Ireland under the Stuarts and During the Interregnum (Vol.1-3). Bagwell Richard

survey, 1615.

      Pynnar’s survey, 1618–19.

To the end of his life James continued to take a great interest in the Ulster settlement, and was impatient when slow progress was reported. Sir Josiah Bodley, who had former experience to help him, made a general survey or inspection, which was concluded early in 1615. The result was disappointing, very few having carried out their engagements to the full. Some had built without planting, others had planted without building, and in general they retained the Irish style to avoid which was a fundamental reason for the enterprise. The Londoners and other defaulters were given till the end of August 1616 to make good their shortcomings, and some advance was made in consequence of the King’s threats. The survey so well known as Pynnar’s followed at the end of 1618. Pynnar found that in the six counties there were 1,974 British families, including 6,215 men having arms and being capable of bearing them. One hundred and twenty-six castles had been built and forty-two walled enclosures without houses. Of substantial unfortified houses Pynnar saw 1,897, and he heard of a good many more, but he thought it very doubtful whether the colony would endure. ‘My reason,’ he says, ‘is that many of the English tenants do not yet plough upon the lands, neither use husbandry.’ They had not confidence enough to provide themselves with servants or cattle, and much of the land was grazed by Irish stockholders, who contributed nothing to the general security. There might be starvation but for the Scottish tenants, who tilled a great deal. The Irish graziers were more immediately profitable than English tenants, and their competition kept up the rents. The Irish, though indispensable, were dangerous, and there were more of them on the Londoners’ lands than anywhere else. The agents indeed discouraged British settlers, persuading their employers at home that the land was bad, and so securing the higher rents which native graziers were ready to give or at least to promise. ‘Take it from me,’ said Bacon, ‘that the bane of a plantation is when the undertakers or planters make such haste to a little mechanical present profit, as disturbeth the whole frame and nobleness of the work for times to come.’[76]

      Fresh survey in 1622.

Four years later there was yet another survey which may be taken to describe the state of the colony at the end of James I.’s reign. The commissioners, who divided the work among themselves, reported that much had been done, but that the conditions insisted on by the King had on the whole not been performed. Many of the undertakers were non-resident, their agents retained native tenants and the British settlers complained that ‘the Irish were countenanced by their landlords against them.’ But few freeholders were made, rents were too high, and covenants too stringent. Some promised leases informally ‘which giveth such as are unconscionable power to put poor men out of their holdings when they have builded with confidence of settlement.’ Much building was badly done, and instead of encouraging villages the undertakers dispersed their tenants ‘in woods and coverts subject to the malice of any kerne to rob, kill, and burn them and their houses.’ Copies of the conditions to which undertakers were bound could not be had, and so the humbler settlers were at their mercy and that of their agents and lawyers. The servitors were rather better than the undertakers, but their faults were of the same kind, and they also were ‘so dispersed that a few kerne might easily take victuals from them by force if they gave it not willingly.’ The Irish grantees as a rule built nothing, and their enclosures made with sods were valueless. They made no estate of any kind to their tenants, but kept to the old Irish exactions, and they ploughed in the ‘Irish barbarous manner by the tails of their garrons.’ The commissioners recommended that the King should give new patents instead of those which deserve to be forfeited. A full fourth part of the undertaken lands should be leased for twenty-one years or lives to the Irish on condition of living in villages, going to church, wearing English clothes, ploughing in English fashion, bringing up their children to learning an industry, and enclosing at least a fourth of their cultivated land. Undertakers were to be fined if they took Irish tenants or graziers on any other terms, and alienation for any longer term was to involve forfeiture.[77]

      The natives not transplanted.

Whether as tenants, graziers, or labourers, the Irish inhabitants were found indispensable. Early in 1624 their stay was officially sanctioned, pending inquiry, and in 1626 there was a further extension to May 1628, and after that for another year; but neither then nor later was the transplantation really carried out. The undertakers, or some of them, had indeed their own grievances. Having been unable to perform their covenants strictly, and being afraid of forfeiture, some of them offered to submit to a double rent and other penalties, in consideration of a fresh title, but this arrangement was not carried out. The result of the uncertainty was that hundreds of British families gave up the idea of settling and went away, while the Irish held on desperately whether the legal landlords liked it or not.[78]

      The Londoners criticised.

      The first school.

Sir Thomas Phillips, officially described as ‘a brave soldier all his life,’ kept O’Cahan’s castle at Limavady in good repair, with drawbridge, moat, and two tiers of cannon. His two-storied residence, slated, with garden, orchard, and dovecote, stood by, and a mile from it he had built a village of eighteen small houses. He was thus in a position to criticise both Londonderry and Coleraine, and was much disgusted at the Londoners’ proceedings. It seemed to him that they cared only for present profit, and made very little attempt to carry out the conditions of their grant. The new city was, indeed, well walled when Pynnar saw it, but the gates were incomplete and the inhabitants not nearly enough to defend so great a circuit. Phillips was employed both by St. John and Falkland to superintend the settlement, and in the survey of 1622 he was associated with Richard Hadsor, a practised official who could speak Irish. Thomas Raven, employed as surveyor by the Londoners, evidently thought Phillips right in the main, but was shy about giving information, though anxious to do so in obedience to actual orders. The number of inhabitants in Londonderry had slightly increased, but 300 more houses would be required ere the walls could be properly manned. There were actually 109 families living in stone houses, and about twelve more in cabins, but not more than 110 armed men were available in the town, and about half that number outside. There was no church except a corner of the old monastery which had been repaired before O’Dogherty’s rising, and it would not hold half the people, few as they were. Near it, however, was ‘a fair free school of lime and stone, slated, with a base-court of lime and stone about it built at the charges of Matthias Springham of London, merchant, deceased.’ Twelve guns were mounted on the fort at Culmore. At Coleraine the number of men was nearly as great as at Londonderry, but the walls or ramparts were of earth, not faced with stones, and subject to frequent crumblings. There was a small church with a bell. The great want at this place was a bridge, and it was thought by some that the Londoners were unwilling to supply it, because they made so much by the ferry. The estates of the twelve companies were perhaps in proportion rather better managed than those of the city of London itself, but there were the same complaints everywhere of insufficient encouragement to settlers, of leases withheld or delayed, and of Irish tenants who would promise any rent being preferred to British colonists. Phillips thought there were about 4,000 adult males in the whole county, of whom three-fourths were Irish. Of the remaining quarter not two-thirds were capable of bearing arms effectively, and in the last year of James’s reign Phillips declared his belief that the colonists were really at the mercy of the natives. The towns, such as they were, seemed ‘rather baits to ill-affected persons than places of security,’ and there were so many robberies and murders that fresh settlers were hardly to be expected.[79]

      English, Scotch and Irish.

      The original idea of the plantation was to settle English and Scotch undertakers in about equal numbers. The Scotch on the whole made the best settlers, in spite of, or possibly in consequence of, their tendency to intermarry with the Irish, and there can be no doubt that the ecclesiastical policy of James and Charles drove many Presbyterians from their own country to Ulster. The chiefs of the Hamiltons and Montgomeries