William Francis Thomas Butler

“ It does not seem that once the war was over, any priests were put to death merely for being priests or for saying mass. It is well known that the English law punished all priests with death, and that some ten were executed under Charles I., who was, as we may remember, accused by the Puritans of showing too great favour to Popery, besides twelve more under the Parliament. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it defined murder as the killing of any person not publicly entertained and maintained in arms by the English, and furthermore as murderers were to be held all who had killed any Englishman so entertained and maintained in arms if the killer had himself not been an officer or soldier in the pay of the Irish against the English. ”

“ But one and all, the Catholics of Kinsale declared that they would not go to Connaught among their enemies the Irish, who hated them as traitors to their religion, and some of them said they would rather be transported to Barbadoes than to Connaught among the rebels. Rather than do so they would forfeit all their possessions. And on the report of the judges Cromwell exempted them from transplantation and allowed them some proportion of lands in the baronies of Muskerry and Barrymore, provided they were distant at least two miles from any walled town or seaport. ”

“ There were two English Protestant factions, two Irish Catholic and one Scotch Presbyterian. The history of the time is a tangle of confused strife.
The Ulster Catholic Irish had risen in arms on October 23rd, 1641. They were soon joined by their co-religionists of old English descent in the Pale round Dublin. The rebellion spread till almost the whole island was involved.
Then came the outbreak of the civil war in England between Charles I. and the Puritan majority of the English parliament in August, 1642.
The effects of the English civil war were soon felt in Ireland. ”

“ Of the new settlers scarcely six of the adventurers founded families. Some forty years after the transplantation many of the children of Cromwell's soldiers could not speak a word of English. The private soldiers who received small grants of land sold them for trifling sums to their officers or to others. Dr. Petty, the surveyor, bought up great tracts of country in this way at very cheap prices. If they remained in Ireland they very generally married Irish women—though this was forbidden under very stringent penalties, and these women generally brought up their children as Catholics. ”

“ In Munster, at the outbreak of the rebellion, the city of Cork and the towns of Youghal and Kinsale, true to their old traditions of loyalty to the English crown, had shut their gates against the rebels, and given every assistance to the government. To them flocked for refuge all the Protestants of the neighbouring counties. Most of these were descendants of the men to whom Queen Elizabeth had granted the estates forfeited in the Desmond rebellion. ”

“ As for those Catholics of full age and sound in mind or body who had resided in Ireland during the years mentioned, for them to have displayed constant good affection to the parliament would have been almost as impossible as it would have been to expect an Irishman who resided in Ireland at the time of the American Revolution to have shown affection to the American Republican Government. ”

“ In short there were to be two Irelands, one English east of the Shannon, in which a new colony might be planted free from all fear of contamination by admixture with the natives, the other comprising Connaught and Clare where alone those natives who had failed to prove constant good affection might hold land. ”

“ When Jones took possession of Dublin in 1647, it would appear that he expelled many of these Catholics who for six years had been fighting against their own countrymen and co-religionists. Those not so expelled were forced to take leases of their own houses from the republican soldiers. It was now provided that holders of such leases were to keep them.
In the rest of Ireland, according to Sir William Petty, twenty-six Catholic landowners, owning between them 40,000 acres (i.e. 80,000 English acres) proved Constant Good Affection. ”

“ During these ten years the parliament had had little or no footing in Ireland outside Munster and part of Ulster, and when Cromwell landed the Royal authority was supreme all over Ireland except in Dublin and Derry.
The citizens of Dublin were the only considerable body of Catholics who had never done anything against the Parliament. Up to 1647 they had been under the authority of the King's Lord Lieutenant, Ormond, but had never been in collision with the parliamentary forces. ”

“ The greater part of the rest of the confiscated lands were distributed to the officers and soldiers—those who had landed with Cromwell in 1649, those who before that date had served for the Parliament in Leinster and Ulster, and those of the Munster Protestant forces who could show that they took part in bringing about the betrayal of Cork and the other garrisons to Cromwell in 1649. These men all received lands instead of their pay, which had been in arrears for years. ”

“ Some may only have got leases under other transplanted persons; others were possibly only settled as tenants at will. But if we consider that at least 1,023 landowners were moved from Munster and Leinster and that the number of those falling into various categories entitled to lands was very small in Ulster, and for reasons of which we have already spoken, very large in Connaught, we may suppose that the greater number of these 2000 persons who received lands in Connaught got them, or rather were intended to get them, in fee-simple. ”

“ Curiously enough the first proposals to transplant any one under this clause refer not to the Catholics but to the Ulster Presbyterians. It was suggested that all their chief men should be removed from Down and Antrim, as being too near their native Scotland, and given lands in the Counties Kilkenny, Waterford and Tipperary. It is curious to speculate on what might have occurred had this been carried out. Would "Waterford and not Belfast have been to-day the commercial capital of Ireland, or would the soft Munster air have proved too much even for Scottish vigour? ”

“ Those who did not get such lands lost everything, and either sought their livelihood on the Continent or lingered in want at home expecting the restoration of the King which they fondly hoped would end all their troubles. As I have said, at least six thousand landowners, and probably a very much larger number, were thus deprived of their lands.
For instance, according to the certificates, only 550 landlords were transplanted from the five Munster counties, and of these only sixty-six were from Kerry. But in Kerry the estates of nearly 550 Catholic landowners were confiscated. ”

“ The Ulster certificates are lost; but there can have been but few Ulster landowners transplanted, for, owing to the plantation under James I., most of that province belonged to Protestants who were dispensed from transplanting; and few of the Catholics could have come within those classes who were entitled to receive lands in Connaught.
For the Connaught and Clare landowners possibly no certificates were issued, as it was easy to find out particulars about them, on the spot; at any rate none have survived. ”

“ Prisoners were hanged, women and children slain in cold blood. There are few more horrible records of atrocities extant than the diary which complacently sets forth the exploits of the garrison of Manor Hamilton. ”

“ Moreover, on the first news of the rising, many English landowners dwelling in strong castles had put these into a state of defence, armed their English tenants, and such of the Englishry as took refuge with them, and not only successfully defended themselves against all attack, but in many cases had made counter attacks against the Irish in their neighbourhood. ”

“ The next clause specifically makes mention of religion. It provided that all persons of the Popish religion who had resided in Ireland at any time from October 1st, 1641, until March 1st, 1650, and had not come under any of the previous clauses were to lose one-third of their estates, and to get lands equal to the other two-thirds wherever the parliament might appoint, unless they could prove constant good affection to the commonwealth. ”

“ The amount of land in Catholic hands had certainly increased rather than diminished between the Restoration and the Revolution, so that it is hard to accept Petty's statement that the area finally left in Catholic hands after the Restoration was over four and a half million acres of profitable land. ”

“ The interesting questions next arise as to what proportion these 2000 or so of Catholic landowners who were assigned lands west of the Shannon bore to the total number of Catholic landowners in Ireland in 1641, and what was the total acreage possessed by the latter at that date.
Sir W. Petty has given certain figures which have been largely adopted by subsequent writers. According to him, the area of Ireland is ten million Irish acres. There is an underestimate here, due to an error that runs through all Petty's survey. ”

“ They gave shelter to all the fugitive Protestants from the country districts, admitted English garrisons inside their walls, and the Corkmen advanced £30,000 towards paying the expenses of the English army besides providing them with food and lodgings. As a reward for this loyalty they and the Catholics of Youghal were all turned out of their homes and driven outside the walls by Inchiquin and the Puritans in 1644. ”

“ They were seventy in number and got about 120,000 acres of some of the best lands in Ireland.
To sum up. There are in Ireland twenty millions of English acres. Of these nine millions were left to the former owners, Protestants who had either proved Good Affection to the parliament, or had redeemed their estates by fines. [43]
The remaining eleven millions were confiscated. Of these about half a million belonged to loyalist Protestants such as Lords Ormond, Inchiquin and Roscommon. The other ten and a half millions belonged in 1641 to Catholics. ”

“ The figures, as given in [ [author: William Henry Hardinge|Hardinge] ] 's printed account of it, show for Munster out of 153,000 inhabitants only 14,000 English and for Leinster only 24,000 out of a total of 155,000. Even in Ulster out of a total of 104,000 the English and Scots combined only numbered 40,600. These figures are perhaps not altogether to be trusted, for it seems impossible to believe that the total population of Ulster in 1659 was so small, and that the total British population was only 86,000 out of a total for the whole island of but little over 500,000. ”

“ And the Census of 1659 attributed to Sir W. Petty gives the whole population as only about half a million. His published statistics and calculations cannot altogether be trusted. ↑ That is to say such of them as were still Protestants. Many of the descendants of the Elizabethan settlers were Catholics in 1641. ↑ These settlements in Antrim and Down had, as I have said before, come about through peaceful penetration. It is curious to find that the MacDonnells and Magees from the Isles were now looked on as being Irish because they were Catholics. ”

“ But the list in the Ormond MS. mentioned below gives four. Hardinge gives sixteen names from Co. Cork. The Ormond MSS. has about thirty, and the Index to the transplanters' certificates gives twenty-one. Hardinge gives sixty-six as the total number from Kerry; but the Index has ninety-six names from Kerry, of whom twenty-three were townsmen of Dingle, one of these being described as a mason and seven as merchants. ↑ Bonn states that in Tipperary among the "Tituladoes" there were sixty Irish, and in Carlow thirty in 1659. Some of these of course may have been Protestants. ”