The Protestant Ascendancy, usually known in Ireland simply as the Ascendancy, is a phrase used when referring to the political, economic, and social domination of Ireland by a minority of great landowners, Protestant clergy, and professionals, all members of the Established Church (the Church of Ireland and Church of England, both being the State Churches) during the 17th through 19th centuries and, in a portion of the island, into the 20th century. The sense of Ascendancy is seen as excluding primarily Roman Catholics, as they have comprised the majority of the Irish population island-wide, but this can be misleading, as members of the Presbyterians and other Protestant denominations, along with non-Christians, were also excluded politically and socially. Even the majority of Protestants were effectively excluded from the ascendancy, being too poor to vote. In general, the privileges of the Ascendancy were resented by Irish Catholics, who remained the majority of the population.
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The phrase was first used in passing by Sir Boyle Roche in a speech to the Irish Parliament on 20 February 1782.[1] George Ogle MP used it on 6 February 1786 in a debate on falling land values:
Then on 20 January 1792 Dublin Corporation approved by majority vote a resolution to George III that included:
The Corporation's resolution was a part of the debate over Catholic Emancipation. In the event, Catholics were allowed to vote again in 1793, but could not sit in parliament until 1829.
The phrase therefore was seen to apply across classes to rural landowners as well as city merchants. The Dublin resolution was disapproved of by a wide range of commentators, such as the Marquess of Abercorn, who called it "silly", and William Drennan who said it was "actuated by the most monopolising spirit".[3]
The phrase became popularised outside Ireland by Edmund Burke, another liberal Protestant, and his ironic comment in 1792 was then used by Catholics seeking further political reforms:
From the 1790s the phrase became used by the main two identities in Ireland:
The gradual dispossession of large holdings belonging to several hundred native landowners in Ireland took place in various stages from the reigns of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary and her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I onwards. Unsuccessful revolts against English rule in 1595–1603 and 1641–1653 and then the 1689-91 Williamite Wars caused much Irish land to be confiscated by the Crown, and then sold to people who were thought loyal, most of whom were English and Protestant. English soldiers and traders became the new ruling class, as its richer members were elevated to the Irish House of Lords and eventually controlled the Irish House of Commons (see Plantations of Ireland).
This process was facilitated and formalized in the legal system after 1691 by the passing of various Penal Laws, which discriminated against the property rights of the leading families of the majority Roman Catholic population, and the non-conforming ("Dissenter") Protestant denominations such as Presbyterians, where they :
However, those protected by the Treaty were still excluded from public political life.
The situation was confused by the policy of the Tory party in England and Ireland after 1688. They were Protestants who generally supported the Catholic Jacobite claim, and came to power briefly in London in 1710-14. Also in 1750 the main Catholic Jacobite heir and claimant to the three thrones, Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonny Prince Charlie"), converted to Anglicanism for a time, but had reverted to Roman Catholicism again by his father's death in 1766.
The son of James VII, James Francis Edward Stuart (the Old Pretender), was recognised by the Holy See as the legitimate monarch of the Kingdom of England, Kingdom of Scotland, and the separate Kingdom of Ireland until his death in January 1766, and Roman Catholics were morally obliged to support him. This provided the main political excuse for the new laws, but it was not entirely exclusive as there was no law against anyone converting to Protestantism. Thousands did so, as recorded on the "Convert Rolls", and this allowed for the successful careers of Irishmen such as that of William Conolly, but the majority decided not to convert.
From 1766 onwards the Papacy did not object to the fact of an established Anglican church, as Roman Catholicism was the established church in countries such as Spain until 1931 and Austria until 1918. It did, however, push for reforms allowing equality within the system.
Among the forms of discrimination faced by Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters under the Penal Laws were:
As a result, political, legal, and economic power resided with the Ascendancy to the extent that by the mid-eighteenth century, though a small fraction of the population, 95% of the land of Ireland was calculated to be under minority Protestant control. Some 9% of this land belonged to formerly-Catholic landlords who had converted to the state religion.
Reform, though not complete, came in three main stages and was effected over 50 years:
The confidence of the Ascendancy was manifested towards the end of the 18th century by its adoption of a nationalist Irish, though still exclusively Protestant, identity, and the formation in the 1770s of Henry Grattan's Patriot Party. The formation of the Irish Volunteers to defend Ireland from French invasion during the American Revolution effectively gave Grattan a military force, and he was able to force Britain to concede a greater amount of self-rule to the Ascendancy.
The parliament repealed most of the Penal Laws in 1771–1793 but did not abolish them entirely. Grattan sought Catholic Emancipation for the catholic middle classes from the 1780s, but could not persuade a majority of the Irish MPs to support him. Following the forced recall of the liberal Lord Fitzwilliam in 1795 by conservatives, parliament was effectively abandoned as a vehicle for change, giving rise to the United Irishmen - liberal elements across religious, ethnic, and class lines who began to plan for armed rebellion. The resulting and often Protestant-led rebellion was crushed with vicious brutality; the Act of Union of 1801 was passed partly in response to a perception that the bloodshed was provoked by the misrule of the Ascendancy, and partly from the expense involved.
In the opinion of professional historians, the Ascendancy ended with the closing of the Dublin parliament in 1801, but it became a convenient expression to denote areas of life where a small minority of Church of Ireland members still had unique legal advantages, such as sitting in the London parliament (until 1829) or the tithe support for their church which was levied on most landowners.
The abolition of the Irish Parliament was followed by economic decline in Ireland, and widespread emigration from among the ruling class to the new centre of power in London, which increased the number of absentee landlords. The reduction of legalized discrimination with the passage of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 meant that the Ascendancy now faced competition from prosperous Catholics in parliament and in the higher-level professional ranks such as the judiciary and the army that were needed in the growing British Empire. From 1840 corporations running towns and cities in Ireland became more democratically elected; previously they were dominated until 1793 by guild members who had to be Protestants.
The festering sense of native grievance was magnified by the horrors of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52, with many of the Ascendancy reviled as absentee landlords whose agents were shipping locally produced food overseas, protected by the British establishment, while much of the population starved. Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the famine. About 20% to 25% of the population died or emigrated. The Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 was passed to allow landlords to sell mortgaged land, where a sale would be restricted because the land was "entailed". Many landlords went bankrupt as their tenants could not pay any rent due to the famine.[6] Some 5,000,000 over-mortgaged acres were sold to new landlords by 1857, some of whom were Catholic merchants. This represents a quarter of the entire land area of Ireland, which is just over 20 million acres (81,000 km2). One example was the Browne family which lost over 50,000 acres (200 km2) in County Mayo.[7]
As a consequence, the remnants of the Ascendancy were gradually displaced during the 19th and early 20th centuries through impoverishment, bankruptcy, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland by the Irish Church Act 1869, and finally the Irish Land Acts, which legally allowed the sitting tenants to buy their land. Some typical "Ascendancy" land-owning families like the Marquess of Headfort and the Earl of Granard had by then converted to Catholicism, and a considerable number of Protestant Nationalists had already taken their part in Irish history. A survey of the 4,000 largest landlords in 1872 revealed that already 43% were Roman Catholics, 48% were Church of Ireland, 7% were Presbyterians, and 2% unknown.[8]
Arguably the term "Protestant Ascendancy" was used from 1879-90 in the Land War and the Plan of Campaign as an emotive term in what was really an economic dispute. The government-sponsored Land Commission then bought up a further 13 million acres (53,000 km2) of farmland between 1885 and 1920 where the freehold was assigned under mortgage to tenant farmers and farm workers. Given the violent aspects of the Land war most remaining landowners were glad to sell up unless they were active farmers.
With the Protestant yeoman class now driven out by a newly rising "Catholic Ascendancy",[9] the dozens of remaining Protestant large landowners were left isolated within the Catholic population without the benefit of the legal and social conventions once used to prop them up. Local government was democratised by the Act of 1898, passing many local powers to councillors who were usually supportive of nationalism. Formerly landlords had controlled the grand jury system, where membership was based on being a large ratepayer, and therefore from owning large amounts of land locally. The final phase of the decline of the Ascendancy occurred during the Anglo-Irish War, when some of the remaining Protestant landlords were either assassinated and/or had their country homes burned down by the Irish Republican Army. Nearly 300 stately homes of the old landed class were burned down, tenants who remained loyal to the landowners and many of whom collaborated with the British were killed, and Protestant landlords were assassinated. The campaign was stepped up by the Anti-Treaty IRA during the subsequent Irish Civil War (1922–23), who targeted some remaining wealthy and influential Protestants who had accepted nominations as Senators in the new Seanad of the Irish Free State.
The Irish Free State earned semi-autonomy as a dominion within the British Empire in December 1922, while the British Government had already, in 1920, partitioned Northern Ireland from the rest of Ireland. The Parliament of Northern Ireland voted to remain within the United Kingdom in 1922. There, the newly elected ruling class included many of the Protestant landed gentry, despite the area having an industrial economy. This gave the term 'ascendancy' a continuing role well into the twentieth century. The remainder of Ireland gained complete independence in 1949 as the Republic of Ireland.
Long before the independence of most of Ireland in 1922, the formerly-landed Ascendancy had lost any real political influence and those who remained comprised a small, isolated, landed minority in their own land; most supported the Irish Unionist Alliance though some were Protestant Nationalists.[10] By now their involvement had passed to literary and artistic matters, with Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats starting the influential Celtic Revival movement, and followed by authors such as Somerville and Ross, Hubert Butler and Elizabeth Bowen. Ballerina Dame Ninette de Valois, Nobel prize-winning author Samuel Beckett[11] and the artist Sir William Orpen came from the same social background. Chris de Burgh and the rock concert promoter Lord Conyngham (formerly Lord Mount Charles) are high-profile descendants of the Ascendancy in Ireland today.
Their later role was portrayed in the 1980s book "Twilight of the Ascendancy" by Mark Bence-Jones.[12]