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Catholicism and the Irish Confederate Armies: For God or King?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Pádraig Lenihan
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Extract

The Irish, noted a French traveller in 1644, ‘se nomment Ayrenake’. Is it all that noteworthy that those whom the traveller questioned should denote themselves as ‘Éireannach’ or Irish? The answer must be a cautious ‘yes’ because if the same question had been posed some forty years earlier the reply would most likely have been either ‘Gael’ or ‘English’ depending on the respondent's racial identity. This new patriotism which centred on love of one's native land and religion had been created over the preceding sixty years by the ‘Old’ (i.e. of pre-Reformation settler stock) English who found themselves increasingly estranged from Protestantism as espoused by the crown and by ‘New’ English officials and settlers. A more immediate impulse towards the fashioning of a new Irishness was the Protestant device of lumping all Irish Catholics together regardless of putative ethnicity. In the 1680s an Irish Protestant spokesman briskly summed up the outlook of his group; ‘If the most ancient and natural Irishman be a Protestant, no man takes him for other than an Englishman; and if a cockney be a Papist, he is reckoned in Ireland to be as much an Irishman as if he was born on Slevelogher.’ By then what had been a self-serving rhetorical commonplace was indisputably a reality. So, the ‘faith and fatherland’ patriotism was to an extent thrust on the Old English and was not necessarily hostile to the crown in general or to the Stuarts in particular. Far from it, the motto of the Confederation of Kilkenny (1642–9) ‘pro Deo, pro Rege, pro patria Hibernia unanimis’ shows how an earlier generation had tried to square this circle.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , October 1994 , pp. 182 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1994

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References

Notes

1 la Gouz, Francois; Les Voyages et Observations du Monsieur de la Boullay le Gouz, Paris 1653, (Ireland) pp. 428–61.Google Scholar

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3 I drew on the following sources in describing the evolution of a faith and fatherland ideology. Brendan Bradshaw; ‘Native Reaction to the Westward Enterprise; a Case Study in Gaelic Ideology’ in Andrews, K. R. et. al. (eds.): The Westward Enterprise (Liverpool, 1978);Google Scholar Nicholas Canny ‘The Formation of the Irish Mind’ in Past and Present, xcv, (1982); Michael Mac Craith: ‘Changing Political Ideologies in the Gaelic World of the Reformation’, paper delivered at the Conquest and Union conference, University College, Galway, 18 September 1993; Mary Catherine Kennedy: Eagla an Ghallsmacht, M.A. thesis, University College Galway, 1987.

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10 S.P. 63/264, p. 67: ‘A Lyst of the Army of Leinster’. The list included two dozen chaplains: One vicar general (Fr. Oliver Darcy) on 5s per day. One chaplain major of the infantry on 3s per day. Eighteen ‘chaplains of foot’ (i.e. three per infantry regiment), on Is per day. One chaplain major of the cavalry on 3s a day. Two other chaplains for the cavalry on 2s per day.

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29 Inchiquin to Lenthall, 18 November 1647. Tanner letters, p. 275.

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34 Lynch: De Praesilibus, ii, pp. 247–257.

35 Gilbert: Contemporary History, i, p. 30.

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45 Gilbert, J. T. (ed.): Contemp. Hist., iii,Google Scholar ‘An Impartiall Relation of the Most Memorable Transactions of General Owen O'Neill and his Party, from the year 1641 to the year 1650’, p. 208.