ABSTRACT
Claims that lords justices Parsons and Borlase deliberatelygoaded the Old English into rising with the Ulstermen are unconvincing because at the outset of the rising they were not secure enough to play with fire.1 Actions such as disarming the Palesmen and describing the insurgents as ‘evil-affected Irish Papists’ reflected panicky bumbling rather than cold malice.2 Flushed with the success of their counter-offensive, however, the lords justices did not encourage the individual surrenders which would otherwise have brought the rising to a quick end.3 The cause célèbre of Nicholas Nettervill, Viscount Dowth, accused of provisioning insurgents near Drogheda, suggested otherwise: his plea that the besiegers had taken what they wanted ‘against his will’ was rejected out of hand.4 The case suggested that a net of complicity and guilt would be thrown wide enough to catch nearly all Catholic landowners, as did Charles’s formal assent in March 1642 to an act of the English parliament to fund reconquest by loans ‘adventured’ on confiscated estates. He signed away his prerogative rights to wage war and make peace and it would now be for the English parliament to adjudge on any pardon granted to an Irish rebel.5 The scale of the envisaged confiscations, amounting to roughly half the land in the country, emphasised that parliament assumed collective Irish guilt.
