Between the Reformation and catholic emancipation a succession of statutory and other provisions was framed by the authorities in Dublin and London with the intention of enforcing religious conformity Persons who refused to conform were rendered liable to various disabilities and penalties of a severe nature. Discrimination became widespread in the first half of the eighteenth century with what were collectively known as the penal laws. These contained general provisions which touched all citizens in relation to many aspects of their lives, especially the holding of land. But from 1537 there were also specific measures aimed at particular groups, including the legal profession. These measures ensured that appointments to the bench could continue to be manipulated on the basis of loyalty to the established church. Long after the first relaxation of the penal laws, catholic lawyers who refused to conform were still excluded from the higher ranks of the legal profession. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which statutory and other requirements, introduced from 1537 onwards, were effective in excluding Roman Catholics from legal practice and in achieving outward religious conformity among lawyers between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Whether as a unionist, or as an independent, T W Russell was never taken lightly by the parliamentary representatives of late Victorian unionism: directly, and obliquely, his contribution to the evolution of their movement was immense. As a popular unionist missionary in Britain between the first two home-rule bills, and as a protégé of Joseph Chamberlain, Russell was a valuable medium of communication between the British and Irish unionist parties. Moreover, he was both a champion of unionist farmer demands and a loyalist member of parliament; so Russell also created a vital bond between Irish unionism and rural opinion. As a member of the parliamentary Ulster party, Russell worked unstintingly for its success, provoking flexibility among both the more obtuse landed elements in the commons and among radical farmers in the counties. Yet, when he left unionism, his influence (now indirect) remained. Confronted by the spectre of presbyterian farmer militancy led by Russell, Irish unionist members of parliament meekly tailored their public pledges; and when, between 1900 and 1902, his agitation peaked, these members went further, revising the structure of their party in order to deflate his criticism and restore old loyalties. As one of the most significant forces in moulding twentieth-century unionism from nineteenth-century toryism, Russell merits special attention: his relationship with the unionist leadership in the strategically crucial years between 1894 and 1906 is examined here at length.

John White was appointed chief surgeon to the First Fleet on 24 October 1786 and sailed with that fleet, aboard the Charlotte, on 13 May 1787 for Botany Bay on the eastern seaboard of New Holland (Australia) where a penal colony was to be established. Between 18 and 20 January 1788 the entire fleet arrived at its destination and thus began the settlement of Australia by Europeans. White served as surgeon-general of the new colony, New South Wales, for almost six years until 17 December 1794 when he sailed on the Daedalus for Europe, never to return to Australia.

The interest of the document printed here lies in its description and explanation of one of the paradoxes of the early seventeenth-century Irish economy. The rapid increase in the labour supply and increased commercialisation brought a dramatic growth in exports of all kinds from Ireland. The expansion was such that for the greater part of the period between 1603 and 1641 Ireland appeared to have had a surplus in the balance of trade. Yet, as the author of this document points out, despite this dramatic growth, Ireland remained a poor country, even by the standards of other contemporary underdeveloped regions such as Scotland. The resolution of that paradox is provided here by Peter French, an alderman of Galway and a member of one of the most important Galway merchant families. The document is a petition by French to the English privy council which is preserved among the papers of Sir Julius Caesar, master of the rolls and chancellor of the exchequer under James I. It was acquired by the British Library in 1842. French’s explanation of the paradox of poverty at a time of rapid trade growth is one historians have not fully considered. It depends on looking at the flow of specie and bullion in and out of early seventeenth-century Ireland, a difficult exercise given the nature of the surviving sources.

The travail of the mountains has finally ended with the publication of the long-awaited second volume of A new history of Ireland, almost two decades after its inception. By a curious coincidence Clarendon has simultaneously published the second volume of the History of Wales (R.R. Davies, Conquest, coexistence and change: Wales, 1063-1415). A comparison is therefore not only inevitable, it is revealing. The Welsh volume is carefully integrated and closely written, whereas its Irish counterpart lumbers along camel-like with sometimes distressingly little co-ordination: where Davies contains his narrative within a tight conceptual framework, the latter is constructed on a traditional narrative scheme that consumes half of the text. The difference is due in part to the probably insurmountable difficulty of integrating the labours of nineteen contributors, but part of the problem arises from the rigidity of the scheme into which their labours are compressed.

As reactions to yet another initiative on Northern Ireland underlined the durability of traditional perspectives on both sides of the border, it was understandable that there should have been some nostalgic re-examination in the Irish media of the might-have-been of Gladstone’s first home rule initiative of a hundred years ago. Centenaries increasingly stimulate historians and publishers into action also, but the two major new studies of the home-rule ‘episode’ from Gill and Macmillan take a pessimistic, even jaundiced view of the 1886 scheme as unworkable, and incapable of satisfying Irish nationalists, much less unionists. Despite its precipitation of a major political realignment in British politics and its confirmation of Irish political polarisation, the crisis of 1885-6 has received relatively little attention from historians. In Britain, the only major study since Hammond’s romantic Gladstone and the Irish nation has been the decidedly anti-romantic and detailed dissection of the web of party intrigue and political calculation and infighting involved in Cooke and Vincent’s The governing passion.