In June 1474 the Irish Council in Dublin dispatched a number of messengers in ‘enbassade’ to King Edward IV of England. Led by Sir Gilbert Debenham (d.1500), their mission was to deliver a report to the king and his council outlining the ‘myserable state’ of the colony as well as the need for immediate royal intervention in Ireland for the ‘relef and socour of his said land’. Most striking among the items listed in the report was the fear that a Scottish invasion of Ireland was imminent and that the Scottish king, James III, ‘havyng in … mynd the grete conquast that Bruce some tyme sens the kyng of Scotts made in the same land’ planned to ‘reduce all thye [i.e. Edward IV’s] land to the obeysuance of the king of Scotts’. No such invasion occurred, however. The rather exaggerated belief that ‘10,000 and more’ Scottish troops ‘had entred and dwellen in Ullester’ more than likely reflected the increased Scottish military presence in western Scotland and the Firth of Clyde in the lead-up to James III's forfeiture of the earldom of Ross – the title to which was then held by the fourth (and last) Lord of the Isles, John MacDonald (d.1503). These security concerns were nevertheless not completely unfounded. Instead, English anxieties regarding the possibility of Scottish intervention in Ireland were symptomatic not only of an active royal Scottish interest in Ireland but also of much older and established geopolitical concerns.

By the late fourteenth century England, despite being the most powerful kingdom, financially, economically and militarily, could no longer dominate insular politics. Under Edward I the ‘first English empire’ had reached its zenith by the year 1300; the king's wars of conquest in Scotland, however, resulted in the destabilisation and eventual reorientation of ‘British’ politics. Not only was the pan-insular aristocratic nexus that had bound communities of Anglo-Norman ancestry in relative stability since the early thirteenth century now shattered, the establishment of the Bruce monarchy and the strengthening of Franco-Scottish ties greatly increased England’s vulnerability within the wider archipelagic context. The outbreak and course of the Hundred Years War served to ingrain political alliances in western Europe and by the late fourteenth century the English had suffered a number of major reverses in the continental war, becoming entangled in France and the Iberian peninsula.