Plantations of Ireland - The 1641 Rebellion

The 1641 Rebellion

In October 1641, after a bad harvest and in a threatening political climate, Phelim O'Neill launched a rebellion, hoping to rectify various grievances of Irish Catholic landowners. However, once the rebellion was underway, the resentment of the native Irish in Ulster boiled over into indiscriminate attacks on the settler population in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Irish Catholics attacked the plantations all around the country, but especially in Ulster. English writers at the time put the Protestant victims at over 100,000 and William Petty, in his survey of the 1650s, estimated the death toll at around 30,000. More recent research, however, based on close examination of the depositions of the Protestant refugees collected in 1642, suggests a figure of 4,000 settlers were killed directly and up to 12,000 who may have perished from disease or privation after being expelled from their homes.

The Irish Catholics formed their own government, Confederate Ireland, to fight the subsequent wars, negotiating with Charles I, for, among other things, an end to the plantations and a partial reversal of the existing ones. The following ten years saw murderous fighting between the rival ethnic and religious blocks throughout Ireland until the Irish Catholics were finally crushed and the country occupied by the New Model Army in the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1649 to 1653.

Ulster was worst hit by the wars, with massive loss of civilian life and mass displacement of people. The atrocities committed by both sides further poisoned the relationship between the settler and native communities in the province. Although peace was eventually restored to Ulster, the wounds opened in the plantation and civil war years were very slow to heal and arguably still fester in Northern Ireland today.

In the 1641 Rebellion, the Munster Plantation was temporarily destroyed, just as it had been during the Nine Years War. Munster saw ten years of warfare between the planters and their descendants and the native Irish Catholics. However, the ethnic/religious divisions were less stark in Munster than in Ulster. Some of the earlier English Planters in Munster had been Roman Catholics and their descendants largely sided with the Irish in the 1640s. Conversely, some Irish noblemen who had converted to Protestantism - notably Earl Inchiquin, sided with the settler community.

Read more about this topic:  Plantations Of Ireland

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