The Plantation of Ulster : Ideology and Practice

The first major academic study of the Ulster Plantation in over 25 years. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field on a broad range of historical and literary topics redresses the previous coverage of the plantations, moving away from an exclusive colonial perspective, to include the native Catholic experience. This book is the first major academic study of the Ulster Plantation in over twenty-five years. The pivotal importance of the plantation to the shared histories of Ireland and Britain would be difficult to overstate. It helped secure the English conquest of Ireland, and dramatically transformed Ireland's physical, demographic, socio-economic, political, military, religious and cultural landscapes. Indeed, those legacies are still contested. The divisions between the descendants of the native and settler communities continue to underpin Irish and British politics. As the peace process evolves and the violence of the previous forty years begins to recede into memory, vital space has been created for a timely reappraisal of the plantation process and its role in identity formation within Ulster, Ireland and beyond. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field on a broad range of historical and literary topics offers an important redress in terms of the previous coverage of the plantations, moving away from an exclusive colonial perspective, to include the native Catholic experience, and in so doing will hopefully stimulate further research into this crucial episode in Irish and British history. -- Back cover This book is the first major academic study of the Ulster Plantation in over 25 years. The pivotal importance of the Plantation to the shared histories of Ireland and Britain would be difficult to overstate. It helped secure the English conquest of Ireland, and dramatically transformed Ireland's physical, political, religious and cultural landscapes. The legacies of the Plantation are still contested to this day, but as the Peace Process evolves and the violence of the previous forty years begins to recede into memory, vital space has been created for a timely reappraisal of the plantation process and its role in identity formation within Ulster, Ireland and beyond. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field offers an important redress in terms of the previous coverage of the plantations, moving away from an exclusive colonial perspective, to include the native Catholic experience, and in so doing will hopefully stimulate further research into this crucial episode in Irish and British history. - Cover Front matter 1 Contents 6 List of illustrations 8 List of contributors 9 Series editors’ preface 12 Acknowledgements 13 Introduction: The plantation of Ulster: ideas and ideologies 16 The ‘British’ crown, the earls and the plantation of Ulster 33 Civilising Gaelic Scotland: the Scottish Isles and the Stewart empire 48 Plantation and civil society 70 The city of London and the Ulster plantation 93 Success and failure in the Ulster plantation 113 The Catholic Church in Ulster under the plantation, 1609 – 42 134 Randal MacDonnell and early seventeenth-century settlement in northeast Ulster, 1603 –30 158 Educating the colonial mind: Spenser and the plantation 173 Responses to transformation: Gaelic poets and the plantation of Ulster 191 The plantation of Ulster: aspects of Gaelic letters 213 Angling for Ulster: Ireland and plantation in Jacobean literature 233 ‘The Scottish inhabitants of that Province are actually revolted’: John Milton on the failure of the Ulster plantation 253 Index 270