Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.)
(Institute of Irish Studies, Belfast, £15)
The Irish Rising of 1641 is one of the landmark events in our history both because it produced unprecedented sectarian atrocities that have never been forgotten on either side of the denominational divide, and because it exacerbated existing tensions between different political groupings in Scotland and England. The three kingdom dimension of the disturbance is elegantly stated by Michael Perceval-Maxwell, and most of the other nine essayists in the collection accept his high-politics explanation of the insurrection even when they consider the events of 1641 in a particularly Irish or Ulster context. Four of the essays by John McCavitt, Phil Kilroy, Gráinne Henry and Michelle O’Riordan relate to different aspects of the background to the rising; two essays, by Raymond Gillespie and Hilary Simms consider what happened in Ulster during the winter months of 1641-2; and Aidan Clarke, Jacqueline Hill and Toby Barnard write of the ideological consequences that flowed from the events of 1641. Credit for this intelligent organisation must go to Brian Mac Cuarta who, in his carefully nuanced introduction, shows himself to be an accomplished historian, although his concern, and that of Archbishop Robert Eames who supplies the foreword, is to promote religious reconciliation by confronting people with the unpleasant truths of the past.
All readers will applaud this experiment in applied historiography while hoping that it achieves its laudable objective. In the short term I am happy to recommend the book to both general readers and specialists, because the essays are all well written, and there is a good mix between summaries of existing knowledge and excursions into the unknown. Of the summary essays that by Gráinne Henry on ‘Ulster Exiles in Europe 1603-4’ is the most successful, while Phil Kilroy’s discussion of ‘Protestantism in Ulster 1610-41’ suffers from the usual shortcoming of the genre in that it seeks to comprehend religion solely through the fulminations of theologians and devotes scanty attention to lay opinion or religious practice. This deficiency is partly made good by Raymond Gillespie when he briefly discusses Protestant reportage of the visions associated with the atrocities suffered by them, but this is in the course of a general essay on the Ulster origins of the rising. Michelle O’Riordan also returns to her previous publications when she describes the writings in Irish by Ulster authors that have a bearing on the events of 1641. The essay marks a new departure for her in that she takes account of prose compositions as well as those in verse but it is never clear what is distinctive about Ulster writing or what she means by ‘a native Ulster mentalité’.
The depositions — both those collected in the 1640s and the 1650s — from former residents of County Armagh form the basis of the investigation by Hilary Simms of what happened in that cockpit of insurrection. In her modest but effective study she concludes that while reports of multiple massacres were exaggerated the total number of Protestants killed in this relatively small area ranged between 500 and 1,000. My own reading of the same sources had led me to the same conclusion. The slaughter in Ulster was extensive and I have evidence of a murderous aspect to the uprising in many counties besides Armagh especially if we take account of all Protestants killed in all circumstances. This suggests that the early Protestant pamphlets, decrying the revolt as the product of a conspiracy led by the Anti-Christ, were not without substance. Aidan Clarke, in his stimulating contribution on this subject, is correct to praise the compositions of Henry Jones and John Temple for their logical coherence, but I think he has set out on a false trail in searching for a linear development of anti-Catholicism in Protestant writing on Ireland from some inchoate form at the close of the sixteenth-century to the ‘full-blown anti-popery’ that found expression in the writings of 1642. Barnaby Rich, for one, would have considered such a proposition as nothing short of calumny. The best approach to the study of hostile sentiment towards the Irish in the civil and religious spheres is to contrast the attitudes expressed at moments of crisis with those articulated when Protestant settlers were attempting to establish better working relations with their Catholic neighbours. Because of such ebbs and flows in animosity, it does not seem valid to think in terms of linear progression.
Both Jacqueline Hill and Toby Barnard consider how the publications of Jones and Temple assumed the deserved status of classics in the Irish Protestant martyrology of the next two centuries. Their essays are all the more valuable when they explain how Catholic authors strove to counter the key Protestant assumption that a total annihilation of Protestants in Ireland had been intended in 1641. However we will never have a full understanding of Catholic perceptions of these events until account is taken of Irish language sources as well as the Catholic texts prepared for the English speaking and reading elites. In this respect I would call particular attention to Seanchas na Sceithe by Antoin Ó Rafteirí, but the folklore archives would also have material on Catholic perceptions of injustices suffered in the past.
Ulster 1641 advances our knowledge of the uprising in several respects, while some individual pieces will provoke continued debate. The impact is blunted by two assumptions shared by most contributors: first that the rising was a uniquely Ulster happening, and second that no disturbance would have happened had it not been precipitated by dislocations in the political life of England and Scotland. John McCavitt consciously departs from one of these orthodoxies by identifying the grievances cherished by Ulster Catholics as a result of the development of a plantation society in Ulster during the first half of the seventeenth century. McCavitt does not conclude from this that a rising had become inevitable in 1641 or that the insurrection that did happen was ‘the sole product of the alleged iniquities of the Ulster plantation’. However what he does say about the disruption of indigenous society provoked by the plantation goes a considerable way towards explaining why the earliest disturbances of 1641 erupted in Ulster and why the insurrection in Ulster was more bloody than in other provinces. Even this does not explain why the Ulster insurrection spread so rapidly to all parts of Ireland, but McCavitt’s essay suggests that more account needs to be taken of long-term developments within Ireland itself that contributed to the widespread social and religious discontent that erupted in the fury of 1641.
Nicholas Canny