Plantations of Ireland - Ulster Plantation (1606 Onwards)

Ulster Plantation (1606 Onwards)

Prior to its conquest in the Nine Years War of the 1590s, Ulster was the most Gaelic part of Ireland and the only province that was completely outside English control. The war, of 1594–1603, ended with the surrender of the O’Neill and O’Donnell lords to the English crown, but was also a hugely costly and humiliating episode for the English government in Ireland. Moreover, in the short term it had been a failure, since the surrender terms given to the rebels were very generous, re-granting them much of their former lands, but under English law.

However, when Hugh O'Neill and the other rebel Earls left Ireland in 1607 (the so-called Flight of the Earls) to seek Spanish help for a new rebellion, the Lord Deputy, Arthur Chichester, seized the opportunity to colonise the province and declared the lands of O’Neill, O’Donnell and their followers forfeit. Initially, Chichester planned a fairly modest plantation, including large grants to native Irish lords who had sided with the English during the war. However, this plan was interrupted by the rebellion of Cahir O’Doherty of Donegal in 1608, a former ally of the English, who felt that he had not been fairly rewarded for his role in the war. The rebellion was swiftly put down and O’Doherty killed but it gave Chichester the justification for expropriating all native landowners in the province.

James VI of Scotland had become King of England in 1603, uniting those two crowns –also of course gaining possession of the Kingdom of Ireland – an English possession. The Plantation of Ulster was sold to him as a joint "British", i.e. English and Scottish, venture to pacify and civilise Ulster. So at least half of the settlers would be Scots. Six counties were involved in the official plantation – Armagh, Fermanagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal and Tyrone.

The plan for the plantation was determined by two factors, one was the wish to make sure the settlement could not be destroyed by rebellion as the first Munster plantation had been. This meant that, rather than settling the Planters in isolated pockets of land confiscated from convicted rebels, all of the land would be confiscated and then redistributed to create concentrations of British settlers around new towns and garrisons. What was more, the new landowners were explicitly banned from taking Irish tenants and had to import them from England and Scotland. The remaining Irish landowners were to be granted one quarter of the land in Ulster and the ordinary Irish population was supposed to be relocated to live near garrisons and Protestant churches. Moreover, the Planters were also barred from selling their lands to any Irishman.

The second major influence on the Plantation was the negotiation between various interest groups on the British side. The principal landowners were to be Undertakers, wealthy men from England and Scotland who undertook to import tenants from their own estates. They were granted around 3,000 acres (12 km²) each, on condition that they settle a minimum of 48 adult males (including at least 20 families) who had to be English-speaking and Protestant. However, veterans of the war in Ireland (known as Servitors) and led by Arthur Chichester, successfully lobbied that they should be rewarded with land grants of their own. Since these former officers did not have enough private capital to fund the colonisation, their involvement was subsidised by the City of London (the financial sector in London), who were also granted their own town (Derry, now officially named Londonderry although typically called Derry in general parlance) and lands. The final major recipient of lands was the Protestant Church of Ireland, which was granted all the churches and lands previously owned by the Roman Catholic church. It was intended that clerics from England and the Pale would convert the native population to Protestantism.

The plantation was a mixed success for the English. By the 1630s, there were 20,000 adult male English and Scottish settlers in Ulster, which meant that the total settler population could have been as high as 80,000. They formed local majorities of the population in the Finn and Foyle valleys (around modern Derry and east Donegal) in north Armagh and east Tyrone. Moreover, there had also been substantial settlement on unofficially planted lands in north Down, led by James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery, and in south Antrim under Sir Randall MacDonnell. What was more, the settler population grew rapidly as just under half of the planters were women – a very high ratio compared to contemporary Spanish settlement in Latin America or English settlement in Virginia and New England.

However, the Irish population was neither removed nor Anglicised. In practise, the settlers did not stay on bad land, but clustered around towns and the best land. This meant that many English and Scottish landowners had to take Irish tenants, contrary to the terms of the plantation. In 1609, Chichester had deported 1300 former Irish soldiers from Ulster to serve in the Swedish Army, but the province remained plagued with Irish bandits known as "wood-kerne" who attacked vulnerable settlers. It was said that English settlers were not safe a mile outside walled towns as native Tories plagued the forests and wolves roamed the countryside.

The attempted conversion of the Irish to Protestantism also had little effect, at first because the clerics imported were all English speakers, whereas the native population were usually monoglot speakers of Irish Gaelic. Later, the Catholic Church made a determined effort to retain its followers among the native population.