A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  Very soon after the beginning of James I’s reign in 1603 hundreds of English and Scots began to cross the Irish Sea to start a new life in eastern Ulster. Much of this countryside had been devastated in the recent rebellion. In 1606 Sir Hugh Montgomery returned from raising what he called ‘recruits of money’ in Scotland to arrive in his new estate in Co. Down. He found

  those parishes more wasted than America (when the Spaniards landed there).... Thirty cabins could not be found, nor any stone walls, but ruined roofless churches, and a few vaults at Grey Abbey, and a stump of an old castle in Newtown.…

  But Sir Hugh in the said spring brought over with him divers artificers, as smiths, masons, carpenters, etc.... They soon made cottages and booths for themselves, because sods and saplings of ashes, alders, and birch trees with rushes for thatch, and bushes for wattles, were at hand. And also they made a shelter of the said stump of the castle for Sir Hugh, whose residence was mostly there.

  Irish labourers felled timber in the forest of Slut Neal by the River Lagan. Floated downstream to Belfast, the logs were taken from there by sea to Donaghadee and Newtownards. The harbour built by Sir Hugh at Donaghadee became very busy; here arrived ‘a constant flux of passengers daily coming over [ignoring] evil report of wolves and woodkerns’.

  With proper ploughing, and fertilised with seaweed gathered from the shore, the soil gave bountiful harvests in 1606 and 1607. Every parish had a watermill provided by Lady Montgomery to grind corn. According to records preserved by the Montgomery family, the Co. Down colony was flourishing:

  Now every body minded their trades, and the plough, and the spade, building and setting of fruit trees, etc., in orchards and gardens, and by ditching in their grounds. The old women spun, and the young women plied their nimble fingers at knitting—and every body was innocently busy. Now the golden peaceable age renewed, no strife, contention, querulous lawyers, or Scottish or Irish feuds, between clans and families, and surnames, disturbing the tranquillity of those times; and the towns and temples were erected, with other great works done (even in troublesome years).

  Of course, this is a rosy, romantic picture. But there is no denying the success of the Scottish settlement in north and east Down. The king’s commissioners reported in 1611:

  Sir Hugh Montgomery knight hath repaired part of the Abbey of Newtown for his own dwelling, and made a good town of a hundred houses or thereabouts all peopled with Scots.

  In addition, a school was built and the master paid £20 a year ‘to teach Latin, Greek and Logics, allowing the scholars a green for recreation at golf, football, and archery’.

  The commissioners also liked what was happening along the north Down coast:

  Sir James Hamilton knight hath builded a fair stone house at the town of Bangor in the Upper Clandeboye.... The town consists of 80 new houses all inhabited with Scottishmen and Englishmen. And hath brought out of England 20 artificers, who are making materials of timber, brick and stone for another house there.

  The said Sir James Hamilton is preparing to build another house in Holywood three miles from Bangor and two hundred thousand of bricks with other materials ready at the place, where there are some 20 houses inhabited with English and Scots.

  In the Lagan valley the Lord Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, had rented out land to his provost-marshal, Sir Moses Hill. Hill built a house at Stranmillis, and, where Shaw’s Bridge stands today, he had erected ‘a strong fort built upon a passage on the plains of Malone with a strong palisado’.

  In Belfast the royal commissioners found ‘many masons, bricklayers and other labourers awork’ putting up a fine manor house, a castle for Sir Arthur which ‘will defend the passage over the ford at Belfast between Upper and Lower Clandeboye, and likewise the bridge over the river of Owenvarra between Malone and Belfast’. This castle, standing where today High Street joins Castle Junction, dominated Belfast until April 1708, when it was accidentally burnt down.

  Chichester rarely had time to be in Belfast now. His duties as chief governor of Ireland required him to be based largely in Dublin Castle. It was here that, early in 1608, he was preparing the details of the ‘plantation of Ulster’, the king’s ambitious scheme to colonise western and central Ulster with industrious and reliable English and Scottish families.

  Then a messenger galloped into the castle courtyard bearing momentous news: Sir Cahir O’Doherty, Lord of Inishowen, had raised the banner of rebellion once more in the north. It was a revolt which was eventually to cause the king to scrap his original plan of colonisation—his plantation of Ulster would become an enterprise on a scale never yet seen in western Europe.

  Episode 84

  THE REBELLION OF SIR CAHIR O’DOHERTY

  Sir Cahir O’Doherty had changed sides to join the English towards the end of the Nine Years War. When that rebellion had ended in 1603, he had been restored to his lordship of Inishowen in north Donegal. After the Earl of Tyrone and the Earl of Tyrconnell had sailed away with the noble Gaelic families of Ulster in 1607, O’Doherty had been chairman of the grand jury which had judged the earls to be guilty of treason. Then, a few months later, he was pushed too far.

  The new English governor of Derry, Sir George Paulet, was contemptuous of the native Irish and in an argument punched O’Doherty in the face. The Lord of Inishowen, the Annals of the Four Masters record, ‘would rather have suffered death than live to brook such insult and dishonour’.

  O’Doherty began his rebellion in a rather unusual way. On 18 April 1608 he invited the governor of Culmore Fort, Captain Henry Hart, and his wife to dinner in his new castle at Burt. He enticed Hart upstairs, put a knife to his throat, and, as the captain’s wife screamed for mercy, O’Doherty threatened that ‘if she or he did not take some present course for the delivery of Culmore into his hands, both they and their children should die’. By this ruse, Culmore—a strategic fort which commanded the entrance to Lough Foyle—fell to O’Doherty.

  The following night O’Doherty attacked Derry, took the lower fort without difficulty, shot Governor Paulet dead, and then encountered fierce resistance in the upper fort. A surviving defender recalled:

  Lieutenant Gordon, hearing the shot, issued forth naked upon the rampier, with his rapier and dagger, where, with one soldier in his company, he set upon the enemy and killed two of them, using most comfortable words of courage to the soldiers to fight for their lives; but the enemy being far more in number, one struck him on the forehead with a stone, whereat, being somewhat amazed, they rushed upon him and killed him and the soldiers also.

  As dawn broke the surviving townspeople barricaded themselves in the Bishop’s House and adjacent dwellings. However,

  Destitute of victuals and munition, and seeing a piece brought by the enemy from Culmore, and ready mounted to batter the said houses, and wearied with the lamentable outcry of women and children, after much parley and messages to and fro, [they] yielded the said houses.

  The Irish set fire to Derry and Strabane soon after, and factions of O’Cahans, O’Hanlons and MacSweeneys joined O’Doherty, threatening to spread the revolt across Ulster. The king’s marshal was soon on hand, however, to recover the burnt shell of Derry. In the wild country of north Donegal O’Doherty was cornered near Kilmacrenan and killed at the Rock of Doon. Meanwhile Lord Deputy Sir Arthur Chichester crushed the O’Hanlons in Co. Armagh and moved into Tyrone, executing dozens by hanging, ‘a death which they contemn more than any other nation living; they are generally so stupid by nature, or so tough or disposed by their priests, that they show no remorse of conscience, or fear of death’. Another force in north Donegal besieged Doe Castle, ‘the strongest hold in all the province which endured a hundred blows of the demi-cannon before it yielded’.

  The governor of Ballyshannon brought up five warships to hunt down O’Donnells who had retreated to the islands, took the castle on Tory Island and slaughtered the defenders. When the O’Gallaghers’ castle of Glenveagh fell, the rebellion was over. The crown forces now had cont
rol of country which, Chichester admitted, only recently had been as inaccessible as ‘the kingdom of China’. The Lord Deputy was not impressed by the scenery we appreciate so much today, describing it as ‘one of the most barren, uncouth, and desolate countries that could be seen, fit only to confine rebels and ill spirits into’.

  From Coleraine the Attorney-General wrote to King James I assuring him that he had six counties ‘now in demesne and actual possession in this province; which is a greater extent of land than any prince in Europe has to dispose of’. This was an accurate assessment. The crushing of O’Doherty’s rebellion had resulted in the seizing of extensive lands to add to the vast territories confiscated from the earls who had fled from Lough Swilly the year before. The scale of the ‘plantation of Ulster’, the king’s ambitious scheme to colonise the province with loyal British subjects, was now greatly magnified. This was the era of colonial expansion when England sought to catch up with Spain, Portugal and Holland. Only a year before the first successful band of English settlers had crossed the Atlantic for Virginia. As for Chichester, he declared he would ‘rather labour with my hands in the plantation of Ulster than dance or play in that of Virginia’.

  Episode 85

  THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER

  The summer assizes of 1608 confiscated virtually all the territory of Ulster west of the River Bann for King James I. English and Scots were already busily colonising the counties of Antrim and Down. The lands of Co. Monaghan had been redistributed in Queen Elizabeth’s day. Out of the nine counties of the northern province, that left six to be included in the ‘plantation of Ulster’: Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan and counties then named Tyrconnell and Coleraine. This colonising project, the king explained to his Lord Deputy, would be a civilising enterprise which would ‘establish the true religion of Christ among men ... almost lost in superstition’. Besides, a plantation would pacify Ulster and secure the province against the risk of further native rebellion and foreign invasion.

  The first thing to be done was to make a detailed survey of the vast territory to be colonised. ‘To avoid His Majesty’s further charge’, the decision was made not to attempt to measure the land but to conduct an inquiry. The traditional Irish local land divisions caused much confusion. The basic units were the townlands, called tates in Co. Fermanagh, polls in Co. Cavan, and ballyboes elsewhere. Each townland was supposed to be enough to support one extended family—small and compact on good land, and more extensive in mountainous and boggy areas. Groups of townlands made up larger divisions known as ballybetaghs and quarters. The commissioners making the inquiry found it all very perplexing. In the end they decided to make grants based on the ancient land divisions, keeping the Irish names in an anglicised form. Tattyreagh, for example, means the ‘grey townland’.

  In April 1610 a detailed brochure was published in London. Readers of what became known as the ‘Printed Book’ could find out all the terms and conditions of the plantation. The confiscated land of each county was divided into ‘precincts’, often based on the existing structure of baronies, and each precinct was subdivided into large, middle and small estates, or ‘proportions’. It soon became clear that separation was the essence of the scheme.

  The largest group of colonists, known as ‘undertakers’, had to clear their estates completely of native Irish inhabitants. Undertakers had to be English or ‘inland’ Scots who had taken the Oath of Supremacy—that is, they had to be Protestants—and, having removed the natives, they had to ‘undertake’ to colonise their estates with British Protestants. Indeed, it was during the Ulster plantation that the term ‘British’ came into general use—officials got tired of constantly saying ‘English, Scots, Welsh and Manxmen’. The undertakers paid rent of £5 6s 8d annually to the king for every thousand acres. In all, they received over a quarter of the confiscated land.

  Another group of grantees were termed ‘servitors’. They were councillors of state, captains and lieutenants with military commands and other servants of the crown, and, between them, they were assigned about one-fifth of the plantation lands. They did not have to remove the native Irish, but they enjoyed reduced rents if they brought in British colonists. Their estates were not merely rewards for past service to the crown: servitors were expected to play a key role in the defence of the plantation.

  Between one-quarter and one-fifth of the confiscated lands were allocated to what were described as the ‘deserving’ native Irish. This was less generous than it seemed, because a number of these grants were for the lifetime only of those named in them.

  The leading planters of all categories had to build towns, parish churches, schools and forts. The Church of Ireland received over a thousand townlands. Trinity College Dublin, founded in the reign of Elizabeth, was also given generous grants.

  It was not long before noblemen, adventurers, gentlemen and courtiers began applying to the king for lands in Ulster. King James issued a special proclamation for Scotland, urging his original subjects to become planters:

  Forasmeikle as the Kingis Maiestie haueing resolued to reduce and setle vndre a perfyte obedience the north pairt of the Kingdome of Ireland, which now by the providence of Almichtie God, and by the power and strength of his Maiesties royal army, is fred and disburdynit of the former rebellious and disobedient inhabitants thairof ... his Maiestie, for this effect, hes tane a verie princelie and good course, alswell for establischeing of religioun, justice, and ciuilitie within the saidis boundis, as for planting of colonies thairin, and distributeing of the same boundis to lauchfull, ansuerable, and weill affected subiectis, vpon certane easie, tolerable, and profitable conditionis, and although thair be no want of grite nomberis of the cuntrey people of England, who, with all glaidnes, wald imbrace the saidis conditionis, and transport thame selfiss, with thair families, to Yreland ... yit, his sacred Maiestie, out of his vnspeikable love and tender affectioun towards his Maiesties antient and native subiectis of this kingdome ... hes bene pleasit to mak chose of thame to be Partinairis with his saidis subiectis of England, in the distribution foirsaid ...

  The great migration to Ulster had begun, drawn from every class of British society.

  Episode 86

  ‘MAKE SPEED, GET THEE TO ULSTER’

  During the summer of 1610 Thomas Blennerhasset and his brother Sir Edward travelled with their families and servants from Norfolk to Ireland. Both of these Englishmen had been granted estates by King James I in the precinct of Lurg in north Fermanagh. They were planters known as ‘undertakers’, that is, they undertook to clear their Ulster estates of the native Irish and to colonise them with loyal Protestants from Britain.

  Thomas Blennerhasset was so delighted with his Fermanagh lands that he wrote a pamphlet urging his fellow-Englishmen to join him. His main argument was that Ulster had lost most of its population from conflict and famine during the last great rebellion. The province’s fertile soil was just waiting to be properly farmed by his fellow-countrymen:

  Fayre England, thy flourishing sister, brave Hibernia; (with most respective termes) commendeth unto thy due consideration her yongest daughter, depopulated Ulster.... Dispoyled, she presents her-selfe (as it were) in a ragged sabled robe, ragged (indeed) there remayneth nothing but ruynes and desolation, with a very little showe of any humanitie: of her selfe she aboundeth with many the best blessings of God.... Fayre England, she hath more people than she can well sustaine; goodly Ulster for want of people unmanured, her pleasant fieldes and riche groundes, they remaine if not desolate, worse.... Make speede, get thee to Ulster, serve God, be sober.

  It was widely believed then that England was overpopulated. And it was certainly true that many of the king’s Scottish, English and Welsh subjects were eager to get a slice of the action in Ulster. Not for many centuries in western Europe had so much land been made available for colonisation. Much of it was ideal for the grazing of cattle and the cultivation of corn. Most of the rivers swarmed with salmon, and vast numbers were netted, trapped and salted by the n
ative Irish for export to Spain and elsewhere. And a rich eel fishery flourished at Toome, where the River Bann flows out of Lough Neagh.

  Ireland still possessed great forests. Some of the largest of these were in the six counties of the Ulster plantation: around Lough Erne, in south Armagh, and—the largest—in Glenconkeyne at the foot of the Sperrin Mountains. Unlike farmland, stands of oak, elm, ash, alder and willow offered a quick return on investment. Once felled and seasoned, wood fetched a good price when split, sawn and shaped into planks for rafters, ship timber and staves ready to be fashioned by coopers into barrels. Branches could be chopped up, piled high and covered with ash ready to be converted into charcoal for the smelting of iron. England and Scotland were among the first countries in Europe to have their forests seriously depleted. One Scot bemoaned the loss of trees in his native land:

  Ah! what makes now, my Countrey looke so bare?

  Thus voyd of planting, Woods and Forests fayre.

  As the great migration to Ulster got under way it was clear that the colonists were drawn from every class of British society. Some were noblemen like the Earl of Abercorn and the Earl of Ochiltree from Scotland who responded to a personal appeal from King James to take estates in Co. Tyrone ‘for a countenance and a strength to the rest’. Others were former army commanders who had helped to conquer this province—men like Sir Basil Brooke with the proportion of Edencarn in Donegal; Sir Richard Wingfield, who had led the victorious cavalry charge at the Battle of Kinsale, and who was granted the proportion of Benburb in Co. Tyrone; and the king’s Lord Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, who received the proportion of Dungannon to add to his vast estates in Inishowen and Co. Antrim.