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The
most determined resistance to reconquest came from the Gaelic
chieftains of Ulster (the northeastern quarter of the island),
led by Hugh O'Neill, 2d earl of Tyrone, at the end of Elizabeth's
reign. In suppressing their rebellion between 1595 and 1603, English
forces devastated the Ulster countryside.
Once these chieftains
had submitted, however, King James I of England was willing to
let them live on their ancestral lands as English-style nobles
but not as petty kings within the old Gaelic social system. Dissatisfied
with their new roles, the chieftains took ship to the Continent
in 1607. This "flight of the earls" gave the English crown a pretext
to confiscate their vast lands and sponsor scattered settlements
of British Protestants throughout west and central Ulster (the
Ulster Plantation). The crown's actions indirectly encouraged
the much heavier unsponsored migration of Scots to the coastal
counties of Down and Antrim. These settlements account  for the
existence in present-day Ulster of numerous Protestants--many
them Scottish Presbyterians--of all social classes.
Elsewhere in 'modern' Ireland, Protestantism
has been confined to a small propertied elite, many of whose members
were the beneficiaries of further confiscations a generation after
the Ulster Plantation. The pretext for these new confiscations
was the rebellion of the Gaelic Irish in Ulster against the British
settlers in 1641. Indeed, this rebellion triggered the English
Civil War, which put an end to King Charles I's attempt to create
an absolutist state (represented in Ireland by the policies of
his lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford). When
the Puritan party defeated Charles, their leader, Oliver Cromwell,
quickly imposed (1649-50) English authority on Ireland. Cromwell
repaid his soldiers and investors in the war effort with land
confiscated largely from the Anglo-Irish Catholics of the Irish
midlands who had joined the rebellion hesitantly and only to defend
themselves against Puritan policies.
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