If you like a good rebellion–and who doesn’t, from the comfort of a couch–the English Parliamentarians are a reminder of how murky history gets and why it’s not always wise to take sides. 

Let’s talk about the Parliamentarians, King Charles, and, gulp, Ireland. 

 

A bit of Irish history

We’ll keep this to a minimum or I’ll never find my way back to our alleged topic. 

After the Normans conquered England, they looked across the water and noticed one more island sitting off to the west. And did nothing. Then in the twelfth century, Ireland’s high king deposed one of its local kings, Diarmait, and Diarmait turned to England’s Henry II for backing. 

Many a colonial conquest has started out that way. 

Henry encouraged him to hire some of the Norman knights who’d been kicking around after being on the losing end of fighting in Wales. (Unemployed knights could be a hazard, so I expect this suited everybody.) Diarmait offered to pay them not in cash but in Irish land, which is how the first of the English lords sank their roots into Irish soil. By 1175 they were powerful enough that the Irish kings had recognized the English king as an overlord, hoping he’d stop the Norman lords from taking any more Irish land. 

It didn’t work. Before long–measuring that in historical time–the Normans had imposed feudalism on eastern Ireland, the part they controlled. The lords had parceled out land to their knights and a country of clans and herding became a country of manors and peasants. They’d swept away Irish law in favor of Norman, and ditto the Irish version of Catholicism in favor of Roman–the flavor that suited the Normans’ tastes. 

Over time, they integrated to some extent, intermarrying and adopting the language, but they continued to be a group of their own. As one of them, Maurice fitzGerald, complained, “Just as we are English as far as the Irish are concerned, likewise to the English we are Irish and the inhabitants of this island and of the other assail us with an equal degree of hatred.” 

In “Controversy: Oliver Cromwell in Ireland,” Micheál Ó Siochrú says there were three different ethnic groups in Ireland during the 1640s: the native Irish, who were between 80 and 90 percent of the population; the “old English”–the descendants of the those Norman colonists; and a new wave of Protestant English settlers (plus some Scottish soldiers, administrators, etc.), who’d been coming over since early in the seventeenth century.

The first two groups were Catholic and the Protestants–obviously–weren’t, so we’re looking at ethnic divisions with religious and class overlays. 

And if that didn’t produce enough tension, since the 1550s Irish land had been handed to English-born Protestant officials and by the seventeenth century Protestant settlers were displacing native Catholics in large parts of the country. All the situation needed was for someone to light a cigarette and toss the still-lit match over their shoulder.

 

The Irish Rebellion

With that in place, we’ll skip a few years. In 1641, a rebellion (I should probably say “another rebellion”) broke out. The rebels weren’t hoping to break with England or the crown, only to end religious and political discrimination against Catholics. The plan was for the rebellion to put them in a strong negotiating position. England, though, read it as an uprising that needed to be crushed. 

The rebellion started with a small, not particularly well organized group of Catholic gentry and military officers, who tried to occupy Dublin Castle–and failed. It was the match I was talking about, though. Around the country, Catholics attacked Protestants. Protestants attacked Catholics. The colonial government attacked Catholics. Thousands of people died on both sides–by one estimate somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000, which is another way of saying that no one was counting.

As the uprising grew, the Catholic elite, who’d hoped for a polite, apartment-size rebellion, were horrified, and in an effort to take control they set up a government, which for a while held part of the country, while the royalists another held part, the Scots held a third bit, and the Parliamentarians (a.k.a. the English Protestants) held a fourth. 

Eleven years of war followed. 

Meanwhile, in England . . .

. . . news of Catholics slaughtering innocent Protestants circulated. In some tellings, more Protestants were slaughtered in Ireland than actually lived there. But you know how these things go: Popular news sheets featured the stories. Preachers thundered. Tables were thumped. Money was raised. The stories flew on the wings of outrage and people believed the most lurid of them. Why wouldn’t they? They fit so neatly with the English image of the Irish. And the waves of fIrish Protestants taking refuge in England added credibility to the stories. 

To be fair, there does seem to have been slaughter and I believe the first killings were of Protestants, but it didn’t match the lurid stories and soon the killing was on both sides.

As a side point, since I’ve mentioned the English image of the Irish, I’ve read an argument that it was during its occupation of Ireland that England first learned to portray a colonized people as ignorant, lazy, dumb, brutish, and any other negative adjective you want to tack onto the list. Ugly? You bet. Smelly? I haven’t seen it but I’m sure someone said so. 

Take the argument for what it’s worth. To me it has a convincing ring. You’ll find one colonized group after another portrayed that way.

But back to our story: All this was happening in 1641, which matters because it was when the king (Charles I; you’re welcome) and Parliament were arm wrestling over who was going to run the country and who was going to be merely decorative. One of the few things they’d have agreed on was that someone had to do something about those pesky Irish Catholics. They’d even have agreed that doing something involved sending an army. Where all that love and harmony broke down, though, was over who’d be in charge of the army, because whoever controlled that army– 

Yeah. They were bright enough to know the army equaled power. 

By 1642, king and Parliament were openly at war with each other, giving the Catholic forces in Ireland a bit of breathing space, which they used to form a united movement. Or at least a government that was more united than England’s. And than England’s armed forces in Ireland, which were split between king and Parliament, with some Scottish forces  and a settler army thrown in just to complicate the picture.

 

Financing the army

Where the story gets interesting–as in, I hadn’t known even a hint of this before–is when they got to the question of how to pay for the conquest of Ireland, because armies are expensive. Keep that in mind if someone offers you one. What Parliament did was basically to create a public-private partnership that parallelled Diarmait’s agreement with the knights he hired: People would lend money to the state and be paid in Irish land once it was conquered. Some 18% of the country’s profitable land, or 2.5 million acres, was promised. 

Whose land was it? Catholic land. Rebel land. That way Parliament could break the power of the Catholic landowners and pay off their investors all at once.

The investors were called the Irish Adventurers. 

A parallel bill to finance ships offered the reward of “all Ships, Goods, Monies, Plate, Pillage,and Spoil, which shall be seized or taken by any of the Persons by them employed by Force of Virtue of this ordinance.”

Basically, it was piracy. 

The adventurers included radicals from the Parliamentary party, rich City merchants who could invest £1,000, smaller investors who’d put in £25–a year’s pay for a tradesman. The investors also included a handful of men who went on to become Levellers–campaigners for equality, near-universal suffrage, and religious tolerance. I’d love to explain that but I can’t.

 

And then?

And then for a while nothing happened. There was this little business of the English Civil Wars going on and Ireland was off on the other side of the water. It was only once Charles was reliably dead and guaranteed not to cause any more trouble that Parliament picked up its quarrel with Ireland, sending its New Model Army, with Oliver Cromwell in command. His orders were to bring Ireland “to the obedience of the Parliament of England.”

Yes, it’s an odd thing how easily people who start out saying, We demand freedom, can turn around and say, You have to obey us, but turn around they did, using the 1641 Rebellion as a rallying cry: Those bloodthirsty Irish had, as Cromwell put it, had “imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.”

There was more to it than that, though. It was also an economic necessity. The merchant adventurers had to be paid back. And Parliament’s army–the New Model Army–hadn’t been paid, in some cases in years. They had to be paid, and Parliament already had a model of how to use Irish land to pay English debts.

The war dragged on into 1651 and 1652, with the Catholic armies turning to guerrilla warfare and the New Model Army killing civilians, destroying food, and setting bubonic plague loose, although to be fair that last part wasn’t deliberate.

Ó Siochrú talks about it as a genocidal conflict “in which the people of Ireland–the civilian population–were deliberately targeted. People were driven out of their homes and killed, crops were destroyed, infrastructure was wrecked, and it really had an absolutely disastrous impact on the population of Ireland.” 

In Ireland, he says, the English “saw themselves as outside of the realms of civilised society and therefore the behaviour that could be justified in Ireland would never have been accepted in England, or indeed even in Scotland, and certainly not on the Continent.” Who won the war? You already know, right? The English eventually, and they reshaped Irish society to their own benefit, confiscating almost all Catholic-owned land and using it to pay off the investors (at least those who hadn’t sold their shares) as well as military veterans and Protestant supporters of Parliament. 

Catholic landowners who hadn’t supported the rebellion were compensated with some land west of the Shannon river but Catholic religious practices were banned in public, and priests executed. The Anglican Church was also forbidden, although for some reason the Quakers were tolerated.