Cos. Antrim, Down and Armagh

Counties Antrim, Down and Armagh made up the whole eastern seaboard of Ulster, from the Giant’s Causeway in the north, to the Mountains of Mourne in the south. The three counties differed geographically and politically. County Antrim, to the north, had large stretches of ‘barren mountainous’ country but also ‘good and fertile’ soil along the coast and in the southern baronies of Massereene and Antrim. Civil Survey, x. 56-61. In the sixteenth century the county had been gradually colonised by Scottish clans, especially the MacDonnells, created earls of Antrim under James I. CSP Ire. 1608-10, pp. xii-xiv. County Down, to the south east, included the ‘hugely mountainous’ Mourne range on the Leinster border, but otherwise was low-lying and of relatively good agricultural potential. Civil Survey, x. 63-7. It was also the most accessible of the three to England and the south of Ireland, and was dominated by Old English families such as the Magennises of Iveagh, the Savages and Bagenals. CSP Ire. 1608-10, pp. xi-xii. County Armagh lay west of Down, with mountainous areas interspersed with very fertile land, with the barony of Oneilland having ‘the finest [soil] of the plantation of Ulster’. Civil Survey, x. 69-71. Before the Ulster plantation, this region had been ruled by the O’Neills, earls of Tyrone, and by subordinate clans such as the O’Hanlons and McCanns, although the Church of Ireland’s primate owned estates centred on the cathedral city of Armagh. CSP Ire. 1608-10, p. x.

The flight of the earl of Tyrone and his allies in 1607, and the Ulster plantation which followed, brought radical changes to the social make-up of all three counties, even though Down and Antrim were not included in the official plantation scheme. Armagh saw an influx of New English settlers, including Sir Oliver St John, Lord Audley (later earl of Castlehaven), and Sir Garrett Moore (later Viscount Drogheda), and also a number of Scots. CSP Ire. 1611-14, p. 130; 1615-25, pp. 225-6. By the end of the 1620s, this group, and other land-owners, such as Sir Francis Annesley†, Lord Caulfield, Sir Edward Trevor and Sir Faithful Fortescue, controlled the county, to the almost total exclusion of the native Irish. CSP Ire. 1615-25, p. 439; 1625-32, p. 254. Unsurprisingly, the county seats in the Irish Parliaments of 1634 and 1640 were controlled by the new settlers. CJI i. 216; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 63; McGrath, Biographical Dict. The changes in County Down were more gradual, as the Old English and Irish landowners, faced by official distrust and financial ruin, sold their lands to English and Scottish speculators. By the 1630s the Montgomery, Hamilton and Hill families had taken over the large estate of the Magennises of Iveagh through purchase. Letters of a Great Irish Landlord ed. W.A. Maguire (Belfast, 1974), 10-13. Political change was also gradual: in the 1613 elections for the Irish Parliament, the native Irish put forward Sir Arthur Magennis and Rowland Savage as their own candidates, and were only narrowly defeated by a settler party fielding Sir James Hamilton and Sir Hugh Montgomery. CSP Ire. 1611-14, p. 439. In 1634 the seats went to same interest and in 1640 Montgomery shared with the New English settler, Edward Trevor. CJI i. 217; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 64; McGrath, Biographical Dict. The situation in County Antrim was complicated by the tenacious grip of the earls of Antrim, despite their financial insecurity, on most of the north of the county. J.H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: the Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609-83 (Cambridge, 1993), 23-42, 61-8. The power of the MacDonnells balanced the influence of the English settlers, including Viscount Chichester, Viscount Conway and the Clotworthy family, who had bought up lands in the southern baronies under James I, and it was this group that dominated the parliamentary elections, with Arthur Chichester and Sir John Clotworthy* being returned in 1634 and Chichester and Roger Langford in 1640. H.F. Kearney, Strafford in Ire. (Cambridge, 1989), 250; McGrath, Biographical Dict.

This uneasy relationship between natives and newcomers may have contributed to the violence which accompanied the outbreak of the Irish rebellion of 1641. In November the lords justices saw the northern rising (especially the disturbances in counties Down and Armagh) as the work of Tyrone’s old friends among the native Irish, and there was certainly an element of score-settling in some of the attacks. CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 346. In the early months of the rising the insurgents forced the Protestant population to take refuge in the strongholds of Carrickfergus, Belfast, Newry and Lisburn, defended by the militia forces under Viscount Chichester and Arthur Hill*. Warr in Ire. ed. Hogan, 18. The arrival of the Scottish forces under Monro in the spring of 1642 forced the Irish to withdraw, and the east coast was under Protestant control until the disastrous defeat of the Scots at Benburb, when the victorious Confederate forces marched eastwards, leaving County Down ‘deserted by the inhabitants and burnt by the rebels’. CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 393-4, 469. After the defection of the Scottish army to the Stuart cause in 1648, the southern part of the region continued to be controlled by the parliamentarian army under George Monck*, but it was not until the autumn of 1649 that Colonel Robert Venables* and his Cromwellian troops reduced Antrim and Down to English control, and Armagh remained ‘bandit country’ until the end of 1651. CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 27, 30; Ire. under the Commonwealth, i. 12.

counties Antrim, Down and Armagh took a long time to recover from the economic effects of the Irish wars for three reasons. The first was the physical devastation created by the rival armies, with Antrim and Down later described as ‘wholly destroyed in the late war by fire and the sword’, and Armagh reduced to a state of destitution. CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 699. The second was the lack of reliable coinage, which undermined confidence in the local economy, leading to complaints as late as 1657 of ‘misery and distraction’ in the area, with ‘no money stirring, none will trade ... no rents paid’. SP63/287, ff. 64, 102v, 130. The third reason for the slow recovery was the decision to raise most of the Ulster assessment contributions from the east of the province, as the west had been even more badly damaged by the war. In 1651, of nearly £5,500 per month for the whole of Ulster, over £3,000 was levied on the eastern counties; and Arthur Hill*, George Rawdon* and other revenue commissioners were forced to further increase the burden on the ‘four solvent counties’, including Antrim and Down, to pay for a £700 shortfall elsewhere. Ire. under the Commonwealth, i. 60, 131. The situation in 1654-5 was little better, with the three counties paying over £4,000 of the £7,500 levied in the province. An Assessment for Ire. (Dublin, 1654, 1655). The only solution was to reduce the rate across Ulster, but even when this was effected later in the 1650s, there was still an imbalance. In 1657 George Rawdon again complained that the assessments were too high (‘Antrim and Down pay ... as much as the other seven counties of Ulster’), provoking tenants to desert the land or remove their stock to prevent distraint; and similar concerns reappeared in 1658-9. SP63/287, ff. 52, 70; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 641, 655, 699.

The three counties also experienced a great deal of social upheaval in the decade after the war. Royalists, such as Viscounts Montgomery of the Ards, Chichester, Conway and Claneboye were threatened with sequestration, and the land remaining in Catholic hands (most notably the estates of the marquess of Antrim in the north) was confiscated. The Catholic landowners were replaced by a large number of adventurers and soldiers, whose land allocations in Ulster were confined to this area. Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 384, 405-6. These new men augmented the pre-1641 settlers who hoped to increase their own estates in the counties, including Clotworthy, Hill and Rawdon. Landownership changes were reflected in the government of the area: from 1651 eastern Ulster was governed by the army, with first Robert Venables then (from 1655) Thomas Cooper II* serving as commander-in-chief; but from the early 1650s financial and judicial proceedings were increasingly concentrated in the hands of revenue commissioners and JPs - bodies which included long-established settlers such as James Traill*, Hill and Rawdon, as well as military men. Ludlow, Mems. i. 261; SP28/80, ff. 168-70; SP28/83, f. 3; SP28/85, f. 47. The assessment commissions of 1654 and 1655 followed suit: Venables and his subordinates Daniel Redman* and John Duckinfield* were joined by Hill, Rawdon, Annesley, Traill and Clotworthy. An Assessment for Ire. There were tensions between the two groups over land, but these were no more problematic than divisions within the Old Protestant community: for example, when Rawdon and Clotworthy quarrelled over land boundaries in County Antrim. CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 541, 619-20, 641, 659, 661, 666. Likewise, there was little sympathy between closet Episcopalians such as Rawdon and Hill and the garrison officers influenced by local Baptist ministers, notably Timothy Taylor at Carrickfergus and Andrew Wyke at Lisburn, except when it came to their shared opposition to the Presbyterian Scots. St J.D. Seymour, The Puritans in Ire. (Oxford, 1921), 72-80, 171-3.

The modus vivendi between the Old Protestants and the military provides the context for the elections for counties Antrim, Down and Armagh in the protectorate Parliaments. The 1654 election, held at Belfast, saw the return of Colonel Venables with the pro-Cromwellian Old Protestant, Arthur Hill of Hillsborough. Mercurius Politicus no. 219 (17-24 Aug. 1654), 3710 (E.809.5). The indenture is badly damaged, but the electors included the Old Protestant Thomas Coote* and the Scot, James Melville. C219/44, unfol. A similar pattern can be seen in 1656, when Colonel Thomas Cooper II was returned with an Ulster Scot (and client of Viscount Claneboye), James Traill. Cooper’s comment that in these elections ‘I have been wholly passive in the business, and had not friends, whom I esteem, overruled me, should not have suffered my name to have been mentioned’ should not be taken at face value. TSP v. 343. The result of the election strongly suggests that Cooper was following Henry Cromwell’s* orders to conciliate the Protestant settlers in the north, even to the extent of tolerating the return of a Scottish Presbyterian. By 1659 the consensus had broken down, and with Cooper elevated to the Other House the Old Protestants were able to secure the election of George Rawdon (the brother-in-law of the 3rd Viscount Conway) and Sir John Skeffington (son-in-law of Sir John Clotworthy).

The elections for the General Convention, which met in Dublin in March 1660, saw the return of older interests in north-east Ulster. Of the six county seats, three went to those who had worked with the Cromwellian regime: Rawdon in Antrim, Hill in Down and the former English soldier, Edward Richardson in Armagh; but they were balanced by other landowners whose allegiances had been more doubtful: Sir John Clotworthy took the other Antrim seat, while a Claneboye client, Roger West, was elected for Down, and a Scottish baronet, Sir George Acheson, for Armagh. Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 170-6. The restoration settlement continued this development further, as some royalists were give back their lands (notably the marquess of Antrim and Marcus Trevor), and others were rewarded with titles (Viscounts Montgomery and Claneboye becoming earls of Mount-Alexander and Clanbrassil, respectively), but they had to share the laurels with Clotworthy, Annesley, Hill and Rawdon, who remained a powerful force in the civil government in the counties. The election returns for the Irish Parliament of 1661 show that, apart from Hans Hamilton at Armagh, settlers of English extraction enjoyed a monopoly of the county seats. CJI i. 588-9.