“Beasts with Claws”: The English Republic, the Presbyterian Peril, and the Ulster Question

Robert Armstrong

doi:10.1017/jbr.2021.120

Abstract

AbstractAmong the multitude of enemies facing the newly born English republic, the Presbyterians of Ulster posed a threat at once ideological and military. Such supporters of the new regime as John Milton derided the “blockish presbyters” of a “remote” province and denounced them as Scottish intruders upon English soil. But the threat they posed lay not only in their capacity to mobilize an armed population but to do so around religious and political positions drawn from a common stock of ideas present across the three kingdoms. The twin dangers could be made to serve polemical purposes within domestic English debate as the Commonwealth sought to counter the religious ambitions and constitutional challenges of those they branded as “Scottified” Presbyterians. In Ulster, the short-lived Presbyterian “revolt” proved a remarkable though fleeting success. Its proponents cultivated these transplanted ideas into fertile if fragile growth in the form of armed organization and communal mobilization. This episode attests to the importance of localizing ideology in precise contexts, and to the fact that print was only one vector, if a vital one, for its transmission.

Highlights

“God hath eminently begun to punish those, first in Scotland, in Ulster, who have provok’d him with the most hatefull kind of mockery, to break his Covnant under pretence of strictest keeping it; and hath subjected themselves to those Malignants, with whom they scrupl’d not to be associats.”[1]
Among the multitude of enemies facing the newly born English republic, the Presbyterians of Ulster posed a threat at once ideological and military. Such supporters of the new regime as John Milton derided the “blockish presbyters” of a “remote” province and denounced them as Scottish intruders upon English soil. The threat they posed lay in their capacity to mobilize an armed population but to do so around religious and political positions drawn from a common stock of ideas present across the three kingdoms
By the time John Milton included this claim in the closing pages of his Eikonoklastes, published in the autumn of 1649, the English Commonwealth had faced the rapid rise and swift demise of a significant challenge to its authority from among the Presbyterian population of the northern Irish province of Ulster

Summary

Introduction

“God hath eminently begun to punish those, first in Scotland, in Ulster, who have provok’d him with the most hatefull kind of mockery, to break his Covnant under pretence of strictest keeping it; and hath subjected themselves to those Malignants, with whom they scrupl’d not to be associats.”[1].

Results

Conclusion