Swift’s Last Autumn1745 CE

Dateline

In 1745 Ireland stood close to, but not inside, the last great Stuart attempt to overturn the Hanoverian monarchy. The Jacobite rising began in Scotland, crossed into England and never became an Irish insurrection. Yet it made Ireland intensely relevant: Irish Catholic subjects were regarded by the state with suspicion; Irish-born exiles and soldiers were active in France and Scotland; Irish food exports became a security question; and Dublin acquired a new lord lieutenant charged with preventing a feared second front. The year also closed with the death of Jonathan Swift, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral and Dublin’s most formidable literary voice. Thus 1745 joined continental war, domestic policing, trade, religion and culture in an island that was peaceful, but far from untouched.

A Viceroy for a Crisis

Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield, began his Irish viceroyalty in January. He did not reach Dublin until 31 August, when he was sworn in as lord lieutenant. By then Charles Edward Stuart had landed in Scotland and raised his standard at Glenfinnan; government concern had therefore become immediate rather than theoretical. Chesterfield’s task was to secure the kingdom for George II while avoiding measures that might manufacture the very unrest he feared.

Ireland’s political order was plainly unequal. A Protestant landowning and office-holding elite dominated the Irish parliament, local corporations and the established Church of Ireland. The Catholic majority remained burdened by the penal-law system: excluded from parliament and many offices, constrained in property and education, and viewed through a political lens shaped by the Williamite war and the continuing Stuart claim. Yet enforcement was variable. A crisis could bring a sharp revival of official suspicion, while ordinary administration often rested on local accommodation, patronage and the practical limits of government power.

Chesterfield understood that distinction. His policy in the crisis was watchful rather than indiscriminately punitive. Later accounts credited him with refusing to close Catholic chapels merely because rebellion had broken out across the North Channel. That was not religious equality, and it did not remove the disabilities under which Catholics lived. It did, however, recognise that a broad assault on Catholic worship could turn anxiety into resistance. His administration sought intelligence, readiness and visible loyalty without treating every Catholic as a rebel.

The Dublin government’s formal actions show how the emergency developed. On 25 February, before the Scottish rising, an embargo was placed on the export of provisions for two months. The surviving proclamation records the measure, though it should not be read as proof of one simple cause or a uniform effect across the island. On 26 July parliament was prorogued until 8 October. As the rising advanced, official language hardened: on 10 October a proclamation offered £50,000 for the capture of the eldest son of the Pretender, Charles Edward. On 26 October the export of oats and grain to Scotland was prohibited. A proclamation of 19 November ordered a day of fasting and humiliation for 18 December. These measures reveal an administration connecting food, shipping, public worship and dynastic security.

Irish Soldiers in a European War

The most dramatic Irish military contribution of the year occurred not in Ireland or Scotland but in the Austrian Netherlands. On 11 May, at Fontenoy, French forces defeated a British-led allied army. The Irish Brigade in French service became celebrated for its counter-attack during the battle’s decisive later phase. Its regiments were descendants, in organisation and memory, of the Irish Jacobite military diaspora created after the Williamite victory and the Treaty of Limerick. Their officers and men did not represent Ireland as a sovereign state; they were soldiers of the French crown. Nevertheless, their Irish identity, Catholic background and attachment to the Stuart cause made them politically resonant on both sides of the Channel.

Contemporary archival holdings preserve correspondence on the Irish regiments and accounts of Fontenoy, as well as papers on the movements of the Dillon, Lally, Bulkeley and Clare regiments in 1745–46. Such records caution against treating the Brigade as a romantic, homogeneous band. It was part of a professional European army, sustained by French institutions and containing men of varied origins. But it also maintained family, clerical and political links with Ireland. Fontenoy therefore helped to renew a powerful image: Irish soldiers abroad defeating the army of the Hanoverian state that governed Ireland at home.

The Jacobite expedition that followed had a marked Irish expatriate presence. Charles Edward left France in July with a small party rather than the large French invasion he had hoped for. Among his closest advisers were Irishmen formed in the world of Stuart exile. Sir Thomas Sheridan, the prince’s tutor and counsellor, John William O’Sullivan, a former French officer, and the clergyman George Kelly were among the Irish Jacobites who travelled with or closely served him. Their presence made the rising an archipelagic and European enterprise, not simply a Highland affair. It did not, however, provide Charles with an Irish army or open an Irish landing place.

Events in Scotland also exposed the limits of French support. A vessel carrying arms and volunteers was damaged after an encounter at sea and returned to France, while Charles reached the Hebrides with only restricted resources. Later, on 22 November, Irish piquets drawn from French service landed at Montrose with Lord John Drummond’s force. Their arrival gave the Jacobite army trained regulars and artillery experience, but it came too late to transform the campaign. By the end of December the Jacobite army had marched into England and then withdrawn north from Derby. Ireland had remained quiet, though it had mattered to the logistics, imagination and diplomacy of the war.

Markets, Bread and Linen

Security policy touched everyday economic life. The ban on sending oats and grain to Scotland was a reminder that Irish produce travelled through interconnected Irish Sea markets and could feed armies as well as households. It also came only a few years after the catastrophic scarcity and disease of 1740–41, which remained within living memory. That earlier disaster should not be projected unchanged onto 1745, but it helps explain why provisions, prices and the movement of grain were politically sensitive matters.

Legislation and petitions from 1745 offer narrower evidence of ordinary concerns. An Irish act continued and amended regulations requiring corn, meal and other goods to be bought and sold by weight, addressed fraud in such transactions, regulated the price and assize of bread, and dealt with markets. It shows government attention to measurement, retail practice and the staple food supply rather than proving how successfully rules worked in every town. In Dublin, master linen weavers, manufacturers and dealers issued a printed case to the Irish parliament. Their intervention points to a commercially organised trade seeking influence in the capital. Linen was increasingly central to Ireland’s export economy, although production still depended heavily on dispersed rural spinning, weaving households, merchants and market networks rather than later factory industry.

These were different worlds from the polished political society of Dublin Castle, but they were linked. The state needed food supplies, customs revenue and secure ports; merchants needed predictable rules and access to markets; rural households lived with the consequences of prices, rents and demand for cloth. In a year of war scare, a sack of oats, a cargo leaving an Irish harbour or a petition from linen traders could acquire a strategic meaning.

Deaths and Dublin Culture

On 19 October Jonathan Swift died in Dublin, aged seventy-seven. For years illness had removed him from active authorship and public controversy, but his death was still a major civic and cultural event. As dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, he belonged to the established church and to Dublin’s institutional life; as author of Gulliver’s Travels, the Drapier’s Letters and A Modest Proposal, he had become inseparable from arguments about power, poverty, commerce and Ireland’s place within the British polity. His will left £12,000 towards what became St Patrick’s Hospital, opened in 1746. The bequest did not yet change care in 1745, but it gave his final year a lasting social legacy.

Dublin’s theatrical life also continued. In 1745 the actor Thomas Sheridan, father of the later playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, took over management of the debt-ridden Smock Alley Theatre. His undertaking indicates that even amid military alarm the capital remained a place of performance, print, patronage and urban consumption. Meanwhile, on 16 November New Style (5 November Old Style), James Butler, second duke of Ormond, died in exile at Avignon. Born in Dublin Castle and long a central figure in Irish and British high politics, he had spent decades outside the kingdoms after his Jacobite commitments. Swift’s death in Dublin and Ormond’s death abroad marked, in very different ways, the passing of figures shaped by the political worlds that had preceded Hanoverian stability.

By the final weeks of 1745, no uprising had erupted in Ireland. That outcome owed something to the weakness of practical Jacobite organisation on the island, something to the calculations of Catholic clergy and gentry, and something to Chesterfield’s preference for restraint backed by preparedness. It should not be mistaken for contentment or inclusion. Ireland remained a confessional state ruled by a narrow elite, while Irish people, goods and soldiers were deeply implicated in the wider conflict. The year’s significance lies precisely in that contrast: public quiet at home, but Irish influence and Irish vulnerability extending from Dublin’s markets and cathedral to Fontenoy, France and the Jacobite camps of Scotland.