The tract of land ... by the bay of Galway ... is good pasture for cattell; but so craggy and full of stones, and so destitute of deep mold, that in very few spots of it a plow can goe; yet the tenants, by digging, manure it so well, that they have corn for themselves, their landlords, and the market. Never was garden with more paines tilled for black seeds. They carry on horses, out of the shore, all the seaweeds cast in daily, as long as they can get it, from Michaelmas till sowing time past: and sometimes on spring tide low waters, they goe as far down as they can, man, woman and child, and cut the sea weed with knives, to have it cast up again by the sea. With this they muck the land, and dig up daily, earth to cover it, out of watery furrows which serve for conveying away the water from the ridges. This mucking and digging keeps them in action till March, before which they sow not a grain of corn. In sowing, they give so small a measure of seed as can be immagined, being sure not a grain will fail to multiply. In summer, when it grows up, they goe, man, woman and child, and ly prostrate ... to weed it with their bare hands…. Twice, perhaps, they thus weed it before it comes to an ear. The soile bears not but for two years, till they muck it again.... Here is a kinde of corn they call bwagh, the grain is like wheat, but more brownish and swarthy; the bread like barly bread but finer.... This land hath no help for building but thatch, and plenty of rude stones that cannot be wrought. It is destitute of wood and lime-stone.
At least the land was at peace. Some of the credit for that must be given to Charles II’s viceroy, the Duke of Ormond.
Episode 102
ORMOND
James Butler, the newly created Duke of Ormond, returned from exile in triumph. He entered Dublin on 27 July 1662, fifteen years to the day since he had surrendered the city to the forces of parliament. He had endured years of poverty and danger as King Charles II’s most faithful servant. He had served for a time as Charles I’s Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and commanded his armies; now he was returning with the same title as Charles II’s viceroy. The people of Dublin trusted that he would bring with him a new era of peace, toleration and prosperity. As he made his way from Howth Castle he was greeting by great cheering crowds. ‘The joy of the city’, it was recorded, ‘was continued by the plenty of wine that was given in the streets, the ringing of bells, bonfires and several fireworks.’
Ormond was determined to make Dublin a capital city to be proud of. He began by getting the king to upgrade the city’s mayor to become Lord Mayor at a salary of £500 a year. At the king’s request, Ormond created what is still the largest public park in Europe, Phoenix Park. Originally the 2,000 acres were intended for the chase: one nobleman went to England to bring back fallow deer; another travelled to Wales to fetch partridges; and the duke’s son provided pheasants from his Tipperary estates. It was not long before poachers from the city hunted down every last game bird, but the descendants of the fallow deer still graze there today. Of course, Charles never came to Ireland and planned to give the park to his mistress, Barbara Villiers. Ormond talked the king out of it. The mistress, of course, was furious: she hissed in Ormond’s ear that she hoped she would live long enough to see him hanged.
From the outset Phoenix Park was a public park where citizens could take their ease. Ormond liked it too, and—finding Dublin Castle dingy and dank—built himself a viceregal residence close by. Grounds were set aside nearby for a gracious home for old soldiers, the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, and work began in 1680. It remains today Ireland’s finest seventeenth-century building.
Ormond encouraged Dublin Corporation to designate St Stephen’s Green for development as an elegant residential square for persons of substance; the sites were apportioned to eighty-nine speculators by lot. Over much of the city brick houses were replacing the decaying timber dwellings; the most handsome of these became known as ‘Dutch Billys’, though they were actually built by Huguenots, Protestants escaping from persecution in France. The Huguenots developed a flourishing silk industry in the area known as the Coombe. There they developed a unique fabric, called poplin, made from a blend of silk and wool, still favoured for men’s neckties today.
The 1662 ‘Act to Encourage Protestant Strangers to Settle in Ireland’ also attracted to Dublin Jews who had taken refuge in Tenerife. These Jews were accepted as a variety of ‘foreign Protestants’ and became a vibrant addition to Dublin society.
During these years Dublin acquired its first stone-lined quays, street lamps, a boys’ school known as the Blue-Coat Hospital, a fine stone bridge to Ormond Quay to add to the four wooden bridges already there, a post office and a theatre in Smock Alley—though at a gala performance in 1680 the galleries collapsed, killing three people. The two cathedrals both acquired new sets of bells in 1670, and St Patrick’s was given a new roof built with forty tons of oak donated by the executed Earl of Strafford’s son from his Wicklow estate.
High on the list of exports was wool. The coarse long-stapled wool from Irish sheep was just what was wanted for the new draperies in the fashion houses of the European mainland. Much of it was landed at St Malo in northern France. Most Irish wool was spun and woven in the homes of the poor to clothe themselves. But Dublin and country towns such as Carrick-on-Suir, Carlow and Bandon began to specialise in weaving high-quality woollen frieze for sale to the gentry and for export overseas.
The Westminster parliament believed the flourishing Irish export trade in live cattle was damaging the English home market. In 1663 and 1667 it passed Cattle Acts forbidding the export of live cattle from Ireland. This caused much resentment, and Ormond travelled several times to London in a vain attempt to get the legislation repealed.
The damage to Irish trade was less than expected. It seems to have been more than compensated for by the rise in exports of butter. English settlers, who had no liking for Irish bog butter, knew what the overseas buyers wanted, and this probably explains why Belfast and Youghal together accounted for half of all Irish butter exported. The Dutch paid the highest prices, but the French bought the greatest quantities.
The growing prosperity of Ireland depended on peace, and this the Duke of Ormond was determined to maintain.
Episode 103
WORK, FOOD AND LEISURE
The long period of peace during the reign of Charles II gave the Irish economy ample time to recover. The great majority, humble people who worked the land, had seen many changes of landlords. Gaelic noble or Cromwellian trooper, it made little difference: one landlord seemed as bad or as good as another. Working the farm without the constant fear of cattle being seized, corn being trampled and homes being burnt—that was what really improved the quality of life.
The most recent English arrivals in Ireland often wrote home to describe the characteristics of the native Irish who worked for them. One anonymous letter describes the inhabitants of the Curragh of Kildare in 1683:
The men are hardy, laborious and industrious, of healthful bodies and constitutions, able and enured to bear labour, and live to a great age, generally to seventy and eighty.…
Their women [are] generally inclined to corpulency and thick-legged, which is occasioned by their loose garments, flat pumps and brogues, using little or no action or exercises, in or without their houses, having easy labour and being good nurses but bad housewives, not being used to any sort of manual labour except spinning, which by reason of the suppleness of their fingers they perform well.
They are great admirers of music, yet their own songs are doleful lamentations as those of a conquered people, or as the Jews in bondage or captivity.…
They are not very lascivious, yet the ordinary sort of people take a sort of pride in prostituting their daughters or kinswomen to their landlord’s sons ... and if the young women bear a child or children, the parents are exceedingly fond of it ... and further, if they happen to nurse a gentleman’s child, whose parents fall into decay or want, they think themselves bound to provide for that nursechild as for their own, it having drawn of the same milk.…
Their diet ge
nerally is very mean and sparing, consisting of milk, roots and coarse unsavoury bread; their lodging and habit proportionable ...
Potatoes had become an important supplement to the staple diet, Sir William Petty observed: ‘Their food is bread in cakes, whereof a penny serves a week for each; potatoes from August till May ...’. Nevertheless, oatcakes and bread, together with dairy products, formed the usual daily fare of the Irish, as Thomas Dineley recorded:
Dyet generally of the vulgar Irish are potatoes, milk, new milk which they call sweet milk, bonnyclobber, mallabaune, whey, curds, large brown oatcakes of a foot and a half broad bak’t before the fire, bread made of bare, a sort of barley, peas, beans and oatmeale, wheat and rye for great days.
The food of the upper class was, of course, more luxurious and varied. Lord Orrery’s steward left notes on what was served at Castlemartyr House in west Cork:
1679 Thursday the 3rd of July. Mr Love was the only visitor dinner & supper.
Dinner: 1 hanch of Venison; Calves head harshed; Pulletts 2; Sallett; Turbett; 1 shoulder & Rack of Mutton; 1 Briskett of beafe Boyled; Chickings 6; Pease; Kidney toastes; Neates tongues; Clary & Eggs; Rabitts 2.
Supper: Water Gruell; 1 shoulder of veal Roste; Stewed Troutes; Sliced Beafe; Beanes; Harty choakes; 1 Line & breast of Mutton.
The following day, when three Scottish officers and Mr Love joined the household at table, the bill of fare was even longer and included:
Scotch Schollops of Veale; Sallett; Harty choakes, Could Lamb; Tongue & marrowbones; Buttered Carretts; Venison Pye; Chickings 3 & 3 rabitts; Gelly; Sheepes Tongues; Ducks 3 ...
An inventory of the contents of Rathcline House, Co. Longford, the property of Viscount Lanesborough, dated April 1688, gives some idea of kitchen and outhouse equipment in a great house:
Kitchen: 1 grate and fender, 1 frying pan and dripping pan, a brass or copper boiler, 2 pair of racks ... Larder: 1 cupboard and dresser, a crackt sylebub cup, a butter tub, an iron hoop with hooks to hang meat on, 2 pailes. Bakehouse: powdering tub, etc. Dary: 12 coolers, 2 pailes, 9 bouls, 1 butter tub, one churn and stafhold, 1 cheespress, 4 chees fatts. Brewhouse: 1 brass or copper furnace sett, 2 keeves, 1 guile, 1 tundish and longeard paile, hopsive, casks etc.
The anonymous account of Kildare tells us that the Curragh, twenty-seven miles from Dublin, was becoming the playground of the rich:
Hither repairs the Lord Lieutenant or Chief Governor when His Majesty’s important affairs will admit leisure to unbend and slacken from tiring cares. Hither are also seen to come all the nobility and gentry of the kingdom that either pretend to love or delight in hawking or hunting or racing, for in this clearer and finer air the falcon goes to a higher pitch or mount so often as to be scarce visible, the hounds enjoy the scent more freely ...
Ireland was still an alien country, however, especially in its continued support for the Catholic Church.
Episode 104
THE POPISH PLOT
Like so many other Englishmen freshly arrived in Restoration Ireland, the anonymous author of the description of Co. Kildare in 1683 was both fascinated and repelled by the religious beliefs and practices of the native people. This account, like many later ones, reveals that ancient pagan beliefs were intermixed with a strong Catholic piety:
Notwithstanding all the laws and methods used to reclaim them there they still retain some customs, heathenish, barbarous and superstitious.…
Such are their opinion of souls departed that as the party was conditioned when alive his soul is transmigrated into some creature of like fierce disposition as a cruel man into a wolf and the like, hence the first lamb or calf that fall of that season they devote or dedicate to him ... they suppose he’ll spare their herd or flock that year.…
At their first seeing of a child they spit in the face of it in token of good will to it ... and whereby they say that is secured from an evil eye.…
They are much given to credit charms, spells, incantations, divinations and attribute all diseases not very frequent or common among them to ... witchcraft. Their ignorant priests nursle them up in this that they might have matter for their exorcisms.…
Their wakes also over dead corpses, where they have a table spread and served with the best that can be had at such a time, and after a while attending (in expectation the departed soul will partake) they fall to eating and drinking, after to revelling, as if one of the feasts of Bacchus; the next day at their setting out to accompany it to the grave, as soon as the bearers have taken up the body, they begin their shrill cries and hideous hootings ... and if there be not enough to make out a good cry, they hire the best and deepest mouthed in all the country ... this may now be heard two miles or more.
After a long period of service in the Vatican, Oliver Plunkett returned to Ireland in 1669 as Archbishop of Armagh. The Catholic primate spent much of his time attempting to stamp out pagan superstition and disciplining clergy who encouraged the continuance of pre-Christian practices.
Meanwhile Catholics who had lost their landed estates under Cromwell pressed hard to get them back. The fact that Charles had been restored largely as a result of the action of Cromwell’s former generals made it extremely difficult to meet this demand. After much wrangling, it was agreed to order the Cromwellians to give up one-third of their lands, so that these could be redistributed to loyal Catholics. But the process was slow, and only a few thousand of the dispossessed were restored to even a small portion of their estates. Decisions proved hard to enforce. For example, Patrick Sarsfield—father of the famous soldier—had testimonials from some of the most powerful in the land. The court ordered the return of most of his lands in Kildare, but Sarsfield found it impossible to get Sir Theophilus Jones out of his extensive Lucan estate.
Charles II’s viceroy in Ireland, the Duke of Ormond, was an unusual man for his time. He believed in religious toleration. A fervent member of the Church of Ireland, he had nevertheless been brought up as a Catholic, and in his lifetime he had seen too much blood spilt over religion.
In the reign of Charles II two political factions had emerged in England, and the insulting names they hurled at each other stuck. Opponents of the king became known as ‘Whigs’, from ‘whiggamore’, a Scots expression denoting a rebel Covenanter. Supporters of the king became known as ‘Tories’, from the Irish word tóraidhe, meaning a bandit. Charles II had no legitimate heir, and the Whigs feared that his brother James—an avowed Catholic—would make the kingdom Catholic when he came to the throne.
In 1678 details of an alleged ‘Popish Plot’ were revealed in London. It was claimed that the Jesuits intended to assassinate Charles II and, with the help of the French, put James on the throne. London was soon gripped by an anti-Catholic hysteria.
Ormond was certain the plot was a complete fabrication, and he was right. When orders came from London to arrest the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, however, the viceroy had to comply. Archbishop Plunkett was the only man named in the plot. A member of an Old English family in Co. Meath, he had made some enemies, particularly among the Franciscans in Ulster, as he imposed strict Church discipline. Ormond made sure that the archbishop was not convicted of treason when brought to trial in Dundalk. The viceroy kept Plunkett in prison, nevertheless, perhaps for his own safety.
Then in 1681 the House of Lords at Westminster voted to have Archbishop Plunkett put on trial in London.
Episode 105
THE TRIAL OF OLIVER PLUNKETT
London, 8 June 1681. A huge throng swarmed the approaches, gateway and lobby of Westminster Hall. They crowded to witness the trial of the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett, accused of high treason:
Clerk of the Court: Oliver Plunkett, hold up thy hand.
Unable to find a lawyer to speak for him, Archbishop Plunkett had to conduct his own defence. He pleaded that he had not been able to get his witnesses over from Ireland. The Lord Chief Justice was not impressed:
Lord Chief Justice: Look you, Mr Plunkett, it is vain for yo
u to make this discourse now.... You shall have as fair a trial as if you were in Ireland: but for us to stay for your witnesses, we cannot do it.
Plunkett: My lord, I desire only—
Lord Chief Justice: We can’t do it.
The twelve jurymen were sworn, and the Clerk of the Court read out a long indictment charging the archbishop with high treason.
Mr Heath: May it please your lordship, and you gentlemen of the jury, this is an indictment of treason against Dr Oliver Plunkett, the prisoner at the bar. It sets forth, that the two and thirtieth year of the king, at Dublin in the kingdom of Ireland, he did compass and imagine the death of the king, and to raise war to extirpate the Protestant religion in Ireland, and to establish the Romish religion there. And that to accomplish these treasons, the defendant did raise great sums of money in the kingdom of Ireland.…
Attorney-General: May it please your lordship, and you gentlemen of the jury, this gentleman, as primate under a foreign jurisdiction ... issues out warrants to his clergy to make a collection of money and sent into France to further the business.... First, we call Florence MacMoyer.
Solicitor-General: Are you sworn, sir?
MacMoyer: Yes, sir.
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Page 29
