Lecture Five (part one) Wednesday 16th February
The Causes of the 1641 Rebellion
Click this link for the BBC's 1641 Rebellion site http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/plantation/planters/es10.shtml
In today’s lecture we are going to examine the reasons that led to the Gaelic Catholics in Ulster rising in rebellion in October 1641 to be joined shortly thereafter by most other Catholics in Ireland.
The 1641 rebellion erupted in the first instance in Ulster, when rebel Catholic elements surprised Protestant settlers.
In accounting for this sudden outbreak of revolt, historians are divided about the importance of its long and short term causes.
In recent years, there has been a marked movement away from viewing the 1641 rebellion as a reaction to the Ulster Plantation of 1610. Quite apart from the significant time lapse involved, it has been pointed out that there is evidence of considerable economic and social interaction between the Protestant settlers and the Catholic native population in the intervening period.
Instead, short term factors are stressed. Some of the primary native Irish ‘beneficiaries’ of the Ulster Plantation, it is suggested, having got into economic difficulties, resorted to desperate measures to combat this situation.
Added to this, the rise of a puritan dominated English parliament portended the onset of religious persecution in Ireland.
Thus, 1641 is regarded to some extent as a pre-emptive strike by ‘Catholic’ Ireland in an endeavour to overthrow the Protestant regime in Ireland.
However, while there is considerable justification in affording importance to such short term factors, long-standing grievances associated with the Ulster Plantation remain a primary factor too.
It is this smouldering resentment which contributed to the viciousness of the attacks on the Protestant settlers and the large numbers of fatalities involved.
Causes, reasons and excuses as to why the Catholics rose have been portrayed by both sides almost from the month after the rebellion broke out right up to this present day. They were couched in mainly religious terms. Today, this has more to do with contemporary events rather than what really happened in 1641.
In the 1640s Irish Protestants were able to marry cultural and religious polarities which they claimed were the two main reasons for the rebellion.
These reasons proved satisfying for Protestants from the 1640s right up to the 20th century. All held that the cause of the rebellion was to destroy English civility and the Protestant religion.
The Catholics, for their part, were not able to offer reasons for the rebellion until well into the 1660s. The reasons for these Catholic writers, many of whom were involved in the Catholic confederation of Kilkenny, were couched in religious terms also. For them, Catholics were forced to defend themselves in arms because of the intolerance of the Protestant officials in Ireland, and of those Protestants in England and Scotland who were then challenging the authority of King Charles.
Historical explanation in Ireland always seems to have been related to the religious persuasion of the particular historian. Both sides (Nationalists and Unionists) invented their respective histories based on these reasons and for both, almost all aspects of Irish history could be couched in religious terms.
The only early 20th century challenge to this dogma came from Marxist historians after WW 2, none of whom came from Ireland. They were wholly sceptical of religious reasons given for political events in Ireland’s history.
These insisted that the essential divisions in society have always been determined by economic factors. They have suggested that the theological differences which were thought to have occasioned the so-called religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, served merely to accentuate divisions that were fundamentally economic in origins.
To apply their model to the 1641 rising, they would hold that the divisions that existed were not religious but rather economic. The planters were the ‘haves’ and the Gaels the ‘have nots’.
A second challenge to the Nationalist and Unionist genre of explaining all of Irish history, including the rising, in religious terms, emerged in the 1960s in Ireland.
The Irish historians most responsible for this were Robin Dudley Edwards and T W Moody. The wanted to release Irish history from Nationalist-Unionist invective and replace it by value free history based on historical evidence.
This new methodology rubbed off on their research students, especially Hugh Kearney and Aidan Clarke. What made these historians different from those who came before them was that they relied heavily on the authority of documentary sources as opposed to sectarian polemic.
In relation to the 1641 rising neither of these wholly dismissed religion as one of the causes of the rising. For them, it was considerations of patronage and privilege, and exclusions therefrom, rather than issues of theology, which precipitated the political action that resulted in the rising of 1641.
One of their more enduring influences on future historians was their advancement of the belief that political events in 17th century Ireland were largely independent of religious considerations.
This assumption was given canonical status in Irish historiography by their chapters in the New History of Ireland, volume 3 which dealt with early modern Ireland.
Whereas this is a very brief summary of the historiography I will now look more closely at the different reasons.
The causes of the 1641 rebellion in Ireland can be divided into two main areas.
1 Religious
2 Economic
Religious causes
So economic or religious? A good place to begin to look for evidence for either of these is in the depositions that the Protestant survivors made in the 1640s and again in the 1650s. Professor Nicholas Canny has studied the depositions more than anybody else and he has concluded that they possess much of value to historians looking for answers as to the causes of the rising.
Instead of looking at the depositions made by Ulster Protestants let us look at those made by Protestants in Leinster. As the rising in Leinster was not marred with the wanton killings so characteristic of Ulster, it should be easier to establish what was intended by the leaders of the revolt there.
In County Longford, perhaps because of its close proximity to Ulster, the rising there was characterised with the disgruntled O’Farrells using the disturbances there to recover the status and property they had lost through the process of change promoted by the government during the previous few decades.
Many of the deponents from Longford told stories of having their property stolen by the O’Farrells and that which wasn’t stolen was destroyed. Many settlers claimed that the O’Farrells told them that they were taking their property for distress for arrears of rent due to them for the land that had been taken from them ever since the plantation of Longford. The O’Farrells were as concerned as their Ulster counterparts in presenting their actions within the context of loyalty to the crown. It seems then that the only evidence from the Longford depositions are that the reasons were economic in that the O’Farrells wanted to take back and be compensated for what they had lost as a result of the plantation there.
Louth was affected by the rising almost from the start as the rebels marched through there on their way to lay siege to Drogheda. Most of the deponents only told the story that they had been robbed of their belongings, not only by the rebels, but also by their neighbours who had ‘scores to settle’.
In Meath, things were different. The settler landowners there were in a better position to defend themselves until late November or early December. When the attacks did come they were carried out mainly by Catholics who were described as the younger sons of landowners or tenants within the county. Later on, when the peasants rose, the rebels were described as the ‘poorer sort of parish dwellers and others’.
The Old English landowners initially kept aloof but it seems that they were eventually forced into joining with the Ulster rebels by the actions of their tenants and of the Lords Justices who proclaimed that all Papists were in rebellion in the country.
In Kildare as in Meath, the impetus for Catholic landowners to join the rebellion came from below. Here as in Meath, once order had broken down, the insurgents formed themselves into armed bands and these were often led by local gentry who were advised by priests who gave them moral encouragement to ‘rid the country of Protestants’.
Here we have religion emerging as a reason but only to the extent that it was been used by priests for their own ends.
Robbery, was also extensive in Kildare. Thomasine Martin of Athy stated how a fortnight before Christmas she was ‘robbed by her neighbours Irish Papists of the said town, who came to her house, threw her down and trod upon her, and cast clothes over her that she would not see them’. Despite their efforts Thomasin was able to identify three of her neighbours as the assailants, two widows and one brogue maker, all from Athy.
When all this evidence is pieced together it becomes clear that public order had broken down in most areas of Leinster by the middle of November 1641. The leaders, in most cases were those who had cause to be dissatisfied with the existing social order, or who had very little to loose.
Many deponents held that ‘all papists were actors, abettors or at least secret well wishers unto this rebellion’.
In county Kilkenny, we find much evidence that Protestantism was becoming a main target. Not only do we find them been robbed but any vestiges of Protestantism were been destroyed.
For example ‘the Protestant bibles and prayer books and other good English and Protestant books … torn in pieces and employed as waste paper to wrap in soap, starch , candles and wares that they sold’.
Even more evidence of this anti Protestantism can be seen in the treatment accorded to the severed heads of some Protestants who had been killed during a siege of a local big house at Ballinakill
The town had a very large iron smelting industry and this became the target of the insurgents who wanted to destroy it as something alien to them (Economic). A few local Protestants resisted but they were eventually killed and beheaded after a short siege.
Their severed heads were carried in procession to the town of Kilkenny were they were put up on sticks on market day and, by all accounts, the Catholics of the area began to mock the heads in various ways.
An unexplainable phenomena was that most of the Catholics doing the humiliation were women who did all sorts of unmentionable things to the severed heads.
The role of women in the rising is crying out for an historian to investigate because there is much evidence to suggest that they were to the fore in most instances of murder and robbery.
One of the heads, belonged to a Protestant clergyman, and his head was chosen for special ridicule. They put a gag in his mouth and balanced a bible on the head and taunted it to preach.
The Catholic population declared the heads to be heretics and later buried them in a hole in the ground (they would not afford them the luxury of burying them on sacred ground).
What then was specifically religious about the 1641 rebellion.
In the rest of Leinster, the rebels themselves articulated justifications for their actions. In the main there were able to cite no more than general politico-religious justifications for their actions.
For example they told John Keaney, a Protestant clergyman that they ‘had good reasons to take up arms because the Catholics of Ireland never attained to any height of dignity or office worth speaking of in this kingdom when as every peddler or other (the settlers) that came out of England were masters and entrusted to bear a great sway in this kingdom and curbed the natives’.
The reason cited here is a sense of exclusion from political office on religious grounds. Whereas this would have been what motivated the ‘leaders’ of the rebellion the vast majority merely took advantage of the breakdown in public order to rob, humiliate, murder and even settle old scores upon the people who had settled in their midsts. This can be seen as an opportunistic reason
In many areas the motives were sectarian as it was only Protestants who were attacked.
This denominational selectivity was mentioned in many depositions. One to hand was that made by John Jessop of Kilkenny who noted that all his tenants and followers had been robbed and stripped by the rebels, save one who, although a planter recently come over from England, was a Catholic. The rebels treated this man with ‘favour and courtesy for he was a papist although he came but lately out of England and no acquaintance were between them’.
It seems then that he was spared no matter that he was a planter and that he came from England. His Catholicism was what saved him.
Many other deponents realised that it was their religion and not their ethnicity that made them the more vulnerable. Those who converted to Catholicism were also spared.
There were many priests among the rebels who assumed leadership roles. Whereas they, in the main, tried to prevent killings, they almost always gave the choice to the settlers to ‘turn to the mass or leave the community’.
An example of this can be seen from some depositions from County Carlow. There a priest who was with the rebels stressed that all protestants be given the opportunity to convert to Protestantism.
Consequently many Protestants were brought to him and one of these (Robert Wadding) describes what happened. He said that the priest was ‘so busied in given absolutions to those Protestants who had been brought to him by some rebel captains that it took a long time before he was brought in front of the priest. When he was brought up in front of the priest he told him that his only course was to go to Mass and to hold with them and that if he did so he would be restored immediately to his property’.
The Catholics called this ‘being reconciled’ and this particular priest added his own wording to an oath that the settlers were required to take. He made them swear to continue true and faithful subjects to the king of England and should honour and obey him in all matters temporal; that they should acknowledge the Holy Church of Rome to be the true church and the Pope of Rome to be supreme head over the church of Ireland and they should honour him in all causes spiritual whatsoever.
Priests were also very active in recovering traditional places of worship and their traditional burial sites from Protestant control. Recovering the burial sites was so important that they went so far as to ensure that all Protestant corpses be removed from the graveyards. For example, in county Kildare, the local Catholic bishop declared that he could not sanctify ground that contained ‘heritic bones’.
The removal of bodies was described by many of the protestant deponents who complained that the corpses when removed were dumped in ditches.
In Kilkenny and Waterford the corpses were put to much more macabre uses when they were used to make gunpowder.
There are some very detailed accounts from Waterford were two rebels were engaged in the manufacturing of saltpetre from the rotting remains.
The trouble began there when a Protestant clergyman called Haylin and his wife had been buried in the grounds of the cathedral. Then after Whit, 1642, when the city had been cleared of Protestants the insurgents ‘caused to be digged to make gunpowder’ the graves of Haylin, his wife and other protestants. The ‘corpses which still have some bone and flesh on them’ were then taken over by Richard Neyler of the city, apothecary, and one named Waas who had ‘formerly been a protestant but was now a papist’. Wass was also an engineer and master of the rebels ordinance. The protestants were ‘caused to be boiled in a great furnace till they came to salt petre and made them gunpowder’.
If Religion was not the most important reason why the rebellion broke out, it most certainly was one of the most important reasons that gave the rebellion its impetus as it was easy to identify the objects of their hatred by their religion.
Economic causes of the Rebellion
To look for economic causes for the rebellion one need only look at the work of two scientists who lived in Ireland in the 1650s.
The primary concern of the scientists, Gerald and Arnold Boate in their Ireland’s Natural History, published in 1652, was to illustrate the potential that existed in Ireland for the promotion of agricultural and manufacturing employment in Ireland. They said that the opportunity to create such employment would be there only when the natural resources of the country were brought into the possession of zealous and enterprise Protestants. To prove this point they wrote a length about the enterprises of the settlers who had come to Ireland during the plantation of Ulster.
These, ‘the introducers of all things good in Ireland’ were credited by the Boates with the pursuit of advanced agriculture, the reclamation of bogs and the introduction of mining activity in several parts of the country.
While praising the settlers like this the Boates also alluded to the cancellation of all these advances by the Catholic rebels in 1641 who, by the display of ‘unthankful ness hatred and envy’ and proven themselves to be a ‘brutish nation’.
‘those barbarians, the natural inhabitants of Ireland, who not content to have murdered or expelled their English neighbours … endeavoured quite to extinguish the memory of them, and of all the civility and good things by them introduced amongst that wild nation; and consequently in most places they did not only demolish the houses built by the English, the gardens and enclosures made by them, the orchards and hedges by them planted, and destroyed whole droves and flocks at once of English cows and sheep, so as they were not able with all their insatiable gluttony to devour the tenth part thereof, but let the rest lie rotting and stinking in the fields’.
For the Boates then, the reason the Catholics rose in rebellion was to destroy all the innovations brought in by the settlers. This seems to support what I said previously in relation to the number of Gaels who could not adopt to the new economic order introduced by the settlers.
For the Boates, the targets for many of the rebels was everything new that had been introduced by the settlers.
Many Protestants, in the depositions, commented on what they saw as a wanton and symbolic destruction of English improvements and methods and that, more often than not, Catholic priests in Ireland were very hostile to the enterprising and modern culture of the settlers.
This was later supported by Sir William Petty who wrote, in 1671, that priests in Ireland had ‘humble opinions of the English and Protestants and of the mischief’s of setting up manufactures and introducing of trade’.
Other economic factors was the large number of Gaels, who had originally been granted lands, and who had failed to adopt to the new economic order imposed by the settlers. Many of these Gaels lost their lands through mortgage foreclosure or by direct sales where money was more important to them than working the land.
When they had spent their money and when their land were taken over by the person who had advanced them money, they became destitute and looked to rebellion as the only way as they no longer had anything to loose.
Conclusions
The 1641 rebellion must be regarded as a popular peasant uprising as well as an attempted coup d etat by a small number of disgruntled Catholic landowners.
The disturbances of the rising were used by different social elements among the Catholics in Ireland to serve different ends. Local groups all had their own reasons for rising.
While the rising was religious in the sense that it was designed to remedy particular religious grievances identified by the Catholic clergy, it was also religious in that it was intended as a pre-emptive strike against a further erosion of the already precarious position of Catholicism in Ireland.
Priests and their demands had to speak over the heads of the more conservative Old English landowners and, in so doing, unleashed a peasant fury which they were only able to partially control.
The efforts of the higher Catholic clergy to dictate the course of events was complicated by the articulation of a parallel set of objectives by discontented Catholic lay people. It was also made difficult by the local clergy who interpreted what they were suppose to do in many different ways.
For example, in Westmeath it was reported that friars from the continent were telling the people to ‘fall to this course of rebellion or commotion and swore them to take action assuring them that though the English did discharge muskets and that some of them should be killed yet they should not fear for such as so died would be saints. And they should rush on with a multitude and kill at the Protestants and so receive arms from them’.
In relation to whether religion played more a part than ethnicity it must be said that whereas in many cases this proved true there were other cases to contradict it. For example, in County Galway where the rebels were said to have said that they would spare none, not so much as any of the old Roman Catholics if there were of the English kind of race.
Rumour played a very big part in galvanising support for the rebellion once it had started. These rumours were many and varied and included such things like the Scots were ready to come to Ireland to massacre all the Catholics; that John Pym in the parliament intended to do the same; that he had already killed the king and so on. It was also widely rumoured that the king was in fact in Ireland.
It was reported that one Walsh from Maynooth in Kildare said.
That the king was in the north of Ireland and rid disguised and had glassen eyes because he would not be known and that the king was as much against the Protestants as he himself and the rebels were, for that the Puritans in the parliament of England threw libes in disparagement of the king’s majesty making a question whether a king or no king.
It seems then that the prime factor that drove the peasants to take up arms was a sense of grievance over the loss of property and status. But to this must be added the annoyance over questions of religion.
Priests in Ireland were the biggest looses because of the clandestine status of Catholicism on the eve of the rebellion. They would also have felt aggrieved because they appreciated, from their continental experience, just how scandalously shabby was the profession of their fate in Ireland compared with the public manifestations of religious fervour where Catholicism enjoyed the fulsome support of the state. Priests, therefore, had every reason to be advocates of change.
Catholic lay-people, especially landowners, looked to the clergy for help in the face of the anarchy that had broken out. By so doing, however, they effectively became prisoners of their priests and were brought to endorse politico-religious principles they would never previously have countenanced.
The later history of the 1641 rising, especially the tensions between the Catholic landowners and the clergy, in the Confederacy, will show that by in large the Catholics found themselves engaged, against their better judgement, in what, by any standards, was a war of religion.