“They have no wealth but flocks and herds, they have no trade but agriculture or pasture, they are unlearned men, without human help or protection. Yet though unarmed they are so active in mind and body, that it is dangerous to drive them from their ancestral seats, to forbid them fire and water: thus driving the desperate to revenge, and even the moderate to think of taking arms. They have been deprived of weapons, but are in a temper to fight with nails and heels, and to tear their oppressors with their teeth . . . Since they see themselves excluded from all hopes of restitution or compensation, and are so constituted that they would rather starve upon husks at home, than fare sumptuously elsewhere, they will fight for their altars and hearths, and rather seek a bloody death near the sepulchres of their fathers than be buried as exiles in unknown earth.”

         Robert had several sons, who were joined in Ireland by younger sons of the various Maxwell houses in Scotland. Because of the oppression of the Cromwell Era, few records remain of these Scots-Irish immigrants. But one of these was John Maxwell, a member of The Irish Parliament from1727 to 1756. This one recorded fact tell us much about him. He was Anglican, since Catholics and Presbyterians were not permitted to hold public office, and he represented County Cavan. He was raised to the peerage of Ireland in 1756 as Baron Farnham of Farnham, in Co. Cavan. Upon his death in 1759, he was succeeded in the barony by his son, Robert, who was made Viscount Farnham in 1760, and Earl of Farnham in 1763, clearly establishing that the family were strong and effective supporters of the English.

        American records show that David Maxwell, this writer’s maternal ancestor, sailed from Donegal for Philadelphia in about 1750, shortly after the failure of the Jacobite Risings in Scotland. Clearly, he was not so favored as were his cousins of Farnham. Was he a Jacobite Scot, a Catholic who had fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie? Was he an Irish Presbyterian, persecuted in his turn by King James’ minions, because he refused to accept the Church of England? Was he merely a younger son, seeking his fortune? Due to the lack of records at the time, we just don’t know.

        Like those of the Anglo-Irish of “The Pale,” the Scots-Irish loyalties, their culture and their language were English. They spoke neither Gaelic nor Irish and knew nothing of the traditions, laws, religion, or culture of the Gael. They scorned and had little in common with those they had evicted. They were city dwellers, described as “the scum of both nations, who from debt, or breaking, or fleeing justice, or seeking shelter, came hither hoping to be without fear of man’s justice.” They were looking for the same kind of opportunity that the colonists in America would seek a short time later, and they had the same disdain for the natives and their pastoral lifestyle whom they displaced. These were the Scots-Irish Protestants of Cavan, Belfast, Londonderry and Enniskillen, and some of the land they settled was the “Uire Gaedhil” of the MacDonnells, land won from the Ui’Neill in alliance with the Dal n’Arade more than a thousand years before. The rest was the “Clandeboye” (Down and Meath) of the southern Ulaidh, the “Tir Eóghan” (Tyrone) of the northern Ulaidh and that portion of “Tir Chonnaill” (Donegal) east of Lough Foyle which the “Dál Cuinn” had held for a thousand years before the Romans took Britain.

        The “Cromwellian Land Settlement” of 1652 identified “rebel” landowners for clearance. The most guilty, including 105 named chief rebels, were subject to execution, banishment and “transportation,” while others who had not shown “constant good affection” to Parliament were subject to various levels of forfeiture and transplantation to Connacht. Several thousand prisoners of war, priests, vagrants and other “dangerous” persons were transported to servitude in the West Indies. Those Irish landowners not responsible for “massacre or aggravated rebellion” were to be removed to the counties of Galway, Roscommon, Mayo or Clare in the west of Ireland, where they were to receive, depending on their “guilt,” the equivalent of two-thirds, one-third, or one-fifth of their former lands. Some of Cromwell’s army radicals advocated removal of the Catholic population as a whole, but were opposed by the “old Protestants” who could not function without their native retainers. In June 1657, the process was declared complete even though many had received less than the law provided and some nothing at all. On the other hand, some had used bribes or influence to obtain lands illegally and others refused to move, despite threats of punishment.

        Those Irish remaining east of the Shannon were little more than slaves, with no vote, no church and no hope for any improvement in their lot. Of those exiled west of the Shannon, thousands starved to death; thousands more left Ireland to join continental armies or to emigrate to America; but for those who remained and lived, Hell was Ireland. Fynes Moryson, private secretary to Lord Deputy Mountjoy, gave an eye-witness account of the famine intentionally caused by the English:

        “Now because I have often made mention formerly of our destroying the rebels’ corn, and using all means to famish them, let me by two or three examples shew the miserable estate to which the rebels were thereby brought. Sir Arthur Chichester, Sir Richard Moryson and the other commanders of the forces sent against Brian MacArt (ÓNeill) aforesaid, in their return homewards saw a most horrid spectacle of three children (whereof the eldest was not above ten years old) all eating their dead mother, upon whose flesh they had fed twenty days past . . .”

Oliver Cromwell
By Robert Walker
British National Portrait Gallery

        The defeated and dispossessed Irish were in desperate condition. By 1641, although some 85% of the population of Ulster was still Irish, about 85% of the land was controlled by English Protestants. Belfast contained only seven professed Roman Catholics in 1708. There was no place in Ireland and no leader with remaining resources, to whom they could turn for refuge or relief. When Cromwell arrived in 1649, his army’s slogan, “To Hell or Connacht,” was profoundly appropriate, even though it was intended to mean that if the Ulster Roman Catholics didn’t move west of the Shannon to the wilderness of Connacht, they would literally be murdered.

        This was the cess-pool in which the Irish MacDonnells had to survive. Alice ÓNeill MacDonnell, a daughter of The ÓNeill and wife of Randal Arranach MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, told that when she was taking a thousand men southward to strengthen the cause of Charles Stuart, she stopped at Limavady to see her cousin, the wife of ÓCahan, late chieftain of that country, whose ancestors were empowered to inaugurate each new ÓNeill chieftain and also long since relatives of the MacDonnells by marriage. She found her in the ruined hall of the ÓCahan castle, once the frequent scene of lighthearted revelry, but whose window casements now were stuffed with straw. ÓCahan’s lady, whose beauty and whose bounty had evoked sweet tunes from many harps and had inspired a minstrel’s lay, was huddled there, wrapped in an old blanket, seated on her hams on the hearth, cowering over a miserable fire of brambles which she had laboriously gathered from the woods.

She sits alone on the cold gravestone,
And only the dead are nigh her;
In the tongue of the Gael she makes her wail;
The night wind rushes by her:

Few O few, are the leal and true,
And fewer shall be, and fewer;
The land is a corse; - no life, no force -
O wind with sere leaves strew her!

Men ask what scope is left for hope
To one who has known her story;
I trust her dead! Their graves are red;
But their souls are with God in glory.

                     An Irish Bard, 18th Century

The Earth Turtle
© Copyright 2006, Cari Busiak

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Bun Na Mairgie (Mouth Of A River Of Pity) Franciscan Friory, Ballycastle, Co. Antrim.  It remained the primary Irish burial place of The MacDonnells Of Dun Naibhig And The Glens, and of their successors, The MacDonnells Of Antrim, until abandoned by the Franciscans in 1720.

Wicklow Gaol
Built in the Cromwellian era (perhaps under the auspices of Alasdair MacDonnell
Of Leinster, Governor of Wicklow) to facilitate the repression of the Irish