By July 1605, the war was over, but the men who had moved through it together had not simply gone home and disappeared. Some of them had moved again.
The trail we had been following around Richard Tyrrell had previously brought Ó Maol Phádraig, McInlowe, Tuite, Brady, Ó Raghallaigh and other families together in the country around Abbeylara. Now, in a short pardon dated 19 July 1605, part of that same society appears much farther north, at a place written Killeffaine in County Cavan. Six Ó Raghallaigh gentlemen are there, followed by two Brady yeomen, William Buí Tyrrell, William Ó Maol Phádraig and several others. Simon Tuite of Tuitstown, already known from the earlier Tyrrell-associated material, appears again, and the pardon ends with Brian McEnlewe of Killeffaine.
That movement is the most important thing about the patent. These men had not merely survived the final years of the Nine Years’ War. They appear to have travelled north through the same network that had connected them before, from the Abbeylara country into lands associated with the Tyrrell family in Cavan. The pardon therefore gives us something more useful than another isolated appearance of William Ó Maol Phádraig. It gives us a glimpse of what happened to some of these men after the fighting stopped.
The location is crucial. In Ó Maol Phádraig: the name, the people, and the clans, Part III, Killeffaine was identified as Killyfern in County Cavan. Re-examination of the patent alongside the Tyrrell evidence now points much more convincingly to Killyfana in Annagh parish, Tullygarvey. Richard Tyrrell and his family are independently associated with Killyfana and with substantial holdings in this part of Cavan. Once that correction is made, the pattern becomes much clearer: the men are not appearing randomly in north Cavan. They have turned up in a locality tied to the same family around whom we had already been following them.
The possible recurrence of two individuals makes the movement especially striking. In the earlier Tyrrell material there was a William Ó Maol Phádraig and a Brian McInlowe. In 1605, William Ó Maol Phádraig and Brian McEnlewe are together again at Killyfana within the same Tyrrell circle. The surviving records are not precise enough to make either identification absolute, but the combination of names, timing, social standing and apparent joint movement is difficult to dismiss. Simon Tuite provides a useful fixed point: he is securely the same man in both settings, showing that identifiable members of the earlier group really did carry forward into this new one.
This begins to explain something that has otherwise looked rather strange in the Ó Maol Phádraig record. Men of the family appear over a surprisingly wide area during these years. Seen individually, every distant appearance can look like a separate problem. Seen through Tyrrell, there is a mechanism. A political and military following that had moved across the Midlands during the war was now being redistributed across the lands and opportunities available to its patrons afterward.
For William Ó Maol Phádraig, that seems to have meant a move north. He was not moving into an empty landscape. At Killyfana he was surrounded by six Ó Raghallaigh gentlemen and other substantial local families. Tyrrell had acquired land, but land alone was of little value. It had to be occupied, stocked, worked and integrated into a countryside in which older Gaelic families were still firmly established. Men already trusted within the Tyrrell network were exactly the kind of people who could help make those new holdings function.
The larger movement is more important than trying to assign William a specific office. The wartime network had become a landed network. Men who had once been connected through campaigning were now connected through settlement, tenancy, service and the practical business of making estates work.
For a brief period, that may have looked like the beginning of a workable future.
Then the Crown began to reorganise Cavan.
What Happened Between 1605 and 1610
The five years separating William Ó Maol Phádraig at Killyfana from Brian Ó Maol Phádraig in the final patent are where the story changes completely.
In 1605 we are looking at men finding places inside the post-war order. They had survived, shifted residence, followed patrons and begun building lives around new holdings. Nothing in the pardon suggests that the old social world had vanished. Ó Raghallaigh gentlemen still occupied the countryside. Tyrrell could acquire land and bring trusted associates with him. Men such as William Ó Maol Phádraig could move into that environment and remain recognisable within it.
The Crown, however, had not finished deciding what victory meant.
In 1606, its approach to Cavan still seemed to leave considerable room for the lesser native landholders. Sir Arthur Chichester and Sir John Davies examined the county and treated many of the men beneath the great Ó Raghallaigh lords as possessing substantial rights of their own. Rather than imagining every acre as the personal property of the chief, Davies could describe these subordinate occupiers as freeholders with real estates in the lands they held.
The political attraction was obvious. If the Crown recognised the lesser landholders individually, it could break the power of the great Ó Raghallaigh lords without uprooting the entire society beneath them. The old lordship could be dismantled and replaced by many smaller proprietors whose titles came directly from the king. For men who had survived the war, submitted, taken pardons and were trying to fit themselves into the new order, this offered a plausible future. The political structure might change, but their own land and local standing might survive.
That is the context in which the pardons need to be understood.
A pardon was not itself a deed of ownership. It did not hand a man title to the land he occupied. But in the years after the war, pardon and land settlement were part of the same larger process. Men were being encouraged to submit, return to the king’s peace and become lawful subjects under Crown authority. In Cavan, the government was at the same time recognising that many lesser occupiers held interests of their own, separate from those of the great Ó Raghallaigh lords.
The apparent bargain was clear enough: submit, accept the Crown’s authority, abandon the old political loyalties, and your own position might be regularised under the new system. A man could lose the protection of the old lordship without necessarily losing the land his family had long occupied.
That expectation is crucial to what followed.
As plans for the Plantation developed, the rights recognised in 1606 became a problem. If the lesser Cavan families really held hereditary estates independently of the Ó Raghallaigh lords, then the Crown could not simply take the whole county through the forfeitures of the great families and redistribute it as it pleased.
What had looked like a solution suddenly became an obstacle.
By 1610 Davies was arguing almost the reverse of the position he had taken only four years earlier. The customary possession of the lesser Irish landholders could now be treated as uncertain and dependent, something closer to a “scrambling and transitory possession” than an estate the Crown was bound to respect.
The people had not suddenly acquired a different history between 1606 and 1610. What had changed was what the Crown wanted to do with their land.
The men who had submitted had every reason to believe that they were entering a new legal order in which their position could be recognised. Instead, at the moment Plantation required more land, the basis on which many of those rights had been understood was changed beneath them.
It was in the middle of that reversal that the last Ó Maol Phádraig patent was issued.
Brian Ó Maol Phádraig of Duher
On 3 July 1610, another general pardon was issued. Among the Cavan gentlemen were Ó Raghallaigh, McCabe, McCaffery, McSherry, McGilleduff and other familiar Bréifne families.
Among them appears:
Brian O’Mulpatricke of Duher, Co. Cavan, gentleman.
Immediately after him comes Owen McSherry of Doher, gentleman.
Brian appears at an extraordinary moment. Five years earlier William Ó Maol Phádraig had been living at Killyfana within the Tyrrell and Ó Raghallaigh world. Now another Ó Maol Phádraig is recorded as a gentleman of his own named place, again surrounded by families belonging to the native landed society of Bréifne.
His pardon is dated 3 July 1610. Within weeks, the commissioners responsible for imposing the Plantation would be in Cavan deciding which claims to land would survive and which would not.
The pardon placed Brian inside the king’s peace. It regularised his legal position as a subject and cleared the burden of past offences covered by the grant. In the wider post-war settlement, that was supposed to mean something. Men had submitted, accepted the Crown’s authority and been encouraged to believe that their own landholding could be recognised separately from the forfeitures of the great lords.
Then the Crown changed the terms.
The distinction between pardon and land title was about to become painfully clear. The pardon could protect a man from prosecution. It could not protect him if the government now decided that the land he believed was his had never been legally his at all.
4 August 1610
When the Plantation commissioners reached Cavan on 4 August 1610, the native landholders did something that deserves far more attention than it usually receives.
They hired a lawyer.
They attempted to defeat the Plantation through English law.
Their argument went directly to the heart of the settlement they believed they had entered. Their estates, they said, were hereditary. Whatever rights the great Ó Raghallaigh lords had forfeited, the lands possessed by lesser families did not simply disappear with the attainder of a chief. They also relied upon the Crown’s earlier proclamations of pardon and oblivion.
In effect, they were saying: we submitted, we accepted your peace, and our rights were understood as separate from those of the forfeited chiefs. You cannot now treat all of that as though it never existed.
The challenge failed.
Davies rejected their understanding of hereditary possession and insisted that the Crown was not bound to recognise the old Gaelic arrangements as independent estates. The very legal system into which these men had been encouraged to enter could now tell them that generations of accepted possession did not amount to the kind of ownership that mattered.
The contradiction with 1606 is hard to escape. When recognition of lesser freeholders helped weaken the great Ó Raghallaigh lords, the argument suited Crown policy. When those same rights threatened to obstruct the Plantation, they became inconvenient.
This is where the pardons take on their real significance. The men had not confused a pardon with a title deed. They had understood the pardon as part of a broader settlement in which submission to the Crown opened the way for their existing position to be recognised. The Crown had encouraged precisely that transition from Gaelic allegiance to direct dependence upon the king.
At the last moment, when Plantation demanded more land, the government backed away from the consequences of its own earlier policy.
The commissioners proceeded with the settlement. The Cavan men did not accept it happily. Davies himself acknowledged that they remained deeply dissatisfied at being required to leave lands their septs had enjoyed for generations. Chichester understood the emotional force of what was being demanded and remarked that the language of “removing and transplanting” was received among the native population almost like a sentence of death.
The reaction becomes easier to understand when the paperwork is stripped away. These were families who knew where their fathers and grandfathers had lived, where their cattle grazed, which neighbouring families shared boundaries with them and which local relationships defined their position. Their rights existed through inheritance, long occupation, family memory and the accepted workings of Gaelic society. They had then been encouraged to translate that position into Crown law.
When they tried, the rules changed.
Men had survived the war only to discover that peace could take away what war had failed to destroy.
A Plantation Built Before the Map Was Finished
Even if the Crown’s legal position had been consistent, the practical execution of the Plantation would have been extraordinary enough. It attempted to redistribute a countryside the government did not understand accurately.
The surveys contained missing denominations, uncertain boundaries, alternate place-names that had not been recognised and townlands that were imperfectly placed. Some parcels simply failed to appear. They later emerged as “concealed lands”, although the supposed concealment could amount to little more than a surveyor having failed to record a local name or subdivision.
The result was chaos in paper form. Old patents collided with new grants. Servitors disputed with undertakers. Native grantees disputed with one another. Bishops discovered that land claimed for the church had already been allocated elsewhere. Corporations and schools entered the same confusion. Men who had received royal grants could discover that the Crown had misunderstood part of the property and that someone else possessed a competing title.
Cavan produced seventy-seven disputes requiring examination, more than any of the neighbouring counties dealt with by the same commissioners. Further polls appeared after the original distribution. Acreage proved defective. Boundaries had to be reconsidered. Local juries were repeatedly necessary because the people who actually knew the landscape could identify places that official maps had failed to understand.
There is a grim irony in all of this. English administrators had repeatedly portrayed Gaelic landholding as uncertain and disorderly. The system erected to replace it almost immediately generated overlapping grants, contradictory claims, defective measurements, omitted lands and years of litigation.
The Crown was not standing outside this confusion as a neutral judge. It had decided which Irish rights counted, changed its interpretation of those rights as policy developed, claimed the land that supposedly lacked valid title, redistributed it to new owners and then judged the disputes created by its own surveys and grants.
Measured against modern expectations of property rights and public administration, the process would raise profound questions about forced dispossession, retrospective reinterpretation of ownership, unequal treatment and abuse of state authority. The Crown’s own record is enough to show how readily legal principle bent when it conflicted with the objectives of Plantation.
And none of this produced the orderly new society its architects imagined.
They Could Not Do Without the Irish
By 1611 the weakness of the scheme was already obvious. Many undertakers had not built what they were required to build. Some were absent. Some had placed agents on their estates and gone home. Others retained or leased to Irish tenants because the new estates could barely function without them.
The settlers needed labour, cattle, rents, food and people who understood the countryside.
The native population that the Plantation had intended to displace was often indispensable to its success.
The situation in Tullyhaw, where Brian Ó Maol Phádraig’s home of Dowra lay, is particularly revealing. Carew found little serious Plantation activity there in 1611. Hugh Culme and Walter Talbot were among the few men doing much at all. When Bodley inspected again in 1613, progress remained uneven. Legal ownership had changed far more quickly than life on the ground.
A family might therefore wake up after the Plantation in much the same landscape it had occupied before. The same hills stood outside the door. The same neighbouring surnames remained nearby. Cattle still grazed on the same rough ground.
Yet the land now belonged, in law, to someone else.
That may be one of the most useful ways to understand what happened to many lesser Gaelic families. Dispossession did not always mean immediate physical expulsion. Some remained on or near the land they had always known, but their relationship to it had been transformed. A family that had once possessed recognised local standing could become a tenancy buried inside somebody else’s estate.
The people survived while their position in the records collapsed.
One Last Familiar Name
There is a small entry in the 1610 pardon that should not be missed.
Only a few names before Brian Ó Maol Phádraig appears Fall O’Mulchonery, an Ó Maolchonaire man.
Their appearance in the same patent cannot establish a personal relationship between the two men. Yet after the long history in which Ó Maol Phádraig and Ó Maolchonaire repeatedly appear in overlapping Bréifne, ecclesiastical and learned environments, there is something striking about finding both surnames together in the final patent.
They are still sharing the page while the society around them is being taken apart.
The End
The contrast between 1605 and 1610 gives these two small patents their real historical value.
In 1605, William Ó Maol Phádraig has moved north with a network already familiar from the Tyrrell world around Abbeylara. William Buí Tyrrell is at Killyfana, Ó Raghallaigh gentlemen surround him, Simon Tuite has carried forward from the earlier record, and Brian McEnlewe may represent the same McInlowe connection seen before. The men who had survived the war were adapting to peace and turning old relationships toward land and livelihood.
Five years later Brian Ó Maol Phádraig is still present, still identified with a place and still recognised as a gentleman. The old names continue to surround him.
But almost everything beneath that appearance has changed.
The Crown had first encouraged lesser landholders to believe that their own rights might survive the destruction of the great lordships. Submission, pardon and recognition as lawful subjects offered a path into a new settlement in which their holdings could be confirmed directly under the king. Then Plantation made those rights inconvenient. The government stepped back from the implications of its earlier position and redefined the very possession those men were trying to protect.
The resulting settlement was imposed through incomplete surveys, overlapping grants and a legal process that produced dozens of disputes almost as soon as it began.
The new order did not even replace the old population. It frequently left those same people living as tenants beneath new owners.
This was not the extinction of Ó Maol Phádraig in 1610. It was the destruction of the kind of world in which the family had been visible.
For centuries Ó Maol Phádraig had adapted to change. The family had survived shifts in ecclesiastical organisation, dynastic power, Tudor intervention and war. The people could adapt again. Some may have remained in the same countryside; others moved, entered service or eventually appeared under different forms of the name.
What became much harder to preserve was the family’s independent place in the political and landed order.
That helps explain the silence that follows the last patent. The people did not necessarily disappear. The structure that had recorded them as chiefs, gentlemen, yeomen and men of named places was disappearing around them.
Nor did the Plantation bring peace. It left displaced proprietors beside native tenants, new landlords dependent upon the very population they were supposed to replace, unresolved property disputes and increasingly severe pressure on Catholic life. These grievances accumulated through the following decades. The violence that erupted in 1641 cannot be reduced to a single cause, but it did not come from nowhere. An entire generation had grown up with the consequences of what was being imposed in these years.
The war had ended in 1603.
For many families, the hardest years were still ahead.
References
Calendar of the Patent Rolls of the Chancery of Ireland, James I, Patent CXV–38, 19 July 1605.
Calendar of the Patent Rolls of the Chancery of Ireland, James I, Patent LXV–20, 3 July 1610.
Fitzpatrick, Matthew, and Mike Fitzpatrick. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the name, the people, and the clans. Part III.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 6 (2025), 27–41.
Farrell, Gerard. “Class divisions and the ‘mere Irish’ of colonial Ulster.” Journal of Postgraduate Research, Trinity College Dublin, 2014.
Farrell, Gerard. The ‘Mere Irish’ and the Colonisation of Ulster, 1570–1641. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Hunter, R. J. The Ulster Plantation in the Counties of Armagh and Cavan, 1608–1641.
Carew, George. Plantation survey, 1611.
Bodley, Josias. Plantation survey, 1613.