The Story of Ireland (2011) s01e03 Episode Script
The Age of Revolution
1 At the dawn of the 17th century, Europe is caught in the maelstrom of religious war.
Irish chieftains had allied with Catholic Spain against England.
For nine years, the Protestant armies of Elizabeth I fought the Irish and their Spanish allies.
The final Irish defeat came in Ulster, where the mighty Gaelic earl, Hugh O'Neill, and other nobles were scattered into exile in Catholic Europe.
But out of sight was not out of mind.
Their presence on the continent stokes English Protestant fears.
Would the earls attempt to return and stir the people to rebellion? England's attempt to solve the Irish problem would unleash unprecedented change.
The country would witness savage bloodletting as it became a battleground in Europe's religious wars.
It would feel the full force of dramatic upheavals beyond her shores in America and in France.
Ireland was about to be launched into a long age of revolution.
The Ulster earls are gone, but the people are still Gaelic, still Catholic.
In English minds, Ulster is dangerously unstable.
And it's here that a new king will attempt a radical solution - social engineering on a massive scale.
King James I would plant thousands of Protestant settlers on the lands of the exiled Gaelic lords.
The land was parcelled out in blocks of up to 2,000 acres.
By the time six counties were colonised, only one-quarter of the land of Ulster remained in Irish hands.
The town the planters called Londonderry was to become a Protestant citadel.
These planters lived in an age of expansion.
English ships also carried settlers to America.
And here in Derry, on the banks of the river Foyle, they would forge a Protestant identity different from anything seen in Ireland before.
These were not land-grabbing aristocrats, but small traders and farmers, and they had come to stay.
It was about establishing something identifiably British.
It was about setting up bunds - defended dwellings - bringing the number of planters in, setting up market towns, road networks, modernising and making it clearly identifiable as a place that was part of England and Scotland.
To help pay for the plantation, James turned to the commercial guilds of the City of London.
These companies already backed settlements in America.
To the tailors, butchers, drapers, goldsmiths being asked to go to dangerous Ulster, plantation was sold as a commercial opportunity.
This book of maps from 1622 shows how the settlements took shape.
This is a piece of cartography - from long ago.
- Yes.
But it's you know, as anybody who has lived in Northern Ireland during the period of the Troubles, to actually see this, in a sense, the beginning of it all - Yes.
it's quite awe-inspiring.
It really is.
It brings you right back to the heart of it and so you see really what was the genesis of an awful lot of the issues in Northern Ireland.
Of course, we can see when we look on the pages here, where they run through the number of people who are, for example, freeholders on this territory 1.
Englishmen on this property - 16, natives - 186.
That's the mathematics of disaster, isn't it? In a sense, it is.
One of the major issues with the Londonderry plantation was that there remained a huge number of native Gaelic Irish tenants on the lands.
You've got normal stone houses which would have housed the early settlers, and then these cabins.
They're very much what we would envisage to have been native Irish housing.
Some Gaelic Irish worked for the new masters, rented land from them.
Outnumbered, the settlers couldn't create a Protestant land for a Protestant people.
That sense of insecurity is part of, and continues to be a part of, the Protestant psyche for a very long time.
Originally, part of the idea had been to segregate them - this'll be the British population and the Irish will be kept apart.
But that, of course, proved actually almost impossible, because no matter how hard the London companies might try to attract somebody in London, it wasn't something very attractive.
So the whole problem was getting the numbers of people and settlers here on the ground in order to actually secure plantation.
But from across the narrow channel between Ireland and Scotland, came thousands of settlers who would rescue the plantation.
There'd been a long tradition of Scots migration to Ulster, but these were Presbyterians, strict Calvinists, viscerally opposed to Roman Catholicism.
These were people who have been victims of religious persecution in 17th-century Scotland.
They certainly see themselves as a chosen people, or an elect nation.
Their world consists of trials and tribulations and deliverances.
And that means that they're tested by God.
And in Ireland, of course, they're tested by God in the form of the threat posed by the Catholic population.
The Reformation had created the most enduring division in Irish history.
These Presbyterians would never be assimilated into Gaelic society, like earlier settlers in Ireland.
The native Irish were bewildered, "like a flock without a shepherd," wrote a poet at the time.
The native Irish are tremendously angry and resentful of what they see happening with the Ulster plantation.
Their leaders have been driven into exile, they've been forced out of their homes in many instances, and they have this population arriving over, both from England and Scotland, that have different culture, different language, different traditions, and of course a different religion.
A Gaelic poet writing in the 17th century described the settlers as, "the crafty, false, peeving sect of Calvin", and he predicted a day when they would be driven from Irish shores.
The writer's bitter tone reflected a traumatised Irish world.
In the rest of Ireland, Catholics still controlled around 70% of the land.
But they faced the constant threat of losing their estates.
After Charles I ascended to the throne in 1625, his officials in Ireland sought to expand the plantations, until conflict closer to home ended their ambitions.
By 1640, in Parliament there was a challenge to Charles's kingly powers and his more moderate brand of Protestantism from religious Puritans like Oliver Cromwell.
In Scotland, religious allies of the Puritans rebelled against Charles.
Parliament refused to finance the King's war against fellow Protestants.
Events now moved towards a war of Charles' three kingdoms - England, Scotland and Ireland.
The Irish Catholic elite was alarmed by this crisis in Parliament.
They'd lost land and power, but at least under Charles there was a degree of religious tolerance.
Now, faced with the prospect of a militant Protestant Parliament, they would rebel.
The uprising was planned for 23rd October 1641.
The rebels failed to capture Dublin Castle, centre of English control in Ireland.
Poorly planned, betrayed by informers, the rebellion descended into anarchy.
The attempted coup now became something utterly different.
Across Ireland, it was the people who were dictating the pace of events, and in Ulster it would unleash a spasm of rage from the dispossessed.
The native Irish now turned on the Protestant planters.
As one insurgent told a group of settlers, "We have been your slaves all this time, now you shall be ours.
" Here in Portadown, Irish rebels rounded up Protestants from the surrounding farmlands.
100 men, women and children were force-marched through the countryside, and brought to this spot on the banks of the River Bann.
At the point of swords and pikes, they were forced to strip naked and driven into the cold water.
Nearly all perished.
Portadown would become a defining event in the narrative of Ulster loyalism.
"That terror dogs us," wrote the poet, John Hewitt, "at the back of all our thoughts.
" The Government retaliation was savage.
Almost immediately, we get indiscriminate reprisals by Government forces against the civilian population of Ireland.
Men, women and children are killed in their hundreds, indeed thousands, during the early months of the rebellion, by Government forces.
Across 17th-century Europe, stories of atrocity abounded in the wars of religion.
But in Ireland, the Government systematically collected evidence from Protestant survivors.
All 33 original volumes are kept here at Trinity College in Dublin.
There's some pretty lurid stuff in here.
How much of it can we believe? You get people whose throats are slit, who are shot in front of their wives and children, babies on pikes, people being roasted alive.
Some of these are witness statements, but often we get second- or third-hand accounts as well.
This is ideal material for a propagandist, and there's an explosion of print material in London from late 1641 onwards.
It has a huge impact on Oliver Cromwell.
He was highly outraged by what he saw was going on in Ireland, and he was determined to intervene at some stage.
By 1642 in Ireland, a Catholic confederacy was in open rebellion.
The Pope had even sent a cardinal with money and weapons.
But English attention was diverted from Ireland as the struggle between King Charles and Parliament erupted into civil war.
After seven years and nearly 200,000 deaths, the King was defeated.
He was executed in January 1649.
Parliament had triumphed, and Oliver Cromwell emerged as commander of the army.
But the Royalist threat had not vanished.
The King's followers now regrouped in Ireland, allied with the rebellious Catholics.
In the mind of Oliver Cromwell, it would be hard to imagine a more toxic alliance, and he was dispatched to Ireland to destroy it.
He comes to Ireland with an absolutely clear philosophy.
That philosophy is - I will terrorise those who resist me, and I will give generous terms to those who surrender.
Drogheda, County Louth.
In Irish memory, it is a place forever shackled to the name of Oliver Cromwell.
On September 11 th 1649, Cromwell and his army of 12,000 men began to lay siege to the town.
The English Royalist commander of the garrison, Sir Arthur Aston, proclaimed that, "The man who could take Drogheda could take hell.
" He hadn't met Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell demanded the surrender of the joint English and Irish garrison.
When this was refused, the bombardment began.
A breach was made in the town walls, but the first assault was beaten back by the defenders.
Cromwell then sees himself having to take command.
He leads the second charge himself.
He has to get past the bodies of his friends and colleagues.
So he comes in, and we have to imagine him going street by street, house by house even, clearing the town, killing anyone he encounters, which will certainly include civilians.
Almost 3,000 men were slaughtered, virtually the entire garrison, and many after they had surrendered.
Cromwell said, "Being in the heat of the action, "I forbade them to spare any who were under arms in the town.
" Any priests found were murdered, and the commander of the garrison, Sir Arthur Ashton, was beaten to death with his own wooden leg.
Several hundred civilians were killed, but the English and Irish defenders were the main targets of execution.
That is done, as Cromwell himself makes clear, by knocking them on the head.
That's to say, they're clubbed to death.
- He beats their brains out.
- He beats their brains out because it saves bullets.
You've got a long campaign in front of you, you don't waste bullets.
Here at St Peter's Church, Cromwell's men set fire to the building.
They killed soldiers and civilians alike as they tried to flee the flames.
Drogheda was an act of vengeance against English Royalists and the Irish, whom Cromwell blamed for the massacre of Protestants.
Its military aim was to terrorise other garrisons into abandoning resistance.
But a later English politician who would wrestle with the Irish question had no doubt about the nature of Cromwell's legacy.
Said Winston Churchill, "He cut new gulfs between the nations and creeds.
"Upon us all still lies the curse of Cromwell.
" At Wexford, his army committed another massacre, but many garrisons surrendered.
Cromwell was back in England by mid 1650, leaving the army under the command of his son-in-law.
Guerrilla bands now staged hit-and-run attacks.
Cromwell's army responded with ferocity.
The serious loss of life really takes place after Cromwell's departure, much of it induced by the Cromwellian soldiers themselves.
They simply destroy the infrastructure of the country.
They razed crops, they drove people out of their homes, they burnt down buildings.
They deliberately targeted the civilian population in a very systematic way.
The uprooting of populations was a common feature of European war in this period.
But what happened next would change Ireland's social order irrevocably.
In 1652, Parliament in London passed the Act of Settlement, a radical bill decreeing that the rebel Catholic nobility were to lose their estates and be exiled to the poor regions west of the River Shannon.
One of Cromwell's generals came here to the Burren in the west of Ireland, inspected the landscape and then remarked approvingly, "There is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, "nor earth enough to bury him.
" To here, and to the fastnesses of Connaught, the Irish nobility were to be banished.
In the telling of the Irish story, this is Cromwell's enduring legacy - "Go to Hell or Connaught.
" But his attitudes were more complex.
Does Cromwell deserve his uniquely monstrous reputation here? No.
He's not the most anti-Catholic of Englishmen.
He thinks he knows Ireland and he doesn't think it's necessary to be so severe and so he spends most of the 1650s trying to make the settlement less severe than his successors.
By blaming it all on him, you let the English more generally off the hook.
A handful of large landowners survived, but the grand narrative was of dispossession.
By the end of the 1650s, only around 15% of land remained in Catholic hands.
Galway would become the only remaining county with a Catholic landowning majority.
Across the country, a new Protestant ruling class was being installed.
But English dreams of a settled Ireland have always been hostage to external events.
The country was never the calm laboratory of colonial experiment.
Now, dramatic events in Europe and in England itself would reverberate west and drag Ireland to the forefront of conflict once more.
This crisis would begin in a Europe dominated by a kingly colossus - Louis XIV, Catholic King of France.
He terrified his neighbours with his territorial desires and built monuments to his own glory, like the great Palace of Versailles.
His neighbours, both Catholic and Protestant, found themselves drawn together in shifting military alliances against the expansionism of Louis.
Even by the standards of contemporary monarchy, Louis had a conspicuous sense of his own greatness.
Once, when angered by some misfortune, he asked, "Has God forgotten everything I have done for him?" But Louis' power was about to be challenged by a man who would become a hero to the Protestant cause in Europe and an icon of enduring power to the Protestants of Ireland.
Prince William of Orange, Protestant leader of the Dutch Republic, resisted French attempts to conquer his country.
William is not a dogmatic man, but he does feel that there's a sort of free world, which is predominantly Protestant, which has to be defended.
But it's important to realise that defending Protestantism doesn't mean fighting Catholicism.
It means fighting France.
William is drawn to Ireland by an English crisis.
Cromwell is long dead and the monarchy restored.
But King James II is a Catholic, and when his son is born in 1688 the nightmare of Protestant England - a Catholic dynasty - is at hand.
Haunted by the memory of past persecutions, Protestant noblemen ask William to invade England and re-establish a Protestant monarchy.
For William, Protestant England would be a valuable ally in his war with King Louis.
Soon after William landed in Devon, James fled to France.
Early in 1689, Parliament offered the Dutch King William the English throne, which he duly accepted.
But his exiled enemy King James was busy conspiring with the French king and preparing to fight back.
Louis XIV understands that if he really wants to hurt William he needs to destabilise his position on the British Isles, And supporting James is a good way of doing that.
With Louis' help, James raised an army in France and sailed for Ireland.
On March 12th 1689, he landed here at Kinsale in County Cork.
This Catholic king landed with about 1,200 French troops.
But soon thousands of Irishmen were rallying to his flag.
They were willing to support an English king because they believed he would grant them religious freedom and return confiscated lands.
To the dispossessed, the arrival of James signalled the rebirth of hope.
James marched through Cork and on towards Dublin.
By April his army was besieging Londonderry, one of the last bastions of Protestant resistance.
But the defenders closed the city gates, and they remained shut until the garrison was relieved after 105 days of siege.
Their slogan of "No surrender" would echo through the centuries.
This escalating crisis brought William himself to Ireland with a large army.
He would face King James here on the banks of the River Boyne on 12th July, 1690.
This was a battle about European, English and Irish power struggles and both armies were diverse - Germans, Dutch, Danes, English, French and Irish prepared to fight.
Tell me about the battle.
The Williamite plan was to push a part of their army in the face of the Jacobite army across the river, and at the same time swing another part of the army around behind the Jacobite lines and cut them off from retreat.
In a word, to envelop or destroy them.
The push across the river was relatively successful.
However, the arm of the pincer failed to close on the retreating Franco-Irish army.
So most of the Franco-Irish army, the Jacobite army, escaped intact.
Describe for me the scene at the end of the day.
What does James do when he sees the battle has turned against him? James, not to put too fine a point on it took horse for Dublin.
And by fleeing, he implicitly admitted that the Battle of the Boyne was for him the deciding event.
His cowardice is condemned.
He's described as Seamus an Chaca, they called him James the Shite who lost Ireland.
To William, the Boyne and the battles that followed were important, but only as part of a wider European power struggle.
In Ireland, however, his victory ensured the survival of Protestant supremacy.
And among the Protestants of Ulster, this Dutch king with his multinational army would be acclaimed as a saviour and his victory at the Boyne commemorated each July.
How do you think William would have viewed Orange marches, Orange triumphalism, the kind of thing that we've seen historically in Ireland? I think he would have been uncomfortable with it.
William loathed public festivities.
He didn't like marches in the first place.
The moment he entered London in 1689, when the English people were cheering him, they were actually carrying sticks with oranges.
He thought it was nonsensical.
He took a detour, avoided the crowds.
To the vanquished Irish Catholics, William offered generous terms, but his successors ignored the promises.
By the end of the Williamite wars, the Catholic elite in Ireland had either been wiped out, driven into exile or abandoned any resistance.
The people who'd led the great rebellions against Elizabeth, against Cromwell, had been thoroughly defeated and in their place came a new ruling ascendancy.
The Irish ascendancy means the privileged Irish.
We're talking about, from the late 17th through the 18th century, privileges, as in every European ancien régime, privilege is associated with religious profession.
To be a member of the ascendancy, to be privileged, you're Protestant.
But unlike the rest of Europe, in Ireland, the state religion was that of the minority.
Throughout the 18th century, this Protestant ascendancy monopolised power and wealth.
Its grandees emerged from a range of backgrounds, from nouveau riche and nobility.
There was a surge in construction of grand public and private buildings.
There were new road networks and canals.
Ireland offered opportunity for men of the right faith.
To be a member of the ascendancy does not mean that you're only, let's say, the descendants of Cromwellian expropriators.
It can mean that you're from a Catholic family who has cleverly converted at the right time.
In this country of men on the make, the story of William Conolly offers a striking parable of the possible in ascendancy Ireland.
This is Castletown House and it was built by Conolly in 1722 at the height of his fame.
He was one of the most powerful political figures of his day.
He was the son of a family that had converted to the Protestant faith.
William Conolly was the speaker of the Irish House of Commons for nearly 15 years, and on his death he owned 100,000 acres of land, with an annual income of £ 17,000.
He was born an innkeeper's son.
A house like this would have cost an absolute fortune at the time.
Where did Conolly get his money? He got it in wheeling and dealing and land speculation in the area round Derry, where he took a lot of the land, which had been confiscated during the Williamite wars from Catholics.
With something as grand as this, what is Conolly saying to the rest of ascendancy Ireland? To keep political power, he needed a place where people could come and be received, so this was set up really as a second court outside Dublin.
So Conolly's preening here, at one level, but he's also very cleverly looking after his cronies, making sure that what he wants politically happens.
He is.
But it's not very dissimilar from what might happen today.
You bring all the people you want to influence together in one room.
You give them lots of wine, you give them lots of food and then you decorate it with examples of your good taste.
Conolly's political associates would have been brought down here to be entertained and to view this house and to understand just how civilised a person Conolly was.
The masters of the ascendancy would help to make Dublin a city of the Enlightenment.
The great statesman Edmund Burke learned the art of oratory here.
Jonathan Swift created literary masterpieces.
Tell me about the impulse behind this remarkable transformation of Dublin in the 18th century.
Well, it's the usual forces - money and power - because the country was beginning to boom at that point.
We had an independent parliament in College Green and the great families.
Because the parliament was here and because the commercial capital of Ireland was here, they would have their houses in streets like this, even though their estates might be in the countryside.
So they would come up, stay in their townhouses, attend Parliament, have balls in Dublin Castle and design their new houses.
In 1741, the composer George Frideric Handel was invited to Dublin, after being asked to compose a special work in aid of the city's sick.
The result was one of the most famous pieces in the entire canon of classical music - the Messiah.
This arch is all that remains of Neal's Music Hall, where Handel's Messiah was first performed on 13th April, 1742.
So great was the demand for tickets that gentlemen were told to come without their swords and ladies without their hoops, so that there might be more room for all.
Handel was delighted with the quality of the Dublin voices in his choir and with the response of the audience, drawn, as he put it, "From persons of distinction of this generous nation.
" For the ascendancy, it must have seemed an affirmation of status.
After this, how could condescending English visitors dismiss them as mere provincials? But Handel was alert to another music.
As he walked the streets of Dublin, he heard the tunes of itinerant Irish musicians.
He even transcribed one of them, a melancholy air called The Poor Irish Boy.
It was music far removed from the Georgian salons of Ireland.
It evoked a country where the material prosperity of the ascendancy simply never reached.
Between 1739 and 1741, famine and disease killed up to 400,000 people.
The Gaelic poets and the musicians, who had once served to the Catholic nobility, evoked a world in turmoil.
When I listen to the songs of this period and examine the preoccupations, the political preoccupations of people, what you get again and again is a sense of a society that feels it's been disinherited.
Well, they were disinherited for a start off, that's the first thing! And secondly, it would be very unusual, with such a vast disinheritance, not to have that, emotionally, actually coming through.
There's also another strange, interesting, very, very special tradition, which speaks even more, I think, of the psyche of the moment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and that's the music of the harpers.
With the collapse of Gaelic society, aristocratic society, you have these itinerant harpers, these nomadic harpers.
So the world that paid for them, that sustained them, is gone.
So they had to look for patronage and, of course, they logically looked to the new landowners of the big houses, the Anglo-Irish owners of the big houses.
So the key person in that is Turlough O'Carolan, who was born in 1670, died in 1735.
He was right in the middle of that period and he was by far the most famous.
He's in between worlds and that's why he's interesting, because if you listen in to Carolan, you can hear the Gaelic aristocratic past, you can hear the hidden Ireland present and you can also hear the world of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, all in there.
From the early 18th century, restrictions on Catholics had been strengthened under the so-called Penal Laws, a charter for the defence of Protestant power.
The main aim of the Penal Laws was to ensure that Catholics would never get back into a position where they would have power over the Protestants and take revenge, which had happened in the 17th century.
- Good evening, everyone.
- Good evening, Father.
And, indeed, you're all very welcome to this sacred place, the mass rock in Tomhaggard, County Wexford.
But religious oppression only served to make the Catholic priesthood more powerful in rural Ireland.
when priests were forbidden to say Mass.
Under the Penal Laws, Catholics were banned from Parliament and public office.
They were barred from voting and from running schools.
Here at mass rocks, just like this one behind me But Catholic worship itself was never banned.
In fact, as the 18th century progressed, the Catholic church grew in strength.
A great seminary was built with Government funding here at Maynooth in County Kildare.
It would become the largest seminary in the world.
The true significance of the Penal Laws was not religious, but economic.
Catholics were not allowed to buy land, and if an existing Catholic landowner died, his property had to be divided among all his children and that would ensure that no big landowner would survive.
A handful of the Catholic elite had held on to their estates, but the majority of rural Catholics became tenants of Protestant landlords.
"Among some of these," wrote the English traveller Arthur Young, "there was a habit of tyranny.
" It's easy to imagine ascendancy Ireland as a country with one rigid divide - Catholic poor and Protestant overlords - but within those terms, Catholic and Protestant, there existed many different aspirations.
There was an emerging Catholic middle class.
People like the young lawyer Daniel O'Connell, whose family had held on to its lands and who had later become a leading figure in the story of Ireland.
Others were the children of merchants and traders, like Thomas Moore, the son of a Dublin grocer, who would become the most popular poet of his day.
Ascendancy Ireland couldn't live in a bubble, sealed apart from this large, active, vibrant, Catholic culture all around you.
There were transactions between Protestants and Catholics on all sorts of levels.
There was far more of a coming and going and far more of a complexity to Irish society in the 18th century than has often been allowed by historians.
Protestant Ireland, too, was a varied landscape, not all grandee landlords.
In Ulster, Presbyterians were also victims of the Penal Laws.
Their Calvinism was condemned by the established Anglican Church.
And like Catholics, they were forced to pay for the upkeep of Anglican ministers.
Discrimination prompted many to look beyond Irish shores.
Ireland was now part of a rapidly expanding British Empire, and that colonial expansion offered space for those wanting to escape poverty and persecution.
At Belfast docks and the other Ulster ports begins one of the great themes of the story of Ireland - emigration.
We're used to the idea of Irish emigration to the United States being a Catholic phenomenon.
But the first people to come here in any sizable numbers were Ulster Presbyterians.
Between 1717 and 1776, more than a quarter of a million of them crossed the Atlantic to the New World.
From the port of Philadelphia, they travelled hundreds of miles west and south, along an old Indian trail that became known as The Great Wagon Road.
Many came to the frontiers of the new America, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
This is the oldest Presbyterian church still standing in Virginia.
Founded in 1740, many of the congregation can trace their ancestry back to the first wave of Ulster Scots who settled in this area.
What kind of character did they bring to this place? Oh, I think they were a very sturdy, independent people.
They had already made a transition from one country to another when they moved from Scotland to Ireland, and so they were perfectly willing to cross an ocean.
It takes a certain amount of endurance, of courage, of faith, of forward-looking.
They're good qualities for pioneers to have.
Some of these Ulster Scots settlers become what are known as the hillbillies.
They head for the mountains.
Well, the people that came to be known as hillbillies were the people who lived somewhat on the fringe of the Scotch-Irish community, who moved up into the hills and the hollers, in more remote areas.
They got a reputation for being kind of a lawless bunch who were outside the mainstream.
They were often associated with moonshine.
The Ulster Presbyterians had arrived in a dynamic environment.
The borders of America were continually expanding.
There was also a growing sense that Americans should govern themselves and not be beholden to a foreign king.
In 1775, Americans rebelled against the rule of King George III.
The Ulster Presbyterians joined the American War of Independence.
To what extent was freedom of religious expression a crucial part of their decision to join the Revolution? I think it was an important contributing factor.
The whole opportunity that the Constitution offered with the Bill of Rights to have freedom of religion was something they wholeheartedly supported.
In 1780, Ulster-Scots militiamen played an important role on the American side in a famous victory.
At the Battle of King's Mountain, they helped to defeat a larger force loyal to the Crown.
An eyewitness account of the battle was published in the Belfast Newsletter.
It also printed personal letters from relatives in America.
In one such letter, a young woman writes "You will undoubtedly laugh at me when I assure you "I often wish to be a man.
"With what pleasure would I take up arms with my brave countrymen "and, like them, glory in fighting for my liberty.
" By 1783, the American revolutionaries had finally defeated the British and won independence.
The American colonists have proved that Britain is not invincible, and that message will have a powerful impact in Ireland, inspiring a cross section of opinion - Catholic and Protestant, radical and moderate - all of them questioning ever more loudly how Britain governs their country.
In Ireland, it will be a period of reform and fear.
Protestant volunteer groups are formed, loyal to the Crown, but demanding more power for the ascendancy parliament and a greater Irish share of imperial trade.
A committee of influential Catholics supported by reformist Protestants succeeds in gaining voting rights.
But British Government concessions to Catholics unsettle ascendancy grandees, who fear the loss of their power.
And in rural Ireland, change creates uncertainty.
Catholics and Protestants join sectarian secret societies.
The Ireland of the late 18th century swirls with contrary ambitions and ideas.
Nothing is settled or inevitable.
But the deep fissures in society are about to be exposed.
Ireland stands on the verge of cataclysm.
Once again, it is events abroad which will provide the spark.
In 1789, bloody revolution convulsed France.
The King and thousands of his nobles were dispatched to the guillotine in the name of a secular republic.
Monarchies and the privileged classes throughout Europe looked on with horror.
But the French Revolutionary cry of "liberty, equality and fraternity" inspired a group of idealists in Ireland.
What was happening here, the destruction of an imperium, was watched avidly by educated young men in Ireland.
Suddenly, the unimaginable became possible - a world of inherited privilege transformed into a society of the free, where reason would overwhelm prejudice.
To the revolutionaries of France, it wasn't just the monarchy or the aristocracy, but also the established church, that was part of a structure of tyranny that had to be destroyed.
In Belfast, these developments were watched with excitement by a group of radicals.
They were Presbyterians, who now set out to unite all Irishmen in the cause of liberty.
They were shaped by Revolutionary ideals and the intellectual ferment of the Age of Enlightenment.
They produced an alliance that would have seemed unthinkable, Protestant intellectuals from the south, Catholic middle class and the descendants of Ulster planters.
It is these Presbyterians who, here in Belfast in 1791, found the first organisation dedicated to breaking the link with Britain.
They called themselves the United Irishmen and they sought a secular Irish republic.
They allied themselves with the Catholic Committee, in peaceful agitation.
But events in Europe propelled them from activism to revolution.
In 1793, England and France went to war.
The pro-French United Irishmen were outlawed.
Here at Cavehill, overlooking Belfast, in June 1795, a group of Irish Protestants gathered to swear an oath - "Never to desist in our efforts "until we subvert the authority of England "over our country and assert our independence.
" But there is a fundamental crisis.
They do not speak for all Protestants.
And in rural areas, sectarian clashes between what are called Catholic Defenders and Protestants were escalating.
The Defenders were drawn from the impoverished Catholic peasantry.
Rural Ireland is very poor.
In the later 18th century, you have secret societies, you have rural gangs of agrarian agitators.
You have an underworld, in a sense, of dissent, making its feelings felt through violence.
Disparate Protestant groups now come together to form an organisation that will be crucial in Ireland's history - the Orange Order - the voice of Protestant fear.
But an idealistic young Protestant lawyer from Dublin hoped that even the Orangemen might eventually be won over to the United Irish cause.
Theobald Wolfe Tone would become the most articulate proponent of Irish independence.
He was very vivacious, very clever.
Quite quickly he moves on from the law to become a political pamphleteer.
He begins to analyse the wrongs of Ireland and one of the main wrongs was that the vast bulk of the populace was excluded from all political rights - in other words, the Catholics.
As one of the most high-profile United Irishmen, Tone was forced to flee Ireland in the fateful year of 1795.
Government plans to give Catholics full political rights had been abandoned under pressure from the Protestant ascendancy.
Tone made his way to Revolutionary France to seek military help for an Irish revolution.
On May 2nd, 1796, Tone was called to meet the leaders of the French Directory.
It's easy to imagine Tone's excitement.
This is his moment.
From backstreet meetings in Belfast and Dublin, he's come to the centre of international revolution.
Walking into the splendour of the Palais de Luxembourg, he said he felt as if it were all a dream.
Waiting to greet him was the great military tactician and founder of the Revolutionary Army, Lazare Carnot.
Tone deliberately ignored the sectarian reality in Ireland when he spoke to Carnot.
He told him that all the people were unanimous in favour of France and eager to throw off the yoke of England.
"He asked me then," wrote Tone, "what I wanted.
"An armed force, "arms and some money.
" Tone comes out into the Jardin de Luxembourg, outside the Palais.
He's walking around, it's a beautiful summer's evening, listening to music coming out, and don't forget he's been in really high-level discussions, so he's a bit overwhelmed by them.
And then the head of the military bureau comes out and says, "It's done.
It's agreed.
We're sending an invasion force to Ireland.
" He's a top French general.
And Tone just had this moment, "I've succeeded, this is what I wanted.
" Tone's meeting precipitates one of the most dangerous threats to England by Revolutionary France.
15,000 French troops in 43 ships arrived off the west coast of Cork in December, 1796.
With only 11,000 British troops in the area, a French victory looked imminent.
Tone came tantalisingly near to his dream of landing a French army in Ireland.
"We were close enough to toss a biscuit ashore," he said.
But bad weather and the indecisiveness of commanders scuppered his hopes.
The French turned for home.
"England," he wrote, "has had its luckiest escape since the Armada.
" In Dublin Castle, this aborted invasion sparked panic and a brutal crackdown was ordered.
A campaign of terror was carried out by the army and Government militias.
The crackdown that had happened in Ireland had been rather indiscriminate, in that the forces responsible had treated civilians, ordinary people, as if they were rebels.
But by doing that, you had a big influx of Catholics into the United Irishmen, who were a very different kind of person than had joined the United Irishmen before.
The United Irish Army numbered around 100,000 men, inspired both by idealism and desperation.
Ireland's revolution was planned for the early summer of 1798, but in May many of the United Irish leaders were arrested, destroying hopes of a coordinated rebellion.
Localised fighting erupted.
United Irishmen rose in Kildare, Carlow, Longford, Wicklow, Meath, to the west in Mayo and to the north in Antrim and Down.
The first significant rebel victory was at Oulart in County Wexford, where over 100 Government soldiers were killed.
Oulart was quickly followed by the rebel capture of Wexford town and Enniscorthy.
But sectarian fear was deepening.
The United Irish include large numbers of Catholic Defenders.
The Orange Order supports the Government.
Where the violence breaks out, the question is, whose sense of rebellion will predominate? Will it be that of the secular-minded United Irish intelligentsia, with their French ideas, or will it be that of the, if you like, more deeply rooted, more ancient antipathies that the Defenders have kept in their world view? The sectarian divisions, which had been papered over by the United Irishmen's talk of universal brotherhood, now exploded into the open.
In Ulster, working class and rural Protestants woke to their old fear of overthrow by the Catholics and they rallied to the crown.
Militia attacks on civilians helped to heighten sectarianism.
In the ranks of the United Irishmen, the ideal of fraternity across the religious divide was fraying.
Most of the rebels were tenant farmers and they had inherited a long tradition of grievance about Protestant newcomers taking over land, about sectarian conflict, about the new Orange Order.
There are people fighting for themselves.
Armed with pikes and some inferior muskets, the rebels at New Ross faced Government troops equipped with cannon.
The rebels pour down these little streets, take over the middle of the town very quickly, but then they come up against gun emplacements.
They were simply mown down by grapeshot and chain shot.
Maybe only 3,000 rebels attacked the town, maybe less, and 1,500 people almost certainly died in 12 hours, which is astonishing.
The United Irish army was inspired both by Revolutionary idealism and more local animosities.
And as the reality of defeat dawned, hatred would lead some to sectarian massacre.
Over 100 Protestant men, women and children were rounded up and locked in a barn at Scullabogue.
Once it became clear the battle was going against the rebels, an order came that the barn should be set on fire.
There was still maybe up to 100 people in it, crowded into it, and they'd been there for days in sweltering heat.
They were told to let nobody escape.
Essentially, this group kept the people inside, including women and children, in the barn, while they were consumed by flame.
One of the United Irish leaders, Myles Byrne, called what happened here at Scullabogue, "A lamentable disgrace, carried out by cowardly ruffians.
" A rising which started with the ideal of uniting Catholic and Protestant had ended here in sectarian butchery.
The rebellion was now entering its final phase.
By the end of the summer, 30,000 people were dead.
As for Wolfe Tone, he was captured on a French boat off the coast of Ireland.
Brought to trial in Dublin, Tone began to realise what had been unleashed that summer.
It's so poignant and so sad.
He says, "For a fair and open war, I was prepared.
"That it has disintegrated into mayhem and assassination "and bloodshed, I am sincerely sorry.
"This is not what I had wanted.
" He was sentenced to death, but cheated the executioner by cutting his own throat.
Tone the martyr would become an icon In next week's programme, the age of Union and the rise of Catholic power.
Irish chieftains had allied with Catholic Spain against England.
For nine years, the Protestant armies of Elizabeth I fought the Irish and their Spanish allies.
The final Irish defeat came in Ulster, where the mighty Gaelic earl, Hugh O'Neill, and other nobles were scattered into exile in Catholic Europe.
But out of sight was not out of mind.
Their presence on the continent stokes English Protestant fears.
Would the earls attempt to return and stir the people to rebellion? England's attempt to solve the Irish problem would unleash unprecedented change.
The country would witness savage bloodletting as it became a battleground in Europe's religious wars.
It would feel the full force of dramatic upheavals beyond her shores in America and in France.
Ireland was about to be launched into a long age of revolution.
The Ulster earls are gone, but the people are still Gaelic, still Catholic.
In English minds, Ulster is dangerously unstable.
And it's here that a new king will attempt a radical solution - social engineering on a massive scale.
King James I would plant thousands of Protestant settlers on the lands of the exiled Gaelic lords.
The land was parcelled out in blocks of up to 2,000 acres.
By the time six counties were colonised, only one-quarter of the land of Ulster remained in Irish hands.
The town the planters called Londonderry was to become a Protestant citadel.
These planters lived in an age of expansion.
English ships also carried settlers to America.
And here in Derry, on the banks of the river Foyle, they would forge a Protestant identity different from anything seen in Ireland before.
These were not land-grabbing aristocrats, but small traders and farmers, and they had come to stay.
It was about establishing something identifiably British.
It was about setting up bunds - defended dwellings - bringing the number of planters in, setting up market towns, road networks, modernising and making it clearly identifiable as a place that was part of England and Scotland.
To help pay for the plantation, James turned to the commercial guilds of the City of London.
These companies already backed settlements in America.
To the tailors, butchers, drapers, goldsmiths being asked to go to dangerous Ulster, plantation was sold as a commercial opportunity.
This book of maps from 1622 shows how the settlements took shape.
This is a piece of cartography - from long ago.
- Yes.
But it's you know, as anybody who has lived in Northern Ireland during the period of the Troubles, to actually see this, in a sense, the beginning of it all - Yes.
it's quite awe-inspiring.
It really is.
It brings you right back to the heart of it and so you see really what was the genesis of an awful lot of the issues in Northern Ireland.
Of course, we can see when we look on the pages here, where they run through the number of people who are, for example, freeholders on this territory 1.
Englishmen on this property - 16, natives - 186.
That's the mathematics of disaster, isn't it? In a sense, it is.
One of the major issues with the Londonderry plantation was that there remained a huge number of native Gaelic Irish tenants on the lands.
You've got normal stone houses which would have housed the early settlers, and then these cabins.
They're very much what we would envisage to have been native Irish housing.
Some Gaelic Irish worked for the new masters, rented land from them.
Outnumbered, the settlers couldn't create a Protestant land for a Protestant people.
That sense of insecurity is part of, and continues to be a part of, the Protestant psyche for a very long time.
Originally, part of the idea had been to segregate them - this'll be the British population and the Irish will be kept apart.
But that, of course, proved actually almost impossible, because no matter how hard the London companies might try to attract somebody in London, it wasn't something very attractive.
So the whole problem was getting the numbers of people and settlers here on the ground in order to actually secure plantation.
But from across the narrow channel between Ireland and Scotland, came thousands of settlers who would rescue the plantation.
There'd been a long tradition of Scots migration to Ulster, but these were Presbyterians, strict Calvinists, viscerally opposed to Roman Catholicism.
These were people who have been victims of religious persecution in 17th-century Scotland.
They certainly see themselves as a chosen people, or an elect nation.
Their world consists of trials and tribulations and deliverances.
And that means that they're tested by God.
And in Ireland, of course, they're tested by God in the form of the threat posed by the Catholic population.
The Reformation had created the most enduring division in Irish history.
These Presbyterians would never be assimilated into Gaelic society, like earlier settlers in Ireland.
The native Irish were bewildered, "like a flock without a shepherd," wrote a poet at the time.
The native Irish are tremendously angry and resentful of what they see happening with the Ulster plantation.
Their leaders have been driven into exile, they've been forced out of their homes in many instances, and they have this population arriving over, both from England and Scotland, that have different culture, different language, different traditions, and of course a different religion.
A Gaelic poet writing in the 17th century described the settlers as, "the crafty, false, peeving sect of Calvin", and he predicted a day when they would be driven from Irish shores.
The writer's bitter tone reflected a traumatised Irish world.
In the rest of Ireland, Catholics still controlled around 70% of the land.
But they faced the constant threat of losing their estates.
After Charles I ascended to the throne in 1625, his officials in Ireland sought to expand the plantations, until conflict closer to home ended their ambitions.
By 1640, in Parliament there was a challenge to Charles's kingly powers and his more moderate brand of Protestantism from religious Puritans like Oliver Cromwell.
In Scotland, religious allies of the Puritans rebelled against Charles.
Parliament refused to finance the King's war against fellow Protestants.
Events now moved towards a war of Charles' three kingdoms - England, Scotland and Ireland.
The Irish Catholic elite was alarmed by this crisis in Parliament.
They'd lost land and power, but at least under Charles there was a degree of religious tolerance.
Now, faced with the prospect of a militant Protestant Parliament, they would rebel.
The uprising was planned for 23rd October 1641.
The rebels failed to capture Dublin Castle, centre of English control in Ireland.
Poorly planned, betrayed by informers, the rebellion descended into anarchy.
The attempted coup now became something utterly different.
Across Ireland, it was the people who were dictating the pace of events, and in Ulster it would unleash a spasm of rage from the dispossessed.
The native Irish now turned on the Protestant planters.
As one insurgent told a group of settlers, "We have been your slaves all this time, now you shall be ours.
" Here in Portadown, Irish rebels rounded up Protestants from the surrounding farmlands.
100 men, women and children were force-marched through the countryside, and brought to this spot on the banks of the River Bann.
At the point of swords and pikes, they were forced to strip naked and driven into the cold water.
Nearly all perished.
Portadown would become a defining event in the narrative of Ulster loyalism.
"That terror dogs us," wrote the poet, John Hewitt, "at the back of all our thoughts.
" The Government retaliation was savage.
Almost immediately, we get indiscriminate reprisals by Government forces against the civilian population of Ireland.
Men, women and children are killed in their hundreds, indeed thousands, during the early months of the rebellion, by Government forces.
Across 17th-century Europe, stories of atrocity abounded in the wars of religion.
But in Ireland, the Government systematically collected evidence from Protestant survivors.
All 33 original volumes are kept here at Trinity College in Dublin.
There's some pretty lurid stuff in here.
How much of it can we believe? You get people whose throats are slit, who are shot in front of their wives and children, babies on pikes, people being roasted alive.
Some of these are witness statements, but often we get second- or third-hand accounts as well.
This is ideal material for a propagandist, and there's an explosion of print material in London from late 1641 onwards.
It has a huge impact on Oliver Cromwell.
He was highly outraged by what he saw was going on in Ireland, and he was determined to intervene at some stage.
By 1642 in Ireland, a Catholic confederacy was in open rebellion.
The Pope had even sent a cardinal with money and weapons.
But English attention was diverted from Ireland as the struggle between King Charles and Parliament erupted into civil war.
After seven years and nearly 200,000 deaths, the King was defeated.
He was executed in January 1649.
Parliament had triumphed, and Oliver Cromwell emerged as commander of the army.
But the Royalist threat had not vanished.
The King's followers now regrouped in Ireland, allied with the rebellious Catholics.
In the mind of Oliver Cromwell, it would be hard to imagine a more toxic alliance, and he was dispatched to Ireland to destroy it.
He comes to Ireland with an absolutely clear philosophy.
That philosophy is - I will terrorise those who resist me, and I will give generous terms to those who surrender.
Drogheda, County Louth.
In Irish memory, it is a place forever shackled to the name of Oliver Cromwell.
On September 11 th 1649, Cromwell and his army of 12,000 men began to lay siege to the town.
The English Royalist commander of the garrison, Sir Arthur Aston, proclaimed that, "The man who could take Drogheda could take hell.
" He hadn't met Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell demanded the surrender of the joint English and Irish garrison.
When this was refused, the bombardment began.
A breach was made in the town walls, but the first assault was beaten back by the defenders.
Cromwell then sees himself having to take command.
He leads the second charge himself.
He has to get past the bodies of his friends and colleagues.
So he comes in, and we have to imagine him going street by street, house by house even, clearing the town, killing anyone he encounters, which will certainly include civilians.
Almost 3,000 men were slaughtered, virtually the entire garrison, and many after they had surrendered.
Cromwell said, "Being in the heat of the action, "I forbade them to spare any who were under arms in the town.
" Any priests found were murdered, and the commander of the garrison, Sir Arthur Ashton, was beaten to death with his own wooden leg.
Several hundred civilians were killed, but the English and Irish defenders were the main targets of execution.
That is done, as Cromwell himself makes clear, by knocking them on the head.
That's to say, they're clubbed to death.
- He beats their brains out.
- He beats their brains out because it saves bullets.
You've got a long campaign in front of you, you don't waste bullets.
Here at St Peter's Church, Cromwell's men set fire to the building.
They killed soldiers and civilians alike as they tried to flee the flames.
Drogheda was an act of vengeance against English Royalists and the Irish, whom Cromwell blamed for the massacre of Protestants.
Its military aim was to terrorise other garrisons into abandoning resistance.
But a later English politician who would wrestle with the Irish question had no doubt about the nature of Cromwell's legacy.
Said Winston Churchill, "He cut new gulfs between the nations and creeds.
"Upon us all still lies the curse of Cromwell.
" At Wexford, his army committed another massacre, but many garrisons surrendered.
Cromwell was back in England by mid 1650, leaving the army under the command of his son-in-law.
Guerrilla bands now staged hit-and-run attacks.
Cromwell's army responded with ferocity.
The serious loss of life really takes place after Cromwell's departure, much of it induced by the Cromwellian soldiers themselves.
They simply destroy the infrastructure of the country.
They razed crops, they drove people out of their homes, they burnt down buildings.
They deliberately targeted the civilian population in a very systematic way.
The uprooting of populations was a common feature of European war in this period.
But what happened next would change Ireland's social order irrevocably.
In 1652, Parliament in London passed the Act of Settlement, a radical bill decreeing that the rebel Catholic nobility were to lose their estates and be exiled to the poor regions west of the River Shannon.
One of Cromwell's generals came here to the Burren in the west of Ireland, inspected the landscape and then remarked approvingly, "There is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, "nor earth enough to bury him.
" To here, and to the fastnesses of Connaught, the Irish nobility were to be banished.
In the telling of the Irish story, this is Cromwell's enduring legacy - "Go to Hell or Connaught.
" But his attitudes were more complex.
Does Cromwell deserve his uniquely monstrous reputation here? No.
He's not the most anti-Catholic of Englishmen.
He thinks he knows Ireland and he doesn't think it's necessary to be so severe and so he spends most of the 1650s trying to make the settlement less severe than his successors.
By blaming it all on him, you let the English more generally off the hook.
A handful of large landowners survived, but the grand narrative was of dispossession.
By the end of the 1650s, only around 15% of land remained in Catholic hands.
Galway would become the only remaining county with a Catholic landowning majority.
Across the country, a new Protestant ruling class was being installed.
But English dreams of a settled Ireland have always been hostage to external events.
The country was never the calm laboratory of colonial experiment.
Now, dramatic events in Europe and in England itself would reverberate west and drag Ireland to the forefront of conflict once more.
This crisis would begin in a Europe dominated by a kingly colossus - Louis XIV, Catholic King of France.
He terrified his neighbours with his territorial desires and built monuments to his own glory, like the great Palace of Versailles.
His neighbours, both Catholic and Protestant, found themselves drawn together in shifting military alliances against the expansionism of Louis.
Even by the standards of contemporary monarchy, Louis had a conspicuous sense of his own greatness.
Once, when angered by some misfortune, he asked, "Has God forgotten everything I have done for him?" But Louis' power was about to be challenged by a man who would become a hero to the Protestant cause in Europe and an icon of enduring power to the Protestants of Ireland.
Prince William of Orange, Protestant leader of the Dutch Republic, resisted French attempts to conquer his country.
William is not a dogmatic man, but he does feel that there's a sort of free world, which is predominantly Protestant, which has to be defended.
But it's important to realise that defending Protestantism doesn't mean fighting Catholicism.
It means fighting France.
William is drawn to Ireland by an English crisis.
Cromwell is long dead and the monarchy restored.
But King James II is a Catholic, and when his son is born in 1688 the nightmare of Protestant England - a Catholic dynasty - is at hand.
Haunted by the memory of past persecutions, Protestant noblemen ask William to invade England and re-establish a Protestant monarchy.
For William, Protestant England would be a valuable ally in his war with King Louis.
Soon after William landed in Devon, James fled to France.
Early in 1689, Parliament offered the Dutch King William the English throne, which he duly accepted.
But his exiled enemy King James was busy conspiring with the French king and preparing to fight back.
Louis XIV understands that if he really wants to hurt William he needs to destabilise his position on the British Isles, And supporting James is a good way of doing that.
With Louis' help, James raised an army in France and sailed for Ireland.
On March 12th 1689, he landed here at Kinsale in County Cork.
This Catholic king landed with about 1,200 French troops.
But soon thousands of Irishmen were rallying to his flag.
They were willing to support an English king because they believed he would grant them religious freedom and return confiscated lands.
To the dispossessed, the arrival of James signalled the rebirth of hope.
James marched through Cork and on towards Dublin.
By April his army was besieging Londonderry, one of the last bastions of Protestant resistance.
But the defenders closed the city gates, and they remained shut until the garrison was relieved after 105 days of siege.
Their slogan of "No surrender" would echo through the centuries.
This escalating crisis brought William himself to Ireland with a large army.
He would face King James here on the banks of the River Boyne on 12th July, 1690.
This was a battle about European, English and Irish power struggles and both armies were diverse - Germans, Dutch, Danes, English, French and Irish prepared to fight.
Tell me about the battle.
The Williamite plan was to push a part of their army in the face of the Jacobite army across the river, and at the same time swing another part of the army around behind the Jacobite lines and cut them off from retreat.
In a word, to envelop or destroy them.
The push across the river was relatively successful.
However, the arm of the pincer failed to close on the retreating Franco-Irish army.
So most of the Franco-Irish army, the Jacobite army, escaped intact.
Describe for me the scene at the end of the day.
What does James do when he sees the battle has turned against him? James, not to put too fine a point on it took horse for Dublin.
And by fleeing, he implicitly admitted that the Battle of the Boyne was for him the deciding event.
His cowardice is condemned.
He's described as Seamus an Chaca, they called him James the Shite who lost Ireland.
To William, the Boyne and the battles that followed were important, but only as part of a wider European power struggle.
In Ireland, however, his victory ensured the survival of Protestant supremacy.
And among the Protestants of Ulster, this Dutch king with his multinational army would be acclaimed as a saviour and his victory at the Boyne commemorated each July.
How do you think William would have viewed Orange marches, Orange triumphalism, the kind of thing that we've seen historically in Ireland? I think he would have been uncomfortable with it.
William loathed public festivities.
He didn't like marches in the first place.
The moment he entered London in 1689, when the English people were cheering him, they were actually carrying sticks with oranges.
He thought it was nonsensical.
He took a detour, avoided the crowds.
To the vanquished Irish Catholics, William offered generous terms, but his successors ignored the promises.
By the end of the Williamite wars, the Catholic elite in Ireland had either been wiped out, driven into exile or abandoned any resistance.
The people who'd led the great rebellions against Elizabeth, against Cromwell, had been thoroughly defeated and in their place came a new ruling ascendancy.
The Irish ascendancy means the privileged Irish.
We're talking about, from the late 17th through the 18th century, privileges, as in every European ancien régime, privilege is associated with religious profession.
To be a member of the ascendancy, to be privileged, you're Protestant.
But unlike the rest of Europe, in Ireland, the state religion was that of the minority.
Throughout the 18th century, this Protestant ascendancy monopolised power and wealth.
Its grandees emerged from a range of backgrounds, from nouveau riche and nobility.
There was a surge in construction of grand public and private buildings.
There were new road networks and canals.
Ireland offered opportunity for men of the right faith.
To be a member of the ascendancy does not mean that you're only, let's say, the descendants of Cromwellian expropriators.
It can mean that you're from a Catholic family who has cleverly converted at the right time.
In this country of men on the make, the story of William Conolly offers a striking parable of the possible in ascendancy Ireland.
This is Castletown House and it was built by Conolly in 1722 at the height of his fame.
He was one of the most powerful political figures of his day.
He was the son of a family that had converted to the Protestant faith.
William Conolly was the speaker of the Irish House of Commons for nearly 15 years, and on his death he owned 100,000 acres of land, with an annual income of £ 17,000.
He was born an innkeeper's son.
A house like this would have cost an absolute fortune at the time.
Where did Conolly get his money? He got it in wheeling and dealing and land speculation in the area round Derry, where he took a lot of the land, which had been confiscated during the Williamite wars from Catholics.
With something as grand as this, what is Conolly saying to the rest of ascendancy Ireland? To keep political power, he needed a place where people could come and be received, so this was set up really as a second court outside Dublin.
So Conolly's preening here, at one level, but he's also very cleverly looking after his cronies, making sure that what he wants politically happens.
He is.
But it's not very dissimilar from what might happen today.
You bring all the people you want to influence together in one room.
You give them lots of wine, you give them lots of food and then you decorate it with examples of your good taste.
Conolly's political associates would have been brought down here to be entertained and to view this house and to understand just how civilised a person Conolly was.
The masters of the ascendancy would help to make Dublin a city of the Enlightenment.
The great statesman Edmund Burke learned the art of oratory here.
Jonathan Swift created literary masterpieces.
Tell me about the impulse behind this remarkable transformation of Dublin in the 18th century.
Well, it's the usual forces - money and power - because the country was beginning to boom at that point.
We had an independent parliament in College Green and the great families.
Because the parliament was here and because the commercial capital of Ireland was here, they would have their houses in streets like this, even though their estates might be in the countryside.
So they would come up, stay in their townhouses, attend Parliament, have balls in Dublin Castle and design their new houses.
In 1741, the composer George Frideric Handel was invited to Dublin, after being asked to compose a special work in aid of the city's sick.
The result was one of the most famous pieces in the entire canon of classical music - the Messiah.
This arch is all that remains of Neal's Music Hall, where Handel's Messiah was first performed on 13th April, 1742.
So great was the demand for tickets that gentlemen were told to come without their swords and ladies without their hoops, so that there might be more room for all.
Handel was delighted with the quality of the Dublin voices in his choir and with the response of the audience, drawn, as he put it, "From persons of distinction of this generous nation.
" For the ascendancy, it must have seemed an affirmation of status.
After this, how could condescending English visitors dismiss them as mere provincials? But Handel was alert to another music.
As he walked the streets of Dublin, he heard the tunes of itinerant Irish musicians.
He even transcribed one of them, a melancholy air called The Poor Irish Boy.
It was music far removed from the Georgian salons of Ireland.
It evoked a country where the material prosperity of the ascendancy simply never reached.
Between 1739 and 1741, famine and disease killed up to 400,000 people.
The Gaelic poets and the musicians, who had once served to the Catholic nobility, evoked a world in turmoil.
When I listen to the songs of this period and examine the preoccupations, the political preoccupations of people, what you get again and again is a sense of a society that feels it's been disinherited.
Well, they were disinherited for a start off, that's the first thing! And secondly, it would be very unusual, with such a vast disinheritance, not to have that, emotionally, actually coming through.
There's also another strange, interesting, very, very special tradition, which speaks even more, I think, of the psyche of the moment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and that's the music of the harpers.
With the collapse of Gaelic society, aristocratic society, you have these itinerant harpers, these nomadic harpers.
So the world that paid for them, that sustained them, is gone.
So they had to look for patronage and, of course, they logically looked to the new landowners of the big houses, the Anglo-Irish owners of the big houses.
So the key person in that is Turlough O'Carolan, who was born in 1670, died in 1735.
He was right in the middle of that period and he was by far the most famous.
He's in between worlds and that's why he's interesting, because if you listen in to Carolan, you can hear the Gaelic aristocratic past, you can hear the hidden Ireland present and you can also hear the world of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, all in there.
From the early 18th century, restrictions on Catholics had been strengthened under the so-called Penal Laws, a charter for the defence of Protestant power.
The main aim of the Penal Laws was to ensure that Catholics would never get back into a position where they would have power over the Protestants and take revenge, which had happened in the 17th century.
- Good evening, everyone.
- Good evening, Father.
And, indeed, you're all very welcome to this sacred place, the mass rock in Tomhaggard, County Wexford.
But religious oppression only served to make the Catholic priesthood more powerful in rural Ireland.
when priests were forbidden to say Mass.
Under the Penal Laws, Catholics were banned from Parliament and public office.
They were barred from voting and from running schools.
Here at mass rocks, just like this one behind me But Catholic worship itself was never banned.
In fact, as the 18th century progressed, the Catholic church grew in strength.
A great seminary was built with Government funding here at Maynooth in County Kildare.
It would become the largest seminary in the world.
The true significance of the Penal Laws was not religious, but economic.
Catholics were not allowed to buy land, and if an existing Catholic landowner died, his property had to be divided among all his children and that would ensure that no big landowner would survive.
A handful of the Catholic elite had held on to their estates, but the majority of rural Catholics became tenants of Protestant landlords.
"Among some of these," wrote the English traveller Arthur Young, "there was a habit of tyranny.
" It's easy to imagine ascendancy Ireland as a country with one rigid divide - Catholic poor and Protestant overlords - but within those terms, Catholic and Protestant, there existed many different aspirations.
There was an emerging Catholic middle class.
People like the young lawyer Daniel O'Connell, whose family had held on to its lands and who had later become a leading figure in the story of Ireland.
Others were the children of merchants and traders, like Thomas Moore, the son of a Dublin grocer, who would become the most popular poet of his day.
Ascendancy Ireland couldn't live in a bubble, sealed apart from this large, active, vibrant, Catholic culture all around you.
There were transactions between Protestants and Catholics on all sorts of levels.
There was far more of a coming and going and far more of a complexity to Irish society in the 18th century than has often been allowed by historians.
Protestant Ireland, too, was a varied landscape, not all grandee landlords.
In Ulster, Presbyterians were also victims of the Penal Laws.
Their Calvinism was condemned by the established Anglican Church.
And like Catholics, they were forced to pay for the upkeep of Anglican ministers.
Discrimination prompted many to look beyond Irish shores.
Ireland was now part of a rapidly expanding British Empire, and that colonial expansion offered space for those wanting to escape poverty and persecution.
At Belfast docks and the other Ulster ports begins one of the great themes of the story of Ireland - emigration.
We're used to the idea of Irish emigration to the United States being a Catholic phenomenon.
But the first people to come here in any sizable numbers were Ulster Presbyterians.
Between 1717 and 1776, more than a quarter of a million of them crossed the Atlantic to the New World.
From the port of Philadelphia, they travelled hundreds of miles west and south, along an old Indian trail that became known as The Great Wagon Road.
Many came to the frontiers of the new America, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
This is the oldest Presbyterian church still standing in Virginia.
Founded in 1740, many of the congregation can trace their ancestry back to the first wave of Ulster Scots who settled in this area.
What kind of character did they bring to this place? Oh, I think they were a very sturdy, independent people.
They had already made a transition from one country to another when they moved from Scotland to Ireland, and so they were perfectly willing to cross an ocean.
It takes a certain amount of endurance, of courage, of faith, of forward-looking.
They're good qualities for pioneers to have.
Some of these Ulster Scots settlers become what are known as the hillbillies.
They head for the mountains.
Well, the people that came to be known as hillbillies were the people who lived somewhat on the fringe of the Scotch-Irish community, who moved up into the hills and the hollers, in more remote areas.
They got a reputation for being kind of a lawless bunch who were outside the mainstream.
They were often associated with moonshine.
The Ulster Presbyterians had arrived in a dynamic environment.
The borders of America were continually expanding.
There was also a growing sense that Americans should govern themselves and not be beholden to a foreign king.
In 1775, Americans rebelled against the rule of King George III.
The Ulster Presbyterians joined the American War of Independence.
To what extent was freedom of religious expression a crucial part of their decision to join the Revolution? I think it was an important contributing factor.
The whole opportunity that the Constitution offered with the Bill of Rights to have freedom of religion was something they wholeheartedly supported.
In 1780, Ulster-Scots militiamen played an important role on the American side in a famous victory.
At the Battle of King's Mountain, they helped to defeat a larger force loyal to the Crown.
An eyewitness account of the battle was published in the Belfast Newsletter.
It also printed personal letters from relatives in America.
In one such letter, a young woman writes "You will undoubtedly laugh at me when I assure you "I often wish to be a man.
"With what pleasure would I take up arms with my brave countrymen "and, like them, glory in fighting for my liberty.
" By 1783, the American revolutionaries had finally defeated the British and won independence.
The American colonists have proved that Britain is not invincible, and that message will have a powerful impact in Ireland, inspiring a cross section of opinion - Catholic and Protestant, radical and moderate - all of them questioning ever more loudly how Britain governs their country.
In Ireland, it will be a period of reform and fear.
Protestant volunteer groups are formed, loyal to the Crown, but demanding more power for the ascendancy parliament and a greater Irish share of imperial trade.
A committee of influential Catholics supported by reformist Protestants succeeds in gaining voting rights.
But British Government concessions to Catholics unsettle ascendancy grandees, who fear the loss of their power.
And in rural Ireland, change creates uncertainty.
Catholics and Protestants join sectarian secret societies.
The Ireland of the late 18th century swirls with contrary ambitions and ideas.
Nothing is settled or inevitable.
But the deep fissures in society are about to be exposed.
Ireland stands on the verge of cataclysm.
Once again, it is events abroad which will provide the spark.
In 1789, bloody revolution convulsed France.
The King and thousands of his nobles were dispatched to the guillotine in the name of a secular republic.
Monarchies and the privileged classes throughout Europe looked on with horror.
But the French Revolutionary cry of "liberty, equality and fraternity" inspired a group of idealists in Ireland.
What was happening here, the destruction of an imperium, was watched avidly by educated young men in Ireland.
Suddenly, the unimaginable became possible - a world of inherited privilege transformed into a society of the free, where reason would overwhelm prejudice.
To the revolutionaries of France, it wasn't just the monarchy or the aristocracy, but also the established church, that was part of a structure of tyranny that had to be destroyed.
In Belfast, these developments were watched with excitement by a group of radicals.
They were Presbyterians, who now set out to unite all Irishmen in the cause of liberty.
They were shaped by Revolutionary ideals and the intellectual ferment of the Age of Enlightenment.
They produced an alliance that would have seemed unthinkable, Protestant intellectuals from the south, Catholic middle class and the descendants of Ulster planters.
It is these Presbyterians who, here in Belfast in 1791, found the first organisation dedicated to breaking the link with Britain.
They called themselves the United Irishmen and they sought a secular Irish republic.
They allied themselves with the Catholic Committee, in peaceful agitation.
But events in Europe propelled them from activism to revolution.
In 1793, England and France went to war.
The pro-French United Irishmen were outlawed.
Here at Cavehill, overlooking Belfast, in June 1795, a group of Irish Protestants gathered to swear an oath - "Never to desist in our efforts "until we subvert the authority of England "over our country and assert our independence.
" But there is a fundamental crisis.
They do not speak for all Protestants.
And in rural areas, sectarian clashes between what are called Catholic Defenders and Protestants were escalating.
The Defenders were drawn from the impoverished Catholic peasantry.
Rural Ireland is very poor.
In the later 18th century, you have secret societies, you have rural gangs of agrarian agitators.
You have an underworld, in a sense, of dissent, making its feelings felt through violence.
Disparate Protestant groups now come together to form an organisation that will be crucial in Ireland's history - the Orange Order - the voice of Protestant fear.
But an idealistic young Protestant lawyer from Dublin hoped that even the Orangemen might eventually be won over to the United Irish cause.
Theobald Wolfe Tone would become the most articulate proponent of Irish independence.
He was very vivacious, very clever.
Quite quickly he moves on from the law to become a political pamphleteer.
He begins to analyse the wrongs of Ireland and one of the main wrongs was that the vast bulk of the populace was excluded from all political rights - in other words, the Catholics.
As one of the most high-profile United Irishmen, Tone was forced to flee Ireland in the fateful year of 1795.
Government plans to give Catholics full political rights had been abandoned under pressure from the Protestant ascendancy.
Tone made his way to Revolutionary France to seek military help for an Irish revolution.
On May 2nd, 1796, Tone was called to meet the leaders of the French Directory.
It's easy to imagine Tone's excitement.
This is his moment.
From backstreet meetings in Belfast and Dublin, he's come to the centre of international revolution.
Walking into the splendour of the Palais de Luxembourg, he said he felt as if it were all a dream.
Waiting to greet him was the great military tactician and founder of the Revolutionary Army, Lazare Carnot.
Tone deliberately ignored the sectarian reality in Ireland when he spoke to Carnot.
He told him that all the people were unanimous in favour of France and eager to throw off the yoke of England.
"He asked me then," wrote Tone, "what I wanted.
"An armed force, "arms and some money.
" Tone comes out into the Jardin de Luxembourg, outside the Palais.
He's walking around, it's a beautiful summer's evening, listening to music coming out, and don't forget he's been in really high-level discussions, so he's a bit overwhelmed by them.
And then the head of the military bureau comes out and says, "It's done.
It's agreed.
We're sending an invasion force to Ireland.
" He's a top French general.
And Tone just had this moment, "I've succeeded, this is what I wanted.
" Tone's meeting precipitates one of the most dangerous threats to England by Revolutionary France.
15,000 French troops in 43 ships arrived off the west coast of Cork in December, 1796.
With only 11,000 British troops in the area, a French victory looked imminent.
Tone came tantalisingly near to his dream of landing a French army in Ireland.
"We were close enough to toss a biscuit ashore," he said.
But bad weather and the indecisiveness of commanders scuppered his hopes.
The French turned for home.
"England," he wrote, "has had its luckiest escape since the Armada.
" In Dublin Castle, this aborted invasion sparked panic and a brutal crackdown was ordered.
A campaign of terror was carried out by the army and Government militias.
The crackdown that had happened in Ireland had been rather indiscriminate, in that the forces responsible had treated civilians, ordinary people, as if they were rebels.
But by doing that, you had a big influx of Catholics into the United Irishmen, who were a very different kind of person than had joined the United Irishmen before.
The United Irish Army numbered around 100,000 men, inspired both by idealism and desperation.
Ireland's revolution was planned for the early summer of 1798, but in May many of the United Irish leaders were arrested, destroying hopes of a coordinated rebellion.
Localised fighting erupted.
United Irishmen rose in Kildare, Carlow, Longford, Wicklow, Meath, to the west in Mayo and to the north in Antrim and Down.
The first significant rebel victory was at Oulart in County Wexford, where over 100 Government soldiers were killed.
Oulart was quickly followed by the rebel capture of Wexford town and Enniscorthy.
But sectarian fear was deepening.
The United Irish include large numbers of Catholic Defenders.
The Orange Order supports the Government.
Where the violence breaks out, the question is, whose sense of rebellion will predominate? Will it be that of the secular-minded United Irish intelligentsia, with their French ideas, or will it be that of the, if you like, more deeply rooted, more ancient antipathies that the Defenders have kept in their world view? The sectarian divisions, which had been papered over by the United Irishmen's talk of universal brotherhood, now exploded into the open.
In Ulster, working class and rural Protestants woke to their old fear of overthrow by the Catholics and they rallied to the crown.
Militia attacks on civilians helped to heighten sectarianism.
In the ranks of the United Irishmen, the ideal of fraternity across the religious divide was fraying.
Most of the rebels were tenant farmers and they had inherited a long tradition of grievance about Protestant newcomers taking over land, about sectarian conflict, about the new Orange Order.
There are people fighting for themselves.
Armed with pikes and some inferior muskets, the rebels at New Ross faced Government troops equipped with cannon.
The rebels pour down these little streets, take over the middle of the town very quickly, but then they come up against gun emplacements.
They were simply mown down by grapeshot and chain shot.
Maybe only 3,000 rebels attacked the town, maybe less, and 1,500 people almost certainly died in 12 hours, which is astonishing.
The United Irish army was inspired both by Revolutionary idealism and more local animosities.
And as the reality of defeat dawned, hatred would lead some to sectarian massacre.
Over 100 Protestant men, women and children were rounded up and locked in a barn at Scullabogue.
Once it became clear the battle was going against the rebels, an order came that the barn should be set on fire.
There was still maybe up to 100 people in it, crowded into it, and they'd been there for days in sweltering heat.
They were told to let nobody escape.
Essentially, this group kept the people inside, including women and children, in the barn, while they were consumed by flame.
One of the United Irish leaders, Myles Byrne, called what happened here at Scullabogue, "A lamentable disgrace, carried out by cowardly ruffians.
" A rising which started with the ideal of uniting Catholic and Protestant had ended here in sectarian butchery.
The rebellion was now entering its final phase.
By the end of the summer, 30,000 people were dead.
As for Wolfe Tone, he was captured on a French boat off the coast of Ireland.
Brought to trial in Dublin, Tone began to realise what had been unleashed that summer.
It's so poignant and so sad.
He says, "For a fair and open war, I was prepared.
"That it has disintegrated into mayhem and assassination "and bloodshed, I am sincerely sorry.
"This is not what I had wanted.
" He was sentenced to death, but cheated the executioner by cutting his own throat.
Tone the martyr would become an icon In next week's programme, the age of Union and the rise of Catholic power.