The Plantation of Ulster

1609: The confiscation and resettlement of six Ulster counties, and the roots of a division that outlasted it.

When the northern earls sailed from Rathmullan in 1607, the crown treated their lands as forfeit. What followed was not the first plantation in Ireland, but it was much the largest and the most thoroughly planned.

Six counties were taken: Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone. Coleraine was renamed Londonderry after the London livery companies were brought in to fund and settle it. Antrim and Down are not on that list, and are often wrongly included. They had already been settled privately, from 1606, by Scottish landowners working with local arrangements rather than the official scheme.

The land was parcelled out in three classes. Undertakers, English and Scottish, took the largest share on condition that they brought over British tenants and kept Irish ones off. Servitors, crown officers in Ireland, were given land on easier terms and were permitted Irish tenants. A share was set aside for "deserving Irish", a small number of Gaelic landholders judged loyal enough to keep something.

It did not work as drawn. Undertakers found British tenants hard to recruit and Irish ones already on the ground and willing to pay, so many quietly kept them in defiance of the terms. What resulted was not a clean replacement of one population by another but two communities living in the same fields on entirely different legal footings, one dispossessed and resentful, the other planted and uneasy. The consequences of that arrangement ran through 1641, through the wars that followed, and a great deal further.