There is now an extensive literature on agrarian protest and unrest in Ireland from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, ranging from studies of secret societies to large-scale organisations such as the Land League. There has not, however, been any detailed published account of the dynamics and character of a most extensive and significant Irish agitation, the United Irish League, which was launched in January 1898. A study of this body is important, not only in its own terms, but for the light it throws on the nature of Irish agrarian agitation generally, especially as there exist more extant records than for earlier examples. By early 1900 this organisation had spread across most of Ireland, and it was to have major implications for the future course of Irish nationalism. Its methods were partly a consequence of a cumulative experience from the past, focused particularly on its immediate predecessors, the Land League of 1879–82, the subsequent Irish National League, and the Plan of Campaign in the latter half of the 1880s. Its political and agrarian purposes were to an unusual degree clearly articulated, thereby enabling a more precise analysis of the way in which particular methods of protest were related to objectives.

The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland involved a substantial transfer of property from Catholics to Protestants, and the transplantation of dispossessed Catholic landowners to the western province of Connacht. The latter scheme proved controversial, receiving considerable attention from contemporary Protestant authors, and outright condemnation from all Catholics. Nonetheless, it was little commented upon by historians over the following two centuries.

In any account of the liberal party’s dealings with Ireland, Gladstone must occupy a dominant and dynamic position. Yet perhaps his most significant legacy was a negative one. His dramatic and, from the party point of view, destructive failures with home rule in 1886 and 1893 demonstrated to two generations of liberal leaders, Morley and Lloyd George no less than Rosebery and Crewe, and even to his own son Herbert, that so long as the house of lords retained a legislative veto, home rule for Ireland could not be a practical part of the liberal programme. A recent article has shown that ‘ disengagement ‘ from home rule was evolved during the period from 1894 to 1905 as a matter of deliberate policy, and was not simply the result of a huge independent majority won by the party in 1906. It was a policy dictated by necessity, but it evolved, nonetheless, only gradually, through a series of compromises between two warring factions of the party. Where Rosebery and the extreme liberal imperialists worked to exclude home rule from the party programme altogether in 1900-1, Gladstonians wanted only to put it into cold storage. Again, when liberal imperialists and even uncommitted liberals called for a self-denying ordinance on home rule for the 1906 election, Gladstonians wanted the party simply to steer clear of any firm commitment. What averted a split on the earlier occasion was Asquith’s enunciation of a ‘ step by step ‘ principle on home rule in such a way as to differentiate it clearly from Rosebery’s ‘ clean slate’, while in the autumn of 1905 party unity was restored by Campbell-Bannerman’s promise to translate this principle into a legislative proposal.

Sir Thomas Phillips is not to be found among the worthies of the Dictionary of National Biography, nor is he mentioned in Webb's Compendium of Irish Biography or Crone's Concise Dictionary. He was one of those known in early-seventeenth Ireland as ‘ servitors ’—military men who had fought for the crown during Tyrone's rebellion and established claims on the royal generosity which they expected to have satisfied after the peace. In the Ulster plantation, servitors constituted a separate group among the planters, and some of them thus became the founders of great landed families. In his successful pursuit of forfeited land in Ulster, Phillips is a fair example of the servitor class. Very likely he would have left no more mark on Irish history than many another fellow-adventurer, had he not staked his claim in a part of Ulster that presently became a sphere of interest of the city of London. Within a few years of the Londoner's advent, Phillips engaged them in a controversy which he maintained with almost incredible pertinacity for a quarter of a century, and which, on the eve of his death, ended in a crushing defeat for his opponents.

Since the English Reformation, occasional days of thanksgiving, prayer and fasting were appointed by royal authority in response to an array of exceptional circumstances varying from outbreaks of disease to bad weather, and popish conspiracies to military successes. Details of these days of religious observance, their inspiration and purpose were communicated to the public by printed proclamation and reinforced by the publication of specially prepared forms of prayer for use in Anglican services on these occasions. The reign of William III (1689–1702) saw these days of occasional fasting and thanksgiving take place with unprecedented frequency. For the most part, this intensification of state-appointed public worship corresponded with the king's struggle against Louis XIV during the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97). Such days of occasional fasting and thanksgiving provided an opportunity for the Williamite court to promote the legitimacy of the new regime as part of a larger strategy of ‘courtly reformation’.

In 1435 the Irish council complained to Henry VI that there is not left in the nether parts of the counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare, that join together, out of the subjection of the said enemies and rebels scarcely thirty miles in length and twenty miles in breadth, thereas a man may surely ride or go in the said counties to answer to the king’s writs and to his commandments.

The letter was accompanied by a request that the king render payment due to the lord lieutenant Thomas Stanley for his service in Ireland, and also suggested that the king should travel to the colony to help fight off its enemies. Accordingly, the perilous state of English Ireland was almost certainly exaggerated to strengthen the arguments for financial and military support from the crown. Nevertheless this letter demonstrates that in the minds of the settler elite, which staffed the Irish council, the four counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare were the bastion of English rule in Ireland, beset, the council would have us believe, by enemies on all sides. This picture of the ‘four counties’ as the political, and to a certain extent the cultural, stronghold of Englishness in Ireland can be found in other contemporary sources, as the region was perceived as both distinct and distinctly English.

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.

The issue of citizenship played a major role in the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921; but that point was overshadowed by the tendency of those who negotiated the treaty (and the authors who have written about it) to see the issue of ‘common citizenship’ as only one point under the heading of allegiance to the crown and membership of the British Empire. That it was a central issue is clear, however, for at one point in the 1921 negotiations Lloyd George asked, ‘to put it bluntly will you be British subjects or foreigners? You must be either one or the other.’ Arthur Griffith, the leader of the Irish delegation, answered: ‘in our proposal we have agreed to “reciprocity of civic rights”. We should be Irish and you would be British and each would have equal rights as citizens in the country of the other.’ That exchange caused the British to ask the Irish for a direct answer to the question, would they ‘acknowledge this common citizenship?’. The Irish, however, only responded with the words, ‘Ireland would undertake such obligations as are compatible with the status of a free partner’ in ‘the community of nations known as the British Commonwealth’. Those words did not satisfy the English negotiators, but in the end the Irish accepted an agreement in which the words ‘common citizenship’ appeared in the oath to the king which all members of Dáil Éireann would have to take. That satisfied the British demands on allegiance to the crown.

On 26 May 1315 a Scottish army commanded by Edward Bruce, recently created earl of Carrick, landed near Larne in County Antrim. From this date until his death at Faughart on 14 October 1318 there was a Scottish presence in Ireland. We are told that Edward was crowned king of Ireland near the scene of his eventual defeat soon after 1 May 1316; his supporters certainly regarded him as king, and he himself used the title. In reality, however, his control never extended beyond the lands of the earldom of Ulster, which he used as a base from which to launch destructive expeditions to other parts of the country. Yet at least until the retreat of the Bruces from Limerick in April 1317 a Scottish conquest of Ireland must have appeared to be within the bounds of possibility; it is hardly too much to say that during this brief period the future political shape of the British Isles depended on the outcome of an often obscure series of campaigns and alliances in Ireland.

The warfare in Ireland from 1593 to 1601 involved vital issues for both English and Irish. In many respects it was a unique conflict; certainly the opposing forces of the two countries were never so nearly balanced, and Kinsale is the major battle, all the potentialities and consequences of the occasion considered, in our history.

A seventeenth-century manuscript miscellany, which once belonged to Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, contains a short treatise on the origins of government by Sir George Radcliffe. Radcliffe was legal assistant to Sir Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy of Ireland (from January 1640 earl of Strafford and lord lieutenant). The treatise insisted on the divine origin of all human political power and implied that the best form of government was absolute monarchy, in which the monarch was free of all human law and subject to divine restraint alone. It will be suggested below that the composition of this treatise can be dated to the summer of 1639. This introduction will offer an outline of Radcliffe’s education and political career, explain the genesis of his treatise on government, point out some pertinent aspects of its argument, and finally assess the document’s significance.

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.

How small in fact were the differences between and within the Irish communities overseas, and between their cultures and work achievements and those of their host societies? The past decade has seen the arrival of fairly complete bibliographies of the Irish diaspora in the United States and in Britain, and substantial bibliographical essays on the Irish in Canada and in Australia. The pioneer volume of Hartigan and Hickman, compiled outside the academic grid and its resources, is welcome, intelligent and full of small surprises, despite some odd omissions (e.g. all but one of Denis Gwynn’s relevant titles). Yet, unlike Patrick Blessing, they could not rely on and collate existent bibliographies, as he could do with those of J. T. Ellis and Robert Trisco on American Catholic history (1982), Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes on Irish-American fiction (1979), and W. C. Miller (1975) and Séamus Metress (1981) on the bibliography of Irish-America overall.

The Commonwealth Labour Party (Northern Ireland), hereafter referred to as the C.L.P., came into existence on 19 December 1942. Its birth was the result of a split in the ranks of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (N.I.L.P.). This split centred on the personality and the political outlook of the man who had led the N.I.L.P since 1932, and who was to be leader of the C.L.P during its five-year lifespan: Harry Midgley.

Midgley (1892-1957) was, by the time of the formation of the C.L.P., one of the best-known and most controversial politicians in Northern Ireland. Born into a working-class protestant home in north Belfast, he acquired an early political education as a youth through the medium of the Independent Labour Party organisation in the city. He was close, at least initially, to William Walker, the most outstanding labour leader produced by the north of Ireland during the early troubled years of the labour movement. In addition, he met and listened to some of the most eminent spokesmen of British labour, most notably Keir Hardie. Midgley served his time as a joiner in the Workman Clark shipyard (where his father was a labourer) before spending a brief period in America in 1913 and 1914. After serving in the Ulster division in the First World War, he returned to Belfast in 1919 and quickly got himself a job as a trade-union organiser with the Linenlappers’ Union.

The relationship between the Reagan administration and the Northern Ireland conflict is a neglected area of transatlantic history. This article addresses the extent of Ronald Reagan’s interest in the Northern Irish conflict and the manner in which other protagonists sought to secure or prevent his involvement. It will examine the president’s approach in the context of different views within his administration, the State Department’s wish to maintain American neutrality on the issue of Northern Ireland, and the desire of leading Irish-American politicians for the American government to be much more interventionist. These debates coincided with significant developments in Northern Ireland. Therefore, Reagan’s contribution to the Anglo–Irish process encapsulates a variety of issues: the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 1980s, the 1985 Anglo–Irish Agreement and the internationalisation of the conflict before the election of President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Of all the crown courts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, the chancery court has received the most favourable judgement from historians. Through its exercise of equity, the chancery court has been perceived as a mediator between English common law and Gaelic customary law. Equity provided the chancellor with the possibility of considering a judgement from the point of view of ‘reason and conscience’, to ensure what W. J. Jones has called the ‘protection of the innocent from the ruthless specifications’ of common law courts. In Irish terms this meant that the chancellor was prepared to consider Gaelic forms of partible inheritance from the standpoint of equity. In Gaelic society land descended according to a variety of customs which, it was argued in chancery, had been observed ‘time out of mind’ in a particular family or region and therefore in fairness or equity might be upheld even if they were contrary to common law practice.

This benign view of the Irish chancery court’s attitude to Gaelic customary law has much in common with the attitude of the English chancery court towards women. Historians of early modern England have portrayed chancery as a judicial forum which provided women with legal redress which would have been denied them at common law. Female litigants in the sixteenth-century English chancery court included single, widowed and married women. Under common law, only single women and widows were entitled to legal representation in their own right. Married women, as femmes couvertes, were legally merged with their husbands on marriage, and so could not bring cases in their own name at common law. In the English chancery court, however, a small number of married women were permitted at the discretion of the chancellor to sue on their own without their husbands. In the course of the sixteenth century the English chancery also contributed to the extension of the legal franchise of women.

The tide of Irish immigration to the United States, which reached its crest during and following the famine years of the eighteen-forties, was second only to that of the Germans in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the Irish immigrants who arrived by the hundreds of thousands and the succeeding generations of Irish-Americans became one of the most important national groups in the American population, at the same time maintaining a keen interest in their native land.