Seal of the General Assembly of the Catholic Confederacy of Kilkenny
The Confederacy of Kilkenny functioned as a de facto state in Ireland from 1642 to 1649, controlling large parts of the country and based, as its name suggests, in the cities of Kilkenny and Waterford. The raison d’etre of the Confederacy was threefold, and represented by its motto: first, the demand for religious toleration of Catholics in Ireland (the huge majority of the population) which Charles I’s government had failed to grant; second, the recognition of Charles I as King of Ireland; third, the demand for true self-government for Ireland. The Confederacy is politically and constitutionally interesting from a High Tory point of view, since although the Confederates ultimately gave their name to the Tories in England by a long chain of pejorative etymology, the doctrine of passive obedience espoused later by the English Tories can scarcely be attributed to the Confederates, whose obedience was modified by two crucial and interlinked imperatives: religious toleration and the self-determination of the Irish people.
These imperatives were interlinked because the Irish defined themselves as different from the English through their continued Catholicism and, indeed, they viewed the Roman Catholic Church as a representative of and embodiment of the Irish people, just as many in England viewed the Church of England. Unlike in England, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was not missionary but truly national; the Confederacy of Kilkenny made the putative Catholic commonwealth of Ireland a fact.
The origins of the Confederacy lay in the Irish rising of 1641 against the royal government, which was essentially the consequence of royal neglect of Ireland as well as the intransigence of Church of Ireland clergy such as the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, on the King’s proposed Graces. The Irish Catholics were extremely loyal to the Stuart Kings but the continued plantations of the country with foreign Protestants and the failure of the King to listen to Irish petitions for religious toleration, in addition to the constitutional injustice of Poynings’ Law, made a reluctant rebellion inevitable. Had Charles paid more attention to Ireland he would not have had to negotiate later for a Catholic army – loyal Irish Catholics could have crossed to England and crushed the Parliamentarians early on in the English Civil War.
The Dublin government led by Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and then James Butler, Earl of Ormonde existed in order to protect the interests of the plantations, since it consisted only of Protestants; although Catholics had not yet formally lost their right to sit in the Irish Parliament, the Parliament contained an unrepresentative number of Protestants. Since the Confederates recognised the King and his Parliament, they self-consciously avoided setting themselves up as an alternative to the legislature of the Irish state. Consequently, the General Assembly was not divided into houses of Lords and Commons; peers, bishops and commoners all sat on the Assembly. Likewise, the speaker of the General Assembly was not addressed as such but by his surname, and was called the Prolocutor. Nevertheless, the Assembly had its own seal and functioned as an alternative government until such time as the King would grant Catholics a role in the official organs of the Irish state. It set up it own courts, raised its own armies and minted its own currency (see below).
Ormonde’s cessation of war with the Confederacy in September 1643 was the only sensible course since there were by this time Parliamentarian rebels on Irish soil, who posed a far more serious threat than the Catholics. In 1644 a Confederate army crossed to Scotland to aid the Royalists there. However, Ormonde betrayed the Confederacy and the King when he handed over Dublin to the Parliamentarians in August 1647, preferring the Parliamentarians to hold the city rather than the Confederates. At the subsequent Battle of Dungan’s Hill the Leinster army of the Confederacy was destroyed by a Protestant force consisting of both Royalists and Parliamentarians. However, by January 1649 the Confederacy was prepared to accept help from Ormonde against the encroaching Parliamentarians and Ormonde realised the situation in England was desperate enough to consider an alliance with them.
However, in 1648 the Confederacy was fatally weakened when Owen Roe O’Neill broke with the Confederates in his belief that it was not defending the rights of the Gaelic Irish; he became an ally of the Parliamentarians and was supported by the Papal Nuncio Rinuccini. Many of the Confederate leaders were ‘Old English’ Catholic families who had supported Queen Elizabeth during the Catholic risings of the 16th century, and this rankled with the native aristocracy. When the combined Confederate-Royalist army failed to take Dublin on 2nd August 1649 Cromwell had a place to land his army of Ironsides, whose genocidal campaign changed Ireland forever. The Confederates resisted town by town but the end for the Confederacy of Kilkenny finally came on 12th May 1652 when Thomas Preston surrendered the city of Galway, the last in Confederate hands, after a nine-month siege.
Irish Confederate Halfpenny (Kilkenny Money)
The Confederacy minted its own coinage, not so much to demonstrate its authority but ‘of necessity’, as money was desperately needed to pay the armies and no new money was in circulation. On 15th November 1642 the General Assembly decreed that ‘there shall be 4000l. of red copper coyned to farthings and halfpence, with the harp and the crown on one side and two septers on the other’. This resulted in the production of the Kilkenny Money (1642). In the same decree, the General Assembly ordered that silver plate should also be made into coin, giving rise to the crowns known as Blacksmith’s Money. In 1643, the Confederates issued what has become known as Rebel Money, a variation on the Ormonde Money issued by the royal government in Dublin, which substituted a cross for the royal cipher. In addition, Confederates holding Bandal, Kinsale and Youghal minted local issues in those places, mostly of small denominations.
The Confederacy of Kilkenny had some similarities to the next independent Irish state to succeed it, the Irish Free State of 1922. Unlike the Irish Free State, the Confederacy did not begin with Republican aims and later set them aside, but the Confederate courts of the 1640s could be compared with the Republican courts of the 1920s that were set up in defiance of the British administration in those areas under the control of the IRA in the Anglo-Irish War. Likewise, the armies raised by the Confederacy were not much different from the IRA in that war. The eventual reluctant co-operation of Ormonde with the Confederacy likewise mirrors the co-operation of the British with the Free State on the basis that Republicans were more dangerous than rebels prepared to acknowledge the King – although, in the 17th century, the republicans were Protestant settlers!
Those ignorant of Irish history often remark that 17th century conflicts lingered on there for longer than anywhere else; the truth is that both Unionists and Nationalists updated their political ideology even if their aims remained the same. The Unionists modelled themselves on the ascendancy classes of the British Empire and treated the Irish like recalcitrant natives, while the Nationalists from 1798 became Republicans, basing their claim for Ireland’s independence on the right to national self-determination of the Irish people. The latter is a great tragedy of Irish history, since it gave an essentially ethnic identity to the Irish state and it has actually held back the unification of Ireland. The modern Scottish National Party has learnt from the mistakes of Irish Republicans and self-consciously downplays the ethnic element of the struggle for independence.
Had Irish Nationalists made a constitutional argument for Irish independence, rather than one based upon ethnic identity, the British government would have had far less justification in withholding Irish unity by keeping control of the six counties. Irish Nationalists could have argued, for instance, that Poynings’ Law and the Act of Union of 1801 were unconstitutional and illegal; they could have argued that the Plantations were an illegal act imposed upon Ireland, and that the Confederacy of Kilkenny represented the legitimate government of Ireland until Cromwell’s invasion. The strength of the Confederacy was its unification of Gaelic Irish with ‘Old English’ Catholics in the cause of religious toleration and Ireland’s independence. The Republican ideological commitments of modern Irish politics (which are, after all, foreign imports to Ireland) have held back and still hold back the unification of Ireland; ethnic animosities have taken the place of legitimate constitutional grievances.
