Plantations of Ireland in the context of "Irish Rebellion of 1641"

Sir Walter Raleigh (/ˈrɔːli, ˈrɑːli, ˈræli/; c. 1553 – 29 October 1618) was an English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion in Ireland, helped defend England against the Spanish Armada and held political positions under Elizabeth I.

Raleigh was born to a landed gentry family of Protestant faith in Devon, the son of Walter Raleigh and Catherine Champernowne. He was the younger half-brother of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and a cousin of Sir Richard Grenville. Little is known of his early life, though in his late teens he spent some time in France taking part in the religious civil wars. In his 20s he took part in the suppression of rebellion in the colonisation of Ireland; he also participated in the siege of Smerwick. Later, he became a landlord of property in Ireland and mayor of Youghal in east Munster, where his house still stands in Myrtle Grove. He rose rapidly in the favour of Queen Elizabeth I and was knighted in 1585. He was granted a royal patent to explore Virginia, paving the way for future English settlements. In 1591, he secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, without the Queen's permission, for which he and his wife were sent to the Tower of London. After his release, they retired to his estate at Sherborne, Dorset.

The Kingdom of Ireland (Early Modern Irish: Ríoghacht Éireann; Modern Irish: Ríocht na hÉireann, pronounced [ənˠ ˌɾˠiːxt̪ˠ ˈeːɾʲən̪ˠ]) was a dependency of England from 1542 to 1707, and subsequently Great Britain from 1707 to 1800. It was ruled by the monarchs of England and then of Great Britain in personal union, and was administered from Dublin Castle by a viceroy appointed by the English king: the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. By the late 17th century, the state was dominated by the Protestant Anglo-Irish minority, known as the Protestant Ascendancy. The Protestant Church of Ireland was the state church. The Parliament of Ireland was almost exclusively Anglo-Irish. From 1661, the administration controlled an Irish army. Although formally a kingdom in personal union on equal footing with England and later Great Britain, for most of its history it was de facto a dependency with a viceroy sent as an envoy from London. This status was enshrined in the Declaratory Act 1719, also known as the Irish Parliament Act 1719.

The territory of the kingdom comprised that of the former Lordship of Ireland, founded in 1177 by King Henry II of England and the English Pope Adrian IV, after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. By the 16th century, the Pale, the area of effective English rule, had shrunk greatly; most of Ireland was held by Gaelic nobles as minor principalities notionally subject to London but independent in practice. By the terms of the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, Henry VIII of England became "King of Ireland", theoretically elevating Ireland to coequal status with England as a kingdom in personal union. There followed an expansion of English control during the Tudor conquest. This sparked the Desmond Rebellions and the Nine Years' War. The conquest of the island was completed early in the 17th century. It involved the confiscation of land from the native Irish Catholics and its colonisation by Protestant settlers from Britain. Most Catholic countries at the time did not recognise Protestant monarchs as legitimate kings of Ireland (or indeed of England), instead supporting the Jacobite government-in-exile from 1688 onwards.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert (c. 1539 – 9 September 1583) was an English adventurer, explorer, member of parliament and soldier who served during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and was a pioneer of the English colonial empire in North America and the Plantations of Ireland. He was a maternal half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh and a cousin of Sir Richard Grenville.

Sir Richard Grenville (b. 1542 – d. 1591), also spelt Greynvile, Greeneville, and Greenfield, was an English privateer and explorer. Grenville was lord of the manors of Stowe, Cornwall and Bideford, Devon. He subsequently participated in the plantations of Ireland specifically the Munster plantations, the English colonisation of the Americas and the repulse of the Spanish Armada.

Grenville also served as Member of Parliament for Cornwall, High Sheriff for County Cork and Sheriff of Cornwall. In 1591, Grenville died at the battle of Flores fighting against an overwhelmingly larger Spanish fleet near the Azores. He and his crew on board the galleon Revenge fought against the 53-strong Spanish fleet to allow the other English ships to escape. Grenville was the grandfather of Sir Bevil Grenville, a prominent military officer during the English Civil War.

Ireland was conquered by the Tudor monarchs of England in the 16th century. The Anglo-Normans had conquered swathes of Ireland in the late 12th century, bringing it under English rule. In the 14th century, the effective area of English rule shrank markedly, and from then most of Ireland was held by native Gaelic chiefdoms. Following a failed rebellion by the Earl of Kildare in the 1530s, the English Crown set about restoring its authority. Henry VIII of England was made "King of Ireland" by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542. The conquest involved assimilating the Gaelic nobility by way of "surrender and regrant"; the confiscation and colonisation ('plantation') of lands with settlers from Britain; imposing English law and language; banning Catholicism, dissolving the monasteries, and making Anglican Protestantism the state religion.

The Tudor policies in Ireland sparked the Desmond Rebellions (1569–1573, 1579–1583) and the Nine Years' War (1594–1603). Despite Spain sending an armada to support the Irish Catholics during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), by 1603 the entire country was under English rule. The Flight of the Earls in 1607 largely completed the destruction of the Gaelic aristocracy and left the way open for the Plantation of Ulster, which established a large British Protestant population in the north. Several people who helped establish the plantations of Ireland also played a part later in the early colonisation of North America, particularly a group known as the West Country Men.

The Irish (Irish: Na Gaeil or Na hÉireannaigh) are an ethnic group and nation native to the island of Ireland, who share a common ancestry, history and culture. There have been humans in Ireland for about 33,000 years, and it has been continually inhabited for more than 10,000 years (see Prehistoric Ireland). For most of Ireland's recorded history, the Irish have been primarily a Gaelic people (see Gaelic Ireland). From the 9th century, small numbers of Vikings settled in Ireland, becoming the Norse-Gaels. Anglo-Normans also conquered parts of Ireland in the 12th century, while England's 16th/17th century conquest and colonisation of Ireland brought many English and Lowland Scots to parts of the island, especially the north. Today, Ireland is made up of the Republic of Ireland (officially called Ireland) and Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). The people of Northern Ireland hold various national identities including Irish, British or some combination thereof.

The Irish have their own unique customs, language, music, dance, sports, cuisine and mythology. Although Irish (Gaeilge) was their main language in the past, today most Irish people speak English as their first language. Historically, the Irish nation was made up of kin groups or clans, and the Irish also had their own religion, law code, alphabet and style of dress.

The Irish Confederate Wars took place from 1641 to 1653. It was the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a series of civil wars in Ireland, England and Scotland, all then ruled by Charles I. The conflict caused an estimated 200,000 deaths from fighting, as well as war-related famine and disease.

It began with the Irish Rebellion of 1641, when local Catholics tried to seize control of the Dublin Castle administration. They wanted an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, to increase Irish self-governance, and to roll back the Plantations of Ireland. They also wanted to prevent an invasion by anti-Catholic English Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters, who were defying the king. Rebel leader Felim O'Neill claimed to be doing the king's bidding, but Charles condemned the rebellion after it broke out. The rebellion developed into an ethnic conflict between Irish Catholics on one side, and English and Scottish Protestant colonists on the other. These first few months were marked by ethnic cleansing and massacres in Ulster.

In the history of colonialism, a plantation was a form of colonization in which settlers would establish permanent or semi-permanent colonial settlements in a new region. The term first appeared in the 1580s in the English language to describe the process of colonization before being also used to refer to a colony by the 1610s. By the 1710s, the word was also being used to describe large farms where cash crop goods were produced, typically in tropical regions.

The first plantations were established during the Edwardian conquest of Wales and the plantations of Ireland by the English Crown. In Wales, King Edward I of England began a policy of constructing a chain of fortifications and castles in North Wales to control the native Welsh population; the Welsh were only permitted to enter the fortifications and castles unarmed during the day and were forbidden from trading. In Ireland, during the Tudor and Stuart eras the English Crown initiated a large-scale colonization of Ireland, in particular the province of Ulster, with Protestant settlers from Great Britain. These plantations led to the demography of Ireland becoming permanently altered, creating a new Protestant Ascendancy which would dominate Irish society for the next few centuries.

Irish measure or plantation measure was a system of units of land measurement used in Ireland from the 16th century plantations until the 19th century, with residual use into the 20th century. The units were based on "English measure" but used a linear perch measuring 7 yards (6.4 m) as opposed to the English rod of 5.5 yards (5.0 m). Thus, linear units such as the furlong and mile, which were defined in terms of perches, were longer by a factor of 14:11 (~27% more) in Irish measure, while units of area, such as the rood or acre, were larger by 196:121 (~62% more). The Weights and Measures Act 1824 (5 Geo. 4. c. 74) mandated the use throughout the British Empire of "Imperial measure", also called "statute measure", based on English measure. Imperial measure soon replaced Irish measure in the use of the Dublin Castle administration, but Irish measure persisted in local government, and longer still in private use.