County Derry is a rather untypical county within the Ulster Plantation scheme. It was a rather strange place because it wasn’t settled in the normal way: it was settled using the great London Companies. Hence, the county is renamed from its old name of ‘Coleraine’ to ‘Londonderry’.

And the reason this is done is quite simply to raise money because the London Companies are the people with large amounts of reserves in London. The way it is done is by dividing the county up between those who simply kicked-in money into the Exchequer (and this is the origins in a way of the joint-stock companies who are also involved, I mean they are a new economic mechanism which are set up to settle Virginia and are used in Ireland as well). So the involvement of the London Companies in the settlement of this new County Londonderry is quite simply a profit-making process. They are not at all interested in pushing ideas of civility, in pushing ideas of religion or anything else: they are interested in getting a return on their investment.

And ultimately in many ways, that’s the story of the whole of the Plantation - that there are different agendas at work. The government wants to reform Ulster, wants to introduce Protestantism, wants to introduce new economic ideas. Many of the settlers coming from England with poor backgrounds and with relatively little money (younger sons) want to make money. There are two agendas at work and those two agendas often clash. And certainly if we are to measure the success or failure of the Ulster Plantation, we have to ask by whose agenda are we measuring it - the government or those who were actually involved?