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The New Scots, the men of the army the Scottish covenanters sent to Ireland, were the most formidable opponents of the Irish confederates for several crucial years in the 1640s, preventing them conquering all Ireland and destroying the Protestant plantation in Ulster. The greatest challenge to the power of the covenanters in Scotland at a time when they seemed invincible came from a largely Irish army, sent to Scotland by the confederates and commanded by the royalist marquis of Montrose. Thus the relations of Scotland and Ireland are clearly of great importance in understanding the complex 'War of the Three Kingdoms' and the interactions of the civil wars and revolutions of England, Scotland and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century. But though historians have studied Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish relations extensively, Scottish-Irish relations have been largely neglected. Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates attempts to fill this gap, and in doing so provides the first comprehensive study of the Scottish Army in Ireland.
Analysing the make-up and workings of the Royalist party in Scotland and Ireland during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, Royalists at War is the first major study to explore who Royalists were in these two countries and why they gave their support to the Stuart kings. It compares and contrasts the actions, motivations and situations of key Scottish and Irish Royalists, paying particular attention to concepts such as honour, allegiance and loyalty, as well as practical considerations such as military capability, levels of debt, religious tensions, and political geography. It also shows how and why allegiances changed over time and how this impacted on the royal war effort. Alongside this is an investigation into why the Royalist cause failed in Scotland and Ireland and the implications this had for crown strategy within a wider British context. It also examines the extent to which Royalism in Scotland and Ireland differed from their English counterpart, which in turn allows an assessment to be made as to what constituted core elements of British and Irish Royalism.
This book evaluates the Confederate Catholic war effort from the preceeding phase of localized insurgency, through the formation of a national self-government in 1642, until the Confederate Catholic regime was finally subsumed in a broad pan-Royalist alliance in 1649. While this alliance held out the prospect of significant religious and constitutional concessons this achievement was nullified by the subsequent Cromwellian catastrophe: the Confederate regime failed. In attributing this failure to political factionalism, historians have neglected the potential and limitations of the Confederate war effort. This study does not substitute crude military determinism but acknowledges that political indecision and strategic incoherence inhibited the war effort at critical junctures. From the conflicting political priorities of Confederates two partially exclusive military strategies, insular, and expeditionary, can be identified. Both strategies were proactive and so demanded standing armies rather than local militia units. This book emphasizes the crucial importance of the tax gathering apparatus in fueling the incremental growth of standing armies. In the absence of large scale foreign patronage, exacting money from an agrarian economy, rather than the shortages of material, or still less, manpower representing the crucial extrinsic limit to Confederate military potential. Given these limits, it was a considerable achievement to contain two British interventions (in 1642 and 1646/7 respectively). The influence of the contemporaneous "military revolution" on the European mainland was mediated by the cadre of returned mercenary officers. Consequently, the Confederates developed a qualitative edge in fortification and siegecraft. The application of the continental model and the shift from putatively "celtic" or irregular tactics of raiding and running battles would be more problematic. This and other explanations for the poor battlefield performance of the Confederate armies are discussed.
Analysing the make-up and workings of the Royalist party in Scotland and Ireland during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, Royalists at War is the first major study to explore who Royalists were in these two countries and why they gave their support to the Stuart kings. It compares and contrasts the actions, motivations and situations of key Scottish and Irish Royalists, paying particular attention to concepts such as honour, allegiance and loyalty, as well as practical considerations such as military capability, levels of debt, religious tensions, and political geography. It also shows how and why allegiances changed over time and how this impacted on the royal war effort. Alongside this is an investigation into why the Royalist cause failed in Scotland and Ireland and the implications this had for crown strategy within a wider British context. It also examines the extent to which Royalism in Scotland and Ireland differed from their English counterpart, which in turn allows an assessment to be made as to what constituted core elements of British and Irish Royalism.
This book charts developments in Ireland in the aftermath of the Ulster rising in October 1641. For the next twelve years the island was engulfed in a ruinous conflict involving Irish confederates, Scottish covenanters, English parliamentarians and royalists from each of the three Stuart kingdoms. The 1640s, however, also witnessed a variety of political, constitutional, military and cultural initiatives, centred primarily (though by no means exclusively) on the confederate administration in Kilkenny. Following on from the pioneering research of Donal Cregan, leading scholars in the field examine the major issues of the time, in a series of challenging and accessible essays. -- Publisher description.
These ten thematic essays examine the three Irish wars of the seventeenth-century in relation to each other, thereby yielding important comparative insights. The military potential of England and, later, an emergent Britain, was immeasurably greater than that of Irish Catholics. John McGurk, James Scott Wheeler and Paul Kerrigan evaluate the logistical and naval strategies exploiting this advantage. Such was the disparity that an effective Irish military response to conquest and colonisation was only feasible in the favourable archipelagic and continental European circumstances explored by John Young and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin. Defeat or victory ultimately depended on relative military performance in manoeuvre, battle and siege, operations evaluated by Pádraig Lenihan, Donal O’Carroll and James Burke. Bernadette Whelan examines the role of women as victim, survivor and, occasionally, combatant. ’You cannot carry fire in a sack’, Raymond Gillespie notes the impact of war, especially on urban Ireland.
This collection of essays, part of the Four Courts Press Ulster & Scotland Series, studies Scottish settlement in Ulster and its longer-term impact in the post-Plantation years. Contributors include: William P. Kelly (UU), Robert Armstrong (TCD), David Menarry (U Aberdeen), Michael Perceval-Maxwell (McGill U), Raymond Gillespie (NUIM), Alison Cathcart (U Strathclyde) and Ciaran Brady (TCD).