Nation and archipelago

This chapter explores John Milton's Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels (1649), a 25,000-word treatise that is a touchstone text for a turning point in British and Irish history, a telling account of the tensions between colonialism and republicanism, and a tipping point in Milton's thinking around Archipelagic interdependence – the tied fates of the nations that make up the emerging British state. This multi-authored work, exemplary in its many-sided depiction of a pivotal point in the history of the three Stuart kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, depicts different national and religious communities responding to the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649. Milton's commission was to address the “complication of interests” in Ireland in the wake of the killing of the king. His protean polemic captures the contradictions of a poet against empire countering a challenge to metropolitan government from a complex planter society

Scottish migration to Ireland 1585-1607.

The connexions between lreland and Scotland reach far back. Geographically close and to some extent ethnically similar, the lnhabitants of the Western Isles of Scotland and those of Ulster bad constant communication with each other since the times of St. Columba and the Dalriadic kingdom, if not before. So near akin did these peoples appear to outsiders that the central government in Scotland referred to its lslesmen as Irish, though, from the point of view of government the Isles definitely constituted part of Scotland