Ulster-Scots Agency - History

Skip Navigation

History

Migration back and forth across the narrow North Channel between Scotland and Ireland, which at its narrowest point (between Torr Head and the Mull of Kintyre) is only 13 miles apart, has been ongoing from time immemorial, Scotland owing its very name to Roman times and the settlement of Irish-speaking gaels in Argyle who were known as Scotti.

 

County Antrim and County Down were essentially the majority of the Anglo-Norman Earldom of Ulster, founded by Hugh de Lacy in 1205. Walter de Burgh succeeded de Lacy and became the first Earl of Ulster in 1264. Walter was succeeded by his eldest son, Richard Og de Burgh “The Red Earl”.

 

Richard de Burgh’s daughter Elizabeth became the second wife of King Robert the Bruce in 1302.  After Bruce had killed his rival Comyn in Dumfries on 10th February 1306, he fled Scotland for Rathlin Island, just off the coast of North Antrim. He sought refuge on Rathlin from autumn 1306 until spring 1307 where according to legend he was inspired by the determined spider in the cave.

Bruce’s father in law, the Red Earl, was the most powerful Earl in Ireland and he sided with the English King Edward I in the wars which eventually led to the Battle of Bannockburn in June 1314. Bruce defeated the English at Bannockburn and won Scottish independence.

At a later stage, Edward the Bruce, brother of Robert, was to become High King of Ireland in 1316, meeting his death at the battle of Faughart in 1318.  For several centuries beginning in the middle ages, Scots mercenary forces known as gallowglass were hired by Irish chieftains, many of them settling in Ireland, spawning ‘Irish’ names such as MacSweeney and Gallogly (a surname directly deriving from ‘gallóglaigh’, the Gaelic plural term for gallowglass).

 

Scottish involvement in Ulster entered a new phase in the fourteenth century with the marriage of Margery Bisset, the Anglo-Norman heiress to two-thirds of the Glens of Antrim, to John Mór MacDonnell (McDonald), Lord of the Isles. By the sixteenth century the MacDonnells had consolidated their grip on much of Co. Antrim, while Scottish settlers had expanded further south into parts of Co. Down. In addition, marriage alliances saw Scottish links with the powerful O’Neills of Tyrone and O’Donnells of Tyrconnell (Donegal).

 

With the expansion of Tudor rule in the sixteenth century, Crown officials became increasingly concerned about further penetration by the Scots in Ireland. The Reformation had further complicated matters, as the Scots settlers and their kinsmen in the Scottish Isles had remained Catholic. Several efforts were made to uproot the Scots in Ulster by force, meeting only with temporary success. In the end, by 1586, when this was recognised as an impossible task, the Crown authorities adopted a policy of granting the Scots legal right to the territories they occupied in an attempt to bind them to allegiance to the English Crown.

 

If this was the expectation, the events of the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) were to prove that it was misplaced. The MacDonnells of Antrim supported the military campaigns of Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone. By the concluding stages of the war, however, Randal MacDonnell was supporting the English crown against his former rebel ally. By the time James VI of Scotland succeeded as James I of England in 1603 Randal was playing an important part in helping James ‘pacify’ the Scottish isles. Rewarded with legal title to lands totalling a staggering 300,000 acres (though much of it was the mountainous Glens of Antrim), Randal exercised considerable influence at the new Jacobean court in London. He consolidated his position further by promoting the settlement of Lowland Scots on his lands.

 

In terms of Irish history, the period from 1603 – 1610 is perhaps the most influential, as it includes the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the Flight of the Earls in 1607 and the Plantation of (the west of) Ulster in 1610. Many claim that this era has defined Ireland’s history right up to the present day.

 

However the story of the Hamilton & Montgomery Settlement of 1606 is largely overlooked. Most histories of Ireland and Scotland don’t mention it at all, and in most histories of Ulster it is only given a few sentences. Yet it was the foundational event of the era, and the single most important event in Ulster-Scots history. Everything that followed was built on the achievements of Hamilton and Montgomery.

Royal-approved settlements in Ireland had been attempted a number of times during the 1500s, and had failed. The same was the case in Scotland. So when James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery made their proposal for a private, self-financed settlement of County Antrim and County Down to the recently-crowned King James I, perhaps the King expected their scheme to fail too. Yet it was an amazing success, and arguably provided the King with the encouragement to proceed with the Plantation of Virginia at Jamestown in 1607, the blueprint for the Plantation of (the rest of) Ulster in 1610 and the Plantation of Nova Scotia in 1621.

The popular name for the hurried departure from Ireland of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, in September 1607 is the Flight of the Earls. With its tragic and romantic connotations, it is considered one of the most mysterious events in Irish history. Historians have attempted to offer an explanation. The earls have been accused by some of abandoning their people to English rule; at the very least the flight is perceived as the inevitable consequence of the defeat of Hugh O’Neill’s forces during the Nine Years War (1594–1603). In this view it is considered to mark the final recognition that Ireland had succumbed to English control.

 

Why the earls fled in such hurried circumstances is addressed in alternative explanations. Alleged to have become involved in a new plot against the crown, they are portrayed by government officials at the time as fleeing because they feared that their treasonable activities were about to be exposed. For others, by contrast, the sudden nature of the flight is viewed as resulting from a campaign of harassment by crown officials who were bitter that O’Neill and O’Donnell had been pardoned at the end of the Nine Years War. According to this school of thought, the earls fled to the continent fearing that they were on the verge of being arrested, framed for treason and executed. If the debate about the causes of the flight will continue to rage, there is little disagreement about the enormous consequences of the event, paving the way, as it did, for the Plantation of Ulster.

 

The Plantation of Ulster was the organised colonisation of Ulster by people from Britain. Private plantation by wealthy landowners began in 1606, while official plantation controlled by the monarchy began in 1609.  All land owned by Irish chieftains the Ó Neills and Ó Donnells (along with those of their supporters) were confiscated and used to settle the colonists. This land comprised an estimated half a million acres (4,000 km²) in the counties Tyrconnell, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, Coleraine and Armagh (wasteland, woodland and bogland were uncounted). 

 

The "British tenants", a term applied to the colonists, were mostly from Scotland and England. They were required to be English-speaking and Protestant.  The Scottish colonists were mostly Presbyterian and the English mostly ‘persecuted’ Dissenters.  The Plantation of Ulster was the biggest and most successful of the Plantations of Ireland.  Ulster was colonised so as to prevent further rebellion, as over the preceding century, it had proven to be the region most resistant to English control.