Ireland 432-1800 Ireland from St. Patrick to the Norman Conquest, 432-1169

The story of the first thirty years of the seventeenth century comprises a catalogue of crown assaults against the lands, language, religion and culture of the Old Irish and the political ascendancy of their co-religionist, the Old English. By enforcing long-standing anti-Catholic statutes and packing new boroughs and parliamentary constituencies with Protestant planters the king succeeded in establishing a Protestant majority in the Irish Parliament of 1613-5, a body which he hoped would be more amenable to political and financial needs of an increasingly rapacious crown policy. His son Charles I’s ongoing struggle with his increasingly recalcitrant and puritanical English and Scottish parliaments in the 1630s forced him and his lord lieutenant [Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford] to ensure that Ireland would not longer be a burden on the English exchequer. This resulted in piratical assaults by the government on titles to crown lands, thereby initiating numerous plantation projects in Leitrim, Kings and Queen’s Counties, Westmeath and the province of Connaught. These relentless assaults and the failure of the Gaelic Irish to adopt to the new economic and political climate, coupled with the increasingly anti-Catholic words and actions of the Irish and English parliaments, prompted the outbreak of the 1641 Rebellion and the subsequent massacre of thousands of Protestant settlers in Ulster. Ireland became the bloodiest theatre in the ‘War of the Three Kingdoms’. Conflict raged for twelve years between the forces of King Charles, the armies and allies of the English and Scottish parliaments and a political conglomeration of the Old Irish and Old English commonly known as the Confederation of Kilkenny. This bloody war and its consequences would also cast a long shadow over the history, politics, economics, political culture, literature and memory of eighteenth-century Ireland.

‘An cogadh do chríochnaigh Éireann’ (The war which finished Ireland) resulted in the death of as many as half of Ireland’s population through war, famine and plague and witnessed the effective destruction of the Irish economy. Indeed, the re-appearance of the wolf as a provided a appropriate barometer of population and a stark indication of the general dislocation which had befallen the country. The war was utterly transformed and speedily concluded with the arrival of Cromwell and his New Model Army, a conclusion further hastened by the collapse of the king’s cause through disunity, acrimony and the incompetence of its leaders, particularly the marquis of Ormond and the earl of Clanricard. Although formal hostilities had ceased in 1652 the remnants of the Confederate and Royalist armies waged a ‘war of the flea’ from the bogs, mountains, forests and fastnesses of the country. Parliament moved swiftly to counter this ‘Tory’ problem by facilitating wholesale transportation of the remnants of the scattered armies to the continent, a policy that had effectively served the Jacobean government in the aftermath of the Nine Years’ War. Like the ‘Flight of the Earls’ and the wholesale transportation of Irish Swordmen, this policy would supplement a military and religious Diaspora in mid-seventeenth century Europe, a group which would continue to play a disproportional role in European and Irish religious, political and literary history and culture.

The Cromwellian regime in Ireland swiftly initiated a wholesale plantation thereby establishing order, punishing combatants and rebels, as well as rewarding with confiscated lands those ‘adventurers’ who had pledged financial assistance for the subjugation of Ireland. The soldiers who had campaigned with the Parliamentary Army and the New Model Army were paid in like coin. All those who possessed estates and had not ‘manifested their good affection to the commonwealth’ suffered according to their degree of delinquency. Moreover, all ‘delinquent’ proprietors were to be transported across the river Shannon into Connaught and Clare [‘To Hell or Connaught’ in the Irish nationalist tradition]. However, the plantation quickly encountered acute organizational and logistical problems. Catholics showed a natural reluctance to move, English and Irish Protestant opinion sharply split on the practicality of wholesale transplantation and there was a realization that the Catholic labouring classes, who tended to follow their transplanted masters, would be needed as ‘hewers of wood and carriers of water’. These logistical problems were compounded by a general unwillingness on the part of the adventurers to take up their new possession, stemming from the total desolation of the country and the continued ravages of the ‘tories’. Many soldiers chose or were forced to sell their small stakes in the land to which they were entitled which severely compromised the security aspect of the new settlement. In spite of these setbacks, the Cromwellian Conquest heralded the effective destruction of the Irish Catholic landed interest, the decimation of the Catholic elements in the old corporations and boroughs and Ireland’s total incorporation into the newly constituted Commonwealth.

Sir William Petty’s Down Survey probably best exemplified Ireland’s utter subjugation to the iron will of the English Commonwealth. Petty, originally chief physician to the Cromwellian army, took responsibility for mapping all the forfeited land which had been identified by the Civil Survey, the huge inquiry into Irish land and land ownership previously undertaken as a prelude to the Cromwellian confiscation. It was known as the Down Survey because it was set down in map form form the beginning of the undertaking as opposed to being tabulated in book form. Drawn by parish they comprised the most accurate maps that had ever been drawn previously, with details of boundaries, names acreages and land quality. These would provide the blueprint outlines for most detailed maps of Ireland until the advent of the Ordnance Survey at the end of the eighteenth century, dramatically portrayed in Brian Friel’s Translations.

The death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658 and the collapse of his Protectorate heralded the end of military rule, the recall of the ‘Long Parliament’ and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. In stark contrast to his father (or later his brother, James II) the wily Charles II succeeded in walking a political tight-rope between asserting the prerogatives of the crown and insuring the succession of his Catholic brother James, duke of York, while placating an empowered, puritanical and often truculently anti-Catholic parliament. Many Irish Catholic royalists who had fought for his father in Ireland and accompanied his son into exile fell victims to this realpolitick. Under the stewardship of his lord lieutenant James Butler, duke of Ormond, the Irish economy slowly recovered from the ravages of the 1640s and 1650s. However, this recovery was often tempered by intermittent famines, adverse climatic conditions and detrimental trade restrictions imposed from the English parliament. The lord lieutenancies of Ormond, Robartes, Berkeley and Essex were preoccupied with the appalling state of the country’s finances and the political unease caused by the activities of Ulster Presbyterians, Independents and Roman Catholics, many of who were un-reconciled to the Restoration settlement in church and state. London-inspired political factionalism, recurring Popish Plots, French invasion scares and the disruptive activities of ‘tories’ [outlaws] and ‘fanatics’ [Presbyterians] disrupted the relative tranquillity of Restoration.

These difficulties aside, the Restoration period was an era of unprecedented economic growth. Dublin trebled in size in the 25 years of Charles II’s reign, becoming the second city in the British dominions and dwarfing its Irish counterparts. During this period its quays were cut on both sides of the river and extensive tracts of land reclaimed. Four news bridges were constructed across the Liffey, St. Stephen’s Green was laid as a fine square with trees and walks, Ormond accumulated and preserved the lands adjoining the Lord Lieutenant’s residence which would eventually become the Phoenix Park. He also founded Kilmainham Hospital for sick and wounded soldiers, modelled on Les Invalides in Paris, which remains one of the finest surviving Restoration buildings in the islands. Trinity College recovered from the destruction and stagnation of the war and Interregnum to prosper from generous endowments under the Restoration settlement. Neighbouring College Green housed many of the town houses of the higher aristocracy such as Lords Anglesey, Charlemont and Clancarthy. A college of physicians was also formed shortly after the Restoration, a new theatre was founded in Smock Alley which led to a renaissance in an Irish theatrical tradition which had been suppressed during the Cromwellian era. A whole series of taverns and coffee houses sprang up within the city, including one on Cork Hill in which was founded the renowned Philosophical Society. This counted among it’s members Sir William Petty, William King, Sir William Molyneux and Narcissus Marsh and vied with the Royal Society, its English counterpart, and gave Dublin a distinguished position in the world of philosophy, political economy and learning.

The newly restored Church of Ireland basked in the patronage and favour of the arch-Royalist and Anglican Ormond. Under John Bramhall, archbishop of Armagh (1661-3), the convocation of bishops addressed the major tasks of reconstruction, in particular the removal of dissenting ministers, chronic absenteeism, the holding of multiple benefices and the restoration of ruined churches. There was also a renewed attention to pastoral care. The preaching and writing of Jeremy Taylor, bishop of Down and Dromore (1661-67) exemplified the new intellectual activity of the church. However, many of the aforementioned problems continued to plague the ministry and it failed dismally to proselytise among the Catholic masses. Although their Presbyterian failed to secure recognition of the covenant, in spite of Charles II’s undertakings in the late 1640s, they were effectively left in peace to re-organize outside the ambit of the established Church. They continued to be supplemented by immigrants and religious refugees from Scotland and they managed to flourish in spite of the hostility of Ormond and the enmity of his episcopal cohorts.

The ensuing war and the participation of two contending kings of England, Ireland and Scotland therein, thrust Ireland to the forefront of European politics. Armies from eight European countries [Ireland, England, Scotland, Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark] battled throughout the kingdom, supplemented by Jacobite ‘Rapparees’ [an irregular Jacobite militia] and local Protestant paramilitaries. The war itself, though much less bloody and destructive than its immediate predecessor, comprised the largest military operation ever to occurr in Ireland. It can be effectively divided into three main phases. The first involved military assaults by James’s forces against defiant Protestant outposts in Bandon, Sligo, Enniskillen, Derry and East Ulster, culminating in the unsuccessful Siege of Derry. This Protestant defiance prompted William to dispatch an expeditionary force of 10,000 men under the octegenarian Marschal Schomberg, a veteran of the Thirty Years war who had left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes which had guaranteed Protestant freedom of worship since the reign of Henry IV.

In the meantime, King James had summoned parliament in May 1689 (the ‘Patriot Parliament’ in nationalist parlance) to raise taxes for his war effort. Under considerable duress, he overturned the Acts of Settlement, attained supporters of King William and effectively conceded Ireland’s legislative and judicial independence. Schomberg’s military inactivity and allied reversals in Europe forced William to initiate the second phase of the war, whereby he himself led an army into Ireland to confront King James and the Irish Jacobites. Landing at Carrickfergus in June 1690 he immediately marched on Dublin, engaging James’s inferior forces on the River Boyne (1^st July 1690) in what was a hugely significant if rather indecisive cavalry engagement. James’s subsequent flight, feted in popular print and propaganda through the capital cities of Augsburg Europe, precipitated the fall of Dublin and the effective collapse of the Jacobite military and political interest east of the Shannon. The Jacobite cause was retrieved somewhat by Sarsfield’s destruction of the Williamite siege-train at Ballyneety and William’s subsequent failure to capture the strategic Jacobite citadel of Limerick. In turn, these short-term Williamite reversals were assuaged somewhat by the duke of Marlborough’s successful amphibious assault on south Munster which resulted in the capture of the strategic ports of Cork and Kinsale.

The third and final phase comprised a series of aggressive jousts between the Williamite commander Baron Ginkel and his Jacobite counterpart General Saint Ruth for Athlone, Limeick and Galway. Athlone comprised a key crossing-point on the Shannon into the Jacobite heartland of Connaught and the Atlantic ports of Limerick and Galway provided vital gateways to France. Ginkel’s capture of Athlone precipitated the decisive battle of Aughrim which, through a mixture of rash headedness, bad luck, indecision and treachery, resulted in the slaughter of over 7,000 Irish Jacobites in one of the bloodiest battles ever fought in Ireland or Britain. William’s eagerness to conclude a costly diversion from his European war, and Jacobite despair of future French assistance paved the way for the Treaty of Limerick. This guaranteed freedom of worship to those Catholics who wished to remain in Ireland and facilitated the removal of a Jacobite army to evacuate to France and continue the war against the Williamites. They went, according to their leader Patrick Sarsfield, ‘to make another Ireland in the armies of the great King of France’. The so-called ‘Wild Geese’ and their successors, the Irish Brigades in France and Spain, remained pivotal to Irish Jacobite hopes and Protestant fears for the first half of the eighteenth century.

A major check on the the Irish parliament was the fact that Poyning’s :Law (constituted in 1495 by Henry VII’s Viceroy Sir Edward Poynings as a check on over-mightly Earl of Kildare rather than on the law-making potential of the Irish parliament) stipulated that the lord lieutenant/deputy required permission of the king and the English privy council to summon parliament and his own approval for draft bills of the Irish parliament. The Irish House of Common owed its political clout to the fact that (like the English/British House of Commons) it could vote taxes. The reality of this so-called ‘sole right’, the political impediments caused by Poyning’s Law and the ambiguous relationship between the Irish and English/British parliaments became key issues in eighteenth century Irish constitutional politics.

The army was the single most important institution of state in the eighteenth century, accounting for some 60% of the of the Irish budget. Because of England’s traditional fear of a standing army and the Irish Protestant unease at the huge, pro-Jacobite and politically unreconciled Catholic majority, an English act of parliament of 1699 fixed the Irish peacetime establishment at 12,000. In reality, however, the large numbers of pensioners and invalids were continually foisted on the Irish established meant that its number generally gravitated around 6,000 [although they would not all have been deployed or resident in the country]. It was afforded considerable importance due to its size [there was less than 7,000 in contemporary England, 8,000 in post-1760s America], its importance in preserving the revolutionary settlement, repelling invasion and intestine rebellion. Its also had great socio-economic importance as a potential career and font of patronage for the aristocracy and gentry. Throughout the course of the eighteenth century the Irish military establishment soon acquired an unsavoury reputation for incompetence, corruption, indiscipline and desertion. The proliferation of small barracks throughout the country and its commonly deployment [in the absence of a police force] in support of the legislative arm of the state in guarding prisons, quelling riots and hunting outlaws and highwaymen meant that the red coat was a conspicous and often disruptive force in Irish life. The militia occasionally supplemented the army, particularly in times of emergency, a military practice which would have disastrous consequence for peace and stability in the 1790s.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century justice was administered in Ireland through a combination of central [Common Pleas, King’s Bench, Chancery and Exchequer] and local assize courts presided over by justices and assize judges that sat four times per year [quarter sessions]. Throughout the eighteenth century a close relationship existed between crime and political, religious and socio-economic violence. This violence usually occurred in times of war, socio-economic and political agitation and involving a whole host of para-military, sectarian and agrarian groups from Tories, Rapparees, through Houghers, Whiteboys, Rightboys, oakboys, Peep O’Day Boys and Defenders [below]. In the absence of surviving court records it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons with Britain or other European countries. Homicide and theft were comparatively high, property crime, burglary and robbery and petty crime less prevalent. The death penalty (normally a public hanging) was the standard punishment for a whole series of serious offences including homicide, arson, rape, infanticide, robbery and theft, the latter substituted by burning [for women] and supplemented with disembowelling, burning and quartering for treason. Petty crime and theft was normally punished by flogging, branding, burning on cheek or hand, the stocks or transportation to the army, navy or English/British colonial possessions in North America, the West Indies and later Australia.

As well as supplanting James II on the throne ‘The Glorious Revolution’ abolished the royal power to suspend and dispense with parliament. It prohibited the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime without the consent of parliament and forbade the raising of taxes without recourse to the house. This did not apply to Ireland, of course, where the minority Protestant community were happy to have the added security of a large army garrison. It also required that parliament met frequently and that its member ought to be able to speak freely. As a consequence of these constitutional changes paliament transformed from an event to an institution. Prolonged warfare in Europe in the 1690s and early 18^th century drove government spending beyond the boundaries of the traditional crown revenues, necessitating additional grants of taxation and revenue. This gave the Irish parliament greater bargaining powers. The struggle to attain and retain the fruits of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and Irish Protestant dissatisfaction at the generosity of the Treaty of Limerick would become central to the progress of the 1692 and 1695 parliaments.

The 1692 parliament was presided over by the Lord Lieutenant Viscount Sydney, Lord Chancellor Sir Charles Porter and Vice-Treasurer Coningsby, the latter two having been signatories of the contentious Treaty of Limerick. This short and stormy session lasted less than a month and floundered on their failure to properly marshal government support. In consequence, parliament rejected government bills, including a money bill which they thre out on the basis of the ‘sole right’ of the Irish parliament to formulate money bills, deemed by the crown to be a direct defiance of Poyning’s Law. Opposition crystallized around this issue and the question of the proper management of forfeited Jacobite estates, which many felt were being too liberally bestowed on King William’s generals, friends, favourites and mistresses. There was also deep dissatisfaction with what was deemed to be an overly generous political and religious settlement with the vanquished Catholics [Treaty of Limerick]. Parliament chose to take its stand on the ‘sole right’ issue throwing out two money bills because they had not originated in the Irish houe of Commons. Sydney dissolved the session with a rebuke in which he re-asserted the prerogatives of the crown and rejected the ‘sole right’. He was succeeded by three lords justice (Sir Henry Capel, Sir Cyril Wyche and Sir William Duncombe). The former became lord deputy in 1695 and was entrusted with the successful management of the 1695 parliament.

In three parliamentary sessions (1695, 1697, 1699) Henry Capel (d. 1696) and his political successors (through a mixture of negotiation, co-option of political opposition and compromise on key issues such as the ‘sole right’ and the Treaty of Limerick) succeeded in effecting a successful parliament, ‘Securing the Protestant Interest in Ireland’ [to use the title of Ivar McGrath’s recent book] and laying the foundations for the penal laws against Irish Catholics. Under this penal code Catholics were prohibited from becoming solicitors, teaching school or being educated overseas; they were also denied the right to bear arms, own a horse worth more that 5 pounds or enlist in the army. A bill were also enacted to facilitate the expulsion of Catholic bishops and the religious orders. The frequent changes in the Irish administration that occurred for the duration of William’s reign represented the inherent difficulties in finding a satisfactory government for Ireland. William failed to honour his commitments to Irish Catholics under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick, although the treaty itself was finally passed in mutilated form through the Irish parliament in 1697. Nevertheless, 483 of the 491claims made by Irish Catholics for the restoration of their estates under the treaty’s terms were allowed. In spite of this, however, pressures from the emerging penal code would make it increasingly difficult for them to retain their estates as Catholics.
Queen Anne 1702-14

Queen Anne, youngest daughter of King James II and half-sister of his exiled son James Stuart [‘James III’ or the ‘Old Pretender’] succeeded to the crowns of the three kingdoms on the death of William III in 1702. Two issues dominated her reign; the vexed question of the succession to her crowns and England/Britain’s continued participation in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1714). This new dynastic conflict, which saw the main European powers waging war in support of the Habsburg and Bourbon claimants to the vacant throne of Spain, further polarized English and Irish politics and political life between the ‘Tories’ and ‘Whigs’. The Tories were traditionally staunch supporters the Crown and the Anglican Church, suspicious of Presbyterianism, the toleration of religious dissent and of the maintenance of a standing army. Increasingly ambivalent towards the revolutionary settlement of 1688 a vocal minority within their ranks also supported a Jacobite succession to the crowns and British withdrawal from costly European wars. In contrast, the political loyalties of the Whigs leaned towards preserving and strengthening the rights of parliament and the political legacies of the revolutionary settlement. They favoured religious toleration for Protestant dissenters and tended to be more anti-Catholic and anti-French than their Tory counterparts. Throughout the first 14 years of the eighteenth century the Whigs and Tories clamoured for the ear of Queen Anne, English [and Irish] public opinion and control of the government and foreign policy. This political infighting had ramifications for the government of Ireland that continued to switch between the Whig and Tory interest. This had with important implications for the continued imposition of the penal code and the status of Irish dissenters.

The death of a childless Queen Anne in 1714 heralded the succession of George Guelph, Elector of Hanover, great-grandson of James I and the strongest Protestant claimant to the thrones of the three kingdoms. He immediately dismissed the Tories from office in consequence of their opposition to the war and their political flirtations with the exiled Stuarts. Royal disfavour and the threatened impeachment of the leading Tories such as Harley, earl of Oxford, St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke and the leading Irish Tory grandee James, Butler, 2^nd Duke of Ormonde precipitated the imprisonment of Harley, the flight of the latter two to the court of the exiled Stuart. This resulted in the collapse of the Tory interest in Britain and Ireland and the emergence of a total Whig monopoly on British and Irish politics until thee 1760s. The new Whig junta came to be dominated by Sir Robert Walpole and his political circle. Their elaborate spy networks kept track of recalcitrant Jacobites and their foreign policy sought the diplomatic isolation of the House of Stuart. In turn, George II’s reign was dominated by Walpole and later the Pelham brothers. Until his removal in 1743 the wily Walpole succeeded in maintaining peaceful relations with the France and forging numerous political alliances with other European powers that ensured the effective diplomatic isolation of the House of Stuart. However, numerous invasion scares and dynastic wars in the 1730s (culminating in the Wars of Jenkins’ War [1739] and the Austrian Succession [1743-49], the Jacobite invasion of [1745] and the Seven Year’s War [1755-1762] animated the hopes and fears of Jacobites and anti-Jacobites alike and kept the Stuart cause to the forefront of political discourse.

Bereft of an effective political adversary the Irish Whigs fragmented between ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ factions. George II’s reign would become the golden era of the ‘Undertakers’ or political powerbrokers who managed the business of government in the Irish parliament. In return, they expected to be consulted on policy and to receive a substantial share in government patronage. By the end of the 1730s they had become so powerful that instead of being agents of the lord lieutenant they effectively dictated policy. The stifling political climate of late seventeenth and early-eighteenth century Ireland also gave birth to a ‘Patriot’ movement among Irish Protestants. This manifested itself in a new awareness of Irishness and a commitment to the defence of Irish political and economic interests. Irish ‘Patriots’ railed against the ‘Undertakers’, political corruption, the anglicization of the Irish polity and episcopate and the continued affronts to Irish legislative independence, Irish trade, commerce and manufacture. They deemed these to be destructive to trade and commerce and dangerous to the rights and properties of the Irish kingdom and its subjects.

These legislative affronts and associated trade restrictions inspired William Molyneux, Jonathan Swift and Charles Lucas to take up their pens in the patriot cause. Molyneux’s Case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England stated argued that that the English parliament had no right to to make laws for Ireland. Its principal claim was that legislative independence was not news, that it could be traced back to at least the fifteenth century. The English House of Commons condemned The Case as ‘bold and pernicious’ and had it burned by the common hangman. Public indignation at continued affronts to the British parliament’s assaults on the Irish polity and economy, coupled with his dismay at the wretched poverty of the lower classes, inspired Jonathan Swift to assume the mantle of champion of Irish manufacture and the Irish poor, and the scourge of absentee landlords and the English misgovernment. His Proposal for the use of Irish manufacture (1920), published anonymously, made a thinly appeal to anti-English sentiment, urging a boycott of English manufacture and calling on his compatriots to ‘burn everything English except their people and their coal’.

Swift also tapped into the popular discontent and indignation that resulted from ‘Wood’s Halfpence’. In the early 1720s, the scarcity of small specie prompted the British ministry to grant George I's mistress, the duchess of Kendal, a patent to issue a large quantity of copper coins. She subsequently sold her patent to an iron-master named William Wood. Utilizing his publicly-spirited alter-ego ‘M.B Drapier’ an indignant Swift expressed outrage at this possible effects of a debased coinage on the Irish economy. The resulting furore galvanized opposition to the patent that was subsequently withdrawn. The victory elevated Swift to national sainthood and showed that government control of parliament could be precarious in spite of the deft management of ‘undertakers’. Swif had ingeniously used Wood’s patent as a lightning rod for a broad attack on English policy and he took up and reiterated the sentiments expressed by Molyneux. He continued his ranting against endemic absenteeism, English misgovernment and the resultant poverty and idleness of the lower classes. His biting satire A modest Proposal (1729) argued that Ireland could escape from its grinding poverty by farming Irish children for food which has been various read as the ultimate indictment of English misgovernment or a literary representation of the author’s despaired abandoning of the lost cause of Ireland’s poor which he had fearlessly championed over the previous ten years.

Charles Lucas, a Dublin apothecary of Clare extraction, initially earned his spurs by his attacks on the oligarchic monopoly of the adminstration of the civil politics in his native city by the lord mayor and aldermen. As a candidate in the Dublin by election of 1749 he published his electoral address and a newspaper The Censor in which he drew heavily of the arguments of William Molyneux to stress the independence of the Irish parliament He broadened his political interest to national politics, articulating his trenchant opposition to political jobbery, the undertaker system and English restrictions on Irish trade in his weekly newspaper, The Citizen’s Journal. Like his populist London counterpart John Wilkes he stood for election to parliament in 1749 and would have prevailed but for his denunciation as an enemy of the country for which he was duly banished to the Isle of Man. However, it proved much more difficult to banish his political legacy, a difficulty compounded by the emerging divisions among the undertakers themselves. Lucas later returned in triumph in 1760 to contest and win a Dublin seat. He soon re-emerged as a leading figure among the patriots and assisted in the foundation of the Freeman’s Journal. The exertions of Molyneux, Swift and Lucas would guarantee their places in the pantheon of Irish ‘Patriotism’ and inspire a patriot grouping which would emerge in the 1770s (under the leadership of Henry Flood, Henry Grattan and Lord Charlemont) to mobilize parliamentary and popular opinion in support of free trade and legislative independence.