Plantations in 16th- and 17th-century Ireland involved the confiscation of Irish-owned land by the English Crown and the colonisation of this land with settlers from Great Britain. The main plantations took place from the 1550s to the 1620s, the biggest of which was the plantation of Ulster. The plantations led to the founding of many towns, massive demographic, cultural and economic changes, changes in land ownership and the landscape, and also to centuries of ethnic and sectarian conflict. They created large communities with British and Protestant identities, and a new Protestant elite.Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, pp. 5–6: "The Gaelic Irish and Old English were increasingly seen by outsiders and defined themselves, as undifferentiatedly Irish. ... By the 1630s, members of the Catholic elite, whatever their paternal ancestry, shared a common identity and set of political attitudes. ... Conversely, it is possible to speak of a contending Protestant/New English/British group. The term 'British' has validity because of its contemporary usage (in referring to grantees in the Ulster Plantation for example) and, especially, because it embraces, as it was designed to, both English and Scottish interests in Ireland...the consciousness of being a privileged minority in a hostile environment." The Plantations took place before and during the earliest British colonisation of the Americas, and a group known as the West Country Men were involved in both Irish and American colonisation.
There had been small-scale immigration from Britain since the 12th century, after the Anglo-Norman invasion. By the 15th century, direct English control had shrunk to an area called the Pale. In the 1540s the English Tudor conquest of Ireland began. The first plantations were in the 1550s, during the reign of Queen Mary I, in Laois ('Queen's County') and Offaly ('King's County'). These plantations were based around existing frontier forts, but were largely unsuccessful due to fierce resistance from Irish clans.
The next plantations were during the reign of Elizabeth I. In 1568 there was an attempt to establish a colony in Kerrycurrihy, but it was destroyed by the Irish. In the 1570s a privately funded plantation of east Ulster was attempted, but it also sparked conflict with the local Irish lord and ended in failure. The Munster plantation of the 1580s followed the Desmond Rebellions. Businessmen were encouraged to invest in the scheme and English colonists were settled on land confiscated from the defeated rebel lords. However, the settlements were scattered and attracted far fewer settlers than planned. When the Nine Years' War broke out in the 1590s, most of these settlements were abandoned, although English settlers began to return following the war.
The plantation of Ulster began in the 1610s, during the reign of James I. Following their defeat in the Nine Years' War, many rebel Ulster lords fled Ireland and their lands were confiscated. This was the biggest and most successful of the plantations and comprised most of the province of Ulster. While Ulster was mainly Irish-speaking and Catholic, the new settlers were required to be English-speaking Protestants,: "Advisors to King James VI/I, notably Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy from 1604, and Sir John Davies, the lawyer, favoured the plantation as a definitive response to the challenges of ruling Ireland. ... Undertakers, servitors and natives were granted large blocks of land as long as they planted English-speaking Protestants". with most families coming from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England. This eventually created a distinct Ulster Protestant community..
The Ulster plantation was one cause of the 1641 Irish Rebellion, during which thousands of settlers were killed, expelled or fled. After the Irish Catholics were defeated in the Cromwellian conquest of 1652, most remaining Catholic-owned land was confiscated and thousands of English soldiers settled in Ireland. Scottish settlement in Ulster resumed and intensified during the Scottish famine of the 1690s. By the 1720s, British Protestants were the majority in Ulster.
Background There had been small-scale immigration from Britain in the 12th century, after the Anglo-Norman invasion, creating a small Anglo-Norman, English, Welsh and Flemish community in Ireland, under the Crown of England. By the 15th century, English control had shrunk to an area called the Pale. By the Tudor period, however, Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory initially lost to the Anglo-Normans: "even in the Pale, all the common folk ... for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit and of Irish language".Culture & Religion in Tudor Ireland, 1494–1558. Archived 16 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine, University College Cork At a higher social level, there was intermarriage between the Gaelic Irish aristocracy and Anglo-Norman lords. To varying degrees inside and especially outside of the Pale, the 'Old English' had integrated into Irish society. Edmund Spenser wrote of the old English: "they are more sharpely to be chastised and reformed … for they are more stubborne, and disobedient to the law and government, than the Irish". English discourse on Ireland largely viewed the Gaelic Irish outside the Pale as savages, and compared them with the Native Americans in 1580.
In 1174 Rory O’Connor (Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair) defeated the Anglo-Norman army at Thurles and began making incursions into the Pale itself forcing Henry II to come to talks, the treaty of Windsor was drafted which was agreed upon that the Anglo-Normans would have mostly the Pale but couldn't make incursions into Irish held lands. Henry II would later disavow the treaty he agreed to and make incursions into Irish kingdoms, forfeiting his title as lord of Ireland and his right to the Pale itself, meaning subsequent claims by the English monarchy to Ireland such as Henry VIII's lordship or later kingship were illegitimate.
Laudabiliter was a decree issued by the Pope that made Ireland's people the subjects of Henry II, however there is some debate on whether the Laudabiliter was legitimate or a forgery. The Laudabiliter could be compared to the Papal Bull "Inter Caetera," issued by Pope Alexander VI, which gave the Spanish the exclusive right to rule the lands discovered by Columbus, making the native Americans their "subjects". Despite this the Laudabiliter had a continuing political relevance into the 16th century. Henry VIII of England was excommunicated by Pope Paul III on 17 December 1538, causing his opponents to question his continuing claim to be Lord of Ireland, which was based ultimately on Laudabiliter. Henry established the Kingdom of Ireland in 1542.Magnum Bullarium Romanum, Volume 4, part 1, p. 315 (1743 edition; facsimile reprint 1965)
Gerald of Wales argued that the English crown has the right to rule Ireland because of a mission to civilise a barbarous people. His writings shaped English and European views of Ireland for centuries. He says: The idle woodland people the Irish reject agriculture, cities, the rights and privileges of citizenship and hence civilisation itself, the mission is to civilise and truly Christianise the Irish. The Irish rejected the Laudabiliter.
Early plantations (1556–1576)
The first Plantations of Ireland occurred during the Tudor conquest. The Dublin Castle administration intended to pacify and anglicise Irish territories controlled by the Crown and incorporate the Gaelic Irish aristocracy into the English-controlled Kingdom of Ireland by using a policy of surrender and regrant. The administration intended to develop Ireland as a peaceful and reliable possession, without risk of rebellion or foreign invasion. Wherever the policy of surrender and regrant failed, land was confiscated and English plantations were established. To this end, two forms of plantation were adopted in the second half of the 16th century. The first was the "exemplary plantation", in which small colonies of English would provide model farming communities that the Irish could emulate and be taxed.
Laois and Offaly
The second form set the trend for future English policy in Ireland. It was punitive/commercial in nature, as it provided for the plantation of English settlers on lands confiscated following the suppression of rebellions. The first such scheme was the Plantation of King's County (now Offaly) and Queen's County (now Laois) in 1556, naming them after the new Catholic monarchs Philip and Mary I respectively. The new county towns were named Philipstown (now Daingean) and Maryborough (now Portlaoise). An act, the Counties of Leix and Offaly Act 1556 (3 & 4 Phil. & Mar. c. 2 (I)), was passed "whereby the King and Queen's Majesties, and the Heires and Successors of the Queen, be entitled to the Counties of Leix, Slewmarge, Irry, Glinmaliry, and Offaily, and for making the same Countries Shire Grounds.". The act was repealed in 1962. This plantation initiated the colonial settlement pattern for extending English control in hostile regions. The Leix-Offaly plantation also demonstrated to the Crown high cost of colonialism, leading them to encourage private financial participation in colonial ventures.
The O'Moore and O'Connor clans, which occupied the area, had traditionally raided the English-ruled Pale around Dublin. The Lord Deputy of Ireland, the Earl of Sussex, ordered that they be dispossessed and replaced with an English settlement. However, the plantation was not a great success. The O'Moores and O'Connors retreated to the hills and bogs and fought a local insurgency against the settlement for much of the following 40 years. In 1578, the English finally subdued the displaced O'Moore clan by massacring most of their fine (or ruling families) at Mullaghmast in Laois, having invited them there for peace talks. Rory Oge O'More, the leader of rebellion in the area, was hunted down and killed later that year. The ongoing violence meant that the authorities had difficulty in attracting people to settle in their new plantation. Settlement ended up clustered around a series of military fortifications.Lennon pp. 169–170Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650, pp. 128–129
Kerrycurrihy In 1568–1569, Warham St Leger and Richard Grenville tried to establish a small English joint stock colony in the barony of Kerrycurrihy, by Cork Harbour, on land leased from the Earl of Desmond.Lennon, Colm. Sixteenth Century Ireland, the Incomplete Conquest. Gill & Macmillan, 1994. pp. 211–213. They then proposed establishing larger corporate colonies in late 1568 creating a consortium of English merchants to fund a colony in Baltimore, west Co. Cork, mainly for exploiting the fisheries in Munster. The scheme was privately funded but also received a stipend from the English crownEllis, Steven. Ireland in the Age of the Tudors. Routledge, 2014. p. 293 At about this time as part of the joint stock scheme Grenville also seized lands from the native Irish for colonisation at Tracton, to the west of Cork harbour creating the first English joint stock colony in history. After Richard Greenville had departed from Ireland the fledging colony of Tracton was sacked by Donald MacCarthy and James FitzMaurice FitzGerald along with the native inhabitants. The colony was small and quickly overwhelmed and all the English colonial inhabitants were killed except three or four English soldiers, who were promptly executed the next day. Sir Peter Carew had also asserted his claim to lands in south Leinster. The plantations in the south of Ireland led to bitter disputes with local Irish. However, in June 1569 the fledgling colonies were destroyed by the Irish under James FitzMaurice when the first Desmond Rebellion began.Ellis, Steven. Ireland in the Age of the Tudors. Routledge, 2014. p. 295