Restoration Ireland: Always Settling and Never Settled (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Restoration Ireland: Always Settling and Never Settled Raymond Gillespie Restoration Ireland: Always Settling and Never Settled. Edited by Coleman A. Dennehy. (Burlington, VT:Ashgate Publishing Co. 2008. Pp. xvi, 202. $99.95. ISBN 978-0-754-65887-0.) The last thirty years have seen very significant advances in our understanding of seventeenth-century Ireland. New conceptual frameworks have been advanced and old evidence re-examined from different perspectives. However, much of this process is visible mainly in writings about the period before 1660. Here plantation and colonization provided a framework for organizing investigations, drawing mainly on the records of central government. For the years after 1660 the nature of the evidence changes, and the comforting world of plantation surveys and investigations gives way to more intractable sources. Even estate collections are thinner for Restoration Ireland than for the earlier period. Moreover, the archives of the period after 1660 are dominated by the papers of one man: James Butler, first duke of Ormond. This massive collection, with all its potential to introduce distorting lenses into our view of Restoration Ireland, has daunted most historians with the result that the only real biography of the duke is that by Thomas Carte, published in 1735–36. This book is a most welcome venture into little-explored territory. As with many charts of unexplored territory there are areas where there "be dragons" and where even the most intrepid explorer does not enter. However, there is much that is new and interesting. The essays are enveloped by contributions by Tim Harris, who sets out the problem that confronts the scholar of Restoration Ireland and suggests an agenda for research, and by Toby Barnard, who tries to isolate the character of the period, drawing not only on the lives of the elite but also trying to capture the experience of a wider slice of society. Between these two bookends are nine essays that deal with specific [End Page 842]problems. Two deal with the complex issue of land. Michael Perceval-Maxwell offers a historiographical overview of the attempts by historians to deal with the thorny question of the Restoration land settlement, while Kevin McKenny attempts to bring statistical precision to the problem by atomizing Irish landholding as portrayed in the Books of Survey and Distribution. One essay, by Coleman Dennehy, deals with the Restoration parliament of 1661–66, which tried to give shape to the land settlement. John Cronin delves into the little-explored relation between history and literature with an examination of the plays of Roger Boyle, first earl of Orrery, and reads Boyle's play The generall( c.1662–64) as a piece of political lobbying using innovative literary forms. Perspectives on the native Irish are offered in Ted McCormick's essay on that Restoration polymath, Sir William Petty, and his plans to engineer Ireland socially, transforming it into a civilized and profitable country. However, the largest group of essays, some four, confront the problem of religion in Restoration Ireland. Only one, that by Sandra Hynes on the Quaker response to the new world, deals with Protestantism. It is regrettable that there is no attempt to tackle the problem of the established Church, which was so central to the religious and social agenda of the years after 1660.The other three (by Eoin Kinsella, Jason McHugh, and Anne Creighton) deal with Catholics and land, the response of Catholic clergy to the Restoration (using the example of the radical Nicholas French), and Catholics and politics in the 1660s. Taken together, these three essays provide an important new starting point for the examination of the political dilemma of balancing loyalty with salvation that brought turmoil to many lives in Restoration Ireland. There is much in this book that is both new and interesting, and it deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the early-modern British Isles. Raymond Gillespie National University of Ireland, Maynooth Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press