Irish Rebellion of 1641
The Ulster Plantation (from 1610) had dispossessed Catholic Gaelic and Old English landowners, transferring land to Protestant settlers. In October 1641 Phelim O'Neill and other dispossessed Catholic gentry rose in arms to recover their lands and protect Catholic interests amid the political crisis engulfing the three Stuart kingdoms. The rising spread rapidly and was accompanied by widespread killings of Protestant settlers in Ulster, atrocities that were amplified in English propaganda and would shape Protestant memory for centuries. The rebels organised as the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny, effectively governing much of Ireland and fighting as one faction in the wider War of the Three Kingdoms. The rebellion was an organised armed contest for control of Ireland along confessional and colonial lines. It led directly to the Cromwellian conquest of 1649-53, in which roughly 40 per cent of the Irish population perished and Catholic land ownership was reduced from a majority to under a tenth, setting the structural conditions for three centuries of colonial land relations.
- Year: 1641 CE
- Category: Political
