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Despite differing historiographical traditions, the histories of Tudor England and Ireland often face similar problems, not least how best to narrate and analyse episodes of state and non-state violence in a satisfying way. Latterly, sophisticated models for dealing with this have emerged in treatments of English popular politics. These works succeed in eschewing both inherited ideas of English exceptionalism and the ‘enclosure’ of social history. They also offer a compelling and holistic view of social and political interactions in the past from a number of vantage points. Many recent treatments of sixteenth-century Irish history, by contrast, have centred on atrocity and even genocide. This narrower focus does not preclude important scholarship, but its thematic and methodological limitations hamper that scholarship's broader non-polemical value. The appreciation of Tudor Ireland's status as a political society and the close scrutiny of that political society and its actors is a necessity. It offers just as promising an embarkation point for sophisticated and interesting studies as the study of Tudor English popular politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the execution of his father Charles I in January 1649, the exiled king Charles II pursued various political, military, and diplomatic strategies to recover his kingdoms. Proclaimed king of Ireland and Scotland, Charles II adopted the traditional view of monarch–subject relations and expected the loyalty of his subjects and their devotion to his restoration. The recent experiences of war and regicide, however, had changed the ways in which Irish and Scottish subjects determined the nature and degree of allegiance owed to the king. In Ireland and Scotland, subjects placed their own interests above the royalist cause. Tensions in Ireland among Catholics and between Catholics and Protestants tested the bonds of loyalty to Charles II, and Scottish Covenanters circumscribed the king's authority and imposed strict conditions upon their political and military support. Moreover, Charles II's position of exile exacerbated existing tensions within his kingdoms. While Charles I experienced the withdrawal of his subjects' allegiance and strove to recover that loyalty, as an exiled king Charles II struggled to gain the allegiance of his kingdoms and to secure loyalty in the face of religious tension, geographic distance, failing war efforts, and conflicting interests among his subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Oliver Cromwell remains a deeply controversial figure in Ireland. In the past decade, his role in the conquest has received sustained attention. However, in recent scholarship on the settlement of Ireland in the 1650s, he has enjoyed a peculiarly low profile. This trend has served to compound the interpretative problems relating to Cromwell and Ireland which stem in part from the traditional denominational divide in Irish historiography. This article offers a reappraisal of Cromwell's role in designing and implementing the far-reaching 'Cromwellian ' land settlement. It examines the evidence relating to his dealings with Irish people, both Protestant and Catholic, and his attitude towards the enormous difficulties which they faced post-conquest. While the massacre at Drogheda in 1649 remains a blot on his reputation, in the 1650s Cromwell in fact emerged as an important and effective ally for Irish landowners seeking to defeat the punitive confiscation and transplantation policies approved by the Westminster parliament and favoured by the Dublin government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Irish Party, the organization which represented the constitutional nationalist demand for home rule for almost fifty years in Westminster, was the most notable victim of the revolution in Ireland, c. 1916-23. Most of the last generation of Westminster-centred home rule MPs played little part in public life following the party's electoral destruction in 1918. This article probes the political thought and actions of one of the most prominent constitutional nationalists who did seek to alter Ireland's direction during the critical years of the war of independence. Stephen Gwynn was a guiding figure behind a number of initiatives to 'save' Ireland from the excesses of revolution. Gwynn established the Irish Centre Party in 1919, which later merged with the Irish Dominion League. From the end of 1919, Gwynn became a leading advocate of the Government of Ireland Bill, the legislation that partitioned the island. Revolutionary idealism - and, more concretely, violence - did much to render his reconciliatory efforts impotent. Gwynn's experiences between 1919 and 1921 also, however, reveal the paralysing divisions within constitutional nationalism, which did much to demoralize moderate sentiment further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism are essential categories for the interpretation of political discourse in Stuart Ireland, Scotland, and England. In the 1650s, the Capuchin Richard O'Ferrall defined the future of the Irish kingdom by means of its past. This Irish ancient constitution was not anchored in J. G. A. Pocock's common law mind, but rather in Aristotelianism. Ancient constitution discourse in England and Scotland shared this Aristotelian basis. Responding to O'Ferrall, John Lynch, Catholic archdeacon of Tuam, employed openly anti-Aristotelian arguments which had been pioneered by the Jacobean attorney general for Ireland, Sir John Davies. Recognizing the Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian nature of these discourses enables the incorporation of both Catholic and Protestant writers, whether educated in Ireland, England, or France, within a coherent account of political thought across the Stuart world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1643, Robert Rich, the second earl of Warwick, the parliamentary lord high admiral, issued directions for naval officers in the Irish squadron to execute any soldiers seized whilst crossing from Ireland to join royalist armies in England and Wales. An ordinance was duly promulgated by parliament in October 1644 which authorized the killing of Irishmen captured at sea or in England. Thereafter, although a number of captains implemented this policy and put to death mariners, soldiers, and passengers detained on vessels going to and from confederate and royalist ports in Ireland, the killing of maritime captives never became the norm in the war at sea. This article provides a detailed analysis of the atrocities that occurred and the treatment of prisoners taken in the seas around Ireland during the war of the three kingdoms. In particular, this article examines the effect exerted by the threat of retaliatory executions of English seamen held in towns such as Wexford and Waterford on forcing parliament and its naval commanders to moderate their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders Thomas Carlyle's views on the crisis facing Ireland in the 1840s and British responses to it. It argues that while Carlyle saw this crisis as being related to difficulties facing contemporary 'English' society, he treated it as a distinctive manifestation of a malaise that afflicted all European societies. Carlyle's views on Ireland reflected the illiberal and authoritarian attitudes which underwrote his social and political thought, but they were not, as has sometimes been suggested, premised on anti-Irish prejudices derived from racial stereotypes. An examination of Carlyle's writings on Ireland demonstrate that he attributed the parlous state of that country in the 1840s to widespread failures in leadership and social morality that were not unique to the inhabitants of Ireland and were also to be found in England. Carlyle's works were not only admired by leading members of 'Young Ireland', but also generated ideas that framed their response to the economic, social, and political challenges facing Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 189os evangelical Protestants took to preaching on the streets in southern Irish towns and cities. They provoked an angry response, with large Catholic crowds gathering to protest at their activities. This created a difficult situation for the authorities. Obliged, on the one hand, to protect the rights and liberties of the preachers, they also looked to nurture behaviour appropriate to the sectarian realities in Ireland. At stake was the extent to which Ireland could be treated as an undifferentiated part of the United Kingdom, with W. E. H. Lecky increasingly recognizing the need for a different legal basis in Ireland. These events formed part of the wider evolution of' constructive unionism'. More broadly, respectable Irish Protestant and Catholic disapproval of preachers and the `mob' revealed the way in which class attitudes cut across sectarian identities, suggesting that the political dividends paid the wider unionist movement by this exposure of the apparent realities of' Rome rule' were little valued in the locale. Similarly, interventions by home rule politicians reinforced the sense that conciliating British public opinion was a central concern. Here was an example of how locally orientated sectarianism helped shape national political agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]