41 Come Again

Perhaps my headline is a bit of a misnomer for a link to the 1641 Depositions Project regarding the Irish Rising of October 1641.  But, when the English during the Exclusion Crisis c. 1680 worried that their divisions from the first years of the Long Parliament might be erupting again, they did have some fear about Catholic or Irish Plots. 

As Sir George Hungerford noted in the Commons debate 15 December 1680 (as printed in Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates, 2nd ed. (2009), 221:

• I am of opinion, that the late queen mother’s [Henrietta Maria’s] zeal for her religion, was not only a great occasion (amongst many others) of the miseries that befell us in [16]41; but the great cause of all our miseries now, by perverting the duke [of York] from his religion, as is reported. …

In any case, the depositions called for in the wake of the 1641 Irish Rebellion have been transcribed, appropriately enough beginning with those from Ulster where the rising began, and are available online.
As a recent article on the project notes:

• While massacre is an old theme in Irish history, digitisation is, of course, a relatively new one. Both themes have been brought together in The 1641 Depositions Project, an initiative involving scholars from Trinity College Dublin, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Cambridge and IBM (LanguageWare). The project is funded by the AHRC, the IRCHSS and the TCD Library. The depositions are witness statements relating to the Irish rebellion of 1641. They detail a range of experiences and alleged crimes such as losses of possessions, murder and massacre. Their contents have generated controversy for centuries. ("Digitisation, Massacre and Irish History," by John Cunningham, History Compass Exchanges, November 25, 2009)