DAVE MANSELL was increased during the reign of Charles 1. Presbyterian ministers were harshly dealt with by the government of Ireland after Wentworth became viceroy in 1633. When Charles tried to impose an Anglican liturgy on the Presbyterians in Scotland in 1638, an organized national resistance faced him and there were sympathetic movements in Ulster which Wentworth considered corn1tituted a serious threat to English ascendancy. This conflict was soon overshadowed, however, by the struggle fomented by the clash between Charles's proclivity to political absolutism and the rising power of the English bourgeoisie, which led to the civil war between crown and parliament. Although nominally a Protestant monarch, Charles, like his Stuart predecessors (with the exception of James 1) also had a proclivity to Catholicism. The Pope had emissaries close to the throne during the civil war. Taking advantage of the political confusion in England, the dispossessed Irish Ulster peasants rost against the colonists throughout the province and, for a time, swept the Plantation away except for some of the towns such as Londonderry. These « massacres of 1641 » are one of the key symbolic memories for the Protestants of Ulster. The rising spread southwards and was joined by many of the Catholic gentry of Anglo-Irish stock eager to regain their positions as exploiters of the Irish peasantry. Whilst the English civil war raged the rebellion made political headway, but by 1649 Cromwell was able to land in Ireland to prevent it becoming a stronghold of Royalist resistance. Cromwell was ferociously anti-Catholic in politics and religion, which was scarcely a rare condition for bourgeois leaders in Europe at a time when tht Catholic Church was a general ideological and organizing centre of the feudal counter-revolution. On landing in Ireland he said that he would defend freedom of religion and would make it impossible for a Catholic mass to be held. To the leaders of the Puritan revolution this was not a contradictory statement: freedom of religion meant the freedom of Protestant tendencies and the strict exclusion of Catholicism. Anti-Catholicism remained a main tenet of the British popular movement throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, continually fed by Republican, Whig or nationalist agitation, and Catholic emancipation only became possible in England after Catholicism ha been reduced to a matter of private conscience. after the triumph of the Protestant ascendancy in all areas of social life and the decline of the Catholic Church as a European power. 58
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