Ireland and the Glorious Revolution: From Kingdom to Colony

Abstract

Abstract In considering the question of Ireland and the Glorious Revolution, one is immediately struck by the fact that Ireland did not experience the Glorious Revolution in the sense in which the term is understood in the history of England and Scotland. The occupancy of the throne indeed changed as a result of the Glorious Revolution, as in the other kingdoms of the British monarchy, but this change and the settlement which followed was largely imposed from without as a result of more than two years of intermittent warfare. In Ireland the Revolution was not marked as in England and Scotland by constitutional debate, nor did it produce any central revolutionary document such as the Declaration of Rights or Claim of Right. By default, therefore, the central document of the Revolution in Ireland was the treaty which ended the Jacobite War, and for many reasons the Treaty of Limerick was ill-suited as the basis for a settlement, not least because the Irish Protestant colonists who emerged as dominant after the war had no voice in making the Treaty. The contrast with the circumstances of the Restoration in 166o could not be more striking.