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Looking west

During the reigns of the Tudor monarchs King Henry VIII and his children, the religion of England was quite unstable for many years because of the Protestant Reformation and then the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This turmoil was eventually settled by Queen Elizabeth I after she came to the throne in 1558. She established England as permanently Protestant.

Both Queen Elizabeth I and her successor King James I wanted to settle the situation regarding Ireland. The Irish had resisted any kind of Protestant Reformation, and there were a number of Irish lords who fought any connection to England. In the 16th centrury, after years of fighting in Ireland, the English government decided that the best way to secure Ireland was to organise a mass migration of Protestants, mostly from Scotland, to settle there. This organised migration and settlement was known as ‘plantation’ and it happened in the northern province of Ulster.

The Ulster Scots gradually turned Ulster into an area of Protestant control, but there were still a lot of Catholics living there. This was to cause serious problems later in the 19th and 20th centuries when the division of Ireland between Catholic and Protestant was to cause violent unrest.