Even before the Williamite war had ended proposals were being made for militia reform in Ireland. The fact that the force was ‘only voluntary’ was seen as a distinct disadvantage. Moreover, it was realised that this was an issue in which ‘the king's conjunction with the parliament’ was essential to allow a satisfactory outcome. The force existed only under royal prerogative, being called together by royal proclamation as circumstances demanded. The aim now became to establish in Ireland a militia force that would enjoy a statutory existence and control. A statutory force, while giving parliament a say in its existence, also had the advantage that it could be made to involve compulsory service and that a regular vote of credit could be expected. That process would take almost two and a half decades to complete.

Securing legislation would be complicated not just by political rivalries, but also by the Irish legislative process. In the wake of the Williamite conquest the Irish parliament would become an indispensable part of the Irish governmental system, yet its independence was severely limited by the existence of Poynings' Law. This medieval statute ensured that the Irish parliament could only consider measures already approved in London by the monarch and his council, and that no Irish parliament would sit before a legislative programme had been prepared. In order to circumvent this provision, and in an attempt to control its own agenda, the Irish parliament developed the ‘heads of bills’ procedure.

On 21 February 1760 the French privateer, surgeon and smuggler Francois Thurot anchored his squadron of three small ships off the County Antrim coast at Kilroot, just north of the town of Carrickfergus. His journey to this point had begun in early October the previous year when he had left Dunkirk with a force of five ships and more than a thousand troops. Evading the Royal Navy blockade, he had sailed north to Gothenburg and taken on supplies. From here he had travelled to Bergen, before heading to the Faroe Islands. Four days' sailing then placed the small fleet off the northern coast of Ireland. Adverse weather prevented an intended landing at Malin and a proposed attack on the city of Derry. Running low on supplies, the French were forced to sail for Scotland, mooring off the island of Islay on 16 February 1760. It was from here that the now depleted force headed once again for Ireland by way of the North Channel, coming to rest off Kilroot.

Originally the mission of Thurot, and the troops his ships carried, had been to attack some point in Ireland with the intention of creating a diversion from a largescale invasion of England. However, the defeat of the proposed invasion force at Quiberon Bay in November 1759, and the loss of two of Thurot's ships and a quarter of his troops relatively early in the voyage, effectively transformed an organised military expedition into a privateering adventure.

In eighteenth-century Scotland, where no militia was formed until 1797 despite sustained agitations for such a force from much earlier, support for a militia was largely centred around two key themes: the national and the social. A Scottish militia was promoted because of a need to preserve Scottish ‘national independence after the Union’, and the necessity of maintaining harmonious ‘social relations’ through local military service. In England the militia issue was more complex. At first support for a statutory militia was clearly an attempt to oppose and limit Crown power and influence, and also to balance the ambitions of central government with the prerogatives and status of local elites. The Westminster act of 1757 was indicative of the continued tendency to strip the Crown of its powers, and perhaps marks the final victory of parliament over the monarchy. Calls for a militia had generally been supported by ‘backward-looking’ Whigs. However, the issue became increasingly depoliticised from the 1750s, and the militia debate became increasingly ‘utilitarian’, with parliament and wider society concerned about the militia's efficiency and utility rather than its political importance. Military and national defence needs finally defeated purely political concerns regarding the necessity of a militia. From 1786 the militia in England had become a government prerogative. The force had already become broadly acceptable to all, not least because of the decline and virtual extinction of the radical, republican Whig concepts that had been vital in initially supporting the institution. At least in its complexity, the situation in Ireland was comparable with that in England.

The landing of Thurot at Carrickfergus allowed the King's Irish subjects to exhibit their implacable loyalty. In particular Ulster's Protestants could both demonstrate their unswerving fidelity and bathe in the afterglow of their own supposed martial prowess. It also provided an issue around which parliamentary Patriotism could crystallise, in opposition to the alleged incompetence of the Dublin administration. Debates concerning the militia in Ireland became central to this. In the meantime the Seven Years War continued to be fought in its many theatres, and the Irish militia continued to carry out its accepted tasks. The death of George II and the accession of his son brought a re-issuing of militia commissions, and a new birthday to commemorate. It also necessitated an election. Notably, the issue of the militia did not appear to be an important one at the hustings, such as they were. However the reappearance of organised agrarian protest, together with the entry of Spain into the war in 1762 provided a new, twofold impetus to action both in parliament and on the ground.

The emergence of Whiteboyism in the province of Munster in 1761 brought new duties for the militia there. Protests by small farmers and labourers against enclosures of common land, the shift from labour-intensive tillage farming to pasturage, and eventually also the payment of tithes, developed into a series of intimidating nocturnal attacks and threats. In April 1762 a Dublin writer called for the ‘forming of independent companies’ across the country to ‘give a confidence and firmness to the Protestant interest’ and to counter the threat of the Whiteboys.

Lord Townshend emerged in the wake of the confused sessions of 1767–9 as a resident lord lieutenant. Whereas previous viceroys had stayed in the country only for as long as the meeting of parliament made it necessary, Townshend, either on his own initiative or at the behest of the London government, made the decision to become resident in Ireland for the entire duration of his tenure of office. His appetite for reforming the government of Ireland went much further than this symbolic measure, however. Frustrated by the inability and unwillingness of the undertakers to deliver the augmentation promptly, Townshend began to disassemble the political machinery of the country. By dismissing numerous officeholders and massively expanding the patronage of the Crown, Townshend and his able chief secretary, Sir George Macartney, created a ‘Castle party’ through which they themselves could wield influence in the Irish Commons without the need of intermediaries. As a result the lord lieutenancies of Townshend and his successor Lord Harcourt have been described as marking ‘the highpoint of the British government's policy of closer control’ in Ireland. With the administration exerting so much control and influence within the Irish parliament, it was no longer necessary for it to offer major concessions to the opposition in order to ensure the passing of its own measures. The former undertakers found themselves sidelined and, in a fit of righteous indignation, joined the opposition.

The Militia Act of 1778 was the product of the Patriot opposition in the House of Commons. Militia reform had been a concern of this group for almost twenty years. The act ultimately passed into law, however, only because it had become acceptable to the government in London, where previous opposition to militia reform had been overcome by the need to establish a force that would be capable of strengthening Irish defences during the war and of maintaining internal security at a time when the regular army garrison was being depleted.

In the meantime the people had taken matters into their own hands. In the wake of the growing threat of invasion or a possible rising, and even before the Militia Act passed, one observer reckoned that there were almost nine thousand men ‘already armed in independent companies’. Traditionally this rush to the colours began on St Patrick's Day 1778 in the town of Belfast. Such actions were nothing new. Various emergencies over the previous half century had seen Irish Protestants mobilise themselves. The obvious similarities to former crises and the reactions of the Protestant population were not lost on contemporaries, who saw the rush of men to arm themselves for their own defence as comparable to events in 1745, or simply as the Protestants of the country arming themselves ‘without waiting on the usual commissions’. The difference was that under the old militia legislation such volunteers could be legitimised, even retrospectively, by the issuing of royal commissions.

By the mid 1780s Ireland and Britain were at peace with the world. The Volunteers had lost their raison d'être, and the debate over a militia in Ireland had been transformed. A militia was now clearly seen by all as an antidote to the residual Volunteering phenomenon. Establishing an Irish militia would defeat the political pretensions of the Volunteers and the small radical minority in parliament who still supported them. This situation politicised the Irish militia issue more heavily than had been the case since the 1760s. However, the fundamental constitution of the debate was now very different and, with Volunteering in decline, a militia was less of a necessity to their opponents than it had been a few years before. The apparent threat of the Volunteers, and lord lieutenant Rutland's obsession with displacing them with a militia, remained. In a broader context Ireland was being disturbed by the violent agrarian protests of the Rightboys in Munster, and sectarian clashes between Protestant ‘Peep o'Day Boys’ and Catholic ‘Defenders’ in the north. It was these events, coupled with his lack of confidence in the army, that prompted Rutland to fear in late 1785 the ‘reconstituting the Volunteer corps in all their dangerous and illegal extent’.

A month after Rutland's observation Thomas Orde finally finished the drafting of the militia bill he had sought to introduce into the Irish parliament at the beginning of the year. It was modelled on the 1762 Westminster act that had transformed the English militia into a permanent force.

This work has been completed over an extended period. My interest in the Irish militia in the eighteenth century was first sparked by research undertaken as an undergraduate in the 1990s. Further work led me to realise that the organisation, or at least mention of it, was a ubiquitous feature of the period. For the most part though, historians have been sceptical of its importance and utility. This study is, in part, an attempt to give the Irish militia in its pre-1793 form, and the ideas that surrounded it, the prominence they deserve. It highlights the social importance of the militia, especially in the years prior to the 1760s. The militia's roles in defining men's places in local hierarchies, and reinforcing both the connexions and divisions in society, are considered. It also examines the militia as an organisation through which the relationships between subjects and the state could be negotiated. Militia service drew men into alliance with the state, and demonstrated to outsiders the nature of the nation's polity. The political actions and rhetoric that surrounded the militia are also considered.

The Irish militia issue differed substantially from that which existed elsewhere in the king's dominions. English true Whigs saw a militia, an army of citizens, as a necessary counter-balance to a standing army dependent upon the monarchy for its authority, and through which royal patronage could be exercised. In Scotland a militia was desired to demonstrate Scottish independence of spirit, and to allow for the maintenance of traditional social interdependence.

The creation of a statutory militia in Ireland marked out a new phase in the force's development. For the first time the militia had its foundations in law, and not just in established practice and precedent. The 1716 act had been passed in the wake of a threatened invasion. Earlier attempts to pass such legislation had failed for a variety of reasons. For some at least, the final act was a compromise, with Dissenters barred from commissioned service. The act's passage underlines the complexities of the legislative system, and the divisions within it. Clashes over the militia had taken place on party grounds, and between the upper and lower houses of the Irish parliament. English and Irish interests also came to be at odds. However, a force controlled by law, and in which the legislature and the executive had their parts to play, had been established. The militia would exist in this form, at least on paper, for the next sixty years.

The 1716 act ‘to make the militia of this kingdom more useful’ contained 15 clauses. These stipulated that all Protestant males between 16 and 60 should be listed for possible service, with those failing to appear being fined. Commissions of array were to be issued by the Crown when required, while officers were to be nominated by the lieutenant governors of each county. Town militias could be called out by their officers as necessary.

The practice of Protestant civilians in Ireland banding together to act in defence of themselves and the state probably dates back to the earliest efforts of the Crown to establish Protestant colonies in the country. Under the Tudors and Stuarts a series of ‘plantations’ were undertaken, in which English, and eventually Scottish, settlers were brought to Ireland and established in communities across the country. The intentions were to develop the country economically and socially, promote Protestantism, and secure the territory from both foreign invasion and domestic rebellion. The creation of King's and Queen's Counties from the territories of Laois and Offaly in the 1550s was the first such venture. Begun as a purely military enterprise, it developed into a much wider attempt to settle the area. In 1556 explicit instructions were issued by the Crown that those receiving land were to equip themselves with weapons and be prepared ‘without wages, for service within that our realm against all enemies, rebels and traitors’. Additionally, for every ploughland granted they were to maintain an English archer. The Munster plantation, begun almost thirty years later, saw similar seigniorial responsibilities imposed, with the result that a 12,000- acre estate would have yielded a force of 15 horsemen and 48 foot soldiers to be raised from the tenantry. The Ulster plantation, begun in 1609, required the new proprietors to provide arms for their tenants. Establishing a militia amongst the ‘stubborn and rebellious people’ of Ulster had been an early consideration.

By the end of June 1782 the Irish Volunteers had been in existence for more than three years. Their members were almost exclusively Protestant, invariably loyal, and consisted overwhelmingly of the ‘middling’ class of men. They were predominantly led by their social betters: men from the established elites who controlled the land and politics of the country. This large, armed body of men outside the confines of the law was regarded with suspicion by the government. This was not least because they were perceived as having played key roles in the establishment of free trade and legislative independence. Arguably, Volunteering had considerably expanded the active political constituency in Ireland, and coupled political agitation with the threat of armed force. In the Irish parliament however, a further constitutional debate had now emerged. Despite the granting of free trade, disputes had arisen between Irish and Portuguese interests that seemed to demand a clarification of the relevant laws. The Methuen Treaty of 1703 had allowed English merchants to trade with Portugal on favourable terms and, with free trade, Irish merchants expected to be granted the same privileges. However, the Portuguese government was reluctant to admit Irish textiles on the same terms as English goods, as they undercut domestic manufactures. In turn, London was unwilling to pressure the Portuguese and risk alienating a vital European ally. With this in mind, the focus of many, especially in the Patriot grouping, shifted to the apparently fragile condition of legislative independence.

Historians have long recognised the importance of the militia in eighteenth-century England, Scotland and the American colonies. This has been seen to lie not just in its military roles, but in its provision of a key political battleground, on which issues of the relationships between rulers and ruled, and the structure of the constitution, were disputed. Militia-type organisations outside the Anglophone world have also drawn the attentions of historians, in particular those in the United Provinces, Geneva and France. The rights of citizens to bear arms, their consequent roles in the state, and the implications of such service for subjects and rulers, have all been recognised as having profound consequences within legislative and governmental systems. They were especially acute in this period because a central part of the process of the consolidation of state power in eighteenth-century Europe was the expansion of national armed forces, and in particular standing armies. Considerations of conflict, competition and empire led to the rise of the ‘fiscal–military state’, in which the expansion of regular armed forces was coupled with increasing taxation, and growing professionalism in government. Arguably the composite monarchy of Britain and Ireland represented the archetypal example of such changes. However, the political, constitutional and military issues that surrounded the concept of the militia in eighteenth-century Ireland have rarely been considered. Where the force itself has been mentioned it has generally been as a social project rather than a military or political one, and stress has usually been laid upon its inefficiency and ineffectiveness.