rising of 1641

rising of 1641. The rising commenced in Ulster on 22 October amid a constitutional and related economic crisis convulsing Charles I's multiple monarchy. There were three plots—a conspiracy by Rory O'More and Conor Maguire in February 1641; a conspiracy of army officers disbanded from Wentworth's army, subsequently abandoned; and the coalescence of these earlier plots under Sir Phelim O'Neill in August.

The insurrection has traditionally been seen as a revolt against the Ulster plantation. However, the main conspirators were debt‐ridden scions of families who were originally beneficiaries rather than victims of the plantation. Their demands were for improvements in property rights and safeguards for religious freedom, reflecting their fear of the Puritan administration that had succeeded Wentworth in Ireland and of the growing assertiveness of a virulently anti‐Catholic English parliament. The successful recent revolt of the Scots Covenanters provided a model.

Although the plan to take Dublin Castle on 23 October was betrayed by Owen O'Connolly, the rising in Ulster had already begun. Co‐ordinated attacks took the colony by surprise but what was conceived as an armed constitutional protest legitimized by forged royal commissions degenerated into a spate of sectarian massacres as the gentry lost control of untrained levies. At least 4,000 settlers were murdered in such incidents as the notorious drowning of a refugee convoy at Portadown. Reprisals followed against Irish living in planter‐controlled districts, notably the massacre of the inhabitants of Islandmagee, Co. Antrim. From Ulster, the insurgents turned south, capturing Dundalk on 31 October and defeating a government force at Julianstown (29 Nov.). Around 3 December the Old English gentry of the Pale, having been again denied the Graces and fearing a government backlash against all Catholics, made a historic decision to throw in their lot with their co‐religionists. Thereafter the insurrection spread nationwide, laying the basis for the Confederate War.

Lurid propaganda produced in the aftermath of the rising, notably Temple's Irish Rebellion (1646), alleging a premeditated plot to exterminate the Protestant population and wildly exaggerating the numbers killed, helped legitimize the sequestration of Catholic land in the Adventurers' Act and Cromwellian land settlement. Many of these accounts drew on depositions collected from Protestant survivors. For over a century annual church services of deliverance inaugurated on 23 October 1662 alerted Irish Protestants to the fundamental disloyalty of their Catholic compatriots evidenced by the rising (see anniversaries).

Bibliography

Mac Cuarta, Brian , Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (1993)

Hiram Morgan