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Chapter 5 The Return of the Exile: Oliver Plunkett between Rome and

This chapter and the next turn to the problem of the way in which Irish clerics and laypeople were caught between, on the one hand, the power structures of the English administration in Ireland to which they owed taxes and under whose system of justice they lived, and, on the other, the Roman , which demanded both their moral and financial support. My first case study is of Oliver Plunkett, who as the of , ecclesiastical administrator of all Ireland, was the most important cleric to return to Ireland in the period following the Restoration. His attempt in a very Roman way to appease the power of the English administration left him alienated from not just actively rebellious rapparees but also the majority of the people, especially in the area around Armagh. Plunkett was also pitted against the Irish Francis­­ cans. The friars’ practices in Ireland sometimes ran afoul of Catholic orthodoxy, which the Roman-trained Plunkett was attempting to enforce during the 1670s. At around this same time, beginning in 1677, some Irish Catholics who had converted to Protestantism in order to hold on to their land in Ireland emi­ grated from Ireland to Rome in order to return to the faith of their grandparents and become part of the global Catholic Church. Chapter 6 concerns this very different group of exiles, most of them sailors and craftsmen rather than aris­ tocrats or scholars, who ended up in Rome at the Ospizio dei Convertendi. These two case studies—one about the consequences of the Roman decul­ turation of an Irish Catholic cleric returning to Ireland in 1670 to be executed at in 1681 (chapter 5) and the other about the conflicted and feigned identities of poor Irish Protestant, formerly Catholic, or pretended Protestant migrants who migrated to Rome from 1677 through to the eighteenth century (chapter 6)—take this study into the realm of multiplying cultural conflicts as well as altered and shifting identities that emerged as the Irish negotiated their relations between the English Protestant-controlled administration of Ireland and the orthodox Roman control of the Catholic religion. Perhaps no life so fully embodies the triumph and the tragedy of the Irish relationship with Rome as that of Oliver Plunkett.1 Born in 1625 into a distin­

1 Plunkett has attracted a large number of biographies, including the first but incomplete edi­ tion of his letters, Patrick Francis Moran, Memoirs of the Most Reverend Oliver Plunkett, , and Primate of All Ireland Who Suffered Death for the Catholic Faith in

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004335172_007 174 Chapter 5 guished Old English family, he was educated in Ireland by his cousin Patrick Plunkett, a Cistercian . Through Patrick’s brother Nicholas, a member of the confederate government (1642–49), Oliver met the papal representative to Ireland Pier Francesco Scarampi. This benefactor brought the twenty-two- year-old to Rome in 1647, at the height of the war. While living at the Irish College in Rome, where he studied, and after taking holy orders in 1654, Plunkett requested permission to stay in Rome to continue his education, an understandable choice considering that from 1653 on, could be arrested and shot on sight in Ireland.2 After , he lived with the Oratorians at San Geralomo della Carità, where he served as chaplain. At the nearby Ospedale di Santo Spirito, where nearly half a century earlier Tadhg Ó Cianáin had died, the young Irish priest did charitable work. He also studied law for three years at La Sapienza (the University of Rome), and in 1657 he became professor of theology at the Collegio di Propaganda Fide, where he lived and worked for twelve years. He nominated himself for the position of archbishop of Armagh in 1669, when, with the restoration of Charles II to the throne, it seemed like there might be much accomplished.3 A little more than a decade later Plunkett would be tried, convicted, and executed on charges of treason, falsely accused of having plotted with the pope and the king of France for an invasion of out­ side forces to defeat the Protestants of Ireland. Beatified in 1920, he in 1975 became the first Irish martyr to be canonized by the Catholic Church.4

1681 (: James Duffy, 1870); George Croly, The Life and Death of Oliver Plunket, Primate of Ireland (Dublin: J. Duffy, 1850); Alice Curtayne, The Trial of Oliver Plunkett (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1953); J. F. Stokes, The Life of Blessed Oliver Plunkett (Dublin: The Catholic Truth Society, 1954); Tomás Ó Fiaich, Oliver Plunkett, Ireland’s New Saint (Dublin: Veritas, 1975); Tomás Ó Fiaich and Desmond Forristal, Oliver Plunkett: His Life and Letters (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1975). No source, however, presents as well documented a picture of the man as Monsignor John Hanly, ed., The Letters of Saint Oliver Plunkett 1625–1681 (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1979), which includes all of his letters, many of them previously unpublished, as well as thorough commentary on their context. 2 Tomás Ó Fiaich, preface to The Letters of Saint Oliver Plunkett, xvi. 3 For the letter in which Plunkett nominates himself, see: “To the cardinals of Propaganda congregation, a petition,” n.p. (Propaganda college), n.d. (ca. June–July 1669), original Italian, AP, SC Irlanda 1, 300r, Hanly, 25–26. According to Breifne Walker, it was not unusual for bishops to nominate themselves. See Breifne Walker, “Blessed Oliver Plunkett and the in Ireland,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5th series, 109 (1968): 317. 4 The documents relating to his can be consulted in Armacana, Beatificationis seu declarationis martyrii Ven.Servi Dei Oliverii Plunket, Primatis Hiberniae et Archiepiscopi Armacani, 2 vols (Rome: Pontificia in Instituto Pii IX, 1914, 1917), hereafter referred to as Beatificationis.