Introduction

Summary

What began on 23 October 1641? Was it a rebellion? An uprising? A nationalist rising? A Catholic plot? A pre-meditated massacre? An indiscriminate slaughter? A fabrication? An exaggeration? A response to the wider pressures of ‘Britain’ and an integral part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms? Contemporaries, scholars and historians alike have debated and contested the causes and course of what is now known as the 1641 rebellion in Ireland. Like any military event there were participants (both losers and winners), survivors, victims and witnesses. The records and testimonies left behind are fraught with difficulties for researchers. Memories of 1641 justified a range of controversial policies such as land confiscations, penal laws and the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Historians have had to consider the course of wider Anglo-Irish history and politics when attempting to understand what unfolded in Ireland during the 1640s. Accounts were highly partisan, divided along Catholic and Protestant, and later nationalist and unionist, lines. These passionate debates meant that the main body of evidence for the rebellion of 1641, now known as the 1641 depositions, has been decried as lies by Catholics and exalted by Protestants as evidence of Catholic perfidy. As a result, historians have been reluctant to engage with the depositions to any great detail.