Inchiquin’s Cork Coup1644 CE

Dateline

In 1644 Ireland’s war was neither a single rebellion nor a straightforward contest between king and parliament. The Catholic Confederate association headquartered at Kilkenny governed much of the country in the king’s name while seeking redress for Catholic religion, land and political exclusion. James Butler, marquess of Ormond, held Dublin and remained Charles I’s lord lieutenant. Scottish Covenanter troops under Robert Monro dominated much of Ulster, while Protestant garrisons and communities held strategic positions elsewhere. During the year, negotiations, campaigns and a sharp political rupture in Cork showed how closely Irish affairs were bound to the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

Negotiating From Kilkenny

The Confederate leadership entered 1644 with a difficult calculation. The cessation agreed with Ormond in September 1643 had suspended much fighting between the Confederates and the royalist administration, but it was only a truce. It gave the Catholic leadership time to pursue a permanent settlement with Charles I, yet it also left the Covenanter army in Ulster and parliamentarian-aligned forces in Ireland outside the arrangement. The Confederacy had built a functioning wartime administration: a General Assembly, a Supreme Council, provincial armies, taxation and courts. But its political authority was uneven. The Assembly was representative by the standards of the day, bringing together peers, clergy and commoners, but the franchise was confined to male property holders; by 1644 the Supreme Council was increasingly directing policy between assemblies.

In late March, Confederate commissioners reached Oxford to present their case directly to Charles. Their demands went well beyond a pardon for those involved in the rising of 1641. They sought repeal of anti-Catholic laws, public freedom for Catholic worship, access to civil office, safeguards for estates and a free Irish parliament less constrained by Poynings’ Law. Those objectives joined religion, constitutional practice and property in a single programme. Protestant petitioners from Ireland advanced almost the opposite vision: security for Protestant settlers, a continuing Protestant military establishment and further plantation. The gulf between the two positions made a comprehensive settlement exceptionally hard to devise.

Charles nevertheless authorised Ormond on 24 June to treat for peace with Confederate agents, and exchanges between Dublin and Kilkenny continued through the summer and autumn. The negotiations mattered because the king needed Irish stability and, potentially, Irish soldiers as his war in Britain worsened. The Confederates, in turn, wanted formal guarantees rather than another temporary expedient. Yet there was no final treaty in 1644. Nor should later events be pulled back into this year: Edward Somerset, earl of Glamorgan, did not arrive to conduct his secret Irish negotiations until June 1645, while the papal nuncio Giovanni Battista Rinuccini landed in Ireland only in October 1645.

The Costly Ulster Expedition

The year’s largest Confederate field effort was directed towards Ulster. The Scottish commander Robert Monro had consolidated his position around Belfast and led what was probably his most extensive expedition in Ireland, taking a force of Scottish and local British troops south into Longford and Meath. His army was formidable but also burdened by the familiar problems of pay, supply and competing demands from Scotland.

The Confederates answered with a proposed force of about 6,000 under James Tuchet, earl of Castlehaven, intended to cooperate with Owen Roe O’Neill’s Ulster army. The command itself exposed rivalries. O’Neill, the experienced general of the Ulster Confederates, had reason to resent the appointment over him of Castlehaven, an Anglo-Irish Catholic nobleman whose military reputation rested particularly on cavalry command. Castlehaven’s selection was a political compromise, not a simple military decision, and cooperation in the field remained uneasy.

A contemporary account associated with O’Neill records the human geography behind the campaign. As pressure mounted, O’Neill’s troops and their creaghts—civilian groups moving with cattle and other necessities—left exposed parts of Ulster for Meath, Longford, Leitrim and Cavan. Such movements were not incidental to war. Armies consumed grain, livestock, carts and fodder; displaced families followed soldiers or fled them; and the ability to feed a force often decided where it could remain. When Monro advanced towards Granard in the summer, the prospect of Castlehaven joining O’Neill helped deter a direct encounter. Monro withdrew northward late in July after burning Carlanstown, according to the same narrative.

Castlehaven and O’Neill then moved towards Charlemont, drawing provisions from Newry, Dundalk and Drogheda, the important towns still observing the cessation in that region. In early September the combined force established a magazine at Tonregee and Castlehaven led a mounted and infantry foray into enemy-held country. It achieved little beyond a small clash near Dromore. Monro’s larger force soon threatened the Confederate position, disrupting the routes by which food had been brought to camp. The expedition ended without the decisive victory its planners had hoped for. Later recriminations between the generals were intense, but neither received a formal censure. The failure showed that Confederate Ireland could raise substantial armies without necessarily supplying, coordinating or directing them effectively enough to break an entrenched enemy.

Soldiers Across the North Channel

Ireland was also a reservoir of manpower for war beyond the island. In June, roughly 1,600 armed men under Alasdair MacColla MacDonnell left Ireland for Scotland, forming the core of the force that joined James Graham, marquess of Montrose, in the royalist campaign there. Their departure reflected the enduring links between Ulster and the western Scottish Highlands: kinship, Gaelic lordship, seaborne movement and older struggles over land and power all crossed the North Channel. For Charles, the expedition promised urgently needed military assistance; for Randal MacDonnell, earl of Antrim, it also offered a means to advance MacDonnell interests in the Hebrides and western Scotland.

Its political consequences were immediate. On 24 October the English Long Parliament passed an ordinance directing that no quarter be given to Irishmen, or Irish-born Catholics, taken while fighting for the king on land or at sea. The measure was both a response to the Irish intervention and an expression of the intensely anti-Irish, anti-Catholic rhetoric generated since 1641. It made service abroad still more dangerous for Irish soldiers and hardened the sense that the Irish conflict could not be separated from the English and Scottish wars.

Cork Breaks With Ormond

The most consequential development within Ireland came in Munster. On 17 July, Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin, publicly declared against the cessation and aligned his army with the English parliament. His move was not simply an ideological conversion to parliamentarianism. Protestant officers and settlers in Munster feared that a royalist accommodation with the Confederates would sacrifice their security, property and religious position. Parliament subsequently recognised Inchiquin as president of Munster, although it did not immediately provide all the money and supplies he needed.

In July, Inchiquin’s forces expelled Catholic inhabitants from Cork city, and comparable action affected Youghal and Kinsale. Contemporary parliamentary accounts justified the expulsions by alleging a Confederate conspiracy to seize Cork; Confederate and royalist critics condemned the policy as a grave wrong. The surviving evidence does not permit the episode to be reduced to one side’s propaganda. What is firmly clear is that people identified as Irish and Catholic were driven from the city, their goods and provisions were seized, and civic life was reorganised through coercion. For families forced out, the strategic calculation of military commanders became an immediate loss of home, employment, goods and community. Modern historians rightly identify the episode as an early form of ethnic cleansing.

Ports, Revenue And Fragile Security

War did not eliminate commerce. The cessation had improved the Confederates’ maritime position in the south-east. Lord Esmond’s adherence at Duncannon Fort meant parliamentary warships could no longer safely use the waters below it to obstruct shipping to Waterford and New Ross. Waterford port records for this period indicate substantial traffic with foreign ports, an important reminder that merchants, mariners and townspeople continued to move goods through an economy reshaped rather than simply extinguished by conflict. Such trade could supply necessities, bring military stores and provide customs revenue, but it was vulnerable to blockade, privateering and sudden changes of allegiance.

For ordinary people, security remained local and conditional. Towns that supplied armies acquired leverage but also endured requisitioning. Rural households faced moving troops, burnt settlements, disrupted markets and the recurrent danger that livestock would be taken for military use. Catholic worship had expanded in many Confederate-held districts after 1641, but the peace negotiations revealed why religion could not be treated as a private matter: the possession of churches, the legal standing of clergy and the holding of office were central questions of power and belonging.

By the end of 1644, no side had secured Ireland. The Confederate government retained extensive territory and diplomatic purpose, but its Ulster offensive had stalled. Ormond still sought a settlement, but Inchiquin’s break had opened a durable parliamentarian front in Munster. Irish troops were now influencing the Scottish war, while Westminster had answered with a brutal declaration of exclusion. The year therefore left Ireland more deeply entangled in the conflict of three kingdoms, with peace discussed constantly but made harder by every new campaign and political rupture.