John Martin the Irishman was described by one of his shipmates as the unluckiest man in the English fleet. He himself, appearing in turn before the inquisition in Mexico, complained that he was ‘ the unluckiest mortal on board, as all he knew was how to sweep the ship, and everybody ill-treated him, and called him St Peter or St Patrick and a thousand other names ’. A little later, the inquisition scribe noted that Martin ‘ remained a while sighing and grief-stricken, and then said that he was surrounded by a thousand dangers in this trial which far from going in his favour appeared to be taking him on the road to the devil, and he wished to God he had not married in this country and brought trouble on others as well as on himself, because he saw that he was doomed to die ’. Again, on 1 February 1575, Martin told the inquisitors ‘ that he was tired of being admonished so many times and that he called God to witness that he wished he might be doomed body and soul if he had anything further to say, and although his tears might be of no avail here on earth they might still serve him with God ’. His gloomy prognostications were fully justified. At the second auto-da-fé in Mexico city, on 6 March 1575, Martin was garrotted and his body burnt: no other person was done to death on this occasion. Out of the hundred or so members of the English fleet captured by the Spaniards in 1568, only four were executed for heresy, and only two of these in New Spain. George Reaveley who died in the Mexican auto of 1574 has been termed ‘ one of the first martyrs of the protestant cause in America ’.

In 1825 there was published in Liverpool a pamphlet of 59 pages entitled The present state of Ireland, with a plan for improving the position of the people. Its author was James Cropper, a quaker merchant of that city and senior partner of the firm Cropper, Benson and Co. As a young man he had been apprenticed to the firm of Rathbone, Benson and Co., living and working in the small circle of liberal radicals in the city, of whom the Rathbones, the Binns and the Roscoes were perhaps the most famous. In 1799 he had set up business on his own account, and later joined in partnership with another quaker, Thomas Benson, son of Rathbone's partner, as Cropper, Benson and Co. The firm engaged in a wide variety of commission trading, but increasingly specialized in cotton imports from the United States of America, acting also as the Liverpool agent for the Black Ball line of packets which from 1818 provided the first regular passenger sailings between New York and Liverpool. As an ‘ American ’ merchant in Liverpool, Cropper helped to form the American chamber of commerce in the port, serving as treasurer and later as president. Besides his trading activities Cropper was a founder-director of the Liverpool-Manchester Railyway and he also invested heavily in the New York State canal system.

It was in 1872 that English agricultural labourers formed their first nationally organised trade union, and with this development came immediate pressure to secure improved wages and reduced hours of employment, wherever possible. In such circumstances unionists were clearly anxious to create a general scarcity of labour, in order to strengthen their bargaining position, and they particularly frowned upon the itinerant Irish workers who came to swell the agricultural market during the hay and corn harvests. Although, from the farmers' point of view, extra labour was clearly needed at these busy seasons of the year, the farm workers themselves were keen to eliminate—or at least to regulate—this type of competition.

In practice the Irish harvest migration had probably already reached its peak by the end of the 1840s and had then fallen off fairly rapidly, in the face of the massive emigration movement of the early 1850s.

The Easter rising inaugurated a period of violence in Irish history, but its immediate consequence was to spark off a political rather than a military upheaval. The most important development in the next few years was the emergence of a united and organized separatist party which was capable of winning and holding the loyalties of most Irishmen; between 1916 and 1919 the achievements of the Sinn Fein party outweighed in importance those of the Irish Volunteers. This article will examine how the different Sinn Fein elements combined to form a single party, and how they overcame problems which nearly undermined its unity.

For some time before the Volunteers resorted to their protest in arms the nationalist party of John Redmond had been in a state of crisis, and its roots had begun to wither even though few traces of decay were yet visible above ground. Its supporters were dismayed by Carson's successful defiance of the Asquith government and by the postponement of home rule until after the end of the war. The party's extremist rivals were growing in strength and influence, encouraged by Griffith's propaganda and by the formation of the Volunteers. The nationalists had become vulnerable to an onslaught from outside their ranks or to erosion from within. Yet until after the turning-point of May 1916 Redmond still retained the grudging and unenthusiastic support of the great majority of the population.

On 4 September 1607 the two Ulster earls, Tyrone and Tyrconnell, and the lord of Fermanagh, Cuconnaught Maguire, accompanied by their respective kinsmen, embarked from Lough Swilly for continental Europe. They never again returned to the lands they had striven so hard to hold. Their departure was a tragedy for Gaelic Ireland; their former dependants were left leaderless and unprotected, and what remained of the Gaelic way of life was soon undermined by the plantation in Ulster. The ‘ flight of the earls ’ is one of the black pages of Irish history and the event marks the end of an age.

What occasioned this sudden and mysterious departure? Of the many answers suggested almost all have been coloured by prejudice and the picture, consequently, remains clouded. Professional historians, with few exceptions, have shied away from the subject, and have contented themselves with qualified versions of the explanations offered by such writers as Fr Meehan, T. M. Healy, and Seán O'Faoláin. An essay in revision is certainly long overdue.