Catholic Ireland under the penal laws has long been an important and flourishing field of study. Recent decades, meanwhile, have seen the emergence of a significant literature on the mid-seventeenth crisis, inspired in part by the digitisation and publication of the 1641 depositions. By contrast, Restoration Ireland has remained a relatively neglected subject, though recent research on the Church of Ireland and parliament, as well as the always fascinating and complex land confiscations and settlement, has helped address this scholarly omission. Paul Smith’s book is a major addition to two literatures: that on Restoration Ireland and that on early modern legal history. It is the first book-length study to chart the history of anti-Catholic legislation and the legal position of Irish Catholics in the period before the introduction of the penal laws in the 1690s.
Smith’s work does not just address this historical lacuna; he also makes a compelling case for why doing so matters to how we understand Catholic Ireland in this period, not least because the exclusionary eighteenth-century future was neither preordained nor an obvious outcome to contemporaries. The opening chapters deal with the experiences, words and actions of key religious figures. Key here is St Oliver Plunkett, Ireland’s only early modern martyr. Through his execution during the Popish Plot and the continued public display of his relics in Drogheda, Archbishop Plunkett has had an outsized afterlife dominated by mythmakers and hagiographers – even his entry in the Dictionary of Irish biography (Cambridge 2009) refers uncritically to his ‘saintly nature’. Smith, however, offers a shrewd analysis of Plunkett’s political and episcopal career, which grounds Plunkett firmly in his contexts and which makes a compelling case for a modern critical biography of this still fascinating, if elusive figure. Plunkett, together with his friend Bishop Brenan of Waterford (later archbishop of Cashel), is portrayed by Smith as a leader of the accommodationist party in the Irish Church, and their position is contrasted with that of more militant clergy like John Lynch, Nicholas French, Edmund O’Reilly and John O’Molony, all of whom were largely forced to make their careers in exile. Lynch (the subject of important modern work by Ian Campbell) and French, in particular, used their written work to offer alternative pathways for Irish Catholics both within and beyond the then current legal restrictions.
Smith’s work on Irish Catholic legal thought is impressive and adds to what is a growing literature on early modern Irish Latin sources, but where this book really breaks new ground is in his account of Irish-language poetry as a source for the rejection of English law. Drawing on the surviving corpus of Irish poetry from this period, including work by major poets like Daibhí Ó Bruadair and Aogán Ó Rathaille, as well as more obscure figures like the Sligo schoolteacher Sean Ó Gadhra, Smith provides a nuanced account of how Gaelic poetry reveals attitudes to the spread of English law and custom across the seventeenth century. Rightly circumspect of the grander claims made by some scholars of poetry as the source of Irish Catholic public opinion, Smith’s work avoids polemic and instead is very aware of the contradictions between declared support for the Stuart monarchs and the same monarchs’ ambivalent attitude to the rule of law, especially during the reign of James II.
The duplicitous attitude of the Stuart court to their Irish Catholic adherents was never more clearly articulated than during the debates over Irish confiscated property after 1660. The operation and politics of the court of claims are fiendishly complicated, but Smith does an impressive job of exploring its operation through an examination of well-chosen case studies. His selection of examples is interesting here. There are some large landowners and peers, including Lords Slane and Galmoy, but also some unusually well-documented examples from the Catholic middling sort and petty gentry. His close analysis of these cases reminds the reader that the burden of confiscation fell heaviest on these smaller landowners. Furthermore, many of them found it difficult to find the funds to fight their cases during the short period within which the court sat, adding an important barrier to entry to full participation in civil society.
Negotiating such hurdles required access to good lawyers, and the Restoration period saw the emergence of a cadre of effective Catholic lawyers who were willing and able to navigate an increasingly hostile legal system on behalf of their co-religionists. Smith draws on three case studies – John Walshe, William Talbot and Gerald Dillon – to explore the careers and practices of representative examples. Of these, Talbot was the most prominent, being a grandson of the first Lord Baltimore and nephew of the earl of Tyrconnell. He acted for the second Lord Baltimore in Maryland before returning to Ireland in the 1670s, where his practice, like those of Walshe and Dillon, revolved around the complexities of estate preservation and management. Each of them was part of a wider familial network which both boosted their career advancement and also ensured that their skills were in demand to protect family interests, especially in the cases of Walshe and Dillon during the turmoil that followed the Williamite victories at Aughrim and Limerick. Here Smith’s work is invaluable in providing a vital context – a prequel, even – for the recent careful reconstruction of early eighteenth-century Irish Catholic lawyers and men of business by Eoin Kinsella and John Bergin.
Catholics and the law is an important contribution to Irish legal history and to the historiography of the Restoration period, but also to the history of the penal era more often associated with the period after 1691. The legislation directed against Irish Catholic property and political and legal privileges introduced by the Irish parliament from 1695 onwards built on earlier English and Irish precedents. The severity of the measures directed towards the influence of bishops and lawyers as well as property owners also reflected the strategies which Irish Catholics had used to work with and against legal restrictions during the Restoration period. How they did this is ably demonstrated in this book.
