232. Colonising Ireland: The First Plantations (Ep 2)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Terumpo. And we continue our Ireland series today in the company of the fabulous Professor Jane Allmyer. And we're sort of considering something last week, which I'm not sure we've really got to the bottom of. No, so it's this whole business of how did the Tudors succeed in exercising control over Ireland in a way that the Anglo-Normans had actually rather failed in doing? Great question, William. What happens is they basically take Dublin and have their administrative military headquarters in Dublin. and then they have these raids from Dublin.

1:04Then they establish garrisons in strategic areas. But it really is military force. And in addition to the army, they have these local warlords who are basically operating on behalf of the Crown as well as the use of martial law. So from my drives around Ireland, I'm very familiar with those lovely Anglo-Irish castles that you see now sitting often in sort of gorgeous, bucolic green meadows, often at strategic crossing places, where bridges cross the big rivers and so on. Those are garrisoned in Tudor times by English troops. What's actually happening? So the English troops will use the, if you want, Anglo-Norman.

1:42Some of these castles are vast, the one at Carrickfergus, for example. Enormous, absolutely. Enormous, absolutely. But they'll also then build their own fortifications where the troops will be garrisoned. So, for example, Newry, Bagnell, builds his own tower house where the troops will be stationed. So what we see is a lot of military architecture popping up, especially in these areas where they want to exercise control. It does really remind me of the Romans, though. You know, when the Romans came and sort of dropped little garrison places and they could move troops very quickly from place to place, were they connected and interconnected like that?

2:16There's really no really effective road system, Anita. So the most effective way of getting around Ireland is either the river networks or taking ships because the roads are just so appalling. But you do have these fortified castles and other communities strategically placed around the country. And then really Dublin remains the military headquarters, the administrative headquarters, and use that as your base and go out and raiding parties. Is there a military and technological edge that the Tudors have that the Gaelic Lords don't? Well, obviously, they've got access to guns and gunpowder. That's exactly what I mean.

2:53Are they much more artillery minded? Not necessarily, William, because increasingly we find Gaelic lords learning the business of war on the continent. So you get large numbers of Irish mercenaries in the service of Spain, and these guys are actually at the cutting edge of warfare. And then what happens is that new style fortifications come relatively late to Ireland, these star-shaped bastions. And by this stage, the reign of Elizabeth I, the Catholic-Protestant divide, which continues to this day in Northern Ireland, possibly finally exhausting itself, begins to really assert itself. You have one group of people who are very clearly Catholic, who are looking to the continent, going over to the Spanish armies, and another group who are sailing over from England and sitting in garrisons, taxing and taking land.

3:42Yes. So the population of Ireland at this point is probably about a million people. We don't actually know. And probably about 200 ,000 are English and Welsh colonists. So it's quite a significant number. And how long have those English and Welsh colonists been? Are they the descendants of the guys that turned up in Norman times or are they new arrivals? No, no, no. These are ones who are coming from really the mid-16th century on. And taking land and settling it and throwing out the peasants who've been there before? Exactly. So what we see is mass expropriation. So for example, in the 17th century, something like 8 million Irish acres are confiscated.

4:17That is a third of the entire country. What does confiscation look like? I mean, you know, you can say I confiscate land for you, but what do you do to the family that's farmed this for generations and that thinks it is their land? How do you take it from them? Well, under these surrender and re-grant agreements that we talked about, what happens is if you go into rebellion, then the king comes in and says, hang on, you've been bad. I'm going to take your land and usually executes the lord. So you're not coming back. And then say, we're going to confiscate your estates. We see this in Munster and then later in Ulster.

4:48And then that land is reallocated to settler colonists. Now, what happens to the people who are living there, if you want the Gaelic inhabitants, is many of them are supposed to be, if you want, driven off their lands. But the truth is they stay. Why? Because you need people to, you know, cut wood and hew water. So, I mean, it's very practical. They need the labour of the existing. But are they like indentured labour? Are they sort of working for a place to live or do they get paid? I mean, you know, what is the situation for them? Well, nobody's really getting paid. Remember, there's no money in Ireland.

5:17It's very much a redistributive economy, and that's something that is being changed as part of this colonial process, that there's this push for commercialization, urbanization, and the replacement of an economy that's effectively a barter one with one that is around money. What I'm not entirely clear about is, is it English lords sitting in the castle with Irish peasants, or is it new colonist peasantry moving in and farming the fields themselves? Well, it's actually a little bit of both because what we get are ordinary English people coming over, upstarts, men on the make, who are coming from relatively humble origins in England and then doing very well, land grabbing.

6:00And then all of a sudden they rise up the social hierarchy. Sorry, this sounds to me just like your description of the East India Company. The person who's the second or third son in England who goes off and joins the East India Company or goes over to India to try and make their money and ends up sort of becoming enormously rich in landowning. Why is it different? The difference is that the second son who goes over to India, joins the East India Company, becomes an official, shuttles around India and then goes and retires back in England. While these guys arrive, take land, farm it and stay. Right.

6:31And then pass that land onto their children. So that is absolutely, you know, it's a replacement of the population. But we have some individuals, somebody called the Earl of Cork, who comes over as a penniless sort of land grabber. By 1642, when he dies, he's the richest man, not just in Ireland, but in the three kingdoms, the three Stuart kingdoms. I mean, vast fortunes are being made by these colonists. And actually, many of them then become extremely important because they sort of team up with investors in London and they become adventurers sort of on a global scale. So previously on the last episode we did with you, we were talking about Hugh O 'Neill.

7:09We were talking about how he's utter pain in the bottom for the British and almost bankrupted the Exchequer with his uprisings and rebellion. And William mentioned Edmund Spencer. I don't think we did it really justice. So can you give us a pen portrait of Edmund Spencer and why his name is now really quite inextricably linked with Hugh O 'Neill and what did he say about him? Well, it's not that Spencer talks about O 'Neill per se. What happens is that Spencer writes a really important tract called A View of the State of Ireland. He writes it at the height of the Nine Years' War after O 'Neill's men have basically burned down his Holman.

7:44So he's not very fond of Hugh O 'Neill. Definitely not, nor his followers. But in that, he basically calls for the extirpation of the Gaelic Irish. And nobody uses the word ethnic cleansing or genocide in the early modern period. But that's effectively what Spencer is calling for. Like what? Tell us exactly what he said. First, fire and sword. In other words, use fire and sword, use martial law. That's a given. But he's also saying in Ireland, what we need is the English colonists to come in. We need to get rid of these treacherous Irish and in their place, bring in English colonists who will civilize again.

8:24Good English civilized men, yeah. But introduce Protestantism, but also commercialize Ireland. So on the one hand, you've got to get rid of the indigenous population. On the other, then you've got to bring in these colonists who are going to civilize Ireland. He had an influential voice and we've talked about the fact he penned the Fairy Queen. But who was he? Who was this man? Who was he? Why does it matter that he writes this quite poisonous piece of ethnic cleansing? Well, he's one of these men on the make. He's from quite humble background in England. Why is it important? It's because his view, which actually isn't published until the 1630s, but it becomes a foundational text.

9:01In other words, it influences policies about Ireland and this sort of very hard line ethnocentricity, cultural superiority becomes absolutely embedded in the English view of Ireland. He describes Ireland as a diseased portion of the state. It must first be cured and reformed before it could be in a position to appreciate the good, sound laws and blessings of the nation. And very particularly, he pushes for the banning of the Irish language being taught so that the speech being Irish, the heart must need to be Irish. For out of abundance of the heart, the tongue speaketh. So he's banning languages.

9:44He's far and sword. He's not a very, I had no idea when I was reading The Fairy Queen. No, I mean, he does. No, you separate the politics from, you know, The Fairy Queen is just a mile away. Well, it's racism as we would understand it today. Absolutely. But what's so important about Spencer, he doesn't just influence the people around him. He then becomes a foundational text right through until the 19th century. So as imperialists go out to empire, including in India, they will have been sort of fed a view of the state of Ireland. And they quote Spencer as in this is the way for this. The way Combrances has been in the earlier period.

10:19It's a foundational text. And what's interesting is the manuscript circulates very widely, but it's like everything. When it's printed, William, all of a sudden you're reaching vast numbers of people. And of course, it's in English, so people can read it. And because it's Spencer, this great poet, people read it. And I should just say that with it comes what looks like a woodcutter, Spencer, who is this sort of figure like Dick Dastardly. Dick Dastardly with a ruff rather than with Muttley. And he's got this very little pointy goatee beard, this little pointy nose. His hair is in a sort of almost like a Mahican.

10:52A little Widdish Peak fox kind of face. He's a fox. He's a fox. He's a fox. Interesting, though, he has a son, Peregrine, who then marries a Catholic. And Spencer's grandson. Oh, my God. How did he deal with that? Well, he dies. I think his encounter with Hugh O 'Neill really finished him off. So he goes back to London to basically berate about what O 'Neill has done. But then his son marries a Catholic. And where you see his grandson is petitioning the Cromwellians for his grandfather's estates back. And they hear his plea and they note in the record, they say, he was the son of the poet Spencer.

11:30So it's really interesting to see that happen. Does he get the land back? I think he does, actually. So when we were dealing with the uprising in the last episode, we talked about how the Spanish landed, but landed in the wrong place. And then there's the siege of Kinsale. The Spanish army fails and the English get the upper hand. And then what happens is the Irish are in disarray. But they really, it's guerrilla warfare until at 1603, they finally surrender. It's an extraordinary decade. Exactly the same time as this. The first English voyages are going to Indonesia. There's the foundation of the colony in Virginia, the Isle of Roanoke.

12:10That colony fails. And this is going very badly. So the English are expanding in all directions, but making a bit of a balls up of all of it. And of course, Elizabeth is dead, but he doesn't know that. And there's a new king on the throne. It's James VI of Scotland. How do you know that Hugh O 'Neill, who's like the bane of England's life and is fighting and putting everything into fighting, and she doesn't know there's a new monarch? Because there's no internet. There's no mobile phones. It takes weeks for news to come from London to Ireland. So what has happened is he thinks he's signed a peace with Elizabeth, but in practice, she's dead already.

12:45The treaty means nothing because the person who signed with? Well, it does mean something because he's made it with the crown. Okay. And then what happens is James the Sick comes in. And to begin with, he says, OK, O 'Neill, we'll work together. But actually, from that point on, the military conquest of Ireland really has been completed by 1603. And we start to see serious encroachment onto these estates in Ulster. And so in 1607, O 'Neill says, OK, we have this flight of the earls where he leaves Ireland from Donegal, Rathmullen, and actually then goes to Spain looking for help, and then actually ends up in Rome because the Spaniards aren't willing to help.

13:21It's a bit like the English leaving the Americas. There's a mass movement out of the defeated rebels. You're dealing with the cream of the Gaelic aristocracy, goes with O 'Neill. Hundreds of their followers go with them, who then actually enlist in the armies of Spain. Is this the wild geese? It's the wild geese. And obviously the wild geese we associate then with the French in the later period. But it's the beginning of that serious military migration. It's actually begun earlier, but it really increases in scale. And the Spanish take them all in. Oh, happy days. give them muskets. Hand fodder.

13:52Well, I mean, you know, tin soldiers, you wind them up and send them back and you frustrate your enemy. But it's also quite useful for the English because whoever flies is the one who's disloyal. So you've got like a whole map of treachery for them and they must be whooping it up. We know everybody now by name, by face, who's buggered off to Spain and they are the enemy. We know who they are and we can round up their friends. We know exactly where this circle of treason is. And two things happen. One is O 'Neill dies in exile in Rome. And by this point, he's broken, he's blind, he's an alcoholic.

14:24And then what happens is the king then uses this opportunity to confiscate not just O 'Neill's estates, but the estates of all of the earls because he goes with Red Hugh O'Donnell and others. So all of a sudden, you have most of Ulster that's confiscated. And once it's expropriated, then it can be, if you want, filled with your own colonists and planters. Resettled. And can I just remind people? what you said in the first episode. Ulster, for us, is the loyalist part of Northern Ireland. But it became so because it was the most wild and resistant part of Ireland before. And its ability flee. Yeah.

15:03But it's only when, you know, the guys peg it out of the country, it's left open for this to happen. And what are the scale of the casualties? And now we're talking a sort of genocidal wipeout of the original indigenous population? Or is it just a few toffs heading off to Spain? Well, where the real deaths have occurred is during the Nine Years' War itself, because England uses sort of fire and sword campaigns. And, you know, something like a third of the population of Ulster is massacred. A third of the population of Ulster? What are the kind of numbers? We don't actually know, William, but you're talking about, I would say, tens of thousands of people lose their lives.

15:37And it's not just the fighting men, it's the women. Very much women and children. What you see are the English target civilians, particularly women and children. And what happens? It means rape, killing. Oh, yeah, absolutely. All sorts of atrocities are committed. And they also use famine as a tactic. And obviously, we see this happening time and again in an Irish context, that because you're destroying crops, you're reducing people then and letting them starve to death. And there are a number of accounts of alleged cannibalism, where basically, you know, people are eating each other because at times there's so hard.

16:12Did the people of England know that this was happening in their name? Because I'm just wondering, because when some of the greatest atrocities happened in India, for example, when the English or the British heard about it, there was an upsurge of sympathy. There was a revulsion, you know, not in our name. Did that happen at all during this period? Not that I'm aware of. What you see is this sense of celebration at long last, you know, that traitor O 'Neill and his sort of locust-like, and this is the sort of language they're looking You know, they're vermin, they're insects, they're caterpillars.

16:45I mean, they're very, very, very dismissive. And it's a great victory, or it's actually portrayed as this great victory for England. Let's take a break now. Join us after the break where we find out what happens now that there is a vacuum in Ulster and everything is up in the air.

17:06Welcome back. So in the last half of the episode, we saw the final defeat of the Gallic resistance and the mass evacuation of the old Gallic nobility. It isn't just one or two of them who leave, the whole lot pack up and go off to Spain, leaving the Irish, which are left, effectively defenseless. And this is a period of great violence. This is a period when people are extremely ruthless. This is no understanding of anything like human rights or international law. And the English come back and they begin the plantations. Jane Elmar, tell us all about what a plantation is and how it affects itself on the ground.

17:48So let's be very clear. Plantations have been happening actually under the Tudors as well. That's when we've seen Munster and other parts planted. So Munster's the south, what we would now think sort of cork and kerry and this sort of area. Exactly. So you've got four provinces in Ireland. And under the Tudors, we see Munster being planted. but also the other two provinces, Leinster, which is where Dublin is, there are some modest little plantations. Plantations of what? What are they being forced to grow? A plantation is literally where you take people and you plant. So it's nothing to do with crops.

18:18Sorry, I should have been clear. No, it's about planting people. And those people in turn will plant crops. It's more like Israeli settlements from the West Bank than plantations in the West Indies. Very much so. Very much so. So we've got Leinster with its plantations. and then in Connott, which is the province in the west. There are attempts, but there's not so much plantation going on there. With the Flight of the Earls now, Ulster is open to plantation. So there are nine counties in Ulster and we see most of Ulster being confiscated with the Flight of the Earls. And there's two types of plantation going on in Ulster.

18:56You have informal plantations going on in County Antrim and County Down. So, County Antrim and County Down are the ones that Belfast is today. Exactly. That we know from the news. That you know from the news. County Antrim, I just want to say this, is actually being planted by Scots, the McDonald's of Antrim, who happen to be Catholic. Because they're not far away. Because they're not far away. They've been there for a long time. They can just sail over the sea. They come over from Stranran. But do they give them financial inducement? Do they say, come on over, Scots? Well, actually, they've been there for a while.

19:29And what happens is they're loyal to the king. And the king likes Sir Randall Macdonald, who is the first Earl of Antrim. And it says, listen, County Antrim is a particularly problematic area from the crown's perspective because it's so far. It's that northwest part, Giants Causeway. And he says, listen, you take care of that. Where the ferry lands from Stranraff today. It's exactly it. And then what you have in County Down are the Montgomery family. Who are still there. Who are still there. and they basically have a plantation and you've got the Hamiltons and the Montgomery's who've come over from Ayrshire.

20:04I just want to be really clear because you use this phrase and you know it all the time. So they have a plantation. Does that mean that they call people over from Scotland? So you know what? The head Big Cheese Montgomery says, we've got land to put you on. Come on over here boys and you will make money. So that's what you mean by - That's what I mean by plantation. So what they'll do is they're given 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 acres and you have to bring in 10 families per thousand acres. And then those families have to bring others in. So you create Protestant colonies. Also, Protestant pyramid schemes as well, really.

20:36Some are working the land, but of course they need the Irish indigenous population to work the land. But what we're moving from is, if you want a semi-nomadic barter economy into a settled agricultural one. And this transition is happening And there's huge emphasis on urbanization. So a lot of these colonists who are coming in are also founding towns because towns are so important, not just for strategic control, but also for this commercialization that's going on. Right. So then you have, for the first time in these lands, you have an urban class and a peasant class where everyone was the same at one point and working and moving around.

21:15You suddenly have, you know, the haves and have-nots. Very much so. Very much so. And they can be delineated on religious lines because the ones who have not happen to be the old Catholics who were there before. You do have some Catholic lords like the McDonald's of Antrim. So, you know, it's not necessarily purely unsectary. No, no, no. It's more subtle than that. You know, how is the throne not worried about having somebody who is a Catholic after all of the very strong feelings of the last 50 years having that position? Let's look at the Stuarts. Anne of Denmark converts to Catholicism. Charles I marries a Catholic.

21:48So actually the issue with Catholicism isn't with the crown, it's with those underneath the crown and the Lord Deputy. So as long as you've got the ear of the crown, actually you're all right. And people like Randall MacDonald have the ear of the crown. So I've talked about the informal plantation, but in addition to that, you've got the formal plantation of six counties that are confiscated when O 'Neill and the Earls flee. And those are the counties that are divided into lots and the majority are given to colonists. They call them undertakers because they literally undertake to plant or colonize their estates.

22:31And that means bringing people in, mostly from England, but also from Wales. But now they're coming from Scotland as well. And that's really important. So you've got that group, but you also then have a group of what we call servitors. These are people who have served the crown loyally during the Nine Years' War, and they're being rewarded with Irish land. And then the third group you have are the deserving Irish. And the deserving Irish are Catholic, mostly Gaelic people who have served the crown and they're being rewarded for their loyalty. Neither the servitors nor the deserving Irish are expected to colonise and civilise the way the undertakers are.

23:09So you have this quite hierarchical society. And in addition to the colonists, they give land to corporate bodies. And we'll talk about Derry in a minute or Londonderry. but also civilising institutions like Trinity College Dublin, which is my own university. It's given extensive lands in Ulster. So it's really an extraordinarily ambitious blueprint that the king has for Ulster. And is the idea to sort of drive the Gaelic Irish out into the sea, into the bogs? Yeah, that's the idea. And of course, it doesn't happen in practice because they don't have enough human capital. It's as simple as that.