Ireland 1600-1700: Religion, Land and Nation

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Following the defeat of the indigenous Irish aristocracy in 1603 and the departure of their natural leaders in 1607 King James I of Great Britain and Ireland found that he had something of a clean sheet in the smaller kingdom, which seemed open to exploitation and short-term demands. After a period of peace, negotiation and domination, simmering sectarian tensions in Ireland boiled over in 1641 playing a central part in the convulsion in both Britain and Ireland known as the Civil War. The resulting cocktail of new constitutional ideas, religious experiments and virulent sectarianism that made Ireland into a chaotic battlefield on which the British King and his Royalist supporters, the English Parliament, the Covenanting Scots, the Confederate Irish (split between Old English and Gaelic-Irish factions) and the Army of the English Commonwealth all met each other to assert pre-eminence . Oliver Cromwell's lieutenants set the foundations of a new order of expropriation and colonisation in Ireland which, despite occasional indications to the contrary, became more and more entrenched. After the fall of the Catholic King, James II of England, the Protestant elite in Ireland were raised into the ascendancy and imposed a sectarian society on the country which established the framework out of which modern Ireland emerged.