I

Until recently little attention has been paid to the study of sexual violence in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Nicholas Canny and Mary O’Dowd have discussed the reasons for the paucity of evidence for rape in the witness testimonies of the 1641 Depositions, and the meanings of some forms of sexual violence in the Rebellion have been touched upon briefly elsewhere, though these studies have tended to focus on the English pamphlet literature concerned with those events.Footnote ³ O’Dowd has done much to advance the study of women in early modern Ireland, publishing work dealing specifically with Irish women and war in the 1640s, but has offered only a passing explanation for the ‘curiously small’ amount of evidence for rape. She suggested that rape was likely to have been more frequent than the depositions might lead one to believe, but that any women who were raped would have exercised reticence in reporting their ordeal, a product of the shame attached to the experience of sexual assault.Footnote ⁴ Indeed Henry Jones, head of the first commission responsible for collecting the Depositions, suggested as a reason for the scarcity of allegations of rape that ‘wickednesse of that nature have commonly not witnessess’.Footnote ⁵ Canny has offered the alternative argument that deponents otherwise so keen to list atrocities they had witnessed would have been unlikely to avoid reporting rape. Canny’s interpretation is that this absence of evidence equates to evidence of absence – that ‘such assaults did not take place’.Footnote ⁶ Furthermore, Canny has suggested that the restraining influence of Catholic clergy and the seriousness of the crime of rape within the Catholic community may account for the paucity of reports of rape, and because the act of stripping, so prevalent in the experience of the settler community, may have been considered even more humiliating than rape.Footnote ⁷

Several recent studies have attempted to deal directly with violence against women in the Rebellion. Naomi McAreavey has argued for the complexly gendered nature of female experiences of the rising, reading the depositions as ‘literature of trauma’.Footnote ⁸ In her honest attempt to bridge the gap between a narrative and a literary methodological approach to the Depositions, McAreavey has admitted that her approach has allowed her to discover the truth about deponents’ experiences as opposed to the ‘objective facts’ of the rising.Footnote ⁹ Miranda Chaytor has recently produced an article on narratives of rape in seventeenth-century England, but has favoured a literary–psychological approach, rendering it problematic as a piece of historical writing.Footnote ¹⁰ Diane Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm have compared the evidence for sexual violence in the Depositions with the many reports of such published in the English pamphlet literature of the period.Footnote ¹¹ Though their work shares many of the same aims as this study, its value for students of the 1641 Rebellion is limited, because whilst they intended to explain ‘the anomaly of the low numbers [of rapes] reported in the survivors’ depositions’ when compared to reports in the English press, they failed to acknowledge the highly dubious nature of the latter.Footnote ¹² This study offers a thorough analysis of the relevant 1641 Depositions, the body of evidence on which conclusions regarding the prevalence of rape needs to be based.Footnote ¹³

More generally, feminist historians have produced a considerable amount of work on the experience of rape and its meaning in the history of the British Isles, and some have been heavily influenced by the work of the pioneer feminist historian Susan Brownmiller, who famously argued that rape was and still is a weapon used by all men to keep all women in a state of fear.Footnote ¹⁴ These writers share an approach to the history from the starting point that, due to the high rates of rape in modern surveys, it is ‘no longer possible to consider the historical data as in any way reflecting the real incidence of sexual violence’.Footnote ¹⁵

The theory and methodological approach behind this study constitutes an attempt to guard against this very presumption, that rape must have been more common than the evidence for it would suggest. Firstly, a cross-cultural analysis by the anthropologist Peggy Sanday has demonstrated that certain societies are verifiably more ‘rape-prone’, and some notably ‘rape-free’.Footnote ¹⁶ Secondly and more pertinently, Roy Porter has warned against the tendency to universalise from a polemical twenty-first century perspective, and has criticised the presumption that the sexual dynamics of history can reveal truths about rape ‘that are trans-historical, facts of nature or biology’.Footnote ¹⁷

Garthine Walker has been similarly critical of the unhistorical tendencies present in the literary-psychological approach of Chaytor and others. In her scholarly study of sexual violence in early modern England, Walker has argued that interpreting ‘the narrative framework of early modern accounts of rape as if the experience of rape is self-evidently similar to our own serves, unhelpfully, to reproduce rape as a naturalised, ahistorical category’.Footnote ¹⁸ Walker has rightly dismissed Chaytor’s work as neither ‘theorised nor historicised’, criticising its reliance on the ‘self-confirming assumptions of psychoanalytic theory’ which presupposes that the repression of traumatic memories defies all boundaries of time and culture. This study will attempt to historicise rape in the 1641 Rebellion rather than approaching it as an ahistorical phenomenon.

II

In December 1641 the Dublin government commissioned a group of Church of Ireland clergymen to collect ‘depositions’, witness statements concerning the events of the Rebellion. These statements were collected by a series of different commissions over the next few years, and a set of judicial interrogations were collected in the early 1650s. Collectively this material, known as the 1641 Depositions, amounts to around 8,000 statements, examinations and associated materials. Though the first commission was originally instructed to record information about robbery and spoils, after 18 January 1642 its mandate was widened to solicit all information about the rebels’ activity and future intentions, constituting what was essentially a welcoming approach to even the most unfounded of rumours.Footnote ¹⁹ As Marie-Louise Coolahan has explained, this function ‘mitigated against editorial indifference, rather urging a copious approach’.Footnote ²⁰ In this sense Hall and Malcolm have failed to appreciate the driving factors behind the collection of information for two reasons. Firstly, in their attempt to explain what they deem to be the low levels of rape reported to the commissioners, they have argued that the various legal frameworks which collided at the onset of the Rebellion lowered rape victims’ expectations of a prosecution in a court to the extent that they chose not to report the rape at all. They have also presumed that rumours of rape must have been widely circulated, without having been reported.Footnote ²¹ Secondly, in addressing what they judge to be the ‘anomaly’ of the low number of reported rapes they have advanced the argument that rapes were only reported to the commissioners after the victim’s story had been scrutinised and then accepted by her community.Footnote ²² On the contrary, the willingness of commissioners to hear and record even the most unfounded of rumours would have made the idea of community scrutiny unnecessary.

The methods employed by the commissioners to solicit the information of deponents share similarities with those of the English courts. Martyn Bennett has highlighted the several ways in which the Depositions are very similar to the evidence ‘taken by commissioners for oyer and terminer, the panels of judges set up to hear and determine important incidents such as the English midland riots of 1607’.Footnote ²³ Coolahan has most recently explained the process by which the Depositions were created. She has emphasised that the Depositions were official documents created in a formal legal setting, in the presence of commissioners intent on the collection of as much information as possible about the crimes committed by the rebels, their motives, and their intentions. Those who testified were in no doubt as to the seriousness of this project: they had to swear an oath on the Bible that all the information they gave was truthful and accurate. Deponents dictated their account orally, and a transcript was then read back to the deponent for their approval, all of which was witnessed by two commissioners who then co-signed the document. Though only the deponents’ answers were recorded, it is clear that deponents’ testimonies were directed by the commissioners in the form of specific questions in a standardised sequence. The Depositions are full of legalistic formulae, no doubt the addition of the clerks, which also indicate the points at which new questions were put to the deponents. Thus, though encouraged to elucidate their experiences, deponents were not permitted to verbalise an uninhibited stream of consciousness, and there is wide variation in the extent to which depositions included elaborate narratives of cruelty, suffering and loss, or alternatively a bare-bones inventory of property stolen or destroyed.Footnote ²⁴

Chaytor has explained the difference between ‘examinations’ and ‘informations’ as recorded in English courts in the seventeenth century. The former were concise, coherent testimonies given by defendants to a set sequence of questions, confined to the legally relevant facts, and most likely the summaries of an interrogation conducted by legal authorities. By contrast, the latter were testimonies of victims of the alleged crime, and were ‘expressed in a language which bears in its syntax and rhythms, hesitations and digressions the marks of ordinary speech’.Footnote ²⁵ The Depositions do not conform fully to either of these typical narrative structures. As Coolahan has explained, compared to the evidence from English courts, the Depositions show an unusual combination of interrogation and freedom of speech. The deponents did not have to defend themselves or the stories they told, and were able to furnish their answers with extra detail to varying degrees, but they were ultimately confined by the questions they were asked. We can only presume that the varying levels of elaboration and emotion that can be found in the Depositions were the result of some deponents having more or less information to convey, opinions to express, or insistence on being heard. The willingness of a particular commissioner to indulge a deponent’s narrative may also have been a factor. For all their similarities with testimonies from the English legal system, the Depositions are a unique type of legal document.

The specifics of these methods and structures have important implications for the reading of the Depositions: whilst deponents were not permitted to indulge themselves in an unrestricted narrative, there was ample time to expand on their experiences and they were encouraged to do so, in a formal dialogue where truthfulness and scrupulousness were guaranteed in the format and the formality of the occasion.

III

Rape in early modern law was regarded as a very serious crime, worthy of the highest punishment.Footnote ²⁶ What are less simple to explain are the various cultural meanings and attitudes attached to rape in the early modern British Isles. To understand the significance of rape in the 1641 Rebellion, or in any war of the period, we have first to attempt to answer a crucial question: what did rape mean for the people whose lives it affected?

Hall and Malcolm among others have argued that in the mid-seventeenth century, rape was conceived – culturally, if not legally – as a property crime against the raped woman’s father or husband, the theft of a lucrative commodity and the repository of a woman’s honour: her virginity, or her chastity. Chaytor has argued that, despite the law pertaining equally to women regardless of status, the reason a widow did not bring a case of rape to the authorities was because, as a feme sole, she would not have considered any theft to have taken place.Footnote ²⁷ However, these assumptions do not seem to be sufficiently supported by surviving evidence about rape in the early modern British Isles. Bashar has shown that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though convictions were still rare, rape law in its practical operation in the courts focused on the sexual assault of the woman.Footnote ²⁸ An analysis of the structure of the Depositions in general, as well as those which report rape, lends weight to this correction. In the great majority of cases including a report of rape, the mention of the rape occurs in the midst of a narrative of more general information on the activities of rebels, after a formulaic section which details the financial and material losses of the deponent, highlighting the distinction between crimes against property and person, both in the eyes of the commissioners and those of the deponents.

Echoing O’Dowd, McAreavey has argued that the horror of traumatic experiences including rape makes them unspeakable. However, an examination of the different social contexts in which rape was discussed reveals a much more complex picture of the restrictions of modesty, and the willingness and ability of women to talk about rape. Most narratives of rape in the early modern British Isles survive within the legal testimonies of plaintiffs, and as such, the way in which rape was represented was subject to the ‘constraints, demands, conventions, and the inherent values of rape law’.Footnote ²⁹ There was a legal disincentive for a plaintiff to graphically describe an experience of rape. Any description of the physical act of penetration framed the rape as a sexually motivated violation, as opposed to an act of violence. Herein lay a ‘wretched paradox’: due to the way in which female consent was conceived in legal terms, and the gendered conceptualisation and language of consensual sex, the assertion of penetration implied submission to the will of the rapist – that very submission indicating consent.Footnote ³⁰ Thus the practicalities of the court case encouraged victims of rape to use non-sexual language to convince the court that they had been violated: evidence which proved or disproved female consent was the crux of the matter.Footnote ³¹ The Depositions, as legal documents themselves, must be considered with this in mind, as this could account for the often passing mention of the act of rape or attempted rape in the Depositions where it is mentioned, despite the relative abundance of other detailed information on the context of the incident and the identities of those involved.

Female modesty also imposed restrictions on what a woman described to a courtroom dominated by men, restrictions which may well indicate how difficult it may have been for a woman to speak about a rape at all. In her study of sexual knowledge in early modern England Patricia Crawford cites the example of Ann Barnes, who in 1661 complained that she was thrown to the ground by Nicholas Ames. She refused to describe what happened next, stating that ‘modesty does inforce me to forbeare the relacon of his unruyle behaviour’.Footnote ³² As Steve Hindle has demonstrated with the case of Margaret Knowsley, whom a preacher attempted to rape, even when such an accusation was commonly believed by a community, it could still be shameful to talk about it, and the victim could sometimes expect verbal and physical abuse for making her allegation public.Footnote ³³ Women did, however, describe some of the physical details of rape, when it was relevant. Though uncommon, Walker has offered several examples of women using their own informal vocabulary to describe their ordeal. Thirteen-year-old Margaret Hesketh claimed that John Wolfe ‘pulled out his privy member and putt it into my body’; Jane Moore, a married woman, claimed that Thomas Bowman ‘did enter into my body by mere strength’; and the teenager Sarah Kempe said that Joshua Taylor ‘did do me’.Footnote ³⁴ At the very least, testimonies such as these show that contrary to Chaytor, there were definitely some ‘words for the rape’s reality’.Footnote ³⁵

The type of rape narrative which has been discussed so far was delivered in the male-dominated environment of the court. As Crawford and Mendelson have argued, women were much more frank and willing to talk about rape, and bodily matters generally, when the audience was exclusively female, and there was less need to adapt their language to ‘collective notions of feminine modesty’.Footnote ³⁶ Crawford has explained that though any modest woman, whether married or not, had to be very careful about what she said in mixed company, in their own company women were to some extent freed from the self-restrictions on their conversation with men.Footnote ³⁷ This exclusion of men from the intimate language of rape constituted what Walker has argued was a ‘women’s culture of shared knowledge’.Footnote ³⁸

There is also the issue of the legal process by which women’s experiences of rape were recounted and recorded by the court and its clerks. Chaytor has suggested that what may have been a well-rehearsed story of the rape was left relatively unchanged by the clerks who recorded it, after the Justice of the Peace had heard the story and decided there was a case to be heard. With the exception of clarifications and legal formulae, clerks wrote at the dictation of the plaintiff, neither changing nor omitting anything.Footnote ³⁹ Walker has expressed the same sentiment, suggesting that though ‘clerks who transcribed depositions might have substituted stock legal phrases for more colloquial expressions’, both types of language were interchangeable, and ‘in either case, the weight given to the sexual nature of the episode in a narrative was the woman’s own’.Footnote ⁴⁰

When reading the accounts of rape in the Depositions, these considerations must be kept in mind. Given the restrictions of modesty and the bias of the legal system against victims of rape, the very existence of these reports testifies to their truthfulness and to the accuracy of the deposition to the original narrative of the victim. Given the fact that early modern women did indeed have the language to report rape in a variety of contexts, we can also be confident that the reports of rape made to commissioners on behalf of victims are by no means less truthful or reliable in their own right where it is clear, as in these cases, that a woman has confided in another person who has reported the rape on her behalf, whether it be with her assent, or because the victim has died. It is quite possible that some women were raped without witnesses, and then murdered, and that some women chose not to report the rape to anyone. However the different means by which a victim could have her story told and heard suggest that the reports of rape from the Depositions are not merely a small fraction of a more widespread but unreported phenomenon.

IV

There are a host of questions that must be asked of those depositions that report rapes or attempted rapes. Each case deserves close examination, and as far as possible this shall be carried out thematically, so as to glean as many conclusions about the particular aspects of the rape narratives as possible. These conclusions will also be judged against those advanced in other studies of rape in the Depositions, as well as the evidence for rape in England and elsewhere.

Nine deponents reported rape to the commissioners. Seven of these were men, and two were widows who had lost their husbands during the Rebellion. Additionally, four deponents reported attempted rapes (two of whom reported the same incident), and a further deponent reported that rebels had threatened his daughters with rape. As well as this there is one deposition given to a Scottish church session in 1642, in which an Irish refugee reported that she had been raped by Irish rebels. These deponents show an interesting range of occupation and social status. They named themselves as a gentleman, farmer, carpenter, tanner, miller, rector, saddler or merchant, and in one case – the examination of Samson Moore – an occupation was not given. The widows’ husbands were named as a gentleman and an esquire. Their relationship, or lack thereof, to the rape victim is crucial. Of the nine reports of rape the deponent either stated the rape victim’s name – as in eight of the Depositions – or named her as a servant in their household. In five of the cases in which the threat or attempt at sexual violence took place, the victim was either a direct relative of the deponent – as in two depositions – or was or had been a member of the deponent’s household.

Gilbert Pemberton, in a relatively short deposition on behalf of his niece Elizabeth Powell and her late husband, reported that in October 1641 the latter two had been robbed and imprisoned by Phelim O’Neill and his soldiers after they had taken the town of Armagh, and that ‘as he hath credibly heard, his said niece being a pretty woman they tooke to themselues to keepe and to use or rather abuse her as a whore’. He then stated his belief that her husband had probably been killed by this time, and it is quite plausible that Elizabeth survived at least as long as was necessary to recount this to Pemberton or an intermediary. Either way, there is little reason to believe this report was false.Footnote ⁴¹ In the joint deposition of Christian Stanhawe and Owen Frankland was reported the following incident. From late October 1641 onwards, a group of rebels had set a guard of one hundred men on the house of these deponents, and over several nights they ransacked the property of all its valuables and weapons. Frankland also reported that certain armed rebels had on several occasions entered the chambers of the female servants and ‘attempted their chastities’, threatening to ‘pistoll them if they wold not consent’. Frankland clearly couldn’t be sure of exactly what happened on such occasions, but later made it clear to the commissioners that he believed some of the servants had been raped.Footnote ⁴² Stanhawe did not mention rape, but considering the proximity of the deponents during their several months of confinement together, and the fact that they chose to depose together and corroborate the evidence of the other, it seems likely that one of them had heard the rape story from one of their servant girls, the likelihood that the victim/s in this case were willing to convey their allegations to their employers, with an expectation of being heard and believed.

Both John Stibbs of County Longford, and Suzan Steele separately reported that a tenant of Oliver Fitzgerald – one of the rebels whom Stibbs listed as being active in his local area – had committed ‘a rape upon the body of Sarah Margarett Adgor’, a daughter of one of their neighbours.Footnote ⁴³ The corroboration of this allegation in Suzan Steele’s deposition greatly increases its credibility. Harrowingly, Stibbs makes it clear that this rape occurred over two weeks before the Adgor family were finally turned out of their home by a local band of rebels, led by one Oliver Fitzgerald, the landlord of the rapist in question, Hubert Farrell. These deponents each referred to the families of the other, and they were clearly well acquainted, and part of the same small community.Footnote ⁴⁴ Stibbs and Steele also reported that in February 1642 ‘Edmund duff fferrall [Farrell] did cutt and greivously wound one Katherin Robinson and would have ravished her, but that twoe of his owne company rescowed her from him and saved her for that time’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Steele’s version also includes the name of the rebel who rescued Robinson.Footnote ⁴⁶ The wording of both depositions is similar enough to be sure that Steele and Stibbs had communicated their stories to one another, and for a reasonable degree of confidence that the two incidents they described had indeed occurred. These depositions also make it clear that there was some significant degree of open communication about such crimes, and that despite the horror of their experiences, the victims had been able to convey an initial narrative of these events, in which they named their attackers. For better or worse, in this case these narratives were shared amongst a close-knit set of neighbours, long before any opportunity appeared to report these crimes to legal authority.

The rape of Mary, a servant girl living in Tuam, County Galway, is highly believable. Christopher Cooe recounted how at around the beginning of January 1642, Mary had confessed to him and his wife that whilst working in the house of another merchant in the town, ‘a rebel … one Lieutenant Bourk [Bourke]’ had ‘forceibly ravished her, and to prevent her crying out one of his souldjers thrust a napkin into her mowth and held her fast by the haire of her head till the wicked act was performed’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Both Mary’s employer and her attacker are untraceable, though a captain from the same area, named Richard Bourke, was reported in many depositions for his cruel and murderous behaviour. Mary identified her attacker, and the time and physical setting in which the rape occurred, and that information fits with the chronology of the Rebellion and its chief actors in Tuam. As with the case in the depositions of Steele and Stibbs, whilst Mary the servant girl may not have been able or willing to tell her own story to the commissioners, she had clearly trusted her employers enough to recount her ordeal in considerable detail, given the unimaginable level of distress that the conversation must have caused her.

In some cases there is little need to establish any facts beyond the sworn testimony of the deponents. For instance, Occar Butts, a gentleman from County Wexford, reported that in November 1641 his home was broken into and his family robbed and then stripped of their clothes. The rebels, several of whom Butts named, then threatened to rape some of his children. There is very little reason to believe that this incident did not occur.Footnote ⁴⁸ William Dynes, a carpenter from Kildare, reported that John and Elizabeth Bird, a couple with whom Dynes used to live, were ‘stript by the rebels [who] … would have ravished’ Elizabeth Bird were it not for the objections of some of their company.Footnote ⁴⁹ Though it is unclear as to whether he witnessed this incident himself, at the very least we can be confident he was told about this attempted rape by the Birds themselves. A farmer, and English Catholic, in County Offaly named Raph Walmisley, who at the time shared his village with an Irish rebel camp, recounted that during Lent of 1642, a friar named Father John, accompanied by an Irish soldier, came to the deponent’s house at night-time, and demanded that he be lodged for the night. Walmisley recounted how the friar had attempted to rape Mary Redferne, the maid who had escorted him to his room, whilst threatening her with a knife. Luckily, Walmisley’s wife intervened: the friar fell into a drunken sleep, and left the next morning.Footnote ⁵⁰

Samson Moore, who had been captured with his family on their way to Cork and sent back to their home in the west of the county, reported that he had heard along the way of the murder of Robert Scott and his wife, and the rape and murder of two of the three Scott daughters by a rebel named ‘William Morphee’ [Murphy], ‘the cheife actor’ in the gruesome tale, who had previously sheltered the vulnerable Scott family as refugees in his own house, during the time at which Gerrat Barry’s army was encamped to the south-west of Cork city.Footnote ⁵¹ Moore knew the Scotts, as he claimed to have recognised their clothes, worn on the backs of the alleged killer and his family. However the means by which Moore came by this information are far from clear. Other deponents from Cork corroborate the murders though none mention any sexual violence.Footnote ⁵² Thus this rape story occupies a grey area in the spectrum of credibility. We have named victims, known to the deponent, and a named perpetrator, though we cannot presume that the means by which the deponent was informed were reliable. There is not enough evidence for these allegations of rape to safely say that they occurred. George Burne, a miller from County Tyrone, reported the rape of a woman by several rebels in the village of Donaghmore, less than three miles from his home, and described how her husband, Mr Allen, was made to watch the assault before they were both murdered.Footnote ⁵³ Burne must have known the Allens, but did not name the rapists, or the company from which they came, and corroboration for his claim is lacking.

Other reports of rape are less credible, though there is no reason to presume they are false. Andrew Adaire of County Mayo, who had been taken by the rebels and imprisoned in Sligo for three months, reported that ‘seuerall of the rebells of Phelim O’Dowles company’ raped the wife of Sam Barber, the ‘register of Elfin’ [Elphin].Footnote ⁵⁴ No record exists of anyone surnamed Barber in or around Elphin in County Roscommon. It seems this was a story recounted to Adaire, perhaps by another prisoner, perhaps by a rebel, but there is no way of showing beyond reasonable doubt that this rape had actually happened. Similarly, William Collis, a saddler from the town of Kildare who was imprisoned for some time by rebels there, repeated the story told to him by his captors of how Elizabeth Woods had been raped by seven of those rebels in succession.Footnote ⁵⁵ With no further corroboration, this report cannot be taken as credible evidence that a group of Irish rebels had committed multiple perpetrator rape of an English woman at Kildare.

There is only one self-report by a likely victim of rape in the 1641 Rebellion. Anne Griffith, who had escaped from Killyleagh in County Down to Scotland as many refugees had done, petitioned the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1642 indicating that she had been raped by unnamed Irish rebels, and asked for financial assistance. In her petition she stated that she had been ‘inhumanely used’ by rebels, and whilst this might seem to create an uncomfortable level of doubt, the similarity of language when compared to other reports of rape in the Depositions makes it very likely that she was reporting a rape.Footnote ⁵⁶ There is no mention of Griffith or her late husband in the depositions, however the fact that she reported the rape herself means we can cautiously presume she was telling the truth, despite the lack of corroborating evidence.

We can conclude at this point that at least five women were raped – perhaps several more, depending on the number of servants raped in the Stanhawe household. As well as this, we can also safely say that the three reports of attempted rape are credible, as is Occar Butts’s claim that his two daughters were threatened with rape. The other reports show varying, but ultimately deficient degrees of credibility, and though none of them are unbelievable, they are all too problematic to be considered reliable. Only two reports named rape victims as servant girls, and in only one of the three attempted rapes was the victim named as a servant. Of the rest for whom any information regarding status exists, all were named as the wives, widows or daughters of men with respectable professions. Whilst the few surviving records from seventeenth-century England show that most of the women who brought charges of rape were poor, and possessed less social power than the men they accused, these findings negate O’Dowd’s argument that reports of rape in the Rebellion ‘usually relate to servant girls’, and that a reticence to report rape ‘was exercised by the deponents, particularly if the victim was still alive or of a high social standing’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Furthermore, and contrary to some of the assertions made in the literature mentioned above, these depositions make it clear that most of the victims clearly did have a language with which to express their experience of rape, and that they must have reported their ordeals to members of their community, long before and independent of any hope of legal redress. These stories were not smothered, nor were they confined to a relatively non-judgemental sphere of exclusively female conversation, but instead were told and retold to parents, neighbours, employers, friends, with the expectation that they would be believed. At least one deponent was brave enough to recount her ordeal in the most public and intimidating of settings, and where victims could not or would not do the same, members of their communities, accepting their story without any evidence of community scrutiny, spoke on their behalf.

Canny has skilfully outlined the complex and varying motivations of those who participated in the insurrection as it spread south from Ulster in the closing months of 1641, and has identified the different variables which determined the characteristics of the Rebellion in each of the four provinces. What is clear is that robbery, expulsion, humiliation and murder against the settler community generally stemmed from pre-existing and often longstanding grievances over the loss of land and status to the settlers, indebtedness, a virulent anti-Englishness, and a wider and arguably more vitriolic animosity towards the presence of Protestants and Protestantism in Ireland, fanned by the counter-reformation preaching of Catholic clergy. Canny has also argued that the animosity against Protestants is best conveyed by the stripping of victims, ‘rites of violence against Protestant objects and bodies, and the role played by women and children in the disturbances’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Certainly the common pattern of stripping as explained in the Depositions seems to stem from the desire to humiliate, degrade and dehumanise, and rape in the Rebellion should certainly be seen in the arguably psycho-sexual context of stripping.Footnote ⁵⁹ There are also examples of the sexualised display of Protestant corpses by rebels, suggesting an element of sexual sadism.Footnote ⁶⁰ The great extent to which acts of violence, degradation and humiliation were understood and justified by insurgents in terms of religious purifications has been made clear by Brian Mac Cuarta, who has interpreted commonly reported acts of expulsion, optional or forced conversion, and the disinterment and degradation of bodies as examples of ritualised purification rites, intended to purge the country of the heresy of Protestantism.Footnote ⁶¹

Given these wider motivations and justifications for their actions, how should the crimes of rape committed by rebels be interpreted? Answers to this question are made difficult by the small amount of evidence regarding rape in the Rebellion, and the care that must be exercised to avoid the creation of patterns where there are none. The reports of rape in the Depositions form an unclear picture, as in a few cases the victims of rape or attempted rape were also physically assaulted, or stripped of their clothes, or murdered afterwards, whereas in other cases the rape appears to have occurred in private settings, where the rapist had clearly taken advantage of the physical isolation of the victim, or their age or social status. In these cases, we can discount the motivation of (immediate) public humiliation. The depositions in question give us no insight into the specific motivations behind each case from the perspective of the rapists themselves, and whilst the religion of the settlers is often a clear reason for their persecution, there is nothing to suggest that these rapes were any more or less the product of anti-Protestantism than any other act of violence. In fact, in the case of the attempted rape of Elizabeth Bird, the incident had occurred after she and her husband had ‘turned to masse’, according to their neighbour, adding even more confusion to the motives behind those who, sometimes encouraged by Catholic clergy, gave the option of conversion to their Protestant neighbours.Footnote ⁶²

Indeed, if there is any pattern in the motivations behind these rapists in the Rebellion, it is that of opportunism. Of all of the reports of rape or attempted rape in the Depositions, we can be confident that at least five of them occurred in settings where the victim was alone with the rapist, or else in the company of another potential victim, and that in at least three of these cases the victims were servant girls, and thus possibly children. That said, the wider motivations at work during the insurrection should not be discounted, as these rapes did not happen in isolation. Most of these attacks were to greater or lesser degrees extensions of physical violence against settlers, which were in turn the products of longstanding economic and social grievances, and a well-rooted animosity to Protestantism. However, the evidence from the Depositions precludes any definite answer regarding the rebels’ motivations for rape in particular, and by all accounts opportunism was the only identifiably prevalent factor. We are thus left to speculate on the degree to which, at the moment of their crimes, these rapists were motivated by the desire to inflict pain and humiliation, the desire to express empowerment or hatred – religious or otherwise – or sexual desire itself, freed from the usual constraints of social order or likelihood of punishment. Given the fact that the majority of these rapists were known to their victims, and that they often belonged to the same communities, we are also left unsure as to whether some of these attacks were targeted on specific individuals for specific reasons.

The identities of the men who raped or attempted to rape these women are important, because they can help us understand the social contexts of sexual assault in the Rebellion. In the majority of the Depositions, the victims of crimes committed by rebels were able to name at least a few of those responsible. In many depositions, extended lists of these rebels, their inter-relationships and their standing in the local community were provided. This demonstrates the extent to which Protestant settlers were entwined with rebels in the same social fabric before the outbreak of the Rebellion as landlords, tenants, neighbours, and associates. The same relationships are evident between rape victims and their attackers in the Depositions.

Of the fourteen-strong company that ransacked his house and threatened his daughters, Butts was able to name three, two of whom lived within two miles of Butts’s own home.Footnote ⁶³ Burne identified the prominent rebels active in his locality as inhabitants of the same village as Mr Allen, and implies that the same rebels raped and then killed Mrs Allen.Footnote ⁶⁴ Stanhawe named the rebels who had detained her in her home, stating that they were led by three brothers ‘all of Clankan’ [Clancan], an area between the Rivers Bann and Blackwater, just south of Lough Neagh, placing the rebels’ home within two miles of Stanhawe’s address.Footnote ⁶⁵ Though Stibbs and Steele gave only the names of the attackers of Sarah Adgor and Katherin Robinson, Steele did state that the Adgors were her neighbours, and also that the landlord of Adgor’s rapist, Hubert Farrell, lived in her own village. Judging from this evidence, and the many members of the Farrell clan named by both deponents, we can be confident that Adgor was a neighbour of her rapist. Though several deponents from County Longford named the residence of Robinson’s rapist, Edmund Farrell, as Cavan, a village seven miles from Longford town, there is no mention of a Robinson family from Longford anywhere in the Depositions.Footnote ⁶⁶ Though the evidence from other reports of rape would suggest it is likely, we cannot be sure that Robinson belonged to the same community as Farrell.

There seems to be no trace of an Elizabeth Woods of Wexford town, though several pieces of information, taken together, shed more light on Collis’s report. Collis and his wife Rebecca referred to the Woods family of Wexford. Rebecca’s deposition was co-signed by Mary Woods, who in turn deposed that her husband Robert had been murdered by a colonel named Dempsey.Footnote ⁶⁷ Collis also reported that he was imprisoned with Robert by the same rebels who raped Elizabeth Woods, on the night before Robert Woods was killed by Colonel Dempsey.Footnote ⁶⁸ Taken together, all this evidence suggests that the Collis family knew Robert and Mary Woods well, and that both couples probably knew Elizabeth Woods, who in turn was likely to have known her attackers. Mary, the servant girl raped by a Lieutenant Bourke at Tuam, was able to name her attacker. Many depositions refer to rebels surnamed Bourke in County Galway and Tuam in particular, and several refer to a prominent Captain named Richard Bourke who lived four miles south of Tuam.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, the Depositions contain no other reference to a Lieutenant Bourke. That these two were in fact the same man is speculation and cannot be confirmed. The evidence is unclear as to whether the servant Mary Redfearne knew her ungodly attacker, the friar named John. Furthermore there is no mention of him in any other depositions from County Offaly.Footnote ⁷⁰

The family of the Scott girls of County Cork knew and had lived with William Murphy for a substantial period of time, though other deponents who reported the murder of the Scotts suggest that Murphy may have been innocent. Murphy deposed to the commissioners in 1652, claiming that he had agreed to accommodate the Scott family for around seven weeks beginning in early November 1641.Footnote ⁷¹ Murphy claimed they were murdered by a group of five men, including three sharing the name O’Reilly who lived in a nearby village, who had forced the Scott family out of his house. This claim is supported by the man who had previously accommodated the Scotts, along with nine other deponents from central County Cork, almost all of whom named the same men as the culprits.Footnote ⁷² According to one of these deponents, only one of the O’Reillys in question was involved in the Rebellion as a combatant: the rest were not.Footnote ⁷³ Considering that the victims and their attackers lived so close to one another, it is likely that the Scotts knew the O’Reillys who attacked them. What is clear is that Murphy was not directly responsible, though possibly guilty of a terrible betrayal of a desperate family who had placed their trust in him, and that if the two daughters were raped before they were killed, the O’Reillys were culpable.

William Dynes reported that he was robbed by Henry Fitzgerald, who then occupied the castle of the earl of Kildare, and implies that the attempt to rape Elizabeth Bird was made by men in the same company, who would have carried out this crime but for the objections of some in that company. The would-be perpetrators were then saved from the retribution of their peers by the intervention of the earls of Castlehaven and Antrim. According to Dynes, both earls resided three miles from Kildare, for some period during the early months of the Rebellion. No further information exists concerning those responsible for the attempted rape. In some of the reports of rape, the identities of the perpetrators are much less clear. Andrew Adaire, who heard of the rape of Sam Barber’s wife whilst imprisoned in Sligo, named the perpetrators only as ‘Rebells of Phelim o Dowles company’.Footnote ⁷⁴ There is no trace of a rebel leader by that name or its variants in the entire county. Gilbert Pemberton stated that it was Phelim O’Neill and his followers who raped his niece and imprisoned her husband at Armagh, but supplied no further details of the incident. No mention is made of the niece or her husband in all the depositions from Armagh. Ann Griffith similarly gave no indication of the identity of her attackers, or the circumstances in which she was taken captive and her family killed. As with Bird and Pemberton, there is no way of knowing whether or not Griffith knew the men who raped her.

In conclusion, if we include Griffith’s testimony, and presume that only one servant was raped in the Stanhawe household, we can safely say that of the fourteen women who suffered rape, attempted rape or were threatened with rape, seven knew their attackers, and three may well have done. All of the nine deponents who reported rapes knew the men responsible, all of whom, excluding Father John and several of the O’Reilly gang, were rebel soldiers. Three deponents – Gilbert Pemberton, Andrew Adaire, and William Dynes – were able to name the company to which the rapists belonged, but there is no indication that these deponents knew the individual perpetrators in those companies, nor can we be sure that the victims in these reports knew their attackers. What becomes clear then in the study of these depositions is that in many cases, the victim and the deponents who reported the crime knew the attackers, and knew them as neighbours within the same neighbourhood, parish, or town. Harrowingly, we can conclude that the incidents of rape which occurred in the early months of the Rebellion were not perpetrated by opportunistic rebels who, finding themselves far from home, took advantage of the free rein that anonymity and social turmoil afforded to them. Rather, they attacked and raped women with whom they had until recently shared community, and presumably no small degree of mutual trust.

V

Whilst an understanding of rape and its occurrence in a civilian context helps us to understand how women reported and spoke about rape, more specific to this study are the incidents of rape committed by soldiers during wartime, the attempts made to prevent it from happening, and the punishments meted out when it did. To understand the significance of rape as it was recorded in the Depositions, the extent to which rape was ‘the mothers’ milk of militarism’ in early modern warfare must first be investigated.Footnote ⁷⁵

The illegality of rape by soldiers at war was very clear. Rape of a civilian was a capital offence, whilst other sexual offences were to be punished ‘according to the quality of the offence’.Footnote ⁷⁶ According to the articles or ordinances of war, incorporating a ‘formal machinery for enforcement and punishment’, which armies produced and disseminated independently of one another, women, children, clergy and the aged were to be treated as non-combatants and to be left unharmed in all circumstances.Footnote ⁷⁷ The two exceptions to this rule were when any of the above took up arms, or when they happened to reside within a besieged town or fortification which was overcome after quarter had previously been offered but refused. In these circumstances, it was legal to treat such civilians as enemy combatants.Footnote ⁷⁸ When considering the evidence for rape in early modern warfare it is vital to distinguish between the mud-slinging propaganda used to portray enemies as savage, and reports which were relatively less politically biased, or more specific in their detail. Much of the evidence, unfortunately, belongs to the former category. That is not to say that it is certainly unreliable, but rather that the combination of generalised accusation and obvious political bias renders it too suspect to be of any use to the question at hand.

Charles Carlton has highlighted two examples of rape during the First Bishops’ War in Scotland, whilst a few reports from the Thirty Years’ War demonstrate that even if generalised horror stories in the printed press were fabricated, rape did occur during wartime, and that where it was proved to have happened, punishment was meted out according to accepted ordinances of war.Footnote ⁷⁹ The frequency of rape in the English Civil Wars is debatable. Of the combined number of ninety-two soldiers whose trials were recorded in the two sets of civil courts martial papers that survive, only one involved an attempted rape.Footnote ⁸⁰ John Morrill has concluded that compared to other civil wars, acts of atrocity in England at this time were rare. He counted only three cases of rape, attributing the unusually benign nature of the conflict to the fact that both sides ‘spoke the same language and did not regard the other as inhuman malignants’.Footnote ⁸¹ There was certainly no shortage of generalised reports of rape in the pamphlets and newsbooks circulated during the Civil War, however some pamphlets clearly represent more trustworthy accounts of rape, furnished with names and addresses of victims and perpetrators, and dates and locations at which the rape occurred. Examples from Berkshire and Yorkshire and a few others to which a reasonable degree of credibility can be attached demonstrate that rape in the Civil War was rarely reported but not unheard of.Footnote ⁸²

The Irish rebels’ relationship with the accepted articles of war has deep implications for the significance of rape in the Depositions, and is unfortunately far from clear. Micheál Ó Siochrú has shown that by ‘early 1643 the pattern of warfare in Ireland had altered significantly, with the conventional armies on all sides operating largely according to accepted military standards’.Footnote ⁸³ There were no official publications on the laws of war issued by the rebels before the articles created by order of the earl of Castlehaven for the Confederacy in 1643, a fact which renders the existence of accepted rules for military conduct in the ranks of the rebels up until that point much less clear. After all, the violence of 1641 was an insurrection, not, at least initially a war, although Canny has argued that rebel leaders must have put severe sanctions in place for anyone found guilty of rape.Footnote ⁸⁴ Sir Phelim O’Neill responded to allegations that Irish rebels were guilty of many rapes by issuing a petition to the English parliament claiming that any offenders had been, and would continue to be, punished severely.Footnote ⁸⁵ However if Phelim’s cousin Owen Roe O’Neill was to be believed, discipline in the rebel ranks was worryingly lax.Footnote ⁸⁶

There is however one testimony that sheds a great deal of light on this issue. Job Ward, a landowner from County Laois, had been besieged in his home in County Wicklow for four months before finally agreeing to terms of quarter – itself an interesting indication of the extent to which generic rules of engagement were being honoured – and had plenty of information to report about the rebels. Ward reported that during this time he ‘did observe and see certayne articles and statutes touchinge the Church of Rome and other thinges’. He did not comment on who had issued the articles, how they had been conveyed to him, or whether they were widely known or accepted. In his testimony he then recounted what reads very much like an abridged set of the articles of war, with numbered items covering obedience to God, the king and commanding officers, and issues concerning the chain of command and the jurisdiction of church authorities in military affairs, amongst other things. Bizarrely, the fourth item in this list – ‘that none shall force or ravish any woman or mayde’ – was an interlinear addition to the manuscript between the third and fifth ordinances, indicating that this numbering had been altered to accommodate the correction.Footnote ⁸⁷ The significance of this editing of the manuscript remains frustratingly unclear. The rebel articles of war recounted in Ward’s deposition show that by February 1642 at the very latest, long before the Rebellion became a war, there was, at least in some rebel camps, an accepted set of military codes of conduct for Irish rebel soldiers, which included an ordinance against the rape of civilians.

All the rapes and attempted rapes mentioned in this study were reported to have happened between October 1641 and May 1642, well before the establishment of the confederate institutions at Kilkenny in late 1642, and the publication in 1643 of Castlehaven’s official set of ordinances on military discipline and codes of conduct.Footnote ⁸⁸ In an environment where a uniform and accepted code of conduct was non-existent, even if soldiers and their commanders had their own ad hoc arrangements for internal military discipline, evidence from the Depositions reveals the varying standards of conduct to which rebels of different ranks conformed. Several deponents who reported rape revealed their opinions about the level of military discipline displayed by the rebels whom they encountered, and opined that for a soldier of any description to rape was by any standard ungodly and unlawful, and that such an offender ought to be punished. Butts declared that the threatened rape of his children was such as ‘God almightie did not permitt’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Stibbs and Steele qualified their reports of the rape of Adgor to the effect that ‘the offendor was not punist (as he this deponent was credibly informed)’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Two examples suggest that members of the rank and file were willing to intervene to uphold standards of military conduct, at their own risk. Stibbs and Steele claimed that Thomas Duffe was wounded after he prevented Edmund Farrell from raping Robinson, and Dynes stated that Bird was saved from her assailants by men from the same company who, given their way, ‘wold have kild them [the would-be rapists]’.Footnote ⁹¹ But Dynes’s deposition also demonstrates that for all the expectations of civilians, responsibility for the prevention and punishment of rape lay with commanding officers: the earls of Castlehaven and Antrim intervened to protect the felons from any form of summary justice. The truth behind Dynes’s claim that they were also ‘enterteyned’ by the earls remains a mystery, but Dynes certainly perceived the intervention as a travesty of justice.Footnote ⁹²

Less directly, there is some evidence for the indifference of commanding officers as well as rank and file rebels towards rape in the Depositions. Of all the thirteen deponents who reported rape or attempted rape, in only two cases – the rape of Adgor and the attempted rape of Redfearne – was it stated that an individual acting alone was responsible. Though Burne stated that one of the rebels raped Mrs Allen, it was done ‘before her husbands face’ whilst other rebels murdered Mr Allen, suggesting that the others were engaged in a collaborative act of torture.Footnote ⁹³ In the eight other reports of rape in the Depositions, the plural ‘rebels’ is used to identify multiple perpetrators. Whether or not this signifies multiple perpetrator rape, the consent of the group is implied at the very least. The respective deponents make it explicit that Elizabeth Woods experienced multiple perpetrator rape, and that Mary, the servant from Tuam, was restrained by another soldier while Bourk raped her.Footnote ⁹⁴ Only two reports of rape in the Depositions are unclear regarding the number of perpetrators. Stibbs and Steele did not specify whether Thomas Duffe was with Edmund Farrell when the attempt was made, and Frankland did not specify whether separate attempts at the rape of the female servants were made by individuals, or whether these rebels raped in packs. Anne Griffith, for her part, reported that whilst imprisoned by the rebels she was abused by more than one soldier, but did not specify whether or not these were separate incidents. The implications of these facts are harrowing. Of the nine reports of rape in which more than one rebel seems to have been involved, only two show any evidence of a soldier or commanding officer making any attempt to restrain his fellow soldiers. The wider context of rape in contemporaneous wars, and the deponents’ narratives of these events make it clear that deponents had general expectations of the rebels in terms of military conduct, and that in several cases rebels had conviction enough to police the behaviour of their peers and subordinates. Furthermore, at least in certain cases, rebels had codes of conduct which were both comprehensive and respected, as the detailed deposition of Job Ward makes clear. Thus when it occurred, rape occurred despite these conditions, in situations when there was no one willing to restrain the intent of an individual, or more usually, when a group of rebels consented in the act.

There is some evidence from the relevant literature on early modern warfare showing that, when a military authority judged that a soldier had committed rape, punishment was harsh, and designed to send a clear message to would-be rapists, despite the troublesome interpretive dilemma as to whether this evidence of punishment was indicative of the true prevalence of rape. Carlton has commented on the harsh punishments carried out by military authorities in Scotland, arguing that commanders have traditionally punished rape ‘less for the hurt it inflicts on the victims, than for the damage it does to military discipline and civilian relations’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Nevertheless a soldier was lucky to escape death if convicted of rape: there are several examples in the diary of Robert Monro which attest to the severity with which rapists were punished.Footnote ⁹⁶ Heavy punishments served as a warning to other soldiers, and the directives issued at the start of a conflict served to impose order and discipline on a newly mustered army whose knowledge of or full adherence to the articles of war could not be presumed.

There is some evidence in the Depositions of punishment meted out to soldiers found guilty of rape. Moore reported that one of the men involved in the rape of the two Scott girls had been hanged by Lord Muskerry for the crime. Muskerry himself was interrogated by the high court of justice in Dublin in 1653 about his involvement in the Rebellion, and perhaps unsurprisingly he had little to offer concerning rebel outrages in the area. Despite this reluctance, he did report that the murder of the Scott family had occurred in his barony, and named the culprits as ‘the Relyes … [who] were all hanged by this examinants persecution’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Several deponents from County Cork also confirm these claims. One stated that some of the Scotts’ attackers were hanged ‘by the English party’, suggesting a situation in which jurisdictional boundaries between crimes by civilians and soldiers, and between opposing forces, were fluid and blurred.Footnote ⁹⁸ The corroboration of the details of these executions by a variety of different deponents removes any reasonable doubt that they did take place. The question as to whether this level of adherence to military codes of conduct pertaining to rape was commonplace or not remains a frustrating one. However, conservative conclusions can be drawn from the Depositions, if they are understood in the context of early modern warfare, as discussed above. Clearly, in theory as in practice, the punishment for someone found guilty of rape was severe, and this seems to apply to the 1641 Rebellion just as it did to other conflicts of the same period in Scotland, England and around central Europe, all with very broadly similar sectarian characteristics. Furthermore, the rarity of reports of rape from various conflicts during this period, combined with the wealth of opportunity to report such crimes which the Depositions offered to the deponents, and the wealth of detail that they include as a body of evidence, makes it at least likely that the prevalence of rape reported in the Depositions closely reflects the prevalence of rape in the Rebellion. When and where rapes or attempted rapes were interrupted or discovered, culprits were at times prevented from committing these crimes, at times apprehended – and presumably, chastised to some extent – and, at least in the case of one of these reports, convicted and executed. We cannot make any reasonable conclusion as to whether the other rapists mentioned in the Depositions were eventually brought to justice. However, the swift military justice which Lord Muskerry meted out to those who had attacked the Scotts, whether it was as punishment for murder and rape, or murder alone, makes it at least possible that the other rapists discussed in this study were eventually brought to justice, of a sort. Despite evidence for the existence of formalised codes of military conduct in the Rebellion, rape tended to occur when even the most basic ethical standards were collectively ignored.

VI

This study has approached the evidence for rape in the Depositions with the mentality best explained by Porter, that rape, like any other cultural phenomenon, is affected over time by ‘complex configurations of economic, political, domestic and ideological arrangements’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Accordingly, the evidence for rape in the Rebellion has been placed within the historical context of early modern Europe, its wars, its laws, and its cultures.

English legal testimonies show that victims of rape, in the few instances where they reported it, were willing and able to speak about their experiences, even if they chose not to deal directly with the legal system. Despite being restrained by popular notions of modesty, and the legal and exclusively male setting in which they had to testify, both sexes had the vocabulary to talk about the sexual violence of rape, and the words of these legal narratives were largely those of the victims alone. The 1641 Depositions must be seen in this context, as a body of sworn legal testimonies, collected by commissioners intent on soliciting as much information about the Rebellion as possible, however incredible or unreliable it may have seemed. Only one woman reported that she herself had been raped during the Rebellion, and indeed this account does not occur in the Depositions themselves, a fact which could be taken to suggest the lengths to which rapists were willing to go to bury their crimes. However the Depositions make it clear that although some women would not – or could not – report rape in a legal setting, victims of rape in the Rebellion were prepared to confide in their friends, neighbours or employers, and to have their testimony conveyed to the commissioners indirectly.

The laws of war prohibiting rape in early modern European warfare were clear and widely known, and punishments for those who broke these laws were harsh. Despite these deterrents, soldiers occasionally did commit rape. While the Rebellion was not a war in the usual sense, but an insurrection whose main victims were civilians, a study of sexual violence therein must be contextualised with the evidence for rape in the conflicts of early modern Europe. The illegality of rape – by any standard – in the Rebellion was well known, but in these instances disregarded, despite the possibility that the crime might eventually be discovered and punished; as Edward Shorter has reminded us, in such turbulent situations, ‘soldiers, plunderers, and maniacs rush through the rips in the fabric of the social order’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Each of the Depositions containing reports of rape or attempted rape has been subjected to a detailed analysis, and cross-referenced with the testimonies of other deponents to establish as far as possible the veracity of each allegation of rape. Having considered this evidence the following statements can be made. At least five allegations of rape can be believed beyond reasonable doubt. As well as this, in the majority of cases the victim can be presumed to have confided in a deponent with whom they were familiar, and both the deponent and the victim knew the perpetrators as members of their own communities. These incidents of sexual violence can be dated to the last months of 1641 and the early months of 1642, placing them well before the publication of any official code of military conduct governing all Irish rebel forces. Prior to this, civilians and soldiers alike had shown a broad understanding of the universally accepted standards of military conduct and discipline as they pertained to rape, and ad hoc codes of conduct were clearly in place in some areas by the time these crimes took place. However the extent to which rebels were adhering to widely accepted moral codes, as opposed to emerging codes of military conduct, remains unclear. It is also clear that some commanding officers were prepared to punish offenders from their own ranks, and justice could be swift and severe. There was an expectation – both by the settler population and by some more conscientious rebels – that decent standards of military discipline would and should be upheld, and at least some deponents witnessed ethical military conduct. For all these deterrents, and although some rebels were brave in their attempts to intervene, rape occurred during the Rebellion mainly when groups of soldiers collectively disregarded the immorality and illegality of rape.

Henry Jones’s suggestion that ‘wickednesse of that nature have commonly not witnessess’ is more historically plausible an explanation for the low levels of rape in the Rebellion than one based on statistical evidence for rape in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Footnote ¹⁰¹ Indeed, if some rebels were willing to kill for clothes, surely some would have killed to ensure the rape they had committed would never come to light. Jones’s speculation simply cannot be confirmed, but considering the wealth of evidence from the Depositions, unparalleled as they are in the depth and richness of the information they contain about the Rebellion and early modern society more generally, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that rape in the Rebellion was rare, and no less rare than in the major European wars of the seventeenth century.

For all the ways in which the evidence for rape in the Depositions can be contextualised within a study of early modern society and its wars, there are significant limitations to our understanding of rape in the Rebellion, its impact, and its meaning. There is only one extant report of rape by a victim herself, which precludes much insight into the victim’s own perspective on her ordeal. Nor is there much revealed about the Rebellion from the rebels’ point of view, forcing us to deduce their motives and intentions from the testimony of the very people least likely to give an unbiased interpretation. Despite these limitations, the Depositions have much to offer. The recent digitalisation of the Depositions has enabled a comprehensive investigative approach to rape in the Rebellion, a methodology which can be modified and applied to benefit studies of many different aspects of the history of seventeenth-century Ireland.

Ethan Howard Shagan has asked whether historians of the Rebellion should ‘abandon emotion for cool, analytic reason’, and this study has been in part an attempt to achieve that goal.Footnote ¹⁰² This is not to say that we should disregard the human effect of rape in the Rebellion, and the damage done to the lives of those who experienced it, however much we are limited by the lack of information available. With that in mind, the condition of Mary, the servant girl, in the aftermath of her rape is a fitting point at which to end this study. Cooe conveyed her state of mind as follows: ‘Mary … complained and sayd that shee had layn sick upon it for three or fowr dayes and was in such a condition that she thought shee should never bee well nor bee in her right mynd againe the fact was soe fowle & grievous unto her’.Footnote ¹⁰³