The comprehensive defeat of the Jacobite Irish in the Williamite conflict, a component within the pan-European Nine Years' War, prevented the exiled James II from regaining his English throne, ended realistic prospects of a Stuart restoration and partially secured the new regime of King William III and Queen Mary that had been created by the Glorious Revolution. The principal events - the siege of Londonderry, the Battles of the Boyne and Augury, and the two sieges and Treaty of Limerick - have subsequently become totems around which opposing constructions of Irish history have been...

General Percy Kirke (c. 1647-91) is remembered in Somerset as a cruel, vicious thug who deluged the region in blood after the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685. He is equally notorious in Northern Ireland. Appointed to command the expedition to raise the Siege of Londonderry in 1689, his assumed treachery nearly resulted in the city's fall and he was made to look ridiculous when the blockade was eventually lifted by a few sailors in a rowing boat. Yet Kirke was closely involved in some of the most important events in British and Irish history. He served as the last governor of the colony of...