Two records separated by only three years provide an unusually revealing glimpse of the world in which the northern Ó Maol Phádraig were living shortly before the upheaval of 1641. The first is a yearly lease made on an English Plantation estate in County Cavan in 1628. The second is a royal pardon issued in 1631 to Edward Duffe O’Mulpatrick and sixteen others, with the extraordinary condition that one member of the group, Toole Mac Conway, leave Ireland within fourteen days and enter military service in the war in Sweden.
Taken together, the records show two sides of the same changing society. The old Gaelic political structure had been dismantled, but many of the families that had sustained it remained close to the same land and to one another. They adapted to the new estate system, retained or recovered land wherever possible, preserved local relationships and increasingly shared a Catholic identity that distinguished them from the new political and religious establishment.
At the same time, the authorities were becoming increasingly concerned about men who remained outside the new social order, particularly younger men with military experience, family standing and the ability to gather followers. Overseas military recruitment provided employment and manpower for friendly foreign armies, but it also offered the government a convenient means of removing potentially troublesome men from Ireland.
The evidence does not support the stronger claim that the Crown deliberately sent Irishmen abroad simply to have them killed. It does show that officials recognized a political advantage in having thousands of such men somewhere other than Ireland. In the case of Toole Mac Conway, removal from the country was not merely encouraged. It was written directly into the conditions under which mercy was granted, giving the pardon an unmistakably coercive element. Mac Conway could have his pardon, but only if he left Ireland. Such a condition also sent a message to the other men around him: royal mercy could be conditional upon submission, departure and obedience.
Within another decade, many of the tensions visible beneath these records would erupt into open war.
Donnough Ó Maol Phádraig and the Two-Poll Fugh
On 1 May 1628, Sir Edward Fishe leased two polls of land called Fugh to Donnough O’Mulpatrick, who was explicitly described in the surviving inquisition as Irish. The tenancy was for one year and formed part of the great proportion of Dromany, an approximately 2,000-acre Plantation estate in the barony of Loughtee.
Sir John Fishe had originally received the Dromany proportion during the Plantation. Following his death in 1623, his interests passed to his son Sir Edward. The inquisition taken in 1629 records numerous leases across the estate and provides an unusually detailed picture of the individual land divisions from which the property was composed.
The document shows that there were actually two separate places called Fugh within the estate. One consisted of a single poll and the other of two polls. Donnough’s lease specifically concerned the two-poll Fugh, allowing us to distinguish his holding from another historical Fugh that appears elsewhere in the surviving records.
The surrounding denominations provide a further clue. Close to the two-poll Fugh appear Aghanilly, Carriaghan, Tullagh and Derhowe, corresponding to the later Aghavilla, Carrigan, Tawlaght and Derryhoo. These form a compact geographical group around the townland later known as Feugh Maxwell. Feugh Bishops, or Drumalla, lies within a different group of neighbouring townlands.
The evidence therefore points strongly toward Donnough’s two-poll Fugh being the property later known as Feugh Maxwell. Early seventeenth-century polls did not always correspond perfectly with later mapped townland boundaries, so the identification should remain a careful reconstruction rather than an absolute statement. The combination of the two-poll description and the surrounding placenames nevertheless makes the identification very strong.
More Than a Small Tenant
The size of Donnough’s lease also deserves attention. The acreage represented by an Irish poll varied considerably, and Plantation surveys did not use a perfectly uniform system, but two polls represented a meaningful amount of agricultural land. Donnough was not being recorded as a labourer with a small garden or cabin.
Nothing in the document gives him the formal title of steward, so it would be wrong to describe him as one without qualification. His position does suggest a man with sufficient resources, agricultural experience and reputation to be entrusted with a substantial block of estate land. The possibility that Ó Maol Phádraig men performed the practical functions later associated with estate yeomen, substantial farmers or land managers fits a pattern appearing elsewhere in the family’s records, even where the precise office remains unstated.
Donnough’s situation becomes more revealing when he is viewed alongside the other native Irish tenants of the Fishe estate. He was not standing alone among a population of newly arrived British settlers. Several Ó Raghallaigh men were obtaining leases within the same property and, in some cases, in the same immediate landscape.
The Ó Raghallaigh Were Still There
Among the Irish tenants recorded by Fishe are men whose names can be rendered as Connor O’Reilly, John O’Reilly, Cathal O’Reilly and Cahir O’Reilly. Some of their holdings lay among or close to the land divisions surrounding Donnough’s Fugh.
Cathal and Cahir are particularly intriguing because prominent brothers named Cathal McOwen O’Reilly and Cahir McOwen O’Reilly are known from the Plantation settlement. They belonged to an important surviving Ó Raghallaigh branch and received native grants after the redistribution of Cavan. Cathal remained in possession of lands until his death in 1634, placing him unquestionably in the right generation to be the Cathal appearing on Fishe’s estate in 1628. Cahir McOwen likewise survived the Plantation as a recognized native grantee.
The identification cannot yet be considered proven. The Fishe record does not preserve the patronymics, and Cathal and Cahir were not unique names among the Ó Raghallaigh. There were other men of those names in the wider dynasty. Yet the combination of date, social standing and the presence of several Ó Raghallaigh tenants on the same estate makes the possibility difficult to ignore.
Their previously documented landholdings elsewhere do not rule them out. A native gentleman could hold property under a Crown grant in one district and simultaneously rent additional lands from another proprietor. Grazing, tillage, livestock, dependants and subtenants could be distributed across several holdings rather than concentrated around one residence.
Contemporary Plantation evidence shows native Irish men doing exactly that.
Holding Land as a Means of Holding Influence
The Plantation took political sovereignty away from the old Gaelic dynasties much more quickly than it removed their economic and social influence. Families that had once exercised power through lordship could lose the legal ownership of large territories while retaining cattle, capital, relatives, followers, local knowledge and established relationships with the people who actually worked the countryside.
Some members of the old families received Crown grants. Others became tenants of the new proprietors. Some leased several properties simultaneously. Native intermediaries could also assist landlords with collecting rents, managing tenants and dealing with the Irish population of an estate.
Plantation settlers themselves sometimes complained that Irish tenants were prepared to offer higher rents and were successfully competing with British settlers for desirable leases. Such complaints reveal that at least part of the native population retained enough capital and livestock to participate actively in the new land market.
For the Ó Raghallaigh, this offered a means of retaining something of the wealth and authority of the world they had lost. Their kingdom no longer existed in law, but individual branches of the family could continue to own or lease substantial farms, support dependants and preserve influence within their former territory.
Donnough Ó Maol Phádraig belongs comfortably within that environment. For decades the family had repeatedly appeared beside the Ó Raghallaigh. Cathal Bán Ó Maol Phádraig occurs among an Ó Raghallaigh following in 1586. Moriertagh Ó Maol Phádraig appears at An Críonach in 1593. In 1602 Conor O Molpatrick was sufficiently prominent to be described as “chief of his name” in a pardon dominated by the Ó Raghallaigh political world.
Twenty-six years later, an Ó Maol Phádraig man and several Ó Raghallaigh men are again found in proximity. The difference is that the paperwork now belongs to an English Plantation estate.
The legal structure had changed. The underlying human network had survived.
The Old Clans Sticking Together
The survival of these relationships provides a useful way of understanding the years between the Plantation and the rebellion of 1641. The older Gaelic families had been linked through more than formal political allegiance. Marriage, fosterage, clientship, military service, shared territory and generations of personal association had created relationships that could survive the destruction of the lordship itself.
People did not cease to recognize one another because a Crown survey reassigned the land.
The Fishe estate may therefore offer a glimpse of old relationships being rebuilt inside the new economic system. An Ó Maol Phádraig could become a tenant of Edward Fishe while remaining socially connected with Ó Raghallaigh families occupying neighbouring lands. An Ó Raghallaigh gentleman could accept a Crown grant and simultaneously seek additional leases from another proprietor. Accommodation with the new regime and loyalty to the older community were not mutually exclusive.
For men who had once belonged to a ruling or service class, accumulation of land could also provide a way of rebuilding wealth. Farming, cattle raising, leasing and estate management were not simply methods of survival. Successful participation in the new economy could preserve the resources required to support a household, dependants and wider kin group.
The political kingdom had been lost. Control of land, even as tenants, offered a way of hanging on.
Religion Adds Another Bond
Kinship and territorial allegiance long predated the religious divisions of the seventeenth century, but Catholic identity increasingly reinforced those older relationships.
The new Plantation order was closely associated with Protestant government, Protestant settlers and the established church. For many native families, therefore, political dispossession and religious exclusion increasingly became parts of the same experience. The families who had previously been bound together through lordship and locality were now also likely to share a Catholic identity distinct from the government and much of the settler population.
This development should not be reduced to a simple Protestant-versus-Catholic explanation for every dispute. Economic opportunity, family ambition, local rivalry and personal loyalty continued to influence behaviour. Native Catholic families could cooperate with Protestant landlords for decades when doing so served their interests.
Yet religion provided an increasingly powerful additional bond. By the time serious political conflict returned, the older Gaelic relationships of kinship and territory overlapped with a developing sense of Catholic solidarity. When rebellion eventually spread through Ulster, many of the men able to organize it were drawing upon relationships that had existed long before 1641.
The rebellion did not have to invent those networks. It mobilized networks that had survived.
Edward Duffe Ó Maol Phádraig, 1631
Three years after the Fugh lease, another Ó Maol Phádraig appears in a very different setting.
On 14 July 1631, Charles I issued a pardon to Edward Duffe O’Mulpatrick and sixteen others, described in the surviving calendar as in forma pauperis. An unusual additional condition applied to one member of the group: Toole Mac Conway was required to leave Ireland within fourteen days and serve in the war in Sweden.
“Duffe” represents the Irish byname Dubh, meaning black or dark. Edward may therefore have been known in Irish as something equivalent to Éamonn Dubh Ó Maol Phádraig. Contemporary English records could render Éamonn in several ways, including Edward, Edmund and Edmond, making later identification particularly difficult.
Unfortunately, James Morrin’s nineteenth-century calendar does not preserve the names of Edward’s sixteen companions apart from Mac Conway, nor does it give Edward a residence. The original Patent Roll was later destroyed. Unless another contemporary copy or related administrative document survives elsewhere, information discarded during the calendaring process may now be permanently lost.
No secure second record of Edward Dubh has yet been identified.
Toole Mac Conway Was Ordered Out of Ireland
The condition attached to Toole Mac Conway transforms an otherwise obscure pardon into something far more revealing.
He was not merely encouraged to seek employment as a soldier. His departure from Ireland was a condition of royal mercy. Within fourteen days he was expected to leave the country and enter military service in the war involving Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden.
There is a coercive quality to that arrangement that should not be overlooked. The Crown was effectively saying that Mac Conway could receive mercy only if he removed himself from Ireland. It was a pardon tied to exile through military service. For Mac Conway himself, the choice was hardly a free one. For the other men named in the same pardon, the condition would also have served as a demonstration of what royal leniency could require.
The date falls in the middle of an exceptional recruiting campaign.
In June 1631 Lord Esmond reported that Sir Piers Crosby intended to raise approximately 3,500 men in Ireland for Swedish service. Esmond welcomed the plan because it would provide employment for what he described as Ireland’s idle young men and remarked that the country could spare even more.
Sir Frederick Hamilton, whose base at Manorhamilton stood in County Leitrim immediately west of the wider Bréifne country, also received authority to raise approximately 1,200 men for Gustavus Adolphus. Hamilton subsequently took a Scottish-Irish regiment into the German theatre of the Thirty Years’ War.
Sir Arthur Forbes and Captain John Baillie were engaged in another recruiting effort at almost exactly the same time. On 29 July 1631 they acknowledged receipt of 1,500 rixdaler for the raising and transportation of 500 men from Ireland.
The timing around Mac Conway is extraordinary. His pardon was issued on 14 July. Fourteen days brought him to approximately 28 July. The surviving Forbes-Baillie agreement for the transportation of another five hundred men is dated 29 July.
There is no evidence placing Mac Conway among those particular five hundred recruits. The chronology nevertheless demonstrates that the condition imposed upon him coincided precisely with a large, organized movement of men from Ireland into continental military service.
Foreign War as an Instrument of Control
Overseas military employment had an obvious practical purpose. European armies required soldiers, Irish and Scottish men had long traditions of military service abroad, and soldiering could offer wages and advancement unavailable at home.
There was another consideration.
The Stuart administration worried about young men who were land-poor, unemployed, armed or accustomed to attaching themselves to men of greater local importance. Authorities were particularly suspicious of gentlemen who possessed little property of their own but retained enough status to gather followers around them. Later legislation directed against cosherers and idle wanderers explicitly described such men as capable of becoming leaders of outlaws and rebels during periods of disturbance.
Government enthusiasm for exporting thousands of recruits therefore had an internal political benefit. Every able-bodied man serving in Germany or Scandinavia was one fewer potentially troublesome man remaining in Ireland. Military recruitment provided employment, reduced the number of unattached fighting men and removed individuals whose social position made them difficult to incorporate into the Plantation order.
The Mac Conway pardon takes that policy one step further. Foreign service was imposed upon him as a condition of mercy. In practical terms, the Crown was using pardon and military service together: the individual was spared punishment at home on the understanding that he would leave the country, while the other men around him were shown that mercy could be conditional and disciplinary.
It would go beyond the surviving evidence to describe the policy as an attempt to kill off the Irish population in foreign wars. Officials expected casualties, as they did in any military undertaking, but the surviving material emphasizes removal, employment and control rather than deliberate destruction. The authorities plainly believed that Ireland was easier to govern with thousands of potentially restless young men serving elsewhere.
Overseas recruitment was therefore not merely foreign policy. It could also function as domestic social control.
Were the Ó Maol Phádraig Becoming Radicalized?
Edward Dubh’s pardon raises the question of how the political attitude of families such as Ó Maol Phádraig was changing during these years.
There is no evidence identifying Edward’s offence, so his pardon cannot be presented as proof that he had participated in political rebellion. Nor does the record state that Edward himself was ordered into Swedish service.
The broader sequence nevertheless suggests growing tension.
Earlier Ó Maol Phádraig records place the family within the political and military following of the Ó Raghallaigh. After the Plantation we find members of the family adapting to the new land system while continuing to occupy the same social landscape as Ó Raghallaigh and other native families. Three years after Donnough’s Fugh tenancy, another Ó Maol Phádraig appears among seventeen pardoned men, one of whom the government required to leave Ireland altogether.
Rather than imagining a sudden transformation from peaceful farmer to rebel, the surviving evidence points toward a gradual hardening of attitudes within a population whose political position had been progressively diminished. Men could cooperate with the new government when necessary while remaining deeply dissatisfied with the loss of land, status and religious freedom. Taking a lease from an English landlord did not erase older loyalties, and obtaining a Crown grant did not necessarily produce affection for the regime that had redistributed the family’s former territory.
The same men could accommodate themselves to the Plantation and still become opponents of it when circumstances changed.
Where Did Edward Dubh Come From?
The surviving pardon gives Edward no residence, leaving two geographical possibilities open.
The stronger possibility remains Cavan and the wider Bréifne-Leitrim region. Ó Maol Phádraig was securely established there before 1631, and Donnough’s Fugh tenancy provides a precisely located family record only three years earlier. Other surviving evidence repeatedly places the surname around northern Cavan and the adjoining Fermanagh and Leitrim country.
The recruiting activity of Sir Frederick Hamilton adds another connection. Manorhamilton stood immediately west of the old Bréifne heartland, giving the region direct exposure to recruiting for Swedish service during the same year as Edward’s pardon.
A Tyrone connection remains possible but less certain. Toole Mac Conway’s name fits comfortably within a northern Gaelic environment, and Sir Piers Crosby possessed Tyrone interests while actively recruiting large numbers of men for Sweden. Ó Maol Phádraig is also independently documented in Tyrone by the early 1660s, when Tirlagh Ó Maol Phádraig and his wife appear at Mullaghmossagh in Aghaloo parish.
That later Tyrone record cannot prove that Edward lived there thirty years earlier. It simply confirms that movement northward occurred.
There is also no requirement that Edward and Mac Conway originally came from the same place. The seventeen men could have been brought together through imprisonment, prosecution or administrative procedure. Without the missing names, the geography of the group remains unresolved.
The Same Families Continue to Reappear
By placing the 1628 and 1631 records together, a broader pattern becomes visible.
The Plantation had broken the sovereignty of the old dynasties but had not removed their descendants from the landscape. Ó Raghallaigh families retained grants, accumulated leases and continued to possess local influence. Ó Maol Phádraig men continued to appear around them. Other familiar families such as Brady, McGovern, Maguire and MacMahon remained deeply rooted in neighbouring districts.
These were not isolated households randomly scattered across Ulster. They were communities shaped by generations of kinship, marriage, fosterage, service and shared territory. Increasingly they were also connected through Catholic identity.
The state recognized the continued power of such relationships. Concern about land-poor gentlemen gathering followers, policies directed against coshering and wandering, and enthusiasm for removing thousands of men into foreign armies all reveal anxiety about a population whose political power had been reduced without eliminating its ability to organize.
That ability becomes much easier to see once the story reaches 1641.
From Accommodation to Organized Resistance
The uprising of 1641 did not emerge from a social vacuum. Across Ulster, many of the principal families involved had survived the Plantation in precisely the ways visible in the earlier records: as native grantees, tenants, substantial farmers, soldiers, clerics and local intermediaries.
The Ó Raghallaigh, Maguire, MacMahon and O’Neill networks that became central to the rising had continued to exist during the supposedly quiet Plantation decades. Their members still knew one another, intermarried, occupied neighbouring lands and retained relationships with dependants and lesser families.
Catholic religion increasingly provided a common cause across those older political divisions. What began with strong local and dynastic elements could therefore develop into a much wider Catholic political and military movement.
The later appearance of the same family networks in organized rebellion does not prove that Donnough Ó Maol Phádraig was secretly preparing for war in 1628 or that Edward Dubh was already committed to rebellion in 1631. It demonstrates instead that the structures capable of supporting later resistance had survived throughout these years.
Plantation ownership sat over an older social landscape that had never entirely disappeared.
A DNA Sidenote: Groome and Maxwell
Two DNA observations provide an interesting sidenote to the documentary story, although neither is needed to establish the historical argument.
A Hugh Groome appears among the native Irish people recorded in the Fishe material. Groome initially looks like an unexpected surname in a Gaelic Cavan setting, yet Hugh is explicitly identified as Irish, and other seventeenth-century records show Groome-like names occurring among clearly Gaelic families.
A modern Irish Groome paternal line also falls beneath BY9001, specifically under FGC54803, a branch currently estimated to have formed around 1000. The documented paternal ancestry of the tester can be followed securely to Martin Groome, born about 1808 and died 1885, of Knockdrin in County Offaly, while estate evidence places Groome families in the same locality by 1700.
There is no evidence that Hugh Groome of Cavan was an ancestor of the Offaly line. The value of the observation lies elsewhere. Groome joins Farrell and the other apparently different surnames beneath BY9001 in demonstrating how an old regional paternal lineage could divide centuries before hereditary surnames became fixed. Different branches could remain within the broader Midlands, Conmaicne and Bréifne world while eventually acquiring completely different surnames.
The second observation concerns Maxwell. Donnough’s Fugh can be identified with considerable confidence as the land later known as Feugh Maxwell. The qualifier developed later through Maxwell estate ownership rather than being part of the placename in 1628. Independently, a Maxwell paternal line occurs beneath BY12234.
No documentary evidence presently connects that DNA Maxwell family with the estate-owning Maxwells associated with Feugh. It remains an interesting coincidence to investigate rather than evidence upon which to build an argument.
Both observations nevertheless fit the wider DNA picture: the variety of surnames beneath BY9001 and BY12234 is compatible with an old regional paternal population whose branches acquired different identities long after their male lines had separated.
Holding the Ground
The two records tell different stories, but they belong to the same historical process.
At Fugh in 1628, Donnough Ó Maol Phádraig was adapting to Plantation Ireland through land. Around him were members of the older native families, including several Ó Raghallaigh men who were themselves finding ways to retain or rebuild economic influence under the new system. Three years later Edward Dubh Ó Maol Phádraig appears among pardoned men at the very moment the government was helping to move thousands of Irish fighting men into continental armies, with one of Edward’s companions explicitly ordered to leave Ireland as a condition of mercy.
The old clans had lost control of the state, but they had not vanished from the countryside. They were still farming, leasing, accumulating cattle and land, maintaining kinship networks and preserving local influence. Their Catholic identity increasingly reinforced relationships that had previously rested upon lineage, territory and lordship.
Government officials understood that such communities still contained men capable of gathering followers. Overseas recruitment, conditional pardons, legislation against wandering retainers and increasingly intrusive administration all formed part of an attempt to control a society that had been politically defeated without being socially dismantled.
When rebellion finally came in 1641, many of the names would be familiar.
The road to that rebellion did not begin in October 1641. It ran through years like 1628 and 1631, when the old families were learning how to survive inside the Plantation while the Crown was learning how difficult those families could be to control.
From there the story leads directly toward 1641 and, ultimately, Benburb in 1646, when the surviving Gaelic and Catholic networks that had remained embedded in the countryside would emerge openly as an organized military force.
References
Morrin, James. Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls of Chancery in Ireland, of the Reign of Charles the First: First to Eighth Year, Inclusive. Dublin, 1863, p. 583.
Inquisitionum in Officio Rotulorum Cancellariae Hiberniae Asservatarum Repertorium. Vol. II, Ultonia.
Fitzpatrick, Matthew and Mike Fitzpatrick. 2025. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans. Part III.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 6, 27–41.
Farrell, Gerard. 2014. “Class Divisions and the ‘Mere Irish’ of Colonial Ulster.” Journal of Postgraduate Research, Trinity College Dublin.
Farrell, Gerard. 2017. The ‘Mere Irish’ and the Colonisation of Ulster, 1570–1641. Palgrave Macmillan.
Fallon, James. Study of British recruitment for Scandinavian military service during the Thirty Years’ War.
Murdoch, Steve. Studies of Scottish and Irish military service in Scandinavia and the German states during the Thirty Years’ War.
Dictionary of Irish Biography. “Hamilton, Sir Frederick.”
Scotland, Scandinavia and Northern European Biographical Database, University of St Andrews.
National Records of Scotland. Lord Forbes Papers, GD 52/93.
Farnham Papers, National Library of Ireland.