–FIVE–

The 'Second Reformation,' 1822-7

Had this charge, expressed as it was, in no very courteous or measured language, come from an individual less elevated in character and station than Archbishop Magee, it would have passed without any comment from us … That he will be answered by disciples of Calvin and Knox, we believe … That he will awaken the slumbering polemics of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland we apprehend … To us the charge presents itself as a political document of great importance.

Dublin Evening Post, 29 October 1822¹

Another system was deemed more suitable to the objects of the establishment. Vituperation, virulence, fury—these were the weapons which they employed. Archbishop Magee had given the view hollow, and all the little dogs of the village—Tray, Sweetheart, and the rest, joined in the cry. War ad internacionem was declared. The Papists and their religion were to be crushed, not by brute force, for this, happily, is not yet in their power, but by slander, taunts, and insults, which the Catholics of Ireland would be less or more than men if they did not resent.

Dublin Evening Post, 24 January 1824²

There is seven times more Scripture reading in this parish and the adjacencies thereof than there was in the year prior to 1817; nay, if I would say fifteen times as much among certain classes; I believe few there would think me wrong.

JAMES EDWARD JACKSON³

ARCHBISHOP MAGEE AND THE CHURCH MILITANT

By 1822 it was abundantly clear that Protestantism in Ireland, encompassing both the religion and the class who professed it, was under serious attack. Between the ominous prophecies ascribed to Pastorini, the blatant outrages of Captain Rock, and the verbal thunderings of O’Connell and MacHale, Irish Protestants had good reason to be terrified.⁴ The extent to which the abrasive anti-Catholicism of the evangelicals was responsible for arousing this hornet’s nest of sectarianism was considerable. Undoubtedly, the struggle for Catholic Emancipation and the suffering associated with the economic crisis generated much anti-Protestant and anti-landlord sentiment. Nevertheless, the pervasive absorption with religious issues that characterized so much of the journalism and polemical literature of this period points to the overweening ambitions and divisive strategies of evangelical activists as a major source of the troubles.

The most obvious source of sectarian awareness at the popular level was the sheer amount of material in print. The mountain of bibles and tracts, controversial and otherwise, with which the country was now being deluged, along with the preaching of itinerant missionaries who travelled the country repeating the invective of their superiors in a more vulgar fashion, made the peasantry more familiar than ever with the age-old dispute between Protestantism and Rome. Knowledge thus obtained was put to the very opposite use from that intended by its distributors, and was often employed as evidence for the righteousness of the Catholic cause. As an employee of the Baptist Society lamented in 1819, after a period of scripture-reading in a Catholic district, ‘the chief object of their conversation was controversy, wresting the Scriptures to support their superstitions’.⁵ Even the Rockite movement had biblical overtones. In anonymous notices and particularly in the oaths binding members of the conspiracy together, the word ‘rock’ was used in association with the church of St Peter, ‘founded upon a rock’.⁶ The bibles, which the evangelicals hoped would teach the peasantry to live according to the word of God, were instead combed for any indication that the same word might sanction the extermination of heretics.⁷

In addition to the material disseminated by the various evangelical societies, the triumphalist tone of popular Protestantism became especially marked in a spate of new journals and newspapers that began to capitalize on the heady patriotism generated by the British victory over Napoleon. The standard fare of newspapers like The Courier, The Patriot and The Watchman was the moral supremacy of the Protestant faith, the cornerstone of British identity and patriotism, coupled with virulent attacks on Catholicism as the enemy within the gates, subversive and persecuting in intent, and committed to the triumph of slavery and superstition. The ugly tone adopted by the ultra-Protestant press was soon emulated in the streets, where assaults on Catholics were especially popular with supporters of the Orange Order, who appeared to be displaying a new sense of buoyancy and self-confidence. Certainly, in 1819, the Dublin Evening Post assessed the Orange authors of the ‘Mountrath Declaration’ as a set of men who ‘in a period of comparatively profound peace, exhibit the banner of religious discord, rake up the embers of history, and make a declaration of interminable war against the Catholics of Ireland’.⁸ Throughout the 1820s the Dublin Evening Post never ceased to lay the blame for the growing sectarian polarization on the ultra-Protestant propaganda that was disseminated with impunity under the nose of the government.⁹

By the early 1820s the effects of this propaganda were to be seen in abundance in the outbreaks of sectarian violence that frequently accompanied the commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne (12 July), the birthday of William III (4 November), and the Popish Plot (5 November). The mobilization of the forces that were used to preserve law and order during the Rockite disturbances—regular troops, yeomanry, and the new police force introduced by Robert Peel in 1822—was an additional provocation. In the consciousness of the Catholic population these forces were identified with Protestant supremacy, and their recruitment and deployment often served as avenues whereby Orange attitudes and tactics were introduced into areas that had never known sectarian discord.¹⁰ Consider the incident reported in the Dublin Evening Post on 1 August 1822 that occurred in the village of Moylough in east Galway. There a convert by the name of Mannion, who had engaged in particularly riotous and inflammatory behaviour during the 12 July celebrations, had been allowed to go free because the chief of police, ‘instead of trying to prevent insult and outrage, actually encouraged it’. According to the indignant Post reporter, Galway had always been renowned for good relations between Protestant and Catholic, ‘until this year’, when the chief of the police, a man ‘paid for the preservation of the peace … encourages his men to violate it by his own example and provokes unoffending subjects to acts of a desperate nature by wantonly insulting them at their very doors’.¹¹

The inflammatory tone of ultra-Protestant propaganda and the corresponding displays of vulgar supremacism in the streets was certainly fuelled and sustained by manifestations of Catholic defiance. But an even more potent source of fear and paranoia among the defenders of Protestant supremacy was the popularity of support for Emancipation among the educated elite in Britain and among liberal Protestants in Ireland. Ironically, the demise of Catholic leadership over the Quarantotti fiasco had left the field open for liberal Protestants to assert themselves. By 1820 the movement had united the various strands of liberalism that had survived the catastrophe of the 1790s—William Drennan of the United Irishmen, for example, as well as Henry Grattan of the ‘Patriot Parliament’— into a powerful bloc of opinion that enjoyed widespread support among Britain’s educated elite, and particularly among those who considered themselves the guardians of public morality such as William Wilberforce and Charles Grant. With the death of George III and the accession of George IV in 1820 there was hope that Emancipation would be carried by an enlightened legislature. The emergence of the youthful and dynamic William Conyngham Plunket as the leading spokesman for the liberal Protestant Emancipationists, following the death of Henry Grattan in 1820, put fresh enthusiasm into the movement. The decision of George IV to visit Ireland in the summer of 1821 gave optimists the impression that Emancipation would be carried.

This combination of Protestant leadership and royal sympathy had entirely the opposite effect on ultra-Protestant sympathizers, however, and inflammatory sectarianism in word as well as deed became the order of the day throughout the spring and summer of 1822. The celebration of the Orange festivals during the summer of that year was of such a character that the Dublin Evening Post, always in the forefront of the liberal cause, warned that they would ‘steep Ireland into deeper horrors than any with which she has been hitherto scourged’. They interpreted the barefaced triumphalism of anniversaries in Enniscorthy and Bandon, where Orange incendiaries were often joined by troops of the militia who gloried in playing sectarian tunes and other provocative behaviour, as evidence that the Orangemen ‘were about to enter into some new confederation’.¹² As the events of the latter part of 1822 were to reveal, they were not entirely mistaken in their assessment of the situation.

Into the cauldron of heightened sectarian tension dredged up by sectarian rivalry and inflammatory propaganda, an incendiary device of an entirely different kind was dropped from an unexpected quarter. On the occasion of his inauguration as archbishop of Dublin at St Patrick’s Cathedral on 22 October, the Rev. Dr William Magee asserted openly that the Church of Ireland was the only legitimate ecclesiastical body in Ireland, and that its members should embrace a new mission to assert this orthodoxy and bring the general population into the fold. Because of his stature as the head of the country’s most important diocese, it appeared to contemporaries that he had not only invited open conflict with the Catholic bishops but also placed himself and his Church at the forefront of the crude anti-Catholic crusade of the Orange Order. As the Dublin Evening Post observed, up until this time the fulminations of extremist Protestants had been ignored by upper-class Catholics, who ‘provided a nonconducting medium between the fury of frantic polemics at one extremity of the chain and the irritable and volcanic passions of the multitude at the other’.¹³ But Magee’s sermon was seen as a turning point after which the highest echelons of the Church of Ireland came to be infected with the confrontational style of Orange supremacism. As George Ensor remarked of the sermon:

This, observe, was not uttered at a subscription meeting to convert Dissenters and Catholics; nor after a charitable dinner to raise contributions for the sons of the clergy; they were not rash words, improvidently wrung from a petulant, presumptuous man; no, they were the aura dicta pronounced … in a charge to the clergy of two dioceses—subjected to revision, after much popular animadversion and published at the unanimous request of the influential clergy (the Doctor’s favourite epithet) of Dublin and Glendalough.¹⁴

Some years later, Magee himself asserted that there had been nothing extraordinary in his charge, certainly nothing that he had not said many times before. In light of similar opinions expressed on other occasions by his episcopal contemporaries, this rings true. What set the incident apart was the decision of Bishop Doyle and other Catholic prelates, including Dr Patrick Curtis, archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland, and Dr John MacHale, to respond publicly to Archbishop Magee’s claims concerning the rights and duties of the Established Church. This was a radical departure on the part of the Catholic clergy and marked the beginning of officially sanctioned Catholic resistance to Protestant ambitions to extend the principles of the Reformation in Ireland.

Why did Archbishop Magee choose this particular time to give official sanction to the Reformation movement? The answer must be sought in the nature of the campaign for Catholic rights, which increasingly emphasized legal and constitutional issues. All supporters of Catholic claims based their charges against the establishment on legal grounds, and it was surely no coincidence that the leading spokesmen for the movement were themselves lawyers. Since the passage of the Act of Union in 1800 a clear-cut body of liberal thought had been developed to the effect that Catholicism was compatible with constitutional freedom, and indeed that if this freedom counted for anything, Catholics could no longer be denied political equality. Increasingly the position of lay theorists like Denys Scully and Theobald McKenna was reinforced by clerical opinion, particularly that of James Warren Doyle, the youthful bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, whose acronym of ‘JKL’ (James of Kildare and Leighlin) would shortly become a household word.

In addition to the legal weapons that were being sharpened by able Catholic defenders, during the early 1820s the subject of tithes was again brought into the public sphere by the spread of the Rockite disturbances, and resolutions for tithe commutation began to issue from the highest reaches of the political world.¹⁵ Once again the cry of ‘the Church in danger’ began to be invoked, and once again another scion of the Woodward family spoke for his community, only this time the complaint included the fear that the Established Church

had as much to fear from parliament as from the whiteboys … The landlords have allowed the results of absenteeism and rackrenting to fall on the backs of the poor clergy and the ‘saints’ are open to any charge that might be made against us. The Irish Church is in great danger and government ministers have given up entirely, saying that changes in the Irish Church need not involve the Church of England … I consider this as letting slip the dogs of war against us.¹⁶

In light of such fears Magee’s sermon may be seen as an attempt to regain the high moral ground for the Church of Ireland and its followers, from the legal and constitutional reformers on the one hand, but equally from the criticism and challenge of evangelical purifiers on the other. In assuming the mantle of the Reformation movement, Archbishop Magee was not so much pushing aside the claims of the evangelical crusade as jumping on board and taking over the reins in the name of the Church of Ireland.¹⁷

While Magee’s strident declaration that the Church of Ireland should assert its supremacy as the ‘national’ church may have been impolitic in the charged political climate of the early 1820s, it was an opinion that was not without support among many of his colleagues. Magee was one of a group of energetic and reforming churchmen who were elevated to the episcopal bench in the first quarter of the century, and who had come to recognize that the new circumstances afforded by the Union afforded an unprecedented opportunity for the established religion to extend its claims in Ireland. Those circumstances included the union of the churches of Ireland and England and the commitment of the government to support a program of church-building and an increase in the ministry. The trend was underpinned by the growing religiosity generated by the reaction to events in France. This, and the competition and example of Independent evangelicals, fuelled the movement towards episcopal orthodoxy in the period in question. There is also abundant evidence that the Church of Ireland was becoming increasingly defensive both of its right to be a national church and to work towards orthodoxy in religious life, which was becoming increasingly common in England and Scotland.¹⁸

Until the 1820s, however, reformers in the Church of Ireland were content to proceed quietly in the manner exemplified by John Jebb. But the politics of the early part of that decade did a great deal to change this and to compel the most committed of the new bishops into a more open and confident assertion of their aims and objectives. The inaugural sermon of Bishop Jebb in 1823, for example, echoed the same theme of increased attention to pastoral duties and included the implication that the Church of Ireland clergy should seek to include the Catholic population in its mission.¹⁹ In a similar vein, at his triennial sermon in Tuam Cathedral in 1822, Archbishop Power le Poer Trench addressed Catholics present in a polite but strong rhetorical tone as to why they should consider the doctrines of the reformed faith superior to those of Rome.²⁰ Magee’s sermon was unusual only in its intemperate attack on the Catholic body as being ‘a Church without a Religion’—a comment that was immediately recognized by the Dublin Evening Post as not only insulting but dangerous in the highly combustible sectarian atmosphere of the time.

In assessing the impact of the famous ‘antithetical’ sermon, Magee’s personality should also be taken into account. Prior to his appointment as archbishop of Dublin, he had enjoyed an outstanding scholarly reputation as a fellow of Trinity College, famed for his rhetorical flourishes and for his good opinion of his own abilities. Through his outspoken support for the political ambitions of his friend William Conyngham Plunket, he had earned a reputation as a liberal in politics. It was to this reputation—if W.J. Fitzpatrick is to be believed—that he owed his appointment as archbishop.²¹ But if the subject of his visitation sermon was any indication of his political leanings, he had apparently fallen into line very quickly with the evangelical ideal of religious duty and its accompanying spirit of Protestant partisanship.²² Indulging in the love of antithesis that had characterized his oratory since his student days, Magee preached at length on the two great obstacles confronting the Church of Ireland:

We, my Rev Brethren, are placed in a station in which we are hemmed in by two opposite descriptions of Christians: the one possessing a Church without what we can call a Religion and the other possessing a Religion without what we can call a Church: the one so blindly enslaved as to suppose infallible Ecclesiastical authority, as not to seek in the Word of God a reason for the faith they possess; the other so confident in the infallibility of their individual judgment as to the reasons of their faith that they deem it their duty to resist all authority in matters of religion. We, my Brethren, are to keep free of both extremes, and holding the Scriptures as our great charge, whilst we maintain the liberty with which Christ has made us free, we are to submit ourselves to the authority to which he had made us subject. From this spirit of tempered freedom and qualified submission sprung the glorious work of the Reformation, by which the Church of these countries, having thrown off the slough of slavish superstition, burst into the purified form of Christian renovation.²³

These adverse references were unmistakably directed at the Catholics and the Presbyterians. As had been predicted by the Dublin Evening Post, neither group was prepared to tolerate such an obvious insult without striking back. The Presbyterian response, however, was overshadowed by Bishop Doyle’s reply on behalf of the Catholics, which appeared two weeks later in the Dublin Evening Post. Doyle’s decision to enter into public controversy with such a distinguished prelate of the Church of Ireland was an unprecedented move for a Catholic bishop. Magee had argued that the Established Church possessed the sole legitimate claim to apostolic succession in Ireland. In the opinion of the historian W.D. Killen, this was a fatal mistake on the archbishop’s part. By taking his stand on what Killen called ‘the essentially popish ground of so-called apostolical succession’ instead of ‘the impregnable foundations of Protestantism’, Magee had placed himself at the mercy of the young prelate of Kildare, who ‘had long been furbishing his weapons of theological warfare’.²⁴

Doyle’s reply to Magee’s charge was equal to its author’s reputation as the rising star of the Catholic episcopate and had the immediate effect of infusing an extraordinary sense of confidence into the Catholic body as a whole. In a formidable display of legal, historical and theological learning, Doyle took Magee to task on the apostolic-succession question. Not content with having demolished his adversary’s reasoning in this matter, he went on to declare that the property of the Church of Ireland was held not by dint of any divine sanction, but ‘only by virtue of the civil law, and that law is penal—highly penal’.²⁵

Like O’Connell, Doyle was capable of grasping and highlighting the contradictions between the privileges enjoyed by the Church of Ireland and the moral framework of the legal system. This was especially true with regard to tithes. ‘But what’, enquired Doyle, ‘does the establishment give the peasant in return for his tithe?’ Confident that the only truthful reply was ‘nothing’, he advised his opponent not to accuse of injustice anyone who might think differently

as you will never succeed in convincing your countrymen that they are conscientiously bound to pay for what they don’t receive … There is not a peasant in Ireland who does not know, as well as Ulpian, that commutative justice requires an equivalent to be given for what is received.²⁶

This last criticism had implications that went far beyond the purely spiritual realm, since it vindicated the right of Catholics to withhold tithes and consequently threatened the very foundations of the Established Church. To stalwart defenders of the Protestant interest like Magee and Sir Harcourt Lees, it meant that the sword of Catholic tyranny, which had been glittering in the scabbard for so many years, was now drawn and ready to strike.

The contest between Doyle and Magee let loose a flood of polemical treatises from the pens of less renowned, though hardly less vigourous, apologists for the respective denominational interests. Local and national newspapers became forums for religious controversy, and Bible society meetings were turned into occasions for whipping up the enthusiasm of militant Protestants. While the controversy between the bishops was in full swing, sectarian hostilities at the popular level became more open and aggressive. One notorious incident associated with the controversy was the clandestine desecration of a Catholic altar in Ardee, County Louth, with a calf ’s head, understood to be a symbol of gross insult and ridicule.²⁷

A more disturbing prospect for the Catholic clergy, however, was the strength of the Protestant response to Magee’s proclamation of a reformation crusade. Before 1822, evangelical overtures to the Catholic population had not gone further than Bible and tract distribution and the enticement of children to schools run by one or another of the various societies. Between 1822 and 1827 this system was supplemented by more direct efforts to increase the number of converts from Catholicism. In line with Magee’s proclamation that the Established Church was under a severe and immediate obligation to unfurl the banner of the Reformation, the making of converts assumed pre-eminent importance and became the source of particularly bitter hostility between the two major religious groups.

MORAL ASCENDANCY AND THE LANDED ELITE

The ‘Second Reformation’ of 1822–7 revealed the degree to which the evangelical message had fallen on fertile soil among the landed aristocrats of the Church of Ireland. The intensification of the Reformation movement after 1822 was strongly linked to its popularity among the great landowning families, and support from this quarter was largely responsible for its institutionalization at the local level. Although the patronage of the nobility was also an essential element in the growth and popularity of the evangelical movement in Britain, most visitors from Britain were amazed at the extent to which it prevailed in Ireland. The great Cambridge revivalist, the Rev. Charles Simeon, confided to a colleague following an extended visit in 1822:

You, who know the precise line in which I walk at Cambridge, would be astonished, as I myself was, to find earls and viscounts, deans and dignitaries, judges, etc. calling upon me … I dined at the Countess of Westmeath’s and met Judge Daly and many other characters of the highest respectability.²⁸

Evidence from a variety of sources, not least the critical and satirical, suggests that the ‘spiritual flooding’ that Elizabeth Bowen spoke of as having occurred sometime around 1817 was by no means an isolated incident. Indeed, the amount of attention that the phenomenon was attracting prompts the question whether what was taking place was not in fact the equivalent of an ‘awakening’ among certain sections of the Church of Ireland community. What kind of evidence should we use for this? Clearly, the enthusiasm of itinerant preachers about the progress that was being made among the landed classes might be explained as congratulatory self-indulgence; but there is simply such an abundance of it for the years in question (roughly 1816–21) that it cannot all be coincidental. James Edward Jackson’s annoyance at the ‘bustling activity’ and ‘proselytizing spirit carried even to obtrusiveness’ of the HBS is clearly suggestive of revivalist excitement:

In point of fact the Bible Society everywhere presents itself to your eye, in the Anniversary and the Committee Meeting, in the city and the village, in advertisements in the newspapers and in placards on the walls. It crosses you in your walks, with troops of female associates; it is the theme of your social parties, and of your domestic circles. It ascends your pulpits, and ‘canvasses’ for charity at your doors. You repel it, and it returns; you make objections, and it shifts its ground, until at length wearied out with importunity and perhaps unconsciously moved by insinuations against your zeal, you give the sanction of your name to measures which you secretly dislike, that you may not be singular, or that you may be quiet.²⁹

Several of the major figures who were to dominate the Church of Ireland’s evangelical wing over the next several decades in one degree or another underwent a conversion experience during this period, and memories recorded later in the century invest these years with a special significance. More significantly, millenarian beliefs associated with perfecting the world in anticipation of the Second Coming began to gain serious followers among prominent aristocratic families like the Rodens of County Down and the Powerscourts of County Wicklow.

In Dublin the celebration of the ‘April meetings’, as the week-long series of annual meetings of the various evangelical societies came to be known, provided remarkable evidence of the popularity of evangelicalism among the upper classes. A correspondent of the Baptist Society commented in 1821 that:

not less than 2,000 people attended, and these of the first respectability … Many of the speeches of the bishops, clergy, and laymen were excellent, and I believe not exceeded by any meeting in London.³⁰

In the provinces the sense of drama and expectation was equally pronounced. Following a visit to Lord Lorton’s demesne at Rockingham in 1821, where he preached to a crowd of two or three hundred, the Baptist missionary Isaac MacCarthy wrote:

I cannot describe the interest which seems to be excited in the minds of the people to hear the word of God all through this neighbourhood, particularly in the town of Boyle. The crowd was so great that we deemed it expedient to prop the left of the Sessions House, as some were apprehensive of danger if it were left without it.³¹

The Lorton estate was already well known as the centre of a local revival in north Roscommon, but the Lortons were by no means alone as prominent local sponsors of the evangelical crusade. By 1822 there was a growing network of great landed families who subscribed to the objectives of the Reformation movement and who exerted enormous influence, locally and nationally, because of their social and political prominence. Who were these families, and what distinguished them from their peers who chose not to answer the evangelical challenge?

In one of his attacks on the clergy of the Established Church, Bishop Doyle had pointed to ‘the saints’ (i.e. the evangelical clergy) as having disseminated the hostile anti-popery spirit among ‘the little gentry with whom they associate’.³² This was undoubtedly true, but such practices were by no means confined to the smaller gentry, as the names of Farnham, Roden, Powerscourt, Lorton, Manchester, Mountcashel and Gosford in the front ranks of the evangelical family roster testify. Many of these great evangelical families were related through marriage, and in some cases their prominence in the movement could be attributed to the influence of a younger son, nephew, or son-in-law trained for clerical orders at Trinity College.

That the cultivation of habits of personal piety, duty and responsibility was the rising fashion among the youthful aristocracy is powerfully evident in one of the few personal accounts to have survived from this period, the diary of Lady Anne Jocelyn of the Roden family. It is strewn with references to the great evangelical families of Dublin and Wicklow who made up the young girl’s social circle—the Parnells, Synges, Le Despencers, Dalys, La Touches, Howards and Wingfields, but her private musings reflected her absorption with religious issues after the death of her beloved sister, Fanny, who had married into the Powerscourt family. Her preoccupation with death and fear of the day of judgment was never far from her thoughts, not only on occasions when she has been exposed to death but often quite spontaneously, as, for example, with the entry for 22 May 1812:

I was standing on a dangerous rock today, and it occurred to me, suppose I tumbled in and was drowned, was I fit to die suddenly in that kind of way. Oh I fear not, what an awful idea death is; I trust my heavenly father will support me at that dread hour. How guarded all my thoughts and actions should be.³³

It was this mentality that pushed her to engage in good works on her father’s estate at Tollymore in County Down. She persisted in ministering to the needs of the poor even as the shadow of death hung over her and finally claimed her in 1822, at the age of twenty-one.³⁴

Contemporary critics frequently pointed to the relationship between women and clergymen as the basis of much of the fanaticism that appeared to take hold of otherwise reasonable men. In a thinly disguised account of the Reformation movement on the Roden estate in County Down, Eyre Crowe Evans drew a revealing and humorous picture of this feminine–clerical alliance in his novella Old and New Light in 1825. Of the local evangelical curate, Mr O’Syng, he observed:

His proselytes in and about Ardenmore were numerous, especially among the weaker sex, whom his pathos, and cambric handkerchief moistened with pulpit tears, never failed to move. Even the good squires, who slumbered or snored through the young apostle’s preaching, heard his doctrines subsequently repreached to them by domestic missionaries with whom for peace-sake it was always best to coincide.³⁵

The role of women in the movement was of unquestionable importance, even if it did provide critics with an excuse for treating the subject flippantly.³⁶

The most essential reason for the commitment of Irish Protestants to evangelicalism, however, was an unbounded confidence that adherence to duty and responsibility as directed by the teachings of the Bible would secure their position as property owners and the natural leaders of society. This attitude was in keeping with that of their British counterparts, who had survived the upheaval created by the democratic threat of the late eighteenth century and the Napoleonic Wars and were currently in a position of greater strength than ever. The confidence generated by political victory and an exceptionally strong economic foundation (guaranteed by the demand for agricultural produce stemming from the war effort and the rising population of the industrial cities) allowed the landed aristocracy to believe that providence had indeed favoured their way of life and that hierarchy and tradition had won out over democracy and infidelity.³⁷ The duty of this class in Ireland, as expressed in 1822 in the Christian Observer was:

To encourage the agriculture, commerce, and manufacturers of Ireland, to give her an able and upright magistracy, a resident gentry, and a resident and pious clergy; to raise the degraded condition of the peasantry and enable them to enjoy a fair portion of the produce of their labours, to allay the religious dissensions which pervade every part of the country and embitter the quiet of every hamlet within it; and to devise a substitute for the tithe system, that everlasting source of discontent and disorder, are a few, and but a few, of the obligations imposed upon them [the rulers of the country].³⁸

To this litany of desirable objectives, Irish evangelicals would have added, as a prerequisite, the eradication of Catholicism and priestly influence, which they held responsible for the wretched state of the country in the first place.

Evangelical myopia about the cause of Ireland’s lamentable condition and the cure necessary to relieve it gave rise to a whole new series of derisive appellations. As William Urwick complained, ‘all workers for the gospel were contemptuously and sneeringly called in common “Methodists”, “New Lights”, “Swaddlers”, etc., as best suited the taste, or slang, or convenience of their opponents’.³⁹ In 1837 the diarist Humphrey O’Sullivan referred to the ‘wretched swaddlers [suadleirige beaga] who are trying to see whether they can wheedle away the children of the Gael to their accursed new religion’.⁴⁰ The contemptuous use of the word ‘saint’ had a long history, extending back to the Puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century and currently enjoying a new lease on life in association with William Wilberforce and his followers in the Clapham Sect. It was used with equal vigour in Ireland.⁴¹ The most popular epithet for Irish evangelicals during the 1820s, however, was ‘New Light’, a term that had come into general vogue in America in connection with the anti-establishment revivalist movement that had originated in New England.⁴²

In Old and New Light, Crowe Evans evidently did not feel the need for a subtitle to inform his readers that the work was a study of the conflict between the easy-going traditional followers of the Church of Ireland and the ill-founded and socially disruptive enthusiasm of the evangelicals. His protagonist, the amiable Charles St George, cuts an implausible figure (considering the book was published in 1825) as a naïve, well-meaning young clergyman, fresh from Trinity College, who arrives in County Louth completely unfamiliar with the New Light phenomenon. His innocence provides an opportunity for the writer to present us with the opinions of the high-spirited younger members of a local gentry family, the Penningtons, as well as with those of the tormented Harry Lowrie, heir to the Laylands estate, where the newly acquired sanctity of his sisters and parents has literally driven him out of the place. Upon enquiring what the New Light marvel was all about, St George is greeted with the following reproachful comments:

‘When Mr. St. George has spent an evening at Laylands’, said Miss Mary Pennington, ‘he will know perfectly well what New Light means. Why, they would not allow dancing there on any account!’

‘Of reading a novel they would abhor the thought’, cried Miss Pennington, equally horrified at such rigidity, ‘and their pianos would not stoop to music less grave than “Let the bright Seraphim”, or “Angels ever bright and fair”.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Louisa, don’t mention that Seraphim’, cried Harry.

‘I have heard that tune so frequently of late that Shaun caught me whistling it to the hounds last week and asked me from what witch I had learned that confounded cronon [wail] that was setting the dogs off their sport’. ‘My father, Sir’, continued the young man to St George, ‘has sold his hunter the other day and gave away his pack, not to me or to any honest sportsman who would use them—he should distribute them in separate couples to every poacher about the country, spoiling the sport that he now thinks it a sin to partake of—now that’s what I call New Light’.⁴³

One of the phenomena strongly underlined in Crowe Evans’ novella is the popularity of the evangelical movement in the counties of north Leinster.⁴⁴ While the geographical expansion of the movement did not conform to any clear pattern, some areas of the country were definitely more susceptible than others to the spread of religious revivalism. This was particularly true of areas that had experienced heavy Protestant settlement and where a substantial Protestant middle class helped to bolster the confidence of the landed elite. The influence of evangelical landlords was heaviest in an arc that stretched from the Atlantic to the Irish Sea across Sligo, north Roscommon, Cavan, Monaghan, Armagh, Louth and south Down. This was the southern flank of the Ulster plantation, a border country where sectarian passions were never far below the surface, and where the triumphalism of the resident gentry reflected a frontier mentality. This was also the territory where the Orange Order had taken root most firmly in the 1790s, and many of the leading gentry who had been associated with the Society since the 1790s would emerge as leaders of the ‘Second Reformation’ movement in the 1820s. To a certain extent this was also true of Wicklow, Carlow and Wexford, where Protestant settlement was much more extensive than in any other part of the country outside the north-east.⁴⁵

Marriages between the great evangelical families in these areas were very common. The most powerful champions of evangelicalism in Leinster—the Powerscourt family of Wicklow—maintained strong connections with the Roden family of Down, traditional stalwarts of the Protestant cause. Intermarriage between various branches of these two families extended over three generations. Lady Louisa Jocelyn, a sister of Robert Jocelyn (1756–1820), 2_nd earl of Roden, was married to Rev. Edward Wingfield, brother of Richard Wingfield (1762–1802), 4^th Viscount Powerscourt. The latter’s son, Richard Wingfield (1790–1823), 5^th Viscount Powerscourt, married Lady Frances Jocelyn, eldest daughter of the 2^nd earl of Roden. One of the offspring of this union, the eldest son and heir, Richard Wingfield (1815–?) married Lady Elizabeth Jocelyn, his first cousin once removed. Although this is undoubtedly the most striking example of marital linkages between evangelical families, many similar instances can be found among the aristocrats whose names repeatedly appeared on the lists of patrons and vice-presidents of the HBS and kindred organizations, and whose estates provided havens for evangelical clergymen, scripture-readers and Bible schools. The Kingston and Mountcashel families, for example, two of the most prominent aristocratic names in Cork and Tipperary, were connected through marriage and were both closely associated with the evangelical movement. Viscount Lorton, whose estate at Rockingham, County Roscommon, was well known for its evangelizing activities, was a brother of the earl of Kingston and a son-in-law of the earl of Rosse, another fervent advocate of the cause. The practice of intermarriage extended down the ranks to include the professional classes. The eldest daughter of Viscount Lorton, for example, was married to a son of Thomas Lefroy, and the offspring of the Lefroy and La Touche clans could be found in the highest reaches of the evangelical aristocracy. These marriage alliances undoubtedly reflected mutual recognition by kindred spirits travelling the same road.

With the notable exception of Theodosia Howard, Viscountess Powerscourt, no woman gained national recognition for involvement in the evangelical movement. Yet much evidence points to the role of women as central figures in such practical operations as distributing bibles, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, and supervising Bible schools. Besides giving women opportunities to escape the domestic environment, evangelical philanthropy also made it possible for the wives and daughters of landlords and clergymen to cooperate with men in a way that did not threaten Victorian ideals of womanhood.⁴⁶

In a sardonic description of what he calls ‘that appalling smugness’ that overtook the Irish gentry during this period, Hubert Butler includes an interesting note on the involvement of women in philanthropic activity:

At first it had quite a genial aspect, there was less abuse, less violence, less drink, less extravagance. I think it was merely that the Rakes of Mallow had taken their money and their merriment to Bath and Brighton. A great crop of charitable institutions and alms houses grew up, there were bible classes and farming classes. In the drawing rooms, where chair covers had been embroidered to the sound of the harpsichord, acres upon acres of warm cross-over shawls were knitted, in the kitchens where rum punch had been brewed, gallons of soup and mountains of nourishing jellies were prepared for the deserving poor. It is said that Lady Elizabeth Fownes literally killed herself with woolwork; and at Piltown the four daughters of Lord Duncannon regularly taught in the village school.⁴⁷

This is an imaginative portrait of serious religion at work in the domestic environment. But some of the more important features to be found on the larger canvas of Irish evangelicalism are absent, and they are not to be found when Butler attempts to answer the question he sets himself—‘How was it that these improved manners did not lead to friendlier feelings but instead the old bitterness intensified, the old divisions deepened?’⁴⁸

The effects of misplaced philanthropy are more vividly documented in Old and New Light, and go a long way towards explaining the bitterness and ill-feeling generated by the now-fashionable philanthropy of evangelical aristocrats. Crowe Evans’ work is set in the early 1820s, when the country was suffering the full effects of the post-Napoleonic depression. Jemima Lowrie has recently opened a Bible school on her father’s estate at Laylands and has succeeded in enrolling the children of a tenant, Tim Byrne, a once-prosperous farmer now fallen on hard times. All goes well for a while, and the youngsters are regularly sent to Miss Jemima to receive instructions, ‘which, whenever they were accompanied by a wedge of bread or a trencher of stirabout, were exceedingly welcome to young scholars’.⁴⁹ The trouble starts when Jemima rewards the eldest child with a gift of a new Bible, which is introduced to the Byrne household at a most unfortunate moment, when the local Catholic curate, Fr McDowd, happens to have stopped by for a social visit. The ensuing conflict over who should have control over the minds of the hopeless Byrne children is related to the sympathetic Charles St George by Tim Byrne:

‘But as I was goin to ’quaint your reverence, when Miss axed for the childer, sure Judy couldn’t but send em. And sure as she did, it war’nt to spell at all, at all, that Miss Jemima taught ’em, but tip-top larnin to—to puzzle the priest; and if you war but to see Father McDowd, how mad he was at the hathen knowledge that had been put into the craturs. For all that, I got round the priest, and talked to him oncet or twicet, for he is a good sort of a body, and likes a drop, and isn’t malevolent the laste taste in the world. Ontil las Saturday night it was come five weeks, who should be with us but Father McDowd, when the childer cam home. And what should little Judy have in her fist but a bran-new Bible, given her, she said, by Miss, all as one as if it was a story book. Och, by my sowl! Ye might as well ha’ been tying Dundalk Bay in a big storm down wid a rope of suggawns (i.e. straw ropes) as thought of quieting him. Puillialoo! your reverence knows what the clargy are like when they’re vexed; troth, they’re as bad as the women, every bit; and that’s saying enough for ‘em. And the long and the short of it was, that Father McDowd wouldn’t hear of me sending the childer any more, at all, at all.

‘Well?’

‘And sure that angered Miss, and Miss angered Master; and it’s all fallen upon poor Tim’s head. Judy and Martha were first forbidden the big house; Martha went up the day after the bible row to the big house, and all the young ladies flew at and abused her; and the poor girl would ha’ cried, if she could, but the tears din’t come to the broken-hearted cratur. And then the cow was pounded every hour in the day, and the childer frighted and threatened; and at lasht, down comes the agent and asks Tim for what he hasn’t. And he driv off our heifer, your reverence, and we’re to be turned out to the ditch; and all our bits o’ things, the remains of our ould days o’ comfort are to be canted immadiately … ‘There’s more like me in the country persecuted, and all for some trifle o’ the kind! And I know what they’ll do is to unite and ruin the country, by burning and slaying and massacreeing every new tenant that dares to step into their shoes. But I’m a pacable man, and the women dependent on me, and what to do in the wide world this blessed day, I don’t know.’⁵⁰

This is one of the few realistic (if fictional) accounts of the ‘priestly intimidation’ highlighted in the evangelical press, and of corresponding charges from outraged Catholics that landowners and employers were using economic pressure to force parents into sending children to the Bible schools. If it accurately represents the end product of the ‘improved manners’ of the gentry, it is not difficult to see why the bitterness between landlord and tenant intensified. To the evangelical mind, the source of the problem was the interference of the Catholic clergy, and little sympathy was wasted on the ill-fated peasant caught between the economic power of the landlord and the social and cultural demands of his religion.

Evidence that landlords were in fact pressuring Catholic tenants to attend schools in which the reading of the Protestant Bible was obligatory surfaced on several occasions. In June 1824 Fr James Mulcahy of Castletownroche in County Cork reported that twenty-three labourers and servants had been dismissed by Lord Ennismore because they would not send their children to a school run by the KPS on his estate. Some months later, the Dublin Evening Post alleged that Lord Ennismore, along with Lords Carbery, Lorton and Roden, were known to be involved in proselytism of this kind.⁵¹ In October 1827 another priest in Bray, County Wicklow, reported to Archbishop Murray that some thirty or forty families on the estate of the earl of Rathdrum were threatened with eviction the following spring if they did not send their children to the local Protestant school.⁵²

A recurring theme in the evangelical propaganda of the 1820s was the spirit of enquiry allegedly developing among the peasantry as a result of exposure to itinerant preachers and Bible schools. After centuries of bondage to Rome, Irish Catholics were depicted as having finally awakened to the source of their misery; they were said to be ready and eager to dismiss the authority of the priests and to absorb the true word of God as contained in the Bible. It is a measure of the popularity of the movement and of the effectiveness of its propaganda that this belief was widely accepted. Occasionally, a sober voice commented on the true state of the Catholic Church in Ireland, but even a candid acknowledgment of its strength was unlikely to curtail the evangelicals’ enthusiasm and served, if anything, to strengthen their sense of purpose and commitment. In 1817 an itinerant Baptist preacher working in the southern counties made the following admission:

Some people say popery is on the decline in this nation, but if I must give you my candid opinion on that subject, I think to the contrary. Let anyone travel as much as I have done, and see the preparations they are making to establish their interest—the number of priests and friars they are educating, the monasteries and superb chapels they are building in cities, towns, and villages all through this country—you would not imagine popery was losing power here; but especially if you knew the dreadful and despotic influence the priests have over the bodies and souls of the poor people, you would be more convinced of the reality of my idea.⁵³

Contrary to what the propagandists liked to claim, the intensification of the evangelical crusade in the early 1820s had the effect of strengthening the authority of the priests. A further dimension of sectarian awareness was forced upon Catholics who were exposed both verbally and in print to the arguments between the reformed faith and Rome. The exclamation of the peasant child who led the Rev. Caesar Otway to the summit of Croagh Patrick—‘God help the poor heretics, they have no religion at all, at all!’⁵⁴—provides one glimpse of the sectarian division embedded in the popular consciousness. It would be fatuous to suggest that the Irish peasantry were at any previous time oblivious to the religious differences that set them apart from their Protestant neighbours. Yet there is much contemporary evidence in literature and journalism to suggest that the 1820s and 1830s were years in which Irish Catholicism at the popular level assumed the jealous, exclusive and self-righteous tone that was to characterize it for the remainder of the century and beyond. Undoubtedly, the vigilance of the priests and the repeated denunciations of many aspects of the reformed faith, especially the Protestant Bible, accounted for this tightening of Catholic ranks. The fictitious conflict between Fr McDowd and Miss Jemima may again be employed to illustrate what took place in communities where the evangelical spirit was abroad:

Father McDowd was not a shepherd that could rest ignorant or patient at these inroads upon his flock. He paid daily visits to the Byrnes and to all the cottiers who dwelt around; and he zealously instilled antidotes stronger than the poison that he sought to counteract. Except for the purpose of opposing Miss Lowrie’s endeavours at proselytism, the good father would not have thought it necessary to instruct his young flock as to the diabolical condition of all who went to church [i.e. the Church of Ireland]. But he was now under the necessity of depicting them in the most fearful and abominable light to his little flock, and his teaching was all the more powerful, independent of parental example, for the lessons of Father McDowd were imaginative, full of impressive horrors, miracles, and divine interpositions; to which Miss Lowrie had nothing to oppose but very naked common sense, stupid morality, the pragmatic maxims of religion, which the young and the ignorant are incapable of comprehending or reverencing. The consequence was not only that Miss Jemima failed utterly in spreading of natural religion through the rising generation around her, but that her ill-imagined endeavours had the effect of causing the blackest bigotry to be instilled into the youthful poor, joined necessarily with a detestation of herself, her family, and all her persuasion.⁵⁵

This account stands in sharp contrast to the euphoric reports of Catholics deserting their traditional allegiance to the priests for the blessings of true religion, which became a standard feature of evangelical propaganda. Within the wider context of denominational relations, it is also closer in spirit to the actual consequences of the evangelical mission. In a letter to Lord Lansdowne complaining of the treatment of tenants on the estate of the earl of Rathdrum, Archbishop Murray accurately acknowledged the effects of proselytism when backed up by the economic clout of the landlord class:

Can peace or happiness be expected to continue when such occurrences take place? We too look to the present government with the most confident hope that it will not identify with the authors of these proceedings and by the grant of funds which can be turned into such vexatious purposes. We want much the means of education. We would receive them from the government with great gratitude, but we cannot accept them if accompanied by any inroad on our religious principles, which we hold dearer than education or than life itself.⁵⁶

CONVERSIONS AND CONTROVERSY: KINGSCOURT AND ASKEATON

Between 1822 and 1827 the two areas of the country that experienced the most successful attempts at Reformation were Kingscourt, County Cavan, and Askeaton, County Limerick. For many years Kingscourt was the prototypical example of the Reformation movement in operation at the local level. With its moral-agency system (a new departure in estate management in which a ‘moral agent’ supervised the lives of the tenantry in accordance with the landlord’s demands) and its network of teachers supplied by the Irish Society, it rapidly became a missionary centre for the whole of south-east Ulster, until what was known as the Kingscourt District embraced the counties of Cavan, Louth, Meath, Monaghan and Tyrone.⁵⁷ The term ‘Second Reformation’ was at first used almost exclusively in connection with the Kingscourt District, but it shortly came to be used in connection with the general evangelical mission to the Catholic population.

The work begun on the estate of Lord Farnham at Kingscourt in 1821–2 was part of the general drive to intensify the mission to the Catholic population that had gathered force with the founding of the Irish Society and the Scripture Readers’ Society in 1818 and 1822 respectively. The 2^nd Baron Farnham, John James Maxwell (1760–1823), who occupied the seat when the experiment was begun, had been among those who had supported the ultra-Protestant cause since the 1790s. His only surviving child, a daughter, Lady Harriet, was married to Denis Daly of Galway, who had died in 1791. Although Daly had been known as a liberal, his son, the Rev. Robert Daly, was an ultra-conservative supporter of the Union and a committed advocate of the new spirit of reform generated by the evangelical movement.⁵⁸ Following his appointment as rector of Powerscourt in 1814, Robert Daly became an intimate member of the Roden–Powerscourt evangelical circle, and his missionary inclinations were given full freedom in this hospitable environment. Along with Henry Monck Mason he had become a firm supporter of the Bible-in-Irish movement and was a founding member of the Irish Society. The 5^th Baron Farnham, John Maxwell (1767–1838), under whose stewardship Kingscourt became the mecca of the Reformation movement, was married to the former Lady Lucy Annesley of the Gosford family of Armagh, who was also a fervent supporter of the cause. There was no offspring from this union but the evangelical link was sustained by a nephew, Henry Maxwell, who succeeded to the title in 1838 and was married to Lord Roden’s sister-in-law.

The movement to convert the Catholic tenants on the Kingscourt estate began in 1822, when the Rev. Winning, a Presbyterian minister connected with the Farnham household, invited the Irish Society to provide teachers for the schools that were to be established with Lord Farnham’s financial support.⁵⁹ The committee furnished nine teachers at the outset, but this number was greatly increased as the district became the main base for the Society’s activities. Winning had apparently begun this work of his own volition and had set up three or four schools with the assistance of an inspector, Thomas Russell, and two circulating masters. Once the Irish Society became involved, the number of schools and scholars rose dramatically. Between 1822 and 1825, 83 schools were opened and 3090 students, including 2110 adults, were enrolled. The most spectacular increase occurred in the latter part of 1825, as the following table indicates:

SCHOOLS ON THE KINGSCOURT ESTATE, 1822–5⁶⁰

Precisely why such a big increase took place between May and November 1825 is not clear. Given the bias of evangelical propaganda, which was constantly under fire from the Catholic and liberal Protestant press for fraudulence, it seems reasonable to treat these figures with caution. It must also be remembered that a certain percentage of those attending the schools would have been Protestant. The only safe conclusion is that after the onslaught of the Catholic clergy against the Reformation movement in 1824, the evangelicals greatly increased their campaign, and the Kingscourt area was the focus of their strongest efforts in this regard.

The prominence of the Kingscourt District as a centre of the new Reformation was further heightened in 1826 with the appointment of a moral agent, William Krause. This office, in contrast to that of the regular agent who oversaw the granting of leases and the collection of rent, had no equivalent in Britain. It entailed the supervision of the moral welfare of the tenantry, with particular emphasis on school attendance, and to a lesser extent on the provision of medical services and the general improvement of living conditions. The moral-agency system spread across the great estates of south Ulster in the 1820s and nothing better reflected the ideological ambitions of these landlords.⁶¹

The man appointed as Lord Farnham’s moral agent, William Krause, was the very model of a self-conscious British patriot who took up the cause of Protestantism and the Union when other outlets for his nationalistic aggression closed off.⁶² A native of the West Indies, Krause had seen active service in the Napoleonic Wars. Following a visit to Ireland in 1822 he had a near-fatal illness, as a result of which, in the words of his biographer, ‘his heart was turned from sin and the world to the Lord’. The change was also consonant with his political sympathies. By his own admission he had been born a ‘lover of aristocracy’, with a ‘sovereign contempt for the mob, misnamed the people’.⁶³ The political claims of the people he described as ‘low-born Irish papists’ were the particular object of this contempt:

There are no people that could be more quickly tamed than the Irish papists. The fact is, a real and thorough papist is trained up a slave; his system of religion inculcates this, and the effects of their moral bondage are seen in the character of their crimes.⁶⁴

His enthusiasm for his new vocation as the moral agent of Lord Farnham may be inferred from his stated preference for cholera over ‘popery’ as the lesser of the two evils. He was eventually ordained a minister of the Church of Ireland and ended his days, in what had by then become a tradition, as an incumbent of the Bethesda Chapel between 1840 and 1852.

The fruits of the combined industry of Krause, Winning, the Farnham household and the Irish Society began to appear around Kingscourt in the latter part of 1826, when reports of converts were broadcast in the ultra-Protestant evangelical press. In a two-month period alone, 300 Catholics were said to have made public recantations of their faith in Cavan town. The evangelicals claimed that this remarkable occurrence was the result of the curiosity aroused by the Bible War of 1824, but it was really the impact of the general election of 1826 that provided the context for the extraordinary upsurge in conversions that caught the imagination of the country. The decision of the Catholic Association to back liberal Protestant supporters of Emancipation in this election resulted in the so called ‘revolt of the forty-shilling freeholders’, which convincingly illustrated that the landlords’ hold on electoral politics could be broken by discipline and organization in the Catholic ranks. In four constituencies a candidate backed by the Catholic Association had succeeded in defeating an anti-Emancipationist contender, and in a fifth the conservative incumbent held on to his seat by a mere five votes. The only county in which the ultra-Protestant camp managed to hold its ground was Cavan, where the Farnham interest was strong enough to withstand the challenge launched by Robert Southwell, the candidate backed by the Catholic Association.⁶⁵ To promoters of the Reformation movement, the defeat of Southwell appeared as providential approval for the work in which they were engaged. As adherents of a millenarian interpretation of worldly events, Lord Farnham, along with Robert Winning and William Krause, was now ready to believe that Cavan was indeed favoured by divine providence to take the lead in a movement that would deliver the country from the advancing forces of the Antichrist.

From Cavan the movement spread to other parts of the country where evangelical missionaries had been active and before long it began to be broadcast that the entire country was about to be embraced by the spirit of a wildfire revival. Krause in particular was emphatic on this point and spoke in glowing terms of the thirst for knowledge currently sweeping the country and of the hundreds of Catholics in County Cavan ‘who want only protection and the countenance of the gentry to induce them to come forward’.⁶⁶

In January 1827 Lord Farnham launched the Cavan Association for Promoting the ‘Second Reformation’ in Ireland. His inaugural address contained a resounding account of the successes in his own district and a lengthy analysis of how the peace and security of the country were dependent on the Reformation movement. Underpinning his attachment to this belief was the old argument of Bishop Woodward, by now an article of faith among conservative aristocrats, that the political Emancipation of Catholics would lead to the collapse of the Established Church, the destruction of the Protestant interest in Ireland and the eventual separation of the two islands. Like Archbishop Magee’s famous sermon of 1822, Lord Farnham’s address prompted Bishop Doyle once again to take up his pen to defend the rights of the Catholic population. Declining to indulge in religious controversy, Doyle defended Emancipation on the grounds of its sheer inevitability and discounted Farnham’s assertion that the political integrity of the United Kingdom would be greatly endangered as a result of its passage. He questioned the peer as to why, if he was so fearful about Emancipation, he entertained no anxiety whatever of the consequences, should it be indefinitely withheld. Agreeing with Lord Farnham’s belief that the Church establishment must fall sooner or later, Doyle warned that the evangelical campaign against the Catholic religion would be fruitless: ‘Fruitless, I mean, of such conversions as you contemplate, but probably fruitful in results far and widely different from those which you would have the public to believe you to expect.’⁶⁷ Doyle was eventually obliged to enquire into the truth of reports that hundreds of people were being converted in the Cavan area. In so doing, he was at least acknowledging that the existence of converts was not wholly a figment of the imagination of evangelical propagandists.

Lord Farnham’s proclamation of the successes of the evangelicals in his native county drew an extraordinary amount of attention to the Reformation movement not only in Cavan but throughout the country generally and also in Britain. This was due in large measure to the effectiveness of the evangelical propaganda machine, which deluged regional and national newspapers with accounts of the self-sacrificing work of dedicated missionaries and the harvest of souls they were reaping. In Cavan town weekly bulletins of the latest number of converts were posted in public places and carried through the streets on placards by hired persons.

Three months after Lord Farnham’s famous inauguration speech, Bishop Jebb of Limerick, whose opinions on the ascendancy of evangelical influence had always fluctuated between admiration for their commitment and dedication and fear of what their enthusiasm implied for denominational relations, candidly admitted to a correspondent in England that the news from Cavan had changed his mind:

Within these few weeks my opinion has undergone a considerable change. I have learned from various trustworthy quarters that in almost every part of Ireland inquiry and thirst for knowledge, and even in some instances a degree of religious anxiety, are gaining ground among the Roman Catholics. Numbers, I am well informed, in neighbourhoods predominantly popish, are thinking and inquiring and reading the scriptures, who have not as yet proposed to conform: and what is especially remarkable, in the county of Tipperary several of the priests wish to place the scriptures in the hands of their people and are still withheld from doing so only by the injunctions of their superiors. From the papers you can learn what is going on in Dublin as well as in Cavan; you see also weekly notices of conversions in all parts of the country. So far as I can learn, the clergy of the diocese of Ferns are acting very systematically to produce this effect; several of the parochial clergy, with the sanction and under the guidance of the bishop, preach controversial sermons; they have divided among themselves the prominent subjects in debate and preach rotationally in each other’s pulpits, thus giving each congregation a view of the whole controversy.⁶⁸

Bishop Jebb was not alone in his belief that 1827 was the annus mirabilis of the Protestant Reformation in Ireland. Like Lord Farnham, his fears had been fuelled by recent political events. The victory of the Emancipationist candidates in the 1826 election had shown what discipline and organization in the Catholic ranks might achieve, and it pointed ominously to the political sophistication of O’Connell and his supporters. Catholic hopes were further heightened, and the Emancipation debate given more scope than ever, when Canning succeeded Lord Liverpool as prime minister in 1827. The hubbub in press and parliament over the pros and cons of Emancipation ensured a hospitable reception among ultra-Protestants for the harbingers of Reformation. Robert Daly, writing as ‘Senex’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, kept readers informed of the horrors that lay in store for the kingdom, and for the Protestants of Ireland in particular, if Catholics were granted full political freedom.⁶⁹

In May 1827 the writer of a long article on the Catholic question strongly defended the benefits, temporal as well as spiritual, that a Reformation would generate among the benighted inhabitants of Ireland:

If its people were Protestants, it would be free from its present divisions and distractions; the Catholic question, which is now used as an instrument for filling it with almost every kind of evil and for placing its eternal peace and the peace between it and Britain in peril, would be unknown. If its people were Protestants, they would be free from spiritual tyranny; they would be accessible to instruction and civilization; the subject would not be arrayed against the ruler, and the tenant against the landlord; neighbour would not be seeking the ruin of neighbour; society would be placed under these bonds, feelings, and regulations without which it can never know prosperity.⁷⁰

This essay provides a succinct and telling revelation of the overlap between religion and politics that characterized the evangelical mentality. To this way of thinking there was only one solution to the country’s problems, this being the elimination of the Catholic question through the elimination of the Catholic religion. The main purpose of the article was to respond to a speech recently made in parliament in which the attorney general for Ireland, William Conyngham Plunket, had attacked the evangelical crusade, referring to it as ‘the merest chimera that ever bewildered the mind of man’.⁷¹

Neither the warnings of Doyle nor the criticism of Plunket, however, were likely to deflect anti-Emancipationists on both sides of the Irish Sea from believing what they wished about the prospects of the ‘Second Reformation’ in Ireland. What this belief, or delusion, as some would have it, amounted to was the inevitability of the triumph of the Protestant religion now that the priests had been openly challenged on the dogmas and despotic tendencies of the Catholic Church, and scriptural education made universally available. Given the successes of the evangelicals in education and controversial preaching, it seemed entirely logical that substantial numbers would renounce the errors of popery, and that the process, once begun, would accelerate rapidly. When Lord Farnham announced the conversion of seven or eight hundred Catholics in his own district, it was interpreted as a sign of divine intervention. The evangelicals went through 1826 on a wave of popularity, with approval for their work coming from many different quarters. This was sufficient to propel Bishop Doyle into organizing defensive action on behalf of the Catholics. Predictably, his first concern was to investigate the truth behind the Cavan conversions.

The man to whom he entrusted the task of reporting on events in Cavan was George Ensor, a Protestant lawyer of impeccable liberal views and a strong supporter of Catholic Emancipation. Ensor published a total of seven letters on the Cavan conversions and the Reformation movement generally. The first of these appeared in February 1827, and the remaining six were published in rapid succession between November 1827 and February 1828. Later in 1828 they were published in collected form by Richard Coyne of Capel Street, Dublin, under the title Letters Showing the Inutility and Exhibiting the Absurdity of What Is Rather Fantastically Termed ‘The New Reformation’. Ensor’s approach to his subject may be inferred from the title. Like his English contemporaries William Cobbett and the Rev. Sydney Smith, his support for the Catholic cause had more to do with his detestation for all that evangelicalism represented rather than an attachment to or appreciation of the doctrines of the Catholic faith. As a Protestant, he could afford to indulge in biting sarcasm without fear of being labelled a bigot, and as a liberal, he was entirely dismissive of the commitment to evangelizing the heathens abroad and the Jews and Catholics at home while society in Britain was rife with inequality and crime. Of the foreign missionary agencies, he wrote, ‘I wonder that they do not send out a mission with Franklin to the Pole, for the Quarterly Review, No. 68, felicitates its readers on Parry’s sailors learning their catechism at the Arctic Circle.’⁷² But his wrath was reserved for the Irish evangelicals, ‘who hate them [the Catholics] and their kindred, and Ireland’s self, except what they can wring from its misery’.⁷³ Doyle had chosen his rapporteur well, it would appear.

In the most damaging of the charges levelled in the New Reformation letters, Ensor accused the Cavan evangelists of exploiting the economic destitution of the peasantry to attract converts. That conversions occurred was not denied. What was strongly implied, however, was that a combination of economic hardship and political disappointment in 1826–7 had left the Catholic peasantry of Cavan in a state of extreme vulnerability. Although he asserted that ‘a season of great distress, want of food, and want of employment prepared the Cavan conversions’, Ensor did not dwell on the precise causes of the economic crisis.⁷⁴ Since the country did not experience famine, even on a regional or local basis, during this period, the economic distress to which Ensor alluded can most likely be attributed to the decline of handloom weaving associated with the cotton and linen industries. The prominence of weaving in Cavan had made it one of the most prosperous and densely populated of Irish counties by the end of the eighteenth century. All this was to change, however, when mechanization turned handloom weaving into an obsolete trade. The earnings of the once-prosperous weavers went into an irreversible decline, bringing widespread immiseration in its wake. Between 1820 and 1835, the income of cotton weavers declined by more than 50 per cent, while the cost of food and housing remained steady.⁷⁵

Relief was afforded to displaced artisans only through emigration and eventually through absorption into the factory system. Until the transition was made, suffering and deprivation were inevitable. A visitor to Kingscourt in 1836 gave the following account of the conditions of the inhabitants:

In several hovels we found widows in extreme want. Naked mud holes, rather than rooms, with half a rood of ground attached, pay 24s., 28s. and even 30s. per annum rent. One man, with an asthma, and several women told us they lived ‘by begging in the name of God’. The houses of labourers were scarcely better. In one cabin a youth, almost grown up, said that his father was gone to seek work but had been long without it and that he himself could only get work at harvest for 4d. a day. In this wretched place, blackened with smoke, dark, damp, and dirty, without even the corner for the pig, the spade resting idly against the wall, and a little heap of very bad turf, with a broken loom, the only property besides, did the father and his five children sleep on one bedstead (if the rude collection of stakes nailed to each other deserve that name) without mattrass [sic], without clothing, nay, even without straw. In another cabin we found a woman spinning, who said she could earn by her wheel about 1½ d. in the day, which was confirmed by a lady of Kingscourt with whom we were walking, who further said that she could get a number of women to work for her at that rate.⁷⁶

Along with economic deprivation, Ensor had listed ‘the Malthusian doctrines of clearing estates of redundant population in order to increase surplus produce’ as having contributed to the poverty of Cavan Catholics. It is certainly not difficult to appreciate how tenants faced with eviction on top of all their other miseries might agree to attend Bible schools or even to change their religion so as to preserve their slender subsistence. The final blow to Catholic solidarity in Cavan, in Ensor’s opinion, was the failure of the forty-shilling freeholders to unite in support of an Emancipationist candidate in the 1826 election: ‘When the people of Cavan failed as electors, they were prepared to take another step downwards.’⁷⁷ Whatever number of them converted to Protestantism in 1826–7—‘this famishing, land-clearing, expatriating, vindictive Protestant year’, as Ensor called it—they allegedly returned to their traditional faith once the threat to their subsistence was removed. Ensor compared their experience to that of birds ‘which visit milder climates at intervals, but their coming is proof of a great severity in their native country, and who return when the iron days are passed and the sun cheers them home’.⁷⁸

Despite Ensor’s repeated assertions that the Cavan converts were driven by hunger and deprivation to become Protestants, and that they had returned to the Catholic fold when the crisis receded, at no point did he refer to the number of people involved. In the metropolitan parish of Armagh he learned of six Catholics who had converted, and in a Tyrone parish he did not name, a further two.⁷⁹ But the fate of the ‘hundreds of converts’ in the Kingscourt area was left unspecified, except for a general comment on their eventual return to the Catholic faith. In January 1828 the British Critic, in a leading article entitled ‘The Irish Reformation’, claimed that by September of the previous year the total number of converts for the country as a whole had reached 2357, and that more than half of these resided in the Kingscourt District.⁸⁰ In view of the social ostracism that usually accompanied a change of faith, it would have been unusual if that many people enjoyed the direct protection of the landlord and the authorities. In the 1830s such protection was frequently afforded in ‘colonies’ in which the converts lived, together with clergymen and teachers, but there is no evidence that such a settlement was ever planned in Kingscourt. What we do know is that, whatever the number of converts, the entire area was in the throes of sectarian conflict throughout the 1830s.⁸¹ Popular animosity was repeatedly vented against converts and especially against the Bible readers and teachers employed by the Irish Society. According to the Society’s annual report for 1833, the hatred aroused by its schoolmasters and students was a consequence of their being the only Catholics locally who were not involved in illegal associations: ‘of the thirty or forty families connected with the enterprise, none are ribbonmen, and several have had a narrow escape from being murdered’.⁸² Baptist Wriothesley Noel encountered several people who had renounced Catholicism and who were forced as a result to move to distant parishes. One woman told how she had been recognized at a fair by her former neighbours, ‘who damned her soul, declared her a disgrace to her church, and called out in the crowded street, “turn coat, turn coat”’.⁸³

Teachers and readers were continually beaten and persecuted, and on occasion murdered. In July 1830, when a man named Moore was arraigned for having fired shots at some of the Irish Society’s masters, the Rev. Winning impressed upon Lord Farnham the importance of his attendance at the trial:

The Committee think—and think justly—that the interests of their schools in that district are intimately concerned with the issues of this trial. The hostility of the priesthood is incessant against these schools— the characters of the teachers are vilified—threats, intimidation, and every hostility are resorted to. Three of our men have already been murdered— and if Moore now evades justice, their lives will be greatly exposed.⁸⁴

Despite the terrible risks connected with working for the Irish Society, the Rev. Noel was proud to note in 1836 that men persisted in offering themselves for training. The Rev. Winning had informed him that if the Irish Society were to give permission, 500 new teachers could immediately be trained and put to work. Noel drew no connection between this remarkable assertion and the dire poverty that he had witnessed in the area. At a time when the wages of occasional workers averaged 10d. a day in summer and 6d. in winter, when many labourers could hardly obtain two days’ work in the week, and when by the author’s own admission many of the inhabitants were on the verge of starvation, the average wage of 6s. a week paid to the teachers of the Irish Society must have seemed handsome indeed.⁸⁵

The most thorough account of the Cavan conversions appeared in the British Critic in January 1828, in a seminal article whose author was wholly familiar with the impulses and objectives of the movement. The article shows what the reading public in England was learning about the current state of religious affairs in Ireland. Rather than being the work of dedicated clergymen labouring to spread the light among the enslaved masses, the Irish ‘Second Reformation’ was represented as a reaction by lay Catholics against the excesses and abuses of their own Church. Bible and school societies and evangelical landlords and clergymen were portrayed as merely responding to rather than initiating the development. Such an interpretation drew the Irish experience into line with that of northern Europe in the sixteenth century, and this was precisely the intention.⁸⁶

Cavan, needless to say, was presented as the fountainhead of the revival, though this was attributed not to the zeal of the Farnham family, but to its proximity to County Fermanagh, ‘the very gangway of Irish superstition’.⁸⁷ This was of course a reference to the road leading to Lough Derg, the famous penitential shrine in the southern part of County Donegal. The Catholic clergy of Cavan, allegedly envious of the profits pouring into Lough Derg, had set up a place of pilgrimage in their own county at Coronea. Popular opposition to this venture was said to have been the beginning of the Reformation in Ireland. Within a short period entire communities went over to the reformed faith and the light was beginning to spread even further afield: ‘The whole country seemed to have waited only to receive a signal from some peculiarly favoured district, that it might be encouraged to express its general impatience.’⁸⁸

Just as evangelicals had once seen the hand of God at work in the country’s deliverance from the horrors of the French Revolution and Napoleon, so they now perceived the same influence operating to save them from the threat implicit in the passage of Catholic Emancipation. That zealous clergymen and landlords were on hand to assist the Reformation was taken as further evidence of divine sanction. To stop the Reformation at this point, said Lord Farnham’s cousin Leslie Foster in the House of Commons, would be like stopping the falls of Niagara.⁸⁹ Thus was the English public made aware of what they might expect in Ireland.

Outside of the Kingscourt District the greatest number of conversions during the heyday of the ‘Second Reformation’ in 1825–7 was recorded in Askeaton, County Limerick. They were investigated by Bishop Jebb, then head of the diocese in which they took place, in response to an enquiry from a colleague in England, the Tory MP Sir Robert H. Inglis. The evidence forwarded by Jebb, in addition to that contained in his private correspondence, suggests that the Askeaton conversions were a much more complex affair than those at Kingscourt, involving genuine popular anti-clericalism on the part of those who converted, in addition to the usual presence of evangelical activity by a local Protestant clergyman.

The person mainly responsible for planting the evangelical standard in Askeaton was one Rev. Daniel Murray, a Church of Ireland clergyman who had been appointed vicar of Askeaton in the summer of 1824. We know little about his background or education, but his dedication to parochial work, especially to education, marked him as one of the body of ‘superior young divines’ whom Bishop Jebb rejoiced to see replacing the apathetic older generation of clergymen, not only in Limerick but throughout the country.⁹⁰ Having been entrusted with a sum of £200 a year for charitable purposes, the vicar and his wife established schools in the area. Three were set up altogether, one under the patronage of the KPS and the other two under their own direction but with Catholic masters so as ‘to meet the prejudices of the people’. The scheme was violently opposed by the local priest, Fr Fitzgerald, who ordered parents to withdraw their children from the schools. This they refused to do, and gradually they began to register their opposition to the priest’s directive by adopting the Protestant faith. According to Jebb, two families withdrew in June 1825, and they were followed during the next eighteen months by about 170 adults and 300 adolescents and children.⁹¹

The most remarkable feature of the Askeaton conversions was the apparent absence of the type of coordinated activity between landlords and evangelical agencies that characterized other areas of the country where the Reformation movement took root. Although the Rev. Murray was a member of the HBS and the CMS, he received no assistance from external sources. According to Jebb, he preferred it that way. When help was offered by the Methodists and by representatives of other evangelical organizations it was politely declined. Murray was said to be on the best of terms with his Catholic parishioners, a fact that his diocesan superior attributed to his unwillingness to engage in sectarian controversy and his disavowal of itinerant preaching and other forms of evangelical activity likely to arouse the hatred of Catholics. Bishop Jebb was of the opinion that it was this attitude that endeared him to the local people and had led to their departure from the Catholic Church.⁹²

The motives of the Askeaton converts are difficult to determine. In view of the denominational rivalry and religious controversy that had been openly raging since 1822, and considering that Catholic popular opinion held that Protestants were not only usurpers but heretics to boot, the question arises as to why a relatively large group of people should have decided to join the enemy camp at this time. Bishop Jebb’s assertion that they were moved by the benign influence of the Rev. Murray, behind whose work lay the hand of God, seems less than convincing. But his allusions to the dispute between the local parish priest and Catholic parents who wished to avail of education for their children points to a more realistic explanation.

Although the relationship between priests and people was frequently misrepresented by the propagandists of the ‘Second Reformation’ in the 1820s and ’30s, tension between the two was not entirely illusory. Since the middle of the eighteenth century popular hostility to the demands of the Catholic clergy had surfaced on numerous occasions, though it had noticeably diminished by the 1820s. There were two areas in particular in which priests were likely to fall afoul of their parishioners: the exaction of fees for services such as weddings and baptisms, and the opposition to agrarian secret societies.⁹³ Since agrarian combination was generally a response to economic deprivation, a condition that might be traced in part to the exactions of the clergy, it was not uncommon to find these two grievances voiced at the same time. During the Rockite disturbances of 1821–4, the western part of County Limerick, including Askeaton, was one of the most disturbed areas in the whole country. Agrarian outrages were repeatedly denounced from the altars of Catholic chapels, and the clergy from the bishop downwards did their utmost to dissuade the popular classes from violence.

The interest of the Limerick clergy in the preservation of public order was evidently stronger than that of their colleagues in most areas affected by disturbances. Why this should have been so is not clear, but contemporary opinion suggests that the authorities and the clergy, Protestant and Catholic alike, suspected that there was a more sophisticated revolutionary process at work behind the disturbances, which usually tended to spread like wildfire from county to county and to abate just as quickly on the passage of reform or the improvement in the economy. As early as 1816, John Jebb confided to the archbishop of Cashel that the most disturbed parts of County Limerick were also the most prosperous ones, and that tithes formed no part whatever of the popular grievances in these areas: ‘In many instances, indeed, tithes were but too fatally put forward … as a stalking horse; and the people were industriously drilled on that subject by persons who kept themselves out of view, and who had other, and infinitely more desperate objects to carry.’⁹⁴ This tone was still current in 1822. A correspondent of the Dublin Evening Post noted that the anti-tithe movement in Limerick was burning less brightly than in the neighbouring counties of Cork and Tipperary, but interpreted the quietude in ominous terms: ‘there is a silent fermentation in that county, an apparent quietness of purpose maturing, which threatens this devoted district with the most direful calamities’. As further evidence, he pointed to the singular change that had occurred in the manners and habits of the common people, who appeared to have departed from their usual indulgence in drinking and fighting at fairs.⁹⁵

One measure of the popular hostility encountered by the Catholic clergy in their strivings to preserve the peace in County Limerick was the physical violence they had to endure. On two occasions priests were attacked for preaching against outrages; in one of these cases the priest was actually killed on the altar of his chapel. Another priest, Fr John Mulqueen, was shot to death in 1819, though his assailants were said to have been unaware of his identity.⁹⁶ Such incidents were almost unique to County Limerick at this time, a fact that suggests that the clergy of this county were intensely committed to the maintenance of law and order, and that anti-clericalism was still running strong there when it appears to have abated elsewhere. Conversely, the Church of Ireland clergy were considered to be well regarded in County Limerick, though the grounds for this claim are somewhat dubious. Certainly, the renown of Bishop Jebb as the most fair-minded and conciliatory prelate of the Church of Ireland did much to enhance denominational relations.

The most famous expression of such goodwill occurred in the parish of Murroe on 16 December 1821, when Jebb was still archdeacon of Emly. During a particularly severe outbreak of disturbances the parish had been kept peaceful ‘by the good disposition of the people and the indefatigable exertions of the parish priest’, but the great fear was the incursion of ‘emissaries from disturbed parts’. According to Jebb’s account, the farmers and the lower classes were well pleased with the protection afforded them by the police and the military, and promised to turn in any emissaries who appeared among them. When they asked Jebb how they might be of further service in keeping the peace, he replied that he would like to be granted leave to preach to the congregation after Mass on Sunday. This he did with the support of his Catholic counterpart, Fr O’Brien Costelloe. The response of the congregation was overwhelming.

Nothing could exceed their attention and the expression on their countenances was actually delightful … some shed tears. When called upon, if they approved the resolutions to hold up their right hands, they held them up to a man. Even the children imitated the gesture.⁹⁷

In political terms, and especially on the subject of Catholic Emancipation, Jebb was no liberal. Yet his sympathy for the Catholic poor and his willingness to treat their clerical superiors respectfully and diplomatically won him the abiding respect of middle-class Catholics, who regarded him with some justification as the Protestant equivalent of Bishop Doyle. The comparison is reasonably valid when his mildness and charity are compared with the fury of Archbishop Magee. But whether his appointment as bishop of Limerick in 1823 did anything to lessen popular sectarianism in the county is impossible to determine. The most that can safely be said is that the Catholics of Limerick had some reason for thinking well of the Protestant clergy and bishop at the same time that they were at odds with some of their own priests.

The district around Askeaton was a traditional Protestant stronghold, though it is most unlikely that this lent itself to good denominational relations. The Palatine settlers whose villages dotted the area had never been integrated into the local community and were a constant source of sectarian friction because of their ultra-Protestant sympathies and their eagerness to join the yeomanry and the militia, forces frequently used to put down rebellious Catholics.⁹⁸ According to the reporter from the British Critic, however, the Palatines had no influence, either positive or negative, on the Catholics who opted to join the Church of Ireland in 1825–6. The Oliver family, whose clerical offspring had introduced evangelical ideals to the district around the turn of the century, was not mentioned in any contemporary account as having been involved with the conversions. The social composition of the converts is unknown, but an interesting piece of evidence was provided by Bishop Jebb, who recalled that one of the most upright among them had formerly been a leader of a faction known as the ‘Four Year Olds’. This may indicate that the man in question had been involved in a conflict between labourers and cottiers on the one hand and graziers and strong farmers on the other. The latter group was closely aligned with and supported by the Catholic clergy, a fact that may have helped to push the landless element in the direction of Protestantism.

Askeaton was not the only area where a Catholic exodus occurred following a dispute of a social or religious nature within the Catholic body itself. The Crotty cousins of Parsonstown in King’s County, for example, were accompanied by over a thousand of their parishioners when they took leave of the Catholic Church in 1829.⁹⁹ Despite the large number of people involved, very little noise was made either by the Catholic clergy or the press on this occasion. The same was true of Askeaton. According to Bishop Jebb, the Askeaton converts were quietly received into the Church of Ireland after a lengthy period of instruction, during which the Rev. Murray assessed their motives and weeded out all whom he considered unsuitable.¹⁰⁰ Jebb’s letters contain no evidence that the converts were persecuted by their Catholic neighbours, a response that became almost axiomatic in other parts of the country where similar events took place. What eventually became of the converts is not known. After 1826 the Askeaton area remained relatively calm and did not develop into a missionary centre like Kingscourt or the colonies established on Achill Island and the Dingle peninsula in the early 1830s. When Baptist Wriothesley Noel toured the country in 1826 specifically to chart the progress of the Reformation, Askeaton was not on his itinerary, and it received no mention in the accounts of subsequent evangelical travellers. A remnant of the popular response to the conversions, however, was recorded in a popular ballad collected by Douglas Hyde in County Galway at the end of the nineteenth century:

Ye muses now come aid me in admonishing the pagans

The New Lights of Askeaton whose fate I do deplore

From innocence and reason they are led to condemnation

Their faith they have violated, the occasion of their woe

The mass they have forsaken, their source and renovation

To free them from damnation and Satan’s violent yoke

The means of their salvation at the great accounting table

When mountains shall be shaken and nations overthrown.¹⁰¹

CONVERSIONS AND SOCIAL CONFLICT

From 1825 onwards, the evangelical drive to win converts for the ‘Second Reformation’ added yet a further dimension of violence to life in Ireland. During the late 1820s and throughout the 1830s the Kingscourt District was rife with sectarian disturbances, as were parts of County Sligo, the diocese of Tuam, and the diocese of Kildare and Leighlin, where the evangelicals were also beginning to make inroads into Catholic ranks. Converts were denounced from Catholic altars and excommunicated if they persisted in their apostasy. More seriously, they were frequently attacked by their neighbours, refused goods when they went to purchase them, and often driven out of their homes altogether. Several cases were reported of Catholics who were murdered because of their involvement with the evangelical crusade, either as converts or schoolteachers. The protection of the local gentry was not sufficient to guard against such excesses.

Protection was nowhere more in evidence than on Lord Farnham’s Cavan estate, and yet this area was the scene of some of the greatest atrocities. Of the 900 or so teachers whom the Rev. Noel claimed had been employed in the Kingscourt area since the inception of the Reformation, many had allegedly been beaten and persecuted and a few had been killed. In one case the victim was a relative and tenant of the parish priest, who eventually evicted him because he had refused to quit his work as a reader of the scriptures in Irish; he was waylaid and murdered one evening while returning from Kingscourt with a parcel of books. Reports were also made to Noel about teachers who had their faces bloodied and their jaws broken. The Rev. Winning gave his own account of how schoolmasters employed by the Irish Society were driven out of rural areas and forced to live in the towns after their houses had been broken open and their property destroyed. He claimed to have seen schoolmasters ‘covered with wounds and bruises, their faces disfigured, their eyes closed, and one with his teeth knocked out’.¹⁰²

By far the most serious incident took place in 1829, when a body of armed Catholics descended on a Protestant village near Kingscourt in search of some individuals on whom they wished to exact vengeance. They were dispersed by gunfire, but when it was observed that the police and militia were assembling in the area, frightened local Catholics sought support from elsewhere and a body of 20,000 men reportedly surrounded Kingscourt. The town, which was predominantly Protestant, was kept in a virtual state of siege and the inhabitants were badly frightened. The besiegers were eventually repelled by the military, and several of the ringleaders were later hanged or transported.¹⁰³ This incident was probably the work of the Ribbon organization, which was said to be very strong in the area at this time. Sectarian motives were certainly to the forefront.

One of the instigators of the attack was said to have been the local Catholic curate, a Fr Nolan, who was obliged to leave the area as a result. By immersing himself in scriptural studies, the better to improve his talents as a controversialist, Nolan apparently saw the light and decided to convert to Protestantism and carry the banner of the ‘Second Reformation’. In so doing, he joined a small band of convert priests who drew on themselves the everlasting venom of their erstwhile clerical colleagues. Shortly after Nolan conformed, he was appointed a minister of the Church of Ireland in Athboy, County Meath, which was considered part of the Kingscourt District. He quickly made a name for himself as a controversial speaker and conducted preaching tours around the country. Two pamphlets explaining his change of religious allegiance—Nolan’s Reasons for Leaving the Church of Rome and A Second Pamphlet—each went through five editions in the 1830s.¹⁰⁴

Nolan’s case was exceptional, however. Most of the Catholic priests in the area joined forces in condemning the Reformation movement. From the altars on Sunday they preached against the use of the Bible, branding it (so their critics claimed) ‘the black book’ or the work of the devil. Efforts were mounted to keep Catholic children away from the Bible schools and to persuade adults to turn in bibles, tracts and controversial literature that had been distributed gratuitously. In 1839 a supporter of the Irish Society named Richard Benson of Fatham, near Kingscourt, informed the Dublin headquarters of the Irish Society that its teachers were being denounced from Catholic altars and were in constant fear of their lives. The priests of the area were said to be circulating pamphlets calculated to mobilize their followers against the designs of the Irish Society. Benson described the contents of one of these pamphlets:

The system of Irish teaching is represented as having been introduced into this county by three heretic lords—Roden, Wicklow, and Farnham—that it first took root in Kingscourt, sprang up, and brought forth many branches there, and that within the last few years, some of its seeds had been blown over and had taken root in the Fatham woods, from whence it was the author’s determination to cast it out, and … he invites his fellow countrymen to collect all the bibles, testaments, and elementary books issued by the society into one pile on the top of Thangullian and there in the face of heaven to make one glorious bonfire of the whole.¹⁰⁵

This is a fair representation of the opposition encountered by the Reformation evangelists wherever they sought to ply their trade. And hostility was not always confined to denunciation from the altar. Many converts and preachers paid dearly in person for their zeal.¹⁰⁶

Outside of Cavan and the adjoining counties that made up the Kingscourt District, the most active evangelical missionaries and their equally energetic opponents were to be found in County Sligo. The main reason for this was that Sligo served as the centre of operations for the LHS. Besides the schools run by this organization, the Scripture Readers’ Society had about thirty workers employed in the area. By 1828 Sligo was not far behind Kingscourt in converts and controversy. In one seven-month period about 160 adults were received into the Established Church, and their dependents, who numbered about 200, were also expected to be raised as Protestants.¹⁰⁷ Some of the most blatant aggression against evangelical missionaries and their proselytes took place in the Sligo area.¹⁰⁸ In the parish of Ardagh, in an effort to prevent Catholic children from attending Bible schools, the local priest reputedly offered up a special prayer during Sunday Mass to the effect that if ‘any parent should not withdraw his child from the free schools, his horse and his cow, his foal and his calf, and any other living stock, with himself and his child, might be dead within the year’.¹⁰⁹

The investigator for the British Critic noted a marked difference in the attitudes of the Catholic clergy towards schools conducted under the sanction of the gentry and those under the direct management of one or another evangelical agency. What the priests were said to fear was the development of an attachment between the gentry and the peasantry that would interfere with their own authority.¹¹⁰ On these grounds, it was said, they were not nearly so condemnatory of schools run by the Irish Society, where classes were conducted in Irish, thereby preventing any involvement by the gentry, who were ignorant of the language. In the parish of Killenummery in County Sligo, where the resident landlord was closely identified with the evangelical cause, the Catholic bishop made a special visit to warn his flock about the dangers of proselytism. Shortly afterwards, a schoolmaster was murdered in broad daylight while on his way to a Protestant church to recant his former faith. A local priest, finding religious tracts on his body, informed the crowd that had gathered at the scene that the murder was the work of the devil to punish the schoolmaster for reading such material. It was reported from a neighbouring parish that a man who had made known his intention to conform had had his cow killed.¹¹¹

It is clear from the pattern of Catholic clerical opposition to the evangelical movement that the struggle was concerned not only with ecclesiastical legitimacy but also with the issue of which party, the priests or the Protestant landed classes, would emerge as the natural leaders of the Catholic peasantry.¹¹² Irish Protestants were correct in identifying the priests as their greatest adversaries. No force in Irish life at the local level did more than the priesthood to undermine the influence of the landlords, and it is not surprising that by the end of the nineteenth century the Catholic presbytery had replaced the ‘big house’ as the focus of local authority. The jealousy and bitterness that characterized relations between the priests and the landed classes, who warily eyed each other from a distance, each convinced that the other was the scourge of the country, can best be understood in this light. Historical and contemporary conditions dictated that evangelical Protestants stood little chance against the priests when it came to promoting themselves as representatives and protectors of the people. Yet this is not to deny the evangelicals’ sincerity. In 1840 the diarist Elizabeth Smith, who worked tirelessly to improve her County Wicklow estate and the living standards of the tenants, captured the dilemma of the conscientious evangelical:

I think, nay I feel sure, that if we Protestants did our duty, if we acted up to our principles, if the landlord visited and assisted them and became acquainted with their tenantry, and our clergy laboured with zeal in their vocation, there would be few papists in this country in twenty years.¹¹³

Like most of her contemporaries, Mrs Smith persisted in the belief that the peasantry were browbeaten by the clergy, and ‘would be happy and prosperous if those priests would let them alone’, by which she meant, in this instance, that if the priests had not interfered with the political allegiance of the tenants, the tenants would not have been faced with the hostility of the landlords.¹¹⁴ It was a conflict in which there was little room for compromise. The stakes were assessed in 1827 by a writer in Blackwood’s Magazine, in an ominous portent of the tone that Catholic–Protestant relations in Ireland were to assume over the remainder of the century:

The reformation is a measure of defence as well as of aggression; it is one of self-preservation as well as of conquest. The war between the two churches is a war of extermination; and if the established one lay down its arms or act merely on the defensive, it must inevitably perish. The dissenting body of Protestants exist through it; it is their shield; and if it fall, Presbyterianism and every other form of Protestantism will soon be banished from Ireland.¹¹⁵

Notes

1. DEP, 29 Oct. 1822.

2. DEP, 24 Jan. 1824.

3. James Edward Jackson, Reasons for Withdrawing from the Hibernian Bible Society, Founded on the Public Documents of that Institution (Dublin 1822), p. 37.

4. In 1822–3 the disturbed condition of counties Cork and Limerick prompted many observers to compare the situation with the Rebellion of 1798. DEP, 29 April 1823; D. Woodward to John Jebb, 30 March 1822 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/151).

5. Fifth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1819), pp. 41–2.

6. An oath found on a suspected Rockite, Denis Egan, captured near Roscrea, County Tipperary, in April 1822, contained the following exchanges: ‘What are you? A Christian. Who made you a Christian? St. Peter the Rock. How do you prove yourself a Christian? By being baptized and openly professing and adhering to the Catholic Church and the sign of the cross until death.’ DEP, 19 April 1822. Similar references to the Catholic Church as ‘the rock’ appeared frequently in the rhetoric of Daniel O’Connell as well as in the the oral tradition of the Irish-speaking commnity, as, for example, in the long poem of Anthony Raftery called ‘The Catholic Rent’: ‘But not of blown sand is the foundation of this wall / Christ, as is read, is beneath it, together with Peter / A work that shall not fail and that shall not burst is this Rock / The One-son set it up, who was crucified on earth for us / It was James, no lie, who left Ireland to the English / But we have near home the Revelation, / And I think not far from us is satisfaction’. Hyde, Abhráin atá Leagtha ag an Reachtuire, p. 119.

7. The Rev. Mortimer O’Sullivan claimed that bibles were welcomed by people who could not otherwise obtain copies of Pastorini, so that they might study and discuss the book of Revelation, the traditional source of millenarian prophecy. See Donnelly, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’, p. 120. In 1828 a notice posted at the Catholic chapel of Drumkerrin, County Sligo, declared that any Catholic who dealt with Protestants deserved to be beaten with cudgels because Protestants were the locusts mentioned in the book of Revelation. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 39.

8. DEP, 8 July 1819.

9. Referring to the government’s failure to exercise a restraining influence on the virulence of ultra-Protestants in 1823, the Dublin Evening Post commented: ‘… while they permit such mad dogs to run through the streets, who can tell what the consequences will be. We said it before and we repeat it now, that these people are looking for a rebellion in the expectation that it may give them the fling which they exercised in the last—and that it may end in the same way. They forget that there was then a conspiracy, which, when reached at its fountain, was certain to dissolve in ruin to the cause of the conspirators … In short, times have changed. Conspiracy was the danger then, the danger now is, there is no conspiracy.’ DEP, 25 Nov. 1823. The influence of a Church of Ireland clergyman, Sir Harcourt Lees, was singled out for its particularly inflammatory character, of which the paper gave the following sample: ‘Were the [Catholic] population 10,000,000 I would not value them a rush, for in a week I could raise an army of Protestants in Great Britain and Ireland that would annihilate them even with their Popish Pastors at their head. Therefore, my lads, take care of yourselves; I know how to manage you, if you are not better than Lord Wellesley or the King himself. Political power you shall never have. You are the first fellows I shall make an example of, for depend on it, if I take the field against you it is not nut-cracking but priest-cracking I will be.’ DEP, 9 Dec. 1823.

10. Donnelly, ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’, pp. 127–35.

11. DEP, 1 Aug. 1822.

12. DEP, 6 July 1822.

13. DEP, 31 Oct. 1822.

14. George Ensor, A Defence of the Irish and the Means of Their Redemption (Dublin 1825), p. 3.

15. DEP, 23 Feb. 1822; 22 Aug. 1822.

16. D. Woodward to John Jebb, 30 March 1822 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6936/151).

17. In his famous inauguration sermon Archbishop Magee outlined the position of the Church of Ireland in the following terms: ‘It will not do … to content ourselves with exclaiming against what is called new light, without endeavouring to extend to our flocks the benefit of the old, to be fearful of an excess of zeal, without any alarm as to the consequence of indifference.’William Magee, A Charge Delivered at His Primary Visitation in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on Thursday the 24th of October, 1822 (Dublin 1822), p. 14.

18. The ‘Second Reformation’ movement as part of the campaign to consolidate a Protestant United Kingdom has been examined by Stewart J. Brown in ‘The New Reformation movement in the Church of Ireland, 1801–29’ in Stewart J. Brown and David W. Miller (eds.), Piety and Power in Ireland: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin (Belfast and Notre Dame 2000), pp. 180–208; and Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1801–1846 (Oxford 2001).

19. In his inaugural sermon, Bishop Jebb called on the Church of Ireland ‘to manfully assert and defend the faith … which, we are persuaded, is the faith of the true Catholic and Apostolic Church—but, to also maintain unity of spirit with brethren of the Church of Rome … to contend, not by reviling or undervaluing, but by being better Christians.’ John Jebb, A Charge Deliverd to the Clergy of the Diocese of Limerick at the Primary Visitation in the Cathedral Church of St. Mary, on Thursday, the 19th of June, 1823 (Dublin 1823).

20. Catholics were present on this occasion out of gratitude for the relief work that Archbishop Trench had engaged in during the famine that swept the western counties in 1822. See chapter 7.

21. W.J. Fitzpatrick, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, vol I (Dublin 1861; 1890), p. 207.

22. According to his biographer, Archbishop Magee had been a lifelong opponent of Catholic claims and had drawn up a petition to oppose the endowment of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth in 1795. A.H. Kenney, Memoir of the Late Right Rev. William Magee (Dublin 1842), p. ix.

23. Magee, A Charge Delivered at his Primary Visitation, p. 22.

24. Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. II, pp. 420–1.

25. Fitzpatrick, Doyle, vol. I, p. 211.

26. Ibid. Doyle’s representation of the acuteness of peasant awareness of the tithe problem was borne out by another source. Mortimer O’Sullivan engaged in a conversation with a countryman as to the distinction between tithes and debts: ‘I asked him what he meant by debts, if he did not allow tithes to be such; his answer was prompt: “Anything that I get value for, and sure the minister never gave me value for the tithe.”’ See Mortimer O’Sullivan, Captain Rock Detected or the Origin and Character of the Recent Disturbances amd the Condition of the South and West of Ireland Considered and Exposed. By a Munster Farmer (Dublin and Edinburgh 1824), p. 195.

27. Patrick Curtis, Two Letters Respecting the Horrible Act of Placing a Calf ’s Head on the Altar of the Chapel of Ardee, and also His Answer to the Protestant Archbishop Magee’s Charge Against the Roman Catholic Religion (Dublin 1822).

28. Charles Simeon to T. Thomason, 26 April 1822. Quoted in Lefroy, Memoir of Thomas Lefroy, pp. 94–8.

29. Jackson, Reasons for Withdrawing from the Hibernian Bible Society, p. 4.

30. Seventh Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1821), appendix, p. 19.

31. Ibid. p. 21.

32. Doyle, Letters on the State of Ireland, pp. 76–7.

33. Diary of Lady Anne Jocelyn (unpaginated, NLI, MS 18,430).

34. Ibid.

35. Eyre Crowe Evans, Today in Ireland (1825; New York and London 1979), p. 14.

36. Lord Farnham, who was, according to W.J. Fitzpatrick, ‘in the main a sincere and wellintentioned man, perfectly honest as a politician’, was said later in life to have fallen a victim, ‘with an immense number of old ladies, to much of the fanatical folly then so prevalent in Ireland’. Fitzpatrick, Doyle, vol. II, p. 1.

37. This is the argument advanced by Linda Colley in her study of the formation of British national identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See in particular her chapter on ‘Dominance’. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Connecticut and London 1992), pp. 147–93.

38. Christian Observer (Feb. 1822), 127.

39. Urwick, James Digges La Touche, p. 78.

40. Mícheál McGrath (ed. and trans.), Cinnlae Amhlaoibh Uí Súilleabháin (The Diaries of Humphrey O’Sullivan) (London 1936–7), p. 236.

41. The controversial preacher Rev. Robert McGhee remarked of the typical Irish evangelical that ‘if he professes to make the gospel the guide of his public principle, whether he be a clergyman or a layman, he is styled as an epithet of singular contempt, a “saint”’. Robert J. McGhee, Truth and Error Contrasted (Dublin 1828), p. 303.

42. This should not be confused with the term ‘New Light’ as used by Irish Presbyterians in the eighteenth century; for the difference between this and the more widespread use of the term in the American colonies see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford 2002), p. 98.

43. Crowe Evans, Today in Ireland, pp. 21–2.

44. Ibid. p. 24.

45. Cullen, Modern Ireland, pp. 20–1.

46. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford 1980).

47. McDowell, Social Life in Ireland, pp. 28–9.

48. Ibid.

49. Crowe Evans, Today in Ireland, pp. 158–9.

50. Ibid. pp. 175–8.

51. DEP, 1 June 1824; 4 Sept. 1824.

52. James Roche to Daniel Murray, 12 Oct. 1827 (DDA, Murray Papers, MS 30 [10], no. 2).

53. Eighth Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1822), p. 12.

54. In the same locality Otway made the following observation about the anti-Protestant tradition in popular culture: ‘I may here remark that in almost every religious ruin I have ever visited, the neighbouring people, besides telling you of the original destruction by bloody Bess or cursed Cromwell with his copper nose, always have some more recent instances to narrate of Protestant mischief-doers. The children have got these stories at their fingers’ ends: it seems part of a system by these means to preoccupy the minds of the young Roman Catholics with deep and hateful prejudices against their Protestant countrymen …’ Caesar Otway, A Tour in Connaught, Comprising Sketches of Clonmacnoise, Joyce Country, and Achill (Dublin 1839), p. 308.

55. Crowe Evans, Today in Ireland, pp. 159–60.

56. Daniel Murray to Marquis of Lansdowne, 5 Nov. 1827 (DDA, Murray Papers, MS 30 [10], Later File, no. 3).

57. Baptist Wriothesley Noel, Notes of a Short Tour through the Midland Counties of Ireland in the Summer of 1836, with Observations on the Condition of the Peasantry (London 1837), p. 103.

58. This was not as uncommon as might have been supposed, and was clearly indicative of the move away from the self-assured confidence of the eighteenth century towards the more rigid polarization of the nineteenth. Among the roster of active evangelical clergymen were offspring of families who had been famous for their championing of the Catholic cause (such as Rev. William Bushe, the nephew of Charles Kendall Bushe), many from families who had recently been Catholic, such as the Rev. Edward Nangle, and others (often the most vehement of all) who had converted from Catholicism, such as the O’Sullivan brothers, Mortimer and Samuel, and the famous propagandist, the Rev. William Phelan.

59. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, p. 103.

60. The Irish Society: Quarterly Extracts of Correspondence, no. 16 (1825), pp. 3–4.

61. J.R.R. Wright, ‘An evangelical estate c. 1800–25: The influence on the Manchester Estate, County Armagh, with particular reference to the moral agencies of W. Loftie and H. Porter’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Northern Ireland Polytechnic 1982).

62. ‘Since I have returned to England, I have been induced to think that Ireland is blessed in a much greater degree than I thought when I was there. I have made enquiries with regard to the religious state of England since I have been at Hereford, and from what I can collect, the progress towards EVANGELISATION is by no means so rapid here as in Ireland. Preachers of the gospel are not so plentiful, and the schools are not so numerous in proportion.’W.H. Krause to Robert H. Inglis, 21 Dec. 1824. Quoted in C.S. Stanford, Memoir of the Late W.H. Krause, with Selections from his Correspondence (Dublin 1854), p. 208.

63. Ibid. p. 7.

64. Ibid. pp. 180–1.

65. T.P. Cunningham, ‘The 1826 General Election in Co. Cavan’, Breifne: Journal of Cumann Seanchas Breifne, ii, 2 (1965), 5–46.

66. Stanford, Krause, p. 225.

67. J.K.L.’s Letter to the Rt. Hon. Lord Farnham (Dublin 1827), p. .

68. John Jebb to Robert H. Inglis, 7 April 1827. Quoted in John Charles Forster, The Life of John Jebb, D.D., Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert, and Aghadoe (London 1845), pp. 668–9. The more aggressive features of the ‘Second Reformation’, such as controversial preaching, itinerancy, and the parading of converts, did not meet with the approval of Bishop Jebb. Nevertheless, he considered the conversion of Catholics a most desirable objective and never departed from his lifelong dream that it could be effected through the quiet and steady work of the parochial clergy of the Church of Ireland.

69. Blackwood’s Magazine (Jan. 1827), 61–73.

70. Ibid. May 1827, 575.

71. Hansard, 2nd ser., vol. XVII (1826–7), p. 807.

72. George Ensor, The New Reformation: Letters Showing the Inutility and Exhibiting the Absurdity of What Is Rather Fantastically Termed ‘The New Reformation’ (Dublin 1828), p. 26.

73. Ibid. p. 8.

74. Ibid. p. 37.

75. W.H. Crawford, Domestic Industry in Ireland: The Experience of the Linen Industry (Dublin 1972), p. 26.

76. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 92–3.

77. Ensor, New Reformation, p. 37.

78. Ibid. pp. 38–9.

79. Ibid. p. 53.

80. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 49.

81. The correspondence of Lord Farnham for 1831–2 is full of accounts of agrarian crime in County Cavan in the early 1830s. One informant in 1831 described gangs of young men rampaging through the streets on market days attacking any Protestant they could lay hands on. At the Christmas fair in Virginia, Protestants were unable to appear on the streets and had to take refuge overnight with sympathetic Catholics, who had their houses attacked and windows broken as a result. Local Protestants were also out of fear said to be contributing to ‘emissaries’ who were going through the surrounding townlands collecting funds for O’Connell. John King to Lord Farnham, 10 Jan. 1831 (NLI Farnham Papers, MS 18, 1612/10).

82. Fifteenth Report of the Irish Society for Promoting the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Language (1833), p. 7.

83. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, p. 106.

84. Robert Winning to Lord Farnham, 23 July 1830 (NLI, Farnham Papers, MS 18,612/9).

85. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 95–109.

86. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 11.

87. Ibid. p. 27.

88. Ibid. p. 30.

89. Hansard, 2nd ser., vol. XVII (1826–7), p. 809.

90. John Jebb to Robert H. Inglis, 7 April 1827, quoted in Forster, John Jebb, p. 680.

91. Ibid. p. 672.

92. Ibid. pp. 672–7.

93. Connolly, Priests and People. See in particular his chapter ‘Vile and wicked conspiracies’, pp. 219–63, for a thorough treatment of popular anti-clericalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

94. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 3 May 1816 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/5).

95. Ibid.

96. DEP, 13 Nov. 1819.

97. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 18 Dec. 1821 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/8). The following resolutions were unanimously adopted at the meeting: ‘Resolved: that we altogether disapprove of these secret associations and private meetings, which, in opposition to the laws and to religion, have for some time past unhappily prevailed in different parts of the country.

   ‘Resolved: that we consider it an offence against the laws of God and man to administer and take oaths, which, under the seal of secrecy, have been tendered and still are tendered by designing persons to many of our deluded fellow countrymen.

    ‘Resolved: that we have learned with deep sorrow and hold in utter abhorrence the barbarous atrocities which, in consequence of such oaths and meetings, have been committed in this and in adjoining counties.

    ‘Resolved: that we rejoice in the peace and tranquility hitherto maintained in the parish of Abingdon; and are determined by every means in our power to preserve to ourselves this honourable distinction.’

98. Cullen, Modern Ireland, pp. 205–6.

99. Ignatius Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe, 1800–50 (Dublin 1992), pp. ‒. See also Bowen, Protestant Crusade, pp. 150–3; and Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 224–9.

100. Forster, John Jebb, p. 674.

101. Hyde, Raftery, p. 115. It is worth noting that Douglas Hyde, himself the product of a Protestant clerical background, was not at all familiar with the implication of the term ‘New Light’ and confused it with ‘some religious sect’ of Scottish origin because he had seen it mentioned in a poem by Robert Burns. Yet the movement for the restoration of the Irish language, in which he played so prominent a role, can trace one of its most visible roots to the Reformation crusade of the earlier part of the century.

102. Noel, Notes of a Short Tour, pp. 102–9.

103. Ibid. p. 97.

104. Ibid. pp. 130–7.

105. Quoted in Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 247.

106. On the consequences of one sermon, the Rev. Winning wrote: ‘On Sunday last the priest of Ballytrane denounced from the altar the reading of the Irish Scriptures and said the men who were teaching were destroying the country and must be stopped. The following night a party of about thirty broke into the houses of the Irish scholars within a circuit of about seven miles between Carrickmacross and Ballybay and beat the poor men with stones in the most shocking manner … One poor man had not a tooth left; when thrown down they trod them out and drove them down his throat with their ironshod brogues. Four of the men who have suffered most will not (if they survive) be for months able to earn anything for their families.’ Miss Lyster to Mrs Cairns, 4 Jan. 1836 (PRONI, Roden Papers, mic. 147/reel 5, pp. 16–18).

107. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 31.

108. In 1828–9 the influence of the Catholic Association was said to be especially strong in the Sligo area, both in pressuring converts to return to the Catholic fold and in heightening political expectations among the common people that the existing order was soon to be overturned. One guileless tenant informed his landlord, obviously a kindly man, that he should not continue to spend money renovating his house ‘until the world should be more settled than it is’ and other admonitions suggesting how uncertain he considered his landlord’s possession to be. Christian Examiner (March 1829), 232–3.

109. Ibid.

110. The fostering of such an attachment was self-consciously pursued by certain landlords involved in the education enterprise. Consider the case of Richard Smyth of the Ballintray Estate, who made every possible compromise, from employing Catholic schoolmasters, to permitting the use of the Douay Bible, to inviting the priest to scrutinize what was going on. The reason given for his desire to see the children in attendance, besides the obvious one of education, was that he wanted to become better acquainted with those who were going to be his future tenants: ‘I feel it is a natural consequence that, having taken an interest in their improvement as children, I shall be more disposed to regard them with kindness and to promote their happiness and welfare when they grow up into manhood.’ Richard Smyth to tenants of Ballintray Estate, 31 May 1827 (CICE/KPSA, General Correspondence III, CIII/17).

111. British Critic (Jan. 1828), 38–9.

112. In a debate on the state of Ireland in the House of Commons in 1825, Alexander Dawson described the priests as ‘the most mischievous set of men in Ireland. There was no ill-feeling or disturbance they were not the cause of. The Roman Catholic priest causes all the bad feelings between landlord and tenant, and all the evils consequent thereupon.’ DEP, 19 Feb. 1825.

113. David Thomson and Moyra McGusty (eds), The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith, 1840–50 (Oxford 1980), p. 11.

114. Ibid. pp. 11–12.

115. Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1827), 582.