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  • Mediating Cultural Memory: Ireland and the “Glorious Revolution”
  • Leith Davis (bio)

On 5 November 1688, William of Orange landed his force of 40,000 men at Torbay in Devonshire. Over the following month, he marched his troops to London, assuming control of the government as James II fled to France. This “Dutch invasion,” in Jonathan Israel’s phrase, would in time be reconceived as the “Glorious Revolution.”1 It would become, in other words, a powerful lieu de mémoire, a term coined by French historian Pierre Nora to designate “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.”2 According to Nora, lieux de mémoire “emerge in two stages.” First, “moments of history” are “plucked out of the flow of history,” then are “returned to it,” but in an altered state so that they are “no longer quite alive but not yet entirely dead, like shells left on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.”3 The 1688 Revolution was plucked out of then returned to history in such a way that it became a “symbolic element” not only of “the memorial heritage” of the English nation but of the British empire as well,4 as it was credited with saving the English nation from tyranny, establishing the rights of individual subjects, and bolstering British power overseas.5 As G.M. Trevelyan famously pronounced, the “Glorious Revolution” was a “turning-point in the history of our country and of the world.”6

While the Revolution has been the subject of a long and complex historiography, recent work has provided new perspectives on the imperial [End Page 185] aspects of 1688, examining, among other issues, its repercussions in British, Atlantic, and European contexts.7 This article contributes an archipelagic context to this wider approach to the Revolution by focusing on the Williamite wars in Ireland. Although William and Mary were proclaimed monarchs in England in February 1689, the conflict in Ireland, known in Gaelic as Cogadh an Dá Rí, or the “War of the Two Kings,” dragged on for nearly three years after William’s landing in Torbay. During this time, as I will suggest, Ireland moved front and center into the sights of the citizens of the metropolis. I begin by considering the way Irish events were initially mediated in newspapers and examining how Ireland itself became represented in space and time through maps and printed works like, Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana, that were advertised in the newspapers. I focus next on how the first major government victory in Ireland, the relief of the siege of Derry on 29 July 1689, served as a crucial point in shaping the conflict in Ireland for the English population. As I indicate, the representation of the siege of Derry drew on articulations of a previous Irish lieu de mémoire, the 1641 Rebellion, reframing them into a template which constructed the rest of events in Ireland as a providential narrative for both Irish and English Protestants. I conclude by arguing that the construction of the 1688 Revolution as a lieu de mémoire subsequent to William’s victory necessitated the erasure of the inconvenient matter of Ireland.8 Instead of appearing as an important theatre of war determining the fortunes of William’s Protestant cause, the “War of the Two Kings” was decoupled from the story of the “Glorious Revolution,” as Ireland itself became a foil to the English and British modernizing project. This writing and re-writing and un-writing of Ireland within the context of the 1688 Revolution thus tells us much about the relationship between cultural memory, cultural amnesia, and empire.

Information regarding the conflict in Ireland was initially represented in England on the pages of the six unlicensed newspapers that sprung up shortly after William’s arrival in London in December 1688; the Orange Gazette paid particularly close attention to Irish affairs.9 With their periodic style of reporting, the newspapers gave the war in Ireland “a precise location in space and in time,” shaping the messy confrontation into...

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