Ireland's Protestants

A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants 1649-1770. Toby Barnard. Yale University Press. [pounds sterling]25.00. 489 pages. ISBN 0-300-09669-0.

By the mid-eighteenth century there were about 400,000 Protestants in Ireland of which about 20,000 were either freeholders of land or freemen in the towns. Toby Barnard, author of Cromwellian Ireland and much else, is here concerned with the remaining 380,000. To manage this awesome task (and he does manage it magisterially) he organised them into nine categories with the inevitable overlap: Peers, a brief chapter; the quality; the clergy; professions; office holders; agents; soldiers and sailors; the 'middle station'; and 'the lower people'. This ranking of orders also enabled the author to bring together many of his own specialised articles and monographs, not to mention the extraordinarily industrious scholarship evident in 132 pages of bibliographical notes. It is now clear that Protestants were in every sector and level of Irish society which is not always appreciated in general histories of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Ireland. But it did not follow that Protestant Ireland became a replica of England; indeed, much of rural Ireland lacked Protestants. Excellent maps and clear tables illustrate this.

Who were 'the quality'? Income is a rough guide, and by the mid-eighteenth century [pounds sterling]1000 to [pounds sterling]2000 a year might give a certain gentility, but in this chapter Dr Barnard takes the reader through the subtleties of what constituted Irish gentility: public office, education, ancient lineage and those who had lost caste and held onto gentility by repute rather than by reality. As the author so charmingly asserts, 'The clergy, the lawyers, military and naval officers, patentee officers and other professionals inflated the quality of Protestant Ireland'.

The present volume owes a nod to the premier anatomist of Ireland, William Petty, but has none of Petty's wilder speculative notions or dodgy statistics. As the author states in a modest Preface: 'My interest is unashamedly in the people who lived in a particular place at a specific time', an aim that belies his fine analysis of how Irish Protestants maintained a precarious ascendancy over the disposed Catholic majority. The chapter on 'Office and Office-holders' strikes this reader by its comparisons with aspects of contemporary Ireland: eminent people kept offices in the families which their ancestors acquired; many did better by going to law than by farming their lands; office jobbing, corruption and the mushrooming of bureaucracy were seventeenth and eighteenth-century governmental phenomena that can easily be paralleled today but they seemed to do it with more style then than now.

The reader will meet a veritable galaxy of rakes, atheistic clergy, philanthropic snobs, scholars, apothecaries and antiquarians in this elegant, witty, informative and, in true Horatian style, entertaining book. The author calls it a sketch and promises a companion volume to 'probe the minds, values and material worlds of the Irish Protestants', perhaps in the Annales tradition? Perhaps, then we shall hear more of their intellectual and antiquarian legacy to modern Ireland to enrich our understanding further.

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