IMPACT OF EMPIRE- IRELAND

what happened in 1169?

In 1169, King Henry II invaded Ireland and started an English colony around Dublin.

The Pale

- The English saw themselves as rulers of Ireland but they only controlled an area called the Pale.

- Irish people living 'beyond the Pale' were stereotyped as wild, uneducated and savage - the beginning of a long history of anti-Irish racism.

- By the end of the Middle Ages, the Pale had shrunk in area and English control had weakened. At this time Ireland and England were both Catholic, but when England became a Protestant country in the mid-sixteenth century, Ireland remained Catholic.

Irish politics (FIX THIS)

Ireland was governed by a Lord Deputy, appointed by the English monarch. The Irish parliament was Protestant-dominated and had limited powers.

- In the 1640s, the Irish Catholic majority supported Charles I against the English parliament in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

- His Declaration for the Liberty of Conscience in 1687, which granted religious freedom to all Christiansincluding Catholics, was very popular. James made an Irish Catholic - Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell - the lord deputy and he built up Catholic membership of the army in Ireland, bringing in many Catholic officers.

- The Protestant settlements were called plantations because people were being 'planted' in Ireland to colonise it.

- The plantations included army garrisons and new towns where only English laws and customs were permitted. The city of Derry was rebuilt with high walls to protect Protestants from Irish rebels. Catholics were forced to live outside the walls in the Bogside.

- The Irish Catholic majority deeply resented the plantations and there were many uprisings against them. English policy had created a deep and dangerous religious and class divide.

1688 Ireland

When James was forced to escape from England after William's invasion in 1688, he was pressed by the French king, Louis XIV, to return and win back the three kingdoms' (Ireland, Scotland and England) by military force. Most Irish Catholics were Jacobites and Tyrconnell formed a Jacobite army.

1689 Ireland

James landed in Ireland in March 1689 with 6,000 French troops and held a parliament in Dublin. This passed a law giving confiscated land back to the former Catholic owners. It also declared that the English parliament had no right to make laws governing Ireland.

- James had the backing of King Louis as well as wide support in Ireland. In William's eyes, therefore, battling the Jacobites was not only about who ruled England, it was also part of the wider European war he was committed to - the War of the Grand Alliance, or the Nine Years' War. Although his priority was fighting France, William felt forced to face James in Ireland. So when the Protestant residents of Derry were surrounded by Jacobite forces in April, William sent warships and troops with the aim of breaking the siege. Over the next two and a half years, two international armies would face each other.

The war of 1689-91

The war went very well at first for the Jacobites, but after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 James fled Ireland and the Jacobites retreated. The Battle of the Aughrim in 1691 was a clear victory for the Williamite forces.

- Under the Treaty of Limerick many Jacobite soldiers left for France. Many Catholic landowners lost their land.Catholics no longer had a say in government and lost all military and political power. Ireland was under British rule.

3 October 1691- Treaty of Limerick

Marked the end of the war. Irishmen who had fought for James were given three choices: they could join William's army, return home or continue following James in the French army, which would mean leaving Ireland forever.

Flight of the wild geese

Fourteen thousand soldiers chose to leave for France in what became known as 'the flight of the Wild Geese. The king knew that Catholic guerrilla fighters had inflicted real damage in Williamite areas, so by sending the most committed fighters to France, he removed the risk of the fighting continuing. Meanwhile, Jacobite landowners were told they could keep their land if they swore allegiance to William and Mary.

Religious outcomes

Many Protestants thought at first that the king had been too generous to the losers. William did not stick to the promises in the treaty and many Catholic landowners who did not swear the oath quickly enough had their land taken away.

- Irish Catholics had lost their army, their land and their political power. They would now be totally excluded from government for nearly 200 years. Ireland was now quite clearly a British colony, and English attitudes to the Irish reflected this

Impact on Ireland of British control after 1691

The Irish parliament was entirely Protestant and the winners began to punish the losers. Catholics lost land, religious freedoms and political power.

The Penal laws

- 1695 = weapons taken away; banned from studying overseas; bishops and priest banished

- 1704 = inheritance rights taken away; rights to buy and lease property restricted; banned form some professions; not allowed to have a public position unless they become protestant

- 1728 = Not allowed to vote.

- There would be no Catholic in parliament until 1828.

The Ascendancy

The main winners in Ireland after 1691 were the wealthy Protestants, Ireland-born but of English origin.The whole system favoured them. They formed an elite group centred around the Anglican Church, Dublin Castle and English fashions. Many were extravagantly rich. They came to be known as the Protestant Ascendancy, and they saw themselves as the only true Irish 'nation', whose God-given right to rule was proved by the Williamite victories in battle.

Exceptions in the Ascendancy

They were not all wealthy: several rose from poverty. For example, William Conolly was the son of a blacksmith in Donegal and became Speaker of the House of Commons in the Irish parliament

Divisions

There were deep class divides among Protestants, too. The Ascendancy class belonged to the Church of Ireland, an offshoot of the Church of England. Most of the Scottish settlers, however, were Presbyterians - a Protestant group that broke from the Church of England as its members rejected ideas of bishops and a monarch as head of the Church. Like Catholics, they suffered from laws discriminating against them. Some of them were tenants of the rich landowners, with lives similar to their Catholic neighbours. There was always a tension between the division of faith (between Protestant and Catholic) and the division of class (between the Protestant Ascendancy and the Catholic and Protestant poor).

- Ireland was seen as a second to England, there to help and protect it, which outraged the Ascendancy

1699 English Woollen Act

In 1699, to protect English exports, the English Woollen Act made it illegal for the Irish to export woollen cloth beyond the British Isles.

1720 Declaratory act

In 1720, the Declaratory Act ruled that the British parliament had the right to make laws for Ireland 'in all cases whatsoever'. The Irish House of Lords no longer had the right to be a final court of appeal.

1722-1725

From 1722 to 1725, the British government gave the right to manufacture Irish halfpennies to an English entrepreneur, William Wood, against the will of Irish Protestants.

Although protests against 'Wood's halfpenny' eventually succeeded, it was clear that both political parties in England - the Whigs and the Tories - saw all the Irish (Catholic and Protestant) as a conquered people. Indeed, the negative stereotypes used against Catholics were used more and more against all the Irish.

changes on the land

In the years following the chaos of war, the Irish countryside was changing.

- Woods were cleared to make way for cattle (easier than grain to move in a hurry in time of war) and a new crop took over. The potato - brought over from the Americas - proved to be well-suited to Irish conditions. Nutritious, easy to grow and capable of producing large crops, by the 1700s it was the staple diet in many homes. People still ate cereals, dairy products, fish and jellied blood, but the healthier diet centred on the potato reduced mortality and increased fertility, with more children surviving infancy.

Famine 1729

There was very little manufacturing in Ireland, although Huguenot refugees brought an improvement in the quality of linen cloth in the 1690s and helped Belfast grow rapidly. Most people, though, were entirely dependent on the food they could grow. When crops failed, as they did dramatically in 1729, there was serious famine.