Ireland: the Vendée of England?

Below is an excerpt from a letter by Frederick Engels to Jenny Longuet, dated February 24, 1881. In the letter, Engels polemicizes against a certain Regnard, a French historian who apparently admired Oliver Cromwell and considered Ireland to be “the Vendée of the English revolution”. (Vendée was a region in France which became famous or notorious for opposing the French revolution in the name of Catholic reaction.) Engels clearly begs to differ! Note also Engels´ attack on the Protestant Reformation.

<<<<<

L’Irlande la Vendée de l’Angleterre. Ireland was Catholic, Protestant England Republican, therefore Ireland-English Vendée. There is however this little difference that the French Revolution intended to give the land to the people, the English Commonwealth intended, in Ireland, to take the land from the people.

The whole Protestant reformation, as is well known to most students of history save Regnard, apart from its dogmatical squabbles and quibbles, was a vast plan for a confiscation of land. First the land was taken from the Church. Then the Catholics, in countries where Protestantism was in power, were declared rebels and their land confiscated.

Now in Ireland the case was peculiar. “For the English,” says Prendergast, “seem to have thought that god made a mistake in giving such a fine country as Ireland to the Irish; and for near 700 years they have been trying to remedy it.”

The whole agrarian history of Ireland is a series of confiscations of Irish land to be handed over to English settlers. These settlers, in a very few generations, under the charm of Celtic society, turned more Irish than the aborigines. Then a new confiscation and new colonisation took place, and so in infinitum.

In the 17th century, the whole of Ireland except the newly Scotchified North, was ripe for a fresh confiscation. So much so, that when the British (Puritan) Parliament accorded to Charles I an army for the reduction of Ireland, it resolved that the money for this armament should be raised upon the security of 2,500,000 acres to be confiscated in Ireland. 

And the “adventurers” who advanced the money should also appoint the officers of that army. The land was to be divided amongst those adventurers: so that 1,000 acres should be given them, if in Ulster for £200 — advanced, in Connaught for £300, in Munster for £450, in Leinster for £600. And if the people rose against this beneficent plan they are Vendéens! If Regnard should ever sit in a National Convention, he may take a leaf out of the proceedings of the Long Parliament, and combat a possible Vendée with these means.

<<<<<<