In the introduction to this book on Irish political history between the 1688 Revolution and the fall of Walpole (the choice of a British political moment as terminus is telling), David Hayton situates his work in its Irish historiographical contexts. It is by now a cliché to note that the Irish eighteenth century before circa 1760—and excepting Swift—has been comparatively underresearched. In recent years Sean Connolly, Toby Barnard, and not least Hayton himself have, along with a small platoon of younger scholars, begun to probe that gray zone. But Ruling Ireland, a collection of eight linked essays, six of which were previously published elsewhere, has another, equally salient, intellectual (and institutional) context. In addition to his references to Sir Lewis Namier (2); “Namierite lines” (5); and Patrick Reilly, his undergraduate teacher at Manchester, and namierizer of pre- and postunion Anglo-Scottish history (7), it may also be relevant that Hayton toiled for many years in that great living monument to Namierite scholarship, The History of Parliament Trust. Ruling Ireland displays all of the virtues and some of the limitations of a highly particular way of doing history.

One of the shortcomings, from the historian's point of view, of the Namier method of “structural analysis” of politics is, as Herbert Butterfield trenchantly observed, that while a “freeze-frame” technique may provide illuminating snapshots of history, it is unable to track change over time. It is, in short, incapable of sustaining narrative. Indeed, John B. Owen once wrote a narrative history of eighteenth-century England after being challenged in an Oxford senior common room that no Namierite would dare attempt a textbook. Butterfield got Namier right, and the results of Owen's The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815 (Totowa, NJ, 1974) are mixed. The Namier method is also criticized for dismissing the motive force of political ideas, for “taking the mind out of history” as A. J. P. Taylor put it, and for too narrow a focus on parliamentary and high politics (quoted in Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals [New York, 1983], 169).

Hayton, in fact, matches attention to detail—based on command of the archive—with skilled, precise narrative. He is alert as well to the role of ideology in politics, especially where it is confessionally based. Thus he acknowledges the part played by “principle” in the emergence of party during Queen Anne's reign but concludes—along sound “Namierite lines,” as it were—that “personality remains the nub, since the factions out of which the whig and tory parties grew had initially derived their identity from leaders rather than ideologies” (95). Hayton's focus is narrow, as he concentrates on parliamentary, ministerial, and, in an age when church and state were inseparable, ecclesiastical politicking. He insists on the need for “political history per se” (4), and although such an approach is not as fashionable as it once was, in capable hands it can yield unexpected insights. For example, as Hayton shows, one thing that distinguished Irish from English Whigs was a marked and persistent antipathy toward Protestant dissent. The reasons for that are well known. Dissenters in England were geographically dispersed, and so, in electoral terms, the Whig consensus rested on a Low Church–nonconformist coalition. Dissenters in Ireland—effectively Presbyterians—were concentrated in Ulster. That, their Scottish origins, and from the mid-1690s increased migration from Scotland lent Irish dissent strength and cohesion or, from the standpoint of the established church, menace. Even the Whig grandees, the Brodricks, in faraway Cork, saw it like that. Hayton's parliamentary perspective helps explain why Irish Whigs allowed their anti-Dissenter animus free reign: regional concentration neutralized the Presbyterians as an electoral force. Unlike in England, in other words, hostility to dissent had no political price tag attached.

The relationships, parallels, and divergences of English (after 1707, British) and Irish politics are central to this book, as Hayton's account strikes a balance between the “gravitational” force exerted by the larger island on Irish affairs and political dynamics of purely local provenance. In outline, the trajectory he traces moves from Whig-Tory conflict to a rhetoric of patriotism. As subjects of a subordinate kingdom, restrained by commercial and constitutional impediments imposed by Westminster, it is not surprising that Irish Protestants eventually became restive. However, apart from the occasional crisis in Anglo-Irish relations, such as the Woods Ha’pence episode in 1723–24, the Dublin parliament caused the British government little trouble. As in Britain, Walpoleian stability rested on close parliamentary management, but in Ireland this was contracted out to “undertakers”—local politicians who delivered parliamentary majorities in return for control of local patronage. Hayton's analysis of the origins and conduct of the undertaker system is his most important contribution to our understanding of this period. When he moves beyond College Green, Dublin Castle, and Whitehall, it is to look at the Church of Ireland and at the impact of the 1704 Sacramental Test, which excluded Dissenters from certain offices of public trust. Quite rightly, he identifies nonconformity as a major fault line in Irish politics and society.

Of course there was much more beyond the Dublin parliament than that: an entire “hidden Ireland,” the “Ireland” of the majority of the inhabitants of the island, Catholic, Gaelic, and Jacobite; an “Ireland” in which, after the first chapter, Hayton evinces little interest. This brings us back to Namier and to a paradox. Namierism deconstructed the Whig interpretation of history, yet its palpable refusal, shared by the author of Ruling Ireland, to take Jacobitism seriously is itself a species of Whiggery.

This is a first-rate, highly professional, and necessary monograph, written for the specialist and the advanced student. When J. A. Froude wrote that early Hanoverian Ireland had no “history,” presumably he meant that it lacked the drama of the tumultuous seventeenth century or of the succeeding age of revolution. That is flat nonsense. History is about more than wars and rebellions. But, in the end, neither the clarity of Hayton's prose, nor the cogency of his argument, nor the depth of his research can rescue this period from its, shall we say, comparative dullness.