Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641

Abstract

Historians such as Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe have recently stressed the “British” nature of the crisis which toppled Charles I's regime in the 1640s. England, these historians remind us, was not the first of Charles's three kingdoms to rebel but the last; the Scots rose in 1639–40, the Irish rose in the fall of 1641, but the English only belatedly followed suit in August 1642. They have thus suggested that the origins of the English Civil War cannot be explained within a purely English context but must be understood within the larger vortex of multinational British politics.This injection of the “British problem” into the historiographical debate may seem like a neutral intervention, but in practice it has been closely associated with the revisionist interpretation of the seventeenth century. Since the 1970s, revisionist historians have contended that early Stuart England was an ideologically stable society which collapsed only after a series of sudden, contingent events disrupted the existing consensus. They have thus been at pains to find short-term, nonideological explanations for the Civil War's outbreak or else face embarrassing charges that they have proven why there was no civil war in seventeenth-century England. The “British problem” has come into the debate as just such an explanation, as an answer to thorny questions about how such a violent storm as the English Civil War could have arisen out of clear skies. After all, if radicalized Scotsmen spread the language of confessional conflict and resistance theory across the border, as Sharpe has argued, then no internal explanation for the English Civil War is required.

Religion, Political Thought and the English Civil War

“…16 Finally, as news of the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland began to circulate in England, it was accompanied by lurid accounts of sectarian atrocities that fuelled an already established climate of anti-Catholicism. 17 After 1642, religion was a central feature of justifications for war, and was important also in discourses of alliance and settlement. Borrowing an argument from the Covenanters, many among the English opponents of the King maintained that they were fighting to preserve religion 'by law established'; the King's propagandists said much the same thing.…”

‘The Rebels Turkish Tyranny’: Understanding Sexual Violence in Ireland during the 1640s

“…24 Such accounts of continental religious conflicts combined easily with one of the most widely known anti-Catholic texts in England: John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs, first published in 1563 and frequently reprinted and updated throughout the seventeenth century. 25 Foxe devoted a whole chapter to the cruelty of the Turks, and throughout his long book he repeatedly equated the cruelty of Catholics with this heathen standard of barbarism. 26 Although few extant copies of Foxe's Acts and Monuments survive from seventeenthcentury Ireland, it is clear that some of the settlers who were caught up in the 1641 rebellion had substantial libraries which were likely to have held copies of such a text.…”

“The balance of cruelty”: Ireland, Britain and the logic of genocide1

“…It was the Parliamentarian propagandists who first characterized the uprising of 1641 in terms akin to genocide. 37 Certainly, the massacres of 1641 had a profound psychological impact on the Protestant settler bloc. Witness, for example, A History of Portadown Loyalists:…”