13 FEBRUARY 1993, Page 29

Children of the siege

Thomas Pakenham

A HISTORY OF ULSTER by Jonathan Bardon The Blackstaff Press, Belfast, £30, £14.95, pp.928 Jonathan Bardon is the Marathon Man of Ulster history. He begins his run at the end of one Ice Age, in about 10,000 BC, when the melting glaciers washed clean the hills of Down and Antrim ready to receive the first settlers bold enough to paddle the 12 miles across from Scotland. He ends his run at the end of another ice age, when trozen political attitudes in the North hand melted enough to allow a cautious "and to be stretched out from the Unionists of Belfast to the government in Dublin.

No wonder Bardon becomes somewhat breathless — especially during the final 2,°0-page sprint from the 1960s to the 1990s, when car bombs had livened up the once 'dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone' (in Churchill's famous phrase). Yet his History of Ulster is an awe-inspiring achievement. Bardon is a full-time history teacher at a college of business studies in Belfast. In the last ten years, according to his blurb, he has written various television scripts and three other books as well as this colossal tome. A bad case of historiomania, You might think. But there is nothing obsessional about Bardon's prose. His nar- rative propels one smoothly forward. Is he Catholic or Protestant — which foot does he dig with, as they say up there? Who cares. He is lucid and fair, almost too fair Perhaps. Sometimes his tone is incongru-

ously bland for the bloody mayhem of Ulster history.

Of course not all the bad times involved bloodshed, or were evenly shared. Blight blackened the potato counties of western and central Ulster as cruelly as it blackened the potato counties of Munster and Connaught. The corn counties of the north-east were spared like their counter- parts to the South. Bardon describes the festive mood in Belfast in 1849 when the Queen and Prince Albert came to open the new Victoria dock, and launch Belfast itself down the slipway of the steam-age world. A hundred miles away to the west the work- houses of Tyrone and Donegal were choked with the victims of the Great Famine.

And there were good times, too. The rise of the cottage-based linen industry filled the small towns of Ulster with bleach greens, the envy of the South. True, the hand-loom weavers were thrown out of work when the linen industry moved to the great steam-powered factories of Belfast. But the wealth brought by two industrial revolutions a century apart was widely diffused — especially among the Protes- tants.

Yet the engine that drives Bardon's nar- rative forward is powered by the triple themes of conquest, plantation and resistance. Twice in the century after the Reformation the Catholics of Ulster tried to upset England's Protestant applecart. For their failure they had to pay a heavy price in English and Scottish settlers. Thereafter the lines were drawn: two embattled communities, both children of the siege, feeding on mutual antagonism and afraid to look beyond the siege-works.

The first Ulster eruption after the Reformation was the rebellion of Hugh O'Neill, the great Earl of Tyrone, launched in 1595. Ulster was still the most Gaelic, most Catholic and least anglicised of the four Irish provinces. Only the feuding of the feudal lords had allowed the English Crown to maintain a precarious ascendan- cy.

O'Neill seemed the last man to lead a mob of wild Gaelic chieftains. He had been Queen Elizabeth's pet Irishman: molly- coddled at Court, taught English sonnets and the arts of love at the side of Essex. But he had also learnt the arts of Eliza- bethan war. With these innovations he hoped to turn back the clock and restore the old aristocratic, Gaelic order. He chose a good moment. England had her hands full with Spain, and Spain promised O'Neill a new armada bound for the North.

For six years O'Neill had the English on the run, and seemed to have an Ulster throne at his feet. He forged a modern army out of the bare-legged gallow-glasses and wood-kernes that passed for soldiers in Ireland. He forged a united front from the bickering Irish lords. He ambushed and destroyed one of the Queen's armies at the Battle of the Yellow Ford. The Spanish landed their armada as they had promised. But it was weaker than he had expected only 3,500 troops with a mutinous com- mander — and it was off-loaded at the wrong end of Ireland, at Kinsale.

When O'Neill marched south to join hands with the Spanish his army was caught in the open and crushed by the English Lord Deputy, Mountjoy. O'Neill never recovered. Though courted by the Crown once again, he took off for Europe in the impetuous 'Flight of the Earls', leaving Ulster a smoking ruin.

Half a century later the Catholics had their second go at the apple-cart. This time the alliance was between Gaelic and Old English (the descendants of the Anglo- Norman invaders who had stayed Catholic). They had plenty of grievances to share. To the old wounds of religious and political discrimination was added a new body-blow: dispossession from their land. The ill-judged Flight of the Earls had given James I the chance for a radical shake-up of property. Scottish Presbyterians poured across into Antrim and Down. Other English and Scottish adventurers of every class (the 'scum of both nations', according to one authority) straddled the counties to the west. In theory only Catholics of proven loyalty were to have been allowed to retain their land. Of course in practice there was confusion. By the winter of 1641 the Catholic landowners saw their chance to exploit Charles I's difficulties. But they soon lost control of the uprising, which degenerated into mayhem and massacre.

How many Protestant settlers were mur- dered — or died of exposure after being driven from their homes? Bardon shows good sense in rejecting the hysterical pro- paganda that the Protestants later made from the affair. But some of the claims the Portadown massacre, for example seem only too authentic. When Cromwell sailed for Ireland in 1649 the stage was set for an orgy of revenge.

After the Cromwellian settlement, Ulster became the show-place of loyalty to the British connection — that is, north-east Ulster. When James II landed at Dublin with an army provided by Louis XIV, it was Ulster that provided the bridgehead for William of Orange to repossess Ireland in the name of the Crown. If Derry and Car- rickfergus had been lost to the Catholics, there would have been no victory at the Boyne — as the 'No surrender' graffiti in the Shankhill Road, Belfast still remind the taigs today.

One footnote, and not, I hope, a grumble. Bardon has such a fine gift for narrative that it is a pity to see it interrupt- ed, in the early paragraphs of each chapter, by a so-called 'overview'. I detect the bale- ful hand of his publishers. A table of chronology would have provided a better summary for each chapter. And some decent maps and a few illustrations would have been a well-earned reward for Bar- don's ten years at the grindstone.