In the history of Europe political revolutions are commonplace; cultural and social revolutions are somewhat less abundant; but revolutions in the ownership of property are exceedingly rare. Even the French revolution, the prototype of profound social upheaval, is today regarded by many—particularly the followers of the late Professor Cobban—as a revolution which failed to transform the proprietary class. And in England, the believers in a great seventeenth-century social revolution have either evaded or artfully rationalised the considerable evidence that the land-owning families of 1660 were essentially the land-owning families of 1640. Despite enormous fiscal pressures, the Long Parliament and its successors never embarked upon a serious effort to expropriate or extirpate those it defeated. ‘It is their reformation, not their ruin, is desired’, wrote the author of Burton’s Diary, and the recent work of Mrs Joan Thirsk, the most exactingstudent of the royalist land sales during the interregnum, tends to confirm the verdict.

During the latter part of the reign of James II, the Church of Ireland was in a position of considerable delicacy. On the one hand, there was a real fear that the church would face annihilation at the hands of the ruling administration; if the threats of the catholic population had come to fruition, if the statutes passed by the Jacobite parliament of 1689 had been put into effect or if the Tyrconnell administration had remained in power any longer than it did, this fear would almost certainly have been realized. On the other hand, by the spring of 1689, Anglican churchmen could see that a Williamite victory might spell for them—as it did for the Church of Scotland—summary disestablishment. Most Irish Anglicans had already fled to England, thereby lending support to the Williamites; the northern presbyterians had actually taken up arms on the Williamite side. Only the remnant of the Church of Ireland left in Dublin seemed to be disloyal to the protestant king: and this remnant, to save its skin, had to continue outwardly loyal to its de jure and de facto monarch, James II. Whatever the outcome of the war which they all foresaw, the leaders of the remnant of the Church of Ireland can have held little hope for the future. A Jacobite victory would almost certainly mean the triumph of the catholic church and the despoiling of the Church of Ireland: a Williamite victory might well mean the triumph of the presbyterians and a partial disestablishment. In either case the Church of Ireland, dependent for its very existence on a firm establishment, would founder.

The search for a solution to the Irish question in the 19th century led to several attempts to obtain the support of the papacy for the policies of the English government. Though England and the papacy never maintained formal diplomatic relations, mattels of common interest were dealt with by a succession of agents resident in Rome. Around 1850 began the practice of getting an envoy formally accredited to Tuscany to reside in Rome and to treat with the Vatican. The most famous of these was Odo Russell (later Lord Ampthill) whose stay in Rome lasted from 1858 to 1870. After the disappearance of Tuscany as a separate state in 1860 his accreditation was to Naples. In 1861, on the fall of Naples, he ceased formally to be accredited. The pope would not, of course, treat with any envoy accredited to the new kingdom of Italy. Russell kept the government’s view of Irish problems before the pope and may have been partly responsible for Pio Nono’s condemnation of Fenianism in January 1870. Russell’s successor, Sir Henry Jervoise, remained only until 1874 when he was withdrawn by Lord Derby and not replaced.

The value of the Irish Registry of Deeds as a source, particularly for social and economic historians, has long been underestimated. It first received serious consideration in a lecture delivered to the Conference of Irish Historians in 1943 by Mr Samuel Weir. Mr Weir’s estimate of the usefulness of this source ran as follows : ‘while making no claim that the documents preserved in the Registry of Deeds are primarily of historical value, it is claimed that they can be of immense value as corroborative evidence’. This guarded, almost apologetic statement was typical of the diffident attitude towards the registry which prevailed among historians both then and for some time thereafter.