1. Seventeenth-Century Britain and Ireland

2. British History
“The seventeenth century was, historically, and is, historiographically, a mess …” Jenny Wormald (2008)

3. Master narratives Whig history The puritan revolution Marxist history
Divine right v. representative government
The puritan revolution
A conflict over the legacy of the Reformation
Marxist history
Feudalism/absolutism v. a rising capitalist class

4. Revisionism Political ideology Religion Class
General acceptance of royal authority
No “high road to civil war”
Unreasonable demands of parliament
Stability of England under “Eleven Years Tyranny”
Religion
Arminian innovation rather than puritan crusade
Class
Collapse of academic Marxism
Eclipse of class-based interpretations

5. What are we left with? Return to focus on individual monarchs
But why, then, did things get better?

6. “British History” Central problem of managing a composite state:
The quest for a uniform religious policy
Scottish revolt against Charles I
Who was to suppress the Irish rising of 1641?
James II and Irish Catholicism

7. Seventeenth-Century Ireland
Plantation
Religion and identity
Conflict

8. Plantation Formal plantation and unplanned settlement
Antrim and Down
Londonderry
Continuing British settlement to c.1710
The Irish and the plantation
20% of land
Suvival as tenants
Economic marginalization
Ulster and beyond
New agricultural techniques
But continued reliance on stock rearing
Munster: wool, iron
Better communications, more developed urban network

9. Conflict Conflicting perspectives Normalisation
Violence in European context
Erosion of ethnic differences
Examples of mutual accommodation
Periods of peace and economic growth
An Age of Atrocity
Martial law continued after 1603
Massacre and atrocity
Post-war terror and social cleansing

10. Religion and identity (1): Protestantism
Church of Ireland
The end of the native Reformation
Calvinist theology
Dissent
Initial accommodation of Scots
Emergence of a Presbyterian church structure
Southern dissent
Conflict within Protestantism
Wentworth and Laudian policy
Post-1660 repression
Temporary Protestant unity
Sacramental test (1704)
Catholicism
Revival and Tridentine reform
The dilemma of the Old English

11. A war of many parts 1641-52 A war of the three kingdoms
The Catholic revolt
Begun by benficiaries of Ulster plantation
A response to the rise of English parliament
Unleashed forces in Ulster leaders could not control
Arrival of emigres under Owen Roe O’Neill
Conflicted loyalties
Confederate Catholics
Loyalty to king or church
An ethnic dimension
But primarily a division between haves and have-nots
English Protestant royalists v. parliamentarians
Scots revolt against parliament 1649