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Ireland and the Stuart monarchy 1660-1702
Gabriel Glickman
Restoration Ireland – key themes
• Relationship of Ireland with rest of British Isles.
• Relationship of Ireland with the crown.• Relationships of communities within Ireland.
The Civil War and its legacy
• Crown authority collapses in Ireland in 1640s – six different armies fighting.
• Splits among Catholics and Protestants.• European dimension – international religious
conflict. • Cromwellian conquest followed by major
expropriations of Catholic land.
Political and economic subordination to England
• Parliament constrained by Poyning’s Law.• Navigation Act shuts Irish out of Atlantic
commercial economy and foreign trade.• 1667, 1671 – laws against export of Irish
cattle. • Ireland has neither constitutional freedoms of
Scotland nor full incorporation of Wales into England – seen as more like a colony.
The Irish Protestant elite
• Anglicised structure of laws, parliament, religion, education.
• See themselves as ‘English’ rather than ‘Irish’ or ‘British’.
• Trajectory of Irish elites towards building careers in England e.g. Ormond, Sir Robert Southwell.
• Tendency to press for closer incorporation with England, rather than greater independence.
Irish Catholicism
• Irish Catholics = 80 per cent of the population but only c. 25 per cent of the land after 1662 Act of Settlement.
• Exclusion from public office – many educated and seek careers in foreign Catholic countries.
• Major Catholic divisions over how far to accommodate the English crown; how far to repudiate papal power.
Irish Protestant Dissent
• Mainly Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster; also Baptists, Quakers and Congregationalists.
• Face coercion and prosecution under bishops of established Church of Ireland.
• Greater conflict in post-1660 Ireland = not between Catholics and Protestants, but between (Protestant) Church of Ireland and the Dissenters.
• Irish Protestant radicalism and conspiracy part of continuum of Dissenting unrest throughout British Isles 1660-1685.
Programme of James II
• Much more authoritarian than in other parts of British Isles.
• No attempt to extend Dissenting freedoms as well as those of Catholics.
• Moves under Tyrconnell to establish Catholic monopoly over public office.
• Results in reawakening of sectarian tensions.
The Irish war 1689-91 – three interlocking conflicts
• Cogadh an da Ri – ‘War of the Two Kings’: dynastic conflict
• Struggle for European balance of power: foreign armies of William of Orange and Louis XIV entering Ireland.
• Clear faultline of Catholic vs Protestant, as opposed to many different political, religious and ethnic factions of 1640s Civil War.
- Sectarian identities crystallised: Protestant and Catholic pamphlets understand conflict as religious war.
Legacies of conflict
• Crown seeks to formalise Protestant hold over Ireland by new laws – extending its authority.
• See Irish Protestants as now totally dependent on London.
• Tension between Crown and Irish Protestants who share anti-Catholic agenda but want greater freedom for Irish Parliament e.g. end to Poyning’s Law and Navigation Act.
Identity of Irish Protestants
• Writings of King, Molyneux etc. show they still see themselves as predominantly English.
• Argue that greater freedoms for Irish Parliament = granting them their full constitutional rights as Englishmen.
• Want Ireland to be a full kingdom ruled separately under the crown – less like a colony.
• Difference between ‘patriotism’ and nationalism (i.e. no demand for independence).
Opposition from the crown and from England
• Lord Lieutenant Sidney, English pamphleteers etc. -wars have shown Irish Protestants totally dependent on Crown: Ireland incapable of being self-governing community.
• Cost of protection from English state = submitting to English interest.
• Irish elites offered more safeguards for Protestantism, but no more independence.
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