In 1678, against a backdrop of paranoiac fear of Catholicism, Titus Oates and his followers succeeded in convincing both Parliament and the public of a Jesuit and Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and overthrow the Protestant establishment. As a result, hundreds of Catholics suffered imprisonment and 24 were executed. Here is the background of that plot, its development, and its long-term repercussions. "With the technical mastery of a seasoned professional...he retells in vivid detail an extraordinary tale of human credulity, knavery, and folly."--The Times.

Biographical studies of the two Dukes of Ormonde illuminate aspects of the operation of political power in seventeenth-century Ireland, and, on a wider European stage, the predicaments facing the nobility.

This is a study of religion, politics, and society in a period of great significance in modern Irish history. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the consolidation of the power of the Protestant landed class, the enactment of penal laws against Catholics, and constitutional conflicts that forced Irish Protestants to redefine their ideas of national identity. S. J. Connolly's scholarly and wide-ranging study examines these developments and sets them in their historical context. The Ireland that emerges from his lucid and penetrating analysis was essentially a part of ancien r--eacute--;gime Europe: a pre-industrialized society, in which social order depended less on a ramshackle apparatus of coercion than on complex structures of deference and mutual accommodation, along with the absence of credible challengers to the dominance of a landed --eacute--;lite; in which the ties of patronage and clientship were often more important than horizontal bonds of shared economic or social position; and in which religion remained a central part of personal and political motivation. - ;Abbreviations; Introduction; I. A NEW IRELAND; 1. December 1659: `A Nation Born in a Day'; 2. Settlement and Explanation; 3. A Foreign Jurisdiction; 4. Papists and Fanatics; 5. Counter-Revolution Defeated; II. AN ELITE AND ITS WORLD; 6. Uneven Development; 7. Gentlement and Others; 8. Manners; III. THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICS; 9. A Company of Madmen: The Politics of Party 1691-1714; 10. `Little Employments...Smiles, Good Dinners'; 11. Politics and the People; IV. RELATIONSHIPS; 12. Kingdoms; 13. Nations; 14. Communities; 15. Orders; V. THE INVENTIONS OF MEN IN THE WORSHIP OF GOD: RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES; 16. Numbers; 17. Catholics; 18. Dissenters; 19. Churchmen; 20. Christians; VI. LAW AND THE MAINTENANCE OF ORDER; 21. Resources; 22. The Limits of Order; 23. The Rule of Law; 24. Views from Below: Disaffection and the Threat of Rebellion; 25; Views from Above: Perceptions of the Catholic Threat; VII. `REASONABLE INCONVENIENCES: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE PENAL LAWS'; 26. `Raw Head and Bloody Bones': Parliamentary Management and Penal Legislation; 27. Debate; 28. The Conversion of the Natives; 29. Protestant Ascendancy? The Consequences of the Penal Laws; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index. -