My Dear Michael,

You have made me shake and shiver, by bringing before my eyes the ticklish ground on which I stand.

Writing to his brother and collaborator Michael in October 1825, John Banim evinced an anxious preoccupation with the politics of his soon-to-be-published novel, The Boyne Water (1826). Informed by the political crisis surrounding the Treaty of Limerick and its unfulfilled promise of Catholic Emancipation, the novel tells a story of cultural stress and religious intolerance in late-seventeenth-century Ireland. The treaty, signed on the Treaty Stone at Limerick in 1691 following James II's loss to William of Orange, promised Irish Catholics political and religious freedom, a promise that soon disintegrated when the pact failed ratification in 1695. Despite swings of the political/cultural pendulum across one hundred and thirty years, the Emancipation controversy dogged its English promisors from 1691 well into the nineteenth century; it remained the most volatile political issue of...