Born Fighting (7 page)

Other battles were fought over the next several years, but after Bannockburn there was no doubt that Scotland would win its independence. King Edward II had been humiliated, retreating first to Stirling Castle and then narrowly escaping across the border to England before being captured. Many English nobles were indeed captured, some of them later used for ransom or to redeem Scottish captives, among them Bruce’s wife and daughter. The English attempted to use the authority of the pope to subdue the Scots, but without avail.
³⁸
And the resoluteness of the Scots after Bannockburn was reflected in the famed declaration of the Abbot of Arbroath, Bruce’s own chancellor, who wrote to the pope in April 1320:

For so long as one hundred of us shall remain alive we shall never in any wise consent to submit to the rule of the English. For it is not for glory we fight, for riches, or for honours [
sic
], but for freedom alone, which no good man loses but with his life.

This declaration was not merely an expression of the will of a monarchy, for it had become clear that neither Bruce nor any other Scottish leader could fight or rule without the consent—and the unique notion of kinship—of those who had brought him victory. Arbroath’s words reflected the coda of an entire people, born largely through resistance to the yoke of Rome and hardened through centuries of warfare. Nor was it simply the attempted rule of the English that would spur Scottish defiance. A people had been formed, from the bottom up. Later centuries would scatter them across the globe. And wherever they traveled, they would bring with them an insistent independence, a willingness to fight on behalf of strong men who properly led them, and a stern populism that refused to bend a knee, or bow a head, to anyone but their God.

PART THREE

The Ulster Scots
                              

No Surrender.

—
The blood oath of Londonderry, 1689

                              

1

The Ulster Plantation
                              

IN THE MID
-1980s, while I was serving as assistant secretary of defense, a high-ranking British army general with whom I was meeting learned that most of my ancestors had come to America from Northern Ireland. The general was a highly respected officer throughout Europe and in America, both for his operational skills and his intellectual prowess. The author of several well-received books, he also had extensive “ground time,” as the infantry likes to put it, in some of the more turbulent areas of Asia and Africa. But upon hearing of my Ulster origins, within minutes the general was telling me of his most difficult assignment—commanding British troops in Northern Ireland during the period in the late 1970s known as the Troubles, when violence flared continuously between Catholic and Protestant factions.

“They are the hardest, toughest people on earth,” he said with the kind of quiet conviction of one who has had many chances for comparison. “Both sides, Catholic and Protestant alike. That is why Ulster is such a nightmare. Both sides would rather die than take a step back.”

I could not restrain a knowing smile, for the culture had hardly changed after it crossed the Atlantic Ocean three hundred years ago and set up its communities in the Appalachian Mountains. There’s an old saying in the mountain South. Insult a Yankee and he’ll sue you. Insult a mountain boy and he’ll kill you.

The blood feuds of today’s Ulster—and their legacy in the journey of America’s Scots-Irish—have their roots in a decision made in 1610 by King James I of England, who also reigned as James VI of Scotland, to form a Protestant plantation on Irish soil. Three years earlier, James, an enthusiastic colonizer, had created a similarly structured colony in Virginia, known appropriately as Jamestown.

James had several different motivations for establishing the Ulster Plantation. Some dealt with the problems inside Ireland. Some reflected England’s concern about the strategic moves of competing foreign powers such as Spain and France. Some ineluctably boiled down to the politics of religion. And some had to do with the geography and demographics of Scotland itself.

As with Scotland, the English had attempted to subdue Ireland for centuries, with similarly negative results. The major difference in these two countries’ experiences with the English were on the one hand that for centuries the sea protected Ireland from large-scale invasions, and on the other that the Irish, by clinging even harder than the Scots to the reign of powerful tribal chieftains, were slower to configure themselves in political terms as a nation. But that did not mean that the English would prevail over Irish culture as a whole. As in Scotland, during the centuries well before 1600 the English dotted the Irish countryside with Anglo-Norman royalty, which in the case of Ireland was followed by a small gentry class of professionals and tradesmen. But time and distance caused these early “Anglo-Irish” families to be assimilated until they eventually became more Irish than English in both outlook and loyalties.
¹

This relatively comfortable balance among the various ethnic groups was to change as Ireland moved to the front burner of English politics during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603). England had gone through the Protestant Reformation beginning in the reign of Elizabeth’s father, the notorious Henry VIII, while the Catholic Church and particularly the Jesuits had chosen Ireland as a strategic focal point of a “Counter-Reformation.” The Jesuits had begun this fervent movement in 1561 with all the determination of a guerrilla force. They “preached to the people in their own tongue, performed pastoral duties with devotion, taught the catechism to children, identified themselves with the patriotic struggles of the Irish against the English, and so won the hearts and loyalties of the people.”
²

In addition to its religious goals, this effort had clear political overtones, since the Church had for centuries played heavily in international politics, and the Protestant Reformation had confronted and diminished the power of Rome. As longtime Princeton professor Joseph Strayer pointed out, in each country of Europe during this period, “the Church became closely connected with the government. The Protestant Reformation was merely the extreme stage of this process. The kings of France and Spain remained within the Catholic Church largely because they were able to gain special privileges from the pope. . . . The rulers of England and north Germany set up state churches which gave them a large degree of control over the religious life of their countries.”
³
Thus in English eyes the missionary work of the Jesuits in Ireland represented something of a political flanking movement engendered by Rome, made more dangerous by the alliances some Irish chieftains were seeking with powerful Catholic nations such as Spain and France.

Queen Elizabeth sought to address this threat by encouraging larger numbers of Protestant English to settle in Ireland. In this quest she enacted policies that stripped many native Irish of their property in order to provide land grants to English lords and gentry. This practice, which represented a change from the notion of merely settling in Ireland to that of actually colonizing it, was first attempted in Leinster and Munster during the 1560s and twice in Ulster during the 1570s. Predictably, it infuriated the local and dispossessed Irish, who persistently attacked the English immigrants, driving most of them back to whence they came.

England’s hostile relations with Spain toward the end of the century put an even more intense focus on Ireland and resulted in renewed efforts to encourage non-Irish Protestants to migrate there. In 1588, Philip II of Spain sent a large naval fleet into the North Atlantic with the mission of crushing both the Dutch and English navies, justifying his acts largely in the name of Catholicism while desiring eventually to dominate Europe’s foreign affairs. Able, highly experienced English seamen, with the help of smaller, more maneuverable ships as well as some bad Atlantic weather, thoroughly decimated the famed Spanish Armada. But Philip’s ambitions remained intact, and after the armada’s defeat he looked toward placing Spanish naval bases in Ireland, which would have had a powerful strategic impact on both England and the Netherlands.

In 1595, Hugh O’Neill, the powerful earl of Tyrone, set off a rebellion in Ulster whose end result might have accomplished Philip’s ends. O’Neill’s personal goal was to unite the Gaelic lords of Ulster under his sway. He was himself a rather curious figure, in many ways as personally contradicted as Scotland’s Robert the Bruce. He was Irish but had been reared in England as a Protestant. Although he rebelled against the English, he had served in the English army, in Ireland. Denounced as a traitor by the English when he claimed an Irish title, “The O’Neill,” by Gaelic ritual, he was nonetheless accepted in the court of James I in 1603 after his final defeat. Ever mercurial, he then in 1607 chose to lead the famed “flight of the earls” into exile from Ireland and died in Rome nine years later.
⁴

But by 1598, three years into his rebellion, The O’Neill had ignited the imagination of Ireland, largely by giving the English their worst-ever defeat at the hands of the Irish, in the Battle of Yellow Ford. Native Irish resistance was spreading south and west from Ulster all across the island, with religion as its rallying cry. The O’Neill was developing an alliance with Spain. And Queen Elizabeth decided that she must crush The O’Neill and conquer Ulster, if not Ireland itself.

In 1601, King Philip, who had supplied The O’Neill with arms and munitions, finally sent a Spanish military expedition to Ireland. In a display of lamentable seamanship on a par with that of the ill-fated armada thirteen years before, the Spanish managed to land their army on the remote peninsula of Kinsale in County Cork, as far away as one can get from Ulster without leaving Ireland. The O’Neill’s army traveled the length of Ireland to link up with the Spanish, but the English beat them to Kinsale and intercepted their advance. On Christmas Eve, 1601, the English cavalry attacked at dawn, devastating the weary and disoriented Irish army as it was preparing to break its encampment. After also smashing the Spanish, the English then turned north in a savage campaign that laid waste to Ulster itself.

Led by the ruthless Charles Blount, the eighth Lord Mountjoy, who had been appointed lord deputy of Ireland by Elizabeth in 1600, the English army turned Ulster into a sparsely populated no-man’s-land. Killing any Irishman found to be carrying arms, destroying homes, confiscating food and livestock, the English deliberately brought about a famine that caused the native Irish to move elsewhere and eventually broke the back of the rebellion. Mountjoy’s campaign, which took a terrible toll on civilians, was based on a plan to “make Ireland a ‘razed table’ on which the Elizabethan State could transcribe a neat pattern.”
⁵
It had as its implicit justification among many English the notion that the Irish were a lesser race. That callousness sowed the seeds of a bitterness and desire for revenge that carry on even into today.

One by one, the lords of Ulster capitulated until The O’Neill was isolated and fighting a desperate rearguard action. Finally, Queen Elizabeth authorized Mountjoy to offer him a pardon. The O’Neill accepted this pardon in 1603, just as Elizabeth herself was dying and James I was ascending the English throne. And in the ensuing seven years the groundwork was laid, partly by design and partly by happenstance, that brought about the formal creation of the Ulster Plantation.

First, in 1603, two Scottish lairds from Ayrshire, Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton, arranged the private purchase of large tracts of Ulster from Con O’Neill, an Ulster chieftain then imprisoned by the English. The complicated formula that allowed these purchases included their assistance in obtaining Con O’Neill’s pardon, his release from prison, and, oddly, a knighthood for O’Neill balanced by a pledge from the two lairds to King James that the land would be “planted with British Protestants.”
⁶
Almost immediately, Montgomery and Hamilton began arranging the migration of large numbers of lowland Scots into their Ulster lands.

Second, also in 1603, Sir Arthur Chichester, the new English lord deputy for Ireland, received a sizable land grant from the king as a reward for his services during The O’Neill’s rebellion. His lands were “on the East Coast of Antrim, near the modern city of Belfast. Determined to ‘plant’ his estates, he brought farmers from his own county of Devon and attracted others from Lancashire and Chesire. His colonization so prospered that much of southern Antrim became English in character.”
⁷

Finally, in August 1607, the cream of Ulster’s Irish aristocracy, including Hugh O’Neill himself, left Ireland for permanent exile. Other Irish were to follow these hundred or so key leaders until by 1614 “there were 300 Irish students and 3,000 Irish soldiers in Spanish territories alone.”
⁸
This famous “flight of the earls” provided “the symbolic image of the last great Gaelic chieftain joining the world of the Irish exiles.”
⁹
Importantly, it also allowed the English to confiscate their lands. In the next year, “all the holdings of their clans in six of the nine northern counties were declared escheated to the King.”
¹⁰
The seizure of almost all the lands of Ulster brought with it even more bitterness from the native Irish, as it ignored the less formal but still binding Irish tradition of subownership, thus dispossessing many Irish of property they held under their own honored codes.
¹¹

This is not to imply that there was an immediate nationalistic resistance from the Irish to migration on their soil, particularly when it came from Scotland. For centuries small bands of Scots and Irish had flowed back and forth across the narrow straits that separated their two countries. As was previously mentioned, the
Scotti
who provided the diplomatic backbone of Scottish unification and for whom the country is named were originally an Irish tribe. And as R. F. Foster points out, by 1600 “there was a sense, indeed, in which some of the [Ulster] province was ‘planted’ already; Scots had been spilling back and forth across the narrow straits since time immemorial, and Antrim and Down were densely Scottish in population. In many ways the Antrim coast was closer to the Scottish mainland than to its own hinterland.”
¹²

But this time the issues were different and overwhelming, both in their emotions and in the number of people involved. They included Irish memories of the rapacity with which the English had starved, burned, and otherwise forced them from their lands, coupled with the collapse of the Irish chieftains. The volatile tinderbox of religious differences would be ignited again and again for many generations, fed by undeniable political implications that would soon cut not two but three ways, since many English and Scottish in the Ulster settlements would battle fiercely over vastly differing views of Protestantism. And the confrontations would become far more serious due to the sheer volume of migrations that followed the creation of the Ulster Plantation. In 1600 less than 2 percent of Ireland was of English or Scottish descent. Within a century that number would rise to 27 percent, almost all of it in Ulster.
¹³

Characteristic of traditional Anglo-Norman precision, the 500,000 acres of the original Ulster Plantation were laid out with exactitude. Half would be divided between “Undertakers”—lords and gentry from England and Scotland who would agree to “plant” Protestant farmers and also provide fortifications behind which their planters might defend the allotted areas, and “Servitors”—proven soldiers who could be used in further military operations in Ulster. One-tenth (50,000 acres) would be allotted to the twelve municipal corporations that comprised the government of London and would be responsible for developing trade. These same companies had underwritten the Jamestown Plantation in 1607. Two-tenths went to the Episcopal Church, now to be called the Church of Ireland. One-tenth went to the establishment of forts and towns. And finally, only one-tenth would go to native Irish “of good merit,” who would be free to take on Irish Catholic tenants.
¹⁴