From Ballyboyle to Corglass... a Boyle family's story
Part 1 - Ballyboyle - our ancient ancestors
The Plantation of Ulster
The departure of the Gaelic chiefs provided the new King James I and the English administration with the opportunity to introduce far-reaching changes to bring Ulster under its permanent control. Declaring their departure as treason, the territories of the departing lords were forfeited to the Crown and an elaborate programme of re-distribution got underway. Only about twenty per cent of the land was reserved for the ‘deserving’ Irish - those of the Irish nobility who had sided with the English, or who had changed sides (often more than once).
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The government initiated an ambitious project to ‘plant’ the territory with colonies of loyal English and Scottish subjects. Over half-a-million acres was expropriated and re-distributed to ‘undertakers’, - wealthy English and Scottish aristocrats and merchants, who ‘undertook’ to create a loyal, protestant colony by building fortified towns, importing loyal tenants from Scotland and England, and maintaining a militia. ‘Servitors’ - army officers and administrators who were veterans of the Nine Years’ War were also awarded grants of land, with capital investment supplied by the Livery Companies and guilds of London. Former Catholic church lands and buildings were allocated to the protestant Church of Ireland.​
Not surprisingly, the native Irish population did not take kindly to the influx of settlers who arrived to take over the land they once regarded as their own. It is reckoned that the settler population reached about 80,000 by the early 1630s. The native population of Ulster before the plantation is hard to estimate; figures range from 40,000 to 200,000. Massive cultural gulfs in language, religion, farming practices, laws and habits made any serious assimilation unlikely in the short term, though there was a little. But within a generation of the settlers arriving, the resentment exploded in the rebellion of 1641.
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Though there were multiple causes for the rebellion, the consequences of the plantation was a major factor, especially in Ulster. Here, the natives turned on the British colonists, massacring about 4,000 and expelling about 8,000 more. The massacres made a lasting impression on the psyche of the Ulster Protestant population, providing them with a mentality of siege and threat to match the Catholics’ sense of dispossession and subjugation.
What was more, the new landowners were explicitly banned from taking Irish tenants. The peasant Irish population was intended to be relocated to live near garrisons and Protestant churches, where they could be kept under surveillance and eventually converted to the reformed religion.
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However, this did not generally happen in practice, as the new landowners were unable to persuade enough English or Scottish tenants to fill their agricultural workforce and had to fall back on Irish tenants. Furthermore, a quarter of the land in Ulster was granted to some 300 native lords who had taken the English side in the Nine Years' War or were deemed ‘repentant’, though they received only a fraction of what they had held formerly.
Consequently, the majority of the Gaelic Irish - the food-producers, rent-payers, and labourers - remained in their native areas, though some were displaced to worse land than before the plantation, and were reduced to the status of tenants-at-will, losing whatever tenancy rights they may have held before. Ten years into the plantation, surveys shower that the British undertakers preferred to let their land to native Irish than to British colonists, as the former would pay higher rents and could not acquire any legal interest in the lands they held.
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The Plantation of Ulster was a success in that it succeeded in establishing a permanent loyal Protestant population in the province. However it was a failure insofar as it left much of the native population in place, but disappropriated, disaffected, and leaderless. It created two communities living cheek by jowl with reservoirs of resentment and hatred that are still with us today.