ABSTRACT
English dominance of the British archipelago was always contested. Relations among the British nations under the Tudors and Stuarts ranged from being merely difficult to bloody warfare. The English quest for control in Scotland and Ireland began centuries before and continued unabated in the early modern period. Ireland probably suffered the most from English attentions. Henry VII, with reason, considered it a nursery of rebellion, and tightened English control over the island, bringing Irish government formally under English supervision with Poynings’s Law (1495). His successes were limited, and the English government expended vast quantities of treasure and lives in repeated attempts to subdue Irish resistance. Major rebellions shook English rule in the 1580s, 1590s, 1640s, and 1690s. Each uprising led to increased brutality and new schemes designed to tame the Irish. Henry VIII proclaimed himself king of Ireland in 1541, and initiated a policy of ‘surrender and regrant’ – persuading Irish leaders to accept titles and estates on English terms. The limited success of this policy led Queen Elizabeth to begin the plantation of English settlers on seized Irish lands. Under James, English plantations were reinforced by Scottish settlements in the northern province of Ulster. The process of remaking Ireland as a Protestant, Anglo-Scots settler society gained headway. The marginalization of traditional Irish culture and leadership resulted in the massive rebellion of 1641. Ireland plunged into a welter of violence and disorder that lasted into the 1650s, when Cromwell’s government imposed peace by conquest. The Interregnum authorities tried a new tactic: the forcible expulsion of all Irish from their native lands, resettling them in the wilderness of Connaught, in the far west of the island. The advent of the devoutly Catholic James II in 1685 briefly offered the Irish majority hope, but his expulsion from England prompted still more bloodshed, as the exiled king sought to rally the Irish against his rival, William of Orange. James’s hopes to use Ireland as a springboard for an invasion of England were dashed at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690.
