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The Irish Protestants and James II, 1688–90

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Raymond Gillespie
Raymond Gillespie*
Affiliation:
Department of Modern History, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth
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Extract

Modern historical writing on the events of 1688 to 1691 in Ireland has been characterised by a sense that the two sides in that conflict were acting out predetermined roles. There is in the writing no doubt that Protestants would rally to the cause of William III and that Catholics would be the loyal supporters of the deposed James II. Roy Foster has characterised the ‘war of the two kings’ as a clash of two cultures: ‘one Catholic, French-connected, romantically Jacobite … and temperamentally Gaelic’, and the other that of the Protestant ‘Ascendancy’ created by ‘the traumatic events of James’s short reign and its aftermath’. For J. G. Simms political advantage was the key to the events of 1688–90: Catholics naturally supported James since to do so offered ‘an unusually favourable prospect of establishing their predominance’; and in the Protestant mind, since ‘William was lawful king of England, he was automatically king of Ireland … [and] would not abandon the English stake in Ireland’. Put more starkly by J. C. Beckett, ‘the struggle which reached its climax at the Boyne and ended at Limerick ran a clear course from the accession of James II’. Modern historians were not the only ones to make the assumption that Irish Protestants would support William and Catholics James. Many contemporaries outside Ireland made a similar equation. The English Jacobite John Stevens seems to have believed there was a definite link between religion and political loyalty when he arrived in Ireland in 1689 to serve James. On his arrival at Naas he was allocated a billet by the sovereign of the town, but the innkeeper refused to admit him. ‘The man being an Irishman and a Catholic’, Stevens noted, ‘made his ill carriage towards us appear more strange but his religion and country he thought would bear him out’. Arriving at Dublin he approached his prominent Jacobite friends, but ‘friendship was grown so rare in Ireland as loyalty in England’. He was relieved from apparent destitution by ‘the hands I least expected it from’, a New English Protestant who lent him £10.

Type
Articles
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 110 , November 1992 , pp. 124 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1992

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