On 17 September 1496 Gerald, eighth earl of Kildare (the ‘Great Earl’), landed at Howth, County Dublin, after a lengthy and troubled voyage from England. One of the earl’s fellow travellers gave thanks to God for his safe arrival. If Kildare did likewise, his gratitude probably sprang less from his delivery from the natural elements than from his survival of a hostile political climate at court. Since the battle of Bosworth in 1485 not one but two Yorkist pretenders had found support in Ireland. The first of them — Lambert Simnel — was crowned in May 1487 as ‘King Edward VI’ in Christ Church cathedral, Dublin, after which a parliament was held in his name. Kildare was chief governor of Ireland during both conspiracies. More recently he had faced allegations of treason during the expedition of Sir Edward Poynings (1494-5). Despite this dubious record of loyalty to the newly established Tudor dynasty, on 6 August 1496 Henry VII appointed the Great Earl lord deputy of Ireland.

This article examines the actions of the various groups that made up the Ulster Protestant interest from shortly after the end of the First Civil War in England in late 1646 to the defeat of the Engagement in 1648. At the beginning of this period the English parliament took a renewed interest in Ulster, sending men and commanders, which accelerated a process of polarising the hitherto united Ulster British forces along ethnic lines. This culminated in almost unanimous support for the Engagement by the Ulster Scottish élite, while their Ulster English counterparts generally remained loyal to the parliamentary commanders in the province. Within Ulster Scottish society a further division occurred, between the royalist-inclined élite and much of the populace, who followed their Presbyterian ministers in opposing the Engagement. The article attempts to explain why the Ulster Scottish elite made this choice, and seeks to place this series of events within a British/Irish context, exhibiting the interrelated nature of events in each of the three kingdoms from the unique perspective of Protestant Ulster.

The phenomenon of European migration during the early modern period — whether to overseas locations or across frontiers within Europe — is a complex one. In general, people migrate of their own volition from places of low opportunity or deprivation to areas of higher opportunity, where they hope to find employment or a better life.2 In the early modern period, however, the reasons why people migrated are less clear. Of course, many thousands migrated to improve their circumstances, usually in the hope of returning to make a permanent home in their place of origin. Yet, according to Nicholas Canny, English migration to transatlantic destinations in the early part of the seventeenth century was ‘high-risk subsistence migration’, since both the Chesapeake and the West Indies proved lethal for Europeans. The precise reasons why migrants continued to leave home, when such were the prospects before them, remain opaque to historians.

Four days after the dramatic launch of the anti-home rule campaign at Craigavon on 23 September 1911, where Sir Edward Carson was ‘delivered to his people’, Fred Oliver, a keen Unionist, passionate federalist and peddler of various constructive political initiatives, wrote to Geoffrey Robinson, editor of The Times. In the course of a long and pessimistic letter he expressed deep distress at the violent tone adopted by Carson at Craigavon, admitting that ‘he was glad to see the Irish Times has been “pole-axing” Carson and co’ and imploring Robinson to criticise similarly ‘all this Ulster shouting and drum-beating and treasonable Tom Foolery’.

Conspiracy theories have always accompanied the shadowy and ambiguous interventions of British intelligence in Irish affairs. Commentators in Ireland often accuse British intelligence and security agencies of being stubbornly hostile to Irish nationalist aspirations and inclined to oppose, and even sabotage, official British peace initiatives This attitude has a long heritage and can be traced back to the Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations in 1921. There was a widespread belief in Irish nationalist circles that intelligence officers were exercising a baleful influence on British politicians: at one point during the negotiations Michael Collins angrily brandished a warlike British military intelligence document that had fallen into his hands and claimed that the army was working to destroy the truce.

In an earlier article in Irish Historical Studies the present author argued that the beginnings of the Irish Free State’s campaign against venereal disease were caught up in a politics of prostitution that mobilised nationalist, republican and post-colonial sentiments, revolving around the struggle between military and civilian authority, and invoking the moral arbitration of the Catholic church. Susannah Riordan’s recent response has clarified the administrative history of interdepartmental inquiries into the threat posed by venereal diseases, setting concerns over the role of prostitution in propagating disease within the context of the wider public health programme. She properly identifies inquiry references to ‘prophylaxis’ with chemical disinfection following exposure to infection, and rightly separates the report filed by Major Donal Carroll, the army’s chief sanitary officer, from that of Dr Robert Percy McDonnell, Medical Inspector of the Department of Local Government and Public Health.