Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Prelude: Survivors and Victims
- 1 Introduction: Irish Relief and British Problems
- 2 Distress and Great Necessity: The Experience of Survival in 1641
- 3 The Hand of God and the Works of Man: Narrations of Survival
- 4 Imagining the Rebellion: Atrocity, Anti-Popery, and the Tracts of 1641
- 5 ‘A World of Misery’: The International Significance of the 1641 Rebellion
- 6 Many Distressed Irish: Refugees and the Problem of Local Order
- 7 Local Charity: Contributions to the Irish Cause
- 8 Hard and Lamentable Decisions: The Distribution and Decline of Irish Relief
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: Irish Relief and British Problems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Prelude: Survivors and Victims
- 1 Introduction: Irish Relief and British Problems
- 2 Distress and Great Necessity: The Experience of Survival in 1641
- 3 The Hand of God and the Works of Man: Narrations of Survival
- 4 Imagining the Rebellion: Atrocity, Anti-Popery, and the Tracts of 1641
- 5 ‘A World of Misery’: The International Significance of the 1641 Rebellion
- 6 Many Distressed Irish: Refugees and the Problem of Local Order
- 7 Local Charity: Contributions to the Irish Cause
- 8 Hard and Lamentable Decisions: The Distribution and Decline of Irish Relief
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
On 25 October 1641, the Lord Justices and Council of Ireland penned the first in a long series of frantic letters about the Irish rebellion to correspondents in England. Their news was dire, reporting ‘a most disloyal and detestable conspiracy intended by some evil affected Irish papists’. The Lord Justices at the time, Sir William Parsons and Sir John Borlase, interpreted the rising unambiguously, presenting it as a Catholic rebellion. When their letters reached Whitehall and Westminster on 1 November, they generated considerable anxiety and distress. Subsequent days saw the arrival of evermore terrifying news from Ireland. On 5 November – the anniversary of Guy Fawkes's plot to blow up the king and parliament and a date obviously resonant with fears of popish plots – their letters from Dublin warned that
all the Protestants in the kingdom, were never in so great danger to be lost as at this instant, no age having produced in this kingdom an example of so much mischief done in so short a time as now we find acted here … by killing and destroying so many English and Protestants in several parts, by robbing and spoiling of them and many thousands more … and all their wickedness acted against the English and Protestants with so much inhumanity and cruelty as cannot be imagined from Christians even towards infidels.
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- Information
- England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion , pp. 9 - 31Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009