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O’Neill’s forces themselves used scorched earth tactics in parts of the country during the Nine Years’ War but Chichester responds in kind and very, very effectively - he’s a very effective killer and there’s no doubt that the depopulation of Ulster which occurs in the second part of the Nine Years’ War, he’s one of the principal architects of that depopulation. Forced starvation, summary killings, driving people out of the Province either as refugees down south to the Pale or basically across the Channel to Scotland, definitely he’s one of the principal personalities behind that.
What’s interesting is how he behaves after the Nine Years’ War, how he behaves as Lord Deputy, and how he pushes in 1605/1606 immediately after acquiring the Lord Deputyship, the Chief Governorship of Ireland for the imposition of Draconian policies in Ulster, which is to be singled-out for special treatment from November 1605. And by February 1606, he has doubled the number of Provost Martials in the Province, and by the end of the year he has trebled them and the Provost Martials of course are imposing martial law on the general populace, and targeting the defeated Gaelic lords, and they help to basically create The Flight of the Earls. Chichester is behind The Flight of the Earls: Moses Hill is the stalking-horse as I said Earlier.
But he maintains the pressure after The Flight of the Earls, after the Ulster Plantation is begun, for the continuance of special measures in different parts of the country, and also he is behind a largely Protestant persecution policy, targeted again at the Catholic gentry of the entire country, to drive them out of their privileged positions, to drive them out of local government and the provincial government and create a new order that he shapes.
Chichester, I think, has a more longer-lasting, subtler effect on Ireland and the structures of power in Ireland, than Cromwell - Cromwell comes in and it’s like a bomb going off, but he’s only here for just over a year and then he’s gone.
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