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The most sharply dated Irish event of the year occurred in Dublin on 1 February. Conor O’Devany, Roman Catholic bishop of Down and Connor, and Patrick O’Loughran, a priest associated with the archdiocese of Armagh, were executed at George’s Hill after conviction for treason. They had been tried on 28 January. The prosecution linked them to the Flight of the Earls of 1607 and alleged dealings with the pope and Spain; O’Loughran’s past service to the exiled Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, made him particularly vulnerable. The charges made the two clerics symbols of a state still anxious about foreign intervention and the displaced Gaelic leadership.
George Carew, Lord Carew of Clopton, was commissioned in June to investigate Irish government and, especially, the progress of the Ulster Plantation. He arrived in Dublin on 11 July. The surviving state-paper calendar dates the commissioners’ formal Ulster circuit from 29 July; Carew and his colleagues travelled north by way of Newry, Carrickfergus and Dunluce, reached Derry on 14 August, and then moved through Donegal, Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh. They were back in Dublin early in September, although Carew’s wider Irish business continued into October.
The formal Plantation centred on six counties where extensive lands had escheated to the Crown: Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone. This was not the whole of Ulster. Antrim and Down, for example, had already attracted substantial private settlement, particularly from Scotland. But the six escheated counties became the arena for a much more systematic Crown programme, designed in Dublin and London and justified as a means of security, revenue, Protestant reform and ‘civil’ order.
The central development was the 1609 survey of the escheated lands of Ulster, conventionally associated with Sir Josias Bodley. The Crown claimed extensive rights over territories formerly dominated by the great Gaelic lordships of the O’Neills and O’Donnells and by associated families. The project concentrated on six counties: Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone. This was not the whole province. Antrim and Down, where Scottish settlement and private arrangements already had importance, lay outside the principal scheme; Monaghan was also treated differently.
Cahir O’Doherty was not an obvious enemy of the English administration. Lord of Inishowen in north Donegal, he had assisted English forces during the Nine Years’ War and had received a royal patent confirming his lordship in 1603. He was a knight, a justice of the peace and an alderman of Derry. In early 1608 he even acted as foreman of the jury that indicted the departed Ulster earls for treason. These positions show the awkwardness of the political world created after the war: an Irish lord could be drawn into Crown institutions while still defending a local inheritance, kinship following and status founded on older Gaelic practice.
