Golden Age or Penal Era?
I. Overview
Hanoverian succession/ Whig stability
1691 (T. of Limerick) - 1798: the long peace
imperial wars, especially the Seven Years' War (1756-1763)
Age of Revolution: the Volunteers, Patriots, SUI, 1798
the Act of Union
II. Golden Age?
"We are no petty people; we are the people of Swift, Burke, and Grattan." --William Butler Yeats
the Ascendancy
land monopoly (86% in 1702; over 90% as the century proceeded)
Irish Parliament (elected by limited Protestant franchise) / Dublin Castle (appointed from London)
1735-1770 "age of the undertakers" (Dublin Castle's management of the Irish Parliament)
e.g. Henry Boyle [see Barlett]
architecture (Georgian neoclassicism) [link to images]
Dublin: showpiece capitol
Handel's Messiah premiered in Dublin in 1742
country houses with gardens
philosophy and literature
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) - clergyman and author (satirist)
George Berkeley (1685-1753) - clergyman and philosopher
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) - poet and playwright
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) - playwright
John Field (1782-1837) - pianist-composer
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) - politician and political philosopher
grievances [see Bartlett]
trade restrictions
1663 no direct exports from Ireland to the colonies (some exceptions: horses, victuals, servants, and (from 1705) linen
1671 no direct imports into Ireland of sugar, tobacco, and other named ("enumerated") colonial products 1696 no direct imports into Ireland of any colonial products 1699 no exports of wool and woollen products to any country except England
> prompted Molyneux's Case of Ireland Stated
limitations of the Irish Parliament
subordinated to England
> Poyning's Law/ Declaratory Act
not representative
the first Irish nationalists?
nations = imagined political communities (Benedict Anderson)
sense of place (Ireland as their land); sense of common goals (maintain elite status); sense of history (never forget 1641; King William as deliverer)
III. Penal Era?
the penal laws [see Penal Laws website]
Edmund Burke on the penal laws: "a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the peverted ingenuity of man"
1691
Catholics barred from public office and membership in parliament
1695 Catholics cannot keep weapons 1695 Catholics cannot go overseas for education; Catholics cannot teach or run schools in Ireland 1697 banning of Catholic regular clergy and Catholic hierarchy 1697 banning of intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants 1698 Catholics excluded from the legal professions 1703 Catholics prohibited from serving as guardians to orphans 1704 Catholics prohibited from purchasing land, inheriting land, and holding long leases
estates of deceased Catholics to be divided equally among male heirs
lay priests must register with the authorities
1715 Catholics barred from owning horses worth more than 5 pounds
conditions in rural Ireland
underdevelopment and poverty
1727-1730 series of small famines
1740-41 major famine (200,000-400,000 deaths)
constant population growth: more than doubled (to 4.6 million) by the end of the century
increasing subdivision of land and growing reliance on the potato
growth of agrarian violence, especially during 1760s
secret societies (Ulster Oakboys and Whiteboys) seeking to regulate the "moral economy" via violence and intimidation
government response: the "Whiteboy Acts" (1766, 1767, 1787) which made many acts of protest capital offenses
BUT: age of Catholic revival and resurgence [see Bartlett]
emergenceof a Catholic large farmers and middlemen
growth of a Catholic tenant farmer class
engagement of Catholics in trade and professions