Nation and archipelago

This chapter explores John Milton's Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels (1649), a 25,000-word treatise that is a touchstone text for a turning point in British and Irish history, a telling account of the tensions between colonialism and republicanism, and a tipping point in Milton's thinking around Archipelagic interdependence – the tied fates of the nations that make up the emerging British state. This multi-authored work, exemplary in its many-sided depiction of a pivotal point in the history of the three Stuart kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, depicts different national and religious communities responding to the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649. Milton's commission was to address the “complication of interests” in Ireland in the wake of the killing of the king. His protean polemic captures the contradictions of a poet against empire countering a challenge to metropolitan government from a complex planter society

The origins of epenthesis in liquid+sonorant clusters in Mid-Ulster English

Epenthesis in liquid+sonorant clusters is a well known feature of Irish English, almost universally assumed to be the result of contact with Irish, which has extensive epenthesis. However, epenthesis was (and still is to a degree) common in English and Scots in Britain, specifically in liquid+sonorant clusters in stem‐level codas. This paper examines epenthesis in Mid‐Ulster English (MUE), comparing it to epenthesis in Irish, English and Scots. This comparison reveals that epenthesis in MUE is essentially identical to epenthesis in English and Scots, diachronically and synchronically, and is not very like epenthesis in Irish. At most, Irish played a reinforcing role in the development of epenthesis in MUE. That this most `Irish‐like’ of features of this Irish English dialect is not of Irish origin has important consequences for our understanding of the historical phonology of MUE and other Irish English dialects

The Ulster Rising of 1641, and the depositions

‘We are now’, wrote James Anthony Froude, as he approached the topic of the outbreak of the civil war in Ulster in October 1641, ‘ upon the edge of the gravest event in Irish history, the turning-point on which all later controversies between England and Ireland hinge ’. Froude may have exaggerated, but few would quarrel with Lecky's comment on the same issue that ‘ hardly any page of history has been more misrepresented ’. It is well known that the reason for the controversy surrounding the events in Ulster in 1641 is that they have been linked with a charge against the Irish of perpetrating a ‘ general massacre ’ of British protestants at the outbreak of the war in which tens, even hundreds, of thousands of protestants were killed. The allegation of a ‘ general massacre ’ has, in turn, been used as a moral justification for subsequent English policy in Ireland.</jats:p

Ireland and the Monarchy in the Early Stuart Multiple Kingdom

Ireland's position as a kingdom in early modern Europe was, in some respects, unique, and this eccentricity sheds light upon the complexity of governing a multiple kingdom during the seventeenth century. The framework for looking at the way Ireland operated as a kingdom is provided, first by an article by Conrad Russell on ‘The British problem and the English civil war’ and secondly by an article by H. G. Koenigsberger entitled ‘Monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe – dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale’. Russell listed six problems that faced multiple kingdoms: resentment at the king's absence, disposal of offices, sharing of war costs, trade and colonies, foreign intervention and religion. Koenigsberger used Sir John Fortescue's two phrases of the 1470s to distinguish between constitutional, or limited monarchies, and more authoritarian ones during the early modern period. Both these contributions are valuable in looking at the way the monarchy operated in Ireland because the application of the constitution there was deeply influenced by Ireland's position as part of a multiple kingdom and because Englishmen, looking at Ireland, wanted her to be like England, but, at the same time, did not wish her to exercise the type of independence that they claimed for England.</jats:p