ABSTRACT
This chapter examines various accounts, descriptions and reminiscences pertaining to the Jacobite/Williamite War (1689-1691) through a mixture of surviving 'high' literature, popular verse and folk memory from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Irish Jacobites would look to the exiled Stuarts to restore their lands, dissolve the penal laws against Catholic education, property and religion and reverse the dominance of the Protestant ascendancy. James II' short reign (1685-1688) ushered in a new era of hope for Irish Catholics, as manifest in surviving Irish-language verse. Finally, King James II, 'the worthy knight' of high literature becomes 'James the Turd', the worthless shite of its vernacular and folk equivalent. This mostly unflattering view, largely absent from the work of named Jacobite poets in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tends to survive in nineteenth- and twentieth-century vernacular literature and folk memory.
