The Foxite Whigs, Irish legislative independence and the Act of Union, 1785–1806

Abstract

The establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3, once regarded as a watershed in Irish constitutional history, has more recently and quite properly been reduced to an achievement of modest proportions. According to the new historiographical orthodoxy, Irish legislative independence was an aberration in a period of increasing British political control, and one that actually encouraged the British ruling class to pursue the political assimilation of Ireland into Britain by means of a union. Historians now have a tolerably clear picture of the process by which William Pitt and the British executive gradually became convinced that an incorporating union provided the best solution to the constitutional anomalies and sectarian difficulties posed by the government of Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s.