The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms by Eamon Darcy (review)

Eamon Darcy’s book, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, addresses an important turning point in Irish history, one that would cement sectarian attitudes for centuries to come. But, as Darcy so assiduously demonstrates, this was not the inevitable outcome of actual events on 23 October 1641; rather, it was in large part due to how that episode and the subsequent rebellion were portrayed in print. It is, after all, the printed versions of these events that influenced memories and attitudes amongst those in Ireland, England and beyond. Equally important is that this body of literature, and the 1641 depositions from which it derived, have formed the backbone of academic and popular historiographical debates down to the present. Unfortunately, the reliance on these sources has nurtured very sectarian interpretations of the conflict, and these tend to ignore sociopolitical trends and relationships between Ireland and the rest of the British world. Just as Ireland was a key element in an expanding and confrontational colonial empire, the Irish rebellion was, in fact, part of ongoing religious and political struggles in the Three Kingdoms. And, despite the fact that Irish religious and colonial conflicts have been typically overlooked in the broader British narrative, they nonetheless played a critical role in informing Britain’s religious politics and its overseas expansion. This study goes some way towards bridging this gap by examining Ireland’s 1641 rebellion in the much wider contexts of British colonialism and European conflict. Instead of focussing on the rebellion itself, Darcy examines how details about these events were collected, manipulated, and disseminated to British audiences. He likewise explores how these portrayals influenced English attitudes towards Ireland, the Irish, and Catholicism in general.

Analysing pamphlet literature produced during and shortly after the Irish uprising, Darcy’s book is primarily concerned with how the 1641 depositions have influenced popular memory and historiography of the event. These depositions are an incredible contemporary resource for the study of seventeenth-century Irish political, religious and material history. Consisting of eyewitness testimonies and second hand accounts of Irish Catholic attacks on Protestant settlers, first in the North, and then throughout the country, they offer unique insight into the causes and effects of the rebellion. And, although the majority of deponents were Protestant, and thus infused their testimonies with their own prejudices, these records “accurately capture… the fears of the settler population,” and “capture cultural constructs of violence,” especially in terms of “what people believed had occurred, or expected to occur, in times of war and conflict” (12–13).

Engaging with themes typically present in colonial and wartime discourses, Darcy outlines how the evidence presented in the depositions was selectively exploited to demonise the native Irish for propagandist purposes. For example, Sir John Temple’s Irish Rebellion maintained that 154,000 Protestant settlers had been massacred, yet this figure was based on only one out of more than 8,000 depositions. The resultant image of the savage Irish was comparable to depictions of Indigenous populations in the Americas and, in both cases, used to prove that conquest and the violent subjugation of indigenous populations was justified. The message being propagated was that Englishmen had a divine duty to civilise and convert distant heathens. And, in order to lure more settlers and investment for these civilising missions, it was also noted that this came with the rather convenient benefit of harnessing economic resources because of the perception that indigenous populations had failed to capitalise on them.

Comparing representations of ethnic and religious violence in the Americas and the Thirty Years’ War, Darcy points out that there was nothing remarkably unique about Irish violence or its depictions. Similar accounts of religiously motivated massacres and extreme brutality against women and children were typically present in propagandist accounts of other colonial uprisings and European wars. The purpose of all these narratives was to sensationalise and shock and, as Darcy convincingly illustrates, accounts of 1641 evoked the...