Personal blog of Mark Thompson. Formerly Managing Director of GCAS Design in Belfast, Northern Ireland (from 1999 - 2006) and Chairman of the Ulster-Scots Agency (from June 2005 - June 2009). Thoughts on Ulster-Scots heritage, identity, evangelical Protestant faith, music and other stuff I stumble upon.
"In 1686 certain continental powers joined together in a league, known in history as the League of Augsburg, for the purpose of curbing the arrogant power of France. These powers were impartially Protestant and Catholic, including the Emperor of Germany, the King of Spain, William, Prince of Orange, and the Pope.
The latter had but a small army, but possessed a good treasury and great influence. A few years before a French army had marched upon Rome to avenge a slight insult offered to France, and His Holiness was more than anxious to curb the Catholic power that had dared to violate the centre of Catholicity. Hence his alliance with William, Prince of Orange.
King James II, of England, being insecure upon his throne, sought alliance with the French monarch.
When, therefore, the war took place in Ireland, King William fought, aided by the arms, men, and treasures of his allies in the League of Augsburg, and part of his expenses at the Battle of the Boyne was paid for by His Holiness, the Pope. Moreover, when news of King William’s victory reached Rome, a Te Deum was sung in celebration of his victory over the Irish adherents of King James and King Louis."
Words and their meanings change over time. To our age, the word 'Revolution' means a kind of "burn it all down and start afresh" often with the implied use of force and arms. That's not what was understood in 1700s America and Britain.
When the Founding Fathers wrote of 'revolution' they expressly regarded it as a return, a recovery of the rights as expressed in the 1689 Bill of Rights, and a selection of other earlier documents such as the Magna Carta – rights which successive Parliaments and Monarchs had taken from the people.
“The Revolution (of 1688 in England) was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty ... The very idea of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution [1688] and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.
All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity ... In the Petition of Right submitted to Charles I, the Parliament says to the King ‘Your subjects have inherited this freedom,’ claiming their franchises not on abstract principles such as ‘the rights of man,’ but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers ... They preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title ... to that vague speculative idea of ‘natural right.’”
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797) in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
We were in Somerset again recently, and I visited the Monmouth Rebellion visitor exhibition at Westonzoyland St Mary's Church (link here) and the remote, nearby, Battle of Sedgemoor Memorial which is around a 15 minute walk along stony tractor lanes out onto the Somerset 'Levels'. No grand white marble 'national' masterpiece here, just a simple community monument among straggly trees. We also went to Glastonbury and saw there the brass coloured memorial plaque in an entry to the six unnamed men who were hanged from the sign of the White Hart Inn the day after the battle, on 7 July 1685 - "their bodies left to infect the air"*.
• At the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685 an estimated 1300 of the 'rebel' men were killed, they were mostly just civilians who had armed themselves to oppose King James II's army. Many of their bodies sank into the marshes and still lie there; artefacts and home-forged weapons are dug up from time to time.
• The show trials of the 'Bloody Assizes' began on 25 August, during which 850 were sentenced to "transportation" and sold as slaves to the Caribbean sugar plantations owned by King James II's friends (his wife got the money) and a further 350 or so hanged, drawn & quartered at 50 locations in the West Country.
• But in between the battle and the trials, for the interim six or seven weeks Lieutenant-General Percy Kirke's regiment, not long back from Tangiers in Morocco, conducted a murderous rampage across the south west**. I've not been able to find the statistics of how many they killed, but I'll be back over again later in the year so will find out more at this new exhibition, 'After Sedgemoor' at the Museum of Somerset.
In The Last Popular Rebellion; the Western Rising of 1685 by Robin Clifton (1984) he says that "Kirk's troops marched from Bridgwater to Taunton spreading fear before them, while the militia reorganized itself to begin a great manhunt over the whole county. The fighting was over, the terror was yet to come". The church records from Westonzoyland recorded 1384 corpses, with yet more unrecovered in cornfields three miles away at Chedzoy; a pit for 174 bodies was dug and filled.
But what of Ireland? Four years later, and desperate to cling to power, in 1689 it seems that King James II authorised similar butchery and brutality here. Lord Galmoy, Piers Butler, had regiments in the west of Ireland, and also a regiment in County Down who were active in the 'Break of Killyleagh' which I have been researching for a while now. This quote is from a 1693 source, and not for the faint of heart:
"The Lord Galmoy was likewise sent with forces to guard the passages between the north of Ireland, and those parts of Munster and Connaught that adjoined to Ulster, to prevent the south and western Protestants from joining, who being a malicious and bloody Papist, first drew blood there, causing two gentlemen who had taken arms for their own defence, under Colonel Sandason (Sanderson), to be hanged on a signpost at Belnahatty (Bellaheady), and their heads being cut off, were kicked about the streets by his soldiers, like foot-balls;
at Omagh he took two others upon the same pretence, and caused the son first to hang his father, and carry his head on a pole through the streets, crying, ‘This is the head of a traitor;’ and then the young man himself was hanged.
It was also reported, that some of his dragoons meeting with a clergyman's wife, whose husband had fled northward, several of them, one after another, ravished her, and then ripped up her belly, and exposed her with a dead man upon her.
At Tipperary, an English gentleman seeing some dragoons marching towards his house, shut up his doors (it being late in the evening), as if they were gone to bed; but sixteen of them coming thither, and not being quickly admitted, they forced open his doors, calling him traitor for shutting them against the King's forces; and having pillaged all things of value, they then deflowered his daughter and only child before his face; all sixteen lay with her, and three of them (as was affirmed by his family) after she was actually dead.
These were the beginnings of the villainies which the Protestants suffered from these execrable wretches."
And also this:
"Galmoy was deaf to any thing could be offered in behalf of the two Prisoners but caused them both to be hanged on sign post, had their heads cut off, which he gave to the Soldiers for foot-balls, who when they had pleased themselves for some time with this barbarous diversion the infamous Galmoy ordered them to be set on the Market-house in Belturbet, to remain a spectacle of his dishonour, and their constancy. It is said that Maguire was so much disgusted at this action that he returned to Crom, threw up his Commission, and would serve K James no longer.
This inhuman treatment of these young Gentlemen more and more demonstrated to the Protestants the necessity of their uniting firmly together, and the inhabitants of Derry and Inniskillen having thus bid defiance to Tyrconnel, encouraged the Protestants of other parts to put upon their defence..."
A Monmouth rebel who survived to tell the tale, and to write others, was John Oldmixon. In his Memoirs of Ireland (1716)he described Galmoy, twice, as an 'infamous wretch':
There was among them an infamous wretch, whom no titles could honour; Pierce Butler, Viscount Galmoy. He had a Regiment of Horse, which was quarter'd on the borders of Ulster...
These are unimaginable war crimes. These accounts from Ireland would once have seemed extreme to me, but when we "zoom out" from merely Ireland and balance these with what is known about what King James II had authorised his army in the West Country of England, and of the barbarities his regiments inflicted upon Scotland even earlier, starting during his years there as Duke of York – and also what James II's cousin Louis XIV was doing to the Huguenots in France – it's entirely plausible.
That being the case, to reduce the 1688 Revolution which finally overthrew James II to merely being an encounter between two kings and their armies on opposing banks of a river, of generals and military strategy all overlaid with a quasi-religious gloss, is to utterly utterly miss the point.
"Zoom out" even further, leaving the narrowness of Ireland behind, and the Glorious Revolution was the Liberation of Europe.
* from The Last Popular Rebellion; the Western Rising of 1685 by Robin Clifton (1984), p 224.
** In The Western Rising, an Account of Monmouth's Rebellion by Charles Chenevix Trench (1969) a letter from Kirke is quoted in which, one week after the Battle of Sedgemoor, he said that "the rebels lately buried are not sufficiently covered ... press ploughs and men to come to the said place where the rebels are buried that there might be a mound erected on them".
The same noun but totally opposite outcomes. Not all revolutions are the same. Where do your rights come from - your inherent Created humanity, or the power of the state?
I found this on the shelves again recently, I picked this up years ago. It's a startling example of how knowledge was once mainstream. I doubt there's anything comparable today.
I've set this YouTube video to play at the appropriate point, at 40min, hopefully it will work. About 20 years ago, when I was Chair of the Ulster-Scots Agency, Professor Kaufman (Wikipedia here) undertook a review of the then-extant University of Ulster's Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies. Not everyone was pleased that such a review was necessary, but peer review is essential. He did a good job.
Almost 250 years ago, on 19 April 1775, the famous battle of Lexington and Concord took place in rural Massachussetts. The official National Parks Service website provides a summary. What of the Ulster-Scots dimension? A man from Londonderry (Ulster) had emigrated to Londonderry (New Hampshire), and became a key figure in the aftermath –
"At the breaking out of the Revolution, (Matthew) Thornton held the post of colonel in the New Hampshire militia, and had also been commissioned a justice of the peace by Benning Wentworth, acting under British authority; but after Lexington and Concord, on the 19th of April, 1775, John Wentworth, then governor, retired from the government of New Hampshire and went to England.
Under these circumstances the colony called a "Provincial Convention" of which Thornton was appointed president. There was no state constitution as yet and no declaration of independence, but there was no other constituted government in the province besides this provincial convention, and I am fond of thinking, and believe it to be historically correct to affirm, that this extemporized but indispensable New Hampshire convention, presided over by a Scotch-Irishman, Ulsterborn, was the first independent sovereignty upon this continent! It certainly assumed the functions of an independent government in the name of the people of the colony."
- from Scotch-Irish in New England by Rev. A. L. Perry, Professor of History and Politics, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.. Taken from The Scotch-Irish in America: Proceedings and Addresses of the Second Congress at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 29 to June 1, 1890.
YouTube sent me this – published 4 days ago and has 422,000 views already. It's a pretty good summary of some of the connecting themes. Jump in at 10:27.
• ALICE LISLE BEHEADED IN WINCHESTER, 1685 The last woman to be beheaded by the British state was Alice Lisle, on the orders of King James II, and found guilty in a show trial by his Lord Chief Justice, Judge George Jeffreys. She was 71 years old; a plaque in Winchester commemorates where she met her barbaric end - today, it's the Eclipse Inn (pic below from Flickr here)
Jeffreys (biography from 1898 is online here) was notorious, having presided over imprisonments and executions of enemies of the state, such as Algernon Sidney, William Russell and Thomas Armstrong (all executed in 1683, for their reputed involvement in the Rye House plot) and Richard Baxter. But to go after an old woman was a new horror.
Killed because of her kindness. Her alleged crime was to provide accommodation in her home of Moyles Court to John Hickes and Richard Nelthorpe, two of those who had been supporters of the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion of summer 1685; she claimed to have had no knowledge of such involvement, she'd never met Nelthorpe before, and Hickes hadn't yet been put on trial so his involvement was only an allegation. Some histories say that Jeffreys pressured the jury into finding Alice guilty only after they had twice, or maybe three times, found her innocent.
But King James II wanted blood, and Alice Lisle's was to be the shocking, barbaric, first in his series of 'Bloody Assizes' in the south west of England in Autumn 1685. Alice was originally sentenced to burning at the stake, but this was (mercifully?) reduced to a mere public beheading.
(The painting below of Alice being arrested in her home, painted by Edward Matthew Ward in 1857, is in the UK Parliament art collection). Alice Lisle was posthumously pardoned by King William III and Queen Mary II upon their accession to the crown in 1689.
• KINGS CAN BE TYRANTS Monarchy is not an end in itself, because kings can be tyrants. So said the publishers of the 1560 Geneva Bible, refugees from England. They wrote this advice into the Bible's marginal notes - some say over 400 times. The Bible was used by English non-conformists - and those who sailed on the Mayflower, seeking religious freedom in the New World, had it with them. Kings can be tyrants.
So when Charles II reclaimed the throne in 1661, and through his authoritarian Clarendon Code laws ejected over 2000 non-conformist ministers from the churches in which they preached, doubtless many of them recalled that the Geneva translators had prepared them for such times as this. Kings can be tyrants.
• REV JOHN HICKES One of them was Rev John Hickes (1633-1685) a former Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He had qualified as a clergyman and took a post at Stoke Damerall near Plymouth, but he was one of those that Charles II 'ejected'. So he then crossed the River Tamar into Cornwall and became one of six ministers to serve the non-conformist community at Saltash - in 1665 they were all reported as being 'notoriously disaffected to ye government of ye Church established in ye Kingdom of England' (online here).
The church buildings are still there today. Ramping things up, in 1671 Hickes authored a pamphlet entitled A sad narrative of the oppression of many honest people in Devon, &c. He was also involved in illegal outdoor church services, known as conventicles, at nearby Kingsbridge. In 1672 he personally petitioned King Charles II on behalf of the nonconformist population of the 'West Country'.
Following his arrest at Alice Lisle's home, Hickes was sentenced at Wells on 23 September 1685, and hanged, drawn and quartered with five others at Glastonbury on 6 October 1685. A plaque there reads:
......
On this site stood the medieval White Hart Inn
Somerset 1685
The Pitchfork Rebellion
On Monday June 22nd 1685 James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, having previously landed at Lyme Regis, marched in wet weather from Bridgewater to Glastonbury with his rebel army. They lodged in the two parish churches and camped in the Abbey ruins before continuing to Shepton Mallet the next day.
On Friday July 3rd 1685 Lord Feversham leading the royal troops passed through Glastonbury from Shepton Mallet to camp at Somerton in pursuit of the rebels, then back in Bridgewater.
On Tuesday July 17th, the day after the battle of Sedgemoor, the Wiltshire militia leaving for home marched to Glastonbury where 6 unnamed rebels were hanged from the sign of the White Hart.
The following rebels were later hanged in the town:
Israel Bryant of Glastonbury, Yeoman
John Hicks, Minister of Religion
William Meare of Bridgewater
Richard Pearce
James Pyes of Colyton, Carpenter
......
• Many of John Hickes' surviving letters and his last speech were compiled after his execution, and published by his son-in-law John Tutchin. A selection of them can be found in various later books, such as J.G. Muddiman's The Bloody Assizes, published in 1929 (from page 104 onwards, online here).
PS: Edward Matthew Ward also painted the moment when tyrannical King James II realised his reign was over, entitled King James II Receiving the News of the Landing of William of Orange in 1688, (which he painted in 1851.)
Here's the press release. To apply for this position you'd have to have some astonishingly optimistic expectation, against almost all other evidences, that 'the system' that runs Northern Ireland will - or has ever wanted to - advance Ulster-Scots in any substantial way.
For the past 25+ years, many excellent people have worked very hard within the few Ulster-Scots entities, pouring their energies into trying to make those effective - only to find that 'the system' is content for those few entities to exist (under-resourced in every conceivable way), but not for those entities to prosper.
As the old saying goes, better tae hae nane than a bad yin. I wish the successful applicant well.
Thomas MacKnight (1829-1899) was editor of the Northern Whig newspaper (DIB entry here). The first volume of his series Ulster As It Is was published in 1896, as a retrospective on his almost 30 year career, and is online here.
MacKnight advocated a non-sectarian Ulster, an alternative to the entrenched "two tribes" mentality which came to dominate around 1885/6. In the first chapter he says of himself, "I can scarcely be accused of having much sympathy with the evil spirit of sectarian and party intolerance with which Belfast and the North of Ireland have perhaps been much too indiscriminately associated".
A quick glance through shows him to have been equally critical of both extremes that were emerging.
Here are two quotes from Ulster As It Is about the United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion, and how that story was being claimed by Irish nationalism on the cusp of its centenary commemorations.
“I have never been able to find that the Presbyterians in the North of Ireland and others who might be considered either United Irishmen or sympathisers with them entertained what are now called Irish National views. The descendants of these men ought to know what political convictions their fathers and grandfathers held on the great Irish question of the time. They one and all told me that their ancestors at the end of the last century were not Irish Nationalists but that the most advanced of them contemplated setting up a cosmopolitan republic based on the principles enunciated in Paine's Rights of Man. … Irish Nationalists as they are now known the United Irishmen could scarcely be at that time."
“Dr Drennan who might be regarded as the poet of the United Irishmen lived near Belfast. The study in which he wrote is still pointed out in the grounds of a solicitor Mr Dinnen at Cabin Hill three miles from the town in the county of Down. Not long ago a number of Nationalists who visited Belfast thought of paying a visit to Dr Drennan's tomb but his son who recently died pointed out that his father had in 1818 made a remarkable speech in favour of Parliamentary reform. In that address the poet of the old United Irishmen stated that with Parliamentary reform and other recognised Liberal reforms granted he would be quite satisfied. His son was also always a reformer and a Liberal and when he died a decided Liberal Unionist having no sympathy with the present race of Irish Nationalists.”
• this 1992 article by Brian Walker '1641, 1689, 1690 and All That: The Unionist Sense of History' published in The Irish Review mentions MacKnight - it's excellent in showing how history here has been selectively celebrated over the centuries (you'll need JSTOR access).
• Here are two examples from it: in 1789 a cross-community procession marked the centenary of the Siege of Derry, but "rather than being seen simply as a Protestant victory, the siege was celebrated as a triumph of liberty"; the procession "included the Catholic bishop Dr Philip McDevitt and his clergy". and in 1790 the centenary of the Battle of the Boyne was "celebrated not as a great Protestant triumph but as a constitutional victory".
Maybe MacKnight's work and thinking deserves to be re-discovered. Few today even know that there ever was a vision for an "alternative Ulster" back then.
A culturally complex society, cleaved in two, divided and radicalised, and subtle histories then 'claimed' and appropriated by the two new opposing factions...
There's been a lot of water under the bridge since 1873, but it's often illuminating to go back and see what our predecessors thought and wrote down. Over the past year or so I've occasionally dipped into an excellent book by Thomas Witherow, who was Presbyterian moderator and also a Professor of Church History and Pastoral Theology (Wikipedia here).
In his 1873 book Derry and Enniskillen in the year 1689, there is a chapter entitled 'Reflections' (online here) where he goes beyond the chronological history and gets into what was for him present-day application. He says this:
Every admirer of King William should remember that, as that great monarch often said, he had come over "to deliver the Protestants, but not to persecute the Papists."* To tolerate honest difference of opinion, is the spirit that William always aimed to promote.
Under these circumstances, is it a duty which we owe to God and our country, to celebrate the victories of our ancestors in any form that is calculated to excite the prejudices and provoke the ill-will of neighbours, with whom, though we differ in religion, yet we come into contact on the everyday business of life, and to whom we are bound by ties of citizenship and of mutual service and obligation?
Is it not quite possible to cherish the remembrance of great actions, without doing anything that living men may justly regard as a provocation and an insult? Christianity positively enjoins us to love our neighbour as ourselves; but is the discharge of that obligation consistent with doing something else not commanded by God, but which, as we know for a fact, will hurt our neighbour's feelings, stir up in his heart evil passions, and thus tempt him to sin?
Is it generous to remind, without necessity, any section of our countrymen, that on one occasion our ancestors won a victory over theirs; and would not a noble adversary show more of true greatness and merit by disdaining to stoop to any such unworthy boast? A brave man fights if he must fight, and shakes hands with a gallant foe when the fight is over; but no truly brave man ever insults the vanquished, by reminding him and his, years afterwards, of the defeat. Were he in a thoughtless moment betrayed into such an act, he would, on reflection, feel no little ashamed; certainly he would not desire that the pen of history should record it of him. Is it wise to do an act, not required by the authority of God or of the law, which is known from repeated trial to stir up bitter feelings in our neighbours, which withdraws our own attention from our everyday business, which gives such an unfavourable picture of our own religion, and confirms others in the prejudices which they entertain against our faith?
If to taunt our neighbours with the defeats our ancestors inflicted on theirs, is therefore neither wise, nor manly, nor generous, nor Christian, how can we honestly in the sight of God do such an act, or encourage others to do it?
* Witherow quotes this from Walter Harris' 1745 The History of the Life and Reign of William-Henry, Prince of Nassau on page 175. Whatever the history, as Witherow understood, it's the present-day application which matters. Our generation could learn much from Witherow, even 152 years after he wrote those words.
They had led simultaneous rebellions, both of which began in the Netherlands and had a degree of reach into Ireland. King James II had hardly warmed his claimed throne when these rebellions were both planned. Both attempts were short-lived, ending within weeks in summer 1685. James II had a medal struck, made by Regnier Arondeaux. Wikipedia here.
