From Joe Sturge's records, with many thanks . .
[undated but must be after 1878]“Nothing can surpass the vigour and energy with which this peasantry of African descent labour on these holdings of their own.
. . The first lime orchards were planted in 1852 by Mr Burke, an enterprising planter then living on the island, afterwards passing into the possession of the Sturge Montserrat Company, and encountering various difficulties . . They were generally planted 15 feet apart.
. . No lovlier sight could be seen than these orchards when the trees are laden with their bright fruit, the air being pervaded with the fragrance of the blossom.
. . A visitor to the island says “A more picturesque or delightful spot is not often to be found. Above are the thickly wooded hills, broken by deeply ridged gorges in which the tree fern, banana and mountain palm flourish. In the ravines are many large trees with their singular red pods containing the cocoa bean, high trees covered with creepers, and fern trees 40 feet high. Below is the broad expanse of sea, at one time all aglow with brilliant sunlight, or the glorious glow of the setting sun. As the heat passes away, the distant isles light up, pink and purple. The sun nears the horizon, and gives a sudden dart out of sight.”
. . The island has been described as the black man’s Paradise.
. . A drive through the lime plantations to Olveston could not soon be forgotten, when, as in 1878, they were bearing. The air perfumed with the scent of fruit and leaf, the sea a sheet of blue, the land iridescent with sun and colour – on to Harris village, perched on a lofty summit. The cultivated fields, the trees laden with breadfruit, mangoes and bananas, the wide stretch of land and sea with Antigua on the horizon. The fruits: shaddock, pineapple, sugar apple, guava, cocoanut, sapodilla [sic], custard apple, banana, soursop, may not, to English taste, appear as tempting as our own, but are some of them good.
In 1873, when Mrs JE Sturge made acquaintance with M, communication with England was only fortnightly. No steamer landed mails except at St Kitts, and from there they were brought by a small schooner. When the trade wind dropped, this vessel could be seen becalmed, vainly tacking over the still, blue water. Sometimes a rowboat was put off to bring the letters ashore to impatient colonists. Postage at that date was 1/- per letter. The mail was often heavy. It was conveyed in a sack up the long steep hill to Olveston House and poured out on the floor to be opened and digested by degrees. . ”
Monday 6 August 2007
Some early Montserrat Company reports
These extracts come from records kept by JE Sturge - and many thanks to him . .
[Memorandum for the guidance of Mr Hamilton as he went out to his new post. Birmingham. Feb 8 1887. Morality came first on the list. Some period comments about keeping an eye on negroes. Request to diversify and develop, including into invalid recuperation:]
“The Directors wish Mr Hamilton in his management of their estates and business to have special regard to the maintenance of a high standard of morality among the officers of the Company and also to the improvement and civilisation of the negro work people and tenants. They do not wish to retain in their service any white Overseer who is guilty of dishonesty, immorality or of intoxication.
With regard to the coloured people, the Directors wish that in selecting Overseers and in choosing tenants for the cottages persons of moral life and respectable character should always be chosen, and overcrowding of the houses should be strictly forbidden.”
Could put more here
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes 1888 report from son Joseph:]
“In Montserrat the cottages have distinctly improved and I am told on very good authority that the people take better care of their children than formerly. I do not believe that the Montserrat peasant need envy any in the world as to his material position. His money wages are small and have diminished but he has a decent house, a garden and provision ground, a horse to ride, a cow, sheep, pigs and fowls, so that even if work fails, he is in no danger of starvation. The unfortunate result is that he is satisfied to vegetate having no ambition that is not easily satisfied and no idea that there is a greater world beyond the narrow limits in which he lives.”
“Report of J Sturge’s [VII: son of famous one] visit to Montserrat
March 4th to 26th 1891
Drought . . There was a little rain in January but February and March have been almost rainless and now cattle are dying and people are reduced to great straits for ground provisions.
Blight. Hamilton might well say that we had not appreciated the extent to which the blights have been spreading latterly. The lime orchards at Olveston are pretty much destroyed
. . [more on various possibilities] . . There is a very capital opening just now in Montserrat for taking in American boarders for the winter months. They are coming down in crowds, 70 on one steamer and 26 on another called at Montserrat while I was there. The Leewards Islands Government is giving a heavy guarantee for the establishment of hotels on Antigua and St Kitts. Montserrat is a far more attractive island and I have suggested to James Hollings that if without incurring any fresh expenses he liked to take boarders at Richmond from Dec to April next he could almost certainly make far more than the rent we should charge him for the year . .
A Telephone has proved a great success in Antigua and it is in consideration whether one should be established in Montserrat . .
The increase in leprosy in Montserrat and the absence of means for dealing with it are serious evils to which I strongly called the Governors attention.
The cost of my journey for Kew, New York, Washington, Florida, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and 3 weeks in Montserrat (78 days) was £102 . 9 . 0”
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[“In 1894 disease began to attack the limes. In a report on O Garra’s Estate in that year, Mr Henry DeCourcey Hamilton wrote:”]
I found three trees dying from a kind of canker just above the roots, so that when the trees were pulled down they broke off, I have never noticed this disease before in the lime trees, but it almost exactly resembles the canker that destroyed thousands of acres of cinchona in Ceylon.”
Elberton Estate
Details of Wilkins valuation 30 Sep 1895
[list and values]
Chattels on Elberton Estate June 30 1899
[one side foolscap list no values – surprisingly few: 2 sieves, 1 skimmer, 1 ladle, 1 thermometer, 4 citrometers, 2 copper 1 gallon measures, 1 gauging rod, 4 hurricane lanterns, 1 juice pump etc etc]
[Further scraps from 7 Aug and 1 Oct 1899 valuations of various machines and buildings]
“Report on a visit to Montserrat September 1899 [Joseph Sturge]
. . I met by appointment a few of the coloured people in order to point out to them that the animosity which has lately been shown towards the whites may help to decide the company against re-establishing its plantations.
. . It is difficult to guage the exact extent of the destruction of the lime orchards. At O Garas, large areas of orchards are blown clean away, into the ravines or out to sea. At the Grove and ILes Bay where the soil is stiffer, the roots of the trees are mostly broken off about a foot from the stem . . In the stiffest soil of all, some of the trunks are broken off above ground and these will doubtless shoot and bear again in a few years. . . estimate is that, against 24,000 barrels last crop, the surviving trees may yield 1000 barrels in 1900 . . eventually up to 5000 barrrels and that any further increase would have to come from fresh planting . . The beautiful nutmeg trees, some of them 20 feet high and just giving a profitable return, are all totally destroyed, and so is the vanilla. The cocoa trees are all wrecked . . Elberton estate house totally destroyed and blown clean away [and so it went on, including future prospects and suggestions]
“Interim report 1903 [Joseph Sturge VII 1847-1934]
Absent 4 March 9 May. 19 days Montserrat 3 New York 1 each Halifax, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington
On approaching the Montserrat coast a strong and offensive sulphurous smell reminds you that the subterranean forces are more active than they used to be. On the 22nd of March the explosions in St Vincent and Martinique were heard, and I myself saw the great clouds of volcanic dust therefrom. It seems to be the feeling on Montserrat that the worst earthquake shocks there were more terrifying than the hurricane of 1899.
In revisiting the orchards after an interval of two years, one sees a very satisfactory growth in most places . . There is blight everywhere; on every tree and almost every fruit, but not at present to a very harmful result. In looking back on the large sums we have spent on spraying and fumigating Driver says that he believes it did more harm than good . . [Bellars / Bellans? Probably Bellas from another source] is very strong on cultivation he says that to spray or fumigate blighted lime trees until you have first thoroughly cultivated the land they grow in is like treating a typhoid patient without removing the bad drains which caused the attack.
This however is at variance with Hamilton’s observations that blighted lime trees recovered when the bush was allowed to grow up around them.
. . With regard to new cultures, I went carefully into the question of pine growing which Hamilton now suggests. I find that the practical difficulty is that the steamers come only fortnightly and that in the season a great deal of fruit that was unfit for shipment by one mail would be overripe before the next [remember tomatoes].
Very great interest has been aroused in the West Indies in the revival of the cotton cultivation which was given up after the American War because sugar was so much more lucrative. Conditions have now totally changed. The cotton seed which was then a waste product has become only second in importance to the lint. This enormous increase of the demand for cotton has made Lancashire anxious for its supplies. And £25,000 has been raised there to stimulate production in the West Indies and elsewhere. Sandall and Wades [?] the only remaining sugar planters on Montserrat have put 100 acres into cotton in our island and a larger area in St Kitts. The first crop has been gathered but not sold; but the results appear to satisfy their local agent. As they will be willing to gin and bale an experimental crop from us, I have arranged to plant about 25 acres at the North as an experiment. This will not I think risk more than £50 and is not likely to result in much loss. If the directors think well to make a really serious experiment we will not I think be too late to arrange to do so when I come home.”
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes Report to the Imperial Commissioner of Agriculture, 1905, Hon – later Sir Francis Watts:]
“. . During the past twenty years, sugar has been a decadent industry in Montserrat . . The traditions of Montserrat are based on sugar and its peasantry still adhere to its cultivation in preference to anything else”
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes 17 Nov, 1906 Joseph Sturge wrote to Alexander Duncan who had applied for and was granted the job of Assistant Manager in Montserrat:]
If you were to hit a workman in the West Indies you would soon find yourself before the Magistrate; and the best and most successful managers even avoid fines and trust to tact and reasoning . . When I have watched Mr Bellas [Duncan’s predecessor] paying wages in Montserrat, I have been struck by the extraordinary patience he showed in explaining over and over again to a man anything in the reckoning which he did not quite understand thinking it better to keep a hundred people waiting five minutes than let one man go away with a sense of injustice; and it was to this fairness and patience that he owed his success with the people”
1909 Friends Tract: Joseph Sturge. The Christian Merchant.
Friends Ancient and Modern No 12
“’During the short period of two years,’ wrote Rev JF Phillippo, from the West Indies ’60,000 apprenctices received in the aggregate one quarter of a million of lashes and 50,000 other punishments with the tread-wheel, the chain gangs and other means of legal torture ; so that, instead of a diminution, there was a frightful addition to the miseries of the negro population’
. . The Government took no public action, but privately influenced the colonial legislatures, so that they did away with the apprenticeship system by Acts of their own . . “
1911 coloured map – red is S estates – very pretty – prob on Birmingham website.
[Lots of MCo Annual reports: at least 1917 to 1954 and 1956 – which latter is very depressing reading for both limes and cotton.]
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[From / related to annual report 1917:]
“The difficulty in obtaining freight packages and, still more, the scarcity of labour have proved serious problems during the year. The exodus from Montserrat has now greatly reduced the working population.”
[Then Dora goes on:] The ‘exodus’ spoken of here was to the United States mainly.
[Dora doc: Appendix 1: Letter to JS on his visit in 1922]
[Letter from Mr Shand, Montserrat. 29 Aug 1924:
“I cabled you today as follows: ‘Severe hurricane twenty two lives lost ninety per cent cotton and lime crops destroyed one thousand pounds damage building. All well.’
I do not think I have overestimated the destruction and damage . .
“TA Twyman’s Report on visit to USA and Montserrat. September 1924 – January 1925 [post 1924 hurricane.
Much on the business and botany. Thomas Twyman was MD after JS7]
I am very glad indeed that it was possible for me to see something of educational institutions for coloured people in the States . .
While being motored along, asking questions of, and discussing agricultural problems with, the Agent, or sitting in a delightfully furnished sitting room drinking creamy fresh milk, or being shown by a proud housewife stores of bottled fruit, in a cellar recently constructed by her husband, it was difficult to realise that their parents were born in slavery. What I saw seemed ample justification for the work of those who had faith in the future of the coloured people. The County agents are nearly all Hampton or Tuskegee trained.
[In Montserrat] . . in the early years of their school life, between five and seven, a great many of the children lose time due to their being infected with yaws. I discussed this latter with Doctor Coulter, the Senior Medical Officer, whom I found very much alive to this and similar problems. The Government has made provision for free treatment in case of yaws from which good results are anticipated.”
[Cables on “Memorandum from The Montserrat Co Ltd, 2 Gas Street, Birmingham”.] “To AL Wilson Esq,
Cable received from Montserrat 17.9.28
Olveston House and Works Iles Bay Works Ginnery Refinery Richmond Grove Houses much damaged other houses and buildings down stored cotton heavy loss lime trees uprooted staff all well”
[Three more for later days that month]
[Memorandum for the guidance of Mr Hamilton as he went out to his new post. Birmingham. Feb 8 1887. Morality came first on the list. Some period comments about keeping an eye on negroes. Request to diversify and develop, including into invalid recuperation:]
“The Directors wish Mr Hamilton in his management of their estates and business to have special regard to the maintenance of a high standard of morality among the officers of the Company and also to the improvement and civilisation of the negro work people and tenants. They do not wish to retain in their service any white Overseer who is guilty of dishonesty, immorality or of intoxication.
With regard to the coloured people, the Directors wish that in selecting Overseers and in choosing tenants for the cottages persons of moral life and respectable character should always be chosen, and overcrowding of the houses should be strictly forbidden.”
Could put more here
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes 1888 report from son Joseph:]
“In Montserrat the cottages have distinctly improved and I am told on very good authority that the people take better care of their children than formerly. I do not believe that the Montserrat peasant need envy any in the world as to his material position. His money wages are small and have diminished but he has a decent house, a garden and provision ground, a horse to ride, a cow, sheep, pigs and fowls, so that even if work fails, he is in no danger of starvation. The unfortunate result is that he is satisfied to vegetate having no ambition that is not easily satisfied and no idea that there is a greater world beyond the narrow limits in which he lives.”
“Report of J Sturge’s [VII: son of famous one] visit to Montserrat
March 4th to 26th 1891
Drought . . There was a little rain in January but February and March have been almost rainless and now cattle are dying and people are reduced to great straits for ground provisions.
Blight. Hamilton might well say that we had not appreciated the extent to which the blights have been spreading latterly. The lime orchards at Olveston are pretty much destroyed
. . [more on various possibilities] . . There is a very capital opening just now in Montserrat for taking in American boarders for the winter months. They are coming down in crowds, 70 on one steamer and 26 on another called at Montserrat while I was there. The Leewards Islands Government is giving a heavy guarantee for the establishment of hotels on Antigua and St Kitts. Montserrat is a far more attractive island and I have suggested to James Hollings that if without incurring any fresh expenses he liked to take boarders at Richmond from Dec to April next he could almost certainly make far more than the rent we should charge him for the year . .
A Telephone has proved a great success in Antigua and it is in consideration whether one should be established in Montserrat . .
The increase in leprosy in Montserrat and the absence of means for dealing with it are serious evils to which I strongly called the Governors attention.
The cost of my journey for Kew, New York, Washington, Florida, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and 3 weeks in Montserrat (78 days) was £102 . 9 . 0”
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[“In 1894 disease began to attack the limes. In a report on O Garra’s Estate in that year, Mr Henry DeCourcey Hamilton wrote:”]
I found three trees dying from a kind of canker just above the roots, so that when the trees were pulled down they broke off, I have never noticed this disease before in the lime trees, but it almost exactly resembles the canker that destroyed thousands of acres of cinchona in Ceylon.”
Elberton Estate
Details of Wilkins valuation 30 Sep 1895
[list and values]
Chattels on Elberton Estate June 30 1899
[one side foolscap list no values – surprisingly few: 2 sieves, 1 skimmer, 1 ladle, 1 thermometer, 4 citrometers, 2 copper 1 gallon measures, 1 gauging rod, 4 hurricane lanterns, 1 juice pump etc etc]
[Further scraps from 7 Aug and 1 Oct 1899 valuations of various machines and buildings]
“Report on a visit to Montserrat September 1899 [Joseph Sturge]
. . I met by appointment a few of the coloured people in order to point out to them that the animosity which has lately been shown towards the whites may help to decide the company against re-establishing its plantations.
. . It is difficult to guage the exact extent of the destruction of the lime orchards. At O Garas, large areas of orchards are blown clean away, into the ravines or out to sea. At the Grove and ILes Bay where the soil is stiffer, the roots of the trees are mostly broken off about a foot from the stem . . In the stiffest soil of all, some of the trunks are broken off above ground and these will doubtless shoot and bear again in a few years. . . estimate is that, against 24,000 barrels last crop, the surviving trees may yield 1000 barrels in 1900 . . eventually up to 5000 barrrels and that any further increase would have to come from fresh planting . . The beautiful nutmeg trees, some of them 20 feet high and just giving a profitable return, are all totally destroyed, and so is the vanilla. The cocoa trees are all wrecked . . Elberton estate house totally destroyed and blown clean away [and so it went on, including future prospects and suggestions]
“Interim report 1903 [Joseph Sturge VII 1847-1934]
Absent 4 March 9 May. 19 days Montserrat 3 New York 1 each Halifax, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington
On approaching the Montserrat coast a strong and offensive sulphurous smell reminds you that the subterranean forces are more active than they used to be. On the 22nd of March the explosions in St Vincent and Martinique were heard, and I myself saw the great clouds of volcanic dust therefrom. It seems to be the feeling on Montserrat that the worst earthquake shocks there were more terrifying than the hurricane of 1899.
In revisiting the orchards after an interval of two years, one sees a very satisfactory growth in most places . . There is blight everywhere; on every tree and almost every fruit, but not at present to a very harmful result. In looking back on the large sums we have spent on spraying and fumigating Driver says that he believes it did more harm than good . . [Bellars / Bellans? Probably Bellas from another source] is very strong on cultivation he says that to spray or fumigate blighted lime trees until you have first thoroughly cultivated the land they grow in is like treating a typhoid patient without removing the bad drains which caused the attack.
This however is at variance with Hamilton’s observations that blighted lime trees recovered when the bush was allowed to grow up around them.
. . With regard to new cultures, I went carefully into the question of pine growing which Hamilton now suggests. I find that the practical difficulty is that the steamers come only fortnightly and that in the season a great deal of fruit that was unfit for shipment by one mail would be overripe before the next [remember tomatoes].
Very great interest has been aroused in the West Indies in the revival of the cotton cultivation which was given up after the American War because sugar was so much more lucrative. Conditions have now totally changed. The cotton seed which was then a waste product has become only second in importance to the lint. This enormous increase of the demand for cotton has made Lancashire anxious for its supplies. And £25,000 has been raised there to stimulate production in the West Indies and elsewhere. Sandall and Wades [?] the only remaining sugar planters on Montserrat have put 100 acres into cotton in our island and a larger area in St Kitts. The first crop has been gathered but not sold; but the results appear to satisfy their local agent. As they will be willing to gin and bale an experimental crop from us, I have arranged to plant about 25 acres at the North as an experiment. This will not I think risk more than £50 and is not likely to result in much loss. If the directors think well to make a really serious experiment we will not I think be too late to arrange to do so when I come home.”
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes Report to the Imperial Commissioner of Agriculture, 1905, Hon – later Sir Francis Watts:]
“. . During the past twenty years, sugar has been a decadent industry in Montserrat . . The traditions of Montserrat are based on sugar and its peasantry still adhere to its cultivation in preference to anything else”
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes 17 Nov, 1906 Joseph Sturge wrote to Alexander Duncan who had applied for and was granted the job of Assistant Manager in Montserrat:]
If you were to hit a workman in the West Indies you would soon find yourself before the Magistrate; and the best and most successful managers even avoid fines and trust to tact and reasoning . . When I have watched Mr Bellas [Duncan’s predecessor] paying wages in Montserrat, I have been struck by the extraordinary patience he showed in explaining over and over again to a man anything in the reckoning which he did not quite understand thinking it better to keep a hundred people waiting five minutes than let one man go away with a sense of injustice; and it was to this fairness and patience that he owed his success with the people”
1909 Friends Tract: Joseph Sturge. The Christian Merchant.
Friends Ancient and Modern No 12
“’During the short period of two years,’ wrote Rev JF Phillippo, from the West Indies ’60,000 apprenctices received in the aggregate one quarter of a million of lashes and 50,000 other punishments with the tread-wheel, the chain gangs and other means of legal torture ; so that, instead of a diminution, there was a frightful addition to the miseries of the negro population’
. . The Government took no public action, but privately influenced the colonial legislatures, so that they did away with the apprenticeship system by Acts of their own . . “
1911 coloured map – red is S estates – very pretty – prob on Birmingham website.
[Lots of MCo Annual reports: at least 1917 to 1954 and 1956 – which latter is very depressing reading for both limes and cotton.]
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[From / related to annual report 1917:]
“The difficulty in obtaining freight packages and, still more, the scarcity of labour have proved serious problems during the year. The exodus from Montserrat has now greatly reduced the working population.”
[Then Dora goes on:] The ‘exodus’ spoken of here was to the United States mainly.
[Dora doc: Appendix 1: Letter to JS on his visit in 1922]
[Letter from Mr Shand, Montserrat. 29 Aug 1924:
“I cabled you today as follows: ‘Severe hurricane twenty two lives lost ninety per cent cotton and lime crops destroyed one thousand pounds damage building. All well.’
I do not think I have overestimated the destruction and damage . .
“TA Twyman’s Report on visit to USA and Montserrat. September 1924 – January 1925 [post 1924 hurricane.
Much on the business and botany. Thomas Twyman was MD after JS7]
I am very glad indeed that it was possible for me to see something of educational institutions for coloured people in the States . .
While being motored along, asking questions of, and discussing agricultural problems with, the Agent, or sitting in a delightfully furnished sitting room drinking creamy fresh milk, or being shown by a proud housewife stores of bottled fruit, in a cellar recently constructed by her husband, it was difficult to realise that their parents were born in slavery. What I saw seemed ample justification for the work of those who had faith in the future of the coloured people. The County agents are nearly all Hampton or Tuskegee trained.
[In Montserrat] . . in the early years of their school life, between five and seven, a great many of the children lose time due to their being infected with yaws. I discussed this latter with Doctor Coulter, the Senior Medical Officer, whom I found very much alive to this and similar problems. The Government has made provision for free treatment in case of yaws from which good results are anticipated.”
[Cables on “Memorandum from The Montserrat Co Ltd, 2 Gas Street, Birmingham”.] “To AL Wilson Esq,
Cable received from Montserrat 17.9.28
Olveston House and Works Iles Bay Works Ginnery Refinery Richmond Grove Houses much damaged other houses and buildings down stored cotton heavy loss lime trees uprooted staff all well”
[Three more for later days that month]
Montserrat. Her Disasters
Extracts from: A Souvenir of the Great Hurricane of September 12th – 13th 1928. FE Peters [Nov 1928]
With thanks to JE Sturge
“That little Montserrat has been repeatedly overwhelmed by awful cataclysms there is abundant evidence.
[Powson flood vindicating the cause of Harry Powson as dance – ringleader / Fanny Garvey linked to lying and talebearing.
Another individual committed murder and absconded to another island – with a flood taking place the same night.
Prior to the hurricane the jetty was 300 feet long, 134 feet now remain. .
The rainfall during the hurricane could not be measured, as the rain gauges that were not blown away floated.
[St Anthony’s Anglican Church] The silver Communion Plate was a gift of the freed slaves as a thank offering to God for their emancipation. There is an inscription on the Chalices to that effect.
. . At Mary’s School – Chapel.
This “Church of the Emancipation”, used also as a schoolroom was built in 1838 by the Rev JC Collins to commemorate the Abolition of Slavery.
. . St Augustine’s Chapel-at-ease
The little “Chapel Among the Hills” is situated high up in Roche’s mountains, surrounded by forest trees. It was built in 1911 . .
. . Mr AB Mulcare of the Christian Mission writes: . . The children who were all the time in their glee (children like) now began to cling to our arms for protection. O what a sensation to have nine small children to contend with at such a crisis
. . [OR Kelsick, Assistant Treasurer, Shipping and Harbour Master] The Hospital, recently refitted and made up to date has been very much knocked about. The Private Ward has been unroofed and the upper story destroyed. Mr AW Howell Rock, Government Dispenser, who lived on the first floor thus describes what took place there:
When the hurricane reached us at about 11am on the Wednesday all at the Hospital had taken the precaution to have all hurricane shutters closed in all quarters – public and private wards, matrons and dispensers quarters and the nurses quarters.
Although we knew what evil effects hurricanes had caused on previous occasions, yet because we had never experienced them we did not expect this to be of so great intensity and so destructive. Especially was it so when between the hours of 11am and 2pm nothing more serious than bending trees, broken branches, and flying leaves was observed. Between those hours our little family was able to get a short rest.
The second period of our history is from 2pm to 4pm. During this time the children, who were enjoying the rain before continued doing so and were watching with childlike excitement and pleasure the manner in which the wind was removing one part after another of the lower hospital building (formerly the Poor House).
At about 2pm the Matron came over to the Private Wards as she had observed that the east door had blown open. She told me about it, and I promised and later went to try and close it; but on going upstairs I found that the wind had forced off the ‘eye’ to the bolt of the door. No means being available to remedy the condition, the door had to be left open. At this time my wife was with me, and when we observed that the galvanise over the gallery had been partly blown away, we decided it was useless to attempt to remain there to do anything to the door. With little difficulty we got back down to our own quarters.
At this period the Dispensary, adjoining my quarters, was being swamped with water, which also ran into our bedroom. We tried to dry up the water in the bedroom but later had to abandon the attempt.
At about four o clock we heard the galvanize of the northern section of our quarters begin to yield to the forces of the wind. On examining I found that the wind was beginning to lift it off. This made us decide to go over to the main hospital, for we feared that if the wind got in at that point it would sweep everything before it. As a result we quickly put away a few things leaving some clothes hanging in the bedroom, the sitting room with the furniture, the dining room with its sideboard, and the table laid with the meals, and left the house. Each of the three children was covered with a jacket, wife put on her sweater, and I a raincoat.
We waited for a lull and went across. In going over a gust of wind nearly hindered my wife from following us. Fortunately it was short.
We remained with some of the patients in the male Ward. Between 5.30pm and 6pm the whole frame of the lower building previously mentioned was blown away. At 6.30 a powerful gust of wind began to raise the roof of the male Ward. We took this as a warning to repair to the female Ward, which we all did. At this time we became very apprehensive for night had set in. About an hour later we heard the roof of the female Ward groaning and squeaking under the pressure of the wind; and the place shook so that we wondered what next to do. Some thought of the cellar, but it was impossible at that time to get there. We all then went into they Maternity Ward where in some parts the water was one to two inches deep. Two patients had to be lifted or helped into that ward. We remained there until about 8 o clock when we saw this roof bending and heard it creaking as the wind struck it. This was about 8pm. We remained in the bathroom and linen room until day-break. While at this place we saw the roof bending and yielding to the wind and wondered if it would give way. We could hear the banging of loose galvanize and boards on the main roof. The flashes of lightning penetrated the crevices: meanwhile some earnestly prayed that the Lord would be merciful and withdraw His wrath. The rain poured in through the seams in the roof all night, and we sat or stood in water all through the long hours until morning.
At about midnight there seemed to have been a lull and we were cherishing the hope that the storm was abating, but it shortly after resumed its work with nearly the same degree of force. This made us disappointed. During the lull some of us sang praises to God for his protection hitherto, and offered prayer to him for further protection. We later were confident that the place of refuge would not be broken by the fury of the wind.
At about three o clock we began to realise that the storm was abating, as the force of the wind, though still great, was somewhat less than before.
It was with eagerness we waited for the coming of the morning, and it was with some degree of satisfaction that we beheld its dawning. Then we peeped out to see what destruction was wrought. Before 6 o clock two of our friends, Messrs. Freddie and Willie Peters came across from their home at Spring Gardens which was badly damaged to see how we had fared. It was cheering to see some of our neigbours. Thank God for our lives and the lives of many others were spared. We praise Him!
. . [Photo – huge uprooted] Tamarind tree, St Anthony’s churchyard
“There were four of these apparently very old trees. One seen in this picture has been uprooted; the remaining three are to be destroyed. What a pity! They lend a most peaceful, hallowed appearance to the spot.
It is said that during slavery the slaves had to remain under these trees while their owners worshipped in the church. A notice was posted to the door – “Dogs and slaves not allowed.”
. . Since the storm the increase in the death rate has been appalling and many familiar faces have passed from sight and gone to join the Great Majority. Few now remain of the generation who were born immediately after the Emancipation.”]
[Ends with list of 37 dead – their names, glebe and parish]
With thanks to JE Sturge
“That little Montserrat has been repeatedly overwhelmed by awful cataclysms there is abundant evidence.
[Powson flood vindicating the cause of Harry Powson as dance – ringleader / Fanny Garvey linked to lying and talebearing.
Another individual committed murder and absconded to another island – with a flood taking place the same night.
Prior to the hurricane the jetty was 300 feet long, 134 feet now remain. .
The rainfall during the hurricane could not be measured, as the rain gauges that were not blown away floated.
[St Anthony’s Anglican Church] The silver Communion Plate was a gift of the freed slaves as a thank offering to God for their emancipation. There is an inscription on the Chalices to that effect.
. . At Mary’s School – Chapel.
This “Church of the Emancipation”, used also as a schoolroom was built in 1838 by the Rev JC Collins to commemorate the Abolition of Slavery.
. . St Augustine’s Chapel-at-ease
The little “Chapel Among the Hills” is situated high up in Roche’s mountains, surrounded by forest trees. It was built in 1911 . .
. . Mr AB Mulcare of the Christian Mission writes: . . The children who were all the time in their glee (children like) now began to cling to our arms for protection. O what a sensation to have nine small children to contend with at such a crisis
. . [OR Kelsick, Assistant Treasurer, Shipping and Harbour Master] The Hospital, recently refitted and made up to date has been very much knocked about. The Private Ward has been unroofed and the upper story destroyed. Mr AW Howell Rock, Government Dispenser, who lived on the first floor thus describes what took place there:
When the hurricane reached us at about 11am on the Wednesday all at the Hospital had taken the precaution to have all hurricane shutters closed in all quarters – public and private wards, matrons and dispensers quarters and the nurses quarters.
Although we knew what evil effects hurricanes had caused on previous occasions, yet because we had never experienced them we did not expect this to be of so great intensity and so destructive. Especially was it so when between the hours of 11am and 2pm nothing more serious than bending trees, broken branches, and flying leaves was observed. Between those hours our little family was able to get a short rest.
The second period of our history is from 2pm to 4pm. During this time the children, who were enjoying the rain before continued doing so and were watching with childlike excitement and pleasure the manner in which the wind was removing one part after another of the lower hospital building (formerly the Poor House).
At about 2pm the Matron came over to the Private Wards as she had observed that the east door had blown open. She told me about it, and I promised and later went to try and close it; but on going upstairs I found that the wind had forced off the ‘eye’ to the bolt of the door. No means being available to remedy the condition, the door had to be left open. At this time my wife was with me, and when we observed that the galvanise over the gallery had been partly blown away, we decided it was useless to attempt to remain there to do anything to the door. With little difficulty we got back down to our own quarters.
At this period the Dispensary, adjoining my quarters, was being swamped with water, which also ran into our bedroom. We tried to dry up the water in the bedroom but later had to abandon the attempt.
At about four o clock we heard the galvanize of the northern section of our quarters begin to yield to the forces of the wind. On examining I found that the wind was beginning to lift it off. This made us decide to go over to the main hospital, for we feared that if the wind got in at that point it would sweep everything before it. As a result we quickly put away a few things leaving some clothes hanging in the bedroom, the sitting room with the furniture, the dining room with its sideboard, and the table laid with the meals, and left the house. Each of the three children was covered with a jacket, wife put on her sweater, and I a raincoat.
We waited for a lull and went across. In going over a gust of wind nearly hindered my wife from following us. Fortunately it was short.
We remained with some of the patients in the male Ward. Between 5.30pm and 6pm the whole frame of the lower building previously mentioned was blown away. At 6.30 a powerful gust of wind began to raise the roof of the male Ward. We took this as a warning to repair to the female Ward, which we all did. At this time we became very apprehensive for night had set in. About an hour later we heard the roof of the female Ward groaning and squeaking under the pressure of the wind; and the place shook so that we wondered what next to do. Some thought of the cellar, but it was impossible at that time to get there. We all then went into they Maternity Ward where in some parts the water was one to two inches deep. Two patients had to be lifted or helped into that ward. We remained there until about 8 o clock when we saw this roof bending and heard it creaking as the wind struck it. This was about 8pm. We remained in the bathroom and linen room until day-break. While at this place we saw the roof bending and yielding to the wind and wondered if it would give way. We could hear the banging of loose galvanize and boards on the main roof. The flashes of lightning penetrated the crevices: meanwhile some earnestly prayed that the Lord would be merciful and withdraw His wrath. The rain poured in through the seams in the roof all night, and we sat or stood in water all through the long hours until morning.
At about midnight there seemed to have been a lull and we were cherishing the hope that the storm was abating, but it shortly after resumed its work with nearly the same degree of force. This made us disappointed. During the lull some of us sang praises to God for his protection hitherto, and offered prayer to him for further protection. We later were confident that the place of refuge would not be broken by the fury of the wind.
At about three o clock we began to realise that the storm was abating, as the force of the wind, though still great, was somewhat less than before.
It was with eagerness we waited for the coming of the morning, and it was with some degree of satisfaction that we beheld its dawning. Then we peeped out to see what destruction was wrought. Before 6 o clock two of our friends, Messrs. Freddie and Willie Peters came across from their home at Spring Gardens which was badly damaged to see how we had fared. It was cheering to see some of our neigbours. Thank God for our lives and the lives of many others were spared. We praise Him!
. . [Photo – huge uprooted] Tamarind tree, St Anthony’s churchyard
“There were four of these apparently very old trees. One seen in this picture has been uprooted; the remaining three are to be destroyed. What a pity! They lend a most peaceful, hallowed appearance to the spot.
It is said that during slavery the slaves had to remain under these trees while their owners worshipped in the church. A notice was posted to the door – “Dogs and slaves not allowed.”
. . Since the storm the increase in the death rate has been appalling and many familiar faces have passed from sight and gone to join the Great Majority. Few now remain of the generation who were born immediately after the Emancipation.”]
[Ends with list of 37 dead – their names, glebe and parish]
More Sturge / Montserrat stuff
And here's some more notes - thanks to JE Sturge . .
“TA Twyman’s visit to Trinidad, Montserrat, USA and Canada. September – December 1930.
[started a factory in Trinidad – three others started too, thinking there were profits to be made]. . from purely commercial considerations, it would probably be better to give up the attempt to grow limes in Montserrat and look to Trinidad only for supplies of juice.
[selling botanic station to the Government – I didn’t realise it was a MC enterprise, but its hardly surprising]
. . a new hospital has been built near to Plymouth. The Scotch Matron in charge when I was in Montserrat in 1928 is still there and is doing excellent work.
[there’s also an abbreviated report – which includes the Montserrat limes’ detail – and about selling the trade mark in Canada?]
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes on other crops: bananas mentioned in 1955 report of the Company Attorney FS Delisle:]
“without doubt the greatest agricultural boon on the island is bananas”
[Quotes on other crops: papaw milk mentioned in 1955 report of the Company Attorney FS Delisle:]
“It is difficult to overestimate the importance to the peasantry of the money thus put into circulation (ie by selling the papaw ‘milk’). Some idea may, perhaps, be formed from the fact that the ‘milk’ is carried for miles from the place from where it is collected to the buyers. The money so spent probably constitutes the largest direct form of monetary payment reaching the peasantry during the past two years.”
[Quotes on other crops: onions mentioned in a 1957 report of the Company Attorney FS Delisle:]
“Very considerable interest is also shown in a new variety of onion which has been tested by ourselves and others throughout the island. Although we have previously been able to grow onions on Montserrat on a fairly large scale, a variety which will keep has never been found until now. The new onion has had enthusiastic reports from the Southern and Bermuda markets and there seems to be no reason why this crop should not form part of a very valuable sideline on the estate”
“STURGE MEMORIAL BOOKS
This book is given to the
children of Montserrat
to remind them of
JOSEPH STURGE (1847 – 1934)
who often visited the island
Also in memory of
his father JOSEPH STURGE
who came in 1837 and
who helped to free the
people of Montserrat from
a life of slavery”
[Given in MC school ? date]
Various other notes to me:
Reference in: A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes as a reference: Records of Montserrat: Mr Savage English]
[Ginning – separates lint from seed
Then crush seed for edible oil
By product is cotton seed meal – high protein cattle feed]
[S Gloucester villages:
Olveston – from 3 estates previously called Hope, Needsmust and Freemans
Elberton – birthplace of famous JS – previously Bransby’s
Family originating in Bristol area.]
[John and E Sturge – chemical company – sold to another company – Alan Bridge acquired huge amount of J and E Sturge documents – but unkeen to share without a parking ticket guarantee – wants to put it all in a museum: Clark (shoes) museum in Street/Streatham.]
Mar 25 is the anniversary of Trading act – on Sat 24 before – statue will be rededicated, and a blue plaque ‘opened’
Kingsley Howe: said he’d seen an oriole once – and JS has never seen one
Exodus from M in 1917: building the Panama canal
[Quakers and slavery – Whitfield and Georgia – and religious link – this is a story to follow up. Try biog for JS and Euston Quaker library]
[Joseph Sturge took a trip to Crimea to try to stop war – there’s a book about the trek: collection of letters – from descendant of one of the other – Friends Book Centre – or via Sturge family website.
Also tried to stop Denmark – Schleswig Holstein war – shuttle diplomacy]
[Try www.sturgefamily ]
Look in Birmingham library for Sturge correspondence – and Quaker library in Euston for biogs at least
[Wilson Sturge, son of Charles: after bankruptcy . . in Russia, then Dukhobors in Cyprus, and then Canada – protesting naked. Then Wilson died at sea. – see SL Lewis]
Gaunts Earthcott to Frederick Road. An account of the Sturges of Birmingham, by Sylvia Lloyd Lewis. [Pamphlet. Written for the 1980 Sturge Pilgrimage]
“Sophia [sister of Joseph VI] kept house for Joseph except during his marriage; she was perhaps rather strict, as there is mention of her insisting on Greek lessons for visiting nephews supposed to be on holiday”
[Then there is another Sophia, sister to Joseph VII – who worked on peace and basketry in Ireland]
“Some Negro Proverbs [undated on notepaper from Spring Gardens, 183 Huntingdon Road, Cambridge – likely to be one of the three daughters of JE Sturge, all born in M, who returned later]
Buckra work nebber done ~
Bull horn nebber too heavy for him head ~
Cashew nebber bear guava ~
Bragging ribber nebber drown anybody ~
Cockroach nebber so drunk, him nebber walk past fowlyard ~
Cousin Fowl always boil good soup
Coward men keep whole bones
When cockroach make dance, him no ape Fowl
When Cow no hab tail, Gor ? a Mighty brush away Fly
When black Man tief – him tief half a bit (4d). When buckra tief – him tief whole Estate
Stone Walls hab Eyes
Table Napkin want to turn Tablecloth
Spider an Fly cant make bargain
Two Bull cant stand in one Pen
Shoes alone know if Stocking hab holes ~
No throw away dirty water afore you have clean ~
Misfortune nebber throw cloud
Hungry fowl wake soon
Good Friend better dan Money in de Pocket
Hand full, Hand come
Hog run for him life. Dog run for him character ~
Hab money, hab friend ~
Cunning better dan Strong ~
One tief no like to see nother Tief carry long Bag ~
Cockroach nebber in de right before Fowl
Sickness ride horse to come
Take foot to go away ~
[Photos To insert dates of photoalbums:]
o Ecuelling limes by hand – good photos: one close up, the other further away
o Also 2 good photo of shipping limes / juice barrels into small boats
Joe Sturge says that the boats went round the island to ship from different places
Watchhook pin of JS hair. “This pin was meant to fasten into a bedhanging. It has a hook from which to hang a watch. Behind the glass is a plait [flat, like chairtop weave] of Joseph Sturge VI’s hair [grey, golden – difficult to know if its bleached since being made], and on the back is inscribed: JS 5 / 14 / 1859 [in copperplate]”
Memoirs of JS. Henry Richard 1865 [Definitive, if flowery, biog].
“TA Twyman’s visit to Trinidad, Montserrat, USA and Canada. September – December 1930.
[started a factory in Trinidad – three others started too, thinking there were profits to be made]. . from purely commercial considerations, it would probably be better to give up the attempt to grow limes in Montserrat and look to Trinidad only for supplies of juice.
[selling botanic station to the Government – I didn’t realise it was a MC enterprise, but its hardly surprising]
. . a new hospital has been built near to Plymouth. The Scotch Matron in charge when I was in Montserrat in 1928 is still there and is doing excellent work.
[there’s also an abbreviated report – which includes the Montserrat limes’ detail – and about selling the trade mark in Canada?]
A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes on other crops: bananas mentioned in 1955 report of the Company Attorney FS Delisle:]
“without doubt the greatest agricultural boon on the island is bananas”
[Quotes on other crops: papaw milk mentioned in 1955 report of the Company Attorney FS Delisle:]
“It is difficult to overestimate the importance to the peasantry of the money thus put into circulation (ie by selling the papaw ‘milk’). Some idea may, perhaps, be formed from the fact that the ‘milk’ is carried for miles from the place from where it is collected to the buyers. The money so spent probably constitutes the largest direct form of monetary payment reaching the peasantry during the past two years.”
[Quotes on other crops: onions mentioned in a 1957 report of the Company Attorney FS Delisle:]
“Very considerable interest is also shown in a new variety of onion which has been tested by ourselves and others throughout the island. Although we have previously been able to grow onions on Montserrat on a fairly large scale, a variety which will keep has never been found until now. The new onion has had enthusiastic reports from the Southern and Bermuda markets and there seems to be no reason why this crop should not form part of a very valuable sideline on the estate”
“STURGE MEMORIAL BOOKS
This book is given to the
children of Montserrat
to remind them of
JOSEPH STURGE (1847 – 1934)
who often visited the island
Also in memory of
his father JOSEPH STURGE
who came in 1837 and
who helped to free the
people of Montserrat from
a life of slavery”
[Given in MC school ? date]
Various other notes to me:
Reference in: A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes as a reference: Records of Montserrat: Mr Savage English]
[Ginning – separates lint from seed
Then crush seed for edible oil
By product is cotton seed meal – high protein cattle feed]
[S Gloucester villages:
Olveston – from 3 estates previously called Hope, Needsmust and Freemans
Elberton – birthplace of famous JS – previously Bransby’s
Family originating in Bristol area.]
[John and E Sturge – chemical company – sold to another company – Alan Bridge acquired huge amount of J and E Sturge documents – but unkeen to share without a parking ticket guarantee – wants to put it all in a museum: Clark (shoes) museum in Street/Streatham.]
Mar 25 is the anniversary of Trading act – on Sat 24 before – statue will be rededicated, and a blue plaque ‘opened’
Kingsley Howe: said he’d seen an oriole once – and JS has never seen one
Exodus from M in 1917: building the Panama canal
[Quakers and slavery – Whitfield and Georgia – and religious link – this is a story to follow up. Try biog for JS and Euston Quaker library]
[Joseph Sturge took a trip to Crimea to try to stop war – there’s a book about the trek: collection of letters – from descendant of one of the other – Friends Book Centre – or via Sturge family website.
Also tried to stop Denmark – Schleswig Holstein war – shuttle diplomacy]
[Try www.sturgefamily ]
Look in Birmingham library for Sturge correspondence – and Quaker library in Euston for biogs at least
[Wilson Sturge, son of Charles: after bankruptcy . . in Russia, then Dukhobors in Cyprus, and then Canada – protesting naked. Then Wilson died at sea. – see SL Lewis]
Gaunts Earthcott to Frederick Road. An account of the Sturges of Birmingham, by Sylvia Lloyd Lewis. [Pamphlet. Written for the 1980 Sturge Pilgrimage]
“Sophia [sister of Joseph VI] kept house for Joseph except during his marriage; she was perhaps rather strict, as there is mention of her insisting on Greek lessons for visiting nephews supposed to be on holiday”
[Then there is another Sophia, sister to Joseph VII – who worked on peace and basketry in Ireland]
“Some Negro Proverbs [undated on notepaper from Spring Gardens, 183 Huntingdon Road, Cambridge – likely to be one of the three daughters of JE Sturge, all born in M, who returned later]
Buckra work nebber done ~
Bull horn nebber too heavy for him head ~
Cashew nebber bear guava ~
Bragging ribber nebber drown anybody ~
Cockroach nebber so drunk, him nebber walk past fowlyard ~
Cousin Fowl always boil good soup
Coward men keep whole bones
When cockroach make dance, him no ape Fowl
When Cow no hab tail, Gor ? a Mighty brush away Fly
When black Man tief – him tief half a bit (4d). When buckra tief – him tief whole Estate
Stone Walls hab Eyes
Table Napkin want to turn Tablecloth
Spider an Fly cant make bargain
Two Bull cant stand in one Pen
Shoes alone know if Stocking hab holes ~
No throw away dirty water afore you have clean ~
Misfortune nebber throw cloud
Hungry fowl wake soon
Good Friend better dan Money in de Pocket
Hand full, Hand come
Hog run for him life. Dog run for him character ~
Hab money, hab friend ~
Cunning better dan Strong ~
One tief no like to see nother Tief carry long Bag ~
Cockroach nebber in de right before Fowl
Sickness ride horse to come
Take foot to go away ~
[Photos To insert dates of photoalbums:]
o Ecuelling limes by hand – good photos: one close up, the other further away
o Also 2 good photo of shipping limes / juice barrels into small boats
Joe Sturge says that the boats went round the island to ship from different places
Watchhook pin of JS hair. “This pin was meant to fasten into a bedhanging. It has a hook from which to hang a watch. Behind the glass is a plait [flat, like chairtop weave] of Joseph Sturge VI’s hair [grey, golden – difficult to know if its bleached since being made], and on the back is inscribed: JS 5 / 14 / 1859 [in copperplate]”
Memoirs of JS. Henry Richard 1865 [Definitive, if flowery, biog].
What Shall I Drink? The Lancet says – “MONTSERRAT”
From: The India Planters Gazette 3rd November 1885, with thanks to Joe Sturge
See the following extract: We counsel the public to drink their Lime Juice whenever and wherever they list. As a rule, Lime Juice is, particularly during the summer, a far more wholesome drink than any form of alcohol. We have subjected samples of the ‘Lime Fruit Juice’ of the Montserrat Company to full analysis, with a view to test its quality and purity. We have found it to be in sound condition and entirely free from adulteration.” The Lancet
Either alone or sweetened to taste and mixed with Water or Soda Water and a little Ice if obtainable, one of the most delicious drinks can be made, but care should be taken that “Montserrat” Lime Fruit Juice only is used, as it has the delicate aroma and flavour peculiar to the Lime Fruit and found in no other Lime Juice.
Cooling and delicious
[Cartoon – with little black boy holding tray with juice on, JB seated, and 3 medical etc-looking men standing to minister to him with various containers]
John Bull “What shall I drink?” (Vide Moonshine)
Dr Dean of Bangor “Not Tea” | Analyst “Not Water” | Dr Sir Wilfred Lawson “Not Beer”
Chorus Why The Montserrat Lime Fruit Juice & Cordials!
Many other refreshing Drinks can be produced with the Montserrat Lime Fruit Juice Cordials, a list of which follows:-
“LIMETTA”
or Pure Lime Juice Cordial
Aromatic, Clove, Strawberry, Raspberry, Sarsaparilla, Pineapple, Jargonelle, Peppermint, Quinine
Sold by Druggists, Stores, and Wine Merchants throughout the World.
Caution:- The Greatest Care should be observed that “Montserrat” Lime Fruit Juice and Cordials only are supplied, as there are numerous concoctions sold under the name of Lime Juice Cordial that are entirely artificial, or so charged with deleterious acid as to be injurious to health.
10 July 1884 Patent Office Trade Marks Branch
Montserrat Lime Juice registered to Messrs Evans Sons & Co, also trading as Evans, Lescher & Webb.
See the following extract: We counsel the public to drink their Lime Juice whenever and wherever they list. As a rule, Lime Juice is, particularly during the summer, a far more wholesome drink than any form of alcohol. We have subjected samples of the ‘Lime Fruit Juice’ of the Montserrat Company to full analysis, with a view to test its quality and purity. We have found it to be in sound condition and entirely free from adulteration.” The Lancet
Either alone or sweetened to taste and mixed with Water or Soda Water and a little Ice if obtainable, one of the most delicious drinks can be made, but care should be taken that “Montserrat” Lime Fruit Juice only is used, as it has the delicate aroma and flavour peculiar to the Lime Fruit and found in no other Lime Juice.
Cooling and delicious
[Cartoon – with little black boy holding tray with juice on, JB seated, and 3 medical etc-looking men standing to minister to him with various containers]
John Bull “What shall I drink?” (Vide Moonshine)
Dr Dean of Bangor “Not Tea” | Analyst “Not Water” | Dr Sir Wilfred Lawson “Not Beer”
Chorus Why The Montserrat Lime Fruit Juice & Cordials!
Many other refreshing Drinks can be produced with the Montserrat Lime Fruit Juice Cordials, a list of which follows:-
“LIMETTA”
or Pure Lime Juice Cordial
Aromatic, Clove, Strawberry, Raspberry, Sarsaparilla, Pineapple, Jargonelle, Peppermint, Quinine
Sold by Druggists, Stores, and Wine Merchants throughout the World.
Caution:- The Greatest Care should be observed that “Montserrat” Lime Fruit Juice and Cordials only are supplied, as there are numerous concoctions sold under the name of Lime Juice Cordial that are entirely artificial, or so charged with deleterious acid as to be injurious to health.
10 July 1884 Patent Office Trade Marks Branch
Montserrat Lime Juice registered to Messrs Evans Sons & Co, also trading as Evans, Lescher & Webb.
The Cromwellian Catastrophe in Ireland: an Historiographical Analysis
From: Jameel Hampton. Queen's University
Despite the `relevance' of its constituent motifs to the twentieth century,1
Cromwellian Ireland has traditionally been an unfashionable topic for his-
torical research . .
This is primarily due to the fact that source material is scant, fragmented, and has always been a formidable impediment in research efforts. Nonetheless, study of this topic is rewarding in its own right, but also because one can encounter several interesting works, and these works are often representative of the prevailing historical models in their time of composition. Moreover, the topic that had formerly received only two major bouts of attention—around the turn of twentieth century, and in the late-1960s and early-1970s—has been the subject of considerable interest in the past twenty-five years. While this article discusses many works, it focuses on three specifically, and the remainder to provide a better general historiography and for contextualizing purposes: John P. Prendergast’s classic The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1865), the first and seminal work in this area; Karl S. Bottigheimer’s sober and quantitative English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1971); and Peter Berresford Ellis’ Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian Colonization of Ireland, 1652-1660 (1975).
The availability and unavailability of sources has had a profound and limiting effect on scholarly undertakings in this area. Private papers and the overt or oblique correspondence of those directly involved in Interregnum Ireland were destroyed accidentally, or deliberately, in the nervous months preceding and proceeding the Restoration. The scarcity of material means concerned historians must utilize fragmentary and incomplete evidence. This scarcity is most apparent in attempting to gauge the reactions and writings of lower class Irishmen, although Ellis’ Hell or Connaught! attempted to redress this problem. Furthermore, it is difficult to assess Irish trade during the Interregnum as no port books were kept for the limited shipping traffic at Dublin and the port books from Bristol deal only with Ulster linen. There is also a distinct lack of records describing Irish economic interactions with America and Europe.[2] Indeed, the historiography of Cromwellian Ireland makes for an interesting narrative in its own right: it is a subject of two major paroxysms of scholarly interest and production. Prendergast’s classic and its unearthing of source material was succeeded by many books and articles, but most notably S. R. Gardiner’s History of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate (1903), and Robert Dunlop’s similarly voluminous Ireland Under the Commonwealth (1913).[3] Sadly, the most valuable source, The Books of the Commonwealth, were mostly destroyed in a fire in the opening moments of the Irish Civil War in 1922, although extracts remain available in the aforementioned works of Prendergast, Gardiner, Dunlop, and the Maynouth Journal Archivium Hibernicum (1917).[4]
The second paroxysm occurred in the late-1960s and early-1970s. Much of the reinvigorated interest can be attributed to the ‘statistical turn’ of the time. The surveys and censuses conducted under the Commonwealth, especially Petty’s Down Survey that earned Ireland the uncomfortable distinction of being Europe’s most well known country, are conducive to quantitative analysis as they contain massive amounts of information.[5] This sort of study could answer pertinent questions about land tenure in the period. What group gained the most from the Cromwellian revolution in land tenure?[6] What affiliation or alignment was most likely to result in the loss or gain of land? Race? Religion? Nationality? Or, perhaps, those with experience in Ireland, as opposed to adventuring newcomers, had better chances of attaining or retaining land? Notable contributions in this area belong to Bottigheimer, Kevin McKenny, and R. C. Simington.[7] New and novel qualitative approaches also produced important works. T. C. Barnard’s Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649-1660 (1975) innovatively and comprehensively examined the constructive side of the Cromwellian programme in Ireland, dealing with policy on finance, education, and religious and legal reform. The third Volume of the landmark compilation A New History of Ireland (1976) dealt extensively with many untouched areas including Irish language, the development of the English language in Ireland, Irish Literature, and the Irish Diaspora in the age of the counter-reformation. Ellis’ Hell or Connaught! travelled mostly on well-trodden paths, but did make incursions into the realm of Irish poetry in a valid attempt to discover the reactions and mindsets of the lower class and underground clergy during the Interregnum. The literary and cultural aspects of the period were given considerable treatment in the 1993 collection Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660.
With the end of the heyday of quantitative history and the exhausting of qualitative sources, Cromwellian Ireland has remained a subject of scholarly debate. The surge of interest in military history has recently produced books and articles addressing Cromwell’s Celtic campaigns.[8] These include Brendan Fitzpatrick’s Seventeenth-Century Ireland: The War of Religions (1988), Marcus Tanner’s Ireland’s Holy Wars: The Struggle for a Nation’s Soul, 1500-2000 and Tom Reilly’s controversial, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland (1999). The latter attracted much criticism over its controversial claim that Cromwellian rule benefited Ireland and its attempts to acquit Cromwell of the charges levelled by past historians. Indeed, Reilly felt his project rescued Cromwell from the prejudiced and enormous condemnation of past historiography: “the focus of this book is to exculpate Cromwell from the charges of wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of the ordinary and unarmed people of Ireland. The question of Cromwell’s guilt preoccupied many of the last century’s historians. Their verdict was a resounding cry of guilty! Cromwell is once again in the dock here, but this time the evidence of the day is assessed in the legal sense ‘without prejudice’.”[9] Reilly’s work was criticised as a Goldhagen-like ‘ground breaking book’, which merely dressed up old arguments in the new clothes of self-proclaimed revolutionary revisionism, as Barnard put it in Cromwellian Ireland:
The model of integrated ‘British’ history has also been applied to Cromwellian Ireland. David Stevenson’s article “Crowmell, Scotland, and Ireland” in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990) showed how the problem of multiple kingdoms that plagued Charles I also contributed to the untenable nature and the subsequent demise of the Protectorate. Nicholas Canny’s Making Ireland British: 1580-1650 was a detailed examination of plantations under the ‘multiple kingdoms’ approach.
What other sources are commonly available? Fortunately for scholars, the Commonwealth was an entity particularly obsessed with counting and compiling information, as evident in the aforementioned surveys and censuses. There is also the conventional score of government and government-related sources, including transplantation certificates, parliamentary proceedings, and petitions. In the foreword to the 2000 Edition of Cromwellian Ireland, Barnard mentioned the value of three sources that became available after the flurry of the 1970s: Petty’s complete archive housed at the Bodleian Library, the Christ Church muniments, and the papers of the Earls of Cork. In English Money and Irish Land, Bottigheimer made use of two newly discovered censuses, not available to, or unknown by, Prendergast. The trend in the 1990s towards integrated ‘British’ history did not yield any results in this area, but as Ellis suggested in the waning lines of Hell or Connaught!, any further exploration needed to be conducted in continental archives, especially those in the Netherlands and Spain.
Despite the great disparity in methods, foci, objectives, and sources, there are some common questions addressed in most works on Cromwellian Ireland: What were the major hindrances to the implementation of policy and the resettling of confiscated land? How is localism used as a model in the three works? Who benefited most when the dust settled with the Restoration? What sort of motivation was the most important in spurring on government, soldier, and adventurer? How did Cromwellian policy affect the Irish economy? How do the authors loyalty to or deconstruction of convenient superficialities like ‘Irish-Catholic’ and ‘English-Protestant’ hurt or help the validity of their greater contentions?[11] Was Cromwellian Ireland a case of continuity in Anglo-Irish relations or an anomaly?[12] In the seventeenth century? In the medieval and early modern periods? How much did international concerns, specifically Ireland as a potential staging point for an invasion of Britain, figure in English policy? What does this period say about the nature and motivations of English imperialism and hence the British Empire? What does it say, if anything, about Imperialism in general? How the three authors approach these critical issues will comprise the remainder of the article.
Prendergast’s The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, remains the seminal book in this area: it was the first comprehensive work on policy and the proceedings of the plantation;[13] it uncovered the appropriate sources and the difficulties that ask perseverance, detective work, and creativity from concerned historians; it revealed the major themes, actors, and events of the period and attested to the utter devastation in Ireland; and, perhaps most important, its twin theses, the ‘economic motivation thesis’ and the ‘existing-English thesis’ remain the explanatory pillars of Cromwellian policy and plantation in Ireland.
Fiercely pro-Irish and writing in the high years of the Home Rule movement, Prendergast’s Cromwellian Ireland was the foundation of the nineteenth century Irish colony state. In his estimation, the Commonwealth was only a naturally occurring high tide in the centuries-old English repression of Ireland, which fluctuated in its severity. Prendergast identified the reign of Henry VIII as the beginning of a new extreme phase in English repression, with subsequent monarchs seeking to replace the Catholic “Old-English” with Protestant landowners to achieve a decisive and permanent ‘second conquest of Ireland’. Indeed, this contention related intimately to another of Prendergast’s major themes: the irresistible Irish way of life that never failed to seduce and assimilate English adventurers before the sixteenth century: “Had the first English adventurers in Ireland been of the same mind as the king and nobility of England the Irish might possibly been subdued, their lands taken from them, and the nations reduced to serfdom, or exterminated. But the early settlers learned to love the Irish, and to prefer the freedom of Irish life and manners to the burdensome feudal system.”[14] The reign of James I saw the “new religion” purge followers of the old from land and office, leading to Prendergast’s conclusion that the Cromwellian programme was not an abrupt anomaly in Anglo-Irish history, but followed policies that had built up for more than a century.
Prendergast saw the history of England and Ireland in a racial framework. Writing in the age of a resurrected Gaelic Ethos, British imperial militarism and jingoism, and pseudo-scientific racial and biological determinism, Prendergast contended that the English, possessed by “the land hunger of the Anglo-Saxon race”, were innately barbarous, violent, and xenophobic.[15] The latter contention was made well clear in a fascinating section where Prendergast described how England exploited religious antipathies in attempting to make a reverse “apartheid” state out of the corner of south-east Ireland after making Connaught an Irish “reservation”:
Conversely, the Irish are unique surviving remnants of a pure, natural and enlightened Gaelic race.[17] Yet, while Prendergast’s allegiances were clearly Irish-Catholic-Gaelic, and his presentation made much of religious loyalties and perceived racial characteristics, his serious analyses cut through these artificial and inaccurate constructions to assert that forms of English authority are the only real villains: officers cheating soldiers out of their land; landlords cheating and exploiting their poor tenants; and a ruthless monarchy, and then a ruthless republic, exploiting and manipulating English, Scots, and Irish alike.
Prendergast organized the English adventure into three groups to clearly present their motivations, conduct, and eventual results; it is in this third area that he leaves a legacy to the study of the subject. The adventurers’ main goal was simply to settle their land, but they came into conflict with parliament over the adequacy of protection from Tories, timetables for conquest and settlement, and tax exemptions. The descriptions of how the adventurers’ plans were irreparably tied to parliament uncovered a major avenue for historical investigation, which Bottigheimer eventually addressed. Prendergast also touched on the roles of the Papacy and England’s international strategic concerns. Moreover, Prendergast created the underpinning ‘economic motivation thesis’ by saying that financial concerns were primary among parliament’s motivations, and that the soldiers and officers of the army, the third group, were also largely motivated by money: the soldiers largely wanted financial compensation for their lands as they wished not to settle or plant; the officers wished to accumulate as much land as possible to either sell or plant; and both were adamant that they receive the same rate of arrears as the adventurers.[18]
The other great legacy that Prendergast left for later scholars is the simple identification and description of major events and edicts, beginning with the determination of guilt and the deportations, and the transplantation scheme, remonstrances, and its application. Prendergast also provides the motivations for, as well as relevant texts from, and the ramifications of, the Down Survey, Petty’s Civil Survey, the 1642 Adventurers Act, the Doubling Ordinance, and the 1653 Adventurers Act. The sum of these descriptions is that the Cromwellian endeavour in Ireland was an utter debacle. One of the major strengths of this work is that Prendergast, when not making scathing anti-English comments, lets the sources speak for themselves and lead the reader to the obvious conclusions.[19] At the same time, he can hardly be accused of examining and providing only selective examples to support a pre-formed thesis due to the groundbreaking and discovery oriented nature of the project, the comprehensiveness of this work, and a Thompsonian-style questioning and distrust of easy and convenient conclusions and generalizations.
This depiction of this confused and corrupt quasi-official exercise in greed was filled with black humour, scorn, and contempt. Often and with delight, Prendergast mocked the English and their abject failure. He also mocked their motives, methods, and their perception that they were backed by the divine. A good example was his description of the official procedure for land allocation to the army after the completion of the Civil Survey:
But the bumbling he described added comedy to the tragedy,[21] and this feature has been closely imitated by subsequent scholars, as Bottigheimer put it: “Sometimes (to paraphrase Marx) historical events occur first as farce and then as tragedy. Lord Lisle’s expedition, finally launched in February 1647, was the curtain-raising farce to the uncomic Cromwellian conquest of two years later.”[22] Prendergast’s sweeping and bold narrative with its comparative references to the ancients and scripture remained refreshing and entertaining in the more coldly analytical and sterile state of more recent historical scholarship.
Bottigheimer’s English Money and Irish Land was the logical extension of his 1967 Doctoral thesis at Berkeley.[23] Inexorably rooted in the historiographical trends of its time, this work is very different from Prendergast’s in its cool and scientific detachment. Indeed, as Bottigheimer purported in the opening pages of the book, his analytical goals were formed in opposition to some of Prendergast’s assumptions:
However, Bottigheimer’s major contentions pointed to a different sort of inevitability in discussing the intensifying of Irish policy in the Interregnum. Like Prendergast, Bottigheimer saw the reign of Henry VIII and the genesis of the fears of invasion and counter-reformation as making Ireland exceptionally important. Bottigheimer also identified a cyclical pattern of plantation and rebellion beginning in the mid-sixteenth century that could only be broken by a drastic measure, such as the ultra-ambitious Cromwellian scheme: “On one hand Plantation created an appetite for new appropriations by the English, while on the other it undermined the land tenure system of Ireland and stimulated new rebellions, which in turn justified further plantation.”[25]
Bottigheimer wrote as a self-identified quantitative historian,[26] but he confronted possible criticisms of his methods in the preface, and this work managed to maintain a nice balance between quantitative and qualitative history.[27] Moreover, Bottigheimer’s plan of attack was part quantitative and part qualitative, leading to a greater qualitative end: he sought to discover who invested in Ireland and why they did so in order to address “the central question of Colonialism or Imperialism: why and by what means one society expands into another.”[28] Through considerable use of conventional government and government-related documents, Bottigheimer dealt with several questions relating to the interactions of government and the adventurers: What were their respective policies toward Ireland? Was either camp in possession of group cohesion or a cohesive agenda? How did the two camps agree and disagree? What success did the adventurers have in pushing their agenda on parliament? How did this relationship contribute to formulation of policy and the implementation of the settlement? In the end, Bottigheimer concluded that by 1649 the adventurers had been relegated to the status of “junior partner” in the Irish enterprise and that this abjection should have been seen as apart of the growing competence of the fledgling English Republic.[29]
As revealed by the book’s title, Bottigheimer subscribed to the traditional thesis that money and property were the major motivating factors of both government and adventurer, but he made interesting and convincing arguments about supplementary motivations. He downplayed the role of Protestant zeal and instead gave agency to the reaction toward the 1641 Rebellion,[30] which he claimed was a direct and insulting affront to the otherwise confident and increasingly powerful parliamentary forces. He also emphasised the ensuing anti-Irish propaganda of 1641 and 1642.[31] Bottigheimer explained the financial and supplementary motives of the adventurers in a fascinating regional and socio-economic framework:
Bottigheimer also pointed to a unique Cromwellian economic cyclical dilemma to explain how government was also largely motivated by money. The smaller expeditions of 1641 to 1649 were under-funded as parliament would not divert any considerable finances from the efforts in England. Consequently, the efforts of the adventurers did not yield any economic returns. By 1653, the costs of maintaining the Irish Garrison contributed to pressure for more confiscations; more time meant more money, more money meant more confiscation, more confiscation meant more extreme means, culminating in the attempted ethnic cleansing of Ireland.
Bottigheimer adhered to Prendergast’s time-honoured thesis that the ‘existing-English’ were the great winners in the aftermath of the settlement due to their Protestantism and Protestant alliance with the administration of Henry Cromwell, as well as the vast majority of soldiers who wished not to plant their land. English Money and Irish Land was similar to Prendergast’s book in its portrayal of the confused, piecemeal, and bumbling Cromwellian policy and implementation. It was also similar to Barnard’s Cromwellian Ireland in its unemotional focus on the politics and constructiveness of Irish Policy in the Interregnum. Bottigheimer referred to English policy as “clearly unable to make good use of the resulting spoils [of confiscation]”,[33] and, in anti-governmental comments similar to Prendergast’s, he engaged in some counter-factual ‘what if’ history: “Had Ireland been conquered in late 1642 or early 1643 by an expedition financed by the adventurers, a very different and much less drastic settlement would have resulted; one in which the adventurers rather than the soldiers played a key role.”[34] In terms of style, English Money and Irish Land was well-written, clear, and as Bottigheimer promised, the massive amounts of computed-analysed data do not obstructively impinge themselves on his well-balanced and largely chronological narrative.
Stylishly garnished with arresting quotations, poetry, and Shakespearean selections, Ellis’ Hell or Connaught! presented a very different sort of work from the others discussed in this article. Ellis is a popular historian and many of his non-academic public histories have sold very well. Hell or Connaught! was partly a political and military prosopography of the Cromwellian élite, and more of a chronicling narrative than a modern, analytical scholarly work with a Thompsonian ‘pregnant principle’. Moreover, the book can generally be described as a traditional, top-down history, dealing with major figures, events, and battles, and the typical paradigms of national histories. This was evident in the work’s structure: the chapters were titled after Henry Cromwell, Edmund Ludlow, and Charles Fleetwood; the major focus was the motivations and assumptions of the aforementioned men and men like them; the index was a mere massive compendium of names; and the book was printed with portraits the of prominent English political figures dealt with in the narrative. However, this vividly written work investigates some unexplored areas of research at the time of its composition and publication, some of which were presented shortly after in A New History of Ireland.
Ellis managed to discuss the impacts of war and displacement on Irish life and Ireland itself in his dealings with poetry as a historical source and his dealings with changes in diet, environmental abuses, cultural manifestations, and currency. This work also provided an unmatched, considerable treatment of Irish migration to, and interaction with, America and Europe, deportation to the Barbados and America, the writings and persecution of underground Catholic priests, and the Continental network that supported them. Ellis utilized trial records to good effect as they not only reveal much about the persecution of priests and their intellectual and theological dispositions, but also because they typically lent themselves to entertaining narratives. In fact, this work had many of the characteristics of an amateurish microhistorical work: using scant and fragmented evidence, Ellis asked the reader to make speculative and imaginative leaps when forming greater conclusions from particular examples.
While entertaining and not altogether without merits, this book was seriously flawed as accurate history. Ellis professed that he chose not to include a decent bibliography or references: “After considerable deliberation, I have decided not to use copious footnotes for source references because I do not wish to claim an academic status for this work to which I feel that it is not entitled.”[35] The narrative was decisively pro-Irish and took its accounts of devastation, starvation, and cannibalism directly from Prendergast’s work, and although it contained some good work from primary sources, Ellis usually leaned on other scholarly works. Most important, Ellis’ dealings with the relevant historiographical debates were dilettantish: there was no penetration of the terms ‘Irish-Catholic’ and ‘English-Protestant’; in a book that dealt with the military and national paradigms, there was little regard for the foreign and imperial ramifications of the issues.[36]The motives for the Cromwellian endeavour were discussed in no more detail than the metaphor with which he opened the book,[37] other relevant received scarce mention or none at all. There is, however, an exception. Ellis stated that the heightened concern for Ireland and the extreme programme of displacement began with the reign of Mary and the Spanish Armada, and outlasted the Republic, only fading with the renewed English confidence after the Glorious Revolution.[38] Perhaps, for the purposes of entertainment, Ellis attributed the motives of Petty and other figures under examination more to outrage and revenge, exacerbated by the 1641 Rebellion, and less to the widely reputed economic thesis.
Ideally, what would a replete and comprehensive historiographical study of the literature on Cromwellian Ireland entail? It might begin with the classic and seminal works of Prendergast, Gardiner, and Dunlop, as solid grounding to study the more recent work and as representatives of the first paroxysm of scholarly interest. Second, a full study and comparative study of the qualitative and quantitative innovations and contentions of the late-1960s and early 1970s. The military-oriented works of the 1990s, which testified to the sustained interest in the topic, should be examined and compared to the original militarily concerned works of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Finally, it would be prudent to examine the full range of recent studies including the works of Barnard and Clarke, the aforementioned literary- and cultural-histories, as well as those conducted under the multiple kingdoms model. The prospect of relevant materials in continental archives, as well as the utilisation of the relatively new transatlantic framework for historical analysis, should ensure continued interest in the period.
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[1] These topics include questions about the necessarily violent and brutal natures of authoritarian régimes, the motives and results of imperialism and withdrawal from empire, and perhaps most important, historical-based blame, guilt, and their admissibility in contemporary debate and policy in the ever-active relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom and between Ireland’s various regional, religious, and cultural identities.
[2] T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649-1660. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41-46. This article is also much indebted to Aidan Clarke, “Ireland, 1534-1660” in Joseph Lee, Ed. Irish Historiography, 1970-1979. (Cork: Cork University Press, 1981), 34-55.
[3] Many other works dealing wholly or partly with Ireland in the Interregnum were produced in this period including, J. A. Froude’s, The English in Ireland (1881), J. O’Hart’s, Irish Landed Gentry when Cromwell Came to Ireland (1883), Richard Bagwell’s, Ireland Under the Stuarts and During the Interregnum (1909), many articles, several articles by Dunlop, and a great many works on the plantation of Ulster.
[4]The Books of the Commonwealth were fifty-six manuscript volumes kept by the administration in Ireland from 1650 to 1660. There were nearly totally destroyed in a fire after Free State artillery hit Republican positions at Dublin’s Four Courts, the home of the Public Records Office of Ireland. Peter Berresford Ellis, Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian Colonization of Ireland, 1652-1660. (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 250.
[5] These sources are numerous: Books of Survey and Distribution, the Civil Survey, the Down Survey, the 1659 Census, and the 1660 Pender Census. Kevin McKenny, “The Seventeenth-Century Land Settlement in Ireland: Towards a Statistical Interpretation” in Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Ed. Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 183-185.
[6] For Ulster, Philip S. Robinson claimed that Cromwellian settlers only became dominant in exceptionally fertile areas with ready access to the sea and thus external markets. Philip S. Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster. (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994), 98-105.
[7] In addition to the Bottigheimer and McKenny works discussed in this article, see R. C. Simington, The Transplantation to Connaught, 1654-1658 (1970).
[8] These works include T. Bartlett and K. Jeffrey, Eds. A Military History of Ireland (1996), J. S. Wheeler’s Cromwell in Ireland, Jane H. Ohlmeyer’s article “The Wars of Religion, 1603-1660” (1999), and Aidan Clarke’s Prelude to Restoration in Ireland: The End of the Commonwealth, 1659-1660 (1999). Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, xvii-xviii.
[9]Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland. (London: Phoenix, 1999), xi.
[10]Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, xvii-xviii.
[11] Although his analysis was confined to Ulster, Philip S. Robinson made valuable points about the fallacies that are convenient superficialities, which should be discarded in the interests of deeper historical investigation and historical accuracy: “perceptions of cultural difference are based on cultural identification rather than on reality . . . With more tangible cultural traits (such as traditional house types or English dialects) there are clearly elements which can claim ancestry from different source areas. But the end product of cultural contact in Ulster cannot be explained simply in terms of assimilation of one form by another. Cultural fusion, the mutual adoption of traits, interdependent development and subsequent evolution have given rise to patterns of cultural phenomena that are neither ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ nor ‘British’ and ‘Protestant’ in type.” Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster, 193-194.
[12] The existence of the continuity debate manifests itself in that the introductions of every work examined in this article provide a brief background history of Ireland. Prendergast’s extends back to Roman times, while Ellis begins in 1172 when Henry II supported Norman leaders in Ireland in their claim to portions of the island. The beginning of English law and administration in Ireland was prudent to follow.
[13] In a fascinating preface, Prendergast told of his quest to look at features of the period other than the well-documented military campaigns. John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. (London: Constable, 1996), xviii.
[14] Prendergast constantly reverted to this idea in the course of his narrative. When concerned with the Tudor and Stuart periods he maintained this argument in support of his condemnation of English government, not the adventurers, soldiers, or civilian population. Ibid., lii, 129-131.
[15] Moreover, “LAND-HUNGER OF THE ENGLISH” is included in the book’s considerable subject index. Ibid., 55, 268.
[16] Prendergast often used the terms “reservation” and “plantation”, and “apartheid” is a popular term to describe Cromwellian Ireland in later literature. Ibid., 118-119.
[17] “Free by nature, the Irish did not bind up their infants in swaddling clothes. It required the lapse of ages, and the burning eloquence of Rousseau, to induce the world to follow the practice of the Irish, who never went wrong in this respect; so true is the saying that he who follows nature never goes out of theway . . . The harp that had been long silent in Gaul, and was heard in Britain only in the mountains of Wales, was universally played in Ireland . . . Over the rest of Europe a thousand years of Roman and feudal slavery had divided society into conquerors and conquered, into gentlemen and serfs; so the lower classes are but in many countries emancipated villains, exhibiting traces of their former selfish condition, in their brutal manners. Ireland escaped the feudal yoke, and hence perhaps it is, that the commonest Irishmen has something in him of the gentleman.” Ibid., xxxix-xl, 55.
[18]Ibid., 20-21, 88-133.
[19] Prendergast included some primary source material in his footnotes and the course of his narrative. The remainder are in the massive appendices.
[20]Ibid., 80.
[21] “[the Irish] were brought to such wretchedness, as any stony heart would have rued the sight. Out of every corner of the woods and glynns they came forth on their hands, for their legs could not bear them,--they looked like anatomies of death, and spoke like ghosts crying out of the grave; they flocked to a pot of water-cresses as to a feast, though it afforded them small nourishment, and ate dead carrion, happy when they could find it, and soon after scraped the very carcasses out of the graves . . . and, more horrible still, children were killed and eaten, and the poor wretches who killed them were tried and hanged for it by those that drove them to such horrors.” Ibid., 14.
[22] Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 203.
[23] His thesis dealt with the motivations and build-up to the settlement, but did not extend to the settlement itself. Ibid., 7.
[24]Ibid., 2-3.
[25]Ibid., 28.
[26]Ibid., vi.
[27] “This book is a composite of literary and quantitative methods of historical inquiry. Chapters I, II, IV and V will be found to be for the most part conventional attempts to describe from documentary evidence the origins, nature, and development of the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. Chapters III and VI, and the two lengthy Appendices, A and B, are quantitative . . . Every attempt has been made to keep the quantitative methodology unobtrusive; in part because it is frequently more overwhelming than informing” Ibid., v.English Money and Irish Land can be compared with the somewhat more unwieldy and statistical presentation of Kevin McKenny’s aforementioned article and Theodore K. Rabb’s Enterprise and Empire (1966).
[28] Bottigheimer concluded that the Cromwellian endeavour in Ireland was a failure for both capitalism and imperialism: “In the long run the adventure was a two-fold failure. In a fiscal sense it failed to raise the amount of money necessary to repress Catholic Ireland. In a colonial sense it failed to find and tap an aggressive, expansive, and enterprising stream within English society. It did not arouse any abiding interest in the colonization of Ireland, comparable to the seventeenth-century emigration to North America.” Ibid., 54, 75.
[29] Bottigheimer’s 1967 article of the same title dealt with some of questions addressed in the subsequent book, and like the book, it attempted to address the interactions of capitalism and imperialism: “Might they [the adventurers] provide an example of a group of investors shaping the policy of their government along classical ‘imperialist’ lines?” Karl S. Bottigheimer, “English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland” Journal of British Studies, 7 (1967): 12-13.
[30] Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, 30-31.
[31]Ibid., 75.
[32]Ibid., 64-66.
[33]Ibid., 163.
[34]Ibid., 114.
[35]Ibid., 250.
[36] Only on the final page of the book did Ellis vaguely and melodramatically mention greater questions of Ireland’s status vis-à-vis Britain and the Empire: “the memory of all their conquests and the subsequent confiscations and colonizations, that kept alive in the Irish spirit to keep striking for their freedom . . . the feelings which were to cause generations of Irish to rise up in an attempt to strike off the colonial yolk” Ibid., 249.
[37] “Early on the morning of September 11, 1652, three English frigates, Revenge, Providence, and Expedition, rounded Raven Point and sailed into Loch Garman, at the south-east tip of Ireland.” Ibid., 1.
[38]Ibid., 11.
Bibliography
Barnard, T. C. Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Bottigheimer, Karl S. English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Bottigheimer, Karl S. “English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland” Journal of British Studies 7 (1) 1967, 12-27.
Byrne, F. J., Martin, F. X., and T. W. Moody. Eds. A New History of Ireland. Vol. 3 “Early Modern Ireland, 1534-1691” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Clarke, Aidan. “Ireland, 1534-1660” in Joseph Lee, Ed. Irish Historiography, 1970-1979. Cork: Cork University Press, 1981.
Ellis, Peter Berresford. Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian Colonization of Ireland, 1652-1660. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975.
McKenny, Kevin. “The Seventeenth-Century Land Settlement in Ireland: Towards a Statistical Interpretation” in Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Ed. Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Prendergast, John P. The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. London: Constable, 1996.
Reilly, Tom. Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland. London: Phoenix, 1999.
Robinson, Philip S. The Plantation of Ulster. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994.
Despite the `relevance' of its constituent motifs to the twentieth century,1
Cromwellian Ireland has traditionally been an unfashionable topic for his-
torical research . .
This is primarily due to the fact that source material is scant, fragmented, and has always been a formidable impediment in research efforts. Nonetheless, study of this topic is rewarding in its own right, but also because one can encounter several interesting works, and these works are often representative of the prevailing historical models in their time of composition. Moreover, the topic that had formerly received only two major bouts of attention—around the turn of twentieth century, and in the late-1960s and early-1970s—has been the subject of considerable interest in the past twenty-five years. While this article discusses many works, it focuses on three specifically, and the remainder to provide a better general historiography and for contextualizing purposes: John P. Prendergast’s classic The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1865), the first and seminal work in this area; Karl S. Bottigheimer’s sober and quantitative English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1971); and Peter Berresford Ellis’ Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian Colonization of Ireland, 1652-1660 (1975).
The availability and unavailability of sources has had a profound and limiting effect on scholarly undertakings in this area. Private papers and the overt or oblique correspondence of those directly involved in Interregnum Ireland were destroyed accidentally, or deliberately, in the nervous months preceding and proceeding the Restoration. The scarcity of material means concerned historians must utilize fragmentary and incomplete evidence. This scarcity is most apparent in attempting to gauge the reactions and writings of lower class Irishmen, although Ellis’ Hell or Connaught! attempted to redress this problem. Furthermore, it is difficult to assess Irish trade during the Interregnum as no port books were kept for the limited shipping traffic at Dublin and the port books from Bristol deal only with Ulster linen. There is also a distinct lack of records describing Irish economic interactions with America and Europe.[2] Indeed, the historiography of Cromwellian Ireland makes for an interesting narrative in its own right: it is a subject of two major paroxysms of scholarly interest and production. Prendergast’s classic and its unearthing of source material was succeeded by many books and articles, but most notably S. R. Gardiner’s History of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate (1903), and Robert Dunlop’s similarly voluminous Ireland Under the Commonwealth (1913).[3] Sadly, the most valuable source, The Books of the Commonwealth, were mostly destroyed in a fire in the opening moments of the Irish Civil War in 1922, although extracts remain available in the aforementioned works of Prendergast, Gardiner, Dunlop, and the Maynouth Journal Archivium Hibernicum (1917).[4]
The second paroxysm occurred in the late-1960s and early-1970s. Much of the reinvigorated interest can be attributed to the ‘statistical turn’ of the time. The surveys and censuses conducted under the Commonwealth, especially Petty’s Down Survey that earned Ireland the uncomfortable distinction of being Europe’s most well known country, are conducive to quantitative analysis as they contain massive amounts of information.[5] This sort of study could answer pertinent questions about land tenure in the period. What group gained the most from the Cromwellian revolution in land tenure?[6] What affiliation or alignment was most likely to result in the loss or gain of land? Race? Religion? Nationality? Or, perhaps, those with experience in Ireland, as opposed to adventuring newcomers, had better chances of attaining or retaining land? Notable contributions in this area belong to Bottigheimer, Kevin McKenny, and R. C. Simington.[7] New and novel qualitative approaches also produced important works. T. C. Barnard’s Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649-1660 (1975) innovatively and comprehensively examined the constructive side of the Cromwellian programme in Ireland, dealing with policy on finance, education, and religious and legal reform. The third Volume of the landmark compilation A New History of Ireland (1976) dealt extensively with many untouched areas including Irish language, the development of the English language in Ireland, Irish Literature, and the Irish Diaspora in the age of the counter-reformation. Ellis’ Hell or Connaught! travelled mostly on well-trodden paths, but did make incursions into the realm of Irish poetry in a valid attempt to discover the reactions and mindsets of the lower class and underground clergy during the Interregnum. The literary and cultural aspects of the period were given considerable treatment in the 1993 collection Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660.
With the end of the heyday of quantitative history and the exhausting of qualitative sources, Cromwellian Ireland has remained a subject of scholarly debate. The surge of interest in military history has recently produced books and articles addressing Cromwell’s Celtic campaigns.[8] These include Brendan Fitzpatrick’s Seventeenth-Century Ireland: The War of Religions (1988), Marcus Tanner’s Ireland’s Holy Wars: The Struggle for a Nation’s Soul, 1500-2000 and Tom Reilly’s controversial, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland (1999). The latter attracted much criticism over its controversial claim that Cromwellian rule benefited Ireland and its attempts to acquit Cromwell of the charges levelled by past historians. Indeed, Reilly felt his project rescued Cromwell from the prejudiced and enormous condemnation of past historiography: “the focus of this book is to exculpate Cromwell from the charges of wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of the ordinary and unarmed people of Ireland. The question of Cromwell’s guilt preoccupied many of the last century’s historians. Their verdict was a resounding cry of guilty! Cromwell is once again in the dock here, but this time the evidence of the day is assessed in the legal sense ‘without prejudice’.”[9] Reilly’s work was criticised as a Goldhagen-like ‘ground breaking book’, which merely dressed up old arguments in the new clothes of self-proclaimed revolutionary revisionism, as Barnard put it in Cromwellian Ireland:
Tom Reilly has trenchantly defended Cromwell’s conduct, along lines which, if long familiar, have never before been so thoroughly (and sometimes repetitively) rehearsed. The conventions of contemporary European warfare, the imperatives of money and terrain, the threat from Scotland, and the weight of English and Protestant ideology combined to produce a short but notably sharp campaign. Mr. Reilly has reminded of the tainted nature of the sources from which any analysis or narrative has to be fashioned . . . the resuscitation of an ‘honourable’ Cromwell in Ireland attests to the perennial search for arresting reinterpretations.[10]
The model of integrated ‘British’ history has also been applied to Cromwellian Ireland. David Stevenson’s article “Crowmell, Scotland, and Ireland” in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990) showed how the problem of multiple kingdoms that plagued Charles I also contributed to the untenable nature and the subsequent demise of the Protectorate. Nicholas Canny’s Making Ireland British: 1580-1650 was a detailed examination of plantations under the ‘multiple kingdoms’ approach.
What other sources are commonly available? Fortunately for scholars, the Commonwealth was an entity particularly obsessed with counting and compiling information, as evident in the aforementioned surveys and censuses. There is also the conventional score of government and government-related sources, including transplantation certificates, parliamentary proceedings, and petitions. In the foreword to the 2000 Edition of Cromwellian Ireland, Barnard mentioned the value of three sources that became available after the flurry of the 1970s: Petty’s complete archive housed at the Bodleian Library, the Christ Church muniments, and the papers of the Earls of Cork. In English Money and Irish Land, Bottigheimer made use of two newly discovered censuses, not available to, or unknown by, Prendergast. The trend in the 1990s towards integrated ‘British’ history did not yield any results in this area, but as Ellis suggested in the waning lines of Hell or Connaught!, any further exploration needed to be conducted in continental archives, especially those in the Netherlands and Spain.
Despite the great disparity in methods, foci, objectives, and sources, there are some common questions addressed in most works on Cromwellian Ireland: What were the major hindrances to the implementation of policy and the resettling of confiscated land? How is localism used as a model in the three works? Who benefited most when the dust settled with the Restoration? What sort of motivation was the most important in spurring on government, soldier, and adventurer? How did Cromwellian policy affect the Irish economy? How do the authors loyalty to or deconstruction of convenient superficialities like ‘Irish-Catholic’ and ‘English-Protestant’ hurt or help the validity of their greater contentions?[11] Was Cromwellian Ireland a case of continuity in Anglo-Irish relations or an anomaly?[12] In the seventeenth century? In the medieval and early modern periods? How much did international concerns, specifically Ireland as a potential staging point for an invasion of Britain, figure in English policy? What does this period say about the nature and motivations of English imperialism and hence the British Empire? What does it say, if anything, about Imperialism in general? How the three authors approach these critical issues will comprise the remainder of the article.
Prendergast’s The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, remains the seminal book in this area: it was the first comprehensive work on policy and the proceedings of the plantation;[13] it uncovered the appropriate sources and the difficulties that ask perseverance, detective work, and creativity from concerned historians; it revealed the major themes, actors, and events of the period and attested to the utter devastation in Ireland; and, perhaps most important, its twin theses, the ‘economic motivation thesis’ and the ‘existing-English thesis’ remain the explanatory pillars of Cromwellian policy and plantation in Ireland.
Fiercely pro-Irish and writing in the high years of the Home Rule movement, Prendergast’s Cromwellian Ireland was the foundation of the nineteenth century Irish colony state. In his estimation, the Commonwealth was only a naturally occurring high tide in the centuries-old English repression of Ireland, which fluctuated in its severity. Prendergast identified the reign of Henry VIII as the beginning of a new extreme phase in English repression, with subsequent monarchs seeking to replace the Catholic “Old-English” with Protestant landowners to achieve a decisive and permanent ‘second conquest of Ireland’. Indeed, this contention related intimately to another of Prendergast’s major themes: the irresistible Irish way of life that never failed to seduce and assimilate English adventurers before the sixteenth century: “Had the first English adventurers in Ireland been of the same mind as the king and nobility of England the Irish might possibly been subdued, their lands taken from them, and the nations reduced to serfdom, or exterminated. But the early settlers learned to love the Irish, and to prefer the freedom of Irish life and manners to the burdensome feudal system.”[14] The reign of James I saw the “new religion” purge followers of the old from land and office, leading to Prendergast’s conclusion that the Cromwellian programme was not an abrupt anomaly in Anglo-Irish history, but followed policies that had built up for more than a century.
Prendergast saw the history of England and Ireland in a racial framework. Writing in the age of a resurrected Gaelic Ethos, British imperial militarism and jingoism, and pseudo-scientific racial and biological determinism, Prendergast contended that the English, possessed by “the land hunger of the Anglo-Saxon race”, were innately barbarous, violent, and xenophobic.[15] The latter contention was made well clear in a fascinating section where Prendergast described how England exploited religious antipathies in attempting to make a reverse “apartheid” state out of the corner of south-east Ireland after making Connaught an Irish “reservation”:
Religion in 1520 had not created a difference between the Irish and other nations; but now, in 1653, there were foreign nations to be found, who, agreeing with the English in religion, might always be trusted to continue enemies of the Irish, and might be invited to form part of this plantation. Being nearest to the succour of England, being coasted on the east by the sea, and to be rendered defensible on the land by a few forts upon the banks of the rivers, the plantation might easily secure itself in case of any rising of the Irish inhabitants of the two other districts [The Connaught reservation and ‘mixed plantation’ that was the rest of Ireland].[16]
Conversely, the Irish are unique surviving remnants of a pure, natural and enlightened Gaelic race.[17] Yet, while Prendergast’s allegiances were clearly Irish-Catholic-Gaelic, and his presentation made much of religious loyalties and perceived racial characteristics, his serious analyses cut through these artificial and inaccurate constructions to assert that forms of English authority are the only real villains: officers cheating soldiers out of their land; landlords cheating and exploiting their poor tenants; and a ruthless monarchy, and then a ruthless republic, exploiting and manipulating English, Scots, and Irish alike.
Prendergast organized the English adventure into three groups to clearly present their motivations, conduct, and eventual results; it is in this third area that he leaves a legacy to the study of the subject. The adventurers’ main goal was simply to settle their land, but they came into conflict with parliament over the adequacy of protection from Tories, timetables for conquest and settlement, and tax exemptions. The descriptions of how the adventurers’ plans were irreparably tied to parliament uncovered a major avenue for historical investigation, which Bottigheimer eventually addressed. Prendergast also touched on the roles of the Papacy and England’s international strategic concerns. Moreover, Prendergast created the underpinning ‘economic motivation thesis’ by saying that financial concerns were primary among parliament’s motivations, and that the soldiers and officers of the army, the third group, were also largely motivated by money: the soldiers largely wanted financial compensation for their lands as they wished not to settle or plant; the officers wished to accumulate as much land as possible to either sell or plant; and both were adamant that they receive the same rate of arrears as the adventurers.[18]
The other great legacy that Prendergast left for later scholars is the simple identification and description of major events and edicts, beginning with the determination of guilt and the deportations, and the transplantation scheme, remonstrances, and its application. Prendergast also provides the motivations for, as well as relevant texts from, and the ramifications of, the Down Survey, Petty’s Civil Survey, the 1642 Adventurers Act, the Doubling Ordinance, and the 1653 Adventurers Act. The sum of these descriptions is that the Cromwellian endeavour in Ireland was an utter debacle. One of the major strengths of this work is that Prendergast, when not making scathing anti-English comments, lets the sources speak for themselves and lead the reader to the obvious conclusions.[19] At the same time, he can hardly be accused of examining and providing only selective examples to support a pre-formed thesis due to the groundbreaking and discovery oriented nature of the project, the comprehensiveness of this work, and a Thompsonian-style questioning and distrust of easy and convenient conclusions and generalizations.
This depiction of this confused and corrupt quasi-official exercise in greed was filled with black humour, scorn, and contempt. Often and with delight, Prendergast mocked the English and their abject failure. He also mocked their motives, methods, and their perception that they were backed by the divine. A good example was his description of the official procedure for land allocation to the army after the completion of the Civil Survey:
Having thus ascertained, by as near a computation as could be made without actual measurement, the extent and value of the lands seized by from the former proprietors on each of the three provinces on this side of the Shannon, a general council of officers next apportioned the amount of arrears to be satisfied in each province. They then proceeded, like the adventurers, to draw the first or grand lot, to ascertain in which province each regiment of horse, foot, and dragoons was to be satisfied in its arrears. For on debate of the matter whether they should take their lands by lot, or have them assigned to them respectively by some competent authority, they resolved for the former mode, declaring that they had rather take a lot upon a barren mountain as a portion from the lord, then a portion in the most fruitful valley upon their own choice.[20]
But the bumbling he described added comedy to the tragedy,[21] and this feature has been closely imitated by subsequent scholars, as Bottigheimer put it: “Sometimes (to paraphrase Marx) historical events occur first as farce and then as tragedy. Lord Lisle’s expedition, finally launched in February 1647, was the curtain-raising farce to the uncomic Cromwellian conquest of two years later.”[22] Prendergast’s sweeping and bold narrative with its comparative references to the ancients and scripture remained refreshing and entertaining in the more coldly analytical and sterile state of more recent historical scholarship.
Bottigheimer’s English Money and Irish Land was the logical extension of his 1967 Doctoral thesis at Berkeley.[23] Inexorably rooted in the historiographical trends of its time, this work is very different from Prendergast’s in its cool and scientific detachment. Indeed, as Bottigheimer purported in the opening pages of the book, his analytical goals were formed in opposition to some of Prendergast’s assumptions:
This study is concerned with the mechanics of English expansion into Ireland during the seventeenth century. Both English and Irish historians have tended to regard that process as inevitable . . . In order to perceive more clearly how this phase of English expansion came about it has been necessary to assume that it was not at all inevitable, that it was not even the result of a distinct colonizing urge or a general land-hunger, but rather that it was a by-product of specific political and economic developments within England. If the concept of inevitability is thus suspended, and English Protestants are assumed to have been no more and no less inherently rapacious than other men in other times, there remains the hypothesis that the colonization of Ireland is comprehensible, and that it occurred because of identifiable forces within English society. What those forces were and how they operated is the general concern of this work. How they produced the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland is the more specific subject, while the minute operation and effect of the so-called ‘Adventure for Irish Land’ is the pinnacle upon which this inverted pyramid stands and from which more general ideas were developed.[24]
However, Bottigheimer’s major contentions pointed to a different sort of inevitability in discussing the intensifying of Irish policy in the Interregnum. Like Prendergast, Bottigheimer saw the reign of Henry VIII and the genesis of the fears of invasion and counter-reformation as making Ireland exceptionally important. Bottigheimer also identified a cyclical pattern of plantation and rebellion beginning in the mid-sixteenth century that could only be broken by a drastic measure, such as the ultra-ambitious Cromwellian scheme: “On one hand Plantation created an appetite for new appropriations by the English, while on the other it undermined the land tenure system of Ireland and stimulated new rebellions, which in turn justified further plantation.”[25]
Bottigheimer wrote as a self-identified quantitative historian,[26] but he confronted possible criticisms of his methods in the preface, and this work managed to maintain a nice balance between quantitative and qualitative history.[27] Moreover, Bottigheimer’s plan of attack was part quantitative and part qualitative, leading to a greater qualitative end: he sought to discover who invested in Ireland and why they did so in order to address “the central question of Colonialism or Imperialism: why and by what means one society expands into another.”[28] Through considerable use of conventional government and government-related documents, Bottigheimer dealt with several questions relating to the interactions of government and the adventurers: What were their respective policies toward Ireland? Was either camp in possession of group cohesion or a cohesive agenda? How did the two camps agree and disagree? What success did the adventurers have in pushing their agenda on parliament? How did this relationship contribute to formulation of policy and the implementation of the settlement? In the end, Bottigheimer concluded that by 1649 the adventurers had been relegated to the status of “junior partner” in the Irish enterprise and that this abjection should have been seen as apart of the growing competence of the fledgling English Republic.[29]
As revealed by the book’s title, Bottigheimer subscribed to the traditional thesis that money and property were the major motivating factors of both government and adventurer, but he made interesting and convincing arguments about supplementary motivations. He downplayed the role of Protestant zeal and instead gave agency to the reaction toward the 1641 Rebellion,[30] which he claimed was a direct and insulting affront to the otherwise confident and increasingly powerful parliamentary forces. He also emphasised the ensuing anti-Irish propaganda of 1641 and 1642.[31] Bottigheimer explained the financial and supplementary motives of the adventurers in a fascinating regional and socio-economic framework:
Of the 1,533 adventurers it is possible to attribute a geographical location to all but 202. Of the 1,331 who can be classified, 750 prove to have been from London . . . The remaining adventure money came from all over the country . . . the West Country as a whole generated an amount of capital and a number of investors unmatched by any other provincial area. The West had long been identified with Irish colonization, particularly with the plantation of Ulster in the late sixteenth century, but this is not necessarily an adequate explanation of the enthusiasm of Devon. In addition, the phenomenon of small investment is nowhere more visible than in Exeter . . . The adventure in Exeter was therefore markedly different from the adventure in London, where it was largely the province of very rich men. In Exeter appeared the phenomenon of ‘popular’ colonialism, in which relatively humble people sought security and increments of wealth from the nearby lands of Ireland.[32]
Bottigheimer also pointed to a unique Cromwellian economic cyclical dilemma to explain how government was also largely motivated by money. The smaller expeditions of 1641 to 1649 were under-funded as parliament would not divert any considerable finances from the efforts in England. Consequently, the efforts of the adventurers did not yield any economic returns. By 1653, the costs of maintaining the Irish Garrison contributed to pressure for more confiscations; more time meant more money, more money meant more confiscation, more confiscation meant more extreme means, culminating in the attempted ethnic cleansing of Ireland.
Bottigheimer adhered to Prendergast’s time-honoured thesis that the ‘existing-English’ were the great winners in the aftermath of the settlement due to their Protestantism and Protestant alliance with the administration of Henry Cromwell, as well as the vast majority of soldiers who wished not to plant their land. English Money and Irish Land was similar to Prendergast’s book in its portrayal of the confused, piecemeal, and bumbling Cromwellian policy and implementation. It was also similar to Barnard’s Cromwellian Ireland in its unemotional focus on the politics and constructiveness of Irish Policy in the Interregnum. Bottigheimer referred to English policy as “clearly unable to make good use of the resulting spoils [of confiscation]”,[33] and, in anti-governmental comments similar to Prendergast’s, he engaged in some counter-factual ‘what if’ history: “Had Ireland been conquered in late 1642 or early 1643 by an expedition financed by the adventurers, a very different and much less drastic settlement would have resulted; one in which the adventurers rather than the soldiers played a key role.”[34] In terms of style, English Money and Irish Land was well-written, clear, and as Bottigheimer promised, the massive amounts of computed-analysed data do not obstructively impinge themselves on his well-balanced and largely chronological narrative.
Stylishly garnished with arresting quotations, poetry, and Shakespearean selections, Ellis’ Hell or Connaught! presented a very different sort of work from the others discussed in this article. Ellis is a popular historian and many of his non-academic public histories have sold very well. Hell or Connaught! was partly a political and military prosopography of the Cromwellian élite, and more of a chronicling narrative than a modern, analytical scholarly work with a Thompsonian ‘pregnant principle’. Moreover, the book can generally be described as a traditional, top-down history, dealing with major figures, events, and battles, and the typical paradigms of national histories. This was evident in the work’s structure: the chapters were titled after Henry Cromwell, Edmund Ludlow, and Charles Fleetwood; the major focus was the motivations and assumptions of the aforementioned men and men like them; the index was a mere massive compendium of names; and the book was printed with portraits the of prominent English political figures dealt with in the narrative. However, this vividly written work investigates some unexplored areas of research at the time of its composition and publication, some of which were presented shortly after in A New History of Ireland.
Ellis managed to discuss the impacts of war and displacement on Irish life and Ireland itself in his dealings with poetry as a historical source and his dealings with changes in diet, environmental abuses, cultural manifestations, and currency. This work also provided an unmatched, considerable treatment of Irish migration to, and interaction with, America and Europe, deportation to the Barbados and America, the writings and persecution of underground Catholic priests, and the Continental network that supported them. Ellis utilized trial records to good effect as they not only reveal much about the persecution of priests and their intellectual and theological dispositions, but also because they typically lent themselves to entertaining narratives. In fact, this work had many of the characteristics of an amateurish microhistorical work: using scant and fragmented evidence, Ellis asked the reader to make speculative and imaginative leaps when forming greater conclusions from particular examples.
While entertaining and not altogether without merits, this book was seriously flawed as accurate history. Ellis professed that he chose not to include a decent bibliography or references: “After considerable deliberation, I have decided not to use copious footnotes for source references because I do not wish to claim an academic status for this work to which I feel that it is not entitled.”[35] The narrative was decisively pro-Irish and took its accounts of devastation, starvation, and cannibalism directly from Prendergast’s work, and although it contained some good work from primary sources, Ellis usually leaned on other scholarly works. Most important, Ellis’ dealings with the relevant historiographical debates were dilettantish: there was no penetration of the terms ‘Irish-Catholic’ and ‘English-Protestant’; in a book that dealt with the military and national paradigms, there was little regard for the foreign and imperial ramifications of the issues.[36]The motives for the Cromwellian endeavour were discussed in no more detail than the metaphor with which he opened the book,[37] other relevant received scarce mention or none at all. There is, however, an exception. Ellis stated that the heightened concern for Ireland and the extreme programme of displacement began with the reign of Mary and the Spanish Armada, and outlasted the Republic, only fading with the renewed English confidence after the Glorious Revolution.[38] Perhaps, for the purposes of entertainment, Ellis attributed the motives of Petty and other figures under examination more to outrage and revenge, exacerbated by the 1641 Rebellion, and less to the widely reputed economic thesis.
Ideally, what would a replete and comprehensive historiographical study of the literature on Cromwellian Ireland entail? It might begin with the classic and seminal works of Prendergast, Gardiner, and Dunlop, as solid grounding to study the more recent work and as representatives of the first paroxysm of scholarly interest. Second, a full study and comparative study of the qualitative and quantitative innovations and contentions of the late-1960s and early 1970s. The military-oriented works of the 1990s, which testified to the sustained interest in the topic, should be examined and compared to the original militarily concerned works of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Finally, it would be prudent to examine the full range of recent studies including the works of Barnard and Clarke, the aforementioned literary- and cultural-histories, as well as those conducted under the multiple kingdoms model. The prospect of relevant materials in continental archives, as well as the utilisation of the relatively new transatlantic framework for historical analysis, should ensure continued interest in the period.
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[1] These topics include questions about the necessarily violent and brutal natures of authoritarian régimes, the motives and results of imperialism and withdrawal from empire, and perhaps most important, historical-based blame, guilt, and their admissibility in contemporary debate and policy in the ever-active relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom and between Ireland’s various regional, religious, and cultural identities.
[2] T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649-1660. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41-46. This article is also much indebted to Aidan Clarke, “Ireland, 1534-1660” in Joseph Lee, Ed. Irish Historiography, 1970-1979. (Cork: Cork University Press, 1981), 34-55.
[3] Many other works dealing wholly or partly with Ireland in the Interregnum were produced in this period including, J. A. Froude’s, The English in Ireland (1881), J. O’Hart’s, Irish Landed Gentry when Cromwell Came to Ireland (1883), Richard Bagwell’s, Ireland Under the Stuarts and During the Interregnum (1909), many articles, several articles by Dunlop, and a great many works on the plantation of Ulster.
[4]The Books of the Commonwealth were fifty-six manuscript volumes kept by the administration in Ireland from 1650 to 1660. There were nearly totally destroyed in a fire after Free State artillery hit Republican positions at Dublin’s Four Courts, the home of the Public Records Office of Ireland. Peter Berresford Ellis, Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian Colonization of Ireland, 1652-1660. (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 250.
[5] These sources are numerous: Books of Survey and Distribution, the Civil Survey, the Down Survey, the 1659 Census, and the 1660 Pender Census. Kevin McKenny, “The Seventeenth-Century Land Settlement in Ireland: Towards a Statistical Interpretation” in Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Ed. Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 183-185.
[6] For Ulster, Philip S. Robinson claimed that Cromwellian settlers only became dominant in exceptionally fertile areas with ready access to the sea and thus external markets. Philip S. Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster. (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994), 98-105.
[7] In addition to the Bottigheimer and McKenny works discussed in this article, see R. C. Simington, The Transplantation to Connaught, 1654-1658 (1970).
[8] These works include T. Bartlett and K. Jeffrey, Eds. A Military History of Ireland (1996), J. S. Wheeler’s Cromwell in Ireland, Jane H. Ohlmeyer’s article “The Wars of Religion, 1603-1660” (1999), and Aidan Clarke’s Prelude to Restoration in Ireland: The End of the Commonwealth, 1659-1660 (1999). Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, xvii-xviii.
[9]Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland. (London: Phoenix, 1999), xi.
[10]Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, xvii-xviii.
[11] Although his analysis was confined to Ulster, Philip S. Robinson made valuable points about the fallacies that are convenient superficialities, which should be discarded in the interests of deeper historical investigation and historical accuracy: “perceptions of cultural difference are based on cultural identification rather than on reality . . . With more tangible cultural traits (such as traditional house types or English dialects) there are clearly elements which can claim ancestry from different source areas. But the end product of cultural contact in Ulster cannot be explained simply in terms of assimilation of one form by another. Cultural fusion, the mutual adoption of traits, interdependent development and subsequent evolution have given rise to patterns of cultural phenomena that are neither ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ nor ‘British’ and ‘Protestant’ in type.” Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster, 193-194.
[12] The existence of the continuity debate manifests itself in that the introductions of every work examined in this article provide a brief background history of Ireland. Prendergast’s extends back to Roman times, while Ellis begins in 1172 when Henry II supported Norman leaders in Ireland in their claim to portions of the island. The beginning of English law and administration in Ireland was prudent to follow.
[13] In a fascinating preface, Prendergast told of his quest to look at features of the period other than the well-documented military campaigns. John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. (London: Constable, 1996), xviii.
[14] Prendergast constantly reverted to this idea in the course of his narrative. When concerned with the Tudor and Stuart periods he maintained this argument in support of his condemnation of English government, not the adventurers, soldiers, or civilian population. Ibid., lii, 129-131.
[15] Moreover, “LAND-HUNGER OF THE ENGLISH” is included in the book’s considerable subject index. Ibid., 55, 268.
[16] Prendergast often used the terms “reservation” and “plantation”, and “apartheid” is a popular term to describe Cromwellian Ireland in later literature. Ibid., 118-119.
[17] “Free by nature, the Irish did not bind up their infants in swaddling clothes. It required the lapse of ages, and the burning eloquence of Rousseau, to induce the world to follow the practice of the Irish, who never went wrong in this respect; so true is the saying that he who follows nature never goes out of theway . . . The harp that had been long silent in Gaul, and was heard in Britain only in the mountains of Wales, was universally played in Ireland . . . Over the rest of Europe a thousand years of Roman and feudal slavery had divided society into conquerors and conquered, into gentlemen and serfs; so the lower classes are but in many countries emancipated villains, exhibiting traces of their former selfish condition, in their brutal manners. Ireland escaped the feudal yoke, and hence perhaps it is, that the commonest Irishmen has something in him of the gentleman.” Ibid., xxxix-xl, 55.
[18]Ibid., 20-21, 88-133.
[19] Prendergast included some primary source material in his footnotes and the course of his narrative. The remainder are in the massive appendices.
[20]Ibid., 80.
[21] “[the Irish] were brought to such wretchedness, as any stony heart would have rued the sight. Out of every corner of the woods and glynns they came forth on their hands, for their legs could not bear them,--they looked like anatomies of death, and spoke like ghosts crying out of the grave; they flocked to a pot of water-cresses as to a feast, though it afforded them small nourishment, and ate dead carrion, happy when they could find it, and soon after scraped the very carcasses out of the graves . . . and, more horrible still, children were killed and eaten, and the poor wretches who killed them were tried and hanged for it by those that drove them to such horrors.” Ibid., 14.
[22] Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 203.
[23] His thesis dealt with the motivations and build-up to the settlement, but did not extend to the settlement itself. Ibid., 7.
[24]Ibid., 2-3.
[25]Ibid., 28.
[26]Ibid., vi.
[27] “This book is a composite of literary and quantitative methods of historical inquiry. Chapters I, II, IV and V will be found to be for the most part conventional attempts to describe from documentary evidence the origins, nature, and development of the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. Chapters III and VI, and the two lengthy Appendices, A and B, are quantitative . . . Every attempt has been made to keep the quantitative methodology unobtrusive; in part because it is frequently more overwhelming than informing” Ibid., v.English Money and Irish Land can be compared with the somewhat more unwieldy and statistical presentation of Kevin McKenny’s aforementioned article and Theodore K. Rabb’s Enterprise and Empire (1966).
[28] Bottigheimer concluded that the Cromwellian endeavour in Ireland was a failure for both capitalism and imperialism: “In the long run the adventure was a two-fold failure. In a fiscal sense it failed to raise the amount of money necessary to repress Catholic Ireland. In a colonial sense it failed to find and tap an aggressive, expansive, and enterprising stream within English society. It did not arouse any abiding interest in the colonization of Ireland, comparable to the seventeenth-century emigration to North America.” Ibid., 54, 75.
[29] Bottigheimer’s 1967 article of the same title dealt with some of questions addressed in the subsequent book, and like the book, it attempted to address the interactions of capitalism and imperialism: “Might they [the adventurers] provide an example of a group of investors shaping the policy of their government along classical ‘imperialist’ lines?” Karl S. Bottigheimer, “English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland” Journal of British Studies, 7 (1967): 12-13.
[30] Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, 30-31.
[31]Ibid., 75.
[32]Ibid., 64-66.
[33]Ibid., 163.
[34]Ibid., 114.
[35]Ibid., 250.
[36] Only on the final page of the book did Ellis vaguely and melodramatically mention greater questions of Ireland’s status vis-à-vis Britain and the Empire: “the memory of all their conquests and the subsequent confiscations and colonizations, that kept alive in the Irish spirit to keep striking for their freedom . . . the feelings which were to cause generations of Irish to rise up in an attempt to strike off the colonial yolk” Ibid., 249.
[37] “Early on the morning of September 11, 1652, three English frigates, Revenge, Providence, and Expedition, rounded Raven Point and sailed into Loch Garman, at the south-east tip of Ireland.” Ibid., 1.
[38]Ibid., 11.
Bibliography
Barnard, T. C. Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Bottigheimer, Karl S. English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Bottigheimer, Karl S. “English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland” Journal of British Studies 7 (1) 1967, 12-27.
Byrne, F. J., Martin, F. X., and T. W. Moody. Eds. A New History of Ireland. Vol. 3 “Early Modern Ireland, 1534-1691” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Clarke, Aidan. “Ireland, 1534-1660” in Joseph Lee, Ed. Irish Historiography, 1970-1979. Cork: Cork University Press, 1981.
Ellis, Peter Berresford. Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian Colonization of Ireland, 1652-1660. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975.
McKenny, Kevin. “The Seventeenth-Century Land Settlement in Ireland: Towards a Statistical Interpretation” in Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Ed. Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Prendergast, John P. The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. London: Constable, 1996.
Reilly, Tom. Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland. London: Phoenix, 1999.
Robinson, Philip S. The Plantation of Ulster. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994.
Colonialism / Imperialism
The central question of Colonialism or Imperialism is suggested to be: why and by what means one society expands into another . .
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