Godly charity or political aid? Irish protestants and international Calvinism, 1641–1645

Abstract

The rebellion of Irish catholics in October I64I and the accompanying atrocities committed against protestant settlers in Ulster are generally acknowledged to have exercised considerable influence over the political events leading up to the Civil War in England. Fears of invasion by marauding Irish catholics, and the suspicion that Charles I would use the rebellion as a pretext for raising an army against parliament, were widespread in England. Some contemporary observers, such as Clarendon and Richard Baxter, considered the Irish massacre and rebellion crucial in precipitating the armed confrontation between king and parliament which followed. News of the events in Ireland reached London in November and lurid and sensationalized descriptions were immediately published in a stream of broadsheets and pamphlets, often with dramatic titles such as, 'Bloody newes from Ireland, or the barbarous crueltie by the papists used in that kingdome'. The significance of the Irish rebellion for the subsequent political and religious developments in England has long been accepted. It has, however, been largely forgotten that Calvinists perceived the rebellion as yet another incident in the host of persecutions they were confronted with in the early seventeenth century. Similarly, it has gone unnoticed that the rebellion gave rise to a charitable collection in the United Provinces for suffering, Irish 'brethren in Christ'. In what follows I shall argue that this collection among the Reformed communities in the Netherlands was initiated by godly Englishmen for political, as well as religious reasons, and furthermore that it was never exactly what it pretended to be. The number and the character of the tracts pouring out from the printing presses in London in the I 64os brings to mind the wealth of pamphlets published 20 years earlier during the first years of the Thirty Years' War which had threatened the very existence of European protestantism. Then, the tracts had been primarily concerned with the dangers to the Reformed communities in Bohemia and the German Palatinate. In I 64I the same fear of a catholic conspiracy to eradicate European Calvinism is in evidence in the tracts dealing with the Irish rebellion. To Calvinists, the disturbances in Ireland only represented yet another instance where the godly had to face the forces of AntiChrist. That, at least, was the way most English puritans interpreted events in Ireland. The puritan artisan, Nehemiah Wallington, saw the rebellion as being part of a great catholic plan stretching back to the Spanish Armada in I588. It demonstrated 'how Antichrist, even those bloody-hearted Papists, doth plot against the poor Church of God'.' John Dillingham, Lord Montague's chief informant in London, had no doubt that the Irish rebellion was part of a great catholic scheme, 'we are diverted from