Edmund Burke and the Long Seventeenth Century

The wars and massacres, land confiscations and plantations, peace treaties and redress, and all the oscillating upheavals in socio-political power in Ireland during the seventeenth-century, can be regarded as typical of the cycle of religious sectarian warfare evident throughout Europe at that time. The warring factions that fought to control the government of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales are, when loosely sketched, analogous to those found on the continent’s mainland: a Protestant, democratising power versus a Catholic, aristocratic force that could lay claim to a traditionally-held belief in their appointment by divine power. However, by the mid’ seventeenth-century there was an ethnic dimension to this power struggle as it played out in Ireland: the supporters of the Catholic interest were overwhelmingly Gaelic with a distinctly different language and cultural practices than that of the English-speaking settlers (also known in Ireland as planters) who supported the Protestant interest. It is at this level – the level of culture – that the wars in Seventeenth-Century Ireland can be understood as a colonial struggle – with the ultimately politically vanquished Gaelic aristocrats, (known by the end of the century as Jacobites for their support of King James II and VII of the House of Stuart) not only losing political power but enduring the slow decline of their cultural dominance and social influence, becoming increasingly marginalised in the decades after the final battles of 1691.