The negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny endured, except for brief intervals, from the signing of a truce on 15 September 1643 until two weeks before the king's death (30 January 1649), when, too late, they culminated in a treaty. On the royalist side they were officially directed by the marquis of Ormond, but in practice a number of agents were active at various times on the king's behalf. Of essentially secondary interest to Charles, the negotiations absorbed much of the time and energy of the confederation and undoubtedly contributed to its eventual downfall.

Few periods of Irish history have been more extensively written about than the later eighteenth century: a mere list of books and papers dealing with the Volunteer movement, ‘Grattan's parliament’, the insurrection of 1798 and the legislative union of 1800 would make up a moderate-sized volume. Most of these writings are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. Indeed, it might be said that this relationship is the basic theme in the Irish history of the period, even for social and economic historians; and the pattern is so well-established that it may well seem rash to assume that it can be substantially modified, or even made significantly clearer, except, perhaps, by the production of new and hitherto unsuspected evidence. Yet there is something to be said for looking again at the whole subject on the basis of our existing knowledge, not simply, as Irish historians are inclined to do, from the standpoint of Ireland, nor yet as if events in Ireland were a mere appendage to British history, but rather, as Professor Butterfield has done for one brief period in his George III, Lord North and the people, to consider Anglo-Irish constitutional relations during the late eighteenth century as part of the general political history of the British Isles.