During the winter of 1713-14 the tory ministry in England began to disintegrate. Despite a massive tory victory at the 1713 election, the new parliament which met in the following spring did not furnish the court with a reliable majority in either house. The tory party had fallen into complete disarray Queen Anne’s deteriorating health was the root cause, giving rise to panic among tories. It was clear that there was little hope for them at Hanover, where Prince George, angry at thepeaceofutrecht, wascommitted to thewhigs. Some tories actively considered declaring for the Pretender Others, more afraid of a Jacobite restoration than the accession of a whiggish but protestant king, identified themselves as Hanoverians and voted against the ministry in parliament. The vast majority, whether Jacobite or Hanoverian, were agreed on the necessity of taking some decisive measures to crush the whigs and entrench themselves in power against the fateful day when the queen should die. More than ever they were impatient of the leadership of Lord Treasurer Oxford, the former Robert Harley, the essence of whose political management seemed to be duplicity and procrastination.

F. S. L. Lyons in his Ford lectures at Oxford, and in a broadcast talk, has stressed the need for a new general theory of Irish culture, a wider understanding of the Irish tradition. This essay is an attempt to take a few steps in this direction. It will review some of the English literature written in Ireland between 1780 and 1820, and trace its connections with Ireland and with England. In the forty years after the Volunteer movement, it will be argued, Irish authors writing in English, influenced by new ideas about Celts and constitutions and even about Carthaginians, did something to establish a tradition of specifically Irish literature. This has all too often been neglected or misunderstood by literary historians, for whom Anglo-Irish literature begins more than half a century later.

There is general acceptance in recent writings that fenianism in its heyday — which is to say the middle 1860s — was espoused predominantly by members of lower-ranking social and occupational groups. It is not difficult to assemble supporting references and texts from well-placed contemporary observers. T.D.Sullivan writing privately to Thomas D’Arcy McGee in 1862 described the active but still anonymous organisation subsequently known as the ‘I.R.B.’ or the ‘feninas’ as drawing the bulk of its membership from among ‘shopkeepers’ assistants in our cities and chief towns who have a little smattering — often a very little indeed — of education’, and from ‘the very poorest and most ignorant people’ By 1865 the term ‘fenianism’ was in extensive use and the thing itself was receiving widespread attention. Writing his diary for 26 June that year, W J. O’Neill Daunt expressed the opinion that in his part of County Cork those implicated in fenian activities were ‘country lads’ and ‘town shop-boys’ At the same time, the mounting pile of constabulary reports from around the country provided more and more references to the infection of specific categories by fenianism: in one area, shopboys, artisans, servants and reduced farmers; in another, ‘young men of the labouring class and also mechanics or tradesmen such as tailors, nailors, shoemakers’; elsewhere, subordinate employees on the railway Less specifically, an alarmed detective visiting the Thurles area reported that the ‘lower orders’ thereabouts were fenians virtually to a man.

Erskine Childers has commonly been seen as the éminence grise of hardline republicanism in the negotiations for an Anglo-Irish treaty that took place in London between October and December 1921. Lloyd George described him as ‘rigid and fanatical’ and believed that Childers had attempted to ‘wreck every endeavour to reach agreement’ Thomas Jones saw Childers as an ‘intense republican’, and it is clear that Jones, too, regarded Childers as an obstacle to an agreed solution. Childers has been portrayed as an inflexible wrangler who stood in the way of an agreement in the winter of 1921 and who was fundamentally opposed to the more conciliatory views of Arthur Griffith, in particular, and of Michael Collins. In Peace by ordeal Lord Longford has stressed the gulf that lay between Childers and Griffith and the way in which this contributed to a division in the Irish dele-g ation as a whole. On one side were the delegates who were more prepared to compromise and reach a settlement with the British negotiators; on the other were those, backed by Childers, who held out against concessions and who signed the treaty on 6 December only with the greatest reluctance.