Redmond O'Hanlon

Alfred Webb

A Compendium of Irish Biography

1878

O'Hanlon, Redmond, a dispossessed proprietor of Ulster, under the Cromwellian settlement, and leader of a band of outlaws. [His father or grandfather, hereditary Royal Standard-bearer north of the Boyne, was killed in 1600 at the pass of Carlingford, fighting on the English side. James I. bestowed upon his family seven townlands, of which they were dispossessed in 1653, under the Cromwellian settlement, receiving some pittance of land in Connaught.]

Redmond headed a band of "tories," and kept the counties of Tyrone and Armagh in terror, the farmers paying him regular contributions to be protected from other outlaws. He thought more than once of retiring to France, where he was known to fame as Count O'Hanlon; but the expectation of a French invasion, and the hope of retrieving his ancestral lands kept him at home. He was at length betrayed by his foster-brother in the hills near Eight-mile-Bridge, in the County of Down, 25th April 1681, and his head was placed over the jail of Downpatrick. Many other dispossessed proprietors followed O'Hanlon's example. Colonel Poer in Munster, Colonel Coughlan in Leinster, and Colonel Dudley Costello in Connaught, headed bands of tories that gave infinite trouble to the Government.

Sources

93. Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland: John P. Prendergast. London, 1870.

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