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Rebellion
of 1641, Term given to the protracted conflict which began in 1641. The
rebellion is most notably associated with three key elements, the massacre of
protestants in Ulster in 1641, the surprising ‘union’ of Old English and
Gaelic Irish catholics, and the Cromwellian onslaught against the rebels in the
latter stages of the conflict. A hotly debated topic, the 1641 rebellion erupted
in the first instance in Ulster, when rebel catholic elements surprised
protestant settlers. In the ensuing hostilities large numbers of protestant
settlers were killed. The number of deaths was soon inflated by contemporary and
subsequent Protestant writers as some hundreds of thousands. Modern research
calculates the actual number of deaths to be 12,000 out of a total protestant
population in Ulster at the time of 40,000, a massacre by any scale. (Listen
to audio clips of academic opinion from BBC website) The rebellion soon
spread to other areas of Ireland when the Gaelic Irish of Ulster were joined in
revolt by their Old English co-religionists. For a time, such was the success of
the revolt that the protestant dominance Ireland was in danger of being
eradicated, not least when Owen Roe O’Neill led the rebels in Ulster to a
famous victory at the battle of Benburb in 1646, when the primary protestant
army in Ireland was annihilated. Political and cultural differences between the
Gaelic Irish and the Old English are widely considered to have been a primary
cause of the failure of the rebels. What began as an event associated with the
massacre of Irish protestants was to end with the equally notable massacres
wrought by the armies of Oliver Cromwell who landed in Ireland in 1649. The
slaughter of the inhabitants of Drogheda and Wexford are as indelibly imprinted
on the psyche of Irish catholics as the previous massacres in Ulster are on
protestants.
Protestants being massacred in Portadown
Coleraine,
1622. Likened by Sir John Davies to the building of Links http://cgi.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/talkni/ask_ulster_plantation.shtmlBBC webchat with Dr John McCavitt (Feb.2003) The Ulster Plantation Centre: http://www.theflightoftheearls.com/html/mainset.htm See
website the Irish Society, Londonderry: http://irishsociety.infm.ulst.ac.uk/plant.htm BBC
Plantation of Ulster website: http://db.bbc.co.uk/history/war/plantation/ |
