Plantation: Aspects of seventeenth-century Ulster society

Chairman

Introduction

In this era of commemorations and re-evaluations, the Ulster Local History Trust has been very conscious of its mission to promote a deeper awareness and understanding of our troubled past. With this in mind, recent biannual conferences have sought to bring the fruits of new research and reinterpretations of our past to the attention of the wider public, not only in Ulster, but throughout Ireland.

A two-day conference in 2008 looked at the theme of plantation and migration in the seventeenth century under the title ‘Across the narrow sea: plantations in Ulster’. At this conference, leading historians reviewed the historiography of the subject and examined the local, national and wider impact and consequences of the influx of new settlers to Ireland. Professors Patrick Duffy, Raymond Gillespie, Mary O’Dowd, James Stevens Curl and Dr Patrick Fitzgerald examined various aspects of the Ulster Plantation, while Johnny Cunningham, Dr William Roulston and Siobhan McDermott emphasised the lessons to be drawn from local in-depth studies.

This was followed in 2010 by a one-day conference under the title ‘Plantation and Retribution: Ulster 1610–1641’, with a range of talks assessing key issues during that period. Dr Brendan Scott and Dr William Roulston provided evaluations on the limitations of the success of the religious aspects of the plantation programme while Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, Dr David Edwards and Professor Aidan Clarke reviewed the pressures from above and below that culminated in the events of the 1641 rising. The final lecture of the programme was provided by Professor John Morrill in tribute to a leading scholar of the plantation period, Robert (Bob) Hunter.

A number of the papers from these conferences, along with others commissioned for this publication have been made available here and it is the hope of the editors that this collection of essays will further develop the process of investigation and understanding into these early decades of the seventeenth century, a period in our history which has continued to resonate so deeply over the centuries with deeply entrenched viewpoints, and which still provokes heated argument.

The Trust is deeply indebted to all those scholars who spoke at the above-mentioned conferences and who have contributed to this volume. It is hoped that the wide variety of topics and approaches will be of interest to many people and stimulate further investigation and research into this much studied period. Brendan Scott and I wish to acknowledge the support of our fellow trustees on the Ulster Local History Trust and Fintan Mullan and Dr William Roulston of the Ulster Historical Foundation for their commitment to this project. Finally the Trust gratefully acknowledges the support of the R.J. Hunter Committee in making this publication possible and hopes that it will help in some small measure to pay tribute to one of the recent pioneers of early seventeenth-century Irish history.

JOHN DOOHER

When the British came to Ulster: migration, memory and myth

Patrick Fitzgerald

The central preoccupation of this paper is with the chronology of migration from Britain to Ulster and the exploration of the proposition that, on the cusp of the four hundredth anniversary of the Jacobean Plantation of the six escheated Ulster counties, we still tend to take a rather narrow view of the peopling process which spanned, what Sam Hanna Bell dubbed, the Narrow Sea.¹ Working in the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster American Folk Park over the course of the last decade, I have been repeatedly struck by the regularity with which North American roots tourists in search of Ulster-Scots lineage misread the chronology of migration from Scotland to Ireland and indeed later migration from Ireland to North America.² Concerning ourselves primarily here with the former of these two migrations, I am often confronted by those whose migration timeline charts the movement from Scotland to Ireland as an essentially early Stuart phenomenon. Nor is this distorted impression of the sequencing of migration purely due to family lore as many popular historical accounts published on both sides of the Atlantic tend to perpetuate this version of the narrative. Reviewing some of these publications will form part of the substance of this paper.

Before proceeding too much further, however, it is probably worthwhile to draw something of a distinction between the domains of Academic and Public history. Whilst I do not expect the figures quoted below to surprise those academically engaged in the period, I would anticipate that the patterns of migration mapped out may jar with those more familiar with the ‘received version’ communicated at a more ‘popular’ level. If this thesis is accurate it may suggest that historians continue to face real challenges in transferring their research findings to the widest possible public audience.³

I would like to proceed by offering some personal reflections relating to the reading of the landscape in my own locale of south Tyrone. As an immigrant or ‘blow-in’ (in the vernacular) to the small mid-Tyrone village of Seskinore, I can recall my initial impression, when I arrived more than a decade ago, that this classic estate village, with Church of Ireland chapel of ease, estate-sponsored school and broad main street, likely had its origins in the Jacobean Plantation of Ulster. In fact, the extant evidence suggests that the village really only began to take shape in the 1780s, following the marriage of Mary Perry to Alexander McClintock from County Louth but of a family originally from Argyllshire. Although a British planter population was already established in the vicinity in the generation prior to 1641, the development of the estate and the attraction of migrants from Britain or elsewhere in Ulster owed most to the energies of the Perry family, who were granted fee farm lands here in 1662 by Sir Audley Mervyn (lawyer and politician, 1603–75). Although the surname Perry (or Porry) appears amongst the Planter tenantry as early as 1630, the James Perry who was granted lands in 1662 and established his initial seat at nearby Perrymount, was most likely a recent immigrant from Wales.⁴

Similarly, if we turn our attention to another slightly larger Tyrone estate village, Caledon, on the Armagh border, we detect a not dissimilar pattern of delayed development. In 1614, the lands here appear to have been given over, somewhat unusually, to a female Irish grantee, Catherine Ní Neill and only came into the possession of William Hamilton, whose family originated in Lanarkshire, but had been settled in north-west Tyrone for a generation, after the Cromwellian victory in 1649.

Even by 1666, only six British hearth owners were recorded here and again the development of the village only really began under Lord Orrery (John Boyle, 5th earl of Cork and 5th earl of Orrery, writer and friend of Jonathan Swift, 1707–62) in the late 1740s and then most significantly under the Alexanders (James Alexander, 1st earl of Caledon, 1730–1802, son of Nathaniel Alexander, alderman of Londonderry, returned to Ireland from India a very wealthy man in 1772) who acquired the estate in 1776.⁵

Although it does seem entirely appropriate in a publication sponsored by the Ulster Local History Trust to introduce these two localised examples, the primary purpose for doing so is to attempt to illustrate three wider points. Firstly, that the Ulster Plantation was explicitly a British and ‘unionist’ project. Arguably a central reason why James VI and I took such a direct personal interest in the scheme was because he recognised it as a vehicle which could give tangible expression to his desire (one might even suggest fixation) to promote a constitutional union between England and Scotland and to bolster a Stuart dynasty which could exercise effective governance across the three kingdoms.⁶ Secondly, in order to highlight that migration from Britain to Ulster remained relatively modest during the first half of the seventeenth century and accelerated after 1650 towards a peak, of particularly Scottish immigration, during the final decade of the century.⁷ Thirdly, to illustrate the extent to which processes initiated in the 1610s often took significantly longer (several generations) to fulfil their potential.⁸

So let us return from these local examples to consider the historical narrative set out in the popular literature. A brief review of some of the works targeted primarily at a popular audience and published since the Millennium serves to illustrate the point alluded to in the introduction. In the year 2000 Ron Chepesiuk published a book entitled The Scotch-Irish: From the North of Ireland to the Making of America in North Carolina. The opening paragraph of the preface offers the following account:

The Scotch-Irish were originally lowland Scots who migrated in considerable numbers to the province of Ulster in Ireland in the seventeenth century to participate in the colonial scheme established during the reign of James I (1603–25) and then in the next century, because of economic and religious reasons emigrated once more to America.⁹

Although to be fair to the author he later acknowledges in a sentence the migration of ‘an estimated 50,000 Scots’ in the years between 1690 and 1697, this sits against a full chapter of eighteen pages devoted to the Jacobean Plantation.¹⁰ I would suggest that there is little here to dissuade the average reader from deducing that a trans-Atlantic emigrant ancestor of the early eighteenth century came from a family which had been in Ulster for three or four generations. Simultaneously on this side of the ocean, Billy Kennedy published Heroes of the Scotch-Irish in America which in two pages seeks to summarise Scottish Presbyterian settlement in Ulster. Again to be fair to the author, he states in the opening paragraph that ‘movement continued throughout the seventeenth century in what was known as the Scottish Plantation’.¹¹ However, in the remainder of this summation, Kennedy only takes the story as far as 1642 and makes no explicit reference at all to migration during the second half of the century. In 2004, James Webb, elected as Democratic Senator for Virginia in 2006, authored a volume entitled Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America in which, during the course of a chapter dealing with the Ulster Plantation, he does make reference to the volume of migration which followed the early Stuart plantation. Yet, further on in the text, while discussing the origins of the Ulster emigrants who left for colonial America between 1715 and 1775, he claims ‘many of these families had spent more than a hundred years in Ireland. Almost all had spent more than a generation there, so that their children had no direct memory of Scotland’.¹² In other words there is little allowance here for the very significant fresh Scottish immigration in the mid/late 1690s.

Finally, to return to Northern Ireland and a publication of 2007 by Arthur Woods entitled From the Shankill to the Shenandoah: A personal view of the Scotch Irish, which, like Kennedy’s volume, is not academic and thus lacks references. In chapter five, Woods briefly sets out an account of Scottish migration to Ulster and devotes almost all of the text to the reign of James I, suggesting that ‘by 1620 at least 50,000 Lowland Scots had crossed the 12 miles of water which divided Scotland from Ulster’ and later estimates that ‘by 1640 the numbers had reached 100,000’.¹³ Somewhat later in the book the author completes his account of the Scots in Ulster with the short statement that ‘in the last ten years of the 17th century there was a further 50,000 immigrants from Scotland’.¹⁴ This review of some of the popular literature over the course of the last decade hopefully demonstrates how the dominant popular narrative continues to place significantly less emphasis upon the sizeable majority of Scottish immigrants to Ireland who came during the second half of the seventeenth century.

Moving from a review of the popular literature relating specifically to the Ulster-Scots and Scotch-Irish to that dealing with Ulster history more broadly, we find that the narrative delineated is not greatly different. In 2005, Michael Sheane, as one of a series of recent books on Ulster history, published Ulster Blood: The Story of the Plantation of Ulster. In some 130 pages, the author makes virtually no reference to migration into Ulster after the reign of James I. At one point he states that ‘immigration from Scotland to Ulster had reached its peak by 1619’ and then claims in the book’s penultimate sentence that ‘it was not until 1633 that the flow of Scots into Ulster became great’.¹⁵ Art Ó Broin, a Munster man who taught history in Derry for two decades, published Beyond the Black Pig’s Dyke: A short history of Ulster in 1995. Although in the opening of chapter ten, dealing with the establishment of the Protestant Ascendancy, he refers to ‘Elizabethan, Stuart, Cromwellian and Williamite planters’, the overall tenor of the interpretation is effectively summarised by his earlier claim that ‘the troubled nature of modern Ulster was determined by the Jacobean plantation’.¹⁶ The notion, oft repeated since 1969, that the ‘troubles’ of the past generation owed its origins to the Ulster Plantation inevitably tends to downplay the longer term significance of intervening events. By a distance, the most authoritative and influential modern narrative history of the province is that published in 1992 by Jonathan Bardon. Bardon, in chapter five of this volume, deals with the plantation of Ulster, but attaches the dates 1603–1685, which serves to remind the reader that plantation, in terms of inward migration from Britain, was sustained well beyond 1641.¹⁷ Bardon also crucially acknowledges in a paragraph during the following chapter, the scale of migration from Scotland in the wake of the Williamite war. Nonetheless, it is still worth bearing in mind that Bardon devotes over twenty pages to the phase 1603–41 which saw perhaps 40,000 British settlers migrate to Ireland compared to a mere paragraph dealing with the immigration of roughly the same number of migrants during the period 1690–1715.¹⁸

An obvious question at this juncture is how did this grand narrative which underplayed the significance of later seventeenth-century British migration take shape? Turning to Lord Macaulay’s classic and influential 1849 History of England, which also offered regular, if brief, snapshots of the state of Scotland and Ireland, we find a fleeting reference to the scanty harvests which afflicted the former in the later 1690s, but no reference to the sizeable migration to Ireland.¹⁹ The undoubted implication of this trend-setting work is that the colonists of the Williamite era were essentially the descendants of earlier planters rather than recent arrivals. Two highly influential later Victorian histories by Froude and Lecky, though contrasting in interpretation in general terms, did little to challenge the overall impression conveyed by Macaulay.²⁰ Works relating to the Scot in Ulster and the Scotch-Irish in America in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries followed suit in terms of their emphasis on the early origins of the Scottish planter population in Ulster. Harrison, writing on the former migration in Edinburgh in the 1880s and Hanna writing on the latter trans- Atlantic movement at the turn of the century in New York, followed Lecky closely, acknowledging fairly briefly Scottish migration in the 1690s but explaining it only in terms of pull factors rather than push, whilst devoting significantly greater emphasis to the migration of the early Stuart period.²¹

An emerging nationalist historiography also paid scant attention to these late arriving immigrants. Neither A.M. Sullivan in his Story of Ireland (1867) nor John Mitchell in his History of Ireland from the treaty of Limerick (1868) included any direct reference to the Scottish migration of the 1690s.²² Finally, it is also worth noting the limited attention paid to the 1690s’ famine and particularly the associated out-migration, by historians of Scotland from David Hume on.²³ A scan through the 380-odd pages of J.D. Mackie’s 1964 Pelican History of Scotland reveals no mention whatever of the nation’s worst socio-economic crisis and it was only with the emergence of greater interest in economic, social and demographic history in the following decade that the subject began to receive any serious scholarly attention.²⁴

Moving to review the academic monographs in this field, we can also see how research and publication has been more focussed on the earlier phase of migration and settlement. In terms of British settlement in Ulster, four volumes have been key to advancing our understanding over the course of the past generation. In 1973, Michael Perceval-Maxwell published The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I which makes explicit in its title the terminus