Irish Rebellion of 1641
A rising by Catholic gentry in Ulster in October 1641 turned into a massacre, and English accounts of it justified a conquest. The plan was a limited one: seize Dublin Castle and the northern forts in a single night, present the king with a fait accompli, and demand the restoration of Catholic land and the free exercise of religion. The grievance behind it was the plantation of Ulster, in which a large part of the province had been confiscated after 1607 and granted to Scottish and English Protestant settlers, and a wider fear of what the Puritan parliament then fighting Charles I intended for Irish Catholics. The Dublin part failed when it was betrayed. In the north the rising succeeded and then escaped its leaders entirely. Dispossessed tenants attacked settlers, stripped and drove them out in winter, and killed several thousand — at Portadown a group was drowned in the Bann — with Protestant reprisals following in the same manner. Modern estimates put settler deaths at perhaps 4,000 directly and several thousand more from exposure, out of a settler population of around 40,000. The figures printed in London ran to 150,000 and higher, in pamphlets with woodcuts, and they were believed. The rising merged into the Confederation of Kilkenny, which governed most of Ireland for most of the 1640s. The depositions taken from survivors fill thirty-one volumes and are the main source. Cromwell cited the massacres explicitly at Drogheda in 1649, eight years and a civil war later. The number of Protestant dead was still being cited at ten times its likely figure two centuries later, and the depositions were used as evidence in that argument long after they had ceased to be evidence of anything but what frightened people said. They were digitised and published in full in 2010.
- Year: 1641 CE
- Category: Political
