GILBERT, John T. Ed. by. A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652. Now for the first time published with an Appendix of Original Letters and Documents.

Illustrated with portraits and facsimiles. Six volumes in four. Dublin: For the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1879-1880. Quarto. Quarter blue cloth on blue paper boards, titles in gilt on original roan spines. A very good set. Complete sets are rare.
NSTC locates only 2 copies.
This major reference work contains a unique and previously unpublished manuscript entitled ‘An Aphrorismical Discovery of Treasonable Faction’ which was written c.1650. The original is now housed in Trinity College, Dublin. Some parts were actual eye-witness accounts by the narrator of the 1641 period and for that reason they are invaluable. It was written from an Irish point of view and sympathetic to the Royalist cause. It is of special interest to the O’Neill Clan and to affairs in Ulster at that period. Owen Roe O’Neill features a lot, he was characterised by Clarendon as “incomparably the best soldier and wisest man among the Irish Rebels”. The author/narrator comes out strongly on the Confederate Irish side and castigates against the ‘Treasonable Faction’ meaning Ormonde, Clanricarde, Taaffe, Digby, & Dillon. He goes on to denounce the Supreme Council of the Confederates along with the Church leaders. The condition of Ulster in the early days of ‘Plantation’ is illustrated in Thomas Blenerhasset’s Treatise of 1610, while the relation between the Irish and the Planters is illustrated in the ‘Discourse concerning the Settlement of the Natives’. We are also given details of the Irish movement at home and abroad in a series of letters to the learned Luke Wadding, Rector of the Irish Franciscans at Rome. Fr John Colgan, the Donegal Franciscan is featured along with, William Bedell, Arthur Culme, Viscount Montgomery and the arrest of Conor Maguire, Lord of Enniskillen. Undoubtedly the most comprehensive and detailed reference work of the period with extensive notes by one of Ireland’s foremost historians

[L1 5E]