The eulogy on King William I of England in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle includes the interesting assertion that William would have conquered Ireland without weapons had he lived another year or two. Some commentators, such as Sir Frank Stenton, considered it to be merely a testimony to the victorious reputation of the Conqueror. Others have suggested that the chronicler had erred with regard to direction, and Denis Bethell speculated that there was slightly more reason to believe William was contemplating an expedition to Galicia during the last years of his life. Marjorie Chibnall pointed out, however, that there must have been some reason for such a statement. A possible explanation does appear when examining the relations between England and Ireland during the reign of William, and a suggestion can be made that political affairs in Ireland influenced, to some extent, the planning of the Conqueror. There are reasons for believing that, in order to diminish the peril from the west, William deliberately promoted good relations with one particular Irish prince — Toirrdelbach ua Briain, king of Munster and claimant to the high-kingship of Ireland.

To mark the bicentenary of the foundation of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, there is presented here a select bibliography of printed material pertaining to aspects of the history of the college itself and also of Maynooth town and district.

Maynooth emerged as an important settlement by virtue of its association with the Anglo-Norman family of Fitzgerald in the late twelfth century. In 1176 Maurice Fitzgerald, founder of the Geraldine dynasty in Ireland, received confirmation of a grant of lands in the O’Byrne district of Uí Fáeláin, including the lordships of Maynooth and Naas, and Maynooth castle (the ruins of which stand adjacent to the entrance to the college) was subsequently constructed at the junction between two streams, the Lyreen and the Joan Slade. His grandson, Maurice, second baron of Offaly, was instrumental in having Maynooth elevated in ecclesiastical status: in 1248, at Maurice’s request, Archbishop Luke of Dublin erected Maynooth as prebend of St Patrick’s cathedral, and the perpetual right of presentation was entrusted to Fitzgerald and his successors.

This paper will attempt to shed some additional light on the background and motives of those who were to play a leading part in the scheme for the Irish adventurers. The focus will be upon those Englishmen, and Londoners in particular, who invested from 1642 onwards in the reconquest of Ireland in return for grants of Irish land once the island had been secured again. It will be argued that militants who regarded themselves as belonging to the chosen ranks of the godly — that is the minority of mankind singled out for salvation by God, and thus constituting his elect or saints — played a leading part in the scheme and were among its most committed participants, and that they later helped to shape English policy towards Ireland. These militants were also ardent advocates of reformation in church and state in England in the 1640s, and they viewed Ireland and the successful Catholic rising in 1641 from a perspective highly coloured by antipopery. They tended to see the struggle taking place in the mid-seventeenth century in Britain, Ireland and Europe generally in black-and-white terms, as a struggle between true religion (by which was meant a thoroughly reformed Protestant church) and the Antichrist as represented by the pope and the forces believed to be ranged under him in the Catholic church.

When the earl of Pembroke met Henry II at Newnham in Gloucestershire in 1171, in the words of Gerald of Wales he surrendered Dublin (significantly called regni caput), the adjacent cantreds, the maritime towns and castles to the king. ‘As for the rest of the land he had conquered, he and his heirs were to acknowledge that it was held of the king and his heirs.’ Already Mac Murchada had given King Henry ‘the bond of submission and oath of fealty’. Later Mac Carthaig did homage as well as fealty, gave hostages and an annual tribute and ‘voluntarily submitted to the authority of the king of England’, while other Irish submitted and swore fealty. Most significantly, according to Gerald, Ó Conchobair of Connacht Obtained the king’s peace, became dependent for the tenure of his kingdom on the king as overlord, and bound himself in alliance with the king by the strongest ties of fealty and submission’. All in Ireland became the king’s subjects, and Henry’s lordship was accepted by all. It was later confirmed by the pope and publicly proclaimed by his legate, Cardinal Vivian, at a synod in Dublin. From 1171, then, until 1541, when an Irish parliament declared Henry VIII to be king of Ireland, Anglo-Irish relations were governed by one simple fact: the king of England was ipso facto lord of Ireland. Throughout that period the royal style never changed. In all charters and formal letters issuing from his chancery he was Rex Anglie, Dominus Hibernie etc.

It was Gerald of Wales too who first voiced the new reality which faced Ireland after 1171. When he composed a dedication to King John of a new edition of his Expugnatio Hibernica, sometime around 1209, he reminded him that he should not neglect Ireland and wrote that ‘the Irish kingdom was made subject to the English crown, as if through a perpetual indenture and an indissoluble chain’.

The ‘flight of the earls’ is considered one of the most intriguing events in Irish history. Traditionally, historians explaining this event have been divided into two schools of thought. Some have depicted the earls as offended innocents, forced into exile by unwarrantable pressure from Lord Deputy Chichester’s administration. Others have accepted the conspiracy theory, agreeing with the Dublin government’s contemporary view that the earls fled because they feared that their treasonable machinations had been uncovered. Since 1971, however, historical interpretation of the affair has been dominated by an article written by Nicholas Canny.

Departing from the previous lines of explanation, Canny focused on the intentions of the earl of Tyrconnell and Cuchonnacht Maguire to leave Ireland in 1607 as the key to understanding the flight. Anxious to leave the country because they were in acute financial difficulties, they were determined to seek profitable service with Archduke Albert, governor of the Spanish Netherlands. The ‘premature’ arrival of the ship that was sent to encompass Tyrconnell’s passage discomfited Tyrone, then preparing to go to court, causing him to ‘panic’ and take flight.

The reign of George I has long been regarded by historians as an important period in the development in Ireland of what some have called ‘colonial nationalism’. This period witnessed, after all, two long-drawn-out conflicts between the political establishments of Ireland and Britain—the Sherlock v. Annesley case (leading to the Declaratory Act of 1720) and the infamous Wood’s Halfpence dispute of 1723–5. This reign has traditionally been regarded as a ‘difficult’ transitional phase in Anglo-Irish relations which was followed by the superficially uneventful era of government by ‘undertakers’ after the early 1730s, before the ‘national’ question erupted again during the money bill dispute of the 1750s. This article will examine the nature of the anti-English feeling which undoubtedly existed at this time among certain sections of the Irish Protestant community. It will be argued that conflict within the episcopate of the Church of Ireland had a significant role in fomenting much of the ‘national’ tension between the so-called Irish and English interests at this time. It will be suggested, moreover, that disputes over the distribution of ecclesiastical patronage made a major contribution to the development of this conflict.

Although it has long been recognised that the politics of the larger Irish borough constituencies before the reform acts of 1832 turned on conflicts of opinion over serious issues, thorough analysis has been hampered by the paucity of one crucial type of evidence — the poll book. This necessary resource for candidates in the days of open voting, in which in their most complete form the names, addresses, qualifications, occupations and votes of the voters at a particular election are recorded, has survived in substantial numbers for English constituencies but rarely for those in Ireland. Cork City is an exception. Poll books for the seven contested elections in this constituency between 1812 and 1830 have survived, and these, together with the more commonplace statistical and written evidence which they enrich, provide ample material for a thorough analysis — in this case of voting behaviour. In this paper we provide a description of the general social and economic contexts of elections in Cork and focus upon the results of a variety of psephological tests to which the poll books have been subjected.

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.

Little has been written of the optimism and excitement among Irish immigrants and other Americans during the revolutionary months of 1848, the European ‘springtime of the peoples’. Studies of Irish-American nationalism hasten over the mobilisation of funds and arms to register the impact of failure. The ignominious collapse of the Young Ireland rising in Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch was to compel Irish-Americans to reconstruct their identity, to redefine the ways and means of their nationalist project. Irish-American nationalism became self-enclosed and self-reliant, an attitude evinced in a pattern of ethnic associational culture extending from mutual improvement to terrorist planning. During the heady months of 1848, however, a different mood prevailed. Looking across the Atlantic to revolutionary Europe, Irish immigrants invoked an international republicanism in which America, their adopted homeland, held pride of place. By recalling their hosts to their revolutionary past, Irish-Americans challenged narrow isolationism — and ‘Know-Nothing’ prejudice — to gain substantial, if temporary, native support.

The depth of change which the country experienced in the reign of James I has become an axiom of early modern Irish historiography. The extension of crown government throughout the island, the flight of the northern earls, the subsequent plantation in Ulster and the putative religious reformation of the indigenous inhabitants contributed to a climate of flux and tension. The burgeoning scholarly interest in this phase of Irish history has resulted in a more detailed understanding of administrative, political, regional and religious trends in the period. Progress has also been made in the study of contemporary mentalities. An interesting development has been the use of sources in the Irish language for the reconstruction of previously obscure intellectual currents amongst the Gaelic élite. The recent appearance of Michelle O Riordan’s monograph on the Gaelic reaction to the collapse of traditional society represents the fullest exposition yet of an interpretation which has characterised the early modern Gaelic ideological response to conquest and social change as fundamentally passive and backward-looking. O Riordan has, in effect, elaborated upon the conclusions of preceding commentators, notably Tom Dunne and Bernadette Cunningham, in portraying the Gaelic understanding of socio-political transformation as lacking in critical perception. This essay is intended as a further contribution to the elucidation of the mental climate of the time. More particularly, it will focus on two themes which figured prominently in the separate, but in this instance similar, communal reactions of the Gaelic Irish and the New English settlers to their respective political and social environments.

The law tracts of early medieval Ireland are one of the most remarkable bodies of literature surviving from the middle ages. These tracts, written in Old Irish, date from the late seventh and eighth centuries and thus may be held to reflect something of Irish society not so very long after the introduction of Christianity. Their physical size and linguistic complexity alone have proved daunting, but once these difficulties have been surmounted the scholar is given a picture of society, albeit somewhat fragmentary in places, that suggests an astonishing degree of legal sophistication. One area in which this sophistication is most apparent is in the layers of grades of men for which the law tracts provide. If we are to believe the tracts, Ireland was an elaborately graded society. Even if we do not believe them, it is clear that those interested in law were also interested in the creation of systems of gradation around which to construct their legislation. Not surprisingly, given the importance of the subject, attempts have been made to make sense of social stratification in Ireland using the evidence provided by the law tracts. One of the more recent is by Neil McLeod. In a paper published in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie in 1986–7 McLeod analysed the various ways in which the early Irish law tracts seem to depict social ranking. There has been been much dispute both over how accurately the law tracts portray social stratification in Ireland and how accurate a picture was intended, and McLeod takes issue with the line advanced by Binchy in his 1943 Rhŷs Lecture that the numerous grades found in the laws were of little or no practical significance and, implicit in his argument, were not really intended to be.

The term ‘Confederation of Kilkenny’ is not of ancient lineage. It dates from the nineteenth century and, as Professor J. C. Beckett has pointed out, seems to have originated in the title of a book by Father C. P. Meehan first published in 1846. Those members of the confederacy which ruled the major portion of the country between the rising of 1641 and the advent of Cromwell officially designated themselves as ‘the Confederate Catholics of Ireland’. Their own description of themselves has been chosen to head this essay not because the pedigree of the term ‘Confederation of Kilkenny’ is insufficiently old or respectable, but simply because their official title accurately describes what the essay is about. It is not concerned with the general history of the Confederate movement, nor with its prolonged diplomatic activities; still less does it deal with the ebb and flow of its military fortunes; nor even with the governmental structures of the Confederation. Of course I am relying on all these for background information and illustration, and, in particular, use has been made of the fact that I have been able to determine the number, and to identify almost the entire personnel, of the Confederation’s successive Supreme Councils. The history of the Confederation, political, diplomatic, constitutional and military, has been taken for granted. I want, then, to look at the people who individually bound themselves together by oath to form the confederacy; more particularly, to look at those who were members of the General Assemblies—constituting, in effect, the Confederate parliament; and more particularly still, to look at the members of the Supreme Councils, which virtually constituted the Confederate governments. This essay, therefore, is concerned with persons—with ‘the Confederate Catholics of Ireland’. It will briefly discuss their family origins, their educational and cultural background, their professions or occupations, and finally their political outlook.

Writers on the Irish land war have long been influenced by such contemporary accounts as Michael Davitt’s The fall of feudalism in Ireland, published in 1904. Given Davitt’s leading position in the Land League, it was only natural that most subsequent histories of the movement borrowed heavily from this publication. The history of the Land League has been viewed from the centre; its local base in the west of Ireland has received less attention. This neglect has resulted in marginalising many of the personalities within the regions, who were important not only to the success of the organisation but also to its origins. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of James Daly and the agrarian movement in Connacht. Only recently has Daly’s contribution begun to receive the attention it merits from historians, with the result that he can no longer be deemed ‘the most forgotten man of Irish history’. However, these studies have failed to trace Daly’s full involvement with the Land League and to note his volte-face, when he changed from being its most ardent supporter to become its bitterest internal critic.

I

James Daly was born in 1838 at Cloonabinna, Boghadoon, County Mayo, the eldest son of a prosperous tenant farmer who rented land from Sir Roger Palmer and had a forty-eight-acre farm on Colonel Charles Cuffe’s property at Coachfield, near Castlebar. Later the family rented land on the earl of Erne’s estate near Castlebar and a farm valued at £45 at Ballyshane in the electoral district of Breaghwy.

The story of the Fenian rising in 1867 may be regarded as starting with the expulsion of James Stephens from the headship of one of the two factions of American Fenians in December 1866. Stephens tried to postpone a rising planned to take place before 1 January 1867. At that time there was vocal dissatisfaction within the rank and file at the lack of action. The Dublin organisation itself was divided on the question. According to the report of Superintendent Ryan of the Dublin Metropolitan Police in January 1867:

Thomas J. Kelly, a former captain in the Federal army now bearing a title of colonel in Fenian terminology, and who had been in Ireland in early 1866, could now count on considerable support in Ireland. A bigger problem he faced was that of bringing the Fenians in Britain under his leadership as soon as he returned from America. Those Americans already in England (largely men who had fled from Ireland after the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act (29 Vict., c. 4) in February 1866), as well as many of the Irish Fenians there, already entertained doubts about the future purpose of an organisation guided by a remote leadership in America. As a result, the American officers and the Fenians in England decided to launch a rising without waiting for future American help, and for this purpose they formed a Directory in England not later than early February but more probably in January 1867.

Protestant working-class loyalists have been found not only in Belfast, behind the painted kerbs and muralled gables of the Shankill Road and Ballysillan. Recent research has found working-class loyalism in the Ulster hinterland of mid-Armagh. However, most of what has been written on southern Protestantism, beyond Belfast and Ulster, has been on the gentry class. Yet Dublin was once the centre of organised Protestant opinion in Ireland and had, in the early nineteenth century, an assertive and exuberantly sectarian Protestant working class. This paper is based on a study of the Protestant working class of Dublin, and examines its organisation and activism as revealed in the City and County of Dublin Conservative Workingmen’s Club (henceforth C.W.C.). The club owned a substantial Georgian house on York Street, off St Stephen’s Green where the modern extension to the Royal College of Surgeons now stands. The club was sustained by a core of activists numbering around three hundred, the usual print-run for the ballot papers at the annual general meeting. The Protestant working class numbered 5,688 in the city in 1881. The county area numbered 4,096, making a total of 9,784 Protestant workingclass men. The city and county total of about 10,000 remained stable up to the census of 1911. Combined with the Protestant lower middle class of clerks and shopkeepers, the potential to be mobilised by the C.W.C. numbered over 20,000. The club records are used to relate the experience of the Dublin Protestant working class firstly to the more familiar working-class loyalism of Ulster, and secondly to working-class Toryism and the concept of the labour aristocracy.

Corporatism or vocationalism had many advocates throughout Europe in the 1930s. Corporatists rejected the extremes of laissez-faire capitalism, with its attendant exploitation of workers, and totalitarian communism, with its emphasis on the doctrine of class struggle. They recommended a middle way between two hostile systems and sought to achieve social harmony by means of the establishment of corporations, representative of workers and employers, to regulate the various areas of national economic activity. These corporations were to secure co-operation between capital and labour, thus eliminating social conflict. In Ireland vocationalism had been popularised by the papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno, and it had strong proponents among certain elements in Fine Gael and the Blueshirts while both were under the leadership of General Eoin O’Duffy in 1933 and 1934. The spectacular failure of the Blueshirts and O’Duffy’s incompetence as Fine Gael leader resulted in the corporate-inspired Labour policy of Fine Gael, published in 1934, being ignored by historians. Yet it is worthy of attention, not least because it was the only significant policy formulation by vocationalists within Fine Gael. Furthermore, an examination of the proposals serves to illuminate reasons why corporatism and the Blueshirts were doomed to political failure.

The Irish mythology of the Great Famine of the 1840s explained the failure of the British government to prevent the deaths of some one million people in terms of a Whig government and ruling élite driven by a commitment to laissez-faire ideology which left them indifferent to the loss of Irish lives. At its most extreme, this mythology attributed a wilful genocide to the English. The term myth as used here does not necessarily imply that the account is untrue. Rather, the myth comprises a combination of fact, fiction and the unknowable in a narrative of such power that, for the people who accept it, the myth provides a guide to future understanding and action. In this respect, Irish mythology about the English and the Famine is rooted in facts: the resistance of the Whig government to any interference with the market; the staunch commitment to ideology of central figures in the making of famine policy such as Charles Trevelyan (assistant secretary to the treasury) and Sir Charles Wood (chancellor of the exchequer) and shapers of liberal opinion such as the political economists Nassau Senior and James Wilson (editor of The Economist); and the indifference to Irish suffering, and indeed the hostility to the Irish, as demonstrated in the language of the radical M.P.J.A. Roebuck.

In November 1899 The Times published a letter from a correspondent in Enniskillen recalling the army’s recruiting parades when he was a boy:

Only weeks before the Boer War had broken out, and the question of seducing ‘stalwart peasant lads’ to ‘take the shilling’ was becoming one of acute political concern in Ireland. For the Boer War was ‘nearly as crucial an event for Irish nationalism as the death of Parnell’. The sight of England engaged in a major colonial war and, in the early months, being ‘worsted in the game’ stimulated national sentiment: ‘the feeling against the British government was brought out in a remarkable manner, owing to the difficulties of the South African War’. Yet there were thousands of Irishmen in Britain’s army in South Africa.

The clandestine contacts between Parnell and the Irish Republican Brotherhood as he rose to national leadership in the first years of the land war provoked political controversy in his lifetime and have aroused speculation ever since. Michael Davitt and John Denvir both tried to recruit Parnell into the I.R.B. in 1878 and were told that he was determined never to join a secret society; but some years ago Paul Bew drew attention to a different allegation contained in an anonymous article published in 1930 in An Phoblacht. The writer claimed that as a youth he was one of the Land League organisers imprisoned in Kilmainham jail under Forster’s administration, and recollected a few incidents ‘for the benefit of the younger generation who stand face to face with the same authorities—under a new disguise today’. He described, among other things, the drafting of the ‘no-rent manifesto’ by William O’Brien and I.R.B. recruitment among the prisoners. The article then stated that soon after Parnell’s release from Kilmainham in 1882 he met a Land League organiser from the west while on his way to consult the records of Griffith’s valuation in Trinity College library, that they walked to the library together discussing constitutionalism and physical force, and that in the library Parnell at his own request took the I.R.B. oath, having first pledged the organiser to secrecy for as long as Parnell lived. (The article then casually continues for several paragraphs of reminiscence and reflection.)