Paolo Giovio’s Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae et Orchadum presents several problems for the historian of early modern Ireland. Published in 1548, but composed for the most part during the early 1540s, it offered a comparatively detailed portrait of Irish geography, culture and politics to an international audience whose appetite for Irish affairs had been whetted by the recent Henrician Reformation. Yet the text offers scant commentary on Irish politics; its geographical information is often confused; its ethnography is evocative but rarely moralising; and its focus on Ulster and the lifestyle of Conn O’Neill is suggestive but tantalisingly so. The author’s sources are as obscure as his intentions. Nevertheless, Giovio’s text was still being read and cited by leading European and even Irish authors up to a hundred years later. It was a seminal treatment of Ireland and the Irish that found few parallels in international print-houses until the gradual emergence of the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis towards the end of the sixteenth century. This article sets the Descriptio in the twin context of early modern geographical humanism and the international fallout of the Henrician Reformation.

On 17 September 1496 Gerald, eighth earl of Kildare (the ‘Great Earl’), landed at Howth, County Dublin, after a lengthy and troubled voyage from England. One of the earl’s fellow travellers gave thanks to God for his safe arrival. If Kildare did likewise, his gratitude probably sprang less from his delivery from the natural elements than from his survival of a hostile political climate at court. Since the battle of Bosworth in 1485 not one but two Yorkist pretenders had found support in Ireland. The first of them — Lambert Simnel — was crowned in May 1487 as ‘King Edward VI’ in Christ Church cathedral, Dublin, after which a parliament was held in his name. Kildare was chief governor of Ireland during both conspiracies. More recently he had faced allegations of treason during the expedition of Sir Edward Poynings (1494-5). Despite this dubious record of loyalty to the newly established Tudor dynasty, on 6 August 1496 Henry VII appointed the Great Earl lord deputy of Ireland.

The seventeenth-century tradition that the Irish lord chancellor, Sir Richard Bolton, was the author of the 1644 Declaration asserting the legislative independence of the Irish parliament has long been considered unreliable. Following the arguments of the Declaration’s eighteenth-century editor, Walter Harris, it has been usual to attribute the work to the Catholic lawyer Patrick Darcy, author of An argument delivered … by the express order of the House of Commons … 9. Iunii 1641 (Waterford, 1643).

In May 1560 a new office was established in the Irish administration, the first to be introduced in almost twenty years. It was that strange creation, the office of secretary of state for Ireland. The chief inspiration behind its foundation was Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, and it is clear from his writings on the subject that he believed some special office of this kind was needed if the policy of reestablishing English government in Ireland was to be implemented successfully.

The history of Poynings’ Law is complex and multifaceted. Much has been written about it, at times with the end result being a recognition that to investigate Poynings’ Law is to venture into a quagmire. At the same time, a number of important works have been published over the years that throw light upon specific periods in the history of that law. Until recently much of the focus has been on the period stretching from the passage of the law in 1494-5 up to 1641, with some significant excursions into the eighteenth-century history of the law.

On 22 August 1798 the United Irishmen’s long-term efforts to obtain French support finally came to fruition with the appearance of three frigates in Killala Bay on the coast of Mayo. Unfortunately for them, their allies had come too late, for the rebellion of 1798 had been suppressed several weeks earlier. Moreover, the French landing force numbered barely a thousand men. Nonetheless, this belated and undersized army was joined by thousands of Irish volunteers and scored several local victories before being overwhelmed at Ballinamuck in County Longford on 8 September.

This article examines the actions of the various groups that made up the Ulster Protestant interest from shortly after the end of the First Civil War in England in late 1646 to the defeat of the Engagement in 1648. At the beginning of this period the English parliament took a renewed interest in Ulster, sending men and commanders, which accelerated a process of polarising the hitherto united Ulster British forces along ethnic lines. This culminated in almost unanimous support for the Engagement by the Ulster Scottish élite, while their Ulster English counterparts generally remained loyal to the parliamentary commanders in the province. Within Ulster Scottish society a further division occurred, between the royalist-inclined élite and much of the populace, who followed their Presbyterian ministers in opposing the Engagement. The article attempts to explain why the Ulster Scottish elite made this choice, and seeks to place this series of events within a British/Irish context, exhibiting the interrelated nature of events in each of the three kingdoms from the unique perspective of Protestant Ulster.

The two ‘great unknowns’ of Irish migration history, women and Protestants, have received deserved attention in the decade or so since Donald Akenson first drew attention to them as lacunae in an otherwise growing field of scholarly concern. A review of the literature, however, demonstrates that Irish women have benefited more than Protestants from recent research. Despite pioneering efforts, much of the work on the non-Catholic dimension tends to be general or indicative in approach, with little of the depth and range now associated with Irish women’s experiences of migration.

The phenomenon of European migration during the early modern period — whether to overseas locations or across frontiers within Europe — is a complex one. In general, people migrate of their own volition from places of low opportunity or deprivation to areas of higher opportunity, where they hope to find employment or a better life.2 In the early modern period, however, the reasons why people migrated are less clear. Of course, many thousands migrated to improve their circumstances, usually in the hope of returning to make a permanent home in their place of origin. Yet, according to Nicholas Canny, English migration to transatlantic destinations in the early part of the seventeenth century was ‘high-risk subsistence migration’, since both the Chesapeake and the West Indies proved lethal for Europeans. The precise reasons why migrants continued to leave home, when such were the prospects before them, remain opaque to historians.

Daniel O’Connell, asked when appearing before a select committee of the House of Commons on 1 March 1825 whether there had been many Catholics among the United Irishmen, replied that there were scarcely any among the leading United Irishmen. The leading United Irishmen were almost all Presbyterians or Dissenters. In the north the lower classes of United Irishmen were at first almost exclusively Dissenters. It spread then among the Roman Catholics and as it spread into the southern counties and of course, as it took in the population, it increased in its numbers of Roman Catholics. In the county of Wexford, where the greatest part of the rebellion raged, there were no United Irishmen previous to the rebellion and there would have been no rebellion there if they had not been forced forward by the establishment of Orange lodges and the whipping and torturing and things of that kind.

In recent years our understanding of the attempts of the Irish Protestant élite to convert and ‘civilise’ Ireland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has increased substantially. Some historians have examined the various campaigns to convert the largely Irish-speaking Catholic native population to Protestantism, through schools, the employment of Irish-speaking clergy and the publication of key religious texts in Irish. Others have explored Protestant efforts to civilise Ireland by bringing its governmental and legal infrastructure into line with those of England and through the spread of English dress, language, industries and agriculture.

Four days after the dramatic launch of the anti-home rule campaign at Craigavon on 23 September 1911, where Sir Edward Carson was ‘delivered to his people’, Fred Oliver, a keen Unionist, passionate federalist and peddler of various constructive political initiatives, wrote to Geoffrey Robinson, editor of The Times. In the course of a long and pessimistic letter he expressed deep distress at the violent tone adopted by Carson at Craigavon, admitting that ‘he was glad to see the Irish Times has been “pole-axing” Carson and co’ and imploring Robinson to criticise similarly ‘all this Ulster shouting and drum-beating and treasonable Tom Foolery’.

The study of the Irish Civil War has undergone enormous changes in recent years, especially in terms of a new appreciation of the role played by minorities and localities in shaping the conflict. However, despite these new perspectives, the war continues to be defined almost solely with reference to its effects on the Free State. This is to ignore one of the most important military and political initiatives of the period: the combined I.R.A. campaign against partition which took place in the first six months of 1922 and persisted into the early stages of the Civil War.

Ulster Protestant, farmer’s son, journalist, I.R.B. member, Irish Volunteer organiser, hunger-striker, Sinn Féin T.D. and Minister for Trade and Commerce, advocate of the Anglo-Irish treaty, Cumann na nGaedheal Minister for Local Government, Finance and Posts and Telegraphs, Vice-President of the Executive Council, Blueshirt intellectual (but no fascist): these successive designations capture the varied early career of Ernest Blythe. Far less is known of his interests and writing after his retirement from political life: the Irish language, theatre and, in particular, the partition question.

Of all the cities of England and Scotland, Glasgow is most widely associated with sectarianism. As Bill Murray has remarked, the city is renowned for its religion, violence and football, three elements which crystallise in the uniquely bitter encounters between the city’s two major football clubs, Rangers and Celtic. The clubs are identified as ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ respectively, although, as Tom Gallagher has commented, supporters’ allegiances tend to be more tribal than doctrinal. Religion is inextricably bound up with nationalism in these sporting contests.

The importance to Irish Travellers of the border with Northern Ireland, historically, is difficult to ascertain. Families with limited travel circuits in the southern counties may have considered it irrelevant, while Travellers living in border counties probably traversed it with ease. How the political boundary hindered nomadic life depended to a large extent on the Stormont and Dublin administrations and on how each jurisdiction treated caravan and tent dwellers. A comparison of north and south in the period from partition to 1960 illustrates how Travellers were regarded in each jurisdiction, demonstrating the contrast between the administration of two distinct polities with a common legal and administrative tradition.

The Universal News was published in London for nine years between December 1860 and December 1869. It originated as a co-operative effort between Irish and English Catholics to produce a newspaper which, though essentially secular, was to be imbued with a religious sensibility. The great majority of Catholics, however, were by this stage overwhelmingly Irish and wanted news of Ireland and Irish politics. This was not necessarily to the taste of all, so from the outset a balancing act was required between the wants and needs of English and Irish Catholics. This was not to be without its problems, for as the decade progressed and the struggle developed between a secular Irish nationalism and church and state, divisions deepened. The Universal News quickly became a paper for Irish Catholics, spanned a turbulent decade and mirrored in its own history both the internal and external struggles of the Irish in England. Furthermore, the history of the Universal News demonstrates the centrality, in Irish journalism in England, of the influence of the church, and the central question for the press of the migrants was how, in a hostile political environment, to produce and sustain newspapers that were at the same time secular but operated within a system of distribution particularly sensitive to clerical control.

Conspiracy theories have always accompanied the shadowy and ambiguous interventions of British intelligence in Irish affairs. Commentators in Ireland often accuse British intelligence and security agencies of being stubbornly hostile to Irish nationalist aspirations and inclined to oppose, and even sabotage, official British peace initiatives This attitude has a long heritage and can be traced back to the Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations in 1921. There was a widespread belief in Irish nationalist circles that intelligence officers were exercising a baleful influence on British politicians: at one point during the negotiations Michael Collins angrily brandished a warlike British military intelligence document that had fallen into his hands and claimed that the army was working to destroy the truce.