Seventeenth-Century Britain and Ireland
British History
“The seventeenth century was, historically, and is,
historiographically, a mess …”
Jenny Wormald (2008)
Master narratives
 Whig history
 Divine right v. representative government
 The puritan revolution
 A conflict over the legacy of the Reformation
 Marxist history
 Feudalism/absolutism v. a rising capitalist class
Revisionism
 Political ideology
 General acceptance of royal authority
 No “high road to civil war”
 Unreasonable demands of parliament
 Stability of England under “Eleven Years Tyranny”
 Religion
 Arminian innovation rather than puritan crusade
 Class
 Collapse of academic Marxism
 Eclipse of class-based interpretations
What are we left with?
 Return to focus on individual monarchs
But why, then, did things get better?
“British History”
Central problem of managing a composite state:
 The quest for a uniform religious policy
 Scottish revolt against Charles I
 Who was to suppress the Irish rising of 1641?
 James II and Irish Catholicism
Seventeenth-Century Ireland
 Plantation
 Religion and identity
 Conflict
Plantation
 Formal plantation and unplanned settlement
 Antrim and Down
 Londonderry
 Continuing British settlement to c.1710
 The Irish and the plantation
 20% of land
 Suvival as tenants
 Economic marginalization
 Ulster and beyond
 New agricultural techniques
 But continued reliance on stock rearing
 Munster: wool, iron
 Better communications, more developed urban network
Conflict
Conflicting perspectives
Normalisation
 Violence in European context
 Erosion of ethnic differences
 Examples of mutual accommodation
 Periods of peace and economic growth
An Age of Atrocity
 Martial law continued after 1603
 Massacre and atrocity 1641-52
 Post-war terror and social cleansing
Religion and identity (1):
Protestantism
 Church of Ireland
 The end of the native Reformation
 Calvinist theology
 Dissent
 Initial accommodation of Scots
 Emergence of a Presbyterian church structure
 Southern dissent
 Conflict within Protestantism
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Wentworth and Laudian policy
Post-1660 repression
Temporary Protestant unity 1685-91
Sacramental test (1704)
 Catholicism
 Revival and Tridentine reform 1603-40
 The dilemma of the Old English
A war of many parts 1641-52
 A war of the three kingdoms
 The Catholic revolt
 Begun by benficiaries of Ulster plantation
 A response to the rise of English parliament
 Unleashed forces in Ulster leaders could not control
 Arrival of emigres under Owen Roe O’Neill
 Conflicted loyalties
 Confederate Catholics
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Loyalty to king or church
An ethnic dimension
But primarily a division between haves and have-nots
 English Protestant royalists v. parliamentarians
 Scots revolt against parliament 1649