The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory

3. “Historical Facts” and “Stupendous Falsehoods”: An Irish Insurrection at the Limits of Scholarship, c. 1865– c. 1965

115 3 “Historical Facts” and “Stupendous Falsehoods” An Irish Insurrection at the Limits of Scholarship, c. 1865–c. 1965 Eminent Victorians? Toward the end of the nineteenth century, in the twilight of his life, the renowned Dublin lawyer John Patrick Prendergast reflected on the times in which he had lived and wrote a memoir that, among other things, contained an account of what he termed his “literary work and experiences.” The memoir marked a new departure for him, as his “literary work” had until then been historical in nature. His interest in Irish history had originally been prompted by his involvement in a chancery case in the 1840s that had touched on aspects of the eighteenth-century penal laws. To satisfy his burgeoning curiosity he began to dig through the copious pamphlet holdings of the library of King’s Inns and slowly began, as he put it, to “perceive the importance of the land settlement” of the 1650s.1 Since nobody seemed to know anything about this particular subject, by September 1848 Prendergast was poring over the Commonwealth documents held in Dublin Castle, “and here I found the record of a nation’s woes.”2 His enthusiasm intensified as he “ransacked other depositories.”3 Through the opportunities provided by his travels on the legal circuit and through various connections and acquaintances, he accumulated more and 116 “Historical Facts” and “Stupendous Falsehoods” more material until he eventually concluded that “all the information that could be hoped for had now been obtained; and if not brought forth, the subject might sleep for another period as long as the last.” Furthermore, he remarked, “much of it had been collected with the view of being able some time or other to treat the subject of the settlement of landed property in Ireland historically considered before the bar of Ireland.”4 This is what Prendergast eventually did; the fruit of his labors was the publication in 1865 of The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. Prendergast is not easily pigeonholed. A member of the Church of Ireland (an ancestor conformed in the eighteenth century) who in later life was vehemently opposed to Home Rule, he was nonetheless a nationalist whose experience as the administrator of the Clifden estates made him a strong proponent of tenant right. Prendergast’s opinions on contemporary events, however, were by no means divorced from his scholarly preoccupations; rather, the two went hand in hand, and this could be said for virtually all who sought to engage with the Irish past amid the tumultuous upheavals of the later nineteenth century. The book that established Prendergast’s scholarly credentials corresponded to a Catholic interpretation of Irish history. Indeed, the composition of The Cromwellian Settlement was prompted by contemporary concerns, for the eponymous settlement, having allegedly been designed “rather to extinguish a nation than to suppress a religion,”5 was quite simply “the foundation of the present settlement of Ireland.”6 To reach this point Prendergast had some preliminary ground to cover, and within that compass 1641 loomed large. The preface to The Cromwellian Settlement stated that it was “needless here to recapitulate the long-continued injuries and insults by which the ancient English of Ireland were forced into the same ranks with the Irish in defence of the king’s cause in 1641.”7 Having thus declared his intention, Prendergast went on to do the opposite. His actual account of 1641 (a necessary prelude to his fuller treatment of the land settlement) began by disputing the argument that the rebellion had been preceded by four decades of harmony.8 Prendergast’s sympathy with those who were subsequently dispossessed was evident in such statements as the following: “There was peace, but it was the peace of despair because there remained no hope except in arms, and their arms were taken from them.”9 The logical outcome of this situation came on 23 October 1641, when “the English power was overthrown in three-fourths of Ireland in a night.”10 Prendergast then refuted the notion of Catholic atrocities: “It has been represented that there was a general massacre surpassing the horrors of the Sicilian Vespers, the Parisian Nuptials, and Matins of the Valtelline, but nothing is more false . . . ; The Irish, to use the words of an old divine, have ever “Historical Facts” and “Stupendous Falsehoods” 117 lacked gall to supply a wholesome animosity to the eternal enemies and revilers of their name and nation...