Pious and Promiscuous: Life, Love and Family in Presbyterian Ulster, by Leanne Calvert, Royal Irish Academy, , 272 pp, €22, ISBN: ‎978-1802050394

Leanne Calvert’s Pious and Promiscuous (published, and beautifully so, by the Royal Irish Academy) sets out to achieve two aims – to tell the story of Presbyterian family life in Ulster, the stories of those who ‘lived, loved and laboured’ in the long eighteenth century, and from this to contribute an under-explored facet to the broader history of the Irish family. Calvert is working within two themes which, as she explains, have often been sidelined within the existing historiography, Ulster and Presbyterianism. Ulster has been considered so different, so much a place apart, that it has been overlooked by historians who will not compare apples and oranges (no pun intended). Presbyterians likewise, as a minority religious grouping clustered in Ulster, have been regarded as exceptional and unlikely to be representative of broader Irish trends.

Calvert has crafted a wonderful, rigorous and moving book which follows family life through sexual union, birth, childhood and young adulthood, work, marriage, childbearing and child-rearing, and death; a canvas no less compelling for its miniature scale and quotidian nature. Calvert has drawn on the ‘Presbyterian archive’ to present to her readers this captivating history of Presbyterian life, a veritable Bridgerton on the Bann.

Calvert’s Presbyterian archive is made up of two sources. The first consists of the records created by the church itself: the inevitable institutional paper trail of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths, the enrolments for Sunday Schools, the lists of poor relief recipients. The greater part of this are the records from ‘discipline’ cases handled by the church courts, courts staffed by a minister and an elected group of elders. It is from the Kirk Session court records in particular that Calvert wrings some of her most fascinating findings, drawing on twenty-three sets of records spanning the period from 1690 to 1830. The courts heard all manner of cases, from sexual misbehaviour to lacklustre church attendance. In 1700, the elders of Burt Presbyterian church in Donegal had decided, for instance, that there was too much alcohol sloshing around the area, and henceforth agreed to keep an eye on the problem. In addition to church records, the second source Calvert draws on are the personal archives of five Presbyterians families with ties to Ulster – the Crawfords and Tennents from Antrim, the Drennans of Belfast and Dublin, the Kennedys of Tyrone and the Youngs of Londonderry.

What does the book tell us about Presbyterian family life? Let us pause for a moment to consider the prevailing stereotypes of this benighted people: Ian Paisley, Scotland, and a certain tang of religious fundamentalism. Perhaps I am biased, being myself a lapsed member. Not content with my own prejudice, I put the question to a WhatsApp group chat. The answers, from a collection of British, American and Irish friends, read like this: Scotland, Paisley, tray bakes, homophobia, ‘self-righteous and judgey’, the American Midwest, Heather Humphreys, and finally, better music (perhaps the devil does not have all the best tunes). A clear picture emerged: a religious grouping that was rigid, unyielding, puritanical. Staunch, I believe, is the word that has been trademarked in this regard. Perhaps though all this really tells us is that Presbyterians in the public mind have become indistinguishable from their ‘Free’ variety, a flavour which only emerged in the 1950s and which has strong links with the Democratic Unionist Party.

Understandably then, I was surprised to learn that Presbyterians used to have – brace yourself – a reputation for being loose. As Calvert writes : ‘The province of Ulster, home to many Presbyterians, has historically been portrayed as a hotbed of illicit sexual activity.’ And the historians have receipts: the north-east of Ireland had higher rates of illegitimacy than the rest of the country, more comparable to England and Wales, while levels of bridal pregnancy were high. While more recent scholarship has thrown doubt on this interpretation, one of the takeaways from the book which struck me most forcibly is the degree to which sexual indiscretion was tolerated and managed within church disciplinary structures which allowed for its expungement.

This is illustrated by the case which opens the book. It is 1712, and Sarah Campbell has drawn the ire of the Carnmoney Kirk Session. She has confessed to a sexual transgression, she is pregnant outside of wedlock, her second such pregnancy. Sarah identified the father as John Wilson, who was also the father of her first child, which he had taken in and raised along with his wife, Mary. In the wake of this, Sarah had taken herself off to Belfast to work as a wet nurse. Returning home after receiving tragic news about her child, Sarah had again fallen in with John. John, meanwhile, steadfastly denied paternity of the second child. Here is extramarital sex, here is adultery, and here is the incorrigibility of a second offence. Despite this, the case demonstrates the ways in which the church courts could expiate guilt. Three years after the case was first heard, Sarah stood before the congregation, confessed her relapse, and was absolved. There are many similar examples. In 1703, Mary Cunningham was called before the Carnmoney Kirk Session to speak to rumours that her husband Thomas had deserted her and run off with a local woman, Agnes. The errant couple confessed to the sin of adultery and it was agreed that they should undergo censure once they had demonstrated sufficient penance. Thomas, as was common for adulterers, was directed to appear publicly before the congregation on three consecutive Sundays in order to absolve his guilt.

This clearly wasn’t a foolproof system, and there were some obvious roadblocks to the satisfactory resolution of cases. In cases with little proof one way or the other, women’s denials of sexual transgression were considered dubious at best. In 1702 Templepatrick Kirk Session investigated the case of Agnes Robison, who, it was alleged by Jean Little, had miscarried a pregnancy following a premarital relationship with Gavine Cudbert. Agnes resolutely denied the accusation. Three years later she was denied a certificate of good standing, something which would have enabled her to access church membership elsewhere. At issue was her failure to evince proof that she was blameless or to accept the guilt of the accusation. The church processes had given Agnes a platform in which to assert her own truth, but without evidence this still left her under a cloud of suspicion that would follow her around. As Agnes learned, attempting to prove a negative was mightily difficult.

Presbyterians migrated to Ulster in significant numbers from the mid-seventeenth century. In the decade leading up to 1700, around 50,000 migrated to Ulster. In 1691, the Presbyterian community in the province numbered 100,000, by 1835 it was almost 650,000. There was an intense concentration in the north-east, the province that the Scots could see from their own shoreline, as well as smaller populations elsewhere, particularly in Dublin.

I started reading this book while travelling to a conference on punishment in the global peripheries. Across three days, speakers detailed the ways in which imperial legacies continued to impact expressions of penality. It struck me that the Presbyterians offered an unusual case within this framing of settler-colonialism. Presbyterians were hardly the ones with all the power. And neither did strength of numbers equate to power and influence. While seventy-five to eighty per cent of the population of Ireland in the early eighteenth century was Roman Catholic, it was the minority Anglican population which held sway. Presbyterians occupied an in-between position, legally proscribed in certain respects but permitted tolerances not granted Catholics. Only in 1845 were marriages performed by Presbyterian ministers considered legally valid. In contrast to the Catholic confessional state of the twentieth century, Calvert is writing within the context of the Anglican confessional state.

Yet within this, there is a surprising degree of ecumenicalism. Calvert details cases of Presbyterians turning to Anglican clergy or Catholic priests to conduct their marriages, leading to a seemingly a la carte arrangement of who could provide religious ministrations in a pinch. In 1767, a woman named Alice Maguire appeared before Cahans Kirk Session with concerns that a member of the Cahans congregation was sexually exploiting her daughter. What marked this out was Alice’s religion, for Alice Maguire was a Catholic, and her plight was heard with great sympathy by the Session. These and other examples offer glimpses of a certain religious mixing that existed at an informal level and which sheds light on the status quo ante the intensification of sectarianism through the nineteenth century.

As well as offences against morality, cases were also heard which involved offences expressly forbidden by the criminal law. The 1726 case of Jane Colvill may have included some criminal wrongdoing. As she lay dying, Jane had confessed to her sister that she was pregnant and that it was her belief that she had been poisoned by the father of her unborn child, who had given her a powder which he said would serve to end the pregnancy.

Before Burt Kirk Session in 1710, Florence Macky alleged that her master, William Smith, had raped her and bribed her to leave the country. Florence’s brother vouched for her story but in the absence of any admission from William, the matter could not be resolved and the case was closed in 1712. Inevitably, in such cases, allegations of rape and sexual assault went hand-in-hand with judgements on the moral character of the complainant. As a result, many women chose not to bring such allegations before the Session. Here was the inevitable deployment of a sexual character reference, such as we would recognise today in sexual offence trials. In some cases, the gendered sexual norms worked in an individual woman’s favour. In 1755, Martha McGregor, for instance, found that her unblemished character persuaded the Kirk Session to accept the truth of her claim that she was pregnant as a result of rape. This meant Martha escaped censure for bearing a child outside of marriage.

The rhythms of daily life were in large part dictated by work and worship. The rituals of life were the rituals of the church, whether it was the tentpole events of baptism and marriage, or the weekly Sabbath gatherings. The ways in which people met and formed new attachments were often through such church-adjacent get togethers. A 1707 case before Templepatrick Kirk Session saw Mary McClaine allege that she had engaged in extra-marital sex with Andrew Malcomson on the occasion that both were ‘wakeing’ a gravely ill neighbour. Less scandalously, in 1822 Robert Magill took the opportunity of a wake to be close to his future wife, Ann Jane Skelton.

Against this backdrop, in which religious belief shaped everyday life, it is hardly surprising that the church’s disciplinary strictures were taken less as a suggestion and more as a roadmap for entry to heaven. The networks of surveillance, on young people and the bodies of women, were par for the course following the internalisation of a moral schema in which eternal damnation was the ballgame. You could attempt to evade earthly sanction, but the Almighty would get you in the end. So it was for Michael Paul, who in 1704 was named as the father of a child by a woman who was most definitely not his wife. Michael denied the claim but appeared again before the Session six years later to confess his adultery. In the intervening period, he said he had been visited by great troubles, including ‘extreame poverty’ and misfortunes which had befallen two of his children. There was always a higher court, and the stakes could not be more serious.

Despite the watchful presence of God, not everyone was willing to accept the public humiliation of censure. Congregation members submitted to church discipline voluntarily, and there was nothing compelling them beyond loss of access to church privileges. Some church members simply refused to submit. One such case is that of Richard Berry, hauled before Burt Kirk Sessions in 1712 for the offence of masturbation. Berry’s case is the only masturbation case in the archives, which clearly speaks to the private nature of the offensive behaviour (unless you’re Richard Berry). Yet the contemporary literature was clear in its warnings on this vice, citing listlessness in young men and acute nose pains for girls who indulged. Various witnesses informed the Session that they had chanced upon Richard masturbating in a field; to make matters worse, he had then encouraged his friends to do the same and engage in a practice that he claimed was ‘sanctioned by Scripture’. Rather than confess, Richard was incensed at the complaint and stormed out of the church telling those gathered that God would judge them for their judgement of him. Richard later returned to apologise for his rash behaviour, while continuing to deny the truth of the allegation.

This gem is one of the things that makes Pious and Promiscuous such a treat – not Richard Berry’s sexual deviancy per se, but the sense that you are pulling up a chair and sitting down for a marathon gossip session, albeit one that is meticulously researched. Let us end with a final nugget. Drawing on the papers of the Tennent family, Calvert details the conflict between William Tennent and his parents following rumours that a woman from Scotland had pitched up in Belfast claiming that her and William were as man and wife and with a bunch of William’s children in tow. William’s father, John Tennent, advised that given the circumstances, it was best that William marry the woman and mitigate his wrongdoing. William’s mother, Ann, was of a different mind, and ensured that a postscript was added to her husband’s letter which ended: ‘your Mother Makes me write that she w[oul]d grudge & grieve to hear of your Marriage w[i]t[h] any of these base whores’.

Calvert’s book offers a deep dive into the lives of Ulster Presbyterians, drawing on the letters and diaries of the more affluent members of society and considering these alongside the revealing fragments of those who fell foul of their church. Arguing for the relevance of these histories, Calvert writes that ‘[w]hile Presbyterians may have been a religious minority, their records offer much more than a marginalised and unrepresentative picture of family life’. This immensely satisfying work does much to further Calvert’s stated goal for an expanded view of the Irish family and the various forms this has taken historically.