ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace in British historiography that Ireland was already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as it was to become in the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries, the 1restless dominion’. 1 Whenever evidence is cited in support of this assumption it is to the effect that Irish society was relatively poor and hence more violent than English society, or that the population of Ireland were innately rebellious because they had never become reconciled to the conquest of the country that had been effected at the outset of the seventeenth century. Some historians of England and Scotland attribute the disturbed history of modern Ireland to religious considerations, but all who make reference to Ireland’s discontent are primarily concerned with the extent to which insurrection there precipitated challenges to authority within Britain itself. Thus several historians of the English civil war explain the outbreak of hostilities in England by reference to developments in Ireland which culminated in the 1641 rising. 2 Similarly, the conversion of King James II to Catholicism is often blamed upon Irish influence, and the rule of the agents of King James in Ireland, most notoriously that of Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, is sometimes cited as one reason why the leaders of the English political nation had no option but to offer the British throne to Prince William of Orange and his English princess. To this extent the conflict, which culminated in the Glorious Revolution, is also attributed to Irish precipitants, and thus further authority is given to the assumption that British rule in Ireland has always been unstable even to the extent of threatening good order in Britain itself. 3
