Two of Ireland’s most powerful clerics, Plunkett, the primate and Brenan, the Archbishop of Cashel, were of a similar mindset, having studied together in Rome. A great deal is known of their approach through their letters, which are preserved in Rome and elsewhere. They believed their wisest course was to guide their flock through a process of accommodation rather than conflict with an antagonistic administration, and to cultivate good relations, particularly with the viceroy. They knew from first-hand experience the challenges faced by the Catholic Church, but sought to deflect hostile intervention by the authorities and to minimise the worst excesses of any new initiatives. They had some notable success with Viceroys Robartes and Berkeley, particularly in education and dealing with charges of exercising papal jurisdiction levied against clerical colleagues. Rather less was achieved with Essex, during whose period in office Plunkett and Brenan had to go into hiding. Essex was succeeded by Ormond, who was unable to prevent Plunkett falling victim to the anti-Catholic hysteria of the English Popish Plot. Before his execution, Plunkett summarised his religious and political philosophy, and insisted on the superiority of divine over man-made law. Brenan survived as archbishop for another 12 years by maintaining a low, elusive, profile and enjoyed the short-lived Catholic revanche on the accession of James II. Plunkett’s prominence as primate and his adamantine character may have played a part in his downfall. In contrast, Brenan died peacefully.
In Restoration Ireland the law primarily served the interests of the English state and the Anglo-Protestant community, and oppressed the majority Catholic population. Analysing the letters of Oliver Plunkett and John Brenan demonstrates the initial success and ultimate failure of their non-confrontational approach to legal and political processes. Other clerics took a more challenging stance. The lives and writings of Nicholas French and John Lynch have been noted; less so those of Edmond O’Reilly and John O’Molony. Exploring their distinct approaches provides a new perspective on the wide variety of clerical engagement with the law. Irish-language literary material has been little examined in this context. The work of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and has contemporaries is considered to show how Gaelic Ireland deeply resented a hostile legal environment. Some Catholic landed families recovered their estates in the 1663 Court of Claims and this book evidences the different approaches they adopted to this unique opportunity despite Protestant hostility. The lives and careers of lawyers John Walshe, William Talbot and Gerard Dillon have been little noted. This book interrogates the considerable corpus of primary sources to illustrate how Catholic lawyers could survive, even thrive for a period. The rise and fall of James II proved their undoing as it did for all of Catholic Ireland. This book explores and illustrates the many ways in which Irish Catholics experienced a legal system that proved fundamentally inimical to their interests.
Other clerics of the period chose less pastoral paths and distinctly different approaches, some as intellectual campaigners and others as political activists, and the wide range of their responses is considered in Chapter 2. John Lynch and Nicholas French left a more consciously literary legacy and wrote from exile. In contrast to Plunkett and Brennan their approach was forceful and confrontational, underpinned by detailed forensic analysis. The Dedicatory Epistle of John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus is particularly useful, written shortly after Charles II’s restoration to the throne. Nicholas French’s writings were extensive and detail how Charles II failed to legislate for the restoration of the lands of his loyal Irish Catholic subjects, or to provide for religious toleration. Their work forms a middle ground; notwithstanding their robust critique, both were strongly loyal to Charles II, and took a long strategic view. It was otherwise in the case of bishops Edmund O’Reilly and John O’Molony as their loyalty to the Stuart regime was tested. They were activists who flirted with rebellion, and O’Molony considered a reordering of the constitutional relationship between Ireland and the Stuarts. In contrast to Plunkett and Brenan they left scant correspondence. Yet even from these relatively meagre resources, it is possible to construct something of the worldview of two of the more radical members of the Catholic Restoration hierarchy.
This book argues that sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. This is perhaps even more remarkable given that the sheer size of the international seafaring workforce that stepped ashore on Ratcliffe Highway placed sailortown’s transient nature on a different level to the traditional slum. While the bourgeois observer viewed the district as chaotic and dangerous, to the international sailor, Ratcliffe Highway exhibited the recognisable characteristics of an urban–maritime culture associated with sailortown. This culture infused the locality and informed sailortown’s own micro-economy of the merchant shipping industry, sailor leisure, and boarding facilities. In understanding how sailortown functioned, this book has viewed Ratcliffe Highway through the prism of a contact zone. Pratt’s definition of contact zones as ‘spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other’ captures the complex cultural exchanges within these waterfront cosmopolitan communities. Sailortown was undoubtedly a transient district and a space of ‘heightened interaction’ that you would struggle to find in any other urban context. Its compact district fostered a space in which differing subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiating and at other times clashing with one another.
Apart from military force, the common law was the most powerful instrument of the English administration in the control of Ireland. Sir John Davies was its most articulate advocate and imagined that the common law would pervade almost all aspects of life as it did in England. For Catholics, the common law became of increasing importance in the seventeenth century, particularly in relation to land ownership and the practice of religion. But could a legal system which emanated from a polity founded on Protestantism accommodate a Catholic population? The Irish parliament enacted legislation which had profound and enduring consequences. The administration issued hundreds of proclamations which had pervasive effect. The land settlement, restraints on the practice of religion and periods of persecution ensured that Catholics had particularly intense encounters with the law. Yet references to the role of the law in studies of the Restoration are scant, and few acknowledge its centrality. Since Catholics constituted the largest proportion of the population, there is a major lacuna in the historiography. The object of the book is to explore and illustrate some aspects of how Irish Catholics engaged with and experienced the common law. This is a vast topic and the book endeavours to take up the challenge of an interdisciplinary approach through a series of case studies. It does not aspire to be comprehensive.
‘The curse of Ratcliffe Highway’ examines how the Victorians ‘imagined’ the Highway by tracing how the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 left an indelible stain on the district’s reputation. By the mid-nineteenth century, the press and social observers had conflated the bloody murders of 1811 with the perceived vice and violence of sailortown. However, this chapter employs the Census material to uncover a rather different picture of Ratcliffe Highway, one that is more socially heterogeneous than contemporaries imagined. By the 1860s, it was a cosmopolitan contact zone where sailors, the local working class, and tradespeople contributed to, and found support from, cultures and sailortown institutions of Ratcliffe Highway. Sailortown, however, was not only a contact zone for those who lodged, worked, and leisured in the district; it was also a site targeted by a legion of religious evangelists, social explorers, and journalists keen to make contact with and observe the urban poor.
Between 1850 and 1900, London’s Ratcliffe Highway was the infamous ‘sailor’s playground’. It was a place where sailors longed for while at sea, and a district where the local population worked and was entertained. However, for social investigators, it was a place of fascination and fear as it haboured ‘exotic’ and heathen communities. Sailortowns featured in most international ports in the nineteenth century and were situated at the interface between urban and maritime communities. They were transient, cosmopolitan, and working class in character, and they provide us with an insight into class, race, and gendered relations within subaltern communities. This book goes beyond conceptualising sailortown as a global economic hub that entangled sailors into vice and exploitation. It will examine how, in the mid-nineteenth century, anxieties relating to urban modernity encouraged Victorians to reimagine Ratcliffe Highway as a chaotic and dangerous urban abyss. Certainly, the sailortown population was mixed and varied and engaged in numerous working-class trades connected with the marine and leisure industries such as dockers, stevedores, sailmakers, sex workers, and international seafarers. Sailortowns were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated, and at other times clashed with one another. However, the book argues that despite these challenges, sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban–maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.
‘From Jolly Jack and Moll to proletarian Jack and Jill’ explores how Victorians turned to the apparent moral failings of the sailors and women in Ratcliffe Highway to explain the district's perceived slide into depravity and violence. On making contact with the populace of the sailortown district, social explorers searched in vain for Charles Dibdin's ‘Jolly Jack and Lusty Moll', characters who had been celebrated in the age of sail. Social explorers were instead confronted with a modern, urbanised, waterfront people who were at the forefront of the transition from sail to steam in the maritime industry. The chapter interrogates the nostalgic texts from a range of social commentators who recast the sailors and the women they met from benign eighteenth-century caricatures to a dangerous urban proletariat immersed in crime and immorality.
This chapter argues that while social explorers imbued many similarities to the traditional slum tourists of the nineteenth century, Ratcliffe Highway’s ‘sailortown’ status unsettled researchers in very different ways from the ‘orthodox’ land-locked slum. For the nineteenth-century social explorer, the district’s remoteness and isolation from ‘civilisation’ had allowed sailortown to evolve unchecked by religious and civic intervention. Indeed, it was believed that sailortown’s seclusion had fostered a malign and degenerate maritime culture that was ingrained in its geography, buildings, commerce, and people. The chapter will proceed to explore how these lofty assessments of the people and the environs of Ratcliffe Highway clashed with the realities of a robust and confident working-class community. This community, along with a notable number of local business people, challenged the dominant narrative of sailortown that stigmatised the people and the district.
Another pillar in sailortown's distinct urban–maritime culture was the seamen’s boarding house. ‘The inner world of the seafaring boarding house’ argues that these institutions provided a familiar and welcoming maritime environment for the international sailor and an important contact zone in the heart of Ratcliffe Highway. Contrary to the enduring stories of boarding houses being run by exploitative crimps, established keepers were often important and trusted members of the onshore maritime community. They held vital information on the locality and the latest news on shipping voyages. Moreover, as this chapter demonstrates, foreign seamen’s boarding houses were ethnically diverse and afforded spaces where cultural negotiation was learned and exercised. However, this urban–maritime culture did not embrace all seafarers. By the late nineteenth century, there had developed a racist stereotype of Chinese and Indian sailors that condemned their seamanship skills, morality, and hygiene. The prejudice was replicated in the boarding house culture ashore, ensuring that Chinese sailors settled in their community further east in Limehouse.