The three counties of Cavan, Fermanagh and Monaghan made up the south-western part of Ulster, bordering on the mountains of Connaught and the lowlands of Leinster and the Pale. They formed an important strategic area which was, until the end of the sixteenth century, controlled by Gaelic Irish families of McGuire or Maguire (in County Fermanagh), O’Reilly (in County Cavan) and McMahon (in County Monaghan).
Tipperary, a large county stretching from the River Shannon in the north to the River Suir in the south, was an important agricultural district, containing some of the best pasture land in Ireland. Waterford, between the Suir and the sea, was more mountainous, but still prospered thanks to the prominence of its ports, especially the city of Waterford in the east and the town of Dungarvan in the west. Close economic links had developed between the two counties, with produce from Tipperary being transported down the Suir from Clonmel to Waterford, for export to Britain and Europe.
The county of Cork, in the south west of Ireland, was one of the most fertile and populous in the province of Munster. Three major rivers (the Lee, Bandon and Blackwater) watered the county, and where they met the Atlantic they formed three harbours, where Cork City and the towns of Kinsale and Youghal were situated. These ports enjoyed commercial prosperity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, exporting fish, timber, cloth, beef, iron and other local commodities.
Counties Antrim, Down and Armagh made up the whole eastern seaboard of Ulster, from the Giant’s Causeway in the north, to the Mountains of Mourne in the south. The three counties differed geographically and politically. County Antrim, to the north, had large stretches of ‘barren mountainous’ country but also ‘good and fertile’ soil along the coast and in the southern baronies of Massereene and Antrim. Civil Survey, x.
The list of MPs for the three counties of Kerry, Limerick and Clare speaks for itself. Throughout the 1650s, the New English soldier, Sir Hardress Waller, and his son-in-law, Colonel Henry Ingoldsby, were able to dominate the civil and military government of the south-west corner of Ireland, and to monopolise its electoral patronage. This was only possible because of the devastation created by the Irish wars and Cromwellian conquest, which left a tabula rasa, with each county bereft of its distinctive social, political and constitutional characteristics.
Gloucestershire was a county of very marked physical divisions, the most obvious of which was the River Severn. West of the Severn below Gloucester lay the Forest of Dean, an important source of naval timber. In the Vale of Gloucestershire, further east, were Gloucester itself and above it, Tewkesbury, both parliamentary boroughs. The hinterland of Gloucester was incorporated into the city government as the ‘Inshire’.
In the seventeenth century, as now, Buckinghamshire was a prosperous rural county whose economy was inevitably overshadowed by its proximity to London. Thomas Fuller would pick up on this.
‘Cheshire ... is a county of a fat, fruitful and rich soil, both for tillage and pasturage ... And although (in most places) it is flat and even, yet it is not without several noted hills ... besides the mountains that divide it from the shires of Derby and Stafford’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 52, 53. Bounded on its English borders by Lancashire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire and by Wales to the west, Cheshire has traditionally been regarded as an isolated border county, one of ‘dark corners of the land’. Blome, Britannia, 52; G.
Herefordshire, according to Sir Robert Harley, was the most ‘clownish’, meaning rustic, county in England. J.S. Levy, ‘Perceptions and Beliefs: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Origins and Outbreak of the First Civil War’ (London Univ. PhD thesis, 1983), 42. It was certainly remote, but its gentry exercised an influence over the south-eastern counties of Wales, and its importance in Welsh affairs was consolidated by its subjection to the council in the marches of Wales, based at Ludlow.