Origins of the United Irishmen

There is a lively debate currently on how Scots Calvinism in particular adopted itself so readily to the new revolutionary enlightenment ideals unleashed upon Europe by the American War of Independence. Three books recently "Scripture Politics", by Ian McBride, "Dissent into Treason", by Feargus Whelan & "A Deeper Silence" by A.T.Q. Stewart all purport to deal head on with this issue in the Irish context (the vast majority of the original United Irishmen coming from an Ulster Presbyterian background) but I've had to put them all back down again with a niggling & vague sense of dissatisfaction.

Insofar as dissenters of all stripes were excluded in numerous ways from participating fully in the civil & political life of the 18th century Anglican 'confessional state' we have of course an instant explanation for their discontent (in England and Ireland at least) but this exclusion was being slowly ameliorated by legislation particularly after the onset of the American crisis where their loyalty on both sides of the British Channel was solicited by Government (on account of French invasion fears etc.). Secondary status within the Union, in other words, cannot be a wholly sufficient explanation.

Now, the American argy-bargy when it did arrive (Stamp Acts etc.) and especially later when war broke out had a seismic impact on British domestic politics; it was a game-changer of huge proportions which instantly radicalised opposition to government - nowhere more so then Belfast and Dublin where a nationwide Volunteer movement was mobilised (ostensibly to protect against French invasion fears) but in actuality a lever to extract concessions of wide-ranging parliamentary reform. For example, I read recently that Locke's second treatise of government which had been out of print for decades suddenly went through several new editions in the late 1760's; radical English Whiggery formerly dormant and acquiescent was resuscitated and given a keener edge.

As to the provenance of the revolutionary ideas themselves until someone comes up with a more comprehensive study of Enlightenment thought I'm happy to follow Jonathan Israel's general tripartite schema for America here, namely;

(a) Classical Republicanism; Aristotle, Plato, Cicero i.e. the entire Graeco-Roman tradition as exemplified by Washington's self-conscious modelling of his public life in accord with the virtues of the ideal citizen particularly Cincinnatus in laying down his command & Madison's tortuous excavations of the Republican tradition from early classical models through to the Italian city-states, the Dutch Republic, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Geneva and beyond in preparation for the Federalist Papers.

(b) the 'Newton-Lockean construct' which embraces the entire Whig radical tradition including that of the 'Commonwealth men' (Gordon, Trenchard etc.) & moderate 'Old Light' Presbyterians. This was the type of moderate Enlightenment which was generally happy to seek incremental change within the broad confines of the Williamite settlement; the "Glorious Revolution's" constitutional settlement - parliamentary monarchy with Bill of Rights - was generally venerated & upheld as exemplary and in America's case the principles evoked in contention for colonist's rights (by Adams, Franklin et al) were done so in respect to perceived infringements of those rights which they held to be duly theirs under the very same British constitution. This was in contrast to;

(c) the radical Paineite rejection of aristocracy & monarchy and the entire British constitution; 'people-centered' and universalist (with respect to democratic rights i.e. it abhorred slavery, treatment of Amerindians etc.) he drew from Dragonetti (anti-feudalist, anti-aristocratic), Helvetius ('greatest happiness of the greatest number') & the French Encyclopaedistes, particularly Raynal's Histoire Philosophique des Deux Indes, probably the most widely read and comprehensive assault on imperialist exploitation of colonised peoples yet written.

Israel of course locates this radical Enlightenment strand ultimately as an outshoot of Spinoza's atheistic monism where rejection of biblically derived codes of ethics in tandem with divine right monarchy sets the stage for an assault on the entire European ancien regime edifice, a position radically at odds with moderate enlightenment's conservative emphasis on reason-centred incremental change (e.g. Hume, Voltaire, Burke & probably the bulk of American rebel colonists prior to Paine's Common Sense and Jefferson's Declaration). Spinoza, too, it could equally be argued (apart from the peculiarly flawed but democratic milieu of the United Provinces) derived much of his own republicanism from Lilburne & the English levelling tradition so it's very much a chicken and egg conundrum perhaps best viewed as mutually interlocking and self-synergising strands of thought with no particular, favoured locus.

However, regionally specific material conditions in America; geography, property & wealth distribution, relative social mobility, absence of entrenched feudal aristocracy etc. the actual lived experience of hammering out a new destiny, all combined to give these ideas an original & particular intonation all the more earth-shattering and real as they were currently transpiring, not resting idly, like Harrington's utopia, on paper and parchment. And it was in Ireland at least that the 'New Light' Presbyterians, not the Seceders or Covenanters, who grasped more assuredly the nettle of America's radical Enlightenment & republican apotheosis without which it's perfectly conceivable they would have continued to blend themselves anaemically into the generalised Whig opposition background.

With respect to the latest literature, Feargus Whelan's book Dissent into Treason: Unitarians, King-Killers & the Society of United Irishmen is the only one of the three that attempts to delve back into the 17th century in seeking 'connective synergies' between early Leveller/Commonwealth republicanism & republican Presbyterianism; chiefly at first along the lines of their shared rejection of episcopacy. The struggle of the Bishop's Wars and the crackdown on the non-conformist sects can all be viewed readily within a libertarian prism and the points of convergence are duly noted & emphasised in terms of liberty of conscience & freedom of worship. It's a crudely drawn schemata however given that the orthodox Calvinists in the Long Parliament were arguably the worst enemy the Levellers ever had e.g.; the attacks on Overton, Walwyn & Lilburne in Thomas Edwards infamous Gangraena - not to mention the Presbyterians own rather autocratic and undemocratic attempts to have the kirk universalised via an imposed Covenant.

Whelan makes the further mistake throughout of conflating Leveller republicanism with the worldview of Cromwellian ideologues such as Owen & Milton, utopian theorists like Harrington, the Rye House plotters (Russell and Sidney) and even the doomed Monmouth (as if!), bracketing them all forthwith as proponents of the "Good old Cause" - Lilburne & co. however, before Cromwell destroyed them, were the only real deal; advocating separation of Church & State via tithe abolition, deep-rooted redistributive land reform with an obvious view to terminating aristocracy, end of monopolies (Merchant Adventurers etc.), abolition of the Lords and a democratic representative Commons via universal manhood suffrage; all underpinned by the 'people's sovereignty', a theory and practice of genuine republican social contract predating Locke's more ambiguous version by more than a generation. Such were the Levellers and their true story & real impact were practically written out of Civil War history by orthodox English historians at least up until Chartist times (see David Hume's dismissive account in his classic multi-volume History). Far as I can see it's only the Marxist historians like Brailsford or Christopher Hill who can ever summon up enough energy to give them the type of study they deserve.

This is neither here nor there either with respect to the development of 'republican sentiments' within Ulster Presbyterianism which all three authors locate as emerging as a consequence of the non-subscribing controversy over the Westminster Confession made compulsory by the General Synod of Ulster when it was formed just after the Williamite Settlement. Ultimately, it boiled down to 'liberty of conscience' with objectors like Abernathy who declined to take the oath confirming their adherence to orthodox Calvinism (double predestination etc.) being labelled, probably correctly, as at best closet Unitarians, at worst outright deists or atheists. Francis Hutcheson, "Father of the Scottish Enlightenment" & tutor to Alison is said to have subscribed with 'his fingers crossed' while taking the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. What emerges clearly at least is that the 'New Light' philosophy taken as a whole (emphasis on "reason", tone and tenor of pulpit addresses, sanctity of one's personal conscience, high regard for tolerance, individual civil & political liberties) all predisposed them to gravitate more readily towards 'progressive' political literature and ideas (Locke, Harrington, Sidney, Ludlow etc.); the Molesworth circle in Dublin for instance was a 'New Light' haven & seems to have been the force behind the only real attempt to reach a rapprochement with Catholics during the Penal Era - Dublin priest Cornelius Nary's famed public dialogue with Anglican Bishop, Edward Synge.

As yet I've failed to come across any particular interest among the 'New Lights' with Leveller literature quite possibly because (a) it was far too radical and considered by then wholly beyond the pale or (b) it simply wasn't readily at hand bearing in mind the pioneering efforts of John Toland to get even Harrington's Oceana and Ludlow's Memoirs into print.

When considering the growth of republican sentiment across 'the Isles' at this point it is impossible to avoid the importance of the religious dimension as in order for the material conditions to be articulated within a rights framework the principal supporting cornice of aristocracy & monarchy had to be initially whittled away. For much of Europe this was the papal dictats emanating from Rome and for England it was represented by the Anglican Church establishment. The greatest ally everywhere to the entrenched privileges of the ancien regime were the legitimising narratives of conservative theological dogma - once you have this centralised locus of power; a symbiotic relationship between ruler & ecclesiastics whilst they might differ on numerous matters of overlapping concern their essential mutual interest is best served by orchestrating a united front. The dissenting sects pass under the radar of this dual observance of Church and State and their autonomy undercuts and delegitimises their authority - freedom of speech and conscience naturally flows from this initial separation from the dual centralised power.

The 17th century world is still very much mediated by biblical injunctions, 'belief' is still almost universal & control of the pulpit is all-important hence you have that great struggle over the extension of the episcopacy which sparked the English Civil War. The Sunday sermon for the dissenting sects is the one great public arena wherein everyday concerns of the community can be thrashed out (every other outlet; public gatherings, the theatre and so on can be officially circumscribed and transgressors packed off to the Star Chamber) - so they are explicitly used by dissenters to float political grievances hence Charles I's and Archbishop Laud's concern to gather them all within the ambit of a single episcopacy which can be centrally controlled and directed. Early Scots Calvinism offered no viable alternative to this top-down model of Church-State authoritarianism (apart from the it's own Covenanting ideal) until the Westminster Oath was rejected by the non-subscribers thereby opening a viable arena for proper 'reason-centred' political discourse predicated on the all-important primacy of one's individual conscience.

It is this development, when thinkers are freed utterly from the shackles of their religious leaders censure which gives them this capacity to range widely & with a more critically trained eye over the entire gamut of social and political grievances. Simply put, they are unblinkered and unbridled and in a position to construct a materialist ethics based on the rational appraisal of society's outstanding faults all from a vantage point outside the dominant locus of power; the king which upholds the Church's right to collect tithes for it's own sustenance and the Church which sanctions the legitimising myth of divine right monarchy.

In Ireland, the clan-based attachments of monastic and later continental Gaelic scribes & bards were an ill-suited intelligentsia to present an alternative radical ideology consonant with Leveller 'republicanism' (the Confederates were dead to any alliance in this respect during the War of the Three Kingdoms, Old English included) and in early Stuart times indeed were busy drawing up fantabulous Irish lineages to legitimise James' succession - power and patronage were still caught up in the warp and whoof of land-based tribal affiliations, underpinned by 'royal' or 'chiefly' power, English if necessary. What did it matter as long they still held title to the land?

The first and only serious republican to emerge from this clan-based Gaelic Catholic cultural milieu during the entire 17th and early 18th century was John Toland and he wound up a deist after rejecting in turn Anglicanism and Presbyterianism. There is though evidence of Owen Roe O' Neill developing republican sentiments at a remarkably early stage. It comes in a letter to the Spanish Crown in 1627 soliciting aid for an Irish invasion and signed by himself and John O' Neill (son of Hugh, the great Earl). Basically, on account of the ongoing rivalry between the O' Donnell and O' Neill factions - a rivalry well known to the Spanish court who are employing descendants of each in Irish continental regiments - a proposed new form of government is being discussed which would obviate these clan-based complications; " in the name of the liberty of the fatherland, and of oppressed religion, and by establishing as the government a republic, which should be so called on its flags and its commissions; and all other public ordinances should be in the name of the republic and kingdom of Ireland". [Jerrold I. Casway, Owen Roe O' Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland, Pennysylvania Press, p.33]. The Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Madrid came soon after and thus scuppered any hopes of a Spanish-backed invasion attempt but it is interesting to see what way Owen Roe's thinking was evolving here.

But most of the English radicals who prepared the ground for Paine's reception; Price, Priestley, Godwin etc. i.e. reformers cleaving after an abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts in which process they acclimatised themselves to deeper issues such as cleansing rotten boroughs, were Unitarian dissenters. Again, essentially free-thinkers operating outside the recognised & sanctioned 'official' centres of power. Michael Durey in his discussion of 'Transatlantic Radicals' from England in fact takes the dissenters, in particular the Unitarians, as his obvious starting point in treating of the phenomenon; as of course did E.P. Thomson in his Making of the English Working Class.

Only those radical Whigs attached more to the Bill of Rights dimension of the Williamite settlement as opposed to the constitutional injunctions which bound the king to the 'Protestant interest' were especially susceptible to entreaties from American secessionists; the central plank of the Rockingham and Foxite Whigs had long concerned itself with denuding the ceaseless attempts of George III to appropriate to himself more power than he was constitutionally entitled. But they never toppled over into French-style republicanism simply because as aristocrats themselves (or patronised by such) their destiny was tied to an unreformed parliament. Grattan's Whigs behaved likewise sponsoring responsibility, place and pension bills (essentially wheedling out in-house corruption sponsored by Castle patronage), with a small minority advocating full Catholic emancipation but always drawing the line at borough reform.

This was pretty much the programme of the old Catholic Committee too led by the Jacobite Earls Kenmare and Fingal (again the conservatism is linked to the old Gaelic myth of Stuart beneficence, sponsored by Rome and supportive of absolutism) while Keogh and McCormick's post-split populist version spear-headed by the restless merchant classes still couldn't align itself publicly with the Presbyterian Belfast radicals demand for proportional representation - one of the incessant moans of William Drennan who became convinced that 'the Catholics' were going to "stab us in the back" in the negotiations over the 1793 Relief Act, which of course they did in a sense via their anaemic capitulation.

The Levellers and all that they had represented were thoroughly swept under the carpet throughout the 18th century (such was the totalising power of Glorious Revolution's grand narrative) and seldom featured in radical circles even as a minor discursive reference point; their history and significance was thoroughly lost to the people as it seems to me and could only be 'reclaimed' via the new and immediate significance of first American and then French revolutionary principles. It is a fact that the principle vehicles to bring home that fresh revelation ("Wilkes & Liberty" aside) were mainly drawn from a dissenting background; in Ireland most clearly.

Ian McBride's study gives a brief sketch of three Covenanting ministers in particular who were drawn into the United Irish fold; William Stavely, Joseph Or & William Gibson. Samuel McSkimin, an Ulster antiquarian, has preserved for us his impressions of Gibson in action;

"on entering upon his mission .. at times so forgot himself as to relapse for a moment into his holy hatred of popery, by introducing the antiquated dogmas of his sect, in allusions to the men of sin, and even to an old jade dressed in scarlet, dyed with the blood of the saints, said to reside near Babylon. These untimely slips of his reverence were overlooked by his hearers with a truly Christian forbearance, for which kindness he was afterwards sure to make amends by pointing out the immediate destruction of the British monarchy"

Bearing in mind the contradictions implicit in the inclusive programme of the United Irishmen - at  the very least the need to defuse sectarian tension - his verbal gymnastics must have been strained to the limit at times trying to bend Covenanter ideology into it's compass; one of the many paradoxes of a fascinating age.

Deireadh leis an nGaeilge - Death of the Irish language?

In reality there can never be a straightforward final and absolute assimilation when your dealing with slippery matters like institutions, laws, customs & character traits - the latter two particularly are notoriously difficult to define (though people know it quick enough when their immersed in a milieu alien to their own - even if they do share the same language). Cultures aren't like genetic codes; a double helix unravelling itself, absorbing scattered material then replicating the same old indefinitely - there are an infinity of subtle variations involved all of which collectively produce the difference; difficult to convey perhaps, but there nevertheless - good travel writers make their living peddling these shades of grey and once they hit upon the happy formula which betrays a peculiar trait the attuned can recognise it instantly.

In terms of overall 'worldview', character 'disposition', typical attitudinal stance - whatever you want to call it - you'd have to be from another planet not to notice strong cultural differences between the various English-speaking countries. That said, the mutually comprehensible language once established creates it's own bind and momentum and without question alters the nature of the relationship - increasing exponentially all those potentially shared cultural memes which begin to dovetail and produce their own mutually appreciated 'storyboard' - technology (tv and internet) permits me now to have a conversation with any English, American, Australian, Canadian etc. on thousands of different topics which would be otherwise mutually barred to us were it not for a shared colonial past - we are rapidly altogether merging into a singular international Anglophone community whose multiple points of contact and terms of reference are surely beginning to outweigh those cultural traits which are peculiar to our own country. Present-day Anglophone dominance in trade and commerce compels French, German & Spanish speakers (for instance) to become bilingual English not vice versa, while most of the English-speaking world usually rests content with being monolingual bores; there being no compelling reason to force them being otherwise. France, Germany and Spain; their people, politics and culture are cut off to me in ways that can never exist with America; information of whom I can absorb a thousand times more rapidly by flicking through Fox, CNN and the like or by reading their views on internet boards. After a while of such exposure, though I never may have set foot in the place; the 'idea' of what they're about comes across naturally enough.

The fact of the matter is that Ireland was assimilated (obviously not completely but clearly not in any minor or negligible fashion); and it's as good a word as any - principally and most obviously through language, secondarily through the engrafting of political institutions which upended completely a particular mode of living ('tribal', 'kin-based', semi-nomadic non-feudal, pastoralist, - 'pre-modern' if you like) tearing across in the process the fabric of a two thousand year old highly evolved system of reciprocal rights & duties (see the seanchus law tracts); a 'civilization' in the making interrupted in it's stuttering progress by first Norse then Cambro-Norman settlers/invaders. Half a dozen dynasties in the 8th century (O' Connor, O' Neill, O' Brien, MacMurrough, MacCarthy etc.) vied for a putative high-kinship mutually acknowledged as having it's core seat and focal point in semi-legendary Teamhra (Tara); the concept of an Ard-Rí though never in actuality achieved without "opposition" in the historical period and most likely not before either (despite best efforts of sundry 'synthetic' historians & annalists to doctor fantabulous lineages for their patron-chiefs thereby granting them retrospective legitimacy in contemporary power struggles) was nevertheless an institution towards which these fierce clan-based rivalries were inexorably moving towards.

In fact, in terms of grasping all the baffling ramifications and potentialities of cultural assimilation, the 11th century of 'the Isles' is one of the most fascinating periods to reflect on - if Canute had consolidated a Scandinavian dynasty and had there been an Irish Alfred to unify the Gaelic septs it would have been more natural for the Dál Riata derived kings of Scotland to look westwards to Ireland to their Gaelic-speaking cousins for marriage alliances thus in time creating the basis for a pan-Gaelic kingdom. The resultant map of 'the Isles' at this point would have been a reverse mirror-image of what actually occurred under Henry II a century later when Norman hegemony was extended into most of southern and eastern Ireland. You can usually catch a glimpse of some of these many 'might have beens' through the lineages of the day. The 'Conqueror' was Henry's grandfather but his maternal grandmother (the Empress Matilda's mother) was a Gaelic-speaking daughter of Máel Coluim MacDonnchada, King of the Scots - the same line also connected him to the Anglo-Saxon Margaret of course which was the principle advantage of the match.

The Anglo-Saxon Norman invasion was in essence a conquest of Scandinavian blood; Viking raiding ships always had a safe berth in the Norman foothold paying tax and tribute from their plunder of Anglo-Saxon lands to the successive Norman lords who evidently never completely shed their piratical roots, indeed finding them essential to consolidate their power. Despite Christian conversion, ennoblement and intermarriage with the feudal lords of the day the Normans were essentially loathe to completely reject their 'wild' Norse past -'going soft' being a constant irritable refrain from their ex-Viking feudalised vassals. Richard I of Normandy in fact married an out and out Viking, Gunnor, who was to be an extremely influential Norman court matriarch up until her death c.1030; their daughter Emma marrying two English kings (Aethelred the Unready and Canute) and giving birth to two more (Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor). Unlike her fist marriage with the Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred, Emma probably had no difficulty communicating with the son (Canute) of Viking marauder, Swein Forkbeard, via her mother's tongue. As far as I'm aware there is little trace of the post-William English Norman rulers celebrating their clearly very recent Viking vintage - they looked instead to their feudal entanglements in France and their insertion into the wider Christian world; perhaps the residue of their (presumably for a time proudly recalled Scandinavian past) was kept as an unofficial sub-culture of court life for a few generations at least and the potential embarrassment simply excised from official documentation.

Back in Ireland, the high-kinship was the prize desperately coveted by them all; all it required was a far-sighted, administrative & political genius of the calibre of Alfred to knit the factions together just like he had done with the exactly contemporaneous individual Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The most important ingredient was there all along; brehons, bards, priests and monks could traverse freely from one corner of the land to the other simply because they shared the same overall culture; laws, language, religious and political institutions - a common reference point that would require no great imagination to weld together. It didn't happen of course, the powers remained too equally balanced and in the end came the intervention of the same Normans who tore asunder the Anglo-Saxon nobility - thus you had the fracturing and degrading of the respective dominant Gaelic dynasties throughout the Middle Ages until by c.1500 there were no fewer than 90 odd individual Gaelic chiefs, each "captains of their countrye", semi-feudalised, half vassalised, independent, proud, headstrong, champing at the bit and each fighting tenaciously their corner - a civilization first interrupted, then transformed, increasingly according to the goals and objectives of a conquering power; and finally squashed, utterly. Assimilated.

The monolingual Gaelic speaking proportion survived in the cracks and crevices thereafter, ignored in the main by a buoyant Ascendency unless it was to collect rents or tithes, eking out an increasingly precarious living on vanishingly small plots of land & surviving in the main on a solitary food source; the spud, until in time nature deprived them too of this necessity and they were either stuffed into limepits or blasted to the four corners to be assimilated afresh. But what they were; their language, culture & institutions proved remarkably resilient (though degraded, bastardised and downtrodden - the 1741 'Bliain an air' famine or 'year of the slaughter' doesn't even register an agitated blip in the proceedings of the altogether otherworldly and apartheid Dublin parliament!) - up until 1845 that is, when the earth opened up and swallowed them whole. The Gaelteachts today are the punch drunk remnants of that social catastrophe; a shadow of a shadow of a life that once was. Enough anyhow to remind us all we were once something else entirely. "Assimilation" as a general process was to be sure an ongoing rude upheaval, a continuous slap in the face, the proverbial boot pressed low and hard, forever, not even for the proud but any with a squidgeon of self-respect; socially, culturally, politically, economically, downgraded and excluded, the hills ever aflame with the wraiths of a thousand rueful ancestors asking you how and why you can put up with it - speaking a language you can't even understand. That's the source of every bomb I grew up with it; tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.

Truly, its something of a miracle that anyone speaks the Irish language at all given all the hammer blows it has received. Successive waves of colonisation and plantation from Elizabethan times through to the Williamite land settlements were the initial fatal first steps as this established unequivocally an Anglophone monopoly in government and administration. So, you might say the crucial years were from Henry's 'surrender and regrant' programme up to the collapse of the Tyrconnell regime; i.e. roughly 1540 to 1690. Here, you had the systematic and self-conscious attempt to 'de-Gaelicise' the country principally via the eradication of specifically Gaelic institutions - Brehon laws, tánistry, mode of land ownership (where primogeniture was enforced over derbfine claims to collective ownership), chieftain's 'cuddy' and even modes of dress. Apart from the obvious colonial dimension the bulk of these changes were designed to claw in more revenues for the Crown diverting the flow of taxable goods from a Gaelic sphere of autonomous chieftains into a centralised Westminster controlled bureaucracy. The native leadership cadre were effectively beheaded and supplanted while for those that remained the cultural focus now switched to England and the ennobling powers of the Crown; this was the new route for power, advancement & security - the organic connectivity with the Irish-speaking majority held together by common custom law and language was effectively severed.

Medieval English kings never had the financial clout to 'complete the conquest' being for the most part tied up in continental commitments or domestic crises; Hundred Years war, War of the Roses etc. with the Reformation when it did come providing the great spur for a further 'othering of the other'. Resistant Catholicism could now be readily equated with and explained by these self-evidently 'barbarous' Gaelic institutions which seemed to nurture recidivist and 'backward' church practices and altogether promote 'popish superstitions'. Such was the hubristic certitude that it was naturally assumed given the 'correct example' that English habits, customs, language (and religion) would inevitably be diffused and picked up willingly by the populace. Such was the power of this propaganda that Molyneaux in the 1690's defending Anglo-Irish (i.e. Ascendency) rights to carve out it's own economic laws independent of Westminster could off-hand say that there was no aboriginal population left in Ireland; the suggestion being that political and economic hegemony (full spectrum dominance in reality) would soon see to it - if it hadn't done the job already.

So, the post-Reformation religious divide enacted the first major schism as hitherto Anglo-Norman medieval lords particularly outside the Pale (Desmond, Butler, Clanrickard, the Fitzgeralds) were long accustomed to the realities of a dual culture; pragmatically intermarrying, learning Irish and even adopting Gaelic customs where appropriate to suit their own needs - no threat to the language there; bilingualism being in fact the norm among both aristocracies although the peasant subclass of both still remained relatively isolated from one another. With the Reformation the 'Old English', who retained their Catholicism, (itself a function, if not of widespread integration of the two communities at the very least a cultural alienation from mainland Britain) were henceforth bracketed and 'downgraded' with the 'native Irishry' and slowly displaced in their turn by the 'newcomer' Protestant English and Scots settlers. It's interesting that after the final collapse of the Jacobite cause (the '45) and more specifically with the Papal assertion of Hanoverian legitimacy (1760) the fight for civil and political liberties now assumed a constitutional as opposed to a simmering underground martial dimension. It was no longer 'open warfare' as such, framed by European Counter-Reformation politics and the attempts of displaced and dispossessed continental Gaelic and Old English emigrés to have their ancestral lands restored - what was now tapped into for the furthering of the now Irish Catholic cause was the universalist enlightenment language of tolerance, democracy, human rights, enfranchisement etc. 'Romanticism', with it's reverence for indigenous languages and customs came two generations later and was too late in a sense for the Irish context; despite best efforts from Davis, O' Donovan, Mangan and the other early cultural nationalists.

In the 1770's, the only practical means by which this new paradigm of struggle could be pushed through to successful completion was via lobbying, speechifying & petitioning through the English language - the drama of the hour; Grattan's speeches, parliamentary Reform Bills and so on were all inevitably reported and circulated by English language pamphlets and broadsheets. English and French were rapidly displacing Latin as the language of learning and knowledge and perforce to participate in this new dialogue the old vernaculars of Europe began to look around this time increasingly like so much dead ballast. The antiquarians ploughed ahead of course and continued to file new discoveries; etymological curios for the consumption of detached scholars - but there were few attempts in Ireland to convey or convert any of this into the native vernacular for the consumption of the masses. Literacy was commonly cited as an obstacle and even those who could read couldn't do so in Irish due to the paucity of material actually printed in the language. This is more clearly a question of power and resources hampered as always by the ubiquitous Penal Code; hedge school masters with slender means at their disposal had no option but to resort to English language publications.

The actual survival of quasi-bardic and seanachaí traditions in Munster and Connaught, as well as the rundale/clachan communal settlements in which they thrived, perversely contributed to this linguistic malaise as knowledge was still by and large communicated as it always had been; by song and word of mouth - so the actual still resonant cohesiveness of Gaelic cultural life in the long run worked against the necessity of adopting a vernacular print literature. Though probably the biggest blow to Irish during this crucial period of the early 18th century (when the majority of the island still spoke the language) was the retention of the Latin mass and the decision by the Vatican (c.1720's) not to allow a translation of the Bible in the vernacular - we sorely needed a Counter-Reformation equivalent of Thomas Cromwell or Catherine Parr both of whom assiduously promoted the like in England; Dublin priest Cornelius Nary favoured the adoption as far as I remember but was shot down.

By the time the National Schools system was rolled out in the 1830's which pointedly excluded any instruction in Irish, post-Emancipation middle-class Catholics led by O' Connell were optimistic of grabbing a share of governance and an increased share of the spoils but this was predicated obviously on them and their offspring being fluent in the language of power and (city) commerce - tally sticks were introduced into primary schools (usually with priest and parental approval) and Irish-speakers punished each time they spoke their native tongue. O' Connell himself set the tone, though a native speaker, saying it were well it vanished off the earth (or words to that effect), it serving no demonstrable purpose - the difference in his attitude and that of the (mainly Protestant) Young Irelanders in this regard couldn't be more pronounced; influenced by Herder and German Romanticism (& Walter Scott) the volksgeist for them took on a powerful and apposite meaning in the Irish context which largely eluded the 'Liberator'. Indeed, when William Carleton wrote his monumental Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry in the 1830's and 40's he was self-consciously preserving country idioms and a way of life which he knew to be rapidly vanishing despite all the fulminations of the Nation.

The final curtain call is preserved for us in the impressions of a contemporary Donegal native who manages (for me) to put it all in a nutshell -

"Tháinig blianta an ghorta agus an droch shaoghal agus an t-ochras agus bhris sin neart agus spiorad na ndaoini. Ní rabh ann ach achan nduine ag iarraidh bheith beo. Chaill said a' daimh le chéile. Ba chuma cé a bhí gaolmhar duit, ba do charaid an t-é a bhéarfadh greim duit le chur i do bhéal. D' imthigh an spórt agus a caitheamh aimsire. Stad an fhilidheacht agus a' ceol agus damhsa. Chaill said agus rinne said dearmad den iomlán agus nuair a bhisigh an saoghal ar dhóigheannai eile ní tháinig na rudaí seo ariamh arais mar a bhí said. Mharbh an gorta achan rud."

"The years of the Famine, of the bad life and of the hunger, arrived and broke the spirit ad strength of the community. People simply wanted to survive. Their spirit of comradeship was lost. It didn't matter what ties or relations you had; you considered that person to be your friend who gave you food to put in your mouth. Recreation and leisure ceased. Poetry, music and dancing died. These things were lost and completely forgotten. When life improved in other ways, these pursuits never returned as they had been. The famine killed everything."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t59y1Hr7900

British Bibliography

Ancient Britain

R. J. C. Atkinson,  Stonehenge
Stephen Oppenheimer,  The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain and Ireland from Ice-Age Hunter Gatherers to the Vikings as revealed by DNA analysis [2006]
Francis Pryor, Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans [2003]
Brian Sykes,  Blood of the Isles: Exploring the genetic roots of our tribal history [2006]
Christopher Snyder,  Exploring the World of King Arthur

Roman Britain

Manda Scott, Boudica: Dreaming the Bull
                        Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle
I. A. Richmond,  Roman Britain (Pelican)
Peter Salway,  Roman Britain

Anglo-Saxon

 Bede,  History of the English Church and People
 Michael Alexander (trans.), Beowulf
Leslie Alcock,  Arthur's Britain: History and Archaeology AD 367-634 [1971]
 Peter Ackroyd, The History of England, Volume 1: Foundation
James Cable (trans.) The Death of King Arthur
Winston Churchill,  A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Vol. 1., The Birth of Britain
Harriet O' Brien,  Queen Emma and the Vikings: The Woman who shaped the events of 1066
Michael Swanton (trans),  Anglo-Saxon Prose
Dorothy Whitelock,  The Beginnings of English Society:, The Anglo-Saxon period (Pelican)
Gwynn Jones (trans.),  The Mabinogion

Medieval 

 Helen Storm Corsa,  Chaucer: Poet of Mirth & Morality
Geoffrey Chaucer,  The Canterbury Tales (trans)
                                   The Canterbury Tales (Everyman)
David Carpenter,  The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284
T. S. Eliot,  Murder in the Cathedral
Froissart,  The Chronicles of Froissart, (trans John Bourchier, ed. G.C. Macauley) [1930]
John Harvey,  The Plantagenets [1948]
Sarah Gristwood,  Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses
E.B. Fryde & Edward Miller,  Historical Studies of the English Parliament, Vol.1, Origins to 1399
                                                    Historical Studies of the English Parliament, Vol.2, 1399 to 1603
Adrian Hastings,  The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism
Geoffrey Hindley,  A Brief History of the Magna Carta: The Story of the Origins of Liberty
May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399 (Oxford History of England)
E. F. Jacob,  The Fifteenth Century, 1399-1485 (Oxford History of England)
A.R. Myers,  England in the Late Middle Ages
A. L. Poole,  From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087-1216
Maurice Powicke,  The Thirteenth Century, 1216-1307 (Oxford History of England)
Jonathan Sumption, Trial by Battle: The Hundred Years War I
Alison Weir,  Lancaster of York: The War of the Roses [1995]
                        Eleanor of Aquitaine, by the Wrath of God, Queen of England [1999]
                       
Tudor England

J. D. Mackie,  The Earlier Tudors 1485-1558
S.T. Bindof,  Tudor England
Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More
Thomas More,  Utopia [1515]
David Starkey,  Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII
Alison Weir,  Henry VIII: King and Court
Derek Wilson,  In the Lion's Court: Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII
Robert Hutchinson,  The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant [2005]
Geoffrey Moorhouse,  The Pilgrimage of Grace: The Rebellion that shook Henry VIII's throne
A.G. Dickens,  The English Reformation [1964]
Richard Rex,  Henry VIII and the English Reformation
Philip Hughes,  The Reformation: A Popular History
G. J. Meyer,  The Tudors, from Lady Jane Grey to Elizabeth I
Anna Whitelock,  Mary Tudor: England's First Queen
Lacey Baldwin Smith, The Elizabethan World
Giles Milton,  Big Chief Elizabeth: How England's Adventurers gambled and won the New World
Neville Williams, Elizabeth I, Queen of England
Ann Somerset,  Elizabeth I [1991]
Christopher Hibbert,  The Virgin Queen: A Personal History of Elizabeth I [1990]
J. B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603
Elizabeth Jenkins,  Elizabeth the Great
Margaret Irwin,   That Great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh
Charles Nicholl,  The Creature in the Map: Sir Walter Raleigh's Quest for El Dorado [1995]
Jonathan Bate,  Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare [2009]
Bill Bryson,  Shakespeare: The World as Stage [2007]
James Shapiro,  1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare [2005]
Christopher Marlowe,  The Complete Plays
                                         Tamburlaine (Parts one and two)
David Damrosch (ed.),  The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Early Modern Period
Neil Hanson,  The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True Story of the Spanish Armada [2003]
Garrett Mattingly,  The Defeat of the Spanish Armada [1959]
Raphael Holinshed,  Chronicles of England, Scotland & Ireland
Geoffrey of Monmouth,  History of the Kings of Great Britain (Pelican)
                                           History of the Kings of Great Britain (Folio)
E.M.W. Tillyard,  The Elizabethan World Picture [1943]


The Stuarts

David Harris Willson,  King James VI & I  [1956]
Katie Whitaker,  A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria
Max Weber,  The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism
John Webster,  The Duchess of Malfi
Francis Bacon,  Essays (Intro. by Oliphant Smeaton)
 Maurice Ashley,  England in the Seventeenth Century, 1603-1714 (Pelican)
John Adamson,  The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I
Robert Ashton,  Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and its Origins, 1646-48
 H.N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution
Anna Beer,  Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer & Patriot
John Bunyan,  The Pilgrim's Progress
Trevor Royle,  Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1660
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
Diane Purkiss,  The English Civil war: A People's History
Nathaniel Philbrick,  Mayflower: A Voyage to War [2006]
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Godfrey Davies,  The Early Stuarts, 1603-1660
 J.C. Davis,  Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700
Samuel Pepys,  The Concise Pepys (Wordsworth Classics)
George Clark,  The Later Stuarts, 1660-1714
Frances Yates,  The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
Austin Woolrych,  Commonwealth to Protectorate
Blair Worden,  The English Civil Wars, 1640-1660
Antonia Fraser,  Cromwell: Our Chief of Men
Antonia Fraser,   King  Charles II
Thomas Babington Macauley,  History of England, from the Accession of James II, Vol I-V.
C.V. Wedgwood,  The Thirty Years War
                               A King Condemned: The Trial and Execution of Charles I
                               The King's War, 1641-47
                               The King's Peace, 1637-41
                               Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593-1641
                                Montrose
Jenny Uglow,  A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration
R.H. Tawney,  Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
John R. Young (ed.),  Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars
Howard Tomlinson & David Gregg (eds.),  Politics, Religion & Society in Revolutionary England, 1640-1660: Documents and Debates.
Stevie Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution, 1640-1660
S.R. Gardiner,  History of the Commonwealth & Protectorate, Vol. 2, 1651-53
                           History of the Great Civil War, Vol. 2, 1644-45
                            History of the Great Civil War, Vol. 3, 1645-47
                            History of the Great Civil War, Vol. 4. 1647-49
Peter Gaunt,  Oliver Cromwell
Pauline Gregg,  Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne
Christopher Hill,  The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution
                                The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714
                                Reformation to Industrial Revolution, 1530-1780
                                God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell & the English Revolution
Thomas Hobbes,  Leviathan
J.P. Kenyon,  The Stuarts
Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714
Jane Ohlmeyer & John Kenyon,  The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638-1660
Jane Ohlmeyer, (ed.)  The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century
John Milton,  Paradise Lost
                         Complete Works

Whig Supremacy


Basil Williams,  The Whig Supremacy, 1714-1760
Douglas Hay & Nicholas Rogers (eds.),  Eighteenth Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords
John Hussey,  Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough: Hero of Blenheim
Edward Pearce  Pitt the Elder: Man of War
J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century


Reign of George III

J. Steven Watson,  The Reign of George III, 1760-1815
Jennifer Mori,  William Pitt and the French Revolution 1785-95
L.G. Mitchell,  Charles James Fox
George Rudé,  Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763-1774
John Ehrmann, The Younger Pitt, Volume One: The Years of Acclaim
                            The Younger Pitt, Volume Two: The Reluctant Transition
                            The Younger Pitt, Volume Three: The Consuming Struggle
Winston Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Vol. 3.,  The Age of Revolution
Carola Oman,  Nelson
John Aikin,  Annals of the Reign of George III
John Bew,  Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny
John Brooke, King George III
Arthur Bryant,  The Years of Endurance, 1793-1802 [1942]
William Hague,  William Pitt the Younger                             
Christopher Hibbert,   Wellington: A Personal History
Mike Jay,  The Unfortunate Colonel Despard
Douglas Kanter, The Making of British Unionism, 1740-1848
Jane Austen,  Emma
                       Sense and Sensibility
                       Pride and Prejudice
                       Persuasion
                       Mansfield Park
Lynn Reid Banks,  Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontes
Northrop Frye,  Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
William Blake,  Complete Works
Charlotte Bronté   Villette
                                Jane Eyre
James Boswell,  The Life of Samuel Johnson
                             Boswell's London Journal 1762-63
Emily Bronte,  Wuthering Heights [1847]
Ann Bronte,  The Tenant of Windfell Hall

British Enlightenment

Michael White,   Isaac Newton: The Last Sorceror
John Locke,  An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Everyman Library)
                        Second Treatise of Government/ A Letter Concerning Toleration (Dover Thrift)
Justin Champion,  Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722
Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
Thomas Paine,  Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings (OUP)
Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Birth of Modern Nations
Lyndall Gordon,  Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
William Godwin,  An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Penguin Classics)
Adam Smith,  Wealth of Nations Vols I & II
John Keane,  Tom Paine: A Political Life
David Hume,  A Treatise of Human Nature [1739]
Mary Wollstonecraft,  A Short Residence in Sweden/Memoirs (Penguin Classics)
                                    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman/Man (Oxford World Classics)

Slave Trade

Adam Hochschild,  Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Elisabeth Kowaleski Wallace,  The British Slave Trade and Public Memory [2006]
Michael Jordan,  The Great Abolition Sham: The True Story of the End of the British Slave Trade
Eric Williams,  Capitalism and Slavery
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and other writings

Age of Reform

Llewellyn Woodward,  The Age of Reform, 1815-1870
Ben Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph: William Hone and the fight for the free press
Michael J. Turner,  The Age of Unease: Government and Reform in Britain, 1782-1832
Dorothy Thompson,  Queen Victoria: A Woman on the Throne
                                    The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution              
                                    The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture
E. P. Thompson,  The Making of the English Working Class
                                The Poverty of Theory & other essays
David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century 1815-1914
Jane Robins,  Rebel Queen: How the Trial of Caroline Brought England to the Brink of Revolution
Donald Read,  Fergus O' Connor: Irishman and Chartist
John Prest,  Lord John Russell
Karl Polanyi,  The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
Paul Pickering, The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League
                            Fergus O' Connor: A Political Life
Edward Pearce,   Reform!  The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act
Mark O' Brien,  Perish the Privileged Orders: A Socialist History of the Chartist Movement
A. L. Morton,  The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen [1962]
John Stuart Mill,  On Liberty
Harriet Martinieu,   A History of the Thirty Years Peace, 1816-1846, Vol. 4 [1849-1850]
Elizabeth Longford,  Wellington: Pillar of State
Brian Jenkins, Henry Goulburn, 1784-1856. A Political Biography
Richard Ingrams,  The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett
Eric Hobsbawm,  Industry and Empire
                               Captain Swing (with George Rudé)
Simon Heffer,  Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle
Alfred Plummer, Bronterre: A Political Biography of Bronterre O' Brien, 1804-1864
Una Pope-Hennessy,  Charles Dickens
Geoffrey Best,   Shaftesbury
Asa Briggs, Victorian People
                      Essays in Labour History
 Terry Coleman, The Railway Navvies
William Cobbett,  Cobbett in Ireland: A Warning to England (ed. Denis Knight)
Phillip Guedalla,  Palmerston
Muriel Jaeger, Before Victoria
Douglas Hurd,  Robert Peel: A Biography
Leslie Williams,  Daniel O' Connell, The British Press and the Famine: Killing Remarks (2004)
Charles Dickens,  Great Expectations
                               Oliver Twist
                               A Tale of Two Cities
                               David Copperfield
                               Hard Times
                                The Old Curiosity Shop
                                 Nicholas Nickleby
                                 Martin Chuzzlewit

Victorian England

Geoffrey Best,  Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851-75
  A. N. Wilson, The Victorians
Robert Ensor,  England, 1870-1914
Roy Hattersley,  Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army
 Christopher Hibbert,  The Destruction of Lord Raglan
Roy Jenkins,  Gladstone
William Kuhn,  The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli
Peter Levi,  Tennyson
Cecil Woodham Smith,  Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times, 1819-61
                                          Florence Nightingale
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria
                              Eminent Victorians

20th Century

Henry Pelling,  A History of British Trade Unionism [1963]
Jeremy Paxman,  The Political Animal
George Monbiot,  Captive State; The Corporate Takeover of Britain
Geoffrey Best,  Churchill: A Study in Greatness
Liddell Hart,  History of the Second World War [1970]
Adam Hochschild,  To End all Wars: A Story of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War
General Sir Mike Jackson,  Soldier: The Autobiography
Oliver James,  Britain on the Couch: Treating a Low Serotonin Society; why we're unhappier now than in the 1950's - despite being richer
John Pilger,  Hidden Agendas
A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford History of England)

British Empire

Alfred Crosby,  Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
Peter C. Mancall,  Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America
Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780's
Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conflict with Tribal Peoples
Linda Colley,  Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850
Brendan Simms,  Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire
Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World
Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia
Robert Bickers,  The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914
John Bowle, The Imperial Achievement: The Rise and Transformation of the British Empire
Fawn Brodie,  The Devil Drives: A Life of explorer Richard Burton [1967]
Penderel Moon,  Warren Hastings and British India [1947]
Matthew Parker,  The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War
Caroline Elkins,  Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
Niall Ferguson,  Empire
Bill Nasson,  Britannia's Empire: A Short History of the British Empire
Richard Gott,  Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt
Stephen A. Grasse,  The Evil Empire: 101 Ways that England Ruined the World
Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
                               Raj: The Making of British India
Jan Morris,  Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire
                      Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress
Narindra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India's Partition
Jasper Ridley,  Palmerston
Karl Meyer & Shareen Brysac,  Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia
Julia Lovell,  The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China
Phillip Knightly & Colin Simpson,  The Secret Lives of Laurence of Arabia
Richard Toye,  Churchill's Empire: The world that made him and the world he made
Donal Morris,  The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation under Shaka and its Fall in 1879.
Edward Said,  Culture and Imperialism [1993]
                         Orientalism [1978]
T.E. Lawrence,  Seven Pillars of Wisdom
E. M. Forster,  A Passage to India
Joseph Conrad,      Nostromo
                                 Lord Jim
                                  Heart of Darkness
                                  Victory
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
                              Plain Tales from the Hills

General Histories

Kathleen Burk,  Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor
David Cannadine,  G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History
Norman Davies,  The Isles: A History
Christopher Lee,  This Sceptred Isle 55BC- 1901: From the Roman Invasion to the Death of Queen Victoria
Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations
R.J. Mitchell & M.D.R. Leys (eds.),  A History of the English People [1950]
G.M. Trevelyan,  British History in the Nineteenth Century and After 1782-1919
                              A Shortened History of England
                              English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries
R. K. Webb,  Modern England, From the Eighteenth Century to the Present
John Davies,  A History of Wales
Arvel B. Erickson & Martin J. Havran,  England: Prehistory to the present
Roy Strong,  The Story of Britain: A People's History

Scotland

GWS Barrow,  Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland [1965]
Maggie Craig,  Bare-Arsed Banditti: The Men of the '45
George Mac Donald Fraser,  The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers
Antonia Fraser,  Mary Queen of Scots [1969]
Michael Fry,  Wild Scots: Four Hundred Years of Highland History [2005]
Magnus Magnusson,  Scotland: The Story of a Nation [2000]
John Prebble,  The Highland Clearances [1963]
                          Glencoe  [1966]
Andrew Murray Scott,  Bonnie Dundee: John Graham of Claverhouse
T.C. Smout,  A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830
David Stevenson,  Alasdair MacColla and the Highland Problem in the Seventeenth Century
                                King or Covenant?: Voices from Civil War
                                Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson,  Inglorious Rebellion: The Jacobite Risings of 1708,1715 & 1719 [1971]
Robert Burns,  The Works of Robert Burns (Wordsworth Poetry Library)
Ronald Black (ed),  An Lasair: Anthology of 18th century Scottish Gaelic Verse
Catherine Carswell,  The Life of Robert Burns
Stephen Gwynn,  The Life of Sir Walter Scott [1930]
Stuart Kelly,  Scott-Land: The Man who Invented a Nation [2010]
Westwood & Kingshill (eds.), The Lore of Scotland: A Guide to Scottish Legends

Literature

M.H. Abrams,  (ed.)  The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2
Ifor Evans,  A Short History of English Literature
Peter Ackroyd,  Hawksmoor
                             Blake
Pat Barker,  Regeneration
Julian Barnes,  A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters
Anthony Burgess,  Big Wilson, Little God
                                A Clockwork Orange
Frances Burney,  Evelina
Steven Caires,  The Joys of Engrish: Strange and wonderful misuses of the English language
Lewis Carroll,  Alice in Wonderland
G. K. Chesterton,  Father Brown Stories                         
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  Complete Works                       
Daniel Defoe,  Roxana
                         Robinson Crusoe
Terrance Dicks,  A Riot of Writers: A Romp through English Literature
George Eliot,  Silas Marner
                         Middlemarch
Michael Ferber,  The Poetry of Shelley                 
Stephen Fry,   The Liar
                         Paperweight                   
H. Rider Haggard,  King Solomon's Mines
Thomas Hardy,  Jude the Obscure
                             Tess of the D' Urbervilles
                             Far from the Madding Crowd
                             The Mayor of Casterbridge
                              The Woodlanders                       
Phyllis Hodgson (ed.),  The General prologue to the Canterbury Tales [1969]
Richard Holmes,  Coleridge: Darker Reflections
Samuel Johnson,  A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford Authors)
D.H. Lawrence,  Lady Chatterley's Lover
                            Sons and Lovers
                              Collected Poems
W. Somerset Maugham,  The Razor's Edge
J.M. Morell (ed.),  Four English Comedies: Jonson ~ Volpone (1606), Congreve ~ The Way of the World (1700), Goldsmith ~ She Stoops to Conquer (1773), Sheridan ~ The School for Scandal (1777)
George Orwell,  1984
                             Animal Farm
                             A Collection of Essays    

Roy Porter,  Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency
Robert Baden-Powell,  Scouting for Boys [1908]
Samuel Richardson,  Pamela
Bertrand Russell,  Freedom Versus Organization, 1776-1914 [1934]
                                A History of Western Philosophy [1945]
                                Mortals and Others: American essays, 1931-35, Vol. 1
                                Unpopular Essays [1950]
                                Russell's Best [1958]
                                 In Praise of Idleness [1935]
Andrew Sanders,  The Short Oxford History of English Literature
Tom Sharpe,  Indecent Exposure
                        Ancestral Vices
William Shakespeare,  The Tempest (Stanley Wood ed.)
                                          Romeo & Juliet  (T. J B. Spencer ed.)
                                          Hamlet
                                          Henry IV, Part One
                                           The Winter's Tale
                                           Julius Caesar
                                           The Complete Works
Mary Shelley,  Frankenstein
Percy Bysshe Shelley,  Selected Poetry
                                        Complete Works
Laurence Stern,  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
R. L. Stevenson,  Kidnapped
                              Treasure Island
Jules Verne,  Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
                        Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Geoff Ward (ed),  Romantic Literature, 1790-1830 (Bloomsbury Guide)
Evelyn Waugh,  A Handful of Dust
Irvine Welsh,  The Acid House
                         Trainspotting
Virginia Woolf,  The Waves
William Wordsworth,  The Complete Works
A.J. Wyatt (ed.),  The links of the Canterbury Tales
Phillip Ziegler,   Melbourne
Douglas Adams,  The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
                              Life, the Universe and Everything
                              So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
                              The Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe
                              Mostly Harmless
                            The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Richard Adams, Watership Down