The 'Old English', an Elite out of favour.
When the English reconquered Ireland in the three great conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries - the Nine Years War, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Williamite War - it wasn’t just the Irish who they were subduing.
They were of course doing that also, and the 16th and 17th centuries saw the destruction of the Gaelic Aristocracy in the Nine Years War, the confiscation of their lands and the subsequent planting of British settlers (most notably in Ulster where a plurality identify as British to this day), the Cromwellian Conquest and forced removal of the Irish to the west (‘To Hell or to Connacht’ being Cromwell’s defining phrase), and a century of peace until the rebellion of 1798. Later nationalist historians weren’t wrong to adopt the lense that these invasions were a case of one people, united in their Protestantism and dislike of the savage Gaels, conquering another who (barring a few traitors) were united in opposition. One only has to have a glance at Spensers ‘A View of the Present State of Ireland’, or Cromwell’s not fully realised ambitions to move the Irish to the Western province of Connacht for that to become obvious.
In this post I intend to explore another perspective, while the wars in Ireland were primarily about the need to subdue another people, there was a secondary need on the part of the English to knock the ancestors of the earlier waves of English settlers down a peg. This latter group were the ‘Old English’, and as their Norman surnames reflected, they descended from the earliest waves of English migration that followed the conquest of Strongbow and others like him. With their castles and their fruitful mercantile and political ties they were tied with the Gaelic nobles as the rulers of Ireland. The nominal authority of England whose name they conquered in was only an afterthought which held sway in ‘the Pale’ i.e. Dublin and its surrounding areas. As early as the 14th century (see the Statutes of Kilkenny) England was having trouble preventing its nominal subjects from forming local loyalties and adapting the customs of the Gaels. These were wealthy merchant families who primarily occupied the cities (see the 14 ‘Tribes’ of Galway), and remained Catholic at the time that the English elite became Protestant. So, while they were in a better position that the Gaelic Catholics, when Cromwell or William captured a city their position was also endangered. Previously there were efforts to win back the discontented Old English but in the 17th century England had had enough.
I’ve been reading an excellent book by David Dickson called “The First Irish Cities”, the first chapter talks about the wallks of each city and the various sieges they repelled or failed to repel. The phrase “expelled the Catholics from the city” happens more times than I care to count. Notably, following these expulsions, there was always an attempt to replace the Old English with another batch of elites imported from England: Protestants who could be trusted never to make friends locally. Sometimes the Old English fared well and retained some of their old privileges, sometimes the Protestants took full control. The latter were the ancestors of the ‘New English’, later becoming the ‘Anglo-Irish’ as the Old English Catholics and Gaels came together to form the Irish (in the 20th century these Anglo-Irish would also be brought into the fold, with the Ulster Protestants being the last people on the island to reject a shared nationhood).
Before looking at why this replacement was undertaken it’s important to look at why Ireland was a geopolitical threat to England’s western flank. Firstly the rebellious Catholic Gaelic lords who had not been subdued were a direct military threat, harassing the English of ‘The Pale’ and posing a threat which culminated in the Nine Years War of 1593-1603, where 30,000 English soldiers died. There was the threat of foreign intervention aided by discontened locals, Spanish support in the Nine Years War, and French support in the Williamite War being the prime examples of this. Lastly Ireland was a safe haven for the losing side in England’s dynastic wars: the Yorkists launching an invasion of England via Ireland, the Confederate-Royalist alliance that drew Cromwell into Ireland, and the support for King James II in the Williamite Wars. These latter wars were not instigated solely by outside powers but also by the English elite that sourced its power in Ireland.
Whether they conceptualised it as such at the time, England’s problem was now less about conquering the Irish and more how to find a suitable elite to rule them. The Norman ancestors of the Old English had proven troublesome before and though only a portion had ever taken part in the great rebellions of the Irish Earls, their loyalty was again under question with the gulf of religious difference having opened up. In the colonies England could rely on an elite that would not form ties with the locals, and a native populace who garnered no sympathy from the other European powers, but Ireland’s Catholics, both Gaelic and Old English, had too much in common with each other and had far too open channels with Europe to be ignored. The solution to this was two-pronged, firstly the plantations attempted to simply replace the natives with British settlers who would remain loyal to England (and later Britain). In most cases these attempts were failures, with Ulster being the only success story and only the north-east which was privately planted being a truly thorough replacement.
The second effort, in those places where plantations failed, was to replace the local Old English elite with New English Protestants in towns which had rebelled and been conquered (every one of Ireland’s 10 urban areas had faced a siege at some point from 1641 to 1700, most more than once.) In many cases this was executed imperfectly, with the Old English fleeing only temporarily and carving out a place for themselves once more in the Restoration period. Cork is an illustrative example of this, quoting from David Dickson’s ‘The First Irish Cities’:
Cork before the Confederate wars had been similar to Limerick and Waterford: an Old English urban community enjoying strong commercial links with France and the English West Country, and a record of hostility towards the new religion and, more obliquely, towards New English settlers in their midst. Since the 1580s the latter had infiltrated much of Cork’s hinterland, and New English merchants gained a strong foothold in the nearby ports of Kinsale and Youghal in the decades leading up to 1641 - but not in Cork city itself. There, nearly every building in the city and suburbs was still owned by an Old English family in 1640, in what was a bustling, expanding town dominated by a small knot of inter-connected families. The Confederate wars changed all that: after the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion, thanks to a large garrison, military control of the city remained in royalist and therefore Protestant hands. But Protestant disillusion with the royalist cause led in 1644 to a tactical switch of allegiances to the English Parliament. This in turn led to the wholesale expulsion of its ‘Irish and Catholic’ citizenry that summer, a poor return for their huge financial outlay in support of the royalist cause over the previous three years. It was indeed a highly controversial action by the garrison commander, the Earl of Inchiquin, but it set the precedent for urban ‘cleansing’ in other cities over the next dozen years. Some of the empty Cork ‘city’ houses were taken by the ‘English’ inhabitants of the suburbs, and many of those displaced from the city travelled no further than Cove Lane or Shandon (where, it seems, a Catholic chape was established in 1645). Some of the expelled were briefly re-admitted in 1649 when the garrison’s loyalties changed again, only to be ejected once more when the city surrendered quietly to Cromwell later that year. From 1649 the island parishes for the first tme became overwhelmingly Protestant, with some of the new residents having Munster roots, but many of them were immigrants.
By 1661 the ‘English’ constituted 65 per cent of taxpaying adults within the walls and 46 per cent of the city and suburbs overall. In the following quarter century, this essentially new urban community was responsible for a commercial transformation of the port, making Cork a far busier place than either Limerick or Galway. The old merchant families managed to recover some of their city properties in the 1660s, but they played only a secondary role in the boom.
Despite the compromises won by the Old English, the cities had been injected with a truly loyal populace. Outside the walls things were even more certain, as the Kingdom of England became the ‘Kingdom of Great Britain’ and then the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’, the New English became the Anglo-Irish. Outside the towns they were the much reviled ‘absentee landlords’ who, though often living in Britain, controlled vast tracts of land and watched from afar as their agents dealt with the agitation of the tenant-farmers. These people had little to gain from striking political deals with the Irish, and were far more directly under the eye of British authorities. Though the victory was not complete in the 17th century, the actions taken then would go on to solve the problem of a disloyal elite. It wasn’t until the arrival of mass politics in the 19th century and the emancipation of Catholics that they would once again have to worry about whether to placate or subject the politically powerful in Ireland. As one Irish historian put it in 1918 “There was peace in the land, but it was the peace of a vast desolation”.
At the danger of simplifying things, I could theorise and say that Ireland’s example is illustrative of a rank order of the most favourable political circumstances for controlling land abroad:
The worst is that of disloyal natives and a mix of loyal and openly disloyal settler elites. This was the case of Ireland and it’s Gaelicised Norman nobility before the 16th century. It could be said that elites gravitate towards the nearest power base whatever their nominal loyalties are. Gaelic lords had substantial political and military power (if not for a shortage of ammunition preventing a rout from turning into a slaugher and allowing time for reinforcements the Gaelic Lords would likely have defeated England in the first stage of the war). The proximity to a Gealic power base meant that the Old English gravitated more to Ireland than to the Crown.
Better than this (though only slightly) is that of powerless natives and elites with power to resist the central authority. After the Nine Years War and the Flight of the Earls the native elites were no longer a problem, but the Old English could still exert power in their ancestral home when they didn’t like the way things were going - for instance when the Irish Confederates supported the Royalists against the Parliamentarians or when King James II arrived to build an army in Ireland.
Thirdly we have a situation where the natives have been partially replaced by settlers but enough natives remain such that the settlers have something to fear, and so they have good reason to seek the favour of the central authority. Protestant settlers in Northern Ireland were in this position. As Conor Cruise O’Brien put it, writing in the 1970s:
The population of Northern Ireland consists of about two-thirds Protestants to one-third Catholics. But Protestant fear of suspicion and Catholics in Northern Ireland do not correspond to these proportions, but to the proportions between Catholic and Protestant in the entire island of Ireland, in which Protestants are outnumbered by Catholics by more than three to one.
This I think marks the important distinction from the unfavourable situation in America where, like in Ireland, the natives were replaced by settlers and the settlers had developed a homegrown elite, yet the Americans had so succesfully colonised their country that they had no real need of Britain and so no real reason for continued loyalty. There were inklings of this in Ireland when after a long century of peace the primarily Presbytarian ‘United Irishmen’ led a rebellion in 1798, but this was rather an exception that proved the rule and Protestant fears of priest-led sectarian mobs were heightened. As for Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I’m afraid that’s a blind spot for my theory and I don’t know enough about either of them to comment, though I suspect fear of America was a motivator for Canada’s continued loyalty to Britain given the fact that Irish-American invaders in the ‘Fenian raids’ were a catalyst for their becoming a nation.
Lastly, where the central power cannot control an area in full, the best scenario for rule is that of a loyal elite presiding over a disloyal, but disarmed and impoverished native population. Without the means or the ability to organise the native threat is diminished and the problem becomes a much smaller one of keeping the elites loyal. And, unlike those pesky Americans protesting their breaches of their inherited rights as Englishmen, a population composed mostly of disenfranchised natives is unlikely to find a sympathetic ear amongst the local elite or articulate troubling demands for autonomy deriving from their historically equal status. Before the overlord country decides for its own reasons to enfranchise the natives of its colony, the only options in this state are submission, appeal to more sympathetic outside powers, or war.
This was the case with the Anglo-Irish elite who oversaw the final destruction of the Irish language and its culture in the 19th century, and who remained steadfast in their loyalty to Britain with only some exceptions. I said that the arrival of mass politics is what disturbed Britain’s rule in the end, this isn’t entirely true. Not even Catholic emancipation undid the power of the landlords. A long path of political agitation and organisation was needed to make even the demand for partial autonomy in the Home Rule Movement, and it was only with Irish-American support and some very lucky radicals that the Irish won total independence from Britain (I could write another whole post on this). It’s fitting that this was the pattern in most colonies that didn’t achieve their independence until well into the 20th century.