The history of the Church of Ireland during the 1640s has been neglected by modern historians.Footnote 1 Faced with the chaos that followed the Irish Rebellion of 1641 – the massacres and atrocities (on both sides), the flight of refugees to Protestant enclaves threatened by the Confederate Catholics, the intervention of a Scottish army intent on imposing the Covenant across Ireland, the various abortive attempts at peace, and finally, the arrival of Oliver Cromwell and all that followed – it is hardly surprising that church historians have preferred to study the rather calmer waters of the 1630s and the 1660s.Footnote 2 Yet the 1640s need much more attention, as they formed a pivotal period in the history of the Church of Ireland. At various times during that decade there were good reasons to fear that the church would be extinguished altogether. The most obvious of these was in the months following the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641, when castles and cathedral cities fell in rapid succession, and nothing seemed to prevent the Catholics from overrunning Dublin itself and (as they threatened) celebrating mass in Christ Church and St Patrick's Cathedrals. Another, perhaps less well known, danger point came in June 1647 when the king's lord lieutenant, James Butler, marquess of Ormond, signed articles to surrender Dublin and its surrounding garrisons to the Westminster parliament, which had already abolished the Church of England. This second existential threat to the Church of Ireland is the focus of this article.
I
On 19 June 1647, the day after concluding the Dublin articles with Ormond, the parliamentary commissioners who assumed the government of the Irish capital issued a diktat, ordering the clergy to stop using the Book of Common Prayer; five days later a further order stipulated that future services in the Dublin area would be conducted according to the Presbyterian Directory for Public Worship. St John Drelincourt Seymour, in the first chapter of his book, The Puritans in Ireland, published in 1921, describes the reaction of the Irish clergy to the ban on the Prayer Book:
This attack on their position was not unexpected, and the clergy prepared to meet it with all the feeble strength they possessed. They assembled together, and after consultation among themselves presented an answer on the 22nd. Whatever may have been their faults in the past it must be admitted that in the hour of trial they stood up firmly for the principles which they professed, though they must have known that resistance was well-nigh useless.Footnote 3
The defence of the Prayer Book, signed by one bishop and eighteen clergy, was based on three arguments: that the book itself was drawn from the Bible and the ancient liturgies of the church; that its continuance was supported by the Protestants in Dublin; and that its abolition would give comfort to the Catholics. Following the imposition of the Directory, a very similar group of clergy issued a second document, dated 9 July. This was less conciliatory: the Prayer Book had been instituted by the crown; to abandon it would be contrary to their ordination vows and the oath of supremacy; and it would also compromise the Church of Ireland's independence from the English church.Footnote 4
The brief campaign against the banning of the Prayer Book in June and July 1647 has been seen as ‘at once the high point and the last hurrah of the intermittent struggle to preserve the Irish established church, as a church of bishops and prayer-books, from being subsumed within English norms’.Footnote 5 It was certainly a forlorn hope. Valentine Savage, writing to Sir Philip Perceval from Dublin on 7 July, feared the worst: ‘all our divines are silenced for not accepting the Directory, and are upon departing the kingdom. Those that were never esteemed for any parts they had are preferred. This the Protestants here do much take to heart’.Footnote 6 Even the by-now customary bread dole for ministers was stopped, and the commissioners’ reply, ‘callous in the extreme’, advised the protesting clergy to submit to the new arrangements or join the army.Footnote 7 When Ormond finally left Dublin on 28 July, it was said that he was ‘attended by the prayers of the distressed clergy, great numbers of whom, with their wives and children, had been kept from perishing through want by his and his lady's bounty’.Footnote 8 Without Ormond to protect them, the clergy were vulnerable indeed.
Yet it has long been recognised that the Dublin articles, and Ormond's departure, did not mark the death of the Church of Ireland. Seymour was perhaps the first to point this out:
It would be imagined that by this time the death-knell of the church in Dublin had been sounded, and that the Prayer Book had ceased to be read. But the curious point about the whole affair is that these tremendous fulminations seem to have fallen with complete harmlessness. From the scanty and uncertain evidence at our disposal it would seem that the Dublin clergy still retained some hold over their churches, and used the Prayer Book, often with not very unpleasant consequences to themselves or their hearers.Footnote 9
To support his point, Seymour relied mostly on evidence from the two Dublin cathedrals –and that evidence is striking. St Patrick's chapter continued to meet to make leases, including that of the tithes of St Kevin's, as late as February 1649.Footnote 10 Although the clergy attached to Christ Church held no formal meetings after June 1647, the chapter there continued to make leases through 1648 and into 1649.Footnote 11 Raymond Gillespie, writing in 2000, is less upbeat than Seymour about the situation at Christ Church, emphasising that ‘without the rationale of liturgical worship the cathedral began to disintegrate’: nowhere was this more obvious than in the exodus of key chapter members, with at least six fleeing to England by the end of 1647.Footnote 12 Gillespie argues that leases made in later years were either the result of opportunism or wilful blindness, as some of the canons ‘may not have understood the enormity of the changes which were taking place’, while others ‘assumed that the events of 1647–9 were a temporary difficulty’.Footnote 13 Gillespie acknowledges that the situation was less bleak at St Patrick's, where the dean, chancellor and treasurer were still resident in Dublin, and others were in nearby parishes, and chapter meetings ‘struggled on’ until the spring of 1650: ‘whether or not the canons were aware of the gravity of the situation facing them is not clear but they certainly continued to make leases of their property at the last chapter meeting as though they would continue as normal’.Footnote 14 The reason for the survival of many aspects of the church also puzzled Seymour:
The lenity of the commissioners may be explained on the grounds that they had too much in hand at the moment to trouble themselves very much about the clergy and their doings. They knew that the strength of the latter was greatly weakened; they knew too that their own opportunity would soon come, and so they were content to bide their time.Footnote 15
Yet the explanations put forward by Seymour and Gillespie are not entirely satisfactory. Did the church just bumble along thanks to the neglect of the parliamentary commissioners and the absent mindedness of the clergy? What follows is an attempt to reconsider the extent to which the Church of Ireland in the Dublin area survived intact, and why.
II
The starting point must be a re-examination of what actually happened in the summer of 1647. Two aspects in particular need to be looked at much more closely. The first is the origin of the clerical petitions of June and July 1647. It is usually assumed that the petitioners were representative of the Irish church, but only twenty-one clergy signed either document, and only one of these was a bishop: Edward Parry, the newly-consecrated bishop of Killaloe. This was a remarkably small number: by contrast, the remonstrance of the Irish clergy of August 1646 (in support of Ormond's treaty with the Confederate Catholics) was signed by eleven bishops and seventy-seven clergy, and in the winter of 1646–7 Dublin has rightly been described as ‘something of an Anglican redoubt’.Footnote 16 In fact there is evidence that the protesters were a well-defined sub-set of the clerical body. Robert Armstrong makes the point that ‘virtually all of them appear to have had a connection to one or other of the city's two cathedrals’.Footnote 17 Bishop Parry was treasurer of Christ Church Cathedral, and his fellow petitioners included the dean of Christ Church, James Margetson; the dean of St Patrick's, Benjamin Culme; the treasurer of St Patrick's, Godfrey Rhodes; the chancellors of both cathedrals (Ambrose Aungier for St Patrick's, John Creighton for Christ Church); and they were joined by at least five prebendaries and other clerics connected with the cathedrals, including Henry Hall and Robert Parry.Footnote 18 As Seymour notes, none of the signatories went on to serve as a minister under the commonwealth,Footnote 19 and this was not a coincidence. Both cathedrals had been centres of Laudian reform in the 1630s. Raymond Gillespie describes Christ Church as ‘a forcing house for the next generation of Church of Ireland bishops’, while at St Patrick's the old guard was gradually replaced by ‘men of assuredly Laudian principles’ during the same decade.Footnote 20 Although some of their number had fled Ireland earlier in the 1640s, most of the senior clergy that remained in 1647 had been appointed during the period of Laudian dominance.Footnote 21 Laudian influences can be seen in the arguments made in the protests, which were decidedly royalist in tone, evoking the authority of the king, and also had a particular view of the status of the church. Many of the leading protesters also had personal connections with Ormond – five had been his domestic chaplains, and over half of the petitioners are known to have a link to the lord lieutenant, suggesting there was a considerable overlap between the Laudians and the Ormondists.
The second aspect that needs to be considered is the role of the parliamentary commissioners. Despite their name, the five commissioners were not purely servants of the Westminster parliament: they were deeply committed to Ireland, and most of them had strong links with the Calvinist wing of the Church of Ireland. Colonel Michael Jones was the son of Lewis Jones, bishop of Killaloe (described by Laud as ‘faulty’),Footnote 22 brother of Dr Henry Jones, bishop of Clogher, and nephew of Archbishop James Ussher. Arthur Annesley, son of Strafford's enemy, Lord Mountnorris, had been brought up in a household that was strictly Calvinist, but conformable with the pre-Laudian Church of Ireland.Footnote 23 Sir Robert King, who had extensive estates in Connaught, was a moderate figure who was on good terms with Ormond as well as parliament.Footnote 24 Sir Robert Meredith, chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, was a County Kildare landowner who had married into the Ussher family, but had fallen out with Ormond in 1643 and in the later 1640s was an ally of the political Independents at Westminster. The fifth commissioner was Colonel John Moore, who was M.P. for Liverpool and a religious Presbyterian, although even he had strong connections across the Irish Sea: he was related to William Brabazon, first earl of Meath, and had been an active member of parliament's committee of Irish affairs, alongside important Anglo-Irish politicians such as William Jephson and Sir John Clotworthy. None of these men had a track record of religious radicalism, and three or four of them had close connections with Ussher and the pre-Laudian Church of Ireland. But the commissioners were not free agents. When it came to religion, their instructions originated with the dominant faction at Westminster, the political Presbyterians, who were keen to suppress the Prayer Book and enforce the Directory, and the orders issued in June 1647 should be seen in that light. A further problem was caused by the rapidly changing situation in England. Even as the commissioners imposed a rigid settlement in Dublin, the New Model Army was challenging the supremacy of the political Presbyterians; the ‘forcing of the Houses’ by a Presbyterian-led mob in late July provoked the army to march on London; in August the Independent faction had seized control of parliament.Footnote 25 The violent political changes in England threw Ireland into a state of flux. The commissioners divided on party lines, with Annesley complaining at the end of July that he and King had been traduced by Meredith.Footnote 26 The continuing confusion in Dublin can be seen in a newsletter sent to Ormond on 8 September: ‘my lord, this place stands at gaze, expecting Sir Thomas Fairfax, [and] change of government [so] that none knows how to turn themselves, the Presbyterians much displeased, and will not now acknowledge a parliament, but terms it an assembly of Anabaptists kept together by an over-ruling power’.Footnote 27
By this time the parliamentary commissioners had scattered. Annesley and King were at Westminster by the middle of August.Footnote 28 Meredith took ship for England in early September, leaving ‘the whole government in Colonel Jones's hands, for Colonel Moore still continues at Dundalk’.Footnote 29 With Michael Jones at the helm, the religious situation in Dublin became calmer. Although some of the cathedral clergy had fled, it seems that most of their colleagues in the city and the surrounding area chose to sit it out.Footnote 30 At the end of September 1647 it was reported that ‘our reverend clergy do yet stay with us in hope that they may be restored to their churches – they stand aloof off, as Moses’ mother did when he was committed to the bull rush ark, to see what will become of them’.Footnote 31
III
The key figure in the survival of the Church of Ireland in the Dublin area between August 1647 and August 1649 was Colonel Michael Jones. Jones is an interesting character, and the title of his only full-length biography, Archibald Kerr's An Ironside of Ireland, is misleading. Jones was a career soldier, who had fought in the early years of the rebellion in Ireland, and then in the north west of England under Sir William Brereton, before becoming governor of Chester in 1646. He was not aligned with any political faction, although his appointment as governor of Dublin, over the head of the Independent candidate, Algernon Sidney (brother of Viscount Lisle), was certainly a political act.Footnote 32 What Jones found in Dublin was not encouraging, as the soldiers were mutinying for lack of pay, and the officers resented interference by the parliamentary commissioners.Footnote 33 Morale improved considerably after the spectacular victory at Dungan's Hill near Trim on 8 August, when Jones defeated the Confederate army of Leinster, under Thomas Preston. One Dublin resident who had opposed the activities of the commissioners in July, now praised Jones and his colonels, who had ‘fought more like lions than men’, and soon became an ardent supporter of the ‘governor’, commenting ‘I pray God long continue him to us’.Footnote 34 It was said that many officers who had served under Ormond had ‘served themselves into favour with our chief commander’ by the end of September, and Jones was now ‘very civil’ to pro-royalist civilians such as Sir Maurice Eustace.Footnote 35
Doubters may have been won over, but difficulties continued. Despite repeated promises, supplies and reinforcements from England were slow in coming, and Jones was forced to mount expeditions to seize livestock and other goods to provide for his troops.Footnote 36 As one commentator noted approvingly in September 1647, ‘they go on getting prey and killing, which is the surest way for them and us’.Footnote 37 In the winter of 1647–8 Jones marched most of his army into County Wicklow, ‘to provide for the necessaries of this army which otherwise could not have subsisted’.Footnote 38 Jones also had to enter into private arrangements to borrow money from the Dublin Corporation, even though this created difficulties of its own.Footnote 39 In January 1648 Jones complained to the Derby House Committee at Whitehall that his new arrangements to levy a tax in Dublin met with ‘opposition from three of the popish aldermen of this city and some other malignants who therein questioned my power’.Footnote 40 In the circumstances, Seymour was perhaps right to argue that Jones could not afford to enforce measures against the Dublin clergy or the use of the Prayer Book, as both seem to have been held in high regard by the people of Dublin. When the ban on the liturgy was imposed in July it was said ‘the Protestants here do take [it] much to heart’;Footnote 41 and in September 1647 it was reported that ‘there is great resort, and of women abundance’ when Prayer Book services were held at Trinity College.Footnote 42
But there were other, more personal, reasons for Jones to ignore the harsh religious agenda set by the parliamentary commissioners. As the son of an Irish bishop, brother of another, and nephew of the primate, Jones had been brought up within the fold. His strongest link with the church in the late 1640s was undoubtedly his brother, Dr Henry Jones, bishop of Clogher, who remained with him in Dublin and soon became his ‘confidential secretary’.Footnote 43 In October 1647, for example, Henry kept Michael informed of news from Munster, and sent him a copy of a letter he had written to Annesley in London.Footnote 44 It was perhaps as a compliment to his brother, who was vice-chancellor of the University of Dublin, that Michael Jones continued Ormond's practice of contributing modest sums to the coffers of Trinity College from February 1648.Footnote 45 In August of the same year Henry was Michael's agent in negotiations for the release of their brother, Sir Theophilus Jones, from a Confederate gaol.Footnote 46 It is telling that, after the regicide, senior royalists approached the colonel through Henry Jones, and in February 1649, when Ormond invited Michael Jones to defect, he sent an accompanying letter to Henry, ‘for from you and others of your function most certainly God will more especially expect the promotion of this cause in your way … and therefore it is that I have chosen to convey this overture to him by you’.Footnote 47 The relationship between the Jones brothers was reinforced by their shared respect for their uncle, Archbishop Ussher. Henry had been Ussher's protégé earlier in his career, and it was with his uncle's backing that he was made bishop of Clogher in 1645. Michael's connection with Ussher was more visceral. Both men had witnessed at first-hand the warm reception of the Catholic agents at the royal court in May 1644, when Ussher was attending the king and Jones was one of the rival Protestant agents, in Oxford to deliver a petition from the settler community fearful of ‘the utter extirpation of the Protestant religion’ in Ireland.Footnote 48 Their reactions to this betrayal had been similar: Jones, in disgust, immediately joined the parliamentarian army; Ussher, after an agonised pause, left Oxford a few months later.Footnote 49 That their relationship remained strong later in the decade is suggested by a letter of 13 June 1647, written to Ussher by James Nugent, vicar of Mullingar in Meath diocese, but now resident in the Irish capital, asking for help in securing a position. Nugent told the archbishop he had already approached Colonel Jones, who ‘told me that you gave him a special charge to do for me what good he might’.Footnote 50 The influence of Archbishop Ussher over Michael Jones's religious policy cannot be proved beyond doubt, but it may help to explain why the Church of Ireland was allowed to continue to function throughout this period.
IV
And function it did. After the departure of the parliamentary commissioners and the establishment of Michael Jones as the sole authority in Dublin, normal service appears to have resumed very quickly. Appointments to livings in the city continued: a new curate of St Nicholas Within was licensed in August 1647, a prebendary of Rathmichael collated in May 1648, and in the same year vicars were appointed for Balrothery, Glasnevin and Whitechurch. In 1649, Dublin Corporation exercised its right as patron to appoint a new curate at Baldoyle.Footnote 51 The growing confidence of the ordinary clergy can be traced through the vestry records of St John the Evangelist, Dublin. The rector, Dudley Boswell, was a prebendary of Christ Church Cathedral and one of the few signatories of the June-July 1647 protests who remained at his post. The yearly accounts from the late 1640s suggest that Boswell tried to run the church as normally as he could, despite the disruptions. In December 1646 – six months before the handover to parliament – he had spent 2s. 6d. on holly and ivy to decorate the church at Christmas; in December 1647, the first Christmas after the parliamentarians took charge, there were no decorations; but a year later 2s. 6d. was again spent on the traditional holly and ivy.Footnote 52 It seems that, having tested the water, Boswell was reassured that such festivals, frowned upon in England, would not be banned in Ireland under Michael Jones. Nor is there any evidence from the St John's records that the Dublin government enforced the ban on the Prayer Book and the adoption of the Directory. The accounts suggest that holy communion was celebrated as often in the year from Easter 1649 as it had in the same period in 1646–7; and there is no mention of the purchase of a copy of the Directory for Public Worship throughout this period.Footnote 53
At the other end of the churchmanship scale, the Ussherian Dr Nicholas Bernard used the Prayer Book at St Peter's, Drogheda, throughout the later 1640s.Footnote 54 Bernard encouraged the townspeople to ‘approach the Holy Communion as often as it is offered to you … which for these many years since this Irish rebellion ye have had a monthly observation of, with a solemn fast preceding as a preparation to it’.Footnote 55 He also prided himself on not having neglected the offices: ‘tis my comfort now that I do not remember, since I came among you, that there hath wanted a morning and evening sacrifice any Lord's Day’, and said he had extended his ministry to include catechising the garrison: ‘of late years I have done it every day in the week, for half an hour to the soldiers (who by the commander were duly brought to the church for that end) whose ignorance in religion I much pitied’.Footnote 56 The importance of the clergy in garrison towns is also suggested by the situation in Trim, where the ‘orders of war’, drawn up in February 1648, included measures to fine soldiers who did not attend the parish church, and provision for a guard to watch the arms piled at the church door during services. The spiritual care of the troops was assigned to Thomas Lambert, a Church of Ireland minister who had previously been chaplain to Lord Moore's regiment at Dundalk.Footnote 57
As Bernard testified, preaching remained immensely popular in the Dublin area, and there is no hint of censorship or even self-censorship in the surviving accounts of sermons. Anthony Martin, the redoubtable bishop of Meath, a long-standing friend of Ussher, was astonishingly provocative.Footnote 58 As early as the first week of September 1647, it was said that ‘the bishop of Meath keeps the Common Prayer up still in the college, where other Protestant divines preach every Sunday in their turns’.Footnote 59 It is clear that Martin was doing far more than merely upholding the college statutes.Footnote 60 As Sir Maurice Eustace reported to Ormond a few weeks later: ‘the bishop of Meath preached the last Sunday a bold sermon in the college. He ripped up all the heresies of these times, and gave the reason that the regality was torn from him to whom it did belong, and that until it were repaired, and that Caesar had his due and that the people returned again to the churches from which they were departed, there was no hope of amendment’.Footnote 61 It is telling that, despite such provocations, Michael Jones was prepared to make cash donations to Trinity College in the months that followed.Footnote 62
V
As well as maintaining the services and traditions of the Church of Ireland – and even, in the case of Bishop Martin, daring to speak truth to power – the old networks of kinship and friendship between the clergy continued to operate during the later 1640s. Unsurprisingly, the circle connected to Archbishop Ussher thrived. When the indigent vicar of Mullingar, James Nugent, wrote to Ussher in June 1647 asking for help in securing a position, he said he had already approached not only Colonel Jones but also John Sterne.Footnote 63 In doing so, Nugent was tapping into the extended Ussher network: John Sterne, chancellor of Dromore, was married to Ussher's niece, Mabel Bermingham; also, as Nugent was careful to mention, he was himself the archbishop's ‘kinsman’.Footnote 64 Michael Jones was as good as his word: in 1648 Nugent is listed as receiving wages as the minister to the garrisons of Athboy and Navan.Footnote 65 In becoming a military chaplain, Nugent followed a road travelled by many destitute clergymen since the beginning of the Irish rebellion; and which was still open to traffic in 1648, when the field army commanded by Jones remained a valuable source of alternative employment. The chaplain to Jones's own regiment of horse in the same year was James Bentley, former rector of Dromkey in County Wicklow.Footnote 66 Michael Jones's colleagues also chose Church of Ireland clergymen as military chaplains. William Aldridge, of Colonel Chidley Coote's horse regiment, had been rector of Drumgowne in Kilmore diocese.Footnote 67 Joseph Berry (or Bury), of Colonel John Ponsonby's horse, had been rector of Muckno in Clogher diocese.Footnote 68 Robert Chambers, of Sir Thomas Armstrong's regiment, had been vicar of Drumcree in Armagh, but in the mid-1640s was resident in Drogheda.Footnote 69 He may have been related to the Captain Chambers who was Ussher's ‘sensechal, and the overseer of all my lands and rents in the counties of Armagh and Tyrone’ earlier in the decade.Footnote 70 Although the choice of chaplain was strictly speaking the colonel's prerogative, it was perhaps no coincidence that Aldridge, Berry and Chambers originated from Armagh province, and thus under the nominal care of Ussher. Needless to say, none of these men were signatories of the protests issued by the clergy in Dublin in June and July 1647.Footnote 71 Instead they joined the majority who chose to ‘stand aloof off’, in the hope that conditions would improve.
The existence of other networks is revealed by correspondence concerning a Welsh gentleman, Griffith Jones of Castellmarch, Caernarvonshire, who had the misfortune to be kidnapped by the royalist naval captain, John Bartlett, in the new year of 1649. He was taken first to the port of Wexford, and then to Kilkenny, where he became a prisoner of the marquess of Ormond (who had returned to Ireland, to resume his duties as king's lord lieutenant, at the end of September 1648). Griffith Jones's brother-in-law, Richard Griffith, crossed to Dublin to try to secure his release, and the letters written by Griffith have been used to demonstrate the presence of an extensive Welsh network that he tried to deploy to secure the release of his friend. This network included a number of senior church figures, such as Lancelot Bulkeley, archbishop of Dublin; his son William, the archdeacon of the diocese; and Bishop Edward Parry, who had been Bulkeley's chaplain in the 1630s: all of whom wrote letters in support of Griffith Jones in the middle of March 1649.Footnote 72 Other evidence adds to the picture: Parry's letter was written jointly with his kinsman, Robert Parry, dean of Lismore and prebendary of St Audoen's; and while most of the clergy involved addressed their letters to Ormond or his secretary, William Bulkeley chose instead to approach his ‘cousin’ Gilbert Deane, dean of Waterford and prebendary of Tassagard (St Patrick's Cathedral), who had received favours from Ormond in the past and was now a member of the lord lieutenant's entourage at Kilkenny.Footnote 73 Deane, like the Parrys, had signed the two protests in defence of the Prayer Book and the church in the summer of 1647. Another go-between was ‘Mr Dean Parker’ (John Parker, dean of Killaloe and prebendary of St Michan's), ‘a prisoner released from hence [Dublin], who promised to move Lord Ormond to declare his mind’.Footnote 74 Yet the old cathedral network – now on both sides of the political divide – was not enough. Richard Griffith soon switched his attentions to lobbying another senior clergyman of Welsh extraction, Dr Henry Jones, who seems to have persuaded his brother to negotiate an exchange of prisoners with Ormond. The failure of efforts to release Griffith Jones was not through lack of effort: as Ormond tightened his noose around Dublin in early July the time for negotiation ended, and the deal fell through.Footnote 75
The case of Griffith Jones helps to underline the fact that the Church of Ireland in the Dublin area survived in remarkably good order for nearly two years after its supposed demise at the hands of the parliamentary commissioners in July 1647. Vacancies were filled, services conducted, festivals celebrated, sermons preached and the networks of friendship and patronage continued to operate. The church was not exactly united: the remnant of the Laudian party, attached to the cathedrals and reliant on Ormond's support, mounted a brief campaign of protest but were soon silenced; some then fled abroad, others stayed, but lay low; those who prospered were those of the Calvinist wing, and especially those with links to Archbishop Ussher. Key to this was the importance of Ussher's nephew, Michael Jones, governor of Dublin, and his brother, Dr Henry Jones, bishop of Clogher. Throughout this period, Michael Jones comes across as pragmatic and reasonable, willing to reconcile former royalists and to ignore outbursts by over-excited bishops. But even Michael Jones could not protect the Irish church for long.
VI
By the new year of 1649 it was becoming clear that the survival of the church across the whole of Ireland was in serious danger. Ormond had returned to Ireland with a remit to negotiate a new peace treaty with the Confederate Irish. Although he declared his intention to preserve ‘the settlement of the Protestant religion, according to the example of the best reformed churches’, many in the royalist camp soon had cause to doubt his assurances.Footnote 76 The religious articles of what became the ‘Second Ormond Peace’ made greater concessions to the Catholic church than had previously been countenanced. The Confederates, keen to curry favour with the Catholic clergy and to prevent new divisions within the Catholic community, pushed for the complete removal of the penal laws, the free exercise of the Catholic religion, including ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the retention of the churches already in their hands. Although Ormond at first baulked at this, eventually he was forced to agree a compromise, in which individuals would be free to practise their faith and churches already in Catholic hands would remain so until a new Irish parliament met to decide the matter.Footnote 77 The peace treaty signed on 17 January 1649 was deeply controversial, and mutiny in the Protestant garrisons of Munster was averted only by the shocking news that the Westminster parliament had decided to put Charles I on trial. The regicide, on 30 January, gave Ormond considerable moral leverage against those Irish Protestants who remained loyal to parliament. In February he even invited Michael Jones to defect to the royalist side, ‘now that the mask of hypocrisy … is laid aside, and now that barefaced they evidently appear to be the subverters of true religion’ and the regicides had been exposed as supporters of ‘irreligion and atheism’ who had ‘murdered God's anointed king’.Footnote 78
It is interesting that Ormond considered such religious arguments might sway Jones, but much depended on who could now be trusted: the fledgling English commonwealth or the Irish royalists who had made common cause with the Catholic Church. Jones's mind was already made up. In his reply to Ormond he did not defend the regicide but denounced the treaty with the Catholics as an agreement ‘wherein there is little or no provision either for the Protestants or Protestant religion, nor can I understand how the Protestant religion should be settled and restored to its purity by an army of papists, or the Protestants’ interests maintained by those very enemies by whom they have been spoiled and theirs slaughtered’.Footnote 79 Other Protestants took a different line. Viscount Grandison's letter, explaining to Henry Jones why he had defected to Ormond, urged the bishop to ‘put before your eyes the innocent streams of blood that issued from his martyred body, that was our lawful king and governor, look at the ruined church … sacrilegious, bloody and ignorant men the only just dispensers of the sacred word of God; all holy orders whipped out of the temple’. In mid-flow he checked himself: ‘but of this no more to your lordship, for I reverence you as a most orthodox father of the church you have lived to see ruined’.Footnote 80 Grandison's decision to join the king was evidently made with great reluctance – for he owed much to the favour of the Jones brothers – but if such senior officers could defect, who might be next? In June 1649, as Ormond's army laid siege to Dublin, Michael Jones had to cope with ‘daily discoveries of treacherous spirits within us, some of whom have been proceeded withal according to their [deserts]’.Footnote 81 A month later, he denounced the situation throughout Ireland as ‘a second general rebellion, the former was only of Irish, this of Scots and malignant English’.Footnote 82 The unity that he had carefully built up within Dublin over the previous two years seemed to be crumbling away.
Michael Jones was not alone in thinking that the survival of the ‘Protestant interest’ meant making a Faustian pact with the English Republic. At the beginning of July 1649 a pamphlet of verses was circulating in London addressed by the Irish church to ‘her elder sister’ in England. The author emphasised the apocalyptic nature of the struggle across the Irish Sea: ‘Especially that work above the rest,/ Suppressing of the Antichristian beast’.Footnote 83 A few months later, Dr Nicholas Bernard urged the Protestants of Drogheda to reconcile themselves to the Cromwellian regime, as the lesser of two evils:
Now I beseech you consider of it, you that have been assaulted or seduced by this argument (as I have heard of many) what if there are diverse heretical tenants scattered up and down the Church (which for the present may be like the sons of Zeruiah, too strong suddenly to be suppressed) not approved by us, but abhorred; will ye therefore go to the church of Rome, where abundance of heretical doctrines are maintained and taught?
To do so, Bernard asserted, ‘can be but like him, that to shun a little dirt newly gathered to the being over shoes, should leap into an old deep dunghill, and so sink up to the middle’.Footnote 84
VI
As Nicholas Bernard realised, when push came to shove most Irish Protestants did not find it difficult to choose between the Catholic church and the Protestant forces under Cromwell, however much the former was endorsed by the king and his lord lieutenant, and the latter associated with radicalism and regicide. The necessary victims of this choice were the hierarchy and formularies, if not the personnel, of the Church of Ireland. After his arrival in Ireland, Cromwell put Dublin under the charge of one of his more radical subordinates, Colonel John Hewson, while Michael Jones, as lieutenant general, accompanied him south on campaign. The implications of this change were made obvious in November 1649, when Lancelot Bulkeley, the ageing archbishop of Dublin, gave his own farewell sermon at St Patrick's Cathedral, as part of the Prayer Book service conducted by William Pilsworth of St Michael's. Such an event would have been unexceptional six months before, but now Colonel Hewson chose to come down hard, arresting all those who attended.Footnote 85
Thereafter, the end of the Irish church was swift. In March 1650 the English parliament resolved to pass an act for abolishing the hierarchy of the Church of Ireland and prohibiting the Prayer Book across the island. The lands of St Patrick's Cathedral were confiscated, and divided between Trinity College, a proposed new college for the university and the foundation of a free school in Dublin. In October 1650 new parliamentary commissioners were appointed, with instructions to enforce across Ireland existing laws banning bishops and the Prayer Book. As Seymour put it: ‘nothing less was contemplated than the utter subversion of the episcopal system of church government’.Footnote 86 Michael Jones did not live to see the end: he had died of fever while on campaign in December 1649. His brother, the ever-adaptable Dr Henry Jones, had by this time thrown in his lot with the invader, becoming Cromwell's scoutmaster-general in Ireland. It was ten long years before he emerged, blinking in the sunlight, as Charles II's bishop of Meath.
