Peter O'Higgins

Peter O'Higgins O.P. (c.1602 – 24 March 1642, St Stephen's Green, County Dublin, Ireland) was an Irish Dominican priest who was hanged outside the walls of Dublin, officially for high treason against King Charles I but in reality as part of the religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Ireland that began under King Henry VIII and ended only with Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Fr. O'Higgins was Beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 September 1992 as one of the 24 officially recognized Irish Catholic Martyrs.

Life

O'Higgins is believed to have been born at Tipper, near Naas, County Kildare. He was educated secretly in Ireland and later in Spain. He may have been ordained at Lisbon on 21 December 1624 and he appears in a list of Irish Dominicans resident in the Spanish Empire as of 1627.

With the accession of King Charles I in 1625, a limited religious toleration was granted and Peter O'Higgins came back to Dublin and was assigned to re-open the Dominican friary in Naas, supported by the Viceroy Strafford who was building Jigginstown Castle nearby. Instead, the 1641 rebellion, a rising of the Irish clans of Ulster and led by Felim O'Neill of Kinard, sought to reverse the Plantation of Ulster, the mass evictions of their fellow Gaels, and the religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Ireland, while claiming to be acting under orders from King Charles I.

Believing that Tudor and Stuart religious persecution was finally at an end, the Catholics of Dublin ejected all Church of Ireland clergy from the Pre-Reformation St Patrick's Cathedral, which was then reconsecrated, followed by a Solemn High Mass. According to the Venetian Ambassador, Catholics in the rest of the British Isles were terrified by this move, as they feared, correctly, that it would make the religious persecution of Catholics worse rather than better.

Similarly, instead of actually solving anything, Felim O'Neill's rising marked the beginning of years of escalating warfare with no quarter given between Catholics and Protestants, Puritans and Anglicans, and finally Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army against both Anglican and Catholic Royalists. According to historian D.P. Conyngham, "Ireland was torn by contending factions, and was oppressed by two belligerents during the reign of Charles... Charles, with the proverbial fickleness of the Stuarts, when pressed by the Puritans, persecuted the Irish, while he encouraged them when he hoped their loyalty and devotion would be the means of establishing his royal prerogative. It is ever thus with Ireland... For eight years Ireland was the theatre of the most desolating war and implacable persecution."

During the rising, Rev. Dr. William Pilsworth, Church of Ireland Vicar of Donadea, was arrested by rebel soldiers and was about to be hanged, when Fr. Peter O'Higgins stepped forward. Dr. Pilsworth later wrote that when he was on the gallows, "a priest whom I never saw before, made a long speech on my behalf saying that this...was a bloody inhuman act that would...draw God's vengeance on them. Whereupon I was brought down and released."

Meanwhile, the Portadown massacre and other recent sectarian violence against Protestants were being both exaggerated and weaponized for what is now called atrocity propaganda. Furthermore, the Irish Royal Army was retaliating with systematic raids and sectarian massacres of their own against both real and imagined Catholics. By the time they recaptured Naas in February 1642, the officers and enlisted men of the Irish Royal Army and many participating clergy of the Church of Ireland made no distinction in their own ethnic cleansing between age, gender, or even between Irish language-speaking Catholics and the traditionally Royalist Old English population of Fingal, County Wicklow, County Kildare, and the Pale.

An understandably terrified Fr. Peter O'Higgins accordingly sought the protection of the Earl of Ormond, who ordered him delivered to Dublin under the protection of Royalist cavalry. The fury of Anglican Royalists towards all Catholics and especially priests, however, was so intense that Ormonde's cavalry, under the command of Sir Thomas Armstrong, had to fight a pitched battle against Ormonde's infantrymen, who demanded in vain that Fr. Peter O'Higgins be surrendered to them. Despite further efforts by Ormonde to protect him, O'Higgins instead fell into the hands of Sir Charles Coote, the infamously anti-Catholic Governor of Dublin.

Upon his arrival in Dublin Castle on 3 February, O'Higgins was imprisoned under terrible conditions. Seeking to save his life, the Earl of Ormond gathered many petitions, of which at least twenty still survive, from Protestants relating how Fr. O'Higgins had saved their lives from sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing and imploring that his life be spared in return. By 13 February, Sir Charles Coote had arranged for the testimony of a witness who alleged that Fr. O'Higgins had called for massacres of Protestants, and on 27 April Higgins was outlawed for high treason. The weakness of the evidence was such, though, that O'Higgins was not charged with a crime and was instead sentenced to death by hanging under martial law.

Death

On the eve of the his execution, Peter O'Higgins was offered his life, a full pardon for high treason, and high preferment in the State-controlled Church of Ireland by Sir Charles Coote if he would renounce his faith. O'Higgins said he would do so only if these verbal promises were first committed to a written and signed document.

On 24 March 1642, a great crowd gathered around the gallows in St Stephen's Green, then outside the walls of Dublin, expecting to see a Catholic priest renounce the Catholic religion. But when Sir Charles Coote's full pardon was given to him, Fr. Peter O'Higgins instead announced to the crowd, "The sole reason why I am condemned to death to-day is that I profess the Catholic religion. Here is an authentic proof of my innocence: the autograph letter of the Viceroy offering me very rich rewards and my life if I abandon the Catholic religion. I call God and man to witness that I firmly and unhesitatingly reject these offers and willingly and gladly I enter into this conflict, professing that Faith. I die a Catholic and a Dominican priest. I forgive from my heart all who have conspired to bring about my death." Among the crowd at the foot of the scaffold was Dr. William Pilsworth who shouted out: "This man is innocent! This man is innocent! He saved my life!" Rev. William Pilsworth was not wanting in courage, but his words fell on deaf ears. With the words "Deo Gratias" on his lips Peter O'Higgins was hanged and died upon the gallows.

Legacy

It has been alleged that the main reason for Prior O'Higgins' execution without a formal trial was that a synod at Kells, County Meath chaired by Archbishop Hugh O'Reilly had recently announced, "That, whereas the Catholics of Ireland have taken up arms in defense of their religion, for the preservation of the King, already threatened with destruction by the Puritans, as likewise for the security of their own lives, possessions, and liberty; we, on the part of the Catholics, declare these proceedings to be most just and lawful. Nevertheless, if, in the pursuit of these objects, any person or persons should be actuated by motives if avarice, malice, or revenge, we declare such persons to be guilty of a grievous offense, and deservedly subject to the censures of the Church, unless upon advice they change their intentions and pursue a different course." Fr. O'Higgins believed otherwise and claimed before his death that Sir Charles Coote's signed pardon proved that his imprisonment, trial before a drumhead military tribunal, and death sentence were motivated solely in odium fidei ("out of hatred of the Faith").

Following his martyrdom, local Recusants attempted to bury O'Higgins in the Dominican cemetery attached to St Saviour's Priory, located on the north side of the River Liffey where the Four Courts now stands. The burial was interrupted, however, by Royalist soldiers, who desecrated O'Higgins's body, which was then buried outside the city walls of Dublin.

On 24 October 1644, the Puritan-controlled Parliament in London, seeking to retaliate for the 1641 uprising, resolved, "that no quarter shall be given to any Irishman, or to any papist born in Ireland." Upon landing with the New Model Army at Dublin, Oliver Cromwell issued orders that no mercy was to be shown to the Irish, whom he said were to be treated like the Canaanites during the time of the Old Testament prophet Joshua.

According to historian D.P. Conyngham, "It is impossible to estimate the number of Catholics slain the ten years from 1642 to 1652. Three Bishops and more than 300 priests were put to death for their faith. Thousands of men, women, and children were sold as slaves for the West Indies; Sir W. Petty mentions that 6,000 boys and women were thus sold. A letter written in 1656, quoted by Lingard, puts the number at 60,000; as late as 1666 there were 12,000 Irish slaves scattered among the West Indian islands. Forty thousand Irish fled to the Continent, and 20,000 took shelter in the Hebrides or other Scottish islands. In 1641, the population of Ireland was 1,466,000, of whom 1,240,000 were Catholics. In 1659 the population was reduced to 500,091, so that very nearly 1,000,000 must have perished or been driven into exile in the space of eighteen years. In comparison with the population of both periods, this was even worse than the famine extermination of our own days."

On 27 September 1992, Peter O'Higgins and 16 other Irish Catholic Martyrs were Beatified in Rome by Pope John Paul II.

References

Sources

• Philip Caraman (1966), The Years of Siege: Catholic Life from James I to Cromwell, Longmans. London.
• D.P. Conyngham, Lives of the Irish Martyrs, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, New York.
• Edited by Patrick J. Cornish and Benignus Millet (2005), The Irish Martyrs, Four Courts Press, Dublin.