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Lay Catholicism and Religious Policy in Cromwellian Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2013

JOHN CUNNINGHAM
JOHN CUNNINGHAM*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland; e-mail: cunninjo@tcd.ie
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Abstract

The conquest of Ireland between 1649 and 1653 created almost as many problems as it solved for the English government of the country. Not least of these was how, if at all, the majority Catholic population was to be won over to Protestantism. This article reassesses Cromwellian religious policy towards the Catholic laity and traces its evolution up to the end of the decade, taking account also of Catholic responses to official measures. It argues that the supposed leniency of government policy has been overstated and that Catholics who refused to conform to Protestantism in fact risked heavy penalties.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 769 - 786
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

For more than two centuries after the event, Irish Catholic historiography depicted the 1650s as a decade of unmitigated persecution and disaster. A similar if less pronounced trend was also evident in Catholic histories of England and Scotland. In all three cases, the experiences of the clergy understandably received particular notice.Footnote 1 Some attention was also given to those religious policies approved at Westminster which were of consequence to the Catholic laity, not least a controversial oath of abjuration. Catholics who refused to take this oath, renouncing their faith, risked the seizure of two-thirds of their property. First introduced in England in 1643, its provisions were strengthened by further legislation in 1657.Footnote 2 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the priest-historians Patrick Francis Moran and William Forbes-Leith published clerical reports from the 1650s which alleged that this oath was being stringently enforced upon steadfast Catholic populaces in Ireland and Scotland respectively. Several English historians also drew attention to the enforcement of the oath in Cromwellian England.Footnote 3 Moran also insisted that Irish Catholics faced fines for their failure to attend Protestant services.Footnote 4 More recently, some professional scholars have offered a rather different appraisal. In relation to Scotland, Allan Macinnes has argued that clerical reports of increased persecution in the 1650s ‘had been largely manufactured’ with a view to winning papal support for the appointment of a resident bishop. In practice, he explained, the Cromwellian regime was ‘prepared to accord a measure of toleration’.Footnote 5 The most up-to-date work on Ireland has similarly found that ‘a significant degree of leniency was granted to the general lay populace’.Footnote 6 Although scholarship on Catholicism in England has also tended towards this tolerationist conclusion, there have been some dissenting voices. Terence Smith, for example, has argued that ‘the intensity of the financial persecution between 1642 and 1660 can have been, in general, little less than staggering’.Footnote 7

In the case of Ireland, the interpretative shift in question coincided with the transition from Catholic nationalist history-writing to the findings of professional academic research, a development also underpinned by a notable change in the character of the sources employed. Whereas Moran relied on a range of contemporary reports compiled in Latin, fifty years later the English historian Charles Firth drew solely on the correspondence of Henry Cromwell, a political moderate and the effective head of the government of Ireland between 1655 and 1659.Footnote 8 More recent assessments have also relied heavily on Henry Cromwell's letters. This narrower source base is, however, inadequate for detailed analysis of Cromwellian religious policy towards Irish Catholics. This is particularly evident in relation to the oath of abjuration, the focus of a whole chapter in Moran, but often the subject of little more than a passing mention in recent decades.Footnote 9 This article seeks to redress this imbalance by providing a more broadly-grounded appraisal of religious policy towards the Irish Catholic laity in the 1650s. Although the surviving sources are limited, they include some materials which have hitherto gone unnoticed. Three aspects in particular require examination: the promises given to the Irish Catholics in the years of conquest between 1649 and 1653; official policy thereafter up to the close of the decade; and the efforts made by the Catholics themselves to secure and to safeguard some measure of religious freedom. The exploration of these matters can shed some new light on a crucial stage in the development of the relationships which existed in the early modern period both among the communities of Ireland and between it and its neighbour island.

I

The post-Reformation problems posed by religious divergence between some European rulers and their subjects had major implications for Ireland.Footnote 10 Under Elizabeth i, the requirement for many officeholders to take the oath of supremacy helped to ensure that Old English Catholics were gradually edged out of governmental positions of influence in Ireland. Under the early Stuarts, most Irish Catholics continued to protest their loyalty, while the sporadic enforcement of recusancy fines did little to slow the development of the Counter-Reformation Church. In 1628 an oath of allegiance acceptable to Catholics was agreed with Charles i as part of the concessions known as ‘the Graces’, but this programme was never fully implemented. Instead, by the 1650s there had emerged further compelling grounds for the supposed irreconcilability of Irish Catholics to the Protestant state, namely their perceived blood guilt as a result of the alleged general massacre of Protestant colonists in 1641.Footnote 11

In England, radical tolerationist arguments in favour of allowing Irish Catholics to go their own way proved most potent in the first half of 1649 as opposition to Oliver Cromwell's planned invasion mobilised.Footnote 12 Following his arrival in Ireland and the killing of all priests captured at Drogheda and Wexford, Cromwell next encountered a Catholic demand for liberty of conscience at the walls of New Ross in October 1649. His response is well-known: ‘I meddle with no man's conscience. But if by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and to let you know, where the parliament of England have power, that will not be allowed of.’Footnote 13 In January 1650 Cromwell published a more considered statement in his Declaration for the undeceiving of deluded and seduced persons. This document hinted at a more conciliatory attitude towards the wider populace: ‘what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their owne breasts I cannot reach; but thinke it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in the least to suffer for the same’.Footnote 14 A year earlier, John Milton had described policy towards English Catholics in similar terms; parliament had ‘confin'd them to the bare enjoyment of that which is not within our reach, their Consciences’.Footnote 15 From this Protestant perspective, there could be no toleration of the practice of Catholicism, or of its bishops and priests; heresy was not to be permitted. At the same time, Catholics would not be forced actually to renounce their beliefs; human authority would not be imposed between God's grace and the soul.Footnote 16 Instead, Cromwell hoped that it would at some point in the future ‘please God to give them another or a better mind’.Footnote 17

By the spring of 1652, the war in Ireland was moving gradually towards a conclusion. At that point an important Catholic commander, Colonel John Fitzpatrick, offered to surrender on condition ‘that we may have liberty for our religion and the due exercise thereof, though not affirmatively, yet tacitly’. In its response, the Irish government conceded only that those priests not guilty of murder would be allowed to depart the country. Others would prove more determined to win concessions. In April 1652 Hugh O'Kelly, representing the Connacht army, and Sir Robert Talbot, representing the Leinster army, made separate journeys to Athlone to discuss religious issues with Commissary-General John Reynolds, a Cromwellian officer who was ‘understoode to be most favorable for applications of that kind’.Footnote 18 Some years earlier, Talbot had reportedly proclaimed ‘that it was indifferent to him to have Mass with solemnity in Christ or St Patrick's Church, [or] privately at his bedside’.Footnote 19 At Athlone in 1652 Reynolds once again reiterated Cromwell's point that Catholic worship would not be permitted in any form. Hugh O'Kelly reported that ‘the exercise of the masse [was] absolutly protested against, either in privat or publicke’.Footnote 20

This repeated insistence that mass would not be permitted greatly complicated Catholic efforts to make an honourable surrender. As late as May 1652 the various Irish forces restated their joint resolution to hold out until guaranteed ‘free exercise of religion in all the kingdom to both clergie and laitie’ and the cancellation of all penal laws against Catholicism.Footnote 21 Despite the unpromising background, the negotiations which took place for the surrender of the Leinster army at Kilkenny in May 1652 did result in some limited concessions in relation to the issue of liberty of conscience. In response to Catholic demands, the parliamentary commissioners stated that ‘it [was] their intention, and the intention of their ministers here not to compel any the Recusants in this nation to their worship or divine service contrary to their consciences’. The Catholics were also promised the benefit of legislation approved by the parliament in September 1650 which had repealed the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity and other former measures against recusants, including the levying of fines for non-attendance at Protestant services.Footnote 22 In 1913 the English historian Robert Dunlop labelled these terms secured by the Irish Catholics in 1652 as ‘Liberty of conscience granted’.Footnote 23

The Leinster articles of May 1652 represented a national treaty of sorts, as the Catholic forces in the other provinces were invited to submit under the same conditions.Footnote 24 Moreover, as a well-informed Irish Jesuit explained a few years later, the terms secured reassured Irish Catholics ‘that they should enjoy the freedom and liberty of their consciences, and not be molested for not going to Church, or any Protestant worship of God’.Footnote 25 Because the Catholic religion had already been illegal on an almost continuous basis for over a century, the withdrawal of these coercive measures could potentially be read as an improvement in the status of Catholicism. Having secured these basic promises, the Leinster officers presumably hoped that they would be able to resume their former practice of sheltering priests and attending mass in private in their homes.

Yet there was no guarantee that the Westminster parliament would look favourably upon these developments. On 1 June 1652 it was informed of the terms recently agreed at Kilkenny. With support from the radical tolerationist MPs Sir Henry Vane the Younger and Henry Marten, the clause which guaranteed that Catholics would not be forced to worship against their consciences was passed by the house. Following the vote, however, the narrow limits of concessions being extended were reaffirmed by the approval of an additional resolution stipulating ‘that this doth not extend to the Allowance of the Exercise of the Popish Religion in Ireland, in any Kind; nor to give any Colour or Countenance thereunto, nor to the least Toleration thereof’.Footnote 26 The distinction between liberty of conscience for Irish Catholics on the one hand and toleration for the practice of their religion on the other was again being made.

II

The first significant post-war measure undertaken by the government concerning Catholicism was a determined effort to remove all Catholic priests from the country. Such a policy was far from being unique in the context of Europe's confessional conflicts, and in Ireland it did not require any change in the law, only the enforcement of an existing one.Footnote 27 In January 1653 the Irish government, invoking an English Elizabethan statute, duly published a proclamation ordering all priests to take ship.Footnote 28 The main Catholic response to this move came in the form of a protest from a group of concerned Catholic gentry. This complaint convinced the Irish government of the need to publish a further document in order to clarify their policy towards the Catholic laity. In a declaration published on 19 February 1653, the promise made in the previous year that nobody would be compelled ‘to any worship or Service contrary to their Consciences’ was reaffirmed. The commissioners also dismissed as ‘false and Scandalous’ the ‘Reports and Rumors amongst [th]e People That [th]e Parlamt … And their Ministers doe intend to require [th]e People of this Nacon to take Oathes to Renounce their Religion and to compell them to Religious worship against their Consciences’.Footnote 29 Between 1649 and 1653, therefore, English policy towards Irish Catholicism remained fairly consistent. Bishops, priests and the exercise of Catholicism would not be tolerated. At the same time, Catholics would not be compelled to renounce their beliefs or to attend Protestant services.

In essence, this position represented only a half-policy. If the population were to be won over to Protestantism, an intense and sustained campaign of persuasion and pastoral endeavour would be needed. Instead, the resources required for such an undertaking were never made available.Footnote 30 On the one hand Godfrey Daniel took a potentially important step in 1652 when he published his Irish-language translation of William Perkins's The foundation of Christian religion. Daniel was convinced that the Irish Catholics were ‘a Teachable people’, and the state did employ several ministers to preach to the natives.Footnote 31 On the other hand, by mid-1653 the Irish government had been authorised to transplant almost the entire Catholic population to the western province of Connacht. Although this policy of forced internal migration was soon moderated, it reflected a fatalistic view of the Catholic Irish as being beyond recall.Footnote 32 The country was at the mercy of its conquerors, but the large dilemma of not merely how but also if Irish souls were to be saved had not yet been resolved.

III

To establish whether or not the stated policy of non-interference with the consciences of lay Catholics remained in place, it is necessary to turn to the subsequent period. By 1659 the Catholics who had expected seven years before to retain part of their lands and to be left unmolested by the state in matters of religious belief now found themselves in a very different situation. In March of that year they obtained permission from Henry Cromwell to hold a meeting in Connacht, an event which has gone unnoticed by historians. The purpose of this assembly was to draw up an address to Richard Cromwell and his council and to compile a remonstrance of their grievances. Because the quantity of land available in Connacht was insufficient to satisfy Catholic entitlements, grievances relating to the transplantation were inevitably voiced. The Catholics' two primary complaints, however, actually related to religious matters.Footnote 33

One of these grievances was ‘The penalties on the act for the sabbath, in theire not frequenting the Protestant churches’.Footnote 34 The legislation referred to here was the Act for the Better Observation of the Lord's Day passed by parliament on 26 June 1657.Footnote 35 It has not been mentioned in connection with Catholicism in Cromwellian Ireland by any historian over the past century.Footnote 36 In 1937 Robert Dudley Edwards suggested that no fines had been levied on Irish Catholics for non-attendance at church simply because they were too impoverished to pay them.Footnote 37 Subsequent scholars have agreed that no penalties were imposed, and they have supported this assertion with the tangible evidence supplied by the repeal of the recusancy laws in 1650 and the related promise made to the Leinster officers in 1652. These factors led Patrick Corish, for example, to conclude that ‘in principle, no one was compelled to attend religious worship contrary to his conscience’.Footnote 38

Rather, it is evident that by 1657 fines for non-attendance at Protestant services were back on the agenda in Ireland. Official enthusiasm for such measures is suggested by the Irish government's unusual decision to pre-empt the parliament by issuing a declaration ‘concerning the observation of the Lord's Day’ a week before the relevant bill received its final approval at Westminster. This declaration was then ‘sent to the sheriffs to be dispersed and observed accordingly’.Footnote 39 The legislation in question proscribed a wide range of activities on the Sabbath and empowered justices of the peace to levy a wide series of fines, including one of 30d. per week for persons who failed to attend ‘the true Worship and Service of God’.Footnote 40 This particular measure was highlighted by Fr Maurice Conry in a work published at Innsbruck in 1659. He had been present in the west of Ireland between 1655 and 1658.Footnote 41 The issue was also mentioned in a retrospective Carmelite report of 1662.Footnote 42 Although there is no evidence to demonstrate how widely the relevant fines were actually enforced, they were clearly contributing in some way to the considerable financial difficulties faced by the Catholics in Connacht in 1659.

IV

The second religious grievance voiced by the Catholics in March 1659 related to the oath of abjuration.Footnote 43 This oath, to be tendered to all suspected Catholics aged upwards of sixteen years, was approved by parliament in June 1657 as part of the Act for Convicting, Discovering and Repressing of Popish Recusants.Footnote 44 The Cromwellian oath of abjuration can be usefully linked back at least to the controversial Jacobean oath of allegiance of 1606. That oath had required subscribers to deny the pope's powers to depose rulers and to absolve Catholics from oaths, as well as to abjure ‘the heretical and damnable doctrine’ that it was permissible to murder excommunicated princes.Footnote 45 The oath of abjuration approved by the English parliament in 1643 built upon this foundation. The seizure of two-thirds of the property of those who refused to take it posed considerable financial difficulties for many English Catholics, even causing some prominent landowners to renounce their religion.Footnote 46 The revised oath introduced in 1657 went even further, entailing abjuration of not only papal supremacy, but also transubstantiation, purgatory, justification by works and other Catholic beliefs.Footnote 47 Parliament's approval of a new oath in 1657 has been seen as a reactionary measure, designed to squeeze more revenue from Catholics following on from the outbreak of war with Spain in the previous year. None the less, it did cause disagreement in parliament; some MPs objected to the oath on several grounds, including its impinging on liberty of conscience.Footnote 48

By the autumn of 1657 Henry Cromwell's various correspondents within Ireland had informed him that Catholics were highly alarmed at the prospect of this new oath. The priests remaining in the country were reportedly stirring up opposition, while some Catholics were said to be selling their cattle and stock ‘at strange undervalues’ and buying horses ‘to put themselves into a shifting condition, either for force or flight’. Henry Cromwell was perturbed by this intelligence and he accordingly expressed the wish that ‘this extrame course had not been so suddenly taken, comeing like a thunder-clapp uppon them’. It seems that he would have preferred something akin to the oath of allegiance of 1606, ‘for their renounceing all forreign jurisdiction’, in combination with ‘ordinary smaller penalties’ such as the fines provided for by the Act for the Better Observation of the Lord's Day.Footnote 49 Historians have usually read Henry Cromwell's reluctance as sufficient evidence that the oath was not enforced, or at least enforced only fitfully and ineffectively. A century ago, Firth argued that ‘Henry Cromwell disapproved of the oath … and he seems to have quietly dropped any attempt to enforce it.’Footnote 50 Scott Spurlock has written that ‘Henry Cromwell never implemented it in full force, and persecution began to abate’.Footnote 51 It is necessary to test such conclusions against a wider range of evidence.

Over the previous two decades, oaths had played a particularly important role in Irish affairs, from the enforcement of the ‘Black oath’ against the Scottish Covenant in Ulster to the introduction of the Engagement countrywide in 1652.Footnote 52 By March 1659 the oath of abjuration approved by parliament two years earlier was the primary grievance of the Catholic assembly in Connacht:

grievous in itself as imposeing on their consciences, not yet satisfied, and grievous to their estates; this takeing from them two parts of their estates, and that toties quoties, according to reiterated presentments for nuisances, and that after cutting short of their estates in theire transplanting into Conaught, so as in a short time all will be reduced into nothing.Footnote 53

Other Catholic contemporary observers vehemently insisted that the oath was being widely enforced, albeit, they claimed, no Catholic could be found to take it.Footnote 54 On the government side officials and officers apart from Henry Cromwell also recognised the oath as a matter of crucial importance. For example, when a group of army officers met in Dublin in September 1658 to welcome the accession of Richard Cromwell, the oath and its consequences appear to have been the only other item on the agenda.Footnote 55 In the same year, the lord chancellor of Ireland, William Steele, identified the oath as the main issue of contention in the state's relations with Catholics.Footnote 56 In turn, the Catholic response to this threat was more sophisticated than has been previously realised, involving appeals both to the continent and to London. Both aspects are worthy of some attention.

V

In the early autumn of 1657 a friar named Fitzsimons followed Henry Cromwell to Connacht on his annual progress. Fitzsimons posed as a solicitor for the transplanted Catholic Conly Geoghegan, a disguise suitably reinforced by his possession of relevant legal papers. A government informer, however, reported that Fitzsimons's actual purpose was to conduct surveillance in preparation for an invasion. Two Catholics, Daniel O'Sullivan Beare and Bryan Roe O'Neill, had apparently recently departed from Munster in a Spanish vessel ‘and brought along with them several petitions from the Catholicks of this nation, declareing under what tyrannicall government they live; makeing mention more than at large of this oath, which is to be forced on them, and craveing assistance from all the catholick princes of Christendom’.Footnote 57 A few weeks later John Somers reported from Leiden that the O'Sullivans were attempting to raise a foot regiment: ‘They levye underhand, not publickly.’Footnote 58 Such manoeuvring by Irish Catholics on the continent was not unusual in the 1650s.Footnote 59 Yet in 1657 at least, the threat posed by the oath of abjuration would appear to have lent particular urgency to this latest appeal for foreign aid.

While O'Sullivan Beare was busy in Flanders, in November 1657 Henry Cromwell learned from a correspondent in the west of Ireland that the Catholics were planning to dispatch an agent to London to lobby for a suspension of the oath.Footnote 60 This plan evidently came to fruition, as on 22 April 1658 Cromwell's council considered a petition presented on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland.Footnote 61 A previously unnoticed document appears to be a copy of the petition in question. Its sole signatory was Sir Robert Talbot.Footnote 62 Talbot, a substantial landowner and a leading confederate in the 1640s, had visited Reynolds at Athlone in April 1652 before helping to negotiate the surrender of the Leinster army at Kilkenny a few weeks later. Rather than retiring to Connacht, he spent much of the decade in London representing the Irish Catholic interest.

Talbot's initial arrival in London was due to the activities of his younger brother Peter, professor of theology at Antwerp and future Catholic archbishop of Dublin. In April 1653 Peter Talbot travelled from Madrid to London to lobby, with the aid of the Spanish ambassador, for concessions to Irish Catholics.Footnote 63 By 1654 Sir Robert Talbot was campaigning in London against the Irish land settlement. In 1655 he was briefly imprisoned when his youngest brother Richard, future duke of Tyrconnell, and his nephew Robin Dongan, arrived from the continent on a mission to assassinate Cromwell. Despite this setback, Robert Talbot continued to represent the Irish Catholic interest in London. His brother-in-law, the English Catholic Lord Baltimore, was also active in the capital at this time seeking to recover his proprietorship of the Maryland colony. As the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 had guaranteed freedom of worship for all Trinitarian Christians, Baltimore was potentially a useful ally for Talbot. Along with presenting the appeal against the oath of abjuration in 1658, Talbot was also one of the two agents who submitted further petitions to the restored Rump parliament in mid-1659 following on from the Catholic meeting in Connacht a few months before.Footnote 64

In 1658 the limited ambitions of the Irish Catholics on the question of religion were reflected in Talbot's cautious approach, in which he focused entirely on the problems posed by the oath of abjuration. His petition, addressed singularly to the lord protector, simply recited the various statements and declarations made by Cromwell and the Irish government concerning Catholicism between 1650 and 1653.Footnote 65 This reasoned approach allowed Talbot to demonstrate that the oath of abjuration was inconsistent with the earlier promises made to the Irish Catholics. Moreover, he pointed out that the loss of two-thirds of their property upon refusal to take the oath would prevent them from paying taxes and force them to ‘begg, robb, steale or starve’.Footnote 66 It seems likely that the Talbot brothers engaged in some cross-Channel collaboration on these points; in a pamphlet published at Antwerp in the previous month, March 1658, Peter Talbot had offered a brief summary of some of these same arguments against the oath, depicting it as a blatant breach of the public faith.Footnote 67

The Talbots' strategy at this time can be usefully compared with that of the English Catholics in the 1650s and that of the Irish Catholics in previous decades. In England in the late 1640s, Catholic efforts to win toleration from the Independent party had foundered when it was proposed that they should take three oaths, including one denying the pope's authority to absolve civil obligation.Footnote 68 None the less, a group of Catholics known as the Blackloists continued their search for a settlement into the 1650s.Footnote 69 In June 1652 the parliament considered a petition signed by a group of twenty-five English Catholic landowners. This group sought ‘liberty to cleere theire religion from whatsoever may be inconsistent with government’.Footnote 70 To this end, the petitioners asserted the authority of Scripture and their belief in the Trinity. They also explained their use of sacred images and the doctrine of justification by works, renounced the pope's authority in absolving Catholics from oaths and emphasised their obedience to the civil power. On this evidence, this group of Catholics would have been content to see the Jacobean oath of allegiance reinstated.Footnote 71 A few years later, in 1658, Sir Robert Talbot made no effort to explain or to justify Catholic beliefs after the manner of his English co-religionists; he may have been mindful of the experiences of his father, Sir William Talbot, under previous regimes.

Sir William Talbot had been dismissed from the office of recorder of Dublin in 1605 for refusing to take the oath of supremacy. Undeterred, he went to London in 1613 as head of an Old English Catholic delegation. After his arrival, he heard James i declare his intention ‘not to extort any man's conscience’, a sentiment which would be echoed by Cromwell decades later. While in London, Talbot was sucked into the controversy surrounding the oath of allegiance when he was asked by the king for his opinion on the teachings of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez concerning the papal deposing power and the lawfulness of tyrannicide. Talbot hesitated to express his abhorrence of these views, declaring instead that he would submit to the judgement of the pope. As a result, he was imprisoned, threatened with execution, and fined £10,000. None the less, Talbot went again to London in the late 1620s as a member of the Irish delegation which negotiated ‘the Graces’ with Charles i.Footnote 72 Shortly after Sir William's death in 1634, his son Sir Robert was expelled from the Irish House of Commons, presumably as a result of his involvement in the unsuccessful agitation for the full confirmation of ‘the Graces’.Footnote 73

Fortunately for Sir Robert Talbot, the guarantees given to Irish Catholics during the Cromwellian conquest meant that he could construct a case against the oath of abjuration based upon the principles of honour, justice and the public faith, and without having to court controversy by seeking to explain or to justify Catholic doctrines. A year earlier Chancellor Steele had recognised the strength of such arguments when he admitted that ‘the keeping of ffaith and Justice inviolable to all men … is that which is the honour and support of any Nacon’.Footnote 74 Furthermore, it could reasonably be hoped that this approach would win Cromwell's personal sympathy. Since his appointment as lord protector in 1653, Cromwell had shown a willingness to assist Irish Catholics. For example, in 1654 Cromwell had opposed the Irish government and backed Talbot and his Leinster army colleagues as they pleaded that their articles of surrender ought to protect them from transplantation.Footnote 75 In 1658 Talbot's considered arguments, based in part on the same Leinster articles, were aimed precisely at securing Cromwell's intervention by provoking his sense of honour.

Although individuals closely linked to Cromwell reportedly backed the approval of the oath in parliament, Cromwell assured European diplomats that he was opposed to it. For instance, he informed the French ambassador that he ‘regretted parliament's approval of a law so contrary to his own promises’.Footnote 76 Did he mean the promises which he had made to the Irish Catholics in 1650? In any case, by the time that Talbot's petition was considered by the council Cromwell's powers were in decline and he did not attend the relevant meeting. The issue was instead referred to a committee which included Cromwell's son-in-law Charles Fleetwood.Footnote 77 As Fleetwood had, until recently, served as lord deputy of Ireland, his opinion would have carried the greatest weight in committee. His kinsman Sir Thomas Fleetwood was among the signatories of the English Catholic petition of 1652, and Charles later assisted him in his efforts to recover his estate.Footnote 78 This behaviour contrasted sharply with Fleetwood's attitude towards the Irish Catholics. In 1654 he had dismissed them as ‘an abominable false, cunning, and perfidious people’.Footnote 79 There is no evidence to show that the relevant committee ever produced a report in 1658. Instead, the writer of a letter sent around this time to George Downing, the commonwealth agent at The Hague, suggested that a way should be found to secure the removal from London of Sir Robert Talbot and other unwelcome Irish Catholics.Footnote 80

VI

While O'Sullivan Beare's recruiting drive and Talbot's petition offer crucial insights into the Irish Catholic response to the oath, other fragmentary and largely overlooked evidence can allow a fresh appraisal of its implementation in Ireland. The enforcement of the oath depended on local justices of the peace presenting the names of suspected Catholics at the quarterly sessions. These individuals were then summoned to take the oath at the next sessions in the county; refusal to do so or failure to appear would result in conviction.Footnote 81 The fragmentary surviving data concerning the enforcement of the oath through this legal apparatus was not for the most part preserved among the so-called ‘commonwealth records’ consulted by Dunlop, whose notes on Cromwellian Ireland in turn helped to inform the views of Samuel Gardiner and Firth.Footnote 82 This largely overlooked material makes it clear that considerable attempts at enforcement were made in a number of counties between 1657 and 1659.

The earliest evidence relates to the autumn sessions held at Loughrea in Co. Galway in 1657. As most of the surviving Catholic landowners in the country held land in that county, the proceedings there were of particular importance. The outcome was as might be expected: an English official at Loughrea reported that ‘they declared that they would never take the said oath but that they would loose all they had first’.Footnote 83 Another contemporary account describes how a large number of Catholics in the city of Cork also collectively rejected the oath in an episode described by David Dickson as ‘a major civil disturbance’.Footnote 84 In February 1658 the Court of Exchequer in Dublin threatened the clerks of the peace in the respective counties with fines of £20 each unless they made returns of persons convicted for their failure to take the oath. This warning was repeated three months later. By then, the returns for Dublin city and county, as well as counties Meath, Kildare, Louth, Monaghan, Cavan and Fermanagh had been lodged with the court.Footnote 85 These returns were soon followed by those from some other counties. In April 1658 Catholics were convicted for refusing to take the oath at the quarterly sessions in counties Kerry and Tipperary. The proceedings in Kerry took place over three days and the lost manuscript list of convicts extended to twenty-two membranes.Footnote 86 Elsewhere in Co. Wexford, the sheriff complained that three priests housed in the jail there were instrumental in discouraging the people from taking the oath.Footnote 87 At Naas, in October 1658, 120 individuals from just two baronies in Co. Kildare were summoned. When they failed to appear in January 1659, all were convicted.Footnote 88 These proceedings appear to represent a second round of convictions within that county. Overall, a very fragmentary source base provides evidence of legal proceedings relating to the enforcement of the oath of abjuration in at least fourteen of the thirty-two counties.

In Kildare and in most other counties outside of Connacht, Catholic landownership was by the late 1650s a thing of the past. Across much of the country, therefore, the oath of abjuration must have been aimed at dispossessed proprietors and at persons of lower social rank. The men convicted in Kildare were mostly described as yeomen, but they included ‘Owen McShane, Sherriffe's Bailiffe’.Footnote 89 In Co. Kerry, in 1658, Charles Bastable, a justice of the peace, was among those criticised by a Protestant observer for the thoroughness with which he was implementing the oath. His motivation was identified as material rather than religious. Bastable was one of the chief tenants on the Castleisland estate of Lord Herbert, and his family had been robbed and driven out by their Catholic neighbours in 1641. By the mid-1650s, Bastable was back in situ and engaged in competition with Catholic tenants for leases of property on the Herbert estate.Footnote 90 His elevation to justice of the peace was probably as a result of Henry Cromwell's conservative tendencies, which included the favouring of members of the Old Protestant community in official appointments.Footnote 91 For Bastable then, the oath provided a means to harass his Catholic competitors for land and, perhaps, to gain a measure of revenge for 1641.

Further data relating to the actual taking of the oath by Catholics serves to confirm that it was enforced, while also contradicting the traditional Catholic depiction of universal constancy. In May 1658 Sir John Bourke, presumably he of Derrymacloghney, Co. Galway, took the oath. Bourke had been assigned 1,200 acres as a transplanter; his actions provide a further indication that surviving Catholic landowners in Connacht were coming under pressure to conform to Protestantism, a circumstance which gives further substance to the complaints voiced by them in March 1659.Footnote 92 In King's County, Turlough Geoghegan pleaded sickness and Thady Carroll requested a translator before they too took the oath at Easter 1659 and recovered their property. Several witnesses confirmed that Carroll, despite the presumed language difficulties involved, also ‘frequent[ed] publique meetings where the word of God [was] preached’. An individual named Richard Duffe, probably from Co. Dublin, had abjured his faith a few months earlier.Footnote 93 The near-contemporary Irish language poem Tuaireamh na hÉireann also makes reference to the taking of the oath by some Catholics: ‘Chugainn na mionna do cumadh chum léirsgrios, | atá gan miotal acht iomarca is éitheach’ (‘Others took oaths framed for their oppression, | they are without mettle but with much lies’).Footnote 94 It was against this background of oath enforcing and oath taking that the Catholics who met together in Connacht in March 1659 concluded fearfully that ‘in a short time all will be reduced into nothing’.Footnote 95 This fear, it would seem, was not unwarranted.

VII

The evidence discussed in this article makes it apparent that the recent depiction of Cromwellian religious policy towards the Irish Catholic laity as one characterised by leniency cannot be sustained. While Henry Cromwell adopted a moderate approach to various issues, the space created in Ireland by 1653 for the task of converting Catholics through persuasion was instead increasingly filled by a more forceful approach. Moreover, the Catholic community, stripped of its land and wealth, was ill-equipped to shoulder these further burdens. At the same time, the supremacy of coercion over gentler methods was never fully secured. As late as May 1659 a delegation of Protestant agents dispatched to London was instructed to petition the restored Rump parliament to suspend the oath of abjuration so that ‘all care and diligence may be used to instruct the people soe as they may … be made by Degrees to understand their Errors’.Footnote 96 Catholicism remained a problem for the Protestant state, but the issue of which was the most appropriate solution remained open. After 1660 the pressure eased considerably and Catholic pleas to Charles ii did not focus much attention on the religious situation in the previous decade. At the same time, Catholicism was still technically illegal and, as the Irish Catholics again went about reconciling their religious faith with their temporal loyalty, the old controversies around papal authority soon flared up once more.Footnote 97 The Cromwellian period would be just one chapter in the elongated history of confessional conflict in Ireland. Yet, despite the limitations of the evidence and the difficulties of reconstructing events at the local level, it is clear that that chapter merits greater attention than it has hitherto received. This in turn may provide a basis for the drawing of more meaningful comparisons between the religious problems of Cromwellian Ireland and those which existed in England and Scotland, as well as in other areas of post-Reformation Europe.

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