Capture of Dungannon
Who Fought
Rebel Irish forces under Sir Phelim O'Neill
the Protestant plantation garrison
History & Significance
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 began on 23 October 1641. Initiated by Irish gentry and military officers, the rebellion sought to end English domination of Ireland, restore lands confiscated through the plantations of Ireland, and secure Irish control over the country's government and affairs. Planned as a swift coup d'état to gain control of the Protestant-dominated central government, it instead developed into the 1641–1653 Irish Confederate Wars, part of the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
Despite failing to seize Dublin Castle, rebels under Felim O'Neill quickly over-ran most of Ulster, centre of the most recent land confiscations. O'Neill then issued the Proclamation of Dungannon, a forgery claiming he had been authorised by Charles I of England to secure Ireland against his opponents in England and Scotland. Many Royalist Anglo-Irish Catholics responded by joining the uprising, and the rebellion spread throughout Ireland.
In November, rebels besieged Drogheda and defeated a government relief force at Julianstown. Especially in Ulster, thousands of Protestant settlers were expelled or massacred, and Catholics were killed in retaliation. By April 1642, Royalist troops held Dublin, Cork, and large areas around them, with much of Ulster occupied by a Scottish Covenanter army and local Protestant militia. This left approximately two thirds of Ireland under rebel control.
In May 1642, Ireland's Catholic bishops met at Kilkenny, and declared the rebellion a just war. Along with members of the Catholic nobility, they created an alternative government known as Confederate Ireland. For the next ten years, the Confederacy fought a four-sided war against Irish Royalists, Scottish Covenanters and English Parliamentarians.
The roots of the 1641 rebellion derived from the colonisation that followed the Tudor conquest of Ireland, and the alienation of the Catholic gentry from the newly-Protestant English state in the decades following. Historian Aidan Clarke writes that religion "was merely one aspect of a larger problem posed by the Gaelic Irish, and its importance was easily obscured; but religious difference was central to the relationship between the government and the colonists". During the decades between the end of the Elizabethan wars in 1603 and the outbreak of rebellion in 1641, the political position of the wealthier landed Irish Catholics was increasingly threatened by the English government of Ireland. As a result, both the Gaelic Irish, and the Old English communities increasingly defined themselves as Irish and were viewed as such by the newcomers.
The pre-Elizabethan population of Ireland is usually divided into the native Irish and Old English, many of whom were descendants of medieval English and Anglo-Normans settlers. These groups were historically antagonistic, with English settled areas such as the Pale around Dublin, Wexford, and other walled towns being fortified against the rural Gaelic clans. By the 17th century, the cultural divide between these groups, especially at elite social levels, was narrowing; many of the Old English spoke Irish, patronised Irish poetry and music, and have been described as being "More Irish than the Irish themselves". Writing in 1614, one author claimed that previously the Old English "despised the mere Irish, accounting them a barbarous people, void of civility and religion and [each viewed] the other as a hereditary enemy" but cited intermarriage "in former ages rarely seen", education of the Gaelic Irish and "the late plantation of New English and Scottish [throughout] the Kingdom whom the natives repute a common enemy; but this last is the principal cause of their union". In addition, the native population became defined by their shared Catholicism, as opposed to the Protestantism of the new settlers.
The ground they fought on
The site of Capture of Dungannon lies on Armagh Group, bedrock that formed in the Visean. The rock here is limestone, argillaceous rocks and subordinate sandstone, interbedded.
Having rapidly overrun much of Ulster, Sir Phelim O'Neill used the captured town of Dungannon as the platform from which to issue his famous proclamation, asserting that the rebels acted on the authority of King Charles I himself and producing a forged royal commission in support of this bold and consequential claim.
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- Irish Rebellion of 1641 · Wikipedia
- Dungannon · Wikipedia