The Communities of Ireland and the British State, 1660–1707

Abstract

In 1682 the old Cromwellian survivor Colonel Richard Lawrence argued that ‘if the majority of proprietors may give the denomination to a country, which usually it doth, Ireland is become west England’. Those Protestant proprietors were ‘governed by English laws enacted by English parliaments and administered by English judges, guarded by an English army, and governed by English ministers of state … and all this administered by the absolute commission from the king of England’. Moreover, the Protestants in Ireland were ‘not only English by privilege, as Paul was a Roman, but English by blood, and many of them English by birth’. Sixteen years later another pamphleteer wrote, simply, that Ireland was now ‘an English Protestant country’.¹ Yet the provincial identity to which Law-rence and others laid claim is called into question by the polemical context in which the claim appears. Similarly, when seventeenth-century Scots used the term ‘North Britons’, the political context cannot be ignored. Yet the inhabitants of eastern or southern England did not need to insist upon their English identity: who would dispute it?