Dublin had become Protestant by the time…
1695 CE
Dublin had become Protestant by the time of the Reformation.
During the English Civil Wars, the city's royalist defenders, after contemplating joining forces with an armed Irish Catholic confederacy, had surrendered the city in 1649 to Oliver Cromwell's English parliamentary army.
By the end of the Cromwell era in 1660, this was a town of only nine thousand inhabitants.
The city’s remarkable resurgence begins now, ten years after the resettlement of thousands of refugee Huguenot weavers, their rights curtailed in 1685 by the French Crown’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Flemish weavers having come in their wake, the cloth trades now flourish, threatening English cloth interests and prompting the British Parliament to impose export restrictions upon Dublin.
The Irish Parliament, dominated from 1691 by the Ascendancy, as the English Protestant establishment is called, passes the first of the Penal Laws—a series of harsh discriminatory measures against Catholics and Dissenters in Ireland.
These laws, which will for years be the cause of sporadic fighting by Irish Catholics, will ultimately disenfranchise them, place restrictions on their ownership of property, hinder them from entering the professions, and obstruct their education.
Not until the times of their great grandchildren, some of whom are to form a small army during the American Revolution, will these laws begin to be repealed.