Abstract
Professor Jacqueline Hill has rendered invaluable service, across more than four decades, to the historical profession in Ireland. One remarkable piece of testimony is the front page of successive issues of Irish Historical Studies, where she appears, year after year from 1978, as Secretary to the Committee of Management, unobtrusively but effectively underwriting the work of successive editorial teams. It was largely thanks to her efforts that the ambitious aim of providing readers with a comprehensive annual listing of new books and articles across the field of Irish history was not abandoned at the end of the 1970s, when titles became too numerous to be listed in the journal itself. Instead a succession of experiments culminated in the creation of Irish History Online, now hosted by the Royal Irish Academy and a vital tool for Irish historians of all specialisms. Later she bravely stepped outside her own area of expertise to take on the massive task of seeing the final volume of the New History of Ireland, with more than a thousand pages of text, through to its publication in 2003. Meanwhile her own research, notably her study of Dublin corporation from the Restoration to the era of Daniel O’Connell, has been a significant and influential contribution. On all of these grounds her Festschrift, bringing together some of the leading figures in early modern Irish history, is a well-deserved tribute.
Professor Hill's great contribution, in her Dublin study and in other work, was to move decisively away from lazy cliches about a supposedly cohesive and all powerful ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, and to focus instead on the many levels, competing and overlapping, at which power was exercised in ancien régime Ireland. The same concern runs through the chapters collected in this volume. Colm Lennon demonstrates how the Dublin parish of St Audeon's, and within it the Fraternity of St Anne, provided a forum for cooperative action between Catholic and Protestant members of the city's long-established families. Raymond Gillespie tracks the rise in the city's politics of the apothecary turned property developer Mark Quinn, and probes the possible connection between the loss of his prized civic eminence in the factional struggles of the Restoration period and his suicide in 1674. Brendan Twomey shows how the celebrated conflict between Charles Lucas and the Dublin aldermanic elite had part of its roots, not in issues of high constitutional principle, but in the complex arrangements that financed improvements to the city's water supply. Mary Ann Lyons shows how changes during the eighteenth century in the ancient practice of riding the franchises reflected the declining economic and political authority of the guilds.
The riding of the franchise relates to another major theme in the history of the eighteenth-century town, civic pride and the emergence of a culture of urban improvement. Jonathan Wright provides a revealing case study of contemporary assumptions and preoccupations, through a discussion of John Black, who despite a long residence in Bordeaux retained a lively interest in the progress of his native Belfast. James Kelly, in a dense study of public opinion in Dublin, provides a salutary caution against linear narratives of steadily broadening ambition. From the 1750s to the 1770s, newspaper reports suggest that public interest in the reshaping of the city centre was at best intermittent, with new proposals facing opposition both from commercial vested interests and from a public alert to hints of speculative profiteering. Enthusiasm for expansive new building projects became more evident in the 1780s and early 1790s, only to fall off again as complaints multiplied of soaring housing costs and alleged corruption among decision-makers.
Two other contributions look beyond Dublin to provincial locations. David Hayton, examining the short-lived but fraught controversy over alleged harassment of Church of Ireland clergymen by Presbyterian units of the milita in the aftermath of the Jacobite scare of 1715, expertly dissects the different levels of political interaction – local, national and regional – that were involved. Toby Barnard, with equal skill, mines an apparently unique record of challenges to voters in the Dungarvan by-election of 1758 to provide insights into what qualification as a potwalloper could mean in practice. The numerous objections to voters on the grounds of their not being Protestants, meanwhile, reveal an unexpected promiscuity in the church-going habits of some individuals. In provincial Dungarvan, as in Dublin's St Audeon's, the image of a society in which rigid confessional boundaries overrode all other divisions and connections cannot be taken entirely for granted.