Three Weeks of Silence: The Death of a Queen and the Rebellion of the Catholic Towns (eBook)

In the spring of 1603, a queen died in England, and for nearly three weeks, no one in southern Ireland knew it. Into that silence stepped the chartered merchant towns of Munster and Leinster ? Cork, Waterford, Kilkenny, Limerick, Wexford ? communities who had spent seven decades quietly practicing a Catholic faith the crown had never managed to extinguish. Convinced that royal authority itself had briefly lapsed, and hopeful that the new king might prove sympathetic to Rome, their citizens rose: storming a fortress, reclaiming cathedrals, swearing sacred oaths in packed churches, and daring to test just how far chartered liberty could bend before it broke. What followed was a reckoning ? a Lord Deputy's marching army, a recorder's extraordinary jury acquittal and its furious undoing, a judiciary purged of every Catholic voice, and a diaspora of soldiers and priests scattered across Counter-Reformation Europe. The Citizen King's companion volume in miniature, this is narrative history at its most human: mayors and friars, merchants and juries, caught in three astonishing weeks that decided, four decades before Ireland's Catholic Confederation took up arms in earnest, that faith and crown could not, after all, be reconciled. A revolution of charters and consciences ? and the tragedy that followed.