Colonialist intervention in a metropolitan revolution: reconsidering A remonstrance of divers remarkeable passages

Abstract

This article presents findings from a fresh examination of a familiar source, shedding new light on the creation of one of the best-known contemporary accounts of the 1641 Irish uprising. It is argued that a text usually regarded as the work of Henry Jones, dean of Kilmore, ought to be understood as the intellectual property of both a team of authors and their sponsors, a New English faction at Dublin Castle with long-standing ambitions to crush popery and entrench planter hegemony in Ireland. It is argued that this group's objective was to strengthen the hand of the populist ‘junto’ at Westminster, led by John Pym, that was wrestling with Charles I for political and constitutional supremacy in English affairs in the winter and spring of 1641–2. The colonialists contributed to this metropolitan revolution by rendering safe to handle the Irish rebels’ politically-explosive seditious slander that their uprising had been raised by royal command. The notorious falsehood of the rebels’ claims has obscured the demonstrably underhand and fundamentally deceitful calculation with which the colonialists helped introduce it into mainstream English political culture, in order to isolate the king further and weaken his personal authority on both sides of the Irish Sea.