ANY exploration of the waves of migration and bonds of association that have characterized the historic relationship between Scotland and Ireland must begin with a consideration of the physical geographical context within which this human history was played out. Firstly, let us consider the North Channel, the body of water, no more than 22 kilometres at its narrowest point, that lies between the tip of the Kintyre peninsula and Torr Head on the north Antrim coast. Even today those who regularly traverse this ‘narrow sea’ talk in the vernacular idiom about going ‘ower the sheugh’, a sheugh in Irish meaning a field drainage ditch and thereby emphasizing the limited impediment to contact. This perspective may be widened out to accommodate a view of the entire body of the Irish Sea as acting over the longue durée as an inland sea or inland waterway, a bridge to coastal cultural contact rather than a barrier.1 Half a millennium ago travel by sea across this channel could prove easier than the equivalent trip on land. As one recent historian of Ulster and the Isles at this time observes, ‘the culture of the region was a maritime one; the sea was its plastic foundation in transport, livelihood, even poetic idiom’.2
In 1995 Graham Walker entitled a survey of political and cultural interaction between Scotland and Ulster, Intimate Strangers. He reminds us at the outset, in an overview of the longer-term historical relationship, of the problematic nature of Scottish settlement in Ulster from the early seventeenth century.3 The extent to which the Scots could establish and sustain intimate relations in Ireland, with natives and other newcomers, or find this ‘new world’ forever ‘the land of the stranger’, remains a central and unresolved question. Viewing the outcomes of migration as a three-element process, can we determine over time the extent to which Scots in Ireland leant towards segregation, integration, or modulation between the two polarities? Could they, in other words, remain intimate yet strangers, living together and living apart, simultaneously?4
The accession in March 1603 of James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I served to affect a significant transformation in how Scottish migration to Ireland was viewed from London or Dublin. In short, what had consistently been regarded as part of the problem came to be seen as a potential part of the solution. In the opening years of his reign James was preoccupied with sustaining peace, keeping expenditure down, exercising patronage, and promoting a real constitutional union. We should not, however, underestimate the new king’s conservative inclinations.5 If, looking forward, we can discern how Plantation Ulster might come to be viewed as ‘a laboratory for Empire’, we can also, with a contemporary eye, see how colonization in the Scottish Isles in the preceding decade had served as ‘a laboratory for Ulster’.6
The ‘wisest fool in christendom’ was sufficiently canny to learn from the Scottish experience that the private enterprise of gentlemen adventurers might progress his agenda most efficiently. The murky negotiations surrounding Conn O’Neill’s release from imprisonment in Carrickfergus Castle, under pardon in the summer of 1604, opened an early door for experimentation in Ulster. Hugh Montgomery (1560–1636) and James Hamilton (c.1560–1644), two Scottish favourites of the king, with roots in the same area of south-west Scotland, gained sizeable landed footholds in north Down.7 From 1605 on, their endeavours, in close conjunction with the king, amply demonstrated how two men with means and ability could draw upon accessible estates in the Scottish Lowlands to develop and people what Michael Perceval-Maxwell describes as ‘a sort of Scottish Pale’.8 These initiatives would come to represent both a key precedent and practical bridgehead for later, more ambitious colonization.
In north Antrim, Randall MacDonnell, son and heir to Sorley Boy MacDonnell and future first Earl of Antrim, was also actively engaged in sponsoring the migration and settlement of lowland Scots. Here, an individual fulfilling a role much closer to that of the traditional Gaelic chieftain and retaining personal allegiance to Catholicism, sought to attract Protestant Scots as tenants to his Ulster estate.9 Recent archaeological excavations in the vicinity of MacDonnell’s primary seat at Dunluce Castle, on the north Antrim coast, cast a fascinating fresh light on the precocious efforts of one native landholder to avoid debt and embrace urbanization, a commercial market economy, and estate improvement.10 Here Lord Deputy Chichester and the Dublin government were more directly engaged in developments, and new Scottish migrants tended to occupy fortified posts, mixing in amongst their former native inhabitants.11 The different patterns of colonization described above dominated the debate that presaged the Official Plantation of the six escheated counties, which would follow in the wake of the flight of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in 1607.
If the year 1603 altered the context of relations between the three kingdoms, the year 1607 and the departure of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell for the Continent confirmed the potential for dramatic acceleration in the pace and scope of British colonization in Ulster. By 1610 the way had been clearly marked for the Crown’s direct involvement in the most ambitious Plantation scheme yet undertaken in Ireland, indeed one might add, anywhere in the early modern world. The records of the Privy Council in London, as the body that did most to shape the scheme, have not survived for this period, which makes it difficult for historians to reconstruct the planning process confidently. We know that the king himself came to take a very direct personal interest in the project, and it has been suggested that it may have been Chichester, once so implacably opposed to any Scottish involvement in Ulster, who stimulated the king’s enthusiasm by signalling the potential inclusion of Scots alongside English planters.12 There is insufficient space here to rehearse the precise mechanisms by which over half a million acres in the six escheated counties of Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine (renamed Londonderry), Donegal, Fermanagh, and Tyrone came by 1640 to hold a British population of more than twenty thousand souls.13 The involvement of the Scots gave the Plantation of Ulster a distinctive character in comparison with previous plantation schemes outside Ulster, such as those in the counties of Leix and Offaly in the Irish Midlands, embarked upon in the 1540s, and the larger-scale effort to plant the province of Munster after 1583 and the defeat of the Desmond rebellion. Rather than migrants from Scotland merely supplementing migrants from England and Wales in Ulster after 1610, the Scots came to predominate within the settler population. By 1640 settlers from Scotland probably made up something like two-thirds of the British population within the six escheated counties. Within the eastern counties of Antrim and Down, with its firm pre-1610 base for development, the Scots proportion was more likely to be three-quarters or more.14
In the initial stages of the Plantation scheme the mass of Scots migrants crossing to Ulster to take up leases tended to be drawn to those ‘undertakers’ allotted estates, with baronies reserved for Scottish grantees. Over time, however, the agency exercised by individual migrants within Ulster became clear, as tenants moved in search of the most favourable lease or economic opportunity. The phenomenon of ‘colonial spread’, by which settlers penetrated inland from the ports of entry, particularly along river valleys, did not respect official boundaries, and soon the counties bordering Ulster were becoming subject to plantation or simply informal migration and settlement by speculators and tenants. In this sense, for Scots settlers the idea of an expanding frontier, moving gradually south and west, must have seemed real enough. Counties such as Louth, Monaghan, Longford, and Leitrim, and the western province of Connacht, were soon open to planters moving in from the north and east.15 Thus, the port town of Sligo with its strong medieval tradition of maritime trade and surrounded by significant timber resources, was an obvious magnet to Scots settlers who had been granted less fertile and more remote land in west Ulster. Therefore, during the course of the seventeenth century, Sligo town in Connacht rather than Ulster, became one of the most Scottish urban centres in Ireland.16
Before progressing much further it is important to return across the North Channel in order to view developments from a Scottish rather than an Irish perspective. In adopting this approach it is worth noting two contemporary trends, which have served to place greater emphasis upon migrants’ Scottish origins and to recognize the role of plantation in Ulster within the context of early modern Scottish history and the emergence of a Scottish diaspora. In relation to the former, we should acknowledge the large body of research undertaken by individuals in pursuit of family history. Increasing numbers of those who may see themselves as being of Ulster-Scots or Scotch-Irish lineage have pursued their genealogies back across the North Channel.17 The extent to which any of this research has so far influenced academic history is debatable, but the increasing digitization of records and the pursuit of an essentially prosopographical or collective biographical approach by historians may allow all of this data to bear fruit in the future. One specific yet central issue upon which such research could cumulatively shed light is the issue of ‘to and fro’ migration, particularly attempting to establish the proportion of Scots migrants in the 1650s or 1690s, in particular, who were earlier refugees from Ireland now returning west.18 In relation to the second of these trends we can point to an increasing awareness of developments in Ulster within Scottish historiography. Two publications from the 1960s, J. D. Mackie’s History of Scotland (1964) and T. C. Smout’s History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (1969), reveal single fleeting references to the Ulster Plantation in both instances. Although only beginning in 1700, T. M. Devine’s Scottish Nation (1999) acknowledges the significance of seventeenth-century migration to Ireland in the Foreword and reveals the relevance of the ongoing relationship throughout the volume. The same author’s Scottish Empire, 1600–1815 (2003) devotes an entire chapter to migration to Ulster and subsequent transatlantic migration by Ulster Scots.19 Finally, we should acknowledge as a further marker in this direction a conference organized by Dr John Young at the University of Strathclyde in September 2010, which specifically explored Scotland and the Ulster Plantation on the occasion of its 400th anniversary.
In considering the specific geographical origins of migrants from Scotland to Ulster in the reign of James I and VI, the obvious contrast to be drawn with what had gone before was the reorientation away from the Western Isles and Highlands and towards the Scottish Lowlands. Whilst some have sought to nuance this characterization of the migration and highlight successful highland planters, there can be no denying the predominance of those drawn from south-west Scotland and the Border counties within the migration stream to Ulster after 1603.20 Not surprisingly, the great majority of such migrants were Protestant and this fact was obviously central to the civilizing and security imperative behind the scheme and the Crown’s promotion of it. However, there were exceptions such as occurred within the barony of Strabane in County Tyrone, where the Hamiltons (of Renfrewshire) oversaw the settlement of sizeable numbers of Scots tenantry who shared their Catholicism. In County Cavan, Sir Alexander Gordon, on a somewhat smaller scale, established a Catholic Scots enclave in the vicinity of Kilmore.21 The plantation theory that the native Irish could be converted to Protestantism and ‘civilized’ by following the example set by model planters was most glaringly flouted by the migration, both forced and voluntary, which brought members of the notorious riding clans of the lawless Anglo-Scottish Borders to Ulster. Here, the desire to establish order in the Scottish Borders took precedence over any reform agenda in Plantation Ireland and added into the mix of British settlers taking up lands in western counties such as Fermanagh, nominally Catholic and notoriously violent members of border reiving families such as Armstrong, Graham, Johnston, and Elliott.22
From a contemporary popular perspective, of course, the predominant result of the Plantation of Ulster was religious transformation, making Ulster the only Irish province with a genuinely substantial Protestant population and more distinctively still a substantial Presbyterian community, largely but not exclusively associated with Scottish ethnicity. In Ulster from 1610, however, we are confronted by what Sean Connolly describes as a ‘hybrid ecclesiastical structure’, which sustained a ‘distinctive Scottish enclave’ including four Scottish bishops and over sixty ministers within the pre-1640 Church of Ireland in Ulster.23 During the reign of James I and VI the space and latitude that permitted such accommodation began gradually to decline, and events in 1625, following James’s death in March and Charles I’s accession, exposed the growing tensions. In the summer of that year a spirit of religious revival convulsed the area of the Six Mile Water river valley in south Antrim, with significant numbers of settlers coming to hear the preaching of the Scots minister James Glendinning.24 More liturgically conservative elements within the Church of Ireland reacted negatively to these open-air communions and the display of religious enthusiasm. The succession of Charles had only served to stoke the fires of faction as he sought to augment the powers of the episcopate, and promote Laudianism and Arminian doctrines, which were anathema to many clergy and laity in Ulster and Scotland. The conflict culminated in 1638 when the Lord Deputy, Thomas Wentworth, introduced the so-called ‘Black Oath’ to secure obedience to the king and denounce the principles of the national Covenant drawn up in Scotland and signed by thousands earlier that year. Rather than sign, significant numbers of Scots settlers departed Ulster and returned to Scotland. At this juncture Wentworth may well have reflected upon the initial caution his predecessor Chichester had expressed at the beginning of the century with respect to Scottish migration into Ulster.25 In 1640 there thus remained significant distance between English and Scots settlers in Ulster, and not only on issues of religion. Marianne Elliott concludes that ‘the early Scots settlers were closer to their Irish counterparts, in dress, work practices and housing, than to the English’.26
The extent to which the particular migration stream towards Ulster is appreciated as an integral part of the early modern Scottish diaspora and understood is significantly more advanced than was the case a generation ago. This appreciation, however, remains greater in Scotland itself than in Ulster. One fragmentary piece of material evidence, from recent excavations conducted at the MacDonnell seat of Dunluce Castle on the north Antrim coast, serves to illustrate the point.27 Here archaeologists unearthed a late sixteenth-century Polish coin, which signposts the significantly greater flow of migrants from early seventeenth-century Scotland directed east across the North Sea towards Scandinavia, the Baltic states, and beyond. A pioneering essay by Smout, Landsman, and Devine in the early 1990s estimated that the number of migrants leaving Scotland for Scandinavia and Poland-Lithuania during the first half of the century (between fifty-five thousand and seventy thousand) was more than double the total moving from Scotland to Ireland (between twenty thousand and thirty thousand).28 As might be anticipated, migrants from eastern Scotland were more strongly oriented towards northern and eastern Europe than those from the west, but Steve Murdoch, who has developed research in this area, has pointed to diasporic interconnections. Malcolm Hamilton, born at Kilbirnie in north Ayrshire in the 1570s, was allotted two thousand acres at Monea, in County Fermanagh, during the Ulster Plantation. Two of his sons, Hugh and Lewis, went on in the 1620s to serve as officers in the Swedish Army. Enobled as barons Hamilton of Deserf, they ultimately returned to Fermanagh with their Swedish families in 1662 and one of Lewis’s sons, Gustavus, distinguished himself as Governor of Enniskillen during the Williamite war of 1689–91.29
Comparison between the Scottish migration flows to Ireland and northern Europe during this half-century also throws into relief a critically important factor in terms of the endurance of any immigrant ethnic community—the gender balance of the migration flow. Whilst there were women amongst the migration flow to Europe, the preponderance of pedlars and military recruits fashioned a predominantly male migration, which intermarried into the host societies frequently and integrated relatively easily. This served to promote a significant level of ‘ethnic fade’ within second and third generations.30 It remains difficult to be precise about the gender balance within the migration flow to Ireland. Nicholas Canny, in relation to the Scots, suggests that there were ‘probably three women for every four men who made the journey to Ulster’. It certainly seems likely that women were more strongly represented within the settler population as time progressed, and we know that the short crossing allowed some men to return to their homeland to secure a wife.31
One historian, in pursuing a prosopographical study of the Scottish peers in seventeenth-century Ireland, was able to probe the issue of ethnicity in relation to the choice of marriage partner. Jane Ohlmeyer, in examining thirty-four marriages where the geographical origin of the bride was known, found that whereas Irish and English brides were taken in the early decades of the seventeenth century, Scottish women predominated. However, after mid-century, peers of Scottish origin came to show a marked preference for Irish or English brides, indicating a second- and third-generation preference for establishing marriage alliances in Ireland rather than looking back to Scotland. In addition, Scottish peers in Ulster were increasingly, as the century wore on, selecting their own estates in Ireland as their place of burial rather than choosing a final resting place in Scotland. Intermarriage between Scottish settlers and the native Irish also occurred further down the social scale, particularly in those areas where the newcomers were most densely concentrated and, perhaps, more frequently after the initial phase of settlement. The original conception by those who planned Plantation, that Irish and British populations should be segregated from each other as far as possible, proved impossible to enforce. Certainly the majority of male deponents who testified to their losses after the rising of October 1641 recorded their marriage to wives who also originated in Britain.32 As the new society in Plantation Ulster bedded down, more Scots married partners whose origins lay in England or Wales, but there is little evidence to challenge the view that most married within the Scots ethnic group. Even allowing for peaceful cultural transfer and mixing in Ireland, some contrast with Scots military and mercantile migrants integrating into largely urban environments in the towns of northern and eastern Europe is evident. The 1641 depositions serve to confirm the impression of Scots settlers forging fairly tight-knit communities of pastoral farming families, regularly modulating between the polarities of segregation from and integration with their new neighbours.33
In October 2010 a major exhibition entitled ‘Ireland in Turmoil: The 1641 Depositions’ was opened at Trinity College Dublin in order to make available to a wider public the evidence drawn from the manuscript witness testimonies of more than eight thousand British settlers in Ireland who had suffered as a result of the rising. Earlier in the year digitized transcriptions of the same material were made available online.34 Prior to this, Canny had promoted the use of these unique records in order to shed light on the economic and social history of pre-1641 Ireland, and particularly the British settler community. His analysis of the depositions, particularly those from Ulster counties, points to the difficulties of applying any simple native-versus-newcomer dichotomy to the events of the autumn of 1641. Deponents alleged that Scots in different parts of Ulster not only did little to protect English settlers from attack but actually assisted the Irish in attacking them.35 The problems concerning any simple ascriptions of loyalty and identity in relation to Scots in Ulster only become greater during the war-torn, highly-factional decade that followed the rising of October 1641. The still strong sense of Scotland as ‘motherland’ became all too evident during the course of the months following the rising. As the popular rebellion increasingly ran out of control, thousands of Scots fled as refugees to the west coast of Scotland. In the presbyteries of Ayr and Irvine alone there were estimated to be four thousand such refugees by the middle of 1642.36 In April 1642 Major General Robert Monro landed in Ulster with a Scots army, and despite the many twists and turns in allegiance and strategy evident over the course of the subsequent eight years, some consistency is apparent. This force remained focused upon Ulster, drawing logistical support and direction from Edinburgh rather than London, and sought to recoup Scots property acquired since 1605 and lost during the rising.37 In the summer of 1642 the regimental chaplains and office elders in Monro’s army formed a presbytery at Carrickfergus in County Antrim, and in the course of the following decade east Ulster witnessed the intensive formation of Presbyterian congregations. As noted by Patrick Adair, who arrived in Ireland in 1646 and became the first historian of Irish Presbyterianism, ‘there began a little appearance of a formed church in the country’.38 Although one should not exaggerate the pace at which a Scottish-style model of Church government took shape after 1642, there can be no denying its significance as a transitional marker of Presbyterianism becoming a parallel and rival structure to the Episcopalian Church of Ireland and acting as the primary badge of identity for the Ulster Scots.39 The extent to which these settlers in the 1640s looked back towards Scotland should not, perhaps, surprise us. The degree to which they remained, in the preceding half-century, a people apart from both London and Dublin narrowed opportunities for fuller integration and promoted the backward glance to the old country.
The Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland, complete by 1653, re-established a sense of security for the Protestant interest in Ireland and initiated a re-peopling process that drew on Scotland as well as England and Wales. However, it also served to highlight the extent to which Scots in Ulster, particularly those who had supported the royalist cause, continued to be viewed from London as a potential threat. In May 1653 a proclamation by the Commonwealth regime proposed transplanting southwards a group of leading Scots from counties Antrim and Down to Tipperary, in Munster. The initiative was never pursued in practice, as the threat to Oliver Cromwell from Scotland receded, but it serves to remind us of the perceived potential strategic threat that proximity to the Scottish Highlands and Isles continued to pose to centralized authority in London or Dublin.40 Despite continuing doubts in Westminster about the loyalty of Scots, it is clear that the years after 1653 witnessed a very significant wave of Scottish migration into east Ulster, in particular. The depredations of a decade of warfare, and heavy excess mortality brought about by plague in the opening years of the 1650s, created the circumstances by which tenants in search of a generous lease, or artisans looking for a decent wage, were likely to be attracted across the North Channel. There were also, of course, push factors, and we should bear in mind that the oft-quoted summation of British planters in Ulster as ‘the scum of both nations’ is most likely to have applied to immigrants of this era. Estimating with any precision the volume of such migration is challenging, and figures proposed range from as high as eighty thousand to as low as ten thousand. Louis Cullen’s estimate of between forty thousand and fifty thousand migrants, in the absence of strong evidence within Scotland itself of a mass exodus, has been judged liberal and a figure of twenty-four thousand migrants proposed by Rab Houston seems a more reasonable guestimate. The acceptance of this lower figure still suggests that movement was more intensive during the Cromwellian period than at any point in the three decades before 1640.41 Clearly some of those entering Ulster after 1653 were returnees who had departed in the preceding decade and a half. In west Ulster, for example, ‘Old Protestants’, including many Scots settled before 1641, proved well placed in the 1650s to buy up land from English soldiers eager to return ‘home’, but such continuity may be less evident further down the social scale. The crucial point to appreciate here is the high level of turnover experienced by the Scots population in Ulster during the decades between 1640 and 1660. One comparison between British surnames recorded in the Muster Rolls of the 1630s with those listed in the Hearth Money Returns of the 1660s, in the baronies of north and west Ulster, regularly demonstrates continuity of below 50 per cent and occasionally as low as 20 per cent.42 It might be argued that older histories, particularly those shaped in the later nineteenth century, tended to stress continuity between the Jacobean Ulster Plantation settlement and nineteenth-century Presbyterianism. Thus John Harrison, writing on the history of The Scot in Ulster, two years after the first Home Rule Bill of 1886, moves almost seamlessly from a consideration of 1641 to a treatment of Ulster after 1660. Where the immigration of the 1650s is referred to briefly, it is suggested that being feared, it tended to be exaggerated.43 In light of recent research relating to Scottish migration to Ireland later in the century and renewed interest in the early Stuart Plantation era, it might be concluded that the migration of the middle decades of the seventeenth century now represents a very live issue on the historical research agenda for the early twenty-first century.
Although a sense of pragmatism served to fashion a good deal of unity amongst Irish Protestants intent upon retaining their lands at the restoration of Charles II in 1660, there were early signals of difficulties ahead for Ulster’s Presbyterians. Two northern ministers sent to England to demand that their ‘Covenanted King’ should uphold the covenant received short shrift. By the time sixty-one of seventy serving ministers in Ulster had rejected the restored episcopal order and were expelled from their Church of Ireland livings, the proverbial writing was on the wall.44 Nonetheless the intense persecution of the early 1660s did recede somewhat and some Covenanting Presbyterians from the south-west of Scotland who came to Ulster in the 1660s may have seen Ireland as a relative haven of toleration. A stagnant economy served to reduce immigration until the later 1660s, then a renewed influx of Scots was sustained until the severe subsistence crisis of 1674–5.45 Throughout the later 1670s and particularly the early 1680s, the so-called ‘Killing Times’ created the conditions in south-west Scotland for numbers of those drawn from the radical Covenanting tradition to seek refuge in Ulster. This created its own tensions amongst Presbyterians there, keen to prove their loyalty to the Crown, and many of the most radical tended to move back and forth across the narrow sea in response to fluctuations in the levels of toleration or persecution. The impact of fresh migration was being detected in west Ulster as increasing numbers of migrants entered Ulster through the port of Derry. It was reported in 1683 from Donegal that land was ‘plentifully planted with Protestant inhabitants, especially with great numbers out of Scotland’.46 After 1685, economic depression and political instability following the accession of James II caused a brake to be applied to immigration and may indeed have sponsored net migration in the opposite direction. Finally, in 1689–90 the outbreak of the Williamite war in Ireland witnessed a substantial return migration of Scottish migrants and those of Scottish descent.47
We may conclude that immigration from Scotland to Ireland in the generation between the Restoration and the Williamite war was likely to have been similar in scale to that during the 1650s (between twenty thousand and thirty thousand), but that many of these individuals moved regularly backwards and forwards between Ulster and south-west Scotland. It is also important to recognize that this migration occurred against a backdrop of declining movement from England and Wales, so that Ulster’s settler population was becoming increasingly Scots in complexion during these decades. Furthermore, the migrants of this era were more regularly free agents rather than individuals whose relocation was sponsored by landowners acting in the interests of the Crown, as had tended to be the case in the early part of the century. Southern and western Scotland continued to act as the primary feeder region for migration, and this tended to consolidate the predominance of a pastoral-based agricultural economy and a sense of dissenting independence. Whilst the government in London and Dublin viewed this phenomenon with real reservations concerning the ultimate loyalty of migrants, governors in Edinburgh openly worried about the disappearance of tenants and servants leaving farms in Scotland underpopulated and unprofitable.48 Although we can observe Ulster becoming more Scottish, there remains little contemporary comment concerning changes in a sense of belonging in the ‘new world’ of Ireland.
Despite some three generations of migration, predominantly from the Scottish Lowlands into Ulster, we should be wary of exaggerating the firmness of the hold that the ‘Protestant Interest’ enjoyed before 1690. The thousands of refugees who filtered into Derry prior to the famous siege of 1689 had no doubt strong memories of the rising of October 1641, and here in the west, outside core areas of British settlement, Ulster Scots could retain feelings of frontier isolation.49 The phase of heaviest migration from Scotland to Ireland was only to come after peace had been re-established by the Treaty of Limerick in October 1691, and this final migration was to prove critical in confirming Presbyterian and Scots demographic predominance in eighteenth-century Ulster. Acknowledgement of the importance of this fin-de-siècle Scots reinforcement is well established. Harrison’s The Scot in Ulster (1888) referred to a contemporary estimate, which described fifty thousand Scotch Presbyterian families pouring into Ulster since the Revolution. What Harrison, like several other late nineteenth-century historians, failed to indicate was the fact that the strength of migration in this decade derived not only from strong pull factors in Ulster, particularly post-war generous leasing terms, but a major push in Scotland, namely, devastating famine.50 The work on demographic history in the 1970s, in both Ireland and Scotland, reinforced the significance of the famine and the westward migration that resulted from it.51 Only in recent years, however, has focused research been applied to the issue of the impact of the 1690s famine at a national level and specifically related to migration patterns, including those to Ireland. Karen Cullen’s work suggests that an estimate of fifty thousand migrants from Scotland to Ireland in the course of the decade is ‘not unreasonable’ and that such migration drew disproportionately, as it had before 1690, upon western and south-western Scottish counties. Detailed exploration of both kirk and municipal records from the port town of Ayr revealed subsistence migrants, including women and children, receiving charity on their way to Ulster, as well as some evidence of Scottish parishes sponsoring migration of potential long-term drains on poor-relief funds. The absence of famine conditions in Ulster added to its magnetism in these years, but as the best deals in the land market were snapped up and the limitations of charity in the Ulster congregations exposed, there is evidence of return migration. Overall, Cullen concludes that migration during this period was ‘slightly more fluid and less of a one-way process than previously thought’. Finally, she suggests that in these crisis conditions, patterns of migration to Ulster were more closely linked to patterns of internal subsistence migration in Scotland than previous movements to Ireland, which tended to be more permanent in nature.52 Firm conclusions on these points may await fuller exploration of pre-1690 migration patterns.
Undoubtedly, recent research has served to reveal the complex and heterogeneous character of this substantial Scottish migration to Ireland at the end of the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, a number of common themes may be discerned. Viewed historiographically, particularly from an Ulster perspective, we can see how the depiction of large numbers of Scots coming to Ireland as famine refugees would serve to challenge or disturb the dominant popular construction of such migrants as sturdy planters coming to take up land or set up in trade. The nationalist and unionist versions of history that took shape in the decades after Ireland’s Great Famine (1845–51) were ill-inclined to look for parallels between Irish and Scottish migrants or Catholic and Protestant migrants from different eras. The reaction to Scots immigrants by Ulster’s Anglican elite could be particularly hostile, and a further rapid acceleration in the establishment of Presbyterian congregations set off something of a panic amongst those now feeling outnumbered by dissenters and looking across to Scotland where episcopacy had recently been supplanted as the established religion. Contemporary Church of Ireland polemicists, sensing their authority under threat, feared those importing the contagion of nonconformist ideas as they may have feared poorer famine refugees carrying plague.53 Ulster’s Catholics were also clearly sensitive to the reinforcement of Presbyterianism, and even as late as the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Catholic Bishop of Clogher, Hugh McMahon, wrote of Scots Calvinists ‘coming over here daily … seizing the farms in the richer parts of the country and expelling the natives’.54 Much of what McMahon observed was likely the consequence of secondary internal migration as Presbyterian farming families pushed out south and west towards the settlement frontier established in the course of the preceding century. Even a full century on from the commencement of plantation this frontier was less fertile ground for the establishment of intimate relations, and further onward migration would prove an option for some.
Canny, Nicholas, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001).
Cullen, Karen J., Famine in Scotland: The ‘Ill Years’ of the 1690s (Edinburgh, 2010).
Devine, T. M., Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London, 2003).
Fitzgerald, Patrick, ‘Scottish Migration to Ireland in the Seventeenth Century’, in A. Grosjean and S. Murdoch, eds., Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2005), 27–52.
Gillespie, Raymond, Colonial Ulster: The Settlement of East Ulster, 1600–1641 (Cork, 1985).
MacAfee, William, and Morgan, V., ‘Population in Ulster, 1660–1760’, in P. Roebuck, ed., Plantation to Partition: Essays in Ulster History in Honour of J. L. McCracken (Belfast, 1981), 46–63.
Ohlmeyer, Jane H., “ ‘Civilizinge of those Rude Partes”: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’, in N. Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1998), vol. i, 124–47.
Perceval-Maxwell, M., The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (London, 1973).
Robinson, Philip, The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape, 1600–1670 (Dublin, 1984).
Roulston, William J., The Essential Genealogical Guide to Early Modern Ulster, 1600–1800 (Belfast, 2005).
Smout, T. C., Landsman, Ned C., and Devine, T. M., ‘Scottish Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in N. Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), 76–112.
Walker, Graham, Intimate Strangers: Political and Cultural Interaction Between Scotland and Ulster in Modern Times (Edinburgh, 1995).
Young, John R., ‘Scotland and Ulster in the Seventeenth Century: The Movement of Peoples over the North Channel’, in W. Kelly and J. R. Young, eds., Ulster and Scotland, 1600–2000: History, Heritage and Identity (Dublin, 2004), 11–32.