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I

In 1741, Sir Richard Cox contemplated writing the history of Ireland. Intending to focus on the reigns of Elizabeth I and James VI and I, together with the wars started in 1641 and 1688, he doubted 'if any revolutions of the world afford a more copious subject of history'. Cox meant the English victories over the insurgent Irish, each of which had been followed by the transfer of property and power to Protestants, often recently arrived in Ireland from Scotland, Wales and England. Earlier in the eighteenth century, the archbishop of Dublin, William King, lamented the failure of his contemporaries to write an adequate history of the island. He conceded that it would be an intractable task, likely to yield 'a virulent libel, both on the conquerors and conquered'. King could recall 'no example of a country above 500 years in the possession of a people without settling it in a prospect of peace or bringing the conquered into the interest of the conquerors' other than Ireland.

Neither Cox nor King undertook the taxing project. King himself and Cox's grandfather, the first Sir Richard, had earlier written to uphold the English title to and Williamite reconquest of the kingdom. Each personified not just the prevalent attitudes among the Protestant population, but its different strands. Archbishop King, although a dignitary of the episcopalian Church of Ireland, descended from Scottish Presbyterians who had settled in seventeenth-century Ulster. Cox's forebears had established themselves in the southern province of Munster early in the seventeenth century. There, his grandfather, the first Sir Richard Cox, had risen from modest beginnings, thanks to the law and public offices, to a position, adorned with a baronetcy, as a landed proprietor. Coming relatively late into the game, the elder Cox was edged towards the wilder uplands of West Cork. Others had already grabbed the more accessible and fertile places. Indeed, Munster had one of the denser concentrations of Protestants. In 1641 there were an estimated 22,000; by 1660, perhaps 30,000. Even so, if the newcomers commandeered property, they remained in a numerical minority and as a result felt vulnerable. Unevenly spread over the province, they tended - as elsewhere in Ireland - to congregate in the lush valleys, around the coast and in the relatively safe boroughs and ports. West of the River Shannon, the Protestant presence was even sparser. In 1732, there were supposed to be no more than 4,299 Protestant families in the province of Connacht. This was less than a tenth of the total population. Again outposts such as the town of Sligo exerted a magnetic appeal to the Protestants. Sponsored townships, like Newport Pratt - named for its owner, the government functionary John Pratt - on the seaboard of Mayo, harboured others.

Outside Munster, only in Ulster and Dublin were the total and proportion of Protestants in the population greater. In the seventeenth century, Ulster, like Munster, saw the dispossession of many existing owners and the assisted or voluntary arrival of substitutes. By the 1630s, the area may have had 15,000 British settlers, and double that number by 1660. Ulster, because close to Scotland and north-western England, and seemingly welcoming to Protestant newcomers, continued longer than Munster to attract immigrants. Particularly in the 1690s, grim conditions in western Scotland propelled more to the north of Ireland: perhaps 50,000 or even 80,000. Some did not linger long. Recession and hardships propelled Ulster Scots further west, to north America. Nevertheless, by 1732, Protestants formed a majority of the inhabitants in six of the nine counties of Ulster. In Antrim, they amounted to 81 per cent; in Down, 73 per cent. Overall, there were thought to be 62,624 Protestant families (or households) in the province, or nearly 60 per cent of all inhabitants.

Dublin, thanks to its unique combination of functions - as capital, port, administrative, judicial, educational and cultural centre - enticed the ambitious or desperate from the rest of Ireland, as well as from overseas. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Protestants preponderated there. In 1732, they amounted to two-thirds of its recorded inhabitants. By 1706, its population was reckoned at 62,000; by 1760, perhaps 145,000. According to these estimates, it housed a concentration of between 44,000 and 75,000 Protestants. This made it the Protestant stronghold within Ireland, as well as the second most populous city in the Hanoverians' empire. However, the Protestant majority was gradually but inexorably eroded over the eighteenth century, adding to the tensions within the metropolis. Elsewhere, no other town approached Dublin either in size or proportion of Protestants. The capital's nearest rival, Cork, numbered about 18,000 heads in 1706, around 37,570 by 1744, and approximately 55,640 in 1760. Of these between 33 and 40 per cent were Protestants. Other towns, smaller than Cork, let alone Dublin, also accommodated smaller proportions of Protestants in 1732: Limerick just under 30 per cent; Drogheda, 26.5 per cent; Kilkenny, 20.5 per cent and Galway, no more than 13 per cent.

The revolutions benefited the forebears of Cox and King. Beneficiaries laboured to consolidate, celebrate and defend their gains, both through public activism and by their pens. Yet, despite the grandeur of the proposed theme, the younger Cox's history was never completed or published. Nor were the other schemes to write the natural and civil histories of Ireland mooted by Protestant profiteers and prophets. This failure was symptomatic of the incurious and repetitive nature of most of what was printed about Ireland between the 1650s and 1760s. Numerous brochures purported to tell of Protestant Ireland. In general, they justified rather than regretted the sequence of reconquests and settlements, enforced and spontaneous, by and from Britain, which had created the dominant communities over which the likes of Cox lorded. Usually the older Ireland, with Gaelic social organization and Catholic loyalties, was decried. English and Scottish interventions were - for the most part - celebrated, although it was sometimes regretted that they had not achieved more. The literature, certainly abundant, was both partisan and derivative. Indeed, those from Ireland were tempted to devote more attention to exotic localities, such as Poland, the United Provinces or Denmark, than to their own kingdom.

Two such travellers, Sir William Temple and Robert Molesworth, did look at aspects of Ireland, but cursorily. Their tracts aimed to lift Ireland to continental standards of industry and prosperity, rather than to describe its topography or classify its inhabitants. Increased travel worsened the habit among some born in Ireland of belittling their island. To the familiar lament that Ireland failed to meet the standards of lowland Britain was added dismay at how far Ireland lagged behind continental Europe. Just as dazed or dazzled tourists wrote accounts which, when not simply filched from handy guides, followed conventions, entrenched stereotypes and hardly engaged with what had been seen, so reporters from Ireland fell into the same trap. A treatise of 1673, promising to be fresh, repeated verbatim (and unacknowledged) what had been published earlier in the century by Sir John Davies.

Themes of social and cultural change - whether projected or achieved (such as those identified by Cox) - thread through the disquisitions. Two, widely separated in time but both influential, suggest that much altered between the 1650s and 1760s. During the Cromwellian interregnum, Richard Lawrence, an army officer from England, followed numerous precedents in arguing that Ireland would be safe and prosper only when Protestants were everywhere substituted for the incumbent Catholics. Most urgently, the social, religious and military leaders of Catholic Ireland should be expropriated and expelled. Even the generality of the population, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, were best removed to the distant and inhospitable regions beyond the River Shannon. Universal exile, whether internal or external, proved impracticable, and the plan was quickly forgotten. In time, too, Lawrence's own ferocity softened. By the 1680s, coming to know Ireland better as a resident, investor and trader, he realized that apparent underdevelopment was not explained solely by the shortcomings of the Catholic majority. Much responsibility rested with mistaken policies imposed from London. But he also blamed the recently settled Protestants. A few succumbed to luxury and vice; others, conspicuously in Dublin, sank into poverty. Ominously, traits previously ascribed to Catholic ignorance and indolence were appearing among the newcomers from England, Wales and Scotland. In analysing the causes, Lawrence traced much to the makers of policy. Attitudes hostile to trade and manufacture had a further depressing effect. Yet, his analysis was set in a frame in which economic torpor and social ills arose ultimately from moral failings and invited divine rebukes. Only obliquely, through strictures against selfish peers and pretentious merchants, did Lawrence address some of the structures in this world.

Critiques of the behaviour of the Protestants in Ireland began even before Lawrence wrote. The shock of the 1641 uprising, when Irish Catholics rose, stimulated introspection. The Protestants' greed and selfishness had made them neglect their wider duties to the entire population in Ireland. Over the next century, preachers, invited to ruminate on the past, present and future of the Protestants in Ireland, alternated between optimism and gloom. Some were cheered by evidence of peace, industry, prosperity, spreading Protestantism and even social change. Others were despondent when they detected only poverty, unrest (either open or latent), irreligion, emboldened and expanding Catholicism and a society seemingly impervious to the cultural and social forces animating Britain and continental Europe. Secular commentary similarly veered between jubilation and dejection. Firmly among the optimists was the author of a volume, published in 1759, which surveyed the state of Ireland. Much, it seemed, had improved since Lawrence issued his jeremiads. In particular, the prosperous, whether peers, landowners or professionals, discharged their assorted functions conscientiously. In countries other than Ireland, it was conceded, might be found 'many of more popular bustle and éclat, more extensive commerce, greater opulence and pomp, but none of more general, solid and intrinsic worth'. This encomium to the locals, no less than Lawrence's disparagement, spoke of the moment. In 1759-60, new moves were afoot to unite Ireland with England, and on terms detrimental to the smaller kingdom. It was important for the patriotic within Protestant Ireland to emphasize how successfully it was being run. Earlier, Lawrence had moved from demanding the absolute subordination of Ireland to English needs to an appreciation that it was better governed by those familiar with and interested in its affairs. He too, against the grain of his aggressive anti-Irishness of the 1650s, espoused Irish interests and bewailed English mistakes. He dreamed that Ireland might be turned into 'West England'. By 1759, although that term was not used, some celebrated the solid progress towards that goal. Celebrants of material and ethical betterment expressed a popular variety of patriotism. The achievements, Irish Protestant patriots averred, were only possible thanks to the large measure of control which they exercised over their own affairs.

Lawrence and later writers offered lengthy accounts of Ireland. Although they did not aim at the statistical precision of the contemporary political arithmeticians, they provided ample detail on economy and society. Their purposes and perspectives distorted their writings. Undoubtedly, in the intervening century, much had changed. But, according to the attitude of the commentator, the extent and speed of those changes might be either exaggerated or minimized. Nor did the attitudes themselves remain constant over a century. As the years of peace lengthened, some took a more relaxed view of the Catholic majority. Their world was no longer always regarded as threatening. Environments once described simply as dangerously primitive were compared either with the commonplace or the exotic. The imaginative saw the decaying splendours of the County Limerick town of Kilmallock as evidence of former grandeur, and likened it to Baalbek and Palmyra. The younger Cox pricked the pretensions of colleagues by asserting that Ireland was no more important than Corsica. Such comparisons set the kingdom securely in the context of European, not outlandish, civilizations. What once had been decried as barbarous was now thought merely backward. In part, this was because the presumptions of visitors had changed, as well as what they saw. Typical of the altered attitude was the injunction to treat the Irish as 'fellow subjects', with 'good manners, humanity and charity'. By 1759, the consciously polite responded to the evidence that at least some among the leaders of Protestant Ireland had embraced the new codes of politeness. In contrast, back in the 1650s, criteria other than politeness and sociability were invoked to isolate Irish shortcomings. Yet, if the terminology (and perhaps the thinking behind it) changed, there were continuities. Certain enduring features - Catholicism, poverty or industry - still excited the same reactions. In consequence, any attempt to reconstruct the lineaments of Protestant Ireland between the 1650s and 1760s has not only to grapple with sparse or defective data but also with perplexing, cryptic and inconsistent approaches. Especially in questions of stratification and differentiation, what contemporaries thought rather than what, in retrospect, can be shown to have happened, helps more in reconstructing the contours of a changing society.

Topographical set-pieces, celebrations of change as 'improvements' and admonitions to speed those changes, took the place of social analysis. Yet the upheavals of seventeenth-century Ireland stimulated exact enquiries into who owned what. Large tracts of the island were mapped more accurately. Property-owners were inventoried, usually as the prelude to their expropriation or taxation. In order to decide how inhabitants were to be treated they were classified according to confession. The authorities worried that Ireland, even more than England, was underpopulated. Additionally, it contained too few Protestants and too many Catholics. In order to document these assertions, in 1736 there were published enumerations, county by county, of how many Catholic and Protestant families each contained.

Continues...

Excerpted from A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770 by Toby Barnard Copyright © 2003 by Toby Barnard
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.