Abstract
Anti-Catholicism was, in the words of one historian, the “single most salient feature” in the mindset of eighteenth-century Ireland’s Anglican ruling class. This chapter traces one aspect of its expression in Ireland’s Anglophone literary culture. Throughout the period discussed in this chapter, Anti-Catholicism was routinely and repeatedly articulated through opposition to “slavery.” From William King’s denunciation in 1691 of the “Slavery and Destruction designed against the Kingdom and Protestants of Ireland” by James II to Jonathan Swift’s description of the country as a “land of slaves” in 1727, the association was constant. Concentrating on the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Irish House of Lords’ “Report on the State of Popery” in 1731, this chapter examines what exactly was meant by “slavery” in such contexts and why it was rhetorically and conceptually intertwined with Catholicism. The chapter uses a range of literary, political and philosophical texts to trace an interrelationship which, while persistent, was unstable and ever-evolving.
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Notes
- 1.
Clement Fatovic, “The Anti-Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom in English Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (2005): 39–40.
- 2.
See S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 149–158, 228; David Hayton and Adam Rounce, “Introduction,” Irish Political Writings after 1725, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, 17 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008–), XIV (2018), lix.
- 3.
Journals of the House of Lords [Ireland], 8 vols (Dublin: William Sleater, 1779–1800), III, 199-200; see also Anon., Scheme of the Proportions Which the Protestants of Ireland May Probably Bear to the Papists (Dublin, n. pub, 1732).
- 4.
Anon., A Proposal Humbly Offer’d to the P[arliamen]t for the More Effectual Preventing the Further Growth of Popery (Dublin, [S. Powell]; repr. London: J. Roberts, 1731), 4.
- 5.
Edward Synge to William Wake, 19 November 1719, quoted in Paddy McNally, “William King, Patriotism and the “National Question,” in Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context 1688–1729, ed. Christopher J. Fauske (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 55.
- 6.
William Nicolson to William Wake, 24 June 1718, quoted in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962–1983), III, 117.
- 7.
Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power, 251, quoting Richard Cox to Edward Southwell, 24 October 1706.
- 8.
The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis et al., 14 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939–1968), II, 120.
- 9.
King to the Bishop of Lincoln,19 July 1715, quoted in D. George Boyce, “The Road to Wood’s Halfpence and Beyond: William King, Jonathan Swift and the Defence of the National Church, 1689–1724,” in Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. D. G. Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 89.
- 10.
The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins (New York: Norton, 2010), 242.
- 11.
Swift to Charles Ford, 4 April 1720, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–1965), II, 342.
- 12.
Quoted in Oliver Ferguson, Jonathan Swift and Ireland (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 53.
- 13.
“An act for better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland upon the crown of Great Britain,” accessed online at “The Statutes Project,” 31 July 2019, http://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/eighteenth-century/1719-6-george-1-5-irish-dependency-act/.
- 14.
King to Francis Annesley, 28 October 1721, TCD MS 750/7, 20.
- 15.
William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (Dublin: Joseph Ray, 1698), 109.
- 16.
Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1625–1865 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 25.
- 17.
See Rodgers’s discussion of Irish slave ownership in Barbados and Montserrat in the seventeenth century (Ireland, Slavery chap. 2, 24–54).
- 18.
Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2009), 275.
- 19.
OED, “villain,” “villein,” “churl.” In Old English, the last of these words denoted a member of the “lowest rank of freemen” but came after the Norman conquest to denote “a tenant in pure villeinage, a serf, a bondman.”
- 20.
Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, book 3, chap. 3 and 5. Accessed online at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Benveniste.Indo-European_Language_and_Society.1973 (accessed July 16, 2019).
- 21.
Swift, Essential Writings, 278, 286.
- 22.
William King, “Quædam Vitæ Meæ Insigniora,” in A Great Archbishop of Dublin, ed. Charles Simeon King (London: Longmans, Green, 1906), 25, 28.
- 23.
William King, The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the Late King James’s Government, fourth edition (London: Samuel Roycroft, 1691), 14, 5. Subsequent references in main text.
- 24.
Joseph Richardson, “Archbishop William King (1650–1729): ‘Church Tory and State Whig’?” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 15 (2000): 69.
- 25.
“On Barbarous Denominations in Ireland,” Cambridge Works of Jonathan Swift, II, ed. Valerie Rumbold (2013), 243–255.
- 26.
Vincent Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017), 38.
- 27.
Morley, The Popular Mind, 80.
- 28.
Knud J. V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 53–55; Jens Chr. V. Johansen, “Absolutism and the ‘rule of law’ in Denmark, 1660–c. 1750,” The Journal of Legal History 27 (2006): 158–159.
- 29.
Robert Molesworth, An Account of Denmark (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 2011), 70. Subsequent references in main text.
- 30.
Clíona Ó Gallchoir, “‘Whole Swarms of Bastards’: A Modest Proposal, the Discourse of Economic Improvement and Protestant Masculinity in Ireland, 1720–38,” in Ireland and Masculinities in History, ed. Rebeca Anne Barr, Sean Brady and Jane McGaughey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 55.
- 31.
Swift, Cambridge Works XIV, 154.
- 32.
David Clare, “Why did Farquhar’s Work Turn Sectarian after The Constant Couple?” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 103 (2014): 164.
- 33.
George Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, ed. Ann Blake (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 83, IV.i.193–195. Subsequent references in main text.
- 34.
David Roberts, George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 114.
- 35.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 284.
- 36.
Swift, Essential Writings, 248.
- 37.
John Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay (New York: Routledge, 2003), 42.
- 38.
Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. Abigail Williams, Cambridge Works of Jonathan Swift, IX (2013), 322, 319.
- 39.
Richardson, 45.
- 40.
Swift, Prose Works, III, 240, xviii, 177.
- 41.
Swift, Essential Writings, 588–589.
- 42.
Swift, Cambridge Works XIV, 154. Subsequent reference in main text.
- 43.
Frank Lestringant, “Travels in Eucharistia: Formosa and Ireland from George Psalmanaazaar to Jonathan Swift,” Yale French Studies 86 (1994): 123, 135.
- 44.
Richardson, Slavery, 129–134, 129.
- 45.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 89.
- 46.
“Jacob Rees-Mogg Says UK Will Turn Into a ‘slave state’,” https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/13/jacob-rees-mogg-says-uk-will-turn-into-a-slave-state-with-the-brexit-agreement-8136610/?ito=cbshare; “Conclusions of the European Council Meeting of 20 and 21 June 2019 (debate),” http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/CRE-9-2019-07-04-ITM-005_EN.html (both accessed August 23, 2019).
- 47.
Bryan Fanning, “Slaves to a Myth,” Dublin Review of Books 94, November 2017, https://www.drb.ie/essays/slaves-to-a-myth, Liam Hogan, “All of My Work on the ‘Irish slaves’ meme, (2015–19),” https://medium.com/@Limerick1914/all-of-my-work-on-the-irish-slaves-meme-2015-16-4965e445802a (both accessed August 23, 2019).
Select Reading
Connolly, S. J. Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Fatovic, Clement. “The Anti-Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom in English Political Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (2005): 37–58.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
McBride, Ian. Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2009.
Morley, Vincent. The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Cork: Cork University Press, 2017.
Richardson, John. Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1625–1865. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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Ward, J. (2020). Anti-Catholicism and the Rhetoric of Slavery in Irish Writing, c. 1690–1730. In: Gheeraert-Graffeuille, C., Vaughan, G. (eds) Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600–2000. Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42882-2_12
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