Unlike some members of his profession, Richard Hadsor (c. 1570–1635), a Middle Temple lawyer born in Ireland, has not been caught in the spotlight which historians have aimed at the dramatic political confrontations in England and Ireland during the early seventeenth century. Nor, since he was not a recusant, has he attracted the attention of Irish historians of the legal profession. Although canvassed for both, he never attained a seat in a parliament or a place on the English or Irish judiciary. He had no part in the ‘inflation of honours’ as either a broker or a recipient. Although he spent the whole of his professional life in London, nothing is known of his English social circle — apart from a single reference in his will to Sir lohn Bramston, a fellow Templar — or the value of his private practice, and only a little (which is, however, suggestive) of his clientèle. He wrote nothing for publication. He had no legitimate offspring and, therefore, none of the successful lawyer’s usual inclination to create a substantial patrimony. In consequence, it is hardly surprising that he does not figure in the standard works of biography or even in a commemoration of nearly one thousand Middle Templars straddling several centuries. Nevertheless, in his own time Richard Hadsor was no nonentity, and he deserves to be rescued from an entirely posthumous obscurity by something more generous than a scholarly footnote. His career as a devoted royal servant spanned a period in which the Old English were being relentlessly excluded from high office in Ireland, yet as crown counsel for Irish affairs he succeeded in establishing a distinctive niche in the Whitehall bureaucracy.

Between folios 179v and 181v of volume 216 of the state papers for Ireland is a document entitled ‘Discourse humbly presented by Richard Hadsor ...’ which a later hand has endorsed as having being written ‘probably some time in 1604 when Tyrone & Tyrconel were in peace’. In 1854 an anonymous scholar (possibly E.P. Shirley) published a transcript of the document in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, but without appending either notes or commentary on the text or investigating its authorship. In the first volume of the Jacobean series of the Calendar of State Papers, Ireland the editors, C. W. Russell and J.P. Prendergast, provided an almost complete transcript, suggesting that they too found it noteworthy. But since then the ‘Discourse’ has received virtually no further attention from historians. Yet it contains, among other things, the earliest articulation of a ‘three kingdoms’ approach to the new Stuart multiple monarchy. Two reasons may account for its neglect: first, neither the anonymous editor of 1854 nor Russell and Prendergast paid any attention to the question of the authorship of the treatise — the former being apparently of the view that certain sections of the text would be of interest to the journal’s antiquarian readership, while the latter mistakenly attributed the tract to either a Richard or a John Hudson, neither of whom was identifiable; secondly, its contents are odd, a mixture of useful information and relatively unconventional opinion.

The Wood’s Halfpence affair has long been recognised as one of the most serious disputes to have occurred between the Irish and British political establishments during the eighteenth century. There is no doubt that the conflict — caused by Irish resentment over the patent granted to William Wood to coin copper halfpence for Ireland — was one of the most serious ruptures in Anglo-Irish relations between the Williamite war and the ‘patriot’ campaign of the 1750s. The simple fact is that in 1723–4 the British administration was unable to implement its policy in Ireland. The Irish parliamentary managers declined to co-operate in the implementation of Wood’s patent, the Irish privy council failed to offer advice about how the conflict might be resolved, and the Irish lords justices refused to obey the positive orders of the British government.

In the past historians have argued that, shocked by the demonstrable unreliability of its Irish servants during this episode, the British government adopted a systematic policy of appointing English officials to the highest offices of Irish state and church. The appointment of Hugh Boulter as primate of the Church of Ireland in 1724 and of Richard West as lord chancellor in 1725 seemed to support such an interpretation.

In his recent book dealing with the history of duelling in Ireland, James Kelly comes to the conclusion that eighteenth-century Ireland was essentially ‘a violent society’, peopled at least in part ‘by wilful men who put their individual reputations above their lives, their families, their religion, and the law’. Such comments seem to continue a well-established tradition of interpretation that goes back to the nineteenth century. However, this image of a society in which violence was endemic, and conflict a feature of everyday life, has not gone unquestioned by historians. For example, Thomas Bartlett and Sean Connolly have instead noted the relatively controlled nature of popular protest, the early disappearance of banditry, and the reliance, until the very end of the century, on local enforcement of the law, as possible indications that Ireland may not have been as disorderly a society as has been suggested. These differing interpretations have, in turn, an obvious relevance to the wider debate on how eighteenth-century Ireland should be perceived: as a society irreconcilably and uniquely divided by religious and ethnic conflicts, or as a more or less typical part of the European ancient régime.

The Irish Yeomanry was a voluntary, part-time military force raised in 1796 for local law-and-order duties, with the potential for full military service during invasion or insurrection. It consisted of locally organised corps of up to 100 men serving under commissioned officers, paid, armed and equipped by government. The Irish Yeomanry and Orange Order are popularly associated to the extent of being semantically linked in songs: for example, one ballad claims that the Orangeman:

The primary sources apparently corroborate this with much evidence of ostentatiously ‘Orange’ displays by yeomen. On 12 July 1797 eight Catholic Kerry militiamen were killed in Stewartstown, County Tyrone, in a brawl with yeomen and Orangemen after a militiaman seized an Orange cockade. At Hillsborough in October 1798 ‘a party of Yeoman Infantry (calling themselves Orangemen) beat a number of poor Papists out of the market’. Yet to automatically accept the received view on the ‘Orange yeomanry’ risks anachronistical determining cause by consequence.

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‘A considerable number [of refugees] have left on a plea of compulsion without any justification whatever for that plea,’ declared the secretary to the Provisional Government in 1922, referring to the departure from the twenty-six-county area of disbanded members of the R.I.C., British ex-servicemen and civilians believed to have been loyal to the British régime in Ireland. Such a claim was greeted with scant belief in Britain in the spring of 1922 as perhaps as many as 20,000 people, some with their entire families, arrived on British shores and were given refugee status by the British government through its Irish Distress Committee, founded to aid Irish loyalist victims of the Civil War. The committee first sat in May 1922 under the chairmanship of Sir Samuel Hoare, a Conservative, and its function was to give loans of money to refugees from Ireland until they either found work in Britain or decided it was safe to return home. At first it had a budget of £10,000, which was fairly meagre, even by the standards of the early 1920s, considering that it dealt with 3,349 applicants in its first six months. Relief was available to claimants through loans and grants. Even at that early stage when the Civil War was far from over, the Irish Distress Committee realised that its work ‘only touches the fringe of the bigger question of compensation’, though perhaps it did not realise just how big that question was to be in the aftermath of Irish independence.

A list from September 1939 of files destroyed by the Department of External Affairs in the invasion scares of 1939–40 contains an intriguing reference to the possibility of dispatching Irish military forces to the Saarland on the Franco-German border in the winter of 1934–5. There they would serve as part of an international peacekeeping force while a plebiscite on the status of the territory was carried out under League of Nations auspices in January 1935. The context of this article is the events surrounding the creation of the peacekeeping force in December 1934.

That the Irish Free State should be mentioned as a possible contributor to the international force for the Saar is an illustration of the emerging mediatory role the state was to adopt after its three-year term on the League Council concluded in September 1933. With an Irish diplomat, Sean Lester, seconded to League service as High Commissioner in Danzig from 1934, and with Irish-born Edward Phelan, Assistant Director of the International Labour Organisation, being mentioned as a possible contender for the League post of Deputy Secretary-General in 1933, and with Eamon de Valera rising in importance as an international statesman and League supporter, Ireland’s involvement in the Saar was both an illustration and a result of the state’s prominent position in the League in the early to mid-1930s.

The Ministry of Education was, and remains, the most important government department for the Catholic church in Northern Ireland. As Cormack, Gallagher and Osborne note,

The devolved government appeared to recognise Catholic educational interests by usually appointing as Minister of Education one of the more liberal figures within the Ulster Unionist Party such as Lord Londonderry, Lord Charlemont and Samuel Hall-Thompson. However, in the first week of 1950 Sir Basil Brooke ‘surprised everyone, and appalled Catholics’ by appointing Harry Midgley, an avowed opponent of the Catholic clergy and autonomous Catholic schools, as Northern Ireland’s sixth Minister of Education.