The risings in Ulster in late October 1641 marked the climax of one of those key periods in Anglo-Irish history in which events in Ireland had a direct and crucial impact upon the course of events in England. For at least a year prior to the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion, there had been a complex interaction of English and Irish events which, to a significant extent, conditioned the English response to the news of the risings. Not only was thc Irish rebellion of central importance in helping to precipitate the armed confrontation of king and parliament, and in reinforcing party alignment, but sharp memories of the rebellion inay also have made some contribution to the final collapse of royalist fortunes. The great significancc of the 1641 rebellion in the escalation into civil war in England was recalled by Richard Baxter in his autobiography.

In the history of Europe political revolutions are commonplace; cultural and social revolutions are somewhat less abundant; but revolutions in the ownership of property are exceedingly rare. Even the French revolution, the prototype of profound social upheaval, is today regarded by many—particularly the followers of the late Professor Cobban—as a revolution which failed to transform the proprietary class. And in England, the believers in a great seventeenth-century social revolution have either evaded or artfully rationalised the considerable evidence that the land-owning families of 1660 were essentially the land-owning families of 1640. Despite enormous fiscal pressures, the Long Parliament and its successors never embarked upon a serious effort to expropriate or extirpate those it defeated. ‘It is their reformation, not their ruin, is desired’, wrote the author of Burton’s Diary, and the recent work of Mrs Joan Thirsk, the most exactingstudent of the royalist land sales during the interregnum, tends to confirm the verdict.

The formation of an Irish regiment in the Spanish Netherlands, under the Archduke Albert of Austria in 1605, was a noteworthy development, since this contingent was destined to play a vital role in Anglo-Spanish relations during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Unfortunately little is known about the creation of this controversial force and the problems provoked by it.

The pivotal character upon which this examination revolves is Henry O'Neill, the second son of Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone and his second wife Siobhán (sister of Hugh Roe O'Donnell, earl of Tyrconnel), who served as the regiment's colonel from its inception until his untimely death in 1610. Henry first arrived on the continent in the spring of 1600, when as a boy of thirteen, he and other youths, were sent by Tyrone to Spain as hostages.

On 14 February 1669 Charles II informed the committee of foreign affairs that he intended to remove the duke of Ormond from the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland. This announcement ended eighteen months of intrigue, speculation and rumour, and Orinond’s second period in office as viceroy. It seemed to contemporaries that the fickle king had again yielded to the pressure and importunities of his ambitious and politically ascendant courtiers. On hearing the news of Ormond’s dismissal Pepys commented that it showed ‘the power of Buckingham and the poor spirit of the king’. Few of Pepys’s contemporaries would have quarrelled with that judgment and few historians have seriously questioned it since.

During the latter part of the reign of James II, the Church of Ireland was in a position of considerable delicacy. On the one hand, there was a real fear that the church would face annihilation at the hands of the ruling administration; if the threats of the catholic population had come to fruition, if the statutes passed by the Jacobite parliament of 1689 had been put into effect or if the Tyrconnell administration had remained in power any longer than it did, this fear would almost certainly have been realized. On the other hand, by the spring of 1689, Anglican churchmen could see that a Williamite victory might spell for them—as it did for the Church of Scotland—summary disestablishment. Most Irish Anglicans had already fled to England, thereby lending support to the Williamites; the northern presbyterians had actually taken up arms on the Williamite side. Only the remnant of the Church of Ireland left in Dublin seemed to be disloyal to the protestant king: and this remnant, to save its skin, had to continue outwardly loyal to its de jure and de facto monarch, James II. Whatever the outcome of the war which they all foresaw, the leaders of the remnant of the Church of Ireland can have held little hope for the future. A Jacobite victory would almost certainly mean the triumph of the catholic church and the despoiling of the Church of Ireland: a Williamite victory might well mean the triumph of the presbyterians and a partial disestablishment. In either case the Church of Ireland, dependent for its very existence on a firm establishment, would founder.

‘ … it is most certain that from I Jacobi to this day so long as Ireland hath had any degree of peace there hath been every year as great an importation of Irish cattle as there is now, and this he that will take the pains to examine the customs books shall find … ’

Sir Heneage Finch, in the house of commons, 18 October 1665

The Tudor subjugation of Ireland which was accomplished by the very end of Elizabeth's reign left the Irish economy in a depressed condition. But conquest brought more than economic dislocation. The success of English arms involved the destruction of the old Irish social system and permitted the development of a much more thorough programme of plantation than had been possible during the sixteenth century. The Ulster plantation, which followed the flight of the earls in 1607, was succeeded by smaller plantations in Leinster, Connaught, Wexford and King's County before 1641.

If the major themes in Irish history during these years were the progressive decline of the protestant ascendancy, the rise of a catholic middle class, the growth of agrarian and urban popular politics and the social and economic consequences of a swelling population, then it would be generally assumed that parliamentary electioneering—at least until the passage of catholic emancipation in 1829—had very little to do with them. Supporters of such an assumption would argue that elections were largely the preserve of an élite—the protestant ascendancy—and that despite catholic enfranchisement in 1793 and the pruning of the most notorious close and rotten boroughs by the act of union, electioneering in Ireland was largely confined to wearisome bargaining between landlords, excessive drilling of freeholders both genuine and fictitious, unbecoming scrambles for Castle patronage and the almost indecent disposal of such ill-gotten gains amongst squads of dependents. Furthermore they might add as a confirmatory postscript, that the disfranchisement of the 40s.

The Irish act of 21 George III, cap. 10, and more particularly its eighth clause, derived its nickname from the borough of Newtown, now Newtownards, Co. Down, which was then and for a decade thereafter in dispute between the families of Ponsonby and Stewart. According to the wording of its preamble, the eighth clause was designed merely ‘ … for the more effectual quieting of corporations and securing the rights of persons who have been or shall be elected into the offices of aldermen and burgesses’; yet historians have attributed to it purposes more sinister and consequences more dire than this innocent, conservative wording would ever suggest. (The wording of preambles and titles should not of course always be taken at face value: it was after all an act ‘ … for the further regulating the election of members of parliament and preventing the irregular proceedings of sheriffs and other officers in electing and returning such members’ which in 1728 provided for the automatic disfranchisement of all Roman Catholics.) The preamble to the eighth clause of the Newtown act goes on to state that, owing to a dearth of protestant inhabitants of appropriate standing, many corporations have been forced, in violation of their charters, to elect as burgesses and other officers persons who are not resident within their precincts; and the clause purports only to be giving legal authority to an existing situation, by ‘quieting’ such persons in the possession of their offices. Historians, on the other hand, have seen the dispensing with the residence qualification as a pernicious innovation, not as a legalisation of the status quo. Accordingly they have blamed the Newtown act for strengthening the hands of borough patrons and curtailing still further the independence of the corporations, and all this merely to gratify the particular local ambitions of one over-powerful family, the Ponsonbys, at the expense of their rivals, the Stewarts.

Thirty years ago, in a magisterial study of the early operation of Poynings’ Law, Professor R. Dudley Edwards and Professor T.W. Moody noted that ‘the primary dividing-line in the history of the law falls between the parliaments of 1613–15 and 1634–5’. Previously, they showed, it had curtailed the Irish executive and enjoyed the approval of the Irish parliament; only subsequently, they argued, was it used as a means of enabling the government to control parliament. The purpose of the present study is to develop that argument by examining both the way in which Lord Deputy Wentworth took advantage of altered circumstances to reierse the statute’s function in 1634–5 and the way in which members of the Irish parliament unsuccessfully campaigned to restore the traditional interpretation of its provisions in 1640–41.

Nineteenth century industrialism brought intensified immigration to the cities of England. E. P. Thomson, in The making of the English working class, generalized on one segment of the new urban population, the Irish :

The three main opposition groups in Ireland facing Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, in 1640 were the Old English, the New English and the Ulster-Scots. All three groups had grievances over land and religion, but it was the religious issue which was primarily responsible for bringing the lord lieutenant into conflict with the Ulster-Scots. Because Charles I had a dispute with his subjects in Scotland, because the Ulster-Scots maintained close contact with their homeland and because of Ulster's close proximity to Scotland, the quarrel between Wentworth and the Scottish settlers in the north of Ireland gained a significance which transcended Irish politics. No major rebellion broke out in Ulster during the bishops’ wars, yet much of Wentworth's policy towards the Ulster-Scots during this period can, at best, be regarded as ill-advised. This paper will attempt to show how this policy developed and why it was misguided.

The search for a solution to the Irish question in the 19th century led to several attempts to obtain the support of the papacy for the policies of the English government. Though England and the papacy never maintained formal diplomatic relations, mattels of common interest were dealt with by a succession of agents resident in Rome. Around 1850 began the practice of getting an envoy formally accredited to Tuscany to reside in Rome and to treat with the Vatican. The most famous of these was Odo Russell (later Lord Ampthill) whose stay in Rome lasted from 1858 to 1870. After the disappearance of Tuscany as a separate state in 1860 his accreditation was to Naples. In 1861, on the fall of Naples, he ceased formally to be accredited. The pope would not, of course, treat with any envoy accredited to the new kingdom of Italy. Russell kept the government’s view of Irish problems before the pope and may have been partly responsible for Pio Nono’s condemnation of Fenianism in January 1870. Russell’s successor, Sir Henry Jervoise, remained only until 1874 when he was withdrawn by Lord Derby and not replaced.

When the Irish chieftains sent their ‘Remonstrance’ to Pope John XXII at the time of the Bruce invasion, they included among their indictments of English rule in Ireland the murder of Murchertach MacMurrough, the Irish king of Leinster, and of Art, his brother. The killer they named as ‘Geoffrey de Pencoyt’. This was evidently an event of some moment, to be classed with the more famous murder of Brian Rua O’Brien by Thomas de Clare in 1277 and the slaughter of the O’Conors of Offaly by Peter de Bermingham in 1305. Yet beyond the fact that the murder took place at Arklow on 21 July 1282, very little is known about it. The documents printed below shed new light on the event, suggesting strongly that it was politically motivated and inspired by the Isish justiciar, Stephen Fulbourne. They also furnish tlie crucial missing links between facts that have long been known, but which have not hitherto made coherent sense.

The value of the Irish Registry of Deeds as a source, particularly for social and economic historians, has long been underestimated. It first received serious consideration in a lecture delivered to the Conference of Irish Historians in 1943 by Mr Samuel Weir. Mr Weir’s estimate of the usefulness of this source ran as follows : ‘while making no claim that the documents preserved in the Registry of Deeds are primarily of historical value, it is claimed that they can be of immense value as corroborative evidence’. This guarded, almost apologetic statement was typical of the diffident attitude towards the registry which prevailed among historians both then and for some time thereafter.

Between 1801 and 1921 Ireland in common with the rest of the British Isles was represented in the house of commons at Westminster. During this time the basis of the Irish representation underwent considerable change both in relation to the number of Irish M.P.s, electors and population and in comparison with the number of M.P.s, electors and population for Great Britain. The purpose of this article ir, by means of statistical tables, to analyse the Irish electorate between 1868 and 1915 and in particular to show the effect of the electoral reforms of 1868 and 1884–5. The electorate of Ireland will be viewed not only in the context of the separate Irish constituencies and the proportion of electors to adult males and population in each but also in the context of the whole of the British Isles and the total number of electors and population with the proportion of electors to population in each country. As well the average number of electors and population per M.P. for the different countries will be shown.

During the struggle for Irish home rule and independence, A. V. Dicey, Vinerian professor of English law at Oxford, appears as the leading academic spokesman for the unionist forces. In 1886, while he denied having any special knowledge of Irish affairs, he rejected all proposals for altering the union on constitutional and national grounds:

Whatever may be the difficulties, or even the disadvantages, of maintaining the union, it undoubtedly has in its favour not only all the recommendations which must belong to a policy of rational conservatism, but also these two decisive advantages—that it does sustain the strength of the United Kingdom, and that it does not call for any dereliction of duty.

In the mid-1880s English political leaders found it essential to develop new policies for Ireland. While the liberals, led by Gladstone, were converted to the home-rule solution, the tories sought to preserve the union with a two-pronged policy. First, Ireland’s economic disorders were to be cured by vigorously developing the system of state-aided land purchase, and by having the imperial treasuly assume a large portion of the cost of developing the country’s natural resources and industrial potential. This aspect of the policy rested upon the tory conviction that Irish support of home rule would diminish in direct proportion to significant economic and social advance. The second part of the policy called for the establishment of a democratic system of local government which was to be the limit of political concessions to Irish nationalist sentiment.

The electoral debacle of 1874 removed only the least important aspect of Irish liberalism. The real strength of the liberal approach to Irish government continued to lie in the much less accessible, but much more important, official world of Dublin Castle which, in the early 1880s, was still confidently running Ireland as it thought best without too much reference to public opinion. The emergence of militant nationalism should not divert attention from the plain fact that the government of the country remained firmly in the hands of liberal-minded administrators, of whom very little is known. Dublin Castle, like Whitehall, guarded its secrets with care, the great scandal of 1884 marking the single departure from normal practice. The high value which the liberal establishment of 1880–85 placed on discretion is registered most forcibly through the lack of memoirs written by senior officials, whose competent management of affairs deserved a permanent literary memorial. No Boswell, or even Edward Hamilton (Downing Street's uncritical diarist at this time), came forward to describe the régime at work or at play. Unpublicised achievements are easily forgotten: and in this case the problem of penetrating a wall of silence is made more difficult by the absence of most of the appropriate archives. Apart from Spencer himself, only Thomas O'Hagan, the Irish lord chancellor (1880–81) and one of the least important figures in Forster's circle, seems to have preserved a substantial body of papers, though further discoveries may still be made.