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Irish primate and saint executed at Marble Arch
If you are passing near London's Marble Arch on Sunday, pause and spare a thought for the last Irishman to be executed for propagating the Catholic faith. Oliver Plunkett was hanged, disembowelled, quartered and beheaded at this spot, the site of Tyburn, on July 1, 1681. (July 11, in the New Style Calendar).
On December 10, 1975, Pope Paul VI canonised the martyred Archbishop of Armagh.
Oliver Plunkett was born in 1629 at Loughcrew, Co. Meath.
Oliver’s early education was under his relative Patrick Plunkett, Abbot of St. Mary’s, Dublin. Oliver was 12 years old when the Irish uprising of 1641 erupted and saw, the next year, an independent Irish Confederate Parliament sitting at Kilkenny.
At 16 he decided to join the priesthood and was sent to Rome under the care of Father Scarampo, becoming a student in the Irish College of Rome. The Jesuits ran the College and Oliver was a particularly brilliant pupil, soon achieving a doctorate in philosophy, theology and mathematics. He also pursued civil and canon law at the Roman Sapienza (University).
In 1654 he was ordained in the priesthood. That was a bad year for Ireland. The Irish had been conquered once more and this time Cromwell was pursuing his ‘final solution’ by herding the Irish into a reservation in Connacht. Irish found east of the Shannon could and were put to death while thousands were sent into slavery in the New World. The remnants of the Irish army were allowed to seek employment in France or Spain. Between 1641 and 1651 Ireland had already lost one-third of its population.
Oliver was now professor of theology at the Vatican’s College of Propaganda.
On July 9, 1669, he was appointed to the primatial see of Armagh, and consecrated on November 30, at Ghent in Belgium, by the Bishop of Ghent and the Bishop of Ferns.
He set out, stopping first in London, where he lobbied those with influence in the Government in an unsuccessful attempt to secure some modification of the anti-Catholic laws in Ireland. In mid March, 1670, he finally entered Armagh.
There was much work to be done from a priestly viewpoint and by December, 1673, he was able to report to Rome that he had confirmed in the faith some 48,655 people who it had not been able to confirm during the recent suppression of the religion.
He opened a high school in Drogheda and invited Jesuits to take charge of it. He boasted that he had 150 pupils on the roll of which no fewer than 40 were sons of Protestant Irish gentry.
Oliver soon found that the arguments as to whether Armagh should be the primacy of Ireland were still raging and, in 1672, he published a booklet arguing the right of Armagh to be the seat of the primacy. Two years later the Archbishop of Dublin, Peter Talbot, published a response in Lille, claiming Dublin should be the ecclesiastic primacy. The temporary solution to the argument was that Armagh was named as the primatial see “of all Ireland” while the archbishop of Dublin was named ‘Primate of Ireland’.
Oliver's greatest mistake was his attempt to curry favour with the English colonial administration in Ireland.
In Ulster the dispossessed Irish had taken to the forests and mountain fastness, forming guerrilla bands called ‘Tories’ — toiridhe, a pursuer. Many Irish had been fighting in this manner since the defeat of the main Irish armies in the early 1650s. If captured, they were immediately executed. Anyone found sheltering them also met with a summary execution.
Oliver had a meeting with the new English Lord Lieutenant, Arthur Capell, the Earl of Essex. Oliver offered to persuade the Irish guerrillas to surrender if, in exchange, the Lord Lieutenant granted them safe conduct to leave for the Continent. The new Lord Essex was determined not to repeat the fate of a former Earl of Essex executed by Elizabeth I for making terms with the Irish. But, naturally, Lord Essex was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the English Government would cynically use the Catholic Hierarchy in Ireland to help enforce their rule over the Irish.
Oliver, with the Archbishop of Cashel, Dr John Brenann, set off into the Ulster mountains to negotiate with the Irish guerrillas. Many guerrilla leaders accepted the conditions outlined by the Archbishop of Armagh. They went in to surrender, prepared to go into exile. Few, if any, were allowed safe passage to France or Spain. They were executed. Before the Irish of Ulster realised it, the back of the guerrilla bands had been broken.
A year later, in 1673, with the Tories safely deposed, Lord Essex opened a new storm of persecution on Irish Catholics, closing the schools, the Catholic churches, and arresting priests and bishops. Indeed, one wonders whether Oliver now regretted what he had done when he found himself branded an outlaw and having to hide out in the forests and mountains.
At length, on December 6, 1679, Oliver was captured and taken into prison at Dublin. Oliver was the perfect scapegoat for the ambitious anti-Catholic plotter Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-1683). A former Chancellor, he used Titus Oates (1649-1705) as a ‘witness’, to a so-called ‘Popish Plot’ to kill Charles II and place his brother James on the throne in order to turn England back to Catholicism. Some 80 innocent Catholics were executed in the hysteria of the backlash to the ‘plot’ before the reality, that it was an imaginative fabrication, was discovered.
Lord Shafestbury had brought forth a stream of informers to swear that Oliver had plotted to bring in 20,000 French soldiers to help an Irish insurrection, which would be paid for by the Catholic clergy.
Shafestbury had Oliver removed to Newgate Prison in London. Yet the first grand jury could not agree so a second trial was held at which Sir Francis Pemberton, the Chief Justice, told the new jury that there was no greater crime than to propagate the Catholic Faith.
Oliver was found guilty. The military guard was numerous as he was taken from Newgate Jail, along Oxford Street to what is now Marble Arch, the site of Tyburn.
Mounting the scaffold, Oliver made a speech, which was set down and printed that July as The last speech of Mr Oliver Plunkett, Titular Primate of Ireland, who was executed at Tyburn on Friday, the first of this instant July, London, 1681. (July 11, New Style). Demand for copies caused it to be reprinted many times and translated into several languages.
Thankfully, Oliver had expired during the hanging part of the execution and was spared the pain of disembowelling, quartering and beheading.
The very day after Oliver’s execution, the truth came out. Shaftesbury was thrown into the Tower of London from where he eventually escape to exile and died the next year. Titus Oates was summoned for perjury but when William of Orange seized the throne, Oates was actually given a state pension.
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