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The English and Scottish settlers were very worried from the start that, in fact, they were perhaps going to be the subject of attack. The term is often used, you know, ‘the siege mentality’ of the Protestant settlers: well basically from day one there was a siege mentality. And there’s a quotation basically about the Protestant settlers in County Londonderry working with the axe in one hand and the sword in the other. So they were actually cutting down the wood to make the buildings, and such was the fear of attack by Irish outlaws and people hostile to the Plantation, that they felt they had to be armed at the time.
So they did have this tremendous sense of feeling vulnerable to attack. Not least because the Earl of Tyrone, having fled Ireland at the time of The Flight of the Earls in 1607, had every intention of coming back: it is a misunderstanding that The Flight of the Earls was a one-way process, that the Earls left Ireland with no intention of coming back. The Earls left Ireland because they were worried that their treasonable machinations had been uncovered by the Government.
The Earl of Tyrone, in particular, who lived until 1616, planned to come back to Ireland - as he said himself, he would rather die in Ireland than rot in Rome. In fact, he said at the end, that even though he perhaps might not succeed in re-conquering his territories, he would much prefer to go back to Ireland and die fighting there with 100 men than to die in Rome.
So throughout the Early years of the Plantation, there was always this fear: on the one hand of an international-sponsored invasion of Ireland, that the Spanish would help O’Neill to return, and if O’Neill returned that the Planters would be ejected; and on the other hand, at a domestic level in Ulster, there were considerable evidence of a lot of attacks by native Irish outlaws known as ‘wood kerne’.
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