A Narrow Sea by Jonathan Bardon

Author:Jonathan Bardon [Bardon, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill Books

EPISODE 67

‘LIKE A CONTAGIOUS DISTEMPER’

Throughout the seventeenth century, and particularly during the 1690s, tens of thousands of Scots had crossed the Narrow Sea to Ulster. Then, during the first years of the eighteenth century, this migration stopped rather suddenly. After a string of bad harvests in Scotland, yields of corn were so good that there was a surplus for the burgeoning gin trade in London. At the same time, in Ulster the restless Scots and their descendants began to contemplate starting a new life across the Atlantic Ocean.

The British colonisation of North America had begun at around the same time as the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century. By the beginning of the eighteenth century – despite abrasive competition with the French and wars with native peoples – the American colonies were thriving. The first emigrants were drawn from the Laggan district in north-east Donegal, and it was clear that the exodus had begun in earnest by 1718. In that year 11 Presbyterian ministers and nearly 300 members of their congregations petitioned the Governor of New England, Samuel Shute, for a grant of land there. At least one ship brought 100 passengers from Londonderry to New York, and The Boston News-Letter reported the arrival of 11 ships from Belfast and Derry in the summer and autumn of 1719. Between 1717 and 1719 as many as 7,000 emigrants left Ulster for America.

The authorities in Dublin were alarmed at this draining away of a Protestant population that had been so painstakingly settled in Ulster during the seventeenth century. William King, Archbishop of Dublin and a commissioner for the Irish government, wrote in 1718: ‘No papists stir … The papists being already five or six to one, and being a breeding people, you may imagine in what condition were are like to be in.’

Ten years later Hugh Boulter, Archbishop of Armagh, deputising for the viceroy, informed the Duke of Newcastle:

The humour has spread like a contagious distemper, and the people will hardly hear any body that tries to cure them of their madness. The worst is that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North, which is the seat of our linen manufacture.

Indeed, most Catholics had at this stage neither the resources nor the inclination to go to the American colonies which were, in any case, still overwhelmingly Protestant. Presbyterians were the great majority leaving Ulster and were known in America as the ‘Scotch-Irish’. In 1729 an Address of Protestant Dissenting Ministers to the King argued that the sacramental test – excluding those who were not members of the Church of Ireland from public office – was found by Ulster Presbyterians to be ‘so very grievous that they have in great numbers transported themselves to the American Plantations for the sake of that liberty and ease which they are denied in their native country.’

Almost certainly this was not the main cause, though Presbyterian ministers had a key part to play in organising the first sailings across the Atlantic. Ezekiel

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