Cromwell and Ireland
After Owen Roe's victory over parliamentary forces at Benburb in 1646, Charles I, facing Cromwell's insurgence at home, offered a treaty that would have reversed the Plantation policy; but the Catholic clergy, holding out for emancipation from the Protestant crown, persuaded Owen Roe to reject it. After deposing the king in 1649, Cromwell turned to the reconquest of Ireland, and in September stormed the town of Drogheda, slaughtering 3,500 inhabitants in reprisal for earlier revolutionary terrorism.
Owen Roe's death in November signaled the collapse of the resistance. Limerick and Galway capitulated in 1652, and 30,000 Irish soldiers followed their chiefs into exile in what the Irish remember as the Flight of the Wild Geese.
The Cromwellian Act of Settlement in 1652 extended the Plantation policy; Irish lands were seized and distributed among demobilized English soldiers and the financiers of the reconquest. The Catholic church was outlawed and its properties confiscated. Towns were seeded with English burgesses, and native merchants were relocated to the perimeters.
The common people were reduced to virtual slavery as tenants on lands immemorially theirs. By 1655, what remained of the Gaelic nation languished among the stony acres west of the Shannon. By 1688, Protestants, though they constituted a tiny minority of its population, owned 78 percent of all the land in Ireland.
James II in Ireland
With the ascension of James II, a Catholic, in 1685, England's policies in Ireland were somewhat liberalized. But James was deposed in 1688 and fled to France. In 1689 he moved to Ireland, where he hoped to establish in this Catholic nation a base from which to recover his throne. Catholic France rallied to the Jacobites (as his followers were called) and sent a fleet to Kinsale in 1689.
The Battle of the Boyne Ireland
But Protestant Europe as determinedly supported William of Orange, James's Protestant successor. Things came to a head in July, 1690, when a mixed army of Danes, Germans, French Huguenots, and English overwhelmed the Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne. The Irish army, under Patrick Sarsfield, fell back and retrenched beyond the Shannon.
They then sallied forth to meet the Protestants at the Battle of Aughrim, and, when defeated again, Sarsfield gathered the remains of his army behind the walls of Limerick and indomitably withstood two lengthy English sieges before finally obtaining favourable terms of surrender, which London was largely to ignore. Sarsfield and his men, like the earls some 40 years before them, fled in exile to France. (Sarsfield joined the French army and died in battle in 1693, crying: Oh, that this were for Ireland.)
English rule in Ireland
The hope of lrish freedom dashed, England imposed the Penal Laws in 1695, the apartheid statutes by which Catholics were denied nearly all rights at law and were reduced to serfdom. (In the words of one lord chancellor: The law does not take into account the existence of such a person as an Irish Roman Catholic.) Yet while the Penal Laws ensured the privileges of the Ascendancy (Protestant settlers), they also effectively tied most of the Protestant gentry but not the Protestant magnates to the land, while tariffs restricted the economy.
Furthermore, although the Dublin Parliament was supposedly autonomous in most areas, in fact it merely rubberstamped the acts of Westminster. All Catholics and many Protestants chafed under the English yoke.
In 1791 the Protestant patriot Wolfe Tone founded the United Irishmen, which inspired by the French Revolution attempted to bring together Catholics and Protestants in common cause against the English government.
The movement gained strength quickly in Ireland but was suppressed in 1794. Tone fled to Paris to raise an army of liberation, and, in 1798, Ireland's third revolution broke out in Wexford. Tone and a French fleet hurried to its aid, but the ragtag rebels, led by two priests, John Murphy and Michael Murphy, were crushed at Vinegar Hill in Enniscorty (County Wexford) before the fleet could arrive.
The Act of Union Ireland
The French, surrounded at Castlebar (County Mayo), surrendered, and Tone, denied an honorable execution before a firing squad and condemned instead to the gallows, slit his throat. In 1801, the Act of Union abolished the Irish Parliament and absorbed Ireland into a United Kingdom. Revolution erupted for the fourth time in 1803, led this time by Robert Emmet, but it collapsed in confusion on the brink of success, and Emmet, whose stirring speech from the dock embedded itself in the Irish memory, was hanged.
The Catholic Relief Bill Ireland
In 1793, a Catholic Relief Bill had ostensibly restored all Catholic rights except that of holding elective office, an omission that rendered the rest meaningless. In 1823, Daniel O'Connell the brilliant Kerry lawyer and orator who came to be known as the Liberator organized the Catholic Association which, by tithing its members a penny a month, became an organ of legal defence and agitation and the underground government of the Gaelic nation.
O'Connell was a peerless organizer, and when defiant voters in Clare elected him to Westminster in 1828, the orchestrated mass movement behind him so intimidated England that he was seated, accomplishing full Catholic emancipation in a stroke.
In 1830, leading a substantial Irish voting bloc in Parliament, O'Connell embarked on a campaign to repeal the Act of Union. Committed to reform within the constitution, activism within the law, and loyalty to the crown, O'Connell threw his party's support behind the Whigs, counting on them to back the repeal movement if they displaced the Tories. But Prime Minister Melbourne's Whig government, once elected, reneged, supported by a Protestant Ascendancy determined to protect its property and power under the Union by force if necessary.
Daniel O Connell and revolution in Ireland
The Irish masses stood ready to take up arms at the first word from O'Connell; the Young Ireland party, led by journalist Charles Gavin Duffy and poet Thomas Davis, urged O'Connell to abandon his pacifist principles and lead them in revolution. O'Connell had no such intention. Instead, in 1842-43, he organized and addressed a series of monster meetings rallies in support of repeal; at the one held at Tara, nearly a million people assembled peacefully to hear him speak in the open air.
Many of the original battle meeting sites can still be seen in Ireland, and modern day visitors can take advantage of cheap airport car hire from Dublin Airport to explore the historical sites of Ireland.The meetings were perfectly legal, but the English government mindful of O'Connell's tremendous influence sent troops to surround the meeting held at Clontarf and threatened violence if the crowd did not disperse.
Though he was within his rights and though the assembly could probably have overwhelmed the soldiers, O'Connell cancelled the meeting. The next year, he and Duffy were arrested and convicted of sedition. Though the House of Lords later reversed the verdict, O'Connell emerged from 2 months in prison largely stripped of his influence. He split with Young Ireland in 1846; momentum passed to its leaders, and he died in 1847.
The Potato Famine Ireland
In 1847, the potato, staple of the common people, succumbed to blight for the second time and the Great Famine descended over Ireland. It was a catastrophe beyond description; starvation, dysentery, and cholera decimated the population, and tens of thousands fled to America. Ireland lost about 2 million people between 1845 and 1855, yet Britain stuck to its freetrade philosophy and intervened as little as possible on the theory that private enterprise would eventually sort things out. Relief aid actually decreased as the famine worsened.
Yet, throughout this Irish holocaust, food was exported from Ireland to pay rents to absentee landlords in England. Great estates went bankrupt and passed into the hands of profiteers who thought nothing of evicting their destitute and starving tenants.
In 1848, under the leadership of William Smith O'Brien and spurred by the writings of John Mitchel (who had been deported to Australia for publishing the seditious journal United Irishman), what remained of Young Ireland staged and bungled an armed insurrection. Its participants followed Mitchel to Australia.
For almost a decade, the nationalist movement lay dormant and the Irish language and economy languished through neglect. Industrialization was financed by London only in Ulster, which attached itself commercially to the industrial northwest of England, alienating itself still further from the rest of Ireland, where there were virtually no manufacturers. Circumstances were preparing Ulster for separation.
Home Rule in Ireland
After the collapse of the repeal movement, the nationalists regrouped behind the Home Rule proposal, which would have restored at least a measure of autonomy to the Irish nation. After 1875, the leader of the Home Rule party at Westminster was Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish Protestant and charismatic leader who implemented the policy of obstruction, or withholding his considerable political support to gain concessions for Ireland.
Parnell's tactical brilliance secured the admiration and cooperation of William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister; despite their efforts, however, the Home Rule Bill was twice defeated in Parliament. Shortly thereafter, Parnell suffered a serious blow to his reputation: Two British civil servants were murdered in Dublin's Phoenix Park, and The Times published a forged letter allegedly from Parnell condoning the killings.
Owen Roe's death in November signaled the collapse of the resistance. Limerick and Galway capitulated in 1652, and 30,000 Irish soldiers followed their chiefs into exile in what the Irish remember as the Flight of the Wild Geese.
The Cromwellian Act of Settlement in 1652 extended the Plantation policy; Irish lands were seized and distributed among demobilized English soldiers and the financiers of the reconquest. The Catholic church was outlawed and its properties confiscated. Towns were seeded with English burgesses, and native merchants were relocated to the perimeters.
The common people were reduced to virtual slavery as tenants on lands immemorially theirs. By 1655, what remained of the Gaelic nation languished among the stony acres west of the Shannon. By 1688, Protestants, though they constituted a tiny minority of its population, owned 78 percent of all the land in Ireland.
James II in Ireland
With the ascension of James II, a Catholic, in 1685, England's policies in Ireland were somewhat liberalized. But James was deposed in 1688 and fled to France. In 1689 he moved to Ireland, where he hoped to establish in this Catholic nation a base from which to recover his throne. Catholic France rallied to the Jacobites (as his followers were called) and sent a fleet to Kinsale in 1689.
The Battle of the Boyne Ireland
But Protestant Europe as determinedly supported William of Orange, James's Protestant successor. Things came to a head in July, 1690, when a mixed army of Danes, Germans, French Huguenots, and English overwhelmed the Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne. The Irish army, under Patrick Sarsfield, fell back and retrenched beyond the Shannon.
They then sallied forth to meet the Protestants at the Battle of Aughrim, and, when defeated again, Sarsfield gathered the remains of his army behind the walls of Limerick and indomitably withstood two lengthy English sieges before finally obtaining favourable terms of surrender, which London was largely to ignore. Sarsfield and his men, like the earls some 40 years before them, fled in exile to France. (Sarsfield joined the French army and died in battle in 1693, crying: Oh, that this were for Ireland.)
English rule in Ireland
The hope of lrish freedom dashed, England imposed the Penal Laws in 1695, the apartheid statutes by which Catholics were denied nearly all rights at law and were reduced to serfdom. (In the words of one lord chancellor: The law does not take into account the existence of such a person as an Irish Roman Catholic.) Yet while the Penal Laws ensured the privileges of the Ascendancy (Protestant settlers), they also effectively tied most of the Protestant gentry but not the Protestant magnates to the land, while tariffs restricted the economy.
Furthermore, although the Dublin Parliament was supposedly autonomous in most areas, in fact it merely rubberstamped the acts of Westminster. All Catholics and many Protestants chafed under the English yoke.
In 1791 the Protestant patriot Wolfe Tone founded the United Irishmen, which inspired by the French Revolution attempted to bring together Catholics and Protestants in common cause against the English government.
The movement gained strength quickly in Ireland but was suppressed in 1794. Tone fled to Paris to raise an army of liberation, and, in 1798, Ireland's third revolution broke out in Wexford. Tone and a French fleet hurried to its aid, but the ragtag rebels, led by two priests, John Murphy and Michael Murphy, were crushed at Vinegar Hill in Enniscorty (County Wexford) before the fleet could arrive.
The Act of Union Ireland
The French, surrounded at Castlebar (County Mayo), surrendered, and Tone, denied an honorable execution before a firing squad and condemned instead to the gallows, slit his throat. In 1801, the Act of Union abolished the Irish Parliament and absorbed Ireland into a United Kingdom. Revolution erupted for the fourth time in 1803, led this time by Robert Emmet, but it collapsed in confusion on the brink of success, and Emmet, whose stirring speech from the dock embedded itself in the Irish memory, was hanged.
The Catholic Relief Bill Ireland
In 1793, a Catholic Relief Bill had ostensibly restored all Catholic rights except that of holding elective office, an omission that rendered the rest meaningless. In 1823, Daniel O'Connell the brilliant Kerry lawyer and orator who came to be known as the Liberator organized the Catholic Association which, by tithing its members a penny a month, became an organ of legal defence and agitation and the underground government of the Gaelic nation.
O'Connell was a peerless organizer, and when defiant voters in Clare elected him to Westminster in 1828, the orchestrated mass movement behind him so intimidated England that he was seated, accomplishing full Catholic emancipation in a stroke.
In 1830, leading a substantial Irish voting bloc in Parliament, O'Connell embarked on a campaign to repeal the Act of Union. Committed to reform within the constitution, activism within the law, and loyalty to the crown, O'Connell threw his party's support behind the Whigs, counting on them to back the repeal movement if they displaced the Tories. But Prime Minister Melbourne's Whig government, once elected, reneged, supported by a Protestant Ascendancy determined to protect its property and power under the Union by force if necessary.
Daniel O Connell and revolution in Ireland
The Irish masses stood ready to take up arms at the first word from O'Connell; the Young Ireland party, led by journalist Charles Gavin Duffy and poet Thomas Davis, urged O'Connell to abandon his pacifist principles and lead them in revolution. O'Connell had no such intention. Instead, in 1842-43, he organized and addressed a series of monster meetings rallies in support of repeal; at the one held at Tara, nearly a million people assembled peacefully to hear him speak in the open air.
Many of the original battle meeting sites can still be seen in Ireland, and modern day visitors can take advantage of cheap airport car hire from Dublin Airport to explore the historical sites of Ireland.The meetings were perfectly legal, but the English government mindful of O'Connell's tremendous influence sent troops to surround the meeting held at Clontarf and threatened violence if the crowd did not disperse.
Though he was within his rights and though the assembly could probably have overwhelmed the soldiers, O'Connell cancelled the meeting. The next year, he and Duffy were arrested and convicted of sedition. Though the House of Lords later reversed the verdict, O'Connell emerged from 2 months in prison largely stripped of his influence. He split with Young Ireland in 1846; momentum passed to its leaders, and he died in 1847.
The Potato Famine Ireland
In 1847, the potato, staple of the common people, succumbed to blight for the second time and the Great Famine descended over Ireland. It was a catastrophe beyond description; starvation, dysentery, and cholera decimated the population, and tens of thousands fled to America. Ireland lost about 2 million people between 1845 and 1855, yet Britain stuck to its freetrade philosophy and intervened as little as possible on the theory that private enterprise would eventually sort things out. Relief aid actually decreased as the famine worsened.
Yet, throughout this Irish holocaust, food was exported from Ireland to pay rents to absentee landlords in England. Great estates went bankrupt and passed into the hands of profiteers who thought nothing of evicting their destitute and starving tenants.
In 1848, under the leadership of William Smith O'Brien and spurred by the writings of John Mitchel (who had been deported to Australia for publishing the seditious journal United Irishman), what remained of Young Ireland staged and bungled an armed insurrection. Its participants followed Mitchel to Australia.
For almost a decade, the nationalist movement lay dormant and the Irish language and economy languished through neglect. Industrialization was financed by London only in Ulster, which attached itself commercially to the industrial northwest of England, alienating itself still further from the rest of Ireland, where there were virtually no manufacturers. Circumstances were preparing Ulster for separation.
Home Rule in Ireland
After the collapse of the repeal movement, the nationalists regrouped behind the Home Rule proposal, which would have restored at least a measure of autonomy to the Irish nation. After 1875, the leader of the Home Rule party at Westminster was Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish Protestant and charismatic leader who implemented the policy of obstruction, or withholding his considerable political support to gain concessions for Ireland.
Parnell's tactical brilliance secured the admiration and cooperation of William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister; despite their efforts, however, the Home Rule Bill was twice defeated in Parliament. Shortly thereafter, Parnell suffered a serious blow to his reputation: Two British civil servants were murdered in Dublin's Phoenix Park, and The Times published a forged letter allegedly from Parnell condoning the killings.
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