Protestant ascendancy

Protestant ascendancy, commonly used to describe the Protestant landed elite that dominated Irish society under the penal laws. The term is also used in relation to the 19th and early 20th centuries, though here the emphasis shifts from political realities to subjective identification, ‘the ascendancy’ being seen as an exclusive caste whose sense of being the natural leaders of Irish society was increasingly challenged by the rise of Catholic political power.

The term had been traced back to the debate on the Catholic relief bill of 1782, when Sir Boyle Roche MP (1743–1807) advocated liberating Catholics ‘so far as is consistent with the Protestant ascendancy’. It was taken up by defenders of the Church of Ireland during the Rightboy attack on the tithe system in 1786–8, and became firmly established as a slogan during the bitter campaign against the Relief Acts of 1792–3. In all cases what was referred to was a state of affairs: the ascendancy of Protestants over Catholics. It was only later that the term came to refer to an imagined social group, the Protestant ascendancy, and that a slogan expressing Protestant anxieties at a time of revolutionary change was retrospectively applied to the 18th century as a whole. The characterization of this ‘ascendancy’ as a landed elite also obscures the strong middle‐class element in Protestant political activism, and Irish Protestant society generally, in the late 18th century and after, while the term ‘Protestant’, which in the 18th century meant Anglican, leaves the status of Presbyterians and other Protestant dissenters unclear.