The experience of Charles II in exile on the European Continent in the 1650s has received considerable attention from historians. Less so the Royalists who stood at his side and, until this volume, the small circle of Irish courtiers who remained with him through his years of difficulty. In The King's Irishmen, a finely nuanced and entertaining account of the Stuart court in exile during the years of the Interregnum, Mark R. F. Williams explores the multiple conceptions of loyalty, honor, and service that resided among Irish Royalists. In doing so, he has illuminated, “a period of history which has been left almost entirely in the shadow of the War of the Three Kingdoms” (17). The book's nine chapters each offers a profile of a member (or, in one instance, a fraternity) of the group of prominent Irishmen working on behalf of Charles Stuart. In this book, the involvement of Irishmen in the Royalist cause is complicated by their conflicting motives, the bitter rivalries that divided the Catholic powers; and Vatican reluctance to support the restoration of a Protestant monarch.

For the Irishmen who stood by Charles II in his decade of travail, “exile was not, by definition, a fixed place” (13). The king's court moved across national borders due to circumstances beyond the control of the exiles, and throughout the 1650s, their priorities were shaped by the realities of political, religious, and cultural change in Europe and the Three Kingdoms. This was all the more difficult because of the deep roots of Royalist culture in tradition, community, and locality. But in the darkest hours of exile—remote from the immediate circumstances of the Three Kingdoms—the Royalist cause became a pliant and malleable concept, as much abstraction as reality. Williams points out that malleability on issues of religion and government had been forestalled in previous decades by the political imperatives of the Three Kingdoms. Now removed from the anchor of tradition, community, and locality, even loyalty became malleable. The disruptions that accompanied exile, we learn, “were both impossible to ignore and difficult to surmount,” but they provided opportunities to shape the cause of the young monarch (9). This led to conflicting—even contradictory—aspirations within the exiled court of Charles II.

The overarching concern of Peter Talbot, a Jesuit priest and the most prominent of the four Talbot brothers in the Royalist court, was the plight of the Catholics of Ireland. Though a moderate compared to some others among the Irish clergy on the Continent, Talbot tirelessly spun out a web connecting the restoration of Charles II to European anxieties (the leveling influences of the English Commonwealth, Spanish vulnerability in the Atlantic, declining Vatican's influence, among others). And Talbot had a rich imagination. Perhaps the young king would embrace Catholicism? If not, perhaps an alliance of continental Catholic powers would coalesce around the restoration of a Protestant prince. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Woven into Talbot's web were occasional misrepresentation of the king's commitment to the Catholics of Ireland. Talbot “created immense tensions,” Williams tells us (145). Irish expectations did not always align with reality.

In the exiled court, James Butler, the marquis of Ormond, stood in sharp contrast to the over-busy Peter Talbot. “My Lord of Ormond,” Charles II wrote in 1650, “is a person whom I depend upon more than anyone living” (259–60). In The King's Irishmen, Ormond is a man of strength and depth of character, “an individual as divided between pragmatism and idealism as the Europe in which he and his king now found themselves adrift” (21). Williams situates Ormond in both a historical and a historiographical perspective. Perhaps the most controversial—as well as the most interesting—of the king's Irishmen in exile, Ormond was the very model of the seventeenth-century aristocrat, the exemplar of honor and duty. A Protestant member of an old English Catholic family, Ormond skillfully negotiated the thorny terrain of confessional boundaries as the king's chief representative in the courts of Europe.

The King's Irishmen: The Irish in the Exiled Court of Charles II, 1649–1660, underscores the significance of the deeply rooted and widely dispersed Irish networks on the European Continent as instruments in the Royalist cause. Readers will not miss the irony that the continental communities of Irish clergy, soldiers, merchants, and public officials—well connected to the colleges, armies, commerce, and courts of Europe—had grown in size and strength in the seventeenth century largely as a consequence of English policies in Ireland under the early Stuarts that had bred instability, distrust, and sectarian divisions.

Mark Williams has made an important contribution to early-modern Irish and continental European historiography. This book will fit comfortably onto the growing bookshelf of volumes dealing with the Irish in Europe—as well as the Irish abroad more generally—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some readers might wish to have learned more about the immediate impact of the events surrounding the Restoration on the community of Irishmen depicted here. That is not so much a criticism of this book as a reflection on the richness of Williams’ subject and the significance of the Restoration for Irishmen at home and overseas. In the decades after 1660, the hard realities of English politics that shaped the Restoration settlement bred a new set of grievances for Irish Catholics. This does not diminish the role of Irish courtiers who sustained the young king and the Royalist cause in the shadowland of exile.