The Plantation of Ireland

The task of recovering Ireland from the grasp of the brave Tyrone was now resumed with more vigor than ever. Essex's successor in the government of Ireland was a stern, energetic nobleman, Lord Mountjoy. The first act of this new ruler was to re-organize the shattered and demoralized English troops. He restored rigid discipline to his army, and inflicted the severest punishments on those soldiers who in the least deviated from their duties. As a military chief, Mountjoy was wary and heartless. He refused to be drawn into bogs and forests, where the Irish clans could pick off his men. His plan of conquest was simply to lay waste the country. Wherever he went, he destroyed crops and villages, and thus made a desert. In this way he reduced the greater part of Munster and Connaught to submission.

Tyrone himself was about to despair, when the news reached him that a Spanish fleet of fifty vessels, under Don Juan d'Aquila, had reached Kinsale. The Irish chief promptly marched towards that place with five thousand men, to effect a junction with his allies.

The English under Carew promptly laid siege, both by land and sea, to the Spaniards in Kinsale. Tyrone, having joined O'Donnel, came up, and took up a position which threatened the besieging forces. But now treachery wrought the ruin of the Irish patriots. Tyrone resolved to take the English by surprise and to attack them before they knew his intention. But a traitor from his camp carried the intelligence to Carew. When Tyrone made his assault he found the English ready to receive him. After a desperate fight, he was forced to retreat in confusion. He could no longer stand up against such a disaster, and in the face of an enemy so superior in numbers and discipline. At last the brave Tyrone was forced to submit to Mountjoy, while O'Donnel sought safety in flight across seas. The English avenged the rebellion by the most ruthless cruelties. The country was desolated. Human beings, cattle, crops, were exterminated.

Just after Tyrone had given in his submission, the news reached Ireland, that the iron-souled English queen, Elizabeth, was dead (1603). The Irish were at first rejoiced to hear this; for they had heard that James the First, Elizabeth's successor, was favorable to the Catholics and they hoped that he would defend them in the practice of their faith. But they were destined to be rudely undeceived. James very soon showed that he was resolved, not only to suppress the creed of the native Irish, but to force Protestantism upon them by every means in his power. Not only the native Irish, but the Anglo-Irish of the Pale (the descendants of the original English settlers) were Catholics. The decrees of the new English king bore with equal severity on both. Sir Arthur Chichester, whom James sent to Ireland as lord-deputy, commanded the chief citizens of Dublin to attend the Protestant church; and, when they refused, he threw them all into Dublin castle. A fine was inflicted on all persons who did not go to the Protestant church every Sunday. A person in Ireland who did not take the oath of supremacy, which acknowledged the king as the sole head of the church, could not hold either a military or a civil office. He could not be a magistrate, a judge, a lawyer, or an army officer.

The reign of James was marked by a vigorous renewal of the attempts which had been made by Elizabeth, to colonize all Ireland with Englishmen. The success of this scheme, though by no means complete, was much greater under James than it had been under Elizabeth. James first directed his attention to Ulster. Tyrone and other Ulster chiefs had submitted to the crown. But it was necessary to deprive them of their local power, and, indeed, if possible, to get rid of them altogether. A false charge was made against Tyrone and O'Donnel's son Rory of having formed a plot to kill the lord-deputy, and seize Dublin castle. Tyrone was warned that it was intended to arrest him on this charge. He therefore fled with young O'Donnel to the Continent. He repaired to Rome, where, shattered and blind, he died a few years after. Soon after Tyrone's flight, a feeble revolt broke out in Ulster, which was speedily suppressed, its leaders becoming outcasts. Thus, one by one, the greater Ulster chiefs were disappearing.

The "treason" of the Ulster chiefs afforded James the opportunity, which he eagerly seized, to declare their domains forfeited to the crown; and thus a way was opened for putting into practice a scheme for planting the whole of the northern province with English and Scottish settlers. No less than six counties were confiscated by the king, to be divided up and delivered over to new holders, who would be Protestant and loyal. The king's agents went promptly to work to carry the new plantation into effect. The land of the six counties was carefully surveyed. In all, it was found that between three and four millions of acres of Irish land had come into the hands of the crown by the confiscation of James. This land was parceled out into farms of between one and two thousand acres, and was given over mainly to English and Scottish undertakers on condition that they should pay for it an annual rent of from one to two and a quarter pence per acre. Some of the land, however, was retained for the purpose of supporting the Protestant bishops, churches, and clergy, for towns and forts, and for establishing free schools.

The undertakers to whom the farms were given and the settlers upon the domain were bound by certain other conditions besides that of the payment of rent. They were required to build castles as residences; to divide their land into four larger, and six smaller, farms, and to support eight skilled laborers and their families; to let their lands for no shorter period than twenty-one years; to have the houses built in groups, or villages, in order that the settlements might the better defend themselves; to take the oath of supremacy; and not to receive the native Irish as tenants upon their estates. In addition to the undertakers, several of the great London guilds, or trade associations, took large tracts of land in Ireland, and let it out in the same way that the undertakers did. The land in Ulster was of two kinds,—that which was fertile, and that which was useless for farming or grazing. The good land was called "fat land," and the bad, "lean land." Four-fifths of the land confiscated by James was lean: only about a half a million acres were fat, or fertile. Of course it was the fat land which the undertakers seized, and upon which the new English and Scottish settlements were made.

All that was left for the poor native Irish was the lean land, which comprised bogs, barren moors, and dense forests. Thus great numbers of them became vagrants, beggars, and outlaws. They retired from the rich farms where their ancestors had dwelt and labored for centuries, and saw themselves replaced by foreign intruders, who were protected by all the power of the English crown. Under that protection, the colonists began to thrive. Many Englishmen and Scotsmen, attracted by the fertile domains and the low rents, repaired to Ulster, rented farms of the undertakers, and permanently settled down. Castles and comfortable mansions dotted the country. Towns, villages, mills, schools, bridges, and forts appeared in once lonely and secluded spots. An air of thrift and prosperity began to pervade the province. Yet the scheme was by no means fully successful. The want of laborers on the farms, and the lack of enough English and Scottish tenants to rent them, compelled the undertakers here and there to violate the condition which forbade their receiving the native Irish. Many of the English and Scottish tenants, after remaining a while upon the land, returned to their homes across the channel. When they did so, they sold out the remainder of their leases, and the improvements they had made on the land to natives. Thus arose the custom of "tenant right," which has continued in Ulster to our own day.

Having, as far as he could, carried out his plan of planting Ulster, James turned his attention to the two provinces of Leinster and Connaught. By all sorts of legal subterfuge and trickery, the titles to many of the Leinster estates were declared defective; and these estates, like those of the Ulster chiefs, were confiscated by the crown.

In this wholesale seizure of land, the Anglo-Irish suffered in common with the native chiefs. Nearly half a million acres in Leinster were thus taken from their possessors, given over to English undertakers, and granted for the use of the church and schools. Only a small proportion was returned to those who were called "the more deserving" of the recent holders of the land. Those who were dispossessed in favor of the newcomers became, like their fellow-countrymen of Ulster, wanderers and outlaws in wild places. And now, for the first time, we hear of "agrarian outrages" being committed in Ireland. The expelled proprietors and their adherents retorted upon the intruders by assassination, the maiming of cattle, and the destruction of crops.

The English avenged these agrarian outrages by killing off the vagrant Irish wherever they could lay their hands on them. The lord-deputy St. John declared that he had killed three hundred of the recent land-owners in as many years. "But," he said, "as soon as one sort is cut off, others rise in their places; for the country is so full of the younger sons of gentlemen, who have no means of living, and will not work, that, when they are sought to be punished for disorders they commit in their idleness, they go to the woods, to maintain themselves by the spoil of their quiet neighbors." Thus Leinster, as well as Ulster, was planted with some degree of success; and the result was to add a considerable sum to James's treasury from the rents, fines, and the increased customs duties, arising from the better industrial condition of the country. It remained to plant Connaught. But the landed proprietors of Connaught found a way of averting the doom of their fellow-countrymen of the other three provinces. They knew that what James most wanted was money. So they offered him a large sum for new titles to their land, provided he would not pursue his scheme of planting Connaught. While James was hesitating whether to accept it, he died (1625); and Connaught was saved, at least for a time, from a large settlement of English upon the land.

We must now go back a little, and see how James sought to give legal sanction to his harsh proceedings in Ireland. This could only be done through the Irish Parliament. For a long time, James hesitated about calling that Parliament together. It was necessary, in order that his acts should be approved, that Parliament should comprise a majority of Protestants. But a great majority of those who were entitled to vote for members in Ireland were Roman Catholics. James set his agents to work to so arrange the voting-districts as to secure the election of a majority devoted to the king. This was done by converting mere villages in many of the Protestant districts into boroughs entitled to return members. The king's agents also used every kind of threat and pressure to compel the people to vote as they wished. After a very bitter contest, the new Parliament was chosen, and was found to contain a small majority of Protestant members.

After a noisy struggle over the speakership, Parliament went to work to carry out the king's wishes. It forbade the Catholics to worship according to their faith. It required that every Catholic priest should leave Ireland within forty days, under heavy penalties. It declared that a person who sheltered a priest should be fined forty pounds; that, if he did so a second time, he should be imprisoned and that, for the third offence of this kind, he should suffer death. It passed an act, "attainting" of high treason O'Neil, O'Donnel, and many other Ulster chiefs; and confirmed the confiscations of their lands to the crown. It put all the native Irish under the protection and obligations of the English law. Hitherto, by that law, they had been simply outlaws. It also abolished all the old laws which had forbidden marriage and other social relations between the English and the Irish races. At the end of James's reign, therefore, it may be said that the whole of Ireland was under the physical control of the English scepter.