The Proclamation of Dungannon was a document produced by Sir Phelim O'Neill on 24 October 1641 in the Irish town of Dungannon.[1] O'Neill was one of the leaders of the Irish Rebellion, which had been launched the previous day. O'Neill's Proclamation set out a justification of the uprising. He claimed to have been given a commission signed and sealed on 1 October by the King of Ireland Charles I that commanded him to lead Irish Catholics in defence of the Kingdom of Ireland against Protestants who sympathised with Charles's opponents in the Parliament of England.
Following the trial and execution of the Viceroy, the Earl of Strafford, in May 1641, Ireland was in a state of turmoil. There was growing tension between Catholics and Protestants (particularly those of a Puritan tendency) with the former generally sympathetic to King Charles while the latter supported the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters in the dispute that would shortly lead to the outbreak of the English Civil War. This formed part of the wider War of the Three Kingdoms.
On 23 October a major uprising broke out in Ulster organised by leading members of the Gaelic aristocracy. The rebels attacked Protestant plantation settlements as well as native Irish Protestants and took garrison towns held by the Irish Army. Irish government authorities in Dublin struggled to contain the insurgency with the limited number of troops they had at their disposal. A last-minute warning saved Dublin Castle from a surprise attack, although O'Neill was clearly unaware of the failure of the Dublin plot when he issued his proclamation.[2]
After seizing several key strategic points in Ulster over the previous twenty-four hours, Sir Phelim made his proclamation in Dungannon, a town that had symbolic importance as the traditional capital of the O'Neill dynasty. The text read:
In support of his actions, Sir Phelim claimed to have a document from King Charles commissioning him. The Commission was supposedly signed under the Great Seal of Scotland. By declaring their loyalty to the Crown and defence of the Catholic religion, O'Neill and his followers adopted a political stance which was taken up by the subsequent Irish Confederation which governed rebel-controlled territory in the name of the King from 1642 until 1649. The Proclamation encouraged many Catholics to believe they could lawfully join the rising with the King's blessing, while Protestants were left demoralised.
Sir Phelim's second and more trenchant proclamation was made "from our camp at Newry" on 4 November 1641 alongside Rory Maguire:
He also published the actual royal commission that gave authority for his earlier proclamation. It was subtly different, in that it empowered him to arrest and seize property from all of Charles's English Protestant subjects living in Ireland, but exempted his Irish and Scottish subjects. He was ordered to:
Part of the commission in the original spelling:
Until the late nineteenth century historians generally accepted that the commission was genuine, or at the very least Charles had secretly encouraged the Irish Catholics to launch a rising. Since then, for a variety of reasons, it has been considered to be a forgery produced by O'Neill and his associates without the knowledge of the King. They may well have acquired a copy of the Great Seal of Scotland when they captured the garrison town of Charlemont on 23 October.[7]
The historian David Stevenson notes that it would be unlikely that the commission would have been addressed to Sir Phelim O'Neill. Had it been genuine it would almost certainly have been issued to more senior Irish Royalists such as the Earl of Ormond or the leading Catholic noble of Ulster, the Earl of Antrim. It is also unlikely to have been issued at Edinburgh as Sir Phelim claimed.[8] However, King Charles was in Edinburgh on 1 October, dealing with Scottish political matters.[9]
Forgery or not, King Charles publicly proclaimed all the Irish rebels as traitors on 1 January 1642.[10]
That the Commission was genuine was widely accepted in England and Scotland by the King's opponents and even some of his own supporters. It seemed to tie in with earlier rumours of an army plot which had suggested that Charles might bring over the New Irish Army, made up largely of Ulster Catholics, to impose his will on England and Scotland. Anger at the King's alleged links with the insurgents grew – particularly as horror stories of atrocities committed, such as the Portadown Massacre, began to filter across the Irish Sea. Tensions arising from news of the Irish rebellion was a factor in the English push to Civil War in early 1642.
The Scottish authorities dispatched an Army which quickly retook much of Ulster from the insurgents. Once the English Civil War broke out in October 1642, Charles' emissaries began negotiations with the Irish rebels for their support, which seemed to present further evidence to his opponents of his links with the Catholic Ulster leaders. Many of these later dealings were exposed when Charles private letters were captured during the Battle of Naseby (1645) and published as King's Cabinet Opened.
When Phelim O'Neill was captured in 1653 following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, he was put on trial for his life. The authorities offered to spare him if he would repeat his earlier claims that Charles had ordered the Catholics to rise in 1641. O'Neill now refused to implicate the King, who had been executed four years earlier, and was put to death himself.[11] Nonetheless the English Republicans continued to use O'Neill's earlier claims of the King's involvement to justify their decision to commit regicide.