The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion by Annaleigh Margey Eamon Darcy Elaine Murphy

Author:Annaleigh Margey, Eamon Darcy, Elaine Murphy [Annaleigh Margey, Eamon Darcy, Elaine Murphy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Ireland
ISBN: 9781317322054
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Island Magee

About two weeks after Maguire’s exploits a massacre of the Irish population of Island Magee, an eight-mile long peninsula joined to the mainland by a raised causeway, took place in the county of Antrim, an area largely populated with Scottish settlers. From the very beginning of the rebellion its leaders were at pains to secure the support of the Scottish population, or at least to achieve their neutrality.29 Indeed, for a few weeks the Scots were left alone, even though the Scottish leaders in the northern counties of Antrim and Down began to organize resistance immediately after the news of the rising had reached them on the evening of 23 October.30 It was only after the repulse by the Scottish forces at Augher in the middle of November, and the resulting loss of about 500 men, that the insurgents forsook their hopes of winning Scottish support and with them the restraints they enforced upon their subordinates regarding this nation. This defeat was followed by a massacre of a group of Scottish settlers and signified a turning point of the rising.31 The rising gradually converted into a popular based rebellion as the leaders of the insurgence increasingly lost control over the lower elements in society. Robbery and murder became the daily practice.32

Irrespective of this development, the first two months following the insurgence found County Antrim in comparative calm. However, throughout December the northern counties experienced a series of small-scale raids, and the only areas still held by the settler forces there were the Ards peninsula and the western part of County Down, as well as the major part of County Antrim.33 It is against this background that the massacre of the Catholic Irish civilians in the territory of Island Magee took place in the first week of January 1642. In the night of 8 January 1642, a group of Scots came to Island Magee, and killed a number of Irish residents. There are thirty-three depositions in the volume for County Antrim that relate to this incident, taken from Protestants as well as Irish Catholics. Many of these testimonies are examinations of the Scots who were charged with murder. The main purpose of the depositions was to incriminate Irish Catholics with having committed massacres in the course of the wars in Ireland. Accordingly the Island Magee massacre becomes all the more interesting when it is considered that this investigation was one of the very few conducted against British Protestants for the murders of Irish Catholics. This factor provided historians such as Mary Hickson with a rationale to extol the high court of justice and uphold their so-called ‘even-handed impartiality’.34 However, the case is not as simple as this. From 1647 onwards many of the Ulster Scots became royalists.35 The crimes perpetrated by the Scots during the wars gave the Cromwellians the chance to prosecute them and to eliminate the danger of a royalist take-over in Ireland, even though these crimes mainly took place under the tacit approval of the parliamentarian government.36

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