Protestantism, English Ideas of Liberty and their Negation in Jacobean Ireland

This paper examines how Old English catholic claims to ‘liberty of conscience’ posed a major problem for protestant conceptions of liberty in Jacobean Ireland. For English reformed protestants more general claims to liberty were governed by the notion of political liberty, of doing one’s duty to God and for the common good. A supposedly corrupt catholic ‘conscience’ and ‘will’, however, raised questions over whether the Old English would in fact take dutiful action. This left the Old English reliant on the language of civil liberties rooted in law and custom. In arguing that they had always acted within the boundaries of the liberties with which they had been provided, their general claims to liberty were more inured from questions over a corrupt ‘will’ and ‘conscience’. In this manner, the English language of liberty was reshaped in Ireland. In an early modern “republican” understanding of freedom, political and civil liberty were meant to operate in tandem. In particular, civil liberties provided a series of protections which would allow the citizen to act dutifully (to make use of political liberty). In Ireland, however, the two vocabularies were deployed in opposition to one another.

Mark A. Hutchinson is a Research Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of York, as part of the Leverhulme funded project "Rethinking Civil Society: History, Theory, Critique".  Prior to taking up his current position, Mark was a Lecturer in early modern history at Durham University (2016-17) and Lancaster University (2015-16).  Mark has also held a Senior Visiting Fellowship (2018-19), a Mid-Career Fellowship (2017-18) and a Junior Fellowship (2014-15) at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study, Germany, and a Government of Ireland Fellowship at University College Cork (2011-13).  Mark is particularly interested in the implications of Reformation views of humanity for early modern political thought and culture in Ireland, England and the Palatinate in the Holy Roman Empire.  His publications include Calvinism, Reform and the Absolutist State in Elizabethan Ireland (2015; paperback 2017). Mark is currently working on two book projects, one provisionally entitled Sin and Individual Liberty: a study in early modern English protestant thought and the other Sin and Civil Society: English Exchanges over Ireland and the Palatinate in the Holy Roman Empire, c. 1600-1650.

Image: portrait facsimile from The complete works of John Davies of Hereford (15 -1618): Volume 1 (1878)