■■JflflMMi ■MitiiiilM ittwiPinf 
 
 mm 
 
 .■Hnili 
 , tigm 
 
 liila BUSSHs 
 
 ■ ■ ■■ 
 HBHHB&SsSSi 
 
 nHii 
 
 1 ' ■ 111 
 
 J PJjfflffiB 
 
 H1B1 
 
 flilii 
 
 H 
 
 1 
 
 KSB 
 
 
 JwOa HMMMIHMHnHBao 
 
 SsgSMmsm 
 
 I RwftnftgB SB8888B 
 
 
 nnnB 
 

 ■ 
 ■ 
 
 .v/; 
 
 ■ 
 
 ■ 
 
 : - M 
 
 ■ • > - 
 
 i M 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 ■ 
 
W^ 
 
 H 
 
 -Sf,v ...; 
 
 H 
 
 
 alMi 
 
 EnHHj 
 
 
 
 
 ^H 
 
 9SJPM 
 
 
 «l 
 
 
 
 ■ i ■ 
 
 ' H 
 
 ^H 
 
 H 
 
 ^B Efl 
 
 ...-K 
 
 H8 HH 
 
 H 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 ■ 
 
 
1- 
 
 r 
 
 THE SCOT IN ULSTER 
 
9 V 5 
 
 THE SCOT IN ULSTER 
 
 SKETCH OF THE 
 
 HISTORY OF THE SCOTTISH POPULATION 
 
 OF ULSTER 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN HARRISON 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGK LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 MDCCCLXXXVIII 
 
 All Rights reserved 
 
1HVH3 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 These sketches of the history of the Scottish settlers 
 in Ulster were published in the columns of the 
 1 Scotsman ' during this spring. They have been 
 recast, and are now published in a permanent form, 
 as I think they may interest some who care to ex- 
 amine the Irish question for themselves. Their 
 English and Scottish origin seems to me to give to 
 the men of Ulster an inalienable right to protest, 
 as far as they are concerned, against the policy of 
 Separation from Great Britain to which the Irish, 
 — with the genius for nicknames which they possess 
 — at present give the name of Home Rule. 
 
 My thanks are due to many friends in Ulster and 
 at home for kind assistance ; and more especially to 
 Professor Masson for allowing me to have access to 
 those sheets of the ninth volume of the ' Privy Coun- 
 cil Records of Scotland,' now in the press, which bear 
 on the Scottish share in the settlement of 1610. 
 
 J. H. 
 
 7 Greenhill Place, 
 Edinburgh, 16th October 18S8. 
 
 2142 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. THE SCOT GAINS A FOOTING IN COUNTY DOWN, I 
 
 II. THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN AND COUNTY 
 
 ANTRIM, 13 
 
 III. THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER, . . 28 
 
 IV. THE SCOT BRINGS WITH HIM HIS SCOTTISH 
 
 CHURCH, . 47 
 
 V. THE SCOTS AND THE IRISH REBELLION OF 
 
 I64I, 63 
 
 VI. ULSTER FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE 
 
 UNION, 80 
 
 VII. THE SCOTTISH BLOOD IN THE ULSTER MEN 
 
 OF TO-DAY, 97 
 
THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE SCOT GAINS A FOOTING IN COUNTY DOWN. 
 
 'T^HIS is the story of the first great colony which 
 went forth from the "land of brown heath and 
 shaggy wood " in search of a country which would 
 repay the emigrant's toil less grudgingly than did the 
 bare hillsides round the old home. For centuries 
 the Scot had been wont to wander forth over Europe 
 in search of adventure. As a rule, he turned his 
 steps where fighting was to be had, and the pay for 
 killing was reasonably good ; for the English wars, 
 while they devastated the country and kept it poor, 
 made the people a nation of soldiers. Others of 
 the race sought fortune in trade instead of in war. 
 The story of these wanderers is known from the 
 history of the Scots Guard, formed from the sur- 
 
 A 
 
2 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 vivors of that Scottish army which helped so much 
 to win back for France the rich plains of Gascony 
 and Poitou, which the English had held long and 
 firmly ; and in the annals of the Scots Brigade, who 
 did such honest, hard fighting among the Dutch 
 dykes against that splendid Spanish infantry which 
 Parma and Spinola led. Often, too, in the chron- 
 icles of these centuries, one gets a peep at the Scot- 
 tish emigrants who had sought their fortune in trade, 
 at Middleburg or Campvere, at Amsterdam or Lu- 
 beck, or even among the Tartars in the far-off Baltic 
 Sea. The emigrants who lived out the fighting and 
 the toiling, and settled in these foreign lands, founded 
 families, in whose names may still be traced some 
 faint record of their Scottish origin. 
 
 This is, however, the story of a different kind of 
 emigration. These Scots who had flocked from 
 Leith, or Crail, or Berwick to seek fortune, in peace 
 or war, on the continent of Europe, were mostly the 
 young and adventurous, for whom the old home life 
 had become too narrow. They took with them little 
 save their own stout hearts and their national long 
 heads. If they remained permanently in France, or 
 the Low Countries, or Sweden, they married from 
 the people of their adopted land, and the blood of 
 their descendants became less and less Scottish as 
 the generations followed each other. The time 
 arrived at last, however, when war with England 
 ceased, and internal strife became less bloody, and 
 Scotland began to be too small for her rapidly grow- 
 
THE SCOT IN COUNTY DOWN. 3 
 
 ing population, for in those days food did not neces- 
 sarily come where there were mouths to consume it. 
 Then the Scots, true to the race from which they 
 spring — for " Norman, and Saxon, and Dane are 
 we " — began to go forth, like the northern hordes in 
 days of yore, the women and the children along with 
 the bread-winners, and crossed the seas, and settled 
 in new lands, and were "fruitful, and multiplied and 
 replenished the earth," until the globe is circled round 
 with colonies which are of our blood, and which love 
 and cherish the old " land of the mountain and the 
 flood." It was in the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century that the first of these swarms crossed the 
 narrowest of the seas which surround Scotland; it 
 went out from the Ayrshire and Galloway ports, and 
 settled in the north of Ireland. The numbers which 
 went were large. They left Scotland at a time when 
 she was deeply moved by the great Puritan revival. 
 They took with them their Scottish character and 
 their Scottish Calvinism. They founded the Scottish 
 colony in Ulster. Thus it comes to pass " that the 
 foundation of Ulster society is Scottish. It is the 
 solid granite on which it rests." 1 The history of 
 this Scottish colony seems worth telling, for it is a 
 story of which any Scotsman at home or abroad may 
 be proud. Its early history is quaint and interesting ; 
 there is much of suffering and oppression in the story 
 of the succeeding years, but there are flashes of bright- 
 
 1 See an article in ' Fraser's Magazine' on " Ulster," July- 
 December 1876, p. 220. 
 
4 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 ness to relieve the gloom. The men which this race 
 of Scotsmen has produced are worthy of the parent 
 stock; the contribution which this branch of the 
 Scottish nation has made to the progress of civilisa- 
 tion proves that it has not forgotten the old ideals ; 
 the portion of Ireland which these Scotsmen hold is 
 so prosperous and contented that it permits our 
 statesmen to forget that it is a part of that most 
 " distressful " country. 
 
 Our story opens in the days when the world was 
 young to the nations who had embraced the Refor- 
 mation ; for they to whom it had been given to see 
 that new vision of God, conceived also a new ideal 
 of life. Then all things seemed possible to men of 
 daring, because the old limits in both the physical 
 and the moral worlds had been found to be but the 
 invention of man, and the universe was to be, for all 
 time coming, limitless. It was the world in which 
 Shakespeare and Bacon had grown up; in which 
 Spenser had sung of love and purity; in which 
 Sidney had acted his gallant part, and died his 
 chivalrous death; in which William the Silent, and 
 Knox, and Cecil had toiled that we might live in 
 freedom and light. It was an age in which single 
 men with strangely inadequate means dared great 
 deeds, which read to us now like fables; when a 
 young adventurer set sail from Plymouth in a ship 
 little bigger than a big herring-boat, and waged war 
 against the greatest monarch in the world, and plun- 
 
THE SCOT IN COUNTY DOWN. 5 
 
 dered all his colonies along the Pacific shore, and 
 sailed round the world on his way home with a 
 million sterling worth of plunder ; and when another 
 young skipper, in five of those queer old tubs which 
 still float on the Zuyder Zee, went out into the 
 wonder-haunted East, and conquered a New Holland 
 greater than the old, in case it were necessary to 
 break the dykes and leave the old land — to give 
 Holland to the ocean rather than to the Spaniard. 
 It was the age in which the individual was strong 
 and the State weak • in which strong men trusted in 
 their own strength, and did the work of the State. 
 
 And now Queen Elizabeth, who had been the 
 strange, fickle, uncertain, and yet withal the lumin- 
 ous sun in that great English world, was dead, and 
 the fashion of the time was to change. Still, for a 
 while her methods were followed, for the spirit of the 
 great Elizabethan age survived, although its sun had 
 set — still it was left to the individual to do the work 
 of the State. One of the enterprises which occu- 
 pied the adventurous spirits of the kingdom during 
 the early years of James I.'s reign was the coloni- 
 sation of Ulster, and in this the Scots took their 
 full share. 
 
 The last years of Elizabeth's reign had been dis- 
 turbed by the rebellion of the great Earl of Tyrone, 
 who, as The O'Neill, claimed to be King of Ulster. 
 Tyrone fought a good fight — it is not here necessary 
 to inquire why he rebelled. He defeated the first 
 English commander who went against him ; and 
 
6 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 cajoled the Earl of Essex, who next opposed him, 
 into making terms, which Elizabeth at once refused 
 to ratify. He then obtained assistance from Spain, 
 and a Spanish force actually landed at Kinsale. 
 This small army, as well as Tyrone's larger follow- 
 ing, was, however, defeated by Lord Mountjoy, who 
 succeeded Essex as Deputy. The Spaniards gladly 
 returned home, and Tyrone submitted. So in the 
 end of 1602, a few weeks before Elizabeth's death, 
 the war, which had lasted from 1596, came to an 
 end. Tyrone promised to be for the future a faith- 
 ful subject j he received pardon for his treason, and 
 was reinstated in his land. There was peace in 
 Ireland ; but Tyrone had shown what " The O'Neill " 
 could do, when he happened to be an able man : he 
 had united the tribes of Ulster against the English, 
 and had shaken the English Government in Ireland 
 to its foundation. 
 
 About this time one of the cadets of the great 
 O'Neill family, who rejoiced in the euphonious if 
 somewhat cumbersome name of " Con M'Neale 
 M'Bryan Feartagh O'Neal," got into trouble, out of 
 which he seemed to be likely to escape only with 
 the loss of his head. 1 He ruled the Upper Clanna- 
 boye, the north half of County Down, now the most 
 Scottish part of Ireland, and he lived in the old 
 house of Castlereagh, a name which has since be- 
 
 1 The account of the settlement of County Down is taken 
 from 'The Montgomery MSS., Belfast, 1869/ and from 'The 
 Hamilton MSS., Belfast, 1867.' 
 
THE SCOT IN COUNTY DOWN. 7 
 
 come well known in English history. In the end 
 of 1602, when Queen Elizabeth lay dying, Con 
 happened to be holding high state in his halls of 
 Castlereagh with his brothers, and cousins, and 
 relatives of near degree. They were all " proper " 
 men — to use a Celtic term of respect — and quite 
 naturally drank Con ? s cellar dry; whereupon the 
 chief despatched retainers to Belfast, two miles dis- 
 tant, for a fresh supply of wine. How there was 
 wine at Belfast we do not know, for it was then 
 scarcely even a hamlet. 1 There his servants had a 
 quarrel with certain English soldiers, and came back 
 to their master's castle without the " drink." This 
 roused Con to fury, and he threatened dire ven- 
 geance on his clansmen if they did not return to 
 the fight, punish the English, and recover the wine. 
 The second encounter was more serious than the 
 first ; an English soldier was killed ; and the Irish 
 Government took the matter up. O'Neills were not 
 just at this time popular with the ruling powers; so 
 Con's offence, which at another time might have 
 been passed over as a most legitimate after-dinner 
 frolic for an Irish gentleman of quality, was termed 
 " levying war against the Queen." Con was thrown 
 into Carrickfergus Castle, the strongest fort in 
 Ulster; and Sir Arthur Chichester, who was the 
 most powerful Englishman in the North, proposed 
 in a letter still extant to hang Con, without troubling 
 him with a trial or waiting for leave from the Lord- 
 1 History of Belfast, by George Benn, p. 76. 
 
5 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 Deputy. 1 In this desperate plight Con found a 
 " ministering angel " in his wife, and Lady Con dis- 
 covered a friend who, for a " consideration," was 
 willing to lend his assistance, and who fortunately 
 proved just the kind of ally that was needed. This 
 "disinterested friend" was Hugh Montgomery, the 
 laird of Braidstane, in Ayrshire. Montgomery was 
 sprung from a collateral branch of the noble house 
 of Eglinton, and like so many of the lesser Scottish 
 gentry of the period, had sought his fortune on the 
 Continent, and seen service under Prince Maurice of 
 Orange, in Holland. He was a capable man, whose 
 wits had been sharpened by being compelled to dis- 
 cover means of escape out of troubles into which his 
 hot blood had led him ; he had been looking out for 
 an eligible "settlement" in the north of Ireland, and 
 kept himself aware of what went on there through 
 relatives who traded to Ireland from the port of 
 Irvine. Montgomery arranged for Con's rescue from 
 Carrickfergus Castle. The plan was on the same 
 lines as that by which he himself had a few years 
 before effected his escape from the Binnenhof, the 
 old palace and fortress of The Hague, well known to 
 all visitors to Holland. The laird of Braidstane had 
 become too eminently respectable a personage to 
 carry out the design himself; besides, he was married 
 now, and his wife may have had some foolish feminine 
 prejudices against her husband doing love-making. 
 He therefore intrusted the carrying out of the enter- 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1603-6, p. 156. 
 
THE SCOT IN COUNTY DOWN. 9 
 
 prise to a relative, Thomas Montgomery of Black- 
 ston, who was owner of a sloop which sometimes 
 traded with Carrickfergus. The said Thomas pro- 
 ceeded to make love to the daughter of the keeper 
 of Carrickfergus Castle, and became a great favourite 
 with the household ; and, like a generous fellow as he 
 was, he at all times was ready to give the guard as 
 much drink as they cared for. So it came to pass that 
 love-making and wine somewhat discomposed the dis- 
 cipline of Carrickfergus Castle — even to this day the 
 discipline of Irish jails is said to be somewhat loose. 
 Con was furnished with a rope by which he let him- 
 self out of his window, found Thomas Montgomery's 
 sloop waiting for him, and himself in the good house 
 of Braidstane, within a few hours. To Thomas's 
 honour it must be recorded that he did really marry 
 the jailer's daughter, "called Annas Dobbin, whom 
 I have often seen and spoken with, for she lived in 
 Newtown till anno 1664." 
 
 Arrived at Braidstane, Con entered into an agree- 
 ment by which he ceded half his lands in Clanna- 
 boye to Montgomery, on condition that the latter 
 obtained a free pardon from King James for all his 
 offences, and got him admitted to kiss the King's 
 hand. This indenture was believed to have been 
 "fully indorsed and registered in the Town Councill 
 book of the royal burgh of Air or Irvine." 1 The 
 entry, however, has never been discovered in the 
 Town Council records of these burghs. Mont- 
 1 Montgomery MSS., p. 28. 
 
10 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 gomery set to work to fulfil his part of the agree- 
 ment, with the help of his brother, who held position 
 at Court; but his influence proving insufficient, he 
 was compelled to have recourse to another Scot, 
 whose word had more weight with the King. This 
 "kindly brother Scot" was James Hamilton, who 
 had settled in Dublin some years before the Union 
 as a schoolmaster. He had been employed by 
 James VI. as a political agent for various purposes, 
 and especially to gain the adhesion of the Irish 
 leaders to James's claims to the crown of the United 
 Kingdom. Hamilton's influence proved sufficiently 
 potent. Con was admitted to the royal presence, 
 and kissed the King's hand, received pardon for the 
 offences of himself and his kinsmen, and returned in 
 triumph to his ancestral halls of Castlereagh. Yes ; 
 but a new agreement had been found necessary, and 
 poor Con's lands had to be made broad enough to 
 satisfy James Hamilton as well as Hugh Mont- 
 gomery. So, on the 16th April 1605, letters-patent 
 were issued under the Great Seal, " on the humble 
 petition of Conn M'Neale M'Bryan Feartagh O'Neale, 
 and of Hugh Montgomery, Esq., and of James Hamil- 
 ton, Esq.," granting to the said James Hamilton all 
 the lands in the Upper Clannaboye and the Great 
 Ards which had been possessed by Con or by his 
 father, Bryan Feartagh O'Neale, in his lifetime. 
 Hamilton became bound to " plant " the lands with 
 English and Scottish colonists, and to grant them 
 only to those of English and Scottish blood, "and 
 not to any of the mere Irish (excepting the said Conn 
 
THE SCOT IN COUNTY DOWN. II 
 
 O'Neale and his heirs)." 1 Thus this great tract of 
 land, the northern half of County Down, was handed 
 over to Hamilton, who had before entered into 
 agreement with Montgomery and O'Neill as to what 
 portion he should retain, what share Hugh Mont- 
 gomery should receive, and how much of his ancestral 
 estate should be restored to Con O'Neill. 
 
 It is a strange story, but thoroughly characteristic 
 of the time ; for it was a period in which popular 
 feeling was singularly inert, the Reformation fire 
 having burned down, and the great Puritan revival 
 not yet arrived. The affairs of the country were 
 therefore " arranged " by King James, with the assist- 
 ance of a knot of courtiers — shrewd, keen men, 
 without any very high sense of the beauty of unself- 
 ishness. There is no doubt, too, that the main 
 points in the story are strictly true, and the principal 
 actors are real figures in history. James Hamilton 
 became first Sir James and then Viscount Clanna- 
 boye, a title now borne by his descendant, the late 
 Viceroy of India, Lord Dufferin and Clannaboye. 
 Montgomery became Lord Montgomery of the Ards, 
 and although the peerage has become extinct, the 
 Montgomerys still hold a portion of the land which 
 they acquired at this time, and still bury among the 
 romantic ruins of Grey Abbey. Con soon managed 
 to run through his property, and disappears from his- 
 tory : but his son Daniel fought for Charles I. ; went 
 into exile with Charles II. ; returned with him ; mar- 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1603-6, p. 271 ; also 
 see 'Miscellany of the Abbotsford Club,' p. 270. 
 
12 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 ried the Countess of Chesterfield, and died at the 
 English Court in 1663, wealthy and honoured. 1 
 
 It must be noted that the idea of planting colonies 
 in Ireland from the neighbouring island was not a 
 new one. Again and again, during Elizabeth's reign, 
 schemes of colonisation had been drawn up, but these 
 had as a rule failed because the men chosen to carry 
 them out were of the wrong stamp. This was not 
 even the first attempt to " plant " the southern shore 
 of Belfast Lough, for it had been granted thirty 
 years before to Sir Thomas Smith, but he had been 
 driven out by the O'Neills. The grant to Smith in 
 1579, like those given thirty years later by James I., 
 aimed at a thorough colonisation of the country, for 
 he was bound " to enter in with a power of natural 
 Englishmen," and " to divide the lands with such as 
 hazard themselves, or aid with men and money." 2 
 The Earl of Essex next tried his fortune, and failed. 
 The settlement succeeded now for two reasons : 
 first, because King James's Government was so 
 strong that it could keep the peace even in Ireland ; 
 and secondly, because Scotsmen had been for nearly 
 a generation deprived of their wonted occupation of 
 civil war, and therefore had taken the "itch" for 
 emigration. As soon as County Down was opened 
 up, colonists flocked across, until the district became 
 Scottish. 
 
 1 Benn's History of Belfast, p. 77. 
 
 2 History of the County of Down, by Alexander Knox, M.D. 
 Dublin, 1875. 
 
13 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN AND COUNTY 
 ANTRIM. 
 
 r I 'WO miles south from Donaghadee, on the shore 
 road into the Upper Ards, that narrow penin- 
 sula between Strangford Lough and the Irish Sea, 
 there lies a little enclosure which must arrest the 
 stranger's attention. It is a graveyard, and is called 
 Templepatrick. It is surrounded by low stone 
 walls; no church or temple is now within its con- 
 fines ; no trees or flowers give grateful shade, or 
 lend colour and tender interest ; it is thickly covered 
 with green mounds, and with monumental slabs of 
 grey slaty stone, — the graves are packed close to- 
 gether. Read the simple "headstones," and you 
 discover no trace of sentiment \ few fond and loving 
 words ; no request for the prayers of the passer-by 
 for the souls of those who sleep below ; nothing more 
 akin to sentiment than " Sacred to the memory of." 
 Above, great masses of grey clouds, as they go scud- 
 ding past, throw down on the traveller, as he rests 
 
14 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 and thinks, big drops of rain; and before him is 
 spread out, north, south, and east, the sullen sea, 
 whose moan fills all his sense of hearing. It is not 
 the spot which a man would love to picture to him- 
 self as his last resting-place. Read the names on 
 the stones, and you discover why here in Ireland 
 there is to be found nothing of tender grace to 
 mark the higher side, nothing of tinsel to show 
 the lower, of Irish character. The names are very 
 Scottish — such as Andrew Byers, John Shaw, Thomas 
 M'Millan, Robert Angus ; it is a burying-place of 
 the simple peasants of County Down, who are still, 
 in the end of the nineteenth century, as Scottish 
 as they were when they landed here nearly three 
 centuries ago. 
 
 These graveyards of the Scots are now on every 
 shore, — among the great forests of Canada, as well as 
 here by the side of the Irish Sea ; where the new 
 Dunedin rises out of the Southern Ocean, as well as 
 in the old Dunedin, under the shadow of its Castle 
 rock. Thus enter into a common rest those who 
 shared a common toil, whether in the old mother- 
 land, or far away scattered over the wide world. 
 Why should they indulge in sentiment in death who 
 have known only stern toil in life ? — for them is more 
 fitting some expression of that high faith which they 
 have kept, even though they may in holding it have 
 made it somewhat unlovely. And what recks it, 
 after all, to the Scot whether he sleep in an unknown 
 grave, as sleeps John Knox, beside the "great kirk" 
 
THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN. 1 5 
 
 of Edinburgh, which had so often resounded with his 
 eloquence ; or, like Scott, rest, where he desired to 
 rest, among the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey ; or, like 
 that other sweet singer of our Border -land, lie far 
 away from the sound of his dearly-loved Teviot, 
 where 
 
 "A distant and a deadly shore has Leyden's cold remains." 
 
 It is enough if he have done the work which his 
 hand found to do, whether it be, like Knox's, the 
 building up of a nation's character, or, like these 
 peasants, but the tilling of thirty acres of not too 
 fertile land in County Down. 
 
 The stuff of which the great body of the emigrants 
 was made formed one element in the success of the 
 colony, the other was the character of the two men 
 who led and controlled them. 
 
 Had the system of "cram" been invented in 
 James I.'s time, and had the two men on whom 
 devolved the colonisation of South Clannaboye and 
 the Great Ards been chosen by the most exhausting 
 of Civil Service examinations, it is somewhat doubt- 
 ful whether our modern system of discovering ad- 
 ministrators would have put forward men so well 
 fitted for the work as Hamilton and Montgomery. 
 Both seem to have possessed those qualities, amiable 
 and unamiable, which go to make up the very suc- 
 cessful man. Montgomery, too, as the chroniclers 
 tell us, was supported by an able and active wife — 
 a requisite for successful colonial governors, which 
 
1 6 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 the authorities have not yet, as far as has been re- 
 ported, attempted to discover by competitive exam- 
 ination. Each of the two " adventurers," as soon as 
 his patent was passed by the Irish Council, crossed 
 into Scotland to call upon his whole kith and kin to 
 aid him in his great scheme. Both were Ayrshire 
 men, and both from the northern division of the 
 county. Hamilton was a "son of the manse" of 
 Dunlop; and still the curious may see the quaint 
 monument which he raised to the memory of his 
 father and mother in the kirkyard of Dunlop, within 
 a stonethrow of the railway between Kilmarnock and 
 Glasgow. Montgomery was one of the great Ayr- 
 shire family of that name, and sixth laird of Braid- 
 stane, near Beith. It is well to note that matters 
 were differently managed in the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century from what they are in the end of 
 the nineteenth. Nowadays, Hamilton and Mont- 
 gomery would have an interview with some enter- 
 prising firm of accountants in Glasgow, who would 
 thereafter issue a circular citing the Limited Liability 
 Acts of Victoria, and calling on all sensible people to 
 take advantage of the enormous power of developing 
 wealth possessed by the lands of Con O'Neill, Esq., 
 by taking shares in an Upper Clannaboye Land 
 Colonisation Company, Limited. In those old days 
 the two "undertakers" had to rely on their own 
 resources, and on the assistance which their Ayrshire 
 friends were able and willing to give them. 
 
 It must be kept in remembrance that Hamilton 
 
THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN. 1 7 
 
 received the grant of Irish land on the express con- 
 dition that he should " plant " it with Scottish and 
 English colonists. We know generally how he im- 
 plemented his bargain. He seems to have received 
 the hearty support of his own family, for four of his 
 five brothers aided his enterprise, and shared his 
 prosperity : from them are descended numerous 
 families in Ulster, and at least two Irish noble 
 families. Further, there is no doubt that Hamilton 
 did " plant " the land which he had acquired with 
 Scottish tenants, and administered his great estate 
 with prudence and ability. There are recorded the 
 names of those who held farms from Hamilton, and 
 good Scottish surnames they are, and evidently from 
 the same country as the men whom we shall find 
 followed Montgomery. Hamilton founded the towns 
 of Bangor and Killyleagh, in County Down. It is 
 mentioned, too, that he attended to spiritual things, 
 for he raised churches in each of the six parishes 
 embraced in his estate — Bangor, Killinchy, Holy- 
 wood, Ballyhalbert, Dundonald, and Killyleagh. 
 He "made it his business to bring very learned 
 and pious ministers out of Scotland, and planted all 
 the parishes of his estate." Moreover, we discover 
 how primitive were the times in which the Lord 
 Clannaboye lived, for we read " that he maintained 
 the ministers liberally, received even their public re- 
 proofs submissively, and had secret friendly corre- 
 spondence with them." 1 
 
 1 Hamilton MSS., p. 33. 
 B 
 
1 8 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 To Hamilton fell the western portion of North 
 Down, to Montgomery the eastern, and both seem 
 to have added to their estates, as Con O'Neill was 
 forced to sell the third, which he had reserved for 
 himself. There is preserved an exceedingly careful 
 account of how Hugh Montgomery "planted"' his 
 estate — the country round Newtown and Donagh- 
 adee, known as the Great Ards. Montgomery be- 
 longed to a family having numerous connections 
 throughout North Ayrshire and Renfrewshire, and 
 to them he turned for assistance. His principal sup- 
 porters were his kinsman Thomas Montgomery, who 
 had done the successful wooing at Carrickfergus ; his 
 brother-in-law, John Shaw, younger son of the laird 
 of Wester Greenock; and Colonel David Boyd, of 
 the noble house of Kilmarnock. With their help he 
 seems to have persuaded many others of high and 
 low degree to join in trying their fortune in Ireland. 
 The names of the emigrants are intensely Scottish 1 — 
 Montgomeries and Calderwoods, Agnews and Adairs, 
 Cunninghams and Shaws and Muirs, Maxwells and 
 Boyles and Harvies, and many others with good 
 west -country surnames. They began to cross in 
 May 1606, and found the country "more wasted 
 than America (when the Spaniards landed there)," 
 for between Donaghadee and Newtown " thirty cabins 
 could not be found, nor any stone walls, but ruined, 
 roofless churches, and a few vaults at Grey Abbey, 
 and a stump of an old castle at Newtown." 2 The 
 1 Montgomery MSS., p. 56, note, 2 Ibid., p. 58. 
 
THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN. 1 9 
 
 war with Tyrone had been conducted with such 
 savage cruelty on both sides, that great tracts of 
 country had been reduced to a desert, and this dis- 
 trict seems to have been one which had been swept 
 bare of inhabitants. 
 
 The colonists were of very various ranks of life, 
 and of varied experience, probably most of them 
 accustomed to farming and agricultural work ; but 
 the chronicler tells too of " smiths, masons, and car- 
 penters. I knew many of them, old men when I 
 was a boy at school, and had little employments for 
 some of them." 1 They crossed in the early spring 
 of 1606, and their first work was to build cottages 
 and booths for themselves of sods and saplings of 
 ashes, with rushes for thatch, and to make the 
 "stump of a castle" at Newtown fit to shelter Sir 
 Hugh and his wife and family. They then proceeded 
 to break up the ground and plant crops. The soil, 
 which had lain fallow for some years, yielded abun- 
 dantly, so that "the harvests of 1606 and 1607 
 stocked the people with grain, for the lands were 
 never naturally so productive since that time." 2 
 These plentiful seasons gave the colony a great im- 
 petus, as there was plenty, not only for home con- 
 sumption, but for sale to new-comers. Besides, the 
 tidings of success of course induced others to follow, 
 for it would immediately become known along the 
 Scottish shore that the first emigrants were comfort- 
 ably settled in their new country, and that there was 
 
 1 Montgomery MSS., p. 59. 2 Ibid., p. 62. 
 
20 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 every prospect of the colony succeeding. With the 
 vigour characteristic of the race, the new colonists 
 soon established themselves firmly in their new home, 
 and the face of the country assumed a different ap- 
 pearance from the desolation it had before presented. 
 The town of Newtown grew up round the " stump of 
 a castle," while Sir Hugh Montgomery transformed 
 the ruin into a great country-house. In 1613 letters- 
 patent were issued creating Newtown a borough, with 
 provost and burgesses, and with right to send two 
 members to the Parliament at Dublin. Before many 
 years were over, Newtown proudly boasted of a 
 market-cross, "an excellent piece of freestone work 
 of eight squares," with stair leading to a platform, 
 where proclamations were made, and from which, on 
 very festive occasions, claret ran, just as was the cus- 
 tom at the Cross of Edinburgh at this very time. At 
 the present time Newtown, now known as Newtown- 
 Ards, is a clean, thriving little town of 9000 inhabi- 
 tants, with broad streets, and just enough linen 
 manufacturing going on to keep the people busy; 
 while it is famed for the culture of roses all over the 
 three kingdoms. 
 
 Sir Hugh was not unmindful of the spiritual affairs 
 of the colony. He had brought with him " two or 
 three chaplains for his parishes;" and one of his 
 first cares was to proceed to rebuild the ruined 
 church of Newtown. In this work he was assisted 
 by the " general free contribution of the planters, 
 some with money, others with handy crafts, and many 
 
THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN. 21 
 
 with labouring," so that before the winter of 1607 the 
 church was ready for service. 1 Perhaps it is one of 
 the most remarkable and most striking features of 
 this Scottish colony in Ulster, that it was from the 
 first, and has remained even through many persecu- 
 tions, so consistently and so strongly Presbyterian. 
 The Presbyterianism of the colonists was a strange 
 comment on the apparent success of King James in 
 Scotland; for during these very years (from 1607 
 onwards) it appeared as if the King was going to 
 realise the dream of his life — the establishment of 
 Episcopacy in his native country. 2 The back of 
 the Presbyterian Church seemed broken, and the 
 King was steadily introducing Episcopalian forms of 
 worship. It becomes apparent how " skin-deep " and 
 unnatural the change in Scotland must have been, to 
 find that these Scottish colonists set up for them- 
 selves the Presbyterian worship in Ireland, although 
 there the Established Church was Episcopalian. The 
 clergy seem either to have come with the colonists, 
 as in the case of Sir Hugh Montgomery's "planta- 
 tion," or to have been " called " as soon as the Scots 
 were sufficiently settled to be able to form a congre- 
 gation and build a church. Ulster Presbyterianism 
 was not, however, altogether derived from Scotland. 
 A considerable portion of the English colonists, 
 especially those who came to the London settle- 
 
 1 Montgomery MSS., p. 61. 
 
 2 Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, vol. viii., Pref. 
 xviii. 
 
22 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 ment in Londonderry county, were Puritans, and 
 joined with the Scots in Church affairs. A strong 
 Calvinistic element was also afterwards infused into 
 the district by the French Huguenots, who settled in 
 different parts of Ireland after the Revocation of the 
 Edict of Nantes. From the settlement which they 
 made at Lisburn, Ulster derived much of her pre- 
 eminence in the linen manufacture. Many French 
 names thus introduced are still to be found in 
 Ulster. 
 
 The foundations of the industries of Ulster were 
 laid by Montgomery, who was assisted in this work 
 by his wife. The productiveness of the first harvests 
 caused Lady Montgomery to build water-mills in all 
 the parishes, which did away with the use of the 
 native " quairn stones." Her ladyship had also 
 farms at Newtown and Grey Abbey and Comber, 
 which gave employment to the emigrants who had 
 not capital enough to start small farms. To these 
 cottagers she gave grass for a cow and sheep, and a 
 plot for flax and potatoes. She also encouraged the 
 spinning and weaving both of linen and wool ; and 
 shortly the people were able to weave their own 
 "breakin," and to dress in homespun, as they had 
 been wont to do in their native Ayrshire. This 
 wearing of the Scottish " breakin," which was either 
 tartan, or more likely a kind of " shepherd check," 
 was afterwards alleged as a reproach against these 
 Ulster Scots in the English Parliament, in the course 
 of a debate on 3d December 1656. " For in the 
 
THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN. 23 
 
 north the Scotch keep up an interest distinct in garb 
 and all formalities, and are able to raise an army of 
 40,000 fighting men at any time. 1 A market was 
 established at Newtown, which soon became a place 
 of resort, both for the people of the surrounding 
 country, and also for merchants from the Scottish 
 coast, who crossed to it from Stranraer arid Port- 
 patrick. Many of the wealthier class of colonists 
 too, it is recorded, began to act as merchants and 
 carry on business with the continents. " They built 
 stone houses, and they traded, to enable them to 
 buy lands, to France, Flanders, Norway, &c, as 
 they still do." 
 
 The success of this settlement made by Hamilton 
 and Montgomery was immediate ; for four years after 
 the foundation of the colony — in 1610 — Montgomery 
 alone was able to bring before " the King's muster- 
 master a thousand able fighting men to serve, when 
 out of them a militia should be raised." 2 Four years 
 later, we have again specific information of the pro- 
 gress of the Scottish colonies under Hamilton and 
 Montgomery. It is contained in a letter from the 
 Earl of Abercorn to John Murray, King James's 
 Secretary of State. Abercorn had been called in to 
 act as arbiter between Hamilton and Montgomery, 
 who were constantly quarrelling about boundaries, 
 Con O'Neill's estate being by this time pretty well 
 absorbed. He writes: "They have above 2000 
 habile Scottis men weill armit heir, rady for his 
 
 1 Montgomery MSS., p. 65, note. 2 Ibid., p. 66. 
 
24 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 Majestie's service as thai sail be commandit." "Sir 
 Hew Montgomerie is in building ane fyin houese at 
 the Newton, quhairof ane quarter is almost compleit, 
 an Sir James hes buildit at Killilarche ane very 
 stronge castill, the lyk is not in the northe." 1 This 
 muster of 2000 men able to bear arms, of course 
 represented an emigration of at least 10,000 souls. 
 Even now, after this long interval of time, it is cheer- 
 ing to read of any success being accomplished at 
 any period in Ireland, and it is not surprising that 
 the old historian of the colony should have broken 
 forth into singing. " Now everybody minded their 
 trades, and the plough and the spade, building and 
 setting fruit-trees, &c, in orchards and gardens, and 
 by ditching in their grounds. The old women spun, 
 and the young girls plyed their nimble fingers at 
 knitting, and everybody was innocently busy. Now 
 the golden peaceable age renewed ; no strife, conten- 
 tion, querulous lawyers, or Scottish or Irish feuds 
 between clans and families and sirnames." 2 Verily 
 it must have been a golden age which had dawned 
 on one sea-washed corner of unhappy Ireland. 
 
 Meantime, across the river Lagan, in County 
 Antrim, a "plantation" had been made which, al- 
 though not at first peculiarly Scottish, was soon to 
 become so. During almost the whole of James's 
 reign probably the most powerful man in Ireland was 
 Sir Arthur Chichester, who in 1604 became Lord- 
 
 1 State Papers of James VI. (Abbotsford Club), pp. 233, 234. 
 
 2 Montgomery MSS., p. 66. 
 
THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN. 25 
 
 Deputy, an office which he held until 1616. He was 
 an exceedingly able and resolute man, a faithful ser- 
 vant of the King, but one who never lost sight of his 
 own advantage. In the distribution of lands which 
 took place during his term of office, he shared largely ; 
 but even before he became Deputy he had received 
 a piece of land which is still in the hands of his 
 descendant, the Marquis of Donegal. In 1603 
 Chichester obtained a grant of " the castle of Beal- 
 faste or Belfast, with the appurtenants and heredita- 
 ments, spiritual and temporal, situate in the Lower 
 Clandeboye ; " l while in the years immediately suc- 
 ceeding he acquired the lands along the north shore 
 of what was then called Carrickfergus Bay almost to 
 Lough Larne. There seems to have been an old 
 castle, in a tumble-down condition — as most things 
 were in this part of the country — at Belfast, when 
 Chichester got the lands, and probably a hamlet, but 
 it was a place of no importance. Belfast is in reality, 
 from its very foundation, not an Irish, but an English 
 and Scottish town. Chichester was too busy with 
 the affairs of the State to attend to " planting " his 
 allotment of land, so he contented himself with build- 
 ing a great house, and let his lands on long leases, 
 largely to the officers of his army, so that they might 
 do duty for him. The survey of 161 1 tells us how 
 the settlement was progressing. What is now covered 
 by the southern portion of Belfast had been leased 
 by Chichester for sixty-one years, at ^10 per annum, 
 1 Benn's History of Belfast, p. 78. 
 
26 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 to Moses Hill, "sometime lieutenant of his horse- 
 troop." From this Moses Hill is descended the 
 Marquis of Downshire. Hill was busy building a 
 new castle on the site of the old ruin, for the defence 
 of the ford on the river Lagan, and near it "the town 
 of Belfast is plotted out in a good forme, wherein are 
 many famelyes of English, Scotch, and some Manks- 
 men already inhabitinge, and ane inn with very good 
 lodginge, which is a great comforte to the travellers 
 in these partes." The Settlement Commissioners 
 passed along the north shore of Belfast Lough, find- 
 ing everywhere houses springing up, and in every 
 part of the Lord-Deputy's lands " many English fame- 
 lies, some Scottes, and dyvers cyvill Irish planted." 1 
 At Carrickfergus the Commissioners found a pier and 
 town-wall being built, and all through South Antrim 
 — in island Magee, at Templepatrick, at Massereene, 
 and along the shores of Lough Neagh to Toome — 
 settlements of English and Scots, and houses and 
 " bawns " being erected. 2 While South Antrim was 
 thus " planted " mainly by English settlers, the north- 
 ern half of the county was opened up for settlement, 
 without the violent transference of land from Celt to 
 Saxon which was carried out in other parts of Ulster. 
 The north-east corner of Ireland had been long held 
 by the Macdonnels, a clan which also peopled the 
 island of Jura, and Cantyre on the mainland of Scot- 
 land. The chief of these Scoto- Irishmen, Randal 
 Macdonnel, after Tyrone's rebellion, resolved to throw 
 1 Benn's History of Belfast, p. 86. 2 Ibid., pp. 674-676. 
 
THE SCOT SETTLES NORTH DOWN. 2J 
 
 in his lot with the Government, and turn loyal subject. 
 He persevered in this course, notwithstanding many 
 trials to his loyalty, and as reward he received a grant 
 of the northern half of County Antrim, from Larne 
 to Portrush, and the honour of knighthood. He set 
 himself ardently to the improvement of his lands, 
 " letting out to the natives on the coast, and also to 
 the Scottish settlers, such arable portions of his lands 
 as had been depopulated by the war, for terms vary- 
 ing from 21 to 301 years." 1 These leases seem to 
 have been largely taken advantage of by the Scot- 
 tish settlers, who allowed the natives to keep the 
 " Glynnes " or Glens — that district so much visited 
 now for its splendid coast scenery — and themselves 
 took possession of the rich land along the river Bann, 
 from Lough Neagh to the town of Coleraine near its 
 mouth. So Macdonnel and his property prospered ; 
 and in 1620, when King James raised him to the 
 dignity of Earl of Antrim, the patent conferring the 
 honour, after enumerating the faithful services which 
 Macdonnel had rendered to the Crown, specially 
 mentioned " the fact of his having strenuously exerted 
 himself in settling British subjects on his estates." 2 
 Thus County Antrim, from north to south, became 
 nearly as Scottish as the portion of County Down 
 north of the Mourne mountains. 
 
 1 The Macdonnels of Antrim, by the Rev. George Hill, p. 
 229. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 231. 
 
28 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 
 
 TT is beyond measure refreshing, after toiling 
 through tiresome volumes in which a narrow 
 streamlet of text finds its way through a perfect 
 quagmire of notes, and which are so full of facts 
 that they conceal the truth, to turn from them and 
 let the eye wander through some chapters of ' The 
 Fortunes of Nigel.' It is like a draught of sparkling 
 ale after a long and dusty tramp : life comes dancing 
 back again through the veins ; the eye once more has 
 power to enjoy the glare of heaven's light. The 
 weary mind is in touch with something human; it 
 realises the fact that the men who made history in 
 James I.'s time were made of flesh and blood ; that 
 they did not act like machines, but were partly good 
 and partly bad — certainly not the fiends that Irish 
 patriots have painted, devouring the innocent chiefs 
 of Ulster, who, it must be understood, need to be 
 pictured like lambs in one of Caldecott's picture- 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 29 
 
 books, walking on their hind legs, with pink ribbons 
 round their necks. Read ' The Fortunes of Nigel,' 
 and you understand the part which the Scots took 
 in the great plantation in Ulster ; you comprehend, 
 in a measure, the misshapen little king, although you 
 probably undervalue his practical ability, when he 
 chose to apply himself to business ; and you see the 
 poverty of the old land north of the Tweed, and the 
 neediness of the flock of supplicants who followed 
 James to London, — " wheresoever the carcass is, 
 there will the eagles be gathered together." As in a 
 mirror, too, you see the baneful power of the royal 
 favourites, who lived and had their being by reason 
 of James's vanity and laziness. One sighs in vain for 
 some similar guiding light to assist in the understand- 
 ing of the men who made history in Ireland ; for it 
 is strange that in a country which is bubbling over 
 with humour, the writers on history seem to divide 
 themselves into the stupid people who try to write 
 the truth, and do it stupidly, and the clever people, 
 who do not much trouble to seek the draw-well 
 in which truth takes refuge. And yet the men who 
 played the great parts in this strange drama cannot 
 have been dull uninteresting men. We know partly 
 what the leaders of the English interest were, — Chich- 
 ester, Carew, Davies, — and they have in them that 
 mixture of good and bad parts which tempts the 
 pencil of the historical painter. Even after kneeling 
 in alabaster in the little church of Carrickfergus for 
 two centuries and a half, with no company but his 
 
30 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 wife and baby, Chichester looks a capable, many- 
 sided man, in whom there must have been the play 
 of light and shade. But what the Irish chiefs were 
 who made so strange an exit from their own land we 
 know not, unless we are able to believe the theory 
 that they were innocent lambs, who always wore 
 pretty bows of pink ribbon. It is unfortunate that 
 no Irishman has arisen with the deep historical know- 
 ledge, the strong sympathy with the past, the sunny 
 humour, and the splendid imagination of Sir Walter 
 Scott, to throw the clear noonday light of genius on 
 the dark places of the path — to illumine the Ireland 
 of Chichester, as Scott has made bright the England 
 of James I. and Salisbury. 
 
 There is much material recently made available, 
 by the publication of the Irish State Papers, for 
 forming some conception of Ireland in the beginning 
 of the seventeenth century. One thing is very evi- 
 dent — that the English and Scots of the time looked 
 on the Irish just as the white settlers regard Kaffirs 
 in Cape Colony. In the official documents they are 
 invariably termed the " mere Irish." They were 
 treated as an inferior and subject race, who would 
 do a graceful act if they would only disappear from 
 history. The official reports by Government servants 
 made in the end of the sixteenth and beginning of 
 the seventeenth century, also give clear and vivid 
 pictures of the state of Ulster. They may be taken 
 as essentially correct, as the writers had means of 
 observing, and no reasons for writing anything that 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 3 1 
 
 was not true. Ulster is always spoken of as the most 
 savage part of Ireland. At the beginning of James 
 I.'s time, although Elizabeth had waged fierce and 
 devastating wars against the Ulster chiefs during 
 most of her long reign, English authority was 
 scarcely recognised in the north of Ireland. It 
 was represented by the commanders of the ten dis- 
 tricts into which Ulster was divided ; but their rule 
 was little more than a military one, and scarce ex- 
 tended beyond the buildings which composed their 
 military posts, 1 and by the bishops of the Episcopal 
 Church, who had probably even fewer followers in 
 spiritual things than the district governors had in 
 temporal. The country still enjoyed its native laws 
 and customs — still obeyed its native chiefs. There 
 were no towns in Ireland to play the part which the 
 English and Scottish burghs had done in the middle 
 ages, to be the homes of free institutions, the centres 
 from which civilisation might spread. Belfast scarcely 
 existed even in name, and Derry and Carrickfergus 
 consisted but of small collections of houses round the 
 English forts. The whole country, like our Scottish 
 Highlands, was inhabited by clansmen, obeying tribal 
 laws and usages, and living in some measure on agri- 
 culture, but mainly on the produce of their herds and 
 flocks. The land was held by the chiefs nominally 
 for the clans, but really for their own benefit. The 
 tillers of the soil had no sure hold over the lands 
 which they worked, " no certain portion of land 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1608-10, p. xxiv. 
 
32 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 being let to any tenant ; " 1 so that " the more care- 
 ful and industrious the tenant, the more liable to 
 oppression of all kinds — the more likely to be turned 
 out of his holding." 2 In fact, the chief might de- 
 prive the clansman of his holding, just as the clans- 
 man might pass from one chief to another. 3 Rent 
 was paid to the chief mainly in kind — in oats, oat- 
 meal, butter, hogs, and mutton ; partly in money, the 
 amount of cash paid depending on the number of 
 cattle fed. 4 Nor was the civic rule more satisfactory 
 than the land tenure. The different clans of Ulster 
 recognised the chief of the great O'Neill family as 
 King of Ulster, when " The O'Neill " of the time was 
 strong enough to enforce his claims. The chiefs of 
 all the clans and septs of clans seem to have been 
 elected from the families of the chiefs — all the sons, 
 legitimate and illegitimate, and the brothers of the 
 deceased being eligible. 5 A vacancy was therefore 
 the signal for fierce contention, which frequently 
 ended in faction -fight, and almost certainly in one 
 party intriguing with the English authorities, to whom 
 he promised faithful allegiance — a promise surely 
 broken when the end of the assistance was attained. 
 In addition, as was the fact in our Scottish High- 
 lands, clan hatred and war between the clans was 
 common ; for each chief had his body-guard of 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1608-10, p. 534. 
 
 2 Ibid., Carew, 1603-24, p. xiv. 
 
 3 Ibid., Ireland, 1608-10, p. 534. 4 Ibid. 
 
 5 Ibid., Carew, 1603-24, p. xx. Also Sir Henry Maine's 
 Early Law and Custom, p. 136. 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 33 
 
 " swordsmen " — the cadets of the noble houses, who 
 were far too noble to labour, and had therefore to 
 be provided with fighting, and with plunder too, 
 which it was preferable to take from men of another 
 name rather than from the humble members of their 
 own clan. 1 Readers are very much accustomed at 
 present to be served with roseate pictures of the 
 happiness of Irish pastoral life before the " black 
 shadow" of English rule fell on it. To those who 
 enjoy such imaginative writing, the summing up of 
 the men who have laboured to calendar the Irish 
 State Papers will sound cold and hard and unsym- 
 pathetic. " In all the State Papers the system is 
 represented as resulting, for the tenants, in the most 
 painful uncertainty of tenure and great social inse- 
 curity and discontent. In a political point of view 
 the result was most formidable to the English in- 
 terest, as it rendered the Creaghts (the wandering 
 herdsmen) entirely dependent on the heads of the 
 sept and the inferior chiefs, and placed the whole 
 power of the community unreservedly in their chiefs 
 hands for all purposes of war or of peace." 2 It is 
 evident too, that, although the long wars of the six- 
 teenth century had not tended to civilise Ulster, they 
 had had the baneful effect of desolating it to a fright- 
 ful extent ; for both sides conducted the war with 
 terrible cruelty, so that the accounts of the ruin of 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, p. xl. Also, Curte's 
 History, vol. i. p. 13. 
 
 2 Ibid., Ireland, 1608-10, p. xxviii. 
 
 C 
 
34 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 the country and the loss of population are most 
 heartrending. All authorities agree that there were 
 great tracts of country, once fruitful, now uncultivated 
 and without population. 
 
 The plantations in County Down and County 
 Antrim, thorough as they were as far as they went, 
 were limited in scope in comparison with the " Great 
 Plantation in Ulster," for which James I.'s reign will 
 be for ever remembered in Ireland. It is extremely 
 difficult to make out the circumstances which led up 
 to this remarkable measure, or to understand the 
 action of the Ulster chiefs, who, to all appearance, 
 played so thoroughly into the hands of the Govern- 
 ment. The agreement concluded in the end of 1602 
 between the Government and the Earl of Tyrone, 
 as the head of the Ulster chiefs, may or may not 
 have been made in good faith. It was one which 
 could not, in the nature of things, last, for the rights 
 which the chiefs claimed, and the system which 
 their rule represented, were directly opposed to the 
 authority of any civilised government, and rendered 
 such government impossible. James had done good 
 service to the cause of civilisation in Scotland when 
 he broke the power of the Scottish nobles, put a stop 
 to clan feuds, and instituted regular circuits for the 
 administration of justice all over the country. It 
 was his endeavour to carry out a similar policy in 
 Ireland, which was, in some part at least, the reason 
 for the discontent of the Ulster chiefs. 1 Which side 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, p. xviii. 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 35 
 
 first was false to the peace, it is impossible now to 
 say. One party declares that the chiefs began to 
 conspire against the Government ; the other, that 
 the Government drove the chiefs to conspire in self- 
 defence. This only is plain — that the Government 
 was Protestant, the Ulster Irish, Catholic ; that the 
 two parties hated each other intensely ; and that 
 during these very years, all over Western Europe — in 
 Holland, in France, and in Germany — Catholic was 
 fighting against Protestant, or keeping truce only 
 soon to be broken. Wherever the two religions 
 came into contact, there was war. The Ulster chiefs 
 began to correspond with Spain once more, as if in 
 preparation for a new outbreak ; the Government in- 
 tercepted the letters, and O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, 
 and Macdonnell, Earl of Tyrconnel, confessed, if not 
 guilt, at least fear of punishment, by leaving their 
 country, and sailing from Lough Swilly, along with 
 a number of adherents, on the 3d September 1607. 
 The Government at once took advantage of the 
 opportunity. It had long been the dream of the 
 English Government to make a great " settlement " 
 in Ulster; the whole of the governing class in 
 England and Ireland warmly advocated the idea, 
 because they scented plunder; and King James 
 possessed in Sir Arthur Chichester, the Lord-Deputy, 
 a man with vigour, ability, and determination suf- 
 ficient for the task. The plan of the Plantation in 
 Ulster bears evident marks of being the conception 
 in its main outline and in its details of able men. 
 
36 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 The lawyers of Elizabeth's reign had for years been 
 labouring in order to vest in the chiefs, as personal 
 holdings, the lands which they had formerly held — at 
 least nominally — for the benefit of the tribes ; and 
 even those Ulster chiefs who were most opposed to 
 English rule had taken out royal grants for their 
 lands, though they declined to acknowledge English 
 authority in other ways. 1 They had now rebelled 
 against the King and been proclaimed traitors, and 
 their lands were therefore " escheated " to the Crown. 
 Estates were constantly changing hands in this way 
 in Scotland during the sixteenth century. The more 
 important of the chiefs had gone into voluntary exile 
 with Tyrone ; against the rest it was not difficult for 
 the Crown lawyers to find sufficient proof of treason. 2 
 Thus all Northern Ireland — Londonderry, Donegal, 
 Tyrone, Cavan, Armagh, and Fermanagh — passed at 
 one fell swoop into the hands of the Crown; while, as 
 we have seen, Down and Antrim had been already, to 
 a great extent, taken possession of and colonised by 
 English and Lowland Scotch. The plan adopted by 
 King James for the colonisation of the six " escheated" 
 counties was to take possession of the finest portions 
 of this great tract of country, amounting in all to 
 nearly four millions of acres ; to divide it into small 
 estates, none larger than two thousand acres ; and to 
 grant these to men of known wealth and substance. 
 Those who accepted grants were bound to live on 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, p. xix. 
 
 2 The Plantation in Ulster, by Rev. Geo. Hill, chap. ii. 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 7)7 
 
 their lands themselves, to bring with them English 
 and Scottish settlers, and to build for themselves 
 and for their tenants fortified places for defence, 
 houses to live in, and churches in which to worship. 1 
 The native Irish were assigned to the poorer lands 
 and less accessible districts ; while the allotments to 
 the English and Scots were kept together, so that they 
 might form communities and not mix or intermarry 
 with the Irish. The errors of former Irish " planta- 
 tions" were to be avoided — the mistake of placing 
 too much land in one hand, and of allowing non- 
 resident proprietors. The purpose was not only to 
 transfer the ownership of the land from Celt to 
 Saxon, but to introduce a Saxon population in place 
 of a Celtic; to bring about in Ulster exactly what 
 has happened without design during the last half- 
 century in New Zealand, the introduction of an Eng- 
 lish-speaking race, the natives being expected to dis- 
 appear, as have perished the Maori. 
 
 In 1608, a Commission, consisting of the Lord- 
 Deputy and other well-known civilians, made a sur- 
 vey of the counties to be " planted," and drew up a 
 report regarding them, which they sent over to the 
 English Council, 2 who then proceeded to ask for 
 offerers for the land. The description given by the 
 Privy Council of the fertility of Ulster is preserved. 3 
 It paints in tempting colours the great natural capa- 
 bilities of the country. It is stated that the soil is 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, p. 154. 2 Ibid., p. 13. 
 3 Ibid., Ireland, 1608-10, p. 208. 
 
38 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 suitable for the growth of all kinds of corn, of hops 
 and madder ; that it is well watered and well wooded, 
 and its forests are accessible by water ; that parts are 
 very suitable for the breeding of horses, and for the 
 feeding of sheep and cattle ; and that it contains 
 everything needed for shipbuilding save tar. Nor 
 are the sporting propensities of Englishmen forgotten, 
 for districts are pointed out which afford cover for 
 red- deer, foxes, martens, squirrels, &c. The Eng- 
 lish Council requested the Scottish Privy Council to 
 draw up a list of Scotsmen willing to settle in Ulster : 
 and a proclamation, dated "Edinburgh, 28th March 
 1609," 1 is preserved, as well as the list of the Scots- 
 men who had responded, each man stating the 
 amount of land he is prepared to take up, and giving 
 the name of a " cautioner," who becomes security 
 for the " undertaker " fulfilling the conditions of 
 settlement. 2 The list is a long one, and some of the 
 entries amusing — Edinburgh burgesses, for instance, 
 having a decided " hankering " after Irish estates. 
 The names obtained by both English and Scottish 
 Councils were held over, and inquiry made regarding 
 the ability of the applicants to perform their con- 
 tracts ; eventually very few of these Scottish offerers 
 were accepted. The King seems to have taken the 
 duty of selecting the Scottish undertakers into his 
 own hands, the men who got grants being of higher 
 social standing and wider influence than those who 
 
 1 Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, vol. viii. p. 267. 
 3 Ibid., p. lxxxviii. 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 39 
 
 first offered. A second and more careful survey hav- 
 ing been made in 1609, the Commission proceeded, 
 in the summer of 1610, to divide up the land. This 
 second survey may have been better than the first, 
 but it was very inaccurate after all, as it mapped out 
 for division only 500,000 acres of land suitable for 
 " plantation," out of a total acreage of 3,800,000 
 contained in the six counties. What is now called 
 Londonderry County was reserved for the city of 
 London, whose different guilds undertook its coloni- 
 sation. A broad tract of country was devoted to the 
 Church and for schools, a considerable portion for 
 Trinity College, and portions in each county were 
 laid out for the foundation of boroughs. The rest was 
 divided among the old proprietors, the Irish public 
 servants, and the English and Scottish undertakers. 1 
 It is with the Scotsmen only that we are concerned. 
 Fifty-nine Scotsmen were chosen, and to them 81,000 
 acres were allotted in estates scattered over the five 
 counties, Londonderry, as has been said, being re- 
 served for the city of London. A careful examina- 
 tion of the list of Scottish undertakers 2 enables us to 
 see the plan which was finally adopted for securing 
 proper colonists. There was, of course — as was al- 
 ways the case at this time — a certain number of the 
 hangers-on about the Court who got grants, which 
 they at once sold to raise money. But as a whole, 
 the plan of distribution was thoroughly well con- 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1611-14, p. 202. 
 
 2 Hill's Plantation, chap. vii. 
 
40 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 ceived and well carried out. It must be remem- 
 bered that James I. was a clear-headed man of busi- 
 ness when he chose to apply himself; that he was so 
 much in earnest with regard to the settlement of 
 Ulster, that he really did apply himself to the arrange- 
 ments connected with it; and that he was well ac- 
 quainted with his "ancient kingdom" of Scotland, 
 and with its people. James seems to have seen that 
 the parts of Scotland nearest Ireland, and which had 
 most intercourse with it, were most likely to yield 
 proper colonists. He resolved, therefore, to enlist 
 the assistance of the great families of the south- 
 west, trusting that their feudal power would enable 
 them to bring with them bodies of colonists. Thus 
 grants were made to the Duke of Lennox, who had 
 great power in Dumbartonshire ; to the Earl of Aber- 
 corn and his brothers, who represented the power 
 of the Hamiltons in Renfrewshire. North Ayrshire 
 had been already largely drawn on by Hamilton and 
 Montgomery, but one of the sons of Lord Kilmar- 
 nock, Sir Thomas Boyd, received a grant; while 
 from South Ayrshire came the Cunninghams and 
 Crawfords, and Lord Ochiltree and his son ; the 
 latter were known in Galloway as well as in the 
 county from which their title was derived. But it 
 was on Galloway men that the greatest grants were 
 bestowed. Almost all the great houses of the 
 time are represented, — Sir Robert Maclellan, Laird 
 Bomby as he is called, who afterwards became Lord 
 Kirkcudbright, and whose great castle stands to this 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 41 
 
 day ; John Murray of Broughton, one of the Secre- 
 taries of State; Vans of Barnbarroch ; Sir Patrick 
 M'Kie of Laerg ; Dunbar of Mochrum ; one of the 
 Stewarts of Garlies, from whom Newtown-Stewart in 
 Tyrone takes its name. Some of these failed to im- 
 plement their bargains, but the best of the under- 
 takers proved to be men like the Earl of Abercorn 
 and his brothers, and the Stewarts of Ochiltree and 
 Garlies ; for while their straitened means led them to 
 seek fortune in Ireland, their social position enabled 
 them without difficulty to draw good colonists from 
 their own districts, and so fulfil the terms of the 
 " plantation " contract, which bound them to " plant " 
 their holdings with tenants. With the recipient of 
 2000 acres the agreement was that he was to bring 
 "forty-eight able men of the age of eighteen or 
 upwards, being born in England or the inward parts 
 of Scotland." l He was further bound to grant farms 
 to his tenants, the sizes of these being specified, and 
 it being particularly required that these should be 
 "feus," or on lease for twenty-one years or for life. 2 
 A stock of muskets and hand weapons to arm himself 
 and his tenants was to be provided. The term used, 
 "the inward parts of Scotland," refers to the old 
 invasions of Ulster by the men of the Western 
 Islands. No more of these Celts were wanted, 
 there were plenty of that race already in North 
 Antrim ; it was the Lowland Scots, who were 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, pp. 154, 269. 
 
 2 Register of Scottish Privy Council, vol. ix. p. 693. 
 
42 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 peace-loving and Protestants, whom the Govern- 
 ment desired. The phrase, "the inward parts of 
 Scotland," occurs again and again. 
 /The progress of the colonies in the different coun- 
 ties is very accurately described in a series of reports 
 by Government inspectors, and in the letters of 
 Chichester himself. The Deputy believed that the 
 " plantation " was to be the greatest blessing ever 
 conferred on Ireland, and he did his best to make it 
 successful. When he found that the scheme was to 
 be thwarted in some respects, he writes very bitterly 
 of the mistakes which the English Council was mak- 
 ing. It had allowed far too little land to those 
 " natives " who were willing to adopt English civili- 
 sation, and it was giving grants to men who were of 
 no use as colonists. 1 Of the Scottish undertakers, 
 and of the manner in which they were doing their 
 work, there is a special report ; and, on the whole, 
 Chichester is favourably impressed with them. 2 
 "The Scottishmen come with greater port [show], 
 and better accompanied and attended, but, it may 
 be, with less money in their purses." A return 
 is made of what work each undertaker has ac- 
 complished, and of the colonists he has brought 
 with him. It is exceedingly interesting to note how 
 some of the planters are proceeding vigorously to 
 carry out the terms of their contract; others more 
 slowly; while there are a certain number who evi- 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1608-10. 
 
 2 Ibid., Carew, p. 75. 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 43 
 
 dently from the first intend to break all the condi- 
 tions under which they hold their lands. The first 
 class have come themselves, with their wives and 
 families. They are accompanied by servants, and 
 by colonists to whom they have already given lands 
 on lease. They have begun to build stone houses, 
 with fortified courts round them, called in the country 
 " bawns," into which cattle can be driven in cases of 
 alarm. Trees have been felled, too ; and, in one or 
 two cases, mills erected. The tenants have not been 
 idle, for they have put up temporary houses, and 
 broken ground, and already they have taken a crop 
 from the ground, "and sowed oats and barley this 
 last year upon his land, and reaped this harvest forty 
 hogsheads of corn." The stock of cattle is given 
 also — " 70 cows brought out of Scotland, which be- 
 long to the tenants ; " or " brought over a dozen 
 horses and mares for work ; " or " hath 8 mares and 
 8 cows with their calves, and 5 oxen, with swine and 
 other small cattle." The record of other planters is 
 not so satisfactory. They have crossed from Scotland, 
 with one or two tenants, looked at the land, and 
 gone home again ; while in one or two cases there 
 are entries — " has not appeared, and nothing done ; " 
 or, " sent an agent to take possession, who set the 
 same to the Irish, returned into Scotland, and per- 
 formed nothing." 
 
 The most interesting reports of all are those re- 
 garding undertakers who took possession in this year 
 (16 10), made up their minds to remain and to thrive 
 
44 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 in Ulster, and who founded families, whose names 
 were afterwards to be well known in Ireland. In 
 Donegal, on Lough Swilly, will be found on the map 
 the names of two villages, Manor Cunningham and 
 Newtown Cunningham. The men who introduced 
 so Scottish a name into so Irish a county are thus 
 noticed in the report of 1611 : " Sir James Cunning- 
 ham, Knight, Laird Glangarnoth, 2000 acres, took 
 possession, but returned into Scotland. Three 
 families of British resident, preparing to build." 
 "John Cunningham of Cranfield, 1000 acres, re- 
 sident with one family of British." " Cuthbert 
 Cunningham, 1000 acres, resident with two families 
 of British ; built an Irish house of copies, and pre- 
 pared materials to re-edify the Castle of Coole- 
 M'Etreen ; hath a plow of garrons, and 80 head 
 of cattle in stock." Here, too, is a delightful picture 
 of the first settlement of one whose descendant is 
 considered a model Irish landowner : " The Earl of 
 Abercorne, chief undertaker in the precinct in the 
 county of Tyrone, has taken possession, resident 
 with lady and family, and built for the present near 
 the town of Strabane some large timber houses, with 
 a court 116 foot in length and 87 foot in breadth. 
 Has built a great brewhouse without his court. His 
 followers and tenants have since May last built 
 28 houses of fair copies, and before May by his 
 tenants, who are all Scottish men, the number of 
 32 houses of like goodness. There are 120 cows in 
 stock for his own use." Then here is the record of 
 
THE GREAT PLANTATION IN ULSTER. 45 
 
 what was most probably a colony of Galloway men : 
 " The Lo. Uchelrie [Lord Ochiltree], 3000 acres 
 in the county of Tyrone, being stayed by contrary 
 winds in Scotland, arrived in Ireland at the time of 
 our being in Armagh, upon our return home, accom- 
 panied with thirty-three followers, gent, of sort, a 
 minister, some tenants, freeholders, and artificers. 
 Hath built for his present use three houses of oak 
 timber — one of 50 foot long and 22 foot wide, and 
 two of 40 foot long, within an old fort, about which 
 he is building a bawn. There are two ploughs going 
 upon his demesne, with some fifty cows and three 
 score young heifers landed at Island Magy, in Clan- 
 deboy, which are coming to his proportion, and some 
 fifteen working mares, and he intends to begin resi- 
 dence upon his land next spring, as he informs us." 
 
 There were many Scotsmen who were not showing 
 the same activity as Abercorn and Ochiltree ; but, in 
 the main, they must have been the right kind of 
 colonists; for most of them at once proceeded to 
 build houses and provide food for themselves and 
 their families. On the whole, the Scottish settlers 
 seem to have done best, and the London under- 
 takers the worst. The enthusiasm for colonisation 
 was in exact reverse to the home comfort. The 
 Scottish undertakers were poor men, many of them 
 with estates deeply burdened with debt, and they 
 belonged to a poor country. They were the men 
 whom Scott has painted in ' The Fortunes of Nigel ' 
 They had everything to gain by going to Ulster, and 
 
46 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 so had their relatives and humbler neighbours. Be- 
 sides, Ireland was only across a narrow channel, and 
 it was a country which they could see on any clear 
 day. If James had enlisted the men of the north- 
 west of England to aid in the settlement of Ulster, 
 as he did the people of the south-west of Scot- 
 land, the history of Ulster would have been ma- 
 terially altered. To London citizens, on the other 
 hand, Ireland was a far-off savage country, for 
 which they did not feel at all inclined to give up 
 the comforts and the civilised activities of the me- 
 tropolis. Thus the Londoners' colony was, for the 
 first half- century at any rate, a failure, and the 
 " Companies " let their lands to the " mere Irish," 
 breaking the terms of their contract, and involving 
 themselves in ever-recurring quarrels with the Irish 
 authorities. One good thing the " Irish Society," 
 which managed the London settlement, did for 
 Ireland : it founded Londonderry and Coleraine, 
 which in course of long years grew up to be two 
 main bulwarks of Protestantism in Ireland. 
 
47 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE SCOT BRINGS WITH HIM HIS SCOTTISH CHURCH. 
 
 TN this manner, during the early years of the 
 seventeenth century — from 1606 to 161 1 — 
 there was opened up a field for emigration into 
 which Scotsmen were to. pour during the succeeding 
 half-century. The stream of emigrants must have 
 varied in volume from year to year, but probably 
 never altogether ceased ; while the intercourse be- 
 tween the mother country and her sons in the neigh- 
 bouring island was, during the whole of that period, 
 close and intimate. Naturally, those counties which 
 were nearest Scotland received the greatest numbers 
 of the emigrants, until Antrim and Down contained 
 districts as Scotch as Roxburgh or Wigtown — dis- 
 tricts of which thirty years ago, two centuries after 
 the emigration, a writer who knew the people well 
 could say, these " are inhabited by a population 
 speaking as broad Scotch as is now to be met with 
 in the parent country, and who read and enjoy the 
 poems of Ramsay and Burns with as much zest as 
 
48 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 their brethren of the West of Scotland." 1 But, 
 although Down and Antrim received the greatest 
 number of settlers, the Scots also spread into every 
 part of Ulster in which there was good land to be 
 had ; or they took up their abode in the towns which 
 slowly began to rise round the new castle of Belfast; 
 at Londonderry and Coleraine, in the Londoners' 
 territory; and at Donaghadee, and Newtown, and 
 Bangor, and Lisburn, in the Scottish and English 
 settlements of Down and Antrim. Probably none 
 of the colonies which Scotland has sent out more 
 deserves the support and encouragement of the 
 mother country than does this colony in Ulster, 
 for in none have the colonists had to struggle 
 against greater odds. For more than a century 
 the Scots of Ulster were oppressed by laws which 
 deprived them of their civil and religious rights 
 and crippled their trade ; while all through the cen- 
 turies they have been crushed, as they still are, 
 by the presence of an inferior race, whose lower 
 civilisation makes all their ideas of comfort lower, 
 and causes them to multiply with a rapidity which 
 ever presses on the means of subsistence. Thus 
 always facing up to the savage realities of life, these 
 Scots of Ulster are in character more akin to our 
 common forefathers of the seventeenth century, re- 
 taining more of their stern Calvinism than the Scots 
 of this generation in the mother country. The 
 establishment and growth of this Calvinistic Church 
 1 Ulster Journal of Archseology, vol. i. p. 3. 
 
THE SCOTTISH CHURCH IN ULSTER. 49 
 
 in Ireland is a remarkable chapter in the history of 
 the Scots. 
 
 For two or three years after the "great settlement 
 of 1 6 10," the colony went on increasing; and then 
 its progress was checked by rumours of a great plot 
 among the natives to sweep away the foreign settlers. 
 Such a conspiracy did actually exist, and was certainly 
 a thing which might be expected; but it was dis- 
 covered and suppressed in 16 15, before it came to a 
 head. 1 This danger past, the settlement again made 
 progress, the Government putting pressure on the 
 undertakers to compel them to fulfil the conditions 
 of their contracts, and fully plant their lands with 
 "British" tenants. In 16 18 the Irish Government 
 instructed Captain Pynnar to inspect every allotment 
 in the six " escheated " counties, and to report on 
 each one, whether held by "natives" or "foreign 
 planters." The report presents a very exact picture 
 of what had been done by the settlers in the counties 
 inspected — Londonderry, Donegal, Tyrone, Armagh, 
 Cavan, and Fermanagh. Pynnar points out that 
 many of the undertakers had altogether failed to 
 implement the terms of their agreements. On the 
 other hand, he reports the number of castles, 
 " bawns," and " dwelling-houses of stone and timber 
 built after the English fashion," and mentions the 
 number of tenants, and the size and conditions 
 of their holdings. He states that "there are upon 
 occasion 8000 men of British birth and descent 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1615-25, p. viii. 
 D 
 
50 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 for defence, though a fourth part of the lands is 
 not fully inhabited." 1 Of these, fully a half must 
 have been Scots; and if there be added the great 
 colonies in Down and Antrim, there must have been 
 an immigration from Scotland of between 30,000 
 and 40,000 in these ten years. Pynnar regrets that 
 " many English do not yet plough nor use husbandry, 
 being fearful to stock themselves with cattle or ser- 
 vants for those labours \ " and states, that " were it not 
 for the Scottish, who plough in many places, the rest 
 of the country might starve." 2 When we come to 
 the detailed report of each holding, it is easy to 
 understand why the Scots were doing the work of 
 colonists so well — they were led by men of energy, 
 who were devoting their lives to the task. Pynnar's 
 report also enables us to understand the new frame- 
 work of society which it was intended to build up 
 in Ulster. James and his advisers quite understood 
 that to give a feeling of security to the new colony, 
 it was necessary to have fortified houses all over the 
 country, with a certain number of walled towns which 
 should contain garrisons. Every undertaker was 
 therefore bound to raise a " castle of stone," which 
 would certainly vary much in size and strength, 
 but which was at least to give to the small settle- 
 ments as much protection as did the "little towers 
 and peels, such as are common in our Borders." 3 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, p. 422. 2 Ibid., p. 423. 
 3 Letter from Alexander Hay, Scottish Secretary of State — 
 Privy Council Record, vol. viii. p. 793. 
 
THE SCOTTISH CHURCH IN ULSTER. 5 1 
 
 We have accounts of many of these castles, and of 
 the colony which was gathering around them. 
 
 This, for instance, is a description of the settle- 
 ment made in East Donegal by one of the most 
 energetic of the Wigtownshire undertakers : " Sir 
 W. Stewart, 1000 acres, called Rumaltho. A large 
 and strong court 80 feet square and 14 high, four 
 flankers, fair strong castle of same materials three 
 and a half stories high. A large town of forty- 
 five houses, and fifty-seven families, all British, some 
 having estates for years. A church begun of lime 
 and stone, built to setting on of roof. A water-mill 
 for corn. This is a market town, and stands well 
 for the good of the country and the King's ser- 
 vice." 1 In County Armagh here is another very Scot- 
 tish name: "Arch. Acheson, 2000 acres. A castle 
 begun 80 feet long, 22 wide, now two stories high. 
 Planted with British ; in toto, 29 tenants, with under- 
 tenants, making 144 men with arms. Has also built 
 a town called Clancurry, wherein dwell 29 British 
 tenants, each having a small parcel of land — in the 
 whole making 173 men armed." 2 The Achesons — 
 there were two brothers among the " planters " — were 
 from the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. Archibald 
 was afterwards raised to the Peerage, and took his 
 title from his property of Gosford, in East Lothian. 
 His descendants are still Earls of Gosford. The 
 brothers of that Sir James Hamilton who had 
 "planted" in Down along with Sir Hugh Mont- 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, p. 408. - Ibid., p. 417. 
 
52 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 gomery, also turned out most enterprising colonists. 
 One of them, John, settled in Armagh beside the 
 Achesons, and along with them founded " the 
 flourishing colonies of Markethill, Hamilton's Bawn, 
 and Mullabrack." x They assisted, too, in the settle- 
 ment of County Cavan; Sir James "had built a very 
 large strong castle of lyme and stone, called Castle 
 Aubignee, with the King's arms in freestone over the 
 gate. This castle is five stories high, with four round 
 towers for flankers. " It stands upon a meeting of 
 five beaten ways which keep all that part of the 
 country." He had "settled" "forty -one families, 
 which do consist of eighty men-at-arms." 2 Of the 
 fortified towns, the " Londoners " were bound to 
 erect two — Londonderry and Coleraine ; and grants 
 were given to undertakers to build forts on selected 
 sites, round which it was intended to raise towns, 
 like that which Lord Chichester was building round 
 the Fort of Dungannon. 3 
 
 The only county in which the Scottish settlers 
 failed to take firm root was Fermanagh, for there, 
 by 1618, when Pynnar reported, a large number of 
 the Scottish proportions had been sold, and were 
 held by Englishmen. The result is seen in the small 
 number of Presbyterians in comparison to Episco- 
 palians to be found at the present day in County 
 Fermanagh. 
 
 It is strange to turn from these records, nearly 
 
 1 Hill's Plantation, p. 568 note. 
 
 2 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, p. 392. 3 Ibid., p. 414. 
 
THE SCOTTISH CHURCH IN ULSTER. 53 
 
 three centuries old, to the political map of to-day, 
 and compare the one with the other. It makes the 
 reader feel how brief a period three centuries are in 
 the history of races, and how little races change in 
 the course of centuries. For the North of Ireland is 
 now very much what the first half of the seventeenth 
 century made it. North Down and Antrim, with the 
 great town of Belfast, are English and Scottish now as 
 they then became, and desire to remain united with 
 the countries from whom their people spring. South 
 Down, on the other hand, was not "planted," 1 and 
 it is Roman Catholic and Nationalist. London- 
 derry County too is loyalist, for emigrants poured 
 into it through Coleraine and Londonderry city. 
 Northern Armagh was peopled with English and 
 Scottish emigrants, who crowded into it from An- 
 trim and Down, and it desires union with the other 
 island. Tyrone County is all strongly Unionist, but 
 it is the country round Strabane, which the Hamil- 
 tons of Abercorn and the Stewarts of Garlies so 
 thoroughly colonised, and .the eastern portion, on 
 the borders of Lough Neagh, round 'the colonies 
 founded by Lord Ochiltree, that give to the 
 Unionists a majority; while in Eastern Donegal, 
 which the Cunninghams and the Stewarts "settled" 
 from Ayrshire and Galloway, and in . Fermanagh, 
 where dwell the descendants of the Englishmen 
 who fought so nobly in 1689, there is a great 
 minority which struggles against separation from 
 1 Knox's History of County Down, p. 17. 
 
54 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 England. Over the rest, even of Ulster, the desire 
 for a separate kingdom of Ireland is the dream of 
 the people still, as it was three centuries ago. In 
 many parts of Ireland, which were at one time and 
 another colonised with English, the colonists became 
 absorbed in the native population ; but in Ulster, 
 where the Scottish blood is strong, this union has 
 not taken place, and the result is the race difference 
 which is so apparent in the electoral statistics of the 
 present day. It is perhaps the stern Calvinism of 
 these Scots, which still survives, that has prevented 
 the colony from mixing with the surrounding people, 
 and being absorbed by them as the Jews of the 
 northern kingdom became merged in the surround- 
 ing "heathen." The history of the Presbyterian 
 Church is therefore an important part of the story 
 of the Scot in Ulster; in fact, for many years the 
 history of Ulster, as far as it has a separate history, 
 is chiefly ecclesiastical. It must be so ; for this is a 
 story of Scotsmen and of the first half of the seven- 
 teenth century, and at that time the history of Scotland 
 is the history of the Scottish Church. Church polity, 
 Church observance, Church discipline, fill all the 
 chronicles, and must have formed the public life of 
 the people. We moderns may be extremely sur- 
 prised and very much bored by the heavy polemics 
 of these old annals; but our wonder does not alter 
 facts, nor our disdain in all probability affect the 
 souls of our pious ancestors. 
 
 Before glancing at the building up of the Presby- 
 
THE SCOTTISH CHURCH IN ULSTER. 55 
 
 terian Church of Ireland, it is necessary to note two 
 acts of legislation which much aided the consolidation 
 of the Scottish colony. In 161 3, after an interval of 
 twenty-seven years, a Parliament met at Dublin, to 
 which were summoned members from many northern 
 towns, such as Dungannon and Coleraine, which 
 were certainly then boroughs rather in embryo than in 
 reality. 1 This Parliament repealed a law of Queen 
 Mary, which was intended to prevent the Scots from 
 settling in Ireland; the Scots thus aimed at being 
 the Western Islesmen, who infested and plundered 
 Northern Ulster. 2 Two years later there met a con- 
 vocation of clergy, which proceeded to draw up a 
 Confession of Faith for the Episcopal Church of 
 Ireland, as an establishment separate from that of 
 England. The Irish clergy were at this time strongly 
 tinged with Puritanism, and the result was that a 
 Confession was adopted much more Calvinistic, and 
 therefore nearer that of the Scottish Church than 
 was the Thirty-nine Articles. The formation and 
 growth of the Presbyterian Church was also much 
 aided by Archbishop Ussher, the Primate of Ire- 
 land. Ussher is remembered as the most learned 
 Englishman of a learned age ; but better worth re- 
 cording even than his learning is his broad-minded 
 toleration. Unlike his contemporary, Archbishop 
 Laud, he was incapable of rage against men who 
 differed with him about mere forms, and ever ready 
 to recognise the great realities in which they agreed. 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Carew, p. 170. 2 Ibid., p. 159. 
 
56 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 He steadily prevented all persecution of Presby- 
 terians by Episcopal bishops, and treated the Scot- 
 tish preachers as friends and fellow-Christians. 1 
 
 There is in the Manuscript Room of the Advo- 
 cates' Library in Edinburgh a quaint narrative of 
 the history of the early days of the Presbyterian 
 Church in Ireland, which tells how a revival of re- 
 ligion spread through the Scots of Ulster. Its de- 
 scription of the first settlers is not flattering. " In 
 few years there flocked such a multitude of people 
 from Scotland that these northern counties of Down, 
 Antrim, Londonderry, &c, were in good measure 
 planted, which had been waste before ; yet most of 
 the people, as I said before, made up a body — and 
 it's strange, of different names, nations, dialects, 
 tempers, breeding, and, in a word, all void of god- 
 liness, who seemed rather to flee from God in this 
 enterprise than to follow their own mercy." 2 Prob- 
 ably the narrator blackened the characters of these 
 first settlers for the purpose of heightening the effect 
 of the mighty change which came over them. In 
 several cases the " plantationers " came accompanied 
 by clergymen. Both Hamilton and Montgomery 
 looked after the spiritual wants of the emigrants in 
 County Down, and a " minister " is stated to have 
 accompanied Lord Ochiltree who had hereditary 
 connections with the Presbyterian Church, his aunt 
 
 1 History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, by James 
 Reid, D.D., vol. i. p. 137. 
 
 2 Stewart's Narrative, p. 313. 
 
THE SCOTTISH CHURCH IN ULSTER. $7 
 
 having been John Knox's second wife. There is, 
 too, a curious record of the Bishop of Raphoe's im- 
 portation of clergy from Scotland. This northern 
 see, now styled Deny and Raphoe, was in the early 
 years of the settlement filled by George Montgomery, 
 a brother of Sir Hugh, the great " planter " in County 
 Down. Bishop Montgomery held the lands assigned 
 to his see ; and we are told that he made " proclama- 
 tion in the Scottish ports from Glasgow south to 
 Larggs," " at how easy rents he would set his Church 
 lands, which drew hither many families." 1 The col- 
 ony he formed must have been considerable ; for we 
 find in 1612 that his successor, Bishop Knox, who 
 was living on Lough Swilly, at some distance from any 
 English garrison, obtains protection for himself and 
 for " seven ministers that he brought out of Scotland, 
 who are hated by the Irish." 2 The real founders of 
 the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, however, were 
 clergymen who took refuge in Ulster, driven from 
 Scotland and England by the persecuting spirit then 
 abroad against the Puritans. These men were, there- 
 fore, of necessity strong Calvinists. It must be borne 
 in mind that the south-west of Scotland, from which 
 the Ulster Scots largely came, was during this whole 
 period intensely Presbyterian ; it was the district 
 from which in the succeeding generation came the 
 " Westlan' Whigs " who fought at Bothwell Brig, and 
 which produced the martyrs whose graves are still 
 
 1 Montgomery MSS., p. 99. 
 
 2 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1610-15, p. 315. 
 
58 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 visited at Wigtown, and in the quiet upland kirk- 
 yards of New Galloway and the " clachan " of 
 Dairy. The first minister to come seems to have 
 been Edward Brice, an Edinburgh graduate, who 
 settled at Broad Island in Antrim, in 1613. He 
 had been minister of Drymen in Stirlingshire, but 
 was driven from his charge by Archbishop Spottis- 
 woode. Echlin, Bishop of Down, following the ex- 
 ample of the Primate, made no difficulty about 
 recognising Brice. 1 Others, both Scottish Presby- 
 terians and English Nonconformists, followed — 
 among whom one of the best known was Robert 
 Blair. He had been a professor in Glasgow, but 
 disapproving of the prelatic changes going on in 
 that University, he accepted the invitation of Ham- 
 ilton, Lord Clannaboye, and settled at Bangor in 
 Down, in 1623. The story of his ordination by 
 Bishop Echlin shows how the spirit of Ussher was 
 reflected in the other bishops. Blair objected to the 
 " sole ordination " of the bishop, whereupon Echlin 
 rejoined, " Will you not receive ordination from Mr 
 Cunningham and the adjacent brethren, and let me 
 come in among them in no other relation than a 
 Presbyter ? " 2 In this way Blair's scruples were re- 
 spected, and the law which imposed ordination by 
 the bishop of the diocese satisfied. When divines 
 of opposing Churches could thus agree, verily the old 
 chronicler was right in declaring that the " golden 
 peaceable age " had returned. 
 
 1 Reid, vol. i. p. 98. 2 Ibid., p. 103. 
 
THE SCOTTISH CHURCH IN ULSTER. $9 
 
 The Presbyterian Church rapidly strengthened, 
 and became powerful ; and the more the bishops 
 pushed things to extremes in Scotland, the more 
 were able men driven to take refuge in Ulster. In 
 1626, a son of John Welsh of Ayr, and grandson to 
 John Knox, threw up the Chair of Humanity in 
 Glasgow, and settled at Templepatrick in Antrim, 
 being ordained by his kinsman Knox, who had 
 succeeded Montgomery as Bishop of Raphoe. 1 In 
 1630, he was followed across by John Livingston, 
 who was long a power in the North of Ireland. 
 Livingston's story was similar to that of the others. 
 He had been minister of Torphichen, and was 
 "silenced" in 1627 by Archbishop Spottiswoode ; 
 being in Irvine during his wanderings, he was in- 
 duced to go over to Ireland, where Bishop Knox 
 acted like the Bishop of Down, and became a " Pres- 
 byter " for the nonce at his ordination. 2 In this way 
 the Presbyterian Church of Ireland was founded by 
 the very stoutest of Calvinists. 
 
 Meanwhile the tide of colonists flowed on. Of 
 course there are no accurate statistics of the annual 
 immigration, but all the records of the time speak of 
 the West of Scotland and the North of Ireland as 
 being united closely by daily intercourse. For in- 
 stance, in 1 6 16 there is a return among the State 
 Papers "showing what impost was paid for wines 
 brought into Ireland in Scottish bottoms for the year 
 ending March 161 6, more than is paid for the like 
 1 Reid, vol. i. p. 112. 2 Ibid., p. 116. 
 
60 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 quantity imported in English and Irish bottoms." 1 
 Another proof is found in the fact that the country 
 people were in the habit of crossing from Stranraer 
 to Donaghadee, attending Newtown market, selling 
 their wares, and crossing to Scotland again the same 
 night. 2 Some years afterwards, too, when Strafford's 
 tyranny had driven many favourite ministers out of 
 Ulster, the northern Presbyterians were accustomed 
 to cross over to the Ayrshire and Galloway churches. 
 " On one occasion, five hundred persons, principally 
 from the county of Down, visited Stranraer to receive 
 the Communion from the hands of Mr Livingston." 3 
 The most exact account of the emigration is con- 
 tained in a very curious book of travels in Scotland 
 and Ireland, by Sir William Brereton, a Cheshire 
 man, well known afterwards in the Civil War. He 
 states that he came to Irvine, in Ayrshire, on the ist 
 July 1635, an d was hospitably entertained by Mr 
 James Blair, and that his host informed him that 
 " above ten thousand persons have within two years 
 last past left this country wherein they lived, which 
 was betwixt Aberdine and Enuerness, and are gone 
 for Ireland; they have come by one hundred in 
 company through this town, and three hundred have 
 gone hence together shipped for Ireland at one tide. 
 None of them can give a reason why they leave the 
 country ; only some of them who make a better use 
 of God's hand upon them have acknowledged to 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1615-26, p. 139. 
 
 2 Montgomery MSS., p. 60. 3 Reid, vol. i. p. 226. 
 
THE SCOTTISH CHURCH IN ULSTER. 6l 
 
 mine host in these words, 'that it was a just judg- 
 ment of God to spew them out of the land for their 
 unthankfulness ! ' One of them I met withal and 
 discoursed with at large, who could give no good 
 reason, but pretended the landlords increasing their 
 rents ; but their swarming in Ireland is so much 
 taken notice of and disliked, as that the Deputy has 
 sent out a warrant to stay the landing of any of these 
 Scotch that come without a certification." l 
 
 Thus was Ulster filled with Scotsmen, and the 
 simple forms of the Scottish Church established in 
 the North of Ireland. But the "golden peaceable 
 age " of Archbishop Ussher could not last long. In 
 1633, Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Straf- 
 ford, began his celebrated term of office as Lord- 
 Deputy of Ireland, and with him came Laud's polity 
 in matters ecclesiastic. The Calvinistic Confession 
 of Faith was altered ; the bishops tinged with Puri- 
 tanism were deposed, and High Churchmen placed 
 in their stead ; a High Commission Court was estab- 
 lished in Dublin ; and conformity to the Established 
 Church was enforced by pains and penalties. Then 
 Wentworth's hand fell heavily on the Presbyterians, 
 laity and clergy. Many of the latter had to flee and 
 take refuge in Scotland, where they again found 
 churches, after that country revolted against Episco- 
 pacy in 1637. Many of the laity, too, returned to 
 the West of Scotland, helping in this way to bind the 
 two countries together — Irvine, in Ayrshire, becom- 
 1 Travels by Sir William Brereton (Chetham Society), p. 119. 
 
62 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 ing a regular place of rendezvous for the Ulstermen, 
 both lay and clerical. 1 Wentworth viewed this inti- 
 macy with a jealous eye, especially after Scotland had 
 risen against Charles and placed an army in the field. 
 Then the Deputy's hand fell yet heavier on the Scots 
 of Ulster. He imposed on every Presbyterian an 
 oath of passive obedience, long remembered as the 
 Black Oath ; he disarmed the Ulster Scots as far as 
 he could, and raised an army of 9000 men, largely 
 Roman Catholics, to overawe Ulster. Wentworth 
 seems to have feared a rising of the Scots ; for in a 
 letter to Coke, the English Secretary of State, he 
 states that there are 13,092 British men between 
 sixteen and sixty in Ulster, but congratulates himself 
 on the fact that they are badly armed. 2 
 
 1 Reid, vol. i. p. 217. 
 
 2 Strafford's Letters, vol. i. p. 199. 
 
63 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE SCOTS AND THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1641. 
 
 '"PHERE is mingled pain and pleasure in reading 
 the history of the Great Rebellion, as it affected 
 first Scotland, and then England. There is no feeling 
 but pain and weariness for him who is so unfortunate 
 as to be compelled to toil through the sad story of 
 the long-drawn-out struggle, which for ten years 
 desolated Ireland, and which needed Cromwell's 
 iron hand and iron will to bring to an end, so that 
 the weary wretched land might have rest. Much 
 misery, much bloodshed the great Civil War caused 
 in England : but it has left a glorious legacy in the 
 memory of Cromwell's strong manhood ; of Milton's 
 noble purity of purpose and search after an ideal in 
 politics; of the manly simplicity of many brave men 
 who fought and died on either side — Pym, and 
 Hampden, and Falkland ; while we Scots are proud 
 to record the intellectual greatness and moral worth 
 of Henderson and of Rutherford, and never tire to 
 sing the praises of that dashing cavalier, " Bonnie 
 
64 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 Dundee." There is no silver lining to the black 
 cloud which forms Irish history at this time ; there 
 is no name among the English and Scots who fought 
 in Ireland which should be rescued from kindly ob- 
 livion ; while the one man of pure life and principle 
 whom the Irish put forward — Owen Roe O'Neill — 
 lacked that strength and moral force which made 
 men like George Washington the founders of great 
 nations. 
 
 It is fortunately not necessary here to recount at 
 length the horrors which characterised the revolt of 
 the Irish in 1641, or to relate the confused story of 
 the prolonged civil war which followed, and deso- 
 lated the land. For nearly two centuries a strife of 
 tongues has raged regarding the character of the 
 revolt, and apologists have been found who have 
 denied the atrocities committed on the settlers, and 
 done their best to wipe out the bloody stain which 
 rests on the character of the Irish people. The diffi- 
 culty of arriving at the truth regarding this sad por- 
 tion of Irish history is very great ; for not only are 
 the facts covered over thick with the fabrications of 
 succeeding generations of controversialists, but even 
 the original documents of the period are not to be 
 trusted, many of them being framed for the purposes 
 of deceit. Recent research has, however, proved, 
 that while the accounts of the horrors of the revolt 
 have been greatly exaggerated, the cruelties prac- 
 tised were only too horrible. This must have been 
 so ; for it is to be remembered that in Ireland it was 
 
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1641. 65 
 
 the rising of race against race, and that the race 
 which rose in rebellion was the lower in civilisation, 
 and considered that it was suffering under grievous 
 wrongs at the hands of the Government of their con- 
 querors. Probably no fairer or more weighty account 
 of the Rebellion of 1641 has been written than that 
 of Mr Lecky, who says — " No impartial writer will 
 deny that the rebellion in Ulster was extremely savage 
 and bloody, though it is certainly not true that its 
 barbarities were either unparalleled or unprovoked. 
 They were, for the most part, the unpremeditated 
 acts of a half-savage populace." 1 
 
 Wentworth's government bore hardly on the Ulster 
 Scots, and there are traces in his letters that he had 
 in view a plan even more thoroughgoing than dra- 
 gooning and religious persecution. He certainly did 
 not like these Irish Presbyterians, and feared their 
 sternness. There seems to have floated in his mind 
 some half-formed plan of getting quit of their troub- 
 ling for ever by driving them out of Ulster in a body. 2 
 It was not fated, however, that Wentworth was to 
 carry out his plan ; the Scots were to remain, and 
 their stern determination to have their own way was 
 destined to trouble the Irish dictator of the nine- 
 teenth as it had done his prototype of the seven- 
 teenth century. Wentworth was by far the ablest, 
 
 1 History of England in the Eighteenth Century, by W. E. 
 H. Lecky, vol. ii. p. 143. Compare also Gardiner's Fall of the 
 Monarchy of Charles I., chaps, xv. and xvi. 
 
 2 Reid, vol. i. p. 273. 
 
 E 
 
66 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 and therefore the most dangerous, of all Charles I.'s 
 lieutenants, and when the Long Parliament began 
 its sittings in 1640, he was its first victim. He was 
 impeached and executed, his death leaving Ireland 
 really without government ; for he had permitted no 
 one near him who was capable of grasping the reins 
 when they fell from his hands. Wentworth's rule 
 had been hard on all — on the Roman Catholics, 
 whether Irish or Norman-Irish, as well as on the 
 Presbyterians, and he had given fresh sharpness and 
 poignancy to the remembrance of the many wrongs 
 under which they suffered. To men smarting under 
 great grievances, the time appeared well suited for a 
 blow for freedom. The Scottish people had just ac- 
 complished a successful rebellion, and had compelled 
 the English king virtually to agree to all that it de- 
 manded ; while England itself was evidently rapidly 
 drifting into civil war. Ireland, moreover, was almost 
 devoid of troops, for the army which Wentworth had 
 raised was disbanded early in 1641 ; while the Gov- 
 ernment at Dublin was in the hands of two Lord 
 Justices, lacking both character and ability. The 
 northern settlers, besides, were without cohesion, and 
 badly armed. The leaders of the Irish determined 
 on a great struggle for independence. The rising 
 was arranged with great ability, the plan being con- 
 summated largely by the aid of Roman Catholic 
 friars, who passed from district to district unnoticed. 
 Warning of impending danger was sent from England 
 to the Lord Justices, but they remained unmoved ; 
 
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 164I. 6j 
 
 and Dublin Castle itself would have been secured by 
 the rebels if one of the party intrusted with its sur- 
 prisal had not turned traitor on the evening before 
 the outbreak. 
 
 It was in Ulster that the greatest fury of the rising 
 was felt, for it was in the northern province that the 
 land had been to the fullest extent taken from the 
 original proprietors ; religion, patriotism, and interest 
 therefore alike called on the native population to 
 attempt to recover supremacy. On the night of the 
 22d October 1641, all over Ulster, as if with one ac- 
 cord, the Irish rose on the English settlers, who lived 
 in most cases in isolated farmhouses in the midst 
 of an Irish population ; while armed bodies, led by 
 the chiefs of the Irish septs, easily surprised most of 
 the forts, which were feebly held by small English 
 garrisons. The plan of the original settlement had 
 been broken through by Wentworth, when he, out 
 of jealousy of the Presbyterians, disarmed the coun- 
 try, and so destroyed that system of defence which 
 James I. had wisely judged necessary for the protec- 
 tion of the settlement. Before the morning broke 
 all Ulster was ablaze with burning villages and farm- 
 houses. There followed what must take place in every 
 agrarian revolt — murder and outrage, even though 
 it may have been true that "the main and strong 
 view of the common Irish was plunder," 1 and that 
 the leaders, with some exceptions, deprecated mur- 
 der, and desired only the expulsion of the English. 
 1 Carte's History of Ormond, p. 175* 
 
68 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 The settlers were driven out of their homes unarmed 
 and defenceless, many of them stripped of clothing, 
 in a singularly inclement season, with no place of 
 refuge near at hand to which they could retreat; 
 while around them flocked, like birds of prey, all the 
 blackguardism of an unsettled country. It is not 
 necessary nor desirable to describe the horrors which 
 accompanied the flight of this miserable crowd — 
 men, women, and children, the aged, scarce able to 
 walk, the babe at the breast — toward the cities of 
 refuge on the coast. None dared give them shelter 
 or succour their distress. Many perished of cold 
 and hunger, many were barbarously outraged and 
 murdered ; while famine and fever carried off in 
 Dublin and Londonderry and Coleraine not a few 
 of those who had escaped the perils of the way. 
 One curious point it is very difficult to determine — 
 how far the Scottish settlers suffered along with the 
 English. It appears that the leaders of the revolt 
 desired to distinguish between the two nationalities, 
 probably rather to cause diversity of interest than 
 because the Irish had reason to love Scottish more 
 than English settlers, or because Presbyterians were 
 more tolerant of Roman Catholics than Episco- 
 palians. 1 It is stated by one of the bravest of the 
 Englishmen engaged in the defence of the colony in 
 Fermanagh, that " in the infancy of the rebellion the 
 rebels made open proclamations upon pain of death 
 that no Scotchman should be stirred in body, goods, 
 1 Lecky's History, vol. ii. p. 130. 
 
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 164I. 69 
 
 or lands, and that they should to this purpose write 
 over the lyntels of their doors that they were Scotch- 
 men, and so destruction might pass over their fam- 
 ilies." 1 This may have been the intention of the 
 Irish leaders, but no such plan could possibly have 
 been carried out after their followers had tasted 
 blood, and we know for certain that many Scottish 
 settlers perished in the uprising, while, of course, 
 very many fell in the long civil war which followed. 
 The Scottish settlements, as far as they escaped de- 
 struction, seem to have owed their safety to the 
 thoroughness with which the plantation had been 
 carried out. Thus the original Scottish colony in 
 North Down did not suffer severely; while the settle- 
 ment, by this time probably more Scottish than Eng- 
 lish, in South Antrim, and the plantation along the 
 Foyle in Donegal and Londonderry, escaped with 
 little injury, because in all these districts the foreign 
 population was stronger than the native, and because 
 the planters soon took arms in defence of their 
 hearths and homes. 
 
 When the rebellion broke out, Charles I. was in 
 Edinburgh, endeavouring to make terms with the 
 Scottish Parliament, in order to separate the interests 
 of the Covenanters from the English Puritan party. 
 The news of the outbreak was sent to the King by 
 Sir Arthur Chichester, Governor of Carrickfergus, 
 and Charles read the letter to the Scottish Parlia- 
 
 1 Lecky's History, vol. ii. p. 130, note. 
 
70 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 ment on the 28th October 1641. 1 Chichester's 
 letter, dated two days after the outbreak, announced 
 that " certain septs of the Irish " had risen in force, 
 and that " great fires " could be seen from Carrick- 
 fergus. The House at once appointed a committee 
 to consider the matter, and instructed it while it 
 awaited fuller news from Ireland to meet, that after- 
 noon, with Lord Eglinton, and inquire " what ship- 
 ping the western coast of Scotland can afford." The 
 inquiry drew out the answer that shipping for four to 
 five thousand men could be found from Glasgow to 
 Ayr. 2 By 1st November the King was able to give 
 Parliament more exact information, which he com- 
 municated in person. He read a despatch from the 
 Lords Justices, informing him that all the north 
 of Ireland was in rebellion; and asked the assist- 
 ance of the Scottish Parliament, desiring especially 
 their help in saving Carrickfergus and Londonderry. 
 "The President answered, these two places did in- 
 deed very much concern the Scots, that were most 
 numerous in the north parts of that kingdom. His 
 Majesty replied, if he had not been a Scotsman him- 
 self, he had not spoken that." 3 The King knew 
 that he appealed to Scotsmen as such, and that in a 
 matter so important as the safety of their Ulster kins- 
 men, they would rise superior to the intense party 
 hate which then divided Covenanters from Cavaliers. 
 
 1 Balfour's Annates of Scotland, vol. iii. p. 119. 
 
 2 Thomson's Acts of Scottish Parliament. 
 
 3 Balfour's Annales, vol. iii. p. 129. 
 
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1 64 1. 7 1 
 
 The Scottish Parliament was not slow in responding, 
 for on the 3d November, only ten days after the 
 revolt broke out, it adopted the report of the com- 
 mittee, which recommended that if the English Par- 
 liament would accept their assistance, and were will- 
 ing to pay the troops, a Scottish force of 10,000 men 
 should be sent into Ulster; and further, "that they 
 should supply their brethren in Ireland with arms out 
 of the common magazine for 3000 men, two parts 
 muskets and the third part pikes." 1 The practical 
 difficulty was that Ireland was a dependency of 
 England, and that therefore the Scottish Parliament 
 had no right to send troops without the consent of 
 England. The force was promptly offered, but not 
 so promptly accepted by the English Parliament, 
 which was at this time entering on its long struggle 
 over the Great Remonstrance. Ireland was therefore 
 on this occasion, as it has been so often since, sacri- 
 ficed to the contention of English parties ; for the 
 English Cavaliers objected to the employment of an 
 army of Covenanters, fearing what it might do in 
 case of success in Ireland ; while the Roundheads as 
 strongly protested against the King being allowed to 
 raise any other force to be sent to Ireland, in case it 
 might be afterwards used against the liberties of his 
 English subjects. 
 
 Meanwhile the news of the rebellion, and the re- 
 ports of the atrocities attendant on it, had sent a 
 shudder of rage and horror through Scotland, in the 
 1 Balfour's Annates, vol. iii. p. 134. 
 
72 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 same way that the tidings of the Indian Mutiny 
 excited this country during the autumn months of 
 1857. The diary of John Spalding of Aberdeen, 
 who was a kind of seventeenth - century James 
 Boswell, and kept jottings from day to day of what 
 struck him, is full of the prevailing feeling. His 
 evidence is the better proof that this sympathy 
 was universal in Scotland, and not confined to 
 one party, from the fact that he himself was Episco- 
 palian in his leanings, and not therefore of the party 
 which was supreme in Parliament. " Great cruelty 
 in Ireland, and mekill blood spilt of the English and 
 Scottish Puritan Protestants j fire and sword went 
 almost through the whole land, nor mercy to sex or 
 kind, young or old, man, woman, or child, all put to 
 death, and their goods spoiled." 1 Again, some 
 months later, he writes that the Irish use " fire, sword, 
 and all manner of cruelty against man, wife, and 
 bairn of English, Scottish, and Irish Covenanters 
 within their kingdom, without pity or compassion." 2 
 The same annalist tells that on 27 th February 
 1642, a collection was made in every parish in the 
 kingdom for behoof of the Ulster Scots, who were 
 forced to flee into the west parts of Scotland. He 
 adds that out of " this poor paroche fourscoir poundis 
 were collected." 3 This flight of great numbers of 
 Ulster settlers into the parts of Scotland from which 
 
 1 Memorials of the Troubles in Scotland (Spalding Club), 
 vol. ii. p. 99. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 155. 3 Ibid., p. 107. 
 
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1641. 73 
 
 they had emigrated, is corroborated by the Records 
 of the City of Glasgow. In February 1642, the 
 Council votes a sum from the city funds for behoof of 
 the refugees. This not proving sufficient, on the 5th 
 March the Corporation " ordanis ane proclamation to 
 be sent throw the toune to desyre all these quha 
 will give or contribut any supplie to the distressed 
 people that com from Ireland, that they cum upon 
 Weddnesday next at the ringing of the bells." 2 The 
 great excitement caused in Scotland by the rebellion 
 in Ulster, and the intense interest shown by the 
 country in the fate of the settlers, prove conclusively 
 how many in every part of the mother country were 
 personally concerned for friends and relatives among 
 the settlers in the North of Ireland. 
 
 When at last, in the end of January 1642, terms 
 were arranged between the English and Scottish Par- 
 liaments, 2 the Scottish authorities had no difficulty 
 in finding at once a portion of the troops which they 
 wished to send to Ulster. Scotsmen had been fight- 
 ing for a generation on both sides of the great Thirty 
 Years' War, and many of these "soldiers of fortune" 
 had returned home when the war broke out between 
 Scotland and King Charles in 1638. The Scottish 
 Estates had now three regiments which had not been 
 disbanded after the King's surrender — two stationed 
 near Edinburgh and one in Aberdeen, where it had 
 
 1 Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow, vol. 
 1630-1662. 
 
 2 Rushworth, vol. iv. p. 501. 
 
74 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 been sent to overawe the northern Episcopalians. 1 
 These regiments were at once ordered to Ireland, 
 while after the manner of the time, certain noblemen 
 received commissions to raise other regiments to 
 follow. There exist two most vivid sketches of the 
 character of these troops, who were mostly profes- 
 sional soldiers, trained in the wars of the Continent. 
 In Scotland they had been led against Charles by 
 men of genius and high enthusiasm, and had behaved 
 well ; in Ireland their leaders had no spark of genius, 
 and discipline soon became slack. We can therefore 
 easily understand why they accomplished but little, 
 and were not an unmixed blessing to the northern 
 settlers. Let one of their commanding officers, Major 
 Turner, speak for himself: " I had swallowed without 
 chewing, in Germanie, a very dangerous maxime, 
 which militariemen there too much follow, which 
 was, that so we serve our master honnestlie, it is no 
 matter what master we serve " 2 — quite the code of 
 morals for a soldier of fortune. Here, too, is an ac- 
 count of how the regiment in which Turner served, 
 Lord Sinclair's, had behaved while posted at Aber- 
 deen : " This regiment did no good, but maikill evil, 
 daylie deboshing, in drinking, nicht walking, com- 
 batting, sweiring, and brocht sindrie honest women 
 servants to great misery." 3 The Scottish army of 
 Ulster was placed under the command of David 
 
 1 Memoirs of his own Life and Time, by Sir James Turner, 
 p. 17. 
 
 2 Turner's Memoirs, p. 14. 3 Spalding, vol. ii. p. 101. 
 
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 164I. 75 
 
 Leslie, " newly created Earl of Leven, for his success- 
 ful rebellion against the King \ " and the advanced- 
 guard, which crossed from the western ports to Car- 
 rickfergus on the 14th April 1642, was led by his 
 lieutenant, Monro, who, like Leslie, and most of the 
 army, officers and privates, had been trained on the 
 Continent in the Thirty Years' War. 
 
 But long before the Scottish forces landed at Car- 
 rickfergus, the Ulster settlers had recovered from their 
 first panic, and had formed themselves into regiments 
 for mutual defence. It is a fact, that if the Irish 
 leaders intended to respect the lives of the Scottish 
 settlers, it was the latter who formed the greater por- 
 tion of this militia. From the open country of 
 Cavan, Armagh, Tyrone, Londonderry, and Fer- 
 managh, the rebellion swept the English and Scottish 
 settlers ; " for the wild Irish did not onlie massacre 
 all whom they could overmaster, but burnt tounes, 
 villages, castles, churches, and all habitable houses, 
 endeavouring to reduce, as far as their power could 
 reach, all to confused chaos." 1 Enniskillen was 
 saved by the bravery of its people, who again, fifty 
 years later, showed the stuff of which they were made. 
 Londonderry and Coleraine were safe, while the south 
 of Antrim and north of Down, and the settlement on 
 the borders of Tyrone and Donegal, had been rescued 
 from plunder. From these districts as centres the 
 settlers attacked the Irish. In the east, the regiments 
 were commanded by Chichester and Lord Conway, 
 1 Turner's Memoirs, p. 19. 
 
76 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 and by the natural leaders of the Scots, Lord Mont- 
 gomery, and Hamilton, Lord Clannaboye; in the 
 west the settlers of West Tyrone and East Donegal 
 rallied round two very capable Scotsmen, Sir William 
 and Sir Robert Stewart, who proved in the war that 
 was to follow, dashing partisan leaders. 1 To these 
 troops arms were sent by both the English and 
 Scottish Councils, while the settlers supplemented 
 this supply by purchasing arms. There is a proof of 
 this in the Register House of Edinburgh, in the shape 
 of a quaint bond, whereby Mure of Caldwell became 
 security that his kinsman Lord Clannaboye would 
 pay for 400 muskets at 10 pounds Scots each, which 
 he had purchased from the "Scottish War Office." 2 
 
 During the winter of 1641-42, these forces more 
 than held their own against the Irish, and after 
 Monro's arrival in April 1642, they were able, in 
 conjunction with him, to push southwards, and retake 
 and garrison Newry. In the west, too, the Stewarts 
 recovered the command of much of Tyrone and 
 Londonderry counties, and relieved Coleraine, which 
 had been hardly pressed. Thus the principal Scottish 
 settlements were freed, and many who had fled to 
 Scotland, either from Wentworth's tyranny or after 
 the rising of October 1641, began to return to Ulster. 
 One peculiar effect the rebellion had on the North 
 of Ireland — it swept away the Church established 
 by law, the bishops and most of the parish clergy- 
 
 1 Reid's History, chaps, vii. and viii. 
 
 2 Hamilton's MS., p. 46. 
 
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1 64 1. 77 
 
 men having perished or fled. In its place, the Scot- 
 tish army proceeded to establish a Presbyterian 
 Church. It would appear that it was the custom for 
 each regiment to have an ordained minister as chap- 
 lain, and to elect from the officers a regular kirk- 
 session. 1 In June 1642, the clergy and elders attached 
 to the Scottish regiments met as a Presbytery at Car- 
 rickfergus, and, in conjunction with a number of the 
 Scottish residents of Down and Antrim, petitioned 
 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 
 which met at St Andrews in July, to send over a 
 number of ministers. The Assembly consented, and 
 appointed certain members who had been settled as 
 ministers in Ireland before Wentworth's persecution, 
 to proceed on a mission to Ireland. This mission 
 the Assembly repeated next year; and in 1644, 
 a larger deputation was sent to carry the Solemn 
 League and Covenant to Ireland and to present it 
 to the people. The Assembly's deputation on this 
 occasion proceeded all through Ulster, as far south as 
 Sligo and Enniskillen, and both troops and settlers, 
 English as well as Scottish, adopted the Covenant in 
 great numbers. 2 It is evident that the great majority 
 of the settlers left in Ulster were Presbyterians ; for 
 not only would the Scots be so almost without excep- 
 tion, but very many of the English who had immi- 
 grated since 1610, belonged to the Puritan party. 
 
 Meanwhile the operations of Monro's little army 
 were sadly hampered for want of supplies. It is 
 1 Reid's History, vol. i. p. 370. 2 Ibid., chaps, ix., x. 
 
y8 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 doubtful whether his force ever reached the stipu- 
 lated number of 10,000, although it is certain that 
 4000 men joined it in the autumn of 1642. The 
 arrangement between the two Parliaments had been 
 that the English should pay the Scottish troops ; but 
 by the autumn of 1642, England was plunged in civil 
 war, and the money which had been raised for the 
 war in Ireland was seized to carry on war against 
 Charles. 1 The Scottish regiments, therefore, fared 
 very badly, and at times seem to have been driven to 
 live on the country in which they were settled. The 
 campaign of 1643 was not a brilliant one, although 
 ground was recovered. The winter found the troops 
 very discontented ; 2 they had received almost no pay 
 since they landed, and when news came of the pro- 
 posed expedition into England in support of the 
 Parliament, three of the regiments were no longer 
 to be held back, but returned to Scotland against 
 orders. 3 The Ulster settlers were greatly alarmed at 
 the prospect of being left unprotected should the rest 
 of the Scottish troops also go ; but fortunately a sup- 
 ply of money and of provisions arrived at Carrick- 
 fergus in April 1644 — a portion of the food being a 
 free gift of 3000 bolls of meal from the shire of Ayr. 
 About the same time, too, the Dutch showed their 
 sympathy with the cause of Protestantism in Ireland 
 by making a collection in all the churches of Holland 
 
 1 Rushworth, vol. iv. p. 775. 
 
 2 Turner's Memoirs, p. 29. 
 
 3 Reid's History, vol. i. p. 436. 
 
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1641. 79 
 
 by order of the States-General : they transmitted to 
 Ulster four shiploads of provisions and clothing, which 
 were distributed among both people and soldiery.* 
 
 Thus once more Presbyterianism was re-established 
 in the North of Ireland, and rapidly strengthened its 
 organisation, until, in 1647, there were thirty regular 
 congregations in Ulster. Meanwhile the war dragged 
 its slow length along, devastating the country horribly, 
 and causing terrible loss of life, with changing fortune, 
 and ever-varying parties, until Cromwell crossed in 
 1650, and in one dreadful campaign crushed the oppo- 
 sition of Catholic and Presbyterian alike, and estab- 
 lished the rule of the English Parliament. At first 
 Cromwell's Government pressed hardly on the Ulster 
 Presbyterians, and many of the settlers were scheduled 
 for transportation into Leinster and Munster on ac- 
 count of their having opposed the army of the Com- 
 monwealth. 2 Cromwell relented, however ; the orders 
 for transportation were not carried out, although 
 lands seem to have been found for some of the 
 Commonwealth soldiers in the northern counties. 3 
 Government allowances were made to the Presby- 
 terian clergy; and under Cromwell's strict rule the 
 North of Ireland seems to have recovered steadily 
 from the terrible blow of the Rebellion of October 
 1641. 
 
 1 Reid's History, vol. i. p. 437. 
 
 2 Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 187 and 552. 
 
 3 Prendergast's Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, p. 90. 
 
8o 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ULSTER FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE UNION. 
 
 'T^HE story of the Scots of Ulster during the cen- 
 tury and a half which succeed the Restoration 
 would indeed be almost too dreary for a Scotsman to 
 tell, were it not closed by the promise of brightness 
 and prosperity in the future. It is like a day of cruel 
 storm and grey leaden skies, which clears at sundown, 
 with the earnest of sunshine for the morrow. The 
 possibility of a brighter future which the Union gave, 
 has certainly been fulfilled in Ulster. When this 
 chapter of their history closed, the Scots of Ulster 
 were deeply discontented, were in great measure dis- 
 loyal to the Government, and desirous of a radical 
 change of institutions ; they are now among the most 
 loyal subjects of the British Crown. The country 
 was wretchedly poor, with waning trade and manu- 
 factures \ it is now filled with a well-to-do population, 
 while its trade arid staple manufactures show what a 
 strong race can do, even when it works under disad- 
 vantages, if it be but blessed with good government 
 
ULSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 8 1 
 
 and free laws. The material prosperity of Ulster is 
 a thing very evident ; it can be proved by statistics, 
 or seen with the eye. It shows in the humble pros- 
 perity of the small farmers of County Down, with 
 their carefully whitewashed cottages, and their care- 
 fully tended farms, cut up with their many hedge- 
 rows ; in their balances in the bank at Belfast ; their 
 belief in the Orange Society ; their deep attachment 
 to the Presbyterian Church ; their supreme ambition, 
 like their brethren in Scotland, if it be possible, to 
 breed a son who may " wag his pow in the pu'pit." 
 King James was right when he insisted that the 
 colonists should be fixed to the soil by leases for 
 long terms of years, or for life. It shows in the well- 
 ordered little country towns, with their broad streets, 
 and well-built churches adorned with handsome 
 spires ; their busy weekly markets ; and that surest 
 sign of a high-class population, — their well-washed, 
 clean-pinafored children. It shows in the perfervid 
 energy of her greater towns, especially Belfast ; in 
 the genius which their inhabitants evince for busi- 
 ness of all kinds ; in their zeal for religion, — call it 
 sectarianism if you will, the zeal shows at least vigour 
 and intensity; in their desire for education, which 
 must in course of time bring culture and refinement 
 in its train. There may be many faults of passion 
 and headstrong zeal in this Scottish Ulster, but there 
 is what far more than compensates, there is the first 
 necessity for a living organism, — abounding life. 
 The master-mind of Oliver Cromwell grasped the 
 
82 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 position in which the three kingdoms must stand if 
 they are to remain at peace with one another, and by 
 the exercise of his own strong, despotic will, swept 
 away their separate Parliaments, and made them in 
 reality one Commonwealth. The Restoration brought 
 back their separate Parliament to Ireland as well as 
 to Scotland; to both they were to prove a curse 
 instead of a blessing. Fortunately for Scotland, the 
 early years of the eighteenth century saw its Parlia- 
 ment ended ; the nineteenth was to be begun before 
 Ireland was united with its greater sister kingdoms. 
 With the Restoration ceased the intimate connection 
 which had existed between Scotland and her colony 
 in Ulster ; they had been kept together, in very great 
 measure, by their common religion, and now in both 
 the Presbyterian Churches fell on evil days, and 
 had to fight a long fight for very existence. In 
 Ireland the Scottish Church had not to wait long 
 before it received its quietus. Charles II. landed 
 at Dover on the 25th May 1660; his restoration 
 brought back Episcopacy as a matter of course ; but 
 if the Irish bishops had been wise men it need not 
 have brought any persecution of the Northern Pres- 
 byterians, for it was insanity for the two parties of 
 Protestants to quarrel in face of the enormous mass 
 of opposing Catholics. There was no Archbishop 
 Ussher now to restrain the bishops, so they went to 
 work with a will ; and within a year of the Restora- 
 tion every Presbyterian minister, save six or seven 
 who recanted, were driven from their churches ; they 
 
ULSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 8$ 
 
 were forbidden to preach, baptise, marry, or exercise 
 any function of the ministry. The old Scottish 
 writer Woodrow, in his ' History of the Sufferings 
 of the Church of Scotland,' gives a list of the ejected 
 clergy. The numbers show approximately how the 
 Scottish colony had recovered from the effects of 
 the Rebellion of 1641, and grown in strength dur- 
 ing the nine quiet years of Cromwell's government. 
 There were in 1660, sixty-eight Presbyterian ministers 
 in Ireland, all save one in Ulster, and of these sixty- 
 one left their churches, and seven conformed to the 
 Established Church. 1 Woodrow gives his reason for 
 quoting the list : " Because I have always found the 
 elder Presbyterian ministers in Ireland reckoning 
 themselves upon the same bottom with, and as it 
 were a branch of, the Church of Scotland." 2 The 
 Presbyterian Church in Ireland, although it soon got 
 back its liberty to some extent, did not entirely 
 recover the blow of 1661, until the next century 
 was nearly run out. The number of Presbyterian 
 churches in Ulster gives some indication of the 
 population of Scottish origin, although a moiety of 
 the Presbyterians were English. The extent of the 
 emigration from Scotland is, however, more exactly 
 given by Sir William Petty in his ' Political Survey of 
 Ireland in 1672.' 3 He takes the total population of 
 
 1 Reid's History, vol. ii. p. 266. 
 
 2 Woodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scot- 
 land, vol. i. p. 155. 
 
 3 Sir William Petty's Political Survey of Ireland (London, 
 1719), PP- 9> 18, 20. 
 
84 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 the country at 1,100,000, and calculates that 800,000 
 were Irish, 200,000 English, and 100,000 Scots, — of 
 course the English were scattered all over Ireland, 
 the Scots concentrated in Ulster. Petty divides the 
 English into " 100,000 legal Protestants or Conform- 
 ists, and the rest are Presbyterians, Independents, 
 Anabaptists, and Quakers." He states distinctly that 
 a very large emigration had taken place from Scotland, 
 after Cromwell settled the country in 1 65 2. The power 
 of the Scots must, indeed, have been so considerable 
 and so much feared as to be greatly exaggerated, for 
 it was asserted in Parliament in 1656, that they "are 
 able to raise 40,000 fighting men at any time." 1 
 
 Charles II.'s reign brought many remarkable 
 changes, which had much effect on Ulster as well 
 as on the rest of Ireland. It saw the beginning of 
 the " Regium Donum," the State grant to the Pres- 
 byterians. The persecution did not continue as hotly 
 as it was begun in 1661 ; gradually the Presbyterians 
 recovered a portion of their freedom ; gradually their 
 ministers returned. In 1672 the Presbyterian clergy 
 approached the King directly. The good-natured 
 monarch received them kindly, and granted them 
 from the Irish revenues a sum of ^1200, to be given 
 annually towards their support. It was the begin- 
 ning of the State aid to the Irish Presbyterian 
 Church, which continued with a slight interval until 
 put an end to by the Disestablishment Act of 1 86 9. 2 
 
 1 Montgomery MSS., p. 65, note. 
 
 2 Reid's History, vol. ii. p. 334. 
 
ULSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 85 
 
 The other and deeper mark made on Irish history 
 was the beginning of that repression of Irish indus- 
 tries which was to come into full force in Queen 
 Anne's time. The first blow struck was an Act 
 which forbade the exportation of cattle from Ireland 
 to England; 1 the second, when by the fifteenth of 
 Charles II., Ireland, which up to this time in com- 
 mercial matters had been held as part of England, 
 was brought under the Navigation Acts, and her 
 ships treated as if belonging to foreigners. 2 
 
 The Revolution of 1688 was accomplished almost 
 without bloodshed in England; in Scotland the 
 struggle really finished at Killiecrankie ; in Ireland 
 it was long and bloody. Once more it was the old 
 race difference — a cleavage in race made more bitter 
 by that terrible land question, the creation of the 
 great settlements of Elizabeth and James's time, and 
 of the yet more violent settlement of Cromwell. The 
 Revolution in England of necessity brought civil war 
 to Ireland. The greater portion of Ireland remained 
 loyal to James II. ; the north at once declared for 
 William III. The Protestants of Ulster universally 
 took arms, but their raw militia had little chance 
 against the army which Tyrconnel, the Lord-Deputy, 
 had got together in support of James II. 3 Rapidly 
 he overran Ulster, until only at two points was the 
 cause of Protestantism and of William of Orange 
 
 1 Leland's History of Ireland, vol. iii. p. 448. 
 
 2 Macpherson's History of Commerce, vol. iii. p. 621. 
 
 3 Reid's History, chap. xix. 
 
86 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 upheld — at Enniskillen and at Londonderry. It is 
 not possible to retell the story of the heroic defence 
 they made, for it has been told by Macaulay in a 
 chapter among the noblest in our historical literature, 
 and inferior pen dare not meddle with the theme. 1 
 It is war on a small scale, but, like the struggle of the 
 Greeks at Thermopylae or at Marathon, it is a fight of 
 heroes. Nor is it necessary to recount the war by 
 which William III. regained Ireland in 1690, save to 
 regret that the great Dutchman's broad-minded scheme 
 of religious toleration was not carried out, and the 
 disgraceful repressive measures of the next reign ren- 
 dered impossible. One lasting benefit William III. 
 conferred on Ulster ; he did his best to encourage the 
 linen manufacture, especially by inducing colonies of 
 French Protestant refugees, driven from France by 
 the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, to settle in 
 north-east Ireland, with Lisburn as their centre. 
 These Huguenots seem to have been men of skill and 
 enterprise, many of them of rank and education. 
 They received inducements to settle, their churches 
 having special privileges, even when in the next reign 
 the most severe laws were passed against Dissent. 2 
 
 One strange memorial of this reign we have — the 
 list of the survivors of the brave men who defended 
 Londonderry, and who signed an address to William 
 and Mary on the 29th July 1689, immediately after 
 the siege was raised. The names are so strikingly 
 
 1 Macaulay's History of England, chap. xii. 
 
 2 See series of articles in ' Ulster Journal of Archaeology. ' 
 
ULSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 87 
 
 familiar to a Scotsman, that the list might be taken 
 from an Edinburgh Directory. Of course there are 
 many good English names, like that delightful sur- 
 name which Thackeray has made beloved as long as 
 the English language lasts — Dobbin; but the Scot- 
 tish surnames are very numerous. There are five 
 Hamiltons, and three Stewarts, and three Cunning- 
 hams, and three Mansons, besides representatives of 
 very many of our Lowland Scottish surnames. One 
 very Scottish name, too — as if to act as a commentary 
 on the manner in which Ulster was treated in the 
 Separation Bill of 1886 — that of Gladstone, spelled 
 in the old Scottish way, "Ja. Gledstanes." 1 
 
 The end of the seventeenth century probably saw 
 the last of the emigration of Scots into Ulster ; while 
 for years that were to follow the Scots were to leave 
 Ulster in thousands for America. " For some years 
 after the Revolution a steady stream of Scotch Pres- 
 byterians had poured into the country, attracted by 
 the cheapness of the farms and by the new openings 
 for trade." "In 17 15, Archbishop Synge estimated 
 that 50,000 Scotch families had settled in Ulster 
 since the Revolution." 2 • u?o ? 1 
 
 We now come to two groups of measures which were 
 to mould the history of Ireland during the eighteenth 
 century, and whose baneful effects are still felt in 
 the country — the repression of her woollen manufac- 
 
 1 Walker's True Account of the Siege of Londonderry : 
 London, 1689. 
 
 2 Lecky's History, vol. ii. pp. 400, 401. 
 
88 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 tures, and the penal laws in matters of religion. The 
 commerce of Ireland, after two devastating civil wars, 
 cannot have been extensive, or of a magnitude which 
 ought to have excited the envy or fear of England ; 
 but in the end of the seventeenth century the state of 
 England was not a prosperous one, and her woollen 
 manufacturers imagined that competition from Ireland 
 was injuring them. The consequence was that in 
 1698, Parliament petitioned William III. to have 
 laws enacted for the protection of the English woollen 
 manufacture by the suppression of the Irish; and 
 accordingly, next year Government passed an Act 
 through the Irish Parliament, which was utterly sub- 
 servient, forbidding any exportation of Irish woollens 
 from the country. It was afterwards followed by 
 Acts forbidding the Irish to export their wool to any 
 country save England — the English manufacturers 
 desiring to get the wool of the sister kingdom at their 
 own price. 1 
 
 The penal laws against Roman Catholics and 
 Presbyterians are the special glory of Queen Anne's 
 time ; hers was essentially a High Church regime, 
 and in the Irish Parliament the High Church party 
 ruled supreme. The Acts against Roman Catholics 
 denied them the exercise of their worship, and laid 
 the great body of the people of Ireland under pains 
 and penalties so cruel and degrading that the laws 
 could not in reality be put in force to their full extent. 
 Those against Presbyterians were not so severe, but 
 1 Lecky's History, vol. ii. p. 210. 
 
ULSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 89 
 
 were sufficiently galling, and strangely unreasonable, 
 as being applied against the very men who had been 
 the stoutest bulwark of Protestantism not twenty 
 years before. The blow against the Protestant Dis- 
 senters was delivered through a Test Act, which 
 compelled all serving in any capacity under Govern- 
 ment, all practising before the law courts, all acting 
 in any town council, to take the Communion of the 
 Established Church. The Act at once emptied the 
 town councils of the Ulster towns; it deprived of 
 their commissions many who were serving as magis- 
 trates in the counties. It drove out of the Corpora- 
 tion of Londonderry several of the very men who had 
 fought through the siege of 1689. 1 A strange com- 
 mentary on the Test Act was given in 1715, when 
 Scotland was in ferment owing to the Jacobite Rebel- 
 lion, and trouble was feared in Ireland. The services 
 of the Presbyterians were accepted for the militia, and 
 then Government passed an Act of Indemnity to free 
 them from the penalties they had incurred by serving 
 their country and breaking the Test Act. 2 
 
 These two groups of repressive measures fashioned 
 the history of Ireland during the first seventy years 
 of the last century. The country was utterly wretched, 
 fairly broken-hearted. Its agriculture was miserable, 
 and chronic scarcity alternated with actual famine ; it 
 had little commerce, and no manufactures, save the 
 slowly increasing linen manufacture of Ulster. It is 
 hard to say whether the gloom is illumined or intensified 
 
 1 Reid's History, vol. ii. p. 511. 2 Ibid., vol. iii. p. 69. 
 
90 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 during the early years of the eighteenth century by the 
 lurid splendour of Dean Swift. His genius grasped 
 the facts with regard to the material needs of Ireland ; 
 either his madness or his clerical profession rendered 
 him blind to the utter barbarity of the religious posi- 
 tion. With regard to Ulster there are two outstand- 
 ing facts in her history besides the rise of the linen 
 manufacture — the steady emigration, and the rise of 
 the Secession Church. The latter is a strong proof 
 of the kinship to Scotland ; the former is, perhaps, 
 even a stronger of the blood which was in her sons, 
 for they left Ulster, as their forefathers had come to 
 it, in search of a more kindly home across the seas. 
 The emigration from Ulster is one of the most strik- 
 ing features of Irish history, and one which had a 
 most marked effect on the vital force of the United 
 States of America, which drew some of its best blood 
 from the Presbyterians of the North of Ireland. 
 There was nothing to induce the active-minded men 
 of the North to remain in Ireland, and they left in 
 crowds, going away with wives and children, never to 
 return. In 1718, we have mention of "both min- 
 isters and people going off." In 1728, Archbishop 
 Boulter states "that above 4200 men, women, and 
 children have been shipped off from hence for the 
 West Indies within three years." He regrets, too, 
 that almost all were Protestants. In consequence of 
 the famine of 1740, it is stated that for " several years 
 afterwards, 12,000 emigrants annually left Ulster for 
 the American plantations;" while, from 1771 to 
 
ULSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 91 
 
 1773, "the whole emigration from Ulster is esti- 
 mated at 30,000, of whom 10,000 are weavers." 1 
 
 The Presbyterian Church in Ireland moved in 
 parallel lines to that of the mother country during 
 the whole of the century. There was no training 
 college in Ireland, and most of the licentiates for the 
 Irish Church studied at Glasgow. Naturally they 
 took their theology from the school in which they 
 were trained, and as it was the age of the Moderates 
 in Scotland, so it was the time of the Non-subscribers 
 in Ireland. In 1708, when the vials of the wrath of 
 the High Church party were opened on the heads of 
 the devoted Presbyterians, there were one hundred 
 and thirty Presbyterian congregations in Ulster; 2 
 but there was not much life or heart in the Church. 
 In 1726 the Non- subscribers — that is to say, the 
 party who refused to sign the Scottish Confession of 
 Faith — formed a separate synod, which weakened 
 the Church and lowered its tone. Then followed 
 in Scotland the secession of Ralph Erskine and his 
 brethren, and in 1747 this Secession Church planted 
 her first congregation in Ireland; soon the Isle of 
 Saints was blessed with both Burghers and Anti- 
 burghers. These titles are but names in Scotland 
 now, where once they were the watchwords of bitter 
 sectarian strife. The Secession Church in Ireland, as 
 in the mother country, was the Church of the poor ; 
 
 1 Lecky's History, vol. ii. p. 260. Reid's History, chap. 
 xxvi. Froucle's English in Ireland, vol. i. p. 436. 
 
 2 Reid ; s History, vol. iii. p. 2. 
 
92 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 and in Ireland the poor were so very poor, that it 
 was with difficulty that ordinances were kept up. 
 Presbyterian dissent was, in truth, the protest from 
 the humble members of the body, against the non- 
 orthodox doctrines which the "New Light" move- 
 ment had introduced into the Church. This con- 
 stant intercommunication between the Presbyterian 
 Churches in Ireland and Scotland is a fact worthy 
 of careful attention. 
 
 Meanwhile the linen manufacture was growing in 
 Ulster. In William III.'s time the exports amount- 
 ed to ;£6ooo annually; in 1741 they had risen to 
 ^£480,000; in 1 77 1, to ^i^ijooo. 1 Then came 
 a check, and they fell considerably, causing great 
 distress among the weaving population of Ulster. 
 Shortly after this last date we have a very vivid and 
 minute picture of Ireland given in Arthur Young's 
 ' Tour in Ireland.' 2 He visited Ulster in the years 
 when the American War was beginning, in the result 
 of which Ulster was deeply interested, for in it many 
 of her sons fought bravely against England ; when 
 Paul Jones showed the weakness of England, for he 
 ranged the coast, and actually took a man-of-war out 
 of Belfast Lough. 3 Young did not find Ulster in a 
 very happy condition. " The increase of the people 
 is very great, extravagantly so; and is felt severely 
 
 1 Macpherson's History of Commerce, vol. iii. p. 228. 
 
 2 A Tour in Ireland, made in the years 1776-77-78, by 
 Arthur Young. 
 
 3 Benn's History of Belfast, p. 620. 
 
ULSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 93 
 
 by emigration being stopped at present" — stopped, 
 America being closed on account of the war. Rents 
 were very low, " had fallen in four years 3 s. an acre, 
 and are but just beginning to get up again." The 
 people were very poor, living chiefly "on potatoes 
 and milk and oat bread ; " their little farms divided 
 and subdivided until "the portions are so small 
 they cannot live on them." In almost every cottage, 
 from Newry northwards to Loch Swilly, he found 
 the weaving or spinning of flax going on. "A 
 weaver will earn from is. to is. 4d., a farming 
 labourer 8d." 
 
 Ulster was, indeed, poor and miserable in these 
 years. Her staple trade had suffered one of those 
 collapses which come occasionally to all manufac- 
 tures, and the exports of linen had fallen from 
 25,000,000 yards in 1 77 1, to 17,000,000 in 1774. 1 
 Hundreds of weavers were out of work ; and to add 
 to the misery, there had been additions to rents made 
 on some of the great estates, especially Lord Done- 
 gal's, and many tenants were turned from their hold- 
 ings. 2 The misery was greater than they could bear, 
 and the Protestants of the North had recourse to 
 deeds of violence. " Armed bands of misguided 
 individuals, calling themselves ' Hearts of Oak ' and 
 ; Hearts of Steel,' traversed the country, administered 
 unlawful oaths, dictated terms as to rents and tithes 
 to the proprietors, and perpetrated many other acts 
 
 1 Macpherson's History of Commerce, vol. iv. p. 60. 
 
 2 Froude's Ireland, vol. ii. p. 130. 
 
94 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 of insubordination and outrage." l On a people so 
 situated, the news of the Rebellion of the American 
 colonies had a tremendous effect, all the greater 
 because so many thousands had left Ulster during 
 the last twenty years for the American colonies, and 
 because so many of the " Hearts of Steel" were among 
 the staunchest soldiers in the American army. 2 The 
 Protestants of Ulster became strongly republican, in- 
 tensely sympathetic with the revolted colonies, and 
 sternly set on obtaining redress of their own political 
 grievances. The condition of the country pointed 
 to the necessity for the abolition of the restrictions 
 on trade ; the temper of the people demanded the 
 abolition of the religious disabilities. The reforms 
 were obtained in a strange way. The strain of the 
 war with France and America compelled the British 
 Government to strip Ireland of troops, so that when 
 rumours of a threatened invasion reached the coun- 
 try, she seemed as if she would be an easy prey to 
 a French army. The emergency roused the spirit 
 of the people; and in 1778, all over the North of 
 Ireland, the Protestants, high and low, began to 
 arm and form themselves into volunteer regiments. 3 
 Meanwhile the Irish Parliament, under the influence 
 of that group of orators whom Grattan led, awoke 
 out of the sleep of a century, and, close corporation 
 though it was, began to move for reform. The Vol- 
 
 1 Reid's History, vol. iii. p. 338. 
 
 - Lecky's History, vol. iv. p. 350. 
 
 3 Froude's Ireland, vol. ii. p. 254. Benn's Belfast, p. 630. 
 
ULSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 95 
 
 unteers threw their weight into the same scale, and 
 made themselves a serious political power by uniting 
 into a common organisation which embraced all the 
 corps of Ulster. The Government yielded, and by a 
 series of Acts passed through the Westminster Parlia- 
 ment from 1780 to 1782, Ireland was freed from the 
 restrictions which had destroyed her woollen trade, 
 while her shipping was accorded the same privileges 
 as English. At the same time the penal Acts against 
 the Catholics were abolished, and the Presbyterians 
 were freed from the Test Act, so that public life was re- 
 opened to them once more. This, however, did not 
 satisfy the Ulster men. At a great assembly of dele- 
 gates from the volunteer corps, representing 25,000 
 men, which met in uniform in the great church of 
 Dungannon, a series of resolutions were passed de- 
 manding the independence of the Irish Parliament. 1 
 This, too, the Government yielded; and in 1782 
 there began to sit what is usually known as Grattan's 
 Parliament. 
 
 The Volunteers reached the height of their power 
 and fame in the Dungannon meeting ; and although 
 they intended to keep up their organisation for the 
 purpose of retaining political power, they gradually 
 decayed, and passed out of sight. For the rest 
 of the century Ulster was greatly excited by political 
 feeling, the French Revolution fanning the flame 
 which the revolt of the American colonies had 
 kindled. The North became mad for fraternity, 
 1 Froude's Ireland, vol. ii. p. 334. 
 
96 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 and the Society of the " United Irishmen " was 
 inaugurated at Belfast in 1791. 1 There was to be 
 no more Catholic or Protestant — all were to be 
 united in one brotherhood of equality and fraternity. 
 The Society at first embraced all who desired reform, 
 and many of the best of the North of Ireland Presby- 
 terians joined it ; but gradually the old cleavage 
 between Protestant and Catholic began in its midst, 
 and as its more violent members hurried it down- 
 wards towards open rebellion, the split became 
 wider, and in 1795 tne association of Orangemen 
 sprang into existence. In this way, when rebellion 
 actually broke out in 1798, the struggle was not so 
 severe in Ulster as it would otherwise have been, 
 although much good blood was spilt of the Presby- 
 terians of Down and Antrim. The Rebellion of 1798 
 brought in its train, and as its inevitable issue, the 
 Union, which once again united the English and 
 Scottish settlers of Ulster under a common Govern- 
 ment with the race from which they spring. The 
 Union rendered possible that enormous advance in 
 contentment and prosperity which Ulster has made 
 during this century. 
 
 1 Benn's Belfast, p. 643. 
 
97 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE SCOTTISH BLOOD IN THE ULSTER MEN 
 OF TO-DAY. 
 
 TT is difficult to bring home to men who do not 
 know Ireland and its history, the fact that there 
 is a deep, strongly marked difference between the 
 Ulster men and the Irish, and that that difference is 
 not accidental, not the divergence arising out of dif- 
 ferent surroundings, not even that springing from 
 antagonistic religious training, but is the deeper, 
 stronger-marked cleavage of differing race. It is as 
 distinct as that between any two varieties of any 
 other animal — say between mastiff and stag-hound. 
 Of course, intermarriage gradually shades off the 
 difference of type ; but take the Scots of the Ards 
 of Down, who have probably scarcely intermarried 
 with the Irish during the 300 years they have been 
 in the island, and contrast them with the inhabitants 
 of West Donegal, who have probably scarcely mixed 
 their blood with the English, and you see the race 
 difference. It is strange for any man who is accus- 
 
 G 
 
 "1 
 
98 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 tomed to walk through the southern districts of 
 Scotland, and to meet the country people going 
 about their daily work in their everyday clothes and 
 everyday manner, to cross into Ireland and wander 
 through the country roads of Down or Antrim. He 
 is in a country which is supposed to be passionately 
 anxious to set up a separate nationality, and yet he 
 cannot feel as if he were away from his own kith and 
 kin. The men who are driving the carts are like the 
 men at home ; the women at the cottage doors are in 
 build and carriage like the mothers of our southern 
 Highlands ; the signs of the little shops in the vil- 
 lages bear well-known names — Paterson, perhaps, or 
 Johnstone, or Sloan ; the boy sitting on the " dyke " 
 with nothing to do, is whistling " A man's a man for 
 a' that." He goes into a village inn, and is served 
 by a six-foot, loosely-hung Scottish Borderer, worthy 
 to have served " drams " to " the Shepherd and Chris- 
 topher North " ; and when he leaves the little inn 
 he sees by the sign that his host bears the name of 
 " James Hay," and his wonder ceases. The want of 
 strangeness in the men and women is what strikes 
 him as so strange. Then he crosses the Bann, and 
 gets into a different region. He leaves behind 
 him the pleasant green hills which shut in Belfast 
 Lough, the great sweep of rich plain which Lough 
 Neagh may well ask to show cause why it should 
 not be annexed to its inland sea; he gets within 
 sight of the South Derry hills, and the actors in the 
 scene partly change. Some are very familiar; the 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. 99 
 
 smart maid at his inn is very like the housemaid at 
 home, and the principal grocer of the little village is 
 the " very image " of the elder who taught him at 
 the Sunday-school ; but he meets a donkey-cart, and 
 neither the donkey nor its driver seem somehow or 
 other to be kin to him; and the "Father" passes 
 him, and looks at him as at a stranger who is visiting 
 his town, — then the Scotsman knows that he is out 
 of Scotland and into Ireland. It is not in Belfast 
 that he feels the likeness to home so much, for every- 
 body is walking fast just as they are in Glasgow, so he 
 cannot notice them particularly, and, of course, the 
 " loafers " at the public-house doors, who are certainly 
 not moving smartly, do not count for anything in either 
 town; but it is in the country districts — at Newtown- 
 Ards, or Antrim, where life is leisurely, that he recog- 
 nises that he is among his own people. While it is 
 in a town which is in the border -land between 
 Scottish and Irish, say at Coleraine, on a Saturday 
 market-day, that he has the difference of the two 
 types in face and figure brought strongly before him. 
 Some seem foreign to him, others remind him of his 
 " ain countrie," and make him feel that the district he 
 is in, is in reality the land of the Scot. The manner 
 in which the two races have lived side by side for 
 three centuries and are yet separate still, is stated 
 with fine courtesy and good feeling in the account 
 of the parish of Dungiven in Derry, written by 
 the rector, for an old Statistical Account of Ire- 
 land. — The book was never completed, like so 
 
IOO THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 many noble attempts in Ireland. — " The inhabitants 
 of the parish are divided into two races of men, as 
 totally distinct as if they belonged to different coun- 
 tries and regions. These (in order that we may 
 avoid the invidious names of Protestant and Roman 
 Catholic, which indeed have little to say in the 
 matter) may be distinguished by the usual names 
 of Scotch and Irish; the former including the de- 
 scendants of all the Scotch and English colonists 
 who have emigrated hither since the time of James 
 I., and the latter comprehending the native and 
 original inhabitants of the country. Than these, no 
 two classes of men can be more distinct : the Scotch 
 are remarkable for their comfortable houses and 
 appearance, regular conduct and perseverance in 
 business, and their being almost entirely manufac- 
 turers ; the Irish, on the other hand, are more neg- 
 ligent in their habitations, less regular and guarded 
 in their conduct, and have a total indisposition to 
 manufacture. Both are industrious, but the industry 
 of the Scotch is steady and patient, and directed 
 with foresight, while that of the Irish is rash, adven- 
 turous, and variable." 1 
 
 It is not necessary to follow the history of Ulster 
 during the present century, for the Union brought 
 back the English and Scottish settlers into full com- 
 munion with the great national life which they had a 
 right to share, and opened up to them a part in the 
 great future of what we lovingly call the English 
 1 Statistical Account of Ireland, Dublin, 1814, vol. ii. p. 307. 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. IOI 
 
 nation. The legislation of 1782 and of the following 
 session broke the shackles which had fettered hands 
 which Nature had fashioned to be skilful in man- 
 ufactures, and took away that clog on intellectual 
 powers which were fitted to excel in commercial pur- 
 suits ; while the Union of 1801 induced these men of 
 the North to become in very deed citizens of the 
 United Kingdom, instead of living, as they had been 
 wont to do, with their hearts across the Atlantic, in 
 company with their brethren who were serving under 
 the shadow of the Stars and Stripes. It is profitable, 
 however, standing as we do among the closing years 
 of the nineteenth century, to look back on the work 
 accomplished by our kinsmen who left Scotland in 
 the seventeenth century, and to trace the indelible 
 marks which they have left on the " sands of time," 
 and on the face of Ulster. And we may safely assert 
 that they were strong men, full of firm determination 
 and governed by deep religious feeling, because, after 
 three centuries, their descendants bear not a few 
 traces of the strength of character and fire of their 
 forefathers. The Ulster of 1888 tells, deeply written 
 across its face, the story of the emigration which 
 began in 1606. 
 
 It is necessary to recapitulate what this emigration 
 amounted to, and what effect it really had on Ireland. 
 The settlement made by Hugh Montgomery and 
 James Hamilton, in 1606, opened up the county of 
 Down to Scottish emigrants. They took possession 
 of the whole of the north of the county, but they 
 
102 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 were satisfied with the arable lands which they found 
 there, and did not intrude on the hill-country of the 
 southern baronies, which therefore remained Irish 
 and Roman Catholic. To the west of the county 
 the Scots were met by the English colony which 
 Chichester had founded at Belfast, and which spread 
 up the river Lagan, along both its banks, towards 
 Hillsborough, on the County Down side, and far into 
 County Armagh on the west. Their common Puri- 
 tanism formed a bond of union between these Eng- 
 lish and Scottish colonists. It made them unite and 
 form into communities wherever they met, whether 
 on the banks of the Lagan or northward throughout 
 the length and breadth of County Antrim, when it 
 was opened up to settlers by Sir Arthur Chichester 
 along the shores of Belfast Lough, and by Macdonnel 
 northward to the Giant's Causeway. The only dis- 
 trict of this county not thoroughly colonised were 
 the highlands along the north-east shore. Then 
 came James's great scheme of colonisation in 1610, 
 which threw open other six counties for English and 
 Scottish settlers. In some of these counties, and in 
 some parts of them, the settlements were successful ; 
 in others they failed to take root. In Armagh the 
 British colony took firm hold, because, as soon as 
 the county was opened up, settlers flocked into it 
 across the borders from Down, and in even greater 
 numbers from the English colony in Antrim. On 
 the other hand, the " plantation " of Cavan was, 
 comparatively speaking, a failure. In County Tyrone 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. 103 
 
 the British settlers did not invade the mountainous 
 country on the borders of Londonderry county, but 
 contented themselves with the finer lands in the 
 basin of the Mourne, and on the shores of Lough 
 Neagh, and along the streams which flow into it. 
 Londonderry county was, during the early years of 
 the Settlement, left very much to itself by the "Irish 
 Society of London," which kept its contract largely 
 in the direction of drawing its rents — an operation 
 which is still performed by the London Companies, 
 the valuation of the Londoners' property being stated 
 in the Government return for last year at ^77,000 
 per annum. 1 At the mouths of the two rivers which 
 drain the county, however, the London Society 
 founded the towns of Londonderry and Coleraine, 
 and these as time went on became ports by which 
 emigrants entered and spread all over the fertile 
 lands of the county. In Donegal the British only 
 attempted to colonise the eastern portion j while 
 in Fermanagh the Scots seemed to be so little 
 at home that they handed over their lands to the 
 English, who here established a strong colony, 
 from which have sprung some of the best -known 
 names among the English in Ireland. Into these 
 districts of Ulster both English and Scottish emi- 
 grants, but especially the latter, continued to stream 
 at intervals during the whole of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 The two counties which have been the most 
 1 Thorn's Irish Almanac, p. 736. 
 
104 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 thoroughly transformed by this emigration are the 
 two which are nearest Scotland, and were the first 
 opened up for emigrants. These two have been 
 completely altered in nationality and in religion. 
 They have become British, and in the main, certainly 
 Scottish. Perhaps no better proof can be given than 
 the family names of the inhabitants. Some years 
 ago, a patient local antiquary took the voters' list of 
 County Down " of those rated above £\2 for poor- 
 rates," 1 and analysed it carefully. There were 
 10,028 names on the list, and these fairly represented 
 the whole proper names of the county. He found 
 that the following names occurred oftenest, and ar- 
 ranged them in order of frequency — Smith, Martin, 
 M'Kie, Moore, Brown, Thompson, Patterson, John- 
 son, Stewart, Wilson, Graham, Campbell, Robinson, 
 Bell, Hamilton, Morrow, Gibson, Boyd, Wallace, 
 and Magee. He dissected as carefully the voters' list 
 for County Antrim, 2 in which there were 9538 names, 
 and found that the following were at the top : Thomp- 
 son, Wilson, Stewart, Smith, Moore, Boyd, Johnson, 
 M'Millan, Brown, Bell, Campbell, M'Neill, Crawford, 
 M'Alister, Hunter, Macaulay, Robinson, Wallace, 
 Millar, Kennedy, and Hill. The list has a very 
 Scottish flavour altogether, although it may be noted 
 that the names that are highest on the list are those 
 which are common to both England and Scotland ; 
 for it may be taken for granted that the English 
 
 1 Ulster Journal of Archaeology, vol. vi. p. 77. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 323. 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. 105 
 
 "Thompson " has swallowed up the Scottish " Thom- 
 son," that " Moore " includes the Ayrshire " Muir," 
 and that the Annandale "Johnstones" have been 
 merged by the writer in the English "Johnsons." 
 One other point is very striking — that the great 
 Ulster name of " O'Neill " is awanting, and also 
 the Antrim " Macdonnel." The scrutiny was in- 
 teresting, too, as showing that certain peculiarly 
 English and Scottish surnames of less frequency 
 were localised in certain parishes, and only found 
 in these ; a colony had settled on that spot in 
 the seventeenth century, and there their descend- 
 ants remained. Taking Down and Antrim together, 
 twenty-five surnames covered 17 per cent of the 
 population. Another strong proof of the Scottish 
 blood of the Ulster men may be found by taking 
 the annual reports presented to the General Assembly 
 of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, held in June 
 1887. Here are the names of the men, lay and 
 clerical, who sign these reports, the names being 
 taken as they occur : J. W. Whigham, Jackson 
 Smith, Hamilton Magee, Thomas Armstrong, Wil- 
 liam Park, J. M. Rodgers, David Wilson, George 
 Macfarland, Thomas Lyle, W. Rogers, J. B. Wylie, 
 W. Young, E. F. Simpson, Alex. Turnbull, John 
 Malcolm, John H. Orr. Probably the reports of 
 our three Scottish Churches taken together could 
 not produce so large an average of Scottish sur- 
 names. 
 
 Perhaps the most characteristic outcome of the 
 
106 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 Scottish colonisation of Ulster is the Presbyterian 
 Church of Ireland. Its career since the Union has 
 been highly honourable, and one which gives promise 
 of good work in the future ; for it has been steadily 
 consolidating, and closing its ranks, in presence of 
 the great masses of its opponents. In 1818, a union 
 was brought about between the two bodies of non-con- 
 forming Presbyterians who bore the quaint Scottish 
 titles of Burghers and Anti-burghers, and they became 
 a " Secession Church"; in 1840, this Secession Church 
 made up its differences with the main body of Pres- 
 byterians, and formed the Presbyterian Church of 
 Ireland. The United Church has since gone on 
 striking its roots deeper and deeper into Ulster 
 society. The Disestablishment Act of 1869 put an 
 end to the Regium Donum — the grant to the Pres- 
 byterian Church, begun by Charles I. This endow- 
 ment had been given, with one slight break, every 
 year since its institution, had been frequently in- 
 creased, and in the last year it was voted, amounted 
 to ^3 9,000. The clergy who had received allow- 
 ances from the Regium Donum were, however, en- 
 titled to allowances for life; these as a body they 
 commuted for a slump sum, and handed over to the 
 Church the sum of ^587,735, to form a permanent 
 endowment for the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. 
 The interest of this sum has been supplemented by 
 a Sustentation Fund. 
 
 The Presbyterian Church of Ireland now numbers 
 over 550 congregations, and there are, besides, small 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. 107 
 
 United Presbyterian and Reformed Presbyterian 
 Churches. 1 The Presbyterians number over half a 
 million — about one-tenth of the population of the 
 country. The Episcopalian Church claims over 
 600,000. The Presbyterians may with safety be 
 taken as representing with sufficient accuracy the 
 Scots of Ulster. The manner in which the Presby- 
 terians are distributed is itself sufficient proof of this. 
 Ulster claims fifteen-sixteenths of them, and they are 
 found just where we know that the Scots settled. 
 In Antrim they constitute 45 per cent of a total 
 population of 422,000; in Down, 40 per cent of a 
 population just under 300,000 ; while in London- 
 derry they are 33 per cent; in Tyrone, 19; and in 
 Armagh, 16 per cent of the population. But it is 
 when we come to examine the details of the census 
 of 1 88 1 that the clearest traces of the Scottish 
 emigration are to be found. Down has only 40 per 
 cent of Presbyterians, but that is because the south 
 of the county was never colonised, and is still Roman 
 Catholic. The old Scottish colony in Upper Clanna- 
 boye and the Great Ards is still nearly as Presby- 
 terian as in 1630. It has already been recorded 
 how James Hamilton, immediately after settling in 
 1606, raised churches and placed "learned and 
 pious ministers from Scotland " in the six parishes 
 of his estate — Bangor, Killinchy, Holywood, Bally- 
 halbert, Dundonald, and Killyleagh. These par- 
 ishes have gone on flourishing, so that when 
 1 Report of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, 1S87. 
 
108 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 the census collector did his rounds through 
 Hamilton's old estate in 1881, 1 he found that it 
 contained 29,678 inhabitants; and that although it 
 was situated in what has been called the most 
 Catholic country in Europe, only 3444 Roman 
 Catholics were there to be found, as against 17,205 
 Presbyterians. For two centuries and a half these 
 " Westlan' Whigs " have stood true to their Scottish 
 Church. The record of Hugh Montgomery's settle- 
 ment is quite as curious. His old headquarters, 
 Newtown-Ards, has grown into a flourishing little 
 manufacturing town ; and Donaghadee is a big 
 village well known as a ferry for Scotland. Still 
 they remain "true blue" Presbyterian. Mont- 
 gomery's estate is pretty well covered by the four 
 parishes of Newtown-Ards, Grey Abbey, Comber, and 
 Donaghadee. These have a united population of 
 2 6,559; tne Presbyterians number 16,714, and the 
 Roman Catholics only 1370 — the balance being 
 mainly Episcopalians and Methodists. In Armagh 
 and in Fermanagh, on the other hand, the Episco- 
 palians are more numerous than the Presbyterians. 
 In the former there are 32 per cent belonging to the 
 Church of Ireland, and only 16 to the Presbyterian 
 Church ; while in the latter there are only 2 per 
 cent of Presbyterians, as against 36 of Episco- 
 palians. The balance of nationalities and of re- 
 ligions remains to all appearance what the colonisa- 
 tion of the seventeenth century made it, and that 
 1 Detailed Census of Ireland, 1881, County Down. 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. IO9 
 
 notwithstanding the great emigration from Ulster 
 during the eighteenth century. The only strange 
 change is, that Belfast, which was at its foundation 
 an English town, should so soon have become in 
 the main Scottish, and should remain such unto 
 this day. 1 
 
 The most outstanding feature of Irish industry is 
 the linen manufacture. In this the Scots have done 
 their full share of work, although it cannot be said 
 that they have any right to claim any exclusive credit 
 for its present importance. It is indeed altogether 
 the creation of the colonists, but English and French 
 have contributed their share as well as the Scots. It 
 is only right to bear testimony to the debt of gratitude 
 due to the Huguenot refugees, who seem to have 
 possessed rare mechanical genius. The descendants 
 of these French settlers are among the most honoured 
 of the Protestants of the North. The linen trade of 
 Ireland is now one of the important industries of the 
 United Kingdom ; it is almost entirely confined to 
 Ulster ; and a glance at the list of the members of the 
 " Linen Merchants' Association of Belfast " will con- 
 vince the most sceptical how thoroughly the captains 
 of the industry are English and Scotch. According 
 to the factory inspector's reports for 1885, 61,749 
 persons were employed in the flax mills and factories 
 in Ireland. 2 Of these the greatest number were in 
 
 1 Benn's Belfast, p. 88. 
 
 2 Twentieth Annual Report of the Flax Supply Association, 
 Belfast, 1888. 
 
110 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 County Antrim — the great town of Belfast bringing 
 up the total; Armagh comes second; Down third, 
 with Londonderry and Tyrone far behind ; and the 
 other counties of Ulster represented to a very small 
 extent. The supremacy of Ulster in the linen manu- 
 facture is shown in a very striking way by taking the 
 statistics for 1885 for the United Kingdom. Of the 
 total of 1,155,217 spindles used in the spinning of 
 linen in the United Kingdom, 817,014 were in Ire- 
 land, as against 220,644 m Scotland and 117,559 in 
 England; while of 47,641 power-looms employed in 
 the trade of the United Kingdom, 21,954 are in Irish 
 mills. The application of steam-power to the weav- 
 ing of linen may be said to be the work of this 
 generation of Ulster men, as in 1850 there were only 
 58 power-looms in Ireland, although steam-power had 
 been already extensively introduced into Scotland and 
 England. It is pleasant to know that Ulster retains 
 her supremacy for the quality of her linens, as well 
 as for the quantity produced. 
 
 But the linen manufacture is also a blessing to the 
 North of Ireland from the stimulus it gives to her 
 agriculture, by encouraging her farmers to grow the 
 flax which the factories spin and weave into linen. 
 The acreage under flax has varied much from year to 
 year ; in 1887 it stood at 130,202, almost entirely in 
 Ulster, and the value of the flax produced was nearly 
 one million sterling. As four times this quantity is 
 consumed in the United Kingdom, a wide margin for 
 profitable increase is still left to the agriculturists of 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. Ill 
 
 Ulster. Of the Irish counties, Down heads the list 
 for the production of flax, with Tyrone and London- 
 derry as second and third. It is a crop which 
 scourges the ground, and requires good farming, but 
 in successful years it is exceedingly profitable. 
 
 In other commercial pursuits besides the linen 
 trade, the descendants of the Scottish settlers have 
 shown themselves worthy of the stock from which 
 they spring, and have made Ulster a striking con- 
 trast from its wealth and prosperity to the other 
 provinces of Ireland. The great town of Belfast is 
 a most remarkable example of what energy and 
 ability can do. A century ago, it was a small town 
 of 12,000 inhabitants; it is now a handsome, thriving 
 city of near 300,000. Besides its great linen trade, 
 it is one of the most frequented ports in the United 
 Kingdom. " Its custom dues are larger than either 
 Glasgow or Hull, being surpassed only by London 
 and Liverpool in the United Kingdom." 1 Its repu- 
 tation for shipbuilding is rapidly extending, and at 
 the present time there are in course of construction 
 on the banks of the Lagan, what promise to be 
 two of the greatest and swiftest ships of our mercan- 
 tile marine. Into other branches of industry these 
 Scots of the North of Ireland are throwing them- 
 selves with perfervid energy and wonderful success. 
 Meanwhile the city is extending its arms down both 
 sides of Belfast Lough ; it has cut new streets through 
 
 1 Article on "Situation in Ireland," 'Scotsman,' 16th Jan- 
 uary 1888. 
 
112 THE SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 old quarters, built handsome public buildings, in- 
 augurated new drainage works, and is at the present 
 time forming a new sea-channel three or four miles 
 long through the shallows of the Lough. The suc- 
 cess of Belfast is not due to the salubrity of its 
 climate, to the richness of the soil, or to its natural 
 position, certainly not to the small stream which 
 forms its harbour. There are many towns more 
 advantageously situated in Ireland. The increasing 
 prosperity is the well-merited reward of the work of 
 her sons, and her condition is widely different from 
 that of the other great towns of Ireland, because her 
 inhabitants differ in race from theirs. 
 
 It is, indeed, in the practical work of the world 
 that those men of Ulster excel at home and abroad. 
 They have made but little mark in art or literature ; 
 but in commerce and manufactures and science, in 
 war and diplomacy, they have done their own share 
 of hard and successful labour. Americans have ever 
 been willing to bear testimony to the part which 
 Ulster men took in building up the fabric of the 
 United States. The Presbyterian emigrants were 
 among the stoutest soldiers who fought in the War 
 of Independence ; and many of the best citizens 
 of the United States spring from the same stock. 
 Descendants of Ulster men have filled the President's 
 Chair in the persons of James Monroe, James Knox 
 Polk, John C. Calhoun, and James Buchanan ; Stone- 
 wall Jackson came of the same blood; and A. T. 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. 113 
 
 Stewart, who founded in New York the greatest busi- 
 ness in the world, was from County Down. Ulster 
 has produced three men who have in a notable way 
 translated science into practice : Fulton, one of the 
 inventors of steam navigation ; Morse, whose name 
 is linked with telegraphy; and M'Cormick, the in- 
 ventor of the reaping-machine. To the service of 
 this country she has given many who have upheld 
 the honour of England as soldiers and administrators. 
 Ulster can boast of the names of some of the best 
 of the captains who served under Wellington ; and 
 she gave to India two men who helped materially 
 to save her for England during the great Mutiny — 
 Henry and John Lawrence. Of the blood of the 
 settlers also sprang Lord Castlereagh and George 
 Canning, Sir Henry Pottinger and Lord Cairns ; and 
 also one of the most brilliant and successful of living 
 administrators, Lord Dufferin, who is the inheritor 
 of the tide of one of the first of the Scottish settlers, 
 James Hamilton, Lord Clannaboye, and is the pos- 
 sessor of part of the old Scottish settlement on the 
 south shore of Belfast Lough. 
 
 In literature and art these Scots of the North of 
 Ireland cannot rival their brethren of the old land. 
 Perhaps their history during the century and a half 
 which succeeded the Restoration sufficiently accounts 
 for their want of the power of expression in prose 
 or verse, in sculpture or in painting; for during 
 that period the North of Ireland was wretchedly 
 
 H 
 
114 TH E SCOT IN ULSTER. 
 
 poor, and its Presbyterian inhabitants were by the 
 Test Act cut off from the higher culture of the 
 universities. Certainly the names which Ulster has 
 produced in literature and art cannot rival the great 
 men which she has brought forth for the active pur- 
 suits of life : — 
 
 " He came from the North, and his words were few ; 
 But his voice was kind and his heart was true." 
 
 But though these men of Ulster are not much given 
 to the arts of poetry or oratory, still they are a strong 
 practical race, full of energy, courage, and persever- 
 ance, who, if allowed fair-play, will leave the world 
 a little better than they found it. They have had a 
 hard fight for existence during the centuries they 
 have been in Ireland ; and now when they have 
 begun to enjoy the full fruits of the Union of 1801, 
 we need not wonder if they protest, not loudly but 
 deeply, against any attempts to impair the arrange- 
 ment which has brought to them good government 
 and prosperity. Time will, we trust, help to bridge 
 over that deep chasm which separates the Scot and 
 the Irish in Ireland ; but the cleavage is more likely 
 to be closed if they both continue to live in the full 
 communion of that great empire in which both may 
 well glory. Certainly it seems little short of mad- 
 ness in any statesman to attempt to force a race 
 so " dour " and determined as are these Ulster men — 
 descended as they are from blood as " dour " as any 
 
THE ULSTER OF TO-DAY. 115 
 
 which the world has known, the English and Scottish 
 Covenanters who fought together at Marston Moor 
 — to attempt to compel men of such a stock to 
 submit to a form of government against which they 
 protest, and which they dislike and distrust with all 
 the force of their nature. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 OUBE TOUNIS COLLEDGE. 
 
 SKETCHES OF THE HTSTOEY OF THE OLD COLLEGE 
 OF EDINBURGH. 
 
 With an Appendix of Historical Documents. 
 
 Crown 8vo, 5s. 
 
 SOME OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 Spectator. 
 
 " Mr Harrison has not only searched to much purpose the old Scotch 
 burgh records and other sources of information for the history of the 
 foundation of the University, but has given a very careful account of 
 its history to the days of Principal Robertson, accompanied by pic- 
 tures of Edinburgh society about the close of the eighteenth century. 
 His narrative is clear, flowing, and commendably succint." 
 
 Literary World. 
 
 "With a love-inspired patience and diligence he has sought out and 
 studied historical documents, exploring all manner of out-of-the-way 
 stores of information, and skilfully weaving all his discoveries into a 
 most attractive and readable book." 
 
 Bibliographer. 
 
 " Mr Harrison tells the history of the College well, and leads us 
 along from the day of small things to the distinguished success of a 
 later date with a tale of unflagging interest." 
 
 Scotsman. 
 
 "It contains a series of pictures of episodes in the past life of 
 Edinburgh, painted by one who is thoroughly familiar with his sub- 
 ject, and whose sympathy with it is as sincere as his knowledge is 
 exhaustive." 
 
 Midland Counties Herald. 
 
 "Mr Harrison, who was evidently in love with, and possessed a 
 competent knowledge of his subject, has related the history of the 
 College with a crispness and vivacity of style which are calculated 
 not only to commend it to Scotchmen, but to secure for it the atten- 
 tion of a wide circle of readers." 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS Edinburgh and London. 
 
LATELY PUBLISHED, 
 
 Ipsbieattb' bg |Jennissxou to %n Ufast (Sraxhras Utejwtg % dfywztx. 
 
 ON SOME OF SHAKESPEARE'S FEMALE CHARAC- 
 TERS. By HELENA FAUCIT, Lady MARTIN. Third and 
 Cheaper Edition. With Portrait. 8vo, 7s. 6d. 
 "This is one of the books we dare hardly criticise "We have seldom 
 
 met with a book which has given us more refined enjoyment as we read, and 
 
 more original matter for meditation afterwards."— Times. 
 
 THE LAND BEYOND THE FOREST. Facts, Figures, 
 and Fancies from Transylvania. By E. GERARD, Author 
 of 'Reata,' 'Beggar my Neighbour,' &c. In Two Volumes, with 
 Map and Illustrations. 25s. 
 
 " She has given a delightfully varied and interesting, and, for general infor- 
 mation, sufficiently complete account of the ' Land beyond the Forest.' The 
 book is more readable than most fiction." — Scotsman. 
 
 TIMAR'S TWO WORLDS. By Maurus Jokai. Author- 
 ised Translation by Mrs HEGAN KENNARD. Crown 8vo. 
 
 "It is long since we met with a story so vigorous— so full of human sym- 
 pathy, of strength and pathos "We regretfully close this delightful book." 
 
 — Saturday Review. 
 
 "Not only as its author's masterpiece, but as a masterpiece of European 
 literature, pervaded by a primeval freshness of style that should titillate the 
 palate of the most jaded novel-reader."— A thenceum. 
 
 FRAGMENTS FROM MANY TABLES. Being the 
 
 Recollections of some Wise and Witty Men and Women. 
 By GEORGE RUSSELL. Crown 8vo, 4s. 6d. 
 
 New and Cheaper Edition. 
 
 WANDERINGS IN CHINA. By C. F. Gordon Cumming, 
 Author of ' At Home in Fiji,' ' A Lady's Cruise in a French Man- 
 of-War,' ' Fire Fountains,' &c, &c. With Portrait of the Author, 
 and numerous Illustrations. Complete in One Volume, 8vo. 10s. 
 
 INSULINDE. Experiences of a Naturalist's Wife in 
 the Eastern Archipelago. By Mrs H. 0. FORBES. Post 
 8vo, with a Map, 8s. 6d. 
 
 "A sober, gracefully written narrative." — Westminster Review. 
 
 " An unpretending but pleasantly written description of everyday life in the 
 Eastern Archipelago. The volume might very well serve as a guide-book 
 for those whose vocation may take them into those yet little-known spots 
 of the earth's surface." — Vanity Fair. 
 
 A New and Cheaper Edition of 
 
 POOR NELLIE. By the Author of ' My Trivial Life and 
 
 Misfortune.' New Edition. Crown 8vo, 6s. 
 
 " It is a very powerful and remarkable book." — Spectator. 
 
 " A work of great ability and of absorbing interest." — St James's Gazette. 
 
THE BLACKSMITH OF VOE. A Novel. By Paul 
 CUSHING, Author of 'Misogyny and the Maiden,' ' A Woman 
 with a Secret,' &c. 3 vols, crown 8vo, 25s. 6d. 
 
 "Full of clever drawing, and rich in striking incident,"— Daily Telegraph. 
 " It is a powerful and interesting novel, which should increase the reputa- 
 tion of its talented author." — Scotsman. 
 
 EPISODES IN A LIFE OF ADVENTURE ; or, Moss 
 
 from a Kolling Stone. By LAURENCE OLIPHANT, Author 
 of 'Piccadilly,' 'Altiora Peto/ 'Haifa,' &c. New Edition. Post 
 8vo, 6s. 
 
 " The book is written in a most pleasing style, and is fresh and vigorous 
 throughout. "Spectator. 
 
 " The book bristles with adventures in every page. Among these his sport- 
 ing reminiscences will be found the most absorbingly exciting. We wish Ave 
 could transcribe some of them." — Saturday Review. 
 
 LAYS OF THE SCOTTISH CAVALIERS, and Other 
 Poems. By Professor AYTOUN. Printed from a New Type, 
 and tastefully bound in cloth, fcap. 8vo, 3s. 6d. Cheap Edition, 
 in paper cover, Is. 
 
 "A delightful edition of the beautiful ballads of Professor Aytoun 
 
 Many will delight in obtaining in so handy and portable a form the romantic 
 and stirring poems which have helped to make the name of Professor Aytoun 
 a household word with us." — Morning Advertiser. 
 
 Finer ballads than these, we are bold to say, are not to be found in the 
 -Times. 
 
 SARACINESCA. By F. Marion Crawford, Author of 
 'Mr Isaacs,' 'Dr Claudius,' 'Zoroaster,' &c. Third Edition. 
 Crown 8vo, Cs. 
 
 " 'Saracinesca' is a very remarkable book, and a great advance upon any of 
 the author's previous works." — Academy. 
 
 " It is a book of which even the greatest masters of fiction might with reason 
 have been proud."— Pictorial World. 
 
 "No better picture has been drawn of Roman society than the one con- 
 tained in Mr Crawford's new novel 'Saracinesca.'" — Morning Post. 
 
 A New and Cheaper Edition. Complete in One Volume. 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE. As related in her Letters 
 and Journals. Arranged and Edited by her Husband, J. W. 
 CROSS. New Edition, Illustrated, with Portrait and Wood En- 
 gravings. Crown 8vo, 7s. 6d. 
 
 NOVELS BY GEORGE ELIOT. Cheaper Editions. 
 Crown 8vo, with Illustrations. Viz. : — 
 
 Adam Bede, 3s. 6d.— The Mill on the Floss, 3s. 6d.— Felix 
 Holt, the Radical, 3s. 6d.— Scenes of Clerical Life, 3s. — 
 Silas Marner, 2s. 6d.— Romola, with Vignette, 3s. 6d.— Daniel 
 Deronda, with Vignette, 7s. 6d. — Middlemarch, with Vignette, 
 7s. 6d. 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, Edinburgh and London. 
 
DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 MAR 1 
 
 ? 1999 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY PRODUCTS, INC. #859-5503 
 
BOSTON COLLEGE 
 
 3 9031 01254472 2 
 
 t. 9 
 
 214Z 
 
 PA^° ^1 eH5 
 
 ^pO VVo^rv-u 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS 
 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
 Books may be kept for two weeks unless other- 
 wise specified by the Librarian. 
 
 Two cents a day is charged for each book kept 
 overtime. 
 
 If you cannot find what you want, ask the 
 Librarian who will be glad to help you. 
 
 The borrower is responsible for books drawn 
 in his name and for all accruing fines. 
 
BM 
 
 USUI 
 
 $&BS&R888£3l8