This paper will discuss the Cromwellian plantations in Ireland during the 1650s. The Cromwellian plantations, in which thousands of Irish were evicted from their land, was just one chapter in the long struggle of the Irish against English domination. The English had first begun the domination of Ireland during the 1100s, with the reign of Henry II. Prejudice against Irish Catholics increased in the 1500s, when Henry VIII established the Protestant Church of England as the official church of the state. Also in the 1500s, during the reign of Elizabeth I, the first plantations were imposed upon Irish landowners. These plantations caused the Irish to lose their lands, which were in turn sold or leased to English colonists and speculators. Such plantations continued during the early 1600s with the Stuart dynasty and the reign of James I and Charles I. However, they reached new heights in the years following 1649, when the Commonwealth leader Oliver Cromwell took control of both England and Ireland.
In October, 1641, the tension between Irish Catholics and English Protestants accelerated when a rebellion broke out in Dublin, Ulster and other locations across Ireland. In Dublin, the Irish rebels failed in their attempt to overthrow the seat of English government located there. However, in Ulster, Irish rebels took complete control of the city and forcibly drove out the English Protestant population. In so doing, however, the rebels turned the event into a horrible massacre. Hundreds of Protestants were executed by drowning, and many more deaths occurred "in the panic-stricken flight of refugees that choked the roads to Dublin. Many died along the way from hunger and fatigue. Others succumbed to exposure in a period of intense cold" (Costigan 71). Although this event was in truth terrible, the stories which circulated in England exaggerated the guilt of the Irish rebels and caused an increase in antiCatholic sentiments througho...