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THE POLITICAL, MATERIAL AND MENTAL

CULTURE OF THE CORK SETTLERS,

c. 1650-1700

T. C. BARNARD

County Cork has been lucky in its early and its recent historians. Without their researches this essay, avowedly impressionistic and anecdotal, could not have been attempted. As it. is. 1 diffidently squeeze between the titans a study of a little explored and formative period which may at least identify problems for further pursuit.'

Introduction

Richard Cox, the first Cork Protestant to stand back and reflect on his home county in the 1680s, emphasised three visible features. He shared the zest of his kind for 'improvement'. The past interested him enough to record ecclesiastical ruins, but here. he may simply have cribbed the format of Sir James Ware and English antiquaries. Cox also catalogued nearly two dozen mansions, and in doing so prefigured those later annalists of the new English order who equated the county with its owners and saw their residences as oases of gentility and taste.

An interest in big houses may tell us something of Cox the lawyer's aspirations, for he was thrusting himself into the enchanted circle of big house owners. Yet it was a fascination shared by county Cork's next historian (and the first to be published), Dr Charles Smith. In the 1740s Smith itemised about 200 seats. This apparently dramatic increase may alert us to underlying changes: most obviously, spreading prosperity. Smith, however, had an incentive to thoroughness unknown by Cox, namely the,need to list new houses comprehensively in order to entice their owners into subscribing to his publication.²

Neither Cox nor Smith was indulging a snobbish whimsy in recording gentlemen's seats. Rather each acknowledged the symbolic as well as utilitarian importance of the houses. These mansions, the hubs of estates now owned by Protestants, indicated a network of manors enmeshing the county in which a new world was in the making, and implied other settler achievements: remodelled and enlarged villages endowed with freshly built schools, market houses, almshouses and (sometimes) churches. Architecture made manifest the aims of the Protestant settlers: to enrich themselves and their neighbours and thereby to accomplish what the government had willed when it had placed them on their acres, a stable Protestant society. Thus the houses inventoried by Cox and Smith consciously displayed the different and allegedly better values of the newcomers. Cox indeed asserted that the inferior condition of the native Irish was most tellingly illustrated by their failure to build in brick and stone, an axiom widely accepted by other English commentators. Even the pre'-Reformation structures which he admired he took to be the work of the earlier invaders, such as the Vikings and the Anglo-Norman Culture and religion, Cox argued, had depressed the Catholic Irish, habituating them to dwell in 'cabins which are worse than hogstyes'. Through enforced changes in building, he hoped, the Irish would become 'neat and clean about your persons, and in your houses. ..to which in truth you are naturally inclined'.³ It is true that throughout Europe the supporters of the revived classicism behaved as if engaged on a crusade in which more than style was at stake.⁴ In the Irish context, however, a developing enthusiasm for classical symmetry complicated an approach to architecture already rich in qualitative judgements, seeing it as a vital -because so visible -assertion of English superiority.

England in the early eighteenth century has been called 'a federation of country houses'.⁵ Thus, if we follow Cox and Smith in seeing county Cork in a similar light, we may be led towards important insights. Later writers have detected the essence of Protestant Ireland in its landed elites and in their members' distressingly transient homes. Some panegyrists occasionally seem keen to relive, at least vicariously, the landowners' aimless indolence. In understandable reaction the parasitic and enfeebling effects of 'landlordism' have been emphasised. Much of what the. owners spent their money on has been adjudged archaic and anachronistic because not self-evidently productive. Passing their lives in a 'sealed-in, autonomous world of privilege', preoccupied with the 'fastidious display of arrogance', the landed classes' demise can be treated at once as inevitable, owing to their failure to adjust to new political, social and economic imperatives, and deserved. Their houses and parks, important works of art, by being degraded into 'zones of superfluity' can be left to vanish unlamented.⁶

This essay will not attempt to rehabilitate 'landlordism'. Instead it will dissolve that abstraction which turns individuals into a homogeneous and undifferentiated class, which is then all too easily censured. It will seek to penetrate and evoke the distinct worlds of the largest but often absent and unashamedly Anglo-Irish magnates, of the more modest proprietors and of the merchants, lawyers and office-holders whose roles in settler society are more often mentioned than analysed. If nothing else, something of this newly hidden Ireland will be conveyed: the varieties of behaviour and outlook, of wealth and ways of life.

The focus of my study raises questions about using the county as the point of entry into later seventeenth-century Ireland. What starts as a convenience can turn into a major interpretative tool. The county , some of its English chroniclers claim, was more than an administrative unit. As its functions proliferated, and as local virtuosi and cartographers isolated its distinctive characteristics, so it became the principal arena for its leading inhabitants. The passionate attachment of the latter to the county , it has been argued, conflicted with and sometimes overrode obligations to national government! In turn sceptics have stressed competing and frequently stronger loyalties, either political, cultural and ideological or (for the majority) more parochial and personal.⁸ This controversy has yet to echo through Irish historiography. Certainly historians of nineteenth-century Ireland have based their enquiries on the county: two fine studies of Cork lead the field here.⁹ But writers on early modern Ireland have preferred to deal either in provinces or in economic and geographical regions, without in detail discussing the methodological misgivings which may have caused them to eschew the county and favour the larger district. Thus, in voluntarily confining myself to one county , albeit the largest and perhaps the richest in Ireland, ^l0 I shall seek to avoid the silent jump from a descriptive to an evaluative use of the county .Rather than assuming without demonstrating the existence of a cohesive county community , I shall discuss what sense of their county the settlers in Cork possessed. A second problem is that the shire, imported from England and by the seventeenth century reproducing in Ireland most of its features, encourages the belief that Cork society in essentials resembles what we might meet in the larger English and Welsh counties remote from London. Again this is a presumption worth discussing rather than silently accepting or rejecting, and such a discussion may help us decide whether Irish Protestant communities were colonial, provincial or a special Hibernian hybrid.

The very fact that counties were designed to ease Ireland's subjection to England may have weakened affection for and involvement in them among their residents. Attachment to a locality , pace MacDonagh, ^l1 strong among many in Ireland, was usually inspired by something more specific aI1d obtrusive than the unwieldy and contrived construct of County Cork. Dickson has isolated thirteen different farming regions in South Munster, eight of them in county Cork itself, and each varying in its social and economic features.¹² The size of the county, the diversity of soils and terrain, the unevenness of settlement and the awkwardness of travel all retarded any well-developed county community .Furthermore the county, ragged at its edges, merged imperceptibly into west Waterford, south Limerick and south Kerry. The baronies along the Blackwater corridor, for example, belonged functionally to the economy and society of County Cork. Settlers from those parts of county Waterford were elected to represent Cork in parliament, to serve as clerk of the peace for county Cork and, in the: case of the greatest, took his title from Cork. ¹³ The difficulties of holding together this large and disparate county were further suggested when it was proposed to split it administratively into ridings, when its quarter sessions were divided between a northern and southern circuit, and when ecclesiastical oversight was again shared between two Protestant bishops, of Cork and Ross and of Cloyne.¹⁴

Among the newcomers the wealthiest owned estates which ignored county boundaries and indeed the Irish Sea. The worlds of these magnificoes, with the growing popularity of the Grand Tour, reached beyond the British Isles. For the majority of settlers, of more modest means, the county was an irrelevance. If an administrative district impinged on them it was most likely to be the barony, the borough, the village, the townland or the parish. Yet clearly the county was something more than an abstraction in the minds of Dublin and London officials. The Cromwellians and their successors used it as the basis for redistributing lands. By the 1680s a fortunate few could buy Petty's maps published in Hibernia Delineatio, and see for themselves the extent and shape of their shire.¹⁵ For Cox it offered a precise framework for systematising his local curiosity and pride.

Also by the 1680s the well-established cycle of quarter sessions and twice-yearly assizes was a social as well as business event. In April 1686 the assizes lasted seventeen days. Landowners from as far afield as Carbery and Bantry were drawn by them to Cork city .Leading settlers serving as high sheriff, magistrates or grand jurors, either formally through addresses and presentments or informally through talk, voiced their worries. In addition the need to choose members of parliament, frequent between 1654 and 1661 and again after 1692, required gatherings and might stimulate county-wide planning. On these occasions it could be convenient to parade county solidarity, even if we question its spontaneity and suspect it of being adventitious and partisan.¹⁶

In 1658 a Cork settler prefaced a complaint with the words 'since this county became a county'; over twenty years later the chaplain of Cork's pre-eminent politician eulogised his master as 'the cement of the country gentry where he lived'. In each case the writer, rather tenuously linked with county Cork, may have slipped for rhetorical effect into the categories borrowed from and appropriate to English experience. Similarly when the heir of Kanturk and Lohort returned to his estates in 1682, his uncle recommended that he study the foibles of the county's gentry .But once more the adviser, for long absent from Ireland, assumed too readily that a gentleman's life in Cork would conform to that of his English counterparts. More telling as an indicator of some sense of identity with the county was the praise by Cork's political boss of a parliamentary speaker in 1693: 'he is of our county'.¹⁷ Such sparse and often ambiguous evidence for settlers' identification with county Cork has to be balanced against examples of the hold of other, equally powerful allegiances. Elections, while they might oblige cooperation between gentry throughout the shire, were times when urgent national and international questions could divide rather than unite. The eagerness with which the denominations of Whig and Tory were taken up by the Cork gentry owed much to long-standing rivalries over policies and between personalities which stretched back to the early eventeenth century; the affiliations also offered new means of expressing the inchoate tensions between the eastern and western baronies of the county.¹⁸

The administrative net in which all who inhabited county Cork were to be caught trawled less than comprehensively. Boroughs, including Cork, Youghal, Kinsale and Clonakilty , held their own sessions, and brusquely repelled the county courts' encroachments. Towns struggled less successfully against being rated for county levies; failure to gain exemption bequeathed bitterness, and the county came to stand principally for taxes. A patron could popularly serve a borough by freeing its inhabitants from jury service in distant parts of the county , and by procuring a local meeting of the sessions or, better still, of the assizes, which attracted extra custom. Within most landowners' grasp was a grant of manorial courts through which useful services were dispensed to the immediate locality .If tenants benefited thereby, county-wide activity was lessened.¹⁹ In seventeenth-century England most counties which approached Cork in size were internally divided for administrative and judicial purposes, and even then the courts tended to attract as jurors, litigants and even as active magistrates those who lived closest.²⁰ It is likely that a similar situation prevailed in later seventeenth-century Cork and, if it did, reduced the gravitational field over which county administration was effective.

To the pull of parochial forces must be added those which operated on the men most likely to staff county government. By definition the richest, they were most encumbered with interests which ignored county borders. Their actions, rooted in family or self, might reflect impulses of loyalty to the Irish and English king, to the Protestant interest and religion (variously perceived), or ideas of honour, honesty and virtue. The province of Munster, although extinguished as an administrative reality in 1672, continued to mean something, and not just to its aggrieved and humiliated lord president. It, rather than the county , better coincided with the extent of the plantation which had first brought the ancestors of many Protestants to the region. It took more notice of the interdependence which agriculture, trade and shared marriages, culture and religion created. Political management, undertaken by Orrery in 1659 and 1663 and by Midleton and Shannon in the early eighteenth century, reached beyond county Cork's to south Munster's M.P.s.²¹ The act to bridge the Blackwater at Cappoquin, procured in 1666 by Lord Cork, was intended to assist the several counties required to contribute to its cost.²² Defence of land through the law, the commonest of the settlers' public activities, meant exploring a maze of courts: those of the province (until 1672), of the county , of the Tipperary palatinate at Clonmel and the four in Dublin. In addition settlers and their agents from other counties, most conspicuously from Kerry , visited Cork for the assizes, so robbing them of any exclusivity to the county.²³

These preliminaries can be closed by returning to Richard Cox. His feelings of local attachment and pride had been encouraged by an invitation to contribute to a planned Irish atlas, the format of which itself hinted at the stronger sense of locality (though not always for county) among Ireland's settlers. But Cox's interest in Cork existed alongside, and was often subordinated to, a fierce zeal for the endangered Protestant interest in Ireland. In advising how England could regain Ireland in 1689, Cox proposed to tap localism. His understanding of the anxieties of his fellow Protestants, whether forced into exile or embattled in Cork, informed his scheme. Cox saw too how the experience of adversity and deracination, which he himself had shared, created a precocious Irish Protestant identity.²⁴ In English counties there seems to have been some correlation between the length of time during which families had been settled and the strength of their devotion to the county .²⁵ By that token, the Protestants of Cork, few of whom could trace back their ancestors more than two or three generations, would be unlikely to exhibit this sentiment. However, continuous threats, with estates overrun in the 1640s and again in 1689-90, stimulated a rapid growth of local engagement. The widespread reluctance to flee in 1689 arose, in some cases, from affection for the locality. Dublin, when compared to Cork, was 'this dog of a town'. Once in England even well-connected refugees like Henry Boyle and his wife (Lord Inchiquin's daughter) longed only to return to county Cork. She in particular railed against Bristol, her temporary home, as the 'rudest place in the world'.²⁶ Nevertheless we must suppose, and this is clearest in the case of Cox, that sense of place embraced love of a particular estate and locale, a region or province, and the loose and shifting idea of Protestant or English Ireland.

Dickson has delineated the structure of the Cork settler community .In 1641 Catholics still owned two-thirds of the land; by the 1660s their share was halved; after the Williamite Wars of the 1690s it had dwindled to a meagre 8 per cent. Among the new owners Dickson detected an elite in south Munster of about twenty families who owned perhaps 20 per cent of the profitable acreage. Below these grandees he found a larger group, numbering approximately one hundred, who filled public office, in Dublin as M.P. or in the county as high sheriff, justice of the peace or grand juror. A yet larger group, of perhaps three hundred, holding 1,000 statute acres or more, had the wherewithal to play something other than a parochial role.²⁷ As in England, so in county Cork, income and its source determined entry into society and politics. £100 annually, derived from land, has been suggested as the minimum stake in Ireland to join the commission of the peace.²⁸ More difficult to gauge is the proportion these three hundred formed in Cork's total Protestant population. The best estimate for the settler population before 1641 is 22,000. In the later seventeenth century contemporary figures are guesses. Recovery and growth after the disruptions of the Confederate Wars were slow, and a total of 30,000 might be hazarded.²⁹

Whatever the figure, the danger of generalising about this society from its leaders is evident. Yet we must begin with those nabobs, and not simply because their activities have left the clearest traces. Far from living exclusively in 'sealed-in' worlds, the landowners, through their demands, standards and preoccupations, touched numerous dependants, neighbours and poorer Protestants, and helped to refashion the society in which all lived. Also they ensured that Ireland was closely integrated into the British Isles and western Europe, and was assuredly neither an offshore colony nor a nearer America.

Economic as well as social pre-eminence belonged to the peers, for ennoblement customarily went still to those who could sustain the honour from an appropriate income. In 1700 ten peers owned land in the county , but six of them were absentees. A similar situation had prevailed in the previous forty years, and even those who normally resided might be disabled from playing their expected parts, leaving openings for men of more modest rank. Some who had gained land in Cork thanks to the upheavals of the civil wars had done so almost by chance, as for example Lord Anglesey who took no interest in county , as distinct from Irish, affairs.³⁰ Others, notably the second earl of Cork, loosened their ties with the region, as his transformation from Lord Cork to Lord Burlington aptly symbolised. Cork, although from time to time a visitor and a powerful champion of Irish concerns in the English House of Lords and at court, contributed more to settler society by his absence than his presence, In return he expected Irish remittances to fund his English building ventures.³¹

Judged by what we know of rentals, Lord Cork and ,.Burlington overtopped all rivals, including his younger brothers. The empire of his father, the first earl, had been dismembered to provide for his numerous offspring. After 1650 four sons survived, each with a substantial holding in the county: the continuously absent Robert Boyle; the often resident Lord Shannon, with his 'mongrel' estate, partly in England and partly in Cork around Ballinrea; Lords Orrery and Cork. The last enjoyed the lion's portion: Lismore, Lisfinny, Tallow, Dungarvan, Youghal, Inchiquin, Bandon and Carbery. Moreover he added to his patrimony. In 1666 he spent £8,000 on confiscated property in Youghal, and in 1691, following his brother Robert's death, some of his father's lands reverted to him. Thus supplemented, his Irish rentals yielded over £20,000 and now, in contrast to his father, he also owned extensive English lands.³² .

Below Cork the hierarchies of wealth and status did not always coincide. Some peers, including Cork's brother Shannon, his nephew Barrymore and Inchiquin hovered near genteel penury.³³ The wealthy owners of Mitchelstown and Liscarrol for the moment remained commoners. The estates of Orrery , the Percevals and the Fentons (after 1670 amalgamated with those of the Kings from Roscommon) probably each yielded about £4,000 p.a.³⁴ Yet each owner, through the unpredictable impact of deaths, minorities, jointures, rent charges, extravagance and mounting debts, enjoyed in practice a considerably smaller income and often was incapable of leading settler society. The Percevals, for example had to escape the consequences of too close support of Ormonde and the king in the 1640s. Later a rapid sequence of premature deaths hit them. Only between 1652 and 1665 and again from 1680 to 1686 did the Percevals dictate local taste while disdaining the rough and tumble of politics.³⁵ The Kings of Boyle Abbey had inherited the Fenton estates through an heiress. The last Fenton wldow remarried, and her new husband, Sir William Petty , gleefully added defence of her jointure rights to his other causes. The contentions between the Pettys and the Kings were soon eclipsed by vicious fights within the King tribe itself. Estates elsewhere, the third Lord Kingston's marriage to a Catholic dairymaid, his own conversion and jacobitism, trickery by his uncle and enforced sojourns abroad, rendered the owners of Mitchelstown nullities in Cork life.³⁶

The Inchiquin O'Briens showed how indigenous families might survive by religious and political conformity to the new English order. Survival but hardly prosperity rewarded them in the later seventeenth century. In the labyrinth of the 1640s the first earl had taken several wrong turnings. In the 1650s he returned to his old faith and, accepting Spanish pay, governed a second province recently troubled by rebellion, Catalonia. After 1660 lnchiquin's past services brought him Rostellan. He now obliterated old quarrels with his neighbour and erstwhile adversary Orrery and cemented the unexpected friendship by a double marriage. Inchiquin's heir married one of Orrery's daughters, and a daughter married Orrery's younger son: conjunctions reminiscent of those contrived by Orrery's father and given added allure by the fact that Rostellan marched with Orrery's Imokilly estate. Trading on this link, the dying Inchiquin in 1673 entrusted his children to Orrery's care, a duty which the latter punctiliously performed. Family fortunes, estimated in 1689 at £2,530 p.a., remained precarious. Military commissions with the attendant pay and the delusive quest for heiresses were the strategies to keep afloat. Orrery had done what he could to assist his son-in-law, lodging him and his bride in his own mansion at Charleville, and delegating to him some of the presidential powers and allowances while away in England.

In 1686, now a widower, hard-up and politically suspect, the second earl of Inchiquin stalked an heiress in Dublin and, while staying in Herefordshire, bagged another. His bride, Lady Herbert of Cherbury, was the widow of a Kerry settler. However her main attractions, as Inchiquin disarmingly admitted, were a jointure of £1,000 p.a., £5,000 in jewels and a further £2,000 in cash. Acquaintances shook their heads and predicted that the countess 'will not find much joy'. But she proved equal to her husband and insisted on high-life in London. However Inchiquin had a second scheme to escape from his financial straits, another match with an heiress, this time for his son. The daughter-in-law, whose father was a wealthy London merchant, would bring a dowry of £8,000. Yet in the end, it seems, the girl's father, dissatisfied with the inadequate provision made by Inchiquin, backed out of the contract.³⁷ In 1689 Inchiquin and his Boyle brother-in-law led the Protestants who resisted the Catholic onslaught. Fighting was the only trade that either knew or could follow without derogation from his aristocratic standing. Earlier it had taken Inchiquin to Tangier, and it led each to his death: Henry Boyle of Castlemartyr in the Low Countries in 1693 and Inchiquin in Jamaica in 1692. The Inchiquins bowed out of Cork affairs until 1708 when the third earl returned to Rostellan and there launched a costly building campaign. ³⁸

Most remarkable among the titled owners was Orrery, self-appointed captain of the Cork Protestants. To compartmentalise Orrery's multifarious activities and to discuss his life at Charleville and Castlemartyr without reference to his other concerns -in Limerick, as governor and property-owner; throughout Munster as lord president; in Dublin, briefly as lord justice, then as privy councillor and peer; in London, first as a lobbyist and expert on all matters Irish; then as M.P. for Arundel and an active politician; and indeed as a voluminous writer and controversialist -would be unjust to a man whom few liked. He was the man who so impressed Cromwell and who governed Scotland for him; he steered M.P.s into offering Cromwell the crown, but then smoothed the way for Charles II's restoration in Ireland.³⁹ For a short space he ruled Ireland on the king's behalf and even when demoted from that job to which his talents fitted him so admirably (in his own estimation), he was constantly at Ormonde's elbow, chiding and chivvying, steadied his band of dependants, the 'Orreronians', in the Irish Commons. No doubt he exaggerated his achievements, although the evidence for his diplomatic and managerial skills is strong.⁴⁰ His consolation prize, of lord president of Munster, provided a wonderful pretext to deluge the governments in London and Dublin with admonitions. Yet Orrery never sank into provincial inanition. He kept his seat in the English parliament and his entree to the court. Through his own and his wife's relations he had access to the smart intellectual world of London and the English country house circuit. He retained his Somerset estate. Crippled and reduced to semi-invalidism, peremptorily dismissed as lord president in 1672,. he morosely reviewed past and present, and warned of the new threats from France and Catholicism. He relived fading glories as he compiled his treatise on warfare and fanned the cooling embers of old passions as he prepared a history of the Confederate Wars. This then was the man who lorded it over Cork society until 1679.⁴¹

For the role which he aspired to fill, Orrery suffered several disadvantages. Some might suppose that the chief was his temperament, combative and irascible: tendencies perhaps worsened by the constant pain which he latterly endured. No more easily than any other Cromwellian collaborator could he shed the reputation for suppleness which, to the unfriendly (and there were plenty), smacked of treachery. Furthermore Orrery's eagerness to ingratiate himself with the returned Charles II stopped well short of masking his strongest convictions. His attacks on Catholicism as a political as well as religious system were unlikely to please a monarch whom he also berated for siphoning off the Irish revenue. Connected with his difficult opinions was his uncertain hold on royal and government favour. His numerous enemies, including those in county Cork, seized upon and magnified rumours of his impending ruin, particularly in 1669 when he faced impeachment in the English parliament, and, when he was dismissed as lord president, openly gloated. In fact he was too valuable a royal servant to be gratuitously antagonised by the complete withdrawal of favour. ⁴² His loss of office in 1672 was quickly compensated, most appositely by a generous pension and then with a new commission to oversee the military security of Munster. His state and status had hardly been impaired.⁴³

The pension which the king had settled on Orrery highlighted another of his difficulties. His magnificence had to be supported from an income frankly inadequate to the task. Like so many others in Restoration Ireland Orrery had large expectations, and he constantly badgered friends and officials to assist him to the enjoyment of funds earmarked for him. Until these promises were honoured -in the most important case not until 1699 -he lived on an income which seldom exceeded £4,000 p.a.: small beer by the standards of the English peerage or, indeed, of his elder brother.⁴⁴ From this he must pay not only the normal expenses of a peer, educating and providing for his two sons and finding portions for his four daughters (at a cost of about £20,000), but also finance the grandiose rebuilding of Charleville (calculated at £20,000), and the more modest works at Castlemartyr, said to have cost £2,900. Four lengthy stays in London cost a further £20,000. The lawyer Cox, called in to unknot the family's tangles in the 1680s, remarked that Orrery's 'soul was much larger than his fortune, tho' he had great offices and a plentiful estate'. Contrary to the impression that Orrery sought to convey, the debts had not all been contracted by his extravagant heir; he himself had regularly been overspending for decades.⁴⁵

The detailed financing of Orrery's public career, and especially of the splendour with which he surrounded himself at Charleville, remain puzzling. His own analyses reveal the main sources of his income. If rents constituted about 60 per cent of the expected receipts in 1678, it was the lands in Imokilly and Limerick which he had gained through his own industry rather than those around Charleville inherited from his father which lifted him from the middling plateau to the pinnacle of local landed society .But rents alone did not guarantee his pre-eminence in Cork. The steady and certain income from provincial and military offices added another £1,500, or almost 40 per cent of the expected total.⁴⁶ Orrery's figures tell us of the dangers which menaced and which were already lapping his estates. On his death his salaries would cease, the two Cork holdings would be separated, his own patrimony descending to his heir, while Castlemartyr, subject to a life interest for his wife, would pass to the younger son. The Limerick properties, intended to endow his as yet unmarried daughter, had already been depleted to satisfy more pressing needs.

His eldest son's annual income of £1,050 was already eaten into by the £450 needed to service his debts and a further £500 payable to his estranged wife. In his case and in that of his younger brother, Henry , inheritor of Castlemartyr, worth £600 p.a. but liable to rent charges of over £300, only their pay as captains of horse gave them much disposable income. The worsening situation seems to have caused Orrery to scale down the size of a younger daughter's dowry and to borrow. Family fortunes deteriorated further in 1683 when the second earl's death obliged the estates to keep two dowagers, one of whom survived until 1710. These two widows, usually but not invariably resident in England, took at least 70 per cent of the estates' income. Only the long minority of the third earl, boarded in cheap continental pensions with cut-price servants, and the firing of the costly incubus of Charleville, enabled the Orrerys to survive. ⁴⁷

The first earl of Orrery had risen above the expectations of a younger son, and avoided the lot of another brother, Viscount Shannon, who on £1,000 p.a. contented himself with 'a neat house and a curious small park' and the crumbs of public employment left once Orrery had taken his pick, scrounged hospitality from his bachelor brother in England and unctuously commiserated with affluent eldest brothers.⁴⁸ Orrery by dextrous opportunism had raised his income to £4,000, but it was not of itself enough to live as he did. His spending on Charleville far surpassed his brother Cork's on Burlington House in London and that of most aristocratic builders in England.⁴⁹ Charleville, in its scale, its decoration and furnishings, was designed to rival the state which Ormonde kept at Kilkenny and Dublin Castle. ⁵⁰ But in pitting himself against Ormonde, Orrery foolishly ignored the disparities which extended beyond rank, lineage and royal favour to their wealth. Ormonde's annual income approached £24,000. Orrery, in comparison, borrowed to pay for his finery. Of course his accounts hide the 'free gifts' and sweeteners which came his way as lord president. He was also accused, and was almost certainly guilty, of sharp practice when at the Restoration Cromwellian officers had conveyed their lands to him in trust, only to discover that he had then sold them and pocketed the proceeds. But even with these bonuses, we can assume that receipts fell short of his expenditure, ⁵¹

We may speculate on, though we should not reflexively condemn, the monstrous vani~ which made Orrery so spendthrift, to the detriment of his heirs. Here we seem to glimpse an early example of that insouciance which bedevilled numerous Protestant dynasties in Ireland. (It was also alleged to afflict English aristocrats). However such fecklessness, if attributed to Orrery, hardly fits with a picture of a man in all other respects shrewd and calculating. The heavy outlay on show was connected intimately with his local and national ambitions. Closer investigation of his houses and their contents will show his and other landowners' relationship to the wider world of objects, ideas and men which radiated from the 'armed' chairs in which they sat at the physical and symbolic centre of their possessions.⁵² The lines of connection spread from their houses throughout Protestant Ireland into England and on into Europe and the expanding continents of Asia, Africa and America.

Rolf Loeber first made us take seriously what the settlers built in later seventeenth-century Ireland.⁵³ But the lost civilisation of the settlers still awaits resuscitation, and in hunting their values and ideas, the details of that physical world, rarely now surviving but retrievable through inventories, bills, accounts or correspondence, can assist. The artifact with which they were surrounded were laden with meanings, some literal, others symbolic, which need to be decoded. From all descriptions, Charleville and Castlemartyr set the standard of modish splendour in Munster, as Orrery had intended. So we shall start there, moving on to the other mansion which in comfort and elegance may well have surpassed them -the Percevals' Burton House.⁵⁴ Charleville impressed initially by its size. As Orrery's heir less appreciatively commented, 'the only fault 'tis too big by one half. But to Cox it was quite simply 'magnificent'. Its other novelty, implicit rather then explicit in contemporary accounts, was its style: its regular facades deliberately distinguished it from the asymmetrical mansions and towers which dotted south Munster, such as Orrery's father's castle at Lismore, and which had recently reached an apogee at Coppinger's Court.⁵⁵

With more regard for effect than literal truth Orrery dated the laying of the foundation stone at Charleville to 29 May 1661, the first anniversary of Charles II's re-entry into London. Although habitable by 1663, work there fell into at least two distinct phases. Orrery hoped to have '2 or 3 rooms to entertain my friends, then every week I shall enlarge my quarters'. In 1664 the house was taxed on only twelve hearths; by 1667 the number had risen to fifty-six; and in 1680 to sixty-five. Like so many other landowners, both in England and Ireland, Orrery demonstrated his virtuosity by apparently designing his houses himself. His own hope that he could turn his property in Limerick into 'the Covent Garden of that city' suggested both his yardstick and his grasp of the significance of the new classicism derived especially through Inigo Jones from Italy.⁵⁶ Although the final palatial scale of Charleville is well attested, its architectural details are more mysterious. Defensive features which in England had atrophied through long years of disuse (notwithstanding their brief resurrection during the civil wars) were more often, though not invariably, retained by house-builders in Restoration Ireland. Orrery was alive to these differences when he wrote of 'the little old fashioned flankers such as most noble men and gentlemen's houses have to this day in Ireland'. Indeed the retention of such flanking walls and gun emplacements may indicate not only what had survived earlier bombardments but also how lawless the owner conceived his locality still to be. In this respect, if Charleville did include these consciously martial airs, it contrasted with Orrery's more southerly seat at Castlemartyr. The latter, begun only in the late 1660s, intended originally as a modest seat for a younger son but expanded to forty hearths, lacked defences. Denser English settlement in Imokilly and greater Protestant confidence may have tempted Orrery to relax his habitual anxieties about Irish Catholic intentions.⁵⁷

The grandeur of Charleville is better understood when we remember that it was here that Orrery literally held court. He claimed that he had doubled spending on it, to £20,000, in order to fit it for himself, the king's governor.⁵⁸ The presidential duties also explained the choice of this location rather than a site near Ballymaloe. From Charleville he could more easily oversee the province, reach his own properties at Askeaton and Limerick, and communicate with Dublin.⁵⁹ (Previous lords president had chosen nearby locations for their court, at Mallow and Doneraile). In turn litigants, witnesses, jurors and messengers could more readily reach headquarters. Once dismissed as lord president, Orrery promptly abandoned the house, transferring, ostensibly for reasons of health, to Castlemartyr.

With no plans, it is fruitless to conjecture whether Charleville followed the English vogue for the double-pile format or French- inspired sequences of rooms en enfilade and sets of lodgings for the principal inmate. Orrery , thanks to his travels and aspirations, could be expected to know the various settings deemed suitable for a peer and a representative of the monarch; so much comes across strongly when we see how he used and furnished his residences. The surviving lists of contents at Charleville and Castlemartyr at first seem to consist of meaningless lists of fabrics: 'sad coloured serge curtains and counter- pane', 'curtains and valance with gilt leather fringe', 'grey serge bed with hangings', Indian coverlets, turkey-work carpets, fustian and calico window curtains, 'one white quilt with great yellow tassels', arras hangings, Indian taffeta, sarsnet and buckram, stools and chairs covered with red baize.⁶⁰ But this sense of profusion, a kaleidoscope of colours, patterns and textures, is precisely the point. Much of the house's capacity to impress came not so much from its wooden and caned furniture, which by later standards was sparse, but from the fabrics which hung at the windows and beds as curtains, on the walls as tapestries, draped over tables and beds as carpets, quilts and counterpanes, and on chairs and stools as embroidery and upholstery .⁶¹ The foremost historian of these matters has observed 'in the decoration of interiors it was obviously the upholstered types of furniture which made the greatest impact', and the elaborately contrived beds usually constituted the most important pieces of furniture.⁶² Judged by these standards, Orrery's houses and indeed the Percevals' Burton were well abreast of contemporary fashion, set in France and soon copied in England.

In other possessions Orrery displayed not only wealth and position but his awareness of continental currents and court standards. In the principal rooms pewter vessels, brass fire implements, sconces and candlesticks glittered; great looking-glasses refracted the light; clocks chimed; and a few prized bottle-shaped vases and lidded jars of oriental porcelain gaudily hinted at distant cultures. When guests came to dine, as they frequently did, they would be seated on chairs upholstered in 'Turkey' work, could admire the gilt leather hangings, the painted images of family and royalty , the green curtains at the three windows, the burnished wall sconces and fire dogs and the three turkey-work carpets removed from the tables only when the food was served. Meals too offered further chances to impress: through the quantity , variety and rarity of the foods and wines, by the silver dishes freshly engraved with Orrery's armorials in which they were served, by the dazzling glass and the fine linen napery .

What, we may ask, did the visitor make of all this? At Charleville, the litigants and tenants who thronged the town on market and court days would see only the bulk of the new house, its thriving plantations of recently planted oak and ash, the roofs and chimneys of the offices, stables and pigeon-house or the elaborate wrought iron gates which sharply demarcated the entry into the demesne. But the bustle of these houses in their heyday drew far more than the regular army of indoor and outdoor servants into their ambit. Neighbours, relations and clients constantly arrived on business or for entertainment.⁶³ In a few cases we can do more than guess at what feelings they carried back to their inevitably more modest homes. Many, no doubt, were indifferent to the carefully contrived physical setting, affected more by the plenty of food and drink or the sport offered in the billiard room or by the pedigree horses, hounds and hawks kept by Orrery .⁶⁴ Disdain was another reaction, at a show which verging on the vulgar invited censure.⁶⁵ Frank curiosity might result, for the ingenious and unusual contrivance appealed strongly to seventeenth-century minds.⁶⁶ Envy, when it arose, might fuel resentment against nobles with wealth to squander, and invite critical gossip about how Orrery had. come by these riches. A further response was emulation when the visitor, captivated by a new fad, glimpsed what he (or she) might also do. Competition and imitation could be complex affairs, and did not automatically lead to the diffusion outwards and socially downwards of a habit. Nevertheless they should not be ignored as forces for change in later seventeenth- century Ireland.⁶⁷

Let us trace more exactly the impact of the physical worlds which Orrery had so laboriously created. Through the houses, as well as from them, he simultaneously advanced his political career, controlled his lands and led his family. Orrery, alert to the significance of the latest buildings of his peers, saw what would best cater to his own sense of self-importance. In translating his dreams into actuality a wider set of influences came into play. His family and friends in Ireland (like Lord Conway) linked him with most of the foremost architects of the day.⁶⁸ His frequent travels kept him au fait with the latest developments. Then too there were the women of his family, notably his wife and daughter-in-law, both formidable. Ormonde confessed to Orrery that it had been his wife's and his architect's importunities which had persuaded him to add expensively to Kilkenny Castle. Orrery's sister-in-law, Lady Cork, oversaw the completion of Burlington House. The first Lady Orrery, a Howard reared in the now rather threadbare and old-fashioned splendour of Audley End and Charlton Park, and the headstrong Lady Broghill, a Sackville used to the fashionable luxury of Knole, can hardly have been silent as Orrery planned. Certainly Lady Orrery and one of her daughters jumped to fashion's stem commands.⁶⁹

We cannot be precise about the influences which determined the appearance, inside and out, of the mansions of county Cork, other than to insist that they met the standards derived directly from England and the continent, but we can suggest some ways in which these buildings affected more than their immediate environs. £20,000 was the figure put on the final cost of Charleville: high even by English levels. When we remember the spate of similar though less grandiose and therefore less costly undertakings in the county, and the public edifices erected or improve in Cork city and other towns, we might suppose that they reflected and further fuelled a booming economy.^7O But because many materials and much of the labour could be supplied from the estate itself these works have usually been credited with only limited economic consequences ⁷¹ Yet we should not underestimate what buildings on the scale of Charleville required, or imagine that estates were in this respect self-sufficient. Trees had to be felled, hauled from the woods, seasoned, squared and prepared; deal was imported; suitable stone had to be located, quarried and then transported to the site; brick and lime kilns were constructed, fuelled and manned. Draught oxen must be hired, roads and causeways repaired or made. The county and beyond were scoured for the craftsmen proficient in the specialised skills; experts were in short supply, not least because other landlords like Lord Cork and Perceval had snapped up the best; they were constantly at risk of being poached.⁷² So it went on, for months, often for years, the incessant heaving and hauling, levelling, digging; chiselling, sawing and hammering. Even when the shell was finished, roofs needed to be tiled or slated, courts cobbled and paved, terraces gravelled, walls limed, rooms wainscoted, floored and ceiled, saplings planted, furniture turned and joined. Orrery, brutally frank that the indigenous Irish should serve as hewers of wood and drawers of water, might aim to employ only Protestants, but such specialists were few and the sheer volume of work obliged him to relax his embargo.⁷³ The tasks attracted the skilled, sometimes from England, but also schooled locals in crafts as masons, carpenters, glaziers, painters and gardeners, as well as offering much casual and unskilled employment.

The quest for suitable materials and workmen obliged landowners to look further than their own estates, and so strengthened the ties of dependence between neighbours and with more distant acquaintances. The hermetic and introverted world had, perforce, to admit these outside influences. But still it might be argued that whatever could not be supplied from the estate would simply be imported lock, stock and barrel from England, leaving these essentially English houses shallowly rooted in Irish soil. Undoubtedly many of the most sumptuous items in Cork houses had been shipped from England or the continent. Few of the array of textiles could be woven locally, and indeed spoke of the growing imports into Europe from the east. The statue, perhaps of marble, which caused such a commotion when Orrery had it sent via Youghal, was merely the most spectacular among a list of imports which included beds, silver, porcelain, inlaid cabinets and paintings.⁷⁴ Yet it seems unduly negative to assume that merchants and craftsmen in the province did not rise to (or profit from) the wealth and diversified tastes of the local landowners. Let us then look a little longer at a few of the articles conspicuous in establishments like Orrery's: silver, fabrics, ceramics, paintings and horses.

Silver had a special appeal, for above all commodities its intrinsic worth proclaimed wealth unequivocally. Much of the silver which crowded the tables first at Charleville and then at Castlemartyr –the cistern, the sixty-six plates (many of them emblazoned with Orrery's arms), the boxes for sugar, pepper and mustard, the tankards and syllabub cups, the pierced mazarin for straining fish and meat –was inherited by Orrery's widow. It weighed over 3,700 ounces. The dowager countess felt neither sentimental affection nor aesthetic delight in it. She regarded it simply as a resource which, since she no longer needed to maintain an establishment of her own, let alone keep up the port of her husband, she wished to' sell to the highest bidder.⁷⁵ Like other owners of unwanted silver in county Cork she assumed that the best price would be given in London: a telling comment on how far the settlers were thought to lag behind the English nobility and gentry in civility and spending power. Yet Lady Orrery was wrong. Her silver was eventually bought by the pre-eminent Dublin goldsmith, Sir Abel Ram.⁷⁶ Was its fate to be melted down and fashioned into new wares, now bearing the heraldic devices of a different family clambering to the prominence which the Orrerys, at least temporarily, had lost? The interposition of the Williamite wars may well have condemned it to an ignoble but more obviously utilitarian fate.

The ubiquity of silver utensils among the Irish Protestant gentry is strongly suggested by the guilds of goldsmiths and other workers in precious metals which existed in Dublin and, since 1656, in Cork.⁷⁷ Such articles were wanted increasingly, not only for domestic use, but for ceremony and religion. The corporation of Youghal, for example, presented Orrery in 1661 with 'a pair of fair silver candlesticks, a tankard and a dozen plates'. Soon too freedom boxes were required in Cork, while landowners donated communion plate to their parish churches.⁷⁸ These requirements, and the need to repair or remodel older items, could be satisfied locally. Because so little identifiable provincial Irish silver of this period survives, we may be in danger of neglecting this result of the settlers' presence. In 1666 Orrery sent off a heavy consignment of silver, including two London hall-marked flagons, two more with Dublin marks and a spoon assayed at Cork. These unfashionable articles (how acquired, who can tell?) were melted down and made into plates, then engraved with Orrery's crest, a powder box for his wife and two communion chalices. This work, together with repairs to a cistern, candlesticks and a fruit dish, had been entrusted to John Bucknor. No gold or silver-smith of that name is recorded in England or Ireland. But in fact Bucknor was Orrery's tenant in Limerick city and was there designated as a 'goldsmith'. Orrery's ostentatious life at Charleville had created extra work for one inhabitant of Limerick, already specialising in the services covered by the term goldsmith; another of Orrery's Limerick tenants followed the same trade ⁷⁹

Silver, I have argued, was a commodity in a category of its own. The varied textiles to be found in the Orrery and Perceval houses were unlikely to have been made locally. Although the textile industry, especially around Bandon, thrived, it principally supplied clothing materials. Local notables were keen to patronise it. In 1666 Orrery's heir reported how Ormonde, the lord lieutenant, had announced 'he will wear nothing but what is made in Ireland, so that we are all going to follow his example and are going to make us frieze clothes, a suit whereof will not cost 20s'.⁸⁰ That craze was short-lived. The linen –the sheets, tablecloths and napkins -which formed a large and valuable element in the possessions of many households could also be locally manufactured. Orrery boasted how he had lured Dutch weavers to settle in Charleville and Limerick; flax was planted on his lands and a weaver was employed in the house to supply its needs.⁸¹ However the finest linens had still to be imported from the Low Countries. We know that on their trips to London the Orrerys patronised suppliers there. Yet, just as in the case of linen, so with the decorative furnishing fabrics, the clear signs of increased demand in Restoration Ireland stimulated efforts to meet it. Turkey-work with its vivid patterns and colours, in its authentic form expensively procured from the Levant, was soon more cheaply made in East Anglia.⁸² Even before 1660 the enterprising had attempted to manufacture it in Ireland; after 1660 these efforts were redoubled, precisely because of increased demand. One entrepreneur in Dublin promised to make 'Turkey work carpets and covers for chairs as good and cheap as England can afford'. This may not have been an entirely empty boast, since Ormonde, the patron of this venture, owned at Kilkenny an Irish turkey-work carpet, while the projector himself, as a descendant remembered, dined in a large room 'hung with the best sort of tapestry'.⁸³

Settlers who bought Irish fabrics would restrict their choice and fall behind the latest fashions. Those without the money or the chances to buy the new imports drew apart from their trend-setting neighbours, the truly Anglo-Irish. Yet quickly these distinctions were blurred. A merchant of Youghal, enriched through supplying imports to the local notables, aped some of their style. His Youghal house boasted a dozen turkey-work chairs and four matching cushions. In the same town one of Lord Cork's factotums, urged on by his wife, would use only the best plate and insisted on the latest and most colourful clothes.⁸⁴ Away from the busy ports where the newest commodities first appeared, they were less easily procured. Yet there were ways.

Another widow, this time Lady Perceval from Burton House, had in 1686 inherited, besides the contents of her chamber, her jewels, clothes, coach and horses, a third part of the plate and furniture of the recently built mansion. Lady Perceval, eager quickly to shake the dust of county Cork from her heels, decided to sell most of the goods. Curiously, feathers from mattresses were to be barrelled up and sent over to England. Less surprising was her view that a portrait of Lord Strafford and a chamber organ would find a readier market in London. Her crimson velvet bed 'lined with white silk embroidered' and with its set of paragon curtains, had been dismantled and sent to Cork. That too was to be shipped to England rather than being offered for sale in Dublin, but now Mrs Pigott was to be allowed a sight of it, 'if by chance she have a fancy for it, tho' it is not likely that she will go to the price that it is appraised at'. Mrs Pigott did not splash out.

However the other goods which Lady Perceval ordered to be sold locally found a ready vent, the purchasers an interesting cross-section of Munster society. The biggest spender was 'Mr. Broderick', either Thomas landlord of Midleton or Alan the rising lawyer: he secured for £63 what had been expertly valued at £69. His wife picked up a Persian quilt. Others who bought included St Leger from Doneraile, Lady Aldworth from Newmarket, Mrs Mary Clayton from Mallow, Sir Thomas Southwell from Rathkeale in Limerick, and members of the Hodder, Badham and Evans families. Finally the troublesomely drunken clergyman from Charleville purchased a bell and close stool with its pan. Sales of this sort, whether voluntary or enforced, kept goods circulating. With this brisk market for the second-hand we may expect that these exotic luxuries, worn and scuffed, gradually descended into humbler homes. Novelties became familiar, spurring the quest for fresh rarities.⁸⁵

The evidence from Burton House reveals another effect of the growing consumerism in the county. The Percevals' possessions had been evaluated by a professional. He sniffed at the old, knew that turkey-work 'was now too common to be smart, but could spot 'printed Kidderrninster stuff. This expert was 'Mr Virgin the upholsterer' from Cork. Upholsterers at this time not only sold much of what was needed to furnish a house, they. could also double as interior decorators. Dublin by the 1680s contained several, one of whom was patronised by Lord Cork; now it seemed that Cork city had work for at least one. Virgin already knew the house and its contents, for he had valued them when its last owner died in 1680 and had since supplied some of the grander effects for the 'green room'.⁸⁶

The ceramics to be found in these mansions pose more problems, but again show the diffusion of European tastes. What was recorded was mostly described as 'white earthenware', tin-glazed pottery often later lumped under the generic name of delft. Some of this, especially the white tiles commonly mentioned, had been imported from Holland, usually as ballast. Much more, the great earthen jugs, the cups, dishes, porringers and basins, and the newer 'blue stoneware', had probably been shipped over, again from Holland or the Rhineland and Britain.⁸⁷ Yet we cannot entirely discount the possibility of local manufacture. Potters are recorded in the towns, and Lord Shannon wrote of one who could make plant pots. When Cork houses had quickly to be opened up and equipped earthenware plates and cups were to be had immediately in the locality .⁸⁸ Ceramic wares gradually displaced the more customary wood, pewter or silver; even slower to appear was porcelain, at this date manufactured only in the Orient. The Orrerys owned china, and its value and rarity are indicated by the care with which it had to be packed. The larger cargoes of oriental porcelain arriving in Europe coincided in time, and soon became closely associated with other imports, of chocolate, tea and coffee. The taste for these outlandish beverages, percolating through the wealthy, changed possessions and social habits.⁸⁹

Tea as an import into Ireland is recorded. only in the second decade of the eighteenth century .However silver teapots started to be made by Irish craftsmen a little earlier, and we may guess that tea-drinking as a ritual was known among the elite by the end of the seventeenth century.⁹⁰ The rare references to coffee and chocolate show that they were used in Dublin by the 1670s. Indeed one of Lord Cork's properties there, in or near Cork House, was used as a coffee house by 1667. Usually, though, friends from England procured parcels of coffee or chocolate as a special favour or gift.⁹¹ The Orrerys, true to their roles as the pacesetters in county Cork, bought tea, a teapot and china cups or bowls from which to drink it. Alas, the date of their purchases is unknown, but it cannot be before the mid-1660s. Moreover they were bought while the Orrerys were staying at Powerscourt. This then would seem to be a fashion first introduced through Dublin. But other evidence, from a fashionable household near Dublin, reveals that in 1674 the prized tea which was being drunk there had been imported via Kinsale, so it may be that county Cork was unusually well-placed to pioneer this new taste.⁹²

Paintings hung in the houses of Orrery, the Percevals and the latter's Kinsale relations, the Southwells; portraits were the favourites. The Castlemartyr dining-room and Lady Orrery's own chamber contained images of the king and queen, proclaiming a loyalty from which her husband had notoriously wavered. The Percevals, as we have seen, owned a painting of Charles I's controversial viceroy Strafford, and also portraits of the king's brother, the duke of York, and of Lady Orrery. Although descriptions are usually exiguous, other subjects included classical mythology, landscapes and a genre scene of a woman making sausages.⁹³ Many of these had first come from the continent. Thus the payments recorded in the accounts of those living in Ireland for pictures, for example the regular disbursements of Sir William Petty in Dublin from the 1650s, were to dealers who supplied the chosen images. But by the late 1670s, if not earlier, portraitists painted in Dublin; Petty and the Percevals had their likenesses done there. Insofar as later seventeenth-century Ireland possessed an artistic capital it was obviously Dublin. A telling indicator of this was the grant to a Dutchman of a monopoly in auctioning pictures -presumably imports and perhaps the rejects of families like the Percevals and Boyles.⁹⁴

These hints of a stirring interest in art occur at much the same time as they did in England. If Ireland is compared with the more distant parts of England and Wales, rather than with London, little divergence appears.⁹⁵ Nor should we too readily reject the notion of journeymen painters active in Munster. Their skills were in demand, often for humdrum tasks such as the marbling and graining of woodwork or the painting of hatchments and other heraldic achievemepts so conspicuous at the funerals which regularly punctuated settler society . After Sir John Perceval's burial in 1686 £10 was owed to Jefemy Stratton 'the painter', some of it clearly for work on the decor for the obsequies. More difficult to explain satisfactorily is the payment on Orrery's behalf to 'Huton' for the picture to adorn his son Henry's chamber. We do not know if Huton was Orrery's supplier, his upholsterer or the painter himself. Framed paintings, like porcelain, when found in Restoration Cork, were very much the perquisite of the Anglo-Irish elite. None was listed among the effects of the wealthy Youghal trader in 1673; he preferred the more useful, indeed (given his calling) essential, map of The world.⁹⁶

The attitude of the settlers to these artifacts was startlingly prosaic. Only the hazards of survival, the consequent rarity and the workmanship have in time transformed these objects into works of art. Although building mania early infected some, conscious collecting, other than of books, probably did not begin until the eighteenth century. Here the added popularity of the Grand Tour, together with its changing itineraries, seem to have been vital factors. George Berkeley's glum predictions of how neighbours would react to an early eighteenth-century Perceval's booty should warn us against elevating ownership into connoisseurship: 'to feed their eyes with the sight of rusty medals and antique statues would (if I mistake not) seem to them something odd and insipid. The finest collection is not worth a groat where there is no one to admire and set a value on it, and our country seems to be the place in the world which is least furnished with virtuosi'.⁹⁷ Grandees with Cork estates, discouraged by the prevalent philistinism, used their rentals to finance their buying and building sprees elsewhere. County Cork's contribution to Burlingtonian Palladianism would be crucial, but indirect.⁹⁸ In default of aristocratic leadership, a succession of munificent bishops assumed the role. The contributions of Berkeley at Cloyne and Robert Clayton in Cork are well known. Significantly Smith stressed how Bishop Berkeley's example was 'so happy, that it had diffused itself.⁹⁹ Less widely praised, but perhaps even more influential, had been the activities of Charles Crow, a predecessor of Berkeley at Cloyne. His library contained the English version of Vignola's the regular architect and a more recent architectural text-book translated by John Evelyn. In accordance with these published designs Crow rebuilt his episcopal palace and embellished the cathedral; he was also a generous patron of Irish silversmiths.^l0O It would be dangerous to infer from this early eighteenth-century evidence that such cultivated enthusiasm already existed at the end of the seventeenth century .More usual then was indiscriminate endorsement of the new and what passed for the smart. Even so the social and perhaps cultural leadership provided by the bishop of Cork is suggested in 1678 when it was with him that the viceroy stayed while visiting the city .¹⁰¹

The vogue for building and adornment tightened Cork's dependence on England and Europe, whence ideas, materials and practitioners frequently came. But these new fashions elicited local responses. A surprising range of settlers turned their hands to designing; not only. The self-confident Orrery, but former army officers whose experience had previously been limited to siege trains and fortifications, and surveyors trained to map and measure fields. Specialist skills were scarce, making versatility a necessity , though again this was not peculiar to Restoration Ireland; the same was true in provincial England.^l02 Site inspections, the reading of plans and the supervision of craftsmen had to be added to the many duties of agents. As we have seen Orrery planned to employ only Protestant and English workers, but it is unlikely that such a self-denying ordinance could be observed. It is true that the most ambitious furnishings were imported, but some could be produced locally. At Burton, for example, Thomas Sweeny, a carpenter, constructed beds; the Irish harp was presumably made nearby. A local joiner fashioned the imposing wooden seats for Orrery and his wife in the church at Charleville and made an oval table for the earl, for 19s ¹⁰³

This showy and sometimes sophisticated world of classical harmonies, books, paintings and ideas was less typical of settler society than the stables and kennels. One Cork peer derided 'the coarse home-spun country gentlemen, [who] if you do not talk of dogs and horses to them, they will not ...talk of anything else to you'. In general, though, love of sport and animals bridged rather than widened the social and economic gap between the grandees and the squireens. Lord Cork, an aficionado of the chase, the card table, the billiard room and the bowling green, best exemplified this predominant trait.^1O4 The dual interests of leading settlers are also well captured in the rather pathetic lists of effects left by Sir Philip Perceval in 1680. Inventoried are his silver watch, his personal silver-gilt cutlery in its cases, family miniatures, rings, small volumes in French, Italian and Spanish, the bundles of leases and memoranda on which he was working as he took his inheritance in hand, and also fowling and birding guns and an alarming tangle of nets for entrapping quail, plovers and other birds. His stables housed more than fifty horses. Beagles had also been bought, and work begun on new kennels.¹⁰⁵

Lady Broghill's objections to her husband, Orrery's heir, numerous enough, centred on being eaten 'out of house and home, for my lord's horses, dogs and strange company do devour most unconscionable'. Broghill's aptitudes were confined to horsemanship and animals. After his wife had bolted, he passed much of his time hunting over his absent uncle's lands around Lismore. Earlier, in trying to endear himself to his grandfather-in-law, Broghill had offered to procure in Ireland motley creatures suitable for sport or as pets: falcons, hawks, martens, wolf dogs, red deer, even a tame wolf cub.^l06 Orrery, like most landowners, built stables for the horses vital for work, travel and pleasure. The pack of hounds which he kept and the park which he created and stocked with deer diverted his frequent visitors. But, as in all else, his wish to excel was apparent. His mares he sent to his brother's distinguished stud between Youghal and Lismore, there to be covered. Orrery prided himself particularly on an Arabian horse, but a neighbour coolly commented 'though he hath very good horses, he hath hardly one colt that is tolerably handsome'.^l07

Interest in and accomplishment with horses united many, and not only men or Protestant settlers. For Orrery it provided a bond with his old foe and new ally Inchiquin. Lord Cork presented horses of his own breeding to the king and duke of York and to a group of kinsmen and neighbours in Munster. However the £100 owed by Lord Antrim for a horse rankled. In Cork city a hard-working merchant confessed his weakness for the chase.^1O8 The quest for good animals, either for use or for breeding, obliged enquiries and travel to the remoter parts of Ireland. Perceval sent a messenger into Clare to discover whether Lord Thomond had a fine beast to sell; Jephson from Mallow Castle made a similar request of Inchiquin, only to be deterred by the outrageous asking price of £200. Concern to improve strains led to the import of animals. But, naturally, it was a two way traffic. Again Lord Cork illustrated this. His horses constantly crossed the Irish Sea; stallions sent to improve the breed; mares and colts, together with spaniels and setting dogs, dispatched to Minehead, thence to amble to his stables in East Yorkshire. Irish hobbies of equable temperament were highly esteemed in England for short journeys; other unfortunate mares and foals were shipped to the West Indies. Something of the scale of this traffic is conveyed by Petty's assertion that in 1685 1,054 horses had been exported from Ireland to England: these the ones noticed by the customs men.

Horses were vital to the life of the settlers. Less evidently utilitarian were horse-races. They had certainly taken place before 1641, and during the 1650s had offered a painless way for Lord Cork to impress Cromwellian notables at Youghal. In the 1680s when races were regularly run at the Curragh, Dublin emptied and the work of governing Ireland ceased. Landowners in Ulster as well as in Munster sponsored meetings with plates and purses for prizes.^11O These two horse-races, in which gentleman rode against gentleman, offered fresh occasions 'to compete and excel. Yet we should not think of this pastime as exclusive to the settler elite. In 1684 three Cork gentlemen, including Henry Boyle and Thomas Broderick, agreed with Youghal's richest merchant who was to build them stables on the South Green of the town as part of a project to popularise the already well-established races along the strand. The gentlemen had organised a subscription of £400 among their friends; they now expected Youghal corporation to add £200. From the invested proceeds two annual prizes of thirty guineas would be awarded. The merchant, not to be outdone, proposed himself to donate two extra prizes of £20 a piece. The scheme closely resembled many in England. Whether or not it succeeded, the races continued, and in the eighteenth century attracted modest municipal backing. A confluence of punters into the town could only benefit business and enable Youghal to withstand the competition from Cork city and other, newer settlements.¹¹¹

The breeding, training and care of horses, and other animals, fostered wider contacts; wider in both the geographical and social senses. Smiths and farriers attended to equine needs. The Irish had long been valued for their skills with horses, readily finding work in England as grooms. The tradition persisted, as Lord Cork's groom 'Irish Will' indicated.¹¹² In Cork itself we can only guess the degree to which racial or religious tensions were forgotten in shared enthusiasm for a spirited mount. Horses could, but did not invariably, reduce friction.The quality of a horse easily advertised its owner's status and wealth. The gulf between those able to keep a horse of their own and those without was enormous: it determined, for example, whether or not one could travel readily and widely. Horse ownership differentiated settler from settler; also it marked off the bulk of the newcomers from the mass of the poorer Irish, so many of whose animals had been commandeered or killed during the Confederate Wars. As with other livestock, native horses differed from the improved strains introduced by the settlers, and once more taught the monotonous lesson of alleged English superiority .Even the treatment and feeding of horses could be read as an index of the cultural differences between natives and newcomers, and of the supposed barbarism of the Irish ¹¹³ This world of possessions, tentatively evoked, profited producers and suppliers. But merchants dared not depend entirely on the orders from fickle grandees, frequently absent and sometimes doubtfully solvent. One in Cork, keen to cash in on the greater range of goods which he could import, bewailed the conservatism of his customers. New lines, like Caudebec hats from Normandy, simply did not go. Traditionalism affected diet. He warned a correspondent that a consignment of wine, probably Portuguese, 'being not white nor rosy , as smaller wines', would not sell, and that Bordeaux 'is a la mode' in Cork. Also demand was seasonal. Wine and dried fruits had to catch the Christmas market. Lent in turn greatly increased consumption of dried fish and pickled herrings, imported from Minehead, for Protestants as well as Catholics abstained during these weeks ¹¹⁴ The fairs and markets, proliferating through landlord pressure, survived thanks to the greater volume of trade, and in themselves speeded the circulation of goods, new, second-hand and occasionally stolen, throughout provincial society.¹¹⁵

The Irish flocked to these fairs, but (it has been implied) as sellers of what the prospering Protestants consumed. Some have suggested that cultural values as well as poverty inhibited the Irish from spending on the fripperies which, for the settlers, were turning from luxuries into necessities. Petty opined that Irish labourers needed only salt and tobacco to be self-sufficient, so simple were their tastes and so light their purses. However an eighteenth-century propagandist contrasted the frugality of Protestant tenants with the profligacy of Catholics who 'squander their substance at fairs and patterns'. It is not clear whether growing consumerism accentuated or blurred differences between natives and newcomers.¹¹⁶ With new goods, as has long been clear, came ideas. Recently it has been argued that the exchange of goods in itself constituted an exchange of ideas. As the familiar staples of the local economy were supplemented by strange imports, horizons widened and other worlds and values were glimpsed.¹¹⁷ What we know of this linked traffic in commodities and ideas in later seventeenth-century Cork reminds us forcibly that it was an economic and cultural province. Dependence on, but not necessarily subservience to England and Europe, were the hallmarks of this society, at least in its upper and acquisitive reaches.

Beguiled by their wealth, misled by the copious remains and too willing to accept them at their own valuation, have I let the Anglo-Irish bulk too large in this account?

If I have done so, I have followed the assessment of contemporaries who, oblivious to the hidden shifts in the structures of economy and society, explained growth, recession and dearth in terms of the impact of powerful individuals (or God). Modern historians may know better, and be able to show, for example, that the bans on exporting live cattle and woollens to England encouraged profitable diversification, or that the older habits of settlement and cultivation outlasted the newcomers' insistence on improvement. Even so it is accepted that landowners possessed in the lease a potent instrument with which to alter their district.¹¹⁸ In the later seventeenth century Lord Cork, having unavailingly fought the Cattle Bill and entered his dissent in the Lords' journal, apocalyptically noted after its passage 'this is the second time an unhappy day for Ireland, on which day the rebellion broke out anno 1641 '. In Cork city the merchant William Hovell anxiously watched the movements of the nobility , knowing from experience how the arrival of Ormonde and his entourage or the need for Cork, Shannon and Inchiquin to remit rents into England, affected the rate of exchange and his own business. Already, too, observers were worrying about the adverse effects of absenteeism, and specifically Cork's lengthening absences from Lismore.^l19

The demands of the leading landowners influenced the lower levels of Cork's society, and not simply like giant sponges sopping up wealth in rents. Small towns created or expanded by magnates, like Orrery's Charleville, felt the chill when their patrons shut up their mansions, and decayed unless they could develop other services.¹²⁰ In 1679 a census found sixty-six inmates at Castlemartyr. This establishment, while large, was smaller than those at Charleville or Lismore in their heydays. In addition to members of the immediate and extended family, it contained a variety 6f functionaries ranging from the chaplain and housekeeper to a trumpeter, housemaids and a hen-woman. A household of this size, as its menus and guest lists show, consumed royally. But although it employed its own baker and brewer and could eat what the garden and estate grew, it neither was, nor was intended to be, self-sufficient. Meat had to be bought at market; the many sorts of fish testified not only to the abundance but the regularity of landings from Ballycotton Bay.¹²¹ Sugar, anchovies and capers, hogsheads of claret and pipes of canary were supplied by Cork and Youghal merchants. ¹²² The house, its stables and kennels, the gardens and park, even when empty of all but a skeleton staff on board wages, required upkeep. When we remember the thick scatter of these mansions, we can sense, even if we cannot quantify, the extra work. Employment had been created for masons and labourers, and spectacularly for domestic servants, perhaps the most common occupation of all. ¹²³

The more prestigious jobs tempted migrants from Britain, and, more importantly, sustained cadets of other settler families, enabling them to stay and often quietly to flourish.¹²⁴ The benefits conferred by high-spending landlords on lesser men can be illustrated if we consider four groups: squireens, agents, lawyers and merchants.

Orrey's first loyalty , like that of his father and many other dynasts, was to his family. An accomplished nepotist, he shared what he could, including his houses, with his close kinsmen and sons-in-Iaw. Next he gratified his clients, using posts in the presidency , in the boroughs, in Limerick city and in the provincial militia. The Brodricks, the Foulkes, Sir Richard Kyrle and the Southwells may serve as examples of Cork gentry who orbited in Orrery's universe or escaped to a more congenial solar system.

Sir St John Brodrick had served as Orrery's provost-marshal in the 1650s. Staying on after 1660, he retained the post and had earned payment in Irish lands, set out around Ballyanen, adjacent to Orrery's Imokilly estate. Brodrick happily combined oversight of Orrery's lands and the construction of Charleville with the development of his own holdings. Keen to supplant Inchiquin as 'lord paramount' in Imokilly, he had his new settlement at Midleton incorporated as a parliamentary borough, with himself as its first sovereign, in 1671. In the 1670s, however, he took up residence at Wandsworth, but maintained his close ties with Orrery, now attending to the latter's Somerset estate.¹²⁵ Also in Wandsworth lived Brodrick's brother, Sir Allen: a very different career as a soyalist conspirator and as Ormonde's henchman brought him too into Ireland. As surveyor-general, a commissioner in the court of claims and as farmer of the great apanage in Ireland bestowed on the duke of York he amassed wealth which, after his death in 1680, underwrote the Irish careers of his nephews, the sons of Sir St John. The future belonged to this second generation of Brodricks. By 1695 they had replaced the Boyles as the managers of south Munster's M.P.s, so that the Dublin parliament of that year was known as the 'Brodricks' Parliament' .¹²⁶

Kyrle too had come to Ireland to fight and had stayed on. As he exploited his lands, south of Mallow, especially through ironworks, he soon fell into disrepute as a trickster and bad payer, and was hotly pursued by neighbours in the law courts. This unsavoury reputation did not, surprisingly, prevent his being considered as a suitable tenant for Charleville when, following the second earl's death, it was imperative to have it aired if it were not to fall completely derelict. Kyrle, however, opted for a fresh life. In 1684 he was chosen to govern Carolina and, having quickly antagonised settlers there, died within a year. Kyrle, originally from Herefordshire, had alighted for a while in county Cork like a migratory mosquito but left no more lasting traces than a few smarting settlers.^l27

More enduring were the Foulkes. Of a family probably settled in Munster before 1641, Sir Francis, like Brodrick and Kyrle, advanced through the profession of arms. In the 1650s Lord Cork leased him Camphire, good land at the junction of the rivers Blackwater and Bride, on which Foulke later claimed he had spent more than £2,000 in draining the bog and other improvements. With baroque courtesy he deferred to Lady Orrery , sending her presents of eggs and pigeons, and stoutly defended the local interests and reputation of her husband. But Foulke, perhaps like other veterans ofllthe wars, adjusted imperfectly to the peace. By the 1670s, seriously in debt and threatened by Lord Cork with re-possession of Camphire, he was found a posting more to his inclinations when Orrery appointed him to govern Limerick city .This better approximated to the life of the camp after which Foulke hankered. In 1674 when there was talk of the Dutch recruiting regiments among the Protestants of Ireland, he was eager to volunteer, expecting after a couple of years to be able to sell his command and use the money to provide for his old age. But above all the prospect of fighting the French 'would make me young again'. He would, no doubt, have been pleased by the epitome of his character after his death in 1678: 'an honest gentleman and a good officer'. His widow kept Camphire, and pestered Orrery to let one of his best farms to her son. Another son, having served as a cornet in Orrery's own troop at Charleville in the 1660s, married into the local gentry and later helped to run Cork's affairs from Youghal and Lismore.¹²⁸

Different because not satellites of the Boyles were the Southwells of Kinsale. A cadet of settlers in Limerick, Robert Southwell, using the post of customer of Kinsale as his springboard, was the first to emerge into wealth. In 1641 he valued the annual profits of the position at £100, and made £50 p.a. from the malt trade. Southwell had realised and assiduously exploited Kinsale's potential as a victualling centre. In 1649 his thirst for enrichment converged with his politics when he provisioned Prince Rupert's marauding royalist flotilla. Although he cooperated with, and again profited from, the Cromwellian usurpers, his principles could be unabashedly advertised after 1660, and underpinned a close relationship with Ormonde who used the Southwells as a counterweight to the pervasive Boyles. The Southwells' court connections were publicised when Prince Rupert stood as god-father to a Southwell grandson.^l29

In 1664 Robert Southwell totted up his income. In 1641 he had been lucky to clear £150 p.a.; now he enjoyed £1,014. This put him on a par with prominent gentlemen like Jephson of Mallow and indeed with the shabbier peers like Lord Shannon. Southwell had kept his brewing and malting business, which had quadrupled in value since 1641; otherwise his income came entirely from property in or near Kinsale. Because Southwell, apparently, owned no lands in England and seldom travelled beyond the county, we can regard him as an Irish Protestant rather than one of the Anglo-Irish. However, Southwell was hardly introverted, and his family's English links grew. No less than Orrery, Southwell subscribed to the cult of improvement. He invested in the local fisheries, to no permanent profit, and backed the bid to have Kinsale declared a free port. That campaign failed, but the expanding victualling trade benefitted Southwell: his tenants prospered and, after his death, his heir, normally living in England, negotiated to lease the family home as a navy office and their warehouses and cellars to the victuallers. ¹³⁰

In comparison with a magnate like Cork or Orrery, Robert Southwell's needs were modest. He expected to spend £943, well within his annual income. This sensible moderation seems to have been transmitted to his only surviving son. At the end of the 1650s, rather than plunge onto the dangerous switchback of public life, the younger Robert Southwell, fresh from Oxford, toured Europe. On his return, he assessed how best to make a name for himself. Ireland, he concluded, offered no posts which would stretch or adequately reward him. Thus it was, assisted by his father and probably by his English wife's marriage portion, he bought his way into government service. His principal investment, of £2,000, was in one of the clerkships of the English privy council, which carried a formal salary of £450. He was launched on a career which would take him as ambassador to several European courts, win him the presidency of the Royal Society (the only son of Kinsale to hold the office?) and eventually, in the 1690s, return him to Ireland as secretary of state. From his earnings he bought a Gloucestershire estate. He had not entirely severed his Irish links. Through his numerous well-placed contacts he promoted Kinsale's and his family's interests, now inseparable in his mind; Ormonde regularly confided his views on Ireland to him; in 1679 he inherited his father's Kinsale portfolio; and, after 1686, oversaw his brother-in-law, Perceval's, much more valuable north Cork estate. Most of his methodical and efficient control of the two Cork inheritances was exercised from a distance. In a generation the Southwells had changed from Kinsale Protestants to English landed gentlemen who happened to enjoy a useful Irish rental,^l31

These contrasted lives show how factors of chance, temperament, wit and patronage make it impossible to foretell which families would advance in status and wealth, which would stagnate and which would disappear or decline. The unequal distribution and use of opportunities are again shown in the achievements of agents. This was an attractive route which cadets of settler families could tread in order to maintain themselves in the province. Lionel Beecher, a sprig from that prolific Munster tree, had, so he alleged, traded in a substantial way at Youghal before the war. Early in the 1640s he had skipped back to North Devon, only to see the twelve ships in which he had a share sunk during the naval warfare of the 1650s. Back in Youghal after 1660 he demanded compensation for his losses and pleaded with Cork and Orrery for employment. Orrery entrusted him with rent collection and estate management. In this modest way Beecher turned. into an effective pluralist. He acted as seneschal of Orrery's Askeaton manor (delegating the work to an English deputy); in addition he sought the seneschalship of Charleville. At home in Youghal he held the posts of land-waiter, deputy-surveyor and storekeeper of the customs. In 1669 he entreated Orrery to assist him to the post of surveyor of the customs in the port (in Cork's gift as Lord Treasurer of Ireland) -duties which might reasonably be expected to ease the import of the expensive requirements of Orrery's households. Beecher's comfortable life ended abruptly with Orrery's. Thereafter he was constantly bombarded with imperious demands from the dowager and with searching enquiries from her efficient Dublin agent. New disaster struck when at Christmas 1686 his house was burnt. Beecher smelt arson, his ties with the Boyles supposedly making him a target. It gave him a wonderful excuse for the disorder which had enveloped his care of the Boyles' affairs. What became of Beecher and his six children, and whether his duties had contributed to the rise of another settler dynasty, cannot be said.¹³² After 1691 his work was being done by a member of a second family later to become prominent in the locality, the Longfields.¹³³

Agencies generally benefited men already settled in the area. The concerns of large landowners, especially when their estates were scattered or they themselves were absent, created chances which the alert grabbed. Yet estates offered wideropportunities, as the case of Dr Jeremy Hall shows. Hall, from Yorkshire, arrived in Dublin about 1639 thanks to the patronage of another Yorkshireman, soon to be earl of Strafford, the viceroy of Ireland. A promising lad, Hall was put into Trinity, only to have whatever future he had mapped disrupted by the civil wars. He returned to England, collected a doctorate and a large library in London. However it was his pre-war Irish connections which decided his career after the Restoration. Hall, a fussing, valetudinarian bachelor, was soon in demand among the Anglo-Irish as a suitable governor for their sons when they toured Europe. Lords Roscommon (Cork's son-in-law) and Donegall used him thus, then Orrery. So struck with his talents was Orrery that he inveigled him into remaining in his employ. Hall returned to Dublin and there, by his meticulous oversight of the business and legal affairs, made himself indispensable to the family. Although devoted to the Boyles, he kept up his other connections. The second Lord Strafford, usually absent from Ireland, needed a reliable man on the spot to watch over his interests in county Wicklow, and Hall fitted the bill perfectly. So it was that he bustled about Dublin, instructing lawyers and attorneys, consulting government functionaries, cultivating the powerful and listening for gossip and rumour. Off he jogged into the countryside, to Powerscourt, to Blessington, and on his employers' affairs' into Wicklow, Limerick and sometimes to Cork. His salary, £100 p.a., was often in arrear; frequently he threatened to resign or retire. But he did not desert the Boyles, and indeed lent the first earl money and by way of return acquired some of Orrery's Limerick houses. It was he who hastened to Charleville to attend the lonely deathbed of the second earl and to arrange his makeshift funeral; it was he who poked about in the church at Youghal and, tut-tutting at the rain falling through the window onto Orrery's new monuments, ordered repairs. He criss-crossed England and, when no suitable governor could be found, took the third earl to the continent. Hall had impinged only intermittently and temporarily on county Cork. Nevertheless, his presence in Ireland after the Restoration can be traced directly to the needs of Orrery and his Cork-based clan.^l34

The patterns of employment provided by the settlers, and their tendency to spillover into a world larger than county Cork, are repeated when we look at the lawyers. The clearest profiteers from the landowners' needs, the lawyers were the most unpopular. As Lord Shannon railed: 'lawyers ...are now in a manner entailed as a rent- charge on most large estates and families, and are become such a customary and necessary charge. ..as rich men cannot live at ease on their estates without a lawyer's advice ...'.¹³⁵ Four will show how lawyers battened on Cork society.

William Worth, a Trinity graduate, was son and heir of county Cork's leading ecclesiastical politician in the 1650s. Many in the county could echo one planter's comment: 'I knew his father well. It will concern me to know him also'. Worth, bequeathed property in Cork city, began his practice there and by 1678 was its recorder. After he had been appointed as a baron of the exchequer in Dublin many Cork settlers turned to him to assist them through that legal maze. Worth, like other judges with his background, was dismissed in James II's reign, and temporarily forsook Ireland for England.^l36 .

Sir Standish Hartstonge hailed from Norfolk. His mother, the Standish heiress from Bruff in county Limerick, first made him think of Ireland.The running and improvement of Bruff were easily combined with the duties of recorder of Limerick. Equally handy for Bruff was Charleville, and soon Hartstonge, having attracted Orrery's favour, was second justice of the presidency court. But while building this valuable provincial base, he also made a name in Dublin. His ascent resembled Worth's: office in the Tipperary palatinate court and then in the exchequer, and was also halted in the 1680s. He too, following his dismissal, returned to England where through his family and a succession of wives he owned much land. The law had enabled him to strengthen his position as a landowner and to work, almost at will, in England, Wales or Ireland; thanks to its estates the family continued as a power in eighteenth-century Limerick.¹³⁷

More deeply rooted in county Cork was Richard Cox. Of settler stock, as an orphan he had first been cared for by his grandfather, Oxford graduate, music-lover, recorder and thrice-sovereign of Clonakilty. Next he was looked after by an uncle who happened to be seneschal of Lord Cork's Bandon estate. If we can believe Cox's disingenuous account, his own drive, a small legacy and the help of Lord Cork lifted him from a small-town attorney working in the local courts around Bandon into a London-trained lawyer. After a spell of somnolent contentment with his new wife at Clonakilty , he suddenly roused himself, resumed practice in Cork and landed the recordership of Kinsale. He claimed to have earned £500 in his first year, which he invested in land, 'kept my coach and lived well'; With remarkable prescience, Cox removed to England in 1687, offering his health as an excuse. There he fluently championed the Irish Protestant cause, developed an exile's affection for his homeland, and soon returned triumphantly to Ireland in the train of the conquering William III. Henceforward his pre-eminence was assured, subject only to the fierce interplay of party.^l38

Briefs and retainers had come the way of Worth, Hartstonge and Cox from their Munster neighbours and acquaintances, and, especially in their earlier years, helped them to succeed at the bar. Alan Brodrick most clearly shows the importance of the local base. A younger son of the creator of Midleton, Brodrick, another Oxford graduate, having been called at the Middle Temple in 1678, decided to ply for hire in Ireland. In the early 1680s he complained of the 'lamentable dull trade ...with us young men at the bar' .He affected more interest in the latest songs from London, especially if bawdy 'to comply with the female fancies', and in improving his rig with lace cravats, cuffs and a new peruke. He set about exploiting his family contacts in Cork and soon won the invaluable backing of Baron Worth, in whose house he lodged. With Worth's influence, he hoped to become recorder of Cork. But others, including Cox, harboured the same ambition. As well as fawning on Worth, Brodrick built up an interest with the mayor and sheriffs, whom he served as counsel. He correctly calculated that if he could survive the first lean years then he would be rewarded. Survival was mightily helped when, again on Worth's recommendation, he was retained by several leading and litigious Cork landowners, including Inchiquin, Kingston, Clancarty and Lady Orrery .In his first year Brodrick estimated that he had earned £120; now, with the guaranteed retainers, he hoped to make £200. Even so his outgoings were heavy . The annual rent on his chambers amounted to £41; he kept two clerks, one of his own choosing, the other foisted on him by WorW1 and a Cork alderman as the price of their support; in addition he employed a man servant and a groom.¹³⁹

Steadily Brodrick pushed forward. Fearful of the political uncertainty he contemplated buying land in England. Whether or not he did, by 1689 he was said to enjoy £300 p.a. from Irish land. Any indecision about whether to persist with an Irish career was banished by William Ill's victories. The power base which he had industriously constructed in Cork served him well. He was now appointed recorder and as king's sergeant commissioned to practise in the county. By 1697 he contentedly grumbled about the hectic round which took him from the House of Commons to Dublin Castle, the Council board, the King's Inns, the Customs House and to Munster. The hopeful young man had matured into a pompous heavy-weight who delighted in puncturing the pretensions of 'pert and saucy' young barristers. Much in demand at the bar, he could earn £10 daily -little when set against the £40 which successful English barristers could command -but enough to bring him £1,000 p.a. He admitted that the sum was 'very fair', but added smugly 'I have worked hard for it'.

As early as 1692 Brodrick, Cork city's M.P., was reckoned a politician of national standing. In Parliament he argued for its sole right to initiate money bills, resisted the executive's interference and managed other members. But local causes were not forgotten. In particular an issue , which for some years had angered Cork merchants, and which Brodrick had been instructed to press, inspired his attacks on an oppressive and corrupt government. Since the 1680s Cork customs officers had collected tolls of quayage and cranage, brushing aside objections about their size and legality .Brodrick used these irksome exactions to document his general case against the administration.^l40

These successful lawyers sprang from the same soil as the landowners, and as the former thrived they drew nourishment from their landed hosts. Judges and barristers, along with army officers, first felt the force of the Catholic revanche after 1685, when Catholics were again permitted officially to practise and replaced the Protestant judges. The Protestant lawyers, copying the adroit Catholic barristers earlier in the century, driven by self-interest and equipped with their training, led the attack on the Stuarts' Irish polices. This willingness to speak for the wider Irish Protestant cause may have rehabilitated the lawyers with the settlers whom they had entangled and fleeced. ¹⁴¹ Although obviously an important component in settler society , many unanswered questions remain about the role of the Irish legal profession. As among landowners, so among lawyers, a chasm yawned between the Anglo-Irish, like Cox and Brodrick, and the small-town attorney, content with the recordership of Clonakilty or Charleville and to ride the Munster circuit.

Similar differences separate the one or two merchants whose lives can be reconstructed in useful detail from the anonymous remainder. Trade in the rapidly growing Cork city, free from the stranglehold of a single local landowner, differed even from a merchant's life in the smaller ports. Inland, away from the shipping lanes with their constant arrivals, news and novelties, trade obeyed distinct rhythms. Youghal, still very much in the ambit of Lord Cork, had its handful of civic notables. There, in Raleigh's House lived the one man known to own and understand the recent acts of settlement and explanation: little wonder that he was the town's recorder.¹⁴²

A tantalising glimpse into this world is offered by the inventory compiled in 1673 on the death of Samuel Hayman, one of Youghal's leading traders. Hayman's bequests totalled £2,590; his assets were valued at nearly £2,800. Modest prosperity, based in part on the financial services that he performed for Lord Cork, enabled him to live in solid comfort. In his house were some of the furnishings now taken for granted in the county's mansions: table carpets, an 'arras carpet', two looking glasses, linen, pewter, silver, books other than his 'Great Bible'. But much of Hayman's wealth lay in coin -he had kept £200 in silver and £40 in gold in his desk -and in merchandise, ranging from deal boards, rape seed, salt, glass bottles, canvas, broad cloth, dowlas, pitch and barrelled beef. He owned livestock, held leases on Youghal properties and on a substantial house in Minehead where his family had originated and where his brother and partner still lived. He also had shares in five ships and was owed money both locally and by others in Clonrnel, Dublin, Ilfracombe, London, La Rochelle and Barbadoes. His fortune was to be shared equitably among his six children: the eldest son received £400; the others, regardless of sex, were each bequeathed £300. Hayman, as we would expect of a trader, belonged to a world united by the sea. Wherein, we may ask, lay the difference between his brother's life in Minehead and his in Youghal?¹⁴³

Hayman's effects provide no clues about his perceptions of the world. Yet another merchant, William Hovell, originally from Kinsale but by the early 1680s established in Cork city, offers a refreshing perspective on the affairs of the county .Hard-working and cautious, Hovell rarely let slip a concern with something other than the rate of exchange or the price and quality of pilchards, butter and cloth. A business ethic is evident; for Hovell credit amounted to more than accumulated funds and hinged on reputation and honest dealing. Those who fell short, whether his own kin and apprentices or the egregious Sir Matthew Deane of Dromore, were roundly censured. Through his correspondents Hovell's world reached to the West Indies and the Mediterranean; his wife's people lived near Mallow; close relations remained in England. A man of some education -he could read but not write French -Hovell hardly typified the small-town huckster.^l44 He, no less than Hayman, the lawyers and the landowners whom I have described, was Anglo-lrish rather than exclusively Irish in his orientation. If we can trust the estimate of his wealth in 1689, Hovell enjoyed an income from land of £320, which put him on a par with the middling gentry of the county , but above all else, what Hovell's letters reveal is the foreboding which turned to panic as Tyrconnel's plans unfolded.

From our vantage point the Protestants' ascent after 1649 looks steady and inevitable, so much so that expressions of alarm or doubt among seventeenth-century Protestants like Orrery tend either to be discounted or treated as fabrications. But unless we take seriously that sense of uncertainty about what their ultimate fate was to be we omit an essential ingredient in Protestant mentalities, and also fail to explain the sense of dangers escaped which expressed itself in vengeful triumphalism after 1691. The crises of James lI's reign and the Williamite Wars were the experiences which most decisively shaped Protestant identities. Hovell in Cork expressed an almost craven Protestant loyalism in 1685 and hoped by appeasing James II to temper the king's catholicising intentions. Eagerly he recorded the news that the king had attended Protestant worship, and was thankful that Monmouth's rebellion had been suppressed without its spreading, as it had seemed that it might, from Somerset into Munster. But Hovell was tormented by lack of solid information, and begged his chief Dublin contact 'to advise anything of news, without any observations or animadversions thereon, but only bare and public matters of fact ...for we have here nothing certain'. One 'stupendous letter' from Dublin dissuaded Hovell from building in Cork. Reasons for alarm quickly multiplied, as Protestant judges and officers were replaced, as 'idolatrous mass is here celebrated openly in the midst of the city'; and as Catholics boasted of what further changes were in the offing. A palpable apprehension entered Hovell's comments by the summer of 1686. His habitual caution increased, limiting his remarks on public affairs to Latin saws and religious platitudes (heartfelt for all their conventionality). He reassured his Dublin friend that he immediately obliterated any opinions on politics in his letters lest they fall into the wrong hands and be misconstrued.

A cynic might conclude that Hovell bewailed the uncertainties because they depressed trade. Certainly recession accompanied the political instability , as did rising lawlessness. Thoughts of local investment were abandoned as merchants and landowners jostled to convey to England as much of their substante as possible.¹⁴⁵ In this atmosphere there were few material inducements to stay. Yet Hovell's attitudes should not be reduced to simple calculations of profit and loss. The flimsy structure of Protestant domination was creaking and collapsing, but, in complete contrast to 1641, the settlers had time to see what was happening and escape. Hovell planned to send his wife and children to England as early as 1686, but himself confessed 'I am loath to leave Ireland, but I fear we soon must'. Leave he did, but probably not until 1688. He saw this crisis not exclusively in personal or mercenary terms. For him, as for many of his coreligionists, it could be traced back to the 'massacres' which had begun on 23 October 1641 and which the Catholics now threatened to repeat. The plight of the Huguenots, so often paralleling that of the Irish Protestants, also dismayed him and reminded him of the seerriingly inevitable antagonism between Catholics and Protestants. Hovell, rich and with English relations, fled; other Cork merchants stayed. One who did testified to the mood in December 1689. While at church in Cork, news arrived from Dublin 'of a massacre designed on us all on that day ...You cannot imagine what a fright and confusion it put all into, all running out with their swords in their hands and breaking the church windows to get out. Ever since every house is upon their guard and all keep watch. The Irish laugh at it and threaten for the disorder. But the burnt child dreads the fire, and all have not forgot.'¹⁴⁶

Hovell revealed another aspect of the Cork Protestants' experience after 1685 which added to their nervousness: the absence of leadership. Orrery's death in 1679, convenient to Ormonde in his bid to damp down panic in Ireland over the ramifications of the Popish plot, had left a vacuum at the centre of Munster's affairs. Hovell believed that so long as Ormonde lived, no harm would befall the Protestant community: the duke's death in 1688 was accordingly a heavy blow. By then most local notables had removed themselves to the safety of England, although, as we have seen, Henry Boyle and Inchiquin attempted to rally the Protestant resistance. In default of effective lay leaders, it was the bishop of Cork, Edward Wetenhall, who stayed and did what he could to sustain Protestant morale during the dark days of 1690.¹⁴⁷ Only with the peace did the Coxes, Brodricks, Bernards and Boyles re-appear to head the local settlers.

Wider worlds

In discussing Hovell, I have introduced obliquely the matter so far glaringly missing from this account: Protestant relations with the bulk of the population. They may seem too uncomplicated to need much discussion; composed of loathing on the Irish side, and contempt on the part of the newcomers. But to suppose that Protestant attitudes were uniform, or that public utterances mirrored private behaviour, is to rest too heavily on the repellent writings of Orrery , Brodrick and Cox .¹⁴⁸ There was a tradition, at once more relaxed and more generous, which, while severely shaken by the scares of 1689-91, did not evaporate. ¹⁴⁹ Personal experience mattered. The veterans of the confederate wars constantly guarded against any resurgence of the Catholic menace. For younger generations, sceptical of the dire warnings of their elders, James II's reign provided a rapid education. A new and uncompromising mood marked the later 1690s. The more that contemporaries in England treated the Irish Catholics as a joke rather than a threat, the more the Protestants of Ireland did what they could to prove the contrary and to protect themselves. Through by-laws the Cork boroughs imposed oaths and so excluded Catholics from their running. In Kinsale, for example, the more aggressively Protestant ethos was signalled by the decision in 1695 to celebrate the 29 September 1690 'as a day of public rejoicing by making bonfires, illuminations and other marks and demonstrations of joy', in thanks that 'the Protestants of this corporation were delivered out of the hands and power of their implacable enemies of Roman Catholic persuasion '¹⁵⁰

The octogenarian Lord Cork and Burlington, who had fought the Irish in the 1640s and who had seen his own, his father's and brother's schemes for assimilating the Irish to English ways run like water into the sand, was especially bullish. He insisted that the now antiquated and generally obsolete requirement of military service be included in tenancies. He ordered his agents to destroy the cabins which had mushroomed in Lismore, 'so as this crew of vermin may be put out of that place'. Yet fearsome as the rhetoric is, what really lay behind it? Lord Cork's venom against the Irish was no worse than the abuse which he hurled at his family's long-standing enemies among the settlers, like the Pynes of Mogeley, one of whose sons was seeking to encroach on Cork's precious deer-park. All Cork asked of the poor Irish was that they rebuild their cabins on the other side of the Blackwater; Catholics were still given tenancies. Similarly Orrery's worries about Catholics on his lands differed little from his fury when cottagers illicitly colonised the woods of his Somerset manor. ¹⁵¹ In Munster the poor and rootless, 'the rascal multitude', who obstructed the landowners' grandiose plans, happened, usually, to be Catholic and Irish, characteristics which easily explained why they impeded 'improvement'. Social equals among the Catholics, such as Clancarty (Ormonde's brother-in-law and the greatest Catholic landowner in Cork after 1660) or Sir James Cotter, had to be treated with grudging respect. Furthermore, at this higher level, assimilation stilt occurred, as the examples of Barrymore and both the Thomond and Inchiquin O'Briens showed.¹⁵² Relations between the newcomers and natives are too complex to be dealt with in the compass of this essay: but let us remember that they were complex.

In conclusion one other distortion needs correcting. The worlds which I have tried to penetrate have been peopled overwhelmingly with men. But seventeenth-century Munster was a woman's world. Redoubtable wives and widows, headed by the two Lady Orrerys and Lady Petty , took their turns in directing estates. Lady Maynard of Curraglass had a profitable side-line as a money-lender. Robert Southwell's wife went from Kinsale into the hinterland of Mallow in a hired wooden calash to defend the family's interests. Lady Foulke like a tigress protected her sons. At Youghal after Edward Lawndy was drowned his widow took over the running of his extensive business; while Mrs. French traded in iron.¹⁵³ These examples are few and, no doubt, exceptional. However, one theme of this account has been the growing traffic between Cork and England. The excitement over and appetite for goods, the zest for rebuilding and redecoration, were feelings shared by women. It was Hovell's wife, for example, who insisted that their linen should be the best from the Low Countries.^l54

The commodities shipped across the Irish Sea united England and Ireland. Conspicuous among them were women. Yet endogamy distinguished the Irish Protestants from the Anglo-Irish. The former selected their wives from the neighbours' daughters, as the Tynte girls from Ballycrenan (the beauties of Restoration Cork) or later the children of Arthur Bernard of Bandon remind us. The Anglo-Irish, like Cork and Orrery , looked further afield, to other Irish provinces or to England.¹⁵⁵ Marriage alliances which traversed the Irish Sea further deepened Ireland's participation in the economic, social and cultural life of England. These arranged matches were sometimes attended by strains (though probably no more often than in England). The sense of dislocation felt by a bride from England was sensitively suggested by Lord Broghill. He admitted that living 'at such a rambling rate as I have done for five or six years ...disabled me from being so kind to my wife as my inclinations do promote me to be'. He had done what he could, but the headstrong Lady Mary Sackville was dissatisfied. For those used to London, as she was, Broghill acknowledged that 'this country at first cannot but a little discompose any body that hath lived amongst the best company of England'. Some brides settled happily into the provincial ways, just as they might in Northumberland, Shropshire, Cornwall or Scotland; others, notoriously Lady Broghill, Mrs Freke of Rathbarry and Anne Jephson, did not.^l56 As well as this important difference among the settlers as to where they sought spouses, there existed, or so Cox contended, a difference between Irish and English: the former lorded it over their wives, while the latter behaved more considerately.

We come back in the end to the difficulty of seeing beneath the thin but dazzling crust of Anglo-Irish to the Protestants whose lives were bounded by county Cork. We can conclude that the latter had less money, usually found brides within their own community, were more likely to be educated locally and at Trinity rather than in England and on the continent, and were less tied to English patrons. Whether these distinctive traits narrowed or softened attitudes, we can only conjecture. Those who crowded the favourite locations, around the basin of Cork harbour, along the banks of the Blackwater and Bandon rivers or in the environs of Mallow, Youghal and Kinsale, comfortable in the society of numerous like-minded neighbours, regularly and easily in touch with Dublin and England, probably lived more sophisticated existences than their few coreligionists who tried life beyond Macroom or around Skibbereen and Bantry .But even if the bucaneering Hulls of Leamcon, Richard Hutchins at Bantry and Richard Hedges isolated at Macroom lived more roughly than the Boyles and Percevals, they were not frontiersmen.¹⁵⁷ Such social and geographical contrasts are, moreover, commonplace: they can be instanced in most English and Welsh counties. Distance made county Cork lag behind metropolitan habits; so too did spending power, for in size and average wealth, while increasing, the settler elite hardly matched its equivalents in London or lowland England. Yet county Cork was not uniformly backward. By 1700 Cork city , Kinsale and Youghal were recognisably English towns. Those who travelled through the accessible and better populated baronies sensed familiarity, not strangeness.¹⁵⁸ Nor did remoteness and under-development make county Cork a colonial society .In some aspects it conformed better to the smartest metropolitan standards than Northumberland, Glamorgan and Yorkshire.¹⁵⁹ Cork, we must admit, was special among Irish counties; and though the populations of County Dublin, Antrim or Down may have resembled it in religion, structure and wealth, we can hardly treat it as a paradigm for, say, Mayo, Roscommon or Clare.

Cork was unlike any English county in that its landowners floated above a population different not only in wealth and culture, but also in race and religion. This feature has deluded Some into supposing that the Protestant grandees are most appropriately likened to the colonists of north, or the conquistadores of Latin America. Instead it ought to recall the similarities between the Irish situation and that in most other seventeenth-century monarchies, from Scotland to Bohemia, from Russia to Spain, where ethnic and religious differences further complicated economic and social disparities.