Lecture One Wednesday 19th January
The historiography of 17th and 18th century Ireland
I will try to make each lecture as interesting as possible by making as many of them as possible into a combination of lecturing, audio visual documentaries and class discussion. The reason for this is because I want to take you beyond the normal way of ‘learning’ history and instead to instil in you not only an interest in the craft but also an understanding of what I believe to be the central tenets of history. That is there is no such history, only interpretation.
We shall see this in the collection of documentaries that I will show you. They range from the ultra nationalist Radhrc documentaries that were shown in Ireland and America for a specific nationalistic purpose. Others will include the middle of the ground approach of Robert Kee in his monumental ‘Ireland: A television history’. Finally I will show you one or two documentaries from a revisionist perspective which tries to show that we do not really know what happened at all. These are aptly named – ‘So you think you know?’
I do not care about dates etc (the usual attributes of history) At the end of this course if I have gotten you to understand the craft and dangers of history; if I have arisen in you a curiosity to know what really happened and an understanding that just because you read about something in a source (like a book) that that was not necessarily what occurred then I have done my job.
Because I am not going to spend all of the time lecturing to you, I might not get to say everything I wanted to get across in the lecture. If this is the case then you will find very comprehensive lecture notes on my website.
Let me begin this lecture by saying that a knowledge of the truth is never dangerous though ignorance of the truth may be so. Even more dangerous is that half knowledge of history that has enabled political intriguers to influence the patterns and actions of their dupes by misleading them with garbled accounts of the past.
The past and garbles accounts of it are the root cause of many of the world’s conflicts. (This is especially true of the former troubles in Northern Ireland) ungarbling the past are what my lectures will be about.
The historiography of the period.
In today’s lecture we are going to look at the historiography of Ireland, particularly that of the seventeenth century. After that I will show you the first of the documentaries that will serve as an example of how we can take Ireland's greatest icon and totally missunderstand it. It was part one of a three part series done by the BBC called 'so you think you know....'. This one deals with St Patrick.
What I hope you will get out of today’s lecture is an understanding of the historians craft particularly, processes whereby, more often than not, history is just as dangerous a weapon as the bomb and the bullet.
I am going to preface this lecture by a very important sentence which, if you remember and apply to any and all essays and answers to historical questions, will stand you in good stead.
The sentence is simple; THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HISTORY; ONLY INTERPRETATION.
Hopefully in today’s lecture you will begin to understand what is meant by this.
I suppose the best contemporary example I can give you can be had from the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq. If George Bush and Tony Blair wrote a history of it, they would perhaps spend much of it on the reasons for going to war. On the other hand, if the BBC or any other journalist wrote a history their main areas of concentration would be that the reasons cited for going to war were non-existent. Similarly, if a pro-Sadam Muslim were to write a history it would be one from the ground looking up. In a few hundred years when historians come to look at it what ‘evidence’ would they have before them and how could the write an accurate history of it.
The best Irish example I can give you would be when I was growing up I was educated by the Christian Brothers who literally bet it in to me that Jesus Christ died for the Irish race and that Padraig Pearse died for the Irish part of the human race. No exceptions, no deviation. The education system was geared that way and all the text books were written to emphasize this and the struggle for Irish freedom for over 800 years from cruel British Tyranny.
The historiography of the 1641 rebellion
Let us look first at the 1641 rebellion where in October of that year, the native Irish of Ulster rose in rebellion.
From the outset, publications about 1641 purported simply to tell what happened; but from the start, they confused the Gaelic insurgents intentions with the actuality of what really occurred.
Right from the start Protestants and later unionists, would use the rebellion with its attendant ‘massacres’ to further their own ends and to warn that Irish Catholics could never be trusted.
From 1642 the first of the lurid accounts began to be published about what the Catholic Rebels had done and were intending to do to the Protestant settlers.
The most effective pamphlet was that of Sir John Temple, an official in the Dublin government in the 1640s.
According to Temple, the rising of 1641, and an associated pre-mediated massacre of Protestant settlers in Ireland had been planned by the Catholic leaders in the country, including priests, long before 1641.
He further alleged that the Old English Catholics in Ireland were as guilty as the native Gaelic Irish who had first risen.
All of this was planned with military precision with the intention of gaining Ireland for the Pope.
Events in Ireland, according to Temple, were part of a broader European-wide Catholic attack on Protestantism and success in Ireland would have led to an immediate assault on the Protestants of England and Scotland.
Because the Catholics were in no position to defend themselves against the accusations of Temple so his work assumed the status of an OFFICIAL HISTORY of the rebellion for not only the 17th but also the 18th and 19th centuries.
It was held to be the standard interpretation and it must be noted than various editions of this work were brought out each time Protestant control of the Irish government was threatened by Catholic demands for a recovery of some of their lost power.
Other pamphlets quickly followed and some, were even published as early as a month or two after the initial rebellion.
The main reason for publications such as these was that it was in the interests of the government in Ireland at the time in order to first introduce and then to sustain a system of subjection.
Click for pamphlet sample ONE TWO THREE
Another, and just as important reason was that the pamphlets were used by the beleaguered Protestants in Ireland to advertise their plight to a wider protestant world, and solicit support from England and Scotland, which countries alone could save them.
This clear propagandist purpose from the start coloured the publications. They were also used to tar the Catholic Irish with blood guilt.
It was also necessary for the powers that be in Ireland and in England to show the guilt of the Catholics as it was going to be their intention to confiscate their lands. The surest way to confiscate a persons land in this period was to show that they were guilty of treason and the best way to do this was to show that they had risen in rebellion against their king.
Later on when the King and the Parliament went to war in England, things got very confusing in Ireland. At this stage the parliament, in its attempts to garner support against the king, took the lead from the Irish Protestants and published many hundreds of pamphlets with the intention of creating the illusion that the King and any Royalist Irish Protestants where equally to blame in the cause of the Irish natives who had risen in 1641.
Some of the pamphlets contained pictures (WOODCUTS) of the ways in which the Catholics were supposed to have massacred their Protestant neighbours.
The thing about these woodcuts is that they were very expensive to make as the wood had to be carved in reverse and these used with ink to print the images on to the pamphlets.
There is much evidence to suggest that many of these woodcuts were in fact second hand in that they were not made specifically to depict the so called massacres. Instead they were previously used to show atrocities during the 30 years war in Europe.
What happened in Ireland was that the woodcuts were purchased and the story was then invented to suit the picture.
Depositions
Many of these publications were based on depositions that were hurriedly taken from the Protestant refugees who were fleeing the insurgents.
The depositions more than any other collection of sources for the history of 17th century Ireland, have remained controversial since the time they were first compiled. There were take from Protestant inhabitants in 1642 and again in 1645, 1647 and 1652.
Initially they were taken, as I have shown already, to tar the Irish Catholics with blood guilt. Later on, however, they were also used as a legal record of loss and criminal guilt.
The numbers of Protestants allegedly killed in the massacres ranged from 154,000 in 1642 to over 600,000 by 1648.
Ranges of numbers that were claim to have been massacred in the initial rebellion.
1642 It was claimed that there were 154,000 Protestants killed.
1644 The number killed was 250,000 Protestants (Jones)
1646 The number killed was 300,000 Protestants (Temple)
1648 The number killed was 600,000 Protestants (Milton).
Each time when it looked that the Catholics in Ireland were wanting or getting more civil and/or religious rights there was another outpouring of atrocity literature associated with the 1641 rebellion.
The Catholics, for their part, struggled to free themselves from this tenacious reputation for disloyalty and savagery and blamed the Protestants for exaggerating or even fabricating what had occurred in the early 1640s.
The 1641 Massacres in the 21st Century.
It is very hard to believe, I am sure, but the 1641 massacres are still held up as truths in the 21st century.
Many of the banners carried by the Orangemen in their 12th of July parades carry images of many of these woodcuts from the 17th century.
In a documentary I will be showing in a few lectures time you will see one Orangeman asked do you really believe that hundreds of thousands of Protestants were killed in Ulster in 1641. His reply was OF COURSE I DO. ISN’T THERE A PICTURE OF IT ON THE WALL AT THE ORANGE HALL.
Of course he is referring to a picture of one of the woodcuts mentioned before.
Scots Irish.
Also in the 21st century and perhaps what is more disturbing are the following four pictures that I have lifted from a very popular Scots-Irish American website. They claim to be about the 1641 massacres but appear to depict other events as neither their style or the clothing worn belong to the seventeenth century.
The name Scots Irish was a title given to the descendents of the mainly Scottish settlers from Ulster who emigrated on mass to the United States in the eighteenth centuries.
WHICH MOVEMENT IN ITSELF WAS FORGOTTEN IN THE MORE POPULAR HISTORIES OF IRELAND.
When the Famine Irish were streaming off the boats from the 1840s onwards in the states, the descendents of the people, who now call themselves Scots Irish, began to call themselves this to distinguish them from the Catholic migrants who flooded America at this time.
GANGS OF NEW YORK would have had some but the vast majority of the Scots Irish left New York and pushed their way westwards where they now predominate in the Appalachian mountains. HILLBILLES MACDONALDS, CAMPBELLS AND SO ON.
As if these slides are not bad enough take a look at the actual website.
http://www.scotchirish.net/Who%20are%20the%20Scotch%20Irish.php4
What really happened in 1641 Ireland.
Historians such as Nicholas Canny in UCG, rather than trying to ignore or write the depositions out of Irish History, has examined them and found them very useful to create a social history of the period as many of the deponents stated how they held their land, what mortgages they had on it, money loaned or borrowed and so on,
Among his more important conclusions were that the deponents themselves acknowledged that the rising itself was far more complicated that either Temple, or any of the other pamphlets, have depicted. Many of the deponents admitted that the purpose of the rising was not to overthrow the plantation and to return to the old Gaelic order that had been overthrown in the sixteenth and first four decades of the 17th centuries.
WE SHALL SEE THIS IN OUR LECTURE ON THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER.
The deponents saw that the Catholic intentions was to make Ireland a Catholic kingdom under King Charles I.
All in all then the rebellion was not seen as a cohesive, planned uprising to overthrow and kill the Protestants. Rather it was seen as a mishmash of Gaelic clans, many of whom did not even know why they had risen but who took advantage of the situation, once they did rise to pursue their own agenda. It was when this mob got involved in the rising that things began to get out of hand with isolated incidents of atrocities.
In the main, however, many of the deponents said that the Catholic leaders and even some of the priests intervened to stop or prevent many of the excesses of the mob.
The popular attacks did not usually result in the loss of life, nor were they intended to. However, they were often gruesome affairs because they involved face to face confrontations between individuals who had long known each other and who had lived beside each other for the best part of 40 years.
The typical assault/offensive involved an armed band of Irish descending upon a Protestant settler family and demanding, at knife point, that they leave their homestead and farms. Protestants who refused to leave or who actively resisted, were frequently killed.
Protestants who also refused to tell where there money and land title documents were hid were sometimes tortured to reveal their secrets.
Obtaining land titles, loan or mortgage documents also played an important part in the rebellion. The titles and leases were important because they gave the settlers the legal title to the land they held. The other documents were important also because they were the only records that existed that could prove that certain Gaelic persons had borrowed from the settlers or who had mortgaged their lands to them.
This issue of money lending is important as all the indications are that many of the Gaelic landholders, who had survived the plantation of Ulster, and elsewhere, heavily mortgage and/or borrowed extensively from the settlers. Money was something new to the Gaels as up to then tribute and loyalty to the clan were the governing economic forces.
It was the evidence of these debts that was actively sought after in the homes of the settlers and many a protestant was tortured to reveal where these documents were hidden. Life certainly would have been lost during these house raids but not to the extent that was portrayed by the pamphlets and later ‘histories’.
Once the Protestants had armed themselves, however, things began to get worse because what you had then was bands of men and women from both sides meeting each other in open conflict. Inevitably people were going to get killed. Once the Protestants had armed themselves, however, very few of them were massacred as they tended to drive the rebels out of the area. It was the Protestants defending themselves, where they often killed many rebels that led to Protestants been killed as a form of retaliation or revenge.
The two most notorious incidents in Protestant mythology were the drowning of the Protestants at the bridge over the Bann at Portadown and the burning of Protestants in a thatched cottage in the parish of Kilmore.Both of these were recognised by deponents as the Catholics getting revenge for the 1000 Catholics that were killed by the settlers in a battle at Lisburn. In fact, one such deponent said ‘that the slaughter of the Protestants could be dated to this battle.
The Myth of Cromwell’s storming of Drogheda and his massacre of the Gaelic Irish civilians there
The Cromwellian storm of Drogheda in 1649 produced a Catholic counter equivalent to that of the Protestant myths of the 1641 massacres.
The image of Oliver Cromwell as the principle personification of English violence is a relatively recent product of unionist-nationalist divisions in Ireland –it was the Catholic Counter to the Unionist myths of the 1641 massacre.
In the 17th century, one might think that Cromwell would have been viewed as a hero among the Protestants of Ireland but, if anything, he was hated even more by this group. The reason for this was that there were more Protestants killed in Ireland by Cromwell’s forces than had been killed by the Catholic insurgents of 1641. The reason for this is that, as we shall see in a later lecture, the Protestant settlers in Ireland had divided along similar lines to the sides in the Civil War in England that broke out between the King and his Parliament. These ideological divisions emerged in Ireland and indeed Cromwell was sent to Ireland mainly to put down the Protestant Royalists more so than the Catholic Rebels.
Nationalist histories of this period would tell us that Cromwell massacred every man, woman and child in Drogheda (all of them Catholic) until the streets ran red with blood. This never happened. The garrison and townspeople within the Drogheda walls that fateful day were mainly Irish Protestants who were fighting for the royalist cause after the execution of Charles I in 1649. The standard they were fighting under was the royal one and not one for Ireland.
We have come to know the wrong history of Drogheda through nationalistic interpretations of Irish history which deliberately invented the myth.
To give you a few examples that it was a Protestant Royalist garrison A contemporary letter describing the event indicated that the Irish Protestants from the Drogheda garrison suffered the added indignation of having their heads severed and ‘sent to Dublin, to be hanged up on pokes as traitors’: Two letters, one from Dublin (22 Oct.,1649), E574(18).
Additionally, there were two Gaelic Irish armies in the field at this time, none of which were actually near Drogheda. The first of these was the Connaught one, under the Earl of Clanricard. When Drogheda fell they were lying disease ridden in Galway.
The actions of the other Gaelic Irish army under Owen Roe O’Neill will shock you. They were actually supporting the Parliamentary forces by helping to lift the siege of Derry of 1649 where the Royalist Protestant forces were besieging the Parliamentary Protestant forces there. Owen Roe brought his army to the assistance of the Cromwellians there at the very time that Drogheda was overrun,
The Protestants settlers in Ireland fought their own civil war in this period. Whereas the royalists among them hated Cromwell, those who supported the parliament held Cromwell up to be a hero but soon dropped this notion after the Battle of the Boyne when King Billy was held to be a safer hero figure for Protestant Ireland.
Cromwell was soon forgotten about by both traditions. It was only in the mid 19th century, as the emerging nationalist and unionist traditions ransacked the past in search of justifications for their world views, that Cromwell emerged as a central figure in Irish history.
People like Daniel O’Connell created the myth that the only true Irishman had to be Gaelic and Catholic. It was as a direct result of this doctrine that the myth of the Cromwellian massacre at Drogheda was invented.
There was indeed a massacre but the people killed where, in the main Protestants who were there fighting for their executed king.
Ironically the myth was expanded upon by the Protestant leaders of the so called Gaelic Revival where people like Yates and Hyde looked to the tradition of the Irish language and peasant folklore as the exclusive repository of Irishness.
Father Dennis Murphy brought out his Cromwell in Ireland in 1883 which tells the story from what he called, the folklore tradition. This book, in turn was used as the main reference for his Short History of Ireland for Schools which, in turn, was used by most writers who were producing school history books which were used for so long to indoctrinate the children and people of Ireland.
Finally I will conclude with an example of what is commonly held to be the Irish American Bible of Irish History. It is Seamus MacManus’s History of the Irish Race, In relation to Cromwell and Drogheda, MacManus claims to be quoting from a letter Cromwell sent to Parliament after the event. According to MacManus, Cromwell is quoted as saying ‘I ordered all men, women and children in the town put to the sword’. I have seen the original letter and the quote is actually this – I ordered all in arms in the town put to the sword.
I prefaced my lecture on historiography by saying there is no such thing as history, only interpretation. Here is another thing to remember.
Irish History is, more often than not, something that didn’t happen written by somebody who wasn’t there.
