Reaction of the natives
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Reaction of the natives
The native reaction to the Plantation of Ulster was essentially hostile. However, in the early stages after The Flight of the Earls there is evidence that a restructuring of land ownership in Ulster was welcomed by many.
A Royal proclamation issued in September 1607 was designed to ‘assure the inhabitants of Tyrone and Tyrconnell that they will not be disturbed in the peaceable possession of their lands’.
Lord Deputy Chichester believed that a window of opportunity had been opened up to reconcile many of the native inhabitants of Ulster to English rule, if an equitable redistribution of land could be implemented, combined with the infusion of a Protestant settler element into Ulster as a guarantee of security.
For some time, Chichester’s views held considerable currency and the prospective Plantation in the early stages envisaged the preponderance of the lands available being allocated to native grantees.
The outbreak of O’Doherty’s revolt in 1608 was to change everything, resulting in the native inhabitants of Ulster receiving less than a quarter of the confiscated lands.
The so-called native ‘freeholders’ who were being courted by crown officials prior to The Flight of the Earls were to be particularly disappointed. While 200 freeholders had been identified when the settlement of Co.Monaghan was implemented in 1606, a total of only 280 native Irishmen were allocated land grants when the Plantation allocations were announced in 1610 for six entire counties in Ulster.
Even the so-called ‘deserving natives’ who were allocated proportions of land were decidedly unhappy with their lot, believing they were entitled to much larger grants.
Not surprisingly the native Irish in Ulster bitterly resented their treatment.
An English commander articulated their sense of acute grievance when he remarked of the native Irish population of Ulster that ‘there is not a more discontented people in Christendom’. Lord Deputy Chichester signalled the potential danger arising from such resentment, remarking that the native inhabitants would endeavour ‘at one time or other to find an opportunity to cut their landlords’ throats’. To undermine the potential threat to the Protestant settlers, Chichester resorted to a large-scale transportation strategy, claiming that he eventually shipped some 6000 malcontents to Protestant Sweden, the majority from the province of Ulster. Even this tactic was insufficient to quell discontent.
Apart from the intense disappointment with the land allocations, and the prospect that many of the native Irish were to be cleared off the lands of the English and Scottish undertakers, there were other important ramifications from the Plantation of Ulster for the native Irish.
On the one hand Catholic priests were to be banished from Ulster while efforts were made to force the Catholic population to attend Protestant services.
Overall, in the early stages, there was little in the Ulster Plantation that proved attractive to the native population. That the government largely failed to ensure that Catholics were transplanted from the lands of Scottish and English undertakers reduced the sense of displacement that might otherwise have occurred.
Reaction of the Natives - Dr. Hiram Morgan
The natives were affected in a number of ways:
The upper classes were decimated by the Plantation of Ulster.
In the first instance, many of them had left in the so-called ‘Flight of the Earls’; and then in the land grants that took place, they were of course really quite marginal to the land grants, and only 20 per cent of the land was granted to native Irish Ulster Catholics.
Furthermore, of that 20 per cent a lot of those grants were ‘life grants’ so that those grants expired with the lives of the people the land was granted to.
The other consequences... the consequence for the vast majority of the people, the native lower-classes as it were - now their position is very interesting. In the first instance they benefit from the Plantation, in the sense that the tyranny and the exactions of their local lords is removed from them; so that in the first ten or 15 years of the Plantation they are in a quite advantageous position, and one of the great themes of Gaelic literature in the Early 17th century is the ‘uppity Catholic’ - these lower classes who are making their way.
But the thing is that as large numbers of settlers come in the late '20s and Early '30s, these Irish are themselves forced out of tenancies onto bad lands so that they suffer by the 1630s.
So their position is pretty good at the start when there are few settlers around but by the 1630s their position is quite attenuated.
Reaction of the Natives Dr. Raymond Gillespie
Those who were dispossessed had a very wide range of fates. Some of them decided they could no longer stay in Ireland, some of them left. They went in vain - they went to continental Europe. Some of the more famous figures (Owen Roe O’Neill, for example) comes back in the 1640s to fight during the Irish wars of the 1640s. So some clEarly go to serve in armies abroad; others stay at home and basically become bandits in the countryside - the English refer to them as ‘wood kerne’. These are people who are perceived as a tremendous threat to the Plantation.
But it would be wrong to over-stress the number of people who were dispossessed because the population of Ulster in the late 16th century was the lowest of any part of Ireland. So there were enormous areas where there simply weren’t any people and it’s these areas which are colonised very heavily by the new settlers. Equally well there are areas that are simply left alone, which are never colonised - the areas for example around Ardboe, around the Lough Neagh shore, which has remained almost a sort of enclave almost up to the present day. Again the southern part of the Ards (again a very different sort of world) was the Savage estate, not colonised at all by settlers.
So the experience of dispossession is very variable: in some places it’s quite extensive and the response of many of these people is either to flee into the woodlands or to go abroad; in other places there is almost no dispossession at all.
Reaction of the Natives - Professor Nicholas Canny
The people who were identified by the Crown as worthy of gaining land, did include some of those who had made their peace with the Crown Earlier and therefore might come under the category of ‘deserving’. It also included a significant number of people that the Crown was very dubious about as ever becoming ‘loyal subjects’, but nonetheless the Advisor to the Crown realised that, pragmatically, that some accommodation had to be provided for them within the system otherwise they were going to be a discontented element.
It was very difficult - I suppose all of them would have been disappointed in the amount of land which they individually were assigned and, in most instances, where they were assigned land, it was different from where they traditionally had been located; in that sense there was a severance between them and those who they would have regarded as their natural followers. If you took somebody from County Fermanagh and gave them land in County Tyrone, for example, that was a major dislocation and it forced them to find new tenants to occupy land for them.
And there was a difficulty in finding tenants, because there had been a prolonged period of warfare from the 1590s forward to 1603, leading to a massive depopulation. So in that sense there was a scarcity of tenants and providing an Irish proprietor with land in an area and location, different from what he had traditionally occupied, presented him with the immediate problem of finding tenants who would pay him rent - because land without tenants was of no benefit in itself. In that sense it was a major challenge for them, and there was a very limited prospect on their part of introducing tenants from Scotland and from England which - that was the other source of tenants that an English or a Scottish proprietor would have that an Irish proprietor mightn’t normally be able to draw upon, because they wouldn’t have the social and political connections or perhaps the financial resources necessary for bringing in tenants from outside. So in that sense they were at a disadvantage relative to the newcomers who were coming in.