The Tangled History of Ireland and the British Crown

by The Laird o’Thistle
May 13 2011

With her grandson’s royal wedding now behind her, Queen Elizabeth II turns this coming week (May 17-20) to the fulfillment of a long-held dream. She and the Duke of Edinburgh will visit the Republic of Ireland. This will be the first visit by a reigning British monarch to the Republic, and the first royal visit at this level to Ireland (as opposed to Northern Ireland) since the Queen’s grandparents, King George V and Queen Mary, visited in 1911. Besides the official ceremonial events in Dublin, the Queen and her husband will be visiting a Guinness warehouse, the Irish National Stud, and the historic Rock of Cashel site as part of their itinerary. And while the royal couple is expected to be greeted warmly by most of official Ireland, and by the bulk of the people, there remains opposition in some quarters and some security concerns.

The Queen has, of course, been numerous times to the part of the “Emerald Isle” which still belongs to the United Kingdom, the six northern counties of Northern Ireland often called Ulster. She visited there first in 1946 as a Princess. Official visits to the north occurred during the Coronation Tour of 1953, during the Silver Jubilee in 1977, and the Golden Jubilee in 2002. She’ll undoubtedly be back sometime next year during the Diamond Jubilee as well. She has also made a number of quick, often unannounced, visits during the long years of “the troubles” and since.

Although there have been no visits to the south by a reigning monarch since 1911, the century preceding that saw several visits to the then still united Ireland. King George IV visited in 1821, enjoying some Irish whiskey and the company of his Anglo-Irish mistress (Lady Conyngham) along the way. Queen Victoria visited on four occasions, in 1849, 1853, 1861, and finally in 1900 shortly before her death. Edward VII visited in 1903. And, finally, George V and Queen Mary visited in 1911, accompanied by their daughter Princess Mary and the Prince of Wales (Edward VIII).

Her Majesty and Prince Phillip are also not the first of their immediate family to go to Dublin. The Prince of Wales made the first official royal visit to the Republic of Ireland in 1995.

But with all that being said, this visit is historic, hopefully opening a new chapter of friendship between the two neighboring islands and perhaps, in the hopes of some, beginning the process that could bring Ireland back into the Commonwealth in due course. And so, to set the visit in context, I offer an extremely “quick and dirty” look at the history of Ireland and the British Crown… dashing through a couple of millennia in a few paragraphs.

Ancient Ireland was a Celtic tribal culture, dating back into the mists of pre-history. Myths and legends indicate ties between the Irish and early Britons (Welsh), with connections across into what eventually became Scotland as well. The tribes of Ireland were divided among several regional sub-kings (Ri’) who in turn chose one of their number to be the “High King” (Ard Ri’). Beginning in the fifth century a branch of the royal chiefs of the “Scots” of Dalriada in Ulster (north Antrim) began to colonize the isles and west coast (Argyll) of what we now know as Scot-land. Her Majesty thus traces her royal Scottish succession and lineage back fifty-one generations to Fergus, son of Erc, who died in 501 C.E. And, through the family of the late Queen Mother, H.M. is also descended from several other old Irish royal lines.

A century after the Norman invasion of England (1066) their descendants invaded Ireland (1169-71), and out of that invasion the “Lordship of Ireland” under the English Crown emerged. Although Pope Adrian IV (the only English Pope in history) had authorized Henry II to take possession of Ireland as early as 1155, the king had not done so. What eventually happened was that Dermot MacMurrough, the “King” of Leinster, had been deposed – for kidnapping somebody’s wife – by a confederation of the other Irish kings led by the High King, Rory O’Connor. MacMurrough, in turn, allied himself with an ambitious Norman Lord from Wales, Richard de Clare, known to later generations as “Strongbow.” The alliance of MacMurrough and de Clare provoked King Henry II of England to invade, primarily to keep “Strongbow” and his friends from becoming too powerful and possibly establishing their own rival realm.

Henry’s invasion ended the ancient High Kingship, and established the often nominal – over against the native chiefs and Norman lords – rule by the English Crown. In the centuries that followed the direct rule of the Crown was largely confined to the region right around Dublin, known as the Pale, and to several garrisoned castles scattered across Ireland. The future King John was designated “Lord of Ireland” by his father in 1177, and at his succession to the throne the title permanently merged into the Crown. There was also an Irish Parliament, dating from 1297. In the 14th century the Lordship was challenged by an invasion (1315-1318) led by Edward Bruce (brother of Scotland’s King Robert I), who hoped to establish himself as King of Ireland. The attempt failed. By the 16th century the vice regal office of Lord Deputy had become semi-hereditary in the family of the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare.

The reign of Henry VIII saw a major transition in Irish affairs, as the “Lordship” transitioned into a “Kingdom.” In 1534 “Silken Thomas” Fitzgerald, heir of the 9th Earl of Kildare led a rebellion against the king after receiving an inaccurate report that his imprisoned father had been executed at the Tower of London. (The old Earl was still alive, but died of illness and grief over his son’s rebellion shortly thereafter.) The rebellion was ultimately quashed. Silken Thomas and his five uncles were all executed in London. A new harsher royal regime began in Ireland.

Henry VIII’s change in religion was also a major element in the new political regime. In 1540 Henry seized the Irish monasteries as he had already done in England, and the new Protestantism began to be established… but with far more popular resistance than it met in England. (Except for the brief period under Mary I, the Protestant “Church of Ireland” continued as the officially established church until January 1, 1871.) Fearing that the Pope might try to withdraw the historic grant of the Lordship of Ireland, in 1541 Henry had the Irish Parliament name him King of Ireland, and thus Ireland became a Kingdom. The Crown of Ireland Act created a “personal union” of the crowns of England and Ireland, so that whoever was King (or Queen) of England was also King (or Queen) of Ireland. The “Kingdom of Ireland” continued as a separate entity, with its own Anglo-Irish dominated Parliament, until it officially merged into the “United Kingdom” in 1801.

The harsh policies of Henry VIII did not manage to bring Ireland under control, and his daughter Elizabeth I found herself having to be harsher still. The historic near-anarchy in much of the country, combined with deep and widespread resistance to the religious change, raised the specter of the Queen’s enemies (Spain, in particular) using it as a base for attacks against her. Facing a series of uprisings, often led by old-line Irish or Anglo-Irish nobles, the English responded so severely that tens of thousands of Irish people died, and supporters of the Queen were put in place of the disgraced and displaced old nobility. Famous Elizabethans such as the poet Edmund Spenser and the infamous Earl of Essex were involved in the protracted “Nine Years War” (1594-1603), led on the Irish side by Hugh O’Neill the Earl of Tyrone and centered mostly in Ulster. The Nine Years War brought down the curtain on Elizabeth’s reign, ending just days after her death.

The accession of James I (VI of Scotland) as Elizabeth’s successor created in his person the “personal union” of three crowns, Scotland, England, and Ireland. In Ireland the new king started out with the rather surprising move of graciously receiving Tyrone, and his ally the chief of the O’Donnells, at court. The English were incensed at James’ favoring of these “rebels.” Back in Ireland, however, Tyrone and O’Donnell faced new restrictions and interference in their affairs. Finally in 1607, fearing rumors of imminent arrest, the earls (O’Donnell had been made Earl of Tyrconnell in 1603) fled. The “Flight of the Earls” became a great game-changer in the north, as the confiscated estates of the two earls provided the bulk of the lands for the introduction of Protestant (mostly staunch Presbyterian) colonists from King Jimmy’s native Scotland and from England… the so-called Plantation of Ulster. The native Irish in the plantation areas were pushed aside into more marginal lands and social positions, but were not totally displaced (as had been intended). This undertaking was the beginning of the division that still exists between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland.

The seventeenth century proved tumultuous. King James’ son, Charles I, managed to provoke separate civil wars against him in all three of his kingdoms at once. But eventually his Irish allies made enough trouble that Oliver Cromwell, who supplanted and killed Charles, brought over his own updated version of the old “crush the Irish” policy. Cromwell also settled large numbers of his own supporters in Ireland. Like the Scots, the Irish quietly rejected Cromwellian rule and supported Charles II, but the military might of the English Parliamentarians prevailed until after Cromwell died. The Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 brought back the monarchy, but the 1688 overthrow of the Catholic James II by his daughter Mary, and his nephew/son-in-law William of Orange, had a profound impact in Ireland.

Because he had converted to Catholicism there was strong support for James II in Ireland. By chance the usually unlucky king had a capable Viceroy in charge in Dublin, Richard Talbot, a newly created Earl of Tyrconnell. Talbot initially held Ireland for James, with only two towns in Ulster (Derry and Enniskillen) being in the hands of Williamite supporters. In 1689 the deposed James tried to regain the throne by coming back via Ireland, with French support. Simply put, James blew it. Once in Dublin, he supported policies that would redistribute much of the land held by powerful Protestants back to Catholics, thus alarming and alienating that powerful segment of the population. And then William responded with overwhelming military force against James. James II suffered his decisive defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in Ulster in 1690, and fled.

The victor, King William III, reacted harshly, imposing the stringently anti-Catholic “Penal Laws” that drove the majority of the Irish population to the margins of society and kept them there for well over a century. On the Protestant side William was seen as a great hero. He and his victory have been celebrated right down to our day by the sectarian Orange Lodges of Northern Ireland in their annual processions. Notwithstanding all the things that had preceded from the times of Henry II on down to James I and Cromwell, it was the struggle between James II and William of Orange, and the aftermath, that shaped Ireland and its troubles as we have known right down to recent times.

From the time of the Battle of the Boyne until the merger of Ireland into the United Kingdom in 1801 the country was totally dominated by the aristocratic “Protestant Ascendancy” created by William’s victory. The transition to the House of Hanover brought no significant change. While there was quiet support for the deposed Stuarts among the populace, there was no overt Jacobite activity comparable to the risings in Scotland in1715 and 1745. Over the course of the century many of the anti-Catholic laws fell into gradual disuse and others were repealed, most notably in the Relief bill of 1793. The major political occurrence of the 18th Century, however, came at the end. The United Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a republican movement inspired by the French Revolution that ended up causing several thousand deaths and led directly to the union of 1801. The “Kingdom of Ireland” ceased to exist and was absorbed into the United Kingdom (originally formed in 1707 with the union of England and Scotland).

Nineteenth century Ireland, still dominated by the old Ascendancy, saw (as noted) the first visits by reigning monarchs since the Battle of the Boyne. In a movement led by the charismatic Daniel O’Connell, Catholic “emancipation” was achieved in 1829, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and so on. As the century progressed the crisis of the potato famine and the struggle over the corn (grain) laws highlighted the profound gap between rich and poor in Ireland. Emigrants poured out of the country to the United States, to various lands of the British Empire, and into the great industrial cities of England and Scotland. Those years also saw the building up of the nationalist sensibilities that would ultimately lead to separation from the British Crown.

A small abortive uprising, The Young Ireland Rebellion, occurred in 1848… a year of attempted revolutions across Europe. It basically lasted a day, and might not have lasted that long if the local police had been a bit less trigger happy. Another more significant movement arose in the 1860s, and the “Fenians” unsuccessfully attempted their own rebellion in 1867. (Their movement spread to supportive groups among Irish immigrants in other lands, and some of the more violent elements resorted to dynamite attacks and other tactics we would now describe as terrorism.) They were also supposedly implicated in the so-called “Jubilee Plot” to try to blow up Queen Victoria and the royal family during the Golden Jubilee in 1887, though it appears the British government of the day was actually manipulating the whole thing to entrap members of the movement and discredit the efforts for Irish Home Rule. The Fenian movement was the immediate precursor to the Irish Republican movement.

Facing mounting unrest and disorder in Ireland several reforms, or attempted reforms, were attempted under the leadership of the perennially returning Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone. (He served as P.M. four different times.) As noted earlier, the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871. Queen Victoria – who never liked Gladstone – was reluctant, but came around. Bills to establish a devolved “Home Rule” for Ireland were proposed in 1886 (failed to pass the House of Commons) and again in 1893 (passed in the Commons but failed in the House of Lords). In this case Victoria was opposed to immediate Home Rule, but did favor a more gradual devolution process. A third, and finally successful, attempt to establish Home Rule came long after both Gladstone and Victoria were dead, achieving final passage in 1914 with a provision that it would not go into effect until the end of World War I, but by then… it was too late.

The 1916 Easter Rebellion against British rule marked the beginning of the process that resulted in the establishment of the Irish Free State as a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire in 1922. Within days of the 1922 transition the six counties of Northern Ireland opted out of the new state, choosing to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Free State retained George V as its official head of state until his death in 1936. A new constitution written in 1937 placed the monarchy in an ambiguous position. All internal Irish affairs were under a President, but the King ostensibly remained the nominal Head of State for international relations. Clarity was attained in 1949 when Ireland unambiguously declared itself a republic, and left the Commonwealth. King George VI, the Queen’s father, was thus the last British monarch to “reign” over the entire island of Ireland. (Although, I have now seen a claim that the abdication of Edward VIII was not properly ratified in Ireland, which means that he technically may have been “king” in Ireland until his death in 1972, or at least until 1949.)

The subsequent history of the British Crown in relation to Ireland has been dogged by “the troubles” that broke out between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland in 1969. The following three decades saw too much death and too much violence, including the assassination Earl Mountbatten that spilled over into the Irish Republic in 1979. The progress of the peace process and a new political climate in recent years has finally paved the way for this coming week’s royal visit to Dublin. Without doubt the Queen carries with her a personal and vivid awareness of the place she will be taking in history simply by going.

I hope she and Prince Phillip remain safe and well, and have an absolutely wonderful time.

Yours aye,

– Ken Cuthbertson