The treason trial of Connor Lord Maguire, second baron of Enniskillen, in February 1645 brought into focus competing conceptions of the constitutional relationship of England and Ireland. Maguire had been implicated in the plot to seize Dublin Castle on 23 October 1641 during the Irish revolt of that year and was tried in early 1645 before a Middlesex jury. The key issue of the trial was whether Maguire, as a peer of Ireland, having committed treasonable acts in Ireland and elsewhere and being brought “into England against his will, might be lawfully tryed … in the King's Bench at Westminster by a Middlesex Jury, and outed of his tryal by Irish Peers of his condition by the statute of 35 Henry VIII c. 2.” In the earl of Stafford's trial almost four years earlier, the defense had consistently assumed a position that will be termed Irish constitutional exceptionalism. Both Strafford and other apologists for his rule as Lord Deputy in Ireland during the 1630s adopted this constitutional stance in response to proceedings against them in both the English and Irish Parliaments during 1641. It held that while Magna Carta and the common law generally held sway in Ireland, because of circumstances unique to that particular kingdom, significant exceptions existed with regard to the legal rights and privileges these legal instruments conferred on the king's Irish subjects. In contrast, the case for Maguire rested on a view of the constitutional relationship of England and Ireland that emphasized a more closely shared heritage of legal privileges for both commoners and peers as guaranteed by Magna Carta and the common law—a position best characterized as constitutionalist.

In the days before Christmas 1805, William Thomas Fitzgerald's Nelson's Tomb; a Poem made its appearance in London book shops. Fitzgerald was one of the foremost loyalist versifiers of his day—and had previously published an ode to Nelson after the Battle of the Nile. When he took pen in hand, Britain was mourning Nelson's recent death at Trafalgar. Nelson's Tomb then, considered the manner in which Britons would mark his passing. Nelson's funeral would be, Fitzgerald boasted, “no hireling pageant.”

Fitzgerald's words conveyed the contemporary loyalist sense that the funeral for Lord Nelson would be genuine, ordered, harmonious, and widely acceptable—that it would avoid the accusations of artificiality and the expressions of dissent that had greeted previous patriotic pageants such as the Naval Thanksgiving of 1797. At first glance, Fitzgerald's expectation would seem to accord with the recent orthodoxy concerning state spectacle in Britain during the wars of 1793–1815, an orthodoxy holding not only that the public pageants of the period were an important manifestation of the particular brand of patriotism that loyalists were interested in marketing but also that the product itself had unifying and socially cohesive effects. But Nelson's funeral—which was held on 9 January 1806 and drew crowds of between twenty and thirty thousand people—has not been widely treated as a loyalist spectacle, largely because those who have considered it have joined Linda Colley in recognizing its apparently iconoclastic nature. Colley was attentive to the state pageants of the period; they featured in her argument for the privileging of a cult of monarchy in officially consecrated expressions of British nationalism.

A recent article in the Calcutta magazine Desh outlined the exploits of a revolutionary fighting for “national freedom” against the British Empire. The article related how, during wartime, this revolutionary traveled secretly to secure the aid of Britain's enemies in starting a rebellion in his country. His mission failed, but this “selfless patriot” gained immortality as a nationalist hero. For an Indian—and particularly a Bengali—audience, the logical protagonist of this story would be the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, the former president of the Indian National Congress, assumed the leadership of the Indian National Army with the support of the Japanese imperial government during the Second World War in the hopes of freeing India from British rule. The subject of the story, however, was not Bose, but the United Irishmen leader Theobald Wolfe Tone and his efforts in 1796 to secure assistance for an Irish rebellion from the government of Revolutionary France. The article went on to narrate how Ireland had been held in the “grip of imperialism” for an even longer period of time than India and concluded that the Irish and Indian nationalist movements were linked by a history of rebellion against British rule.

As the Desh article illustrates, the popular image of the relationship between Ireland and India within the British Empire has been that of two subject peoples striving for national freedom. This linkage of Irish and Indian history has had particular resonance in Bengal.

In June 1913, on a holiday trip to Paris, George Wyndham died suddenly of a heart attack—he was not quite fifty years old. Shocked by this unexpected loss, colleagues in the Conservative Party and the House of Commons, whose inner circles he had occupied for a quarter of a century, organized the usual tributes. Obituaries laid out Wyndham's pedigree as scion of one of England's more romantic landed families, charted his meteoric rise in the 1890s under Arthur Balfour's patronage, referred briefly and discreetly to his troubled tenure as Irish secretary from 1900–1905, and applauded his versatility as a sportsman and a man of letters. Despite his truncated career, interest in Wyndham did not wane after these first homages. Working through the interruption of war, his family saw that collections of letters and essays, with the 1925 set prefaced by J. W. Mackail's “life,” reached the public. These materials prompted pen portraits and biographies that appeared at regular intervals into the 1970s.

A largely sympathetic group of authors, those who wrote about Wyndham faced the interesting challenge of presenting as inspiring and exemplary a life whose disappointments had threatened to outweigh its achievements. The solution they found was one that Wyndham would have accepted, for, indeed, he helped to shape it. In their hands, George Wyndham became a modern Siegfried, the charming, versatile, and disinterested son of an extraordinary ruling class—now, alas, eclipsed—who had guided Britain through two centuries of unprecedented grandeur and prosperity.