Latest / The History of Ireland: Rebellion, Empire, and Independence — Fexingo History / The Burning of Wildwood: Ireland's Tudor Plantations Before Ulster
Transcript
- Lucas: We've talked a lot about the Ulster Plantation — how James I carved up the north after the Flight of the Earls, bringing in Scottish Presbyterians and English undertakers. But that wasn't the first plantation in Ireland. Not by a long shot. Luna: Oh really? I thought the Ulster one was the template. Lucas: It became the template, yes — but there was a prototype, and it happened fifty years earlier, in the midlands. Under Queen Mary I, of all people. Most people don't associate her with Ireland, but she and her lord deputy, the Earl of Sussex, tried a smaller, more brutal experiment in Laois and Offaly. Luna: Laois and Offaly — that's not Ulster, that's the midlands. Right around where Portlaoise is today. Lucas: Exactly. Back then the region was known as Leix and Offaly — Gaelic territories ruled by the O'More and O'Connor clans. The Tudors had been trying to control them for decades, but the clans kept raiding the Pale — that English-controlled area around Dublin. So Mary and Sussex decided to do something drastic: plant English settlers right on top of them. Lucas: In 1556, Parliament passed an act creating two new shires out of the confiscated lands. King's County — named after Mary's husband Philip II of Spain, though she called it after the king — and Queen's County, for herself. The old Irish names were wiped off the English map. The main town in Queen's County was called Maryborough, later renamed Portlaoise. King's County's town was Philipstown, now Daingean. Luna: So they literally renamed the landscape. That's a power move. Lucas: It was, and it was backed up by garrisons. Sussex built forts at Maryborough and Philipstown, and he brought in English settlers — soldiers, farmers, artisans — offering them land at low rents. But the Gaelic clans didn't just disappear. The O'Mores and O'Connors had been there for centuries, and they fought back immediately. Lucas: Within a year, a major rebellion broke out led by Rory O'More, known in Irish as Ruaidhrí Ó Mórdha. He used guerrilla tactics — burning the settlers' crops, ambushing patrols, and melting into the woods. The English response was brutal. Sussex ordered the systematic burning of the forests — the 'woods of Leix' — to deny the Irish cover. It's sometimes called the 'burning of the wildwood.' Luna: That's vicious. But did it work? Lucas: In the short term, yes and no. The rebellion was suppressed, but the plantation never really took off. Not enough English settlers came — the land was poor compared to the fertile valleys of Munster or the plains of Meath. And the constant threat of attack made life miserable. By the 1570s, many settlers had abandoned their farms. Lucas: But the administrative structures stayed. King's County and Queen's County remained on the map for nearly four hundred years, right up until 1922. And the idea — confiscate land, plant loyal subjects, rename everything — that became the blueprint for later plantations: Munster in the 1580s, and then Ulster in the 1600s. Luna: So the Ulster Plantation wasn't a sudden invention. It was learned from failures like this one. Lucas: Exactly. And there's another layer here that people don't often talk about — the legal mechanism used to justify the seizure. It was called 'surrender and regrant.' The idea was that Irish chiefs would surrender their traditional Gaelic titles to the Crown, and then be regranted their land under English law with an English title like Earl or Baron. In theory, it was peaceful. In practice, it was coercive. Lucas: Sussex used surrender and regrant on some of the smaller clans, but the O'Mores and O'Connors refused. They didn't recognise the authority of an English queen to give them what they already owned. So Sussex simply declared their lands forfeit by right of conquest. That set the legal precedent for everything that followed. Luna: It's interesting — this episode really ties together a lot of the themes from earlier shows. The Penal Laws, the Land League, even the Flight of the Earls — they all have roots in this kind of land seizure. Lucas: Absolutely. And if you're finding these connections useful — if the show helps you make sense of how Ireland's history fits together — honestly, that's exactly what we hope for. If today's episode was worth a coffee to you, we do have a way to keep this going ad-free. It's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small thing that makes a big difference for keeping the research deep and the episodes coming. Lucas: So, back to the midlands — one detail that always sticks with me is the fate of the O'More chieftains. After the rebellion, Rory O'More was killed in a skirmish, and his head was sent to Dublin Castle. But his family didn't give up. His son, also called Rory, led another rising in the 1570s. The English finally caught him and executed him, but the O'Mores kept fighting well into the 1600s. Luna: So the plantation never fully pacified the area. Lucas: Not for generations. And there's a fascinating archaeological angle too. In the 1990s, excavations at the old fort in Maryborough — modern Portlaoise — uncovered traces of the original Tudor settlement. They found English pottery, coins, and even the foundations of a house that had been burned down, probably in one of the O'More attacks. Lucas: It's a physical reminder that this wasn't just a policy on paper. People lived and died on those frontier farms. And the names they gave the towns — Maryborough, Philipstown — they were deliberately English, deliberately royalist. It was a way of saying 'this is England now.' But the Irish names survived too. Portlaoise comes from Port Laoighise — 'the fort of Laois.' The old name never really died. Luna: That's the thing about colonialism — you can rename a place, but you can't erase the memory of what was there before. Lucas: Exactly. And that memory fueled resistance for centuries. The midlands plantation is often forgotten because it was a 'failure' — not enough settlers, too much violence. But in a way, it was a success for the Crown: it established the principle that Irish land could be taken and regranted, that English law could supersede Gaelic custom. That principle was then applied on a massive scale in Ulster. Lucas: There's also a personal story from that period that I love. A woman named Eleanor O'More, Rory's sister, was captured by the English and held hostage. She eventually married an English soldier named Henry Harrington, and they had children. Her descendants became part of the Protestant Ascendancy — a strange echo of the very system that destroyed her brother. Luna: That's such a human detail. It shows how complicated these histories are — no one is just a villain or a victim. Lucas: Right. And it's a reminder that these plantations weren't just about land — they were about families, loyalties, survival. So next time you hear about the Plantation of Ulster, remember that it wasn't the first. It was the third, maybe the fourth attempt. And the lessons learned in Laois and Offaly — how to subdue a population, how to rename a country — they were perfected in blood and fire long before the Scottish ships arrived at Derry. Luna: I'll never look at a map of Irish counties the same way again. Lucas: Good. That's exactly the point.