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THE LANGUAGE AND SYMBOLISM OF CONQUEST IN IRELAND, c. 1790–1850*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2008

Jacqueline Hill
Jacqueline Hill*
Affiliation:
THE UNIVERSITY OF WALES, BANGOR
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Abstract

The question of whether Ireland had been conquered by England has received some attention from historians of eighteenth-century Ireland, mainly because it preoccupied William Molyneux, author of the influential The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (1698). Molyneux defended Irish parliamentary rights by denying the reality of a medieval conquest of Ireland by English monarchs, but he did allow for what could be called ‘aristocratic conquest’. The seventeenth century, too, had left a legacy of conquest, and this paper examines evidence of consciousness among Irish Protestants of descent from ancestral conquerors. It considers how and why this consciousness took a more pronounced sectarian turn during the 1790s. Williamite anniversaries, increasingly associated with the Orange Order, became identified in the Catholic mind as symbolic reminders of conquest. Thanks to the protracted struggle for ‘Catholic emancipation’, this issue continued to feature in political debate about Ireland well into the nineteenth century, while the passing of the Act of Union (1800) revitalised the older debate about whether England could be said to have conquered Ireland. Liberal Protestants and Catholics contended that England had invariably intervened to prevent any possibility of reconciliation between conquerors and conquered. Thus the language of conquest remained highly adaptable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 18 , December 2008 , pp. 165 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2008

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Allan Blackstock, John Gillingham and Cadoc Leighton for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Errors that remain are my own.

References

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36 Blackstock, Loyalism, 63–8, 72–5; and on choice of date, Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 1997), 111–17.

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67 Burke, Langrishe, 320.

68 Abbé [James] MacGeoghegan, Histoire de l'Irlande Ancienne et Moderne (2 vols., Paris, 1758), i, xii–xiii.

69 Taaffe, Impartial History, i, 47; Parnell, Historical Apology, 3, 27–30.

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71 Jeanne Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland's Past: The Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (1980), ch. 2; Murray, Damien, Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies, 1840–80 (Maynooth, 2000), ch. 1Google Scholar.

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73 Ibid., ii, 213, 217, 222. For reasons for preferring ‘English’ to ‘Normans’ to describe the invaders, see ‘Normans’ in The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. S. J. Connolly (Oxford, 1998), 389–90, and John Gillingham, ‘Normanizing the English Invaders of Ireland’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. Huw Price and John Watts (Oxford, 2007), 85–97. I am grateful to Professor Gillingham for allowing me to read his article before publication.

74 Augustin Thierry, History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; with its Causes, and Consequences to the Present Time (1841), ix.

75 Ibid., 233–4, 273.

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77 James Godkin, ‘The Rights of Ireland’, in Repeal Prize Essays, ch. 2, 33. Cf. ‘I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races; . . . the deadly animosity that now separates the inhabitants of Lower Canada into the hostile divisions of French and English’, in The Report of the Earl of Durham (new edn, 1902), x.

78 Moore, History, iii, 74–5; Godkin, ‘Rights’, 53.

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88 Irish Times, 12 May 2007.