HIS32970 The 1641 Rebellion

Academic Year 2022/2023

The 1641 rebellion was one of the hinge points in Irish History. Following a failed strike to seize Dublin Castle and some limited success in occupying fortresses in Ulster, the rebellion gradually spread throughout most of the island with a pattern of violence which involved attacks against the Protestant population which saw them plundered, often stripped, expelled from their homes, and sometimes becoming the victims of even worse violence, including many deaths, either directly at the hands their attackers or more commonly from exposure during a very cold winter. In turn, the essentially settler population responded with often savage reprisals and their capacity to inflict casualties was increased in areas where they were supported by organized military forces, and then vastly expanded by the gradual arrival of armies from England and Scotland to repress the rebellion. The constitutional crisis in England which ultimately led to the outbreak of Civil War in August 1642 meant that rather than being quelled the rebellion instead gave birth to an oath-bound association, the Confederate Catholics of Ireland, which attempted to both restrain the social disorder which had engulfed the island and to organize to protect the Catholic community from the expected retribution for the rebellion from Britain. Much of the island came under the control of this Catholic proto-state which only dissolved itself in 1649 as the bulk of its organization made peace with a Royalist party also engaged in war with the regicidal English parliament. It was this Interregnum regime which conquered Ireland between 1649 and 1653, resulting in a profound demographic catastrophe and what proved an enduring shift in the confessional division of land ownership and urban government. Part of the motivation for the conquest and the punitive settlement derived from the desire to settle accounts for the 1641 rebellion which was widely believed to have caused a greatly inflated number of casualties, and for which most of the Catholic population was assigned responsibility in different measures. Protestant memory of the 1641 rebellion which tended to exaggerate the number of deaths, the brutality and malevolence of the violence, the responsibility of the Catholic clergy and the role Protestant negligence had played in allowing their community to become victims in such a harrowing fashion, meant that it subsequently became a central reference point of Protestant identity in the island. In a cognate fashion, the savagery of the Cromwellian conquest and its attendant demographic disaster, intensified by changes in landownership and the exile of key military, mercantile and clerical elites, helped to unify a narrative memory of Catholic Irish as victims of state and sectarian violence.