wake of Cromwell’s conquests. Hartlib represented Ireland as a realm cleared for the free settlement of not only the Protestant English but Protestants from the Continent as well—exiled Bohemians and other refugees from the Thirty Years’ War.123 Neither the native Irish nor the Catholic Old English had a role to play in this new Ireland—in Hartlib’s Protestant vision, they were not even subordinate; they were invisible. Natural history, prosperity, and Protestant English colonization of Ireland were further linked in the Down Survey of Irish land, which William Petty conducted for Cromwell. Petty surveyed landownership as well as the quality and productivity of the land county by county in preparation for the transfer of much of that land from its Irish Catholic owners to soldiers in Cromwell’s army.124 Petty, though less anti-Catholic in theological terms than Hartlib, nonetheless saw Roman Catholicism as an impediment to the increase of trade in Ireland, as Adam Fox has observed.125 Petty also maintained the link between topographical knowledge, the improvement of trade, and English imperial dominance in Ireland (and elsewhere).126 Through the Restoration he plied Charles II and other influential members of the court with reports, grounded in his new methods of “political arithmetic,” encouraging the Crown to take a strong hand in displacing Irish Catholics with Protestant English planters.127
However, the story of the establishment of Ireland’s place within England’s Britain cannot be told solely in terms of English efforts to establish imperial dominance. The case of William Molyneux indicates that further complexities inhered in the production of topographical studies of Ireland. Molyneux was from a wealthy, Protestant Anglo-Irish family with roots in Calais. As a student at Trinity College Dublin, he became interested in natural philosophy and mathematics. After a stint in London studying law at the Middle Temple, he returned home, where he founded the Dublin Philosophical Society, modeled on the Royal Society, in 1683. Like Sibbald and Lhuyd, Molyneux maintained an extensive correspondence with British naturalists. As secretary of the Dublin Philosophical Society, he exchanged letters and meeting minutes with the Royal Society and the Oxford Philosophical Society.128
Topography was one of Molyneux’s many scientific interests. He served for a time as surveyor-general and chief engineer for Dublin, and he took responsibility for the Irish sections of the bookseller Moses Pitt’s English Atlas.129 Pitt’s Atlas was to be a luxury product, a complete, up-to-date atlas of the world in eleven volumes, but only four volumes were ever published. Expected to include six hundred plates, the project failed on account of exorbitant production costs of as much as one thousand pounds per volume, compounded by financial losses Pitt incurred through his misadventures in real estate development.130 In promoting the project, Pitt advertised the support of Charles II, his brother the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, the Royal Society, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The maps, made from plates that had been engraved earlier in the century for Dutch cartographer Johannes Janssonius’s Atlas major but partially recut based on the latest available knowledge, were to be accompanied by reams of historical and topographical information, at least some of it newly collected. Leading scholars, including Christopher Wren, John Pell, Robert Hooke, Thomas Gale, and Isaac Vossius, signed on to advise Pitt and monitor his progress.131
Though it fell far short of Pitt’s projections, this was intended as a prestige product, meant to demonstrate the heights to which English knowledge of the world, and English printing, had ascended by the late seventeenth century. In participating in this project, then, Molyneux worked in concert with English mapmakers, virtuosi, and printers. In the early 1680s he issued a set of queries requesting information for the account of Ireland.132 Respondents were largely Anglo-Irish and Protestant, reflecting the makeup of Molyneux’s correspondence. Molyneux did work with at least one Catholic Irish, rather than Anglo-Irish, antiquary, Roderic O’Flaherty of County Galway, author of a 1685 treatise on Irish history. O’Flaherty’s involvement in the project spawned an ongoing correspondence; O’Flaherty also worked closely with Lhuyd on the Irish Gaelic portions of the Glossography, mailing him printed sheets of the dictionary heavily annotated with his remarks and offering extended critiques of the entire book in his letters.133 Nevertheless, Molyneux and most of his respondents saw themselves as participants in a Protestant, Anglo-centric “Britain,” an allegiance reflected in the questionnaire that Molyneux circulated. As noted on the questionnaire, interested persons could pick up their free copies at the bookshop belonging to Dudley Davis in Dublin. A brief advertisement followed: patrons could also purchase at Davis’s shop William Dugdale’s Antient usage in bearing of such ensignes of honour as are commonly call’d arms (1682), which was published with a “Catalogue of the Present Nobility and Baronets of England, Scotland, and Ireland.”134 Given a small space to insert an advertisement for other books he carried, the bookseller chose this one, suggesting he presumed a readership who saw, either in actuality or aspirationally, the British nobility as their appropriate social context.
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,
