Trollheart

Chapter VIII: Under the English Heel, Part II: The Return of the King

Timeline: 1650 - 1691

England was never a country built to be a republic. It may have worked for France, and it may have worked for the United States, but England had been ruled by monarchs from its earliest days, and though the execution of Charles I and the ascension of Oliver Cromwell shook English society and politics to its roots, in the grand scheme of things it was more a small tremor than the earthquake it could have been. Unlike the French Revolution a century later, where the deposing of the King and all the noble classes led to a true republic (though first to The Terror) which never went back to a monarchy, England was a land of kings and queens, and Cromwell’s attempt to turn it into a republic was really nothing more than a blip on history. Even now, four hundred years after his rule, and when it certainly has little or no need of one, England - Britain, indeed - stubbornly persists in perpetuating an outdated and completely unnecessary monarchy.

It’s probably true to say England will never be free of the Crown.

Which is why it was no great surprise to find that soon after Cromwell's passing and with the ineffectual attempts of his son to govern, England was soon welcoming a king back onto the throne.

Charles II: Back in the Saddle

Charles II (1630 - 1685)

No stranger to the battlefield, Charles II had fought with his ill-fated father at the Battle of Edgehill during the English Civil War, and had been made commander of the English forces in the West Country by 1645, at the tender age of fifteen. However the war was not going in his father’s favour, and in 1646 Charles fled to join his mother in exile in France, later moving to Holland where he tried to aid his father against Cromwell but was unable to prevent the king’s death and the abolition of the monarchy. Enraged at Cromwell, and loyal to the Crown, Scotland proclaimed the king’s son as monarch of Scotland, but he was not allowed travel there unless he gave an undertaking to impose the Scottish Presbyterianism religion upon the kingdom of Britain, which he refused to do. After his attempts to invade Scotland and force them to accept him as king on his terms failed miserably though, he had no choice and so agreed in 1650, arriving in Scotland and riding to take England back.

In this he again failed miserably, Cromwell’s forces beating his armies back and necessitating his going on the run to avoid capture, literally hiding in a tree (now called the Royal Oak) in Shropshire until he could be smuggled back to France in defeat. It would therefore not be by force of arms or in military victory that Charles would return to England, but rather at the invitation of the English Parliament, frustrated with the incompetent and inexperienced son of Oliver Cromwell. The grand experiment was over; Charles was asked to retake his place on the throne of England, the republic was abolished and the monarchy restored.

But what did all this mean for Ireland?

Like much of Ireland’s troubles, Charles’ return and the Restoration, as it became known, can be summed up in one word: Catholicism. Despite his assurances to the Scots that he would promote and disseminate their religion, it was Anglican Protestantism that was made the sanctioned, and indeed compulsory, faith in the new England. With the outbreak of the Great Fire of London in 1666, things began to turn bad for Catholics.

Great Balls of Fire! London’s Burning! (September 2 - 6, 1666)


A fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane in the early hours of September 2 1666. The family managed to escape the blaze but by then the fire was spreading, and delays in obtaining the permission of the Lord Mayor of London to demolish the adjacent buildings to stop the growth of the fire meant that by the time he had arrived it was already too late. Most of London’s buildings were of wood at that time, and easily caught fire, aided by the dry spell the city had been experiencing that month. Add in the overcrowding, the use of thatch for roofs, towering, crumbling tenement buildings that often reached six or seven stories and warehouses filled with tar, pitch and other combustibles, to say nothing of the stocks of gunpowder left over from the Civil War, and the City was quite literally a powder keg just waiting for a spark.

And when that spark was lit, the entire thing went up with frightening speed.

There being no fire brigade to speak of, the blaze had to be tackled by local people, the militia and the Watch, none of whom had any real professional training in fire-fighting, and the narrow, crowded streets, further congested by the panicked populace trying to get away from the fire, complicated matters as well. Essentially, the efforts to combat the fire turned more into attempts to escape or outrun it than to extinguish it, leaving the flames to hungrily devour the city unchecked, ranging further and further, and razing the city to the ground. In the aftermath, Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth, a man universally deemed unequal to his role and completely useless, was blamed for the fire’s development, refusing in the early stages of the fire to allow houses be pulled down as their owners could not be located, and growling of the fire that “a woman could piss it out.”

By sunrise on Sunday September 2 over 300 houses had been burned down and the fire had reached London Bridge, aided by a high wind. By mid-morning efforts to combat the fire had been abandoned, and everyone was running to escape it as the city burned. Charles himself intervened to have houses and buildings pulled down, after Bloodworth had made a half-hearted attempt at it, fainted and gone home to bed, leaving the city to the fire. But even demolition of buildings was insufficient to prevent the fire spreading, and it roared hungrily across the city, reaching the business district by Monday, devouring the Royal Exchange, the houses of bankers and exclusive shopping precincts.

Imagine the terror of a fire that raged on unchecked for four days! No emergency services to call, no way to put it out, and nothing to do but watch and wait, prepare and hope it didn’t get to your part of town, being ready to do what everyone else was, what everyone else had no option to, but flee as the flames advanced and claimed more of London. Those who could escaped via the boats on the river, those who couldn’t were hemmed in by the ancient Roman wall, which made a firetrap of the city. The king put his brother, James, Duke of York, in charge of combatting the fire - the Lord Mayor had fled the city - and he had some success, but he was fighting a losing battle. The fire raged on through Monday, and far from showing any signs of abating, was strengthening by the next day.

To the horror of all watching, the venerated Cathedral of St. Paul’s, surrounded by wooden scaffolding as it was in the midst of restoration work, went up like a torch and was completely gutted on Tuesday. As the flames headed for the Tower of London, with its gigantic store of gunpowder, the army took matters into their own hands and blew up buildings to halt the advance of the fire. The wind dropped near the end of the day, and with it the fire, which began to gutter out. In the end, over 13,500 houses as well as major buildings like the Royal Exchange, St. Paul’s Cathedral and The Custom House had been destroyed, the damage originally estimated at one hundred million pounds, later revised down to ten million.

In the immediate aftermath of the Great Fire (and even during it) speculation ran rife as to who might be responsible for such a tragedy, popular opinion excluding the possibility that this could have been, as it was, a tragic accident. Nebulous accusations against “foreigners” led to Dutch, French or any other non-English people in London running the risk of being lynched by mobs, and the army spent a good deal of its time rescuing innocent travellers from the hands of the angry crowds. And of course, as was ever the case in Protestant England, much of the blame fell, without a shred of evidence, upon the shoulders of the hated Catholics. The famous Gunpowder Plot had been, after all, only sixty years ago and was still fresh in the minds of most English people: the attempt to blow up parliament and assassinate the king (James I) and all of his ministers fuelled the hatred and widened the division between Catholics and Protestants.

Having dealt already with the Great Plague the year before, Charles was in no mood to fuck around with the Irish, and having a scapegoat to hand was useful for him, to divert attention from the fact that the streets which had been built during his father’s day, and his father’s, and so on, had been directly responsible for the spread of the fire. A monument to the Great Fire bore the inscription “Popish frenzy which wrought such horrors is not yet quenched.”

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When the Lie Becomes the Truth: The Popish Plot (1678 - 1681)

Although Charles II had been welcomed back after the rigours of life under The Lord Protector, his marriage to the Catholic Catherine of Portugal, his alliance with the old enemy France against Protestant Holland, and the embracing of his brother and heir James, Duke of York, of Catholicism, all led to there being much suspicion as to where the king’s loyalties lay, in terms of religion. His lenient attitude towards and treatment of Catholics had not gone down well with his people, and they worried that on his death they could be left with a Catholic King.

Sometimes, into such a cauldron of worry and paranoia the tiniest match has to be dropped to set the whole thing off, and two men who had many reasons to hate Catholics, one of which was believed to be actually insane, somehow gained the trust of the authorities, whipped up the public into a frenzy, and engineered the execution of innocent men, including priests, and one man who would later be canonised by the Church.

And it was all a lie.



Titus Oates (1649 - 1705)
One of the two instigators of the plot, Oates was an English priest, and a poor one. A terrible scholar, he only managed to be ordained due to a false claim to have a degree (oddly enough, its production was never demanded and its existence seems to have been taken on trust by the Bishop of London, who ordained him) and later got into trouble while serving aboard a naval ship and being accused of “buggery” in Tangiers. Only his status as a priest saved him, but he was dismissed from the Navy. Prior to this incident, he had, while serving as curate in All Saint’s, Hastings, accused a teacher of sodomy with one of his pupils, completely baselessly, in order to take his job, and when the allegations proved groundless was himself accused of perjury.

Having been ordained into the Church of England in 1670 Oates, after some misadventures and after making some powerful enemies, switched his allegiances and became a Catholic priest seven years later. He met and cultivated the friendship of Israel Tonge, and together they authored anti-Catholic pamphlets, Oates later confiding to Tonge that he had only pretended to convert in order to get close to Catholics and learn their secrets. Between them they concocted the Popish Plot in 1678.

Israel Tonge (1621 - 1680)

A Doctor of Theology, Tonge blamed Catholic Jesuits for the burning down of his church during the Great Fire of London, He became even more anti-Catholic, writing tracts and essays denouncing them, and fabricating wild conspiracy theories about Rome’s lust for power and the danger of the Pope. Another rabidly anti-Catholic doctor, Richard Barker, sponsored him (and later, Oates), providing him with food, lodgings and money, and securing for him a position as rector in the parish of Avon Dasset, in Warwickshire, a post Tonge did not however accept.

Together these two men would create a conspiracy to rival the best of Qanon or any in Trump’s time. Completely fabricated, with no evidence or provenance whatever, it would still be accepted as legitimate and lead to the further persecution and death of many blameless Catholics.

Writing the manuscript himself, Oates laid out a plot by the Pope to have the king assassinated, naming Jesuit priests who were to carry out the attempt, about a hundred in all. He then slipped the note into the house of Richard Barker, where his friend Tonge was living. Tonge then “discovered” the writing, passed it on to his friend Christopher Kirkby, who became alarmed and informed the king. Charles was sceptical, but agreed to see Tonge and Oates, then passing the matter on to his Treasurer, Thomas Osborne, Lord Danby. Danby seemed convinced, but the king brushed the whole thing off, believing Oates a liar. The Duke of York, however, fearful for his brother’s life and knowing (though he was himself a Catholic) how vehemently opposed to the Church of England English Catholics were, ordered an investigation into the threat.

Though Charles was still reluctant and did not believe a word of it, he probably worried that ignoring the threat might make him look overly sympathetic to Catholics, further cementing in the minds of his subjects his untrustworthiness, and recalling to their memory the fact that he was married to a Catholic princess. Therefore, he agreed to the investigation, and as it gathered steam and people were arrested on various spurious charges, Oates was given a complement of soldiers and allowed to begin rounding up Jesuits. The murder of a prominent anti-Catholic minister in suspicious circumstances set things in proper motion.

Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, to whom Oates had made his first depositions about the alleged plot, was found murdered with his own sword. The slaying was never solved, and laid at the feet of unnamed Catholics. As a result, and with the supposedly genuine threat of an attempt on the king’s life by these heathens, Charles was prevailed upon to exile all Catholics to within twenty miles of London. Parliament issued the declaration that "This House is of opinion that there hath been and still is a damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried out by the popish recusants for assigning and murdering the King." Things began to move fast.

Oates seized upon his success and accused five Catholic lords: (William Herbert, 1st Marquess of Powis, William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, Henry Arundell, 3rd Baron Arundell of Wardour, William Petre, 4th Baron Petre and John Belasyse, 1st Baron Belasyse) and while the king scornfully maintained that at least one of them was so afflicted with gout that he could barely stand, and was unlikely to be plotting anything, the Earl of Shaftesbury had them all arrested and taken to the Tower. Shortly afterwards he demanded that the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, be excluded from succession to the throne, due to his Catholic allegiances. At the end of the year the second Test Act was passed, as anti-Catholic fervour swept through England, which forbade Catholics from sitting in either the House of Lords or the House of Commons, and so effectively banning them from holding any political office.

Two of the “Popish Lords” would die - Stafford beheaded while Petre simply died in the Tower - but the remaining three would be acquitted. However Catholic hysteria had descended on England long before this and as would happen in the Salem witch trials ten years later, accusations flew, unproven allegations were taken as evidence, and Catholics were persecuted, exiled and murdered.

Oliver Plunkett (1625 - 1681)

Last of Oates’ victims was a man who would go on to be canonised and therefore made a saint in the latter half of the twentieth century. Oliver Plunkett was Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland. The grandson of a Baron, he was well connected to powerful Irish families such as the Earls of Roscommon and the Lords of Louth. He travelled to Rome in 1647, his ambition to become a priest, but by the time he was ready to return Cromwell held sway over Ireland and it would have been death for him to set foot on his native land again, so he remained in Rome until 1670, when the Restoration returned Charles II to the throne and, for a time, a more tolerant attitude was observed by the Crown towards Catholics.

With the passing of the Test Act, however, his church was destroyed and he had to flee into hiding, refusing to be exiled. When the Archbishop of Dublin was arrested as part of Oates’ crazy conspiracy, Plunkett was accused of plotting a French invasion of England. He was arrested but Lord Shaftesbury, knowing he would never be convicted in Ireland, sent him to be held in Newgate Prison, where, despite the first trial collapsing on the grounds of the witnesses against Plunkett also being on the run, wanted men, and total lack of any evidence to convict, the second trial found him guilty and he was sentenced to be executed.

Much again like the Witch Trials would, the fervour for killing Catholics began to die down after this. This could be partly ascribed to the - mistaken - belief that all those who had plotted against the king (according to Oates and Tonge) had been dealt with, and that the danger to his royal person, and the kingdom, was passed, and partly, too, to accusation after accusation being made, each madder and more far-fetched than the last. Oates remained as zealous as ever, trying to extend the conspiracy he had created into Yorkshire, but the English were by now tired of his unfounded allegations, and many believed that some of those who had been accused and executed were in fact good and innocent men. It began to look more and more like one man’s evil quest for personal revenge, which was what it was, of course. As trials collapsed all over the place, and the king was finally able to step forward and pronounce the witch-hunt for what it was, Oates rather stupidly accused the king himself of plotting with Catholics, and was arrested and thrown into prison.

When Charles died and was succeeded by James, the new king - a Catholic, remember - had Oates tried for perjury, probably the best he could do. Found guilty, it was unfortunately impossible to sentence Oates to death for such a crime, so he was ordered to be whipped through the streets, pilloried every year and imprisoned for life. He was eventually released in 1689 when William of Orange became king, but by then everyone had forgotten about him and he faded out of history, from hero to zero.

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Trollheart

Wiki is your friend. Plus, as you know, books and all...
In fairness, I learned a lot of this in history class in school, but that was over forty years ago now. Some of it I remember, some is new to me. It's very interesting though. Always a good idea to know your own country's history.

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Meanwhile, back in Ireland…



The usual rivalries had been going on since Cromwell’s death and the collapse of the Commonwealth in Ireland, and they seized this and declared that, and fought among themselves, trying to establish the right of Charles in Ireland, even inviting him to invade the country, but the exiled king was more interested in regaining his father’s throne first. On doing so, and being established as King of England, Charles was unanimously proclaimed King of Ireland and the commonwealth parliamentary union dissolved by the king. Initially he allowed religious toleration, however Catholics in general were not returned the land stolen from them and given to Protestant settlers under Cromwell; some were, but on balance only about twenty percent of the lands were returned to Catholic hands.


The War of the Two Kings: (1688 - 1691)

The reign of James II did not last long. Three years after his accession on the death of his brother, he was deposed and England was once again a Protestant monarchy, and has remained so ever since. His dissolution of Parliament when they refused to pass new tolerance laws aimed at Catholics, and the birth of his own son, a Catholic and now heir to the English throne, barring his daughter Mary, a Protestant, from the succession, led to what is known to history as The Glorious Revolution. Mary ascended the throne as Mary II, ruling jointly with her husband, William of Orange. James, defeated in battle, his army scattered, fled to France.

He landed in Ireland in 1688 with French backing and attacked Ulster, where the majority of Protestants lived. Jacobite* commander Richard Hamilton secured eastern Ulster while a rising in Scotland helped James’ cause, and while King William preferred to tackle the Irish invasion at its source - France - he was convinced to commit troops so as not to be seen to be abandoning the Irish Protestants in Ulster. The siege of Derry, which had been going on since April, was broken by William’s forces in July, and the death of Viscount Dundee, who had raised the Jacobite forces in Scotland, further weakened James’ position, as the war began to swing against him. The final blow that loosed the Jacobite hold on Ulster was the battle of Newtownbutler, where James’ forces failed to take Enniskillen.

Pushed back to Dundalk by the newly-arrived Duke of Schomberg, who took Carrickfergus at the end of August, James holed up there while the battle stalled for the winter. With little resources to rely upon in piss-poor Ireland, supplies had to be shipped in and this was not made any easier by the inexperience of Schomberg’s agent, leaving his men virtually to starve after six thousand had died from disease, and leading John Stevens, an English Catholic serving in the Grand Prior Regiment to remark, on surveying the abandoned camp later "besides the infinite number of graves a vast number of dead bodies was found there unburied, and not a few yet breathing but almost devoured with lice and other vermin. This spectacle not a little astonished such of our men as ventured in amongst them."

As the war entered its second year, the usual rivalries and differences surfaced in the Irish Parliament between the Old Irish, who wanted the lands back which had been confiscated from them by Cromwell, and those under Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell and Lord Deputy of Ireland, who were in the minority of those who had benefited from the land transfer. These latter, seeing the war dragging on and not turning in their favour, suggested a compromise with William, but the Old Irish, wanting Irish autonomy, were against this. The French, though willing to commit troops to James’ cause, only supplied enough to allow him to fight the war, not win it, as keeping William busy meant that his eyes were diverted from France. In other words, as long as the English King was fighting the man who wanted to take (or re-take) his throne, he would not have time to consider invading or making war upon the old enemy.

Not that the French and Irish got on at all, despite both being fiercely Catholic and fiercely anti-English. No, indeed. The Irish hated the French, especially the suggestion of their envoy Jean-Antone de Mesmes, known as d’Avaux, that James retreat to the Shannon in County Clare and destroy everything in between as they went, including the capital of Dublin. For his part, d’Avaux had nothing but contempt for the Irish, confiding to his successor that they were 'a poor-spirited and cowardly people, whose soldiers never fight and whose officers will never obey orders.” Oi! C-C-comeover heren’ say tha’, ye froggie bastad!

* Followers of James II were called Jacobites, don't ask me why.

The Battle of the Boyne (July 11 1690)

Perhaps one of the most famous battles in Irish history, the Battle of the Boyne was the turning point of the war, at least as far as James personally was concerned, the defeat from which he never recovered. William’s army of about 36,000 was made up of soldiers from many different nations, perhaps what might be called today a coalition, while James had about 23,000, mostly French and Irish, with some Scottish and a few English. William’s troops, though his army had only been recently put together and so had seen little action, were better equipped and drilled than those of his enemy, possessing the newest flintlock muskets, and while James’s Jacobite cavalry were a fine fighting force, his infantry was largely made up of Irish peasants, who had little to no fighting experience and often were armed with scythes and pitchforks.

William made his way from his victory at Carrickfergus south towards Dublin, but was stopped by James’ forces about thirty miles from the capital, at the River Boyne. Control of the ford on the river would allow them access to the road to Dublin, so William sent a diversionary squad to cross the river at Roughgrange, little realising that there was a deep swampy ravine there, and when James’ forces intercepted them, neither could get at the other and had to leave it to the artillery to fight. So move, countermove, volley, slash, attack, pincer blah blah blah and eventually William won the day. James legged it back to France, enraging the Irish who had fought for him, and continued to fight on in his presence. William rode triumphantly to Dublin, and issued the Declaration of Finglas, which offered amnesty to any ordinary Jacobite soldiers, as long as they surrendered by a given date, but excluded their leaders.

The Twelfth

Ever since the founding of the Protestant Orange Order in 1752, William's victory at the Boyne has been celebrated and commemorated on July 12 in Ulster. As the route through which their commemoration march passes goes through Republican areas, tensions have flared and violence erupted historically as nationalists consider the Orangemen to be provoking them by crowing over their victory. The Twelfth was, for a long time, a nexus for unrest, protest and violence in Northern Ireland, especially during The Troubles.

James may have given up the fight, but the Irish still had much at stake and much reason to hate William (though they also now hated James, who they viewed as a despicable coward) and they continued to struggle against the armies of the victorious king of England. Having withdrawn to Limerick, the port which controlled access to Ireland from the south, the Jacobites (if you can call them such; no longer fighting for James but for themselves they probably should just be referred to as the Irish) awaited an assault on the city, knowing William would have to attempt to take it, as he did, in late July. More or less in charge was this fella.


Patrick Sarsfield (1655 - 1693)

An Irish soldier who fought in the Franco-Dutch War and in the Rhineland, Sarsfield was, like all Catholics in England, banned from being in the military after the Popish Plot and the subsequent Test Act. When James came to power though his rights were re-established and he fought for him in the War of the Two Kings in Ireland. He must have been highly regarded, because even d’Avaux (remember him?) who had been so scathing in his comments on the Irish soldiery, remarked that though he was "not...of noble birth [...], (he) has distinguished himself by his ability, and (his) reputation in this kingdom is greater than that of any man I know [...] He is brave, but above all has a sense of honour and integrity in all that he does". Oddly enough, the king disagreed, calling Sarsfield “brave, but very scantily supplied with brains.”

When James returned to France after the Battle of the Boyne, leaving Tyrconnell in charge, the Earl wanted to sue for peace, heading the Peace Party, but Sarsfield, in opposition and flying the flag for Ireland as head of the War Party, vowed to fight on. Sarsfield attacked William’s artillery at Ballyneety, breaking the Siege of Limerick, and holding Athlone, though losing Kinsale and Cork, two important ports. When Tyrconnell went to France Sarsfield took advantage of his absence to arrest several of the members of his Peace Party, and went over James’s head to ask King Louis XIV of France for aid against William. He also requested Tyrconnell’s removal, making himself commander of the Irish forces.

His nemesis returned from France bearing letters making Sarsfield Earl of Lucan, and a large French contingent arrived soon afterwards (though whether this was due to his request of the king or Tyrconnell’s representations in person I don’t know) though most of these - over 7,000 - would die at the decisive battle of the war, The Battle of Aughrim, in July. He sued for peace soon after, Tyrconnelll dying of a stroke, and was allowed, under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick, to leave for France along with about 14,000 other soldiers, to serve in the French military.

The Battle of Aughrim (July 22 1691)

(Don't these guys all look the same? This is actually Godert de Ginkel, though to be honest he could be yer man Sarsfield above, couldn't he?)

Seeking to bring an end to the three-year war, and establish once and for all the dominion of King William and smash Catholic power forever in Ireland- and, more importantly to him, deny the French a base from which to launch attacks both at England and Holland - Godert de Ginkel, William’s commanding officer in Ireland, defeated the French Charles Chalmot de Saint-Ruhe, in charge of the Irish forces, at Athlone and pushed him back towards Limerick. At Aughrim in County Galway Saint-Ruhe decided to make his stand.

The Frenchman used the terrain very much to his advantage, placing his armies where they were protected by bogs on either side, woodland and hills, all of which helped the Jacobites to make significant gains in the battle, as the Williamites struggled in waist-deep water and got stuck - and many drowned - in the bogs. Rather hilariously - or is it tragically? No, definitely hilariously - the Jacobite defence collapsed as Saint-Ruhe, overjoyed by the seeming route of the Williamites, charged across the battlefield roaring “They are running! We will chase them back to the gates of Dublin!” and promptly had his head knocked off by a cannonball! Ah, the whims and chances of war, eh?

With their commander no longer possessing a head, the demoralised Irish were soon defeated though Sarsfield tried to engage in a rearguard action. Pushed by the Williamites up the hill of Killcommandan, the Irish infantry were slaughtered in their thousands, stark evidence of how the loss of a commander can turn the tide of battle quickly. The Jacobites lost thousands of men, including some of their best commanders, and the resistance against William was broken and defeated forever. An observer with the victorious army, with the curiously appropriate name of George Story, had this to say afterwards: "from the top of the Hill where [the Jacobite] Camp had been," the bodies "looked like a great Flock of Sheep, scattered up and down the Countrey for almost four Miles round."

The English dead were buried, but the Irish were left where they fell, their bones scattered across the battlefield, to remain there for years to come. They were left to ravens and wild dogs, some of which of the latter became so fierce that they constituted a hazard to people passing that way. A rather touchingly tragic story is told by the English author John Dunton, of a greyhound who, his master slain at the battle, remained with his corpse, guarding it until shot by a passing soldier the next January.

The Siege of Limerick and the End of the War: The Wild Geese Fly

Sarsfield retreated to Limerick after losing the Battle of Aughrim, and while Galway surrendered soon after the battle, Limerick held out for a while longer. When Irish troops defending the Bridge at Thomond were pushed back by Ginkel’s forces towards Limerick city, the French, displaying the enmity they had harboured for the Irish all along, refused to open the gates and let them be slaughtered outside. Furious at this treatment of Irishmen, Sarsfield took over command of the city from the French and began negotiations for peace. Under the Treaty of Limerick he was allowed to leave for France, along with about 19,000 others, in an exodus that became known as the Flight of the Wild Geese. Other assurances, particularly with regard to tolerance for Catholics and the possession of their lands, were overturned, or just ignored by the Protestant Irish Parliament, ensuring Catholics remained second-class citizens in English-occupied Ireland for another two centuries.

The Act for the Abrogating the Oath of Supremacy in Ireland and Appointing Other Oaths, passed in 1691, prevented Catholics from holding any office, as it demanded that they deny transubstantiation, the Catholic belief in the Holy Host actually becoming the Body of Christ during Mass. This being one of the principle tenets of Catholicism, but not held by Protestantism, meant no Catholic would swear such an oath, and so was unable to, for instance, practice law or take a seat in parliament. The Disarming Act of 1695 went further, banning Catholics from owning a weapon or a horse (worth more than five pounds) while a second bill, passed that same year, refused Catholics permission to have their children educated abroad. Exempted from these Acts and bills were those who were covered by the Treaty, though of course by now they had all fled to France, so the matter was somewhat redundant.

The victory of William of Orange, now William III of England, Ireland and Scotland, ensured the domination of the Protestant Ascendancy for the next two hundred years, and the virtual enslavement of Catholics, reduced to all but serfs on the lands of English nobles and subjected to progressively harsher Penal Laws as time went on.

So here we end the seventeenth century, almost, as we did the sixteenth, ground down by the English once again, our island occupied, our religion banned and our lives regarded as nothing.

Is it any wonder we hate the English?

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Trollheart

That one, only if you're a Proddy (Protestant) - a Republican would knee-cap you for praising it!

But yeah, you're right: one thing you can say about these guys - they may have gone around knocking seven shades of shite out of each other for thirty years, but they can sure paint!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

deleted: politics has no place in my History of Ireland journal!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Chapter IX: Under the English Heel, Part III:
Settling Old Scores - Catholics, Celts and the Crown


This Land is (no longer) your land: the Continuing Disenfranchisement of Ireland’s Catholics

Timeline: 1701-1741

Orwell once wrote, if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on an upturned face forever, and in some ways this must have been how it felt to be Irish - or at least, native and Catholic Irish - for centuries. The over-arching title of this section has been “Under the English Heel”, and indeed that’s how it was. Apart from sporadic risings, rebellions and joining occasional forces with England’s enemies in the hope of kicking His or Her Majesty’s troops and settlers off our island, we remained under English, later British control, rule and law until well into the twentieth century, and like most occupiers, the English were not soft and pleasant masters. Burning enmity between the two schisms of the Christian Church - for which we cannot only blame Luther, as all his accusations were mostly based on truth, but a succession of power-hungry popes too, and a Vatican that seemed more interested in shoring up its power and filling up its coffers than tending to the needs of its flock - meant that whoever was in power would ensure to put down and repress the other, and for hundreds of years, even under the odd Catholic monarch, or at least those nominally tolerant of Catholicism, we Irish were seen as lower life forms, heretics and peasants, an underclass to be kept down almost in the same way a failed painter from Vienna would one day see the Jews.

Not that I’m attempting to equate Irish occupation with the Holocaust, of course. Many, many Irish may have died in the various uprisings, wars, and under the oppressive regimes that characterised successive occupants of the English throne, but at least there was no mass genocide practiced on the Irish people. Well, unless you count the famines, which we will come to in due course. The point though I’m trying to make here is that for the Irish, life under an English king or queen was never going to be easy, never going to be profitable and never going to be tolerant, which is why full independence was the only way Erin’s sons would ever get out from under the boot of the British. It would, however, take another two hundred years before this would finally be accomplished, and we could, in theory - in the South at least - wave a not-so-fond farewell to the agents of the Crown.

But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, as noted in the closing lines of the previous chapter, we were still well and truly all but slaves. The Plantation of Ulster had ensured that power lay in the hands of Protestants, and with the Flight of the Wild Geese in 1691, nobody was left to fight for the Catholic cause, nobody would raise the flag for Ireland, except vaguely in exile, most of which attempts would come to nothing.

The Art of (Reneging on) the Deal

Nobody, least of all myself, would venture to suggest that all Irish - or even any Irish - were fine, upstanding citizens, to whom the mere suggestion of breaking their word was anathema. Nobody is a paragon. Everyone lies, everyone cheats, everyone breaks promises. This is doubly applicable to politics, and not unknown to kings either. However the duplicity of the English Crown after the Battle of Limerick was, to put it mildly, appalling. Having promised, in the Treaty of Limerick, certain concessions to the Irish Catholics, the Protestant-controlled Parliament threw almost all of these undertakings out, and set about making Irish Catholics the worst treated creatures in their native country, hoping, in the end, to destroy and eliminate once and for all the religion they saw as heretical, and opposed to the Crown.

With the ordination of bishops prohibited, no new priests could be installed to replace those killed or who had fled during the pogroms following the burst of anti-Catholic sentiment resulting from the Great Fire in 1666. No new clergy were allowed enter the country from abroad, and as Catholics were banned from attending school, either in Ireland or abroad, the future looked bleak for Irish Catholicism. More stringent and harsher Penal Laws passed in England led to the eventual direct rule from Westminster of Ireland, meaning the King and his Parliament could, if they wished and if it was expedient or profited them, overrule any laws passed by its counterpart in Ireland.

Meanwhile, the conquered island became the breadbasket of England, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say it became its supply depot, as the land was stripped of its lush forests to supply His Majesty’s Navy with timber, its food produce - pork, butter, cheese, beef etc - going to feed the sailors and also supply the rest of England as well as its colonies in the West Indies, all of which would inevitably lead to the first, but sadly not the last, Great Famine in Ireland. There would be, of course, little to no sympathy across the water for the starving millions in Ireland, as the Catholics were universally despised and reviled by the English, and no help would ever be forthcoming from those who had much (mostly due to the hard and badly-paid work of the poor Irish Catholics) for those who had little, or indeed nothing. To some degree, whether it’s true or not, you would have to wonder how many tears might have been shed had the entire Catholic population of Ireland starved to death? Not many, I would venture to suggest.

Of course, had the grinding, stamping boot been on the other foot, there’s no doubt that the result would have been the same. If somehow the positions had been reversed and it had been England suffering from starvation and want, I somehow doubt that my ancestors would have been piling food into boats to send to them. No, more as a matter of circumstance than anything else, these two factions hated and loathed each other, and the one would have been happy to have seen the other disappear from the face of the earth, enemies to the end of time it would appear. Talk about Arabs and Israelis! They ain’t got nothing on the hatred between the Irish and the English.

Some Catholic landowners did convert to Protestantism, if only to avoid losing their lands, but would always been looked on (and down) as mere “converts” and sneered at by the Ascendancy, who would never consider them part of its august assembly. Most though clung to their religion and thereby lost their lands, their rights to own property, their and their children’s right to an education, and the right to worship, though how strongly reprisals against masses and so forth were prosecuted I don’t know. In Cromwell’s time, yes; after him, not so sure they wanted to waste the energy, and anyway, they had a ready-made slave labour class here, so why try to change it?

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Intermission: Catholic England? The Trouser Serpent Enters Eden

Here I’d like to diverge slightly away from the timeline, and look back to see how things could have been different, for Ireland and for England. What I’ll propose here will of course be simplistic and I’m sure there are plenty of valid reasons for the hatreds between our two countries, but it can’t be denied that the biggest bone of contention - even when England left a remnant of its eight-hundred-year occupation behind it to stagger through almost into the twenty-first century - between us has been religion.

So, the question becomes: what if England had remained Catholic?

It’s not as crazy a question, I think, as it seems. England had been, after all, staunchly Catholic for thousands of years, if only because up to then there was only Catholicism in Christianity. It was the early fifteenth century that saw the rise of Martin Luther and what would become known as Protestantism, which slowly spread across Europe, but England resisted it, even to the point of its then king, Henry VIII, writing in vigorous defence of Catholicism and denouncing Luther, earning him the title Fidei Defensor, or Defender of the Faith, bestowed upon him by a grateful Pope Leo X. Remember, at this point England was a world power, and the pope would have been concerned had its king turned against him. Of course, later that’s exactly what he did (though not specifically against the Pope himself, but against his allies) but that’s history and here we’re considering an alternate timeline.

Henry’s problem with Catholicism - or more properly, the Pope - was that the Bishop of Rome refused to annul or make invalid his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to allow him marry Anne Boleyn. There were of course many reasons for this, not least among them being that Catherine was the aunt of Charles V of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor and an important ally of the then pope, Clement VII, the sanctity of marriage (the moreso between a king and his wife) within the Catholic Church, and the possibility of disinheriting and effectively bastardising Catherine’s daughter Mary, who would be next in line to the throne.

So Henry decided, after trying to cajole, force or trick the pope into annulling the marriage, he didn’t need him. He would do it himself, and so, like a child annoyed at the rules of the game and making his own game, taking his ball and going home, Henry VIII of England set himself up as head of his own religion, his own breakaway faction from the Church, following (mostly, or as far as it benefited him to do so) the precepts of the fledgling Protestant movement being taught and disseminated by Martin Luther, thereby creating the Church of England and making England a Protestant country.

But consider: what if the pope had allowed the annulment? Yes, the historical ramifications would have been huge - Queen Mary, known to history as “Bloody Mary” for her persecution of Protestants when she came to power - would never have ruled, and her sister, Elizabeth, would have ascended the throne unopposed, rather than, as she was, seen throughout her reign by Catholics - the pope especially - as a bastard and a Protestant usurper. Plots to dethrone or assassinate her would not have been hatched, and in all likelihood, England might have been stronger against its enemies, being a cohesive, truly united kingdom.

Apart from the Scots, of course. Damn Scots! They ruined Scotland!

Meanwhile, Ireland might not have been such a prize, or, if it was, might have acceded more readily to a king who followed the same religion as them. Much of the opposition to England’s invasion and occupation and rule of Ireland was that it was performed under the banner of Protestantism, the Anglican Protestantism taught by and compulsorily required by the Church of England. Irish Catholics feared the erosion, even destruction of their faith, and so fought with everything they had against this foreign oppressor. But had Henry got what he wanted from the pope, it’s highly unlikely England would have changed religions. Up until the time of the “king’s great matter” as they referred to his pending demand for divorce or annulment of his marriage to Catherine, Protestants and Lutherans in England were seen as heretics, and imprisoned, tortured and burned with the full approval and knowledge of the king. It was only when Henry began to see - or be shown, by men like Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, who had much to gain by swaying His Majesty’s allegiances their way - that allowing, even embracing and finally insisting on Luther’s new anti-Rome religion could help him to get what he needed that he broke with Rome.

Though there were plenty of Protestants in England at the time, and many at Henry’s court, before the “great matter” (or before the king met Anne Boleyn) none of them would have admitted it, for to be branded a follower of Luther was to repudiate the Catholic Church, seen at the time as the only Church, and Luther’s ideas as heretical and nothing more than the ramblings of a sect or cult leader, and that was punishable by death, usually very painful death. Henry’s about-turn in accepting Protestantism was motivated purely by his own lust and his desire to get his own way, and set in motion by the refusal of the pope to grant this.

So had Henry either been able to keep it in his pants, or convince the pope that kicking Catherine to the kerb was the best policy, England might now still be a Catholic country, and everything from the Famine to the Rising and right up to the Troubles need never have happened.

The first and only time I have heard of in history where a man set up an entire religion and his people were later persecuted, imprisoned, burned and hanged because the king wanted to get his end away. Well, technically he could do that anyway, but since Durex would not be invented for about another four hundred years, he wanted to make sure any sprogs his new bit of totty dropped were legitimate heirs, especially if he hit the jackpot and got a son.

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Fragmentation of Faith: Schisms within the Schism

However, he did and so we end up with the situation we now have, which makes it necessary, even important that we look into the basics of Luther’s rebellion against Rome, which we have already detailed, but more importantly, how the divisions and cracks appeared in the alternative to Catholicism, and how, obviously, they affected Ireland.

See, this is what I find so stupid about religion. Invent a new one and you can be guaranteed that of those who join up, some at least will have an issue with something within your religion. It might be a minor sticking point, or it might be a fundamental basic tenet, but nobody is going to agree with everything your religion stands for. And as invariably happens in such cases, the chances are they’ll start their own version, probably taking what they like from yours and leaving behind the things they don’t agree with.

Thus it was with Protestantism, originally called Lutheranism. It quickly split into… right. Hmmm.

It is indeed like a minefield out there. Ask about the divisions in Protestantism and you can get everything from Baptists and Quakers to Wesleyans and Methodists. But a lot of them are American-based, and as we’re only concerned here with Ireland and England - and to some lesser extent, Scotland, I’m going to try to concentrate on the branches that refer to or impact on them.

Lutheranism, is of course the granddaddy of them all, named for the man who started it, Martin Luther. Now the word Protestant of course refers to someone who protests against something, in this case the Church of Rome and the Pope, so I think it’s possible (though I’m open to being corrected) that you can equate the two. When Henry VIII decided to embrace Protestantism (Lutheran teachings) for his own political and personal benefits, and made himself head of the Church of England, the state religion was Anglican Protestantism (I assume that refers to its being English). From what I read - and my recent watching of the series The Tudors, which of course may be rife with historical inaccuracies but I think gets the religion part right - Anglicanism was basically a sort of “poor man’s Catholicism”, retaining many of the trappings, including mass, hymns, statues and recognition of the sacraments, while flatly and outright denying any authority from Rome over its church (the whole point, after all, of setting the damn thing up in the first place).


John Calvin, father of Calvinism

In Scotland you had Presbyterianism, from presbyter, or elder, which was and is the state church of the country. I’m unsure about the differences between it and Anglicanism, so I’m just going to drop this direct quote from Wiki in here, which may or may not clarify it. Presbyterian theology typically emphasizes the sovereignty of God, the authority of the Scriptures, and the necessity of grace through faith in Christ. Right. All nice and clear then. What about other offshoots from, as it were, the main tree? Well there’s also Calvinism, named for John Calvin, who started the whole thing off north of the border. Calvinism appears to be… the wellspring of Presbyterianism. D’oh! Now I’m totally confused.

Let’s see if we can sort this out. Basically Anglican Protestants - the Church of England - had (and presumably still have) fundamental differences of belief with the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian Protestants, founded and based on Calvinism. Maybe it would be easier - if entirely simplistic, but I’m drownin’ here - to say that English Protestants (Anglicans) didn’t like and certainly did not concur with the beliefs of Scottish Protestants (Presbyterians). To return to our dilemma in Ulster then, the Scottish settlers there, all or mostly Presbyterians, would have been shunned and ridiculed by the ruling English Anglicans, and while not censured as harshly as the Catholics, would still have had their share of oppression from the English.

Something that does seem to have been a major sticking point between the two - Anglican Protestantism and Presbyterian Protestantism (try saying that after six pints!) - is fealty to the King of England. As Henry had established himself as the head of the Church of England, he demanded all "proper" Protestants recognise that. Scotland did not do this, of course, being a separate kingdom, and probably also disputing that any mortal could speak for God, be he King or Pope. I'm not entirely sure what or who Presbyterians saw as the supreme head of their church, but I think it may have been nobody less than God.

This refusal to accept Henry led to Calvinists, Presbyterians and others being labelled "dissenters", for obvious reasons, and while they weren't as persecuted or hated as Catholics, they were no friend to the Anglican Church, and no friend to Henry. So far as I know, even Lutherans - the original Protestants - were not welcome in England, and may even have been burned even after the establishment of the Church of England. With Henry VIII, as with English kings down through history, it was his way or no way.

Okay, well that as I say is putting it in puppets and diagrams style, simplifying it to the nth degree, and probably also wildly inaccurate, but it does at least explain why this happened.

Ulster Says No: Presbyterianism in the North

One fact was not in dispute, and that was that Presbyterians were descended mostly from Scottish settlers who came to Ulster, and to be honest, if there’s one thing an Englishman hates almost as much as an Irishman or a Frenchman it’s a Scot. So the descendants of Scots in Ulster were also hit by the draconian Penal Laws passed in the early seventeenth century. Not as hard as the Catholics, mind - they could sit in Parliament but could not hold office - but they too were banned from occupations such as the legal profession, the judiciary and the army, and while Ulster, once the holdout kingdom, would remain more or less fiercely loyal to the Crown following the Plantation, its inhabitants were nevertheless looked upon by the ruling Ascendancy as inferior.

Catholic as Charged: The Penal Laws (1607-1678/93 (technically 1829)

Penal of course means of the penis… no really, it refers to punishment and that is exactly what the Penal Laws passed over (some might say, and with good cause, pissed over) Ireland during the eighteenth century were supposed to be. They specifically set out to disenfranchise, punish and impoverish, both financially and intellectually as well as spiritually and morally, the hated Catholics of Ireland who had so long resisted English rule, and who were seen by the Crown as heretics and heathens. More to the point though, they were couched in such a way as to afford the best deals possible for the Protestant Ascendancy, the settlers from England and Scotland who had come over at the invitation of the English government to take lands from Irish chieftains and lords and colonise the country.

Although initially reluctant to damage their support base among English Catholics, particularly the old English landowners, the ascension to the throne of the fiercely Protestant James I and final victory over the Irish in the Nine Years War in 1603, and the events such as the Gunpowder Plot two years later, coupled with the Flight of the Earls in 1607 provided impetus for harsher treatment of Catholics, and Irish in general, and the first of the Penal Laws was passed in 1607, banning Catholics from holding public office or joining the army. Much worse was of course to come, and some of the laws have been discussed in the previous chapter, but other, tougher ones had yet to be passed.

After ruling that Catholics could not educate themselves or their children (or send the latter abroad to be educated), priests and bishops to be exiled and land confiscated from Irish Catholics in favour of Protestant settlers, the Popery Act of 1703 sought to change how Catholics could inherit land on the death of their father. Unlike English (Protestant) law, this Act ruled that the land must be divided up amongst all the sons of the late landowner. However, if the eldest son was to convert to the “true religion” he could then inherit the land for himself. Daughters, of course, had no rights either way, so if a man died with only female offspring, well, I don’t know what happened in those cases.

The Popery Act also forbade Catholics to hold public office, as mentioned above, and anyone holding public or military office other than Catholics had to swear an oath of denying transubstantiation, which as already mentioned is the process by which, according to Catholic belief, the wine and the host are changed into the literal body and blood of Our Lord at the mass. No Catholic was likely to deny the most sacred tenet of his religion, which effectively excluded him then from public office. Under the Popery Act, Catholic landholding, already at a minimal level of 25%, shrunk by a further 20% over the next seventy-five years.

This Act also attacked Presbyterians and other “nonconformist” Protestants, who were similarly commanded to make the declaration and, if they could not, had to step down from the post they held. This resulted in the resignation of hundreds of Presbyterians and Calvinists from their positions, thus leaving the jobs for loyal Anglicans to fill.

Note: this should not be confused with an earlier, identically-named Act passed in 1698 (that one by the English Parliament, the above by the Irish) in which a bounty was placed on the head of all priests in England, people encouraged to spy on and betray, hunt and turn in any priest seen or suspected of “popish behaviour”, such as saying mass (or trying to), offering the sacrament or praying publicly, contrary to English law. Similar to the later Act passed in Ireland, Catholics were prohibited from being educated and owning land or holding public office.

Further note: Neither of the above should be confused with the Papist Act, passed in 1778, which we will come to in due course, and which was in fact a relaxing and relenting of the harsh and draconian laws levied on Catholics, seen as one of the first of what were known as Roman Catholic Relief Laws. Ironically, perhaps, this single Act would lead to unrest and riot in England, as the Catholics were seen to be getting treated with too much lenience. Oh, you English, you!

The other big one was the Disenfranchisement Act, passed in 1728, which did exactly what it said on the tin, disenfranchised Catholics by making it illegal for them to vote. In a chilling foreshadowing perhaps of the Third Reich two hundred years later, an Act was also passed forbidding the intermarriage of Catholics and Protestants, while Presbyterian marriages were not recognised by the state. Some of the laws were all but inhuman, such as the one which forbade Catholic families adopting orphans (I’m not sure if that only applied to Catholic orphans, though I would doubt it, because why would the English care?) and a particularly cruel one ruling that, should priests or other illegal persons be discovered in a village or town, and not reported by the inhabitants of that town, the reward given for capturing the fugitive would be levied on the people there. It sounds a little confusing, doesn’t it, so here’s the transcript from the Big W.

Any and all rewards not paid by the crown for alerting authorities of offences to be levied upon the Catholic populace within parish and county.
Teaching even in private homes of Catholics was also forbidden, leading to the famous idea of the “hedge school”, where usually priests and nuns would undertake to attempt to educate children out in the fields, perhaps as a way to defeat the spirit of the law by sticking to the letter of the law.

As for the king’s subjects, they had better not even think of converting (can’t imagine why any would of course) as there were very stiff penalties for such, including losing the king’s protection - essentially I guess leaving you in a “Purge”-like situation where anyone could do anything to you and the king’s law would not punish them, forfeiture of all lands and inheritance and imprisonment for a period of time to be decided by the king.

You can surely see the metaphor here of someone (English Crown and Parliament) using a long stick to push and hit the Irish Catholics, shoving them further and further back across an imaginary line marked “extinction”. The problem with that is the very stick you’re beating and pushing your opponent with can become your own undoing, when they grab it and hit you with it. After eight centuries of this treatment, while the Penal Laws would not prove the final straw that broke His Majesty’s back, he would find that stick turned on him, though it would be another two hundred years before he would have to take his lumps.

Outlaws, Robbers and Politicians: The Rise of the Tories

Anyone who hates the Conservatives will be grinning when I tell you that the word does indeed come from the old Irish for robber or outlaw, the word, tóraí, coming from the slightly shorter word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, as outlaws and robbers were chased or pursued men. Having its origins in the English Civil War, the Tory Party supported the then king Charles I, and opposed the attempts by Parliament to reduce him to a figurehead without any real power. Their efforts were thwarted however by the coup by Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army, and they had to wait for the Restoration of 1660 when Charles II returned from exile in triumph to re-establish the monarchy. Ranged against them were the Whigs, Protestant agitators (many of whom had been part of Cromwell’s army) who began to accuse the king of endeavouring to undo the work of Henry VIII and return England to the Catholic faith. In this they were helped by the fact that the king’s brother, James Duke of York (who would succeed to the throne as James II on the death of his brother in 1685, though only for three years before being deposed and replaced by the Protestant William of Orange) was a Catholic.

Unable to politically attack the king directly, as to do so was an act of treason, The Whigs tried to implicate the top Tory, Count Redmond O’Hanlon in a supposed plot with the Earl of Ormonde, James FitzThomas Butler, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to murder famous liar and forger Titus Oates (remember him?) but to no avail. Used as a derogatory term from 1681, the opponents to the Whigs were called Tories, and a leading nonconformist minister called Oliver Heywood likened the two factions to the old Roundheads (supporters of Cromwell and Parliament) and Cavaliers (those who took the side of the king) prevalent leading up to and during the English Civil War. It should not however be misconstrued that the Tories were any friend to the Catholics, as they supported the Church of England and approved of and advocated the continued suppression of both Catholics and nonconformist Protestants. Well, of course they did.

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Yo Trollheart you numbnuts! Isn’t this supposed to be the story of Ireland? What’s with all the English history dude?

I hear ya. I do. But here’s the thing. Whether we like it or not (and we don’t, as a rule) the history of our country is inextricably tied up with that of England, Britain, or the United Kingdom - whatever you decide to call it. After all, were it not for the English, we would most likely have been left in peace to carry on with our lives. We’re not - never have been, never will be - a conquering race; we barely have an army, and what there is of it is usually on loan to the United Nations on peacekeeping duty in some godawful place, so we don’t exactly sit around maps of Europe, or anywhere else, greedily licking our lips and trying to figure out how we can get control of their resources, economy, politics or all three.

But first the Romans, then the Vikings, and finally the English pushed us to take up arms, so because the English have had such a huge impact on how our country developed (after all, we’re probably one of the only nations who doesn’t use their own national language) I feel it’s important that we keep abreast of the developments across the pond in parallel with Irish history. So who was on the throne at any given time, what their religious proclivities were (almost all of them were and continue to be Protestant Anglicans, but some were more tolerant towards Catholicism than others) and how they viewed Ireland is something we need to deal with. Some of the time, events not actually taking place in Ireland had a huge impact on our history, such as, as already related, the Great Fire of London, which pushed anti-Catholic sentiment to even higher levels, and the French Revolution of 1789.

So from time to time I will seem to veer off into something that could be mistaken for the History of England. It’s not. It’s just that our history did not take place in a vacuum, and events around the world, from Rome to, obviously, London, had a profound effect on our development as a nation. So bear with me as we say hi to the newest arse on the English throne, though after five years of her reign that behind would be sitting on the throne of the newly-designated Great Britain.

Queen Anne (1665 - 1714)

Born, as you can see, one year before the aforementioned Great Fire, Anne was the daughter of James, Duke of York, brother of Charles II, who, as we already discussed, was a secret-though-not-so-secret Catholic, and as he was next in line for the throne, the English nobility feared he would return their country to the worship of Catholicism. Therefore, Charles instructed that his two nieces (the other being Mary, who married William of Orange and reigned jointly with him as Mary II, not to be confused with Bloody Mary) should be raised in the Anglican faith. Not entirely sure what say their father had in this, but it was the king’s will and so it was done. I suppose he couldn’t have really opposed his brother’s wishes, at least not in public, as he was trying to keep his Catholic leanings low-key, and would not want to add any truth to fears that his two daughters might also end up as Catholic monarchs.

At any rate, on the death of Mary William reigned alone after the Glorious Revolution in which his wife’s father was deposed and sent packing, and on his death, Anne succeeded her cousin to the English throne. To allay any fears, Anne had married Prince George of Denmark and Norway, a Lutheran, so there was little chance she was going to have any Catholic sympathies, and nineteen years after her marriage George became the royal consort, given the title Duke of Cumberland, and if anyone feared he might be an ambitious man, endeavour to control England from behind Anne’s throne, this statement he made would have put the issue to rest: God send me, he wrote, a quiet life somewhere, for I shall not be long able to bear this perpetual motion.

It was far from an idyllic marriage though. Blessed(!) with seventeen(!) children, Anne was to see none of them survive, as early in her marriage George caught smallpox (which she had already had, and which had prevented her attending the coronation of her sister) and became very sick, while their two young daughters died of the disease. Another child was stillborn, and this would continue to be the pattern through Anne’s life - children either died at birth, were miscarriages or lived barely long enough to be acknowledged as such. Twelve were stillborn, four died before the age of two years, with the final surviving child, Prince William of Gloucester, a potential heir to the throne, lasting eleven years, but still not old enough to claim his birthright. Historians and medical experts disagree on what he died from, but smallpox is one of the favoured theories, and given that Anne’s children had died of this disease, she had had it herself and so had George, it seems fair to assume that was the cause. In any case, it deprived England of its heir, leaving Anne childless at the age of thirty-five, an age thought beyond childbearing in those days. Indeed, she only lasted another fourteen years on the Earth after William’s passing. Severe gout, which caused her to gain weight and grow “corpulent”, necessitating her having to be carried or wheeled everywhere, coupled no doubt with the terrible stresses of so many pregnancies and losses, told against her and she died in 1714.

She had been, however, a popular monarch, despite being the daughter of the much-hated James, and on her coronation had this to say: "As I know my heart to be entirely English, I can very sincerely assure you there is not anything you can expect or desire from me which I shall not be ready to do for the happiness and prosperity of England.” Already afflicted with the gout which was to so trouble her and possibly shorten her life, she had to be carried to her coronation in a sedan chair. Less than two weeks after her accession to the throne, England became entangled in the War of Spanish Succession, which so far as I can see has no direct bearing on Irish history so will not be covered here. She was a patron of Handel and Newton, and greatly interested in the arts, theatre and music as well as poetry.


See you Jimmy! The Act of Union (1707)

Anne was the first English monarch to preside over four nations, when the Act of Union formally bound England, Ireland, Wales and the recalcitrant Scotland as the Kingdom of Great Britain, later the United Kingdom, giving her the quirk of reigning over England until 1707 and then all of Britain until her death in 1714.

And to understand this, I’m afraid we have to take yet another detour, this time to the north.

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