Rebellion In Ireland Research Articles

Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock

Reviewed by: Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock Rory Loughnane Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe. By Andrew Hiscock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. x+289 pp. £75 ($99.99). ISBN 978–1–108–83018–8. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe is another major study by Andrew Hiscock, one of our leading commentators on early modern cultural and intellectual history. This ambitious book, divided into six chapters and with an expansive Introduction and Conclusion, offers a series of case studies about the 'cultural debate concerning the status and functions of violence' (p. 2). While grounded in Shakespeare's late Elizabethan English histories in its core chapters, it is an emphatically European book, a political statement of its own right in these testing times. It looks beyond the Atlantic archipelago to mainland Europe, and in particular to the wars of religion that raged in sixteenth-century France, demonstrating that for the Elizabethan elite 'it became impossible to conceive of England's political survival without having a watchful eye beyond the borders of the kingdom' (p. 4). In his lucid and learned Introduction, Hiscock moves seamlessly from Augustine and Seneca to early modern political commentators to post-World War critics and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Žižek, all of whom have considered the origins and outcomes of violent acts. Hiscock draws together his sources carefully, revealing how the phenomenon of violence, and its deployment as a tool for social (dis)order and nation-building, has long been and remains [End Page 242] foregrounded in cultural debate. The book helps to reveal how Shakespeare's early histories, and the early modern dramatic scene more generally, contributed to such debate about the militarization of society and helped inform cultural opinion about the status and functions of rebellion and nation-led violence. The chapters, in brief, are bookended by case studies about individuals: Chapter 1 uses the career of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his unfinished History of the World book project, to analyse broader English attitudes towards the use and justification of violence; Chapter 5 turns to Robert Devereux, his disastrous Irish campaign, and the failed rebellion of 1601 that led to his execution; Chapter 6 usefully considers European responses to the careers of Ralegh and Essex in the two centuries that followed. The core chapters, 2, 3, and 4, analyse, respectively, the three Henry VI plays, the two Henry IV plays, and Henry V. Hiscock identifies a continuity of sorts between the plays, wherein Shakespeare 'repeatedly returns attention to the disturbingly creative ways in which cultures of violence disclose the sobering realities of corruption and human failure' (p. 150). The study of Henry V in Chapter 4 leads naturally, of course, into the study of Essex's failures in Chapter 5, as the Chorus opening the play's fifth act in the Folio text alludes to Essex's efforts to quell rebellion in Ireland. Hiscock concludes the book by extending his analysis to the nineteenth century, where he demonstrates an enduring fascination in dramatic and operatic writing with narratives of violence and the late Elizabethan court. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe marks a significant contribution to our collective understanding of how violence figured in early modern cultural debate, and how Shakespeare's creative engagement with English history in the late Elizabethan period helped to introduce and sustain such debate, albeit without any hope for resolution, in the popular forum of the theatre. Shakespeare's early history plays persistently reveal the fault-lines of violence, variously condemning and valorizing its use; indeed, as Hiscock observes, part of the entertainment of such plays was the fiction of real violence it represented. It is this tension surrounding the cultural 'appetite for violence', a phrase Hiscock repeats usefully, that helps bridge the early modern and modern worlds this study traverses. Rory Loughnane University of Kent Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

The Watson Family, the Association for the Discountenancing of Vice and the Irish Cheap Repository Tracts*

Abstract Although the history of Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts in England and America is well known, little has been written about the 270 or more editions published in Ireland 1795-c. 1830. They were first published by William Watson, a Dublin bookseller who, in 1792, had founded The Association for the Discountenancing of Vice (ADV). This article describes the founding and growth of the Association and the involvement of Watson and his son in the publishing of the tracts during the late 1790s. It also describes the role of the Watson family, the ADV and the Cheap Repository tracts during the Anglican Evangelical Crusade (1801–1830) after the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. Whilst many members of the Dublin book trade suffered from a severe economic depression after 1801, the Watson family continued to prosper, thanks to the printing and publishing work undertaken on behalf of the ADV. The Watson family business closed in 1832, but the ADV has lasted to the present day operating under a different name.

Glossing the Diary: Women Writing for Posterity, the Case of Elizabeth Edgeworth (1781–1800)

ABSTRACT The inclusion of paratextual apparatus within a diary, alongside attention to presentation, historical contextualisation, and the employment of textual strategies makes it clear that an audience is to the fore, particularly a future or posthumous one. Connections with posterity permit the eighteenth-century female diarist to imagine a situation whereby their diary could be a document connecting them tangentially to literary and cultural authority. Analysis of the diary of Elizabeth Edgeworth (1781–1800) permits a better understanding of the relationship between diaries and posterity; the strategies for the achievement of an audience; the methods of communication with this audience; and the role of life writing in controlling and shaping a family’s narrative and legacy. The difficulties in achieving an audience for one’s works are evident throughout Elizabeth’s diary, as she attempts to negotiate her personal environs, and add to the family record of the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland. Elizabeth’s diary functions primarily as a public document, one that tells us much about the experience of growing up within a famous family during a pivotal time, and of one family member’s attempts to communicate and preserve a particular version of this experience for posterity.

‘Lessons learned’ during the Interbellum: ‘Irish war’ and British counterinsurgency

ABSTRACT Historians generally view the Irish War of Independence as the first and largely unsuccessful experience for the British army in conducting modern counterinsurgency. This article argues that during the Interbellum the ‘Irish war’ became a starting point for the military thought about this type of conflict, although this did not become fully consolidated in the army’s thinking. Some important aspects of the British forces’ conduct in the ‘Irish war’ remained undervalued, not least because of the only official analysis of this conflict, ‘The Record of the Rebellion in Ireland’, was classified for a long time. It strongly challenges traditional and revisionist understanding of this conflict and its implications on the British way of counterinsurgency during the Interbellum. These contradictions between documentary evidence from archives and established methods of historical thinking, as well as correlations of archival material with our understanding of modern counterinsurgencies, will be contrasted and analysed in this article.

British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects, by Sheshalatha Reddy

Reviewed by: British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects by Sheshalatha Reddy Mukti Lakhi Mangharam (bio) British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects, by Sheshalatha Reddy; pp. xl + 271. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £79.99, $109.99. Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects examines the ways in which British colonial ideologies constructed colonial populations as repellent and revolting, thereby justifying rule over them. Reddy argues that colonized populations actively and collectively resisted—revolted—against imperial control over their labor and land. The word revolting thus describes not only the colonial view of the colonized but also the latter’s active rebellion against British authority. Reddy illustrates this revolt through three critical “flashpoints,” the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India, the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, and the 1867 Fenian Rebellion in Ireland (xiii). For Reddy, these rebellions were a response to the colonial disciplining of populations into a labor force suited to extracting surplus value. This disciplining was done through what Reddy, drawing on Michel Foucault, calls biopolitics, the disciplinary tools deployed by states and corporations to manage and regulate populations in an attempt to transform the varied subjugated peoples of India, Jamaica, and Ireland into a modern laboring force. Reddy argues that the revolts demonstrate that, at the height of industrial capitalism, the revolting body of early colonial rule was figured incompletely as a laboring subject. The oppressed colonized worker never could be transformed into someone whose identity was created and limited by labor. The last chapter of the book turns to the postcolonial nation state to show, through Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest (1997), how the figure of the woman, occluded from both colonialist and nationalist discourses on the rebellions, is repurposed within our contemporary neoliberal state as the consummate disposable but laboring subject. The book presents a valuable archive of primary and secondary texts surrounding key colonial revolts. Each chapter reads on average five or six main texts surrounding the rebellion in question drawn from a wide variety of genres. These include plays, poetry, novels, novellas, photographs, broadsheets, periodical essays, and political economic tracts, produced by both the colonizers and colonized. In this respect, it is a well-researched and thorough collection of readings of texts surrounding the rebellions, encompassing primary source material written since the 1850s. Reddy brings to our attention fascinating but lesser-known figures such as the Jamaican nationalist writer and artist Roger Mais (1905–55), who was the product of a middle-class creole family but evinced a commitment to black working-class politics and resistance, was imprisoned for his political activism, and wrote at least thirty plays and three novels. The book also excels in its [End Page 657] readings of better-known texts such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie (1936). Reddy argues that workers’ efforts to value themselves in this text depend on their reintegrating minds and bodies that have been dichotomized by industrial capitalism. Reddy shines at portraying the complexity of resistance to colonialism, which took psychological, physical, and spiritual forms. She is less successful when it comes to arguing that the rebellions were reactions to the colonial disciplining of populations into a labor force suited to extracting surplus value. This is largely due to an incomplete and only tenuous focus on the concept of labor. Different colonial theorizations of labor, whether John Locke’s concept of “property in the person” or his ideas of labor’s property constituting capacity, or even Karl Marx’s concept of alienated labor, are not adequately developed or explained in relation to the literary texts examined (Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett [Cambridge University Press, 2013] 31). Nor are colonized people’s own views of their labor explored. Other historical arguments made about the transformation of colonial populations into labor, such as Andrew Sartori’s well-known Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (2014), are only briefly mentioned. The texts themselves are not consistently mined for passages focusing on ideas and experiences of colonial labor. This is because Reddy’s argument is less about the coercive transition to waged labor in the...

Milton, John Hall, and Thomas Waring's Brief Narration of the Rebellion in Ireland

Milton, John Hall, and Thomas Waring's <i>Brief Narration of the Rebellion in Ireland</i>

Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life by Gerard Kilroy

Reviewed by: Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life by Gerard Kilroy Anne Dillon Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life. By Gerard Kilroy. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2015. Pp. xxii, 458. $135.99. ISBN: 978-1-4094-0151-3.) This is an outstanding book, a biography of the young Jesuit Edmund Cam-pion, who was executed for treason at Tyburn on December 1, 1581. Thomas Alfield, in his eyewitness account written for publication shortly after the events of Campion’s trial and death memorably described him as “The flower of Oxford … and an honour to our country.” Gerard Kilroy’s intention, discussed in his introduction, is to re-imagine through the documentary evidence available Campion’s scholarly and priestly life. And he succeeds in doing so impressively and without a hint of hagiography. Kilroy’s meticulous scholarship, careful reading of a vast range of historical, literary, and visual sources—including several previously unknown, recently discovered manuscripts—his perceptive analysis and interpretation of these, bring to life on the page the boy, the scholar, the Jesuit priest, the missionary, and the martyr; the man who as a young scholar, had been earmarked for preferment by Queen Elizabeth herself and whose death scandalised the whole of Europe. His findings, however, go much further. They notably clarify, add to, and in some cases change our understanding of the Elizabethan settlement at this critical point as the Queen and her counsellors negotiated the matter of the Anjou suit and the succession within the immediate consequences of the bull, Regnans in excelsis, of Pius V and the intentions of Nicholas Sander, the King of Spain, William Allen, Sir Francis Englefield, and others in promoting rebellion in Ireland. In addition, they provide new insight into the internal politics and factionalism of the Catholic community at home and in exile. Kilroy’s detailed re-creation of Campion’s early years provides clues to the man. The son of a radical Protestant stationer, Campion was brought up among the tight-knit print community who lived and worked in and around St. Paul’s churchyard. This upbringing, he shows, exercised a potent influence throughout his life. Campion’s intuitive understanding of the power of print characterised his scholarly and missionary work. So too, this upbringing exposed him from an early age to the culture of the spoken word: in sermons, most notably at Paul’s Cross, in dialectic, and in oratory. It nurtured in him a lifelong devotion to disputation, “a belief that intellectual argument was the only solution to the theological differences of the period” (p. 15). Campion’s inherently sweet nature, combined with his wonderfully receptive intellect, Kilroy shows, singled him out early for patronage by the city elders who ensured his education in its own schools: St Paul’s, Christ’s Hospital—and later St. John’s, Oxford. The chapter on Campion’s Oxford career is outstanding. Kilroy’s identification and use of previously unknown material in his reconstruction of the Queen’s visit in 1566 throws new light on this event. Campion’s skills in oratory and disputation famously so impressed Elizabeth on this occasion that she instructed Leicester to offer him “preferment and patronage on an unlimited scale” (p. 43). Kilroy’s findings contextualize and clarify the anxieties, tensions, and factionalism in the [End Page 136] regime during these days as the matter of the Queen’s marriage and the succession became the fulcrum around which a series of complex diplomatic shifts and personal manoeuvres were executed. He shows too the consequences of Leicester’s appointment as Chancellor of the university as, with the transfer of power from a Catholic majority to a Calvinist minority, large numbers of Catholic scholars swiftly migrated from Oxford to Louvain. Campion’s formative time in Ireland, his scholarly work there, conversion, and departure for Douai in 1571 are particularly well brought out. It is not possible in a short review to do justice to Kilroy’s expert reconstruction of Campion’s career which then followed. His use of known, and previously unknown archival sources to reconstruct Campion’s pilgrim journey to Rome, entry into the Society, his novitiate in Brno, ordination and the six happy and fulfilled years spent in...

The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting: The Strategy for Unity in Henry IV, Part I

The starting point of this study is Renan’s idea that forgetting is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation and the basis of national identity is not memory but amnesia. This study investigates the above issue focusing on the way how the monarch tries to control historical memory to answer traumatic loss and establish national unity in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part I. At the time when England was suffering from the memory of civil war and the history of bloodshed on which Henry’s crown was founded, Percy’s rebellion reminds King of repaying his debt to the rebels. Therefore, in Henry IV, Part 1, remembering the past is dangerous since it encourages the rebellion and historical memory becomes a threat to the cause of unity. This drama depicts the monarch who needs to suppress memories of the past in order to maintain his own power and consolidate the nationhood. In addition, the rebel alliance in Henry IV, Part I is connected to the Welsh resistance and reminds the audience of the coalition of families against the English rule in Ireland. Finally, through domesticating the Welsh rebel leader and marginalizing women, King Henry IV, Part I reflects the wish fulfillment of suppressing rebellion in Ireland.

An act ‘soe fowle and grievous’:1 contextualizing rape in the 1641 rebellion2

AbstractThis study aims to critically re-evaluate existing explanations for the scale and significance of rape during the 1641 Rebellion in Ireland, using a contextual analysis of the legal testimonies of English Protestant settlers, known collectively as the ‘1641 Depositions’, analysing as far as possible the veracity of reports of rape, the circumstances in which rape occurred, and the identities of - and relationships between - victims and perpetrators. This study considers how women reported rape, comparing the Depositions to similar processes of legal testimony in early modern England. Rape perpetrated by combatants in contemporaneous conflicts is also considered, and the existence of - and adherence to - ad hoc codes of military conduct in Irish rebel ranks is investigated. Most reports of rape during the Rebellion appear highly credible, and almost all perpetrators were known to their victims as members of the same communities. There is a multiplicity of possible motivations for these crimes, with no clear pattern other than opportunism within situations where standards of ethical and military conduct were collectively ignored by rebel soldiers.

“Every County had more or lesse the civill warre within it selfe”1: the realities of war in Lucy Hutchinson’s Midland shires

IntroductionAs a historian of her own times, Lucy Hutchinson was shrewd enough to acknowledge that the warfare which comprises a major part of the memoir of her husband Colonel John Hutchinson was not simply an English Civil War. When she dealt with the first reverberations of the conflict which was then about engulf her family, she wrote:about the yeare 1639 the thunder was heard afarre of ratling in the troubled ayre, and even the most obscured woods were penetrated with some flashes, the forerunners of the dreadfull storme which the next yeare was more apparent.In writing this Lucy dated the beginning of the fall of the Stuart monarchy to 1639 - the year of the first Bishop's War.2 No doubt she and John, who seem, according to her account of the period some two years later, to have read newsbooks and discussed contemporary affairs together, were well aware that the trouble had begun two tumultuous years preceding the almost farcical first war in the four nations. The warning signs had been there even earlier when Charles I stage-managed his belated Scottish coronation in a way which symbolically turned the clock back to before the early-fourteenth-century Declaration of Arbroath by openly giving precedence to officials of the Church of England over the men of the Kirk. Serious trouble had begun in 1637 when the attempt to introduce a new prayer book, based upon the English Book of Common Prayer, into Scotland had provoked violence. This policy had firstly caused riots, and then secondly inspired the drafting of, and even more importantly, the mass subscription to a National Covenant creating a bond between the Scottish people and God in defence of the Kirk against the king's aggression. The king's provocative reaction in not seeking a compromise and being openly aggressive had pushed the Scots further. By the summer of 1639 the storm Lucy had alluded to had actually been underway for some time: by then Scotland had formed a new political structure and an executive which had not only circumvented the king in church and state but was able to manage a war effort to challenge him militarily. Mutual aggression led to the first war in the British Isles since the Nine Years' War and was later named by the victors after the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud and his fellow Episcopalians both sides of the border: as the Bishops' War.Lucy's broad vision was not limited to her understanding that the war which broke out in England in 1642 had origins which lay beyond England's border; like her contemporary fellow historian, the royalist politician Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, she acknowledged that the war was an affair which absorbed the entirety of the British Isles. In her background narrative, Hutchinson spent some space in her text dealing with the three initial conflicts within the archipelagic-wide war which preceded the direct involvement of her husband and herself. The First Bishops' War of 1639 was brief and involved the English forces being chased ignominiously out of Scotland and a more serious fight between Scottish covenanters and anti-covenanters outside Aberdeen at the Bridge of Dee, which ironically occurred during the peace negotiations being held at Berwick upon Tweed. A second Bishops' War in 1640 was a more deadly and involved the Scottish Army of the Covenant invading England, defeating the king's forces and occupying northeast England for a year. The third war in the sequence sprang from the rebellion in Ireland which began on the night of 22 October 1641 and involved a rapidly developing crisis for the Dublin administration. An alternative national Irish government was established in Kilkenny which managed a structured war-effort that challenged armies sent from England, Wales and Scotland. It was this latter war which more than any other formed the backdrop to the Lucy and John's decision to throw themselves into the coming war against their king. The war in Ireland created an atmosphere of fear in Britain where the newly invigorated press and rapidly spreading rumours inspired a genuine fear that there was an imminent threat of an invasion by Roman Catholic forces from Ireland. …

Political Obedience and the State: Elizabethan News Pamphlets and Rebellion in Ireland

Rebellion in Elizabethan Ireland triggered the publication of a series of early news pamphlets in England that have been labeled as tedious military narratives celebrating English victories over native insurgents. Careful scrutiny of these pamphlets, specifically those titles that relayed news of the Second Desmond rebellion (1579–1583), suggests otherwise. Therein, it was not news of events in Ireland that was stressed, nor indeed was it the Catholicism of the Old English who had entered into rebellion. Instead, these works prioritized political obedience to queen and commonwealth above all else and employed this revolt to remind readers of the essential obligations of fidelity and virtue. As agents of persuasion rather than purveyors of news, the authors echoed official thinking by the state in cultivating the importance attached to obedience amid strains in both kingdoms that attended the Counter-Reformation.

Disappointing Friends: France and the Confederate Catholics of Ireland, 1642-48

This article examines the interactions between the Confederate Catholics of Ireland and France during the 1640s. Despite the mutual goodwill between the governments, ultimately this relationship proved disappointing to both parties. The Confederate Catholics did not receive the level of support from France which they had hoped for from the beginning of the rebellion in Ireland. On the other hand, France’s policies in Ireland largely failed. Mazarin’s government failed to make use of Irish resources to fashion a successful anti-parliamentarian coalition in Ireland as a launching-pad for the resuscitation of the royalist position throughout the archipelago. French recruitment policies in Ireland also proved unsuccessful as the French received fewer recruits during the Confederate period than either immediately before or immediately after the association’s existence. From their perspective, a certain limited advantage was gained by the fact that Spain also was unable to profit from Irish recruiting grounds during the 1640s, but the failure of the attempts to re-establish the Stuart monarchy ultimately undermined even this small achievement, when Spain gained disproportionately from the mass exodus of Irish soldiers following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the early 1650s.

"Methinks the truth should live from age to age": The Dating and Contexts of Henry V

overleaf 72. It only really surfaces—this in both versions—in Henry’s private prayers on the eve of Agincourt, where he asks that his father’s “fault ... in compassing the crown”(4.1.290–91) be not visited on him that day, where—perhaps perversely—it registers most strongly as one of the burdens the king has to carry rather than as a questioning of his status. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.78 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:07:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms abstract Richard Dutton discusses Henry V as a succession play and analyzes the differing registers of that theme in its 1600 Quarto and 1623 Folio texts. He considers its chronicle history genre, noting how such works typically introduced fictional romantic elements that allowed for an oblique (and apparently acceptable) topical allusiveness, by contrast with the “politic”histories of Daniel, Jonson, and Chapman in the mid-1600s. Henry V appeared in the wake of the dramatic shifts in European politics in 1598, especially confrontation with Spain, now intent on placing the Infanta Isabella on Elizabeth’s throne. This coincided with outright rebellion in Ireland as well as possible threats from Scotland. Dutton traces how the two texts register these issues, arguing that the Folio version (the only one that mentions Ireland) is likely to date from after the decisive Battle of Kinsale (1601) rather than from 1599, and therefore to celebrate Mountjoy rather than Essex.Richard Dutton discusses Henry V as a succession play and analyzes the differing registers of that theme in its 1600 Quarto and 1623 Folio texts. He considers its chronicle history genre, noting how such works typically introduced fictional romantic elements that allowed for an oblique (and apparently acceptable) topical allusiveness, by contrast with the “politic”histories of Daniel, Jonson, and Chapman in the mid-1600s. Henry V appeared in the wake of the dramatic shifts in European politics in 1598, especially confrontation with Spain, now intent on placing the Infanta Isabella on Elizabeth’s throne. This coincided with outright rebellion in Ireland as well as possible threats from Scotland. Dutton traces how the two texts register these issues, arguing that the Folio version (the only one that mentions Ireland) is likely to date from after the decisive Battle of Kinsale (1601) rather than from 1599, and therefore to celebrate Mountjoy rather than Essex. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.78 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:07:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

‘That's their history’: can a museum's historical programme inform the reconciliation process in a divided society?

In 1998 the Ulster Museum's exhibition, ‘Up in Arms! The 1798 Rebellion in Ireland’, commemorated the bicentenary of the 1798 Rebellion, an event which saw the birth of both constitutional nationalism and the concept of the armed struggle in Ireland. The hostilities of 1798 bore all the hallmarks of a civil war, with an estimated 30,000 dead and up to 5,000 transported or exiled. It left long memories in the Nationalist community and something akin to a cultural amnesia among the Unionists (even though the United Irishmen who led the rebellion were originally largely Protestants). The failure of the rebellion led directly to the Act of Union of 1800, the raison d' être of0 the Unionist community. The political and social unrest of the years prior to the outbreak of rebellion in 1798 had seen the formation of the Orange Order, the staunchly Protestant society whose processions, seen as colourful by the Protestant community and as intimidating by the Catholic community lie at the heart of the current post-conflict tensions.

An 'Indelible Hibernian Mark'? Irish Rebels and Australian Labour Radicalism: An Historiographical Overview

The Bicentenary of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, described recently by Oliver McDonagh as, 'probably the most sanguinary episode in all Irish history ,2 is a moment for antipodean reflection. The small colony of New South Wales was a gaol and later a place of refuge for a goodly number of Irish political prisoners of the 1790s 400 or more United Irishmen and 200 300 'Defenders'.3 Parts of the district

The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, 1638-1651.

List of Plates. List of Maps. Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part I: Rebellion: . 1. Britain and Ireland in 1638. 2. War. 3. Parliaments in Opposition. 4. Rebellion in Ireland. Part II: War:. 5. The Agony of Choosing Sides. 6. The Wars Develop. 7. The Costs of War. 8. Victory and Defeat. 9. War in the Celtic Nations 1644--7. Part III: A Revolution in the Making:. 10. The Radical and Conservative Impetus. 11. Engagement to Execution. 12. Crisis. 13. A Crowning Mercy. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Three 1798 Bicentenary Exhibitions Compared

THREE 1798 BICENTENARY EXHIBITIONS COMPARED JOHN TURPIN 1798 Fellowship of Freedom, The United Irishmen and 1798, National Museum of Ireland, May 25, 1998–spring 1999, accompanying book by Kevin Whelan , published by Cork University Press, IR£4.95. Up in Arms, The 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, Ulster Museum, April 3–August 31, 1998, compiled by W.A. Maguire, accompanying catalogue, paperback st£9.95, hardback, st£25. National 1798 Visitor Centre, Enniscorthy, County Wexford, 5 June 1998–continuing (hand-leaflet only). today’s historical commemorations, consisting of large public exhibitions and related publications, have replaced nineteenth-century unveilings of public sculpture. The target audiences for recent historical exhibitions, like that of past commemorative events, is not primarily academic, but rather the community at large. These modern multimedia exhibitions represent a new genre, different from traditional museum displays and far closer to the world of commercial entertainment. Whereas the promotion of public awareness of the past through the study of material culture has been the educational mission of museums and galleries since the nineteenth century, today the museum is only one player in the modern world of historical commemorative exhibitions. The role of stage plays, historical films, painted transparencies, waxwork displays, reproductions, dioramas, photography (and especially modern commercial processes of enlargement), all have become germane to contemporary commemorative exhibitions in museums and heritage centers. The centrality of the display of original objects in any exhibition claiming to reinterpret the past—once axiomatic in museums—is now being challenged. Consumer-friendly technology, borrowed from commercial sources, has become increasingly visible in museums , with varying degrees of success. THREE 1798 BICENTENARY EXHIBITIONS COMPARED 261 In this review of three exhibitions commemorating the 1798 Rebellion —at the National Museum of Ireland, at the Ulster Museum, and at the National 1798 Visitor Centre at Enniscorthy—I will consider issues not only of academic content, but also the too often neglected issues of reception and the use of new modes of presentation. Although a number of other displays around Ireland commemorated the ’98 Rebellion (for example , the restoration of Wicklow’s historic jail), the Dublin, Belfast, and Enniscorthy exhibitions bear comparison: all three were undertaken with “official backing” and sought to make an impact at a national level. The 1798 bicentenary commemorations in Ireland have been extensive; new scholarly research on all the aspects of the Rebellion has resulted in publications revealing not only new information about the event, but new interpretations as well. A century ago in 1898, celebrations throughout nationalist (but not unionist) Ireland were dominated by the “Faith and Fatherland” view: the Rebellion took place because the Catholic peasants, cruelly goaded by vicious British soldiers and led by their priests, rose up in defense of their faith and families against British Protestant colonial aggression. Absent was any mention of the United Irishmen, the role of Protestant intellectuals, Catholic militiamen, or of the European context of French revolutionary ideology; 1798 was seen as the first in a chain of rebellions leading inexorably to Fenianism and to twentieth-century republicanism , culminating in 1916 and Irish independence. In this deeply nationalistic and sectarian interpretation in 1898, the struggle to recover the fourth green field continued; such a view of the Rebellion represented a reaction against the original loyalist interpretation—an equally sectarian Protestant reading of history. Recently, however, historians have put the Rebellion and the role of the Society of United Irishmen securely within the broader context of the political movement toward liberty in North America and France. Furthermore , because of the increasing recent secularism and decline in traditional Catholic nationalism in the Republic, this new interpretation has gained favor. The secularist and pluralist message of the United Irishmen of the 1790s is now welcomed as an alternative to the traditional Catholic–nationalist stress on political violence. In Northern Ireland, public memory of the 1798 Rebellion has been radically different from that of the Republic. As Northern Protestants, who formed the backbone of the United Irishmen in the North in the 1790s, were transformed into staunch unionists and attached to the British connection, they became increasingly repelled by and alienated by the THREE 1798 BICENTENARY EXHIBITIONS COMPARED 262 Catholic nationalist appropriation of 1798. Although scholars were...

The American Catholic Press and the Easter Rebellion

THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC PRESS AND THE EASTER REBELLION BY Thomas J. Rowland* From the onset of European hostilities in the summer of 1914, the maintenance of American neutrality had proven a serious challenge to the American Catholic press. This was particularly the case in the many papers and periodicals with a distinctive Irish-American flavor. While ethnic, cultural, and religious prejudices vied for the sympathies of all Americans, the American Catholic press steadfastly clung to the government's position of unequivocal neutrality and admonished the Wilson administration for any departure from that stance. The outbreak and subsequent suppression of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland in the spring of 1916, however, tested the mettle and capacity of IrishAmerican Catholics to adhere to established policy. Representing scores ofdiocesan news organs, the American Catholic press had emerged at the turn of the century as both a reflector and molder ofits community's attitudes, aspirations, and biases. Circulation had risen dramatically in the years leading up to World War I. Because these papers reported on a wide range ofpolitical, social, and religious events, they provided a telling and panoramic view of the divisive issues affecting the community.1 No issues were more turbulent, yet more germane, to the Irish-American community than the progress of Irish Home Rule and the maintenance of American neutrality. For a variety of reasons, Irish-America rallied strongly in defense of the Administration's declaration of neutrality in 1914. Ardent supporters of Irish nationalism, particularly the New York-based Clan-na- *Mr. Rowland teaches history in the Continuing Education Department of Georgetown University and serves as a health care management consultant.¦Research for this essay included a review of over twenty diocesan newspapers and Catholic periodicals. Research focused on the English-speaking press, nearly all ofwhich was controlled by Irish-Americans. It should be noted that in several American cities Catholic papers were edited and managed by German-Americans. For insight into the increase in both circulation and influence of the Catholic press by World War I, see Donna Merwick, Boston Priests: A Study ofSocial andIntellectual Change (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973), p. 189, and Aaron I. Abell, American Catholicism and Social Action: A Searchfor SocialJustice, 1865-1950 (Garden City, New York, I960), p. 289. 67 68THE AMERICAN CATHOUC PRESS AND THE EASlTR REBELLION Gael, though supportive of German war aims as a means of liberating Ireland, labored passionately to hold the government accountable to its pledge. They doubled their efforts in times when they perceived that American favor was veering toward the Allies. Although others were outspoken in their preference for the Allies, the vast majority of Irish-Americans cooled their ardor for Irish nationalism and insisted on neutrality as a way of taming the potentially inflammatory ethnic allegiances ofAmerican Catholicism. Such restraint also had the benefit of trumpeting Catholic patriotism and loyalty at the same time. The parameters of this struggle remained relatively fixed through numerous crises and permutations in public opinion leading up to April, 1916. Then, the issues of Irish liberation and American neutrality emerged in such a convulsive way as to undermine the fragile balance which had been respected by most in the Irish-American community. The Easter Rebellion in Dublin served as both the catharsis and catalyst in reshaping the definition of the status quo.2 The outbreak ofwar in August, 1914, had placed the entire progress of Irish freedom in abeyance. The British Empire's war effort had wrought a co-operation between the Conservatives and Liberals which effectively robbed John Redmond's Irish party of the political maneuverability necessary to enact the Home Rule measure. Eroding hopes for a Home Rule settlement even further was the promotion of its most implacable foe—Sir Edward Carson of Ulster—to a post within the London coalition government. Redmond's vigorous support of the British Empire appeared to have his countrymen's blessing. However, by April, 1916, with Irish casualties mounting, and with the specter of conscription looming larger, a heightened sense of apprehension and unrest had been woven into the national fabric. Yet, despite these adverse circumstances, the vast majority of Irishmen were opposed to fomenting open rebellion.3 While John Redmond labored to establish...

Sculpting Heroic Histories: Celebrating the Centenary of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland

In this paper I explore the role of public statuary in constructing a heroic analysis of the past through an examination of the centenary celebrations staged to commemorate the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. Monuments entered the arena of public, secular space in Ireland mainly during the nineteenth century. It was not until the latter decades of that century that nationalist statuary, which sought to elaborate Ireland's quest for political independence, emerged. The significance of these monuments rests, I argue, in their popular appeal and the debates that surrounded their construction and unveiling. Although an alliance of nationalist interests was achieved during the centenary celebrations, this paper emphasizes the tentative nature of that alliance and the gendered iconography and discourse surrounding the statues themselves.

Fresh Light on Bate's Case

On the afternoon of 7 July 1610, two petitions of grievance, one temporal and one spiritual, were presented to James I. According to the French ambassador, he received them with ‘un assez mauvais visage’ and uncharacteristically few words, although later the king permitted himself the tart comment that the petition of temporal grievances was long enough to be his chamber tapestry. Although James exaggerated its size, politically it was a weighty document, for among its complaints it set out the Commons' view that the new impositions, already bringing in around £70,000 per annum, were illegal. ‘With all humility’, they presented ‘this most just and necessary petition unto your Majesty, that all impositions set without assent of parliament may be quite abolished and taken away.’ To answer the grievance, on 10 July James turned to his lord treasurer, Robert Cecil earl of Salisbury, for a full statement. The speech which he then gave formed the basis for all future defences of the royal power to impose on trade made by crown spokesmen up to 1640. Salisbury described how, early in 1607, his friend and predecessor, Lord Treasurer Dorset, had proposed new impositions to help fill the empty royal coffers. The privy council, after discussion, decided instead to raise money on loan; but in October 1607 renewed rebellion in Ireland rendered the situation more urgent, and by spring 1608 it was apparent that loans could not meet the king's necessities.