That the brief historical moment from Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 to the Act of Explanation in 1665 was pivotal because it saw the massive land confiscations of the preceding decade ‘essentially’ (p. 164) preserved is the central argument of this book. By ‘essentially’ McCormack presumably means about two-thirds preserved, because she cites an intriguing contemporaneous source (p. 116) that asserts the Court of Claims, which sat for eight months in 1663, decreed the return of one third of the land owned by Catholics in 1641.
McCormack next presents the ‘ideas and debates’ that ‘shaped’ (p. 3) this settlement. She challenges M.A. Creighton’s contention that the outcome can primarily be explained by patronage connections and court factions rather than by arguments and general principles. The book, then, belongs firmly to the history of ideas genre. The method is the examination of texts from the various interested parties. These included the earl of Orrery’s Irish colours display’d (1662), a belligerent attack on Irish papists on behalf of the ‘Old’ (pre-1641) Protestants, and the various unpublished memoranda from Catholic spokesman Sir Nicholas Plunkett, who argued that the 1649 treaty between the then earl of Ormond, royalist governor of Ireland, and the Confederate Catholics voided any previous outlawries against the latter.
The ideas and texts are embedded in a more or less chronological explanatory narrative. Quite rightly, the narrative devotes considerable attention to the proceedings of the Court of Claims. True to form, McCormack sees the court arising from an idea, namely that of the earl of Clarendon, English lord chancellor, who wanted claimants to be judged by objective legal rules and principles that epitomised the relationship between king and subject rather than leave such decisions to the discretion of Ormond, Charles II’s lord lieutenant. Not that Ormond was bereft of ideology. Indeed, Attorney General Sir William Domville is ably presented as representing that great man’s views such as that the Adventurer’s lands were void because the relevant act was an English one. The narrative also captures the outraged response of Protestant Ireland, both within parliament and without, at the court’s supposed favour to papists, beginning with the shock of James Allen of Coolmine, County Dublin, being declared innocent when at least three depositions, by my count, implicated him as an insurgent captain in 1641–2.
Audley Mervyn, speaker of the Commons, demanded that the Catholic claimant should have to ‘prove his Innocency’ (p. 147) rather than forcing the Protestant occupier to produce proofs that he was ‘nocent’. Mervyn’s speech went on to attack royal authority and its reverberations coincided with the discovery of a plot orchestrated by Colonel Thomas Blood, an Old Protestant landowner from County Meath, to surprise Dublin Castle. It was, concludes McCormack, ‘probable’ (p. 158) that M.P.s deliberately encouraged the plotters so as to deliver the ‘master stroke’ (p. 158) of a security threat that intimidated the king and his courtiers from further dabbling with the 1662 Act of Settlement. The timing of McCormack’s assumption does not quite work since the court was not wound-up right after the plot but following the later furore raised by the perverse finding that Randal MacDonnell, earl of Antrim, was an innocent.
I would need more than McCormack’s bare assertion before accepting her claim that the six commissioners and chairman were Clarendon’s ‘creatures’ (p. 114) and did ‘not in fact split into two opposing camps of English and Irish’ (p. 136). L. J. Arnold and others have shown that Sir Richard Rainsford, Sir Winston Churchill, and Sir Thomas Beverley seem to have usually favoured Catholic claimants to the extent that the Court was frequently deadlocked. Were the three acting through sympathy for Irish Catholic royalists, distaste for ex-Cromwellians, the pursuit of justice, timely bribes, instructions from patrons, or any or all of the above?
The author believes that memory of ‘the’ massacre (the killing of Protestant civilians by Catholic insurgents in 1641–2) ‘did not exercise a potent effect’ (p. 48). I wonder. What about the frequent, if oblique, references to the massacre in the chosen texts: ‘bloody rebellion’ (p. 138), ‘murthered’ (p. 140) and ‘murtherers’ (p. 157)? This particularly bold and confident assertion might not be sustainable but others certainly are and they force the reader into a reappraisal of the familiar. For example, one intriguing assertion is that Irish Catholic identity was an external imposition or ‘colonial creation’ (p. 14). Conversely, the Protestant possessors (especially the ‘Old’ Protestants) won an ill-matched contest by, amongst other things, fabricating an Englishness based on ‘triumph over Irish rebels’ (p. 165).
To sum up, even if one does not accept all of McCormack’s arguments, they are fresh, well-made, and always thought-provoking. This is a welcome addition to Irish Restoration scholarship.
