The Irish Hydra : English policy and plantations in Gaelic Ulster in 1567 - 79

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is provide an analysis of Ulster politics during the period between the death of Shane O'Neill in June 1567 and the Crown's estrangement from Turlough Luineach O'Neill in 1579. The importance of this period is that it was one of the great-lost opportunities of Tudor rule in Ireland, a time when a peaceful settlement in Ulster remained a distinct possibility. Therefore, though historians tend to look only at the 1590's or the Henrician and early Elizabethan period, this thesis contends that during the timeframe covered, the foundations were set down for the great crisis that was to erupt in Ulster and Ireland in the 1590's. While employing the traditional methods of interpretative political narrative, this thesis utilises the techniques and perspectives of historical geography, social and political anthropology and Gaelic literary work while paying due attention to the history of Ulster's individual septs and lordships. It seeks to anatomise the political, historical, social, military and economic developments, which existed in the province prior to 1567 in order to reveal the manner in which they served to shape the development of events in the years thereafter. With this foundation established, it seeks to reveal the erratic and contradictory actions through which the English Crown sought to establish its authority in the province. Charting the progression of English interventions from the recruitment of local Gaelic crown allies to the policy of private entrepreneurial colonization associated with the projects of Sir Thomas Smith and Walter Devereux, earl of Essex, and finally, in a reversion to conciliation through the attempted reconciliation with Turlough Luineach O'Neill and other lords, it sees to provide a detailed explanation as to how things went so badly wrong in Ulster in this time of opportunity. It concludes that Whitehall, by choosing to forgo negotiations with the Gaelic magnates in favour of forcibly asserting its rule in Ulster through planters and colonies, made further conflict inevitable and so contributed fatefully to the major conflict that was yet to come.