The Irish Rebellion of 1641 began as an attempted coup d'état by Irish Catholic gentry, but rapidly degenerated into bloody inter communal violence between native Irish Catholics and English and Scottish Protestant settlers. The rising was sparked off by Irish Catholic fear of an impending invasion of Ireland by anti-Catholic forces of the English Long Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters. In turn, the rebel’s association of themselves with the King of England Scotland and Ireland, Charles I, helped to trigger the start of the English Civil War. The Irish rebellion broke out in October 1641 and was followed by several months of violent chaos in Ireland before the Irish Catholic upper classes and Clergy formed the "Catholic Confederation" in the summer of 1642. The Confederation was a de facto government of Ireland that was loosely aligned with the Royalist side in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The subsequent war continued in Ireland until the 1650s, when Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army decisively defeated the Irish Catholics and Royalists and re-conquered the country.
Causes
The roots of the 1641 rebellion lie in the failure of the English State in Ireland to assimilate the native Irish elite in the wake of the Elizabethan conquest of the country. The pre-Elizabethan Irish population is usually divided into the "Old (or Gaelic) Irish", and the Old English (Ireland), or descendants of medieval Anglo-Norman settlers. These groups were historically antagonistic, with English settled areas such as the Pale around Dublin, south Wexford, and other walled towns being fortified against the rural Gaelic clans. However, by the seventeenth century, the cultural divide between these groups, especially at elite social levels, was declining. For example most Old English lords not only spoke the Gaelic language, but extensively patronised Irish poetry and music, Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis (more Irish than the Irish). Intermarriage was also common. Moreover, in the wake of the Elizabethan conquest, the native population became defined by their shared religion, Roman Catholicism, in distinction to the new Protestant British settlers and the officially Protestant British government of Ireland. During the decades in between the end of the Elizabethan wars of conquest in 1603 and the outbreak of rebellion in 1641, Irish Catholics felt themselves to be increasingly threatened by and discriminated against by the English government of Ireland.
Plantations
The 16th century English conquest of Ireland was marked by large scale " Plantations", notably in Ulster and Munster. These were mass dispossessions of Irish landowners, usually as punishment for rebellion, and their settlement with colonists from England and Scotland. The terms of the Plantation, particularly in Ulster, were very harsh on the native population, who were forbidden from owning or renting land in planted areas and also from working there on land owned by settlers. One result was the destruction of formerly powerful Irish clans such as the O’Neills and the O’Donnells culminating in an event known as the Flight of the Earls in 1607. Many of the exiles (notably Owen Roe O'Neill) found service as mercenaries in the Catholic armies of Spain and France. They formed an émigré Irish community, militantly hostile to the British Protestant state of Ireland. Another result was the build up of local grudges between natives and settlers at all levels of society that would explode into violence in 1641.
The religious question
Most of the Irish upper classes, however, were not ideologically opposed to the sovereignty of the King of England over Ireland, but wanted to be full subjects of the triple monarchy and maintain their pre-eminent position in Irish society. This was prevented by two factors, firstly their religious dissidence and secondly the threat posed to them by the extension of the Plantations. Protestantism was the official religion of the Three Kingdoms of Ireland, England and Scotland. Non-attendance at Church services was punishable by fines and open practise of another religion by arrest. Catholics could not hold offices of state, or serve in the military. The Irish privy council was dominated by English Protestants. The elections of the Irish Parliament were arranged so as to give Protestants a majority in it by the first decade of the 17th century. Moreover, the Irish Parliament was subordinate to the English Parliament by a 15th century ordinance known as Poynings Law. The Protestant (and therefore settler) dominated Government of Ireland tried to confiscate more land from the native landowners by questioning their medieval land titles and as punishment for non-attendance at Protestant services. In response, Irish Catholics appealed directly to the King, first James I and then Charles I, for full rights as subjects and toleration of their religion. On several occasions, the Monarchs appeared to have reached an agreement with them, granting their demands in return for raising taxes. However, Irish Catholics were disappointed when, on paying the increased levies, the King postponed the implementation of their demands. What was more, by the late 1630s, Thomas Wentworth, Charles’ representative in Ireland was proposing further widespread confiscations of native land in order to break the power of the Irish Catholic upper classes. It is likely that this would eventually have provoked armed resistance from Irish Catholics in any case, but the actual rebellion was pre-empted by the destabilisation of English politics.
Conspiracy
In 1640, Scotland rose in revolt against Charles I’s religious policies, believing them to be too close to Catholicism. The King’s attempts to put down the rebellion militarily failed when the English Long Parliament, which had similar religious concerns to the Scots, refused to vote for new taxes to pay for raising an army. Charles therefore negotiated with Irish Catholics to recruit an Irish army to put down the rebellion in Scotland, in return for the concession of long-standing Irish Catholics demands. To the Scots and the English Parliament, this appeared to confirm that Charles was a tyrant, who wanted to impose Catholicism on his Kingdoms and to govern without reference to his Parliament. During the early part of 1641, the Scots and Parliamentarians publicly proposed invading Ireland and subduing Catholicism there once and for all. Frightened by this, a small group of Irish Catholic conspirators conceived a plan to take Dublin and other important towns around the country in the name of the King, both to forestall an invasion and to force him to concede the Catholic’s demands.
Economic Factors
Economics also contributed to Ireland's slide into rebellion. The Irish economy had hit a recession and the harvest of 1641 was poor. The conspirators like Phelim O'Neill and Rory O'Moore were heavily in debt and risked losing their lands to creditors. What was more, the Irish peasantry were hard hit by the bad harvest and were faced with rising rents. This aggravated their long-standing resentment against the British settlers and contributed to the widespread lootings and killings that followed the rebellion.
The Rebellion
The conspirators were a small group of Irish landowners, mainly Gaelic Irish and from the heavily Planted province of Ulster. Hugh MacMahon and Conor Maguire were to seize Dublin Castle, while Phelim O’Neill and Rory O’Moore were to take Derry and other northern towns. The plan, to be executed on the 23rd of October 1641, was to use surprise rather than military force to take their objectives and to then issue their demands, in expectation of support from the rest of the country . However, the plan for a fairly bloodless seizure of power was foiled when the authorities in Dublin heard of the plot from an informer (a Protestant convert named Owen O’Connolly) and arrested Maguire and MacMahon. O’Neill meanwhile successfully took several forts in the north of the country, claiming to be acting in the King’s name. Fairly quickly, the violence spiralled out of the control of men who had instigated it. The English authorities in Dublin over-reacted to the rebellion, believing it to be a general uprising of Irish Catholics aimed at massacring the British and Protestant population. Their response was to send commanders such as Charles Coote and Warhame St Leger (themselves Protestant settlers) to subdue the general population, which they did by assaults on the civilian inhabitants. Meanwhile, in Ulster, the breakdown of state authority prompted widespread assaults by the native Irish population on English and Scottish settlers. Phelim O’Neill and the other insurgent leaders initially tried to stop the attacking of Protestants, but were unable to control the local peasantry - motivated by sectarian and ethnic hatred and by resentment of decades of social and economic subordination to the settlers. Communal violence of this kind spread within months to the rest of the country. Many Irish Catholic lords who had lost lands or feared dispossession joined the rebellion and participated in the assault on the settler population.
Massacres
The number of British Protestants killed in the early months of the uprising is controversial, early Parliamentarian pamphlets claiming that over 100,000 settlers had lost their lives. In fact, recent research has shown that the number is far more modest, in the region of 4000 or so killed, though many thousands were expelled from their homes. The general pattern around the country was that the violence of the attacks intensified the longer the rebellion went on. At first, there were beatings and robbing of local Protestants, then house burnings and expulsions and finally widespread killings, most of them concentrated in Ulster. The bitterness created by the massacres of 1641 proved extremely long lasting. Ulster Protestants commemorated the anniversary of the rebellion every October for over two hundred years after the event. Images of the massacres of 1641 are still represented on the banners of the Orange Order. Even today, the killings are thought of by some as an example of attempted genocide.
Civil war and Confederation
see also Irish Confederate Wars
At first, many of the Irish Catholic upper classes were reluctant to join the rebellion, especially the "Old English" community. However, within six months almost all of them had joined the rebellion. There were three main reasons for this. First, local lords and landowners raised armed units of their dependants to control the violence that was engulfing the country, fearing that after the settlers were gone, the Irish peasantry would turn on them as well. Secondly, the English Parliament and the Government of Ireland made it clear that it held all Irish Catholics responsible for the rebellion and murders of Protestants and would punish them accordingly . Thirdly, it looked initially as if the rebels would be successful after they defeated a government force at Julianstown. Charles I was initially hostile to the rebels and sent over a large army to subdue them. The Scots also sent an army to Ulster to defend their compatriots there. However, the quick defeat of the rebels in Ireland was prevented by the outbreak of Civil War in England. Among other issues, the English Parliament did not trust Charles with command of the army raised to send to Ireland, fearing that it would afterwards be used against them.
This gave the Irish Catholics breathing space to create the Catholic Confederation, which would run the Irish Catholic war effort. This was instigated by the Catholic clergy and by landed magnates such as Viscount Gormanstown and Lord Mountgarret. By the Summer of 1642, the rebellion proper was over and was superseded by a conventional war between the Irish Catholics, who controlled two thirds of the country, and the British controlled enclaves in Ulster, Dublin and around Cork in Munster. The following period is known as Confederate Ireland The Confederation sided with the Royalists in return for the promise of self-government and full rights for Catholics after the war. They were finally defeated by the forces of the English Parliament in 1649-52 and land ownership in Ireland passed almost exclusively to Protestants.
Sources
- O'Siochru, Micheal, Confederate Ireland 1642-49, Four Courts Press Dublin 1999.
- Lenihan, Padraig, Confederate Catholics at War 1641-49, Cork University Press, Cork 2001.
- Ohlmeyer, Jane and Kenyon, John (ed.s), The Civil Wars, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998.
- Canny, Nicholas, Making Ireland British 1580-1650, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001.
See also
Last updated: 08-07-2005 22:03:43
