Scotland and Ireland

Scotland

As after the death of Cromwell in 1658, Scottish politicians found themselves reacting to events in England. In December 1688 James’s ministers fled Edinburgh in the wake of anti-Catholic rioting, leaving the control of the city to radical Presbyterians.

In January 1689 William summoned a Convention of Estates to meet in Edinburgh on 14 March. Scottish Jacobites refused to attend and on 4 April members voted, with only five against, that James had attempted ‘the subversion of the Protestant religion, and the violation of the laws and liberties of the kingdom.’ The Claim of Right, the Scottish equivalent of the Bill of Rights, was accepted on 11 April. ‘

It was also a Presbyterian revolution. On 22 July William reluctantly agreed to an act abolishing bishops. He was also forced to accept a lesser degree of toleration than in England. A witch-hunt was initiated against clergy who sympathized with episcopacy. 664 ministers were dismissed in the following decades and many Episcopalians, who still held to divine right monarchy, looked to the restoration of the Stuarts to secure their rights.

John Graham of Claverhouse,
Viscount Dundee
Public domain

Whereas the Presbyterians of the Lowlands were overwhelmingly Williamite, Jacobitism remained strong in the Highlands. When the Convention offered the Crown to William, John Graham of Claverhouse, now created Viscount Dundee by James, rode north to rally the Jacobite clans. On 27 July 1689 several thousand Highlanders led by Viscount Dundee defeated William’s forces under General Mackay at Killiekrankie. But this was a Pyrrhic victory as Dundee was killed and the Jacobites were finally trounced at Crondale on 1 May 1690. But the rebellion showed the strength of Scottish Jacobitism and further pushed William into the arms of the Presbyterians.


An Act of 7 June 1690 established Presbyterianism as the established religion of Scotland.The principle of one established Church for the whole of the British Isles was abandoned.

Because his army was tied down first in Ireland and then on the Continent, William was unable to subject the Highlands to the same military conquest as Ireland. Instead the government constructed Fort William, but lacked the troops to police it, and the Highlands remained unstable and militarily threatening. In the summer of 1691 the chiefs were given the opportunity to recognize William as king by taking an oath. The failure of Alasdair MacIan to meet the deadline led to the punitive massacre of Glencoe on 13 February 1692, a very nasty incident which was exploited by William’s opponents.

Ireland

Ireland presented a much graver threat. In the wake of James’s flight, Tyrconnell, the Lord Deputy, mobilized Irish Catholics and by March 1689 controlled most of Ireland except Ulster. By April only Derry and Enniskillen stood out against the Jacobites. With the encouragement and financial support of Louis XIV, James landed at Kinsale on 12 March with about 3,000 French reinforcements to assist Tyrconnell. But this proved more difficult than he had anticipated and in April he besieged Londonderry after being denied entry to the city when thirteen apprentice boys shut the gates in his face. The city was finally relieved (after 105 days) on 31 July 1689 when William’s ships broke through to relieve the city. The siege had more symbolic than military importance. At Enniskillen the Protestants were able to go on the offensive and on the day the siege of Derry was lifted the Williamites defeated the Jacobites at Enniskillen and Newtownbutler.

On 13 August 1689 the 70-year-old veteran Marshall Schomberg landed unopposed near Bangor at the head of 10,000 troops which included Huguenots and Dutch infantry. He quickly took Carrickfergus and reached Newry in September. But Tyrconnell raised a new Jacobite army and reached Dundalk before the over-cautious Schomberg. Bogged down there, nearly two thousand Williamites died of fever. Both sides then took to their winter quarters. But James had lost the initiative – he showed poor powers of leadership and his army was disorganized.

On 14 June 1690 William arrived at Carrickfergus with 15,000 troops, nearly half of them hired from Denmark. By the end of the month he had assembled a combined Protestant army of 36,000 (James’s army comprised 25,000 and was similarly international, and comprised French and Irish) , 40 pieces of artillery and 1,000 horses. On 1 July (12 July NS) William met James at the Battle of the Boyne. Though Schomberg was killed, the Jacobites were forced to retreat westwards. Casualties were slight by the standards of contemporary warfare and the Jacobites retreated in good order.

The battle of the Boyne, by Jan Wyck
Public domain

What made the defeat so decisive was James’s reaction. He deserted the army, made rapidly for Dublin and left for France from Kinsale on 4 July. But Jacobite resistance continued for a year, under Patrick Sarsfield, who held out at Limerick. William left Ireland in early September, but Marlborough (now an earl) arrived with 5,000 troops and soon captured Cork and Kinsale, the main ports used by France to supply the Jacobites. On 3 October the Treaty of Limerick was signed. By its terms not only the French but some 12,000-15,000 Irish soldiers left for France, the ‘Wild Geese’.

The Penal Laws

In spite of the relatively generous provisions of the treaty, the long-term outcome of the Williamite war of 1689-91 was to strengthen the Protestant ascendancy through a series of penal laws. Catholics were oppressed by a series of penal laws designed to bar them from the professions and deprive them of land.

1. A statute of 1697 criminalized any attempt to perform a marriage between a Protestant woman with an estate of £500 or more and any man who had not obtained legal certification that he was a Protestant.
2. By an Act of 1704 Roman Catholic landowners who possessed fee simples at common law had these fee simples turned into estates which could not descend according to the laws of primogeniture; instead at the death of such an owner his estate was to descend according to the rules of gavelkind. But should the eldest son conform to the Church of Ireland, then he could take the entire estate by primogeniture. Moreover Roman Catholics could not acquire land from Protestant by purchase or marriage. Nor could a Catholic purchase any interest in land greater than a term of 31 years. The land confiscation articles were rigorously applied, reducing Catholic owned land to 14% of the whole by 1714.

Presbyterians were also disadvantaged, though to a lesser degree.

Conclusion

1. It is completely wrong to describe the Glorious Revolution as bloodless. It was fiercely contested in both Scotland and Ireland.
2. In Scotland, the Revolution saw the establishment of the Church of Scotland as a Presbyterian Church. The logical consequence of the Revolution was to be the union of the English and Scots Parliaments in 1707.
3. The Revolution left a very troubled legacy in Ireland. A series of penal laws confirmed the Protestant ascendancy and it was only a hundred years later that the legal position of the Irish Catholics began to improve.