ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore one relation of the rising in depth: the 1643 treatise composed by Jones, together with Randall Adams, Henry Brereton, and Edward Pigott. The “Brittish martyrs” identified by Jones were overwhelmingly the settlers of English and Scottish origins that had come to live in Ireland as part of several plantation schemes from late sixteenth century onwards. These projects had an important religious dimension: they aimed at transformation of Ireland from “darkness” of “barbarism” and “superstition” to the “light” of “civility” and “true religion.” The 1641 Irish Rebellion was a moment of despair and of profound challenge to the Protestant community in Ireland, and its cherished aims of converting and civilizing the country. In light of the multiplicity of change in seventeenth-century Ireland, and overlapping of religious, colonial, political, cultural, and economic transformations wrought through plantation and other reform efforts, it is unsurprising that the 1641 Rebellion has generated much debate as to its causes and conduct.
