Editing Irish Confederate Wars (section)

==Overview==
The war in Ireland began with the [[Irish Rebellion of 1641|Rebellion of 1641]] in [[Ulster]] in October, during which many [[Scottish people|Scots]] and [[English people|English]] [[Plantation of Ulster|Protestant settlers]] were killed. The rebellion spread throughout the country and at [[Kilkenny]] in 1642 the Association of The [[Confederate Ireland|Confederate Catholics of Ireland]] was formed to organise the Catholic war effort. The Confederation was essentially an independent state and was a coalition of all shades of Irish Catholic society, both [[Gaels|Gaelic]] and [[Old English (Ireland)|Old English]]. The Irish Confederates professed to side with the English [[Cavalier]]s during the ensuing civil wars, but mostly fought their own war in defence of the Catholic landed class's interests.

The Confederates ruled much of [[Ireland]] as a ''de facto'' sovereign state until 1649, and proclaimed their loyalty to [[Charles I of England|Charles I]]. From 1642 to 1649, the Confederates fought against Scottish [[Covenanter]] and English Parliamentarian armies in Ireland. The Confederates, in the context of the [[English Civil War]], were loosely allied with the English Royalists, but were divided over whether to send military help to them in the war there. Ultimately, they never sent troops to [[England]], but did send an expedition to help the Scottish Royalists, sparking the [[Scotland in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms|Scottish Civil War]].

The wars produced an extremely fractured array of forces in Ireland. The Protestant forces were split into three main factions (English Royalist, English Parliamentarian and Scottish Covenanter) as a result of the civil wars in England and Scotland. The Catholic Confederates themselves split on more than one occasion over the issue of whether their first loyalty was to the Catholic religion or to King Charles I (see [[#Shifting allegiances|the principal factions in the war]]).

The wars ended in the defeat of the Confederates. They and their English Royalist allies were defeated during the [[Cromwellian conquest of Ireland]] by the [[New Model Army]] under [[Oliver Cromwell]] in 1649–53.<ref>Philip McKeiver; A New History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign,Advance Press, 2007, {{ISBN|978-0-9554663-0-4}}</ref> The wars following the 1641 revolt caused massive loss of life in Ireland, comparable in the country's history only with the [[Great Famine (Ireland)|Great Famine]] of the 1840s. The ultimate winner, the English parliament, arranged for the mass confiscation of land owned by Irish Catholics as punishment for the rebellion and to pay for the war. Although some of this land was returned after 1660 on the [[Stuart Restoration|Restoration of the monarchy in England]], the period marked the effective end of the old Catholic landed class.