The Irish Rebellion and Irish Refugees

[00.00]

On the 23 October 1641, about a year before the outbreak of Civil War in England and Wales, a bloody rebellion swept across Ireland, led by a small group of Catholic gentry and military officers, many of whom were Gallic Irish.  The rebels’ goal was to oust the hated English administration and to regain the lands and influence they had lost in preceding decades of the plantation.  They planned to surprise the authorities and seize Dublin Castle and other strategic points.  But on the 22 October, their plot was betrayed and some of the leading conspirators arrested.  The vital element of surprise had been lost.

Despite this setback, the uprising went ahead and spread rapidly through Ulster and across Ireland, largely unchecked by the overwhelmed authorities.  Protestant and Presbyterian homes were burned, families butchered and towns besieged. Soon, panic spread through the Protestant communities, as in the words of one contemporary observer, “the floodgate of rapine, once being laid open, the meaner sort of people was not to be contained”.  In turn, the Protestants’ response was described as one of “excessive and indiscriminate brutality”.

As news of the atrocities became widely known, often exaggerated by rumour, Protestant refugees fled to defended towns such as Dublin, and to the ports where they desperately sought ships to take them to safety in England or Scotland.  They took with them lurid news which was soon filling the newsbooks.

How would this wave of refugees be received in an increasingly divided England where Civil War was imminent?  Would Parliament support their fellow Protestants?  How could the money be found to provide support and relief?  

To get answers to these questions, publisher Mike Gibbs talked to Dr Bethany Marsh whose research into the fate of the Irish refugees in towns and rural parishes across England, has recently been recognised with the award of the prestigious Midlands History prize.

[02.23]

Mike Gibbs:   Let’s begin by discussing what your research into the Irish rebellion of 1641 actually revealed, because this was the year before the Civil War actually started in England and subsequently in Scotland.  Give us a picture of Ireland at that time.

Bethany Marsh:  Absolutely.  What we have to remember is Ireland and England had this long history of friction, okay, due to England’s colonial interests in Ireland.  After the Reformation, there was this conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism and this friction resulted in some deep-seated economic, religious and political grievances between the native Irish, who were predominantly Catholic, and the English, who were obviously predominantly Protestant.  This resentment towards the English administration ultimately led to this outbreak of rebellion in 1641.

[03.24]

Mike Gibbs:  On the evening of 23 October 1641, the Rebellion began.  Was it a great surprise, was it a great shock?  And what actually happened?

Bethany Marsh:  For many, it was a complete shock, but I think what was even more shocking was how this, what was meant to be an organised Rebellion, which the native Irish actually organised – it turned into this sort of popular Rebellion amongst the sort of normal, everyday, Catholic population, who rose up against their Protestant neighbours.  Much of what we know about the individual experiences of the Rebellion – including, particularly, experiences of violence – is provided by a collection of documents called the 1641 Depositions, which are fantastic documents, which I would recommend anyone to have a flick-through and read, because they are available online, and I will give the website details later.

As thousands of dispossessed English and Scottish settlers fled to Dublin for safety in 1641, the authorities there established what was called the Commission of the Despoiled Subjects – so that was in December 1641.  The idea of this commission was to collect statements from these refugees in order to find out what losses – material losses, so property, money, possessions – had been lost, but also to find out what violence they were experiencing, maybe to get a bit of rumours about who the rebels were, and maybe some names, or stories that they had heard on their travels as they fled to Dublin.  This commission consisted of eight Church of Ireland clergymen, headed by a man called Henry Jones, and, as I say, they collected these statements over the course of the early 1640s and then later they collected another set of documents in the 1650s.

[05.16]

Mike Gibbs:  There must have been widespread panic among the Protestant communities.  What were their immediate responses to these occurrences that we have just heard?

Bethany Marsh:  What we need to remember is that the Rebellion mainly started in Ulster, that is the province towards the north of Ireland.  These communities would have felt quite isolated as refugees fled out of particular towns where violence was happening.  They would have gone through other villages, spreading this panic that we talked about, and revealing these stories of attacks and violence.  Lots of refugees, as these stories spread down into the other provinces, including Munster towards the south of Ireland – they would have run away, that’s what the majority of these victims and Protestant communities of the Rebellion did.  They fled – whether pre-emptively before violence happened, because they had heard these stories, or because they had actually been physically attacked.  They would have gone to places they regarded as safe – so, fortified towns, so places that they thought were going to be protected from soldiers’ attacks, nearby castles and fortresses, but the preferred destinations for many were port towns.  So, port towns along the east coast of Ireland and so Dublin was a particular one for those refugees in Ulster and down in Munster it was places like Youghal or Waterford or Wexford, where they could then board a ship to escape the country altogether.

[06.49]

There were a number of New English and Scottish Protestants, however, who responded differently.  What you have to imagine is that the majority of refugees were actually women and children, because their husbands and male members of their family were actually taken in Dublin and other places to fight as soldiers against the rebels.  So, the majority of people who ended up actually fleeing Ireland were these women and children.

[07.13]

Mike Gibbs:  So, do we have an estimate of how many women and children actually fled?

Bethany Marsh:  It is difficult to estimate the exact number of refugees who both became displaced in Ireland and those who fled to England and other places, mainly because of gaps in the documentation.  What we have to think is that these refugees flooded into towns and officials were not prepared for this big influx of people, and they weren’t taking lists of names and they weren’t doing a census to check how many they had.  The documentation we have to get estimates is quite scant but we do have some idea.

So in Dublin, for example, there was an influx of refugees in 1641 and 1642 and a letter from the Lord Justices in Ireland to the House of Commons stated that about 4,000 poor in Dublin were being relieved as much as they could, on about £50 per week.  £50 per week only amounted to about three pence per person, which is about £1.50 in today’s money, so if you are only receiving £1.50 a week as a refugee, that is not going to be enough to sustain you and, as a result, it has been estimated that about 30 refugees were dying per day, for lack of food and shelter.  We also have to remember that in 1641 and 1642, the winter was exceptionally cold – it was one of the coldest winters that they had had – so you have refugees in Dublin and in other port towns living on the streets, there is nowhere for them to stay and so they are exposed to the cold.  Overcrowding leads to disease, starvation also leads to disease, so it is a very grim picture of these refugees that we get in Ireland, when they fled.

[09.00]

Mike Gibbs:  Many of these refugees fled to England.  Was there a concerted and organised effort to transport them to England?  Or was it every man, woman and child for themselves?

Bethany Marsh:  It was a little bit of both, because the administration in Dublin – the Englishadministration – knew that they could not maintain these refugees.  You had members of the Irish Privy Council, such as Sir John Temple, who were giving out their own money to try and stop these refugees from starving, but it wasn’t a long-lasting policy of any sort, and it certainly wasn’t feasible to keep them all there.  And so some English administrators started organising for these people to be sent across to England – and I have a quote from one of their letters to the Mayor of Chester.

On 14 January 1642, a letter was sent from the Privy Council of Ireland to Thomas Cowper, who was this Mayor of Chester.   They related that:

“Four thousand, at least, of the poor English (made poor and miserable by the cruelty of the rebels here) have continued in and about the City [of Dublin]….  We have now at last, with much difficulty, shipped a good number of them to England, to whom upon their arrival we desire you to extend your favour and furtherance for their relief … out of those contributions which have been raised for them from the piety and charity of Godly persons on that side.”

What this quote shows is not only that English officials were sending these refugees across to England and making them England’s problem – which was both practical for them in terms of getting dependents out of the way – but also a way of making sure these refugees were cared for, because they knew that more organised efforts at relief were being arranged in England, whereas in Ireland there was no national relief effort because they were too busy trying to suppress these Irish Catholic rebels.

[10.57]

Mike Gibbs:  And all of these different refugees that came to England in the previous years had been Protestants?

Bethany Marsh:  Yes, absolutely.  Their key unifying factor is that they are Protestant.  England is a Protestant nation: it is known to be protecting Protestant refugees and part of this is that protecting Protestants was seen as a way of gaining God’s favour, and a way of safeguarding your relationship with God.  We have to remember that this is an extremely religious society, much different than it is now, and pretty much everybody will have believed in God and will have wanted to have this good relationship with God.

[11.35]

Mike Gibbs:  It is these Protestant refugees who are now in places like Chester and the other ports.  What national response was then organised?

Bethany Marsh:  Yes, so these refugees from Ireland arrived into Chester, Bristol and several other ports.  Those were the two main ones, because they had pre-existing links with Ireland, but you also had Milford Haven, Minehead, the City of London and the Isle of Wight as well, and then several ports in Norfolk and Suffolk, which were obviously much further away so the numbers were significantly less – but they were still there.

This national response from the English administration – so this is Parliament and the King – was twofold.  So, there was a practical response and then there was a more spiritual response.  The practical response came on 31 January 1642, when the House of Commons passed the Act of Speedy Contribution and Loan.  This is as close to a formal relief project as they were ever going to get.  It was a voluntary collection which was mandated across England and Wales, so it spread the cost of the refugees across the country – it didn’t just make it Parliament’s problem but it made it everybody’s problem.  The idea was that people would give their money for these Godly religious people that came out of Ireland.  Local officials, what they would do is they would keep close accounts of who was giving money, and how much they were giving: these accounts and all the money was then to be sent to London, where the Commission for Contributions – the committee responsible for all this money – was then to collect it, keep it, and decide who was going to get it.  That was the first thing.

[13.19]

The second thing was that Parliament called for a programme of monthly fast days.  What this meant is that, once a month, you would have to go to church, you would have to listen to a sermon all about how evil the Irish were, and how evil Catholics were.  And then, you would be so moved that you would give your money that you had saved to the local clergymen, and then they would keep that and presumably give it to any refugees who came their way.  These sermons were really, really important because they encouraged people to pray and to give charity to the distressed Irish.  This tended to both the physical and their spiritual needs of these refugees.

[14.00]

About 60% to 65% of these fast day sermons that were performed in Parliament for the House of Commons were actually published and then disseminated to the localities.  The idea was that this took the problem of refugee care out of London and spread it into the localities and it was incredibly effective, given how much money was actually given over both to the Act of Contribution, which I mentioned, but also how aid was continually provided to refugees in the localities.  The purpose of these fast day sermons was, in part, to try to earn God’s favour – I mentioned this earlier.  They believed quite strongly that the Rebellion in Ireland had happened because of the sins of the English people, and the sins of the Protestants in Ireland.  They thought that God had allowed these Catholics to rise up and slaughter – or supposedly slaughter – all these Protestants because they had lost God’s favour and because they had become very lax in their Protestantism.  The way to gain God’s favour back was to pray for Ireland, to provide relief to these refugees and these sermons reinforced this continually in order to drive home that point and make sure that everyone in England was doing their part to help the Protestant English achieve ultimate victory in Ireland.

[15.20]

Mike Gibbs:  Was there any general xenophobia about the arrival of these Irish refugees?

Bethany Marsh:  Anti-Irish feeling wasn’t actually new.  If you want to regard anti-Irish feeling as being xenophobic, or xenophobia, which is what we as contemporaries might consider it to be, this was well-established in England during the 17^th century and the Irish Rebellion certainly exacerbated this anti-Irish sentiment, as the Irish were increasingly demonised in these accounts.  All the pamphlets talking about these atrocities – this anti-Irish sentiment grew and there was, as a result, many revenge killings, particularly of English/Irish soldiers during the 1640s.

On 23 April 1644, for example, Colonel Anthony Willoughby, who was a Royalist soldier, went to Dublin to get soldiers for the King.  He got 150 troops.  Now, we need to remember that these were mostly New English Protestants, so that is people who were only one generation or two generations having been in Ireland.  They were Protestant, they regarded themselves as English, and so they in no way were these evil native Irish Catholics, that everyone perceived the Irish to be.  However, when Willoughby’s ship with these soldiers was captured by the Parliamentarians and taken to Pembroke, the “Irish” – and I use air quotes here – the “Irish” soldiers they had on board were murdered.  This was also seen in a few other cases where soldiers were drowned in Milford Haven in April 1644 as retribution for these killings of Protestants in Ireland.  Again, it is unlikely that these soldiers that were drowned were actually native Irish Catholics at all: they were probably more likely Protestants and were probably New English as well, so they had only been in Ireland for one or two generations, maybe three at a push.  It shows what the response of English people towards the Irish was and how this climate of fear and suspicion had grown up and had worsened over the course of the Irish Rebellion but also into the British Civil Wars, particularly in England.

[17.30]

What we might see as quite surprising is actually this wasn’t the response that refugees received at all: there was actually a very clear distinction between the English/Irish soldiers, the native Irish rebels in Ireland, and the refugees themselves.  This is probably for me one of the most surprising things I found in my research.  There were some reports rumouring that the Irish rebels were preparing to invade England, and this caused a little bit of suspicion towards refugees.  Some people worried that maybe Irish rebels were coming into England under this pretence of being refugees but these were only isolated incidents.  In June 1645, for example, there were complaints in London, in St Martin-in-the-Fields, that there were numerous poor and sick people, including 60 people pretending to have fled from Ireland in order to get money, so very small, isolated instances of suspicion.

But, generally speaking, as I have said, anti-Irish sentiment actually did not touch the refugees really.  They were very distinguishable from other Irish and from the wandering poor.  And this awareness is largely due to the success of religious ministers and those sermons that we talked about earlier, this message that they sent that it was their Christian duty to look after them was really successful.  People wanted to gain God’s favour in recovering Ireland from what they called the’ antichrist’ – the Catholic evil, as they saw it.

[18.56]

Relief was seen as an act of personal piety and it was also a national responsibility.  It was an act of atonement for England’s sins and consequently refugees from Ireland were not treated like these evil Irish rebels, but they were rather a means for other people of England to reaffirm their entitlement to God’s favour.  The xenophobia that you might have thought would happen didn’t really happen at all.

[19.20]

Mike Gibbs:  The award-winning research that you have conducted takes us actually into villages and communities where groups of Irish refugees ended up.  Tell us about how that was organised on a village-by-village level.

Bethany Marsh: National relief, which we mentioned previously, quickly devolved into focusing on local government relief.  It wasn’t physically possible to maintain a national measure for looking after refugees because there were just too many of them and they were too widespread across England to try and have a centralised system of government, and so it devolved to the localities.  But, without recourse to an established national procedure, local officials – so that is church wardens, overseers of the poor, constables – they had to incorporate these refugees into a pre-existing system of relief called the Poor Laws.  Simply put, these were a series of laws from the Elizabethan period that had been codified to help manage relief in the localities and to prevent vagrancy – so that is to stop people from running around all over the place.

[20.30]

Upon arrival in England, the refugees were expected to return to their parishes of birth or previous residence.  Then, once settled in these home parishes, refugees were then to be provided for by their family or by their own labours.  If this wasn’t possible for the refugees, for relatives or friends to look after them, then it was the church warden or overseers of the poor’s responsibility and they were expected to provide this parish relief.

I mentioned ‘home parishes’: what this meant was the parish of your birth, or it meant the parish of your parents’ birth.  For many refugees, this wasn’t too much of an issue as the majority of the refugees would have been New English – so that is the planted communities that I mentioned, who were sent over during the Elizabethan and Jacobean plantation schemes.  A lot of them would have been born in England originally, or some of them their parents were probably born in England, so they could return to these parishes that were their ‘home parishes’, to receive this Poor Law relief.

[21.29]

The way this relief was to be given out was through apprenticeships, so if you were a child you could get an apprenticeship with a skilled worker, perhaps.  Or, it was to be given out with pensions, that is, regular money that was to be given to you by the local officials.  For others, one-off payments were the preferred method of providing relief to refugees, particularly those who had no claims to settlement, because this increased the transience of refugees and prevented them from settling in your area, and it just emphasised their inability to gain a regular pension and it just meant that the problem moved on and you were able to do your religious duty: ‘Here is some money.  I’ve been kind and loving and Christian towards you.  Now you may go’.

As a result of this lack of refugee settlement, with all these people getting these one-off payments and then leaving, refugees were forced to travel continually across the country from parish to parish, to seek assistance as they were unable to remain in one place for any extended length of time.  This meant that the parishes closest to the major routes across England got the most refugee traffic, as it were, particularly the Great North Road.  This is the road, it’s an old Roman road that passes from York down to London, so it cuts right through the centre of the country.  We can see from the research that I have done on refugee numbers that these places got the most refugees.  In Upton in Nottinghamshire, they aided at least 426 refugees between 1641 and 1651.  Now, that might not sound like many but I say a minimum because the accounts are very annoyingly not very specific: they might say ‘a group of refugees’ were aided, or ‘a gang of people from Ireland have been relieved’, for example, and we do not know how many that is.  It could be 20, or it could be 10, and we do not know what group sizes they tended to travel around in.  From other examples, we know that they sometimes travelled in those very large groups of 10 to 20, but sometimes it was a smaller group of maybe just a small family, so we have to take refugee numbers with a little bit of a pinch of salt.

[23.33]

Mike Gibbs:  How big would be the community into which those refugees were going?

Bethany Marsh:  Upton was an incredibly small village with only a couple of hundred residents maximum and so if you got this large gang of 20 people from Ireland who were fleeing, that is quite a significant number of people to come into your small village.  It was the same with Coddington in Nottinghamshire: they aided 83 refugees and that is again a very small community.  Then in Claypole in Lincolnshire, which is also on the Great North Road, or just off the Great North Road, they aided 410 refugees within the same period.  A similar trend can be seen in County Durham.  These very small villages saw a significant number of people, and this is not just refugees because you also have maimed soldiers travelling around, and you have normal wandering soldiers moving about.  You have your normal poor, your sort of migratory poor, moving around.  There’s lots of movement happening and, as a local official, you are having to navigate both your religious duty and the duty of care to these poor distressed Irish people, while also maintaining peace and order in your community with all of these other people coming through.  It was quite a hard job for them to do.

[25.50]

Mike Gibbs:  How was this relief funded from these small communities?

Bethany Marsh:  It depended on which local official gave this money.  If it was the church warden, this money came out of the poor rate, so that was collected from members of the community and was more of a religious rate. So, it was kind of, if you were a church warden giving this money, you sort of saw these refugees as a religious problem – they were a religious concern and so you gave them this money.  Constables, on the other hand, gave it out of the parish chest and, again, it was a rate that was collected from the local people and it was a tax but, if you were a constable giving this money, this was more of a civil concern.  What is interesting is that, in most places, in particular the Midlands and outside of London, both church wardens and constables gave this money, so they were clearly jointly seen as a religious concern and a civil concern.

One might wonder, if they are seen as a civil concern, maybe people were worried that they were dangerous, that they were going to cause harm, but what my research into the village of Upton in Nottinghamshire shows is that this couldn’t possibly have been the case.  In Upton, the constables from 1645 to 1651 created this very unique and very interesting form of trying to support people in their community, and this was lodging refugees in people’s houses.  So, what they would do is refugees would come into the area and what the constables would do is that they would place them in the house of somebody in their community who was at risk of going onto the poor rate – so, someone who was close to being destitute but not quite there – and they would not pay the refugees, they would pay the person who was housing the refugees to look after them.  They would have to buy fuel for the fire and they would have to buy them food and any other needs that they might have had, but what this did was that it kept money from the parish chest – so that rate that was being paid – it kept it circulating in the community and it meant that it wasn’t going out of the community and going off with these refugees.  It is an incredibly brilliant and a quite amazing initiative that these constables came up with, in order to actually safeguard the people of their parish but, in order to have these refugees in their homes, they clearly did not find them that terrifying and clearly did not see them as these dangerous religious people like potential Catholics.  They could not have possibly have been why would they have put them in their houses.

[27.22]

What these constables managed to do was to promote social cohesion.  What they were able to do was to prevent social disorder and any form of public disorder by making sure that they were looking after members of their own community but also making sure they were addressing their religious needs as a community to help these poor distressed people.  Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that refugees were completely welcomed with open arms, and ‘We love you and we’re going to look after you’ – I wouldn’t go that far because, at the end of the day, they were moved on.  We have to remember that Upton, as with many villages, was a small community and they could not afford to have all of these new dependents, particularly as I mentioned earlier that the majority of them were women and children on their own with no male in the family to support them in any sort of way.

These communities could not look after them so they needed to move them on, but they in no way denied relief – not, at least, as the documents show.  There may have been cases where they denied relief to people who didn’t have the proper proof, or they didn’t believe were genuine about their claims to be refugees from Ireland, but certainly the documents show that they were helping people continually throughout this 10-year period as the Civil Wars were going on.

[28.37]

We have to remember that the English Civil Wars are happening: they have taxation to consider.  Upton in particular is only a few miles away from Newark, which was a really important garrison and was sieged three times.  They were taking soldiers, they were taking beds and horses and food, and they were taxing the local community and yet, still, they are helping refugees.  It shows that this religious feeling of needing to aid distressed co-religionists was incredibly strong and yes, while there wasn’t maybe this desire to keep them in the area, there certainly was this feeling enough to help them out in order to keep social cohesion.  They were able to help them but also look after their own.  It was incredibly clever.

[29.27]

Mike Gibbs:  And so, listening to what you are saying, and the tone in which you are saying it, you obviously feel that this was a successful programme of relief.

Bethany Marsh:  I think it was incredibly successful, given what they had to work with at the time.  It is hard to judge because we don’t have all the documents.  It would be wonderful if we had constables’ accounts and church wardens’ accounts for absolutely every single village, town and parish within the whole of the country, to get a really fair judgement of what was actually happening but, from the evidence that we do have, it does seem to have been really effective and really successful.

[30.05]

Mike Gibbs:  When the Civil War finally ended, what happened to these refugees?  By then, had they been assimilated, or did they still exist as a clearly-defined group?

Bethany Marsh:  We must assume that most of them became assimilated into society more generally.  I mean, remember, they were majority descended from the English, or had lived in England previously, so they would have been quite discernibly English.  They should have dressed like English, they would have spoken with English accents, and they spoke English fluently, so they should not have been too discernible by the 1650s and into the 1660s.  Certainly, you get a reduction in people requesting aid largely because, by the ‘50s and ‘60s, you have gone beyond the Irish Rebellion as being this key moment, because it has been surpassed by the Civil Wars in England and you have more people petitioning local Quarter Sessions and Parliament for relief because they have lost their husbands, for example, or because they have been wounded in the Civil Wars – sometimes in Ireland, but also in England as well.  Refugees become less of a concern because, most likely, they became assimilated.

[31.20]

Mike Gibbs:  Bethany, thank you for a fascinating insight into what I presume is a little studied area of the British Civil Wars.  Where can listeners learn more?

Bethany Marsh:  What I would highly recommend for listeners, if they want to learn more about the individual experiences of the refugees, is to read some of the 1641 depositions, those accounts that were taken in Dublin of these refugees.  They are all available online because of the 1641 Depositions Project.  If they go to 1641.tcd.ie, you can search all of the depositions to your heart’s content: they are all there from the different counties, and you can search whether you want women or children or if you want to look up various murders.  You can find all sorts of things.  There is also the Civil War Petitions Project as well, where you can find the petitions of various widows and maimed soldiers who were injured or their husbands were killed in the Civil War in Ireland as well.

[32.23]

Mike Gibbs:  Bethany, thank you very much indeed.

Bethany Marsh:  It’s been my pleasure.  This has been wonderful.  I love talking about the refugees from Ireland whenever I can.  It’s great.

Mike Gibbs:  Thanks.

[32.29]

We hope you enjoyed this programme. To learn more about the Irish rebellion of 1641 and its impact on people rich and poor, go to the extensive and well-presented 1641 depositions project of Trinity College in Dublin, at 1641.tcd.ie and look at the links in the programme notes.

To ensure you don’t miss our future programmes on the British Civil Wars, subscribe to our monthly newsletter ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ at our website: worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk. There you can also listen to previous programmes by leading historians, exploring the causes, conflicts and consequences of the wars across the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. They are also available on Spotify and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.