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Tag Archives: Henry Cromwell


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Charles II Proclaimed King of Ireland

charles-iiKing Charles II is proclaimed king in Dublin on May 14, 1660, six days after London, thus ending Oliver Cromwell’s reign as Lord Protector and beginning a brief and limited Catholic Restoration.

The Restoration of the monarchy begins in 1660. The Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland (1649–60) result from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms but collapse in 1659. Politicians such as General George Monck try to ensure a peaceful transition of government from the “Commonwealth” republic back to monarchy. From May 1, 1660 the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies are all restored under King Charles II. The term Restoration may apply both to the actual event by which the monarchy was restored, and to the period immediately before and after the event.

With the collapse of The Protectorate in England during May 1659 the republic which had been forced upon Ireland by Oliver Cromwell quickly begins to unravel.

Royalists plan an uprising in Ireland and seek to turn Henry Cromwell and Lord Broghill, who is in contact with the King’s court in the summer of 1659, towards the cause but the plan comes to aught. Henry Cromwell leaves Ireland in June 1659. Broghill shows reluctance to declare for the King, but nevertheless republicans are suspicious of him following George Booth‘s revolt in England in 1659.

Sir Theophilus Jones, a former soldier under Charles I of Ireland and governor of Dublin during the republic, seizes Dublin Castle with a group of officers and declares for Parliament. Acting in Charles II’s interest, Sir Charles Coote seizes Galway while Lord Broghill holds firm in Munster. On January 9, 1660 a council of officers declare Edmund Ludlow a traitor and he flees to England. The regicide Hardress Waller re-takes Dublin Castle in February 1660 but with little support he surrenders to Sir Charles Coote. Waller along with fellow regicide John Cook is arrested and sent to England. The officers in Dublin support General Monck.

The army is purged of radicals and a Convention Parliament is called. Coote seeks to move the Convention Parliament towards restoration, but his rival Broghill does not openly declare for the King until May 1660.

In February 1660 Coote sends a representative to King Charles II in the Netherlands and invites him to make an attempt on Ireland, but the King regards it as inexpedient to try to reclaim Ireland before England. At the same time Broghill sends his brother to invite the King to land at Cork. In March 1660 a document is published asking for the King’s return, “begged for his forgiveness, but stipulated for a general indemnity and the payment of army arrears.”

Following events in England, Charles is proclaimed King of Ireland in Dublin on May 14 without any dissent. The Irish Royal Army is reestablished.

After 1660, the commonwealth parliamentary union is treated as null and void. As in England the republic is deemed constitutionally never to have occurred. The Convention Parliament is dissolved by Charles II in January 1661, and he summons his first parliament in Ireland in May 1661.

(Pictured: Charles II in Garter robes by John Michael Wright or studio, c. 1660–1665)


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Birth of John Stearne, Founder of Irish College of Physicians

john-stearneJohn Stearne, Irish academic and founder of the Irish College of Physicians, is born at Ardbraccan, County Meath, on November 26, 1624.

At the time of Stearne’s birth, his grand-uncle, James Ussher, is Bishop of Meath. His father, John Stearne of Cambridge, who settled in County Down and married Mabel Bermingham, a niece of Ussher, is remote relation of Archbishop Richard Sterne.

Stearne enters Trinity College, Dublin at the age of fifteen in 1639, and obtains a scholarship in 1641. On the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Stearne leaves for England, and in 1643 goes to Cambridge, where he studies medicine at Sidney Sussex College, and collects material for his first work, Animi Medela. He remains at Cambridge about seven years, and then spends some time at Oxford, where he is welcomed by Seth Ward, then fellow of Wadham College. He is elected a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin in 1643, a position from which he is ejected by order of the Rump Parliament. Upon his return to Ireland in 1651 he is restored to his fellowship by Henry Cromwell, with whom he is on good terms, and to whom he dedicates one of his books.

In 1656 Stearne is appointed the first Hebrew lecturer in Trinity College, Dublin, receiving the degree of M.D. in 1658, and that of LL.D. in 1660. In 1659 he resigns his fellowship but is appointed to a senior fellowship in 1660, after the Restoration, receiving a dispensation from the statutes of the university respecting celibacy. He becomes in the same year professor of law. During his tenure of these various offices, Stearne practises as a physician in Dublin, obtaining special permission to reside outside the walls of the college.

Stearne is best known as the founder of the Irish College of Physicians. In 1660 he proposes to the university that Trinity Hall, situated in Back Lane, Dublin, then affiliated to the university, of which he has been constituted president in 1654, should be a college of physicians. The arrangement is sanctioned, and Stearne, on the nomination of the provost and senior fellows of Trinity College, in whom the appointment is vested, becomes its first president. No students are to be admitted who do not belong to Trinity College.

In 1662 Stearne is appointed for life professor of medicine in the university. In 1667 a charter is granted to the College of Physicians, under which a governing body of fourteen fellows is constituted, of whom Sir William Petty is one, with Stearne at their head as president for life.

Stearne dies in Dublin on November 18, 1669, and is buried, by his own request, in the chapel of Trinity College, where his epitaph, by his friend Henry Dodwell the elder, describes him as Philosophus, Medicus, summusque Theologus idem.


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Death of Poet Laureate Nahum Tate

nahum-tateNahum Tate, Irish poet, hymnist, and lyricist, who becomes Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1692,  dies on July 30, 1715. Tate is best known for The History of King Lear, his 1681 adaptation of William Shakespeare‘s King Lear.

Tate is born in Dublin in 1652 and comes from a family of Puritan clergymen. He is the son of Faithful Teate, an Irish clergyman who was rector of Castleterra, Ballyhaise, until his house is burned and his family attacked after he passes on information to the government about plans for the Irish Rebellion of 1641. After living at the provost’s lodgings in Trinity College, Dublin, Faithful Teate moves to England. He becomes the incumbent at East Greenwich around 1650, and “preacher of the gospel” at Sudbury from 1654 to 1658 before returning to Dublin by 1660. He publishes a poem on the Trinity entitled Ter Tria, as well as some sermons, two of which he dedicates to Oliver and Henry Cromwell.

Nahum Teate follows his father to Trinity College, Dublin in 1668, and graduates BA in 1672. By 1676 he moves to London and is writing for a living. He publishes a volume of poems in London in 1677 and becomes a regular writer for the stage. He also adopts the spelling Tate, which remains until his death.

Tate then turns to make a series of adaptations from Elizabethan dramas. His version of William Shakespeare’s Richard II alters the names of the characters and changes the text so that every scene, to use his own words, is “full of respect to Majesty and the dignity of courts.” In spite of these precautions The Sicilian Usurper (1681), as his rewrite is called, is suppressed on the third performance on account of a possible political interpretation.

In 1682, Tate collaborates with John Dryden to complete the second half of his epic poem Absalom and Achitophel. Tate also writes the libretto for Henry Purcell‘s opera Dido and Aeneas, which is given its first known performance in 1689. Tate’s name is also connected with the famous New Version of the Psalms of David (1696), for which he collaborates with Nicholas Brady.

Nahum Tate dies in Southwark, London, England, on July 30, 1715 and is buried at St. George Southwark on August 1, 1715.