Abstract
In the century following the short-lived parliamentary experiment of 1653–9, public discussion of the prospect of another Anglo-Irish union was never more than sporadic. Among Englishmen, very few even gave the idea a second thought. One who did was Sir William Petty, the political economist and ‘indefatigable projector’, who devised grandiose plans of bringing representatives of all three kingdoms into a single imperial parliament, and toyed with fantastic ideas of transferring populations in order to bring Irish and English society into congruity.1 Operating in the world of practical politics, however, monarchs and their English ministers flinched at the likelihood of complicating the management of the Westminster parliament by an infusion of unpredictable Irish Members. In any case, the operation of Poynings’ Law, and the assumption by the English Parliament of a right to determine by itself all matters of Anglo-Irish concern, and indeed to legislate for Ireland if the need arose, meant that there was no constitutional imperative tending towards union; from an English point of view, no urgency to consider alternative arrangements to improve the efficiency of Anglo-Irish governance. Serious interest in the idea of an Anglo-Irish union was thus confined to Ireland and its Protestant propertied elite, from which, intermittently, proposals, recommendations and humble requests for union would issue.
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Notes
James Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of Unionist Opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1800’, in Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1986–7), pp. 239–40;
T.C. Barnard, ‘Scotland and Ireland in the Later Stewart Monarchy’, in S.G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (Harlow: Longman, 1995), p. 259.
Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, pp. 244–5. See also Desmond Clarke, Arthur Dobbs Esquire 1689–1765… (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 28–30.
In a passing phrase in Daniel Szechi and D.W. Hayton, ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdoms: The English Government of Scotland and Ireland’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party: Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes (London: Hambledon Press, 1967), p. 268.
A gentle reprimand seems to be implied in the recording of this observation in Jim Smyth, ‘“No remedy more proper”: Anglo-Irish Unionism before 1707’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 302.
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), ch. 5.
Idem, ‘The “excellent use” of colonies’ in William and Mary Quarterly, 23 (1966), pp. 620–6; J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), The Political Works of James Harrington Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 71–2;
Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 196–9.
Jacqueline Hill, ‘Ireland without Union: Molyneux and his Legacy’, in John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 271–96, esp. pp. 277, 286–7.
J.I. McGuire, ‘The Irish Parliament of 1692’, in Thomas Bartlett and D.W. Hayton (eds), Penal era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History 1690–1800 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1979), pp. 4–5.
For Molyneux, see in general J.G. Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin…, ed. P.H. Kelly (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1982).
Also of interest in this connection is P.H. Kelly, ‘Locke and Molyneux: the Anatomy of a Friendship’, in Hermathena, 121 (1979), pp. 38–54.
P.H. Kelly, ‘A pamphlet attributed to John Toland, and an unpublished reply by Archbishop King’, Topoi, 4 (1985), pp. 81–90, esp. 88.
J.G. Simms, The Williamite Confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), pp. 124–5;
D.W. Hayton, ‘The “Country” interest and the Party System, 1689–c. 1720’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Party and Management in Parliament, 1660–1784 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), pp. 60–3.
‘Notes when the establishment was under consideration’ [19 Oct. 1703] (Surrey History Centre, Woking, Midleton MSS, 1248/4, f. 360, printed in D.W. Hayton, ‘A debate in the Irish House of Commons in 1703: a whiff of Tory grapeshot’, Parliamentary History, 10 (1991), p. 161).
Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, p. 244, also notes the publication of A union between England and Scotland…prejudicial to England except also that Ireland is included (1706), which neither he nor the present author have been able to locate. There also appeared a second edition of Molyneux’s Case: Patrick Kelly, ‘William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1986), p. 136.
Jonathan Swift, The story of the injured lady. Being a true picture of Scotch perfidy, Irish poverty, and English partiality. With letters and poems never before printed (London, 1707), printed in Herbert Davis (ed.), The prose works of Jonathan Swift (14 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941–68), IX, pp. 1–9.
See especially Godfrey Davies, ‘Swift’s The story of the injured lady’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 6 (1942–3), pp. 473–89;
also Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (London: Methuen, 1962–83), II, pp. 169–75;
Joseph McMinn, ‘A Weary Patriot: Swift and the Formation of an Anglo-Irish Identity’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 2 (1987), pp. 104–5;
N.L. York, Neither Kingdom nor Nation: The Irish Quest for Constitutional Rights, 1698–1800 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), pp. 43–6.
Southwell to King, 14 Mar. 1701/2 (Sir C.S. King, A Great Archbishop of Dublin… (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), p. 101); same to same, 9 Apr. 1702 (Trinity College Dublin, Lyons (King) collection, MS 1995–2008/904).
Kelly, ‘Origins of the Act of Union’, 242; Cox to Lord Nottingham, 2 Oct., 6, 9 Nov. 1703 (B.L., Add. MS 29589, ff. 269, 308, 310); same to Edward Southwell, 1, 12 May 1707 (ibid., 38155, ff. 31, 41. For Cox, see S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 81–3;
Ian Montgomery, ‘The Career of Sir Richard Cox’ (University of Ulster unpublished MA thesis, 1993); idem, ‘“An entire and coherent history of Ireland”: Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana’, Linen Hall Review, 12, no. 1 (1995), pp. 9–11.
P.W.J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland: A Study of Anglo-Scottish Politics of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), chs. 1, 6.
F.G. James, Ireland in the Empire, 1688–1770: A History of Ireland from the Williamite Wars to the Eve of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 51–62;
Patricia Punch, ‘Queen Anne’s First Irish Parliament, 1703–4: The First Session’ (unpublished MA thesis, University College, Dublin, 1982); Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power, pp. 78–9.
Joseph Addison to Lord Godolphin, 7, 14 May, 25 June 1709 (Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 137–8, 158).
F.G. James, ‘The Irish Lobby in the Early Eighteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 81 (1966), 543–57; James, Ireland in the empire, pp. 154–8; Szechi and Hayton, ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdoms’, p. 248.
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Hayton, D. (2001). Ideas of Union in Anglo-Irish Political Discourse, 1692–1720: Meaning and Use. In: Boyce, D.G., Eccleshall, R., Geoghegan, V. (eds) Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932723_6
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