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Select document: Ormond’s civic entry into Kilkenny, 29/31 August 1646

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Alan J. Fletcher
Alan J. Fletcher*
Affiliation:
School of English and Drama, University College Dublin
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Extract

The purpose of this article is to make generally available for the first time a document whose content and context introduce their peculiar leaven to our understanding of a pivotal moment of early modern Irish history, the eve of the collapse of the authority of the ruling peace faction within the Kilkenny-based Confederation of Irish Catholics. The occasion of the document was the official visit to Kilkenny of James Butler, marquis of Ormond, some time near the end of August 1646. This took place at a time when rivalries within the Confederation were running high and the struggle to determine the Confederation’s effective political constituency was coming to a head. While a good case could be made for publication of the document on other grounds — in comprising Ireland’s earliest known surviving example of a speech of civic welcome addressed to a visiting dignitary, it is of special interest to the department of Irish social history concerned with civic performance, pageantry and public display — this is not the aspect chiefly pursued here. Rather, in addition to publishing the speech, this article attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its delivery and some of the elements of the larger event in which it centrally participated, before considering the construction that the speech and its circumstances strove to put upon a volatile political situation in the hope — vain, as it proved — of containing it. As an adjunct to its interest in the Confederation’s large-scale public dimensionings of party policy, the article also presents in an appendix another document similarly hitherto unpublished, a set of verses posted upon the gates of Kilkenny at a time when the General Assembly was sitting. The assembly in question, probably the seventh, ran from January to April 1647. The city-gate verses appear with the civic entry speech in the unique manuscript in which it has been preserved.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 139 , May 2007 , pp. 365 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2007

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References

page 365 note 1 See especially Siochrú, Micheál Ó, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: a constitutional and political analysis (Dublin, 1999), pp 87–117 Google Scholar.

page 365 note 2 Original texts published in this article are conservatively edited. No attempt has been made to standardise spelling, capitalisation or punctuation, but abbreviations have been silently expanded. I am grateful to Mr William Murphy of County Kilkenny, the current owner of the speech and its companion documents, for having allowed copies to be made from which the editions presented here were prepared. These documents derive from what was originally a larger anthology of verse assembled for Ormond between the 1640s and 1680s, the bulk of which is now preserved in Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn F. b. 228. For a recent account of the Osborn manuscript and its history see Carpenter, Andrew, ‘Lost and found: tracing items from a collection of verse presented to James Butler, first duke of Ormond’ in Butler Soc. Jn., iv (2005), pp 479-89Google Scholar.I am grateful to Professor Carpenter for providing me with a draft of this article before its publication. As well as the entry speech and the city-gate verses, Mr Murphy’s manuscript contains one other item as yet unpublished, an anonymous congratulatory poem composed on the occasion of the retirement of Sir Richard Blake as chairman of the General Assembly.

page 366 note 3 I am grateful to Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú for helping to pinpoint the date of Ormond’s visit.

page 366 note 4 Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ire., p. 105.

page 366 note 5 Fletcher, A. J., Drama, performance, and polity in pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Toronto, 2000), pp 197–205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 368 note 6 Neely, W.G., Kilkenny: an urban history, 1391–1843 (Belfast, 1989), p. 34 Google Scholar.

page 368 note 7 Fletcher, A.J., Drama and the performing arts in pre-Cromwellian Ireland: a repertory of sources and documents (Cambridge, 2001), pp 366-7Google Scholar.

page 368 note 8 Gilbert, J.T. (ed.), The history of the Irish Confederation and the war in Ireland, 1641 (-1649) (7 vols, Dublin, 1882-91), vi, 19–20 Google Scholar. I owe this reference and other general assistance to Professor Raymond Gillespie.

page 368 note 9 Fletcher, Drama & the performing arts, pp 367–9, 371, 373.

page 368 note 10 Gilbert, Ir. Confed., vi, 19.

page 369 note 11 For some illustrations of triumphal arches see, for example, Depuys, René, La tryumphante et solemnelle entree faicte sur le ... advenement de ... Charles prince des Hespagnes ...en la ville de Bruges, 1515 (Paris, [1515])Google Scholar.

page 370 note 12 The present manuscript is too workmanlike in appearance to suggest that it may have been a presentation copy, however.

page 370 note 13 For details of his life see Carrigan, William, The history and antiquities of the diocese of Ossory (4 vols, Dublin, 1905), iii, 443-4Google Scholar. Another local Smith/Smyth who mounts a lesser claim to authorship is one Mr Smith, formerly of Ballinakill. He served as a schoolteacher in Kilkenny at this time. A Protestant, some four years earlier he had come in for some scurrilous rough-handling during a spate of anti-Protestant militancy in the city (see Graves, James and Prim, J.G., The history, architecture and antiquities of the cathedral church of St Canice, Kilkenny (Dublin, 1857), p. 40)Google Scholar.

page 370 note 14 He died in 1655 and is buried in St Mickle’s Church, Damagh, County Kilkenny.

page 370 note 15 While Carpenter, Andrew, Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork, 2002), p. 273 Google Scholar, attributes three verse compositions to Smyth, the entry speech under review is conceivably a fourth, and a possible fifth is the first set of commendatory verses prefacing the polemical, pro-Catholic and nationalist play of Burkhead, Henry, A tragedy of Cola’s furie, or, Lirenda’s miserie (Kilkenny, 1646), p. 3 Google Scholar, for these were also the work of a William Smyth.

page 371 note 16 See Cunningham, Bernadette, ‘ “Zeal for God and for souls”: Counter-Reformation preaching in early seventeenth-century Ireland’ in Fletcher, A.J. and Gillespie, Raymond (eds), Irish preaching, 700–1700 (Dublin, 2001), pp 108-26Google Scholar.

page 372 note 17 ‘My Irish campaign’ in Cath. Bull., vi (1916), p. 658 Google Scholar; vii (1917), pp 111–12. Rinuccini’s own account of his reception adds further details to those noted by Massari, including a mention by name of Richard Bellings as having been in attendance: see Prim, J.G.A., ‘The market cross of Kilkenny’ in R.S.A.I. Jn., ii (1852-3), pp 223-4Google Scholar.

page 373 note 18 See Wither, George, A collection of emblemes (1635), introduction by Michael Bath (Aldershot, 1989), p. 1 Google Scholar, for brief discussion of his staunchly Protestant sympathies. Irish circulation of A collection of emblemes is hardly surprising, given both its successful printrun and the likelihood that Wither came to Ireland for a period in the first half of the seventeenth century. For his career see Oxford D.N.B.

page 373 note 19 Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ire., p. 106.

page 374 note 20 Moore, S.F. and Myerhoff, B.G., ‘Introduction: Secular ritual: forms and meaning’ in iidem (eds), Secular ritual (Amsterdam, 1977), p. 24 Google Scholar.

page 375 note 21 Carte, Thomas, The history of the life of James, first duke of Ormonde (2nd ed., 6 vols, Oxford, 1851), i, 580 Google Scholar.

page 375 note 22 Ibid.

page 375 note 23 Gilbert, , Ir. Confed., vi, 19–20 Google Scholar. Bellings shows sensitivity to the impact that the ceremony attending prestigious visitations was generally capable of making. In the summer of 1642, for example, the Supreme Council of the Confederation made a regalstyle tour of various Irish towns and cities, their purpose being ‘to settle in the minds of the people a veneration for the new magistracy, without venturing to let them feel the effects of their power’ (ibid., i, 87–8).

page 376 note 1 In margin: ‘Job 17’ (the lemma ‘et rursum post tenebras spero lucem’ is from Job 17:12)Google Scholar.

page 376 note 2 In margin: ‘Here the Proclamation opened and shewen’.

page 377 note 3 eyes (Wither, A collection of emblemes, p. 90).

page 377 note 4 In margin: ‘Withers Embl. Lib. 2 Embl. 28.’

page 377 note 5 That (Wither, A collection of emblemes, p. 90).

page 377 note 6 There (ibid.).

page 377 note 7 mysteriously to me (ibid.).

page 377 note 8 foolishly (ibid.).

page 377 note 9 Defences necessary (ibid.).

page 378 note 10 In margin: ‘Apoc. c. 10 v. 6.’

page 378 note 11 See Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ire., p. 131.

page 378 note 12 Ibid., pp 202, 205.