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Massacres and myths 21 October 2007
 
 

Eyewitness accounts of the bloody 17th century rebellion that drew the battle lines for Ireland's Catholic-Protestant divide are to be made publicly available for the first time by a Cambridge University-led team of scholars.


Researchers will mark Tuesday's (October 23) anniversary of the 1641 Irish Catholic uprising with the launch of a project to transcribe and digitise 3,400 testimonies by those who lived through the alleged “massacres” 366 years ago.

The huge stockpile of evidence, housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, has never been comprehensively analysed, but could hold the key to providing an accurate account of the brutal events that triggered centuries of sectarian divide.

What actually occurred is the subject of one of the most bitter controversies in Irish history. Some argue that an attempted bloodless rebellion by Catholics quickly spiralled out of control. Others claim that thousands of Protestants were deliberately massacred.

The decade of savage warfare that followed is so deeply etched into the national consciousness that images of the supposed “massacre” are still used on banners by the Orange Order to this day.

But the true course of events has never been fully understood. By making the 19,000 pages of depositions and other documents widely available, the project team – which includes researchers from Cambridge and Aberdeen Universities and Trinity College, Dublin – hopes to shed light on one of the darkest moments in Ireland's troubled past.

The three-year project is the most ambitious joint British-Irish collaboration in the humanities ever undertaken and is being supported with €1million of funding from research councils on both sides of the Irish Sea.

“Propagandists, politicians and historians have all exploited the depositions at different times,” Professor John Morrill, from the University of Cambridge, who will chair the research team, said.

“The 1641 massacres have played a key role in creating and sustaining a collective Protestant and British identity in Ulster. Meanwhile in England, the rebellion and subsequent brutal conquest and subjugation by Oliver Cromwell and his colleagues has been largely airbrushed out of the collective memory.

“As G. K. Chesterton wrote a century ago, the problem with the English conquest of Ireland in the 17th century is that the Irish cannot forget it and the English cannot remember it – but we still don't know what exactly happened.”

The years before the 1641 rebellion witnessed a build-up of grudges between the older Catholic population of Ireland and a new generation of Protestant settlers. The Catholic Irish upper classes particularly wanted equal recognition under their Protestant English rulers, who denied them the right to hold offices of state or serve in the military.

England was meanwhile on the brink of its own civil war. Events there – particularly plans by King Charles I to raise an Irish army to suppress a rebellion in Scotland – led to the Scots and English Parliamentarians publicly proposing to invade Ireland to subdue Catholicism. Frightened by this, a group of Catholic Irish gentry formulated a plan to seize Dublin and other towns in the name of the King.

The Catholics hoped then to force Charles to accept their demands. Instead, they were only partially successful, leading to ethnic hatred and violence, and thousands of deaths on either side.

The depositions at Trinity College Library, Dublin, tell the stories of thousands of Protestant men and women of all classes. They were collected by government-appointed commissioners and provide the chief evidence for the sharply-disputed claim that the rebellion began with a massacre of Protestant settlers. The library acquired the documents in 1741, but their poor condition enabled only restricted access and made them very difficult to read.

Now researchers will transcribe and digitise all 3,400 depositions, examinations and associated materials. The resulting transcripts and digitised originals will be available online for academics and the general public. They will also be published in book form.

Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith's Professor of Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, said: “This body of material, unparalleled elsewhere in early modern Europe, provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the history of 17th century Ireland, England and Scotland.

“By making it easily accessible to a wide audience it will help all traditions in Ireland and in Britain reach a better understanding of their own history.”

The project has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Library of Trinity College Dublin.

For further information, please contact the University of Cambridge Office of Communications on 01223 332300

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