Yet how much was a shared culture worth, when it came down to it? In the 1690s the English Parliament handed down a series of laws and judgments restricting Irish trade. Among other things, the English sought to limit Ireland’s woolen exports to England in order to protect the English trade in woolen fabrics. The Irish Parliament, which was in a weakened state following the revolution of 1689 and subsequent warfare in Ireland, refused to approve the new statutes, but their rejection of them did not halt their implementation.135
Molyneux registered vocal opposition to these laws in The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated, published in 1698. He marshaled historical precedent to support the argument that though subjects of the same king, England and Ireland possessed independent representative institutions, and the English Parliament had no jurisdiction over Ireland. He argued that Ireland was not a colony of England but, like Scotland, an independent kingdom with whom England shared a king, properly governed by the king in concert with a Protestant Anglo-Irish Parliament.136
Molyneux’s claims to coequality with England were founded on the sort of arguments about human descent and the definition of Britain that featured prominently in topographical works. By no means did Molyneux argue that the majority Catholic Irish should have any part in governing Ireland: though Molyneux had corresponded with Irish antiquaries such as O’Flaherty, he nevertheless wrote strictly in defense of the “Protestant Interest of Ireland.”137 The Protestant Anglo-Irish were descended from “English and Britains” who had “from time to time” crossed the Irish Sea and seized power over the Irish.138 Molyneux argued that the Anglo-Irish, therefore, as the descendants of the English conquerors of Ireland, could claim the same rights and liberties maintained by the English in England.139 The Anglo-Irish were no less English than the English, no less British than the British. Indeed, Molyneux was not averse to a closer political union with England, one that would admit Anglo-Irish representatives to the English Parliament, though he thought it unlikely.140 He was correct in this assumption. His arguments for Anglo-Irish liberty were condemned in England: the English were by no means willing to grant that liberties flowed from shared descent, especially when Anglo-Irish liberties conflicted with English trade.141
Conclusion
In both its unities and its divisions, topographical writing was a mirror in which Britons could see themselves reflected. It attempted to instill in readers a sense of “Britain” as a shared political, linguistic, cultural, and geographical space. However, collectively topographical works displayed a profound uncertainty as to who and what should be included in Britain and Britishness. This was not merely a result of the different methods that topographers followed, as per Ogilby. No matter which method one followed—linguistic, historical, economic, geographical—topographical studies exposed competing forces uniting and dividing Britons. Topography may have been a cracked mirror, but the Britain it reflected came prefractured.
Topographical writers revealed the Scots, Welsh, Anglo-Irish, Catholic Irish, and English as peoples with deeply rooted independent cultural, linguistic, and political traditions. Yet, as topographical writings also recognized, Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales shared equally long histories of political, commercial, and cultural contact, even integration. Connection and contact—through trade, conquest, intermarriage, or the kind of social and educational mingling that occurred in London and the university towns—only intensified in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Many naturalists and antiquaries were at the forefront of this movement, getting into contact with each other through travel, correspondence, and the reading of each other’s books.
In some ways topographical writers participated in a “colonial” dynamic, in which the non-English British affiliated themselves both with English versions of Britain and their own “native” traditions (while some English writers felt free to pay minimal or no attention to the non-English parts of Britain). Molyneux, Sibbald, and Lhuyd participated in the project of constructing Britain from an English perspective. Yet they also resisted it, or at least maintained strong ties to their own piece of Britain, however they defined it.142 Their national visions—and identities—were neither strictly in concert with English versions of the same nor wholly oppositional. Neither were they consistent across projects, as can be seen particularly in Lhuyd’s career. So too were their identities and practices as scholars hybrid, fluid, and contextual. This can be seen, again, in Lhuyd’s career in his dual use of English and Welsh in his correspondence. One might compare the complex, shifting colonial identities and national visions expressed by Spanish Creole clerics-scholars in New Spain in the eighteenth century, described by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, as they worked to define the history of the New World with and against Enlightenment historians of empire writing in Spain.143
Molyneux’s work as a topographical investigator and as a defender of Anglo-Irish liberties highlights the complexity of “British” identities and loyalties. It also shows how histories of human descent in the British Isles, a familiar concern in topographical writing, could be deployed in attempts to negotiate national relationships in the late seventeenth century. Like Sibbald and Lhuyd, Molyneux collaborated with London-based scholars, making points of contact with England and Englishness and even with Britishness. So too did others in his Anglo-Irish milieu—Dugdale’s catalog of the nobility, advertised on Molyneux’s questionnaire for the English atlas, was, after all, a register of the English, Irish, and Scottish nobility. Yet it was these points of contact, these engagements, that were, for Molyneux, arguments for why Ireland could not be fully ruled by England and subsumed within Britain. The distinctiveness of Ireland as a kingdom within Britain, coequal with England, was rooted, for Molyneux, in Anglo-Irish claims to being fully English. As such, the Anglo-Irish, Molyneux believed, were subjects of the British king but were not bound by a Parliament in which they had no representation.
Both Molyneux and Lhuyd met with resistance to their attempts to graft their parts of the “British” nation into relationship with England and empire. This resistance was symptomatic of the limits, set largely though not entirely by the English, that Welsh, Anglo-Irish, and Scottish naturalists met when they participated in the project of defining Britain. Lhuyd, although he had his supporters in the Royal Society, was mocked when he spent his scholarly energies (and his subscribers’ money) on writing into being a Britain without England.
The failure of Molyneux’s arguments is particularly striking given the overall aims of topographical writing. Molyneux’s statement that shared liberties flowed from common descent foundered in the face of the English Parliament’s insistence on protecting English trade. In their books seventeenth-century naturalists often rhetorically depicted a Britain knit together