Irish Rebellion of 1641

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Irish Rebellion of 1641 began as an attempted coup d'état by Irish Catholic gentry, but rapidly degenerated into bloody intercommunal violence between native Irish Catholics and English and Scottish Protestant settlers as part of the Irish Confederate Wars and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

The rising was sparked off by Catholic fears of an impending invasion of Ireland by anti-Catholic forces of the English Long Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters. In turn, the rebels' association 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, 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.

1 Causes
2 The Rebellion
3 Massacres
4 Civil war and Confederation
5 Sources
6 External links
7 See also

[edit] 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 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 English 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.

[edit] Plantations

The 16th and early 17th 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 the granting of their land to 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 of this 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 Catholics' demands.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 the 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 Sir Charles Coote and William 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.

[edit] Massacres

The number of Protestants killed in the early months of the uprising is the subject of debate. Early Parliamentarian pamphlets claimed that over 100,000 settlers had lost their lives. In fact, recent research has suggested that the number is far more modest, in the region of 4,000 or so killed, though many thousands were expelled from their homes. It is estimated that up to 12,000 Protestants may have lost their lives in total, the majority dying of cold or disease after being expelled from their homes in the depths of winter. 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. In one notorious incident, the Protestant inhabitants of Portadown were taken captive and then massacred on the bridge in the town. In County Armagh, recent research has shown that about 1,250 Protestants were killed in the early months of the rebellion, or about a quarter of the Protestant population.

Modern historians have stressed that the massacres of 1641 had an overwhelming psychological impact on the Protestant settler community. Whereas before the Rebellion, inter-communal relationships had been improving, after it, many Protestants in Ireland took the attitude that the native Irish Catholic community could never be trusted again. This attitude led many settlers to take merciless reprisals on Catholics when they got the chance, particularly in 1642-43 when a Scottish Covenanter army landed in Ulster. Massacres of Catholic civilians or prisoners in 1641-42 occurred at Kilwarlin woods near Newry, Rathlin Island, Glenmaquinn near Strabane and elsewhere. In addition, the English Parliament passed an Ordinance of No Quarter against the Irish rebels, meaning that prisoners were to be killed when taken. William Lecky, the 19th century historian of the rebellion, concluded that, "it is hard to know on which side the balance of cruelty rests".

The widespread killing of civilians was brought under control to some degree in 1642, when Owen Roe O'Neill arrived in Ulster to command the Irish Catholic forces and hanged several rebels for attacks on civilians. Thereafter, the war, though still brutal, was fought in line with the code of conduct that both O'Neill and the Scottish commander Robert Munro had learned as professional soldiers in continental Europe.

In the long term, the cycle of massacres initiated in 1641 polarised Irish politics along sectarian lines. The effects of this can still be seen, particularly in Northern Ireland today. The bitterness created by the massacres of 1641 proved extremely long lasting. Ulster Protestants commemorated the anniversary of the rebellion on every October 23 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. In fact, if the figure of 12,000 deaths is accurate, this would represent less than 10% of the British settler population in Ireland, though in Ulster the ratio of deaths to the settler population would have been somewhat higher.

[edit] Civil war and Confederation

From 1641 to early 1642, the fighting in Ireland was characterised by small bands, raised by local lords or among local people, attacking civilians of opposing ethnic and religious groups. 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. This perception was soon shattered when the rebels failed to take nearby Drogheda, but by then the Pale lords had already committed themselves to rebellion.

By early 1642, there were four main concentrations of rebel forces; in Ulster under Phelim O'Neill, in the Pale around Dublin led by Viscount Gormanstown, in the south east, led by the Butler family - in particular Lord Mountgarret and in the south west, led by Donagh MacCarthy, Viscount Muskerry. In areas where British settlers were concentrated, around Cork, Dublin, Carrickfergus and Derry, they raised their own militia in self-defence and managed to hold off the rebel forces.

Charles I was initially hostile to the rebels and sent over a large army to Dublin to subdue them. The Scottish parliament also sent an army to Ulster to defend their compatriots there. However, a 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. Because of the Civil War in England, English troops were withdrawn from Ireland and a military stalemate ensued.

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 1649-53 and land ownership in Ireland passed almost exclusively to Protestants.

[edit] 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.