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

  All of these planters brought over relatives, neighbours, trusted comrades-in-arms, stonemasons, carpenters, thatchers, labourers and tenant farmers. In the initial stages of the plantation the estates granted to Englishmen were occupied by colonists who were mostly English. For example, in north Armagh the Brownlow brothers from Nottinghamshire and other undertakers from Staffordshire enticed over many of their English tenants. They included families from the Vale of Evesham who carried over apple-tree saplings, ensuring that in time Armagh would be known as the ‘Orchard County’. No fewer than four members of the Cunningham family from Wigtonshire got estates in Co. Donegal—virtually all of the families they persuaded to join them were from this south-western corner of Scotland. Indeed, most of the Scots—judging by their surnames—came from Ayrshire, Wigtonshire, Clydeside, Lanark, Renfrew, Sterlingshire and the Borders.

  The English colonists had more capital, but the Scots were the most determined. Sir William Alexander observed: ‘Scotland by reason of her populousnesse being constrained to disburden her selfe (like the painfull Bees) did every yeere send forth swarmes.’

  Some parts of Ulster, however, were not attracting swarms of planters. For this reason King James now turned to the city of London.

  Episode 87

  THE LONDONDERRY PLANTATION

  For centuries the clans living in the Southern Uplands, on the borders of Scotland and England, had been raiders living by plundering the farms on either side of the mountains. Then, in 1603, when he became ruler of both Scotland and England, King James I was determined to suppress these proud and lawless Borderers. A joint royal commission of English and Scots ruthlessly crushed the clans in the hills and enforced the king’s law by the gallows. The Johnston family alone faced seventy-seven charges of slaughter in 1609.

  Those who had lived by plunder now had no work. The king was assured that in every Border parish there was ‘ane grit number fund of ydle people without any calling, industrie, or lauthfull means to leif by’. Royal officers often offered them a stark choice: face the dungeon or the noose, or go to Ireland. Other Borderers on the run had already made their way to Ulster as fast as they could. Perhaps that is why the Rev. Andrew Stewart of Donaghadee claimed that ‘From Scotland came many, and from England not a few, yet all of them generally the scum of both nations, who, for debt or breaking and fleeing from justice, or seeking shelter, came thither.’

  Most of them preferred to put a good distance between themselves and the Borders, which is why so many of them ended up in Co. Fermanagh. Their surnames—Johnston, Armstrong, Elliott and Beattie, in that order—dominated the muster rolls of colonists in that county. Indeed, it was only at the beginning of the twenty-first century that Johnston ceased to be the commonest surname in Co. Fermanagh.

  The part of Ulster which proved to be least attractive to planters was what was then called the county of Coleraine. Sir Thomas Phillips, described as ‘a very discreet and valiant commander at all times’, had done much to develop his grant of church lands here. In April 1609 he travelled to London. There he explained to the king and his advisers that his colony was dangerously exposed to the native Irish. In the lowlands of the county the O’Cahans seethed with resentment at the loss of their ancient territory. Elsewhere former Gaelic warriors—known as ‘woodkerne’—lurked in the forests, living as bandits.

  The solution, Sir Thomas suggested, was to persuade the merchants of London to colonise this wild county in Ulster. The king was delighted by this proposal. The city merchants were not so sure. A special court of aldermen met on 1 July. The representative of the Fishmongers declared: ‘It were best never to entermeddle at al in this busyness ... for that it wil be exceeding chargeable.’ Nevertheless, the city fathers sent a deputation to tour the county in the autumn. When the investigators returned, they recommended that the London Companies become involved in the plantation. In particular, they were impressed by the huge stretches of valuable oak forest.

  The livery companies of London, descended from the medieval guilds, hammered out an agreement with the king in January 1610. The companies could afford to dictate terms—after all, the city had unwritten much of the cost of conquering Ireland during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The capital was always the most reliable source of ready money for the crown. Fretting at the slow progress of the plantation of Ulster, King James granted the London Companies not only the entire county of Coleraine, but also the barony of Loughinsholin with its great forest of Glenconkeyne, as well as a slice of Tyrconnell including Derry and Culmore, and another slice of Co. Antrim to give more land to the town of Coleraine.

  The new enlarged county was renamed the county of Londonderry. This great area of around half a million acres would henceforth be supervised by elected representatives of the London Companies, known as ‘The Honorable The Irish Society’. The Society sent over to Ireland two agents, John Rowley and Tristram Beresford, along with 130 masons, carpenters and other workmen. Both Rowley and Beresford were ruthless asset-strippers who lined their own pockets, plundering the forests against orders and illegally exporting the timber for the making of barrels. Most progress was made at Coleraine, which was surrounded by a ‘rampier’, a massive wall constructed of clay and sods.

  More agents arrived in 1613. They stamped out theft and corruption and marked out the ground for the walls of the newly founded city of Londonderry. Work began with a will on the erection of massive walls for what was to be the very last walled city to be built in western Europe. Meanwhile the lands of Co. Londonderry were being mapped by the city of London’s surveyor, Thomas Raven—after whom the Ravenhill Road in Belfast is named. By the end of the year 1613 all was ready for a grand draw in London to parcel out the Irish Society’s twelve proportions.

  Episode 88

  THE LUCK OF THE DRAW

  On 17 December 1613 aldermen and freemen of the city of London crowded into the Guildhall, full of expectation. This day there would be a draw for the twelve proportions of Londonderry, the county granted to the city for plantation by King James I. The fifty-five livery companies arranged themselves into twelve associations. The Goldsmiths, for example, joined with the Cordwainers, Paintstainers and Armourers. Called to order, a hush descended on the packed guildhall as the City Swordbearer, with great pomp and ceremony, conducted the draw.

  By the luck of the draw, the Grocers, the Fishmongers and the Goldsmiths got the most fertile proportions. The Drapers and the Skinners were particularly disappointed: their estates included much land which was both difficult of access and infertile.

  King James regarded the colonisation of six counties in the northern province of Ireland as the greatest project of his reign. He hoped that, by settling loyal British subjects there, Ulster would change from being the most lawless part of the island to being the most peaceful. Though certainly not a failure, the king’s scheme was far too ambitious to bring about the realisation of his dreams.

  Perhaps the greatest failing was that the land was not properly measured. The planters got far more land than they could colonise successfully. For example, Co. Londonderry was thought to contain 40,000 acres; in fact there were no fewer than half a million acres in the twelve estates granted to the London Companies. A man granted a thousand acres might discover that he had at least six thousand. Nearly all the planters brought over the required number of British Protestant families, but even then they could not possibly manage to farm the lands they had been granted without local Irish help.

  The most important planters, the undertakers, were supposed to clear the native Irish completely off their proportions. Very few of them did so. With a nod and a wink, the ordinary Gaelic Irish were allowed to stay on to provide cheap labour or to pay useful rents for the land they worked themselves. Inevitably the king got to hear about it, and he was furious. Removing the natives was, in his words, ‘the fundamental reason’ for the plantation. James ordered one plantation survey after another. The survey of the London lands in 1614 appalled the king. He
fired off a long and angry letter:

  Having taken an exact survey of the works and plantation performed by the City of London, I cannot find that either in the one or the other they ever intended his Majesty’s satisfaction and regarded the true end and drift of his favourable grant so that whatsoever they talk of great masses of wealth by them expended, naming what sums they please, yet of any real plantation or fortification to the purpose (the only means of setting and securing those parts which they have undertaken) they have little or nothing to say.

  It was in vain that James raged against the undertakers. The king announced the confiscation of the undertakers’ estates in 1619. Then he realised he was cutting off his nose to spite his face; the eventual outcome was that he returned the lands on condition that fines were paid. And so the grand royal plan to separate natives and newcomers had come to nothing.

  It could be said that the planters themselves had been deceived by their own government. They had been told that the native population had been all but wiped out by war and famine. When these British colonists arrived in Ulster, they found that they were everywhere outnumbered by the Gaelic Irish. Some of these Irish were waiting to be moved on. Others lurked in the forests: these were landless men and former warriors known as woodkerne waiting their opportunity to attack the settlements. At Charlemont Sir Toby Caulfield was forced ‘every night to lay up all his cattle as it were in ward, and do he and his what they can, the wolf and the woodkerne (within caliver shot of his fort) have oftentimes a share’.

  In 1615 the agent for the Drapers’ Company were building Moneymore ‘as it were with the sword in one hand and the axe in the other’. In the following year the Ironmongers’ agent, George Canning, informed London that his labourers were ‘fearful to work in the woods except they be ten or twelve in a company’. The Lord Deputy ordered his officers to ‘take up lewd kerns or such as have been rebels or idle livers’; and indeed, hundreds were rounded up and shipped off to serve in the armies of the King of Sweden. Again and again, however, woodkerne emerged from their forest and mountain retreats to plunder the settlers.

  However, the disillusionment of the Protestant planters was more than matched by the deep discontent of the Catholics, Old English and Gaelic Irish alike.

  Episode 89

  ‘THE HERETICS INTEND TO VOMIT OUT ALL THEIR POISON’

  In the early seventeenth century the people of central and western Europe continued to be bitterly divided by religion. In the realms ruled by King James I, most people living in England, Wales and the Scottish Lowlands were Protestants supporting the Reformation. In Ireland only the British colonists in Ulster and recently arrived officials and landowners, known as the ‘New English’, were Protestant. The great majority of the inhabitants of Ireland remained Catholic and supported the Counter-Reformation. These were not only the native Irish but also the descendants of the Norman conquerors, known now as the ‘Old English’.

  The Old English as Catholics gave their allegiance to the pope. They also, very willingly, gave their allegiance to the king. James, however, demanded that he alone be recognised as the supreme governor of the church. Catholics, particularly in Dublin, who refused to attend Protestant church services were fined. If they were lawyers, they lost their right to practise. If they were public servants, they lost their jobs.

  Tension rose in the capital when Conor O’Devany, the Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor, was, on trumped-up charges, convicted of treason in February 1612. A Jesuit priest watched as the bishop, a frail man in his eighties, was taken to the scaffold in Dublin to be hanged, drawn and quartered:

  Along the road by which they went there was a multitude of people of all degrees, such as were never seen at such a spectacle before; and the Catholics, despising the danger, cast themselves upon their knees to ask the bishop’s blessing, which he gave them to satisfy their devotion, and the blows and the kicks of the heretics were not sufficient to deter them.

  This account is confirmed by that of Barnaby Rich, a Protestant. He recalled that the bishop was followed by

  troops of citizens, not of the inferior sort alone, but of the better, and amongst the women, of the best men’s wives within the city of Dublin ... [who kept up] such a screeching, such a howling, as if Saint Patrick himself had been going to the gallows.

  And after the hanging, and the plucking of the victim’s still beating heart from his breast and the chopping of his body into four pieces,

  happy was she that could but get her handkerchief dipped in the blood of the traitor. And the body being once dissevered into four quarters, they left neither finger nor toe, but they cut them off and carried them away. And to show their Catholic zeal, they tore his garments into tatters, and some others that could get no holy monuments to his person, with their knives they shaved off chips from the hallowed gallows.

  The calling of a parliament confirmed the worst fears of Old English Catholics. The Lord Deputy created new parliamentary seats—thirty-four of them in the newly planted counties in Ulster—to ensure a Protestant majority. One Catholic gentleman predicted the introduction of anti-Catholic laws:

  What keeps everyone in a state of suspense is the fear of the approaching parliament, which is to assemble after St John’s festival, in which the heretics intend to vomit out all their poison and infect the purity of our holy religion.

  After the elections in the spring of 1614 leading Old English lords had an altercation with Lord Deputy Sir Arthur Chichester as they were escorting him from church:

  Two of their followers drew their swords, close by the Lord Deputy, whereupon he himself called the guard. At least five hundred swords were drawn, everyone fearing that there had been a massacre intended by papists.

  On that occasion bloodshed was avoided; but, for security, the Irish parliament was summoned to meet inside the walls of Dublin Castle. Tempers rose when it was time to elect the Speaker of the House of Commons. Catholics placed their own candidate, Sir John Everard, in the chair. Whereupon the Protestants placed their own candidate, Sir John Davies, on his lap. This was not a pleasant experience for Everard, as Davies was extremely corpulent—a fellow-Englishmen remarked on how Davies ‘goes waddling with his arse out behind him as though he were about to make everyone that he meets a wall to piss against.... He never walks but carries a cloakbag behind him, his arse sticks out so far.’ In protest at the unseemly events in the House of Commons, the Catholic MPs—most of them Old English—walked out en masse.

  Catholic fears of persecution proved justified. Catholics lost their jobs and paid heavy fines for refusing to take communion in Protestant churches. When the city of Waterford stubbornly continued to elect Catholics as aldermen, the Lord Deputy revoked the city’s charter in 1618.

  Then in 1625 James I died. Would his son, now King Charles I, show greater tolerance? At first the signs were good. In 1626 the king proposed ‘matters of grace and bounty to be rendered to Ireland’. What did this mean? It looked as if Charles was prepared to allow Catholics to practise as lawyers and to be appointed to government jobs. In return the Irish parliament cheerfully voted the king subsidies of £40,000 each year for three years.

  But the years that followed showed that Charles could not be trusted at all.

  Episode 90

  THOMAS WENTWORTH AND THE ‘GRACES’

  The ambition of Charles I was to become a monarch whose power was absolute, just like the King of Spain or the Holy Roman Emperor. The problem was that parliament normally voted the money needed to pay for government, the army and the navy. To rule without the consent of parliament, therefore, Charles had to find alternative sources of income. Ireland was one of those alternative sources.

  In 1626 the king presented the gentlemen of Ireland with what he called ‘matters of grace and bounty’. These ‘graces’ were particularly appealing to the Old English Catholics because they offered religious toleration, the right of Catholics to become lawyers and hold government jobs, and—above all—secure legal titles
to their landed estates. Though nothing definite was granted, the Irish parliament, which still had many Old English Catholic members, voted large sums of money to the king.

  In January 1632 King Charles announced his decision to appoint as his Lord Deputy his trusted servant, Thomas Wentworth. Having taken up his post in the following year, Wentworth proved to be arrogant, overbearing and insensitive. He called his policy ‘Thorough’; it had only one purpose—to make certain his master, Charles I, had supreme power in both church and state.

  Wentworth called an Irish parliament to meet in July 1634. The first session was to raise money for the king, the Lord Deputy warning that he would enforce fines for failing to attend services of the Established Church if the subsidy payments ‘be not freely and thankfully given’. Fully expecting the implementation of the Graces, the Irish parliament voted more generous payments to the king for the next four years.

  Having got his money, Wentworth then showed his true colours. He had no intention of granting toleration to Catholics or, indeed, to Presbyterians. More alarmingly, he would not grant the Old English landlords secure legal title to their estates, even if these lands had been in their possession for centuries. A ‘Commission for Defective Titles’ began a series of rather disturbing inquiries. Both the Old English and Gaelic Irish lords of Ireland began to have real fears that their lands might be taken away from them.