Padraig Lenihan – författare

The seventeenth century was one of the most dramatic in Irish history. This is the story of the civil wars, religious controversies and battles for home rule that ripped across Stuart Ireland and lay the foundations for the modern troubles.

This groundbreaking and controversial new study tells the story of two nations in Ireland; an Irish Catholic nation and a Protestant nation, emerging from a blood-stained century. This survey confronts the violence and enmity inherent in the consolidation of conquest. Lenihan contends that the overriding grand narrative of this period was one of conflict and dispossession as the native elite was progressively displaced by a new colonial ruling class. This struggle was not confined to war but also had cultural, religious, economic and social reverberations. At times the darkness was relieved throughout the period by episodes of peaceful cooperation. Consolidating Conquest places events in Ireland in the context of three Stuart kingdoms, religious rivalry within and between those kingdoms, and the shifting balance of power as monarchy and commonwealth, Whitehall and Westminster, fought for ultimate power.

The Boyne was, and is, politically potent: how many other battles are commemorated every year? Yet it was militarily indecisive. The largest battle in Irish history, it concluded the English War of Succession, the Irish and French-backed James II being defeated by William III securing a Protestant monarchy in England.A startling new history of the largest and most famous battle in Irish history, this book incorporates findings of a series of newly discovered sources. Was the Boyne really as important as William of Orange's propagandists claimed, or was it, as the losers--the French and many of the Irish--insisted, "only a skirmish"?Padraig Lenihan reconciles the political potency of the Boyne with its military indecisiveness, challenging the conventional view of this most controversial event.

Left for dead at the sack of Drogheda, Richard Talbot later ingratiated himself with the future James II by plotting to assassinate Oliver Cromwell. Using fresh primary sources The Last Cavalier: Richard Talbot (1631-91) traces how Talbot, though a gallant, gamester and 'cunning dissembling courtier', grew to be more than just another Restoration rake. He took on the cause of reconciling his countrymen's allegiance to London and to Rome and, under a Catholic king, clawing back their lost status and power. Talbot, now Earl of Tyrconnell and viceroy, almost succeeded but after the Boyne (where he led the Jacobite army in battle) he lost his grip. The Last Cavalier is the first full-scale biography of a great though not a good man.