William Cole

Sir William Cole (c.1571–1653) was an English soldier and politician, who participated in the Plantation of Ulster and established a settler town at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. Despite his initial loyalty to the Stuarts, he was a leading English Parliamentarian figure in the Irish Confederate Wars of the 1640s. Early life and arrival in Ireland Cole was born and raised in London, the only son of Emmanuel Cole of Devon. He was educated at Cambridge University before becoming a soldier in the English Army and fighting in the Low Countries during the Anglo-Spanish War. He arrived in Ireland in 1599 to fight in the Nine Years' War. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1601 and participated in the Siege of Kinsale in 1603, after which he was promoted to captain. In 1607, Cole was given command of Enniskillen Castle, which he later purchased outright in 1623. In 1611 he was granted 1,000 acres at Cornagrade and he purchased a further 1,000 acres at Dromskeagh in 1612. He constructed Portora Castle in 1612. Plantation of Fermanagh In May 1612, Cole received a grant of land from James VI and I for a new town at Enniskillen, with a church, public school, market house, gaol and twenty houses for burgesses. Upon the town's incorporation on 7 February 1613, Cole became its first provost. He was knighted on 5 November 1617 and served terms as High Sheriff of Fermanagh in 1608, 1615, 1623 and 1627. In 1616 he was appointed a justice of the peace and collector of fines in Fermanagh. The 1622 commission into the progress of the Ulster plantation singled him out as a model planter who had encouraged the arrival of many English and Ulster Scots families to Enniskillen. In 1622 he helped fund the construction of the first Protestant church in the town, completed in 1627. In 1633, Cole was briefly imprisoned in Dublin Castle for orchestrating protests in Fermanagh and Monaghan against the payment of contributions to the army. In 1634 and 1639 he was elected as the Member of Parliament for County Fermanagh in the Irish House of Commons. In 1640 he was part of an Irish parliamentary delegation sent to London to complain against the King's Lord Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford.