After the end of the Nine Years War, the Tudor policy of plantation was revived by Kingjames VI and I and applied to Ulster. The first plantations, in 1605, in Antrim and Down, were a private venture by a local Catholic aristocrat. Sir Randall McDonnell, who had been awarded extensive lands for switching sides during the war. As a result of the Flight of the Earls, the English government acquired vast amounts of land in Ulster. After a short-lived uprising in Donegal in 1608, James decided to apply the policy of plantation to the rest of the province. The Articles of Plantation, passed in 1609, provided for most of the Irish population of Donegal, Derry, Tyrone, Armagh, Fermanagh and Cavan to be removed to designated reservations to release the province’s best land for plantation with Protestant Lowland Scots and English tenant farmers. The scheme foundered, as all schemes to repopulate Ireland foundered, on its reputation for violence and rebellion. The undertakers (chief planters) who were appointed by the government to oversee the plantation found that it was both necessary and profitable to retain Irish tenants as they were prepared to pay high rents to stay on the land. Although a Protestant majority - mainly of Lowland Scots - was established in Antrim and Down, in the rest of Ulster they were a minority among a resentful Catholic population. The bawns and fortified houses that the settlers built across the countryside are symbolic of their feelings of insecurity.
In 1606 King James established a Commission for the Remedy of Defective Titles. All Irish landowners were required to prove their titles to ownership of their lands. As James knew, the different traditions of landownership in Gaelic Ireland made this impossible in many cases and provided a pretext for another round of land confiscations from the Irish gentry. This made land available for further plantations in the Irish midlands and the south. The sense of tenurial insecurity the commission created was a major cause of the rebellion that broke out in 1641. The wars and plantations had dislocated the Irish economy and caused hard times for many Catholic landowners, many of whom were forced to go into debt or mortgage their estates. A series of poor harvests in the 1630s exacerbated the situation. Sir Phelim O’Neill, the pre-eminent leader of the Ulster rebellion, had debts of over ?12,000 in 1640. One of Sir Phelim’s creditors, a Mr Fullerton of Loughgall, was, coincidentally, also one of the first to be killed when the rebellion broke out.
World History
