I

The process of selecting who from amongst England and Scotland's nobility, gentry and mercantile community would receive lands in the English and Scottish precincts in Ulster was initiated in the spring of 1609. This ensued from the finalisation of the broad parameters of the scheme over the Christmas season of 1608/9 following the submission of a plantation ‘Project’ to King James I and his ministers by Davies and several others, notably his close ally, the chief justice of king's bench, Sir James Ley.Footnote ⁷ The details set out by Davies and his colleagues were incorporated almost entirely into A collection of svch orders and conditions, as are to be obserued by the vndertakers, vpon the distribution and plantation of the escheated lands in Vlster, which was published in London in January 1609 and in Edinburgh at the end of March to advertise the initiative to the wider political community.Footnote ⁸

We know a great deal about the manner in which interested parties in Scotland petitioned for lands in Ulster. News of the plantation scheme was transmitted by the Scottish secretary of state, Sir Alexander Hay, from London to the Scottish administration in March 1609 and the government there was placed in charge of overseeing the solicitation of petitions in Scotland.Footnote ⁹ The Orders and conditions were quickly published and a proclamation was issued advertising the initiative on 28 March 1609.Footnote ¹⁰ By mid-summer, large numbers of applications were being received, with seventy-seven having been submitted in total by September 1609. These applicants were drawn from a distinct constituency, generally being younger sons of Scottish gentry families. Geographically, they were overwhelmingly from the southern regions and a large majority hailed from within twenty-five miles of Edinburgh. However, of these seventy-seven, just over a dozen would eventually receive lands in Ulster. Late in 1609 responsibility for the selection of the Scottish undertakers was transferred to London where Hay, the duke of Lennox, Ludovick Stewart, and the earl of Dunbar, George Home, were formed into a sub-committee charged with overseeing the process. Hereafter, court intrigue began to play a major role in the selecting of the Scottish undertakers and many of those who would receive grants of land in the Scottish precincts were individuals with close personal relationships with the king.Footnote ¹¹

The mechanisms whereby the English undertakers petitioned for land and received grants of estates have not been studied precisely. In March 1609, the Venetian ambassador in London wrote to the government of La Serenissima that one of the core aspects of the entire scheme, the expensive obligation that each grantee had to build a castle and bawn or defensive structure within two years of receiving their lands, had dissuaded many potential applicants from becoming involved. Nevertheless, in the months that followed the number of petitions which the government received still far outweighed the quantity of estates available.Footnote ¹² Some individual applications for lands were received in London from a few lone suitors, such as John Carvile and Francis Perkins.Footnote ¹³ Early on, the regime also seems to have been giving genuine consideration to allocating multiple proportions to particular persons. It was, for instance, speculated that Sir James Harington, an M.P. for Rutland and the future first baronet of Ridlington, could be assigned two ‘great proportions’ in Tyrone.Footnote ¹⁴ As such, there was a lack of clarity in the spring and summer of 1609 about what kind of proposals the government even wanted to receive. This all changed in the second half of 1609. The evidence is frustratingly limited owing to a lack of surviving documentation, but what is relatively clear is that from the summer onwards, the crown began receiving proposals from companies or consortia of individuals who wished to receive grants of whole precincts or even counties. It is unclear if the government in London had made it known in some particular fashion that it wished for groups to petition for land in this way, but the number of consortia formed in 1609 and early 1610 is suggestive. Interestingly, their leaders were prominent individuals who had nearly all been knighted in the first months of the reign of James I.Footnote ¹⁵ The syndicates they led (see appendix) and their significance to the plantation planning process have been almost entirely elided to date.

Easily the most ambitious of these consortia was that led by Sir Clement Heigham and Sir Thomas Chichester. This involved forty-one gentry and landholders from England led by Heigham and a cohort of servitors and officials operating in Ireland headed by Chichester.Footnote ¹⁶ Chichester was the lord deputy's brother and so well placed to exert influence to have the proposal accepted. Heigham was a landholder and official from Norfolk who had served as an M.P. for Suffolk and acted as muster-master of the county in the late Elizabethan period.Footnote ¹⁷ His position at the head of a notable East Anglian family enabled him to build support for the project in the region and the company was dominated by individuals from Norfolk and Suffolk.Footnote ¹⁸ They included figures such as Thomas Blennerhassett, John Archdale, Thomas Flowerdew, John Dillon, Henry Hunnings, Robert Bogas and Francis Sacheverell, each of whom would later play roles of varying importance in the plantation. Collectively, the syndicate sought an area of land in Fermanagh which they took to be approximate to virtually the entirety of the county. They also sought a small corridor of land in north-east Sligo in order to provide access to the sea. A market town would be created at Belleek and they proposed to erect forty manors throughout the county and bring over 1,000 settlers. They would expend £40,000 on this enterprise.Footnote ¹⁹ In petitioning for this huge amount of land, they suggested it measured 60,000 acres, but the plantation surveys which had been undertaken in 1608 and 1609 were entirely deficient, such that the crown believed it was planting approximately 460,000 acres in total in west Ulster, when the actual size of the territory involved was about eight times this amount.Footnote ²⁰

The Heigham/Chichester consortium had competition for an extensive grant in Fermanagh. A company of fifteen individuals, also hailing from Norfolk and Suffolk, led by the English attorney general and future chief justice of common pleas, Sir Henry Hobart, had put forward a petition for 15,000 acres in Fermanagh.Footnote ²¹ This geographically homogenous group of potential planters from East Anglia might well have been able to mobilise large numbers of English settlers from the region to move to Fermanagh. Moreover, Hobart was well-regarded as a prospering landholder and estate manager, whose expertise would prove beneficial in Ulster. Curiously, some individuals were involved in both consortia, notably Thomas Blennerhassett and Thomas Flowerdew. Such dual petitions were not unusual and were replicated across many of the syndicates. Conspicuously in this regard, Sir Henry Clare, a veteran of the Nine Years’ War in Ireland, was the head of a syndicate which sought 12,000 acres in Cavan, while also being involved in a separate consortium seeking the precinct of Lifford in Donegal.Footnote ²²

These consortia were not ignorant of Ireland. They clearly knew which lands were in the greatest proximity to the more economically developed Pale region and a disproportionate number of them applied for a block grant of the precinct of Oneilland in Armagh. One such application by a group of nine individuals largely drawn from Suffolk and London was led by Sir William Monson, sometime M.P. for Malmesbury and from 1604 to 1616 the admiral of the Narrow Seas.Footnote ²³ Oneilland was also sought by a consortium led by Richard Fiennes, seventh Lord Saye and Sele. This particular group is noteworthy for the involvement of a Joseph, William and Edward Ward who between them apparently had thousands of pounds which they could expend on the plantation, both in terms of their incomes and disposable money. The same precinct in Armagh was also sought by a syndicate led by Sir Francis Anderson of Bedfordshire and a separate small consortium of six individuals led by the Somerset M.P., Sir Maurice Berkeley.Footnote ²⁴ If they were not granted Oneilland, Berkeley and his associates requested that they would have the precinct of Lifford.Footnote ²⁵ With its relatively valuable land opening out into Drongawn Lough and Lough Swilly, and its proximity to the town of Derry, Lifford was one of the better precincts available to the English undertakers. Other than Oneilland, it was the only precinct which was especially sought after by the consortia. It was also the subject of a petition by Sir Thomas Cornwall, the future twelfth Baron of Burford and a favourite of Henry, prince of Wales, at his time of petitioning in 1609/10. Cornwall requested to have the entirety of Lifford made over to himself and six other members of his extended family.Footnote ²⁶ Another petition of this kind came from the Touchet family. Mervyn Touchet, the son of George Touchet, Lord Audley, applied for the entire precinct of Omagh in Tyrone to hold along with extended members of the Touchet family, such as his brother-in-law, Edward Blunte.Footnote ²⁷ One further family initiative, though one for which very limited details are available, was led by Sir Hugh Wirrall from Middlesex. He wanted 6,000 acres anywhere in Ulster, which he would divide three ways with a family member, John Wirrall, and a certain Thomas Montfort.Footnote ²⁸

Donegal was also the focus of a petition for which there is a frustrating lack of detail. This arose in July 1609 and was spearheaded by Captains Richard Mansell and William Fisher, acting as agents on behalf of a company of London merchants led by Nicholas Isaac and Thomas Pinder. The syndicate wished to undertake the wholesale colonisation of the county. Accordingly, they sought to be acknowledged as grantees of all of Donegal and promised in return to build a large sea port and town there.Footnote ²⁹ The government in London was enthusiastic about the project, but it was stillborn. Perhaps this was because the more ambitious scheme to have London's merchant community develop the Londonderry plantation was significantly advanced in the second half of 1609 and green-lit in January 1610.

A similarly ambitious consortium was championed by the prominent Yorkshire landholder, politician and M.P., Sir John Mallory.Footnote ³⁰ This clique sought 19,000 acres in Armagh and was significant as being comprised of individuals such as Stephen Butler of Bedfordshire, Thomas Wood of Yorkshire and William Wake of London who were listed as having thousands of pounds available to put towards the plantation. As a result, these individuals would have brought considerable resources to bear in planting Armagh.Footnote ³¹ Chichester had made it clear that the undertakers needed to have significant wealth available to them if they were to make a success of the enterprise and, indeed, one of the main reasons why the Munster Plantation had achieved so little between its first establishment in 1587 and its overthrow in 1598 was that many of the grantees there had been men of limited wealth.Footnote ³² However, regardless of the resources which Mallory and his associates would have been able to employ in Ulster, their petition, as with those of nearly all the other consortia, was to be rejected.

II

The Orders and conditions had envisaged that the plantation would be underway by the summer of 1609 and the undertakers in place in Ulster by Midsummer Day.Footnote ³³ This hubris was a worrying portent of a cascading series of overly optimistic deadlines which bedevilled the implementation of the Ulster plantation theory throughout James's reign. In this first instance, the decision to delay was made within weeks of the establishment of the first deadline.Footnote ³⁴ By March, it was clear that the inception of the plantation would have to be delayed until 1610 so that a new survey could be carried out.Footnote ³⁵ When early 1610 arrived, it was evident that the entire enterprise would be delayed until the summer, wholly a year after the originally intended date.Footnote ³⁶ In the interim, the terms on which the British undertakers would be given their lands were also altered: the grantees would now have three years to build their castles and people their lands with British tenants, each ideally planting twenty-four British settlers or ten families on each 1,000 acres of land they would be granted.Footnote ³⁷ It was on this revised basis that the undertakers were finally selected in 1610.

Before those final decisions were made, a system of oversight, one which has been surprisingly overlooked in the historiography, was put in place, and this would have a bearing on the overall selection of those who received estates. The initiative was mooted by Chichester in the first weeks of 1610 in a set of instructions in which he proposed that some of the leading political figures of England and Scotland should become involved in the plantation. Such individuals, Chichester argued, should be enjoined to undertake the plantation of a barony each. The lord deputy specifically proposed Salisbury and Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, as candidates.Footnote ³⁸ What Chichester was proposing was not that Salisbury and others should become direct participants, but that they would act as patrons or overseers of the plantation effort in specific precincts. This, Chichester believed, would act as an encouragement to the undertakers and a means of monitoring the king's great British project more closely from court.Footnote ³⁹ A similar proposal had been made in the spring of 1609 by the English chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Julius Caesar, amongst whose papers is a brief note speculating that large estates should be given to senior political figures like the earls of Salisbury, Suffolk and Oxford, and also a small number of English servitors in Ireland, notably the future lord deputy, Sir Oliver St John.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although there is little direct mention of either Caesar's earlier proposal or Chichester's a year later, in correspondence between the governments in England and Ireland, such an arrangement was clearly implemented speedily following the Irish viceroy's suggestion. By the late spring of 1610, a system was in place whereby some of James I's most senior ministers and trusted advisors were installed as overseers of a majority of the plantation precincts. They included both English and Scottish men close to the king. The Scottish overseers included courtiers like Ludovick Stuart, second duke of Lennox, the first gentleman of the royal bedchamber and a privy councillor.Footnote ⁴¹ Lennox also had been granted lands in the precinct of Portlough in Donegal and had a personal stake in Ulster.Footnote ⁴² Of equal eminence as a courtier amongst the Scottish overseers was John Erskine, second earl of Mar, who along with Lennox was the only Scot to be both appointed to the English Privy Council and raised to the Order of the Garter in 1603.Footnote ⁴³ The other Scottish overseers were George Home, first earl of Dunbar, Edward Bruce, first Baron Bruce of Kinloss, and Sir Alexander Hay, Lord Whitburgh, the Scottish secretary of state.Footnote ⁴⁴ Generally speaking, these men were given collective oversight of the Scottish precincts, rather than having individual precincts assigned to them.

For our purposes, the identity and role of the English overseers is more significant. Salisbury was made an overseer of the undertakers in the precinct of Clogher in Tyrone. He was joined by Edward Somerset, fourth earl of Worcester,Footnote ⁴⁵ who had oversight of Oneilland in Armagh; Gilbert Talbot, seventh earl of Shrewsbury,Footnote ⁴⁶ in charge of the two precincts of Clankelly and Lurg and Coolemakernan in Fermanagh; Henry Howard, earl of NorthamptonFootnote ⁴⁷ (Loughtee in Cavan); and Thomas Howard, first earl of SuffolkFootnote ⁴⁸ (Lifford in Donegal).Footnote ⁴⁹ An exception was made for the precinct of Omagh in Tyrone, where the entire barony had been granted to the extended family of George Touchet, Lord Audley and no overseer was appointed.Footnote ⁵⁰ Collectively, these individuals were some of James's closest English advisors. Salisbury served as lord high treasurer of England and was effectively the king's chief minister. Suffolk had been the lord chamberlain since 1603. Northampton was the lord keeper of the privy seal. Shrewsbury's position was less senior, but he was a member of the Privy Council and as the titular seventh earl of Waterford he was the head of the Talbots whose connections with Ireland stretched back to the fourteenth century. The role played by the overseers in the early stage of the plantation was considerable and in some cases seems to account for why the Englishmen who were given lands in Ulster were chosen as undertakers. There is tentative evidence to suggest this. A schedule of the British undertakers in each of the precincts which was finalised around May 1610 listed the grantees in each barony and noted specifically that these had been ‘made choise of’ by the respective overseers of the precincts.Footnote ⁵¹ But beyond this we can speculate that they also had a considerable hand in choosing who received estates in the precincts they were overseeing.Footnote ⁵²

III

The selection of the British grantees was largely not finalised until the late spring of 1610.Footnote ⁵³ In the end, the sixty-four Scottish proportions made available throughout Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone were distributed amongst fifty-eight undertakers (six were granted two proportions).Footnote ⁵⁴ Just sixteen of the seventy-seven individuals who had petitioned directly to the government in Edinburgh in the summer and autumn of 1609 were included.Footnote ⁵⁵ The bulk of the remainder fell to James's long-standing political allies and court favourites, and their extended families and client networks.Footnote ⁵⁶ Accordingly, a series of chief undertakers were selected for the Scottish precincts, they being Michael Balfour, Lord Burley (Knockninny in Fermanagh); Sir James Douglas (The Fews in Armagh); Sir Alexander Hamilton (Tullyhunco in Cavan); James Hamilton, earl of Abercorn (Strabane in Tyrone); Sir John Home (Magheraboy in Fermanagh); Sir Robert McClelland (Boylagh and Banagh in Donegal); Andrew Stewart, Lord Ochiltree (Mountjoy in Tyrone); Esme Stewart, Lord Aubigny (Clankee in Cavan); and Ludovick Stewart, duke of Lennox (Portlough in Donegal). Many of these were faithful servants of the king who requested them to become involved in Ulster, particularly Abercorn, Lennox, Ochiltree and Burley.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, the selection of these leading Scottish undertakers broadly determined the make-up of the other grantees in their respective precincts. A number of other estates, for instance, in Strabane were apportioned to Abercorn's Hamilton brethren, while the king determined that Lennox should have multiple Cunninghams of Ayrshire take land under him in Portlough. Beyond this, the general pattern was to have an equal number of grantees with places of origin in the eastern and western Scottish lowlands. A disproportionate number of the 1609 applicants had been from south-east Scotland in close proximity to Edinburgh, but the final list of grantees included several undertakers from the south-west around Ayrshire and Kircudbrightshire, which lay in geographical proximity to the north of Ireland.Footnote ⁵⁸

The situation was nowhere near as clear nor as uniform amongst the English undertakers. Of the fifty-one estates granted in the seven baronies of Oneilland (Armagh), Loughtee (Cavan), Lifford (Donegal), Clankelly (Fermanagh), Lurg and Coolemakernan (Fermanagh), Clogher (Tyrone) and Omagh (Tyrone), approximately three-fifths were assigned to individuals who had been involved in the various consortia which had petitioned for lands in 1609 and 1610. However, while a large number of these individuals were granted estates, the companies as a whole were almost entirely ignored in favour of engaging with individual members from within them. The following seeks to determine why the individuals so chosen (see also the appendix) were selected.Footnote ⁵⁹ Some of the details in this section are taken from the working notes of Robert Hunter, who between the 1970s and the early 2000s was carrying out research on this topic with a view to writing a monograph on the English in the Ulster Plantation in early Stuart Ireland, but the project was incomplete at the time of his death.Footnote ⁶⁰

Omagh in Tyrone was the only region in which one of the consortia was granted something approaching what they had petitioned for. Here, the consortium led by Mervyn Touchet was amalgamated with a much more ambitious petition for lands in Ulster which his father, Lord Audley, had put forward and they and their extended family were assigned the entirety of the precinct of Omagh.Footnote ⁶¹ Audley was granted a ‘great proportion’ of 3,000 acres, while his two sons, Mervyn and Ferdinando, were each assigned 2,000 acres, the same amount that was given to his sons-in-law, John Davies and Edward Blunte. The government's motivations in doing so were varied. Davies was one of the most senior political figures in Ireland. He was doubtlessly influential in ensuring the success of this extraordinary grant, while his father-in-law was a veteran of the Nine Years’ War. Audley had served in Munster in the early 1600s under the governor of the southern province in the latter years of the conflict, George Carew, and Carew's growing influence at the Jacobean court in the 1600s might well have also been a factor in the grant of lands made to Audley and his extended family.Footnote ⁶²

An unusual situation also played out in the other district allocated to English undertakers in Tyrone: the barony of Clogher in the east of the county. The consortia were ignored here altogether, with a decision taken to effectively allocate the precinct to a number of very senior New English officials in Ireland to compensate Chichester in his disappointed hopes that the servitors would be given the leading role in the plantation. Thus, English-born Irish officials, such as Thomas Ridgeway, William Parsons and George Ridgeway, received the lands in Clogher.Footnote ⁶³ There is no great mystery why some of these individuals were able to obtain estates. Parsons, for instance, was related by marriage to Sir Geoffrey Fenton, the recently deceased Irish secretary of state, and was already beginning his ascent as a major Irish official, eventually becoming an interim viceroy of Ireland many years later.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, several of the other servitors granted lands in Clogher were more obscure. An example of this is the father and son pair, Walter and Thomas Edney, whose grant of the 1,500-acre proportion of Ballyloughmaguiffe was no doubt on account of Walter's prominent role in aiding in the suppression of O'Doherty's rebellion in 1608, a background which he shared with another grantee in Clogher, Sir Thomas Ridgeway.Footnote ⁶⁵ Evidently, Clogher was effectively allocated to servitors of varying backgrounds, some being senior officials in Dublin, others army veterans who had played a role in suppressing unrest in Ulster at different times.

Beyond Omagh and Clogher, the pattern in the other five precincts was relatively homogenous. In Lifford in Donegal, Loughtee in Cavan, Oneilland in Armagh, and Clankelly and Lurg and Coolemakernan in Fermanagh, the general pattern was that individual members of the consortia were selected to receive lands. For instance, in the precinct of Lurg and Coolemakernan, five of the seven grantees were members of the consortia. However, these were not selected as a block from one individual consortium.Footnote ⁶⁶ Instead, individuals were chosen from multiple consortia in each precinct. Sticking with the example of Lurg and Coolemakernan, the five individuals who hailed from consortia here came from three different syndicates. We will touch on the four other precincts presently as a block, but it is worth noting first that a unique situation prevailed yet again in the precinct of Lifford in Donegal. While the circumstances here were not as overt as in Clogher, the nine grantees in Lifford might also generally be classed as servitors, albeit ones who had been involved in the consortia. Several of them had served in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War or in the years since. For instance, Sir Robert Remington had been made vice-president of the provincial government of Connacht in the mid-1600s and Henry Clare had served extensively in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War, having been in Ulster under Lord Burgh in 1598 and in Munster under Carew.Footnote ⁶⁷ Hunter speculated that Sir Thomas Coach, who received the 2,000-acre Lismongan estate in Lifford, was the same Sir Thomas Cooche who was knighted in Dublin on the date of James's coronation in England in the summer of 1603, while Edward Russell, the recipient of the proportion of Acharin (1,500 acres) in Donegal, was most likely a relative of the Irish viceroy between 1594 and 1597, Sir William Russell, during whose tenure of that office Edward had spent time in Ireland.Footnote ⁶⁸ Henry Docwra, the leader of the highly consequential military expedition to Lough Foyle in the final years of the war, was also given lands here as a former military commander, though he quickly turned these over to William Wilson.Footnote ⁶⁹ An additional reason that these individuals were granted lands concerned the Cadiz expedition of 1596 against Spain. Several of the recipients in Lifford, notably Remington and Maurice Berkeley, had been on the Cadiz expedition and were knighted during it. It is highly instructive, then, that the overseer of the plantation in Lifford, Thomas Howard, first earl of Suffolk, had been vice-admiral of the naval expedition to Spain in 1596. Hence, the grantees in Lifford were selected on the basis of their military experience in Ireland and the bonds of having served with the barony's overseer at the height of the First Anglo-Spanish War.Footnote ⁷⁰

What the foregoing indicates is that in the case of the seven precincts allocated to English undertakers in Ireland, three were almost wholly granted to servitors with experience of serving in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War and the first years of the reign of James I. The assumption to date in the historiography has been that Chichester's hopes that the servitors would be given the dominant role in the plantation were frustrated in 1609, yet the situation in Omagh, Clogher and Lifford indicates that the government listened to his complaints in the course of 1609 and early 1610 and decided in the end to make over nearly half of the lands allocated for English undertakers to servitors in a way which simply did not occur in the Scottish precincts.Footnote ⁷¹ Consequently, the traditional idea that the servitors received only the baronies which were allocated to them and the Irish is fundamentally incorrect. In practice, the servitor proportions were far more numerous than is usually acknowledged.

This leaves four precincts which were allocated as originally intended to English undertakers: Lurg and Coolemakernan and Clankelly in Fermanagh, Oneilland in Armagh and Loughtee in Cavan. Curiously, it was not the leaders or most prominent members of the consortia which were selected to acquire estates in these. Thus, Henry Hobart was not granted any lands, nor were those members of his fifteen-man consortium that had the greatest financial means, men such as John Thurston and Arthur Everard. However, lower-ranking members of the group, including Henry Hunnings, Thomas Flowerdew, Thomas Blennerhassett, Robert Bogas and John Archdale, were all given land.Footnote ⁷² This is highly peculiar. These latter five applicants had a combined annual income of less than £1,000 between them. Thurston, by way of contrast, claimed an individual annual income of £600. More strikingly Hobart had amassed very considerable estates in East Anglia, particularly in Norfolk. He was drawing an annual income of roughly £8,000 from these by the early 1620s and was consequently possessed of the financial means which many commentators at the time, Chichester chief amongst them, believed was absolutely necessary to make a success of the plantation in Ulster.Footnote ⁷³

This pattern was replicated elsewhere. Sir Francis Anderson, who led a consortium seeking the entire precinct of Oneilland in Armagh, gave his annual income at the time of application as £2,000 and yet did not receive any lands.Footnote ⁷⁴ Similarly, although the prominent Yorkshire M.P., Sir William Mallory, only gave his annual income as £1,000, several members of his consortium were possessed of considerable resources, notably William Wake (£2,000) and Thomas Wood (£1,600 in disposable money).Footnote ⁷⁵ The consortium led by Lord Saye and Sele included three Wards: Edward, Joseph and William. Edward, with an annual income of £400, was a successful suitor for lands in the plantation, but Joseph and William, who had apparently thousands of pounds of disposable assets which they could utilise in their efforts, were not selected to join the Ulster project. Joseph does appear to have been selected originally, but decided to forego the lands, which were then granted to John Heron.Footnote ⁷⁶ As such, the choice of individuals from within the consortia makes markedly little sense. That James's government might have had reservations about granting entire precincts to the companies was understandable. But the subsequent decision to grant lands to individual members of these consortia, and those of lesser means and social standing, while excluding those who led the consortia and had the financial and social resources to make a success of the enterprise, is truly puzzling. Had figures like Hobart or Anderson been chosen to lead the plantation effort in regions such as Fermanagh and Armagh, where they had sought lands, the project may have then developed very differently in the years that followed.

This confusing development certainly warrants further investigation. While there is a lack of extant documentation offering clear answers as to why this occurred, there is solid tangential evidence with which to establish why many of the grantees were chosen in this way. Firstly, there were a number of clear reasons why certain consortia proposals and individual members were rejected. In the case of the large proposal put forward by Heigham and forty others for the whole of Fermanagh and adjoining lands westwards to the sea, one reason why this project would have been viewed unfavourably was that the application for lands around north-east Sligo and the southern extremity of Donegal clashed with the decision of the government to maintain a large fort at Ballyshannon and to place seasoned military commanders, like Basil Brooke and Henry Folliott, in a leadership role here.Footnote ⁷⁷ A different motive led to the rejection of those members of consortia who hailed from London's merchant community, men like the London grocer William Banaster, the goldsmith William Ward, and others like William Unwin, Michael Saltford and Edmund Caston. These individuals most likely were removed from consideration for grants of land in the second half of 1609 and January 1610 as agreement was reached with the City of London and its livery companies that they would collectively undertake the plantation of Coleraine and the barony of Loughinsholin. As this occurred, a decision was evidently taken to remove individual London merchants who had petitioned for lands in the other five counties as part of the consortia from consideration.

While there are clear reasons why certain consortia were rejected, there is no obvious pattern in terms of how these four precincts were otherwise divided up. Instead individuals were selected with a fair degree of randomness from the different consortia and granted lands based on their court connections and other factors. A good example of this was found in Armagh. Here, the much coveted precinct of Oneilland was not made over as a block to any of the numerous companies which had petitioned for it. Rather, it was distributed amongst individuals involved in a number of different consortia. The precinct was divided into thirteen proportions, seven consisting of 1,000 acres, five of 1,500 and one was a 2,000-acre ‘great proportion’, though again these were inaccurate acreages and the actual size of these estates was multiple times the presumed amount. These thirteen proportions were distributed amongst ten undertakers, with three receiving two proportions each. The foremost was Lord Saye and Sele, who was granted the two 1,500-acre proportions of Derrycreevy and Dromully to give him 3,000 acres overall. Saye and Sele had been the head of a consortium which did indeed petition for Oneilland, but he was to be joined by only two of his associates in that initiative, William Stanhowe and Richard Rolleston. The others who actually received lands in Oneilland had generally been involved with other consortia. John Dillon from Staffordshire, who had formed part of the company headed by Maurice Berkeley which had requested either Oneilland or Lifford in Donegal, received 1,500 acres. Similarly, Francis Sacheverell and John Brownlow had been involved in Sir Francis Anderson's suit to have Oneilland. Anderson himself did not receive any plantation lands at all, though curiously Brownlow's son, William, who had not apparently been involved in Anderson's initial application, did receive a 1,000-acre proportion in Oneilland. Two of the remaining grantees in Oneilland, James Matchett and William Powell, had formed part of the huge consortium of over forty individuals headed by Heigham and Chichester that had sought the entire county of Fermanagh. A final grantee, John Heron, is anomalous in that he had no obvious connections with any of the companies which had petitioned in 1609 and early 1610.Footnote ⁷⁸

This begs the critical question in all of this: why, from amongst the well over 100 individuals who were involved with the various consortia, were the twenty-nine individuals who received lands in Oneilland, Loughtee, Clankelly and Lurg and Coolemakernan chosen?Footnote ⁷⁹ Again, as with so much else concerning the selection process, there are no documents extant which make clear the rationale of the government in this respect and there is also an almost complete absence of discussion of potential candidates in the correspondence between London and Dublin in 1609 and early 1610. This problem is compounded by the loss of the acts of the privy council for the decade between 1604 and 1613, most likely during the fire at the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall in 1619.Footnote ⁸⁰ Owing to all of this, the first we hear of these individuals being involved in the plantation, generally speaking, is when they were listed as part of the consortia and then had letters patent issued in the summer or autumn of 1610. Faced with this lack of evidence, we have to assume that these twenty-nine individuals received estates owing to their connections with individuals at court in London or perhaps to senior administration figures in Ireland. Taking the example of Oneilland, there are several individuals here whose ties to the court, members of the English Privy Council or other influential figures in England or Ireland may have been decisive in the decision to grant them lands. John and William Brownlow from Nottinghamshire, who received the 1,500 and 1,000-acre proportions of Dowcoron and Ballynemoney respectively, might well have been chosen to receive estates through the influence of their cousin, Richard Brownlow, a prothonothary in the court of common pleas in London. Or maybe it was their relationship through marriage to Thomas Roper, a senior English military commander in Ireland, who was influential in ensuring they acquired estates near the southern shores of Lough Neagh.Footnote ⁸¹ Similarly, William Powell, who received a large 2,000-acre estate in Oneilland near the Brownlows, was an equerry or squire of the king's stables in England (specific note was made of this in the listing of the members of his consortium). Given that he very quickly sold his Ulster estate to Richard Rollestone, it may have been given to him as a reward for his service without any expectation that he would plant there, an eventuality which is likely in the case of a substantial number of those who received estates and then quickly sold them.Footnote ⁸² This impulse may even have extended to Lord Saye and Sele, an exception amongst the heads of the consortia as one who was actually granted lands in Ulster. As Hunter uncovered during his research many years ago, Saye and Sele had been petitioning for a large reward from the crown for his extensive service to the crown for some time, while he also indicated an interest in the economic projecting of the period which has been explored in detail by Joan Thirsk for England and Nicholas Canny for Ireland.Footnote ⁸³ In 1608, he was proposing to grow woad if he was given lands somewhere. His connections by marriage to the Kingsmills, several of whom had served in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War, might also have ignited his interest in planting in Ulster.Footnote ⁸⁴ His enthusiasm soon waned and despite a grant of lands in Oneilland, he did little to develop his estate and quickly sold it to Anthony Cope, himself an individual with ties to the crown, his father having entertained James I at Hanwell Castle in 1605.Footnote ⁸⁵

Grantees elsewhere also had clear connections to the court. For instance, while most of the grantees in Lifford, as seen earlier, were military veterans from the Nine Years’ War or the Cadiz expedition, Sir Thomas Cornwall was not. Instead, his grant was based on his relationship with the heir to the three kingdoms, Prince Henry, a familiarity which was significant enough that he later became a gentleman of King Charles I's privy chamber and was referred to as ‘the great baron’ during his lifetime.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the patent which was issued to Cornwall for his lands in Donegal in August 1610, he was described as ‘one of the gents of the Prince's privy chamber’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Further to the south in Fermanagh, Thomas and Edward Blennerhassett from Norfolk must have owed their grants of the proportions of Edernagh, Bannaghmore and Tullynakein along the shores of Lough Erne to their ties to both Hobart and Heigham in England, who might not have taken lands themselves as the heads of two different consortia, but who had substantial enough influence within government circles all the same. Similarly, their ties to John Blennerhassett, a cousin of theirs in Ireland who subsequently went on to become the chief baron of the Irish exchequer, would have facilitated Thomas and Edward in their pursuit of lands in Ulster.Footnote ⁸⁸ Hunter posited that John Sedborough, the recipient of one of the smaller 1,000-acre proportions in the barony of Clankelly in Fermanagh, may have owed his grant to his ties to the newly consecrated bishop of Meath, George Montgomery, while the Bogas family seem to have had an interest in Atlantic colonisation, with some Bogas family members active in Virginia in the 1620s, a colonial interest which may explain why Robert Bogas was granted an estate in Clankelly in 1610.Footnote ⁸⁹ Sedborough and Bogas's neighbour in Fermanagh, Robert Calvert, most likely owed his grant to the influence of George Calvert, a probable relative who had considerable experience of Ireland and was enjoying a period of pronounced success as a royal diplomat in the late 1600s. George Calvert was close enough to the king and Salisbury to gain an estate for a relative who wanted one.Footnote ⁹⁰

These are the individuals who we can identify who their patron or ally might have been with either virtual certainty or a fair degree of confidence. Others are vastly more speculative. There is no obvious reason why John Heron obtained the 2,000-acre proportion of Aghavillan and Brochus in Oneilland in County Armagh, but he might have had some link to the Herons of south Leinster, a New English family headed in Elizabethan times by Nicholas Heron, the sometime seneschal of Carlow and Wexford.Footnote ⁹¹ Similarly, there is no distinct explanation for why John Dillon was granted an estate in the Armagh precinct, but Hunter did note that Robert Dillon, who did not receive an estate but who was part of Maurice Berkeley's consortium which had sought a grant of the entirety of Oneilland, had a daughter named Grace who had married Sir John Chichester, the deceased brother of Deputy Chichester. Robert was most likely related to John and so the marriage ties may account for the success of John's suit for lands.Footnote ⁹² Elsewhere, Hunter drew a complete blank when carrying out work on the backgrounds of successful grantees like Francis Sacheverell, John Taylor and James Matchett, placing a note next to the latter's name which read ‘Another mystery!’ when nought could be revealed about Matchett's origins or how he came to be granted an estate.Footnote ⁹³

These details, so far as they are available, for why those who received estates in the English precincts did so in the first place show some clear patterns as to why certain grantees were given lands above others. Servitors and military veterans prevailed in the baronies of Clogher in Tyrone and Lifford in Donegal, while a good many others appear to have received lands owing to the intercession of relatives and allies within government circles in England and Ireland. This methodology was haphazard and ultimately detrimental to the success of the plantation. Had the heads of the consortia and the wealthier and more resourceful members thereof been given estates in Ulster, it probably would have met with greater initial progress. To highlight this, we might look at the example of Sir William Monson's consortium. Monson was not just the head of a consortium and a prominent naval commander, but his brother Thomas was a favourite of the king.Footnote ⁹⁴ William should have been in a prime position to obtain lands and yet his consortium was one of the least successful. Only James Matchett received lands from it, and he was a member of multiple other consortia in any event. Instead of wealthier applicants like Monson, other individuals, men such as John Taylor, who was listed at the time as having an income of just 200 marks (£133 6s. 8d.), were granted estates quite contrary to the stated views of Chichester and others that grantees would need incomes of several hundred pounds per year to make a success of the plantation.Footnote ⁹⁵ Matchett was noted as having an annual income of just £84.Footnote ⁹⁶ This pattern was replicated across the English precincts and was a major cause of the listless development of the plantation throughout the 1610s. One plausible explanation might be that it was felt that men of modest means might prove to be more enthusiastic and committed to the enterprise, but if this was the case it was never explicitly stated and would prove to be an ill-founded hypothesis. Many grantees of modest means quickly sold up or simply ignored their estates after being granted them for several years.

IV

Perhaps the decision to grant estates to individuals in the way which the crown administration ultimately did might have ended better had the overseer system functioned well in the years ahead, but this was not the case. There is little doubting that a substantial oversight role was envisaged for the six English and five Scottish overseers. For instance, in the first years of the plantation, they were charged with managing certain aspects of its day-to-day management in London. When John Bourchier arrived at court in the early summer of 1611 with a wide ranging set of points from Chichester concerning the plantation, these were responded to by Salisbury, Lennox, Suffolk, Shrewsbury and Worcester.Footnote ⁹⁷ Given this early display of diligence, it seems likely that if the overseer system had functioned effectively in the longer term, perhaps it would have been a boon to the plantation. Personal connections between overseers and grantees might also have helped direct the course of development: in precincts such as Lifford, for example, the overseer, Suffolk, had longstanding ties with several of the grantees going all the way back to their shared experience on the Cadiz expedition. But good intentions and potentially robust systems ran aground owing to the ravages of mortality. Within months, two of the five Scottish overseers, Bruce and Dunbar, were dead. Salisbury, the most senior English overseer and the one most responsible for the shape of the plantation, died in May 1612. He was followed soon after in 1614 by Northampton, while Shrewsbury only lived until 1616, the same year that Alexander Hay died. As such, over half of the overseers were dead within five years. Furthermore, many of those who survived were not in a position to exercise the role effectively. For instance, from the mid 1610s Suffolk found himself increasingly out of favour at James's court. Thus, almost immediately from its establishment, death and court intrigue served to dismantle the overseer system. With it, the raison d’être for selecting many of the English undertakers, based on their personal relationship with the overseers, vanished. In its place, the crown was left with several dozen English undertakers of very limited resources who had been granted estates across Ulster that were actually far larger than anyone knew at the time owing to wildly inaccurate surveys.

The end result of this contentious selection process was unsurprising. In the years that followed, almost every single British undertaker failed to meet the requirements imposed through the articles of plantation. In a great percentage of cases, by the time the three years which the undertakers had been allocated to complete their building and tenanting requirements had elapsed, nothing had actually been done other than for the grantee or his agent to visit Ireland, take out their letters patent and leave again. A few did begin building on their lands, but almost none abided by the plantation stricture that they should remove the Irish from their estates and people them with British tenants within three years.Footnote ⁹⁸ It quite simply was too expensive for the grantees to do so in the time they were allocated with the limited resources available to them, exactly as Chichester had feared. Consequently, within a few years a hybrid Hiberno-British plantation began to emerge. There were regional variations to this. As one might have expected, the English grantees in Oneilland in Armagh did begin creating a broadly English colony after the first years, with undertakers like the Brownlows establishing major new plantation settlements at Lurgan.Footnote ⁹⁹ But elsewhere, the manner in which the English undertakers were selected in 1610 was flawed if viewed purely from the perspective of the successful implementation of the plantation scheme. In Omagh, for example, Audley and his family did nothing other than build a few castles in the 1610s and when new owners, Sir Piers Crosby and Sir Henry Mervyn, came into possession of the vast majority of the barony in the 1620s, it was still almost entirely inhabited by the Irish. No plantation to speak of had been initiated.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Many similar instances of delinquency on the part of the undertakers were noted in the many surveys of the plantation commissioned in the 1610s and early 1620s, while by the end of the reign of James I in 1625, nearly half of the estates had experienced a change in owner. Thus, the manner in which the English undertakers were selected in 1610 had profound consequences for the early history of the plantation.