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An Entire and Coherent History of Ireland: Richard Cox's Hibernia AnglicanaAuthor(s): Ian MontgomerySource: The Linen Hall Review, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 9-11Published by: Linen Hall LibraryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20534459 .

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An Entire and Coherent History of Ireland

Richard Cox's Hibernia

Anglicana IAN MONTGOMERY

'Since Ireland is reckoned among the principal islands in the world and deserves to be esteemed so...it is

strange that this noble kingdom, and the affairs of it, should find no room in history...'

Richard Cox ' s HiberniaAnglicana: or the history of Ireland

from the conquest thereof by the English to this present time was the first attempt at a comprehensive history of English involvement in Ireland to be written from the perspective of

the 'New English', the Protestant immigrants of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The two volumes

were published in London in 1689 and 1690, between William and Mary's accession to the throne and William's

expedition to Ireland. This was a time of considerable

anxiety for Irish Protestants, many of whom had fled to

England to escape from what they perceived as an Irish Catholic rebellion and also for English Protestants who had

only just been delivered from what they saw as a French

inspired Catholic tyranny. A history of Ireland could be

expected to attract more interest among Englishmen than

would normally be expected and Cox used this interest to

press the case of the Protestant exiles. Both volumes of the

history are prefaced with dedications to William and Mary which stress the strategic and economic importance of

Ireland to England and call on William to defeat the Catholic conspiracy in Ireland and thus complete the work he had begun in rescuing England from popery. A work the size of Hibernia Anglicana was not of course produced

specifically in response to the events of 1688/89, it was

Cox's good fortune to have been working on the history of the English crown's involvement with Ireland just at the

time when the future ofthat relationship seemed to hang in the balance.

Richard Cox always though of himself as an Englishman who happened to live in Ireland. His grandfather had moved to Cork from Wiltshire around the end of the sixteenth century and the family had prospered before

being ruined in the 1641 rebellion. The historian, born at

Bandonbridge, County Cork in 1651, had to make his own

way in the world. Orphaned at an early age he was brought up by his mothers family and made a career for himself as a lawyer. After an apprenticeship in the manorial courts of

the Boyle family in County Cork he travelled to Gray's Inn to qualify himself to work in the crown courts. By 1687 he had become the moderately prosperous Recorder of the

important town of Kinsale and the owner of a estate near

Clonakilty in western Cork. At the accession of James II however he felt it expedient to move to England. By his own account he had distinguished himself as 'a sincere

Protestant and a good Englishman', and earned the enmity of local Catholics and when James's Irish administration

began to introduce Catholics into civic offices he lost his

position as Recorder of Kinsale. Telling his friends that he was moving for the sake of his health he settled near Bristol where he again practised law. While in England he made several important friends, including Sir Robert Southwell, a retired courtier and diplomat and the owner of a large estate in County Cork. Through Southwell he was introduced to the second Duke of Ormond, the greatest land owner in

Ireland, who was to become an important patron for Cox. It

was from Bristol that Cox observed the momentous events

of 1688/89 while working on the completion of his history.

*This account is based on my unpublished MA dissertation The Career of Sir Richard Cox (University of Ulster, 1993). See

also Walter Harris' life of Cox added to his edition of Sir James Ware's The history of the writers of Ireland in W. Harris

(Ed.) The whole works of Sir James Ware concerning Ireland revised and improved (2nd edition, Dublin, 1764), Vol. 1, pp 207-52 and Richard Caulfield (Ed.) The autobiography of Sir Richard Cox (London, 1860).

Ian Montgomery

VOLUME 12 Number 1 PAGE 9

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Cox's interest in historical writing can be traced back to

1684 when he contributed a description of County Cork to William Molyneux's proposed Natural History of Ireland.

While this was intended to be a topographical description it shows an interest in the history of the county from the

Norman settlement. In 1685 he offered to send Molyneux a 'rough collection of the affairs of Ireland from 1170 to 1641' which he had not the time to complete himself.

Despite the need to earn a living at the Bar his exile in Bristol obviously gave Cox the time to complete this work.

Political events also gave him a spur towards publication. James IT s appointment of the Irish Catholic Richard Talbot, first as commander of the army in Ireland and then from

1687 as Lord Deputy, appeared to Irish Protestants to be a

betrayal of the principals on which Ireland had been governed for the previous hundred years. Protestants like Cox,

brought up on stories of massacre and betrayal in 1641, saw

Talbot's policy of replacing Protestant army officers and

civic officials with Catholics as a threat to the whole bases

of their security. The 'Old English' interest which Talbot

represented made no secret of their intention to reverse the

restoration land settlement, which had failed to restore

Catholics to all the land they had held before the start of the 1641 rebellion. This would not only affect the new

Cromwellian settlers of the 1650's but could start a process

which would reverse all the changes in land ownership since the middle ages and ultimately destroy the bases of the

English crowns control over Ireland. By explaining the history of English involvement in Ireland Cox

hoped to alert his audience to the dangers posed not

only to Irish Protestants but also to the English state

by events in Ireland.

The history begins, with the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 and its theme is the struggle

between the civilising forces of English government and society and degenerate influences of the native

Irish. The scene is set by an introduction which

describes Gaelic Ireland as a primitive and backward

looking society redeemed only by its contacts with

England and concludes that: '...the Irish have as

much reason to thank God and the English for a more civil and regular Government exercised over

them.'

Civil and regular government was not always

possible however and the weakness of English administrations led to the intermarriage and decline

; into barbarity of many of the English settlers. The

degeneracy of the native Irish and the kold English' as the descendants of the medieval immigrants were

known, was confirmed by their refusal to accept the

reformed religion. This allowed the complex divisions of Irish society to be presented as a simple dichotomy: '.. .if the most ancient natural Irishman

be a Protestant, no man takes him for other than an

Englishman; and if a Cockney be a Papist, he is

reckoned, in Ireland, as much an Irishman as if he

was born on Slevelogher../ Ireland could be explained as simply another

battle ground in the great conflict between light and darkness being fought across Europe. Cox was

aware that the recent history of Ireland and of

England was more complex than this black and

white picture allowed; commenting on the execution

of Charles I he laments: '.. .Oh! that I could say they were Irishmen that did that

abominable fact or that I could justly lay it at the door of the

Papists...'

However, until Ireland had been regained by the crown

and the Protestants of Ireland rescued the more complex realities could be ignored.

Like all historians Cox had to take account of the works

of his predecessors and in his introduction he passes

judgement on the historians of Ireland. Catholic writers

like Keating and Walsh are dismissed as untrustworthy on

account of their religion, Protestants such as Archbishop Ussher and Sir James Ware are treated with more respect

but no one, he points out, had yet had produced a

chronologically arranged general history. Cox draws heavily on previous historians but he also used manuscript material,

particularly the Carew papers in Lambeth Palace Library, and for the events of the seventeenth-century he may have

had the advantage of meeting some of the participants. He

would appear to have seen the manuscript of Sir Robert

Southwell's unpublished life of the first Duke of Ormond and may well have been supplied with other documents from this source. A more dubious source was the

fictionalised accounts of the reformation produced by Sir James Ware's son Richard which Cox appears to have

accepted as genuine. The pressures of producing such an ambitious work to

catch the tide of public interest in Ireland can be seen in the

LINEN HALL REVIEW SPRING 1995 PAGE 10

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structure of the work. Volume 1 contains, as well as an

introductory account of pre-Norman Ireland a continuous

narrative of Irish history from the Norman invasion to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. The second volume

begins with an essay on the 1641 rebellion before a

chronological account of Irish affairs which peters out with the death of the King in 1649. A brief account by an

anonymous collaborator brings the story down to 1688 and

the rest of the volume is given over to transcriptions of

documents mainly from the Carew collection. A promised third volume which would describe William's expedition to Ireland never materialised.

Cox returned to Ireland in 1690 with William's army and went on to enjoy a successful career as a judge,

eventually becoming Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1703. He played an active part in the turbulent politics of post revolution Ireland as a supporter of the second Duke of

Ormond and was fortunate to escape impeachment when

Ormond defected to the Jacobite cause in 1715. Although he produced a book of religious polemic and another of

philosophy he did not return to historical writing. Cox was aware of shortcomings in his narrative and promised a

corrected version however the second and last edition,

published in 1692 is merely a reprint of the first. The

relatively large number of surviving copies suggests that

the two editions of the history sold well. The critical reception of Hibernia Anglicana has on the

whole been unfavourable. Fault has been found both with

both the number of errors of fact and mistakes in

transcription, the result probably of its rushed production, and at the underlying assumption which inform the work.

Cox's emphases on the complete dependence of Ireland on

England did not find favour with many Irish Protestants

who, in the period after the Revolution, who were being to resent the interference of the English Parliament in their affairs. William Molyneux's The case of Ireland's being bound by Acts of Parliament in England stated, published in Dublin in 1698, emphasises the rights of Irish Protestants as free-born Englishmen rather than their dependence on

English governments and it is significant that he makes no

reference to Cox's work, although he must have been aware

of it. The aspersions cast by Cox on the culture and history of Gaelic Ireland were answered in 1717 by the poet and

grammarian Hugh MacCurtin in A brief discourse in vindication of the antiquity of Ireland and as the eighteenth century progressed Irish Protestants began to take a more

positive view of Gaelic Ireland. Bishop William Nicholson in his Irish historical library of 1724 while discussing

MacCurtin's work at some length passes over Cox briefly

with the comment that the work: '.. .came into the world in

somewhat of a looser dress than was (most certainly) at first intended by the compiler...'

a view that has generally prevailed.

One modern Historiographical study has described Cox as: '.. .hardly more than a propagandist with an impressive

employment of documentation... '

a rather harsh judgement which ignores Cox's

achievement in putting together a very readable narrative of

Irish history from an admittedly rather narrow perspective. Later historians have made use of Cox, particularly the

transcribed documents in the second volume. Like all

histories HiberniaAnglicana is a record of the age in which it was written as well as an account of the period it

ostensibly deals with and Cox gives an invaluable insight into the minds of the English Protestant lite at one of the

great crises of seventeenth-century Ireland. Cox himself is

always confident both about the outcome of the forthcoming struggle in Ireland and about the value of his book despite its admitted shortcomings: i will not pretend this collection is free from mistakes, no wise man will expect that, for he

that copies after others (as collectors of histories must do) cannot always be sure that he writes truth...'

and launches the book with a robust defence against

any potential critics: T am far from being solicitous about the reception this book will have in the world; for either the censurer could do it better and then he should have done

I so.. .or he could not do it better and then by censuring me

he will but proclaim himself an envious coxcomb...in a

word the censure of fools or conceited fops can do me no

prejudice...' The Linen Hall Library has two sets of the first edition

of Hibernia Anglicana both of which appear to have come i from the collection of Robert Belshaw the Dublin book

collector who left part of his collection to the Linen Hall in 1909. One set has Richard Cox's name written in a

contemporary style on various pages but this does not

match his known signature. One volume of the other set has

the name Alan Broderick on the title page. The signature appears to match that of Alan Broderick later first Viscount

Midleton, a Cork landowner and lawyer who was a political

rival of Cox's both in County Cork and in the intense party -

I political strife in Dublin during the reign of Queen Anne.

VOLUME 12 Number 1 PAGE 11

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