Excerpts from A History of Ireland
Peter and Iona Somerset Fry (Barnes & Noble, Inc: New York, 1993)
"Meanwhile, positions were hardening on both sides of the main religious divide. 'Toleration is a grievous sin', said the Protestant
archbishop of Dublin in 1627, and twelve bishops supported him. Protestants were moving towards a nationalistic, rabidly anti-Catholic
Puritanism..." (p 141)
"In 1581 recusancy fines and the penalties for celebrating or attending mass were sharply increased, and in 1585 all Catholic priests were ordered
to leave the country or be regarded as traitors. The priests went into hiding and moved about the country disguised as labourers or herdsmen,
and worked alongside their flocks. And the martyrdoms began. In the early years, there had been only two martyrs, both of them suspected of
aiding Spain, but in the last twenty years of Elizabeth's reign nearly a hundred Catholic clergy were imprisoned for long periods or done to
death, many without trial. The Irish people rewarded these priests, who risked so much for them, with a total devotion. By the
seventeenth century, despite the laws and the lynchings, Catholic priests were everywhere - in the towns, in the castles, the villages, the
peasants' cabins and the houses of the gentry of the Pale..." (p 141-142)
"Cromwell was a gentleman farmer from eastern England who had emerged, in is forties and quite without military training, as the most
brilliant general of the English civil war. He had a forceful personality and strong Puritan convictions. Like almost everyone else in
England, he had believed every word, and every exaggeration, contained in the horror stories of Protestant massacre which had circulated
ever since the 1641 rising, and never considered the grievances which had led the Irish to rebel. Ireland before the rebellion had been a
blissful Arcadia, he liked to think, which only the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish had spoiled. Like other Englishmen before him, even the
poet Spenser, he believed the only solution to the perennial problems of Ireland was to extirpate the Irish, to root them out and destroy
them, as the Israelites had extirpated the idolatrous inhabitants of Canaan." (p 153)
"... At Wexford, however, the Confederate governor prevaricated when called upon to surrender, hoping for reinforcements, and an
'unexpected Provience' came to the aid of the English forces in the person of a young Captain Stafford, who betrayed the castle which
stood next to the city wall. The English set up their scaling ladders, swarmed over the fortifications and stormed the town, running amok
among the surprised and defenceless townspeople and killing more than 2,000 of them, for the loss of only twenty men..." (p 155)
"The English intended the Irish to pay for the suppression of their rebellion - and pay for it in the only way they could, with their land.
In 1642, soon after the rebellion had broken out, the English parliament had passed an Adventurers' Act which declared the lands of
the leading rebels forfeit and offered them for sale to English subscribers, the adventurers. With a curious blindness, the English were
planning to perpetuate the wrong which had led to the rebellion in the first place. In 1652, with Ireland quiet once more, the act was put
into effect...Ireland had suffered terribly during the years of war. A third of the country's Catholics had been killed, and the population
had fallen back to its medieval level of half a million." (p 156)
"The transplantation [via the Cromwellian Act of Settlement] was carried out with amazing speed. An English geographer, Sir William
Petty, surveyed andmapped almost the whole of Ireland in thirteen months and the Irish and Old English gentry and aristocracy were
ordered, on pain of death, to be across the river Shannon by 1st May 1654. Naturally they prevaricated, hoping against hope for some
change of heart in the English, and the date was put back twice, to December 1654, and then to Marh 1655. By then 44,000 people had
been turned out of their homes and farms in the fertile east and south to make the long trek, with their families, followers, cattle, pigs,
sheep, chickens and such goods as they could take with them to Connacht. They travelled through the wet and cold of winter, some
half-starving because they had not been able to reap the harvest before setting out, and others knowing they would reach their new
lands too late for sowing." (p 157)
"For a brief while, Ireland was united to England as never before. An English Protestant gentry wielded total power over landless
Catholic Irish peasants. Catholic priests were banned and hunted - an iniquitous Cromwellian law offered a 5 pound reward to anyone
bringing in the head of a wolf or a Catholic bishop - while the Protestant church reorganized itself with fresh vigour." (p 158)
“The estates of some 270 Catholic landowners, some of them rebels and others absentees, were forfeited. It was the final blow in a century of confiscation. In 1603, when the Tyrone wars ended, considerable areas of Munster had belonged to Protestants, such as the Butler family and the parvenu earl of Cork. Twenty-five years later, when Ulster had been planted with Scots and English, a quarter of all the land of Ireland was in Protestant hands. Wentworth ruthlessly carried plantation into Connacht, and the Protestant proportion rose to 40 per cent. Then the Cromwellian settlements took root, and the Protestants came to own three-quarters of the Irish land. In 1692, after James’ defeat, Catholics had only one-seventh of the land, which they had once owned, left. Unable to follow the vagaries of the English, when they executed one king and drove out another, the Irish found themselves, for their loyalty, dispossessed – and reduced, in many instances, to the level of dependent tenants and labourers.” (p 164)
“From 691 onwards, even before the Treaty of Limerick had been sent to William, an act of the English parliament was applied to Ireland which required members of both houses of parliament to take an Oath of Allegiance and make delcarations against the mass and the pope, which no conscientious Catholic would do; the first principle of the Treaty of Limerick, which granted Catholics the same toleration under William as they had had under Charles II, was being denied. The Irish parliament summoned in 1692 was Protestant and determined to remain Protestant; Catholics were to be subjugated and kept out of the way. The lord lieutenant, who had to placate parliament in order to raise funds, promised that Catholics would not be allowed to join the army. In 1695 another parliament made it illegal for Catholics to keep schools, become school teachers or private tutors, send their children abroad to be educated, as many of the Catholic gentry were used to doing, or become the guardian of a child; as Catholics were already barred from obtaining degrees at Trinity College, Dublin, their education was effectively truncated. Catholics were hindered from buying confiscated land; when about a million acres were put on the market, Catholics were not allowed to buy, or lease, more than two acres each. Catholics were forbidden to wear swords, a normal part of a gentleman’s dress in those days, to own a sporting gun, or a horse worth more than 5 pounds; if a Protestant admired a Catholic’s horse, he could take it from him, there and then on payment of that sum. Then in 1698 Catholics, with a few exceptions, were excluded from the practice of law; not only was a career denied to young, ambitious men, but Catholics as a whole were deprived of legal representation from amongst their own people.” (p 165-166)
“In 1704 the Irish parliament passed an act ‘to prevent the further growth of popery’ which was the most severe of all the Penal Laws which discriminated against Catholics. Known as the Gavelkind Act, it stated that Catholics should only inherit land from each other, never from Protestants, and on the death of a Catholic landowner, his property must be equally divided amongst his sons, causing the family to decline in wealth and status, unless the eldest son conformed to the established Protestant Church. In a rule which was bound to cause family dissension, the son could take over the estate within his father’s life-time, if he turned Protestant, and reduce his father to the status of his life-tenant. Other laws prevented Catholics from giving mortgages or acquiring land on a lease of more than thirty-one years, and fixed their rents at two-thirds of the value of the crops grown or livestock reared on it. If a Catholic improved the output of his holding through his skill and hard work, his rent would go up; and if he tried to avoid the increase by hiding his improved output from his landlord, the first Protestant who found him out could take his land from him. Similarly, if a Catholic bought land from a Protestant in secret, any Protestant who caught him out could evict him. A Catholic could not acquire property by marriage with a Protestant, but a Catholic wife who turned Protestant would be rewarded with a part of her husband’s estate. A Protestant woman who married a Catholic was deprived of her property. Later on, marriages between Protestants and Catholics were declared null and void, and priests who performed such marriages could be hung. Catholics were grossly hampered in business too. They were more heavily taxed than Protestants, restricted in their choice of premises to work in and limited in the number of their employees, so that their businesses were prevented from growing. They could not vote in parliamentary or local elections, or enter the government service in any capacity, however humble. They had no place in the judicial system; a Catholic plaintiff had to be represented by a Protestant lawyer, to come before a Protestant judge and a Protestant jury. The law employed and protected Protestants; it punished Catholics. In a very famous statement the Lord Chancellor, John Bowes, and the Chief Justice, Christopher Robinson, declared ‘that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic’. Naturally, many Catholics belonging to the landed and merchant classes turned Protestant; they were not all prepared to be martyred for their religion any more than people are now. ‘Tis sad for me’, wrote a Catholic father, ‘to cleave to Calvin or perverse Luther but the weeping of my children, the spoiling them of flocks and lands, brought streaming floods from my eyes’. Such men were often hypocritical Protestants, timeservers who attended what Protestant services the law required and went on hearing mass privately, in their own homes. Their children might still go abroad for a Catholic education – nominal Protestants could not be prevented from sending their children abroad – but they were more likely to attend Protestant schools at home. Within a generation or two, much of the Catholic heritage was forgotten.” (p 166-167)
“Cottiers tried to supplement their income by doing casual work on the larger farms, but around 1715 a great deal of land was turned over from arable use to pasture, which required less labour. So they took to begging. When they had planted their crops in the spring and cut the turf for the next winter’s fires, they wandered off, to spend the summer migrating from place to place, very much as their forefathers had done when they drove their cattle to upland summer pastures a thousand years earlier. Even employed people would spend the summer begging; wages were so low that servants left their jobs and farm hands quit the farms to join the seasonal migration. Thousands of poor Irish would simply wander along the roads and paths, barefoot, ragged, feckless and idle, living in the open and begging for their food, less often from more prosperous wayfarers and the houses of the great than from other poor cottiers like themselves. Most communities expected to support some beggars, generally about ten in the winter and thirty or forty between planting and harvest time. When cottiers had handed over two-thirds of their produce as rent, they still had to pay the government hearth tax of 2s or 3s a year and their religious dues. The first of these dues, very much resented, was the tithe paid to the Protestant clergy of the Established Church, who lived in comfortable parsonages up and down the country and attended to the spiritual needs of the upper classes. They seldom visited the hovels of the poor. Secondly, the cottiers supported their own parish priests. Protestants did not want to stamp out Catholicism; they had far too much to gain from the subjugation of the Catholic population, whom they referred to as ‘Catholic enemies’ and exploited as a conquered race, to wish them to turn Protestant, and they believed that religion, any religion, spread ‘civility’ and reduced the crime rate. In 1703 Catholic parish priests were asked to register with the government and over a thousand did so, including a number of bishops and friars masquerading as parish priests in order to carry on their work. Catholic priests had been holding their services in old barns, in gentlemen’s houses and in the open, setting up altars on ‘mass-rocks’ and under trees. After they were registered they were allowed recognized church buildings, where their congregations could gather quite openly. Simple houses were put up for the priests, and soon became landmarks. Parishioners paid for their priest in grain and vegetables, mil, livestock sent to market, cloth they had woven – whatever they had, besides the usual fees for marriages, funerals, and baptisms. And the priest, in return, acted as their leader. He was generally a farmer’s son, so he understood rural problems, with a superior education at a Catholic seminary abroad which enabled him to arbitrate in disputes, arrange for some kind of village schooling, negotiate on behalf of his flock with the outside world and organize relief during times of famine. After 1720, the presence of Catholic priests was tacitly accepted by the ruling Protestants, and in 1727 the Protestant primate, archbishop Boulter, reckoned that there were 3000 Catholic priests in the country as against a mere 800 Protestant clergy – a telling testimony to the superior zeal of the outlawed Catholic Church.” (p 169-170)
“Afterwards, Swift was silent for a while. He had taught the Irish the invaluable lesson that they could defeat England by constitutional means. Then between 1727 and 1730, Ireland endured three years of famine; the bodies of people who had starved to death lay unburied outside their hovels, and Swift wrote the most grotesquely ironic of all his tracts. In A Modest Proposal for Preventing Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or the Country, he ingeniously advises that ‘one-fourth part of the infants under two years old be forthwith fattened’ as ‘dainty bits for landlords, who as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have best right to eat up the children’. He was so deeply shocked by the exploitation of the common Irish, which seemed to him next to cannibalism, that he wanted in turn to shock his complacent, well-fed, and especially English, readers.” (p 176)
“The Penal Laws had never been fully enforced; there was not, and never could be, the machinery to enforce all of them, all the time. But they had done their work. They had enslaved the bulk of the Catholic Irish for the enrichment of their Protestant superiors, and they had also, less intentionally, encouraged in the Irish the characteristics of slaves: idleness, mendacity, a protective foolishness, and a light, smiling gaiety that masked a sense of wrong. The Penal Laws had also eroded what respect the Irish had ever had for the law. ‘The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic’. The Catholic Irish, including their leaders, the priests, turned away from a system of law which punished but did not protect them.” (p 177)
“Irish peasants had been impoverished, degraded, exploited and brutalized. When they made war upon their superiors in the only way they could, by combining into what amounted to primitive trade unions, it was inevitable that the cruelty of their methods would match the cruelties that had been practised upon them.” (p 179)
“About 1785 a new Presbyterian peasant organization, the Peep o’Day Boys, had begun attacking Catholics who outbid Presbyterians in rent. At dawn, the peep o’day, they would appear Catholic homesteads and either burn the house down or terrorize the occupants by threats, physical abuse or firing through their windows. When they had no specific target, the Peep o’Day Boys would congregate in country towns and villages, hold military-style parades with colours flying, bands playing and shots being fired, and then smash up any Catholics unfortunate enough to be around and create a general atmosphere of aggression and terror designed to drive Catholics away from the area…” (p 193)
“The Orangemen attacked Ulster Catholics with merciless brutality. They assaulted them, turned them out of their homes, or ‘papered’ them, pinning notices to their doors telling them to go ‘to hell – or Connacht’, that is, go to Connacht or die. Poor Catholic weavers had their looms broken, and labourers’ houses were burned down; sometimes as many as a dozen houses would be burned in one place in a night. At the end of 1795 the governor of Armagh wrote: ‘No night passes that houses are not destroyed, and scarce a week that some dreadful murders are not committed. Nothing can exceed the animosity between Protestant and Catholic at this moment in this country.” (p 194)
“Pitt, in England, sent out the marquis Cornwallis to be both lord lieutenant and commander-in-chief; Cornwallis was the only British general to have emerged from the American War of Independence with his reputation not merely unscathed but enhanced. He overrode Lake: troops were certainly not to be let loose on the countryside and there was to be no punishment without trial. On the one hand, fugitive rebels were streaming into camps in Kildare and the Wicklow mountains; they had to fight on or be hanged. And on the other the Castle, the Irish establishment was talking glibly of exterminating all Catholics. Cornwallis took the sensible and liberal course of granting a general amnesty and forced the necessary bill through parliament, so that on 17 July 1798 the country had the respite if needed. About 50,000 people had been killed in little more than a year, most of them in cold blood…” (p 206)
“In 1849, when the worst of the famine was over, one more murderous blow was struck against Ireland, and epidemic of cholera that hit many of the largest towns, including Dublin and Belfast. By 1850 the population of Ireland, which in 1845 had stood at about 8.5 million, had been reduced to 6.25 million, that is, slashed by one-quarter. A million people had died from starvation and disease, another million had fled from their native land on overcrowded ships to seek refuge in Britain, Europe or North America (chiefly the last). The great bulk of this two million people were part of the ‘gigantic’ unemployment problem that was ‘solved’ by the famine – as one of the British officials of the time, Charles Trevelyan, permanent secretary to the Treasury, so succinctly put it: in his view the famine reflected the wishes of an all-wise Providence.” (p 233)
“…The potato blight of 1845 and the hardship it created in Ireland convinced the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, that the Corn Laws must be repealed so that grain could be released at prices which the Irish peasantry could afford. Peel’s earlier career in Ireland and his attitudes fortunately did not affect his essential humanity, and in making the moves necessary to get the laws repeated he risked – and was willing to risk – his position at the head of the administration. He stands out as one of the very few Englishmen who showed something other than callous indifference to the plight of the victims of the famine.” (p 233)
“Among the principal men in the government involved in the new administration’sprogramme was Charles Wood, chancellor of the Exchequer, and he had as permanent secretary to the Treasury the civil servant Charles Trevelyan (who, we have noted, acknowledged the intervention of Providence in the solution of the Irish high population problem, p 233). Both were devotees of the concept of dissociating the government from helping the Irish in their tribulations and determined that Ireland herself should stand the cost of bringing succour to her less fortunate millions in the famine crises. Between them these two did more than any others to create the miseries that followed the change of administration at Westminster after Peel was defeated. Whether this was a series of deliberate acts which today we might classify as genocidal, or whether more simply they were the manifestation of breathtaking meanness and callousness from officials too rigidly tied to the prevailing ideas of laissez faire economics must still be open to debate. Certainly, Trevelyan said, and wrote, time and again that the Irish were exaggerating their miseries, that they must do more for themselves, and he intervened frequently to nullify on-the-spot remedies being applied by sympathetic officials in Ireland, and constantly complained about expenditure and alleged extravagance. Very briefly, the Whig policy applied in 1846 and again in 1847 was that there should be no buying of food for the Irish starving by the government; this was to be provided by private enterprise, which of course meant that it would be sold to those who could raise the money. Government aid was to be strictly limited to generating public works to provide employment, but even this was to be largely funded by property owners in the areas of distress. But these works did not – could not – relieve distress because there were only enough jobs for about one-tenth of the number of people looking for them, and when the government finally saw that the schemes would not work, it took a year or more to make meaningful adjustments. By that time, several hundred thousand poverty-stricken people had succumbed to fever or disease and died or joined the emigration queues that were fast becoming a new feature of Irish reaction to the famine. The government tried other schemes, such as a network of soup kitchens. These did afford relief of a temporary nature to over two million people. Then the government decided to transfer the whole problem of Ireland’s poor to the Irish landlords through special poor law legislation, which served only to encourage the landlords to evict as many poorer tenants as they could. The government also expanded the workhouse scheme, though not at the same time the size or the number of workhouse buildings, so that by 1848 nearly a million people were in workhouses that normally were capable of accommodating a total of 250,000. All these and other schemes took time, and were administered by – for the most part – honourable but bureaucratic people who stuck rigidly to the rule book, and so numerous victims suffered far more than they need have done because of delays, inefficiencies, mistakes and injustices. What probably caused more resentment and despair than anything was the sight of cartloads of grain and other food products being shipped over to England or elsewhere from healthy Irish fields while Irishmen, Irishwomen and Irish children starved and slid into slow and premature death because the potato had failed…” (p 234-235)
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Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland