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✜ C H A P T E R O N E ✜ The Transformation of Ulster Society in the Wake of the Glorious Revolution IN THE SUMMER of 1689, war came to the northern Irish port town of Derry. A few months earlier, thousands of Protestants from the surrounding countryside began fleeing into the walled city on the River Foyle after Derry’s inhabitants refused to allow the quartering of a regiment of Irish Catholics and Scottish Highlanders in their midst, and as the army of the deposed English king, James II, attempted to subdue the countryside. The troubles had their origins in England the previous year. Fearing that James planned to reestablish “popery” in a Protestant kingdom, members of England’s Parliament had urged William of Orange, protector of the United Provinces of the Low Countries and husband of James’s daughter Mary, to invade the country . James fled England for the Continent before William’s invasion force. He then arrived in Ireland on March 12, 1689, at the behest of his French ally Louis XIV. Both believed that if the Catholic James gained control of Ireland, he could retake the crown of England from his Protestant son-in-law, who had assumed the throne with Mary. As James approached the walls of Derry, one of only two fortified towns in Protestant hands, the inhabitants met him with musket fire and shouts of Protestant Ireland’s allegiance to William and Mary. Undeterred , his French and Irish Catholic commanders blockaded the town, ran a boom across the Foyle, and initiated a siege campaign. If the townspeople would not surrender, James’s army would starve them into submission.1 The refusal of the people to submit stemmed less from the international significance of the war of the two kings than from their fears of a victory by James. Over the course of the seventeenth century, England ’s government had sponsored a policy of conquest by colonization in Ireland, hoping to displace the kingdom’s native Catholic pop9 Sir William Petty’s Map of Ulster (1680), courtesy of the Edward E. Ayer Collection of the Newberry Library. T R A N S F O R M A T I O N O F U L S T E R S O C I E T Y ulation with loyal Protestants from England and Scotland. The plan hinged on entrusting those settlers who had been members of the established church in England with control of Ireland’s political institutions and its official church, the Church of Ireland, to the exclusion of other groups. Through a policy combining coercion, co-optation, and conquest, these “churchmen,” as they were called, confiscated the richest lands in Ireland, proclaimed theirs the established church of the kingdom, and assumed privileged positions in the Dublin parliament . Dissenters, those Protestants who refused to conform to the rites and episcopal edicts of an established church they judged tainted by Catholic vestiges, also peopled the kingdom during the seventeenth century. Most settled in Ulster, favored an unadorned form of worship and a Presbyterian church government free of bishops, and because of their nonconformity did not enjoy the full spectrum of legal and political liberties churchmen did. But while divided along confessional lines, Protestants shared a common fear and hatred of Catholicism. In 1641, Papists rose in the kingdom, killing thousands in Ulster and nearly overturning the Protestant settlement of the kingdom . In the face of a renewed Catholic threat, Ireland’s Protestants again found common ground.2 Indeed, the problems for Ulster’s Protestants began as soon as James assumed the throne in 1685. In that year, James elected a Catholic , Richard Talbot, to the Irish peerage under the title of earl of Tyrconnell and placed him in charge of the Irish army. True to Protestant fears, Tyrconnell purged Protestants from the ranks and the officer corps. He then pushed to have Catholics admitted to local corporations that controlled local and national political affairs, gave them seats in the Irish Privy Council, and established them as judges. In 1687, when Tyrconnell assumed the lord lieutenancy for the kingdom, many Protestants believed he would use his power to overturn Ireland ’s land settlement by dispossessing Protestants of lands. Many feared, therefore, that a counterrevolution was afoot, one that could undo the privileged place of Protestants in the kingdom.3 Ulster’s Protestants paid a dear price for contesting the counterrevolution . The 30,000 refugees and 7,500 officers and...

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