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Colonialist intervention in a metropolitan revolution: reconsidering A remonstrance of divers remarkeable passages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2024
Abstract
This article presents findings from a fresh examination of a familiar source, shedding new light on the creation of one of the best-known contemporary accounts of the 1641 Irish uprising. It is argued that a text usually regarded as the work of Henry Jones, dean of Kilmore, ought to be understood as the intellectual property of both a team of authors and their sponsors, a New English faction at Dublin Castle with long-standing ambitions to crush popery and entrench planter hegemony in Ireland. It is argued that this group's objective was to strengthen the hand of the populist ‘junto’ at Westminster, led by John Pym, that was wrestling with Charles I for political and constitutional supremacy in English affairs in the winter and spring of 1641–2. The colonialists contributed to this metropolitan revolution by rendering safe to handle the Irish rebels’ politically-explosive seditious slander that their uprising had been raised by royal command. The notorious falsehood of the rebels’ claims has obscured the demonstrably underhand and fundamentally deceitful calculation with which the colonialists helped introduce it into mainstream English political culture, in order to isolate the king further and weaken his personal authority on both sides of the Irish Sea.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd
References
1 The text appears in the English Short Title Catalogue (‘ESTC’) as Wing, J943, A remonstrance of divers remarkeable passages concerning the church and kingdome of Ireland, recommended by letters from the right honourable the lords justices, and counsell of Ireland, and presented by Henry Jones Doctor in Divinity, and agent for the ministers of the gospel in that kingdom, to the honourable House of Commons in England (‘London, Printed for Godfrey Emerson, and William Bladen, and are to be sold at the signe of the Swan in Little-Brittain, 1642’) — hereafter, the Remonstrance. ESTC refers to ‘at least two editions’ published in 1642. The edition referred to here is that acquired by George Thomason, British Library, E141(30).
2 H.M.C., Ormonde MSS (new series, 8 vols, London, 1902–20), ii, 67; Clarke, Aidan, ‘The commission for the despoiled subject, 1641‒7’ in Cuarta, Brian Mac (ed.), Reshaping Ireland 1550‒1700. Colonization and its consequences (Dublin, 2011), pp 241‒60Google Scholar.
3 Remonstrance, sig. A3-[A4v].
4 Journal of the [English] House of Commons (hereafter CJ), ii, 480, 490; Eyre, G. E. B. (ed.), A transcript of the registers of the worshipful Company of Stationers of London, from 1640‒1708 (3 vols, London, 1913), i, 40‒41Google Scholar.
5 Clarke, Aidan, ‘The 1641 depositions’ in Fox, Peter (ed.), Treasures of the library. Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, 1986), pp 111‒22Google Scholar.
6 Kathleen Noonan, ‘“The cruell pressure of an enraged, barbarous people”: Irish and English identity in seventeenth-century policy and propaganda’ in Historical Journal, xli (1998), pp 163‒8; Joseph Cope, ‘Fashioning victims: Dr Henry Jones and the plight of Irish Protestants, 1642’ in Historical Research, lxxiv (2001), pp 370‒91; idem, England and the 1641 Irish rebellion (Woodbridge, 2009); John Cunningham, ‘1641 and the shaping of Cromwellian Ireland’ in Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey and Elaine Murphy (eds), The 1641 depositions and the Irish rebellion (London and New York, 2012), pp 155‒9; Eamon Darcy, The Irish rebellion of 1641 and the wars of the three kingdoms (Woodbridge, 2013), pp 85‒93; David Frederic Greder, ‘Providence and the 1641 Irish Rebellion’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Iowa, 2015), pp 78‒112.
7 Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the struggle for the English revolution (Oxford, 2004).
8 Keith Lindley, ‘The impact of the 1641 rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641‒5’ in I.H.S., xviii, no. 70 (Sept. 1972), pp 143‒76; Joad Raymond, The invention of the newspaper (Oxford, 2005), pp 111‒20; David O'Hara, English newsbooks and Irish rebellion, 1641‒1649 (Dublin, 2006); Cope, England and the 1641 Irish rebellion.
9 Conrad Russell, The fall of the British monarchies 1637‒1642 (Oxford, 1991), pp 481‒2. For publication of the Remonstrance in its English political context, see Jason Peacey, Politicians and pamphleteers: propaganda during the English civil wars and interregnum (Farnham, 2004), pp 240‒41.
10 Aidan Clarke, ‘The genesis of the Ulster rising of 1641’ in Peter Roebuck (ed.), Plantation to partition. Essays in Ulster history in honour of J. L. McCracken (Newtownards, 1981), p. 31; idem, ‘The 1641 depositions’, p. 120.
11 W. D. Love, ‘Civil war in Ireland: appearances in 3 centuries of historical writing’ in Emory University Quarterly, xxii (1966), pp 57‒72; K. S. Bottigheimer, English money and Irish land. The ‘adventurers’ in the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971), p. 47.
12 Aidan Clarke, ‘The 1641 rebellion and anti-popery in Ireland’ in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641. Aspects of the rising (Belfast, 1993), pp 149‒50; idem, ‘The commission for the despoiled subject, 1641‒7’, pp 247‒8.
13 Aidan Clarke (ed.), ‘“A discourse between two councillors of state, the one of England, and the other of Ireland” (1642) from B.M., Egerton MS. 917’ in Analecta Hibernica, xxvi (1970), pp 159‒75.
14 Thomas Carte, Life of James Butler, duke of Ormond (6 vols, Oxford, 1851), v, 519.
15 For an accessible introduction, see David Scott, Politics and war in the three Stuart kingdoms, 1637‒49 (Basingstoke, 2004), chapter 2, esp. pp 25‒9.
16 See, however, Clarke, ‘The commission for the despoiled subject’, pp 247‒8 for an overview of the structure of the text, and Clarke's extension of Cope's substantial quantitative analysis of the text's source material.
17 The same structure was adopted in 1643, when several commissioners prepared a much longer account, ‘A Treatise giving a representation of the grand Rebellion in Ireland’ (B.L., Harley MS 5999 – ‘the 1643 treatise’), recently analysed in Joan Redmond, ‘Religion, civility and the “British” of Ireland in the 1641 Irish rebellion’ in I.H.S., xlv, no. 167 (May 2021), pp 2‒3, and in eadem, ‘(Re)making Ireland British: conversion and civility in a neglected 1643 treatise’ in Simone Maghenzani and Stefano Villani (eds), British Protestant missions and the conversion of Europe (New York, 2020), pp 57–78.
18 The figure of 641 is derived from the online database and accords reasonably well with the 637 ‘Persons … examined’ between 30 December 1641 and 8 March 1642 to whom the commissioners refer in their concluding report (Remonstrance, p. 80 [recte, 78], and cf. p. 81 [recte, 79] which lists a total of 623 ‘Examinates’).
19 Remonstrance, pp 57, 64‒5. Reference hereafter to the Examinations excludes these two.
20 T.C.D., MS 817, ff 11, 42.
21 T.C.D., MS 832, f. 173; Arthur Vicars (ed.), Index to the prerogative wills of Ireland, 1536‒1810 (Dublin, 1897), p. 4.
22 T.C.D., MS 810, f. 269.
23 T.C.D., MS 816, f. 132, and see f. 97.
24 T.C.D., MS 815, f. 199.
25 T.C.D., MS 812, f. 41, and see f. 76.
26 Remonstrance, pp 1‒2.
27 Remonstrance, pp 2‒7.
28 Remonstrance, pp 7‒12 (pp 7‒8 for sub-section C(i), and the quotation). A similarly ‘thematic’ structure was adopted in the 1643 treatise: Redmond, ‘Religion, civility and the “British” of Ireland’, pp 2‒3.
29 Remonstrance, pp 6, 9, 10.
30 The other two are the ones numbered 74 — known to be a late addition — and 72, which it is proposed to treat as such.
31 Setting out its components sequentially, with the putative original draft underlined, the Remonstrance was structured as follows: A B(i) B(ii) B(iii) B(iv) C(i) C(ii) C(iii).
32 Aidan Clarke, ‘Jones, Henry (1605‒82)’ in D.I.B., iv, 1025–7.
33 ‘Fashioning victims’, p. 371 and n. See also Cope, England and the 1641 Irish rebellion, pp 34‒5: Jones ‘emerged as chief commissioner … by March 1642’, and the Remonstrance was ‘Jones's’.
34 The figure for the Examinations themselves is just over 92%.
35 Remonstrance, titlepage, sig. A3 and pp 12, 80; see T.C.D., MS 840, ff 29, 36.
36 T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of identity among Irish Protestants 1641‒1685’ in Past & Present, cxxvii (1990), p. 51. Dr Barnard also refers to Jones as an ‘agent’.
37 Crant's deposition is at T.C.D., MS 832, ff 212‒19, and states that it was ‘taken the 9 day of ffebruarye 1641’, but also that it was sworn on 13 February. A selection from it (‘Iur. 13. Febr. 1641’) was published in the Remonstrance, pp 35‒6, and was one of the most heavily cited of all the Examinations, appearing in six footnotes on pp 3, 7, 9.
38 ESTC, Wing E1337A, A declaration from both Houses of Parliament (London, undated), p. 2; see Darcy, Irish rebellion, pp 86‒7.
39 CJ, ii, 471; W. H. Coates, V. F. Snow and A. S. Young (eds), The private journals of the Long Parliament (3 vols, New Haven, 1987), ii, 8‒9, 14‒15.
40 A declaration from both Houses of Parliament, p. 2.
41 Remonstrance, p. 1.
42 Ibid., pp 33‒4.
43 Cf. Darcy, Irish rebellion, p. 90.
44 R. Dunlop, ‘The forged commission of 1641’ in E.H.R., ii (1887), pp 527‒33; Samuel R. Gardiner, History of England from the accession of James I to the outbreak of the civil war, 1603‒1642 (10 vols, London, 1883‒4), x, 91‒3; Thomas Fitzpatrick, ‘Sir Phelim's Commission’ in New Irish Review, xxi (1904), pp 333‒48; idem, ‘The Ulster civil war, 1641. “The king's commission” in the County Fermanagh’ in Ulster Journal of Archaeology, second series, xiii (1907), pp 133‒42 (part 1); ibid., xiv (1908), pp 155‒9 (part 2); ibid., xv (1909), pp 61‒4 (part 3); idem, ‘The forged commission — who was the forger?’ in The Antiquary, vii (1911), pp 417‒21; idem, ‘Sir Phelim O'Neill: his commission’ (U.C.D.A., Thomas Fitzpatrick papers, LA12/8, unpublished manuscript); Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625‒42 (Dublin, 1966), pp 165‒8; Keith Lindley, ‘Impact of the 1641 rebellion’, esp. pp 163‒4; Clarke, ‘Genesis of the Ulster rising of 1641’, pp 30‒31; David Stevenson, Scottish covenanters and Irish confederates (Belfast, 1981), pp 84‒7; Michael Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish rebellion of 1641 (Montreal, 1994), pp 218‒19; Cope, England and the 1641 Irish rebellion, p. 38; John Cunningham, ‘Who framed Charles I? The forged commission for the Irish rebellion of 1641 revisited’ in E.H.R., cxxxvi (2021), pp 55‒84.
45 See, for example, J. T. Gilbert (ed.), A contemporary history of affairs in Ireland, 1641‒1652 (3 vols, Dublin, 1879), i, part 1, 364‒5, Cavan remonstrance, 6 Nov. 1641; The generall remonstrance or declaration of the Catholikes of Ireland received of George Wentworth, 28 December 1641 (London, 1641[/2]); Carte, Life, v, 280‒81, lords of the Pale to the nobility and gentry of County Galway, 29 Dec. 1641.
46 The kings maiesties speech in the House of Lords in Parliament on Tuesday the 14. day of Decemb. 1641 (London, 1641), sig. A3v.
47 The one possible exception of which I am aware is G. S., ‘Minister of Gods word in Ireland’, A briefe declaration of the barbarous and inhumane dealings of the northerne Irish rebels (‘1641’), p. 7, where it is claimed that the high sheriff of Cavan, Mulmore O'Reilly, ‘rose with fourscore Rebels more, and gave out that hee had the King's warrant to disarme all the English’. There is no obvious reason to follow G. K. Fortescue's allocation of this text to December 1641, although it is bound with items in Thomason's collection from that month. Catalogue of the pamphlets, books, newspapers, and manuscripts relating to the civil war, the commonwealth, and restoration, collected by George Thomason, 1640‒1661 (2 vols, London, 1908), i, 51. Michael Perceval-Maxwell has suggested publication in ‘either late 1641 or during the first two or three months of 1642’: ‘The Ulster Rising of 1641, and the depositions’ in I.H.S., xxi, no. 82 (Sept. 1978), p. 147.
48 John Nalson (ed.), An impartial collection of the great affairs of state (2 vols, London, 1682‒3), ii, 638‒9.
49 H.M.C., Ormonde MSS, new series, ii, p. 43; R. P. Mahaffy (ed.), Calendar of the state papers relating to Ireland 1633‒1647 (London, 1901), p. 354.
50 F. E. Ball, The judges in Ireland, 1221‒1921 (2 vols, New York, 1927), i, 310; Aidan Clarke, ‘Mayart, Sir Samuel’ in D.I.B., vi, 452; R. M. Armstrong, ‘Mayart, Sir Samuel’ in O.D.N.B.
51 W. H. Coates (ed.), The journal of Sir Simonds D'Ewes from the first recess of the Long Parliament to the withdrawal of King Charles from London (Yale, 1970), p. 219.
52 CJ, ii, 328.
53 Coates (ed.), D'Ewes, p. 227.
54 Russell, The fall, p. 479.
55 A declaration from both Houses of Parliament, p. 3.
56 CJ, ii, 469; The declaration or remonstrance of the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled (19 May 1642), p. 58 (B.L., E148(17)).
57 The declaration referred to ‘the Deposition of Tho. Crant, and many others which we may produce’: LJ, iv, 630.
58 Merriam Webster dictionary, ‘Usage notes’ (https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-versus-lead) (16 May 2021). Cf. O.E.D.: ‘to give insufficient priority to the most important or salient aspect of a news story’.
59 See the references at pp 3‒4, footnotes (H), (M), (O), (Q), (T) and (V), to Examinations numbered 9, 10 and 11, mentioned already, as well as 15, 17, 20, 21 and 26.
60 Remonstrance, p. 5.
61 T. C. Barnard, ‘1641: a bibliographical essay’ in Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641, pp 173‒86; idem, ‘Parlour entertainment in an evening? Histories of the 1640s’ in Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in crisis. Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001), pp 20‒43.
62 T.C.D., MS 835, f. 138.
63 Remonstrance, pp 9, 56, and T.C.D., MS 835, f. 117v.
64 Remonstrance, p. 10, n. (and T.C.D., MS 836, ff 2‒3). Another eye-witness, Philip Taylor, testified that the drownings took place ‘in his sight’: Remonstrance, p. 63. See Micheál Ó Siochrú and Mark Sweetnam, ‘The 1641 depositions and Portadown Bridge’ in Seanchas Ardmhacha, xxiv (2012), pp 72‒103 (pp 87‒8 for the depositions of Clarke and Taylor).
65 T.C.D., MS 809, ff 245‒7, and Remonstrance, pp 18‒20 (Biggar, or Bigger); T.C.D., MS 834, ff 130‒35, and Remonstrance, pp 20‒22 (Mountgomery); T.C.D., MS 835, f. 166, and Remonstrance, p. 38 (Shorter); T.C.D., MS 818, f. 88, and Remonstrance, p. 49 (Palmer); T.C.D., MS 835, f. 170, and Remonstrance p. 61 (Slack).
66 Remonstrance, p. 45.
67 Greder, ‘Providence and the 1641 Irish rebellion’, pp 91, 96.
68 Remonstrance, pp 1‒2, 5‒7.
69 Exactly as would be alleged in 1643: The mysterie of iniquitie, yet working in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, for the destruction of religion truly Protestant (London, 1643), pp 37‒8 (B.L., E76(25)). For an important recent discussion of this text, see Cunningham, ‘Who framed Charles I?’
70 Remonstrance, p. 29 [recte, 25], third whole paragraph; and T.C.D., MS 809, ff 1‒4. The fullest recent account concludes that ‘[i]nternal English political machination’ in the summer of 1641 ‘inadvertently doomed many Protestants across Ireland’: Andrew Robinson, ‘“Not otherwise worthy to be named, but as a firebrand brought from Ireland to inflame this Kingdom”: the political and cultural milieu of Sir John Clotworthy during the Stuart Civil Wars’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Ulster, 2013), pp 159‒62.
71 The lords justices ‘neglected to give his Matie an account of that business’: [Secretary Nicholas?] to Ormond, 1 Apr. 1642 (Bodl., MS Carte 3, f. 80, cited by Darcy, Irish rebellion, p. 91).
72 Clarke, ‘Genesis of the Ulster rising’, p. 31, citing An abstract of certain depositions … concerning the traitorous intentions of the rebels in Ireland, in rejecting the government of his majestie (York, 1642 — ‘the Abstract’), and cf. idem, ‘The commission for the despoiled subject’, p 249.
73 Remonstrance, sig. [A4v], and see Armstrong, Protestant war, p. 26, and sources there cited.
74 Patrick Little, ‘The Irish “independents” and Viscount Lisle's lieutenancy of Ireland’ in Historical Journal, xliv (2001), pp 943‒4; Aidan Clarke, ‘Selling royal favours, 1624–32’ in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (eds), A new history of Ireland, iii: Early modern Ireland, 1534‒1691 (Oxford, 1991), pp 233–42, esp. pp 235‒9.
75 Those threats had of course taken new form in 1640, with the raising of Strafford's largely Catholic ‘new army’ to fight the Scots: Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, pp 125‒7, 131‒2.
76 Ibid., pp 149‒50; Russell, The fall, pp 387‒92.
77 Ibid., pp 396‒7; Armstrong, Protestant war, pp 48‒9.
78 Remonstrance, p. 1.
79 Ibid., pp 21, 33, 37, 68.
80 See, for example, the prosecution of those alleging Strafford had brought Irish soldiers to York to slaughter Protestants, or that the king went to Mass with the queen: Andrew Hopper, ‘“The Popish army of the North”: anti-Catholicism and parliamentarian allegiance in civil war Yorkshire, 1642‒46’ in Recusant History, xxv, no. 1 (2000), p. 14.
81 Remonstrance, pp 14, 15.
82 Jason Peacey, ‘Print culture, state formation, and an Anglo-Scottish public, 1640‒48’ in Journal of British Studies, lvi (2017), p. 817, original emphasis. For the Irish connections of one of the text's two London publishers, William Bladen, see H. R. Plomer, Dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London, 1907), pp 25‒6.
83 W. D. Macray (ed.), The history of the rebellion and civil wars in England (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), i, 399‒400.
84 Sylvester, Matthew (ed.), Reliquiae Baxterianae: or Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times (London, 1696), pp 28‒9Google Scholar. See also Richard Baxter, Holy Commonwealth, or political aphorisms, opening the true principles of government (1659), pp 472‒4; Lamont, William, ‘Richard Baxter, “Popery” and the Origins of the English Civil War’ in History, lxxxvii, no. 287 (July 2002), pp 336‒52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 Seaver, Paul, Wallington's world. A puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (Stanford, 1985), pp 168‒9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
86 LJ, iv, 709.
87 Clarke, ‘Genesis of the Ulster rising’, p. 31.
88 Armstrong, Protestant war, p. 69.
89 Clarke, ‘Genesis of the Ulster rising’, p. 36.
90 For the consistent failure after 1642 of ‘a reluctant [English] parliament to put Ireland at the top of its political agenda’, see Little, ‘The Irish “independents”’, p. 942, and idem, ‘The English parliament and the Irish constitution’ in Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in crisis, p. 106. Thanks are due to Orna Somerville, Archivist, UCD Archives, who kindly provided copies of Thomas Fitzpatrick's papers; to Toby Barnard and Patrick Little, who commented helpfully on a draft; and, as ever, to Jason Peacey.