Life
Author of Essay on a Union of Ireland with England (Dublin 1704);
favoured Union of Great Britain and Ireland on the grounds of commercial
advantage; also Reasons Offered for Erecting a Bank in Ireland (1721).
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Criticism
See Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (London
1961).
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Commentary
J. A. Froude, The History of the English in Ireland (1895), discourses at length on his pamphlet Essay on a Union of Ireland with
England (1704), in which Maxwell, ‘expressing the general sense
of intelligent Anglo-Irishmen, had foretold that, with discouraged industry
and a continued separate political existence, Ireland must inevitably
fall back into the hands of the Celts.’ (Vol. 1 [bk 2, chp. 2 Sect.
2] p.325.)
Jim Smyth, ‘Anglo-Irish Discourse c.1656-1707: From Harrington to Fletcher’, in Bullán: A Journal of Irish Studies, 2, 1 (Summer 1995), pp.17-34, esp. p.26ff.: ‘Maxwell’s manipulation of the standing army scare in his discourse on union places him squarely in the neo-Harrington school (the defence of Coeana fell to a citizen militia), even if he used it to turn Harrington’s theory of provinces neatly on its heat.’
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References
There is no Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB] article on Henry Maxwell.
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