The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (57 page)

Henry Warren’s illustration of the death of the ageing Brian Boru at the sword of the Manx warrior Brodir during the Battle of Clontarf, April 1014.

Giraldus Cambrensis – sharply observant, learned and untrustworthy – chronicled the first years of the Anglo-Norman presence in Ireland. His
Topographia Hibernica
, a page from which is shown here, was profoundly influential in medieval Europe.

Daniel Maclise’s
Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife
is a Victorian view of a pivotal moment in Irish history; the couple are wed amid piles of corpses, with divinities thronged around.

The Battle of Kinsale – shown here in Franz Hogenberg’s 1602 engraving – marked the eventual, hard-won and bloody Elizabethan victory in Ireland.

Hugh O’Neill morphed from ally to bitter enemy of the English state: this astringent image captures a contemporary Elizabethan view of the Earl of Tyrone surrendering to the English after the suppression of the rebellion in 1602.

The Buildings of the Company of Mercers
, from ‘A Survey of the Estate of the Plantation of Londonderry’. The Company of Mercers was among the London guilds participating (reluctantly) in the Plantation of Ulster. The Mercers established estates in the valley of the ‘fishy, fruitful’ river Bann in the new county of Londonderry.

Lough Swilly, County Donegal, looking north to the Atlantic. This fjord-like inlet witnessed both the Flight of the Earls and the capture of Wolfe Tone; and both Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill were alive to its strategic possibilities.

Two views of a figure celebrated in England as a democrat and vilified in Ireland as a genocidal maniac: Oliver Cromwell, at the notorious storming of Drogheda; and in death.

A popular image of the siege of Derry. With its images of defiant heroism in the face of adversity, the siege was a defining moment in the formation of an Ulster Protestant identity.

The familiar image of the victorious King William on his white horse at the Battle of the Boyne, by Jan Wyck. King James – his defeated opponent and father-in-law – fled back to France; the conflict in Ireland continued for a further year.

The eighteenth-century elegance of College Green, Dublin, with a rebuilt and expanded Trinity College (right) and Ireland’s new Parliament House, the first purpose-built bicameral parliament in the world.

In
A Modest Proposal
, Jonathan Swift suggests sardonically that ‘a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled’. Swift was a waspish observer of eighteenth-century Irish society – and a vital contributor to the country’s cultural debate.