by Neil Hegarty
A good deal of this would become apparent only in the course of time – but even as events were rushing forward, Hugh O’Neill and his supporters quickly realized that they had been swept aside by history and politics. A new fleet from Spain would not arrive: Spanish naval power had been disabled at the battle of Gibraltar in 1604; the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations had at last borne fruit and the prime objective of the Spanish State was to maintain friendly relations with the new Stuart monarchy; and in the meantime, O’Neill’s lands were being subjected to steady encroachment by the English. On 14 September 1607, he and a host of Irish nobles and their families took ship at Rathmullan in County Donegal. This was the Flight of the Earls, one of the great landmark events in Irish history: O’Neill and his followers, beaten and dispossessed, sailed out of Lough Swilly bound for Europe. ‘We are a flock without a shepherd,’ an Ulster poet wrote. O’Neill would die in Rome nine years later, still dreaming of leading an invasion of his homeland.
Part Three
Faith and Fatherland
Chapter Five
A Rude and Remote KingDom
Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And Northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.1
By the end of the Elizabethan age, a century of Tudor engagement with Ireland was at last bearing fruit. The country had been subjected to sword and starvation; rebellion had been stamped out. English influence was once again spreading across the island, although in some upland areas – for example, the Wicklow mountains, within hailing distance of Dublin – there were many districts that had remained largely resistant to government control. Mountjoy, who was lord lieutenant from 1600 to 1606, reported a raid into the glens of central Wicklow in 1600, describing how government troops had ‘spoiled and ransacked the counties of Ranelagh and Cosshay, swept away the most part of their [i.e. the rebels’] cattle and goods, burnt all their corn and almost all of their houses, leaving them little or nothing that might relieve them’.2 Elsewhere, however, the network of administrative counties – so alien to Gaelic Ireland, so familiar an element of life in modern Ireland – that had gradually developed during the sixteenth century was now virtually complete. Ulster was carved into nine such units; and the system was rounded off in 1606 with the addition of Wicklow as Ireland’s thirty-second county. In Dublin, meanwhile, the foundation in 1592 of Trinity College had symbolized a new cultural confidence: the college’s role in the centuries to come would be as a centre of English and Protestant influence in the Irish capital.
The events at Kinsale and at Rathmullan brought to an end the political autonomy of Ulster. Many of the province’s Gaelic leaders had gone into exile and their lands were in the hands of the Crown; the notion that the original landowners might maintain possession of their properties – which had taken root with the original lenient treatment of Hugh O’Neill – was now set aside for good. For Ireland might have been ostensibly pacified and its old order unravelled and discarded, but it was still not regarded as loyal; on the contrary, its overwhelmingly Catholic population was, in the eyes of the administrators at Dublin Castle, pledged fundamentally to the papacy. This was a problem that required an altogether new solution – and the English response would be radical.
The Plantation of Ulster was a state-sponsored endeavour, vastly greater in scale than the sixteenth-century plantations that had been undertaken in Munster and Leinster. It provided for the uprooting and removal of the native Irish population from much of the province and its replacement by Protestant colonists loyal to the Crown and to the new order in Ireland. Certain principles underpinned the project: the first was concentration, the English government having learned the lessons of earlier attempts at plantation, when a thinly dispersed population of settlers had not always been able to defend itself; the second was segregation, thus creating an atmosphere in which sparks would be less readily generated.
The government’s plans were greeted in some quarters with enthusiasm, and the private sector hastened to take a stake in this new enterprise. Before the official scheme itself was even underway, indeed, a complex set of negotiations had resulted in an independent plantation being established in counties Antrim and Down. In 1605 the O’Neills of Clandeboye, near the small settlement of Belfast, had transferred two-thirds of their extensive lands into the ownership of two well-connected Scotsmen, James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery. In return, the family was guaranteed security of tenure and of succession on its remaining possessions. It was a pragmatic decision, in other words, based on a clear understanding of what the future had in store. Sir Arthur Chichester, a former soldier who was lord lieutenant from 1605 to 1615, also received a large grant of land, extending from Carrickfergus west to Lough Neagh.* These were perfect business opportunities: the lowlands of Scotland, so clearly visible from the County Down coast, were overpopulated, while Ulster itself was underpopulated; and what could be easier than ferrying an entirely new population across the narrow sound between the two islands? The first Scottish settlers – farmers, carpenters, stonemasons and other artisan workers – were landed at Donaghadee in May 1606; leases were awarded to suitable settlers, and two years of good harvests and mild winters ensured that the enterprise got off to a smooth start.
The large-scale Crown-sponsored colonization of Ulster was initiated in the following year, with government lawyers asserting royal title to six Plantation counties: Donegal, Fermanagh, Coleraine, Armagh, Cavan and Hugh O’Neill’s former seat of power, Tyrone. The Flight of the Earls eased this change of ownership, for the territories of the departed O’Neill and his allies could now be declared forfeit. The Plantation project ordained that three main groups would be granted land: ‘undertakers’, namely English or Scottish nobility, who received the largest parcels of territory; ‘servitors’, former army officers who were given medium-sized plots of land, both as a reward for their services and to ensure that security in areas of continued native settlement was in reliable hands; and finally those native Irish who had displayed loyalty to the Crown.
The position of this third group was carefully controlled. Although its members would eventually receive between a fifth and a quarter of all land granted in Ulster, few would possess anything like as much as their ancestors had done. In addition, some were permitted to hold their new lands only for their own lifetime and were forbidden to gift it to the next generation. There was also a deliberate policy of granting them land far away from their traditional home areas in an effort to weaken their personal following. And there were yet further restrictions: the native Irish were not permitted to lease land as tenants from undertakers; and while they might lease from servitors or from the few Gaelic clan chiefs left, they were obliged to pay more rent than the newly planted settlers.
Rigid as these restrictions appeared on paper, though, they could not always be applied in practice and – as had been the case in the earlier Munster schemes – the aims and principles of the Plantation began to alter according to the facts on the ground. For example, the scheme envisaged that very many English and Scots Protestant settlers would be drawn to the lowlands of Ulster; in addition, the established – that is, Protestant – Church in Ireland and Trinity College also received large grants of land. Initially, however, not enough of these new leaseholders would come to Ireland to occupy the undertakers’ estates; furthermore, in many cases undertakers actually preferred Irish tenants because they paid higher rents and were not obliged to be given security of tenure through a lease. Such circumstances led to a Plantation in which new settlers found themselves living side by side with native Irish, generating the very tensions that the planners had sought to avoid. And of course, to the general sense of cultural displacement that the Plantation brought to many members of the native Irish community humiliation had been added in the form of higher rents and absence of security.*
As a result of the init
ially slow uptake of land in Ulster, a decision was taken to exclude the county of Coleraine from the overall scheme. The territory was instead offered to the guilds of the city of London as part of a new and very large corporate endeavour: the involvement of such prestigious private corporations in the Plantation – so it was reasoned – would shore up the entire operation and provide long-term stability. The London guilds were distinctly underwhelmed by the offer: they were reluctant to become involved in any way with remote and unpromising Ulster, and it took a fair amount of negotiation and browbeating on the part of the Crown to change their minds. In January 1610, however, agreements were finally reached: the county’s area was expanded substantially as part of the deal, to take in sections of the former O’Neill lands in Tyrone and the mouths of the rivers Foyle and Bann, with their rich fisheries and commercial possibilities.3 The county was renamed Londonderry to reflect its backers, and the guilds set about parcelling up their new territory among themselves. The administration of the new colony was in the hands of fifty-five companies in all, including grocers, drapers, fishmongers, goldsmiths, skinners and tailors. Urging Londoners to come west, a pamphlet declared that Ulster’s promised land ‘yieldeth store of all necessary for man’s sustenance, in such measure as may not only maintain itself, but also furnish the city of London’.4
With the establishment of a new county came the foundation of a new city: the old monastic settlement at Derry now became Londonderry, perched on its hill above the Foyle. The city was laid out along sternly rational lines: behind its new walls lay a geometric grid of streets, a design that would be repeated in the years to come in the new English colonies of the New World. The colonists planned to top off their new home with another symbol of changing times, by constructing on the brow of the hill the first Protestant cathedral to be consecrated in Europe since the Reformation. The stone that recorded the cathedral’s completion in 1633 emphasized the role played by the city’s backers:
If stones could speake
Then Londons prayse
Should sound who
Built this Church and
Cittie from the grounde.
The development of the Plantation in the new city and county of Londonderry signalled both its ambitions and its limitations. The London guilds set to work adapting the territory to their own ends: market towns were founded across the county, and new development grafted on to already existing settlements; Draperstown, for example, received investment from the Company of Drapers. As time went on, however, it became apparent that the London guilds were not always scrupulous in applying the policy of segregation, for in the new county, as elsewhere in Ulster, the planter population was very thinly distributed, and it was clear that the economies of these new settlements would require an Irish presence if they were to function successfully. As a result, many Irish families – some of them regarded as upstarts by the old Gaelic ruling class – managed to carve out a substantial space for themselves in this new order.
In the new colony of Londonderry, however, the new social structure was imposed strictly: Protestant planters dwelt within the new fortifications, while the Catholic population lived in a district – low-lying, marshy and later called the Bogside – below the city walls. It was as potent a symbol of the new order as could be imagined. Across the Plantation counties, the settlers from the very outset adopted an embattled outlook, inhabiting both physically walled settlements and fortresses of the mind. Habitually they worked their fields with a weapon to hand; and tales spread of refugee Irish lurking in the woods and uplands, at all times ready to seize the opportunity to wreak havoc on the planted towns and tilled fields. Gaelic Ireland was imagined intensely by the settlers: brooding beyond their walls, dispossessed, unsettled and threatening.
Because English settlers did not arrive in the expected numbers, the Plantation never assumed the High Church character that had been anticipated by its designers. This was in part due to the well-earned reputation of Ulster as ‘a rude and remote kingdom…the first likely to be wasted [laid waste] if any trouble or insurrection should arise’. As late as the spring of 1608, the old settlement at Derry had been burned in a sudden native Irish revolt: as unattractive an advertisement as could be imagined for the new city of Londonderry that was to follow. But the initial sluggishness of the Plantation effort was also due to the colonization of North America, which began simultaneously with the successful settlement of the Jamestown colony of Virginia. Increasing numbers would be drawn towards the tabula rasa of the New World, seeing in its ostensibly empty landscapes opportunities that the confined fields of Ireland could not offer. And people saw liberties too: the Mayflower anchored at Cape Cod in 1620, its Puritan passengers craving religious freedoms and prepared to take their chances in an unknown land in order to acquire them. Ireland, with its bloody and chequered past, could never hold the same potential.
Ultimately, planter numbers would swell – augmented not solely by English men and women but increasingly by settlers crossing the North Channel from Scotland, the kin of those lowland Scots who had already emigrated to Antrim and Down. These new colonists were predominantly (but not wholly) Dissenters: Presbyterians whose cultural attitudes were already profoundly adversarial, having been the object of religious persecution in Scotland itself, and who arrived in Ireland to find themselves once again on the wrong side of a High Church regime. They came determined both to reclaim their new land of Ulster from popery and barbarism and to maintain their own distinct faith and identity in the face of the disapproval of government and established Church. Stories were told of colonists rowing back across the sea to Scotland on a Sunday in order to participate in a true Presbyterian Sabbath, then returning the same day. These newcomers carried with them a religious culture that, with its overtones of egalitarianism and democracy, was wholly different from any that had hitherto existed in Ireland: there was little sense of hierarchy among the Dissenters, no caste of bishops ready to triangulate the relationship between God and the flock. They brought too a fierce certainty that they were a chosen people and that Ulster was to be their promised land; their destiny was to have their faith and resolve tested unceasingly by God in the form of the threat posed by the Catholic population. These settlers were Presbyterian first and Scottish a distant second: and future conflicts in Ireland would increasingly be shaped by religion.
These Scots immigrants helped to establish permanently the Plantation in Ulster: by 1622 a mere thirteen thousand colonists had come to Ireland and taken up their grants of land; but by 1640 this number had grown to more than thirty thousand. For some, to be sure, there was a rude awakening: they arrived in remote Fermanagh and Donegal to find land that was boggy, or still heavily forested; back-breaking work would be required to render the fields productive. Yet the harvests were good and the colony established itself: a ship from Scotland sailed up to the new quays of Londonderry in 1615, for example, carrying a load of ‘plaid’, ‘Scotch cloth’ and ‘27 Scots daggers’ – implying the existence of a population that remained armed to the teeth while slowly becoming more sanguine about its prospects.5 Only a little, though: the sense of embattlement, of imminent threat from both the Catholic population and potentially from the government at Dublin, remained a key characteristic of Scots Presbyterian culture in Ireland.
This sense of isolation among many of the incoming Scots – magnified by the feeling that their English fellow settlers, being insufficiently godly, were essentially no better than Catholics – militated against any notion that the two groups could be meshed into one. And yet, in spite of these deep cultural and religious differences between English and Scots, established Church and Dissenters, a new society slowly took root in Ulster. Peaceful contact, commerce and occasional intermarriage inevitably occurred between the settlers and the native Irish too; and Chichester’s hope that ‘these counties in a short time will not only be quiet neighbours to the Pale, but be made as rich…as the Pale itself’ seemed a sanguine one.6 Tensions were nevertheless ris
ing in the province: although displacement did not take place overnight nor at the point of a pike, English and Scottish settlement was inexorably pushing the Gaelic Irish on to the province’s most marginal land. In addition, the new order was exploding long-held notions of class and status: it was no easy matter for the leaders of Gaelic Ireland to be reconciled to a grievous loss of prestige; or to be bettered, socially and financially, by individuals they felt to be their inferiors.
Plantation was also implemented in other corners of Ireland in these years, though to a much less ambitious extent than in Ulster. In Wexford, a number of families – both Irish and Old English, but all Catholic and therefore suspect – were ejected from their lands: those who petitioned most strenuously against the seizures found themselves transported to the new colony of Virginia. Other plantations in the midlands seemed similarly designed to entrench new loyal colonists in the landscape; the previous policy of surrender and regrant was now quietly forgotten. At the same time, there was little attempt at evangelization by the newly established Church of Ireland: efforts seemed directed rather at acquiring and tilling the land than at gaining the loyalty of the Catholic population. The notion of anglicization that underlay English policy in the first half of the seventeenth century, then, existed largely on paper only: while the stern grid of streets behind the walls of Londonderry implied a sense of rationalism and cultural superiority that would inevitably win the day, such attitudes and certainties were seldom teamed with attempts to win hearts and minds.