This groundbreaking and controversial new study tells the story of two nations in Ireland; an Irish Catholic nation and a Protestant nation, emerging from a blood-stained century. This survey confronts the violence and enmity inherent in the consolidation of conquest. Lenihan contends that the overriding grand narrative of this period was one of conflict and dispossession as the native elite was progressively displaced by a new colonial ruling class. This struggle was not confined to war but also had cultural, religious, economic and social reverberations. At times the darkness was relieved throughout the period by episodes of peaceful cooperation. Consolidating Conquest places events in Ireland in the context of three Stuart kingdoms, religious rivalry within and between those kingdoms, and the shifting balance of power as monarchy and commonwealth, Whitehall and Westminster, fought for ultimate power.

This groundbreaking and controversial new study tells the story of two nations in Ireland; an Irish Catholic nation and a Protestant nation, emerging from a blood-stained century. This survey confronts the violence and enmity inherent in the consolidation of conquest. Lenihan contends that the overriding grand narrative of this period was one of conflict and dispossession as the native elite was progressively displaced by a new colonial ruling class. This struggle was not confined to war but also had cultural, religious, economic and social reverberations. At times the darkness was relieved throughout the period by episodes of peaceful cooperation. Consolidating Conquest places events in Ireland in the context of three Stuart kingdoms, religious rivalry within and between those kingdoms, and the shifting balance of power as monarchy and commonwealth, Whitehall and Westminster, fought for ultimate power.

Left for dead at the sack of Drogheda, Richard Talbot later ingratiated himself with the future James II by plotting to assassinate Oliver Cromwell. Using fresh primary sources The Last Cavalier: Richard Talbot (1631-91) traces how Talbot, though a gallant, gamester and 'cunning dissembling courtier', grew to be more than just another Restoration rake. He took on the cause of reconciling his countrymen's allegiance to London and to Rome and, under a Catholic king, clawing back their lost status and power. Talbot, now Earl of Tyrconnell and viceroy, almost succeeded but after the Boyne (where he led the Jacobite army in battle) he lost his grip. The Last Cavalier is the first full-scale biography of a great though not a good man.

The proportion of wartime soldiers dying of disease as against combat injury, ran at about 70-75 percent in armies campaigning in Europe in the century and a half (1648-1789) between the end of the Thirty Years War and the French Revolution. During this time, field armies doubled in size and regimes usually fought for limited territorial gains, so it was safest to `occupy, entrench, and wait'. Consequently, this was an era of massive and protracted encampments: the Christian army that sat down before Belgrade in 1717 had more mouths than any city within 500 miles, but lacked basic urban amenities like regular markets, wells, privy pits, and night soil collectors. Yet the impact of sickness on military operations has been neglected. This study uncovers how many soldiers sickened and died by consulting quantitative data, such as casualty returns and hospital registers, generated by the new state-contract armies which displaced the mercenary hordes of the Thirty Years' War. As plague began to recede from Europe, this study explains what exactly were these `fluxes and fevers' that remained to afflict European armies in wartime and argues that they formed a single seasonal continuum that peaked in late summer. The isolation and incarceration of the military hospital characterized the response of the new armies to `disorder' and to revivified notions of contagion. However, the hospital often prolonged the late summer morbidity/mortality spike into mid-winter by generating `hospital fever' or typhus, the lice-borne disease that erupted whenever the cold, wet, hungry, transient, and unwashed huddled together. The cure was the disease. This scope of the study includes French army operations in some of its contiguous campaigning theatres, north Italy (1702 and 1734), the Rhineland (1734), Roussillon (1674), possibly Catalonia (1693), and, further afield, Bohemia (1742). The study also includes three case-studies involving the British army that include Ireland (1689), Portugal (1762), Dutch Brabant (1748), and the Rhineland (1743). The outliers are studies of Habsburg operations in and around Belgrade (1717 and 1737), and Russian operations in Crimea (1736).

On 1 July 1690 some 23,000 soldiers of the deposed King James II peered anxiously through morning mist towards the River Boyne below them. These Jacobites were mostly Irish Catholics reinforced with grumbling Frenchmen sent by the Sun King, Louis XIV. But William of Orange's much larger army of English, Dutch, Huguenots, Scots and Germans was already stirring. Beset by plots in Britain and reverses on land and sea, William needed to crush the Jacobite army on the spot. Why, then, after he sent part of his army to cross the river upstream, didn't William trap and annihilate the Jacobites? Does the fact that James fled from the battlefield, and Ireland, make the Boyne consequential and decisive? His flight was in sharp contrast to the carefully crafted image of William as a fearless and inspirational warrior-king. The Boyne was, and is, politically potent: how many other battles are commemorated every year? Yet it was militarily indecisive. The largest battle in Irish history, it concluded the English War of Succession, the Irish and French-backed James II being defeated by William III securing a Protestant monarchy in England.