John Gibney

Walter Love's 'Bloody Massacre': an unfinished study in Irish cultural history, 1641–1963

This article is based on the unpublished papers of the American historian Walter D. Love, retained in the Department of Manuscripts, Trinity College Dublin. Prior to his death in 1966, Love was writing a study of the contested historiography of the Irish rebellion of 1641. This article attempts to reconstruct Loves broad overview of the significance of 1641 from the seventeenth century to the twentieth and his efforts to overcome the methodological problems that the writing of such a study posed. Arising from this, it also attempts to reconstruct the framework of the book that Love was writing at the time of his death. In doing so, this article is intended to contribute to ongoing debates about the nature and significance of the rebellion by examining Loves pioneering but sadly unfinished attempt to examine its legacy. Introduction At some point in the early 1960s an American historian of Ireland, Walter D. Love, read The leopard, Guiseppi de Lampedusas epic novel of the Risorgimento. In it was a passage he deemed worthy of recording: Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, annihilated by imagination and self interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves on the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.1 * Authors e-mail: gibneyjf@gmail.com doi: 1 0.33 18/PRIAC.2010. 110.217 I would like to acknowledge the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for funding the research upon which this article is based. I wish to thank Jane Maxwell of the Department of Manuscripts, Trinity College Dublin, for her assistance with the Love papers. I would also like to thank Christopher Maginn and the anonymous referee for their comments on an earlier draft. At the time of this article going to print, it was not possible to establish the identity of copyright heirs to Loves literary estate. I wish to gratefully acknowledge the Board of Trinity College for granting permission to quote from the Love papers. 1 Trinity College Dublin (TCD), MSS 7,236-8, fol. 244. The citation from the relevant edition is Guiseppe Di Lampedusa, The leopard (London, 1960), 250. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 110C, 217-237

Restoration Ireland: Structural Problems and Structural Prejudice

To understand the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis in relation to Ireland, it is necessary to first explain these events, the beliefs that underpinned them, and the structural faults within Irish society that ensured they would have an impact there. This chapter is intended to provide an introduction to the Popish Plot in England, and an interpretive introduction to the unsettled condition of Restoration Ireland.

Institutions and the ‘Irish Plot’, May 1679–November 1680

The English parliament was prorogued on 27 May, but events in Scotland rapidly overshadowed all else. On 3 May 1679 Archbishop James Sharp had been assassinated outside St Andrews by disaffected Presbyterians. A subsequent attack by government forces on an armed conventicle at Drumclog on 1 June prompted the outbreak of a Covenanter rebellion in the west of Scotland. It ended at Bothwell Brig on 22 June when the rebels were defeated by an Anglo-Scottish force under Monmouth, whose star would rise in the aftermath.

Irish Evidence, November 1680

Shaftesbury’s promotion of obscure and dubious Irish informers eventually bore fruit in November 1680. According to Gilbert Burnet, ‘some lewd Irish priests, and others of that nation, hearing that England was at that time disposed to hearken to good swearers, they thought themselves well qualified for the employment’.1 Burnet caustically described them as ‘brutal and profligate men: yet the earl of Shaftesbury cherished them much’. Allegations of an Irish Plot were given credence by their claims, and ‘upon that encouragement it was reckoned that we should have witnesses come over in whole companies’.2

Aftermath, 1681–1691

Memories remained. At least one tract was later written to reassert Plunkett’s guilt and validate the witnesses against him.1 While Plunkett was dead, his accusers were not, and the pamphlet could be seen as a defence of their own position in what was likely to prove a vulnerable time for some of them. There would also be attempts to suggest an Irish link with the so-called ‘sham-plot’: the circuitous allegations that claimed that part of the Catholic plan in the Popish Plot was to mask it as a form of Presbyterian unrest.2 Indeed, in 1682 William Hetherington published a tract refuting the claims that he had manipulated witnesses, and reproducing once again the testimonies of some of the informers with whom he had been involved; he also sought to link these to allegations of a ‘shamplot’.3 Hetherington remained loyal to Shaftesbury, but his fortunes eventually declined with those of his patron: in November 1681 he was arrested on a charge of scandalum magnatum brought by Ormond and was ordered to pay £10,000 damages. His inability to pay saw him imprisoned again, and in March 1682 he was accused of involvement in a plot to assassinate the king. His personal circumstances had changed for the worse, and the pamphlet may have been an attempt to salvage something from his previous activities.

The Popish Plot in Ireland, September 1678–May 1679

Ireland had a role to play in the Popish Plot from the outset. Amongst many other things, Titus Oates had claimed that the Catholic archbishop of Tuam, James Lynch intended ‘to procure some Persons to dispatch the king’.1 Furthermore, there were plans to facilitate ‘the French king’s landing in Ireland … the Irish Catholics were ready to rise, in order to which, there was forty thousand black bills provided, to furnish the Irish soldiers withal’.2 The Jesuits were also implicated: Peter Talbot, the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, had supposedly claimed that ‘the fathers of the society in Ireland were very vigilant to prepare the people to arise, for the defence of their liberty and religion, and to recover their estates’.3 Emissaries were sent to Ireland to lay the ground for a rebellion, and within months the Irish were reportedly ready to rise. Ormond was supposedly ‘in a great perplexity, to see Catholic religion thrive so well’, and there were many who, at the behest of the Jesuits, ‘resolve to cut the Protestants throats again, when once they rise’.4

The Decline of the Irish Plot and the Road to the ‘Tory Revenge’, November 1680–July 1681

At least some of the witnesses made a positive impression on the Lords. On 8 November they ordered the arrest of unspecified ‘Irish ruffians’ (presumably the would-be assassins of the king), and requested that Charles order some of the individuals named in the testimonies to be brought from Ireland. Irish business was to be the second item on the agenda (after the ‘bill against Popery’) when the house reconvened on the following Monday, and the lords requested a conference ‘in the painted chamber, concerning some informations relating to the discovery of a horrid popish plot in Ireland’.1