Revolution

There were two revolutions in Ireland following James's ‘abdication’ of the English throne in the winter of 1688/9. The first was an attempted Catholic revolution, which sought to restore full political, economic and religious control of the kingdom to the Catholic majority and also to make Ireland more independent from England. The other was a Williamite counterrevolution – a revolution, that is, in the sense of putting the clock back to where things had started. The outcome was decided by war, with the crucial turning point coming with the Williamite victory at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690, although the war dragged on for another year until the final Jacobite surrender at Limerick on 3 October 1691. The struggle in Ireland has been described in various ways. In Gaelic it is known as Cogadh an Dá Rí – ‘the war of the two kings’. One contemporary Irish Jacobite styled it simply ‘the Irish war… undertaken to vindicate the king's [James II's] rights against the rebellion of England’. So far as the inhabitants of Ireland were concerned, Irish historians have argued, ‘the war was the climax of a long struggle for supremacy between Protestant settlers… and an older, Catholic population’.⁴ As the account by Charles O'Kelly, a Gaelic Irish landowner who served in James's army, makes clear, the Catholic majority wanted to promote the interests of their religion, but they also wanted their estates back and to free Ireland from English domination.⁵ Protestants have tended to emphasize the religious dimensions of the conflict. Shortly before the Battle of the Boyne, Mercurius Reformatus, a Williamite newspaper published in London, asserted that ‘It is not now a Civil Interest [i.e., who was the rightful king] properly that animates the two Armies in that Kingdom; In effect ‘tis become a Religious War between Papist and Protestant, the one striving to preserve, and the other to propogate [sic] their Religion.’⁶ For Protestants in Northern Ireland the victory at the Boyne is still celebrated as the day when William of Orange ‘overthrew the Pope and Popery’.⁷

A war of two kings, a struggle for supremacy, for independence, a war of religion – no one description does justice to the complexities of the issues that were at stake in Ireland in 1689–91. The war was, in a sense, a combination of all these, but not all the participants in the struggle, even those who were on the same side, saw things the same way. James II, although a Catholic, was not fighting primarily for religion, but for the crowns of his three kingdoms. He did not want independence for Ireland, since his aim was to get back into a position of power whereby he could rule Ireland as an English dependency, and he was concerned about giving too much ground to the Catholic interest in Ireland for fear of further alienating his English and Scottish Protestant subjects. Within Ireland itself, there was not a straightforward split between Catholics and Protestants. The attempted Catholic revolution of 1689 was carried out in the main by the Old English proprietors, those who had lost their lands during the 1640s and 1650s and had not had them restored at the Restoration. The Gaelic Irish benefited little, while the New Catholic proprietors, those who had reacquired land or purchased new estates after the Restoration, felt they could only lose from a revolution that sought to break the Act of Settlement. Moreover, some Protestants sided with James II, either out of a sense of loyalty to their legitimate king or a desire to offer the path of least resistance. Certainly, there is an important sense in which the struggle was over religion, or between rival confessional groupings. Yet there was always much more at stake than religion: there were the questions of economic and political control, of independence versus colonial dependency, of constitutional propriety, and of the international threat posed by an aggressively expansionist France.

THE COLLAPSE OF ORDER IN THE WINTER OF 1688/9

It was in Ireland where support for James II remained strongest over the course of 1688. February saw celebrations in several places for the anniversary of the King's accession (6 February) and at the news that the Queen was pregnant (19 February in Dublin, a week later elsewhere).⁸ According to a hostile account, the Irish were universally confident that the Queen ‘was with Child of a Son’, attributing ‘their great assurance to the Prayers of their Infallible Church, which were daily offered to God upon this account'.⁹ There was widespread rejoicing when the Queen gave birth to a son that summer, and James was reported to have been greatly satisfied with ‘the General Joy… the whole Kingdome Conceived upon the happy News’.¹⁰ The recently purged corporation of Dublin spent £50 on claret celebrating the Prince's birth, and the official day of thanksgiving on 1 July was marked throughout the city with bonfires, bells and ‘all other outward Marks of Inward Joy and Satisfaction’.¹¹ The mayor of Limerick, it is said, ‘made great rejoicings, and let three hogsheads of wine run among the populace’.¹² Overjoyed Catholics celebrated throughout the night, and forced ‘the English out of their Beds’ to drink ‘Confusion to the King's Enemies upon their Knees’.¹³

Most Protestants were less enthusiastic, naturally, though their protests were muted. A couple of libels ‘reflecting much on the King, Queen, and Queen dowager’ were posted on the door of Christ Church and the Temple church in Dublin in January 1688 when news arrived that the Queen was with child.¹⁴ There are hints that the celebrations in Dublin for the Prince's birth were not all they might have been: for example, Tyrconnell's appointee as Lord Mayor had the officers of Christ Church committed to the stocks because ‘he fancied they did not make the Bells ring merrily enough’.¹⁵ One clergyman, of Scottish descent, who gave ‘a smart Sermon… on a publick Occasion’ in Dublin that autumn (possibly 23 October), earned himself a rebuke from his cautious prelate. The bold cleric replied: ‘My Lord, we have a Scotch proverb, He that is afraid of a fart will never stand thunder.’¹⁶ Some Protestants in County Meath tried to commemorate the anniversary of the Irish rebellion on 23 October, though local Catholics managed to put out their bonfires.¹⁷

James felt sufficiently secure about his position in Ireland to order Tyrconnell, at the end of September, to send over one battalion of the regiment of guards, two regiments of infantry and one regiment of dragoons – a total of 2,820 men – to help deal with William of Orange's intended invasion of England.¹⁸ The Catholic majority in Ireland remained firmly behind James in the face of William's threat, holding a number of fast days to beseech God for the King's success against his enemies. According to one Dublin Protestant, one of ‘the ceremonies they used at the Mass Houses’ involved the formal cursing of William's effigy, which they then cut into pieces, cursing and spitting on every bit, before finally burning it.¹⁹ The town of Galway staged a public anti-Williamite demonstration at the beginning of December. A local Protestant had for a number of years kept a statue outside his front door that he had rescued from the stern of an old Dutch ship that had broken up in the harbour, and which had come to be known as the sign of the Prince of Orange. Now a group led by one of the town's sheriffs seized the statue, ‘and burnt part of it in one, and part in another of the most publick places of the Town, drinking several times Confusion and Damnation to the Prince of Orange’. Several leading members of the corporation and many local gentry turned up to witness the affair, as did the deputy town sovereign of nearby Tuam, a man by the name of Connor, who proposed to cut off all his hair and burn it ‘because it was an Orange Colour’. (His son managed to dissuade him from this drastic course of action.) There was a tar barrel in one of the bonfires, which spilled some of its contents onto the burning statue; when Connor saw this, he ‘drew out his Sword, and ran at it, crying, See, I have killed the Son of a Whore, his Heart's Blood runs out of him’.²⁰

With well over one-third of his army in England, Tyrconnell set about recruiting and training replacements. Within a short period of time it was reported that he had 9,000 foot and 3,000 horse.²¹ Following James's flight in December and subsequent ‘abdication’ from the English throne, Tyrconnell accelerated the build-up of troops, so that by early February 1689 he had raised an army approaching 45,000 men, made up overwhelmingly of Catholics.²² Catholic civilians were also encouraged to arm themselves, to protect the country against the Protestants should the army be called away to an engagement elsewhere – these became known as rapparies, or half-pike men, after the weapons they carried. Several reports confirm that the Catholic priests forbade their parishioners from coming to mass unless ‘furnished with a Skene of 16 Inches long in the Blade, and a large Half-pike’. By early January it was said that all the Irish were armed, ‘not a Cowboy without his Bayonnet, or some such weapon’.²³

According to Protestant sources, Catholic priests began telling their flock that Tyrconnell would ‘free them from the Slavery of their Conquerors’, and render Ireland ‘free and independent’.²⁴ Certainly letters began to circulate alleging that the papists were plotting another massacre, along the lines of 1641. One such, dated London, 14 November 1688 (though postmarked Dublin), and purportedly written by one ‘Rory McFlynn’ to the deputy recorder of Kilkenny, claimed that the Catholics had beaten the ‘fanatical army’ in England, and would ‘ere long cut the throats of all [the] fanatical crew’ in Ireland.²⁵ Another, dated 3 December and addressed to the Earl of Mount-Alexander, warned that ‘all Irishmen… through Ireland’ had sworn that on Sunday 9 December they would fall on all the Protestants and ‘murder Man, Wife, and Child’, sparing none. Tyrconnell hastily issued a proclamation promising the Protestants protection and making it an offence to spread false alarms, and urged the Protestant clergy to reassure their parishioners that they would be secured against any acts of violence. This did little to allay anxieties, however.²⁶ The Mount-Alexander letter reached Dublin on Friday the 7th, and the following day thousands of people abandoned their homes and made their way to the ships in the harbour, ‘with Scarce any Cloaths upon their Backs’, in the hope of getting out of the country before the atrocity was committed. In several parts of the kingdom the news of the intended massacre arrived on Sunday the 9th, while people were at church, provoking predictable panic: we have reports of people rushing out of church and being trampled under foot, or else jumping out of windows as they scrambled to escape. When a newly raised and not yet properly uniformed Catholic regiment under the command of the Earl of Antrim arrived at Derry on the 7th, to relieve Viscount Mountj largely Protestant regiment, which had been recalled to Dublin, the inhabitants naturally feared the worst. While the civic leaders, reluctant to defy the authority of their king, contemplated what course of action to take, thirteen apprentices took it upon themselves to shut the gates to the troops, draw up the bridge, and seize the magazine. The Protestants of nearby Enniskillen did likewise on the 16th, refusing to admit two companies of foot soldiers.²⁷

Many Protestants decided to flee Ireland in the winter months of 1688/9, making their way in vast numbers to Lancashire, Cheshire, Bristol, north and south Wales, Devon and the Isle of Man. Others headed for the Protestant strongholds of the north, particularly Enniskillen and Derry.²⁸ Those who stayed put found themselves at the mercy of their Catholic neighbours or the Catholic troops. Although the accounts we have need to be treated with caution, there undoubtedly was a serious problem of discipline with the newly raised troops. Tyrconnell did not have the resources to pay for such large numbers of men, despite seizing the rents of Protestant landowners and Trinity College; he expected the officers, in return for their commissions, to subsist the men for the first few months, but their meagre resources soon became exhausted and the army was forced to live at free quarter and from what it could get from the countryside.²⁹ From a number of towns, including Dublin, Limerick, Galway, Drogheda, Birr and Athlone, came ‘heavy Complaints’ that the soldiers took ‘the very Meat out of the poor Protestants Mouths’. In the countryside the troops seized cattle or grain for their subsistence, and robbed and pillaged the houses of Protestants.³⁰ On 2 February Tyrconnell issued a proclamation denouncing such depredations, but in reality there was little he could do.³¹ Those fleeing Ireland brought news of ‘frequent Robberies and Murders’ that were ‘daily perpetrated in every part of the Country’. Reports from early February claimed that, in the County of Cork alone, ‘above 10,000 head of Cattel’ had been taken from the Protestants.³² A few weeks later, one Dublin correspondent reported how 3,000 cows were stolen in Kerry and ‘above 4,000 sheep in less than 30 miles circumference in some sheep counties’;³³ by the third week of April, we are told, ‘not one Englishman in the County of Kerry’ had ‘the value of one sixpence left’.³⁴ The Comte d'Avaux, the French ambassador to the Jacobite court in Ireland, estimated that in total some 50,000 cattle and 300,000 sheep were slaughtered over the course of just six weeks.³⁵

There may have been a ritualistic element to the attacks on Protestant cattle. One pamphleteer alleged that the Irish ‘would not kill a Beef, or a Mutton, before they had called a formal Jury on him, and tried him for Heresie’. In Headford, County Galway, for example, the soldiers who had seized the choice sheep belonging to a local Protestant appointed a judge and jury, and put the sheep, one by one, in the pulpit of the parish church where they were garrisoned, tugging at each poor animal until it started to bleat, whereupon they would cry ‘down with the Rogue, he preaches heretical Doctrine’. If the soldiers found ‘any small Irish Cattel, that had no Brand’ rounded up by mistake, they immediately dismissed them, and indicted and fined those who brought them. But branded beasts, which ‘belonged to them that followed the English way of Husbandry’ were ‘condemned for Hereticks, and immediately slaughtered’.³⁶

If the Protestant farmers put up any resistance, reports in the London press claimed, the soldiers simply killed them.³⁷ Catholic civilians also took advantage of the general breakdown of law and order to join in the attack on Protestants and settle some old scores; it was even alleged that Catholic priests actively encouraged their parishioners ‘to plunder the Protestants’.³⁸ Accounts from Protestant sources perhaps need to be treated with a degree of scepticism. Nevertheless, the poetry of the Gaelic literatus David Ó Bruadair began to take on a stridently militant tone: ‘My friends, we should never forget to thank God in the choir of our Church / That we see their sadness increase since their [the Protestants'] turn to suffer arrived’, he wrote on 26 February 1689, adding: ‘It is no honest kindness for us to be soft with old fleecers like them… / To have suffered such people to live hath brought nought but a nettle-crop forth’.³⁹ Protestants fleeing Ulster for the Isle of Man in mid-May told how, towards the beginning of that month, the Irish had massacred some 500 Protestants in County Down, sparing neither man, woman nor child. A ship's captain, who had visited the Isle of Man, claimed he ‘saw severall Protestants… whose noses were cut by the Irish’, three of whom had since died, and that he had heard ‘that severall weomen's breasts were cut off by the Irish’ and that a heavily pregnant English woman had been gang-raped by seven Irish dragoons.⁴⁰

Protestants throughout Ireland naturally tended to look to William of Orange for assistance, especially given that his Declaration of Reasons of September 1688 had affirmed his intention to secure ‘the Protestant and British Interest there’.⁴¹ Towards the end of November, the nonconformist ministers and gentlemen of note in the Province of Ulster decided to send a delegate to the Prince to represent ‘the Dangers and Fears of the Protestants in Ireland’ and urge him ‘to take some speedy and effectual Care for their preservation and relief’.⁴² An address in the name of the Presbyterians of Ireland eventually reached William on 26 December, promising that ‘all the Presbyterians in Ireland were at his Highness's service… for the perfecting the ends of his Declaration’..⁴³ In the meantime, the Protestants who stayed in Ireland began to arm in self-defence. Derry and Enniskillen in the north, as we have seen, had been the first to take a stance against Tyrconnell, refusing admission to his troops in December. In early January, Protestants from all the northern counties, numbering over 60,000 men, formed themselves into an armed association to defend their religion, ‘Ancient Government’ (which they saw ‘as depending upon England’) and ‘Laws and Liberties’, against the illegal actions of Tyrconnell and the Catholics; they promised they would protect the Catholics as well, but insisted that only those ‘Qualified by the Laws of the Land’ should be allowed to bear arms.⁴⁴ Within each county there were local centres of resistance. At Hillsborough, County Down, in eastern Ulster, the effort was headed by the Earl of Mount-Alexander; in County Antrim, in the north-east, by Lord Massereene. In the north-west, the Protestants of County Sligo issued a declaration stating they were resolved ‘to adhere to the Laws of the Land, and the Protestant Religion’, and that they would unite themselves ‘with England, and hold to the Government thereof, and a Free Parliament’.⁴⁵ Most of this activity was explicitly Williamite. The castle at Ballyshannon in County Donegal declared ‘for the Prince of Orange, and Protestant Religion’.⁴⁶ When news reached Derry and Enniskillen that the English Convention had voted that King James had abdicated and placed William and Mary on the vacant throne, both places held ceremonies to proclaim the new monarchs, which they conducted ‘with such Joy and Solemnity’ as their circumstances would allow.⁴⁷

Protestants in the south also began to organize in self-defence. In the second week of December 1688, the Protestants of the town of Bandon, in County Cork, ejected the Catholic dragoons and then shut the town gates.⁴⁸ Early in the new year, the Protestant nobility and gentry of the province of Munster issued a declaration justifying their actions. Pointing to the violations to ‘Laws of this Kingdom’ since James's accession, to the ‘almost Subversion of the Protestant Religion' and the ‘Thefts and Outrages… committed by the Popish Forces of this Kingdom’ against Protestants, and how they had been threatened with ‘the loss of our Religion, Laws, Lives, Liberties and Properties’, they had ‘unanimously Resolved’, they explained, to repel ‘Force with Force’, and ‘stand by each other in the Suppression of all that shall molest us… in our Religion, Laws, Lives, Liberties and Properties’.⁴⁹ Towards the end of January, the 180 Protestants of Killmare (now Kenmare), in County Kerry, withdrew to a makeshift garrison at Killowen, an island on the Kenmare River, and declared they had decided to associate in defence of their ‘Lives and Religion… against the Enemies of the Protestant Church’ until they were received into the ‘Command of His Highness the Prince of Orange’.⁵⁰

There was also a powerful lobby in London representing Protestant interests in Ireland, comprising both long-time absentee landowners and those who had fled in the face of recent developments. On 21 December, a large contingent of nobility and gentry with ‘Estates and Effects in Ireland’ addressed the Prince about ‘the great danger’ facing the Protestants, and imploring his relief.⁵¹ Similar addresses followed at the end of the month and early in the new year, while towards the end of April the Protestant bishops of Ireland petitioned the Lords ‘laying open their afflicted condition’.⁵²

However, the fate of Ireland was of concern not just to those Protestants with an interest in that kingdom; it was seen as a British concern, in which the Scots and English also had a stake. In the second week of January, the Scottish nobility, worried about the plight of their fellow countrymen in Ulster, drew up an address to William asking him to send forces to Ireland to reduce it ‘to the Government of England’.⁵³ Indeed, at the beginning of February the Scottish council decided to send a considerable supply of muskets and powder from the magazine in Stirling Castle to the Protestants in Derry for their defence.⁵⁴ There was pressure from the English as well, and especially those with more Whiggish sympathies, for William to take action on behalf of the Protestant interest in Ireland. Thus on 26 December, the provisional government in London addressed the Prince, pledging their support for his efforts to deliver them ‘from the miseries of Popery and slavery’ and desiring him ‘to take speciall care of Ireland’.⁵⁵ In the Commons on 29 January, the Whig lawyers Pollexfen, Maynard, Treby and Somers objected to holding the debate over what conditions should be attached to the offer of the English crown to William and Mary because this ‘would necessarily take up much time, whereby Ireland might be destroyed’.⁵⁶ The petition presented to the Lords on 2 February from the citizens and inhabitants of London and Westminster, urging that William and Mary might be ‘speedily Settled in the Throne’, also pleaded ‘that Ireland, now in a Bleeding and Deplorable Condition, may be rescued from its Miseries’.⁵⁷ For William, too, preserving ‘the Protestant religion and the English Interest’ in Ireland remained a high priority, as he made clear to both the provisional government in London in late December and again to the Convention Parliament when it convened on 22 January.⁵⁸

However, William was in no position to take speedy military action; that would have to wait until his position within England had been settled and parliament had voted a supply to the army. Tyrconnell himself seemed in two minds: should he try to hold out until James could arrive from France with military reinforcements, or would it be wiser to try to broker a deal with William now, while he still had the chance? William made an attempt to open negotiations with Tyrconnell, sending Richard Hamilton, an Irish Catholic officer in the English army who had been arrested at the time of the Revolution, with an offer of terms. For his part, Tyrconnell dispatched Viscount Mountjoy to France to seek James's permission to treat with William, explaining that he could ruin the kingdom, if that was what his majesty wanted, ‘and make it a heap of rubbish’, but that ‘it was impossible to preserve it and make it of use’. However, this appears to have been a ploy to get Mountjoy out of the country – Tyrconnell also sent Chief Baron Rice to Paris with the secret message that Mountjoy was a traitor and that otherwise Ireland remained loyal to James and would rise on his behalf.⁵⁹ Indeed, Tyrconnell was soon making it clear that he would not capitulate. Towards the end of the third week of January, he publicly declared that ‘he would raise and arm all the Irish from 16 to 60’ if the English invaded, and let them loose upon the Protestants. Many panic-stricken Dubliners hastily took boat for England; at Holyhead, the newly arrived refugees claimed they ‘had Certaine advice that all the Papists were ready to Execute their Barbarous designe’ whenever they got ‘the word of Command’.⁶⁰ On 25 January, Tyrconnell issued a proclamation against armed associations, ordering all those so assembled to disperse under pain of treason; a month later he ordered all Protestants in Dublin immediately to hand over their arms and ammunition and called in all serviceable horses (those who refused, he said, ‘must run the risk of the ill-consequences which may fall upon them by the disorders of the soldiers’), and on 1 March, he issued orders for the seizure of arms and horses throughout the country. ⁶¹ The centres of resistance at Bandon and Killmare caved in; isolated, and with no prospect of immediate relief from William, the Protestants decided to surrender and make the best terms they could with the Catholic forces sent to suppress them.⁶² Only the north remained in open defiance to the Jacobite regime. On 22 February, William and Mary, recently designated king and queen of England and Ireland by the English Convention, issued a declaration offering a full indemnity to those in Ireland who laid down their arms and promising Roman Catholics the freedom to exercise their religion in private, but stipulating that those who continued in arms would be deemed traitors.⁶³ On 7 March Tyrconnell responded with a declaration against the treasonous armed associations in Ulster and Sligo, and sent Richard Hamilton with a force of some 2,500 men to reduce the rebels.⁶⁴ It was, in effect, a declaration of war.

THE ATTEMPTED CATHOLIC REVOLUTION OF 1689

James's supporters in Ireland awaited his arrival with eager anticipation. After several false reports of his landing, prompting bells and bonfires in Dublin and elsewhere,⁶⁵ James finally reached Ireland on 12 March, landing at Kinsale, where he was received, we are told, ‘with all the demonstrations of Joy imaginable’.⁶⁶ James was the first king of England to visit Ireland since Richard II in 1399 – though he did so, of course, only after having lost his English crown. (Ironically, 1399 was also the year that Richard was forced to abdicate the English throne, likewise following a foreign invasion in the face of which he had surrendered without a fight.) From Kinsale James made a slow progress to the Irish capital. ‘All along the road’, one Irish account states, ‘all degrees of people’, of both sexes, old and young, came to meet him ‘with staunch loyalty, profound respect, and tender love… as if he had been an angel from heaven’, so that the hundred miles from Kinsale to Dublin were ‘like a great fair’.⁶⁷ When James arrived at Cork on the 15th, he was greeted by ‘the Irish’ – after ‘their rude and barbarous manner’, our Protestant source editorializes – with ‘Bagpipes, Dancing, throwing their Mantles under his Horses Feet, making a Garland of a Cabbage Stump, and such like Expressions of Joy’.⁶⁸ At Kilkenny, on 22 March, he was presented with an address by one Dr Murphy, the titular Bishop of Ossory, pledging the commitment of ‘all Irish heads’ for restoring James II to his ‘own throne’. Revealingly, the Irish thought of James as king of England, though an English king to whom they professed a particular attachment because he was descended, through his Scottish heritage, from the original line of Irish kings. ‘Never was a King of England so kind to this country’, the address read; ‘never was this country so kind to a British prince’. Whereas ‘the other English monarchs’ had commanded ‘the bare duty of our allegiance… our endevours for your Majesty's interest’, Murphy assured James, ‘are the effect of a national inclination and the work of a sympathy of blood’.⁶⁹ The most magnificent reception was reserved for Dublin, which James reached on the 24th, Palm Sunday. James rode through the town on horseback to the ‘lowd and joyfull acclamations’ of people ‘of all ranks’ shouting ‘God save the King’: the magistrates, nobility, gentry and judges were out in numbers; soldiers lined the streets; tapestries decorated adjacent buildings; there were pageants on specially erected stages; friars sang; ‘Oysterwenches, Poultry- and Herb-women’, dressed in white, danced and strewed the streets with flowers; pipers played ‘The King enjoys his own again’; and the local inhabitants drank toasts with wine paid for out of the town coffers. ‘A mad Scots man’ apparently ‘rushed through the crowd’ and flung a hat on James's head, crying out in French, ‘Let the King live for ever’.⁷⁰

There were reasons why the Catholic people of Ireland might have thought twice about taking up the cause of restoring their banished king. One retrospective Irish Jacobite account conceded that ‘the sad remembrance’ of how they ‘had been oppressed’ by Charles II should have made ‘the Irish Catholick nobility’ rejoice ‘at the misfortune of an ensuing King of England, especially of the immediate successor and brother of their oppressor; which brother at the time of their oppression behaved himself not much better’, having ‘received into his possession the estates of several Irish Catholicks’. But Catholics, this author continued, regarded loyalty to the ‘lawful sovereign’ as a religious duty. It was ‘the pretended reformed people of England’ who were ‘prone to rebellion’, having dethroned three kings one after another (Charles I in 1649, Charles II on the death of his father, and James II in 1689). It was therefore in the King's interest, the author went on, to make ‘Ireland a powerful nation, in order to be a check upon the people of England’, and in the process he spelled out what the Irish Catholics hoped to achieve in return for their loyalty: the restoration of ‘their ancient estates’; an independent Irish Parliament capable of enacting laws without English approval; judicial independence, so that causes could be determined ‘without an appeal to the tribunals of England’; a ‘full liberty’ for merchants to export and import ‘without an obligation of touching at any harbour in England’; Catholic self-governance, meaning ‘the principal posts of state and war’ should be conferred ‘on the Catholick natives’, and that there should be a Catholic standing army and militia; and the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.⁷¹

It would be wrong to convey the impression that James had no Protestant support. Many Protestants, particularly those of the Established Church, had qualms about renouncing their allegiance to their legitimate king, even though they had no sympathy for Tyrconnell's agenda. One anonymous correspondent sent a letter to Clarendon on 20 November 1688, begging the former Lord Lieutenant (who was himself to become a Jacobite) to help ‘save a kingdom’, in which he stated that there were ‘thousands that have never bowed the knee to Romish Baal, yet who know how to be loyal to the King’.⁷² Although the climate had certainly changed by the following March, and many Protestants had either fled, been brutalized out of their allegiance, or come to accept the English Convention's judgment that James had abdicated and that William and Mary were now their lawful sovereigns, there were still some Protestants in Ireland who welcomed James's arrival, believing that his presence would help restore law and order. The managers of the Boyle estate in Munster, for example, provided money for beer and a bonfire so that the tenants could celebrate James's arrival at Kinsale.⁷³ One Protestant broadsheet stated that the late King's arrival in Dublin on 24 March ‘gave us some hopes it would abate the Cruelty of the inraged Tyr[connel]l’;⁷⁴ indeed, James did issue a proclamation the following day forbidding plundering and offering his protection to all his subjects.⁷⁵ Shortly after James's arrival in Dublin, Bishop Dopping of Meath and the Dublin clergy waited upon James at Dublin Castle and promised they would ‘continue loyal as church principles oblige’.⁷⁶ Quite a few Protestants of the Established Church were to fight with James against William III; indeed, according to one member of William's army in Ireland, 5,000 of the 7,000 horse that were to fight with James at the Battle of the Boyne were English Protestants!⁷⁷ Some of the nonconformists who had benefited from Tyrconnell's assault on the corporations, and most particularly the Quakers, allied themselves with James.⁷⁸

At the same time, the evidence of widespread Catholic support for James should not lead us to assume that the Catholics were in total agreement. Although keen to restore him to the throne because he was a zealous supporter of the Catholic religion, they were all too aware, O'Kelly tells us, that he had showed himself ‘as little disposed as his brother… to assert the hereditary rights of the natives, or restore their estates’.⁷⁹ Many Irish Catholics may have identified more strongly with Tyrconnell, at least at this juncture, since he was known to be eager to challenge the land settlement; indeed, there was some speculation in January among Protestants in Britain that Tyrconnell, who was said to be descended from the old kings of Ireland, might usurp the throne for himself.⁸⁰ On the other hand, those Catholics who had either managed to hold on to their estates or else had purchased new ones since the Restoration were reluctant to risk what they had in a war. Their chief spokesman, the Earl of Limerick, had tried to persuade Tyrconnell to come to terms with William before James arrived in Ireland, advising him that ‘they had more than they were willing to lose upon this occasion’, and thought ‘it was not equal to venture the loss of good Estates on the same bottom with those who had none, and who would do anything to get one’.⁸¹ Limerick and the Catholic New Interest did in the end fight for James, though they were to be the first to look for a compromise settlement when things started going against them. James had an incentive to try to build bridges between the Catholic and Protestant populations of Ireland, not least because his aim was to re-establish himself as king in all three of the British kingdoms. There were others close to the King, however, who advised him to throw in his lot totally with the Catholics. In a much publicized coffee-house conversation, Lord Brittas, an Irish noble who had arrived with James from France, allegedly told a local Protestant minister that James could not trust his Protestant subjects, and that it was James's design ‘to regain his Thrones by down right force of the Arms of his Catholick Subjects, and by assistance from France’, so that coming in as ‘an absolute Conqueror’, he would ‘be free from those Fetters and Chains Wherewith his rebellious Protestants would bind him’, and might ‘do what he please’.⁸²

The tensions that existed within the Jacobite interest in Ireland became evident during the meeting of the Irish parliament, which James summoned to assemble at Dublin on 7 May 1689. With the corporations now dominated by Catholics and the sheriffs handpicked by Tyrconnell, James and his Lord Deputy were well placed to secure the return of the type of parliament they wanted. Tyrconnell sent out letters with the election writs recommending his choice of candidates; it was also said that the sheriffs were instructed to alert Catholic, but not Protestant freeholders about the election. Not that the Protestants, particularly those in the north, were keen to participate and, by implication, recognize James's right to summon a parliament in Ireland, after the English Convention had conferred the Irish crown on William and Mary. The counties of Donegal, Fermanagh and Londonderry, and a number of boroughs, mainly in Ulster, refused to make returns. The result was a depleted House of Commons, seventy short of its full quota, and one that was overwhelmingly Catholic, there being only six Protestants returned. To judge by the surnames, however, over two-thirds were of Old English stock; the Gaelic Irish were firmly in the minority. The House of Lords should have been a predominantly Protestant body. Yet of the sixty-nine temporal peers who had the right to sit in the upper house, only a handful remained in Ireland, while James set about creating new titles and reversing outlawries in order to boost the Catholic presence. Although Protestant writers criticized James for such practices, it should be pointed out that the Scots allowed forfaulted peers to take their seats in the Scottish Convention of 1689, before their forfaultures had been overturned. Contemporary accounts disagree over how many sat in the House of Lords. One lists forty-one lay peers as being present on 7 May, but this certainly includes some who were absentees and others who left shortly after the opening session; other accounts put the figure at between thirty and thirty-two, which probably reflects the number of those lay peers who were in continual attendance. Of these, only five were Protestants (though it is possible that two or three other Protestant peers might have attended briefly); the rest were Catholic, but again mostly of Old English stock, there being only a few Gaelic Irish peers. Significantly, James insisted that the spiritual peers should be the bishops of the Established Church, not the titular bishops of the Catholic Church. There were only seven left in the kingdom, and three of these had to be excused on the grounds of age or sickness, but four – the bishops of Cork, Limerick, Meath and Ossory – did take their seats.⁸³

We might wonder why James chose to call a parliament at this juncture. Would it not have been better to have concentrated on reducing Ulster, rather than get distracted by lengthy parliamentary proceedings? The answer, however, seems straightforward. James had been dethroned in England and Scotland for allegedly promoting popery and arbitrary government; he could not be seen to be doing the same thing in Ireland. This is why James issued a proclamation for the calling of parliament the day after he arrived in Dublin: any initiatives he took in Ireland, even if it was only raising revenues to fight the war, had to be seen to be sanctioned by parliament, and not based solely on royal authority. Hence also why James was careful not to represent himself as promoting the interests of Catholics; instead, he repeatedly emphasized that he was in favour of religious toleration. On the day after his arrival in Dublin he issued another proclamation declaring that henceforth all subjects of his kingdom of Ireland should ‘enjoy the free exercise of their religion’.⁸⁴ In his opening speech to parliament on 7 May, James again made liberty of conscience his central theme. ‘I have always been for Liberty of Conscience’, he insisted; ‘It was this Liberty of Conscience I gave, which my Enemies both Abroad and at Home dreaded; especially when they saw that I was resolved to have it Established by Law in all my Dominions, and made them set themselves up against me.’ He further stressed that he was ‘against invading any Man's Property’, and promised he would consent to ‘such Good and Wholesome Laws as may be for the general Good of the Nation, the Improvement of Trade and the relieving of such as have been injured by the late Acts of Settlement’.⁸⁵ On 18 May 1689, James issued a declaration from his court at Dublin in which he pointed out that, since arriving in Ireland, he had made it his ‘chiefe concerne to satisfy the minds of our Protestant Subjects, that the defence of their Religion, priviledges and properties, is equally our care with the recovery of our rights’.⁸⁶

The first measure passed by the Dublin parliament was an act recognizing James's ‘Just and Most Undoubted Rights’ to his ‘Imperial Crown’, which offered a forthright condemnation of the Glorious Revolution in England. Thus the act began by complaining how James's treasonous subjects in England had ‘first forced [him] to withdraw’ from Whitehall – no voluntary desertion here then, even with regard to James's first abortive flight – and then placed him ‘under a guard of Forreigners’ when he had been brought back to London, ‘compelling’ him ‘to go to Rochester’, where he ‘remained in Restraint’ until, through the mercy of God, he was able to escape to France. The ‘execrable’ usurpation by William of Orange, equalled (as it was) only by ‘the barbarous Murder’ of Charles I, the act continued, was ‘against the Law of God, Nature and Nations’; indeed, most of those who were guilty of helping to bring it about had ‘sworn that it was not lawful to take up Arms against [James II] on any pretence whatsoever’. The act then proceeded to rehearse the classic theories of indefeasible hereditary right and divinely ordained, irresistible monarchy. James had succeeded his brother, Charles II, ‘by Inherent Birth Right, and Lawful and Undoubted Succession’, and James's ‘Right’ to his ‘Imperial Crown’ was ‘originally by Nature, and descent of Blood, from God alone, by Whom Kings Raign, and not from [his] People, nor by virtue or pretext of any Contract made with them’. Neither the peers, the commons, parliament nor the people had ‘any Coercive Power over the Persons of the Kings of this Realm’ and subjects' allegiance to the king was ‘Indissoluble’ and could not ‘be renounced by us, or our Posterities’; moreover, this allegiance was due, the act continued, to the king's ‘natural Person, from which the Royal Power cannot be separated’ – thereby explicitly denouncing the theory (articulated in England at the time of the Revolution) that James II, through his actions, might somehow have unkinged himself. The act of recognition further stressed that the command of all military forces was vested in the king alone, and neither parliament nor the people might ‘lawfully… raise or levy any War Offensive or Defensive’ against the King, his heirs and lawful successors. In short, it was

Utterly unlawful for your Majestie's Subjects of this, or any of your Kingdoms, on any pretence whatsoever, actually to resist your Majesty, or our Lawful, Hereditary King for the time being, by Violence, or Force of Arms; or to withdraw their Allegiance from your Majesty, your Heirs and Lawful Successors; but that the Decision in all Cases of a misused Authority by our Lawful, Hereditary King (if any such should happen) must be left to the sole Judgment of God, the King of Kings, and only Ruler of Princes.

The ideology of royalism offered here was entirely conventional; one might even say it was rather moderate by later Stuart standards, since it did not embrace the language of royal absolutism which figured so prominently in Tory defences of monarchical government during the reign of Charles II. Its rearticulation here points to the radicalism of the act of overthrowing James II in both England and Scotland; no wonder the act accused ‘these late Traytors’ of having acted upon ‘desperate Antimonarchic Principles’.⁸⁷

The legislative programme enacted by the Dublin parliament ended up going much further than James would have liked, while at the same time falling short of what many Irish Catholics hoped for. A generous measure for liberty of conscience was passed. This began by remarking that ‘persecuting People upon the account of Religion’, far from helping ‘advance Christian Faith, or Piety’, in fact merely occasioned ‘animosities and divisions between his Majestie's Subjects, and discouraged strangers from living amongst them to the great hinderance of Trade, Peace and [the] Welfare of this Kingdom’. It therefore stipulated ‘that all and every person and persons whatsoever professing Christianity’ should have ‘Liberty of Conscience, and full and free Exercise of their respective Religions, Ways and forms of Worship’ and should be free to meet and assemble together, with their respective ministers and teachers ‘in such Churches, Chapels, private houses, or other places, as they shall have for that purpose’, provided that ‘nothing be taught, preach'd, or done contrary to their Allegiance, or contrary to his Majestie's peace’, and that all such meetings and assemblies ‘be always in some open or publick place… unto which all persons may have open, free, and uninterrupted access, or passage’. The act also repealed the oath of supremacy and the Jacobean oath of allegiance and all other laws that were inconsistent with liberty of conscience.⁸⁸ The Act of Uniformity, however, was left on the statute book: James's intention, as with his agenda in Scotland and England, was to remove the disabilities of the penal laws without undermining the Protestant establishment. Catholics would have liked a full restoration of their Church to the position it was in before the Reformation. The Catholic bishops and clergy, who held a general meeting in Dublin at the time of the parliament, presented the King with an address asking for the repeal of all the penal laws, and particularly the Act of Uniformity, and requesting that the Catholic clergy ‘be restored to their Livings, Churches, and full exercise of their Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction’.⁸⁹ The Commons did in fact draft a more radical bill for liberty of conscience, which would have taken away ‘the King's Supremacie in Ecclesiasticks’ and abrogated ‘all Penal Laws against Papists’; lawyers said it would have settled ‘Popery as legally as it was in H. 7th's time’. James objected, however, not only because he knew it would further alienate his Protestant subjects in Scotland and England, but also because ‘it diminisht his Prerogative’ by taking away his position as head of the Church. He insisted he did not wish to destroy the Protestant establishment, but only ‘take away the Penalties that were against Liberty’.⁹⁰ Nevertheless, the Irish parliament did pass an act stating that in future Catholics should not have to pay tithes to Protestant ministers; the monies should be vested instead in their own clergy.⁹¹

The most controversial issue in the parliament of 1689 was the land settlement. Most Catholics wanted the Acts of Settlement and Explanation repealed. Lord Chancellor Fitton declared the acts ‘Diabolicall and as hatched in Hell’, and it was moved that they should be ‘burnt by the hands of the Hangman’. The Protestant lords and bishops opposed repeal, as did several Catholics who had purchased land since the Restoration.⁹² Lord Chief Justice Keating, one of the remaining Protestant judges, petitioned the King on behalf of the purchasers under the Act of Settlement, arguing that the proposed repeal would ruin ‘all the Protestants in the Kingdom’, dispossess ‘the thriving Catholicks who were Purchasers’, destroy ‘Trade and Commerce’, and ‘infallibly destroy your Majestie's Revenue, and sink that of every Subject’. Bishop Dopping of Meath insisted it would be against the King's honour to break his promise not to repeal the acts and ‘to consent to the Ruining of so many Innocent Loyal Persons’. Not just Protestants, but also Catholics who had legally acquired land since the Restoration, would suffer. Besides, politically and financially, Dopping continued, repeal made no sense at this juncture. The present possessors would have nothing left to pay taxes, while the old proprietors would come in ‘Poor and Hungry’ and be unable to pay for some time. Repeal would also ruin the King's ‘Interest in the Kingdoms that he has lost’, for the Protestants of England and Scotland would not want to see him restored once they discovered how their brethren in Ireland were used; it would ‘ruine the Kingdom in point of Trade’; destroy ‘the Publick Faith and Credit of the Nation’, on which no one would dare to rely, if acts of parliament proved to be no security; and be inconvenient ‘when a Civil War is rageing in the Nation, and we are under Apprehensions… of Invasions from abroad’ – it made no sense to attempt to ‘divide the Spoyl before we get it’.⁹³

Supporters of repeal emphasized the injustice of the land settlement. Many innocents had never had their claims heard; others had been falsely declared rebels, because they held land in rebel territory; and even those found innocent were seldom repossessed of their estates, since all land that might have been available to compensate existing possessors had been swallowed up by great men such as Ormonde, Anglesey, Orrery and Coote. (James II himself, of course, might have been added to this list.) Although the present purchasers had a right, this was ‘posterior to the antient Proprietors’, and antiquity took precedence.⁹⁴ As for those who had purchased land since the Restoration, they should have realized that the Act of Settlement ‘was most unjust, and could by no true Law hold’; the principle of caveat emptor obliged the purchaser to buy nothing but what was the true property of the seller. Nevertheless, most acknowledged the need for some sort of compensation for those who had purrchased land in good faith.⁹⁵

James unquestionably wanted to preserve the Acts of Settlement and Explanation.⁹⁶ It was made clear to him, however, that if he did not consent to repeal ‘the whole Nation would abandon him’.⁹⁷ He particularly concerned that parliament would not vote the much needed taxation if he did not capitulate. In the end, he agreed to the passage of an act that gave the landholders of 1641 or their heirs the right to recover their property, and a special court of claims was to be set up to determine individuals' rights. Those who had rebelled against James were also to forfeit their lands, which were to be used to compensate the ‘New Interest’ purchasers.⁹⁸ As one Protestant commentator put it, the act ‘unravelled the Act of Settlement all to shreds’.⁹⁹ This measure was backed up by an Act of Attainder against Protestants, listing 2,470 individuals who were to be declared traitors, and thus subject to the penalties of execution and the confiscation of their estates, if they did not return to allegiance to James by a certain date.¹⁰⁰ As a result, parliament granted James a much needed subsidy of £20,000 per month for thirteen months, which was in fact some £5,000 higher than the amount James had initially asked for.¹⁰¹

The repeal of the land settlement carried with it a rejection of the Protestant interpretation of the Irish Rebellion. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Dublin parliament repealed the act for the annual commemoration of it on 23 October, on the grounds that it was ‘the occasion of great strife, Quarrels, and Animosities between his Majestie's Subjects’ of Ireland.¹⁰² It also passed various measures designed to break the Anglo-Protestant ascendancy and secure greater independence for Ireland from England. ‘An Act for taking off all Incapacities on the Natives of this Kingdom’ stated that ‘all and every the ancient Natives of this Realm, of Irish Blood’ should be ‘capable of all manner of Employments within this Realm, and of Purchasing Land in Plantation Countreys, and elsewhere’, and therefore that all laws which placed ‘any Incapacities on any natural born Subject of this Realm, either of Irish Blood, or otherwise, by reason of his Names, Blood, or Religion’ were ‘hereby Repealed, Annulled, and made utterly void’.¹⁰³ A Declaratory Act affirmed that ‘His Majesty's Realm of Ireland’ was and always had been ‘a distinct Kingdom from that of His Majesty's Realm of England’, and ‘as the People of this Kingdom did never send Members to any Parliament ever held in England… no Act of Parliament past, or to be past in the Parliament of England’ should be ‘any way binding in Ireland’, unless ‘made into Law by the Parliament of Ireland’. It also prohibited appeals from the Irish courts to King's Bench in England.¹⁰⁴ The Bishop of Meath opposed the measure in the Lords, arguing that it was ‘prejudicial to the King and Kingdom; robbing the King of his Prerogative, and the Subject of the Liberty of appealing to the King in person’.¹⁰⁵ The Jacobite Life later said that James would never have assented to ‘such diminutions of his Prerogative’, were it not for the realization that he could not afford ‘to disgust those who were otherwise affectionate Subjects’.¹⁰⁶ James did, however, manage to prevent the repeal of Poynings’ Law, which the Irish saw as ‘the greatest Sign and means of their Subjection to England’.¹⁰⁷ The Navigation Acts, on the other hand, were set aside, and acts passed allowing direct trading with the colonies, and prohibiting the import of English, Scottish or Welsh coal. The French hoped to step into the favoured economic position with regard to Ireland previously enjoyed by the English, but James, thinking still as a king of England, blocked a bill that would have allowed the export of raw wool from Ireland to become a French monopoly, and insisted that another bill that allowed for the naturalization of French subjects be modified to apply to all countries.¹⁰⁸

Taken together, the legislation of 1689, if made effective, would have amounted to a genuine revolution, transferring political, religious and economic power to a new ruling class. The imperial dominance of Ireland by England would have been destroyed and the Anglo-Protestant ascendancy overturned. The repeal of the Act of Settlement would have resulted in a fundamental restructuring of landowning in Ireland; as William King pointed out, with not much exaggeration, ‘two thirds of the Protestants of the Kingdom held their Estates’ by this Act, while many of the rest would be divested of their estates by virtue of the Act of Attainder.¹⁰⁹ At the same time, however, it was a revolution that would have benefited primarily the Old English. The repeal of the Act of Settlement made no specific provision for those (primarily Gaelic) landowners who had been dispossessed before 1641. In particular, the position of the Ulster Gaels, who had lost their estates in the aftermath of the Earl of Tyrone's rebellion (1593-1603), was never addressed, although they presumably hoped to regain some land at the expense of those Protestants who were holding out for William in the north. Although at one level the legislative initiatives of the Dublin parliament amounted to a bold strike for independence from England, Ireland would still have remained in the hands of its English conquerors, albeit those who had come before the Reformation. For many Irish Catholics, both Old English and Gaelic, the legislation of 1689 did not go far enough. O'Kelly lamented the fact that James could not be persuaded to abrogate the impious laws enacted by Queen Elizabeth against the Roman Catholic faith, for fear it would alienate his English subjects, ‘whom he alwaies courted’.¹¹⁰ As D'Avaux put it, James had ‘a heart too English to do anything that might vex the English’.¹¹¹ The irony, of course, is that James had already done more than enough to ‘vex the English’.

The Catholic revolution in Ireland of 1689, however, was a paper one only. Although liberty of conscience was, in theory, provided for, and some effort made to seize the estates of those Protestants who refused to submit to James, no court of claims was set up for the time being to oversee the transfer of property back to the 1641 proprietors. Whether this revolution could be brought into effect in Ireland would depend on the outcome of the war.

THE WAR OF THE TWO KINGS AND THE TREATY OF LIMERICK

The Jacobite war in Ireland was bloody and long.¹¹² It was an inter-national war. William employed not just English but also Scottish, Anglo-Irish, Dutch, German, Danish and even French (Huguenot) troops. Although the mainstay of the Jacobite army was Irish Catholics, it did have some British and French officers, and for the campaign of 1690 was supplemented by a sizeable contingent of French, Germans and Walloons.¹¹³ Initial Jacobite successes enabled James to regain control over most of the north, with the exception of Derry and Enniskillen. Derry famously withstood a lengthy siege, lasting 105 days, against the odds and in the face of severe privations. Such was the shortage of food inside the garrison that people were forced to live upon dogs, cats, rats, mice and horseflesh.¹¹⁴ At the beginning of July 1689 the Jacobite commander General Rosen, in a desperate attempt to induce a surrender, ordered all Protestant men, women and children from within thirty miles to be rounded up and brought before the city walls, where they were to be left without food or shelter. Those inside were faced with the stark choice of either coming to the aid of their Protestant friends and relatives – admitting them into the garrison where they would place an added burden on the dwindling food supplies – or watching them die of starvation at the gates. William King claimed that between 4,000 and 7,000 were brought, naked, before the walls, including ‘old decrepit Creatures’, ‘Nurses with their sucking Children, Women big with Child’ and ‘some Women in Labour’, although his figures were probably an exaggeration. The garrison responded by erecting a gallows on the ramparts and threatening to hang the Jacobite prisoners they had taken if the Protestants outside the gates were not allowed to return home. James was furious with Rosen for violating the terms of the protections he had offered Protestants in Ulster, and ordered his general to back down.¹¹⁵ The city was finally relieved on 28 July 1689 by Williamite forces under the command of Major-General Percy Kirke; the Jacobite army raised the siege on the 31st and marched away. The depredations caused by the siege were such that when King went to Derry as its newly appointed bishop in March 1691, he ‘found the land almost desolate’, and nearly all ‘country houses and dwellings burnt’; whereas ‘before the troubles’ there had been ‘about 250,000 head of cattle’ in the diocese, after the siege there were only about 300 left; out of 460,000 horses, two remained, ‘lame and wounded’, while there were but seven sheep, two pigs, and no fowl.¹¹⁶ A Commons' Committee Report of 1705 estimated that ‘12,000 perished by Sword or Famine’ during the siege.¹¹⁷

William III came over in person to lead the campaign in June 1690, and on 1 July achieved what proved to be a decisive victory over the Jacobite forces at the Battle of the Boyne, just outside Drogheda. Given that William had an army of 36,000 mainly veteran professionals against James's 25,000, the result might have seemed a foregone conclusion. As always, however, luck and human miscalculation played their part. William himself was nearly killed the day before the battle: as he was reconnoitring the river crossings on 30 June, he was fired upon from enemy lines and struck on the right shoulder by a bullet which ‘tore his Coate and shirt, and made his skinn all black’. If William had fallen, it would undoubtedly have been ‘a fatal Blow to his Army, and Kingdoms too’, as one Protestant eyewitness put it. The actual battle the next day was more conceded by the Jacobites than won by William. When a small contingent of William's troops managed to cross the Boyne at Rosnaree, to the west of the Jacobite camp, James wrongly guessed that the rest of the Williamite army would follow, and so sent the bulk of his forces to cut them off. This opened the way for the major part of William's army to cross the river further east at Oldbridge to face what was a seriously depleted Jacobite right flank. In danger now of being caught in a pincer movement in the bend of the river, the Jacobite troops opted to retreat, throwing down their arms and equipment in a state of confusion. When he saw his men give way, James made haste for Dublin where, at an emergency meeting with his privy council, he announced that since his army was unreliable and had ‘basely fled the scene of battle and left the spoil to his enemies’ he was ‘never more determined to head an Irish army’ but was resolved ‘to shift for myself, as should they’.¹¹⁸ The next day James left for Duncannon, in Waterford harbour, and thence took ship for France (via Kinsale), ‘leaving his poor Teagues to fight it out, or do what they pleased for him’. The Jacobites withdrew to Limerick and William secured control of Dublin on the 5th.¹¹⁹

The actual fighting at the Boyne was limited and the losses slight: perhaps 1,000 on the Jacobite side and half that on William's. Yet although James's flight and the Williamite capture of Dublin were of crucial significance, William failed to cut off the Jacobite army in retreat, thus missing the chance to bring the war to an end there and then. Missed opportunity was followed by a major reverse, when William failed to take Limerick in August. After that William himself returned to England, and although Williamite forces under the command of John Churchill, now Earl of Marlborough, captured Cork and Kinsale in late September and early October, the campaigning season ended without the conflict in Ireland having been brought to a definitive conclusion. Those parts of Ireland back under Protestant control saw a return to the status quo ante. Thus, following the withdrawal of the Jacobite government from Dublin in July 1690, eleven aldermen who had been displaced by Tyrconnell in 1687 took it upon themselves ‘to revive the magistracy and take up the exercise of it’, petitioning William to approve their action and authorize them to elect other members to make the full quota of the city government, which he did accordingly. In October, the restored corporation passed an act disenfranchising Catholic freemen.¹²⁰ When Waterford fell, also in July, William simply restored the old corporation ‘upon application made… by the [displaced] Protestant aldermen’.¹²¹ Likewise Youghall and Kinsale saw the restoration of their old corporations in August and October 1690 respectively.¹²²

Following James's flight the Jacobites were divided over the wisdom of continuing the war. Tyrconnell thought the time had come to submit to England and try to get the best terms possible. According to O'Kelly, those Catholics who had bought lands since the Restoration, only to have their purchases jeopardized by the Dublin parliament's repeal of the Act of Settlement, were the most eager to reach an accord with William, knowing that he would not let the repeal stand.¹²³ The Old Catholic proprietors, together with the Gaelic Irish, tended to want to continue the struggle; the Irish feared that the English intended to extirpate them ‘Root and Branch’. There was some discussion about whether the Irish should break completely with England, and ‘join themselves to some Catholic crown able to protect them, rather than be subject to the revolutions of the Protestant kingdoms of Great Britain’. Some of the Gaels would have liked to have seen the kingdom put ‘into the hands of the antient Irish’, a design allegedly promoted by one Balderic O'Donnel, who was trying to build up a popular following among the soldiery with the intention ultimately of making his own peace with the British without James's knowledge or consent.¹²⁴ The war therefore dragged on for another year, with Tyrconnell recommitted to the cause, until Jacobite resistance was effectively crushed at the Battle of Aughrim on 12 July 1691, ‘the most disastrous battle in Irish history'.¹²⁵ As many as 7,000 Irish soldiers were slain and another 450 taken prisoner; the Williamite casualties were about 2,000 killed. A Danish chaplain in the Williamite army described the ‘horrible sight’ after the battle: ‘when many men and horses pierced by wounds could have neither flight nor rest, sometimes trying to rise’ only to fall back down suddenly, ‘weighed down by the mass of their bodies’; when ‘others with mutilated limbs and weighed down by pain’ would cry out ‘for the sword as their remedy’, only to be denied this by their conquerors; and when still ‘others spewed forth their breath mixed with blood and threats’. ‘From the bodies of all’, our source continues, ‘blood… flowed over the ground, and so inundated the fields that you could hardly take a step without slipping’.¹²⁶

By now William was determined to bring the war in Ireland to an end, so that he could concentrate his efforts and financial resources on the continental campaign. He authorized his commander in the field, Baron de Ginkel, to offer the Jacobites favourable terms if they would surrender. On 21 July the Jacobite enclave at Galway caved in, and in return procured a rather generous treaty of surrender whereby both the garrison and the townsmen were guaranteed their estates. Tyrconnell's death on 14 August following a stroke proved a fatal blow to Irish morale, and the war eventually came to an end when Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, now effective ruler of Jacobite Ireland, surrendered Limerick on 3 October. By the time the war was over, some 25,000 men had died in battle. Thousands more had died of disease.¹²⁷

In negotiating their surrender at Limerick, the Jacobites pushed for terms that would have sanctioned the gains they had achieved during James II's reign and, in effect, would return them to the position they were at in 1688. Thus they asked for a full indemnity, the restoration of all Irish Catholics to the estates they had held before the Revolution, complete liberty of worship, and the right of Catholics to be members of corporations, trade freely, and hold military and civil offices.¹²⁸ Such proposals were rejected out of hand; the Protestant negotiators wanted a return to the position of Charles II's reign.

The treaty that was finally agreed comprised thirteen civilian and twenty-nine military articles. The first clause of the civilian articles provided that ‘The Roman Catholicks of this kingdom’ should ‘enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion’ as were ‘consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of king Charles the second’. Such ‘privileges’ had, of course, been very limited, and what liberty of conscience the Catholics had enjoyed had been by connivance rather than legally established right. Nevertheless, the same article went on to promise that William and Mary, as soon as their affairs allowed them to call a parliament in Ireland, would try to procure for the Roman Catholics ‘such farther security… as may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account of their said religion’. Article two promised that all the inhabitants of Limerick, or any other garrison in the possession of the Irish, and all soldiers now in arms in the counties of Limerick, Clare, Kerry, Cork and Mayo (the remaining areas under Jacobite control), ‘and all such as are under their protection’,¹²⁹ would be restored to ‘their estates… and all the rights, titles and interests, privileges and immunities’ they were entitled to ‘by the laws and statutes that were in force in the… reign of Charles II if they submitted to William and Mary and took the oath of fidelity and allegiance contained in the English Declaration of Rights. Another article stated that merchants from the city of Limerick, or any other towns in the counties of Clare or Kerry, who had absented themselves overseas and not borne arms since William and Mary were proclaimed in February 1689, would also have the benefit of the second article if they returned home within eight months. Subsequent clauses provided an indemnity for any acts committed during the course of the war and insisted that the only oath to be administered to Catholics who submitted to the government should be the oath of fidelity and allegiance of 1689; no longer could they be penalized, in other words, for refusing to acknowledge the royal supremacy. The military articles allowed ‘all persons, without any exceptions’, to have ‘free liberty’ to leave Ireland, if they so desired, for any country beyond seas, England and Scotland excepted, with their families and household possessions. The soldiers were to choose whether to stay behind or go to France, where they would be transported at English expense.¹³⁰

THE ALLEGIANCE CONTROVERSY

There was no revolution settlement in Ireland in quite the same sense that there was in England and Scotland. Although there was a peace treaty following the surrender of Limerick, and a subsequent Williamite settlement worked out over the years 1692–7, there was no equivalent of the English Declaration of Rights or the Scottish Claim of Right nor even any separate constitutional adjudication that the Irish throne was vacant. James did not need to be separately dethroned in Ireland, because the Irish crown was ‘a dependent upon England’, as the English House of Lords confirmed on 6 February 1689.¹³¹ The Declaration of Rights of 13 February therefore declared William and Mary to be ‘King and Queen of England, France and Ireland’, and they were officially crowned with this title at the coronation ceremony of 11 April 1689.¹³² Yet there remained the thorny question of how to justify the transfer of allegiance from James to William. In Ireland, James had clearly been overthrown by force; it could hardly be argued that he had deserted the kingdom and left the throne vacant. How were Protestants in Ireland able to rationalize the stance they had taken against James?

In theory, the allegiance of the crown's subjects in Ireland had automatically transferred from James to William and Mary when the English Convention declared William and Mary the new sovereigns. Thus Andrew Hamilton, a Protestant clergyman of the Established Church, in his pamphlet justifying the actions of the Enniskillen men, wrote that when the news came ‘That the Convention of Estates in England… had Voted the late King James's Desertion to be an Abdication, and placed their present Majesties in the Vacant Throne’, we thought ourselves obliged ‘from this time on and upon these grounds… to behave our selves as their Subjects, our Allegiance being transferr'd and descending from the late King James upon his voluntary Desertion, as if he had been naturally dead’. It was a theory that allowed Protestants who believed in non-resistance and passive obedience to explain, as Hamilton put it in his dedication to William and Mary, ‘how we became Subjects to Your Majesties, without breach of our former Loyalty’.¹³³

When William came to Ireland in person to lead the war effort, the majority of Protestants in Ireland saw him as their legitimate king who had come to deliver them from Catholic tyranny. Upon entering Belfast on Saturday 14 June 1690, William was met with cries of ‘God save the King, God bless our Protestant King, God bless King William’. The Protestants presented him with an address in which they urged him to ‘Conquer what is your own, / And add poor Ireland to sweet England's Crown’. That night the streets ‘were filled with Bonfires, and Fire-Works’, and within three hours, as news of William's arrival spread, ‘all places’ that were in Protestant hands ‘had made Bonfires so thick, that the whole Country seemed in a Flame’. Those who did not join the celebrations suffered victimization at the hands of Williamite crowds. In Lisburn, when the eminent Quaker preacher George Gregson did not make a bonfire, ‘the Soldiers broke all his Windows, pull'd down the Pales round his House’, seized his ‘Wheel barrows, Shovels, Pick Ax's, Tubs, Pitch and Tar-Barrel's from his back yard, and ‘Piled them up before his own Door in a stately Bonfire’.¹³⁴ The Presbyterians in the north, however, had their own particular agenda. On Monday 16 June, the Presbyterian ministers of Belfast presented William with a congratulatory address in which they expressed their hope that he would use his influence to get them ‘Religious Liberty’, which in turn would encourage ‘those of our number now in Scotland to return’ and ‘prove a special Means of more fully planting this Province with such Protestants as will be endeared to your Majesties Government, and a Bulwark against the Irish Papists’.¹³⁵

The gradual ‘deliverance’ of Ireland from Jacobite control over the course of 1690–91 saw similar celebrating in Protestant quarters. When the Protestants of Dublin learned of the victory at the Boyne, they ran about the streets, shouting with joy, ‘saluting and embracing one another, and blessing God for this wonderful Deliverance’.¹³⁶ William himself entered Dublin in triumph on 5 July, and ‘was received with all possible Demonstrations of Joy’, we are told by a Protestant source, ‘from a delivered People’.¹³⁷ There was more Protestant rejoicing following the victories in the autumn.¹³⁸

Yet it was by no means that simple. Protestants in Ireland had first taken up arms in December 1688, not only long before the English Convention had declared that James had abdicated, but even before James's first attempted flight from England, let alone his second successful escape to France. Moreover, the abdication theory was difficult to sustain when James had come to Ireland in person to defend his right to the crown. As the Jacobite Life was later to put it: ‘that senceless cant word of Abdication, which was the poor and only excuse for their unnatural rebellion in England, had not the least shaddow of pretext in Ireland, unless the King's comeing into a Country he had never been in before, and governing a Kingdom in person he had hithertoo govern'd by a deputy, must be counted an abandoning of it by the Parliamentary Logick of our days’.¹³⁹ The Presbyterians, of course, did not feel constrained by the doctrine of non-resistance and passive obedience as it had come to be articulated during the 1680s; indeed, their clergy openly exhorted their followers to take arms in defence of their religion. But what about Protestants of the Established Church? Were they, as one Presbyterian apologist claimed, ‘forc'd to take sanctuary’ in the Presbyterian ‘sentiments concerning the just measures of Government and Subjection’, which they had previously branded as seditious, to defend their own actions ‘in this great and happy Revolution’?¹⁴⁰ Or did they manage to articulate an alternative theory to justify their actions, which remained consistent with their Church's teachings on non-resistance?

In the first place, it must be re-emphasized that many Protestants of the Established Church did not engage in armed resistance. Large numbers fled the country. Of those who stayed, many were never actively disloyal to James. One Protestant correspondent in Dublin commented towards the end of January 1689 how ‘The Protestants in the Army have all layd down, resolving not to fight against their religion, nor against their King’, adding that ‘we seem to wish that the Army had done so in England, rather than deserted’.¹⁴¹ Some continued to serve the man they believed to be their rightful king, either in his administration or even in the army; when the Williamite deliverance came, they could justify it in providential terms. This was the stance taken by Anthony Dopping, Bishop of Meath. In July 1683, Dopping had preached in Christ Church, Dublin, asserting that the principles of passive obedience and non-resistance had been the ‘constant opinion of the Church of England’ and endorsed by the Irish Act of Uniformity of 1666, insisting that those who justified resistance to oppose the inundation of popery were not sons of the Church but borrowed their principles from Rome, Scotland or Geneva.¹⁴² At the time of the Revolution Dopping chose to stay in Ireland, and even took his place in the Jacobite parliament of 1689, where, as we have seen, he proceeded to oppose most of the pro-Catholic initiatives. He was quick to go over to William when the latter delivered Dublin in July 1690, leading a delegation of Protestant clergy to thank William on 7 July for rescuing them ‘from the Oppressions and Tyranny of Popery’, and delivering a speech in which he praised ‘God as the Author of our Deliverance’ and William ‘as the Happy Instrument raised up by His Providence for the effecting it’.¹⁴³ In a sermon preached at St Patrick's, Dublin, on 26 October 1690, Dopping maintained that ‘the subjecting of a nation or people to a forrain power is a worke of God almighty and providence’ and ‘that there is a time, when a people so subdued are bound in duty to submitt to the power of their Conquerors, notwithstanding their allegiance to their former prince’. Even so, Dopping's providentialism was mixed with a prudential view of subjection that allowed subjects to renounce their allegiance to a prince who could not protect them and to choose another master: ‘the allegiance of the subject is founded on the protection of his prince, no man being bound to obey a power that either cannot or will not protect him in his life and fortune’.¹⁴⁴

Providential explanations worked less well, however, for those who had been more active in their resistance. Typically, Protestants of the Established Church maintained that they had acted defensively, and therefore had not actively resisted. Thus Hamilton, after rehearsing the ‘miserable Depredations’ and ‘open Noon-day Robberies’ of the armed ‘Rabble of the Irish Papists’, insisted that the Protestants took arms ‘in defence of [their] Laws, against those, who when the King was gone, would govern by Force, tho the Law said they should not be capable of any Employment; and when they declared they would act in contradiction to all the Laws in being’.¹⁴⁵ Another author maintained that it was ‘Self-preservation’ that motivated the Protestants of Ulster ‘to Associate and take up Arms’: ‘the case of the people of England and Protestants of Ireland differed in several Particulars’, for ‘those who in England endeavoured the subversion of Religion and laws Established, had no Bloody designs against the Lives of their Country-men… neither did they pretend a Title to the generallity of their Estates’.¹⁴⁶ The declarations of the various Associations that formed in the winter of 1688/9 similarly represented the Protestants as acting in self-defence, against an immediate threat to their lives, liberties and religion. The men of Killmare, for example, said that they purposely did not put themselves into regiments, because they had no commission to do so, and they did not want to be the first to draw the sword; they merely put themselves in a ‘defensive posture’. Likewise the Protestant nobility and gentry of Antrim declared that ‘if we be forced to take up Arms, as it will be contrary to our Inclination, so it shall be only Defensive’.¹⁴⁷

An extended examination of why the Protestants of Ireland were now free from their oaths of allegiance to James II was offered in a tract of 1691 by Edward Wetenhall, an Englishman educated at Cambridge and Oxford, who moved to Dublin in 1672 and became Bishop of Cork and Ross in 1679. Wetenhall's was a multifaceted argument that acknowledged that different rationales could come into play at different stages of the revolutionary crisis for different types of people. James, he claimed, had made it unlawful for Irish Protestants to keep the oath; God and James had made it impossible for them to do so; and, further, Protestants in Ireland had been formally released from their oaths. James had made it unlawful for Irish Protestants to keep the oath because he had sought ‘to subject the Imperial Crown and Dignity of the three Kingdoms… to the Power of [a] Foreign Prince or Potentate’, which ‘for a Subject to do’ was treasonous: Irish Protestants could not therefore keep their promise in the oath of allegiance to ‘assist and defend such a King… because by this assistance… we commit Treason against the Crown’. It was also ‘unlawful by the Law of God, for a Protestant People to assist and defend in the Exercise and Possession of Regal Power such as James II had made and carried himself’, since this would contribute ‘not only to the destroying their own, but their Protestant Fellow-Subjects' Estates, Liberties and Lives, and what is more their Common Religion too’. ‘Our oaths’ could not ‘oblige us to be Assistants, and aiding to the cutting off the Heads of innocent Protestant Peers, or hanging up such Commons; and to the disarming, and putting out of Power, all Protestants, and arming and advancing all Papists, and so destroying our selves, Neighbours and Religion’. Wetenhall came close to advocating contract theory when he conceded that rather than say that James had made the oath of allegiance unlawful, it might be more accurate to say he had ‘made the Oath as to him void and null’, since those who took it were supposed to swear ‘to a King who would govern according to Law, and protect his Subjects and their Rights’.¹⁴⁸

It was also impossible, Wetenhall said, for Protestants to keep their oath of allegiance to James. By the terms of that oath, subjects were supposed to defend and assist the king, but Protestants could not perform this duty because James had disarmed them. Furthermore, God had made it ‘morally impossible’ for Protestants to keep the oath because He had now ‘put us under the power of a second William the Conqueror’, who had ‘a Right to our Allegiance by conquest’. Moreover, the oath required the crown's subjects to defend all jurisdictions, pre-eminences and authorities granted to the Imperial Crown of the realm, but James had again made it impossible for his subjects in Ireland to do this and at the same time maintain their allegiance to him, because he had assented to an Act (in the Irish parliament of 1689) separating the kingdom of Ireland from the crown of England. Yet if Irish Protestants were freed from obeying James in things unlawful and impossible, ‘the Safety of the Persons of the King and Queen, and their Children’ were still ‘most religiously inviolable’. ‘None of us,’ Wetenhall insisted, ‘would attempt, or consent to any attempt, upon their Sacred Persons.’¹⁴⁹

Wetenhall then claimed that Irish Protestants had been released from their oaths of allegiance. In the first place the Irish parliament of 1689 had repealed the Jacobean oath of allegiance, the only such oath Irish Protestants had taken, a deed which Wetenhall sarcastically remarked was ‘the only Service they did us’, which ‘we ought not, but with thanks, to acknowledge, and record it to Posterity’. James's forbidding Protestants from keeping arms was also equivalent to discharging them from the oath, given that the oath required them to use such weapons in his defence. And after the Battle of the Boyne, James had told his men ‘to shift for themselves’, which surely had to be taken as referring to all the people of Ireland – another example of the King releasing Protestants from their allegiance. Turning to the oath in the English and Irish Acts of Uniformity (of 1662 and 1666) against taking up arms against the king or those commissioned by him, Wetenhall protested that commissions to Catholics were against the law and therefore not valid; thus Protestants were justified in rising against Tyrconnell and all Catholics pretending commissions from the king. If James himself chose to head these men, this did not make these officers any more legal, it simply made James ‘less a legal King’ – not to mention the fact that King James had ‘otherwise Un King'd himself; for certainly a King, which releases his Subjects of their Allegiance… is no longer their King’.¹⁵⁰

So far, Wetenhall's reasoning had been primarily secular. Turning to the question of whether Scripture taught that all oaths were inviolable, however, he shifted to a religious justification for forsaking James, an area where Protestants had to be careful given their insistence that resistance for religious reasons was illegitimate. ‘I am not commanded to damn my soul, through fidelity to any Oath,’ Wetenhall alleged. Yet ‘the Loyalty by this Oath claimed from us,’ he went on, ‘was not consistent with the common means of our Salvation; namely, not with the Enjoyment and Exercise of true Religion. But without the Publick Exercise of true Religion, People cannot ordinarily and generally attain unto Salvation.’ One could not be expected to ‘be constant to your Oath of Allegiance to your King, even to the abandoning the means of Salvation, and to virtual renouncing your God and Christian Faith’.¹⁵¹

Wetenhall's analysis implied there were a series of different points at which Protestants in Ireland might have ceased to owe allegiance to James II: when James's administration in Ireland under Tyrconnell first began to act illegally (1687–8); when William of Orange successfully completed his conquest of England (and when was that – 11 December; 13 February; 11 April?); when the Irish parliament rescinded the oath of allegiance (summer 1689); after the Battle of the Boyne (1 July 1690); or even perhaps as early as the summer of 1685, when James had first started disarming Irish Protestants, although presumably in this regard Wetenhall was thinking more of Tyrconnell's orders for disarming Irish Protestants of late February and early March 1689. Intriguingly, however, Wetenhall remained adamant that nothing he had said contradicted the doctrine of non-resistance and passive obedience. In the first place, many had indeed suffered passively. Second, this was a doctrine that had ‘its Bounds, and Seasons of Practice’: on occasions, resistance could be ‘necessary and lawful’, such as when your adversary has actually declared war on you. To sit back and do nothing at this juncture would have been tantamount to persuading Protestants in the three kingdoms ‘to give all their Throats to be cut’. Yet God had delivered them from the hands of those who would destroy them and ‘brought us poor oppressed Protestant subjects under a Protestant Prince’, and Protestants were free to put themselves under his protection. William and Mary were conquerors; God did not assign Protestants ‘any active part in advancing these Princes their Power’, or so Wetenhall claimed, ‘only a Passive Lot’.¹⁵²

The most extended examination of why Protestants in Ireland were free to renounce their allegiance to James II offered by a Church of Ireland Protestant came from William King, Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, and subsequently Bishop of Derry and Archbishop of Dublin, in his State of the Protestants of Ireland Under the Late King James's Government of 1691. Like Dopping, King had previously upheld the doctrine of non-resistance. In the preface to the published version of a sermon delivered by William Sheridan, Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh, at King's own church in Dublin in March 1685, King had written that it was ‘impossible any one of our Communion should be disloyal without renouncing his Religion’.¹⁵³ His experiences over the next few years, including imprisonment by the Jacobite regime in 1689, however, appear to have convinced King that his loyalty to James II could cease without a renunciation of his religion.¹⁵⁴ Nevertheless, like most clergy of the Established Church, his first instinct was to reach for a providentialist explanation. Thus, in a sermon preached at St Patrick's on 16 November 1690 to mark the official day of thanksgiving for the success of the Williamite campaign in Ireland, he insisted that the Revolution was the result of a ‘miraculous Concurrence of Providences’ – he listed eighteen. We should ‘own the whole of our Deliverance’, he concluded, ‘to be a Work of God’; indeed, ‘God in his Providence’ had ‘so ordered the matter that we in this place have had no hand in it’. Although he acknowledged that James II had faced ‘an unexpected Opposition’ to his designs in Ireland from the inhabitants of Derry and Enniskillen, once one considered ‘the Places and Persons that made this Opposition’ and the fact that it was ‘a Miracle that they should undertake, much more that they should succeed in it’, it became clear that ‘God Almighty in his Providence had raised them up for that juncture, and inspired them with Resolution in an extraordinary manner, to show his power in their weakness’.¹⁵⁵

King's State of the Protestants was a detailed attempt, as the tract's subtitle explained, to justify the ‘Carriage’ of the Protestants of Ireland towards James II, and show ‘the absolute Necessity of their endeavouring to be freed from his Government, and of submitting to their present Majesties’. King began by insisting that it was ‘granted by some of the highest assertors of Passive Obedience, that if a King design to root out a people, or destroy one main part of his Subjects [in this case, the Protestants] in favour of another whom he loves better [i.e., the Catholics], that they may prevent it even by opposing him with force’. In such a case, King said, the prince ‘is to be judged… to have Abdicated the Government of those whom he designs to destroy contrary to justice and the Laws’, and his ‘Subjects may desert their Prince, decline his Government and Service, and seek Protection where they find it’.¹⁵⁶ Resistance was therefore justifiable ‘in some cases of extremity’: when the mischiefs of submitting to tyranny were more dangerous to the commonwealth than a war, then ‘people may lawfully resist and defend themselves’, King insisted, ‘even by a War, as being the lesser evil’.¹⁵⁷ He also justified William's intervention. ‘It may be lawful for one Prince to interpose between another Prince and his Subjects’, he said, ‘because he may have an Interest in that People and Government, to defend which Interest he may lawfully concern himself, and prevent their Ruin by a War’, and ‘the same may be lawful, if the Destruction of a People by their Prince, be only a step and degree to the destruction of a Neighbouring People’.¹⁵⁸

The rest of King's tract sought to document at length that ‘King James designed to destroy and utterly ruin the Protestant Religion, the Liberty and Property of the Subjects in general, the English Interest in Ireland in particular, and alter the very Frame and Constitution of the Government’, and thereby to justify the Protestants' renouncing their allegiance to James. Discussing the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, King asserted that ‘those Oaths were made by us to the King, as Supreme Governor of these Kingdoms’, but the King having ‘abdicated the Government’ by ‘endeavouring to destroy us’ had absolved the people from them.¹⁵⁹ Implicit in King's thinking was a contract theory of government. He came closest to making this explicit in his discussion of James's use of the dispensing power to promote Catholics to civil and military offices in violation of the law. ‘Every Law in these Kingdoms is really a Compact between the King and People’, King alleged, ‘wherein by mutual consent they agree on a Rule by which he is to govern, and according to which they oblige themselves to Obedience’. Everyone agreed ‘that in Cases of sudden and unforeseen Necessity, there is no law but may be dispensed with’, but it was a ‘most wicked as well as hazardous thing… to pretend a necessity for dispensing with those publick Compacts, when the pretence is not real’. James II's use of the dispensing power could certainly not be justified on the grounds of necessity, since there were plenty of Protestants ‘willing enough to serve him in every thing that was for the Interest of the Kingdom’. James, however, knew that the Protestants would not assist him in his plan ‘to destroy the Laws, Liberties and Religion of the Kingdom’, and so if there was any necessity for James to employ persons not qualified by law, ‘it was a criminal Necessity’. ‘If he imagined, that such a Necessity would excuse him from his Coronation Oath, of governing according to the Laws, and justifie his dispensing with all the Laws made for the Security of his Subjects, why should he not allow’, King asked, ‘the same Liberty to his Subjects, and think that an inevitable Necessity of avoiding Ruin, should be a sufficient Reason for them to dispense with their Obedience to him, notwithstanding their Oaths of Allegiance.’¹⁶⁰

Having gone thus far, however, King ultimately came back to seeing the Revolution in providential terms. The threat to ‘our Liberties, Properties, Lives and Religion’ was such, he said, that there remained ‘no other prospect or possibility for us to avoid this Destruction, but his present Majestie's interposing on our behalf, as he had done for England: A Providence of which we so little dream.’ It was clear, then, that William ‘was rais'd up by God to be a Deliverer to us and the Protestant Cause’. Indeed, we ‘did not make the least step to right our selves by force, till God's Providence appear'd signally for these Kingdoms, in raising them up a Deliverer, and the putting the Crown on their Majesties' Heads’.¹⁶¹

Within a purely Irish context, King's account seemed to offer a plausible rationalization, from an Anglo-Protestant perspective, of why it was legitimate for Protestants in Ireland to transfer their allegiance to William and Mary. Viewed from a British perspective, however, King's arguments appeared far less coherent, as the Nonjuring Church of Ireland clergyman and Jacobite polemicist Charles Leslie made clear in his lengthy Answer to King. If King's fundamental premise be true, Leslie said, ‘That if a King design to destroy one main Part of his People, in favour of another whom he loves better, he does abdicate the Government of those whom he designs to destroy’, then it followed that ‘the Episcopal Party in Scotland’ should be free ‘from all Obligation to K. William's Government’. Moreover, although King alleged that it was James's intention in Ireland to overturn the Established Church, in Scotland William actually did overturn the Church ‘by law established’. The Scottish Presbyterians might seek to justify their revolution settlement in the Church by saying that this was in accord with what the majority of the people had wanted. Yet by this logic, Leslie pointed out, the Jacobites could argue ‘That it was as just to set up Popery in Ireland, as Presbytery in Scotland’.¹⁶² Referring to King's doctrine of abdication, Leslie asserted that ‘not only the Papists in England, and Episcopal Party in Scotland, and the present Papists in Ireland, may justifie their taking Arms against the Present Government when they please’, but, he continued, in a calculatedly provocative statement, ‘the Irish Papists in 41 might have justified their Rebellion against King Charles I by this Author's Principles, which do indeed justifie all the Rebellions that ever were in the World’, but which in particular give ‘full Liberty to all Dissenters in Religion to take Arms against the Government’.¹⁶³ Leslie also challenged the view that William ‘had a Title to Ireland, by being King of England, because Ireland is but an Appendix to the Crown of England’. If the government of England was dissolved ‘by Abdication, and returned back to the suppos'd Original Contract or first Right of Mankind to erect Government for their own Convenience’, it followed that ‘the Tye which England had upon Ireland by Conquest was dissolved, and Ireland left as well as England in their suppos'd Original Freedom, to chuse what Government and Governours they pleas'd’.¹⁶⁴ As Leslie's Answer brilliantly demonstrated, there was no coherent justification of the British revolutions of 1688–91; William's right to the different crowns of the Stuart three kingdoms could only be justified by different, and at times contradictory, revolution principles.

The Irish rejected the notion that Ireland was obliged to follow England in owning or disowning the kings of England. As one Irish Jacobite account put it, ‘the behaviour herein of the people of England is no rule to Ireland’, which was ‘a distinct realm’ and ‘a different nation’, with ‘discrepant laws’ and ‘a parliament of her own’. Ireland had ‘never acknowledged her king to be chosen by the people, but to succeed by birth; nor her king to be deposable by the people upon any cause of quarrel’. ‘When the lawful king of England dies’, this author continued, ‘Ireland acknowledges immediately the person next in blood, be he Catholic or Protestant, to be the king of England and hers, whether the people of England consent to it or not’. The implications of this argument were that the regal union of the three kingdoms was automatically dissolved as a result of the Revolution in England of 1688–9:

England, separated from the lawful king, has no more right in Ireland than has France or Spain, or hath Ireland in England; so that each nation of the three, viz., English, Scotch, and Irish, is independent of the other two, but all are depending on the king. Hence it is that if the blood royal be extinct, every one of the three nations may choose a distinct government.

As far as the Irish were concerned, therefore, they were conquered by a usurper in 1689–91, who could never have a legitimate claim to the allegiance of the people of Ireland. As the same author put it, writing about the surrender of Limerick, ‘the Irish Catholick nation’ was brought ‘under the heavy yoke of an usurped government’.¹⁶⁵

THE LEGACY OF THE WAR

The war left a bitter legacy. It led to a hardening of attitudes and an intensification of hatreds, while at the same time encouraging a tendency to see the Irish problem in more starkly polarized terms. We have seen that the Irish problem had never been merely about religion. At its heart lay a cluster of interconnected tensions and resentments, all of which were deeply permeated by the religious question, but which in themselves were not intrinsically religious in nature: resentment at English imperial control over Ireland; concerns over access to political power, economic opportunity, legal rights and privileges; and, most centrally of all, the land question. The war of 1689–91, although it concerned religion, was not a war of religion. James himself was not fighting for religion, but for his kingdoms, and he was prepared to allow liberty of conscience to all religious groups who would be loyal to him. The Catholics were fighting not just for their faith, but to regain control of their country and their land. The Williamites, on the other hand, saw themselves as fighting against the international threat of popery and arbitrary government, and its domestic manifestation within the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland in the form of James II. Nevertheless, increasingly from 1689, the struggle came to be seen as in essence one between competing faiths – the Protestants and the Catholics, or (which amounted to the same thing) between the English/British and the Irish. That this should have been the case was related to how people, both within Ireland and throughout Britain as a whole, came to experience the war.

Protestant discussions of the war tended not to see the struggle purely in religious terms but identified a broad range of concerns.¹⁶⁶ A major one was national security. Anyone who considered ‘the Situation, Ports, Plenty and other Advantages of Ireland’, argued the Munster Protestant Sir Richard Cox, in his famous contemporary history of Ireland, would admit that if Ireland should ever ‘come into an Enemy's Hands, England would find it impossible to flourish, and perhaps difficult to subsist’. Ireland lay in ‘the Line of Trade’, and thus English control was essential to guarantee the safety of English shipping, whereas if the Irish were allowed to export their wool them-selves, this would ‘soon ruine the English-Clothing-Manufacture’. It was for these reasons, Cox insisted, that William needed to reconquer Ireland and keep it ‘inseparably united to the Crown of England’.¹⁶⁷ Yet it was not just the security of England, but that of the whole of Europe that was at stake. As William King put it, ‘If we consider the State of Europe, the growing Power of France, and how much the late King was in the French Interests’, it was clear that the measures of James II ‘must have been fatal to all Europe’, not just ‘to the Protestant Interest’ (though admittedly Holland lay nearest to destruction), but also to Catholic Europe, and that was why the inter-national confederation against Louis XIV included both Catholic and Protestant rulers, even the Pope. What had ‘been done to King James’, King therefore maintained, should be regarded not ‘as the single act of their present Majesties, or of the People of England, but of all, Europe’.¹⁶⁸

Protestant pamphleteers therefore represented the struggle as being against the international pretensions of the major European superpower, France. The French did not seek ‘to relieve the poor Irish’, one author alleged, ‘but to secure the Country for themselves’; indeed, such was the ascendancy that Louis XIV had gained ‘over the Fortunes’ of James II ‘that all his Motions’ were now directed by French Ministers, and he stood ‘but as a Cypher to… justifie the Politicks of the Most Christian King’.¹⁶⁹ Another, writing in May 1689, asserted ‘that Ireland is now become a French Province; and he who was lately King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, is now but the French King's Deputy of that Kingdom’.¹⁷⁰ Reports from Protestants fleeing Ireland that spring confirmed that ‘all things in Ireland [were] Governed by the French Embassador as if Ireland were the French King's and King James under him’.¹⁷¹ So powerful was this propaganda that Louis XIV found it necessary to deny that he intended ‘by Force of Armes to make the Kingdom of Ireland a dependent province of the Realme of France’, insisting that his only aim was to restore James II to ‘his rightfull Throne’.¹⁷²

Protestant sources repeatedly pointed to the maltreatment of the Protestants within Ireland at the hands of the French. On 14 April 1689, one Dublin diarist recorded how ‘Some French’, who had landed at Passage on Ireland's south coast, had defaced the local church, burning the seats and tearing the Bible (the leaves of which they wore in their hats) and ‘had like to kill the minister’.¹⁷³ Other reports complained of various ‘insolencies’ committed by the French, from intimidation and rape to theft and murder.¹⁷⁴ The behaviour of the French soldiers (there were six regiments of French infantry in Ireland in 1690¹⁷⁵) was sufficiently bad that a proclamation was issued, in French, on 5 May, forbidding them from taking anything without payment (on pain of death) and from disturbing any Protestant churches or religious meetings (on pain of severe punishment).¹⁷⁶ Yet Protestants also sought to represent the Catholic Irish as being unhappy about the French alliance. A letter from Dublin of June 1689 told how ‘the Natives look very suspiciously’ on the French, and complained of being ‘sold to the French’. ‘Putting French Officers in the place of the Irish who raise'd the Men’ was a particular cause of discontent, and ‘many of the common Souldiers’, it was alleged, deserted ‘their Colours upon it’.¹⁷⁷ Pamphlets carried accounts of how ‘Quarrels often happen between the French or the Irish’ and how Irish men of estate and sense began to wish themselves under English government again.¹⁷⁸ In the spring of 1690 some seventeen Irish Catholic officers threatened to resign their commissions when James informed them of his design to use the French troops as his personal guards: ‘for they owned’, it was reported in England, ‘that they had rather submit to the English, then be Slaves to the French’.¹⁷⁹

Closely related to the fear of France was concern about tyranny. James, it was claimed, by his actions in England and Ireland had made it clear that he aimed at the total subversion of government and the setting up of ‘an Arbitrary Tyrannical Power’.¹⁸⁰ There was particular resentment against some of the emergency taxes James found it necessary to levy to finance his war effort, which were seen as ‘a Strain of Arbitrary Power’ worse than Charles I's levy of ship money.¹⁸¹ Economic grievances more generally were emphasized. It was not just that the Protestants had lost their estates or that their trade had been ruined, but the whole kingdom had been impoverished as a result of the policies pursued by James and his French allies; the country had been devastated by civil war, and the economy had been further undermined by the debasement of the currency and the introduction of brass money to help finance the Jacobite war effort.¹⁸² One tract, focusing in particular on James's economic exactions, optimistically reported that it was ‘generally thought his oppression and tyranny will, in a little time, make the Irish… weary of him’.¹⁸³

None of these concerns – over security, over France, tyranny, or the economic well-being of the people of Ireland – were divorced from anxieties over religion. In all these areas, the threat was seen to be coming from a Catholic source, although Protestant polemicists maintained that Irish Catholics had as much reason to be concerned as Protestants. Yet even when Protestant writers did specifically address the issue of Catholicism, they did so in such a way as to make clear that the Catholic menace was not seen in purely religious terms. Popery was a threat to the political sovereignty of the monarch, even a Catholic monarch like James II. King recounted how ‘The Priests told us that they would have our Churches, and our Tyths, and that the King had nothing to do with them’. One Catholic clergyman, in a sermon preached before James at Christ Church, Dublin, in early 1690, went so far as to assert that ‘Kings ought to consult Clergymen in their temporal affairs, the Clergy having a temporal as well as a spiritual right in the Kingdom; but Kings had nothing to do with the managing of spiritual affairs, but were to obey the Orders of the Church’.¹⁸⁴ When James tried to exempt a Protestant, Sir Thomas Southwell, from the provisions of the Act of Attainder, he was told by his Catholic Attorney General, Sir Richard Nagle, that he could not do it. ‘He who in England was flatter'd into a conceit of an absolute and unlimited Power to dispense with the Establish'd Laws’, one Protestant pamphleteer concluded, ‘is not allowed in Ireland the Priviledge inherent to all Sovereign Powers by the Law of Nations, to pardon the Offences of a Subject’.¹⁸⁵

Protestants were therefore well aware that there was much more at stake in the conflict of 1689–91 than religion. Nevertheless, the experience of a war in which the protagonists were divided overwhelmingly along confessional lines encouraged Protestants to reach the conclusion that the essence of the Irish problem was the struggle between Irish Catholics and British Protestants, and that the main reason why the Irish had proved so vindictive was because of their religious principles. The main complaint we hear from Protestant sources during the course and immediate aftermath of the war concerned the treatment of Protestants at the hands of their Catholic enemies. The promise of liberty of conscience, it was alleged – with much justification – was not made good. Many Protestants, both lay and clerical, found themselves thrown into prison, and Catholic clergy seized possession of several church livings.¹⁸⁶ William King, who himself was assaulted in the streets by Catholic troops and had his church services disrupted on a number of occasions, recorded how ‘Several of the Inferiour Clergy were beaten and abused’ or ‘way-laid as they travelled the High-way’, even ‘shot at and wounded’. Some were ‘so beaten that they died upon it’; others ‘had their Houses set on fire’.¹⁸⁷ Some Protestant churches were seized by Catholic priests, others by Catholic troops (under the pretence that the Protestants had hidden arms in them), and still others were defaced by Catholic mobs, who would break the windows, pull up the seats, throw down the pulpit, communion table and rails, and steal whatever they could carry away. In some churches, in order to satirize the Protestant style of worship, ‘they hung up a black Sheep in the Pulpit, and put some part of the Bible before it’. Although James issued a proclamation on 13 December 1689 condemning the seizure of Protestant churches as a violation of the Act for Liberty of Conscience, it proved difficult to enforce.¹⁸⁸ When the Dean of St Patrick's in Dublin, Dr Lisbourn, tried to resume preaching following the issuance of this proclamation, he was ‘pulled down’ from the pulpit ‘by the Priests’, and had ‘his Vestments torn from his Back’, while the perpetrators justified their action by telling James that if he gave the least countenance to ‘Heresie in the Nation, he could never expect a Blessing on his Army’.¹⁸⁹ James feared such acts of ‘indiscreet Zeal’ from his Catholic supporters in Ireland, if he did nothing to stop them, would prevent him from returning to England: ‘for who will rely on our Royal Word, if they see it publickly broken’.¹⁹⁰ We also have innumerable accounts of alleged wartime atrocities committed on Protestants. Protestants were subjected to free quarter, the plundering of their goods and possessions, imprisonment without trial, economic privation and even starvation. News of such treatment was quick to filter back into England, as the accounts of diarists testify.¹⁹¹ The most disturbing tales of war atrocities against Protestants in Ireland, of course, were associated with the siege of Derry.

Protestant writers thus tended to blur the distinctions between the different interests among both the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland, opting instead for a simplified Protestant ‘Us’ versus Catholic ‘Them’ dichotomy. Cox, in the introduction to his Hibernia Anglicana, fully understood the historical tensions between the native Irish and the Old English, who originally conquered Ireland, and how through to the sixteenth century ‘the Old English and the Old Irish’ would repeatedly ‘split upon the old indelible National Antipathy’. He also recognized that the New English interest that had been established since the Reformation was divided between episcopalians and Protestant dissenters. But these differences among Protestants were now ‘very little taken notice of in Ireland’, he said. Moreover, the Old English had become assimilated with the native Irish over time: ‘they insensibly degenerated not only into Irish Customs, Habit and Manners, but also assumed Irish Names’, and since the Reformation the two interests were further tied together by the common bond of their shared Catholic religion. Reflecting on the experiences of the seventeenth century, and posing the question of how these differences stood at the time of the Revolution of 1689, Cox concluded that, ‘Whereas the Old English were heretofore on the British side in all National Quarrels, they are now so infatuated and degenerated, that they do not only take part with the Irish, but call themselves Natives, in distinction from the New English; against whom they are (at present) as inveterate as the Original Irish.’ He went on to add that the papists were never so enraged against the Protestants as now.¹⁹²

Protestants interpreted what happened in 1689–91 against the backdrop of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Although the Irish Parliament outlawed the commemoration of 23 October, the day continued to be observed by exiled Protestant communities in England. In 1689, for example, the Archbishop of Tuam, John Vesey, preached a thanksgiving sermon in Bow Church in London, while a number of Protestant dissenting ministers also observed the day ‘very solemnly’, among them Daniel Williams, a nonconformist divine who had fled Dublin in September 1687 and who preached to an audience comprised heavily of Protestant refugees from Ireland.¹⁹³ The following year Richard Tenison, Bishop of Killala, preached to the Protestants of Ireland at St Helen's, London.¹⁹⁴ Once the Protestants regained control of Ireland, sermons on 23 October revived on the Irish mainland – the best known being that delivered by Edward Wetenhall at Christ's Church Cathedral, Dublin, before the members of the newly convened Irish parliament in 1692, which was subsequently printed in amended form.¹⁹⁵

Although there were differences of emphasis, the sermons tended to rehearse similar themes. All recalled the horrors that the Irish had allegedly committed on the Protestants in 1641, often lifting their examples straight from Sir John Temple's famous History of the Irish Rebellion of 1646. Williams claimed that ‘Two Hundred thousand Protestants’ had been destroyed by the bloody Irish rebels: some butchered, drowned, or burned alive; others stripped naked and left ‘to perish by Cold and Famine’.¹⁹⁶ Tenison talked of Irish Catholics ‘hewing Christians in pieces’ and killing men ‘by degrees… that they might feel themselves dye’.¹⁹⁷ Vesey spoke of burning, drowning, burying alive, ‘ripping up Women big with Child, and giving the Infant to the Dogs; compelling the Wife to kill the Husband, and the Son the Mother, and then murder the Son’.¹⁹⁸ The Irish would have committed similar atrocities again in 1689–91, Wetenhall asserted, had not so many Protestants fled the kingdom. Nevertheless, what was done was bad enough. The Protestants were deprived of ‘Defensive Weapons’, ‘all Manner of Refuge or Security’, and ‘the very Necessaries of Life’; were imprisoned without cause, even placed under formal sentence of death; while it ‘was worse yet with those Forlorn Numbers driven before the Walls of Derry, of whom God alone knows how many perished’. Moreover, the Catholic clergy gave their congregations the same ‘Bloody Instructions’ as they had in 1641, bidding them to arm themselves ‘under pain of Suspension from Mass’ and to ‘Plunder and Stop all Protestants’, to ‘spoil and burn’ what they could not possess, advising them not to kill the Protestants, ‘but starve them with Cold and Hunger’.¹⁹⁹ Likewise, Tension talked about ‘the whole Nation rising again in Arms, seizing our Houses, plundering us of our Goods, and driving us into Exile and Banishment, when we had liv'd Peaceably, Hospitably, and most Obligingly among them’.²⁰⁰

The comparison with 1641 enabled these Protestant preachers to delegitimize the grievances of the Irish Catholics. ‘All the Favours and Kindness we can shew them, prove ineffectual’, Tenison asserted. ‘For was not the last Rebellion begun when they enjoy'd their Estates, and had the free Exercise of their Religion? When they were Members of Parliament, and Magistrates of Corporations? When their Lawyers… did Practice in our Courts? And when they had all the other Priviledges they could reasonably desire.’²⁰¹ Speaking of 1641, Williams claimed that the Catholics of Ireland committed ‘all these Villanies… when enjoying their Religion, and Civil Immunities in common with the English; and no way provoked by them’, while Vesey similarly insisted the Catholics of Ireland were ‘a People unpro-vok'd’, who ‘enjoy'd equal benefit of the Laws with the Protestants, shar'd equally in the Legislative Power and Administration of Justice; had the Bar fill'd with Lawyers of their own Perswasion’ and ‘had (by Connivence) the toleration of their Religion and exercise of their Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction’. Nevertheless, such favourable treatment could not ‘restrain them from so barbarous a Design’. Why? ‘Nothing but their Religion’, Vesey concluded, was capable of inspiring them ‘to such Cruelty’.²⁰² Likewise, both Wetenhall and Tenison blamed the Catholic clergy in Ireland for inciting their congregations against the Protestants. Referring to 1641, Tenison charged the Catholic clergy with ‘most falsely telling the People, that they were a Free Nation, and had no dependence on England, and should strive to recover their Ancient Rights’; Ireland was not a free nation, since ‘it was Conquer'd some hundreds of Years since’. Yet even though ‘the Title of England to that Kingdom be so clear, so very ancient and just’, Tenison averred, they had ‘openly rebell'd five times in less than fourscore years’, between 1567 and 1641; and, of course, again now in 1689.²⁰³

What conclusions, therefore, were Protestants to draw? Given the fact that these were thanksgiving sermons, praising God for deliverance, these preachers naturally urged Protestants to repent their sins. At the same time, it was transparent, they argued, that any concessions granted to Irish Catholics were pointless. ‘They have a Natural Aversion and Antipathy to us’, Tenison alleged, ‘And have resolv'd… to be our Enemies for ever… undoubtedly, when they have the Power in their hands, we must expect all the Mischief they can do us’.²⁰⁴ Although the Catholics had been defeated in war, Wetenhall said, only their power, ‘not their Malice’, was abated, and ‘Their very common People’ continue to tell us, ‘They will yet have a Day for it’. And while he urged the Protestants in Ireland to trust in God for deliverance from the Irish papists, he also warned them to be careful not to contradict that trust, and posited a bleak ‘us versus them’ dichotomy for future relations between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland: ‘Those who mix with them in Sin, must expect to be Sharers in their Vengeance… Those who mix with them in Society, will soon mix with them in Sin… Those who mix with them in Blood, are thereby most intimately mixt in Society, and consequently cannot avoid mixture in Sin.’ Protestants should not trust Irish Catholics: as good Christians, Wetenhall insisted, we should keep faith with them, ‘but we ought not to be such Fools… as to believe they will ever keep Faith with us’. If anyone were to ask whether ‘the Body of the Irish Nation’ by the law of the Gospel might qualify for forgiveness, it should be remembered, Wetenhall gloomily concluded, that ‘God himself forgives not Impenitents’.²⁰⁵

The Protestant clergy were not the only ones to draw such conclusions. One Protestant pamphleteer of 1689 admitted that he ‘had once a Charitable and favourable Opinion of many of’ the Irish Catholics: although he knew ‘that the Church of Rome holds bloody and damnable Principles’, he ‘was willing to believe, that the poor ordinary Members of it might not be instructed in them’. ‘But now’, he said, he had ‘downright Demonstration, that they… cannot be wronged in the worst Character that can be given of them. That they suck in this Romish Poison with their Motherss Milk; and are taught to hate and abhor English Men, and Protestants, as soon as their Pater Noster’. As a result, he would ‘never be induced to believe, That true Morality, and Popery; an honest Man, and a thorough-paced Papist can be consistent'.²⁰⁶

The extent to which Protestants who lived in or returned to Ireland shared the views articulated by their clergy or by Protestant polemicists is difficult to gauge. The Protestant Jacobite Charles Leslie claimed that in the north of Ireland, where Protestants were more numerous, the Protestants came to style the Irish Catholics ‘Bloody Dogs, Inhumane Murtherers, Cut-throats, etc.’ during the course of the war, with ‘Remember 41’ being ‘the usual Salutation they gave them’.²⁰⁷ Many Protestants within Ireland thought the terms of the Treaty of Limerick were too generous. According to Burnet, the concessions in the Treaty were ‘no small grief’ to ‘some of the English, who hoped this war would have ended in the total ruin of the Irish interest’.²⁰⁸ George Story, a Williamite chaplain, recorded that ‘a great many People’ in Ireland held that ‘Providence seem'd now to have given the Irish up, and that if this occasion was neglected, of putting it out of their power for ever hereafter to endanger the English interest… that all the Expense and Blood it had cost England in their Reduction’ would ‘signifie nothing’. Story himself disagreed, holding that ‘the Irish’ were still Christians, ‘tho’ misled and abused in many great Points’, and had ‘a natural Right to their Countrey’, which many of them had ‘never forfeited by any Rebellions’. For Story, any policy founded in blood was not ‘warrantable by the Law of God’, and Protestants should ‘be careful not to deface and dissolve the Bonds of Christian Charity; nay of humane Society’; it was ‘unreasonable to destroy other People, purely because they cannot think as we do’. Nevertheless, his protests imply that there were many Irish Protestants who held the views that he condemned.²⁰⁹

The situation on the ground was always going to be more complicated than Protestant polemicists might like to represent it, however. Wetenhall's own remarks against mixing with Irish Catholics reveals how difficult it was in practice for Protestants who had to live and make a living in Ireland to have no commerce with their Catholic neighbours. Wetenhall bitterly complained how ‘Many of us, to this day, much more affect and court the Irish, than our own Countreymen’.²¹⁰ There also remained a significant divide within the Protestant community in Ireland between those of the Established Church and the dissenters. During the siege of Derry, an interdenominational truce had been temporarily established, with the episcopalians holding their services in the cathedral in the morning, and the Presbyterians in the afternoon. Yet almost as soon as the war was over, tensions began to resurface. Rival accounts of the siege of Derry reveal the persistence of animosities between English conformists and Scottish Presbyterians. As one Presbyterian writer was to lament, ‘Tis pity that distinction of Parties, which was so generously laid aside during the Siege it self, should be soon resum'd in these Discourses it has unhappily occasioned’.²¹¹ On top of this, there remained the question of the nature of the imperial relationship between England and Ireland, which (as we have seen) had been a cause of concern to Protestants in Ireland, as well as to Catholics, in the reigns of Charles II and James II. A return to the status quo ante, which was the immediate effect of the Williamite victory, in other words, left many of the problems that had beset Protestants in Restoration Ireland unresolved.

Let us turn finally to a consideration of the plight of the Irish Catholics, which was documented in detail by Leslie in his lengthy Answer to King's State of the Protestants. They too had experienced great suffering during the war. Those in the Protestant-controlled north lived ‘in mortal Fear of the Protestants’, Leslie asserted, ‘and commonly durst not sleep in their Houses, but lay abroad in the Fields least they should fall upon them’.²¹² After each victory, the Protestants were quick to take their revenge on the local Catholic population. Leslie wrote of ‘the vast Number of poor harmless natives, who were daily Kill'd up and down the Fields, as they were following their Labour, or taken out of their Beds and Hanged, or Shot immediately for Rapparees’, which he justly concluded was ‘a most Terrible Scandal to the Government’.²¹³ As the Protestant forces progressively recaptured control of Ireland, many of the local inhabitants fled (or were forced to flee) across the Shannon into those parts that remained under Jacobite control. In reply to King's criticism of the Jacobite tactics at the siege of Derry, which Leslie was at pains to recall that James II had himself opposed, Leslie asked: ‘Is not Starving a County, or a Province, as Barbarous as Starving a City? And was not Crowding all the Irish Men, Women, and Children over the River Shannon done on purpose to reduce them to Famine?’ It certainly had this effect, since ‘many of them’ were to die of starvation.²¹⁴ One Irish Jacobite account complained how, after the Battle of the Boyne, ‘the enemy’ plundered the houses of those who had fled, ‘took away what cattle they [had] left behind, and seized on their estates and farms’.²¹⁵ William's army, which like James's suffered from lack of pay, could be just as brutal towards civilians, and at times was not particularly scrupulous in distinguishing between friend and foe.²¹⁶ Thus at the end of November 1690, Roger Morrice heard reports of ‘great Complaints of our Army out of Ireland, that they are as burdensome as King James's was, and that they plunder Protestants as well as Papists’.²¹⁷ In February 1691, with no end to the war yet in sight, one Dublin Protestant bemoaned the miserable condition of Ireland, complaining how people had been ‘reduced to beggary’ by a combination of ‘our own Army and the Irish Rapparees’.²¹⁸

The sufferings of the Irish Catholics did not end with the conclusion of the war. Under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick, some 16,000 Jacobite soldiers chose to leave Ireland,²¹⁹ never to see their homeland again – an exodus known to history as ‘the flight of the wild geese’. Some women and children did accompany the soldiers to France. In the process of boarding the ships, however, where the practice was to board the men first, families often got separated. In one gruesome incident, some women, who had seen their husbands already taken on board ship, tried to grab hold of the boat that had returned to pick up the officers, but they were either dragged off, or lost their grip, and drowned, or else ‘had their fingers cut off, and so perished in sight of their Husbands, or Relations’.²²⁰ O'Kelly's account confirms that despite the assurance that husbands could transport their wives and children, ‘when the ablest Men were once gott on Shipboard, the Women and Children were left on the Shore, exposed to Hunger and Cold, without any Manner of Provision, and without any Shelter in that rigorous Season’. Those who chose to stay behind were no better off, since they had ‘Nothing in Prospect but Contempt and Poverty, Chains and Imprisonment, and, in a Word, all the Miserys that a conquered Nation could rationally expect from the Power and Malice of implacable Enemyes’.²²¹

Many Irish Catholics felt betrayed by their king, believing (with some justice) that James was more interested in regaining his English throne and appeasing Protestant opinion in Britain than in helping them redress their own grievances. As Leslie put it, ‘the Generality of the Irish Papists do… lay all their Misfortunes upon K. J., because he would not follow their Measures, and was so inclinable to favour the Protestants’; ‘though a Roman Catholic’, James was ‘too much an English-man to carry on their Business’.²²² James's Irish armies referred to him as ‘Séamus an chaca’ – James the beshitten – for the way he fled to France following defeat at the Boyne.²²³ Legend has it – though there is no corroboration from contemporary sources – that James said to Lady Tyrconnell after the Boyne, ‘Your countrymen, madam, run well’, to which she replied, ‘Not quite so well as your majesty, for I see you have won the race’.²²⁴ O'Kelly was particularly bitter about the way the Irish had been treated by their military leaders, especially Tyrconnell and Sarsfield, whom he felt had betrayed the cause. The other main Irish Jacobite account of the war was more sympathetic to Tyrconnell, but nevertheless agreed that James had ‘spoiled his business in Ireland by his over great indulgence towards’ the Protestants, and also blamed the ‘want of wisdom’ and ‘the want of fidelity in some of his counsellors’, and ‘the ignorance or treachery of some great commanders in the army’.²²⁵

Yet it would be wrong to exaggerate the degree of disillusionment of Irish Catholics with the Stuart cause. The Irish Jacobites did not see the surrender of 1691 as a permanent settlement, but rather as a local truce in what was a general European conflict. They thus continued to harbour hopes of a French-backed Stuart restoration over the next couple of decades as England remained embroiled in war with France. Irish poets might have accused James II of having ‘one English and one Irish shoe’ and of ‘causing misery all over Ireland’; they also recognized that ‘As bad as James was, it [was] worse to be without him’. More generally, the retaliatory legislation enacted against the Catholic population in Ireland following the conclusion of the Jacobite war meant that significant numbers of Irish Catholics remained committed to the Jacobite cause. That Ireland remained quiet during the invasion scare of 1708 and the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 was more to do with a lack of leadership and Ireland's strategic irrelevance than lack of Irish sympathy for the exiled Stuarts.²²⁶

The above remarks highlight the divisions that existed within the Jacobite cause: James II, the Old English and the Gaelic Irish all had their own agenda. Nevertheless, the struggles of the Restoration period, which came to a head during the reign of James II and the war of 1689–91, had at the same time helped forge a stronger sense of common identity among the Irish Catholics, encouraging the view that the Protestants were the enemy. One Irish Jacobite account, representing the decision in 1689 ‘to restore the Irish Catholicks their lands’ as an attempt ‘to render at last that great justice to the nation which had been wanting for forty years’, said that he called ‘the Irish Catholicks the nation of Ireland, because Protestants therein are deemed but intruders and new comers’. And despite emphasizing the political and economic sources of contention between the Irish Catholics and Anglo-Protestants, the same author nevertheless tended to represent the root of the problem as being religious difference. Thus he wrote of the Protestants of Derry that ‘they hate the king for his religion, and love Orange for his contrary persuasion’. ‘The people of England, since their fall into heresy’, he asserted, ‘is a nation prone to rebellion through the depravedness of religion.’ England was ‘a nation without conscience or fear of God… while the Irish Catholics have showed themselves honest men in giving every one his due: to Caesar what is Caesar's; to God, what is God's to fellow-subjects what is theirs, by not invading their lands or their goods’. Those Irish soldiers who, following the Treaty of Limerick, enlisted to fight in William's army, this author insisted, were ‘foes to their country by siding with her enemies’, and did ‘betray the cause of their religion in strengthening the party of heretics’.²²⁷ In short, the struggle had come to be seen as one between rival religions. As a Dublin diarist put it, as early as January 1689, ‘Protestants and Papists’ had now become ‘the words of contests’.²²⁸ Sir Richard Cox, referring to the religious divide in Irish politics in the introduction to his Hibernica Anglicana of 1692, believed that ‘This great concern’ had ‘so silenced all the rest, that at this Day we know no difference of Nation but what is expressed by Papist and Protestant’.²²⁹

10

‘This Wofull Revolution’ in Ireland1

‘This Wofull Revolution’ in Ireland¹