Paul Cullen (1803-78) became archbishop of Armagh in 1849, after long service as rector of the Irish College in Rome, returned to Ireland the following vear, was translated to Dublin in 1852 and created cardinal in 1866. The picture of Cardinal Cullen as a prelate whose brand of ultramontanism made him an inveterate opponent of Irish nationalism, both constitutional and revolutionary, ought not to have survived the work of Monsignor Corish, Fr Mac-Suibhne and Dr John Whyte. In fact, this caricature has been perpetuated by such established historians as Professor Dudley Edwards, Dr F. S. L. Lyons and others. They continue to reproduce the hostile view which several generations of nationalist writers have taken of Cullen’s actions and motives in Irish politics. Take the charge that in the 1850s he tried to put an end to the clerical participation in politics which had been so important in the national movement. ‘Archbishop Cullen of Dublin attempted to withdraw the clergy completely from politics’ —thus Professor Edwards in A new history of Ireland (1972), writing as if Dr MThyte had never examined this question with the compulsive impartiality typical of him.

The usual route to the discovery of Froude’s English in Ireland in the eighteenth century, first published between 1872 and 1874, and Lecky’s History of Ireland in the eighteenth century, which first appeared as a separate work in 1892, lies through the bibliographies of more recent historians. Today, eighty to a hundred years after their appearance on the scene of history, politics and rature, these works are still authorities for the period they cover. They are monumental works: monuments to the skill, industry, personality and opinions of their authors and, in varying degrees, to their scholarship.

It is of the nature of a revolutionary conspiracy that it tends to leave as little trace as possible of its internal history; and it is not surprising that documentarv evidence of the activity of the supreme council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood is scanty. The documents printed below are for this reason of peculiar interest and importance.