Inchiquin’s Cork Coup
The Confederate leadership entered 1644 with a difficult calculation. The cessation agreed with Ormond in September 1643 had suspended much fighting between the Confederates and the royalist administration, but it was only a truce. It gave the Catholic leadership time to pursue a permanent settlement with Charles I, yet it also left the Covenanter army in Ulster and parliamentarian-aligned forces in Ireland outside the arrangement. The Confederacy had built a functioning wartime administration: a General Assembly, a Supreme Council, provincial armies, taxation and courts. But its political authority was uneven. The Assembly was representative by the standards of the day, bringing together peers, clergy and commoners, but the franchise was confined to male property holders; by 1644 the Supreme Council was increasingly directing policy between assemblies.