This study fills a major gap in the mainstream narrative of Irish history by reconstructing political developments in the year before the restoration of Charles II. It is the first treatment of the complex Irish dimension of the king's return. The issue of the monarchy did not stand alone in Ireland. Entangled with it was the question of how the restoration of the old regime would affect a Protestant colonial community which had changed in character and fortune as a result of the Cromwellian conquest, the immigration that had accompanied it and the massive transfer of land that followed. As the return of Charles became increasingly probable, Cromwellian and pre-Cromwellian settlers were united in their determination to ensure that the restoration of Charles did not deprive them of their gains. This account discloses how the leaders of the Protestant establishment protected its interests by managing the transition back to monarchy.

In recent decades, the historiography of early modern Ireland in general, and of the seventeenth century in particular, has been revitalised. However, whilst much of this new work has focused either on the critical decades of the 1640s or the Williamite wars, the Restoration period still remains largely neglected. As such this volume provides an opportunity to explore the period between 1660 and 1688, and reassess some of the crucial events it witnessed. For whilst it may lack some of the high drama of the Civil War or the Glorious Revolution, this was a time that established a political and social settlement, based upon the maintenance of the massive land confiscations of the 1650s, that would underpin the social and class structure of Ireland until the end of the nineteenth century. Including contributions from both established and younger scholars, this collection provides a set of interlocking and interrelated essays that focus on the central concerns of the volume, whilst occasionally reaching beyond the chronological and thematic barriers of the period as required. The result is a homogenous volume, that not only addresses a glaring historiographical gap in critical areas of the Restoration period; but also serves to take stock of the work that has been done on the period; and as a consequence of this it will help stimulate and provoke further argument, debate, and research into the history of Ireland during the Restoration period. Directed primarily at an academic audience, this collection will be useful to a range of scholars with an interest in seventeenth century political, social and religious history.

Crossing boundaries of political, intellectual and cultural history, this study highlights the complexity of political culture in Restoration Ireland. This book focuses on how historical memory and political discourse affected land settlement and political processes in early Restoration Ireland. The period 1660-1667 was one of insecurity for the Protestant plantation in Ireland, as Catholic spokesmen undermined the Protestant status quo. The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland draws out the dynamism of the rhetorical, moral and legal challenges that Catholics made to Protestant power inIreland and examines the Protestant responses and the rise of a Protestant identity inextricably linked with the possession of power. This identity was expressed as that of the 'English in Ireland', a belligerent self-denominationwhich did little to accommodate the king or the importance of monarchy to the Protestant position in the country. Crossing boundaries of political, intellectual and cultural history, the book highlights the complexity of political culture in Restoration Ireland, which was defined by the intersection of political language, ideas, historical understandings and economic imperatives. DANIELLE McCORMACK is Assistant Professor at the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland.

This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive study of the remaking of Ireland's aristocracy during the seventeenth century. It is a study of the Irish peerage and its role in the establishment of English control over Ireland. Jane Ohlmeyer's research in the archives of the era yields a major new understanding of early Irish and British elite, and it offers fresh perspectives on the experiences of the Irish, English, and Scottish lords in wider British and continental contexts. The book examines the resident peerage as an aggregate of 91 families, not simply 311 individuals, and demonstrates how a reconstituted peerage of mixed faith and ethnicity assimilated the established Catholic aristocracy. Tracking the impact of colonization, civil war, and other significant factors on the fortunes of the peerage in Ireland, Ohlmeyer arrives at a fresh assessment of the key accomplishment of the new Irish elite: making Ireland English.

Draws from a wide range of disciplines to bring together 36 leading scholars writing about 400 years of modern Irish history

In this important study, reissued here in paperback along with a new historiographical essay, T.C. Barnard anatomizes the Irish problem of the mid-seventeenth century and connects it to the English politics and policies both before and after the interregnum. He looks closely at how and by whom Ireland was ruled and how its government was financed, and he explores in detail the primary Cromwellian goals in Ireland: propagating the Protestant gospel, providing English and Protestant education, advancing learning, and reforming the law.

Written in a lively and engaging style, and designed to be accessible to a broader audience, this collection combines new research with the latest scholarship to provide a fresh and invigorating introduction to the revolutionary period that transformed Britain and its empire. There has been an explosion of interest in the 'Glorious' Revolution in recent years. Long regarded as the lesser of Britain's seventeenth-century revolutions, a faint after tremor following the major earthquake of mid-century, itis now coming to be seen as a major transformative episode in its own right, a landmark event which marked a distinctive break in British history. This collection sheds new light on the final crisis of the Stuart monarchy by re-examining the causes and implications of the dynastic shift of 1688-9 from a broad chronological, intellectual and geographical perspective. Comprising eleven essays by specialists in the field, it ranges from the 1660s to the mid-eighteenth century, deals with the history of ideas as well as political and religious history, and not only covers England, Scotland and Ireland but also explores the Atlantic and European contexts. Encompassing high politics and low politics, Tory and Whig political thought, and the experiences of both Catholics and Protestants, it ranges from protest and resistance to Jacobitism and counter-revolution and even offers an evaluation of British attitudes towards slavery. Written in a lively and engaging style and designed to be accessible to a broader audience, it combines new research with the latest scholarship to provide a fresh and invigorating introduction to the revolutionary period that transformed Britain and its empire. TIM HARRIS is Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History at Brown University STEPHEN TAYLOR is Professor in the History of Early Modern England and Head of Department at Durham University.

Dublin has experienced great—and often astonishing—change in its 1,400 year history. It has been the largest urban center on a deeply contested island since towns first appeared west of the Irish Sea. There have been other contested cities in the European and Mediterranean world, but almost no European capital city, David Dickson maintains, has seen sharper discontinuities and reversals in its history—and these have left their mark on Dublin and its inhabitants. Dublin occupies a unique place in Irish history and the Irish imagination. To chronicle its vast and varied history is to tell the story of Ireland. David Dickson’s magisterial history brings Dublin vividly to life beginning with its medieval incarnation and progressing through the neoclassical eighteenth century, when for some it was the “Naples of the North,” to the Easter Rising that convulsed a war-weary city in 1916, to the bloody civil war that followed the handover of power by Britain, to the urban renewal efforts at the end of the millennium. He illuminates the fate of Dubliners through the centuries—clergymen and officials, merchants and land speculators, publishers and writers, and countless others—who have been shaped by, and who have helped to shape, their city. He reassesses 120 years of Anglo-Irish Union, during which Dublin remained a place where rival creeds and politics struggled for supremacy. A book as rich and diverse as its subject, Dublin reveals the intriguing story behind the making of a capital city.

In Seventeenth-Century Ireland, Professor Raymond Gillespie, one of Ireland's most eminent historians, tries to understand Ireland in the seventeenth century in a new way. Most surveys of seventeenth-century Ireland approach the period using war, conquest, plantation and colonisation as their organising themes. It does not see Ireland as a passive receptor of colonial ideas imposed from above. In fact, Professor Gillespie argues that the seventeenth century was a uniquely creative moment in Ireland's history, as the various social and political groups within the country tried to forge new compromises. He also shows how and why they failed to do so. Well-established ideas of monarchy, social hierarchy and honour were under pressure in a fast-changing world. Political, religious, social and economic circumstances were all in flux. The common ambition of every faction was the creation of a usable focus of governance. Thus plantations, the constitutional experiments of Wentworth in the 1630s, the Confederation of the 1640s, the republican 1650s and the royalist reaction of the latter part of the century can be seen not simply as episodes in colonial domination but as part of an on-going attempt to find a modus vivendi within Ireland, often compromised by external influences. This book is not simply a narrative history of politics in seventeenth-century Ireland. It is a social history of governance that, while dealing with the main political, religious and economic developments, has at its interpretative core the process of making a new society out of competing factions. Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents - Introduction: Seventeenth-Century Ireland and its Questions Part I. An Old World Made New - Distributing Power, 1603–20 - Money, Land and Status, 1620–32 - The Challenge to the Old World, 1632–9 Part II. The Breaking of the Old Order - Destabilising Ireland, 1639–42 - The Quest for a Settlement, 1642–51 - Cromwellian Reconstruction, 1651–9 Part III. A New World Restored - Winning the Peace, 1659–69 - Good King Charles's Golden Days, 1669–85 - The King Enjoys His Own Again, 1685–91 Epilogue: Post-War Reconstruction, 1691–5

This Handbook brings together leading historians of the events surrounding the English revolution, exploring how the events of the revolution grew out of, and resonated, in the politics and interactions of the each of the Three Kingdoms--England, Scotland, and Ireland. It captures a shared British and Irish history, comparing the significance of events and outcomes across the Three Kingdoms. In doing so, the Handbook offers a broader context for the history of the Scottish Covenanters, the Irish Rising of 1641, and the government of Confederate Ireland, as well as the British and Irish perspective on the English civil wars, the English revolution, the Regicide, and Cromwellian period. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution explores the significance of these events on a much broader front than conventional studies. The events are approached not simply as political, economic, and social crises, but as challenges to the predominant forms of religious and political thought, social relations, and standard forms of cultural expression. The contributors provide up-to-date analysis of the political happenings, considering the structures of social and political life that shaped and were re-shaped by the crisis. The Handbook goes on to explore the long-term legacies of the crisis in the Three Kingdoms and their impact in a wider European context.