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By Root 1046 0

parliamentary independence under the crown, security of title to lands and freedom of worship without financial or political penalty. This was a form of politics familiar from Tudor England: a loyal rebellion, designed to present grievances from a position of strength. It was not conceived as a separatist, nationalist or even anti-Protestant movement, but an attempt by elite figures to secure extra leverage in making their case to their king. Magnates in Tudor England had made a similar case, that their Catholicism could be reconciled with political loyalty to the crown. Force was a means to secure a change of policy, typified in the proposal that the Earl of Ormond, who was both Protestant and of Old English extraction, should replace the despised Lords Justice in Dublin.19 Significantly, however, most of the leaders of aristocratic rebellions in Tudor England had ended up dead.

The initial plan had been that on 23 October risings in Ulster would coincide with an attempt to seize Dublin Castle but the Dublin conspiracy was betrayed the night before and the chief conspirators arrested. Ormond had already withdrawn to the family seat at Kilkenny, and it remains unclear whether or not he knew about the impending attack on Dublin Castle. The Ulster risings did bear fruit, however. Building on a coalition against plantation and in favour of the Graces, it brought together the aspirations of the Gaelic and Old English leadership. Increasing indebtedness had led to hostility against the settlers in Ulster and that also fed into the support enjoyed by the leader of the rising there, Phelim O’Neill. The Ulster rebels declared themselves to be in arms in defence of their liberties, not against the King – a claim typical of risings in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. It seems clear that at this stage the Irish Catholic nobility felt that they could call off the rising if their political demands were met – they seem to have made that offer explicitly.20 Outside Ulster, however, in the other three provinces, and in Ulster once the rising was underway, significant social tensions were released.21

For Protestant settlers the rising evidently came as a surprise: they said so, and it is clear from statements taken about the rising that many of them had not fortified their houses or taken serious measures to protect themselves. However, although it was not in origin a religious protest, it came to be one, and was certainly seen that way in England. Forceful expropriation led to physical violence and there was at least an element of religious hostility in those attacks.22 It is difficult to believe that the rising had no basis in real tensions between ‘natives’ and ‘newcomers’.

English reports of atrocities in Ireland were wildly exaggerated

Whatever the actual course of events on the ground, atrocity stories quickly began to circulate in England, both orally and in print, along with fevered rumours that the Irish were coming. VVorse and worse nevves from Ireland reprinted a letter read to the House of Commons on 14 December, reporting how in Munster the ‘rebels’:

exercising all manner of cruelties, and striving who can be most barbarously exquisite in tormenting the poor Protestants, wheresoever they come, cutting off the privy members, ears, fingers, and hands, plucking out their eyes, boiling the heads of little children before their mothers” faces, and then ripping up their mothers” bowels, stripping women naked, and standing by them being naked, whilst they are in travail [labour], killing the children as soon as they are born, ripping up their mothers” bellies as soon as they are delivered…23

And so on. The pamphlet goes on to name names, dates and places, but the modern consensus is that these pamphlets reveal more about the imaginations of the authors and readers than about events in Ireland. Although there were more measured voices, these stories offered for a receptive audience in England a manifest proof of the existence of the popish plot and the horrors to which it could give rise.

Worse still, on 4 November,