Near St Abbe’s Head, south of the Firth of Forth, a heavily armed French privateer Calonne flying French colours had just captured the merchant brig Nancy from Aberdeen bound for Newcastle. The Calonne, also known as the La Cologne, was a 400 ton ex-French naval frigate, two-decked and armed with thirty-six cannon with a crew … Read more
It had seriously occurred to me, on readingStevan Ellis’s ‘“More irish than the Irish themselves’?: the“Anglo-Irish” in Tudor Ireland’ (HI Spring 1999), which seems to arguefor a total separation of the ‘Gaelic’ and ‘English’ elements inmedieval Irish history, that this view, expressed with heavy Swiftiansarcasm, represents a deliberate parody. How else could Dr Ellis regardthe … Read more
A brief entry in the Annals of Ulster, dated June 1513, records the death of the Archbishop of Armagh, Octavian del Palagio. The obit precedes by only a few entries that of a more famous individual: Gerald fitz Thomas FitzGerald, the Great Earl of Kildare, who died from gunshot wounds received in battle in September … Read more
The war between William and James, though of relatively short duration, was fought on a scale unsurpassed in Irish history: there were 60,000 men at the Boyne, more than 40,000 at Aughrim. In recent years, the war has received much attention from historians whose works we can now add to Demetrius Boulger’s time-honoured Battle of … Read more
The nature of history ‘When the curtain falls, it’s time to get off the stage.’ So remarked the British prime minister, John Major, after losing the 1997 general election. The curtain fell on the British empire a long time ago, but unlike politicians, British historians do not see a change of regime as invalidating their … Read more