Irish Rebellion of 1641 - Rebellion

Rebellion

The planners of the rebellion were a small group of Irish landowners, mainly Gaelic Irish and from the heavily planted province of Ulster. Hugh Óg MacMahon and Conor Maguire were to seize Dublin Castle, while Phelim O’Neill and Rory O’Moore were to take Derry and other northern towns. The plan, to be executed on 23 October 1641, (Roman Catholic Feast of St.Ignatius of Loyola) was to use surprise rather than military force to take their objectives and to then issue their demands, in expectation of support from the rest of the country. However, the plan for a fairly bloodless seizure of power was foiled when the authorities in Dublin heard of the plot from an informer (a Protestant convert named Owen O’Connolly) and arrested Maguire and MacMahon.

O'Neill meanwhile successfully took several forts in the north of the country, claiming to be acting in the King's name. At Newry on 4 November he published a Royal Commission from King Charles that gave him wide powers. Though a forgery, the Commission persuaded many of the landed gentry in the rest of Ireland to support him. Fairly quickly, events spiraled out of the control of the men who had instigated them. The English authorities in Dublin overreacted to the rebellion, which they characterized as 'a most disloyal and detestable conspiracy intended by some evil affected Irish Papists' which they claimed was aimed at 'a general massacre of all English and Protestant inhabitants'. Their response was to send troops under commanders Charles Coote and William St Leger (themselves Protestant settlers) to rebel held areas in counties Wicklow and Cork respectively. Their expeditions were characterised by what modern historian Padraig Lenihan has called, 'excessive and indiscriminate brutality' against the general Catholic population there and helped to provoke the general Catholic population into joining the rebellion.

Meanwhile, in Ulster, the breakdown of state authority prompted widespread attacks by the native Irish population on the English Protestant settlers. Initially, Scottish settlers were not attacked by the rebels but as the rebellion went on, they too became targets. Phelim O’Neill and the other insurgent leaders initially tried to stop the attacks on the settlers, but were unable to control the local peasantry. A contemporary—though hostile—Catholic source tells us that O'Neill "strove to contain the raskall multitude from those frequent savage actions of stripping and killing which were after perpetrated and gave their enterprise an odious character as well in the opinion of their countrymen as of strangers" but that "the floodgate of rapine, once being laid open, the meaner sort of people was not to be contained".

Communal uprisings spread to the rest of the country. Munster was the last region to witness such disturbances; the rebellion in Munster was largely a product of the severe martial law William St Leger imposed upon the province. Many Irish Catholic lords who had lost lands or feared dispossession joined the rebellion and participated in the attacks on the settlers. However, at this stage, the attacks usually involved the beating and robbing rather than the killing of Protestants. Historian Nicholas Canny writes, 'most insurgents seemed anxious for a resolution of their immediate economic difficulties by seizing the property of any of the settlers. These popular attacks did not usually result in loss of life, nor was it the purpose of the insurgents to kill their victims. However they were always gruesome affairs because they involved face to face confrontations between people who had long known each other. A typical offensive involved a group of Irish descending upon a Protestant family and demanding, at knife point, that they surrender their moveable goods. Killings usually only occurred where Protestants resisted'.

The motivations for the popular rebellion were complex. Among them were a desire to reverse the plantations; rebels in Ulster were reported as saying, 'the land was theirs and lost by their fathers. Another motivating factor was a sharp antagonism towards the English language and culture which had been imposed on the country. For example, rebels in county Cavan forbade the use of the English language and decreed that the original Irish language place names should replace English ones. A third factor was religious antagonism. The rebels consciously identified themselves as Catholics and justified the rising as a defensive measure against the Protestant threat to 'extirpate the Catholic religion'. Rebels in county Cavan stated, "we rise for our religion. They hang our priests in England". Historian Brian MacCuarta writes, "Longstanding animosities against the clergy were based on the imposition of the state church since its inception thirty years previously. Ulster Irish ferocity against everything Protestant were fuelled by the wealth of the church in Ulster, exceptional in contemporary Ireland". There were also cases of purely religious violence, where native Irish Protestants were attacked and Catholic settlers joined the rebellion.