Irish Protestant Research Articles

The Creation of State Anniversaries: James VI and I and the Politics of Thanksgiving

Abstract Religious anniversaries ordered by the state—by the monarch, royal council or parliament—were observed in England and Ireland from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. These have been studied chiefly as occasions for special sermons and popular festivities, the expression of English or Irish Protestant national identity, or the pursuit of party controversies. But examination of both the original establishment of state anniversaries by James VI and I, with three appointed during the short period from 1600 to 1605, and the principal documents published for these occasions, the orders and the forms of prayer, brings different perspectives. The anniversaries were British in scope. The first was originally ordered in Scotland, where James developed a politics of thanksgiving that he subsequently re-applied in England and Wales, with anniversaries which were later duplicated in Ireland. The king’s immediate purposes were to assist the management of political and ecclesiastical difficulties, and to advance a closer union of his Scottish and English kingdoms. His long-term aim was to increase the authority and the godly claims of the Stuart dynasty. This promotion of a divine-right British monarchy remained central to the special English and Irish church services which were conducted each year during the following centuries. In so far as the anniversaries came to be concerned with national identities or party causes, these were in tension with the texts and meanings of their religious services.

Black spirituals for Irish evangelicals: the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Irish tours, 1873–6

AbstractFrom 1873 to 1876, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an African-American choral troupe from Nashville, Tennessee visited Ireland three times. This article details their experiences and impressions of the country, focusing especially on the relationship they forged with their Irish evangelical sponsors and audiences. While the Jubilee Singers’ story is typically told as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity, this article argues that there is another way of framing the narrative that emphasises the centrality of evangelical Protestantism to the Jubilee Singers’ mission. The Irish tours brought this dimension into full relief, demonstrating how evangelicalism fostered a degree of mutual understanding between the singers and Irish Protestants while also serving to exclude Irish Catholics. This article also examines audience responses to the Jubilee Singers, particularly the racial and aesthetic concepts they used to describe them. For all that the singers were familiar on account of their faith, they were unfamiliar on account of their race; this tension structured not only Irish responses to the singers, but also the singers’ responses to Ireland.

Colin Barr. Ireland’s Empire: The Roman Catholic Church in the English-Speaking World, 1829–1914.

Throughout much of the English-speaking world, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the words “Irish” and “Catholic” were practically synonymous, and yet historians have lacked a clear answer as to why this was. While most Irish Protestants migrants—beyond the “Scotch-Irish” of the southern United States—evolved from being “Irish” and “Protestant” to merely “Canadian” or “Australian,” Irish Catholics maintained a strong dual identity. Many theories have sought to explain the phenomenon. Some say it lies in the timing or sheer numbers of those Irish Catholics who migrated abroad. Others have suggested it was their shared sense of oppression that kept them together. Still others point to the role of political leaders in binding them as a constituency. There is undoubtedly some truth to all these theories, yet none have been articulated in a single argument supported by primary source evidence. In his excellent new book, Ireland’s Empire: The Roman Catholic Church in the English-Speaking World, 1829–1914, Colin Barr offers one, clear answer: the Roman Catholic Church itself. In Catholic communities all over the world, Irish bishops, priests, and nuns built what Barr calls a “Hiberno-Roman” institution, which “emphasized loyalty to both the papacy and to Ireland, encouraged Irish symbolism and Roman devotions, and insisted on communal cohesion and social separation, especially in education and matrimony” (18). In what Barr admits is a very top-down approach to understanding religion and identity, the book argues that the church’s hierarchy created a sociotheological framework for understanding the world, which ensured that the twin identities of “Irish” and “Catholic” were nurtured and protected with iron discipline.

The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland by Crawford Gribben

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland by Crawford Gribben Kevin Hargaden (bio) Crawford Gribben, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 352 pages. 'The dominance of Christianity in Ireland was never complete and has never been uncontested' (p. 2). So begins Crawford Gribben's superb account of the history of the Irish Church. Over the course of five immensely readable chapters, Gribben takes the reader across 1600 years and demonstrates that the rise of the Church was never as stratospheric as is popularly held, both within and without the Church, and he offers solid ground to place its precipitous fall in context. This is an excellent book, which will be of value to those interested in history, Christianity, or Irish culture. In the opening chapter, Gribben tells a story familiar in rough outline to many – the conversion of Ireland in the fifth century – but with much finer detail than many of us have to hand. Patrick and Palladius, the two main figures in that early stage of conversion, are explored at length. In his introduction and then continuing in this chapter, Gribben elegantly outruns popular theories about the pre-Christian religion of the Celts. What we do know for certain is limited, but this evidence does not match the widely accepted narrative that Christianity came with a persecuting zeal against the pagan beliefs that were prevalent on the island. The conversion process advanced by assimilation rather than annihilation. 'Christians co-opted traditional legends', 'sanctified festivals' and even turned some Celtic deities 'into saints' (pp. 35–36). He also disposes of the idea that can be found in some contemporary spirituality traditions that the Irish Church understood itself as an alternative to the centralised Roman orthodoxy. In the seventh century, Columbanus could write, to Pope Boniface, that the Irish Church were disciples of Peter and Paul who 'accept nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic teaching' (p. 56). The mission appeared complete: 'Christianity had converted the Irish' suggests Gribben, 'But Christianity might also have created the Irish' (p. 56). In chapter two, Gribben charts how a religious insurgency matured into the most stable institution on the island. A noteworthy strength of the book is how Gribben demonstrates that while Ireland is definitionally peripheral from the European continent, it was never isolated (p. 16). In one fascinating aside he mentions how the partial skeleton of a barbary ape was discovered [End Page 454] at the Emain Macha site in Armagh, dating from a century before Christ (p. 24). If nothing else, this suggests that Irish people were embedded within a wider consciousness long before they joined the European Economic Area and became poster-children for economic globalization! That outward-looking stance was embraced by the Irish missionaries who moved from their local monastic strongholds into Britain and then deep into the continent. The arrival of Scandinavian pirates we now know as Vikings drew 'Ireland into extensive international networks' and, in time, 'together in the structures of a common faith' (p.69). Through Gregorian reform, the arrival of the Normans, the rise of the mendicant orders and the tumult that followed the partial solidification of English rule in Ireland, the Church stayed strong. As Churches across Europe were about to become engines of acrimony with the Reformation, in Ireland it 'existed as a genuinely incorporating body' for the different communities that shared the island (pp. 86–87). The book is about the rise and fall of Christian Ireland, not Catholic Ireland. And chapter three is a fascinating account of how we came to have our three historic Christian identities: Protestant and Dissenter along with Catholic. More is said about why the Reformation never truly took hold in Ireland, but Gribben's suggestion that a key factor was the commitment of the 'Old English families in the Pale' to stay faithful to Rome is compelling (p. 91). A striking insight in this chapter – at least to this reviewer who is a leader in a Presbyterian congregation marked by its busyness – is how dreadfully lax the early Irish Protestants were. 'The small number of committedly Protestant clergy were sometimes left with nothing to do' (p. 99). As haphazard...

Review of Smyllie’s Ireland: Protestants, Independence, and the Man Who Ran the Irish Times (2019), by Caleb Wood Richardson

The first scholarly book-length account of Robert Maire Smyllie, editor of The Irish Times between 1934­ and 1954 and the central figure in a literary coterie to which Brian O’Nolan belonged, treats Smyllie as a lens on the historical experience of southern Irish Protestants in the twentieth century rather than providing a biography. Nevertheless, Richardson goes far beyond existing accounts to present the details of underexplored areas, such as Smyllie’s teaching of Irish or travels in Czechoslovakia. Richardson picks his way through the mass of Smyllie’s journalism by drawing out fresh perspectives on the Protestant orientation towards several interlocking themes, such as localism, censorship, British patriotism, Irish nationalism, and cultural patronage. Smyllie’s relationship to Brian O’Nolan’s Cruiskeen Lawn column receives most of a chapter dedicated to southern Irish Protestants as ‘Gaels.’ The book is a clarion call for scholars to turn to Smyllie as an important context for O’Nolan.

Cultural Hybridity, Discordant Relationships, and Critical Perspectives

Cultural Hybridity, Discordant Relationships, and Critical Perspectives

Anti-Standing Army Ideology, Identity, and Ideas of Union within the British Isles, 1689–1714

AbstractTraditionally, anti-standing army ideology in the 1690s and 1700s has been viewed primarily through an English prism. As a result of the unique contribution of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the place of Scotland has also been examined in this regard, particularly in relation to the ‘paper war’ of 1697–9. However, Ireland also loomed larger than has previously been acknowledged within the associated debates. This was evident both in the arguments advanced and in the writers who advanced them. Several individuals with close connections to Ireland – both Anglo-Irish and English Protestants – figured prominently among the anti-standing army writers, including Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard, Sir Francis Brewster, and Henry Maxwell. That they did so requires explanation, given that the army in Ireland offered the minority Protestant ruling elite the greatest security against a Catholic Jacobite rebellion. The involvement of these men in anti-standing army debates also highlights their engagement in an Irish Protestant context with the idea of a Gothic constitution and the extent to which their writings contributed to the post-Glorious Revolution whig canon. Yet the debates also highlight the limitations of such ideology when faced with the question of Irish identity and confessional allegiance, the constitutional relationship with England, and the presence of a standing army in Ireland. One proposed solution to such limitations was political Union.

The 1844 Philadelphia Bible Riots and the American Irish Catholic Press

ABSTRACT This article analyses the development of an American Irish Catholic identity following the 1844 Philadelphia Nativist riots, as perpetuated in New York’s The Truth Teller, and the Boston Pilot. The journalists of these two papers espoused that Irish Catholics had experienced unimaginable horrors at the hands of the British state and the system of Protestant Ascendancy that Britain instituted. For them, the 1844 Nativist riots were a manifestation of Protestant Ascendancy on American soil, instigated by Irish Protestant infiltrators of the Orange Order. These journalists used the experiences of 1844 to differentiate themselves from Irish Protestants, whom they derided as Orangemen. They challenged the rise of Nativism and Whig Anglo-Saxonism, which they believed had been corrupted by a clandestine Orange movement operating in the United States. The specific Irish Catholic response of these papers deserves attention from historians.

Violence, Vulnerability and the Overcoming of Trauma in Rachel Seiffert’s The Walk Home

Rachel Seiffert’s The Walk Home (2014) tells the story of a Protestant Irish family living in Glasgow that has been haunted by a problematic fanaticism since the Partition of Ireland (1922). Its narrative builds an intricate family tree where its members, immersed in the vicious cycle of ethno-sectarian violence, reveal their own traumas and intrinsic frailties. Their isolation and helplessness are further exacerbated by their tendency to repress their traumatic past. However, the encounter between Lindsey and Eric, two relatives-in-law, encourages them to run away and confront the past through art respectively, thus casting some light on the unending transmission of trauma in the family. Drawing on theories of trauma and ethics (Freud 1950 [1917], 2001 [1914]; Levinas 1986, 1998 [1993]; Volkan 2001, 2017; Butler 2004; LaCapra 2014 [2001]), I will attempt to demonstrate, firstly, that the narrative form of The Walk Home performs the disruptive and repetitive symptoms of transgenerational trauma; and secondly, that the ethical encounter with the other and the recognition of a shared vulnerability transmitted through families can empower characters like Lindsey and Eric to change their lives. The analysis also considers the possibility of challenging the perpetuity of the traumas arising out of the British-Irish conflict and developing resilience through the acknowledgement of vulnerability, the need for interdependency and the heling power of artistic representation.

Women and the Reformation in Tudor Ireland

This paper addresses a major historical lacuna by highlighting some of the ways through which women helped to shape Irish responses to the English Reformation in Ireland. It reveals that women were often key to a web of contacts linking English resistance to the Tudors’ reformations to Irish resistance. It affirms that women played a significant role in the Reformation in Tudor Ireland, not least of all in its ultimate failure. Because virtually no Irish women became Protestants in the sixteenth century, though a small number of Irish men was converted, no self-perpetuating indigenous community of Irish Protestants was generated.

“All the nightmare images of ethnic conflict in the twentieth century are here”: Erroneous statistical proofs and the search for ethnic violence in revolutionary Ireland, 1917–1923

AbstractIn the 1990s, Canadian historian Peter Hart claimed tens of thousands of native southern Irish Protestants experienced something akin to “ethnic cleansing” at the hands of the IRA in the early 1920s. Hart's research revised the “Irish nationalist revolution” (ca. 1917–1923) as an essentially ethnic conflict, and this article re‐examines his evidence and methodology. Exaggerating the number of forced migrations, Hart's analysis rests on erroneous statistical proofs which he supported with a gross evidence selection bias. To better understand Hart's revision, his work is compared with Michael A. Bellesiles' Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000), which also exhibited similar but also very different statistical errors. A central argument in this article is that erroneous statistical proofs are best understood as social constructs, where they articulate the prejudices of their host academies. Greater awareness of this problem is needed if it is to be avoided in the future.

“Spiritual heirs of the great Protestants who gave their lives for Ireland”: Expanding Irish American Nationalist Landscapes, 1919–1922

Abstract Overshadowed by more numerous Catholic immigrant compatriots, Irish Protestants receive scant attention in histories of post-colonial Irish settlement. This neglected dimension of the ethnic history is addressed here through a nationalist organization that supported Ireland’s independence cause from an explicitly Protestant worldview. Protestant Friends of Ireland (PFI) operations reveal a more diverse and complex ethnic landscape than the historical record suggests. Despite their distancing from cultural roots across the Atlantic, ethnic Irish communities maintained interest in Ireland’s political status. This article argues that the short duration of Protestant Friends campaigns between 1919 and 1922 belies their scale and impact. Ethnic contemporaries witnessed an extensive Protestant nationalist presence in PFI crusading and active recollection of Protestant Irish patriots. PFI connections embraced by Ireland’s polarizing political principal, Éamon de Valera, assume a central role in this account, while the confluence of events in 1921 signaled a transition for America’s Irish.

Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c.1840-1914, by Rowan Strong

Reviewed by: Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c.1840–1914 by Rowan Strong Tamara Wagner (bio) Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c.1840–1914, by Rowan Strong; pp. ix + 302. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £74.00, $100.00. This study fills an overlooked gap in current research on emigration. Rowan Strong’s Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c.1840–1914, examines in detail the active role of religious societies in nineteenth-century emigration movements. While there has been a valuable outpouring in recent years of studies on migration in the global nineteenth century, the functions and, in particular, the intricacies of religion [End Page 693] have tended to be sidestepped. At best, religion is addressed in passing, or religiously motivated societies such as the SPG (the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) or the SPCK (the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) are referenced in the context of various pro-emigration institutes without the necessary dissection of how Victorian Christianity informed different practices as well as ideologies. Strong’s book proves that such critical attention adds valuable insight to both nineteenth-century emigration studies and Church history. It is indeed an impressive, meticulous, and carefully nuanced account that will be of interest to scholars working in the interconnected fields of history and literary and cultural studies, particularly in reference to the global nineteenth century, imperialism, the colonial history of Britain’s antipodal colonies (Australia and New Zealand), and popular culture. In exploring shipboard diaries and the work of the Anglican emigrants’ chaplaincy as hitherto-unused “grass-roots sources,” Strong contributes invaluable material to the study of popular cultural productions more generally as well as for emigration studies and research more specifically focused on Anglican Church history (19). Strong considers the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy as “a major religious structural response to British mass emigration in the Victorian period” that generated a global network for the maintenance of the emigrants’ well-being, and this included providing the religious practices they were familiar with (3). The connection to imperialist jingoism was complicated and it significantly changed over the course of the century. Generally, an imported religion was considered a major ingredient of social capital for colonial settlers, but Strong stresses that the Anglican emigrant ministry was genuinely concerned with emigrants’ religious needs rather than with imperialist expansion or colonial strategies. Their efforts “were not always invariably some sort of cover for other political or cultural values” (108). Thus, Strong provides a critical analysis of the competing religious constructions of emigration at the time, distinguishing between the concept of “ecclesiastical social capital for the Church” and imperial social capital and, further, the imperialist jingoism of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century (97). Not all Anglican engagement with the British Empire “saw the empire through a rosy prism as a totally good thing” (107); instead, the chaplaincy network “contained a more predominant dimension of pastoral response to emigrant need,” which could include practical assistance across denominations (110). One of the most important aspects of the study is the way in which emigrant ships as floating villages facilitated encounters across religious boundaries. The emigrant journey, Strong argues, “catalysed religious interactions, which could result in both continuities and changes for emigrants” (110). The result was what Strong terms “interdenominational involvement” (4) and “inter-religious encounters” (18). Although Strong offers several close readings of incidents that provide evidence of an undeniable, ongoing sectarianism, a strength of his study is that it also highlights the breadth of religious persuasions among emigrants. In particular, Strong offers detailed analyses of Catholics, Protestant Irish, Baptists, and Methodists, as well as “The Freethinking and the Indifferent” (161) in nineteenth-century accounts of the voyage, although unfortunately there is only a brief paragraph on “Non-Christians” (165). The problem here, Strong shows, is the lack of sources. Only one shipboard diary even mentions non-Christians other than freethinkers, doing so in only a brief note. Earlier in the study, Strong [End Page 694] references the activities of the Salvation Army and the Mormons and briefly describes encounters between Jews and Anglican chaplains, yet it is...

The Human Passion for Meaning Making: What Shapes Our Lives

(Autumn 2013), 349–54. 5 Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Suspecting Glance (London: Faber, 1972), pp.9–12 & 63. 6 From General Richard Mulcahy’s speech at the inaugural meeting of the Council of Education, 5 May 1950 – published in Council of Education: Terms of Reference and General Regulations (Dublin, 1950). See also The Irish Times, 6 May 1950. 7 John A Murphy, ‘Easter 1916: Psychological Milestone Marked’, The Irish Times, 30 March 2016. 8 Felix M Larkin, ‘From Mythology to History: F.X. Martin and the Historiography of the 1916 Rising’, in Marnie Hay and Daire Keogh (eds), Rebellion and Revolution in Dublin: Voices from a Suburb, Rathfarnham, 1913-23 (Dublin: South Dublin County Council, 2016), pp.195–217. 9 Lyons wrote The Irish Parliamentary Party 1890–1910 (1951) and The Fall of Parnell (1964), as well as notable biographies of John Dillon MP (1968) and Parnell (1977). 10 Bryan Fanning, The Quest for Modern Ireland: the Battle of Ideas, 1957–1972 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008), p.221. 11 John J Horgan, Parnell to Pearse (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009 [1949]), p.39. 12 Parnell’s words here are as recorded in William O’Brien, An Olive Branch in Ireland and its History (London, 1910), p. 47. They were quoted by Conor Cruise O’Brien in Parnell and his Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p.145, n.1. 13 Donat O’Donnell [Conor Cruise O’Brien], Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (London: Burns & Oates, 1953), p. 103. 14 Patrick Maume, ‘Donogh O’Malley’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography, vol.7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 15 From General Mulcahy’s speech to the Council of Education, 5 May 1950 (see n. 6 above). 16 Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long? (Dublin: Gill Books, 2004), p.178.. 17 Maume, loc. cit. 18 Anne Chambers, T K Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot (London: Doubleday, 2014), pp. 176–8. 19 Maume, loc. cit. 20 Alvin Jackson, Judging Redmond and Carson: Comparative Irish Lives (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2018), pp.92 & 203 21 Jackson, Judging Redmond and Carson, p.150. 22 Jackson, Judging Redmond and Carson, p.128. 23 See Carson’s speech to the House of Lords in December 1921 on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, quoted in Geoffrey Lewis, Carson: the Man Who Divided Ireland (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2005), p.231. 24 Felix M Larkin, ‘Carson’s Abandoned Children: Southern Irish Protestants as Depicted in Irish Cartoons, 1920–60’, in Ian d’Alton and Ida Milne (eds), Protestant and Irish: the Minority’s Search for Place in Independent Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), pp.246–67, at 246–8. 25 From President Kennedy’s speech at Amherst College, 26 October 1963. Studies • volume 109 • number 435 292 Felix M Larkin The Human Passion for Meaning Making: What Shapes Our Lives William Mathews SJ In the preface and opening chapters of Ciarán Benson’s book, The Cultural Psychology of the Self, a major category treated is that of ‘the meaning making self’.1 This is a term that arose out of Jerome Brunner’s engagement with the notion of interactive learning in education. Wikipedia defines it as ‘the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships and the self’. It is a process involved in counselling, educational psychology, and social semiotics. The present study will suggest that the human meaning making passion is a major force in shaping who we are in the central process of becoming that we all go through in our lives. Central to the discussion here will be the idea of the ‘no two the same’ concreteness of this process, its unique location, its linguistic dimension and the human values it involves. The discussion will briefly examine the meaning making passion expressed in Seamus Heaney and some other creative artists; then, at greater length, the physicist Albert Einstein; and, finally, the remarkable Etty Hillesum, who died in Auschwitz at the end of 1943.2 The elusive meaning makers In a BBC interview, Seamus Heaney described his understanding of his adult consciousness as like...

Waterford port and harbour, c.1815–42: shaping the port. By Mary Breen. Pp 64. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2019. €8.95. - The Kirwan murder case, 1852: a glimpse of the Irish Protestant middle class in the mid-nineteenth century. By Suzanne Leeson. Pp 64. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2019. €8.95. - John Ferrall: master of Sligo workhouse, 1852–66. By Fergus O'Ferrall. Pp

Waterford port and harbour, c.1815–42: shaping the port. By Mary Breen. Pp 64. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2019. €8.95. - The Kirwan murder case, 1852: a glimpse of the Irish Protestant middle class in the mid-nineteenth century. By Suzanne Leeson. Pp 64. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2019. €8.95. - John Ferrall: master of Sligo workhouse, 1852–66. By Fergus O'Ferrall. Pp 64. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2019. €8.95. - Rathcoole and the United Irish rebellions, 1798–1803. By Kerron Ó Luain. Pp 64. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2019. €8.95. - Landholding in the new English settlement of Hacketstown, Co. Carlow, 1635–1875. By Oliver Whelan. Pp 64. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2019. €8.95. - Volume 44 Issue 165

Loyalist Mobilization and Cross-Border Violence in Rural Ulster, 1972-1974

ABSTRACTThis article argues that, at a tactical level, loyalist terrorism in the Irish border region between 1972 and 1974 worked. Cross-border attacks including bombings in Irish towns prompted the Irish government to reinforce security along the border—a long-standing loyalist demand. The loyalist campaign led to the IRA embarking on an effort to punish those who were believed to have passed information to loyalists, resulting in the killing of an Irish Protestant senator and widespread condemnation of the organization in the Republic of Ireland. However, short-term gains were outweighed by a growing perception among nationalists that the British state tolerated or even colluded in such attacks, undermining the British Army’s campaign to gain trust (and information) within the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. The article also contends that middle-class loyalists played an important role in mobilizing and equipping loyalist paramilitary organizations. It concludes that the British Army showed an excessive tolerance of loyalists with political capital or ties to the security forces, despite evidence that such individuals were directly supporting the activities of loyalist paramilitaries.

Andrew Jackson and the Protestant Irish of Philadelphia: Early Nineteenth-Century Sectarianism

ABSTRACT Andrew Jackson has long been represented as the archetype of Scots Irish immigrants. However, by the election of 1832, Ulster Presbyterians in Philadelphia, once champions of Jacksonianism, turned against the president and his politics. Catholic Irish immigrants also began to flock to the United States around this time. In Philadelphia Andrew Jackson became the focal point of Irish sectarian differences, some of which became violent. The Irish community became divided over religion and Jacksonian political culture. Ironically, Jackson, whom some historians have identified as the archetype of the Ulster Presbyterians in America, appealed to Irish Catholics but helped spur Irish Protestants into his opponents' camps.

Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spencer (1711–1790) ed. by Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hatfield

Reviewed by: Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spencer (1711–1790) ed. by Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hatfield David Fleming Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spencer (1711–1790), ed. Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hatfield. Oxford: Legenda Books, 2017. Pp. 284. $99. At a glance the title might suggest that this edited collection of letters is from the great Elizabethan poet and writer Edmund Spenser, but the eagle eyed will notice the dates point to an eighteenth-century figure, Spenser’s great-great grandson and namesake, a poor scion of a middling protestant landed family attempting to maintain his genteel status. Presented are 117 of his letters written between 1732 and 1762 to members of the Price family, his kinsmen who formerly resided in Ireland but were living in good circumstances in Wales during this period. The letters are not entirely new to Irish scholars; Toby Barnard used them extensively to provide an example of an Irish protestant struggling to make his way in the world (Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents,1641–1770, 2004). Their publication in this format gives them a wider audience and scope for further exploration. The editors’ introduction combs the correspondence for meaning, and in most cases [End Page 73] their efforts are solid and convincing. However, there are a few occasions when too much is made of a word or phrase. For example, it is suggested that the valedictory sign off at the end of most letters, which usually took the form of “your most obliged humble servant” or variations thereof, indicated or emphasized a “social” or class distinction. However, such epistolary phrases were the customary way of signing off letters among family members and the literate more generally. The contemporaneous letters of Katherine Conolly to her sister are evidence of this. The Spencer letters do demonstrate in content, as the editors highlight, the deferential relationship that subsisted between Spencer and his extended and better circumstanced relatives. The editors are both scholars of English literature, and their disciplinary norms are much in evidence in the way the letters are presented. They are interested in how the letters can be “read” for meaning, which leads them to identify different “Edmund Spencers.” Occasionally they go too far. One example, which relates to “patriotism,” may suffice. On July 19, 1755 Spencer informed Alice Price of political machinations in the small borough of Innistiogue, County Kilkenny, where a battle for control was being fought between two proprietorial families, one described by Spencer as the “court party” and the other the patriot, implied from the phrase “our Patriot borough.” The editors conclude that Spencer subscribed to the emerging patriot ideology that would find its fullest expression in Ireland in the 1770s and 1780s, when the Irish parliament gained legislative independence and other concessions from Britain. Indeed, this reading may well hold true, but use of the term “patriot” was fluid and often abused and may simply reflect the political dynamic of the 1750s, when national political divisions influenced the local dimension and amplified existing rivalries. The leaders of both local parties had aligned themselves to opposing parliamentary forces, and as Spencer was agent for one of them, he no doubt felt bound to follow his political direction. Thus, it may be too much of a leap to say that Spencer was a patriot in the context of what would happen in the 1770s and 1780s. Of more interest is the fact that Spencer, as a tax collector, was not influenced by superiors in the Revenue to take a different line in 1755. In the same vein, the editors discuss Spencer’s loyalty to the Hanoverian establishment, which is a fair question given he corresponded with individuals who had connections with Jacobites. The lack of loyal expressions or references in the letters prompted a doubt in the editors’ minds whether he fully subscribed to the Hanoverian establishment. But not every letter had to express loyalty, nor was it a significant topic of epistolary conversation even among the most loyal of subjects. Indeed, everything in Spencer’s letters, including his reporting of the Scottish rebellion in 1745 and the French invasion scares thereafter, all point in...

Ex-Priests, Fenians, and the Independent Irish Catholic Church in New York City, 1878–1883

Ex-Priests, Fenians, and the Independent Irish Catholic Church in New York City, 1878–1883 Alexander E. Callaway (bio) After leaving the priesthood in 1878, James A. O'Connor (1846–1911) became an evangelical Protestant and vigorous opponent of the Roman Catholic Church. By the time he died thirty-three years later, his "Reformed Catholic" movement, dedicated to the conversion of Catholic priests, was well established. The ministry's headquarters, Christ's Mission, and its monthly magazine, The Converted Catholic, would remain in operation for nearly a century.1 O'Connor's evangelistic work was detestable to his former coreligionists. Catholic officials and the Catholic press cast him as "a bad man" who was "suspended by his Bishop … for acts which unfitted him not only to serve as a priest … but even to associate with well behaved, respectable men"; a "renegade priest" and an "unfortunate man," who lived "to imitate the Prodigal"; and even as a picture of "insanity."2 Upon learning of his death, the Catholic Messenger [End Page 117] memorialized him with like opprobrium: "he devoted his life to villifying [sic] Catholics," and "died as he lived, unrepentant."3 O'Connor's Catholic critics claimed that he had been suspended from the priesthood for debauchery and that his evangelical ministry was a sham.4 O'Connor adamantly denied these accusations. He had given up the priesthood voluntarily, not been dismissed for drunkenness or immorality.5 Having "lost faith in the Sacraments which he was giving to the people," he "resolved at all hazards to free himself from the deplorable state of hypocrisy in which he saw so many other priests spend their lives."6 Even when he was arraigned on two separate occasions for public intoxication, he insisted that he never imbibed. He maintained that he had left the Roman Catholic Church for conscience's sake, and that the "Romanists" sought to destroy him—be it by libelous accusation, drugging, or trumped-up charges and Catholic judges—in order to stymie his evangelistic success.7 Catholic opposition did not impair O'Connor's ministry, though. Official accounts claimed that by the end of his life, Christ's Mission and his internationally circulated publications had been instrumental in the conversion of more than 160 Catholic priests, and many times that number of lay Catholics.8 [End Page 118] In stark contrast to Catholic perspectives, Protestant ministers such as Josiah Strong and Reuben A. Torrey lauded O'Connor throughout his evangelical career.9 According to the New York Observer and Chronicle, he "was a preacher of unusual ability … gentle in his relations with all men … extremely courteous to those from whom he differed," and "a friend of every man who needed material, intellectual or spiritual aid."10 O'Connor "died as he had lived, a true Christian, with rock-ribbed faith in the merits of his Savior by whose blood he had been redeemed."11 The truth about someone who is simultaneously extolled and reviled may often be found somewhere between the extremes. The following narrative, therefore, avoids profiling O'Connor as either a morally compromised anti-Catholic bigot or a beleaguered Protestant saint. It focuses on his five-year transition from Roman Catholic priest (1878) to founder of the Reformed Catholic movement (Fall 1883). During this time, O'Connor joined another ex-priest, James V. McNamara, an Irish nationalist and Fenian who, seeing Vatican I as issuing in the spiritual subjugation of Irish Catholics by "Italians," resolved to form an Independent Catholic Church (ICC). In support of Emmet Larkin's observation that nineteenth-century Irish nationalists sought to "make Irish rather than Catholic the inclusive term" of Irish cultural identity, McNamara sought to unite Catholic and Protestant Irish in his ICC.12 O'Connor became McNamara's coadjutor, but the alliance foundered as O'Connor's deepening evangelical convictions and emphasis on converting Catholics diverged from [End Page 119] McNamara's political anti-Catholicism, which became increasingly pugnacious and eventually led to his affiliation with the American Protective Association (APA).13 In addition to shedding light on two understudied figures who deserve more attention, this account, reconstructed from press reports, pamphlets, and manuscript material, illustrates the complex negotiations between...

The Caledon Lockout: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Rural Ulster, 1918–1922

AbstractThis paper examines an unsuccessful strike by Irish Catholic and Protestant workers at a woolen mill in 1919. The location, Caledon in County Tyrone, is renowned as a stronghold of Ulster Unionism and Orangeism, yet in the context of the revolutionary period in Ireland from 1916–1926, traditional sectarian divisions briefly abated in the face of working-class solidarity. In this respect, the analysis offers something of a corrective to assumptions regarding the immutability of sectarian divisions in Ulster. The article also places Caledon within the context of a widespread and sustained movement of unskilled workers in the main provincial city, Belfast, and across much of rural Ulster between 1918–1920. Nevertheless, the manner in which the employer defeated the strike and the village's subsequent history of violent sectarianism offers valuable insights into the creation and consolidation of Northern Ireland, or what many local Catholics called “the Orange State,” which celebrates its centenary in 2020.