William Francis Thomas Butler

“ The sufferings of individuals, even of whole classes, from the effects of confiscation were greater perhaps than we can now conceive. In spite of some mitigating features, such as I have mentioned, the condition of the greater part of the population all through the eighteenth and for the greater part of the nineteenth century was indescribably wretched.
Yet, after all, two or three centuries are but a short span in the life of a people. In more than one country that space of time has seen a revolution in the ownership of land as sweeping as we have seen in Ireland. ”

“ On the one side we have the credulous optimism of the Irish, their idea that logic and right should override might, their belief in the justice of their cause leading them to ask for the unattainable, their inability to realise the dislike with which they were regarded by all parties in England, their failure to perceive that in the minds of Englishmen the interests of England outweighed all other considerations, their want of union, the selfishness of their great men, in other words a complete absence of political insight and ability. ”

“ Common to the whole island was an almost complete divorce between occupancy of the land and the legal ownership of it. The whole of Ireland had been parcelled out among the invaders, and the claims of their descendants still held good in law. No length of occupation could give a valid title to an Irishman to any lands ever held by an Englishman. Even where there had never been effective occupation it would seem doubtful, whether any Irishman could claim a legal estate.
And in the districts in the hands of the colonists there was a great confusion as to title. ”

“ None of the actual inhabitants, therefore, could have any rights to land unless they could show a grant from the former English owners, or—since the rights of these had largely fallen to the Crown—from the Crown.
The native inhabitants naturally enough protested against this theory. They pointed out that they had held their lands for at least two centuries, that they had been recognized as subjects and treated as landowners under Elizabeth and even under James himself, and that during the 16th century no Irish had been deprived of their lands on such grounds as were now put forward. ”

“ As to the Acts in general, barely a generation had passed since clause (1) of the Act of the Long Parliament for the Settlement of Ireland had condemned practically the whole adult male population to lose both life and estate, and since the Act for the Attainder of the Irish Rebels (1657) had attainted all Catholic and many Protestant landowners, excepting of the Catholics only those falling within the classes of comparatively innocent laid down in the first Act. At least eight thousand Catholic and about one hundred and seventy Protestant landowners had lost everything under the Cromwellians ”

“ James I., or his advisers, had in his early years followed this course. Alongside of much injustice we find conscientious endeavours to deal fairly with those in actual occupation of land. But as time goes on we find a deterioration in the moral standard. The distinction between old Irish and old English is revived, to the disadvantage of the former; grasping officials have almost a free hand as regards extortion; musty parchments are brought to light in support of titles long forgotten. Matters become worse under Charles I. Neither old Irish nor old English are safe. ”

“ There were of course some great Protestant landowners as Lord Barrymore in Cork, Lord Kerry, and Lord Thomond who, as was well known to everyone, were Protestants and had either fought for the parliament, or else had been absent from Ireland during the war. They no doubt got back their estates as a matter of course. But for the others, they had first to prove that they were Protestants, and then meet the awkward question since what date. For the parliamentary authorities had noticed that since 1652 quite a number of landowners had been struck with the advantages of the reformed religion. ”

“ Can we doubt that with one kingdom solidly united in his favour he would have been able to beat down his opponents? That the Plantation of Ulster cost the son of James I. his head is a proposition which can be maintained, that it cost James' grandson and namesake his Crown is a proposition which hardly admits of dispute. ”

“ Nor could the Kings of England win over the natives and blend both peoples into one nation by granting to the Irish the protection of the English laws, or by giving them a legal title to the lands still in their occupation. The former course was made impossible by the opposition of the colonists; and the Crown, having granted away practically the whole island to the settlers, was debarred from the latter. The result was that at the opening of the reign of Henry VIII., close on three and a half centuries after the first invasion, the island was divided very unequally between the two nations. ”

“ In working at one phase of Irish history my aim has been above all to find out and set down what actually happened; a matter not at all as easy as one might suppose if one were merely to consider the number of works dealing with Ireland in which the various confiscations have been treated more or less fully. As to figures one soon learns that it is rare that any two sources agree ”

“ In scarcely any other country of Europe was the power of the landowner so absolute. It was not checked by any manorial system such as prevailed in England, nor by any communal system such as we find on the Continent. The Irish peasant stood alone in an individual relationship to the landlord. He had no rights based on immemorial custom, and strengthened by being enjoyed by an organised community. The German or Hungarian serf, the English manorial tenant formed part of a definite organisation, recognised by the law, possessing certain rights as against the landowner. ”

“ A noteworthy point is the following direction: "Where small parcels are claimed by many through colour of gavelkind, the grant to be to the eldest and worthiest in each cartron, he being required to grant estates to others (if need be) ; yet they are to consider that the multitude of small freeholders beggars the country, whereof none to have less than one cartron."
Here there is a deliberate crushing out of the small landowners, who were to become leaseholders on the estates granted to the wealthier clansmen.
So far there had been no question of any confiscation or plantation. ”

“ Cork in the time of James L, and was one of the six members sent by the Irish Protestants to Cromwell's Parliament—the first Union Parliament—in 1653.
In this pamphlet he declared that the new settlers had need of the Irish lower orders—poor labourers, simple creatures, whose sole design was to live and maintain their families, the manner of which was so low that their design was rather to be pitied than by any body feared or hindered. They alone could till the land, and so enable the new English landholders to live. ”

“ On the other side there is the grim determination to make no concession without a struggle, the threat in the last resort of the sword, the appeal to race hatred and religious prejudice, the amazing dishonesty of individuals seeking for place and profit. ”

“ But we are told, on the authority of the Commission of 1699 that in many places, notably in the west of Ireland, juries, often composed of adherents of James who had been secured in their estates by the Articles of Limerick, refused to convict persons whose support of the fallen monarch was notorious. [20] As it was, however, the Commissioners of Irish Forfeitures reported in 1699 that 3,921 persons in Ireland as well as 57 who resided in England had been attainted and outlawed, and that these persons between them owned over one million and sixty thousand Irish Plantation acres. ”

“ As to the title of the Crown to the lands, Offaly had been claimed with more or less of legal right by the Earls of Kildare, and by their attainder their rights were vested in the Crown. Leix as part of the Mortimer inheritance already was Crown property. The fact that the O'Conors had never been dispossessed of their lands and that the O'Mores had recovered theirs two centuries before was not allowed by the authorities to have any weight, since as alien enemies the Irish had no rights valid according to English law. ”

“ Now, immediately after the departure of the Earls the Deputy had declared to the inhabitants of these counties that they would be no losers by the attainder of the fugitives, and that every man was to be confirmed in his own. At this period no great plantation appears to have been contemplated; the demesne lands of the chiefs would have supplied room for a certain number of settlers, leaving those Irish who claimed freeholds undisturbed. And to convict the Earls of treason juries of natives were summoned whom the Crown for its own purposes found it convenient to consider as freeholders. ”

“ The first move in the new policy of confiscation under pretext of law was made not in the midlands, but in the northern portion of County Wexford. A large portion of this territory seems to have been left to the Irish at the first invasion. [14] In the fourteenth century the Irish of Leinster had elected as king a descendant of Donnell Kavanagh, illegitimate son of King Dermot MacMurrough, [15] and he and his posterity had expelled the settlers from most of Carlow, all north Wexford, and such parts of Wicklow as they had occupied. ”

“ Some of the Irish declared they preferred death to transplantation. Accordingly one or two landlords were hanged, to encourage the rest, and a certain number were shipped as slaves or indentured labourers to the West Indies.
But meantime many of the English had begun to object to a complete transplantation of the whole native population. They declared that they could not get Protestant tenants to cultivate the farms, and that they themselves being soldiers or townsmen could not cultivate the land themselves, neither could they get labourers from England. ”

“ Above all we must date from this period the destruction of the smaller men who had formed a veritable peasant proprietary west of the Shannon, and in some other Irish districts such as the Cork barony of Carbery. With them vanished too almost all the smaller gentry, owners of from two to five hundred acres, who abounded in the Anglo-Norman districts such as Kilkenny, South Wexford and South Tipperary.
Of the great men, too, though some such as Ormond, Clancarthy and Clanrickard actually increased their revenues, numbers were completely ruined. ”

“ A common religion, common disabilities began to draw the two older elements together. The conscious idea of a nation begins to appear. But the test of nationality becomes almost a religious one. The descendant of the planter of Leix or the undertaker of Munster, if a Catholic, begins to be classed as an Irishman. The Protestant heirs of Brian of the Tributes feel and speak as Englishmen.
By the year 1641 we find somewhat more than half the island still in possession of Catholics, some of them the descendants of planters of the previous generation. ”

“ On the demesne lands of the lord lived a mass of cultivators, mostly of Irish origin, all tenants at will, or at best holding by Irish custom, which would not be recognised by English law. Many of these were still for all practical purposes serfs, and looked on as such both by Irish and English; for villeinage lasted in Ireland long after it had disappeared in England, and was finally only abolished by Chichester in 1604—5. Others were in a better position, the descendants of the Betagii of the earlier inquisitions. ”

“ Thus 22,000 acres, or one-third of the country were available for a plantation. In reality the loss to the Irish was much greater than a third. For first there were several of the old English who had by purchase or by grant obtained heavy chief rents on certain of the districts in question, and these were now to be commuted for grants of land, and Sir Richard Masterson had claims to a large extent of land, which claims were to be fully satisfied; and secondly very few Irish were to be provided for in distributing the 24,000 acres set apart for the old inhabitants. ”