The rise and fall of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy continues to fascinate historians. During the eighteenth century, the Anglo-Irish attempted to identify a constitutional tradition that justified their domination in Ireland and explained their conception of equal partnership in the British empire.

Although they claimed that they led a "free" people living in an "independent" kingdom, that "free" people included a disfranchised and exploited Catholic majority, and their "independent" kingdom was actually a subordinate part of the British empire.

The reified constitution that the Anglo-Irish looked to as the foundation of their political rights was not really their creation. They borrowed from an earlier generation of Irish constitutionalists, many of whom were, ironically, Catholics. Thus Patrick Darcy's 1643 Argument deserves as prominent a place in the emergence of Irish constitutionalism as William Molyneux's more famous 1698 Case of Ireland Stated.

And despite what the Anglo-Irish elite called "parliamentary independence" in 1782, they did not escape their dependence on - or subordination to - Great Britain. Moreover, their persistent exclusivity, their unwillingness to truly welcome Catholics and lower-class Protestants into the political culture, contradicted their assertions that they spoke for a united people.

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All of their complaints against the British empire notwithstanding, the Anglo-Irish had no intention of following the lead of their Revolutionary American cousins. That they talked the same constitutional language even though they pursued different objectives is a reminder that political rhetoric is best studied in a social context. If the Anglo-Irish and Revolutionary Americans turned out to be different in one sense, they were alike in another.

In the United States the Founding generation ultimately gave way to the Jacksonians, just as in Ireland the parliamentary Patriots of the 1770s were challenged by the Volunteers in the 1780s and United Irishmen a decade later. Both the Americans and the Anglo-Irish learned that ideas employed as ideology can have unintended consequences; both were trapped by the very constitutionalism that they had hoped would liberate them.