On Mr. Deasy's sideboard
Stephen sees a "tray of Stuart coins, base treasure of a bog."
They are relics of a sorry period in Ireland's history: its
invasion in 1688 by King James II of England, who was seeking
a Catholic base of power against the Protestant King William who had deposed
him. In 1689-90, after securing the allegiance of many Irish
nobles, James issued a series of new coins that were minted
from base metals like copper and brass and debased the
existing Irish currency.
This was not the usual invasion. James ascended the English
throne on the death of his brother Charles II in 1685, but
quickly excited opposition because he was openly Catholic and
employed the rhetoric of absolute monarchy, confirming two
longstanding suspicions about the Stuarts. When he produced a
Catholic heir, powerful Protestant opponents reacted by
encouraging his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange to
raise an army and invade England from the Low Countries. James
fled England, an action which was interpreted as abdication
(and euphemized as "The Glorious Revolution"), and William III
was installed as King, ruling jointly with his wife, James'
daughter Mary.
From France, where he had first taken refuge, James landed an
army in Ireland. He was welcomed by the Catholic lords who had
lost land and power as a result of the long Confederate Wars
of the 1640s and Oliver Cromwell's conquest in 1649-53. But
when William brought his own army to Ireland and defeated
James' forces at the Battle of the Boyne (near Drogheda) in
1690, their downfall became total. Catholics who had supported
James fled the country, becoming the first "wild geese." The ruling class
which eventually became known as the Protestant Ascendancy
took shape. And Parliament passed a series of harsh new penal
laws in the 1690s and early 1700s to suppress the Catholic
population. Edmund Burke remarked that these laws constituted
"a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted
for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a
people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as
ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man."
James's coinage added its own modicum of disaster to this
general catastrophe, because it debased the Irish currency by
inflating the money supply. Excepting some gold and silver
proof strikes, the coins contained no intrinsic value; they
are called "gunmoney," because much of the metal in them came
from melting down old
brass cannons. But, as Gifford observes, they do have
value as collectors' items: "The coins, though initially as
worthless as the Stuart attempt to use Ireland (a bog) as a
base from which to retake England, are, of course, rare."
Presumably Deasy owns them for their numismatic value, not
because they celebrate the Irish Catholic cause. And
presumably they exist in this chapter to inspire Stephen's
contempt for the "base" nature of money and his despair about the
sorry course of Irish history.
In his "Alphabetical Notebook," transcribed by Robert Scholes
and Richard Kain in The Workshop of Daedalus (1965),
Joyce wrote that "Irish wits follow in the footsteps of King
James the Second who struck off base money for Ireland which
the hoofs of cattle have trampled into her soil." Thornton
notes the relevance of this sentence to Deasy's concern with
money and cattle, but Stephen is also probably imagining coins
being fished from Irish bogs.
