Owen McGee

A History of Ireland in International Relations


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of the 1650s, up to 30 per cent of the Irish population would be lost due to warfare, plague or exodus.45 Meanwhile, after being ‘all things to all men’ for the duration of the English civil war, the southern Irish royalist James Butler intrigued for the underground court of Charles II on the European continent, looking for French and Spanish support against Cromwell, before the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 made this unnecessary. Thereafter, as a reward, Butler was granted land and a university chancellorship in England; was promoted from a marquis to the Duke of Ormond; and, as a long-term leader of an Irish administration, controversially maintained all Cromwell’s discriminatory legislation. Ormond could also be said to have laid the basis for the future integration of Ireland into the British Empire by arranging that virtually all appointees to lead the Irish administration would henceforth be drawn from the ranks of career diplomats in the English foreign office which, upon the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, essentially became a British foreign office.46 In the words of Sir William Temple, who was England’s diplomat at the Hague at the same time as he directed government policy regarding Ireland, the sole purpose of the Irish administration was to provide security for ever-growing English investments and plantation schemes in Ireland, to be overseen by English appointees who would ‘own and support upon all occasions that which is truly a loyal English protestant interest’.47 This policy was upheld by all eighteenth-century Irish parliaments, each of which upheld Cromwellian land settlements that denied Catholics the right to exercise political power and in the process created a strongly colonial mindset among a new ruling class.48