The Scots

part 2

One of his early acts was to confirm an increased grant of land to Sir Randall MacDonnell. Among the new tenants whom this Catholic landowner introduced were Lowland Scots who were Protestants. They were the first of a new kind of Scottish immi grant and soon James began to grant land in Antrim and Down to Lowland Scots. He allowed two Ayrshire men, James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery, to share in the dismemberment of the Co. Down estates of Conn O'Neill. O'Neill's part in the bargain was escape from prison in Carrickfergus and a pardon for his alleged crimes. The Crown's concern was that 'the sea coasts might be possessed by Scottish men who would be traders as proper to his majesty's future advantage'.

Thus began the free enterprise colonisation of Antrim and Down by Lowland Scots. It preceded and prepared the way for the later Offlclal colonisation of Armagh, Coleraine (now Londonderry), Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone which is known as the Plantation of Ulster. Monaghan had already been colonised by Englishmen and its Irish landholders brought into an English system of land tenure.

It is commonly believed that it was this official plantation of mid- and west-Ulster which established a permanent Scots presence in Ireland. In fact most of the Scots who came to Ulster in the seventeeth century came either to Antrim and Down or arrived in the second half of the century.

It was the success of the Scottish settlements in Antrim and Down which encouraged the Crown to embark upon the official plantation, following the so-called Flight of the Earls in 1607. The flight to Catholic Europe of the O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, and the O'Donnell, earl of Tyrconnell or Donegal, and about a hundred lesser chieftains, signalled their recognition that their long campaign to resist the advance of English authority and law in Ulster had failed. They could not face a future of diminishing independence and influence. Their military struggle in the last years of Elizabeth's reign had left Ulster devastated and depopulated, ripe for redevelopment. The Crown used the flight of the earls, whose estates were declared forfeit, to initiate a vast enterprise of colonisation and re-distribution of land in mid and west Ulster.

The Plantation of Ulster followed a number of precedents both in Ireland and in colonial America. Sixteenth-century plantations in Leix and Offaly and in Munster had lacked sufficient English tenant-farmers and artisans to ensure lasting stability. The Ulster plantation attracted, in addition to English and Welsh settiers, a substantial number of lowland Scots. It was not only landowners, a military aristocracy, who settled in Ulster, but farmers, masons, smiths and carpenters. The pattern had been established in Antrim and Down. The records of the Montgomery estates in Co. Down report that 'everybody minded their trades, and the plough, and the spade, building and setting fruit trees in orchards and gardens, and by ditching in their grounds.'

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