Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

England’s response to the Irish rebellion was vitiated by three things: mis-

information from Dublin, blind prejudice against papists, and total lack of

sympathy for legitimate Irish aspirations. Parliament’s ﬁrst reaction—to

order the raising of 8,000 men to reinforce the Lords Justices’ inadequate

army and to request Leicester to go to Dublin at once—was reasonable

enough. But it created a dilemma for Leicester, a studious, indecisive man,

because of the king’s instruction to await his personal command. The com-

mand never came, and Leicester never went. The Commons’ second reaction,

on the day after news of the rebellion ﬁrst broke, was to demand that all

prominent English recusants should be not only disarmed but arrested, and

they launched an impeachment of the queen’s confessor, Father Philip, large-

ly because he, when interrogated, refused to swear on a protestant bible.

Pym, however, brought them to the central issue on 5 November with a

motion to instruct the commissioners attending upon the king to put to him

an unequivocal demand for parliamentary control over the composition of

his government. The suppression of the Irish rebellion clearly necessitated the

raising of a sizeable army; parliament had already voted for it. But could the

king, whose army it would be, be trusted with it? If he could not, parliament

needed to ensure that political and military decisions which would normally

have been his to take were subject to the control of men that it could trust. The

time was not yet ripe, though it soon would be, for parliament to claim direct

control over the armed forces, though the very next day Cromwell carried a

motion that the Earl of Essex, as Captain-General south of Trent, should be

empowered to assemble the trained bands in that great area at any time, until

parliament took further order. That however was an emergency measure,

prompted by an unreal fear that the catholics in England were about

to rise in arms, and that an army from Ireland would cross the sea to join

them. Pym’s motion, and the draft that he put to the House, looked beyond

immediate contingencies, and the great debate on it on 8 November separ-

ated future parliamentarians from future royalists more clearly than any

previous one. The resultant ‘Additional Instruction’ to the commissioners in

Scotland, approved by 151 votes to 110, alleged that the king continued to

take counsel from ‘favourers of popery, superstition and innovation’, and

blamed them not only for ‘contriving by violence to suppress the liberty of par-

liament’, in other words for devising the army plot—but also for the present

‘conspiracies and commotions in Ireland’. The commissioners were to

request him to get rid of such advisers and ‘to employ such counsellors and

ministers as shall be approved by his parliament’;

if he did not, parliament

would be forced to take its own measures for dealing with the Irish rebels.

This demand that parliament should positively approve all ministerial

198 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 199–201.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 198

appointments went signiﬁcantly further than the request in the Ten Propos-

itions that he should employ only such as parliament had cause to conﬁde in,

and it was a direct result of the rebellion. It was never formally put to him,

because the Lords kept on putting off their debate of the Additional Instruc-

tion until he was back in England, but he was soon informed of it.

It would be fascinating to know whether Pym believed that there was some

complicity between the king and the rebels. He never directly accused him,

but the speech that Pym made when he delivered the Additional Instruction

to the Lords on 8 November suggests that he did suspect Charles, not of

approving the massacres, but of countenancing the conspiracy that sparked

them off.

Considering what little evidence he had before him, and how long

it has taken historians (with much more to go on) to arrive at a consensus that

puts the king in the clear, Pym’s suspicion is understandable. It could feed on

Charles’s earlier willingness to employ a force to be raised in Ulster under the

catholic Earl of Antrim against the Covenanters in western Scotland, on his

readiness to employ Strafford’s Irish army, and on his reluctance to disband

it. Pym may or may not have known that Antrim, by his own later account,

received orders from Charles in the late summer of 1641 to reassemble all he

could of Strafford’s disbanded troops and hold them ready, if occasion

should offer, for use against the English parliament. Antrim, however, held

aloof from the plots to surprise Dublin and Ulster, and afterwards wrote of

the rebellion that the business was ‘spoiled by bloodshed and robbery’.

Much more damaging at the time was a proclamation that Sir Phelim O’Neill

and a fellow-commander in Ulster issued on 4 November, for it published a

commission purporting to come from the king himself, authorizing all Irish

catholics to rise in defence of his person and to seize the lands, goods, and

persons of all English protestants. It looked authentic, bearing as it did the

great seal of Scotland, but this had been purloined from another document.

The commission was beyond doubt a forgery, but that is clearer now than it

was then.

In the Commons the great business of mid-November was the Grand

Remonstrance, which was ﬁrst read on the 8th and ﬁnally passed in the small

hours of the 23rd. The debates on it were punctuated by worsening news

from Ireland and alarms about a catholic rising in England. Members were

seriously perturbed when a tailor called Thomas Beale came rushing to the

House on the 18th to report that he had miraculously escaped injury when a

pair of popish plotters had caught him eavesdropping from behind a hedge in

Moorﬁelds. They had attacked him with drawn swords, run him through his

cloak, and left him for dead, so he told the members, and they swallowed it.

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 199

See the discussions in Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 137–8, and Russell, Fall of the English

Monarchies, pp. 418–20.

Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, pp. 98, 102–3.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 199

The plot that he overheard was allegedly hatched by some priests; it was for

108 picked men to assassinate an equal number of puritan peers and MPs on

the 18th, in order to create a tumult in London while the catholics rose in six

widely scattered counties. Needless to say the 18th passed without incident,

but Pym and Hampden repeatedly interrupted the debates on the Remon-

strance with hot new ‘evidence’ of the plot in the counties. One may well

wonder whether they believed any of it themselves.

The text of the Remonstrance antedated the Irish rebellion, for its prepar-

ation had been entrusted to a committee of eight on 3 August. Pym himself

wrote most of it. It spoke only for the Commons, for it was never presented

to the Lords, and though it was addressed to the king it was essentially pro-

paganda directed at the public, aiming to bring the political nation round to

its authors’ view of the political situation. It was a wildly tendentious docu-

ment, falling into three main sections. The ﬁrst and longest catalogued all the

grievances, oppressions, illegalities, and blunders of the ﬁrst ﬁfteen years of

the reign, which were were rooted in ‘a malicious and pernicious design of

subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government’. There were

echoes here of the charge against Strafford, but now the design was attributed

to an unholy alliance of ‘the Jesuited papists’, the bishops and other corrupt

clergy, and councillors and courtiers engaged in promoting the interests of

foreign catholic powers for their private ends. Together they had striven to

sow division between the king and his people, to disaffect him towards par-

liaments, and by cherishing the catholicizing faction in the church to build up

a party of papists, Arminians, and libertines, ﬁt to advance their sinister pur-

poses. The same malignant party was held responsible, in what was obvious-

ly a newly added passage, for the rebellion and massacres in Ireland.

After devoting nearly a hundred numbered clauses to the abuses of

1625–40, the Remonstrance gave the next sixty or so to boasting of the pres-

ent parliament’s achievements. But its most interesting part was the third, in

which it set forth what the Commons intended to do in the matter of religion,

and what they expected of the king. They meant to reduce the exorbitant

power that the bishops had assumed and debar them from temporal ofﬁce,

but not (it was implied) to abolish them. They denied the malignant party’s

slander that they intended to dissolve all church government, but the king’s

power as Supreme Governor was to be exercised ‘by such rules of order and

discipline as are established by parliament’. Sensitive to current accusations

that they were encouraging sectaries and fanatics, they declared

that it is far from our purpose and desire to let loose the golden reins of discipline and

government in the church, to leave private persons or particular congregations to take

up what form of divine service they please, for we hold it requisite that there should be

throughout the whole realm a conformity to that order which the laws enjoin accord-

ing to the word of God.

200 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 200

In other words they were as opposed to religious toleration as the Scottish

Covenanters were. In order to effect the intended reformation and frame the

prescribed order, there was to be ‘a general synod of the most grave, pious,

learned and judicious divines of this island; assisted with some from foreign

parts, professing the same religion with us’.

The words ‘of this island’

implied that the synod should include Scottish divines, and the addition of

foreign ones carried an assumption that the religion of (say) Dutch and

French Calvinists was the same as the Church of England’s. Whatever church

order the synod prescribed, it would not be the Prayer Book order enshrined

in the existing laws, and that was the main reason why the Grand Remon-

strance played a powerful part in driving Anglicans into the royalist camp.

But it was not likely to satisfy the Scots either, since besides envisaging the

survival of episcopacy, it made the synod’s recommendations subject to the

approval and conﬁrmation of parliament.

Following the committee stages, the ﬁnal debate on the Remonstrance as a

whole began at about noon on 22 November, when the king, on his way back

from Scotland, was two days’ ride from London. Strangely, Cromwell

expected it to be short. In fact, it was the longest and probably the most

impassioned debate that there had ever been in a single sitting. More sharply

than in any previous one, future royalists were pitched against future parlia-

mentarians. More speeches are recorded against the Remonstrance than for

it, and its opponents had a powerful case. They deplored its raking over griev-

ances long past, and in many cases already remedied. They scored strong

points against the unprecedented manner of proceeding without even seeking

the concurrence of the Lords. Above all they attacked as subversive the device

of presenting as an address to the king what was plainly an appeal to the pub-

lic against his manner of exercising his royal authority, for the ﬁction that

everything amiss could be blamed on his evil counsellors was wearing very

thin now. ‘Wherefore is this descension from a parliament to a people?’ asked

Sir Edward Dering, who had shifted a long way since he had introduced the

Root and Branch Bill; ‘I did not dream that we should remonstrate down-

ward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the king as of a third person.’ To

such objections, Pym retorted that all the plots and designs that had created

the current critical position had been rooted in popery, and popery had been

rampant at court. ‘It’s time to speak plain English’, he said, ‘lest posterity

shall say that England was lost and no man durst speak truth.’

It was well past midnight when the House ﬁnally divided and carried the

Remonstrance by a bare eleven votes, with over 300 members still present.

But that was not the end of the night’s work, for two bitter disputes broke out

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 201

Full text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 202–32; quotations on religion

from p. 229.

Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. Coates, pp. 184–5.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 201

after many of the Remonstrance’s supporters had gone home. One was over

an attempt by its opponents, ultimately unsuccessful, to stop it from being

printed or published. The other, even angrier, broke out when the royalist

Geoffrey Palmer pressed a motion to allow those who opposed the Remon-

strance to have their protestations entered in the Journal of the House. This

was against precedent, for the registration of individual dissents was a privil-

ege enjoyed by peers but not by MPs. But it expressed the extremely strong

feelings that the Remonstrance aroused, especially in those who detested it.

Members took their sheathed swords out of their belts, holding them men-

acingly before them, and for a while it looked as though ﬁghting would break

out on the ﬂoor of the House. Mercifully they were persuaded to adjourn

without taking a decision on Palmer, and they ﬁnally went home as the clock

struck two. Yet such was the division he provoked that the House spent more

than eight hours during the next two days in debating ﬁrst whether to ques-

tion him, which they did, and then on how he should be punished. For much

of this time the attendance was higher than during the ﬁnal debate on the

Remonstrance itself, despite the fact that a large number of members had

failed to resume their seats after the summer recess. Palmer in the event spent

twelve days in the Tower, but was not expelled.

When the king entered London on 25 November, the City fathers had the

fountains ﬂowing with wine and entertained him to a splendid banquet in the

Guildhall. This may seem surprising after the Londoners’ demonstrations

against Laud and Strafford and the tumults aroused by the army plot, espe-

cially considering that three of the City’s four MPs were strong supporters of

Pym and the fourth a moderate parliamentarian. But there was a division of

interest and opinion between the majority of the citizens and the narrow oli-

garchy which dominated the City’s government, and the past year’s events

had been widening it. Over the centuries, immense authority had accrued to

the Lord Mayor, who was elected annually, and the Court of Aldermen,

whose twenty-six members were elected for life, and from whom the Lord

Mayor was traditionally chosen. The aldermen constituted an elite of wealth

and power; typically, they belonged to more than one of the chartered trad-

ing companies which derived their exclusive privileges from the crown,

whose needs they frequently met by raising loans, to their own considerable

proﬁt. Some proﬁted even more as farmers of the customs, which forged

another link between them and the court; some helped to manage the corpor-

ate monopolies whereby the crown had evaded the 1624 Monopolies Act.

These interests did not make them creatures of the court, for until 1641 the

grievances which they shared with the bulk of London merchants against the

202 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, pp. 191–200. On 14 December a member complained

(with exaggeration) that over 200 MPs were regularly absent, most of them since the summer

recess (ibid., p. 287).

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 202

crown’s ﬁscal exactions, its damaging interferences in their commercial oper-

ations, its appalling record in repaying loans, and its punishment of the City

for failing to carry out the Londonderry plantation outweighed, for most of

them, the personal proﬁt that their links with the king’s government brought

them. But they were mostly conservative men, and during 1641 they became

alarmed at the radical temper of the lesser citizenry and at the rising tide of

iconoclasm and sectarianism. They drew closer to the crown for much the

same reasons as the constitutional royalists like Hyde and Culpepper in the

Commons and the Earls of Hertford and Southampton in the Lords did,

because the crown stood for the defence of order and traditional values. The

annual election of the Lord Mayor on 28 September generated quite unusual

heat, but the successful candidate was a royalist, Sir Richard Gurney. The

corporation’s welcome to Charles was quite sincere, but he was mistaken in

supposing that he could henceforth look to the City for support against the

parliament, because the oligarchy’s hold on its government was shortly to be

thrown off.

London indeed was about to enter upon a phase of turbulence even greater

than that which had accompanied Strafford’s attainder and the scares about

the army plot. The parliament buildings were the main target for popular

demonstrations until about the end of the year, when the focus shifted to

Whitehall. Since the start of the session parliament had continued to have a

guard of trained bands set at its own request by the Earl of Essex, but the king

had removed it as soon as he got back from Scotland, on the ground that his

presence was guard enough. Essex accepted that his commission as Captain-

General south of Trent had lapsed with the king’s return, but parliament

requested the king to continue the guard. Charles did so, but appointed the

Earl of Dorset, a moderate royalist, to command it. On 29 November a

menacing crowd of citizens, armed with swords and staves, ﬁlled the parlia-

mentary precincts, persistently chanting ‘No bishops!’ They pressed against

the door of the House of Lords and intimidated members of both chambers.

The Lords directed Dorset to call up the guard and disperse the mob, and

when the demonstrators deﬁed his repeated requests to clear Palace Yard he

ordered his men to open ﬁre. Fortunately they did not obey, but the shaken

citizens made off hastily, and the incident rankled. Next day the Commons

dismissed Dorset’s guard on their own authority, and on a motion by Pym

two MPs who were also JPs of Westminster undertook to set another in its

place. The episode is interesting not only for the constitutional clash, but

because the Commons’ debate on it showed that the majority regarded the

demonstrating citizens as their allies. They wanted a guard not against them

but against the king, for a fear was already being hinted that he was nursing

a design against some of themselves.

Early in December a mass petition was afoot in London, calling for the

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 203

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 203

exclusion of the bishops from the Lords and for the reform of abuses that had

crept into the City government. The chief organizer was John Fowke, a rich

City merchant, and soon, as Alderman Fowke, to be a major power in City

politics. The systematic gathering of signatures was accompanied by a good

deal of pressure and led to some unruly scenes; the Lord Mayor and Recorder

used even more pressure to stop it, but at least 15,000 were collected, and

plans were laid for a procession of 10,000 supporters to accompany it to the

Commons on the 10th. To prevent this, the JPs of Middlesex, under instruc-

tions from both the king (via the Lord Keeper) and the House of Lords, set a

guard on the parliament-house of 200 men with halberds. The Commons

took great offence; they voted that to set a guard without their consent was a

breach of their privileges, discharged the guard, sent for the offending JPs,

and committed one of them to the Tower. The big procession was aban-

doned, but the petition was brought to Westminster on the 11th by four rep-

resentatives of each ward and a company of City notables riding in ﬁfty

coaches. Fowke presented it, and received the House’s warm thanks.

The

Commons gave a more mixed reception on the 23rd to a petition for the out-

right abolition of episcopacy, said to have been signed by 30,000 apprentices,

but they did express appreciation of the orderly manner in which it was

presented.

Meanwhile the news from Ireland was worsening, for the rebellion was

threatening to become nationwide. The tragedy was that the escalating crisis

in England was not only distracting the government in Westminster from taking

the necessary steps to prevent that from happening, but was blinding most of

the parliament to what those steps should be, and making them politically

impossible for Charles to contemplate, at least in public. In a less inﬂamed situ-

ation, justice and common sense should have pointed to the sort of conces-

sions that the king had seemed ready to grant earlier in his reign, especially

public exercise of the catholic religion, a secure title for landowners who had

possessed their estates for sixty years or more, recognition of the rights of the

Irish parliament, and free access to public ofﬁce for those who were prepared

to take the oath of allegiance but not the oath of supremacy. If such legitimate

aspirations could have been met, the rebellion could have been conﬁned

mainly to Ulster and defused. But the ﬁercely anti-papist temper at Westmin-

ster, heated by wickedly exaggerated tales of massacre, put concessions to

catholics out of the question, and made it impossible for Charles to appear to

consider them without gravely damaging his cause. In Dublin the Lord Just-

ices and the council, like the English parliament, thought in terms of sup-

pression rather than concession, but for the present they could do little more

204 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. Coates, pp. 271–3; Brian Manning, English People and

the English Revolution 1640–1649 (1976), pp. 61–7; Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies,

pp. 431–4.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 204

than defend the territory surrounding the capital. They called in what they

could of the scattered Irish army, and about three quarters of it managed to

comply. It was still of course the king’s army, and he appointed Ormond as

its lieutenant-general. Ormond recruited three new infantry regiments, main-

ly from refugees from Ulster, and he commissioned Sir Charles Coote and two

other protestant colonels to raise more. He decided to take the offensive

against the Ulster rebels, but the Lords Justices countermanded it. They were

strongly identiﬁed with the planter interest, and he with that of the Old Eng-

lish aristocracy, but there were probably military motives as well as factional

ones behind their decision. They may have thought it rash to commit all their

military resources against the rebels before they could be reasonably sure of

beating them, for they were expecting the English government to send them

powerful reinforcements as a matter of urgency. At their distance from West-

minster they could not know how swiftly England was sliding towards civil

war, or how long it would be before any forces could be spared outside her

own conﬁnes.

In mid-November the leaders of the rebellion drew up an oath of associa-

tion to be sworn by all who joined them. It was clearly a bid to make their

cause acceptable to the Old English nobles and gentry, who so far were most-

ly holding their ﬁre. It carries strong echoes (which may have been conscious)

of the English Protestation of six months earlier, though its commitment was

of course to the catholic and not to the protestant faith. It pledged those who

took it to defend the free and public exercise of the true catholic religion

against all who should oppose it, to bear faith and allegiance to their sover-

eign lord King Charles, and to defend him against all who should attack his

prerogative or commit any acts contrary to regal government, the power and

privileges of parliament, or the lawful rights of subjects. It had its effect on the

Irish parliament, which reassembled on 16 November, for the Commons

(where the Old English had the ascendancy) refused to describe those in arms

as rebels or traitors, though they did agree reluctantly to ‘detest and abhor

their abominable actions’.

The Old English members then sent Lord Dillon

on the mission (his second) to the king already mentioned, with a petition urg-

ing that the rebellion could and should be suppressed without intervention

from England or Scotland, that the implementation of the Graces would be

more effective than military force, and that Ormond should be put in charge

of the government of Ireland. It amounted to an offer to support the king

against the rebels if he fully granted the concessions that he had earlier

offered, if the Irish people were allowed the free exercise of their religion, and

if the hostile and self-interested Lords Justices and their like-minded council-

lors were removed from the Dublin government.

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 205

Clarke, Old English in Ireland, pp. 169–70, 173.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 205

If it had been possible for the king and the English and Irish parliaments to

agree in confronting the rebellion on some such terms as these, an incalcul-

able number of Irish and English lives could have been saved and the whole

subsequent history of Anglo–Irish relations could have run differently. But of

course it was not possible. For Charles to have entertained a pact with the Old

English ascendancy on the basis of toleration for papists would have been

political death to him, while at Westminster the Commons thought only of

forceful suppression. On 3 December they heard reports of settlers stripped

naked, bound hand and foot, and left to die of cold. Ten days later they were

informed that 30,000 had already been put to the sword, and next day Sir

John Clotworthy communicated a letter telling of eyes plucked out, women’s

bellies ripped open, male genitals hacked off, children’s brains dashed out,

and other horrors. Vivid woodcuts, illustrating them in gory detail, were soon

ﬁnding a brisk sale on the bookstalls. Meanwhile Pym divulged the proposals

that Dillon had just brought from members of the Irish Commons to the king,

and obtained a vote from the House ‘that they will never give consent to any

toleration of the popish religion in Ireland, or in any other of His Majesty’s

dominions’. Pym also welcomed the Scots’ offer of military co-operation in

reconquering Ulster, and got the king to agree to it.

England’s utterly uncompromising response to the rebellion was one rea-

son why it spread far beyond the bounds that its originators had intended.

Another was that the spontaneous violent uprising of the Ulster peasantry,

born of generations of repression, was proving infectious, and a threat to the

landed elite in general as well as to English overlordship. Catholic land-

owners, whether of Irish or Old English stock, felt menaced from two sides.

On the one was an English parliament in increasingly close accord with the

Scottish Covenanters, utterly opposed to their religion, unsympathetic to their

property rights and political aspirations, and bent on further plantation; on

the other was a populist movement which posed a threat to landlords’ rights,

as well as to life and property generally, if it got further out of control. Louth

and Meath were lost to the rebels by the end of November, as was county

Wexford to the south. In between, many rose in Wicklow too, but Sir Charles

Coote recovered that territory with a brutal efﬁciency that inaugurated, on a

small scale, a protestant counter-terror. He was rewarded by being made gov-

ernor of Dublin. Drogheda, however, remained under siege by the rebels, and

a small force that was sent from Dublin to relieve it was ambushed on the

way, and most of it killed or captured. The territory of the Pale was threat-

ened on all sides, and since more than four-ﬁfths of it was still in Old English

ownership much depended on the attitude of the chief landowners there, the

so-called Lords of the Pale. They had been prepared to defend it against the

rebels, but the Dublin government had (as we have seen) unwisely antago-

nized them by refusing to allow them, as catholics, to arm themselves and

206 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 206

their tenants. Like the catholic Old English elsewhere, they faced the prospect

of a military reconquest of Ireland, directed by a puritan-dominated English

parliament in partnership with Presbyterian Scottish Covenanters, both lured

by the prospect of further conﬁscation and settlement of Irish land. No won-

der they felt they had common ground with the insurgents who had framed

the oath of association. The latter invited a large number of Old English

nobles and gentry to a meeting early in December on the Hill of Crofty in

Meath, where their representatives urged upon them that ‘you are marked

forth for destruction as well as we’.

On being assured that the rebels

remained loyal to King Charles, all those present agreed to join them in arms,

and the pact was cemented at a second meeting at Tara a few days later. But

for the present it was an alliance, not a fusion of forces, for the Old English

appointed their own commander in the person of Viscount Grandison; and

by no means all the Old English or even Old Irish magnates in other parts of

the country joined it. Others besides Ormond who stood out against the

rebellion included the Earls of Clanricard, Thomond, and Inchiquin.

By Christmas the outlook from Dublin was bleak but not hopeless. The

arrival of a regiment of 1,100 foot under Sir Simon Harcourt, the ﬁrst troops

to reach Ireland from England since the outbreak of the rebellion, relieved the

immediate threat to the territory of the Pale. Drogheda was still surrounded

by an estimated 20,000 men, but since they had no artillery and not much mili-

tary skill it was not in imminent danger of falling. Munster and Galway were

still quiet, though they would not remain so for long. Above all, there was no

overt sign yet of the rebellion developing into a war for national independ-

ence. Two classes of Irishmen had some motivation to head it in that direc-

tion, the exiles in the service of Spain and the catholic clergy who had had

their training on foreign, especially Spanish, soil. But though the Spanish

Army of Flanders included a whole Irish tercio (a unit larger than a regiment),

whose ofﬁcers and men came in large part from Ulster, it was to be some time

before they returned in signiﬁcant numbers. As for the clergy, they did their

best from the start to give the rebellion the character of a crusade, but it was

not to their advantage to pursue objectives at odds with those of its leaders

and their patrons, the indigenous catholic gentry. The great majority of the

latter still hoped to attain theirs within the framework of the monarchy that

had so nearly granted them the Graces. When, in the coming year, they found

Charles powerless to meet their desires, and control passing to a parliament

bent not only on denying them but on an almost limitless threat to their prop-

erty, the whole situation would change.

That unhappy outcome stemmed mainly from England’s own constitu-

tional conﬂicts. The main problem was to raise a force for Ireland that the

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 207

Quoted in Clarke, Old English in Ireland, p. 181.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 207