‘But the Irish have no philosophical historian’ was the taunt of David Hume, and so of course enlightened Irishmen of the eighteenth century were determined to have one. A great European audience awaited any thoughtful, elegant and dignified history like Hume’s of England andRobertson’s of Scotland. An indispensable mark of the ‘philosophical historian’ was that he could rise above religious partisanship, as Hume, Voltaire, and Robertson seemed to do; but for eighteenth-century Irishmen this required an enormous effort of mind and feeling—Irish society was still drastically rent by its religious antagonisms. Protestants wrote histories that were alive with catholic rebellions and massacres; they justified the penal laws as necessary protection against an unforgivably and ineradicably rebellious people. Catholics wrote histories to protest against the penal laws; they laboured to show that the rebellions and massacres were really provoked by protestants and that most past troubles were caused either by the protestants themselves or by the unfortunate division of the country, by law, into two hostile bodies.

Captain O’Shea’s successful divorce petition in November 1890 not only set in motion the forces which shattered the unity of Parnell’s party but also extricated the Salisbury ministry from a position of acute discomfort. Among unionists of all political complexions there was profound relief when news of dissension over the divorce and its aftermath first leaked out of Committee Room 15. Government supporters, already chagrined by Parnell’s triumphant emergence from the ordeal of the special commission, had expected a lengthy and inconclusive hearing in the divorce court. Not even in their fondest dreams did they imagine that the Irish leader would refuse to defend the suit or that the reaction of the Liberal leaders would imperil the ‘union of hearts’. Lord Cranbrook expressed the joy and hopes of his cabinet colleagues when he wrote in his diary on November 27: ‘Consternation prevails among the separatists. Can we get the advantage of the confusion to pass our measures?’ The answer to this question was in the affirmative. Much of the opposition to the Irish land purchase bill disappeared overnight, and parliament adjourned for the holidays on December 9 after a brief session which was notable for the absence of obstruction. O’Shea’s handiwork and Gladstone’s sensitivity to nonconformist opinion thus combined to give the government a new lease of life.

While the reign of Edward II has long been recognised as a critical period in the historical development of Ireland, it is less well known that the early years of the reign of Edward III also represent a critical phase. As in the previous reign, the crisis was connected with Anglo-Scottish warfare. In 1315 it was the Scots under Edward Bruce who had taken the initiative and overrun Ireland. It was the Scots again who landed in Ulster in 1327, hoping once more to enlist Irish support for their cause. In the following year the dying Robert Bruce paid a last visit to Ulster, demonstrating in a peaceful yet forceful manner that the initiative still lay with the Scots. By 1335, Edward III had shown his qualities as a military commander and the situation had changed: an expedition set sail from Ireland to co-operate with the English in an invasion of Scotland.

The details of this episode are of more than intrinsic interest. The surviving documents that record the organisation of the expedition illustrate the workings of the English dominion in Ireland in the crucial period following the Bruce invasions. Whether or not the expedition marked a restoration of royal authority in Ireland is a question that calls for an analysis of the events and circumstances that formed the background to the expedition of 1335.

The writings of Columbanus, Adomnán’s Life of Columcille and Bede’s account of the Irish mission to Northumbria together show us a church c. 600 remarkable for its austerity, its vitality and its happiness. Constant journeys and displacements, mean dwellings, common food, the discipline of study and prayer left the leaders not saddened but content, and commended them to the people’s veneration. The motive force of their actions was the love of God, followed with a rare degree of perfection; and, as the sources constantly say or imply, such love is no trouble. Vive in Christo ut Christus in te urges Columbanus, and Bede, in his sober summing-up on the Irish mission to Northumbria, while he disclaims any intimate knowledge of Columcille, testifies: ‘We know for certain that he left successors distinguished for their purity of life, their love of God and their loyalty to the monastic rule.’

The indifference to worldly interests which sustained these early pilgrims, and their concentration on purely religious values contrast sharply with the early ninth-century church, a great institution fully alive to the civilizing influence which power and wealth could exert. We need to know how this change came about, and in precisely what ways the church c. 800 differed from its predecessor.

It is a historical truism that the ‘Irish question’ dominated British parliamentary life during the last third of the nineteenth century. For good reason does Sir Robert Ensor give one of the chapters in England, 1870-1914 the title ‘The ascendancy of Parnell’. Yet it is the custom to treat the Irish nationalist contingent at Westminster as concerned only with Irish questions. It has been observed, to be sure, that the ‘Irish question’ had a highly significant impact upon English affairs. The Irish land acts of 1870 and 1881, for example, have come to be seen as a type of government intervention in economic affairs foreshadowing the twentieth-century welfare state. One aspect of the existence of an Irish third party at Westminster has, however, been curiously neglected, the impact of Irish M.Ps upon essentially English political controversies. It is with one such controversy that this paper is concerned, the notorious Bradlaugh case.

Gladstone’s dramatic commitment of the liberal party to a policy of home rule for Ireland in 1886 was followed by the Grand Old Man’s two attempts at turning his policy into legislation. The first home rule bill, that of 1886, was defeated in the house of commons and then in a general election: the second, that of 1893, was overwhelmed in the house of lords and then dropped by Gladstone’s fourth government. Though the Gladstonian commitment remained and the liberal party continued to be a home rule party — and though the pros and cons of the union of 1800 remained the major structural feature of British party politics — it was not until 1912 that the liberals did anything further about their major Irish policy. For most of the period 1893-1912 they were, of course, impotent in opposition and consequently in no position to take the initiative on home rule. In 1906, however, they won a landslide victory over their unionist opponents and it is striking that this electoral victory and the great impulse it gave to one of the most dynamic governments in the whole history of British liberalism was not followed, as had the last two liberal victories under Gladstone, by the introduction of a third home rule bill. Had the liberal landslide of 1906 been put behind another home rule measure the whole history of the matter would certainly have been radically different. The house of lords would have been easily overwhelmed; the great advance in constitutional reform for Ireland would have been carried in a spirit of liberal reform rather than of political surrender; the development of Sinn Fein would have been frustrated or at least diverted. But the liberal victory of 1906 was not so used. Home rule was postponed and sidetracked and was taken up again only when the liberal party once more desperately needed Irish votes in the budget election which followed the rejection of Lloyd George’s financial measures by the lords in November 1909. The home rule banner was hoisted afresh by Asquith, the prime minister, in his Albert Hall speechof 10 December 1909 and the third home rule bill appeared in due course in 1912 in direct — and significant — succession to the budget and the parliament act for both of which the Asquith government needed Irish support in the commons.

The assessment of the contribution of Garrett Hugh FitzGerald to the search for an antidote to potato blight, as put forward by Mr T. P. O’Neill in his article on the scientific investigation of the potato failure of 1845—6, needs to be revised, if only to do justice to Robert Kane.

FitzGerald wrote to a local newspaper on 9 March 1846, suggesting, as a result of experiments he had made in search of a cure for potato blight, that seed potatoes should be steeped before planting in a solution of bluestone (copper sulphate). In February and March of the same year he wrote two letters on the subject to the chief secretary for Ireland. These letters were forwarded for consideration to the relief commission, of which Robert Kane was the scientific member.

One of the grounds on which standard histories of Ireland find fault with the Spanish expedition which Don Juan del Aguila led into Kinsale in 1601 is that it came to the wrong place. If, our authorities say, the expedition had come to Munster a year or two earlier, before the insurrection had been crushed there, it might have stood some chance; but now it ought to have come to some northern or western port where O’Neill and O’Donnell could readily have joined forces with it, and not to a port ‘in a province already subdued and all the length of Ireland from the northern chiefs’ (Curtis). The Spaniards in 1601 ‘had come at the wrong time and in the wrong place’ (Hayden and Moonan).

This judgement, in the form stated by D’Alton, is canonised by Hayden and Moonan and by Curtis, who both merely summarise D’Alton. Underlying this view, it will be noted, is the assumption that Aguila, had he so desired, might have landed elsewhere on the Irish coast. While accepting without challenge this assumption, some writers not unnaturally have wondered whether there might not be some hidden explanation for what at first sight appears to have been a ‘dreadful mistake’. Perhaps the Spaniards chose a southern port because their ulterior design was to launch an attack on England (O’Faolain’s suggestion); perhaps the journey to Ulster was considered too far, Ulster’s coasts too inhospitable (Falls). Father Jones, whose conclusions are otherwise tentative, has shown that the expedition (finally at least) did intend to go to Kinsale.

Dr Lyons’s admirable study of the downfall of Parnell, recently published, has raised once again the question of the relations between Joseph Chamberlain and the Irish leader and more particularly of the part alleged to have been played by Chamberlain in bringing about the latter’s ruin. Like the late Henry Harrison, who devoted so many eloquent pages to this subject, Dr Lyons had to write without access to Chamberlain’s own papers, which, however, do not contain, so far as I am aware, anything that is at variance with his main conclusions. Nevertheless, they do containcertain letters, which are not mentioned in J.L. Garvin’s Life of Joseph Chamberlain and which supplement Dr Lyons’s account.

For over ten years (June 1895–January 1906) a conservative and unionist government was in office, and, except for the minor devolution crisis of 1904-5, Irish home rule was not a serious issue at Westminster. In Ulster it was a period of relative quiet, undisturbed by the agitation and riots that had attended the home rule bills of 1886 and 1893. After 1886 conservatives and liberal unionists were united electorally and supported unionist parliamentary candidates, though they retained formally separate organisations; liberal home rulers were politically unimportant for most of the period, though they contested seats in Londonderry, Antrim and Tyrone.

In the absence of an immediate external threat dissent grew among those not committed to nationalism. T. W. Russell, M.P. for South Tyrone, found himself increasingly at variance with his leaders over the claims of tenant farmers and stood as an independent unionist in 1906; he was later to become a home rule liberal. At the Belfast municipal elections of 1897 the labour movement of the city returned six candidates, and during the following decade contested the North Belfast parliamentary seat in three successive years. A serious and embarrassing challenge to the leadership of Ulster unionism and the Orange Order was offered by the electoral success in 1902 of T. H. Sloan, a shipyard worker and master of an Orange lodge, and by the formation of the Independent Orange Order in the following year. Sloan, who held his South Belfast seat until 1910, contended that official unionist and Orange leaders disregarded working-class interests and were too ready to yield to catholic and nationalist pressure. The radicalism of the new order was strengthened by one of its officers, Robert Lindsay Crawford, who wished it to follow his own evolution towards liberal nationalism. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the origin and growth of the Independent Orange Order, its rôle in the general election of 1906 and the revival of Ulster liberalism, and its relationship with the Belfast labour movement.

On 23 January 1869 Gladstone visited Queen Victoria at Osborne and presented two papers relating to the proposed disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, ‘one of them on the general policy and effect of the measure, the other a dry recital of the purport of what would be the leading clauses of a bill’. The memorandum here presented is the former of these papers. Two copies of it are known, one in the Royal Archives at Windsor (D 25/6), the other among the Gladstone papers in the British Museum (Add. MS 44757, ff. 72-96v). The copy at Windsor is in Gladstone’s own hand, that in the British Museum is presumably the work of a secretary, though the hand has not been identified. Apart from insignificant variations, mainly in punctuation, the two copies are identical. That which follows is the version in the Royal Archives and is printed by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen. The paragraph-arrangement of the original hasbeen preserved, but the punctuation and use of capitals have been standardised according to the practice of this journal.