The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (23 page)

Chapter Six

A Divided Nation

By October 1691, Jacobite resistance in Ireland had ended. In that month the city of Limerick opened its gates to the Williamites, and a new era in Ireland began. Among Protestants, hopes were high that the postwar settlement would bring at last the sense of security they had long craved – but just as the Irish conflict had been but one element in a wider European conflict, so too was the final treaty heavily influenced by events overseas. William’s essential pragmatism was once more in evidence: he and his officials judged it imperative to wind up operations in Ireland as rapidly as possible in order to see off a resurgent French threat closer to home. He understood clearly that this could best be achieved by giving certain limited favours to the Jacobites, including a measure of religious toleration and guarantees in relation to land ownership; and the Jacobites also knew that, their dire military situation notwithstanding, they were now in an unexpectedly strong bargaining position.

The result was the Treaty of Limerick of 3 October 1691, which formally ended the war in Ireland. Its terms provided, somewhat ambiguously, for Catholic freedoms ‘consistent with the laws of Ireland or as they did enjoy in the reign of King Charles II’; other clauses ensured the continuation of the property and commercial rights of those who had surrendered at Limerick, provided they swore allegiance to William and Mary. Those who wished to leave Ireland for a new life in Catholic France would be permitted to do so – although they would be stripped of their property and privileges of citizenship. It is estimated that some twelve thousand individuals left for France at this time, swelling even further the Irish population in Europe; these exiles would later become known as the Wild Geese.

The Treaty of Limerick was condemned by elements from both parties. For many Jacobites its terms were punitive; their negotiators, it was felt, might have held out for a better deal. On the other side, many Protestants felt that the king and his officials had been duped into agreeing lenient terms:

Had fate that still attends our Irish war,

The conquerors lose, the conquered gainers are;

Their pen’s the symbol of our sword’s defeat,

We fight like heroes but like fools we treat.
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In response, the Protestant government in Dublin set about refashioning the treaty. The result was the design of a new political and cultural order in Ireland – one that was overtly punitive and anti-papist.

The first fruits of this decision appeared in 1697, when anti-clerical legislation – the first of the so-called penal laws and a signal breach of the Treaty of Limerick – was enacted. The legal and cultural phenomenon of such legislation was, of course, far from being unique to Ireland. Statutes designed to persecute various minorities had been a feature of Europe’s cultural landscape for centuries; in Ireland itself, Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews and others had been the target of various statutes since the Reformation. The intention behind the penal legislation enacted progressively by the Irish parliament between 1691 and 1760, however, was specifically to crush what remained of Catholic power in the country.

If the penal laws were at first defensive in nature, they soon developed into a remarkably dense maze of legislation that encompassed every aspect of daily life. Catholic priests were outlawed; Catholics were prohibited from entering parliament; from voting; from owning firearms; from marrying Protestants or adopting children; from buying land; and from owning a house valued at more than £5. New inheritance laws stipulated that any land left by a Catholic must be broken up among all his children, the idea being to ensure that no large Catholic estates could possibly survive intact for more than a generation or two. Bars were set on Catholic education – ‘no person of the Popish religion shall publicly or in public houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning within this realm’ – leading to the establishment of discreet ‘hedge schools’ across Ireland.

The penal laws make for fascinating reading, being a heady combination of shrill paranoia and beady-eyed realism. Much of the legislation was informed by the notion of cunning papist plots and propaganda concocted in Rome to be exported wholesale to Ireland with the intention of defeating Protestantism by guile; at the same time, clear and cool attention was paid to the importance of property and land in the operation of power. Female sexuality was the subject of the usual hysterical attention, as the preamble to the law barring inter-religious marriage makes clear:

Whereas many protestant woman, heirs or heirs apparent to land or other great substances in goods or chattels, or having considerable estates for life, or guardianship of children intitled [sic] to such estates, by flattery and other crafty insinuations of popish persons, have been seduced to contract matrimony with and take to husband, papists, to the great ruin of their estates, to the great loss of many protestant women that they forsake their religion and become papists, to the great dishonour of Almighty God, the great prejudice of the protestant interest, and the heavy sorrow of all their protestant friends…
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But, although the intention of the penal laws was to intimidate, the legislation taken in its entirety did not succeed. Indeed, it would have required unprecedented resolve for such a vast body of law to be enforced; and – as had been the case with the Statutes of Kilkenny three centuries previously – such a resolve was not always in evidence. Sometimes, this absence of will emanated from the Irish authorities themselves: the futility of attempting to enforce such laws must rapidly have been understood in government circles. Sometimes too, the English – and following the Union of Scotland and England of 1707, British – authorities had good political reasons for watering down much of the legislation that flooded their way from the Irish parliament. An eighteenth-century
entente
with Catholic Austria, for example, made aspects of the penal laws politically unpalatable. Passive resistance on the part of the population also had its effect: it would be next to impossible to pursue a renegade Catholic priest across the fields if the local community – Catholic but not infrequently supported tacitly by Ascendancy families – was determined to provide that priest with succour.

In Ireland itself, the web of penal legislation was subject to scathing criticism. Looking back at the era, the political commentator Edmund Burke (1728–97) – whose own family had Catholic antecedents – claimed that the code was ‘a machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man’.
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Burke also criticized its short-sightedness: in oppressing the great majority of the Irish population in such a way, he claimed, the penal code had had the effect of preventing them from tasting the delicious fruits of British civilization and orienting them instead towards the siren calls of the French Revolution.

Even if the penal laws were not everywhere enforced, they criminalized an entire culture and crucially helped to make the connection between faith and nation indivisible in the minds of its people. Faith as an expression of national identity had long been central to English culture; now, loss of land and of religious freedom became the defining marks of caste for the Irish. As for the wider purpose behind the formulation of the penal legislation, it remains an open question as to whether the Protestant administration of Ireland truly imagined it could reverse the Catholic tide in Ireland and evangelize to remake the country in an Anglican image. European models certainly existed, albeit in reverse: during the Reformation in Austrian Bohemia and Hungary, large sections of the population had embraced Protestantism, but this movement had been crushed by the Hapsburgs and these lands were now solidly Catholic once more. In parts of France where Protestants had formed the majority, the Huguenots had been expelled and their religion suppressed ruthlessly.

There were clear differences, though, between Ireland on the one hand and Austria and France on the other. The Counter-Reformation had had the aid both of the wider Catholic Church in Europe and of the overwhelming power of the Hapsburg and Bourbon states; such conditions did not exist in Ireland, where the State simply did not possess the same cultural or military resources, apparatus of government, modern bureaucracy or police service. Nor, in the British State to which Ireland was now intrinsically connected, was there any longer the political will to attempt anything on such a scale. The Protestant ruling class in Ireland realized rapidly that it would have to settle for a situation in which papism must be borne as a persistent presence in the land – always provided that Catholics conducted themselves quietly and deferentially; assertiveness would not be tolerated. At the same time, in the first decades of the eighteenth century the Catholic Church in Ireland continued to develop some of the characteristics of an underground organization, its structures existing outside of, and in a sense against, the State.

In practical terms, however, the primacy of the Ascendancy seemed assured. Within two generations the Cromwellian troopers and planters who had settled across Ireland had become an aristocracy, and their scattered country seats – the so-called ‘big houses’ – were features in every corner of the Irish landscape. Many of these houses were relatively modest; others – in keeping with the spirit of the picturesque that typified the age – were grander and built in peerless locations across the country. The construction of many ‘big houses’ nearly bankrupted the families that lived in them – such mansions tended to be ruinously difficult to heat and maintain, and the walls of many an otherwise gracious drawing room ran with water in the course of an interminable Irish winter – but they were necessary and crucial statements of authority. They dominated the landscape as the Anglo-Norman keeps and castles of previous centuries had done.

At the same time, many parts of the country’s cities were rebuilt in a manner fit for the aspirations of this ruling class, and Dublin in particular became an architectural showcase boasting all the elements of a national capital: in particular, the foundation of the city’s glorious Parliament House in 1729 was symbolic of a new political energy. It was accompanied by a broader cultural dynamism, as befitted the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. In philosophy and architecture, in economics, city planning and literature, Dublin now sparkled with energy. This vitality found expression in a host of ways: in a loud and boisterous theatrical life; in the great quadrangles of Trinity College, the Georgian set-pieces of Merrion and Mountjoy Squares, and the green copper domes of the Custom House and Four Courts reflected in the waters of the river Liffey; in the earnest salons and glittering balls of the city’s winter season; in the first performance, in April 1742, of Handel’s
Messiah
in the Music Hall. But such frenetic activity was viewed coldly by some observers, who regarded these Ascendancy families, for all their activity and influence, as mere
arrivistes
: the satirist Jonathan Swift, for example, scorned William Conolly (1662–1729) – owner of the splendid Palladian pile at Castletown in County Kildare, Speaker of the Commons and unrivalled dispenser of patronage – as a mere ‘shoe boy’. Yet there existed hitherto unsuspected common ground between men such as Swift and many members of this ruling class. Once again, the notion of acculturation was complicating Anglo-Irish affairs, as those who lived in Ireland began to question their cultural identity and to look askance at the treatment of Ireland by the ostensible mother country.

The Woollen Act, passed in 1699, is frequently taken to epitomize Ireland’s inferior status as a British dominion, its economic needs subjected to those of the mother country. The Act – it was a backbench measure, rather than one formulated by the government itself – expressly prohibited the export of Irish woollen materials, a measure designed to protect the British wool industry from Irish competition. The new law had the unexpected side effect of stimulating the infant linen industry in Ulster: in general, however, it led to considerable economic hardship in Ireland and helped to underscore the country’s position as an entity subordinate to British interests. After all, Poynings’ Law of 1494, which had made manifest the inferior status of the Irish parliament in relation to its English counterpart, had never been repealed; Ireland, since the reign of Henry VIII a kingdom in its own right, was being treated by the British government as a mere colony, a subservient appendage.

The political journey of Swift himself exemplifies the evolving nature of the Anglo-Irish relationship. He was born in Dublin in 1667, spent much his life travelling between Ireland and England, and was at all times ambivalent in his feelings towards the land of his birth. In 1714, however, he settled at Dublin, taking up an appointment as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral. He returned reluctantly, disappointed and embittered that his Tory political connections in England had not sufficed to advance a metropolitan career. (Queen Anne was reputed to have taken a cordial dislike to both him and to his
Tale of a Tub
, and to have blocked his career at every turn.) Once established on the Dublin social scene, however, Swift had leisure to consider the society around him and its place in a wider empire – and his response was to move towards an ever closer identification with the city. Indeed, he could scarcely have avoided questioning his situation: St Patrick’s lay in the middle of some of the city’s most appalling slums; deprivation and poverty pressed all around. Dublin’s social scene may have been glittering indeed, but only for the few: poverty, want and hunger remained facts of life for the great majority of the city’s population.
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