Nicholas French

Nicholas French (1604 – 23 August 1678), Roman Catholic Bishop of Ferns, was an Irish political activist and pamphleteer, who was born at Wexford.

He was educated at St Anthony's College, Leuven, and returning to Ireland became a priest at Wexford. In 1641, war broke out in Ireland after a Rebellion of Irish Catholics in October of that year. French, along with several other Catholic clerics and gentry, helped to organise the rebels into a more cohesive political movement, the Confederate Catholics of Ireland in March 1642, with the intention of attaining freedom of religion and legal equality for Catholics and self-government for Ireland. The Confederates established their capital at Kilkenny and with the collapse of Royal authority as a result of Civil War became the de facto government of Ireland between 1642 and 1649.

In 1646 French was appointed bishop of Ferns. In the same year, he helped the Papal Nuncio Giovanni Battista Rinuccini to bring down a peace agreement signed by the Confederate Supreme Council with the English Royalists and Charles I that fell short of the original Confederate demands.

French and a lawyer named Nicholas Plunkett then assumed control of the Supreme Council and tried to promote a better peace treaty with the Royalists at the same time as a more vigorous prosecution of the war in Ireland. A new Treaty was signed with the Royalists in 1648 and French was prominent in trying to secure the widest possible support within the Confederation for it. However, the most hardline Catholic elements remained hostile to it. In any event, the Royalist/Confederate alliance lasted little more than a year -as they were crushed by an English Parliamentarian conquest of Ireland which began in 1649. The Parliamentarians were extremely hostile to Catholic clergy, executing them when they apprehended them, and French deemed it prudent to leave Ireland in 1651, and the remainder of his life was passed on the continent of Europe.

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