The great fraud of Ulster

by T. M. Healy

“The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world.... They come of as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth ... very present in perils, great scorners of death.”

For the uprooting of such a breed, high political and moral reasons had to be invented, but when the natives were got rid of and their persecutors could discover no political or religious pretexts to cloak their greed, they fastened nakedly on the input and earnings of the settlers from England and Scotland.

These supplanters of the Gael were in the third and fourth generation harassed and skinned as thoroughly as if they had belonged to the outcast race. In the province where Papists were almost forbidden to breathe, the framers of the Penal Code, in the name of “the rights of property,” taught the humbler Protestants the scantiness of their mercies.

The descendants of the “great Deputy” did not attempt to enforce their Patents while knowledge of their origin prevailed and malodor beset them; but in the reign of George III. their baleful activities had consequences which were empire-wide. The extravagance and rapacity of the Chichesters led to the enforced emigration of the children of the Planters, and powerfully contributed in 1776 to the loss of the American Colonies. The armies of Washington were so largely recruited from the evicted tenants of Ulster that, according to the evidence presented to a Parliamentary Committee, half the Revolutionary soldiers were Irish. For this Lord Donegall and his imitators were to be thanked. The “flight of the Earls,” which the “great Deputy” promoted, had for its sequel the flight of the peasants, provoked by his descendants; and with it the breakdown of the imperial tie between Britain and the greatest part of North America.

The American upheaval was itself preceded by a rebellion amongst the Ulster Protestants. A close connection can be traced between the failure of the one outbreak and the success of the other. In July, 1770—only eighty years after the Battle of the Boyne—the offspring of the Planters in the Counties of Antrim, Down, Derry, and Tyrone rose in arms. British writers like J. A. Froude and John Wesley, Irish historians like Lecky and Benn, agree as to the responsibility of the landlords who provoked the insurrection. Froude links together as cause and effect the atrocities of the Marquis of Donegall and the loss of the American Colonies.

He says:—“Sir Arthur Chichester, the great Viceroy of Ireland under James I., was, of all Englishmen who ever settled in the country, the most useful to it. His descendant, the Lord Donegall, of whom it has become necessary to speak, was perhaps the person who inflicted the greatest injury to it. Sir Arthur had been rewarded for his services by vast estates in the County Antrim. The fifth Earl and first Marquis of Donegall, already by the growth of Belfast and the fruit of other men’s labours, while he was sitting still, enormously rich, found his income still unequal to his yet more enormous expenditure. His name is looked for in vain among the nobles who, in return for high places, were found in the active service of their country. He was one of those habitual and splendid absentees who discharged his duties to the God who made him by magnificently doing as he would with his own. Many of his Antrim leases having fallen in simultaneously he demanded £100,000 in fines for the renewal of them. The tenants, all Protestants, offered the interest of the money in addition to the rent. It could not be. Speculative Belfast capitalists paid the fine and took the lands over the heads of the tenants to sub-let.

“Mr. Clotworthy Upton, another great Antrim proprietor, imitated the example, and at once the whole countryside were driven from their habitations. Sturdy Scots, who in five generations had reclaimed Antrim from the wilderness, saw the farms, which they and their fathers had made valuable, let by auction to the highest bidder; and, when they refused to submit themselves to robbery, saw them let to others, and let in many instances to Catholics, who would promise anything to recover their hold on the soil.

“The most substantial of the expelled tenantry gathered their effects together and sailed to join their countrymen in the New World, where the Scotch-Irish became known as the most bitter of the Secessionists.”

Mr. Froude traces to these evictions the uprise of the “Peep of Day” and the “Hearts of Steel” conspiracies, and adds:—

“It is rare that two private persons have power to create effects so considerable as to assist in dismembering an Empire and provoking a civil war. Lord Donegall, for his services, was rewarded with a marquisate; and Mr. Clotworthy Upton with a viscounty (Lord Templetown). If rewards were proportioned to deserts, a fitter retribution to both of them would have been forfeiture and Tower Hill....