William III’s policy for ending the Irish war went through many changes during the fifteen months between the battle of the Boyne and the surrender of Limerick. With the varying fortunes of the war it oscillated between unconditional surrender and the securing of a negotiated settlement by the grant of liberal terms. William regarded the Irish war as an exasperating sideshow which diverted his forces from the real scene of action in the Netherlands, where he and his allies were hard put to it to withstand the pressure of the French. From the beginning of his reign his policy had been to induce the Irish Jacobites to surrender upon terms, and it was with the greatest reluctance that he decided in the spring of 1690 that he must himself go to Ireland and fight the matter out.

There goes the man who killed the home rule bill.’ Few will question the truth of this comment on Joseph Chamberlain. Yet the man who so vigorously opposed the home rule bill had from the very beginning of the second Gladstone administration, in which he held the comparatively junior office of president of the board of trade, been one of the members of the cabinet most anxious to consider Irish needs and opinion. He had criticized Forster’s coercion policy and had pressed for remedial legislation. He had acted as the link between the cabinet and the negotiators of the ‘Kilmainham treaty’. For a brief period he had been conspicuous for the relative closeness of his relations with Parnell and other leading Irish nationalists. ‘ I have spoken freely and openly to him [Parnell] and to many other Irish members, since Mr Forster ceased to be Irish secretary,’ he wrote to Gladstone on 7 June 1882, after his attention had been called to newspaper comments on the fact that he had been observed in conversation with Parnell in a lobby of the house of commons the day previously. At the end of 1884 and in 1885 he had engaged in negotiations with Parnell with a view to the establishment in Ireland of what later came to be known as a ‘national council’, but at the time was usually termed a ‘central board’.