The English

The opportunity to make progress came almost at once, with the flight of the Ulster earls to the continent. The decision to colonise the province was taken not merely as a means of pacifying that part of Ireland, but also as a way of introducing a sufficiently large block of Protestant upholders of the government to allow military victory to be converted into political control. In the years that followed, further colonising opportunities were provided in the midlands, at the expense of the Irish; plans were made to plant Connacht, at the expense of both Old English and Irish; and the migration of English settlers to all parts of Ireland was actively encouraged. Although the Old English managed to hold their own, their attempts to secure guarantees of their position were unsuccessful and it was clear that time was not on their side. Inexorably, they were being challenged, disadvantaged and threatened with the ultimate penalty for their Catholicism, the loss of their land.

It was, of course, open to them to change their religion, but the threat that they faced was not exclusively religious. The England that conquered Ireland was not only Protestant, but restlessly expansionist, and the English who came to Ireland were not seeking converts. They were looking for personal gain, and just as they had no more respect for the Old English than they had for the native Irish, so also they showed little inclination to look with favour on those few of the other colonists who had become Protestant. There was no convincing evidence that conversion brought advantage and, in the event, far from following the English example, the Old English reacted against the uncongenial ethos of Eng land and turned to the continent for their education. There they encountered the invigorated and modernised Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation and their acceptance of it set them sharply apart from the still traditionally inclined native Irish, though officialdom was slow to understand the significance of that division. Officials presumed that Catholic birds of a feather would flock together. But the Old English remained, like their predecessors, a 'middle nation', repudiated by their fellow Englishmen, repudiating their Irish fellow Catholics.

It was an impossible position to sustain for long. In the words of Cecil Day Lewis, 'only ghosts can live between two fires', and when the Ulster Irish rose in rebellion in 1641, the Old English saw no alternative but to join them in self-protection against the greed of the new settlers and the militant Protestantism of the English parliament and its Scottish allies. The outcome of the war which followed, and of the English Civil War which was fought alongside it, determined the fate of the old colony. The defeat of the Confederate Catholics, as the Old English and the Irish called themselves - more hopefully than accurately - and the triumph of Cromwell and the English parliamentary armies, formed a bizarre epilogue to the long-drawn-out conquest of Ireland as the descendants of the original conquerors were themselves conquered in their turn. In the aftermath, the Cromwellian land settlement, only slightly modified at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, and the Williamite confiscations of the 1690s achieved the degradation of the Old English. Their inherited lands were lost and their descendants tumbled down the social scale to be submerged in the peasantry and become what they had never wished to be, Irish to both English and Irish alike.

There were some who escaped that fate. The history of individual families is not necessarily the same as that of the group as a whole. Although the lines of division between the Old and New English were firmly drawn, they were not impassable. In the seventeenth century, conversion to Protestantism might well suffice to convert an Old Englishman into a New Englishman. The king's chief representative in Ireland, both during the wars of the 1640s and after the Restoration - James Butler, duke of Ormond - was of Old English stock, and many of those he fought against were his close relatives. Less well known is the significant degree of movement which took place in the opposite direction, as a sizeable minority of the descendants of post-Reformation settlers became assimilated, adopted Catholicism, and, in the long run, paid the penalty.

The classic case is that of Edmund Spenser - poet, Munster planter, and leading idealogue of the Tudor conquest of Ireland - whose immediate descendants lost their lands as 'Irish papists' in the 1650s. That was not an unusual outcome. In the midlands, particularly, post-plantation developments saw many families dividing as the junior branches, stemming from poorly endowed younger sons, went native. In the 1640s, there were many settler cousins in arms against one another. The principles of group association were cultural in character, and choice did exist. Thus it was that not all members of the Old English group shared in the downfall of their fellows. A prominent few managed to make the adaptations necessary to survival, to renounce their historic identity, and to conform to the new ethos.

After 1660, colonial Ireland was Protestant Ireland. A new colony, more representative of what England had become, had replaced the old one. In time, it too was to discover the predicaments of colonial status and face the difficulties of maintaining a satisfactory relationship with a mother country that went on changing. Like their predecessors, these colonists seemed English to the Irish and Irish to the English; perhaps this was because they were, as their predecessors had been, and as Maurice Fitzgerald had not foreseen, both Irish and English.

Click here for part 4, or here to go to the start of the article.

From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print).
Also see A Little History of Ireland.