On 14 February 1669 Charles II informed the committee of foreign affairs that he intended to remove the duke of Ormond from the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland. This announcement ended eighteen months of intrigue, speculation and rumour, and Orinond’s second period in office as viceroy. It seemed to contemporaries that the fickle king had again yielded to the pressure and importunities of his ambitious and politically ascendant courtiers. On hearing the news of Ormond’s dismissal Pepys commented that it showed ‘the power of Buckingham and the poor spirit of the king’. Few of Pepys’s contemporaries would have quarrelled with that judgment and few historians have seriously questioned it since.

The Irish act of 21 George III, cap. 10, and more particularly its eighth clause, derived its nickname from the borough of Newtown, now Newtownards, Co. Down, which was then and for a decade thereafter in dispute between the families of Ponsonby and Stewart. According to the wording of its preamble, the eighth clause was designed merely ‘ … for the more effectual quieting of corporations and securing the rights of persons who have been or shall be elected into the offices of aldermen and burgesses’; yet historians have attributed to it purposes more sinister and consequences more dire than this innocent, conservative wording would ever suggest. (The wording of preambles and titles should not of course always be taken at face value: it was after all an act ‘ … for the further regulating the election of members of parliament and preventing the irregular proceedings of sheriffs and other officers in electing and returning such members’ which in 1728 provided for the automatic disfranchisement of all Roman Catholics.) The preamble to the eighth clause of the Newtown act goes on to state that, owing to a dearth of protestant inhabitants of appropriate standing, many corporations have been forced, in violation of their charters, to elect as burgesses and other officers persons who are not resident within their precincts; and the clause purports only to be giving legal authority to an existing situation, by ‘quieting’ such persons in the possession of their offices. Historians, on the other hand, have seen the dispensing with the residence qualification as a pernicious innovation, not as a legalisation of the status quo. Accordingly they have blamed the Newtown act for strengthening the hands of borough patrons and curtailing still further the independence of the corporations, and all this merely to gratify the particular local ambitions of one over-powerful family, the Ponsonbys, at the expense of their rivals, the Stewarts.

Nineteenth century industrialism brought intensified immigration to the cities of England. E. P. Thomson, in The making of the English working class, generalized on one segment of the new urban population, the Irish :

Between 1801 and 1921 Ireland in common with the rest of the British Isles was represented in the house of commons at Westminster. During this time the basis of the Irish representation underwent considerable change both in relation to the number of Irish M.P.s, electors and population and in comparison with the number of M.P.s, electors and population for Great Britain. The purpose of this article ir, by means of statistical tables, to analyse the Irish electorate between 1868 and 1915 and in particular to show the effect of the electoral reforms of 1868 and 1884–5. The electorate of Ireland will be viewed not only in the context of the separate Irish constituencies and the proportion of electors to adult males and population in each but also in the context of the whole of the British Isles and the total number of electors and population with the proportion of electors to population in each country. As well the average number of electors and population per M.P. for the different countries will be shown.

In the mid-1880s English political leaders found it essential to develop new policies for Ireland. While the liberals, led by Gladstone, were converted to the home-rule solution, the tories sought to preserve the union with a two-pronged policy. First, Ireland’s economic disorders were to be cured by vigorously developing the system of state-aided land purchase, and by having the imperial treasuly assume a large portion of the cost of developing the country’s natural resources and industrial potential. This aspect of the policy rested upon the tory conviction that Irish support of home rule would diminish in direct proportion to significant economic and social advance. The second part of the policy called for the establishment of a democratic system of local government which was to be the limit of political concessions to Irish nationalist sentiment.