The English Civil War and Interregnum transformed the colonies of Britain and significantly altered the relationship between England and its colonies. Scholars such as Aidan Clarke and Toby Barnard maintain that the upheaval of the Interregnum and the subsequent struggle for power in the Restoration significantly changed Irish society. More recently, Carla Pestana has argued the same for the American colonies. In Ireland such changes were accelerated by the wholesale transfer of land ownership, first demonstrated by Karl Bottigheimer more than thirty years ago. In this work, Kevin McKenny draws from his comprehensive database of every recorded landholder in Ireland in both the pre-1640 and post-1660 periods. In his view, only a complete quantification of the material can provide “an adequate and absolute understanding of the land ‘settlement’ in seventeenth-century Ireland” (19).
His other objective is to consider how the new order achieved dominance in northwest Ulster. As a result, the transformation is visible not just along religious lines, indeed Scottish Catholics prospered, but in the number of landholders and the size and location of estates. McKenny provides a thorough examination of the rise of a set of pre-1641 settlers quite different from the much-studied early seventeenth-century families who dominated the Irish government and church: the Temples, Merediths, Loftuses, and Usshers.
McKenny's detailed analysis of northwest Ulster settlers, those who came in the early 1600s from England and Scotland, shows that ethnicity, economic considerations, and even willingness to adapt to commercial and economic realities and employ evolving notions about property and landholding played a more significant role than religion in determining land allocation. His study focuses on the Laggan Army, a force of landowners and their tenants and neighbors previously ignored by historians. First brought together by Thomas Wentworth and reconstituted in the wake of the 1641 rebellion, the Laggan Army acted as a kind of mutual protection force, determined to hold northwest Ulster from falling into the hands of the rebels, with whom many of the Protestant settlers had been on good terms. Indeed, at the beginning of the rebellion, Sir Phelim O’Neill notified Sir William Stewart, the leader of one of the four regiments of the Laggan Army, that the rebels intended no harm to the Scottish settlers and expressed his goodwill. The massacre of five hundred of Stewart's soldiers at Augher exploded that goodwill as both English and Scottish settlers of northwest Ulster came to see themselves as hardened frontiersmen defending their homes. They drove the rebels out of northwest Ulster, rounded up refugees and even provided for their safe transport. McKenny enthusiastically praises the Laggan Army as a fighting force, but its significance goes beyond its military success.
Throughout most of the 1640s, the politics of Civil War England had little impact on the parties in Ireland. However, proliferating factional armies made it more difficult, but not impossible, for the Lagganeers to walk a middle line of expediency. The protection of life and personal property determined their political allegiance. The settlers of northwest Ulster even managed to neutralize the parliament's pressure to reject the cessation of 1643 and sign the Solemn League and Covenant by insisting on a watered down covenant. McKenny argues that the Laggan Army, because of its effectiveness, was courted by both sides, the Earl of Ormond and Sir Charles Coote. Ormond won out more often because he was able to make good on his promises and because Ulstermen, in general, were almost preternaturally royalist.
Expediency, a successful strategy for the 1640s, was no long possible with the execution of the king in 1649. McKenny argues that ideology trumped the particular considerations of hearth and home and ushered in a period of suffering for the settler society of northwest Ulster. Many of the Lagganeers, having fought against the rebels for nearly a decade and unable to stomach republicanism, now found themselves fighting with the Catholic Irish under Ormond against their fellow Protestants settlers at the siege of Derry in 1649. Over the next year, more Ulster settlers were killed by parliamentary armies than had been killed by rebels in the 1641 uprising. The “British” civil war had come to Ireland. McKenny reminds us that Oliver Cromwell went to Ireland to put down the royalist revolt there as much as to fight Catholic rebels. The execution of the garrison at Drogheda was meant as a warning to Protestant royalists as well as Catholic rebels. Some Lagganeers, but rarely the officers, defected to the parliamentary armies. Others left Ireland to fight for the king in Scotland. Grouped with Irish Catholics as recipients of Cromwell's wrath, those who stayed true to their royalist ideology after August 1649 were targeted by Cromwellian policies of confiscation and transplantation.
The sufferings of the royalist settlers translated into political capital with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. McKenny examines the role of the “1649 officers” in the transformation of power in Ireland after the Restoration. Proclaimed by Charles II in 1660 to designate those who had remained faithful to his father and supported him in Ireland, the group sought to oversee the settlement of arrears of pay for those who had fought for the king. As McKenny argues, they acted as a kind of real estate company, overseeing the rents and the sale of lands whose proceeds would provide arrears for the officers. This became a kind of club, whose members saw to each other's advancement and rather quickly wrestled power from old parliamentarians. They came to dominate completely the Irish parliament and Privy Council. These settlers, under the favor of the Restoration, used commercial and mercantilist instruments to consolidate and expand their lands. They were adaptable, even employing Catholic lawyers when expedient. Such flexibility favored many of the former Lagganeers and not a few Catholic landholders. Rather than a society of many small landholders envisioned by Cromwell, late seventeenth-century Ireland saw fewer landowners, with greater estates, consolidated in a particular region, who by the 1680s monopolized political power in Ireland.
As impressive and helpful as McKenny's work is, a number of areas could have been expanded to great benefit. For example, in his chapter “The Laggan Army in the ‘British’ Civil War” McKenny briefly discusses the importance of honor in Ulster settler society but confines his treatment to a few remarks on the royalist Lord Grandison and the parliamentarian Colonel Michael Jones. Given that Ulster settlers could be so pragmatic in their actions until ideological conversion, an extended treatment of the meaning of honor in the culture could have illuminated their adherence to ideology after 1649. In addition, although the author mentions a few women in his discussion of the land upheaval, he does not offer any consideration of how they managed to preserve and consolidate their lands, especially since the survival strategies he touts for male landholders could not have been counted on for women. Much of McKenny's book, and his major points and evidence, can be found in his earlier work on the subject. Indeed, a number of chapters are nearly exact republications of his earlier work, although there is no acknowledgment of that by the author or the publisher. However, in this book there is new discussion of the northwest Ulster settler communities and invaluable appendices relating to the landholding and transfers in northwest Ulster and the 1649 officers. In this format McKenny's work will reach the wider audience that it deserves.
