THERE is no subject, connected with Irish history about which so many untruths have been told as about the Rebellion of 1641. The Irish in the northern parts of your Majesty's Kingdom of Ireland, two nights last past, did rise with force, and have taken Charlemont, Dungannon, Tonragee, and The Newry, with Your Majesty's stores there — towns all of good consequence — and have slain only one man. 'Horrid crimes,' cold-blooded murders, were ultimately committed by the Irish, and Sir Phelim O'Neil shares responsibility for some of these excesses. The original intention of the rebels was to drive out the English settlers, and to recover the lands from which the native population had been dispossessed; 4. A second Commission was issued on the 18th of January, 1642, and 'murders' were included in it; but the fact that 'murders' were not included in the first seems to show that murders were not a prominent feature at the outbreak of the Rebellion. Published 3 March 2010. The Government [continues Mr. Lecky] believed that the one effectual policy for making Ireland useful to England was, in the words of Sir John Davies, to root out the Irish from the soil, to confiscate the property of the septs, and to plant the country systematically with English tenants. 1641 rebellion, memory and history, Northern Ireland, Portadown, Ulster loyalism The 1641 rebellion first began in Ulster. The breath was scarcely out of his body when everything was changed. He was laid in the grave, according to his desire in his last will and testament, hard by his wife's coffin that had been buried there four years before. 449, May 1905]. The idea which, in the main, still exists in the English mind about the Rebellion of 1641 is, that it was a wanton massacre of the English settlers in Ulster having its origin in the murdering propensities of the Irish race. The Irish Rebellion of 1641 was a result of Protestant plantations taking over Irish lands. The outrages committed by the Irish were committed by a 'tumultuary rabble'; 6. A group of academics has been tasked to reinvestigate a centuries-old massacre of Protestants in Ireland. The 1641 Depositions constitute the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the 1641 rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers and as a result they have been central to the most protracted and bitter of Irish historical controversies. 'Blood' was ultimately 'shed;' horrid crimes' were committed by the 'tumultuary rabble;' but not, in all probability, until the disciplined armies of England showed the example. The undaunted American widow returned to Ireland in the midst of the Great Famine and helped organise relief for the destitute and hungry. At least as many Catholic civilians were also killed in the early months of the rebellion as the English and Scottish forces, based in Dublin, Cork and in Ulster (where a Scottish army landed in early 1642) fought back, carrying out massacres of their own. Twelve thousand English were destroyed by the whole 'tumultuary [Irish] rabble' in Ulster. Again they fought for their homes. 'All the Irish officers,' as Mr. Lecky tells us, 'laboured to give a character of humanity to the war.' Mr. Lecky mentions the fact that 'numbers of Protestants were sheltered by the mother of Sir Phelim O'Neil;' and Mr. Walpole — an Englishman — in his history of Ireland, says:—. The Irish chiefs were dispossessed, and English and Scotch adventurers poured in to take their place. It relates the circumstances under which the great exodus to the New World began, the trials and tribulations faced by these tough American pioneers and the enduring influence they came to exert on the politics, education and religion of the country. He was treated with royal hospitality. The Rebellion of 1641--generally called a 'massacre'--was undoubtedly a struggle on the part of the exiled nobles and clergy and the evicted peasants to get possession of their estates and farms, which had been occupied … Nevertheless, it is a curious fact, that, in this Commission there is no direction to inquire into the 'murders' committed by the Irish. And all this was done in pursuance of a well defined policy. It is a noble sentiment. The spirit in which the Commissioners — Mr. Jones, Dean of Kilmore, and several other Protestant clergymen — set to work may be gathered from the statement of the objects of the Commission: 'To keep up the memory of the outrages committed by the Irish to posterity.' Hugh Óg MacMahon and Conor Maguire were to seize Dublin Castle, while Phelim O'Neill and Rory O'Moore were to take Derry and other northern towns. He was for a time kept in captivity on Lough Erne; but even then, as his biographer and son-in-law Clogy, tells us, he was allowed perfect liberty, 'to use the divine exercises of God's worship, to pray, read, preach, and sing the songs of Zion in a strange land, as the Three Children, though, in the next room, the priest was acting his Babylonish Mass.' Whenever the Irish fought back, the English government would take over more land as punishment. The depositions alleged that women and children were massacred by the Irish during the 1641 rebellion, but the digitization of the depositions, researchers say, reveals new truths. But, as Mr. Lecky rightly says, these 'isolated episodes, by diverting the mind from the broad features of the war, serve rather to diminish than to enhance its atrocity.' In recent years, there has been a marked movement away from viewing the 1641 rebellion as a reaction to the Ulster Plantation of 1610. The cessation of hostilities [says Clarendon] was no sooner known in England, but the two Houses declared against it... persuading the people that the Rebels were brought to their last gasp, and reduced to so terrible a famine that, like cannibals, they did eat one another; and must have been destroyed immediately, and utterly rooted out, if, by Popish counsels at Court, the King had not been persuaded to consent to this cessation. Contemporaries in Ireland, England and Europe interpreted the Irish rebellion of 1641 as part of a universal catholic plot to destroy the protestant faith. 'These men,' says Mr. Lecky, 'rivalled the worst crimes perpetrated in the days of Mountjoy and Carew.' The 1641 Rebellion broke out in Ulster on 22 October and was marked by attacks on the English and Scottish Protestant settlers who had arrived in Ulster in the Ulster Plantation.The Gaelic Irish of the province, led by Sir Phelim O'Neill captured a string of defensive towns in county Armagh. Northern Ireland has begun to grapple with the question of how to represent the 1641 rebellion to a new generation of visitors to 1641 massacre sites, including Portadown. ', How many of the Irish fell? A bloody episode in Irish history, the 1641 rebellion erupted in the first instance in Ulster, when rebel Catholic elements surprised Protestant settlers, massacring large numbers. In the north however O’Neill successfully seized Charlemont Fort and a number of other fortifi… But the armies and the government of England exulted in the slaughter of the Irish. At first the guard did their duty successfully, protecting the settlers from the fury of starving and naked peasants, who hung on the flank of the refugees. It is equally certain that, before a week had passed, the troops slaughtered numbers of the rebels without the loss of a man on their side. The Irish — the O'Moores, the O'Lalors, the O'Kellys, the O'Donnellys — came with their retainers to the number of 200. There were not 300,000 English in all Ireland in 1641. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. This, of course, is not the case. Why, the answer is obvious: What business had you in the house? Not only the men, but even the women and children who fell into the hands of the English were deliberately and systematically butchered. Their sole object was to drive out the settlers and to recover the lands. The rebellion, which broke out in October 1641, was a significant moment in the formation of identity in Ireland. No mercy whatever was shown to the natives, no act of treachery was considered dishonourable, no personal tortures and indignities were spared to the captives.' The 1641 Rebellion. On the 23rd December, 1641, a Commission was issued by the Government to make inquiries on oath respecting the rebellion. A 19th century poem, in the voice of a 1641 rebel, mentions Islandmagee and, implicitly, Portadown. Mrs Nicholson’s recollections of her tour among the peasantry are still revealing and gripping today. The expression, 'nits make lice,' was used by the soldiers to justify the murder of infants. The war began with an attempted coup d’etatby a small group of Irish Catholic landowners led by Rory O’Moore and Phelim O’Neill. 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