An Irishman’s Diary on the opportunistic Rowland White and 16th-century Ulster

Throughout Irish history there have always been unscrupulous figures that have accrued authority and wealth through exploiting turbulent political circumstances for their own gain.

One such figure emerged in the late 1560s, when the English state under Queen Elizabeth I was seeking to consolidate its authority over Ulster and therefore needed a popular advocate to whip up both public and private support for the creation of an English stronghold in the province.

Conveniently a suitable candidate appeared in the form of a well-heeled opportunistic Irishman named Rowland White, who in the search for social and monetary gain promised to help consolidate English rule in Ulster, in return for a small maritime lordship along the windswept, wild and wooded shores of Strangford Lough called the Dufferin (where the small towns of Killyleagh and Killinchy are now situated).

As is often the case with these opportunistic and mercurial figures, Rowland White had a tragic background. Despite been born as the heir of the noble White family of Dufferin, his family had been expelled from their lands by Scottish and local Gaelic raiders in the early 16th century.

Growing up in exile, Rowland was forced to watch his family slide into genteel poverty and obscurity. Determined to reverse this decline, Rowland capitalised on his family’s remaining connections in the Pale to reinvent himself as a successful and innovative merchant.

However, it soon became apparent that despite his boasts, proud lineage and fortuitous marriage to the daughter of the influential Sir John Rawson, the first Viscount of Clontarf, Rowland was little more than an exceptional publicist and reckless investor, a fact proven by his eventual bankruptcy in the early 1560s and subsequent imprisonment in a debtor’s prison for three years.

Thereafter, humiliated and embittered by his further slide down the social ladder, Rowland now conspired to exploit English ambitions to gain authority around Strangford Lough by presenting himself as the ideal loyal Protestant figure to promote royal interests there.

Capitalising on disdainful English assumptions of Gaelic society and his own intellectual arguments on the future development of Ulster along English lines, Rowland launched a public relations campaign targeting prominent English academics and politicians in a series of widely read works, such as the The Dysorders of the Irisshery, which was published in 1571, and which claimed that not only was Gaelic Ireland morally bankrupt but also impoverished and badly governed, leaving its people with "nothinge lefte to cherisshe or care for".

Eager to make use of this well-known loyalist and intellectual Irishman, and overlooking his earlier failings, the crown moved with unusual pace to declare its support for the establishment of a colony under Rowland’s control in the Dufferin by the late 1560s.

However, after being swept up in his campaign to receive royal backing for his colony in the Dufferin, Rowland had underestimated the problems he would face enacting his policy on the ground.

His new Gaelic Irish neighbours disturbed by his plantation of their lands, were quick to attack his colony, while English support proved limited as supplies rarely arrived, and the already numerically inadequate English forces in Ulster were unwilling to provide Rowland with military protection.

Ever the opportunist, even as his colony teetered on the verge of collapse, Rowland formulated a new strategy to rescue his flagging political career and retain his estates.

In a dramatic U-turn, Rowland now sought an alliance with the very Gaelic lords attacking him, betraying his earlier ideals by now opposing the seizure of land from the native Irish aristocracy and the introduction of English settlers.

However, despite Rowland’s newfound status as an advocate for Gaelic land rights, his prior pro-plantation propaganda in England had resulted in a renewed groundswell of support for the creation of English colonies in Ulster.

Indeed, since Rowland’s departure for Ulster, such men as Sir Thomas Smith, the secretary of state, and Walter Devereux, the Earl of Essex, had begun the process of acquiring huge grants of land in east Ulster from Elizabeth I at the expense of Rowland’s new Irish protectors, such as the O’Neills of the Clandeboye.

Rowland was despatched in late 1571 by his latest patrons, the Gaelic Ulster lords, to England to oppose the policy he had directly encouraged and popularised.

Humbled and terminally ill, Rowland died en route to London, while his plantation soon collapsed in a war between the very colonists he encouraged and the Gaelic lords he helped dispossess.

In the end, Rowland’s quest for status and the methods he used to achieve it sowed the seeds of his own destruction.