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".  

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