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Religious and political debate in the first year of the Long Parliament had been both open-ended and very public; unlike the Covenanting movement it had been constrained neither by organizational structures nor by a clearly stated programme. The content of the debate can be characterized both in terms of extravagant hopes, particularly for religious reformation, and of deep anxieties about the dangers of popery, sectarianism and what was being said, by whom and to what audiences. Charles’s public performances communicated a regality that was surely appealing to people becoming anxious about social, religious and political order. In the opening weeks of the second session fear was a more potent political emotion than hope, and fears of popery and Puritan populism were quite evenly balanced. That probably put the King in a strengthening position, particularly since so many of the grievances voiced twelve months earlier had now received a statutory redress.

If there was a drift of opinion towards the King, however, it was abruptly reversed in early November, when Pym was delivered more promising material than a surgical dressing. On 1 November, seventeen senior privy councillors came to the Commons to inform them ‘of certain intelligences, that were lately come, of a great treason, and general rebellion, of the Irish Papists in Ireland; and a design of cutting off all the Protestants in Ireland; and seizing all the King’s forts there’.11 This was sterner stuff than the attempt on Pym’s life, and offered a clearer reminder of the need to show solidarity in seeking to preserve the true religion.

Since 1541 Ireland had been regarded by the English as a sister kingdom. Gaelic elites had been invited to surrender their lands to the crown, accepting them back on feudal terms: the initial intention was to transform the Gaelic chiefs into aristocrats like their counterparts in England. Had this succeeded there is no particular reason to believe that the Tudor and Stuart monarchs would have favoured expropriation. That it did not succeed was due in part to the vested interests of Gaelic lords. The crown wanted succession to follow the principles of primogeniture, which lent stability and order to hierarchy, but in Ireland this would have meant cutting off the prospects of younger sons and others who could, under Irish law, hope to succeed through competition. The failure to transform the Gaelic elite into a court aristocracy was exacerbated by the failure of the Reformation, which also created a rift between the crown and its natural allies in Ireland – the group increasingly known as the Old English. Descendants of Anglo-Norman settlers, these groups were, in theory at least, culturally and politically closer to London than their Gaelic counterparts. In practice this was not true, and when both Gaelic and Old English groups failed to accept Protestantism a layer of religious conflict came to overlay these other political problems. A series of rebellions under the Tudors had led to an increasingly hostile policy of expropriation, culminating in the 1590s. In that decade rebellion in the Gaelic heartland of Ulster was eventually defeated and the landowning elite was replaced, largely by Scots. What was once close to the core of Gaelic society was now dominated by Protestant settlers. During the 1590s too, Spenser, one of the flowers of the English Renaissance, had written his View of the Present State of Ireland, a text used to appal modern sensibilities. It argued that the ‘wild Irish’ lived in barbarous conditions, bringing waste to a potentially fruitful island as a result of the corruption of their religion and manners (that is, the codes of social and political life by which they lived). Plantation of laws, civility and religion was the only way to redeem the waste. The creation of this Protestant, ‘New English’ presence in Ireland was a considerable threat to existing Gaelic or Old English elites. By the early seventeenth century Ireland seems to have