Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
2-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
History
Advisor
Sarah Covington
Committee Members
Clare Carroll
Timothy Alborn
Alan Ford
Subject Categories
European History | History of Religion | Legal
Keywords
Early Modern Ireland, Church of Ireland, English Civil Wars, 1641 Depositions, 1641 Rebellion, Seventeenth Century
Abstract
This dissertation looks at the early life and career of Protestant Church of Ireland bishop Henry Jones (1605-1682). Best remembered for donating the Book of Kells to the Trinity College Dublin library, his largest impact was as the leader of a commission appointed to take victim testimony from Protestants who had suffered at the hands of Catholic rebels in the Irish Rebellion of 1641, arguably a fulcrum of Irish history. Jones was a nephew of Archbishop James Ussher and followed his path to Trinity College Dublin where he was greatly influenced in his training as both a Church of Ireland cleric and a humanist historian. His first of many publications was a short book arguing against the Catholic pilgrimage to Saint Patrick's Purgatory that showed both historical sophistication and anti-Catholic prejudice.
When rebellion struck in 1641, Jones was chosen to collect testimony from Protestant refugees streaming into Dublin. His training as a humanist historian, and his family connections to both the Old and New English elite, gave him a particular readiness to collect a massive archive of thousands of records, now known as the 1641 Depositions. This dissertation argues that the depositions cannot be fully understood without taking into account Jones' role in them. It shows how the variety of influences in his family background, education, and role in the Church of Ireland greatly influenced his ability to take on the responsibility of leading the commission. He then shaped those archives, selecting and editing them into a record of Catholic guilt despite the diversity of evidence they contained that showed deep connections between all communities living in Ireland, Catholic and Protestant, as well as Scottish, English and native Gaelic Irish.
For much of his career Jones returned to these original depositions, wielding them in the service of a developing Irish Protestant interest. He presented the evidence to the parliament in London as the English Civil Wars were beginning. After the execution of Charles I, under Oliver Cromwell, he again marshalled evidence for parliament under very different circumstances. The goal was always the same, to increase the amount of land controlled by the Protestants of Ireland. Later, he even contributed his relentless anti-Catholic viewpoint to the debate over the English Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot of the 1670s. Adapting to the constantly changing world of seventeenth-century Ireland, Jones was a central figure in radically different political regimes, first as an Old English Royalist, then a chief intelligence gatherer (scoutmaster general) for Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army, and then as a privy council member in the Irish Restoration government under Charles II.
Throughout his career Jones also displayed a knowledge of the Irish that was perhaps unparalleled among his class, repeatedly advocating for the conversion of the natives to reformed Christianity in their vernacular. He has been remembered as an early supporter of the Irish language, though as this work shows he was more interested in its use to convert and control the Gaelic Irish than to preserve their culture. This dissertation argues that his life's work on the depositions made him the first and most influential contributor to their depiction of the Catholic Irish as unrepentant villains in the 1641 Rebellion. This dissertation focuses on how his family connections, his early training as a humanist, and his political involvement in Ireland prepared him to collect, shape, and deploy the 1641 Depositions.
Recommended Citation
Dolan, Phelim, "Henry Jones and the 1641 Depositions: Shaping a Crucial Record of Early Modern Ireland" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6188
