Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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people also felt that the king had been driven too hard. If he had not been far
away in Scotland, he might have exploited this reaction to considerable
advantage. But while his opponents’ suspicions were concentrated on his
activities north of the border, they were quite unaware of the imminent danger
of an explosion in Ireland. This unforeseen tragedy, more than any other fac-
tor, was to wreck the widespread hopes of a new constitutional deal in Eng-
land and Scotland.
188 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
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Three Kingdoms in Crisis
When Charles arrived in Edinburgh on 14 August 1641 he was delighted by
the warmth of his reception. He did not yet appreciate that most Scots
believed they had already won the substance of what they had fought for in
the Treaty of London, and expected to secure the rest in the course of his visit.
After his ceremonial entry into parliament on the 17th he made a gracious
speech which seemed to confirm their hopes. But when he offered to touch the
acts passed by the parliament in 1640 with his sceptre, the traditional way of
conferring the royal assent, a pretext was found for requesting him to delay
the ceremony. Parliament, it transpired, was not prepared to acknowledge
that his assent was necessary, and he allowed the acts to be published a few
days later without it. After what he had conceded earlier in the year he could
hardly do otherwise, but this was more than a symbolic defeat for him.
He genuinely desired to come to agreement with the Scottish parliament,
but three unsettled questions still stood in the way of it. One was the treat-
ment of those whom the Covenanters branded as ‘incendiaries’, the chief of
whom were Traquair and Montrose. He eventually agreed not to grant them
access to him or give them public employment without parliament’s consent,
and he conceded that parliament should bring them both to trial, on the
understanding that it would refrain from passing final sentence. A more ser-
ious difference was over the appointment of officers of state; just what had he
agreed to in the previous year? His assumption was that he would nominate
them, subject to parliament’s approval, which he expected it to give unless it
advanced specific objections, but parliament’s understanding was that it
would name a list of candidates from whom he would choose. There was a
direct clash over the two highest offices of all: the Covenanters wanted Argyll
as Chancellor and his brother Loudoun as Treasurer. But Charles could not
stomach Argyll in the powerful place of Chancellor, which eventually went to
Loudoun, while the treasury, for which he had proposed the Earl of
Morton, was put into commission. The third divisive issue, which was really
not resolved at all, was whether the Scots had a right to be formally heard
when decisions were taken at Westminster which deeply involved their coun-
try’s interests.
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In most of these points of difference, personalities were almost as much
concerned as principles. Argyll remained the most powerful man in Scotland,
with or without the Chancellor’s office. Hamilton was much associated with
him at this time, and he also kept in close touch with the English commis-
sioners appointed by the Long Parliament to attend the king. Charles was dis-
pleased with Hamilton and frankly suspected that his main concern was with
his own self-preservation, but he did not break with his old friend, who still
attended upon him and regularly slept in his bedchamber. Nothing was ever
simple in Hamilton’s motives, but he may have been genuinely striving to
keep the channels open between the king and the Covenanting nobles. Mon-
trose was a personal enemy of his; that too played a part in his rapport with
Argyll, which was bitterly criticized by the Scottish royalists, and led Rox-
burgh’s son Lord Ker to challenge him to a duel.
An extraordinary plot came to a head in the second week of October,
which came to be known simply as the Incident. The evidence is complex and
shot through with uncertainties, but the plan seems to have been to assemble
four hundred armed men and seize Argyll, Hamilton, and Lanark in the
king’s withdrawing room. The three were to be brought there by Will Murray,
Charles’s Groom of the Bedchamber; Lord Almond (who had signed the
Cumbernauld Band) and the catholic Earl of Crawford (who commanded
one of the three Scottish regiments still under arms) were to perform the
arrest. Almond, it is reported, intended to bring the three to legal trial, Craw-
ford to murder them. Murder, we can be sure, Charles would never have
countenanced, and there is no certain proof that he was privy to the plot. But
the fact that his intimate servant Murray had a central role in it makes it
scarcely conceivable that he knew nothing of it, and so does the conduct of
Montrose, who wrote to him three times from prison asking for an audience,
and on 11 October was given one. What he wanted to offer, according to
Crawford, was an accusation of high treason against Argyll and Hamilton. It
was never levelled, because one of the several soldiers of fortune involved,
Colonel John Urry or Hurry (who was to change sides three times before the
wars were over) divulged the plot to General Leslie. Leslie, like the man of
honour he was, made Urry repeat it to Hamilton and Argyll. They could
scarcely believe it, but after some hesitation they fled to Hamilton’s house at
Kinneill, some miles outside Edinburgh. Soon the wildest rumours were run-
ning, and they were not kind to the king. Charles furiously denounced the
whole affair as a fabrication of his enemies, designed to discredit him, and he
had the gall to throw most of the blame for it on Hamilton, one of its intend-
ed victims. But he did not help his cause by coming to parliament next day
with a guard of several hundred armed royalists. He demanded a public inves-
tigation, to clear his honour; parliament decided on a secret one, and named
only one royalist to the committee entrusted with it. After it had produced a
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face-saving report, Hamilton returned to Edinburgh and to attendance
upon the king.
Charles’s credit was seriously damaged. He stayed in Scotland until the par-
liament dissolved itself on 17 November, but when he departed he had
achieved none of the objectives for which he had come north. Any thoughts he
may have had of mustering a following strong enough to help him recover his
position in England must have withered under the chill realities of the Scottish
political scene. Montrose was released just before he left, in a general amnesty
following the Incident, but the Covenanters remained so dominant that the
Scottish royalists were almost powerless to help him. The parliament had
stood its ground to him; when a new Scottish privy council was named short-
ly before the dissolution, ostensibly by him with parliament’s advice and
consent, he was allowed four or five royalists on it, but eight more whom he
had proposed were overruled, and Covenanters appointed in their place. The
four commissions that parliament had set up to look after its various interests
until its successor met ensured that its constitutional standing would be fully
safeguarded. Charles sought to sweeten his departure by making Argyll a mar-
quis, Hamilton a duke, Leslie an earl and Wariston a knight, but these and
other honours that he conferred were to have no effect when it came to civil
war and their recipients had to choose sides. A full military alliance between
the Covenanting leadership and the English parliament would be only a mat-
ter of time. Edward Hyde’s subsequent verdict, writing as Earl of Clarendon,
was ‘that he seemed to have made that progress in Scotland only that he might
make a perfect deed of gift of that kingdom’.
1
The lurid reports of the Incident came as a godsend to Pym, for he badly
needed something to revive a sense of urgency in England, now that the armies
were disbanded. On the first day of the new session the Commons had to wait
idly after prayers for a quorum of forty members to assemble, and Pym waited
longer for a fuller House before he broke the news from Scotland. Hyde and
Falkland tried to cast doubt on it, but a majority in both Houses were ready
to believe that they too might be threatened with violence and ordered a
guard to be posted on the Palace of Westminster night and day. Next day (21
October), in a House so thin that it again had difficulty in maintaining a
quorum, a new bill was introduced to exclude the bishops from parliament,
and it passed its three readings so rapidly that it was sent to the Lords two
days later.
2
The Commons followed it up with a resolution asking the Lords
to suspend the bishops when the vote on the bill was taken. But Charles, from
Edinburgh, had just let it be known to the peers through Secretary Nicholas
Three Kingdoms in Crisis 191
1
Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, I, 415.
2
On the thin attendances see The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Oct. 1641–Jan. 1642, ed.
W. H. Coates (New Haven, 1942), pp. 11–15, 29, 32–3, 49.
ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 191
that he had no intention of altering the government of the Church of England,
and he shortly underlined his message by appointing five new bishops and
translating others. Episcopacy, however, was not the issue uppermost in
Pym’s mind. His main plan for the new session was to revive something that
had been mooted at intervals since the parliament first met: a comprehensive
remonstrance of the state of the kingdom, which would tabulate all that had
gone amiss since Charles’s accession, state what parliament had achieved so
far by way of remedy, and set out what still remained for it to do. The first of
November was set aside for the Commons to consider a draft of this Grand
Remonstrance; meanwhile on 30 October Pym kept the temperature up by
divulging to the House, with all the oratory he could command, its commit-
tee’s full report on the second army plot.
On the appointed day for the great debate, however, the Grand Remon-
strance was thrust aside by the appalling news that a major rebellion had
broken out in Ireland. It was to bring terror and carnage to the settler
population, and in the longer term it set in train a great tragedy for the Irish
people as a whole. In between, it was to have a powerful bearing on the course
of events that culminated in civil war in England.
There were two connected parts to the initial design: a plot to seize Dublin
Castle and incapacitate the English administration, and a rising in Ulster to
recover the estates of the dispossessed Irish nobles and gentry. There had been
no Lord Lieutenant in Dublin since Strafford’s recall, and Lord Deputy Wan-
desford was dead. Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, had been appointed Lord
Lieutenant in June 1641, but Charles had charged him not to go to Ireland
until he personally ordered him to do so. Responsibility in Dublin lay with two
elderly Lords Justices, both closely associated with the settler interest: Sir
William Parsons, who had sided with the Irish parliament’s opposition to
Strafford, and Sir John Borlase, an indolent ex-soldier. The design against
Dublin Castle, like the Ulster rebellion, had been timed for 23 October, but
the Lords Justices were informed of it the very night before. They were able
to arrest the chief conspirators, Lord Maguire, Hugh MacMahon, and about
thirty others, and they made Dublin safe, but they could not cope with the for-
est fire that was spreading in the north. Now that Strafford’s levies were dis-
banded they had only the older regular army at their disposal. It numbered
fewer than 2,300 foot and 950 horse; it was widely dispersed, and some of its
units were already disarmed by the Ulster insurgents. The Lords Justices pro-
claimed a state of rebellion, describing it as ‘a most disloyal and detestable
conspiracy intended by some evil-affected Irish papists’.
3
Before long they
192 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
3
Quoted in A New History of Ireland, III, 292. On the outbreak of the rebellion see also M.
Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin, 1994); Aidan Clarke,
The Old English in Ireland (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1966), ch. 9; the chapters by M. Perceval-
Maxwell, Raymond Gillaspie, Hilary Simms, and Aidan Clarke in Ulster 1641, ed. Mac
ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 192
were depicting it as a general rising by the ‘mere Irish’ against English rule and
a popish-inspired design to massacre all the protestants in Ireland.
Their reports were far from the truth. At first, their misrepresentations can
be largely attributed to panic, prejudice, and imperfect knowledge, but they
probably became more deliberate quite soon. It suited the books of the settler
class to portray the rebellion as a general attempt by the catholic Irish to extir-
pate the English crown’s authority and the protestant religion, because that
would lead (they hoped) to a massive military response, a total subjugation of
Ireland, and the release of untold quantities of land for easy purchase and
colonization. Their attitude was tested on 24 and 25 October when eight of the
chief Old English Lords of the Pale, all catholics, approached the Lords
Justices, professing their loyalty to the king and asking to be furnished with
arms for their own defence. The Lords Justices replied that they were not sure
whether they had arms enough to defend the city, which was manifestly untrue,
since the store in Dublin Castle included all those handed in by Strafford’s dis-
banded army, and sufficed for nearly 10,000 men. But their reluctance to arm
catholics of any kind was understandable, though soon afterwards they
proclaimed their belief in the personal fidelity of the Lords of the Pale.
To understand what really lay behind the Irish rebellion, it is necessary to
make some distinctions between the attitudes of the Old English and the Old
Irish, though the line between them was anything but clear-cut. The Old Eng-
lish lordships were scattered over most parts of Ireland except the north;
Ulster was Old Irish territory, where it had not been taken over by English or
Scottish settlers, though there were Old Irish landowners in all the provinces.
It will be remembered that in December 1640 Charles had received a delega-
tion and a remonstrance from the Irish parliament.
4
The Old English mem-
bers of that delegation entered into a negotiation with him, and he appointed
a committee of the privy council to consider their grievances in general and the
Graces in particular. During the time of Strafford’s trial, when he was dab-
bling in the first army plot, he was hoping to save at least part of Strafford’s
army, and he needed a non-parliamentary source of revenue to keep it afoot.
On 3 April, in return for the promise of a subsidy from the Old English, he
agreed to cancel the future plantations that had been planned, authorize a
statute conferring good title on landlords with sixty years’ possession, and
grant the enactment of others of the Graces. In return for two more voluntary
subsidies he offered further far-reaching concessions in July, and ordered that
the bills to implement them should be prepared. His raising of Old Irish hopes
was of course a tactical move, and part of the same strategy as his planned
Three Kingdoms in Crisis 193
Cuarta; and William Kelly’s essay on Ormond in Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars, ed.
J. R. Young (Edinburgh, 1997).
4
See pp. 163–4.
ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 193
visit to Scotland. If he could enlist a substantial party in both kingdoms and
rally a large part of the English nobility, he might (he thought) be able to pull
off what he most desired, a dissolution of the Long Parliament.
His concessions were highly unwelcome to the Irish council in Dublin,
which had a strong interest in further plantation, especially in Connaught,
and resented not being consulted. It took steps to frustrate the passage of the
promised bills through the Irish parliament, but before that was necessary
Charles was given a pretext to withdraw the Graces again (which he did will-
ingly enough, once he had to give up hope of keeping up any part of Straf-
ford’s army). A row developed over a Scottish settler in Ulster who had been
imprisoned for refusing the black oath. The leadership in Edinburgh took
umbrage and pressed his case on the English House of Lords, which at one
stage summoned the entire Irish council to appear before it as delinquents.
Naturally there were protests from Ireland, to which the Lords responded by
requesting the king not to grant the Graces, and to declare the Irish parlia-
ment to be subject to that of England. Charles complied.
Aggrieved though the Old English were by this treatment, few of them
thought of resistance, let alone rebellion. Their loyalty to the king, though
strained, survived, since a political triumph for the ultra-protestant elements
in the English parliament, in partnership with the Scottish Covenanters,
could harm them more than ever he could. Nor was it a matter merely of cal-
culation, for they felt honour bound to maintain their old partnership with
the crown, however ill it had been rewarded. But another party, mainly of
Old Irish, were coming to feel that they would need to resort to force to secure
what they considered to be their rights. A group of them began to make con-
tingency plans to that end in February 1641, and it was not long before the
second denial of the Graces and the English parliament’s evident intent to
treat Ireland as a subject province took the brakes off their enterprise and
improved its prospects of finding wide support. In their own minds they were
not plotting a rebellion against their king, for they too saw themselves as his
loyal subjects—certainly more so than the Scottish Covenanters, in their esti-
mate. Their plan was for a coup against the government in Dublin, which they
regarded as disloyal to him, coupled with a seizure of strongholds and towns
in Ulster. What they sought for Ireland were the liberties that the king’s Eng-
lish subjects enjoyed: the rights of an independent kingdom under a common
monarch, with a government answerable to him but not to that of England, a
parliament with the same powers and privileges as that of Westminster, and
a free judiciary. For themselves they sought the same security of title as Eng-
lish landlords had, and the right to practise the catholic religion—the nation-
al religion, in fact if not in law—without political or financial disabilities.
They were anxious to demonstrate that, contrary to English prejudice, their
catholicism was in no way incompatible with loyalty to the crown.
194 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
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They planned to seize Dublin Castle on 23 October 1641, but their design
was betrayed and foiled. According to Lord Dillon, who was in on their
secrets, they intended to replace the Lords Justices with James Butler, Earl of
Ormond, a rare protestant among the great Old English families and a
staunch though not uncritical royalist. He was a close and trusted friend of
Strafford, who in 1638 made him Lieutenant-General of the Irish army and
commander-in-chief during his own absences in England, despite the fact that
Ormond was not quite twenty-seven when so promoted and had seen no mili-
tary action. He was also Lord President of Munster, where most of his vast
estates lay, though they extended well into Leinster. For all his loyalty to the
king and his attachment to Strafford, he had serious misgivings about their
plans to use the Irish army against the Covenanters, and in the spring of 1640
he withdrew to his seat at Kilkenny, ostensibly because of his anxiety about
his wife’s pregnancy, though he stayed there for more than two months after
she bore him a daughter. The interesting question, then and ever since, is
whether he knew in advance of the intended strike against Dublin Castle, but
the surviving sources leave us no certain answer.
The planned coup in Dublin was aimed mainly against the Long Parlia-
ment’s plans, of which the Lords Justices were the agents, to subject Ireland
to itself and make her an even more subordinate kingdom than she had
become already. Its betrayal did not put a stop to the wider movement,
centred on Ulster and aimed at redressing the grievances of the 1630s: the
massive plantations, the failure to grant the Graces, the religious, political,
and economic disabilities of Irish catholics, and so on. Sir Phelim O’Neill, the
catholic leader in Ulster, punctually set off the rising there on 23 October by
capturing the key fortress of Charlemont, but he immediately issued a procla-
mation, declaring that they were not in arms against the king but only in
defence of their liberties. Lord Dillon, the head of a gaelicized Anglo-
Norman house but nevertheless a protestant and an Irish privy councillor,
had visited Charles in Scotland shortly before, probably to assure him that
whatever he might hear of commotions in Ireland the participants’ intentions
were loyal and their aims just. Perhaps his mission was their last bid to secure
those aims without having to resort to rebellion. Charles is reported to have
told him that he would come to Ireland in person in the spring or summer of
1642, presumably hoping by then to have crushed the Covenanters. Dillon
came to see him again in London late in November 1641, when the rebellion
was in full swing, with a document signed by many Irish catholic nobles and
gentry, offering to suppress it themselves if he would grant certain not unrea-
sonable demands,
5
of which more will be said shortly.
So why did a rebellion in one province, with such limited objectives, lead to
Three Kingdoms in Crisis 195
5
Russell, Fall of the English Monarchies, pp. 396–8.
ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 195
so much brutal bloodshed and swell within months into almost a national
movement, in which some elements aimed ultimately at national indepen-
dence? One reason, as we shall see, was that political strife in England pre-
vented the English government from giving the concessions and assurances
that would have held the mass of the Old English nobility and gentry to their
allegiance. Another was that the rebellion passed rapidly out of control and
unleashed popular violence on a scale that its planners had never intended,
and mostly deplored. This outbreak of terror took everyone by surprise, for
in spite of all the dispossession caused by the plantation Ulster had not looked
like a powder-barrel waiting for a spark to explode it. There had been much
mutual rapprochement since the plantation began; landlords who had settled
only a generation or two ago were living on easy social terms with their Irish
gentry neighbours, and without fear of their Irish servants. The richer were
building not fortified castles but typical undefendable Jacobean mansions
with as much glass as masonry in their walls. Intermarriage was not uncom-
mon, and many native Ulster gentry bore a part in local government. But the
ruling elite, whether long or lately settled, did not appreciate the gulf that had
grown between them and the smaller folk who had been the worst losers
when their clan territory was parcelled out under English law. Such people
would never have risen if their superiors had not raised the standard of rebel-
lion, and not all did so; there were cases of planters being saved by their Irish
servants. But such was the pent-up resentment of the majority that once let
loose it became uncontrollable. The early successes of the rebellion were
almost too rapid and sweeping for its own good. Some of the settlers’ castles
and some walled towns, including Derry, held out, but the rebels secured
much of central Ulster within two days and controlled eight of its nine coun-
ties after two weeks. Very early they began to advance southward; they took
Dundalk on 31 October, Ardee in the Pale two or three days later, and then
they laid siege to the vital port of Drogheda. Wherever they went they spread
shock and terror. Social order collapsed, for many Irish JPs joined the insur-
gents, and many less sympathetic magistrates were killed or driven to flight.
Although O’Neill publicly ordered that no hurt should be done to anyone on
pain of death, there was a spontaneous surge among the common people to
settle old scores and help themselves to the planters’ possessions. In the early
stages there was more robbery than murder, though from the start many
settlers were turned out of their property, some to be killed, many set adrift,
others made prisoners in order to be ransomed. Most of them probably knew
their attackers, and had hitherto seen no reason to fear them. More probably
died of exposure than were actually murdered, for many who were forced to
take to the roads were stripped of their clothes as they fled.
Certainly there were horrible incidents, later enshrined in the folk memory
of protestant Ulster, like that of the hundred or so men, women, and children
196 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646
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who were imprisoned in Loughgall church, then marched to Portadown and
drowned in the River Bann, some after being tortured. In another well attested
case about thirty were herded into a house at Shewic and burnt alive in it.
Refugees were soon landing in England with harrowing tales of murder,
mutilation, and rape, which seemed to bear out the wildly exaggerated reports
in the public prints of a general massacre. Generally the rebel leaders did what
they could to restrain the savagery, and some catholic priests ritually cursed
those who perpetrated it, warning the people against bringing down the
wrath of God on what for them was a holy cause and a fight for the faith. We
who have seen in our own time how far humanity can be forgotten in the heat
of racial hatred, ethnic cleansing, religious fundamentalism, and reaction
against colonial exploitation should not find it difficult to comprehend what
happened in Ulster, which had elements of all these phenomena.
Modern catastrophes of such kinds, however, at least stand some chance of
accurate and objective reporting, whereas what England heard and read of
Ireland in 1641–2 was not only grossly overstated from the start, but dwelt
solely on one side’s atrocities. It is still very hard to form an estimate of how
many perished in the Ulster rebellion. A careful attempt has been made for
Armagh, one of the province’s nine counties, which probably had between
3,000 and 5,000 settlers in 1641.
6
Reports of the numbers killed, whether in
‘massacres’ like Portadown or in individual murders, yield a minimum of 527
and a maximum of 1,259. Allowing for a tendency to exaggerate, balanced by
some incompleteness in the evidence, one might conclude that about a fifth of
the settler population was actually killed; the estimates do not include deaths
by exposure. These calculations, lacking in precision as they necessarily are,
suggest that the most widely accepted older estimate (made by Ferdinando
Warner, an Anglican parson, in 1767) of 4,028 murder victims and perhaps
twice as many refugees who died of cold, sickness, or hunger
7
is of the right
order of magnitude, though it does not refer exclusively to Ulster. Con-
sidering that there were about 34,000 English and Scottish settlers in the
province in 1641, these figures are tragic enough. But they bear no relation to
the ‘statistics’ of protestants killed in Ireland that circulated most widely in
England: 154,000 in April 1642, rising to 250,000 in 1644 and 300,000 in
what became the standard authority, Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion
of 1646. If it had been known that in 1641 there were fewer than 100,000
protestants in all Ireland, the absurdity of these confident allegations should
have been self-evident, but this was a pre-statistical age.
Three Kingdoms in Crisis 197
6
Hilary Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh, 1641’, in Ulster 1641, ed. Mac Cuarta,
pp. 123–43.
7
F. Warner, The History of the Rebellion and Civil War in Ireland (1767), p. 297. Among
those who have accepted Warner’s estimate as the best available are W. E. H. Lecky (in History
of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, I, 46–89), Gardiner, History of England, X, 69, and A New
History of Ireland, III, 291–2.
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