ABSTRACT
On 3 October 1691 the last regular Jacobite forces in the British Isles agreed to surrender their last stronghold, Limerick, on terms designed to facilitate the evacuation of those wishing to carry on the war in France and the return home of those who wanted to remain in Ireland (Making of a Great Power, F(iv)). After two years of bloody warfare the Protestant minority, supported by English and Dutch troops, had overcome the Roman Catholic majority (supported by French troops) (236a, 52–257; see also Making of a Great Power, pp. 195–6 and Ch 14). Between 1692 and 1697 the Protestants’ precarious military triumph was converted into the Williamite settlement: a colonial ascendancy resting on the twin pillars of English arms and a new, fully sectarian political order (232a, 264). The economy was in ruins, much of the population had been uprooted, banditry and guerilla warfare were rife, and with the departure of most of the Catholic nobility to France the old social order appeared to have disintegrated. ‘Cashel’s company gone, its guest-houses and youth; the gabled palace of Brian flooded dark with otters; Ealla left leaderless, lacking royal Munster sons’, lamented the poet Aogán Ó Rathaille. 1 The Williamite settlement did not have a happy beginning.
