The chief undertaker, Lord Audley, was in a sense a servitor-figure. George Touchet, Lord Audley, was of Heleigh in Staffordshire (Lynch, Castlehaven’s Memoirs, xii, Drake, Fasciculus mervinensis, p. 19). He was born in 1551, had been engaged in campaigns on the continent being at a time governor of Utrecht in the Netherlands, before – in what may be regarded as a standard manner – coming to Ireland, when he was wounded at the Battle of Kinsale. He subsequently acquired lands in Munster and thus forms a link between the Munster plantation and that of Ulster. In January 1609 he put forward an elaborate proposal to be grantee of 100,000 acres in Tyrone or adjoining parts of Armagh, which was transmitted by the English privy council to Chichester (CSPI, 1608-10, pp. 258-9). Sir John Davies, his son-in-law and the Irish attorney-general, commended his proposal as consistent with the character of his ancestors, one of whom he said had taken part with De Courcy in the Conquest of Ulster (ibid., p. 256). At the beginning of 1610 Chichester included him (? as a member of the Dublin privy council) as a suitable servitor grantee in the plantation (ibid., p. 365, also p. 428), but in the previous October and November he had been critical and evasive about Audley’s grander scheme. Audley, he said, was ‘an ancient nobleman and apt to undertake much; but his manner of life in Munster, and the small cost he has bestowed to make his house fit for him so any room within the same, does not promise the building of substantial castles, nor a convenient plantation in Ulster’ (ibid, pp. 297-8, 319).

Apart altogether from such considerations, Audley’s scheme – reminiscent of Tudor plantation schemes of Ireland – was not consistent with the plan of plantation for Ulster the details of which were by now fairly clear. As a kind of family insurance police, perhaps, his son Sir Mervyn, applied, at the beginning of 1610?, as head of a consort for the barony of Omagh, but only put down two names of prospective undertakers as well as his own (who put the names down? i.e. who formed the consort?), Edward Blunt, his brother-in-law, who was from Derbyshire (Drake, Fasciculus mervinensis, p. 23), and was subsequently a grantee, and Sir Richard Brook who did not become an undertaker. Thus by now they were proceeding within the framework of plantation laid down (CSPI, 1608-10, p. 548). Furthermore on 22 June 1610 the English privy council informed Chichester that Audley was ‘now content to rank himself under such conditions as have been since arranged for the planting of that whole province’ and indicated that he should be treated as liberally as possible as a servitor (ibid., p. 467).

This was in addition to his position as an undertaker. Already he had been appointed as superintendant of the precinct of Omagh, and his assignation of the land amongst the consort group was received in Dublin on 23 May 1610 (Ulster Plantation Papers, no. 21). Normally the arranging and supervision resided with a member of the English privy council. Audley’s position as supervisor and grantee was unique amongst the English-appointed baronies (though not without some parallel amongst from the Scots). In Armagh as a servitor he received a grant of a nominally 500 acres in January 1611 (CPR, Jas I, pp. 188-90), as well as the reversion of the land granted to Art McBaron O’Neill and his wife (see Cal. pats, p. 222). The greater part of this grant was to himself and his wife (Elizabeth, according to Hill, Plantation, p. 268 and CPR, Jas I, p. 222; Lucy according to Drake, Fasciculus mervinensis, p. 19) and it has been said (Lynch, Castlehaven’s Memoirs, p. xii) that his good treatment in Ireland was due to the influence of Sir James Mervyn of Fountell in Wiltshire, whose daughter he had married, and who had no direct male heir. Sir James Mervyn was indeed a fairly prominent person – both as landowner and official, he was collector of the customs at Dartmouth (Drake, Fasciculus mervinensis, p. 14), a member of parliament, and from 1604 Master of Swans in the Thames, but he died on 1 May 1611 (ibid., p. 19).

The arrangement for the barony must now be outlined. Audley and his wife received 3,000 acres: the great proportion of Fynagh and the small proportion of Rarone. His elder son Sir Mervyn Touchet received the great proportion of Brade. His other son Sir Ferdinando the great proportion of Fentonagh. Edward Blunt, of Harleston in Derbyshire (Drake, Fasciculus mervinensis, p. 23), who was married to Anne, the eldest daughter, received 2,000 acres. [If Blunt is of the family of Blunt, Lord Mountjoy, then we have a connection with the pre-plantation military conquest of Ulster; we know that Lord Mountjoy’s father had married Catherine Leigh from Yorkshire, of whom the servitor Leighs of Omagh may have been a connection (F.N. Jones, Mountjoy, p. 18). However, it is a fact that there was a dispute involving Lord Audley’s father-in-law Sir James Mervyn and Mountjoy’s father, Sir James, in 1578-9 (Drake, Fasciculus mervinensis, p. 14). The name Brook, however, was connected with the Blunts (Jones, Mountjoy, p. 19) – could Sir Richard Brook have been one of those? The family of Willoughby also seems to have been connected with Mountjoy (see Table at p. 144 by Jones), and John Leigh acquired lands in Clogher barony Co. Tyrone from a grantee Francis Willoughby (Hill, Plantation, p. 265).]

The final grantee, Sir John Davies, the attorney-general, and one who had played a very prominent part in planning the plantation, was married to Lord Audley’s fifth daughter, Eleanor (Drake, Fasciculus mervinensis, p. 23). Davies was from Wiltshire. The group of grantees were thus from the west and midlands of England.

Davies took out his patent (he also had land elsewhere in Ulster) in June 1610, the others, together in March 1611. At the time of allocation in the summer of 1610 no Omagh grantee appears to have presented himself to receive possession (Ulster Plantation Papers, pp. 213-15). Davies indeed was present in a different capacity – and indeed by virtue of this office he had to be an absentee, a factor militating against the success of the plantation in this barony. It seems indeed that the privy council in England had second thoughts about establishing him in Omagh barony at all, as appears in a letter of his to Chichester in January 1611. He was not dislodged, however.

The plantation in this barony proved to be one of the least successful enterprises of (English) undertakers in plantation Ulster. In the first place it was slow to get going. In April 1611 John Leigh, who had the military command at Omagh, was giving attention to Blunts’ land. It would be difficult to draw ‘any English to dwell upon the same’, so he would not take it as a free gift if tied to perform the conditions. He would offer Blunt £150 (CSPI, 1611-14, p. 32). However, the estate was not sold to him: it was kept within the family connexion. When the first government survey of the plantation was conducted in 1611 by Carew, the Omagh undertakers presented a poor showing. Leigh’s work on the fort at Omagh was commended, but neither Audley nor his sons had appeared or done anything. Sir John Davies, through his agent William Bradley, was engaged in building activities, and had four fee farmers, a leaseholder and a carpenter, with their families on the estate. (CSPI, 1611-14, p. 125). However, when the enquiry was over and the commissioners back in Dublin, Audley and Blunt arrived from England ‘and went to see their proportions’ (ibid., p. 128). It was thus slow in getting off the ground.

One of the commissioners’ initial problems – land disputes – did not, it seems, affect them so much, probably because they were a family group. However, they are seen in dispute with neighbours – a very considerable amount of land was at issue between Davies and Capt. Leigh (Ulster Plantation Papers, pp. 254-5). In addition there was the famous personal encounter between Lord Audley and the Earl of Abercorn from the neighbouring barony which came to a head in 1614 (CSPI, 1611-14, pp. 538-40). His son-in-law Davies, in his defence, said that he was sitting down now in his ‘old age in the most barren and desolate piece of land in all Ulster, namely the Omey, which was thought almost impossible to be planted by civil men, and has already at his great charge drawn thither an extraordinary colony of English and Scottish gentlemen (ibid., p. 538). Lord Audley had indeed at least been resident at Omagh on 12 May 1613 because he wrote from there to Chichester concerning his status in the Dublin parliament (Hastings MSS, IV, p. 14, see also pp. 5-6 and p. 339), which he doesn’t appear to have attended (p. 285), but that Davies’s account had in it an element of special pleadings appears from the 1613 government survey.

The articles of plantation had required of undertakers, amongst other requirements including buildings, to have no Irish on their lands and to have settled them with British at a rate of 24 adult males per 1,000 acres. Thus in Omagh barony a colony of 264 adult males would have been required. We will compare this later with figures of those present in 1619, 1622, and 1630.

In October 1615 an enquiry was to be conducted, of the kind common generally in the plantation into concealed lands in Omagh barony (CPR, Jas I, p. 293). This indicates that all of the original grantees are still recorded as owners – in most other baronies where a family group of owners would not exist, a number of estates would have been changed hands at this time. This inquiry into concealed lands was at the request of Lord Audley, and the King himself indicated that the land found would be granted to them (CSPI, 1615-25, p. 92). In a letter to Chichester at this time the King, after omitting the background circumstances of the Audley family grant, commended Audley on his personal energies there ‘as well for the rest as himself’. ‘And having been continually resident there upon for divers years past, and by letting those lands at very low rates without fine, has (as the king is informed [by Davies?]) drawn thither so many English and Scottish tenants as exceed the numbers required by the articles of plantation, and has, used a great stock of English cattle brought thither, bestowed in buildings upon the same £2000 at least, and intends to bestow as much more in the like structures’ (ibid., p. 93).

He was thus in no sense in disfavour. On 6 September 1616 he was created Baron Audley of Orier in Co. Armagh, and Earl of Castlehaven in Co. Cork (CPR, Jas I, p. 304). As well as that in February 1617 he was appointed special governor and commander to the crown in the barony of Omagh because of its very unsettled condition (CPR, Jas I, p. 320). [Such commands in the hands of undertakers were not entirely unusual: later, in 1625, the earl of Annadale was appointed governor of Donegal (CPR, Jas I, pp. 588-9) and Balfour was appointed in Fermanagh (ibid., p. 591).] There had been a minor rising in 1615, and there is plenty of evidence of sporadic and localised disorder. How effective he was remains in doubt – nobody was mustered from the barony in 1618 (CPSI, 1615-25, p. 221), but it is doubtful if he did very much because he died in 1617 (Belmore, Two Ulster Manors, p. 2).