A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770

530 Pages·2004·33.115 MB·English

by  Toby Barnard

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The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770
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A New Anatomy of Ireland

A New Anatomy of Ireland:
The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770
Toby Barnard
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
Copyright © 2003 by Toby Barnard
First published in paperback 2004
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Set in Bembo by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong
Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press
The Library of Congress catalogued the previous edition as follows
Barnard, T. C. (Ioby Christopher)
A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649-1770.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300—09669-0 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Ireland—History—18th century. 2. Ireland—History—17th century
3. Protestants—Ireland—History—18th century. 4. Protestants—Ireland—
History—17th century. I. Title.
DA947 B36 2003 305.6’40415-—dce21 2002155553
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-300-10114-7 (pbk.)
246810975 3
Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund
Contents
Preface
vi
Abbreviations
xi
List of Illustrations
xv
Chapter1 The Problems of Orders
Chapter 2 _—-P eers
21
Chapter 3 The Quality
41
Chapter 4 Clergy
81
Chapter 5 Professions
115
Chapter 6 Offices and Office-holders
143
Chapter 7 Soldiers and Sailors
177
Chapter 8 Agents
208
Chapter 9 The Middle Station
239
Chapter 10 The Lower People
279
Chapter 11 Conclusion: Ranks and Rankings
328
Notes 332
Index 465
Preface
The research and writing of this book have arisen from a wish — simple
but naive — to discover what it was like for Protestants to live in the
Ireland of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this period,
Protestants, mainly from England, Scotland and Wales, twice reconquered
Ireland, and took over property, office and power. The processes by which
this system — in all but name a Protestant Ascendancy — was erected have
been traced clearly. Also, the embryonic ascendancy has been shown in
action. The excellence of these accounts has freed me to pursue my own
enquiries. Thanks to the studies — notably those by David Hayton — of
public policy, the interplay between governors in Dublin and government
in London is well understood. More recently, Ivar McGrath, Paddy
McNally and Eoin Magennis have narrated in convincing detail conven-
tional ‘high’, parliamentary politics between 1690 and 176s. In parallel, the
structures and dynamics of demography and the economy have been
uncovered in a series of pioneering works by Louis Cullen and David
Dickson. Equally helpful are two admirable books — David Dickson’s New
Foundations and Sean Connolly’s Religion, Law and Power — which splice
together the separate strands. Anyone keen to know what happened in
Ireland between 1659 and 1800 should turn to those books, not to this.
My interests look tangential to those of most who have recently inves-
tigated Stuart and Hanoverian Ireland. This volume concerns itself little
with the processes by which Protestants ensconced themselves but a great
deal with the results. In many accounts, the few who ran the Dublin par-
liament or their counties bulk large, leaving in the shadows the majority
who peopled Protestant Ireland. If, as has been suggested, mid-eighteenth-
century Ireland contained approximately 400,000 Protestants, we can
begin to discern fewer than 20,000, usually freeholders in the countryside
and freemen of the boroughs. Most remain in darkness. Once before, I
was sucked into a historiographical black hole: Cromwellian Ireland. As
with that earlier study, so with this, the reasons for the void are quickly
identified. For want of evidence, it is difficult to bring into focus many
Preface vii
of the 20,000, let alone the mass outside those élites. The effort may seem
disproportionate to the results. In the voluminous log of the exploration,
this, the first stage, attempts to delineate the society. It tries to recover
something of those customarily overlooked. Each chapter has obliged me
to tackle a topic (or topics) which deserves a monograph to itself. The
next instalment of my own investigations will show the members of the
Protestant interest in action (and in repose or at play); probe their minds
and values, and detail their material worlds. To separate these spheres fal-
sifies what was united in their lives, and misleads by relegating recreation,
domesticity and sociability to a distinct and — by implication — lower
sphere. Unfortunately, to make it manageable, the fabric has been rent
asunder.
My wish to make sense of this society arose after Paddy O’Flanagan
invited me to contribute to a collection of essays on County Cork. His
invitation obliged me to review and reorder diffuse researches. Many of
the problems to which I then sought answers are pursued here — albeit
in a larger space and over a longer period. South Munster still supphes a
disproportionate amount of the evidence. I have attempted to correct it,
but Ulster — particularly its distinctive Presbyterian society and economy —
is under-represented. I have shown some of the overlapping activities of
Protestant dissenters and conformists, and speculated on what developed
separately and in parallel. Patient use of kirk session records and family
papers may allow a detailed reconstruction of this society before 1770, but
it has scarcely begun. There is also a view of the Protestant possessors to
be reconstructed from the plaints of the dispossessed. Poetry and prose in
the Irish language have started to be interpreted. The results do not always
inspire confidence that startling new perspectives will be revealed.
Inevitably, this account, like the sources on which it is grounded, is biased
and uneven in what it covers. Numbers are offered from time to time, in
a bid to show how many belonged to the distinct social and occupational
groups. Levels of income are sometimes suggested. However, there is no
sustained effort at quantification, since it would invest this exercise with
a spurious statistical plausibility. Sir William Petty, the pioneer anatomist
of Ireland, littered his speculations with numbers, all too many of which
turn out to be guesses, and sometimes wild ones. Yet the homage to Petty
indicated in my title is not entirely ironic, although Petty was alert to
ironies. The arresting but untypical example has been favoured above the
aggregation; the concrete before the generality. This is by intention. My
interest is unashamedly in the people who lived in a particular place at a
specific time.
Undoubtedly, in preferring the individual to the abstraction, I will
offend historical ascetics and — more worryingly — ignore those who exist
viii Preface
only as part of a statistic in bills of mortality or lists of tax-payers.T o repeat
the analogy of one of the most distinguished archers among current his-
torians: I have reverted to the bow and arrow. There is a method in this,
even if, since it is wearisome to all but a handful of professionals, I fail to
rehearse it here. In the main, I have gone to the testimony of those whose
lives form the subject of the study. Inevitably, what survives, by chance or
design, relates to few. Moreover, it is a fabrication, whether deliberate or
unconscious. Despite these shortcomings, the fragments of letters, journals
and accounts offer a way into otherwise forgotten lives. Sometimes I have
been obsessive in trying to track down and read what was written in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland. It is not pure whimsy to
unfold a letter last read by the person to whom it had been addressed in
1699. The scatter of sand falling from the folds reminds that this was
written and received. The physicality of these worlds was most strikingly
conveyed to me in a library when I come across a hank of hair still pinned
to a plaintive note from a grieving widow, asking a relation to include it
in a mourning brooch. Perhaps it was; or maybe the request was ignored.
It is a happy thought that much that I have not had time to consult
or which is not yet available will eventually offer alternative perspec-
tives. Already, under its presently enlightened directorship, the National
Library in Ireland is yielding up more of its secrets; collections in North
American, British and continental European archives in time will do the
same. Print, especially the newspapers produced in eighteenth-century
Ireland, sampled very selectively, can also be expected to change consid-
erably what is offered here.
Provisional as this sketch is, there comes 2 moment to exhibit it. And,
sketch though it is, it has cost me dear. At the same time, the pleasures
have been great. It is not perhaps enough to repeat that simple curiosity
led me into an engagement with the history of Protestant Ireland. Insis-
tence that this account is conceived as neither eulogy nor elegy, or that I
have no wish vicariously to associate myself with the ascendant, will not
convince doubters. Living in a village close to the intersection of Roman
roads and favoured by the Romans and Normans, it seems natural enough
to be curious about now almost vanished orders and immigrants.
As a result of those labours, I have acquired many new friends, and —
I hope — lost none. Working in Oxford and teaching mainly the history
of the British Isles and continental Europe pose obstacles. which partly
explain the long gestation. In Oxford, and particularly in my college, I
have been indulged and stimulated in my Hibernian obsessions, notably
by Geoffrey Ellis and Christopher Tyerman. Roger Pensom on journeys
backwards and forwards has obliged me to clarify notions and approaches.
Much to my surprise, Hertford, which had long tolerated my interests,