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By Root 1248 0

was determined to assert its authority, and in 1541 Henry VIII had himself proclaimed king in Dublin, with the country formally annexed to England. The ‘planting’ of settlers had a political purpose: the Tudors put down resistance mercilessly (Humphrey Gilbert’s processional avenue of severed heads being an example of their style), confiscating the land of those involved and giving it to settlers from England or Scotland. When, in September 1607, the Earls of Tyrconnell and Tyrone scrambled aboard a ship in Lough Swilly on the north coast of Ireland and fled the country (‘the flight of the earls’), the English grabbed their chance, seized lands in the particularly troublesome northern province of Ulster and ‘planted’ them with English and Scottish settlers. Because England and Scotland had embraced the Reformation – unlike Ireland – these loyalists were marked out from their Catholic neighbours by their Protestant religion. The resulting sectarian tensions lasted into the twenty-first century.

The English continued creating plantations in Ireland for much of the sixteenth century; as would happen elsewhere in the empire, they offered those with high hopes and empty pockets the chance to acquire land, even if it came with the ever present possibility of rebellion or war. Although the scheme was less costly than maintaining heavily armed garrisons or fighting campaigns in Ireland, it was not cheap, and since James’s government could not afford to fund the scheme itself, it forced the City of London to do so. Slightly against their better judgement, a dozen livery companies extracted what concessions could be had and began to ship in settlers. As with later imperial projects, funding for the scheme was raised by issuing a prospectus outlining delectable rewards. This approach seems to have been developed by the Tudor scholar Sir Thomas Smith, whose son was to lead an expedition to settle the Ards Peninsula in Ulster. Their manifesto invited adventurers – specifically the younger sons of the nobility or gentry – to join the project to acquire land and escape the overcrowding that beset them at home. (‘England was never that can be heard of, fuller of people than it is today.’) Did they really, the advertisement asked, fancy the alternative of trying to make do as clergymen in the current economic circumstances of ‘excessive expence; both in diet and apparel’? By contrast, those who joined the project would be offered at least 300 acres of land, which would be more than enough to ensure a good living. ‘I cannot see’, said the proposal, ‘how Fathers that haue many sonnes, or landed men that haue many younger brothers, can do better … than to prefer them, and set them forthe in this jorney with me.’ Eight hundred young men answered the call.

The plantation of Ireland had an unmistakably strategic purpose. When Thomas Hacket dedicated a book to Elizabeth’s man in Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney (who said he ‘cursed, hated, and detested’ the country), he made explicit comparison with the odious way the Spanish behaved in their colonies in the New World. But the real reference point – and it is one that is used again and again in the lifetime of the British Empire – was another empire altogether. Quite apart from the military benefits and the possible financial dividends for those involved, the English considered their settlements to be part of a civilizing mission to a culturally inferior people. The English purpose in Ireland, argued Sir Thomas Smith, was no different to that of the Romans when they first encountered the primitive ancient Britons. The Irish were culturally inferior to the English, and, he advised his son as he left for Ulster, the English should follow the models of Rome, Carthage and Venice.

The principles of colonization in Ireland were applied in North America, too. Many of the financial mechanisms – the creation of joint-stock companies, for example – were similar. Attitudes towards the indigenous peoples also echoed: like the Irish, native Americans were considered lazy, unsophisticated and feckless – adjectives