The 1641 Rebellion

1641: A rising of the dispossessed Catholic gentry of Ulster that spread into a decade of war, and whose atrocity stories would echo for centuries.

In October 1641 the Catholic gentry of Ulster, many of them squeezed by the Plantation, rose in rebellion, seizing forts and estates across the north. What began as an attempted coup by a small group led by Sir Phelim O'Neill spilled into widespread violence, and thousands of Protestant settlers were killed or driven from their homes in a bitter winter.

Exaggerated accounts of the killings, printed in England, hardened anti-Catholic feeling for generations and were later used to justify Cromwell's brutal campaign. The rebellion drew in the wider Catholic population and merged into the confederate wars that followed. These were part of the wider crisis of the Three Kingdoms that also produced the English Civil War.