1685 - Edict of Nantes revoked by Louis XIV. 200,000 French protestants (Huguenots) flee the country.
1688 - 'Glorious Revolution' - English and Irish protestants see this as the foundational bedrock of their civil and political liberties. A Bill of Rights is enshrined in the constitutional settlement which limits the power of the monarchy, secures a permanent legislature and guarantees a protestant succession to the throne. Same events are lamented as the 'shipwreck' by Gaelic poets, who for generations thereafter express their hopes for the imminent return of the 'rí thar caladh' (king from overseas) most notably through the aislingí genre of vision poems. Bards like Ó Rathaille and Mac Domhnaill denounce the Hanoverian 'usurpers', the Lutheran and Calvinist 'heretics' and hope for the natural order restored, the (catholic) church re-established, the true king returned to his throne and the catholic aristocracy returned to their ancestral estates.
1689-1697 War of the League of Augsburg - England joins major European powers to stop expansionist designs of Bourbon 'Sun King 'Louis XIV and his apparent attempts to impose a 'universal monarchy' on the continent.
1690 July 12th - Battle of the Boyne
1691 Battle of Aughrim; 7,000 Irish Jacobites killed. Treaty of Limerick. 'Wild Geese' remnants of Irish Jacobite armies evacuated from Limerick
1693 - Papacy declares it's support for the 'Pretender'. Prior to this Rome had supported the Grand Alliance against Louis. This support had repercussions in terms of English parliament honouring the civil articles of the Treaty of Limerick. Rome only withdrew it's support from the Stuart cause in 1766 finally acknowledging the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession. Throughout this entire period the Stuarts were given the right to nominate all episcopal appointments in Ireland.
1695 - First penal codes passed in Ireland which are essentially war-time measures prohibiting catholics from bearing arms or owning horses fit for military service.
1695 Hugh Reilly's Ireland's case briefly stated. With many subsequent reprints this was a popular response to the Irish penal era laws of exclusion
1697 Treaty of Ryswick ends War of the League of Augsburg; however, despite intense English pressure Louis refuses to expel the Stuarts from his domain. Catholic members of the League had also acted as a brake on Dublin parliament's attempts to extend penal laws in Ireland, notably HRE emperor Leopold I.
1697 Bishop's Banishment Act
1698 William Molyneaux's The case of Ireland's being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated. Used a mass of legal precedents to show that Ireland was a 'Complete Kingdom within Itselfe', was united to England only by a shared allegiance to the Crown and was not a dependent territory like the American colonies. It's battle-cry for Irish legislative autonomy was picked up with greater force by the colonial nationalists or 'protestant patriots' in the time of Grattan and Flood.
1698 Nicholas Plunkett (son of the Earl of Fingall) anonymously publishes A light to the blind, one of the first Jacobite histories of the Williamite wars.
1699 Woollen Act restricts Irish capacity to export, creates protestant resentment at Irish economic subordination.
1701 Death of James II.
1702-1713 War of the Spanish Succession - Extension of the Augsburg wars intended to prevent a Bourbon claimant taking the Spanish throne which would immeasurably strengthen French power in Europe and beyond via control of Spanish overseas possessions. French plans of an invasion force to Ireland which it would hoped would rouse 40,000 Roman Catholics into action are reluctantly abandoned.
1703 Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery
1708 - Catholics were never wholly excluded from joining British Army as one War Office dispatch laments that in that year as many as 130 men dispatched to Flanders deserted, later adding they
wound up"joining the Irish to fight against us at Malplaquet"
1709 Battle of Malplaquet - 180,000 men in the field testifies to the astonishing military escalation during this period. An estimated 75-85% of government expediture in Britain during the 18th century is dedicated to the ongoing costs of war.
1713 - Papal Bull Unigenitus condemns the proposition that reading scripture is necessary for the masses. Body blow for the development of both literacy and print vernaculars throughout catholic areas of Europe.
1713-1714 Treaty of Utrecht ends War of Spanish Succession. 'Balance of Power' concept behind future European stability is seriously promoted for the first time, eg: Abbé de Saint-Pierre's Projet pour rendre le paix perpétualle en Europe (1712). As part of the British diplomatic effort the 'Old Pretender', James Francis Edward Stuart (styled James III by his supporters) is forced to quit France.
1715 - Five British regiments sent to suppress the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland
1716-31 Anglo-French peace. French Cardinal Fleury is instrumental in maintaining pressure on British government during this period to relax Irish penal laws. Stuart intrigues now switch instead to Spain for support. Nevertheless, Irish recruits to French regiments would continue at an average rate of 1,000 a year during the 20,s, 30's & 40's.
1718 - Outbreak of Anglo-Spanish hostilities. Protestant Bishop of Meath records;"The Popish Natives have a firm Perswasion that their Religion & Rights are to be restored to them by the Spaniards & that this is the time when these fine Prophecies of theirs are to be fulfilled"
1719 - Jacobite invasion of England attempted b Ormond who sailed from Cadiz at the head of a Spanish fleet
1720 Declaratory Act asserts the right of Westminster to pass laws 'to bind the People and Kingdom of Ireland'.
1722 - Second Ormond invasion attempt planned with Irish officers in the Spanish service to coincide with a British general election.
1722 John Broderick, Cork Magistrate writes; "You cannot imagine the confusion and dread that every body in this country is in on account of the vast numbers of men that are daily enlisted and transported for the service of the King of Spain. They appear publickly in great numbers, 60, 80, 100, in a gang, with their officers at the head of them, & when the wind is fair they march down to the sea side, & are shipt off; when tis not, they skulk up and down the Countrey till another opportunity"
1729 Jonathan Swift Proposal that all Ladies and Women of Ireland should appear constantly in Irish manufactures. Strong 'buy-Irish' sentiment emerged from the 1720's on; prefiguring the 'free trade calls of the Volunteers & Patriots a generation later.
1739-40 Correspondence of Richard Purcell, land agent to the Earl of Egmont's estate in Cork is useful bellweather of native mood. During this year a Franco-Spanish alliance was mooted but when it failed to materialise he noted the dejection of the local 'Raps'. Again,the following year in March during the Great Frost, he noted that despite the approaching famine 'the lower classes were surprizingly elated' with hopes of a Spanish expedition. However, unless an actual landing took place he could not think them 'mad enough to rebel on their own bottoms' ie without doubting their rebellious intent without arms and ammunition they would remain quiescent.
1739-1748 War of the Austrian Succession - Anglo-French rivalry resumed.
1740-41 Year of the Great Frost followed by 'bliain an air', year of the slaughter, in which an estimated 250,000-380,000 Irish people lost their lives. In a survey of it's effects throughout Europe John Post highlights administrative inadequacies to account for the exceptionally high mortality rfate in Ireland. Unlike England, Ireland had as yet no Poor Law
1748 Dublin apothecary Charles Lucas launches the Censor, or the Citizen's Journal; his colourful outpourings against government corruption and English jobbery soon landed him a prosecution for sedition whence he fled to the continent.
1749 Charles Lucas, The Great Charter of the Liberties of the City of Dublin; actually a translation of a Latin Charter issued by Edward IV in 1462, Lucas' point being to emphasise all the liberties that had been lost in the interim & that the English parliament had treated Ireland no better than 'a conquered province or dependent colony'.
1749 George Berkeley, A Word to the Wise "The House of an Irish Peasant is the Cave of Poverty; within, you see a pot and a little straw, without, a Heap of Children tumbling on the Dunghill... In every Road the Ragged Ensigns of Poverty are displayed; you often meet Caravans of Poor, whole families in a Drove, without clothes to cover, or Bread to feed them"
1753 - Charles O' Connor, Dissertations on the ancient history of Ireland
1753 - Money Bill dispute - arose over a constitutional issue of whether the Dublin parliament or the English parliament had a right to dispose of surplus revenue in the Irish exchequer. Archbishop George Stone with the backing of the Dublin Castle administration took on the chief undertaker Henry Boyle. Stone was massacred by the 'patriot' pamphleteers
1755 Charles O' Connor's Case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland
1756 Foundation of the Catholic Committee.
1756-1763 Seven Years War - Spearheaded by Pitt the Elder, French are eventually driven out of Canada, lose many of their lucrative West Indian slave colonies, territory in West Africa and India where Britain finally gain a foothold in the subcontinent. Improved economic conditions in Ireland follow almost immediately with expanded imperial trade networks. "Trade has become the golden ball for which all nations of the world are contending" - Andrew Fletcher, contemporary Scots political theorist.
1757 Malachi Postlethwayt's, Britain's commercial interests explained and improved. Mammoth study which attempted to provide a long-term solution to ensure future stability for the assorted colonial possessions of the expanding British Empire whose legal and constitutional was ill-defined, ad hoc and locally specific. Greater integration and uniformity is recommended, in Ireland's case via an 'Act of Union' along Scottish lines.
1758 Abbé MacGeoghagan's Histoire de l'Irlande, ancienne et modern, tirée des monuments plus authentiques.
1758 John Curry's Historical memoirs of the Irish rebellion in the year 1641. This was an attempt to set the record straight on the number of protestants massacred during the rebellion of that year, a figure routinely exaggerated into the tens and even hundreds of thousands by ultra-protestant ideologues. Catholic historan and activist, Curry's rich merchant father had sent him to study medicine in Paris. Their family lands had been taken during the Cromwellian and Williamite confiscations.
1759 Recruitment in Ireland for foreign armies is finally made a capital offence.
Further Reading:
Ian McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (New Gill History of Ireland, V. 4), 2009
Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766: A Fatal Attachment, 2004
John Bergin, Eoin Magennis (eds), New Perspectives on the Penal Laws: Eighteenth century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Special Issue No.1, 2011
T.W. Moody & W.E. Vaughan, A New History of Ireland: Eighteenth Century Ireland, 1691-1800, Vol. IV, 1986
S.J. Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630-1800, 2008
Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century, 1924
John Mitchel, The History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick to the Present Time, 1869
Patrick Fagan, Dublin's Turbulent Priest: Cornelius Nary, 1658-1738, 1991
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