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7 January 2010
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Wars and Conflict - The Plantation of Ulster

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Flight of the Earls
- Dr. David Edwards

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Chichester is the sort-of organiser and chief, he is the soldier. He’d fought a violent war in Ulster during the Nine Years’ War against O’Neill and his allies, and Chichester was determined that his fellow soldiers, English soldiers, who had conquered Ireland, who had beaten O’Neill and O’Donnell in the Nine Years’ War, would be among the principal beneficiaries of the post-1603 settlement. He wants his military allies, his supporters, his fellow captains from the Nine Years’ War to gain land and status in Ireland, in recognition of the service that they had done to the Crown. He more or less had to accept the Scottish hijack of a significant proportion of the Ulster Plantation, and many of his followers who he had been putting forward for grants in the Ulster Plantation (even before the Plantation had been approved in London) didn’t get land in Ulster.

So one of the things that Chichester does is he looks beyond Ulster to the rest of the country in order to find land for the soldiers: and so you have what Irish historians call - somewhat euphemistically - ‘the minor Plantations’, Wexford, Longford, Leitrim, West Meath, Upper Ossary in 1626, various territories which are all across the country. Chichester in 1612 begins the process of these minor Plantations and the beneficiaries of these are to be Chichester, Chichester’s family and in-laws, Chichester’s military supporters (the captains that he had served with and he was friends with from the Nine Years’ War) and other members of the Dublin government.

So the whole sort-of second layer of Plantation is created in order to facilitate the sort of Plantation society that Chichester had wanted in Ulster but not got.
 

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