The pattern of Irish Catholic history in the fifty years following the Restoration in 1660 is well-known, as banishment, confiscation and penal laws sought to deprive the majority of the Irish population of property, wealth, power and influence. Only the brief interlude of James II offered respite, soon snuffed out by the Williamite victory. Any analysis of Catholic landholding during the period certainly confirms the truth of this account as the statistics show a stark and general decline. History, though, is rarely simple and straightforward, and this impressive and valuable book complicates our picture by examining the story of the ‘new interest’—those Catholics who expanded their estates after 1660 often by purchasing land from Protestant beneficiaries of the Cromwellian settlement. Unlike their co-religionists who had lost their lands and sought to overthrow it, these Catholics were naturally anxious to uphold the settlement, and sided with Protestants in defending it. Equally paradoxical was their position during the reign of James II, when their natural welcome for a Catholic sovereign was tempered by fears that the king would respond positively to Catholic pressure to reverse the settlement. After defeat at the hands of William, the ‘new interest’ morphed into the ‘articlemen’, as many of them sought to claim the benefit of the articles of Limerick and Galway. Yet again they had a strong incentive to engage with the Protestant government and parliament in order to ensure that the articles were observed and their estates protected, and, whilst some had Jacobite sympathies, others were clear in their opposition to the return of a monarch which would threaten their landholding.

Kinsella’s way in to the complexities and contradictions of this new Catholic interest is through the career of one man— Colonel John Brown of Westport House (1640 -1711), who, in the 1660s and 1670s, acquired one of the largest estates in Ireland. Kinsella traces the complex way in which Browne gained his wealth and sought to protect and enhance it using his expertise as a lawyer. Just as the Earl of Cork exploited the chaos of the Nine Years War, so Browne used the confusion following the Restoration to buy and sell, in hundreds of different deals, portions of land from Catholics and Protestants, clergy and laymen. By the end of the 1670s he had an enormous landholding in Connacht. But the uncertainties caused by the Jacobean attempts to reverse the land settlement, and an unwise investment in ironworks, left Browne struggling under a mountain of debt in the latter part of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth century. He sought to exploit the articles of the Treaty of Limerick by securing a provision—the bizarre Article 13—that his debts were to be paid off through a levy on the Catholic landholders who benefited from the Treaty. Given that most of his creditors were Protestant, Browne could rely upon a favourable response from parliament to enforcing this article of the Treaty at least. But it could not prevent the dissolution of the Browne estate, most of which had been sold off by 1704, though his son Peter did skilfully seek to pick up some of the pieces to rebuild the family fortune. In the end the pressure of the Penal Laws forced many of Browne’s descendants to conform in order to preserve their estates.

Unravelling this complex tale is not straightforward. Kinsella brings together a wide range of primary sources from archives in Ireland, Britain and the Netherlands in order to create a comprehensive narrative, skilfully weaving together the political, economic and legal strands to shed a valuable light on the activities of those Irish Catholics who were prepared to engage with the English crown and government. He provides a helpful corrective to the existing historiographical focus upon those who fought for the Jacobite cause and ended up in exile—the narrative of dispossession, discontent and resistance as he puts it—and, in the process, sheds light on a previously obscure aspect of post-Restoration Irish history.