WALSH, Peter. The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary, or Irish remonstrance, so gracefully received by His Majesty anno 1661.

“VOMITTED FORTH IN ONE HOUR MORE FILTH AND BLASPHEMY THAN LUTHER AND CALVIN TOGETHER”

Against all calumnies and censures. In several treatises : with a true account and full discussion of the delusory Irish Remonstrance and other papers framed and insisted on by the National Congregation at Dublin, anno 1666, and presented to His Majesties (then) Lord Lieutenant of that Kingdom, the Duke of Ormond, but rejected by His Grace. To which are added three appendixes: whereof the last contains the Marquess of Ormond Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, his long and excellent letter of the second of December, 1650. In answer to both the declaration and excommunication of the bishops, &c. at Jamestown. London & Dublin: 1674. Folio. pp. [2], lii, [18], 276, 297-329, 331-349, 349-357, [360], 357-378, 390-765, [1], 83, [3], vi, 137. Bound at the Abrams Bindery in full brown morocco, blind-stamped panel tooling to boards. Spine with raised bands elaborately decorated in gilt, title in gilt on maroon morocco label on spine; board edges gilt. Neat circular library stamps. A very good copy. Rare.

ESTC R13539. Sweeney 5499 Wing 634.
Father Peter Walsh, OFM, controversial Franciscan, political theorist, and advisor to Ormond, here provides the fullest contemporary defence of the 1661-62 Irish Remonstrance, the loyalty oath promoted by Charles II to secure Catholic allegiance to the restored monarchy. On the restoration Walsh urged his patron, Ormond, to support the Irish Roman Catholics as the natural friends of royalty against the Protestant sectaries, who had supported the Parliament during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Walsh endeavoured to mitigate their lot and efface the impression made by their successive rebellions by a loyal remonstrance to Charles II, boldly repudiating papal infallibility and interference in public affairs, and affirming undivided allegiance to the crown. For eight years he canvassed for signatures to this address, but in spite of considerable support, the strenuous opposition of the Jesuits and Dominicans deterred the clergy and nearly wrecked the scheme. A General Chapter of the Franciscans held in Antwerp in 1664 protested Walsh’s publications undermining the authority of the Minister General and of the Holy See. The work stands as the most substantial printed record of the bitter divisions within the Catholic community in Restoration Ireland, between the episcopal party and what Ormond called the “Old Irish Loyalist” faction rallied by Walsh.
A monumental folio, extremely important for the study of Irish political theology, Ormondist statecraft, Cromwellian and Restoration settlements, and the sources of later Jacobite tensions.
Peter Walsh (1615-1688), D.D. was born at Mooretown near Naas, County Kildare. His father was a chandler at Naas and a member of a local Old English family, his mother it is said was an Englishwoman and a protestant. He was educated at the Irish College at Louvain. Joined the Franciscan Order and was later Professor of Divinity at Louvain. He is described by Joep Leerssen in Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael as “one of the most important Irish historians of the [17th] century”. Walsh returned to Ireland in 1646, the following year he attacked in nine consecutive sermons the Disputatio Apologetica of Cornelius Mahony, in which the rights of the kings of England to Ireland was denied. As a consequence of his conduct Walsh was deprived of the lectureship in divinity to which he had been appointed at Kilkenny. The collapse of the Confederation brought with it a bitter aftermath of mutual recriminations between Rinuccinians and Ormondites, between Gaels and Gall (Old English), between Franciscans and Jesuits, clerics and laymen. He proved to be a most divisive influence from the start as he opposed the pro Old Irish policy adopted by the papal nuncio Archbishop Rinuccini and wanted the Confederate Catholics to make peace with James Butler, then the Marquess of Ormond.
The present work is Walsh’s ‘magnum opus’ and the volume that sums up the direction his life took in post-Restoration Ireland. He devised the Loyal Formulary, or Irish remonstrance as a means of reconciling the Irish Catholics with Charles II, the basis of this being a denial of papal infallibility and the promise of total allegiance to the crown. This important work contains both eyewitness accounts and contemporary documents, and is the most important source for the history of Ireland in the restoration period. Despite all his endeavours, it came to naught and in 1670, he himself was excommunicated by a Franciscan general chapter held in Spain.
He was driven from the house, and even forbidden to enter any town which possessed a library. Rinuccini accused him of having affected the nobility of Ireland and destroyed the cause. He also afterwards described him as “turned out of his convent for disobedience to superiors, a sacrilegious profaner of the pulpit in Kilkenny cathedral, who vomitted forth in one hour more filth (sordes) and blasphemy than Luther and Calvin together in three years”.
Walsh sided with Ormond and wrote against the Papal Nuncio, which led to his excommunication. For his loyal services to Ormond he received a pension from the Government. He died in 1687 and is buried in St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, London. The Bishop of Salisbury said of him that “He was the honestest and learnedest man among them (Catholics), and was indeed in all points of controversy almost wholly a Protestant”. In the dedication to Charles II Walsh declares himself an “unrepentant sinner”, determined to die as he had lived, the king’s “most loyal, most obedient, and most humble servant”.

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