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 — part of the wider crisis of the Three Kingdoms that also produced the English Civil War.