Ireland is one of the few remaining countries where it's a major news item that Catholics make up less than 90 percent of the population. According to reports last spring, the number of Protestants is edging higher while the number of Catholics is holding steady. The Church of Ireland, Ireland's largest Protestant denomination and the former established church, gained congregants for the first time in over a century. Presbyterian and Methodist memberships also increased. Meanwhile, many new non-Catholics have recently arrived in Ireland, and groups that still represent only a tiny fraction of the Irish population, such as Muslims and Orthodox Christians, are nevertheless growing rapidly relative to their numbers a decade ago. As a result, only 88.4 percent of residents in the Republic of Ireland are Catholic.1

Changing religious affiliation reflects a changing Ireland. Thanks to the "Celtic tiger" economy, Ireland has become a country that attracts, rather than sends, migrants. Its diversifying population has encouraged many, from political commentators to radio presenters, to ponder what it means to be Irish. Do you have to be born in Ireland to be Irish? Do you need to speak Irish to be Irish? And do you have to be Catholic to be Irish?

Toby Barnard's work on the often-neglected history of Irish Protestants has something to add to this contemporary discussion. A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1648-1770 outlines who Irish Protestants were; Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1649–1770 describes what Irish Protestants owned. Filled with detailed and careful research, Barnard's books remind us that Protestants have a long history in Ireland and that their history includes more than Oliver Cromwell's rampage in the 1650s.

In Cork my husband and I often encounter remnants of that forgotten history: a Methodist church (now a clothing store), a Quaker assembly room (now closed), and three Church of Ireland churches that have been turned into a Catholic church, a concert hall, and an office development. Barnard's books help the reader envision who might have filled such Protestant churches from the 1650s to the 1770s, a period known as the Protestant ascendancy. At this time the Protestant population in Ireland was around 400,000, or a quarter of the island's population. Catholics outnumbered Protestants, but Dublin and parts of Ulster, the northernmost province, had more Protestant than Catholic residents after 1732. Protestants continued to dominate Ulster demographically, while the Protestant presence in Dublin declined over the eighteenth century. In Cork, 33 to 40 percent of the population was Protestant. Other Irish towns—Limerick, Drogheda, Kilkenny, and Galway—were less than a third Protestant. In any case, Protestants enjoyed disproportionate wealth and influence. The law of the land reserved the upper reaches of Irish society—as well as positions in the church, law courts, and army and navy—for Protestants.

A New Anatomy surveys the Irish Protestant population, from peers to the poor. Barnard organizes the book by social class, but he acknowledges that defining someone's social standing depended more on perception than on substance. Participating in hunts, which marked "quality," required an annual income of forty pounds. Beyond appearing on horseback, dress and living arrangements greatly influenced the perception of "quality."

Barnard's decision to separate his subjects by class, despite the elusive nature of social definitions, gives the book a sterile feel. The reader learns tidbits about social classes but gains few extended introductions to specific peers, clergy, or barristers. Barnard has compiled so much information in these two volumes that he sometimes loses sight of the people in the study. For example, he notes that rank within the hierarchy of professions depended on the price of training. Therefore practicing law at Dublin Four Courts was highly prestigious since it required studying at the London Inns of Court. However, no one barrister stands out much more than any other in Barnard's account.

This lack of individuality is a pity, because when Barnard turns to biography, he brings Irish Protestantism to life. He describes four land agents who ran the Boyle estates in southern Ireland to illustrate the varieties of Protestant landowners. Digby Foulke, William Congreve, Roger Power and Richard Bagge came from distinct regions, made different fortunes, and had varying success. Foulke's parents were tenants on the Boyle estate, and he and many relations continued in Boyle employment. Congreve was from Yorkshire but became fully integrated into Irish Protestant society. Roger Power came from an Old English family near the Boyle estate. He was elected to parliament in 1703. When he died, his estate was estimated at six thousand pounds, a great sum. Bagge, the lowliest in status of the four, left the earl's employment after he was accused of corruption. The obvious differences in the backgrounds and success of the four men indicate that simple categories such as "land agent" do not tell the whole story.

To be fair, Barnard's excursions into biography are limited by the records and correspondence that his subjects left. Lady Arbella Denny (1707-1792), a regular letter writer (and a fascinating character in her own right), features prominently in both books. Her wide-ranging accomplishments typify the influence that Protestants had in Ireland during the ascendancy. Lady Denny was the daughter of an earl, the wife of a member of parliament, and the first woman elected to the Royal Dublin Society. She was widely known for her charitable works; she reformed the Foundling Hospital and in 1767 opened the Magdalen Asylum as a refuge for women from good homes who had become prostitutes.

Barnard's second volume, Making the Grand Figure, describes the possessions that Arbella Denny and other Irish Protestants would have owned. Although the book sometimes feels like a catalogue of country houses, Barnard argues that the materialism of Protestant culture characterized the entire Protestant experience in Ireland. Protestant wealth, particularly elaborate displays of wealth, distinguished Protestant from Catholic. Since maintaining distinctions between privileged Protestants and poor Catholics was at the heart of the Protestant ascendancy, the material goods that Protestants used to reinforce their separation from Catholics are central to the history of the ascendancy.

Barnard begins with Protestant houses, which were built with stone and mortar, in contrast to Catholic dwellings of straw and mud. Protestant houses had high ceilings and wooden floors, while Catholic cottages had low ceilings and mud floors. And Protestants filled their homes and calendars with goods and pursuits that most Irish Catholics could not afford. Barnard devotes a good portion of the book to the production and accumulation of silver. He notes that banking was more difficult in Ireland than in England and that owning silver may have been a convenient way to hold assets. Irish Protestant householders also collected paintings when they had the funds and etchings and engravings when resources were limited. Outdoors Protestants rode, hunted, raised dogs, and planted ornate gardens.

To contextualize the lives of Irish Protestants, Barnard provides occasional comparisons with English society. The greatest similarity between English and Irish society in this period was the monopoly that the established church held. To participate in state functions or to practice most professions required holding membership in the Church of England or Ireland and receiving the Eucharist at least once a year. Among those who fulfilled the confessional qualifications, Irish Protestants were distinct from their English counterparts. Overall, residents of Ireland were less wealthy, and even Irish "quality" were generally poorer than "quality" in lowland England. Clerical stipends were also lower in Ireland than in England.

Barnard's comparisons between Irish Protestants and upper-class English highlight a fundamental question that neither of his books addresses. Is Protestant the distinguishing characteristic for the people whose lives he describes? Barnard writes about Irish Protestant and Catholic housing, but better descriptors might be rich and poor housing.

Barnard's neat picture becomes still more complex when we take into account the shifting relationship between Protestantism and national identity. During the ascendancy, Protestants in Ireland largely regarded themselves as English. But the Protestant ascendancy itself started a historical process that led many Irish Protestants to decide they were Irish. Hence the uneasy relationship between English and Protestant and Irish that persists to this day.

As Barnard exhaustively documents, English settlers in Ireland were privileged in their training, careers, houses, furnishings, and leisure. They built grand houses and elaborate gardens, purchased fine silver and family portraits, and tried to impress their neighbors with their dress and comportment. And then, Barnard occasionally hints, at some point they were no longer completely English. Just as new arrivals to Ireland are changing the definition of what it means to be Irish in the 21st century, so English Protestant settlers in Ireland have changed past definitions of Irishness in ways that are still potent. Barnard's books begin to open up their lives.

Mary Noll Venables recently received her Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Yale University and is now living in Ireland.

1. Conor Pope, "Major rise in Muslims, Orthodox Christians—Census," Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland), April 8, 2004; Georgina O'Halloran, "Success story for Church," Evening Echo (Cork, Ireland), June 3, 2005.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.