Imagining the Irish child: Discourses of childhood in Irish Anglican writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

By Jarlath Killeen

This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion.

The book is structured around a detailed examination of six ‘versions’ of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children’s bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526161963

Book preview

Imagining the Irish child

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Imagining the Irish child

Discourses of childhood in Irish Anglican writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Jarlath Killeen

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Jarlath Killeen 2023

The right of Jarlath Killeen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6197 0 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: ‘Irelands Lamentation’, in A prospect of bleeding Irelands miseries (1647).

Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

For Eilís

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Bad to the bone: the evil child

2 The Massacre of the Innocents: the vulnerable child

3 Instruction and delight? The believing child

4 On the road with Jack Connor: the Enlightenment child

5 Extraordinary bodies: the monstrous child

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1 James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London: Printed by A.N. for Iohn Rothwell, and are to be sold at his shop, 1642) – the Davenants forced to watch the roasting of their children. Illustration K. Courtesy of the British Museum

2 James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London: Printed by A.N. for Iohn Rothwell, and are to be sold at his shop, 1642) – very young children having their brains bashed out, and others being dragged by the hair. Illustration P. Courtesy of the British Museum

3 ‘Irelands Lamentation’, in A prospect of bleeding Ireland’s miseries (1647). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland

4 Strange Newes of a Prodigious Monster, borne in the Township of Adlington in the Parish of Standish – testified by the Reverend William Leigh in 1612 – front page. Courtesy of the British Library

5 Frontispiece and title page of John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (Dublin: Printed by Aaron Rhames, 1724). Courtesy of the Library of Trinity College Dublin

6 A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1789), 11. Courtesy of the Library of Trinity College Dublin

7 A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1789), 20. Courtesy of the Library of Trinity College Dublin

8 A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1789), 25. Courtesy of the Library of Trinity College Dublin

9 John Kay's engraving Three Giants, with a Group of Spectators (1783) – Charles Byrne and the Knipe brothers. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

10 William Blake, ‘Glad Day’ or ‘Albion Rose’, c.1796 (though etchings date back to 1780). Courtesy of the British Museum

11 Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809), Ossian Singing his Swan Song, oil on canvas, 1787. Courtesy of Statens Museum for Kunst / National Gallery of Denmark

Acknowledgements

There were times when I thought that this book was never going to be finished. Much of it was written during the long, rolling lockdowns that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic, and the dramatic shift to distance teaching and learning, and was completed just as Ireland began to ease restrictions and move towards whatever normality will be in this new phase. That it was completed at all comes as something of a surprise. My thanks to Matthew Frost and the team at Manchester University Press for steering me through the process. Many thanks also to the anonymous readers for the Press, who read the manuscript so carefully and made some extremely helpful suggestions for revision to which I have tried my best to respond. I want to thank the Library of Trinity College Dublin; the National Library of Ireland; the British Museum; the British Library; the Wellcome Library; the National Gallery of Denmark; and the Morgan Library, New York who have been generous in granting permission to reprint images, and who supplied me with digitised copies of various texts when libraries were closed or inaccessible due to the pandemic.

I am extremely grateful to the following people for helping me along the way: Clare Clarke, Paul Delaney, Aileen Douglas, Crawford Gribben, Christina Morin, Bernice Murphy, Brendan O’Connell, David O’Shaughnessy, Margaret Robson, Ian Campbell Ross, and to my colleagues in the School of English in Trinity College Dublin for their generous support.

Darryl Jones is someone to whom I owe a great deal, both personally and professionally, and I want to thank him in particular for listening to my frustrations and complaints during the prolonged writing period.

I would like to thank my family for their continued love and support. Mary Lawlor, as always, has had to put up with my mind being absent and distracted for long periods, and my debt to her can never receive enough acknowledgement.

I have been thinking about the ideas and texts discussed in this book for years, but their significance became ever sharper for me with the arrival into the world of Eilís, who has grown up as the book was taking shape first in my mind, then on the computer screen. My greatest debt in this world is to her, who is the most wonderful gift to a most undeserving father. In a letter to his daughter Alicia, Bishop Edward Synge beautifully assured her that ‘Nothing in this World is of so much consequence to me as your Welfare, not meerly because you are my Child, mine only Child.’ I dedicate this book to my daughter, with my deepest gratitude and love.

Introduction

Following the death of his wife, Lucy, in 1691, the Irish natural philosopher (and later MP) William Molyneux was left with the responsibility of raising their only surviving child, a son, Samuel, who was then just two years old. Molyneux was acutely aware of his parental duties, and extremely anxious about the best way to bring up the boy. He was particularly concerned that young Samuel, the offspring of parents who were both prone to physical illness, and therefore not the result of ‘hardy breeding’, and having been left without a mother at a very young age, needed particular care and attention as he grew up.¹ Fortunately, the congenial Molyneux was not lacking in well-connected friends, and he received some personal assistance in thinking through the demands and requirements of childcare from one of the most significant intellectual figures of the day, who also happened to have developed an interest in the education of the young. Having read the description of himself as the ‘incomparable Mr. Locke’ in the Dedicatory Epistle of Molyneux's Dioptrica Nova (1692),² the philosopher was flattered enough to write to thank the Dubliner for making ‘great advances of friendship’, and the two of them began a warm and affectionate correspondence that lasted until Molyneux's sudden death at the age of only 42 in 1698.³ Locke was by the time of their first exchange of letters not just a leading philosopher, but one who, despite being a childless bachelor, had for years been working through the challenges of child-rearing, having already been asked for his advice by his friends Mary and Edward Clarke, who were hard at work trying to raise their own son.

On 2 March 1693, Molyneux wrote to Locke, setting out the difficult circumstances in which his son was placed, and explaining: ‘I have but one child in the world, who is now nigh four years old … my affections (I must confess) are strongly placed on him … [and] my whole study shall be to lay up a treasure of knowledge in his mind, for his happiness in this life and the next.’ ⁴ In this letter he reveals that he heard, through his brother Thomas Molyneux,⁵ about Locke's interest in child-rearing and asks him for guidance as to the best approach to his son's intellectual and moral education, since he had ‘been often thinking of some method for his instruction, that may best obtain’ Samuel's contentment in the future in this world and his ultimate salvation in the next. In the same letter, Molyneux urges his friend to bring his ideas about education to print for everyone's benefit, but hopes, as a pleading ‘tender father’, that Locke will give him a preview of these ideas before they are published: ‘let me most earnestly entreat you, by no means to lay aside this infinitely useful work, 'till you have finished it, for 'twill be of vast advantage to all mankind, as well as particularly to me your entire friend’.

⁶

Molyneux's encouragement of Locke bore fruit. His friend sent him that ‘much desired piece, Of Education’, in August of the same year, which Molyneux immediately pored over for help and advice, ‘finding it answerable to the highest expectations I had of it’.⁷ While generally enthusiastic about the child-centred liberality of Locke's educational ideas, praising them as ‘very reasonable, and’, for the most part at least, ‘very Practicable’, Molyneux's touching concern for Samuel's emotional wellbeing is in evidence in his heightened sensitivity to Locke's use of the language of disciplinarian power in describing relations between parent and child. Molyneux thinks he can detect a subtle authoritarianism in some of Locke's suggestions, complaining that ‘one particular … seems to beat hard on the tender spirits of children, and the natural affections of Parents’. That single ‘particular’ was Locke's insistence that one of the ways to encourage the growth of maturity in children was to ensure that ‘a child should never be suffer'd to have what he craves, or so much as speaks for, much less if he cries for it’. This advice Molyneux found to be too taxing on a father's natural desire to please and gratify his children. While it may be wise to moderate the hunger of children, so as to prevent them from becoming physically unhealthy or gluttonous, a stringent approach to their ‘wants of fancy and affection’ seemed to Molyneux ‘too strict and severe’.

⁸

Molyneux is especially anxious that the maturing child be permitted to articulate clearly what it desires ‘in matters indifferent and innocent’, and could see no reason why ‘they may not be allowed to declare what will delight them’. Molyneux is concerned that any interference in the natural communication between a child and his parents would constitute a breach of the child's rights as a human being, and declares it the equivalent of ‘deny[ing]’ a similar ‘liberty … between man and his Creator’.⁹ Just as grown-ups make petitionary prayers to God, requesting that He grant them what they most wish for, so the child ‘may be allow'd’ to make similar pleas to ‘their parents and governors’, in the hope of meeting a similar benevolent generosity.¹⁰ Molyneux also invokes a practical as well as a principled objection to Locke's apparent severity, which indicates the first-hand nature of his own care for the young Samuel. Molyneux not only finds Locke's recommended restraint an unnecessary restriction of children's freedom, but points out that it would prove a needless burden for the hapless parent tasked with denying their children even their heart's most trivial desires. Implement this scheme, he warns, and ‘you must have the children almost moaped for want of diversion and recreation, or else you must have those about them study nothing all day but how to find employment for them; and how this would rack the invention of any man alive, I leave you to judge’.¹¹ Molyneux is clearly speaking here from his personal struggle to try to keep a very young child entertained and distracted, and finds the childless Locke's high-minded instructions unreasonable and impracticable in achieving harmony in the household.

¹²

Molyneux was influential in persuading Locke to have his ideas about the instruction of children committed to print, and he was not the only member of the Irish elite to have a strong interest in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Locke's book had two Dublin reprints in 1728, with further Irish editions in 1737, 1738 and 1778. The 1728 and 1737 editions were printed ‘at the request of several of the nobility of this kingdom’, which suggests that this was a text in demand.¹³ In an examination of ‘What the women of Dublin did with John Locke’, Christine Gerrard found that among the members of the ‘Triumfeminate’ group associated with Jonathan Swift, including the poet Mary Barber, and the poet and memoirist Laetitia Pilkington, Locke was considered an important authority on good childcare, and admired for his famous description of the child as a ‘White Paper, or Wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases’, by which metaphor he highlighted the importance and consequence of early education for the shaping of the future adult.¹⁴ Pilkington's Memoirs (1748), where the child's mind is described as a ‘spotless Paper’ waiting to be written upon, and Barber's poems for her son Constantine, praising the ‘great Sage’,¹⁵ are important evidence of the impact of Locke's views on children and childhood in the nurseries of the Dublin elite: ‘early eighteenth-century Dublin knew Locke not primarily as a political or economic writer, but as a philosopher interested in the development of human perception and understanding, and perhaps even more importantly, as an educational writer, with an interest in childhood development and how children learn, and also in parent/child relationships, maternity and childbirth’.¹⁶ Later, Richard Lovell Edgeworth would put his own happiness as a child down to the careful treatment of his mother, Jane, who, having read ‘every thing that had been written on the subject of education’, ‘preferred with sound judgement the opinions of Locke’ over that of other child-rearing experts, though she wisely modified his advice with ‘her own good sense’.¹⁷ Indeed, when RLE in collaboration with his daughter Maria came to write their own set of instructions, Practical Education (1798), they produced what is effectively a Lockean text, built on their empirical observation of actual children over many years, and devoted (like Locke) to the use of education as a means to shape a rational adult out of the nebulous blob nature provided to parents.

¹⁸

Some Thoughts Concerning Education is both a kind of child-rearing manual, in which Locke tries to think through how a parent should respond to the demands of bringing up young children, but also a text that operates at a much more philosophical level, as Locke attempts to figure out what children are like and how childhood should be understood, and vacillates between these practical and philosophical modes. Indeed, what is impressive at the theoretical level may be (as Molyneux found) completely useless to the parent trying to look after the material child in the here and now. Unsurprisingly, Locke's claim that the child is born a ‘blank slate’ without innate ideas is now far better known than any of his mundane advice about, for example, how loose or tight a boy's clothes should be, or whether children should be allowed to roam around the place without any shoes.¹⁹ A tension between the metaphorical and philosophical and the material and practical, between what Richard Nash describes as ‘purely semiotic markers’ and their ‘material embodiments’, is a common one in the history and the scholarly treatment of childhood.²⁰ Rhetorically powerful models of the child can be so influential, indeed, that according to some scholars there is no way of getting beyond the hypothetical and metaphorical to the ‘real’ child at all. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, for example, pointedly criticises the entire discipline of children's literature studies for ‘making judgments and criticisms on behalf of a real child who does not exist’, concluding that ‘its writings are useless to the fulfilment of its own professed aims’.²¹ One of Lesnik-Oberstein's points is that the children of intellectual analysis are creatures of the discursive rather than material world. For Erica Burman, too, given the imbrication of ideas about childhood in social, spiritual and political discussion, ‘arguably all appeals to the child are metaphorical’.²² Certainly, discourses of the child and childhood exist at a distance from the living, breathing human beings who supposedly embody the ideas being discussed. As Molyneux found when reading Locke's advice, there is a considerable gap between the real child, Samuel Molyneux, and the malleable wax figure his philosophical friend had conjured up.

This book is about how ideas about the ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ were enormously productive in Irish Anglican writing and thinking of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even as real children and lived childhoods often (though not always) slipped completely out of view. It takes seriously the argument that discourses about children and childhood have important material effects on living children, and it is critical that, where possible, these effects are registered and understood. However, as historian of childhood Hugh Cunningham has pointed out, the distinction between ‘children as human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas’ is also important.²³ In this study I will examine the circulation of ideas about children and concepts of childhood in Irish Anglican print culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, considering the work of a variety of writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents in the period from the formulation of the Irish Articles in 1615 to the lead up to the 1798 Rebellion. This is a treatment of ideas about the child and childhood, and emphatically not a history of Irish children, who will flit in and out of the picture throughout, resistant to being completely captured by the discourses that were supposed to encapsulate their lives.

The book is structured around a detailed examination of five particular ‘versions’, models or representations of the child that generated cultural interest in these two centuries: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the believing/spiritualised child, the enlightened child and the monstrous child. These versions of the child are widely recognised as important by Childhood Studies scholars, but so far have not been scrutinised in a specifically Irish context, and their significance for understanding the political and intellectual history of the period has tended to be overlooked. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the language of childhood has been applied far beyond young people to individuals, communities and collectives that have been understood as ‘childlike’ or ‘childish’.²⁴ It traces these versions of the child across a wide range of genres and literary forms, including some directly for and about children (catechisms, children's bibles, educational treatises, letters), and some emphatically not meant for children at all (histories, sermons, political pamphlets and fiction). The book shows how concepts of the child (like Locke's malleable wax figure) often broke free of the young people to which they supposedly referred, and migrated into debates about communal identity, religious belief, historical understanding and political controversy.

A focus on the discourses of childhood by members of just one group in Ireland across two centuries may appear narrow. However, given the political and cultural dominance of the Anglican community in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish life, understanding the ways in which its members imagined the ‘child’ is an important precursor to a more expansive treatment of the subject. A comprehensive history of ideas about childhood in Ireland has not yet been written.²⁵ While appreciating the ways in which childhood has been inflected in different national histories has been central to the scholarly reclamation of childhood since the 1960s,²⁶ Ireland has not featured very prominently in this work. As Maria Luddy and James M. Smith put it in what is currently the most extensive treatment, Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present (2014), while ‘in other countries considerable scholarship already exists’ in relation to Childhood Studies, ‘the study of children and childhood, and the concepts associated with these words, is only beginning in Ireland’.

²⁷

Most of the best existing work on children in Ireland has focused on the books written for them in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Barbara Ann Young's The Child as Emblem of the Nation in Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (2006) and Pádraic Whyte's Irish Childhoods: Children's Fiction and Irish History (2011) do not tackle anything earlier than the twentieth century, while the collection Irish Children's Literature and Culture, edited by Valerie Coghlan and Keith O’Sullivan (2011), is explicitly focused on material from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Where Irish childhoods have been examined, most attention has also (and understandably) been on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.²⁸ In an incisive article on ‘Jonathan Swift's Childhoods’, the children's literature scholar Mary Shine Thompson complains that ‘To date historians have paid scant, incidental attention to Irish childhood during and before the Enlightenment.’ ²⁹ One of the reasons for this scholarly gap is plain enough: the evidence of what children thought, the ways in which they saw the world, their dealings with and feelings about their parents, brothers and sisters, their peers, their possessions, the books they read, has always been and remains difficult to pin down. The historian Anna French points out that ‘the children of the early modern period have long been regarded as the socially silent’, lacking the authority to speak of their own experiences, and requiring the adults around them to define the significance of their state of being: they ‘slip through our fingers in texts … they are out of reach’.

³⁰

The best relevant work on the early modern period concentrates on the emergence of Irish children's literature. Anne Markey's excellent survey, ‘Irish Children's Books, 1696–1810’ (2017), and her groundbreaking collection, Children's Fiction, 1765–1808 (2011), opened up new avenues of investigation for scholars of children's literature.³¹ While both of these publications briefly discuss ideas of childhood in eighteenth-century Ireland, Markey's main interest is in drawing attention to the very neglected body of early literature explicitly for children by Irish writers, establishing what was actually published and the relative significance of these writers and books. Recently, there has been some welcome attention to early modern Irish childhood, both in its material and ideological manifestations. Clíona Ó Gallchoir has looked at the ways in which childhood was represented in two eighteenth-century Irish texts, William Chaigneau's The History of Jack Connor (1752)³² and Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765–70), arguing that they ‘reflect both broader enlightenment ideas about childhood, and the specific socio-political conditions pertaining in Ireland in this period’ (primarily related to the education of the children of Irish Catholics).

³³ Anne

Markey, too, has also turned to how childhood is configured in early Irish fiction which takes education and schooling as a major subject. Looking at Jack Connor and The History of Harry Spencer; Compiled for the Amusement of Good Children, and the Instruction of such as Wish to Become Good (1794) by ‘Philanthropos’ (James Delap), in which ‘swathes of text are copied verbatim, or almost word for word’ from Brooke's Fool of Quality, she argues that in their representation of childhood, these texts are ‘concerned with reinforcing the hegemony’ of the Protestant ascendancy, while also providing ‘verifiable insights into diverse, contemporaneous experiences of Irish childhood, albeit from a privileged adult perspective’.³⁴ This current book builds on these important insights, though considerably widening the perspective and arguing that the models of the child that can be found in the literature of these centuries had significant implications far beyond the nursery and the schoolroom. The children imagined by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglicans in Ireland found their way into debates about the nature of the Irish political nation itself.

A study of how ideas of childhood circulated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish writing is important because these are the centuries recognised as crucial ones in the development of the modern understanding of childhood. Famously, the great French historian Philippe Ariès didn't think that childhood was all that real prior to the eighteenth century.³⁵ In the decades following his notorious claim, archaeologists, ethnographers, historians, educationalists, sociologists, children's literature specialists, all constituting what is now termed ‘Childhood Studies’, have not only shown that Ariès was mistaken, but have brought to light the multiple and overlapping discourses in which children and childhood have been implicated back to the emergence of the human species.³⁶ However, even though Ariès was wrong to claim that childhood was ‘invented’ in the early modern period, it did change quite significantly in this period.³⁷ According to the historian J. H. Plumb, in a seminal essay from 1975, childhood and children both become central to the cultural life of eighteenth-century Britain. Hugh Cunningham too stresses that for the historian of modern childhood, ‘the eighteenth century holds pride of place’.³⁸ Children became ever more increasingly obsessed over by parents, educationalists, catechists, doctors, writers, publishers, toy manufacturers, philosophers, theologians, and just about everyone else as well.³⁹ Childhood may not have been ‘invented’ ⁴⁰ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then, but it was certainly reimagined, and in an extraordinarily wide variety of genres and fields.

The extent to which these changing ideas about childhood can be tracked in Irish writing of this period has not been examined extensively. The period from the early seventeenth century to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion is also a crucial one in the creation of modern Ireland. If Ireland was, as Declan Kiberd puts it, ‘invented’ in the late Victorian period, then it was an invention that built on ideas about the nation that had been formulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Modern ideas of Ireland and childhood grew up together in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and what I want to examine here is some of the ways in which treatments of the child and debates about Ireland often intersected in the writing and thinking of the dominant community on the island.

In their introduction to a collection of essays on the family in the nineteenth century, the historians David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli invite scholars to ‘dive’ into the ‘messy, but fascinating whirlwind of forces that together shaped and continue to shape family life’. Messiness, contradiction, confusion, discursive slipperiness are all in evidence in the circulation of ideas about childhood in Ireland (and Irish childhood) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this study will follow these ideas wherever they lead us.⁴¹ It is important to emphasise that the book does not claim either that the versions of the child and childhood explored here were the only ones important to Irish Anglican thinking, or that Irish Anglicans were the only ones to use these ideas. Indeed, as will be emphasised throughout the book, and as has been demonstrated by an enormous body of scholarship on childhood in Britain (excluding Ireland) and Europe, the models of the child attractive to Irish Anglicans were also among the most significant of those being discussed elsewhere, though I will argue that Irish writers do inflect these models in interesting and sometimes peculiar ways.

John Gillis points out that the ‘language of age in pre-industrial Europe’ can now seem ‘hopelessly vague’, which means that defining what is meant by the terms ‘childhood’ and the ‘child’ in this period can be frustrating.⁴² Famously, in the sixteenth century, the English cleric and reformer Thomas Becon asked, ‘What is a child, or to be a child?’ ⁴³ and the experts (whether they are benevolent philosophers dispensing childcare advice, or historians arguing over whether childhood was ‘invented’ or ‘discovered’) have been disagreeing with each other about the answers to this question ever since. Narrowing the focus to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland does not provide much more clarity, unfortunately. Age, for example, which is now considered one of the most obvious ways to distinguish the child from the adult, was not a key defining factor in the early modern period, even though historians have continued to look to life chronology as a way to set limits and indicate where childhood ends and adulthood begins.⁴⁴ When Mary O’Dowd looked at the available evidence in early modern Ireland, for example, she discovered that ‘the late teens from the age of 16 or 17 to 20 was a significant time’ for young men, as it was in this period that they ‘were liable to be called up to serve in the local hosting or militia, an indication that they were deemed to be men at that stage’.⁴⁵ However, even here where some element of chronological certainty seems to be provided, the key issue is an adult perception of a child's ability to carry out certain actions – in this case, acts of directed violence. As pointed out by Anna French, what is really at issue here is less numerical age than perceived ‘stage’ of life, a stage that could be physical but could also be understood as spiritual.⁴⁶ This ambivalence and lack of chronological clarity indicates that ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ are imprecise, ambiguous and often quite murky terms. In this study, I am guided by Keith Thomas's argument that some conceptual stability can be provided by understanding childhood in the early modern period as indicative of a relative lack of authority. In this way the term ‘child’ can be used to describe not just young individuals (or what we might call actual, or material children), but also those individuals and groups whose relative position in society was subject to the authority of others.

⁴⁷

William Molyneux's slight disagreement with his friend John Locke over the limits of a child's freedom is a useful place to start this study, as it is a good indication of how a discussion about one kind of child can be brought to bear on debates about completely different embodiments of this nebulous concept. The gap between pedagogical theory and childcare reality, between the philosophical and the actual child was pointed out by Molyneux in his otherwise generous and appreciative response to Locke's views on education. Locke, in his reply defended his argument for limiting the independence of children, and expressed a concern that without such strictures, young children in particular would be liable to desire something simply because their elder siblings already had it: ‘does one go abroad? The other straight has a mind to it too. Has such a one new or fine cloths or play-things? They, if you once allow it them, will be impatient for the like, and think themselves ill dealt with if they have it not.’ ⁴⁸ Locke's warning is that children will always want what their elders (and those more rationally developed) already have, even though they are not ready to take on the burden of adult responsibility that the possession of even these material objects indicate. While it is ‘natural’ to want what your elder brother has, the duty of the parent is to set limits and to sternly refuse to indulge a child who is merely envious of what others have.⁴⁹ Molyneux agreeably accepts Locke's response as it pertains to the denial of the child in ‘matters of fancy and affectation’, but it is significant that in these exchanges both men frequently move beyond a discussion of how exactly one individual, Samuel Molyneux, should be instructed, and into a more general dialogue about ‘man's liberty’ and individual freedom in which wanting what the elder brother already possesses is recognised as a potentially serious threat to the stability of the rationally organised household.

⁵⁰

A few years after this exchange between friends about household management and relations, Molyneux would repurpose the discussion of fraternal tension between elder and younger brothers, in a politically explosive text that would jeopardise his relationship with Locke, and also indicate that he was well aware that Lockean limits to childhood desires were not only being applied to energetic 4-year-olds making demands on the time and attention of their harassed parents. By the 1690s, the discourses of childhood and the language of liberty and dependence were already being applied at a political level, in debates about the ‘state of Ireland’, debates in which Molyneux was about to become a central figure. The literary critic Declan Kiberd points out that British imperialism notioned the association of colonised peoples and places with children and the state of childhood very early in its imperial history. Kiberd argues that ‘Within British writing, there had long been a link between children's fiction and the colonial enterprise, which led to an identification of the new world with the infantile state of man.’ ⁵¹ While this identification was particularly strong in the Victorian period,⁵² debates about the status of the Irish parliament in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries frequently employed what Mary Lowenthal Felstiner calls ‘family metaphors’,⁵³ which represented both Ireland itself and its ruling Anglican elite as in an infantile or juvenile state, and the English parliament as maternal protector or paternal disciplinarian with (like the conscientious parent in Locke's On Education) the responsibility to curb any precocious or insolent Irish demands.

Far from accepting, however, that Ireland was the child to the English parent, in his celebrated (and very quickly notorious) Case of Ireland, Stated (1698), Molyneux tried to demonstrate that they were actually siblings with the same father, and that the Irish demand for legislative equality was simply an example of the now mature younger son wanting what his older brother had already been granted by their benevolent father. He dedicated his volume to the king, and praises him as ‘the Common Indulgent Father of all your Countries’, for having ‘an Equal Regard to the Birth-Rights of all Your Children’, expressing his certainty that the king would ‘not permit the Eldest, because the Strongest, to Encroach on the Possessions of the Younger’.⁵⁴ The two countries are treated by Molyneux as equal members of ‘Your Majesty's Glorious Family’, even if England just happens to be (by accident of ‘birth’) the older of the two brothers.⁵⁵ As Patrick Kelly has pointed out, this passage draws on one in John Locke's Second Treatise of Government from 1689, which asks: ‘Is it reasonable that the eldest Brother, because he has the greatest part of his Father's Estate, should thereby have a Right to take away any of his younger Brothers Portions?’, Locke maintaining that ‘exceeding the Bounds of Authority’ is not a ‘Right’ that can be claimed.⁵⁶ Since it is not reasonable or just that an elder brother should have complete power over his younger brother, if Ireland and England are really to be treated as sons of the same monarch, Molyneux insists, neither should have political authority over the other. Just as children (or, at least, sons, like Samuel Molyneux) will eventually outgrow their need for their father to set limits on their actions, so, too, countries eventually reach a level of political maturity that means they are less subject to the authority of their father (the king). As well as relying on Locke's Two Treaties of Government, this configuration also depends on the assumption – articulated in Locke's On Education – that a child properly brought up will grow into mature self-authorisation entitled to self-governance, an argument that is liberating at the level of the individual, but politically incendiary when applied to a ‘childlike’ country like Ireland.

Molyneux's key strategy here is the denial that England (rather than the sovereign) is the parent figure in Anglo-Irish relations, though his analogy accepts Ireland's status as a child, while extending this status to cover England as well. He wrote the Case of Ireland, Stated in reaction to three different threats to Ireland's political equality: the decision by the House of Commons in London to prohibit Irish woollen exports (as they would be in direct competition with similar products from England), disputes about the location of the power to allocate land taken from Irish Catholics in the Williamite wars, and a disagreement over the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish and English Houses of Lords. As James Woods points out, ‘In all of these cases, Molyneux's objection was the general one that the legislative and juridical arms of the English government were acting as if Ireland were a colony entirely dependent on and subordinate to England. Against this vision of Ireland's and England's relationship, Molyneux appeals to the principles of equality and reciprocity.’

⁵⁷

Childhood as a descriptor of a state of being often appears under numerous negative aliases, such as ‘dependence’, and Molyneux is keen to not only establish the analogous dependence of England on the power of the king (and therefore undermine English claims to political dominance), but to represent both countries as ready to take on the mantle of adult authority. Woods is interested in the ways in which Molyneux's treatise draws on ideals of friendship and amity in polite, civilised society (ideals which also formed the basis of his correspondence with Locke) as providing a basis for a proper consideration of the relations between ‘friendly’ countries like Ireland and England. As Woods points out, Molyneux originally appealed to ‘our Brethren of England’ in his dedication to King William in the printer's copy, before changing that to ‘our Friends of England’ in the published version. This change suggests that Molyneux eventually came to the conclusion that an analogy based on friendship rather than fraternity would have a more persuasive rhetorical force in arguing for the equality of the two kingdoms.⁵⁸ This last-minute emendation may, however, also be due to Molyneux's realisation that any acceptance of the metaphor of Ireland's child status would render his argument for the independence of its parliament more precarious. As is illustrated in Molyneux's 1693 correspondence with Locke over the proper way to rear children, even one of the most ‘liberal’ and child-centred thinkers of the period believed that children's ‘innocent’ desires ‘of fancy and affection’ had to be subject to the control of a potentially disapproving father figure, while in every ‘matter of moment’ their decisions were to be guided by older and therefore wiser (and wiser simply because older) family members.

Molyneux's political intervention was extraordinarily controversial and provoked a series of often intemperate