O’Doherty’s rebellion took place in April 1608 in Derry. This came as a major shock to King James I and the Crown Government, not least because O’Doherty was known as ‘The Queen’s O’Doherty’. And just to give you a sense of O’Doherty’s friendship - or so it seemed - with the English Government, that at the very time (in fact, a matter of months before the rebellion), the youthful Sir Cahir O’Doherty was actually engaged in a scheme to become a member of the Prince of Wales’ household. So this is a person, this is a leading member of the leading Irish aristocracy who was seeking to assimilate himself with the English system, and yet this was the man who led this dramatic revolt in Derry in April 1608.

Now as it turns out, O’Doherty had very good reasons for it. There were minor Crown officials in Derry who were very hostile to O’Doherty and who provoked him into his rebellion, and there is no doubt about that. In fact, the key man who provoked O’Doherty into revolt was a man called Sir George Pollett, and the view of the Crown administration in London was that Pollett was killed in Derry in April 1608, and the view of the English Privy Council was that if he hadn’t lost his life in the rebellion, he would have in fact been executed for having provoked it.

Now the reality is that the English Privy Council acknowledged that there were perhaps justifiable reasons for O’Doherty’s revolt but the fact that The Queen’s O’Doherty rebelled came as a major shock. And this is reflected in a contemporary Protestant pamphlet and it talked in very bitter terms about the native Irish, and about how they basically would stab the English in the back. They talked about the blood of the English was as music to the Irish at a banquet, that the serpent never conceals his enmity more shrewdly than when he conceals it in amity (or in friendship) and the reaction, the specific reaction then to O’Doherty’s revolt was that Ireland and the Irish and the Irish like O’Doherty were to be rejected; that the English wanted to assimilate them into the burgeoning English system, but that they were rejected as a bastard, Ireland in fact was rejected as a bastard. It could have been part of this grand scheme of the unified Crowns of England and Scotland under James I, and Ireland almost as a sister kingdom, but O’Doherty’s rebellion convinced elements in England that the Irish were to be rejected. And this sentiment influenced ultimately the Ulster Plantation in 1610 when much more land was taken away from the Ulster Irish than might otherwise have been the case.