From the Plantation of Ulster to the Cromwellian Settlement

Map of The Battle of Kinsale 1601

This is an illustration of the Battle of Kinsale in 1601.

Map of The Battle of Kinsale 1601

Map of The Battle of Kinsale 1601

This is an illustration of the Battle of Kinsale in 1601.

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Under Elizabeth , battles in Ulster , the most recalcitrant of the Irish provinces, raged and under her Stuart successor James 1 of the United Kingdom of England and Scotland , Ulster was cleared of its native aristocracy after the debacle of collapsed Spanish aid at the Battle of Kinsale. The seized Ulster lands were planted under James, with the cooperation of private interests like the London companies. Disorder and chaos marked the transplantation of the original population, and as elsewhere they reacted badly to the imposition of new overlords and the superior positions granted to the English speaking settlers who were mainly lowland Scots.

Seventeenth century Ireland was a mini-theatre of the European wars between Protestantism and the old religion, now in a counter-Reformation militant phase. More damagingly it served as a cockpit of the so called war of the three kingdoms, sometimes known as the English civil war. English administrators and English landowners ruled in Ireland with the assistance of certain key individuals of the pre-existing society. A new world was being made by these dealings when in 1641 a section of the old Gaelic order attempted to reverse the plantation by driving out and massacring the new settlers. Panic and chaos spread throughout Ulster and thousands of settlers fled seeking sanctuary. News of the rebellion spread and there were further uprisings in Sligo , in Meath and Westmeath, Leitrim and Longford and in Wexford and Carlow.

The Scottish rebellion against the attempt of a Stuart king to impose the Laudian prayer book , a text seen as proto-Catholic by the Scottish Presbyterians, set the context for the move against Charles by parliamentary forces in England.  In Ireland, Charles’s man Wentworth or Stafford had created unease in various quarters.

In Ireland, all New English interests were represented through the new order, and so Ireland too became ground on which the struggle about monarchy, parliament and religion was enacted. In Ireland this was further complicated by an alliance of the catholic Old English and the remnants of the Gaelic aristocracy through the Confederation of Kilkenny- this attempted to ally their shared interests with the supporters of the King who were lead by James, Duke of Ormond. At one stage, at the time of the Battle of Benburb, three armies were up on Irish ground-the army of the Confederacy, Ormond’s royalists, the native Irish wing of the Confederacy under Owen Roe O’ Neill in Ulster and a Scots covenanting army under James Munroe.

Oliver Cromwell

Cromwell only spent 9 months in Ireland from August 1649 to May 1650, but his impact was to be everlasting on the island. With fierce brutality Cromwell succeed in completing the English conquest of Ireland where others had failed. Cromwell first set a course to Drogheda. 3,500 men women and children were killed over the two day battle, with the city suffering heavy bombardment. Nearby towns surrendered or evacuated. Less than a month later, Cromwell arrived at Wexford town. Here over 1500 people were slaughtered in the massacre that ensued. Cromwell rested in Youghal until the spring of 1650 and then turned his attention towards Kilkenny and the Tipperary towns of Fethard, Clonmel and Cashel. By May 1650 Ireland had been placed under British rule and Cromwell returned home. Sieges on both Limerick and Galway, the last city under Irish control to fall, ended in October and November 1650 respectively. English rule in Ireland was complete.

Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell

Cromwell only spent 9 months in Ireland from August 1649 to May 1650, but his impact was to be everlasting on the island. With fierce brutality Cromwell succeed in completing the English conquest of Ireland where others had failed. Cromwell first set a course to Drogheda. 3,500 men women and children were killed over the two day battle, with the city suffering heavy bombardment. Nearby towns surrendered or evacuated. Less than a month later, Cromwell arrived at Wexford town. Here over 1500 people were slaughtered in the massacre that ensued. Cromwell rested in Youghal until the spring of 1650 and then turned his attention towards Kilkenny and the Tipperary towns of Fethard, Clonmel and Cashel. By May 1650 Ireland had been placed under British rule and Cromwell returned home. Sieges on both Limerick and Galway, the last city under Irish control to fall, ended in October and November 1650 respectively. English rule in Ireland was complete.

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Cromwell, under pressure to pay his army, decided to do so through debentures on Irish lands. His soldiers were to be paid by confiscating the lands of all who fought against the parliamentary forces in Ireland. Cromwell came to Ireland determined to crush all rebellion there and to avenge the 1641 massacres, massively inflated in the retelling, and evidence that the Gaelic Irish were savage barbarians as the English had always proclaimed. At Drogheda , Wexford and other sites he gave no quarter, and massacred civilians. After his bloody successes the cry ‘To Hell or to Connaught ’ was raised. An initial plan to remove all native Irish, a category by now indicated to include catholic Old English, and forcibly resettle them west of the Shannon- effectively all Connaught and the county of Clare –   was only partially implemented. But the other lands were almost all forfeited.

One of the most significant of the new men who came to Ireland was the Oxford anatomist William Petty, the most recent and systematic in a line of colonial surveyors and map-makers of the land of Ireland with a view to the exploitation of its natural resources and the improvement of its agricultural production. Petty’s maps are a fascinating insight into the attempt to make Ireland anew through population movement, transplantation and the settlement of thousands of Cromwellian soldiers on Irish land. In Gaelic literature of the period and later, this further wave of New English settlers are excoriated.   Many of the pre-1640’s Protestants were not too keen on them either. For many Cromwellian soldiers, Irish land was not an attractive payment, and further sub sales and exchanges increased the chaos of Irish land-titles, and landed disorder.

William Petty was a child of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Petty was a friend and associate in Oxford and London of the great physicist Robert Boyle, himself the son of Richard Boyle (an Elizabethan adventurer ennobled as First Earl of Cork for services in Ireland and the wealthiest and most successful of the New English). Petty emulated him by acquiring massive Irish estates for his services. Petty further consolidated these gains by marrying into the old Gaelic Norman aristocracy of the south- west and establishing the powerful dynasty of the Petty Fitzmaurices, the Lansdownes. This is merely one example of the construction of a new landed aristocracy through Irish conquest.