In 1252 Geoffrey de Geneville married Matilda de Lacy, the elder coheiress of Meath and Weobley, thereby becoming lord of Trim in Ireland and Ludlow in the Welsh March. By birth, however, this second son of Simon, lord of Joinville, was the lord of Vaucouleurs in Champagne and was thus an ‘exotic’ figure to find involved in late thirteenth-century Ireland. While Geoffrey was not alone in being a landowner in Ireland with continental origins, since he was part of what Robert Bartlett calls the ‘aristocratic diaspora’ — the movement of western European aristocrats from their homelands into new areas where they settled in order to augment their fortunes — he was exceptional in that he was the most successful figure to emerge in Ireland as a result of Henry III’s tendency to invest foreigners from the court circle with lands in outlying areas. This pattern has been described as a policy by H. W. Ridgeway, who saw an intention to secure potentially troublesome border regions as one reason behind Henry’s distribution of peripheral patronage to ‘aliens’; and, indeed, Geoffrey numbered himself among the upright men of different nationalities placed in Ireland by the descendants of Henry II in order to bring the island to the obedience of the English king and to conserve the peace. The success that Geoffrey made of his grant of Trim related to the ‘secure nature’ of that particular lordship. However, that cannot be the whole story. There is no firm evidence that either William de Valence or Geoffrey de Lusignan, Henry III’s half-brothers, or the Savoyard knight Otto de Grandison, members of the Poitevin and Savoyard entourages of Henry III and the Lord Edward and the recipients of grants in the securely held areas of Wexford, Louth and Tipperary respectively, ever visited the lordship of Ireland in spite of their receipt of valuable lands there.

The Regency Crisis that proceeded from the apparent insanity of George III in October 1788 has a twofold importance in Irish political history. In an Anglo-Irish context, it can be argued that this episode crucially accelerated the hardening of British opinion in support of a political union with Ireland, and therefore marked a stage in the long ‘prelude to union’. But the Regency Crisis was also significant in purely domestic terms. Its consequences for the development of Irish parliamentary politics form the central concern of this article, the primary object of which is to analyse the course of events in Ireland and especially the evolving motives of the key individuals and factions in opposition between November 1788 and March 1789. The process not only made for intrinsically thrilling political drama; the ‘opposition’ response to the machinations of government on this issue paved the way for the advent of an Irish Whig party that was to transform the balance of power in the Irish parliament during the course of its final decade.

Traditional accounts of the establishment of the 36th (Ulster) Division in October 1914 suggest that this unit was formed purely from the pre-war U.V.F. Writing in 1922, Cyril Falls (himself an officer in both the U.V.F. and the 36th Division) declared:

Modern historians have echoed this view. Tom Johnstone, for example, has noted that ‘the battalions of the (36th) Division, based on the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.) order of battle, had been in existence since before the war’. Meanwhile Philip Orr has even suggested that the 36th Division was a ‘covenanting army’, all its members supposedly having signed the Ulster Covenant opposing home rule. In this article the validity of these claims will be considered, particularly with regard to the continuity in personnel and equipment between the U.V.F. and the 36th Division and the military efficiency that the formation had achieved by the time it arrived on the Western Front.

The character of modern Ireland after partition has long been the subject of debate, by columnists, poets, novelists and historians. John Whyte’s outstanding study of the process by which what he called the ‘Catholic moral code’ became enshrined in the ‘law of the state’ summarised the ‘remarkable consensus’ achieved in the years 1923-37, a time when there was ‘overwhelming agreement that traditional Catholic values should be maintained, if necessary by legislation’. Based on personal reminiscences and published documents, Whyte’s contribution is of enduring value to those seeking to understand the culture of modern Ireland. His account is even more impressive when read against the background of materials which have more recently become available in the National Archives. These enable some of the detail to be filled in, but they also provoke some new questions about the state of the country and the means by which a peaceable Ireland was to be constructed in the aftermath of a war of independence and a civil war.

On 7 September 1948 the newly appointed Taoiseach, John A. Costello, the leader of a coalition government in which his party Fine Gael was the senior partner, announced in Ottawa that he intended to repeal Eire’s External Relations Act, and thus sever its final tenuous link with the crown. The External Relations Act ‘empowered the Executive Council of the Irish Free State to authorise the use of the king’s signature on the letters of credence to be presented to heads of foreign states by Irish diplomatic representatives’. Eamon de Valera, Costello’s predecessor, had introduced the External Relations Act in 1936, and had regarded it as a device that might help to end partition. The measure magnified Ireland’s constitutional ambiguity, but with its repeal the twenty-six counties would assuredly become a republic outside the Commonwealth.

The political career of Sir Francis Annesley, Lord Mountnorris, is well known to historians. A first-generation settler, he held plantation lands in Ulster and Munster; as vice-treasurer of Ireland he became a rival of the Boyle faction in the Dublin administration in the early 1630s; and after a spectacular fall from grace in 1635 he became one of Lord Deputy Wentworth’s bitterest enemies and spoke against him at his trial in 1641. Yet, unlike his rival, the first earl of Cork, there is little information about Mountnorris’s personal attitudes, his religious views or his family life, other than what can be gleaned from official sources, and from the (mainly hostile) comments of contemporaries. The discovery, therefore, of a cache of family papers in the Public Record Office at Kew provides a unique opportunity to flesh out the bones of his political career. It also allows a comparison between the Annesleys and the Boyles, whose extensive archive has moulded our view of the New English in general. Perhaps the most interesting of these documents is Mountnorris’s letter to his daughter, Beatrice Zouche, dated 5 February 1641[/2], in which he outlines how he expects her to order her day with prayer and meditation and domestic concerns appropriate for a godly matron. This letter reveals a great deal about Mountnorris’s own religious beliefs and his attitudes to his children, and provides some important clues about the mindset of the New English in Ireland.

Historians feel the need to label their research. These labels can be either descriptive, for example by dynasties, such as ‘Tudor and Stuart history’, or interpretative (analytical), such as ‘the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation’. Alternatively, labels can be used as heuristic devices: ‘confessionalisation’ in preference to ‘Reformation and Counter-Reformation’. The theoretical approach expressed in the ‘confessionalisation paradigm’ claims to open up a perspective on all the essential forces at work in the era, whereas the empirical research, assumed to be covered by the more conventional labels, is deemed too compartmentalised.