Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T21:30:59.608Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE LANGUAGE AND SYMBOLISM OF CONQUEST IN IRELAND, c. 1790–1850*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2008

Jacqueline Hill
Jacqueline Hill*
Affiliation:
THE UNIVERSITY OF WALES, BANGOR
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The question of whether Ireland had been conquered by England has received some attention from historians of eighteenth-century Ireland, mainly because it preoccupied William Molyneux, author of the influential The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (1698). Molyneux defended Irish parliamentary rights by denying the reality of a medieval conquest of Ireland by English monarchs, but he did allow for what could be called ‘aristocratic conquest’. The seventeenth century, too, had left a legacy of conquest, and this paper examines evidence of consciousness among Irish Protestants of descent from ancestral conquerors. It considers how and why this consciousness took a more pronounced sectarian turn during the 1790s. Williamite anniversaries, increasingly associated with the Orange Order, became identified in the Catholic mind as symbolic reminders of conquest. Thanks to the protracted struggle for ‘Catholic emancipation’, this issue continued to feature in political debate about Ireland well into the nineteenth century, while the passing of the Act of Union (1800) revitalised the older debate about whether England could be said to have conquered Ireland. Liberal Protestants and Catholics contended that England had invariably intervened to prevent any possibility of reconciliation between conquerors and conquered. Thus the language of conquest remained highly adaptable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 18 , December 2008 , pp. 165 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Allan Blackstock, John Gillingham and Cadoc Leighton for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Errors that remain are my own.

References

1 See, e.g., Davies, R. R., Domination and Conquest. The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Canny, Nicholas, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland (Hassocks, 1976)Google Scholar; Lennon, Colm, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin, 1994)Google Scholar; Pawlisch, Hans, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kelly, Patrick, ‘Conquest versus Consent as the Basis of the English Title to Ireland in William Molyneux's Case of Ireland’, in British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Brady, Ciaran and Ohlmeyer, Jane (Cambridge, 2005), 334–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For which see Anthony Carty, Was Ireland Conquered? International Law and the Irish Question (1996).

3 Kelly, Patrick, ‘William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1988), 136Google Scholar.

4 William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland Stated, reprint of 1st edn (Dublin, 1977), 31, 33.

5 Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, by Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), 231–3.

6 Ciaran Brady, ‘The Decline of the Irish Kingdom’, in Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe, ed. Mark Greengrass (1991), 96–7; Kelly, ‘Conquest versus Consent’, 335–40.

7 Cunningham, Bernadette, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), 148–51Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., 111–12, 165–6; Molyneux, Case of Ireland, 40–7.

9 Kelly, ‘Conquest versus Consent’, 354–5.

10 Kidd, Colin, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), 254–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Small, Stephen, Political Thought in Ireland 1776–1798 (Oxford, 2002), 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 R. B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion 1750–1800 (1944), 45–6; Small, Political Thought, 60–3, 78–80.

12 Leighton, C. D. A., Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom: A Study of the Irish Ancien Régime (Dublin, 1994), 31–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, Jacqueline, ‘Ireland without Union: Molyneux and his Legacy’, in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707, ed. Robertson, John (Cambridge, 1995), 280–2Google Scholar; Kelly, ‘Conquest versus Consent’, 350–3.

13 Molyneux, Case of Ireland, 32, 34–5.

14 Smyth, Jim, ‘“Like Amphibious Animals”: Irish Protestants, Ancient Britons, 1691–1707’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 789–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, ‘Molyneux’, 280–1; Kelly, ‘Conquest versus Consent’, 351.

15 Quoted in A New History of Ireland, iii: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691, ed. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (Oxford, 1976), lxii.

16 Leighton, Catholicism, 78–9.

17 Quoted in Hill, ‘Molyneux’, 292.

18 Kidd, British Identities, 251–7.

19 Quoted in Plowden, Francis, A Historical Review of the State of Ireland, from the Invasion of that Country under Henry II to its Union with Great Britain (5 vols., Philadelphia, 1805)Google Scholar, ii, Appendix lviii, 8–10.

20 See Flanagan, M. T., ‘Fitzgerald, Maurice (d. 1176)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

21 Quoted in James Kelly, ‘“The Glorious and Immortal Memory”: Commemoration and Protestant Identity in Ireland 1660–1800’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 94, Sect. C (1994), 32, 37.

22 Ibid., 32, 41–4.

23 Leighton, Catholicism, 68.

24 Barber, Samuel, Remarks on a Pamphlet, Intitled [sic] The Present State of the Church of Ireland (Dublin, 1787), 36Google Scholar.

25 I. R. McBride, ‘Barber, Samuel (1737/8–1811), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

26 Quoted in Allan Blackstock, ‘Armed Citizens and Christian Soldiers: Crisis Sermons and Ulster Presbyterians, 1715–1803’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 22 (2007), 96–7.

27 Miller, David W., Queen's Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (Dublin, 1978), 25Google Scholar.

28 [Willam Henry], A Philippic Oration, against the Pretender's Son, & (Dublin, 1745), 14–15. I am grateful to Allan Blackstock for this reference.

29 Edmund Burke, A Letter to Sir Hecules Langrishe, Bart. M.P., on the Subject of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, in The Works of Edmund Burke (6 vols., 1884–99), iii, 304–5, 312–15, 319–21; Hill, ‘Molyneux’, 293. Burke's views on conquest are further discussed by Sean Patrick Donlan, ‘The “Genuine Voice of its Records and Monuments”? Edmund Burke's “Interior History of Ireland”’, in Edmund Burke's Irish Identities, ed. Sean Patrick Donlan (Dublin, 2007), 69–101, and Richard Bourke, ‘Edmund Burke and the Politics of Conquest’, Modern Intellectual History, 4, 3 (2007), 403–32.

30 Hill, Jacqueline, ‘Politics and the Writing of History: The Impact of the 1690s and 1790s on Irish Historiography’, in Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. George Boyce, D., Eccleshall, R. and Geoghegan, V. (Basingstoke, 2001), 231Google Scholar; Dickson, David, ‘Paine and Ireland’, in The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, ed. Dickson, David, Keogh, Dáire and Whelan, Kevin (Dublin, 1993), 136–7Google Scholar.

31 Kelly, James, ‘Eighteenth-Century Ascendancy: A Commentary’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 5 (1990), 173–87Google Scholar.

32 Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, ed. J. T. Gilbert and R. M. Gilbert (19 vols., Dublin, 1889–1944), xiv, 285–6.

33 McBride, Ian, The Seige of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Dublin, 1997), 20–1Google Scholar; Hill, Jacqueline, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997), 224–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kelly, Patrick, ‘Perceptions of Locke in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 89, Sect. C (1989), 276–8Google Scholar.

34 Both quoted in Dennis Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland, from the Period of the English Invasion to the Present Time (4 vols., Dublin, 1811), iv, 341, 393–4.

35 Statement of General Principles, meeting of masters of Orange lodges, Armagh city, 1797, in The Formation of the Orange Order 1795–1798: The Edited Papers of Colonel William Blacker and Colonel Robert Wallace, ed. Cecil Kilpatrick and Brian Kennaway (Belfast, 1994), 109; Allan Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland 1789–1829 (Woodbridge, 2007), 57.

36 Blackstock, Loyalism, 63–8, 72–5; and on choice of date, Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 1997), 111–17.

37 Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain 1795–1836 (1996), 29–36.

38 Hill, Jacqueline, ‘National Festivals, the State, and “Protestant Ascendancy” in Ireland, 1790–1829’, Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1984), 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Transactions of the General Committee of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, during the Year 1791 (Dublin, 1792), 12.

40 33 Geo. III, c. 21.

41 Dickson, David, New Foundations: Ireland 1660–1800, 2nd edn (Dublin, 2000), 197Google Scholar.

42 Blackstock, Loyalism, 90–3; Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, from the Arrival of the English (1801), 4th edn (Fort Wayne, 1995), 81, 115 n. 1.

43 Hill, ‘National Festivals’, 37.

44 Ibid., 40–1.

45 Parnell, William, An Historical Apology for the Irish Catholics (Dublin, 1807), 139–40Google Scholar.

46 Taaffe, Impartial History, ii, 379–80.

47 Blackstock, Loyalism, 129–30; idem, An Ascendancy Army: The Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), 262–3, 278–91.

48 Hill, Patriots to Unionists, 324–9; Morash, Christopher, A History of the Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge, 2002), 94–102Google Scholar.

49 A Report of the Trial of James Forbes [et al.] for a Conspiracy to Create a Riot (Dublin, 1823), 37–8.

50 Hill, ‘Politics and the Writing of History’, 230.

51 O'Connell, Daniel, A Memoir on Ireland Native and Saxon (Dublin, 1843), 9, 33Google Scholar.

52 W. J. Battersby, The Fall and Rise of Ireland, or the Repealer's Manual, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1834), 306, 310, 324, 349, 352, 370.

53 Plowden, Historical Review, i, 28–9.

54 George Ensor, Addresses to the People of Ireland (Dublin, [1822]), 9, 16, 21, 25–6.

55 Jonah Barrington, The Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation (Dublin, [1833]), vi.

56 Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire of Virtue’, in An Imperial State at War, ed. Lawrence Stone (1994), 128–64; Parry, J. P., ‘The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851–1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 11 (2001), 149–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Hansard, 4 Feb. 1834, xxi, cols. 5, 99.

58 Quoted in Dublin Evening Mail, 17 Jan. 1831.

59 Hansard, 11, 12 July 1843, lxx, cols. 963, 1057–8.

60 R. M. Martin, Ireland before and after the Union with Great Britain (1843), 3rd edn (1848) Preface, ix, xxxvii.

61 Kelly, ‘William Molyneux’, 144–7.

62 Barrington, Rise and Fall, 1–2; Battersby, Repealer's Manual, 105–6; and on the pro-Union side see reference to Thomas Spring Rice by M[ichael] Staunton, ‘Reasons for a Repeal of the Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland’, in Repeal Prize Essays: Essays on the Repeal of the Union (Dublin, 1845), 82–6.

63 Thomas Moore, The History of Ireland (4 vols., 1835–45), ii, 333.

64 Musgrave, Memoirs, 4–26, 582; see also James Kelly, Sir Richard Musgrave 1746–1818: Ultra-Protestant Ideologue (forthcoming).

65 ‘Address to the Protestant Young Men of Ireland’, The Warder, 12 Sept. 1846; Dublin Journal, 24 Mar. 1804; Reply of the Orangemen of Dublin to the Address of the Repealers (Dublin, 1848), 6. See also Blackstock, Loyalism, 182–3, 214–16, 227–62.

66 Taaffe, Impartial History, ii, 377–80; The Belfast Politics, Enlarged, ed. John Lawless (Belfast, 1818), 1–2; Moore, History, ii, 285–6, 342. See also Donal McCartney, ‘The Writing of History in Ireland, 1800–50’, Irish Historical Studies, 10 (1957), 353.

67 Burke, Langrishe, 320.

68 Abbé [James] MacGeoghegan, Histoire de l'Irlande Ancienne et Moderne (2 vols., Paris, 1758), i, xii–xiii.

69 Taaffe, Impartial History, i, 47; Parnell, Historical Apology, 3, 27–30.

70 Plowden, Historical Review, i, 28–9; Taaffe, Impartial History, iii, 571.

71 Jeanne Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland's Past: The Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (1980), ch. 2; Murray, Damien, Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies, 1840–80 (Maynooth, 2000), ch. 1Google Scholar.

72 Moore, History, i, 1–2, ch. 2, 160.

73 Ibid., ii, 213, 217, 222. For reasons for preferring ‘English’ to ‘Normans’ to describe the invaders, see ‘Normans’ in The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. S. J. Connolly (Oxford, 1998), 389–90, and John Gillingham, ‘Normanizing the English Invaders of Ireland’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. Huw Price and John Watts (Oxford, 2007), 85–97. I am grateful to Professor Gillingham for allowing me to read his article before publication.

74 Augustin Thierry, History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; with its Causes, and Consequences to the Present Time (1841), ix.

75 Ibid., 233–4, 273.

76 Mulvey, Helen F., Thomas Davis and Ireland: A Biographical Study (Washington, 2003), 218–21Google Scholar.

77 James Godkin, ‘The Rights of Ireland’, in Repeal Prize Essays, ch. 2, 33. Cf. ‘I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races; . . . the deadly animosity that now separates the inhabitants of Lower Canada into the hostile divisions of French and English’, in The Report of the Earl of Durham (new edn, 1902), x.

78 Moore, History, iii, 74–5; Godkin, ‘Rights’, 53.

79 Thierry, Conquest, vii, 273–80; Godkin, ‘Rights’, 2, 24–5, 62.

80 Godkin, ‘Rights’, 67, 144, 159.

81 Davis, Thomas, Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Duffy, Charles Gavan (Dublin, 1845), 176–8Google Scholar; see also Murray, Romanticism, 102–3.

82 T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (4 vols., i and ii, 1849, iii and iv, 1855), i, 3–18, 67–8, 105, ii, 127–9.

83 Report of Enniskillen meeting, The Warder, 8 Aug. 1846.

84 Address of Irish Confederation to the Protestants of Ireland, Freeman's Journal, 8 July 1847.

85 ‘Rules of the Orange Society, 1798’, in Senior, Orangeism, App. A, 299, 301.

86 Godkin, ‘Rights’, p. 144.

87 Daniel O'Connell to Lord Cloncurry, 24 Sept. 1828, in The Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell, ed. M. R. O'Connell (8 vols., Dublin, 1972–80), iii, letter 1489.

88 Irish Times, 12 May 2007.