Certainly within the political nation, if you’d want to call it that, within the Ulster lordships, that there’s no doubt about it that O’Neill certainly was very oppressive and tyrannical over his immediate subordinates and family members. And in that sense, once he had abandoned the country, their short-term thinking would have been that now they were going to gain more land, that they were going to gain more political influence, perhaps that they would be integrated into the political order which had been established by the Crown in the aftermath of O’Neill’s defeat.

Now, you must remember that a significant number of the lesser lords in Ulster had made their peace with the Crown long before O’Neill did in 1603 and as they abandoned O’Neill’s military effort, some of them in the late 1590s, other of them in 1601/1602, they believed that there would have been a dismemberment of the lordship and that they would get substantial holdings of land as outright proprietors. And instead of that, they had after 1603 been placed under the control of O’Neill (and in the case of those in Donegal, under the control of Rory O’Donnell who had become Earl of Tyrconnell). So in that sense the abandonment of the lords did hold out perhaps a prospect that what they had hoped to gain when they made their peace with the Crown in the first instance, would now be realised. I don’t think anybody among that higher political order in Ulster would have anticipated the kind of comprehensive Plantation which does in fact proceed fairly rapidly after 1610.