Chapter 2 considers the archipelagic impact of the 1688 Revolution by examining the the War of the Two Kings in Ireland (1688–91). It analyzes how Irish events were mediated in newspapers such as the Orange Gazette and the London Gazette, both in the news stories and in advertisements for printed works such as maps, Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana (1689) and James Farewell’s The Irish Hudibras (1689). It focuses on how the media event surrounding the relief of the siege of Derry shaped English perceptions of the rest of the conflict in Ireland. The importance of Derry was amplified by the visit of George Walker to London and by thanksgiving services held in churches in London. By examining the representation of the siege in John Mitchelburne’s Ireland Preserv’d (1705), this chapter also assesses how Ireland was subsequently erased from the memory of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in Britain.

The Introduction situates the book within the theoretical parameters of Cultural Memory Studies, Print Culture Studies and British Studies. It provides a short history of Memory Studies, focusing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) as well as Aleida Assmann’s, Astrid Erll’s and Ann Rigney’s focus on media and memory. It surveys the complex media ecology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the role that printed texts played in articulating sites of memory changed between 1688 and 1745 as the meaning of print itself changed in relation to oral and manuscript cultures. It compares the media environments of the beginning and end of this period by focusing on the creation and circulation of two documents – the Declaration of William of Orange (1688) and the Particulars of the Victory regarding the Battle of Culloden (1746). The Introduction concludes by suggesting that Michael Rothberg’s concept of noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory) provides a useful model for examining printed works of British national memory in the mid-eighteenth century.

Chapter 1 begins by comparing Gilbert Burnet’s focus on the song “Liliburlero” as the media event of the 1688 Revolution with what contemporary scholars have written about the importance of printed works at the time. It asserts the importance of adopting a multi-media perspective on the 1688 Revolution. It analyzes James II/VII’s shifting use of media in the context of challenges to his throne by the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll in 1685 and William of Orange in 1688. It assesses William’s Declaration outlining “the Reasons Inducing him, to Appear in Armes in the Kingdome of England” and suggests that the document gained its authority as a printed text by being represented in oral and manuscript forms. It concludes by suggesting that the initial mediation of the 1688 Revolution impacted its later re-inscription as a site of “Glorious” cultural memory when William’s Declaration was reprinted in early eighteenth-century histories of recent events such as those by Edmund Bohun and Abel Boyer.