprived of his freedom, he asserted, because the O’Reillys needed his skills as a carpenter.47 William Gibbes, who claimed a last-minute reprieve from execution at the Belturbet bridge, made a similar claim, testifying that he had been forced to stay in Cavan as a prisoner because the rebels needed skilled butchers.48 The claims of imprisonment in these cases are, however, complicated. A number of other depositions point to the fact that some settlers chose to stay in the provinces and engaged with the rebels without any coercion or threats. The deposition of

44 45

Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 13. Deposition of Richard Parsons, TCD Ms. 832, 90. Parsons claimed that it was at the bridge over the Blackwater in Portadown that ghosts appeared, relating rebel reports of ‘a vision or apparition in the shape of a man … seeming to stand bolt upright with elevated hands’. For an excellent dissection of the evidence for the Portadown atrocity, see Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh, 1641’, 124–7. 46 The depositions of William Gibbes, TCD Ms. 832, 140, Richard Parsons, TCD Ms. 832, 89, and Thomas Smith and Joane Killin, TCD Ms. 832, 142, claim late January/early February dates for the attack, whereas Richard Bennett, who claimed to be present for the removal of corpses, asserted that it occurred in May, TCD Ms. 832, 81. 47 Deposition of Richard Bennett, TCD Ms. 832, 81. 48 Deposition of William Gibbes, TCD Ms. 832, 140. Other deponents in the town made similar claims about having been imprisoned. See Elizabeth Poke, TCD Ms. 832, 126, and Awdrey Carrington, TCD Ms. 832, 109.

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Awdrey Carrington, for example, reported that her husband, a skilled weaver, stayed in Belturbet because he believed he could make a living practicing his craft.49 Others made similar decisions, with one deposition reporting that at least eighty English settlers, including the eventual victims of the Belturbet bridge attack, chose to stay in the town ‘upon promise of safety of life’.50 None of these depositions records imprisonment or coercion, suggesting that some settlers made calculations about their relative safety.51 Some tantalizing clues suggest the reasons behind the violence that occurred at the River Erne. In his deposition, William Gibbes attempted to list as many of the dead as he could remember. They included seven members (spanning three generations) of a family named Carter, the extended families of the hanged James Carr and Timothy Dickonson, two single male planters and a number of single women with dependent children.52 The murders of the Carters, Carrs and Dickonsons may have represented an attempt at ritualized punishment and humiliation. The assault on their extended families implies that the rebels were focused in their violence and were partially motivated by a desire to blot out the family lines.53 The dependent nature of some of the victims also suggests a possible subsistence issue in the background of the massacre, with the attack partially intended to remove nonproductive settlers from the town; on the other hand, the deponent Elizabeth Poke, a single

49 50 51

Deposition of Awdrey Carrington, TCD Ms. 832, 109. Deposition of Arthur Culme, TCD Ms. 832, 117. One key ambiguity in the depositions is whether flight from the plantations was coerced or voluntary. In Belturbet, deponents claimed that the O’Reillys had initially promised safety to any settlers who stayed in the town. In early November, however, as rumors swirled of Irish marching into the county from neighboring Fermanagh, where Rory Maguire had cultivated a reputation for brutality, a large group of English chose to abandon the town. See depositions of Richard Lewis, TCD Ms. 832, 46; George Elwood, TCD Ms. 832, 67; and John Anderson, TCD Ms. 832, 67. Estimates of the number of settlers who stayed in Belturbet vary widely. The deposition of Thomas Smithe and Joane Killin, TCD Ms. 832, 142, claimed that eighty English adults lived in the town. On the other hand, Awdrey Carrington claimed that more than 140 settlers in Belturbet lived in the town until November 1642, a full year after the outbreak of hostilities. Deposition of Awdrey Carrington, TCD Ms. 832, 109. 52 The deposition of William Gibbes, TCD Ms. 832, 140, lists: ‘John Jones, Thomas Carter, Samuel Wellsh, Old William Carter, the wife of the said James Carr, one Mrs. Phillips, widow Munday, Ann Cutler, Elizabeth Stainton and two children of her own and four of her daughter’s children, the wife of the said William Carter … two of her daughters and two of her grandchildren’ plus several others ‘he cannot name’. 53 Other depositions suggest that elsewhere in Ulster a fair amount of score-settling occurred, with rebels attacking men who have been bad neighbors or with whom they had disputed before the war. Raymond Gillespie’s ‘Murder of Arthur Champion’ illustrates this kind of violence very well. Likewise, the execution of Richard Blaney, a justice of the peace in Monaghan, suggests a similar motive. Before being hanged, one of the rebels taunted Blaney, asking him ‘do you remember how you hanged my brother and made me flee my country for three years? But I will hang you before you go.’ Similarly, Luke Ward in Monaghan was hanged in retaliation for presenting a rebel’s kinsmen at an earlier quarter session. Both the Blaney and Ward cases are noted in the deposition of Hugh Culme, TCD Ms. 834, 58, 112.

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woman with no clear occupation or connections, lived in Belturbet for a full year after the incident at the bridge.54 It is finally difficult to determine who was responsible for this atrocity. One deponent clearly had been influenced by the currents of rumors in the area, claiming that Rory Maguire – who had cultivated a reputation for extreme violence in county Fermanagh, but who had nothing to do with the Belturbet attack – was behind the incident.55 More credibly, William Gibbes and Joane Killin suggested that common rebels, specifically Knogher Oge O’Reilly and Brian Oge O’Mullpatrick, carried out the assault spontaneously and without orders from above. This would suggest that the Belturbet atrocity had much in common with other incidents in Ulster, in which Irish elites lost control of their subordinates as the rising progressed.56 The involvement of Philip O’Reilly, a member of the Irish parliament and by far the highest-status rebel in county Cavan, is especially complicated. One deponent claimed that he ‘seemed to be afraid and much grieved’ at the massacre and was directly responsible for arranging proper burials for the victims.57 Although this account suggested remorse for the killings, another deponent claimed that Philip O’Reilly was not particularly upset about the actual murders, but rather about the fact that subordinate men had acted ‘contrary to his word’ and had thus dishonored his name.58 Within the sometimes vague and confused accounts of violence in county Cavan, it is impossible to ignore the ever-present evidence of survival. The mere existence of the depositions testifies to individual survival at least as far as Dublin. In other cases, the atrocity accounts shed some light on more specific experiences. Many of the accounts of the Belturbet bridge massacre, for example, came from individuals who were living in the town in early 1642, but who later fled. If the depositions are taken at face value, it seems that men with specific and desirable trades stayed behind either as a result of coercion, or more likely, calculation. At least some of these deponents indicated specifically that they had been persuaded to stay behind by promises of safety and security. Also significant are accounts of protection by men connected to the rebellion. Philip macHugh macShane O’Reilly’s failed promises to protect those who stayed in Belturbet stands out as an example of how this protection could fail; William Gibbes’s version of the massacre, including his own last-minute salvation by a well-disposed Irish acquaintance reveals, at least in outline, how other kinds of connections and advocacy could also be valuable.

54 55 56 57 58

Deposition Deposition Deposition Deposition Deposition

of Elizabeth Poke, TCD Ms. 832, 126. of Elizabeth Croftes, TCD Ms. 832, 55. of William Gibbes, TCD Ms. 832, 140; and Joane Killin, TCD Ms. 832, 143. of Richard Bennett, TCD Ms. 832, 81. of William Jameson, TCD Ms. 832, 64.

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* Collective self-defense among settlers also occurred during the rebellion. Only twenty miles from George Creichton’s home in Virginia, two members of the planter gentry found collective defense to be the best strategy for survival. Sir James Hamilton and Sir James Craig defended their castles at Killeshandra in county Cavan until mid-June 1642. During this time, they raised and maintained private militias composed of local English settlers. These ad hoc garrisons in turn protected other settlers, who sought shelter in the environs of the planter fortifications. As Cavan was plunged into rebellion, these castles became the focus of settler resistance and harbored, according to one account, more than 1,300 souls until the summer of 1642.59 References to other English enclaves centered on castles or fortified estate houses appear throughout the depositions, with references to 116 separate places that staged some resistance to the rebels.60 Depositions from around Birr Castle, William Parsons’s home in western Kings county, provides significant detail on how survival may have worked in these settings. Two very full accounts survive from the leaders of the defense of Birr. William Parsons kept a daily diary that ran from the start of the rebellion until the beginning of the final siege of the castle by a Catholic Confederate force of two thousand men led by Colonel Thomas Preston, a veteran of the Thirty Years’ War, in January 1643.61 Chidley Coote, the garrison commander at the castle, also made a lengthy deposition, which fleshed out the activities of the soldiers and provided detail on the siege of the castle. Together, the two documents give an almost unbroken account of sixteen months during the rebellion.62 These documents are further augmented by approximately twenty-five other depositions from individuals who lived at Birr Castle before its surrender.63 Birr Castle sits upon a strategically important ford on the Little Brosna

59 Gilbert, Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland, vol. 1, 486, 494–7. The figure of 1,300 comes from Jones, Remonstrance of the Beginning and Proceedings of the Rebellion, 39. Jones wrote this tract after his own flight from Cavan in 1641, and the sources for his extensive account of events at the Killeshandra estates are obscure. 60 Cope, ‘Ireland Must Be Looked After’, 388–91. 61 NLI Ms. 13667. This is an unpaginated facsimile of the original manuscript diary. 62 Deposition of Chidley Coote, TCD Ms. 814, 90–5. 63 William Parsons and Chidley Coote were both connected to important individuals in the English administration of Ireland. Chidley’s father, Sir Charles Coote was military governor of Dublin and staged ongoing campaigns in Munster and Leinster until his death in early 1642. See Armstrong, Protestant War, 21; Moody, Martin, and Byrne (eds), New History of Ireland, vol. 3, 294, 296. William Parsons was nephew to Sir William Parsons, one of Ireland’s two Lord Justices at the beginning of the rebellion. In April 1642, Sir Charles Coote led a relief mission to Birr and spent several days riding out against local rebels with his son. See NLI Ms. 13667, 10–11 April 1642; NLI Film Pos. 795 (Rosse Mss.), Order by Lord Justices and Council for twenty-five horse for Captain William Parsons (1 April 1642). DNB, vol. 42, 929; Moody, Martin, and Byrne (eds), New History of Ireland, vol. 3, 292. Sir Lawrence Parsons’s widow, referred to in the depositions as Lady Parsons, was also present throughout the events at Birr Castle, but she made no deposition.

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River, on the east–west route linking Dublin to Galway. In 1641 this was a remote and forbidding landscape. Extensive boglands surrounded the town, and ten miles to the west the land gave way to the marshes of the Shannon River valley. Ten miles to the west, the barren Slieve Bloom mountains rose over the landscape. Although significant deforestation occurred throughout Ireland throughout the early modern period, maps of Kings county from the end of the seventeenth century indicate that much of the terrain was still heavily forested, adding to the sense that this was a fairly isolated and wild place during the rebellion years.64 In contrast to county Cavan, where armed rebels appeared fairly soon after the initial rising of the Ulster O’Neills, Kings county saw a much more gradual slide into rebellion. Chidley Coote reported that robberies and attacks on English settlers began only in late November, having spread from county Wicklow. Before any substantial disorders began, William Parsons and his castle lieutenants summoned the English inhabitants of the surrounding countryside and asked them ‘to join into a body and to contrive … [a] way as might prefer our lives and estates from the cruelty of the Irish papists’. Some of the settlers refused. ‘Contrary to all the reasons given them of the danger,’ Coote reported, the dispersed farmers felt it best that ‘each man and family would look unto themselves and what belonged unto them only.’ Frustrated but not thwarted, Parsons raised a body of forty horsemen and one hundred foot out of the population of Parsonstown, whom he charged with garrisoning Birr Castle.65 This ad hoc militia served until the fall of Birr Castle in January 1643 and owing to interventions by Sir William Parsons in Dublin, received payment from the crown for their service.66 Parsons’s diary and Coote’s deposition both indicate that policing functions dominated the garrison’s normal activities. On 22 December 1641, for example, the troop seized upon three suspected horse thieves and hanged them on the spot.67 In January 1642, the garrison executed two reputed rebels, one of whom confessed to driving away several cows and stealing an Englishman’s sword ‘because he was drunk’.68 Perhaps the most graphic display of the Birr garrison’s attempts to enforce order occurred during a 64

Discussion of the early modern topography of Kings county can be found in J.H. Andrews and Rolf Loeber, ‘An Elizabethan Map of Leix and Offaly: Cartography, Topography and Architecture’, in William Nolan and Timothy P. O’Neill (eds), Offaly History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 1998), 243–86. The landscape and siege are also covered in Thomas Lalor Cooke, The Early History of the Town of Birr or Parsonstown (Dublin, 1875), 1–5. 65 Deposition of Chidley Coote, TCD Ms. 814, 90. As in county Cavan, the absence of adequate weapons points to a significant shortcoming of the plantation, as settlers were required to possess serviceable arms to use in the event of just such a crisis. 66 HMC, 2nd Report, Appendix, 219–20. In the absence of a large standing army, the state sponsorship of similar quickly raised provincial garrisons was common in 1641; Armstrong, Protestant War, 15. 67 NLI Ms. 13667, 22 December 1641. 68 Ibid., 28 January 1642.

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raid on lands belonging to the O’Carrolls – the Native Irish sept that had previously owned the lands around Birr – in February 1642. Parsons ordered his soldiers to summarily execute a suspected rebel ‘captain’ and displayed his head on a pike outside the sessions house in Parsonstown.69 Witnesses to the events at Birr between October 1641 and January 1643 described the local landscape as especially dangerous. Early in the war, members of the O’Carroll and O’Molloy septs took up positions in the forests surrounding the main road into town. From there, they staged cattle raids and attacks on farmers and woodcutters carrying supplies into Parsonstown.70 According to William Parsons, the rebels’ local knowledge of the bogs north and south of town allowed them to use the wastes as a place of refuge. From these places of security, the Irish staged raids on harvesters and livestock and hid plundered English property.71 During a raid in June 1642, Parsons described the scene as his men, lacking knowledge of the paths through the wastelands, watched helplessly as the rebels ran off with their cows. When Parsons’s men tried to pursue the bandits, ‘they rid into the bog … [and] would not come out of the bog, but stood there and shot about thirty shots’.72 The proclamation of martial law gave the Birr garrison wide latitude in seeking out rebels, and both Parsons’s diary and Coote’s deposition suggest that the soldiers tended not to differentiate between hostile and peaceable Irish. Garrison raids occasionally targeted noncombatants. Coote, for example, claimed that he burned an Irish hamlet to the ground early in the war because he suspected that it harbored rebels, and Parsons recorded on 11 April 1642 that his men killed two women during an attack on an Irish camp at Cree.73 Likewise, in mid-February 1642, Parsons ordered his soldiers to burn all the Irish houses in Clanlagah. This was clearly a preemptive strike, with the town targeted not because it was a rebel stronghold but because of Parsons’s ‘fear that the enemy should encamp there’.74 Parsons and Coote described the local landscape as divided between the security of the English enclave at Birr Castle and the wilderness occupied by 69

Ibid., 23 February 1642. Armstrong suggests that similar incidents by local settler garrisons constituted part of a concerted Dublin Castle strategy to create ‘zones of disruption’ in rebel­dominated territory. Armstrong, Protestant War, 35. 70 See, for example, NLI Ms. 13667, 1 February 1642, 3–4 February 1642, 11 March 1642, 13 April 1642, and 23 May 1642. 71 Ibid., 1 September 1642–14 September 1642; see also depositions of Robert Shepley et al., TCD Ms 814, 82; and Childley Coote, TCD Ms. 814, 93. 72 NLI Ms. 13667, 14–15 June 1642; deposition of Chidley Coote, TCD Ms. 814, 91–2. Deponents also reported that the Irish from the bogs harassed workers trying to plant and clear the fields. See depositions of Robert Shepley et al., TCD Ms. 814, 82. The importance of terrain and landscape in seventeenth-century Ireland is generally discussed in John McGurk, ‘Terrain and Conquest 1600–1603’, in Lenihan (ed.), Conquest and Resistance, 87–114; and Pádraig Lenihan, ‘Strategic Geography 1641–1691’, in ibid., 115–50. 73 TCD Ms. 814, 93. NLI Ms 13667, 11 April 1642. 74 NLI Ms. 13667, 14 February 1642.

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the rebels. As the rising progressed, the isolation of this enclave must have appeared more and more stark. Scorched-earth tactics on the part of both the garrison and the rebels highlighted this division. Fearing arson, William Parsons stripped the thatch from most of the buildings in Parsonstown in February 1642, only to have the O’Carrolls and O’Molloys burn the houses and outbuildings on the edge of the town. The following April, the rebels attacked again and ‘burnt my town almost every house to the ground’.75 In the fall of 1642, the Irish burned whatever crops they could not harvest themselves, and succeeded in destroying the small stores of harvested hay, turf, and corn that the inhabitants of the castle had gathered in nearby fields.76 As Coote and Parsons described it, by January 1643, the castle stood in the midst of a barren landscape: rebels prowled the woods and bogs, livestock could graze in safety only in the shadow of the castle walls, almost all English-constructed buildings had either been burned or rifled, and what fields had not fallen fallow now lay wasted. Other deponents confirmed this assessment and blamed the rebels, complaining that they had unmade the landscape so that ‘forty years improvement of peace is destroyed by these miscreants in one half year’.77 Although the Birr defenders and other local planters asserted a degeneration of the Irish landscape and people, when other deponents described their day-to-day activities in shadow of Birr Castle they conveyed a social landscape that was considerably more complicated, in which Protestants and Catholics, New English and Irish continuously interacted with each other right down to the final siege at Birr. A number of English settlers lived on farms and estates away from Birr Castle for many months after the coming of the rebellion, many coming to the castle only in January 1643, just prior to the garrison’s surrender. According to Chidley Coote, this was primarily the result of a ‘flocking in of all the poor widows and orphans from the town into the castle … and the poor women and children that were turned out of the country … [by the Confederate army] out of an intent to starve them out the sooner’.78 Thus, there was apparently a large body of persons living in the countryside who felt threatened by the appearance of the Confederates in 1643 but who had not been particularly put out by the activities of the local O’Carroll and O’Molloy rebels during the previous year. Others in the countryside seem to have occupied a liminal position, moving freely between communities of rebel supporters and the Parsonstown settlement. An Irishman named Teige Carroll and an Englishman named John Heywood both sold victuals and supplies to Parsons’s men throughout the rebellion, 75 76 77 78

Ibid., 17–19 February 1642, 13 April 1642, 17 April 1642. Ibid., 14–15 September 1642. Deposition of Marmaduke Clapham, TCD Ms 814, 79. Deposition of Chidley Coote, TCD Ms. 814, 94. The clearance of settlers was a part of a wider strategy to disrupt local garrisons. Pádraig Lenihan, ‘Confederate Military Strategy, 1643–7’, in Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis, 164.

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carried messages to the Irish, and provided intelligence on the O’Carroll’s activities at the beginning of the war.79 Both men’s houses were occasionally threatened by rebels, but they managed to protect their property without armed assistance. They also seem to have turned healthy profits through selling food and supplies to the inhabitants of Parsonstown.80 Although many English tracts and pamphlets on the 1641 rebellion conflated English ethnicity and Protestant religion, the settlers around Birr reflected religious diversity. William Parsons apparently did not attempt to clear Parsonstown of Catholics, and at least one Irishman related to the local rebels lived in the castle. The deponent Raphe Walmisley indicated that his father, mother, and a nephew – all of them English Roman Catholics – found themselves ‘trapped’ in Parsonstown until the 1643 siege. Walmisley’s deposition also notes that a local Catholic named Nicholas Harbert and his wife ‘had free access betwixt the Irish and English’, moving without obstacles between the rebel-occupied countryside and the town.81 One of the garrison soldiers, Thomas Uipham, a Roman Catholic, in March 1642 ‘did cunningly slide down and run away with his piece, his sword, and his bandoleer’. Uipham later joined with the rebels.82 Parsons also made reference to a skilled gunsmith named Teige O’Carroll, whom he kept as a prisoner in the castle until November 1642, when he ‘did pick the lock in the stable and run away’.83 As was the case in county Cavan, some Kings county deponents suggested that the simplest way to appease the rebels was to abandon Protestantism. Several witnesses noted that rebels offered to restore seized property to those who ‘would go to mass’, and depositions suggest that for some converts, stolen goods were indeed restored.84 One deponent recounted that a neighbor and landlord both attempted to convince him to abandon his religion and attend Roman Catholic masses.85 On the other hand, Childley Coote dismissed the viability of conversion as a survival strategy. He recalled that during the hardest days of the siege of Birr Castle, ‘some of a weaker kind … would during this scarce time fly unto [the rebels] … desiring their pardon in a most submissive manner’. Even when they offered to convert to Catholicism, ‘the most pitiful answers they could obtain were stripes and taunts and strict command to go to Birr and pray to the puritan gods for relief ’.86 79

For Heywood, see NLI Ms. 13667, 5 March 1642, 30 March 1642, 26 April 1642, 19 October 1642, and 21 October 1642. For Carroll, see ibid., 19 October 1642, and 2 December 1642. 80 Ibid., 1 September 1642, 22 October 1642. 81 Deposition of Raphe Walmisley, TCD Ms. 814, 106. 82 NLI Ms. 13667, 14 March 1642, 4–5 April 1642. 83 Ibid., 12 November 1642. 84 Depositions of Elizabeth Evers, TCD Ms. 814, 55; and Raphe Walmisley, TCD Ms. 814, 106. 85 Deposition of John Holmsted, TCD Ms. 814, 248. 86 Deposition of Chidley Coote, TCD Ms. 814, 94. Instances of attacks on late converts are discussed in Brian Mac Cuarta, ‘Religious Violence against Settlers in South Ulster, 1641–2’, in Edwards, Lenihan, and Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity, 166.

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Parallels to the Irish justice of the peace Philip macMulmore O’Reilly also appear in the Birr depositions. Deponents gave particularly illuminating testimony regarding Irish individuals who acted with hostility to English authority and the Birr garrison but revealed themselves as friends to specific English neighbors. When the Parsonses abandoned Birr Castle in 1643, John Holmsted, an English settler from Clonoghill, and his family were unable to join the convoy of refugees ‘by reason of the weakness of his wife, she being at the time of the taking of the castle in childbed … [and] not able to travel on foot’. After successfully petitioning the Confederate Army for assistance, the Holmsted family were kept as prisoners in the castle for several weeks. Charles Carroll subsequently fronted a £100 bond on Holmsted’s behalf, and moved the family into his house. According to Holmsted, Carroll ‘by himself and his wife did many good offices for the relief of this deponent in particular, and also for the relief of the Castle of Birr generally’. Holmsted’s assessment of his benefactor betrayed a great deal of ambiguity – at the same time that he praised Charles Carroll for assisting the English of Birr, he also named him as a particularly active and dangerous rebel.87 Tensions unrelated to religion and ethnicity escalated within the community at Parsonstown as time progressed. Food was a major problem. To a limited extent the Parsons family offered assistance to those who fled to the settlement. Parsons recorded several instances in which plunder seized by his garrison was ‘restored to the owners and others disposed to the poor people as was thought fit’.88 However, the refugees who came into the settlement seeking protection generally depended upon their own devices. The depositions indicate that parties of unarmed men, women, and children frequently left the castle in order to forage for food.89 Parsons also occasionally ordered noncombatants into the fields to gather grain and stock under armed guard. Sometimes the gleaners kept the harvest ‘for their pains’. At other times, particularly towards the end of 1642, the soldiers kept all of the provisions gathered from the countryside for their own use.90 The soldiers throughout the rebellion also ran a market in seized agricultural products, selling their plunder, at inflated prices, to hungry inhabitants of the town.91 In the midst of the final collapse of resistance at Birr Castle, fractures appeared among the refugee community. When the garrison surrendered in January 1643, a number of inhabitants stayed behind. John Holmsted did so voluntarily, fearful that his newly delivered wife and five small children would not fare well on the journey. Others were compelled to stay behind. 87

Deposition of John Holmsted, TCD Ms. 814, 244. Charles Carroll was explicitly implicated as a rebel in Holmsted’s deposition as well as that of Anthony Stockdale, TCD Ms. 814, 243. 88 Ibid., 31 January 1642. See also 21 April 1642, 30 April 1642, 8 June 1642, 13 June 1642, 7 February 1642; deposition of Chidley Coote, TCD Ms. 814, 92. 89 NLI Ms 13667, 23 May 1642, 29 October 1642. 90 Ibid., 1 November 1642, 22 November 1642, 9 December 1642. 91 Ibid., 10 May 1642, 21 November 1642.

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Richard Tailor, an apprentice cobbler in Parsonstown, reported in his deposition that he ‘was restrained and kept at Birr… by and amongst the rebels to make shoes and boots for them’.92 Seventeen English children ‘whose parents were either formerly slain by the rebels or dead’ also did not join the exodus from Birr and later, deponents claimed, died.93 While deponents used these references to underscore the cruelty of the rebels even after the English garrison left, they also illustrate the fact that the refugee community was not necessarily wholly unified and that pragmatism might work against religious or ethnic loyalties. Despite this evidence, many of the accounts of conditions in Parsonstown and Birr Castle suggest an attempt to reconfigure a unified Anglo-Protestant identity. In their assessment of the events at Birr, the military leaders Parsons and Coote both described a landscape neatly divided by ethnicity and religion. On the one side stood loyal English and Protestant settlers, driven from their property, abused by the rebels, and suffering together in common misery within the civilized boundaries of William Parsons’s castle. On the other side lurked the Irish rebels, intimately connected to the chaotic landscape of mountains, forests, and bogs. According to Parsons and Coote, the rebels united in a common joy of their disorderly and chaotic landscapes. Through terrifying raids out of Ireland’s wastes they sought to plunge the kingdom into anarchy. From this point of view, the war in Ireland was a conflict between two antagonistic cultures, the core of whose respective identities were embodied in and reinforced by the landscapes in which they dwelt. At the same time, their own accounts, and depositions from others who were at Birr in the early 1640s, demonstrate that this division was never so neatly defined. A close reading of the depositions reveals important tensions within the archive. Some witnesses described a tenuous survival, as reflected in grim narrations of flight, victimization, and poverty in Dublin. In other cases, the evidence points to a more complicated social setting, in which religion and ethnicity were not clearly delineated social categories and in which survival often hinged on the pragmatic fashioning and refashioning of these identities. The rebellion was not simply an Irish versus English, or Catholic versus Protestant conflict. Friendly pre-war social relations and acts of conscience pulled individual actors on both sides of the conflict in multiple directions. In many of the cases discussed above, it is clear that deponents did not necessarily see religious and ethnic identity as the most important components of their social identity and were willing to refashion themselves in the interest of personal security. As the Irish Lord Justices and the deposition commissioners attempted to mobilize English relief, evidence of an appeal to a kind of moral economy is 92 93

Depositions of John Holmsted, TCD Ms. 814, 99; and Richard Tailor, TCD Ms. 814, 260. Deposition of Richard Tailor, TCD Ms. 814, 260–1.

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apparent. The Dublin Castle letters and Henry Jones’s reports to parliament alluded to failed moral obligations on the part of wealthy and respected men who fled Ireland at the first sign of trouble. When Jones invoked the flight of Dublin’s elite, he implied that they had betrayed their brethren, leaving them to die in the city’s streets. Jones’s published Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland constructed a similar moral argument in favor of England’s responsibilities towards Irish Protestants. ‘We who have borne the burden and heat of the day, may not be cast off, not having what to eat, or what to put on,’ he wrote, ‘that the rather we may find this admittance into your charity, in that our sufferings are prolonged by our enemies to proceed (which we glory in) from that your zeal for the Church of God.’94 This invocation of a moral economy of relief is important because it demanded action in the name of Ireland’s war victims, both living and dead. It did so, however, in the language of religious unity. These victims should provoke sympathy because they were loyal religious brethren suffering in the face of a heartless enemy. Activism on their behalf included charity, but could not be limited to contributions. Rather, the experiences of Ireland’s war victims as reported in England pointed to the need for vigilance and activism against the enemies of the godly everywhere. This argument illuminates the discontinuity between the Irish rising as lived in Ireland and as represented in England. Arguments like those penned by Henry Jones formed the foundation for English relief projects for Ireland. Sermons and pamphlets, as well as the national charitable collections inaugurated under the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan, stressed the religious unity and universal suffering of Ireland’s settler population. In comparison to the information contained in the depositions, these discourses suggested the existence of an easily identifiable, united, and deserving body of war victims. This simplified abstraction also tapped into important tensions and anxieties in English culture, particularly the fear of popery. The moral imperative to relieve a clearly deserving body of sufferers, combined with the often repeated claim that the papist conquest of Ireland would be a prelude to bloodshed in England, opened the door to contemplation of the nation’s danger and activism to thwart the impending threat.

94

Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 11–12.

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4 Imagining the Rebellion: Atrocity, Anti-Popery, and the Tracts of 1641

During the early years of the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’, the London artisan Nehemiah Wallington reflected on the political, spiritual, and personal significance of the crisis. Ireland, and specifically the Protestants who suffered under the yoke of the papist rebels, was a central part of this reflection. In late 1641 and 1642, Wallington felt compelled to memorialize stories of atrocities against the godly in Ireland in a commonplace book. He summed up his awareness of the intense suffering of his brethren, lamenting ‘the daily bemoanings of the poor oppressed Protestants [which] would almost pierce a Christian’s heart’. Wallington is, of course, well known to students of the seventeenth century thanks to Paul Seaver’s Wallington’s World, a masterful recreation of the social, cultural, and mental world of this idiosyncratic and word-obsessed puritan turner. Although many of Wallington’s surviving writings attest to his spiritual growth and self-reflection, his works in the 1640s reflect an extensive and intensive engagement with matters of high political significance. Ireland and the war victims of 1641 loom large within these writings. Wallington collected printed accounts of the atrocities in Ireland and copied out excerpts from these tracts, organizing them into a coherent narration of popish inhumanity. Despite the time and expense involved, he felt that this work was an important part of his spiritual duty: … [I] write them down for the generation to come that they may see what God hath done, that they may put their trust in God and the children unborn may stand up and praise the lord and talk of all his  

BL Add. Ms. 21935, 164f. Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth Century London (Stanford, 1985).  The most important volume of Wallington’s writings on the 1640s is BL Add. Ms. 21935. Wallington described the relevant sections as a ‘black cover book called A Bundle of Mercies in the beginning of parliament, which book I was constrained to leave about the middle and write of the miseries that broke forth in Ireland’. Of secondary importance is BL Add. Ms. 40883 (‘The Growth of a Christian’), which includes a rough chronological account of the years 1640–3. See Seaver, Wallington’s World, 200, 205–6.

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wondrous works. And for our troubles here, and the misery of poor bleeding Ireland, oh how could I be any way affected either with sorrow for the church of God to mourn and pray for them, or with joy to rejoice with them or give thanks for them.

Wallington concluded that this testament of God’s punishments and mercies would serve the entire godly community both at present and in the future. The surviving version of Wallington’s excerpts from the rebellion tracts seems to have been a product of the mid-1640s. The Irish writings are situated within a longer chronological narrative of England’s providential history, beginning with the escape from the Spanish Armada and proceeding through a familiar litany of national salvations including the Gowry Plot, the Gunpowder Treason, and the Spanish Match. A significant part of the narrative bitterly recounted affairs in England since Charles I’s coronation. Wallington specifically, and predictably, charged William Laud with a variety of offenses during his tenure as archbishop of Canterbury. Laud had innovated the liturgy, corrupted the church fabric, persecuted the faithful, tolerated the papists, and ignored the plight of Protestants on the continent. These betrayals of the faith and affronts to God, Wallington concluded, were ‘worse than in ’88 or that horrible gunpowder plot: surely the Pope and cardinals, the friars and priests and jesuits, nay I think great Beelzebub with all the devils in hell hath laid their heads together to consult and contrive this hellish plot to undermine and overturn the gospel’. This pessimism about England’s condition was only tempered by Wallington’s relief that so far God had shown ‘exceeding great mercy toward England in sparing it that hath abounded with all manner of sins, when he hath destroyed other people, nations, lands and kingdoms’. Ireland in the 1640s was one of these ‘other people, nations, lands and kingdoms’ that had not been spared God’s wrath. Within his providential narrative of English history, Wallington included a long section entitled ‘Of the Miseries of Ireland’ in which he digested a number of pamphlets published in late 1641 and early 1642. Although it is impossible to track down all of the texts that Wallington read, it is possible to reconstruct much of his reading list. At the beginning of his writing on Ireland, he accused the ‘papists there’ of acting with ‘barbarous inhumanity’, which, he claimed, ‘is  

BL Add. Ms. 40883, 16f. BL Add. Ms. 21935, 9f. A similar historical narrative is repeated elsewhere in Wallington’s writings. See, for example, BL Sloane Ms. 1457, 4–53.  BL Add. Ms. 21935, 2f.  A heavily edited and reorganized version of Nehemiah Wallington’s writings appears in R. Webb (ed.), Historical Notices of the Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I by Nehemiah Wallington (London, 1869). This version is very muddled in that it mixes different volumes of Wallington’s writings and reorganizes the material in a way that confuses the sense of the original manuscripts. For material on the Irish rebellion, this version is largely unhelpful as it excises almost all of the most graphic accounts of violence that dominated Wallington’s representation of the war. Webb’s

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not to be paralleled amongst pagans and infidels’. He proceeded to preserve graphic and disturbing accounts of almost unspeakable violence. The types of atrocities that Wallington memorialized had particular significance to him, revealing the aims and intentions of not only the rebels in Ireland, but papists in general. Cumulatively, these accounts of violence in Ireland demonstrated the inhumanity of the popish enemy and situated the Irish rebellion within a global plot to extinguish the light of true religion. One text that features prominently in Wallington’s excerpts is a mostly fictional tract entitled Treason in Ireland, attributed to an Irish correspondent named Stephen Jerome. Although this tract is obviously fictional in retrospect, Wallington took it as credible evidence of the rebels’ boundless cruelty. In his notes, Wallington copied out Jerome’s account of: the execution of the entire family of ‘William Clarke’, including six children at a town called ‘Rockall’; the gang rape of a virgin before her parents, after which the rebels ‘pulled her limbs assunder and mangled her body in pieces’; and the mass execution of ‘above twenty families’ in the plantation town of ‘Puckingell’. Wallington’s excerpts from Treason in Ireland end with a description of an orgy of bloodshed in the same town, during which rebels allegedly seized an English maid and repeatedly ‘abused her body at their pleasure’ before drowning her in ‘the boiling cauldron or pan of wort that was then over the fire’, they then murdered an old woman, ‘cut off her head, and afterward fired the house’.10 Wallington was also apparently moved by the content of a 1641 tract entitled Happiest News from Ireland. From this account, Wallington extracted anecdotes about the murderous ‘Lord of Care’. Care’s crimes also included the mass execution of fifteen children in ‘Kilworth’. Care’s men were responsible for killing an elderly woman by pinning her to the gate outside her house where they ‘[ripped] up her belly … took out her bowels and wrapped them about her neck’. At Kilworth, the Irish engaged in rapes of English women, tortured the men by tearing ‘the flesh from their bones with pincers’, and hung ‘little children upon hooks by the throats’.11 From Tristram Whetcombe’s The Rebels’ Turkish Tyranny, Wallington found more fodder for his overheated imagination. From this tract, he took an extended excerpt describing the horrific torture of a man named ‘Dabnet’ annotations are useful in identifying some (but not all) of the titles of original texts consulted by Wallington.  BL Add. Ms. 21935, 164f.  Stephen Jerome, Treason in Ireland for the Blowing up of the King’s English Forces (London, 1641). 10 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 165f; Jerome, Treason in Ireland, 4–5. 11 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 165f; Happiest News from Ireland (London, 1641). This tract is identified in Webb (ed.), Historical Notices, vol. 1, 298. Bottigheimer suggests that the ‘Lord Care’ may be a fictionalized allusion to John Holles, second earl of Clare. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 34.

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of Croke Haven in County Cork. After being forced to watch the rape of ‘his wife, a religious, godly woman’, the rebels tied Dabnet to a chair while they roasted two of his young children on spits over the fire. A third child was at first forced to turn the spit, and was then thrown into the fire by the rebels, who held him in the flames ‘till he was burnt to ashes’. After his children died, Dabnet was mutilated as the rebels ‘cut off both his ears and his nose, and put out both his eyes, and cut off both his arms, and his legs also’ and then threw him onto the fire. When Dabnet insisted that he ‘would not … yield, but that he was resolved to die Protestant’, the rebels finally cut out his tongue before running a hot iron down his throat.12 Wallington did not report Dabnet’s final words as they appeared in the pamphlet, despite their clear resonance with his own religious convictions. According to the pamphlet, Dabnet ‘spake to them thus, that the worst that they could do to him, he doubted not but that it was for his eternal good, and he did admonish them to take heed, for all these things will rise up at the day of judgment against them’.13 Acts of violence against mothers and children appear repeatedly in Wallington’s extracts. From James Salmon’s Bloody News from Ireland, Wallington copied an assertion repeated in several other texts that rebels were ‘dashing their children’s brains out against the posts and stones in the street, and tossing their children upon their pikes and so running with them from place to place, saying, that these were the pigs of the English sows’.14 He also recorded an account of a December 1641 attack by ‘Captain Vaul’, who murdered ‘tender infants sucking at their mothers’ breasts’ in the environs of Londonderry. Vaul’s men also allegedly raped a ‘grand woman big with child’ before ripping her fetus from the womb.15 Similar charges were repeatedly leveled against the rebels in the sensationalist press in 1641–2. For example, an anonymous tract entitled A Bloody Battle reported on an assault against ‘Mr. Atkins outside Kilkenny: ‘they laid hold of his wife, being big with child, and ravished her, them ripped open her womb and like so many Neros undauntedly viewed nature’s bed of conception, afterward took her and her infant and sacrificed in fire their wounded bodies’.16 Acts of violence against ministers also seem to have struck a nerve with Wallington. From James Cranford’s Tears of Ireland – a gruesomely illustrated compendium of Irish atrocities published early in 1642 – he copied

12

BL Add. Ms. 21935, 165r; Tristram Whetcombe, The Rebels’ Turkish Tyranny (London, 1641), 2–3. 13 Whetcombe, Rebels’ Turkish Tyranny, 3. 14 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 168f; James Salmon, Bloody News from Ireland (London, 1641), 3. Salmon’s tract is identified in Webb (ed.), Historical Notices, vol. 1, 301. This atrocity also appears in text and a graphic illustration in James Cranford, The Tears of Ireland (London, 1642), 54–5, 69. 15 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 166f. 16 A Bloody Battle, Or the Rebels Overthrow and the Protestants’ Victory (London, 1641), sig. a3r. Also see Thomas Partington, Worse and Worse News from Ireland (London, 1641), 2.

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out the story of an Ulster minister named Trafford, who was murdered with his children as they fled to Dublin.17 He also wrote out an account of the horrible death of a minister named Low, who died when the rebels ‘[flayed] the skin off his head and back, saying that they would make a drum head of his skin, that the heretics may hear the sound of it’.18 These stories are, of course, extremely disturbing in content and pornographic in their graphic descriptions of violence. Most of the tracts used by Wallington were also largely fictional. Although Wallington apparently believed what he read, and went so far as to record details such as the names of those who suffered and the places in which atrocities occurred, there is little supporting evidence to suggest that most of these murders, rapes, and mutilations occurred. Contemporary published accounts of the rising that stressed authenticity by using the 1641 depositions – for example, Henry Jones’s Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland (1642) and the Lord Justices’ letters – omitted references to rapes and attacks on infants and pregnant women even as they asserted the cruelty and inhumanity of the Irish rebels.19 Although Wallington was aware of these authoritative kinds of sources, mentioning in his account the ‘diverse letters sent from Ireland, which were read in the house’, his excerpts almost exclusively came from shorter, less reliable accounts.20 Two of the pamphlets Wallington used, A Bloody Battle and Happiest News from Ireland, came from the press of John Greensmith, a London printer notorious for fabricating stories of atrocity. Greensmith’s liberties with the truth were so bad that parliament imprisoned him in 1642, accusing him of paying two Cambridge students to fabricate atrocity pamphlets.21 While Nehemiah Wallington’s obsessive focus on violence is not discussed in detail by Seaver, this chapter argues that Wallington’s understanding of violence was an integral part of his view on the significance of the Irish rebellion. Wallington’s transcriptions give insight into one kind of English response to the 1641 rising. Within his imagined version of the rebellion, the question of whether any of the atrocities he recorded actually occurred is relatively unimportant. What is significant is the fact that Wallington seems

17 18 19

BL Add. Ms. 21935, 166r; Cranford, Tears of Ireland, 29–30. BL Add. Ms. 21935, 167f; Happiest News from Ireland, unpaginated. The absence of concrete references to rapes represents a significant difference between the 1641 depositions and the published tracts. Mary O’Dowd argues persuasively that rapes were probably underreported in the depositions as women feared the humiliation and negative reflections on their own reputations that could follow their testimony. On the other hand Canny also notes that the depositions are not completely free of testimony regarding rape, including several very graphic accounts. See O’Dowd, ‘Women and War in Ireland’, 91–111; Canny, Making Ireland British, 544–5. 20 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 164f. 21 CJ, vol. 2, 396. The Commons Journal indicates that the titles Good News from Ireland and Bloody News were two of the Irish tracts authored by the Cambridge students. These titles are not listed in Thomason or the Short Title Catalogue. It is probable that the Commons Journal misreported the titles of the Greensmith-printed tracts, Happiest News from Ireland and A Bloody Battle.

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to have believed the truth of what he read. This conviction in turn informed the conclusions that Wallington drew from the rebellion. In the end, he found that the violence of the rebellion proved the inhumanity of the Irish and justified their extermination. The papist rebels, in Wallington’s own words ‘are so insufferable, that it transcends even patience itself to tolerate them any longer … so far do these bloody miscreants denigrate from the name of Christians’.22 Several discrete themes repeatedly appear in Wallington’s account of the Irish rebellion. Many of the atrocities that Wallington copied out referred to the extermination of Protestant family bonds. His description of the Dabnet family noted above focused on the systematic and step-by-step extermination of an entire family. Likewise, the rapes that Wallington noted were rarely private acts of interpersonal violence, but were rather explicitly public, often perpetrated before the eyes of husbands and fathers as a prelude to a gruesome death. In these crimes, as well as the assaults on pregnant women, the private and sacred bonds of marriage and parenthood were both literally and figuratively torn apart by the rebels. Impotent Protestant patriarchs stood at the foreground of these accounts, unable to fulfil their fundamental role as protectors while the rebels destroyed their loved ones. As Seaver has demonstrated in his discussions of Wallington’s self-reflective writings, Nehemiah Wallington took seriously his duties as a husband and father.23 Wallington’s pastiche of other writers’ accounts of 1641 tells a story that reflects this central concern and that presents the Irish as intentionally mocking patriarchal responsibilities as they relentlessly attacked the fundamental institution of the family. The theme of snares is likewise important. Repeatedly, Wallington warned of the papist rebels’ sly attempts to catch up unsuspecting persons in their web of deceit and sin. By creating conditions of hardship in Ireland, the rebels made sin an attractive survival strategy. In contrast to the open attacks that destroyed the bodies of English Protestants, these machinations assaulted the souls of victims. This theme comes through especially strongly in Wallington’s discourses on cannibalism among victims of the rebellion. He recorded rumors that starving Protestants ‘being together and in great distress for want of food did condition to cast lots to eat one another’.24 He also recounted a story of two Protestant survivors found by English soldiers ‘feeding upon the dead carcass and cutting off slices from his thighs, legs or arms, broiling them on the fire to preserve their own lives’.25 Similar circum-

22 23 24

BL Add. Ms. 21935, 164f. Seaver, Wallington’s World, 67–95. BL Add. Ms. 21935, 226r. Like rape, cannibalism is an activity largely absent from the 1641 depositions. 25 Ibid., 232f.

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stances, he noted, had obtained in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War, when hardships created by marauding Catholic armies caused Protestant war victims to lapse into cannibalism.26 To Wallington, such decisions were lamentable and his accounts reveal a significant ambivalence about war victims’ choices under circumstances of hardship. On the one hand, such people suffered because of a lack of Christian compassion. In Ireland, the rebels were the main causes of this, but Wallington also repeatedly asserted that English charity for Protestant war victims in Ireland came too slowly.27 Despite these sympathetic impulses, however, Wallington’s spiritual sensibilities made him adamant that one should not abandon God’s laws, even in times of extreme distress. Drawing examples from the Bible, Wallington reminded himself that God frequently punished men with hardships equal to those experienced in Ireland. The Jews endured moments in which they were ‘driven to dwell in dens, in mountains, in the wilderness and in the woods’.28 The Old Testament book of Lamentations was full of stories of God testing and tempting individuals in times of deprivation and hardship.29 The story of Samson demonstrated that the wicked took delight in making the godly ‘a laughing stock to thy enemies’ and Job taught the necessity of patient suffering.30 According to Wallington’s moral system, hardships, even as horrible as those in Ireland, could not excuse falling away from God’s laws. Rather they should be viewed as tests of one’s spiritual commitment and strength. ‘Persecution and outward affliction’, he wrote, ‘should not hinder God’s child from persisting in a good cause.’31 Notably absent in the Wallington extracts are explicit references to symbolic violence. Henry Jones’s Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland used the depositions to show how the specific kinds of violence used by the Irish provided commentary on their aims and motives. Jones’s work focused extensively on the desecration of church fabric and assaults on Protestant ministers. Refer26

Ibid., 82f. Wallington referred to the same incident in the notebook preserved in London Guildhall Ms. 204, 474. In this extract, Wallington drew from Philip Vincent’s Lamentations of Germany (London, 1638). Vincent recorded several acts of cannibalism, some of which violated the bonds of familial piety. For example, Vincent wrote of the death of a nine- or ten-year-old girl in the Palatinate at the hands of her mother: ‘The mother fell a weeping, and broken with her own thoughts, as a ship tossed and beaten between two rocks, desperate necessity and her motherly affection, catcheth at her head, untieth her hair-lace, twisteth it about the neck of this innocent lamb, and so strangleth her; when it was dead, she having nor knife nor hatchet to cut it in pieces, took a spade and therewith hewed it into gobbeths, and so dressing the head, and part of the body devoured it; some part thereof she sold to her neighbors for four stivers the pound.’ Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, 49. 27 See, for example, BL Add. Ms. 21935, 226r. 28 Ibid., 186. 29 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 77r–80f. 30 London Guildhall Ms. 204, 188. 31 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 52f. This is a major theme throughout Wallington’s diaries. See Seaver, Wallington’s World, 51–3, 60.

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ences to Rome and Catholic monarchs, the destruction of Bibles, beatings of ministers, and mocking gestures towards the worship conventions of Protestants revealed the rebels’ religious motives. Their aims, Jones concluded, were ‘that not one Protestant should be left in the kingdom’.32 In Wallington’s extracts, however, rebel violence tended to be presented as more indiscriminate and chaotic. The rebels, in this imagining, did not pull down churches or mock the sermons of Protestant ministers, nor did they seek to justify their actions with references to papal bulls, royal commissions, or abstract notions of religious freedom for Catholics.33 Rather, the rebels killed on a massive scale – Wallington estimated that as many as thirty thousand families had been murdered in Ireland – because they simply took pleasure in shedding blood.34 Wallington did not need to be convinced of the popish inspirations of the rebels. The 1641 tracts convinced him of the basic inhumanity of the papist adversary. Wallington’s conviction in the importance of steadfastness in the face of persecution was underscored in his more personal accounts of the sufferings of his wife’s sister, Dorothy Rampaigne. Dorothy’s husband, Zachariah Rampaigne, had been a planter ‘well beloved and of a great estate’ in Enniskillen, county Fermanagh, and had suffered at the hands of the Irish rebels in 1641. The Rampaigne family story echoes many of the themes in the 1641 depositions. Initially, the family took refuge with other settlers at Castle Coole, a fortified plantation estate, but they were soon driven away by the Irish rebels. Despite promises of safe carriage out of Fermanagh from Brian Maguire, rebels attacked and stripped the families within a few miles of Castle Coole. Three of the English men in the party, including Zachariah Rampaigne, died as a result of the assault. After several days spent ‘in the frost and snow’, Dorothy Rampaigne and her four children returned to Enniskillen and spent several months wandering the environs begging relief from their Irish neighbors. During her later flight to Dublin, Dorothy Rampaigne saw ‘two children starved to death with hunger and cold’, and a third kidnapped by the rebels.35 Dorothy Rampaigne and two of her children eventually fled to England for a time, although the circumstances regarding this trip are uncertain.36 At some point Nehemiah Wallington heard an account of her experiences in Ireland and vividly reimagined the death of Zachariah Rampaigne:

32 33

See Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 7–8. Wallington did note, in a catalog of providential preservations, that a group of Irish rebels planning to burn books were assaulted and driven away by ‘a swarm of bees out of a garden’. Unlike Jones’s references to the destruction of Bibles, the destruction of scripture is not a main point of this episode. Wallington did not even explicitly state that the books were Bibles. Rather, the episode exemplified God’s miraculous intervention in punishing the rebels. See BL Sloane Ms. 1457, 73f. 34 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 164r. 35 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 227f–229r. 36 BL Sloane Ms. 922, 155f–159r. Seaver, Wallington’s World, 83–4.

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… his wife beholding, did on her knees beg for his life, as also his children crying pitifully, ‘Oh do not kill my Father, O do not kill my Father,’ being much distracted, pulling their hair, being content and desiring to die with him. But these bloody rebels did drive them from him, saying they would reserve them for a worse death, even to starve them to death.37

Like the unfortunate Mr Dabnet in The Rebels’ Turkish Tyranny, Rampaigne comforted his wife by reminding her that ‘we are here by the Lord’s permission in the rebels’ hands, led as sheep to the slaughter, but let us not fear them, for they can but only take away this life’.38 Wallington found these words both instructive and inspiring as he contemplated the possibility of violence erupting in his own nation. Unsurprisingly, in Nehemiah Wallington’s version of the 1641 rebellion, many of the nuances and complexities that appear in the depositions are absent. Complicated survival arrangements, appeals to pre-war social relationships, and the rejection of Protestant identity disappear beneath the deluge of atrocity stories in his work. In this imagined war, barely human papist rebels mowed down thousands of helpless Protestants. This is not to say that Wallington paid no attention to complexity. Indeed, in the case of his own sister-in-law, he had ample opportunity to uncover a survival strategy that ran contrary to his exhortation to Protestant fidelity. Unfortunately, the story is fragmentary, only preserved in two letters written by Wallington and his wife, Grace, in 1647. Apparently Zachariah Rampaigne’s widow had entered into an irregular relationship with an Irishman and had recently become pregnant with his child. Wallington learned of this when Dorothy’s correspondences with her Irish partner were somehow misdirected to his home in London. In an angry letter, Wallington berated Dorothy for her sins, thanked God for intervening to bring the sin ‘to light’, and warned that unless she turned away from her sinful ways, she would spend eternity in ‘a lake which burneth with fire and brimstone’.39 He also complained that ‘you

37

BL Add. Ms. 21935, 228f. Wallington record this information as if he had heard it directly, but it is not clear whether this represents Dorothy’s actual account of the murder or a dramatic embellishment on Wallington’s part. 38 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 229f. 39 BL Sloane Ms. 922, 155f–159f. Seaver, Wallington’s World, 83–4. There is some ambiguity over whether this letter was intended for Dorothy Rampaigne (as Seaver claims), or perhaps another member of the Zachariah Rampaigne family. As transcribed in the notebook, Wallington addresses the letter to ‘Mistress MR’, whom he repeatedly refers to as ‘sister’. A follow-up letter from Grace Wallington, also transcribed, provides more contextual information, complaining that ‘MR’ had betrayed the memory of her husband and had been an ‘unnatural mother’ in her conduct. As a result, Grace offered to raise the son of the original marriage, ‘being the child of him whom I so dearly loved’. BL Sloane Ms. 922, 159f–r.

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will do what you can to get all the plate and money you can carry to the Irish rebel in Ireland’.40 It is possible that Wallington’s sister-in-law had entered into this relationship before the outbreak of war in Ireland. It may also have been the case that she represented an example of those who accommodated themselves in various ways in order to find some means of survival. This seems possible, as Dorothy had referred to her affair as the result of ‘a great deal of weakness for which you have repented’.41 Wallington, for his part, did not accept the possibility that his sister-in-law’s actions reflected the complexities faced by those who lived in seventeenth-century Ireland. To him, this was one more example of the snares thrown up by the papists as they tried to trip up the weak. Whereas Wallington’s accounts of violence simplified the Irish rebellion into a war of papist aggression, his attempts to contextualize the conflict added a great deal of complexity. Wallington understood the rising as part of a dangerous popish plot with roots centuries earlier and with ramifications that stretched far beyond Ireland. In his providential narrative, the rebellion reflected the historical persecution of the godly, dating back to the times of the primitive church. The kinds of tortures he related from Ireland could easily be interchanged with those that he noted from the history of the primitive church: … some were dashed against the stones, some were tumbled down headlong from high places into rivers, some they smothered with smoke proceeding from a small fire, some had their entrails pierced with sharp sticks … some were scourged quick and then sprinkled with vinegar or powdered with salt, some were set up quick upon forks and suffered to die of hunger or thirst, and those that could escape into the deserts and mountains, either they died of hunger or of thirst, or of cold, or they were devoured of wild beasts.42

Ireland’s miseries, Wallington claimed, were also comprehensible in the more recent historical context provided by Protestants’ experiences in France and Germany. This long historical view suggested a brutal coherence, linking the sufferings of early Christians to those of seventeenth-century Protestants. Wallington, in summary, imagined a community of Christian believers, united across history in their experience of victimization at the hands of enemies whose lust for destruction and humiliation knew no bounds. Although the papists were open enemies of the godly, Wallington also believed that a more insidious danger lurked in England. Wallington’s writ-

40 41 42

Ibid., 158f. Ibid., 157r. London Guildhall Ms. 204, 317.

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ings invoked a familiar rogues’ gallery of domestically rooted evil counselors and crypto-papists who could be counted on to facilitate this assault. Charles I’s queen, the French Catholic Henrietta Maria, elicited particular scorn. In his section on Ireland, he noted contemporary rumors that the rebels claimed to be ‘the Queen’s army for toleration of their religion’.43 He also recorded an accusation made in the tract entitled A Terrible Plot against London and Westminster Discovered that Henrietta Maria was mentioned in letters ‘directed out of Ireland to a great personage of this city, a papist’. From this account, Wallington concluded that ‘though … the King’s Majesty be a good Protestant in his heart, yet I am persuaded that by the persuasions of the Queen’s Majesty, and the advice of the Catholic lords, and other gentlemen, the wished design may take full effect’.44 Wallington also seems to have had the French-born queen in mind when he explained that God might smite a people for the ‘marrying of strange wives … [mixing] the holy seed with the people of the land’.45 Wallington’s greatest condemnations and anxieties targeted the English bishops.46 Virtually all of England’s dangers in the preceding forty years, he asserted, could be laid at the feet of the prelates. Immediately preceding his section on Ireland, Wallington copied out long extracts from pamphlets relating to the Star Chamber prosecutions of William Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastwick, proceedings in which Wallington himself had been tangentially involved.47 Wallington more explicitly argued that the plight of Ireland’s war victims worsened as a direct result of the prelates’ ill affections. In late 1641 and 1642, while the presses turned out page after page of gory descriptions of rebels who ‘did most cruelly and barbarously murder the people of God’, the bishops sat impassively in the House of Lords, orchestrating delays and obfuscations so that ‘no help nor succor did we send unto them’.48 That the prelates could stand by while their own nominal brethren died in horrific ways spoke volumes to their lack of conscience and evil intentions.49 In Nehemiah Wallington’s account, victims rather than survivors took center stage. He presented these victims as objects of pity. Their sufferings also 43 44

BL Add. Ms. 21935, 168r. Ibid., 188r; A Terrible Plot against London and Westminster Discovered (London, 1641), sig. A3r. This tract is identified in Webb (ed.), Historical Notices, vol. 2, 48. 45 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 74r; this is a quote from Ezra 9: 2–7. 46 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 133f. 47 Ibid., 48–65. In 1637, Wallington and his brother faced examination in Star Chamber as a result of having purchased copies of their proscribed works. See Seaver, Wallington’s World, 3, 101, 159– 60. The Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne case is the subject of Stephen Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground: Alexander Leighton, the Puritan Triumvirate and the Laudian Reaction to Nonconformity (Hamden, CT, 1978). 48 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 157r. 49 Wallington repeated this conclusion later in his book; see ibid., 163f–r.

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should serve as a clarion call to action if the godly were to preserve themselves from the global papist threat. War victims therefore presented a pretense for the contemplation of matters that had very little to do with the actual experiences of individuals in Ireland or the material needs of persons displaced by the conflict. The Irish rising caused Wallington to reflect on his own personal responsibilities in this time of crisis. As he saw it, the horrible spectacle of the Protestants of Ireland demanded action in the form of prayer, charity, and, as the case of his sister-in-law necessitated, rebuke. Wallington also recognized the need for more strident political activism. He expressed his sense that England was not doing enough even as God’s anger moved closer and closer to home. Against this inaction, he cited God’s curse against Meroz in the Old Testament, a passage frequently invoked by English ministers advocating for Irish relief: And yet we wicked, hard hearted wretches lay not this their miseries into heart and are so far from sending of them help that we … rather take the rebels part against them. O how shall England escape that curse in Judges 5:23, ‘Curse ye Meroz (saith the angel of the lord), curse the inhabitants thereof, because they came not to help the lord against the mighty’.50

Wallington’s reflections give some insight into the thought process that gave meaning to the rising. Although Wallington’s sensibilities may not have necessarily reflected the views of the majority of people living in England in the 1640s, Paul Seaver’s reconstruction of his spiritual and intellectual context persuasively suggests that his worldview was firmly rooted in typical puritan beliefs.51 Wallington’s reflections on Ireland thus represent one particularly accessible, but not necessarily unique glimpse of how other English readers may have tried to make sense of the horrific news arriving from Ireland in the early 1640s. To Wallington, the spilled blood of Protestant martyrs in Ireland necessitated action in England. On 23 December 1641, the first London fast day for Ireland, Wallington awoke at 2am in order to prepare himself for a day of contrition ‘that I might prevail with the great God of heaven and earth for this land and poor Ireland that lies wallowing in his blood’. He attended services at his local church, and by his own account, had a successful day of repentance and prayer.52 As London teetered on the brink of chaos during the following month, partly through the evolving conflict between crown and parliament and partly owing to swirling rumors of popish plots against the metropolis, Wallington continuously took refuge in this kind of reflection. 50

BL Add. Ms. 21935, 169f. For contemporary references to the passage, see sermons such as Goodwin, Ireland’s Advocate; Marshall, Meroz Cursed. 51 On the typicality of Wallington’s puritan views, see Seaver, Wallington’s World, 112–42. 52 BL Add. Ms. 40883, 11f.

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The Irish rising played an important role in reinforcing his sense of spiritual obligation. Irish war victims deserved and needed English prayers in order to survive. English observers needed to pray, not only so that the Irish Protestants might be helped, but so that English Protestants might be spared the wrath of an angry God. In the dark days of December 1641 and January 1642, Wallington’s activism also moved beyond spiritual reflection. On 3 January, he shut up his shop in the face of a rumored attack by ‘our enemies’ and took provisions for self-defense with his family and servants. On 6 January, the night after Charles I’s failed attempt to capture the five members, his household was similarly roused. At midnight, alarms were raised in London, ‘and great knocking and bounding at all our doors, that we should stand on our guard … women and children to get up and all were put in great frights’.53 According to the fearful rumors circulated that night, the papists had drawn up ‘a list of the names of our best ministers and of our best citizens’ and marched towards London with an Irish army smuggled into England a year earlier by the earl of Strafford.54 On 11 January, the day that Colonel Thomas Lunsford was removed from the Tower, Wallington similarly feared ‘it would have been a bloody day’, although Wallington felt that his own prayers – which began with a session of intense self-reflection and repentance before dawn – may have helped prevent this.55 Although the Irish rebellion is only one of the manifold crises that broke over England in 1641 and 1642, the shift to activism in Wallington’s case is important, and marks a broader significance of the Irish rebellion. Ministers’ exhortations to prayer on the fast days and parliament’s authorization of relief collections of the war victims demanded a response from the English people. The context in which the Irish rebellion was situated, however, could mobilize even more drastic action. As will be seen in the next chapter, much of the contemporary writing on 1641 focused on parallels between Ireland and Germany, making the explicit argument that a unified and bloodthirsty enemy, based at Rome, was behind the horrors of these religious wars. This writing also placed blame on the shoulders of English Catholics and the hidden supporters and encouragers of popery. The kind of activism alluded to in Wallington’s writings did not target only the Irish rebels, but could just as easily turn against these actors. The Irish rebellion was therefore a key moment in which vague fears crystallized in the minds of readers like Nehemiah Wallington.

53 54 55

Ibid., 12f. BL Add. Ms. 21935, 163f. BL Add. Ms. 40883, 12r.

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5 ‘A World of Misery’: The International Significance of the 1641 Rebellion

Nehemiah Wallington’s extracts placed the violence of 1641 into a broad historical context and underscored the spiritual significance of Protestant suffering. Although horrific, the atrocities that pamphleteers disseminated about Ireland were in many respects identical to those that had been reported from war-ravaged France and Germany in the preceding two decades. Wallington understood this connection and explained it within a providential framework. As he saw it, the sufferings of Protestant noncombatants were tests of faith for the godly, reminders of the natural ferocity of the papists, and should serve as a divine warning of God’s anger over Protestants’ own spiritual failures. In this view, the war in Ireland was not a specifically British problem, but rather a desperate crisis for all Christians. England should respond to Ireland’s misery not because of the political, historical, and cultural links between the two kingdoms, but because the plight of war victims in Ireland highlighted the dangers faced by the godly in Europe generally. Prior to his section on the 1641 rebellion, Wallington copied accounts of Protestant suffering on the continent during the 1620s and 1630s. Some of this information came firsthand from a network of correspondents. A letter from Wallington’s cousin, John Bradshaw, a merchant who witnessed the duke of Buckingham’s expedition to France in 1627, provided graphic information on the suffering of French Huguenots. Bradshaw reported that more than sixteen thousand Protestant inhabitants of La Rochelle had died of starvation during the French siege, and that the survivors had lived in ‘a world of misery’. Although this account lacked the explicit scenes of violence and bloodshed found in Wallington’s transcriptions from the Irish pamphlets, he preserved detailed information on the ensuing famine, including Bradshaw’s account of food shortages, vastly inflated prices on staple commodities, and the grim assertion that some survivors had turned to eating human corpses, the ‘dogs, cats, mice and frogs being all spent’. Wallington also noted the



For Wallington’s extensive network of correspondents, see Seaver, Wallington’s World, 96–108.

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sufferings of soldiers at the Île de Ré assault, who returned to England looking ‘like anatomies’. More graphic testimony characterized Wallington’s accounts of the Thirty Years’ War. He copied long extracts from a book that he had read in 1638, ‘of ye miserable estate of Germany’. Although Wallington did not record the name of this text, it is clear that his source was Philip Vincent’s Lamentations of Germany, an explicitly illustrated account of atrocities against civilians in the Thirty Years’ War. As in his writings on Ireland, Wallington copied some of the most disturbing and graphic information presented in this publication. Most of his transcriptions dealt with a variety of tortures, strangulations, hangings, burnings, and other atrocities. As in the La Rochelle letter and Wallington’s later sections on Ireland, the problem of subsistence cannibalism appears prominently, as do accounts of rapes and attacks on families. Wallington’s apparent interest in assaults against ‘maids and matrons, widows and wives, without distinction … in the presence of their parents, husbands, neighbors, &c., women with child in child-bed, &c.’ duplicates almost exactly the kinds of violence that he recorded from Ireland in 1641 and 1642. Also comparable is his selection of acts of indiscriminate and extreme cruelty. In both Germany and Ireland, Wallington inferred, pillaging Catholic soldiers delighted in humiliating the godly before they destroyed them. The theme of patient suffering in the face of popish cruelty appeared regularly in English Protestant religious culture from the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign onward. Canonical texts like John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments linked the sufferings of Protestant martyrs to a tradition of persecution against true Christians stretching back into the first century. Although it has been suggested that this framework supported a self-assured conception of England as an ‘elect nation’, more recent scholarship has suggested that views of England’s struggle with the forces of popery could be decidedly pessimistic.

 

BL Add. Ms. 21935, 77; BL Sloane Ms. 922, 77. BL Add. Ms. 21935, 80–2. Wallington returned to these same issues in his 1654 commonplace book. See Folger Library Ms. V.a.436, 25–6.  BL Add. Ms. 21935, 81; Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, 8–14.  BL Add. Ms. 21935, 82; Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, 38, 45, 48.  BL Add. Ms. 21935, 81; Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, 17.  For the concept of England as God’s chosen nation, see William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963), 157–61; Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto, 1978), 39–45. In contrast, Peter Lake demonstrates that the view of England as a nation blessed by divine providence was repeatedly undermined by repeated experiences of ‘popish assault[s] on English independence’. The attendant fear of Catholics, he argues, was a much more relevant component of early Stuart culture than the self-congratulatory view proposed by Haller. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’, 80.

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Peter Lake’s work on popery complicates our understanding of this anxiety further, persuasively demonstrating that English Protestants perceived the popish threat as murky and inherently unpredictable. Although the pope stood at the head of this enemy force, the various plots, intrigues, and anxieties of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries suggested that the papists were insidious threats. Popery could be interpreted as a set of attitudes – for example a belief in the efficacy of ritual over prayer – rather than a fixed confessional identity. By this logic, even persons claiming to be Protestant could be viewed as popish agents. In the 1630s and 1640s, the Church of England bishops, who claimed authority over the nation’s religious policies and appeared to be ushering the nation towards a ritually based liturgical culture, could thus be perceived as ‘a direct emanation of the Pope’s tyrannical rule over the church’ and therefore a popish threat. In responses to the 1641 rising, this problem is clearly evident. Pamphleteers and ministers condemned a variety of players who did not participate directly in the Irish rebellion, ranging from sinners at home to papist backsliders to the Protestants bishops, for aiding and abetting the aims of the rebels. A number of longer pamphlets published after the outbreak of the Irish rising mimicked the structure of Foxe’s work.10 Henry Jones’s Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland included an encyclopedic list of Protestants abused by Roman Catholic rebels. Printing the names and origins of those victimized by the rebels along with a lengthy description of their sufferings, the Remonstrance copied Foxe’s presentation of individual histories as testimony of loyal Protestants’ patience in the face of popish horrors.11 Jones’s catalog of rebel excesses included mass murders, atrocities, and the desecration of Protestant churches, harkening back to John Foxe’s lamentations over the ‘outrageous cruelties committed … by the favorers and followers of the church of Rome upon faithful Christians’.12 In later tracts on the rebellion, pamphleteers deployed a similar system of organization. John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion is perhaps the best known of these, but a number of other lengthy publications included catalogs of massacres and atrocities in order to illustrate the sufferings of the godly.13 

Lake, ‘Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’. For the malleability of popish fears and their essentially destabilizing impact, see Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’, 74–83.  Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’, 77. 10 For more detail on the comparisons between Foxe and the Irish pamphlets, in particular the parallels between the kinds of atrocities described in the Irish tracts, see Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord’, 9–15. 11 Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 12, 80. 12 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments Most Special and Memorable Happening in the Church with an Universal History of the Same, vol. 2 (London, 1641), 1027. 13 New synthetic works on the rising appeared in print into the 1680s, and John Temple’s Irish Rebellion was republished into the ninetenth century. Representative examples include: Cranford, Tears of Ireland; An Abstract of Some Few of the Barbarous, Cruel Massacres and Murders, of the

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Printed works on the Irish rebellion did not, however, simply reiterate a traditional argument for godly patience in the face of suffering. The tracts of late 1641 and 1642 also dredged up more recent concerns over Roman Catholic activities on the European continent. In the 1620s and 1630s, pamphleteers used a mix of anti-popish stereotype, references to Protestant war victims, and appeals to national pride to argue in favor of English intervention in the continental crisis.14 Sensationalized accounts of violence and cruelty underscored the terror posed by Catholic armies. For example, the Swedish Intelligencer, a periodical newsbook published between 1632 and 1635, reported on arbitrary executions, tortures, and robberies committed during the 1631 sack of Magdeburg, claiming that the violence stemmed from ‘a popish spite … for [its] having been one of the first that harbored Luther and his religion’.15 The Lamentations of Germany, Nehemiah Wallington’s main source of information on the Thirty Years’ War, took this further. The publisher of the tract included vivid descriptions and engravings of all conceivable kinds of atrocities carried out by Roman Catholics, sparing no detail in gruesome accounts of rapes, attacks on children, and mutilations of pregnant women. Anecdotal accounts – for example the claim that the Count of Tilly encouraged Croatian mercenaries in his Catholic League army to eat infants – further emphasized the horror meted out by the papists, as did lavish woodcut illustrations of a diverse range of grisly acts added ‘the more to affect the reader’.16 Amid the graphic depictions of carnage and bloodshed, the author made it clear that the miseries endured by Protestants on the continent should be viewed with particular horror by English audiences. Those victimized in the war ‘are of the same religion with us … [and] many of our own have suffered with them’. The godly who were burned out of Magdeburg and the hapless civilians who were tortured and maimed for

Protestants and English in Some Parts of Ireland (London, 1652); Edmund Borlase, History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion (London, 1680). 14 For the 1620s and 1630s, see Cogswell, Blessed Revolution, 302–7; and Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s’, 805–25. 15 Swedish Intelligencer: The First Part (London, 1632), 28. For other descriptions of atrocities enacted by Imperial and Catholic forces, see The Invasions of Germany, with all the Civil and Bloody Wars Therein (London, 1638), 16–20; and N.C., The Principal Passages of Germany, Italy, France, and Other Places, Number One (London, 1636), 1–40. Key scholarship on newsbooks and the circulation of knowledge of current events includes: O’Hara, English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion; Alan Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 335–405; Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996); Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present 112 (1986), 60–90. 16 Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, 8. The descriptions of atrocity in this tract are analyzed in Barbara Donagan, ‘Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War’, Past and Present 118 (1988), 67–70; and Barbara Donagan, ‘Atrocity, War Crime and Treason in the English Civil War’, American Historical Review 99 (1994), 1145–7. For those who still found the prose of The Lamentations of Germany too plodding, an aspiring poet published a version of the tract in doggerel verse later in 1638. See Martin Parker, A Brief Dissection of Germany’s Affliction (London, 1638).

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their faith were all part of a European world ‘now drunk with misery’ at the hands of popish firebrands.17 Pamphlets relating to the Irish rising returned to this theme. The Irish pamphlets of 1641 and 1642 mobilized sensationalist accounts of an international popish plot that emphasized connections between the Roman Catholic powers in Europe and the rebels. Tracts published purported letters or conversations between the pope and the leaders of the insurrection, which indicated that the rising was an extension of the continental assault on Protestantism and was a prelude to an invasion of England.18 Others claimed to reprint correspondence between rebel leaders and Roman Catholic monarchs, in which the continental leaders agreed to support Catholics in Ireland with men, money, and arms.19 During the winter months of 1641 and 1642, tracts also included shadowy reports of correspondence between the Queen, Archbishop Laud, and the Irish rebels and warned of ships packed with priests, soldiers, and arms sailing from Dunkirk and Castile for Ireland.20 More authoritative accounts from royal officers in Dublin confirmed that the rebellion had been fostered and encouraged by continental Roman Catholics. The Irish Lord Justices’ first letters to England warned of an international dimension to the rising, noting that the rebels ‘expect money and arms out of Spain and the Low Countries’.21 Henry Jones’s Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, which was sanctioned as reliable in March 1642 by the Irish Lord Justices and in April by the English parliament, summed up the assertion that the Irish rebels colluded with continental papists: It being confessed that they had their commission for what they did from beyond the seas. That from Spain, they did expect an army before Easter next, consisting if of none others, yet of the Irish regi-

17 18

Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, unpaginated preface. The Rebels’ Letter to the Pope ([London], 1641); Disputation betwixt the Devil and the Pope ([London], 1642); The True Demands of the Rebels in Ireland (London, 1642). See also Matters of Great Consequence and Worthy of Note to All England (London, 1642); Declaration Sent to the King of France and Spain from the Catholics or Rebels in Ireland (London, 1642); Copy of Two Letters Sent from Rome (London, 1642). 19 Copy of a Letter Written from Dermond MacConnor, One of the Chieftains of the Irish Rebels, unto the King of Spain (London, 1642); Treacherous Plot of a Confederacy in Ireland with the Rebels at Galway (London, 1641); Black Box of Rome Opened ([London], [1642]). 20 Representative examples of these kinds of tracts include: Exceeding Good News from the Isle of Wight (London, 1642); True Relation of Certain Passages which Captain Basset Brought from the West Parts of Cornwall (London, 1642); Apprehending of Captain Butler at Portsmouth in the County of Southampton and His Followers Who Were Bound with Bullets and Ammunition for Ireland (London, 1642); True Relation of the Apprehension of Five Friars, One Pilgrim and Three Soldiers (London, 1642); Confessions of John Browne, a Jesuit in the Gatehouse ([London], 1641); A Discovery of the Notorious Proceedings of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1641); and The Copy of a Letter Sent from the Earl of Traquere in Ireland the Second of October 1641 to Old Father Philips Here in England (London, 1641). See also Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 199–205. 21 NLI Ms. 2542, 21–7, 49–53.

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ments and commanders serving in Flanders and elsewhere under that king. … From France also they look for aid; being in all this further encouraged by bulls from Rome. …. In all which respects, and in allusion to that league in France, they [term] themselves the Catholic Army and the ground of their war the Catholic cause.22

According to Jones, the imminent arrival of Owen Roe O’Neill and other Irish Catholics from continental military service under the king of Spain further proved the international scope of the menace.23 A number of tracts published in the wake of the 1641 rebellion contained exhaustive catalogs of recent popish abuses in Holland, Spain, and Ireland, and linked them to a wider plot to attack England. One publication from early 1642, for example, reprinted a late Elizabethan history of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, casting it as a ‘warning piece’ for the inhabitants of London who might soon face similar Roman Catholic intrigues.24 Another claimed that the papists’ natural addiction to chaos had obviously manifested itself in the unprecedented levels of violence gripping both Germany and Ireland.25 The engraver Wenceslaus Hollar visually depicted the argument for a unified interpretation of the English, Irish, and continental crises in a broadsheet published sometime after the Battle of Edgehill. Hollar’s illustration showed large armies assembled across Europe and the British Isles, and suggested that their clash stemmed directly from the plots of the Holy Roman Emperor, ‘the double headed eagle, [who] wide doth spread her wings to fan the coals that seemed as dead’. Driving home the point, Hollar depicted in the margins of his engraving vignettes from Europe’s recent history, including scenes of the defenestration of Prague, the Scottish Prayer Book rebellion, and massacres of Protestants in Germany and Ireland.26 For readers who were familiar with Thirty Years’ War atrocities, the parallels between the violence of 1641 and earlier horrors in Germany must have been obvious. Vincent’s Lamentations of Germany reported that the count of Tilly’s Catholic soldiers ‘tortured [men] by half strangling them’ while Jones’s Remonstrance referred to the Irish rebels’ ‘hanging, half22 23

Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 3. Ibid., 50–1. Micheál Ó Siochrú has suggested that a profitable comparison might be drawn between Irish atrocity literature and print accounts of the ‘black legend’ of Spanish activities in the New World, especially as disseminated in various versions of Bartolomé de la Casas’s writing. The frequent invocation of the Spanish, both as supporters of the rising and inspiration for rebel atrocities, appears in a number of contemporary tracts and pamphlets. See Ó Siochrú, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars’, 67. 24 A Warning Piece for London: Being the True Relation of the Bloody Massacres of the Protestants in Paris by the Papists and Cavaliers (London, 1642). 25 H.P., The Manifold Miseries of Civil War and Discord in a Kingdom: By the Examples of Germany, France, Ireland and Other Places (London, 1642). 26 Wenceslaus Hollar, A Map and Views of the State of England, Scotland and Ireland (n.d.). A reproduction of the image can be found in Adamson, ‘The English Context of the British Civil Wars’, 24–5.

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hanging … delighting in the tortures of the miserable’.27 Vincent noted that in Germany ‘some householders … [were] openly gelded in the presence of their wives and children’. English tracts asserted the same crimes against the Irish rebels.28 Engravings of Catholic soldiers engaging in atrocities likewise appeared in pamphlets from both wars.29 Finally, in their tactics the Irish rebels seemed to duplicate the actions of their brethren in Europe. Just as Catholic soldiers leveled Magdeburg with fire and delighted in burning Protestants alive, for example, English pamphleteers conveyed news of the rebels trapping unsuspecting settlers within the buildings of Armagh and burning them alive.30 Even those tracts that lamented England’s slide towards civil war and supported the crown’s call for order in the spring of 1642 suggested that the causes of the kingdom’s domestic misery could be found on the continent. Portraying ‘Germany leading this dance of death’, a pamphlet opposed to war in England called for reconciliation between the crown and parliament, suggesting that popish elements fomented the tension in England as part of a broad plot to undermine the ‘lives, laws, and liberties’ of men all over Europe.31 Fortuitously, the first news of the Irish rebellion arrived in London on 1 November 1641, at a point in the ritual year when anti-popish fears were close to the surface. With the planned celebrations of Gunpowder Treason Day only four days off, elements of the rising – rumors of a wide-reaching Catholic plot, the suddenness of the rising, and the violence of attacks on Protestants – kindled the same kinds of fears that ran beneath the annual celebrations of England’s deliverance from Guy Fawkes and his confederates.32 The parliamentary sermon commemorating the Gunpowder Plot in 1641 specifically alluded to these parallels. Flush with the news of atrocities in Ireland, the puritan preacher Cornelius Burges told his listeners in the Commons on 5 November that the rebellion should have been expected. In spite of failures, popish plotters would never be ‘discouraged, but they will 27 Compare Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, 5–7, 23–5 and Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 7, 10–11. 28 Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, 13; Thomas Partington, Worse and Worse News from Ireland (London, 1641). 29 The illustrations in the Lamentations of Germany are directly comparable with those in Cranford, Tears of Ireland. See Cope, ‘Ireland Must Be Looked After, 89. 30 Swedish Intelligencer: The First Part, 28; Jacob Farmer, A Letter Sent Out of Ireland (London, 1642). 31 H.G., England’s Present Distractions Paralleled with those of Spain and Other Foreign Countries (London, 1642), 3, 5. For a discussion of how condemnations of ‘disloyalty, rebellion and social anarchy’ in Ireland were used to bolster the Royalist cause in England, see Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord’, 17–23. 32 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, 1989), 142–52; Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996), 395–6.

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work again and again, never giving it over. If one plot fail, they are ready with another, and another, of other sorts.’ Comparing the popish intrigues of earlier years and the blunt cruelty of more recent plots in Germany and Ireland to vomit, Burges suggested that ‘the best that comes up into the basin is but filthy stuff, but that which is behind, and comes last, is far more loathsome and bitter’. He concluded his sermon with a prayer for a successful conclusion to the war against the papists in Ireland.33 Tracts and pamphlets on Ireland printed in 1641 and 1642 made obvious allusions to the Gunpowder Plot. Nehemiah Wallington copied long sections from a spurious pamphlet entitled Treason in Ireland, which focused on the designs of Patrick Locke, ‘a great papist and a man of great means’, who had allegedly built extensive underground vaults beneath the center of Dublin. Within these vaults, Locke set smiths to work making pikes for the rebels, housed an army of five hundred rebels and one hundred ‘popish priests, friars and jesuits’, and stored up massive stocks of gunpowder. Upon the outbreak of the rebellion, Locke planned to ignite the gunpowder and ‘blow up the hill therewith, when the army marched over it’. Just as Gunpowder Treason would have wiped out the monarchy and parliament in one fell swoop, Locke’s plan would have utterly destroyed the English army in Ireland.34 Popish plots did not end at the shores of the Irish Sea, but rather extended into England. A number of anxieties came together in the Beale plot, a confused mix of rumor and anxiety that disrupted London shortly after first news of the Irish rebellion reached the metropolis. On 15 November, Thomas Beale reported to the House of Commons that he had overheard two suspicious men plotting in the fields of St Luke’s Old Street parish in London. From this conversation, he claimed to have learned of plans hatched by two priests named Jones and Andrews to coordinate a general rising by recusants in Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and Lancashire, to assassinate ‘that rascally puritan Pym … the chief cause of our misery’, and to massacre ‘all these base puritans’ in London.35 A tract on the plot 33

Cornelius Burges, Another Sermon Preached to the Honorable House of Commons now Assembled in Parliament, November the Fifth, 1641 (London, 1641). 7–8. A similar sermon from November 1641, although directed at a London audience rather than parliament, can be found in Goodwin, Ireland’s Advocate. Burges and Goodwin moved in the same circle of radical preachers as Stephen Marshall and Edmund Calamy. See Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England, 330–1. 34 Jerome, Treason in Ireland, 1–2. Such subterranean plots were, in Wallington’s view, natural to the rebels. On the same page he also copied out sections of a tract entitled Happiest News from Ireland, which claimed that a rebel named Mark Davo had an extensive underground complex in the province, where he ‘did keep six smiths at work for the space of two years making provision for war’. BL Add. Ms. 21935, 168. A similar story, which Wallington did not report, made the rounds in Thomas Creamor’s Gun-Powder Plot in Ireland (London, 1641). Here, the rebels were reported to have ‘placed great store of faggots and barrels of gunpowder’ beneath the ‘chiefest church in Dublin’, with the aim of wiping out the Protestant Lord Justices and the privy council when they attended services. 35 A True Discovery of a Bloody Plot Intended to Have Been Put in Practice (London, 1641), 4–5. Beale’s appearance at parliament is recorded in CJ, vol. 2, 315–16. See also O’Hara, English News-

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asserted that the rebellion in Ireland and the planned rising in England were connected, and that the papists held out enormous hopes that ‘if they prevail there [i.e. Ireland], we shall not need to fear here’.36 When Nehemiah Wallington encountered news of the Beale plot in print, he connected it to other rumors of plots in the air in 1641. He referred to the mysterious men in the fields as ‘two Frenchmen, who were supposed to be the chief agents’, a detail that is not included in the original tracts about Beale’s eavesdropping. From a tract entitled A Great Discovery of a Damnable Plot, Wallington had read an accusation that the earl of Worcester had built enormous underground vaults in Wales, and inferred that this was the location from which the papist soldiers who planned to sack London would come.37 He also connected the Beale plot testimony to another pamphlet of late 1641, which reported that papists had deceitfully enclosed an encrusted plague sore in a letter delivered to John Pym on the floor of the Commons. Although Pym escaped unharmed, a secretary standing nearby ‘took a conceit at it, and sickened and died presently’. Wallington imagined this as the culmination of the overheard plot against ‘that rascally puritan Pym’.38 Wallington blended other printed accounts of popish plots in England into this metanarrative. From a tract entitled Bloody News from Norwich, Wallington reported that when the papists rose, they ‘intended to burn the whole city without remorse’.39 This fear connected nicely to the information he found in Four Wonderful, Bloody, and Dangerous Plots Discovered, including reports of a completely fictional confrontation alleged to have occurred in Chester on 20 November, in which English recusants allegedly massacred twenty-five Protestants.40 Wallington connected the Chester rebels to the Lancashire papists warned of by Beale, and in turn suggested that ill-affected recusants in both counties were making incendiary bombs and had ‘correspondence with the rebels, who hope to land some forces out of Ireland on that coast’.41 Nehemiah Wallington’s account imposed a great deal of narrative cohesion on a confused and often inaccurate print hysteria. It is again difficult books and Irish Rebellion, 29–32. Wallington included extensive extracts from the Beale plot in his commonplace book; see BL Add. Ms. 21935, 186. 36 True Discovery of a Bloody Plot, 5. 37 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 186. A Great Discovery of a Damnable Plot at Rugland Castle in MonmouthShire in Wales (London, 1641). Wallington recorded more information on the earl of Worcester’s suspicious activities at Raglan Castle in BL Add. Ms. 21935, 185. 38 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 188; A Damnable Treason by Contagious Plaster of a Plague-Sore (London, 1641). 39 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 187. 40 Ibid., 187; Four Wonderful, Bloody and Dangerous Plots (London, 1641), unpaginated. The tract reported a much more dangerous intention, asserting that a captured papist had confessed ‘that their intent was to have ruined most part of the city, and to have slain all the Protestants that they could reach’. 41 BL Add. Ms. 21935, 178.

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to reconstruct reader responses to this kind of material, but Wallington’s transcriptions, his attempts at organizing materials from a diversity of print sources, and his occasional side commentary demonstrates a remarkable ability to connect the information that circulated around him. Like tiles in a mosaic, Wallington took the pieces of evidence that he found in print and fashioned them into a full picture of the danger that now faced the nation. In Wallington’s view, at stake was a carefully coordinated, long-planned and multifaceted plot. In the end, however, all of the complexity could be boiled down to one aim, ‘one plot against England, for it is England that is that fine sweet bit which they so long for, and their cruel teeth so water at.42 Nehemiah Wallington was not the only English observer to see international popish intrigue at work in the Irish crisis. When the Irish Lord Justices’ first letter on the rising was read on the floor of the House of Commons, the news provoked deep anxieties about popish plotting at home.43 On 1 November, after agreeing to solicit loans from the City of London for emergency supplies affairs, the Commons proposed a series of measures designed to secure England from covert popish plotters. These included: a petition to the House of Lords to remove the earl of Portland, a suspected recusant, from the lord lieutenancy of the Isle of Wight; directives to the county sheriffs regarding securing ‘the persons of papists of quality in the several counties’; and recommendations to dissolve the Capuchin friary in London and begin the compilation of a list of all priests associated with the Queen’s household.44 On 2 November, Henrietta Maria’s loyalty took center stage when parliament committed the Queen’s Catholic confessor, Father Philip, to the Tower after he refused to take an oath upon the English Bible during an examination before the Commons.45 Lower-profile recusants also drew the attention of parliament. The Commons ordered the search and seizure of private letters and packages sent between England and Ireland, and formed a standing committee to examine possible connections between English recusants and Irish rebels.46 Clearly, home-grown popery was important in the minds of those members of parliament who supported measures that, at least on the surface, had little to do with Irish Catholic rebels. Concerns about the Irish rebellion as a prelude to more dangerous plots circulated beyond Westminster. In early November, representatives of the Commons approached the City of London with a request for a loan of 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 185. D’Ewes, Journal, 60–79. CJ, vol. 2, 301–2; D’Ewes, Journal, 63–4. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, vol. 1, 413. Father Philip had been the source of considerable concern in the months before the rising; see Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 201–2, 212–13. At least one contemporary tract linked him to the Irish rebellion; see Copy of a Letter from the Earl of Traquere in Ireland. 46 CJ, vol. 2, 304; Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil War, vol. 1, 413.

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£50,000 to secure and defend Ireland.47 While the London aldermen agreed to float funds, their loan was conditional. ‘In respect of the tyrannical and bloody dealing of the Irish papists and the conspiracies at home’, the City creditors requested that parliament take steps to insure that the ‘persons of all the great lords of the popish religion and of other papists of quality … be so secured as there might no possible danger arise from them’. The City added a second proviso, ‘that some speedy course might be taken’ to eliminate the English prelates’ seats in the House of Lords, asserting that ‘many good laws and many good motions … were rejected or stopped … by the malignity of the bishops’.48 In this demand, the London aldermen referred to a growing gulf between the Lords and Commons. Throughout November 1641, the Lords balked at several of the more extreme proposals against recusants originating from the Commons. The Lords repeatedly refused to discuss the earl of Portland’s lord lieutenancy and resisted broader proposals to police English Catholics.49 In this context, some members of the Commons complained that the Lords seemed to be stalling on a variety of measures vital to England’s security.50 Leaders of the Commons also connected the outbreak of the rebellion to various loose ends in domestic politics. A week after the outbreak of the Irish rising was announced in parliament, John Pym initiated renewed debate on the Grand Remonstrance. An address of national grievances to Charles I had first been informally discussed in parliament in the spring of 1641 and pursued more seriously by Pym and his allies in August 1641. Although the Commons scheduled a reading of the text of the Grand Remonstrance for August 14, Pym seems to have calculated that the time was not right and shelved the project. The announcement of the Irish rebellion, however, served as the catalyst for renewing discussion of this withering attack on crown policies.51 When finally presented to the crown in December 1641, the Grand Remonstrance leveled criticism against English recusants, Catholic nobles, and the bishops. As part of a coherent plot, these secret popish agents had infiltrated the crown’s inner circle of advisors and had ‘so far prevailed as to corrupt diverse of your bishops and others in prime places of the Church’.52 William Laud and the other prelates who advised the crown had embraced a popish brand of religion ‘not yet … called popery’, and conspired to destroy the

47

CJ, vol. 2, 300; John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 4 (London, 1721–2), 405–6. 48 D’Ewes, Journal, 133. 49 LJ, vol. 4, 418, 426–7. 50 CJ, vol. 2, 302. 51 Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 81–9. 52 S.R. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628–1660 (Oxford, 1899), 128. Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 144–51.

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kingdom through economic mismanagement.53 The outbreak of the war in Ireland represented the culmination of this joint conspiracy between papists and prelates, and fully revealed the depths of their perfidy. ‘Only in Ireland’, the Grand Remonstrance argued, ‘which was farther off, they have had time and opportunity to mold and prepare their work, and had brought it to that perfection that they had possessed themselves of the whole kingdom, totally subverted the government of it, routed out religion, and destroyed all the Protestants.’54 The petition went on to propose sweeping reforms that would destroy the power wielded by the prelates and called upon the crown to take some measure ‘for depriving the bishops of their votes in parliament, and abridging their immoderate power usurped over the clergy and other your good subjects’.55 As the magnitude of the Irish rebellion became clearer in the increasingly ominous news arriving from Dublin in both correspondence and rumor, opposition to the bishops became more strident. By the middle of December, members of the Commons openly declared that the English bishops conspired to thwart the relief of Ireland as part of a plot to ensure the success of the popish rebels. Chief among these controversies was the problem of raising soldiers. While the Commons desired an immediate levy of soldiers for Ireland’s defense, the Lords refused to pass an impressment bill on the grounds that parliamentary interference in such matters encroached upon the royal prerogative. In a speech before the Commons in early December 1641, John Pym asserted that the nation’s hands were tied because the House of Lords insisted on resisting defense measures and that therefore ‘the loss of Ireland must be imputed to the Lords’.56 Even after the passage of an impressment bill for Ireland in February 1642, Pym reiterated the claim that the slowness of England’s response to the rising could be traced to ‘prelates and such persons as are altogether devoted to the romish religion’ in the upper house.57 By stalling relief measures, they prolonged the conflict, gave encouragement to the enemy, and added to the suffering of Ireland’s war victims. Anti-prelacy, often presented in an international context, ran through many of the parliament-authorized fast sermons for Ireland in 1641 and 1642. During the 22 December 1641 fast sermons, the puritan preachers Edmund Calamy and Stephen Marshall both linked Ireland, papist expansion on the continent, and the English bishops. In England’s Looking Glass, Calamy claimed to ‘hear Rochelle, Bohemia, the Palatinate and other parts of Germany, saying: Oh England, look upon us and learn to be righteous’ 53 54 55 56 57

Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 139–41. Ibid., 150–1. Ibid., 204–5. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil War, vol. 1, 439. John Pym, Mr. Pym his speech in Parliament, on Saturday the 19th of February (London, 1641), sig. a3.

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and connected the violence on the continent to ‘the bloody rebellion that is in Ireland’.58 These horrors, Calamy continued, must be read as providential warnings. With each atrocity, violence came closer to England and would soon spill into the nation unless the people pursued a speedy reformation of abuses: ‘sin destroyed Rochelle and the Palatinate; it hath brought the sword into Ireland, and will bring it into England, unless we turn away from all our evil doings’.59 The most grievous of these ‘evil doings’ had been the work of those in England who had encouraged ‘the great prophanation of our Christian Sabbath-day’ and ‘the idolatry … the superstition, the apostasy … that reigns amongst us’.60 These accusations, with unsubtle references to the Book of Sport controversy and the recent reforms of church fabric and furnishings, were familiar anti-Laudian complaints.61 Marshall made a similar point in Reformation and Desolation. Parliament, as ‘our physicians and repairers of our breaches’, should actively seek out and destroy ‘all the images and relics of idolatry’.62 Chief among the many problems still plaguing the nation was the corruption at the center of the Church of England and the ‘magistrates and ministers [who have] taken sin’s part and … join with sin against God’.63 To correct these missteps, Marshall concluded with an appeal for the ‘breaking down of all the images and relics of idolatry’ and ruthless punishment of ‘them who have been the troublers of our peace and the greatest kindlers of God’s wrath’.64 Calamy and Marshall connected their calls for further national reform to the plight of Ireland’s Protestants. Calamy suggested that the long delays in assisting Ireland reflected the continued presence of ill-affected men in positions of power.65 Marshall likewise criticized the ‘unexpected blocks and runs, huge trees cast in the way of our worthies’, and suggested that the blood of the Irish Protestants underscored the growing danger: ‘God hath suffered [a sword] to be drawn out upon our dear brethren in Ireland, upon our own flesh and blood, and that by a nation but whom … we may fear God will plague us.’66 * 58 59 60 61

Calamy, England’s Looking Glass, 16. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 36. Peter Lake, ‘ “A Charitable Christian Hatred”: The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (London, 1996), 145–83. 62 Marshall, Reformation and Desolation, 52–3. 63 Ibid., 38. 64 Ibid., 51. Marshall also proposed a ‘grave synod of divines’ to assist parliament in the remaking of the Church. 65 Calamy, England’s Looking Glass, 53. 66 Marshall, Reformation and Desolation, 47–8. Marshall and Calamy presented similar versions of these arguments in their later fast sermons to parliament. See Calamy, God’s Free Mercy to England and Marshall, Meroz Cursed.

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Several themes are central in this discussion of discourses on Ireland’s miseries. First is the sense of growing danger, evidenced in the tracts, parliamentary documents, and other reflections on events in Ireland in 1641 and 1642. Repeatedly, those who commented on the Irish rebellion connected it to the perceived expansion of popery in the previous two decades. The repeated emphasis on violence and victims was central to this perception. The violence meted out against Protestants in Ireland was indistinguishable from that experienced by Protestants on the continent. Survivors of the war in Ireland added to the already swollen ranks of unrelieved and neglected Protestant war victims from the Thirty Years’ War. Ireland, by this logic, was not an isolated catastrophe. Rather, it was a next step in the papist offensive and a prelude to bloodshed in England. When situated in this context, the wide variety of fears and anxieties that circulated around the rebellion makes significantly more sense, as do the accusations against the bishops and others in England who on the surface had nothing to do with the Irish rising. From the very first arrival of news of the rebellion in England, men like John Pym and Nehemiah Wallington assumed that the papists, including Irish rebels, English recusants, and their hidden allies had more dangerous plans afoot. Alone, this may not have been particularly disruptive. Anxieties about popery and secret plots stretched back decades in English culture, and a diversity of confused rumors of anti-Protestant plotting swirled around Charles I, Henrietta Maria’s household, the court, and the prelacy in the 1630s and 1640s. What changed in 1641 was the rhetoric of activism. Pamphleteers, ministers, members of parliament, and ordinary laymen like Nehemiah Wallington cast the rebellion as an event that demanded a response. These responses could include prayer, reflection, contributions, vigilance, and ultimately – as Calamy and Marshall suggested in their fast sermons – an offensive against malignants and recusants. England must not merely observe the horrors at work in Ireland, but must actively respond to them. Ireland’s war victims formed the center around which this argument coalesced. These discourses represented the Protestants of Ireland as ‘brethren’ whose sufferings occurred because of their religious loyalty. This representation reinforced the moral obligations between coreligionists in the two nations, presenting relief and other forms of activism as an inescapable burden that the godly bore towards one another. As Edmund Calamy phrased it when he challenged parliament to be more active in stamping out the vestiges of popery as part of its response to the rebellion, ‘this is a duty that God requires and expects from your hands’.67 It would be difficult to assert that Nehemiah Wallington’s fears represented the fears of all Englishmen, or that the agenda of John Pym and his allies reflected the aspirations of everyone in the nation. A key question, there-

67

Calamy, England’s Looking Glass, 45.

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fore, is the extent to which the politicization of Irish war victims extended beyond the ranks of literate, urban, and politically aware individuals. One way to examine this is to look at other ways that the English people came into contact with the Irish rebellion. In the 1640s, large numbers of individuals fled from the war in Ireland into England. Local officials, parish churchwardens and overseers, and ordinary English men and women thus came into contact with Irish refugees, and had to respond in some way. Likewise, the state-­sponsored charitable collections mandated in the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan carried the call for action into local communities, stressing the obligations and spiritual duties that English Protestants had towards their coreligionists. This argument stressed the importance of religious identity, suggesting the invisible spiritual connections between Protestants, whether in Germany, France, Ireland or England. These calls for action were, however, often complicated by the fact that most of the people displaced by the Irish rising were strangers. In local communities, particularly those coastal towns that saw the concentrated arrival of large numbers of displaced persons, the Irish could be seen as threats to local order and economy. This created a significant ambiguity. On the one hand, representations of Irish Protestants presented them in an abstract way, stressing their innocence and fidelity. On the other hand, when Irish Protestants actually appeared in English communities, they could provoke a range of responses, from sympathy to skepticism and fear.

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6 Many Distressed Irish: Refugees and the Problem of Local Order

In the months following the outbreak of the Irish rebellion, news of atrocity, hardship, and crisis from Ireland assailed English audiences. The pamphlets of 1641 and 1642 saturated the print shops with news of the horrors facing victims of the Irish rebellion. By and large these published works echoed the sentiments in Nehemiah Wallington’s commonplace book, stressing the Protestantism and fidelity of the war victims and the broad international threat posed by the popish enemy. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan set in motion a national collection for those despoiled and victimized at the hands of the rebels in Ireland. Although parliament’s relative slowness in drawing together the Act has been characterized as ‘niggling, unco-operative, suspicious, and ungenerous’, it is also true that this national project – which stressed an overtly anti-popish agenda and implicitly spoke to contemporary anxieties about English recusants and prelates – marked a rare moment of cooperation between Westminster and Charles I in the otherwise overheated political climate of January 1642. Despite expressions of sympathy towards the survivors and victims of the 1641 rising, various factors also raised suspicions about those who arrived in English towns and parishes. Particularly in areas that absorbed large numbers of Irish poor and had long-term problems with local recusants, the arrival of displaced settlers triggered increased anxiety and vigilance. In correspondence to Westminster, local officials who dealt with the arrival of these individuals expressed fears that their sheer numbers could help cover the infiltration of popish agents into England. They also worried that the pressure refugees placed on the local economy and instruments of law and order would make it difficult to respond to a full-scale Irish invasion. These fears reflected the fact that pamphleteers, ministers, and politicians had framed the Irish rising as part of an international conspiracy, combined with the fundamentally unstable nature of English beliefs about popery. Parliament played a key role in transforming these fears into action by authorizing local defensive measures and investigations. Whereas these kinds of efforts 

Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 35.

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involved a limited pool of local officials, the parliament-initiated Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan expanded this work to the middling and lower sort of English men and women by reiterating the confessional ties and mutual obligations that all Protestants shared. The arrival of large numbers of suffering Protestants in England in 1641 and 1642 represented a major departure from the situation that obtained during the early phases of the Thirty Years’ War. Apart from a handful of port towns that absorbed Huguenot refugees from France in the late 1620s and 1630s, England saw very few displaced persons from the continental conflicts. The crown did authorize collections on behalf of German Protestants in 1628, 1630, and 1635, but the limited funds collected were intended to be sent overseas. Although tracts and pamphlets may have shocked English readers with accounts of Protestant suffering in the Thirty Years’ War, those who suffered remained strangers and far removed from English soil. The evidence from the Palatinate crisis, however, also suggests that no matter how remote, Protestant war victims could still be viewed as potential economic problems. The correspondence between leaders of the German Protestants and the Dutch Church at Austin Friars – the institution responsible for transferring money collected in England for Palatinate refugees – reveals that the exiles felt frustration over what they felt were slow and meager responses from their English brethren. This frustration led to periodic threats of a mass exodus of refugees into England. Complaining about the returns on the 1628 collections, a group of ministers from the Upper Palatinate warned that ‘many of the exiles, when they see the collections fail, will come in troops to you and other churches, a course which we try to prevent’. This in turn provoked consternation in London, where the consistory at Austin Friars suggested that the spiritual leaders of the exiles ‘should cease to threaten their benefactors’. Ultimately, the threatened exodus of German Protestants into England did not materialize in any substantial way. The state papers contain no references to refugees from Germany in the 1630s, and even the most complete churchwardens’ accounts from London refer to only a handful of impoverished Palatine Germans receiving outdoor 

A 1628 proclamation calling for charitable collections on behalf of uprooted inhabitants of the Île de Ré noted that they had ‘abandoned their own country, their houses and estates and other earthly commodities and have withdrawn themselves into this our realm’. Although the proclamation did not indicate the number of Huguenots who had settled destitute in England, it noted that the refugees had confined themselves to London and the port towns of Plymouth, Southampton, and Portsmouth. See Wyndham Anstis Bewes (ed.), Church Briefs or Royal Warrants for Collections for Charitable Objects (London, 1896), 127–8.  Joannes Henricis Hessels (ed.), Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1897), 1370, 1375, 1395, 1407. These collections are discussed extensively in Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London, 176–84.  Hessells (ed.), Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, vol. 3, 1427.  Ibid., 1433.

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relief. According to the censuses of resident aliens in London that the crown conducted in 1627, 1635, and 1639, only 151 of the 2,441 strangers living in the city were of German origin, a figure that includes those dwelling in the metropolis for commercial purposes as well as religious refugees. In 1641 and 1642, ample evidence suggests that anxiety attended the arrival of persons displaced by the Irish conflict. The Lord Justices occasionally played off this anxiety, warning of the potential departure of Irish refugees for England in correspondence to parliament. In late July 1642, for example, they sent a letter claiming that without funds from England, more than eight hundred women and their children ‘must either starve here or be sent into England’. The strategy apparently worked, as the Commons quickly ordered £3,000 of the money raised by the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan to be sent overseas, the first of the contribution money to be sent into Ireland. Long-standing stereotypes about the Irish poor formed an important part of the cultural context for dealing with Protestant settlers fleeing from Ireland. As has been discussed by a number of historians of the early modern period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a widening distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.10 While individuals who found themselves in poverty as a result of accident, family crisis or other fortuitous events usually received assistance, the period saw a growing suspicion of those whose poverty could be traced to moral failures, bad choices, or idleness. Irish vagrants ranked particularly high among those whose poverty was viewed with skepticism and even hostility. The image of the manipulative Irish beggar – shifty, dangerous, often engaging in criminal activity and usually feigning disability in order to garner sympathy – was widely disseminated in early Stuart society. Famine and war frequently drove indigent Irish across the St George’s Channel, where they pressed local parishes for temporary relief.11 The state papers from the late 1620s contain repeated references 

For isolated examples, see St Michael’s Woodstreet Churchwardens’ Accounts, Guildhall Library London Ms. 524/1, 60–3; All Hallows the Great Churchwardens’ Accounts, Guildhall Library London Ms. 818/1, 76; and St Dunstan in the West Churchwardens’ Accounts, Guildhall London Ms. 2968/1, 380, 401, 481, 540, 566.  Irene Scouloudi (ed.), Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis, 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639: A Study of an Active Minority (London, 1985), 107–8.  NLI Ms. 2541, 379.  CJ, vol. 2, 720. As of October 1642, however, the funds had not been sent. Ibid., 805. 10 For Europe in general, see Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994); for England in particular, see Slack, Poverty and Policy, 91–107; A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985), 29–47; Noonan, ‘Brethren Only to a Degree’, 78–119. 11 Patrick Fitzgerald, ‘Like Crickets to the Crevice of a Brew-House: Poor Irish Migrants in England, 1560–1640’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, vol. 1: Patterns of Migration (Leicester, 1992), 13–35; Beier, Masterless Men, 62–5; Slack, Poverty and Policy, 98; Noonan, ‘Brethren Only to a Degree’, 114–17.

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to the problems posed by wandering Irish poor, particularly in Wales and the west country.12 Crown proclamations in the 1620s and 1630s presented the Irish poor as inherently undeserving and ordered that local English justices of the peace take special care in uncovering, punishing, and deporting Irish vagrants.13 Many of these measures arose from the fact that English stereotypes assumed the inseparable nature of Irish ethnicity and Roman Catholic religion.14 The ethnic background of Irish vagrants, whose difference was marked in language, customs and the tendency to travel in groups, also made them more easily identifiable to skeptical local authorities.15 These kinds of suspicions lay close to the surface in 1641 and 1642. A number of contemporary publications refuted negative criticisms of war victims and refugees, implying that such views circulated to some extent. Thus, John Goodwin’s November 1641 sermon entitled Ireland’s Advocate chastised Londoners who ‘blaspheme the poverty and hard condition of the saints … as if they were of a base original descent’.16 The anonymous A Warning Piece Shot off from Ireland to England outlined the kinds of criticisms that targeted Ireland’s Protestant settler population. According to the author, some in England publicly asserted ‘that there are none or very few sincere Christians in Ireland, but men of debauched life, [and] vile conversation, such as England hath spewed out’.17 In the context of news of the Irish rebellion, this view led some to the providential conclusion ‘that it is the just judgment of God, to weed them out’.18 Edmund Calamy alluded to the same idea before an audience of members of parliament in his 23 February 1642 fast sermon: Let us not think ourselves more righteous than Ireland, because we are not wallowing in blood as Ireland. … The nature of man is prone to censure Germany and Ireland as horrible sinners above all others.

12

See, for example, CSPD Charles I, vol. 3, 358, 495–6. For an extensive discussion of the local problem of poor in the region, see Fitzgerald, ‘Like Crickets to the Crevice of a Brew-House’, 14–16. 13 CSPD Charles I, vol. 6, 462. 14 Fitzgerald, ‘Like Crickets to the Crevice of a Brew-House’, 17. According to Noonan, preoccupation with the religious background of Irish living in England became increasingly significant after the outbreak of the rebellion. A parliament-mandated survey of Irish living in London was prepared in mid-November 1641. While constables had considerable latitude in drawing up this census, Noonan suggests that at least some local officials were delineating between ‘papist’ and ‘Protestant’ immigrants. Noonan, ‘Brethren Only to a Degree’, 53–4. 15 Noonan, ‘Brethren Only to a Degree’, 115–16. 16 Goodwin, Ireland’s Advocate, 23–4. 17 A Warning Piece Shot Off from Ireland to England (London, 1641), 4. 18 Ibid., 4. This criticism may reflect contemporary assumptions about Old English ‘degeneracy’ and suspicious that many English settlers in Ireland were covert Catholics. See Canny, Making Ireland British, 48–9, 120, 160–1; Edwards, ‘Haven of Popery’, 95–100.

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… It is a barbarous action to censure them that are punished by God, to be the greatest sinners.19

Although so much of the print culture discourse on the rising presented Irish survivors and victims as sympathetic objects of pity and charity, it is clear that more skeptical views also circulated. The arrival of refugees from the Irish rebellion posed immediate economic problems in English parishes. While systematic quantitative data on the number of persons who arrived in English ports in late 1641 and early 1642 is lacking, surviving evidence suggests that port towns from Southampton to Liverpool saw a sizeable influx of destitute settlers throughout the winter months. In some cases, these refugees arrived with enough property to support themselves for at least a limited time. Correspondence from Chester, Liverpool, and the Welsh town of Wyne, for example, indicated that the families of the Dublin gentry, including those of the Lord Justices and Councilmen, had arrived within weeks of the outbreak of the rising ‘with their trunks and stuff and intend to anchor here and were a coming every passage’.20 In other cases, however, refugees arrived in total destitution. The Lord Justices of Ireland in January 1641, for example, warned the mayor of Chester of the imminent arrival of four thousand individuals ‘made poor and miserable by the cruelty of the rebels here’.21 In England, the impact of these indigent war victims on the local economies of port towns seems to have been severe. The mayors of Bristol and Chester complained several times to parliament in the winter and spring of 1642 about ‘the confluence of many distressed Irish thither’.22 Members of parliament received similar reports from Exeter and other coastal towns in Devon, Dorset, and Somerset. Inland communities, particularly those on the roads into London, also saw problems as poor Irish moved through their streets. Members representing Northamptonshire and the towns of Oxford and Colchester complained on the floor of the Commons about the economic problems caused by the migration of Irish refugees.23 By the autumn of 1642, those men who remained at Westminster could see for themselves the magnitude of the problem as ‘distressed English … come out of Ireland’ crowded into London and the suburbs.24 The influx of these refugees posed obvious economic problems in a society that had few formal resources designed to deal with assisting large groups of impoverished individuals. The fact that 19

Edmund Calamy, God’s Free Mercy to England (London, 1642), 18. Similar criticisms attended Irish refugees in Scotland; see Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates, 18. 20 TNA SP 63/260, 151–2. 21 CRO DCC/47/18. 22 PJLP, vol. 1, 94; PJLP, vol. 2, 297; CJ, vol. 2, 565; LJ, vol. 5, 55; TNA SP 63/260, 151. 23 CJ, vol. 2, 467, 574; PJLP, vol. 1, 208–9; PJLP, vol. 2, 333; LJ, vol. 5, 229. 24 CJ, vol. 2, 831.

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these destitute arrivals were of Irish origin and unknown religious loyalty worsened local concerns. Bristol was a main receptacle for those fleeing the rebellion, especially settlers from Munster.25 The impact of these arrivals, however, seems to have been manageable. Churchwardens’ accounts from city parishes attest to limited outdoor relief. The parish of St Philip and St Jacob recorded only three disbursements totaling 3s 6d to Irish between October 1641 and May 1642, although an additional six payments to ‘ministers’ and widows may also have been intended for displaced settlers.26 In comparison to previous years, these outlays were not unusual. In 1638, the churchwardens gave 2s to ‘an Irish gentleman and his company’ and in 1630 gave 1s to ‘a poor Irish woman’.27 St Mary Redcliffe parish in Bristol also saw limited numbers of refugees. In 1641, the churchwardens gave 10d spread out over several occasions to ‘poor Irish’.28 In 1642, they gave 1s each to ministers from Ireland on three different occasions, disbursed a total of 6s to an unspecified number of ‘Protestants stripped by the rebels in Ireland’, and paid 6s 8d ‘for a minister driven by the rebels out of Ireland that preached on the fast day’.29 Isolated and small disbursements to Irish poor continued in this parish until 1645, then stopped entirely. The Bristol churchwardens’ accounts also mention pauper burials on a number of occasions, at least one of which was ‘a poor child come out of Ireland’.30 Larger numbers of Irish refugees in Bristol seem to have been dealt with beyond the typical arrangements prescribed in the English poor law. In April and May 1642, the Commons revised the terms of the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan, allowing the mayor and aldermen of the city to ‘detain such monies in their hands as are gathered’ and ‘dispose of and distribute the said monies collected, to such distressed Protestants as are fled out of Ireland to that city’.31 This broke with the prescriptions of the original Act by allowing local officials, rather than parliamentary clerks, to distribute funds. The devolution of parliamentary administration also means that records are unfortunately lacking, although there is very limited evidence that suggests how the collections and disbursements were carried out. The churchwardens of St. Mary Redcliffe parish recorded that they paid £1 15s ‘to the collectors, which they disbursed more than they received’ following a Good Friday fast 25 26

John Latimer (ed.), Annals of Bristol in the Seventeenth Century (Bristol, 1900), 155. BCRO P/St.P&J/ChW/3a/265–8. In later years, the accounts contain no specific attribution of ethnicity or place of origin for recipients of outdoor relief. 27 BCRO P/St.P&J/ChW/3a/251–7. 28 BCRO P/St.MR/ChW/1(d)/1641 Account. 29 BCRO P/St.MR/ChW/1(d)/1642 Account. 30 BCRO P/St.T/ChW/73/1641–2 Account. The nature of the war in Munster, characterized by a slow slide into hostility and considerable local accommodation of English settlers, probably meant that Bristol saw a trickle of refuges through the 1640s rather than the large flood that descended upon more northern English ports in late 1641 and 1642. 31 CJ, vol. 2, 565.

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sermon by an Irish refugee minister. It is probable that Irish poor attended church on this occasion, received charity from the collectors or minister, and any shortfall in contributions by the congregation was made up out of the churchwardens’ account.32 Aside from distributing limited charity, the mayor and aldermen of Bristol also seem to have busied themselves with moving refugees out of town. The churchwardens’ accounts from St. Werburgh parish note payments of 3s 8d ‘to poor distressed Irish men and women having the mayor’s pass to go home to their country’ in the spring of 1642.33 The reference to passes implies that these Irish refugees were being subjected to a modified version of the poor law, in which local constables or justices would attempt to return wandering poor to their parish of birth. Under these procedures, the mayor or his assistants would have interviewed the displaced settlers, provided them with a pass to an English parish, and then sent them out of the city. In Chester, a main receptacle of war refugees from Dublin, the Pale, and southeast Ulster, conditions were much worse. Those fleeing the rebellion arrived in a town tense with anxieties about local recusancy and disrupted by the presence of large numbers of poorly paid soldiers awaiting shipment for service in Ireland. The letters and papers of Chester’s mayor, Thomas Cowper, highlight the many difficulties posed by the arriving Irish, and the extent to which they added to local fears and eventually local political action. Very early in the war, Chester saw the arrival of families of state officers and wealthier planters from Ulster and the Pale. Beginning in January 1642, the town also saw the arrival of what must have seemed staggering numbers of destitute Irish. On 14 January, the Irish Lord Justices and Council sent letters to Cowper, informing him of their decision to begin clearing Dublin of settlers who had fled into the town: … four thousand at least of the poor English … having continued in and about this city a long time, where as much hath been done for them, to keep them alive as possible … we have now at last, with much sadness, shipped a good number of them for England, to whom upon their arrival we desire you to extend your favor and furtherance of their relief….

The Lord Justices suggested that Cowper relieve these poor ‘out of those contributions which have been raised for them from the piety and charity of the godly persons on that side’.34 The arrival of these men and women presented problems, causing Cowper

32 33 34

BCRO P/St.MR/ChW/1(d)/1641 Account. BCRO P/St.W/ChW/3(b)/110. CRO DCC/47/18.

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to complain in February 1642 of ‘the great confluence and resort of people to this city from Ireland’.35 In a letter to the earl of Leicester, lord lieutenant of Ireland, he warned that a subsistence crisis was imminent as the refugees wreaked havoc on the local economy: ‘the prices of all sort of victuals is much increased (being grown scarce) by reason that there were and still are to the number of seven hundred English fled out of Ireland now resident in this city, besides the many hundreds of distressed Irish that daily resort to the same’.36 As was the case in Bristol, parliament eventually gave the mayor of Chester authority to distribute money raised under the terms of the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan directly to Irish poor.37 The arrival of poorly supplied soldiers awaiting transport into Ireland complicated matters further in Chester. On 22 February 1642, Cowper and the Chester Assembly wrote to Leicester requesting that soldiers for Ireland be billeted at Liverpool ‘for that this city is not of capacity to entertain any more’.38 Cowper’s correspondence complained that the soldiers strained food resources and generally made life difficult for the people of Chester. He noted that the inhabitants ‘are forced to entertain the said soldiers at under rates’ and that ‘the soldiers [are] impressing goods for the citizens and impressing people coming with victual to the market’.39 Local merchants in Chester had also expressed concerns that the troops spread dissent among the local apprentices and seduced some into breaking their contracts in order to join the army.40 ‘Strange and tempestuous weather’ was to blame for at least some of these difficulties, as it prevented shipping to Ireland.41 One ship that did manage to leave port in February 1642 caused even further problems when it wrecked, stranding several hundred soldiers in the city without orders and ‘destitute of any means of relief and subsistence’.42 Thomas Cowper’s letters attest to a variety of tensions with the armed men in the town. In March 1642, a gang of soldiers broke into the home of a Chester couple, apparently pursuing a dispute with two soldiers quartered there. In the course of the altercation, the town watchmen witnessed the pursuing soldiers ‘with their swords drawn offering violence to the wife … having her fast by the hair of her head, with blood upon her breast’. When the watch detained the unruly men, a larger group of soldiers, including two 35 36 37 38 39 40

CRO DCC/47/27. CRO DCC/14/15. PJLP, vol. 1, 94. CRO DCC/14/15. CRO DCC/14/27. CRO DCC/14/29. In late February or early March, Leicester responded to Cowper’s complaints about the soldiers, asserting that the soldiers were subjected to ‘barbarous usage’ and admonishing the mayor and aldermen to do more to ensure that they were fed well and housed comfortably. See CRO DCC/14/56. 41 CRO DCC/14/31. 42 CRO DCC 47/29. In the sixteenth century, Chester had likewise been a strategic ‘bottleneck’ in transporting English soldiers for service to Ireland. Armstrong, ‘Long Parliament Goes to War’, 81.

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officers, attacked one of the city gatehouses. After proclaiming that ‘Mr. Mayor is an ass and hath no command over no soldiers’, the band rescued their compatriots.43 Cowper’s letters also noted a rise in crime in the environs of Chester, a fact that he suggested reflected the troubled economic conditions combined with the disruptive presence of hungry troops.44 Anxieties about the possibility of an Irish invasion in concert with local recusants in Cheshire exacerbated these problems. Instructions from Westminster in late 1641 suggested that local authorities should be especially attuned to evidence of possible collusion between Irish rebels and English recusants. For western port towns, parliament mandated ‘a strict exam of all passengers either going or coming’ in order to prevent communication between the rebels and their potential allies in England.45 These initiatives had a definite impact on Chester. In January 1642 Thomas Cowper intercepted and detained Thomas Netterville, the son of Nicholas, first Viscount Netterville of Dowth, on the grounds that he was ‘a dangerous person’ seeking passage into Ireland.46 The elder Netterville had, upon the outbreak of the rising, pledged his loyalty to the crown, but like many other Old English joined the rebels in November 1642 after perceived abuses by the Lord Justices. In the same month, Cowper also took charge of a Colonel Butler, who had been apprehended at Holyhead in Wales.47 Cowper’s correspondence indicates that the Chester sheriffs detained other suspicious travelers into Ireland well into the summer of 1642.48 Cheshire members of parliament repeatedly wrote to Cowper reminding him that ‘that the apprehending of the Irish commanders (who are popish and suspected to be too well … affected to the rebels in Ireland) is very acceptable unto that house’.49 Despite these efforts, the Chester mayor suffered from criticisms of lapses in his vigilance, as was the case in February 1642 when the lord high admiral, the earl of

43

CRO DCC/14/57a. The lieutenant of the band of soldiers, the man responsible for calling the mayor an ass, later presented a carefully worded apology: ‘I do repent of the inconsiderateness of the act … and whatsoever unmannerly language might perchance pass from me.’ CRO DCC/14/57b. 44 For example: CRO DCC/14/71 refers to the robbery of more than £70 from a crown officer in Chester; CRO DCC/14/87 contains a reference to mischief and slanderous words spoken by a drunk and disorderly soldier. 45 TNA SP 63/260, 152. Similar measures were taken in Wales; see Charles McNeill (ed.), The Tanner Letters: Original Documents and Notices of Irish Affairs in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Dublin, 1943), 137–40. See also Lindley, ‘Impact of the 1641 Rebellion’, 154–5. 46 CRO DCC/14/7. 47 CRO DCC/14/8. The records are obscure as to the identity of Colonel Butler, but it may be a reference to Colonel John Butler, who in the summer of 1641 had been one of the officers named to transport Irish soldiers raised by Thomas Wentworth into the low countries for service with the Spanish army. Upon the outbreak of the rising, Butler was in Edinburgh negotiating shipment of the troops, and his presence in Chester a month later would make sense. See Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 184–7. 48 CRO DCC/14/90. Cowper also complained periodically about the costs involved in imprisoning suspicious persons. See CRO DCC/47/29. 49 CRO DCC 47/24.

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Northumberland, rebuked the mayor for having allowed a known papist to pass into Dublin.50 The most severe perceived threats to order in Chester manifested themselves shortly after the outbreak of the rebellion. On 30 October 1641, as news of the rising began to arrive from Ireland, the city constables arrested several kinsmen of the rebellious Connor Lord Maguire as they passed through town. Maguire had been one of the chief plotters of the rising in Ireland and oversaw the failed attempt to seize Dublin Castle.51 Aside from their connections to a well-known partisan in the Irish rising, the men arrested in Cheshire had drawn attention to themselves by boasting of their service in the Spanish army in the low countries. One of the men had allegedly said upon ‘hearing of the rebellion in Ireland that he was very glad and joyful of the news’.52 Later in November, Cowper also investigated the conduct of an Irish servant, who spoke out in support of the Irish rebels, expressed his hopes that Charles I would be deposed in favor of the Prince of Wales, and behaved suspiciously when he learned that local authorities were searching strangers’ papers.53 The vigilance evident in Chester during November 1641 may also have been related to anxieties about local recusants and Irish rebels in north Wales in November 1641. Thomas Chedle, the commander of Beaumaris Castle wrote to the privy council on November 10, reporting on local rumors of that the castle at Conwy ‘was to be surprised by the recusants of these parts’. According to his letter, Chedle considered this a dangerous and credible rumor, but was unable to stir the deputy lord lieutenant in Anglesey, Sir Thomas Holland, into action. Chedle’s anxieties worsened as local gossip suggested that the local Catholics planned to rise in concert and sack Beaumaris, Caernarvon, and Chester.54 These letters arrived in London at the same time that Thomas Beale’s claims about popish plots in Lancashire and the west were breaking in parliament. In December 1641, local justices of the peace under orders from the privy council examined the conduct of Chedle and Holland and the veracity of the rumors.55 According to their final report, Chedle’s suspicions focused

50 51

CRO DCC/47/30. Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 204–11. Maguire’s trial for treason is treated at length in D. Alan Orr, Treason and the State: Law, Politics and Ideology in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2002), 141–70; and D. Alan Orr, ‘England, Ireland, Magna Carta and the Common Law: The Case of Connor Lord Maguire, Second Baron of Enniskillen’, Journal of British Studies 39 (2000), 389–421. 52 CRO DCC/47/5. 53 CRO DCC/47/13. 54 TNA SP 16/485/95, 214. 55 The privy council did not act on Chedle’s letter for a month, conceiving that if there had been any truth behind the plot, that ‘there would have been more diligence used to advertise his majesty thereof’. Privy Council Registers Preserved in the Public Record Office (London, 1967), 201. See also Calendar of Wynn (of Gwydir) Papers, 1515–1690 (Aberystwyth, 1926), 275.

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on ‘a family of papists in their neighborhood though of an inconsiderable number’.56 Although these were well-known local recusants, news of the war in Ireland made them seem more immediate threats. William Bold, one of the justices who investigated the case, reported that local tensions were especially high because the ports named in the rumors were ‘receptacles for foreigners’, including large numbers of refugees from Ireland.57 He also noted that fears of an invasion had some credibility, as ‘Anglesey and ­Caernarvon are to Ireland being within eight hours sail’.58 John Griffith, vice admiral for north Wales, also took the perceived link between Irish rebels and local recusants seriously in November 1641. Although he was not convinced that the Conwy papists posed a credible danger, ‘in these perilous times he would not be securely thereupon’ and therefore ordered his men to search the countryside for hidden arms. During the same period, Griffith actively sought out ‘strangers that passed’ for Ireland. According to Bold’s investigation, Griffith’s vigilance unintentionally caused local Protestants ‘to apprehend fears that that place in their neighborhood might be made a receptacle to men to surprise the town of Conwy, these apprehensions, multiplying fears began to turn to confidence and belief ’. It was this, Bold concluded, that triggered widespread rumors of a popish plot, and ultimately led to Chedle’s letters to the privy council.59 The dialectic between north Wales, parliament, and the privy council seems especially significant here. As Bold explained it, parliament-ordered measures for local defense implemented after first news of the Irish rebellion convinced locals that ‘the papists in general’ planned a coordinated rising along the coastal region stretching from Conwy to Liverpool. A zealous local officer in the person of John Griffith acted decisively, but in the process inflamed fears about the conduct of recusants in the region. These fears triggered letters to the privy council, whose subsequent investigations further raised suspicions and anxieties.60 Behind the scenes, there were other issues at stake as well. In his 10 November 1641 letter to the privy council, Thomas Chedle singled out the derelict deputy lieutenant in Anglesey, Sir Thomas Holland, for having endangered north Wales through his negligence. Describing Holland as ‘very old and unwieldy’, Chedle criticized the deputy lord lieutenant for having ‘carelessly slighted’ his duties. The trained bands for the Isle of Anglesey

56

TNA SP 16/488/100. The papists were rumored to be living in the nearby hamlet of Creuddyn. See Calendar of Wynn Papers, 275. 57 TNA SP 16/488/183. 58 TNA SP 16/488/100. 59 At the time of Bold’s investigation, Griffith still was playing an important role in stirring up local vigilance against recusants and Irish plotters: Thomas Cowper in Chester received at least one letter from Griffith in early 1642 warning of suspicious Irishmen operating in north Wales and Cheshire. CRO DCC/14/6. 60 TNA SP 16/488/100.

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stood in deplorable shape, and ‘neither are nor have been trained or exercised this year nor have they in a readiness other powder or shot’. The December report by William Bold verified these deficiencies, echoing almost verbatim Chedle’s complaints about the shortcomings of the trained bands.61 Holland may have been suspect for other reasons as well. In a contemporary letter unrelated to the Conwy affair, Griffith Williams, dean of Bangor, described Holland’s wife as a notorious recusant who ‘daily prays for the safe and prosperous success of Irish and popish recusants’.62 The Conwy episode reveals how the Irish rebellion transformed vague concerns about specific local recusants and the perceived failures of a local crown officer into activism. In this case, it is clear that a number of purely local tensions that had little to do with Ireland had been present on the coast of north Wales and the Dee for some time. The Irish rebellion added a sense of immediate threat to these pre-existing concerns. The possibility of an Irish invasion in concert with recusant risings was part of this threat. Protestant refugees from the rebellion – strangers to the region, destitute, and of indeterminate religious loyalty – added to local fears, which in turn prodded local authorities into action. Fears for the safety of Chester may also have fanned the flames of anxiety in rural Lancashire. In this case, anxieties seem to have begun in London, and then were reflected back into the provinces. On 16 November 1641, the Commons received letters from James Stanley, Baron Strange, the acting lord lieutenant in Lancashire. One day earlier, the Commons had taken direct testimony from Thomas Beale regarding the alleged popish plots in the county.63 These allegations must have seemed more credible in light of Strange’s letter, which asserted the existence of ‘many rumors of dangers brought to him and somewhat himself did partly gather’.64 According to Sir Simonds D’Ewes’s account, the timing of the letters reinforced concerns about a combined Irish and recusant rising in the west and ‘these new relations did much persuade me to the belief of it’.65 Throughout the remainder of 1641, rumors about papists in Lancashire arose during parliamentary proceedings. On 17 November, John Pym reported on claims ‘that some six papists were this night come out of Lancashire armed with pistols and swords and were all together in one house in London’.66 Later in the month, the Commons investigated information regarding a man named Adam Courtney 61 62 63 64

Ibid. Calendar of Wynn Papers, 275. D’Ewes, Journal, 144–5; also TNA SP 16/485/93); LJ, vol. 4, 439–40. D’Ewes, Journal, 152–3. The Strange letter was not the only one to raise these concerns. In a letter dated 5 November, Henry Robinson in Lancashire noted to Sir Henry Mildmay that the recusants of the county were discontented and that a ‘great store of them’ had been moving about the county suspiciously. These tensions, he asserted, were connected to the execution of a Catholic priest in the county several weeks earlier. See TNA SP 16/485/61. 65 D’Ewes, Journal, 153. 66 Ibid., 163. See also TNA SP 16/485/82.

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alias Smith, who had been arrested near Stratford-upon-Avon. Armed and in possession of letters, which he had tried to destroy when challenged by the local constable, Courtney admitted that he was ‘a papist [and] that he had been in Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire and other places’.67 Nothing serious came of Courtney’s suspicious conduct, but it seemed to confirm and reinforce the sense that Lancashire and the other counties were ‘most stored with papists and in that respect most dangerous’.68 Tensions also ran high on the ground in Lancashire, partly in response to directives from the Commons for better defense against a possible Irish invasion and more stringent surveillance of recusants. On 23 November, Lord Strange, acting under his authority as lord lieutenant, summoned the Lancashire sheriff, deputies, and many of the local justices to Wigan and issued a series of orders regarding local defense. He ordered that the oath of allegiance be administered to the trained bands and that all those who refused should be dismissed. Strange also set up a plan to muster and exercise the trained bands more frequently so that they ‘shall be in a readiness to march to such places of rendezvous … upon twenty-four hours warning at the most, or less if occasion be’. More potentially disruptive at the local level were his orders to the justices that: due watch and ward shall be kept in each several township … strict command be given to the watchmen that they apprehend and stay all such known papists, strangers or other persons, which ride and travel in the night time, or that go around offensively, or whom they shall suspect to carry any letters or messages. … The watchman each night shall go and seek privately about such recusants’ houses as are of great rank and quality, if that they can find there, or see any unlawful assemblies or tumults thereabouts.69

Although Lancashire had been troubled by concerns about the local recusant population before 1641, Strange’s instructions and the allusions to a papist rising helped legitimize and publicize these fears. Inhabitants saw direct evidence of escalating danger as they witnessed drilling soldiers, more careful watches, and greater scrutiny of local recusants. Evidence of this new vigilance made it back to the metropolis. On 1 December the mayor of Liverpool reported in a letter read in the Commons that a known local recusant had publicly proclaimed ‘how the Protestants should shortly have a blow and the papists should have crosses or the like in their hats that they thereby might not be killed’.70 Likewise, in February 1642, parliament received news that a Catholic priest in the county allegedly had instructed local recusants 67 68 69 70

D’Ewes, Journal, 201. Ibid., 172. Susan Maria Ffarington (ed.), The Farington Papers (Manchester, 1856), 74–5. D’Ewes, Journal, 222–3.

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how to ‘make fireballs and grenados … and [said] that when the business of Ireland was a little over, that then the Irish should land in Lancashire and all those towns in Lancashire should upon one day be burned, and then the papists to rise’.71 As in Chester, the arrival of refugees from Ireland added substantially to these fears. In February 1642, letters from the mayor of Liverpool informed the Commons of ‘the danger of the landing of Irish papists there’. Because of the ‘great numbers [arriving] from thence into England’ as a result of the displacement of Protestant settlers, it would be difficult to intercept rebels arriving covertly.72 A petition sent to the Commons in March repeated these charges, adding that the refugees also posed major subsistence problems. Equally troubling was the unrest and anxiety caused by the arrival of despoiled Protestant settlers: ‘… your petitioners, being seated in the mouth of danger, and having fresh and daily spectacles of the Irish cruelties presented to their eyes, cannot but choose but apprehend fear from the novelty of so great barbarism’. The petition continued with an appeal for more attention to defense and policing of recusancy lest ‘the war (or rather the massacre) should be transported hither from the opposite shore, where the number of popish recusants and the opportunity of landing may invite an invasion’. As with the Chester evidence, the petition and correspondence from Lancashire suggests that local inhabitants assumed collusion between local Catholics and the Irish rebels.73 These fears gained strength in the back-and-forth process of communication between the local communities and London. Parliamentary and privy council initiatives caused local officials to pay more serious attention to local policing, which in turn generated more warnings of recusant unrest in the provinces.74 The volume and rhetorical intensity of printed materials on the Irish crisis placed the 1641 rebellion into a confessional context, suggesting that the survival of Protestantism hung in the balance. Breaking with the pattern established during the Protestant catastrophes of the 1620s and 1630s, the Irish rising generated a substantially different form of evidence in the form 71 72

PJLP, vol. 1, 431. PJLP, vol. 2, 14. In March 1642, a petition from Liverpool also complained about the economic instability caused by the arrival of destitute poor from Ireland. 73 George Ormerod (ed.), Tracts Relating to Military Proceedings in Lancashire during the Great Civil War (London, 1844), 3–4. 74 This process seems similar to that described for Essex by John Walter. Walter argues that the inhabitants of Essex and the men sitting at Westminster were united in the ‘widespread subscription to a belief in the existence of a popish plot’. Popular violence in the Stour valley against the interests of Sir John Lucas originated with conflicts dating back to the early years of Charles I’s reign. As parliament in 1641 and 1642 asserted the people’s right to police members of the malignant party, locals took these requests seriously. The resulting attack on Lucas’s home near Colchester arose from pre-existing concerns that had been transformed into activism by parliamentary assertions of the important role to be played by ‘God’s people in the developing religious and political conflict’. See Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, 290–322; quotes on 322 and 290.

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of refugees. Displaced Irish Protestants, most claiming ancestral roots in England, poured across the Irish Sea in late 1641 and 1642 and provided direct evidence of the magnitude of the crisis and danger. The case of Sir Thomas Holland seems especially illuminating in this regard. Old, uncommitted to his work as deputy lieutenant, and married to a suspected recusant, Holland was no doubt a source of local concern long before 1641. With the outbreak of the Irish rebellion, vague concerns about his conduct were replaced by activism, in this case letters to the privy council complaining of his neglect and the proliferation of popery in the area. This transformation of vague fears and suspicions is a significant part of the political context to the English civil war, and an important component of the mobilization of the English people for war. Individuals fleeing the war in Ireland also played an integral role in politicizing these local communities. Although refugees may have provoked local sympathy, they were also viewed as disruptive and potentially dangerous by local officials in communities on the western coast of England. Under any circumstances, the arrival of large numbers of destitute strangers would have severely disrupted the local economy and policing. In the context of the mobilization of English troops for service in Ireland, these problems only compounded. Equally important, however, were the ways that the arrival of Irish refugees intersected with general fears of popery and specific local tensions. In the communities discussed above, the arrival of news of the rebellion stirred up anxieties about local recusant populations. In part, this reflected long-standing local tensions. Westminster directives that characterized the Irish rebels as a generic popish threat and highlighted the possibility of collusion between Irish rebels and English papists energized these preexisting local tensions, and seem to have forced local officials to shift from suspicion to action. Under these conditions, Irish refugees could be a source of fear as much as sympathy.

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7 Local Charity: Contributions to the Irish Cause

In coastal communities, individuals fleeing the rebellion in Ireland had an important impact on perceptions of local safety, especially during the first few months after the outbreak of the rising. In inland parishes, Irish refugees appeared more often as fleeting inconveniences. In Wiltshire, large numbers of Irish poor passed through local parishes in the early 1640s, but do not appear to have caused many disruptions. They also did not receive particularly generous treatment. Although the outpouring of sympathy for victims of the rebellion in print might suggest otherwise, in Wiltshire much of the evidence from local parishes suggests that local officers treated those displaced by the war as ordinary deserving poor. Refugees of English origins very occasionally appear in overseers’ accounts, but the vast majority of Irish appear in churchwardens’ accounts as recipients of outdoor relief. Often traveling in large groups, they received very limited charity from the local churchwardens before being shuffled on their way to other places of refuge. By contrast, evidence suggests very positive responses to the national collections prescribed by parliament in the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan. From the very beginning, parliament intended that funds raised through the Act should assist refugees from Ireland. The statute made special mention of those who ‘for the sake of their lives have been enforced to forsake their habitations, means and livelihood in that kingdom and to [flee] for succor into several parts of His Majesty’s realm of England and Dominion of Wales’. The Commons also created a Committee for the Contribution Money to oversee disbursements. Over time, and possibly under the influ

One exception to this occurred during fast day church services in Pudsey, West Yorkshire, sometime in 1642. Joseph Lister’s late-seventeenth-century memoir recorded that during a fiery sermon by the puritan preacher Elkana Wales, a man burst into the church ‘and cried out with a lamentable voice, “Friends … we are all as good as dead men, for the Irish rebels are coming.’“ After a day’s panic, investigations revealed that the ‘Irish rebels’ were in fact ‘some Protestants that were escaping out of Ireland for their lives in England’. Lister’s account is somewhat vague and problematic, recording events that transpired when he was fourteen years old and decades before he wrote his memoir. See Thomas Wright (ed.), The Autobiography of Joseph Lister of Bradford in Yorkshire (London, 1842), 7–8.  SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141.  CJ, vol. 2, 456, includes the first reference to the Committee for the Contribution Money (25 February 1642).

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ence of lobbying from Henry Jones and the Irish Lord Justices, the Commons moved towards a broader definition of relief, agreeing that the collections could assist war victims who had not fled into England. This transformation contained elements of pragmatism. During discussion of the issue on the floor of the Commons, several members agreed that sending relief monies to Ireland might in fact ease some of the problems that the arrival of refugees in England caused. John Glyn and Simonds D’Ewes both argued that confining charity to ‘such as were come hither’ would only serve to ‘draw them all into England’. Beginning in April 1642, members of the Committee for the Contribution Money explored the possibility of an ‘order for preventing the coming over of the poor out of Ireland’. These discussions bore fruit in the summer as the Commons drafted orders to local English constables and justices mandating that ‘no more monies may be disposed out of the contribution money to relieve such as come out of Ireland hither, but that the monies may be sent to relieve the distressed Protestants that do reside in Ireland’. Surprisingly little work has been done on the mechanics of the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan or the relative success of the collections that the statute mandated. Even in works that attempt to assess the impact of the Irish rebellion on English society and political culture, the relief effort is often overlooked. Karl Bottigheimer’s English Money and Irish Land mentions the collections in passing, suggesting that the collections were intended to solicit ‘pure charity’ from ‘thousands of small donors’. In the long view, he concludes, the later Act for Adventurers, which promised grants of Irish land to large-scale creditors of the Irish war effort, was a more important gauge of parliament’s and English elites’ concern with the rebellion. The response to the Act for Adventurers was overwhelming – investors sank £292,712 into the cause – and reveals that many of those inclined to assist the Irish cause ‘were thinking as much of Irish land as of Protestant suffering’. ‘However Protestant their faith or English their blood’, Bottigheimer writes regarding the victims of the rebellion, they ‘were brethren only to a degree’. Only when parliament focused on military affairs and framed contributions as an investment opportunity did English audiences respond with anything resembling enthusiasm on behalf of the Irish cause.    

PJLP, vol. 2, 36. CJ, vol. 2, 521. Ibid., 674. This lack of work on the Act extends to work that explicitly seeks to document the impact of the rebellion. No mention of the Act, for example, occurs in Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies; Lindley, ‘Impact of the 1641 Rebellion’; or Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord’.  Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 47. Discussion of investment in the Act for Adventurers can be found in ibid., 54–5 and Hazlitt, ‘Financing of British Armies’, 30.  Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 35. Robert Armstrong argues for a more strident response from parliament and suggests that infighting between various political interests, rather than inattention, rendered ‘a response slower and less substantial than needed to quell Irish assertiveness

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On the other hand, Anthony Fletcher and John Morrill demonstrate through their analyses of contribution lists that the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan was reasonably successful in raising ‘money quickly for a popular cause’. Focusing on Buckinghamshire, Morrill finds that when presented with the Act, ‘a majority of the population seems to have been willing to give’.10 Over eight thousand contributors donated £1,098 12s 10½d in Buckinghamshire. This represented a significant response to the ongoing crisis, and leads Morrill to conclude that ‘the response … appears to have been enthusiastic and widespread’.11 For Sussex, Anthony Fletcher compares gifts made under the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan in 1642 to local subscriptions to the Protestation Oath in 1642, and finds that between 40 and 60 per cent of local males gave something to Ireland.12 While parliament may have been slow to implement the collections and wealthy Englishmen chose to invest small fortunes in the Act for Adventurers, the call for charitable assistance to Ireland’s distressed brethren was by this measure successful at the local level. This chapter focuses on Irish poor relief as evidenced in local churchwardens’ accounts and surviving returns from the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan. Wiltshire is a useful basis for this discussion for a number of reasons. Over two hundred contribution lists survive from the county, forming a sizeable pool for discussing the impact of different local and regional variables.13 The materials from Wiltshire allow a comparison of the treatment of refugees as recorded in outdoor relief payments by churchwardens and the state-sponsored relief project, as recorded in returns on the Act. The evidence from Wiltshire suggests that local inhabitants responded much more positively and generously to the abstract construction of Protestant victimhood disseminated in the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan and the print material discussed in previous chapters. Although the bodies of poor war victims may have provided a sad spectacle to parishioners in rural Wiltshire, the abstract appeals generated far more positive action. * and English anxieties’. Within this context, he suggests that the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan should be interpreted as a ‘goodwill gesture’. Armstrong, Protestant War, 51–3. 10 Morrill, ‘Introduction’, in Wilson (ed.), Buckinghamshire Contributions for Ireland 1642, x. 11 Ibid., xii. 12 Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600–1660 (London, 1975), 256–7. A less systematic comparison for fourteen parishes in Surrey likewise suggests that on average just over 65 per cent of males who took the Protestation also gave charity to Ireland. See Jeremy Gibson and Alan Dell (eds), The Protestation Returns, 1641–42, and Other Contemporary Listings (London, 1995), 10. 13 The returns on the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan are preserved in TNA SP 28/191–5. Additional lists, including some made on a 1643 ordinance for Irish relief, are scattered throughout the exchequer papers. For a complete index, see Gibson and Dell (eds), Protestation Returns, 1641– 42. The Wiltshire returns are to be found in a folder in TNA SP 28/195 and are especially useful because they are extensive, can be compared to contemporary returns on the Protestation Oath, and can all be decisively dated to 1642.

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Wiltshire had significant problems with Irish vagrants for decades before the rebellion of 1641. Patrick Fitzgerald has examined local records from southwest England, concluding that over the whole of the seventeenth century Irish poor were ‘a perennial phenomenon’.14 He finds that the Severn estuary bore the brunt of Irish immigration because of its connections to ports trading with Ireland and long-term traditions of migration between the region and Munster. Although the impact was most severe in coastal communities, the problems posed by poor Irish migrants radiated throughout the southwest.15 In enforcing the poor laws in the 1620s and 1630s, the justices of the peace in Salisbury repeatedly punished and deported suspicious Irish. They also seem to have been particularly careful when examining passports in the possession of Irish vagrants. Twice in 1633, the Salisbury magistrates had occasion to seize counterfeit passports, which Irish poor used to evade punishment and gain parish charity as they allegedly traveled back to Ireland. Episodes like these reflected and simultaneously helped to reinforce the stereotype of a criminal underclass of disorderly and undeserving Irish poor.16 Similar issues reappeared in the 1640s, and in many cases churchwardens’ entries regarding the arrival of refugees from the Irish war are indistinguishable from earlier entries dealing with Irish vagrants. The parish of Highworth in extreme northeastern Wiltshire provides the most complete records regarding the relief of transient poor in the county. The parish was situated in the northeastern corner of the county, on a major road between Bristol and Oxford. Churchwardens’ accounts for the parish are continuous from 1628 to 1659.17 The outbreak of the Irish rebellion created expanded demand for outdoor poor relief and is clearly evident in the Highworth churchwardens’ accounts. Before the rising, the highest volume of wandering poor is reflected in the accounts for 1630–2, when twenty-five total individuals received outdoor relief. By contrast, between April 1640 and April 1642, the parish gave £2 3s 5d in outdoor relief to a total of at least 148 displaced settlers from Ireland. Although a large number of persons from Ireland moved through Highworth and the total sum of outdoor relief distributed was considerably higher than prior to the outbreak of the Irish rebellion, Irish war victims do not seem to have been treated as special cases. The 148 individuals who received relief in the parish in 1640–2 split a total of 19s 9d, or 1.6d per recipient. To put this in perspective, in 1638–40, fourteen Irish poor received a total of 3s, or just under 2.6d per person.18 This difference 14 15 16 17

Fitzgerald, ‘Like Crickets to the Crevice of a Brew-House’, 27. Ibid., 15. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 61. The information in this and the following paragraph is found in the unpaginated churchwardens accounts from Highworth, WCRO Ms. 1184/19. Up to 1646, the accounts run in two-year stretches, from March to March. 18 Ibid. The 1640–2 account includes fifty-seven entries for outdoor relief, of which thirty-eight were specifically intended for Irish. These entries indicate that 109 adults and thirty-nine children

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may, of course, reflect the changed economic circumstances, especially in a time of economic uncertainty and with untold numbers of additional Irish refugees possibly arriving in the future. Irish poor remained part of the Highworth landscape through the 1640s, but the amount of money disbursed for relief declined. From March 1642 to March 1644, Irish refugees accounted for twenty-seven of thirty entries pertaining to outdoor relief and received assistance totaling 14s 9d. Accounts for 1644–6 and 1646–7, and 1648–9 lack detail on outpayments, making it impossible to determine precisely how many refugees moved through the parish, but the records do indicate that the parish gave at least some assistance to transient Irish during these years. In 1647–8, the churchwardens bestowed 15s 4d to despoiled Irish poor, 14s 2d in 1649–50, and £1 10s 6d in 1650–1. This last figure, which coincides with the Cromwellian invasion, is large and in fact exceeds the total charity to Irish in 1640–2. Although the reasons for this spike are unclear and may simply reflect the sensibilities of the parish officers or minister, it may also indicate an influx of refugees fleeing the disruptions of Cromwell’s army in Ireland or displaced settlers returning to Ireland as a result of the conquest.19 In contrast to parishes in suburban London, where Irish poor continued to present a significant problem through the 1650s, only a handful of Irish poor are represented in the Highworth accounts from after 1651.20 In the later 1640s, several changes are evident. As the decade progressed, the Highworth churchwardens subjected transient poor from Ireland to closer scrutiny. In the churchwardens’ accounts from the first several years after the start of the Irish rebellion, no mention is made of examining or questioning travelers regarding their background. In 1647–8, however, churchwardens began describing Irish as traveling with passports or certificates of loss. By 1649–50, almost every churchwarden entry regarding charity for Irish referred to passports or certificates. This change may, of course, reflect an alteration in local record-keeping. However, when viewed in light of Kathleen Noonan’s findings for London, where discriminatory giving to Irish refugees prevailed in the later 1640s, it seems likely that persons displaced by the rebellion found themselves more closely scrutinized, as had prevailed earlier in the seventeenth century.21 Increasing numbers of large groups of Irish also from Ireland received outdoor relief. A number of the entries are vague in identifying recipients of relief or indicate that charity was given to a group of travelers, suggesting that the figure of 148 underrepresents the number of persons who actually moved through the parish. During the same period, Highworth also saw three separate groups of Germans and one group of French pass through the parish. 19 Some of these refugees may have been soldiers deserting the Confederate army in Ireland after the arrival of Oliver Cromwell’s troops. See James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999), 87. 20 For London churchwardens’ charity to Irish in the 1650s, see Noonan, ‘Brethren Only to a Degree’, 167, 200–1, 219. 21 Ibid., 176–7.

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appeared on the roads in the later 1640s. Whereas single travelers and a number of families made up the bulk of the churchwardens’ entries in the 1640–2 account, the 1642–4 account referred to large groups, including one composed of eleven men, women and children, and three groups consisting of two or three women and a number of children. Few Irish nuclear families or single poor appear in this period, suggesting that some refugees, perhaps those without links to an English community, began to coalesce into bands of permanently itinerant poor. In larger groups, wandering poor may also have found greater security and received less scrutiny by parish churchwardens. The arrival of refugees from the Irish rebellion made a measurable impact on St Edmund’s parish in Salisbury. In the decades before the rising, transient poor made only sporadic appearances in the churchwardens’ accounts. In 1623, for example, the parish laid out money in outdoor relief only five times, with total payouts totaling a mere 3s. The late 1630s seem to have been particularly light years for poor relief. No references appear in the accounts made at the beginning of 1637, 1639, 1640, or 1641 and the 1638 accounts refer to a total distribution of 5s 6d to nondescript ‘travelers’.22 The pattern of relatively small payments to the poor changed with the onset of the Irish rebellion. The account drawn up in April 1642, which covers outlays during the preceding year, recorded payments to three Irish families and three Irish ministers, totaling 17s 6d.23 These distributions were relatively generous, ranging from 2s 6d to 5s per disbursement. Although accounts do not survive for most of 1642, the churchwardens’ accounts covering April 1643–April 1644 reveal a significant presence of Irish poor. The churchwardens recorded payments of £1 12s 4d to Irish during this period. As in Highworth, the Irish poor moving through St Edmund’s parish in the later 1640s also traveled in groups. A number of groups of five or more people appear in the accounts, including one led by a Protestant minister, and several headed by one or two women and a number of children. References to Irish ‘gentlemen’ or ‘gentlewomen’, who generally received more monetary relief than other poor, may suggest a certain degree of scrutiny and discriminatory giving on the part of the churchwardens during this period as well.24 Although the accounts from St. Martin’s parish in Salisbury are less complete, a similar picture emerges. For the pre-war period, Irish poor appear only in the accounts from 1630, 1632, and 1639.25 The outbreak of the rebellion led to increases in the number of Irish recipients of charity, but not the amount of charity given out. In 1639 and 1640, a total of ten payments totaling 8s 6d were made to wandering poor, including 4d given to 22

Henry James Fowle Swayne (ed.), Churchwardens’ Accounts of St. Edmund and St. Thomas Sarum, 1443–1702, with Other Documents (Salisbury, 1896), 319. 23 Ibid., 322. 24 Ibid., 322–5. 25 WCRO Ms. 1899/65, 1630 Churchwardens’ Accounts; 1632–3 Churchwardens’ Accounts; 1639– 40 Churchwardens’ Accounts.

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a beggar, 1s 6d to several ‘Irish women that were undone by fire’, and 3s to a man who had been robbed of all his possessions on the roads.26 In 1642 and 1644, the parish relieved eighteen groups of poor Irish, most of them women traveling with multiple children. Disbursements, however, were relatively small, ranging from 6d to 1s for each band.27 In the same period, St Martin’s parish also took on one displaced Irish woman, who settled in the parish and received regular charity from the overseers.28 The more remote parishes of Wilton and St Mary’s Devizes saw a small but steady stream of impoverished Irish move through the region seeking relief in the 1640s. The Wilton churchwardens provided very limited outdoor relief to the wandering poor in the 1630s, with the largest single payment amounting to 9d for a ‘walking minister’ in 1635. In 1641 and 1642, the parish distributed a total of 2s 8d to several wandering Irish poor and on one occasion gave 2s 6d to a despoiled Irish minister. They likewise provided 2s 2d to ‘distressed Irish gentlemen and women at several times’ in 1643, and 3s 6d to a refugee minister and a gentlewoman in 1645. As in Highworth and Salisbury, the parish saw mostly larger groups of Irish refugees seeking assistance in the later 1640s. The Wilton churchwardens accounts also indicate that by 1647, most of the traveling companies of Irish poor possessed certificates.29 Devizes, on the periphery of Wiltshire’s major roads, saw fewer displaced Irish settlers. From April 1641 to April 1643, the parish made no extraordinary payments to distressed Irish travelers.30 After Easter 1643, however, groups of Irish poor began moving through the town with regularity. Thus, the 1647–8 accounts recorded a shilling ‘given to three Irish women and five small children’, 2s 6d given to a group of women, and 6d to ‘an Irishman and his children’.31 Devizes also made accommodations for a woman that ‘that came out of Ireland’ and began to collect charity out of the local poor rates. This was the sister-in-law of John Weeks, an inhabitant of the parish, who had evidently settled with her kin during her period of exile and poverty.32 The records from inland communities suggest a number of comparisons with the port towns discussed in the previous chapter. The most striking difference is the lower number of individuals seeking assistance in Wiltshire. Kathleen Noonan’s work on metropolitan London suggests that the influx

26 27 28 29 30

Ibid., 1639–40 Churchwardens’ Accounts; 1640–1 Churchwardens’ Accounts. Ibid., 1642–3 Churchwardens’ Accounts; 1644–5 Churchwardens’ Accounts. Ibid., 1644–5 Churchwardens’ Accounts. WCRO Ms. 1242/15. In the 1641–2 accounts (running April to April), there are two references to ‘travelers [paid] by the appointment of Mr. Mayor’. Similar references appear in earlier years, though it is possible that these may have been Irish poor who received outdoor relief. WCRO Ms. 189/1, 31–3. 31 Ibid., 43–62. The 1647–8 account is in ibid., 60–2. 32 WCRO Ms. 189/21, 1642 Overseers’ Accounts.

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of Irish after October 1641 posed a major social problem in London, with hundreds of indigent refugees settling in the city and suburban parishes. A report drawn up in the late summer of 1643 reveals that the City supported at least five hundred completely destitute Irish refugees.33 The evidence from Chester and Bristol discussed in the previous chapter likewise suggests a major problem with impoverished Irish, and indicates that the local mayor and other officials attempted to clear refugees from the ports as quickly as possible. Although the passage of almost 150 Irish through a small town like Highworth in the winter and spring of 1641–2 must have been disruptive, it pales in comparison to the hundreds of displaced persons seen in one of the port communities. Elsewhere in Wiltshire, even parishes on major transportation routes saw only a few dozen individuals from Ireland at the height of the rebellion. These travelers also demanded relief over a concentrated period of time, primarily in 1641–3, with Irish disappearing except for occasional larger bands of refugees from most local records in the later 1640s. Permanently settled refugees appear occasionally in Wiltshire records. The accounts from St Martin’s Salisbury and St Mary’s Devizes indicate that Irish settled in the community. Paperwork related to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan reveals that poor families had also settled in Wroughton and Hannington.34 In these isolated cases, it is important to note that the recipients of poor relief were not strangers to the community. The unnamed woman who received relief in St Mary’s Devizes was related by kinship to an established member of the parish, and the heads of households for the refugee families settled in Wroughton and Hannington had been born locally.35 This also again suggests that churchwardens and overseers applied normal English poor law procedures to persons displaced from Ireland, settling them in their parish of birth. When Irish refugees did travel through the Wiltshire parishes in the later 1640s, they often did so in groups. Early in the rebellion, the churchwardens’ accounts show that most of those receiving relief were single individuals or family groups. By the middle of the 1640s, larger groups of refugees, headed by multiple adults and including several children, replaced individual travelers on the roads. During the same period, some evidence suggests a deepening suspicion of the rebellion’s refugees and official efforts to track their movements. In Highworth and Salisbury, individuals claiming losses in the rebellion received charity apparently without question in 1641 and 1642. This stands in contrast to the 1620s and 1630s, when wandering poor – particularly those of Irish extraction – were treated as disorderly. However, by the middle of the 1640s, references to examinations of Irish poor and refugees traveling with certificates implies that that churchwardens now 33 34 35

Noonan, ‘Brethren Only to a Degree’, 151. See also BL Add. Ms. 4782, 236–7. See TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Hannington, Wroughton. Slack, English Poor Law, 27–31.

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treated refugees within the guidelines set down by the English poor laws and had reverted to earlier, more discriminatory views of Irish poverty. It is also worth noting that persons affected by the Irish rising are easy to spot in churchwardens’ accounts: they are almost always identified as ‘Irish’ or ‘from Ireland’. Although many of these men and women claimed English ethnicity, kinship, and often birth, local officials seem to have identified them with their adopted country. Alone this signifies little, but when viewed in the context of the seventeenth-century English poor laws and the assumed connection between Irishness and disorderly poverty, this identification may be suggestive of deeper tensions. While the impact of Irish war refugees does not seem to have been catastrophic anywhere in Wiltshire, displaced settlers did represent a strain on local resources. As deserving poor, they were entitled to parish support, and the records demonstrate that Irish poor did draw off outdoor relief moneys in the aftermath of the rebellion. In late 1641 and 1642, it is clear that most sizeable towns or parishes on major roads had some experience with Irish poor, and the Wiltshire evidence suggests that even small, out-of-the-way parishes confronted the presence of some Irish refugees. The inhabitants of these communities thus had direct, firsthand evidence of the Irish rebellion and its human costs. Given the state in which many of the Irish refugees traveled, they no doubt posed a grim spectacle to parishioners. Those who listened to the sermons of itinerant Irish Protestant ministers or spoke with refugees as they passed through no doubt heard even more terrifying evidence of the situation in Ireland. Like the printed tracts and pamphlets that disseminated stories of Catholic atrocities, these firsthand experiences publicized the crisis in Ireland. The Irish war victims who demanded assistance from the parishes that they passed through also reinforced the call for activism that runs through so many of the English discourses on the rising. Local parishioners in Wiltshire came into contact with Irish poor in different ways through the administration of the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan. The same churchwardens who administered outdoor relief to Irish refugees received instructions in the spring of 1642 to collect contributions from their fellow parishioners towards the relief of Irish poor. The local records from Wiltshire reveal that responses to the national relief effort were very positive. Both in total sums collected and in the percentage of parishioners who contributed to the Act, the inhabitants of Wiltshire gave generously. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan was not the first opportunity that English parishioners had to assist Protestant victims of confessional war. Although modest in their returns, English churchwardens had collected relief in 1628, 1630, and 1635 for Protestants who had fled the Palatinate. The 1628 proclamation for the Palatinate charity cast displaced Protestants ‘as fellow members of the true church’ who deserved England’s pity. It ordered ministers to read the royal appeal for relief to their congregations, ‘with an 127

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exhortation to the people for the stirring up of their Christian devotion to a work so full of charity’. Following this appeal, the proclamation asked churchwardens and overseers to make a ‘diligent collection of all the parishioners and persons present’.36 In 1642, the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan duplicated these prescriptions. Ministers and parish officers should ‘use their best endeavors … by all other good ways and means whatsoever’ to raise contributions. Churchwardens and overseers of the poor should plan to ‘ask, take, receive, and gather the several gifts and charitable benevolence of all and every person and persons’.37 The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan did not, however, simply duplicate past efforts for continental Protestants. One of the nagging difficulties with early projects for the German war victims was the fact that contributions fell significantly short of expectations. The exiled ministers of the Upper Palatinate residing in Nuremberg complained about the small returns – totaling less that £3,500 – in a letter written to the consistory of the Dutch Church in London just before the letters patent for 1628 collection expired. This lukewarm response led them to conclude ‘that this contribution has not been serious to anyone’.38 The 1630 royal proclamation authorizing new collections likewise noted that ‘our gracious intention [has] not yet taken so good effect for the relief of those distressed souls as we expected’ and exhorted churchwardens and ministers to actively solicit contributions by making ‘diligent collections of all the parishioners at their dwelling houses’.39 The impact of these relatively minor alterations was apparently minimal: nationwide, the 1630 collection raised less than £5,000.40 This stands in marked contrast to the collections made under the terms of the Act, where several counties alone raised thousands of pounds for the relief of Irish poor.41 The 1642 collections placed considerable pressure on all English subjects to assist the distressed Protestants of Ireland. Reflecting on-going attempts in the Commons to deprive the bishops of power, the 1642 statute took responsibility for the collections away from the central Church administration. Parliament ordered the county sheriffs and the commissioners of the 1641 subsidy to collect funds from individual parishes and pay them into London-based clerks. The Act instructed local officials to give liberally to the cause, ‘it being hoped and expected that by their good example herein they will encourage others to do the like’.42 The subsidy commissioners also 36 37 38 39

Bewes (ed.), Church Briefs, 130. SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141. Hessels (ed.), Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, vol. 3, 1455. By the King: A License for a Collection throughout England and Wales, Towards the Maintenance of the Exiled Ministers of the Palatinate, 19 August 1630 (London, 1630). 40 Hessels (ed.), Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, vol. 3, 2948–62. 41 See Table 1. 42 SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141.

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Table 1: County contributions to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan County Bedfordshire Berkshire Buckinghamshire Cambridgeshire Cornwall Derbyshire Devon Dorset Essex Gloucester Hampshire Herefordshire Hertfordshire Huntingdonshire Kent Leicestershire Lincolnshire London Middlesex Norfolk Northamptonshire Oxfordshire Rutland Shropshire Somerset Staffordshire Surrey Sussex Warwickshire Wiltshire Worcestershire Yorkshire Total

Amount £947 11s 6d £513 9s 8d £912 14s 8d £862 14s 11d £50 0s 0d £81 14s 1d £2080 0s 0d £786 12s 5d £4655 12s 8¾d £875 1s 11d £757 1s 5d £84 11s 2d £1716 15s 2d £301 14s 1d £2203 13s 11d £563 18s 1d £555 8s 9d £9032 7s 1d £2417 4s 0d £1399 13s 0d £1399 13s 0d £199 9s 0d £95 9s 5d £373 0s 0d £494 7s 1d £19 12s 7d £1902 14s 3d £1239 12s 9¼d £182 6s 0d £1499 18s 4d £180 0s 10d £296 7s 0d £45,931 16s 6¾d

     Source: TNA SP 16/539, f. 303. TNA 16/539 lists no contributions for: Cheshire, Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Suffolk, and all of Wales.

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received instructions to ‘summon and call together … such persons and persons residing within the several counties … as they in their discretion shall think fit’ to ‘earnestly move and persuade them liberally to contribute and lend money toward so good a work’. The authors of the statute expressed their hope that at least some of the individuals summoned before the subsidy commissioners could be convinced to loan larger sums of money to the Act for Adventurers.43 In Wiltshire, the subsidy commissioners carried out these instructions to the letter. Surviving among the collection materials is a listing of prominent inhabitants of the division of Salisbury, in the southeastern corner of the county, who found themselves pressed for contributions by the subsidy collectors.44 The three subsidy commissioners – Lawrence Hyde of Heale parish, Edward Tooker of Maddington, and Stephen Bowman of West Harnham – made substantial contributions. Tooker and Hyde contributed £2 each, the third highest contributions in the division, while Bowman gave £1. In addition to providing an example to their neighbors, the three men played a significant role in pressuring others in the region. According to the list, the collectors ‘called before us the most able and sufficient persons of estates within that division’. Using their tax lists as a base, they solicited contributions from 196 individuals and received £80 7s for their troubles. In the majority of cases, the individuals who appeared before the commissioners were the wealthiest inhabitants of their parishes, and without exception paid more than £3 towards the subsidy in 1641.45 It is likely that the personal pressure placed on persons called before the subsidy commissioners led to high returns. Those summoned also may have recognized the responsibility that attended their status in the region and therefore chose to donate generously. On the other hand, limited evidence, including references by the subsidy commissioners to contributors passing off counterfeit and clipped coins, suggests that a certain degree of grumbling and subversion may also have accompanied the solicitations.46 At the parish level, the instructions to ministers, churchwardens, and overseers of the poor also generated high returns. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan contained relatively few specific prescriptive instructions to the local collectors. However, it did order the ministers and churchwardens to write down ‘the persons’ names that shall give … [and] set down in a note in writing … the said sums of money’. These instructions broke decisively from the precedents set during collections for continental war victims in the 1620 and 1630s, which mandated no record-keeping at the parochial level. 43 44 45

Ibid., 142. TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Salisbury Division Commissioners’ Report. A handful of highly assessed members of the gentry were not pressed for Irish contributions for unknown reasons. Additionally, popish recusants, who were taxed at twice the standard rate, were understandably not solicited for Irish relief. 46 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Salisbury Division Commissioners’ Report.

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The 1642 statute made it clear that the local lists would eventually settle in the hands of parliament’s treasurers in London, which would lead to ‘better discovery of the true payment’ of monies and would help avoid ‘all deceits and evil dealings’.47 The statute also introduced the possibility that a gift to the cause – and conversely a refusal to give – would be made known to a wider audience, promising that ‘all and every the said notes or schedules of collections … shall be imprinted and published’.48 Although the promised book of contributions never actually appeared, this provision in the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan created significant pressure to give. Whereas collections for war victims in France and the Palatinate in the 1620s and 1630s allowed individuals to give anonymously, the 1642 effort placed a great deal of emphasis on the performative aspect of charity. Those who refused to give would have to justify their negligence to their churchwardens as well as their neighbors. They also faced the possibility that their uncharitable behavior would be revealed to the entire commonwealth in the printed contribution book promised by parliament. In comparison to collections for distressed continental Protestants, the returns made on the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan were very robust. In the 1630 collection for Germany, the entire diocese of Salisbury (inclusive of Wiltshire and Berkshire) raised only £362 2s 2½d; in 1642, the Wiltshire parishes alone raised £1,499 18s 4d.49 While displaced settlers received limited relief as they passed through parishes in the county, local communities responded generously to the collections. The parishioners of Highworth, for example, gave £3 8s 10d to the cause. In Wilton, 157 households raised a total of £9 14s 5d for the Act. This parish distributed only 10s 10d to Irish poor in the entire period 1641–5.50 In St Mary’s Devizes – a parish that either did not see or chose not to grant outdoor assistance to Irish war victims until the spring of 1643 – a total of sixty-seven households contributed £4 0s 4d in March 1642 under the terms of the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan.51 Local churchwardens and ministers used a variety of means to solicit contributions. In some parishes, the churchwardens made door-to-door collections and gathered charity from all households. In the communities of Allington, Idmiston, Porton and Gomeldon, Britford and East Harnham, Netheravon, and Netherhampton, the collection lists explicitly indicate that the clergy and local officers moved through the parish, soliciting all house-

47

SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141. A large number of these lists were in fact forwarded to London and are preserved in TNA SP 28/191–5. Some administrative papers, although incomplete and fragmentary, can be found in TNA SP 28/193, London Folder and SP 28/195, Administrative Papers. 48 SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 142. 49 TNA SP 16/539, 303. Berkshire raised an additional £513 9s 8d. 50 TNA SP 28/196, Wiltshire Folder, Wilton. 51 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, St Mary’s Devizes.

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holds for assistance.52 In other Wiltshire parishes, the collections seem to have been made less formally, sometimes in the church following Sunday services. The return for Alderbury, for example, noted that the collection was made after church services on 20 April 1642.53 In the parishes of West Grimstead and Pitton and Farley, large parishes served by both a church and a smaller chapel, the churchwardens conducted a door-to-door collection in the neighborhood of the main church and informal collections at the chapel after Sunday services. Collections made at the church door also could be more haphazard. In West Grimstead, the churchwardens listed the names of those who contributed during their household collections but only indicated the amount of charity (12s 6d) that had been collected at the door of the Plaitford chapel.54 In Collingbourne Ducis, a scene of chaos ensued when collections were made in the church, as the churchwardens indicated that some parishioners’ ‘names were omitted through their hasty casting in of their monies’ before names could be recorded.55 Finally, evidence suggests that some parish churchwardens solicited subscriptions to the relief effort and collected monies at a later date. In Barford St Martin’s parish, for example, the churchwardens indicated that three parishioners refused to pay earlier promised contributions.56 The degree of commitment to the collections by parish churchwardens and ministers also varied. In Sutton Mandeville, Fisherton Anger, Wishford Magna, Berwick St James, Bemerton, and Britford and East Harnham, the parish clergymen did not contribute to the Irish charity. In a number of other parishes, one or more churchwardens and overseers also failed to give. The Wiltshire returns reflect the fact that some local officials either neglected or refused to conduct collections. The collection list prepared by Roger Chubb, churchwarden of Odstock, indicated that he was the lone contributor to the Irish charity in his parish and listed the names of twelve prominent members of the community, including the parson, who ‘gave nothing’.57 Similarly,

52

Elsewhere in the kingdom these door-to-door collections seem to have been pursued zealously. The churchwardens of Stoke Newington, Middlesex, reported that they have ‘gone from house to house and demanded the free benevolence of all those within our parish that were able to give anything’; in Hanapston, Dorset, the minister and churchwardens actively sought out ‘the houses of those that were not there at the church’ during the regular collections, pressing the absentees for assistance. See TNA SP 28/193, Middlesex Folder, Stoke Newington; TNA SP 28/191, Dorset Folder, Hanapston. 53 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Alderbury. 54 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, West Grimstead, Pitton and Farley. 55 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Collingbourne Ducis. 56 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Barford St Martins. Similar problems can be found in other returns. In Rolvenden, Kent, the vicar promised five shillings which he later refused to pay for unknown reasons. The churchwardens of Marston, Bedfordshire, likewise reported that ‘diverse persons who promised their charity and set down the certain sum that they would give but now refuseth, which sum comes to about £1 2s’. See TNA SP 28/192, Kent Folder, Rolvendon; SP 28/191, Bedfordshire Folder, Marston. 57 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Odstock.

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an undated note apparently written by one of the subsidy commissioners reported that the entire parish of Bramshaw, including the minister and churchwardens, ‘gave nothing towards the relief of Ireland’.58 Given the range of churchwarden responses to the Act, it is unsurprising that the number of parishioners who gave to the Irish project ranged widely. Following Anthony Fletcher’s methodology in Sussex, it is possible to partially reconstruct the percentage of parishioners who contributed to victims of the Irish rebellion by comparing the contribution lists for the Protestation returns.59 This approach leaves some problems since the lists of those who took the Protestation do not fully represent the parish population. In its language, the Protestation Oath was designed to appeal to a wide distribution of English parishioners, excepting only committed papists, but was only tendered to male parishioners. During the Irish collections, however, in some communities the churchwardens conducted collections by the household. The Irish lists, therefore, frequently include the names of women who would have been missing from the Protestation Oath rolls. Moreover, the Protestation returns list all males who subscribed to the oath. In many cases, this could include multiple males who lived in a single household. For churchwardens who only recorded collections for Ireland based on the head of household’s names, servants and other dependant males may not be included on the lists generated by the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan. Despite these difficulties, the Protestation returns are the best existing guide to parish populations for the early 1640s and offer a rough, if imperfect index to inhabitants of the Wiltshire parishes. Because so many individuals potentially would have been underrepresented in the Irish collection lists, it seems fair to suggest that the percentages discussed below represent minimum figures.60 As Table 2 indicates, responses to the Irish collection varied significantly from parish to parish. Aside from Odstock and Bramshaw – previously noted as parishes where the clergy and churchwardens did not participate in the Irish efforts – the percentage of adult males who contributed to Ireland and took the Protestation ranged from 14.3 per cent in Fisherton Anger, a parish just outside the cathedral town of Salisbury, up to 76.7 per cent in Netherhampton. Even in neighboring parishes, returns varied widely. The contiguous parishes of Winterbourne Earls, Winterbourne Dauntsey, and Winterbourne Gunner, for example, saw returns of 37.3, 52.8 and 67.6 per cent respectively. These differences occurred in spite of the fact that the three parishes

58 59 60

TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Bramshaw. Fletcher, County Community in Peace and War, 256–7. For thorough discussions of the Protestations as indices to parish populations, see David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), 65–8; Gibson and Dell (eds), Protestation Returns, 1641–42, 6–9; Morrill, ‘Introduction’, in Wilson (ed.), Buckinghamshire Contributions for Ireland, xi–xii.

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Table 2: Parish contributions to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan, Salisbury Division of Wiltshire

Parish Allington Barford St Martins Baverstocke Bemerton Berwick St James Boscombe Bramshawe Britford and East Harnham Collingborne Ducis Coombe Bissett Everly Fifeild Fisherton Anger Fittleton and Hackestone Fouleston and Quidhampton Fovent Ham* Honnington* Idmiston Laverstock and Ford Maddington Netheravon Netherhampton Newton Toney North Tidworth Odstocke Orcheston St Mary Overton* Patney Porton and Gomeldon Sherrington* Shrewton Stapleford Steeple Longford Stratford Toney Sutton Mandeville

Percentage of males listed on the Protestation Total amount Average Returns who also gave to collected individual the Irish collections contribution 72.4% £3 16.0d 67.1% £1 3s 4.6d 58.6% £1 3s 13.8d 57.7% 11s 10d 6.5d 42.6% 12s 6d 6.8d 16.7% £1 2s 4d 44.7d   0.0% 0 0.0d 54.0% £2 2s 9d 6.6d 76.3% £7 1d 14.9d 52.6% £1 5s 9d 7.2d 61.5% NA NA 63.0% £1 13s 6d 13.0d 14.3% 15s 10d 7.6d 52.3% £2 4d 9.1d 45.2% £1 10a 5d 13.5d 41.4% £3 3s 12.8d 51.1% NA NA 50.0% NA NA 45.2% £1 1s 6d 5.5d 38.6% £1 6s 14.9d 28.0% £1 7s 4d 11.3d 62.4% £4 13s 1d 9.2d 76.7% £1 18s 8d 13.3d 34.0% £1 5s 13.6d 24.2% £1 15s 5d 26.6d   3.1% 6d 6.0d 36.7% 8s 8.7d 67.3% NA NA 48.5% £1 3s 14.5d 64.0% 19s 4.1d 55.6% NA NA 62.5% £1 5s 5d 5.3d 44.3% £1 3s 8d 4.3d 29.6% £1 2s 1d 8.0d 71.8% £1 14s 11.0d 23.3% £1 9s 2d 19.4d

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Tilshead West Deane and Grimstead West Harnham Winterborne Dauntsey Winterborne Earles Winterborne Gunner Winterborne Stoke Winterslow Wishford Magna Wyly*

62.7% 38.9% 40.0% 52.8% 37.3% 67.6% 67.9% 39.8% 66.2% 21.7%

£1 12s 8½d £1 10s £1 11s 7d 12s 1d £1 2s 7d £1 12s 5d £1 12s 9d £2 1s 9d £2 16s 1d NA

7.7d 20.0d 10.5d 6.3d 12.9d 11.8d 8.4d 10.2d 12.9d NA

Total

45.6%

£63 18s 1½d

9.0d

Source: TNA SP 28/195/Wiltshire Folder. * Surviving returns either do not list the amount of individual contributions or these figures are illegible.

shared the same minister, who indicated that he had pursued contributions with equal diligence.61 All told, the Irish collections seem to have been successful. Twenty-four of the forty-six parishes in the Salisbury division saw contributions from more than half of the males on the Protestation returns. Almost every parish included a number of women who contributed, again suggesting that the Irish collection drew together a broader base of the local population than had the Protestation. When the sums collected are broken down, several parishes appear as very generous. In Collingborne Ducis, for example, a total of 113 parishioners, including sixty-eight women, gave a total of £7 1d. In sixteen of the forty-six parishes in the division, the average individual contribution exceeded one shilling per person. The collections for Ireland took place after refugees and printed material regarding the Irish rebellion had been circulating for some time. In Wiltshire, most collections occurred in April and May 1642, well after the publication of inflammatory tracts on the rising and the observation of several national fast days. The common practice of forwarding tracts from London into the provinces suggests that at least some of the print ephemera found its way into Wiltshire, particularly along the road and market networks.62 Print was not the only means by which stories of the rising moved through England.

61

TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Winterbourne Earls, Winterbourne Dauntsey, and Winterbourne Sherburg alias Gunner. 62 For the spread of news, see Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth Century England’, esp. 69–72, 88–90.

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Refugees traveling through the region by the spring of 1642 lent tangible evidence of the rebellion’s human cost. Evidence from elsewhere in England suggests that despoiled Irish served to cultivate sympathy. In London’s All Hallows the Great, for example, the churchwardens reported that their fellow parishioners were moved by the testimony of their pastor, who ‘had a son and two daughters besides four nephews and nieces in Ireland, which have greatly suffered in this rebellion to their utter spoiling and undoing’. In response, the parishioners contributed the respectable sum of £66 18s 2d to the Irish collection.63 Ministers and their assisting churchwardens possessed other tools to help raise funds. With the language of confessional unity and lamentations over the ‘diverse cruel murders and massacres of the Protestants … daily committed by popish rebels’, the statute itself represented a powerful call to assist the distressed Irish.64 Moreover, informal networks of communication were no doubt important. In February 1642, the Commons passed a resolution asking members of parliament to contact gentry, justices, constables and other notables informing them of the various endeavors proposed for Ireland, including the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan.65 A significant number of important men in the Long Parliament came from Wiltshire, including John Evelyn, Edward Hungerford, John Ludlow, and John Moore, the last a member of the committee that distributed monies to distressed Irish Protestants.66 Moreover, the county maintained ties to chief parliamentary figures such as John Pym, who had represented Coombe in the Short Parliament, and Denzil Holles, who represented the puritan town of Dorchester in Dorset but resided in Wiltshire.67 In Wiltshire, the presence of settled Irish poor also affected the collections. With limited economic resources, the repeated appearance of Irish wanderers or the permanent settlement of a refugee family could have a significant impact on the local community’s willingness to give charity to the centralized project. In Wroughton, the churchwardens kept aside half of the money raised in the local church for the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan to meet the needs of John Picket’s large family when they relocated to the parish after the rebellion.68 In Hannington, charitable funds were

63

TNA SP 28/193, London Folder, All Hallows the Great. Unfortunately, the churchwardens did not list the number of contributors, making it impossible to determine the average individual contribution gathered in this parish. For similar accounts, see TNA SP 28/192, Huntingdonshire Folder, Swineshead. 64 SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141. 65 LJ, vol. 4, 615. 66 See TNA SP 28/193, 63–5, 82; SP 28/195, Administrative Accounts. 67 Victoria History of the County of Wiltshire, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1957), 137–8. Dorchester’s experience as a center of puritanism is the subject of David Underdown, A Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT, 1994). 68 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Wroughton.

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not diverted but the churchwardens indicated that ‘the parish would have contributed a great deal more’ had parishioners not been concerned with the long-term economic impact of a family originally from the area that had returned after the outbreak of the rebellion.69 At the local level, the social context in which the Irish project transpired, particularly the leadership of the local clergy and relief collectors, likewise affected collections significantly. The parishioners of Melksham, in the west of the county, made the largest contribution in Wiltshire (£145 8s 7d) and saw the highest rate of individual giving (on average, each contributor gave 14s 9d). Part of this large contribution can be traced to gifts by a handful of households who made substantial contributions of several pounds each. During the 1630s and 1640s, Melksham was a center of puritan preaching in the region, and contemporaries traveled from the surrounding area to hear sermons at the parish church.70 The generally high level of giving in the parish probably reflected the religious temperament of the community.71 The opposite occurred in parishes where the local clergyman was less strident in pursuing contributions. Some of the lowest parish contributions for the Salisbury Division occurred in places where the local minister did not himself make a contribution to the relief of Ireland. In the seven parishes where the ministers did not participate – Bemerton, Berwick St James, Britford and East Harnham, Fisherton Anger, Odstock, Wishford Magna and Wyly – the average size of individual contributions was significantly lower than elsewhere in the region. Churchwardens also played important roles in making the collections successful. The door-to-door collections allowed closer personal contact than collections made at the church door, thus giving collectors the opportunity to persuade their neighbors of the necessities facing the commonwealth. In Wiltshire, very few churchwardens made lists of those who refused to contribute, thus granting a degree of anonymity to those who chose not to give. Elsewhere in England, however, conscientious churchwardens who kept careful lists of those who refused to contribute had a decisive impact on the local response. Of the forty-one parishes in Wiltshire where churchwardens kept inclusive lists, 80 to 90 per cent of parishioners contributed to the Irish program.72 It seems fair to suggest that the prospect of having one’s lack of sympathy publicized motivated otherwise apathetic contributors to find something to give to the Irish cause.73

69 70

TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Hannington. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in Engalnd, 1603– 1660 (Oxford, 1985), 78. 71 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, Melksham. This is a point made by Fletcher for east Sussex; see Fletcher, County Community in Peace and War, 257. 72 Cope, ‘Ireland Must Be Looked After’, 297–8. 73 In some communities (although not in Wiltshire), churchwardens also chose to combine collec-

137

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Elsewhere in England, churchwardens occasionally added information that singled out individuals whom they deemed capable of contributing something to the relief of Ireland but who refused. The churchwardens of Brickhill Magna in Buckinghamshire, for example, listed the names of ninety-one contributors to the Irish cause and added the names of four individuals – all members of the gentry – who would give nothing.74 The churchwardens of Chelsea, Middlesex, drew similar attention to those who would not give during the collection, specifically noting that ‘we have been with these several persons above-named who have all generally refused to contribute’.75 In Stuckly, Buckinghamshire, the wardens went further, using the Irish collection as a pretense to complain of a complete lapse of responsibility among the leaders of their parish. After noting the refusal of the local parson and vicar to participate in the Irish collection, the churchwardens thought it their duty to explain to parliament that the aforenamed ‘do none of them reside upon their livings amongst us’ and failed to discharge their parochial duties.76 On the other hand, churchwardens also occasionally justified the actions of their non-contributing neighbors. In St Giles in the Fields parish in London, the collectors indicated that twenty-two of those solicited had good reason for not giving, including several individuals who were temporarily absent from the parish, two who were in abject poverty, and two who had themselves fled from Ireland as a result of the rebellion. They also listed the names of seven suspected papists and eighty-five ordinary householders who simply ‘would not give’.77 The actions of the local gentry also affected contributions, although in less tangible ways. As explained above, the subsidy commissioners in the Salisbury Division of Wiltshire had worked diligently to press the wealthiest gentry of the region into contributing. At the local level, the removal of these local elites from the pool of contributors seems to have affected parish collections negatively. The churchwardens of North Tidworth specifically complained that ‘this collection had come to a greater sum but some of the parish have given their benevolences to the commissioners’.78 Elsewhere in the area, it seems possible that low levels of contribution occurred because these local notables were not present to serve as examples to their neighbors.

tions for Ireland with subscriptions to the Protestation. In these cases, credible arguments can be constructed that view this as either a positive or negative influence on the Irish charity. This issue is discussed in Morrill, ‘Introduction’, in Wilson (ed.), Buckinghamshire Contributions for Ireland, xi–xii. 74 TNA SP 28/191, Buckinghamshire Folder, Brickhill Magna. 75 TNA SP 28/193, Middlesex Folder, Chelsea. 76 TNA SP 28/191, Buckinghamshire Folder, Stuckly. 77 TNA SP 28/193, London Folder, St Giles in the Fields. 78 TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder, North Tidworth.

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Finally, matters of local economy influenced contributions at the local level. In northwest Wiltshire, regional economic pressures had a measurable affect on the Irish collections. Early in 1642, when the Irish collections were just beginning, this region experienced significant social dislocation owing to the outbreak of plague in the town of Malmesbury. As part of the typical plague relief measures the local justices of the peace levied plague rates against the surrounding communities, including £80 from the parishes of the hundred of Malmesbury and £49 from the hundred of Chippenham.79 With these considerable plague-related burdens occurring at the same time as the Irish collection, responses to the latter were understandably muted in the regions that bore the economic brunt of the epidemic. There are no surviving records from any parishes in Malmesbury hundred and only a handful from Chippenham hundred, suggesting that collections may not have taken place.80 On the other hand, local economic distress did not always impact on collections. The collapsing textile trade in East Anglia, and the devastating impact of this decline in the 1630s and 1640s, represented a major economic problem in England.81 Despite the significant problems triggered by this constriction in the industry, the parishes of Essex contributed more than £4,600 during the Irish collections.82 At the national level, other constraints upon the collections can be discerned. Most striking is the fact that collections for Ireland appear to have been neglected in large portions of northern England and Wales. With the exception of the three parishes of Haverfordwest on the coast, no evidence indicates that churchwardens carried out collections in Wales.83 Likewise, except for the York city parishes, there is no evidence of collections having been conducted in the northern counties of Cheshire, Cumberland, Durham, Northumberland, Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Yorkshire. This may reflect lingering economic problems associated with the Bishops’ Wars and the Scottish invasion.84 For Lancashire and Cheshire, parliamentary directives 79 80

WCRO Ms. A1/110, 1646 Trinity Sessions, 124, 152. TNA SP 28/195, Wiltshire Folder. The relevant parishes in Chippenham hundred are: Biddleston, Box, Castle Coombe, Chippenham, Corsham, Easton Gray, Langley Burrell, Leigh Delamore, Littleton Drew, Great Luckington, North Wroxall, Sherston Magna, Tytherton Lucas, and Yatton. As late as 1646, the Committee for Irish Affairs in the House of Commons was attempting to collect money that had never been paid in by local churchwardens throughout England. See entries throughout BL Add. Mss. 4782 and 4771. 81 Manning, English People and the English Revolution, 117–22; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 223. 82 TNA SP 16/539, 303. 83 A 1646 account of the Irish collections drawn up for the Commons indicates that no money from the northern counties and Wales reached London. TNA SP 16/539, 421. This may represent a breakdown in the centralized record keeping, since returns from three parishes in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, survive separate from the main archive of returns, in TNA E 179/265/11. On the other hand, the Commons in May 1642 investigated why the Irish collection had been neglected in ‘some whole counties of Wales’, PJLP, vol. 2, 365. 84 For a discussion of the economic problems created by the Scots in the north, see Bennett, Civil Wars Experienced, 17–21.

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that allowed local mayors and other officials to distribute contribution money locally meant that churchwardens did not forward lists of contributors to Westminster, if they kept them at all. Unfortunately for modern historians, this means that there is a significant hole in the evidence for the communities that probably saw the biggest influx of refugees. The relatively generous responses in Wiltshire to a collection made for Protestant war victims who were to all intents and purposes strangers is striking. There were some elements within the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan that placed pressure on potential contributors. The Act demanded a significant commitment of time and resources from the local ranks of subsidy commissioners, county sheriffs, and local churchwardens and ministers. According to the prescriptions of the statute, the subsidy commissioners and those in the parishes who conducted the collections should make extra efforts to encourage contributions and should give generously in order to serve as examples to their neighbors. At the local level, the Act also placed some pressure on potential contributors. Not only were the churchwardens and clergy charged with soliciting their neighbors, but the promised publication of books of contributions turned the act of giving into a public performance on a national stage. Despite this evidence of pressure, it is important to remember that the collection for Ireland was always voluntary. Nowhere in the evidence surviving from 1642 is there any evidence that this collection was forced or coerced, either at the national or the local level. As has been seen in Wiltshire, the structure of the collections prescribed in the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan generated mixed results. Some communities saw extraordinary efforts on the part of the clergy and churchwardens while others saw local collectors lapse in their duties. Local responses likewise ranged from the very generous in the puritan-influenced parish of Melksham to the very ungenerous as in Odstock and Bramshaw where parishioners did not participate at all. Complaints about unsympathetic neighbors and individuals failing to pay in promised contributions that can found in the local contribution lists likewise suggest that individuals and occasionally entire parishes were perfectly willing to turn a deaf ear to pleas for Irish charity. Although the Act was an ambitious national project, it was in the end carried out by local parish officers interacting with their neighbors and associates. In this process of interaction, the disposition of local ministers and churchwardens, the pressure of local economic conditions and a host of extraneous variables influenced the collections in many ways, resulting in a range of responses to the call for Irish relief. The Irish poor who appeared in the towns and villages of Wiltshire appear not to have presented an overwhelming social problem. Moreover, the local churchwardens seem not to have treated displaced war victims from Ireland with particular generosity. They suspended their traditional suspicions 140

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towards the Irish poor during the first several years of the rebellion, but the reemergence of references to Irish poor bearing certificates and passports in the mid-1640s suggests that this was only a temporary situation. In terms of the amount of relief distributed to war victims, the evidence is even more ambiguous. Churchwardens labeled these men and women as ‘Irish’ despite their English ethnicity. When outdoor relief for war refugees is compared to charity for Irish poor in previous decades, it is apparent that churchwardens did not treat the Irish of the 1640s with more charity than the vagrant and ‘undeserving’ Irish of the earlier period. The parishioners of Wiltshire thus responded more positively to the kind of relief proposed in the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan than to the actual refugees who moved through their communities. When English Protestant parishioners made a contribution during the collections held during the spring of 1642, they were devoting their energies and resources to an abstract argument that stressed the uniformity of the Anglo-Protestant settlers of Ireland and asserted England’s obligations towards their distressed brethren. Although individual communities varied in the size of their contributions and in the percentage of parishioners who gave, the inhabitants of Wiltshire consistently chose to send their money out of their own parishes. Faced with tangible evidence of the war’s casualties, the inhabitants of a parish like Highworth – who saw nearly 150 refugees move through the town in the space of a year – nonetheless sent their money away to London for the ‘great multitudes of godly and religious people’ described in the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan.85 The material covered in this chapter suggests that the Act should be acknowledged as having been successful in mobilizing English activism. When the local context for relief – including the treatment of refugees and responses to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan – is reconstructed, English audiences responded with generosity not to the actual victims of the Irish crisis who appeared on the roads beginning in the winter of 1641–2, but to the argument for Irish relief as it was conveyed in the Act and the supporting pamphlets, tracts, and sermons about the war. This in turn stresses the significance of Ireland’s rebellion for English communities. The Act brought news of ‘cruel murthers and massacres of the Protestants’ into every parish in England and Wales, and suggested that it was the responsibility of ‘all and every person and persons’ in these communities to respond to this catastrophe.86 The Irish collections also called on the English people to mobilize their efforts and resources as part of a larger, national defense against the rise of popery. In March and April of 1642, the men and women of Wiltshire responded to this argument and sent signifi-

85 86

SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141. Ibid.

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cant sums of relief to their distressed brethren who suffered at the hands of Ireland’s papist rebels. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan drew the English people together into a community of interest and reminded them of the danger posed by the unchecked rise of popery in the British Isles.

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8 Hard and Lamentable Decisions: The Distribution and Decline of Irish Relief

As the 1640s progressed and England plunged into turmoil, Irish war victims fell out of the public eye, at least in print and political discourse. Many, however, continued to wander English roads in search of charity, possibly hoping for a future return to Ireland. By 1643, they were largely left to their own devices as the charitable projects that had mobilized English sympathy and activism in 1641 and 1642 gradually disappeared. Much of this reflected the basic anti-popish motivations behind early responses to the rebellion. Irish war victims might be objects of pity, but as the evidence from the first months of the rebellion clearly illustrates, they served as warnings of the evil intentions and basic cruelty of a papist enemy that might soon target England. When war came to England in 1642, much of the momentum for activism on behalf of the Irish dropped off in favor of mobilization for war at home. The language of the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan presented the collections as part of a relief effort for individuals despoiled in the 1641 rebellion. In reality much of the money collected in English parishes did not reach the hands of those most in need. Parliament sent some funds to Ireland and several hard-pressed communities in England received permission to spend contribution money locally. Much of the charity, however, remained in London where the parliamentary Committee for the Contribution Money used it to assist relatively high-status individuals who had fled the war. As 1642 progressed and the military situation in Ireland deteriorated, parliament diverted relief funds to the Irish war effort. When war came to England, the Commons also looted funds raised for Irish relief for the parliamentary cause. 

The Journals of the Lords and Commons and private diaries from members of the Long Parliament provide some information on the disposition of contributions. Sparse materials from the Committee for the Contribution Money are scattered among the administrative papers for the 1641 collections, in TNA SP 28/193, Administrative Accounts (unfoliated bundle) and SP 28/195, Miscellany (unfoliated bundle); these include incomplete schedules of outpayments to Irish refugees in 1642. These are supplemented by an additional schedule in TNA SP 16/539, 202. A 1646 listing of all Irish contributions collected in English counties can be found in TNA SP 16/539, 421. ­ Materials from

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In part, the diversion of relief money to the war effort reflected contingencies. Pressed for funds as war with the king became increasingly likely, money for Ireland seemed an attractive resource. The decision to plunder Irish money for an English war, however, was not purely pragmatic. According to the logic of anti-popery, the diversion of Irish charity to an English war makes a certain amount of sense. Stereotypes about popery in the mid-seventeenth century held that the enemy was devious and deceptive. In the 1630s and 1640s, criticisms of Charles I’s evil counselors, concerns about the intentions of conformable Catholics, and fears about the Protestant bishops reflected the belief that papists could infiltrate the centers of politics and Protestant English culture. By this logic, overt aggression by the papist rebels in Ireland was connected to the subvert machinations of papists and crypto-papists at home. Diverting money to a war intended to destroy the power of ill-intentioned and popishly affected counselors to the king makes sense in this context. The politicization of relief appeared early on in the process of making distributions. Parliamentary disbursements of the contribution money tended to reach those who could establish their loyalty to the Protestant cause. This discriminatory giving tended to reward high-status individuals, those with personal connections to members of parliament, or persons whose conduct demonstrated their adherence to the godly cause. Few funds reached survivors of the rebellion who set up new lives in England, and by late in the spring of 1642, parliament curtailed funds entirely for those who fled to England. Well before members of parliament diverted Irish relief money to the English civil war, the majority of Irish war survivors – the men and women whose stories had mobilized relief in the first place – found themselves marginalized in the competition for limited English resources. In the months after the outbreak of war in Ireland, Irish Protestants consistently lobbied for more and speedier English assistance. The Lord Justices’ letters repeatedly raised the issue, and in the spring of 1642, Dr Henry Jones presented petitions to the English parliament on behalf of several groups of impoverished settlers in Ireland and in England. His accompanying report, the Committee for Irish Affairs include a letterbook for 1641–6 (BL Add. Ms. 4771), an order book for February 1642–February 1643 (TNA SP 16/539, 12–43) and letters and orders for November 1643–September 1644 (TNA SP 16/539, 98–122); orders of the Committee for Irish Adventurers for October 1642–September 1643 are found in BL Add. Ms. 4782. The absence of complete accounts reflects the rather chaotic nature of parliamentary committees on Ireland in the 1640s. Several different incarnations of the Committee for Irish Affairs met in the 1640s, which was intended to coordinate Irish policy. From 1 March 1642 until at least December 1642, a subcommittee (the Committee for the Contribution Money) managed funds raised under the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan while a separate subcommittee managed the Adventurers’ money. At an indeterminate point in either late 1642 or early 1643, the Committee for Irish Affairs assumed control over the contribution money, and a number of orders regarding the charitable funds survive in the materials related to the committee’s business.

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published as the Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland can likewise be read as a petition for relief contributions. In spite of these kinds of appeals, parliament disbursed relief funds slowly. At the end of May 1642, the Lord Justices complained that they had received just £1,000 in charity from England. Most of this had not been spent on the intended poor relief, as the Lord Justices and Council made the ‘hard and lamentable’ decision to use the funds to pay soldiers defending Dublin. In July, the situation had not improved, and Henry Jones presented a new round of petitions from Dublin’s refugee population to the Commons. These pleas worked to only a limited degree. In August, the Commons ordered £3,000 of the contribution money to be sent into Ireland. The disbursements of these funds have been lost, but Henry Jones’s papers suggest that the Committee for Contribution Money intended that the money be used to assist the ‘inferior sort of poor English Protestants’. By this time, an additional £1,000 had been spent to relieve the Irish poor living in London. Even so, this represents less than one-tenth of the more than £43,000 raised for victims of the rebellion. The Commons also ordered limited disbursements of money for Irish refugees who had come to England. As noted in the previous chapter, members of parliament debated the benefits of relieving Irish poor in England, with some fearing that the promise of relief payments would draw large numbers of indigent refugees into the country. On the other hand, the Committee for the Contribution Money did make some individual payments to despoiled Irish living in London and allowed the contribution money to be spent directly by local churchwardens in coastal communities receiving large numbers of poor, such as Bristol and Chester. A good deal of the money raised under the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan also went towards Irish military affairs. The original statute acknowledged that this could be an appropriate use of the funds, reflecting the need for ‘a present supply of money … for the raising of men to suppress the said rebellion’. The largest single expenditure of contribution money came in May 1642, when parlia

Jones printed heavily edited extracts from the 1641 depositions in this text, predictably cutting references to ambiguities and settler survival and stressing acts of violence. This in turn led him to assert that ‘our sufferings are general, the hatred of the enemy being expressed to the whole nation, and to all the professors of the truth’, a conclusion that is not borne out by the evidence of the depositions. See Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages, 10.  NLI Ms. 2542, 241.  Ibid., 379.  CJ, vol. 2, 728.  TCD Ms. 840, 54.  PJLP, vol. 2, 402.  This figure is consistent with a June 1642 parliamentary report, which claimed that a total of £5,574 had been spent ‘out of the contribution moneys to diverse distressed persons that came out of Ireland, and sent thither for reliefs’. Declaration Concerning the Generall Accompts of the Kingdom (London, 1642), unpaginated.  SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141.

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ment sent £10,000 to pay English soldiers in Dublin.10 Preparations for the earl of Leicester’s abortive expedition to Ireland in 1642 also received funds out of the contribution money.11 Much of the contribution money remained in England. Ten surviving schedules from the Committee for the Contribution Money indicate that between March and December 1642, 569 individuals resident in England received £5,007.12 Unfortunately, the surviving material does not document the context in which these lists were drawn up or provide much information on the background of the relief recipients. A comparison of the schedules with the names recorded in the 1641 deposition archive indicates that very few of the relief recipients had testified as to their losses in Dublin: of the 569 names on the schedules, only twenty-three appear in the depositions. Of these, most were high-status individuals of some importance in Irish political affairs. They include: Sir Walsingham Cooke and Sir Henry Spottiswood, both prominent members of the Dublin gentry; Matthew de Renzi and John Martin, both large landowners and members of the Irish House of Commons; and Dr Henry Jones, whose work on lobbying the English parliament has already been discussed. Status seems to have been important in these distributions. Members of the Irish gentry, including committee-identified knights, gentlemen, military officers, and the wives of prominent members of the Irish political administration occupy sixty-one of the 569 entries on the distribution lists. The eight highest distributions went to the wives of important state officers and military commanders, who received a total of £600. Other members of the gentry received less hefty disbursements, but on average received more than £28 per person, compared to an average disbursement of £5 14s for individuals of indeterminate or obviously lower social status. The sixty-one highest status men on the schedules received £1,732, or 34.5 per cent of the monies distributed by the contribution committee.13 Clergymen were also well-represented: seventy-one of the names on the lists belonged to Protestant ministers, and they received an average disbursement of approximately £11 each. Members of parliament occasionally intervened with the Committee for the Contribution Money to solicit assistance for individuals whom they deemed particularly deserving. In these cases, the charity granted was often of considerable size and reflected the special status of the recipient or particular services rendered by the war victims on behalf of the state. 10 11

HJ, vol. 5, 77. References to more than £2,000 in expenditures to supply and equip Leicester appear in SP 28/195, Miscellany folder, disbursement schedule. 12 In all of the surviving materials, the schedules consist of a list of several dozen names, an order for payment, and the signatures of the members of parliament present when the list was compiled. The schedules also indicate the date upon which the listed refugees collected the ordered sums. 13 See Table 3.

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Table 3: Disbursements of Relief Money to Irish Refugees Nobles Crown Officers Members of the Irish Parliament Knights Gentlemen Esquires Military Clergy Scholars Men (no occupation listed) Women (no occupation listed) Women (widows) Orphans

Number 9 1 9 5 11 22 4 71 4 271 126 35 1 569

Amount £570 £40 £275 £240 £141 £421 £45 £778 £27 £1520 £762 £183 £5 £5007

Average £63 6s 8d £40 £30 11s 1.3d £48 £12 16s 4.4d £19 2s 8.7d £11 5s £11 £6 15s £5 12s 2.1d £6 0s 11.4d £5 7s 6.9d £5 £8 15s 11.9d

Source: TNA SP 16/539, 183–4 and 202–3: two schedules, dated December 1642 and July 1642. TNA SP 28/193, Miscellany folder: four schedules, dated 1 May 1642, 9 May 1642, 13 May 1642, and 20 May 1642. TNA SP 28/195, Administrative Accounts folder: four schedules, dated 9 April 1642, 14 April 1642, 15 April 1642, and 23 April 1642.

In March 1642, the Lords and Commons ordered that £200 be paid to the countess of Kildare, ‘for that her ladyship’s estate is now in possession of the rebels in Ireland’.14 Likewise, in July the Lords and Commons intervened to order relief to a number of individuals whose specific sufferings and loyalty deserved special mention. Henry Jones received one such gift for ‘his great learning, prudence and piety’ as well as ‘his great services done both here and in Ireland … in the behalf of the distressed church and Protestants of that kingdom’. A similar reference to extraordinary piety and loyalty to the Protestant cause accompanied the order for £200 in relief to Archibald Hamilton, bishop of Cashel.15 Adam Loftus, former lord chancellor of Ireland, received £200 in relief, reflecting ‘the great worth and long time of faithful service performed to the crown … and of the present condition he is brought into now in his great old age by reason of the rebellion’.16 These extraordinary payments could also reflect political sensibilities. Among those who received assistance in July 1642 was Richard Fitzgerald, a Protestant 14 15 16

TNA SP 28/195, Miscellaneous Accounts. HLRO, Main Papers, 20 July 1642. Ibid., 6 August 1642.

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member of the Old English gentry. According to the orders of the Lords and Commons, Fitzgerald was deserving of extraordinary consideration because of his bravery and because he was a useful symbol to Old English settlers whose loyalty to the state had wavered during the course of the rebellion. The order mentioned ‘his great sufferings by the rebels in Ireland, who have a greater malice towards him, being their countryman and a constant zealous professor of the true Protestant religion’. The £200 bestowed upon Fitzgerald might thus ‘serve as encouragement to others who shall show the like zeal and constancy in these times of danger and distress’.17 In the case of these special payments under orders of parliament, several of the recipients used informal contacts to secure charity. Dame Elizabeth Gray, for example, received £200 in restitution for the ‘great extremity the cruelty of the barbarous rebels … hath brought a person of her quality unto’.18 Gray had a considerable network of contacts that helped to insure the timely payment of relief funds. Appended to parliament’s orders for payment survive two handwritten memos from William Wheeler and Sir Henry Mildmay, both members of the Commons, asking the treasurers to pay out the allotted sums as quickly as possible. Mildmay’s memo reflected the personal contacts at work behind the scenes, as he attempted to both persuade and threaten the treasurers: ‘The lady is of that great birth and quality, mother to the Earl of Stanford, grandmother to my Lord Gray, a lord dear to the House of Commons. I pray you give her respect according to her worth … or else it will be very ill taken.’19 Similar memos accompanied the order for relief to Theodore, Lord Docwra. In this case, John Pym personally intervened, sending word that ‘I shall take it as a favor if the treasurers [of the contribution money] will be pleased forthwith to pay my Lord Docwra and I likewise assure myself that it will be very acceptable to both houses of parliament’.20 Impoverished refugees occasionally petitioned parliament directly for assistance. A small number of these petitions survive in House of Lords Record Office. Unfortunately, these materials are not systematic and are clustered around a group of petitions made in July 1642. In most cases, the petitions included testimonials from agents for the refugees and information on the payments made by the Committee for the Contribution Money, usually on the order of several pounds. Although an incomplete record, they shed some light on how the process of self-fashioning extended beyond the 1641 depositions. The surviving petitions for relief carefully recorded the economic, physical, and emotional sufferings of the petitioner. They also tended to include 17 18 19 20

Ibid., 20 July 1642. Ibid. TNA SP 16/491, 194. Ibid., 193.

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supporting statements by prominent members of the refugee community that affirmed the petitioners’ needs and good character. Elinor Winter, for example, complained that her husband, ‘a minister of God’s word in Ireland was at Candlemass last slain by the rebels … and despoiled of all his goods amounting to £500’. Burdened with several ill children, Winter desired monetary assistance in purchasing passage for Holland, where she had a ‘sister of hers of whom she hopeth to find some relief ’. Winter stressed her absolute dependence on English charity and cast herself as an innocent victim of the rebellion. Her cause was strengthened through the support of Henry Jones, who at the end of Winter’s petition added a handwritten note indicating that ‘her charge is great … and being the wife of a minister, I make bold to recommend her to your favor’. Apparently persuaded by the petition and Jones’s appeal, the committee granted Winter’s request for £5.21 Paul Bennett, a refugee out of Wexford, eschewed long testimony regarding his sufferings, noting only that he had lost an estate valued at £300 and had to support a family consisting of his wife and six small children. To support his petition, Bennett secured signatures from twelve individuals in London, including three ministers and two high-profile refugees, Matthew de Renzi and Sir Walsingham Cooke. In acknowledgement of his sufferings, he received £10 of England’s charity.22 Joane Brady, the wife of Garrat Brady, an Irish gentleman, presented her petition in late July 1642. Brady spelled out the extent of her economic misfortune, noting that she had ‘lost seven poles of land in the parish of Kill in the county of Cavan and therewith all her personal estate’. In the course of the rebellion, she and her ‘six children [had been] exposed to great misery and wants’, and now lived in London ‘in a perishing condition’. A postscript affirming that Brady ‘lived always in a good repute, hath lost a good estate and is here in great distress … and worthy of much compassion’ signed by eight higher-status refugees, including Henry Jones, Nicholas Loftus and the ministers Faithful Fortescue and Thomas Crant, appeared at the end of her petition. In this case, the intervention of so many well-known Irish Protestants may have helped stave off any suspicions of Brady’s Irish background.23 It is unfortunate that more cannot be determined about how the contribution committee made its decisions, but for the surviving petitions it is clear that the ability to mobilize a network of supporters helped secure funds. Petitioners also stressed their loyalty to the Protestant religion. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan asserted the existence of a body of war victims who were innocent in their suffering, Protestant in their religion, and deserving of England’s pity. Materials related to the disbursements of 21 22 23

HLRO, Main Papers, 5 July 1642, Petition of Elinor Winter. Ibid., 9 July 1642, Petition of Paul Bennett. Ibid., 23 July 1642, Petition of Joane Brady. The Committee for the Contribution Money granted her £5.

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the contribution money suggest that individuals seeking assistance conscientiously sought to present themselves as conformable to this abstraction. From the very beginning the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan contained certain inherent tensions, which are reflected in the disbursements. The question of whether money should assist refugees in England or war victims in Ireland was one source of debate. Another ambiguity centered on whether ‘relief ’ constituted only charity or whether it could encompass military intervention. Parliamentary disbursements of the contribution money demonstrate strong evidence of a preference for the latter. Over the course of 1642, the Commons spent a significant sum of money raised through the contributions on the Irish war effort. As England moved toward civil war in the summer of 1642, the Commons also dipped into the Irish contribution money for English military affairs. This key transformation of the relief effort reflected a basic assumption that the Irish rebellion was part of a wider popish offensive, and suggests important connections between contemporary interpretations of the Irish rising and the slide towards civil war. In June 1642, John Pym lobbied the Commons to approve a transfer of contribution money to Sir John Hotham for the defense of Hull. Asserting that the soldiers at Hull ‘were in great distress for want of money’, Pym convinced the Commons to divert approximately £2,000 of the money raised in Lincolnshire under the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan to Hull ‘for the payment of the garrison there’.24 This diversion paled in comparison to the Commons’ decision in July 1642 to divert £100,000 of the Adventurers’ money to the earl of Essex’s army.25 In justifying this decision the Committee for the Defense of Both Kingdoms asserted that the diversion was a temporary, emergency loan that would ‘be repaid in so short a time that it shall not … frustrate the acts already made on behalf of adventure’.26 During the same period, parliament also diverted military resources intended for Ireland. In July, it delayed the departure of soldiers raised for service in Munster so that they might be available in the event of war, and eventually an entire brigade of troops intended for Irish service fought under Essex at Edgehill.27 The decision to fund the English war effort through moneys raised under the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan and under the Act for Adventurers triggered controversies in the Royalist camp and at Westminster. The use of contribution money for Hull provoked consternation among members of parliament like Simonds D’Ewes, who days earlier had taken notes on letters to the earl of Leicester read in the Commons that warned ‘if some 24 25 26 27

PJLP, vol. 2, 13. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 79–80. HMC, 5th Report, 40. CJ, vol. 2, 702; Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 80.

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course be not taken this summer, most of the poor English there will starve next winter’.28 The use of a large proportion of the Adventurers’ money – the £100,000 diverted to the earl of Essex represented more than one-third of the money raised under the Act – proved even more contentious. According to D’Ewes, the agreement to send so much Irish money to the earl of Essex’s army only passed the Committee for Adventurers after John Pym had ‘packed [it] on purpose without the knowledge and to the great discontent of the rest and of many others in the house’.29 Economic necessity in part motivated these decisions, but anti-popery, which had formed the foundation for the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan from the start, justified them. English discourses on the rising held that the papists were waging a coherent assault on Protestantism from multiple fronts. The confessional language of the Act stressed the innocence and Protestantism of the war victims, and used this as the main argument in favor of charitable projects. Those who encountered the rebellion in print might carry away a more comprehensive interpretation of the rising. Thus, men like Nehemiah Wallington believed that the rising was an extension of confessional wars on the continent, as the papist enemy decimated the godly in France, Germany, and now Ireland. Wallington also saw the Irish rising as the immediate prelude to a popish offensive in England, possibly in collusion with recusants, crypto-papist bishops, or members of the court. Evidence from English communities that saw heightened levels of suspicion in 1641 and 1642 suggests that these anxieties were not merely the figments of the London turner’s overheated imagination, but were shared by others throughout the country.30 By this logic, the use of Irish money for the defense of Hull and the earl of Essex’s army made sense. Although observers of the Irish rebellion might draw different conclusions about the magnitude and specific nature of the popish threat, the vast majority of writings, sermons, speeches, and statutes that dealt with the war agreed that it was a popish-inspired war. Irish relief, full of ambiguities and tensions, reflects these sensibilities. Throughout all manifestations of this project, anti-popery remains the one clear thread, even if the Irish war victims themselves did not neatly conform to the construction of Protestant victimhood. For those who believed that Charles I had been corrupted by papists in the royal household and court, or who feared that the king had himself been seduced into popery, the diversion of Irish contribution money to parliamentary military affairs was not a corruption of the Act, but rather carried the concept of Protestant relief through anti28 29 30

PJLP, vol. 2, 19. PJLP, vol. 3, 301. Armstrong, ‘Long Parliament Goes to War’, 90–1. Armstrong, Protestant War, 66. Armstrong also suggests, however, that the main impetus for the diversion of Irish money was pragmatic. With limited economic resources, no credit mechanisms, and war looming in England, ‘hard choices would be made’. Armstrong, ‘Long Parliament Goes to War’, 99.

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popish activism to a logical conclusion. Parliament must do everything necessary in order to insure the survival of Protestantism. In 1641 and early 1642, this work focused on Ireland; in later 1642, England had become the battleground. Those who disagreed with the diversion of relief money to the English war effort did not necessarily disagree about this basic premise, but rather about the most efficacious means of assisting the Protestant cause. This is the precise argument that the Commons made in August 1642 when pressed by Charles I on the legality of the diversion of the Adventurers’ money to Essex’s army. Over the course of the late 1630s and early 1640s, the Commons argued, the king had been seduced by ‘popish and prelatical counsels’, and his actions before the formation of the parliamentary army only underlined the point. When parliament had sent convoys of ammunition, victuals, and horses to Chester for shipment into Ireland, ‘his majesty’s cavaliers’ hijacked the materials in preparation for war. Likewise, royalist agents had moved through the countryside stirring up trouble and proclaiming their hostility to the English parliament, which ‘so intimidated and discouraged the Adventurers and others that would have adventured, that they have rendered that good bill in a manner ineffectual’.31 The actions of the cavaliers had thus undermined the intent of the statute long before parliament’s diversion of funds. The king’s allies had also proven themselves to be enemies of Protestantism: in attacking convoys of supplies and intimidating well-affected potential contributors, they exacerbated the suffering of Protestants in Ireland and endangered the safety of Protestants in England. The money raised for Ireland was intended to help prosecute a defensive war against the papists. Now that the battlefield had shifted to England, the funds must be spent to block the more immediate threat: … the House of Commons lively apprehending the imminent danger of this kingdom, and finding that whilst they were active here to subdue the rebels of Ireland, there were papists, traitors and delinquents more active … to conquer and destroy the parliament and good people of England, thought it necessary to provide for the safety of both by preparing a competent army for the defense of [the] king and kingdom.32

Karl S. Bottigheimer has argued that the decision to use the Adventurers’ money for the Parliamentarian army, combined with the growing conviction that an English victory in Ireland would be a long process, led to a precipitous collapse of interest in Irish projects. ‘The diversion’, he writes, ‘cast a pall over the adventure and betrayed its slender pretensions to non31

His Majesty’s Message to the House of Commons Concerning an Order Made by Them for the Borrowing of One Hundred Thousand Pounds (London, 1642), 8–9. This tract includes both parliamentary and crown commentary on the diversion. 32 Ibid., 13.

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partisan and wholly Irish objectives.’33 To supporters of the parliamentary diversion, there was likely more logic in these decisions. English relief for Ireland originated from the assumption of common religious alliances between the two nations and a sense of obligation towards the distressed Protestants of Ireland. Diverting Irish contribution money or funds raised under the Act for Adventurers represented an extension of the principles of self-defense against popery that had informed English projects for Ireland since the outbreak of the rebellion. Certainly to Charles I and his Royalist supporters, the diversion would have been interpreted as a dangerous and partisan act, but to someone like John Pym or the local officials who had to manage growing fears about popery and local order in 1642, it would have been seen not only as justified, but absolutely necessary. The politicization of relief in the summer of 1642 affected future charitable work for Irish Protestants. At the end of January 1643, one year after the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan received Charles I’s sanction, the English parliament passed an ordinance for renewed Irish collections. The authors of the ordinance again placed war victims are at center stage, in language even more vivid than had characterized the Act: The gasping condition of the Protestants in Ireland is too manifest, their estates devoured, their lives daily sacrificed, not only to the malice of their and our bloody enemies, the popish rebels, but likewise to the more unavoidable executioners, starving, cold and hunger, their sorrows hardly to be equaled, nor their utter destruction possibly to be prevented but by the great and undeserved mercy of God upon some speedy supply of their grievous necessities.34

As in 1642, local churchwardens and ministers received instructions to ‘collect and gather the free and charitable benevolence of all inhabitants thereof, from the best to the meaner sort’. The new ordinance, however, broke with the earlier precedent in explicitly stating that ‘sums of money [are] to be employed and laid out for the maintenance of the army in Ireland against the rebels … and for no other cause whatsoever’. Although the plight of Protestant poor in Ireland might be lamentable, the ordinance made it clear that only military intervention would bring relief. To better cultivate gifts of an appropriate magnitude, the ordinance promised that larger contributions would be treated as loans and that creditors would receive compensation ‘out of the rebels’ lands in Ireland’.35 To speed along military mobilization, the 1643 ordinance also proposed that individuals could donate supplies,

33 34

Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 80. C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, vol. 1 (London, 1911), 70–3. 35 Ibid., 72.

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arms, and ammunition to the cause.36 Under these new terms, it is difficult to discern what, if anything, distinguished the new Irish contributions from the loans made under the Act for Adventurers. The 1643 ordinance did not require churchwardens to submit lists of contributors, and detailed accounts survive from only nine parishes in all of England. Although the data sample is very small, the results suggest a general falling away of contributions during the 1643 project. In Middlesex, Harrowhill and Roxheath parish declined from £47 18s 1½d in 1642 to £20 11s 4d in 1643, Friary Barnett declined from £18 9s 7d to £4 0s 8d, Hamsteed from £17 12s 10d to £5 1s 10d, Hendon from £38 5s 4d to £22 12s 6d, and Tottenham from £50 15s 7d to £15 8s 10d. Declines were not universal: two parishes in Canterbury collected only £6 4s 3d in 1642 versus £25 13s 11d in 1643, and St Giles in the Fields in London – one of the parishes inundated with Irish refugees – went from £23 16s 2d in 1642 to £34 17s 4d in 1643.37 On a national level, the money raised under the ordinance clearly suffered from the chaos of the civil war. A digest of contributions to Ireland drawn up by the parliamentary treasurers in 1646 indicated that the 1643 ordinance had not been published or undertaken in regions under occupation of the Royalist army including all of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Wiltshire. The new ordinance also was not published in Wales or the northern counties of England.38 The shift towards military affairs is clear in surviving evidence on the disbursement of the 1643 collections. Responsibility for distributing the contributions shifted from the Committee for the Contribution Money – which seems not to have met after December 1642 – to the Committee for Irish Affairs, a joint committee charged by parliament in August 1642 with coordinating Irish military, political, and economic affairs. This committee oversaw a number of smaller committees charged with managing specific Irish problems. For economic matters, including both the Adventurers’ money and the Irish charity, the Subcommittee of the London Adventurers, composed of members of parliament and London financiers, formed the nucleus of an Irish war party, which lobbied for expanded military intervention.39 In 1643, this subcommittee authorized expenditures of £500 for the defense of Enniskillen and £2,413 to purchase cheese and salt beef for soldiers stationed

36 37

Ibid., 73. The relevant parishes are all found in TNA SP 28/193: Middlesex (Harrowhill and Roxheath, Friary Barnett, Hamsteed, Hendon, and Tottenham), London (St Giles in the Fields), and Kent (Swanscombe, Canterbury St Mildred’s and Canterbury St Mary Magdalene). For a discussion of the refugee problem in the London suburbs through the 1640s, see Noonan, ‘Brethren Only to a Degree’, 199–208. 38 TNA SP 16/539, 421. 39 Armstrong, Protestant War, 66–8. The work of the Subcommittee of the London Adventurers beginning in August 1642 can be found in BL Add. Ms. 4782. See also CJ, vol. 2, 500, 511, 728, 742.

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in Dublin.40 They also paid a total of £700 to Sir John Clotworthy – an Irish planter and member of the English House of Commons with a strong commitment to the parliamentary and Protestant cause – to be distributed among English and Scottish soldiers operating in Ulster. A payment of £500 provided provisions and back pay to the forces holding Duncannon Fort in March 1643, and an additional £500 went to the English army operating in Connacht.41 At several different times in 1643 and 1644, ordinance money also provided back pay to soldiers and relief to maimed veterans.42 The Irish poor, by contrast, received almost no assistance from the 1643 ordinance. Among surviving materials for the Committee for Irish Affairs, only one reference to money sent into Ireland exists. At the end of 1645, as the Committee distributed the last of the ordinance money, they ordered £70 sent to Sir John Temple in Dublin to repay a loan he had made for ‘the diverse poor … in great want in and about that city’.43 The little relief that the Committee for Irish Affairs distributed consisted mainly of odd supplies and old clothing that had been donated under the terms of the 1643 ordinance. In April 1644, for example, the widows Elizabeth Rogers and Elizabeth Deale received old clothes and shoes, three yards of broadcloth, a side of bacon, some wheat, and a Bible. Other Irish poor received similarly eclectic gifts of supplies that had been donated by sympathetic English contributors.44 Even in the case of goods that had been contributed for the use of Ireland’s poor, parliament sometimes diverted charity to the war effort, sending, for example, donated clothing to the garrisons at Athlone and Galway ‘for the clothing of those soldiers there’.45 Despite the rolling back of relief in 1643, the Committee for Irish Affairs continued to receive petitions for relief. They very rarely responded to these requests, and then only in cases involving particularly high-status Protestants.46 James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh, and John Leslie, bishop of Raphoe, each received £100 out of the ordinance money in 1643. The committee praised the former for his Protestantism, noting ‘how much he hath merited the church by his great industry, frequent preaching and exemplary life’.47 Large payments also reached Sir Samuel Moyant, a judge in the Irish court of common pleas, Edward Pigott, one of the commissioners who assisted Henry Jones in gathering depositions and who in February 1644 traveled to Westminster to present more evidence from the depositions regarding alleged rebel atrocities, and the widowed Ladies Craig and 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

BL Add. Ms. 4782, 64, 87–8. LJ, vol. 5, 647; Bodleian Library Oxford, Carte Ms. 68, 361. BL Add. Ms. 4771, 15, 44, 45; BL Add. Ms. 4782, 103–4, 167–8. BL Add. Ms. 4771, 64. A large number of these distributions are listed in BL Add. Ms. 4771, 39, 186–92. BL Add. Ms. 4782, 18. BL Add. Ms. 4771, 15, 46–7, 62, 64–5. LJ, vol. 5, 671; BL Add. Ms. 4782, 21–2.

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Caulfield.48 Limited evidence suggests a hardening of attitudes towards even these higher-status recipients. The bishop of Raphoe requested additional assistance after the Committee for Irish Affairs’ initial gift of £100, but received word that ‘parliament was not now in cause to give him the relief he desires’.49 Likewise, John Maxwell, bishop of Killala, living in poverty in Bristol with his wife and seven children, received no charity from parliament. Since he ‘hath been and still is an able and painful preacher’, the Committee for Irish Affairs offered to put forward his name as a candidate for a vacant preaching position at London’s St Andrew Holborne parish, but claimed it could do nothing more.50 The evolving and complicated political relationship between various Irish and English interests arguably played a role in the decline of relief. From the first discussions of troop deployment in 1641, questions of prerogative arose as the crown and parliament struggled to take control of Irish affairs. Problems of allegiance also arose when open war began in England and both Royalist and Parliamentary camps began to court various Irish interests. As Robert Armstrong puts it, Dublin in late 1642 in many respects became the center of a ‘crucial struggle for control’.51 With the outbreak of civil war in England, Protestants in Ireland found themselves under enormous pressure to take sides. Various contingencies shaped these choices, and to observers in England, particularly those committed to the Royalist or Parliamentary side, the tortured maneuverings of key Irish Protestants must have seemed fickle and duplicitous.52 The case of Murrough O’Brien, first earl of Inchiquin, provides an illustrative, if somewhat unusual example. Although head of an important native Irish family, he was a Protestant, had extensive connections to Dublin Castle and sided with the state in 1641. Like the earl of Ormond, he opposed the Catholic Confederacy, but also adhered to the terms of the crown-brokered 1643 cessation, which many Irish Protestants opposed. Despite having been indicted for treason by the English parliament for his support of the cessation, Inchiquin broke with the king and joined the Parliamentary cause in 1644. He switched sides once more in May 1648, reconciling himself to

48 49 50

BL Add. Ms. 4782, 180–3, 204, 218; BL Add. Ms. 4771, 24. BL Add. Ms. 4782, 87. Ibid., 245–6. The fact that both petitioners were members of the prelacy may also have played a role in these refusals. The bishop of Raphoe had raised his own troops to defend against the rebels at the start of the rebellion, but had also supported Wentworth’s persecution of convenanters. See DNB, vol. 33, 455–6. The bishop of Killala also opposed the covenanters, penned several proLaudian tracts before the outbreak of the Irish rebellion, and served as Charles I’s chaplain for a time at Oxford. Ibid., vol. 37, 518–19. The committee’s suggestion that the bishop of Killala might consider preaching in order to support himself could reflect the view that the prelates neglected important pastoral work; see Kenneth Fincham, ‘Episcopal Government 1603–1640’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuarts, 1603–1642 (Stanford, 1993), 71–92. 51 Armstrong, Protestant War, 69. 52 For more discussion of this issue, see ibid., 90–119.

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Charles I and entreating with the same Confederates against whom he had fought in the early 1640s.53 Similar instances occurred with other Protestant players throughout the 1640s.54 These kinds of maneuverings, conditioned by the contingencies of the civil wars, challenged the claim that Irish Protestants were united and deserving. In the aftermath of the 1643 cessation, as Charles I began to negotiate with the Confederates and incorporated a muddle of soldiers who had served in Ireland into the English Royalist army, the evaporation of any argument in favor of indiscriminate charity is easily explainable.55 As the Irish Protestants became partisans in the English conflict, the moral argument in favor of their unconditional relief lost much of its power. It is hardly surprising under these circumstances that Irish charitable projects disappeared or that Irish refugees in English communities found themselves subjected to traditional poor law discipline as the 1640s progressed. The decisive end of charity for Irish poor can be dated to the summer of 1643. In June and July 1643, the Commons referred several petitions from groups of Irish poor ‘who pretend they have lost all they had in Ireland’ to the Committee for Irish Affairs. Their investigation of the petitions concluded that at least five hundred Irish refugees whose poverty and Protestantism could both be definitively established lived in London and the suburbs. Given these numbers, the committee found that ‘the relieving of such a number in any considerable way will require a great sum of money’. In the context of war, this money simply could not be produced. Thus, in its report to the Commons, the Committee for Irish Affairs recommended that Westminster should simply cease all charitable outpayments to Irish poor and publish an ordinance showing ‘that in this time of necessity in this kingdom, those poor people of Ireland cannot be provided for and relieved by the parliament’.56 The committee also concluded that the state should expend no further effort on charitable relief. Rather, any additional funds raised for Ireland should go ‘wholly and only … for the providing, paying for, and sending over of victuals, clothes, arms and ammunition for the army in that kingdom’. ‘Saving the kingdom from being utterly lost is the highest piece of charity,’ the report 53

DNB, vol. 41, 373–9. A key question is whether this kind of inconsistency among Irish Protestants in the 1640s represents a disintegration of the New English interest or inherent internal divisions. According to Robert Armstrong’s analysis of the 1640s, ‘the question of whether there was a “community” to be defended at all, or a “Protestant interest” to be addressed surfaces throughout’. Armstrong, Protestant War, 12. 54 Aoife Duignan, ‘Shifting Allegiances: The Protestant Community in Connacht, 1643–5’, in Armstrong and Ó hAnnracháin (eds), Community in Early Modern Ireland, 127–31; Robert Armstrong, ‘Ormond, the Confederate Peace Talks, and Protestant Royalist’, in Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis, 122–40; McKenny, Lagan Army in Ireland, 89–90. 55 For the backlash against Irish Royalist soldiers serving in England, see Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, 54–61; O’Hara, English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion, 92. 56 BL Add. Ms. 4782, 258–9.

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stated, ‘and ought to be preferred before the relief of any private or particular persons whatsoever.’57 The presence of many Adventurers on the committee – whose investment would only see a profit in the event of a successful English conquest – no doubt shaped this decision. The battleground in the defense of Protestantism had by this point shifted, and the necessities of Ireland’s distressed settler population became part of the background noise of the mid-century crisis. Although Irish relief thus ended in the summer of 1643, the Irish poor did not disappear. Some Irish settlers were still resident in the provinces when parliament declared an end to English relief. In June 1643, evacuees from the Birr siege had only been in Dublin for a few months. Likewise, wandering Irish poor appear in English churchwardens’ accounts from all over England into the late 1640s and occasionally into the 1650s. During this later period, these refugees found themselves subjected to increased supervision as suspicious poor. Discourses on the Irish war victims as deserving brethren in print disappeared entirely, and appeals to England’s responsibilities towards the Protestant settlers of Ireland shifted to the high political issues at stake in the 1640s. In many ways this should not be surprising. From the beginning many commentators on the rebellion presented Irish refugees as symbols of Irish and popish cruelty. Even as relief projects disappeared in the later 1640s, this abstract and simplified representation of the Irish victims and survivors of 1641 endured. As evidence of their respective good intentions, both Royalists and Parliamentarians deployed references to Irish settlers in competing discourses. Royalists defended themselves against the accusation that they had abetted the papist rebels. In Eikon Basilike, Charles I asserted sympathy for victimized Protestants. The blame for the slow response to the rebellion lay with ‘distractions and jealousies here in England [that] made most men rather intent to their own safety, or designs they were driving, than to the relief of those who were every day butchered in Ireland’.58 Against charges that Charles I had cooperated too much with the rebels during the cessation and later negotiations, Eikon Basilike asserted that the crown contemplated such a course only ‘when all proportionable succors of the poor Protestants in Ireland (who were daily massacred and over-born with numbers of now desperate enemies) was diverted and obstructed here’.59 The crown’s political acrobatics in the mid-1640s, in this analysis, represented attempts to fulfill 57

Ibid., 197. Similar proposals had been raised in the Commons as early as May 1642, when members debated John Evelyn’s suggestion ‘to suspend the Committee for the Contribution Money for Ireland and that it [the contribution money] might go to the wars’. The result of the debate was indecisive, although the Commons did order that the Committee be ‘suspended for a time’ in May 1642. PJLP, vol. 2, 325, 334. 58 Charles I, Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings (London, 1649), 92. 59 Ibid., 94.

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Charles I’s obligations to protect and defend his subjects in Ireland by any means necessary. John Milton’s response in Eikonoklastes in turn blamed the king for ‘those retardings and delays which by himself were continually devised, to hinder and put back the relief of those distressed Protestants, whom he seems here to compassionate’, and suggested that Charles I had ‘under hand favored and promoted’ the papist rebels at every opportunity.60 In both sides of the argument, the actual war victims remained marginal, unrelieved and important primarily as fodder for polemicists. Irish relief was thus a short-lived project, but important within the cultural, social, and political dynamics at work in the early 1640s. The Irish rebellion connected with deep-seated fears about the intentions of Europe’s papists and the necessities of Ireland’s suddenly impoverished settler population demanded a strident, activist response. In the communities where collections were made, sermons spoken, tracts read and rumors traded, the rising served as a clarion call for an English response to a broad papist threat. When war came to England in 1642, this activism found other outlets in the conflict between crown and parliament as the survivors of 1641 faded out of the national consciousness in this time of British turmoil.

60

John Milton, Eikonoklastes in Answer to a Book Entitled Eikon Basilike (London, 1649), 122, 119.

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In the immediate aftermath of the 1641 rebellion, refugees posed significant challenges to local economies and public order in Ireland and England. They packed the suburbs of Dublin, choked the ports of England, and eventually swarmed into London or took to the roads seeking assistance from increasingly anxious and impoverished parishes. War victims and survivors for a brief but important time took center stage in print and political culture. In a basic way, graphic horror stories of Catholic atrocities against English settlers fed a sensationalized print industry, but the significance of these discourses ran much deeper. Irish war victims became a pretense for talking about and giving meaning to issues of significance in English culture: the threat of international popery, the aims and intentions of English royal advisors, bishops and recusants, previously unspoken or diffuse local fears and anxieties, and the perceived social obligations between those of the Protestant faith. Survivors of the rising played an important role in this process. News from the Irish provinces, intelligence on the rebel actors and their deeds, and much of the disseminated news about the rising came from the mouths and pens of people who claimed to have experienced the war and survived. Their stories heightened tension in England and created the opportunity for broadbased activism on a national scale. Throughout the 1640s, ordinary English settlers in Ireland gave depositions regarding their experiences and losses in the war. Although their depositions have been mined for information on socio-economic conditions and tensions in the plantations and on violence, the survivors themselves have often been marginalized. With some exceptions, historians have said little about self-preservation and survival strategies. This is indeed unfortunate, as the survivor stories provide significant insight into social conditions in Ireland before and during the rising as well as the experience of war. It is doubly unfortunate because the survival stories in the depositions also reveal important evidence of deep fissures within the colonial society of seventeenth-century Ireland. In contrast to the constructed image of universal Anglo-Protestant victimization that appeared in contemporary discourses, it is clear that individuals did not conform themselves to fixed religious or ethnic identities. Rather, the war in Ireland exposed the fragility of the Anglo-Protestant settler ‘community’ in local contexts, and revealed how important parallel social structures – based on kinship, neighborhood, and friendship – could mitigate danger. In the depositions, it is thus possible to 161

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read between the lines and discern at least the echoes of the complicated and heterogeneous communities in Ireland that preceded the rising. In English discourses on the rising, different kinds of ambiguities and tensions are evident. Local officials in English towns simultaneously pitied Irish war victims for their sufferings and feared Irish refugees for the potential disorder that they represented. On a basic level, the hundreds of displaced persons who flooded into England from Ireland posed a potentially severe economic problem. In more complicated ways, it is clear that English parishioners worried that the strangers on the road might usher popish horrors into England, either by destabilizing local communities or by screening an invasion. This in turn reflects the fact that English political leaders, ministers, and the anonymous authors of tracts on the rebellion cast the conflict in Ireland as part of an international, confessional war. The rebels in Ireland, according to this view, acted in concert with the same popish enemies who waged war on the European continent, enacted unspeakable atrocities against the Protestant populations of Germany and France, and intended to carry this offensive into the British Isles. A devious enemy, the papists might stage their next attack from any number of locations. The example of Nehemiah Wallington suggests that these tales of bloodthirsty papist rebels struck a major nerve among some English consumers of these texts. Fears of the popish enemy also informed formal projects for Irish relief such as the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan. The relative unimportance of appeals to a common ‘British’ community in these discourses is particularly striking in light of recent trends in favor of British-oriented approaches to the mid-seventeenth-century implosion of the Stuart kingdoms. The crisis in Ireland is rightfully identified as a moment of central importance because it set in motion the forces that threw crown and parliament into an irresolvable conflict. The war in Ireland in 1641 drastically limited Charles I’s political options and ended the possibility of his once again dismissing a hostile and uncooperative parliament. The evidence regarding representations of war victims and relief, however, raises questions about whether those who lived through the tumultuous years of the 1640s would have cared much about the ‘British’ dimensions of the crisis. The rhetoric of relief suggested a community of Protestants all over Europe who were endangered by the machinations of the papists and who were obligated to defend and assist one another. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan built upon this assumption and recycled earlier charitable projects that had been created for Protestant war victims on the continent. The Act underscored the common bonds between Protestant believers and asserted that those in positions of security had a moral responsibility to assist those in danger. Key to this project was an argument that stressed the moral economy



See, for example, Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 398–419.

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of religious loyalty. To abandon one’s brethren, no matter how geographically or culturally remote, was a violation of this moral economy, a repudiation of Protestant identity, and a challenge to God. This argument was a key component in mobilizing Irish relief, but could also work in other directions. Calls for Irish relief stressed the fact that English parishioners must do something for Ireland: they must translate their sympathy, their horror, and their guilt into activism. On a basic level, this required contributions of money toward the alleviation of Irish settlers’ suffering. The invocation of the great specter of international popery, however, demanded greater potential sacrifices. Ireland manifested only the most recent evidence of the machinations of a global papist threat. English Protestants must stand up to defend and relieve the Irish Protestants, but they must also take active steps to mobilize for defense against an expanded popish offensive, which could come in the guise of an Irish invasion, a rising by local recusants, or more insidious plotting by popish sympathizers at court or in the Church. Amid these calls for anti-popish mobilization, a strain of interpretation also admitted that the success of the Irish rebels might be part of God’s plan. Angered at lukewarm religion and lapses into superstition, the papist rebels might represent God’s chastisement of the sinful. Here again, activism – in the form of repentance, prayer, and advocacy against those enemies that might be already present in England – appears as a central theme. The Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan should be viewed as an important part of the process by which the English people took on responsibility for these issues. Like the Protestation Oath and other parliament-sponsored initiatives, the Act provided an opportunity for well-affected English to demonstrate their loyalty, compassion, and spirit of Protestant community. In mobilizing this kind of activism, the Act, with its explicit assertion that ‘all and every person and persons’ must do something for Ireland, should occupy a place of some importance in our understanding of the dialectical process by which parliament and the English people in 1641–2 claimed authority over affairs of state. The crisis in Ireland demanded that the English people do something about the plight of Irish Protestants and showed that activism could come through political action, informal community responses, and personal introspection. Members of parliament, London protestors, backstreet printers, and the English people who petitioned Westminster in 1641 and 1642 argued for the existence of an insidious enemy making war against the godly all over Europe. When the Irish Lords Justices and other advocates engaged in attempts at persuasion, they likewise cast the war as an international crisis directed and mobilized by agents on the continent. The example of Irish



SR, vol. 5, 16 Car. I, c. 30, 141.

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relief projects should serve as a reminder that the men and women who read horrific accounts of violence in Ireland, confronted bands of wandering refugees, and gave contributions to the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan did not necessarily understand their world as the product of a complicated dance between the peoples of the three kingdoms. Rather, they saw the crisis of 1641 as a battle for Protestant survival, with the agents of popery engaging in a mass campaign of brutality and irreligion. Popery formed a web, connecting anxieties stirred by political intrigues emanating from Rome, Madrid and Paris, the horrors of Germany and Ireland’s burned-out villages, and the desecration of England and Scotland’s Protestant churches by crypto-papist elements working within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In late 1641 these fears crystallized around Irish Protestant victims and survivors and created a necessary precondition to civil war.

164

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184

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Borlase, Sir John  9, 10; see also Lord Justices of Ireland Borrowes, Erasmus  40 Bottigheimer, Karl  120, 152 Boyle, Lady Joan, countess of Kildare  147 Bristol  108–10, 156 Buckinghamshire  121, 129, 138 Burges, Cornelius  12n.18, 95–6 Burke, Ulick, fifth earl of Clanricarde  39 Burrowes, Erasmus  40 Burton, Henry  86 Butler, Col. John  112 Butler, James, first duke of Ormond  2, 22, 39, 156 Butler, Sir Richard, of Kilcash  2–3, 44 Byrne, Luke  43

1641 Depositions  33–8, 57–8, 65, 74 Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan  11, 30, 75, 103, 104–5, 119–20 administered in English parishes  14, 121, 128–42 as model for Scottish collections  54 compared to collections for German Protestants  127–8, 130–1 distribution of funds raised under  106, 109, 111, 145–50, 151–2 renewed by 1643 ordinance  14, 153–5 Act for Adventurers  120–1, 150–1, 152–3, 154 Anti-popery  90–1, 144, 151–3, 162–4 and fears of plots  85–6, 96–9, 102 and outbreak of English civil war  23–6 and responses to the 1641 rising  6, 91, 93–5 Antrim, second earl of  see MacDonnell, Randall, second earl of Antrim Apparitions/ghosts  34n.45, 64 Armagh  40 Austin Friars, Dutch Church at  105–6, 128 Bastwick, John  86 Beale Plot  96–7, 113, 115 Beale, Thomas  see Beale Plot Beaumaris Castle  113 Bedfordshire  129 Belturbet  41, 42, 58–9, 63–7 Berkshire  129, 131 Birr Castle  45n.60, 68–74 Bishops and the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan  128, 155–6 criticisms of  77, 86, 91, 99–101, 151, 152 Bishops’ Wars  20, 52, 94 Book of Sport  101

Caernarvon  113, 114 Calamy, Edmund  12, 13, 100–1, 107–8 Cambridgeshire  129 Cannibalism  81, 82n.26, 89–90, 92 Canny, Nicholas  17n.36, 19, 33, 37n.20 Carlow  3, 42 Carrick-on-Suir  3 Castle Coole  83 Castlehaven, third earl of  see Touchet, James, third earl of Castlehaven Catholic Confederates  3, 22, 68, 71, 73, 156–7 Cavan, county   40, 41, 50, 57–68 outbreak of rising in  38, 42, 43, 58 see also Belturbet, Virginia, Cavan town Cavan town  43, 58 Cessation of 1643  36, 156, 157 Charity  see Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan; Palatinate, collections for; Poor laws Charles I, King of England and Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan  11, 54, 152–3

185

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and Irish forged commission  38, 59, 61–2 and London crowds  25n.70 criticisms of  86, 144, 153 relationship with English parliament  19–20, 29 responses to 1641 rising  10, 52, 158–9 Chedle, Thomas  113–14 Cheshire  110–13, 139 Chester  97, 108, 110–13, 115, 152 Clanricard, fifth earl of  see Burke, Ulick, fifth earl of Clanricarde Clarendon, first earl of  see Hyde, Edward, first earl of Clarendon Clotworthy, Sir John  38, 155 Colchester  25, 108 Coleraine  50–1 Conway Castle  113–14 Cooke, Sir Walsingham  146, 149 Coote, Chidley  68–74 Coote, Sir Charles  68n.63 Cork, county  79 Cornwall  129 Countess of Kildare  see Boyle, Lady Joan, countess of Kildare Covenant, Scottish  19, 52, 53, 156n.50 Cowper, Thomas  108, 110–13 Craig, Sir James  68 Cranford, James  79–80 Crant, Thomas   43, 61, 149 Creichton, George  35, 43, 59–61, 63 Cromwellian conquest of Ireland  36, 123 Cumberland  139 Danvers, Elizabeth  1–5, 36 Danvers, Thomas  1–2 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds  115, 120, 150 De Renzi, Matthew  146, 149 Derbyshire  129 Devereux, Robert, third earl of Essex 150 Devizes  125–6, 131 Devon  108, 129 Docwra, Theodore, second baron of Culmore  148 Dorset  108, 129 Dublin and outbreak of 1641 rising  38 poor relief in  47–8, 49–50, 155 refugees in  15, 45–50, 55 rumored plots against  96

Duncannon  155 Dundalk  40 Durham  139 Edinburgh  52–4 Eikon Basilike  158 Enniskillen  83, 154 Erne, River  63–4 Esmond, Laurence, first baron of Lymbrick  41 Essex  129, 139 Essex, third earl of  see Devereux, Robert, third earl of Essex Evelyn, John  136, 158n.57 Exeter  108 Fasts  see Parliament, fasts for Ireland Father Philip  98 Fermanagh, county  38, 58, 83–4 Fitzgerald, Richard  147–8 Fletcher, Anthony  24–5, 121, 133 Fortescue, Faithful  149 Foxe, John  90–1 France  85, 89, 94, 103, 131 Galway, county  42 ‘General Crisis’ historiography  29n.87 Germany  85, 88, 89–90, 94–5, 100–1, 107; see also Palatinate, collections for Gillespie, Raymond  18n.40, 23, 33–4, 66n.53 Gloucestershire  129 Glyn, John  120 Goodwin, John  12 Goodwin, Thomas  12n.18 ‘Graces’  19 Grand Remonstrance  99–100 Greensmith, John  80, 107 Griffith, John  114 Gunpowder Plot  9, 27, 77, 95–6 Hamilton, Archibald, bishop of Cashel 147 Hamilton, Sir James  68 Hampshire  129 Hannington  136 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England  28, 86, 98 Herefordshire  129 Hertfordshire  129 Highworth  122–4, 131 Holland, Sir Thomas  113–15

186

INDEX

Holles, Denzil  136 Holyhead  112 Hotham, Sir John  150 Hull  150 Hungerford, Edward  136 Huntingdonshire  129 Hyde, Edward, first earl of Clarendon  10 Île de Rhé  see La Rochelle Inchiquin, first earl of  see O’Brien, Murrough, first earl of Inchiquin Isle of Wight  98 James I, King of England  16 Jermone, Stephen  78 Jones, Henry, dean of Kilmore and the 1641 depositions  34 as lobbyist for Irish refugees  47, 56, 75, 120, 144–7, 149 author of A Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland  34–5, 36, 53n.107, 75, 80, 82–3, 91, 93–4 experience in 1641 rising  63 Julianstown  49, 62 Kent  129 Kildare, County  40, 41 Killeshandra  68 La Rochelle  89, 100–1, see also France Laggan Army  50 Lake, Peter  27–8, 90n.7, 91 Lancashire  96–7, 115–17, 139 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury 77, 93, 99; see also bishops Leicester, second earl of  see Sidney, Robert, second earl of Leicester, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Leicestershire  129 Leitrim, County  44 Leslie, John, bishop of Raphoe  155 Lincolnshire  129 Lismore  62 Lister, Joseph  119n.1 Liverpool  108, 111, 116–17 Local history  22–6 Loftus, Adam  147 Loftus, Nicholas  149 London collections for German Protestants in 105–6

collections for Irish in  14, 129, 138 fears of plots against  96, 98–9 Irish refugees living in  107n.14, 108, 123, 125–6, 145, 154n.37, 157 tumults in  24, 25n.70, 87–8 Londonderry  4, 50–1 Long Parliament  see Parliament Lord Justices of Ireland and 1641 depositions  35–6 and outbreak of 1641 rising  9, 39 and refugees in Dublin  14–15, 45, 46, 48, 49–50 in England  11, 106, 108, 100 in Scotland  51 requests for charity on behalf of  48, 50, 55, 144–5 and soldiers  48 see also Parsons, Sir William; Borlase, Sir John Low Countries  38, 94, 113, 149 Lucas, Sir John  25 Ludlow, John  136 Lunsford, Thomas  88 MacColla, Alasdair  50n.92 MacDonnell, Randall, second earl of Antrim  21 Maguire, Brian  83 Maguire, Connor, second baron of Enniskillen  38, 113 Maguire, Rory  38–9, 67 Maguires of county Fermanagh  38 Malmesbury  139 Marshall, Stephen  12, 13, 14, 100–1 Martin, John  146 Maxwell, John, bishop of Killala  156 McCarty, Donough, second viscount Muskerry  43 Meath, county  40, 41 Melksham  137 Middlesex  129, 138 Middleton, Thomas  28 Mildmay, Sir Henry  115n.64, 148 Military Affairs soldiers for Irish service, from England  100, 111–12, 145–6 soldiers for Irish service, from Scotland  10, 53 soldiers in Ireland  15, 50, 62, 69–71, 154–5 Milton, John  159

187

INDEX

Mogeely  1–3 Monaghan, county  44 Moore, John  136 Moral economy  42, 74–5, 82, 162 Morrill, John  17–18, 20, 27, 121 Moyant, Sir Samuel  155 Mulpatricks of county Cavan  63 Navan  40 Netterville, Nicholas, first viscount Netterville of Dowth  112 Netterville, Thomas  112 Norfolk  129 Northamptonshire  108 Northumberland  139 Northumberland, tenth earl of  see Percy, Algernon, tenth earl of Northumberland, Lord High Admiral Norwich  97 Nugent, Richard, first earl of Westmeath 43 O’Brien, Murrough, first earl of Inchiquin 156 O’Carrolls of Ely O’Carroll  41–2, 70–3 O’Connolly, Owen  38 O’Dowd, Mary  22 O’Molloys of Kings county  70–1 O’Mores of county Longford  38 O’Neill, Owen Roe  38, 94 O’Neill, Sir Phelim  38–9, 44 O’Reilly, Mulmore  see O’Reilly, Myles O’Reilly, Myles  58, 61 O’Reilly, Philip MacHugh MacShane 58, 67 O’Reilly, Philip MacMulmore  58, 61–3 O’Reillys of county Cavan  38, 42–3, 58–67 Ohlmeyer, Jane  15, 21, 26n.77 Old English  2, 19, 29, 39, 43, 48, 58, 60, 107n.18, 112, 148 Ormond, first duke of  see Butler, James, first duke of Ormond Oxford  108, 129 Palatinate, collections for  14, 105–6, 127–8, 131 Parliament and Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan: creation of  11–12, 128, 136 disbursement of funds  119–20, 143–4, 147–8, 150–2

and fear of popery  96, 98–100, 104, 115–17 and Irish military affairs  10, 50–1, 53, 100, 145–6, 154–5, 158 and Irish refugees  55, 108, 157 and outbreak of 1641 rising  9–12 and relationship with Charles I  20 bishops’ votes in  86, 99, 100 Committee for Irish Affairs  139n.80, 144n.1, 154–7 Committee for the Contribution Money  119–20, 136, 143, 144n.1, 145–8, 154 Committee for the Defense of Both Kingdoms  150 fasts for Ireland  11–14, 87–8, 109, 135 Parrat, William   51 Parsons, Sir William  9, 10, 38, 62n.25, 68n.63, 69; see also Lord Justices of Ireland Parsons, William, of Parsonstown  68–74 Parsonstown  see Birr Castle Percy, Algernon, tenth earl of Northumberland, Lord High Admiral  112–3 Piggott, Edward  155 Plague  139 Plunkett, Christopher, second earl of Fingal  60 Plunkett, Patrick, ninth baron of Dunsany 43 Poor laws, English  109–10 treatment of Irish in  106–7, 122, 126–7, 140–1 Portadown  65 Print authenticity of  4 reader responses to  113–14 Privy Council, England  113, 114 Privy Council, Scotland  53–4 Protestation Oath  121, 133–5, 163 Prynne, William  86 Puttocke, Roger  40 Pym, John  24, 136 and administration of the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan  148, 150–1 and fear of popery  11, 20, 96–7, 115 reactions to 1641 rising  11, 20, 99–100 Pyne, Sir Nicholas  3

188

INDEX

Survival strategies  32–4, 60–1, 65–6, 72, 84–5, 161–2 Sussex  121, 129, 133

Rampaigne, Dorothy  83–5 Rampaigne, Zachariah  83–4 Rape  4–5, 78, 80n.19 Recusants, England  52, 98, 99, 112–17, 151 Refugees from France  105 from Germany  14, 105–6 from Ireland  11, 106 in Dublin  14–15, 45–50, 145 in England  108–111, 115, 117, 122–7, 136–7, 157 in Scotland  51–2, 53–4 Robinson, John  4–5 Root and Branch Petition  12 Royalists  152–3, 158 Russell, Conrad  20–1, 25n.70, 120n.7 Rutland  129

Temple, Sir John  45, 48, 91, 155 Thirty Years’ War  6, 28, 31, 82, 90, 92, 94–5, 102, 105 veterans of  50, 68 ‘Three kingdoms’ historiography  15, 55, 162 Tilly, count of  see Tserclaes, Johann, count of Tilly Touchet, James, third earl of Castlehaven 3, 43 Touchet, Lady Frances  3 Trained bands  116 Trewman, John  52 Trim  40 Tserclaes, Johann, count of Tilly  92, 94

Salisbury Division of Wiltshire  130–5, 138 Salisbury  122, 124–6 Salmon, James  79 Scotland  16, 19 and soldiers for Irish service  10, 53 collections for Irish in  54 reactions to 1641 rising in  52–5 Scots-Irish  19, 50–2, 57, 59–60, 156n.50 Seaver, Paul  76, 81, 84n.39, 87 Shropshire  129 Sidney, Robert, second earl of Leicester, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland  111, 150 Sligo  22 Soldiers  see Military affairs Somerset  108, 129 Somerset, Henry, fifth earl of Worcester 97 Spain  29, 38, 93–4, 113 Spottiswood, Sir Henry  146 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre  94 Staffordshire  129 Stanley, James, first baron Strange  115– 16 Star Chamber  86 Stewart, Sir Robert  50 Stewart, Sir William  50 Strafford, first earl of  see Wentworth, Sir Thomas, first earl of Strafford Stratford-upon-Avon  116 Subsidy  128–30 Surrey  129

Ussher, James, archbishop of Armagh 12, 155 Vaughan, Sir John  51 Vincent, Philip  90, 92–5 Violence in 1641 depositions  33–4, 44–5, 63–7 in print  4–5, 76–88, 92–3 retributive  22, 38–9, 66, 70–1 symbolic  82–3 Virginia (county Cavan)  50, 58–60 Wales  97, 108, 113–15, 139, 154 Wallington, Nehemiah  76–88, 96–8 Walter, John  25–6, 117n.74 Warwickshire  129 Waterford  2–3 Wentworth, Sir Thomas, first earl of Strafford  19, 20, 51–2 Westmoreland  139 Weston, Jerome, second earl of Portland  98 Wexford, county  37, 149 Wheeler, William  148 Whetcombe, Tristram  78 Wicklow, county  41, 42 Williams, Griffith  115 Wilton  125, 131 Wiltshire  119–42 Women and the 1641 rising  1–5, 39–40, 49, 79

189

INDEX

Worcester, fifth earl of  see Somerset, Henry, fifth earl of Worcester Worcestershire  129 Wroughton   136

Wyne  108 Yorkshire  129, 139

190

Irish Rebellion:Irish Rebellion 16/06/2009 13:31 Page 1

J o S E P h C o P E is Associate Professor of history at the State University of New York at Geneseo.

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England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion

JosEph CopE

Front cover: Assaults on English Protestants during the 1641 Irish Rising. From Ireland: or, a Booke, Together with an Exact Mappe, of the Most Principal Townes, Great and Small, in the Said Kingdome (London, 1647).  British Library shelfmark E.1175.(3), 160. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.

England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion

The 1641 Irish Rebellion has long been recognized as a key event in the mid-17th century collapse of the Stuart monarchy. By 1641, many in England had grown restive under the weight of intertwined religious, political and economic crises. To these audiences, the Irish rising seemed a realization of England’s worst fears: a war of religious extermination supported by European papists, whose ambitions extended across the Irish Sea. England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion explores the consequences of this emergency by focusing on survivors of the rising in local, national and regional contexts. In Ireland, the experiences of survivors reflected the complexities of life in multiethnic and religiously-diverse communities. In England, by contrast, pamphleteers, ministers, and members of parliament simplified the issues, presenting the survivors as victims of an international Catholic conspiracy and asserting English subjects’ obligations to their countrymen and coreligionists. These obligations led to the creation of relief projects for despoiled Protestant settlers, but quickly expanded into sweeping calls for action against recusants and suspected popish agents in England. England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion contends that the mobilization of this local activism played an integral role in politicizing the English people and escalating the political crisis of the 1640s.

JosEph CopE