Protestant Ascendancy

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The Protestant Ascendancy refers to the political, economic, and social domination of Ireland by the great landowners, establishment clergy, and professionals, all members of the Established Church (Church of Ireland/Church of England, both State Churches) during the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. The term can be misleading, however, because Presbyterians and other Protestant denominations were often excluded along with Catholics.

Background

The gradual dispossession of several hundred native landowners in Ireland with large holdings took place in various stages from the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary and her Protestant sister Elizabeth I. Unsuccessful revolts against English rule in 1595-1603 and 1641-1653 and then the 1689-91 Williamite Wars caused much Irish land to be confiscated by the Crown, which then was sold to people who were thought loyal, most of whom were English and Protestant. English soldiers and traders became the new ruling class and its richer members were elevated to the Irish House of Lords and controlled the Irish House of Commons (see Plantations of Ireland).

This process was facilitated and formalized in the legal system after 1691 by the passing of various Penal Laws, which discriminated against the richer families of the majority Catholic population, and the non-conforming ("Dissenter") Protestant denominations such as Presbyterians, when they

had revolted against the government and
did not swear allegiance to the king.

The son of James II, the Old Pretender, was recognised by the Holy See as the legitimate king of Britain and Ireland until his death in 1766, and Catholics were obliged to support him. This provided a further political excuse for the new laws. Among the discriminations now faced by Catholics and Dissenters under the Penal Laws were:

Exclusion of Catholics from most public offices (since 1607), Presbyterians were also barred from public office from 1707.
Ban on intermarriage with Protestants; repealed 1778
Presbyterian marriages were not legally recognised by the state
Catholics barred from holding firearms or serving in the armed forces (rescinded by Militia Act of 1793)
Bar from membership in either the Parliament of Ireland or the Parliament of Great Britain from 1652; rescinded 1662-1691; renewed 1691-1829.
Disenfranchising Act 1728, exclusion from voting until 1793;
Exclusion from the legal professions and the judiciary; repealed (respectively) 1793 and 1829.
Education Act 1695 - ban on foreign education; repealed 1782.
Bar to Catholics entering Trinity College Dublin; repealed 1793.
On a death by a Catholic, a legatee could benefit by conversion to the Church of Ireland;
Popery Act- Catholic inheritances of land were to be equally subdivided between all an owner's sons.
Ban on converting from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism
Ban on Catholics buying land under a lease of more than 31 years; repealed 1778.
Ban on custody of orphans being granted to Catholics
Ban on Catholics inheriting Protestant land
Prohibition on Catholics owning a horse valued at over £5 (in order to keep horses suitable for military activity out of the majority's hands)
Roman Catholic lay priests had to register to preach under the Registration Act 1704, but seminary priests and Bishops were not able to do so until the 1770s.
When allowed, new Catholic churches were to be built from wood, not stone, and away from main roads.
'No person of the popish religion shall publicly or in private houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning within this realm'. Repealed in 1782.

As a result, political, legal, and economic power resided with the Ascendancy to the extent that by the mid-eighteenth century, 95% of the land of Ireland was calculated to be under Protestant control. A small amount of this land belonged to Catholic landlords who had converted to the state religion.

Act of Union

The confidence of the Ascendancy was manifested towards the end of the 18th century by its adoption of a nationalist Irish, though still exclusively Protestant, identity, and the formation in 1760 of Henry Grattan's Patriot Party. The formation of the Irish Volunteers to defend Ireland from French invasion during the American Revolution effectively gave Grattan a military force, and he was able to force Britain to concede limited independence to the Ascendancy.

The parliament repealed most of the Penal Laws in 1771-1793 but did not abolish them, and, following the forced recall of the liberal Lord Fitzwilliam in 1795 by conservatives, it was effectively abandoned as a vehicle for change by liberal elements who began to plan for armed rebellion. The resulting rebellion was crushed with vicious brutality; the Act of Union of 1801 was passed partly in response to a perception that the bloodshed was provoked by the misrule of the Ascendancy, and partly from the expense involved.

In the opinion of most historians, the Ascendancy ended with the closing of the Dublin parliament in 1801, but it became a convenient expression to denote areas of life where Church of Ireland members still had unique legal advantages, such as sitting in the London parliament (until 1829) or the tithe support for their church which was levied on most landowners.

Decline

The abolition of the Irish parliament was followed by economic decline in Ireland, and widespread emigration from among the ruling class to the new centre of power in London which led to the phenomenon of the absentee landlord. The eventual arrival of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 meant that the Ascendancy now faced competition from prosperous Catholics in parliament and the various professions. From 1840 corporations running towns and cities in Ireland became more democratically elected; previously they were dominated by guild members who were often Protestant.

The festering sense of native grievance was magnified by the horrors of the Irish Famine of 1845-52, with many of the Ascendancy perceived as absentee landlords shipping food overseas, protected by the British establishment, while much of the population starved. However, the Encumbered Estates Act of 1848 was passed to allow landlords to sell mortgaged land; many went bankrupt as their tenants could not pay any rent due to the famine.

As anti-Protestant Irish Catholic groups perceived a lack of support for the Ascendancy from the central government, open and secret societies were organized to destroy the Protestant ruling class. These societies agitated to end the final legal privileges of Protestants in the city corporations and to initiate civil insurrection in the countryside by attacking Protestant landowners, killing rent-collectors, ambushing peace-officers, etc. The result was that the economic position of many landowners worsened in the face of violence and lack of rent income. With Protestants now unable to effectively communicate with local courts to maintain the peace and record elections, the mass of Catholic tenants coerced into voting for Irish Republican Brotherhood endorsed candidates, the corporations predominantly in the hands of Catholics, a large number of seats in the in the Irish House of Commons passed to Catholic and Irish nationalist movement. As a consequence, the remnants of the Ascendancy were gradually displaced during the 19th and early 20th centuries through impoverishment, bankruptcy, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869, and finally the Irish Land Acts, which legally allowed the squatting tenants to buy their land. Even with the Irish Land Acts, the Catholic tenants primarily refused to pay for their purchase and the British government was forced to buy out the Ascendancy directly.

With the Protestant yeoman class now driven out by the newly rising "Catholic Ascendancy", the Protestant lords were left isolated by a generally hostile Catholic population. The final phase of the decline of the Ascendancy occurred during the Anglo-Irish War, when many of the remaining Protestant landlords were either assassinated and/or had their country homes burned down by the Irish Republican Army. Nearly 300 stately homes of the old landed class were burned down, hundreds of Protestant and Catholic tenants who remained loyal to the lords were murdered, and dozens of Protestant landlords were assassinated. The campaign spread to the cities and was stepped up by the Anti-Treaty IRA during the subsequent Irish Civil War (1922-23), who identified the remaining wealthy and influential Protestants as collaborators with the Parliament in London. Compensation was paid for this destruction by the new Irish Free State leading to another 250,000 Protestants to leave in the years before World War Two.

Long before the independence of most of Ireland in 1922, the Ascendancy had lost real political influence and those who remained comprised a small, isolated, landed minority in their own land. By now their involvement had passed to literary matters, with Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats starting the Celtic Revival and followed by authors such as Hubert Butler.

Protestant Ascendancy

Background

Act of Union

Decline

See also