Tudors: Mary And Elizabeth

¶ In 1171, King Henry II of England landed in Ireland to insist that both the recently arrived Cambro-Normans (i.e. Welsh Normans) and the native Irish, also known as Gaels or Milesians, subject themselves to him and his successors. He was the first English monarch of the Plantagenet dynasty.
¶ In 1485, the Plantagenets lost the throne of England and the so-called lordship of Ireland to the Tudors. For several reasons, the Tudors were anxious about Ireland.
¶ One matter of concern was a belief that certain of the country’s important Norman families had Gaelicized. 
¶ Irish historiography (i.e. history-writing) developed the adage “more Irish than the Irish themselves” to characterize such families, who not only intermarried with the native Irish but also, to a consequential degree, adopted their language, dress, hairstyles, horse-riding techniques, and legal system, known as the Brehon Laws.
¶ A second matter of concern was the possibility that England’s continental enemies, particularly France and Spain, might use Ireland as a western flank during future wars against England.
¶ That risk intensified once the second Tudor monarch, Henry VIII, ceased to recognize the Pope as head of the church. While one of Henry’s daughters, Mary Tudor, attempted to restore Roman Catholicism during her reign as Queen Mary I (1553-1558), Protestantism was once again privileged when her half-sister, Elizabeth Tudor, acceded to the throne, becoming Queen Elizabeth I. She would reign for 44 years (1558-1603).
¶ Just as the French and Spanish monarchies remained Catholic after the Reformation, so too did most native and Norman families in Ireland. In an attempt to promote Protestantism in Ireland, Elizabeth I commissioned a translation of the New Testament into Gaeilge (the Irish language).

Plantation Under Mary Tudor: Laois-Offaly

¶ In and around Dublin, the English crown established a zone of control, known as the Pale (sometimes demarcated by a ditch). From the Pale, it attempted to administer Ireland as a colony.
¶ While the area’s boundaries shifted over time, the notion of its being surrounded by hostile Irish communities yielded the expression, “beyond the Pale.”
¶ Early in their ascendancy, the Tudors relied on the Norman Fitzgerald family, earls of Kildare, to keep the Pale fairly stable and secure; however, that arrangement ceased in 1534-1535, when Thomas Fitzgerald (“Silken Thomas”), heir to the earldom, led a revolt against King Henry VIII.
¶ Silken Thomas’s Rebellion precipitated Henry’s decision to shift from using the title Lord of Ireland to that of King of Ireland. He also introduced the surrender-and-regrant scheme, designed to align both Gaelic and Gaelicized Norman families with the Tudor dispensation. Among other outcomes, the scheme sought to establish English common law in place of the native-Irish Brehon Laws and their associated customs.
¶ Under the scheme, many Gaelic and Gaelicized lords surrendered their lands to Henry VIII. Once assured of the lords’ loyalty and their commitment to the English system (in such areas as inheritance), he then regranted them their lands by means of a charter, usually along with a noble title, such as earl or baron.
¶ An example: By participating in the scheme in 1542, Conn O’Neill, the head of the Northern O’Neill clan — a native-Irish dynasty in Ulster, Ireland’s northern province — gained the title Earl of Tyrone. He gave up his Gaelic style, The O’Neill. After much complicated maneuvering, the first earl was succeeded by his grandson, Hugh O’Neill, who would assist the English during the Second Desmond Rebellion (see below) but later lead a major anti-English rebellion.
¶ The surrender-and-regrant scheme continued even after the death of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I.

¶ When the Protestant Elizabeth’s half-sister, the Catholic Mary Tudor, was Queen of England — and Ireland — she and her husband, King Philip II of Spain, had to address the fact that two native-Irish families, the O’Mores and the O’Connors, were regularly attacking the Pale.
¶ In 1556, Mary and Phillip determined to confiscate the attackers’ tribal lands in the Irish midlands, west of Dublin, and settle or plant them with English loyalists (both Catholic and Protestant). The regime reconfigured the territory into a pair of counties (a process called shiring): Queens County, now County Laois; and King’s County, now County Offaly.
¶ The effort had limited success, but it established a template for subsequent plantations on a larger scale.

Plantation Under Elizabeth Tudor: Munster

First Desmond Rebellion (1569-1573)

¶ Mary Tudor, daughter of Catherine of Aragon (Henry VIII’s first wife), was succeeded by Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of Anne Boleyn (his second wife). Between 1569 and 1573, Queen Elizabeth would face a crisis in Ireland, the First Desmond Rebellion, centered on James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald — often referred to by the single name Fitzmaurice — a member of the Fitzgerald (or Geraldine) dynasty of Desmond, a territory in Munster, Ireland’s southern province.
¶ The Fitzgeralds of Desmond traced their origins to the twelfth-century Norman invasion of Ireland. Fitzmaurice was captain general of the dynasty’s private army, and he had multiple reasons to resent the Elizabethan regime, not least its promotion of Protestantism and its punitive treatment of the Earl of Desmond, his cousin, in the aftermath of a regional war he had fought against another of Ireland’s leading Norman families, the Butlers of Ormond.
¶ Amassing a coalition force that included native-Irish families and gallowglasses (foreign mercenaries), Fitzmaurice initiated the First Desmond Rebellion, to which the crown responded with a scorched-earth campaign, notorious for the brutality of one English commander, Humphrey Gilbert.
¶ Ultimately, Fitzmaurice accepted an offer of pardon and self-exiled to continental Europe, bringing the conflict to a close. During his time away, he interfaced with Pope Gregory XIII, among other Catholic leaders.

Second Desmond Rebellion (1579-1583)

¶ In July 1579, with the Pope’s endorsement, Fitzmaurice and around a hundred Italian and Spanish soldiers landed at Dingle, County Kerry. Thus, the Second Desmond Rebellion began. Persisting for four-and-a-half years, it exceeded the first in bloodshed and religious zeal; and it occurred when the English were actively attempting to de-Gaelicize the territory of Desmond and other parts of Ireland, primarily by means of provincial presidents and councils.
¶ Fitzmaurice was killed during an early skirmish; however, by that time Gerald Fitzgerald, the 15th Earl of Desmond, had (reluctantly) joined the rebellion, which he would come to lead. The earl implored his peers to commit to the fight, explaining, “I and my brethren are entered into defense of the Catholic faith and the overthrow of our country by Englishmen.”
¶ In general, the rebels used guerrilla tactics, while the English military launched larger-scale actions from garrisons.
¶ In September 1580, over a year into the rebellion, perhaps as many as 600 Italian and Spanish soldiers, funded by the Pope and King Philip II of Spain, landed at Smerwick in County Kerry.
¶ Soon, they found themselves besieged within the nearby Dún an Óir (“fort of gold”). After three days, they surrendered, only to suffer a mass execution by order of the siege commander, Arthur Grey, the Englishman appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland. The English courtier and adventurer-soldier Walter Raleigh played a central role in the Smerwick massacre.
¶ Prior to assuming the post of Lord Deputy of Ireland, Grey had received a letter from Henry Sidney, a former holder of the office. Sidney advised Grey not “to temporise” — that is, compromise — with the native and Norman Irish if he “aspire[d] to a perfecte Reformation of that acursed Countrie.”
¶ Grey’s secretary was the English poet Edmund Spenser. In A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), a retrospective account that has become an Irish cultural touchstone, he acknowledged how the Second Desmond Rebellion saw the decimation of many non-combatants, as well as buildings, livestock, and crops. (Some interpret portions of the text as advocating genocide of the Irish.)
¶ Spenser’s View recalls, “Out of everye corner of the woode and glenns they [the Irish] came creepinge forth upon theire handes, for theire legges could not beare them [due to starvation from lack of livestock and crops]; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spake like ghostes, crying out of theire graves; they did eate of the carrions, happye wheare they could find them, yea, and one another soone after, in soe much as the verye carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theire graves.”
¶ Ultimately, the English defeated Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, and his severed head was sent to Queen Elizabeth I in London. With the intention of planting them with English settlers, the authorities claimed and surveyed his lands and those of other rebels.
¶ In September 1584, one of the surveyors, Henry Wallop, noted the massive destruction throughout the province of Munster, especially the loss of population “by sworde, and by Justice, but chiefelie by famyne.” Some historians estimate that the Second Desmond Rebellion resulted in 48,600 deaths, civilian and military (around one third of Munster’s inhabitants).
¶ Having been preceded by a variety of proposals, the crown-directed redistribution of Desmond and other lands — known as the Plantation of Munster — benefitted a range of “New English” settlers, including Walter Raleigh (believed to have introduced the potato into Ireland from the Americas) and Edmund Spenser, who received a former Desmond family castle at Kilcolman, County Cork, where he composed his literary masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, an epic poem.
¶ Richard Boyle, an English colonial adventurer, amassed significant lands under the Plantation of Munster. In time, he purchased Raleigh’s Irish estates, which covered around 42,000 acres. For his home, he chose a Raleigh property, Lismore Castle in County Waterford — a site we sometimes visit from GS’s campus in Wexford Town.
¶ Born in Lismore, Richard Boyle’s fourteenth child, Robert Boyle, became the “father of chemistry,” renowned for advancing Enlightenment science (the so-called new philosophy) by formulating Boyle’s Law and refining the scientific method for the conduct of experiments. His seventh child, Katherine, also gained a reputation as a scientist. She is generally referred to by her married name: Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh.
¶ We have a track record of faculty and student participation in the Robert Boyle Summer School, held across venues in Lismore and Waterford City, usually in late June. It gathers together scientists, historians, philosophers, and members of the public to explore themes related to science and culture. The 2020 Boyle Summer School took as its theme “Women in STEM: Past, Present, Future.” It was postponed due to Covid-19, but it will be rescheduled.
¶ As with any conflict, the Second Desmond Rebellion is complicated. One of its cultural legacies is a broad consciousness of the rebel leader Fiach McHugh O’Byrne, memorialized in the ballad, “Follow Me Up to Carlow” (1899), written by Patrick Joseph McCall (who also composed famous ballads about the 1798 United Irish Rebellion in County Wexford). O’Byrne successfully resisted Arthur Grey and his crown forces in a theater of the rebellion that emerged in Leinster, Ireland’s eastern province. Some of the action occurred within the Pale.

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James I & VI: Plantation Of Ulster

The Nine Years’ War And The Flight Of The Earls

¶ Late in the reign of England’s last Tudor monarch, the unmarried and childless Queen Elizabeth I, the crown forces battled against a coalition led by the two dominant Gaelic (or native-Irish) chieftains in Ulster, Ireland’s northern province: Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone, and Red Hugh O’Donnell, chief of the O’Donnell clan of Tyrconnell (a region roughly equivalent to the present-day county of Donegal).
¶ Known as the Nine Years’ War (1593-1603), the conflict necessitated the largest deployment of English troops during the entire Elizabethan era.
¶ One phase of the war (March-September 1599) saw Elizabeth appoint the Second Earl of Essex, Richard Devereux, as commander.
¶ Shakespeare’s history play Henry V refers to Essex in Ireland. In the Prologue to Act 5, the Chorus hopes that “the general [Essex] of our gracious Empress [Elizabeth]” will soon be welcomed home “from Ireland … / Bringing rebellion broached [defeated] upon his sword.”
¶ While especially identified with Ulster, the Nine Years’ War also involved other parts of Ireland. A crucial English victory was the Siege of Kinsale, which stretched from October 2, 1601, to January 3, 1602.
¶ Kinsale is a coastal community at the mouth of the River Bandon in County Cork on Ireland’s southern coast. The Ulster fighters traveled there to merge with around 4,000 Spanish reinforcements; however, the English cavalry overwhelmed the combined Irish-Spanish opposition.
¶ After Kinsale, Red Hugh O’Donnell traveled to Spain, where he died. His brother, Rory, succeeded him as chief of the O’Donnell’s. He joined Hugh O’Neill to continue the fight in Ulster.
¶ In March 1603, Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell surrendered. They began treaty negotiations, during which, unbeknownst to them, Elizabeth passed away. For his subjugation to the crown, O’Donnell was created the First Earl of Tyrconnell.
¶ The two Gaelic lords would remain in Ulster, in diminished circumstances, until September 1607, when, learning that they were to be imprisoned, they exiled themselves to Continental Europe.
¶ Known as the Flight of the Earls, this leave-taking is popularly considered the end of the Gaelic dispensation on the island of Ireland. One of effects was an outpouring of lament poetry, mainly in Gaeilge (the Irish language). The patronage of bards by leading families was a key feature of Gaelic civilization.
¶ Written by March Caball, a four-page article in the November-December 2009 issue of History Ireland magazine offers a fine overview of how native bards responded to the trauma of dispossession.

Re-imagining Ulster

¶ After Elizabeth’s death, the throne of the Kingdom of England (which included the Kingdom of Ireland) passed to her cousin, King James VI of Scotland, a member of the Stuart dynasty.
¶ James was the Protestant son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, beheaded by Queen Elizabeth I.
¶ Thus, three kingdoms — England, Ireland, and Scotland — came under the reign of a single individual, although technically each remained separate from the other.
¶ In Scotland, James retained the title “James VI”; in England and Ireland, he acquired the title “James I.”
¶ James had to address the vacuum in Ulster created by the English victory in the Nine Years’ War and the subsequent Flight of the Earls.
¶ He determined to institute a major plantation scheme for six of the nine counties that constitute Ulster: Armagh, Cavan, Derry (sometimes called County Coleraine), Donegal, Fermanagh, and Tyrone. The remaining three counties — Antrim, Down, and Monaghan — were also planted, but under private schemes endorsed by James.

¶ Seen by King James an “Anglicizing,” “civilizing,” and “pacifying” endeavor, his six-county Plantation of Ulster began in 1609 and affected around a half-million acres.
¶ It had a complex structure, with several grades of planter, not least, a category called servitors (army veterans of the Nine Years’ War) and another called undertakers (wealthy English and Scottish individuals capable of maintaining large grants of land and managing tenant farmers on that land).
¶ Yet another category was livery companies (trade guilds) from the city of London, such as the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. James I obliged the so-called Great Twelve livery companies to take responsibility for lands around the ancient monastic settlement of Derry (“oakwood”). Each company received a tract of land called a manor or proportion.
¶ For its part, the City of London’s Corporation was charged with constructing, near the monastic site, a new, walled city on a grid pattern. It received the name Londonderry. Today, the city is often referred to as “Derry/Londonderry.” In time, London Corporation’s Irish unit called itself the Honorable the Irish Society.
¶ Intent on claiming them, James I’s son and successor, Charles I, ordered a survey of the livery companies’ Irish estates. The work, conducted in 1639, generated a remarkable artifact: the Great Parchment Book of the Honorable the Irish Society. Although damaged by fire in 1786, it has now become available to researches and is undergoing digitization. The project’s website presents superior content for teaching and learning.
¶ The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland has also produced worthwhile assets, such as an illustrated PDF (95 pages in length) that details historical sources useful in studying the Plantation of Ulster.

¶ Many of the tenant farmers enticed to Ulster were Presbyterians from James’s home country of Scotland, the country on the island of Britain closest to Ulster. Most of the English planters were Episcopalian and, thus, became members the Church of Ireland.
¶ As they embedded themselves in Ulster, the Scottish Presbyterians developed a distinctive identity, now called Ulster-Scots, based to a consequential degree on attending local churches (known as kirks or meeting halls) and laboring in the linen industry, which historically was a household endeavor, from cultivating the raw material, the flax plant, to spinning and weaving in family homes (“cottage industry”).
¶ Spinning districts were more concentrated in the west of Ulster and weaving districts in the east. Both practices could exist in the same location, however.
¶ Many of the Scottish planters originated in the Lowlands (or southern portion) of Scotland and spoke the dialect of English known as Lallans (meaning “lowlands”), Broad Scots, or, simply, Scots. which the Scottish poet Robert Burns would make famous. Here is a phrase in Broad Scots from Burns’s poem “Elegy on the Year 1788” (written on New Year’s Day of the next year): “our gudewife’s wee birdy cocks.” The noun gudewife means wife; the adjective wee means little; and the locution birdy cocks means male birds.
¶ The particular form of Broad Scots spoken in Ulster is generally known as Ulster-Scots or Ullans (= Ulster + Lallans).
¶ The arrival of Presbyterian Scottish and Episcopalian English settlers into Ulster effectively laid the foundation for the Partition of Ireland in 1922, whereby two countries emerged on the island: the six-county, majority-Protestant Northern Ireland, consisting of six Ulster counties; and the 26-county, majority-Catholic Irish Free State, which would become the sovereign Republic of Ireland.
¶ The Plantation of Ulster changed not only the population but also the landscape. An undertaker in receipt of more than 1,000 acres was obliged to construct a house protected by a bawn (wall) , while one in receipt of more than 2,000 acres had to build a castle.
¶ Defendability and the water supply were key considerations for the development of plantation villages and towns, many of which featured a central plaza called the diamond.
¶ One finds the term “newtown” in the names of several plantation settlements — consider, for example, the village of Newtownbutler (County Fermanagh) and Newtownards (County Down).
¶ Between 1710 and the American Revolution approximately 200,000 Ulster-Scots emigrated to the 13 American colonies, settling from New England to Georgia, generally to the west of the coastal cities, especially in the Appalachian region. Known in America as Scots-Irish (or Scotch-Irish), they tended to identify with the patriot cause. George Washington would declare, “If defeated everywhere else, I will make my stand for liberty, among the Scots-Irish in my native Virginia.”
¶ In Georgia, a Scots-Irish settlement named Queensborough developed in the 1760s and 1770s on appropriated Muskogee (or Creek) Indian lands along the Ogeechee river, between Augusta and Savannah. The city of Louisville, the sometime capital of the State of Georgia, emerged out of the initiative.

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Cromwell: Final Act

1641 Rebellion And Confederate Wars

¶ Beginning on October 23, 1641, the displaced, angry native Irish rebelled against the settlers who had appropriated their lands during the Plantation of Ulster. This action is called the 1641 Rebellion.
¶ Having begun in Ulster, the rebellion quickly expanded into the Ireland-wide Confederate Wars, named after the Irish Catholic Confederation (or Confederation of Kilkenny), a coalition of native and Norman Catholic nobles, plus other Catholics, such as church leaders and professional and military men.
¶ The 1641 Rebellion stunned the planters in Ulster. Privations and atrocities that the insurgents visited upon them were a key focus of evidentiary hearings that began in December 1641 and continued well into the 1650s. Held in a variety of locales, the hearings (commonly called the 1641 Depositions) ended up reflecting all of Ireland’s 32 traditional counties.
¶ Curated via a website from the University of Dublin (Trinity College), the 1641 Depositions contain over 8,000 accounts from females and males. Victims presented their testimonies, and rebels were interrogated. The inclusion of female contributors renders the 1641 Depositions the largest single written repository of women’s voices from Early Modern Europe.
¶ Within the 1641 Depositions, first-hand accounts address such matters as: the loss of goods, including crops and livestock; arson and other damage to property; and the desecration of churches and religious artifacts. Also detailed are a range of crimes against the person, not least drowning and other forms of murder, assault, rape, stripping, and incarceration.
¶ One witness, Eleanor Price, a widowed mother of six from County Armagh in south-central Ulster, told the inquiry about being imprisoned by Irish rebels and, then, enduring the murder of five of her offspring. They were among the victims of a November 1641 massacre-by-drowning of planters in the River Bann at Portadown Bridge.
¶ Price asserted that the rebels “then and there instantly and most barbarously drowned the most of them [the captured planters]. And those that could swim and come to the shore they either knocked them in the hands and so after drowned them, or else shot them to death in the water.”
¶ Subsequent Protestant propaganda highlighted the 1641 Rebellion. One key text was John Temple’s 1646 book, The History of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, together with the Barbarous Cruelties and Bloody Massacres that Ensued Thereupon.
¶ Today, many who identify as Ulster-Scots continue to recollect the Portadown Bridge Massacre and other horrors that Protestant planters suffered during the 1641 Rebellion at the hands of the native-Irish rebels, most of whom were Catholic.
¶ One of the Wexford entries reflects the questioning on April 1, 1654, of a rebel named “Patricke Wicken” concerning a fellow rebel, the late “Peirce Synnott,” who “about the Hallantide [Halloween] 1641” ejected a certain Apollo Waller (father of “a protestant minister”) from his home “in an hostile manner.” In company with other insurgents, Synott then occupied the building and used its “houshould goods the whole time of the Rebellyon without giuing [giving] … any manner of satisfacion for the goods by him taken.”

¶ News of the 1641 Rebellion and its aftermath put pressure on England’s second Stuart king, Charles I, to exact revenge; however, he was preoccupied by a domestic struggle against Parliament. It would culminate in his beheading on January 30, 1649, and the ascendancy of Oliver Cromwell, general of the parliamentary army (the “Roundheads”).
¶ Once the zealous Puritan Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) gained power as Lord Protector of Britain’s short-lived republic (variously called the Protectorate, the Commonwealth, and the interregnum), he and his New Model Army invaded Ireland to suppress the Confederate Wars.
¶ Cromwell’s invasion featured such brutal actions as the massacring of the populations of two towns: Drogheda, north of Dublin (on September 2, 1649); and Wexford Town in southeastern Ireland (on October 2, 1649). While the invasion lasted between 1649 and 1653, Cromwell himself was present in Ireland for just nine months. His son-in-law, Henry Ireton, replaced him as commander for much of the subsequent period.
¶ Respecting his treatment of Wexford’s citizens, Cromwell asserted, “God … in his righteous justice, brought a just judgement upon them, causing them to become a prey to the soldier, who in their pyracies had made preys of so many families, and made with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they had exercised upon the lives of divers poor Protestants.”
¶ Cromwell’s Irish campaign should be analyzed in terms of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (also known as the British Civil Wars), a period of interrelated conflicts in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
¶ One focus for Cromwell in Ireland was stripping Catholics of ownership of land in three of the country’s four provinces: Ulster (north); Leinster (east); and Munster (south).
¶ In practical terms, the first move was to confiscate all of Ireland’s Catholic-owned estates and then to allot property in Connaught, the western province, to Catholic landowners who could demonstrate non-involvement in the Confederate Wars. Connaught was seen as peripheral, with generally poor land. However, primarily for reasons of national defense, its coast and the estuary of the Shannon, a major river, were reserved for English settlers.
¶ Thus, significant numbers of Irish Catholic landowners found themselves having to relocate to Connaught, an outcome popularly expressed as “to Hell or to Connaught.”
¶ In addition, Cromwell’s regime punished certain Irish-Catholic insurgents by forcing them into indentured servitude in the West Indies (Caribbean), especially the island of Monserrat. In Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (Allen Lane, 1988), Roy F. Foster notes, “[T]here were possibly 12,000 Irish in the West Indies by the late 1660s” (page 107).
¶ Foster also explains that “[a]n interim survey for Wexford shows that 77 per cent of Catholics (by 1641 figures) disappeared as landowners [in that county]; the remainder got lands in Connacht [an alternative spelling for Connaught], on average less than half their original holdings in acres” (page 111).
¶ Clearly, Cromwell effected major social engineering in Wexford and throughout Ireland, establishing Protestant domination of land-ownership. Broadly speaking, that scenario would persist until the land-reform acts passed between 1870 and 1909.
¶ The Catholic land that Cromwell confiscated in Ulster, Leinster, and Muster was redistributed to two classes of British planters. Large grants went to Adventurers, individuals who had financed efforts to put down the 1641 Rebellion in Ireland. Smaller grants went to New Model Army veterans of Cromwell’s Irish campaign. The legal mechanism for this redistribution (popularly called the Cromwellian Plantation) was the 1652 Act for the Settlement of Ireland.
¶ Many of those who received Cromwellian grants sold their new properties to existing Protestant landowners in Ulster, Leinster, and Munster. Thus, the latter individuals expanded their estates.
¶ In order to redistribute Irish lands effectively, Cromwell commissioned a cartographic (map-making) survey of Ireland, conducted using state-of-the-art scientific principles and techniques emerging from the Enlightenment or Scientific Revolution. William Petty, sometime physician-general of Cromwell’s army in Ireland, spearheaded the project, which is known as the Down Survey. Using a scale of 1:50,000, the work took place between 1656 and 1658. It constitutes the first large-scale mapping undertaken anywhere in the world.
¶ The University of Dublin (Trinity College) has produced an excellent website that includes digital copies of Down Survey maps, as well as useful contextual and explanatory details.
¶ In 1660, with Oliver Cromwell dead, the English terminated their experiment in partial republican government and restored the monarchy, crowning as king Charles II, exiled son of the beheaded Charles I. The Restoration reversed some of the changes in land-ownership wrought under Cromwell in Ireland.
¶ Roughly, Catholics owned around 60% of Irish land before the Cromwellian invasion; just 9% of it by the time of the Restoration; and 20% of it after the efforts of redress attempted by the Restoration authorities.
¶ With around four-fifths of the island’s territory in Protestant ownership by the latter years of the seventeenth century, the stage was set for what historians call the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, a phenomenon that received a boost when, in 1688, Charles II’s successor, his brother James II, was removed from the thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland by his son-in-law, William of Orange, a Dutch prince. The staunchly Protestant William ensured that James would be England’s last Catholic monarch.
¶ Culturally, the name Cromwell became a byword for violent English excesses in Ireland. James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses, parodies this matter by having a bigoted, drunk Irish nationalist nicknamed “the citizen” attempt to attack a fellow Irishman, the novel’s chief protagonist, Leopold Bloom. The narrator of the scene, which occurs in a Dublin pub, relates, “I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the citizen getting up to waddle to the door [of the pub], puffing and blowing with the dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him [Bloom], bell, book and candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him.”
¶ Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, a popular Irish novel first published in 1806, presents the successful courting by a young Englishman of the title character, Glorvina, daughter of a dispossessed Catholic Gaelic lord.
¶ One of the Englishman’s forebears had received Glorvina’s family’s ancestral lands as a reward for fighting in Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland. He tells an acquaintance that the lands “fell to us in the Cromwellian wars,” having been “earned … by the sword.” This bald statement notwithstanding, the young man gains great empathy for native-Irish culture.
¶ The novel ends with a letter, in which the young man’s father, also empathetic towards the Irish, anticipates his son’s marriage to Glorvina: “Take then to thy bosom her whom heaven seems to have chosen as the intimate associate of thy soul, and whom national and hereditary prejudice would in vain withhold from thee. In this the dearest, most sacred, and most lasting of all human ties, let the names of [the two families] be inseparably blended, and the distinctions of English and Irish, of Protestant and Catholic, for ever buried.”

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