1641 Rebellion
Dr. Raymond Gillespie on the causes of the Rebellion
I think it’s very difficult to try and draw simple analogies and to explain the rebellion in 1641 as, in some way, a reaction to the Plantation. There are some very obvious reasons why that shouldn’t be. I mean, for example, there are 30 years between the Plantation and the rebellion where very little happens; there are very little in the way of plotting; the sort of buildings which are being put up in the Plantation are not buildings for defence; the evidence that we have as to how people were armed suggests that, by the 1630s, they were a good deal more slipshod about keeping guns and swords and so on than they had been 20 years Earlier.
I think the important thing about 1641 is it was not inevitable; that it was the result of a particular set or combination, if you like, of factors which took place in the summer of 1640 running through into the summer of 1641 and finally exploding into rebellion in the winter. Those factors are partly economic, they are partly to do with bad harvests, they are to do with an army which was supposed to go to Scotland being quartered in Ulster, they are partly religious, to do with the Presbyterian persecutions of the 1630s, they are also to do with events in England - rumours are flying around Ulster that Catholics are to be hanged, that their land is to be confiscated, that John Pimm in London is going to clamp-down hard on Catholics. There is no truth to these rumours but the important thing is that these rumours are flying around and destabilising the situation.
And this is all creating political tensions as well. And we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of fear, the importance of rumour that are floating around Ulster in the summer of 1641 and, partly as a result of this, and modelling themselves on what the Scots had done three years Earlier in the first Bishops Wars, the Ulster Irish decide not, I think, to have a long drawn-out war as ultimately happens, but to have a short, sharp campaign which will put them into a position of power, where they will negotiate a peace just as the Scots had done. As one of them said later, ‘The Scots have taught us our ABC, the Scots taught us how we would do this’.
Of course it all went very wrong - partly because Sir Phelim O’Neill was not a military commander; he had no military experience; the background of the, the conditions under which rebellion happened; really, the tensions were incredible, the rumours were flying around and no-one really knew what was happening. And it’s in that very unstable situation that all sorts of things go wrong - gratuitous violence, chains of command break down, old scores are settled. And we know from some of the evidence that indeed Scots were robbing Scots, under pretext that it was part of the rebellion.
So the rebellion is not a simple inevitable reaction to the Ulster Plantation: indeed, the evidence that we see from the demands of the Irish in the Early weeks of the rebellion, make no mention of the Plantation; they only arise much later, into 1642 and 1643 when they actually demand the Plantation be unwound. But the initial outbreak of rebellion was really almost an accident.
Dr. John McCavitt on the causes of the Rebellion
Such was the acute sense of discontent by the native Irish in Ulster in 1610, that I have no doubt that there was a lingering bitterness. So how do you account then for the fact that there’s, you know, there’s 30 years, 31 years of a time lapse? And what you must remember is that, at the time of the Ulster Plantation in 1610, there was a concurrent transportation scheme carried out by the royal authorities, which resulted in some 6,000 able-bodied men being transported from Ireland to Sweden. The vast majority of those people were shipped out from Ulster so, to a large extent, the 30-year time lapse is accountable for the fact that a lot of the able-bodied manhood of Ulster (the swordsmen as they were known) have been shipped out.
Secondly, in the Early years of the Plantation, the Crown Authorities had done their best to decommission the arms of the native Irish. You know, it’s a remarkable sort of comparison to the present-day situation where a proclamation was issued in 1605 which sought to disarm people in Ireland. So you actually had a situation in 1610 and thereafter, where the native Irish basically didn’t have any weapons: it’s very hard to launch a revolt without weapons. There’s a remarkable story at the time of the O’Doherty’s rebellion in Derry in 1608 (in the Bogside area of Derry, known as ‘the Bogside’ back then too) where one English Officer was only eventually killed because he had been hit on the head with a stone.
So it’s, you know, the insurgents were so poorly armed - there was only a hundred of them, or a couple of hundred of them - they were so poorly armed that some of them came armed with stones. So it would have been very hard for the Ulster-Irish in 1610 or shortly thereafter to rise in revolt, and again not least because of their leaders had gone to the Continent, Hugh O’Neill.
Professor Nicholas Canny
on the causes of the Rebellion
In as far as those who precipitated events in 1641 (Phelim O’Neill and his associates) ultimately I suppose you could say that they were themselves beneficiaries or descendants of those who had benefited from the Plantation, by becoming Catholic proprietors or native proprietors within the scheme. That doesn’t mean that they were happy with the scheme and there is significant evidence of discontent among those Catholics who had become proprietors, and who had become part of the political nation (if you want to use that term) within the politics of Ulster in the preceding 30 years period of time.
But when they engaged in their insurrection on 22nd October 1641, unquestionably they weren’t intending on the destruction of the entire Plantation that had been brought into place. We don’t know precisely what they intended: they presumably intended to seize the positions of strength, the military fortification of the province; having done that to, from this position of strength, to engage in some negotiation with the Crown with a view to bettering their condition in some way. But they, I think it is correct to say, that they weren’t intent on destroying the Plantation.
But on the 23rd and the 24th and the 25th of October 1641, the popular attacks which are relatively spontaneous, are clEarly focused upon the tenants who had moved in and become beneficiaries of the Plantation; and that these actions, as well as the words which are articulated in justifying those actions - targeted attacks upon those who had moved in and benefited from the Plantation - these indicate that there was a popular sentiment of dispossession which was articulated in action as well as in words when the opportunity provided itself, when the political order was challenged by the actions which Phelim O’Neill and his associates engaged upon.
And it is important, I think, to recognise that the leaders of 1641, as much as the Crown Authorities, were probably as much taken by surprise by this popular outburst: that in that sense, there was a distance developing between Catholic proprietors and their subordinates which they didn’t have a full understanding of.
Long term consequences
The 1641 rebellion halted but did not stop the progress of the Plantation settlement and British (and particularly Scottish) migration to Ulster resumed after the war. In 1659, almost a third of the population in the province were of British origin; and by the mid-18th century Protestants were in the majority. By the late 17th century also, the population in Ulster was geographically divided with those of Irish extraction living on poor quality and marginal lands and the British community were settled on the better agricultural land. The Ulster Plantation, thus, determined the long term division of the province into Protestant and Catholic communities.
The tension and suspicion between the two groups initiated during the early years of the Plantation was intensified as a consequence of the wars of the 17th century. The massacres of 1641 left permanent and deep scars in the group memory of the Protestant settlers. The accession of the Catholic King James II to the English throne in 1685 revived fears that the landed wealth and political power of Irish Protestants would be undermined. The birth of a son to James’s wife in 1688 was the signal for James’s son-in-law, the Protestant William of Orange to invade England and claim the English throne in the name of his wife, Mary. William’s actions received strong support among Irish Protestants. The subsequent war of the two kings, William III and James II on Irish soil in 1689 further exacerbated the hostility between Catholics and Protestants, particularly in Ulster where William III was subsequently identified as a defender of Irish Protestantism.
The wars of the 1640s also strengthened the position of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. The first presbytery was established in Belfast in 1642 and from then on Presbyterianism began to develop its own institutional infrastructure. The earliest session records date from 1646 and testify to the strong sense of community encouraged by the church and also the strict moral code which church members were obliged to observe. In the 18th century Presbyterianism continued to be a major ideological force in Ulster and was reinforced through a popular evangelical movement. Allegiance to Presbyterianism was also strengthened by legislation designed to establish conformity to the Church of Ireland.
The penal legislation of the Irish parliament at the end of 17th and beginning of the 18th century discriminated against all dissenters from the established church although it was primarily directed at undermining Catholicism. Contrary to the intentions of the legislators, however, the laws had the effect of consolidating allegiance to Catholicism and Presbyterianism and intensifying the existing divisions in society.
Economically, the province benefited from the expansion of the linen industry in the late 17th century. Many of the second and third generation of settlers grew flax and spun and wove yarn in addition to tending a small farm. The perception of the Protestant settler as an enterprising and hardworking individual (although usually portrayed as a man) dates from the middle decades of the 18th century when linen exports soared and the rural economy prospered.