Billy’s boys, or an Orangeman’s dilemma

The month of July is named after Caius Julius Caesar—‘husband to every man’s wife, and wife to every woman’s husband’. But in Northern Ireland July is unquestionably the month of […]

The curse of Cromwell?

In 1997, shortly after the Labour Party’s victory in the British general election, the newly appointed foreign secretary, Robin Cook, received a courtesy visit from Bertie Ahern. The taoiseach entered […]

Reconstructing the seventeenth-century landscape of the Pale

When the lords of the Pale (as they continued to be styled in subsequent depositions) gathered at various hilltops in east Meath in October 1641, their dilemma was palpable. Should […]

Civil and Down Surveys

Like other losers across Ireland, and now doubly tainted as ‘Irish’ and ‘papist’, the lords of the Pale faced their punishment under the Cromwellian administration. Widespread changes in land ownership, […]

‘Behind every great woman . . . ’:William Cecil and the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland

The degree to which important figures in history were influenced in their exercise of power by their immediate subordinates is a subject of endless fascination. The possibility that there might […]