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

Abstract

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.