Ireland's Puritan Revolution? The Emergence of Ulster Presbyterianism Reconsidered* This article has deliberately focused upon Ulster. Though the distinctions between a northern, Scottish Presbyterianism and an `English' Presbyterianism in the southern and eastern parts of Ireland can be too boldly drawn, the Ulster experience, with its Scottish army, its emergent presbytery and its petitioning campaigns remains sufficiently distinctive in these years to merit treatment on its own terms.

Author: Armstrong, Robert

Source: English Historical Review, Volume 121, Number 493, September 2006 , pp. 1048-1074(27)

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Abstract:

The emergence of an enduring Presbyterian tradition in Ulster, if built upon large-scale Scottish migration, was the product of the particular conditions of the 1640s. Opinion was mobilized with the emergence of religious petitioning which plugged the province into developments in all three Stuart kingdoms and sharpened Protestant discontent into a specifically Presbyterian reading of recent events and of aspirations for future reform. Political turbulence brought a Scottish army to Ulster which would provide cover for the spread of Presbyterianism. The fluid nature of religious and political authority across the three kingdoms allowed emergent Ulster Presbyterianism to skirt jurisdictional perils in calling for Scottish ecclesiastical intervention in Ireland and avoid the dangers of dependence upon the civil power. Scottish conformist clergy in Ulster were largely excluded, and the Ulster presbytery shaped by the more radical elements of the Scottish kirk, strongly represented in the adjacent south-west of Scotland and influential in the courts of the church. Young Scotsmen, products of the Covenanting universities, were ordained to Ulster parishes, in many cases destined to spend decades in their new homes. Presbyterianism rooted itself in Ulster localities through the appointment of elders meeting in sessions, in a province where both political and social order had partially collapsed after the rising of 1641. The 1640s were Ulster's `Presbyterian moment': if neither the vision of a transformation of all of Ulster society nor the hope of a permanent capture of `the' Church of Ireland were effected, an ineradicable religious tradition was formed.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1093/ehr/cel213