Will I love Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766?

In this book Ó Ciardha deals with the red-haired stepchild of the Jacobite movement. 

Despite the fact that support for the exiled Stuarts was strongest in Ireland and that the tens of thousands of Catholic Irish soldiers in European armies were a major military and diplomatic resource for the Stuart monarchs, Ireland got short shrift in all Jacobite policymaking. 

This is because Protestant religious prejudice meant Catholicism, and Catholic Irish soldiers in particular, were politically toxic in England and Scotland. To control the British Isles the Stuarts needed to control England and Scotland and so the Irish Jacobites were always… show more.

If Scotland supplied the largest number of Jacobite forces in the Risings at home, Ireland had the largest number of Jacobites in the service of foreign armies, as Catholics had no possibility of an army career in Britain at this time.

Ó Ciardha’s book is the best single-volume study of the trajectory of Irish Jacobitism – its politics, its plots, and its culture, over the many decades when it was a serious political option.