Kingdom of Ireland

Kneeling in the rushes

formationDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890)

The kingdom an Irish Parliament had voted into existence in 1541 was, for its first decades, more a change of style than a change of government. Henry VIII's own solution for making the new title real was not conquest but a bargain: Gaelic chiefs would surrender their lands to the crown and receive them back as English peerages, holding by patent rather than by the sword or by Brehon custom.

An earldom for O'Neill

Con O'Neill, head of the most powerful lordship in Ulster, was persuaded to travel to the English court in 1542 to receive the earldom the Irish government had chosen for him - Tyrone, since Ulster itself was a royal title the King would not part with. His written submission, signed with a mark since he could not read the English it was drafted in, asked Henry's forgiveness for having "usurped" his own name and state and begged to be given "what name, state, title, land, or living it shall please your Highness." A week later he knelt in a chamber at Greenwich hung with cloth of Arras and was girt as Earl of Tyrone by the King's own hand, his chaplain translating his thanks into English for the court. The Four Masters recorded the moment plainly: O'Neill was created an earl, and enjoined that he should not be called O'Neill any longer.

Edinburgh University Library · Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · John Derricke · Public domain

The same summer brought Murrough O'Brien to Court, created Earl of Thomond, and Mac William of Clanricarde, created earl of that name - each ceremony a repetition of O'Neill's, each chief trading an Irish title with centuries of standing behind it for an English one that existed only on paper. The bargain suited the crown far more than it suited the families who took it: Con O'Neill's own patent, granting the earldom in remainder to a son whose legitimacy his own kinsman Shane would later deny outright, planted a succession dispute that outlasted every man present at Greenwich that day.

A plantation with a fort at its centre

Where persuasion failed, the government tried a harder instrument. Sir Edward Bellingham's campaigns against the O'Mores and O'Connors of Leix and Offaly in the late 1540s were followed, under Mary's own deputy the Earl of Sussex, by a formal settlement of both territories as shire ground - the first attempt anywhere in Ireland to replace a Gaelic lordship wholesale with an English colony rather than merely extract its submission. The western half of the new Queen's County was reserved for the O'Mores themselves, each head of a sept made a landlord holding by knight-service, forbidden unlicensed firearms on pain of forfeiture and, on a second offense, death; the eastern district went to English settlers bound to keep arms, speak English, and hold no more than three hundred acres. Twelve fortified villages, among them Stradbally and Abbeyleix, were built as satellites to the royal fort renamed Maryborough after the Queen, with the fort at Offaly renamed Philipstown after her husband. A church was ordered built in each settlement within three years.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · Robert Dunlop · Public domain

The old inhabitants never reconciled themselves to it. Donough O'Connor and the O'Mores' own chief Connell fell into Sussex's hands within the year and were released only at Kildare and Ormonde's intercession; both broke their promises of good behaviour as soon as they were free. The settlement held in outward form regardless, Leix and Offaly renamed King's and Queen's County - the pattern of plantation the crown would apply, with far greater violence, to Munster after the Desmond rebellion's collapse a generation later.

You have killed yourself long ago

formationDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890)

Gerald FitzGerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond, had spent years as a hunted fugitive by the time his rebellion finally collapsed in the autumn of 1583. Most of his followers had already made their peace with the crown's forces under the Earl of Ormonde, and Desmond himself was reduced to hiding with a handful of companions in the woods of Kerry, his last trusted adviser physically shackled to one of Ormonde's own men so he could no longer be consulted in private.

A raid on the wrong household

What finally exposed him was an act of ordinary desperation rather than any grand betrayal. On 9 November, twenty of his remaining men raided cattle from Maurice O'Moriarty near Tralee Bay, stripping his wife and children in the process. The O'Moriartys, with leave from the local English garrison, traced the stolen herd into the glen of Glanageenty. Climbing the hillside by moonlight, Owen O'Moriarty spotted a fire below and, at daybreak, led a party into the hut it came from.

"Thou hast killed thyself long ago"

Desmond's own companion fled at the first alarm; the earl himself was caught half-asleep and wounded in the arm before he could be recognized. "I am the Earl of Desmond," he cried out, "save my life!" Owen O'Moriarty's reply survives in the record almost exactly as spoken: "Thou hast killed thyself long ago, and now thou shalt be prisoner to the Queen's Majesty." A rescue seemed imminent as they carried him off, so Owen ordered the fatal blow struck rather than risk losing him - the earl's head was carried first to Ormonde, then to Elizabeth herself, and displayed on London Bridge as proof that the last great Geraldine rising was finally, verifiably over. His forfeited estates across Munster were opened to English settlement in the plantation that followed, reshaping the province's landholding more thoroughly than the war itself had.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A yellow ford in a yellow bank

expansionDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890)

By 1598 Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, had built the most formidable Gaelic military confederacy Ireland had seen under English rule, armies trained and drilled in something closer to continental fashion than the loose warbands of earlier risings. When an English relief column under the Marshal, Sir Henry Bagenal, marched to resupply the besieged fort on the Blackwater that August, O'Neill and his ally Hugh O'Donnell were waiting for them at a crossing the local people called, for the colour of its bed and banks, the Yellow Ford.

A column strung out over open ground

The Irish forces, outnumbering the relief column roughly two to one and fighting in the loose, mobile formation their opponents' close ranks could not match, harassed the English column from the moment it crossed the ford. O'Donnell's marksmen used the juniper-covered hills to pick off the ox teams hauling the army's heaviest gun, which stuck fast in the mud; Bagenal himself, riding forward to rally his vanguard, was shot through the brain. The confusion following his death was made worse by an accidental explosion of gunpowder among the English ranks.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · Unknown cartographer · Public domain

A rising the defeat set loose

The rear half of the army held formation well enough to retreat to Armagh in reasonable order, but the losses - close to two thousand men, by contemporary count - amounted to the heaviest single defeat English arms had yet suffered in Ireland. News of the victory did what years of O'Neill's own diplomacy had not: it drew risings across Munster, Leinster and Connacht that had been simmering under the surface into open rebellion almost overnight. What had been a war contained largely to Ulster became, within weeks of the Yellow Ford, a rising that threatened the crown's hold on the whole island at once.

A night march that lost its way

peakDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890)

A Spanish expeditionary force landed at Kinsale in the autumn of 1601, hoping to give Tyrone's rebellion the foreign backing it had sought for years. Lord Deputy Mountjoy moved quickly to besiege the town before the Spanish could break out or be properly reinforced, and by December his own army was itself caught between the garrison inside Kinsale and the combined forces of Tyrone and O'Donnell converging from the north

• a position Mountjoy himself likened to Cromwell's later one at Dunbar, holding the sea while the enemy held the land around him.

Betrayed before the attack began

A coordinated assault was planned for the night of 24 December: the Irish army would strike Mountjoy's camp while the Spanish garrison sallied out to join them. The plan was betrayed in advance - one of Tyrone's own officers let the English commander Carew learn the timing over a shared bottle of whiskey - and Mountjoy had his men standing to arms hours before the attack came. Worse for the Irish, their own chiefs quarrelled over precedence in the march, strung their three battalions out too far apart to support each other, and O'Donnell's guides lost their way in the dark entirely.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · Unknown engraver · Public domain

Routed at daybreak

Dawn found Tyrone's vanguard alone and exposed within sight of the English lines, with O'Donnell's own division still wandering somewhere behind. Mistaking a tactical withdrawal for a retreat, the Irish foot broke and ran; the English cavalry, given leave to press the advantage, rode down the fleeing army with almost no resistance. The Irish lost something close to two thousand men; the English, by Mountjoy's own count, lost one. Tyrone withdrew north in dejection, the Spanish garrison surrendered soon after, and the confederate army that had terrified the English administration for seven years broke apart into its component clans, never to fight as one force again.

Kneeling to a queen already dead

peakDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890)

Tyrone held out for two more years after Kinsale, but with his confederacy broken and no further help likely from Spain, he opened negotiations for submission early in 1603. Elizabeth herself, in one of her last acts of state, gave Mountjoy authority to grant surprisingly generous terms - restoring nearly all of Tyrone's former lands rather than punishing him further - on the reasoning that a repentant earl with something to lose made a more reliable subject than a chieftain with nothing left to protect.

A submission timed by accident

Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603. Mountjoy learned of it on the 27th, but his secretary managed to keep the news from becoming public in Ireland until 5 April - and in the days between, unaware the queen he was submitting to no longer lived, Tyrone made his way to Sir Garret Moore's house at Mellifont and knelt at the door of Mountjoy's own chamber. He remained kneeling, by an eyewitness's account, for the better part of an hour, performing his penitent submission in stages as he was called forward, renouncing the name O'Neill, all dependence on Spain, and every claim over neighbouring lords' lands.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · Oliver Gargan · CC BY-SA 4.0

Tears for the wrong reason, or the right one

Only after the written submission was complete did Tyrone travel on to Dublin, arriving the day before official word of Elizabeth's death and James's accession reached the city. When the new king was proclaimed and the crowds around him shouted for joy, Tyrone, by every account present, wept openly - grief the onlookers read as remorse for his own rebellion, though he had submitted everything the war had been fought over to a monarch who, unknown to him at the time, was no longer even alive to receive it.

The same house, twice

peakDrafted from Walsh), The Flight of the Earls (1916)

Four years of uneasy peace followed Tyrone's submission - years in which the earl found himself increasingly hemmed in by English officials suspicious of his every move, his old authority over neighbouring lords steadily whittled away by a government no longer willing to leave any Gaelic lord more power than the letter of his own patent strictly allowed. In September 1607, a French ship arrived off the Donegal coast at Rathmullan, in Lough Swilly, sent for Tyrone and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, by arrangement made weeks before.

A last night at Mellifont

Before he sailed, Tyrone took formal leave of the Lord Justice in Dublin and spent his final night on Irish soil at Sir Garret Moore's house at Mellifont - the same house where he had knelt for nearly an hour four years earlier, submitting to Mountjoy without knowing the queen he submitted to was already dead. Whether the choice was deliberate or simply practical, an eyewitness in his own party recorded it without comment, one house serving as the setting for both the end of his war and the end of his presence in Ireland altogether.

Ninety-nine passengers, and an empty title left behind

The ship that carried them from Lough Swilly on 14 September held some ninety-nine people in all - the two earls, their immediate families, and a substantial following of kinsmen, retainers and clergy. Rory O'Donnell left behind his wife, Brigid Fitzgerald, and took his infant son with him instead; neither man would see Ireland again. With their departure, no Gaelic lord of any real standing remained on the island outside the crown's own patents and plantations

• the war Tyrone had fought to a draw at Yellow Ford and lost outright at Kinsale ended, in effect, not on a battlefield but on the deck of a ship none of the men aboard expected to be their last sight of home.

Walsh), The Flight of the Earls (1916) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A righteous judgment of God

peakDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1909-1916)

By September 1649 Oliver Cromwell had landed in Ireland with an army better supplied and more heavily armed than anything the country had seen, sent to avenge the massacres of Protestant settlers that had opened the 1641 rebellion and to finish, once and for all, the reconquest the Tudors had never quite completed. Drogheda, held for the royalist cause by Sir Arthur Aston, stood between his army and the north.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1909-1916) · Robert Walker · Public domain

A breach carried at the second attempt

Cromwell's siege guns, firing shot far heavier than the town's own cannon could match, opened a practicable breach within days. The first assault was thrown back, but Cromwell himself led a second wave through the gap, and once his infantry gained the inner defences the defenders were driven back into the Mill-mount, a fortified rise inside the walls. There, by Cromwell's own account written days later, he ordered his men to "put all to the sword," forbidding any quarter to those found still in arms.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1909-1916) · William Murphy · CC BY-SA 2.0

Two days of killing, and a justification offered in the same breath

The slaughter continued through the following day. Soldiers taken in the two towers that held out longest were, in one case, decimated and the survivors shipped to Barbados; in the other, spared outright but transported the same way. Sir Arthur Aston himself was killed, reportedly with his own wooden leg, in which rumour had wrongly placed a hoard of gold. Cromwell's own estimate put the dead at close to two thousand, and he offered, in the same letter that reported the figure, both an apology and a defence at once: that the severity was "a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches," and that it would "tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future." The campaign that followed bore that logic out in its own way - garrison after garrison surrendered rather than risk what Drogheda had shown awaited those who did not.

A shot that only grazed him

peakDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1909-1916)

James II, deposed in England but still recognized as king by his Catholic supporters in Ireland, drew up his army along the southern bank of the river Boyne in the summer of 1690 to block his son-in-law William's advance on Dublin. William surveyed the position from the northern bank the day before the battle; while he sat resting afterward, a Jacobite gun crew fired on his party, and a six-pound shot struck him on the shoulder, tearing his coat and drawing blood. He remarked, in Dutch, that it had come near enough, had the wound dressed, and remained on horseback for three hours more. A garbled report of his death reached Paris in time for public rejoicing there before it was corrected.

Fords found by men who knew the ground

The battle itself, fought on 1 July, turned on a flanking crossing upriver at Slane, guided by Williamite officers from the Enniskillen garrisons who knew every ford on the river. While that force drew off part of the Jacobite line, the main Williamite army - the Blue Dutch Guards in the lead, drums beating as they entered the water waist-deep under fire - forced the crossing at Oldbridge directly. Jacobite cavalry under the Duke of Berwick charged the Dutch guardsmen repeatedly as they came ashore but could not break them, and by early afternoon the Jacobite infantry was in full retreat.

National Army Museum · Bagwell, 3 vols (1909-1916) · Jan Wyck · Public domain

What one river crossing actually settled

James left the field for Dublin and then France, never to command an army in Ireland again; the war itself dragged on for another year around Limerick, ending only with that city's surrender the following October. But the Boyne broke the one realistic chance Jacobite Ireland had of reversing William's position by a single decisive stroke, and the anniversary of a battle James did not even stay to finish would go on being marked in Ireland for centuries after everyone who had actually fought in it was dead.

A charter that was never kept

peakDrafted from Lecky, 5 vols (1892)

Limerick held out through the autumn of 1691 even after the Boyne had already decided the wider war, and when the city finally came to terms that October, its garrison commander Patrick Sarsfield secured what looked, on paper, like generous conditions. The treaty's very first article promised Irish Catholics "such privileges in the exercise of their religion as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of Charles II" - a real guarantee, signed by the Lords Justices and ratified under the Great Seal of England, at a time when Charles II's own reign was remembered as the most tolerant period Irish Catholics had known since the Reformation.

Lecky, 5 vols (1892) · Bjørn Christian Tørrissen · CC BY-SA 3.0

A promise that required a parliament willing to keep it

The treaty's civil terms needed parliamentary sanction to take full legal effect, and the Parliament that convened afterward was not disposed to grant it. Rather than the promised toleration, the years that followed produced a new body of law - the Penal Laws - that barred Catholics from owning land on the same terms as Protestants, from entering the professions, from bearing arms, and from a long list of other civil rights, systematically dismantling the position the Treaty of Limerick had appeared to guarantee. Sarsfield himself did not stay to see it: under the treaty's military terms he and several thousand soldiers of the Limerick garrison sailed for France rather than serve a settlement they had no reason to trust, the first generation of what became known as the Wild Geese.

A grievance that outlasted everyone who signed it

The gap between what the Treaty of Limerick actually promised and what Irish Catholics actually received under the Penal Laws became, for later generations, one of the central grievances of the whole period - a broken charter cited by name for a century afterward by people who had never read its text, because its violation had shaped the legal position of most of the island's population before any of them were born.

Thirty-six of them for a quart of ale

contractionDrafted from Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland: Swift, Flood, Grattan, O'Connell (1871)

The century after the Treaty of Limerick's broken promises settled into a fixed shape: a Catholic majority excluded by the Penal Laws from land, arms, and public life, governed by a Protestant Ascendancy that was itself, on questions of trade and legislation, treated by Westminster as barely more than a dependency.

A trade strangled by statute

England's own woollen manufacturers had watched Irish wool exports grow into a serious competitor, and in 1699, at Parliament's own request, William III agreed to discourage the trade outright. The result was industrial ruin: several thousand manufacturers left the country for Germany, France and Spain, the western and southern districts were said to be nearly depopulated, and by 1707 the Irish government could not pay its own garrisons on a debt of less than £100,000. Only smuggling wool to France, which the government proved unable to stop, kept the collapse from being total. William Molyneux's tract asserting Ireland's right to legislate for itself, provoked chiefly by these restrictions, was formally condemned by the English Commons and burned by the common hangman - a fate that stood, for a generation, as a warning against pressing the argument further.

A tradesman who was not a tradesman

Jonathan Swift, the dean of St Patrick's, took up Molyneux's own argument in earnest once he had a grievance sharp enough to carry it. In 1724 the crown, without consulting the Irish Parliament, Privy Council or Lord Lieutenant, granted an Englishman named Wood a patent to coin £108,000 in copper halfpence for Ireland - a job arranged through the mistress of George I, who was to take a share of the profits. Writing anonymously as a Dublin tradesman, Swift produced a series of letters warning that the new coin would defraud whoever touched it, calculating with mock precision that thirty-six of Wood's halfpence would scarcely purchase a quart of twopenny ale. His famous Fourth Letter went further, declaring outright allegiance to the King "not as King of England, but as King of Ireland," and asserting that "government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." A reward of £300 for his identity went unclaimed; a Dublin grand jury refused twice to indict his printer despite the presiding judge's open hostility; both Houses of the Irish Parliament petitioned against the patent; and Walpole's government, unable to quell the agitation by any other means, was forced to withdraw it.

National Portrait Gallery, London · Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland: Swift, Flood, Grattan, O'Connell (1871) · Charles Jervas · Public domain

Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland: Swift, Flood, Grattan, O'Connell (1871) · J. F. Nicholls and John Taylor · Public domain

A grievance too large for any one pamphlet to settle

The halfpence themselves were a minor matter - Swift's own admirers conceded they were probably sound coin - but the affair proved that a sufficiently unified protest could still make Westminster yield, and his open citation of Molyneux's banned doctrine kept the argument for Irish legislative independence alive in print through the decades in which the Ascendancy Parliament had neither the will nor, under Poynings' Law, the legal standing to press it directly. The claim Swift and Molyneux had both raised - that Ireland was a kingdom entitled to make its own laws - would not be answered until an armed Volunteer movement gave a later generation of the same Ascendancy the leverage neither pamphleteer had possessed.

I found Ireland on her knees

contractionDrafted from Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland: Swift, Flood, Grattan, O'Connell (1871)

By 1782 the Irish Parliament, though it represented only the Protestant Ascendancy and answered still to laws passed at Westminster it had no power to amend, had behind it a force the British government could not safely dismiss: an armed Volunteer movement, originally raised to defend the country against French invasion during the American war, whose numbers and organization had given the demand for legislative independence a weight mere argument never could. A Volunteer convention at Dungannon adopted resolutions asserting Irish independence, drafted in cooperation between Henry Grattan and his old rival Henry Flood - a union of purposes striking enough on its own that observers took it as proof the government's old strategy of dividing Irish opinion by faction had finally failed.

Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland: Swift, Flood, Grattan, O'Connell (1871) · Francis Wheatley · Public domain

An escort through the ranks

The government yielded rather than face a nation "united and in arms." On 16 April 1782, a body of Volunteers drawn up before the Parliament House in Dublin parted their ranks to let Grattan pass through to move the declaration of independence himself. What followed is among the most quoted passages in Irish parliamentary history: "I am now to address a free people... I found Ireland on her knees... I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation." He closed with two Latin words - esto perpetua, may it last forever - that history would not, in the end, grant him.

Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland: Swift, Flood, Grattan, O'Connell (1871) · Francis Wheatley · Public domain

A freedom exercised by very few

The Parliament that had just won this independence remained what it had always been: purely Protestant, narrowly propertied, and answerable to an electorate that excluded the great majority of the population it governed. Grattan himself believed the achievement carried within it the seeds of further reform - that an independent Irish public opinion would go on to widen the franchise and remove the remaining disqualifications in time. Whether it would have, left to itself, became one of Irish history's enduring counterfactuals; events within two decades would not leave it the chance to find out.

A bridge built for gaiety

contractionDrafted from Gordon, History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the Year 1798 (1801)

The rising the United Irishmen had organized across much of the country in 1798 spread furthest and lasted longest in County Wexford, where rebel forces held the county town for several weeks and won a real battlefield victory at New Ross on 5 June. Government troops under General Lake rejected terms of surrender offered on the rebels' behalf, answering that no conditions could be granted to men still in arms - a refusal that, whatever it achieved militarily, removed any incentive for the rebel leadership to restrain what happened next inside the town they still held.

Ninety-seven men killed one after another

On 20 June, as government forces closed in, a mob inside Wexford began dragging prisoners - loyalist civilians and captured militia, mostly Protestant - out to the town's own bridge, a structure the chronicler who recorded the killings pointedly called too handsome and gay in its appearance for what was done there. Groups of ten to twenty were marched out under guard behind a black flag, and killed one after another on the bridge itself, mostly by four men at a time who raised the victim on their pikes while a crowd, largely women by the same account, watched and cheered each fresh group's arrival. Ninety-seven men had been killed before a priest, Father Curran, finally halted the killing - not entirely by persuasion, but aided by the sudden, accurate news that government troops were already attacking the rebel position at Vinegar Hill and needed reinforcement.

Gordon, History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the Year 1798 (1801) · George Cruikshank · Public domain

A massacre that outlived its own justification

The respite the priest secured proved lasting only because the military crisis that interrupted the killing did not pass; Vinegar Hill fell that same day, and the rebellion in Wexford collapsed within it. What the massacre left behind was harder to contain than the rising itself - a specific, well-documented atrocity that loyalist opinion would cite for generations as proof of what Catholic Ireland in arms actually meant, regardless of how unrepresentative Thomas Dixon and the mob he led at the bridge were of the rebellion's own leadership, much of which had spent the previous weeks trying, without success, to prevent exactly this.

One and a half million pounds

endDrafted from Barrington, Historic Records and Secret Memoirs of the Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1844)

The government's first attempt to pass a legislative union with Great Britain, in 1799, failed to carry the Irish House of Commons - a genuine defeat, not a formality, that showed the independence Grattan had won in 1782 could still function as more than a name. The rebellion of the previous year had changed the political weather enough, though, that a second attempt the following session found a different reception, helped along by methods a member who sat through the debates and voted against the measure took care to document in detail.

Peerages and cash, itemised

Jonah Barrington, an Irish MP who opposed the Union to the end, recorded that patronage was distributed with a thoroughness that left little to chance: offices, honours, and outright payment for individual votes. By his own reckoning, and the commissioners' records he had access to, something close to one and a half million pounds of Irish money passed to members of both Houses of Parliament under the formal heading of compensation for the loss of their seats and patronage once Ireland's own Parliament ceased to exist - alongside a fresh round of peerages for members whose support required a different kind of reward. Barrington's own judgment was blunt: without the bribes and the peerages together, a majority against the Union would have stood.

A parliament that ended itself

The Act passed. On 1 January 1801 the Kingdom of Ireland's own Parliament, the body that had declared itself a free nation under Grattan not two decades before, merged into a new Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at Westminster - not conquered, not overthrown by any foreign army, but voted out of its own existence by men many of whom had been paid, directly or indirectly, to cast exactly that vote. The kingdom William Pitt had promised would come with Catholic emancipation attached did not, in the end, receive it for another generation; the union itself outlasted every one of the men who negotiated it into being.

Barrington, Historic Records and Secret Memoirs of the Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1844) · Unknown artist · Public domain