The Irish royalist elite of Charles II in exile, c. 1649-1660

Abstract

This thesis on Irish elite exiles in Continental Europe, from c. 1649-1660 will be a study of those politically, militarily, and socially influential Irish royalists, who are described as Ormondist in the existing historiography and who, in the wake of the victory of English Parliamentary forces in the civil wars of England, Scotland and Ireland of the 1640s and early 1650s, chose to follow the Court of the Stuart claimant to the thrones of those three kingdoms, Charles II, into exile on the Continent. The purpose of this thesis is to establish and advance a number of solutions to a particular set of questions.