The Birth and Early Demise of a Liberal Interpretation of Ireland’s Early Modern Past

Lecky, an Irish Protestant landowner, and liberal commentator on Irish affairs considered historians to be responsible to adjudicate between opposing views, having appraised the evidence. On this basis he condemned the English for harshness that provoked rebellion in 1641, insisted that no massacre had been involved, and that the Cromwellian confiscation had been falsely justified. However, he considered this injustice so ancient as to be irreversible, and he represented the government’s land reform measures as compensation for past injustice. Lecky’s call for moderation made no impression on the authors of Catholic county histories written to refute the elite narratives by insisting the landowners and Protestant were a foreign, malign presence in each county, and that memory was a surer guide to truth than documentary evidence. Protestant authors who insisted that a massacre in 1641 was well documented also decried Lecky’s views.

Re-Imagining Ireland’s Early Modern Past during the Later Nineteenth Century

The Great Famine provided a stimulus to the writing of history, not least because it eroded the credibility both of British rule in Ireland, and of Irish landowners. The new interpretations can be characterized as follows. The authors of a Catholic narrative wanted the Catholic nation that had emerged from suffering to be treated as an equal with the English and Scottish nations within a shared British monarchy. Militant nationalist historians cherished memories of Catholic sufferings in the hope that these would foment popular ‘disaffection’ and further revolutionary action. Moderate Unionist historians acknowledged the unjust treatment of the Irish in the past and detailed this to encourage the present government to promote reform that would elicit loyalty. Hard-line Unionist historians also faulted past British rule. Their concern, however, was that governments had not stuck rigidly to stern measures that would have produced stability. They believed that stability might still be achieved if the present government avoided conciliation.

Enlightenment Historians of Ireland and their Critics

Elite Catholics, who accepted Hanoverian rulers as legitimate, believed that Enlightenment historiography would show the Penal Laws to be unreasonable, and would necessitate a re-definition of the Irish political nation. When Hume, whom these elite members esteemed, endorsed Temple’s interpretation of the 1641 rebellion, they commissioned a philosophical history for Ireland to be written by Thomas Leland, a Protestant divine. Leland failed to meet the expectations of his sponsors by concluding, after a close study of early modern events, that a single Irish political nation would exist only when Catholics renounced allegiance to the Pope. Failure to reach political consensus was largely irrelevant because popular histories showed that concessions to elite Catholics would not have assuaged popular discontent. Moreover, urban radicals, notably Mathew Carey, contended that Enlightenment thinking suggested that a multi-denominational Irish nation could be imagined only in the context of an independent Irish Republic.

The Failure of the Imagination Concerning Ireland’s Pasts

It was hoped that disputes concerning Ireland’s early modern past would be resolved by opening the official archives to public scrutiny. Catholic-nationalist authors seemed generally satisfied with this, but hard-line Unionist authors, concerned over the evidence of continuous official malfeasance that had been uncovered in the archives, demanded that the depositions taken from Protestant survivors in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion be declared an official source. At the same time, moderate Unionists became convinced that the history they had written of the early modern centuries had persuaded officials in London to adopt policies for Ireland that were detrimental to their interests. Under the circumstances they abandoned further investigation into Ireland’s early modern past at the same time that the interest of Nationalist historians waned because they believed their interpretations had been vindicated by such as Prendergast and Lecky. A once vibrant subject was thus abandoned and was not fully resuscitated until the 1960s.

Composing Counter-Narratives in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

This chapter explains how denigration of all Irish people by apocalyptic authors, and the conquest that it legitimized, proved traumatic for all Irish people whether at home or in exile. Annalists despaired of the future but Irish authors from Gaelic and English ancestries who had found refuge in Catholic Europe took inspiration from Catholic histories they encountered there to compose histories in Latin, Irish, and English defending Ireland’s reputation, and arguing from history that foreign powers should sustain Ireland and Catholicism. Divisions emerged between authors, notably Philip O’Sullivan Beare, who advocated renewed warfare, and those, notably David Rothe and Geoffrey Keating, who wrote conciliatory narratives. These argued from history that Catholics of both ancestries in Ireland had been bonded by religion into a single nation, and that Catholics who still prevailed in Ireland should owe allegiance to the British monarchy.

Fresh Unionist Re-Appraisals of the History of Early Modern Ireland

Landowners were challenged both by political change and by historical arguments. Their contribution to debate took the form of county histories to illustrate how landowners had been responsible for improvement and communal leadership. These histories varied because the experience of no two counties was identical. However, most dated the introduction of civil order to the establishment of counties, they enumerated the ‘improvements’ introduced by individual proprietors, they decried absenteeism, and they rejoiced that sectarian strife had been kept at bay other than when it had been provoked by external provocateurs—usually Catholic clerics. George Hill, writing of Ulster counties, dissented from this narrative by attributing past disturbances to the unfair treatment accorded natives in the Ulster Plantation and to the indifference of principal landowners to communal welfare. For him, the bedrock of Ulster society was its Protestant tenant farmers and their willingness to co-operate with their Catholic counterparts.

The Vernacular Alternatives Composed during the Age of Revolutions

Irish-language vernacular verse history proved adaptable throughout the eighteenth century to take account both of new reverses, and of opportunities presented by revolutionary developments in North America, in France, and in Ireland. The oral and the written records were interlinked because manuscript copyists aided memory. Themes from the Irish oral tradition also resurfaced in English-language print form or in political speeches by Daniel O’Connell. Similarly in the Protestant experience narratives composed in the seventeenth century by such as Temple entered into Protestant vernacular culture because they were regularly regurgitated in sermons. When Musgrave composed a Protestant narrative of the 1798 rebellion he could therefore allude to Catholic proclivity to rebel knowing that this was a trope in Protestant oral culture. Musgrave could also dovetail the occurrences of 1798 with Temple’s narrative on 1641 and thus make it comprehensible for his audience.

New Histories for a New Ireland

Authors who approved of the conquest of Ireland ransacked history for clues on how the dominant Protestant minority might bring the majority Catholic population to conform to English civil and religious norms. Military historians, acknowledging the support the Crown had received from loyal Irish lords, suggested that these might be trusted to lead their subordinates towards reform. The lawyer Davies and the religious historians Ussher and James Ware disputed this, and argued from history that because Ireland’s population had just been conquered they stood ready to embrace reform provided they were protected from being tyrannized by their lords and by Catholic clergy. They also imagined Ireland returning to a lost golden age—for Davies to when Ireland had been a source of profit to the Crown, and for Ussher and Ware to when the true Christianity preached by St Patrick had been the envy of Europe.

Eighteenth-Century Aristocratic Histories of Ireland during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Historians, notably Carte, extolling the services rendered by members of the Clanricard and Ormond dynasties to Ireland’s governance, pronounced that Ireland’s populations would have become fully reformed had the Crown continued to act through them. Instead, the government had chosen the path of plantation that had enabled a cohort of Puritanical and disloyal English people to enrich themselves with office and land, and to alienate the population from government and reform. The counter-view, composed by Arthur Collins, concentrated on the Irish achievements of successive members of the Sidney family, crediting them with promoting reform through plantation, and with introducing to Ireland a cohort of godly families who were on the brink of completing their reform agenda. Charles Smith who, in a series of county studies, illustrated how several new Protestant families had improved society to everybody’s benefit, sustained this contention.

Re-Imagining Ireland’s Early Modern Past

Historians—Protestant and Catholic—associated with the Nation newspaper who were identified as members of Young Ireland constructed a romantic narrative of Ireland’s history in English verse that lauded heroes who had created an Irish nation by resisting English intrusion. This successful venture was designed to cultivate national sentiment among people with limited schooling. The more serious intellectual endeavour of Young Ireland was to sponsor a reasoned prose narrative of Ireland’s past to honour all—regardless of origin or denomination—who had fashioned an inclusive Irish nation. This proved less successful because it required their Catholic members to suppress memories of past injustice. Also, Catholic Church authorities, suspicious of the liberal agenda of Young Ireland, encouraged a counter-narrative that would dwell on past sufferings and celebrate those who had become martyrs for Catholicism rather than heroes of some imaginary Irish nation state.