FROM INVASION TO PLANTATION

EARLY MODERN IRELAND – CONQUEST, PLANTATION, ASCENDANCY

I.  CONQUERING IRELAND, 1541-1691

A.  THE ENGLISH CONQUEST.  Henry VIII, declared "king of Ireland" 1541.  Oath of Supremacy.  "Old English" and "New English".  Nine Years' War (1594-1603); Cromwell’s War (1649-51) ("To Hell or to Connacht" = the Cromwellian victory cry);  Williamite War (1690-91).  Treaty of Limerick, 1691.  1649.  Voice of Defeat:  Fear Dorcha O Mealláin, "Exodus to Connacht" (tr. Thomas Kinsella).

B.  CATHOLIC IRELAND IN THE CONQUEST.  Irish colleges: St. Omer (Spanish Netherlands), Salamanca, Paris, Nantes.  Maynooth seminary (est. 1795).  Wild Geese:   Patrick Sarsfield (d. 1693), earl of Lucan.  Irish Brigade.  Richard Murphy, "Patrick Sarsfield's Portrait," from The Price of Stone and Earlier Poems, pp. 75-77.

II.  PLANTATING IRELAND. 

A.  PLANTING IRELAND. Planting of Munster (1570s-1690).  James VI & I (1566-1625), king of Scotland (1567) and England (1603).  Planting of Ulster (1610ff.):  Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh, and Tyrone.  Ulster Scots (American: Scotch-Irish).

B.  THE PROCESS OF PLANTATION (uLSTER).  "Undertakers"; 1000-acre to 3000-acre lots.   Roy Foster:  "laboratory conditions for the chemistry of the civilizing process."  Land measures by productivity.  Oath of Supremacy.

C.  CIVILIZING IRELAND – Edmund SPENSER (ca. 1552-1599).  Cambridge; Council of Munster; Kilcolman, Co. Cork.  A Renaissance humanist.  Brehon law: repugnant "both to God's law and man's."  The "mere Irish."  Civilization and barbarism; cultural evolution.  Chief targets = Old English and Catholic clergy.  Remedy = force, followed by plantation and assimilation.  Puzzlement at contrast between "the zeal of Popish priests and ministers of the gospel."  

D.  THE SCOTTISH PARALLEL.  Lowlands: English-speaking; agriculture; towns and commerce.  Highlands: Gaelic-speaking; stock-raising; few fixed settlements.  Personal union of the crowns of Scotland and England, 1603- .  Scottish Act of Union (1707) --> Kingdom of Great Britain.  Stuart claimants:  James VII & II (1633-1701), deposed 1688 ("Glorious Revolution"); James VIII & III (1688-1766) = "The Old Pretender"; Charles Edward (1720-88), "the Bonnie Prince" = "The Young Pretender"; Henry IX, Cardinal of York.  Risings, 1715, 1745-46.  Battle of Culloden (16 April 1746).  Clearing of the Highlands.

III.  RULING IRELAND – THE ASCENDANCY.  "Drogheda, Derry, Enniskillen--Never Surrender."  Church of Ireland and Church of England.  "Anglo-Irishman" = "a Protestant on a horse" (Brendan Behan, The Hostage).

A.  THE PENAL LAWS.  Penal Code = Penal Laws (1695-1709).  Poynings' Law (1485); Statutes of Kilkenny (1336).  Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903), Irish historian.

B.  ECONOMY OF 18^TH-CENTURY IRELAND.  Castletown, Co. Kildare, William Connolly (1662-1729), speaker of the Irish House of Commons.  Remitted Irish rents (to absentees):  £100,000 of a total landed rent-roll of £1.3 million in 1698 --> £300,000 of a total of £1.6 million in the 1720s -->  £600,000 per year by 1780.  Imports:  £800,000 in 1700 --> over £5,000,000 in 1800.  Exports:  £800,000 in 1700 --> about £4,000,000 --> over £7,000,000 in 1812.  Industrial spinning firms:  Robert Brooke's at Prosperous on the Bog of Allen, capitalized at £40,000 and 2,500 employees (failed 1785); Sadleir brothers' near Cork capitalized at £40,000 and 4,000 employees (failed 1801).

C.  ASCENDANCY POLITICS – "GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT."  "Irish Whigs": Henry Flood (1732-1791), Henry Grattan (1745-1820.  William Molyneux (1656-98), M.P. for Dublin.  The Anglo-Irish nation.  "Grattan's Parliament."  Jonathan Swift, dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.  Trinity College.  Irish Parliament.  Bank of Ireland.

THE SEVEN SAGES – W. B. Yeats

The First. My great-grandfather spoke to Edmund Burke / In Grattan’s house.

The Second. My great-grandfather shared / A pot-house bench with Oliver Goldsmith once.

The Third. My great-grandfather’s father talked of music, / Drank tar-water with the Bishop of Cloyne.

The Fourth. But mine saw Stella once.

The Fifth. Whence came our thought?

The Sixth. From four great minds that hated Whiggery.

The Fifth. Burke was a Whig.

The Sixth. Whether they knew or not, / Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery? / A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint / Or out of drunkard’s eye.

The Seventh. All’s Whiggery now, / But we old men are massed against the world.

The First. American colonies, Ireland, France and India / Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it.

The Second. Oliver Goldsmith sang what he had seen, / Roads full of beggars, cattle in the fields,
But never saw the trefoil stained with blood, The avenging leaf those fields raised up against it.

The Fourth. The tomb of Swift wears it away.

The Third. A voice / Soft as the rustle of a reed from Cloyne / That gathers volume; now a thunder-clap.

The Sixtb. What schooling had these four?

The Seventh. They walked the roads / Mimicking what they heard, as children mimic; / They understood that wisdom comes of beggary.