While the reign of Edward II has long been recognised as a critical period in the historical development of Ireland, it is less well known that the early years of the reign of Edward III also represent a critical phase. As in the previous reign, the crisis was connected with Anglo-Scottish warfare. In 1315 it was the Scots under Edward Bruce who had taken the initiative and overrun Ireland. It was the Scots again who landed in Ulster in 1327, hoping once more to enlist Irish support for their cause. In the following year the dying Robert Bruce paid a last visit to Ulster, demonstrating in a peaceful yet forceful manner that the initiative still lay with the Scots. By 1335, Edward III had shown his qualities as a military commander and the situation had changed: an expedition set sail from Ireland to co-operate with the English in an invasion of Scotland.

The details of this episode are of more than intrinsic interest. The surviving documents that record the organisation of the expedition illustrate the workings of the English dominion in Ireland in the crucial period following the Bruce invasions. Whether or not the expedition marked a restoration of royal authority in Ireland is a question that calls for an analysis of the events and circumstances that formed the background to the expedition of 1335.

It is a historical truism that the ‘Irish question’ dominated British parliamentary life during the last third of the nineteenth century. For good reason does Sir Robert Ensor give one of the chapters in England, 1870-1914 the title ‘The ascendancy of Parnell’. Yet it is the custom to treat the Irish nationalist contingent at Westminster as concerned only with Irish questions. It has been observed, to be sure, that the ‘Irish question’ had a highly significant impact upon English affairs. The Irish land acts of 1870 and 1881, for example, have come to be seen as a type of government intervention in economic affairs foreshadowing the twentieth-century welfare state. One aspect of the existence of an Irish third party at Westminster has, however, been curiously neglected, the impact of Irish M.Ps upon essentially English political controversies. It is with one such controversy that this paper is concerned, the notorious Bradlaugh case.

One of the grounds on which standard histories of Ireland find fault with the Spanish expedition which Don Juan del Aguila led into Kinsale in 1601 is that it came to the wrong place. If, our authorities say, the expedition had come to Munster a year or two earlier, before the insurrection had been crushed there, it might have stood some chance; but now it ought to have come to some northern or western port where O’Neill and O’Donnell could readily have joined forces with it, and not to a port ‘in a province already subdued and all the length of Ireland from the northern chiefs’ (Curtis). The Spaniards in 1601 ‘had come at the wrong time and in the wrong place’ (Hayden and Moonan).

This judgement, in the form stated by D’Alton, is canonised by Hayden and Moonan and by Curtis, who both merely summarise D’Alton. Underlying this view, it will be noted, is the assumption that Aguila, had he so desired, might have landed elsewhere on the Irish coast. While accepting without challenge this assumption, some writers not unnaturally have wondered whether there might not be some hidden explanation for what at first sight appears to have been a ‘dreadful mistake’. Perhaps the Spaniards chose a southern port because their ulterior design was to launch an attack on England (O’Faolain’s suggestion); perhaps the journey to Ulster was considered too far, Ulster’s coasts too inhospitable (Falls). Father Jones, whose conclusions are otherwise tentative, has shown that the expedition (finally at least) did intend to go to Kinsale.