Making Ireland English

Goe lowly noble happy, one made paire With a new groath that ancient stock repaire That times all eating rust may not deface That well brancht, never discontinued race And gallant youth whom England Brittans dubble isle Could not have charmd with any homebred smile (British Library, Additional MS 78234, fo. 5r) In these six lines, Richard Bellings—an Old English Catholic lawyer from County Kildare—pinpointed many of the questions of duty, identity, nobility and survivalism which lie at the heart of Jane Ohlmeyer’s authoritative study. A loyal friend and beneficiary of the patronage of the Protestant James Butler, marquis of Ormond and former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Bellings wrote this stanza in late 1659 to celebrate the marriage of Thomas Butler, earl of Ossory and Ormond’s heir, to Aemilia, daughter of Lodewyk van Nassau, heer van Beverweerd, governor of Sluis, and illegitimate son of the stadholder Maurits van Nassau. To what was undoubtedly a beneficial aristocratic match across international borders were added other motivations: firstly, that both the Butlers and Bellings, stalwart royalists, were then in exile following the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and Ormond anticipated that the match might benefit his exiled monarch, Charles II; and secondly, that it would potentially preserve an ‘ancient stock’ now faced with the real prospect of not being preserved ‘at home’. Precisely what ‘home’ was, as Bellings’s scored-out use of ‘England’ and substitution perhaps suggests, remained equally ambiguous: was it the England in which the Butlers sought power and influence, and rooted their cultural and social identities? Or was it ‘Britain’, as part of a wider, composite Stuart kingdom of which Ireland was, even amid dramatic changes, thought to be very much a part

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