Mid-17th century was a time of crisis in England and Ireland. England was embroiled in a civil war between its monarch and its republican-minded parliament, which was overflowing with Puritans. Ireland was simmering in the wake of the Ulster Plantation, the large-scale Protestant colonization of Ulster Province that began in 1609, eight years after England’s defeat of the Irish at the Battle of Kinsale. By 1641, the Irish were thoroughly exasperated with how colonization was threatening their land titles and their religious freedoms. Thus, they revolted. Three thousand English colonists were massacred in the Uprising of 1641. Within a year’s time, the uprising morphed into the Eleven Years War, which was fought from one end of Ireland
