On the Ulster borderlands, the years 1849 to 1852 represented a crucial period in the development of a correlation between agrarian violence and constitutional political agitation. The emergence of the Tenant League in the region from 1848, along with a parallel clandestine violence from 1849, foreshadowed the better-known Land War of the latter part of the nineteenth century. This article analyses the hitherto unacknowledged interplay between agrarian violence and constitutional politics in south Armagh and surrounding districts. In so doing, it emphasises the years in the immediate wake of the Great Famine as being critical in the long-term development of more politicised forms of collective action. Such methods, in turn, would ultimately be deployed to the detriment of the landed ascendancy in subsequent decades.

This article examines a letter from Cavan's political elite to the lord deputy and council in July 1629 in protest against the imposition of charges relating to the Graces. The letter, with its graphic description of a county gripped by famine, tells us much about conditions on the ground at this time. What is most interesting about this petition, however, are the more than one hundred signatures appended to it. The names include a mix of both Gaelic Irish and British settlers and indicate a plantation county whose two communities were prepared to work with each other, on this occasion at least, in order to achieve a common goal.

In 1903 the governor of South Africa, Lord Alfred Milner, agreed to proposals from the owners of the Transvaal gold mines to alleviate the labour shortage caused by the recent war by recruiting workers from China. The Conservative government of Arthur Balfour gave its approval in May 1904, and had overall responsibility for the scheme until it yielded power to the Liberals in December 1905. The so-called ‘coolies’ were to be indentured on a three-year contract, paid less than the blacks, and quarantined from the local population. Well before the first shipment arrived on the Witwatersrand in June 1904, British trade unionists were alarmed that a precedent was being set for the importation of cheap labour closer to home, and Britain’s ‘Non-conformist conscience’ was disturbed at the spectre of ‘nameless practices’ developing in compounds of young men separated from their families. Events seemed to bear out the apprehensions.

This article examines the memoirs written by Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, fourth earl of Carnarvon, concerning his period as lord lieutenant of Ireland between June 1885 and January 1886, in the brief Salisbury administration. Carnarvon inherited many of the problems of his Liberal predecessor, fifth Earl Spencer, telling Salisbury ‘the day of reckoning in this case will come very rapidly if any unwise promises are made or implied’. Nevertheless he was sympathetic to reform in many different fields, notably home rule, land reform, education and religion. A sensitive politician, Carnarvon penned this memorandum shortly after leaving office in an attempt to uphold his reputation. The memorandum gives a number of insights into Carnarvon’s manoeuvrings in cabinet, and demonstrates the workings of high politics in the late-nineteenth century. It was never published.

Why certain Irishmen came to use violence to obtain their political objectives during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 has proved a difficult question. A number of local studies of the experience of volunteers, following the example of David Fitzpatrick, have provided insights into the process of radicalisation but have not dealt with this aspect of the subject explicitly. A more systematic approach has been taken in the attempt to explain the strong variations in the intensity of activity throughout the country. What caused these variations has indeed been a matter of contention ever since the Anglo-Irish War itself. Michael Collins often voiced complaints about ‘slack’ areas in language that left little to the imagination. Since the publication of Erhard Rumpf’s Nationalismus und Sozialismus in Irland in 1959 historians have sought to explain the unequal distribution of violence by comparing the level of I.R.A. activity in a particular county with certain geographically distributed social and economic variables. Hitherto these attempts have been unable to produce a full explanation for regional variations.

In historical treatment, as was the case in life, John O’Connor Power has been overshadowed by Charles Stewart Parnell, his political nemesis who campaigned successfully to destroy Power’s influence. However during the decade 1874–84, Power was the most enigmatic, controversial and divisive figure in Irish politics. His fellow parliamentarian T P. O’Connor called him ‘one of the few [Irish M.P.s] who stood out from the ruck of Irish placehunters’, whose ‘profound knowledge, his temper ..his profound contempt for ignorance and, as he thought, at the same time the insanity of Parnell made him a source of division’ O’Connor described him as having ‘a powerful but very ugly face, the ugliness accentuated by the marks of a severe attack in childhood of smallpox’ Tim Healy remembered him as ‘reeking of the common clay’ and remarked that ‘Parnell’s aristocratic sensitiveness recoiled’ in Power’s presence.

A list from September 1939 of files destroyed by the Department of External Affairs in the invasion scares of 1939–40 contains an intriguing reference to the possibility of dispatching Irish military forces to the Saarland on the Franco-German border in the winter of 1934–5. There they would serve as part of an international peacekeeping force while a plebiscite on the status of the territory was carried out under League of Nations auspices in January 1935. The context of this article is the events surrounding the creation of the peacekeeping force in December 1934.

That the Irish Free State should be mentioned as a possible contributor to the international force for the Saar is an illustration of the emerging mediatory role the state was to adopt after its three-year term on the League Council concluded in September 1933. With an Irish diplomat, Sean Lester, seconded to League service as High Commissioner in Danzig from 1934, and with Irish-born Edward Phelan, Assistant Director of the International Labour Organisation, being mentioned as a possible contender for the League post of Deputy Secretary-General in 1933, and with Eamon de Valera rising in importance as an international statesman and League supporter, Ireland’s involvement in the Saar was both an illustration and a result of the state’s prominent position in the League in the early to mid-1930s.

A part from the surviving state papers (notably those of Lord Lieutenant Clarendon) one of the most important sources for the history of Ireland in the reign of James II is the ‘Narrative’ written in 1702 by Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan was appointed secretary to Lord Deputy Tyrconnell and first commissioner of the revenue at the end of 1686 and was dismissed, following allegations of corruption, early in 1688. Sheridan claimed that James had made him secretary against Tyrconnell’s wishes so that he could watch Tyrconnell’s behaviour on his behalf, and that Tyrconnell fabricated the charges of corruption in order to be rid of him. Most historians, especially those hostile to Tyrconnell, have accepted Sheridan’s account as accurate. Sir James Mackintosh, for example, wrote : ‘Clarendon and Sheridan’s MSS agree so exactly in their picture of Tyrconnell, have such an air of truth in their accounts of him that it is not easy to refuse them credit, though they were both his enemies’.

It has become a commonplace of Irish history to assume that this country lay outside the full stream of European life until the twelfth century, and to preface an account of the Norman invasion with a brief survey of the very remarkable movement for the reform of the Irish church which we associate principally with the name of St Malachy. Dean Lawlor's short introductory essay to his translation of St Bernard's Life of St Malachy appeared in 1920, and is still the most readable version of this commonly accepted view. It is the purpose of this paper to criticise this view as a whole, and I shall have a good deal to say in criticism, not only of Lawlor's essay, but also of the last chapter of Kenney's otherwise admirable Sources for the early history of Ireland. All the more reason why I should begin by stating clearly my own personal debt to both these scholars. If I criticise their conclusions and their inadequate statement of the evidence, I do so in full consciousness of all that I have learned from their useful publications.

The magna carta of the Irish system of national education, established in 1831, was what came to be known as ‘ the Stanley letter ’, addressed on 31 October 1831 by the Right Honourable Edward G. Stanley, chief secretary for Ireland, to the duke of Leinster, president of the board of seven commissioners appointed by the government to administer the system.

Between the summer of 1770 and the close of the year 1772, large areas of rural Ulster were rendered ungovernable by the activities of the Hearts of Steel or Steelboys. Agrarian agitation was not new, of course — during 1763 Tyrone, Armagh and Mormghan had been similarly affected by the Oakboys — but apart from the more serious and more prolonged nature of the Hearts of Steel outbreak, which gave it a notoriety and importance of its own, and the curious fact that the agitators were presbyterians, it had this unique feature: its outbreak and the heavy emigration which followed its spread and suppression were almost universally ascribed to the wicked greed of a single great landowner, the fifth earl (later first marquis) of Donegall.

Nineteenth-century contested elections were by no means sedate affairs. Dickens’s ‘Eatanswill’, with its mob violence, voters being bribed, locked up, rendered insensible and thrown into canals, found echoes in real events. Bribery, violence, shouting, fighting and horse-play were ‘relatively minor’ features but certainly present in the election at Warwick in 1868 for example. The Victorian system introduced to Ireland could be an explosive mixture indeed. About a fifth of Dr Theodore Hoppen’s recent major work, Elections, politics and society in Ireland, 1832–1885, is devoted to violence including a section specifically on electoral violence. Corruption was also common, and petitions to parliament objecting to the conduct of individual elections and demanding a fresh ballot were not infrequent.

Before considering the manner in which the house of lords handled Irish questions in the age of Peel a brief examination of the ties between the United Kingdom upper house and Ireland is necessary A striking fact that requires emphasis is the growth between 1783 and 1832 of the ‘Irish interest’ in the lords. In the eighteenth century, when the British house of lords was a relatively small body of little over 200 members, the number of peers with a stake in Irish land was only about one eighth of the whole body. Several of these, too, owned wide lands in England and their main interests lay there. But by the time the first reformed parliament was opened on 29 January 1833 the Irish interest’ in the lords had become a formidable body In a house that had doubled in numbers since 1783 virtually one peer out of every four had a stake in Ireland through the ownership of land, and the majority of these were men whose economic interests were exclusively centred on their Irish estates. Moreover this ‘Irish interest’ maintained its strength in the lords right down to the formation of Gladstone's first ministry as the table below makes clear.

The work of J. Murstfield and H. E. Sell hns directed the attention of historians to the importance of the English court of wards and liveries, both as an instrument of fiscal policy and as a welfare organisation for the children and widows of the king's tenants. In the Public Record Office, Lonclon, a great mass of material remains to throw light on every aspect of the court's activity. More recently Dr H. F. Kearney has published a uselul and suggestive paper on the Irish court of wards which was principally concerned with the reign of Charles I. A more detailed appraisal of the earlier period is not easy since the records of the Irish court of wards have, like those of other departments of state, suffered wholesale loss or destruction. It seems unlikely that the wards papers were ever placed in public archives: they apparently never reached the old Public Record Office in Dublin to be consumed in the holocaust of 1922. Consequently, the student has to work from public and private papers scattered throughout these islands in libraries, record ofices and private collections.

For long there has been accepted as genuine a charter, purporting to be issued by Henry III, which follows the text of his first reissue of the Great Charter in favour of his English subjects but which has been to some extent modified to adapt it to Irish conditions. This document, to which the title Magna Carta Hiberniae has been applied, has received an official cachet by its inclusion, with no mark of suspicion, in the first volume of the Early statutes of Ireland, edited by H. F. Berry. In undertaking a careful enquiry into the transmission of the text and its historical background, Dr. Dudley Edwards has performed a valuable service and, as a result, the authenticity of the supposed charter is, at least, very much open to question. He might, indeed, have gone further than he has done and have stated as a positive conclusion his tentative conjecture ‘ that Magna Carta Hiberniae is an adaptation of Henry's first charter, compiled in Ireland ’.

This doggerel vindication of Fitzwilliam’s Irish viceroyalty of 1795 gave one contemporary interpretation of this controversial episode. Such a favourable verdict was far from universal at the time and subsequently has been seriously questioned by historians. In one respect, however, this verse succinctly highlighted one of the most striking features of the Fitzwilliam episode. It appeared that the lord lieutenant had been recalled before ‘he scarcely could explain himself’. The English minister principally responsible for initiating the swift recall was the home secretary, the duke of Portland. Since Portland was a close friend and longstanding political ally of Fitzwilliam, this seeming betrayal excited widespread comment and, in certain circles, gave rise to heartsearching consternation. Yet Portland’s motives have never been satisfactorily explained by historians. Attention has repeatedly been paid to the motives of Fitzwilliam himself, and the conduct of the prime minister, the Younger Pitt, has been carefully scrutinised. Explanations of Portland’s behaviour have been left rather on the sidelines. He is usually portrayed as a weak-minded dupe and traitor to his own avowed principles. A re-examination of the evidence permits a more rounded characterisation. Portland’s attitude was complex but coherent. Instead of the conventional picture of a weak man with weak views, Portland emerges as a man with strong views and some failings.