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

Approximately 19,000 of the Irish Jacobite army evacuated Limerick under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick to continue King James’s struggle on the continent. This Irish Jacobite army remained a distinct military entity until it was disbanded under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick [which concluded the war of the League of Augsburg] and incorporated into five Irish Regiments in the French army. These Brigades [the famous ‘Wild Geese’ of nationalist history and hagiography] emerged as a distinct and much-lauded military force in the French Army. Louis XIV treated them as his own subjects and wished that they would enjoy the same rights as natural-born Frenchmen. Maréschal Vendome had a particular esteem for this warlike nation, whom he deemed ‘Les bouchiers de l’armee’ [The butchers of the army]. They would continually earn and maintain this fearsome reputation on the killing-fields of Steenkirk (1692) Landen (1693), Cremona (1702), Ramilles (1706), Almanza (1707), Blenheim (1708), Oudenarde (1708), Malplaquet (1709), Fontenoy (1745), Laufelt (1746), Bergen-op-Zoom (1746) during the course of the eighteenth century.

Recruitment to the ranks of the Irish Brigades in the French [and later the Spanish] army was the most visible manifestation of militant Jacobitism in the period before the Hanoverian succession. It also fed the ranks of the large Irish diaspora of soldiers, merchants, clergy and their families and dependants in eighteenth-century Europe. Historians have often dismissed the huge numbers routinely mentioned in contemporary correspondence. Nevertheless many Irishmen did take shipping for foreign service, invariably, as far as they were concerned, for the service of the Pretender, or ‘James III in many of the surviving accounts and depositions. The terror of Irish Protestants and the expectations of Irish Catholics cannot be adequately represented by number crunching in the muster rolls of the Irish Regiments in the French or Spanish military archives. Recruitment depositions also reflect an awareness of contemporary Jacobite politics. They refer to invasion plots and the machinations of the most prominent Jacobites on the continent. They reveal extensive and intricate lines of communication between Ireland and the continent, via Catholic priests, Irish soldiers and Franco-Irish privateers, Irish ship-owners and merchants.

The links between the two sections of the Irish Jacobite community continued to be maintained by recruitment in the first decades of the eighteenth century. These recruits are often deemed to have had more than merely mercenary motives for running the gauntlet of capital punishment; mere mercenaries would hardly have risked execution to follow the hazardous profession of soldiering. The authorities received reports of incessant recruitment and clerical participation therein. Catholic clergy were continually implicated and their actions deemed to have official sanction from the Stuart court. One contemporary report claimed that 'the Jacobites are now retiring to St. Germain. The only motion they are making at present is sending Irish priests into Ireland in disguise to raise recruits.' Indeed, Lord Lieutenant Carteret claimed that 'popish priests pass over daily in disguise from France to raise recruits'.

Anti-Jacobite witnesses habitually raised the Jacobite bugbear with regards to recruiting; key members of the surviving Munster Catholic aristocracy and gentry, prominent Protestant converts, unregistered Catholic priests, rapparees, smugglers, gun-runners and privateers also remained associated with the phenomenon. Recruiters allegedly placed great emphasis on 'commissions' received from 'the Pretender' and some recruits refused service to any but 'James III'. These depositions often contained precise information on impending Jacobite invasions and vivid detail on important Jacobite exiles. It remained a major preoccupation of the government in the period before the outbreak of a general European war in 1742 and the Irish Brigades, the ultimate destination, was seen as a Jacobite army-in-waiting. Recruitment also preoccupied Irish poets, Protestant pamphleteers and official correspondents as evidenced in the poems of Aogán Ó Rathaille, Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín, Dáithí Ó hUaithne, Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill and in the pamphlets of Charles Forman and John Keogh.

Arguments among contemporaries and historians over the exact numbers who were recruited, served and died in the Irish regiments in the armies of France and Spain have raged since the eighteenth century and are as protracted as those debates regarding the penal laws. In 1729, the Irish Jacobite Sir Charles Wogan, lamented that 100,000 Irishmen had died serving France since the 1690s. Elsewhere, in a letter to Swift, he stated that 120,000 Irishmen had been killed in the service of France. Writing in the 1760s, the Abbé MacGeoghegan, histroian of the Irish in the French serivce, put the figure at 450, 000 for the period 1690-1745. The historian Richard Hayes believed that these figures represented all those that served in the Irish Regiments and he arrived at a figure of 48,000 casualties for the whole period. In more recent times, Louis Cullen has opted for much more conservative figures, suggesting that ‘at its peak in the late 1720s-1730s, enlistment reached, or did not fall short of, 1,000 per annum’. He also claimed that this did not fall off decisively until the 1740s’.

These recruits supplemented a thriving Irish diaspora in eighteenth century Europe. The Irish colleges provided vital foci for the exiles during the first half of the eighteenth century and acted as tangents between the two sections of the Irish political nation at home and abroad. For example, the College Des Lombardes provided thirteen bishops for Irish sees in the period 1688-1715. 1214 students from the universities of Paris and Toulouse-Cahors served on the Irish mission in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Irish soldiers remained in regular contact with the expatriate clerical brethren of their native diocese, they often contributed to their upkeep in the clerical colleges when their fortunes allowed, and entrusted the exiled clergy and religious with the education of their children. The support given by the first and second generation of Irish émigrés is best exemplified by the proliferation of bursaries, scholarships and educational foundations which they bestowed on the colleges, often with the object of providing education for their impoverished clergy from their native diocese. In return, the colleges took care of the spiritual needs of their secular brethren, they became chaplains to the Irish Brigades, provided expatriate noblemen with testimonies and certificates of noblesse, vital for political and military advancement in ancien regime Europe, and often looked after their orphaned children. On a more fundamental level, the colleges acted as useful ports of call for those arriving from Ireland who were unfamiliar with French and Spanish language and customs.

This diaspora left an indelible mark on the politics, political culture, literature and history of eighteenth-century Ireland and Europe. In conjunction with their service to temporal and spiritual masters on the continent, these exiles often retained their old allegiance to their native land exiled Stuarts. Their presence as an expectant aristocracy, clergy and Jacobite army-in-exile can no longer be considered a creation of the excited pens of later nationalists such as Thomas Davis, Emily Lawless, Matthew O’Conor and John Cornelius O’Callaghan. The links between Ireland and her clerical and military exiles influenced the elaboration, maintenance and survival of Jacobite ideology until the end of the 1750s. In periods of political inactivity, the exiles commented on European politics, sought pensions, titles, preferments and continually dwelt on their exiled and the persecution of the indigenous Irish. Their surviving correspondence demonstrates the constant contact between Ireland and the exiles and highlight popular Jacobite activities such as toasting, duelling and singing. The Stuart king reciprocated this contact with the émigrés by repeatedly turning to Irish generals, colonel-proprietors, priests and religious to obtain preferments for his loyal subjects. Émigré rhetoric bristled with Irish Jacobite self-righteousness and their persecution mentality. They boasted their willingness to serve the cause and return to their native lands and possessions. These declarations cannot be lightly dismissed as hollow rhetoric because many of the most influential Irish exiles were kept informed regarding the strength of the Whig garrison and they forcefully advocated an invasion of Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century.

Their hopes rested on support for the Stuarts from the major European powers. Illicit correspondence between Ireland and the continent also sustained Irish Jacobitism. The Catholic clergy were crucial in this regard. The activities of prominent Irish Jacobites demonstrate official and unofficial contact between Ireland and the continent. French and Spanish privateers and gun-runners, visitors to Rome, the numerous postulations for episcopal preferments, and the interchange between Ireland and its emigrant colonies in Spain, France and Italy provided further links between the two Irelands. These reinforced the Irish Jacobite ideology in an era of relative political quiescence and created conditions in which Jacobite ritual could flourish. A more active brand of Jacobitism re-emerged with the outbreak of the War of Jenkins's Ear in 1739 and the eruption of the War of the Austrian Succession. Prominent members of the Irish exiles in France and Spain reiterated their willingness to serve the Stuarts, their religion and 'oppressed country'. Pivotal Irish émigrés (Dillon, O’Brien, Wogan, Lally, Lords Clancarthy and Clare) justified Catholic optimism by seeking to join in the 'Forty-five’ and relieve 'their poor countrymen'. However, a conflict of interest between Stuart loyalty and French realpolitik infected émigré ranks in the late 1750s. Heavy casualties, the decline of recruitment, the death of James Stuart and the demise of a number of prominent Irish officers in the French service eroded the Irish interest within the rank and file of the Irish Brigade.

The post-Limerick confiscations, dislocations, migrations, coupled with the dynastic wars that ravaged eighteenth-century Europe, gave many opportunities to Irishmen to earn their fortunes and reputations by the swords in other European countries besides France. The War of the Spanish Succession had succeeded in securing Philippe Bourbon, grandson of Louis XIV of France, on the Spanish throne. He quickly formed a number of Irish units beginning with O’Mahony’s and Henry Crofton’s dragoons, the former distinguishing itself at Cremon and the latter at Almanza (1706), the battle which effectively decided the War of the Spanish Succession. Three infantry regiments also transferred from the French service after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) [Limerick, Ultonia and Hibernia] would later be joined by Burke’s Regiment [renamed Irlanda]. Until they were finally disbanded during the Napoleonic era these Spanish regiments emulated their French counterparts continued to wear the red livery of the [Stuart] king of England and marched under the insignia of the harp to Jacobite tunes. The Spanish-Irish military elite contained some of Europe’s most eminent soldiers and statesmen; Sir Charles Wogan, senator of Rome, scourge of the Moors at Oban, governor of La Mancha and correspondent of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift; Sir Toby Burke, Sir Patrick Lawless, later Spanish ambassador to England, Ricardo Wall, Prime-Minister of Spain, Don Bernardo Wall and Alexander O’Higgins, father of Don Bernardo, the father of Chilean independence.

The Irish Diaspora in Austria is characterized more for its quality than quantity. In the mid-seventeenth century the Taaffe, Earls of Carlingford, founded a military and political dynasty that would survive in the higher echelons of Habsburg politics until the end of the nineteenth century. Maximilian Ulysses Von Browne is considered by many to have been one of the greatest siege generals of the army of Empress Maria Theresa. Having drove the French out of Northern Italy in the War of the Austrian Succession he was one of the few Austrian soldiers who could regularly meet and defeat Frederick the Great in battle. Count Francis Lacy, confidant of Emperor Joseph is acknowledged by many to have been a master of the science of supply and authored one of the great works on European military strategy in eighteenth-century Europe. Peter Lacy, dubbed the ‘Prince Eugene of Muscovy’ by none other than Frederick the Great is often given credit for turning the Russian army from being among the worst soldiers in Europe to being among the best. He distinguished himself in numerous wars in Sweden, Poland and the Crimea and had a regiment in the Imperial Army until the Russian Revolution.
The Irish in America

Between 1600-1800 most emigrants from Ireland to American came from the northern half of the country, primarily Ulster. In the seventeenth century southern Catholics probably constituted a large majority of the relatively few emigrants, perhaps 50, 000-60,000 in all, who crossed the Atlantic and settled primarily in the West Indies and Chesapeake region of North America. Before the American Revolution the great majority of Irish Catholic emigrants were poor indentured servants, although a significant flow of more affluent and skilled Catholics did commence in the 1780s and 1790s. By the eighteenth century Catholics comprised between 1/5 and 1/4 of all permanent emigrants. In addition, thousands of Irish Catholics left the southeastern counties of Ireland through the ports of Wexford and Waterford to work in the Newfoundland fisheries. Some of these settled permanently on the Grand Banks or migrated into New England.

However, the largest single confessional group was composed of those would become known as Scots-Irish. One consequence of the Cromwellian conquest and subsequent colonization of Ireland was an influx of some 30, 000 English and Welsh Dissenters, Baptists and Quakers into Ireland. However, the restoration of Charles II, the re-establishment of episcopacy and the re-imposition of tithes, heralded a sharp deterioration in their legal, social and political position that prompted their migration to the ‘New Word’. Their numbers continued to be supplemented by the adverse political, economic, and religious and political changes. The Irish Catholic resurgence in the 1680s, the ensuing war and resulting adverse economic conditions meant that between 1680-1716 some 3,000 left for North America in this period. These figures rose dramatically in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Severe economic distress, trade stagnation, currency shortages, repeated harvest failures, increased competition and sharp increases in rentals for lands post-war era turned this trickle to a flood. Between 1717 and 1719 some 4,500-5,000 took passage to America, a figure that jumped to approximately 15,000 for the 1720s. By 1750 annual emigration figures had risen to some 1,000 per year with the result that between the 1730s and the outbreak of the American Revolution another 50,000 would have supplemented the large Irish presence in the American colonies.

Although Irish commerce and industry had expanded after 1750s so also did population pressures, living costs and expectations. Scots-Irish farmers and leaseholders increasingly fell victim to improving landlords who tended to grant shorter leases, geared rentals to anticipated price increases and demanded that tenants modernize their holdings. The next result was that tenants became increasingly dependant on the linen manufacture. Market fluctuations and the social dislocation associated with the linen manufacture further stimulated stagnation in this sector and prompted further migrations. Indeed increased specialization in the linen industry, sub-division of holdings and increasing population densities had reduced most of east Ulster’s farmers to the level of sub-tenants and farmers with tiny holdings. Emigration continued apace in the period between the American Revolution and the 1798 Rebellion, particularly among Presbyterian small farmers and artisans in the densely populated areas of mid and east Ulster. The economic prosperity and the embargos and naval blockades associated with the Napoleonic and Anglo-American war would later stifle this traffic. Emigration from Ulster between 1807-1814 averaged one thousand per year as compared with 15,000 between 1815-16. In spite of the official predictions that the Act of Union would bring prosperity to Ireland emigration remained a factor in Irish politics until the famine.

Evidence would suggest that a majority of those in the colonies from an Irish background supported the revolutionary cause. These included such prominent figures as John Dunlop (County Tyrone), the printer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Thompson (Derry), the leader of the radical movement in Philadelphia and secretary to the Continental Congress and Aedanus Burke (Galway), a particularly prominent opponent of the federal constitution. Irishmen and their descendants also figured prominently among the signatories of the declaration of Independence and members of the First Congress. These included Matthew Thornton (Limerick), James Smith (Dublin), Thomas McKeane (Derry), George Reade (Dublin), Charles Thomson (Derry) James Duane (Galway) and Charles Carroll of Carrolltown, grandson of Charles O’Carroll of Ely O’Carroll, the first signatory of the Declaration of Independence [“The First Citizen”]

On the outbreak of hostilities Irishmen also assumed prominent roles in the higher echleons of the Congressional army. Richard Montgomery of County Donegal was the first prominent martyr in the cause of American Independence. His death on the ramparts of Quebec is commemorated in the famous political portrait ‘The Death of General Montgomery’ [based on ‘The death of General Woulfe at Quebec’] and vies in propaganda value with the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. Moreover, Montgomery’s memory survives today in the state capital of Alabama and numerous other small towns throughout the United States. Admiral John Brown of Tacumshane, County Wexford, has been called the father of the American Navy. During the revolution he captured numerous British ships and Congress continually commended his heroic actions. Brown later became the senior naval officer with the title of ‘Commodore’ on the formation of the American Navy in 1794. He continued to be a staunch supporter of Washington and Hamilton in giving the US a centralized government and constitution There are monuments to his honour in Washington, Philadelphia and Wexford Town. Other prominent officers of Irish birth and extraction included General William Irvine (Fermanagh), General Andrew Lewis (Donegal), General Richard Butler (Dublin), General John Shee (Meath), Col Edward Hand (Offaly), Col. Walter Stewart (Donegal) and Major-General John Sullivan (Limerick).

Contemporary evidence also points to large numbers of ordinary Irishmen in the ranks of the Congressional Army. In a response to Edmund Burke’s question of the number of foreigners in the rebel army Major-General James Robertson [who had served in the British Army in the colonies for twenty years before the outbreak of the revolution] informed him that general Charles Lee (second-in-command of the Continental Army) had claimed that over half of the army was of Irish extraction. Likewise, in a missive of 23 October 1778 from General Sir Henry Clinton, Commander-in-Chief of the English Army, informed Lord George Germain, Secretary for War, which “the emigrants from Ireland were in general to be looked upon as our most serious antagonists”. These claims would seem to be borne out by the proliferation of Irish names among examination of the officer lists and muster rolls of the continental army and navy. Indeed some of the company rosters look more like the parish registers of a country town in a Gaelic-speaking district of Ireland than the rolls of a body of soldiers who fought for the liberty of a land three thousand miles away from their ancestral home.
*11. Ireland and the American Revolution; The Volunteers, Radical and sectarian politics
The succession of the young British-born George III to the throne in 1760 signalled an end to exclusive Whig rule and a novel attempt by the new king to rule through a hand-picked, non-party cabinet. This led to political uncertainly and instability, as evidenced by the popular political campaigns of John Wilkes in the 1750s and 1760s and the numerous changes of government and general political instability during the first twenty years of his reign. This was exacerbated by a massive expansion in Britain’s colonial possessions in consequence of her recent triumph in the Seven Years’ War. The massive influx of wealth from the North American, the Caribbean and in particular, from the newly-acquired Indian possessions, was offset by administrative problems in these new colonies and a growing self-confident clamour in her other dependencies, particularly America and Ireland. Animated by the collapse of the ‘Undertaker System’ under Lord Lieutenant Townsend and by the return of Charles Lucas, ‘The Irish Wilkes’ to the political fray, Irish Patriots campaigned for a reduction of government pensions and patronage, the exclusion of such pensioners and placemen from parliament, the removal of all restrictions on Irish trade, the taxation of absentee landlords and office-holders and the establishment of a militia. As in the 1720s and 1730s this struggle would crystallize around a number of cause celebres; including the Corn Export Bill of 1765, the Augmentation dispute of 1768 and the Supply Bill of 1769.
American War of Independence

The Treaty of Paris of 1763, which concluded the Seven Year’s War totally removed the French threat from the American colonies. British power had reached now its zenith in North America and the colony flourished from a population of under 500,000 at the beginning of the 18^th century to 4,000,000 by the mid-1770s. However, there were straws in the wind for unrivalled British domination. In spite of their successive military triumphs many Britons resented the expense of conquering and policing their new acquisitions. The government attempted to transfer the costs of an 8,000-strong garrison onto the colonists in the form of sugar and stamp taxes on molasses, letters and newspapers. Colonial representatives refused to accept any these levies without prior consultation, riots and attacks on tax collectors ensued and quickly degenerated into more severe clashes with the British military. This led to war and the formation of a congressional army under General George Washington. After some military reversals culminating in the siege of Boston, Crown Point and Tirconderoga, with abortive threats to Montreal and Quebec, Britain regained the military initiative but failed to deal decisive military or political blows to the ‘rebels’. French military and diplomatic support for the American Revolution heralded a gradual but steady transformation in the fortunes of the respective combatants, culminating in a Franco-American bombardment of Yorktown, Virginia, and Lord Cornwallis’ surrender to general George Washington at Yorktown on 19 October 1781.

As the American crisis developed in the 1760s and 1770s many on both sides of the Atlantic saw comparisons between the grievances of Irish Patriots and the American colonists. Although it provided an enormous boost for Irish radicals Vincent Morley’s comprehensive examination of its influence on Ireland has shown that it received a mixed reception in the various confessional and social sectors of the Irish polity. Anglican opinion diverged between concerns over ‘taxation without consultation’ and fears of imperial fragmentation. Presbyterians had strong political, cultural and personal links with many of the American revolutionaries and their supporters but many withdrew their support in the wake of the American Declaration of Independence. Much of the hostility towards Britain that appeared in popular Catholic circles had its initial antecedents in popular Jacobite, anti-English and anti-Protestant rhetoric of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, an unequivocal pro-American sympathy later emerged in the surviving poems and songs of Colmán MacCárthaigh, Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, Tomás Ó Míocháin and many other Irish poets. Popular support of the American Revolution among the Irish literati also featured in other contemporary sources as evidenced in Breandán Mac Suibhne’s recent researches in the Derry Journal. This sharply contrasted with the pro-government rhetoric of the Catholic clerical and aristocratic elites who wished for the alleviation of penal legislation and to further ingratiate themselves with the government after the self-imposed exile of the Jacobite era. A tangible benefit of this cautious, pro-government was Luke Gardiner’s Catholic Relief Act of 1778 which was the first step in a long-drawn out process for Catholic relief which would come to it’s final fruition in 1829 with O’Connell’s winning of Catholic Emancipation.

The withdrawal of troops from Ireland for the American service, coupled with the threat of a French or Spanish invasion, also led to the formation of the Irish Volunteers as a part-time military force to guard against invasion and maintain law and order. Their military strength quickly grew from around 15,000 in April 1779 to 60,000 by the middle of the 1780s. Originally composed of the urban and rural middle classes, it tended to be officered by the gentry and aristocracy. They initially performed a policing function against Whiteboys, Rightboys, smugglers, illicit distillers and urban rioters. However, the movement quickly assumed a wider political importance, facilitating the emergence and expression of an middle class [and, in some cases, a proto-nationalist] consciousness. They quickly transmuted into an extra-parliamentary and popular pressure group that supported key ‘Patriot’ causes including free trade, legislative independence, parliamentary reform and catholic relief. Grattan and the Patriots used the volunteers to great effect against a weak and divided English parliament. Having successfully agitated for free trade in 1779 the Patriots turned their attention to ending Ireland’s political subordination to the English parliament. The campaign took place on the floor of the Irish House of Commons and amid the ranks of the increasingly raucous volunteers. The new sentiments of patriotism and liberty manifested themselves in popular art and literature, in newspapers such as the Derry Journal and in the politically loaded paintings of James Barry. In 1782 the Patriots finally achieved legislative independence with the repeal of Declaratory Act the modification of Poynings’ Law and a series of other measures which secured the independence of judges, declared the Irish House of Lords to be a court of final appeal and made the legal basis of army discipline dependant on regular parliamentary renewal.

In spite of this Patriot triumph the Irish parliament remained subject to English control, the lord lieutenant and chief secretary were accountable to the British cabinet no longer preoccupied with the American war and fearful of further imperial fragmentation Reformers within its ranks also wrestled with the vexed questions of catholic relief and parliamentary reform. Indeed, these proved to be a bridge too far and would eventually cause a split in patriot ranks that would also extent to the ranks of the volunteers. Many of the landed and parliamentary elite baulked at an extension of the franchise to Catholics and were also made increasingly uneasy by the activities of those radicals like James Napper Tandy who sought to broaden the social and confessional base of the movement by recruiting lower class Protestants and Catholics.