ABSTRACT
The Flight of the Earls was a disaster for Ireland. As Tyrone and Tir Conaill had sailed away in secret, they were deemed traitors and their lands forfeit. They left a vacuum behind them, and Sir Arthur Chichester, who had succeeded Mountjoy as deputy in 1601, saw immediately the opportunity for extensive plantation that had fallen into the government's lap. He had been toying with the idea of a minor plantation in Cavan, to be effected without, he believed, any injustice to the native Irishi now the same moderate plans, which provided for sizeable pockets of English and Scottish settlement in areas still left predominantly Irish, could be extended over the greater part of Ulster. He wrote immediately to the English Council to put his enlarged plan before them. Then in 1608 a minor chieftain, Sir Cahir O'Doherty of Inishowen, on the north coast, broke into sudden rebellion and burned the garrison town of Derry. The revolt was soon over - within four months O'Doherty was dead and his followers scattered - but the government in England had taken fright. Chichester' s moderate schemes were pushed aside and in 1609 Articles of Plantation published which removed most of the Irish to specially designated areas (rather as the American Indians were to be moved to reservations in the nineteeth century) leaving 500,000 acres of good, cultivable land, about a quarter of the whole, to be taken for plantation.
