William III’s policy for ending the Irish war went through many changes during the fifteen months between the battle of the Boyne and the surrender of Limerick. With the varying fortunes of the war it oscillated between unconditional surrender and the securing of a negotiated settlement by the grant of liberal terms. William regarded the Irish war as an exasperating sideshow which diverted his forces from the real scene of action in the Netherlands, where he and his allies were hard put to it to withstand the pressure of the French. From the beginning of his reign his policy had been to induce the Irish Jacobites to surrender upon terms, and it was with the greatest reluctance that he decided in the spring of 1690 that he must himself go to Ireland and fight the matter out.

During the lord lieutenancy of Camden the executive had taken action against newspapers friendly to, or suspected of leanings towards, the United Irishmen, and by the time of the '98 rising all newspapers which it had been unable to purchase had been suppressed. Although a few newspaper owners roused themselves to oppose the union, they reverted to sycophancy, or at best extreme circumspection, in 1803 and for some years afterwards. That O'Connell should have grown up with a distrust of the power of the press, seeing it daily perverted to the Castle's purposes, goes some way to explain his attitude towards it in later years. During the time when he was beginning to make his name at the Bar and in catholic counsels, no Dublin newspaper could be relied upon to present, let alone to advocate, the causes with which he was concerned. Of the old established newspapers Giffard's Dublin Journal showed the most independence of the government—but it was bigotedly anti-catholic and tory. The Freeman's Journal had not recovered from the Sham Squire's ownership—Higgins lived on until 1802 : and Saunders's News-Letter avoided trouble by printing no home news at all of a controversial character.

Writers on eighteenth-century Ireland frequently refer to a levy called quarterage, and explain it as a special tax which the corporations exacted from catholic merchants, traders and craftsmen during the period of the penal laws.

George Unwin, in his Gilds and companies of London, speaks of quarterage as a sort of medieval insurance. When the quarterly subscription was 3d. the societies offered 14d. a week to ‘sick or unfortunate members’. The money derived from quarterage was used also in other ways. Provision was sometimes made by guilds for schools. Cesses were levied on them from time to time for the defence of their cities, provision of fire engines, etc., and much money was spent in maintaining a guild-hall, paying salaries of officials and on entertainment.

It has become a commonplace of Irish history to assume that this country lay outside the full stream of European life until the twelfth century, and to preface an account of the Norman invasion with a brief survey of the very remarkable movement for the reform of the Irish church which we associate principally with the name of St Malachy. Dean Lawlor's short introductory essay to his translation of St Bernard's Life of St Malachy appeared in 1920, and is still the most readable version of this commonly accepted view. It is the purpose of this paper to criticise this view as a whole, and I shall have a good deal to say in criticism, not only of Lawlor's essay, but also of the last chapter of Kenney's otherwise admirable Sources for the early history of Ireland. All the more reason why I should begin by stating clearly my own personal debt to both these scholars. If I criticise their conclusions and their inadequate statement of the evidence, I do so in full consciousness of all that I have learned from their useful publications.

There goes the man who killed the home rule bill.’ Few will question the truth of this comment on Joseph Chamberlain. Yet the man who so vigorously opposed the home rule bill had from the very beginning of the second Gladstone administration, in which he held the comparatively junior office of president of the board of trade, been one of the members of the cabinet most anxious to consider Irish needs and opinion. He had criticized Forster’s coercion policy and had pressed for remedial legislation. He had acted as the link between the cabinet and the negotiators of the ‘Kilmainham treaty’. For a brief period he had been conspicuous for the relative closeness of his relations with Parnell and other leading Irish nationalists. ‘ I have spoken freely and openly to him [Parnell] and to many other Irish members, since Mr Forster ceased to be Irish secretary,’ he wrote to Gladstone on 7 June 1882, after his attention had been called to newspaper comments on the fact that he had been observed in conversation with Parnell in a lobby of the house of commons the day previously. At the end of 1884 and in 1885 he had engaged in negotiations with Parnell with a view to the establishment in Ireland of what later came to be known as a ‘national council’, but at the time was usually termed a ‘central board’.

Each of the general elections that took place between 1885 and 1910 was significant in the history of the party, but that of 1895 had an interest peculiar to itself, setting it apart from the others in the series. It was not an election which brought about any major change in the relative strength of the various parties; it was not even notable for the number of seats to be contested. Nor was it fought upon any major issue of policy, since it was obvious to all but the most optimistic that home rule was not—and for a long time was not likely to be—a matter of practical politics; even the question of whether or not to continue the liberal alliance—a question hotly debated ever since Lord Rosebery's unpromising reference to home rule in March 1894—seemed largely academic in view of the probability of a unionist victory in Great Britain. For the Irish party—or, to speak more precisely, for the anti-Parnellites—the importance of the election of 1895 lay in quite a different direction; it lay in the fact that as a result of this campaign the methods whereby in the past the party had controlled the conduct of the elections over a large part of Ireland were deeply and permanently discredited, and the party itself confronted with a very serious crisis. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the development of that crisis, but before proceeding to consider it in detail, it will be necessary to describe very briefly the way in which this control over the elections was exercised.

There is no catalogue of the contents of the records branch of the Irish land commission, nor is there even a summary description; in consequence, it is not claimed that the description given in this paper is by any means complete. Indeed, it is probable that not all the land commission records are contained in the records branch. For instance, a few of the rare examples of judicial leases executed under the land law act of 1881 appeared in the records branch for the first time in September 1949, having till then been in the hands of another department of the commission—a warning to the historian that the land commission is a working department of government, and not primarily a research institution.

In the decade of the 1650's many of the Irish confederate leaders, lay and ecclesiastical, found themselves exiles in Europe. In exile, they naturally turned again to the disputes which had disrupted the confederation and had helped to make Cromwell's campaign easier than it might otherwise have been. These disputes grew more and more bitter in the disappointment of defeat; and no matter what point they started from, they had a way of returning to the censures which the papal nuncio, Rinuccini, had pronounced on 27 May 1648. These censures had divided the confederation beyond hope of reunion; even after ten years, they were still regarded by one party as having been justly inflicted, necessary for the preservation of the Catholic religion, while the other considered them to have been unjust and invalid, and the real cause of the subsequent overthrow of the confederation.