Tea at Trianon: How Religious Toleration for the Irish Helped America Win Independence

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, May 21, 2026

How Religious Toleration for the Irish Helped America Win Independence

From Providence:

In July Fourth 1779, Congress went to Mass. One newspaper reported that on “the day which gave freedom to the vast republic of America, the Congress, the president and councils of state, with other civil and military officers” attended “Roman chapel” at the invitation of “His Most Christian Majesty” Louis XVI’s emissary. “A Te Deum was performed,” giving “great satisfaction to all present.” Protestant American rebels worshipping with Catholic French monarchists elicited cross-confessional interest in another country: Ireland.
The above report comes from the Presbyterian Londonderry Journal in the north of Ireland. Writing for the Anglican Freeman’s Journal in Dublin, Catholic polemicist Father Arthur O’Leary wondered how “banishment and proscription, on account of religious systems” still prevailed in Ireland when “Presbyterians and Catholics chant the Te Deum in the same chapel in America?” Irish interest in Franco-American worship suggests that the American Revolution was a war with not only global implications but religious ones too. Irishmen and Irish-Americans—Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic—provided essential manpower for both rebels and royalists alike. How Crown and Congress respectively managed religious tensions in mobilizing Irish troops helped decide the war’s outcome. The Continental Army overcame sectarian tensions to become a multiconfessional force. In contrast, King George’s army saw religious animosities hamper recruitment, strain soldier-officer relations, and polarize the war in Ireland.

Nearly half a million Irish immigrated to British North America in the eighteenth century. Outside New England, one in six white Americans were of Irish descent. Two-thirds were “Scotch-Irish” Presbyterians, the rest mostly Catholics. The American colonies appealed to Irishmen because they lacked the religious hierarchy that restricted liberty and opportunity in Ireland. Sectarian and dynastic wars in seventeenth-century Ireland produced a “Protestant Ascendancy” that prescribed privileges for Anglicans but led to dispossession for Catholics and discrimination against Presbyterians. While Catholics owned two-thirds of Irish land in 1640, they retained only a tenth of it sixty years later. “Penal laws” deprived Catholics of civil rights. Largely of Scottish descent, Presbyterians provided invaluable settlers and soldiers to the Ascendancy, yet remained second-class subjects. The Sacramental Test Act excluded most Presbyterians from politics. The linen industry, lifeblood of Presbyterian Ulster, suffered trade fluctuations exacerbated by British commercial rules. Presbyterians resented Anglican attempts in the 1710s to nullify their marriages and collect tithes. New Light minister John Abernathy’s call for “every man” to “enjoy the freedom of following the Light of his Conscience” resonated with Presbyterians. Unavailable in Ireland, economic and religious liberty proved plentiful in America.

“The Irish in America, with a few exceptions, were attached to independence,” observed a South Carolina patriot.. Irish Presbyterians constituted a fifth of Pennsylvanians and a quarter of South Carolinians and Georgians.. Frontier fights against the French and their Native American allies reinforced Presbyterian attachment to ideals of liberty and property. Many Irish Presbyterians had preferred to emigrate than to pay tithes supporting an exclusionary Ascendancy. Their descendants preferred to fight than to pay taxes imposed by a remote Parliament. If the first shot at Concord was likely discharged by a New England Puritan, many future volleys fired in freedom’s name came from Irish Presbyterians. (Read more.)