"The White Knights took possession of huge estates around Mitchelstown, County Cork, in the fourteenth century. In the 1650s, Sir John King married Catherine Fenton, sole heir of the last White Knight. For the next 250 years Mitchelstown was home to the Kings - barons and earls of Kingston. The family built great houses and towns, and included scholars, soldiers and lunatics among its ranks. Their wealth made them one of the most influential dynasties in Ireland."--Jacket.
The gripping story of the tumultuous destruction of the Irish country house, spanning the revolutionary years of 1912 to 1923 During the Irish Revolution nearly three hundred country houses were burned to the ground. These "Big Houses" were powerful symbols of conquest, plantation, and colonial oppression, and were caught up in the struggle for independence and the conflict between the aristocracy and those demanding access to more land. Stripped of their most important artifacts, most of the houses were never rebuilt and ruins such as Summerhill stood like ghostly figures for generations to come. Terence Dooley offers a unique perspective on the Irish Revolution, exploring the struggles over land, the impact of the Great War, and why the country mansions of the landed class became such a symbolic target for republicans throughout the period. Dooley details the shockingly sudden acts of occupation and destruction--including soldiers using a Rembrandt as a dart board--and evokes the exhilaration felt by the revolutionaries at seizing these grand houses and visibly overturning the established order.
Named for its mythical leader “Captain Rock,” avenger of agrarian wrongs, the Rockite movement of 1821–24 in Ireland was notorious for its extraordinary violence. In Captain Rock, James S. Donnelly, Jr., offers both a fine-grained analysis of the conflict and a broad exploration of Irish rural society after the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Originating in west Limerick, the Rockite movement spread quickly under the impact of a prolonged economic depression. Before long the insurgency embraced many of the better-off farmers. The intensity of the Rockites’ grievances, the frequency of their resort to sensational violence, and their appeal on such key issues as rents and tithes presented a nightmarish challenge to Dublin Castle—prompting in turn a major reorganization of the police, a purging of the local magistracy, the introduction of large military reinforcements, and a determined campaign of judicial repression. A great upsurge in sectarianism and millenarianism, Donnelly shows, added fuel to the conflagration. Inspired by prophecies of doom for the Anglo-Irish Protestants who ruled the country, the overwhelmingly Catholic Rockites strove to hasten the demise of the landed elite they viewed as oppressors. Drawing on a wealth of sources—including reports from policemen, military officers, magistrates, and landowners as well as from newspapers, pamphlets, parliamentary inquiries, depositions, rebel proclamations, and threatening missives sent by Rockites to their enemies—Captain Rock offers a detailed anatomy of a dangerous, widespread insurgency whose distinctive political contours will force historians to expand their notions of how agrarian militancy influenced Irish nationalism in the years before the Great Famine of 1845–51.
They were known as the Ascendancy, the dashing aristocratic elite that controlled Irish politics and society at the end of the eighteenth century—and at their pinnacle stood Caroline and Robert King, Lord and Lady Kingsborough of Mitchelstown Castle. Heirs to ancient estates and a vast fortune, Lord and Lady Kingsborough appeared to be blessed with everything but marital love—which only made the scandal that tore through their family more shocking. In 1798, at the height of a rebellion that was setting Ireland ablaze, Robert King was tried for the murder of his wife’s cousin—a crime born of passion that proved to have extraordinary political implications. In her brilliant new book, Janet Todd unfolds the fascinating story of how this powerful Anglo-Irish family became entwined with the downfall not only of their class, but of their very way of life. Like Amanda Foreman’s bestselling Georgiana, Daughters of Ireland brings to life the world of a glittering elite in an age of international revolution. When her daughters, Margaret and Mary, were at their most impressionable, Lady Kingsborough hired the firebrand feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to be their governess, little realizing how radically this would alter both girls’ beliefs and characters. The tall, striking Margaret went on to provide crucial support to the United Irishmen in the days leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, while soft, pleasing Mary indulged in an illicit, and all but incestuous love affair that precipitated multiple tragedies. As the Kingsboroughs imploded, the most powerful and colorful figures of the day were swept up in their drama—the dashing aristocrat turned revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald; the liberal, cultivated Countess of Moira, a terrible snob despite her support of Irish revolutionaires; the notorious philanderer Colonel George King, whose sexual debauchery was matched only by his appalling cruelty; Britain’s cold calculating prime minister William Pitt and its mad ruler King George III. With irresistible narrative drive and richly intimate historic detail, Daughters of Ireland an absolutely spellbinding work of history, biography, passion, and rebellion.
This groundbreaking and controversial new study tells the story of two nations in Ireland; an Irish Catholic nation and a Protestant nation, emerging from a blood-stained century. This survey confronts the violence and enmity inherent in the consolidation of conquest. Lenihan contends that the overriding grand narrative of this period was one of conflict and dispossession as the native elite was progressively displaced by a new colonial ruling class. This struggle was not confined to war but also had cultural, religious, economic and social reverberations. At times the darkness was relieved throughout the period by episodes of peaceful cooperation. Consolidating Conquest places events in Ireland in the context of three Stuart kingdoms, religious rivalry within and between those kingdoms, and the shifting balance of power as monarchy and commonwealth, Whitehall and Westminster, fought for ultimate power.
What was life like for Irish Protestants between the mid-17th and the late-18th centuries? Toby Barnard scrutinizes social attitudes and structures in every segment of Protestant society during this formative period.
"The Pursuit of the Heiress" is a new, greatly enlarged and more widely focused version of what the late Lawrence Stone described as "a brilliant long essay or short book on the subject of the role of heiresses among the Irish aristocracy," which was published by the Ulster Historical Foundation under the same title in 1982 and has long been out of print. The new book comes to the same broad conclusions about heiresses--namely that their importance as a means of enlarging the estates or retrieving the fortunes of their husbands has been much exaggerated. This was because known heiresses were well protected by a variety of legal devices and, in common with many aristocratic women of the day, also had minds and strong preferences of their own--which meant that they were not generally an object of deliberate or profitable pursuit. The new book also ranges more widely than its central theme of heiresses and addresses other aspects of aristocratic marriage such as abductions, elopements, mesalliances, the supposed "rise of the affective family," and the disadvantaged situation of even the richest and most privileged women in an age when both adultery and divorce were largely the prerogative of men.
Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life reinvents Bowen as a public intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and essayist as well as a writer of fiction. Patricia Laurence counters the popular image of Bowen as a mannered, reserved Anglo-Irish writer and presents her as a bold, independent woman who took risks and made her own rules in life and writing. This biography distinguishes itself from others in the depth of research into the life experiences that fueled Bowen’s writing: her espionage for the British Ministry of Information in neutral Ireland, 1940-1941, and the devoted circle of friends, lovers, intellectuals and writers whom she valued: Isaiah Berlin, William Plomer, Maurice Bowra, Stuart Hampshire, Charles Ritchie, Sean O’Faolain, Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and Eudora Welty, among others. The biography also demonstrates how her feelings of irresolution about national identity and gender roles were dispelled through her writing. Her vivid fiction, often about girls and women, is laced with irony about smooth social surfaces rent by disruptive emotion, the sadness of beleaguered adolescents, the occurrence of cultural dislocation, historical atmosphere, as well as undercurrents of violence in small events, and betrayal and disappointment in romance. Her strong visual imagination—so much a part of the texture of her writing—traces places, scenes, landscapes, and objects that subliminally reveal hidden aspects of her characters. Though her reputation faltered in the 1960s-1970s given her political and social conservatism, now, readers are discovering her passionate and poetic temperament and writing as well as the historical consciousness behind her worldly exterior and writing.
The Irish Civil War ended in 1923. Eighty years on, documentary-maker Tom Hurley wondered if there were many civilians and combatants left from across Ireland who had experienced the years 1919 to 1923, their prelude and their aftermath. What memories had they, what were their stories and how did they reflect on those turbulent times? In early 2003, he recorded the experiences of 18 people, conducting 2 further interviews abroad in 2004. Tom spoke to a cross section (Catholic, Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist) who were in their teens or early twenties during the civil war. The chronological approach he has taken spans 50 years, beginning with the oldest interviewee's birth in 1899 and ending when the Free State became a republic in 1949. Last Voices of the Irish Revolution.
This is a groundbreaking study of Cork's rise from insignificance to international importance as a city and port, and of South Munster's development from agricultural hinterland to one of early modern Ireland's wealthiest regions and a symbol of a new commercial order. Reconstructing the framework of a pre-modern regional society in a way never before attempted for Ireland, Old World Colony integrates social, economic, and political history across the heartlands of "the Hidden Ireland" from the seventeenth century's civil wars to Catholic emancipation in the 1820s. Dickson shows that colonization and commerce transformed the region, but at a price: even in South Munster's formative years, the problems of pre-Famine Ireland-gross income inequality and land scarcity-were already evident. Co-published with Cork University Press, Ireland Wisconsin edition for sale only in the U.S., its territories and possessions, and Canada. "A masterful account. . . . So finely nuanced and meticulously researched that it effectively raises the historiographical bar for Irish regional history."--James G. Patterson, H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews
