An Introduction to My Research

History and Identity in Restoration Ireland:
Why Does it Matter?

The above image comes from Michael Kelly’s 1848 translation of a book called Cambrensis Eversus, a book originally published in Latin in 1662. The author, a Galwegian priest called John Lynch, then living in France, gave his work the frank title – meaning ‘The Welshman Refuted’, or ‘The Welshman Destroyed’ if you prefer – to reflect its subject. On the face of it, Lynch’s work is an attempt to demonstrate that the twelfth-century author Gerald of Wales – Giraldus Cambrensis – was not an authoritative documentary source. Gerald’s two texts on Ireland, the Topographia Hibernica (Topography of Ireland) and the Expugnatio Hibernica (Conquest of Ireland), were written in the years after Henry II of England had invaded and claimed dominion over Ireland. They would later become commonplaces of Irish history, relied upon as documentary evidence of both Henry’s invasion and of medieval Irish society. To Lynch, however, Gerald had neither the experience nor knowledge of Ireland necessary to be an authoritative source and that many of the negative stereotypes associated with Ireland and the Irish could be traced back to Gerald.

When I shared the image above on Twitter some months back, I did so with a tongue-in-cheek caption referring to the failure of the British media to consider Irish and Northern Irish perspectives in the ongoing border issue following Brexit. It proved to a bit of a hit, possibly suggesting that there is still the sense that opinions which are not fully borne out of research and evidence predominate in British views of Ireland. Certainly, this was the view that John Lynch appears to have held in the late seventeenth-century. He was spurred on to write his refutation of Gerald of Wales as the latter saw a surge in popularity on the European continent after his works were published there some decades previously. As René d'Ambrières and Éamon Ó Ciosáin suggest in their 2003 article, Lynch may have been motivated by a fear that the negative stereotypes which had informed English views of Ireland might be picked up by those on the continent too. So, a complete refutation became necessary.

This is where my research comes in. Catholic Irish historians from the same period as Lynch, Peter Walsh and Roderick O’Flaherty both thanked Lynch in their own writings for having provided what they saw as a necessary demolition of Gerald of Wales. Clearly there was a sense then that the legacy of Gerald of Wales was a negative one where insinuations against Irish people continued to re-emerge time after time in each new account. Lynch for his own part can be understood as providing a critique of the practices of his contemporaries and of previous generations of writers on Ireland who had adopted Gerald with few reservations. Cambrensis Eversus can also be read as a reassertion of Irishness in response to those insinuations, but also of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiments current in the seventeenth century.

My research looks at histories of Ireland published in the Restoration period, that period following the return of Charles II – as king of the three Stuart kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland – in 1660. For my purposes I have taken that period to end in the early 1690s, with the fall of Charles’s brother and successor James II. Looking at these histories, I seek to examine the role that different forms of identity play in how history is written. How do people understand their past? Can we, as historians now, understand the relationship between identity and history? When I started my research I kept in the back of my mind Anthony D. Smith’s ideas about how identities can be constructed from a common reading of the past. For example, a nation might be thought of as a group of people that see themselves as sharing common cultural aspects which can read back in time (to paraphrase it quite bluntly and a bit too simply).

Three forms of identity have come to the fore in the histories that I have read and these are political identity, religious identity, and ethnic identity. The first is a bit broad but perhaps the most recognisable. Seventeenth-century Ireland had its own parliament and had come to be governed through common law, two fundamental political and legal institutions that are still with us now. The second, religious identity should not be of any surprise to early modernists. Religion was utterly central to the mindset of early modern Europeans and Ireland was no exception. Restoration Ireland saw not just cultural and social conflict between Catholics and Protestants, but also within Protestantism as the population of non-conforming Protestants coalesced into various sects. All, however, appear to have claimed descent from St Patrick: either in an institutional or purely doctrinal sense. The third is perhaps the trickiest to explain. Ethnic identity in this case would not be immediately recognisable to us as the concept of ethnicity and of nationhood as we understood them would be nearly meaningless in seventeenth-century Ireland. For example, Lynch justifies the rule of the Stuart dynasty based on their descent from early medieval Irish kings. No one, however, would understand the Stuarts as being ‘Irish’.

The Restoration period in Ireland was a period of tension. Only eleven years previously, King Charles I had been executed and Oliver Crowell had arrived in Ireland to bring that kingdom in line with England. The settlement that followed Cromwell survived the Restoration, for the most part, intact and the recent memory of the violence of the 1640s still lingered quite strongly. History-writing offers us one way of examining the tension of this period and how these identities mattered to the authors of these histories. Sometimes the past may have been a safer avenue down which an author might explore the tensions of their own time. From reading Lynch it is clear to me that much of his criticism of Gerald’s habit of speaking about Ireland with an unearned authority just as easily applied to those contemporaries of Lynch who spoke about Ireland without the knowledge that they claimed to have had. Taking into account these different forms of identity, what kind of patterns can we see in histories published in this period? When early modern authors speak about the past, what are they telling us about how they saw their own present? These are some of the questions that I am seeking to answer with my research.

This blog will serve as a form of reportage, providing highlights and introductions to some of the topics I have covered, and also some of the tangential, side-aspects which do not fit in to the final product.