The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (19 page)

As a result of the initially slow uptake of land in Ulster, a decision was taken to exclude the county of Coleraine from the overall scheme. The territory was instead offered to the guilds of the city of London as part of a new and very large corporate endeavour: the involvement of such prestigious private corporations in the Plantation – so it was reasoned – would shore up the entire operation and provide long-term stability. The London guilds were distinctly underwhelmed by the offer: they were reluctant to become involved in any way with remote and unpromising Ulster, and it took a fair amount of negotiation and browbeating on the part of the Crown to change their minds. In January 1610, however, agreements were finally reached: the county’s area was expanded substantially as part of the deal, to take in sections of the former O’Neill lands in Tyrone and the mouths of the rivers Foyle and Bann, with their rich fisheries and commercial possibilities.
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The county was renamed Londonderry to reflect its backers, and the guilds set about parcelling up their new territory among themselves. The administration of the new colony was in the hands of fifty-five companies in all, including grocers, drapers, fishmongers, goldsmiths, skinners and tailors. Urging Londoners to come west, a pamphlet declared that Ulster’s promised land ‘yieldeth store of all necessary for man’s sustenance, in such measure as may not only maintain itself, but also furnish the city of London’.
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With the establishment of a new county came the foundation of a new city: the old monastic settlement at Derry now became Londonderry, perched on its hill above the Foyle. The city was laid out along sternly rational lines: behind its new walls lay a geometric grid of streets, a design that would be repeated in the years to come in the new English colonies of the New World. The colonists planned to top off their new home with another symbol of changing times, by constructing on the brow of the hill the first Protestant cathedral to be consecrated in Europe since the Reformation. The stone that recorded the cathedral’s completion in 1633 emphasized the role played by the city’s backers:

If stones could speake

Then Londons prayse

Should sound who

Built this Church and

Cittie from the grounde.

The development of the Plantation in the new city and county of Londonderry signalled both its ambitions and its limitations. The London guilds set to work adapting the territory to their own ends: market towns were founded across the county, and new development grafted on to already existing settlements; Draperstown, for example, received investment from the Company of Drapers. As time went on, however, it became apparent that the London guilds were not always scrupulous in applying the policy of segregation, for in the new county, as elsewhere in Ulster, the planter population was very thinly distributed, and it was clear that the economies of these new settlements would require an Irish presence if they were to function successfully. As a result, many Irish families – some of them regarded as upstarts by the old Gaelic ruling class – managed to carve out a substantial space for themselves in this new order.

In the new colony of Londonderry, however, the new social structure was imposed strictly: Protestant planters dwelt within the new fortifications, while the Catholic population lived in a district – low-lying, marshy and later called the Bogside – below the city walls. It was as potent a symbol of the new order as could be imagined. Across the Plantation counties, the settlers from the very outset adopted an embattled outlook, inhabiting both physically walled settlements and fortresses of the mind. Habitually they worked their fields with a weapon to hand; and tales spread of refugee Irish lurking in the woods and uplands, at all times ready to seize the opportunity to wreak havoc on the planted towns and tilled fields. Gaelic Ireland was imagined intensely by the settlers: brooding beyond their walls, dispossessed, unsettled and threatening.

Because English settlers did not arrive in the expected numbers, the Plantation never assumed the High Church character that had been anticipated by its designers. This was in part due to the well-earned reputation of Ulster as ‘a rude and remote kingdom…the first likely to be wasted [laid waste] if any trouble or insurrection should arise’. As late as the spring of 1608, the old settlement at Derry had been burned in a sudden native Irish revolt: as unattractive an advertisement as could be imagined for the new city of Londonderry that was to follow. But the initial sluggishness of the Plantation effort was also due to the colonization of North America, which began simultaneously with the successful settlement of the Jamestown colony of Virginia. Increasing numbers would be drawn towards the
tabula rasa
of the New World, seeing in its ostensibly empty landscapes opportunities that the confined fields of Ireland could not offer. And people saw liberties too: the
Mayflower
anchored at Cape Cod in 1620, its Puritan passengers craving religious freedoms and prepared to take their chances in an unknown land in order to acquire them. Ireland, with its bloody and chequered past, could never hold the same potential.

Ultimately, planter numbers would swell – augmented not solely by English men and women but increasingly by settlers crossing the North Channel from Scotland, the kin of those lowland Scots who had already emigrated to Antrim and Down. These new colonists were predominantly (but not wholly) Dissenters: Presbyterians whose cultural attitudes were already profoundly adversarial, having been the object of religious persecution in Scotland itself, and who arrived in Ireland to find themselves once again on the wrong side of a High Church regime. They came determined both to reclaim their new land of Ulster from popery and barbarism and to maintain their own distinct faith and identity in the face of the disapproval of government and established Church. Stories were told of colonists rowing back across the sea to Scotland on a Sunday in order to participate in a true Presbyterian Sabbath, then returning the same day. These newcomers carried with them a religious culture that, with its overtones of egalitarianism and democracy, was wholly different from any that had hitherto existed in Ireland: there was little sense of hierarchy among the Dissenters, no caste of bishops ready to triangulate the relationship between God and the flock. They brought too a fierce certainty that they were a chosen people and that Ulster was to be their promised land; their destiny was to have their faith and resolve tested unceasingly by God in the form of the threat posed by the Catholic population. These settlers were Presbyterian first and Scottish a distant second: and future conflicts in Ireland would increasingly be shaped by religion.

These Scots immigrants helped to establish permanently the Plantation in Ulster: by 1622 a mere thirteen thousand colonists had come to Ireland and taken up their grants of land; but by 1640 this number had grown to more than thirty thousand. For some, to be sure, there was a rude awakening: they arrived in remote Fermanagh and Donegal to find land that was boggy, or still heavily forested; back-breaking work would be required to render the fields productive. Yet the harvests were good and the colony established itself: a ship from Scotland sailed up to the new quays of Londonderry in 1615, for example, carrying a load of ‘plaid’, ‘Scotch cloth’ and ‘27 Scots daggers’ – implying the existence of a population that remained armed to the teeth while slowly becoming more sanguine about its prospects.
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Only a little, though: the sense of embattlement, of imminent threat from both the Catholic population and potentially from the government at Dublin, remained a key characteristic of Scots Presbyterian culture in Ireland.

This sense of isolation among many of the incoming Scots – magnified by the feeling that their English fellow settlers, being insufficiently godly, were essentially no better than Catholics – militated against any notion that the two groups could be meshed into one. And yet, in spite of these deep cultural and religious differences between English and Scots, established Church and Dissenters, a new society slowly took root in Ulster. Peaceful contact, commerce and occasional intermarriage inevitably occurred between the settlers and the native Irish too; and Chichester’s hope that ‘these counties in a short time will not only be quiet neighbours to the Pale, but be made as rich…as the Pale itself’ seemed a sanguine one.
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Tensions were nevertheless rising in the province: although displacement did not take place overnight nor at the point of a pike, English and Scottish settlement was inexorably pushing the Gaelic Irish on to the province’s most marginal land. In addition, the new order was exploding long-held notions of class and status: it was no easy matter for the leaders of Gaelic Ireland to be reconciled to a grievous loss of prestige; or to be bettered, socially and financially, by individuals they felt to be their inferiors.

Plantation was also implemented in other corners of Ireland in these years, though to a much less ambitious extent than in Ulster. In Wexford, a number of families – both Irish and Old English, but all Catholic and therefore suspect – were ejected from their lands: those who petitioned most strenuously against the seizures found themselves transported to the new colony of Virginia. Other plantations in the midlands seemed similarly designed to entrench new loyal colonists in the landscape; the previous policy of surrender and regrant was now quietly forgotten. At the same time, there was little attempt at evangelization by the newly established Church of Ireland: efforts seemed directed rather at acquiring and tilling the land than at gaining the loyalty of the Catholic population. The notion of anglicization that underlay English policy in the first half of the seventeenth century, then, existed largely on paper only: while the stern grid of streets behind the walls of Londonderry implied a sense of rationalism and cultural superiority that would inevitably win the day, such attitudes and certainties were seldom teamed with attempts to win hearts and minds.

The new political climate proved alarming to the Catholic Old English community in Ireland. Some of its members, in spite of the travails of the previous century, had made the assumption that they would be in close communion with the English administration rather than in opposition to it – but the increasing identification of the State with Protestantism gave the lie to such notions. For James I, it was a political imperative that the established Church be supported wholeheartedly: as the son of Mary Stuart, he remained the object of scrutiny on the part of his Protestant subjects, who were alert at all times to any sign of secret Catholic sympathies. The relatively liberal policies pursued in Ireland in the opening years of his reign, therefore, rapidly gave way to forms of anti-Catholic repression; and the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 bred an anti-papist sentiment that could not readily be dispersed.

The legislative environment, however, was at first less harsh towards Catholicism than it might have been. James was equally required to foster a sense of unity among the quarrelling component parts of his new realm, and this fact did not permit an outright campaign against the substantial Catholic populations of Ireland and Britain: the legislative programme of 1612, for example, included laws enacted against Jesuits and seminarians, but was in general limited in its anti-Catholic scope. Several years later, though, the campaign was stepped up and directed specifically against the laity: the government now tilted decisively and publicly against the Catholic faith – and this, paired potently with political harassment, had the result of placing both the Gaelic Irish and the Old English firmly on the back foot. As for the Catholic Church itself, it was inevitable that it would emerge as an oppositional political movement.

James died in March 1625 and his son was crowned Charles I in February of the following year. The new king embodied many of the ambiguities of the age: although a shy and diffident man, he was also inflexible in his views and, like his father before him, wholly dedicated to the principle of the divine right of kings. He was no ideologically committed Protestant: rather, he was cosmopolitan and a religious moderate; his consort, Henrietta Maria, was a French Catholic princess. From the very beginning, therefore, the king was in conflict with the increasingly Puritan English parliament. He was required to walk a tightrope at all times, and the increasing fragility of his rule was expressed in the political incoherence of these years. The state’s policies in Ireland inclined first in one direction and then in another, reacting to the climate of the world outside as much as to the state of Ireland itself. When, in the 1620s, the long peace between England and Spain ended abruptly, the Old English families in Ireland sought to make political hay by demonstrating their public loyalty to the Crown. The result – the ‘Graces’ agreed in 1628 between Charles and Old English representatives, guaranteeing existing property rights and an end to land expropriation – symbolized a certain grudging understanding between the two sides. However, when peace negotiations with Spain were once more taken up in the spring of 1629, many of these Graces fell by the wayside and anti-Catholic policies and land confiscations soon began again. To Ireland’s Catholics Charles was no ally, but he was a far better bet than the Protestant English parliament that regarded itself as purified and democratic and was now bent on checking the monarch’s powers.

Increasingly, the Crown struggled to assert itself in both England and Scotland. In 1639, in order to shore up his declining authority in Scotland, Charles attempted to impose the Book of Common Prayer in the kingdom. The Calvinist Scots would have none of it: they responded by occupying northern England and demanding autonomy from the Crown; this in turn destabilized English politics and empowered the English parliament, with the result that Charles lost control of the political process not only in Scotland but also in England. The monarch infuriated the Parliamentarian side yet further by ordering the raising of an army of Irish Catholics to cross the Irish Sea and intervene on the Royalist side in England itself – thus tapping into the latent English fear of the Irish arriving in the night to murder them in their beds. Fearful of what might be in store should a vengeful Puritan parliament gain the upper hand, the Irish Catholics made a fateful decision: they would strike first in support of the Crown.