The Irish Confederation dissolved voluntarily on receiving promises from English royalists that its demand for national political rights for Ireland, including a separate Irish admiralty as well as full liberties for Irish Catholics, would be met.43 These promises were made shortly before the king’s trial and execution in 1649, however, and so they would soon be broken. O’Neill, who was looked upon by many Irish speakers in Ulster as a potential Irish king, died suddenly later the same year not long after he signed a truce with an English parliamentarian force that had come to Ireland with Oliver Cromwell.44 Cromwell’s reputation in Ireland would be shaped primarily by his decision to ignore the truce that was signed with O’Neill as soon as the latter died. Thereafter, Cromwell hunted down all alleged Irish rebels and introduced land laws that denied all Catholics the right to own land. During Cromwell’s Irish campaigns of the 1650s, up to 30 per cent of the Irish population would be lost due to warfare, plague or exodus.45 Meanwhile, after being ‘all things to all men’ for the duration of the English civil war, the southern Irish royalist James Butler intrigued for the underground court of Charles II on the European continent, looking for French and Spanish support against Cromwell, before the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 made this unnecessary. Thereafter, as a reward, Butler was granted land and a university chancellorship in England; was promoted from a marquis to the Duke of Ormond; and, as a long-term leader of an Irish administration, controversially maintained all Cromwell’s discriminatory legislation. Ormond could also be said to have laid the basis for the future integration of Ireland into the British Empire by arranging that virtually all appointees to lead the Irish administration would henceforth be drawn from the ranks of career diplomats in the English foreign office which, upon the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, essentially became a British foreign office.46 In the words of Sir William Temple, who was England’s diplomat at the Hague at the same time as he directed government policy regarding Ireland, the sole purpose of the Irish administration was to provide security for ever-growing English investments and plantation schemes in Ireland, to be overseen by English appointees who would ‘own and support upon all occasions that which is truly a loyal English protestant interest’.47 This policy was upheld by all eighteenth-century Irish parliaments, each of which upheld Cromwellian land settlements that denied Catholics the right to exercise political power and in the process created a strongly colonial mindset among a new ruling class.48
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Dublin became a hub for financial activity, including the creation of new banks and a national canal network. Plans were also implemented to make Dublin a more elegant city with fine parks and buildings to house a governmental administration and parliament.49 However, although Ireland was nominally a distinct kingdom, it was governed in the manner of a colony where the first priority was to create a mercantile system to serve greater British economic interests, thereby ensuring that any expansion in overseas trade that operated via Ireland did not enhance the profile of the country in any way.50 Ireland’s absence of valuable natural resources, excepting wood and peat, had made overseas trade essential to its prosperity. Nevetheless, the British aristocracy usually considered the most prominent Irish landowners, even Ormond, to be poor country squires because they were literally just one step away from bankruptcy.51 Meanwhile, the wealth and political influence of new Irish parliamentary leaders, who built stately homes in Ireland, was purposively made dependent on receiving their education and ‘marrying well’ in England, the latter feat being something that frequently served as a ticket to inheriting family seats in both the British and Irish parliaments.52 Against this political backdrop, occasional stirrings of a colonial or cultural nationalism in eighteenth-century Irish writings were of comparatively little significance.
Jonathan Swift, a Dublin-born Protestant clergyman and pamphleteer of English parentage, called on the British Royal Navy to conquer the Spanish Indies rather than waste English money on land wars in Europe.53 George Berkeley, a philosophical Irish Protestant bishop of English parentage, celebrated the importance of the new Bank of England to all such enterprises. By helping to enhance the performance of British government stock on the Amsterdam stock exchange, it had created a strong Anglo-Dutch banking nexus and stimulated public finance schemes in England that satisfied commercial interests in both the imperial parliament and the London stock exchange that it was in their best interests to allow the British state a degree of perpetual credit that no other European state, most notably France, could match.54 Both Swift and Berkeley were personal investors in the London South Sea Company, a state-backed private enterprise intended to secure a monopoly over (hitherto Spanish-controlled) South American trade. Thereafter, many Irish individuals would benefit financially from opportunities presented by the British Empire, including emigrating to British North America and the Caribbean, although this generally served only to sever any loyalty, or connection, they had to a specifically Irish polity.55 Mirroring this development, some Catholic exiles from Ireland became either diplomats or knighted military officers in Spain, Austria, Prussia and even Russia, but in the process they ceased to have any connection with their birthplace and would never return to Ireland.56 This reflected the fact that Ireland, or Irish families, had never become a distinct player in the dynastic order of early-modern Europe.
The Williamite Wars (1689–91) that deposed the brief rule of James II (1685–9), a Catholic Stuart monarch, were fought largely on Irish soil. In strengthening Anglo-Dutch ties, they paved the way for Protestant families from Saxony in Germany to inherit the British throne and also stimulated much European interest, albeit primarily on a financial level only. James II had granted some Irish ships the right to trade directly with the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of Morocco that was noted for its sugar trade, a wine trade with England, as well as being a basis for Spanish–American trade.57 Anglo-Dutch competition would effectively counteract this trend. Meanwhile, direct Irish imports from the American colonies had always been outlawed in order to give English tobacco and sugar companies a complete monopoly over the Irish market. The export of Irish foodstuffs to the American colonies had been encouraged, however, and this helped to facilitate the commercial development of Cork city and Galway town on the south and west coast of Ireland respectively. Cork and Galway merchants who were Catholics soon had to flee the country, however, because of their legal inability to own property. Combined with the legal bans on their holding parliamentary, civil or military office, this meant that it was very difficult for them to continue in business.58 During the early eighteenth century, some Irish Catholic exiles had associated themselves briefly with the Jacobite court in exile in France but, unlike some Scottish Jacobites of Ulster descent,59 they were evidently unwilling to conspire against England. Reflecting this trend, by the 1760s a movement had developed within Ireland that sought only to restore Catholics’ rights to sit in the Irish parliament.60 Meanwhile, a group of Irish Catholic merchants in Bordeaux who traded with Cork merchants and the French East India Company began acting as informal intermediaries in Anglo-French and even Anglo-American diplomatic relations.61
Upon
