THE EXPERIENCE OF SURVIVAL DURING THE 1641 IRISH REBELLION

Abstract

In recent scholarship, the problem of violence has dominated work on the 1641 Irish rebellion. Unfortunately, no scholarship has addressed the means by which victims of the war survived this conflict. This article uses microhistorical evidence from the 1641 depositions for county Cavan to reconstruct the range of possible survival strategies. Philip MacMulmore O'Reilly, a member of the Irish gentry and kinsman to the Cavan rebels, balanced support for the rebellion with attempts to assist endangered Anglo-Protestant settlers. Although deponents questioned O'Reilly's motives, they agreed that he was instrumental in protecting settlers. George Creichton, a Scottish minister and planter, provides a distinctly different example. Despite his religious views and politics, Creichton forged strong ties to neighbouring Irish before the rising. Although in danger, Creichton mobilized a network of friends, kin, and sympathetic neighbours to protect himself and to assist less fortunate Anglo-Protestant neighbours. These two examples reveal the wider existence of early seventeenth-century social relationships that crossed ethnic and religious lines. In the midst of the chaos of 1641, a significant number of settlers benefited from fragmentation in the rebel ranks and often built their survival strategies upon the social relationships that they had forged in more stable times.