Plantations of Ireland
These plantations were based around existing frontier forts, but they were largely unsuccessful due to fierce resistance from native Irish clans.
While the province was mainly Irish-speaking and Catholic, the new settlers were required to be English-speaking Protestants,[4][5] with most coming from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England.
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.
[citation needed] 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".
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.
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.
[23][24] 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 Desmon.
After Richard Greenville had departed from Ireland the fledging colony of Tracton was sacked by Donald McCarthy, 1st Earl of Clancare and Fitzmaurice along with the native inhabitants.
He then partnered with another Munster colonist, Captain William Newce, to invest in the newly – formed Virginia Company and helped establish the colony at Jamestown in North America.
However, the settlement here was rather piecemeal because the ruling clan – the MacCarthy Mór line – argued that the rebel landowners were their subordinates and that the lords actually owned the land.
[51] The Munster Plantation was supposed to develop compact defensible settlements, but the English settlers were spread in pockets across the province, wherever land had been confiscated.
[52] The English settler population in the 1620s was four times greater than in the earlier Munster plantation and powerful enough to control a considerable area after the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
Initially, Chichester planned a fairly modest plantation, including large grants to Irish-born lords who had sided with the English during the war.
The planters were granted around 3,000 acres (1,214 ha) each, on condition that they settle there a minimum of 48 adult males (including at least 20 families), who had to be English-speaking Protestants.
Planters had achieved substantial settlement on unofficially planted lands in north Down, led by James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery,[57] and in south Antrim under Sir Randall MacDonnell.
Since most land-owning families in Ireland had taken their estates by force in the previous four hundred years, very few of them, with the exception of the New English planters, had proper legal titles for them.
Following the precedent set in Wexford, small plantations were established in Laois and Offaly, Longford, Leitrim and north Tipperary.
There were many small plantations in Munster in this period, as Irish lords were required to forfeit up to one third of their estates to get their deeds to the remainder recognised by the English authorities.
Notable English Undertakers of the Munster Plantation include Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork.
[47] The Irish Catholic upper classes were unable to stop the continued plantations in Ireland because they had been barred from public office on religious grounds.
[67] Plantations stayed off the political agenda until the appointment of Thomas Wentworth, a Privy Councilor of Charles I, to the position of Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632.
Wentworth confiscated land in Wicklow and planned a full-scale Plantation of Connacht – where all Catholic landowners would lose between a half and a quarter of their estates.
[68] In October 1641, after a bad harvest and in a threatening political climate, Phelim O'Neill launched a rebellion, hoping to rectify various grievances of Irish Catholic landowners.
Although peace was eventually restored to Ulster, the wounds opened in the plantation and civil war years were very slow to heal and arguably still fester in Northern Ireland in the early 21st century.
At this time, the new settlers were principally Scots, tens of thousands of whom fled a famine in the lowlands and border regions of Scotland to come to Ulster.
On 14 February 1588, William Herbert wrote to Francis Walsingham that he desired to show posterity his affection for his God and his prince 'by a volume of my writing,' by 'a colony of my planting,' and by 'a college of my erecting.'
They resulted in the removal and/or execution of Catholic ruling classes and their replacement with what became known as the Protestant Ascendancy, Anglican landowners mostly originating from Great Britain.
The forced dominance of the Protestant class in Irish life persisted until the late 18th century when they reluctantly voted for the Act of Union with Britain in 1800.
It abolished their parliament, making their government part of Britain's.The plantations and their related agricultural development also radically altered Ireland's physical environment and ecology.
By 1700, Ireland's native woodland had been reduced to a fraction of its former size; it was intensively logged and sold for profit by the plantation settlers for commercial ventures such as shipbuilding, as much of the English forests had been overlogged to total depletion, and the navy was becoming a great power.
