On 16 February 1966 James Camlin Beckett, who by that time had taught in Queen’s University Belfast for twenty-one years, confided to his diary that he found it ‘hard to stay awake for an hour long lecture’ and wondered whether ‘we also go to sleep without knowing it, when we are giving a lecture instead of receiving it’. In this, the first of the lectures commemorating Beckett’s achievement, I propose — one hopes in a passably alert state — to examine three central aspects of his life and convictions: his politics and sense of national identity, his religious life, and finally his philosophy of history. The lecture draws upon Beckett’s writings, and on his papers and diaries (which are at present housed in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland); other Beckett letters, some in private hands, have also been used.

Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, was a most unlikely antiquarian. A self-made man and a ruthless politician, by the early 1630s he had become the richest landowner in Munster and was entertaining ambitions to rule Ireland as Lord deputy. Yet in the same period the ‘great earl’ spent much time and effort sifting the archives for genealogical information about one of the most ancient noble houses of Ireland — the Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare and Desmond. In 1627 Cork paid for repairs to the ‘pedigree box’ he kept in his study at Youghal, and it was soon put to good use. In 1632 Cork ‘and … other his judicious friends by him imployed herein’ spent time searching ‘several ancient records and sundry other deeds and muniments’ in order to produce a genealogy of the senior branch of the Fitzgerald clan, the earls of Kildare. And shortly afterwards Cork prepared a ‘fair pedigree of the house and descent of the ancient and noble family of the Fitzgeralds earls of Desmond, drawn up by myself, and friends’ searches of ancient records’, which he later sent to Thomas Russell, whose own ‘Relation of the Fitzgeralds’, published in 1638, was dedicated to and probably commissioned by, the earl. Why should a blunt businessman and wily politician such as the earl of Cork spend so much time and effort researching the genealogies of the defunct dynasties of medieval Ireland?

In 1783 Henry Grattan complimented Charles James Fox by describing his views as ‘liberal to Ireland and just to those lately concerned in her redemption’. He also claimed that ‘Fox wished sincerely for the liberty of Ireland without reserve.’ Sir James Mackintosh’s draft inscription for Westmacott’s statue of Fox in Westminster Abbey stated that he had ‘contended for the rights of the people of America and Ireland’. Whiggish historians subsequently built upon this notion of Fox and his followers as great friends of Ireland. For the most part, modern scholars have avoided passing judgement on Fox’s views on Ireland, but a few authors have challenged early assumptions, depicting Fox as unprincipled in his use of Irish politics as a stick to beat the North and Pitt ministries. Christopher Hobhouse, commenting on Fox’s commitment to Catholic relief, claims that he ‘gave himself away’ and that ‘the House could distinguish by this time between Fox the religious liberator and Fox the artful dodger’. John Derry asserts that Fox ‘ruthlessly and irresponsibly exploited anti-Irish prejudice in England’ during the controversy over Pitt’s trade proposals of 1785. L.G. Mitchell notes that ‘his sympathy for American patriots had had real limits, and so had his concern for Ireland’, and that ‘Irish patriots were never sure of Fox, and their doubt was entirely justified.’ There is a good deal of substance in these comments, and in this article I also intend to argue that Fox was first and foremost a British parliamentarian. However, his conduct towards Ireland was not solely ruled by this stance. Free from the shackles of government, Fox was disposed to be generous to Irish patriotism and his friends and relatives in the Irish opposition.

In the late nineteenth century Irish rural labourers had few consistent advocates willing to pursue their social and economic claims at a national level. Those that did exist, such as P.F. Johnson of Kanturk, have generally managed to elude the scrutiny of historians. A number of studies on the Irish land question have referred to Johnson, but he has remained a shadowy figure despite his role as the leading labourers’ advocate between 1869 and 1882. Rural agitation during this period is most often associated with tenant farmers and their perturbations with regard to the prevailing land-tenure system and its administration. The rural working class, especially before 1885, had limited political influence, and neither the British government nor the Irish Parliamentary Party treated its claims with the seriousness that they accorded to the perceived needs of tenant farmers. Nonetheless, many commentators remarked on the wretched condition of the rural labouring population in Ireland, and it was undoubtedly the greatest demographic and socio-economic casualty of the Famine. Wages, working conditions, unemployment and underemployment, housing and access to land were all issues that agitated labourers in the late nineteenth century.

The relationship between constitutional and advanced or physical-force nationalism in nineteenth-century Ireland was always tense and intimate. Both traditions professed to repudiate the stated aims and strategies of the other, while at the same time often co-operating across the apparent ideological and organisational divides. The Fenians worked with Isaac Butt’s early home rule movement, while the New Departures of the late 1870s facilitated I.R.B. involvement in the Land League and the home rule movement, proving crucial to the emergent leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. Although this ideological flexibility was often motivated by a self-interested desire to be associated with influential organisations and personalities, it also arose from the realisation that the ideal strategy was currently inappropriate. The essence of the New Departure lay in allowing physical-force men to join the agrarian agitation of the Land League on the understanding that this did not compromise their separatist ideals. Consequently, the self-identification of separatists at the time of the 1916 rising as belonging to an immemorial tradition, consecrated by the blood of martyrs, needs to be set against both the contingency of political engagement and the lack of precision as to the form of state a separate Ireland might take.