While our neighbour nations have been haunted by conspiracies and confusions, we… suffered nothing under the force of such enchantments… All here was peace and quietness. And what is further observable, all things prospered in our land. Merchandise increased, trades thrived, artificers were encouraged; the King's revenue… considerably augmented and the whole country improved to a very sensible advantage; and all this at the same time when others were preparing for a state of war and when we ourselves in this kingdom were represented to our friends abroad as a desperate, miserable, forlorn people, and exposed as a prey to the common enemy.1
On the surface, Ireland appears to have been where the restored polity was most vulnerable. The Protestants of the Established Church were a small minority, outnumbered even by the Protestant dissenters, let alone by the Catholic majority who made up three-quarters of the total population. The Restoration settlement had left an uneasy political, religious and economic situation. Both Catholics and Protestant dissenters were unhappy about their exclusion from political power and trading privileges and the formal restrictions on their religious freedoms, while the land settlement had left a deep well of bitterness and resentment, with not only dispossessed Catholics feeling cheated at not being allowed to regain what they believed was rightfully theirs but also many Protestants either feeling angry at having to return land that they had recently purchased or else nervous about whether they would be allowed to keep what they had. There were repeated alarms in the 1660 and '70s both that Protestant dissenters in Ireland were conspiring with radical discontented elements elsewhere in the British Isles to bring down the restored monarchy and that Irish papists were in league with the Catholic superpowers of Europe to extirpate Protestantism in this north-west corner of the continent. Those who ruled Ireland had to be careful how they trod; enforcing the strict letter of the law against Catholics and dissenters would only build up further resentment in the vast majority of the population, whereas being too lenient would create fears in both Ireland and England about the security of the Protestant ascendancy.
Having said this, in the 1670s there were signs that Ireland was beginning to recover from the devastations of the 1640s and '50s and, despite the tensions that lay not far beneath the surface, to enjoy a relative degree of stability. It took the revelations of the Popish Plot in England and the subsequent Exclusion Crisis to destabilize the situation in Ireland. Oates's initial revelations had alleged that the Catholics in Ireland were planning another uprising, which was seemingly confirmed in the spring of 1680 when Shaftesbury claimed to have uncovered an Irish plot involving a French-backed conspiracy to massacre Protestants in Ireland. In addition, the covenanters’ rebellion in Scotland in May–June 1679 prompted fears that the Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster might rise in support. And it was undoubtedly the case (as we have seen) that the perception of what was going on in Ireland had a vital impact on public opinion in England during the Exclusion Crisis.
The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to examine exactly what was going on in Ireland. We will assess what impact the revelations of the Popish Plot had there and how those who lived in Ireland reacted, in order to determine the extent to which Ireland did become destabilized at this time. We will also explore how the government of Charles II responded to the Irish situation. The royal administration in Dublin – headed for most of this time by the Duke of Ormonde, who served his second spell as Lord Lieutenant from 1677 to 1685, with his son the Earl of Arran serving as his deputy between 1682 and 1684 – pursued a cautious policy of damage limitation. Thus it took appropriate security measures to prevent any possibility of insurrection, and made some effort to shore up the Protestant establishment, but it remained careful not to overreact against Catholics and Protestant nonconformists (most of whom were peaceful and loyal) for fear of provoking more genuine discontent. The revelations of the Rye House Plot, with its supposed Irish dimension, made it necessary to clamp down more rigorously on public meetings of dissenters and Catholics and to conduct a purge of local office-holders to ensure loyalty to the existing regime. Nevertheless, throughout this period Ormonde and Arran remained careful to adhere strictly to the rule of law. Although there was some disaffection in Ireland at this time, it was in fact limited, and much less of a threat than that which existed in Scotland or even in England. Yet Ireland did mimic England in the sense that it witnessed a marked loyalist reaction in the final years of Charles II's reign, as conformist Protestants across the kingdom sought to demonstrate their backing for the crown in its struggle against the English Whigs through a campaign of loyal addresses. Thus in Ireland, as in England, the years of the Tory Reaction saw a dramatic groundswell of support for the King and his brother – at least among Protestants of the Established Church.
Despite the intrinsic fragility of the situation in Restoration Ireland, it would be misleading to paint too bleak a picture. The Protestant ascendancy may have felt nervous about the potential threat from both popery and dissent, and resented interference by the English parliament in its own economic affairs, but basically it had no alternative but to look to England for support, and in reality it was doing quite well from the imperial relationship. Moreover, in practice the Restoration regime afforded a considerable degree of toleration to Protestant dissenters and Catholics, which meant that religious tensions in Ireland were not fuelled by government-backed persecution, as they were in England and Scotland. The vast majority of Protestant nonconformists – including the Scottish Presbyterians of Ulster – made their peace with the Restoration regime, and even seemed to thrive under it. Many Catholic merchants managed to achieve a certain degree of prosperity despite the legal impediments under which they operated; indeed, in some towns they were able to become freemen and even gain access to corporate office. The land settlement remained the major grievance for Catholics, but for the time being they appeared willing to put their trust in the Restoration regime in the hope that Charles II might open up the land question again – as, in fact, he seemed prepared to do in 1672, before pressure from the English parliament forced him to back down, and again in 1678. In addition, York's public acknowledgement of his conversion to Rome, following his non-compliance with the Test Act in 1673, gave the Catholic majority in Ireland the prospect of one day having a king of their own faith. All they had to do was to bide their time; launching a challenge to the Protestant ascendancy at this juncture would have served only to fuel English anxieties over the Catholic succession, and more likely than not would have rebounded to their disadvantage.
Furthermore, following the devastations and depopulation wrought by the wars of the 1640s and a somewhat shaky start in the early years of the Restoration, the Irish economy was showing signs of recovery. As the land settlement began to acquire an air of stability, the longer it remained unchallenged, the more willing the new owners were to invest in their property and make improvements. Likewise trade picked up, despite temporary setbacks caused by the Dutch Wars of 1664–7 and 1672–4 and the restrictions placed on the Irish economy by the English. The Navigation Act of 1671, which stipulated that all colonial imports should be landed first in England, nevertheless left Ireland free to export directly to the colonies and in any case proved fairly easy to evade, while the Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667, despite destroying a profitable export trade to England, stimulated a diversification of the Irish agricultural economy into salt beef, butter and sheep, and helped promote an expansion of trade with the Continent and the colonies. Growing economic prosperity was reflected in a dramatic rise in receipts from customs and excise, which more than doubled between 1665 and 1683. The population also began to grow, at a time when that of England and Wales was stagnating or even in decline. The most dramatic increase was in Dublin, which at least doubled and may even have tripled in size between 1665 and 1683; by the latter date, with a population of between 50,000 and 60,000, it was the second largest city of the Stuart kingdoms – exceeded only by London. Not that this prosperity was evenly distributed among Ireland's inhabitants; the lion's share of the wealth remained in Protestant hands. Nevertheless, this was not a kingdom that was struggling to keep itself together, or that seemed on the verge of imminent political or economic collapse.2 In the mid-1670s, then, on the eve of the Exclusion Crisis, neither the ascendant Protestant interest, the Protestant dissenters nor the Catholics in Ireland appeared to have anything to gain from rocking the boat.
It took external factors to threaten the relative stability of Ireland at this time. The revelations of the Popish Plot in England in the late summer and autumn of 1678 made it necessary for the authorities in Ireland to be seen to be taking tougher measures against Catholics. On 16 October 1678 the Dublin administration issued a proclamation requiring all Catholic bishops, Jesuits and regular clergy to leave Ireland, and all convents to be closed.3 This was followed two weeks later by an order prohibiting all Catholics from carrying or possessing arms, unless licensed by the Lord Lieutenant, and enjoining them to surrender whatever weapons they had. On 20 November the government issued proclamations prohibiting Catholics from entering Dublin Castle or any fort in the kingdom, or even from living in garrison towns unless they had dwelt there for twelve months, and excluding converts to the Roman faith from the guards.4 The orders were not that strictly enforced, and additional proclamations had to be issued over the next two years to urge the disarming of Catholics and the apprehension of popish clergy not permitted to stay in the country.5 Shaftesbury and the English Whigs complained bitterly in the English parliament that Ormonde was being too soft on the Catholics, but the Lord Lieutenant refused to be pressured into taking panic measures that might serve only to provoke the majority Catholic population and thus do more harm than good.6
The revelations of the Popish Plot in England nevertheless caused panic in Ireland. One correspondent, writing from Ireland to England in early February 1679, claimed that even ‘before wee became acquainted with the horrid Plott, the Irish who had perfect knowledge of it, told many of their English friends, that most woefull bloody times were at hand.’ In paranoid fashion, he then went on to allege that Ormonde was in collusion with the Catholics and had ordered their weapons to be returned and allowed arrested clerics to be released. Indeed, this correspondent protested, both Ormonde and Arran continued to employ Catholics in those parts of the country where they held influence, while the revenue-farmers even appointed Catholics as hearth-tax or excise officials, thereby providing them with the ‘opportunity to search our houses and cut our throats’. Despite the proclamation forbidding papists from keeping houses in Dublin, he went on, prominent Catholics remained in the capital: most of the constables were Catholics; ‘Popish postmasters’ had been ‘put in the Country’; popish schools had been set up in Ormonde or Arran territory; and masses were publicly held ‘and more frequented than our churches’. This author even claimed that Ormonde's elder son, the Earl of Ossory, who came to Ireland briefly in early 1679 to deputize while his father was away in England, had in reality come over to enlist his own private forces and gauge how ready the papists were to assist their brethren in England – though ‘whether our throats or yours’ were ‘first to be Cutt’, or ‘whether the meeting of the Parliament be the time to doe both’, the author conceded he did not yet know.7 Exhibiting a similar degree of paranoia, the Earl of Orrery, governor of Clare in the west of Ireland, warned in February 1679 of an impending French invasion, predicting the likelihood of French success if something were not done quickly to put the kingdom in a better defensive posture. All the major sea ports in his part of the country, he claimed, had within their walls many more Irish Catholics – ‘and that of the loosest sort apt for any mischiefe’ – than soldiers or Protestant inhabitants, with the exception of Cork, whose suburbs were nevertheless filled with ‘dangerous people’. Moreover, not only was the countryside filled with Catholics, but their clan chiefs continued to live among them (despite having forfeited their estates for the last rebellion), as did ‘the romish Clergy’ (despite the proclamations ordering them to leave the kingdom). ‘When the Bulke of the Common people are influenc'd by their lay Cheifes, and by their spiritual guides, how ready will they bee for rebellion,’ Orrery forecast – especially if to those two powerful groups ‘there bee the accession of a French invasion accompanied with Declarations of restoring them to their forfeited estates, and their Clergy to their honors, dignityes and revenues’. 8
Such fears may have been unfounded, but they were certainly genuinely felt. Sir William Talbot, the Duke of York's agent in Ireland, observed how the Popish Plot awakened the Protestants ‘from a lethargy of security’ and made them ‘fly to their armes’. The papists, by contrast, ‘confounded with the blacknesse of the designe of which they protested] their ignorance’, feared a backlash which would lead to ‘their inviolable ruine’. Talbot himself believed the plot was ‘bloune up… by the clandestine and secret instigation of malcontents to bring all to confusion’, but felt that ‘only the hands of providence’ could ‘put a stay to the incensed minds of the multitude’.9 Orrery's suspicions seemed confirmed when an Irish Catholic named Murphy deposed before the Dublin authorities in the spring of 1679 ‘that several Irish Papists were Privatly Inlisted men’, though Dublin subsequently informed Orrery that Murphy was ‘a man of a Craved Braine’ and his testimony unreliable. Orrery found that he had to defer an intended trip to London while fears remained of a possible French attack, the Protestants telling him they ‘would be the more disanimated’ were he to leave the country.10 Then in September one David Fitzgerald, a Protestant sea captain, informed him about a long-standing French design to invade Ireland with an army and some 5–6,000 firearms, to land somewhere between Waterford and Dungarvan. Orrery took ‘the alarm warmly’; Ormonde thought an invasion highly unlikely, given that there was no corroborating intelligence, but nevertheless launched an appropriate investigation. (When the French ship supposed to be carrying the arms arrived at Waterford and was searched, it was found to be laden only with salt.) 11 A Protestant minister preaching at Youghall on 29 December 1679, speaking of ‘the troubles and disquiets that are amongst us’, warned his congregation that this could be their last communion, since they did not know when their liberty might ‘be snatcht away’ from them.12 Fears generated mutual suspicions and increasing tensions between Protestants and Catholics. For instance, trouble erupted when one John Totty, an officer of the mace in Dublin, was sent to shut down a mass house on the Merchant's Key on 1 April 1679: Totty ‘pulled away the priest by the shoulders’; the priest cried out ‘that he wou'd be revenged for it’, and later that night two men caught up with Totty at the Tholsell and left him for dead. 13
Protestants in Ireland who harboured fears of Catholic conspiracy realized that their fate depended on how those in England chose to respond to the Popish Plot. They therefore came to put their faith in the English parliament as the only body that seemed determined to get to the root of the plot, and grew frustrated with Charles II's attempts to foil the English Whigs through recourse to his powers of prorogation and dissolution. There was, in other words, some kind of Irish counterpart to the English Whig movement, albeit modest in scope, committed to securing the regular sitting of the English parliament so that it could deal with the challenge facing Protestants on both sides of the Irish Sea. On 1 March 1681 Viscount Clare and the JPs and grand jury of Country Clare drew up a petition to Ormonde at the Ennis assizes in which they alleged that the recent dissolution of the parliament in England had encouraged the papists in Ireland to great insolence: while there was no parliament, they explained, nothing was done to investigate the plot, and the Catholics formed the opinion that they were favoured. The petitioners therefore implored Ormonde to persuade the King to let parliament sit on 21 March and continue sitting until an effective course had been taken to secure the Protestants of Ireland from popish designs. Whether Clare's initiative was coordinated with the Whig petitioning campaign in England is unclear; Thompson in his Intelligence, perhaps not the most reliable source, claimed that Clare's petition ‘was first draw'd here in England, and sent over by two Persons of Honour’. It nevertheless does seem to have been part of a broader campaign at least within this part of Ireland: there was an attempt to promote a similar petition from County Limerick, although this failed to get off the ground when the grand jury there refused to have anything to do with it. Charles II was furious with Clare, proclaiming that the inhabitants of Ireland were ‘out of their sphere whenever they pretend to give counsel to his Majesty touching his affairs in England’, and had him removed from the commission of the peace, the militia, and all other employments. Under pressure, the grand jury and two of the JPs retracted the petition in late April, early May; Clare himself claimed that his intention had been misunderstood and that he was by no means disloyal, although it was not until December 1683, in the aftermath of the Rye House Plot, that he offered to make a formal retraction too.14
It was not only the revelations of the Popish Plot in England that destabilized Ireland; so too did the outbreak of Presbyterian unrest in Scotland. Protestants of the Established Church in Ireland had long been uneasy about the sizeable nonconformist presence in their own country, and especially that of the Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, who were more geographically concentrated than the English dissenters and also more highly organized. Many, among them Archbishop of Armagh Michael Boyle himself, were unhappy with the de facto toleration afforded Protestant nonconformists and would have liked to have seen the laws penalizing dissent more strictly enforced. Ormonde, although he recognized the need for a policy of pragmatic toleration, nevertheless thought Presbyterians were as bad as Catholics. Churchmen's fears were made worse by the heavy influx of Scottish Presbyterians fleeing persecution in 1678 and of Scottish rebels seeking asylum in 1679.15 In September 1678 the English government instructed Ormonde to maintain a close surveillance over the North Channel to stop militant covenanters from the Scottish south-west escaping into Ireland.16 Such efforts were renewed in June 1679, following the outbreak of the covenanter rebellion in Scotland, lest the Ulster Presbyterians should rise in sympathy.17 Such fears were not totally without foundation. Following the murder of the Archbishop of St Andrews by Scottish fanatics in May 1679, a Derry Presbyterian named Henry Osborne was heard to say in public that he was pleased that the Archbishop was killed, while the following year copies of Cargill's Sanquhar declaration were found circulating in the province.18
Nevertheless, the Ulster Presbyterians remained quiet, with most of their ministers at pains to dissociate themselves from the activities of extremists across the North Channel and to affirm their loyalty to the government. At the end of June 1679 the presbytery of Down drew up an address to Ormonde protesting its loyalty to the king and declaring that it had had no prior knowledge of the rebellion in Scotland and had taken no part in it. In September, eight Presbyterian ministers from Londonderry and adjacent counties drew up a further address, declaring they would ‘remain steadfast’ in their loyalty, continue ‘to pray for his majesty's person and government’ and ‘obey his lawful commandments’, and even when they could not ‘in conscience actively obey his majesty's laws’ they would ‘yet peaceably… submit to his majesty's undoubted authority’. Likewise in July 1680 four leading Presbyterian ministers from County Armagh sent a petition to Ormonde disowning the Sanquhar declaration and protesting that ‘the ministers and people of our profession in this county’ knew nothing ‘but principles of loyalty and due obedience to his Majesty’.19
With the passage of time, doubts began to increase in Ireland about the reality of the popish threat. To many on the ground, it soon became apparent that the rumours of Catholic conspiracy were baseless. For example, at the end of July 1680 a Protestant clergyman, writing from Cashel in County Tipperary about the difficulties he was having in trying to convert the local Catholics, could nevertheless reassure his correspondent in England that all was quiet and ‘the reports of troubles found fals’.20 In the third week of March 1681 William Molyneux wrote from Dublin that, although it was conceivable that ‘Our Plots in Ireland’ were ‘begotten short’, he was convinced they were ‘brought forth in England, for we hear nothing off [sic] them but from thence’.21 What plots were ‘brought forth’ in Ireland were shown to be fabrications. For example, when two Catholic converts to Protestantism accused two Catholics of being involved in ‘a designe to Introduce the French, Subdue the Kingdome, alter the Religion Established, and Introduce Popery’ at the assizes for County Mayo in August 1681, a Protestant jury found that the prosecution ‘was altogether malitious and groundles’ and returned a verdict of not guilty.22 In February 1682 three individuals were sentenced to stand in the pillory – two were also to have an ear cut off – for making false accusations about the supposed Irish Plot.23 At the Cork assizes in August 1682 the principal witness against the titular Bishop of Cork for alleged involvement in the Irish Plot retracted his evidence and declared ‘that what he had before sworn, was all false, and that he was stirred up to do what formerly he did’.24 Of course it would be wrong to convey the impression that all Protestants were suddenly convinced that their worst fears of the Catholics were groundless. Nevertheless, it is clear that many Protestants of the Established Church in Ireland were becoming less credulous of stories of Irish conspiracies they were hearing out of England and increasingly suspicious of how the alleged Irish Plot was being used to try to discredit those in charge in Ireland. Illustrative of this trend is the fact that in May 1681 the Dublin assembly issued a formal condemnation of a pamphlet called Ireland's Sad Lamentation, which had accused Ormonde, Arran and Archbishop Boyle of acting under Roman Catholic influences, in opposition to the true interests of the English in Ireland.25
The Tory press in England did its best to convey the impression that all was well in Ireland, as part of the strategy to calm English anxieties about the alleged popish threat and rally support behind the crown. Thus on 9 March 1681, in the very first issue of his Intelligence, Thompson reported how letters from Dublin showed that Ireland was quiet, contrary to the lies of factious scribblers – in particular he insisted that there was no truth to recent rumours of great meetings of Catholic clergy or of a secret stash of Catholic arms being found near Cork.26 Likewise, in April 1682 Thompson assured his readers that Ireland was ‘in a very quiet and peaceable Condition’.27 Ormonde agreed. Writing to the King in July 1681 from his family seat at Kilkenny, he reported how ‘this kingdom improves visibly, and is improved beyond what could have been reasonably hoped for in the space of twenty years.’ It was true that there was no faction in any of Charles's other kingdoms that did not have ‘some abettors and well wishers in this’, but the King's ‘late conduct in [his] Court, councils and magistracy’ – that is, the way he had responded to the Exclusionist challenge in England – had ‘evidently and advantageously influenced [his] affairs here’.28
In fact we see the same type of royalist reaction in Ireland following the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 as we do in England. This manifested itself in two ways: a desire to uphold and protect the existing Protestant establishment against potential challenges from either Protestant dissenters or Catholics, and a sudden rise in public professions of support for the crown and the hereditary succession in the form of loyal demonstrations and addresses. Not that the trends were identical in the two kingdoms. Indeed, the term ‘reaction’ is somewhat less appropriate in the Irish context; in England there was a marked reaction against the Whigs and their nonconformist allies and a definite swing in public opinion in favour of Charles II and the Duke of York, whereas in Ireland the loyalty of those Protestants of the Established Church who rallied in support of the crown's position had never been in doubt. For this reason it proved unnecessary for the crown to conduct the same sort of purges of local office-holders as in England. Moreover, given that Protestants of the Established Church in Ireland were such a small minority of the total population, they had to be careful not to overreact against those outside the existing establishment. Thus we do not see the same drive against dissent and the strict enforcement of the penal laws which were such central features of the Tory Reaction in England. Nevertheless, we can detect the same type of process at work in Ireland, namely a cementing of the ties between the Protestant establishment and the crown, centred around a commitment to the hereditary succession, the rule of law, and the ascendancy of the Established Church.
A number of towns took measures to ensure that they remained bulwarks of the Protestant establishment. On 28 May 1681 the Trim assembly ordered all those not free of the corporation to leave by 10 June, and required all freemen to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy.29 Similarly in July of that year the corporation of Dublin affirmed that no one would ‘hereafter be admitted to the freedom of this cittie without takeing the oaths of allegiance and supremacy’.30 Ormonde, as Lord Lieutenant, took steps to ensure that those responsible for keeping law and order in Ireland were loyal to the Established Church, issuing a proclamation in November 1681 requiring all officers in the army to produce certificates proving that they had taken the Anglican sacrament, and another the following April requiring the same of all JPs.31
The religious complexion of Ireland made it impossible to contemplate a strict enforcement of the laws against those who worshipped outside the Protestant establishment. Yet, as the governments in Scotland and England began to take an increasingly harsh line against Protestant dissent, so the authorities in Ireland found it necessary to make some gestures against nonconformist activity, especially if it seemed to threaten existing authority structures within the kingdom. The first hint of a hardening attitude came towards the beginning of 1681, in response to the decision by the Lagan Presbyterian meeting in Ulster to call a fast for 17 February to avert the judgement of God at a time when, so the meeting believed, ‘Popery was making great Advances.’ Although meetings had often called fasts in the past, technically only the king could do so, and so this amounted to a usurpation of royal authority. The ministers responsible were summoned before the Lord Lieutenant and council in Dublin, prosecuted for violating the Act of Uniformity, fined £20 each, and imprisoned for the best part of the year for failure to pay, being released only when the Exchequer reduced the fines to 20 shillings.32 During the years 1681 – 2 Dublin Quakers found themselves being pursued for unpaid tithes, and occasionally soldiers were sent to disperse Quaker meetings in private houses.33 However, the authorities in Ireland seemed somewhat unsure of the legal powers they had to act against nonconformist conventicles. In July 1682 Ormonde, in response to an enquiry from Archbishop Boyle about whether the King might do anything to ‘give more force to those Acts of Parliament that we have in Ireland for the suppression of conventicles’, warned, ‘We must goe no further then Law will carry Us.’ ‘Our lawyers in Ireland’ he explained, were unsure whether any of the laws of England could be used against anyone but the papists, though all agreed that ‘the Law against riots and unlawfull Assemblyes’ might possibly be interpreted to reach Protestant dissenters.34 For the time being, however, the Irish government chose to tread cautiously.
As with England and Scotland, there were loyalist demonstrations in Ireland. Whether these were on the increase is difficult to say, because ever since the Restoration there had been a strong tradition among Church of Ireland Protestants of celebrating royal anniversaries, especially Restoration Day itself.35 Nevertheless, the continued commemoration of royal anniversaries undoubtedly took on a new significance in the altered political context of the Exclusion Crisis, and in particular during the years of the Tory Reaction in England, when the Tory press in England was keen to point to examples of loyalist commitment throughout the three Stuart kingdoms in order to substantiate its claim that the majority of people did not support the Whigs. Thus in June 1682 Thompson's Intelligence carried a detailed report of how Dubliners had celebrated 29 May ‘with all the expressions of Joy imaginable’, there being innumerable bonfires throughout the city, including three huge ones constructed at the Lord Mayor's orders at the town hall, the gates of the college, and in Castle Street, ‘where great numbers of People’ drank loyal toasts ‘upon their Knees’, amidst acclamations of ‘God bless the King, and all the Royal Family.’36 At Lifford, County Donegal, on that day, those described by our hostile source as ‘the drunken gentry and justices of the peace’ burned effigies of the Earl of Shaftesbury and a local Presbyterian minister – the latter only recently released from jail after having been imprisoned by the same magistrates for holding an illegal fast.37 There were no royal entries or progresses in Ireland – as in Scotland and England – to provide occasion for loyalist displays, but in the absence of the King or the Duke of York the viceroy could serve just as well. Thus when Ormonde returned to Dublin in the autumn of 1681, after a stay at his country home in Kilkenny, he ‘was received with great signs of Joy, not only by the Inhabitants making Bonefires, but also by the Militia, who were drawn out in order for his Reception’.38
Ireland also followed England in presenting a number of loyal addresses to the crown. Charles II's declaration of April 1681, explaining why he had dissolved his two previous parliaments in England, related as it was predominantly to the English context, did not suggest the obvious need for a response from Ireland. Nevertheless, ‘the loyal and well affected citizens’ of Dublin did draw up an address in May, thanking the King for removing ‘the causeless Fears and Jealousies of Popery and Arbitrary Power’.39 Forty-three further addresses came in from corporations and counties all over Ireland in the spring and summer of 1682, pledging commitment to the King, the succession and the Protestant religion. The first was that of the grand jury for County Cork on 22 March. Claiming to have been ‘animated’ by the loyal addresses in England, the authors acknowledged they had lived in peace and prosperity under Charles II and promised to do their utmost to maintain the King's ‘rights, the lawful Succession and the Protestant religion now by law established’.40 That the royal administration in England did not orchestrate this initiative seems confirmed by the fact that the Earl of Barrymore later felt compelled to write to Ormonde (who was then in London) to apologize that the address ‘was not soe full as it might and ought to have been’, since it did not specifically condemn Shaftesbury's Association (as the English addresses of 1682 did), and offering to promote another address at the next quarter sessions ‘in Expresse tearmes against that Late Rebellious association’.41
The Cork address was soon followed by others that were more ‘full’. That from County Limerick claimed that Charles II's government was ‘famous through the neighbouring World for the Unbyassed and Uncorrupted Justice wherewith the Lawes of the Land’ had been administered ‘and an uninterrupted trade and commerce caryed on beyond what hath been known in any former times’. However, certain malcontents were stirring up trouble, spreading ‘Volumes of libellous Pamphlets against your Majesties happy Government’ in an attempt ‘to alienate the hearts of your Majesties good Subjects’, and thereby threatening to engage them in another civil war. The addressors concluded by promising to defend the King in his ‘regall rights and Prerogatives’ against foreign and domestic force and the evil practices of any who might endeavour to weaken the government under either Charles II or his ‘legall Successors’.42 The address from the corporation of Dublin thanked the King for ‘the great happinesse, peace, security, and tranquility’ now enjoyed under his ‘most gracious government’, expressed a ‘detestation of all those wicked practices and contrivances… by some factious and ill minded men to alienate from your majestie the affections of your subjects, and to seduce them from the duty and obedience that they owe’, and concluded with a promise ‘to defend and preserve’ the King's ‘royall person and Protestant religion and the government, as it is now by law established in church and state, against all confederacies, attempts and associations whatever… by either Papists or fanaticks, or other disturbers of the publick peace’.43
Most of the subsequent addresses followed a similar pattern. The corporation of Waterford, claiming inspiration from the Dublin address, thanked Charles II for the way he and Ormonde had governed them, expressed their ‘utter detestacion of all those malevolent practices and seditious machinations which have been of late drawn into practice by some mutinous and ill designing persons’, and pledged to defend and preserve the King's royal person and prerogative’, ‘the lawful descent of the imperial crowne of these realms in the lineall and lawful course of it’, ‘the true Protestant religion’ and ‘the government as it is now established by law, both in church and state, against all combinacions and confedracyes and associations whatsoever’, whether by ‘papists or sectaries’.44 The address from the grand jurors of County Meath offered Charles II thanks for his ‘repeated assurances’ that he would defend ‘the Protestant Religion as it is now established by Law in this… Kingdom’ and govern ‘according to the Laws’, expressed an abhorrence of associations, and made professions of duty not just to the King but also to ‘your Majesties heires and lawful Successors’. The grand jurors of County Wicklow said they would ‘defend and preserve your Majesties most Royal person and prerogative, the lawful discent and Succession of your Imperial Crowne, and the true Protestant Religion as it is now Established by Law’. The town and borough of Wexford expressed an abhorrence of the Association and promised to defend the King, his prerogative and heirs, and ‘the Religion and government in church and state as now by Law Established against all associations, Covenanters and confederates Whither Papists, fanaticks or Other disturbers of the Peace of Whatsoever Principle or perswasion’.45
Initially the royal administration did not seem to know what to make of the addresses from Ireland. Ormonde, for one, was troubled by the Dublin address of May 1681. ‘Such applications out of Ireland’ were new, he observed, or ‘at least never practised… in good times’; besides, there was bound to be some opposition, and he worried that ‘the number of the disaffected’ might be found to be greater than anyone thought. Similarly Charles, though ‘very glad’ that Dubliners were ‘generally so well inclined’, feared that the promotion of addresses might ‘make them factious there’, as had already proved to be the case in the City of London.46 When the addresses from Cork and Dublin of 1682 were read to the King at Windsor they were laughed at, the Earl of Conway tells us. Secretary Jenkins apparently made ‘a pleasant mistake… in the reading’ – whether a mere slip of the tongue or a deliberate attempt at humour is unclear, though Conway concluded that the Irish addresses were regarded as ‘of little valew’, because they were ‘out of the Rode’, and thought that Ormonde would be instructed to suppress them.47 Yet, whatever the court at Windsor thought of these addresses, the administration in Ireland believed it was important, once the ball had started rolling, to keep them coming. Thus on 9 May 1682 Thomas Parnell in Dublin sent a chastizing letter to Sir George Rawdon in Lisburn, County Antrim, complaining of ‘the Backwardness of [his] county in making an Addresse to his Majesty’ and urging that it ‘should do one speedily’, so as not to be the last.48
What do these addresses allow us to conclude about the climate of public opinion in Ireland? Clearly we are dealing with a small segment of the population. The addresses were issued in the names of the ruling elites of the towns or counties; unlike in England, there were no addresses from humble groups such as apprentices, cooks or tin-nners. The addressors were also overwhelmingly Protestants of the Established Church, although occasionally Irish names can be detected among the signatories: for example, two Magennises signed the Down address of April 1682, though this nevertheless expressed a commitment to the ‘Religion as now Established by law amongst us’.49 Furthermore, not every county or corporation sent in an address (if they had, there would have been four times as many), while some of those that did dragged their feet or showed a distinct lack of enthusiasm. The Dublin administration was concerned about the slowness of certain parts of Ulster to address. Neither the county of Antrim nor the corporation of Belfast ever did, though County Londonderry drew up an address on 25 April. The corporation of Carrickfergus was one of the last, not drawing up its address until 10 July.50 There was also a pocket of disaffection in County Tipperary, which Ormonde thought ‘the worst affected [shire] in the Kingdom’. Although the county did deliver a loyal address at the beginning of May, Arran found that the majority of the grand jury, egged on by the disaffected mayor of Clonmel, Stephen Moore, had refused to sign it. Arran therefore decided to hold it back until he had had the chance to remove Moore from the commission of the peace, and the address from County Tipperary was not to be finally agreed to until 18 July.51 The very last address was County Kerry's of 9 August, though Kerry's slowness may have had more to do with its remoteness from Dublin than with the level of disaffection in the county.52 Some places obviously felt they had to follow the trend and send in loyal addresses lest they be suspected of disaffection. Thus the address from the corporation of Irish Town of 26 April expressed a concern that by ‘pretenses of Slavery and Arbitrary Government’ the enemies of the crown were seeking to destroy the ‘antient monarchy’ and threatening a return to the ‘late fatall confusions and Unparaleled tyranny’, and the addressors wanted to let the world know that they were not tainted ‘with any of those Republican and Seditious Principles’.53
However, there is no doubting that in many areas Protestants were more than willing to make a public profession of their loyalty to the crown. The town of Kilkenny, for example, in the heart of Ormonde territory, despite not getting around to drawing up an address until 19 May, was nevertheless ‘unanimous in it’, as Arran cheerfully reported to his father back in England.54 Indeed, taken as a whole the Irish addresses point to a genuine desire among the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland to be associated with their Tory-Anglican brethren in England in a publicly stated commitment of support for the King and the succession during the years of the Tory Reaction. Like their English counterparts, the Irish addressors appreciated that their own security was inextricably bound up with the security of the Stuart regime in England. The Irish addresses, however, represent the threat to stability as external – as coming essentially from England, not Ireland. Most of them stress that Ireland had experienced peace and prosperity under Charles II; the sources of concern were libellous pamphleteers, the supporters of Shaftesbury's alleged Association, and those who wanted to challenge the King's prerogatives or subvert the succession. There was, of course, a recognition that the evil contrivances of such malcontents might prompt disaffection among the King's subjects in Ireland (hence the desire of the addressors to show that they were not disloyal), and there was also a concern about the possible threat to the present establishment in Church and state posed by both papists and fanatics, which might reflect the concerns and anxieties of the ruling Protestant minority in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Yet on the whole these Irish addresses were reactions to developments within England, and their possible destabilizing effects in Ireland, rather than reactions to developments within Ireland itself. They are, in other words, addresses against the activities of the English Whigs, and thus are essentially Tory (in the English sense) in nature. Moreover, like the Tory addresses in England, the Irish ones expressed a firm commitment to ‘our Religion as it is now Established by Law’ and the ‘Impartial Administration of the wholesome Laws enacted’ to secure the King's subjects ‘in their Religion and property’.55
There is some evidence of Protestant disaffection in Ireland in the early 1680s, beyond the lukewarm enthusiasm for the loyal addresses we have detected in parts of Ulster and County Tipperary. Significantly, however, it took an external stimulus to bring it into the open. Huguenot refugees fleeing persecution in France had been encouraged by Charles II to settle in Ireland. Some went to Cork, but most settled in Dublin, where there was a colony of several hundred French Protestants by the end of the reign. The authorities even allowed them to set up a church in the chapel of St Patrick's Cathedral, where they conducted their own prayer-book services in French.56 The Protestant artisans and apprentices in Dublin, however, regarded the immigrants as a threat to their livelihood, while the fact that they were French and held their services in a foreign tongue made people suspect that they were really Catholics. On arriving in Dublin at the end of April 1682, to assume his responsibilities as Lord Deputy, Arran received intelligence ‘that the Apprentices were to rise the next day, to turn out the French Protestants’. Although Arran ordered the constables to keep a strict watch and tradesmen to keep their apprentices at home, some 300 apprentices – mainly from the outliberties rather than the city itself – assembled the next morning near the new hospital at Kilmainham, on the outskirts of town, armed with staves and a few swords, protesting ‘that the masse and Popish priests should not be tolerated as they ware’, and offering to prove that several of the French refugees ‘ware truely Papists, and seen at Messe, and who could have no other designe but of another massacre’. The guards managed to disperse the crowd, taking some ten or twelve prisoner, and this seems to have settled the matter. A London newsletter writer reported that it had been alleged that the apprentices ‘were to have made two parties, one for the Duke of York and the other for the Duke of Monmouth, the latter of which was to have seized on the Guards’, but admitted that this had not been confirmed. Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall in Edinburgh heard that the Dublin apprentices had ‘also declared against a Popish successor to the Croun’, but he may simply have been repeating what he had read in the London newsletters. There is no hint in Arran's correspondence out of Ireland that the apprentices were trying to make a political statement about the succession.57
An alleged Catholic plot again threatened to disturb the relative tranquillity of Ireland in the second half of 1682 and the early months of 1683. In August 1682 a Catholic Irish mercenary, variously described in the sources as Tilly or Tool, made revelations before Viscount Preston in Paris of a design by Louis XIV ‘to possess himself of Ireland, by which he should curb England and make it subservient to his ends’. The plan, supposedly, was to land 40,000 men in Ireland, whereupon ‘great numbers of the natives were to rise and seize Cork, Limerick, and Galway’ and join with the French forces. According to Tilly, the Irish end of the conspiracy was being coordinated by Colonel Justin MacCarthy, MacCarthy's kinsman the Earl of Clanrickard, and Viscount Clare, who had fallen into disfavour over his promotion of the County Clare petition of 1681. Preston was sufficiently concerned to send Tilly for questioning by the privy council in England, where in the early months of the new year further details of the plot were brought to light: the people of Ireland were to recognize Louis XIV as king, the French were to be given special trading privileges with the Irish, and Roman Catholicism was to be re-established. A man by the name of Peter Stepkins came forward and swore that he had seen an address, in Tilly's handwriting, from the nobles and people of Ireland to the French king, bemoaning their ‘wretched condition from the loss of their property and from being every day hindred in practising their religion’. He also affirmed that the design was to be executed ‘on a Sunday in service time in all the most considerable towns in Ireland by surprising the people at the church doors, giving no quarter’ – thereby hinting at the possibility of a massacre of Protestants. For a while the plot threatened to make some noise in England, but Tilly overstepped himself by claiming that he had already imported thousands of weapons into Ireland; when the English council demanded he reveal where they were or they would lock him up and deny him a pardon, he made himself scarce. In Ireland, Arran had been sceptical from the start, believing the informer to be a cheat. A broadside appeared shortly afterwards exposing the plot as a sham and the informer as a man pursuing a personal vendetta against Colonel MacCarthy.58
Revealing insights into the climate of opinion in Ireland in late 1682 are provided by Archbishop Boyle in a letter to Ormonde dated 10 October, in which he discusses the prospect of calling another parliament in Ireland. ‘It is without doubt’, the primate confidently proclaimed, ‘that this kingdom never enjoyed such peace, plenty, liberty and ease as they have done under your Grace's government’, and ‘the generality of the people’ seemed to be ‘in such a quiet temper at present’ that Boyle felt he could confidently predict the return of a parliament, ‘if carefully elected’, that would do for the King whatever he wanted. Yet Boyle was well aware that this happy state of affairs was dependent upon things in England continuing ‘in as good a posture as now they are’, and that it would not take much to unsettle the situation. For ‘if there should happen to be a recidivation into the late disorders and disturbances in England’, he warned, ‘I doubt we have some, perhaps many, ill-affected spirits amongst us who would take the boldness to be very instant and troublesome to the Government who would not dare to show themselves or appear in such a juncture as this seems to be.’59
There was, of course, to be ‘a recidivation into the late disorders’ in England with the revelations in the late spring and summer of 1683 of the Rye House Plot. Arran was under no doubt that ‘those villains had some of their accomplices here in this kingdom… chiefly in the North, and in Munster’.60 In his examination before the King and council on 8 July, Thomas Walcott reported that plans had been laid to raise disaffected elements in England, Scotland and Ireland, and that Robert Ferguson had claimed that he expected 20–30,000 Ulster Scots to rebel. Other informants implicated the West Country Whig Sir William Courtenay, who sat in the three Exclusion Parliaments as MP for Devon, in a design to engage discontented Protestants from Waterford in a plot to put Monmouth on the throne. However, the government believed Courtenay when he produced a written disavowal of any knowledge of such plotting, and chose not to take any action against him.61
Indeed, the government failed to uncover any firm evidence of an Irish dimension to the Rye House Plot; the nearest it came was discovering fragments of a treasonable Scottish declaration in the possession of a Taunton man who was arrested in the English West Country as he was en route to Ireland.62 The Presbyterians in Ulster, fearful that the clampdown on conventicles that had already begun in England would be extended to Ireland, started, it was said, to engage in ‘mutinous and petulant discourses, and plain menaces of resisting it unto blood’; one informer even claimed that they were raising money to ship arms into the country, though he was discredited as someone who framed ‘his intelligence for profit’. Yet, while the ‘Dissenting party’ in the north may have been ‘generally discontented’ – speaking of ‘persecuting times just coming’ – there is no firm evidence to suggest any genuine conspiracy.63 There is, however, one tantalizing snippet of evidence which could possibly hint at more than appears on the surface. In mid-August 1683 Viscount Mountjoy wrote to Ormonde from Newtownstewart in County Tyrone to report that, despite ‘all the great noise’ the Ulster nonconformists had made ‘of going in great numbers to Carolina’, and the fact that they had kept ‘a great ship at Derry to transport them’, now the time had come ‘not one man goes’, and the ship had been forced to alter her voyage.64 Bizarre, no doubt, but seemingly irrelevant, until one recalls that in 1683 the Scottish Rye House plotters had come to London to meet with their English conspirators under the guise of buying lands in Carolina.65 Could the Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster similarly have been using a scheme to emigrate to Carolina as a cover for their involvement in the Rye House conspiracy? It is not inconceivable, and it would explain why the boat was no longer needed after the government had got wind of the conspiracy. However, clearly one ship would not have been enough to transport a very sizeable contingent of Ulster Scots to join in an uprising in England and Scotland, and we have to concede that we have no corroborating evidence.
The assize records for Clonmel point to some disaffection in the south of Ireland at this time. For example, at the September assizes John and Barbara Lane were indicted for having said the previous April ‘that it was base and unlawfull for his Majestie that he did not exile the Duke of York out of his Dominions for feare he shold breede any Disturbance among the Nation’; John Pryor was charged with saying ‘that he hoped his Royall Highness should never be King whilst his Majestie and the Duke of Monmouth Live’; and Henry Shrimpton was indicted for predicting ‘That the Duke of Monmouth should succeed after his Majesties death and Reigne as King, or else noe King at all’, and for further asserting ‘that his Majestie was as unjust a King as ever was and that he never perform'd any promise that he gave, and… if Cromwell had lived he was as powerfull and as just a King as ever was’. However, since Shrimpton and the Lanes were found not guilty, while Pryor was discharged by proclamation without being brought to trial, one has to wonder how much truth there was behind such accusations.66
The revelations of the Rye House Plot nevertheless prompted a new series of security initiatives. To deal with the potential threat of insurrection, the Dublin administration commanded all officers to their quarters, dispatched additional troops to the north, and issued orders to examine passengers entering Ireland.67 In mid-July Ormonde instructed Arran ‘to disarme all frequenters or keepers of Conventicles… forthwith’, using the laws for disarming Catholics as a guide, though he insisted that the Catholics themselves should be left alone, since only those granted special licences had been able to retain their weapons and there was no reason to revoke these.68
Concern that the Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster were meeting in greater numbers than before prompted Arran towards the end of July to instruct local magistrates to suppress unlawful nonconformist meetings and arrest the preachers. Although in some parts of the north local militias had to be deployed to put a stop to conventicling – the local constables proved wholly unreliable, since many were dissenters themselves – most nonconformist ministers throughout Ireland (including Ulster) chose to cooperate with the government, voluntarily shut down their public meetings, and took out bonds for their good behaviour. On 8 August Arran could confidently report to Secretary Jenkins in England that he had ‘without disturbance suppressed the Fanatic meetings here and in great measure those in the North’, while a few days later Mountjoy informed Ormonde that the northern Presbyterians had proven ‘more complaisant than he expected’, and that he could not ‘hear of one meeting, neither public nor private’. Ormonde remained suspicious of the ‘sudden change of temper and submission’ of the Ulster Presbyterians and thought ‘their acquiescence ought no less to be apprehended and provided against than their stiffness and obstinacy’, while Arran admitted that the methods taken would not ‘convert many of the Dissenters’. Nevertheless, the immediate results must have been satisfying. Dissenters began to return to church, and for a while, at least, most conventicles in Ireland, even in Ulster, were suppressed. Only the Quakers continued to meet, but the Dublin administration did not ‘look upon them as a dangerous sect’.69
The government had to be careful not to be seen to be singling out Protestant nonconformists for punishment and turning a blind eye to the activities of the Catholics. The Archbishop of Dublin persuaded the Catholics in Dublin to close their chapels, which had never been legally authorized, even though they had hitherto ‘been overlooked and neglected by the government’, while the Earl of Longford convinced the authorities in Limerick that they would need to put down public mass houses as well as conventicles.70 Although Catholics were allowed to exercise their religion in their own homes, they had to be discreet. When the authorities learned in August 1683 of the setting-up of a public nunnery and four public mass houses near the west-coast port of Galway, and a friary in Burrishoole, near Newport, County Mayo, they were swift to take action, lest people insinuate that the government was soft on ‘that sorte of People’. The nunnery and priory were quickly dispersed, and several of the priests, friars and nuns were proceeded against at the assizes for violating the laws prohibiting the saying of mass.71 In October, Ormonde was outraged to learn that some friars were planning to set up four chapels in his own home town of Kilkenny, and warned his son that the government would need ‘to use severities to bring them into their wits’ and let them see how impossible it was, ‘whilst Protestant Dissenters are proceeded against, to suffer the other to assume greater liberty than they have heretofore been allowed’.72 The clampdown against Catholics, however, seems to have eased off before the end of the reign. It was clear that, although for some time after the proclamations ordering the titular bishops and the Catholic regular clergy out of the country the Catholic clergy ‘kept themselves quiet’, many had in fact remained in Ireland, and by late 1684 they were becoming increasingly active. In January 1685 Ormonde could tell Sunderland that there were ‘now in this kingdom at least as many bishops of the Roman communication as of the Protestant’, while ‘friars and other regulars do abound in all the parts of the kingdom.’ Ormonde thought the regulars ‘an intolerable surcharge upon the poor people of the Romish religion’, because, ‘besides what these regulars get off them, and besides what they pay to the legal incumbents [i.e. Church of Ireland ministers], they maintain the bishops and a priest in every parish.’ Be that as it may, Charles was happy that the Catholics in Ireland should be able to worship as they saw fit. Indeed, towards the end of that month Sunderland could inform Ormonde that the King had learned that the Archbishop of Dublin had shut down Catholic chapels in the Irish capital and wanted to know why.73
The revelations of the Rye House Plot prompted a certain cleansing of the personnel of local government, though there was not to be a dramatic purge of local offices as took place in England. At the beginning of July 1683 Ormonde informed Arran that it was being ‘insinuated’ in England that Ireland was ‘very ill governed’, and that many of the army officers, JPs and town magistrates were disaffected. It was certainly true, as Archbishop Boyle admitted, that many who had served under Cromwell, or the children of those who had, were in the commission of the peace for want of suitable alternatives, though he insisted that there were very few – if any – JPs who would not take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy or conform to the Established Church. The problem was that the Dublin administration was not quite sure of this, since few JPs, commissioners of array or militia officers had sent in certificates proving they had taken the sacrament, as required by the proclamations of November 1681 and April 1682. Arran did proceed to remove several JPs from the commission, though not for nonconformity – only one JP who was a dissenter could be found, and his appointment had been sanctioned by Ormonde – but because they were negligent or incompetent. By dint of the powers vested in him by Essex's rules of 1672, Arran refused to approve Clonmel's decision to re-elect Stephen Moore as mayor, though beyond this there is little evidence of the Lord Deputy actively interfering to ensure that the corporations chose well-affected men. Nevertheless, Arran felt confident he had loyal men in charge even in the more suspect areas. Thus towards the end of September he could report that the sovereign of Belfast was ‘a very honest man’, even though the town was ‘as fanatic a one as any in Ireland’.74
As the government was policing potential disaffection, the Church of Ireland clergy were busy trying to cement loyalty to the existing regime. In a sermon delivered at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin on 29 July 1683, Bishop Anthony Dopping of Meath held forth on the Pauline doctrine of non-resistance, before affirming that the doctrine of non-resistance had always been the ‘constant opinion’ of the Church of England and was enshrined in the Irish Act of Uniformity. Dopping's conclusion was in accord with the standard line taken by Tory propagandists and Anglican clergy in England: those who justified resistance to oppose a supposed inundation of popery were not sons of the Church, but borrowed their principles from Rome, or Scotland, or Geneva, and were ‘either acted by the Jesuit or the fanatick’.75 As in England, 9 September was set aside in Ireland as a day of thanksgiving for deliverance from the Rye House Plot.76 Although no printed versions of their sermons have come to light, given that they were instructed to follow the same form of prayer as prescribed in England the Church of Ireland clergy presumably used the occasion to focus on the themes of passive obedience and non-resistance. This was certainly true when John Vesey, minister of Abbeyleix in Queen's County (Laois) – not to be confused with the Archbishop of Tuam of the same name – delivered a sermon the following week at the opening of the Clonmel assizes. Vesey urged the need for obedience to one's superiors, and quoted St Peter's teaching on non-resistance: ‘Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake’ ( 1 Peter 2:13). Rebellion was ‘a most grievous Sin’, he intoned, and ‘the pretences of Defending Liberty and Property, of Destroying Popery and Arbitrary Government’, could not make it not a sin. ‘We must not do evil, that good may come thereof,’ he continued; ‘when we find our selves oppressed, let us examine our Lives, and try whether our own Wickedness is not the Cause of Gods punishing us with such Rulers’ – prophetic remarks, as they turned out, since under James II Protestants in Ireland were to find themselves oppressed and did have to consider whether they might do evil so that good might come of it or disobey their superiors in the defence of liberty and property. Yet Vesey's sermon is also revealing for the picture of a vibrant popular political culture it paints for Ireland at this time. ‘There is no person so inconsiderable’, Vesey thought, ‘but may contribute to the general Good of a Nation, either by his Endeavours or Prayers: nay, we commonly find, that Insurrections and Civil Wars are often begun, but always carried on by the Common people.’ People should study to be quiet and mind their own business. ‘If every single person’ would follow St Peter's advice ‘and imploy his thoughts about his own Concerns, and not meddle with State affairs, we should be much happier than we are’. But the problem was that people were meddling with state affairs. ‘How usual is it for men’, Vesey observed, ‘upon a story in a Gazzet, or a News Letter, to descant upon the Government, and censure, if not reproach the Higher Powers.’ ‘Trust the Modelling of the Government to your Superiors, whose business it is to govern,’ he exhorted, and ‘Let us not speak evil of the Ruler of the people.’77
There is no evidence of any loyal demonstrations in Ireland on 9 September to celebrate deliverance from the Rye House Plot. Nevertheless, counties and towns throughout the kingdom were quick to testify their loyalty by drawing up addresses in abhorrence of the conspiracy. Some fifty-two such addresses were presented to the crown in the summer and autumn of 1683.78 That from the city of Waterford of 29 July gave thanks to God for preserving Charles II and the Duke of York ‘from the seditious and horred designes of rebellious and profligate wretches’, and declared an abhorrence ‘of all traiterous and wicked conspiracies’ against the King's ‘person or government’. The addressors went on to ‘acknowledge the blessings of peace, prosperity, and happiness and the exercise of the true Protestant religion established by law’ that they enjoyed under Charles II's government, ‘according to the fundamental lawes of these kingdomes’; expressed the hope that the ‘seasonable and impartial’ execution of the laws would deter anyone who might be so ‘wicked as to stretch forth his hand against the Lords anointed’; and concluded with a promise to maintain the King's ‘roiall person, the lawes, government, prerogatives, and the established religion… against all traiterous oppositions whatsoever’.79 As with the 1682 addresses, the early ones, at least, appear to have been spontaneous testimonies of loyalty, although as time went on other places clearly felt under some informal pressure to conform to the trend. Thus Trim's address to the King of 22 August began by admitting that ‘the late horrid plotts and conspiracyes’ against the King and his brother had ‘made it necessary for all dutifull and loyall subjects to expresse their abhorrence of them, and to give… summ publicke assurance of theyr loyalty and allegiance’. The addressors then went on to assure Charles that they were prepared to lay down their lives and fortunes ‘for the preservation of your Majesties sacred person, your heires and lawfull successors against all opposers whatsoever, and for the maintenance of the Protestant religion as now by Law established, in opposition to Popery and Fanaticizme’.80 This time the county of Antrim did send in an address, as did the town of Clonmel (belatedly); Belfast, however, again did not.
The addresses of 1683, like those of 1682, represented in the main the voice of the Protestant ruling elite of town and countryside. Again, most of the addresses professed a commitment not just to the crown, the succession and the royal prerogative, but also to the rule of law and the existing establishment in the Church. Some Catholics – either in their capacity as freeholders or grand jurors or even perhaps as members of corporations – found themselves able to sign some of the addresses, doubtless keen to demonstrate their own loyalty to the King and his Catholic heir and hostility to the alleged antics of the Protestant dissenters, even if this meant pledging not to challenge the existing legal settlement in Church and state. Ormonde found ‘many of their names in addresses that come out of Ireland’, but, although no one doubted ‘their aversion to the other sort of Dissenters’, he warned Arran that he questioned ‘whether they would make a distinction betwixt Protestants, if both were in their power’.81 The address of 4 October from the grand jury, deputy Lieutenants, JPs, clergy and gentlemen of the county of Dublin created something of a stir because it omitted any reference to the Protestant religion established by law. Catholics outnumbered Protestants on the grand jury that drew up the address by eight to six, and, although the judges tried to have the address amended to include a reference to the Established Church, the foreman refused, saying ‘so they had made it and so it should goe.’82
In the absence of addresses from humbler types or of loyalist demonstrations, it is difficult to get a sense of the social depth of the royalist reaction after Rye House. The overall impression the evidence leaves is that the Protestants of the Established Church rallied behind the crown and succession in very much the same way as their Tory-Anglican counterparts in England; that Catholics were often keen, given the opportunity, to profess their loyalty to the crown and antipathy to the supposed plots of Protestant dissenters, and were undoubtedly sincere in their commitment to the hereditary succession; and that the majority of Protestant nonconformists were innocent of any conspiracy against the government and were prepared to cooperate with the authorities as the Dublin administration took the necessary precautionary measures in the wake of conspiratorial activity in Scotland and England. This is not to suggest that there was no disaffection in Ireland at all towards the end of Charles II's reign. Some Protestants, especially in Ulster but also elsewhere, had their grievances with the existing regime and were worried about the Catholic succession, while it would clearly be naive to assume that the Catholic majority were happy with their lot. Nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, despite all the tensions that existed in Ireland, it essentially took external factors to destabilize the situation in this kingdom. Developments in England and Scotland, rather than within Ireland itself, were what were responsible for creating an Irish problem at this time.
There was little to disturb the peace of the government for the rest of the reign. In the spring of 1684 Arran received information about ‘a new plot’, but thought there was ‘no truth in it’, since it came ‘from a soil very fertile of sham plots’.83 There were signs that the Ulster Presbyterians were again growing restless towards the very end of the reign. In August 1684 Charles expressed his nervousness to Ormonde about the Scottish rebels who had fled to Ireland, and ordered that they be sent back to Scotland.84 In mid-November magistrates found a letter in Belfast, subscribed by twenty hands, enjoining Presbyterians not to attend the services either of clerics of the Established Church or of those dissenters who prayed for the King, and promising assistance to Scottish covenanters fleeing to Ireland to escape persecution in their homeland. Although Ormonde – by this time back in Dublin – at first did not think the discovery significant enough to warrant informing the King, his subsequent investigations revealed an alleged design by the Ulster Presbyterians ‘of rising up in arms’, with certain individuals employed in listing men and others assigned the job of riding ‘up and down the country… to give notice of the time’. Once more, the truth behind the matter is difficult to discern; one historian has dismissed the alleged conspiracy as ‘probably nothing more than the musings of irate malcontents’.85 Nevertheless, the story reveals that the north of Ireland continued to remain a security concern for the Dublin administration right up to the end of Charles II's reign – something that was to condition the way the government was to respond at the beginning of James II's reign when faced with rebellions from Scotland and England under Argyll and Monmouth.