Scotland and the Ulster Plantations: Explorations in the British Settlements of Stuart Ireland

Abstract

The ‘New British History’ of the early modern period may be less influential than it once was, but it is still very pertinent when it comes to Ulster, where the native Irish had to contend not only with a heavy-handed English government but also with interference from Scotland. This book—the fruit of two conferences held in 2006—provides further ‘explorations’ into the vexed relations between the three nations, and specifically the interaction between Ulster and western Scotland, whose geographical closeness across the North Channel was reinforced by migration and plantation, as well as by occasional invasion from both directions. The essays in this volume are, in the main, of the highest quality, with four of the leading scholars of early modern Ireland—Ciaran Brady, Raymond Gillespie, Robert Armstrong and Michael Perceval-Maxwell—giving their usual polished performances. Brady examines eastern Ulster and the MacDonald lordship during the later sixteenth century, a time when their inconsistent treatment at the hands of the successive regimes gave an opening for the rebellious earl of Tyrone to take control of the region. Gillespie's article is broader in focus, looking at the Presbyterian experience throughout the seventeenth century, and especially the way in which the wars of the 1640s, and especially the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643, encouraged the Ulster Scots to develop into a community distinct from their cousins in Scotland. Armstrong seconds Gillespie's argument with an in-depth study of Viscount Montgomery of the Ards, whose awkward position as head of an embattled Scottish interest in eastern Ulster in the later 1640s was made impossible by events in Scotland and England. Perceval-Maxwell carries the story through to the reign of Charles II, examining how the relatively lenient policies in Ulster, masterminded by the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the duke of Ormond, differed from those of the governors of Scotland—resulting in relative stability rather than the constant unrest and rebellion experienced by its larger neighbour. All four articles emphasise the differences as well as the similarities between the Ulster Scots and their cousins on the mainland, and it is interesting to note that this divergence seems to have grown more pronounced as the seventeenth century continued. Supporting them are Alison Cathcart's contextual piece surveying the interactions between Ulster and Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Padraig Lenihan's restatement of his view that the Confederate Catholics of the 1640s were wrong to consider Ulster a more important target than Dublin and the Munster ports; and David Menarry's detailed (and, at times, indigestible) account of Cromwellian attempts to subdue the Ulster Scots in the 1650s.