Political Charity: The 1642 Collection for the Relief of His Majesties Distressed Subjects in Ireland

Abstract

AbstractThis article revisits the 1642 Collection for the relief of the Protestant victims of the 1641 Irish Uprising. Based on an analysis of all extant (English) parish returns, it explores how the act of charity was understood by the thousands who contributed and what its consequences were for popular engagement in the politics of a country on the edge of civil war. Despite the relative historiographical neglect of the returns, the article seeks to show that they provide valuable evidence of politics at the most local level of the early modern state and society that contradicts an earlier historiographical emphasis on localism as the defining characteristic of provincial popular politics. Contributing to the Collection offered recognition and role to groups otherwise largely excluded by age, gender and class from formal participation in the politics of parish and nation. Conceived as an exercise in charitable benevolence to co‐religionists, the Collection demonstrates the political potential opened up in the politics of the gift, suggesting the possibilities of a protestant association with expansive boundaries and wider membership. In a political culture in which anti‐popery provided an imminent language to explain that crisis, a charitable collection for the protestant victims of Catholic cruelty was necessarily political and made the parish a space for political talk. Contextualising the Collection in the contemporaneous set of subscriptions to petitions and oath‐taking required from local communities, the article demonstrates how these developments helped politicise the parish and mobilise the country in the English Revolution.