Ireland 432-1800 Ireland from St. Patrick to the Norman Conquest, 432-1169

The ‘penal code’ first emerged in the early 1690s. In essence, it reflected Irish Protestant desire for revenge at their treatment, humiliation and persecution under Tyrconnell’s Jacobite regime and their disquiet at the subsequent lenient treatment of Catholics at the end of the war [as enshrined in the Treaty of Limerick]. The ongoing war in Europe and related Jacobite invasion scares gave a renewed immediacy to this threat. The laws, as formulated in the mid-1690s, effectively barred those Catholics not covered by the terms of the Treaty of Limerick from keeping arms and attempted to prevent traffic between Irish Catholics and their continenal-based counterparts. Embargoes were also placed on Irishmen seeking an overseas education, while all domestic education for Catholics was also proscribed. Attempts were made to ban bishops and higher clergy, coadjutors and vicars-general from excercising ecclesiastic jurisdiction throughout Ireland. The lower clergy could remain but were obliged to register with the authorities, although they later defied an attempt to force them to abjure the rights of the Stuart Pretender/Jacobite claimant to the throne of the three kingdoms.

The Act to prevent the further growth of Popery (1704) comprised the first and most important single penal statute of the early eighteenth century and the first major legislative attack on secular Catholicism. It effectively assaulted Irish Catholic property, traditionally the corner stone of political power in early modern Ireland. It banned Catholics from buying land, inheriting from their Protestant relations or taking out a lease for more than 31 years. In an effort to break up larger Catholic landholdings it required that the estates of deceased Catholics be divided equally among their children or bestowed whole upon the sibling who conformed to the Protestant faith. Other legislation barred Catholics from practicing law, holding central or local government offices or participating in grand juries, boroughs and municipal corporations. They were finally deprived of the vote and barred from the army and navy. Catholic gentlemen were banned from keeping weapons and could not own a horse worth more than five pounds.

No single topic has generated such controversy in eighteenth century Irish history or spawned such diverse interpretations as the penal laws. Traditionally, they have been seen by Catholic historians and in nationalist historiography as a mean-spirited, legislative assault against a downtrodden defenceless people by a heartless, vindictive and treacherous Protestant ascendancy. This is best exemplified in Thomas Davis’ metaphor of the ‘Broken’ Treaty of Limerick, contravened ‘’ere the ink was dry’. Undoubtedly, the Catholic landed interest were the main focus of government attention and its main casualty over the following century. Over the course of the eighteenth century, many Irish Catholic landowners succumbed to the political, economic and social pressures to reform to Protestantism. Preferring, as one landowner put it, ‘to trust my soul to God than my lands to the laws of Ireland’.

The work of Maureen Wall and Louis Cullen on the Irish Catholic mercantile interest, Thomas Power on the suspect political loyalties of Catholic converts, Kevin Whelan on the 'Underground Gentry', and Hugh Fenning and Patrick Fagan on the Catholic church, shows that the effects of the penal laws and the political shipwreck of the Catholic political interest in the eighteenth century has been exaggerated. Effectively excluded from participation in national politics and barred from purchasing land many Catholics prospered as merchants, manufacturers, middlemen and tenant farmers. Although this growing, increasingly wealthy and solvent Roman Catholic middle class could not participate in Irish political life their access to cash, continued social influence helped to nullify many of the economic and social restrictions of the penal laws. In addition, Irish Protestant unwillingness and inability to actively impose the penal code and incessant Catholic lobbying at the Catholic embassies in London insured that many of the most excessive and virulent anti-Catholic measures sent by the Irish parliament were nullified or failed to be ratified by the English Privy Council.

The psychological effects of the penal laws have also been a bone of contention among scholars. Maureen Wall suggested that the penal laws ‘operated to exclude the Catholic majority from all positions of importance in the country -… in the same was as the colour bar had operated to ensure white ascendance in African countries in recent years’. In recent times, however, Seán Connolly has questioned the validity of this comparison: ‘From this point of view the most appropriate modern parallel would not be the apartheid system so frequently cited but rather the policies which successive Irish governments have adopted towards the Irish language. This tendency to underplay the psychological effects of the penal laws has been underlined by scholars such as Cornelius Buttimer and Marianne Elliott. More recently, Breandán Ó Buachalla has cautioned against the outright dismissal of Wall’s comparison between the penal code and the apartheid regime in South Africa. He rightfully points out that this ‘would be similar to telling a black man in South Africa that the apartheid regime was not so bad or by telling a Derry Catholic that he was not being persecuted under the Stormont administration’.

If people believed that they were subject to discrimination, they were being persecuted and it is often immaterial whether the legislation is being imposed or not. The penal laws were inexorably linked to the fortunes of the exiled house of Stuart in the minds of Irish Catholics. The had rejoiced at the succession of James II, lauded the imminent eclipse of the Protestant religion, the rehabilitation of the Catholic episcopate and the religious orders, the restoration of their ancient rights and the Catholicisation of the army and judiciary. Their political and military adversaries copper-fastened this association by punishing Catholic priests for the attacks of the rapparees and outlaws on Protestants and committed reprisals against their flocks. Fears of possible Jacobite invasions in the 1690s and early eighteenth century prompted in the systematic imposition of the penal code. The hardships caused by these laws resounded in the poems and songs of the Gaelic literati and in the missives, correspondence and memoirs of the Catholic clergy and political commentators at home and abroad. The attempts to prevent pilgrimages to holy wells and shrines, the enforcement of punitive laws against unregistered priests, bishops and religious shows that these laws affected all strata of Irish Catholic society. Cryptic correspondence to Rome and other major centres of Irish population in contemporary Europe also uncover some of the persecution mentality of their contemporaries. Historians who understate the operation or psychological effects of the laws should remember that bishops and priests were still being arrested in the 1730s and 1740s. Poets and Catholic pamphleteers continued to long for an alleviation of the penal laws and exiles retained their persecution mentality and viewed their homeland as a place of persecution and bondage.
*5. Catholicism and Jacobitism
Irish Jacobitism and the historians

Jacobitism, or support for the exiled House of Stuart was the ascendant political ideology in Irish Catholic society between the Battle of the Boyne (1690) and the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789). Common themes in Irish Jacobite verse and political discourse centered on the questions of the hereditary right of the lawful Stuart prince to the crowns of three kingdoms, disdain for the corrupting influence of foreigners and the inevitability of a Stuart restoration as the only solution to the nation’s problems. Like its English or Scottish counterparts, however, Irish Jacobitism involved far more than a blind loyalty to the house of Stuart. Many Irishmen looked to the exiled king to restore their confiscated lands, reverse the political dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy and to rehabilitate the Roman Catholic Church and the Irish language. Irish poets tailored Jacobitism to suit their community’s particular needs: the Stuart cause was evoked to demand the right to bear arms, to inherit lands, to take out leases and vote in elections. Irish Jacobitism constituted more than a folkloric residue surviving from the political shipwreck of the cause itself. Seventeenth century confiscations and the subsequent political decimation of the Irish Catholic landed interest has ensured that the Irish Jacobite tradition was not characterized by a gentry-led and clan-inspired movement as in England and Scotland. Nevertheless, it is closely associated with the surviving Catholic aristocracy at home and abroad, the so-called ‘Underground Gentry’, the Irish Brigades in France and Spain, the Irish Continental colleges in Europe and was vigorously promoted at home by the Catholic clergy and Jacobite literati.

Jacobite studies has increasingly moved centre stage in English and Scottish historical studies, as evidenced in the work of Eveline Cruickshanks, J.C.D. Clark, Allan Macinnes, Jeremy Black, Daniel Szechi and Paul Monod. Traditionally, English and Irish historians have either underplayed or dismissed Irish Jacobitism. Robert Dunlop believed that there was not the slightest threat from Irish Jacobitism. Likewise, Lord Macaulay claimed that the fallen dynasty meant nothing to the Irish who regarded the ‘foreign sovereign of their native land with the feeling with which the Jews regarded Caesar. W.E.H. Lecky concluded that no great enthusiasm existed among Irish Catholics in the eighteenth century for a return of the Stuarts, and the surviving gentry did not wish to risk their estates again. In addition, he maintained that ‘the mass of the population remained torpid, degraded and ignorant; but although crimes of violence and turbulence were common among them, those crimes were wholly un-connected with politics. R.B. McDowell, pre-empting charges of an over-emphasis on the opinions of ‘the thinking few’ and the neglect of the outlook of the masses, in his Irish Public Opinion, 1750-1800 [1944], suggested that ‘the great output of Gaelic poetry through which they [The Irish Catholic masses] expressed their feelings does not contain any formulated political ideas’. In his Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution [1965] Maurice O’Connell deemed it impossible to deduce what the majority of them thought about current political matters, surmising that they were probably ‘too sunk in illiteracy to know or care about the issues absorbing the attention of the upper and middle classes. Seán Connolly stated [in Grant and Stringer, Uniting the Kingdom? The making of British History [1995), that that Catholics were ‘leaderless and demoralized, cut off from the world of politics both by formal exclusion of language and poverty’.

The absence of any serious study of Irish Jacobitism can be also be related to its association with defeat, confiscation and persecution and the emergence of republicanism as the ascendant political ideology within Irish nationalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth cent. The Irish state, established 1922, found no place in its pantheon for the absolutist King James III who deserted the country in its hour of need. The scholarly neglect of Jacobitism is also indicative of the general neglect of the history of the period between the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 and the emergence of secret societies in the later part of the eighteenth century. Disproportionate attention has been traditionally given to the Protestant Ascendancy and the origin, outbreak and nature of the 1798 Rebellion. Recent surveys of eighteenth century Ireland have failed to address the age-old bias towards the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. Their failure to utilize Irish-language sources and continental source-material has often supported an Anglo-centric view of eighteenth-century Ireland.

Irish poetry, one of the key sources for the examination of Jacobitism, has often been dismissed as lacking substantive political content, representing nothing more than the stylised output of a literary caste. Careful examination and contextualization of this material shows that it did not flourish in a political vacuum. Compared thematically and ideologically with contemporary Scots-Gaelic and English Jacobite writings, and with contemporary Whig and anti-Jacobite rhetoric, Irish poetry showed an astute awareness of the workings of local, British and European politics and their possible ramifications for the Stuart cause. The recent work of Breandán Ó Buachalla, Mícheál MacCraith Vincent Morley and Éamonn Ó Ciardha has sought to contextualize this huge corpus of literary material and bring Irish Jacobitism to a similar level of serious scholarly engagement.

A systematic examination of the Irish Catholic polity, an analysis of Irish Jacobite poetry in its appropriate 'British' and European contexts and the inclusion of the Irish Diaspora as a pivotal part of the Irish political 'nation' show that traditional dismissals of Irish Jacobitism do not stand up to even a cursory scrutiny. My own researches sought to demonstrate that both Irish Jacobites and anti-Jacobites were obsessed with the vicissitudes of eighteenth-century European politics, dynastic warfare and the fluctuating fortunes of the Stuarts in international diplomacy. European high-politics and their possible ramifications for a Stuart restoration and a resultant reversal of Irish Catholic political, economic and religious fortunes provide dominant themes in the poems, letters, pamphlets and memoirs of Irish writers, at home and abroad.

It should also be noted that anti-Jacobitism played a pivotal role in the formation of the political ethos of Irish Protestants and Whigs. Indeed, Catholic hopes and Protestant fears mirrored each other throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Denunciations of ’The Pretender’ rained down from pulpit and political platform, while the press focused on his intrigues on the continent. To dismiss these fears of the Jacobite threat as a delusion is to accuse Irish Protestants of collective paranoia for most of the eighteenth century. They considered neither the Pretender’s permanent exclusion nor the Hanoverian succession as inevitabilities in the early eighteenth century. This oscillation between elation and despair continued during the European dynastic wars of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with demonstrations of communal delight at allied victories, the foundation of loyal clubs and societies, and continual unease at military preparations and Jacobite invasion scares. The press remained fixated to the point of obsession with the Pretender’s movements in France and Rome and his numerous defeats and reversals did not totally exorcise the Jacobite spectre.

The succession of James II in 1685 had ushered in a short-lived ‘golden-age’ for Irish Catholics that witnessed a rehabilitation of the Catholic Church and the re-invigouration of Irish Catholic society at all levels, as evidenced in the poetry of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, Diarmuid Mac Sheáin Bhuí Mac Cárthaigh and more popular literature which survives in the manuscript and folk traditions. However, their high hopes were frustrated by James’s unwillingness to totally overturn the Restoration land settlement and his indifferent political and military performance in Ireland. In spite of this, the impoverished Irish Jacobite polity mobilized in defence of their king and sustained a war against William and the English parliament for nearly three years, before finally concluding favourable terms after the second siege of Limerick in 1691. A close study of early eighteenth-century Catholic politics and literature questions both the 'shipwreck' of the Irish Catholic polity and the un-assailed march of the Protestant ‘nation'. There was no amnesia or loss of political consciousness among the greater Catholic populace in the period after the end of the Jacobite Wars. The imposition and maintenance of the penal laws shows that contemporaries did not underestimate the potential of the Irish Jacobite challenge. In the era between the end of the Jacobite war in Ireland (1691), the conclusion of the war of the League of Augsburg (1697) and the war of the Spanish succession (1701-13), Ireland was awash with invasion rumours that unnerved Irish Protestants and re-invigourated Irish Jacobites. Jacobitism continually manifested itself in this period, in Irish poetry, correspondence to and from the Irish Diaspora in Europe, and through the seditious pamphlets, songs and coffee house culture of contemporary Dublin.

Between 1692 and the death of King James II in 1701, Britain and Ireland provided the focus of a possible French descent. Invasion rumours, and the possible participation of the Irish Brigades therein, resonated in contemporary political discourse, newspapers, pamphlets and the poems and ballads of the Irish Jacobite literati. These rumours were not without foundation. In spring 1692, 30, 000 men, half from the Irish Brigades, had been assembled at Brest to accompany James to England in what has been dubbed the ‘Ailesbury Plot’. Louis XIV supplied a squadron of ships to transport 10, 000 men and King James arrived at La Hogue on May 19 1692 to join the expeditionary force. Contrary winds delayed their embarkation until they were intercepted and destroyed at the Battle of La Hogue by a superior force of the Royal Navy. Reckless Jacobitism optimism and French desperation at recent military reversals spawned another invasion scheme in 1695-6. In the period between the death of Queen Mary in 1694 and the spring of 1695, a group of English Jacobites began making preparations for a rebellion. Although the French were too preoccupied with the European theatre to risk an invasion Louis XIV finally authorized the expedition in October 1695. In the following Spring 1696 the Jacobite duke of Berwick was dispatched to England to evaluate the strength of Jacobite forces, while James II proceeded to Calais at the end of the month to join eighteen battalions of infantry and thirty squadrons of cavalry that had been assembled for an invasion. However, this attempt floundered on mutual distrust between the French king and the English Jacobites. Louis XIV was not prepared to support a rising until it had broken out and the English Jacobites refused to revolt until the French king showed his hand.

The death of three ailing monarchs (Charles II of Spain, James II and William III in quick succession) in the early years of the eighteenth century ensured that Europe enjoyed less than five years of peace before being plunged into another bloody dynastic conflict know as the War of the Spanish Succession. Facing the combined strength of Europe, hampered by the ailing Spanish monarchy, bereft of generals of the calibre of Marechals Turenne, Luxembourg and Condé, and confronting the combined military genius of Prince Eugene and the duke of Marlborough, France once again looked to the diversionary potential of Jacobitism. After the signing of the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England on 27 January 1707, and its ratification by the English parliament on 17 March, the French ministry finally decided to organize an expedition against Scotland the following year. Louis promised to furnish 6000 men and provide financial assistance. The Pope pledged additional funding. The duke of Berwick was chosen to command the expedition. James III left St. Germain on 9 March and joined the Jacobite leaders Perth and Midleton at Dunkirk. However, he fell ill with measles and the flotilla was unable to embark until the 23^rd. Hampered by adverse weather conditions they finally reached the Scottish coast at Inverness but failed to make contact with the assembled Jacobites at Leith. Deaf to James's entreaties, Fourbain refused to allow the young king to disembark and they returned to Dunkirk on 7 April.

The death of Queen Anne in August 1714 and the proclamation of George I as king of Britain and Ireland presented the Jacobites with another opportunity to attempt a restoration. In spite of his commitments under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) Louis XIV again undertook to aid the Jacobite cause. He promised substantial unofficial aid, and authorized French and Irish volunteers to support a Stuart invasion of Scotland. He also encouraged his grandson Philip V of Spain to pledge considerable financial aid, while the Pope bestowed 20, 000 pounds. The Jacobites advocated a three-pronged strategy, whereby Ormonde and James III would lead an assault on the southeast of England with the object of marching on London. John Erskine, eleventh earl of Mar, would raise the clans in the Highlands to converge on Glasgow and Edinburgh. Jacobites on the English-Scottish borders were also expected to join the rebellion. However, the authorities were well informed of ongoing invasion plans and they moved to arrest the chief insurgents. Ormonde reached the coast of Cornwall in the autumn but quickly returned to France. After this fiasco Scotland emerged as the main focus of rebellion. Mar proceeded to Scotland where he raised King James's standard at Braemar on 6 September. He seized Perth, gathered a force of 12, 000 men and subsequently proclaimed James III in Aberdeen, Dunkeld, Perth, Montrose, Dundee and Inverness. A combination of chronic indecision and strategic incompetence allowed John Campbell (second duke of Argyll) to overcome the numerical superiority of the Jacobite forces and force a draw in the indecisive Battle of Sheriffmuir on 13 November 1715. By the time the Stuart king had arrived at Peterhead, the initiative had been lost, the clans had dispersed and the rebellion was over. James was keen to reassemble the highlanders but Mar advised him to return to France.

After the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the succession of his sickly five-year old great-grandson Louis XV, control of a bankrupt and war-weary France fell to the regent Philippe, duc d'Orléans. He was eager to strengthen his position in case of a succession crisis, thwarting the ambitions of his main dynastic rival King Philip V of Spain. The Regent of France concluded the anti-Spanish Anglo-French alliance of 1716. This effectively secured the Hanoverian Succession in Britain and Ireland, protected Hanover and thwarted the political ambitions of Philip V of Spain. It remained the corner stone of European diplomacy until 1731, effectively isolating the Jacobites. The movements and machinations of James III, his minister and erstwhile allies still resounded among all sections of the Irish polity. Moreover, there were periods of tension during the 1720s when relations between France and Spain temporarily improved and threatened to transform the international situation to the advantage of the Stuarts.

The era from the outbreak of the Spanish-British colonial conflict known as the War of Jenkins's Ear in 1739 to the Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle in 1748 provides another high point in the history of Irish Jacobitism. Dormant Jacobite spirits in Ireland and on the continent revived with the outbreak of war in 1739, and the emerging succession crisis in the Imperial Habsburg territories. The death of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI on 20 October 1740 precipitated Frederick the Great of Prussia’s invasion of Silesia two months later, in direct defiance of the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’ which had guaranteed the unprecedented succession of Charles VI's eldest daughter Maria Theresa. The War of the Austrian Succession had begun, and it was only a matter of time before Britain and France entered the fray. The subsequent military stalemate in Western Europe restored Jacobitism to the forefront of European politics. Britain and Ireland again became the focus of a possible Franco-Jacobite invasion on behalf of Charles Edward Stuart, James III's eldest son and the great hope of the Jacobites. Although Ireland was not the direct target of these French invasion plans and 'the big dog' did indeed 'fail to bark in the night', the effects of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 reverberated through all levels of the Irish community.

The period between the Seven Years' War and the death of James III in 1766 constitutes the penultimate phase of the Jacobite era in Ireland. Although the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) concluded the War of the Austrian Succession, it provided only a brief respite in the unresolved conflict between Europe's greatest naval power (Britain) and land power (France) that would not be decided until Waterloo. A subsidy treaty between Britain and Russia in 1755 compelled Frederick the Great of Prussia to seek an accommodation with Britain. This diplomatic initiative resulted in the Treaty of Westminster in January 1756, a mutual defensive pact to counter French aggression against Hanover and Austrian pretensions towards its lost province of Silesia. An isolated and embittered Austria turned to her old enemy France, signing the Treaty of Versailles in May 1758. These new alliances constituted a 'Diplomatic Revolution', radically transforming the old system (in which Britain, the Empire and Holland arrayed themselves against France (and later Bourbon Spain). The conflict itself began with Frederick the Great's pre-emptive strike on Saxony in August 1756. After suffering setbacks at Kölin (June 1757) and Hastenbeck (July 1757), the Prusso-British alliance scored stunning victories at Rossbach (1757), Minden (1758) and in the colonial territories of Louisbourg and India. French desperation forced Choiseul, the new French minister of war, to attempt to draw Charles Edward into a French-sponsored invasion of the three kingdoms. Britain's triumph in 1763 laid the basis for a new geopolitics, which hastened the final demise of Jacobitism. It also permitted the emergence of a segment of Irish Catholic opinion willing to make a strategic accommodation with the House of Hanover. The period between the 1760s and the 1790s saw a renewed battle for the hearts and minds of Irish Catholics between die-hard Jacobites and Hanoverian integrationists. This Jacobite twilight also witnessed the evolution from Jacobite to Jacobin politics. Jacobitism, by preventing the emergence of a fully-fledged loyalty to the Protestant House of Hanover within the broader Catholic community, was crucial to the ease with which democratic republicanism penetrated Irish society in the 1790s.

The lack of a comprehensive study of the Catholic Church’s relationship with the House of Stuart is another yawning chasm in eighteenth-century Irish historiography. The close ties between Jacobitism and Catholicism were firmly established at the outset of James II’s accession to the throne. Immediately after his elevation James II petitioned Pope Innocent XI for the right to nominate Catholic bishops in his three kingdoms. James retained this right after his deposition and he, his wife Mary of Modena (acting as regent for her son) and the young ‘James III’ regularly exercised their prerogative. Indeed, of the 129 bishops and coadjutors appointed to Irish sees between 1687-1765 all but five were direct appointees of the Stuart king. It is no surprise, therefore, that the exiled Stuart retained his role as political conscience of the Irish Catholic clergy. As a result of this hold, Jacobitism remained crucially relevant for Catholic Ireland. Although he never got the opportunity to show his appreciation and affection to those Irish who had sacrificed everything in his cause he jealously guarded and judiciously exercised this right of nomination. Rome rarely refused any of his nominees and the Irish Catholic clergy understood that it was the Stuart court and not the Holy See that episcopal hopefuls had to make their representations. In return for his patronage many Irish bishops acted as the eyes and ears of rhe Stuart king and his allies in Europe, keeping them informed of the Strength of the English/British garrison within the country and suggesting ports, towns and regions which would be most suitable for a Jacobite descent. This committments, in addition to official Vatican policy, meant that they continued to inculcate a loyalty to the exiled monarchy in their flocks

Another key characteristic of eighteenth-century Irish history was the close relationship between Irish Jacobite poets and poetry and the Catholic clergy. This has implications for the close links between Jacobitism, Catholicism and the penal laws. Jacobite priest-poets such as Liam Inglis, Seán Ó Briain, Conchubhar Ó Briain, Domhnall Ó Colmáin and Uilliam Mac Néill Bhacaigh Ó hIarlaithe were the heirs of Seathrún Céitinn, Pádraig Haicéad and Piaras Feritéar who had emerged as major political and literary voices in the seventeenth century. They regularly and loudly prompted the Stuart cause, which remained an intrinsic feature of Irish Catholic nationalist identity until the 1760s. The Catholic Church stepped into the breach created by the effective destruction of the Catholic aristocracy and gentry in the aftermath of the Cromwellian and Williamite wars and confiscations to patronize the poets, who remained formidable reflectors and moulders of public opinion. The poets, in turn, steadfastly supported the exiled king and outlawed church. The Irish Catholic clergy’s influence on the main themes and the diffusion of literary output through the greater Catholic community has consequences for the popularisation of the sentiments expressed in contemporary Jacobite literature.
Jacobite song and verse

The Scottish political commentator Fletcher of Saltoun famously commented that ‘I know a wise man that believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of the nation’. This opinion was reiterated by the Irish antiquarian Thomas Crofton-Croker who observed that ‘the songs of the people are always worthy of attention and it appears to me extraordinary that the most positive treason should for so long have been published without notice’. The neglect of Jacobitism in Irish historical scholarship stems from the failure of many eighteenth century historians to engage with the surviving Irish literary sources, particularly the huge corpus of Jacobite poems and songs which survive in the Irish manuscript and folk tradition. The manuscript material derives from two main areas; the greater province of Munster and Oriel (Oirialla, representing most of the modern counties of Louth, Armagh, Monaghan and parts of Down and Meath).

The Irish poet remained one of the great reflectors (and to a lesser extent, moulders) of public opinion in Ireland until the close of the eighteenth century. Through the accumulating social, economic and political disasters of the Reformation, Tudor centralization and anglicization, the collapse of the Nine Years War (1594-1603), the Flight of the Earls (1607), the Plantation of Ulster (1609), the 1641 rebellion and the Jacobite wars, he remained close to the heart of Irish political life and retained his role as political chronicler and conscience of the nation. The importance of Irish poetry as a historical source was stressed as far back as Seathrún Céitinn's Fóras feasa ar Éirinn. Compiled in the 1630s, Céitinn justifies his extensive use of poetry as a source for his history and stated that because ‘the bones and marrow of history are found in poems, he think it is proper to depend on their authority in reference to history’.

The difficulties that arise in assessing the political content of Irish Jacobite poetry and the inherent dangers of utilizing it as historical source-material are best exemplified by the long-running scholarly controversy surrounding Daniel Corkery’s Hidden Ireland. However, most participants in this rather protracted scholarly debate would all concede that a failure to engage with one of the only major sources for Irish-speaking Ireland magnifies the dangers of reading Irish history from exclusively English-language sources. Breandán Ó Buachalla has argued that too much attention has been paid to official state documents to the neglect of literary works, newspapers and ballads. Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh takes the view that these poems ‘deserve closer scrutiny as they are, in many ways, all that we have of the voice of Gaelic Ireland in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. A close perusal of Irish Jacobite poetry in the context of Irish, British and European politics also reveals that, contrary to the opinions of the sceptics, its content was much more than vacuous literary rhetoric. Moreover, it utilization of a popular amhrán [song] metre, its transmission throughout Ireland in the oral and scribal traditions and its employment of imported Jacobite airs such as ‘The White Cockade’, ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’, ‘Bonnie Dundee’, ‘Charlie come over the water’ and ‘Over the hills and far away’.

The Irish poetic tradition became much more democratically minded in the eighteenth century and the poet increasingly functioned as the spokesman of his peers. Moreover, throughout the eighteenth century, the Irish poetic culture had a toasting and drinking dimension; the poetry was often addressed to Ireland in her various female forms, or to her aristocracy, clergy or people. In addition, the poets regularly acted as media for the transmission of English war news to an Irish-speaking public. Moreover, the dramatic quality of the aisling [Jacobite vision poem] resembled an embryonic form of street theatre. Wading through dusty manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy or any other major collection of eighteenth century manuscripts in Europe or North America, or perusing printed volumes of Jacobite poetry and songs, it is easily forgotten that these literary works were not composed as historical source material but were meant for popular performance or recitation. The convergence of Gaelic elite and folk culture is also borne out by the employment of a more popular metre in contemporary composition and its survival and popular and widespread transmission. Murray Pittock has noted ‘those who wished to defend a particularly Scottish (or Irish) high culture were forced to surrender to the standards of the British state’. Breandán Ó Buachalla coined his memorable hierarchical analogy of trí ghluain ó rí go ramhainn [three generations from a king to a spade] to represent the socio-economic decline of the literary in seventeenth and eighteenth century Ireland – from Dáithí Ó Bruadair through Aogán Ó Rathaille and Séamas Dall Mac Cuarta to the hedge school masters and scribes Peadar Ó Doirnín and Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin.

Protestant Jacobitism

In view of the sectarian nature of the Jacobite war in Ireland and William of Orange’s adoption of the role of Protestant champion of Europe, it might seem surprising to find one Irish Protestant Jacobite. The Tory political supremacy in the early-eighteenth century nourished a small Irish Protestant Jacobite interest. It expressed itself in Jacobite rhetoric and fed on an influx of seditious pamphlets from London. It flourished in Dublin and among rural based Protestant clergy. Jacobite activity in County Antrim can be related to the Earl of Antrim’s patronage of non-juring clergy and his ties with Jacobite Scotland. Jacobite dissension in Derry City can be explained by the political and religious leanings of a succession of Anglican bishops and, in the case of Kilkenny, as a result of the influence of the second Duke of Ormonde. Between 1713-16 there was an upsurge of Protestant Jacobite activity in Trinity College Dublin, particularly toasting, pamphleteering and the circulation of seditious poems and songs. This eventually spilled onto the streets and into nearby taverns and coffee shops and galvanised a Jacobite mob.

However, the succession of George I precipitated a sharp decline in Protestant Jacobitism. Although it occasionally re-surfaced in isolated, seditious toasts for ‘Ormonde and the High Church’, it increasingly became the preserve of English-based, Anglo-Irish magnates and a narrow literary circle that included such individuals as Thomas Sheridan, James Barry, 4^th Earl of Barrymore and the 4^th and 5^th Earls of Orrery. Individual Protestants such as the convert Charles McCarthy, Knightly Chetwood and Lord Kingston remained associated with the phenomenon in the minds of Jacobites and anti-Jacobites alike. The Irish Protestant Jacobite legacy is more significant for its quality than its quantity. It supplied the evangelist of the non-juring English Protestant Jacobite tradition (Charles Leslie), the conscience of English Protestant Jacobitism (James Butler, 2^nd Duke of Ormonde), the Stuart admiral-in-waiting (George Cammocke), three of the principal English Jacobite leaders (Lords Arran, Orrery and Barrymore), one of the most fanatical of all the non-juring Jacobites (George Kelly) and two of the immortal ‘Seven men of Moidart who accompanied Charles Edward to Scotland in 1745 (George Kelly and Thomas Sheridan).