Like all pre-modern societies, eighteenth-century Ireland was profoundly unequal. It was an aristocratic society with a colonial settler elite at the top. Most of these were parvenus, beneficiaries of the Cromwellian land settlements, although the position was not quite as stark as that. There was also a surprising degree of social mobility, as is best seen in the case of William Conolly (1662–1729), the son of a minor Catholic landlord and innkeeper from Co. Donegal who had conformed to the Church of Ireland. Through canny land dealing in the confiscations that followed the Williamite war, Conolly made his fortune. He married into a distinguished Williamite family, then entered the Irish parliament, where he demonstrated a talent for political intrigue and manoeuvre that brought him to eminence as Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. He was also the richest commoner in Ireland, rich enough to commission and have built Castletown, the finest classical country house in Ireland, to a design modelled on the Palazzo Farnese in Rome (see next photograph).
Conolly had risen from the ranks. In the pre-industrial age, ‘people of the middling sort’ were not a significant element of society. In the towns, they comprised a small professional and commercial class; in the countryside, a rural middle class of substantial tenants — many of them former Catholic landowners reduced to their new status by the Cromwellian confiscations. The vast majority of the population were rural peasants, either sub-tenants or landless labourers. Only in parts of Ulster was there a rural yeoman class, whose farming incomes were supplemented by the domestic production of linen.
The new masters of Ireland were the victors in the Williamite war, the new Anglican elite. The Jacobite attempt to reverse the Cromwellian land settlement had been an existential threat to their interests and it was they — through legislation enacted in the Irish parliament, which they dominated — who dishonoured the relatively generous terms of the Treaty of Limerick that had ended the war. Here was a reprise of the Dublin administration’s hounding of the Ulster earls after the end of the Nine Years’ War: the people on the ground took a much tougher line with the vanquished than the distant government in London.
From the 1690s to the 1720s, a series of penal laws were enacted with the intention of copper-fastening the social and economic hegemony of this new Anglican elite. Their purpose was not conversion, rather the neutering of Catholics (and to a lesser degree Dissenters) in the public sphere. Most Catholic clergy were banished; Catholics could not educate their children abroad; they could not purchase land or hold leases for more than 31 years; they could not practise law; if a Catholic landowner died, partible inheritance was forced on his sons, unless one conformed, in which case he alone inherited. The whole point was to emasculate what was left of the Catholic landowning class. In an age in which confessional allegiance mattered politically, such legal proscriptions against minorities were not unusual in Europe. What was unusual in the Irish context was their deployment against the majority.
While the penal laws were not rigorously enforced, they were evidence of a society, outwardly at peace, where confessional and ethnic tensions were close to the surface. And while the musculature of the Catholic church survived the penal laws very well — all dioceses had resident bishops in place by 1745 — they were a source of tension and anxiety for old Catholic families like the parents of Edmund Burke. The Burkes and Nagles were Old English families long established in North Cork: while the Burkes conformed, at least outwardly, the Nagles remained Catholic. A reminder of how brittle sectarian tensions could be was the execution of James Cotter, a prominent Catholic and Jacobite neighbour, on what were almost certainly trumped-up charges of rape, in 1720. As late as 1766, the celebrated execution of Fr Nicholas Sheehy in Co. Tipperary was a similar exercise in judicial murder. This was a nervous society.
It was also a traditional society where social relations relied on vertical ties of kinship and obligation, a kind of post-feudal world. In this respect, it was similar to most pre-industrial European societies. Like the Hiberno-Normans in earlier centuries, some post-Cromwellians went native, learned Gaelic and inter-married with older established families. This was the class that furnished the roaring, drunken, duelling squireens (memorably called the ‘half-mounted gentlemen’ by Jonah Barrington) who were very remote from anyone’s idea of English gentility. But they helped to maintain social relations with their tenants, sponsoring hurling matches and race meetings, and their closeness to tenants and neighbours helped to dissolve some of the tensions mentioned above.
What no one in pre-industrial Europe could dissolve or avoid were subsistence crises: famines. They were a regular feature of Irish life throughout the century, although all of them seemed to pale into insignificance in the light of the last such crisis, the Great Famine of 1845–52. None the less, the most severe eighteenth-century famine, that of 1739–41, may have killed a greater proportion of the Irish population than its better remembered successor.
The winter of 1740 was the most severe of the century, so bitterly cold that Lough Neagh, the largest body of fresh water in the British Isles, froze solid so that men could walk safely across it from Co. Tyrone to Co. Antrim. Animals and birds died in great numbers; fish froze in rivers; and the potato crop, including the seed potatoes vital for the next year’s planting, was ruined.
Which brings us back to Castletown and its folly. Old Speaker Conolly had died in 1729, but his widow Katherine remained the chatelaine of the great house until her death in 1752. When the famine struck in the winter of 1739 and then continued the following winter, she commissioned Richard Cassels (see chapter 18) to design the folly in order to provide famine relief work for the starving tenantry. Cassels was working on his designs for the neighbouring house at Carton, country seat of the earl of Leinster. What he designed is a remarkable structure: an obelisk standing on a triple-arched base with flanking mini-pavilions. It enclosed the long view from the rear of Castletown House.
Here we have the eighteenth century in symbolic miniature: the beautiful, symmetrical folly — useless but elegant, offering a distant perspective point for the delectation of the rich — put up as an act of kindly condescension by the architect du jour at the behest of the wealthiest woman in Ireland. And all to provide employment for starving tenants caught in nature’s subsistence trap. Wealth and poverty, and too little between.
