A fitting testament to Bedell

As far as historic figures associated with Cavan go, Bishop William Bedell must rank amongst the most famous.

“He’s certainly up there,” agrees historian Dr Brendan Scott. “He’s a very important person.”

Central to his renown was his project to have the Old Testament translated into Irish for the first time, and of course this a key component to a new book on Bedell - which brings together essays by historians, and edited by Dr Scott but there is so much more to this English man who became such a prominent figure in Breffni lore during a most tumultuous time in politics.

‘Bishop William Bedell 1571-1642: His Life Work and Contemporaries’ delves into his time in Rome, his headstrong pursuit of what he believed was righteousness, his ambitious building projects, his defence of Catholics during this tumultuous era, and how this coloured his contemporaries’ views of him, for good and bad.

Born into a puritanical family in Essex, England in 1571, young William studied theology in Cambridge University, before taking up a post as a minister in a local parish.

“He could very easily have lived out his life in an obscure Essex parish and nobody would have ever have known of him – but the fact was he was a very, very bright man and he had some good patrons who looked out for him.”

His obvious intellect and connections saw him presented with opportunities to broaden his horizons. His capacity for languages, ultimately saw him have a grasp to varying degrees of English, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, and finally Irish. A three year sojourn in Venice as the chaplain to the English ambassador to Venice, where he put his Italian to good use.

“He actually translated the Book of Common Prayer into Italian while he was there. He did that for the craic - it was just one of those things he liked doing,” says Brendan.

This spell in a deeply Catholic society likely gifted him with insights that would shape his perspectives in Ireland.

“He was surrounded by Catholicism, which he wouldn’t have been if he had been back in England, so I think it gave him a wider outlook than some of his contemporaries might have had,” Brendan opines.

Upon his return to England he served at a country rectory in Suffolk before his appointment as Provost of Trinity College Dublin in 1627. It was a post which ill suited him.

“He was seen [by the university authorities] as being soft on Catholics because he brought Irish language classes into Trinity. The whole idea of Trinity was to educate future protestant ministers who were going to be working in Ireland, so you would think a knowledge of Irish would be helpful. But they didn’t really push that in Trinity, and he did, and that made him quite unpopular.”

Brendan describes his appointment in 1629 as Bishop of Kilmore as “sideways promotion”. He would remain in Cavan for the eventful last decade-plus of his life.

“It was certainly more of a backwater,” says Dr Scott of 17th Century Cavan. “It wasn’t the wealthiest diocese by any means. He had spent three years in Venice, so to end up in Cavan must have been a culture shock.”

His time at Trinity hadn’t dimmed Bedell’s zeal for following his own moral compass. Although he was from a country conducting a long-term colonial project, with all the oppression that involves, Bedell was alive to some of the injustices faced by Catholics.

“He stood up for Catholics when they were being hit with unfair fines or unfair tithes – he stood up for them, and he brought some of his own clergy to court over unfair payments that they were taking from Catholics, and that didn’t make him too popular with his clergy, but it did make him popular with the local Irish,” explains Dr Scott.

Worse for the establishment, he was also appointing Gaelic Irish clergy to Church of Ireland parishes in Cavan.

“That didn’t make him very popular among English born or Scottish born clergy, and a lot of them complained about him. But when Bedell was convinced that he was right, he would not stop for anyone. His archbishop could give out to him - anyone could give out to him - and he didn’t care.”

A less contentious part of his legacy was the investment he put into the more dilapidated Church of Ireland buildings across the dioceses; some of this building work remains to this day.

“He had renovations carried out at the then Kilmore Cathedral, which is now the parish hall connected to the cemetery.

“If you had asked Bedell at the end of his life, ‘What was your greatest contribution as Bishop of Kilmore?’ He would have said the church building – he wouldn’t have thought about the Old Testament because it hadn’t even been published.”

At the same time as Bedell was managing affairs in Cavan, a rift was developing in England between King Charles and a rump of his parliament, which led to an unprecedented decade of tumult, sparking the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the English Civil war and ultimately regicide. As the dispute initially ignited Irish confederates sought to capitalise on England’s difficulty.

“In the 1641 rebellion he [Bedell] is left alone for quite a while, when other English people are attacked and kicked out of their houses. A lot of English settler refugees end up in Kilmore for shelter.”

However, circumstances saw the O’Reillys eventually imprison him with a few others in Cloghoughter castle over the winter of 1641, where by the accounts of his son and son-in-law, they were treated well by their captors.

Brendan explains the change of tact by the Irish: “He was arrested because some of the Gaelic Irish had been arrested and imprisoned and so they were trying to do a prisoner swap. They thought - we’ll arrest him and do a swap, which is exactly what happened a few weeks later.”

Bedell was released in January 1642, but having been dispossessed of his home, he shared cramped rooms with other refugees.

“These houses were packed with refugees, and some sort of a dose went around the house. He was probably already weakened from having spent a pretty uncomfortable six or so weeks on Cloghoughter.”

There the 70 year old succumbs to illness, which as Brendan observes, was “a big age” for the times.

“When he died the catholic bishop didn’t want him buried in the graveyard, and the O’Reillys – who were the people who kicked him out of the house in the first place – they said no and gave him a burial with full honours. It was very unusual for an English protestant bishop to get a Gaelic Irish full military honours burial, where they fired a gun shot.”

It is a remarkable life. But what of that Old Testament for which he became famous?

In Britain and Ireland both the Old and New Testaments had been translated into English for Protestants to read and understand. Irish speaking Catholics of course continued to attend Mass in Latin, where Bible readings were also in Latin.

“The whole idea for Protestantism was that their religious services and literature would be in the local vernacular – so if you were in Germany, the Bible would be in German. If you are in Ireland you would think the Bible would be in Irish, and the New Testament had been published in the early 17th Century in Irish, but no one had done the Old Testament, so Bedell took that on himself to do that.”

As such the Catholic Church would have completely opposed this move, but as Dr Scott notes, Bedell wasn’t worried about the Catholic hierarchy. More surprisingly, Bedell didn’t receive “much support” from his Church of Ireland superiors in this endeavour.

“When he believed in the correctness of something, he did it no matter what it cost him.”

The translation was part of his aim to entice Irish speaking natives to the Church of Ireland.

“He saw that as part of his job: he was going out to convert, but a lot of his fellow bishops would have seen that as a waste of time – ‘Don’t waste your time trying to convert the Gaelic Irish, we’ll concentrate on the people who came over in the plantation’.

“Bedell was different, he said ‘No I want to try to convert them’, which made him very unpopular with his English clergy.”

Sadly the Old Testament translation was “ready to go”, but it was never published in his life time.

“It was sitting there on his desk waiting to be published when he died.

“A lot of his papers were burned after the 1641 rising, but they managed to save the translation – the original translation that was done in Cavan is actually in the Marsh Library in Dublin. I’ve actually held it in my hands.”