Irish Protestant Research Articles

Irish rugby and the First World War

This article explores the relationship between Irish rugby and the First World War. When the war initially broke out, the response of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) was much in keeping with that of their English counterpart: fixtures were cancelled and clubs were encouraged to urge enlistment among players and members. The IRFU set up a Volunteer Corps from which a ‘pals’ regiment fought at Gallipoli. Yet for all this ostensibly selfless support, the game of rugby in Ireland, collectively, had a complex relationship with the War. Though rugby players in significant numbers signed up, the motivations for enlistment were complex and contingent upon multiple factors, many of which may not have been rugby-related. Nevertheless, the rugby establishment in Ireland attempted to carve out a special claim for the game of rugby union and its contribution to war effort. This was done mainly through sympathetic newspaper editorials highlighting the sacrifice of individual clubs and players, and making favourable comparisons between the war record of rugby union and other less ‘loyal’ sports. It is argued, ultimately, that the sport may have made exaggerated claims for itself and that these, in turn, were inspired by a hostile political context that threatened the position of southern Irish protestants, the group from which the rugby establishment was largely drawn.

‘Yrelandtsche traenen’ gedroogd

Abstract Drying Irish tears. Transnational solidarity and local politics in Zeeland, 1641-1644This article shows how a local consistory from the province of Zeeland, driven by Calvinist loyalty and concern about the national church and state caused by the outbreak of the First English Civil War, laid the foundation for a charitable collection for Irish Protestants. It reviews the effectiveness of transnational Calvinist networks in generating political and financial support for the Puritan cause even though it contravened the official Dutch policy of neutrality. Decentralization of the collection enabled the authorities to avoid conflict with their Puritan citizens and to maintain consensus, thus maintaining the Republic’s ideal of harmony. Loyalty with fellow believers, the effective use of local lobbying networks, and the decentralized structure of the Dutch Republic were all crucial in the success of this collection. This case shows that international Calvinist solidarity did not necessarily depend on action at the national level but could be triggered by local initiative.

The marriage plot and the plot against the Union: Irish Home Rule and endangered alliances in Henry James's “The Modern Warning”

By the period of the Irish Home Rule crisis – in which Catholics and liberal Anglicans lobbied for limited self-government while northern Presbyterians campaigned to keep Ulster wholly within the Union between Ireland and Great Britain of 1800 – certain of those of pre-Famine northern Irish Protestant origins (the “Scots-” or “Scotch-Irish”) identified with the position of their Presbyterian brethren in Ulster. This identifiably Ulster Protestant engagement with the Home Rule debate is detectable (and generally overlooked) in the Scots-Irish Henry James story “The Modern Warning”. Moreover, equally discounted is the fact that James's story deploys the Irish literary convention of the marriage plot as metaphor for political union in order to grapple with a moment in which that alliance is – in the unionists' view – in danger. This article concludes that the political-union-as-marriage trope still sporadically returns at moments of political crisis in the British Isles, as occurred during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate.

Securing the Hanoverian Succession in Ireland: Jacobites, Money and Men, 1714–16

This article examines the connection between issues of security, finance and the army in Ireland in the years 1714–16. The death of Queen Anne and succession of the first Hanoverian monarch, George I, in August 1714, offered renewed hope to the supporters of the jacobite cause in Ireland, Scotland, England and beyond. However, the threat of a Stuart restoration by force of arms served to galvanise the efforts of government in both England and Ireland in support of the Hanoverian succession, though the necessary military preparations and precautions resulted in increased public expenditure. In Ireland, the government's need to find new sources of revenue meant that parliament would have to be convened, which, in turn, necessitated compliance with a series of constitutional practices which had evolved since the 1690s in relation to Poynings' Law and supply legislation. Yet, despite a threatened jacobite invasion, factional political manœuvring, as ever, demanded compromise, though, ultimately, the wholly protestant Irish parliament took the necessary precautions to secure Ireland for the new Hanoverian regime by voting new taxes and facilitating the creation of a national debt in order to raise new regiments for the army. The coalescing of the issues of security, finance and the army thereby led to innovations in Irish parliamentary and financial practice which were to become key components of the constitutional framework in Ireland until legislative independence in 1782.

Contesting and upholding the rights of the Irish Parliament in 1698: the arguments of William Molyneux and Simon Clement

SUMMARYThis paper explores the constitutional relationship between England and Ireland at the end of the seventeenth century with a focus on the contemporary debate around the prerogative of the Irish legislature. It examines and contrasts the arguments developed in the pamphlets of William Molyneux of Dublin (1656–98), representing the ruling Irish Protestant nation, and of English Whig Simon Clement (1654?–1730?), asserting the rights of the English empire. Molyneux's The Case of Ireland's being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (Dublin, 1698) and Clement's An answer to Mr. Molyneux his case of Ireland's being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, stated: and his dangerous notion of Ireland's being under no subordination to the parliamentary authority of England refuted by reasoning from his own arguments and authorities (London, 1698) are compared and analysed in the context of renewed tensions around the woollen trade. These pamphlets highlight the nature, and the perceived nature, of the constitutional relationship between the two polities in the aftermath of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. The main discussion was whether Ireland was a colony of England or an independent kingdom, and how its nature affected the relationship between both legislatures. Molyneux argued that Ireland, although sharing a monarch with England, was an independent kingdom. To Molyneux, Ireland's independence, as a kingdom, signified the independence of its legislature and the unconstitutionality of the English Parliament's claim to legislate for Ireland. Clement refuted Molyneux's assertions point by point, contending that Ireland was part and parcel of an empire. In Clement's opinion, Ireland's subjection to England meant that the English Parliament had a legitimate right to legislate for Ireland.

Diasporic religion: The Irish and Northern Irish in England

The current research assesses the religious orientations of Irish and Northern Irish Catholic and Protestant migrants in England related to the suggestion that immigration to a comparatively irreligious society increases religious awareness. Participants were 391 opportunity- and snowball-sampled individuals, where 171 were members of the Northern Irish Diaspora, 54 were members of the Republic of Ireland Diaspora and 166 were members of the English Control Group. Findings suggest that the Irish and Northern Irish migrant groups showed significantly higher levels of religious commitment than their English counterparts, although these diasporic groups did not differ from each other in terms of their levels of commitment. Findings are discussed with reference to the impact of religion on migration, Catholic and Protestant religious practices, and the impact of church activities on religious commitment.

Personal Narratives of Family and Ethnic Identity: Orangewomen in Scotland and England, c.1940–2010

Using interviews with 10 Orangewomen from England and Scotland, this article analyses how women could articulate a sense of ethnic identity through membership of the Orange Order during the second half of the twentieth century. What emerged from their reflections was a sense of how Irish Protestant identity interacted with, and was shaped by, Scottish, English and British identities. This article argues that these women's identity was rooted, for most, in a family background in Scotland and Ireland, which was strongly intertwined with their membership of the Orange Order. The example of the female Orange Order demonstrates that identities can be formed through the close interplay of family and ethnic associational life, suggesting ways in which historians of migration might further explore the interaction of migrants' public and private lives.

William Monsell of Tervoe, 1812–1894, by Matthew Potter

Matthew Potter’s biography of William Monsell is one of a number of recent studies of nineteenth-century Irish people whose political views initially seem at odds with their religious beliefs, in a society in which religious confession was a reliable predictor of attitudes to that overwhelming question of Irish life: the utility and desirability of the Union with Great Britain. Most of these have been studies of Irish Protestant nationalists: for example, Colin Reid’s biography of Stephen Gwynn, Marnie Hay’s study of Bulmer Hobson, Paul Bew’s recent reappraisal of Charles Stewart Parnell, and this reviewer’s own monograph framed around Alfred Webb. A study of a Catholic Unionist such as Monsell is a welcome addition. William Monsell was a wealthy landowner in south-west Ireland who married into the gentry. Educated in England at Winchester and Oriel College, Oxford, he was ‘much more English than any of his immediate ancestors’, but ‘paradoxically’, Potter explains, it was his exposure to the Tractarian Movement in Oxford, and in particular his friendship with John Henry Newman, which led him to convert from the Church of Ireland to the Roman Catholic Church (p. 14). The fact of an Irish Protestant converting to Catholicism was unusual in itself, but Monsell’s trajectory was particulary unexpected because it did not have a political catalyst. Whereas other contemporaries may have converted as a final step into their embrace of Irish nationalism (for example, Joseph Biggar or Roger Casement), ironically, Monsell’s conversion to Catholicism had an English ideological context, not an Irish one.

Apocalyptic Ireland: 1580–1641

Historians of early-modern Ireland have studied in some detail the association between religion and violence, but have failed to appreciate one important theological force—the application of apocalyptic passages of the bible to contemporary events. This ‘presentist’ interpretation of prophecy, common throughout Reformation Europe, began to be used in Ireland by Protestant soldiers, officials, and writers from the time of the Desmond Rising in 1579 onwards. By identifying the Pope as Antichrist, and Catholics as his followers, it served to sharpen the antipathy between Protestants and Catholics, and justify violent actions such as the massacre of the Spanish troops at Smerwick in 1580. The advent of peace in 1603 and the rise of Arminianism in England limited official enthusiasm for apocalyptic, but its central position in the Irish Protestant imagination was reinforced by the 1641 rising, which seemed to confirm biblical prophecies about the severity of the Antichristian Catholic threat.

The Emergence of Women's Orange Lodges in Scotland: gender, ethnicity and women's activism, 1909–1940

This article explores the emergence of female Orange lodges in Scotland during the first half of the twentieth century. It uses rare Orange archival records and newspaper sources to establish Orangewomen's working-class background and to analyse their public activism, from fundraising for maternal and child welfare, to political campaigns against Home Rule and in Education Authority elections. While anti-Home Rule politics before the Great War and anti-Catholic politics during the 1920s influenced women's engagement with the Orange Order to an extent, this article argues that the timing and conditions in which female lodges emerged were determined more by broader debate about women's role in public life. Orangewomen did not participate in Edwardian or interwar feminist campaigns but these, together with women's economic and social gains during the First World War, did create the conditions in which women could gain numbers and status within the Orange Order. Moreover, women played a key role in shaping the shifting ethnic identification of the Orange Order during the interwar period, demonstrating the durable, malleable and gendered nature of Irish Protestant ethnic identity in twentieth-century Scotland.

Exodus: The Emigration of Southern Irish Protestants During the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War

Exodus: The Emigration of Southern Irish Protestants During the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War

Southern Magnolias and Orange Lilies: Gender, Class, and School Integration at Central High and Holy Cross

Scholars have written volumes regarding pro-active American Southern and Northern Irish women in the American civil rights movement and Northern Ireland's troubles. This work generally examines the South’s white, upper-class integrationists and Northern Ireland's Catholic Republicans, while Southern working-class segregationists and Northern Ireland's Protestant Loyalists are ignored. These women and the reasons for invisibility in historical records are similar. Both cultures demanded feminine submission to their place, serving God and man, Dixie and Ulster; conservatism discouraged females from politics. This explores the unusual public stance of Southern workingclass segregationist women and Northern Ireland's working-class Protestant females during Little Rock's Central High School crisis of 1957 and Belfast's Holy Cross Primary School protest of 2001. Segregationists protested integrating black students, while Protestants railed at Catholic families who walked daughters to school via the exclusively Protestant Glenbryn Estate. In analyzing these events, I examine the gender history and traditions of each group. I survey the social environment that motivated these women's protests, and the justifications used to delve into the public arena while defending the status quo. I also examine how these choices altered political roles for both groups in the protests' aftermath. My analysis yields integral conclusions regarding the personal and political ideologies of Southern segregationist and Northern Irish Protestant females. This study explores the fears and anxieties that these females held toward what they regarded as black and Catholic encroachment in societies. My study belongs to a limited body of research that will hopefully begin to provide understanding of the perspectives and consequences of two distantly separated groups of women who have been quieted in the Central High and Holy Cross dramas.

Migration and the Female Orange Order: Irish Protestant Identity, Diaspora and Empire in Scotland, 1909–40

This article examines the role of women's Orange lodges in Scotland in the migration process during the first half of the twentieth century. Historians have emphasised the importance of diasporic connections to Orangemen in England during the Victorian era, but none has addressed the extensive participation of women in the forging of Orange networks, both in Britain and Ireland and throughout the British world, during the twentieth century. This article engages with recent research on migration, diaspora and cultures of the British Empire ‘at home’, arguing that some female Orange lodges supported women's emigration from Scotland, both emotionally and financially, especially during the interwar period. Ceremonies held to mark the departure of migrants, letters written ‘back home’ by Orangewomen who had left Scotland, return journeys to visit the ‘old country’ and newspaper reports of their sisters abroad all had a significant effect on those women who remained in Scotland. Using Avtar Brah's concept of ‘diaspora space’, this article argues that the Orangewomen of Scotland developed a ‘diaspora consciousness’ which was shaped substantially by the Orange Order's ideological commitment to empire. Moreover, this ‘diaspora consciousness’ was experienced not only in the physical space of the city of Glasgow and the lodge room, but also in the imaginative space of the Belfast Weekly News, demonstrating how Orangewomen's diasporic identity was rooted in multiple ‘homelands’ that embraced both Scotland and Ireland, connected by an overarching Irish Protestant identity.

The Gardener and the Stable-Boy: Yeats, MacNeice, and the Problem of Orangeism

W. B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice had much in common. Each had been ‘brought up in an Irish middle-class Protestant family’; each was profoundly affected by family roots in Connaught; both expressed violent and inconsistent responses to Irish political and religious conflicts; both lived mostly in England while preserving their very different Irish identities and accents. Like so many Irish writers adapting to a cosmopolitan world, Yeats and MacNeice found it expedient to conceal or distort certain awkward elements of their background. Being Irish in England was bad enough, without having to overcome liberal repugnance for the arrogance of Yeats’s ‘Anglo-Ireland’ or the bigotry of MacNeice’s ‘Black North’. However eloquently they disowned such stereotypes, neither writer could erase the imprint of a Protestant Irish upbringing. This article explores coded passages in their writings which reveal, when fully contextualized, the importance of Orangeism in their own families (Yeats’s Sligo relatives, MacNeice’s father). Each writer, when alluding to Orangeism, used a surrogate to avoid admitting a family connection (Yeats’s stable-boy in Sligo, MacNeice’s gardener in Carrickfergus). Drawing on unfamiliar biographical and institutional sources, the article indicates what each writer had to hide, and why he wished to hide it. Concealed Orange influences in certain poems by each writer are discussed. For Yeats, Orange ballads provided raw material for his celebration of violence and conflict in later life. For MacNeice, Orangeism took on a more benign aspect as he grew older and became reconciled with the mild puritanism of his once terrifying clergyman-father.

The Making of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy: The Life of William Conolly, 1662–1729, by Patrick Walsh The Conolly Archive, ed. Patrick Walsh and A.P.W. Malcomson

The Making of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy: The Life of William Conolly, 1662–1729, by Patrick Walsh The Conolly Archive, ed. Patrick Walsh and A.P.W. Malcomson

Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830 (review)

Reviewed by: Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830 Matthieu Billings Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830, edited by Warren R. Hofstra, pp. 263. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012. $45. As historians increasingly find themselves defending their profession, they may take solace that their role as "myth-buster" remains secure. During the past decade, a number of American politicians have found it beneficial to advance an uncomplicated historical narrative of one of America's earliest ethnic groups— the Scots-Irish. Ireland's Presbyterian immigrants, so the story goes, isolated themselves culturally, embraced a warlike ethos, fought the establishment, and embodied the individualism quintessential to conservative memories of the American Revolution. With a refreshing degree of coherence, Ulster to America takes aim at such monolithic, racialized depictions. The Scots-Irish identity was not "determined, diffusionist, and immutable," argues the book's editor Warren R. Hofstra, but rather, "conditioned and conditional." Moreover, in contrast to their reputation as backcountry people, these immigrants created a more cosmopolitan America. From seaports to frontier outposts, they engaged in transcontinental networks of commercial, intellectual, and cultural exchange. The Scots-Irish were, in Hofstra's words, "receptive to and reflexive of the main currents of historical change throughout the Atlantic world," With attentiveness to time and place, the historians collected in this volume demythologize popular conceptions of an isolated, individualistic, "frontier" people born to fight. For example, where Richard K. MacMaster concedes that the Scotch-Irish of early eighteenth-century Donegal Springs, Pennsylvania, emphasized individualism in their search for religious "order," he finds later generations in nearby Carlisle valuing community amidst an "expanding consumer revolution." Similarly, Hofstra's analysis of mid-eighteenth-century shop inventories from the isolated region of Opequon, Virginia, demonstrates how a people with limited access to money traded surpluses at a "dispersed general store," thereby creating a community of economic interdependency. Hofstra also [End Page 147] challenges the notion of an inherent warlike predisposition by reminding his readers that gents of the British Empire encouraged both Scots-Irish and German Protestants to settle this region in order to hinder French Catholic expansion. In the afterword, Robert M. Calhoon argues that the Scots-Irish negotiated conflict based upon a culture of "historic moderation." Compellingly, he finds examples of this "framework for survival and equanimity in the midst of intense social strife and political conflict" within many essays of this volume. Ulster to America contributes to the recent dialogue over "identity" constructs and the "Scotch-Irish." Through the 1990s, such historians as Grady McWhiney (Cracker Culture) and David Hackett Fischer (Albion's Seed) emphasized what they saw as enduring folkways of the "Scotch-Irish" migration. Recently, however, Patrick Griffin challenged this premise in The People with No Name (2001) by rejecting a static concept of identity and arguing that movement characterized the "nameless" Presbyterian migrants of Ulster. While the essayists of this compilation accept Griffin's basic argument, they debate a more precise nomenclature in the footnotes. MacMaster and Michael Montgomery, for instance, employ the term "Scotch-Irish," due to its "purely American" origins and relatively "common usage" in the eighteenth century. Hofstra adopts the term "Scots-Irish" precisely because it "has no tradition of historical usage" and therefore "evades partisan association or affiliation." Peter Gilmore and Kerby A. Miller emphasize the historicity of the word "Irish," as it was "the term most commonly employed to designate Ulster Presbyterians (and other Irish Protestants) on both sides of the ocean." Patrick Griffin continues to stress the ambiguity of the term—utilizing "Irish" for the historical experience and "Scotch-Irish" when discussing identity. The disputes over terminology underscore the inadequacy of any simple, triumphalist account of the group's experience; these disagreements bolster rather than detract from the book's overarching argument. Ulster to America is structured chronologically and by migratory order. Each chapter title depicts the Scots-Irish experience as a "search" for something— in most cases reflecting key historiographical debates in Atlantic history. In "Searching for a New World," David W. Miller eschews cultural transference by arguing that Presbyterianism, "the most identifiable surviving baggage of the Scots-Irish immigrations," was not a "precious family heirloom," and that...

The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada (review)

Reviewed by: The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada Peter Baskerville The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada. John Clarke. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Pp. 776, $135.00 A reviewer of Clarke’s first ‘monumental work’ on Essex County, Land, Power and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada, can be forgiven for thinking that that work brought ‘together over thirty-five years of research . . . on the southwesterly tip of Ontario.’ In fact, the book encapsulated some of that research, but not all of it. In Ordinary People, the author’s second detailed and meticulously researched tome on Essex County, Clarke, a historical geographer, shifts his view from the broad context – political, economic, and social – within which rural settlers lived to their actual lived experience, or at least as actual as a forensic analysis of the agricultural and nominal level returns extant in the 1851–2 Canadian census will allow. In a prodigious research effort, Clarke hand-linked those returns to each other and, where feasible, to modern soil surveys, historical land records, and a series of tax assessment rolls in an attempt to explore the relationship between agricultural behaviour and cultural origin. From the perspective of that goal, studying Essex is a good choice: its population was diverse – 38 per cent of the county’s families were headed by French Canadians, 18 per cent by American born, 15 per cent by English Canadians, 14 per cent by those of English origin, 11 per cent by Irish origin, 3 per cent by Scottish origin, and a scattering of others. While Clarke refers throughout to Essex as a frontier area, in fact by 1851–2 the county was very much a long-settled and well-developed agricultural region, ranking in the top 15 per cent of Ontario counties in terms of land occupied and in the top 22 per cent in terms of land cultivated and cropped. These characteristics – maturity and diversity, rather than any claim to representivity – underlay Clarke’s decision to study Essex. Indeed, throughout the book he [End Page 495] emphasizes the need for similar studies of other counties in order to determine degrees of representivity. Clarke uses his rich data to test a number of dominant themes in Ontario’s social and agricultural historiography. Clarke points to Essex as ‘the prototype of the ethnic mosaic’ in terms of distinctive territorial ethnic groupings, few cross-ethnic marriages, and a concentration of land business within ethnic pockets. ‘There was no real mixing,’ he concludes (113). Did wheat dominate? While Clarke’s answer to this question clearly supports the McCalla/McInnis observation that wheat was less than king, the evidence he brings to support this observation is at times confusing. At one point we are told that 40 per cent of the county’s farms with cultivated acres grew one or more acres of wheat in 1851, compared to McInnis’s figure of 92 per cent for 1861 (174). Yet later we are told that 69 per cent of Essex properties with ‘land in crop’ produced wheat, and again this is compared to McInnis’s 92 per cent figure (206). Which is the appropriate comparison? Clarke carefully explores the relationship of French Canadians to agriculture – an often charged theme within central Canadian agricultural historiography – and concludes that the relationship remains an ‘enigma.’ Available evidence points to ’backwardness,’ but, Clarke notes, this has to be tempered by the fact that the bulk of French Canadians in the county lived on the ‘least sustainable soils’ (294). Clarke also looks closely at the behaviour of Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants as farmers and observes that Irish Catholics acquired a great deal of land but produced relatively smaller amounts of crops. Irish Protestants were better producers and from Clarke‘s perspective, somewhat surprisingly, concentrated on corn production – a crop almost unknown to them in Ireland. He points to this as an example of a culture adapting to changed environments. More broadly, Clarke notes that there was a significant difference in agricultural behaviour between those born in North America and those who were immigrants...

Irish Protestant migration and politics in the USA, Canada, and Australia: a debated legacy

In the USA, the rediscovery and celebration of Irish Protestant ancestry has extended in recent years to arguments by some scholars, political journalists, and politicians that there exists today an identifiable Scots-Irish socio-political legacy. This essay explores the history and cultural context of Irish Protestant migration and assesses its contemporary ramifications at the national level and in a critical state-level case (Kentucky). To assist in identifying the factors that have fostered or mitigated Irish Protestant identity/ies, comparisons will be made between the American experience and the very different ones of two other major recipient countries: Canada (and the province of Ontario) and Australia (and the state of New South Wales). Source regions, religious affiliation, the timing and magnitude of mass migration, and settlement patterns have all mattered in determining the socio-political roles played by Irish Protestants in the three former British colonies since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even more important have been the local economic and political contexts, including prevailing political party structures and competition. These factors explain why none of the three case countries, the USA included, bears witness to a coherent, identifiable Irish Protestant socio-political legacy.

The Making of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy: The Life of William Conolly, 1662-1729, by Patrick Walsh.

<i>The Making of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy: The Life of William Conolly, 1662-1729</i>, by Patrick Walsh.

The Making of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy: The Life of William Conolly, 1662-1729 - By Patrick Walsh

The Making of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy: The Life of William Conolly, 1662-1729 - By Patrick Walsh