2015 Dean Junior Stephen 0952757 Ethesis
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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Firearms, Legitimacy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Ireland Dean Junior, Stephen Duane Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 Firearms, Legitimacy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Ireland Stephen Duane Dean Junior History Department King’s College London Abstract Controlling access to firearms was one of the few truly successful Anglo-Irish policies of the eighteenth century and a founding tenant of the penal laws. This thesis examines how a concerted effort to remove access to firearms from the majority Catholic population was largely successful after the end of the Williamite war. Changing imperial priorities in the last four decades of the eighteenth century saw a disbarment policy, which had unified the imperial centre and the settlers on the marches dismantled piecemeal. At the same time, a growing awareness of the potential of the Irish Catholic population as recruits eventually overshadowed fears of the threat of the Catholic population gaining training in the use of arms. The resulting melange of ‘official’ non-enforcement of existing laws and the rise of confessional paramilitaries overlapped with the diffusion of state owned firearms into private ownership in the 1770s and 1780s, which made armed Protestants a threat to order rather than its guarantor. This thesis demonstrates how the gun acted as both a tool of coercive governance and a key component of the ritualized maintenance of a Protestant Ascendancy. Furthermore, it examines the remarkable story of the Catholic resurgence from being the chief domestic threat to the British Empire’s domestic stability into a vital component of its fiscal-military state. I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own and has not been previously published. Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the support of numerous friends and colleagues. The number of companions who have prevented this project from collapse are innumerable. It is a testimony to the tenacity of both their intellect and capacity to imbibe strong spirits that this work was completed. I would especially like to thank Macdara Dwyer, William Farrell, Spike Sweeting, and Tim Reinke-Williams for having a shared passion for the early modern world and Feiyi Wen for enduring those discussions. In addition, the comments and suggestions of Martyn Powell and John Bew have made this a much stronger work than it would have been otherwise. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support of my supervisor Ian McBride throughout the duration of this project and its challenges, including a diagnosis of dyslexia, delayed visa applications and navigating the byzantine bureaucracy of higher education. 2 Abstract i. Figures. i. Figures I and II. p. 67 ii. Figure III and IV. p. 68 iii. Figure V. p. 171 Acknowledgements p. 2 Introduction p. 5 1. A Pre-History of the Gun in Ireland p.18 i. The gun in Irish conflict p. 34 ii. Disarming Catholic Ireland p.38 iii. Conclusions p.44 2. Catholics and the Gun p. 54 i. The Penal Laws p. 57 ii. A remnant of an armed Catholicism p. 65 iii. Enforcement and resistance p. 71 3. The Nesting Ground of Wild Geese p. 84 i. Irish military service abroad p. 86 ii. Recruitment in Ireland p. 94 iii. Returning to Ireland p. 105 iv. Conclusions p. 11 3 4. Suspect Communities p. 123 i. Growing the Protestant Interest p. 132 ii. Allies of necessity p. 141 iii. Converts and Dissenters p. 153 5. Arming Ireland p. 161 i. Demographics of recruitment p. 168 ii. The Seven Years’ War p. 174 iii. Agrarian unrest p. 182 iv. A changing world p. 196 6. Protestant Ascendency Redefined p. 198 i. The growth of the state p. 205 ii. Failures and successes p. 213 iii. State firearms p. 221 iv. Coote p. 229 v. The Duel p. 235 7. Conclusion: The Gun after 1778 p. 237 i. The Volunteers p. 237 ii. Catholic Relief p. 244 iii. Parting shots p. 247 Bibliography p. 250 4 Introduction Ireland provides one of the only examples in the early modern history of Western Europe of an indigenous population being disarmed by a minority settler community. The policy of controlling private ownership of firearms originated from the first arrival of firearms into Ireland in the fifteenth century. This was initially designed to keep firearms from the native Gaels but, after the 1640s, gradually became an issue of confessional rather than ethnic distinction. After the passage of the Popery Laws, the monopoly on firearms by Protestants was sustained as other aspects of penal legislation affecting land tenure and the education were relaxed or reformed in the 1770s. This process of enforced disarming was successfully undertaken over the eighteenth century through the use of a confessionally discriminating law code. In the face of a changing political and international landscape, the British state began dismantling one of the longest enduring and effective policies of these penal laws in order to secure a strategically valuable supply of Catholic manpower for military service in the 1760s. However, the limitation of domestic access to firearms by Catholics continued until 1793 when the restrictions surrounding Catholic ownership of firearms were reformed at the same time that the right for those who qualified to vote was returned. This large-scale re-arming of Catholics for domestic military service followed the creation of a militia in response to the military threat from a resurgent republican France. This was part of a wider trend in legislation in the 1790s where the British government attempted to disarm a disaffected population regardless of confessional identity, whilst at the same time expanding the size of state controlled armed forces.1 1 The number of acts regarding weapons in the 1790s demonstrates this clearly enough. There were 9 Acts regulated or restricting the importation of gunpowder or firearms into Ireland regardless of the confessional identity of those wielding them. The British establishment were far more concerned with political allegiance than faith in the period from 1791-1798. For English dimensions to this pattern, see J.E. Cookson, ‘The English Volunteer Movement of the French Wars, 1793–1815: Some Contexts’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 32 (1989): 867-891. 5 The delicate equilibrium between the right to bear arms, the maintenance of law and order, and the balance of power between the citizen and the state became increasingly volatile in decades succeeding the Williamite victory of the 1690s and the passage of the Militia Act in 1793. This thesis examines how attempts at the enforcement of a monopoly on the gun by the Irish Protestant population affected relationships between the three main confessional groups of Ireland, as well as helping to define the relationship between the state and its citizens. By analysing the way that access to the gun became a litmus test of legitimacy historians can discuss the much larger issue of governance, state building and confessional violence. The thesis began after a surprising discovery of how little mention one can find of the gun by Irish historians. There are few studies that demonstrate the longue durée of state policy towards the gun. By writing a history of the gun in Ireland, this work fills in the lacuna that scholars working on eighteenth-century Ireland up to this point have had. Despite the continuing discussion on violence and politicization in eighteenth-century Ireland, the creation of the penal laws, and even the rebellion of 1798, the meaning of bearing firearms is made most conspicuous by its absence. The thesis has therefore been structured to use the debates surrounding the right to bear arms as a lens to view the enduring mistrust of Catholics at the level of local elites. Alongside the enforcement of the penal laws, this was a key component of the expansion of state authority across Ireland. Ultimately, domestic Protestant concerns about Catholic power lost ground to the growing need for Catholic soldiers to support the British Empire, but they certainty put up a spirited resistance. The chapters of this thesis are arranged both chronologically and thematically. Each chapter focuses on a specific area where the gun had an impact on Irish society and each chapter contributes to a larger discussion of how the gun was used as a symbol of both legitimacy and as a means of denying legitimacy to others. The gun was a necessary tool of governance because of the weakness of Britain’s claim of legitimate possession to Ireland yet paradoxically 6 was also a symbol of the state’s legitimacy.