Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766

This book offers the first analytic study of Irish Jacobitism in English, spanning the period between the succession of James II (1685) and the death of his son 'James III', 'the Old Pretender', in 1766. Two crucial features are the analysis of Irish Jacobite poetry in its wider 'British' and European contexts and the inclusion of the Irish diaspora as a pivotal part of the Irish political 'nation'. Both Jacobites and anti-Jacobites were obsessed with the vicissitudes of eighteenth-century European politics, and the fluctuating fortunes of the Stuarts in international diplomacy. European high politics and recruitment for the Irish Brigades in France and Spain provide the dominant themes in the poems, letters, pamphlets and memoirs of Irish writers, at home and abroad. The period between the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession (1739-49) and the end of the Seven Years' War (1763) witnessed a reinvigoration of Irish Jacobitism which permeated all levels of Irish society, at home and abroad. However, Britain's triumph in 1763 laid the basis for a new geopolitics, which hastened the demise of Jacobitism as a potent force in European high politics. It also permitted the emergence of a segment of Irish Catholic opinion willing to make a strategic accommodation with the House of Hanover.